Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing my guardian for a while, gotten 100% world completion, almost entirely in PVE but occasionally in WVW. I’ve done some dungeoning – I’ve got a full set of Twilight Arbor armor, and a handful of runs on a few other dungeons, but I’m far from a dungeon master.

Here’s my current build.

Basically, I’m not a highly skilled player, and while I do all right at dodging out of big red circles, I’m not so hot at recognizing telegraphed attacks and dodging them, so I take a lot of hits. I’ve really appreciated the crutch of high toughness and AH healing. I mostly like hammer, with staff for support (and healing myself via Empower), but I’ve got nothing against Greatsword for AOE and sword/focus for single target fighting. My power’s not too bad, between knight’s armor and berserker’s trinkets, and I’m close to 50% crit, but I can’t help but look at those +10% damage traits for burning and conditions and know that I could do a lot better in terms of damage output. I mostly like hammer, with staff for support (and healing myself via Empower), but I’ve got nothing against using Greatsword for AOE/control and sword/focus for single target fighting.

All that said, I know that any survivability beyond the minimum needed to get through a fight is wasted, and I’d like to be able to deliver more damage for my party when I’m dungeoning, and take down monsters faster in PVE when I’m solo or doing events.

Any thoughts on a build that would let me pull off some better damage numbers while still not ending up on the ground all the time? I don’t think I’d be able to live long in full berserker’s gear, but I feel like a hybrid of the burning builds with AH might be something I could use to be more effective, like 10/25/30/5/0 or something along those lines.

I don’t have a ton of gold to spend on new gear, but I wouldn’t mind either dungeoning for armor with a different prefix, or blowing some badges of honor from achievement chests if getting one more set of exotic armor would make a big difference.

Any thoughts?

Combination of knights/zerker is pretty solid and aggressive for safety buffered DPS gear. You should be looking at trying traits out first before investing into new gear. I like a 10/25/x/x/25 with fiery wrath, absolute resolution, and unscathed contender with hammer, scepter/focus. That leaves 10 points to spend how you like, either more offence/defence/utility or whatever you feel you need. I’m sure others will have better suggestions though.

Your gear looks solid, with it you shouldn’t have much troubles dealing damage or surviving. Get Honor VII, it improves the uptime of Protection greatly and you should be able to survive more easily.

If you want a new build I advice 0/25/0/20/25. While neither the best build for Sword/Focus+Greatsword nor Hammer it’s good for both; so you can use Sword/Focus for open PvE and dungeons you’re already familiar with and Hammer+Staff for new dungeons.

15/15/0/20/20 with a hammer in soldier gear. Move to zerker gear as you get better, trinkets first.

i’m currently going for a more defensive gear setup and offensive traits

Knight Armor, Celestial trinkets, Celestial sword + Valk focus/torch and Hammer

Traits 10/30/30/0/0 taking the +15% crit chance for 1h weps and AH, you get really nice dps with sword and also have hammer that coupled with AH and your high toughness will allow you to tank easily

A 0/30/30/5/5 meditations build gets you good sustainable healing and can work with some valkyrie gear for more vitality. It has very little support though so you’re kinda playing for yourself.

15/15/0/20/10 with 10 trait points left over to use as you see fit, is probably the best DPS hammer build as mentioned before. Although I would use at least Knight’s if you don’t feel comfortable with Berserker’s.

Otherwise 0/30/0/30/10 is also good for a DPS support build, using sword/focus and GS. Alternatively 10/25/0/10/25 (or 10/30/0/5/25 for RHS, but the loss of superior aria) if you don’t mind the low health pool. This one takes a while to get used to, but offers high DPS.

Gear wise Berserker’s with Scholar Runes is what you should go for with both those builds, although Knight’s might be fine.

As for staff I wouldn’t use it, except maybe for trash runs or Fractals for Line of Warding and Empower for shorter fights.

Thanks for all the thoughts. I’m curious about the virtues of trying to combine some of these ideas with a boon duration / burning build. I figure at the very least it’ll play differently.

What about something like this?

