Guild Wars 2

I’ll skip the introductions and make this short.

Full Knight Warrior with soldier runes, Healing Signet and Adrenal Health or full Knight Guardian with Dolyak runes, assuming both have their traits 100% focused on high toughness+vitality, which one would be able to withstand most damage in WvW?

I’ve never tried a Guardian myself, but I’ve literally akitten while someone attacked me and when I came back I was still alive thanks to the regen, and yet I’m still constantly told that Guardians would be somewhat better for survival.

Thoughts on this?

Health regen on Dolyak is terrible last I checked.

Sagramor.7395:

Health regen on Dolyak is terrible last I checked.

Oh, I jut checked on the wiki… Yeah pretty crappy, could replace it with something else, but it still gives quite a lot of toughness.

Guardians get their survivability through prot and other sources of mitigation (blind/aegis/easily achieved 100% vigor uptime) and the availability of many small heals from several sources. After the last patch, Warriors just heal well. When not being focused, healing works just fine (which both classes do well), but when you are getting ganged up on, the damage mitigation tools of a Guardian quickly outshine Warrior regen.

I usually try not to make claims that are unsupported by hard evidence, but even after the last patch, I would still say a well played Guardian will put a well played Warrior to shame as far as tanking damage is concerned. “Well played Guardian” being the key statement.

I could be wrong, but from my personal experience Warrior’s aren’t tanky by being pure meat shields. You become tanky in combination to also playing well with your blocks, dodges and immunities and also through constantly stunning your opponents, allowing your health to regen.

eXeD.9738:

Sagramor.7395:

Health regen on Dolyak is terrible last I checked.

Oh, I jut checked on the wiki… Yeah pretty crappy, could replace it with something else, but it still gives quite a lot of toughness.

I’ve been using the runes of Dolyak since around launch (as soon as I got my first set of exotic gear/had the gold to buy them). And they do work pretty well. Yes, it only heals ~30 (I say about, just because I swear that every now and then I see 33 pop up for healing, but I could be wrong about that). But compare that 30hp a second to how much healing power you need to get an extra 30hp from the healing signet:

If the wiki’s right, our healing sig only has a 0.05 modifier from healing power, so you’d need to increase our healing power by 600 to get the same effect those runes provide (not adding in any added benefit from adrenal health). Plus if you wan extra toughness (like I did), most of the toughness granting runes are useless to us. I’d argue that maybe the Rune of Melandru could also be useful, but depending what traits/utils you roll, Dolyak can be better (I prefer the extra 500hp and hp regen to stun/condi duration). So I’d argue that the Dolyak runes are a viable option if you want to run toughness runes.

As for the OPs question. I’d say that may depend on your playstyle. I haven’t really played a guard, so I can’t really comment there, but as someone said above, a guard with protection will probably have a bit more survivability, especially versus multiple people. But they usually trade that off by having less dps.

And of course I just noticed that you put the Dolyak runes on the guard instead of the warrior. I’ve avoided soldier runes thanks to cleansing ire, and my general non-use of most shouts.