Guild Wars 2

Next on my mission to get 1 character of every class to 80, guardians! (So far I fully unlocked Herald Reaper and Tempest, have a lvl 80 mesmer but not liking the gameplay much). The thing is, I like to have a build in mind to shoot for when I get to lvl 80, I’m not entirely sure what that is exactly. What are some endgame gear/builds DH are having success with in respect to dungeons, lvl 50-70 fractals (cuz I’m not messing with anything higher until ANET tweaks it) and raids?

I think I’ll try to do map completion on my guard (my ele has 51% but he’s… squshy. Like “if I’m not on full alert I’m gonna die” squishy). My question is, how do guards to with mobility to get from point A to B quickly?

Also I have a human male guardian, recommendations on some nice skins to get also very welcome! (I’m thinking I want a medival “dark knight” kind of look)

Guardians have some of the worst mobility in the game.

They have no + movement speed trait (others all have at least one, some have 2)

In order to maintain full swiftness they also either have to use 2 utility skills (save yourselves & retreat) the former of which is on a 60s cd, the later on a 40s cd.

Or they are forced to use the staff. A weapon with absolutely horrible damage (just enough to tag enemies in most castes) and stand still for 4 seconds every 15 seconds while waiting for a symbol to pulse 4 times.

Or you can use Travelers runes (final setup) or sigil of speed (while leveling) for fast movement and these will have a minor impact on your stats. Equipping a staff and shouts for getting swiftness doing Openworld makes no sense and get’s cumbersome very fast.

If you know what you’re doing, you can just zerker setup dungeons and fractals, though being ready with swappable accesories with a little more defensive stats is good in a pinch. If yuou have to go full setup for defensive, I wouldn’t push more than a Soldiers stat. Beyond that, I would say your team is scrub

For world explore, it’s easy enough to have swiftness up between shouts and staff.

I run Dragon Hunter with GS/Bow, Pack Runes, Swiftness trap, and Retreat. I feel like I have fairly high levels of swiftness when moving node to node.

Lack if mobility becomes in issue in other game modes where you may want to slot other utilities.

For movement…guard is great when you use sword tp / ji / gs leap.
With dh it is even better.
With traveler runes I am able to be quicker than majority of other professions

For open world exploration if you don’t have dragon hunter unlocked just use shouts and a sigil of speed . You can even have a staff on swap to quickly drop a symbol of speed. With just save yourselves and retreat I believe you can get almost 90 sec of continuous swiftness . Coupled with a sigil of speed and you can have some pretty good uptime on swiftness. If you are already level 80 and doing HoT content then taking some boom duration food as well will also increase your uptime.

As others said:

Speed runes (they are fairly cheap you can slot them even in karma gear), GS leap, sword teleport, Judge’s Intervention and the Shout Retreat! makes you really fast! I mean REALLY fast

The two teleports can help where no swiftness can be effective: to make shortcuts. So the offhand should be focus to block the annoying attacks like immob from spiders or cripple from other mobs.

A guardian built for map exploration can be very fast but unfortunately they have to use 2 given weapons and two utilities… (no, the staff is not a mobility weapon if solo…)

If you are a DH then you have other source of movement a.k.a. F2 and the swiftness trap. This makes you even faster.

So tldr: a DH exclusively built for movement is as fast as a thief or a warrior….

For dungeon & fractal builds check out Obal’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHYN7WPNOROPyFjT86oOJrQ

Personally I’m not rly a fan of DH in high level fractals (even tho it’s my main) because the mobs there are such HP spunges. Basically fights go a lot faster when replaced by a chrono. But yeah, hopefully this is less of an issue on tuesday.

As for raids, I don’t feel guardian has a great place there. It’s an easy-mode tank for VG, but as soon as you get to gorseval it feels a bit low on the DPS side considering the higher damage needed there.

Narc has a vid here for DH tank (raids only!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HBQkl7IPt8

Personally I run a glassier set up but that’s between you and your (future?) raid group I guess.