Guild Wars 2

I think staff guardians get a lot of undue hate. If your group can keep 25 stacks of might up at all times then sure they’re a waste of space.
If you’re not an pro organised speedrun group though… if you’re in a pug group.. probably with a pvt shout warrior, condi ranger, bunker ele and dead thief.. those might stacks become a lot more useful.

Don’t get me wrong I completely prefer full zerker groups and enjoy playing my zerker guardian most. I’m fully aware of the benefits. But I’m not in a pro meta guild, my friends mostly don’t know about or care about optimized builds, and I end up pugging and having a laugh most of the time.

I’ve used what I consider fairly common pug loadouts below.

A Sw/focus guardian in zerker/scholar gear, 10/30/0/5/25, banner of disc, 5% power of virtue, 50% fury uptime, magic find food, sharpening stone, zero might stacks sits at 9175 effective power. After 12 stacks of might he’s at 10817. That’s +17.89% effective power.

Likewise a 30/25/0/0/15 warrior using zerker gear, banner of disc, 50% fury uptime, magic find food, sharpening stone and zero might stacks gets 9363 effective power. After 12 stacks of might he’s at 10900. An increase of 16.4% effective power.

If we’re talking about a full pvt/melandru/altruistic healing camper.. ugh yeah they’re no use to anyone. But a good boon duration/cleric staff can be useful.
In a pug group which has half decent player but lacks the coordination to fully build might stacks.. sacrificing almost 100% of the guardian’s dps in exchange for a 0/0/0/30/30 (no AH!) staff camper with 100% boon duration & cleric stats will bring back most of the dps the group lost via perma 12 might (15 if you use 2h mastery) to your group members, add a ridiculous amount of health/sec to your group members and bring large amounts of protection/regen. It’s honestly not a bad deal for groups which aren’t pro. I mean half the time I lay down fire fields and I’m the only person stacking might using focus #5 in pugs anyway. Believe it or not there are even warriors who don’t use FGJ/Banners etc.

That is if the guardians does use 4 on cooldown. And that’s already some high hope!

And that they’ll be stuck on staff for another number of seconds after.

The proper technique (imo) is to swap to GS (trash) or hammer (boss) while channelling Empower. Reason being, a trash pull shouldn’t take 20+ seconds, no matter the ridiculously bad party comp. And for a boss, you should still retain at least 1 fire field, typically PF, although I would often also run HG, that you can blast Hammer 2 and Focus 5 as many as 4 more times during the fight (HG → Focus 5, Hammer 2, Hammer 2 → PF → Hammer 2) for minimum 20-24 seconds each of 3-might stacks. Double duration without an otherwise useless weapon swap.

I feel as stated in the OP that the problem is when they run a ‘support build’ along with that staff, and then proceed to use staff as their main weapon. This is what (from experience I feel) the majority of pugs are doing when you see them with staff. When I see a pug guardian with staff, my hopes for them being decent suddenly plummet. Really though, most of them are bad regardless. Little to no virtues usage, no awareness of what’s going on, never taking the correct utilities for each fight, no condi removal/stability/reflections despite being ‘support’… -_-

I have actually seen more rangers running Sword/WH + frost spirit/spotter build than I have seen decent pug guardians.. Not sure how I feel about this.

swiftpaw.6397:

I have actually seen more rangers running Sword/WH + frost spirit/spotter build than I have seen decent pug guardians.. Not sure how I feel about this.

Probably because of the mass amount of bearbows creating so much ranger hate that many groups would flat out not accept them. Makes the players willing to do whatever it takes to not get auto kicked. Guards have always had a free pass so they feel entitled to run whatever horrible build they want.

Perhaps if we can get a few months of LFG posts including “no guards” we can start upping the standard again?

I wonder if AH is the single biggest mistake a Guardian can make.

Sure I much prefer my zerker gear and meta groups.. But when I find myself in a group of casuals my cleric /boon duration 0.0.20.30.20 guard can keep permanent protection, regeneration, 15 might, almost 2k healing per dodge, 600hp per second from battle presence and regeneration combined.. Empower and virtue for 3k burst, and the tool tip for healing breeze is horribly confusing.. I am bursting almost 10k healing to each party member with it. My suicidal pug group were able to facetank butcher in hotw and kohler in ac.

