Guild Wars 2

Has it ever occurred to you, that maybe you just need to git gud?

If you want to do pve and wvw without changing to much, you’ll need to find a good balance of gear, as retraiting is free and fast. Using a good combination of berserker, cavalier, knights, and anything else will allow you to keep much of the damage of a full pve build, and allow you to retrait for wvw. I would aim for 2.5k to 2.7k armor, and then stack as much power, prec, and ferocity as possible. Then for wvw, traiting 6 into honor for force of will (and guard stacks if you have them) should be sufficient health, while putting 6 into valor will bring you to that 3k armor number and grant another 20% crit damage.

For weapons you can keep hammer and greatsword for both modes. Read obal’s sticky for hammer/gs in pve, and watch amins’s videos for wvw hammer/gs. This kind of setup allows you the versatility of going into either game mode and being competative. You won’t be at the top of the charts, but you won’t be a liability either because of gear choices.

It’s generally a support weapon only (and a very good one at that in the right builds). The highest potential fit damage is probably in a permeating wrath build. Just auto attacking and running through zergs or large events can let you burn all the things. But, then again, you can do that with most other weapons also. Staffs auto just make it easier to tag.

This is true. You could go full power stacking with soldiers. I was stuck in my own ascended armor thoughts and could only really think of knights and cavalier. I also use force of will (?) For health, as is basically +6k from 0 on honor, and honor is already useful for defense.

Should you choose to bring it somewhere other than pve, I’d suggest knights. You’ll need the toughness in wvw, and a power/prec split is more beneficial than a power/ ferocity. Nothing much else will provide a better split oof damage and defense.

Hoelbrak is best used as an in between for melandru and strength runes. They fit much better in a wvw scenario.

You could try runes of privateer if you want the might, but there’s nothing really for the condition reduction. The bird is closer to a ranger pet than anything else, and can hit around 1-2k. Those should be around the 2s range iirc.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

So, this is a hybrid of Power and Condition damage? I always think of a hybrid as a mix of DPS (Power or Condi) and Tankiness.

I haven’t really heard of hybrid as describing an offense and defense mix. To me, hybrid is power/condi mix. either defensively (soldiers, dire mix) or offensively (rampagers). Cavalier and Knights are your “tanky” sets (like a literal tank. heavy armor, but can still punch some holes). A mix of DPS and Defense I would just call balanced. And then to round out the other sets, anything with healing power is termed sustain.

More on topic, I think hybrids can definitely find a place in pvp formats. My preferred hybrid is Celestial (or if you don’t like crits, and aren’t in spvp) Soldiers/Dire, with a 6 in Zeal and Virtues for Amplified Wrath and Permeating Wrath. I just feel unlimited aoe burning is too powerful to not take advantage of. The only other option I feel would be if you were going scepter and build towards single target exclusively. Nabbing a bunch of damage mods and getting 100% burn would end up nasty.

Scepter Single Target:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJArfl0ApQoNCxSI8DNR8QZ9J8CbQ1BwE8oXFDA-TFiAwAXeAA62fglegkK/Oq+TFlgOM/B4EAQKA/kGB-w
(I’m not too serious about the signets, but those are some nasty looking stats. 2.3k power, 40% crit (1h), 37% damage, 1kcondi (806 tick burns), all with basically 3k armor and 17k hp.)

Actually, what I’ve found easiest is to just get the magi armor from AC (free monk runes) and clerics everything else. With 30 in honor ( which you’re going to have, I hope) you’ll be sitting at 17k hp without anything else. Sigil of benevolence and monk runes with 2k+ hpow, and battle presence ticks for 300, regen for 400, and anything else is gravy. Also, dem dodge rolls.

Maybe it’s time to make a burning guard to relax with?

It does. 15%, iirc, allows you to dodge every 8.5s instead of 10. It can be okay alone, but with battle presence, it can really help you teammates should they not have vigor.

What you could do is combine valks, cavalier, and knights to get the stats you’re looking for. Conversely, if you take… Deathly perception is it? (50% crit in ds) you can skip knights entirely. You could do something like valks armor, assassin weapons, cavalier everything else. Get some precision boosting foods and some access to fury (if you don’t have set runes, fury, out the much cheaper citadel give long lasting fury) and you’ll have close to 85% crit chance with very good ferocity and good power.

