Guild Wars 2

What’s really amazing is that you got trolled, and still managed to somehow derive useful content from the trolling post and updated the guide to reflect it.

The guide is really fine. The humor is fine. Kudos to you for being a good forum citizen.

Protip for criticizing guides: be nice. You didn’t take the time to contribute to the community, the author did. If you have some superior way of phrasing things, or your sense of humor is different than the author’s, or whatever, then show the world by writing a guide of your very own.

Discussion about the content of a guide is always welcome, but there’s really no need to be rude about it, and criticizing someone else’s writing style will never do anything but cause grief. People write how they write.

Thank you very much for taking the time to post this, there is so much good information here. I especially enjoyed your suggestions of weapon synergy, it has caused me to re-evaluate my opinions on some of the weapons, and ultimately I think I’m a better player for it, so thank you!

The guide is ridiculously optimistic about the capabilities of the class. For example:

3) You are not defined by your weapon. You are not limited by your weapon. While it’s true that certain Traits do encourage the use of certain weapons, remember that Traits are not at all permanent. Look, just because you have a Trait that gives you +15% Crit with a one handed weapon doesn’t mean you can never ever use a staff or a hammer. Be flexible.

I would argue that:
-Traits, weapons and skills are all very defining and not as easily flippable as you make out.
-I can’t switch traits without summoning up vast quantities of gold.
-While I can use a hammer, there are mechanics in place to prevent me eqiupping it mid-battle.

Svarty.8019:

I would argue that:
-Traits, weapons and skills are all very defining and not as easily flippable as you make out.
-I can’t switch traits without summoning up vast quantities of gold.
-While I can use a hammer, there are mechanics in place to prevent me eqiupping it mid-battle.

Untrue, the actual weapon specific traits can be swapped out when out of combat just as your skills and weapons can be. You can’t choose a new LINE, but you can absolutely reconfigure your selected traits in a line.

If you’re going to be switching to a weapon midfight, it needs to be one of your two equipped. That doesn’t mean you can’t carry more in your bag when you’re encountering particular enemies you know a weapon is strong against.

For example I ALWAYS had a staff in my bag for travel and event support. Greatsword too for offense when I was running mace/staff equipped.

The guide is ridiculously optimistic about the capabilities of the class. For example:

3) You are not defined by your weapon. You are not limited by your weapon. While it’s true that certain Traits do encourage the use of certain weapons, remember that Traits are not at all permanent. Look, just because you have a Trait that gives you +15% Crit with a one handed weapon doesn’t mean you can never ever use a staff or a hammer. Be flexible.

I would argue that:
-Traits, weapons and skills are all very defining and not as easily flippable as you make out.
-I can’t switch traits without summoning up vast quantities of gold.
-While I can use a hammer, there are mechanics in place to prevent me eqiupping it mid-battle.

And:

Active Defense: Regardless of your style of play, your Guardian—any Guardian, in fact—will always have defensive abilities available to them. Defensive abilities are defined as abilities that mitigate damage, remove conditions, protect allies, apply boons and provide healing.

Should be reworded to: Survivability depends on active power use. Otherwise you’re as soft as an elementalist. There is no passive defense.

Svarty.8019:

Should be reworded to: Survivability depends on active power use. Otherwise you’re as soft as an elementalist. There is no passive defense.

Armor is passive defense, and we have more of it than elementalists do. It won’t let you survive avoidable big hits sure…but they’re avoidable.

Shimond.2478:

Svarty.8019:

Should be reworded to: Survivability depends on active power use. Otherwise you’re as soft as an elementalist. There is no passive defense.

Armor is passive defense, and we have more of it than elementalists do. It won’t let you survive avoidable big hits sure…but they’re avoidable.

The point is that passive defense is virtually non-existant, which is emphasised by your point.

Nevermind clearly I’m getting trolled here. Let’s keep this thread clean.

Clearly, you don’t understand.

My point is that we require passive defense and all we have is active defense. I got 1 shotted by a whirling warrior (I’m 50 boosted and he’s 80 in WvW zone, but still, rubbish for a class that is supposed to be amazing at defense).

