Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone. I am shockingly new to this game. This is how it happened: my dad said “Your sister is playing this game. I am going to try it out too.” Since games are something that my father and I have always played together and enjoyed wonderfully, I figured I would get the game too. My cousin said “You like playing things that don’t die and are really annoying right?” “Absolutely!” “Yeah, go Guardian.”

So I am playing a Guardian for a grand total of 5 days. I like the class; love the defensiveness. Been using a Greatsword so far because I love the Blind and the Spin to Win. However, I am slowly getting up there in levels (like 20 at the moment) and am sensing that the wheels on my little train are going to come flying off if I have absolutely no idea what to do. This game has less of a “training wheel” session as some other games I have played so I am a little lost.

So far, I have kinda, sorta followed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgQ7Gp9cosw and http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/the-vanguard-guardian-leveling-1-40/ , have 4 points in Radiance and 5 points in Honor and am still using a Greatsword. I was wondering how a Hammer compared to a Greatsword for leveling (I believe the video suggests hammer simply because it is preference for the video maker) or how I should change traits and skills for a Greatsword. I like using the two-handers simply because it strokes that little ego button in my brain that makes me feel like a bad daddy.

For Skill I have been using Signet of Revolve (Heal, Condition removal), Bane (+Power), and Judgement (couldn’t think of anything else; taking less damage is more better.)

ANY advice, ANYTHING would be highly appreciated. I am enjoying the game but am really lost overall. I am not a novice to MMO’s but I am sure everyone can sympathize with the feeling of drowning involved with entering a new game.

Thank you.
-Azernak0

With 20 points in Honor for Writ of Persistence you can shotgun your traits all over the board and still win at PvE using a Hammer. It’s basically the sleepwalker’s choice. Use a Staff as your off-weapon for traveling and you’re good to go. Naturally you won’t be able to do this til you unlock the second level of traits.

One thing that I recommend you do is read the Guardian FAQ thread in the stickies section. That should answer your most burning questions. Beyond that, don’t worry too much – if you haven’t started dying horribly at every turn, you’re probably doing okay.

The two signets you’re using are fine, but I’d also pick up Retreat! for those times when you need to get across a map in a timely manner (just a sanity thing), and once you get to your second tier of utility skills swapping over to Save Yourselves! and Stand your Ground!. Those two shouts are in probably half of every guardian’s utility bar. They’re both stunbreakers so they’ll help you out when you get into content that likes knocking you down and out.

Beyond that, the world’s your oyster.

Thanks for that.

How does Hammer compare to Greatsword for killing? I am desperately poor so I don’t want to spend cash on things that I am clueless on.

GS is better for killing. You really don’t need protection for leveling. Gear with berserker’s.

It likely still holds true today as it did a year ago:

15 radiance, and 5 virtues for leveling. Everything else is bonus. This gives you an aoe blind, party-wide burn, and party- wide 3 stacks of might. Add on 3 vuln too for every mob.

Radiance 5 gives blind on virtue of justice, radiance 10 for vulnerability on blind, and radiance 15 to reset virtue of justice when a mob dies. Virtues 5 for 3 might when you activate justice.

Run up to mob, virtue of justice, spin. Repeat. You’ll do extra damage and mitigate their first hit. Dredge are immune to blind so when you run into them later on, you’ll be able to see how much that “active mitigation” helps as they will do more damage to you.

This will hopefully teach you that blind, blocks, and dodges will be your best tools for reducing damage you take and its designed that way. It’s why we have a low health pool.

At 40 its a game changing combo, or at least was for me.

You can choose to go for more dps after that by going 10 into zeal for extra damage on burning targets, and more into radiance for more crit and extra damage against targets with conditions.

After you get 0/15/0/0/5, go for 5 in Honor to get vigor on crits, which will allow you to dodge more.

Then experiment.

Park the Guardian, roll another class such has Thief, Engineer, or Warrior.

Just saying.

Hammer is a PvE murder machine; the extra AOE damage off of the symbol is quite good, and Mighty Blow gives you access to Blast combos which are quite neat. So if you work with another person with lots of combo fields (like an Elementalist for example) you can stack lots of different effects.

