Guild Wars 2

After playing guardian for the past couple of months and getting up to 80 and exotics, I was happy to get most of the gear I’ve wanted (Cleric).

But I get some backlash from the elitist types who like to run full berserker thru runs and say I gimp their group.

Are guardians really not meant to play their class roles in dungeons? Something obviously isn’t right when people say anything but pure dps is not viable. That’s one issue you have when you remove the holy trinity.

Not saying I prefer the tank/healer/dps combo, but I was getting flak for using a mace in between weapon switches because “0 dps”

1) Healing is a bad stat. You can be effective support without it. It doesn’t scale well with almost any ability, and the sacrifice you make to get it isn’t worth it compared to other stats.
2) Support isn’t just a Guardian role, nor should you strictly define yourself as such.
3) Guardians can support and maintain good damage. It’s better to do it this way because you will never be able to out heal a fight. CC and Boons>Massive amounts of healing.

they are stupid.

Support guardian is a valuable addition for dungeon running. Especially in PUG groups where you arent sure of the players skill.

Staff guardian number 4 skill (12 might stack aoe) is very powerful and more than makes up for your lack of damage
Hold the line shout is valuable to keeping people alive.
Not many people care about this this but using aoe movement speed buffs to make the npc move faster (like at the start of cof or ac paths can also shave off time for speedruns)

I’m not sure who you’ve been pugging with but as imbalancedhero said, guards are one of the most requested and valued additions for dungeons.

I think the biggest problem with support is that…it’s very hard to gauge how effective you are.

Sure, you mitigate tons of damage for your team. But no one notices damage mitigation. People notice if their health bar drops and goes up again, but there’s nothing really that you do that they can visually see and say, “oh man this guardian is keeping me ALIVE.”

I guess my point is, while people say “healing is bad” “dps is only role” because people really have NO IDEA how effective healing/cc is over the duration of a dungeon.

That said however, dps is still an important role you need to contribute too. You can be incredibly support-y without neutering your damage with excess healing power. Which is an okay stat, but focusing on healing is to completely miss the point of this game’s combat mechanics, which is ALL about damage mitigation and not getting hit in the first place.

Guardians are extremely valuable. Anyone who say’s otherwise to you, just put them on block so you don’t accidentally pug with them again.

Remember, the person on the other side of the screen may be a high caffeinated sugar addict. Whom, at the moment, is completely adrenalined out of their little 12 year old mind! :-) It certainly wouldn’t be a fun run if the person was so intolerant that they’d bark about your class so quickly.

Use block and find FUN people to run dungeons with. Life’s too short to worry about such things. If it helps, think of it this way, would they spend years developing these classes, skills, and traits if the didn’t have a place? DPS and dodging isn’t the end all be all of GW2. Certainly not a fun fantasy experience without some magic and class utilities being used.

Guardians are awesome and everyone that does Fractals will LOVE you for doing the support role. You have so many awesome abilities that are unfortunately mostly wasted in easy content (aka most dungeons) because its a stomp dps fest where everything just dies so fast it does not matter much to use supports alot.

However once you get to harder stuff like Arah and Fractals you can shine. Reflects, tons of Boons especially long Protection and the Hammer damage is also quit nice. In addition you get holds and the Spirit Shield is one of the best abilities in the game for pve imho.

On the healing gear part, it depends really, its not a very good stat but in some moderate amounts (500) i find it quit good. You have alot of healing abilities for your team if you go with Staff/x and use your F2 alot and have the proper spec for support (0/0/30/30/10 or a variation there of).

But this just applies to harder content aka Fractals ( I pray A-Net will implement more demanding pve content to challenge us).

So just find a group that is good and not just wants to speed zerg a dungeon.

I always regard support build as secondary, meaning that it shouldn’t be your primary objective when you play (unless you’re in a dedicated team that specifically asked for it). The reason for that is everyone is jack-of-all-trades, you can’t really excel specifically at one thing.

On a PuG situation, ideally you wanna deal damage first to be sure, then support comes next. Afterall, you don’t really know what builds they’re running, your team might end up with 5 support for all you know.

