Guild Wars 2

Hey, I’v been thinking, that Is guardian better/similiar as/than elementalist on supporting abilities? And which would be more fun in your opinion?

From what i have understood, is that elementalist would be better dps, but that guardian would be better for supporting?
Im also planning on leveling an engineer at some point, so would it kinda be a waste to level a guardian/elementalist if the engineer would actually be able to be better support/dps/control?

I also already have a warrior and a necromancer as ’’mains’’ and i always like to have lots of differences between my classes, so would guardian possibly be too much like my warrior considering both dps with swords? (atleast i do :P) Or elementalist too much like necro? (I dont think that’ll be a problem but anyway^^)

All opinions are welcome, just PLEASE dont say ‘’play what you feel is funniest for you’’ Becouse i like all of those 3 classes but i simply dont have time or i dont want to level all 3 to lvl 80 :P

(posted in guardian forums becouse ’’i’’ felt that guardian was weaker in those aspects and im least familiar with guardian strategies so tought these forums are best choice for me^^)

I find Guardian to be very versatile. I can go very DPS and put out some crazy damage. We don’t do burst the way Warriors or Thieves can, but we can hit very, very hard. I feel that in a support role, we can also outshine lots of other classes, because we have so many buffs we can place on ourselves and allies, and when traited properly these buffs can last an extremely long time.

We can also be very tanky, and have high damage mitigation and decent healing skills. I think Elementalist is probably better in the healing department, but not by all that much.

I have builds which allow me to give great support and utility to my group, while still putting out great DPS. And if I want to go full support and really buff my entire team, I can do that as well. The only area where I feel the Guardian falls short is our health pool, but there are ways to buff that up as well.

The Guardian also lacks a good ranged weapon, the only thing we have is the scepter, but it’s decent enough for me. Other than that, we’re not just a “greatsword” class. I think Staff, Hammer, and Sword/Shield/Focus are all extremely viable weapons, and we can put out some crazy DPS, especially with our burning damage thrown into the mix. We also have good AOE damage options and good Control options. Plus, our combo fields of light and fire bring great utility to the group.

Elementalists are probably better suited to dishing out AOE damage than the guardian is, but my understanding is they are a lot squishier. We get to wear some awesome looking heavy armor, so I think Guardians tend to win out on style, lol.

Guardian isn’t for everyone, but I feel you can build a Guardian to pretty much suit any playstyle – Tank/DPS/Heal/Support. It’s all about what you want to bring to the group.

Gardian can support… the problem is what Anet means with “support”… :\

I compared dps skills with healing/support skills and there is a huge gap between them.
The biggest examble is between Judgment Int. and Merciful Int.
The first one works, small CD, good skill.
The second one doesn’t warks cause you miss 90% the target, long CD, bad skill.

So, if you like just “shout” a 300hp regen, “shout” a speed of movement boost or cure 1 condition every 90s… guardian can support. <——- Anet “support idea”

If you would like keep your party alive and full the life of a “near to death fiend”, you can’t.
<——- “Rest of the world” support idea…

Guardian support?
Tecnically yes… but in reality it is not.
Reroll DPS… this game is not designed for support… unfortunatly for me and all the player who like play this role. T_T

Hi Leeain,

I’d have to disagree with you on your points. Yes, there are a few Guardian “support” skills that are completely borked as you mentioned. However, there are lots of great support options for the Guardian you didn’t mention.

For example, you can trait your shouts to remove conditions on teammates, and convert conditions to boons on your teammates. Retreat doesn’t just grant speed boosts, it also grants Aegis which can be a huge deal if timed right. Used in conjunction with Virtue of Courage, you can protect your team from big boss attacks pretty regularly.

Virtue of Resolve is a small AOE heal, but it can also be traited to remove 3 conditions from yourself and your allies, thus freeing up a Utility slot on your bar.

Don’t forget about combo fields. The guardian has access to Light and Fire combo fields. Light combos will remove conditions from your allies, so a well placed Wall of Reflection can not only protect your group and damage your enemy, it can also heal. Symbols are also light fields, so they do this too.

You can trait your symbols to heal allies, so you have good Heal Over Time potential as well. Consecrations are extremely powerful, and can offer great utility to the group, as well as being used both offensively to damage allies, and defensively to heal.