Armor might be a tad low though. Maybe you could move those 2 points from the precision line to toughness. The 1 point minor grants Toughness in ds in addition to the 100 toughness from the trait line. You’d also be able to take advantage of condi removal on entering ds.

Between those two ideas, you’d be trading ~13% crit for 449 toughness (in ds). On course, you could always drop some cavaliers (while using something like fury runes) and replace those with knights, and take a bit of each side. With fury runes and switching the cavalier weapon to knights, you could gain 6% crit and keep the same amount of toughness, with the only choice left being gaining 100 + 170 toughness or 100 precision. Those are the difference between 2523 Armor 64.8% crit, and 2793 and 60% crit (both in ds, and assuming you’re even taking deathly perception)

Maybe more than you were asking for, but I’m on a theorycrafting binge.

If you want to be a personal healing signet for 5 people, take em. I’ve got one guard using them in a full healing power build, and keys just say battle presence for almost 400, regen for 500, plus all the other heals to give out. It gets a little crazy. Pairs best with sigil of benevolence on a staff. If you want to go full heals (like, 2k+ hpow) I recommend.

You could also consider dire armor and weapons with soldiers everything else would give you around 700 condition damage and 6 in Zeal with the soldiers will give you sufficient power to make not burning hurt. The dire/soldiers split will also give you about 1.6k vitality and toughness, which translates into 17k HP and 2.8k armor, and you still have 8 trait points to spend. This of course only works in pve and wvw, and it’s not too welcome in pve dungeons.

Something like 6/4/0/0/4 could work well, using scepter and grabbing radiant fire and Supreme justice. With Fiery wrath, sigil of smoldering, and flame legion runes, you’ll have 100% burn duration, burn on every three hits, recharging voj (and that delicious might + vuln combo), and +27% damage. You could consider moving 1 from virtues to radiance for another 10%, but the burn won’t be as frequent. Maybe you can get around that considering you have recharging voj.

I’ve thought of something like this myself. Were I to do it, is go with as much cavalier as I feel comfortable with, while the rest is valks. 30 in marks for remorseless and of course Intel sigils. If there’s a significant amount of vitality, then maybe wurm runes might be in order. Something like 6/4/x/x/0, with x being some amount of points. I’d like to have around 2.8k armor, with the rest out into vit. Something like this should be nasty.

I don’t take it seriously, but I’ve got my ranger running a perma chill build. At least 2/6/0/0/2, MH axe, sigils of ice, runes of ice, and owl. Consider hydro sigil, ice drake, snow leopard, sword, sb, torch, etc.

It’s pretty fun to use. Might make some people hate you forever. Probably works best as hybrid, as traps and Axe will be putting out quite a few condis, but you’ve got that basically permanent 5% damage and a bird/drake/cat.

Yeah, I’ve read through anyone who’s posted calcs. However, our friend Stars is going fairly in depth, and I’m interested in a) confirming everyone else’s math, b) possibly learning some hidden way to better optimize in some situation, and c) increase the data’s visibility.

I can swap out the soldiers for knights easily enough. I knew my damage would be particularly low by going with sentinels, and I’m not completely worried about that. I just had some bad wvw runs where it felt like I wasn’t helping whomever was around me, which is what Umie’s build was built for. I’ll just have to mess around with a few variants more and perhaps I just need some more time to get accustomed.

It was probably done when they added a direct damage component to it whenever that was. Would be nice to see kitten base chill though.

If you want to go for super, extra low budget cheap, you could grab citadel runes. Gives long lasting fury with fury boosting goodness and a chance for bomb on hit. They’re like, 3 silver per. Other runes will be better, but they’ll also be much more expensive.

My current ranger is a mix of soldier and sentinel (lb+sw/a) that I got following www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/84933-sentinel-frontliner-next-level-wvw-ranger-guide/

Problem is, I’m kind feeling it underwhelming at the moment. It’s kinda expensive, so I was not really wanting to just get rid of it. I also haven’t had much time to mess around and theory craft. So, my question to the ranger community, is were I to keep my current equipment, what are some build ideas I could try to use? I can change weapons and traits, but preferably keep the armor either soldiers and sentinels (mines currently a random mix).

