Guild Wars 2

I’ve come to the conclusion that max dps zerker builds are not good for soloing the open world content. I’m not sure if its me or the gear/skills, but I’m looking for something with a little more longevity. Getting one shot or hit for 80% of my health constantly is not very fun.

what profession are you playing with?

I don’t have any issues with full zerk builds in any area of PvE. Maybe it’s just you.

But if you insist on needing more passive defense, then maybe look into marauder’s gear.

Try using armour with 2 offensive stats and toughness.

Since it’s open-world you can afford to lose some damage, and the extra armour from toughness will allow you to survive a bit longer. It won’t protect you from everything – if a champion hits you with their big attack you’ll be dead either way. But against the normal every day enemies it does make a difference.

nottsgman.8206:

what profession are you playing with?

I have a level 80 Warrior, Guardian, Thief, Necromancer. And Revenant, which I have the least issues surviving on. But it is a very boring playstyle. They are all in full zerker gear, except the Necro which isn’t really geared yet.

Its mostly Silverwaste/HoT stuff that I have survivability issues on.

Both Silverwastes and HoT, of all my lvl 80s, the best are faring Reapers – got one power Reaper with zerker gear and one “million minions” condi reaper. They almost never die – unless they get ganked by husks with immobilize followed by snipers or floppers.
Second is a Ranger with zerker gear that also almost never dies.
Didn’t get my guardian or warrior to HoT yet, but all the other ones do have some issues surviving HoT. Not so much Silverwastes but HoT (especially before getting their elite).

Personally haven’t had many issues in zerker build in open world. The majority of the core maps can be easily face tanked or destroyed before they get damage out. However this is probably the problem when entering Heart of thorn maps. It’s generally a bit harder, but everything goes down at a reasonable rate. A few of the larger mobs are a bit dangerous and will require some dodging. Some are even too dangerous to melee and will require some bar breaking and ranging beforehand. I actually enjoy the open world of heart of thorns a lot because of the little extra skill and awareness that it requires.

if i can make it through all the HoT content (pre-patch) with a zerker ele, you can make it through today

Generally speaking, oftentimes it can be enough to simply swap Traitlines around.

For Warrior, for instance, just swapping Tactics to Defense will be a HUGE buff to your survivability as you’ll get Dogged March, Endure Pain Auto-proc and Cleansing Ire/Last Stand along with Adrenal Healing, making you extremely tanky. Simply slot in a few stances and you’re good to go even in Zerker.

As for gear, I tend to mix in either Knight or Soldier gear with Zerker for Direct Damage fighters, or if you don’t wanna lose too much effective power then you can merely go full Marauders (Crafting it can be expensive though).

For each profession I’d suggest the following:

• Warrior – Change to Strength/Defense/Berserker (or Discipline if you don’t have the elite spec unlocked) while keeping the Zerker Armor. Load stances such as Balanced Stance, Berserker’s Stance and Endure Pain onto your tray and use Headbutt for max Adrenaline at the start of a fight. Should work with Full Zerker in Open World this way.
• Guardian – Keep the Meta build (Zeal/Honor/Dragonhunter) but swap in Defender’s Dogma as your DH GM trait. Swap in LB as a ranged weapon. If this isn’t enough, consider equipping some Soldier gear, or go full Marauder’s.
• Thief – Deadly Arts/Trickery/Daredevil all the way. Mug+Sleight of Hand will help sustain you this way, and Dash as your DD dodge will make moving about and running away a breeze. Use Staff as your weapon of choice, prioritize the use of Vault and Weakening Charge to maintain good DPS while also keeping enemies in check. Swap in some Soldier gear if you’re still having issues.
• Necromancer – Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper with Shouts and Signets, or Blood Magic and Wells if you don’t have Reaper. Use GS/Staff, or D+Wh/Staff. Use Valkyrie or Cavalier, as Deathly Perception/Decimate Defenses will be all the Critting you need.
  For Condition Builds, use Viper (Or if you can’t get that, Sinister or Carrion) and run with Curses/Soul Reaping/Reaper or Curses/Death Magic/Reaper if using Minions.

Thanks for all the advice. I don’t think it would be as bad for an experienced player, but when I’m new to HoT and have no idea what any monster tells are then its pretty difficult to avoid being one shot.

