Alexander Dragonfang

With the lack of other useful elites at our disposal

I've been playing around with support builds for a while now, and CheeseThief largely hit the nail on the head with how you should do it.

30 Tactics is a certainty if you want to support, the Boon duration of 30% is nothing short of legendary (9 more seconds on Signet of Rage!). The Master and Grandmaster Traits can be assigned to augment Banners or Shouts. Here's a summary of both builds:

Banners:

The M and GM traits should go on Inspiring Banners and Inspiring Battle Standard respectively. The former allows your banners to have a large range, and a much more palatable cooldown. The latter applies the Regeneration boon to allies under the effects of your banners. The amount of regen depends on your healing power. There is a formula modelling it in terms of level and healing power.

Advantages:

This build is great for buffing allies with your banners. The variety of banners you can choose is a bonus. You can go all offense with the Strength and Disc banners. Or you can provide bonus Toughness and Vit with Defense Banner, and then bonus healing and Boon duration with Tactics banner.

The range of your banners is sufficient to cover everyone in range of you with the help of the M talent.

You only really need two banners on your skill bar. Don't bother with Battle Standard as the cooldown is too long (sometimes it's useful but mostly not).

Disadvantages:

Mobility is a bit annoying. If people don't carry your other banner for you, you end up sitting around with a little bit of downtime on one of them. In addition for those boss fights where you have to run around a very large room, you largely cannot benefit from your banners (i.e. Giganticus Lupicus).

Summary:

This build is pretty great for providing team support. It doesn't even have to be too defensive, since you can run this build with less Healing Power (much less) than you would run the Shouts build with and still be effective. Plus when things get hairy you can use the defensive banners instead. A great way to support without making too many sacrifices. Also bear in mind despite the fact it says your banner lasts 45 seconds and has a 96 second cooldown, it's really more like 90 seconds they last for, not entirely sure why. The regen form banners syncs nicely with the regen you get from Healing Signet and Adrenal Health (if you spec in to Defense).

Vigorous Shouts:

For this build you can spec the M trait as "Shrug it Off" or "Lung Capacity". The former automatically used Shake it Off! when you gain 2 conditions, it has a 30 second internal cooldown. The latter reduces shout cooldown by 20%. Both have their merits, but Shrug it Off is great for high condition areas. Your GM talent becomes Vigorous Shouts, which provides a burst heal from your shouts.

Advantages:

Able to heal upwards of 6k when using 3 shouts (FGJ, On My Mark, and Shake It Off!). This is great for helping out allies in high damage dealing fights.

Direct Healing is sometimes preferred to ambient regen, since in some heavy hitting boss fights, well, you just need a big heal. So if you heal your 4 party members (and yourself) as well, that's a  30k heal over all, every ~25 seconds (or ~20 seconds with Lung Capacity).

Each of Lung Capacity and Shrug it Off have their merits. Shrug it Off counts as an extra heal, so if you take this trait in a place littered with conditions (i.e. Twilight Arbor), then that extra heal every 30 seconds makes it marginally better than Lung Capacity (plus it is bonus Condition Removal afterall).

Disadvantages:

Unlike banners, the healing you do with this build is MORE dependent on your Healing Power stat, as such you need full clerics to use it effectively. With Banners you could probably just make a full set of Sapphire accessories (clerics stats). So if you go this way, you have to commit to it a bit more than you would banners.

Cooldowns. Sometimes in sticky situations you d find yourself smashing all 3 shouts at once, and using Shake it Off! without having a condition can leave you vulnerable for the next 25 seconds. Being unable to heal in that time is pretty tricky. You have to be liberal with your shouts, don't blow them all at once.

You HAVE to fill your utility slots with FGJ, Shake it Off! and OMM to be properly effective with this, which sadly leaves no room for anything else.

Summary:

Vigorous Shouts is a great build because it provides the Warrior with the only option for Burst Healing. When you're allied with squishy teammates (eles especially), the extra healing is really useful for them. However like I said before to go for VS you do have to commit, gear wise at least.

Concluding Remarks:

Ultimately it's difficult to compare these two builds effectively, however if you have full Clerics Armour (like I do) and Cleric accessories (but gems are Emeralds), then you're in a good enough position to liberally switch between both builds effectively, which is a very desirable position to be. Most people will want to use the banner build, because you lose less damage that way.

The real advantage to both of these builds though, is that if you have two warriors in your team, if both of you run one of these builds, they synchronize in a glorious fashion. One guy provides banners for damage, and the other guy boosts the team's healing.

To give an example of running banners effectively, a Warrior i regularly run dungeons with has Knights Gear, and his accessories are Emerald, with Berserker Gems in. So whole he specs defensively, but with little healing, he can use Banners effectively, and then I can put myself into an effective support build using Shouts. So while the warrior i refer to has a lot of toughness, but using Knights and Emeralds, he isn't even sacrificing too much damage. You can take 30 tactics and then still put the rest of your talents in Arms/Strength for example.

Anyway i hope this gives people an idea of playing a support warrior, just remember, you don't have to give up too much to do it

Thread on Support Builds incoming very soon.

My build was made to be great for all situations: http://www.guildwars...erker-its-back/

You can excel in all content, including WvW, dungeons, solo and DEs without resetting traits.
You can trait all weapons we have.