Guild Wars 2

Tarsius has made a very nice FAQ that got stickied and in that one you can find builds for competitive gameplay and also for casual pve and wvw.

What cant be found is a guide on how to achieve dps (even though burst builds can be found in Jax tpvp thread) and what traits that are of interest in order to do great/good dps and what type of builds those traits could support.

I think that would be a great contribution to the community and also a very nice addition to the FAQ.

So my question is if there are any plans on making such a guide? I personally think its needed but i dont have the time atm to sit down and write it. There are certainly also people more capable of writing it, that also might feel an urge to contribute to the community.

Build 10-30-30-0-0 vhit berserker and meditations. Good for sPvP and good for pve or dungeons like CoF. If you go in more difficult dungeon, mix it whit a knight or whit a soldier, to increase your defence.
Weapons for spvp: GS and Sword+Focus.
Weapon for pve: the same or GS and Scepter+Torch.

High damage, good healing skills.

Thx but my point wasnt to get a build suggestion. Personally i have a pretty good grasp on dps after a couple of hundreds of hours testing with steady weapons and literally thousands of hours in wvw/tpvp

It was that we have a pretty decent sticky part but we lack a guide to dps, we have nice writeu ps and a great FAQ and it would improve even further with a guide to dps like the one Foofad made on burning builds for instance..

That sounds like a great idea to me. I get most satisfaction and enjoyment from DPS builds in game, but alas I don’t really have anything like the time required to put together a comprehensive guide on the subject. I can certainly help out with the theorycrafting and some general suggestions though…

I hope someone can take up the mantle on this.

Alright guys, you talked me into it (sigh).

I’ll go ask foofad to write one.

BAZINGA.

On a serious note, yes great idea. I guess we can give it a collaborative go.

Thx Blasino (and ofc Foofad) :-)

I can contribute a bit if i can free up some time between my business and the newborn.

Perhaps in the area of gearing and traiting for might stacking. Maybe something about swap/block builds and ofc firefield gameplay.

If you guys set the level of ambition i will adapt and write a might stacking chapter.

Well I guess we could start with some framework.

First, I was thinking of starting on the different weapon coefficients. On one side giving them as they are, and on the other side normalizing them to 1 second. I think the normalizing could be important for PvE. (I.E. ZD vs sword chain)

The second I guess go over our trait lines and traits.

Finally, putting it together?

Thoughts or ideas before I start writing stuff?

Lemme help ya then.

Full zerker with divinity runes and some Knight gear (wich can be dumped as you get better and better).

Hit 1. And when available 2. While keep your shouts up.

And dodge, with ocasional heals.
As food use oils for crit and ghost food. So your crits heal you.

There you go.
This is 95% of GW2 PVE content.

There’s already a ton of information on DPS builds over at the Guru guardian PvE forums. You might ask one of them to cross post over here.

Probably need to juggle the order. It’s probably worth getting an overview of sigils, weapons and traits before attempting to go deeper into combos and might stacking:

1. Gear/Accessory considerations – key stats – to zerk or not to zerk
2. Runes / Orbs / Sigils
3. Food / Potions / Oils / Stones
4. Traits / Multipliers which matter
5. Utilities
6. Weapon choices / co-efficients & DPS
7. Might Stacking / Combos and Vulnerability Application
8. Control, Mobility & Burst
9. Ancillary DPS – Retaliation, Burning, Symbols
10. Survival ( mitigation/evasion, healing and condition removal )

How does that look as an outline?

edit: posted before seeing foofad’s suggestion. Are there any general guides? Most of the ones I’ve seen tend to be weapon combination/build specific

personally i dont like some of the guides ar guru, i find them in some cases to be more of a stunt in mathematics than guides that aim to serve the general crowd. But gettting help from over there isnt bad at all.

I like the outline Tarsius made.

Well, hold up – if you’re gonna make the be-all end-all DPS guide, you’re gonna want to back it up with math. There’s no getting around that. It needs to stand up to scrutiny.

But dodge negates all the damage… ergo no need for math… ergo no need for a dps guide!?

Crap…

I like the outline Tarsius made, though I think traits could be listed 1st since they potentially have a bigger impact? And I think math would be involved. I’ll look at the guru guides. I haven’t been on that website in a while =).

Math is what it is but depending on what the general thought process is, maybe take some of the work done by whomever (sorry, forgot person(s)) surrounding the attributes which work together. There are the standard three I thought which I probably have wrong like Critical damage, Critical chance, and power? Or was it precision. Anyway – I could be totally off mark but the idea is to discuss a bit about the attributes and how they compliment one another.

