Guild Wars 2

Reported this bug earlier today—it seems to be triggered by Permeating Wrath. If you remove Permeating Wrath, it works fine.

Fairly straightforward, I think: When the Permeating Wrath trait is enabled, Zealous Scepter does not grant might for scepters or any other weapon.

1. Elementalist
2. Mesmer
3. Ranger

I don’t know what y’all are talking about. I duo fractals with my friend; we roll for everything but swamp. Could probably swing it if one of us had a mesmer, but since neither of us do…

fadeaway.2807:

What would you say to frequent low damage attacks which are enough to kill you via attrition if you don’t bring enough toughness/healing, mixed with a dodgeable high damage attack?

There’s a few of these out there; most notably flame legion that carry flamethrowers. I always enjoy fighting them with a relatively durable guardian build that can use retaliation and afford to stand in the line of fire. They tend to overwhelm players that can’t CC them or take a bit of damage, though, due to their ability to continue spraying fire pretty much uninterrupted for extended periods of time. More enemies of this type would certainly help.

I’d love to join. Tacos must die!

Another couple of things you might be able to work in… Consider bleed on weaponswap and poison on next hit after weaponswap sigils. These give you a couple more conditions to play with and scale from, plus they’re weaker conditions that will get applied more frequently, so they’ll act as covers against condition removal for your confusion.

I run a support/damage/defense hybrid build. It’s tanky, it keeps allies alive, it keeps a ton of might on the party, it hands out boons like candy (that also happen to last a really, really long time), and it ensures that enemies have a very difficult time stunning or immobilizing my allies. I heal for around 700 on a dodgeroll, and with perma-vigor I can dodge every 5 seconds. BUT, I’m not expecting to keep an ally who won’t use his heal skill alive. I can keep an ally who gets stunned from taking a few attacks that might have one-shotted him, give protection to mitigate the next few, dodge next to him once or twice and pop VoR to give out some extra health and regeneration as a buffer, and in general help keep them alive until they can use their main heal.

What I can’t do is save them from their own idiocy if they refuse to use their main heal, or if they insist on “tanking” every hit. If I play right, everyone on my team will have an easier time staying alive and dealing damage, and I’ll deal pretty impressive damage myself. However, my skilled play is not a replacement for a team with their heads screwed on straight, and it never will be.

These forums seem to have an issue with logging me out semi-randomly (Firefox 22.0). It usually happens the first time I attempt to post for the day. My login information is still shown in the upper right of the page as usual, and I get the “reply” box when browsing topics, but when I attempt to use the in-topic reply box to post a reply to the topic, it loses the reply entirely and forces me to log in again. I’ve lost several fairly lengthy and thought-out posts due to this, rendering it quite annoying.

My sylvari guard has a few styles, based on what he’s doing, but here’s his “evil” look (more of a dark fire look than necessarily “evil”):

@Hunter

For WvW, I run a 0/10/10/30/20 build, though in PvE I’ll run a more aggressive variant for more might-stacking (0/15/0/30/25). I have a hair over 1600 power base, and generally make a point of farming up Bloodlust stacks before I go out roaming, giving me around 1850 power. I enter a fight with a minimum of 4 might stacks, and within 5 seconds of entering combat I’ll have 12-15 (an amount I can sustain indefinitely), pushing me solidly above 2250 power. This lets me land Whirling Wrath for an easy 5k against a CC’d enemy, and Mighty Blow drops a nice crit of 3500 or so that’s much harder to avoid. Between the two (or sword/focus if I’m feeling particularly aggressive), I can land extremely painful burst damage. Sword/focus, in particular, can land a burst of 6-10k on unwary or CC’d opponents.

I have nearly 3k armor, high uptime on protection, and around 17k health, rendering direct damage from a single target fairly minimal. Sustain-wise, between VoR, regeneration, and dodgeroll healing, I end up with a bit under 490 healing/second average (reduced if I don’t dodgeroll every time I reach full endurance), not including my main heal, any heals applied by weapons, and VoR activation. Perma-retaliation means enemies have to think about hitting me, and rapid-hit skills pose nearly as much of a danger to the user as they do to me in many cases.

Fighting thieves, too, is as much a matter of practice and learning their tricks as anything. Most thief players rely on tricks available to the thief, rather than beating their opponent in a toe-to-toe fight. For every trick, though, there is a counter-trick or three available to the Guardian.

To list one: thieves love standing in blinding powder, which greatly reduces your DPS and makes landing direct hits with skills like Mighty Blow difficult or impossible to land. To counter, use Whirling Wrath, or drop target and use Mighty Blow in such a direction that you’ll land just outside the powder radius—Mighty Blow’s damage radius is slightly larger. Even better, follow this up with Ring of Warding: your opponent is now locked in a small area with you unless he burns an elite for stability or a shadowstep to escape. Or, just use Virtue of Justice and GS5 (without the pull), and step back out of range. If he shoots you with pistol mainhand, he’ll take as much damage from retaliation as he deals, plus he’ll have around 900-1000 damage/second ticking on him from burning and the chain DoT. If he has a dagger mainhand rather than pistol, stand back and laugh as he takes several thousand damage from the DoTs. If he uses heartseeker to leap out and stealth, yank his chain and Whirling Wrath to burst off enough health to make him reconsider approaching you (even if he’s in stealth), while using something with Aegis to counter the followup backstab if he does decide to continue the fight. If he’s using sword, he can try to teleport to you out of the blinding powder, but he’s just wasted initiative using blinding powder, has probably burned initiative using sword 2, and is now sitting next to you, out of stealth (a decidedly unhealthy place to be).

Celestial armors are solid, though you do have to be careful: while celestial is great to an extent, the more of it you add the more supportive (and less damaging) you become. The extra healing power is fun, since we get plenty of ways to heal (and with staff, two 1:1-scaling heals). Likewise, it’s not all healing, so you still deal reasonable damage. However, if you go too supportive, you tend to lose the ability to solo camps easily, and more of your 1v1 fights have a tendency to end as a stalemate.

