Guild Wars 2

The last time I played the game was right around the time Flame and Frost was running. I was running Hammer/Staff at the time and loved it.

How is hammer doing these days? It looks like the traits got changed, so I’d need to get a new build to work with. I was actually working on building Juggernaut, but don’t want to go through with it if hammer isn’t a good weapon to main anymore. This is primarily for PvE, by the way. I go into WvW sometimes, but not very often. I want to say that my Guardian currently has a full Knight’s set right now, too. Not sure if that’s still a good option for hammer builds, either.

Any advice for me? Just trying to get back into it all right now.

PvE they are great. With writ of persistence, and full zerk gear its a lot of damage and perma protection to the group.

So it’s worth it to grab a full set of Zerker gear for one, then? I remember before that Knight’s seemed to be king.

Full zerk. Anchor guardian has been dead for a long time now. This is the guide for you:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-DPS-Guardian-for-PVE/first

Knight’s armor is now seen as training wheesl for beginner guardians, until they are skilled enough to dodge/blind/block/reflect damage.

^^^ the guide above is pretty awesome. i love using the 15/15/0/20/10 core build. if you do go WvW, you’d spec and gear differently though.

and in general hammer is extremely viable in all game modes – PvE, dungeons, fractals, WvW, PvP, at least, imho. in PvE, hammer 3, 4, 5 is always useful if you need a little breathing room, and just plain funny to see mobs trip over themselves continuously or fly around XDD. your main damage will come from just spamming the AA chain.

in dungeons, fractals, hammer 5 helps a lot for Line of sighting mobs and having them stop in the tracks or interupt strong attacks that they open with and then your groups can lay AoE on them to waste.

only flaw with hammer is its symbol light field………….that overwrites others’ fire fields at the end of every 3 auto attacks.

Relshdan.6854:

only flaw with hammer is its symbol light field………….that overwrites others’ fire fields at the end of every 3 auto attacks.

Yes, in a lot of groups i have to switch to GS+Sword/Focus only because of this…

I don’t use zerker armour, mostly plain old soldier with about 35% crit rate, and that’s just for proccing my sigils.

I use a few buffs to bump up my boon durations so I can keep Retaliation and Protection up all the time. Not sure if that’s the way it’s ‘meant’ to be played, but it’s lots of fun.

Aircool.9527:

I don’t use zerker armour, mostly plain old soldier with about 35% crit rate, and that’s just for proccing my sigils.

I use a few buffs to bump up my boon durations so I can keep Retaliation and Protection up all the time. Not sure if that’s the way it’s ‘meant’ to be played, but it’s lots of fun.

This is only usefull (in PvE) if u can´t stay alive with zerker armor (but u can die after half of the fight and still dealing more dps).
I don´t care about WvsW bigscale.

Honestly the only way to achieve living-through-every-mistake on a guard is by using AH which is bad as it gimps your dps a lot. What i’m trying to say here is swapping out a few pieces for anything isn’t going to make barely any difference to your survival. Might as well stick with zerk, and I don’t know why anyone would use soldiers gear unless they are blind

Just keep in mind that “DPS Potential” is based on having food buffs, 25 stack Bloodlust, 25 Stack of might, Fury…which is very plausible for PvE.

DO NOT expect that to be the case in PvP especially, or in WvW. But that’s why its a PvE guide; additionally, similar test can be done with any class and with Warriors for example, you will see a HUGE difference in the DPS done, just FYI.