Guild Wars 2

So I have been playing for a year now but my skills are… lacking lol. Anyways, I found out that part of the problem wast that I never focused on one class. So atm I have chosen to stick with my guardian.

With that said, I would like advice for gearing up my guardian for small-scale/solo WvW
Currently I have:
Full PVT gear and Lyssa Runes (Love the Runes)
Greatsword and Staff
Shelter, Judge’s intervention, Purging flames, Contemplation of Purity, and Renewed Focus
0, 0, 20, 20, 20
Everything is exotic except for a ring I looted.
Note that I am not a very skilled player so try not to go off on my for any mistakes you find here.
I only have about 3 gold atm.

Thx to anyone who decides to help.

what traits do you usually like to run? I can think of a couple of good builds that you might like. But knowing your traits might give a little more insite to your playstyle. Also where you wanting to be support or more offensive?

Playing multiple characters will make you more knowledgeable, but if you really want to get better it helps to narrow your focus. Get a really good feel for things like how much damage you can take, how quickly your skills activate and how long your cooldowns are so you can make better decisions in combat.

Full soldier’s gear is really not optimal for small-scale WvW combat. Your damage will be severely lacking and you won’t contribute much to your teammate’s sustain or damage pressure that way. I would strongly recommend trying to get some more offensive stats and healing power into your setup as your resources allow. This doesn’t mean totally ditch your soldier’s gear; guardians are a low health class and need to get some vitality from somewhere, but try to get a few pieces of celestial, cleric’s, magi’s, cavalier’s or berserker to round out your stats better.

If you have been playing for a long time, you may have a lot of karma, badges of honor or laurels. You can buy magi’s jewelry from the Temple of Lyssa and Cavalier’s jewelry from the Temple of Balthazar for karma any time those temples are open. Websites that track temple status can be googled to find one to guest to for the Temple of Balthazar, which isn’t commonly done.

Cleric’s and berserker’s weapons and armor can be purchased for modest amounts of gold plus badges of honor from the merchants in the WvW borderlands.

If you have a stash of laurels, you can use them to get some ascended jewelry pieces to help modify your stats.

A source of stability is important in small-scale WvW. I would recommend running Stand Your Ground or Indomitable Courage. These will help your allies as well. Learn to time stability to negate enemy disabling effects and make it safer to stomp downed enemies.

Condition management is also very important. I see you have a good amount of that in your build already with Contemplation of Purity and Runes of Lyssa. Learn to use it well. You have low health as a guardian and cannot afford to let large stacks of damaging conditions sit on you.

Your weapon choices are fine for group play. Learn to use skills like Binding Blade and Line of Warding to seize initiative from enemies and help your group coordinate their attacks on targets. Communication is key and using a voice chat program is an immense help. Calling out to your team when you land a good pull or wall will help them punish the enemies you have caught out of position.

Skill arises from experience and diligence. Try to pay attention to what’s going on and make intelligent decisions instead of reflexive ones. As you become more experienced, you will find yourself making correct choices more often and more quickly. That’s being skilled.

A guardian in my guild who runs a greatsword and staff setup has made several videos of us running smaller groups in WvW. You can see them here if you are interested: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV6azSCyyjhrcNy2WAGKm7w?feature=watch

Thanks for the advice so far. I am still reading it but in the meantime, here is some better info for what was asked.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlUgiDXGyNEf4ESmCRCBxUgRZ0lCIyhA-j0xAYLAcGU2rIasVxioxqXw0lDpW7CBA-w

Since you have 10 points unspent, consider putting them in Valor and using Altruistic Healing. It returns a small amount of health every time you give someone a boon, but when you’re using a staff and have 20 points in Virtues you give out a lot of boons in group combat.

The big one is Empower, which gives 12 stacks of might to up to 5 people. That 75 or so heal from Altruistic Healing gets pretty impressive when you get it applied 60 times over 3 seconds (and then Empower throws out another AoE heal at the end.) Empower is like having a second main healing skill on your bar.

:o thanks Ima do that right now

So while 2 others and I were trying to take a camp, a thief came in and took out my teammates. I was about to be killed (slow reflexes) when this warrior came in and totally destroyed him with his hammer. Is our hammer as useful? I do not normally see guardians with hammers but I really want to. The attacks are very slow though.

hammer is a really powerful weapon in a zergfight, they provide awesome utility with a lot of disables and stuns, the ring of defense for example can decide the outcome of a fight. In smallscale or solo roaming the hammer might be too slow to actually be efficient in fighting high-mobility enemies light a thief or ele. I saw a combination of Sword/Focus & Greatsword once, this seemed quite powerful.

Gizmo.9178:

So while 2 others and I were trying to take a camp, a thief came in and took out my teammates. I was about to be killed (slow reflexes) when this warrior came in and totally destroyed him with his hammer. Is our hammer as useful? I do not normally see guardians with hammers but I really want to. The attacks are very slow though.

Our hammer is an amazing weapon that takes some practice but once mastered can be exceptionally evil for example say you see a thief and you think he is about to steal from you. You drop ring of warding and the moment he steals he gets knocked down and is stuck inside your ring. You now want to use Banish to knock him down again then use Hammer 2 to deal damage switch to GS use Binding blades to pull him again and finish the job with Whirling Wrath.

I’ve killed 8/10 Thieves that have attempted to initiate a fight with me by stealing with just this.

When im roaming on my guardian i use this. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQRAsf7dlUgiDnGyNEfIFRuArHA8g+DXw1DIGxGC-jEDB4LDimgAisI0UBApPFRjtZoIas6FYqTQ6TK1aXAWzAeDMa1yAovFA-w

I actually like to finish fights by myself. This build has really good survivability to, with perma vigor, 1400 toughness, 15k health. The site does not calculate Right Hand Strength so running at 51% crit chance.

If you youtube “burst guardian” Got Boons knows his stuff. If you want get better, study videos of what other people do in certain situations.

When I solo or small group roam, which often gives me a break from zerg running with my Guardian, I use this build. Takes a bit to get used to because solo or small group running is not the same as running with a zerg, so keep that in mind, but the build is solid and fun to play with.

I was always afraid to play a berserker guardian but I guess it is worth a try, especially since my damage is pretty bad atm.