Guild Wars 2

Today I decided I wanted to buy the Orr exotic karma gear for my Guardian as I like the looks of it. I’m sure most of you know the stats aren’t the greatest on it and it’s more of a skin armor regardless. While purchasing the armor I noticed I could get 5/6 with +power, +vit, +toughness. This gave me an Idea and I decided I would try running my Guardian through CoF multiple times wearing this armor with +tough +vit traits as well. I converted the helm to a +power, +prec, +tough as I could not get the above from the karma vendor.

I usually run my Guardian in full berserker’s and traited for maximum damage, I haven’t really had much problems with this survival wise since I’ve used it so long and I’ve adapted to the play style. I thought today would be a nice change up being able to take a little more damage. Boy was I wrong.

I noticed a decrease in my damage, but not enough that I would say I’m useless now and I expected this. I noticed I had way less survivability and this was the big shocker. I noticed I was almost always the one being targeted and I’m guessing it’s due to the +tough as far as I know. This resulted in my doing less damage overall, having to concentrate more on keeping myself up. My friends also noticed this and we also noticed it took longer to even run the dungeon, than if I just went full damage. I could keep the monsters on me, and with the right skill set I could stay up, but as a whole we saw no good difference in wearing that armor. I was thinking maybe keeping aggro would allow everyone else to pump out more constant damage, but without myself as a 5th pumping out as much as usual it just slowed us down.

I guess for now I will just convert the armor to my MF set, until I get tired of my CoF as my main damage set. I’m not disappointed as I said I love the looks of the armor, and will probably keep it as a major part of my gear. Regardless if I decided to convert it to my MF or damage set in the future. I’m disappointed in the lack of effectiveness +tough and +vit seemed to offer to my Guardian.

What is everyone’s opinions on this? Has anyone tried this, have you had any success in PvP, WvW, or PvE with it? Maybe I did something wrong.

Part of the trouble with going full defense on a guardian is we have the thing where we give allies might when we crit. We also (depending on build) get healed every time we give a boon to an ally. So especially in AoE, if you have a high crit rate, your passive self-healing is fantastic (on top of the protection/retaliation/aegis etc boons you’re giving). So you really do need a good bit of precision, too.