Guild Wars 2

Well. I got a level 80 Necromancer and a level 80 warrior and I have run a few dungeons, including Path 4 Arah and I can safely say I’m awful. I looked up the guides for the “best” DPS investing in full Zerker everything, full exotic gear all that.

I spend all my time on my kitten trying to revive myself or just using a bow as a warrior and running around never getting to use my great sword.

I think that since I never run LFG or pug and only go with friends and guildies I would be helping the group more by helping them rather than them wasting time getting my kitten up every 3 seconds.

To this end; is there any class that does support from a distance well? buffs, shields, heals, effective conditions that actually work on bosses? Negating damage or providing CC such as the Gorilla kite fight in Arah, or reviving downed/dead allies mid combat without having to press F?

I would like to provide a way to increase my allies DPS and keep them alive and protect them from damage like maybe a DISC Priest in WOW focusing in mitigation and healing and buffing.

Does this build exist in this game and what class/gear type would be good for it?

You support comes from skills like reflects, condi cleanses, buffs and dodging properly.
I’m not going to discuss necromancer here so let’s use warrior example.
Warrior can be used as dps/support with medium dps and might stacking with phalanx build. If you don’t have good ele restacking might during boss fight you can help with phalanx warrior keeping might up. or you can go standard warrior dps build with banners which is also team support partly.

You don’t need healing like in trinity games when you can dodge boss attack.
There is no dedicated healer in this game because mostly everybody should care for himself in terms of healing. And well timed aegis from guardian is million times better than some silly healing in this game.

Engineer is a good range dps with granades but most encounters in dungeons should be played in melee because of buff range.

For me it’s mostly a learn to play issue and plz dont take it as insult from me.
I don’t know how you play but with organised group you should learn your class and build, rotations and boss fights to do it 100% well.

Meta builds are tools, it’s players who should learn how to play.
I was a terrible scrub and after finding great ppl I’m now much better. If you have organised group of friends the only advise from me is – train, train, train

Before you take a step into changing anything about your characters we first need to ask as to “why” you are spending all this time on the ground, why you think you’re awful, etc (because you shouldn’t). It could be something as simple as changing how you operate your camera to better see the game elements in front of you or actually picking up on telegraph elements like how a mob swings his mace to better budget active defenses, movement, etc.

Our guild sometimes does a program on “how to make full use of your interface to better handle challenges” which has been working for a lot of people. You can also look up Phantaram and his session with soda poppin, its PvP but many of those concepts are very modular with all areas of the game.

The issue could go pretty far depending on how you play the game currently so it would be ideal to take a look at high level play and compare what you see in those videos with how you play the game now.

Well I’ve only been playing for a month and only done a total of 5 – 6 dungeon runs. However full glass canon super max DPS warrior is frustrating. I like Death Shroud Necro but it’s all a bit boring because it’s just auto attacking mostly.

Well if you’ve only done 5-6 runs, you haven’t had time to get accustomed to boss and mob tells on the skills you need to dodge and then being able to identify the skills you can facetank. That all comes with experience, which just comes from trying it more!

Maybe group up with a slightly more defensive party or swap out some berserker armor pieces for knight pieces as you learn encounters. Good luck!

Feel free to give me a shout in game whenever I’m online Ravinsild, I generally run a low level how to fractal program for a lot of people and we can take a look at whatever it is you need to improve.

In theory you should be almost untouchable even as a glass cannon warrior so if you want to go with that setup by all means play what you want.

I am only level 2 FotM but my last Fractal was super fun time!

In gw2 it’s more important to know the encounters than to have a good build or rotation or whatever. There are full groups that get destroyed by dungeon bosses and there are players that can solo an entire dungeon or fractal faster than most pugs.

You gave an example of some gorillas in arah that your group had to kite, i think you are refering to the gorillas on the melandru boss in arah p4, i think having someone on the group just to kite then while the rest of the group slowly kills the boss is a bad tactic, you could instead stack on a specific pillar where those green knockinback things dont hit the group and just kill the gorillas there, then proceed to range the melandru boss, not many groups are capable of meleeing that particular boss.

Arah is the most difficult dungeon in the game, and you have only 1 month of experience playing so it’s normal to struggle there, it’s not a problem on your build it’s just a l2p issue.

