Guild Wars 2

Lucentfir.7430:

Well think about it, You’re already going in 30 in Zeal for it, you get 300 Power and 30% condition duration, for some burn uptime. Symbols, and other Damage amps through burning. Carrion gives you Vit and power so both stats are usable. Then you have Retaliation which scales with Power as well. Burning in long sustained fights puts out a lot of extra damage. We can easily re-apply the same damage and it ticks for the same amount of damage when re-applied. You have traits and skills that give bruns on block and part of our mechanics when we attack x number of times (VoJ).

And what exactly should I do with junk like 30 Zeal, condition damage or vitality?

Well, I won’t comment on Carrion stats …

Looks partly interesting, though neither meditations nor PF are skills I use frequently. And I’m really missing a replacement for the incredibly useless Kindled Zeal.

You are right with your conclusion about the L2P issue, as far as I can tell from what you’ve written. What kind of armor do you use? Something like Knight’s, as “toughness-heavy build” suggests? Anyway, I don’t think that you’ll be happy with a DPS build unless you want to spend a lot of time practicing how to dodge. DPS builds don’t lack survivability if you know how to do that, but you seem to have quite some problems avoiding damage correctly. In a high-toughness AHEM, you should be nearly immortal, so if you already die often in that build, you’d probably spend most of the time dead in a DPS build.

Virtues is a good destination for the 10 points. Switch between UC and the reduced cooldown for consecrations whenever necessary.

Well, that build is not particularly new, since most of the usual DPS builds look pretty similar. However, you should think about moving the 10 points from Valor somewhere else, since both the other lines are better for utility and/or DPS.

14.8 seconds? Congratulations, you freaks

Take a healway build with boon duration runes, problem solved.

Tested un- and re-equipping, it does not work. So whatever the reason for my results from Thursday may have been, those stupid runes are definitely still broken. A shame, since they would have opened up an interesting route for runes.

Thanks, but usually I know how to create proper controls. However, I did another, larger test series with n>100 and the results are consistent with the broken 6th bonus. So even though I’m pretty sure I made no mistake on Thursday, it’s obvious that the bonus at least does not work consistently, which makes the runes worthless.

This game seems so full of bugs … as I said, my numbers from Thursday seemed pretty convincing, but another short test (though I didn’t do the calculations) half an hour ago looked more suspicious. I’ll do a larger series later and post the results here.

Since I just saw the old Rune of Strength bug in this list, I think it has been fixed some time in the last weeks. Did a small test (n~30) on the PvP training golems and the result was almost exactly what I expected with active 6th bonus. Maybe someone can try to reproduce it, but I think we can take that one off the list.

€: Did another test and the runes did not work. So nothing to see here, move along.

And you are sure that damage reduction stacks additively instead of multiplicatively? Because otherwise, this build will fail spectacularly and I can’t imagine that no one would have found out about an invulnerable build if it was possible.

Silv.9207:

1) Add it at Sword Wave (the 3° skill of the chain). Every hit make the enemy bleed for 5 seconds. Damage reduced (just a little) and Bleeding whit every hit. 3 hit in uno skill = 3 Stack of 5 sec. Bleeding.

I don’t really like the idea of exchanging direct damage for condition damage. Unless the reduction of direct damage is so tiny that you could leave it unchanged anyway, this would probably result in an overall DPS nerf, which is not needed.

spoj.9672:

You can argue all you want but both builds have their merits and their disadvantages. Its preference. Do you want more dps but less condi removals or do you want more condi removals and slightly less dps. Its situational.

Wise words. Besides, even the question of DPS superiority is highly situational, since two nearby characters are enough to let EM outshine Power of the Virtuous, unless your group already has full might stacks. The endless repetition of the mantra “Virtues provides more DPS” does not make it true, actually.

Obtena.7952:

I think the point is that Brutaly DOES know his Guardian gameplay. Maybe you don’t agree with him but if you take the time to peruse his posts and are an intelligent individual, you will realize that his information is given with authority, with sound assessment and well spoken. He at least deserves a greater respect than to be insulted by Guardian forum tourists telling him he doesn’t know.

OK, enough kissing kitten. Bottom line … there are a handful of individuals here that shouldn’t be immediately dismissed when they have an opinion on something. If your going to disagree, you better have a comparable depth of knowledgeable, have some context to frame your opinion … or be extremely obtuse.

Remember how this discussion started? Brutaly claiming that people would take Honor into DPS builds just for a “hp cushion”, which is outright bull manure.

