Guild Wars 2

Hi,
I just want to start by saying this isn’t a Guard-hate post, since there seem to be quite a few…

I made a guard thinking it was a tank… Easy enough mistake, the name, heavy armor, and big shield all implied tank. I am used to healers on other games, and figured I could channel that protective instinct into a guard easily enough. So I’ve leveled my guard to 80, solo, which is where my problem comes in.

Soloing PvE I’m tough, Love it, she can essentially solo certain group events “Like reclaim the fort from the fire legions” sort of events, not kill the uber champion boss, but still pretty good. I can’t complain. I thought I was pretty tough until I went into a dungeon with some friends and learned the hard way that guards have base HP only slightly higher than Elementalists (If I’m wrong do correct me.)

I have sadly learned that I am not what I thought I was, which seems to have caught a lot of people out. I’m now having a bit of an identity crisis… I’m running at just about 15,800 HP, I have not even begun to work on Accessories yet, definitely need to work on my gears. I am using a combo of Cleric and Giver’s Armor, and a build which is heavy on Vitality/Toughness, Traits picked are mostly supportive to pt. Shouts, Boons, All Symbols heal, Dodge heals, etc. I have watched some videos on builds, etc before posting here.

Can somebody please help me figure out what my roll is in a party? I am used to soloing, and I’m not really sure what is expected of a guard in a dungeon, or WvW, etc. Is a guard a support class or a tank that I’m using/geared wrong? Something in-between? I’ve seen some people get pretty ticked off at this, but I’m not really bothered by it, I just want to use the character I made to her best ability and be useful to others. Where my heart really lies is in the role of a supportive class/healer, so really anything that focuses on that is what I would find most helpful.

Thanks,
Sorry this is so long!

~Emily~

Well your not a tank or a healer, your main roll is upfront DPS/Support how you do this changes depending on who you are and how you play.
I prefer a to play the easy mode as my warrior buddy puts it 0/0/30/30/10 with Knights Amour, Weapons and a mix of Beserker and Knights Accessories. Health pool is low but with runes for Increased boon duration two monk, two water and then two for protection duration and boon duration food. You can face tank a lot of things and even if is something you cant knowing when to dodge and with a lot of vigor regen stacked up you can keep dodging which equals a large nunber if back ground team heals.
If you focus in healing and tanking i have found in most group the DPS loss is not concenpsted fir for the healing/support you give so if you die then the team generally starts to die to and wipes start to happen.

Wall of reflection and traiting for this helps alot it helps vs ranged attacks provides a combo field for condition removal/retaliation.

The best way you can help your team is to try and increase you damage out put to draw more aggro and help kill things fast, whilst providing protection regen, might and all those other good boons to your team whilst laying down walls to protect yourself and the guys behind you.

I would say experiment a lot with your weapon sets test combinations and learn when its best to swap from close combat sets to support sets and ranged.
Keep tweaking your gear untill you sre happy you can set your gear mire defensive and and mire offensive gear in piece by piece to get acustomed to lower health and armour but uts all about what best suites you.

Being ‘tanky’ in dungeons is tricky business, unless you have access to protection quite often (i.e. hammer chain, shield #4, shouts, etc). If you want to go full on bunker power/toughness/vitality gear is the way to go. If you want to spice up some damage with that you could also do a p/v/t armor setup with knight’s accessories (power/precision/toughness) so that you have some nice crit chance and still keep the base armor pretty high up. Traits I’ll leave up to you to decide though…I use a meditation build for personal survival / damage so I wouldn’t be the one to talk to about shout builds of the overly popular altruistic healing builds that are out there.

Cybill.7390:

Hi,
I just want to start by saying this isn’t a Guard-hate post, since there seem to be quite a few…

I made a guard thinking it was a tank… Easy enough mistake, the name, heavy armor, and big shield all implied tank. I am used to healers on other games, and figured I could channel that protective instinct into a guard easily enough. So I’ve leveled my guard to 80, solo, which is where my problem comes in.

Soloing PvE I’m tough, Love it, she can essentially solo certain group events “Like reclaim the fort from the fire legions” sort of events, not kill the uber champion boss, but still pretty good. I can’t complain. I thought I was pretty tough until I went into a dungeon with some friends and learned the hard way that guards have base HP only slightly higher than Elementalists (If I’m wrong do correct me.)

I have sadly learned that I am not what I thought I was, which seems to have caught a lot of people out. I’m now having a bit of an identity crisis… I’m running at just about 15,800 HP, I have not even begun to work on Accessories yet, definitely need to work on my gears. I am using a combo of Cleric and Giver’s Armor, and a build which is heavy on Vitality/Toughness, Traits picked are mostly supportive to pt. Shouts, Boons, All Symbols heal, Dodge heals, etc. I have watched some videos on builds, etc before posting here.

Can somebody please help me figure out what my roll is in a party? I am used to soloing, and I’m not really sure what is expected of a guard in a dungeon, or WvW, etc. Is a guard a support class or a tank that I’m using/geared wrong? Something in-between? I’ve seen some people get pretty ticked off at this, but I’m not really bothered by it, I just want to use the character I made to her best ability and be useful to others. Where my heart really lies is in the role of a supportive class/healer, so really anything that focuses on that is what I would find most helpful.

Thanks,
Sorry this is so long!

