Guild Wars 2

Just to let you know, im going to craft celestial armor even though i find a lot of the stats wasted and i have everything ready and its just a matter of cool down on crafting charged quartz crystals.

This means i will have a full set in 30 days, if i dont forget to craft those little rascals.

So if you are uncertain if you are gonna invest gold/time in getting them i plan to review them when i got them and write about them in the forum.

Back on topic:

So what runes would you compliment with? Im thinking of with power as primary stats to push dps somewhat.

What would you use?

And if you are going for them what do you think would be suitable for weapons and trinkets?

Runes?
maybe Superior runes of divinity :P
trinkets? Weapons?
Why not celestial
btw. good luck with making build that would have great usage from all-stat – If You will made it, I could finally tell my friend that there really is viable build based on all-stat

Depends on what kind of a spec it is. I can maybe see some sort of Healwayish thing going on, but even with that you’d probably want to bump up your power a lot.

Have to say, just being Frank, I have no idea what the hell it is, never heard of it, total deer in the headlights.

So – first things first. Thank you for taking one for the team Simply put, you are doing this before most to our advantage. Very kind of you – lol.

Secondly, has noted above, no idea what it is nor why I would even want it has of yet. I’m not into gear grinds so this at first read, raises all kinds of alarms. I’m still upset over the whole ascended gear (late to the party, I know – but always planned – so they say) but maybe this is just stat distribution or cosmetic.

Tertiary – if it doesn’t effect current stats (additional mean, aka another GAP), then it probably still doesn’t effect me because I don’t really grind out thinks like this gear or legendaries. While I would like to, and I like better looking textures or skins, the best I’ve done to date is saving / farming enough gold to purchase a complete T3 armor set – lol.

So – to answer your question. I think it is cool that you are doing this and will probably save some people time and money. My thought would be to see if it works within your current or mainstay build (AH, Hammer). That would probably give you the most feedback and/or feel since you know it so well. I couldn’t see you going say healing because that isn’t your main (unless I’m wrong).

Anyway – hope it looks cool never the less.

Celestial is just another stat distribution; it’s all stats equally, just like the all stats ascended trinkets. It’s crafted exotic.

So a exotic chest vs. a celestial chest will have the same stat point value? Ascended gear has more.

the weapons atleast is not the sameas celestial has 240 stat points, 5% crit and 3%MF where a normal exotic dagger has 218 stat points or 154 + 5% stat points

@Crapgame – currently, the highest tier of armor would be Exotics. Ascended currently only exists for jewelry / trinkets.

Celestial, like foofad said, is just another stat distrubution. so would be in the same league or category as: berserker’s, knight’s, soldier’s, cleric’s carrion, etc etc

in terms of appearance, i haven’t looked too far into it yet, but i assume they will be the same as the crafted exotic armor sets (i.e. draconic for heavy armor).

the thing about celestial/divinity runes/all primary stats is that you get a bit of everything, but at the same time, there’ll be wasted stats whereas you could have gone for something else more power focused, crit focused.. wasted stats in the eye of the beholder, but usually magic find, or condition damage for Guardians, for e.g.

however, it does give a good cushion sometimes, depending on your build, and allows for some flexibility in terms of traits. although, you really won’t be “specialized” in any area, as most of the builds we see are now i feel. yes, there are definitely hybrid builds out there, but they still tend to lean towards offense, or support, or defense, or what have you.

@Brutaly, being full celestial will be interesting. both slightly surprised and not so surprised you’ll be taking this on. ; )) you really will be well balanced in terms of stats, and what you choose as your traits will really boost your build in that direction.. but will the stats be enough? i am looknig forward to it.

in terms of runes.. i want to say i am leaning towards something power based as well. though, i might even see a mix of stats as well in a couple more particular areas.. but you might be spreading the stats around too much. i feel boon duration (both general and specific) could be interesting as well.

Celestials actually have more raw stats (point for point) and also more crit damage per piece than valk/ber. 19% versus 16% if i remember correctly which might be an attempt from Anet to make them worth it compared to “ordinary” gear.

