Guild Wars 2

So I just got booted from a COE Path 3 dungeon group for having full clerics gear…wtf. I’m primarily a wvw player so I like playing ultra-support and giving as much heals, protection, and retaliation, etc as I can. I figured clerics gear would make the most sense for me. I also figured it’d be suitable in dungeons as well. But I guess it’s not…? I also have a set of soldier’s gear. Would that be more favorable for dungeon group play? Why did clerics get me booted? Thanks.

Easy answer is that PVE is not the same as WvW. You’re more likely to be accepted with Soldiers gear, but probably not much. The bottom line is that some people care about running dungeons as fast as they can. This means they want to team people that do alot of damage. Unfortunately, being a Guardian, you already have a significant amount of defense in your base toolset. If a player is skilled and knowledgeable with the content, it’s common to see them using full zerker and not get downed.

TLDR .. clerics has very low damage and people like fast dungeon runs. More damage = fast, therefore, they don’t like clerics.

At least run knights but zerker will give guaranteed slot with PUGs.

Your looking a whole other game when you step out of WvW, as Obtena said. DPS is king in PvE.

Best option is to read the sticky:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-DPS-Guardian-for-PVE/first

If you want to run Clerics gear in PvE your gonna have to avoid most groups that say “Speed Run” or “Experienced Only” etc… There are plenty of groups out there that still try to run with things other then the meta.

I would do the same. Clerics gear is dungeons is a waste of space

Also note that Obal’s guide isn’t a max DPS build, he likes to roll in some support it’s not like it’s straight DPS-or-GTFO. It’s just that healing power is a poor stat for support and guardians don’t need other defensive stats so it’s ultimately best to optmize for DPS first then make small tradeoffs for necessary support (in Obal’s case, reflects and condi removal).

In general going “durrhurr i am healz” is not terribly useful in a dungeon because you simply don’t heal enough to make a sizeable difference and the extra time spent fighting things that results from the loss of DPS ends up actually making things harder and more tedious. Moreover, there’s no reason to “heal” when damage mitigation via other guardian options (like hammer prot or consecrations) almost always works well enough.

I’m using almost all cleric piece on my support Guardian and like you I’m a WvWer. I’m doing dungeon with my warrior zerker and my Guardian support cleric and I never wipe in dungeon with my guardian. Normally you’re not supose to wipe in dungeon, but with the LFG tool sometimes you get mix with noobs. With my zerker warrior if the group fail I will die and we wipe, but with my support guardian the group stay up.

Cleric guardian make runs smoother, and that’s why I use my cleric guardian on pugs runs.

For experienced player full DPS is the way to go for fastest run.

Here my video build for my support guardian: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xleAl_RGFr8

Your group will wipe MORE if you lack DPS, that is the problem. 4 bad zerks and 1 good cleric MIGHT be slightly better than 4 bad zerks and one good zerk but more likely the comp is going to be something like 5 bad clerics. In which case you’re all “supporting” each other and no one is doing any damage. You might be able to pool your healing and keep yourselves alive against a boss for ten minutes but with the average pug’s DPS rate that still leaves about an hour to go on that boss. And most dungeons have more than one boss.

Wait, Guardians can be kicked from dungeon runs? Huh… musta missed that nerf…

But seriously, Clerics, in general… is not that awesome, unless you’re using the Healway build. I have a Clerics set just for that build, but I never use it because, while I can survive, I lack to much damage sometimes. It’s not a bad armor set, but just like everything else in the game, especially with the Guardian, it’s situational. I have a Knights set for roaming, Soldier’s set for WvW Guild Raiding, Zerker Set for Dungeons and Fractals, Clerics for that one build I never use but put Phalanx Armor skin over so I’m dam sure not getting rid of it, and a Sentinel’s Set…. which is my holy kitten this fractals is really really hard, lemme swap some pieces. I haven’t used my Sentinel’s set in a few weeks….

If you’re getting booted, though, as a Guardian, unless you have, like, <2K AP (I know, it’s dumb, but I’m seeing it more often of ppl being kicked based on AP), I am left to wonder if you were kicked for dying so much. I’m still getting used to runing 100% Zerker gear, and so I’ve been doing fractals and dungeons with it on, only dying once or twice the whole run. I still don’t get kicked from groups. If you start dropping 5+ times on one boss however….

BroScientist.9875:

So I just got booted from a COE Path 3 dungeon group for having full clerics gear…wtf. I’m primarily a wvw player so I like playing ultra-support and giving as much heals, protection, and retaliation, etc as I can. I figured clerics gear would make the most sense for me. I also figured it’d be suitable in dungeons as well. But I guess it’s not…? I also have a set of soldier’s gear. Would that be more favorable for dungeon group play? Why did clerics get me booted? Thanks.

Because you weren’t running a proper build/gear setup for PvE. PvE and WvW are two entirely different gamestyles, and both require different sets of gear. (With the exception of roaming, since you can get away with running burst/zerks there.) In general, clerics is trash due to the low damage output. The best support you can give as a guardian is active damage migitation by utilizing Aegis, protection, Blinds and Reflects.

