Guild Wars 2

Sword’s main problem is lack of AoE on something intended more as a damage weapon (as opposed to a defense weapon). Giving flashing blade real damage and allowing zealot’s defense to pierce would get it there. Maybe a small arc on the #1.

Greatsword - Best overall weapon. High single target and AoE damage. Easy to pick up and straightforward to learn with a natural progression to advanced usage.

Hammer - Stronger attacks with longer delays and different utility than greatsword. The long delay in the chain on #1 makes this hard to use for newer players. It takes some adjustment. The main downsides is that it’s too easy to avoid some of the attacks in PvP.

Staff - Intended as a support weapon. Some builds use the #1 with high power and crit. Otherwise, it’s mostly used as a secondary support weapon.

Sword - I don’t find this weapon to be all that great. The damage is good, but only against a single target. The utility seems good, but flashing blade is a huge DPS loss if you’re using it only for the blind and zealot’s defense doesn’t do offense very well at range (misses a lot vs moving targets). Zealot’s defense damage is about the same as the #1 chain.

Mace - Good at defense, but don’t expect to do a lot of damage with it. It has next to no mobility so use it for receiving attacks.

Scepter - Great mid-range weapon. A lot of people hate it because it misses often at long range, but the long range is only there for attacking static objects at a distance. When used at mid-range, the #1 almost always hits. The immobilize is very useful and smite gives some decent area damage.

Shield - Weak overall, but strong situationally. Shield of Judgement could use a little improvement, but Shield of Absorption is very good against ranged attackers and for knocking stuff back.

Focus - Very good for self defense, but doesn’t have as much group support like the shield does. The #5 explosion when it doesn’t block also does significant damage.

Torch - Offensive off-hand. Works in niche builds for condition damage. Otherwise, it’s generally not used. Focus and Shield provide a much better balance with offense and defense to scepter and sword and if you’re going mace, you usually want to be fully defensive.

Sounds like you just need more practice.

You should only be losing to thieves that constantly hit and run into a re-stealth. Glass cannon thieves that come straight for you, which are the vast majority, should be easy. Use greatsword’s #4 and stand in it to stack retaliation. Leap out of it with #3 to get more retaliation. Use a protection boon source when they start spamming heavy damage. Before the thief stealths, use #5 to get him chained, but don’t pull in yet. Usually they’ll get themselves to under half HP just from retaliation. When they do start to run, use Judge’s Intervention to stay on them. When they stealth, pull them in with the second part of #5 and whirling wrath, making sure to active Virtue of Justice. That kills at least 50% of thieves.

Against greatsword warriors, just learn to dodge 100blades – stun break their bull’s charge immediately. That makes most of them a walk in the park. Just be careful when you use your binding blade pull into whirling wrath. Preferably, wait until their 100blades and whirlwind are on cooldown so they can’t hit you back or escape your whirling wrath. If they use Endure Pain (take 0 damage from direct attacks), don’t pop cooldowns against them. If they use Frenzy, dodge/kite/CC them until it ends. Learn both those icons.

I would recommend using a different rune set. I use Forge for the protection boon at 50% HP. Earth also works, though may not be as reliable. You could consider a more offensive set as well.

After playing a warrior for a little bit in sPvP and zone PvE, I’ll say that guardians are definitely better than warriors in their current state. Although on paper warriors have a lot of ways to do a lot of damage, that doesn’t pan out in practice. Warriors need to be able to apply constant pressure in order to stay on the offensive and keep the damage rolling. If you kite or stun them, they lose their momentum and they crumble.

Warrior abilities are often very narrow or weaker than similar guardian abilities. For example, Balanced Stance breaks stuns and gives the warrior stability on a 40sec CD. The guardian’s “Stand Your Ground!” gives up to 5 people stability (5sec vs 8sec for warrior) and retaliation with a stun break on a 30sec CD. Bull’s Charge and Judge’s Intervention are both gap closers. Judge’s Intervention breaks stuns and is instant. Bull’s Charge takes time to close the gap with half the range and gets stuck on terrain. It does have a knockdown, but it’s also much easier to avoid.

Guardian weapons also tend to lend themselves to combos far better than a warrior. Greatsword for guardian has CC and burst damage and a gap closer all built in. Warrior doesn’t have the CC component on greatsword.

Guardians having low HP is a poor assessment by inexperienced players. Guardians have very high effective HP because of the passive Virtue of Resolve and Virtue of Courage. Warriors have high base HP because they have little to nothing to increase their effective HP.

