Guild Wars 2

Hey fellow guardians, I’ve been meaning to try out a new build lately and wanted to know the viability. To date, I’ve been running a AH build 0/0/30/30/10. Soldiers Armor, Zerker accessories/weapons. (Mainly, Hammer/GS/Staff) and its been great.

But how well would a MF build do in comparison? Without changing too much gear (just runes, sigils), trait-wise 10/30/30/0/0 or 0/30/30/10/0 and using mainly 1h weapons – sword, scepter, shield. How much survivability is lost? and is the drop in survivability made up for in the increase in damage, DPS and power?

As some context, I mainly play WvW, with some dungeons and PvE on the side. I rarely delve into fractals.

Thanks

Edit: MF = Monk’s Focus

Never play with Magic Find in groups! The can´t remove it soon enough……in PvE, Dungeons and Fractals the best thing u can do in a group is to play Berserkerstyle.

In WvsW Clerics oder Zerg/Knight mixed for big fights.

I’ve been really enjoying monk’s focus with cool downs on meditations and instant meditations. Works very well.

I think meditations are ok, I’ve played with them to be different. But in the end I felt the performance of Ah+shouts and EM were superior. Meditations just need more individuality imo.

For WvW I personally feel that meditations builds are superior when roaming but AH is better for zerging. So depending on what I’m doing I switch between the 2. There are builds that while might not be “optimal” they allow you to switch between the 2 builds with just a few clicks.

chaosmesmer.9857:

Hey fellow guardians, I’ve been meaning to try out a new build lately and wanted to know the viability. To date, I’ve been running a AH build 0/0/30/30/10. Soldiers Armor, Zerker accessories/weapons. (Mainly, Hammer/GS/Staff) and its been great.

But how well would a MF build do in comparison? Without changing too much gear (just runes, sigils), trait-wise 10/30/30/0/0 or 0/30/30/10/0 and using mainly 1h weapons – sword, scepter, shield. How much survivability is lost? and is the drop in survivability made up for in the increase in damage, DPS and power?

As some context, I mainly play WvW, with some dungeons and PvE on the side. I rarely delve into fractals.

Thanks

Edit: MF = Monk’s Focus

Yeah, I think most of us know what MF means….obviously not everyone =P

It offers superior healing in smaller groups.

For a look at the numbers MF heals for 1960 with .4 hp. So if you run with 100 hp it heals for 2000 health when you use a meditation. You will run the 20% cdr on meditations so 16 seconds on smite condition. It puts JI on a 36 second cd.

That is a video by stunningstyles running a build similar to the one you are talking about.

The thing about the meditation build is that it’s designed around killing, where as the AH build is designed around sustaining. The Meditation build heals for more (and deals damage) in solo/small groups, but the AH build gives a huge amount of healing when you can get your buffs onto a group. The downside to AH is you sacrifice damage for the sustain.

Both are good, but again they have different jobs. I’m not going to try and tell you which one suits your play style better. That is something you will have to decide on your own.

As for builds you can run with something like stunningstyles has in his video, I prefer the 0/30/30/10/0 build because I can pick up shout cd making my SYS! on a much lower cd.

As for traits you will want IV, X, XI in radiance. This gives you 15% more crit chance on your one handed weapons, 5% more damage on your sword skills, and Fury when facing 7 out of 8 professions in the game.

In Valor I, and XII are pretty mandatory. The last one is entirely up to you depending on your play style. You can get the extra precision debatable if it’s any good, you can grab group toughness (won’t be of much help since you will be solo/small group roaming), passive condition removal is a great choice since you will be taking shelter.

For your heal, you will take shelter. Every time you block you gain might, 2 seconds of blocking every attack + the heal is great. Use it proactively. If you see an opponent going in for something big, block it. You will learn when to block with time.

You can switch out shoulders/gloves/boots for zerker gear. It isn’t expensive and it will give you a boost in your burst.

AS for the healing MF will heal for 2k every meditation with 100 hp, AH would heal for 79 per boon. Roughly it takes like 25 boons to equal one meditation heal. Now that is a ton in a small group. With 2 people that’s ~12 boons over that time, with 3 people it’s only 8. At around 3 people it offers more heals to go with AH. AH outheals the hell out of MF in a group setting. Now this changes a bit if you go with any Magi gear, and I’ve found there is a sweet spot with celestial rings, a few celestial gems that can get you more hp while taking a relatively small hit to burst damage. If it’s worth it is still something I’m experimenting with.

Edit:

If you look at the forums you will kind of find Guardians are split into two groups. The first group is more dps oriented, this would be what most MF Guardians are in. The second group is more defense oriented, and this would be what most AH Guardians are in. Neither is exactly better than the other, as each offers it’s own strengths and weaknesses. They are just different play styles, with different objectives in mind.

Much stronger than I figured it’d be. I haven’t tried it for WvW, but I’m loving it for roaming in sPvP and it’s alright for just dishing out damage as zerker in PvE.

I’ve found that with the recent buffs to meditations and MF, it has become increasingly viable in pvp(haven’t tested in tpvp). The extra healing given is pretty significant. MI went from being useless to being more useful than JI(depending on the situation) for escaping/heals. I’d venture to say if this was tested extensively, it could work.

Thanks for the reply guys, The best option now is to give it a go and see how it turns out