Kaizz.7306:

Wait, Guardians can be kicked from dungeon runs? Huh… musta missed that nerf…

But seriously, Clerics, in general… is not that awesome, unless you’re using the Healway build. I have a Clerics set just for that build, but I never use it because, while I can survive, I lack to much damage sometimes. It’s not a bad armor set, but just like everything else in the game, especially with the Guardian, it’s situational. I have a Knights set for roaming, Soldier’s set for WvW Guild Raiding, Zerker Set for Dungeons and Fractals, Clerics for that one build I never use but put Phalanx Armor skin over so I’m dam sure not getting rid of it, and a Sentinel’s Set…. which is my holy kitten this fractals is really really hard, lemme swap some pieces. I haven’t used my Sentinel’s set in a few weeks….

If you’re getting booted, though, as a Guardian, unless you have, like, <2K AP (I know, it’s dumb, but I’m seeing it more often of ppl being kicked based on AP), I am left to wonder if you were kicked for dying so much. I’m still getting used to runing 100% Zerker gear, and so I’ve been doing fractals and dungeons with it on, only dying once or twice the whole run. I still don’t get kicked from groups. If you start dropping 5+ times on one boss however….

People are starting to wise up on guardian leaches is what the nerf is. Camp staff or scepter to long in a dungeon group and you are quite likely to get kicked.

If you are in full/partial zerker (or at least knights/valk)and dealing your share of damage it should be obvious to the party. A good group is usually understanding of getting downed, it happens when you have low passive defense: sometimes you miss your aegis/blind/prot/dodge. No big deal, they are zerk too so the fight is quickly over. A bad group sees a zerker go down and they get kitten, stop being bad, dead dps is no dps ect blah blah blah. Well if the clerics did their share of damage the zerker wouldn’t have run out of active defense or had too many chances to make a mistake (long fights can get sloppy). 9/10 times when the zerker goes down in a survival based pug group its not as much his fault as it is the fight is taking to long and quite often the selfish clerics aren’t providing the correct types of support focusing on irrelevant heals instead of preventing the damage in the first place. A very good zerker player can solo quite a bit of the content, but its not easy and even good players have trouble with other players interference (great use of fear skills there bud, now the ball of enemies is split and its a big mess now…)

start your own dungeon instance and then invite people to it. lock them in to playing with you. don’t ping your armor. just play the game.

Or when you use the LFG tool, just look for a party with like 2 necromancers and a ranger in it. They won’t kick you no matter what your build is. -.-

Sera.6250:

Or when you use the LFG tool, just look for a party with like 2 necromancers and a ranger in it. They won’t kick you no matter what your build is. -.-

I got into a group labeled “speed run” for AC 3… lvl 70 engi, staff necro, bow warrior, support bow ranger… Yeah, idk who thought that was a speed run group… They were mad I wasn’t a ele so they could kill the burrows.

I’m a zerk meta guardian, I could tell they did no damage to anything because i would randomly stop attacking and watch the health bars on the enemy just freeze solid. I couldn’t imagine how much of a pita that that group would have been if I hadn’t been there to carry them. Over all the run went smooth because although they weren’t doing any damage they weren’t’ dying or anything either. Run only took about 4 minutes longer than normal because most of the dungeon is time gating and running.

@Notabot: haha well…cmon now. Staying in a winning team like that just doesn’t seem very smart :P

@OP: Rightfully so if it was labeled as a speed run or required specific criteria to be met. Hold on to your Cleric’s gear for WvW but ditch it and run DPS in PvE.

You don’t necessarily need to run clerics in dungeons. I’ve personally done fractals 40 a while back in clerics while testing a full support build and it went ok but would’ve been faster in more dps gear.

I don’t think anyone would kick you for just gear choice since what’s really important is knowing the encounter and the mechanics but then again if you get unlucky and find some stuck up children for teammates I suppose that could happen.

If you are using clerics gear, I’d recommend running in a zerg in wvw as it will be most useful there.

An all cleric dungeon group is actually kind of funny. Pretty average power, no crit damage or chance… But you probably wont die even with the dodge disabled. Fights take like 5-10 times longer to complete, but since most dungeons have skipable sections, it adds less time to the ran than you would thing (depends on actual run, SE1&3, HotW1, CoF1, AC, ect are almost entirely skip most mobs to get to the unavoidable fights/bosses).

TBH If I didnt’ feel comfortable running more damage based builds I would at least run a knights or valk build before I would run a cleric build. I run more balanced in wvw, but in small raiding parties (5 man in a group and whatever people we pick up on the way) and solo/duo camp/yak killing so I don’t need to even consider the role of the cleric guard that you see in zerg groups.

Why they even did invite you? It’s kind of clear that guardians use cleric gear. I would kick every guardian who doesn’t have at least 1k healing power.

Junkpile.7439:

Low quality trolling since launch

Indeed.