Guild Wars 2

Hey I’m new to warrior and I was wondering what a good build is for me for pve. I’m leaning on a banner regen build and I was wondering toughness or healing+ (or vit?) would be more viable for it. My main priority is being able to be “tankish” enough in between heals and dodge while outputting good dps with a GS. thx in advance.

Cleric, power/tougness/healing power. Grab a few knights armor or acc if you want more damage.

In my opinion, for a “Balanced” tank — you can trait 20 to “defense” with 30 in “tactics” and get enough HP, and base toughness / healing that you could probably wear full berserker’s gear and still be very durable.

Regarding damage…

If I were to go that route, I would use a hammer for damage since you can trait “Merciless Hammer” in defense which grants a 25% damage bonus against disabled enemies. In this context, disabled means any movement impairing effect (which are pretty abundant) so typically you’d have a passive 25% damage bonus with hammer.

Unfortunately I find hammer to be kind of boring in solo PVE, but very fun in WvWvW — especially when used with the “Stomp” physical utility – since you can shut down entire group of people for ~5 seconds and knock people off of cliffs / keeps.

Having healing (Cleric) gives you 40% more recharge from Rejuvenation, however you are sacrificing Precision (and thus damage) and everything that relates to Precision, including Bleeding (with 10% damage) and Vulnerability (1% damage per stack). With Toughness (Knight) you can have 96% critical chance and use life stealing food as a core mechanic to bridge the 40% healing ‘reduction’ quite easily, while being really tough and doing very good damage.

I have ran Cleric and Jalis, and neither is really worth it (in PvE).

Or use apothecary armor and get tough, cond, heal.

Clerics is the cheap man’s banner armor, and rocks pve like a freshly anchored ship on your mothers night off. That is, it’s great, power, tough, and heal, dps and regen.

If you are a banner warrior, your dps is secondary anyway, your job is to buff, and support heals.

I’ve tried both 0/25/15/30/0 and 25/0/15/30/0 builds (adrenal health is so good) in attempts to balance the two. In pve I’ve found the prior to be better, in unison with apothecary when using 1h sword and war horn for a bleeds cleanse build. Love it.

In pvp the cond dmg build is great for laying down flame aoe while buffing the group.

Your banners, regardless of game type, ought to be set up like Venn diagrams to spread out as much regen as possible (5 peeps per banner) while overlapping the buffs of the action.

Banners are a support role, not a front lines role. My banners tick for 385 heals on my compadres. My self regen with signet is over 1200, ~650 without signet (assume three stacks adrenal health). That with the boons they provide and my war horn cond conversion, my groups have no problem completing tasks, and I typically end up a primary target in pvp when the foe realizes how much I am countering theirs efforts.

Swinging a big sword isn’t the only way to contribute meaningfully.

Back on topic; clerics for cheap armor, or get pre/vit/heal (mostly from hotw tokens) or the jones’s apothecary armor for pimpin rides.