I’m not necessarily asking for full builds, mostly just ideas that I could build around. Namely, what kind of advantages could I use by having high vit. Thanks for your consideration.

Still good info. I’ll be waiting on the expanded armor and build exposition. (I personally run the hammer deeps when I go dungeoning. I’m sure people would be interested in hammer vs gs/sw vs sc builds)

Practically since beta svarty has been complaining about guardian health. If you look through his post history, he’ll have many random quips about raising the pool, or about how having a low hp pool prevents guardians from being able to use a burning build or something unrelated like that.

It’s been well documented moar hache pees is in his wishlist.

I’d still like to hear other people’s ideas.

Yeah, you could go the super cheap route. I only have kotaki on my guard. Bolt will go father though, as you can use it on more classes, particularly guardian as sword is better than gs for dps (gs only for burst, sword for sustained).

I’d prefer if SoA blocked instead. There aren’t many unblockable projectiles in the game, and the benefit of blocking would be a great help.

The trait for SoA on revive attempt is also kinda lame. 60s CD for a 4s effect, and no trait synergy. Compared to mesmer’s feedback on revive, lasts 6s, +2s with temporal enchanter (doesn’t mix with glamour mastery), and has an icd of 10s. It has a 60-80% uptime compared to our 6%. I know SoA provides a knock back, but it doesn’t help against stable foes or anything else that prevents stomp interruption.

SoJ scales very well with power, but I think it still needs something small.

Even in pve scepter will be quite useful. It’s by far top dps for guardian when all of smite hits, but you can still do very good dps with smite missing a few times like it’s wont to do. You can look into it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guardian-DPS-Spreadsheet/first#post3846690

The biggest thing I’d you’ll be losing a tad group support, but what you’ll bring should be sufficient for most cases.

I would:
*give each weapon a symbol. Symbols are an integral part of the guardian, and each weapon needs to be able to take advantage of that. In addition, each weapon set should have at least a field and finisher. I leveled with sw/f and sc/t, so I never really had a chance to use combos. Symbols on each set would help the field, so we’d just need a finisher.

*Improve spirit weapon AI. The traits for spirit weapons are mostly fine, even the number and placement. However, the weapons have a penchant for disappearing right before you really need it, or getting themselves killed. I think spirit weapons at least need to stay alive until killed as opposed to disappearing after a time. This would open another trait that could either go back into spirit weaps, or do something different. Also, spirit weaps probably shouldn’t go nova by using a command, so that could be changed also.

*Take a look at things that have been forgotten from beta. By this I mean, traits that were a good idea at the time, but have disappeared since. Things like retaliatory subconscious and shimmering defense are examples. They are quite underwhelming considering previous changes or situations where it would come into play.

There’s a few more, but I can’t remember right now. Scepter could use something different (on top of a symbol). Maybe a burst on hit a la engi pistol 1.

I’ve really wanted to get something with shaman gear to work, and I still haven’t found something yet. They key to building around a stat array is to look at what it provides and work around ways to either accentuate it’s strengths or mitigate it’s shortcomings. Shaman gives mainly vitality, with minor hpow and condi. So what I’ve done, is look at traits, runes, and other complementary armor sets that either use vitality, add toughness, and/or make use of healing power and condition damage. Rangers have a7%conversion vitality into power, which could pair well with exuberance runes (which give quite a few stats based on vit. Notably another 7% to power). However, that makes more sense for sentinels as that gives both toughness and power. OTOH, engis have 7% into condi damage, which you could pair with scavenging runes (it’s not ranger, but it could work if you could find some damage reduction traits or effects to take advantage of)

Staying with ranger, you could try to combine some shamans and settlers, and dump some points into BM and WS for a beefy condi bunker. You’d be able to take advantage of all three defensive stats, and you’d have a decent amount of condi damage. I might even consider making something like that as I’m currently unhappy with how my ranger is going.

