Guild Wars 2

As someone who uses the hammer almost exclusively (possibly now exclusively after the greatsword changes), I am against pretty much everything you said.

Obtena.7952:

1. There is too much happening in #1 You have good damage, symbol DoT and protection boon all in a single ability with the added benefit that you get protection %100 uptime if you just spam it.

I don’t really see how this is a bad thing. The high Protection uptime and added Symbol damage are the reason the speed of the chain’s third step is palatable in the first place; it’s also pretty much the defining point of the hammer (hybrid offense and defense).

Obtena.7952:

2. There isn’t enough happening in #5 I have to admit, I don’t get this one, especially if you have a root ability in #3 that also does damage. When I use it in PVE, it’s in combo with #4 for fun.

5 is amazing in PvP, especially in conjunction with 3: root a running target, then trap them in the ring for more DPS time (as a bonus, most players don’t seem to understand our wards, so they just repeatedly run into the ring and stun/interrupt themselves instead of turning to disable the Guardian). It’s also very good for zone control in both PvP and PvE (dungeons, specifically); you can create chokepoints or AoE kill zones more effectively than any other class.

Obtena.7952:

3. The combo finisher with Symbol of Protection and Mighty Smash is weak I guess I’m not a big fan of retaliation. It’s already weak damage and it’s usefulness in team based application is questionable.

Retaliation is very powerful, as can be evidenced by ANet turning the greatsword kit on its head in order to, ostensibly, nerf Retaliation uptime. I wouldn’t mind if they changed the effect to something like Protection or Quickness, but it’s definitely not week as it is. Also, Mighty Blow isn’t specifically meant to combo with Symbol of Protection; a great deal of the hammer’s power comes from the consistency with which it can be used to trigger other’s combo fields.

Obtena.7952:

4. #4 has limited application I feel it’s way too situational. Unless I’m missing a trick, I’m only using it when I feel overwhelmed by too many mobs or want to buy some time with a single mob fight. Even then, I don’t see it’s advantage over exercising more effective mob control options or healing abilities.

In conjunction with 5, it can give you quite a bit of breathing room against a melee opponent. It’s also an interrupt. It’s also hilarious to send things flying.

Obtena.7952:

1. Move symbol to #5. Would give option to bring symbol forward in rotation and get a little more burst. I don’t think it would be unreasonable given the execution times in #1.

The cooldown on 5 is very long; this would be a much bigger nerf than the greatsword change, and I don’t think I would classify Symbols as “burst” damage.

Obtena.7952:

2. Replace Total Retaliation with a stability or swiftness boon I would prefer stability myself. Hammer damage and support falls behind when the long execution times/chains are interrupted.

Swiftness is taken by the Lightning/Blast Field/Finisher combo, and Stability is way too powerful in PvP to be granted with that kind of regularity. Protection and Quickness probably are too, but it might work if they were for very short durations.

3. Add chill to #4 This would make a very situational tool more effective.

As this is a straight buff, it’s hard to say that this wouldn’t be welcome, but it’s also probably unnecessary.

A couple of things:

1) The Valor line provides Critical Damage, which, in conjunction with high Precision, makes up pretty well for the lack of Power provided by the Zeal line.

2) The major traits in the Valor and Honor lines are, for the most part, better than the Zeal line unless you are specializing in Spirit Weapons. The Zeal minor traits are great for Symbols, but you need a heavy investment in Honor to really make that shine as well.

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Generally, I think it has to do with what people are trying to do. For a generic, well-balanced build, Valor and Honor are a bit better. For Spirit Weapons, Symbols, or Burning builds, Zeal definitely has its place.

The skill order change is annoying, but I agree that it actually makes sense in the context of the cooldown changes. The sad part is that, because people are so focused on having to retrain their fingers (which will probably only take a few days of play), many people are missing that the underlying changes are a huge nerf to the damage output of the weapon.

Well, on the upside, at least there’s no reason to question whether to use a greatsword over a hammer anymore.

I run 0/15/30/20/5, which can basically either be the Altruistic Healing hammer build or can be a generic triple Meditation build that works fantastically with a greatsword. I frequently switch my major traits, utilities, and between all three two-handed weapons depending on the situation.

Also, “Draconic” armor simply refers to the exotic tier of crafted armor, not a set of stats, so I’m not actually sure what kind of gear you are wearing/wanting to wear.

I’m fairly certain it’s the latter because I have definitely seen times when a condition has disappeared very shortly after appearing on me.

MysticoN.5068:

So i decided to try a crithammer build a few runs in PvP today (8vs8).