I’d say celestial armor OR trinkets, OR a mixture of both are all effective, but straight-celestial is probably not as viable of an option unless you intend to relax on the damage aspect of the build and concentrate on support for a small group.

As it stands, I run straight-celestial trinkets (though with a Berserker backpiece), Knight’s head/chest/legs/some weapons, and Berserker shoulders/gloves/legs/other weapons.

I run roaming Guardian in WvW. It’s very doable, and incredibly strong if you get your build and playstyle right. While the build I run is designed to solo roam, its effectiveness grows in a 5-man to the point of absurdity. I have no problems with thieves, even good thieves. I’ve dueled a few to a standstill, and killed most of the rest. The only thing that can really get to me in a 1v1 is a very good mesmer, and that mostly because I haven’t figured out many of the subtle tricks a mesmer can pull.

I don’t deal the highest DPS (2.5-3k/sec or so, with bursts going slightly higher, and perma-retaliation added onto that), and I’m not equipped for zergs (I generally don’t use a ranged weapon unless zerging, and I’m not durable enough to survive concentrated fire on the front lines for very long at all). What I do have, however, is permanent uptime on several boons and 33% minimum uptime on all boons. Healing-wise, though I don’t use AH or MF, regeneration ticks for ~200 health/sec, VoR ticks for ~150 health/sec, and dodgerolls heal for 700 (with perma-vigor, dodgerolls are available every 5 seconds, for a potential 140 health/sec). Perma-retaliation and high protection uptime make many enemy actions punish them nearly

I have 9 instant-cast AoE condition removals and one automatic removal every 10 seconds, two stunbreaks, >33% stability uptime, and perma-swiftness, plus weapon mobility, so once I reach melee range it’s nearly impossible to get me off my target; debilitating conditions can be stripped instantly (and often converted into boons), stun effects can be ignored or broken.

And that’s all solo effects. In groups, I give 150 additional toughness to the group, provide considerable might-stacking and other boons, and throw around a lot of CC. Plus, all of those condi removals and the 33% stability uptime apply to the group as well, and in a pinch I can help a teammate out by dodgerolling at them a couple of times, and pop VoR and VoC for a total of around 3400 healing (plus another 2000 if I decide to take a staff), plus adding regeneration for 8s (another ~1600 health), an extra aegis, and 8 seconds of protection (all of which applies to me and up to 4 targets within 1200 range as well).

The forums ate the post the last time I attempted to post it, but let’s see if I can recreate this. It’s a bit outside the prescribed format, but I think you’ll forgive me. This set of three skills is actually the basis for a mainhand spear (land-based).

• Throw/Mighty Throw/Smiting Spear
• Weapon: Mainhand spear 1 (land)
• Skill description: Throw launches a slow spear with a significant projectile arc. Mighty Throw launches a spear that deals more damage, inflicts 2 stacks of vulnerability for 8s, travels faster, and has a flatter arc. Smiting Spear throws a fast spear with no arc that penetrates up to 3 enemies, dealing splash damage and applying 1s of burning to each affected enemy. Throw and Mighty Throw, if chained together immediately, should both strike a target at max range nearly simultaneously.
• Cast time: 1/2s, 1/2s, 1s
• Recharge: None (autoattack chain)
• Visual effects: Throw/Mighty Throw are simple spear projectiles. Smiting Spear throws a spear encased in blue fire.
• Numbers: Balanced to deal approximately 600/900/900 damage without crits and with 2000 power, with the AoE burst from Smiting Spear striking a target hitting for approximately 300 damage (without crit) in a radius of 150 around each target it passes through This AoE has a 3-target cap. 900 range.

• Symbol of Rage
• Weapon: Mainhand spear 2 (land)
• Skill description: Throws a spear high into the air. When it lands, it creates a Symbol of Rage at the target location that gives Fury to allies, as well as damaging and inflicting Blind on enemies.
• Cast time: 1s
• Recharge: 10s
• Visual effects: Throws a glowing blue spear high into the air. When it lands, it sticks into the ground, creating a symbol around it.
• Numbers: Grants 1s of Fury and inflicts 1s of Blind each second. Damage dealt is comparable to other Guardian symbol skills. Symbol lasts for 3s. 900 range.

• Light of the Heavens
• Weapon: Mainhand spear 3 (land)
• Skill description: Calls down an intense ray of light on the target location. Enemies affected are burned and chilled, while allies gain regeneration.
• Cast time: 1.5s
• Recharge: 20s
• Visual effects: a very bright, light blue beam of light from above appears on the targeted location. Nearly opaque, making it hard to see through.
• Numbers: Each second for 5 seconds, enemies in the target area receive 3s of burning and 1s of chill. Allies receive 2s of regeneration. Deals no direct damage. 150 radius. 900 range.

The intent is to set up Spear as a true DPS ranged weapon with some basic AoE damage capability, as well as giving Guardians a weapon that makes significant, intentional use of conditions (giving burning builds a fairly powerful alternative to the Scepter). While superficially similar to the scepter, the Spear as shown would fulfill those roles far better than the Scepter, while not completely avoiding the Guardian’s supportive aspects. To balance this, the spear has relatively little CC compared to the Scepter (while Light of the Heavens chills enemies that stay in it, enemies are highly incentivized to get out as quickly as possible), and its supportive aspects are a tradeoff between damage and support.

Your current build is nearly pure ‘zerk, so yeah, you’re going to go down if something breathes on you too hard. Part of the reason you’re feeling weak, too, is because you’re not able to stand toe-to-toe with something and consistently beat it down in melee, so you’re probably having to drop back to use scepter frequently—which drops your DPS (especially AoE DPS) significantly. Altruistic Healing is nice and all, and the 300 toughness from Valor and 300 vitality from Honor are helpful, but they’re not a perfect substitute for having some defensive stats on gear. As a general rule, trait for the effects you want, gear to fill in the stats around that.

