Guild Wars 2

Should it be Power / Precision / Condition or Power / Precision / Crit damage?

I’d focus on Crit damage, since our condition damage really only comes from one source.

A: non-exsistant, Guardians are uber tanky even when they don’t try for tankyness
but more seriously, if you want to go for dmg I would go for crit since there’s little to no real condition damage and power based builds in this game are left in the dust outside of pvp

Thank alot guys.

What about a Scepter+torch, will that setup benefit more with power/prec/condi? No2 scepter ability cycles pretty fast or is it not considered as a condition?

seithan.4823:

Thank a lot guys.

What about a Scepter+torch, will that setup benefit more with power/prec/condi? No2 scepter ability cycles pretty fast or is it not considered as a condition?

You mean Smite? That doesn’t do condition damage.

Condition builds aren’t really all that viable for Guardians. It’s better to see burning as supplemental damage, instead of focusing on it.

Scepter/torch is great for a crit build, start with the 1 skill at range, then as the enemy comes close cast smite in front of them then cast the 3 skill which will immobilize then in the centre of you smite for 2.5 sec plus add vulnerability then dash in pop the torch 4 and 5( this flame thrower type attack does direct damage) and watch the crit damage fly

so all n all the condition damage is as useless as any? kitten !

Well I wouldn’t say useless be close to it, the only condition that guardians can apply frequently is to burn the target and it doesnt stack in damage, only in time so it should be used mainly as a buffer between cool downs, and if you trait burns can be used for different reasons

seithan.4823:

so all n all the condition damage is as useless as any? kitten !

It’s not useless by any means. But it’s not something you should center your build around as a Guardian. Burning has higher base damage than any other condition by a large margin. It also has the highest damage modifier. What that means is that without investing into it at all, it already plays a semi-large role in your damage dealing capabilities. However, due to it stacking in duration and not intensity, it does not yield as much improvement for investing into it as other conditions do. Increasing the duration isn’t usually worthwhile because you are just increasing the chances of it getting removed before benefiting from it’s full potential. Increasing it’s damage is worthwhile, but doesn’t do as well as bleeding or confusion due to lack of intensity stacking.

RaGe.9834:

A: non-exsistant, Guardians are uber tanky even when they don’t try for tankyness
but more seriously, if you want to go for dmg I would go for crit since there’s little to no real condition damage and power based builds in this game are left in the dust outside of pvp

We got the lowest amount of base HP in the game, “uber tanky even when they dont try for tankyness”. I bet you never played a guardian :P

Meow.5794:

RaGe.9834:

A: non-exsistant, Guardians are uber tanky even when they don’t try for tankyness
but more seriously, if you want to go for dmg I would go for crit since there’s little to no real condition damage and power based builds in this game are left in the dust outside of pvp

We got the lowest amount of base HP in the game, “uber tanky even when they dont try for tankyness”. I bet you never played a guardian :P

For those who dedicate themselves to “tanking” even though this game makes it pretty clear you shouldn’t be doing that (because you’ll die over and over and over), HP has extremely little to do with it. There’s a certain threshold you want just to guarantee survival against any big hit, but after that “tanking” in GW2 is all about aggro and enemy control.

For example: even though my Guardian isn’t max level I often find myself holding the enemy’s attention and then… RUNNING FOR MY LIFE while it chases me down getting any damage in I can edge-wise (Leap of Faith’s blind is aces here). That is “tanking” in GW2, just keeping the enemy’s attention away from others. Trying to take hits even if you have 30k HP is foolish.

Honestly I’m not certain why people are coming down so hard on burning. Yes it stacks in duration, not intensity, but how frequently (as a Guardian) are you managing to get a stack of burning that has more than two seconds of duration on it?

I ask because say you put a 2 second burn on someone. Assuming great reaction times / anticipation, they could cleanse 1.5 seconds of burning, but it typically costs a large cooldown to do so. Meanwhile you hit them with your 4th attack again and proc Virtue of Justice, giving them another 1 second burn. Or you hit them with the active, saddling them with a 5 second burn they might not be able to remove, since they just burned a condition removal cooldown.

In my mind, a burn-heavy build would be one that is constantly re-applying the 1-2 second burns the Guardian has access to, especially via Virtue of Justice. Condition removal only ruins burning if your foe uses it on a large stack, and you can’t put burning back on them. Access to many short-term burns circumvents that defense.

What is a glass cannon Guardian? Something that isn’t viable in competitive play.

I think Burning is only good for the traits that increase your damage against burning targets (Zeal) and increase your damage based on the number of conditions the target has (Radiance).

If you get Might stacks on you, it will improve your condition damage.
Guardians don’t get ways to apply Burning on crit.
The only way to keep Burning up is to invest alot of points into Zeal, using multi-hit skills like Greatsword Whirling Wrath, Sword Zealot’s Defense and Auto-attack Chain (3 hits on 3rd attack for a total of 5 hits per chain), and perhaps getting the burn every 4th attack trait in Virtues.

I think you sacrifice too much for the reward it gives.

Investing into condition damage gear isn’t a very good idea.

Meow.5794:

RaGe.9834:

A: non-exsistant, Guardians are uber tanky even when they don’t try for tankyness
but more seriously, if you want to go for dmg I would go for crit since there’s little to no real condition damage and power based builds in this game are left in the dust outside of pvp

We got the lowest amount of base HP in the game, “uber tanky even when they dont try for tankyness”. I bet you never played a guardian :P

IMO our low hp pool is due to the fact that we have tons of ways to mitigate damage, a guard with a high hp pool would just be OP, as well as tuffness is way better than hp, if you have a high hp and low tuffness you will lose huge chunks of hp much faster and you’ll never beable to regain that hp back to full, mean while a high tuffness and low hp build will force the enemy to deal less damage and you can heal all the way back up to full, your biggest concern would be over healing and condition damage but guards have tons of ways to deal with those too =]

Softspoken really hits it on the head as far as condition damage versus condition duration for us.

The useless stat I would argue is condition duration. Increasing the time that burning stays applied to a target does not give us faster kills. By the nature of the condition stacking in duration and not intensity the game is telling us that if we want to increase the effect of burning we need to stack condition damage to make it “better”.

60 seconds of burning doing 300 damage per a tick results in 18000 damage
30 second of burning doing 600 damage per a tick results in 18000 damage

Do I want to wait 60 seconds to do 18000 damage or 30 seconds?
What if the fight is only 30 seconds long? Then with a 60 second burn I wasted my damage and was ineffective.

Beyond that, is condition damage as good as crit or power based builds? Depends on the weapon you are using.

Fast attacking weapons will apply more burning stacks over time than slower hitting weapons. So Scepter, Greatsword, and Sword are good burning weapons if you do not pop virtue of justice and let it do its thing and proc every 4-5 attacks.

The rest of our weapons you would probably do better off with crit damage as they are slower and more bursty in damage output.

Now in a group situation popping virtue of justice instead of letting it proc periodically works well because 5 people activating a 5 second burn results in 25 seconds of burning with an ability that has a 30 second cool down. Combine that with other burning sources and you can maintain burn on a target for the duration of the fight.

Going back to condition duration. The biggest use of condition duration is to keep debuffs like vulnerability, weakness, and immobilize on the target as long as possible. Unfortunately we are not the best profession out there to maintain stacks of vulnerability or weakness on a target so we honestly shouldn’t worry about those too much and let others focus on that with a better effect. But if you are the only one in the group that can provide a steady source of weakness in the form of Signet of Judgement, then great, 5-6 seconds of weakness could save your group from death so do it.