Guild Wars 2

Hey all,

So I’ve been trying out a few different builds in WvW lately as part of the zerg and wanted some feedback regarding traits and gear. Currently, I run exotic full valk armor (6 pieces) and everything else exotic beserker’s. Noticed I’m a little squishy if I get out of position or if I burst mug-C&D-BS thief finds me (16k health with no added toughness), so am trying to figure out the tradeoff by moving towards a more soldiers or knights set (how bad will my AoE damage drop?). Thinking maybe I replace the armor with soldiers (minimal vital change but gains toughness at expense of crit damage). Not sure if should leave trinkets and staff as is or change as well.

Traits are 0/10/0/30/30 (no surprise here). I need the 20 in arcane at min for blasting staff, and the 20 water min for fall damage reduction (this is huge when running in WvW). The last 10 in water grant the regen and condition removal, so don’t really want to lose that and the last 10 in arcane give EA. The 10 in air is for bolt to heart, but guess I could shift to 10 earth for armor of earth at 50% health (means I take another hit to crit % though).

I should note that I tried a glyph centric build, which was great when it worked, but I found inscription was significantly bugged (often wouldn’t work at all when 2 attunements active due to lingering elements minor train in Arcana line or just flat out didn’t work other times until I switched traits around and gear to get things to “reset”). For now, have been running healing glyph, mist form, lightning flash, and signet of air along with FGS for elite. Only change here might be to switch lightning flash out for armor of earth.

Suggestions and comments would be greatly appreciated.

I actually trait 0/0/10/30/30, the 10 in earth not only gets you some more toughness (especially when attuned to earth) but also an automatic armor of earth at 50% hp major trait. That is huge. I tried running with 10 in air instead for some more crit and crit damage and bolt to the heart… not worth it. The automatic stun break, 9s of stability and protection and with the Soothing Disruption trait in water, automatic regen and vigor ramps up your survivability in a zerg significantly.

As far as gear goes. I use Soldier earrings (ascended), a soldier backpiece (ascended) and berserker/valkyrie (ascended) rings and neck, a berserker chest, and the rest of my armor is valk. The goal for me is 17K+ hp unbuffed (if your server is doing well in wvw it comes out to about 19k hp mid week) with 2000+ armor (which I’m at 2100+), damage comes secondary, and even with soldier and valk gear you’ll have over 3000 attack (about 3100). My weak part is that I only have 21% base crit (50% crit damage), it goes up if you have sources of fury, and I’d suggest a staff with a Perception sigil to build stacks for crit chance, and then swap to a staff with a sigil of energy or stamina (depends on how confident you are that you’ll be getting kills) for more dodges.

I would also suggest that change from lightning flash to armor of earth, it’s a massive help having 2 armor of earths for 18s of stability in a big zerg vs zerg fight. Signet of air can be dropped if you’re running with a zerg and have permanent swiftness, you can run an aoe like glyph of storms (in earth attune) or a blast finisher (arcane wave) in the third slot, or arcane shield if you’re still finding yourself getting cut down easily. Personally I don’t run the falling damage trait, I run Water III, V, and XI. Massive condition removal (remove 2 conditions from everyone around you on water attune plus a heal, and healing rain removes 2 conditions on cast and a further 2 conditions during the field), as well as added survivability by using mist form, armor of earth, and your automatic armor of earth at 50% hp for more dodging and regen.

Devildoc.6721:

I actually trait 0/0/10/30/30, the 10 in earth not only gets you some more toughness (especially when attuned to earth) but also an automatic armor of earth at 50% hp major trait. That is huge. I tried running with 10 in air instead for some more crit and crit damage and bolt to the heart… not worth it. The automatic stun break, 9s of stability and protection and with the Soothing Disruption trait in water, automatic regen and vigor ramps up your survivability in a zerg significantly.

As far as gear goes. I use Soldier earrings (ascended), a soldier backpiece (ascended) and berserker/valkyrie (ascended) rings and neck, a berserker chest, and the rest of my armor is valk. The goal for me is 17K+ hp unbuffed (if your server is doing well in wvw it comes out to about 19k hp mid week) with 2000+ armor (which I’m at 2100+), damage comes secondary, and even with soldier and valk gear you’ll have over 3000 attack (about 3100). My weak part is that I only have 21% base crit (50% crit damage), it goes up if you have sources of fury, and I’d suggest a staff with a Perception sigil to build stacks for crit chance, and then swap to a staff with a sigil of energy or stamina (depends on how confident you are that you’ll be getting kills) for more dodges.