You can also buff your boon duration, so any boons you apply to yourselves or allies last a very long time – up to 90% longer. This can be huge when it comes to raising your groups DPS with might, travelling the map with swiftness, or mitigating group damage with protection or retaliation.

I think Guardians offer a tremendous amount of support. You just need to know how to play it properly.

Nice points Ultramatum.

And… support is not HEALER. Hammer this in your WoW-esque heads.

A little example, a traited Virtue of Resolve will tick on all your party members non stop if you don’t use it. That’s 84 (more or less) hp per second. That’s 2.1k on 25s.

I bet you could like a healing spell that heals 2.1k to all your group every 25s… we have it, and you don’t even have to use it. And we have Regeneration to all party, Protection non stop with hammer, Aegis, and all kind of boons. Oh, and we can DPS in the meanwhile.

No, there isn’t a Prayer of Healing here. We are support, not healers. And I don’t miss it (8 years Holy/Disc priest in WoW).

Guardian’s do fine as support. Most people saying reroll dont realize what support truly is. Will you be able to “support” someone who is nothing more than a glass cannon expecting healers to carry them threw a fight? The answer is no. BUT what you can do is provide a buffer to those around you threw your skills that will save them from minor to mid level mistakes. That is the job of a support. We are there to make it easier on our mates to survive and we fill that roll very well. Heck i my self am able to set on a champion and tank it while dishing out dps boosters while throwing aoe aegis when i notice a big hit coming to make sure that those around me dont have to run away from the mob. And to be honest as long as they are not glass cannons they normally dont have to move. This is the point of support. By me playing this way we dont have to kite a mob meaning we burn it faster since we can chain big hits/combo fields and stay with our hardest hitting dps weapons.

I can understand… support is not only healing… but healing is a part of the support.
Why ignore it?
The point is that there is a huge gap between healing and dps skills.

I tryed full dps build, it works.
I tryed full tank/shield/dmg preventing build, it works.
I tryed buffer/shout build, don’t like it, but is usefull…
I tryed full healing build… epic fail.

Comparing the amount of damage you can make every seconds with the amount of heal you can do, the difference is something like 1 to 5:

If a damage skills deal 3000/5000 damage, a healing skills recover 1000/2000 damage.
If a dot deal 800xsec., a hot heal 300x sec.
If a damage skills have 5/10/15s cd, a healing skills have 60/90/120s cd.
DPS skills have target, healing don’t (lot of time miss it).
Bleeding can be x24, regen no…

As you can see, the “not-self” healing skills have low performance, hight CD and some times wrong mechanics.
And one of the big problems is the “no friendly taget”.

The “no holy trinity” system penalized all the players who did tank and healer in the others past games… but nothing changed for the dps players.

So… i have to be more precise…
You can support… but not be a good healer… but you can be a good DPS. :|

My “support” is done via (primarily) Shouts and Virtues with my spec. It involves just slapping boons on people and removing conditions, but it’s all about timing and closeness and most of the time it fails. There’s nothing reliable about support in this game, especially when you consider that the guy doing the support could be tanking at the time you need supporting. Thus, support is unlikely to come when needed, just get used to dying and running back.

@Leeain
healing is only but a small part of what support is, only healing /= support, but healing + damage mitigation+ crowd control = support

see that? its the 3 aspects that a gurdian can give, only crowd control may seem a bit lacking, unless you are hammer guardian, but we can give plenty of damage mitigation
Ultramatum and Fabsm gave good pointers, but there a few other points they havent mentioned, the focused on the healing aspects, but i will focus on the protection aspects:

Hold the line: it has a small HoT effect AND it gives also protection, (meaning it heals and mitigates damage), the heal is very small, but i use it as a “soft” heal, alongside the protection it gives to reduce the damage, and has a decent cooldown of 35 seconds

then we also have wall of reflection, which gives no healing at all, but it bounces back all projectiles (exception being targetted AoEs), but can also bounce back some magical projectiles, granted it is useless against meleer combatants, but have you seen a ghostly ranger get punched back by its own arrow? on normal it even deals 1k damage, near end boss an eye of zhaitan in story mode, he uses this multi laser pew pew, use it infront of the visible eye and you will have much lolz seeing himself getting owned by its own shooting.
it has a decent recharge with 40 seconds cooldown and lasts 10 seconds, and with two traits it lasts roughly 15 seconds and a cooldown of 32 seconds, and it negates all projectiles, thus doing damage mitigation on your team (if they are smart enough to stand at the other side of the wall, but that is human problem, not skill problem) and on the plus side oding some extra damage to mobs.

