Guild Wars 2

After a decent amount of play testing on my current build I have finally decided to do a write up and share the details of it. I decided to let go of some of my damage and build a more defensive build, focused around multiple forms of self healing, that works in solo roaming, small group, and zerg settings. The best results I found, came from a leech based build with several other forms of self healing, while still managing to keep a good amount of damage and some group support.

There are two variations you can run of this build, one focuses more offensive with a 1h weapon and a 2h offset, but can be easily changed into a tankier 2h variation. Weapons can be used at the choice of the wielder, and are not limited in any way. Traits can also be switched slightly to match weapons, such as blind exposure, in case you choose not to run sword or greatsword. Always make sure you keep an extra off set weapon with a kill stacking buff as well that you can switch off once you hit 25 stacks. I personally use a staff with bloodlust, but Anything with either bloodlust or life (if you chose to go for more tankiness) will work, as long as you get the stacks before you enter major combat.

As for the actual builds……

1h version:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|c.1g.h1.e.1n.h1m|2.1p.h1m|1n.74.1c.74.1n.74.1c.74.1n.74.1c.a7|1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1a.61|0.u64b.a6.u68b.0|54.1|w.18.19.12.1i|e

1h backup link
/gw2skills.net/editor/?fUEQNAseRlUg67WFyNEf4Eh1DAGQ/h9oiwvjXFoIA-jEzAYLA8FEGDkCFRiAQ2TZNBKIW0IiGbDo6FMlKRUt7oIa1CBYeMA-w

2h version:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|1.1p.h1m|2.1p.h1m|1n.74.1c.74.1n.74.1c.74.1n.74.1c.a7|1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1a.61|0.u24c.a6.u68b.0|54.1|v.18.19.12.1i|e

2h Backup link
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUEQJASRlYg67WFyNEf4Eh1DCGwCi9oiwvjXFoIA-jUyA4rARhCU2TZNBKIW0IiGbDo6FMlKRUt7oIa1CBYeMA-w

Your big healing comes from:

Leach every weapon switch, almost 1000 per switch
Omnomberry pie: about 350 every other critical hit, 1 sec CD
Dodge rolling: about 800 heal every roll
Pure of heart: slightly over 700 healing (this can be replaced with Shout CD if desired)
And of course your VoR passive and regen from utilities.

Another great bonus of this build is the amount of fury up time. With 4x rune of the citadel you have a 5% chance to gain fury for 34s (with duration from 2x rune) Also, SY gives another 11s, and being set on fire gives another 5s per application of burning. against any groups or solos of certain classes, you can have almost 100% fury up time, which means more activation of omnomberry pies, and also more constant activation of Empowering might, giving you even more damage.

Condition removal is handled through shouts, and running CoP if you find Conditions are really becoming an issue. This build however runs more vitality than I am personally used to, and find conditions to not be much of an issue. Also the 2h variant uses perfect inscriptions along with signet CD, to make signet of resolve an even better heal, and give 2 10s condition removal.

Any tips, comments, or suggestions are appreciated, let me know what you guys think!

Updates:

1) Changed 2x vamp 4x citadel runes to 5x Citadel runes and 1x ruby, the heal from 2x vamp was found to be of very little use.

Why not use one Sigil of Blood, instead of two Leech?

Since sigil of blood is actually on a 5 second internal cool down, it actually doesnt heal much more than sigil of leeching does over a minutes time. (6216 vs 5850 assuming maximum use of each, calculated with the 80% crit chance I have with fury on) Also, Sigil of blood requires you to be on a target almost all the time to maximize the effect of it, where sigil of leeching, as long as you land a hit before the 9 second weapon swap timer, you are not wasting it.

Makes sense.

I’ve been using Omnomberry, Sigil of Leech/Life/Blood for a couple of days now. Not really a build just some tweaks, and it works great. So I can see how this build would be even better.

I applaud you for thinking outside the box. This build is not bad at all!

Are you actually going to stick to this one?

:P

I’m running sword/torch and scepter/focus: If I use Sigill of Leeching on my off-hands, do I have to use one of the #4 or #5 skills after swapping weapons to get the healing or can I use any skill from my sword or scepter?

Harbinger.8637:

Makes sense.

I’ve been using Omnomberry, Sigil of Leech/Life/Blood for a couple of days now. Not really a build just some tweaks, and it works great. So I can see how this build would be even better.

