Guild Wars 2

I’m level 34 at the moment, tried hammer recently just for the heck of it and find I really quite like its art assets and animations. It clearly seems more of a 1v1 or pvp weapon but I’m curious if one could spec in such a way that using it in pve leveling would not be massively gimping ones self compared to a more damage oriented GS.

Side note, I’ve cleaned out the majority of skill point nodes in the areas available to me and have 31 spare points available. I was going to use them to unlock one of the elite skills – zooka or rampage, but from what I’ve read they are both.. well awful. Any suggestions? I have all signets unlocked I think and several other abilities, anything specific I should definitely have?

Note this is for pve pretty much exclusively. I may try pvp again eventually, but I’ve never much cared for mmorpg pvp, especially with tab target combat, and the zergs I saw in wvw didn’t do much to change that feeling.

PvE is fully centered on two things: Evades and damage.
While the control abilities of the hammer make up for its lack of defensive utility, the damage part is utterly lacking.
If you still want to go with the hammer, I’d suggest, playing the hammer alongside a longbow(tho you will find, ditching the hammer and grabing sword/warhorn or axe/shield will often times prove more eficient, cause the hammer got nothing besides the heavy control setup)

For leveling up you can just get more done with higher dps. There are plenty of weapon sets that can give you a knockdown, a block, or an interrupt and still keep the damage higher. An easy build for leveling up is a signet build but it doesn’t help you learn to play. Experimenting with a few builds yourself will be better in the long run.

Level to 80 with GS, then at 80 play around with hammer