Guardians having poor damage is also a poor assessment by inexperienced players. This is partly due to the Radiance and especially Zeal trait lines being sub-par. To build a guardian for damage, you often pick the Honor and Valor trait lines and then use damage gear. The end result is equal damage to Zeal or Radiance with more survivability and versatility.

I say Aegis is fine as-is. Different abilities need to have different strengths and weaknesses or the game becomes too one-dimensional. Changing Aegis a time-based block would make it just as good against a single big attack, but also multiple small attacks. Its intended weakness is to spread-out damage. Protection, Weakness, and Retaliation aren’t as good against single big attacks (use them when the condition/boon is down) but are better against spread out damage taken over time.

You also have many multi-attack projectile block abilities as a guardian.

They don’t do a lot of damage initially. They have a lot of control and can last a long time in a 1v1. Their weakness is that they have a couple abilities that are their key damage dealers and if you avoid or negate them, they do almost no damage. However, if you combine some of that control with another profession with some decent damage, it’s a pretty nasty combo.

Svarty.8019:

I used to be able to survive using retaliation against thieves, but it feels as though there has been a stealth-nerf to toughness, this is the real reasoning behind my original post. Of course, I have no solid evidence, but over the past week I have felt a lot weaker than before.

I haven’t noticed any difference. There are a few good thieves that don’t die that way, but then there are just a ton of glass cannon thieves that do. Since they got nerfed, they may be finding better builds that you’re not used to. I have seen a few more bleed thieves lately.

Yup. Signets have cast times, which is what makes them not all that good.

Relentliss.2170:

When you only have 10 skills actually having it on the bar taking up a slot is lame.

Not really. The point is that you can’t have everything at once. In other MMOs with a lot of skills, they become very specific very quickly. GW2 limits your available skills so that the ones you have won’t be as limited or if they are, will be more powerful. It also preserves the idea of different builds that have strengths and weaknesses and allows for team play to cover those.

D/D elementalists deal a good chunk of their damage from condition damage. In particular, there is one earth spell that makes spikes in a big area after a channel and will give you a lot of stacks of a strong bleed. If you avoid that, you take a lot less damage. Also, stay out of the fire as to not stack burning.

Against thieves, I rely on the Retaliation boon to do a lot of the work. Glass cannon thieves will kill themselves on it. I use GS and Binding Blade will hit thieves in stealth as long as they’re in range. Do that quick, pull them in, then use Whirling Wrath and that will help finish them off. GS symbol also grants retaliation, so drop it and sit in it to get the full 4 stacks initially.

Relentliss.2170:

Will go on record saying having an autoattack as one of five abiltities is lame in the extreme.

Depends on your point of view. Many prior MMOs require you to repeat ability sequences over and over again to be efficient. However, that has a low skill threshold (it can be easily automated) and leads away from have an interactive game – you’re playing the UI instead. What GW2 does is remove that and make it all automated. However, in order to be efficient, you need to use the other abilities when interacting with enemies to allow you to damage them unopposed or prevent damage, etc. Decisions made about when you use those abilities and which of them you use determine your success – not how well you can repeat 1-1-1-2 all day.

This is mostly intended. For all professions, your #1 is designed to do the most sustained damage. Your #2-#5 are designed as situational abilities. They provide burst or utility and your performance is directly dependent on when you use them.

So if I understand the ANet post correctly, we can only get 500 cogs. However, I have extra stuffing and glue and get it from presents occasionally in stacks of 25. What is that useful for?

Both warrior and guardian can be selfish. Guardians just have less options to be effective when doing that. Warriors have a lot more options.

What other professions got huge buffs to staying at range? If you’re talking about the arrow projectile speed, that was more to fix under-performing weapons than a buff the professions.

I rarely have trouble with players kiting in sPvP or WvW. Most of that trouble is because I’m not familiar with how their build plays. If you’re trying to close the gap immediately all the time, a good player will take advantage of that. You may want to instead use a defensive cooldown or retaliation and wait out their cooldown and then close the gap.

I’m not too worried about kiting either. Many of the stronger players use CC such as immobilize or stun/daze/etc in a short window to take you down.

The scepter has remained untouched because it’s not really broken. [queue complaints]

It was never intended as a 1200 range weapon. It was designed as a mid-range weapon and works perfectly fine in that regard. I admit it’s a little boring, but functionally, it works. The reason it has 1200 range is to address WvW complaints during the BWEs where guardians had nothing to reliably attack forts from a distance. Against static objects, the speed doesn’t matter.

The scepter is actually one of the higher DPS guardian weapons, and the projectile speed is fast enough that when under 600 range, you’ll hit most of the time. Part of the reason it has an immobilize is to synergize with keeping people at mid-range. And considering every other weapon but the staff is melee, if you care about the scepter’s damage damage, do you really want to keep people at long distances? I would wager that the design with the scepter velocity was intentional to keep the guardian themed as a melee or close-range profession.

