Effective warrior guide

''Note: This article is intended to provide guidance for experienced characters playing new warrior PvE characters or inexperienced warriors looking for additional options. If this is your first time playing guild wars, please see Getting started in Guild Wars Prophecies.''

A Warrior's Place
As a warrior, your place is in battle. Knee deep in foes and first in the fight. Warriors have the highest natural Armor rating of any class, as well as defensive and enduring skills such as Dolyak Signet, "Watch Yourself!", and Defensive Stance.

Being a Warrior
As a warrior, you should be the first into battle and the last out. In PvE, your primary responsibility is to mitigate damage to the rest of the group by soaking it yourself. Attempt to block or hinder foes attacking casters. Engage other warriors attempting to attack your party. Once the greater threats to your casters have been dealt with, move on to the opposing casters. In PvP, your job is to deal damage, force people to run away from you, and apply general pressure to the enemy. Engaging casters is typically more important and more useful than fighting other warriors.

Warriors can make use of adrenaline skills that take no energy. These skills have to be charged by successfully attacking, either with a melee weapon, a bow, or a wand. Warriors can also use shouts, which have no activation time, and often aid the entire party.

Always carry a resurrect skill of some kind, as your higher armor rating and survival skills mean you will be most likely to survive a near wipe situation. Monk and Ritualist secondaries should carry reusable resurrection spells like Rebirth or Flesh of My Flesh.

It is also advisable for warriors to carry self-healing skills, such as Healing Signet. Skills like these can keep the warrior effective longer, and allow primary monks to concentrate healing on more vulnerable allies.

Weapon of Choice
It is important to choose a single weapon to use with your warrior. Attribute points are in short supply, and focusing on a single weapon is the only way to use them effectively. See Runes and Armor for options on creating a weapon-flexible warrior. Be sure to read the associated page for details on your chosen weapon.

Strength
Strength grants 1% armor penetration per attribute level when using attack skills, and controls the effectiveness of strength skills. Strength based armor penetration stacks with sundering weapon upgrades, but is replaced by skill based armor penetration.
 * Interesting Strength Skills:
 * Power Attack, Griffon's Sweep,Counterattack and Leviathan's Sweep are direct damage attack skills may be used with any weapon.
 * Protector's Strike and Bull's Strike are skills that may be used with any weapon to deal extra damage to moving foes.
 * Endure Pain and Defy Pain grant extra health to survive when health is low near the end of battle.
 * Sprint and Rush allow you to move faster into or out of battle.
 * Signet of Strength, Warrior's Cunning and Berserker Stance can make your attacks more effective or faster.
 * Warrior's Endurance is an excellent way to gain energy in combat.
 * Dolyak Signet is a great way to gain large amounts of armor and immunity to being knocked down for no energy cost.

Tactics
Tactics controls the effect of Party wide or personal countering skills. Most Tactics skills are defensive in nature.
 * Interesting Tactics Skills:
 * Protector's Defense, "Shields Up!", and "Watch Yourself!" grant additional armor or additional chance to block attacks to other party members
 * Gladiator's Defense, Riposte and Deadly Riposte block incoming attacks and cause damage to the attacking foe.
 * Defensive Stance, Wary Stance, Bonetti's Defense, Deflect Arrows, Shield Stance, and Disciplined Stance grant blocking or armor bonuses against incoming attacks.
 * "Charge!" and "Retreat!" grant speed bonuses to allies or party members
 * Desperation Blow and Drunken Blow are melee attacks that knock you down when you use them. Steady Stance, Balanced Stance and Dolyak Signet let you use these safely.

Stances
Warriors have a great selection of stances, offensive and defensive, generic and specific. The most popular are IAS stances which increase your damage and help build adrenaline for other skills. Examples are Flail, Flurry, Frenzy, Tiger Stance, and Berserker Stance. All these stances come with a penalty and there is no single, best skill in all situations. Due to the warrior's role in combat and the perfect situational awareness of monsters, Frenzy should never be used in PvE.

Healing
Self-healing is especially important for a warrior because he's on the front line, often out of range of the monk, and he takes the brunt of the damage when the monk is busy or out of energy.

