Guild Wars 2

Greetings Fellow Guards!

Dropping by here to share a build which i have been running with much success in Dungeons/FOTM. With over 800hours clocked in, trying out several builds, this is my choice of build due to its party support capabilities.

I do not claim this build to be original , in fact, this is somewhat a ranged variation of the Hammer/AH build previously posted by Brutaly

Do note that this build is strictly tuned for Dungeon/FOTM, there are probably much better builds out there for WvW/SPvP.

Constructive critisms are welcomed! This guide is no where near complete and i will probably update further down the line.

Background
The Guardian is a heavy armor class who relies on boons to make up for their low levels of innate health. They focus on area control and punishing enemies for the position on the battlefield. We want them to feel very powerful when their boons are active, but if those boons are removed, they will start to feel pressure. They can remove conditions more easily than the Warrior, but share the Warrior’s need to be in melee range to dole out maximum damage.

The core of this build is focused much based on Anet philosophy for a guardian. Boon and Field Control.

What can this build offer?

• Extended Might Boon Duration with Empower/Empowering Might, improving your overall party DPS. A good skill rotation will allow you to keep up 10-15 stacks of might permanently.

• Controlling range aggro field with Wall Of Reflection & Shield Of The Avenger.

• Protective Revival Trait, coupled with boon duration, grants a 17 sec protection,regen & aegis boon for both downed member & yourselves. It is not uncommon to see this number reach hit the cap (60s) on some harder instances due to constant reviving.
  tldr, near permanent protection,regeneration uptime.

• High critical chance,crit dmg , & Might stacks brings your overall DPS to a decent level.

• Permanent Vigor buff for evasion, Empowering Might & Vigorous Precision synergy with Alturistic Healing ensures high survialbility. Ranged DPS allows higher safety buffer as compared to Melee

Build
0/0/30/20/20

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAreWlYgyB3FyvDm4ERmCRySMFWE+XPcoEZIA;TsAKvMBJCy2lzLZXrIGEcK4VwUEA

*Cut and paste the above URL to a new webpage if its showing as bad link

Traits
Valor: Purity/Honorable Shield/Altrustic Healing
*replace Honorable Shield with Retributive Armor if you are using a focus

Honor: Protective Revival/ Empowering Might

Virtues: Master Of Consecrations/ Improved Spirit Weapon Duration (ISWD)
*replace ISWD with Absolute resolution for dungeons with minimal ranged aggro

Utilities

1. - Shield Of The Avenger (SOA)
2. - Wall Of Reflection (WOR)
3. - Save Yourselves/Retreat

SOA or WOR can be replaced with Hallowed ground / Stand your ground for encounters that require stability

Equipment
Weapon (1)
Sceptre (Pow/Tou/Vit) – Superior Sigil Of Accuracy (5% critical)
Shield/Focus (Pow/Tou/Vit) – Superior sigil of battle (Gain 3 stacks of might for 20seconds upon weapon switch

Weapon (2)
Staff (Prec/Vit/HealP) – Superior Sigil Of Precision – You gain + 7 / 10 precision each time you kill a foe. (max 25 stacks and ends on down)

• The sigil of precision is used to build up your critical rate for higher efficiency proc on Empowering Might & Vigorous Precision.

Weapon (3)
GS (Pow/Prec/CritDmg) – Superior Sigil Of Accuracy (5% critical)

• Greatsword is used as a replacement for sceptre/shield/focus for melee-friendly encounters

Armor
6x Power/Prec/Tou OR Pow/Tou/Vitality

Rune Of Choice
Superior Rune Of Hoelbrak x 2 (20% might duration, +25 power)
Superior Rune Of Monk x 2 (15% boon duration, +25 healing power)
Superior Rune Of Water x 2 (15% boon duration, +25 healing power)

With a chocolate omnoberry cream (40% magic find, +20% boon duration) and 20 points in virtue, the total boon duration is 90% for might & 70% for all other boons.

*Hoelbrak runes can be replaced with Major rune of sanctuary for 10% boon duration. Personally, i go with Hoelbrak for a more offensive build

Accessories
6xPower/Prec/CritDmg
With 30 points in Honor, your critical damage bonus should be roughly (150 + 60% )

Food
Chocolate Omnobery Cream, Master Maintainence Oil

Boon Duration, Why?
The virtues trait line of a guardian is argubly one of the weakest. The bonus to boon duration does not provide significant help to most builds. However, when stacked to high numbers, this can be game changing. Lets take a look at the synergys for the chosen traits

It is important to note that all extended boon durations affect your party members as well

() – denotes boosted duration on the assumption of the abovementioned loadout at 90% might duration & 70% boon duration boost

Weapon Skills

Shield
Shield Of Judgement- Create a shielding wave in front of you that damages foes and gives 5 (8.5)seconds protection to yourself and up to five allies. 24seconds cooldown with honorable shield trait.

Focus
Shield Of Wrath – SOW has an initiate ‘Blast’ finisher that combos with a fire field (ie: Purging flames or Hallowed Ground) provides 20 (39!!)seconds of Might(3 stacks) to all nearby allies

Staff
Empower – Channel might to yourself and allies around you. Heal nearby allies when it ends. 12 stacks of might for 8 (15)seconds

Symbol Of Swiftness – Sear a mystic symbol into the target area, damaging foes and granting swiftness 8( 15)seconds to allies.

