Guild Wars 2

Edit : Build uses a meaningless stat (attack). It is rubbish and should not be attempted .

The build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJASWlYgqCnFyIEf4EhVBCi9AjesjXPoYCZIA-jAzAYLIMGAhBg+AlzTU2TYNBCW1KiGryGTDTEVbvTtJfIaA-e

What this build offers:
50% damage reduction (compared to 2k armor)
another 33% damage reduction from perma-protection
17k health
620 heals-per-second (possibly more from AH and procs)
2 stunbreakers, many condition removals
buffs your allies
75% damage output of a full-zerker DPS build (calculation and comparisons further down)

Foreword
After this discussion:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Are-tanks-viable-or-does-DPS-reign-supreme/first#post2490927
with some more experienced guardians on the forum, I’ve come to recognize the importance of DPS to any tank/bunker build. Namely, you need DPS to hold aggro, and pure tanking is not very useful to a group if you’re not also dealing out decent DPS. So, the problem I was presented was how to maintain great tankability while dealing out decent DPS ?

Why, that’s impossible! You’d have to manufacture extra stat points out of thin air! And that is exactly what I did. If you want to find out how, read on!

Tankability
50% damage reduction is provided by 2.2k toughness (3478 armor), another 150 from the Strength in Numbers trait, and the Signet of Judgement which provides a flat 10% reduction. SoJ, traited for signet mastery, also serves as a stunbreaker and inflicts weakness on a short 24s CD, which is great for “oh kitten” moments. The symbol of protection, traited for Writ of Persistence, offers another permanent 33% damage reduction, not to mention AH heal for you and your allies with every tick.

17k health prevents spike damage. I could’ve gone for more at the expense of power by switching soldier gear for sentinel, but too much health is wasted and makes your heals less effective, not to mention lowering your DPS. Conversely, you could probably switch to more DPS/less life by simply switching the existing sentinels for soldiers if you feel the build is too tanky.

The strategy behind healing is to increase healing sources without directly putting points in the horribly-scaled “healing power” stat. An extra 300 points in healing power would net this character around 60~70 heals-per-second (not including dodge rolls), while simply putting a sigil of blood in your weapon and munching on omnomberry pies gives you around 150 hps, or the equivalent of 750 healing power.

Heals are provided by the following:
Virtue of resolve: 110 heals-per-second
HtL regen: 35 hps
Sigil of blood: 45 hps (against 1 enemy)
AH from SoP: 77 hps (for 1 person)
AH from SYG, HtL, SoJ and others: around 10~12 hps (1 person)
Signet of resolve: 269 hps
And if you’re eating food: Omnomberry pie: 70 hps (against 1 enemy)

For a total of 618 hps… alone . If you’re running with a team/zerg, the AH goes up exponentially. If you’re facing a mob instead of a boss, the proc heals from omnom/SoB go up. With targets and allies around, heals could easily go up to 1k per second. To be fair, all guardians are pretty good at getting tiny random heals…what makes it special in this case is how well it synergizes with the massive damage reduction.

Stuns are mitigated by Stand Your Ground and Signet of Judgment, both on 24 sec CD through different traits. Conditions are lifted passively by Signet of Resolve, SYG and Hold the Line through the pure of voice trait. Also, by using a hammer, people are gonna shoot cleansing arrows through your SoP all day. Overall, stunbreak/condition removal are not being sacrificed in favor of tankability.

(cont’d)

DPS
I think the reason people hold such animosity towards tanks is because their typical experience with a “tank” involves some random schlub in terrible armor standing around not holding aggro and not dealing damage. Well, this build can! (sorta)
First of all, the formula I’m using for effective attack is as follows:

Effective attack = Attack × [(1 – Critical Chance) + (Critical Chance × Critical Multiplier)] × (1+ damage multiplier 1 + multiplier 2 + ….etc)

Which is basically the same formula used by GW2buildcraft for effective power, except I didn’t make the mistake of multiplying multipliers, and took qualifying instances into consideration (your enemy is unlikely to be burning non-stop throughout the entire fight).