Fantastic guide, much appreciated.

The most useful part for me was your weapon synergies and utility skills discussions. I will be revisiting skills that remove conditions in WvW for sure.

This was an excellent guide, and I particularly enjoyed the little bits of humor thrown into a very long (thank you) and comprehensive (thank you again) guide.

Plus, being able to read all of the weapon skills without having to flip flop through the weapons in game and reading the little tool tips was very nice. Also, your comment and extrapolation of the tool tips helped answer some questions I had about them.

Amazing job!

Congratulations Eveningstar.6940 and Kudos to you. You are a wonderful addition to the GW2 community with your great guide and attitude. I know your guide has been a big help to me as well as many others. I really like that I can review so much data without having to navigate several overlapping menus. Very well done I salute you!

Terrific guide. I’ve been looking for a well-informed, comprehensive article discussing Guardian builds, specifically the synergy between abilities and trait trees and this is by far the best I’ve found. Thank you!

Really great stuff here. Great read. Thanks for doing all that home work.

This guide is just awesome, easy to read, funny and most importantly, it has invaluable information, my main is a 61 Necro but I’ve been dying to play my Guardian alt (which will probably become my main), but at level 11 having so many weapon skills it felt a little bit overwhelming, after reading this guide I have a pretty solid idea of what I’ll use for PvE leveling and what I’ll use on dungeons.

Thank you for this great guide

To join in the praise! Really good work Eveningstar.6940! Don’t worry about the length. It actually inspired me to stop at certain points and go experiment with things ingame. Beyond that it was a nice read during work hours.

I can’t agree more about switching weapons and trying new ways to discover your own playstyle. I was stuck for a while in Greatsword / Scepter + Shield but right before reading the guide I discovered how awesome Mace + Torch is. Not to mention that in dungeons having diverse weapon choices available is invaluable. Fight is messy. Poof take out a hammer and start controlling a mob or two to ease pressure on your team. One suggestion I have for encouraging exploring new weapon combos is while leveling always to try using for a little while the highest available weapons that drop for you even if they are not your usual set up not just for stat gains but also for forcing yourself into figuring out the playstyle of the weapons you haven’t used much.

Excellent work! Since this is a sticky, one suggestion would be creating a section that links to other guides that you feel provide useful/in depth information (entirely at your discretion of course), but does not get stickied.

It’d be like making your guide the Lion’s Arch of guardian guides!

So…..thorough…brain…overloaded….

Great guide!

I just spent awhile reading this and I have to comment.

Thank you so much for this immensely well written guide…the comedic injections just made it all the more fun to read.

I got my elementalist to 80 and after spending a ton of time being frustrated and attempting to visit elementalist forums only to come across 20+ pages of complaints about the poor state the class is in and virtually NO help at all, I’m considering fully rerolling until elementalists get fixed by Arenanet.

I love support so I believe guardian will suit me well and this sort of guide is usually just the sort of thing I look for when I want good information on a class. I’ve bookmarked and I know this will (and already has) helped me immensely with the baby guardian I’ve started.

Nice guide. Really puts the Guardian traits into perspective and offers nice ideas for weapon/trait synergy. Thanks. Kinda makes me want to put down my Ranger and give my Guardian another go.

I know that I see a lot of people complaining the guardian is a little too squishy or don’t enough damage or something, but to be honest, I don’t find this to be the case. Mine is at level 63 or 64 right now, and by this point, I’ve figured a pretty good deal out on my own.

You sort of covered this in the Traits section but to reiterate: Guardians have some incredible synergy among traits. I’ve got enough points such that I’ve picked up the Virtue of Justice bonuses (Blind upon activation and resets with kill). In that same tree, you can also pick up a slot trait that causes Blind to apply Vulnerability. With the weapon set I run (sword/torch and greatsword) this is easy access to three blinds, and each Blind applies a stack of Vulnerability.

