Guild Wars 2

So I was wondering how many (if any) of you have been testing out the new Zealot’s gear. At a glance, this new stat combo seems like something guardians can pretty uniquely utilize to keep a decent amount of DPS while really aiding their support capabilities. Have any of you created a build that takes advantage of this?

Healing power scales badly and doesn’t really offer much support (in zerker you can still do everything about from healing anyway). If they give healing power a massive buff it may be viable but as it stands there is no point running this over zerker in pve

First off, there’s no reason to run anything but Zerker ever in PvE. In fact, considering I’m playing PvE, I may as well be on my warrior (or the one token mesmer) if I want to be truly optimal. But hey, I hate waiting an hour before finding a 100% optimized party, so I like doing things a little bit different to maybe keep my pugs alive.

In respects to the gear, the difference (in my super unoptimised test build of 0/15/30/20/5) between full Zerker and full Zealot’s is fairly massive in terms of how well I can heal. Zerker Selfless daring is 329 while zealot’s is 1043. That’s not negligible. Run a mace with Mace of Justice and it hops all the way to 1293 healing. Given the vigor uptime from the very high crit rate, a guardian can become a decent healbot. Each roll is about a 10% heal on myself, while the completely unnecessary number of blocks gives tons of leeway in preventing being one-shot. (Perhaps even more so than full PVT). I decided to run 30 valor for the crit dmg since I had to find some somewhere. The Altruistic Healing has been a fair amount of sustain thanks to the boons guardians throw around. It makes keeping above 90% health for scholor runes ridiculously easy. I’d say this new gear has made mace play interesting now, if nothing else.

When I swap back to my trusty sword, however, I become more conflicted. Those 1k healing rolls are still very respectable, in my opinion, but in using them, I have to drop either 5 in virtues, making Justice spamming a fair bit less effective, or drop valor by 5 (or even 10), further ruining my crit dmg while also wiping away that health buffer that makes keeping scholor active almost entirely effortless. It still manages to work well enough regardless, but wielding a sword just feels entirely more natural in a Zerker set.

how is a guardian not optimal in PVE, especially when compared with a mesmer? sure, if you’re running some terrible AH build the guardian is a useless DPS leech on the party, but every class has useless builds as well.

In PvE, no question Zerk.

At WvW I did a half zealot half cleric that I liked a lot (is ow my main set for WvW). I’m not a big fan of full tanker, I like to do good DPS and good support as well and this new set fits me perfectly.