Here is an example of a player that can solo that boss faster than many pug groups
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvbmsyrJp2M&ab_channel=Dom

If you just started it’s normal to have some difficulty running full zerker build. The best option would be to use some more defensive gear like celestial, knight, soldier, valkyrie etc.

The best option would probably be your trinkets since they won’t cost you transmutation charge and new runes. Exotic trinket are relatively cheap. Take as much as you need to be comfortable playing and make you dungeon more fun. As you get better, learn how to play the game and learn the encounter, you can start to switch up your defensive pieces to more and more berserker. Make the transition at a pace you are comfortable with.

I like your honestly – something to remember is it could have also been your team :;)

Zerker is not the easiest to play – but it can be worth it in the long run.
Sure you are going to die a lot at first (a lot) – but then you will have a chance to look at your combat log and think what killed me?

Something that sometimes helps is recording your dungeon session and playing it back so you can replay that glorious death (opportunity to learn from it- to see if there is a “tell”). Once you have worked out what killed you – you can look at if / what skills could you use to prevent that happening again.

Remember you character gets hungry and thirsty doing dungeons (food and potions) will help you take less damage and ensure you can stay alive a bit longer.

The ‘heal’ is your “oh-****” moment due to a missed dodge / active defense missing (eg evade/invl) or needing to die to so many conditions.

Dungeons are the only place in this game where a small team setup really matters rather than the pew pew of open world fights.

Finding a good guild or group to run with that’s wiling to teach you will always be a good start (or a group on voice comms). We all remember the first 6mo- where Arah groups took 4 hrs and people were dying a lot all over the place. So don’t worry if things take a long time to master – you’ll get there eventually and become pretty comfortable with your profession at some point.

I also wouldn’t change classes immediately. If you enjoy warrior and necro then stick to them, try to learn about the encounters you will be facing and then try to time your dodges, evades, blocks, etc. right!
It’s all about practice, trust me. And maybe once you mastered your berserker melee playstyle, you might find it more enjoyable than ranging and kiting.
If you need help or advice of any kind, feel free to contact me!

Keep at it. Zerker relies on high damage output from the entire team. At the same time the initial 15-25 seconds of combat usually get covered by guardian, elementalist an mesmer support to mitigate damage via reflects, heals, walls.

This is also where the problem comes up in suboptimal groups.
→ If the damage is to low your skills run out making damage intake go up forcing people to dodge more and heal which in turn reduces damage even further.
→ If you are lacking the support skills damage intake is higher from the get go requiring again more shifted play.

Your job in both cases is to know how aggressive you can play and when to pull out. Alternatively before switching classes and/or gear try for a more defensive spec and shift back to pure offence once you feel comfortable.

Well I always enjoyed stuff like White Mage and Scholar in FF14 and all healers (Holy Pally, Resto Druid, Resto Shaman, Disc Priest, Mistwalker, etc…) in WoW. I even like support in games like Heroes of the Storm, League of Legends and DotA 2.

I guess this game just doesn’t have that though.

Support here is different. With number 6 being heal for everybody we dont need a fluffy dwarf casting shiny heals.

This game has different combat and I dont think you will be able to enjoy it if you’re looking back on classic trinity clone mmos

Ravinsild.4637:

Well I always enjoyed stuff like White Mage and Scholar in FF14 and all healers (Holy Pally, Resto Druid, Resto Shaman, Disc Priest, Mistwalker, etc…) in WoW. I even like support in games like Heroes of the Storm, League of Legends and DotA 2.

I guess this game just doesn’t have that though.

Check out this thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Holy-Trinity-is-back-Cleric-Guard-FOTM/first

That said, guardian or support ele sound like the classes you’ll want to look at.

I have zerk ele as main and have no problem surviving in anything. Dungeons, lvl 50 fractals, pvp…. i have a warrior and it’s disturbing how bad am i At this class. I just find lack of condi clenses and mobility of the class disturbing.

Warrior is mobile with great sword charge, great sword spinning forward attack, axe leap from F1, 1h Sword #2 and such however 1h Sword isn’t really used much I think.

I wish I were better at dodging because I adored my warrior leveling up outside questing!

