Guild Wars 2

Greetings fellow Guardians,

Lately I have decided that among my characters, I picked my Guardian to be my dedicated WvWer and I am here today to seek wisdom and perhaps tips on how to make this build better.

I have theory crafted this build which I designed it to be running in a tight zerg giving frontline support aiming to close the gap and to break up a zerg formation. Here it is:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|2.1n.h2.0.0.0|6.1g.h8.0.0.0|1n.a4.1c.a4.1n.a4.1n.a1s.1n.a4.1n.a1s|3u.0.1c.64.1c.64.3u.0.3u.0.1c.64|0.a2.u45b.k29.a6|0.0|v.13.z.11.0|e

Weapons
I’ve decided to go with Knights Hammer (Force sigil) + Zerker Staff (Perception Sigil) for now. The staff is to spread might boons and also to wreck up a precision boost.

For utilities, I am uncertain if I should swap Purging Flames to Sanctuary . Purging Flames is good for condition removal and also to activate area might. As for Sanctuary, it can be a good tool in breaking up a heavy zerg train. Or perhaps I should swap both for a condition removal skill like Smite Condition or Contemplation of Purity.

Now for my elite, I am lost or torn between Renewed Focus or Tome of Courage. Both are good but I am indecisive at the moment. Any suggestions?

As for my gear, it will be Knights coupled with some Emerald and Azurite orbs. I switched some gear around to mixed with PVT to give me a good even-out stats.

Trinkets will be a mixture of exotic and ascended due to I’m out of laurels and also recycling through my other exotic trinkets which I have obtained in the past.

I’m not planning to be on the gear treadmill at the moment and get full ascended or whatnot. My current aim is to seek improvements on this build and hopefully it will be WvW viable

Misc Buffs: Bowl of Lemongrass Soup will be my first choice for its -40% condition duration. Either Superior Sharpening Stones or Master Maintenance Oils will be my other utility consumable.

Alrighty, I think I got this covered so far, didn’t think my first post will be this long lol. Any feedbacks welcome!

Hi vaKuz,
I think you made a small error somewhere, as you have superior aria but no shouts.

As for the question on Purging Flames: In an upcoming patch it will be buffed to remove 3 conditions on the initial cast(notes are not final yet though), which will make it an extremely good skill for the type of gameplay you are after. I believe it will become one of the goto skills for a restack, since you can cleanse a lot of conditions and reapply the might.

On the elites: I myself have a hard time deciding on this. What I typically do these days is use ToC when we are ramming a door and are under ac fire(might be less needed now with the new Ramming Mastery Buff) and use RF when we are clashing in open field combat. I believe ToC would be strong there as well, but since I have both 5pt traits in Radiance and Virtues, the Virtue refresh is just too good to pass up.

The only thing that I am not sure about in your build is the use of JI. It is a very strong skill when you roam, but I’m not sure what you would use it for in a zerg. I would personally replace it with SyG, as stabilty is very important in WvW.

From my perspective, you need more health and your using too much knight’s gear. I would recommend a 0/0/30/30/10, 0/5/30/30/5 or 10/0/30/30/0 build. If you are going to operate in a zerg environment or group, you will get buffs from that group – factor those in as it relates to your crit chance, etc.

As for armor, try:

Helm = PVT
shoulders = knights or zerkers
chest = PVT
gauntlets = knights or zerkers
legs = PVT
boots = knights or zerkers

Accessories = either all Cavalier or all Soldiers

Brafius.7432:

Hi vaKuz,
I think you made a small error somewhere, as you have superior aria but no shouts.

As for the question on Purging Flames: In an upcoming patch it will be buffed to remove 3 conditions on the initial cast(notes are not final yet though), which will make it an extremely good skill for the type of gameplay you are after. I believe it will become one of the goto skills for a restack, since you can cleanse a lot of conditions and reapply the might.

On the elites: I myself have a hard time deciding on this. What I typically do these days is use ToC when we are ramming a door and are under ac fire(might be less needed now with the new Ramming Mastery Buff) and use RF when we are clashing in open field combat. I believe ToC would be strong there as well, but since I have both 5pt traits in Radiance and Virtues, the Virtue refresh is just too good to pass up.

The only thing that I am not sure about in your build is the use of JI. It is a very strong skill when you roam, but I’m not sure what you would use it for in a zerg. I would personally replace it with SyG, as stabilty is very important in WvW.

lol silly me, it was to be Writ of Exaltation and not Superior Aria. Actually I also could replace that with Wrathful Spirit which might work.

Yes I did notice about the skill updates regarding the meditations and purging flames too. I have been using purging flames just recently to simply spam might, I learnt from somewhere that Sanctuary could be used as a zerg breaker, thus that skill was in my consideration pile.

As for JI, the motivation behind it is when approaching a zerg, cast Hammer #5, quickly cast JI to trap a small handful and spam Hammer #2, #3 and #4. JI can also be used just right after activating Hammer #4 before the execution. A good mini zerg breaker imo. After the October patch, meditations will automatically be casted instantly and it will just get better.

Good idea using ToC while ramming. Although the new Ramming Mastery might make things easier, I still see people failing to cast water fields when called for during the ramming. So I might just use ToC as an added support when sieging thanks!

Rigel.3092:

From my perspective, you need more health and your using too much knight’s gear. I would recommend a 0/0/30/30/10, 0/5/30/30/5 or 10/0/30/30/0 build. If you are going to operate in a zerg environment or group, you will get buffs from that group – factor those in as it relates to your crit chance, etc.

As for armor, try:

Helm = PVT
shoulders = knights or zerkers
chest = PVT
gauntlets = knights or zerkers
legs = PVT
boots = knights or zerkers

Accessories = either all Cavalier or all Soldiers

I agree with the somewhat low HP pool there. I did some fiddling on the calculator and the most I could get would be around 17.5k odd HP after putting some points in the vitality tree.

