Guild Wars 2

@ Hennaz: Nope, vitality is simply a waste in most situations. Its superior to toughness in the very short run, but after that, you’ll always want toughness. In PvE, you don’t need a big buffer for big burst damage, because you should dodge that anyways, but anything that helps reducing incoming damage will help, so that the limited amount of healing you have available can deal with it.

Somehow, I don’t want to know what superior infusions will cost. Probably more than a legendary, given the current prices for the blue ones …

Sorem.9157:

You can easily tank most of the things on this game with a Berserker/Knight setup. At least i’ve managed to do it with my Furious Knight build https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Furious-Knight-Built-WvW-Solo-Burst/

If you’re looking for something more tanky, did you ever consider Cleric’s instead of Soldier’s ?

Going full zerker with an AH-build always gives you quite a good survivability, that’s the principle of the build. On the other hand, that very principle is the reason why especially PVT stuff, but also cleric’s won’t help you a lot on the defense. Both of them totally cripple your damage for having only one offensive stat, and they cripple your selfheal. Without precision, your crit rate drops into oblivion and empowering might becomes useless, which is one of the finest sources of healing for AH.

If you want to use cleric’s armor, use a full healway build. It makes the best of it (AH does not really scale with healing power), has rather decent support for the group and you won’t do damage anyway. For an AH build to be the most defensive, take knight’s, not soldier’s. That gives you higher armor and a constant flow of healing, which will offset the increased vitality of soldier gear after a few hits in the fight. Its only “weakness” are massive hits, but you should not facetank those anyway.

@ the damage argument: You are completely mistaken, Maiden. A guardian can very well be within the damage range of a warrior, even without sacrificing his support. He only needs to the the warrior’s offensive support, but that’s not a big problem in an organized group.

Maiden England.3491:

Dungeons, high level events, WvW, PvP………………… PVT works for all of them. for those who said PVT is useless in PvE, are you insane? YES you do need the health when you are in a dungeon, because you’re the one tanking the most. zerker guards are a joke.

To some degree, everything works. However, just to pick your little list apart:
Dungeons: Utterly useless, even as a “tank” or whatever goes for that in this game, you don’t need all the defense from PVT. If you have an AH build, it actually cripples your long-term defense since crits are an important source of healing – which you won’t have, just for the sake of useless health bar.
Highlevel-Events: Even worse than dungeons, since outdoor-PvE is ridiculously easy.
WvW and PvP: Finally, some places where it might be useful.

haviz.1340:

Dub.1273:

In PvE i’d say berserker, maybe with soldier runes (nice support) and mayyybe with a few knights trinkets. When using AH and beeing able to dodge, everything else is kind of a waste of dps imo.

Using AH and knight’s trinkets is already a waste of dps.

He wanted something tanky. Since that automatically implies a certain level of DPS-loss, your comment was not really helpful.

Yet the hammer has its inherent risk of dying of boredom due to its monotonous gameplay :P

Regarding the gear questions stated above, I strongly disagree with the recommendation to use (some) soldier items. In PvE, soldier is completely useless in more than 99% of any cases. Noone needs something like 19k health if he can dodge even a bit. If you want rather defensive gear, take knight’s refined with a bit zerker or, in the worst case, cavalier/valkyrie. But not soldier.

Might be something like this build, which Obtena features in his signature.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.4|2.1h.hf|2.1h.h4|1h.72.1h.72.1h.72.1h.78.1h.78.1h.78|1h.62.1h.62.1h.62.1o.63.1o.63.1c.62|k25.f6.u12c.0.5|2i.d|v.1d.14.15.0|e

Though to be honest, I can’t grasp why anyone would want to run around with condition damage gear since its massively inferior compared to direct damage boosting stats.

I’d still like to see a reliable reference for damage reduction effects being additive instead of multiplicative. But yes, I doubt that Judgement will be doubled – the other signets, however, are in a dire need of at least double passive effects.

