Does 2 sources of might stack? I ask because Signet of Strength gives 30% chance of applying might, and because I’m also using EM I get might from that whenever I crit as well – would I get more might stacks if SoS procced at a crit, or only get the highest stack of might while loosing the benefit from the other?
Also regarding Omnomberry pies – I don’t use consumables. I don’t have a character with cooking, nor can I afford to buy food to keep it always active. If I was going into a dungeon or such I obviously would consider them … but not for general world PvE.
What about Sigil of Air? It’s cheap.. lolz. 30% chance of added lightening damage.
Decided to compare 2 zerker builds with the above builds… (using the same mace/shield build from above, just switched gear around):
Makes me cringe seeing the low health. Using this would require good dodging right? And good use of aegis for when you can’t dodge? Due to bad eye-to-hand co-ordination, I generally don’t dodge very well… and not sure if the default aegis every 40 seconds would block enough hits, esp vs groups. Thought I’d look at it to be fair… and just see how different it was to what I’m looking at doing.
low health wont be a problem, if any says it does its l2p issue, i run 12k hp on 30+ fractals and tbh thats to much, for open world pve you could run around naked and still be successful
your best options seem to be engi or mesmer, they can both easily run conditions or power and are both in the top 4 professions damage wise, although if you had problems levelling an engi your going to RQ within 10 minutes of starting a mesmer as they dont get strong until 40, honestly if you had problems leveling an engi your only options as far as easy leveling are going to be guardian and warrior, so far ive leveled every profession to 80 and in order from easiest to hardest engi, guard, and warrior were by far the fastest to 80
legendaries are semi hard to get but ascended is like candy at halloween, ive been running daily fractals for the past 3 weeks now and i have about 15 rings, not to mention all the excess laurels and guild commendations that are collecting dust, your problem is that you want it now and cant farm for them
There is no diminishing returns on toughness. In fact the more armor you have the more powerful signet of judgement becomes, so stacking a ton of toughness is actually good if you take it as a utility. That said, for PvE there’s no reason to stack defenses quite so high, since killing things faster is generally better.
There is most definitely diminishing returns on toughness. I attached the generally accepted formula for damage dealt as a function of armor from GW2Wiki. Damage dealt is inversely proportional to armor. Therefore, there has to be a decreasing rate of damage prevented as you stack toughness.
Also Signet of Judgement is more powerful for lower armor values because the 10% damage you prevent having no armor is greater than the 10% you prevent with alot of armor. If you stack toughness, giving you lots of armor, then using signet of Judgement would not be considered the best use of a utility slot.
Generally, those % damage mitigations are best used when you have very little toughness/armor.
off topic but does protection stack with signet of judgement?
between those races there little to no difference because our guardian skills are much more useful than any racial skills, its basically down to what races appearances and cultural armor you like best
Well, rune of the scholar are pretty bad for a melee and cost way too much. For the rest it’s an interesting build, but you took away 20% faster recharge on 2h weapons which means less spam and less DPS.
as a previous person said, learn how to dodge. that is the best way to stay at near full. think about this: you have permanent vigor, so your dodges come back quickly, you have a blind on gs3, and an interrupt on gs5. plus, if things get really hairy, you can just drop back to range with staff and regen up and tossing out the occasional empower. if all that isnt enough to keep you alive, much less at near full, then i would pick a different rune set (though personally, i think if the above is happening, youd need to rethink your playstyle.)
also, cdr is nice, but not needed; just manage your cds better. you’ll get more damage out of more stacks of might (works well with Pack or Strength runes btw) than you will with 20% cdr. most damage comes from auto-attacks anyway, not the other skills, so cdr is useless in that sense. as a side note: EM is more versatile in builds than THM is. So why sub in Pure of Voice? to give the party (and yourself) some on-demand condition removal, something your original lacked. Signet of resolve won’t be enough; maaaaybe if you paired it with the Purity trait, you could get away with it, but not by itself. and if you ever dont run shouts, you can sub in Battle Presence to give the party some much needed regen.
there are very few situations in high end pve where well timed dodging will be able to keep you at higher than 90% hp (note: high end =/= cof), ruby orbs are much more reliable and once you drop the scholars you no longer need to stay above 90% meaning you can go full berserkers and actually increase your damage well past a 10%
Does not look very “ultimate” to me. If I want to have big survivability while still dealing some damage, I can take an AH build with zerker or knight gear. That should toss out at least the same damage while still retaining far greater flexibility. For damage, the typical zerker builds stomp everything else into the ground anyway.
this… my hammer ah/pure of voice build easily outdamages this while providing nearly 10x the team support and damage reduction
I would want a Guardian that stays alive and does his/her best to push as much dps as he/she can. I’ve run with Tank/Healer combos and it just seems slow and more challenging. Pure of Voice is very nice to run with and shouts are great support. The more Wall of Reflection and Avengers Shields the better. I love running with a Hammer guardian for that protection, don’t run 2 though.