The old problem of blinding spell effects obscuring animations is still there.

Alex Shatter.7956:

if i can make it through all the HoT content (pre-patch) with a zerker ele, you can make it through today

I can assume you made it through all of the content to 100% completion without dying a single time then.

Great job, you are the best there ever was.

Murderin.8269:

Alex Shatter.7956:

if i can make it through all the HoT content (pre-patch) with a zerker ele, you can make it through today

I can assume you made it through all of the content to 100% completion without dying a single time then.

Great job, you are the best there ever was.

wow such witty very rhetoric

You could try swapping bits of your accessories to soldier’s stats, but as mentioned and imo, your best bet is to slot a defensive trait line. The warrior’s berserker line is also very good for condition cleanse, and the warrior has looads of skills to avoid damage with and to quickly jump away from opponents if you get overwhelmed. I would swap your build before you swap your armour stats.

Murderin.8269:

nottsgman.8206:

what profession are you playing with?

I have a level 80 Warrior, Guardian, Thief, Necromancer. And Revenant, which I have the least issues surviving on. But it is a very boring playstyle. They are all in full zerker gear, except the Necro which isn’t really geared yet.

Its mostly Silverwaste/HoT stuff that I have survivability issues on.

My 80 war is super tanky in full zerk gear. Go Strength defense and berserker. Use healing signet, rage stomp, outrage, and head butt. Grab rousing resilience, the trait that make zerk mode a stun break, and the trait that gives might and stab for stun breaking.

Start a fight with head butt and outrage to have 3k armor, 19k health, and 800 health regent per second.

You do lose a lot of damage picking these traits but you should still burst down most mobs.

Just change your traits around a bit and get some ascended soldiers trinkets (advantage of ascended is you can just have 1 set and move it around your toons as required).
You still won’t survive if you charge into every fight, but it’ll give you the chance to learn each mob’s attacks and tells. Then when you’re more comfortable, you can swap those trinkets/traits for more glassy ones.

I like how this game has pigeon holed every class into one or two builds and if you don’t take those builds you die…. a lot.

How is that fun at all and isn’t that pretty bad mechanics when half the games systems have been considered obsolete and not usable anymore.

My condition twin pistols Engie dies hideous in hot, my Shortbow Ranger was so useless i had to resort to Longbow which i hate…

My twin dagger ele will die in seconds, as will my warrior and guardian, because those builds i use aren’t ace of spades in the so called meta..

So for me my builds suck i just don’t play said characters anymore, its sad imo..

nottsgman.8206:

Murderin.8269:

nottsgman.8206:

what profession are you playing with?

I have a level 80 Warrior, Guardian, Thief, Necromancer. And Revenant, which I have the least issues surviving on. But it is a very boring playstyle. They are all in full zerker gear, except the Necro which isn’t really geared yet.

Its mostly Silverwaste/HoT stuff that I have survivability issues on.

My 80 war is super tanky in full zerk gear. Go Strength defense and berserker. Use healing signet, rage stomp, outrage, and head butt. Grab rousing resilience, the trait that make zerk mode a stun break, and the trait that gives might and stab for stun breaking.

Start a fight with head butt and outrage to have 3k armor, 19k health, and 800 health regent per second.

You do lose a lot of damage picking these traits but you should still burst down most mobs.

What if i don’t want your cookie cutter build? No offense but i’d like to play my own build viably?

Just change your traits around a bit and get some ascended soldiers trinkets (advantage of ascended is you can just have 1 set and move it around your toons as required).
You still won’t survive if you charge into every fight, but it’ll give you the chance to learn each mob’s attacks and tells. Then when you’re more comfortable, you can swap those trinkets/traits for more glassy ones.

I have no way of getting Ascended gear, i cannot do Fractals, i have very little ascended mats, the grind is insane and my laurels are sitting on 20…

My guardian has no issues with full zerker, but if you find you do I would try using valkyrie or soldier.

My mesmer uses a rabid based condi build for open world so I dunno if she would be squishy in zerker, in rabid however she is very tanky.

Exotic gear is really more than adequate for these regions, no need to worry about having to build a whole new ascended set.

Dante.1508:

What if i don’t want your cookie cutter build? No offense but i’d like to play my own build viably?