Beside the weakness you already mentioned, burning has others: First, the Virtues traits don’t provide much benefit against single targets, second the traits don’t affect the VoJ active iirc, and third, burning itself is pretty weak when running a DPS build. So that’s much more situational than EM.

Brutaly.6257:

Ok so we agree on 3 stacks as a average number from EM.

Now lets break that down. 3 stacks are only true if you have 100% uptime on dps. Any time during an encounter you dont do dps the EM stacks are reduced. So if you have 20% downtime when dodging, being out of range or breaking los the gain from those stacks are reduced with 20%.

The range on em is somewhere 280 and 380 in the tests i made. Only a few encounters supports a team to be gathered so closely and when dodging/breaking los you also in general increase the range from your team, in general being close to the aggro is bad.

[…]

You are overrating the value of that trait just like people overrate the value of selfless daring as a heal, the mediocre range makes them highly situational as a support tool.

with 10 points in virtues you can stack more might per time frame and also faster on the team by just triggering your own firefields with the hammer. 9 stacks from consecrations for 33s.

[…]

Ok, I got curious and checked EM range. You are right, it is depressingly small, much smaller than I remembered. So it is true, I overestimated its effectiveness. However, you are clearly underestimating it, since most encounters either at least allow or even favor group stacking. So unless you are alone in a ~300 radius, which will be the case rather rarely, Honor is at least as strong as anything Virtues has to offer beyond the first 10 points (which one can, and depending on the target instance should, easily take anyway).

Brutaly.6257:

Oh i do have a clue, sure there are some nice supportive stuff in there but people seem to marketing it as a max dps build (which the point of zerker gear is in the first place)

And no EM contributes with max <4,99 stacks of might (average should be around 3-4 stacks with 70% crit chance) with 0% boon duration which in a 2140 (zerker with ascended trinkets and 10 points in zeal) power build is 8% with 5 stacks (which is theoretically impossible from EM alone and 0% boon duration) and more like 5% in reality with a tiny aoe which very seldom benefits the team.

And i didnt say anything about valor but since you mentioned it valor ads in roughly 9% dps that isnt conditional like EM and elusive power.

And if its support and dps you want there are even better options in 25 points virtues since you get bot boon duration (might stacking on weapon swap) for the team and extra damage per boon. Its practically impossible to play with less than 6-8 boons at all times in a coordinated group and 4-5 in a really bad group.

Personally i go 30/30///* with zerkers and alter the last 10 points to fit the scripted content at hand. If its dps we are talking about why degrade the zerker gear by not building for damage.

All the support needed are in the utility skills and consecrations and spirit weapons are both boosted by virtues.

In short honor isnt the best support for dps centric builds either.

Ah, thanks for remembering lazy people like me and providing numbers, so I don’t need to do it. So, to take your numbers, 3 stacks of EM are a realistic scenario, which would provide 3.5 % more damage at 3000 power (halfway between no buffs and all possible buffs, so probably realistic). However, the EM range is not as tiny as you claim, which means that anyone who knows what he does (= is in melee range) will get it. That 3.5 % group DPS increase can be translated roughly into what would be 17.5 % of your own DPS. I don’t see many traits (except FW, which is another story I’ve already discussed in my previous post) which provide such a boost. Taking Virtues or whatever is not as effective, unless your group already has its 25 might.

Brutaly.6257:

Aven.7295:

colesy.8490:

Run full berserker, 0/30/0/30/10.

someone didnt read. thats the guardian dps build

Actually its not, its the dps centric build some berserker guardians use since they need a hp cushion from honor. Hence why i think most full berserker are full of it since they dress for dps but do not fully trait for it.

Its infact possible to squeeze out just as much or more dps from a pvt armor and berserker trinkets guardian with a different build.

Obviously, you have no idea about zerker builds. Vitality is probably the last reason why any zerker player goes into the Honor line, it’s all about support. Unless you have a group which already stacks 25 might in another way, EM alone beats the 30% crit damage from Valor, for example. The only true DPS trait missing in Brazil’s build is Fiery Wrath and that’s the tradeoff between squeezing out the last bit of damage and being able to provide easy condition remove or some other support so the rest of the group does not have to do it.

The pirates weren’t really difficult. First try with Brazil’s DPS build, so I suppose any build that brings a minimum of damage will be sufficient for them.

