Guild Wars 2

I decided to roll a heavy support guardian. My traits are 0/10/30/30/0 using Staff + Mace/Focus (sometimes hammer for KB)

I was curious which armour set is better for support in the end.
I like the +101 toughness on Giver’s vs the +72 toughness.
However, does the +72 vitality make up for the 29 point difference?

I know the boon duration people have said is ‘bleh’ on it’s own, though that is why I am looking between the sets and looking for advice. To see which in the end would make a better support guardian, as, I am aiming for max survivablity while offering support. (After all: a dead guardian does nothing regardless)

Just as a further note: I am leaned more toward Soldier’s over all, I just would rather compare items before attempting to dungeon farm the Soldier’s gear.

Boon duration is only worth it in high doses imo. To that note, Giver’s is not a good armor choice if that’s your only source of boon duration. The stats you give up for the measly increase to duration is better. To that end, consider also cleric or magi so that your dodge rolls push out more healing.

As a supporter, you need at least 5 in Virtues so that you give other boons as well as the activation of them.

You may consider get boon duration from runes and traits, its far better than giver can offer.

ps. you only get 70 trait points at 80, so may want to revisit your build.

Define your role a bit more. You clearly want to be a boon factory, but Givers armor is not ideal. Using runes and traits you can get up to 70% boon duration, combined with food that is 90%. Alternatively you can go with runes to increase a specific boon duration (ex. might – fire, strength, hoelbrak 2/2/2) and have 60% for that specific boon plus 50% from food and traits (realistically, 40% – 30 Virtues is hard to justify) and get even more.

Now you can start to say things like “okay, would I rather increase all boons or focus on a specific one?” If you chose to increase Regeneration, you can have 100-110% boon duration for it and use a Mace and Focus and have nearly infinite Regeneration. If you do 100% Protection you can use a hammer and get almost infinite Protection. If you do Might you can use Empowering Might, and Hammer blast finishes to get – get this – 40 seconds of 3 stacks of might per Fire field blast finished. If there is an Ele in your party, you don’t need a warrior, you can get 25 stacks by yourself.

At that point you have to seriously question whether you even care about survivability because a party with 25 might stacks demolishes any encounter.

As Foo said, define your role more. What Major Traits were you going to spec? Do you see yourself as more of a back line support or a “in the thick of it” support. Also, do you have a consistent group that you will be doing dungeons/pvp etc. with or are you going to pug?

If you are going to pug, I would suggest more a dps/support rather than hard support mostly because you might run into a group with a hard support already and more than one full support in a group can be a hindrance as they sacrifice a lot of personal DPS to buff everyone (at least if you go the Boon Duration route). A decent build to look at is Empowering Might with Knight’s gear. That will give you the toughness that Giver’s is giving with the Power and Precision to get crits.

Do you plan on going an Altruistic Healing route? If so, steer away from Healing Power gear as AH doesn’t benefit much from it (0.01 Coefficient).

Pure support can work in an organized group, but lean more toward flexibility when pugging.

http://www.gw2builds.org/create/bwe_1/guardian#2.0.4.1-3.10.8.3.2-0.10.30.30.0-12.9.11.1.4.7.8

Is my current build with traits. I realize some of the stats on that page are typos, however, they are close to being accurate to the traits I am using (example: cooldown on weapons says it’s 25% on there, it’s actually 20%)

I have one friend that I do instancing with, other than that is it usually pugs. However, if they want DPS, I can switch over to my pure DPS thief, which is why I am going heavy support Guardian on my guardian. To be able to offer either or.

I am thinking, with the way I have it thus far, that soldier’s would be better to go than Givers. Thanks for the input.