by Karen Hertzberg on Jan 20, 2007
by BadYeti & Ralsu
The Warriors primary role
is to protect her allies. She
draws the animosity of her enemies and mitigates incoming damage with
her
defensive skills. The
Warrior's
secondary role is to deal significant damage while influencing the flow
of
battle with her Commands and Shouts. Of
the three protective fighter classes, Warriors have the potential to
deal the
most damage and have the widest range of options for managing enemy
aggression
(aggro). A Warrior
will need to properly
use her stances, special attacks and tactical maneuvers to fulfill her
various
group roles.
Dexterity and constitution are the Warrior's primary
attributes. Dexterity helps the Warrior trigger his powerful Finishing
Attacks and evade incoming damage. Constitution gives him more hit
points and higher resistances. While arguably not as important as the
prior two attributes, Strength and Intelligence also benefit the
Warrior. Strength enables the Warrior to do enough damage to
keep the attention of enemies, while Intelligence increases the
magnitude of his Taunts and improves his combat perception.
Building a good Warrior takes some careful planning at the
character
creation screen and requires you to learn a handful of tactics in the
lower levels.
Warriors of all races start with the same attributes, but the
choice
of race can affect how many points the Warrior automatically gets
placed
into its prime attributes.
Starting
attributes:
Each character gets 20 attribute points (AP) per level, starting at
level ten. Six of your AP are placed for you automatically upon gaining
the level, one per attribute. An additional four points are
assigned to attributes based on your race if you are not one of the
human races. These preferred stats are intended to reflect the traits
of your race. You can place the remaining ten points (or 14
for humans) wherever you want to within their soft caps.
Human races have a soft cap of five points per attribute, while
non-human races have a base soft cap of four points per
attribute. The non-human races, however, gain higher soft
caps on their preferred stats. Thus, a human can develop into a more
balanced character, while a non-human has the potential to become more
specialized.
The table below shows the attribute scores at level 50 before gear and
buffs for the Warrior based on selected race. We've
highlighted the best results for each of the primary attributes for
you. A Warrior will receive enough AP to reach the soft caps
for any two attributes of your choice.
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The other important factor to consider when picking the race for your
Warrior is racial abilities. With their short durations and long
recasts,
racial abilities are less important than attributes in the selection
process, but they can be used to pick between races that are otherwise
equal. The racial abilities are listed below.
Thestran: Inspirational
Commands
You will have 3 inspirational commands at your disposal: Inspirational
Presence, Inspirational Wisdom, and Inspirational Tactics. Each command
is a group buff that will add either 2% to mitigation, a 3% reduction
to mana cost of all spells, or a 2% increase in damage. You may only
maintain one command at a time, however you may have all 3 effects
active at the same time. Recast is instant.
Human Ingenuity: + 10 bonus to all weapon skills, and dodge.
Crafting: +10 Ingenuity
Harvesting: +5 Lumberjacking
Congratulations on joining the ranks of Telon's finest
Warriors! You'll find that if you're careful in how you build
and play your new Warrior, he'll grow to become capable of dishing out
impressive amounts of damage when going all-out on offense and still be
able to tank with the best of them when he needs to.
The first ten levels go by quickly, and you'll find that most of your
opponents are not too dangerous. Any class can comfortably
solo most of the content that's designed for these early levels, and
the Warrior is no exception. Even so, be sure to select your
battle sites and targets carefully. While you have the
potential to put out a lot of damage on a single target, your lack of
crowd control options, snares or healing makes additional enemies
(adds) extremely dangerous to the Warrior.
Your new Warrior will find herself in an outpost not too far from her
race's home town. Look for nearby non-player characters
(NPCs) with yellow shields floating over their heads. These
NPCs have quests to offer you, and these quests will do a great job of
introducing you to the game and the world of Telon. By the
time you finish all of the quests in your starting area, your character
will have some nice equipment, a few coins in her purse, a half-dozen
or so levels under her belt, and directions to her home town.
At this point, head to your home town where you can expect to find a
new set of quests that will introduce you to diplomacy, crafting,
grouping and eventually point you to a nearby dungeon appropriate for
burgeoning adventurers.