~Emily~

Basically, you are doing something wrong. The problem isn’t guardian, it is whatever you are doing. You should be able to “tank” just fine.

hey Emily! i had a similar problem when i first entered dungeons as my Guard lol. though i feel with dungeons, you need to know as much about the dungeons, each encoutner, the mechanics as much as you need to know about the Guardian class. or any class you decide to take into any given dungeon.

when you practice more and learn more, you’ll find yourself changing traits and weapons halfway through the dungeons to best equip yourself for each encounter. though to be honest, it’s not entierly necessary : )) but the Guardian’s set up allows us to do so.

a good youtube channel to check out would be Strife’s youtube channel. he covers most dungeons on his Guard (who he started out with iirc), as well as Warrior and now Mesmer. note that he and his group do speed runs, but he does explain each encounter quite nicely.

and lastly, to be honest, you can play any role in dungeons. i can’t speak for high level fractals yet since that seems to be a different beast in itself… don’t let other people dictate how you should play as a Guardian. it’ll be hard for people to get out of their mindset that Guardians are supposed to only, well, guard and support and heal. we can do anything from being extremely survivable, to being extremely DPS-sy. but if you know you want to do support as much as you can, go that route. : ))

same for WvW. i started off as being mainly hybrid.. decent damage, pretty darn good survivability. then i went the more DPS route. less forgiving in terms of making mistakes but i killed a LOT faster. and most people don’t expect a Guard to be able to hit that hard. then now i’ve been exploring being more supportive as well.

some weapons to note – mace / shield is a nice supportive combo. staff needless to say. hammer is pertty good too. but to be honest, all weapons would work because i feel the Guardian has so many innate supportive abilities that we’d have to try hard to NOT passively support our allies. with that in mind though, you can definitely build for that. shouts for example, consecrations, area blinds, area denial, area control, healing symbols, knockbacks pulls to take off focus fire from your enemies, etc… am sure you know all about this already.

regards to the Guardians low health.. it’s due to the damage mitagation skills we have and also the ability outheal any damage we take. obviously, you’ll still want to recognize and avoid the big hits or focus fire. acuse that’ll kill anyone. XDD

if you wanna talk more, i’d be more than willing to help and we can go through some builds even. good luck!

GW2 has no trinity. (tank/heal/dps) You are not a tank, you can’t just stand still and smack a boss in the face without taking much damage. You need to move around, dodge, and use your skills wisely.

what rainbow said.
You are not a tank.. not a healer. not a dps.
So what are you ??? good question. but i call my guardian a boon bot… go figure.

Why i went back to my warrior and specced into boon hunter.
Its alot of fun. have seen 3 k autoattacks with my axe on some guardians atm =)
And my healing passive is the same or stronger.
225 + 350 ticking all time on me. (signet + adrenaline specc).

Good luck on your guardian tho.

The key to staying alive in dungeons is damage avoidance over damage recovery. You could use up all your traits and gear stats spec’ing for vitality and get your HP to 17k or whatever, but you’ll still be killed in 1-2 shots in some dungeon fights. A better approach is to learn the fights, predict when a big dmg skill is coming your way, and use your dodge or one of your many, many aegis options to keep from taking the hit. Sure, there are benefits to having a larger HP pool and more toughness, but they are not as important as avoiding damage altogether. That’s why berserker builds are very popular right now. If you do it right, you can have your cake (big damage output) and eat it too (stay alive in any fight). People who scoff at berserker builds will point toward some guy they did CoF with who died in every encounter and say berserkers are useless because “if you’re dead you do no dps.” That’s true, but there are plenty of great players who stay up just as well as someone in PVT gear and do tons more damage.

TL;DR: Being a tank in GW2 is not about using your skills properly to survive damage, it’s about using your skills properly to avoid being hit at all.

Actually, you can be a tank in the sense of taking damage and still being able to stay on your feet. You need to look into bunker builds with healing power in mind. Though keep in mind some encounters were meant to 1-2 shot you, even with bunker stats.

@eldain, stop trolling the Guardian forums!

Emily, to paraphrase what a lot of people are saying the Guardian is less of a healing class than a damage mitigation support class (if you play them that way). In dungeons and WvW content it’s much more important to reduce incoming damage than try to heal it away. The heals you can grant other people are probably better considered as a stopgap triage until they can get their own healing abilities off cooldown and working again. What’s much more important is your ability to mitigate or otherwise prevent large amounts of damage to your allies.

Guardians are the only profession in the game that can reliably grant the Aegis boon to allies which when used at the right time can completely prevent damage from large attacks, and have access to a LOT of Protection which significantly increases incoming damage. Furthermore they have a lot of blinds that they can call on to reduce damage taken, and a large number of Crowd Control weapon skills which can be used to great effect. They are the ONLY profession in the game who can create persistent Crowd Control effects that aren’t elite skills. Furthermore they’re one of only two professions in the game who can create area projectile reflection effects.

Creative use of the above, and the Guardian’s ability to spread large amounts of boons such as might stacks and team stability make the Guardian second to none as a supporter who also happens to be able to provide some healing.

Tank form of Guard = Guard with protection boon. So if you want to be a tank, you need to figure out a way to get access to that boon 24/7. Luckily, many Guardians have already made builds based on perma-protection so you can probably scavenge for them in the forums (hint: look for hammer based builds).

In regards to the role of a Guard, they are designed for support; but they can provide sustained dps as well. Pretty much everything a guard does affects other party members, so they are naturally supportive—unless you go for self-fish meditation builds :P