Guild Wars 2

Pretty much what the topic title says, have you come across builds that made you pick up a class again after dismissing it as ‘boring’? I like looking at builds which, while not min/maxing the class, are still interesting and fun to play.

In beta I played the Guardian for like an hour and hated it, then I made another one a month ago and tried the hammer and loved it. Utilities didn’t even matter. I just like being a small Asura and knocking trolls or Norn back across the battlefield.

Engineer getting the flamethrower made it for me….went from squishy to burn the heck out of everything….loved it!

D/D ele (dapheonix build). It was fun being in the middle of the action and dancing attuenments.

However, I hated D/D thief.

Speccing in to Acrobatics as a D/D Thief for the first time. Dance of Death by Iron Maiden immediately comes to mind. So much fun.

Ranger. I used to run a pretty heavy bunker build and one day I realized I just wasn’t having fun in wvw. So I re-traited and now have 30 points in damage and 25 points in skirmishing. I do crazy amounts of damage compared to what I was doing before and I find in best case scenario with right traits+sigil I have 25% damage bonus which more than makes up for our weak pets(because pets are supposed to do a large portion of your damage you would otherwise do alone). Also run a few points points into beastmastery for slight pet buff and a few in toughness so I’m not too squishy. Also changed from SB/LB to LB/GS beceause gs has an awesome swoop ability that has saved my life more times than I can count.

Playing Asura golf with a hammer guardian, it so helps the chuckle factor that the key for the action is four
I forget who created the build (sorry) but the death blossom build where all the endurance enhancements allow you to string 5 together
Sword dagger ranger with a high crit setup
The latest D/D ele in wvw and with applogies to Auesis and the Iron Maiden fans the only song for a d/d ele is from Fun.’s we are young.

So let’s set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun
So if by the time the bar closes
And you feel like falling down
I’ll carry you home tonight

I played P/P thief and i hated it to spam only unload because it was the easy way to survive in dungeons,… at least i thought so… then i saw an incredible thief video where a player could kill people in a zerg in wvw all by himself and choose to go P/D too, with a high rate of boon duration and healing while cloacked… life was never that fun before

When I first got my Engineer to 80, I ran with turrets and pistol and shield. It was alright, I wasn’t too fond of it, and realized I wasn’t doing much in the way of damage. Felt rather useless to me and weak.

So during the gear up process of running dungeons, someone told me to use Grenade Kit. Now I was still kind of new to Engineer and didn’t use kits at the time cause they confused me. Thought it was all about turrets and such.

So I went ahead and tried out the Grenade Kit and dear goodness, it made me fall in love with Engineer. Refunded my traits and set them for big bangs, and it brought a smile to my face. Now I love playing my Engineer.

Just hoping that this nerf that is coming to AoE won’t make me have to shelf them.

A little engineer build called ‘Explosive Runs’

Use the bomb kit, slick shoes, and Elixir U. Grab the standard traits for using the bomb kit and the trait which lowers Elixir CDs. In PvP grab the heal and weakness traits for bombs and it makes an amazing support build.

Get a group of mobs or players> throw on slick shoes> run through them, CCing everyone>hit haste and drop a couple dozen bombs on them before they even get up.

Mesmer – the whole look of the Skills and their skills made me fall in love with. The last Beta Weekend, I discovered a Trait, that let the phantasms use their skill much more often than before. At this point, I could handle three veterans at the same time, and never got killed in spvp.

Unfortunately, they removed that trait in on of the last stress tests – But finally fixed the damage of the shattering illussions. Since then, the mesmer is very balanced to me.

(besides that little stroke the must have had, when giving 3might for every shattered illusion, wich got removed very soon)

Oh ye gods how I hated mesmer levelling it.
Coming from GW1 where things were more manipulative with more of a focus on “Darned if you do, darned if you don’t” Domination style gameplay, I really couldn’t stand the renewed focus on illusions.
Domination is a half-hearted implementation in GW2, and a lot of the cool effects you could achieve in GW1 using Domination skills have been condensed into one condition, Confusion.

So I hated the new mesmer.

Then ding, I hit 80, kitted him out with a complete exotic set, including trinkets and was still having a hard time. I’d invested in an exotic greatsword with a sword/dagger combo as the swap out. And these weapons just were NOT doing anything for me, as while the greatsword may look cool in use, I found it incredibly dull to use.

That’s when I crafted an exotic staff and retraited 0/20/20/0/30.
I stopped molly-coddling my illusions.
I no longer treated them as turrets or pets.
I focussed on making as many as possible as quickly as possible, shattering them as often as possible.
And all of a sudden I was a dodging & dancing fool, nipping about the battlefield and exploding stuff here, there and everywhere. My endurance was constantly being refilled by extra staff bounces, I was hard to hit as I was constantly dodging to create clones, and things in general were going BOOM.

Life as a mesmer starts at 80.

Flamethrower on the engineer. Heh heh heh.

Staff on Ele surprised me as very useful as well. LOADS of CC and utility once u get used to it.

I was really frustrated with my ele, then found out about D/D. Just love the skills and how I can keep moving and still do damage, but I died all the time. Daphoenix build made D/D survivable, so that really let me play D/D a lot more.

My build. Tanky but hurty.

The moment, so long ago, when I picked up a great sword on my mesmer and realized it was a ranged weapon… oh yeah.

my support auramancer build really helped my ele become more fun, though it was already fun so it doesn’t really count.

When I got illusionary Persona on my mesmer that made it a lot more fun, but then it went back to being boring, guess I just don’t like mesmers.

Definitely the Juggermancer. I messed around with condimancer in sPvP and then laid it to rest, thinking I’d never level the thing. Then I stumbled across the wonderful world of power necros and a few weeks later, necro’s my new main.

That moment that I retraited for support/bunker for my first fractal and discovered Kit Refinement on 4 kits, and discovered the Tool Kit.
Why on earth I had previously specced for glass cannon eludes me now.

Flamethrower, it is just fun.

Playing my ranger I used mostly SB/LB. One day a guildie mentioned using sword/torch which never really occurred to me. The idea of tossing fire at someone, slowing/bleeding them with a trap thrown at range and then landing poisons and bleeds on them all before switching weapons just really upped the damage output for my toon.

S/D was also interesting but I found I’d rather have my torch for the fire conditions then the daggers for poison conditions since the sword 3 ability does poison as well.

Now I primarily use sword/torch and LB though sometimes depending on the situation, I’ll go sb/lb or st/lb. All and all the variety for each class is what really makes it fun.