Guild Wars 2

Ok, so I want to use the GS, mace, and shield for my weapon set.

I was wondering if I could make a solid build with this? I need you guys help with skills, traits, etc.

Any help will be appreciated. Thank you

If you plan to tank, I would replace the GS with a Hammer or Scepter +focus.

If you plan to tank, put toughness in your gear so you can hold aggro. Otherwise pickup Vitality for survivability.

Altruistic Healing is an excellent trait to work up for dungeons or any team based play. It heals you for every buff you place on people. These buffs also include weapon symbols, signet buffs, shouts, extra buffs you may place after a borken Aegis etc.

Those are the basics I can share to get you started. There are a ton of builds online that use Altruistic healing.

You need points in Valor to get the crits → vigor buff and dodge heals. 90% of dungeons are dodging.

Tanking does not help much except for those dungeon missions where a tank is required, which are usually not that hard to do without using a tank strategy. What is more important is being able to dodge continuously and do ranged damage. That and increased Aegis layers really help deal with the 1 hit kill scenarios that always stretch dungeon runs to 2 hours longer than they should be. Virtues is good solely because of Wall of Reflection, which can be a lifesaver. Stability of any kind also helps a lot. Protection is probably less useful because in cases where people won’t be able to handle the damage, you won’t either.

Whatever set you take, bring a “high DPS against bosses” set, because just about every mission has this one boss who is vulnerable only for a short period of time and either gets invulnerable or creates a surrounding death zone that will force you to bug out.

I use gs and 1h sword and shield. Get 20% 2h skill cd reduction from the honor trait (20 pts). To survive, get 30 valor for altruistic healing. Also, put 5 points in virtues for the virtues buffs. That leaves you to about 15 points left to invest in whatever! Also, if you are a fan of skill cd reduction, get the shield one as well in the valor traitline (it gives you +90 as well for weilding the shield which is nice).

In my experience “tank” quickly becomes synonymous with “kiter”. Pack some swiftness if you go this route.

Shield is not very useful in dungeon compared to focus, because shield of wrath can fully block many boss combos (saving yourself, or allowing you to revive allies safely).

A good source of healing is a must. Monk’s focus or altruistic healing work if you don’t have any +healing in gear; selfless daring and regeneration work extremely well if you do have +healing.

There are many ways to get altruistic healing to proc if you use it — might on crits, weapon sigils that grant boons, virtues (with 5 points in virtues), hallowed ground (often overlooked), shouts, symbols…. even traits that grant a boon only to yourself work (though 80pts of heal doesn’t mean much)

Pack at least a stun break, judge’s intervention also gives you a teleport to get out of some sticky situations.

CARRY A SCEPTER. Many bosses virtually require you to use a ranged weapon; or have patterns that make them just flat out better DPS.

Strongly consider protective reviver over 2 handed mastery. Your damage is coming from autoattack for the most part anyhow; a few extra seconds won’t make a ton of difference. 10 seconds of protection and regen will, however, make quite a bit of difference.