Guild Wars 2

I’m using 2 Water + 4 Altruism runes. Works fine so far and no need to do dungeons for it. You lose a bit on healing power but the might on heal is a nice boost.

Yes, the point is to have extended duration for all boons. You can substitute Altruism in the place of Monk’s at the expense of some healing power.

just a FYI if you go to tinyurl.com and make your link tiny its always clickable on the forums.

Hello all,

After a particularly violence filled night of WvW roaming/hanging outside invader spawns in border lands, I decided I had to post in this thread.

I don’t have any great additions or comments to add, I just wanted to say “Thanks!” for posting such a great set up. I’ve been using it exclusively for a while now, and once you get past the learning curve, this build is almost too powerful to be fun for WvW dueling… it’s just too easy. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had trouble with 2 or fewer opponents. I consider it a real Badge of Honor (get it? Ha!) now when I’m added to invader parties just so they can tell me how mean a man I am after I kill them.

I really didn’t even want to like this build because running Cleric’s gear seemed so “meh” at first, but I’m won over.

Glad you’re liking it.

Just thinking out loud here:

1. Take your approach, swap out for apothecary and Shaman gear
2. Use Virtue XI
3. Watch your opponents die on your retaliation and burning conditions so short they aren’t worth removing.

Meh, Worth a look.

If only burning condition damage was worth a kitten or retaliation didn’t do more damage based off your power….

Yeah, burning condition is weak, only stacking duration… meh > condition removal. Retaliation is even weaker. If it´s damage was based on power, it´ll be more useful.

The whole point with the condition damage approach is to take advantage of the conundrum that a 1 second AOE burn presents to your foe … they either ignore they are burning and all take the hit or they waste Cond removal on a 1 second burn. Maybe it doesn’t sound as sexy as a 3 shot thief backstab combo, but that’s not the point of the healway build from what I can tell anyways.

This approach gives you the ret + the short burn bursts. The burn appeals to me because if your opponent ignores you, your retaliation isn’t useful. Sure you give up some power. You make up with application of a dual damage approach, one being AOE and ignoring removal and defense. I guess you could say you get burning regardless of your CD stat but the AOE aspect of it from Virtue XI makes it so much more attractive to boost it’s stat.

You’re strong/annoying enough to grab significant focus, hard enough to take significant effort to take down and leverage the strengths of both damage paths.

Segnal.2530:

Yeah, burning condition is weak, only stacking duration… meh > condition removal. Retaliation is even weaker. If it´s damage was based on power, it´ll be more useful.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Retaliation

It does get more damage off your power. And how is retaliation weaker than burning, unless you spec condition damage burning only does 352 damage per second, where Retaliation does a base of 267 per time you are hit. Which since most burst skills are multi-hit attacks, it dishes out a lot more than burning in the same time frame.

The next time you see an enemy thief daggerstorming into your group, try pressing your “Area Retaliation” Button (usually Stand Your Ground! or, if you are stacked up, GS #4) and watch the poor thief die almost instantly. Really fun ^^

Bakitten291:

Segnal.2530:

Yeah, burning condition is weak, only stacking duration… meh > condition removal. Retaliation is even weaker. If it´s damage was based on power, it´ll be more useful.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Retaliation

It does get more damage off your power. And how is retaliation weaker than burning, unless you spec condition damage burning only does 352 damage per second, where Retaliation does a base of 267 per time you are hit. Which since most burst skills are multi-hit attacks, it dishes out a lot more than burning in the same time frame.

Ah, thats new for me. Maybe I´ll start using this buff more frequently then. Honestly, I was against this buff all the time, feels weak and useless for me… but now I see, I might be wrong.

Switched from the typical AH/EM to this build. Even up to now, most people are saying it’s not gonna work. They obviously haven’t tried it out. What I love about this build is it has a gameplay which makes you actively dodge. It’s also a flexible build for huge Zerg vs Zerg battles. I just switch the Vengeful Trait to Master of Consecrations then replace 1 shout with WoR. Thanks for sharing the build. This thread should get stickied.

