Guild Wars 2

greetings. i have decided to start making my guardian completely focused on wvw now, and i’d like some feedback on what i’ve heard/what i plan on doing.

what i’ve HEARD is that wvw guardian can be MUCH more support based, to the point off being somewhat close to the “healer” role in a holy trinity game. people i’ve talked to have said that i should focus on survivability for myself and others via shouts and healing.

this is the build i’m tentatively using, and i have one major question: does writ of the merciful apply to the symbol created using hammers? if not, then i’ll change it to 2 handed mastery:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7;4JFk40J3cFF90;9;69TT;43;019A36C;6UytbUytb30F;7Vl-sWv1-Z5_B5CL0LV350;4V2DsF2Csk
i’m also torn between pure of voice and battle presence, though since im running more shout-oriented it seems like it might be the better choice.

note that for armor i’ll be using clerics while i work on ascended items, which i plan to make a ventari armor and weapon set. i am, however, especially in the dark about what to choose for the sigils, though one person said that choosing endurance regen on swap would be good to keep using the aoe heal on dodge roll as much as possible.

any and all feedback is appreciated, and i’ll try to clarify anything i can if need be. thank you for your time.

You are very low on health. I would build a set of celestial and use that as my base.

Well first off, do you want to be a healer? Because you do have other choices. Also, it’s not just healing that keeps people alive, but boons like stability and condition clears.

I agree that the health could be higher— this is why I don’t like clerics as a base; you will melt to conditions which toughness does not help mitigate. You should invest in soldiers armor I feel and you can use cleric for the rest. And yes, the symbol does heal. However, I don’t think the heal is big enough to really matter; getting people to stand in it in a protracted fight w/o symbol duration increase is not so hot. Two handed mastery would also give you much more crowd control ability. Maybe check out battle presence? I’ve had more success than any other heal method besides dodge heals.That also goes with purity of body because your allies will also receive endurance regeneration.

As for traits, I’d take consecration cooldown instead of retaliation duration because retaliation is pretty trivial to get.

BTW intothemists seems pretty outdated. I’d use http://www.gw2skills.net (though you have to click the US flag because it keeps making it german)

Example:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJASWl8ApWotCxZI0ENRCRl9MkDnJ2fQIUCXFAA-TFCEABL8EAGUJYLq/YlyPO1Fk0+DAcIAe4CAQGgltA-w

As pointed out, your health is really low. In WvW you will end up dying a lot (I have a tendency to get focused), but 13k health will lead to you dying much more. I run Soldier gear which has worked well for me.

The Sigil that renews your endurance on weapon swap is pretty great, for a variety of reasons. The heal on dodge gets triggered more, you take less damage and it encourages you to switch weapons often (which is important because with the Staff you’ll generally end up just firing off all cooldowns and then switching back to your other weapon).

I also agree that Two-Handed Mastery is a better option. In general, it’s going to be a lot more relevant than the incidental healing from your Symbols. Same goes for Consecration Mastery.

In terms of Battle Presence vs Pure of Voice, I’d opt for Pure of Voice. This is a personal thing and if Battle Presence works best for you, play with that. I like the ability to pop of annoying conditions on the fly, but if you don’t mind being Chilled all that much, the extra healing could be nice.

traited sup balista will one shot kill you >_>
Any class with poison will beat you w/o problems.

Advice: Try to get a sweet spot between health and healing power, arround 700 healing power is very good more than that guardian sacrifices alot without being effective.

ArchonWing.9480:

Well first off, do you want to be a healer? Because you do have other choices. Also, it’s not just healing that keeps people alive, but boons like stability and condition clears.

I agree that the health could be higher— this is why I don’t like clerics as a base; you will melt to conditions which toughness does not help mitigate. You should invest in soldiers armor I feel and you can use cleric for the rest. And yes, the symbol does heal. However, I don’t think the heal is big enough to really matter; getting people to stand in it in a protracted fight w/o symbol duration increase is not so hot. Two handed mastery would also give you much more crowd control ability. Maybe check out battle presence? I’ve had more success than any other heal method besides dodge heals.That also goes with purity of body because your allies will also receive endurance regeneration.

As for traits, I’d take consecration cooldown instead of retaliation duration because retaliation is pretty trivial to get.

