Guild Wars 2

Is it a good idea to make the following build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAreRlYgKCXFyvDf4ES2jVCBVQsHEIGtRXFSIA-jQCBkDSjEEBJ5RQMLSZtqpIasqZC16aYKXJyIuIa1A-e

And using the combination of the following:
Virtue of Justice (4.5s retaliation; 24s reload)
“Stand your ground!” (7.75s retaliation; 24s reload)
Signet of Judgement (4.5s retaliation; 20s reload)
“Save yourself” (16.25s retaliation; 48s reload)

In case the calculations are correct and the 25% bonus on retaliation and the 30% bonus on boons comes up the the named length of retaliation per skill it is possible to use the combination to get almost 24/7 retaliation. The question however is:
Is retaliation worth it?

The build tries to give you health and toughness as well as supporting abilities. Your goal is to survive longer than your enemies. By attacking them as well as letting them kill themselves by attacking you.

On a side note: Never combine confusion with retaliation. It’s simply evil.

• There’s a Guardian section
• If you want to base your build around Retaliation, don’t use berserker gear. Retaliation can’t crit. Only go for Power, Toughness, Healing Power and Vitality. So Soldier, Giver, Sentinel, Shaman and Cleric should be the only prefixes.
• Retaliation sucks in PvE

Nretep.2564:

• There’s a Guardian section
• If you want to base your build around Retaliation, don’t use berserker gear. Retaliation can’t crit. Only go for Power, Toughness, Healing Power and Vitality. So Soldier, Giver, Sentinel, Shaman and Cleric should be the only prefixes.
• Retaliation sucks in PvE

• Well I guess this is the wrong section my apologizes.
• Thank you very much I’m gonna take these into consideration.
• So it’s not a good idea to use this build in PvE? Is it possible to keep the traits and use a more fitting supporting combination for PvE?

I’m still new to guardians, so I can barely help you with a fitting build.

Just saying to Retaliation and Confusion. The developers tried to balance the game between PvP and PvE. In PvP the characterkitten like twice a second with 600 dmg. With confusion they get two hits per second back, hurting as hell. Channelled skills only trigger confusion once, but retaliation each attack. HundredBladed might cause more self-damage than any damage spell. That’s why they halved the damage of Retaliation and Confusion in PvP now.
But let’s look at PvE. Mobs need 2 seconds to walk to you (since you initiate a fight from long range), cast 1s, damage you and then start again. Instead of dealing 2x damage per second, you deal 1x damage every three seconds. When I use my 5s confusion in PvE, I hope that they at least get that tick once. It’s completely underpowered.

But let’s looks at bosses. They often only attack every few seconds with ultra-heavy hitterkittenCOUNT based things are utterly useless here.

Nretep.2564:

I’m still new to guardians, so I can barely help you with a fitting build.

Just saying to Retaliation and Confusion. The developers tried to balance the game between PvP and PvE. In PvP the characterkitten like twice a second with 600 dmg. With confusion they get two hits per second back, hurting as hell. Channelled skills only trigger confusion once, but retaliation each attack. HundredBladed might cause more self-damage than any damage spell. That’s why they halved the damage of Retaliation and Confusion in PvP now.
But let’s look at PvE. Mobs need 2 seconds to walk to you (since you initiate a fight from long range), cast 1s, damage you and then start again. Instead of dealing 2x damage per second, you deal 1x damage every three seconds. When I use my 5s confusion in PvE, I hope that they at least get that tick once. It’s completely underpowered.

But let’s looks at bosses. They often only attack every few seconds with ultra-heavy hitterkittenCOUNT based things are utterly useless here.

I see, thank you very much. I wonder if I could figure something out for WvW and PvE without the need of reskilling everytime. Or maybe I find some other build fitting more.

They did balance it for PvP. Since they tried to balance it previously, both skills were underwhelming in PvE and pretty strong in PvP. To balance that, they recently halved the damage of Retaliation and Confusion in PvP. So that you don’t have to think about attacking anymore.
To balance PvE, they’d need to make it like *4 there. But ANet won’t make that.

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

I see, thank you very much. I wonder if I could figure something out for WvW and PvE without the need of reskilling everytime. Or maybe I find some other build fitting more.

Either way, it’s not a perfect sitution. On the one hand, mobs usually attack slower than a player. This means that your Retaliation and Confusion damage doesn’t trigger as often, but it is still at 100% damage output for the raw abilities. Then on the other hand, PvP / WvW players will attack far more often. While they will now trigger your Retaliation and Confusion abilities at an increased rate, ArenaNet also has both of these powers coded to do a reduced amount of damage in PvP / WvW.

In the end, the net damage output in each scenerio is a lot closer than people are acting like. I’d still say that the damage output will be a bit higher in WvW, but that’s no reason scrap an entire PvE character build.

On the wiki it says that retaliation damage is calculated this way for a level 80 character:

198.45 + (0.075 * Power)

Is this calculation for PvE, PvP or WvW?

I’d assume it is for PvE. The damage for WvW / PvP is something like 50% or 66% of the PvE damage.