Guild Wars 2

Manticore Five.9867:

If only it were that simple. Power scales differently between weapons, and also based on rotation.

General rule of thumb:
Power is usually better than precision. UNLESS:

• You take proc-on-crit traits that are important to you.
• You invest significantly into critdam or the Valor line, in which case you want to not have all that critdam locked away behind a low precision.

If you follow that guide, you’ll be either at or close to your optimal damage.

This for sure. My build relies on me getting crits for self healing, so not only does perc give me more damage but also more survivabilty,

I actually was screwing around last night with random builds and tried a 30/5/30/0/5 build with GS heal and meditation healing. It Actually worked decently well in group vs group combat. i had to go partial hit and run tactics but it actually had decent survivabilty between the slow and steady GS heals and the bursty meditation heals. I think it could do pretty decent with full zerkers gear with some knights/soldiers trinkets.

So I transfered servers for the week and ended up dueling on of my fellow guardian guildies. I started off with the 10/25/30/5/0 AH build and lost twice. I switched back to my 0/30/30/5/5 build and won 4 duels without any losses, 3 of which I didnt even use renewed focus. I think the issue with running the 10 in zeal for a soloist build is that if the burning gets cleansed at all you instantly lose 10% damage potential. Where as the 0/30/30/5/5 build has the added survivabilty through the 15% more crit (alon with the actual 50 more perc) and the buffs from virtues.

So I played around with the 10/25/30/0/5 build and found it to be pretty decent. Went Hammer/GS as i wanted to play it as a 2h spec and was blowing groups up pretty decent with the hammer. I did end up going back and switching a few pieces of my knights gear to soldier gear, just because i felt a bit too squishy at times. getting my health back up to 17k really seemed to help with that I still have to say that i hate meditation healing though. Feels too clunky and i waste so much because I almost always open with JI and lose out on a heal doing so. Either way it is a very decent spec and is most likely going to be my go to spec if i get massively bored with my 1h sword spec. (which I am right now for playing it too long >.<)

Short answer: It all depends on your build. You need a balance of both to do decent damage.

You know, it is funny, i actually watched your berserker build video silent. you have 2k less health than me and 500 less armor, and you call me the glass cannon. Also, i have 61% crit damage on top of my crit (which i did actually drop 10% on my 1h sword for sharpening stones and different food) I also did a little math as well. in 60 seconds with just the 1h sword auto attack you get about 120 hits in. with 75% crit that comes to 90 crits per min. At 90 crits per min I heal for a total of 6480 health (72 per AH heal). Meditation healing is about 1800 per meditation, which totals out to be 9000 health over 60 seconds. (3 smite conditions, 1 judges, 1 purity) However the difference is that my healing actually scales based on the number of targets I hit, and also activates on every single one of my attacks.

I’m sorry you cant accept the fact that my build works without video proof. Which is kinda funny considering I run a 0/30/30/5/5 build just like yourself (with different trait selections though). But you can ask some of the people I duel with how effective this build is. The only classes that give me any trouble solo are bunker ele’s, which are just a pain because they run so much, P/d thieves, for the same reason as ele’s, and a completely retaliation spec’d guardian. The only one that can generally kill me is actually the guardian, the other 2 are just annoyances. Once I get the time, and im actually on my computer ill get you a screenshot of my actual stats if you want them, but I have a feeling you wont believe me regardless.

Also bleeds, i was actually thinking about switching to that 10/25/30/0/5 build but im not to sure about it. I personally dont like meditation healing myself, mostly because i use judges and smite as damage and almost always open with zealots + judges. Ill have to try it though, since i like to try different varients every now and then.

Edit: something else i forgot about AH healing with my spec, it doesnt have the overheal worry like meditations do, using a meditation at full health does nothing, possibly lowering your actual healing amount compared to AH.

All of them indeed apply.

Ok, just because you tested it for 4 months or whatever doesn’t make you a god on the subject. You do realize that other people have been testing and tweeking builds too right? Also who said ANYTHING about being a glass cannon? I run a mix of knight’s/soldiers gear. im over 3k armor and run signet of judgement on top of that for another 10% damage reduction. Please stop assuming that just because I went high on crit I sacrificed everything else to get there. And don’t act like just because you make videos you are the only person that knows everything. I respect your build if it works for you, thats fine. I do the same for the other guardians in my guild that I talk too all the time about builds, which we all have different ones of.