Other options for shaman gear might include thief and ele, though those would be harder to do possibly. While guardians might like the vit and hpow, they currently don’t make very good use of condition damage outside of hybrid burn/power builds.

I’ve tried a chilladin in PvP and it was quite interesting. GH, hydro, ice, and ice runes made some people very unhappy. The only thing I’d change is either adding some secondary effect (5% damage/chill increase), or slightly lowering the cooldown.

Force of will is also decent, as it’s quite a few free stats. It enables me to wear the same armor in pve as wvw and 1) stay within ~15%full zerker damage (using the meta hammer build), and 2) retrait for 3k armor and 20k health for wvw. Essentialy, you’re getting 6k more hp by getting that trait than if you never went into that line, which is not an insignificant amount at all. It allows you to focus more on either toughness or damage with gear.

It’s kinda boggled my mind that the “all condition” foods go up to 40%, while individual condis only get to like, 15%. Should be flipped, just like boon duration is with runes.

Citadel also isn’t the worst for loads of fury, but that should be your “no one gives me fury and I only have 20silver”.

Arken.3725:

Renewed Justice: As this trait only works upon killing a foe, it’s far from useful in any sort of fight. This is true with any traits involving a kill or reviving in combat.

This trait is actually quite useful in spvp. You already get blind on voj in order to get this trait. Use it to help guarantee stomps. It recharges on kill, so now you have it to use again later. It won’t help against non interrupting skills, but then again, nothing much does.

Also, for the other guy that I can’t remember because I’m on my phone, amplified wrath increases damage not duration.

Aren’t you fun?

Like most people have said, pure condition could afford Balthazar. Your 4 and 6 for balth won’t be great, but w/e.

Power or hybrid should go for flame legion, particularly if you’re having fiery wrath. My preferred burn build is 6/2/0/0/6 rolling flame legion and a smoldering sigil (I was sure I had 100% burn sans food, but I don’t remember how). There are a few other kinds of burn build. You might also consider at least 5 in valor with defenders flame and guardian runes. Load up on blocks, and if you can hit 50%burn, you’ll get a 3s (potentially 4s) burn per block and long lasting might. Shelter could definitely turn into a bomb that way.

Or, light fields could stay the way they are and retal could be made more useful. Who knows.

I’d rather see symbols changed to fire fields, and maybe tack that on to kindled zeal for fun. Honestly, I think kindled zeal is mostly overshadowed now by amplified wrath, even if it does allow you to get 4016+ condi damage on a guardian (not a typo).

Kindled zeal needs to do something different now, and it’s giving me a feeling of letting the guardian ramp up in effectiveness. That plays into symbols acting as fire fields (to ramp up might), or maybe having another effect while target is burning. Once that happens and spirit weapons are made more fluid, 30 in zeal will feel pretty good.

You gonna get both tickets if you don’t got the proper paper work ya dig?

Torch 5 is amazing for clearing condis. Problem is, it’s hard to see it’s full effect. I do think that it needs something to make it more noticeable. Maybe changing it to one condi removed per second to guard and allies, along with 5 target aoe cap instead of the current 3.

Shield could also use some more synergy with other parts of the guardian. Most of the other suggestions given would all be welcome.

Staff:
Not to say its a terrible proposal, but the fury on symbol, is that even without boon duration, you can get anywhere from 8/15s or 12/12s uptime on fury, on a support weapon, and only that support weapon. You don’t really get Fury as a guardian from any source other than SY!. Also, does the swiftness from LoW stack? If so, considering swiftness can stack in duration 9 times, that’d be giving a zerg 135s+ swiftness indefinitely, or if it doesn’t stack, then its worse than Temporal Curtain in that regard (trading a pull for block, but without potential reflects and a much worse cd.

Sword:
I do agree here. The projectiles from Sword auto 3 should be considered a wave just like staff’s, but at a much smaller range (like 300, which it is at now. Its also called Sword Wave). Zealot’s Defense should probably also block rather than absorb, unless its also preventing certain “unblockable” projectiles (which looks like Static Shield, Shadow Shot, Phoenix, and Mirror Blade). Maybe it could block and absorb, in which case give that to Shield of Absorption also.

