Guild Wars 2

This got pretty wordy, so sorry about that. I’ve read some other posts about this sort of thing, but most of them are trying to refine builds, whereas I’m really more concerned with the overall play style of the class.

I’ve just finished leveling my Guardian to 80 and after getting my final armor and traits set up, I’m kind of disappointed with how poorly the class fits into the current meta. Traditionally I’ve always played tanks, and while I understand that GW2 is designed to do away with the holy trinity, I have to say that I’m really at a loss. Up until now I discarded my low HP and ineffective toughness as simply not having all the trait points, or using low level armor. But now that I’m here, I’m discovering that the high defense/support class of the game really has to be built as a DPS to be any help at all in a group PVE scenario. I’ve tried out building for healing, for vitality, for toughness, and a combination and the fact is that none of these has the potential to change the flow of a fight.

The whole point of playing support is to be able to change the flow of a battle in a way that isn’t damage oriented. But realistically, even a maxed out healing stat will only give allies a few hundred HP each tick, and only if they stand still and wait for it—which is never going to happen in a game where every player has to dodge constantly or take a burst to the face.

Again, I understand that this game isn’t meant to be a standard MMO where you sit around hiding behind a tank and being healed by a full support class, but I was at least expecting to be able to heal someone back to full and give them a real chance at survival, rather than just stalling their inevitable demise with a slow regen and a completely impractical AoE heal. The class has some great options as a buffer, but when it comes to damage output vs. healing there’s really no way to justify choosing healing in the current meta. If you heal someone for 1k health they will still die on the next hit, if you burst 5k you might manage to steal agro and save them. If you choose healing, you are throwing away a lot of game changing potential in the tanky DPS build, trading it in for toughness (worthless against PVE mobs) and healing (weak, slow, and impossible to direct at the specific allies who need it).

Guardian needs a viable support build in order to justify its place in the profession line-up. After all, why would you choose guardian when you could get better DPS, better movement, and equally good buffs from a Warrior? The difference in armor between the classes hardly matters in a dungeon scenario, as the mobs in dungeons will down you in 2-4 hits regardless of your armor. Check any of the most effective builds, after ~1500, toughness is wasted potential.

From what I’ve read in the forums, a lot of players seem okay with this, but I really feel like the game is missing out on a lot of potential for group strategy by ruling out a true cleric class in favor of yet another DPS buffer. Sure, they get there in different ways, but aren’t the high level PVE builds for a lot of classes essentially the same? Whether it’s power or conditions, we’re all basically slaves to damage output.

Besides my confusion about the role of guardian in the class line-up, I’m really troubled by the fact that the way I play my guardian is indistinguishable from the way I play my other, squishier characters. Despite my toughness and vitality, I still spend most of my time dodging and running for my life. If I wanted to run around on the razor’s edge, I’d play my Thief or my Mesmer. I go to a tanky character because I’m in the mood to jump on a giant monster and take the damage like a boss. I choose a guardian because I want to guard, to get between my team and the bad guys. I choose to play my tanky character because I want to stop running around like mad and just be an unshakable force, and it’s kind of hard to feel that way when you are dodge rolling every chance you get.

Am I preaching to the choir here? Missing the point of the class? Because as it stands Guardian is a total dead weight to the team if you build for its strongest stats—toughness, vitality, healing—which makes no sense. And if you build for other stats, then what’s the point of playing the Guardian in the first place?

ohBuckle.3201:

This got pretty wordy, so sorry about that. I’ve read some other posts about this sort of thing, but most of them are trying to refine builds, whereas I’m really more concerned with the overall play style of the class.

I’ve just finished leveling my Guardian to 80 and after getting my final armor and traits set up, I’m kind of disappointed with how poorly the class fits into the current meta. Traditionally I’ve always played tanks, and while I understand that GW2 is designed to do away with the holy trinity, I have to say that I’m really at a loss. Up until now I discarded my low HP and ineffective toughness as simply not having all the trait points, or using low level armor. But now that I’m here, I’m discovering that the high defense/support class of the game really has to be built as a DPS to be any help at all in a group PVE scenario. I’ve tried out building for healing, for vitality, for toughness, and a combination and the fact is that none of these has the potential to change the flow of a fight.

The whole point of playing support is to be able to change the flow of a battle in a way that isn’t damage oriented. But realistically, even a maxed out healing stat will only give allies a few hundred HP each tick, and only if they stand still and wait for it—which is never going to happen in a game where every player has to dodge constantly or take a burst to the face.

Again, I understand that this game isn’t meant to be a standard MMO where you sit around hiding behind a tank and being healed by a full support class, but I was at least expecting to be able to heal someone back to full and give them a real chance at survival, rather than just stalling their inevitable demise with a slow regen and a completely impractical AoE heal. The class has some great options as a buffer, but when it comes to damage output vs. healing there’s really no way to justify choosing healing in the current meta. If you heal someone for 1k health they will still die on the next hit, if you burst 5k you might manage to steal agro and save them. If you choose healing, you are throwing away a lot of game changing potential in the tanky DPS build, trading it in for toughness (worthless against PVE mobs) and healing (weak, slow, and impossible to direct at the specific allies who need it).