Throughout this process, be sure to visit your trainer everylevel to
see if you are able learn new attacks and other
abilities. Heavy Fighter Instructors provide basic training
to all three of the protective fighter classes, and can be found in the
starting outposts. Beginning with level six, however, some
abilities have to be acquired from a more specialized Warrior
Instructor. A Warrior Instructor can be found in your home
town, and the other major cities around Telon.
A
Stunned Enemy Can't
Hurt You (or Your Allies)
Let's face it: your Warrior is stunning. She's going to
develop a variety of ways to throw her enemies for a loop, and she'll
even pick up a couple of them prior to level ten.
Kick is learned at level two. While not dealing a lot of
damage, Kick is going to become a mainstay of your
repertoire. It has a low cost, a fast animation, it's usable
in either stance, and it has a chance to briefly stun your
opponent. Even the shortest stun will interrupt the casting
of a spell. Use this against casters or as an inexpensive way
to try to trigger a Finishing Attack. I promise that last
sentence will make sense in just a few paragraphs.
Stunning Bellow is the more reliable stun. You'll pick this
baby up at level four. You can use it to incapacitate any mob
for up to four seconds. Use it to put a halt to incoming
damage if you just took a huge spike and your healer is failing to keep
up; use it to immediately stop an enemy from beating up one of your
friends if your other snap-aggro tools are unavailable; use it to
interrupt a particularly obnoxious spell from being cast; or use it to
stop a runner from stumbling back into his crowd of easily-angered
friends.
Finishing Attacks and
Counterattacks and Rescues! Oh My!
Starting at level six, your life as a warrior will start to change
focus. Much of your attention will begin to shift from
abilities that you have full control over to those for which you must
react to the combat that's going on around you. Level six
brings you your first reactionary ability,
Decimate. Warriors gain three types of reactionary abilities,
and you'll have one example of each by the time you hit level ten.
Finishing Attacks These deal huge amounts of damage or
hate, and will become the core of your Warrior's offense, especially
after level twelve. Finishing Attacks become available only
after scoring a critical hit (crit) with one of your other special
attacks, but must be launched immediately after becoming
available. Using any other ability prior to the Finishing
Attack will cancel its availability.
Decimate is your first Finishing Attack, and you'll want to use it
every time it becomes available, as its damage greatly exceeds that of
any of your other abilities at this level. Make sure to
always save enough endurance to fire off these attacks.
You'll hate yourself if you have a Finishing Attack light up, but don't
have enough endurance to actually use it before you lose the
opportunity.
Counterattacks These deal impressive damage, though not as
much as Finishing Attacks, and will become available after either
parrying or blocking an incoming attack. As with
Finishing Attacks, using any other ability prior to the Counterattack
will cancel its availability. Riposte is your first
reactionary of this type, and will become available at level eight.
Rescues Rescues are defensive maneuvers that force enemies
to attack you rather than one of your allies. Prior to using
a Rescue, you must select an offensive target that is
munching on one of your allies, select the defensive target that is
being munched on by that enemy, and be within five meters of
them. Protect is your first Rescue, and will become available
at level ten. It's going to be your only way to guarantee
that enemies are locked onto you for many levels. Get used to
using it.
Selecting the Right
Stance for the Job
The first thing you should do when you hit level eight is to track down
your Defensive Stance quest. Once you have found and completed
the
quest, you'll be granted Defensive Stance and have the option of
toggling between that and your Offensive Stance. This
tactical option plays a huge role in what abilities will be available
to your Warrior and how well you'll perform in executing those
abilities.
Most of your high-damage attacks and Finishing Attacks will only be
available in Offensive Stance. Offensive Stance also
increases your accuracy and damage by 10%. On the other hand, most of
your best
aggro-management and tanking tools will only be available in Defensive
Stance. While you're in Defensive Stance your hate will increase by
40%, your blocking will increase by 15%, and your mitigation will
increase by 20%.
Since there is no balanced stance for you to
choose, the net effect of selecting one stance relative to the other,
in addition to their different ability portfolios, will be:
Time to Make Some Friends
This talk of allies brings us to the topic of grouping. Most
of the time when teaming up with others, the Warrior's role is going to
be to absorb damage, to tank for the
group. If you're tanking for a group, be sure that roles and
expectations are clearly communicated. Ask for any relevant
beneficial spells (buffs) that your allies could provide to you, and
understand which party members will be responsible for handling any
adds, either through crowd control or off-tanking them until the
primary target is dropped. I suggest establishing that you
will be the only person to pull mobs, at least until you become
comfortable working with your group. This reduces the
likelihood of multiple pulls and allows you to generate the initial
hate. You'll find some excellent ideas for macros that can
help with this communication in the Ten Ton Hammer
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Guide.