Here are some advices from me

You don’t need to be rich to have good armor. First, do you personal story. Pay attention to the recommended level and do your best to keep up with it, because these quests give you the most experience and some of the best low-level gear. They’ll also give you a good amount of spending money, which you’ll need for the game’s fast travel system and various vendors.

Second, when you explore the world you’ll meet these challenges everywhere – you know, NPCs with hearts on their heads who give you some quest to do. After completing the task, the heart becomes yellow. Go back to them and you’ll see they also now have a sign for a karma vendor. Talk with them and see what they’re selling. You can buy some of the best gear for your level from these vendors.

About weapons, it’s all a personal choice. I use Greatsword/ staff for PvE and Hammer/ Staff for PvP. Just try all the weapons you can and choose what fits you the most. When you find a new weapon equip it. Go kill some stuff. Unlock all the effects. You’ll find you feel better with some weapons than with the others.

Also every time you use a Trait book (needed at levels 11, 40, and 60), all your character’s Traits are reset. You can use this to adjust your build or try out new ones.

Good luck with your guardian

I’ll also recommend 15 in radiance and 5 in virtues asap. The trick is to bind virtue of justice (normally F1) to something you can reach with your left hand without having to move it. I use shift as my modifier, so it’s shift+1 for VOJ and +2 for VOR, etc. If you get used to using a keybind system for activating VOJ early, you’ll be burning down your foes with the quickness. Even if you decide to take the 15 points out of radiance later, you’ll still be very accustomed to activating VOJ at the beginning of every encounter….which is a great way to start your killing-spree.

For leveling 0/15/0/0/5 is the way to go after that I recommend 30 in valor and 20 in honor for a full build of 0/15/30/20/5. This is great for leveling and is my main build anyway.

Traits:
Radiance II
Valor V, VI, XI
Honor II, IX

In general: every time you use Virtue of Justice u blind and burn + get might (thanks to Virtues 5) and a lil bit of healing ( thanks to Valor XI). It refreshes every time you kill a foe. no-brainer for me

Btw. if by any chance you can get a mouse with side buttons ( like razer naga ) spamming F1 is no problemo

Thanks for the advice. I can see the power of Radiance. “I click this button, you miss, I do a lot more damage with a single hit. With t5 points here, I hit even harder. Oh and when you die, I do it to your friend over there.” Neat

What do I do before 40 and that opens up though? I just have 0/10/0/5/0 at level 25. I like the Vigor thing for more Rolling Happy Fun Time, Hmmmm! and Signet Mastery makes my Heal come back faster. I have no idea where to go from there though. I don’t use Virtue of Justice that often because I kill so many things so quickly that the Passive is better. I do use it for single tough guys though; having two Blinds and Aegis is quite silly.

But where do I go from here? I like the Passives too much to warrant getting the “when using Signet, does X” so I am kinda lost.

For everyone who has welcomed me to the game with friendly advice, I greatly appreciate it.
-Azernak0

Don’t worry about your build too much. You don’t have access to much yet. I’d get Honor 10 next at 30 for Superior Aria and pack on shouts. Once you get to 40 your options really start to open up; Something like 0/15/0/10/5 would be great, for the Justice spam whenever you kill something.

So I hit level 45. Jeez is 15 Radiance really nice. The amount of mitigation it adds is frightening. Providing I can kill at least one thing in a group before they take too many hits, I can pretty much take no damage when killing groups. I can see why it is “Get 15 Radiance; nothing else matter as much.”

I am curious what utility skill I should be using. So far it is Signet of Resolve (having played around on my dad’s warrior, I will say free condition removal is worth its weight in gold), Bane for the like 20% extra damage it gives for my abilities at this level, and then the others I pretty much have just left because I have no idea. Retreat for the sanity thing when traveling but for actually “let’s kill stuff”, I am clueless.

Someone mentioned that my damage seemed low but I have nothing to base it on. I am just trying to get a grasp on the class before I get too high level for my own good.