My build does 3992 effective attack under this formula. To put it into perspective:

The maximized guardian DPS build I came up with was this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlYgyCXFSKEf4EhNDCawaGx7eYKwYGB-jQyAYrARfgoCAJvioxWcLiGruGT5SEVbvHimNP1xAoH-e
Which deals 6703 effective attack, and my tank/bunker build would be 60% of that. However, it is quite unlikely to be actually playable, or if it did, it would spend 90% of its time running away from mobs as with 2k armor and 12k health, a couple of hits would bring it down.

A more typical DPS zerker build would probably look like the one korval made on this forum (sorry, would you mind letting me borrow it as a point of reference? ):
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/PVE-DPS-build
which deals 5363 effective attack, of which my tank/bunker build deals approximately 75% of that.

Now 25% less damage may still sound like a lot, but a typical zerker don’t just stand there and facetank…if they’re dodging or running around avoiding attacks 25% of the time, then my build is essentially dealing the same amount of DPS as a zerker. Of course, in my experience zerkers do stand around dealing all that sweet, sweet DPS…because I’m the one taking the aggro.

Last thoughts
Sorry, the “manufacture stat points out of thin air” bit was to keep you reading. So was the trollish topic title.

What I actually did was realize how much stat points I was missing out by mixing and matching (“oh, I’m using knights gear so I lack vitality! Better take some soldier runes!” “huh, now I lack power…better get some soldier gear”) In the end, none of my 4 main stats fell below 60…so why not just start construction process with divinity runes, and fill out each stat from there? That’s 35 extra stat points, extra 60 heal points, and 12% extra crit damage right off the bat! (compared to other runes).

Next was the SoJ signet. Because armor becomes progressively less effective the more you take, a flat, 10% damage reduction becomes the equivalent of 365 toughness at 50% DR! To put it another way, you’re gaining 365 toughness at the cost of a utility skill. And the skill isn’t entirely useless as it’s a good stunbreaker and applies weakness and retaliation with a short cooldown.

Last of all, retributive armor is incredibly good when you have 2400+ toughness (counting strength in numbers)…that’s an extra 120 precision you’re getting at the cost of an adept-tier trait.

Edit: Oh, and strength in numbers, another trait that gives you (and your allies!) 150 in toughness. Before the patch (when it was 70 toughness) this trait was rubbish and not worth taking over purity, but 150 toughness is just too good for a adept-level trait.

So in the end, this build is getting an extra: 35 points in random stats, 515 points in toughness, 120 points in precision, 12% in crit damage, 60 heal and 60 condition damage. This is how it was able to tank like a boss while still dealing passable DPS.

Again, sorry for the trollish title, please critique my build!

Disclaimer
This build has never been tested in-game. Unfortunately, I don’t have the 100+ gold for divinity runes and sentinel gear, nor have I finished collecting ascendents. But it sure looks good on paper, doesn’t it :P

Nope, it does not look good on paper. Way too much vitality and defense in general, utterly useless sentinel gear and too low power and crit damage. You can facetank most “tankable” stuff with a hammer AH build in full zerker gear. If that’s not possible, it’s probably not meant to be facetanked. Besides, mob aggro is another factor that makes such a tank build unreliable and therefore a liability to the group.

Furthermore, the DPS section makes it pretty obvious that you don’t have the slightest idea about a proper DPS build. Otherwise, you would not have cited Korval’s junk wannabe-DPS build as some kind of “reference”. Taking a proper DPS build as reference, you will be somewhere below 50 % of his damage output. And no, such a zerker will not spend most of the time running away from mobs or lying on the ground, if the group is not completely useless.

@CptAurellian:
I’m confused. You say a hammer AH zerker can facetank most stuff, but how do you maintain proper DPS with a hammer AH build? AH means 30 pts in honor and therefore only leaves 40 for radiance and zeal combined. Hammer means not utilizing zealous blade, which is another 5% drop in DPS. With all those drops in DPS, your effective attack is gonna be somewhere in the vicinity of 5.5k (instead of the theoretically maximum 7k, more on that later), which isn’t that far off from my tank build (4k). Of course, I’m just taking clues from what you said, so I could be wrong. If you have such a build, would you mind posting it so I can do the calculations? Thanks.

