Guild Wars 2

is it even possible to run hammer staff in tpvp ?

First of all the hammer for the guardian is lost wep in favor for the warrior
skill 1,1(2),1(3)- godly slow
2-a fail animation with low dmg (shud be a symbol at the end)
3-a a small spike to the enemy (less range more aoe effect multi targets not in line but in an wave)
4-crazy slow launch easily dodge even if you manage you just done them a favor shrinking your mele gap between you and him
5-love the design but its not sanctuary with that cooldown it shud be you just stay inside and you wake up with some well’s, chaos storm making you leave it or your down
staff its for pve wvw
my perspective

It’s not horrible, but it’s worse than the other options. Either you’re giving up Mace/Shield and/or Scepter/Focus, which means taking a pretty big hit in survivability, or else you’re losing the Staff which is a pretty big source of healing and other type of support (and Line of Warding is more useful than Ring of Warding).

Other things holding it back:

• The last auto-attack hit is much too slow to use reliably.
• Banish isn’t something you want to do all that often. A lot of professions can switch to a better ranged weapon than you can. You’d have to do some pretty careful positioning to make it work properly.
• The Hammer trait that gives Chill on crits isn’t going to be reliable enough

It’s good in situations you don’t really want to be in as bunker guard and where you don’t need the defense from mace/focus like 2v1s and 2v2s since you can actually contribute to killing stuff. The imob and the ring are nice, banishing people in downstate off the point or away from people who are rezzing can be cool and with intel sigils hammer 2 does like 2-4k depending on what you hit with it.

This makes it pretty decent in soloq since you will often find yourself in situations a bunker guard doesn’t really want to be in. In teamq where you can rotate out of situations like this it’s not really needed though and in 3v3+ teamfights you will miss your mace/focus pretty hard.

It’s still definetly the best weapon if you want to contribute to killing stuff in some way on bunker guard.

I play bunker guard with hammer/staff.

The key to doing damage with it to have a Sigil of Intelligence on it and make sure that you get to use Mighty Blow on weapon swap.

Taking Glacial Heart is also a option now (since they halved its CD and finally made it kind of viable.

But as posts above already pointed out …. you lose the extra suitability that blocks from mace/focus provide. If you are fighting enemies that deal condition damage or spam lots of small damage power attacks, you probably won’t notice a big loss in suitability. But a big power critter such as Lich Form is probably going to destroy you

Hammer is pretty decent for bunker, it’s mainly there for the CC to help set up burst for your team, it’s also great for peeling. For bunkering I’d rate the weapons as followed:

Staff- Needs to be used if playing bunker, pretty much the pinnacle of support.

Mace/X- This gives you the most amount of survivability/support/damage.

Hammer- Like I said great for controlling a point and setting up burst for your team. Lacks the survivability of Mace.

Sword/X- This give you a bit more offensive pressure. An extra blind is very helpful, and Zealot’s Defense can be used both offensively and defensively.

Scepter/X- Helps apply some ranged pressure and with an immobilize. It’s very situational and only works with some comps and maps.

Greatsword- The worst bunker weapon imo, yet I still see people use it. Doesn’t really bring anything to the table besides damage (there’s the cleansing bolts combo with WW and SoW, but that’s pretty much it for support), and you’re a bunker so damage really shouldn’t be your main focus. Most of the time it’s just detrimental because all GS attacks are AoE and cleave so you just hurt yourself with retaliation.

However, it also depends on the types of bunkers there are some more offensive types like 0/1/6/6/1 with Soldier ammy, and you have more support types like 0/0/2/6/6 with Cleric ammy.

It depends on your team and on the map.

If your team is expecting you to solo-bunker for long periods as a guardian, then hammer is not a good choice. Mace + focus/shield and Staff are just superior in every way in terms of pure survival. Maybe if the auto-chain was faster then you could make some proper use of symbol traits and the protection boon, but at the moment it’s just not reliable enough.

However, if you’re playing more of a team-support role, acting as the fulcrum on mid-point and buffing your team in 3v3/4v4 situations, then hammer is really very useful. I’d even go so far as to say better than Mace. Ring can completely screw the opposition on some of the smaller points. A well timed Banish can get you that clutch-stomp/rez, and on Kyhlo banishing someone down the stairs of clock-tower can turn a fight around. And hammer 1 and 2 let you keep the aoe-boons flowing, while providing reasonable damage pressure.

So for selfish-bunker, don’t use it. But for tanky-support, absolutely viable.