It does heal on refresh. Anytime a boon is applied, regardless of it being a new stack, a refresh, or just a new boon you haven’t had on you yet, you get healed. It is pretty much the basis for my build. Also vigor on crit has no built in cool down, so you never have to worry about missing a heal on a crit

And yeah, that is totally random about the quote, i don’t think it ever did that before…

I know of a Guardian that does just that. runs like 0/0/20/30/30 traits or so, full clerics armor (power/tough/healing) and can tank multiple people at a time in WvW. I personally cant kill said guardian since I run sword/focus + greatsword so all my bursts are multi hit attacks, which end up ripping my face off from the retaliation. Keep in mind also that retaliation does scale with power, so if you want it to do more damage you need to stack it. Hence why clerics is an awesome choice for the build.

Trungalung.7850:

Being that precision scales in linear with no diminishing return per point(unlike other MMOs such as WoW), I haven’t heard of any draw back of having crit chance too high (unless you break the 100% hard cap) unless you mean by sacrificing other stats.

There’s one thing that really helps if you have a really high crit chance. The burst damage you gain from multiple hit attacks such as Whirling Wrath (14 hits), Zealot’s Defense (8 hits), and Smite (15 hits) will be higher since the probability of having most hits crit will be higher.

There is a slight balancing issue with that though, you do have to have some power to go along with the crit. i actually just switched off of using oil back to sharpening stones and my zealots went up about 700 damage, give or take RNG. This does sacrifice a tiny bit of my self heals to do it, but i think the damage was worth the tradeoff.

The point was that each application of vigor heals me because of Altruistic healing. Thus meaning that every crit heals me. ’m sorry if that went over your head but you really dont need to try to belittle me with information that isnt actually the intent of me having built the way I did.

That may be true in some cases but in others crit doesnt have a detremental cap. My build is an example of that. I use AH and the 5 point honor trait (vigor on crit) for my sustainability. In my case more crit = more self healing. I also run 85% crit between traits, sigils, and food buffs for my 1h sword. And around 65ish on my GS

Hey bleeds can i suggest using shelter for your heal? The reason i suggest it is because if you are running 30 in valor the might on block makes the skill damn near over powered. The might you gain for blocking is 15 seconds long and can stack very very quickly. In zerg vs zerg fights you can charge in, get 25 stacks alone off it, and just go around destroying people. And Although it may heal for less than signet you also negate any damage you take while casting it which could be more than signet heals in group fights.

Yeah thats old. Orb bonus Inflated numbers vs under leveled enemies for the most part.

I can think of one situation were alt-f4 could be an exploit. Say you are fighting 2v2 (or possibly more) and one of your allies gets downed while an enemy is down. You go to finish off that enemy who then alt-f4s to avoid death. Meanwhile your ally who should have rallied from the kill ends up dying to another enemy because of the alt-f4 out. Wouldnt that be considered an abuse of game mechanics?

Esoteric.5490:

spartanx.1364:

I rather BG than SoS personally. I really feel like killing them and competing against them. Not saying that IoJ is not competitive, far from it. It just feels like IoJ is that dagger in my side that I cant remove. No doubt the other servers feel the same way.

Basically I love to hate BG, I just hate IoJ.

I feel like this is what the attitude of SoR should be. Indo doesn’t do you all any justice. He reminds me of one CharliePrince…

Personally, I’ve really enjoyed fighting IoJ the last 2 weeks. [ND] and [HIRE] show up every day even when IoJ is being trashed. I tip my hat to them.

Week 4 or not, we are fortunate to have an actually competitive matchup where players still show up every day. Many other servers can’t say that.

Please dont bring that name up again. I really dont want to hear the “our server sucks we belong in t4” bs again :/

Since i mostly use the scepter in more of a melee range i dont have to deal with the slow speed too much, but it does suck when people move out of about 600 range, also i would love for smite to act like the symbol it should be. Give it vigor buff and make it work like a normal targeted aoe instead of doing worse damage on groups.

Sorry to the guys at sor windmill, wanted to duel you guys but had to go abruptly. Thanks for the duel though alpaca. If you want to go again anytime let me know!

Hey ill take the 1g if christos doesnt want to give it up! (jk dont feel like being hunted for doing that) as far as IoJ making a big push at reset we did the same thing 2 weeks ago, them fell behid then pushed back into second by reset. The server has alot of fight in us, the issue is that when we are not at our primetimes we are hurting bad. EU primetime we have outmanned on all but one map and even sometimes on all maps. If we had one more EU guild I honestly think this would be an even closer match than it is now because we could at least fight to hold the stuff our oceanic guilds give us.