In any case if you need Altruistic Healing to stay up then go for it, if not hit the DPS build. The DPS build is quite versatile also, it can get tanky with a Hammer and some gear change, can’t really go wrong if you can survive it.
Blood~
i dont see why you wouldnt want 2 hammer guardians, with a 4 second blast finisher theyre much more party oriented than gs guardians
@op definetly 0/x/x/30/10 for that pure of voice and WoR/shield
Ok,
first of all, thank you Arch for this fine answer!
Well, i’m lvl 68 now, so i know a bit about the game (skills/weapons swap and stuff)
and i know there is no “tanking” in doungens..
but i talk only about wvw, i want to “tank” there.. and when i say “tank” i mean survive longer (in the cost of lower damage ofcurse)
To be honest, i just feel that using shield aint reward enough.. getting 2 abilities with huge CD.. mybe it will be better to just use another “offensive” wepon there?
or just 2handed instead of gimping your self with sword/shield.
well, this is just my thinking..
About thougness (increase armor right?) does it lower magical damage aswell?
(in wow armor does not lower magical damage, only phisical)
Thank you,
Sagi.
what id recommend is once your 80 to keep 1 of every weapon on you as a lot of our weapons (mace, shield/focus, gs/hammer) are very situational, like gs and hammer are by far are highest dps weapons but gs excels on trash mobs because of binding blades while hammer excels on bosses because of the 100% protection uptime
If you join a higher level group, you will advance your personal level and will not affect their rewards, so you can look for people doing the level 2, 4, 6, 8 dailies. You can probably get on lvl 10 daily groups, just be up-front about it if you haven’t done a particular fractal before. At 10+ the bosses will hit you with agony on their attacks, so if you get an infusion (75 regular relics, the new backpieces from Secrets of Southsun living story have an infusion slot for it), you’ll be better off. Especially if you link this infused item when you say you are newer to Fractals on a 10 group, they’ll be more forgiving.
Please don’t join a lvl 20+ until you have enough AR and experience I don’t mind helping out new players, but new players in 20+ is a bit much..
Ok so only run fractals 1-9 until I have agony resistance. I know for CoF almost everyone usses a class cannon build or at least most warriors. Is there a build like that for fractals?
once youve done every fractal you can jump right into 10 as its real easy even with the agony, just tell groups that you have no AR, also at higher fractals a lot of people find it better to run close to glass cannon builds, its a matter of survivability start with a defense set then slowly replace it with pieces of zerker
When i run dungeons with guildies i run an AH build too. After reading this paragraph i tweaked my armor a bit to waste a minor amount of attributes on zerker equipment.
As now, i run all zerker armor with the exception of helm and leggings (which are knight’s) and all zerker trinkets with the exception of rings (knight’s too) but i slotted runes of the warrior for a bit more vitality and 1 less second cd on swapping.
My weapons are all berserker and on the ones i use more (hammer and gs) i slotted might on swap sigil to gain the most out of my runes.
If you want to maximize the healing from AH, i suggest you to replace pure of voice with empowering might when conditions aren’t a problem.
DO NOT drop pure of voice, its by far the best trait we have for party support, and if you want max survivability youll want either soldiers or clerics (dont mix and match these 2), as for squishy-ness youll eventually learn to play more efficiently and youll find that soldiers or clerics is extreme overkill in the survivability department (when this happens its time to start replacing some of your armor with berserkers, ive started using full zerker and have no problem surviving any situation now)
let me add a something nobody here has mentioned: fun.
focus is better for small scale, shield for large, but nothing is funnier then knocking people off a cliff which is why i always use shield in wvw
Below is my build. It isn’t very good I assume. I like playing mace/shield as I like to heal/support and I think it look kittening kitten. I also like staff as secondary for obvi reasons. I play WvW almost exclusively. Can anyone help me out with a good mace/shield build? Or if mace/shield is worthless for WvW let me know as well. I wear full knights armor (except gloves are soldiers) and all my trinks/jewelry are soliders.