On top of that, one of the Traits in the first tree also makes your symbols apply Vulnerability. So between all my blinds and the symbol from the greatsword, I can get a decent stack of Vulnerability running by myself. All this combined with some condition damage gear, Burn duration runes (Balthazar’s runes), and the trait that’s an extra 10% damage to burning targets lets me melt things pretty quickly.

As for defense, we may not have the enormous health pool that a warrior has, but we don’t really need this because we have so many ways to mitigate damage entirely. Not only do we have access to four blinds, but we have two knockdowns (one from the Hammer and one from Bane Signet), two blocks (one from the mace that soaks one hit, and the focus shield soaks three), three ways to apply Aegis (the trait for getting it at 50% health, every 40 seconds from Courage, and for activating Courage), and there’s still the two dodges. While it’s kind of wonky and nearly impossible to time correctly, charr also have Hidden Pistol to do piddly damage but execute a dodge that doesn’t consume Endurance. Don’t forget either that Tome of Courage grants you a full heal and a 3 second stun.

Last night, I was tired of waiting to for a group to show up to the Fire Shaman boss in Iron Marches so I went to tackle him myself. I am not really traited for defense or support, but I tossed on a scepter and focus. I swapped my utility skills to include Sanctuary and Wall of Reflection. Once I got my cooldowns timed and into a pretty decent rotation, I was able to avoid taking nearly any damage from a boss that can instantly down you by hurling a flaming axe that does somewhere between 8k and 10k damage. WoR flipped his own axes and fireballs back at him, Sanctuary soaked the same attacks, Shield of Wrath blocked them when those were down, and in that time, Aegis was probably up. I was almost never without one of my skills, and in the event I found myself in a dead zone, timing my dodges was enough to save my bacon.

Thanks a lot for this awsome Guide! I like the optimisitc view!

Thanks for this, you realy put a lot of thought and work into it. On another note, I, for one, do use judges intervention to teleport myself into a group of mobs and beat them about the head and shoulders with a mace.

Svarty.8019:

Shimond.2478:

Svarty.8019:

Should be reworded to: Survivability depends on active power use. Otherwise you’re as soft as an elementalist. There is no passive defense.

Armor is passive defense, and we have more of it than elementalists do. It won’t let you survive avoidable big hits sure…but they’re avoidable.

The point is that passive defense is virtually non-existant, which is emphasised by your point.

Guardian has more passive defense than most classes. Virtue of Courage ensures that. I usually play an ele, but have a guardian alt I enjoy, too. On that guardian alt I was meleeing a boss that had a long-windup, oneshot skill. And I screwed up. I wasn’t watching my endurance and I didn’t have enough to dodge at the last second.

But you know what? No big. I passively blocked that oneshot so I was fine. You get a free screwup every now and then with guardian that you don’t on other classes (like the ele). You also get passive regen that other classes have to spec/slot for.

I’m not saying the guardian’s passive defense is amazing, but to say it doesn’t exist is patently false.

EDIT: Stupid typos …

This guide is fantastic. I’m a level 35 guardian and I really didn’t understand a lot about my class until reading this, thanks!

Eveningstar.6940:

Binding Blade: Control and an interrupt. Binding Blade does modest damage and produces a leash on the enemy. Use the Pull ability to interrupt them and immediately drag them on to you. The distance—a medium 600—takes a little getting used to, but this is a useful way to either corrall enemies, punish them for running away from you or create setups for Whirling Wrath. This is a Whirl finisher.

Just noting that if you don’t immediately break it by using the pull, Binding Blade is also a fairly strong DoT, equivalent to roughly 4 stacks of Bleeding for 10 seconds (or until you pull). That’s roughly half of a Burning, but stacks with Burning and scales better with condition damage.

(At level 80, it’s 160+.2*[condition damage] damage per second.)

I want to thank you Eveningstar.6940 (even though you insulted my beloved warrior a couple times) this is a great guide to get started as a guardian(which i recently made as an alt and to play in a tight group of friends). Since my main is a warrior and sadly i admit that till recently a very selfishly played warrior i believe this guide will help me contribute to my party in a create way and the guardian may even sneak its way into being my main. thank you again for taking the time to write this, i loved the humor, and way to banish the trolls my friend!