For skips as warrior you can swap for 1h sword for leap and swap back for dps weapon for a fight. To dodge properly you need to learn bosses – it’s a tip for every class. Most huge attacks have a telling so you know when to do this. You can also avoid attacks with gs3

Keep going with your warrior, it’s good practice for the fundamentals of the game. They have the evades/blocks but everything they do is a bit more standard, great to learn with… though personally I’m the worst warrior I suck at timing whirlwinds and often screw up my sword block.

If you want support though, it does exist, it’s just not in the typical “i’m a healer” sense. The way the game is set up for PVE the majority of it is hard hitting slow attack patterns which are something you can typically avoid. With blinds on trash, reflects for projectiles, blocks/dodges/evades for large attacks, well you just shouldn’t really be getting hit unless you screw up. There are some persistant condition fights, or passive damage in general, but those are more the exception than the standard. For those a little group coordination plus your healing skill should have you covered.

If you want to play support I highly recommend a guard, you have Aegis, blinds, projectile defense, condi cleanse, and some healing (and even protection)

Again, support is very much a thing, it’s just not your standard for MMOs GW2 is all about damage avoidance with just a little bit of healing. Kinda the reverse from most typical MMOs.

I agree with sticking to the toons you have now. Warriors are excellent and fairly easy to grasp. The skill cap on the class is quite high due to their overall versatility in all aspects of the game, but for Dungeons and Fractals they are fairly straight forward.

My advice to you would bee to take careful look at your weapon skills and utilities. E.G. Your Greatsword comes with an evade, mace and off sword can block, etc. Switching toons won’t necessary help either as every class “requires” knowing how to dodge. In fact as a Warrior and Necro (your other main toon) you have the highest health pools before modifiers which means there’s you can soak in more mistakes. Guards, on the other hand, have about half the health a warrior does so they can be less forgiving in fights. Granted, they offset that vulnerability with boon and mitigation tactics, but that’s a new scope of skills to hone in order to excel at the class.

In short, Warriors and Necros may seem like they don’t get a whole lot of mitigation by default, but that’s because they have that high health pool to start.

Also, do realize that the game promotes proactive defense rather than the typical reactive recovery. Coming from trinity based games I felt like I could pick up a water ele and spend my time healing and recovering. Turns out despite my uber water spec I wasn’t really contributing that much. Flash forward to my Guard (no skill pun intended) and now I make a habit of making sure my team doesn’t get hurt to begin with.

The wolves in a dungeon called CoE are a good example. They initiate with a leap that does quite a heap of damage and also knocks you down. A reactive defense would be to stun break and to utilize a heal to recover the lost health. A proactive defense would be to dodge (anyone can do) or use a skill to mitigate avoid the effect (blinds, aegis, warding).

I will try to get better on my warrior and I do enjoy my Necro! Too bad minion builds are bad in dungeons, fun for regular PvP though!

However my biggest barrier is how expensive crafting mats are! I have 438 armor smith and 439 weapon smith to make my own exotic so I could change gear types. In addition I don’t have many skill points so buying complete trait sets is difficult to adjust to new builds.

I put all of my resources into a single build and it turns out I can’t play it ! Haha

At least Necro death shroud works out alright ^^;

If you really dig warrior but want to play something tankier & supportive, I’d recommend you look up the phalanx strength build.

You’re a bit more durable & your job is to provide party buffs in addition to damage.

Don’t worry so much about crafting if you’re broke. But some yellow gear, and start dungeon running. You can get a gold+ per run & the baubles required to get exotics for free.

CoF for berserker, CM for Soldier’s, SE for Knight’s.

And Ascended trinkets are pretty easy to get (minus the backpack), just do some guild stuff, get some laurels, PvP/WvW a bit & do a fractal here & again, you’ll have them in no time.

Personally I like Knight’s, but that’s just me. Most will tell you Zerker or go home. Here’s a build example you might like:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fJAQNAR3ZjMdU5ZfH2dwJaAmg6aEEA6qi0rQME8A-ThRBwAUeIAXV+tT9Ha7P6GAcFAMrEkQAlnAA-e

In a group, you want to sack one or both signet for banners, depending on if there’s another warrior.

Regardless of what you do, good luck out there.

You can buy zerk gear for CoF, CoE and Arah tokens.
You can also buy a zerker armor set at Grenth temple in Orr for karma.