Thank you for this build and it’s really effective, even with low healing (1042 healing due to my Sunrise and PVT rings).

I do hope they add Ascended Clerics stuff soon.

wouldn’t it be better to have around ~20% crit chance for this extra vigor boon? (vigorous precision) it holds for ~8 seconds each crit and adds up…

this leads to a question;
as unfortunately Anet hasn’t implemented (even if they said that they will in future we don’t know when ) cleric ascended items, will celestial pieces work better with this build rather than soldier?

on the paper, soldier ascended are better than celestial , more toughness, more vitality and more power, but maybe the precision from the celestial items can be efficient in terms of vigor stacking?

I usually don’t have a problem with keeping vigor up. 4% critchance is not much but it’s something and both GS and sword got a fairly high attack rate. Also, SY! grants fury for a short boost.

Celestial might be an idea but i would try magi (healing power, precision, vitality) gear first.

Iavra.8510:

Celestial might be an idea but i would try magi (healing power, precision, vitality) gear first.

unfortunately we have no magi ascended pieces,
we have soldier, zerker, rabid and two types of magic find ascended gear.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_ascended_equipment

Well you don’t have to use ascended pieces until now and most people are doing very well without them. I would wait until they add cleric armor or use soldier’s in the meantime. I am currently using the soldier back piece (Koss on Koss) but can’t bring myself to do fractals to get the rings anyway.

Got to give you props Chris for making a extremely fun Guardian build. I’ve picked it up recently and it’s been working out exceptionally. Even more so when i got the full build now.Takes a bit of time to get over the learning curve but once you do you’ll play a lot more efficiently(Still working on my mechanical skills). But as i said before props, for making a extremely fun Guardian build.

You don’t need ascended gear to be a valid guardian. What it does do is allow you to fill in stat blanks or balance. But in most builds like this one you don’t really need it.

Currently no one really needs Ascended gear for anything other than Fractals. I find it rather useless otherwise, as it’s still an incomplete, unfinished system. If you do Fractals a lot, you would probably have to choose between the less bad options available (for builds emphasizing Healing Power), but if you don’t care for the Fractals, your build will actually be served even better with your Exotics.

I would get an Ascended Amulet to be sure if available in some useful stat combination, but there isn’t any at the moment. To have Ascended Gear for its own sake makes no sense to me, though of course, many are able to make use of them even now.

just wanted to thank you for sharing such an awesome build. To tell you the truth, I was kinda getting sick of my guardian in WvW. I felt like I really didnt know the class. Reroll was imminent. So I figured I would give this build a try… I feel like my guardian has new life. I am actually useful and can hold up against multiple enemies. This build surprising has a lot more survivability than I would have thought. This has been the most fun build to date I have played. thanks again

Thanks for the comments everyone. Glad you’re enjoying the build.

While ascended gear certainly is not a requirement to play this build effectively, I believe that substituting at least the rings for ascended PTV can be advantageous in the areas of burst survival and damage output. I have serious reservations about taking an amulet as well though. The healing power loss is a little too severe after a third replacement.

A lot of work is going to go into finding a reasonable balance between survival and acceptable damage output once ascended Cleric’s gear is released, but that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I get there.

Chris,

I’ve attempted to emulate your setup here. I’ve got full exotic Cleric’s Armor and GS, only MW jewelry/Sword/Focus so far.

I’ve watched your videos numerous times, but I still got rocked by 1 or 2 opponents the other night when I tried it. I can’t seem to stay on top of anything that wants to kite me. A necro I ran into just kept aoe snaring me and I couldn’t get on top of him (didn’t help he kept trying to kite me into NPCs)

I fought a thief for about 2 minutes, but couldn’t kill her fast enough because she just kept restealthing and opening on me again.

Any tips? Should I focus on farming the rest of my exotic gear before I keep trying in wvw?

Thanks mate.