Guardian needs a viable support build in order to justify its place in the profession line-up. After all, why would you choose guardian when you could get better DPS, better movement, and equally good buffs from a Warrior? The difference in armor between the classes hardly matters in a dungeon scenario, as the mobs in dungeons will down you in 2-4 hits regardless of your armor. Check any of the most effective builds, after ~1500, toughness is wasted potential.

From what I’ve read in the forums, a lot of players seem okay with this, but I really feel like the game is missing out on a lot of potential for group strategy by ruling out a true cleric class in favor of yet another DPS buffer. Sure, they get there in different ways, but aren’t the high level PVE builds for a lot of classes essentially the same? Whether it’s power or conditions, we’re all basically slaves to damage output.

Besides my confusion about the role of guardian in the class line-up, I’m really troubled by the fact that the way I play my guardian is indistinguishable from the way I play my other, squishier characters. Despite my toughness and vitality, I still spend most of my time dodging and running for my life. If I wanted to run around on the razor’s edge, I’d play my Thief or my Mesmer. I go to a tanky character because I’m in the mood to jump on a giant monster and take the damage like a boss. I choose a guardian because I want to guard, to get between my team and the bad guys. I choose to play my tanky character because I want to stop running around like mad and just be an unshakable force, and it’s kind of hard to feel that way when you are dodge rolling every chance you get.

Am I preaching to the choir here? Missing the point of the class? Because as it stands Guardian is a total dead weight to the team if you build for its strongest stats—toughness, vitality, healing—which makes no sense. And if you build for other stats, then what’s the point of playing the Guardian in the first place?

Missing the true meta is my guess.

Meta is dps. All the other abilities just help the group to keep dps up. That’s the Meta in a nutshell.

Support overall is like the red headed step child of GW2.

A well played guardian is a joy to behold and can make even the nastiest of dungeons doable. Look to your block, reflects and other defensive skills for starters. Stats like toughness just improve your personal health and don’t really do anything for the group. It’s good while you are learning but as you get better you can be more aggressive with your stat choices.

Try watching some vids to see how guardians play or join in on a dungeon run with a good guard to see how they do it.

Guardians are good for damage mitigation, timely use of skills, heals and buffs.
What most guardian players are missing is, they need to use their virtues, they aren’t there for show and activating them at the right time does so much wonder than leaving them on for their passive ability.

Having a good guardian in a team vs not having one at all makes all the difference.
To name a few, Wall of Reflect you pretty much mitigate all range damage, Stand your Ground and Hallowed Ground gives stability for knockdown mobs.
Purging flames, Save yourselves removes condition for the entire party, this and much more mitigation and protective skills.
Tome of Wrath also allows heals and full heals and can turn the tide of a losing battle if used correctly.

A good guardian will also make use of rune sets that gives all boons when elite skill is activated.

A must have for support guardians is the staff weapon, No.2 heals on contact and when trigged to explode and No. 4 gives stacks of might and heals at the end, Stand your ground utility also gives protection and regeneration.
I can’t stress enough the use of Virtue of Resolve as a healing skill and is the best in the guardians kitten nal.

Last but not least there is the Virtue of Courage and other utilities that gives aegis, activated at the right time, it gives your party immunity to one hit kills and can be used in conjunction while trying to revive a downed member while under fire.

Shield off-hand also provides damage mitigation by giving protection (-33% incoming dmg) and it’s No. 5 skills allows you to push enemies away, block projectiles as well as heal when reactivated again.

The guardian is a deep class and has a lot of utilities new players need to pick up to be effective in a party, a good start is a staff, constantly using your virtues and switching utilities to suit the situation.

ShannonKasull.2091:

A good guardian will also make use of rune sets that gives all boons when elite skill is activated.

Those Lyssa runes are rubbish, bring some DPS runes as damage is the meta, like scholar runes.

Wear zerker and support with skills (this is for PvE, of course).

Don’t forget selfless daring (your dodges AoE heal at the end). With Vigorous precision that’s a LOT of heals.

The virtue of resolve active ability is also quite useful and activating it does NOT disable Battle Presence.

I run + 90% Might duration (30% from traits, 3 pairs of runes with might duration as the 2-piece bonus). Combined with a high crit chance (love me some assassin gear) and Empowering might, and I pretty much radiate long duration might – you can even make the might from Staff-4 permanent.

The true beauty of a support Guardian doesn’t shine until some very late-game encounters, most notably high levelled fractals (people demand at least one Guardian in a party before the run can start).