Cheers.
-Azernak0

Hello mate,

In general there is much sound advice in this thread already – I think you should be OK with that.

Concerning your damage: I really wouldn’t worry about your damage all that much at the moment. While leveling you’d have to be updating your gear every few levels to really maximize your DPS – something I don’t think is worth it (unless you’ve got gold to waste of course). Follow the advice here and update your gear (especially weapons) every 10 levels if you can afford it. It usually only costs a few silver and having an up-to-date weapon can make quite a difference. Aside from that I wouldn’t worry about damage output yet – you can worry about that when you reach level 80 and start looking into what playstyle, gear and traits you are going to settle on for your first end-game content.

Concerning your utility skills: I’d use the leveling experience as a testing bed for all your utilities. Try them all out and stay flexible – simply choosing 3 utilities and sticking with them from 0 to 80 will probably work but won’t teach you a lot about the class you’re playing.

Personally what I find the biggest boost to leveling (and not getting bored) is if you have access to permanent or near-permanent swiftness (increases movement speed by 33%). Much of the time spent leveling is not actually fighting and killing things but actually getting from one mob to the next, moving to the next vista, changing area when you run out of quests etc. This makes swiftness a huge deal while leveling.

Think of it like this: if you can get from one place to the next 33% faster then it doesn’t matter if you kill 5% slower – you’ll still be faster then the baseline (obviously if you can both kill fast and have swiftness then that’s even better but getting swiftness is generally a lot easier then updating gear, optimizing traits, buying sigils and runes for your gear etc.)

So how do you easily maintain a high up-time on swiftness? By equipping a Staff as one of your two weapons and by picking the utility skills “Save Yourselves!” and “Retreat!”. What you do then is use the Staff #3 skill (creates a symbol on the ground that grants 8 seconds of swiftness), run through the symbol and once you have swiftness from the symbol use both Retreat and Save Yourselves at the same time. Depending on your gear and traits this should give you about 30ish seconds of swiftness which equals about 50% swiftness up-time (or even closer to 75% if you pick the trait “Superior Aria” (trait II in the Honor line) which reduces the cooldown of your shouts by 20%). Gear, traits and runes that increase Boon Duration (such as Major Runes of the Water – starting at level 39 – will grant you 10% extra boon duration for example and only cost a few silver each) will further increase your swiftness up-time (not to mention all other boons to boot).

Please note: the swiftness granted by the Staff (Symbol of Swiftness) is somewhat strange: you only get the full 8 seconds of swiftness from the symbol if you do not yet have any swiftness. If you already have a swiftness buff then the symbol will only grant you 1 seconds of additional swiftness. So you only use the Staff #3 at the very beginning of the Swiftness-rotation (or when your swiftness falls off completely and you have to re-stack it again).

Be warned though: once you get used to having swiftness it’s virtually impossible to play anymore without it… you’ll feel like you have glue on your boots and might go mad. ;-)

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
- Morthur

^ agreed + having Save Yourselves and Retreat on your bar in NEVER a bad idea ( okay maybe if ur in high level fractals switch to Wall of Reflection…

also, you could drop staff and pick sword/focus for some teleporting pew pew ( sword 2 ) and big burst + 2 more blinds + 3 blocks ( focus 5 ) imho staff is well..boring and a bad choice in PvE even though you get to spam staff 3 for swiftness. Would you rather solo a veteran with GS+Staff or GS+Sword/Focus?

I don’t really switch weapons as the Greatsword has been a killing machine. I tried out Hammer for a while but just found the animation slow and sloppy which made my Kitty look lethargically slow. I unlocked all my weapon skills aside from Staff and Trident, though I do have the speed boof from Staff.

I am dropping the 10% damage protection for Save Yourself for a little while. It will really speed me up. I couldn’t care losing 25% of my damage on my attacks to drop Bane Signet yet. It has let me killing entire groups with Spin to Win and Blind.

Thanks for all the advice. I do like how the Guardian is made. Low HP but throws out a dozen “that didn’t hit me.” Makes going all Power and Precision safe (so far).

