Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone,
this has been asked a hundred times perhaps, but I also have to. ;-) My first character is a thief, which I pretty much enjoy but feel like a pure dps-class, that can only share support in a group in a very limited way (stealth and two combo-fields, very very little heal,…). I want to run a second char, now with heavy armor and simply can’t decide between warrior and guardian. To be honest, the high dps of a warrior are tempting, but it’s not everything I want from my new character. Perhaps I want too much (something like a jack-of-all-trades), but these are my requirements:

For PVE (dungeons) and WvW I want to:
1. make a decent amount of damage and be able to win a 1vs1-fight, perhaps even a 1vs2 damage-wise.
2. be strongly supportive for a group and not limited to dealing damage alone.

I heard of warrior-builds that heal and share boons through shouts and/or banners if traited. But generally I heard the guardians are higher capable of supporting while dealing less damage.

So what would you think, which class could be better in sharing both, high dps and strong support for a group (heal, boons)??

Any help would be great!

Either class could do what you described. Guardians can do as much damage as any other profession (but they can’t really do much burst damage).

The only warrior weapon that beats out guardian GS is warrior GS by spamming Hundred Blades on CD. The rest of the weapons are about equal in overall DPS, i.e. warrior axe = guardian 1H sword, mace, etc.

Warrior has access to more CC skills (daze with mace, KD with hammer, spammable CC utils) but those aren’t as useful. In general if you’re using a warrior you’ll want to be wearing full Berserker’s gear and spamming HB. Otherwise you might as well use a Guardian, you’ll have equivalent DPS, better groupwide buffs (symbols, shouts, etc.) and better survivability.

That HB spam is really good for DPS, though.

Guardian can do decent DPS, but as mentioned not burst. However you can spec to last in battle, be very difficult to kill while dishing out some pain and giving nice support to your group.

Running Wvw with my own variant of the crithammer build I find the guardian to be a solid class. Hammer, great sword (leap of faith + judge = lol), staff are my most used weapons.

Don’t let the low health pool fool you, a guardian is no easy target.

Hrm, well I run with a warrior, and while HB is nice its my dual axes that seem to reek more damage, And yes you can go heals with warrior which is extremely useful in WvW, I have spec’d into that with shouts heals and I can hold my own fairly well against 1-2 people at a time at facepoint, more if I decide to go with more mobility. But the base heal gives me about 6k, my shouts heal for 3-4k, Plus I run an almost constant 25 stacks of might at all times by smartly managing my CD’s, [For great Justice] [Signet of Furry] [Signet of Might], Its my gear that makes this all possible which is the same for most classes Im asuming, when I want to go with heals I equip my Healing based Gear, High DPS is my Berserk gear.

I’d give a lot for my Guardian’s 1H Abilities to be comparable damage wise to my Warrior’s Axe. Not sure where you would say they are equal. War Axe > Guard Sword or Mace. (Also Axe gets Eviscerate so even more damage on top for having that equipped in the MH).

Not to mention if you build a Condition Damage Warrior MH Sword can pump out a lot of damage in terms of bleeds.