A few other things that will help you out:

• You don’t have an on-kill sigil. I realize you’re having trouble staying alive, but if you solve that problem, a sigil of Bloodlust to replace the ruby orb on your scepter will do wonders once you get it stacked up.
• You want enough durability and sustainability to stay in melee, where your damage is the highest. Let’s face it: without knowing every fight against every enemy as well as what all of your teammates are going to do perfectly in advance, and without assuming absolutely perfect play, you’re going to take hits. Heck, in WvW you’re going to take hits anyway. That being the case, you need more durability if you’re going to stay in melee with enemies for any sustained period of time.
• Healing power is pretty strong. Your main heal scales 1:1.25, and dodgerolls (which you should be doing frequently) scale 1:1. You may consider replacing a few pieces of armor or trinkets with Celestial gear. They have lesser amounts of power and precision, plus nearly the same crit damage, but you gain 3 defensive stats (toughness, vitality, and healing power) that will all help you out. The condition damage is pretty meh, as is magic find, but you’re still “getting your money’s worth” by using the other 6 stats.
• Consider dropping Retributive Armor to pick up Strength in Numbers. You’ll lose around 2% crit chance, but you’ll gain 4-5% damage reduction. In general, the convert % of stat A to stat B traits aren’t particularly worthwhile.

I run 0/15/0/30/25 or 0/10/10/30/20 depending on what I’m doing, and I have since launch (though the second alteration is a more recent development). Given good gear stats, it’s durable, deals moderate-high damage (2.5-3k DPS on average, with bursts up to 5k), and doesn’t suffer from kiting issues (I have 9 AoE condi removals, a passive removal every 10 seconds, 2 stunbreaks, 33% groupwide uptime on Stability, and perma-Swiftness). It works beautifully, both for general PvE and WvW. It’s also an incredible asset to groups, capable of handing out boons like candy, and having them last an incredibly long time. It even provides a fair bit of group healing in a pinch.

There’s a number of builds that I can see using it. I’ve personally seen ele, ranger, engineer, guardian, and necro builds that can make very effective use of celestial gear, mostly in WvW or other similar scenarios. Since the total stat allocation via celestial gear is much higher (and note, that’s ignoring the magic find), it frees up points from traits/runes/sigils to be used for specific effects, rather than stats, while maintaining effectiveness in other areas.

So, allow me to provide an example I’ve been tinkering with: http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/elementalist/?1.0|b.0.h1i.8.0.h5|0.0.0.0.0.0|0.7g.0.7g.0.71.0.71.0.7i.0.7i|0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.2s.0|k57.a3.0.f5.p56|30.d|1m.20.1u.24.29|e

Since this builder doesn’t have celestial armor yet, I left off armor/trinkets. For a full set of celestial, put in 436 for power, precision, condi damage, toughness, vitality, and healing power, 58 for critical damage, and 44 for magic find. Taking into account the sigil of Corruption, add another 250 condi damage (686 total). You can also assume the presence of around 12 stacks of might and around 50% fury uptime. Two stunbreaks (editor is missing the stunbreaks added to the glyph and signet in the recent balance patch). You apply conditions with massive duration constantly, no matter what you’re doing. Attunement swapping poisons on next attack. 30% chance to burn on crit, with roughly 33% crit chance (not including fury). High bleed applications in earth (3 stacks for a very substantial duration on autoattack, Churning Earth applies 8 stacks). 30% chance to apply either more huge-duration burning (or a long-duration debilitating condition on hit) thanks to Glyph of Elemental Power. It looks almost like a condi build…

And yet, it deals unignorable direct damage: 73% crit damage is reminiscent of a berserker build, the 33% crit chance (boosted to 53% much of the time) is significant enough to apply the high crit damage consistently, and power, while not high by berserker standards, is at least significant (and is further boosted by might, as is condition damage).

Defensively, healing power helps out all of our various heals: Glyph of Elemental Harmony alone gives us over 50% regeneration uptime (if used consistently in water) and scales with a .75 ratio on the direct heal; Cleansing Wave, Water Trident, and Healing Ripple all get a nice 1.0 scaling ratio. Even Soothing Mist gets a tiny ratio (.05 per second, for an extra 29 health/second). While not exactly bunkerish, we also get enough health and armor to soak up a few hits, with over 19% damage reduction via toughness, and over 16,500 health.

You cannot replicate these stats to this extent without celestial gear. You can debate the build’s effectiveness all you want (I’ve found it remarkably effective in small-group combat in WvW), but you cannot ignore the fact that if an opponent has a weakness, this build can find and exploit it. Vulnerable to kiting? Meet perma-cripple. Burst damage? Say hello to constant weakness, significant self-healing, kiting, and significant return burst damage. Forget your condi removal? You’ll get beaten down by conditions. Left your toughness weak? Burst damage via crits will make you wish you hadn’t.

Is it as good for PvE, where direct damage reigns supreme and ‘zerker is often considered the only way to be effective? No, not necessarily, though it’ll still have a blast (pun completely intended). The build isn’t minmaxed for any one thing, and Celestial fits that ethos perfectly.

I’m no burst specialist, but Guardians do have a set of very, very lethal burst combos that are actually harder to avoid than burst from many other professions. Things you’ll probably want to look into:

Grandmaster Radiance trait: Right-Handed Strength (gives +15% crit chance to all one-handed weapons, one of the best single stat-granting traits in the game)
Meditations, especially Judge’s Intervention and Smite Condition
Focus offhand
GS/Sword burst
Mace 3 (while mace isn’t a DPS weapon, it puts out a surprising amount of pain)

Consider also Monk’s Focus (30-point in Valor), giving you some self-healing when using meditations, along with the toughness from the Valor line. Between the two, as well as Guardians’ natural survivability, you should be able to stay alive pretty well so long as you’re approaching unaware targets (which you should be, as with any burst build).

