Guild Wars 2

Hi guys , I finally maxed my 6th character ( got 6 80es ) .
I will begin doing FotM ( did few in the past ) , but what is the easiest class to do that ?
I got >
MM necro > http://tinyurl.com/opjsdrw
Demolisher engineer > http://tinyurl.com/ac2zh5v
Trapper ranger > http://tinyurl.com/pwmk5ox
Banner/signet/shout warrior > http://tinyurl.com/p6fn8wn
Cleric guardian > http://tinyurl.com/osugavl

I know that each class/build has its own pros and cons , but what is the easiest/fastest one according to your experince and my builds.
Thank you

Guardian would probably be the easiest class to progress through fractals. Use the hammer build 15/15/0/20/10 with 10 left over as you see fit to radaince to max dps, valor to go more defensive with strength in numbers, or 10 in virtues for more condition removal. Bring wall and shield of the avenger if there are projectiles. The gear should be all zerk unless your having trouble run knights armor + zerk rest. Clerics gear and AH are bad for dungeon/fractal.

Its a full selection of play how you want builds. Make it stop!

I am currently having a variation of this discussion in another thread, but if you are running Engineer in Fractals, you have to be willing to swap out every single utility for different fractals.

This is probably not ideal, and as obal said, a zerk guardian will be much, much easier and useful, mostly because there is more advice available for each fractal shard.

Also, when you get an opportunity to switch away from Rune of the Fighter to something with a bit more offensive support/defense. For instance, Sup. Runes of Altruism share 3 stacks of might with your party on heal, leaving you with 4 more runes to use for something like Runes of the Earth, and since you can trait for protection from 2 sources, you can keep up basically another set of armor in addition to what you already have when you are attacked. This will be much more survivable to “trash” mobs in fractals, which is quite a challenge for an engineer.

I am sure the boys here will call me a “bad” for advocating something defensive, but in fractals as they go up, having something like protection up, even 40% of the time is much better than going with any extra toughness or vitality on your gear.

As an alternative, if you don’t mind the waste of 2 rune slots, you could get an extra 40% might duration with 4 runes of the Noble. This would help if you stack might, or use HGH.

why would you use runes of the fighter anywhere o_o

Cleric. Guardian.

guanlongwucaii.3162:

why would you use runes of the fighter anywhere o_o

Because they remind me of this: http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/118/1181242123382.jpg

But seriously, don’t use them.

For warrior.
Don’t take any signet traits, ever…
Swap signet of fury for shake it off or another banner. Ideally you want to either go full on shout build with healing shouts and runes of the soldier or full on banner build.
You don’t want to go full ptv build for any dungeon, fractals 28/38/48+ included, because you won’t do any damage and still won’t be as tanky as guardian. I personally like to go for ptv on my armor and then berserker or something similar for my accessories and weapon.

I don’t play guardian a lot, but I know one guy, who does all dungeons and fractals 48+ almost every day for over a year now and he said to me, that investing into healing or vitality for guardian is absolutely worthless, so you can take that for whatever it’s worth to you.

As for the easiest, guardian will probably be your choice, seconded with the warrior, other three are usually not that useful, unless you’re really good at the class. Simply from experience (over 500 fractals), when you have a team, consisting of rangers/engineers/necros in 38+ it usually doesn’t go very well, it’s ok to have one or two, but don’t be surprised, that when run will start getting off the rails people will start pointing fingers at you.

Here’s some advice. Go full zerk everything for fotm 48. You’re not ‘tanking’ anything…. ever.

Banners + FGJ.

OP obviously likes ptv gear, so he won’t convert to berserk builds in a second, I offered some compromises.

Seveleniumus.5973:

For warrior.
Don’t take any signet traits, ever…
Swap signet of fury for shake it off or another banner. Ideally you want to either go full on shout build with healing shouts and runes of the soldier or full on banner build.
You don’t want to go full ptv build for any dungeon, fractals 28/38/48+ included, because you won’t do any damage and still won’t be as tanky as guardian. I personally like to go for ptv on my armor and then berserker or something similar for my accessories and weapon.

I don’t play guardian a lot, but I know one guy, who does all dungeons and fractals 48+ almost every day for over a year now and he said to me, that investing into healing or vitality for guardian is absolutely worthless, so you can take that for whatever it’s worth to you.

As for the easiest, guardian will probably be your choice, seconded with the warrior, other three are usually not that useful, unless you’re really good at the class. Simply from experience (over 500 fractals), when you have a team, consisting of rangers/engineers/necros in 38+ it usually doesn’t go very well, it’s ok to have one or two, but don’t be surprised, that when run will start getting off the rails people will start pointing fingers at you.

The signet cooldown trait is acceptable to use. Having a 48sec SoR is worthwhile. Just swap out the trait if you’re using warbanner instead.

Skip the shout healing build. Skip the full banner build. Unfortunately, these two end up being crutches that will eventually hold you back from progressing in the higher levels of fotm. The reason is because mobs will do so much more damage per hit that they’ll outstrip passive defenses like heal and regen. You will end up having to rely on more active defenses such as dodging and blocking, and using your heals as a supplement to your defense.

You can use banners even if you have no traits for it. You should have space on your utility bar for at least one banner. My personal utility bar is usually (SiO, FGJ, Banner), or (Endure Pain, FGJ, Banner), or (Banner, FGJ, Banner).

I’m by no means a pro like some of the people here in the dungeon subforum, but there’s always room to grow and improve if you challenge yourself to.