Oh and skale venom consumable on a non zerker.. Allowing all other zerkers to use sharpening stones. That’s a nice efficency touch.

Overall I think in an unorganised group as long as you’re not an ah camper.. You bring a decent amount of Dps to the group via might and a ridiculous amount of sustain and mitigation.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. On top of that…. five wrongs don’t make a right.

Please, post numbers to give weight to your “I think”s. How much damage do you lose in several party setups? Because right now, you’ve convinced no one.

I run AH/full zerk in pugs, and while I know I should feel bad about not being optimum, I don’t really. I still have healing symbols, empowering might, boon duration, etc, so I don’t completely lack support. I’m still good about swapping weapon sets to fit the situation. I still use the meta consumables/ runes. I still do fairly decent damage with full zerk gear… I’m even knowledgeable enough to lead most paths. I wouldn’t really consider myself a “camper” just for wanting extra assurance that I can stay alive in less organized groups. For me, that’s one of the main reasons I pug with guardian. To be able to have that and still be decent in regards to DPS. If I want to completely faceroll everything, I just hop on a different character.

I look at it as, if I’m in a pug, I’m probably doing a lion’s share of the dps. So I would rather keep myself on high dps weapons at all times. Also, if you’re using Empower at every cool down, that’s just to much staff camping for me.

Fror.2163:

Please, post numbers to give weight to your “I think”s. How much damage do you lose in several party setups? Because right now, you’ve convinced no one.

Sure, I like talking numbers. I’m not out to convince anyone of anything really, just trying to demonstrate that I don’t think staff support is completely useless. Healthy discussion.
What I can’t do though is give examples for dozens of party compositions.

Take these two simple scenarios:
916 additional power = 1832 total base power.
50% crit chance, 200% crit dmg = 2748 effective power.
Two 10% damage modifiers (1.21) ? 3325.08.

If I add 20% more power (366.4)… what happens to my effective power?
2198.4 total power.
50% crit chance, 200% crit dmg = 3297.6 effective power.
Two 10% damage modifiers (1.21) ? 3990.096

3990.096 – 3325.08? I gained 665.016 effective power by adding 20% more power. Funnily enough, that is 20% of the effective power I had when I
originally ran the first example. 20% more power resulted in 20% more effective power even after the crit and damage multipliers.

35*12 = 420.
420/Character’s power = % increase in damage as a result of Empower.

In my original post I used a sw/focus guard 10/30/0/5/25 in full ascended zerker gear, magic find food, sharpening stone and 10 points in the power tree.
His power is 2348. 420/2348 = 17.887, which is why in my original post I recorded an increase of 17.9% in his effective power when he goes from 0 might stacks to 12.

In my original post I used a warrior 30/25/0/0/15 in full ascended zerker gear, magic find food, sharpening stone and 10 points in the power tree.
His power is 2560. 420/2560 = 16.4, in my original post I recorded an effective power of 16.4% which again matches my simple formula of 420/character’s power.

In summary : the more power you already have, the less 12 stacks of might will benefit you in percentage terms.

Considering a 30 strength full asc zerker warrior with 250 bloodlust will still only have 2810 power before other might stacks.. I’d say at the least you’re looking at a 15% effective power increase per party member. The key word there though is party member. What if that party member is shockingly bad or is wearing pvt gear? 15-20% extra to his dps is not going to be worth much. In fact you could increase dozens of bunker players’ dps by 20% and still not come close to just adding 1 proper zerker (yourself). If your group is a decent mix of players.. perhaps has a couple of zerkers.. and struggle to stack might permanently.. then I can realistically see an empower guardian adding a respectable amount of dps and a great amount of sustain.

fadeaway.2807:

… demonstrate that I don’t think staff support is completely useless. …

A bearbow ranger isn’t completey useless with his 3K DPS. But what’s the point?

Not really a fair comparison. Bow bear brings nothing decent in exchange for the loss in Dps. I’m arguing the loss in Dps with a boon dura/cleric staff guard isn’t as horrible as you might think to a group who does not stack might, and brings a huge amount of mitigation and healing to a group who may not otherwise be able to remain alive.