Burst combinations that I know of (somewhat limited, as this isn’t my normal playstyle):

• Pre-cast focus 5, wait a couple of seconds, hit mace 3, Judge’s Intervention, block an attack to trigger mace 3’s counterattack, Smite Condition (hopefully you have at least one condi by now).
• Pre-cast focus 5, walk up to a projectile-using enemy, hit sword 3, as he runs or dodges away (the natural counter to sword 3) use Judge’s Intervention to continue landing the burst damage. Focus 5 should detonate at some point during this fight for additional burst. Follow up with the sword’s lethal autoattacks.
• CC/damage chain: start out with greatsword. Hit an enemy (or several!) with Binding Blade, immediately use the pull, swap to hammer, use Ring of Warding. Mighty Blow, land a couple of autoattacks (a full chain if you can!). Banish into the side of the Ring of Warding just before it ends. Mighty Blow again (if possible), use hammer 3 for the immobilize. Land more autoattacks/another Mighty Blow and/or swap back to Greatsword for the leap and/or Whirling Wrath to finish. Add in Judge’s Intervention, Smite Condition, and Bane Signet as desired (Bane Signet is particularly nasty). Note that most or all of this chain can be avoided if your opponent has stability: check for the presence of this boon and/or make sure your opponent doesn’t have any more of it available to use before initiating this burst combo! It’s not quite as fast of a kill as more aggressive sets, but it has the advantage of only having one good counter (stability).

Good to see you doing this, Brutaly! I’ve considered shooting for Celestial with my own build, though I’ve dismissed it for now (my own playstyle prefers a higher-DPS setup, as I rarely enter zergs in WvW or situations where I’ll encounter large amounts of unfocused fire). That being the case, I might make a suggestion for runes/traits to counter the inevitable loss of DPS you’ll encounter: you might look into might-duration stacking (or generalized boon-duration stacking). Through runes/traits/food/sigils, you should be able to maintain a consistent 15-25 stacks of might quite easily (even without the staff); that might make up a bit for the loss of direct power.

I’ve noted in the past that 25 stacks of might is huge, giving 875 power and condition damage; being able to maintain that would not only give you something like 218 extra DPS from burning, plus the direct-damage benefits.

One other consideration you might make is that with the healing power from straight celestial gear, AH’s usefulness starts to drop. A build with 20 in virtues and 25 in honor gets a very substantial amount of passive healing from absolute resolution, plus a massive heal-on-dodge if you’re using straight celestial (near or even over 1k per dodge). 10 points in Valor now nets you +250 toughness with Strength In Numbers, which is very strong as well for the point allocation if you can afford to go 30 into Honor for Pure of Voice (need something to replace the condition removal lost from Purity).

Retaliation’s purpose right now, both in PvE and PvP, is to punish burst-hit mechanics. This plays a role in PvP of making opponents think, rather than simply spamming rapid-hitting attacks. These rapid attacks have the advantages of making dodging less useful (thinking of something like thief’s Unload: even if you dodge through the bulk of the attack, you’re still going to get hit by a couple of the shots), as well as mostly ignoring other boons such as aegis and conditions such as blind. That being the case, rapid attacks have very little counterplay; retaliation is the answer to them.

In PvE, its purpose is a bit more nebulous, but having access to it for those few situations in which mobs employ rapid attacks is still useful. As such, it’s an additional tool to help out DPS in conjunction with protection/regeneration, not necessarily something to focus on.

In both of these scenarios, setting retaliation up as a % of incoming damage would do away with its original purpose.

• In PvP, it would be a counter to all damage skills. Case in point: Kill Shot compared to Unload. Currently, Unload takes far more retaliation damage. If retaliation returned a percentage of damage dealt, Kill Shot would be hit far harder than Unload. Furthermore, it would lose its primary current function: that is, giving some method to counter those rapid-attack skills. It would still counter them to an extent, but it would counter everything else to the same extent, converting it from a counter to a primary damage source.
• In PvE, I could sort of see it. However, it still wouldn’t change the fact that enemy attacks would hurt you a lot more than they’d hurt the mobs, and it would change it from a situational counter to specific enemies to a boon that all parties would want to have, permanently, in order to maximize DPS (albeit incidental DPS). Despite running a build that’s capable of providing permanent retaliation easily, I don’t want to see it become an absolute requirement in groups. As it stands it’s a nice-to-have, not a requirement, and it should remain such.

It’s handy in some scenarios, but it’s a sideshow, not a first line of damage (similar to our burning output). There are scenarios where you can’t avoid 100% of the damage, and other scenarios (enemies with flamethrowers, anyone?) where having retaliation (and hopefully protection) on an entire group and facetanking will kill enemies faster than any amount of direct damage would. Those situations are few and far between, but they do occur.

Depends on the situation. If you have 15 in honor, chances are you have permanent (or near-permanent) vigor anyway, so using a dodge every now and then for healing when your endurance is full isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and you’re rarely at full health in WvW except out-of-combat. That being the case, the extra healing power will help keep you topped off. You can dodge 4 times for every Empower you can get off if you have vigor (ignoring the cooldown reduction; that reduces it to 3 times per Empower).

foofad.5162:

The second build is a terrible use of Cleric’s gear since you have zero useful heals to take advantage of your healing power. You only really see Clerics gear used in conjunction with healing weapons like Mace and Staff on account of their direct heals and Regeneration output. So keep that in mind.

Slight disagreement on his healing power being entirely useless in build #2: he has 15 points in honor, which scales 1:1 with healing power, and I believe the shield has a .8 scale on its second activation.

That being said, if you’re running healing power, staff and mace/shield are your best weapons to take advantage of it (greatest number of weapon skills that take advantage of healing power).

It certainly increases the toughness listed on my hero panel by 150…

When you gear for permanent swiftness via pure boon duration, though, you’re not just gearing for swiftness—you also get a lot of other benefits, including (with shouts) a minimum of 33% uptime on every boon in the game (PvE/WvW—this setup isn’t possible in sPvP).

