Guild Wars 2

Hi, I’m currently levelling a guard at the moment. I ended up dumping my zerker gear on my warrior for a pvt set since I found I was dying too often. I prefer the slower but steady play of being alive with lower damage on my warr than kill a few mobs, ganked by vet mushrooms, run back etc.

So what can you reccomend for my Guard? I was considering clerics and doing some kind of staff longbow thing so I can attack from range but keep myself alive with heals but everyone still seems to say NOOO, ONLY ZERK OR YOU ARE SHAME ON YOUR FAMILY!

Does anyone have alternatives to zerker builds for HoT that maintain aliveness and are fun? I don’t care if it’s not “Meta” as long as it’s still “Fun-a” because I’m not “dead-a.”

Assume here that I’m too old for twitch dodging and don’t want to be locked into a build with blinds spam.

The thing is, if you don’t wear zerk, then you don’t perform well. Your performance, is looked upon as the whole of efforts your family has made to raise you. So, if you don’t wear zerker, then YOU SHAME YOUR FAMILY!!!

But on a serious note, I actually have spare soldier set. Should I find things getting to hot, I will switch out a few pieces of zerker for solider. The gear prefixes aren’t an all or nothing thing.

As far as alternate sets as a whole, Marauder is fairly close to Zerker. It is basically just zerker with valkyrie bits, but if you want one single prefix you can go for it.

A mix of zerk/valk or assassins/valk works well.

You could also do zerg or assassins / celestial if you are willing to take the time to farm it.
The later works exceptionally well with more supportive builds as well.

Lastly as Blood said Marauder works quite well.

Aha, I see, I went completely nuts on my warrior and got soldier gear, soldier weapons, and soldiers accessories with crests of the soldier on everything but the armor. I kind of assumed the point of the prefixes was to go full prefix.

I have been confusion.

Celestial, you can use all the stats. From conditions, to healing to any dps stats. I wear full asc celestial and i’m pretty happy with it.

I am really happy with Marauder being made available in PvE as well. That is a great soft alternative towards a slightly more self-sustainy and tanky Berserker set-up.

Run Marauder weapon, armor and amulet, and a mix of Valkyrie and the Zerk+Valkyrie combo rings/trinkets for the remaining slots.

This’ll retain close to the same offensive stats as from Zerker (but ofc not quite as high, a trade-off has to be made!) while gaining a big chunk of Vit on top of it to help stay alive.

With the expansion of Druids and Rev. I’m not too sure which of the 3 including guard would best suited for “heals, condi removal and boons.” Of course you’re going to see a lot say Druid and yes on paper they do stuff that I wish Guards had. I have yet to test with all the new minstrel stats or even nomads on a Druid.

However, with a mace/shield + staff with nomad weap/armor and cleric trinkets worked wonders in WvW awhile back for “supporting” the group. Tbh, idk if it’s even possible to bring that back for example into PvE raids, now that we got Druids and Rev. It just seems like we’re being put on the side for both damage and the supportive role but we’ll have to see how raids stack up against Guards.

If anyone else can confirm the difference between the heals of a Guard and a Druid with similar equipment would be great as I’m also debating whether or not to just keep my guard for PvP and go with Druids for raids in the future.

Maruader will give that dusting of vitality.

I run it on my Rev and will craft for DH as well.

To further this conversation….

I already have full ascended zerk build that I use most of the time, however with the new content, raids coming, wanting to support in wvw, and the desire to be able to stay alive while carrying a weak party through high level fractals, I was thinking of making a second ascended set and was wondering what other guardians are using as their “back-up” support build.

I was considering cleric’s but was wondering if magi might be better to take advantage of better crit proc’s in a support build. Or is cele the way to go?