Guild Wars 2

Since I haven’t really seen someone break down how ascended armor stat increases affect the ‘meta’ guardian builds I decided to try my hand at it and make them as efficient as humanly possible.

A few assumptions I made when doing this is that you will always have a Warrior in the party running with Banner of Discipline, as well as 100% uptime on Fury and Might to some extent. I did not include a Ranger with Spotter. I assumed that the guardian would have 5 unique boons for the purposes of “Power of the Virtuous”, and that for the sake of Elusive Power you would always have Endurance regenerating (ie not full). The enemies in question will also always be burning and have some stacks of vulnerability (which doesn’t mean anything if your group can maintain max stats, but changes if it cant).

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAsdRlUgiCnFyKEfIFSOjCEBteAQHk/UVIewFA-jQCBYfDRDVEkgAkKYIaZmDRMPNrFXFRjVXDT5iIqWKgIGWB-e
This it the most potent and efficient build I could come up with is a Sword/Focus and Greatsword Build, running 10-30-0-5-25 or 10-30-0-0-30 depending on personal taste there. Everything is Berserker except for your Focus, Gloves, and Greaves are Assassins. The additional precision with Banner and Fury with Right Handed Stregnth will get you to 99% crit chance with 2 points of precision wasted.

The second build basically is for people who can’t justify using Unscathed Contender. And is stronger if (and only if) you have Aegis down for more than 77% of the fight.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAsdRlUgiCnFyKEfIFRuArHA8g+rqQ8wZgRPC-jQCBYfDRDVEkgAkKYIaZmDRMPNrFXFRjVXDT5iIqWKgIGWB-e
The gear is exactly the same as above (still ‘wasting’ 2 points of precision to max crit chance). Trait spread is either 10-30-0-25-5 or 10-30-0-30-0. It comes down to you wanting more condition removal without losing scholar runes or you wanting the boons from using your virtues.

I ended up crafting two more builds which either focus on Great Sword and slightly modified for Hammer. And one final build that is pretty much only useful for solo roaming in WvW or maybe even PvP.

Much prefer the 10/30/0/5/25 build even without unscathed cont. The ~5% extra damage from power of the virtuous, consecration mastery, might x 3 on virtue spam and condition removal on virtue make those points amazing. Nothing in honor can touch that imo.

It honestly depends. I agree those three are good traits and make it worthwhile even without unscathed. At the same time Shout Reductions and Innate condition cleansing are also good. I made those builds just for maximum theoretical damage which calls for unscathed.

Even without unscathed, the build with 25 in virtue is higher dps than the one with points in honor.
Did you take the effective power from a website which automatically adds the 10% extra damage from evasive power? (25 honor).

I like builds with 30 in radiance because fotm (especially in pugs) calls for a lot of range damage. Scepter can use all the help it can get.

Without Unscathed, the only damage modifying trait in virtues is Power of the Virtuous, which as i assumed 5 unique boons equals a 5% damage increase over base. The base is the same so if you have Elusive power you have 10% more damage over base. Now unless keeping your endurance low is that much of a damage loss for the sword auto attack chain (which doesnt suffer from the same symptoms as the Warrior Axe Chain) then Elusive Power would deal more than Power of the Virtuous. So in order for people to judge which is more effect over that is by weighting the traits seperately from raw damage. Something which is entirely situational on which dungeon you’re running.

Now if I wanted to heavily rely on Scepter, I’d be going 20-30-0-0-20 without question.

Well, I think that 100% uptime for Elusive Power is a very optimistic assumption. Vigorous Precision usually prevents that. Besides, the 10/30/0/30/0 stuff is not really new – I think I saw it as Guang’s “ultimative” guardian build something like half a year ago. Even ran it for some time, but today I wouldn’t use it instead of the meta. The possibility to take MoC and/or UC is much stronger than any of the Honor stuff, imo.

the main thing i wanted to point out with this is the choice of ascended equipment pieces to minimize precision wasted yet still hit 99% crit chance.

However yes, I do understand its an extremely generous assumption considering i attempt to waste endurance in fights trying to keep it down. I usually run the x-5-25 build just because of (as Fade stated) consecrations and resolve.

Wasting endurance means wasting DPS, unless you can’t use that time to attack anyway. As for the gear choices, there are already some other suggestions around, have a look at obal’s sticky.

I’d like to see elusive power changed to be +10% damage while endurance is full. It’d open up a lot of interesting options for dps guardians. Alternatively if anet take away vigor on crit and make vigor in general more sparse, meaning dodges are less frequent and/or energy slower regenning… the current state of honor might become attractive again.

As for the assassin/zerker stuff – it’s worth keeping a variety of assassin, zerker and even valk gear because when you’re in a group with ranger/warrior it’s easy to hit the cap. I use the valk gear rather than waste points on precision over 100%.

The 100% up-time of Fury is slightly optimistic since For Great Justice lasts 8 seconds with a 24 second cooldown. Which means you’ll need 3 warriors in the team, or 2 warriors and a ranger to keep that fury running. Unless you’re in a good group where you kill things in 8 seconds of course.

Or a single LH elementalist who can provide 1 min of fury every 30 seconds.

For a thread with math in the title there’s a distinct lack of it in the OP :[ where tha numbers at

^ agreed. I was wondering where the numbers were.