Guild Wars 2

Updates:

9/25/2014
Updated build, thanks to Amins suggestion. Another video will be coming soon with new build.

9/14/2014
Brand New Build Information: Started from scratch

After a 3 month Hiatus, I started to play again. I am still not a fan of condition damage on a guardian; however, I found a way to make it work for me. I only use this build for solo roaming or duels in spvp. I run my support build when in small man WWW and my bunker for tpvp.

Current Build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQRApd7flsApQotCxZI8DNR8Ql9Y0ivY1BQC8oXNDA-TVyCABAcQAUVJ4O7P8i+BDM/1kyPfU/ZiTAgEPBASBso0I-w

Please note there is an error in the build site: There will not be 100% burning duration. I choose additional condition duration food in case people run negative condition duration in addition to protect the core of the build. In addition if you want to use the ascended version go full dire. I opted to stay in Exotic as I’m still trying to improve the build.

The core: Amplified Wrath, Defender’s Flame, Superior Rune of the Guardian, Mace, Focus, Shelter. You apply 3 seconds of burning per block at almost 1k a tick. This is the focus of the build, to punish people as they attack you. This is great for people who enjoy playing a defensive style gameplay (like myself).

Below is a vid on play testing. Please note you will see different setups throughout the video as I was trying many variations.

Guardian can’t really make a good Condition Damage Build, why a Guardian can only use Burn. Your damage is all into a condition that deal 700 damage x sec, when your skills can deal more damage alone, whit a lot of critical rate.

But you can play as a Guardian and use Conditions in wvsw, yes. But it’s better to spet 6 points in Virtues and obtain the traits to inflict burn every 3 attacks instead of 5 and inflict Burn as a AoE attack, instead of singel target effect. That can give you the ability to deal more burning damage and do it well against a enemy zerg. (in wvsw there’s only zerg vs zerg fights).
Rune of strenghts don’t give you nothing good. Is better a common Undead, that increase your condition damage and toughness. Might increase your condition damage, but 3 might by weapon swap and 1 might every 5 sec don’t change your damage. A Rune of Undead can.
Save Yourselves can be good only if you active immediatly Purging Flames, or you take all the allies conditions on you and can’t clean it well whit only 2 skills that clean conditions. (you can only do it if you’re in a team whit another guardian that clean conditions whit shouts).

Your build can be used, but is better to you to use near someone that clean conditions and increase the range of your burning ability.
You can try something like 6/x/x/x/6 whit in Virtues VI-VIII-XI.

You do bring up good points. I appreciate it, though I will disagree on the use of strength runes. I can get 9 might up immediately and gradually keep up more stacks during a fight.

I made some updates to the build.

Is it me or current WvW meta is focused mostly on thoughness tanks?

maybe its issue of whom I’m fighting against but skill1 fromtome of wrath with little support from phew allies seems melt zergs – with low into condition dmg.
(just had situation when defending SM lord room with 6 more folks – tome of wrath spam of “1” some movement away enemies and before our main zerg came with help half of enemy zerg was actually downed or very close to it :/ )

if situation like this in wvw meta builds are quite normal thet build like this can have great future in it

in wvw the meta is -40% condition duration for melee classes and shouts which remove conditions. thus burning can tick 1 seconds hence you need to be able to proc burning constantly
the back line is wide open to conditions unless its guild group who stick together

but as i can proc burning constantly i can do nice aoe dmg better than condi/power necro

messiah.1908:

in wvw the meta is -40% condition duration for melee classes and shouts which remove conditions. thus burning can tick 1 seconds hence you need to be able to proc burning constantly
the back line is wide open to conditions unless its guild group who stick together

but as i can proc burning constantly i can do nice aoe dmg better than condi/power necro

so aoe spam of 1s burning is doing a job well enough huh?

I guess should have been a bit more specific about the build. I and vT does not zerg in WWW. I’ll update the OP to reflect this build being used for roaming. If I were to zerg, Harbinger has much better builds, and would definitely be using staff and hammer.

messiah you are right about the negative condi food. It will hurt this build a little; however, as much as its considered meta to run this food and find it funny that most people do not run this food. Its rare. But this can be countered by running Koi Cakes.

In addition, the purpose of this build is to have direct damage as my primary and burning as my secondary form of damage. I depend on bursting with torch, VoJ, and sometimes immob in PF to get my burning off.

Why? I want my might to get stacked and I want my opponent to blow their condi removals before I start my reliable applications of burning.