Consider the build I’ve been tinkering with for post-patch WvW: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARSlYgqCHFyvDfIFSmiVCBtKQQYPwI4rjuKkQA-j0CBYLQYMAEEQkIAJPKrJQCiltht6KalXBRVjIqWXDTIAzLAA-w

Permanent personal swiftness/retaliation/vigor, 66% uptime on group swiftness, 33% personal minimum uptime on every boon in the game. Dodgerolls heal for around 700, permanent vigor/swiftness plus the greatsword make you surprisingly agile in combat, plenty of CC with the hammer and GS pull, 9 condi removals (all AoE) plus the heal signet passive, and surprising durability thanks to high protection uptime and 250 toughness for 10 trait points in Valor.

It truly begins to shine in small group combat, though: most of the benefits you provide are AoE, so one or two of these things in a 5-man mean it’s nearly impossible to CC anyone in the group.

zTales.4392:

Is there any way to make the Guardian mobile and fast? I have a few questions regarding the subject.

1) Is permaswiftness possible without the Staff?
2) Are there any +X% movement speed buffs?
3) What are the fastest weapons the Guardian has (attack speed)?
4) What are the most mobile weapons the Guardian has?

I’m a Guardian newbie, obviously! Help would be appreciated! XP

1. Permaswiftness is indeed possible without the staff. SY + Retreat, 2 superior monk, 2 superior water, 2 major water runes.
2. No, not really, unless you count perma-swiftness.
3. Fastest weapons would probably be the sword and greatsword.
4. Most mobile are, again, sword/greatsword. A caveat remains for the hammer, as well—it has some minor mobility, but its primary form of “mobility” is actually restricting the mobility of enemies. With practice, it’s easily possible to lock down an opponent for 5 seconds of free hammertime.

Not really anything drastically new post-patch. I would say, if you want a slightly more defensive/group defensive support build, it’s now possible to drop 5 radiance and 5 virtues to pick up 10 in Valor for the +150 toughness to allies. This will drop your damage a bit (50 less precision, no bonus damage from boons [losing a max of 9% damage], 5% lower boon duration, slightly slower recharge rate on virtues, no might stacking on PvE mob kills), but in return you’ll gain 250 toughness (150 of which applies to allies), 10% crit damage, and aegis when your health drops below 50%.

End result of the traits would be 0/10/10/30/20, taking signet mastery, strength in numbers, superior aria, empowering might, pure of voice, vengeful, and absolute resolution. I can see this variation being very strong in WvW, especially in small-group roaming. The Renewed Justice trait, while amazing in PvE, loses a lot of its usefulness in WvW small group roaming(the ideal place for this build) , where it often won’t trigger at a useful time (I.E. the “when you kill an enemy”, is often not at a time you’d want to use the AoE blind or might-stacking, and the extra retaliation is unnecessary to maintain perma-retal).

Also, the greatsword got a pretty significant buff to its autoattack, making it particularly attractive with this build since the enhanced boon duration lets the autoattack stack even more might. It’s now pretty easy to maintain 4 stacks of might while attacking a single target, and 9-12 while attacking 3 targets—and that’s without empowering might, might-on-crit/swap sigils, blast finishers in fire fields, and virtue of justice. With all of that factored in, 15-20 stacks of personal might isn’t that unreasonable to expect.

uberkingkong.8041:

People like playing skyrim, because it became open source.

Open source keeps people playing it by playing other peoples mods than by time they get burnt out from the mods an expansion comes out.

Skyrim is not open-source. It has a well-understood modding structure and, to some extent, an API, plus a fairly flexible game structure. Open-source means the source code of the game itself is released, not just a way to interact with said source code. The people that deal with that source code still need to know exactly what they’re doing, or Bad Things Happen™.

GW2, by its very nature, cannot become open-source effectively, as most MMOs cannot. Consider the repercussions: one tiny logical mistake or poorly-designed interaction can bring down a server when there are hundreds of people interacting with it. How on earth are these miraculously-appearing 300,000 people claimed by another poster supposed to coordinate on making changes to a live game in such a way as to avoid these mistakes, which largely stem from a lack of coordination?

We had a very fun experience in AR with the mixed group I took in (one guildmate, 3 pugs, no voice comms). I did my best to explain the fights for the 2 people that weren’t familiar with them, and the first bossfight went without a hitch—until the last phase.

At that point, everyone except my guildmate and me died miserably, leaving us to duo the final golem, which we did with ease. My guildmate is a pure berserker staff elementalist—you think ‘zerker warriors are squishy, try it with cloth armor and 11k health! Even with that squishiness, though, he tends to last longer than many defense-specced players I’ve seen, mostly because of smart play and long range.

Then came the final bossfight. The first combat phase wasn’t so bad, though a couple players got downed unexpectedly thanks to Mai’s shadowstep attack. The first cannon phase was a little shaky—one person died; there’s really not much of a chance to res downed people in that phase, so going down there is nearly a death sentence.

The second combat phase went smoothly enough after we ressed the dead guy. The second cannon phase went fairly smoothly, with the same guy dying again and one other going down.

Third combat phase, smooth enough. The third cannon phase, however… Everyone died except me. A couple people were having trouble seeing the red circles, one didn’t have enough vigor/endurance to dodge when necessary, and one just flat-out caught an unlucky break and got flattened by a horde of fire and lightning balls. I had permanent personal swiftness and permanent vigor up, which made the entire dodging sequence trivial (especially in combination with the GS leap). So, Mai’s at 25%. I’m the only person left alive. I might have been able to DPS the boss down, but instead (for whatever silly reason) I decided to res the rest of the allies. So, I dodged, kited, and alternated between two allies, ressing them as much as possible. Eventually, I got one up. He ran off to res another ally while I began to finish off the other one I’d started to res.