Yeah, I took a step back after running meditation builds for so long and looked for other ways to stay alive other than relying on triple meditations with monk’s focus. I did the math on alot of the max potentials of the different sources of leeching and found that with the right amount of sources along with some additional sources of healing (like pure of heart and dodge rolls) It became very sustainable. The loss of crit damage was a bit hard to swallow, considering I normally run around 60%+ between traits and trinkets, but with the added power of EM, the bloodlust stacks, and the actual damage you do from the leech themselves, I find the loss of those stats aren’t as bad as I thought they would be.

Khenzy.9348:

I applaud you for thinking outside the box. This build is not bad at all!

Thanks! I am always looking for new builds to mess around with and try. I honestly feel like I have build ADD at times lol.

Christos de Soufre.3802:

Are you actually going to stick to this one?

:P

For the time being, I might make slight changes on it, mostly testing on if the 2x vamp runes are better, or if I should just replace them. but for now this is the build.

Tobkilla.4612:

I’m running sword/torch and scepter/focus: If I use Sigill of Leeching on my off-hands, do I have to use one of the #4 or #5 skills after swapping weapons to get the healing or can I use any skill from my sword or scepter?

Nope! How the sigils (and the vamp rune proc) works is that it gives you a buff on your buff bar that shows your next attack will leach health. It does not matter what attack it is, as long as it does damage I believe (need to test to be sure, something like Shield #5 for instance might not activate it because it does no damage) Also, this buff has unlimited duration, so if you swap weapons right before combat drops, you will keep the buff until next time you hit something.

Apparently The gw2buildcraft site is down at the moment, If it doesn’t come back up soon I will switch the links to another build editor.

Runes of the citadel are the most underrated runes in the game imo. I’ve been using them for 6 months or more. The fury buff is amazing for guardians who have few other sources of fury. With my build the proc gives me about 43.5 seconds of fury. Add in save yourselves and you’re talking near 100% fury uptime. The bomb does decent AOE damage (1500 or so on crit) and seems to proc more often than 5% of the time, although it is a bit hit or miss since it spawns on your location. The bomb is especially good for fighting NPCs like guards who just cluster around you.

I like the idea of using sigils of leeching for a roaming type build. For some reason I didn’t think that they dealt any damage, but dealing 900 some damage and healing at the same time is great. I also like how you can “preload” life leech by swapping once as you come out of a combat.

Too bad build craft is down so I can’t look at this.

fishergrip.4082:

Runes of the citadel are the most underrated runes in the game imo. I’ve been using them for 6 months or more. The fury buff is amazing for guardians who have few other sources of fury. With my build the proc gives me about 43.5 seconds of fury. Add in save yourselves and you’re talking near 100% fury uptime. The bomb does decent AOE damage (1500 or so on crit) and seems to proc more often than 5% of the time, although it is a bit hit or miss since it spawns on your location. The bomb is especially good for fighting NPCs like guards who just cluster around you.

I like the idea of using sigils of leeching for a roaming type build. For some reason I didn’t think that they dealt any damage, but dealing 900 some damage and healing at the same time is great. I also like how you can “preload” life leech by swapping once as you come out of a combat.

Yeah, I have been thinking about just going 6x runes for some added power and the bomb, I just need to figure if the 2x vamp rune is worth it or not, and if I really need it to survive or not. And yeah, Leach is very nice as it not only heals you, but deals damage. The Fury uptime is indeed very nice, as I can keep it up about 75% of the time in group fights due to the proc and SY. Add in Inner Fire for fury on burning application, and its up 100% of the time against anything that does burning. The only way to stop it is through boon removal/steal, but with SY it has a decent chance of still staying on you due to all the boons you have.

I have edited in links to the builds for the Gw2 skill editor site since buildcraft seems to be down at the moment. They are located in the first post of the thread.