I would also suggest that change from lightning flash to armor of earth, it’s a massive help having 2 armor of earths for 18s of stability in a big zerg vs zerg fight. Signet of air can be dropped if you’re running with a zerg and have permanent swiftness, you can run an aoe like glyph of storms (in earth attune) or a blast finisher (arcane wave) in the third slot, or arcane shield if you’re still finding yourself getting cut down easily. Personally I don’t run the falling damage trait, I run Water III, V, and XI. Massive condition removal (remove 2 conditions from everyone around you on water attune plus a heal, and healing rain removes 2 conditions on cast and a further 2 conditions during the field), as well as added survivability by using mist form, armor of earth, and your automatic armor of earth at 50% hp for more dodging and regen.

I think if I was only running staff 0/0/10/30/30 looks great because the air adept traits aren’t terribly useful given available skills (other than perhaps bolt to the heart). Like the OP I’m running 0/10/0/30/30 since I do switch to D/D on occasion so I want the be able to use zephyr’s boon.

For my traits I take bolt to the heart and the standard layout for arcane staff (elemental attunement, blasting staff, evasive arcana). Water traits depend on how I’m running. I always have cleansing water and two of the following: arcane abatement, soothing disruption, cleansing wave. Typically I prioritize soothing disruption over cleansing wave to improve the efficiency of cantrips.

For equipment, I use full knight’s armor and knight’s weapon of battle. My trinkets are knight’s with a valk jewel with the exception of the back which is soldier’s.

Utilities that I use are arcane wave (blast finishers are really useful), mist form, and armor of earth. These utilities give you two stunbreaks, although on long cooldown. In addition armor of earth gives you access to stability in case you need it while storming a keep. Elite is whatever since I rarely see a good time to use it in the zerg. I’m still up in the air about what healing skill I want to use. At the moment I’m running Ether Renewal since it does have higher healing potential.

Yeah I run staff 100% of the time, I just never really got the feel for daggers, find several of the dagger skills not very useful (churning earth is highly situational, both of the breath attacks I just never see get used), and I like fields and aoe, and the many control options of staff. I’ll be the first to admit Staff is subpar in small group or 1v1 skirmishes. But in zerging I like it best.

Devildoc.6721:

Yeah I run staff 100% of the time, I just never really got the feel for daggers, find several of the dagger skills not very useful (churning earth is highly situational, both of the breath attacks I just never see get used), and I like fields and aoe, and the many control options of staff. I’ll be the first to admit Staff is subpar in small group or 1v1 skirmishes. But in zerging I like it best.

Yeah I only really use D/D when running solo or in a small roaming group. Churning earth is really good as an opener, but it can be difficult to use after combat is initiated (churning earth→lightning flash→earthquake→ring of earth). The breath attacks are actually pretty useful. The water one functions as a heal and the fire one can help set up fire grab. They do take some getting used to if you’re actually trying to hit with them due to the usual hitbox problems (also affects engineer flamethrower to some extent).

0-0-20-20-30 with mostly your current setup and a few cavalier’s trinkets would boost your toughness a lot without too much of a hit to crit damage. Rock solid and automatic armor of Earth provide much needed stability. Maximizing your own damage is unnecessary in a zerg, 40 people hitting someone for 500 each has the same effect as 40 people hitting someone for 3k each, they go down nearly instantly either way (hence the hurrdurrgiantPVTblob meta).

Being able to give your group stability for 1/5th of the time is more beneficial than 10% crit damage for yourself alone.

Being dead from a 2 shot basilisk>backstab is a detriment to your team. Having no toughness or stability pretty much guarantees this will happen.

I’d ditch the glyph heal too. Ether renewal + rock solid is pretty awesome. Glyph has to be cast in water or earth attunement for maximum effect, has a longer cooldown even when traited and causes you to rely heavily on water and arcane traits for condition removal. Ether renewal is the best path toward a real damage or hybrid build IMO, as it frees up 20-50 trait points depending on how much condition removal and heals you can live without.