Guild Wars 2

Hi all. First post, but I’ve been lurking in the forums since beta. I’ve played around different builds and I’m in the point of trying to experiment other builds. There seems to be a lack of zeal builds, hence I started this thread. As mentioned in other threads, Zeal is pretty lackluster trait line compared to Valor or Honor. Some of the traits doesn’t even make sense or pretty much useless (I’m looking at you zeal adept minor trait). I also agree that the zeal trait line doesn’t synergize well with the weapons it buffs, my point being scepter and focus buff traits. Its here, but the the minor traits will be useless since both weapons don’t even have symbols. “But you can still ue adept minor trait”. Yea, still useless if you’re sniping your foe from a distance. Anyway, zeal may be bad, but with the correct set up, zeal can be pretty interesting. Somewhat gimmicky, but interesting (at least for me). Before I start, a little disclaimer: I’m no guardian master. I only do PvE and dungeons(I haven’t even done all of them). No WvW experiece, nor PvP experience. So everything I put here is based on PvE content that I’ve played. I just wanted to share what I have for those who are interested and probably get some input from the readers as well. Also, this is not an optimal build, more like an alternative “for fun” build. Tweak it to your heart’s content.

Before the builds (yes, there will be multiple builds that I will post all focusing on heavy traited Zeal), a little zeal trait discussion. As mentioned in the wiki, Zeal is basically a symbol heavy traitline. The master and grandmaster minor traits boost your symbols and your damage capability by giving more damage to symbols and dishing out vulnerability. Investing heavily in zeal means Symbol boost, more power, and more condition duration. That’s why that scepter and focus trait in zeal seems out of place as these weapons don’t even have symbols at all. Your increase condition duration benefits you in 2 ways: longer burn and longer vulnerability (who says burn is the only condition guardians can dish out?). Add might to that and you should dish out pretty good damage, not just you but your whole team as well. If you won’t be using symbols, then I would suggest not putting too much into Zeal. But that doesn’t mean you should stay away from it. There are some traits that are good but does not involve symbols like the 10% dmg for opponents on fire.

Below is the build I’m using now:

Zeal: 30 – I(blinding jeopardy), II(Feiry wrath), V(shattered aegis)
Honor: 30 – III, VII, IX(2 handed mastery)
Virtues: 10 – I(Unscathe contender)

Weapon: Berserk Hammer superior sigil of peril/Soldier staff superior sigil of choice (I’m actually using foefire’s power and AC staff with default sigil, lol)

Armor: all COF berserk armor with rune of baelfire.
Why? Because I’m a cheap kitten… and
- More power
- More burn duration = more use of 10% increase in damage
- 5% chance of vigor proc on hit on top of your adept minor honor trait on crit! Yes please!(unkitten th have same cooldown)
- Fire Nova!!! (honestly, I haven’t noticed this proc-ing…)
- This is easy to get with minimum effort. I’m settling on this for now as I blew all my gold in making that foefire’s power (kitten you charged lodestones! But I do not regret it)

Trinkets: all crafted exotic ruby berserk, except for backpiece which I used cavalier (Pow/Tou/Crit dmg). I’m gunning for more damage hence berserk.

Trait choice explanations:
Zeal I: 5 stacks of vulnerability on immobilize
I got this for the hammer 3 skill. With 2 hand mastery, you can churn this out every 12 seconds. That’s 5% additional dmg for you AND your party on top of immobilization that pierces and hits multiple mobs for 11 seconds (due to max zeal and sigil).

Zeal II: 10% more dmg on burning foes
Best zeal trait IMO. Works well with rune of the baelfire and works for any weapon combination. Activating VoJ will give you a 7 sec burn on your next hit… as well as any of your party members in range of VoJ. More burn stack, more 10% dmg for you.

Zeal IV: Burn nearby foes on aegis removal
This one is just a filler to keep the enemy burning. Let’s face it, when you melee, you don’t keep your aegis up for long. You can drop this for any situational trait you may need (50% less falling dmg trait, 50% more dmg when downed… because you get downed a lot due to being glassy… :P)

Honor III: Symbols are larger
As I mentioned earlier, Zeal trait is symbol-centric. The bigger the symbol, more mobs can be hit by it. This will enable you to hit more mobs before they scatter (if they do). Note that each symbol hit applies 4 sec of vulnerability each tick due to zeal minor master trait and have 30% more condition duration. On the hammer, the 3rd AA hit will give you 2 stacks on hit and gives you and party members in it prot boon as well. Wiki is saying the 2 stacks is a bug… so might as well use it now before they fix it, lol.

Honor VII: Symbols last larger
I was actually using symbols heal before I changed to this trait. Reason being is I wanted to dish out more damage by applying 1 more stack of vulnerability as well as 1 more additional hit from my symbols (my symbols crit for 1.2K). The heal from the symbol doesn’t really do much for a glass build (my symbol heal is only around 180+ per tick). If you need other traits, you can swap this out (want might instead? Get empowering might)

Honor IX: Two hand weapon mastery
Mighty blow + blast finisher every 4 seconds, 900 range piercing immobilize + 5 stacks of vulnerability (that lasts 11 seconds) every 12 seconds, banish interrupts every 20 seconds, Empower every 12 seconds, need I say more?