Honestly, you should complain more about how smite’s damage is completely random or how boring scepter seems.

TLDR: If you’re trying to use the scepter against players at 1200 range and complaining, you’re doing it wrong.

Unless you’re making a support build, ignore healing power and go with toughness.

Healing power is generally regarded as a weak because the scaling for most abilities isn’t strong. Certain builds do utilize healing power, but they’re built around the stat and are generally support builds which use abilities to heal yourself and allies and don’t kill things quickly.

Aside from that, toughness reduces the amount of damage you take from direct sources (not conditions). Healing power makes abilities that heal stronger, but not by a lot, and are reactionary in nature. The other part of the equation, vitality, gives you more hitpoints. Soldier classes tend to prefer toughness to vitality, but going fully into one or the other is not recommended.

Mostly agree with the original list, though I would rate scepter much higher. Although it’s boring, it’s pretty effective as a mid-range weapon with a long range option for static targets.

Let’s take a realistic look at this match-up considering strategy and not emotion.

The only servers with a chance for first are DH and DB. No matter what NSP does, it will still come in third by the end of the week. So I can’t really fault NSP for just being downright annoying toward whomever they hate. Some of DH’s players are doing a pretty good job at provoking their wrath through the forums.

For the other two servers, DB gets most of its points from capping everything in the middle of the night and the fact that there is little decent resistance to take it back until midday. The only way for DH to overcome that is to push themselves and take as many points as possible during NA primetime and hold it until DB’s night crew shows up. Now that DB has a decent NA primetime presence, this task is nearly insurmountable and a lot of DH is burnt out from the previous two weeks. It also doesn’t help that DB’s night crew is pretty good, even though it’s mostly PvDoor.

That’s not [GoF] or [RE] guild groups, just players. I don’t think any of DH’s main WvW guilds had a guild group going yesterday.

I wouldn’t talk so much when your guild lost an Omega golem to a cliff inside DH BL’s eastern keep while failing to take it. Our whole server got a good laugh from that.

Furey.6734:

Out of curiosity, have you guys been experiencing a little more resistance by DB during NA prime time or is it the same since the 1st match?

A little, but I think DH having a worse NA primetime is more due to burnout from having to push ourselves to counter a couple hours of DB’s off-peak PvDoor.

ArenaNet doesn’t want players constantly using then interrupting the ability themselves to get extended blocking. The same principle applies to Renewed Focus (goes on full cooldown and doesn’t renew virtures if you interrupt it). Both of these abilities and any similar ones definitely need re-examined with regard to interrupting them.

Teleport abilities get you stuck in objects
- Pretty obvious what’s wrong

Zeal and Radiance Trait lines are weak
- The traits in the Zeal and Radiance trait lines are very narrow and even then aren’t very good compared to Valor and Honor. Zeal focuses far too much on symbols with its minor traits. It’s grandmaster major traits are awful. You can get more benefit from adept traits in other lines than master traits in Zeal. Radiance is far too narrow. Unless you’re using one-handed weapons or multiple signets, there’s no benefit.
- Zeal should give more offensive power or have a mix of defense and offense. Consolidate some of the narrow traits dealing with single weapons or a subset of utility. Radiance needs an appealing trait in the master level for general use.

Frustrating to get the stat combination you want
- Almost every build I’ve seen or used goes heavily into Honor and Valor. However, for more offensive play, many traits and sigils benefit significantly from crit chance. Unfortunately, there is no good way to significantly boost precision from the currently available gear sets without sacrificing vitality or using condition damage or healing power, both of which aren’t all that good for most guardians.
- Another stat combination with precision as its primary stat that doesn’t include condition damage as a secondary would help address this. Or some of the sPvP stat combinations (most have vitality and toughness swapped compared to their PvE versions). Alternatively, re-work guardians to get more use from condition damage without a very specific build.

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.

I’ve seen various comparisons. Some put greatsword ahead in raw damage by a little bit, but because sword attacks faster, it applies burning more often from the passive virtue. Sword also benefits ever so slightly from the second sigil in the off-hand item.

Both sword and greatsword are good, but in different ways. Damage against a single target is about the same. Sword gives you more defensive options to help you against stronger mobs, especially ranged attacks. Greatsword has much better AoE damage and if you aren’t spamming away, has condition removal.

Can’t say much for Darkhaven morning and daytime, since I’m not online then. We tend to be a very active throughout all of NA primetime with some coverage later at night. We normally develop a lead shortly after NA primetime. During primetime, we usually have a short queue for EBG. Other maps rarely have a queue unless we have multiple guilds flooding it.

