Guild Wars 2

Hi all, I’ve been playing around with different builds, some more extensively, some only scratched at the surface, yet I think sharing the experience is better than nothing.

Also, I mostly play W3, and I try to avoid zerging and instead do 5-man group hit actions, ninja depots etc. So it’s to be seen in that light:

-glass cannon (ie max power/prec/crit):
a lot of fun basically derived from numbers popping up, but you can actually get insta-shotted. Also, better not approach keeps too closely or arrow carts etc will make short work of you.
In general, you will need to use a bunch of defensive skills, mist form, arcane shield, and maybe aoe-blind, to ensure that you aren’t going down very quickly most of the time.

All in all:
Glass cannon actually works best from the back of your own zerg, obviously, where you’re probably not being focus fired right away. Use shield/mist skill to prevent frequent deaths. Stay in the back line!

-healing build (with all cleric items):
You can cure conditions and provide regeneration aura and heal people, and you can do it at 150%-200% efficacy compared to non-healing builds. Still I think this build is not viable. It is too situational and although cleric items will also provide toughness and power along with the healing power, your character will imho currently lose much more than it gains.

All in all:
At the moment underpowered, but can be fun if you focus on supporting mid-large groups. Maybe each zerg should have one of these? ^^

-condition damage build:
Currently from what I gather toughness is used about as much or more than vitality, mostly because condition effects can be purged and are not so common.
This might motivate you to try condition damage builds which bypass toughness/armor.
I only tried this a little bit on the surface, and my quick impression was that the effect seemed too weak in pvp to be very viable. This was mostly because it takes effort+time to apply both earth + burning conditions, they can be purged without too much effort, and most opponents will do somewhat bursty damage to you while you actually wait for their HP to tick down. The problem is that condition damage is “just another damage source”, yet eats up another “stats slot” on your items (ie your items will have +power AND +condition damage, although both are just for dealing damage).
Well, as I said I only tried it out a little bit until I lost patience with this build, so maybe I got it all wrong.

All in all:
Didn’t try it much, but seemed too “slow” for pvp. Also, it eats an item stat slot for “+condition damage”. You might still want +power on your items besides +condition, and then you might turn out a bit redundant.

-tanky build (all toughness/knight — didn’t try power/vit/toughness items due to lacking those):
might be using this along with scepter+focus for dungeons, just to prevent death.
In pvp I found it a bit too slow. Especially as a caster who often just stays at range.
Also, while getting a lot of precision, in turn your critical damage bonus remains kind of low, so the amount of precision will not offset the low power greatly.
In 1v1 you could try to outlast your opponent (using cc skills too), but it will probably rather lead to a stalemate.

All in all:
Found it not too appealing outside of dungeons. :-p You survive, but you don’t do that much.

-balanced build (some toughness, some vitality, much power, some precision, good deal of +crit):
Mostly consisting of Knights and Valykrie items, this build so far worked out best for me. The damage is lower than glass cannon of course, but on the other hand the survivability increases a lot just from some toughness/vitality, which in turn allows for non-defensive skill selections! For example arcane power (to make up for not-too-high precision), arcane wave, arcane blast, or signet of fire are totally fine. And if you go 3x arcane skill, the 20% arcane cooldown trait comes in handy too.
Also this build can be easily finetuned via item upgrades.

All in all:
Somewhat lower damage but greatly increased survivability. Makes up for lower damage by allowing more flexible skill choices (no more need for defensive skills to prevent instant death). -> This has become my favourite build.

Yip agree with you on those points although going Cleric with a heavy 0/0/30/30/10 build is quite “fun” for harassing in sPVP, other than that pretty spot on. I do often /facepalm at the way stat allocations are done though on certain gear.

correction “heal build”: That’s supposed to be “150..200%”, not “+150..200%”!
(edit: Dunno why the forum wouldn’t let me edit my actual OP yesterday.)

I’ve been playing balanced build, and love it. Can do everything with it without crippling myself much.

Curiously this is the third time in a couple of days I’ve seen elementalists be described as doing best with a mixed set of stats. I have to wonder if that’s true in general.

Just starting up my ele, but yes i found that a mix of defense and offense has been the most beneficial on my thief and guardian.