For armor. I’d say if you’re petrified of going full zerk at first, start with a heavy dose of knights along with zerk. Slowly swap out your knights pieces for zerk. I’d say anything ascended you should have zerk, so trinkets all zerk, then have exotic knights. If you craft an ascended weapon, make it a Zojja’s (zerk weapon gets the most awesome name attached to it). Knight’s armor to start with ruby orbs, then exchange pieces one at a time to zerk. Once you’ve got full zerk, and you’re starting to feel good about it, look into investing in scholar runes.

Best of luck!

The closer answer is running the meta dps build, substituting in Knights armor as needed. The best answer is running full dps with scholar runes and realizing that if you want to progress fractals and learn to mitigate damage.

Skip the shout healing build. Skip the full banner build. Unfortunately, these two end up being crutches that will eventually hold you back from progressing in the higher levels of fotm.

You don’t use healing shouts as an active heal replacement, you use them to keep your and your teammate health pool at max, you can think of it as a form of mass passive heal. In any case, the main value comes from the amount of condition removal you get with runes of the soldier, when combined with warhorn you can have 5 mass condi removals every ~20 seconds. Btw I have done many fotm 48+ runs and it works just fine.

The closer answer is running the meta dps build, substituting in Knights armor as needed. The best answer is running full dps with scholar runes and realizing that if you want to progress fractals and learn to mitigate damage.

I’m sorry, but unless by “progress” you mean “progress past lv 50” that’s a horrible advice. Sure, if you have a perfect group you do dungeons/fractals with every day you can easily transition to full dps, but most of us don’t have such a luxury and we’re left with pugs and in that situation you, more often than not, will need to carry or be carried, if you’re bad, and dps warrior build is horrible for both cases. There’s nothing worse than a newbie zerker warrior wannabe, who dies every 10 seconds, no matter how much condi removal and vigor you give to them. If op would chose to follow your advice that’s the situation he would be most likely to encounter:
joins pug -> keeps dying -> gets kicked and called names -> repeat -> quits doing dungeons/fotm or gw2 entirely
While I would never kick a newbie, as long as he’s willing to listen, many aren’t that nice to the newcomers. In pugs people don’t really see if you do 10k or 30k+ with your 100 blades, they just see that you’re laying on the ground all the time and they are quick to point fingers.

The Demonic Spirit.3157:

Hi guys , I finally maxed my 6th character ( got 6 80es ) .
I will begin doing FotM ( did few in the past ) , but what is the easiest class to do that ?
I got >
MM necro > http://tinyurl.com/opjsdrw
Demolisher engineer > http://tinyurl.com/ac2zh5v
Trapper ranger > http://tinyurl.com/pwmk5ox
Banner/signet/shout warrior > http://tinyurl.com/p6fn8wn
Cleric guardian > http://tinyurl.com/osugavl

I know that each class/build has its own pros and cons , but what is the easiest/fastest one according to your experince and my builds.
Thank you

Fastest would be warrior, easiest would be guardian and mesmer (so go make one in case you need to teleport people around)

Seveleniumus.5973:

While I would never kick a newbie, as long as he’s willing to listen, many aren’t that nice to the newcomers. In pugs people don’t really see if you do 10k or 30k+ with your 100 blades, they just see that you’re laying on the ground all the time and they are quick to point fingers.

Funny, if I saw a guy do FGJ! and then saw my health go up by 2k, I would probably kick him for that. I guess we live in different worlds.

I think that at least warriors should never use defensive builds and gear on dungeons, they are very tanky even at berserker gear. I understand if you play a squishy class like elementalist that you need some defensive gear so you dont get downed by regular mob’s auto atacks, but with warrior you are just being lazy if you want to bring a pvt/clerics one to dungeons.

they are very tanky even at berserker gear

Starting at about 38+ fractals they die in 1-2 hits. At 50+ it doesn’t matter, because you die in 1-2 hits no matter what gear you have, but lower than that, it helps a lot…

Here is a list of guides to help you:

Warrior:
-Axe/Mace (Nike)

Guardian:
-Sword (Brazil)
-Greatsword (Guang)
-Hammer (Guang)

Mesmer:
-Sword/Focus (Guang)
-Sword/Focus – Old (Brazil)

Elementalist:
-Fire Staff (Guang)
-Scepter/Dagger (Hamartia)
-Dagger/Focus (Zelhyn)
-Comprehensive Guide (Neko)

Engineer:
-Grenades (Guang)

Thief:
-Backstab (Brazil)
-Comprehensive Guide (djk)

Ranger:
-Sword (Brazil)
-Comprehensive Guide (Guang)

Necromancer:
-Dagger (Nike)
(Rumors tell me that spoj will be making an updated Necro Dagger guide soon enough)

Could someone calculate the DPS difference between the meta warrior build (assuming PUG standards) and that shout heal warrior build?

I pug 48s with my zerker guardian and warrior all the time, and I don’t have any problems. OP isn’t starting at 48s, so he’ll have plenty of time to learn the encounters. Besides, you have a lot of room for error at the lower fractal levels, so it’ll give him some time to learn how to mitigate damage via blinds/blocks/ccs

Bright.9160:

Could someone calculate the DPS difference between the meta warrior build (assuming PUG standards) and that shout heal warrior build?

Well, a full zerker 30/10/0/30/0 shout heal build (the “best” shout heal build you can make) is still 24% less dps than the meta build. So you can imagine where it goes once you start adding defensive gear or use worse traits.

For any of the classes I have played, I recommend:

1) full berzerker gear unless you are a boon supporter
2) if you are a boon supporter add some boon duration
3) necros may optionally use condition builds

If you have problems running these then add some vitality/healing/health. And as you get comfortable running fotm, swap as many pieces as you possibly can to berzerker / boon duration.