The issue with them is that you cant mold the build properly and you will loose out on effective hp/power since you cant stack power primarily.

one can argue that eles, engies and guardians might find them worth having, In the guardians case i seriously doubt it but i want to have first hand experience of stuff instead of speculating.

That and i hope people dont fall in the raw stat bullkitten which some have done with celestial trinkets and to avoid that i decided to spend some gold to get these and review them.

And no its not a grind, its just a global cool down then reduces the speed to get them, the activity, getting the specific mat, takes 3,5 seconds each day.

@Foofad
Yeah i thought power would be the primary choice in order to get some damage out of them. It might be interesting with power/critdamage and ruby orbs might suit them well

@Akamon
Yeah im a bit suprised i will get them but just as with magi i just have to know if they actually are any good. But its no grind, its just a matter of gold and waiting for cool downs.

This was the second thought that popped up. The high crit damage and relatively high precision in them might compensate the stuff you sacrifice when going for boon duration.

Edit:
Same appearance as the rest of the draconic and here are the stats
http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/gw2-celestial-heavy-armor-set.jpg

Edit: realized that there will be people buying these and the supply will be very limited so the price might be extremely high.

yes, you’re right, Brutaly! i always forget about the overall higher raw stats.

heh, exactly. i’ve started to incorporate Magi’s into some of my builds they can turn out quite nicely with the right mix. i guess for what it’s worth, i’m quite proud of how the community has “matured” if you will. least within the Guardian community. note, i didn’t start playing until early headstart and took me a WHILE to really learn the ins and outs of the game and i am still learning by the minute (thanks to all you folks!).

early on, many were quick to shun certain traits, abilities, stats, myself included! to name a few e.g., “healing power scales terribly!” —> meet the Healway build and all other builds that stack Healing Power and watch them never go down; “condition guardians? wutloll2p” --> now we have a stickied thread on the Burning Guardian, and a lot more.. and this is only on the official forums. there a ton of other sites, and videos on youtube that have been learning and adapting and trying new things. now with the introduction of celestial gear, it may not seem a BiS by any stretch at first glance, but here, there are people willing to test and experiment with an open mind. so, props to you all! XDD this is just my personal feeling. of course, we have a long way to go.. and the interwebz will be the interwebz.. but it’s been an absolute pleasure. an absolute, absolute pleasure.

though, i digress.

okay, so time for some numbers. yaaay, math. so i did a quick spreadsheet, and i have food coma right after lunch, so apologies for any mistakes. and please correct me if i’m wrong! if you take all Celestial Gear, armor, weapons* and ascended trinkets, save the backpiece (which i only have down as an exotic soldier back with an emerald jewel fwiw), you achieve the following:

Power – 1,366
Precision – 1,392
Toughness – 1,382
Vitality – 1,351
Healing Power – 435
Condition Dmg – 664

Roughly translating to:
Attack* – 2,477
Critical Chance – 26.5%
Critical Damage – 58%
Armor – 2,593
Health – 15,155

For comparison’s sake, let’s just use a typical 0/5/30/30/5 build, to reach:

Power – 1,366
Precision – 1,442
Toughness – 1,682
Vitality – 1,651
Healing Power – 735
Condition Dmg – 744

Attack* – 2,477
Critical Chance – 28.9%
Critical Damage – 88%
Armor – 2,893
Health – 18,155

Note: * Assuming using 2-handed weapons; 79 points to all stats 10% crit dmg (source: gw2db)

As you can see, from a stat spread perspective, i think these are quite respectable stats and this is without runes or sigils or buffs. Of course, my first concern is that Power is definitely on the lower side. Crit chance can be EASILY boosted. Retributive armor – though it’s a trait i won’t really take nowadays, and Master Oils you get just over 40%. and you have a very respectable crit damage right off the bat! In addition, you have close to 850+ dodge roll heals already, and your burns will be doing ~500 per tick.

