Guild Wars 2

I am Spec’d out completely in Berserker Gear. Done to kill in WvW while gathering Badges for Legendary. Need to go on the PVE side and looking for a build that helps with Dungeons, Farming, and Events.

Right now stats are 10/30/30/0/0 Sword and Shield, Scepter and Focus and GS for the Farming.

The build is great for Crits and High DPS, but lacks in surviving when amassed by mobs which the build seems to aggro a lot of especially in dungeons. All the rolling in and out of combat because of constant decreased health and need to self-heal is annoying play for me.

Any help on a more stable build, which focuses on Self-Heals, Tanking, use of GS/Hammer/Sword/Scepter would be helpful. I am big on GS as I am farming to make Twilight so I would like the main focus to be there.

My immediate thought is to stay 30 in Valor and move 20 to Honor. The quick heals from meditations is nice, and the 2H recharge from Honor would be great. I am also using MF gear while farming. Thanks for the help in advance.

Here is what I have been running and it seems to keep me and my allies up.
Traits : 0/10/30/30/0
Radiance: Signet Mastery
Valor: Meditation Mastery, Retributive Armor, and Altruistic Healing
Honor: Writ of Exaltation, Empowering Might, and Writ of the Merciful
Gear: Full exotic berserker armor with 5 Superior runes of the grove. Exotic berserker great sword with major sigil of bloodlust. Cleric staff with sigil of air. Berserker rings, earrings, and amulet.
Skills: Signet of Reslove, Stand Your Ground, Hold the Line, Smite Condition, and Renewed Focus (elite).
Let me first say that this is a modified version of Silent’s Paladin build so credit where credit is due.
My set up is all about the boons while keeping respectable crit chance and damage. Right now I get 41% crit chance so I can keep around 2 to 3 stacks of might on folks and more in bigger fights. Altruistic Healing + Stand Your Ground + Hold the line in a 6 man group = 24 boons that all give me a healing benefit. Then I still have the staff skill Symbol of Swiftness which damages foes, heals (with the trait), and give me a heal because of the boon it provides. Then Empower which has its own built in heal and the stacks of might in big groups also gives me heals. The greatsword’s default attack ends with might boon so heal and the 4 skill symbol of wrath give me a boon, damages foes, and heals me. All this with our passive regen ability, the two evade rolls that end with a heal, and last but not least the nuke selfheal of signet of resolve.

A note on healing. This build will not out pace the damage you take. You still need to evade and not stand in mob made aoe fire etc. Think of the heals as damage mitigation.

The 5 Superior Runes of the Grove give me a 25% chance on hit to give me protection boon for 4 seconds with a 30 second cool down. Trust me, you will be surprised how often this triggers. Oh and it’s a boon so heal from Altruistic Healing.

Something else to remember is that those symbols can generate critical hits just like weapons. So if you read the battle field right, you can place the symbol from the staff on one fight and join in at another part and drop the symbol from your greatsword. Then spin and watch the might boons start stacking up on your team and healing pour on to you.

The above works better in groups. If your soloing then change out AH for Monks Focus and Empowering might for either Two Handed Weapon Mastery or Symbols Last Longer trait. Change the utility skills to Judges Intervention, Purging Flames and Smite Condition. Keep Renewed Focus. If you like you can take 5 points from Radiance and put that into Virtues for extra boons from virtue activation. If you do this I would change your heal to shelter.

Haven’t tried this out in any of the PvP formats but in PvE it’s been a lot of fun.

Don’t listen to people that are knocking hammer. It catches a lot of flack because its attack animation is too slow to be useful in pvp. The thing is, it’s that slow for a reason, and that reason is useless in pvp.

The symbol it provides on its 3rd attack actually makes the hammer’s auto attack much better than the great swords. Not only will the hammer out damage the GS (you can test this with a steady weapon in the mists), but it also provides better defenses because the symbol provides protection (which triggers AH) and the pulses can also crit to trigger empowering might.

That’s just considering the auto attack, when you look into it further, the hammer also has better AoE (hits a better area with its attack chain) and its #2 skill outperforms swords in every way (small gap closer, shorter cooldown, not channeled, blast finisher, more reliable area of effect). after all this, in my opinion binding blade and the GS leap ability don’t bring enough to the table to compete with the hammer (given the right spec).

Another thing I’d like to point out is that the 1h sword is better for single targets than any other weapon in terms of killing speed.

My advice to you is to test things out in the mists and find something you’re comfortable with. I find 0/15/30/20/5 to be very effective at solo, meditations are also great.

Farming seems a lot harder without Binding Blade to pull ranged mobs together, though – just my 2c