Traits

Vigorous Precision – Gain 5 (8.5)seconds of vigor when you critical hit
Note that this means nearly unlimited uptime for vigor

Protective Revival – When you revive an ally, you both gain regen, protection & aegis for 10 (17)seconds

Empowering Might – Nearby allies gain might for 5 (9)seconds when you crit

Sigil

Superior sigil of battle – Gain 3 stacks of might for 20 (39!!) seconds when you switch to this weapon in battle

To be updated further

Dude wall of reflection is useless to some encounters. Some projectiles can not be reflected. For me this skill is useless now. Everything related to it is useless too.
I also dont see how this is a boon contorl build, you only have “Save Yourselves” as your boon skill which is once a minute o.o

Yes I’m being too hard on the skill, it has its uses, of course, but when most stuff is scripted to avoid it and im wasting an utility slot for it, i kind of have sore feeling in my throat

PS: Not to mention that “Save Yourselves” will get you conditions every once in awhile. And I don’t see you having condition removals o.o

What things are scripted against Wall of Reflection?

Harpy push back lightning, asuran boss agony atk in uncategorized, Grawl shaman thing agony atk + lava elementals, Dredges shockwave, rifle, mining machine bombs, ice elementals in svanir, etc etc all gets the reflect and merrily kill themselves on the wall. What more do you want?

Dredge shockwave does not get reflected, I always LOL at guardians that use it against them. Especially the one from the champion

Have you done CoE story? Kudu has 1-shot projectile. It doesn’t get reflected, he still shoots your kitten Not to mention that in there even aegis doesnt help, you can only dodge out of it. And there are quite a few examples of such mobs.

Or the fact that if you are 5-10 steps behind the wall the mobs just shoot over it, the same applies if you’re downhill and mobs are above you. Which is realistic but kind of not cool due to the long reuse of the wall. Not to mention that sometimes you might lag and you might think you are behind the wall but you really arent. No, I personally prefer protection, if anything

Ravenmoon.5318:

Dude wall of reflection is useless to some encounters. Some projectiles can not be reflected. For me this skill is useless now. Everything related to it is useless too.
I also dont see how this is a boon contorl build, you only have “Save Yourselves” as your boon skill which is once a minute o.o

Yes I’m being too hard on the skill, it has its uses, of course, but when most stuff is scripted to avoid it and im wasting an utility slot for it, i kind of have sore feeling in my throat

PS: Not to mention that “Save Yourselves” will get you conditions every once in awhile. And I don’t see you having condition removals o.o

Hi there,

The list of available boons in this build are as follow.
In fact i’ve summarized in post #2 earlier

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-Boon-Control-Guardian-Dungeon-FOTM/first#post1085955

Might – Empower / Empowering Might / Virtue Of Justice activation
Regeneration – Synergy from Protective Revival
Protection – Synergy from Protective Revival
Vigor – Vigorous Precision

Wall of Reflection does not reflect all projectiles, Shield Of Avenger however has the capabilities of migitating some that the fomer is unable to: on top of my head are dredge shockwave, Old Tom poison bolts, Cliffside legendary defender’s purple aoe. The only fractals that do not benefit much from this 2 skills are probably swamp & underwater & to some extent Cliffside. Good replacement alternatives are SYG or Hallowed ground for stability.

The selling point of this build is to provide Might buffs with extended duration and damage recovery with Protective Revival alongside with controlling ranged aggro with SOA/WOR.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Dredge shockwave does not get reflected, I always LOL at guardians that use it against them. Especially the one from the champion

Have you done CoE story? Kudu has 1-shot projectile. It doesn’t get reflected, he still shoots your kitten Not to mention that in there even aegis doesnt help, you can only dodge out of it. And there are quite a few examples of such mobs.

Or the fact that if you are 5-10 steps behind the wall the mobs just shoot over it, the same applies if you’re downhill and mobs are above you. Which is realistic but kind of not cool due to the long reuse of the wall. Not to mention that sometimes you might lag and you might think you are behind the wall but you really arent. No, I personally prefer protection, if anything

Dredges shockwave can be reflected, however, the projectile has a soft edge, which means its edges will get through the wall (the projectile gets reflected when it’s center hit the wall) and as long as some part of it scratches your hit box before the reflection occur (where the wall absorbs it and throws the same ability back as cast by you) you take damage. If you stand further away from the wall you’ll not get hit by any shockwaves, no matter how many are there.

Many people miss this because the skill doesn’t look like a projectile and they never traited consecrated ground and never bothered to move after they cast the wall. So next time, take a few steps back.

On abilities that could go over the wall, you should instead stand inside the wall, your hit box is shorter than the height of the wall and the wall will reflect it before the thing hits. This same tactic can be used to reflect things from both sides of the wall in case you are hit from all directions (may be hard to pull off as charr or norn).

Meh, IMO protection/retaliation/stability, aggressive AH and stun breakers is the way to go. It even works in sPvP. Yes of course you can’t defend a camp like that alone, but you can ninja most people. There is a lot to be done by ANet on the wall to become appealing for me personally. If you think that you should care how far and how close you are to the wall and if you are taking a projectile centrally or sideways. I usually prefer melee gamestyle and I go very close and I make it very personal :P but it is kind of difficult and I can’t really spare time for the wall. Not to mention that not knowing when exactly it will go off is a huge game stopper for me. They could’ve added some blinking 1-2 seconds before it disappears but no. You have to count too >.>

Don’t get me wrong, When I was leveling up, WoR was one of the most used skills by me and it saved me countless times versus champions that shoot from distance and make me go 20% in few seconds. But overally nowadays I prefer what I said above, for these very reasons. Just look at Ruii’s previous post, look in how many fractals the WoR is not having any effect. Add the long reuse time and I get an urge to throw up when i see its icon nowadays :|