If you ever get around to doing something like the grawl shaman boss at 41+, you’ll appreciate every single utility you got and timing/using your skills right as a Guardian will make or break a party there. Even with 2 guardians who knows their class inside out, that fight can be hell.

But healing power is a pretty useless stat, and for the majority of the game, the meta is very DPS orientated, with the early game being mainly faceroll.

Some of the newer endgame content are built more towards other things like control, a high HP pool, and defence, but with everyone expected to contribute decent DPS, you’ll need to factor attack power into any build you make.

PvP is much more diverse than PvE, with bunker being a popular meta for guardians, healway being a very viable and useful build for WvW, and control having a heavy emphasis.

Chullster.3608:

ShannonKasull.2091:

A good guardian will also make use of rune sets that gives all boons when elite skill is activated.

Those Lyssa runes are rubbish, bring some DPS runes as damage is the meta, like scholar runes.

Lyssa runes gives precision, random boon on healing and on top of that, cleanses all conditions, gains all boons and has a cooldown of 45 sec.

We are talking about a support guard here, while healing, you gain boon and on elite you become tanky due to the boons and removes all condition. This frees up my self condition cleansing utility slot and also allows me to use healing breeze instead of Signet of resolve if I do not have 1.
On top of that, you have a 5 sec all boons that allows you to soak up plenty of damage.

Sure, if you want to be a dps guardian by all means wear zerker but if you are trying to increase overall dps to party and sustain party dps by playing support, you need those heals and survivability.

Think about it, a full Zerker guardian(lowest hp pool) that gets downed often cannot control the battlefield and instead of tanking, preventing party members from dropping and giving boons and constantly stacking 15 Might to the entire team attempts to provide DPS.

In the end, it’s a matter of play-style and if people want to play DPS guardian, by all means, but IMO a support heal/buff/tank guard contributes much more overall dps than one that attempts to do nothing but provide mediocre damage.

ShannonKasull.2091:

Lyssa runes gives precision, random boon on healing and on top of that, cleanses all conditions, gains all boons and has a cooldown of 45 sec.

We are talking about a support guard here, while healing, you gain boon and on elite you become tanky due to the boons and removes all condition. This frees up my self condition cleansing utility slot and also allows me to use healing breeze instead of Signet of resolve if I do not have 1.
On top of that, you have a 5 sec all boons that allows you to soak up plenty of damage.

Sure, if you want to be a dps guardian by all means wear zerker but if you are trying to increase overall dps to party and sustain party dps by playing support, you need those heals and survivability.

Think about it, a full Zerker guardian(lowest hp pool) that gets downed often cannot control the battlefield and instead of tanking, preventing party members from dropping and giving boons and constantly stacking 15 Might to the entire team attempts to provide DPS.

In the end, it’s a matter of play-style and if people want to play DPS guardian, by all means, but IMO a support heal/buff/tank guard contributes much more overall dps than one that attempts to do nothing but provide mediocre damage.

You can say whatever you want, but it depends on why you’re playing the game. If you want to do dungeons quickly and efficiently, then you’re wrong and should just go with DPS guard.

If you want to play how you want and role play as some white knight paladin pretending you’re keeping the party alive (which, mind you, you can still do in zerk) while ‘tanking’ all the damage (Don’t forget most attacks are AOEs or cleaves, so that’s silly) then sure, you’re spot on.

The true power of a support guardian is not their raw healing abilities. It is the boons. Consant boon application and longevity.

Edit: also their abilities to remove conditions.

The thing to understand is that rolling a DPS build does not mean you won’t use your support skills. Guardian can pull some great numbers, and the bottom line is this -

your “healing” is never going to compare to what classes will already be doing for themselves.

You want tobe a support Guardian, roll Sword/Focus and GS or hammer and run the aegis/blind trains. Also see obal’s guide in the Guardian forum.

Ethics.4519:

ShannonKasull.2091:

Lyssa runes gives precision, random boon on healing and on top of that, cleanses all conditions, gains all boons and has a cooldown of 45 sec.

We are talking about a support guard here, while healing, you gain boon and on elite you become tanky due to the boons and removes all condition. This frees up my self condition cleansing utility slot and also allows me to use healing breeze instead of Signet of resolve if I do not have 1.
On top of that, you have a 5 sec all boons that allows you to soak up plenty of damage.

Sure, if you want to be a dps guardian by all means wear zerker but if you are trying to increase overall dps to party and sustain party dps by playing support, you need those heals and survivability.

Think about it, a full Zerker guardian(lowest hp pool) that gets downed often cannot control the battlefield and instead of tanking, preventing party members from dropping and giving boons and constantly stacking 15 Might to the entire team attempts to provide DPS.

In the end, it’s a matter of play-style and if people want to play DPS guardian, by all means, but IMO a support heal/buff/tank guard contributes much more overall dps than one that attempts to do nothing but provide mediocre damage.