NICE. been looking forward to this. ; ))

bed time now, but will take a closer look soon enough.

before i jet, i highly recommend gw2skills.net. they’ve updated it so you can use it for PvP, WvW/PvE. i really like it and most of the stuff afaik is pretty up-to-date. gw2buildcraft was kind of outdated on multiple fronts, so maybe that’s why it’s down? oops! just noticed the backup links. it’s late!

aaaand we’re in diff matchups : ((

Christos with his build, and Bash with this. as if Guardians has a hard time dying already! XDD

Buildcraft is back up, but I do agree it is slightly behind (doesn’t have the settler’s gear and whatnot) But I do prefer it just because of the neat and basic layout. Also for the effective power/effective health to help show how much power and health a build really has. The only issue with it is that effective power can easily be cheesed with damage % because it assumes you have all available sources, where things like unscathed contender do not really last long. However the only ones I really use are ones that are easy to keep on a good part of the time like radiant power and the damage from low endurance traits.

akamon.2769:

NICE. been looking forward to this. ; ))

bed time now, but will take a closer look soon enough.

before i jet, i highly recommend gw2skills.net. they’ve updated it so you can use it for PvP, WvW/PvE. i really like it and most of the stuff afaik is pretty up-to-date. gw2buildcraft was kind of outdated on multiple fronts, so maybe that’s why it’s down? oops! just noticed the backup links. it’s late!

aaaand we’re in diff matchups : ((

Christos with his build, and Bash with this. as if Guardians has a hard time dying already! XDD

My wife is also running the RRR bunker ranger build, Should be fun as a small roaming group :P

i was wandering your 2h build
Radiance XII :
Perfect Inscriptions Signet passive effects are improved

the only signet is resolve , what does it improve ?
or does “Blind Exposure: Applying blind also applies vulnerability” make for better choice ?
atleast for F1 and greatsword leap causes blind

and another.
your acc goes cleric, does healing power effect vamp x2 or leeching ?
or just give boost to dodge roll heal

SchuMidas.4782:

i was wandering your 2h build
Radiance XII :
Perfect Inscriptions Signet passive effects are improved

the only signet is resolve , what does it improve ?

or does “Blind Exposure: Applying blind also applies vulnerability” make for better choice ?
atleast for F1 and greatsword leap causes blind

It makes signet of resolve remove 2 conditions every 10 seconds instead of one, adding 2 more condition removals, and possibly allowing for a bit more play on utilities. I went with it for the fact that Radiance does not have much other that signet play and 1h synergy, However if you wanted to you could drop the 5 points out of radiance and put them into virtues. I was more or less just giving a way to be able to stay 2h on the fly without having to reset your traits every time.

Bah you edited the last part in lol,

As far as the cleric’s gear, Healing power effects the dodge roll, regen boon, passive Virtue of resolve, active virtue of resolve, and your heal skill. The big reason for it was mostly the Dodge roll to be honest though, as it scales on a 1:1 ratio. Also if you do opt for sigil of blood it also gets 10% of your healing power, however it isn’t as useful due to it being on a 5 second timer as discussed above. You could honestly go With mostly DPS trinkets if you wanted, however I feel that survivability would be dropped significantly due to that, and it would become a more solo minded build instead of being a good all around build for zerging, group play, and solo.

what do you think of superior rune of the pack x4/x6 instead?

Ray.3780:

what do you think of superior rune of the pack x4/x6 instead?

It could work as well, I honestly love runes of the pack and run them with my sPvP build. With that being said though, the buffs are only 5s long, and are on the same 5% chance, and a 15s CD. This would mean that just to get each buff for 20 seconds I would need to get hit on average 80 times over the course of a minute, where the average for citadel is 20 hits for 30 seconds of fury on a 1 min cd. Also, this makes it alot easier to get close to 100% fury up time with this build.

Superior Sigil of Blood is now a 5 sec cool down? When was this changed?

Wiki still states a 2 sec cool down.

Its been tested and is listed as a bug on the wiki. Not sure if it is under the specific superior sigil of blood page or just the sigil of blood general page.

So I have decided to switch out the 2x vamp runes, as they really dont proc enough outside of zergs to make them useful, and dont heal enough in zergs to make them useful. At the moment I think I am going for 2x water runes to help boost fury duration even more, and also help give more boon duration on the shouts, I have also been looking at rune of the pack more, but not sure If I am willing to give up the huge fury boost, which helps with survivability from the omnom pies. With the 1h build I do not believe it would be an issue, but with the 1h build the loss of 15%+ crit is easy to notice

I used to run Pack runes exclusively on my damage builds, and while the raw stats are nice, the 5% effect is really nothing to write home about. It’s kind of neat, but it doesn’t happen enough to make a difference. I’d much rather use 5 Citadels + 1 Ruby.