The problem with your built is that against thrash mobs, u want to spam virtue of justice for the blind and renewed justice effect. Blind is quite good against thrash mob except for dredge. However supreme justice n permeating wraith doesn’t encourage u to do that. On bosses, if u press F1, if all ur members hit the boss, u can maintain quite a high uptime on burning except for when the boss can cleanse condition eg coe p1 n 2 alpha.

I think permeating wraith n supreme justice are quite bad traits currently.

I’d turn the gear into full berserker and run a "defensive" trait setup.
15/25/0/20/10 should be a good way to go, using a hammer. Against stationary targets your damage output will be really good and you still got a lot of defense with vigor, permanent protection, consecration mastery and the reduced shout cooldown (aegis!).
Second weaponset should be sword/focus for fights against moving targets.

Being able to recognise non-red circle attacks comes with experience, don’t worry about that too much. You’re mostlikely going to take lots of hits when doing new content, probably even going down. Thats just normal. Additionally, if you’re motivated and won’t lose courage from some deaths, you should try out 10/30/0/5/25 (or the shout cd instead of RHS) directly. We learn by doing faults, especially by dying so thats probably the quickest way to improve, while even with faceplanting still being efficient for the time alive.

I don’t think that Knights armor is a huge dps loss (~20%?) relative to berserker, but maybe I read some inaccurate information. So if you’re not short on gold, you could buy some knights armor with scholar, and then go berserker trinkets and weapons.

If the DPS difference is a lot bigger, then maybe it’s less of a decent idea.

On second thought, scholar probably won’t be an amazing investment. Other than Ruby orbs, I’m not sure what alternative there is. Ranger I guess, but who knows when those will get fixed.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARCmAyKAA2DAAAgrHAAAAA-jQBBYfDRLBqIaslhFRjVhET7iIqWKA9UGB-e

This might be a solid option for you. I’ve been running it to great effect. It’s extremely flexible, allowing you to change your entire build just by swapping your weapons and/or major traits. It can be run with any weapons and offers optional support for meditations, consecrations, and shouts.

In other words, it’s a really basic offensive-balanced Guardian template.

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15/15/0/20/20 with a hammer in soldier gear. Move to zerker gear as you get better, trinkets first.

15/25/0/5/25 should be better. Longer symbols are only 1 sec protection more, but 10% personal DPS loss and not rly more Support.
With a Hammer u have protection, retalation usually up. Might Might, fury, vigor and regenaretion u have 7 Boons active. So 7% more dmg from strengh of virtues.

This and a few pieces of knights amor should make a guardian an PvE fortress.
Buy knights chest, leggings and helmet first, cause here is others stats/critdmg ratio bad.

Norjena.5172:

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15/15/0/20/20 with a hammer in soldier gear. Move to zerker gear as you get better, trinkets first.

15/25/0/5/25 should be better. Longer symbols are only 1 sec protection more, but 10% personal DPS loss and not rly more Support.
With a Hammer u have protection, retalation usually up. Might Might, fury, vigor and regenaretion u have 7 Boons active. So 7% more dmg from strengh of virtues.

This and a few pieces of knights amor should make a guardian an PvE fortress.

It’s not only protection uptime, but also one extra tick of damage from Symbol of protection, which should give you more damage than the % bonuses from active boons.

No it doesn´t, it´s only a 12% dps increase if u are AA spamming only (no MB no dogde, no second weaponset).
But u´re are losing 100 precision 10% dmg for all weapons (radiance 25) and 5% or more cause of losing virtues 25.
And i u want Master of Conserations u will lose unscathed contender.

If u don´t want this, u can pick absolute resolution to get a little bit extra healing per second and condition remove.

Ah, my bad i thought it was 15/25/0/20/10 instead of 15/15/0/20/20, that said, i’d rather use only 10pts in virtues and put 10 into radiance instead of dropping symbol’s uptime. Also, i wouldn’t recommend unschated for anybody starting out a guardian.

you talk about unscathed contender in a build yet suggest knight’s gear…. wat?

Dang, lots of good things to think about here. I won’t get another chance to play before tomorrow, but when I do I’ll see if I can try out a few different trait builds over the course of the day.

