Guild Wars 2

I use Superior Strength on my hammer, but Fire is also fine for it’s AoE damage boost. And yes, your legendary will still be legendary if you change the sigil (the name won’t even change to “of Strength”; only if u transmute it, then there will be some problems but hopefully Anet will fix this).

Heinel.6548:

Should be human cultural T3. It’s also the one you see when you select the guardian as your profession in character creation.

Except it’s not T3 cultural. I have T3 and it certainly doesn’t look like that. I also don’t have any idea which armour it might be – I suspect that it’s not in-game.

I definitely agree that the Volcano fractal is too hard when compared to other fractals. That is why all the others should be pumped up to the level of this beauty.

Please don’t dumb down the only challenging thing in this game!

DancingPenguins.9875:

Bas.8976:

StrayDilettante.8671:

I shudder to think how my hunter does fractals. With no missile deflecting or blocking spells at all.

Actually, Rangers are very desirable in good FotM groups due to an ability to DPS relatively safely (doing your job). Not to mention Search & Rescue which besides 40+ efficiency at Maw is a great skill for other tough boss encounters when you cannot risk rezzing yourselves (e.g. Dredge, Volcanic).

Entangle is also very useful. And in terms of projectile reflection and avoiding damage you should bring Whirling Defense (axe offhand I believe?) and Lightning Reflexes. Not to mention your awesome Healing Spring for a looong water field combo!

You are overstating the usefulness of rangers. They are at best as good as most other classes. If you consider the people playing rangers at the level, most are there only on the merit of search and rescue and otherwise contribute very little. It was actually refreshing the other day to see a ranger who was actually pleasant to have around and performs capably. Then again, this more of a people issue than class.

Nah, usefuleness of rangers is not overestimated. The thing is, it is a very appealing class to low-medium skilled players – simple, remotely safe-in-use and because of that people get an impression that rangers are useless. The truth is that each and every class in useful in this game – everything depends, as you said, on the players.

StrayDilettante.8671:

I shudder to think how my hunter does fractals. With no missile deflecting or blocking spells at all.

Actually, Rangers are very desirable in good FotM groups due to an ability to DPS relatively safely (doing your job). Not to mention Search & Rescue which besides 40+ efficiency at Maw is a great skill for other tough boss encounters when you cannot risk rezzing yourselves (e.g. Dredge, Volcanic).

Entangle is also very useful. And in terms of projectile reflection and avoiding damage you should bring Whirling Defense (axe offhand I believe?) and Lightning Reflexes. Not to mention your awesome Healing Spring for a looong water field combo!

Nyghtshadow.4206:

A question for some of you more experienced guardians out there:

I want to get a good armor set for support/tanking (when possible) that grants extra boon duration (which is one of the best things a guardian can have to help out the team), and I was planning on getting the AC armor set with rune of the monk.

My question is if I should use the power-tough-vit or precision-vit-healing power set?
The monk rune and water sigils appear to synergise well with the later but is it worth losing the extra vit and toughness? I plan on using mace/shield and staff with this armor.

Or should I use the HotW armor set with power-tough-vit and sanctuary rune (maybe with a hammer instead of mace/shield) and skip healing power and boon duration altogether?

I don’t have a lot of money to spend on crafting so I want to use one of the dungeon armors. My accessories are power-tough-vit oriented (not all, but that’s what I’m planning to get in the future) and they’re not gonna change (the price and time it takes to get ascended stuff makes changing accessories impractical).

There are various angles at which you can approach the “support/tanking” role, depending on the kind of content you’ll be doing.

Knight’s (to some extent Berserker) set with Ruby/Emerald trinkets is enough for 90% content of the game if you’re good with your class – you can apply 2xSuperior Water, 2xSuperior Monk and 2xMajor Sanctuary for +Boon Duration and it should be enough.

However, if you want a really support/tanky guardian, Healing Power is a very nice attribute if you scale it 1000+. Add 25 stacks of Superior Sigil of Life and you should be good to go. You can go with PVT gear and Sapphire weapons/trinket to achieve that (also 3xWater and 3xMonk for +50 HP at the cost of some a bit of boon duration). You can also go with Cleric’s gear (I don’t think it’s farmable in dungeons though, not sure!).

Basically, if you go with Healing Power after achieving around 1000 of this attribute you focus on scaling Power, Toughness and Vitality. However, you need to be prepared for weak attacks and 4-10% crit-chance.