Not to mention, magic find 41%!! which is awesome. cause magic.

if we’re going for something well-balanced, i am tempted to use a classic Power + Might Duration Rune combo and Might stacking sigils. Say a combo of 3×3 of Fire, Strength or Hoelbrak, Sigils of Battle. Tack on Bloodlust stacks, and a food that gives primary Power, you bring it close to 3k attack/1.8k Power with some nice Might stacks to stick around.

or like you mentioned Brutaly, stacking Boon Duration for a more well-rounded build, and keep Might sigils. and this is just one direction we could head in…

on first glance of some basic numbers.. tbh, apart from power, i am relatively quite comfortable with the stats we get completely untraited. so now i’m wondering if this could open up more builds for the Guardian class going forward? i might be going to try to craft a set as well and see how it goes. after all, i quite like the ring of “The Celestial Guardian”.

Here’s the stats difference against a Berserker Draconic set for pasting into buildcraft:

power: -170,
precision: -79,
toughness: 145,
vitality: 145,
critical damage: 4,
healing power: 145,
condition damage: 145,
magic find: 18

Here’s a build link for full berserker armour with divinity runes and celestial accessories ( no weapon, no food, no traits ): http://tinyurl.com/full-celestial – so you can just paste the above into the “Manual” tab

This could work reasonably well as an all rounder, with weapons and traits defining the build.

If you’re like me, and get frustrated with having to keep 6 armour sets consuming inventory space at all times you could probably risk having one good celestial set + one or two specialised ones.

nice! that’s helpful too, Tarsius. ; )) thanks for that.

i do wonder how much more work these build sites are getting with all this new content that keeps getting pumped out! lol. XDD

Yeah, I’ve wondered about creating a crowd-source style build site – that would allow users to add new gear and tune traits as the content changes ( combined with a voting or moderation system ).
It’s a bit like a busman’s holiday for me though, so I don’t really have the motivation ;-)

I am totally going to get the full armor set for my build, as it actually is a decent stat balance/ increase with the right trinkets.

Also for extra help, and if you don’t actually feel like putting stats on the armor, the basic manual for the clestial armor +2h weapon is

power: 224,
precision: 224,
toughness: 224,
vitality: 224,
healing power: 224,
condition damage: 224,
critical damage: 30,

without weapon it is
power: 145,
precision: 145,
toughness: 145,
vitality: 145,
healing power: 145,
condition damage: 145,
critical damage: 20,

agreed, Bash. i’ll be slowly working towards one as well. ; DD
although, whelp, another armor / jewelry / weapon set… if the datamined data is legit.. we’ll get more bank tabs.. one of these days.

Tarsius, that would be pretty cool actually! if and when ya get around to it, i know nothing of site / app building, but if you ever need an extra eye to catch bugs or give suggestions, lmk and i can help.

and lol, i wouldn’t have known what a busman’s holiday was, so good heads up on the definition. lol. the best kinds of holidays, eh?

The weapon is at 79 per stat with 10% crit damage, so i would assume the armors to be correct as well. however i just realized that everything is account bound, which means im stuck leveling armorsmith at some point to do all of this -.-

The biggest thing I honestly get out of celestial is the added crit damage which my current build lacks. I do lose a very small amount of power, and some healing power, which I am looking at ways to make up, but overall my armor/health go up very slightly, while my crit chance/crit damage go up very nicely.

Ah didn’t realise there was a weapon too – I thought the patch was just skins

we get both insignias and inscriptions!
and Bash is correct, for 2h, it’s 79 per stat + 10% crit damage! and again, 3% MF.
looks like some good changes coming your way!

the thing is though, looking on gw2spidy, gw2db, etc, it looks like we’ll need INDIVIDUAL recipes for each piece of gear we want. so not the usual way of just learning the recipe for the insignia or inscription and using discovery. which is at lesat 6 diff recipes for a full set or armor, and then one for each weapon you want to use.. though, the recipes are all over the TP and are supposedly relatively easy to obtain. can someone confirm this?

and then of course, the time-gatedness of obtaining charged quartz crystals to craft them as well. though i heard people are getting charged quartz from the home-instance node as well though. might be a crit chance kind of deal with harvesting. so we may be able to get a full set within a month. :///

Before the release of this gear, If I wanted to build a hybrid/distributive stat type of gearing, mixing gears gave me better results then using celestial trinkets (I.E. a cleric’s peice here, a zerker’s piece here, a knights piece here….).

