Heavy armor warrior

yeah I'm playing heavy armor warrior recently. I find its so weak, so my question is it need magic skills or not, like fire proof,shied of ice,shield of air etc.

 

Depends on what you want to do
but pretty much yes you need magic it is FAR superior. I play 0 magic in offline for RP reasons only

 

I'd suggest mixing at least a little Earth into your build. Obsidian Arrow is great for ranging targets or grabbing the aggro of an enemy from a distance. The damage also scales with strength. Earthquake is a great high damage AoE skill, but you'll have to see what your fizzle chance is with these skills. Plus there's beneficial buffs like Strength of Earth which is a strength increase buff and Shield of Crystal which buffs your health. The innates in that tree will give you more strength, damage resistance, and maximum damage resistance. Embrace of Earth is kind of like a stance buff and will give you increased damage resistance and Earth attunement at the cost of some movement speed. Plus Earth spells were designed with melee in mind. As in, they have lower fizzle chances and 2 of the 3 damage spells are melee ranged (Earthquake is an AoE around you and Stone Fist hits enemies in an arc in front of you). Fire is a decent choice as well.

Shield of Ice and Douse from the water tree are great for buffing your fire resistance if you're fighting a bunch of fire mobs. Shield of Ice also gives a damage avoidance buff. Death Shield is probably the best shield skill overall since it converts a percentage of damage received to healing (currently mine is at 20%) and it works on all sources of incoming damage. I would highly recommend staying away from Shield of Air unless you plan to be out of focus all the time since damage taken will be taken from your focus pool instead of your health pool at a rate equal to DamageTaken*FocusTransferRatio=FocusDamageTaken. So if you have a 1.5 focus transfer ratio on your Shield of Air and you take a 100 damage attack, 150 damage will be take from your focus pool instead of 100 damage from your health pool. Shield of Air is only really good as an "oh sh*t" button or for really high level Air mages.

Fire proof is a necessary skill for all avatars imo just because of the number of fire damage enemies in the game.

Lastly, Death Field can be an amazing healing spell when farming large groups of enemies. It will do damage to all enemies in the area and heal you for the damage you do to each enemy. So if you hit 5 enemies for 20 damage each, it will heal you for 100 health total. Against single target however, it's basically worthless.

Keep in mind though that if you're using plate armor, it may be difficult to cast some of these spells due to your fizzle chance. You may just want to wait until they buff melee if they ever do. Not sure if they will. There is an innate skill under the Focus skill tree that will reduce your fizzle chance.

Edit: Added explanation of Shield of Air

 

Heavy is very weak right now. I'd go with magic until it's fixed.

 

Yeah, Earth is mandatory, heavy armor warrior is unplayable without it.

 

All the stat buffs, passives (as mentioned) and tactics + subterfuge for dex/armor weak spots.

One more school can help alot. Death meshes very nicely with tanking. Skip the summons, summons passives and death ray (but get to 40 to unlock the best skills) There is also a very nice jewelry enchant for Death (+7.5% to damage/heal per piece) and the glyphs increase in power as you take damage. 40 attunement from gem sockets helps immensely too (since you likely aren't currently using gems)

My tier 4 Death spells are usable only due to having chain/cloth mix. You will find mitigation is mostly gained through passives and active buffs. (parry, defensive stance both rock plus the earth/heavy passives)

Antifizzle Focus tree talent is quite helpful for a hybrid build. There really isn't any point of being a 'pure warrior'

Cherry pick the best active/passives for your role and playstyle

 

Death Knight here and so far I am very happy with it. Grinding the magic to very high levels though and have limited myself to chain.

 

I play a heavy/Polearms/fire build (no earth at all) and really like it. Don't use earth at all. It was decent at low levels but once I got my skills, all of them, in the 60's, it was like a switch was thrown and I became a killing machine.