Leveling Guardian best weapons combo?
Whatever you find the most fun to use.
Leveling: Greatsword / Staff. GS for the sustained damage and “ease of use”, staff for tagging in big dynamic events and constant swiftness.
traits to aim for:
15 radiance + 5 virtues: allows you to spam virtue of justice before pulling each mob, giving yourself might and blinding/burning the mob.
20 honor: for reduced cooldown on 2h weapon abilities, and shout cooldown reduction.
I’d suggest using shouts as your utilities, retreat/save yourselves/hold the line are a good combo for leveling.
I like greatsword and sceptre/torch for the most part. The sceptre is useful for those champion monsters you just just don’t want to get overly close to, and it allows me to start the fight at range, hitting sceptre 2, and the torch 4 and 5 right before switching to greatsword in the midst of a group. Most groups die very quickly.
It’s certainly not the only viable way to go though. Farzo has the right of it, there is just so much survivability built into the guardian, you can’t really go wrong with anything. Sometimes I’ll switch to hammer, and crank the speakers up just because it makes an especially satisfying thwack. Mace has arguably the best survivability if you absolutely need to straight up tank a tougher fight, but that’s been pretty rare for me. Both sword and hammer are fairly balanced offensively/defensively with sword offering more mobility and hammer providing more control. Both sword and mace giving you the option to add offense with torch, melee defense with focus, or ranged defense with shield.
I’ve never played much with staff, but it synergizes well with a group. I know some people use it for increasing might before switching to something like greatsword. It really is whatever you find most fun to use though. If your goal is maximum killing speed for the most part most everything can be handled with greatsword and it seems to kill average groups of fodder the quickest.
(edited by Matt.3284)
Greatsword/Staff is definitely a great combo for leveling. Both have AOE attacks. Both drop light fields. Both help you stack might. Both help you be more mobile (leap and swiftness boon). Both benefit from the Two Handed Mastery trait.
Staff gives you healing while Greatsword gives you damage. Both synergize well with each other. Dropping Line of Warding with staff then leaping through it with Greatsword #3 grants Retaliation. Symbol of Swiftness and Symbol of Judgement both will remove conditions from allies when you use Greatsword #2 and #5. You can stack might with Empower then continue to buff it with Greatsword’s autoattack.
Weapon choice totally depends on your playstyle and preferences, but this combo has been the most effective in my experience.
The trite answer: Any.
And its true any works.
But most people go GS for a reason. Its good dmg, its good aoe, its got control, and it feels fast.
Hammer is nice dps, but can feel slow, so some people dont like it. A symbol build works really well in pve as most mobs run straight for you anyway and sit on your symbols.
Scepter + Focus is a great combo for those hard mobs, you can kite really well and focus is so much more useful in defense than the other options.
Staff is a must for dynamic events, you can spam 1 and tag everything for max credit (not to mention its a kitten good group support weapon), and using staff 4 before charging in with a GS whilst solo really hits hard with those 12might stacks.
I personally found, sword, mace, torch and shield to be lacklustre whilst levelling. They have their place for sure, but I think the other weapons are better for levelling.
I like GS // Hammer.
GS for mostly any easy fight and bursting / aoe dmg/tag…
Hammer for harder fights where you need to hold opponents away for you to heal and get that perma protection/retaliation while you still do good dmg.
Scepter/Shield when you just cant get close for some weird reason and need more missile protection…