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The Warrior is a profession dedicated to up-close and personal combat. It is the quintessential hack-and-slash fantasy hero: they are tough, strong, and adept at wielding melee weapons on the battlefield. Many warrior skills are fuelled by adrenaline, a special power pool generated as a warrior fights and takes hits. Adrenal skills allow a warrior (a profession with inherently low energy regeneration) to have many attack skills to use even when their energy runs out.
Attributes
Strength (Primary)
Strength, available only to warrior primaries, adds 1% armor penetration per attribute level to attack skills. Strength is also the basis of some utility skills and non-weapon attribute specific attacks, as well as being a Shield requirement attribute.
Axe Mastery
Axe Mastery increases basic axe damage and damage dealt by axe skills
Hammer Mastery
Hammer Mastery increases basic hammer damage and damage dealt by hammer skills.
Swordsmanship
Swordsmanship increases basic sword damage as well as damage dealt by sword skills.
Tactics
Tactics increases the effectiveness of shouts and stances that give the warrior and allies an advantage in battle, as well as being a Shield requirement attribute.
Common usage
Combat
The Warrior in Guild Wars is able to excel not just defensively, but offensively as well. Their attacks can cause many conditions such as bleeding or deep wound. Masters of the axe, sword, and hammer, Warriors generally favor focusing on skills from a single mastery.
The axe deals very high base damage (maximum unmodified 6-28) and has a high attack rate (every 1.33 seconds), combining with many powerful skills to deal damage, such as Eviscerate. However, they have a very unstable damage structure, and the amount of damage dealt can range wildly from 4 to 40.
Swords also attack quickly (every 1.33 seconds) but do not deal as much damage as the other weapons (maximum unmodified 15-22). Sword skills cause many conditions, and deal a lot of damage conditionally (such as Final Thrust). They have a more stable damage structure than axes, and most hits will deal around the same amount of damage.
Hammers are the slowest of the weapons (every 1.75 seconds), but each hit deals massive amounts of bone-crushing damage. Hammers offer many attacks that can knock down an enemy (Backbreaker is one such example).
More aggressive Warriors take advantage of increased armor penetration through Strength, the warrior’s primary attribute. As suggested by the raw damage increase of Strength, Warriors can produce an impressive, steady damage output. While Warriors typically focus on one target at a time, their damage is formidable. Many warriors forgo the use of defensive skills entirely, finding it better to kill their enemies quickly: “The best defense is a good offense”. In PvP a Warrior will usually avoid going defensive, choosing instead to deal as much damage as possible to enemy players.
Defense
Warriors often function as what many MMO gamers call a “tank”, a word that describes a defensive, damage-absorbing juggernaut. With their heavy armor and damage absorbing runes and shields, Warriors fulfill this role by soaking up abuse that other characters in the group could not handle. This gives other professions in the party, such as Rangers or Elementalists, the distance needed to make use of ranged abilities.
Some warrior skills are predominantly defensive, such as those found under the Tactics attribute. Tactics skills often help both protect and lead you and your allies.
Running
Warriors have stances and shouts that increase their run speed. They make very good “runners” and when combined with a Monk or a Ranger as a secondary profession they can escape from and survive extremely dangerous situations.
Secondary professions
The Warrior profession combines well with any secondary, as long as you keep in mind their smaller inherent energy pool. Much skill synergy can be found between Warrior skills and certain enchantments; one such example involves using Live Vicariously with Cyclone Axe, where the Warrior will gain health every time they hit a target.