Guild Wars 2

As my title states, this idea occurred rather suddenly to me at an unfortunate hour, and since I lack the means to test it myself, I wanted to present it to the Guardian community for consideration.

The general consensus about Guardian condition builds has been that the poor variety of conditions available to the Guardian stifles the potential of a condition build in most serious contexts. A number of Guardian players have done work to demonstrate that potential does exist for such a build, however (see, for example, Foofad’s excellent guide to Burning stickied in this forum).

The recent introduction of the Runes of Perplexity have boosted condition builds to new levels of power in WvW, granting Confusion to classes that previously lacked access to it. I can’t find any recent discussion about how this could impact a Guardian condition build, but I think that the rune set’s 6th effect has a great deal of potential for Guardians, particularly in large battles (e.g. WvW zergs). For reference:

6) +15% Confusion Duration. Causes 10 seconds of Confusion on Interrupt.

To get straight to the point, the 6th effect drops 5 stacks of Confusion per interrupt, it has no internal cooldown, and Guardians can abuse this with some of the best mass-interrupts in the game (specifically, Line of Warding, Ring of Warding, and targeted Sanctuary). These skills are fairly unique in that there is no limit to the number of players who can slam into them, and they have historically been used to great effect in WvW zerg warfare. It sounds appealing, but the question comes down to what you need to sacrifice to make this a possibility, and whether or not it’s worth it.

Here’s a very, very rough sketch of what I had in mind for a build (5:30 AM, remember?). I can’t find a builder that has Perplexity Runes in its database yet, so you’re all just going to have to pretend that they’re there and adjust the condition damage score accordingly.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJAWSlUgyDXFyMEf4ES2jRCBVwKFxz8gpQjyIA-jUxAYtARLCUesIas6Zioa1NmQALWDA-w

Things I had in mind when putting this together:

-This is a Guardian build first and foremost. In order to be viable for consideration, it needs to be able to survive well at close range and provide support for its allies.

- 20-second Confusion stacks are lovely, but they’re concentrated in two 32-second CD skills and one 120 second CD skill. The build needs good access to Burning to supplement the damage, hence Permeating Wrath and other burning traits/utilities.

-The hardest part, in my opinion – both condition damage and duration are important to this build, since confusion is good for bursting down reckless enemies, but serves as good psychological pressure against attentive ones. I’m not sure I’ve hit a good balance between the two yet, and I lack the gear/funds to do any personal testing. Any input others have is very much welcome.

With that said, here’s the gist of how I envision the build working: in a large battle, you’re a frontliner, keeping yourself and other alive while dropping your wards when blobs of enemies make a push. This enhances the disruptive effect of the Wards and causes it to linger, causing damage, stressing enemy cleansing, and reducing the enemy group’s ability to commit to a full offensive. You’ve got lots of AoE for rapidly proccing Permeating Wrath, and you’re using Empower whenever you can with your Staff/blasting Fire Fields with your Hammer to sustain high Might stacks on yourself and allies. This makes your Confusion very scary when it hits and lets Permeating Wrath keep the pressure high on nearby foes. You’ve got access to the same sort of boons a standard Guardian does, healing on par with Healway builds, and some fairly respectable cleansing built into your traits and utilities. The hope is that sustaining yourself won’t be too difficult when you add control skills and mass Confusion into the mix.

Again, this is 5:30 AM thinking, so let me know if this all just sounds crazy. I’d definitely appreciate any feedback anyone has about this idea, though, since my experience with condition Guardians is nonexistent, and this just seemed like a cool, unique approach to a build that most people, including myself, had written off.

TL;DR: Guardian condition build using Runes of Perplexity to add Confusion to skills like Line and Ring of Warding. The runes give 5 stacks of Confusion per interrupt for 20 seconds each, no internal cooldown. The tentative build has most of the basic features of a standard frontline Guardian, but with the potential for substantial condition pressure. What do you think?

I was considering this mightily, but in the end couldn’t justify it on the basis of no other confusions whatsoever and confusions crappy damage in wvw.

Asura get confusion on racials (Pain Inverter) which seemed like a possibility.

Just to point out that landing a control effect via a ward or knockback doesn’t necessarily guarantee an interrupt, your timing has to be good to catch someone mid-cast ( someone running into it and falling over doesn’t count ). Perhaps in a zerg it will happen randomly enough to be useful, but in smaller battles you’re going to want to save your interrupts to catch telegraphed heals and big hits.
That said, I was myself curious about its potential as someone who used to frequently run with Pain Inverter before they nerfed confusion – a little extra sauce for a burn build.

I’m pretty sure it usually pops up Interrupt whenever anyone so much as runs into a ward Don’t know if it counts for Perplexity.