I’d say on the opposite, guardian are too strong in dungeons….to the point that many party when they get to 4/5 if they lack a guardian reserve the spot for one…. (or a warrior in case they cannot find any).

Too much support and it becomes inefficient.
Too much damage and everyone becomes happy.

In decent teams it’s rarely a question about survivability but rather a question about clear-time. And then only purpose of support is to allow you do damage more. So don’t over-do it.

Can someone explain to me what “healing power doesn’t scale well” means? I see the phrase thrown around a lot on the forums but it doesn’t really make sense. More HP points = more HP, right?

They simply mean that it gives poor return for investment.

Apparently, Healing Power is the most important stat for a supportive Guardian. People who don’t see how well it works, and can’t find the proper synergy with all the utility and weapon skills we have are in no position to tell me “Healing power doesn’t scale well”. It scales perfectly well.

Support Guardian is probably the best companion in any dungeon run, as long as he is the only one specializing in full support, while others put their efforts to maximize the amount of damage dealt to all kind of foes.

I’ve ran uncountable many dungeons, as well as most of the readers of these forums. I’m running full healing power Guardian and the berserk warriors I know and run with wouldn’t be able to pull their best dmg without me (15 stacks of might, regen+protection with boon duration extended to 70%, removing condition, stability and aegis on demand, tremendous amount of direct healing, reflective wall and absorbing shield, everything timed well and used when needed).

On the other hand, the “average” guardian swings his GS or hammer and does close to nothing real support we are capable of. So if all you’ve seen is this kind of guardian, I can imagine where the opinion about “healing power scales badly” comes from, it still does not give the justice to the handful of hard working guardians who can pull amazing supportive gameplay.

Healing power scales badly because it doesn’t scale well with the abilities you use to cure the party aside from roll cures.

Guardian running Staff/Scepter_Focus is invaluable. Mace if you need more heals, but not usually necessary.

Regen boon: Without any healing power it gives 130 Health per second at level 80. With 1350 Healing Power it gives ~300 health per second. I see huge difference, especially if you make the boon last 11 seconds with single shout, and you can maintain it almost permanently with all other abilities.

Regen can be spread to party members through shouts, symbol from mace, skill #4 on focus, traited virtue of resolve, and if you trait your shouts to turn conditions into boons, it often turns poison into regen as well.

Staff skills: Flash of Light & Empower. With 1350 Healing Power they heal accordingly for 1k and almost 3k at level 80. With 2h Mastery the reduced CD of these skills make them heal even more effective.

Virtue of Resolve is affected by Healing Power quite well too. Without Healing Power it heals for 1,625k. With ~1350 healing Power it gives 2,6k.
If traited, it additionaly gives regen boon.

Healing Breeze & dodge rolls – both of them are affected by the Healing Power nicely. The difference between them with or without Healing Power is quite significant.

Problem with people is, they usually look only at one of these skills separately, and only in aspect of their egoistic self heal ability. Multiply the heal amount by 5, as it can affect your full party, and add the numbers from all the outgoing healing and chain them well with appriopriate cool downs on the given skills. It should turn the table around. If these numbers and suggestions of proper usage the skills still can’t convience people, then I guess I exhausted my resources and will stop bothering.

For fractals, maybe, I don’t know, I only got to level 6 (I refuse to continue until they fix several issues with it).

However for dungeons it depends. If your team messes up, having something to back them up is great. But if your team doesn’t mess up, then they don’t need anyone to back them up, so you are effectively slowing them down by not being able to kill monsters.
But since you can change your traits, utility skills and gear between fights, you can simply modify your build if you see that your team doesn’t need any help.

Razzy.2741:

Regen boon: Without any healing power it gives 130 Health per second at level 80. With 1350 Healing Power it gives ~300 health per second. I see huge difference, especially if you make the boon last 11 seconds with single shout, and you can maintain it almost permanently with all other abilities.

Regen can be spread to party members through shouts, symbol from mace, skill #4 on focus, traited virtue of resolve, and if you trait your shouts to turn conditions into boons, it often turns poison into regen as well.

Staff skills: Flash of Light & Empower. With 1350 Healing Power they heal accordingly for 1k and almost 3k at level 80. With 2h Mastery the reduced CD of these skills make them heal even more effective.