I already have full scholar’s berserker gear. I would have trouble changing to a new full set of gear and runes and traits is what I mean.

Crafting your own gear is probably the worst thing you can do cost wise. The three most common alternatives for obtaining gear are
-Dungeon tokens (my preferred)
-Badges of Honor
-Karma vendors

Keep in mind though that outside of dungeon gear and crafting you’ll need to check if the item can be salvaged as slotting an expensive sigil/rune will turn out to be expensive to recover.

Exotic armor is what an organized team will shoot for though you can get by with greens and yellows as you build up your sets. For the most part you’ll want two sets of gear: offensive and defensive with different runes/sigil to achieve their respective goals. Ascended gear is not at all required unless you plan to reach higher scales in fractals. Even then just slotting ascended trinkets will get you pretty far, and they are relatively cheap and easy to acquire.

savacli.8172:

Crafting your own gear is probably the worst thing you can do cost wise. The three most common alternatives for obtaining gear are
-Dungeon tokens (my preferred)
-Badges of Honor
-Karma vendors

Keep in mind though that outside of dungeon gear and crafting you’ll need to check if the item can be salvaged as slotting an expensive sigil/rune will turn out to be expensive to recover.

Exotic armor is what an organized team will shoot for though you can get by with greens and yellows as you build up your sets. For the most part you’ll want two sets of gear: offensive and defensive with different runes/sigil to achieve their respective goals. Ascended gear is not at all required unless you plan to reach higher scales in fractals. Even then just slotting ascended trinkets will get you pretty far, and they are relatively cheap and easy to acquire.

No, just no. Let’s take this appart.
Tokens
Dungeon armor, full set costs 1,380 tokens just for the armor. Let’s assume 10 minutes per dungeon run with daily bonus (meaning this will take a minimum of 8 days instead of 1 with really fast dungeon runs) :

1,380/60 * 10 = 230 Minutes = 3.8 hours. 3.8 hours of farming Gold will get you around 15-25 gold. More then enough to buy your armor of choice.

On top of that, those tokens (if from high enough dungeon) could have been used for buying rares (rares above 68) to salvage and sell ectos(30 tokens = 1 rare).

Tokens/rare cost = total rare * ecto conversion = total ectos * current ecto TP price = gold
1,380/30 = 46 * 0.9 = 41,4 * 32s = 1324,8s = 13,24 Gold + some crafting mats

Not counting any loot or dungeon drops during those runs.

Badges of Honor

All I can say here, spending (wasting) badges of honor to get a slight discount of a couple of silver per item is very meh. Especially with new legendarys and HoT on the horizon.

Karma

Edit Note: since I had the wrong numer for Karma items. Corrected.
At 42,000 Karma per item you are facing a Karma conversion of about 6 copper per Karma (at a price of 2,5g for the item). There is better Karma conversion out there (unless you want the skin). Farming 42,000 Karma takes longer than farming 2,5g.

Again not the smartest approach with HoT and new legendarys comming out.

Ravinsild.4637:

Well I always enjoyed stuff like White Mage and Scholar in FF14 and all healers (Holy Pally, Resto Druid, Resto Shaman, Disc Priest, Mistwalker, etc…) in WoW. I even like support in games like Heroes of the Storm, League of Legends and DotA 2.

I guess this game just doesn’t have that though.

There are few builds that can replicate the healer role pretty well, they are just not needed in the current pve.

One of them for example
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Aquatic-benevolence-rune-of-the-monk/first#post4185521

Dungeon Token is the best approach when it come to gearing up in exotic, but it’s not the fastest.

If you want to compare dungeon token vs trading post. Cyninja made some small mistake.

1380 tokens for a complete armor / 30 tokens per rare = 46 rares
46 rares x 0.875 ectos/rare = 40 ectos
40 ectos x 32.60 silvers x 0.85 (TP taxe) = 11.08 gold.
Lets be generous and say that you get 3 silk scrap per rare for a total of 120.
120 silk scrap x 2.15 silvers x 0.85 = 2.19 gold

So you have two choice with your 1380 tokens. Either you are using them for an exotic armor or you salvage them for 13.27 gold.