I found a problem with the shout’s and buffs to my team. In 2 cases i didnt get any heals. Once it was me and a guardian guarding a point. I used my 3 shouts with a few seconds between ant not one heal.

Another time it was like 5 other on my team on the same point (real Zerg Vs Zerg) and again i poped shout without getting any heals. Anyone had this problem before? I checked my trait if they have been “greyed” out and they havent.

It’s hard to tell for sure without knowing the situation, but I remember reading that applying a boon that stacks in duration to a player that already has that boon doesn’t trigger Altruistic Healing. So if you use “Hold The Line!” in a situation where all five affected targets already had Protection and Regeneration, you don’t actually get any Altrustic Healing procs.

Yeah, this has been a bug for a while actually; it will sometimes just stop working entirely, and you have to zone/re-log to fix it.

I am going to go ahead and admit that I am completely guessing, but it’s probably multiplicative, so you’d end up taking (1 – .33) * (1 – .1) = .6 of normal damage, which is the equivalent of 40% damage reduction.

Fortunately, there is gear that gives you good Power and Precision without sacrificing all of your defenses: Knight’s! I run a build which I switch back and forth between Tri-Meditation (for solo play) and Altrustic Healing/Shouts (for group play), and Knight’s gear works well with both. It works out especially well since healing-based survivability is improved by Toughness (the less damage you take, the more valuable each point of healing becomes).

I’m not wild about the Radiance traits, but the other four are all good in various builds and situations.

Radiance is amazing for offensively-minded builds, often better than Zeal, especially if you like 1H weapons; Right-Handed Strength is incredibly powerful.

@OP: I recommend messing around with a skill calculator like the one here: http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#Mcc. This will give you a better idea of what possibilities exist and allow you to experiment with ideas on paper without wasting hard-earned money on respeccing. Some things you will have to learn from experience, but you can at least see some of the synergies between the different lines.

As far as making money for your training manuals, make sure you are hitting all of the resource nodes that aren’t too far from your paths of travel, and if you aren’t using something for crafting, sell it on the Trading Post! Furthermore, try to avoid using fast-travel too often, as the price really adds up and causes you to skip many of the aforementioned crafting resources.

I like it a lot; I think it is more defensively oriented than the 30 Radiance build, since you lose the option of taking Altruistic Healing. Also, I prefer the skill sets on our 2H weapons for most situations, but if you’re a big fan of the 1H Sword, I think the Right-Hand Strength/Empowering Might synergy is pretty fantastic.

The build that Eveningstar posted is exactly what I use, right down to the major traits. The cool thing about this allocation (0/15/30/20/5) is that it can be converted from a group-oriented Shout build into a solo-oriented Meditation build just by changing majors and utilities:

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#Mcc9VmrnRmmrnRm0fxGVMzobcs

As Jimmy said, Meditations really hit their stride once you can sink the full 30 points into the Valor tree for Monk’s Focus. I just did a quick test, and with 200 Healing Power (i.e. none of the stat on my gear), each Meditation healed me for about 1.8k. Smite Condition is on a 16 second cooldown with Meditation Mastery, so that gives it about one third of the HPCT of Signet of Resolve – our strongest self healing skill – in addition to its AoE damage and condition removal. Judge’s Intervention provides the same healing on a bit more than double the cooldown, but brings even more damage and a teleport escape/chasedown. And again, the thing I really love about the build I’m using now is that I can change it on a whim to suit the situation I am in; if I feel like yelling for a bit, it’s a 15 second ordeal to swap major traits and utilities.

Now, at level 40, I was running the 10/15/0/0/5 core (and experimenting with the Honor line for the first time). Without the 30 point major traits, I would argue that the Valor line isn’t really worth any investment at all. That being said, Shouts are really made to be amazing in group play, and I think they only live up to a small percentage of their potential if you don’t use them with Altruistic Healing (also 30 points in Valor) and in a group. You mention Aegis as a benefit to your build, but the Shouts themselves are contributing only one additional Aegis every 48 seconds (from Retreat).

I want to end by stopping trying to sell my build and simply giving a minor critique on yours. If you want to run a solo Shout build, I would think you would be better served by dropping the 10 points in Radiance (without the Sword/Greatsword and without Renewed Justice, you aren’t going to apply that many blinds, and Vulnerability only adds 1% damage per stack) and putting them into Virtues (you’ll gain 1% damage for each boon you have, likely amounting to more damage than the aforementioned Vulnerability, as well as 10% increased boon duration and a likely more useful major trait).