You can say whatever you want, but it depends on why you’re playing the game. If you want to do dungeons quickly and efficiently, then you’re wrong and should just go with DPS guard.

If you want to play how you want and role play as some white knight paladin pretending you’re keeping the party alive (which, mind you, you can still do in zerk) while ‘tanking’ all the damage (Don’t forget most attacks are AOEs or cleaves, so that’s silly) then sure, you’re spot on.

Mind you if you want DPS, go play a Warrior instead, why try to be something you are not?
While your DPS guardian is trying to do damage instead of upkeeping might and boon heals and damage mitigation you are affecting the overall dps your entire party can do.
Doing dungeons effectively means maintaining group DPS and staying alive, what good is a guard who does nothing but swing his greatsword around.

Downed players do no DPS, that applies for you and your party. Even when stacking in dungeons, having someone in a downed state and having to stop attacking and resurrect them means lower DPS.

However much you want a guardian to be a DPS class, they just don’t fair as well as others in this category, so instead of “role-playing” your “DPS” guardian swinging his greatsword and thinking it is efficient, you need to take a step back and look at the entire picture on how group synergy works.

Some of the advice in this thread is terrible, my god.

Guardian can be tricky to get used to at first. You must understand that your support is pro-active (you will help your allies before they need it). This also mean that if you’re doing it right, no one will be able to notice (which doesn’t have the same feeling of instant gratification as making green bars go up).

Your support takes 3 forms.

1. Boons
Boons are a vital part of your kit. You can apply protection (33% damage reduction, so op), regen, stability, and aegis more than any other class. These allow your group to run self-destructively glassy builds, and can force people to clear content despite themselves.

2. Utility
Reflection/projectile absorption is probably the most important thing to have in pve in this game. You have wall of reflection and shield of the avenger. Lots of classes specifically have the class weakness of having low condi removal. You have pure of voice, purging flames, and Virtue IX trait. Elementalist can trait so that every time they blast a fire field they give fury. You can drop long duration fire fields they can blast with lightning hammer.

3. Direct heals
You can sort of do this, but if you’re doing your job well otherwise this won’t be necessary. Ideally this is only something you incidentally do while performing your actual support functions of damage mitigation.

I suggest you try the build I run.

intothemists

-I run boon duration runes and food, and trait into the boon duration tree. Hold the line gives 8 seconds of protection =)

-try virtue bombing in dire situations (use renewed focus, mash all virtues, mash them all again).

-One of the best parts of guild wars 2 is that you are not required to take damage. So, I run berserker gear to help clear things a little faster. One thing to note is the 5 trait in honor, that gives you vigor on crits. If you don’t want to run berserker, I understand, but I would recommend knights as an alternative, so that you can maintain your vigor uptime.

I hope this is helpful, guardian is a lot of fun, and their support is game changing.

ShannonKasull.2091:

Mind you if you want DPS, go play a Warrior instead, why try to be something you are not?
While your DPS guardian is trying to do damage instead of upkeeping might and boon heals and damage mitigation you are affecting the overall dps your entire party can do.
Doing dungeons effectively means maintaining group DPS and staying alive, what good is a guard who does nothing but swing his greatsword around.

Downed players do no DPS, that applies for you and your party. Even when stacking in dungeons, having someone in a downed state and having to stop attacking and resurrect them means lower DPS.

However much you want a guardian to be a DPS class, they just don’t fair as well as others in this category, so instead of “role-playing” your “DPS” guardian swinging his greatsword and thinking it is efficient, you need to take a step back and look at the entire picture on how group synergy works.

What are you talking about? you don’t bring a guardian for DPS, you bring them for Aegis, blind spam, group might+stabiliy, condition flipping, small packet AoE heals as well as other stuff like staff 5, GS 5 weapon skills etc

You can do all that above in berserker gear and scholar runes, only you’ll be more of a team player because you’ll bring decent damage output too instead being carried by the team while wearing clerics armor and terribad lyssa runes or worse.

The “Dead players are no DPS” in an old cliché trotted out by people unwilling to realise, even now after GW2 is more than a year old, that any other gear stats that aren’t +damage are a waste of time and unnecessary.

ShannonKasull.2091:

Mind you if you want DPS, go play a Warrior instead, why try to be something you are not?
While your DPS guardian is trying to do damage instead of upkeeping might and boon heals and damage mitigation you are affecting the overall dps your entire party can

Sorry for bursting your bubble, but guardians are just as good damage dealers as warriors – and even slightly better according to one of the theorycrafters.

ShannonKasull.2091:

Mind you if you want DPS, go play a Warrior instead, why try to be something you are not?
While your DPS guardian is trying to do damage instead of upkeeping might and boon heals and damage mitigation you are affecting the overall dps your entire party can do.
Doing dungeons effectively means maintaining group DPS and staying alive, what good is a guard who does nothing but swing his greatsword around.