Mai promptly teleported to him, reached into her bag of kittens, said “kitten this guy in particular!” and dropped him again.

So, I left the 90%-ressed ally, sprinted across the entire arena, ressed the downed guardian, drew Mai aggro, sprinted back across, and ressed my other ally, at which point we were able to get everyone up and finish off the boss.

Lessons learned: the final fight is interesting, because it offers multiple ways to complete it safely. Being durable lets you fend off Mai easily. Having decent durability is almost a must. However, it’s not the only thing involved: less-tangible bonuses, like uptime on vigor and swiftness, your character’s general mobility, and CC/condi cleansing, are often the difference between life and death in the kiting phase.

25 a hit doesn’t sound like much, until you consider that WW hits up to 9 times (per target!), binding blade hits up to 5, each autoattack hits up to 3, leap of faith hits up to 3, and symbol of wrath hits up to 5, 5 times. In a group of 5 mobs, chaining off all of your skills and going through one autoattack rotation could potentially heal you for up to 2175, which is by no means inconsequential. Whirling wrath alone contributes over half of that, clocking in at a potential 1125 healing.

Plus, if what I’ve heard is true, it also has a special synergy with weapons like the scepter and longer-duration symbol weapons, since any direct damage dealt while holding the greatsword heals you for 25: throw down an immobilize, smite, and swap to greatsword, then watch as the heals come trickling in as you leap in towards your target.

Zeal just got a very, very interesting 20-point trait for greatsword users. I highly suspect we’ll be seeing a few people spec 20 into zeal for that. It’s not competitive with AH, but it doesn’t have to be—now you can take 20 zeal and 30 valor, with 20 points left for discretionary use, and get an incredible amount of healing on autoattacks (20 honor, for instance: it’s entirely possible to trigger healing from the zeal trait, plus healing from up to 9 boons at once just on the third hit of the GS autoattack). It’s still limiting enough that you have to give up something in order to get that extra healing, but it’s also incredibly powerful over time.

I may be a few minutes late, given a few RL responsibilities that day—it shouldn’t be more than 10 minutes, but depending on the tournament structure Darek might need to take my spot for the first game.

In order to explain why this is broken, let me first explain my build. I run a Boonway guardian build. It has 33% minimum uptime on every boon in the game. It has permanent swiftness, permanent retaliation, permanent vigor, and keeps a consistent 10 stacks of might (5-6 on allies) at all times. It has near permanent regeneration, and well over 100% uptime on protection while using the hammer. When I use Save Yourselves, I enter a virtual godmode, at which point it is next to impossible for an enemy to kill me for the next 16 seconds, without the use of extreme boonstripping mechanics.

Now, add in signet of inspiration. Guardians have a trait that improves signets’ passive effects, which I’m assuming would also apply to SoI, probably by increasing the frequency or duration of applied boons, and another trait giving 20% reduced signet cooldown.

So, why is this broken? First, the signet would give a significant addition to my base 33% boon uptime. Coupled with SYG, it would allow me to grant 66% stability uptime to allies. Coupled with Save Yourselves, I could give that personal godmode to allies for 16 seconds. It would allow me to grant fury to allies, which guardians currently cannot do at all (adding completely new capabilities to the class). Coupled with the insane amount of boons my virtues grant, I could grant incredible amounts of regeneration, protection, might, and retaliation to allies. You think the complaining in WvW about retaliation is bad now? Try it when I can grant perma-retaliation to an entire group.

To look at the end effect, specifically in WvW: Imagine you’re in a small 5-man group, battling another 5-man in an open field. Your enemies have a Boonway guardian equipped with signet of inspiration. You do not. Your enemies can now move 33% faster, dodge more frequently, take 33% less damage, crit 20% more often, can’t be CC’d, hit considerably harder (both directly and with conditions), deal damage whenever you touch them, and heal for 3.2k over the next 16 seconds. Your players may have a few of these effects, though probably not for as long, and not all at once.

It’s not going to take all of those 16 seconds to turn your team into a puddle.

The only possible way I could accept SoI being given to guardians is if it was made an elite skill, with a very long cooldown (and probably replacing Tome of Whatever). Even then, it would still be brokenly overpowered.

If you’re solo, meditations with monk’s focus are better than AH, by a long shot. If you have allies nearby (ideally at least 4 others), AH is viable; but you should make sure you’re giving allies boons as well in order to maximize the healing from it.

Knight’s gear is a pretty valid choice, but keep in mind Guardians have low starting HP. For a good tanky build, you’ll probably want upwards of 15k health, so you’ll want to get some vitality from somewhere. Perhaps a mix of Soldier’s and Knight’s gear would be ideal for you?

Name: Kharel
Account Name: Kharel Arhew.1437
Rank: 7

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Hundred Blades is a high total damage number but keep in mind that it is a four-second channel, and that is four seconds NOT spent auto-attacking. That means that HB doesn’t actually deal 20k damage, it deals 20k minus the damage of about 6 swings from the auto-attack. The formula for overall DPS is [auto-attack DPS + additional DPS for each skill / recharge time].

I see what you’re getting at here, and it’s an excellent way of looking at things, mathematically.

Say skill A does 2k damage with no cooldown and a 1/2s channel. This means its DPS is 4k. This is your autoattack.

Say skill B does 20,000 damage with 8s cooldown and a 4s channel, but roots you in place during the 4s channel. This means its DPS is 20,000 damage over 4 seconds, triggered once every 12 seconds (8s cooldown at the end of the 4s channel = 12s recharge time). That skill’s total DPS is roughly 1667 total, or 5,000 while active (20,000 damage over 4s).

However, we also have to take into account DPS of skill A for comparative purposes: over 4s, we could unleash 8 attacks, dealing 2k damage apiece, for 16,000 damage. Skill B, then, deals 20,000 damage during the same time skill A deals 16,000 damage. Thus, it’s a 4,000 damage increase over the use of skill A during the same time period.