What I’d really like to see is a symbol on sword (and scepter, so that every loadout has a symbol). Now you could make a case for Symbol of Fury, maybe give it a low duration like 3s, and tack it onto Flashing Blade, or have a Symbol of Blocking and Absorbing Projectiles and tack it onto Zealot’s Defense. W/e works, just as long as there’s a symbol for sword (and Scepter).

Torch:
Its not really as kittenome people think, but its still hard to really want on the Guardian. Zealot’s Flame doesn’t stack as much burning anymore, which is unfortunate. Its still decent at dropping some burst tho. Cleansing Flame, ticks 10 times, and removes conditions from allies, on a 15(12)s recharge. It could be a fantastic condi cleanse for the party (zerg), but its really hard to see the effect when none of it happens to you. It also has the problem of only hitting 3 enemies (which hurts its burning capabilities via VoJ passive), having a long channel time for not too much damage, and putting the Guardian in a fairly vulnerable state. Maybe having it remove one condition per 3 ticks from the Guardian (or maybe everyone else too.) would make it more noticeable. Also, considering the torch trait increases burning time, Cleansing Flame should have some way to apply burning outside of VoJ.

Shield:
Like was said, SoA should be blocking things, or at least allow absorption to count as block for trait purposes. It could also probably afford kitten cd reduction for both skills.

Spear:
Considering I have Kamohoali’i Kotaki, I very much care about underwater combat. Honestly though, I think Spear is fine how it is. The only problem is that it uses Powerful Blades and Two-Handed Mastery, which provide no synergy at all. Maybe moving the Spear aspect to Zealous Blade and have it borrow the damage and healing from that trait (then Powerful Blades could afford something more interesting than 10% damage).

Mace:
Mace is pretty decent, but it could use a few tweaks to make it feel better. 3rd chain on Mace auto should hit 3 enemies. It doesn’t need to heal from 3 enemies, as having that one heal makes it better healing for 1v1 situations, but not having a cleave on the damage hurts it. In the very lease, divide the heal into 3, and let all effects cleave at the normal 3 targets for AA (still though, one heal and 3 damage would be best). Protector’s Strike also needs a “cancel” button for the channel. Canceling the channel should just provide the current end effect like many of the other block skills. The delay between block and strike could afford to be sped up a little.

You can dodge or otherwise foil a backstab. Hybrid sneak attack gives you all the benefits and disadvantages of both (which is obvious). I used to run a d/d p/d for zerg surfing, but I think I’m going to refocus into mostly p/d (maybe focus on shadow strike, or something, who knows).

Toxic is actually TM 06.

Zerker is still more damage, even with the procs. 3/5/0/4/2 is the meta hammer build. Using assassins won’t be the worst thing you could do, so use it if you don’t want to spend more money or whatever.

2 scavenging 2 vampiric use separate cooldowns, so you could do that. The best options after that would probably another 2 vampiric or 2 flock for the bird. It doesn’t do a whole ton, but it’s a tad extra damage. Consider 4/3/6/0/1, which will allow you to get the gs trait, spammable voj, and either meditations or ah in valor. If you’re going to go that way though, you’d better make sure you make use of that ferocity you’re getting. You should probably only stack armor that gives ferocity, like berserker, valkiery, cavalier, and assassins.

It won’t compete with meta builds, which I expect you’ve made peace with, but it should be decent

If you add healing power, any green numbers get bigger. A healing skill, is only the skill to the direct right of your health. Healing builds are okay, but try to contribute as much damage as you can while healing. You need to desk some form of damage for every game mode.

Its still tricky to land all of that, but yes, theoretically that’s how it would work. Get a few of those in a zerg and you’ll have fun times. The real kicker is because it has a 20s cap, you’d want more people running it, but with more people running it, you’re likely to just overwrite un-popped aegis. It can still easily work out very, very well.

It got fairly hostile here, considering this is a thread about party healing, but it looks like we have the answer. With these runes and Sigil of Benevolence, Guards can add 22.5% healing to allies (not yourself), while Eles can do +47.5% with trait and aformentioned gear. I’ll be using such a setup with Battle Presence for mindless fun in wvw.