You get to do 5%-20% of the dps of an optimal build. Even what I suggest is only half as effective as optimal builds in terms of DPS.

If you do a mix stat build, you will get at most 20% dps, but more likely 5%. That means one optimal person is worth 20 of you. Meta achievements would be completed faster if 10 of you were constantly reviving someone playing an optimal build poorly. Because those optimal builds just do stupid amounts more damage than you’ll ever do.

It’s not that damage is the only thing that matters, it’s that none damage decisions axe your DPS by punishing amounts to the point that no trade offs are really worth it. Stat build variety is what kind of glass build you want. Build diversity is picking between traits. A tank is just a full berzerker with tanky traits.

People who think you can’t deviate from the meta full zerker builds without nuking your damage into oblivion clearly haven’t taken the time to actually try to craft a build. I don’t even raid in full zerker, as it’s not the best overall build for my classes (ele, thief). 99 times out of 100, an ele is better off with a couple pieces of marauder/valk.

You can gain quite a lot of defense without losing much damage, and there are several ways to go about it.

Marauder gear offers a health boost for a very small loss in damage.
You can complement your berserker/marauder gear with valkyrie’s, knight’s, crusader’s, cavalier’s, etc to gain even more defense, though the damage loss is bigger than the swap from berserker to marauder.

Some traits or skills offer a lot of extra defense. Protection boon, projectile reflects, blocks, invulnerability, condition clears, evades, heals, etc. all contribute a lot to surviving.

Condition builds typically only need 2 stats to do big damage, condition damage and duration, and that can allow you to take health or toughness or the like without a big damage loss.

Also there is food that makes you take less damage. Pop some mussel soup to instantly become way tankier.

Dante.1508:

I like how this game has pigeon holed every class into one or two builds and if you don’t take those builds you die…. a lot.

snip

I have no way of getting Ascended gear, i cannot do Fractals, i have very little ascended mats, the grind is insane and my laurels are sitting on 20…

I’ll counter your first statement by saying: for the equal skill levels, the meta builds actually CAUSE you to die more because of how glassy they are. The only reason players can play those builds at all is because they learned how to dodge, block, blind and generally avoid damage. It does mean, they’ve got a smaller margin of error, especially when facing an unfamiliar foe. The initial days of HoT were littered with the corpses of zerk players… now they’ve learned their foes and continue as zerk players without much drama.

And to my own statement, I never said armor or weapons, I specifically said soldier’s trinkets because all your classes will be able to use them without restriction (as opposed to weapon types or light/medium/heavy armor):

Amulet = 20 laurels + 250 WvW tokens
Accessories x2 = 10g + 24 guild commendations
Rings x2 = 50 laurels + 500 WvW tokens

You get 55 laurels a month via the daily login rewards, so if you’ve already got 20 laurels you’re actually closer than you think to a full set of trinkets. You can easily EoTM your way to the required WvW tokens, or I believe some of the major AP achievement chests give them too.

reikken.4961:

People who think you can’t deviate from the meta full zerker builds without nuking your damage into oblivion clearly haven’t taken the time to actually try to craft a build. I don’t even raid in full zerker, as it’s not the best overall build for my classes (ele, thief). 99 times out of 100, an ele is better off with a couple pieces of marauder/valk.

You can gain quite a lot of defense without losing much damage, and there are several ways to go about it.

Marauder gear offers a health boost for a very small loss in damage.
You can complement your berserker/marauder gear with valkyrie’s, knight’s, crusader’s, cavalier’s, etc to gain even more defense, though the damage loss is bigger than the swap from berserker to marauder.

Some traits or skills offer a lot of extra defense. Protection boon, projectile reflects, blocks, invulnerability, condition clears, evades, heals, etc. all contribute a lot to surviving.

Condition builds typically only need 2 stats to do big damage, condition damage and duration, and that can allow you to take health or toughness or the like without a big damage loss.

Also there is food that makes you take less damage. Pop some mussel soup to instantly become way tankier.

Use the DPS golem and check for yourself how well the homecrafted builds actually compete.

Then compare with other numbers reported. For most classes, you’ll want around 20K dps in group situations.

Though a couple pieces of marauders is not a huge lost, but it’s minute defense gain too.

Murderin.8269:

nottsgman.8206:

what profession are you playing with?

