I have come to appreciate Body Blow as a Warrior trait

[Guy.9207]

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Body Blow

Stuns, dazes, knockbacks, pulls, pushes, and launches inflict bleeding and weakness.

Weakness (3s): -50% Endurance Regeneration, +50% Fumble (Unrestricted)

Bleeding (12s): 264 Damage

It doesn't seem like a lot yes, in fact I'm pretty sure it's pretty underpowered at the moment, but when I run around smacking people with CCs in Open World, I have come to realize just how useful Weakness as a condition is. By having enemies hitting you with a 50% chance of it dealing only half of its total damage (that couldn't crit btw), you end up with them just hitting you like a wet noodle. Let say, a mob should deal 500 dmg per hit (with 1k for crit), this mob with Weakness (which you can also just spam via CCs) now only deals those damage half the time, and other times dealing 1/4 of what it could done to you (in this case 250 dmg which is practically nothing). It pretty much negates any stakes you have when roaming around in places where a bunch of mobs are guarding, because even if you can't use CCs on those enemies at times, them suffering from Weakness means there's plenty of opportunity for you to just shrug off their attacks before re-applying the condition again. It's a reverse-Protection that literally has no cooldown and you can apply it as much as you want.

Better yet, it also synergizes with Defense's Cull the Weak (strike damage mod) and Arms if you run that for some reason (which increases strike chance vs Bleeding foe), so you won't have to rely on using Burst skills or Hammer 2 to apply weakness, giving you a bunch of options to use it whenever you need.

Edited February 13 by NeverLoseGuy.3894

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

The problem is that it shares a slot with Forceful Greatsword and Great Fortitude, both of which are a DPS increase on power builds, the latter also giving you more sustain through raw HP as well - usually a good pick when not running a Greatsword.

The majority of warrior weapon CC also comes on Hammer and Mace, which already have great access to weakness. Maybe you could make an argument for Dagger/Shield.

The bleeding is almost pointless because Strength as a trait line doesn't really lean into conditions anyway, and warrior condition builds tend to lack many sources of CC.

So while weakness is a great condition, the trait itself is overshadowed by better options, and isn't in the best trait line to actually get the most out of it either.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

The issue has never been the weakness. That part is nice. The single bleed stack in the power DPS trait line is the issue.

That bleed stack either needs to be increased or turned into strike damage.

[Langeball.9351]

Basically it should be like scrapper Expert Examination used to be:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Expert_Examination&oldid=2363615

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Stunning or dazing a foe applies vulnerability and weakness to them.

    Weakness (3s): -50% Endurance Regeneration, +50% Fumble (Unrestricted)

    5 Vulnerability stacks (6s): +5% Incoming Damage, +5% Incoming Condition Damage

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Edited February 13 by Langeball.9351

[Guy.9207]

1 hour ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

The issue has never been the weakness. That part is nice. The single bleed stack in the power DPS trait line is the issue.

That bleed stack either needs to be increased or turned into strike damage.

 

51 minutes ago, Langeball.9351 said:

Basically it should be like scrapper Expert Examination used to be:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Expert_Examination&oldid=2363615

Ah yeah, in that case I agree. At the moment the Bleeding practically does nothing outside of increasing crit chance, if running Arms which in of itself is ??? for a power build. I would love to see that trait in Spellbreaker being baked into Body Blow, where doing CC would now also inflict Cripple (and possibly Slow) instead of Bleeding. Now that would be nice and incentivize running Tactics to proc Leg Specialist.

[mirage.8046]

Body Blow honestly feels like it belongs in Arms rather than Strength, but if one were to make the swap, then what replaces Body Blow in Strength?? It is nice tbh because it turns your physical skills into pseudo-condi skills; but because it is underwhelming for condi damage, the bleeding could be upped to 2 or 3 stacks in PvE. 

Or imagine if they replaced the bleeding with 'revealed' like how Engineer has such a trait. Then you can't stop those pesky thieves once they get CC'd. :P

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

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I have come to realize just how useful Weakness as a condition is.

This sentence is why we can't run body blow on power builds in PvP, because we have to run defense for resilient roll. 

Either you give up strength for a small window of consistent damage, or you accept that at any point your damage has a 50% chance of being invalidated by any opponent that has access to it, even if you land the telegraphed hits. 

Body blow should not do any bleeding damage, and instead do 6 seconds of weakness, so hitting people with cc grinds their endurance generation to a halt. Then that's worth considering over resilient roll, for competitive, because as long as you hit your cc eventually your opponent will run out of dodges. The bleeding is useless; nobody playing a condi build on warrior plays strength, and even if they did bleed is the weakest damaging condition in the game. A single stack of it only suits in making it harder for opponents to remove the conditions actually doing the work. 

Edited February 13 by Azure The Heartless.3261

[SleepyBat.9034]

I was testing a cele Hammer, Mace/Torch zerker build using Demon Queen relic in wvw and it was not complete trash.