Guild Wars 2

As I work on my first (and hopefully only) set of ascended armor, I’m looking to build a relatively durable guardian with respectable damage output – something that can perform well both PvE and WvW without a change of gear.

I’ve already decided on Berserker’s weapons and Zerk + Valk trinkets (with a pure zerk backpiece) for offense. With food, this will buff me to a base 30% crit chance and 84% crit damage on a 0/5/30/30/5 build. That’s well enough, I think.

The dilemma comes in with armor choices. The main one’s I’m looking at are Soldier’s and Knight’s, or perhaps a mix of one or both of these with Celestial.

Here are the quick reference stat links. Unfortunately, Ascended Armor stats and the 7% toughness -> precision conversion trait are not in the build site yet, which means I’m working with considerably lower numbers in armor and precision, as well as slightly lower numbers in everything else than would be the case when I finish the set.

Soldier’s:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlUgyC33xKEfIFRuAbBYPwYG741jESRGC-jQxAY/hol9KiGbltIas6aMtLRUtMA6jB-e

Knight’s:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlUgyC33xKEfIFRuAbBYPwYG741jESRGC-jQxAY/holALiGbltIas6aMtLRUtMA6jB-e

Celestial Soldier’s:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlUgyC33xKEfIFRuAbBYPwYG741jESRGC-jgxAY/hol8VWzeCiV2ioxqrx0uER1yAoPGA-e

Celestial Knight’s:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlUgyC33xKEfIFRuAbBYPwYG741jESRGC-jgxAY/hol8VWTgCiV2ioxqrx0uER1yAoPGA-e

The question comes in here:

Which stat combination is the best of these? The higher armor and crit chance of Knight’s? The higher Power and Vitality of Soldier’s? Or the reasonable rounding and higher crit damage of Celestial Knight’s/Celestial Soldier’s?

And for the love of all that is Holy, do not say Berserker’s.

And for the love of all that is Holy, do not say Berserker’s.

“By all that is Holy do you see that build over there? Glorious!”

All Diablo 3 references aside, Mixing WvW and PvE builds generally isn’t a good idea, but if you’re only going to use one build buy the gear that works best in WvW because PvE is easy.

In PvE Knights gear is the best of the one’s you listed. I’m not sure about WvW; Brutaly could tell you that. If he doesn’t see this thread send him a PM. link to his profile

Well the biggest thing that stands out to me when I look at those builds is the armor stat. 2.7k is very low for a heavy if you aren’t backing it up with either good vitality or healing power (you lack both). You have really solid power and crit damage, but to be a true “bruiser”, you need a bit more toughness to be able to comfortable soak up front line damage.

I tinkered with your knights version slightly. The main thing i did was sacrifice some of your really high power to bring the toughness up to a reasonable level. However, your base attack is still 3.1k (a lot of this actually comes from changing the food/oil too, so if you’d prefer lower prec and higher power you can change that easy), which is really good keeping in mind yo ualready have 84% crit damage. I also added the bloodlust sigil, so at full stacks you will actually have higher attack stat than what you would have originally.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlUgyC33xKEfIFRuAbBYPwYG741jESRGC-jQCBYfJD9LQEEAJQFRjtyqIasKkYKXRW7KpqYASBExwI-e