It might be different with this armor. I’ll have to math it to be sure.

From the eye test, the coat, legs, helm and weapon do grab my attention as something that could work into a build. It doesn’t follow the normal stat distribution of the other gear.

It’s like Anet is acknowledging that celestrial gear was not superior to other gear so they had to up the stat distribution for these new pieces.

Blasino.3128:

Before the release of this gear, If I wanted to build a hybrid/distributive stat type of gearing, mixing gears gave me better results then using celestial trinkets (I.E. a cleric’s peice here, a zerker’s piece here, a knights piece here….).

It might be different with this armor. I’ll have to math it to be sure.

From the eye test, the coat, legs, helm and weapon do grab my attention as something that could work into a build.

This is also my observation, 1-5 celestial trinkets is actually lowering your performance because its possible to get better stats (DPS/burst/mitigation/healing) by combining gear.

Even though i find the same pieces to be of interest in a general build i have been thinking of an other perspective.

We all know thakittens impossible to stack anything with celestials and that you can combine gear and get better stats BUT, there is one exception and that if we look upon celestials as a stat.

Stacking celestials will probabaly create a build that no other gear combination can replicate. If it is so the follow up question would/could be:

What type of gameplay will stacked celestials condtribute with?

I have two celestials drops (unbound rings) and also laurels to buy a celestial amulet and when i get the full armor i think i have stacked enough to have this “unique” build and stat combination. The question is what is it good for.

Hopefully they will update the build tools so its a bit easier to compare stats and when celestials stacking occur, if it occur.

And yeah it seems Anet has understood how useless celestials trinkets are in reality.

akamon.2769:

the thing is though, looking on gw2spidy, gw2db, etc, it looks like we’ll need INDIVIDUAL recipes for each piece of gear we want. so not the usual way of just learning the recipe for the insignia or inscription and using discovery. which is at lesat 6 diff recipes for a full set or armor, and then one for each weapon you want to use.. though, the recipes are all over the TP and are supposedly relatively easy to obtain. can someone confirm this?

Its a very common drop are most of them can be bought for a silver or two.

I have all of them, some from drops but most of them are bought, and i think it cost like 3g.

Buildcraft modifiers for Celestial Armour AND Celestial Weapon vs Berserker Armour and Beserker Hammer

power: -270,
precision: -128,
toughness: 145,
vitality: 145,
critical damage: 4,
healing power: 145,
condition damage: 145,
magic find: 18

I actually think this could open up some alternative/hybrid build options for us.

With a full celestial build you can put 15 into honor for 779 dodge rolling ( 454 spvp ), to suppliment or perhaps even forego AH or MF and invest either in alternative Valor traits or push further into Virtues or Zeal.

No matter how you trait, you still end up with a respectable amount of toughness, precision, crit damage and vitality. Even burning ticks just shy of 500.

edit: updated calculation, based on comparison to a berserker hammer

Thx for the math.

It confirms one of my intuitive observations, its possible to redistribute points from honor (15p) and perhaps move them into zeal or radiance and skip AH/MF, from a wvw perspective. My only concern is that the amount of crit damage in celestials will encourage points in valor for stacking crit damage and burst.

Perhaps something like this would work out with 1h weapons,15/25/10/15/5 and shouts and citadel runes or 10/5/20/15/20 with boon duration runes and consecrations for wvw. The latter sounds really interesting tbh.

Might be something worth looking into, to bad it takes 30 days (even though the time sink is just like 20 minutes in total) to get those armor pieces.

That’s pretty much the trait distributions I ended up with too.

I really like the idea of being able to go deeper into Virtues without sacrificing anything at the top end.

Celestial is for people who want a jack-of-all-trades/rubbish-at-everything build, depending on your perspective.

Svarty.8019:

Celestial is for people who want a jack-of-all-trades/rubbish-at-everything build, depending on your perspective.

That, while generally true ( particularly with accessories etc ) – is a bit of an over-simplification – as we are discussing.