I have a level 80 Warrior, Guardian, Thief, Necromancer. And Revenant, which I have the least issues surviving on. But it is a very boring playstyle. They are all in full zerker gear, except the Necro which isn’t really geared yet.

Its mostly Silverwaste/HoT stuff that I have survivability issues on.

I don’t have any issues on my Necro, which runs a mix of Zerk and Viper right now.

Thief, I had some issues with, so I dropped Valk on her. The larger health pool seemed to fix my issue with survivability. I’m planning on upgrading her to Marauder and seeing how it goes.

I run zerk on both guard and warrior with few issues, granted I don’t farm SW with them. You could try Valk or Marauder to see if that helps you.

Part of your issue with thief and guard may be that they have small health pools by default (like ele’s). Only 11,645 base hp at lvl 80. Makes it much less forgiving of errors.

Trading some dps for health and toughness will make your build more forgiving. Full glass builds are hard to play in most games. Miss one dodge/block/whatever and you’re eating the dirt. Some people like that, some don’t.

TheSwede.9512:

Generally speaking, oftentimes it can be enough to simply swap Traitlines around.

For Warrior, for instance, just swapping Tactics to Defense will be a HUGE buff to your survivability as you’ll get Dogged March, Endure Pain Auto-proc and Cleansing Ire/Last Stand along with Adrenal Healing, making you extremely tanky. Simply slot in a few stances and you’re good to go even in Zerker.

As for gear, I tend to mix in either Knight or Soldier gear with Zerker for Direct Damage fighters, or if you don’t wanna lose too much effective power then you can merely go full Marauders (Crafting it can be expensive though).

For each profession I’d suggest the following:

• Warrior – Change to Strength/Defense/Berserker (or Discipline if you don’t have the elite spec unlocked) while keeping the Zerker Armor. Load stances such as Balanced Stance, Berserker’s Stance and Endure Pain onto your tray and use Headbutt for max Adrenaline at the start of a fight. Should work with Full Zerker in Open World this way.
• Guardian – Keep the Meta build (Zeal/Honor/Dragonhunter) but swap in Defender’s Dogma as your DH GM trait. Swap in LB as a ranged weapon. If this isn’t enough, consider equipping some Soldier gear, or go full Marauder’s.
• Thief – Deadly Arts/Trickery/Daredevil all the way. Mug+Sleight of Hand will help sustain you this way, and Dash as your DD dodge will make moving about and running away a breeze. Use Staff as your weapon of choice, prioritize the use of Vault and Weakening Charge to maintain good DPS while also keeping enemies in check. Swap in some Soldier gear if you’re still having issues.
• Necromancer – Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper with Shouts and Signets, or Blood Magic and Wells if you don’t have Reaper. Use GS/Staff, or D+Wh/Staff. Use Valkyrie or Cavalier, as Deathly Perception/Decimate Defenses will be all the Critting you need.
  For Condition Builds, use Viper (Or if you can’t get that, Sinister or Carrion) and run with Curses/Soul Reaping/Reaper or Curses/Death Magic/Reaper if using Minions.

This is good advice, though I would suggest swapping in some Valkyrie instead of soldier on Thief. You can use other methods to get your crit chance up and the extra health helps a lot on thief while still keeping damage up. Even in HoT areas, killing stuff quickly is still one of the best ways to survive.

Murderin.8269:

nottsgman.8206:

what profession are you playing with?

I have a level 80 Warrior, Guardian, Thief, Necromancer. And Revenant, which I have the least issues surviving on. But it is a very boring playstyle. They are all in full zerker gear, except the Necro which isn’t really geared yet.

Its mostly Silverwaste/HoT stuff that I have survivability issues on.

The Necro in your case I’d be looking at, taking advantage of the Shrouds second health pool. Between going back and forth with those pools, allowing the other to build while your using the current, make them very resilient.

You can get a 2nd set of armor with more vitality and toughness. Or perhaps simply a second set of rings and accessories, the 2nd set with Toughness and Vitality. You can then mix/match those to go full offense, or full defense or something in between.

Also make sure you have a Condition removal and break stun skill and use them timely to survive.

I use zerker armor with soldiers trinkets sometimes when i feel like not being on the edge all the time.

