Guardians and wvw Glass cannonish or not
I’m at the sweet crossroads of running balanced guardian or going glass cannonish with silent storms build aka paladin 2.0. Anyone have some opinion on what would be smarter. I was running full knights with soldier runes, with decent crit chance and crit damage from trinkets and such. I do run dungeons occasionally, but I wvw a lot with hammer/staff. Investing into the rest of berserker’s and rune of divinity costs a buttload, so wanting some advice here.
My experience is that going glass cannon with melee weapons is difficult, but far from impossible (staff is not really a ranged weapon). However, you can use the scepter quite well with a glass cannon build. I recall that there was a build posted here some time ago that does the glassy scepter quite well.
However, if done well, this kind of build can be very effective even in WvW since guardians have a lot of damage-negating abilities, and being a heavy-armor class, you still can manage a not terrible armor rating without +toughness on anything. Between shelter, renewed focus, wall of reflection, and save yourselves, you have a lot of ways to ignore or dramatically reduce damage for short periods of time. However, this means that you need time your jump into melee range well, and have some mobility to allow you to get in and out quickly. I think judge’s is a great skill for this kind of builds, and I frankly think that greatsword will work better than a hammer. This kind of playstyle is designed to do heavy damage quickly, and GS is better in that department than hammer, which can do damage, but more slowly and is more of a control weapon.
I would encourage you to try it. Since it sounds like you have been playing guardian for a while especially in WvW, it shouldn’t take too long for you to get it right, since you are already familiar with the ebbs and flows of a WvW battle.
glass cannon actually works pretty well in WvW
quite underrated i think
dont recommend the palidan 2.0 build though. Going 30 pts in zeal isnt a good idea. OK for pve but not good for WvW
use the build like this guy in this video
Valor line is too good to pass up. It increases your armor. Your damage via crit damage. And opens up AH or monks focus. The extra power you get from Zeal doesnt justify not putting points into the Valor line. It is very likely that the extra 25% crit damage will do as much damage as 200 power anyway.
FYI i go full glass with 20/25/25/0/0 traits. And power up with staff 4 before charging in.
But you might want to go with the build in the video instead as its less risky