Guild Wars 2

weapon skills: 1-5
heal: E
elite: Q
utility: Z,X,C

I use A,D to strafe and hold RMB to turn because that is the default control setup I’ve encountered in basically every other third-person game besides GW2.

All boon (and condition) durations are calculated accurately to a very fine degree; they are not rounded to the nearest second or quarter second (unlike what the tooltips often show). So 30% bonus on a 6 second regen = 7.8 s regen (6 * 1.3). However it will only tick 7 times (one more tick than the unbuffed regen), because regen ticks only every second. Essentially the extra 0.8 seconds is wasted.

Valor: Purity, Retributive Armor, Altruistic Healing
Honor: Superior Aria, Writ of Exaltation, Empowering Might
Virtues: Master of Consecrations

This is what I run with most of the time. In select situations I will switch out MoC out for Vengeful (when I’m not running any consecration skills), and Empowering Might out for Pure of Voice (usually only when I need the extra condition removal, like the first part of swamp fractal or in cliffside at the two hand seals where getting rid of that 25 vuln stack on demand is way more helpful than a few extra stacks of might). Finally, you can swap out Writ of Exaltation for a lot of things: other writs or Two-Handed Mastery are probably the most useful. If you run Writ of Persistence with hammer you get 100% uptime on protection as long as you keep autoattacking even without any +boon duration.

Stacking toughness vs stacking vitality has tradeoffs both ways. Toughness doesn’t mitigate condition damage, but has better synergy with healing power (and healing in general, even if you aren’t stacking HP). To make it even more complicated, the effectiveness of toughness or vitality also depends on the value of the other stat. Adding more toughness is more effective if you have high vitality, and vice versa.

You can calculate an “effective health” based on your listed health and armor. Just multiply health by armor (or if you don’t like the super big numbers this gives you, you can peg it to an arbitrary armor value, but that tends to complicate the math). Then you can compare how adding X points of vitality compares to X points of toughness by seeing how much your effective health changes.

haviz.1340:

Your values are not damage reduction but damage increase.

Ah, you are correct. Damage reduction should be 100-100/(100+X)%. But the point I was trying to make was that adding X% more armor has a constant benefit in terms of % damage reduction regardless of how hard your opponent hits.

Since the main use for toughness is to add to your armor, I will mainly focus on armor for the rest of this post.

The damage you take is inversely proportional to armor. In other words, armor acts as a damage divider. Thus every X% increase in armor (not toughness) is equivalent to an X% decrease in damage taken from direct damage sources. This relationship is not affected by your opponent’s attack rating.

So to use your example:

• 2600 armor nets you an 8.3% decrease in damage taken compared to 2400 armor
• 2800 armor nets you a 16.7% decrease in damage taken compared to 2400 armor
• 2800 armor nets you a 7.7% decrease in damage taken compared to 2600 armor

As for how much armor/toughness you need, that all depends on the way you want to play and what you’re comfortable with. Nobody can tell you what the “right” armor value for you is. However, I will say that armor is not the only way to mitigate damage. Correct use of positioning, dodge rolls, boons/conditions (protection, aegis, blind, weakness), etc. all potentially can avoid a lot more damage than simply increasing your armor rating by a few hundred points. Armor is simply your very last line of defense.

I use an AH build in fractals and pretty much every dungeon.

Traits are 0/0/30/30/10. I have a few different sets of armor and weapons, but mostly I run with either:

• Knight’s armor + Berserker’s weapon + Knight’s accessories + Berserker’s amulet/rings/back/
• Magi’s armor + Berserker’s weapon + Knight’s accessories + Cavalier’s amulet/rings/back

As for runes, I use 2x Fire/2x Hoelbrak/2x Strength on the first set and 3x Monk’s/3x Water on the second set of armor. I use Superior Sigils of Strength on my main DPS weapon (either GS or Hammer).

The first set is more DPS oriented with might stacking and high toughness to let me stay in the enemy’s face longer while the second set is more focused toward support with higher healing power and boon duration stacking.

The stats I usually end up with are (depending on what exactly I’m wearing):

• 2600-2900 attack
• 2700-3000 armor
• 14500-16500 health
• 37-41% crit chance
• 60-70% crit damage
• 300-750 healing power

All of the above stats are unbuffed. I almost always use Master Oil to boost my crit chance to around 41-45%. Additionally with empowering might and the strength sigil I always have at least 6-8 stacks of might on me in combat, and when fighting multiple enemies will have up to 11-12 stacks from my autoattack alone (either GS or hammer), so in reality my true attack rating hovers around 2900-3400 (assuming I don’t get more might from other sources).

I mentioned before I used mostly hammer/GS as my main weapon. Which one I use really depends on the situation and the party makeup. If I have a bunch of zerker warriors/melee thieves in my party I use hammer to give them permanent protection. If there’s somebody else that is facetanking everything I will switch to GS for extra DPS and retaliation. If I have 3 eles popping all kinds of combo fields I go back to hammer and spam skill 2 on cooldown for AoE everything.

I switch up my utilities a lot depending on the fractal/situation. In fact I would say this is one of the most important things to do as a guardian. We have a lot of great utilities that can be used to superb effect under the right conditions, so there is no reason to stick with the same three all the time.

Sylvari Nec. No speed boosts (they actually screw with my timing so I prefer not to have them).

Took me 4 hours to make it the first time. Now I’m almost at the point where I can farm it.