If i need more power or more defense i tweak it with my class specific utilities/traits/weapons.

Behold the power of laziness:
- Celestial armour
- Celestial trinkets
- Rune of the Traveler

Never change a piece of gear, pick any build you fancy, anytime, and don’t bother with swiftness anymore. And when you get told your stats are kittene, /shrug to show them how much you care. :p

My reaper is full ascended berserker and she survives most of her Silverwastes and Maguuma encounters with judicious use of her minions and reaper shroud, provided she isn’t swarmed (protecting Blue Oasis by herself for example).

My warrior, however, also full berzerker, needs some rework as he hasn’t quite managed to master dodging just yet. He does look quite impressive while in action though.

I suspect these minor tweeks and lot’s of checking data is not what you were asking for.
Strictly for PvE, Celestial gear will allow you to have the higher (not highest) stats for the power and damage you need and higher (not the highest) stats for defense. Celestrial gear is time gated when crafting it so it can take awhile to accumulate what works best for you.
As you near level 80 you can buy rings and accessories with laurels, they already come with the celestial option. If you choose this way, you will eventually become too strong on defense and want to do more damage so as you obtain better gear you can start using more power oriented inscriptions and insignia’s on that new gear.

I had one older character in ascended celestial gear that handled HoT much better than my others and used it to get through the maps for waypoints and didn’t die much at all.

I use Knight Necro, haven’t got downed on HoT maps yet and I am proud of it. In fact, I don’t even go under 50% HP, lol. A bit too survivable but that’s how I like it, I used to play tanks in older MMOs, haha…

Practically any build is viable in open world depending on your playstyle. If you can use active defenses to mitigate damage then go with more offensive builds. If you prefer to not use active defenses, but would rather just tank it, go with more defensive builds.

I would just like to say to the OP:

Thank you

for asking how to improve yourself, rather than complaining about an inability or lack of desire to complete content. That is a rare trait these days. I commend you.

Here is something that has worked for my warrior during times when I could not see the telegraphed attacks due to onscreen clutter, or when I just wanted to relax while playing solo:

Armor
Head: exotic Cavalier w/Rune of the Pack
Hands: exotic Cavalier w/Rune of the Pack
Chest: exotic Cavalier w/Rune of the Pack
Legs: exotic Cavalier w/Rune of the Pack
Shoulder: exotic Cavalier w/Rune of the Pack

Trinkets
Back: rare Berzerker w/Exquisite Ruby Jewel
Accessory: Rare Knights w/Exquisite Ruby Jewel
Accessory: Rare Knights w/Exquisite Ruby Jewel
Amulet: Rare Knights w/Exquisite Ruby Jewel
Ring: Rare Knights w/Exquisite Ruby Jewel
Ring: Rare Knights w/Exquisite Ruby Jewel

Weaponset 1
Axe: Exotic Assassin’s w/Superior Sigil of Bloodlust
Axe: Exotic Assassin’s w/Superior Sigil of Fire

Weaponset 2
As per set 1 (the weaponset duplication is because I want to play this character as an axe master, but also want the benefits of weapon swapping built into the traits here)

Specializations
Strength:
Reckless Dodge, Restorative Strength, Building Momentum, Great Fortitude, Stick and Move, Axe Mastery

Discipline:
Versatile Rage, Warrior’s Sprint, Fast Hands, Brawler’s Recovery, Versatile Power, Heightened Focus

Arms:
Precise Strikes, Signet Mastery, Rending Strikes, Deep Strike, Bloodlust, Dual Wielding

Heal
Healing Signet

Utilities
Signet of Might or Signet of Stamina
Signet of Fury
Dolyak Signet

Stats (w/25 stacks of bloodlust and 3 stacks of Signet of precision from Signet Mastery)
Power: 2493
Precision: 2297
Crit Chance: 65.76% (note that this is up to 85% about half of the time due to Fury)
Crit Damage: 203.5%
Armor: 3295
Health: 22,813

Also remember that these numbers are without ascended trinkets.

Note that this is not meant to be some sort of super-optimised uber build. It is fun, lets me play my axe-master concept, and works. I have a second set of gear that is all berzerker (except the axes remain assassin’s) for when I feel like doing a bit more damage at the cost of some survivability.

The character is statted for survivability and uses traits to increase damage to compensate.