I haven’t been awake long, so maybe I’m just blanking on this, but what is MW?

Gear-wise, things that can get you killed with this build include not having Superior Sigils of Energy (absolutely required, and major won’t cut it) and a large enough deficiency of toughness or healing power. Not having any Cleric’s jewelry at all can cause that.

I usually just leave when a Thief rolls up to me with a perma-stealth build. It’s hard enough for higher damage builds to kill them before they run off, so I usually don’t bother. There shouldn’t be any reason that they can kill you while you try to leave; just make them waste their time until you get to a tower or zerg.

That said, it is possible to kill most stealth Thieves of average skill. Making effective use of the GS 5 skill when they stealth (or to interrupt their heal) can completely destroy them. Retal and burn blocks are also great for softening them up.

This build does have a learning curve. Just takes some practice.

MW is masterwork(green). And I managed to afford 1 superior sigil of energy for the GS, but could only get a major for the 1h/focus. Perhaps I just got unlucky with my opponents first time out, kite necro and perma stealth thief were in pretty much every fight. Any time I’d come across someone else, one of those 2 would add on me and I couldn’t stay up.

I seemed to get a little panicky and blow 2 shouts at once, rather than letting the prot/regen wear off before using SY. With food buffs i was right at 15.5k hp, but I felt really squishy against that thief. I haven’t played a thief yet so I don’t know all their mechanics… when I was a mesmer at release, I just kited them, so having to take their abuse is a different game for me now.

I’m running full clerics, but not all of it is exotic yet. Will the ~60 toughness/HP make that big of a difference over the green stuff I’m wearing now?

Yes, it will.

Also, boon durations from each shout stack. You can burn them together most of the time without having to worry too much about it.

Oh that’s good to know about the boon duration… I’ll work on finishing up my gear to full exotic… See if that helps.

Thanks mate. When is the new video going to be available?

Sure thing. Next video will be up in a couple of hours.

Oh also as stated above about necros. I may have been either tired or came across a good necro..or gimmicky one, but to my surprise got rocked 1v1. He played smart and made all my boons into conditions and I get bursted by fear damage (traited necro) and a bunch of other conditions. So ya may have been tired or just came across a good one.

There’s a trick to fighting Necros. You have to play extremely defensively.

Edit: It’s pretty fun to flip on the trait for faster meditation recharges and put on Contemplation of Purity before engaging a Necro too. Pop SY, get converted, re-convert. Fight over unless you stand in wells a bunch, but why would you?

My own prefered build/playstyle is a bit different, but I’m watching any non-AH build with great interest . From the videos I can totally grasp the use of Greatsword in this, but I’m a little unclear why sword/focus over sword/torch or sword/shield. Mainly I’m missing the ‘mindset’ for when to use button 4 (the bouncing ray)…?

just use it on cooldown. an additional blind is always useful

It’s a free two blinds and a double condition removal/regen application when used properly.

If you are fresh 80 and have very limited options (money-wise), can you go with rare gear until you earn enough money for exotic, or is it better to go with masterwork and save money for missing important upgrades, like superior sigils? I can’t afford both at the same time.

I’d probably just run something else until you can afford at least rares in addition to the energy sigils. You can get PTV gear from karma to hold you over for a bit if needed.

I don’t usually like to double-post, but I’d like to share this new video with you all. It’s the latest demonstration by yours truly of this build in action.

In reality I run slight variations of this build depending on who/what I’m fighting and how stacked a map appears to be with a certain enemy build type. Should this latest video (which I put a ridiculous amount of effort into, both in-game and during editing) happen to hit 100 likes, I’ll post a new, more detailed build video.

Peacekeeper v1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5rF9WI6hU

Cheers.

Everytime I watch another one of your videos a little piece of my ego breaks and dies. I always end up curled up in a corner crying to myself because I cant do 99% of the things you do.