In addition to the short-term Rescues described earlier in this
article, beginning Warriors will have access to a handful of other
group-oriented abilities to aid them on their way to level ten.
Taunt, acquired at level eight, is an ability familiar to any gamer who
has prior experience with massively multiplayer online games
(MMOs). It's used to draw the ire of an enemy. In
Vanguard, however, Taunt is a much weaker ability than players may be
used to. In Vanguard's system, 1 Hate = 1 Damage, as it
relates to aggro-generation. When you take that into account,
you'll see that Taunt generates far less aggro than any of your other
abilities. Its value comes from the fact that Taunt is
powered by your energy rather than your precious endurance, and that it
doesn't reset your combat timers. Use it to supplement your
main aggro-generators. Taunt and other +Hate abilities are
improved through Intelligence at the rate of +1 Hate per 2.5
Intelligence.
Rend Armor applies a long-duration mitigation debuff on an
enemy. Use this when you're grouped with a lot of melee
combatants who'll be able to take advantage of this debuff.
Don't bother expending its high endurance cost for quick battles, or if
you're in a caster-heavy group.
Taunting Strike, available at level ten, is your bread-and-butter
tanking ability. To use this, you need to be in Defensive
Stance. It generates a lot of hate, especially when you take
into account the 40% bonus from Defensive Stance, and has a very fast
refresh timer and animation.
Press the Attack is your first Battle Command, and you'll get it at
level ten. It increases the damage of one ally of your
choosing by 20% for eight seconds. Wait until you've got
solid hate built up, then drop this baby on your ranger friend and
watch the critter crumble.
Waylay, acquired at level ten, is a positional attack. You
can only use it when you have allies flanking the enemy. It
does a decent bit of damage, but its endurance cost is pretty
steep. Only use it when you have endurance to burn or when
you really need to maximize your burst damage
Whack-A-Mole Your Way to
Victory
Speaking of endurance, you may as well begin familiarizing yourself
with combat timing in the early levels while the stakes are still low
and you haven't yet built any bad habits. The are two
components of combat timing for Warriors to keep in mind: timing as it
relates to endurance regeneration and timing as it relates to
auto-attack. Endurance is the key resource that Warriors use to launch
almost all of their attacks, and therefore you want to be efficient in
its regeneration. A Warrior who is out of Endurance is a
Warrior who is not going to be hurting anyone. Endurance
regeneration is paused for just over two seconds every time that an
endurance-based ability is used. This means that you will not
be regenerating any Endurance if you are just spamming attacks as
quickly as the global cooldown will permit.
The second component of combat timing to consider is how it relates to
auto-attack. Your Warrior's auto-attack is also reset and put
on pause for just over two-seconds every time you fire off a special
attack. This means that if you time things poorly, you can go
through an entire combat and receive very little, or even none, of your
potential auto-attack damage. While there are times when that
might be useful, like during your Staggered
four-attack combo, in most cases it would represent a significant loss
of efficiency.
Fortunately the two timers are reset by the same events and are of
pretty similar duration. Keep them in mind and experiment
with their effects on combat until you become comfortable with
them. A practice that some Warriors find useful is to time
most of your special attacks to follow immediately after your white
auto-attack numbers pop up and your endurance regeneration ticks
forward.
What Does the Future Bring
At this point you should have a great feel for how the Warrior plays up
to level ten. It's a versatile and fun class. You
have the capacity to deal a tremendous amount of damage when
dual-wielding weapons in Offensive Stance. You also have the ability to
switch to
Defensive Stance and break out a shield, gaining a whole different
suite of defensive and aggro-management abilities.
As you go out into Telon, practicing your hard-earned skills, know that
you will constantly be learning new abilities that bring more tactical
richness to your Warrior. You'll gain more stuns, Commands,
Shouts, Rescues, Counterattacks, Finishing Attacks and other unique
abilities.