It’s all about tradeoffs and whether you think they are worth it.
I still maintain the view that zerker for organised groups is the best way forward, but I think well used staff guards in less organised groups or Pugs are getting a lot of criticism which should instead be aimed at pvt AH staff guards.

fadeaway.2807:

Not really a fair comparison. Bow bear brings nothing decent in exchange for the loss in Dps. I’m arguing the loss in Dps with a boon dura/cleric staff guard isn’t as horrible as you might think, and brings a huge amount of mitigation and healing to a group who may not otherwise be able to remain alive.

It’s all about tradeoffs and whether you think they are worth it.
I still maintain the view that zerker for organised groups is the best way forward, but I think well used staff guards are getting a lot of criticism which should instead be aimed at pvt AH staff guards.

But if you go as a staff/cleric guard you are already admitting defeat, by assuming your party will be bads with play how you want builds.

If your PUGs are actually running zerk and coordinated, you become the BHB that gets made fun of.

In a group where this build would benefit the group, as you argue, nobody would notice. In a group where you wouldn’t use this build, people would notice you’re running it.

I don’t call it defeat when grouping with play-how-you-like style players because many of us have friends who got that category or even sit in casual guilds..

Absolutely you’re right that staff guard and bear bow would be laughed out of a good organised group.. But it’s not difficult to figure out whether or not you’re in that sort of group beforehand and build accordingly.

If I sat down and attempted to form a high quality group and ended up with bads then yes that would be defeat.. And I would be a kitten to show up with a staff support guard or bearbow.

But for every day pug/bad/friend/guildy roulette? Staff Guardian does just fine imo.

If cleric or PVT guards want to staff empower, fine. They’re barely at a dps loss camping staff anyway. I just couldn’t see myself camping staff in a pug just to give them more might. I would consider my personal dps more important.

With warrior I always run rage signet in pugs, as I feel my personal dps carries more weight. But for organized groups, I’ll sometimes drop warbanner for the team. With guardian it just seems prudent to always be on your high dps weapons. With sword focus you can at least blast for 3 mights stacks of much longer duration, plus the block and blind. The gs has good dps and utility – blind, gap closer and pull. I’d hate to lose the dps and utility of those weapons, when Empower in a pug is questionable at best.

Maybe for runs, then an Empower at the beginning of a short trash kill. But I’d hate to be stuck on staff for any fight that lasts more than 20 seconds.

fadeaway.2807:

I don’t call it defeat when grouping with play-how-you-like style players because many of us have friends who got that category or even sit in casual guilds..

Absolutely you’re right that staff guard and bear bow would be laughed out of a good organised group.. But it’s not difficult to figure out whether or not you’re in that sort of group beforehand and build accordingly.

If I sat down and attempted to form a high quality group and ended up with bads then yes that would be defeat.. And I would be a kitten to show up with a staff support guard or bearbow.

But for every day pug/bad/friend/guildy roulette? Staff Guardian does just fine imo.

Yes, it does fine. Depending on your definition of fine.

If you are running cleric’s guard you are encouraging bad behavior. Pugs will assume this is good, they can face tank kitten, they expect this is what guards should do, they start doing it on their guards as well, everyone gets stuck in a rut of bad.

That’s a very good point, lead by example.
You know very well how much it feels like talking to a brick wall though when telling Pugs, casuals etc that they should be zerkers. Most of the guardians I speak to in game who were fotm70+ before the patch and are now 50 consider me incorrect and bad for running zerker. Do you honestly feel that’s a war of advice you’ll ever win? Wishful thinking but I suspect there may never come a time when good, well built players of all classes are plentiful.

fadeaway.2807:

That’s a very good point, lead by example.
You know very well how much it feels like talking to a brick wall though when telling Pugs, casuals etc that they should be zerkers. Most of the guardians I speak to in game who were fotm70+ before the patch and are now 50 consider me incorrect and bad for running zerker. Do you honestly feel that’s a war of advice you’ll ever win? Wishful thinking but I suspect there may never come a time when good, well built players of all classes are plentiful.

Running full zerker in any situation will only make you a better player. Yes it’s frustrating when I’m the only zerker (especially as a mesmer), but I wear it as a badge of honor when the shout healing warror or staff camping guard die and I’m left to finish off the boss.

Also, a lot of players in here know exactly what it’s like talking to a brick wall. And that’s not directed at you =)

Kudos to you for that. Personally I find it more difficult to stay alive as a zerker in a bad group than I do to stay alive as a zerker in a full zerker group. For obvious reasons I suppose. It’s hard to get yourself killed when the bosses die in 30 seconds.

