Guild Wars 2

Ranger player here with an ocasional side order of Guardian, even more frequent now that FOTM level has become account wide.

After trying out a few sets, eventually i went full berserk, currently knights on guardian.

With that said, unless i’m at full ranged safety i get down a lot, AR aside (Ranger=20, Guardian=15 at 20ish and we can always tell if it was because of Agony). Besides there’s a happy coincidence about melee being more efficient damage wise since i enjoy melee more, hence why the guardian has knights to withstand 24/7 melee.

Although here’s where the plot thickens: i’m a very casual player and thus my guild participation is unfortunately low so i end up pugging a LOT… er, all the time.

TLDR: So even though zerk is the way, my feeling is unless your whole group is on board with the zerk “meta”, you’ll end up posing as a scrub since everyone is playing it safe while you’re wiping the floor.

So the question is:

should i be playing it safe in a nonzergy way?

is this pure learn to dodge regardless of what others are doing?

Should i be looking for like-minded zerg partners (lfg party message)?

Well I don’t know how it goes with the two new fractals, but for the old ones you either try hard, dodge at the apporpriate places and not get downed, or don’t try hard and play range/tanky or both. Purely depends on you. You will get hate no matter what you do in Fotm, there are enough idiots on both sides, the zerker aswell as the tanky side.
Should you be looking for like minded people? Well yes of course you should. PUGging always has the risk of meeting a kitten and as long as you don’t like laughing over their narrow minded statements you probably wont enjoy PUGging al the time.

If you learn the encounters, most fights should be entirely doable in zerk on your own. There are a few fights where if people arent in melee with you it makes it harder. Or if the dps is low then you are going to have a hard time (slave driver). Id suggest watching videos and looking out for tells more closely when playing. Also knights is fine for when you are learning. Just be prepared to move on to zerker eventually if thats what you want.

Be just tanky enough to stay alive. You can swap in zerk gear for your knights as you get better and learn the content, boss animations etc better. The more dps you can muster, the more you’re helping your team, especially with guardian since you can still have all the support your team needs for fractals while running dps. You could try a hammer dps build, you’ll still get pretty good numbers and have perma protection.

Content is much easier when the whole team is zerk, but you can run full on dps in pugs if you’re experienced enough. Looking for like minded friends is a good idea for your sanity. When tanky groups extend battles for so long, the zerker is bound to suffer, and none of them care that you’re doing half the damage yourself. They only care if they see you’re falling more often then they are, scrub zerker.

Ok guess it’s doable no matter what. I’ll raise the anti-flame shield and work on that muscle memory then.

Apart from dulfy and gw2dungeons am i missing out on good guides for struggling peeps? Maybe video ones?

If you use a greatsword you’ve got a daze on skill 5 and block on 4 to help survivability. Always melee in the healing spring. The leap finisher can be used in a healing spring or field from a trap. A drake pet can give you more blast finishers as can a warhorn. Like a thief you can go on the edge of melee and try to avoid the frontal cleave damage from the melee enemies. A sword has defensive skills as well but it’s just a pain to use and I won’t recommend it to someone who has asked for extra survivability.

Also you can pick your melee fights and go to an axe or bow when it is properly dangerous.

Just keep practicing, if you’re downing every 20 seconds, add a little bit of toughness or vitality, or look upon taking some defensive skills.
Remember – it’s just a game, the most important thing is to have fun.

Check out strife’s videos (stickied at the top of this forum). They are fairly old, so they do not have the new fractals, but the old ones are very well covered in my opinion.

Obal has a ton of great guardian vids.

Fractals
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guardian-Video-Guide-for-Fractals-Shown-at-48

dps guardian in general
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-DPS-Guardian-for-PVE

Obal also did a number of ranger in 48 fractal vids quite a while back. Not really a guide, more a proof that ranger weren’t utterly worthless I guess. I’m too lazy to search for them though they’re probably on his channel.

Here are video guides to dungeons albeit old.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Video-Guides-To-all-Explorable-Mode-Dungeons