If it allows for some build diversity, I’m all for it. The armour in particular seems to allow for quite a nice stats distribution which means you potentially don’t have to put points into Valor for AH/MF

Svarty.8019:

Celestial is for people who want a jack-of-all-trades/rubbish-at-everything build, depending on your perspective.

Depends on your build honestly. For me, celestial armor with the correct trinkets actually keeps my build fairly close to what I have, but increases a few certain areas (mostly crit damage) Alot of people go for more hybrid builds on guardians, so there is alot of stat mixing to achieve that, which ends up giving you celestial like stats in a way to begin with.

In general I think that this gear would fit in very well with modified Healway builds, where survivability and support are great, but damage can be a bit anemic…

So this is what I AM running currently:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|2.1k.hy|6.1k.hy|1k.74.1k.74.1c.74.1n.74.1k.71h.1c.71h|41k.0.21k.0.2u.0.1c.64.1c.64.1c.64|0.0.a4.u28b.u29a|4h.8|w.16.18.19.1i|e

Now this is with 3/6 Ascended and would require a bit of tinkering to figure out the right balance with 6/6.

However this is what I would have with full celestial (and changing consumables to compensate):
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|0.74.0.74.0.74.0.74.0.71h.0.71h|411.0.211.0.311.0.211.0.311.0.2s.0|0.0.a4.u28b.u29b|2e.1|w.16.18.19.1i|e

So there is a significant increase in effective power due to increased crit damage… as well as a very slight increase to effective health. The catch here though is this build is based on 100% fury uptime between Citadel proc and SaveYourself… when you add this factor in, the celestial build sees a HUGE boost.

With 100% fury uptime you will have reasonable damage while still maintaining all of your survivability and having good support through 800ish dodge heals, shouts that convert conditions, and very high uptime on all boons including retaliation.

Now one change I have been using is Permeating Wrath which is questionable… but it adds yet another boost to damage here because of the increased condition damage.

The role I play in this build is to support and add damage to the melee assist train around me. I also have the option of stacking Power (for better damage) or Healing (for better support) or Precision (for more might procs from empowering might).

Good to see you doing this, Brutaly! I’ve considered shooting for Celestial with my own build, though I’ve dismissed it for now (my own playstyle prefers a higher-DPS setup, as I rarely enter zergs in WvW or situations where I’ll encounter large amounts of unfocused fire). That being the case, I might make a suggestion for runes/traits to counter the inevitable loss of DPS you’ll encounter: you might look into might-duration stacking (or generalized boon-duration stacking). Through runes/traits/food/sigils, you should be able to maintain a consistent 15-25 stacks of might quite easily (even without the staff); that might make up a bit for the loss of direct power.

I’ve noted in the past that 25 stacks of might is huge, giving 875 power and condition damage; being able to maintain that would not only give you something like 218 extra DPS from burning, plus the direct-damage benefits.

One other consideration you might make is that with the healing power from straight celestial gear, AH’s usefulness starts to drop. A build with 20 in virtues and 25 in honor gets a very substantial amount of passive healing from absolute resolution, plus a massive heal-on-dodge if you’re using straight celestial (near or even over 1k per dodge). 10 points in Valor now nets you +250 toughness with Strength In Numbers, which is very strong as well for the point allocation if you can afford to go 30 into Honor for Pure of Voice (need something to replace the condition removal lost from Purity).

Korav.8462:

In general I think that this gear would fit in very well with modified Healway builds, where survivability and support are great, but damage can be a bit anemic…

So this is what I AM running currently:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|2.1k.hy|6.1k.hy|1k.74.1k.74.1c.74.1n.74.1k.71h.1c.71h|41k.0.21k.0.2u.0.1c.64.1c.64.1c.64|0.0.a4.u28b.u29a|4h.8|w.16.18.19.1i|e

Now this is with 3/6 Ascended and would require a bit of tinkering to figure out the right balance with 6/6.

However this is what I would have with full celestial (and changing consumables to compensate):
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|0.74.0.74.0.74.0.74.0.71h.0.71h|411.0.211.0.311.0.211.0.311.0.2s.0|0.0.a4.u28b.u29b|2e.1|w.16.18.19.1i|e

So there is a significant increase in effective power due to increased crit damage… as well as a very slight increase to effective health. The catch here though is this build is based on 100% fury uptime between Citadel proc and SaveYourself… when you add this factor in, the celestial build sees a HUGE boost.