if you want to support id recommend hammer over mace/any, hammer outdamages mace and 33% damage reduction and a spammable blast finisher outperform maces tiny heals and regen
edit: checked your build, good trait setup but even spec’d for symbols the heals are still low especially for a wvw situation where normally youll be moving, i prefer shouts with pure of voice because they work well in all situations (even with shouts sanctuary is a great utility for certain situations), elites are optional as none of them are great
also your armor (assuming its exotic) is perfect for wvw (if you want to go the extra mile for support you could use 6 runes of the soldier for extra condition removal)
2nd edit: ive heard that lower tier wvw servers dont use the same tactics as t1 servers so if you find yourself standing still in longrange zerg fights symbol healing may be a bit more effective but imo still outperformed by pure of voice shouts
3rd edit: forgot to mention if you really want to go mace/shield pure of voice shouts is still probably better than symbols
Would a 1 handed build look like 10/30/30/0/0? Or can that vary and still be successful?
Thank you for the responses so far, by the way!
imo 1h weapons are a horrible option except scepter (not because its good), greatswords aoe pull and hammers 100% protection + 6 sec blast finisher make them much better otpions and damage-wise they both outperform sword
also traits, meditations are better for heals while ah isnt usually used because it heals well (except wvw staff) but because it combos so well with pure of voice which is by far our best trait for groups and one of our best for solo, for my build i either use 0/x/30/30/x or 0/10/0/30/30 (fractals only)
if im fighting a boss that i cant melee depending on his attacks ill use scepter/shield or focus, i prefer focus just for the 5 skill
also for gs/staff im guessing you mean for levelling, id say focus on honor traitline for shouts/2h mastery/pure of voice (by far the best traitline we have, it never leaves my build)
Gotcha, by the way why are maces looked poorly upon? They seem like a good tool for healing.
its not that theyre bad, everything else is just better, and your right mace does have better healing than any other weapon but the amount is incredibly small, youd be better off going hammer for 100% uptime of protection
if im fighting a boss that i cant melee depending on his attacks ill use scepter/shield or focus, i prefer focus just for the 5 skill
also for gs/staff im guessing you mean for levelling, id say focus on honor traitline for shouts/2h mastery/pure of voice (by far the best traitline we have, it never leaves my build)
guardian – warrior is trash in wvw anyone who says differently has never played a warrior in wvw, as for dungeons warrior is king here, no class can match my 12-18k per second (yes thats sustained not burst), having levelled both to 80 the only thing i use my warrior for is cof p1 because i like to stick to a main character and guardians more well rounded
you level by doing dungeons, however if your looking to level fast just mapping different zones (besides crafting) is by far the fastest method there is. My last guardian that i levelled that way hit 80 right at about 20 hours
a mistake nearly all new players make is limiting themselves to only 2 weapon sets, its much better for everyone (the people your partied with) if you bring every weapon (except possibly 1h sword and mace) be
edit: forgot to menntion gs/staff is the absolute best weapon set for levelling
Shelter, hands down. ~2 seconds of blocking + a heal
It’s more about mitigating damage, rather than reacting too damage. That 2 seconds of blocking can do so much more for you than any of the other heals.
Agreed. I used to run the Signet of Resolve a lot, but learning how to utilize all of my utilities, plus the passive 10 sec. condition removal trait, Shelter is just very very good, especially if you’re running with high Healing Power.
What? The healing coefficient is the lowest of all 3 on Shelter. The more HP you run, the worse shelter gets comparatively.
For me personally Signet makes the most sense. As stated earlier, it really becomes a nobrainer with signet recharge traited.
even with the signet trait do the math on how much you can heal for every second of the recharge and signet still blows shelter out of the water, i dont understand how anyone could think shelter is better than signet
Hmm I must now reconsider my tankiness haha. A lot of people doing high DPS guards are going GS and scepter/focus, is there a synergy between these two weaponsets moreso than staff? A specific rotation that does a lot of damage? Me confuzzled
I wouldn’t call it synergy, its more like s/f is our best long range option, while GS is our best dps option. Also @ your above post, it doesn’t matter what your toughness/vitality are most bosses that are even mildly difficult will still manage to kill you in 2 hits. For the bosses that can hit you multiple times and still not do a lot of damage, your defensive stats still won’t matter. Vitality and toughness are just a worthless crutch for people who aren’t used to have to actively dodge.