and lastly Sanctuary, untraited, its cooldown is horribly lenghty on 120 seconds, and lasts only 6 seconds, but traited with master of consacrations, its cooldown is 96 seconds, and lasts around 8 or 9 seconds, it has a minor moderate healing factor, but most importantly, it absorbs all projectiles AND pushes back foes (same problem than wall of reflection though, it doesnt stop targetted aoe’s but it absorbs spheres and balls), you can use this to defend a downed member, help a pinned member down, and with the trait of consacrated ground, you can cast it anywhere you want (within range), and this trait also affects wall of reflection. Alternatively, you can ALSO use sanctuary as an offensive skill, if you cast it on a foe that is near a wall, and you cast it well placed, you can pin down that foe with constant/permanent knockback, very much useful against mobs that dont have the unshakeable effect, and against the ones that have it, it still can be used somewhat effectively.

those 3 skills are the staple of my utility section, and only in fights against bosses that dont have ranged do i change them accordingly, but as you can see, guardian support is viable, we can give healing, reduce damage and have CC, so its not a “who is better at supporting”, but rather what kind of support you can be giving, now i dontknow how elementalists give support, but thisis the way me as a guardian can give support, and personally i like it this way, and when i get to play an ele support, i will probably have to play a much different kind of support ele compared to a guardian, doesnt mean one is better than the other, they just are different.

side story related to support:
my guild and i have been doing Ascalonian catacombs recently, and we’ve done it enough times that is “easy”, just the lieutenant kohler can give some troubles, but here i have finally mastered the timing against his pulling, and with 3 skills i can negate them:
shield of absorption (i fight him with scepter and shield)
virtue of courage (i burn it before he does his pull)
and lastly retreat

using those 3 skills (i could also use sanctuary and wall of reflection to negate it, but its harder when they are spread as these have limited range), i’ve been able to practically reduce the success of his pull to his death spin attack by an 80%, enough to say that when i dced one time at the begining of the battle, and took me around 5 minutes to log back in (stupid internet!), upon returning back a friend in the group told me that they had been gotten pulled by the boss several times, meaning htey wherent able to roll out of the pull, meaning me as a guardian, i was albe to give support to my teammates enough to “ignore” this mob special attack!

that, is satisfying for me as a support guardian, and iwont be rerolling to other class for to give support

Support is definitely a strong element in PvE, Dungeons and SPvP. In WvW, dont bet on it honestly lol, well consecretion builds are good there but only in Keep Defense, but total crap anywhere else in WvW or PvE/SPvP.

I love playing support role especially in PvE dungeons, not so much in other areas, plainly because there is minimal or no “Reward System” for support roles. Anet did very nicely in minimizing reliance on Holy Trinity System by implementing DPS, Control and Support role, but theres no “incentive, motivation” for playing a Support role.

Also between the 3 new “Classes” of DPS, Control, Support, im sure you all know that support is the weakest among those 3. I dunno if Anet intended the 3 roles to form a closed Triangle, but its not working now. I find DPS and Control classes to be the more prominent and dominating factor in battles.

Anyways, just my 2 cents.

Leeain.2431:

Gardian can support… the problem is what Anet means with “support”… :\

I compared dps skills with healing/support skills and there is a huge gap between them.
The biggest examble is between Judgment Int. and Merciful Int.
The first one works, small CD, good skill.
The second one doesn’t warks cause you miss 90% the target, long CD, bad skill.

So, if you like just “shout” a 300hp regen, “shout” a speed of movement boost or cure 1 condition every 90s… guardian can support. <——- Anet “support idea”

If you would like keep your party alive and full the life of a “near to death fiend”, you can’t.
<——- “Rest of the world” support idea…

Guardian support?
Tecnically yes… but in reality it is not.
Reroll DPS… this game is not designed for support… unfortunatly for me and all the player who like play this role. T_T

I would say that a Guardian thats traited to share his passive effect of Virtue of Resolve with nearby allies must be one of the most support-oriented builds in the game…