Actually no, the 1h sword actually has a longer hit range than any other melee weapon (at 180 i believe might need to look it up) also it does have an arc that hits multiple people, the cone however is more narrow that a GS. The third attack is kinda blah though just because it does max out at 3 hits and they do less damage individually compared to the regular auto attacks. The other skills i will give you are way more single target orriented but the auto attack actually does pretty decent against groups.

The trick is using judges at the same time as ring to teleport and instant lay down the ring. They will almost always run into it once because the attack is pretty much instant and puts a ring right infrot. Then use banish to knock them into the ring again, switch to gs and bind them, pull, and whirl. I admit alot of it depends on luck but honestly luck is the only way to kill them because of the insane amount of shadow steps.

One of my guild leaders runs a signet heavy hammer build that he loves. Next time he is on i will ask him for it, though he hasnt been on at all the past couple days.

That is actually the build that was originally told to me but at the time but i hated meditation healing so i switched it to a way to use AH healing instead. Now that i have more knights gear it honestly does work pretty decent. Also switching to shelter was nice because of the might on block and also getting rid of my last signet so i could move my signet cd trait to vuln on blind since i have so many.

As fars as 2h weapons go. They are still pretty viable with the build. i use a GS for my other weapon normally. If you wanted you could switch out traits for signet traits and run a build with that.

As far are the condition removal on signet use the issue i run into is that it only removes one condition per signet. And also signet of judgement is never meant to be used but always on as a 10% less damage shield. So that would leave me with healing signet, which i wouldnt want to waste unless i actually need a heal, and one other signet of my choice, since i will never drop judges intervention.

Once i get on my computer today instead of my phone I will give an update on the build and what i changed
.

Ring of warding + judges intervention to get an instant ring on him, then bash away. I run sword/focus + GS and find that if i open with Zealots + judges switch to GS and go binding blade to pull to Whirl i can get them down. If that doesn’t work I normally just walk away instead of wasting my time, since from then on out they will just troll you with shadowstepping all over the place.

Other than that best thing is if they are camping one area wait until they are focused on someone else that wandered by then jump in and blow them up.

Just and Update I figured I would post, I actually switched off of AH to Meditation healing running Smite, Judges, and whatever the condition to boon one is (can never remember the name) and found it to honestly be more tanky than before. The original build i was going off of used meditation healing which i never really like but it does seem to work with this build nicely. I think the main reason being the condition removal that was absent with my original build.

The trait honesly does need to be fixed. I think it is there because the meditation that converted conditions to boons originally had a cast time i believe. (rarely used it so i could be wrong) would love meditations with ground targeting to replace it to be honest. Would give us some mobility and a way to control something like MI instead of the random teleport.

I dont have full knights yet actually only helm chest and legs. The rest is soldiers. I also use crests and orbs in my armor no runes. (partially because i am cheap, partially because they give better overal stats) I run soldiers crests in the knights gear and emerald orbs in the soldiers gear. i do have about 13.4k health, the stat sheet doesnt display full health correctly for whatever reason. Oh and also that picture is with food buff and the oil like I mentioned before.

Also one big thing with this build is running signet of judgement. The 10% decreased damage helps with condition damage and also makes you even more tanky. The only downside to this build is sometimes being able to catch people. Bunker eles are sadly unkillable with this spec but they realy cant kill you if played right. Also thieves are somewhat annoying but arent too bad. If you can land a full zealots on them with your sword then switch to GS and bindling blade pull then into a whirl, they should go down very easy. Also beware of retalation. Because this build is focused on doing damage with multi hit attacks you WILL blow yourself up very fast.

I personally run a 0/30/30/5/5 build with AH and have no issues running solo. the only thing that has been able to kill me is a fully retaliation speced bunker guardian. The key with the build is running mostly knights gear for high crit and toughness.

For the radiance traits I take :
II: signet cd
X: improved sword damage
XI: Right hand strength for 15% 1h crit
In valor I go:
II: Burn on block
VI: 5% toughness to percision
XI: Altruistic healing
And you also get:
Vigor on crit from 5 points in honor
boons off of virtue use.

