Guild Wars 2

Which is the better weapon for leveling/pvp

Use what you like and what fits your build. Both a good.

“Generally speaking” GS does better 1v1 damage and higher front loaded damage. Hammer has better control, potentially higher AoE, and better defense.

I farm with GS. I WvW, boss fight, and solo large group mobs with hammer.

I think it’s best to use both swapping alot, they’re like 2 sides of a coin, hammer is more defensive/controlling, if levelling do the autoattack chain with hammer for protection if you’re in deep.. the 2 weapons compliment eachother big time.

There’s no better or worse of the two.

For leveling, definitely Greatsword. Hammer takes forever to kill regular mobs in the field since you don’t get full damage from the auto-attack chain until almost 7 seconds after you actually start attacking. Greatsword deals slightly less on the auto-attack chain but it’s much faster and all the damage is instant. Plus, most mobs die instantly to a WW, or a WW and one or two hits from the auto.

For champions, greatsword is generally also preferably just because it deals more damage and there aren’t really any champions in the field that a guardian can’t solo. Anything you can’t solo with a greatsword, hammer probably isn’t going to help much either. What you can do is take a staff (for swiftness + healing) or mace (for raw defense) in your offhand for those situations and switch if necessary..

Hammer is a control weapon, which you don’t really need in PvE. Otherwise it’s only really useful for party might stacking (and you need at least 30 in Honor and 10 in Virtues for that, so you can’t do it till level 60 at the very earliest) and for those rare situations where you could use the marginal defense bonus over GS but don’t want to lose so much DPS by using mace. And those are pretty rare.

For leveling/farming I prefer GS by far. Binding + wrath + whirl + a few auto attacks = bunch of dead mobs

GS has some issues in PvP though… whirl moves kinda slow and takes a while to go through the full skill, giving them quite a while to mitigate the damage in multiple ways.

Wrath has a casting time which roots you.

On the plus side binding blade will target and pull in stealthed foes.

In Dung’s/WvW I prefer hammer by far. Hammer provides a lot more protection/control.

Lots of protection time as well as retaliation for your group if you use that symbol for a blast finisher with #2.

2 being a blast finisher is great in dung’s… you’ll be able utilize every single combo field anyone puts down. It works on fields at the start AND end of the short leap.

2 is a short leap on a very short cooldown which helps you stay on your foe.

RoW + JI is amazing for isolating people/stopping runners in pvp and helping your team mates get away if you place it properly (I do wish they would fix it so that you can’t dodge through it though -.-)

ZE… another root is always great.

Banish… punting people to where you want them to go… usually into the middle of your group, off of trying to heal up another player, or in pve you can save your team mates life by giving him some breathing time/space (don’t use this otherwise though as it’ll lower your teams dps as they re-adjust to his new position).

I pair up hammer with scepter + shield in PvP for even more control… gives 2 roots, 2 knockbacks, 2 aoe on short cd’s, 2x protection, RoW, projectile absorb, and (somewhat) distance range for if they are somehow able to get away a bit after all of that.

In a Dung I’ll use Gs+Hammer unless I know that I’ll need some range… then usually gs/scepter + shield for that

Sorry if this is kinda repetitive… I’m on allergy meds and apparently can’t format this worth beans atm xD

Equip both.

Use GS for 1v1 as it kills faster in PvE as the mobs generally do not have high HP. Its mobility is better so you can bounce from one mob to the next easier.

When faced with 5+ mobs (depends how you kill as sometimes I like to pull lots of mobs and kill them in 1 go) switch to hammer.

Both have their uses.