Or you can buy that armor on the Trading Post. But the cheapest exotic level 80 with berserker stats will cost you 25.41 gold if you put an order.

But that’s for berserker stats. All others stats from dungeon can be found at 2 gold or less by pieces of armor, which mean that they will all cost around 12 gold or less on the TP for a complete set of armor. In that case, you are better off paying it on the TP and using your dungeon token for something else.

No, just no. Let’s take this appart.
Tokens
Dungeon armor, full set costs 1,380 tokens just for the armor. Let’s assume 10 minutes per dungeon run with daily bonus (meaning this will take a minimum of 8 days instead of 1 with really fast dungeon runs) :

1,380/60 * 10 = 230 Minutes = 3.8 hours. 3.8 hours of farming Gold will get you around 15-25 gold. More then enough to buy your armor of choice.

On top of that, those tokens (if from high enough dungeon) could have been used for buying rares (rares above 68) to salvage and sell ectos(30 tokens = 1 rare).

Tokens/rare cost = total rare * ecto conversion = total ectos * current ecto TP price = gold
1,380/30 = 46 * 0.9 = 41,4 * 32s = 1324,8s = 13,24 Gold + some crafting mats

Not counting any loot or dungeon drops during those runs.

Badges of Honor

All I can say here, spending (wasting) badges of honor to get a slight discount of a couple of silver per item is very meh. Especially with new legendarys and HoT on the horizon.

Karma

Edit Note: since I had the wrong numer for Karma items. Corrected.
At 42,000 Karma per item you are facing a Karma conversion of about 6 copper per Karma (at a price of 2,5g for the item). There is better Karma conversion out there (unless you want the skin). Farming 42,000 Karma takes longer than farming 2,5g.

Again not the smartest approach with HoT and new legendarys comming out.

Farming: The OP has only been playing for a month so I would not think he has sat down to look at farming strategies nor found good farming spots. I agree that much can definitely lead to a great source of income depending on the time/location. Though, there’s a general opinion of “my soul feels like it’s dying” after so many hours of farming.

Tokens: That one is trickier as, yes, salvaging can lead to more gold than purchasing the armor directly through tokens, but ultimately it’s RNG. Even with the yellow kits and the suggested 90% ecto rate there’s still TP “tax” when selling items. So, the profit from that is around 11-12g. Again, that’s highly variable and could drastically be less or more. For the more common gear prefixes (Berserker’s, knight’s, soldier’s) the cost to buy the gear generally will cost you more than if you spent tokens depending on bid pricing (and if the OP is patient enough, hehe). Lesser used prefixes are much cheaper with some pieces being less than 1g a piece buy or bid.

Badges and Karma: Mentioned as an option. He shouldn’t go out of his way to grind for these but eventually as he plays he’ll build up a reserve. Later down the road he’ll end up with resources in excess of these and can use it to [re]gear his toons.

Anyways, I digress from the original topic. The berserker gear OP has is fine!

I was shown by a guildy how to farm Silverwaste Bandit Chest and events for the boxes and items which is a good way to farm, right ?

I only did it that one day though. I’ve been slowly whittling things down on my Necromancer, running around farming events to unlock traits. Next I was going to run some story modes to get more traits like Axe Training and a golden trait from doing story mode Arah.

I’ve also been PvPing with Arah rewards as a minion mancer and have been doing surprisingly well.

My only issue is feeling useless in dungeons sometimes . I was going to farm Orichalcum and Ancient Wood for some exotic armor.

So far I’m still a little overwhelmed by all the content to do!

Odd, you shouldn’t be whittling things down slowly as a necro unless you are utilizing a very tanky setup. I would recommend taking a look at some dps rotations for them depending on what you are running.

As far as PvE combat is concerned, it shares some similarities with other MMOs like WoW where you do have an optimized combat algorithm to maximize your damage potential (contrary to popular believe, you don’t just spam 1).

IllegalChocolate.6938:

Odd, you shouldn’t be whittling things down slowly as a necro unless you are utilizing a very tanky setup. I would recommend taking a look at some dps rotations for them depending on what you are running.

As far as PvE combat is concerned, it shares some similarities with other MMOs like WoW where you do have an optimized combat algorithm to maximize your damage potential (contrary to popular believe, you don’t just spam 1).