With 100% fury uptime you will have reasonable damage while still maintaining all of your survivability and having good support through 800ish dodge heals, shouts that convert conditions, and very high uptime on all boons including retaliation.

Now one change I have been using is Permeating Wrath which is questionable… but it adds yet another boost to damage here because of the increased condition damage.

The role I play in this build is to support and add damage to the melee assist train around me. I also have the option of stacking Power (for better damage) or Healing (for better support) or Precision (for more might procs from empowering might).

I realize now that buildcraft didn’t carry over the manual numbers in the build, so in the celestial build you can put the numbers that Bash compiled in manually:

power: 224,
precision: 224,
toughness: 224,
vitality: 224,
healing power: 224,
condition damage: 224,
critical damage: 30,

Non-Celestial:
Power 1817
Precision 1482
Toughness 1810
Vitality 1476
Critical Damage 10%
Condition Damage 0
Condition Duration 0%
Healing Power 750
Boon Duration 45%
Critical Chance 30.94%
Damage 10%
Armor 3021
Health 16405

Effective Power 2369.68
Effective Health (EHP) 26993
Damage Reduction 39.23%
Reference Armor 1836

Versus Celestial:
Power 1745
Precision 1461
Toughness 1526
Vitality 1656
Critical Damage 74%
Condition Damage 440
Condition Duration 0%
Healing Power 765
Boon Duration 45%
Critical Chance 29.95%
Damage 10%
Armor 2737
Health 18205

Effective Power 2632.12
Effective Health (EHP) 27139
Damage Reduction 32.92%
Reference Armor 1836

And once you take into consideration 100% uptime on Fury, that is nearly a 20% increase in effective power.

this celestial setup will the builds be gravitating upon after 2-3 months, saying that it is the most balanced setup there is.

i called it first.

The biggest drawback I’m seeing is the lack of power, which prevents any offensive build. While having a smattering of everything is nice and we can do well with that, not having a focus is a huge drawback. Right now, it’s looking more as an alternative to cleric’s gear setups.

For damage builds, it’s probably best to have a mix of power stats (soldier or berserker probably) and celestial if you’re going to try this.

And worth noting, there’s a celestial amulet in sPvP. You can try it a bit there.

good point re: Celestial Amulet in sPvP. though of course, the differences in PvP and PvE/WvW can be quite stark due to the use of consumables, buffs, and mix and matching.

like many ahve mentioned, even when going full celestial armor and maybe weapons, you can tinker to lean towards what have you in the area of trinkets. again, have yet to do more math but the loss of power can be easily compensated for. sure, it’s obviously easier to go a mix of soldiers/zerkers if you’re planning to go full offense. i think the key thing that celestial will be able to open up for us is perhaps some more build options. for e.g. going full into virtues while maintaining more similarity of stats that we have no on other balanced builds.

Triforge pendant is sold for 173 g on the trader. Makes me wonder what people will pay for a celestial chest.

Considering the 24h cd and account bound mats i might sell my first chest to earn some gold.

Talked to a guildie though and he will help me out so in 30 days i will still have the armor and 4 weapons to try out.

Brutaly.6257:

Considering the 24h cd and account bound mats i might sell my first chest to earn some gold.

My understanding was it’s account bound once crafted? I highly doubt you’ll be making any profit.

So worked on some more math…

The exotics have a better stat ratio then the ascended. Each exotic piece has a different one and pieces are better then others.

Legs
Chest
Helm
2H
Gloves/Shoulders/Boots

The last two are arguable though, because the 2H has a lowest stat ratio to its non-celestial counter part but has the higher crit damage.

I’m still messing around with the gear in different builds. I’m trying to see if maybe some of these pieces can help burst builds a little more due to the higher crit damage on some pieces or even taking builds like a support and using the celestial exotics (or some of them) and using the ascended trinkets as your focus (IE all clerics).

pmargeti.7680:

Brutaly.6257:

Considering the 24h cd and account bound mats i might sell my first chest to earn some gold.