I have 6 runes of Perplexity that I got on the cheap (yay buy orders), but honestly after weighing options they seem better suited to warrior or engineer.

Also keep in mind, there are other ways we can interrupt as well. Banish, Binding blade pull, Shield #5 Bane signet activation, also as was mentioned earlier certain racial skills like the asuran one that can dazy (cant remember the name) might also work as well. However, I think it is just like every other form of condition we can possibly get, a bit too far of a stretch to really base a build off of, and requires too much effort compared to a reguar build.

Hey guys, thanks for the replies! Let me maybe try frame my early-morning ideas a little better now.

I got curious about the potential of these runes after reading up on Necros using them despite them not working with Fear. A lot of Necromancers have been giving these runes rave reviews, despite the fact that it only works with two of their skills (Wail of Doom and Spectral Grasp, and a lot of people opt not to run the latter). Wail of Doom is a short-range Daze on a 30 second cooldown, and apparently many Necros feel it’s enough to justify running the runes over ones that give general condition duration. Our interrupting options (or at least the ones I listed above) have better range, similar cooldowns, and aren’t constrained by the AoE cap, so if Necros are making it work, I feel like we could at least give it a shot.

Trying to address some of the individual concerns in this thread, I designed the build in the context of large battles because that’s where we have the potential to generate the most interrupts, and that dictated my choice of the Staff and Hammer as weapons. As Shoe said, interrupts happen very frequently when people hit those walls. Throwing down a wall in front of an enemy zerg as they make a push will reliably generate a cloud of interrupt messages on your screen, and using that to spread mass confusion is a something that most other classes aren’t capable of. Doing it without sacrificing your core duties as a Guardian could be very powerful in a meta where conditions are so rampant, if you can pull it off.

For smaller battles, I’d probably opt for a different approach, running some of the interrupts that Bash suggested (Maybe a GS/Hammer combo?), and I’d focus more on Retaliation to complement the high sustained damage of Burning and Confusion. Keep in mind that the Runes of Perplexity also give you 3 free stacks of Confusion on a target once every 15 seconds, in addition to the interrupt effect. I don’t know the duration of these stacks, but if it’s at least 5 seconds base, you’re getting 3 stacks of confusion on a target for 10 out of every 15 seconds. On a similar note, you’ve got at least 50% uptime on the Confusion generated by each interrupt (20 seconds per stack, generated primarily by two skills on 32 second CD’s, so a potential 100% uptime on it if you can keep landing interrupts).

If that still leaves you worried, maybe think of Confusion as a tool to supplement Burning, rather than as the focus of the build. The build still puts out a lot of AoE burning thanks to Permeating Wrath (though sadly, I don’t think 100% Burning duration is possible with the setup I posted), and its Symbols inflict Vulnerability, which can act as a cover condition. Combined with the Guardian’s ample amounts of Retaliation, you ought to be able to keep up a lot of sustained pressure on targets and punish them frequently for using their skills. It’s strange, I grant you, but I don’t think it’s without potential. As stated above, I’d try it myself if I had the means to do so, but I lack the gear, the funds for the gear, and a strong enough computer to get footage of it in action.

Another couple of things you might be able to work in… Consider bleed on weaponswap and poison on next hit after weaponswap sigils. These give you a couple more conditions to play with and scale from, plus they’re weaker conditions that will get applied more frequently, so they’ll act as covers against condition removal for your confusion.

Shield 5 and it’s on-beginning to revive cousin can also interrupt – particularly in zergs.

Sigil of Geomancy is amazing with Permeating Wrath. It’s a point blank AOE that strikes up to five targets; so if you’re in a huge mess of enemies it’s a guaranteed PW proc as well, on top of the bleed.

this is quite interesting and i definitely thought about it as well. confusion from a Guardian?D (well, apart from my Asura brothers)

it’s 5 confusion stacks per interrupt? and afaik, you really only interupt when someone is using a skill mid-cast yes? even if it’s using shield 5 which is more or less instant. i.e. if i use any interupt skills on a person standing still, does that still trigger?

Hey, just chiming in on something. I’ve been considering this again since I’ve been running the Bear transform on my Norn guardian. The bear has massive interrupts between its Charge and Knockback attacks.

Wolf transform – which I also use sometimes – also has interrupts on its #5 leap attack and #4 howl.

yeah… to be honest condition guardian is becoming interesting…
until last patches we get only burning and a useless bleeding (from sigil), as learned from foofad topic it wasn’t enough to be really effective in pvp nor in pve, but now with a possible confusion spam… we can work at something.

anyway this possible build seems to be strongly related to asura (one of the best races :P ) because of “pain inverter” and "technobabble.
Anyway this “condition build” will be really different from others simply because while every other cond build has X bottom to get X condition, this one has to time skills and also get a bit of luck.