Virtue of Resolve is affected by Healing Power quite well too. Without Healing Power it heals for 1,625k. With ~1350 healing Power it gives 2,6k.
If traited, it additionaly gives regen boon.

Healing Breeze & dodge rolls – both of them are affected by the Healing Power nicely. The difference between them with or without Healing Power is quite significant.

Problem with people is, they usually look only at one of these skills separately, and only in aspect of their egoistic self heal ability. Multiply the heal amount by 5, as it can affect your full party, and add the numbers from all the outgoing healing and chain them well with appriopriate cool downs on the given skills. It should turn the table around. If these numbers and suggestions of proper usage the skills still can’t convience people, then I guess I exhausted my resources and will stop bothering.

You realize that regen power depends on the person it affects, not the person that casted it? Empower heals only you. And while you have 1350 healing power and your skills heal for 50-60% more (which is still bad amount), you do much less damage than same guardian who lacks godly healing power. You lack crit to support your party with empowering might and to get yourself a vigor which is the best damage mitigation resource in the game.

I have a guardian and a ranger level 80. Both decently equipped (not great, decent), with the guardian almost full knight set.
With the ranger I do much more DPS than with the guardian.
However, whenever I’m in a grp with the ranger and see the grp has enough ranged, I asked it I should go with my less dps guardian, and I say that DPS is lower, they ask me to change.
This never happened the other way around. There are never 2 many guardians in a group.
In fact, one time when I was in a grp to CoF path 1 with the ranger, and we were looking for the last 2 memebrs, ppl kept leaving the grp till I logged my guardian. Then the grp got full with no leavers.

Support is great since it buffs the group, and it removes the need to look after you since you can survive by yourself.

My advice to you is to stop trying to join the groups who publish like “lf1m warrior/guardian for CoF p1 speedrun farming”.

Regen duration and effectivity depends on the caster, as any other boon. Not on the receiver. The receiver passively takes the boon casted by the boon giver. The stronger healing power on caster, the better. I tested it with guildies, and it seems it’s the way it works. If I am wrong, I’m sincerely sorry for my mistake, but I’d like a proof.

Empower heals all party members on the 4th tick. Weird you didn’t know about it.
The amount of heals I spread for all party members is usually 2x more effective than their own self-heal skills. If it’s “still bad amount” in your opinion, well, I guess we will never agree.

My mace and focus have both sigils: recharge 50% of endurance on weapon swap and recharge to ful endurance on a kill. I have 20-25% crit chance, which gives me more than enough chance to gain 5s long vigor boon given from trait. Which altogether, makes me able to dodge roll around 4 times during every 10 seconds. Given I heal 1,5k per dodge roll, it’s 6k for me and everyone around, sir. Per 10 seconds, excluding all other heals I can spread. If it’s still bad – you make me really curious, what you consider a good healing.

My damage is indeed the worst there can be, but then again – I do deal some damage, and I can tank foes very well – which makes my full berserk companions melt the foes within seconds without worrying about their own health and safety. They don’t need to dodge roll and interrupt their bursts because of worries to get downed any second. Moreover, 15 stacks of Might I grant (12 stacks from staff, with 70% boon duration and 2h mastery allowing me to chain it pretty well + traited virtue of justice) do increase the overall damage of everyone around me.

But well – I’m done with arguing. As I stated somewhere else, it’s all about personal preference and group setting. I just don’t agree with people saying the Healing Power scales badly. It doesn’t, it’s just underrated.

Razzy.2741:

Regen duration and effectivity depends on the caster, as any other boon. Not on the receiver. The receiver passively takes the boon casted by the boon giver. The stronger healing power on caster, the better. I tested it with guildies, and it seems it’s the way it works. If I am wrong, I’m sincerely sorry for my mistake, but I’d like a proof.

Empower heals all party members on the 4th tick. Weird you didn’t know about it.
The amount of heals I spread for all party members is usually 2x more effective than their own self-heal skills. If it’s “still bad amount” in your opinion, well, I guess we will never agree.