And just like anything in life too much of one thing is probably bad, yeah? Moreover, it would be cool to maybe take a look at dps has it relates to other things such as healing power and armor.

@Foofad
I agree and personally i dont have any issues with mat, my issue is that it alienates the majority of the potential readers. My point is that in order to make it readable for the average joe they need to be easy to understand, straight to the point and the main focus should be “how to get good dps” not “the math behind good dps”.

Ofc one chapter should be math centric and that is one of the reasons why i like Tarsius outline where chapter 4 has the math part covered.

But the main goal must be to write something that actually gets used by the community as a whole, not for the few. And it has to be very easy and comprehensive for that to happen.

@Blasino
I agree, traits should be the first chapter since that is the main dps contributor.

The math chapter should be more of an appendix or a reference.

Copying the calculation I did in the max whirling wrath dps thread from couple of months ago. It might be useful to illustrate how all the modifiers glue together vs armor vs buffs vs conditions. The inappropriate bonuses, like warrior and ranger passives can be edited out easily.

It also assumes 100% crit success

Max Whirling Wrath Damage

( 1100 * (2514 + (25*10) + (180+150) + (25*35) + (180 * 1.2)) * ((0.4 * 7) + (0.15 * 7)) / 2600 ) * ( 1.5 + 0.96 + 0.15 ) * ( 1.1 * 1.2 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.25 ) = 49642.39

Annotation

( 
    Weapon Attack 
    * ( 
        Base Power/Food/Traits 
        + (Sigil of Bloodlust * 25) 
        + (Warrior Banner of Strength + Empower Allies) 
        + (Might * 25)
        + Bane Signet with Perfect Inscriptions 
      )
    * ( 
        Main Strike Coefficient 
        + Secondary Projectile Coefficient 
      ) 
    / Target Armour Rating 
) 
* ( 
    Base Crit 
    + Crit from gear/traits/food 
    + Crit from Warrior Banner of Strength 
) 
* ( 
    6th Rune of Scholar 
    * Unscathed Contender 
    * Radiant Power 
    * Potion of the Undead 
    * Fiery Wrath 
    * Greatsword Power 
    * Sigil of Night 
    * Ranger Frost Spirit 
    * ( Vulnerability * 25) 
) 
= Maximum Total Damage

I do agree with what Brutaly says though – maths shouldn’t be the focus of the article ( or perhaps it can be reserved for it’s own section at the end? )

With the combat log lacking smaller intervals of time (it only displays hours:minutes) it would be an estimate at best which skills provide the damage per second. I’d wager it is Sword>Greatsword>Scepter when just autoattacks are considered, but that is more of a tangent we can discuss later.

It might be constructive to compare the cumulative damage modifiers of each build as well as potential damage of each skill given power/crit chance/crit mod/damage multipliers.

What should be said, however, is:
1) Relative expected damage output – Weapon selections/optimization.
2) Party support, degree of usefulness to the party – Conditon removal/Boons provided to the party.
3) Personal sustainability/survivability – Self-healing, blinds/blocks, etc – The amount of “buffer” a player has to make mistakes given a particular build/gearing setup.

Personally, I’ve been find myself using a 10/30/0/25/5 build in PvE when DPSing. It provides a fair amount of damage modifiers (10% [Target Burning] * 10% [Target Condition] * 5% [Sword/Spear] * 10% [Endurance not full] * None Trait Bonuses) while maintaining the ability to provide might via crit and not sacrificing the loss of the 5 points in virtues.

The build I’ve used in the past to attain huge Greatsword Whirls [20/30/0/10/10] is Dungeon/Fractals viable, but its reliance on Aegis makes its damage output less reliable in most situations. Aegis has the highest priority of all our blocks. If it is currently active, even if shelter/focus/etc are active, it will remove Aegis first. This severely limits the usefulness of Unscathed Contender outside of situations where you can’t control incoming damage perfectly.

Reihert.1509:

Lemme help ya then.

Full zerker with divinity runes and some Knight gear (wich can be dumped as you get better and better).

Hit 1. And when available 2. While keep your shouts up.

And dodge, with ocasional heals.
As food use oils for crit and ghost food. So your crits heal you.

There you go.
This is 95% of GW2 PVE content.

No need for divinity runes, just use ruby orbs or scholar runes.

I’ve got notes scattered around in numerous posts here and over at guru. I’ll try to pull some of that together for a more complete guide on DPS in general.