Anyway we get a total of 3 conditions, now: bleeding, burning e confusion.
While bleeding is pretty useless for its damage (a max of 3stacks isn’t enough to be effective), burning and confusion can help a lot to deal some significant damage.

and i forget we can get 4th and 5th malus on enemies… but always with asura
binding blade -> ring of warding -> radiation filed = a min of 12sec poison and 12sec weakness

Ran this last night! Hilariously fun and devastating area denial. Played it with the intent to utilize large groups at chokes and it shined very well; basically a bunker type with offensive condition capability which doubles as damage mitigation.

Thanks Soryuju, this thread got me super pumped so I tried it out because I feel a condition bunker type guard was lacking for us. Even in a small roaming setting it was pretty successful; I did some 2v4 and 2v5 with a warrior (surprise) and it was subtle in how much tactical control it gives you over the battlefield. The smarter the opponent, the more you can deny them damaging you.

Here is what I used:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=V9;4NF-20D3RG-90;9;4J;0JT41;538-58Aa-V8;2bUytbUytC0kA1-q5;2Vn5oao5pap5qa0D06-03;5V0-N;9;9;9;9;9;0V6s5Y

Proteus.6320:

Ran this last night! Hilariously fun and devastating area denial. Played it with the intent to utilize large groups at chokes and it shined very well; basically a bunker type with offensive condition capability which doubles as damage mitigation.

Thanks Soryuju, this thread got me super pumped so I tried it out because I feel a condition bunker type guard was lacking for us. Even in a small roaming setting it was pretty successful; I did some 2v4 and 2v5 with a warrior (surprise) and it was subtle in how much tactical control it gives you over the battlefield. The smarter the opponent, the more you can deny them damaging you.

Here is what I used:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=V9;4NF-20D3RG-90;9;4J;0JT41;538-58Aa-V8;2bUytbUytC0kA1-q5;2Vn5oao5pap5qa0D06-03;5V0-N;9;9;9;9;9;0V6s5Y

Awesome to hear! My apologies to everyone for not really keeping up with this thread – real life has been a bit busy, but I’ll do my best to be around if there’s still interest in the build. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the next patch saw the runes get nerfed, which will probably render this build useless, but it’s still something for people to enjoy while it lasts.

Anyways, responding to some of the points raised in the thread, I’m pretty sure you only proc an interrupt when you manage to catch someone mid-action, but this still includes things like auto-attacks, so it’s fairly manageable to do, especially in large groups (as I mentioned above, you’ll often see clouds of interrupt messages if you throw down a Line of Warding in front of a charging zerg). I also like the idea of Geomancy Sigils in the build and think they’d be a good inclusion. The condition damage from Corruption is still valuable, though, so it might be worth starting a WvW run with Corruption and switching to weapons with Geomancy after you build some stacks.

The racial skills are interesting, and could definitely be a part of a build like this, though I think you should ideally be able to run the build without having to resort to using them. The goal wasn’t to develop a build that only certain Guardians can play, so I’ll probably avoid making any revisions with racial skills included (but if you think racial skills can improve your personal success with the build, more power to you). Proteus’s post about the build’s performance is encouraging, so I do think potential exists within the general pool of available skills and conditions.

To Proteus, just a few questions about your modifications: first, how do you feel the Celestial gear worked out? It’s an interesting option that certainly works with the Staff and Hammer’s nature as power-based weapons, but did you feel that the gain to direct damage was appreciable compared to the loss in healing power and condition damage?

Also, in Honor, I originally included Writ of Exaltation instead of Protective Reviver, figuring it would speed up the proc rate of Permeating Wrath, make it easier to get Protection in the middle of zergs with the Hammer, and increase the general pressure the build can exert on enemy groups. How useful was PR, though, and were you mostly using it in situations where Resolute Healer wouldn’t be effective?

I’m also glad to hear it worked well in small group play, and I feel like you could use the GS and Shield effectively in these situations, too, since their interrupts won’t be as limited by the AoE cap. Besides Staff/Hammer, I think that GS/Hammer, GS/Scepter+Shield, and Hammer/Scepter+Shield could be interesting combinations for small battles.

Finally, if we’re talking small fights, I’d really be curious to see the Spirit Hammer in action with these runes (assuming it works, it would be devastating, and with the 20/0/0/20/30 setup, you could even make the build a proper Spirit Weapon hybrid). Spirit Hammer is already annoying with its knockback every few seconds and knockdown on command, and if the runes proc on its interrupts, it could become a major threat.