For leveling in particular, I think that the 15 Radiance/5 Virtues combo for Renewed Justice/Inspired Virtues combo is pretty unbeatable. Personally, I think 10 (Burning Wrath)/15 (Renewed Justice)/0/0/5 (Inspired Virtues) is a great core for solo leveling.

If you’re really concerned about solo PvE above all else, then I actually think Shouts are pretty underwhelming; they are exceptional in groups, and should not be ignored in that setting, but Meditations are the king of selfish solo play, particularly with Meditation Mastery and Monk’s Focus.

My personal build at 80 is 0/15/30/20/5 (I like to call it the Valorguard), which comes in two core varieties depending on what I am doing:

Solo play, Meditation focus: http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#Mcc9VmrnRmmrnRm0fxGVMzobcs
Group play, Shout focus: http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#Mcc9VmNvaomNvam0fxGVMVoqMR

Obviously utilities are malleable, but that’s the basic idea; with a single trait allocation, I can get either extreme power in solo play or great group utility (both with exceptional self-healing).

Indeed that seems accurate, thanks very much!

http://fireden.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Guild-Wars-29.jpeg

If they do exist in the game, would anyone happen to know where to find them?

ens.9854:

Maybe I’m mistaken, but I thought badges were primarily a reward for killing opposing players, not for showing up to wvw?

Yes it’s asymmetric. Yes it discourages support. But you know what? I think I’m okay with it. It is things like these that keep the game from becoming a mind numbing “everybody wins” adventure.

Players shouldn’t be rewarded for killing alone anymore than they should be rewarded for just “showing up.” The point of a reward is to encourage a specific kind of behavior, and the ideal behavior from every player on the team should be maximizing their contribution to the team’s victory. For anyone playing a support-oriented build of their profession, spamming AoE in an attempt to get kills (which is what the current system encourages) is likely to be less than optimal for actually helping win the battle.

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The funny thing is that the solution shouldn’t be terribly complicated from a design standpoint (though I don’t and can’t know from an implementation perspective): if player A buffs/heals player B within a certain period of player B killing something, player A should get credit for assisting with the kill.

Fildydarie.1496:

I haven’t compared tiers of armor to each other, but I expect to find that fine armor, scaled, is equivalent to fine armor. Masterwork will remain equivalent to masterwork, and so on. This means that when you get to 80 and exotic is the norm, your scaled gear will have an advantage over unscaled gear, since exotic armor is not available at significantly lower levels.

This is the other thing I’m interested to understand better. Even if the scaling for stats on gear is analogous to base stat scaling, since the number of individual stats on each piece of gear increases as you level, a higher level player is definitely going to have a larger total stat pool than a lower level one, assuming they are both wearing character-level-appropriate gear.

Certainly there is not an issue with down-leveled characters feeling too weak; in fact, my impression is that the consensus is the opposite. The only real takeaway from understanding the quirk I mentioned is that your gear’s level needs to be managed and kept up to date based on your character’s level, not based on the level of the area you are questing in. Furthermore, since not all drops in level-adjusted areas are scaled to your level, it means there is a notable disadvantage to not leveling in level-appropriate zones.

Honestly, I’d like to be able to see “major” events worldwide when I bring up the map (at least in areas that I’ve explored).

This is pretty interesting. If I’m understanding this correctly, there is at least one really weird quirk to the system:

If you are playing in area where you are currently the max level for the area and you level up, the dynamic level adjustment function will actually make you weaker until you upgrade your gear. Your stats go from:

B(level) + gear stats

to

[B(level + 1) / B(level + 1) * B(level)] + [gear stats / B(level + 1) * B(level)
= B(level) + gear stats * [B(level) / B(level + 1)]

Since B(level + 1) is necessarily greater than B(level), your gear stats always end up with a multiplier less than one, so your total stats will end up lower.

How do stat bonuses from Traits factor in? Are they counted among the “other” stats that you mentioned?

ShadowbaneX.6273:

I don’t get these builds that just pile on the Zeal Attributes, try 0/15/30/20/5…“More Power!” isn’t the solution to everything.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fUAQJARWlYgSDXFSPEfIFRuA7DAEThGz41DHSRGC

That build with balanced stats and Altruistic Healing will keep you alive for quite a while and the ability to spam Virtue of Justice on recharge doesn’t hurt either and will out-heal Zealous Blade all-day, all-night and will work with your other weapon set and your underwater weapons as well.