Neat build btw.

Eh, it depends, in big group fights I notice it proc often, but compared to citadel where it stays on for 30s when it procs, it just doesnt seem as effective as you have to pray for to the RNG gods to get to make it happen alot more often. I think you might be right with just going 5 + jewel though, the 90 power will be nice along with the jewel stats. I don’t really run enough boon duration stuff to make the water runes worth it, and I already have good fury up time as it is.

I actually started using it back in October when it was still bugged to give 50 healing instead of power and I was running Altruistic Healing, because when it procced it was often a nice 500-700 HP heal. In that context it was pretty nice. But nowadays when I’m running purely selfish personal damage builds, it’s really not as useful as high uptime fury.

heh, been seeing more talk on Rune of the Citadel lately. not just here, or mayb this is where it spurred from. the fury procs and long duration is definitely something note worthy.

i like the addition of the Water / boon duration runes, Bash. i personally wouldn’t opt for Rune of the Pack for this build. though like you mentioned, the 1h build should still be more than fine. i have Pack on my standard go to WvW set, but debating if i shoudl switch it up. ; ))

and the wife is an RRR ranger now? what happened to thief? :OO

akamon.2769:

heh, been seeing more talk on Rune of the Citadel lately. not just here, or mayb this is where it spurred from. the fury procs and long duration is definitely something note worthy.

i like the addition of the Water / boon duration runes, Bash. i personally wouldn’t opt for Rune of the Pack for this build. though like you mentioned, the 1h build should still be more than fine. i have Pack on my standard go to WvW set, but debating if i shoudl switch it up. ; ))

and the wife is an RRR ranger now? what happened to thief? :OO

Yeah. I ended up going with foofad’s idea for 5+ ruby. The extra 25 healing wouldn’t really do much, and an extra second on save yourselves wasn’t worth 110 power, 14 perc and 2% crit damage. I will update all the builds to show this change.

Hey Bash,

Akamon told me about your build, because I told him I’ve been running 4 citadel, and 2 vamp with my WWW symbol build. Works like a charm. I use sigil of blood instead of leeching for the extra damage and it also procs off of symbol pulses.

Right now I just use Orrian Steak Fritters, I haven’t changed over to pies.

I understand your point of needing to get hit for vamp to be worth it. I do get targeted and hit a lot. Maybe because I run staff, mace/torch. So generally, it has been worth it for me.

Your leeching idea applies to many builds.

Blasino.3128:

Hey Bash,

Akamon told me about your build, because I told him I’ve been running 4 citadel, and 2 vamp with my WWW symbol build. Works like a charm. I use sigil of blood instead of leeching for the extra damage and it also procs off of symbol pulses.

Right now I just use Orrian Steak Fritters, I haven’t changed over to pies.

I understand your point of needing to get hit for vamp to be worth it. I do get targeted and hit a lot. Maybe because I run staff, mace/torch. So generally, it has been worth it for me.

Your leeching idea applies to many builds.

Yeah, that is the nice thing about it because the leech itself all comes from sigils/food, so it can work with a variety of builds. I mainly built this build around it due to the fact that it has added sustain, but still does good damage when paired with the leech.

My issue with the vamp runes is that it heals for just shy of 4000 every minute, and that is assuming best case scenario, activating after the 15s cd. In zerg vs zerg, this might work fine, but even then the random chance for 1000 health compared to a constant 110 power, 14 perc, and 2% crit chance just doesn’t feel like it compares. It was honestly the same reason why I dumped 4x vamp runes, as the proc off heal only activated twice because of our CDs on our heals.

Something to also mention about this build, Make sure for the 1h build you either carry a scepter, a hammer, or both. I completely forgot how annoying kiting is against classes like condition shortbow ranger, and p/p mine engineers. (yes I got owned by one earlier and was not too happy, owned him back though!) Scepter completely negates any kiting aspect a class might have on you, as long as you can stay somewhat close, which you should be able to do. However, scepter obviously has it’s issue when fighting multiple enemies, which is why I always suggest running gs/hammer as none of the 1hs handle multiples very well. If you do run scepter/hammer I also suggest you drop vulnerability on blind and pick up signet mastery and switch your heal to signet of resolve.