BTW intothemists seems pretty outdated. I’d use http://www.gw2skills.net (though you have to click the US flag because it keeps making it german)

Example:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJASWl8ApWotCxZI0ENRCRl9MkDnJ2fQIUCXFAA-TFCEABL8EAGUJYLq/YlyPO1Fk0+DAcIAe4CAQGgltA-w

that looks good, i think i’ll try that. i’ll probably uses battle presence since the runes give me the pure of voice anyway, and i was more thinking with the hammer symbol of supporting gate sieges with rams when under AC fire or somesuch, but again you make a good point with the 2h mastery.
3 questions come to mind:
1) what ascended trinkets should i get?
2) what type of ascended armor/weapon should i work towards?
3) what infusions for the trinkets/armor/weapons would give the best synergy with said the rest of my build?

thanks for the replies guys, i appreciate it :)

Are you going Zerging or roaming? if zerging, which I assume since you want to be supportive I would suggest the following:

Full soldiers armor.
Trinkets can be a mix of soldiers and zerker. The zerker amount depends on your own comfortzone when it comes to survivability.
Zerker/Soldier weapons (again depends on how w2ell you can survive).
Melandru runes together with the lemongrass food to minimize duration of conditions. Energy sigils are really nice on your weapons and secondary sigils to consider would be accuracy, fire, bloodlust.
Don’t mind infusions from start but otherwise vital i armor and precision in trinkets.

You don’t really wanna go all out tank, that won’t help the cause much, you need some dmg as well, therefore you should aim towards 20-30% crit chance and around 2000 power (without sharpening stones).

Build I suggest is 0/0/6/4/4, altruistic healing is WONDERFUL for your survivability. With melandru runes and proper food you should be fine with only Purging flames as condi removal. Purity of body and Battle Presence is not a good trait to aim for and therefore don’t go 6 in Virtues or honor. You should be using your virtues in WvW, not leave them on passive.
So to sum up the traits I would say Valor is most important trait line here, for Strenth in numbers, retributive armor (cause you’ll have a ton of toughness and you NEED that critchance) and Altruistic healer cause it really makes the guardian as tanky as it’s supposed to be.

It really depends on style, Xhean; your way is perfectly fine— I do 6 valor melandru myself—but if I’m correct OP wishes for a healer/support role and you should not use healing power with AH builds due to the abysmal scaling. AH/Melandru is generally more frontline/damage oriented.

I wouldn’t knock Battle Presence. I’ve used it to decent effect even with base healing power besides the HP from honor. I mean it is like giving out half a warrior’s healing signet to allies around you with some investment into HP. The other thing is that F2 is I would feel the least useful active virtue anyways unless Absolute Resolution is taken.

As for Purity of Body, I can sort of understand why it’s taken; and that’s mostly because of the tome which makes the other virtues traits somewhat useless because no Renewed Focus.

As for Deitus, you can check the tabs in the center (for the link I posted above) for some ideas of trinkets and stuff. In reality though you just want to keep tweaking the editor until you get your desired stats so don’t just copy me— whatever you come up with, you want say, 16k+ health, 3000 armor, 800 healing power.

Of course, you should really decide on what role you’d like to play first, before you invest in anything.

You’re right ArchonWing, though personally I feel more supporty going the way I explained than investing in healing power, did that a while back but this feels better in every way. Only thing I miss is high heal on dodgerolls
And yes f2 is not much but it often makes the difference, especially when you add up your guardians.

the role i want to play is one that works in larger groups (~15+) to work as the “utility/heal” guy. i realize that damage is important no matter what you do, but i mainly want to be supporting the potentially squishier folks who can really dish out the pain. i think i’ll try to go for the 3k armor/800 heal/16k hp, and after that i’ll work on power and crit chance. trinkets will probably be the main source of the healing power since i’ll probably be going soldier’s. would what has already been suggested work for runes/sigils/infusions?

Xhean.3452:

You’re right ArchonWing, though personally I feel more supporty going the way I explained than investing in healing power, did that a while back but this feels better in every way. Only thing I miss is high heal on dodgerolls
And yes f2 is not much but it often makes the difference, especially when you add up your guardians.

Well, 0/0/6/4/4 is a very solid frontline-support build and the good part about it is that it is not tied down to any runeset, like a shouts-bunker would be. (Pure of Voice sucks as a sole form of condi removal, after all). Before the patch I would say 0/0/2/6/6 is inferior to AH builds for bigger groups because you would sacrifice too much stats and AH, and would have had a harder time keeping yourself alive through big fights (the extra stability really isn’t worth it). However, I think because of elite tomes it may be a decent alternative if one uses the tomes well, though frontlining AH I think is just going to be better just because you are naturally tougher. The other kind of healway thingy is better just slightly behind them.