WvW guilds on Darkhaven tend to be mostly independent, but support each other when help is needed and we do coordinate to get good map coverage. Lately we’ve been trying to get new guilds and PUGs up to speed.

RockonHarder.7235:

Honestly i beleive your just getting on at bad times. For me i tend to get on after Dragonbrand Primetime. So i’m defending our captured lands with a outnumbered buff.

That’s possible. By the time I get home from work, we’ve already taken most of DB or NSP border. Then it sits for a bit, our guys go to bed and there’s a 20man or so late night NSP guild and the big Taiwanese guilds from DB that just outnumber us and take most of that back. Seems like a lot of the action happens in EBG or early evening for eastern time zone.

Also, I wasn’t at the DB garrison siege from Wednesday. I arrived only at the tail end of it.

Am I the only one that dislikes this matchup? Other than Friday, it’s been almost entirely Player vs Door. Each server just takes turns throughout the day storming the entire map. Their population falls off and a couple hours later, another one is steamrolling everything.

That shouldn’t be possible unless he had access to the keep (gate/walls were down) or was previously in there. I’m not familiar with that guild, and they’re certainly not part of any of our WvW alliances, but I’ll relay it to our community site and see if anyone can contact the leader of that guild about him.

The best way to deal with it is just to report them for hacking.

You also get 3 points for a dolyak completing its route.

UGH at trying to take the hills keep on Darkhaven borderlands tonight from NSP. We burned so much siege to take that place. We had to make do with almost no organized guild presence on that map, but it eventually cracked.

It’s simple: Retaliation. Thieves do all the work. Retaliation sources to watch out for are:
1. “Stand Your Ground!”
2. Light field with Greatsword equipped
3. Using a blast or leap finisher in a light field (common with hammer and greatsword since they can self-combo)
4. Signet of Judgement
5. Bunker guardian build, who usually have the minor trait that gives himself Retaliation for activating a virtue. Generally have a hammer as one of their weapons and will not stray far from a node.

After that, they tend to go either high defense (bunker guardian) and let Retaliation most of the work or go somewhat offensive and kill the thief first using Retaliation damage as the edge. Defensive will tend to have a lot of boons that tick for a while. Offensive will use some form of knockdown to stop the thief as well as gap closers. Both tend to have high toughness.

I don’t have much experience as a defensive build, but condition damage tends to work well and boon removal if you have it. Also, attacking when Retaliation is not active. Against offensive, you want to use hit and run to prevent them from getting in too many hits against you and make them waste their mobility and CC cooldowns.

Kasei.8726:

It was done to nerf bunker guardians. That’s why the protection and boon duration runes were nerfed as well, but only in PvP. They only want it to combat burst damage.

No, I understand that’s probably why it was done. But Shield of Judgement didn’t seem like a major contributor what was broken about bunker guardian. Meanwhile, it greatly reduces the appeal of the shield for other builds.

Can anyone tell me why Shield of Judgement nerf makes sense? Shield seemed a bit weak already.

ViperWire.4261:

So many Darkhaven catapults and trebuchets to try and take West Keep in Maguuma BL.

Poor siege, which was destroyed/rebuilt multiple times. So much wasted gold :*(

Ya, that sucked. Every time we would push, you would flex more people into the zone and then any organized force we had would leave after being pushed back out of the keep. I couldn’t get the PUGs to kill a single mortar on inner walls, so there was no point in dropping siege to take inner.

mrauls.6519:

I don’t understand why dodging during Renewed Focus causes it to go on its full CD w/o giving the effect

Probably to prevent exploiting by continually ending it early and getting a couple seconds of immunity every few seconds. I would suggest that it active all remaining virtues and instantly refresh them in addition to the immunity period. That fixes the dodge problem and makes it a bit more user friendly.

Arken.3725:

Shelter: Again, not terrible but the 2 second block doesn’t make up for healing almost half as much as SoR on a similar CD when traited.

Shelter is fine. Not everyone wants to trait signets, so if you consider the base cooldowns, it’s not all that bad. But the real power is the block. It blocks everything for two seconds. If you block a 4k attack, it’s done more effective healing than Signet of Resolve. Using Shelter to block instant-death attacks in PvE is great, but takes some getting used to. Shelter is best used if you get hit a lot, whereas Signet of Resolve is better if you’re not taking damage.

Phzt.9864:

Posting this in hopes DH can shame a hacker on their server. He’s been warping around the map with this golem and others a few times now. Yes, it’s largely ineffective that he’s porting around with a golem and for some reason attacking a supply camp, but still.