You 2nd build looks decent. I’d consider Superior Aria over Wrathful Spirit, as I feel it outweighs the 3.5s of Retal. You could even consider dropping 5 points from Honor and putting it in Virtues for the damage per boon.
I’d also consider switching runes of Baelfire for Flame Legion. You don’t really gain much from those few seconds of vigor (not that you’d be getting much from 1s burning either), and you shouldn’t be getting hit too often anyway with the myriad of blinds, aegis, WoR, etc. A permanent +7% damage against burning should offer more damage than the fire nova every 30s which, even if it was buffed 100%, doesn’t really offer enough (and there’s no easy to find numbers to figure damage).

If you find yourself not getting enough fury, there’s also Runes of Rage to consider. They’re essentially Fury versions on Rune of Strength.

Engis are great with grenade kit underwater. Guardian and Mesmer are fantastic with tridents. Necro’s Deathshroud is also fantastic underwater as each blast transfers a condition, and they get a few survivability skills on their weapons. In wvw rangers do well because once they get into down state you can’t really stop their pet from rezing them, so it might take a few people to outdamage it.

I’d prolly say they go in order like that.

The only absolutes I would say are
*1 in virtues
*3 in radiance.

That allows you to spam VoJ on enemy kill, giving you 3 might, aoe blind, and 3 vuln if you take that major trait. You’ll end up killing a lot of things while you level, and this creates a snowball effect in damage. Anything else is preference.

It isn’t so much about being better than power, but competitive. Compared to soldiers, a dire burn build definitely could be. You still have you physical strikes, but the burning effectively let’s you “be on target” for as long as someone let’s you keep that burn on them. It’s constant and easily applied pressure which can be harder to provide with just direct damage.

I think the situation with guardian, most condition damage armor sets either have an armor or health weakness, but we also benefit heavily from power. In pvp I ran a fairly successful build using the celestial amulet. In wvw, I figure a combination of soldier and dire could provide the necessary defense, condition damage, and power. I think most of the key is adding burn duration and permeating wrath. With weapons like great sword or staff can easily stack a lot of aoe pressure. I ran a 6/2/0/0/6 to great effect. Amplified wrath, if you’re mainly focusing on burn, effectively adds hundreds of condition damage. There are also plenty of non aoe burn build that could also hurt. As far as pvp and wvw go, I believe condition damage builds can be competitive. Open world pve can also, but meta dungeon runs still don’t really allow any condition build, let alone for guardian.

Gain adrenaline, get blinded. Swap weapon and use burst with 100% crit trait, or swap and land that immobilize/sun, or swap and use burst to remove 3 other conditions besides blind, or swap and…
It’s a blind cleanse every 5s at the cost of swapping weapons, which will also proc any on swap sigils. It’s not useless, it just made for high skilled play. There are plenty of ways to alleviate the cost of swapping weapons, which isn’t even that expensive at 5s. Is it the easiest trait to use? Probably not, but it has plenty of uses as is.

I ran around in spvp a few days ago with 4/4/0/0/6, balth runes, gs/staff, and celestial ammy. It was amazing in team fights. The buffed celestial avoids many problems you might get running carrion or rabid, and you get a chance to really make use of each stat. Due to the sigil of smoldering and radiant fire bug/situation/whatever, I couldn’t get 2s burns, but it was still a burn stacking monster.

I still need to try a 6/2/0/0/6 version, which should work better through adding AW which should end up very nice. A wvw or even pve build might work based on this. The meta is still zerker, but burning might be an acceptable alternative.

They’ve actually said they want to mess with the AI, but they’re waiting on other changes first before they do that (ie ferocity).

Like was mentioned before, toxic alliance and even aetherblades were two groups I saw major improvements with. Zerker builds still survive in pvp formats, but changes like these would help all the other style builds.

They have said they want to keep some of the pve abnegation, which is fine, but they could start really ramping up that ai in the later levels, and really increasing the attack speed for all mobs. I hate when anything has a ridiculously long global cooldown before they can do anything. Well also need to wait on their changes to defiant, as that is a purely pve mechanic that needs to be reworked in respect to wvw and spvp.