Guild Wars 2

So, I have been running full soldier on my guardian for some time now, but I have read that vitality isnt that helpfull in PvE. Im running a “tanky” boon guardian and likes to draw aggro, and as Knight does have higher toughness than soldier, it might be better. What are your toughts? Should I use knight in PvE, and soldier in WvWvW?

I run a mix of Beserker’s and Knight’s and can tank fine for dungeons. It depends on how comfortable you are with dodge rolls and tracking your health while you fight.

I recommend having at least some Knight’s if your using on crit traits like Empowering Might, which plays very well with Altruistic Healing.

Or you could take the wombo combo and use a bit of both. There’s no requirement that you take either extreme, you could even throw in a pinch of berserker if you wanted to and get a balanced build.

Im not to keen on berserk armor… But thanks for your input.

Take knights with zerker jewels. The toughness tradeoff is totally nonexistent (you lose, like, 2% damage reduction) and your DPS goes way up.

On the other hand, soldiers is always bad.

Yeah, I agree – If ignoring Beserker, I’d probably run full Knight or a Valkyrie/Knight blend before straight Soldiers.

If you’re goal is boon uptime for you team, you’re going to want to find a decent amount of precision to maximize empowering might… essentially wanting it to pop close after cooldown. Anyone know what the sweet spot for crit chance is?

I always tell people about the “trade spaces” for dps/survivability.

The first place to look at is your Traits. Most classes can trait survivability, while not completely losing dps. Examples from a guardian:
Retributive Armor: 5% of toughness is given as a bonus to precision.
Empowering Might: Nearby allies gain might (5 seconds) when you land a critical hit.

Second is armor. For a guardian, we have a ton of ways to cleanse. So conditions shouldn’t be an issue. Therefore, if giving up DPS, go for toughness(Knights) gear. Reduce the overall damage as much as possibly (while giving yourself more % to crit).

Third is weapons, forth is the jewelry. I would recommend running full zerker here for 99% of pve.

I run a 0/0/30/30/10 AH/PoV build with full zerker gear. So far I have done level 38 fractals with no issues other than poor play on my part when it does happen.