There was never any such thing. They got rid of the bug where you could roll between auto-attacks to cancel the roll and burn endurance, but you could never cancel the animation frames on an attack in such a way that it actually made you attack faster. If you could, everyone would be doing it.
actually you used to be able to cancel the animation with a dodge roll and the attack would still go off, its semi-fixed now though
Out of curiosity, what do you think about the runes of strength? I’m wondering whether the 20 % might duration are useful or just negligible when using Empowering Might.
well 20% of 10 seconds is 2 extra seconds of might while the 2 runes of strength cuold be substituted for 2 ruby orbs which would be 40 power, 28 prec, 4% crit damage would imo would be much more useful than 2 more seconds of might
so ive mapped all of tyria except wvw… being in t1 means ill literally never have access to a few of the vistas/POIs. is there any way to get them without being inside a keep/garrison because i couldnt find a way while playing yesterday, but due to it being reset night as a solo roamer i rarely got close to the places i needed
ok anyone here who said that guardians and wars have similar dps is either blind or ignorant… full berserker trinkets/armor on both with gs my guardian does about 4-5k/sec, while my war (use axe because gs blows for sustained damage) does anywhere from 10-25k/second
edit: forgot to add that in open world pve warrior is king because survivability doesnt matter when you kill everything so fast
I’m going to just start keeping a zerk set to ping. Won’t use it since I’d rather use something else but I’ll still have a set to ping. Some of the stuff I have is zerk so won’t take too much space up.
if you join a 4war/1mes team and you don’t use full zerker its incredibly easy to tell – once you’ve done 1k+ runs of full berserker you know exactly how fast slaver/effigy should take
What everyone that has posted here has failed to mention is DO NOT USE GS UNLESS YOUR KILLING GATE. That’s right. GS lowers your damage output significantly. On slaver its not much of a difference because WW’ing into the wall makes up for some of the damage loss, but on effigy its a huge damage loss. There’s a reason why teams that consistently kill effigy in less than 10 seconds do not use a GS.
If you want damage then gs/axe+x is the way to go, if u like control then axe/mace but if our like me and want to move as fast as possible then axe+warhorn is for you, also if for some reason you do need range you can swap out gs for rifle (99.9% of this game ranged is a slower less effective option – the exception would be high level fotm)
For traits i run 30/25/0/0/15 to maximize damage
For armor/accessories its really up to you although berserkers/knights are by far the best (once you get used to meleeing everything in knights and you learn to time your dodges theres absolutely no reason to not go complete glass cannon for regular dungeons)
Not sure if this will help or not (you didn’t say how or why managing the keys were hard) but I’d like to add that you might like to look into a razer naga because except for typing you can play this whole game by remapping keys and using only 1 hand
Or you could just do 1 god temple event buy a full light armor set and transmute full AC gear
Edit: dont use healing power its a pathetic stat just put 30 into water and youll be fine on cond removals/healing
Also what i did for armor was get a full set of berserks with soldiers accessories and i have no problem staying alive in every dungeon except arah (i swap back to my full soldiers set for arah)
Thnx for the suggestions, not 80 yet so im not quite sure how ill do, although im not very interested in arah because of the long runs for low reward so i shouldnt have to much of a problem with endurance
Soon my new rangers gonna be 80 and i was wondering what gear and stats i should have to focus on dps (through pow/prec not cond dmg) but still maintain decent-average survivability. Also how much hp does the average ranger need in most high level dungeons? Ill be using a lb/sb or a sb/axe/wh and 2 bears for pets.
when the map is open is the only time it happens, also happens if i minimize gw2 with the map still open the mouse will keep on tweaking out till i close the map in gw2, as soon as i close the map it quits doing it, any ideas on whats causing this? if it helps im using a razer naga
Started a ranger yesterday because im bored with my necro, not really sure what build/gear choices i should use for high dmg ranger (i know berserker gear but what about jewelry and runes)?
its not the lack of vigorous precision, i first noticed it in cof where i kite the mobs (i dont attack anything in this part so it can’t be vigorous precision), shouts would typically heal about 1/4 of my hp bar (note that no1 but me was in range of the shouts)
Im talking about mainly pve dungeons, i used to run d/wh and it blew every other weapon set away for power builds but ur saying axe is better than scepter for pwr/prec builds in general or just wvw?
I don’t mind helping out new players, but new players in 20+ is a bit much..