Thanks everyone for the kind words. I hope you’re enjoying your Guardians as much as I am (just rolled my second one!)

Aseyhe.2948: That’s an excellent insight, and I will update my guide accordingly, and give you credit. Thanks!

Thank you very much for such an amazing guide. I’m very happy to see how you added the entire information at a single place (what the skills do, what the traits do, and so on) – of course someone is not going to read this while playing the game, and it’s better to have all information here and keep changing tab to read skill descriptions at the wiki.

A very useful and detailed read, thanks :-)

You really gave me some nice ideas for damage mitigation. Currently, I have had to play with a “good offense is the best defense” mindset since I couldn’t protect myself which really irks me to no end as a guardian.

Such a nice guide! Thank you very much for taking the time and effort to put this together. I have been enjoying playing my guardian a LOT, but with such a plethora of options to mix and match I felt a little overwhelmed. Now at least I have some guidance and can experiment a little more “scientifically” with my builds.

Thumbs up for a great guide! We need more posts like this.

Hejda!

I am not going to comment your giant post right now as i am only 62 with my guardian at the moment and i have not yet seen all the game to be able criticise your post.

All I wish to say is, Eveningstar, for me this is by far the best written guide to any role playing game class I have ever seen bevor in my long mmorpg live (there have been plenty of them for me until now). It just feels so right to read it and could be an official guideline or part of the startegy book (you should insert some pics for that ;-). It just was fun to read it. Thanks for that!

Around L50 I asked myself if Guardian is really the right class for me – because other classes seem to have so much more fun doing damage especially in WvW. But when I read all your comments on our abilities you opened my eyes for the wide range of opportunities that we are given by Arenanet. You are right – there is so much to explore in our traits, our different weapon sets, our consecrations and their combination. I love my Guardian more than any other twink now (ok – not in WvW) and a big part comes because of your guide.

So I have to say: Very very nice work!

thank you, thank you, thank you … I got a headache ;-) but I’m gonna have more fun with my Guardian now.

This, my good sir, is amazing. It is insightful, even for a veteran like myself. And it has great humor! Dwayna would be proud… Did you mention something about the Queen having a thing for…? Ah nevermind!

In all seriousness, though, thank you, Eveningstar. I had almost given up on my Guardian and this will probably help keep him off the shelf even though my main is mesmer. Oh, and you’re Tarnished Coast as well? Fantastic! Maybe we’ll see each other around.

/hi5’s for RP

I couldn’t log in to the forums last time to thank you for this awesome guide. I finally got in today and I want to commend you on a very good job with this. I’ve already learned a lot of things by reading through this guide, certainly very helpful.

Any chance you’re interested in creating a Guardian WvWvW 101 guide? That would be really useful for Guardians like me who aren’t up to speed yet with WvWvW.

Thanks so much for the kind words, everyone. I’m very happy you’re finding some use in my guide.

As for a WvWvW guide—frankly, I don’t think I’m prepared to write this. I have some experience in PVP, and I can gladly contribute to any discussions on these forums about WvWvW, but from what I’ve seen of this community, we already have at least a half dozen Guardians—all of whom regularly post here—with more experience than I in WvWvW.

So if anyone out there wants to write a comprehensive WvWvW guide for Guardians, I’d be more than glad to read it.

When my gf bout me gw2 I started a guardian.. I actually wanted to play ele.. So I bounced between two of those prof.. Then I tried sPvP and neglected my guardian hating him at end game (I was just bad at playing him tbh).. So I changed to thief and hit 59 (can only play a few hours from time to time).
Love him.. Mobile, high dmg, steal if a nice stun breaker etc…

But with your guide I created a new guardian.. Not only do I love e plate look better than the Ninja, shinobi, gunslinger, lone warder look (they are awesome but), but I love having great sword og sword and board.
So to the point you guide just made me wanna play guardian again, and your humour combined with info is soooo great.

