Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I am researching an approach that I like for my guardian and I regularly see the important mention that you should not neglect damage in a build (PvE, dungeon) since you might last long and have lots of buffs, you are making the group take more time to kill mobs / bosses.

So, my question, more practical: here is a base for the build I’d like:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJApNoIyFYfAgYKwI8veQxHyQA
Basic idea: Valor and Honor give me some survival in pure toughness and HP while at the same time increasing the healing potential towards allies. Valor and empowering might should help out with damage output.

Concerning the damage: is it fair enough to assume that with 15 Radiance and 30 Valor I can contribute to the damage part of the fight through critical hits and critical damage or are you obligated to take some points in Zeal as well for a more direct approach? Or maybe better to compensate through bonusses on gear?

A second question would then be: since I use a mace / focus as primary weapon for the main mitigation and start of a fight (time to drop some boons, get some defense up), what is a good addition as a second weapon to be used while waiting for the cooldowns to return? I presume I could keep the virtues as a sort of mitigation to be used with the second weapon, so a less defense-capable weapon might be best?

I am a very beginner in this profession and it would be nice to know if I am at least thinking in the right direction… It is very hard to see if your own damage contribution actually means anything or maybe isn’t even noticeable at all.

p.s. I am not asking to modify the build in detail; I just need a few overall ideas / advice. That is why I didn’t really see it fit to post this in the Guardian Build topic.

Valor gives trivial offense and selfish support other than strength in numbers. Your missing both 10% damage modifiers from zeal 10 and radiance 25 so you don’t have much offense in this setup. Master of consecrations is the backbone of a solid pve build for wall of reflection, purging flames, and other things when needed. Hammer is a lot better support than mace since it gives perma prot and regen is really weak compared to that. A good secondary weapon is greatsword for grouping mobs and bursting or staff for running, kiting, pulling mobs to LoS spots and putting line of warding before they get there to keep them interrupted.

Something like this would be the best balance of offense and support where you can take 10 out of radiance and put it to valor for strength in numbers for more defense or in virtues for more condition removal. You can put on some knights gear if you want more self sustainability outside of all the blocks, blinds, perma prot, and ccs you have to stay alive. The key to support is just bringing the proper utilities to the fight like wall and shield of avenger when there are projeciles, stability when cc is a problem, retreat for skipping trash and boss fights, etc and you have blind spam, perma prot, consecration cd, shout cd, lots of dps, vuln in the setup below so you are doing the right support.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJASRlUgiC3FSHEfIFRWBRazAgIs+Q8wUgRPC

Thank you Obal. Insights like this are exactly what I am looking for. I will try it out immediately. Going into the Valor AND the Honor tree at the same time is way too unbalanced I see now. I also see the very nice combination you created with the burning condition you set up. Very interesting indeed! Again my thanks.

I say always use 20 in virtues for Absolute Resolution, it’s worth the 10% trade off imo