I agree that Anet succeeded perhaps too well in getting players to do events. Many events turn into zergfests and currently there are only a few events that are at all possible to fail once you get more than ~4 people doing them. However I don’t think the solution is to simply bypass the event chain system by triggering events in the failure chain when you haven’t actually failed. I think it would be annoying in-game to see (to use the centaur bridge as an example) that the centaurs just decided to walk across the river (which honestly I don’t get why they don’t do anyway…) after I spent 5 min preventing that bridge from going up. I mean, why should I have even bothered if my actions in the end meant nothing?

I think some better solutions would be to:

1. Make events scale better. Increasing the number of enemies does not work very well because AoE simply destroys them. Give enemies more abilities, spawn tougher enemies (more Veterans/Champions), or introduce more obstacles. For example in the bridge event once you have 20 people introduce a secondary objective: maybe the centaurs start building a SECOND bridge that you now have to attack, or maybe they realize that sending 3-person teams into a death trap of marks, wells, meteor showers, and turrets isn’t the best idea and starting sieging you with catapults from another location. I think that the last option is the best because not only does it up the difficulty, it also makes things more interesting and dynamic – in the middle of events now you have to spin off separate teams to go take secondary objectives. Also I’ve read that most events scale up to 10 people. Increase this cap. I see 15-20 people doing events often enough that a 10-person cap in scaling is not adequate.

2. Increase difficulty of events the longer they go without a failure. This ensures that event chains never get stuck at the “win” stage. There are problems with this, however, as a person who just entered the zone might be put off with how difficult events are, and people might start to consciously wait for failures to happen before they start participating just to get easier loot/karma/gold/xp.

Wells are very useful, especially when soloing PvE. Aggro 10 enemies and get them to cluster, pop 3 wells on top of them (Darkness, Suffering + another one of your choice depending on situation) and watch them melt in seconds.

Staff has a lot of AoE, but in my opinion the large cooldowns on the 2 big ticket skills (3+4) and the weak damage the one spammable mark (2) does makes it more useful as a backup weapon to switch to on cooldown than as a primary). I run scepter/dagger. 2+5 on that combo offers great AoE potential.

Shelledfade.6435:

The problem with condition dmg is, do you sacrifice power, which sacrifices your duration, for toughness? Obviously you need the condition traits, that’s a must. Do you go glass for duration , or toughness? Probably toughness would be the better choice. But the bleeds must not last very long at all.

Eh. I usually sacrifice power for toughness. I don’t remember exactly, but I do something like 10/30/20/0/10, or 0/30/20/0/20 for those times I feel I need more survability/utility out of shroud. I don’t usually find my conditions are expiring too fast. I can usually maintain 8-10 stacks of bleed when focusing a target. If I run BiP I can up that to 12-14 (BiP + any one of our many condition transfer skills = instant 4-stack bleed for 10-15 seconds, depending on how many duration traits/upgrades you take, plus at least a 2-stack for 30 seconds).

Condition damage/duration isn’t what the necro is lacking. What the necro is lacking is a way to counter burst damage. We laugh conditions off like they’re nothing but even going full toughness/vit + death shroud I find I get burst down way too easily. We have very few panic buttons besides death shroud. No way to get stability other than the one trait that gives you stability when entering death shroud. No way to break stuns. Only two skills that proc protection, both with large cooldowns. In my opinion the only method we have of countering burst is preemptively through the use of conditions (i.e. weakness, blind). But you need to see a burst coming for this to work, which is a tall order especially in team fights when it’s completely possible for a warrior you’re not paying much attention to to decide to charge at you and ruin your day with a knockdown+stun+100blades.

Amen. Before I realized how awful necros were underwater, I’d try to cap the ruins in capricorn and inevitably die either to sharks (/facepalm) or the other team. Now I don’t even try anymore and just let teammates handle the underwater stuff.

OK, let’s say you’re right and stacking increases frequency and not intensity (and I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just need to do some in-game testing to verify). This still doesn’t change the fact that more stacks=more dps. It also doesn’t change the validity of my numbers (again assuming the formula on the wiki is correct).

@Shelledfade: have you noticed that when those numbers tick off, there’s more than one of them and they tick way faster than every second. I don’t know how fast they tick but I usually see something like 3 numbers popping up near instantaneously maybe every 0.5 seconds.

And I’m getting my numbers from the formula provided on the wiki. If that formula is wrong, then obviously my numbers are off and I apologize, but I’ve never actually done extensive testing in-game so until someone tells me otherwise I will go with what the wiki says.

Remember that it’s 5% of condition damage PER STACK. If you are expecting a single stack of bleed to be effective pressure (even at 1200 condition dmg) you will be sorely disappointed every time. As a necro I can consistently put and hold 8-10 stacks of bleed on a single target indefinitely. That is 800-1000 damage per second at 1200 cond dmg and lvl 80, which is a significant amount. As a sword warrior I can do even better, putting 15-20 stacks for up to 2k dmg per second from bleed alone! This is actually more dps than you can get with burning, which is supposed to be more of a “burst” condition. Now of course this still isn’t quite the 5-10k dps that burst warriors can put out with things like 100blades, but bleed is pressure, not burst: less dps but over a longer period of time.

Poison doesn’t stack in intensity, so the damage will be rather weak, but I’ve always viewed poison as anti-healing (with the 33% reduction in healing it imposes) rather than straight damage pressure.