Power, precision, crit damage. That’s all you need.

vesta.3170:

Warrior is definitely the King of dps. It has the 2 highest skills for skill dmg. The GS #2 and the Axe #5.

Guardians can pull just under what a warrior does, but it is not recommended because guards are in the low health tier. You would have to be running with a group that knows what they are doing to go full Zerker on a guard.

That’s total nonsense. Warrior axe 5 is less DPS than their auto attack and a guard can run full zerker quite fine unless the group is maximum garbage.

Yep, a bunch of incredibly ugly skins. Amazing :P

I’ve got the impression that there is no logic behind the rewards. I mean, almost everything on the level of Citadel of Fail path 1? LOL. It’s totally incomprehensible why they did not use the whole spectrum of possible rewards.

Bash.7291:

@cpt: What other damage builds are viable for guardian in pve dungeons? I run them infrequently so the only one i know of that most people are ok with are zerker ah/em builds. Almost every damage build is extremely selfish for us and for group orriented play are not very welcome to groups, except for anchors, which are not really there for damage

Look around on these forums. There is a fair share of builds like the classical 10/30/0/30/0, Brazil’s 0/30/0/30/10, the virtuan 10/30/0/0/30 (where the hell has the thread gone?) or something in between. Most of them bring at least as much support as the AHs floating around out there, if not even much better one, while providing around 30-40 % more damage. Never forget that AH is quite selfish by its very nature.

Fascinating, those V-shaped ice crystals from the ice elementals are reflectable? I wonder … would that work at the fractal ice elemental?

If you had read anything, you’d know that I’m not talking about WvW or PvP.

Bash.7291:

See thats part of the issue right now, there is pretty much one build for dungeons, 0/x/30/30/x with zerkers gear. There is no real deviation from that at all in terms of effectiveness. I personally have no issue lowering the damage on what could be considered the most sustainable damage build in the game, and actually giving it to the damage trees. I look at traits on a basis of build diversity. In dungeons, there is none for guardians. But as i said, this is all personal opinion, and obviously traits would need to be moved aroud alot if that stat set up ever came to happen.

Erm no. There is quite some deviation from the typical AH build since more and more people have already moved or are moving towards DPS builds which are way more effective when played correctly. If AH takes a beating by stripping Valor of the crit damage, you just reduce build diversity and force everyone into the DPS builds.

Bash.7291:

ArtemisEntreri.4138:

[…]

With how the traits are set up right now, I honestly feel like it should be:

Zeal: Power/Critical damage
Radiance: Precision/Condition Duration
Valor: Toughness/Condition damage
Honor: Vitality/healing power
Virtues: Class/Boon duration

This would give zeal the actual damage I feel that it is meant to have, and would make more sense as there is only 1 trait in there (fiery wrath) that actually makes sense with condition duration. Meanwhile radiance is full of traits that add conditions that make sense with condition duration such as vulnerability, blind, and also the added bonus of the new torch trait, and the up time on radiant power.

I would move condition damage to valor, along with making some of the traits more condition based (it already has burn on block, but this could also be a good place for a modified shattered aegis that could give bleeds, and maybe a torment based trait.) It just makes sense that a self sustaining trait line would also have conditions since they can take time to actually do damage.

The other two trait lines I would leave as is, but with the suggestions I am thinking of, well mostly virtues which I feel really needs some offensive support to make it more appealing than just for boon duration bunkering, but we will see those once i finally get around to doing them.

I already stated it in the other thread on the Radiance tree: while such changes might make sense from a PvP point of view, they would definitely obliterate PvE AH builds for anyone who thinks just a tiny bit about effectiveness. It is a huge difference whether you are sitting at ~75% or ~55-60% of the damage output of a DPS build.

Ah, it’s amazing what people make of a small hyperbole. Do some people in this thread feel concerned by my claim, fearing they won’t be allowed to PVT-leech anymore if this point of view finds more followers?

Let’s face the reality, PVT is bad for dungeons in multiple ways: First, lack of DPS (high power does not produce any meaningful damage, as long as crit chance and damage are missing) and second, no on crit procs due to the low crit chance, which for many classes means a severely reduced endurance regeneration. Besides, it just encourages bad play since many easily avoidable attacks are don’t punish you outright in that bunker junk. And in the end, it does not even offer any kind of support for the group like cleric does. So PVT is just egoistic junk.

For starters, there is better gear. Knight is a good example, probably celestial now, too. They give you a meaningful offensive and enough defense to live through some mistakes. Combined with an AH build, they have probably even better survival capacities than PVT, so that is a good starting point for dungeon newbies, which I actively encourage.