Ya, we have a video of him doing that. Character name is Echinamax, male sylvari thief. He’s been kicked from multiple guilds and reported multiple times. Just need to wait on ArenaNet, unfortunately.

Ethersin.3270:

Hello first I’d like to introduce myself, I am Ethersin GL of [RE] Rethesis of DarkHaven server. I normally avoid the forums, but due to certain circumstances I am here today. I’d like to speak about a particular guild in our server ruining the servers rep and inciting flame we don’t need. This video is me capturing them straight hacking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqp0tSGuhvs&feature=youtu.be (watch in HD) So I ask for those in DH, CD, and Yaks to please report these guys if and when you see them and I wanted to state that their actions do not reflect us as a server. As of now I am aware of three of their members being hackers. Thank you all.

You know very well that [HVN] and everyone else in our server alliance denounces and does not support hacking. If you know of more of these hackers, have you reported them to any of the [HVN] officers or any of the other Darkhaven Alliance leaders? Some of the guilds are large and do public invites, so individuals like the one filmed do pop up from time to time. It’s not an organized effort in the least like you claim.

If anyone else has problems with anyone on Darkhaven hacking, please contact us through our website at www.DHAlliance.info and we’ll do what we can.

So what’s to stop the Oceanic server from gaming the system? If they take everything then most of them exit WvW and sit in Lion’s Arch, letting a small force defend, they would get a normal point score, wouldn’t they? But if they’re threatened, they just flood the map temporarily.

Secondly, if I’m understanding correctly, bonus points are scaled with the population modifier that is active when the structure is taken. This seems to discourage upgrading most structures and to let them fall back to equilibrium shortly before your server’s primetime in order to lower your opponent’s bonus points.

Also, without seeing all the details of the model, I’m not sure how close it matches reality. On Darkhaven, since we have a heavy US Pacific time presence as well as a moderate East Asian presence, we tend to start taking everything between 9PM and 11PM Pacific time. Our score goes from average (around +250) toward a blowout at almost +500 within the span of 2 hours.

Don’t immediately hold an entire server accountable for orb theft. If you saw who it was, report them (which gives you id.tag), and if they’re guilded, talk to their guild leader about it. If the guild leader is honest, they will at least kick the person.

Didn’t Darkhaven come back from more than 10k points behind 3 weeks ago in our first week against Sorrow’s Furnace and Sanctum of Rall? We missed first by less than 2000.

So who was saying bad things about Darkhaven?

We’ve done a lot in terms of organization the past week after our night capping strategy was shut down by Sanctum of Rall. We’ve also been drumming up support for WvW to try and fill maps during peak (we used to have no queues for half the maps during peak) and are now looking at off-peak coverage.

But to NSP and Ehmry Bay: Please keep up the fight. Last week was boring for us. Don’t give up when you’re behind; work harder. That’s what we did.

Ya, I feel bad for what happened to Anvil Rock last week. I think your current matchup will be really good based on past experience against Sorrow’s Furnace.

Two weeks ago, Sorrow Furnace / Sanctum of Rall / Darkhaven was really close and competitive. The next week with the exact same matchup, stuff got crazy and SoR shot ahead.

After sitting on it for a day, I agree with the OP. This change did next to nothing for retaliation and hurt greatsword build options and damage significantly. The retaliation boon needs to be changed first, then adjust its sources.

One thing that wasn’t mentioned is that the map looks like that almost all the time – it’s not just an off-hours population balance issue. One day, Ferguson’s Crossing took back their garrison, but it was lost again. Other than that, it’s mostly supply depot raids. It’s not really much fun on our side either.

From my understanding, there are 5 US servers at the bottom with low WvW participation. So whichever server gets bumped down to the next to last bracket will dominate.

Do you have some kind of +healing mod on any of your runes? Usually that isn’t reflected in stats. It also does scale with +healing, but I believe that should be reflected in tooltips.

From a magical warrior perspective, I think shield fits its abilities better. Personal opinion. I was more referring to changing abilities around or doing a mix and match.

NO. Absolutely no. Shield is group defense. Focus is personal defense with some offense. Swapping the #5 ability dilutes both weapons.

Source Info

If you have over 2000 power, then Sigil of Superior Strength is not worth it. Force, Air, or Fire are better at that point because they scale with your power, whereas Superior Strength does not. Fire is best against multiple foes, Air against a single one. Force is better if you have lower crit or a mix of condition and direct damage. If you have high crit damage, also consider Accuracy (+5% crit).

For runes, I can’t really say, and some of it depends on crit chance.