How this build works is that every time you crit, you heal yourself for around 72ish health. Running in almost full knights gear with +100perc +10% crit damage food and Oil that gives 6% more percision from tougness and 4% from vit, you end up with insane amounts of crit. I currently have 86% crit chance with 1h sword between all the buffs, about 50ish with my greatsword. You also get healed pretty decently by your virtues as they apply buffs as well.

My stats are attached, the crit % shown is 20% less due to the trait and 5% sigil in weapon not actually showing on the character sheet. I also have around 61% extra crit damage with this build.

So your issue is with your team then. If your team falls back and you rushed you are more than likely going to die. I kittened about that on the WvW forums for my server that people needed to grow some balls. I also learned not to expect zergs to leap in like i do unless it is a few people from my guild. It is just a matter of adjusting your gameplay. As i said before hit and run tactics are sometimes required as a guardian in a zerg because the second you go in and no one follows, you are in trouble regardless of class.

Mesmers and thieves don’t get away when near me, binding blades into a ring of warding or a signet lockdown promises they die. If people around the person don’t recognize the thief that just owned their friend it isn’t the fault of the class, its the fault of the person controlling the class. and if you are asking for get out of jail free mechanics we honestly have alot.

5 point trait in the vitality line gives us vigor on crit, ensuring we have tons of dodge rolls, renewed focus makes us immune for 3 seconds, and also refreshes aegis which auto blocks an attack and allows you to block another. judges intervention can be used on any acceptable target, which includes critters. there is also ring of warding and line of warding to block off hallways to stop people from getting to you.

As i said before, you seem to want everything built into the gaurdian class but that is unrealistic. If a thief gets caught, they die. if a mesmer gets caught, they die. If a guardian gets caught they are not going to get blown up like other classes and still have a fighting chance. (assuming you aren’t a glass cannon spec)

First off, if you have issues with a class, trying to tell everyone how horrible the class is and to not play it is not the right thing to do. Just because you personally do not like the playstyle of the class does not mean someone else would not enjoy it. Reroll another class and move on if guardian is not your cup of tea and keep the complaining to something constructive.

Second, why would you ever try to to run as a guardian in the first place. Guardians get most of their survivability through attacking not by fleeing like a thief or ele has to do. It is a completely different style of play. It is also one that does encourage gorilla tactics when facing zergs. Guardians have very good survivability over a certain amount of time, once that time is up, (generally if you have exhausted your virtue use/elite skills) you do what you need to to get out of harms way, which is generally running into the middle of your zerg. If someone follows then they will most likely die, so mission accomplished. If you are overextending into the enemy zerg you are going to die regardless of what class you are, as there are limitations on every ability, even those of mesmers, thieves and eles.

It honestly sounds like you expected an OP class with extreme mobility, extreme damage, and extreme survivability all in one, which just does not happen in this game. you have to sacrifice one or two of those to achieve the other, or balance them so you have decent mobility, decent survivability, and decent damage but not a god of all three.

Hey we are on the same server! Anyways, most people go 30 into valor because AH and the meditation heals are considered the 2 go to survivability traits. Unless you are going full glass cannon or full bunker with +healing they are almost required sadly. The other options are the greatsword heal which is grossly underpowered. Or symbol healing which is also sadly underpowered compared to AH and med healing.

I cant access the link, might just be because I am on my phone. But the reason you are getting AH heals is because of the 5 point vitality trait which gives 1s vigor on crit. Essentially any time you crit tou get an AH heal.

I havent really noticed any survivability increase from it. However it does come in handy vs other guardians and eles. other than that it is kinda meh just because only a couple classes use burn a decent amount.

Torch really requires groups of enemies to make it worthwhile. #4 is decet single target but using the toss increases the cd, #5 solo is weaker than pretty much any auto attack we have. However it shines when using it on groups of enemies and allies. I personnaly run sword+ focus / greatsword and use the greatsword for my AoE.

That post shows nothing regarding the other skills other than basic auto attack for sword. It also doesnt factor in offhand skills or having 2 sigils compared to one. Personally i find symbol of wrath useless as damage unless it is pve as 95% of people will not stand on it ad binding blades is the same situation as it is normally used for a pull instead of straight damage. Now if you are talking pve then yes greatsword will outdamage due to mobs standing still. But any other situation I see RHS with sword doing more damage.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Greatsword is actually the highest DPS weapon the guardian has, period. Doesn’t matter whether it’s single or multi-target, it’s the highest for all of them.