The formula for overall DPS, then, is 4000 + (4000 / 12) = 4,333 damage per second while using skill A constantly, except when skill B is available (and triggering skill B on cooldown).

Though the 20k damage number in 4 seconds is very impressive, its net effect on overall DPS is surprisingly small, and only adds up to the effect of a single extra hit from skill A every 6 seconds. It’s up to the player and the situation as to whether 333 DPS is worth being rooted in place a third of the time.

DeathPanel.8362:

Everything that he mentioned as an advantage in his post are achieved by gear and rune choices, not trait choices and therefore can easily be achieved by any AH variant plus the AH build has far higher survival, and more damage.

Not trying to bring up an old argument here or anything; DeathPanel and I disagree very strongly on how necessary AH is. That being said, the quoted text is not exactly correct. AH builds lack the condition removal, perma-swiftness without staff, 33% uptime on every boon in the game, and the VoJ spam combination that I use. Thus, it trades a very significant amount of mobility and groupwide condition removal for increased durability.

I’ve actually seen this in fellow guardians in many cases, and it’s kind of sickening. Guardian autoattacks (especially with our most popular weapons) are actually quite powerful, and often provide amazing bonus effects. Seeing a greatsword autoattack crit for 2k is by no means uncommon, and you can get several of them off between whirling wrath autoattacks!

The greatsword’s third strike gives you might (up to 3 stacks depending on how many targets you hit). The hammer gives you protection on the third strike. The mace heals you on the third strike. The sword procs burning from VoJ at least once on every autoattack chain, and has the highest autoattack damage of any weapon in the Guardian arsenal (single-target). Scepter has the highest single-target ranged damage of any ranged weapon in the game, according to a dev, but many of those projectiles won’t land… So, you’d better spew as many of them out as you can while you’re waiting on other cooldowns. The staff has an amazing cone autoattack with more multi-target damage potential than many other classes’ melee weapons.

There’s really no reason not to autoattack every single moment you’re not doing something else.

I believe I gave this build to you earlier, but just in case my memory is failing me:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARSlYgqCHFyvDf4ESOjVCBtPQQYPwI4rjA-j0CBYLDRjgIaUGBJ5RZNBSQsuNsVXRr8KIqaDqWXDT3CRIAzjBA-w

This is a mixed support/DPS build with extremely high mobility and excellent solo capability, in both PvE and WvW. Virtues traits can be swapped to increased consecration duration and spirit weapon duration, and SYG/Retreat swapped to wall of reflection and shield of the avenger if you end up in a zerg. Spam virtue of justice whenever it’s up when taking a camp, as it will refresh with each kill, giving you extra might and an AoE blind. Use line of sight or GS5 when you first enter a camp to group up enemies, dodgeroll frequently for the heals once you start losing health, and use GS 2 and hammer 2 for burst damage. GS3 gives another great AoE blind and mobility tool, hammer 5 can be used when you need to fall back for a few seconds to let your heal come back up or otherwise kite enemies, and Renewed Focus lets you spam all your virtues for more boons and effects.

You have permanent swiftness without using a weapon slot for the staff, so you can maintain excellent mobility both in and out of combat. Stand Your Ground helps you ignore both enemy players’ CC and guards’ stun skills. When taking a camp, the warrior guards will attempt to stun you immediately after they throw bolas at you when first engaged—either allow the bolas to hit you and cleanse the immobilize with SYG + Pure of Voice, giving you nearly 15 seconds of extra swiftness and nullifying the stun from the followup shield bash, or dodge the bolas and use SYG to avoid or break the stun.

Brutaly.6257:

timidobserver.7925:

If you tune your guardian build for max damage, you’ll do okay damage, but you won’t come near what most other classes are capable of.

If you build properly guardians has one of the fastest, hardest to avoid and highest bursts in the game. Just saying.
We dont need more damage, what we need is more utility in zeal that make the traits worth as much as as traits in other lines, and it doesnt have to increase our damage, tbh i would prefer survivability stuff in zeal, like zealots blade healing no matter what weapon you use.

This, definitely. Zeal’s utility is subpar compared to the other traitlines, without enough sheer damage output to compensate (and increasing damage output can only compensate so much). I get nearly as much bonus damage from going 25 into Virtues as I do going that far into Zeal, and I get far more utility for both myself and my team as a side benefit.

That being said, I run 0/15/0/30/25. That’s by no means an “aggressive” build, damage-wise. I run Celestial trinkets, Knight’s head/chest/legs, and the only ‘zerker equipment I have is my weapons and shoulders/gloves/boots. Again, that’s by no means an “aggressive” equipment set. I run shout utilities, which deal no damage. With this relatively defensive/support-based setup, I have no problem whatsoever laying down a 15k damage burst, not including burning! With Judge’s Intervention, Smite Condition, crit damage from Valor, damage boosts from Zeal and Radiance, and more aggressive gear, I would consider bursts of 20-25k to be perfectly reasonable (and even a bit on the low side)—plus, you’re mobile while bursting (and can even teleport while doing so).

The build I run is listed here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Boonway-alternative-Guardian-build

I have made some tweaks since its initial inception, so I’d recommend reading through the thread (basically, the traits are the same 0/15/0/30/25 I’ve always run, but I now run Celestial trinkets, Knight’s head/chest/legs, and Berserker shoulders/gloves/boots for a better stat spread and more general use). It also works well for PvE and dungeons. I also tinker around with different weaponsets frequently, though I’ve pretty much settled on hammer/greatsword for general roaming purposes, at the very least until scepter projectile speed gets increased.

1. This is a side effect of the build I run (Boonway), but guardians can be amazing solo roamers. The build I run provides me access to permanent swiftness, 9 condition removals, tons of blocks/blinds, and something akin to complete immunity to control effects. Between all this, I cannot be kited except by extremely skilled players and people that are specifically built for teleporting around (which tends to cripple their damage output). I can solo supply camps easily, and curbstomp 9 out of 10 thieves that attack me (and chances are the 10th one will fight to a draw). Highly skilled mesmers still give me serious trouble, but other than that, I don’t have any qualms about engaging any fight I see.

