Guild Wars 2

Hi guys,

I’ve never gotten to level 80 before and have thus never done any dungeons and only recently have I tried my hand at up scaled Eotm. I’m looking for a great general build for open world leveling so I can get into both post 80.

Thanks in advance.

zerker? what else!?

zerker with a few soldier mixtured maybe, in general anything works

If you’ve got trouble staying alive, go full soldiers.

Other then that full zerker is all you need for trash mobs, though in dungeons you might die very fast if you’re unfamilliar with them.

I don’t think there’s really a great build for open world, as everything will work and is great.

I’ve got retreat for the speed, smite condition and save yourselfes for the buff – as recharges don’t really bother as all are very short fights.

If you don’t want to spend money on your guard than do not bother with the gear. Grab whatever you can. Karma gear, level-up reward, trashdrop, 2 silver thingy from TP… Does not matter… Stat priority: (damage on weapon)/power/precision/vitality=toughness/ferocity… Other stats have basically zero value (you need a lot of condition damage to make it work…)

Use GS/Sword+focus for fast moving but always have a scepter and a staff handy for group events and for veterans/elites/champions. Always have one weapon equipped with Sigil of Bloodlust (even if minor).

For utilities I would go with Retreat! (for running…), Smite Conditions (extra damage and after the fight it removes annoying conditions like cripple and poison), and either Bane Signet (power is always good), Judge’s Intervention (for flashing around the map) or Save Yourselves! (get the superior aria trait if you run 2 shouts or the meditation mastery if you have two meditation utilities)

Traits (2 in valor or honor already)
Get the 3 point Radiance trait (Renewed Justice) and the 1 point minor in Virtues (Inspired Virtue). Every time you kill a foe your F1 CD resets so you can cast it again for Might and Burn.
These should give you nice killing power and plenty of survivability.

Hope these help!

Happy Guardin’!

Obal’s video… if you have questions on PVE guardian, look for obal’s stuff and read it, it’ll be worth your time.

Amazing info Aggrostemma, thank you. In regards to the sceptor and staff. Is one used for groups/events and the other used for veterans etc. or do you rotate through both weapons skills?

Actually, for leveling in the open world, conditions reign king. Here’s why.

When you’re in a higher level zone, you don’t get scaled up, but you do get more xp. When a mob is 10+ levels above you, you don’t grab experience, nor can you apply conditions to a foe, and every attack will be glancing, so level 7-9 above yours is your target.

Now, mobs that are a higher level have higher stats, and you’ll proc glancing blows increasingly more often. Conditions, however, never glance, and will do full damage regardless of toughness (which means you only have to worry about their extra vit, instead of vit, toughness, and perma weakness).

What you do, is go aoe conditions, and kill mobs that are 7-9 levels above you, and hopefully that have been alive for 2+ hours. You get extra xp for killing mobs that haven’t been touched in a while, and it caps at something like 250% after 2 hours. Lets say you have a Birthday booster (100%), normal xp booster (50%), killstreak booster, (100%), Food (15%, Strawberry ghosts are good), and the mob has been alive for 2+ hours. That’s ~515% more xp than normal. Once single mob will fill up about 1/2 a bar, which means you’ll only need to kill 20-25 of those kinds of mobs per level (10 bars). It shouldn’t take too long to kill mobs this way, 20-25 should only take 8-10 minutes.

Now, a few caveats. Guardians aren’t known for their conditions, and the only real condition boost isn’t available until 80 anyway, so yeah. I also didn’t really say to stack condition damage, though I will say Carrion is a fantastic stat to use for this, and I’ll go ahead and recommend it for other chars.

I’ve used this method a lot, particularly recently, where I leveled my 3rd guardian (I did go as much carrion as possible too) in under 24 hours of play time. I did not use a single tome, writ of experience, or dungeon path at all. Nor did I use a party to level faster with. You could go even faster, as I didn’t really optimize my time spent leveling, and I also managed to do my personal story up to level 80 while leveling, and I don’t know if that’s quite as optimal. Conditions and kiting is what did it for me.