Haters will hate, but you handled it with style (as already mentioned).
Can’t wait for a WvWvW guide from you;) and hope to see you on the field.

Kind regards Izu, Shield Brothers and Guardians of Surmia.

What a fantastic guide. Actually, I’m starting a Guardian alt BECAUSE of this guide (I main an 80 Ranger). You’ve organized and written everything perfectly. It’s engaging and easy to follow, AND encouraging!

Any chance you’ll get around to doing other class guides (perhaps Ranger next? Pretty please? Bahah)?

Really, really well written, +100 rep.

I play a Guardian. I only play a Guardian. I have always only ever played a ‘Guardian’, since I started in MMOs playing Asheron’s Call 12 years ago. And so I really appreciate this guide!

I will add my thanks, Eveningstar. I am a bit disillusioned about my lvl 80 character right now, so am trying out the different alts that I rolled at launch. I actually thought Guardian would be my main before launch, but was lured away by the all the pretty lights .

I have started playing her today, and found your guide. Very helpful, and I’m hoping that I will enjoy this profession – your information and insights will certainly put me on that path, I hope.

Terrific guide! Thank you very much for taking the time to post it. Very helpful and it gets people who read it thinking.

(I was pleased that I was already doing some of the suggestions )

Just started playing a Guardian a few days ago. Level 20-something. I couldn’t tell you if the details/minutiae of this guide are all correct. Don’t care either. What I can say is it is quite awesome to get a comprehensive overview of the class in a readable, amusing form. Thanks for this.

Beautiful guide. I’ve only had the game for just over a week and i started with a Guardian. this helped clear a lot of my uncertainty. I love how flexible and forgiving this game is and i think it took this guide for it to finally set into my head. Most MMORPG’s I’ve played demanded perfection from level one. It’s nice that i can actually sit back and enjoy endless slaughter with some bros.

Again great guide, lots of work went into it, but i can see a lot of help coming out of it. Keep it up.

This is pretty useful. Gave me a few new ideas on how to play the class. I’m still fairly new with it, so still lots to learn.=P

I just continued to play my 2nd char – the guardian… after taking a longer break after leveling engineer to 80. Now at 40 and asking myself which traits I should chose. Will start 3rd char first to join the last order for the char selection screen medal and then continue guardian.

So far I liked it. Feels much more like a “farm char” than engineer and fun to fight groups of smaller mobs. Playing greatsword at the moment.

The symbol of the greatsword seems interesting and the greatsword itself and that healing trait maybe(also that first trait line has stuff for spirit weapons, I sometimes use the hammer… for knockdown).

Started to like virtures when I got that elite skill that resets the cd on them. 10 on virtues for that additional effects and it is making the Master of Consecrations possible. They seem interesting especially for group playing.

Is it okay to go 30 Zeal(great sword healing trait and maybe one for the spirit weapon to be not destroyed after commanded), 30 Honor(symbols larger, 2h-weapon cd redude by 20 percent for greatsword and maybe longer symbol or healing symbol as last), 10 Virtues(master of consecrations)?

This is the best guide I ever read on Guardian.

Even though I am lvl 55 it’s still nice to do some readup and see what other players think and learn new things!

Thank you a lot for your time in this and great job!

This is the Best guide I have ever read …period! … Overall I have a better understanding of the game, the guardian and combat tactics in general.

I finely feel equipped to make up my own guardian build from scratch.

Thank you ….for this Outstanding guide

Haters will hate…
I am a writer (unpublished) and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed reading your guide. The humour was great and made reading a lot of technical information fun and relaxing. I loved the way you kept your cool with the trolls and answered in a professional manner.
If you have not thought about it I would encourage you to start, you are a writer. You have a nice pace to your writing and a good grasp of pathos.
Well done.

This guide is just what I was looking for, as I’m starting a new guardian. I love that you commented on specific synergies and favorite (and least favorite) aspects of the various elements, which helped me choose a weapon setup and will help me with other decisions down the line. Thank you so much!