Downed players do no DPS, that applies for you and your party. Even when stacking in dungeons, having someone in a downed state and having to stop attacking and resurrect them means lower DPS.

However much you want a guardian to be a DPS class, they just don’t fair as well as others in this category, so instead of “role-playing” your “DPS” guardian swinging his greatsword and thinking it is efficient, you need to take a step back and look at the entire picture on how group synergy works.

You know you can support and DPS at the same time?

“Downed players do no DPS” I’m tired of this mantra that people scream. First of all, you’re wrong. Downed players still contribue DPS by spamming #1.

Secondly, I believe you meant dead players do no DPS. Using the top DPS meta build, you could probably be dead for 25% or more of the fight and still out DPS most of the play how you want builds.

Also, if you think warriors are the meta for DPS, then you should grab a zerk thief or a FGS ele, that may open your eyes.

Elitist attitudes popping up in this thread aside, support doesn’t come from stat choices like has already been said, it comes from utility usage, proper timing of virtues, and weapon selection. You don’t need to run full berserker gear with scholar runes unless you are going to be running organized speed clears, but your stat choices should be damage oriented. This game doesn’t have enrage timers so you’re not going to wipe just because you didn’t down a boss in X amount of time. There are a lot of options out there, try them out and figure out which ones you enjoy playing.

Gnat.9405:

your “healing” is never going to compare to what classes will already be doing for themselves.
.

I kind of disagree with that. Its true that a you can’t be like a traditional healer and heal so fast that people can face tank everything, so if your party is terrible, you can’t save them.

However, even without going full heal (which is useful in WvW or maybe PvP but a waste in PvE), your healing will make a good party last even longer. This is in particular to Book of Courage’s full heal, which if used right can get everyone out of a mess.

Well i play dps/support , i run full cof armour and knights jewellery , with staff greatsword . I do fine also my build is 0/0/30/20/20 , my virtues are support , rest is full deeps

there you go typical support/dps guard

That is a very situational ability, and the exceptions to the rule shouldn’t be sued as an example to attempt disproving a point.

The most common conversation in regards to healing v DPS is the fact that there are very little medium-length encounters. I think a lot of the time you’re either fighting packs of trash for a few seconds or a boss for 1-3 mins (depending on your group), that’s going to one shot you anyway unless you dodge. There is very little room, or opportunity, to use the type of heals that cleric Guardians think they are running.

It always makes me laugh when PvEers talk about supposed weaknesses of classes.
You don’t heal with your regen as guard, but with Empower + heal on dodge trait. Those are your two bread and butter heals and they benefit greatly from a full clerics set.
That support is worthless in PvE isn’t an inherent flaw of the class but of PvE gameplay design. If you want support and teamplay, you need to WvW/tPvP.

ohBuckle.3201:

If you heal someone for 1k health they will still die on the next hit,

Yes, on the next hit. You gave them a chance to react. This is a game where PvE monsters hit with a few big hitters, not a million needle stings like in other MMO.

Also prot and aegis.

And if you build for other stats, then what’s the point of playing the Guardian in the first place?

What a dumb statement. Are you saying the most important thing about class choice are stats?

Support Guards are very very good if well played in WvW. Otherwise, you are going to be much less useful. The entire PvE game is built around max dps and nothing else.

ShannonKasull.2091:

Ethics.4519:

ShannonKasull.2091:

Lyssa runes gives precision, random boon on healing and on top of that, cleanses all conditions, gains all boons and has a cooldown of 45 sec.

We are talking about a support guard here, while healing, you gain boon and on elite you become tanky due to the boons and removes all condition. This frees up my self condition cleansing utility slot and also allows me to use healing breeze instead of Signet of resolve if I do not have 1.
On top of that, you have a 5 sec all boons that allows you to soak up plenty of damage.

Sure, if you want to be a dps guardian by all means wear zerker but if you are trying to increase overall dps to party and sustain party dps by playing support, you need those heals and survivability.

Think about it, a full Zerker guardian(lowest hp pool) that gets downed often cannot control the battlefield and instead of tanking, preventing party members from dropping and giving boons and constantly stacking 15 Might to the entire team attempts to provide DPS.

In the end, it’s a matter of play-style and if people want to play DPS guardian, by all means, but IMO a support heal/buff/tank guard contributes much more overall dps than one that attempts to do nothing but provide mediocre damage.

You can say whatever you want, but it depends on why you’re playing the game. If you want to do dungeons quickly and efficiently, then you’re wrong and should just go with DPS guard.

If you want to play how you want and role play as some white knight paladin pretending you’re keeping the party alive (which, mind you, you can still do in zerk) while ‘tanking’ all the damage (Don’t forget most attacks are AOEs or cleaves, so that’s silly) then sure, you’re spot on.

