Guild Wars 2

The Guardian really is the sum of all it’s parts. Health can be, if you let it, a crutch. The Guardian is designed around a few passive survival buffs and a lot of active defense. Played correctly, we are far, far and away the most survivable class in the game and it really isn’t even close.

Looking at Warriors higher health pool is very dangerous as they just don’t have the means to avoid damage like we do. That fat health pool they have melts like butter compared to ours and they are welcome to it. Someone said it earlier and I believe firmly in it, Toughness. Get some! Given a choice to stack toughness or vitality I’ll take toughness every time.

I found early on that unless we plan to run in a group 24/7, we need to seriously consider our weapon setup. Choose something for high DPS in your primary set but make sure you choose something defensive to fall back on in your offset. Personally, I like Mace/Focus but can also make Hammer work just fine. These are our 2 go-to defensive weapon sets and they make our survivability skyrocket when used correctly.

It took me a little playing around with weapons/traits/skills to figure it out but now I can’t play any other class without feeling terribly squishy!

I had a different experience, then again I played my Guardian a bit different from the masses. Like everyone else, I played around with a GS build but I did not like it. It is a great way to die unless you run in a group/zerg. It just isn’t very survivable even given our classes survival options. It helps once you get the Trait at higher levels that heals you when attacking with a GS but I can’t imagine going that long without it.

In this game, range is king. I am not saying you need to live ranged 24/7 but you definitely want to have a ranged option. I played with all the weapon options and finally decided on the following. Keep in mind now, I ran solo almost exclusively except for events which everyone gravitates toward. For solo, I like;

Sceptre/Torch
Mace/Focus

The sceptre gives you the ability to open up kiting and then, when you have the mobs health down to a manageable level, let it in and nuke it down with your torch. It is almost mandatory for large-scale events as it gets too hard to see making it hard to stay in range with a melee weapon.

The mace/focus is our most defensive set. So when you bite off more than you can chew, you have a fallback set that keeps you on your feet long after anything else can.

Using these sets, I solo’d to 80 with great ease and had a lot of fun doing so. Now, I also played our classes strengths to the hilt and stacked Toughness, Vitality, and Power. In other words, I am almost impossible to kill if I play smart and I do a very nice, steady flow of DPS. I lack the burst of the GS but I am almost never at risk. I am usually the guy that ends the fight and then revives the GS Guardians

Now, in WvWvW it is another thing entirely. I absolutely love the GS there. I actually use the GS and 1H Sword as both weapons give me gap closers which prevents runners.

Bottom line, I have found the Guardian to be a very well designed class and it is pretty solid across the board. You need to think your weapon sets and traits out as there are some less efficient ways to do things but all in all, I would say that Guardian is one of the more balanced classes in the game right now. I really want to play a Necro but that class is obviously broken so I’ll continue to have a blast with my Guardian until AN figures the Necro out.