My mace and focus have both sigils: recharge 50% of endurance on weapon swap and recharge to ful endurance on a kill. I have 20-25% crit chance, which gives me more than enough chance to gain 5s long vigor boon given from trait. Which altogether, makes me able to dodge roll around 4 times during every 10 seconds. Given I heal 1,5k per dodge roll, it’s 6k for me and everyone around, sir. Per 10 seconds, excluding all other heals I can spread. If it’s still bad – you make me really curious, what you consider a good healing.

My damage is indeed the worst there can be, but then again – I do deal some damage, and I can tank foes very well – which makes my full berserk companions melt the foes within seconds without worrying about their own health and safety. They don’t need to dodge roll and interrupt their bursts because of worries to get downed any second. Moreover, 15 stacks of Might I grant (12 stacks from staff, with 70% boon duration and 2h mastery allowing me to chain it pretty well + traited virtue of justice) do increase the overall damage of everyone around me.

But well – I’m done with arguing. As I stated somewhere else, it’s all about personal preference and group setting. I just don’t agree with people saying the Healing Power scales badly. It doesn’t, it’s just underrated.

Iirc, boons duration depends on the caster but boons strenght on the receiver but colour me surprised if I’m wrong.

I don’t really use staff so I might have forgotten about that.

If your glass companions melt fast, they need to step up their game. Anets lead designer said that dungeons in their current state are too easy, meaning you probably shouldn’t need full support guardian. Balanced guardian with support skills/traits is enough.

Healing Power scales badly because only few skills have a coefficient equal to 0.

My bad, some grammar issue. I meant, they make foes melt within seconds. They are doing more than ok on their own.
Full healer just takes away all the worries about getting downed and the pressure about timing your dodges/blocks/heals right and stay in fight for the entire time. Experiencing the facts, most of the people don’t know/remember all the mechanics in the dungeons, I find my role very helpful with the settings I’m using, and that’s also a personal preference.

On a humouristic side, I love the “pros” telling some excuses if they fail to dodge lethal damage: “Lol, I was texting gf”, “I was eatin’ pizza. Hard to do all it with 1 hand lol”, “lag”, “wtf lol?! I’m tired”, “y they agro always ononly on me?!”.
Again, healing guardian takes away this kind of junk talk too, and I’m happy about this as well, cuz I couldn’t stand poor manners of those who can’t admit failures. Personal preference.

I’ve played cleric’s guardian and I was pretty dissapointed that the heals weren’t great, even with signet and 30 pts in the healing traits an ele specced in healing with water could do some better burst healing. Not to mention the empowering might you are missing on giving your team + staff #4 you can improve your teams dps by a lot.

Sure you are pretty much unkillable but you can’t kill crap either, so when you’re with a good team you’re gimping the party and when you’re with a bad party more than likely they’ll still go down.

It’s not like you’re not supporting your party with a shout build focusing on empowering might and staff #4 charge, you still get heals out, you build might for your team and you can still be pretty tanky because of autristic heal, dish out decent dps, just your heals won’t be as effective and you’ll try to critical as much as possible.

The damage you can soak up, the pressure you can relieve off other classes to go full dps, the faster you kill mobs means the less damage you’re taking, and the fact that shouts and reflection skills work without healing power is why people don’t like support guards.

A full knights armor guardian will naturally pull agro because of high toughness, while having high crit chance to heal a ton with AH. You are able to relieve pressure from everyone else, while doing really good damage with GS or Hammer, and ultimately everything dies faster and your party is still safe.

That’s why people don’t like full support guardians, spamming staff 4 which gives 12 stacks of might for 5 seconds doesn’t make up for the 2k auto attacks and relieve pressure from the rest of your group. Consistent Might stacks from Empowering Might with an AH/Crit build plus sources of might stacks from the other 4 members of your group and providing both good damage and relieving pressure is far more valuable.

Kami.7369:

1) Healing is a bad stat. You can be effective support without it. It doesn’t scale well with almost any ability, and the sacrifice you make to get it isn’t worth it compared to other stats.
2) Support isn’t just a Guardian role, nor should you strictly define yourself as such.
3) Guardians can support and maintain good damage. It’s better to do it this way because you will never be able to out heal a fight. CC and Boons>Massive amounts of healing.