Mind you if you want DPS, go play a Warrior instead, why try to be something you are not?
While your DPS guardian is trying to do damage instead of upkeeping might and boon heals and damage mitigation you are affecting the overall dps your entire party can do.
Doing dungeons effectively means maintaining group DPS and staying alive, what good is a guard who does nothing but swing his greatsword around.

Downed players do no DPS, that applies for you and your party. Even when stacking in dungeons, having someone in a downed state and having to stop attacking and resurrect them means lower DPS.

However much you want a guardian to be a DPS class, they just don’t fair as well as others in this category, so instead of “role-playing” your “DPS” guardian swinging his greatsword and thinking it is efficient, you need to take a step back and look at the entire picture on how group synergy works.

I hope you do not play a guardian. Guardians can DPS just as well as any other profession, and do have awesome tools to use both offensively and defensively. You have not mastered the guardian profession, stop

To add to my earlier post, I play a staff/sword focus support Guardian. Yea I do ok in PvE, but I’m much more effective in WvW and feel like sometimes my support is the only thing keeping a fight going. You will feel useful in WvW for sure.

Nike.2631:

Don’t forget selfless daring (your dodges AoE heal at the end). With Vigorous precision that’s a LOT of heals.

Until you then dodge roll off a very high place to your death…. /boggle

:)

My guardian is very tanky. The tankyness comes from skills and abilities and not necessarily by stats, although higher vit, heal, toughness helps in the tankyness.

For example, in WVW, I take my guard and get in the middle of a zerg before my zerg even begins to attack. Granted, I have been killed by this tactic but as I have perfected it and the timing, it works really well:

1.) Teleport to the target zerg using “Judges Intervention”. This prevents the zerg from countering your frontal attack. This surprises the zerg and may have to fiddle with their actions to figure out how to respond, perhaps a good 1 second passes before they react.

2.) Once you are in middle of the zerg, use “Stand your Ground” followed by the great sword’s symbol of wrath. A couple of things can happen after this, if the zerg starts attacking, immediately invoke your “Shelter Skill” healing skill. This, coupled with Stand Your Ground", allows you to stay in the zerg. If you see that you have more time, use your GS “Whirling Wrath”.

3.) Now it’s time to get away. Immediately use the GS ability “Leap of Faith” to get some distance, followed with the use of all your virtues. Immediately switch to staff and cast “Line of Warding” and keep running, and depending on the landscape, away from the two zergs, or perhaps toward your zerg. You may decide to throw a “Wall of Reflection” while running away. However, the “Wall of Reflection” may also be useful while in the middle of the zerg.

Usually you get away and get some time to recover, and usually, your zerg attacks immediately. What this has done is perhaps burn some of the timers on the other zerg that they wasted on 1 target, giving the advantage to your zerg.

This one tanky strategy by one guardian has potentially shifted the advantage to your zerg, to me this is a tank.

This same strategy can be used in dungeons, agroeing mobs, and allowing your teammates, which may be dps focused, to do their damage. Again, this is tanky IMO. You have an upfront person blocking all the damage.

The toughness, vitality, healing help in this regard because it allows you to survive this foolhardy tactic.

OP – Come over to where the big boys play (WvW) and you can support till your tiny asuran heart gives out.

PvE = Insanity: Do it once for the experience and never look back.

Ethics.4519:

ShannonKasull.2091:

Mind you if you want DPS, go play a Warrior instead, why try to be something you are not?
While your DPS guardian is trying to do damage instead of upkeeping might and boon heals and damage mitigation you are affecting the overall dps your entire party can do.
Doing dungeons effectively means maintaining group DPS and staying alive, what good is a guard who does nothing but swing his greatsword around.

Downed players do no DPS, that applies for you and your party. Even when stacking in dungeons, having someone in a downed state and having to stop attacking and resurrect them means lower DPS.

However much you want a guardian to be a DPS class, they just don’t fair as well as others in this category, so instead of “role-playing” your “DPS” guardian swinging his greatsword and thinking it is efficient, you need to take a step back and look at the entire picture on how group synergy works.

You know you can support and DPS at the same time?

“Downed players do no DPS” I’m tired of this mantra that people scream. First of all, you’re wrong. Downed players still contribue DPS by spamming #1.

Secondly, I believe you meant dead players do no DPS. Using the top DPS meta build, you could probably be dead for 25% or more of the fight and still out DPS most of the play how you want builds.

Also, if you think warriors are the meta for DPS, then you should grab a zerk thief or a FGS ele, that may open your eyes.

I main as a thief, I know how much DPS they can do, but compared to a warrior their sustainable DPS fairs in comparison.

Think about this in a logical standpoint, 1 downed player means lesser DPS in and of itself and others trying to resurrect them stop DPSing to do so.
Are you telling me a downed player + people reviving does more damage than a constant heal buff guardian that has no downed player in his team? Do the math.