The 3 staple warrior heals are:
 * Lion's Comfort - A Nightfall skill, it combines strength and tactics, and is good for warriors using both attributes. It heals for less than Healing Signet, but can be used more often and doesn't carry the sometimes-dangerous armour penalty.
 * Healing Signet - The original and most powerful, for a character that specs into Tactics. It subtracts 40 armor from your current armor while casting, so an emergency stance or a solid tanking skill are often used while activating the signet.
 * Vigorous Spirit - The "Paladin" skill. This provides excellent healing over time, preventing the need for emergency healing.  It can also be shared with your warrior, ranger, and assassin allies. This is not a Warrior skill, but a Monk skill.

Runes and Armor
Here is an example armor set for a flexible warrior that allows the warrior to change weapons, skills and attribute bonuses at will.
 * One helm for each preferred weapon, for example,
 * Swordsmanship helm with a Rune of Swordsmanship for when wielding a sword
 * Hammer Mastery helm with a Rune of Hammer Mastery for when wielding a hammer
 * Two matched sets of cuirass, gauntlets, leggings and boots, infused with a Rune of Vigor in the cuirass and a Rune of Absorption in the leggings.
 * Gladiator's Armor for 5 extra energy with High energy builds such as Warrior's Endurance or Flourish
 * Legionnaire's Armor, Dragon Armor or Sentinel's Armor for extra armor with adrenal or tactical builds
 * Stoneskin Gauntlets when using skills that knock down foes, especially with a hammer
 * The remaining gauntlets and boots of your armour set can be infused with a rune of minor tactics, minor strength, rune of clarity or rune of purity, depending on your preference for strength and tactics skills

Sword Warrior
The sword warrior uses his weapon to duel a single enemy at a time, causing conditions like bleeding and doing heavy armour ignoring damage with his attack skills. Use Dragon Slash or Hundred Blades to quickly charge up all your equipped adrenaline attacks simultaneously. Energy can be used for skills to increase your adrenaline gain even further, like "For Great Justice!" and "To the Limit!", or for energy-based attacks like Pure Strike.
 * Dragon Spammer

Axe Warrior
The axe warrior has 2 important PvE skills which can hit multiple opponents at once: Cyclone Axe and Triple Chop. These attacks give adrenaline for each foe hit, the same as Hundred Blades, and allow easy use of adrenaline attacks.
 * Cleave PvE Soldier

Hammer Warrior
The thumper disrupts foes by knocking them down, over and over and over. A common attack chain is Staggering Blow, Heavy Blow, Crushing Blow, Irresistible Blow. Other skills can be added or substituted for these ones as they become available. A stance that increases attack speed is important with a hammer, because of the weapon's slower speed.
 * Basic PvE Hammer

Tank
This character uses Strength and Tactics skills to reduce the damage done by monsters, so that the party needs less healing over all to survive a battle. S/he attracts the attention of melee enemies, as well as protecting his/her party members from ranged attacks. Some popular tanking skills are Dolyak Signet, Flail, Shield Bash, "Shields Up!", "Watch Yourself!", Bonetti's Defense, and Gladiator's Defense.

Choosing a Secondary
For further information on choosing a secondary profession, including information about PvP Warrior builds, see Secondary professions for a Warrior.

Suggested Skills

 * Warriors Endurance, Berserker Stance, and "while in a stance" equipment: at 12 strength, Warriors Endurance lasts 20 seconds, Berserker Stance lasts 10, and both recycle in 30 seconds, allowing you to remain "stanced" and gain constant benefit from stance equipment. Additionally, the energy gain from Warriors Endurance allows the use of energy-expensive attack skills and/or maintained enchantments.


 * Dolyak Signet and "Watch Yourself!": Both these skills have no energy cost, and provide unconditional armor bonuses. "Watch Yourself!" can be maintained continuously even with 0 Tactics (provided sufficient adrenaline) and provides 20 armor(not since it got nerfed, now requires points into tactics to determine the amount of armor benefit). At 16 Strength, the duration, recharge and casting time of Dolyak Signet allow a continual +42 to AL. Combined at those levels, these skills reduce incoming damage by roughly 62%.


 * Skull Crack and Berserker Stance: at 12 Strength, both Dazed and Berserker Stance last 10 seconds, allowing you to interrupt your target caster once a second for 10 seconds.


 * Enraged Smash: Unlike most attack skills, this one is not meant to be combined with other attack skills, but to be used by itself, over and over. And unlike most Hammer elites, it doesn't knock enemies down.