On the second part of your comment, yes, I admit I’m fairly unversed in what a typical DPS build looks like, so if korval’s build is junk then I apologize. However, imho there is nochance that my 4k effective attack is lower than 50% damage output of a proper DPS build, since the theoretical maximum effective attack is 7k unless you’re hitting a persistently-burning, constantly-conditioned enemy at night with persistently low endurance (but dodgerolls decrease DPS) after stacking up on might (and not with empowering might, since that would mean 20 pts in honor).

If you’re constantly fighting under those conditions, then yes, your effective attack can go above 7k. Otherwise, the best you can do is probably a bit lower than this build I made for theoretical purposes (which I already mentioned in my DPS post):
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlYgyCXFSKEf4EhNDCawaGx7eYKwYGB-jQyAYrARfgoCAJvioxWcLiGruGT5SEVbvHimNP1xAoH-e
which is 6.7k effective attack. My build, as I’ve mentioned before, is 4k, or 60% of the theoretical maximum. Whether that is good enough for PvE is up to interpretation, but I would really like to see what your version of a “proper” DPS build looks like so I have something non-theoretical to compare with.

Anyways, I’m not trying to defend this build against criticism. I’m actually seeking criticism since I’m making the decision whether to drop 100g into sentinel armor and divinity runes. But actual numbers would probably be more welcome than opinion, since we all know how much opinions are worth on the internet XD

Thank you for your criticism, you are obviously a very experienced GC player. I’m currently in the process of theorycrafting a DPS build, and would wish to seek your input when it’s done.

There’s no point in building tanky unless your focus in wvw.

Yeah you have high hp/armour, but if your dmg doesnt mtch up, you cant get the mobs to focus you, and they drop aggro and switch to the person doing higher dps, so now they gotta either kite (lowering their dmg), in turn making you have to run around after them, making you do less dmg.

I deleted my original post since I realized that it contained to much offense and to little argument.
So lets try that in a civil way

Most dangerous abilitys (aka the ones that wipe your team) are usualy AoE. You cant tank Subject Alphas Ice AoE or Lupis AoE in P2. You cant tank something like the risen hunters bouncing axe, too.

The few singletarget hits in this game (the ones that don’t one hit you anyway) are usually of little thread. There is simply nothing to tank in this game.

‘sigh’ Ok, that’s gonna be some work now.

First part, the build comparison. Btw, is there a build calculator other than gw2buildcraft which has a display for effective power? Since that site does not seem to receive any updates, it’s starting to get annoying (even if it’s not too much out of date yet).

The DPS build:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|1.1g.h2|6.1a.h1f|1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e|3s.0.3s.0.2s.0.2s.0.3s.0.2s.0|a2.p26.0.u28b.5|2e.1|v.16.17.19.0|e
6613 EP without external buffs. The 3 might come from EM, which your build lacks.

Your build:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|2.1n.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|1c.71j.1c.71j.1c.71j.1c.71j.1n.71j.1c.71j|21j.0.21j.0.31j.0.31j.0.21j.0.2u.0|0.a2.u46b.u27b.0|2e.1|v.16.19.1b.1i|e
3261 EP
Notes: First, sentinels changed to soldiers, since buildcraft does not know them. Second, I deliberately ignored the extra toughness from Strength in Numbers since 4 Precision won’t do much on the offensive part.

The AH zerker:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|2.1g.h2|0.0.0.0.0.0|1g.a7.1g.a7.1g.a7.1g.a7.1g.a7.1g.a7|2s.0.2s.0.3s.0.2s.0.3s.0.2s.0|0.0.u46b.u278.a6|2e.1|v.16.19.11.1i|e
5025 EP

So, if we take the DPS build as 100% damage, then the zerker AH has 76% and your build has 49% of its effective power. Keep in mind that effective damage will still be lower for both builds, because the DPS build does not use a hammer. I’m just too lazy to calculate that difference, since it does not change much in the order of magnitude.

Regarding damage multipliers, Radiant Power is fully active since there is always a condition on any enemy. Fiery Wrath can also be regarded as permanently active, since a DPS build can achieve quite a high burning uptime by using the VoJ active effect, even if there is no one else who applies burning. All three builds have Elusive Power, so that will be pretty much on the same level and therefore yield no differences.