Re: Mrauls

I play guardian as a secondary profession, no, I do not claim to know everything about a guardian but I’ve put my fair share of time into one.
I’m not saying a guardian cannot DPS, I’m just saying they can’t do so as well compared to others.
Anyone who claims so have not tried playing both guardian and other pure DPS classes.
I believe Zerker gear for support guardian as the OP is seeking advice on is a wrong place to start.

Sure you can wear Zerker, try to DPS and Support at the same time, but doing both at the same time means failing to excel at any specific one.

I stand by what I say, a good support guardian, keeps a staff on-hand, constantly upkeeps might, heal, protection and prevents any party member from dropping, and above all, controls the situation by using the right utility/virture at the right time.

ShannonKasull.2091:

I play guardian as a secondary profession, no, I do not claim to know everything about a guardian but I’ve put my fair share of time into one.
I’m not saying a guardian cannot DPS, I’m just saying they can’t do so as well compared to others.
Anyone who claims so have not tried playing both guardian and other pure DPS classes.
I believe Zerker gear for support guardian as the OP is seeking advice on is a wrong place to start.

Sure you can wear Zerker, try to DPS and Support at the same time, but doing both at the same time means failing to excel at any specific one.

I stand by what I say, a good support guardian, keeps a staff on-hand, constantly upkeeps might, heal, protection and prevents any party member from dropping, and above all, controls the situation by using the right utility/virture at the right time.

It’s pretty obvious that you’ve wasted most of your time on your guard, since you seem to have no clue how the situation in any halfway good group looks like. Let me just pick two parts of all that nonsense, since I’ll have to go to work soon:

1) The DPS stuff. First, there are no pure DPS classes. In a good group, virtually everyone brings some kind of support (except the necro, but that class is borderline useless in most dungeons). Be it offensive boons, vuln, defensive boons or reflections. Nothing of the guardian part cannot be done in fully offensive gear and build. Second, both theorycrafting and the experience of good players indicate the same thing: Guards are in a very good position for DPS, if played and buffed correctly. There is especially no need to hide from warriors – they’d rather need to hide from us if we can either keep up UC or have a lot of stuff to reflect.

2) To the last paragraph: Let’s check the real tasks:
- give might to the group: Not really the guardian task unless you use a hammer. Might is stacked by fire fields + blast finishers, which are much better than anything you can put out. If you have an ele, it’s first of all their job. Besides, staff sucks massively since the weapon is incredibly weak and a waste of time for 10 seconds if you use it in combat.
- heal: Useless. Only bad players need tons of heal.
- protection: Can be done easily in a DPS hammer setup. Besides, anyone needs a hammer to apply constant prot anyway.
- prevent party members from dropping: Aegis, protection and reflection are totally independent from gear and part of every good DPS build. Anything else is just a question of the personal (in)competence of your group members.
- utility: Again, any good guardian knows this by heart and has all viable options in his build. The meta 10/25/0/10/25 is there for a reason.

Conclusion: A good DPS player can fulfill any of the important parts about being a guardian.

Warrior/Thief/Ele outclasses a guardians DPS no matter how you cut it.
I have never mentioned anything wrong with berzerker gear, they are a must for dps, but a guard wearing full zerker gear and intending to do no buffing, only damage and the occasional virtues is a bad guardian in my books.
If I want a kitten ed heavy armor DPS I’ll look for a bad warrior, even then they do more DPS than a full zerker guard.

You tell me any halfway good group would have ele’s stacking might, I’m telling you 9/10 groups do not do so, not unless it is a privately formed team or have prior communication.
Most guardians I see do not even bother using virtues/utilities because they claim to be DPS guardians. From personal experience around half of the guardians I meet in dungeons does this and I run dungeons/fractals exclusively.
One extreme case of a guardian I met boasts to me for being at 12k hp Full DPS build saying he was more paper than my 14k thief, ever so often falling in CoE.

And no, with stacking being the norm in most dungeons, heals are not useless, they are a must have necessity because there is little room for dodging and damage mitigation.
More so amplified with guardians having the most AoE heals available in their weapon and utility skill set.

This is more so the case in fotm especially at 40+ scale even at 31+ where instabilities are introduced. Most encounters would have you defer to range instead of melee, how then is a Zerker guardian going to fair in terms of damage potential.

Again, if a Zerker guardian has no intention to buff or heal but instead picks hammers and greatswords and attempts to justify so by claiming they are doing as good a DPS as other damage dealing classes, I’m afraid to say you are only deluding yourselves.

For a clue of how often I do my dungeon runs,

http://postimg.org/image/k09xl3iq1/

I run both closed group and PUG parties and have my fair share of good and bad players.

