Guild Wars 2

Glacial Heart is pretty meh, so it got me thinking of a build I could make that revolves around it. Came up with this. So let’s go over the build;

Weapons:
Hammer (Sigil of Hydromancy) Freeze nearby foes for 3 seconds when you swap to this weapon while in combat.
Greatsword (Sigil of Ice) 30% crit inflict Chill.

Runes, you have two to choose from. More offensive players can op for Ice and defensive can use Svanir. Here are the bonuses so you can see. You can also mix them to get a higher frozen duration. So three Ice and three Svanir. Or four Ice and two Svanir.

ICE
(1): +25 Vitality
(2): +20% frozen duration
(3): +50 Vitality
(4): 5% chance to freeze all nearby foes when hit.
(5): +90 Vitality
(6): +5% Damage damage against frozen foes.

SVANIR
(1): +25 Toughness
(2): +20% Frozen Duration
(3): +50 Toughness
(4): -50% Frozen Duration
(5): +90 Toughness
(6): Become a block of ice for 5 seconds when you fall below 20% health.

Traits: 0/10/30/25/5
Blind Exposure
Purity
Glacial Heart
Altruistic Healing
Superior Aria
Two-Handed Mastery

As for gear I’d recommend knight and berserker so you can crit more, and food go for Bowl of Truffle Ravioli. (100 tough/70 prec)

Fun build, nothing too serious. I just wanted to make Glacial Heart useful.

I was thinking about a similar build lately, but as far as I know the sigils used (Hydromancy and Ice) share their cooldown, so wouldn’t it be counter effective if, for example, the sigil of Ice would proc just before you switched to the hammer (in which case the Hydromancy sigil wouldn´t proc on that swap)? Does that happen often?

Any suggestions for an alternative sigil for the GS? assuming you would swap often to maximize the chill uptime from Hydromancy proc, would the Sigil of Battle work?

Hmm never had a problem with it proc. You can also use Sigil of Chilling on your Hammer so you get a 60% Frozen duration.

i actually use those svanir runes in wvw. let me tell you. its saved my life more than once, or twice, or three times. imho use 1h sword, you get better precision traits if you want to chill someone over and over.

Ya Svanir runes are legit, still one of my favs. Use your virtues to heal up when you are Invulnerability. Then you can combo into Shelter or Renewed Focus.

You could always go 4 svanir and 2 ice for 90% freeze duration. But you would lose out on the iceblock which can save you. If you are human i would suggest running reaper of grenth too. Nothing would ever be able to run from you at that point.

Honestly though i could see the build being useful for any damage style build, go with freeze on crit on both weapons, with the rune durations. Since glacial heart is kinda a meh skill you could always leave it out in favor of something else so you arent limited on weapons. And since most of the freezing comes from the sigils anyways it would be pretty decent at slowing people down.

Edit: just realized that the second duration number on svanir is a reduction on you so forget my 90% comment.

So i actually messed around with a “cold hearted” build in Spvp and the results were pretty nice. I ran with 2x svanir 2x ice 2x sanctuary runes with a 30/10/30/0/0 build, which gives me 90% increased duration. Used hammer/GS, went with 10% extra damage when burning, 5 vuln stacks when using an imobilize, and GS healing in zeal. Blinds giving vuln in radiance, and Meditations cooldown, glacial heart, and meditation healing in Valor. overall it worked very nicely.

The sigils (used ice in both) give 3.8 sec chills, and glacial heart when it proc’ed gave 7.6 second chill. Overall it really locked down anyone near me and gave my team an easy time killing. even more so for the ranged classes so they didnt need to kite at all. I have pretty much already transfered the build over to try it in WvW but haven’t yet. I will update on it once I do. Looking forward to using Reaper of Grenth with it to see how long i can slow someone down for.

@Bash – good call on 2x sanctuary runes. did you test the build with less than 90% frozen duration and how that worked? though given high crit, you would technically have more frozen up time on your foes. either way, good to hear it’s effective!

further theory crafting here, going 25 in radiance could be quite beneficial? iirc, 10% dmg against foes with conditions on them. so with burns, chills, and blinds, invuln, would be a good way to increase dmg

[added: more food for thought (ha) -

• veggie pizza for 40% duration, argubly there could be better foods to use though
• as well as giver’s weapons for condition duration, vitality and precision]

I had read that the giver’s weapons were bugged and not working correctly. However i dont know if i want to give up my stats for them anyways. With the veggie pizza i could possibly drop the zeal traits in favor of the radiance and pick up RHS. The issue though is i love mango pies too much for the passive healing i get :/ But considering the passive damage reduction i get from chill because of the skill recharge increase it might be fine.

Once i get the chance to test it out I will let you know how it works. It should help alot with our mobility issues at the least since enemies will be constantly slowed. Also it should bring some group fight help to my original build (10/30/30/0/0) by causing aoe lockdown. (and sooooooo looking forward to using reaper to perma chill people)

Maybe slightly off topic, but I think glacial heart could work if they make it so symbols apply chill (in much the same way as symbolic exposure allowing them to cause vulnerability).

It could even trade places with wrathful spirits making it grandmaster on the zeal line. It’d fix so many things about the guardian.

Haha unfortunately I picked up a giver’s inscription last night to try it out and heard today it was bugged. I’ll still give it a shot later on. Agreed about the food only thing is condition dmg doesn’t add that much for us.

Would like to hear your findings regardless! And see if it’s worth losing the healing power.