I suppose that a conventional AH build would do the job of keeping enemies close better in most dungeons. Way more defense through the self-heal, no too big losses in offense and probably more flexibility in support.

Obviously, you did not have any look at this forum during the last week. Otherwise, you would have noticed that there were at least two threads complaining about exactly this issue. But since old news is old, they just dropped from the front page. ANet knows about the issue, so it’s their decision to act or not to act.

Anyways, regarding PvE, I personally don’t really care about changes to our ranged options. DPS-wise, the scepter is fine in most cases (at least for a ranged weapon), and the staff is also OK with all its support. Meleeing is still the better option. You just need to know how to dodge, then “40k boss damage” are no problem.

JJBigs.8456:

Honestly I dont even notice EM healing me with AH. The sole reason I run AH is for staff heal on empower. Also if your not running knights/zerk EM makes no sense.

On a side note: I do run both traits, AH and EM. I surely dont run EM for the heals though.

Well, with a halfway decent crit rate, EM provides a wonderfully constant flow of small heals. Of course, that won’t heal you to full if you take a load of big hits (in PvE, you should not eat them anyways), but in too many cases, it is the many small hits that will wear you down eventually. For those, EM healing is a great counter.

I’d rather skip 2h mastery than EM. For the greatsword, it is not really necessary and for the hammer it’s virtually useless in PvE. EM on the other hand is quite nice, both for yourself and the group.

Talloc.6835:

I don’t run a non-AH build because they’re inferior, ’nuff said.

This is absolute nonsense.

Regarding the OP’s question, I mostly run with RF (since they took away stability from ToC) and though it is not completely bad, I’d still like to see some improvements. Right now, it simply does not feel like an elite skill, but just like another generic utility, especially compared to a warrior’s Endure Pain. If ANet allowed us to attack under the effect of RF, I’d already be happy.

Toughness does indeed have a great influence on aggro. In most cases, it outweighs damage done by a lot, so Guanglai’s statements regarding the feasability of an anchor are way too negative. However, the usefulness of such a build is debatable since facetanking is rather impossible in places where you’d really need it.

Pvt Frosty.6973:

YES please! this bug has been around since launch! whats up with that?!

Well, it probably took all their dev resources during the first five months to fix Pure of Voice. Unfortunately, that means that we will have to wait another few months until they’ve figured out what to do with the symbol :P

I disagree, at least regarding PvP. Bunker engineers are even more annoying than bunker guards.

Mujen.2089:

Whats the highest crit damage you get on guardian? I’m at 3100 atk 37% crit chance 86% crit dmg and with a few might stacks doesn’t deal as much damage as I’ve been told is possible (12k+??) with whirling wrath: 0/5/30/30/5. Am I missing something or is 12k not realistic? I haven’t even broken 7k, think ive seen that once as guardian.

With similar stats, I sometimes see numbers of 10-12k appear for my WW when in dungeons. But that is pretty rare and not at all reproducible due to the way WW is currently designed. The devs should redesign it to make the damage more consistent – variation between 2.5k and 12k (for my guardian) is ridiculous.

Maiden England.3491:

Hammer actually does more damage than GS, but more damage OVERALL.

Er, according to the latest calculations I’ve seen (http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/70080-guardian-effective-dps-tests/) as well as my own experience with both weapons, the hammer does not deal more damage than the GS. Still, it can be a good weapon – if you can live with its kind of gameplay.

Server: Riverside
Dungeon: Arah
Problem: Surprise! The kitten gate.

Please try the solution that has already been suggested and make the access independent of the meta chain. So you can try to fix it without annoying everyone.

Volkrin.9765:

I think it’d be kinda cool if Guardians could use pistols, which in conjunction with the torch could make for a really cool “witch hunter” look.

Witch hunter would be an interesting idea, although I’d already be happy of they simply speed up the scepter’s autoattack.