Guild Wars 2

Greetings Guardians,
I’m interested in trying a staff build in PvE. I like the aesthetics and support ability of a staff guardian and want to see if there’s a niche in PvE where this weaponstyle is effective.
Thanks!

Sorry, but the only niche for staff builds are the big temple zergs. There, it shines for tagging loot bags. In any other case, builds based on staff are useless due to abysmal DPS and subpar support. You’ll equip it sometimes for skipping trash or blocking mobs by #5, but that’s the exception. The rule is: staff is bad.

Staff is useful for running TA, kiting in AC, and generally pulling aggro/kiting away from party members. It has some usage in Fractals as well with Line of Warding at dredge level. I wouldn’t ever use it in terms of dealing damage though. Kiting is the main purpose you’d ever use staff.

I tried to make staff (and mace/shield) cleric guardian work but eventually it just wasn’t good enough.
Your damage is terrible and even with boon duration gear empower doesn’t increase your group’s dps by enough to offset the loss of your own.

The only thing Staff is good for is in support of a strong sustained DPS weapon that isn’t bad to park in, like Greatsword, Hammer, or Sword/Focus. If you have high Boon duration, in theory you can pop Empower then enter combat with inflated Might duration for an extended period. But it’s not something you ever want to swap back to while still in combat if you care about dealing damage. You also miss out on having a burst weapon you can swap to for the high damage cooldowns and then return to your sustained weapon.

Staff is just a zerg mob tagging weapon, it has no role anywhere else.

You can however, if you’re still ‘learning’ the class use it for AH and keep yourself alive with #4 but you need to drop it later on since its not helpful after that.

foofad.5162:

The only thing Staff is good for is in support of a strong sustained DPS weapon that isn’t bad to park in, like Greatsword, Hammer, or Sword/Focus. If you have high Boon duration, in theory you can pop Empower then enter combat with inflated Might duration for an extended period. But it’s not something you ever want to swap back to while still in combat if you care about dealing damage. You also miss out on having a burst weapon you can swap to for the high damage cooldowns and then return to your sustained weapon.

Yeah I did that when I was running a 65% might duration build. Then I just switched to glass since eles can stack might better w/o dropping much of their dmg.