PokerTuna.6170:

imho staff is well..boring and a bad choice in PvE even though you get to spam staff 3 for swiftness.

I totally agree. I’m no big fan of the staff but if you’re just running around the map to discover areas, vistas and POI then it’s worth it. You can always switch back to something else once you actually plan on fighting. At least, that’s what I do. ;-)

My General PvE Build

There’s my 2c. I’d progress in this way:

• 15 Radiance
• 5 Virtues
• 5 Honor
• Go nuts

Empowering Might can be Two-Handed Mastery if you want. Also, if you’re running into problems with purging conditions, swap SY for Purging Flames and take Master of Consecrations VI in Virtues instead.

Basically, Sword 2 + GS 3 allows you to cover lots of ground quickly, Focus 5 + GS 2 provides enough burst to down any group of mobs in seconds, and your two shouts should give you a fairly high uptime on swiftness.

Edit: I just re-posted what is more or less my PvE build, but with a few utilities swapped, so you could get an idea of what a Guardian can do with end-game gear. 3800 attack with Greatsword, 3666 with Sword + Focus. Not including bloodlust stacks. Same survivability and group utility that a tankier guardian provides, except my DPS is through the roof. Food for thought.

Why Shelter over Signet of Resolve?

AzernakO.9627:

Why Shelter over Signet of Resolve?

Shelter will instantly make you (virtually) invulnerable for 2 seconds, by which time the heal will have gone through.

All other heals first require a cast time (during which you are vulnerable) and then apply their heal.

I guess it’s a matter of taste but if you have enough condition removal (so you don’t need the extra passive condition removal from the signet) then running the signet is fairly pointless. In those cases I’d use the human racial healing skill “Prayer of Lyssa” (I think that’s what it’s called) or Shelter. The Prayer of Lyssa has the advantage that it only has a 30 seconds CD (10 seconds shorter then an untraited signet) but heals a good deal more then Shelter (but obviously without any blocking).

Basically, if you’re running a very squishy build (full zerker) then you won’t survive a hit in any difficult content anyway – in those cases Shelter is great because it allows you to ignore an otherwise lethal hit even if you don’t have the energy for a dodge or a blind/block at the ready. And in the rare cases where you don’t get one-shot you still can use Shelter for it’s healing if you really have to.

The same goes for PVP: if you’re in a situation where you need your heal to prevent a death then you likely won’t have 1 second to cast it but instead will be interrupted or killed before the heal goes off. Shelter on the other hand will save you every time.

There’s just something insanely satisfying about charging into a huge hoard of enemies, busting a few heads and then being able to Shelter your way out again. No other heal will do that for you.

I’d say:

In PVP and PVE with a glass canon build -> Shelter
In PVE where conditions are manageable -> Prayer of Lyssa
In PVE where conditions are a problem -> Signet
In PVE when you have the trait to reduce signet CDs -> Signet

Just give each a try and see what you prefer for you gear/traits/playstyle.

Edit: you can also combine Shelter very well with Renewed Focus (the Elite skill that refreshed the CD on all your virtues and grants 2 or 3 seconds of invulnerability, depending on traits). Then you can “virtue bomb” people: charge in there, pop all 3 virtues (this will heal you and give you a new aegis), fire off Renewed Focus, pop all 3 virtues again (for more healing and a new aegis) and then follow up with Shelter if needed. This will grant you 4-5 seconds of virtual immortality and heal you for a crazy amount (and perhaps even blind your enemies, grant you stability, remove conditions etc. depending on your traits). It’s pretty insane… try it! ;-)

If your damage is low while leveling you probably need to upgrade your weapon. I buy a new rare weapon with DPS stats every 10 levels or so.

Morthur didn’t quite spell this out, so I just want to reiterate: As long as you block more than about a third of Signet of Resolve’s total healing with Shelter, you will have effectively healed as much as Signet of Resolve did. SoR heals for roughly 33% more but all that is for naught if you take damage while casting it. That’s the power of Shelter. Block a hit or two and you’ve outdone any other heal you have access to regardless of race.