This brings me to ask as in what HP amount is considered a safe measure for Guardians in WvW. I read somewhere recently that about 16k-18k is considered good enough but I am not really sure. It would be great if I could boost it up to as near as 20k but it will be at an expense of my other stats.

Heres what i run for group support.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAW5elcgqC33RLEm4ESmiVCBxegRZUHdpwhkIA-j0DBoNw4NBiaAg+AiXAOLqIaslhht6KalXBRNjIqWZDzcOR2zYG0AW0pWEAzCA-w

so it’s 0/0/20/30/20, you may look to slot some different skills but this is for when i 5 man, i trade it up between scepter and mace depending what is in the group. I will slot scepter for roots if we are low on them.

for my traits i have:-
purity – I have healing breeze slotted rather than the signet and i wanted to cover that lose a condition every 10 seconds.

honourable shield – this is a knock back to help win the stake war, and if ur careful, disrupt a tank train. As an added bonus it blocks projectiles and has a nifty heal when u detonate it, also pushes thieves out of refuge…… no-one likes thieves. And of course protection for everyone in front of you.

superior aria – a no brainer i run an all shout build as stand your ground is the first thing i put on my bar every time, no matter what build.

2-handed mastery – empower every 16 seconds for stacks of might and 3k heal

pure of voice – with the condition meta as it is this is a must i find, each shout removes 2 conditions from everyone that is affected by it.

vengeful – big uptime on retal, i leave fights and it’s still running for 40 seconds, discourages fast attack spam classes like thieves.

absolute resolution – again anti condition tool to help keep them under control, 3 conditions from everyone in the group plus a nice heal. As an added bonus it increases your virtue of resolves passive effect.

I run massed boon duration, 18.5 seconds of Save Yourselves, 9.75 seconds of stability every 24 seconds with Stand Your Ground.

Im not sold on sanctuary(or consecrations in general), it’s timer is insane, i tried it for a while and junked it, you can still be AoE’d, stability can run right through it, u can be feared out of it and it’s not big enough so that u are immune to melee.

I found consecrations in general pretty worthless except wall of reflection, in a fast open combat game they are too clunky. You take your shouts with you, and so does your team if combat moves around(as it tends to do) and they are all on low timers.

Sanctuary works very well as zerg breaker, as it has a knockdown on it. Most of the people that use it however trait for ground targeting.

Although I am also a big fan of the RoW + JI combo for trapping, I am not sure that it will work that well in a zerg fight, since stability prior to engagement is very common. I would say still try it (I am just guessing here), but my feeling is that you will get better use out of something else. It might actually work on the back lines, since most of the stability would go to people in the front. What might be interesting though is to use JI to port ahead of your zerg, draw the focus and then use RF, sanctuary or something like shelter, while your peeps smash them. I think I’ll be trying this myself as well…well, as soon as the game is playable for me again(Bad lag for me since patch)

Hey guys,

Thanks for your feedbacks so far

After reading Rigel’s post, I do have a set of full PVT gear with Soldier runes ages ago. So, instead of spending gold on new armor sets, I figured I used what available gear I have and make minor modifications to fit my WvW role.

Yeah I do agree Consecrations are hideously long, especially in heavy fights. I think they are generally used at the start of a battle only and will be neglected until the battle has ended.

I have factored in shouts and took our Consecrations and here is what I came up with:-

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|2.1n.h2.0.0.0|6.1g.h8.0.0.0|1c.7x.1n.7x.1c.7x.1n.7x.1c.7x.1c.a4|3u.0.1c.64.1c.64.31k.0.31k.0.1c.9c|0.f2.u154.k29.5|0.0|v.13.19.18.1i|e

The trade-off in regards to my original build earlier is about less 85 toughness and 70 power, but I roughly gain1.5k additional HP. My precision and armor values are very identical with hardly any difference.

Also I changed my traits to 0/15/30/20/5 and this will give me a good spamming of VoJ. If needed be, I can easily change my traits back to 0/10/30/20/10 for Consecrations with little to no expense of my overall stats.

Reckon this will be a better setup?

With those stats, you will be very tanky indeed. Very Nice. I currently run around with less than that and I survive very well. I also run with 15 in Radiance and I love it! Every time you kill an enemy you get: 3 stacks of might on 5 allies, an AOE blind on the enemy and also a nice 1k heal if you have AH.

I do have 2 suggestions though:

1. Take a serious look at getting the final soldier rune. The condition removal applies to everyone affected by the shout, so your support goes up a lot!

2. Drop Meditation Mastery and get Altruistic Healing. You would be giving up a 20% cooldown reduction on JI, but gain 70 healing per boon per ally. The 2 biggest sources of healing would be:

An extra 4k (5×12×70) heal (if 4 people are in range) every 16 seconds from using EM on staff. This totals EM to almost 6k every 16secs.

That added 1k (5×3×70, if 4 people are in range) heal on your VoJ spam.

Hey thanks for the tips!

Although, AH would work very well with a high (about 1k odd) healing power stat, but will definitely try it out!

vaKuz,
AH scales very badly with healing power(hp). 100hp = 1 extra health per boon.
Your current build would be: 71 health per boon
1000hp would be: 79 health per boon.
So, all that extra hp gear would only net you about 480 extra healing on your Staff#4, which is not worth it. What makes AH builds strong is the fact that you can get such strong healing without having to get any hp. This makes it possible to up your other stats while still maintaining great survivability. Your current stats would be much better for your purposes. The heals from your dodge rolls does scale very well with hp, but then you are starting to do something different than what you are aiming for.

Let me know how things goes. I’m very curious about how your use of JI will be going.