Guild Wars 2

I’m trying to complete as many zones as possible while I’m levelling my Guardian, and I’m wondering what the best weapon and build combination would be for this.
Since a lot of the mid-level maps seem deserted, I can’t count on other players helping me with hard to get skill points and POIs, so solo survivability is a must.
My highest level character (ranger) is in the mid-fifties, and this will be a completely new guardian, so I don’t have much money for gear or food.

I was thinking of going for great sword/mace+shield with a scepter stowed away for group events. Or perhaps the hammer would be better then the great sword?

Skillpoint-wise I suppose the usual 15 radiance, 5 virtues to begin with. Then honour for survivability?

the problem as always is balancing kill-speed and survivability; a glass cannon doesn’t survive well on it’s own, but a tank character doesn’t kill fast enough to avoid everything resawning before you can get out safely.

Any advice on which weapons, build and armor would work best for soloing the map would be much appreciated.

Definitely level while using the cheapest food and sharpening stone you can get your hands on – some cost pennies, and they yield exp boosts that help out a lot. It’s 20-25% more exp depending on the foods.

If you care about travel time, running Save Yourseles and Retreat gives you almost 100% Swiftness uptime traited for Duration.

While they suck at 80, Spirit Weapons are actually pretty good while leveling. Sword has decent uptime even untraited for, so you might consider that for keeping your damage up. You want to make sure you have at least one condition clearing ability like Smite Condition or Contemplation of Purity on your bar for preventing deaths from bleeds and confusion and the like. Later on you’ll need a stunbreak too, especially in the 40s and up. Doubly so when you start fighting Risen a lot.

I personally find the hammer to be the easiest one to level with. It does plenty of damage including great AoE, and gives you Protection constantly which helps tank. I leveled my second Guardian with Spirit Sword and a hammer all the way to 80.

Traits wise you can go almost any direction and be okay. The only mandatory trait is Honor 5 for Vigorous Precision. That’ll help you out a ton.

For gear, run a split of tank stats and DPS stats. When you start getting access to gear with critical damage, always put the crit damage gear in your shoulders, gloves, boots, and accessories (not rings) first. Those slots give favorable crit damage per stat point. Then you can put Vit/Toughness gear in the remaining slots. If you learn to dodge early on you’ll find that you won’t need too much of that.

^^ what he said.

Staff for movement. Hammer and GS for AOE or multi pack mobs. I don’t recall using food but that was ignorance on my part. Trait / spec I didn’t really bother because it didn’t seem important to me at the time. Armor was whatever dropped.

In other words, I didn’t care much about optimizations because I was leveling to 80 and completing maps, zones, hears, and JP’s. Nothing else mattered and it seemed to go fast enough. During breaks I’d go out in WvW and complete the maps has our server was winning and follow the zerg for badges. Those you can use later on for armor if you so choose.

I've been trying out the hammer and the staff and it has been a lot of fun so far, plenty of utility and control which should help with surviving. I've grabbed some cheap food from the trading post as well, and I'll see about getting those sharpening stones too. So far the class has a great feel to it, like a D&D cleric or a TES battlemage, which is pretty awesome. Thanks for the advice