Well, if you don’t want to differentiate, then definitely zerker. PVT is useless in open world and deserves a kick in dungeons/fractals.

Lemongrass? Can you provide a link? I’m always looking for amusing stuff

So far, your evaluation of the traits makes sense to me. Can’t remember a point where I’d strongly disagree right now.

However, I have a nasty feeling that this great compilation will be worthless because ANet will totally ignore it and any related discussions.

xFireize.6318:

I don’t know how you play your Guardian, but Ring of Warding + JI is a great reason for me to have it as a single target spell.

True. I like JI the way it is now.

Not really, zerker trinkets are quite fine. In my experience, 16k HP with an AH build are no problem in ZvZ, so I don’t see any reason to change a lot, except upgrading the rare trinkets to exotics/ascendeds, of course. For dungeons, go more into the offensive. Your trait setup is already extremely defensive, so get full zerker gear and once you are comfortable with that, change the traits to a useful DPS build for dungeons.

Unless you have very special defensive tasks, zerker trinkets work extremely fine in WvW.

Sandra Martino.3870:

That said, AH should be a standard class mechanic because in soloing, pveing, roaming, pugzerging you will most likely have not a staff ele near to spam waterfields and thuss your survival will be kitten. You`ll be like a warrior, with a standard HP pool but no ability to heal it up and with much lesser health. Everyone always yells that guardians have much better survival than warriors dispite their healthpool, guess what, this survival is completely based on AH. Without AH their survival is kitten.

Nope. I have both classes as full glass cannons and the guard does not have any greater survivability problems than the warr. Usually, it is even better, despite the low health pool, due to easier access to blocks, blinds, protection and more frequent dodges.

There are no ascended valkyrie trinkets, so you’ll need to change the setup anyway. Just take zerker trinkets, you can hardly do anything wrong with them.

You know, the 1s cooldown is already active in the might component of the build you mention. In PvE, most good players have moved away from AH a long time ago, since its damage output is far from optimal. As for WvW, if 40 people can’t kill 5 AH guards, I’m really impressed at the incompetence of the 40.

CMF.5461:

Something that is universal with all profession trait lines is that Power is always combined with Condition Duration. I don’t know why….

That said, I don’t think they would move condition damage into power any time soon.

I think condition damage and toughness would be a good combination, since burning requires time to do damage, and toughness prolongs time. Also down the valor line you have might and burn on block….while we don’t have a frequent enough rate of blocking to make it the core of a build, that synergy works well.

At that rate crit damage could move up to precision and complete that P/Prc/CritD trinity…but they moved crit damage away from precision for a reason, so I don’t think they would be keen on that move either.

Condition damage could also go with healing power, since if we go down the honor tree we may be lacking in power and precision, which would give us some defensive damage via retaliation and burning.

Just some thoughts as we play “dev”.

From a PvP point of view, that might sound like a reasonable idea. However, on the PvE side it is, imho, a pretty stupid switch which just threatens the rest of build diversity out there. The typical DPS builds are already the way to go (and they are in a pretty good position, compared to most other classes), while the proposed stat switch would be the final deathblow to any AH build.

roamzero.9486:

Change Kindled Zeal to Flames of Condemnation – every time you apply burn, you also apply 2stacks of agony and 2stacks of bleed for 3s.

Well, applying agony would definitely be overpowered in PvP :P

As for torment, wouldn’t mind having access to it, maybe that would make condition builds worth considering.

I understand the displeasure with condition damage as second stat in Radiance, but tbh, where would you put it otherwise? Both condition damage and duration are pretty useless for the vast majority of our builds, but they need to be put in some trait line (unless the whole stat system is changed) and no matter where they end up, a lot of people will be kitten ed.

Kjeldoran.3849:

3)rune of cittadel isn’t so good as you think… it’s easy to understand that a 5% chance on being hitted means 100%chance after 20 attacks… do you think you can survive to 20 attacks with this build? i dont…

Aww, that hurts.

However, I somehow don’t see any reason why I should take the OP build over a good old full zerker AH. That one offers slightly more effective power and slightly less effective health (which is, in my experience, easily compensated for by AH). In both cases, I need to change the build if I want to do real DPS, but the AH equip would be at least dual use.

Active only in fight.