Also, your build lacks group support and the survivability of my build. My build also does much more damage as applying burning “constantly” on one target is not reliable on a guardian even when built for it. Your videos even reflect this. The one time you applied burning effectively was after you blew through most of your skills on an ele that ran away in a 12 second battle. Besides that your burning application was random.

If I could I would like to try full celestial with this build. But its just too much of a pain. For Spvp that is what I have been testing it with.

@Blasino I’ve got situation descripted above with my roamer build adapted to suite little more group fights (exchanged meditations for shouts and messed with traits to reflect it to be precise) and picked tome of wrath just because just a while earlier we were ordered to atack from distance and I had no viable ranged AoE

condi dmg is some but not so great – remnants of old time in meaning of some ascended trinkets with condi dmg no idea what those “others” had but still that atackers melted quite rapidly

hmm I think I’ll run some more experiments on case of burning pressure – since retraiting doesn’t cost

Lord Trejgon.2809:

messiah.1908:

in wvw the meta is -40% condition duration for melee classes and shouts which remove conditions. thus burning can tick 1 seconds hence you need to be able to proc burning constantly
the back line is wide open to conditions unless its guild group who stick together

but as i can proc burning constantly i can do nice aoe dmg better than condi/power necro

so aoe spam of 1s burning is doing a job well enough huh?

if i rotate my skills and blocks it can proc 5-10 seconds aoe burning above 5 ppl so yes doing 1.5k aoe dps is greater than aoe power necro wells
also the elite skill does 4 seconds burning and its spammable
also making the enemies using their shouts earlier b4 my team burst on them is useful

Lord Trejgon.2809:

@Blasino I’ve got situation descripted above with my roamer build adapted to suite little more group fights (exchanged meditations for shouts and messed with traits to reflect it to be precise) and picked tome of wrath just because just a while earlier we were ordered to atack from distance and I had no viable ranged AoE

condi dmg is some but not so great – remnants of old time in meaning of some ascended trinkets with condi dmg no idea what those “others” had but still that atackers melted quite rapidly

hmm I think I’ll run some more experiments on case of burning pressure – since retraiting doesn’t cost

Please let me know what you find.

One day I’ll have the time and money to outfit this build in www. My guild has been pulling me to tpvp lately. Yay bunker…

My burn ticks 1050.

After coming back to the game from a 3 month break, I started to work on this build again. The posts before this point are from an older less effective build.

Criticisms always welcome.

Drop the 4 in Valor and take Virtues to 6. You’ve got Permeating Wreath, Stability or Condi Clear, imo.

That is a great suggestion Amins. Thanks Man. It also gives me some room on utilities depending on which trait I go.

Just be careful with permeating wrath. Note that it makes it an AoE around you, not your target, so it’s only truly effective if you’re staying in melee. I believe that only affects the passive effect of VoJ and not the active.

I don’t know if you’ve ever considered putting 4 into radiance, but that’s another possibility. Having the blind and VoJ recharge can be very valuable, as well as the burning duration increase with torch recharge reduction. Can also work some boon removal in that way. Could even make some crazy signet build for condi removal if you wanted. I think this would mean taking 4 out of valor though, but it might be worth the exchange.

Thanks for the heads up. I was looking at absolute resolution. This gives me 6 condi clears and extra healing during a fight. It allows me to have SYG, the greatest guardian skill ever haha and another utility which could be a multitude of things.

I was definitely on the same thinking of going 4 radiance and using signets you can see it in some of the fights in the video. I wanted to make signets useful and work especially since it was in the Radiance line which = moar burning damage!

But in the end, supreme justice was just a much better virtue to have in this build. While the core of the build produces most of the burning damage, supreme justice just adds additional pressure.

Also, the virtue acts as a safe guard. If guardians happen to run this build people will start figuring it out. Though it will be tough to beat the idea of not being blocked, having another way to keep burning is nice.

A lot of my fights were won because people didn’t understand that they died because they attacked me and went into the fight with the idea that I was the standard roaming guardian.

TLDR: while the signet idea isn’t a bad one, I think supreme justice trumped it.

I really do appreciate the input. I’m pretty serious about this build, especially since I’ve had so much success with it. Thank you!

So I made updates to the build, thanks to Amins suggestion. Honestly Bane Signet can be anything. I’ve run wrath, JI, HotL, SY, pretty much a lot of things work here.

I’m trying to get another video up, but a lot of the fights just aren’t great. 1v1 its pretty tough for any prof to beat this build. D/F ele gave me the most trouble so far.

I’ll try and get a new vid up soon hopefully.