Great video Chris! You are a inspiration to some/most of us Guardian players x3. Watching these videos just boosts up my determination to try and pull off stuff like this XP. Though on another note I did come across something when i went about roaming. I came across a glass cannon fire ele. His AoE seemed to by pass my block abilities and still damage through the healing of dodge rolls and such. Might of been poor play on my part but have you ever came across something like this?

Wryscher.1432:

Everytime I watch another one of your videos a little piece of my ego breaks and dies. I always end up curled up in a corner crying to myself because I cant do 99% of the things you do.

Haha, I don’t know whether to be flattered or to feel bad. Thank you either way.

Lucentfir.7430:

Great video Chris! You are a inspiration to some/most of us Guardian players x3. Watching these videos just boosts up my determination to try and pull off stuff like this XP. Though on another note I did come across something when i went about roaming. I came across a glass cannon fire ele. His AoE seemed to by pass my block abilities and still damage through the healing of dodge rolls and such. Might of been poor play on my part but have you ever came across something like this?

Thank ya sir. As far as the Ele goes, I can’t say I’ve ever experienced that. If I’m not mistaken, some ground-targeted AoE (with red circles) can be traited to be unblockable. I’m unsure if Eles have anything like that. Either way, any glass cannon Ele I’ve faced seemed to shrivel after they’d unloaded their burst unsuccessfully.

chris i love your healaway build but i think i love your vids just as much! Awesome job on that last one. you always have great music and footage

I forgot to list the type of Ele facepalm It wasn’t really Targeted AoE, it’s more of a Double Dagger Glass Ele, slides to me then does the Fire ring, spams some other skills runs away and heals. Another note I left out was he had a upscaled thief with him, but as far as i saw it was the ele really doing anything to me. Any other type of Ele such as staff or scepter i can deal with, without much problem.

If you don’t pay careful attention, you can end up getting screwed over by conditions (especially bleeding and burning) when fighting glassy Eles.

can’t wait to check out the new video Chris! i played a variation of the Healway build against a shatter mesmer the other day and the first few fights, i felt was doing alright.. but a couple more duels and was getting rocked. :/// i then realized i still have SO MUCH more to learn. just wanted to say your videos do help a lot and inspire.

I’v aded some changes to your build “Healway Guardian” to increase DMG by loosing little bit healing power. Those are my stats if you are interested Chris

Without actually logging in or doing any number crunching, I’m going to assume you replaced 2 runes with majors for extra boon duration, and… well, something with precision. Not a bad stat spread either way.

If you are interested i can add screenshots with my gear, i’v changed only 4 itemes others are like in your basic build. By doging i hav 1,3500 – 1400 HP thats means i lose only 150 HP per dodge

Sry for my weak ENG.

Chris,

I finished my gear and found my survivability much improved. The build is wonderful and I find myself so durable it’s amazing. I did run into a couple of issues though.

I fought a thief who kited me around for about 5 minutes total, eventually I chased him down and finished him off, but being so kiteable is rough.

Second I fought an Engi who seemed able to keep regeneration up essentially all the time, and then he’d kite me through his net guns and whatnot and I couldn’t ever do enough damage to finish him off. I had him close a few times, but he’d always seem to have the tools to escape and get another heal off or let regen tick and keep him up.

Any suggestions for maintaining proximity to the target, or ways to get that extra little bit of damage to finish off another “bunkery” type of player?

Am I best to just leave the super regenerating players (like me) alone? and focus on squishier less sustainable targets?

Thanks

The drawback to playing a defensively-oriented build is that you likely won’t be able to finish off other defensively built players. If you absolutely cannot seem to get enough damage on a target, switch to another one.

The best advice I can offer for staying on your targets is to practice. GS and sword are the most mobile weapons we have. It’s an inherent issue with our profession that we have a harder time getting around than others do, so we do have that disadvantage.

Wryscher.1432:

Everytime I watch another one of your videos a little piece of my ego breaks and dies. I always end up curled up in a corner crying to myself because I cant do 99% of the things you do.

I feel the same way, especially on the occasions I’ve been fighting alongside him!