Guild Wars 2

I’ve got 10 extra trait pts. I want a defensive trait. Which should I take? Is one better than the other in WvW but vice versa in dungeons? Or both useless in dungeons? Is Prot Inj better only because it automatically means I get Hidden Flask?

-If you’re going worried about being CCed always take Protection Injection
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If you’re taking a few blows from enemies and not being cced much take Protective Shield.

It depends on your build. Protection Injection helps if you don’t pack a lot of stun-breakers. Protective shield helps if you don’t have a ton of toughness and are getting dropped by bursts.

It will also depend on your access to protection. If you can get it pretty reliably, then perhaps protection injection would be better.

As far as the associated minor trait and attribute benefits, I’d probably suggest going into elixirs myself, but it will largely depend on the other aspects of your build.

What kill u in wvw is most properly condition “root”, NOT the “CC”.
Think about it.
For dungeon, it depend a lot on boss, mobs ,your group , your build etc etc etc.

KOK.2650:

What kill u in wvw is most properly condition “root”, NOT the “CC”.
Think about it.
For dungeon, it depend a lot on boss, mobs ,your group , your build etc etc etc.

I believe what Kok is trying to say is that “Protective Shield” is protection on ACTUAL CC, like stuns, knockdowns, etc. and is NOT the same as the CONDITION “immobilize,” which is one of the 3 movement conditions and needs to be cleansed.

Protective Shield is useful for it’s short cool down, but if it triggers every time it can, you have bigger problems than protection alone can solve.

If you aren’t running a protection focused build, the 20% damage reduction trait in the toughness line might be a useful alternative, in that it can’t be “stolen” and stacks WITH protection AND food buffs. So if you get knocked down, you could conceivably have about -73% damage reduction while in that state, at least for a little while.

On a tanky build, this is hilariously troll.

For WvW and PvE take injection. For sPvP, take both if you can, with priority going to injection.

ya, unless you are a bunker, take stabilized armour for a defensive trait, or if you can, take leg mods.

those two will help out a roaming dps build a lot more than PI or PS.

nakoda.4213:

ya, unless you are a bunker, take stabilized armour for a defensive trait, or if you can, take leg mods.

those two will help out a roaming dps build a lot more than PI or PS.

Yeah, if you aren’t doing any kit swapping, the 25% faster movement in combat is very useful. If you are kit swapping, though, definitely take the swiftness on kit swap trait, and try to get the vigor on swiftness for 100% uptime on both.

The vigor trait is in the alchemy traitline, which makes it compete with some of our best traits, but in 1v1s and certain dungeons, perma-vigor (dodge every 5 seconds) is amazing, esp. with swiftness.

Leg Mods is -33% to immo/chill/cripple duration.

nakoda.4213:

Leg Mods is -33% to immo/chill/cripple duration.

Ahhhh. Which is the one with +25% combat movement? I actually quite liked that trait as well.

Power Shoes is what your looking for. I agree with everything said here. Usually PI>PS, but I would be curious to know if PS triggers before or after you take damage from the crit that triggers it.
Also on a somewhat different subject, I’ve seen engi’s brag that they have 100% uptime on protection. But I haven’t been able to figure this one out.

Linc.6834:

Power Shoes is what your looking for. I agree with everything said here. Usually PI>PS, but I would be curious to know if PS triggers before or after you take damage from the crit that triggers it.
Also on a somewhat different subject, I’ve seen engi’s brag that they have 100% uptime on protection. But I haven’t been able to figure this one out.

IIRC, PS will not reduce the damage for the attack that triggers it, only the ones that follow.

As for the 100% protection uptime, I don’t think that’s a real thing in the sense that they can just keep it up whenever they want. Under certain situations you can have perpetual or at least rather long protection, but once those situations change then you cannot maintain that protection consistently.

A common source of high protection uptime is using protection injection, since some additional boon duration can pretty much ensure you always have protection up if you are continually disabled, especially if coupled with protective shield.

Then of course you can sometimes get some from elixir H if you’re using it, and forge runes are sometimes used by engineers for protection and burning as well.

Other sources include transmute or conversion from elixir C, but those aren’t very reliable.

So it’s not a true 100% uptime, just high uptime when certain conditions are met or relatively long duration periods of protection.

can mobs crit? can they trigger protective shield?