I can make one as well but are we all gonna make one and fill the front page? There is no way everyone can agree with each other in some ideas

I really think we should avoid build specifics. As pointed out, no one will agree and there really is no single correct way of doing things.

Rather focus on the individual traits and the synergies between them, and try and not bias any particular build. Encourage practise and experimentation.

Some one said at the top, 10/30/30/0/0, best DPS build you can have, I go full zerk, mainly scepter and torch, greatsword as 2nd set, full meditations trait, awesome busts, with a torch you can hit up to 9k on a thief in mists, a lot more in WvW I guess (I don’t roam WvW, should start tho). Pretty much it, when you go full zerk don’t worry being squishy, I had that fear at the beginning but the you realize that your a guardian and even in a “canon glass build” you can tank 2 players if you got talent, good luck!:)

there are a lot of theorycrafters on community sites, I’d suggest guru if you’re looking for some in depth info.

also, DPS is heavily dependent on circumstance, otherwise under perfect conditions on a single target:
“Scepter > Greatsword > Sword > Hammer > Mace > Staff”
with credit to GuanglaiKangyi

of course this was the info of a couple of months ago, but it should still hold true since not much was changed.

As for traiting weapons, I’d say something like,
For Scepter and Sword, take 20 and 10 in Zeal respectively, 30 in Radiance for Right Handed Strength (and sword trait for sword), also works for mace but the DPS on it is poor overall and wouldn’t make much of a difference whether or not you trait for its damage.
For GS and Hammer, take 25 in Zeal, 25 in Radiance, and 20 in Honor, taking damage traits, the GS trait for GS, and symbol traits in honor (mainly persistence, more ticks on your symbols, affects Hammer more than GS but important to both).

Just some trait combos that synergize well with the weapon, they may or may not be optimal for raw DPS under some arbitrary circumstance but they are good for general use. That and you asked for some trait tips.

Im with Tarsisus on this one. We shouldnt focus on specific builds but what the traits contribute with and how they add to specific weapons.

Blasino and Foofad has stepped up to the plate and Tarsius has outlined a disposition. lets go with that and after we got a first initial guide we give feedback and suggest additions to it.

How about that?

Added another section to my list about bonus dps via secondary effects – eg retal, burning and symbols. Again – the ordering isn’t set in stone

How about the AH build from you Brutaly in full Zerker? Wouldn’t it be a good dps-build? Haven’t tried so far.

BTW…Tarsius…Brutaly…have I seen your names in good old Age Of Conan?

Bamboocha.8129:

How about the AH build from you Brutaly in full Zerker? Wouldn’t it be a good dps-build? Haven’t tried so far.

BTW…Tarsius…Brutaly…have I seen your names in good old Age Of Conan?

The only AH build that can be considered a dps build is x/25+x/30/x/x but personally i would run meditations with that one in wvw and might consider AH in some pve content or just skip meditations and AH entirely.

This is the reason why i think a guide is needed. Dps on a guardian isnt achieved solely by gear, traits are extremely important and specifically damage multipliers.

And absolutely, second pvp 10 Dark Templar in the world and the only bori i did was to get the head, hands and belt :-). I log in occasionally to play a minigame or two but GW2 is so much better so its more seldom than ever.

So I think you are not happy with your AH build anymore. Is there no need to play it nowadays?

I played AoC for 2 years in Mistral and loved it. You are right…GW 2 is the better game but 2 things were better in AoC: The brutal setting with it’s finishers and Fury were you could get killed in every corner! ;-)

Bamboocha.8129:

BTW…Tarsius…Brutaly…have I seen your names in good old Age Of Conan?

Alas, I never played AoC – my last MMO was Aion – Mained a Chanter on Telemachus server

Im very happy with it, i still think its the most competitive setup around. I just think these forums needs some comprehensive info about dps setups. I think the community needs it.

What AH does (besides from adding approx 9% dps from valor) is that it allows you to go into really absurd situations with very offensive gear as long as you have your team with you. A well played AH guardian/team is just the most competitive setup.

But its not per say a dps build. Traits/runes/sigils are in many cases more powerful enhancers of dps than armor, trinkets and weapons.

So when i run with 105% crit damage and over 2k power i wouldnt call it a dps build, its more of an offensive semi tank.

The brutal setting was fun and ofc the finishers where great but very random.

Fury rocked until 1.5 and its also the main reason why i would like to have more pve content in wvw. I loved the feeling doing missions and just waiting for a backstab. That game had so much going for it but that Morrison dude just wrecked it by turning it into a gear centric wow clone.

would love to see a comprehensive DPS guide. also agreed that builds shouldn’t be the main topic, but perhaps there can be a sort of appendix for “popular” or “well-known” or “standard” DPS builds where people can start off with.

definitely beneficial for the Guardian class, especially new users. and knowing the mechanics behind the Guard’s DPS i feel can help those who are playing more supportive roles and still put out a lot of damage.