My understanding was it’s account bound once crafted? I highly doubt you’ll be making any profit.

Hmmm, i understood that the crystals are accountbound but the crafted gear was tradeable. well i will see at first hand in two days.

Well its not an issue if they arent.

Btw the mats to craft this one cost cost about 2g so if they are tradeable they will make a profit, that im sure of.

Edit: just checked it out in the crafting ui and you are right, the gear is accountbound.

Well than its 50 days to have both armor and a set of weapons. Got artificer at 400 on my ranger.

I can appreciate the curiosity surrounding the Celestial stats, but I fail to see how this would be better, or even as useful as the currently available armour stats for guardians.

I can see ele’s and possibly eng’s making some use of Celestial kit, but unless I am missing something, I see this gimping guardians rather than providing more viable build options. If I am wrong, then fine, but it will take some solid proof to convince me otherwise.

Also, all the time gating and recipe acquisition is annoying. There is nothing so special in this stat combination that warrants this.

As for burst builds it’s not more effective, at all. At least not for pvp/wvw.

Effective Power 2643.64
Effective Health (EHP) 17175
Damage Reduction 21.37%
Reference Armor 1836

Current setup

vs celestial

Effective Power 2184.78
Effective Health (EHP) 20201
Damage Reduction 25.97%
Reference Armor 1836

This is without traits, or buffs of course. As someone pointed out earlier it could work on some heal/ah builds but for burst builds or even dps it’s a loss. The loss is simply too great.

Right now the ability to kill a target quickly even without using a burst is huge, and our survival doesn’t really rely on toughness. I think toughness is a very over valued stat to be honest. I still aim for a certain amount, but I don’t see it being nearly as effective in the current setup. I usually aim for around 2500 armor, and almost never die to direct damage (outside of 3v1s. As an example running 2480 toughness and more vitality my current kills:deaths is 30:1 rounded it’s more along the lines of 29.7 to 1. I’m going to be doing screen shots to prove this later today because I lack the ability to record)

Give you an example in this screen shot. We were heavily outnumbered, in the enemy camp. So we dealt with greater forces + npcs. What kills a guardian is condition overload, I was safe because of my meditations but it is an example. Tanky stats as far as toughness just don’t provide a good buffer anymore. It seems, to me at least, much more effective to go with a fair bit of vitality over toughness. The celestial only provides around 1500 more health for a big chunk of burst/sustained damage.

Well Guardians could benefit from it because you may want to improve damage through Power, Crit %, but also Condition damage for burning.

In the same time, Guardian have naturally low health, and benefit from healing power as well. Celestial does help in those domains.

The set in probably subpar than berzerker for speedy dungeon runs.
But for WvW, it could be different, on paper a zerker guardian will be more fragile to a celestial one. Only real testing could prove that, of course.

PvE is questionnable. You lose a bit power, but you gain magic find included for free.

Still I can see Celestial armor + Zerker jewels becoming a popular choice among Guardian population.

The more number crunching I do, I’m convinced that the gear isn’t worth it.

Like GSSBlunaspike says, it really starts to dig into your burst for a burst build. And if you are going for a little more defense switching out some lesser pieces with soldier’s will win out.

For Support builds or hybrid builds. Maybe… but I haven’t gotten there yet.

And for the condition damage to be worth it, I feel we really need to build/trait for burning which generally makes a build weaker if you go that route.

Antares.2586:

Well Guardians could benefit from it because you may want to improve damage through Power, Crit %, but also Condition damage for burning.

In the same time, Guardian have naturally low health, and benefit from healing power as well. Celestial does help in those domains.

The set in probably subpar than berzerker for speedy dungeon runs.
But for WvW, it could be different, on paper a zerker guardian will be more fragile to a celestial one. Only real testing could prove that, of course.

PvE is questionnable. You lose a bit power, but you gain magic find included for free.

Still I can see Celestial armor + Zerker jewels becoming a popular choice among Guardian population.

The reason the zerker will appear more fragile on paper is because the on paper calculations don’t take into account the active abilities of a guardian.