With Necro it’s a lot of spam1 though

Jerus.4350:

With Necro it’s a lot of spam1 though

Yes but a lot of different 1 tho.

As a necro, Dungeons are difficult to use as your traits and skills are naturally selfish (sorry for the bluntness). You can spec for more group support, but there’s noticible trade-offs when attempting to do so. Their roles are also less clearly defined in a group and suffer from the, “someone else can do it better”.

Aye. Just checking, but these are the right rotations in oversimplified form right?

Dagger: keep focus4/locust swarm on cooldown, pop into DS for fury and use 5 when it’s up, use utilities when appropriate, other than that you’re using 1 on daggers?

DS: Use axe2 and hop into DS, pop out and use axe2 again + Focus4/locust and dagger auto out of DS, swap axe and go back into DS for autos and again keep DS5 on cooldown.

That about right? (I only wvw on necro )

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/83937-build-the-shredder-destroyer-of-all/

I was using this build. It’s nice, but I would prefer to be a team player and play a healing/ supporting role and help people revive quickly and keep them protected since I usually don’t do very well as DPS. At least in melee, I do decently as my Necro and I like it, I just want to be more involved than a selfish spam 1 class :x

I was looking at http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/72582-ultra-guardian-support-guide-pve-wvwvw/

I even already got my guardian to 25!

In addition; I run with guildies who don’t ever seem to be optimized for full Zerker rush and people who are typically as new to the dungeon as me, so we don’t know all the best super quick ways to run paths.

We wipe a lot, basically, and I want to help prevent wipes. Often times only 1 person knows the dungeon. I’ve never used LFG tool.

For guardian, The fractal hammer build is very nice. You can even do variations for a little more. Bring along a Phalanx Strength warrior and you don’t have the might issue from the overbearing light fields. I know this variation my buddy used way back when we were first starting was enough to really help on some fights that has more passive damage or if we screwed up.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJASWlsApUo9CxZI8DRR8gk1Y7+UXAsfutLA-TBSBABWcBAoU9HzUCe1+jyP80FswRAQjDBAAPAAA-e

You lose 100 precision and the more consistent 10% mod and a potential Damage Sigil, but you can still get the 10% if you’re not full endurance and you pick up some healing.

As you get better though the healing and supportive additions of things become less needed and the DPS alternatives become much more appealing.

Ah, there’s the problem then. Not only is it you who is unfamiliar with the dungeon, but it looks like your group as a who needs more experience.

If you’re looking for group oriented classes you’ll find it difficult to meet that need with your necro. Your warrior, however, can easily meet that need. Warriors excel at support in the form of their banners and shouts. Their banners and traits provide unique buffs that stack alongside benefits gained from traditional boons as well. Warriors can also be spec’d for a more healing role (regen banners or healing/cleansing shouts), but I would discourage speccing into something like this for PvE as Warriors tend to be more reactive than proactive.

The link you have their for Guards is date way back, I’m afraid. I recommend http://dulfy.net/category/gw2/class-guides-gw2/ for your best source of reading up on classes. They may be a bit dated, but the overall guides are still very solid.

Guards offer a lot of proactive defense even when fully DPS spec’d/gear and seemed to be more geared towards your play style. If you’re looking to pursue that class I can point you to a few other guides.

Yes I really want to play a guardian and help my team with more than just raw DPS!

He’s a Sylvari and I’m an RPer and he’s part of the Nightmare Court. I see him as sort of a “Scarlet Crusader”.

Ravinsild, i think you will not find here the kind of advice you are looking for. People here in the dungeon forum are more “meta oriented”, which means they always follow the latest speedrun tactics and builds, and you are looking for something that is out of the meta right now, that is this traditional support low dps role in dungeons.

I think people already explained to you that all the support you provide is not dependant of your gear, that you can bring support and still do decent dps and blablabla but i see that you still dont like the meta builds.

For guardian you can use the build on this thread
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Holy-Trinity-is-back-Cleric-Guard-FOTM/first

Other kinds of “off the meta” builds you wont find here in the dungeon forum section i think.

Casmurro.9046:

Ravinsild, i think you will not find here the kind of advice you are looking for. People here in the dungeon forum are more “meta oriented”, which means they always follow the latest speedrun tactics and builds, and you are looking for something that is out of the meta right now, that is this traditional support low dps role in dungeons.