I started to work on a draft a little bit yesterday and will continue today.

So should I start posting things here and we can edit it? Or should I create a new thread?

@Brutaly, I was kidding about asking/volunteering foofad. Meaning instead of us doing the work we should just make foofad (that was the joke). I really don’t know foofad to ask him something like this haha. Of course I would never mind foofad contributing or doing this as he is great at it.

Blasino.3128:

@Brutaly, I was kidding about asking/volunteering foofad. Meaning instead of us doing the work we should just make foofad (that was the joke). I really don’t know foofad to ask him something like this haha. Of course I would never mind foofad contributing or doing this as he is great at it.

No no, that’s a great initiative – I second this proposal:
+1 to foofad doing all the hard work

This topic has been discussed a zillion time.
Here’s my DPS build since beta

Gear full Berserker
For PVE:
10/25/10/25/0
GS + Sword+Focus.

For tPvP
20/0/30/20/0
GS + Hammer

WvW is a lag war for me, i dont take part in it.

Highest dps weapon guardian probably has is scepter….but its scepter. Don’t think many people want to use it and for a darn good reason.

@Blasino
Post a new thread, “book” a couple of pages and we can discuss you write up in that thread.

I know you where kidding, hence the smiley in my answer.

And I knew you knew that I was kidding hence the post to make Tarsius to create that cool meme we can use now.

Once I finish the draft I’ll make the new thread and I’ll continue to peruse this thread.

Tarsius.3170:

+1 to foofad doing all the hard work

Well, with a nomination like that, I can’t in good faith refuse…

:DDD
foofad for pressie!

What? It’s not done yet?

Slackerz….

I’d love to see a DPS guide! I recently switched from a AH/EM build to try something fresh. Looking forward to it!

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/83701-the-perfect-dps-guardian-build/

Is pretty much the best dps guide there is. There are also videos on Brazil’s channel aswell that you can check out for the way the build plays.

If u are strictly talking about dps, I dun think brazil’s built has the highest damage.

The highest dps built should take all damage modifiers possible such as fiery wraith/radiant power/elusive power/power of the virtuous etc. it will also depend on weapon setup n circumstances as well

Well so far I got the first sentence done… thats progress right?!?

I have an intro and finishing up with the traits section. If anyone else is writing lets collaborate so we do not step on each others toes… or don’t collaborate so I can waste my time and you will probably put out a better guide >.<.

Blasino.3128:

Well so far I got the first sentence done… thats progress right?!?

http://www.wepsite.de/Novel%20Writing.mp3

I could help you guys do the tpvp DPS guide if you’d like.
It’s very different to wvw and pve and spvp and monkeys.

lies, everything is exactly the same as monkeys. I can’t believe a word you say now

Jax.5261:

I could help you guys do the tpvp DPS guide if you’d like.
It’s very different to wvw and pve and spvp and monkeys.

When Blasino/Foofad :-) posts the first draft just post in in that thread and we get a discussion and im certain it will be added if relevant.

Mind you, its a guide to dps first and foremost. Its not a guide to builds even though there will be builds in in it, or at least i think so.

CMF.5461:

lies, everything is exactly the same as monkeys. I can’t believe a word you say now

Open minded is a key word and ofc some parts differ between tpvp, pve and wvw.
Just the fact that you dont think it does shows how needed the guide is.

Brutaly.6257:

Jax.5261:

I could help you guys do the tpvp DPS guide if you’d like.
It’s very different to wvw and pve and spvp and monkeys.

When Blasino/Foofad :-) posts the first draft just post in in that thread and we get a discussion and im certain it will be added if relevant.

Mind you, its a guide to dps first and foremost. Its not a guide to builds even though there will be builds in in it, or at least i think so.

CMF.5461:

lies, everything is exactly the same as monkeys. I can’t believe a word you say now

Open minded is a key word and ofc some parts differ between tpvp, pve and wvw.
Just the fact that you dont think it does shows how needed the guide is.

The reason I stopped doing guides on every single build is due to the way anet constantly updates and changes the meta. I still have video guides of all of them but having 10 or so constantly changing guides would take too much of my time.

The worded guides are either out of date or on guru.

I’m am still working on it! Promise. I’m hoping to have the draft up this week before I leave for vacation, so you guys can constructively tear it up =).