An example for burst

Focus 5(block/burst), then switch to gs, count to 2,
(gs2, then JI,VoJ all roughly at the same time) then gs4/5, gs3(another blind) switch focus 4(blind condi removal regen damage), sword 3(projectile absorb), sword 2 because they are running or dead also causes blind. I activate VoJ, another blind. While I’m doing this I’m also going through my regular attack setup. You can see some of the examples of my damage from those screen shots above. I’m running under 2500 armor, and the reason it’s possible is because we have lots of blinds/blocks/regen built into us.

Sorry about the above. I genuinely tried to give a good “rotation” for a burst, but the reality is after the initiation it all changes based on the fight. So I gave a rough approximation.
Maybe it’s just how I play, and I will admit I’m not that great.

Personally i never saw them as a mean to get massive burst, the low power prevents that.

I see them as a possibility to get reasonable dps out of non dps centric builds, ie support builds or tank builds.

I think there might be some other trait combinations that might become valid in wvw which also makes them interesting.

Are they interesting from a pure dps or survivability perpsective, no i dont think so.

In short they might be interesting in wvw and they are interesting in open world pve due to MF.

For pure Damage / pure tank builds, no, celestial will not help. However for the hybrid builds like myself that already run a solid mix of all stats (3.4k attack after buffs pre might, 2.9k armor, 16k health, 650 healing power etc etc) the celestial armor is a pretty decent upgrade. the big difference is the amount of crit damage I get back since I don’t run 30 valor anymore. when I get more time I will show the comparison between my current and celestial with different trinkets.

That would be awesome Bash. Would like to see what you came up with.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|1.1g.h17|2.1g.h17|1n.79.1c.79.1n.79.1c.79.1n.79.1c.79|1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1a.61|0.p64.a4.u28b.5|16.1|w.18.19.17.1i|e

Is my current build, add in a manual 250 power and 80 toughness for lust stacks and to fix strength in numbers.

For some reason I cant remember the trinket layout I had that was giving me better overall stats with the celestial gear, Once i figure it out I will edit this post.

nice, Bash. ; ))

agreed with celestial being a stronger contender for your non-typical hybrid builds. again, i’ll still be doing testing as well, but i can sort of imagine a build that focuses on healing power for sustain, moderate to decent direct damage, and a hefty amount of condition damamge. so it’ll definitely be build of attrition with sustained damage. definitely not burst. with support components. e.g. i feel it may make going 30 down virtues easier and can benefit condition damage (VoJ traits) as well as take advantage of high healing (boon duration for regen, protection).

what i like from what i’ve seen so far is that it gives you a good layout of core stats. and then you can tweak towards what direction you want using trinkets, foods, consumables and traits.

will take time, but looking forward to it.

Is the power trade off worth going full celestial in pve/dungeons/wvw? Or instead, only using celestial pieces in low value conversion rate items (like jewel slots) is better?

Also are there any build calculator websites with celestial items added yet?

switching from Knight’s

: -79 PWR/PRE , -170 TOG
: +145 HEAL/CON/VIT, +20% CritDmg, +18% MF

: 328 P/Pr/T against 435 all stats

I wear zerker trinkets, so I can drop some CritDmg%

If I go Celestial armour, Big mama tooth, totem of gorillia, lost ring of usoku, ring of red death (5 pwr infusions), the end result is:

+145 heal/con/vit, +6% crit dmg, +35 Tough, +18% Magic, -86 PWR, -48 PRE (trait gives me 2 pre from 35 tog, so -46 PRE)

How about if we go celestial on trinkets and weapons too (a.k.a full celestial)? Would that be viable as hybrid build?

Erdem.8956:

How about if we go celestial on trinkets and weapons too (a.k.a full celestial)? Would that be viable as hybrid build?

From the looks of it Celestial will offer nothing for a dps build on weapons/armor. Now the new celestial gem looks like a huge gain. Testing a build now but from the way it looks if we go with a burst heavy build we could pick up much higher health, increasing armor, and increasing burst.

It’s a gs/sw/fc build though. I’m fairly certain it would work as a gs/staff or sw/fc scepter build.