I think you are missing something …

Ok, to address those points:

1. Possible, I’ll have to check it.
2. I have yet to see any proof that multipliers stack additively. Until then, I stick to the more intuitive and reasonable multiplication.
3. Well, damage reduction is not really relevant in this case. Although I understand your concern about other faults, the offensive stuff translates pretty well into practice, at least in my experience.

€: Just calculated a bit for point 1.

If the DPS build and yours both used a greatsword, the first part of the autoattack would deal the following average damage against a target with 2000 armor.

Wiki damage formula:
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

So, the DPS build:
0.461 * 1100 * 2554 * 0.8 / 2000 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 + 0.539 * 1100 * 2554 * 0.8 / 2000 * 2.27 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 = 2520
Multipliers are Scholar Runes, Fiery Wrath and Radiant Power.

Your build:
0.549 * 1100 * 2096 * 0.8 / 2000 + 0.451 * 1100 * 2096 * 0.8 / 2000 * 1.92 = 1305

So with the manual calculation, your build sits at 52% of the DPS build’s damage, which is not too far away from the buildcraft results. And we must not forget the hammer, but I’m really too lazy to do all the calculations with the symbol and the other crap. Will be below 50%, definitely.

‘sigh’ Ok, that’s gonna be some work now.

First part, the build comparison. Btw, is there a build calculator other than gw2buildcraft which has a display for effective power? Since that site does not seem to receive any updates, it’s starting to get annoying (even if it’s not too much out of date yet).

The DPS build:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|1.1g.h2|6.1a.h1f|1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e|3s.0.3s.0.2s.0.2s.0.3s.0.2s.0|a2.p26.0.u28b.5|2e.1|v.16.17.19.0|e
6613 EP without external buffs. The 3 might come from EM, which your build lacks.

Your build:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|2.1n.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|1c.71j.1c.71j.1c.71j.1c.71j.1n.71j.1c.71j|21j.0.21j.0.31j.0.31j.0.21j.0.2u.0|0.a2.u46b.u27b.0|2e.1|v.16.19.1b.1i|e
3261 EP
Notes: First, sentinels changed to soldiers, since buildcraft does not know them. Second, I deliberately ignored the extra toughness from Strength in Numbers since 4 Precision won’t do much on the offensive part.

The AH zerker:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|2.1g.h2|0.0.0.0.0.0|1g.a7.1g.a7.1g.a7.1g.a7.1g.a7.1g.a7|2s.0.2s.0.3s.0.2s.0.3s.0.2s.0|0.0.u46b.u278.a6|2e.1|v.16.19.11.1i|e
5025 EP

So, if we take the DPS build as 100% damage, then the zerker AH has 76% and your build has 49% of its effective power. Keep in mind that effective damage will still be lower for both builds, because the DPS build does not use a hammer. I’m just too lazy to calculate that difference, since it does not change much in the order of magnitude.

Regarding damage multipliers, Radiant Power is fully active since there is always a condition on any enemy. Fiery Wrath can also be regarded as permanently active, since a DPS build can achieve quite a high burning uptime by using the VoJ active effect, even if there is no one else who applies burning. All three builds have Elusive Power, so that will be pretty much on the same level and therefore yield no differences.

As a side note, the DPS build I’m using here is not yet the absolute maximum. However, the question about what to use of the 10/25/0/25/0 family mostly boils down to personal flavor and the type of dungeon you want to run, so it does the job. And to carify an apparent misunderstanding, the zerker-AH is not supposed to do proper damage in the sense of a DPS build. Its job is just maximum damage while maintaining enough defensive to “tank” most stuff sufficiently well. Comes in very handy in bad groups, when a true DPS build quickly becomes pretty stressful.

Worked fine with a full zerker 10/25/0/25/10 and GS/Sc+F

Nope, it does not look good on paper. Way too much vitality and defense in general, utterly useless sentinel gear and too low power and crit damage. You can facetank most “tankable” stuff with a hammer AH build in full zerker gear. If that’s not possible, it’s probably not meant to be facetanked. Besides, mob aggro is another factor that makes such a tank build unreliable and therefore a liability to the group.

Furthermore, the DPS section makes it pretty obvious that you don’t have the slightest idea about a proper DPS build. Otherwise, you would not have cited Korval’s junk wannabe-DPS build as some kind of “reference”. Taking a proper DPS build as reference, you will be somewhere below 50 % of his damage output. And no, such a zerker will not spend most of the time running away from mobs or lying on the ground, if the group is not completely useless.