Guild Wars 2

Different professions have different combinations of stats within each trait line. Some lead to stat synergy that helps you direct what gear to combine with the build you have created.

For example that obvious combination of precision and crit damage combined in the Elementalist trait line of Air Magic helps both stats work together well. For Warriors in the Arms trait line they have precision combined with condition damage. This still makes sense since that trait line provides bleed conditions on crit, which helps utilize the mechanics of that build.

For Guardians, what are our trait synergies and what stat combinations go best with us?

Zeal
Power/Condition Duration
Radiance
Precision/Condition Damage
Valor
Toughness/Crit Damage
Honor
Vitality/Healing Power
Virtues
Boon Duration/Virtue Recharge Rate

With our trait lines, it seems we are forced to combine two different trait lines to see full effect with many stats. If you take Radiance and gain Precision, you can increase that effectiveness by taking Valor and gaining Crit Damage. Unfortunately there are not a lot of traits in that combination that have good synergy with crit damage and precision. At most more crit chance with Right Hand Strength at the end of the Radiance line.

The Honor line makes sense as you gain more health you need more healing power to recover that health. The trait synergies in this line encourage you to dodge more with increased energy returns, heals on rolls, and more damage with lower energy. It also promotes utilizing symbols more with large symbols, symbols heal, and symbols last longer. Lastly this trait line promotes the utilization of shouts, with removal of conditions and faster shouts.

With the Honor line encouraging symbol use, the logical combination now points you to the Zeal line with more utilization of symbols causing vulnerability and more damage. These are less critical to the synergy of vitality and healing power though, so can easily be ignored.

With the above examples it really seems like our synergies are broken. Or at least they are less obvious than other professions.

What synergies can you find to enhance our profession play and better gear in accordance to your trait lines?

At this point, the crit damage in the Valor line is basically the only thing making Altruistic Healing work. With the nerf to Vigorous Precision, Empowering Might is a main source of healing. Empowering Might and Vigorous Precision take a good chunk of precision to function. Precision, in turn, calls for crit damage, which you can’t find on gear with healing or toughness, but someone investing in those trees is obviously looking for survivability and/or support.

It’s not immediately apparent, but those trees really do have amazing synergy.

I am well aware of the AH/Crit Hammer build or other variations of that, but I was trying to list out what we have and spark new ideas.

Still I do contest that our trait lines are not as straight forward as they could be as other professions and require us to spread ourselves a little thin. Also as you said a lot of armor doesn’t split stats the way our trait lines do so it requires a little more thinking on our behalf. Maybe that is why I am always so intrigued with the Guardian class as I keep trying to find new ways to make it work.

There are no new ideas. We are pigeon holed into a couple of builds.

Builds can still work even with a lack of synergy.

Synergies are merely power-dynamics that work passively between the interactions of active effects. In that respect, the AH build is the only one that really deserves notice.

But you do not need that much synergy for a build to work.
Traits already have synergy with their respective features. That is enough to make a build around as long as you know what you’re building against.

I am currently going to dungeons, so I focus a little on condition-curing as well as some bonuses that would help myself against groups of mobs focusing on me.
I take things like ‘Purity’ and ‘Courageous Return’ from Valor, ‘Absolute Resolution’ from Virtues’, just to name a few.