I think people already explained to you that all the support you provide is not dependant of your gear, that you can bring support and still do decent dps and blablabla but i see that you still dont like the meta builds.

For guardian you can use the build on this thread
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Holy-Trinity-is-back-Cleric-Guard-FOTM/first

Other kinds of “off the meta” builds you wont find here in the dungeon forum section i think.

When you give someone bad advice all you’re doing to stunting their development as a player. A man with crutches will never learn to walk properly. This sort of cavalier, anything goes everything is great attitude is indicative of someone who will be trapped at the same level forever.

Ah crusaders…reminds me of my DnD character…and why I’m no longer allowed to play paladins in DnD (broke the game, hehe). For those curious I whipped out the RKV and mixed in a bit of Shadow Clone madness. Good times…good times…

Serious face, back on topic:

Guardians have A LOT of potential and require a decent amount of discipline in regards to staying current by reading up on the class and patches. Regardless of your build Guards will always be able to defend one way or another.

While the title gears towards DPS the following thread has a great overview of the class itself towards the second half on the OP’s post. The first half goes into specific builds which you shouldn’t be concerned about quite yet. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-DPS-Guardian-for-PVE/first

Ravinsild.4637:

Yes I really want to play a guardian and help my team with more than just raw DPS!

He’s a Sylvari and I’m an RPer and he’s part of the Nightmare Court. I see him as sort of a “Scarlet Crusader”.

And you can very much help with more than just raw dps, it’s just that you shouldn’t ignore your damage output.

It’s all about opportunity cost. What are you gaining and what are you losing?

I think once you play a bit more you’ll come to understand why we all have a keen eye on our DPS potential. We surely don’t ignore support, not at all, we just try and optimize and bring only what we need and not have wasted stats/skills.

Each character in the group is going to have their support role even an Ele who is generally the big damage guy will often drop a sandstorm for blinds, or swirling winds to block a projectile attack, maybe even water field or condi cleanses.

We all play support first, we just don’t bring more than we need.

I hope that makes sense, it’s something that a lot of people have trouble with and why you see so many “zerker is dumb” posts, those people simply can’t get their brain to switch gears from the standard MMO where you have healers focusing only on heals or tanks just on being beefy (which isn’t meta in those games either, but it’s accepted).

I think a more passive playstyle will help me learn the fights better and once I understand when to dodge, when to projectile block, when to aegis, when to do such and so forth on a defensively/ supporting/healing built guardian then when I know the right spots to melee and such I’ll be able to transition to full Zerker great sword Guardian or something. And then I would have two totally different sets and builds for super versatility

Ravinsild.4637:

I think a more passive playstyle will help me learn the fights better and once I understand when to dodge, when to projectile block, when to aegis, when to do such and so forth on a defensively/ supporting/healing built guardian then when I know the right spots to melee and such I’ll be able to transition to full Zerker great sword Guardian or something. And then I would have two totally different sets and builds for super versatility

Yup yup yup, I have a full set of Ascended PVT from back when i was in this phase

As far as an Intro to Guards I would recommend running hammer builds. While not necessarily the best DPS on its own, you can trait the weapon to where it hits like a truck. Your off-hand in that case will supplement your current need (Staff, GS, M/F being common pairs). For the most part you’ll camp the Hammer auto attack which not only is your main/reliable source of DPS on that weapon, but it also offers perma-protection. When you first start out you can set your 1 to auto-cast while you focus your attention on the fights. Here, you can learn the tales and see what your other mates are doing and intervene as necessary. Afterwards, you can start slowly shuffling in other weapons and learn their uses as well as introduce rotations to maximise your Guardiness.

Keep in mind Ravin that as a guardian you will be constantly expected to approach the fight aggressively (doesn’t matter if you’re full glass or using Skady’s hard support build that was linked). There is no such thing as playing passive even as the full clerics battle presence spec advertised by Skady.

I personally do not agree with learning in clerics or pvt if you truely wish to run glass. To play glass effectively you need to be well, playing glass and being used to risks involved with your desired setup. Back in 2013 when the game first launched, I learned the game in full berserker stats and I have no problem doing anything I want to do whether it is instanced content, sPvP, or WvW.