2. I don’t have much experience zerging—my build is optimized for solo roaming, so I don’t fare as well in a zerg as a build with higher durability might. Even with my build, though, Guardian does just fine with the staff. It has a huge cone autoattack that does enough damage to tag enemies, if not exactly count as a serious threat. Plus, projectile reflection/absorption is amazing in zerg fights, and we have that in spades, backed up with AoE healing and retaliation.

Guardians are brawlers. They’re designed to get in close, stay in close, and beat enemies about the head with large, heavy objects. Built right, they’re incredibly hard to kill, deal significant, consistent damage, and are nearly impossible to shut down. Even better, they provide a lot of their survivability and even some offensive capability to their allies via boons; and they don’t have to invest much effort to provide this sort of support. It simply comes naturally to them.

Built poorly, they have significant issues.

• A poor build won’t deal much damage, won’t have enough survivability due to our low healthpool, and/or won’t be able to stick to opponents in melee.
• Our ranged weaponry is nothing to write home about, and while scepter is the highest single-target damage ranged weapon in the game, it’s very weak against mobile opponents or at long range.
• Guardians have very few ways of shutting down opponents’ movement aside from hard crowd control skills and a couple of immobilizes, so an opponent with Stability is immune to most of our control.
• Many (most?) of our active condition removals are on long cooldowns, and those that aren’t are unreliable (not triggerable on-demand.

Guardians can be very strong in WvW solo roaming. I roam myself, with the Boonway build I’ve been running since launch. I’ve lost only a few 1v1 fights, and those were fights where I was simply outplayed (usually by a really good Mesmer—I haven’t encountered many of them that are good enough to give me a challenge, so I tend to get overconfident and take stupid risks).

On the other hand, I’ve won 1v2s against fellow 80s easily, won a 2v10 once, with another Boonway guardian from my guild (granted, there were several uplevels on the other side, and they arrived scattered in groups of 2-4, but still!), won countless 1v1s, and at this point can solo supply camps quickly and effortlessly, which makes me too much of a threat for enemies to ignore and often brings on some very good fights.

You have to have a build designed for it, and you have to play smart, but it’s entirely possible to not only fight off, but outright kill even those pesky thieves.

Sounds like you might be interested in a build I’ve been tinkering with since launch:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Boonway-alternative-Guardian-build/

The general idea is to support the party through massive boon uptime (which grants good personal survivability), condition removal, and stun immunity, and gear for significant damage. A nice side effect is the removal of one of the most common complaints guardians have—that is, our perceived lack of mobility. It doesn’t win any burst damage contests, but it does deal very strong, consistent DPS, and cannot be kept out of a fight (or even out of melee range for the most part), which in itself increases our DPS significantly.

One thing you won’t be as used to on Guardian coming from a ranger is the mechanics of melee. You’re definitely best off in melee 90% of the time; our ranged weapons are junk when it comes to damage output in most scenarios. However, melee doesn’t mean “stand in front of a target and attack”; quite the opposite in fact!

First things first, turn off melee assist in your settings. While it’s a handy crutch to keep you from running through targets at first, it also limits your mobility in unfortunate ways at times. Second, you’ll probably want to bind a key to “about face” (I forget the exact name of the action—basically, it makes you turn 180 degrees instantly).

Melee is all about movement, even more so than at range. Every movement you make at melee range has a profound effect on the angles of attack both you and your enemy have. Learning the effective ranges of each melee weapon on each class is crucial as well; as a greatsword user it’s entirely possible to outrange many enemies’ attacks entirely, and pocket-kite them to death, staying just out of range of their attacks while landing your own.

Sidestep and circle-strafe constantly, and don’t be afraid to run through your target and turn around, especially between attacks or while using something like Whirling Wrath (actually, the ideal place to use Whirling Wrath is standing literally inside your opponent, ensuring that all the projectiles it flings hit). Often you can avoid an attack or two via clever movement, which is significant damage mitigation in and of itself. Blinds and blocks will mitigate another attack or 11 (in my case). Protection + Signet of Judgement will reduce incoming damage by 43% when combined, which is more damage reduction than you can gain with an entire set of max-level exotic/ascended toughness-focused gear, so don’t ignore boons such as protection when setting up your build.

As far as health goes, I generally target between 14k-16k health at level 80. Toughness, protection, SoJ, blinds, blocks, and clever movement more than make up for the low health pool guardians start with.

I run a Sylvari guard, and couldn’t be happier with it. Reasonable size, I don’t feel the need to yell “RAWR LOOK AT MY GIANT SPIKY ARMOR” every time I see him, and jumping puzzles are a breeze.

Also consider scepter/dagger or staff. Dagger/dagger in PvE will have you up in a mob’s face most of the time, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you know what you’re doing, but as a newbie may cause you some problems. Scepter gives you a bit more distance to play around with, which will (generally) help you avoid a fair bit of damage. Consider it a very effective set of “training wheels” that you may actually enjoy more than the dagger/dagger set in the end.

In general, all of the classes have one common mantra: don’t soak damage up, avoid it entirely. The elementalist, with its low health pool and cloth armor class, just takes this a bit further than other classes. Until you’re used to kiting and avoiding damage, I would highly recommend avoiding melee combat.

Also, do note that the two stacking sigils in Swimsasa’s build will not function together. Replace one with an effect-on-crit or stat bonus for best results.

The boonway build I run specializes in sticking to people using a combination of perma-swiftness and extreme resistance to conditions and control effects. Very, very few classes can outrun you with perma-swiftness, especially with the amount of gap closers Guardians have on their weapons.

Good fights last night in the fight club with a couple of AoS thieves. Taught me a few more things about fighting stealth thieves, which is always a good thing. I was the POM guardian.