I had support Guardian. I was using Staff, i had nice healing power, my build was built around Virtues (30 points in last trait bar), i was giving 150 toughness to allies (trait), my passive regeneration from Virtue was given to allies and was powered up (both traits), hell i even healed 3 conditions when i was activating it. I used Stand Your Ground for stability and retaliation (had longer retaliation +25%), Save Yourself (boons for me, cleaning conditions on allies), Purging Flames (another condition cleaning), Renewed Focus (when used all the Virtues). I healed with Healing Breeze.

And what? Either I’m noob or good supporting in GW2 is impossible. I couldn’t heal allies enough, boons are basically useless, my toughness and vitality was too low. I just stood a little longer than zerker-players. Not to mention really low DPS. I’m frustrated by this, honestly Holy Trinity isn’t that bad idea at all. My wishes to be a Cleric of some kind, was destroyed. Bleh.

ShannonKasull.2091:

Warrior/Thief/Ele outclasses a guardians DPS no matter how you cut it.
I have never mentioned anything wrong with berzerker gear, they are a must for dps, but a guard wearing full zerker gear and intending to do no buffing, only damage and the occasional virtues is a bad guardian in my books.
If I want a kitten ed heavy armor DPS I’ll look for a bad warrior, even then they do more DPS than a full zerker guard.

You tell me any halfway good group would have ele’s stacking might, I’m telling you 9/10 groups do not do so, not unless it is a privately formed team or have prior communication.
Most guardians I see do not even bother using virtues/utilities because they claim to be DPS guardians. From personal experience around half of the guardians I meet in dungeons does this and I run dungeons/fractals exclusively.
One extreme case of a guardian I met boasts to me for being at 12k hp Full DPS build saying he was more paper than my 14k thief, ever so often falling in CoE.

And no, with stacking being the norm in most dungeons, heals are not useless, they are a must have necessity because there is little room for dodging and damage mitigation.
More so amplified with guardians having the most AoE heals available in their weapon and utility skill set.

This is more so the case in fotm especially at 40+ scale even at 31+ where instabilities are introduced. Most encounters would have you defer to range instead of melee, how then is a Zerker guardian going to fair in terms of damage potential.

Again, if a Zerker guardian has no intention to buff or heal but instead picks hammers and greatswords and attempts to justify so by claiming they are doing as good a DPS as other damage dealing classes, I’m afraid to say you are only deluding yourselves.

For a clue of how often I do my dungeon runs,

http://postimg.org/image/k09xl3iq1/

I run both closed group and PUG parties and have my fair share of good and bad players.

Funny that my dungeon group does just fine without a “healer” when stacking. Also meleeing all bosses up to level 50 in fractals so yeah…

A bad guardian doesn’t use virtues, gear is irrelevant. Someone in full zerker gear, using the meta build and timing aegis and reflects at the correct times makes them far more useful than someone doing next to no damage while only providing weak heals that any heavy hitter will completely negate anyway.

Even if you run hammer without the intention of supporting people you will be anyway as long as people are in melee range. The permanent prot from a hammer provides more support than any “healing” build will.

A fully buffed guardian will out dps a warrior, of course you won’t believe that since you seem to lack any knowledge of what an organized group is capable of.

Also posting a screenshot of your dungeon tokens doesn’t prove anything.

Well, arguing about DPS and builds in a guardian sub forum with a group of guardians who believe they can do everything from out DPSing warriors while boasting top tier support all in Zerker and doing 50+ fotm in melee.
You believe what you want and we’ll agree to disagree.

As stated, the tokens show how often I run my dungeons, how often I meet different guardians, good ones and bad ones.
What have you to show for your statements regarding dps, no use for heals, and fotm 50+ melee?

I ran full zerker gear guardian with a semi-support/DPS build in the TA aether blade path when it was first released. My boons were as effective as any other guardians and my damage didn’t blow. In fact I ended up being the last man standing against oak heart after my team wiped early trying to fight him at range. I finished him off alone, in full zerk gear, and survived just fine using dodge rolls/aegis/shelter/renewed focus. I’m not even a very good player, but don’t have many issues in DPS gear.

Our sustained DPS when buffed is extremely high with the right build, we have a lot of damage multipliers, and our weapon damage scaling is quite high. Granted I don’t run full zerk pure DPS on all paths, but I’m just not that twitchy good.

If you want the true support Guardian. Play in WvWvW where a guardian with 3500 armor and 3200 attack with soldier runes to remove all the zillions of conditions can really and truly shine.

The reason I don’t ever invite guardians so parties is because I am one myself and 99% of the time using a better build so I never have to invite a cleric or a support guardian. You have to understand that looking at traits guardian is designed to give lots of support while retaining high dps. 20 points in virtues is enough support for any pve situation

Crapgame.6519:

Nike.2631:

Don’t forget selfless daring (your dodges AoE heal at the end). With Vigorous precision that’s a LOT of heals.

Until you then dodge roll off a very high place to your death…. /boggle

:)

Shhhhhh!

What happens in the Jade Sea Fractal stays in the Jade Sea Fractal.