This is the build I use, though I change the major traits (Meditation heavy when I’m solo, Shouts/Empowered Might/Altruistic Healing when I’m in a group) and utilities depending on the situation. Both Monk’s Focus and Altruistic Healing in their respective situations will keep you up a lot better than Zealous Blade, and Two-Handed Mastery is a much better trait for GS use than Greatsword Power (which is a little sad).

DesertRose.2031:

1.) I’ve played a Mediation Guardian in PvP and with 0 points in Honor the Meditation skills healed for something around 1.5k to 2k health; I doubt you need even more Healing Power.

Good to know, thanks.

DesertRose.2031:

2.) A Guardian has already strong armor and you get +300 Toughness from your traits but has the lowest health pool of all professions so you want to prioritize Vitality a bit more than Toughness.

Is that true in both PvE and PvP? I definitely understand that for PvP, where battles are usually short, but wouldn’t it be the case in the longer PvE battles where you don’t have the opportunity to get out of combat that Healing Power and Toughness would actually play a greater role? Do I need two sets of gear if I want to be really effective at both?

DesertRose.2031:

3.) I would rather see a Guardian that can bring Shouts or Consecrations along but you still bring Cleansing Bolts and a Blast finisher on a short cooldown; still, not being able to bring no team support is the reason why I stay away from Meditations in PvE, even though they are awesome in sole PvE.

I definitely understand your concerns as I share them; I don’t want to feel like I am not bringing much to the team, however, I think the argument can be made that personal survivability combined with battlefield control (Greatsword 5 and Hammer 5) that often results in being the target of enemy attacks is actually a great asset to the group.

That being said, with only a little bit of tweaking, the same point values in each trait line can actually make what looks like a pretty solid shout build as well: http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#MccM0V0zmNvammNvam0GxG0MsVoqMs. That makes me like the setup even more, since I can change on the fly based on the circumstances.

DesertRose.2031:

4.) You might want to switch the major Valor trait with the instant Meditation trait but because that can be changed freely.

Smite Condition and Judges Intervention always seemed pretty instant to me, which is why I didn’t take that trait; is that just my imagination?

First of all, let me say that, despite my overall lack of knowledge of GW2, I have already gathered that there is no “tanking” in the traditional RPG sense of the word in this game. With that, my goal with this build is to be durable enough that I can afford to draw the ire of enemies for long enough to give my allies some breathing room while at the same time contributing enough damage to the group to not feel like I am more of a hindrance than help. I’d also like to have a build that can do well in PvE as well as hold its own in the smaller WvW battles (spec ops kind of stuff, not so much the zerg). Finally, I prefer 2H weapons, though I do carry one of everything in my bags for those times when a situation (especially in dungeons) requires a different approach.

The build: http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#Mccz0M0zmrnRmmrnRm0GxG0Mszobcs

As far as gear, I’m still pretty fresh to 80, and most of pieces are still mid-70 cleric gear from an older spec. My short term goal is to acquire the full Vigil set (which I want to do because I like the design anyway) which has Power/Vitality/Toughness, a rare combination on PvE gear. I’m not sure whether Knight’s or Cleric’s makes more sense for jewelry, and I have only an inkling of what kind of runes I should try to get (Soldier’s seems like a safe bet, but a good one?). That brings me to my questions:

1) Do I need some semblance of Healing Power from gear in order to make the Meditation Mastery/Monk’s Focus combo really worthwhile?

2) Does my current gear goal make sense? If not, what would be better? What would make sense for jewelry and runes?

3) Is my current build too “selfish” to be worthwhile in a group? Or, put another way, if you were in my group and could see my spec, would you be concerned about the fact that I have focused on personal livability rather than group buffs?

4) Is there already a better build out there that does exactly what I want better than what I’ve created?

Thanks in advance for the help. Also, I hope that someone else out there who came to the forums looking for an idea of how to build their Guardian gains something of use from this thread!

baldsh.3896:

All classes have the same base stats at level 80, so starting stats don’t matter.

I don’t think this is true. I have read in multiple places that there are three tiers of base health for the different classes, and Guardians are in the bottom tier along with Elementalists.

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To the OP: I have found that the Honor line (Vitality/Healing Power) is vastly superior to the Valor line (Toughness/Expertise) in terms of survivability increases, both due to the stat bonuses and the traits themselves. I don’t think anything increased my survivability as much as the combination of high healing power and Selfless Daring, which heals me (and nearby allies) for several hundred HP every time I roll. Writ of the Merciful is also non-trivial, since that’s another 100+ HP heal every second while I’m standing in one of my symbols (which is basically all the time since I run GS/Hammer).