I think that in order to clear a dungeon/fotm smoothly you need to hit one of these:

-Massive dps, enough to drop the target(s) before they can hurt you. Aegis, blind, reflect, invul frames etc. This is proven through speedruns.
-Low dps, low sustain, but perfect evades and avoidance. This can be proven by people like Obal Gandalf-ing Lupi to death.
-Low dps, awful evades, high sustain. Slowly but surely. Very slowly. If you’re lucky some of the group might be zerker, in which case it’ll go faster. But they will still have unbound their dodge button and need help. A decent cleric guard (again; not AH) aims to provide the sustain to a group of otherwise dodgy pugs and is imo, a good candidate to provide this role. I know it’s difficult to keep careless players alive but tbh as long as they’re not completely suicidally awful, it’s doable with the right build.

Without the sustain in the third option I find dodgy groups just die. For example if I’m doing Mai Trin in fotm and the group is all over the place, half bunker, half ranged, half all sorts of weird stuff.. and a couple of people are zerkers.. unless those zerkers are good at dodging (for clarification I am not) then they may take more than their fair share of shadowsteps to the face, take more damage than they have sustain, and die. Ultimately you need to take less damage than you can heal over time. And your heal amount over time is finite. You have a set amount of mistakes you can make.

All I’m saying is that in certain groups, a cleric guard is a decent addition, and imo a boon duration staff cleric is the best variation. Staff guards get more criticism than they deserve, but a lot of that criticism comes from players who would never get any benefit from having them in their party in the first place.

Again to swiftclaw though, she has struck a note with me there. You’re not helping the party or the community long term by being their healbot. The ultimate goal for any group should be a smooth full zerker clear.

Staff is one of Guardian’s most diversified support weapons. The skills obviously indicate it is a support weapon and should not be used to combat bosses or single target enemies. When I’m PUG’ing AC or TA I find the staff to be very useful. I expect the Guardian to do stuff like pulling spiders, pulling bosses and destroying poison plants, etc. I’m not expecting for any damage to come from Staff although the empower is somewhat of a consolation.

• Skill 1: Auto-attack is good for fights against big groups of scattered enemies or pull aggro from multiple enemies (such as AC Path 2 graveling defense)
• Skill 2: Easy to pull bosses from long-distance to a stack corner (Kohler)
• Skill 3: Swiftness, to get across risky trash (AC Path 1 end)
• Skill 4: Empower, buffing team before switching to main-hand (don’t forget it also heals the party for a significant amount)
• Skill 5: Blocking trash

Noah.4756:

Staff is one of Guardian’s most diversified support weapons. The skills obviously indicate it is a support weapon and should not be used to combat bosses or single target enemies. When I’m PUG’ing AC or TA I find the staff to be very useful. I expect the Guardian to do stuff like pulling spiders, pulling bosses and destroying poison plants, etc. I’m not expecting for any damage to come from Staff although the empower is somewhat of a consolation.

• Skill 1: Auto-attack is good for fights against big groups of scattered enemies or pull aggro from multiple enemies (such as AC Path 2 graveling defense)
• Skill 2: Easy to pull bosses from long-distance to a stack corner (Kohler)
• Skill 3: Swiftness, to get across risky trash (AC Path 1 end)
• Skill 4: Empower, buffing team before switching to main-hand (don’t forget it also heals the party for a significant amount)
• Skill 5: Blocking trash

So staff is for the guardian mob pulling meta build?

or or, you could just pull without staff.. That works too.

I honestly only use it for vine killing and tagging wraith lord mobs end of arah P3.

Point is, staff shouldn’t be used for damage dealing purposes. It certainly has its uses, but if you’re using it as a primary weapon you’re not going to get very far.

Focus has 1200 range on ray of judgement. If you don’t use focus you’re already doing it wrong. Which makes staff #2 useless.
Empower is a terrible skill all around. In good groups it replaces longer lasting might stacks with crap. In bad groups.. those might stacks aren’t making up for the dps loss you’ll experience by not using sword/focus and greatsword. First, you’re losing out on vulnerability from the weapon blinds. Second fact is that in the more interesting content like fractals your bad group won’t even be getting those stacks, or at least, not the whole group, because they’ll be running like headless chicken and half of the group will be out of your range.
Skill #5 has its uses, but in the few situations that makes it useful you’ll usually be using hammer as one of your weapon swaps which makes it redundant with hammer’s ring of warding.

