Greatsword in PvE
The crithammer build’s survivability is so good because the fact that you have protection up time at permanent or close to. There’s no way GS can come close to that. Since its survivability is so great, it allows you to use damage gears such as berserker without consequences. About the damage of hammer, it has the best damage chain attack with Writ of Persistence. It also has great synergy with Altruistic Healing that adds even more survivability.
For GS, you can go offensive meditations. It’s either 10/25/30/0/5 or 10/0/30/20/5 with 5 spare points for w/e (or 0/15/30/20/5 if you want to take Renewed Justice). The first one will be more “bursty” due to the 10% extra damage and crit bonus from Radiance. The second one will provide more survivability with Vigorous Precision, Selfless Daring, and keeping 2-Handed Mastery. Run double or triple meditation utilities and you should be able to survive.
For dungeon running, Crithammer will destroy any build out there. It’s packed with offensive and defensive power as well as the ability to give out boons and heals as support (permanent protection in melee).
I run 0/15/30/20/5, which can basically either be the Altruistic Healing hammer build or can be a generic triple Meditation build that works fantastically with a greatsword. I frequently switch my major traits, utilities, and between all three two-handed weapons depending on the situation.
Also, “Draconic” armor simply refers to the exotic tier of crafted armor, not a set of stats, so I’m not actually sure what kind of gear you are wearing/wanting to wear.
20/25/0/20/5 is the build I go with. I use precision/vitality/crit %/power build. Only two 3 pieces have vitality (GS/gloves/shoulders). I have no issues at all PvE with this build.
0/15/0/30/15 Justice Spam build would be my pick for a roaming build. It’s not tough enough to do well in most Dungeons however. You’ll notice there’s 10 points missing but I’ll get to that.
Key Traits are (in order of appearance) Justice is Blind, Renewed Justice, Two-Handed Mastery, Empowering Might, Inspired Virtue, Vengeful and Virtue of Retribution.
Justice is Blind is your main form of damage mitigation. Thanks to Renewed Justice and fighting relatively easy enemies (most likely in hordes if you do it right) you will use VoJ a lot and thus toss out a lot of Blinds. Stagger in Leap of Faith in a pinch. Renewed Justice is self-explanatory. You want to burn people a lot and pump your damage output via Might. Hence the addition of Empowering Might. With Berserker gear this should proc a LOT. With one inspired Justice and full Empowering Might you’ll always have 8 stacks of Might on you, equal to an extra 240 Power/Condition Damage. It’s like 240 points in Zeal, just without the stinker Traits or the mostly useless Condition Duration.
Since you’ll be spamming VoJ, a Virtue, you’ll trigger Virtue of Retribution a lot. Since you’ll also have a Symbol of Wrath up 5s out of 8s, Vengeful is maybe not necessary, but I’d rather be safe than sorry and I personally don’t depend on SoW all that much cause I keep moving to drag more enemies into the fight.
The major Adept Traits are up in the air. There’s a bit of room to adapt to playstyle here. I like Blind Exposure, even if it’s only a 1% net damage boost for a few seconds. Signet Mastery is obviously nice with Signet of Resolve. In Honor, there’s Superior Aria for a Shout build and Writ of Exaltation to get more enemies into Symbol of Wrath. Virtue has the aforementioned Vengeful but also Master of Consecrations if you swing that way.
My skill loadout with this would be Judge’s Intervention, Purging Flames and Save Yourselves, so both Shouts and Consecrations might be worth enhancing. Okay, Purging Flames recharges fast enough on its own. But if you dropped another skill for Hallowed Ground MoC might make sense. Conversely, adding Hold the Line would give the build a more defensive twist.
So like I said, there’s 10 points missing. The obvious places to spend them would be to get more of either Radiance or Virtue. The major Master Traits in Radiance all kinda suck, but Radiant Power is a good pick since you’ll be burning a lot of people. Power of the Virtuous is the reverse and works really nicely if you plan to focus on Shouts as your skill loadout. Alternatively, 10 points in Zeal can get you Fiery Wrath which also works nicely with you setting people alight. 10 points in Valor… well, there’s Crit Damage and uh… Retributive Armor I guess. Which would give you a whopping ~50 Precision for your efforts. Unless you go with Knight gear.
My personal pick would be to toss them in Virtue. 25% Boon Duration is nothing to sneeze at especially when you’re generating a lot of relatively short-lived Might stacks. The more overlap you can get here, the faster you kill stuff the sooner VoJ recharges the more Might you can stack. And if you’re worried about survivability at this point you can pick up Absolute Resolution for more passive healing and massive emergency condition removal.
Again, this build might have issues in Dungeons against bosses. But farming drops and during Events it very effectively cuts through chaff. Using Knight gear might cover enough of the survivability hole to make it useful in Dungeons though.
The internet is for Norn