Hammer on guardian
well. that’s one way you could use your hammer in wvw.
Sadly we lost the hammer in favor of the warrior, insane cooldown, one and only one knockback skill with hii chance for an enemy to doge it (war has 3 and a nice combo with it ) one immobil just a spike on the enemy and they can run further on, a leap ( more like an fail animation with low dmg to it) and a ring good for close combat but not a sanctuary (with that cold i wish it was) enemies can still fire at you from outside forcing you to get out of the ring and finally the one skill chain that i have no words to describe it
Hammer is good damage in PvE, and the high protection uptime is nice, especially in fractals. For a hammer build you’ll want to take 3 in zeal for the vuln on symbol and 4 in honor for the longer symbol duration to maximize its potential.
In WvW, hammer does good damage and has great control and CC, but it’s too slow for my personal tastes.
I use the Hammer exclusively now as my main 2H and I use Swrd/Focus or Scptr/Focus as my swap.
Skill 4 (Banish) is almost undodgeable if you know how to use it. Just target the person you want to slam … start the animation by selecting 4 then select JI and you will blink to the target while animation finishes at target immediately hitting with no chance for dodge. Now if they have stability on them obviously the knockdown wont work … but more often then not if you catch a target not prepared for this attack at some ranged distance they wont be prepared for the sudden slam to the face from Banish.
You then immediately select 3 to root them and apply vulnerability (should be 6 stacks if you traited right) close with Hammer 2 then Hammer 5 to trap them ..the rest depends on actions of other player … I find I often at this point have to switch to the sword then go Sword 3 (possibly immediately followed by sword 2 to close gap and because there’s a slight delay before attack lands and selecting 2 quickly afterwards will (much like combining JI w/Banish) land the hit immediately after blinking to target.
I use Celestial Wup Wup for PvE content as it allows for more support stats and a Zerker Hammer for killing fast in WvW and PvP.
The Hammer is the best weapon for both damage and cc and just versatility period.
For pve, hammer is the king of fractals due to 100% uptime on protection and great dps just by spamming AA. It’s not recommended in dungeons because it lacks burst and the light field spam is really annoying.
Here is a link to an old thread from Obal. I would suggest giving it a look as he has been a very reliable source for Guardian in PvE.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-DPS-Guardian-for-PVE/first
and refuses to spare the life in return for the surrender at discretion (unconditional surrender)
of a vanquished opponent.