Pretty much everything is survivable in pve. Just use your zerker set to kill things faster. No content should be really challenging in pve, including heart of thorns.

… that looks like a fun build, but I’d trade Restorative Strength for Death From Above if you’re running Healing Signet. Great for if you misjudge your height when gliding, and also a great combo WITH gliding to land precisely for maximum fun and impact (I suggest right in the middle of a pocket raptor swarm, before hitting the axe whirls to make them pulp and every other player around totes jelly. Warrior privilege ). Besides, Healing Signet is best slotted then ignored.

UnitedChaos.8364:

Pretty much everything is survivable in pve. Just use your zerker set to kill things faster. No content should be really challenging in pve, including heart of thorns.

For some people. I’m still very challenged by PvE content in this game. Open world perhaps not as much, worst case find a zerg train and fake it, right? However if I were soloing, there are still very many open world places I wouldn’t want to get stuck at and I’m near certain that would bring even the best GW2 in the world to their knees, simply because the math isn’t in one’s favor. That said I’m very content to thinking I’m no better than straight line average and I try and want to get better.

I switched my warrior to the defense trait line, and put a couple of toughness trinkets on. I’m facerolling through bosses that my other characters were one shot on, so it seems to work pretty well. My damage hasn’t been hurt that much.

Marthkus.4615:

Dante.1508:

What if i don’t want your cookie cutter build? No offense but i’d like to play my own build viably?

You get to do 5%-20% of the dps of an optimal build. Even what I suggest is only half as effective as optimal builds in terms of DPS.

If you do a mix stat build, you will get at most 20% dps, but more likely 5%. That means one optimal person is worth 20 of you. Meta achievements would be completed faster if 10 of you were constantly reviving someone playing an optimal build poorly. Because those optimal builds just do stupid amounts more damage than you’ll ever do.

It’s not that damage is the only thing that matters, it’s that none damage decisions axe your DPS by punishing amounts to the point that no trade offs are really worth it. Stat build variety is what kind of glass build you want. Build diversity is picking between traits. A tank is just a full berzerker with tanky traits.

Ok thanks for the info, and thank you for the build advice earlier.

Marthkus.4615:

reikken.4961:

People who think you can’t deviate from the meta full zerker builds without nuking your damage into oblivion clearly haven’t taken the time to actually try to craft a build.
[…]

Use the DPS golem and check for yourself how well the homecrafted builds actually compete.

Then compare with other numbers reported. For most classes, you’ll want around 20K dps in group situations.

Though a couple pieces of marauders is not a huge lost, but it’s minute defense gain too.

For any smallish amount, the %health gain is about 5-6x the % dps lost, for ele/thief/guard. like 30 % more health for 5 % less dps. I find that’s a very good trade. running around with 15k health instead of 11,645.

and yes, I can pull 20-25k on the actual bosses, and 30k with realistic buffs in the vacuum of the dps cave. and break 40k with full buffs

Murderin.8269:

I switched my warrior to the defense trait line, and put a couple of toughness trinkets on. I’m facerolling through bosses that my other characters were one shot on, so it seems to work pretty well. My damage hasn’t been hurt that much.

There you go, done and done!

[quote=6117985;TheSwede.9512:

• Necromancer – Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper with Shouts and Signets, or Blood Magic and Wells if you don’t have Reaper. Use GS/Staff, or D+Wh/Staff. Use Valkyrie or Cavalier, as Deathly Perception/Decimate Defenses will be all the Critting you need.
  For Condition Builds, use Viper (Or if you can’t get that, Sinister or Carrion) and run with Curses/Soul Reaping/Reaper or Curses/Death Magic/Reaper if using Minions.[/quote]

For necro, I would use Death Magic instead of one of Spite or Soul Reaping, assuming you want survivability. It is the necro defense line. Plus, Unholy Sanctuary means you go into shroud instead of downed. In terms of survivability, that’s an extremely useful thing.

For HoT survivability, I use Death Magic, Soul Reaping, and Reaper, combined with shouts in slots 6-10. You can then charge into pocket raptor groups, shout them to death, and heal at the same time — without ever swinging a weapon. (But I do miss the might from Spite.)

Ranger is also pretty good for survivability, as your pet can revive you when you go down.