Virtue I: 20% more dmg while aegis is up
I just use this for additional damage and my style of play. You can use retaliation last longer as you will be blasting quite a number of light fields (symbol of prot, symbol of swift, ring ward) as well. If you will be using consecrations your utility slot, then you can use Master of consecrations trait. Wanna use spirit weapons even though they suck and want to prove to Anet you will still use them no matter how much nerfing they do? Use 50% spirit weapon duration instead.

Utility slots
Heal: Healing signet
For this build I believe this is better since you have around 300 heal power and no might on block. Passive also helps on condition removal.

Utilities: Hold the line, Stand your ground, retreat. I got retreat for the demand swiftness and aegis refresh for my 20% damage bonus. These are interchangeable with consecrations, spirit weapons, etc. depending on the situation and your mood. Yes I use spirit weapons at times. Thats the beauty of PvE. :p

Elite: Renewed focus

As you may have noticed, the gimmick here is the vulnerability. At low stacks, vulnerability seems weak. Hell, if you solo, its not even that great. It shines when you’re in a party since the damage increase is applied to everyone who hits the mob. Solo (no one else stacks vulnerability), you can stack vulnerability up to 10 for like 1-2 seconds before it slowly goes down. So on average, you get to have 5-8 stacks of vulnerability every 11 seconds. If partnered with anyone that dishes out vulnerability, you can easily stack up to 20-25. I haven’t experimented with condition duration food yet, but it should make it perform better. With no food, burn last 45% longer, vulnerability lasts 40% longer.

This build is pretty versatile IMO. It deals decent amount of damage and you can configure your utilities and retrait for them depending on the situation. Its squishy alright, but once you have prot, you can take more hits than usual. Also, I tend to dodge a lot when playing this build. Keeps me standing longer increase my damage, and get a little heal as well (Selfless daring and Elusive power minor traits). It helps keep my aegis up too for the 20% damage boost.

Notes:
- For this build, I recommend activating VoJ and hammer 3 on refresh.
- Always position yourself either at the side or at the back of the mob, especially on bosses. This will help you keep your aegis longer for the extra 20% damage bonus. In case its down, you still have 3 ways of getting the aegis back up when you start your combo chain from hammer 3: retreat, virtue of courage, renewed focus + virtue of courage again.
- Don’t be afraid to pop yung virtue of courage when starting you biggest damage chain combo if your aegis is down and reatreat is not available. You have renewed focus to bring it back up again.

I hope this was useful. I’ll be posting some more zeal builds I try them. Thanks for reading the wall of text above.

TL;DR – click on the link below:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.4|2.1g.he|6.1c.h1l|1g.b1.1g.b1.1g.b1.1g.b1.1g.71.1g.71|1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1i.67|u125.0.0.u379.a1|0.0|v.16.19.17.1i|e

You can also use GS/Staff on this build, with some trait adjustments. I would suggest the following:

Zeal: 30
II: 10% more dmg on burning foes
Again, best trait in the zeal line IMO. Don’t drop this. :p

X: 5% more dmg for GS
instead of dealing 5% vulnerability each immobilize, we trade it for a steady 5% damage on the GS itself.

XII: GS attacks heal you
No steady prot means more damage. 25hp per GS attack/skill hit isn’t much, but it still helps.

Honor: 30
III: Symbols are larger
Basically the same as the hammer one, only this time you get retaliation. Hammer can maintain more vulnerability as the symbol of wrath can has a 16 second CD even when traited.

IX: Two hand weapon mastery
Whirling Wrath every 8 seconds, nuff said.

X: Symbols heal allies
For GS, I believe you need this especially with this set up, unless you have omnomberry pie. This helps out a lot especially when going head to head with a group of mobs.

Virtues: 10
II: Retaliation lasts 25% longer
This fits GS builds more as the symbol of wrath gives retaliation and doing leap of faith will give you more retaliation.

I’m still working on a good Hammer/GS sync on this build. Big problem with that is mobility. Not having access to symbol of swiftness, especially in dungeons. Impairs it for me.

I just want to say that I like the initiative and the logic and flow behind the reasoning is pretty accurate, but I don’t think it is quite there yet. Possibly class design holds us back but I am all for breaking a paradigm so keep up the work and hopefully others try to extend past our bounds as well.

It is a fun build, and that is the most important thing, you have to have fun in this game and experiment a little. But when i look at it i see there is a lot more damage possible.

You can go like this for even more vuln stacks and higher crit chance;
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.4|2.1g.he|6.1c.h1l|1g.b1.1g.b1.1g.b1.1g.b1.1g.71.1g.71|1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1i.67|p12.a6.0.p37.a1|0.0|v.16.19.17.1i|e

Or you can go full glass, but then you have to switch some gear to stay alive;
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.4|2.1g.he|6.1c.h1l|1g.b1.1g.b1.1g.b1.1g.b1.1g.71.1g.71|1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1i.67|p12.p63.0.a3.a1|0.0|v.16.19.17.1i|e

Or when you wanna do real damage and keep aegis up almost al the time go scepter;
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.4|c.1g.h2.d.1g.h1|b.1g.h2.e.1g.h1|1g.7h.1g.7h.1g.7h.1g.7h.1g.7h.1g.71j|2s.0.2s.0.3s.0.3s.0.2s.0.2s.0|k29.u6ab.a6.0.a1|0.0|v.16.19.17.1i|e

What kind of damage on crits is high for guardian, i do not run full glass cannon armor but use about 80% zerker, with my best being around 18.5k but avg high damage on crits are 10-12k.