Staff guardians are the reason why I might consider putting out lfg with “No Guardians”. Like others have said on the forum, they have become more common than even the bearbow rangers. You’re more likely to get a decent ranger, warrior, [insert anything else] than a guardian who’s not hugging his staff and cleric gear. This gets old pretty fast.

I gotta say my fractal pugs are smooth but really slow when trying out cleric gear.
Boring as hell.

Swapped to my dps build and hit 15k WW completely unbuffed though. Then we all died to trash mobs :<

Nikaido.3457:

Focus has 1200 range on ray of judgement. If you don’t use focus you’re already doing it wrong. Which makes staff #2 useless.
Empower is a terrible skill all around. In good groups it replaces longer lasting might stacks with crap. In bad groups.. those might stacks aren’t making up for the dps loss you’ll experience by not using sword/focus and greatsword. First, you’re losing out on vulnerability from the weapon blinds. Second fact is that in the more interesting content like fractals your bad group won’t even be getting those stacks, or at least, not the whole group, because they’ll be running like headless chicken and half of the group will be out of your range.
Skill #5 has its uses, but in the few situations that makes it useful you’ll usually be using hammer as one of your weapon swaps which makes it redundant with hammer’s ring of warding.

Staff guardians are the reason why I might consider putting out lfg with “No Guardians”. Like others have said on the forum, they have become more common than even the bearbow rangers. You’re more likely to get a decent ranger, warrior, [insert anything else] than a guardian who’s not hugging his staff and cleric gear. This gets old pretty fast.

Tbh I refuse to take pug guards at all now. I go on mine, and if one joins I insta-kick them like the plague. I’m done. I’m 110% done with pug guardians. Filthy leeches, all of them >:(

swiftpaw.6397:

Tbh I refuse to take pug guards at all now. I go on mine, and if one joins I insta-kick them like the plague. I’m done. I’m 110% done with pug guardians. Filthy leeches, all of them >:(

Staff clerics the lot of them.

I did four fotms today at 29-39. Not high by your standards but all pugs or friendly guildies. Most runs had no blast finishers besides a banner & myself using banner 5, no might besides my virtue/empower, no fury. Nobody using food or consumables besides me. I think a couple were zerkers. This is fairly standard for a lot of casual groups.

The group rarely died when I ran 0/0/10/30/30 and camped with staff. Everyone had perma 15 might, everyone was almost always full hp or quickly brought back to full hp. The runs took a really long time and were dull, but very smooth.

When I ran zerker with the same people, same lack of boons etc, the speed of things was a lot faster. Overall damage wise I could tell I made a huge difference to group dps. Like I said even unbuffed my WW was hitting 15k (without unscathed) and I could burst whole packs of mobs down which would have taken us longer to do before. I suspect in my estimations above where I figured the might on allies would make up a decent portion of dps I was wrong, that only really works when they are as high dps as I would have been if I were a zerker, or higher. Which honestly in these sorts of groups is rare.

Ultimately I think a cleric staff support guard is a decent choice for a bad player, it’s not hard to stand there and provide a boat load of healing to everyone, and if you refuse to play a zerker it’s probably the best of a bad situation. The empower stacks really didn’t add as much as i had hoped, probably for the reasons mentioned above. You could give all the might stacks in the world to a bunker being played by a poor player and it won’t help much.

There were situations however such as mai trin where we simply weren’t good/disciplined enough to stack on her. This lead to more incoming damage than people could survive, and although when she became vulnerable I could burst her down in seconds.. I really felt the staff bunker would have been able to keep everybody alive and provide a much easier fight.

Anyway, I’ll continue playing both sides of the coin for a bit. I like to know both parts to the story. Still think staff cleric is useless in an organised group but surprisingly useful in a bad group. I think it would be surprisingly good in a group of 4 good zerkers who otherwise have no way to stack might, cba to stack might, or want a very strong safety net. I’d probably recommend 4 zerkers and a staff cleric sooner than I would recommend 5 players mixing zerker gear with pvt gear or something to try and get some survivability. Either way if 25 might can be achieved without the guardian the usefulness diminishes.

If the guards are nice and make a fun conversation, I’ll carry them, I don’t mind!
I’ll pretend I didn’t see that staff auto-attack too.