Understanding the core fundamentals of the game and building a strong foundation that makes you modular will get you farther than slapping on a bunch of PvT gear or going full zerker + reading up on a bunch of dungeon guides to the path of least resistance without knowing the meaning behind it. This means knowing your math, knowing how your attacks function at the programming level, knowing how to apply it in a constantly responding environment, this also means not learning the game by stacking in a corner because that will also stunt your growth more than anything else.

Setting aside some time to “work out” your ability to do different things outside of your regular play is sometimes necessary for growth.

I personally like to go into dungeons by myself so I only have my own thoughts to occupy me and seeing how well I can match up against elite mobs. You don’t need to necessarily kill them as you are starting out and fine turning your skills but doing things like kiting them around, poking in and baiting attacks and moving out of the way or working on your dodge timing or active defense abilities against the right attacks like zealots defense against ranged attacks and then slowly getting more and more aggressive with damage dealing will help solidify your game and make approaching content even if you don’t know it much easier.

Looking up on how the systems in the game works and doing your own studies on how things behave in the game will not only allow you to be very situationally stable, you will not be lost for answers if things change, you will at most maybe take a step back to reassess your capability, and then go back at it.

I see a lot of people in my guilds that stroke their ego with there “hardcore” dungeon speed clears and the moment mai trin hits or even cliffside’s archdiviner, they get cut down like paper despite being extremely simple bosses, refuse to take accountability for the fact that they have refused to hone their skills in a headless chicken environment, leaving me to solo constantly(these people have stunted growth and haven’t gotten better at the game in the past years due to their over reliance on design flaws of the game).

Well said IllegalChocolate, though IMO there are 2 ways to approach learning PVE in this game. Dive in headfirst going strait to glass, or tank up and pay attention to each hit and learn to avoid them knowing you’re only surviving because of your safety net. I personally agree that diving in head first, and it will generally be the quicker route to success but wrought with frustration and death. The alternative of tanking up may lead you to become too complacent and not concerned enough with dodging attacks you can simply brush off but you’ll actually be able to be successful along the route thanks to relying on that support structure.

As long as you’re dedicated and adamant about actually learning I don’t think either method is wrong, just again, tanking up often leads to complacency.

That being said, if you still originally wish to run a “hard support oriented” concept akin to something like the disc priest in WoW, what has been linked by Casmurro, aka battle presence with high healing power 0/0/4/6/4 is about as close as your going to get to that (to describe it more accurately in WoW terms, it is more like a cross between a prot warrior and holy paladin in today’s Warlords of Draenor standards of class style where you are still at the very front of the group).

I personally endorse this method of play myself, as a matter of fact when lunar festival hit and the rice balls came out that gave me a small nudge to take a second look at that type of playstyle, I went ahead and crafted a full set of ascended clerics, my first non glass set of armor to see how well it holds up in fractals.

Needless to say many of the groups that I play with that struggle to maintain an hour run have been pushing sub 30minutes in fotm50 and even the far end of groups that struggle with 3 hour fotm50 have been pushing less than an hour with one girl constantly going AFK to check on her chicken in the oven for an entire half of the session and wouldn’t shut it about her nails while we do grawl shaman (the boss was dead within the span of 3 minutes with 2 necros in the group and I didn’t even realize anything happened because of the nail painting conversation). However your experience will very as I spend generally 2 to 3 nights a week in fractals by myself or with another person or two doing things undermanned in full glass.

It is a very valid build, you may not push the “sub 20 runs by [yet]” but for the sake of regular play, it is still very effective(I personally think its fun).

EDIT: you will have to keep in mind that there are stigmas with the build still with a lot of groups kinda like how people have an elitist attitude towards disc priests in battle grounds, not the same thing but you get the point

EDIT2: you should still learn glass even if you want to really just be a hard support high healing power + toughness archetype at the end of the day, this is akin to learning how to tank, heal, and dps to be a good raider in WoW. Learn to just know how to play the game at its core so you can do everything and anything you want with no trouble.

EDIT3: by 3 minutes on grawl shaman I mean going through all bubble phases and then killing it before my shield of the avenger came off cooldown after the first cast, I can’t remember the exact time, was focused on maintaining health bars.