Have to disagree. It all depends on the spec. I honestly think a right hand strength build will put one hand sword over the amount of damage a greatsword can do in single target regardless of what gs build you use. In groups no doubt the greatsword shines. But single target i have to rate the sword better just because of the fast auto attacks and the damage you can do with them.

Karmagettie.7231:

SSnowman i am sorry for some of these posts. I know you are asking for a competitive tier that doesnt have ques. Stay out of the 1’s and 2’s. They all have que’s for the most part.

I play on Tarnished Coast, but Yaks Bend has proven themselves to be a very worthy boarderlands. I am not the first to recommended them, and i believe that Yaks bend and your alliance will be able to co-exist very nicely.

Stay out of IOJ/SoS and all those other higher tier servers. They already have a name for themselves. There is still plenty of time to make your own name in concrete.

Ummmmm no. IoJ has no queues at NA primetime outside of friday reset. And even the past two resets we only had our borderland and EB had queues. Most of the time we actualy run outmanned during those time over the weekdays. The stigma of “The high tier servers all have queues” needs to go. Even T1 servers have their weak times.

Also Even with this huge disadvantage during our NA timeslot the server still pulled out 10k point comeback on friday to take second. Showing that even with less numbers we still will fight tooth and nail and will never back down.

The description for the trait is a bit misleading. You gain fury when you have the burning debuff on you, not when you actually set yourself on fire using the torch skill.

Every class has something they specialize in, Being tanky is just one of guardians. I myself roll a bit more of a tanky spec with some dps mixed in. Can I burst someone down like a warrior or a thief? Hell no. Do i have the mobility of a thief or a d/d ele? Not even close. But that is how those classes are built to survive. Guardians are just built to take damage since we dont have the mobility or the outright killing power of other classes. Are there ways to spec to be kitten near invincible? Yes I know of a spec, however it has very low killing power except in certain situations. (it is sadly i direct counter to my build :/)

It really comes down to a matter of knowing what counters what and sometimes there really isnt much you can do once you already engaged an enemy.

If the greatsword heal actually did something worth while i would totally trait zeal. Sense it doesnt I dont even bother.

AH has almost little to no scaling with +healing. I am running like 75 healing and still getting around 72 per boon. The only way to really increase AH’s output is to increase your method of applying boons. A high crit build with the 5 point vitality trait will keep the heals coming in due to it not having a cd. Symbols also work wonders due to them giving up to 5 boons per second if you have enough people standing on them. Also the staff skill empower gives 12 stacka of might to 5 nearby people as well. So with AH it is a very strong heal.

Maybe having a limit to one per map might work. Also make it so if it is destroyed another one cant be set up for another hour. Also would need something to make it so random trolls cant waste it, such as a high end guild perk like the guild golems or require some other pre-req. Also make a combat radius around it that if there is pvp combat within a certain radius it cannot be used.

Score updates anyone? Have barely been able to get on since reset and its killing me

Keep up the awesome work guys. Sadly i cant join you this morning. Total score update anyone?

Logged on when i got up to check the score real quick, here is an update as of 7:30am EST

I am actually really looking forward to next weeks rematch. I have a feeling the scores are going to keep getting closer and closer as we keep going. Unless of course one server picks up a new coverage slot.

Can we SERIOUSLY stop arguing over the glitching. It happened, its done with get over. I am sick of seeing this thread being nothing but a flame fest. For the asking of proof there was a video and screenshots that were deleted because it is actually against the forum policy to post things like that in the forum. For the people on SoR that can’t seem to get over it, just stop. You are doing nothing more than making the fighting continue for no point what so ever.

Can’t we all just get along and kill each other like civilized WvWers?

zastari.1730:

I’ve been hopping around servers to get a feel for how each bracket plays (Mag last week, Ferguson’s Crossing this week). I’m looking to check out a T2 server next week, which one needs euro primetime coverage the most, and has good commanders that are representative of the server playstyle during this window?

IoJ needs EU coverage badly, our main EU guild transfered off a few weeks back and it is really showing. Normally we hold our main Borderland and our portion of EB up until 5 EST, then we just start losing everything as what is on of our NA teams at that point go to eat dinner and such. My guild’s commanders Silborn and Nomnomnomnomnom (nom x5) are normally on at that time in our Borderland, along with a few others if you wish to talk to them.

EDIT: Yeah VotF transfered off during our SoS/SoR matchups. We lost a couple commanders and a good chunk of people then.