As a side note, the DPS build I’m using here is not yet the absolute maximum. However, the question about what to use of the 10/25/0/25/0 family mostly boils down to personal flavor and the type of dungeon you want to run, so it does the job. And to carify an apparent misunderstanding, the zerker-AH is not supposed to do proper damage in the sense of a DPS build. Its job is just maximum damage while maintaining enough defensive to “tank” most stuff sufficiently well. Comes in very handy in bad groups, when a true DPS build quickly becomes pretty stressful.

Thank you for taking the time to insert my build into the GW2buildcraft calculator, and to show me some good DPS builds. I will consider those builds as reference points in the future.

I’ve used the GW2buildcraft calculator too, but there are some troubling mistakes in their calculation, namely:

1. Their effective power only takes power into consideration, and excludes the innate weapon strength. Since weapon strength is the same across the board whether you use DPS build or tank build, by taking a fixed attack from both builds (well, before damage multipliers that is), it artificially inflates the ratio of attack DPS builds have over tanks. Example: Build A has 10 power +10 weapon attack. Build B has 20P + 10WA. Taking weapon attack into consideration, Build A has 66% of the damage of Build B. But if you take out WA, Build A suddenly only has 50% the damage of Build B.

2. It appears that they’ve multiplied multipliers. For example, go to your DPS build and swap out fiery wrath (for…blinding jeopardy or something innate). You will notice the damage % go down from 53.73% to 39.76%. How does a 10% damage increase increase your damage 14%, unless the 10% was multiplied by the rest of your multipliers (40%)?

3. The damage reduction is all wrong. I specifically calculated my build to be 50% DR of 2k armor, there could be no mistake. 3478 armor + 150 SiN = 3628. 3628/0.9 = 4031. (4031-2000)/4031 = 50.38%….yet it shows 48% of 1.8k armor. If the DR is wrong, what else is wrong?

But I admit, your builds are quite a bit superior to korval’s. I will try to do DPS calculations on them when I port them into gw2skills. Thank you.

Ok, to address those points:

1. Possible, I’ll have to check it.
2. I have yet to see any proof that multipliers stack additively. Until then, I stick to the more intuitive and reasonable multiplication.
3. Well, damage reduction is not really relevant in this case. Although I understand your concern about other faults, the offensive stuff translates pretty well into practice, at least in my experience.

€: Just calculated a bit for point 1.

If the DPS build and yours both used a greatsword, the first part of the autoattack would deal the following average damage against a target with 2000 armor.

Wiki damage formula:
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

So, the DPS build:
0.461 * 1100 * 2554 * 0.8 / 2000 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 + 0.539 * 1100 * 2554 * 0.8 / 2000 * 2.27 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 = 2520
Multipliers are Scholar Runes, Fiery Wrath and Radiant Power.

Your build:
0.549 * 1100 * 2096 * 0.8 / 2000 + 0.451 * 1100 * 2096 * 0.8 / 2000 * 1.92 = 1305

So with the manual calculation, your build sits at 52% of the DPS build’s damage, which is not too far away from the buildcraft results. And we must not forget the hammer, but I’m really too lazy to do all the calculations with the symbol and the other crap. Will be below 50%, definitely.

Ah, it appears that I have been trolled by Anet.

I had based all my DPS calculations off of attack (power+weapon damage) shown on the character sidebar in-game, so I was a bit confused at the wiki formula you posted. Of course, the formula was correct:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

Then I searched for attack:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Attack_%28statistic%29

So basically, attack is a meaningless stat !!! It could say “1” or “1,000,000” or “2d6” and have absolutely no effect on game mechanics. It boggles the mind why Anet would insert a meaningless stat onto the character page, especially a stat used in 99% of RPGs to signify the amount of damage dealt per hit.

It doesn’t matter if my build’s damage is 52% or 47% of a proper DPS, that’s just arguing over schematics. Anything anywhere near 50% is absolutely unacceptable…a build that has twice the DR and deals half the damage? What’s the point? Therefore, I’ve wasted 3 hrs theorycrafting a build based on a faulty mechanic, and blew my entire savings on a divinity rune. That kinda sucks.

tl;dr: Trolled by Anet. Build is rubbish.

Charak.9761:

Yeah you have high hp/armour, but if your dmg doesnt mtch up, you cant get the mobs to focus you, and they drop aggro and switch to the person doing higher dps, so now they gotta either kite (lowering their dmg), in turn making you have to run around after them, making you do less dmg.

A tone of BS.