And chills on symbols would be insanely fun. I do feel glacial heart itself can be polished in so many ways.

Well trying to test out this build has been horrible. Bad lag preventing me from actually testing it along with an enemy server dominating all the maps is killing it as well. However I do not think I will actually like the build too much, I feel like I might be giving up a bit too much just for chill to work, (namely all my rune slots, and my food buff) however I think the place where this might belong is in the AH/EM builds. It could easily be inserted without too much fuss, and would work well with it.

HeyHey Bash sorry had to leave earlier. I agree though. Was thinking of using this with an AH build so as to not give up too much using the runes and food, etc.

I think i am going to save up and get a new gearset and work on a “hot ice” build. Aka A build that focuses on burn damage and chilling. Thinking of going with rabid gear set for the most part (cond/toughness/perc) with scepter/torch and hammer for maximum lockdown potential. I still havent worked out a full build yet though.

Heinel.6548:

Maybe slightly off topic, but I think glacial heart could work if they make it so symbols apply chill (in much the same way as symbolic exposure allowing them to cause vulnerability).

It could even trade places with wrathful spirits making it grandmaster on the zeal line. It’d fix so many things about the guardian.

That it would.

However, ArenaNet wants to change things in small steps. I don’t know if they’ll ever be up for completely removing and adding Major Traits anymore since that’s an instant change… you can’t make that gradual. By the looks of things, most of our traits will stay the way they are (still 2 bugged Grandmaster traits for months).

Alarox.4590:

Heinel.6548:

Maybe slightly off topic, but I think glacial heart could work if they make it so symbols apply chill (in much the same way as symbolic exposure allowing them to cause vulnerability).

It could even trade places with wrathful spirits making it grandmaster on the zeal line. It’d fix so many things about the guardian.

That it would.

However, ArenaNet wants to change things in small steps. I don’t know if they’ll ever be up for completely removing and adding Major Traits anymore since that’s an instant change… you can’t make that gradual. By the looks of things, most of our traits will stay the way they are (still 2 bugged Grandmaster traits for months).

But it is gradual. First, they add a useless glacial heart, which replaced a trait, but is mostly just filler, then they make it good, and we get a new build and a reason to invest in zeal (don’t care what happens to wrathful spirits tbh). Everyone benefits.

Back in beta there were so many people complaining about symbols because of its static nature, and as far as being area denial goes, symbols are still not up to par with everything else. The chill would make symbols something to watch out for, and as long as the guardian has to build for it (no more 30 valor + 30 honor tank) I don’t see why not.

Bakitten291:

I think i am going to save up and get a new gearset and work on a “hot ice” build. Aka A build that focuses on burn damage and chilling. Thinking of going with rabid gear set for the most part (cond/toughness/perc) with scepter/torch and hammer for maximum lockdown potential. I still havent worked out a full build yet though.

That sounds way fun. I’dd personally might mix rabid and knight but full rabid could work as well. Hammer and scepter defs offer so much control. I’d like to add with scepter/ shield you get an extra knockback which I thought was really fun in WvW. Though seeingng how you’re going for icy burns heh. How I wish torch #5 burned as well.

well im kinda debating on what to actually run for a spec. Looking at it I might just drop the Icy part all together and run for longer condition duration. with Hammer, Scepter and possible condition signet (with 3 sec immobilize on use) i could get alot of lockdown without having to sacrifice everything for the freezing. The biggest issue is i need 30 in virtues i believe to make a decent burn build, between either taking the justice on 4 hits trait, or the aoe on justice passive. It would just take too much to get to glacial heart and still take some traits for survivability.

At the moment the build im leaning towards is honestly a burn version of the Healway build that Christos has, just switching clerics out for Apothecary, sticking with 30 in virtues but going towards the justice traits and still keeping some of the healing it has. I am just trying to stick some points outside of the 30 in virtues i need and the 15+ I want in honor. Though I think i can actually manage 100% added burn duration with just 5 points into the zeal tree, which would give me a 2 second burn instead of a 1 with the justice passive.

OK so tried a burn style build in Spvp like the one i wanted. it was pretty much horrible lol. even if i had food buffs I dont think it would do enough damage to be worthwhile. Guess i just stick with my normal build for now until I can find something else to play around with -.-

Tried this in SPvP, condi removal shuts this build down so quickly, haha, well at least it was amusing.

Heinel.6548:

Alarox.4590:

Heinel.6548:

Maybe slightly off topic, but I think glacial heart could work if they make it so symbols apply chill (in much the same way as symbolic exposure allowing them to cause vulnerability).

It could even trade places with wrathful spirits making it grandmaster on the zeal line. It’d fix so many things about the guardian.

That it would.

However, ArenaNet wants to change things in small steps. I don’t know if they’ll ever be up for completely removing and adding Major Traits anymore since that’s an instant change… you can’t make that gradual. By the looks of things, most of our traits will stay the way they are (still 2 bugged Grandmaster traits for months).

But it is gradual. First, they add a useless glacial heart, which replaced a trait, but is mostly just filler, then they make it good, and we get a new build and a reason to invest in zeal (don’t care what happens to wrathful spirits tbh). Everyone benefits.

Back in beta there were so many people complaining about symbols because of its static nature, and as far as being area denial goes, symbols are still not up to par with everything else. The chill would make symbols something to watch out for, and as long as the guardian has to build for it (no more 30 valor + 30 honor tank) I don’t see why not.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Suggestion-Writ-of-Impediment/first#post1158251