Guild Wars 2

My main is a Guardian, and if I had to define him with as few words as possible it would be “tough guy”. It is the versatility and ‘can do’ approach that I can take to almost any task what I like most about the profession. If I want to, I can be extremely resilient, or helpful or deadly… I can tell people in my party feel safer when I’m around, so I guess whatever a Guardian is, the profession is doing all right.

I favor a Hammer/AH build and at the moment I’m running what I consider a basic and well-rounded gear set up: Knight’s armor with soldier runes, berserker’s jewelry & weapons and I’m at 42% crit. My traits are 0/5/30/30/5, so I get almost all my precision from gear and Retributive Armor. As soon as I get a superior sigil of accuracy for my hammer it will go up to 47% and I will be happy with the stats all-around. Variations are possible depending on what you plan on doing, but this should be a solid start for general purposes.

I use a full shout build and I eat conditions like nobody’s business. When my elementalist or necro guildies show up we take down dungeons with ease. If both of them are present or there are two other guardians in the group, the party just won’t wipe.

Hi all! First let me thank the ANet guys for showing some loving for the Mac platform. You earned a fan and a supporter when you released the Mac client

I just wanted to know if the custom playlist feature (one of the coolest I’ve seen so far!) is also available for the Mac client, as I have not been able to find any documentation in this regard. If it is not in the beta (completely understandable!) I’m curious as to if it will be implemented at any point in the forseeable future.

Thanks a bunch!

Welcome to the brigade! I am quite new to the Guardian too, but I’m enjoying it immensely. The first 40 levels have been great fun and I haven’t found any major drawbacks. Word to the wise: while the hammer is super fun (I have been levelling for the last 25 levels with it or so), it requires attentive gameplay and careful timing. I personally like that, but I understand it is not for everybody.

Tell us how you feel after some levels!

Thank you very much! I’ll try both of them tonight. I plan to make a working build out of this as soon as I ding 50… not sure if I’ll succeed, but I will try for sure

Thanks for the builds, Marthiarn and Brutaly. Last night I gave the hammer a try again and I was surprised at how effective it is: not only in terms of sheer power, but also on killing speed. The fact that you can remain mobile during the chain (look for the backs of people) and that the finisher has a jump on it make battles engaging and with a lot of tactical options (yay, clever playing!).

The links to the builds don’t seem to be working, but if I undestand this correctly, the build should look something like this (0/15/30/20/5):

- 0: no power, but stack in gear (knight’s or berserker’s?)
- 15: Justice Is Blind and Renewed Justice are key to keep up momentum. Throw in Healer’s retribution or Blind Exposure depending on situation.
- 30: Altruistic Healing is the build’s ‘engine’, just needs constant boon application to keep it fueled. On the way there, Retributive Armor works wonders with knight’s and Glacial Heart for jaw-dropping of other players and more CC.
- 20: Again the ‘intermediate’ traits are better than the expensive ones. Vigorous Precision and Selfless Daring keep the thing going and you alive (twice at the press of a button!). Writ of Exaltation because bigger is better and the more the merrier and the icing of the cake lets you choose between Writ of Persistence, Empowering Might and Two-Handed Mastery depending on the situation.
- 5: Because inspiration is a boon and I hear two for the price of one (3 actually if you factor in the extra healing) is a good deal.

For maximum effect, Knight’s and Berserker’s gear. Slot/Accesorize to compensate for stats in armor/weapon.

Did I get this right? With so many synergies and pious names it can get really confusing. It is a shame that below lvl 60-70 for solo levelling it is not as effective (Hammer still awesome, though :P ). But I think I’ll give sPVP a go just to try this, even if I don’t find it paricularly compelling. On a side note, I propose this build to be dubbed “Pound of Valor” (PoV… see what I did there?) or “The Tenderizer”, just for kicks XD

Congrats on the thread, Brutaly! I’m VERY new to the game, but you made my day with this discussion. Back in my WoW days (TBC) I played a really kitten Enhancement Shammie (when nobody wanted them, using rogue gear) and had a very similar philosophy: I’m not a mediocre healer. I’m a front-of-the-line BMF (read: really, really face-bashing) by myself, it just happened that when people were around me they got some of my incredible kittenery sticked to them. It was a role I enjoyed immensely and I never had any trouble finding people to dungeon or raid with. Never ever got asked to respec either.

It is just brilliant that you found a way to bring back those mechanics I loved (I mainly used infinite mana and ‘always on’ crits to fuel the buffs and turn into a never-stopping flurry of attacks!) to do what I enjoyed the most: kicking kitten WHILE helping my group and keeping them alive. You, sir, made my day and I cannot wait to get to 80 to try this build. GW2 just turned from awesome to head-exploding exciting!

At this point I cannot contribute anything to the discussion due to my lack of experience, but I will definitely give this build a long good try and see if it can be made even better. I salute you!

Edit: Awesome kitten filter is awesome XD

Hello all! Having a blast with the game. I really like the crafting system (even if it is a bit of a chore to keep it on par with my character level due to fine materials drop rate), but recently I stumbled upon something that has me stumped: I discovered you can make boxes (or satchels) of a certain set of armor (from what I have seen it is every armor set in the game) so when you open them, you get the whole set out of it. I thought that was the coolest thing so far! However after some diggin’ in the interwebs, it seems that you need to discover the recipes via a mystic forge recipe instead of the normal way. If that is so, it is a bummer, as the materials required are insane at the levels the armor is usable. I doesn’t make any sense to me, but before I let it go (and craft every single piece individually) I wanted to know if someone can clarify some of the aspects about boxes of armor and mystic forge usage:

- Can you craft armor boxes with a crafting level below 400 (ie. with the appropriate level to craft every piece individually)?

- Is there any other way to discover/learn/buy the recipe other than involving stupidly expensive (from the point of view of the people actually needing the armor) items from Miyani?

- Does the forge need any particular crafting level to use or that depends entirely on the recipe? I don’t even know if at below 150 crafting level I should bother with MF at all…

I’m sorry for asking these basic questions, but every guide/post I read about the MF or armor sets assumes the user is trying to craft exotic thingamabobs, epic whathaveyou materials or legendary whatchacallits, so we ‘growing’ players can’t make an informed decision about what (and if) to use the mistyc forge for at all.

Thanks a bunch!

Such a nice guide! Thank you very much for taking the time and effort to put this together. I have been enjoying playing my guardian a LOT, but with such a plethora of options to mix and match I felt a little overwhelmed. Now at least I have some guidance and can experiment a little more “scientifically” with my builds.