Guild Wars 2

Ok my mains are warrior/mesmer. I am currently working on my guardian and I have no idea what I want to do with him. I don’t want flat out dps I have that with my other 2 proffesions. I want more of a support role while maintaining power,toughness,and healing power. Is there anyway to make my guardian “self healing” without making him a flat out tank. I know people “mainly elitist” will say either go one way or the other but I am wanting a more balanced build for wvw/dungeons to be able to support my team while being able to 1v1-1v3 people and walk away from it. Any advice would be appreciated such as what I should run on armour,traits,weapons thank you ?

I haven’t tried every single build out there but I find the paragon one to be a great balance between offense, defense and support.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Paragon-Build/first

Ok thanks Shimond and I did check that out. But I guess the only way I could tell is go try things for myself. Now I went to the mists to 1v1 the chieftian and Svaniar. I tried many builds out each was able to take on the chieftain fairly well but I would always lose to svanir. “NOTE” I did not dodge,eat food,etc I just went in hit him and was testing which builds are tankiest but could deal dps but for the record I did move around with scepter/staff can’t really stand still and let something like svanir wail on you with them. After many fails with svaniar I came to the conclusion I had to use a GS which I was trying to avoid lol. Greatsword was my opener with sword/shield as secondary. But this time I didn’t take hardly as much damage as I did the previous times with scepter/foucs,hammer,Staff,Mace/Shield. I actually killed him with over half of my health remaining. I was running Sigil of smoldering on all weapons/shield and rune of the guardian.
Traits were
20-2-7
0
30-2-9-12
20-1-9
0
Tanky build but it did exactly what I wanted it to do which was stand there and take a beating while dealing enough dps to kill the enemy and also giving nice heals to myself. Can I get some opionions on this build please thanks And I did regret not getting the Greatsword healing trait.. I just couldn’t squeeze it in……

GSword healing is always 25, not really that effective. There is some discussion on Hammer vs GSword right now regarding damage output but I threw on a Hammer and ran a 0/15/30/20/5 AH build and it did great for me the other night. Seems to have quite good damage while maintaining Protection (33% dmg reduction) full time and a ton of self healing. I run a mix of Soldiers, Zerkers, Knights gear for a mix of survivability and damage. 2x Runes of Water, Monks and Earth each will allow you to keep stacking Protection and keep you on the front line longer with Hammer’s symbol. Trait AH if you have melee buddies, Monks if you dont.

Also looking at a 15/25/0/30/0 for my next try with Hammer n GSword for more DPS. Also, Hammer 1 n 2 are all that’s used for damage, save the others for when ya need um.

GSword is not the only effective weapon, its just designed quite well and feels good.

Blood~

Bloodgruve.6038:

GSword healing is always 25, not really that effective. There is some discussion on Hammer vs GSword right now regarding damage output but I threw on a Hammer and ran a 0/15/30/20/5 AH build and it did great for me the other night. Seems to have quite good damage while maintaining Protection (33% dmg reduction) full time and a ton of self healing. I run a mix of Soldiers, Zerkers, Knights gear for a mix of survivability and damage. 2x Runes of Water, Monks and Earth each will allow you to keep stacking Protection and keep you on the front line longer with Hammer’s symbol. Trait AH if you have melee buddies, Monks if you dont.

Also looking at a 15/25/0/30/0 for my next try with Hammer n GSword for more DPS. Also, Hammer 1 n 2 are all that’s used for damage, save the others for when ya need um.

GSword is not the only effective weapon, its just designed quite well and feels good.

Blood~

Very true blood. I tried the hammer and the last auto attack for the hammer is its only truely downside. I think thats why most players steer away from it. With GS/Sword shield build that I brought it does keep you up close and gives you a suprising amount of dps while maintaining the fact your hard to kill. I try not to follow everyone else and go with GS but like you said it feels more fluid. Don’t get me wrong I love the hammer’s kiting,penning,and trapping ability it really does have alot of utility and gives you alot more options than the gs does BUT its real downside is that long animation. Its real easy to spot/stun before you can complete it. And ontop of that I belive it got nerfed somewhat that once you start it you can’t get out of the attack. I tried the mace intead of the sword at first but compared to the sword it also falls short. I belive the devs are more pro sword then they are blunt objects. Hmmm nub thing to say but I wish they would introduce a Great Axe into the game. mace-hammer sword-greatsword scepter-staff pistol-rifle shortbow-longbow axe-??dagger??. Just seems kinda odd to me. There should be a medium between Hammer and GS.

No, people just see a long windup time as a downside without counting the constant symbol application let alone high damage of the attack itself.

It’s totally a player problem, not a dev problem. Hammer and mace are absolutely fine.

I haven’t experienced the inability of getting out of the Hammer autochain.. The last swing is long but its nice cuz you can dodge and get back to the target before the chain resets which can be a problem with GSword. Also, Hammers autochain3 symbol does a lot of damage and gives you that wonderful Protection so missing it really drops the Hammers performance. Hammer really needs the bigger and longer symbols.

I think Mace has more to offer than Sword but it has less damage (perceived, haven’t tested). They did a good job making Mace defensive and Sword offensive.

Ultimately I’m going for a build that gives me good melee up-time and good damage. Now that I feel comfortable that the damage output of Hammer is very close to or equal to GSword (as long as you keep um in your Symbol)I’m having a hard time not taking advantage of all that Protection.

Variety is what I like about this game though, there’s no clear cut top cookie cutter build, you can survive w/o AH. Hope it stays that way so we all can have fun.

Blood~

Never said any of them where flat out bad. I just ran a personal test on the mists against the chieftain and svanir. Chieftain was fairly simple for all weapons (some harder than others) but svanir was the hardest to gank and just stand there and trade blows with. The easiest that I found was the sword/shield Greatsword. Wish there was a dps,mitigation,healing tracker. It would make alot of this so much easier lol. Guardian would defiently get mitigation and the only thing that I belive could beat a guardian “o god here comes the hate from warriors” is a water ele in healing/self healing. Im not even gonna try and guess for dps.. To much hate would come from it lol. And as for the hammer giving protection I totally agree. But the chieftain had a nasty habbit of knocking me down while trying to get it down there lol. The shield gives you almost the same thing “minus the symbol” which you think a shield should grant a protection symbol btw. And I like the mace I think it needs a buff thow to be really on par with the sword for me. The healing is nice but svanir would down me anyway.