Quick thoughts:

I’m feeling like I probably don’t hold on to my aegis enough to get a lot of use from Unscathed Contender. I definitely want to try something with 10/25/x/x/x and work on a high burning uptime. It’s a real shame spirit weapons aren’t better – back when they were indestructible I had a lot of fun using them with A Fire Within to keep burning up.

I feel like I want to at least try out Permeating Wrath for open world PVE. If I am in a dungeon and I need to focus on a boss, I can always swap it for Absolute Resolution or some such.

I’ve used meditation based builds in the past – I like the damage and self-healing, but I do want to still be bringing some support to the team along with damage. That’s one of the attractions to a build heavy on Virtues and boon duration.

Also wondering if something shout-y along the lines of 10/25/0/30/5 with Pure of Voice and Runes of the Soldier would be worth a go. Does Radiant Power still increase burning duration even if you are not wielding a torch?

I also might try a Greatsword/Sword+Focus approach with 20/30/10/5/5 that can use some meditations for extra damage or condition purge, or 20/30/0/10/10 that can use shouts and/or consecrations.

Try your best to keep 10 in virtues for MoC

I don’t think you need soldier runes, just slot purging flames. Since you’re already going PoV, purging will get any extra conditions your group may have.
If you feel the need to get extra cleansing just run 15/15/0/20/20, granted the damage ins’t that good but it has alot of utility, and purging + absolute resolution should clear anything off your group, while giving some extra flexibility on utilities (i.e. you won’t be stuck with shouts). Also, meditations are pretty useless in PvE. >:

If you are bad at dodging knight armor with zerker trinkets would eat up your mistakes, but by no means should you make a build which allows you to just facetank stuff as the dps will be very bad, If you took 10,30,0,5,25 took shield of the avenger wall of reflect and retreat you could just not dodge and still not get hit, you got like blocks from everything and you could cycle through your blinds/blocks, also shield of the avenger will keep you protected, I love wall + shield for example if i get aggro on slave driver or if the effigy comes over i just place down wall = shield and i am safe

Oh yes, if u´re using Shield of the Avenger at Lupicus, u can onehit him by reflecting his kick! U´re rly save with this skill.
And if u´re using shield and wall of reflection together, WoR will reflect doubledmg if the projectiles are absorbed by the shield before they can hit the wall.

i’d go with a symbols build.
12/25/0/20/10 (as described by others in this thread) is a good baseline for doing dungeons and having solid support to go with your dps.

25/25/0/20/0 for open-world/world bosses. take signet cooldown and condi-cleans on signet traits, as you’ll want the heal signet, and the +power and -10% damage passives on those signets. last utility is situational so it can be whatever you want (if its a shout, you can take the shout cooldown trait).

in both builds, you’ll want Hammer/ GS/ Staff. Hammer/GS is the more offensive combo….but i like staff for mob tagging and the brilliant Empower skill (extra heal and 12 might stacks), and then swapping to hammer or GS (with hammer, you’ll have almost perma 43% damage reduction).

I tried a couple things today, starting with using greatsword and hammer in a 20/0/0/20/30 build with runes for boon duration (2 each major sanctuary, superior monk and water), liked the boon duration and wasn’t really crazy about greatsword.

I ended up retraiting to 0/0/10/30/30, which I know is more associated with Healway, but I kept my knight’s armor and berserker trinkets, and ended up really liking it. I had perma-vigor in every fight (more than 1 minute of uptime remaining after one big brawl), dodged a lot to make sure Elusive Power was up, and had a ton of Might going from Empowering Might. For roaming around the world, I really appreciated getting perma-swiftness from SY! and Retreat, and I had enough boons going that I felt like I was making a good contribution to my group. I missed Altruistic Healing, but not as much as I thought I would (hammer’s perma-protect was key).

I do definitely want to try again at a serious build supporting heavy sword damage for dungeon bosses, but for today I am really loving the boon duration thing, even though it isn’t what I started looking for.

Thanks again for everyone’s feedback and thoughts – one thing that’s clear is that there actually are a decent number of different builds that are viable for each person’s playstyle, and it’s worth playing a number of different ones to get a feeling for what suits me.