Guild Wars 2

Ive reciently returned to playing my guardian, the purpose for me returning is my guild has a lack of frontline fighters in our WvW group.

Im looking for a build that will allow me to fight on the frontlines and not get obliterated, provide some support for the group thats with me, be able to apply some pressure damage wise if possible and uses a Hammer primarily for combo finishing spam.

any WvW vet guardians out there that could give me some advice?

any help would be greatly appreciated.

You might find this build interesting.

The weapons are interchangeable, so you could easily use a hammer instead of GS.

To fight at the front you need to be able to absorb a lot of punishment first and foremost. This means getting gear with high toughness: knight’s, cleric or P/V/T gear. I prefer knights because it gives you solid damage and a good crit rate.

30 points in Valor for altruistic healing is pretty much required for front line zerg fighting. Monk’s focus can work but it is better for solo and small group situations.

You need a reliable source of condition removal. This means either going 30 points in the Honor for pure of voice or 20 points into the Virtues for absolute resolution.

As for utilities, I use sig of judgement (never activate), reduced CD wall of reflection and save yourselves.

I recommend staff as a secondary weapon for big fights for midrange aoe damage and empower to heal up when you are forced to retreat back into your zerg.

I take shelter over signet of resolve for my healing skill. The 2 second block is more valuable than the extra healing in a big fight and it has shorter CD.

I think there a few builds that can do well on the frontline. Some with more survivability (via healing or PVT) and some with more offensive group support (what I’m doing), but I think they will all have Shelter and Renewed Focus. It’s those two abilities that allow you to survive that initial hit. It’s all the better when a ton of the enemy throw their big abilities into you wasting them, allowing your teammates to come in and clean them up.

Unless you are running support(plan on healing others), don’t use clerics. Use knights and pvt mixed.

Clerics in WvW is not as good in Spvp or other situations because of omnomberries. If you have a decent amount of crit chance(from knights), you will pretty much heal the same amount as wearing clerics but do much more damage.

See the bad thing about using AH and being a frontliner is that often you’re going to be facing the zerg alone, so AH is out the window. If your group/zerg isn’t coming up almost immediately behind you, AH isn’t going to serve you well.

But, this is also mostly just my experience.

Thanks for the responses, i see that there are a few idea on how to get this done. Go AH or not go AH.

right now i have mostly clerics exotics on this toon with some P/V/T weapons and a set of zerker jewels in the bank for PvE easy mode stuff. i might build a knights set over time but for now i think im going to stick with the clerics set and go for the healing build. Shelter and Renewed focus are an obvious choice for me but im still not sure on the weapons or the utilitys.

To be more specific on what im using this build for, i plan on specifically running with my guild group on our larger guild night where i have 15-20 people with me. i plan to have 3-5 melee running closely with me, whether that be warriors, DD ele’s, enginners, or other guardians im not sure but i dont plan to be a lone frontliner and have heavy support from the rest of my group. My squads job will be to distract and confuse the enemy zerg while the Glassy builds chew them up and or supply me with CC, combofields, some heals and some condition removal but i cant solely rely on it. im thinking Save youselves is a no brainer, and probably hold the line but save the 3rd utility for situational use, retreat for traveling, and maybe JI for the gap closer or smite conditon, purity, or puging flames for more condi removal.

looking for a consumable and food for this build aswell, would love to use the boon duration food but dont want the magic find. possibly mango pie.

thanks for the help

I recently started using a similar build(similar in that it is primarily for front line combat) and I REALLY love it.

I went with Toughness, Power, Pre, Vit, Healing, in pretty much that order. ~2900-3000 Toughness, ~3000-3200 Power, Crit is ~25-35% depending on food/buffs, ~12-13.8k HP.

I run it with sword+focus/GS(or Hammer, depends on situation) and find that it absolutely wrecks the glassy players out there. The only real issues you might run into are players set up to do 100% conditions, but with a good group(condition removal fields) this can be easily mitigated. Anything non-conditions is pretty much a joke due to the toughness.

jadjay.8701:

Thanks for the responses, i see that there are a few idea on how to get this done. Go AH or not go AH.

right now i have mostly clerics exotics on this toon with some P/V/T weapons and a set of zerker jewels in the bank for PvE easy mode stuff. i might build a knights set over time but for now i think im going to stick with the clerics set and go for the healing build. Shelter and Renewed focus are an obvious choice for me but im still not sure on the weapons or the utilitys.

To be more specific on what im using this build for, i plan on specifically running with my guild group on our larger guild night where i have 15-20 people with me. i plan to have 3-5 melee running closely with me, whether that be warriors, DD ele’s, enginners, or other guardians im not sure but i dont plan to be a lone frontliner and have heavy support from the rest of my group. My squads job will be to distract and confuse the enemy zerg while the Glassy builds chew them up and or supply me with CC, combofields, some heals and some condition removal but i cant solely rely on it. im thinking Save youselves is a no brainer, and probably hold the line but save the 3rd utility for situational use, retreat for traveling, and maybe JI for the gap closer or smite conditon, purity, or puging flames for more condi removal.

looking for a consumable and food for this build aswell, would love to use the boon duration food but dont want the magic find. possibly mango pie.

thanks for the help

If you have other melees running with you (and you can count on them) then you should go hammer+GS and spam CC. Any general 30 valor builds will be adequate in keeping you alive in those situations, and you can go fairly far even with berzerker gears (Shelter/Renewed Focus is what keeps you alive in those scenarios, since if you’re gonna get attacked, it’ll be 20 ppl focus firing you, spamming 5 cc per second. Defensive stats will NOT help). Go in right after the bunker D/Ds RTL into the zerg and start unloading your chains. Unless the other side has overloaded on mass stability and condition removal, people are unlikely to be able to move at all, by then your DPS’ers should have mowed them down already.

Hmm, I run an offensive guardian in wvw; i use him for breaking the frontline of an enemy zerg mostly.

0/30/20/20/0 build.

I have a mixture of armor and weapon stats but my ending stats are as follows: 1800/1900/1800/1500; so around 16k-17k HP with 3k-3.14k armor. I run with a GS and sword/shield; both have superior sigil of fire on them for aoe damage.

Utilities are SY, SYG, WoR, and ToW.

The reason for the radiance trait line is because I am reliant on blinding large mobs close to me. I activate both SyG and SY for stability and general boons, jump in with the greatsword 3 skill with blinds, then throw up a wall of reflection usually. This lets me have a tiny sliver of breathing room to activate both binding blade then whirling wrath, which i can use to interrupt quite a few people. Whirling wrath should activate virtue of justice which will blind again, and then i activate the active effect to burn them. Switch to sword/shield, knockback, blinds, protection, ZD, and dodge roll back into my own lines, heal if needed, activate ToW, and start spamming conflagrate. It works pretty well as a zerg line breaker.

I am open to suggestions since this is the first build Ive done on my own.