If you go with Toughness/Precision, you try to achieve 40% crit-chance, get AH trait and try to maintain balanced stats.

If you go with PVT you can be an ‘overall’ guard and as you get better with the class you can start specializing in one particular direction.

I believe a minimum for harder game-content is 3000 armour rating and 2700-2800 attack. The rest is up to you: you either go for crits and damage, or healing power and support.

I don’t understand why people compare guardian’s reflect skills with those of other professions. You have to sacrifice vital trait points to bring those utilities to the table and make yourself a very weak-hitting character (anyone who disagrees with this and is not FotM 50+ obviously has no idea what they’re talking about), due to the fact that you have to go either 0/0/30/30/10, 0/0/10/30/30, 0/0/20/30/20 or 0/0/30/20/20.

Of course you can go full knight’s for high-crit AH proc or attempt to go 3/4 or full berserker but in order to be successful in these high scales you need to sacrifice A LOT of damage to be able to mitigate damage done to your other teammates and to let them do their job (PVT gear, HP gear also shines if 1000+ and used properly).

There are 2 (or 3) professions that can provide moderate anti-projectile services but don’t have to sacrifice as much dmg as guards:
Thief: SS and guards are NOWHERE near the DPS a thief can dish out
Mes: Feedback/Warden and NOWHERE near the DPS a mes can dish out

And you have elementalists with their Swirling Winds and Magnetic what-nots (Shield? Aura? Wave?), who can also dish out much more DPS than guards or trait themselves for full-support and actually in most circumstances provide better healing/support.

Anyway, what I can’t understand even more is why people blame guardians when it’s clear that it’s the FotM mechanics that are to be blamed here. Making the majority of fights only range-friendly was not a smart move by Anet. Bosses should be more like Kholer or the Archdiviner (pre-patch, now he’s a kitten). So please don’t blame the class, but rather blame the machanics. I’d much rather run around meleeing and supporting with shouts/other utilities and not stand there like a kittentard cycling my reflects.

And to end with – guardians have the worst range combat (PvE, I don’t do/know PvP) capabilities. And before somebody pops out the sceptre – if you’re traited in a way that you’re doing 3k damage with auto-attack then you’re doing it wrong in the end, trust me.

Yaki.9563:

Bas.8976:

Yaki.9563:

Bas.8976:

Equip staff. Use the symbol (3), after you get the Swiftness buff use Retreat, and when your boon ends, use staff skill 3 again, followed by Save yourselves! When that Swiftness comes to an end, your Retreat should be recharged. Rinse, repeat, perma swiftness.

Since symbol swiftness doesn’t stack with other swiftness, this is pretty clunky.

You can get permanent swiftness without staff but you need to stack boon duration, and much of it will only apply to you rather than the surrounding players/npcs.

As Brutaly already wrote, if you apply the shout’s buff after getting the buff from the staff symbol, they will stack.

What I meant is that you have to wait for your swiftness to end to get the buff from the Symbol, meaning you will never truly have 100% swiftness as there will be a guaranteed gap in there.

If you really count 3/4 of a second (Symbol of Swiftness) as a “gap” then that’s just silly – the method is as close to perma 33% boost as it gets and arguing semantics here is just nit-picking

Yaki.9563:

Bas.8976:

Equip staff. Use the symbol (3), after you get the Swiftness buff use Retreat, and when your boon ends, use staff skill 3 again, followed by Save yourselves! When that Swiftness comes to an end, your Retreat should be recharged. Rinse, repeat, perma swiftness.

Since symbol swiftness doesn’t stack with other swiftness, this is pretty clunky.

You can get permanent swiftness without staff but you need to stack boon duration, and much of it will only apply to you rather than the surrounding players/npcs.

As Brutaly already wrote, if you apply the shout’s buff after getting the buff from the staff symbol, they will stack.

I think I played with you a couple times already and it would be fun to join a progress group since it’s getting really hard to find PUGs 40+.

I’m a Guardian, currently stuck at 49 :/
IGN: Bas Zukaari

Equip staff. Use the symbol (3), after you get the Swiftness buff use Retreat, and when your boon ends, use staff skill 3 again, followed by Save yourselves! When that Swiftness comes to an end, your Retreat should be recharged. Rinse, repeat, perma swiftness.

Thanks for the Ranger builds! I’m a Guardian myself, but my Ranger buddy was wondering about high-level FotM builds, so this is great help!

Any chance to post your Ranger build/armour setup?

Gonna give this a try and see how it plays out in higher FotM levels