Guild Wars 2

As a guardian, I stay with my GS 80% of the time. I have altruistic healing, so my staff 4 skill “empowered” acts as a second heal with a full party of 5. So my question is this. If I complete a whirling wrath on GS, switch immediately to staff, spam orb of light, symbol of swiftness, use empowered and switch back to GS immediately on weapon swap recharge, does the overall DPS of the group take a hit?

Since empower gives a handy 12 stacks of might, it clearly raises the overall DPS of the group. The question is, does my somewhat lower damage in the meantime cancel that out? I can spam orb of light around 3 times during the recharge and of course symbol is hitting per second as well – not to mention the low autoattack. So combining all that and assuming full 5 man party, is it worth hitting the staff regularly for a DPS boost?

If not, I’ll just use it to get my heals when I’m in trouble and boost the other’s damage and heal them as a side effect.

So – regular use as a DPS boost, or occasional use to burst heal myself?

You can use it to increase the damage of the ally and your and heal yourself for a good amount of hp.
I use it then swap GS ant hit the enemy. In dungeon is good because increase your damage (whit 12 stack of might you damage’s good).
You can use it to heal yourself and power up your offensive ability. You Must combine the effect of your staff and the power of your weapons.
If you need heal, use it to heal, if you need a damage boost, use it to increase your damage.

If I assume that your group will take full advantage of Empower, I’d estimate that switching to staff to use it does not change the group DPS a lot. It will increase each party member’s DPS by about 15 % for 10 seconds, but on the other hand, it will cripple your DPS by probably more than 50 % for the same time. So I’d stick to using it only as an emergency heal. However, be aware that this is only a very rough estimate.

Using it before combat then switching is the best thing to do.

Empowering might grants 12 stacks of might, correct? That comes to 35 × 12 = 420 additional power and condition damage. How much that improves DPS depends on the builds of your teammates.

If they’re doing something like running rabid gear, their power will increase from 916 to 1336, giving them a 46% increase in direct damage. Their condition damage will go from around 1400 to 1820, giving them a 19% increase in bleed damage. If they are running around in zerker gear, their power goes from 2400 to 2820 (or so. Build specific zerkers vary greatly here), giving them an 18% increase in damage.

The real question is, does staying in GS do more damage than 18% x 5 players DPS + staff damage. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, so I’d say boon away.

My calculations show me that switching to staff to boost might drops my DPS by around 20% compared to greatsword.

Question is – does the boost to my teammates make up for that 20%? If yes, then it’s worth it because empower also boosts my own and health and that of others.

It’s not merely a question of adding the difference between personal dps lost vs the dps gain given to allies.

By switching you get access to alot of healing for you and your team ( meaning you can survive longer and therefore deal more damage), you get potential on-switch effects of sigil and/or food ( more endurance, chill or extra might for instance ) and you can drop a ward into the middle of a battle – in PvP this can really work to your advantage.

Remember if you use empower towards the end of your Weapon Swap CD you can carry over 12 stacks of might ( or more ) into your next GS combos, which will help mitigate the loss of DPS.

One thing I like to do is Empower at start of combat, then swap to my hammer with Superior Sigil of Battle. 15 stacks of Might with hammer plus 12 stacks on your allies should take most enemies down really quick.

like many have said, i usually pop Empower right before combat, drop a symbol, and then switch back to whatever mainhand, in your case, the GS.

if you’re in a long fight and you don’t see a lot of stacks coming in, or need aheal comnig up, you can always switch to Staff, auto or staff #2 (which deals quiet a bit of damage actually), drop symbol again on enemy or LoW if needed, and then i usually pop Empower when weapon swap is almost up so i can utilize the might stacks in hammer or GS. if you don’t feel you need the heal, you can always just keep hitting with the GS, though it’s quite a CD dependent weapon so i feel switching to staff can actually help quite a bit.

if you’re in organize groups, perhaps you can even time Empower so your group will use their big DPS skills after they receive the stacks when they know it’s coming?

Fun fact: With 100% boon uptime (or, specifically, 100% might uptime which is easier to obtain) as long as you are swapping weapons every 10 seconds you can maintain those 12 stacks permanently. Add Sigils of Battle on both weapons and now you’ve got an additional 12 after 40 seconds of combat for a total of 24. Add in Empowering Might or Greatsword autoattacking, Virtue of Justice + Inspired Virtue, etc, and you can keep 25 stacks of might up forever.

Did some random number crunching with coefficients, not related to this topic, but when I was done it came to mind.

Staff auto attack with 12 stacks of might does more dps than mace auto and slightly less than greatsword/hammer auto attack without any stacks of might.

Sword and scepter do the best auto damage (on paper) than the rest.

Although, the higher base power you have the greater the disparity between staff with empower versus other weapons.

So switching drops your own dps very slightly but raises the dps of your group even more.

Now the question is:

• Do you wait till weapon swap is about to drop and then cast empower (doing less auto attack with staff)

or

• Do you cast empower right away (doing more auto attack with staff, but not getting full empower stack on swap back to main weapon)

Of course as foofad said you can have might effectively never drop off, which makes it so you don’t have to worry about the above.

I have recently swapped to endless might because of the group benefit and noticeable damage increase of my team in pvp and in dungeons. I sacrifice boon duration for other stats and pick up 2h mastery to reach the might overlap, but I lose out on AH.

…I’m ok with that, but some feel they need it, so you can adjust accordingly.

I’ve had conflicting reports from zerker warriors about empower. Some say that they don’t need the additional might since they’re always close to 25 stacks anyway. Others are very happy to receive the additional boost.

So who’s right?

Depends on the group and builds honestly. If there is already a source of might that has people close to 25 already, then your extra might is pointless.

But not every group and situation you run in is going to be an all warrior dungeon run. Also not every group is all zerker as well.

This is besides the point on if zerker is best or not.

If you are in that group, then your build is not optimal for that scenario, but no one accidentally walks into a zerker rush group, so you will know ahead of time what to bring to the table.

I wouldn’t ignore the fact that you can actually dish out quite a bit of dmg with your Staff #1 . If we are already comparing how much dmg a group does I think it is important to also keep in mind that there is a possibility to deal dmg to a whole group (max. 5 ppl). The Staff is the best way to do that.

When I hit ppl with my Staff I usually do around .7 – .9k dmg. if I crit it goes up to 1.6k. Assuming every second hit crits (I have a minimum Crit Chance of 50%) we can say that with one #1 Staff hit I dish out around 5.5k dmg in average. This is also a contribution to my team also taking into account the 5 ppl receiving 2-3 might per hit.

I think the Staff is being way to often reduced to it’s dmg to one enemy, however, the dmg it dishes out in a group is just multiplied, which is often forgotten.

So switching to Staff is does not mean a loss in DPS in every situation. Try to find out when lots of dmg to 1-2 enemies is usefull or when normal ammount of dmg to many enemies is more usefull.