This first reply said it all. Full support traits (30 honor, 30 valor and anything in that direction) aren’t the right ways to use a guardian, for w/e role you might want to play in a group… Healing is the second most useless support ability of a guardian, next to traiting into condi removal. The most powerful healing spell of a guardian doesn’t even take into count the amount of +healing you have….

here’s how I would rate the functions of a guardian, most important to least:

Blind. because virtue of justice is renewed on every kill and because blind also burns if you trait 20 into rad. The only issue is that some mobs are natively immue to blind, dredges for example, but the devs had taken this into count when setting up their hp and dmg.

Block. mostly aegis but also other skills that produce blocking. Focus 5 blocks 3, making it THE best block for yourself. You can trait into more aegis for rest of the group of course.

Stability and reflection. A few of these also produce light fields so they serve multiple purposes, not to mention protection buffs (33% mitigation)

Pets. In a support/group role, shield of the avenger is simply godsend. In 70+ fractals, a guardian that does nothing else but casting avenger is more useful than any other class in w/e spec they might be (given you have the other necessary classes of course), only thing better is a guardian that also does those listed above…

GS skills. Even this is WAY more important than the little group healing you can bring to the table. GS 5 (binding blade and pulling) being the most important attack you have, no other class can do this better than a guardian, and they need utilities…

Condition removal. by which I meant using soldier runes, not trait into boon removal. It’s plenty, especially if you were producing all the light fields properly (and the others in your group aren’t noob enough to not know when to throw finishers).

There are still more. Scepter 3, shield 5, empowering and LoW, list goes on and on, and healing at the very bottom of it.

Here’s the TL:DR version:

A guardian’s job in dungeons is to use its toughness and approximation (threshold distance) to draw aggro, then blind/block/dodge out of the attacks, so no one in the group receives damage and no one needed to heal.

You don’t need support if you have experience. Besides, a DPS GS guardian can ‘support’ plenty with cleansing bolts already. That’s not to say your support guardian is bad or not fun to play; I have a range of builds I play on my guardian at times just for kicks, but you also have to accept that other players may not find it fun to play with a support guardian.

haviz.1340:

Iirc, boons duration depends on the caster but boons strenght on the receiver but colour me surprised if I’m wrong.

You are wrong. Both are dependent on the caster.

Awesome.6120:

You are wrong. Both are dependent on the caster.

True, I just double checked. Sorry for confusion.

I think support builds are important. What’s bad is investing too heavily in Healing Power over other stats. Healing Power doesn’t make up for the stats you lose elsewhere, and the benefits they could’ve provided. It’s important to remember that.

I play a support Guardian, and I play an indestructible build. If I’m playing properly, I cannot die, period. Not even GL can take me down if I’m paying attention and on top of my game. That said, I don’t run a lot of healing. I run enough to get the job done, and run support traits to keep myself alive and to help out across the board, but I don’t overdo it. My support extends to the rest of the team, too, by applying tons of might, reflecting, blinding, the works. People say that healing builds don’t really work, and while you’re not going to be keeping everyone alive through the worst of it, I can keep people alive usually better than they can keep themselves alive without investing much (if any) into Healing Power.

I carry something like 6 different weapons for different situations. In doing so, I can adapt to what the team needs and when. GS is critical, but sometimes I want other things. Realistically my dps isn’t very high compared to a Warrior, but if I wanted to do massive dps, I wouldn’t be using a Guardian to begin with. Deal decent dps, use reasonable amounts of CC, support through your offensive strategies, never go down, and you will do fine.

If you want to support your group, build damage with damage gear, then use trait/utility things that your group can benefit from. As the encounters stand right now, and I do mean all of them, anything less than your maximum damage output just slows things down. Even condition damage is less effective than direct (until such time as we see new mobs with physical damage mitigation).

Healing particularly is useful for keeping inexperienced players alive, but players who are used to the encounters won’t be getting hit enough as is to even be healed. I ‘enjoy’ having a healer spec around, mainly because it allows me much more leeway to laze my way through the run. By no means does it speed up any group I’ve been a part of though.