Guild Wars 2

Well, I’m not trying to get into a kitten contest about what’s better, but I do have a few problems with that build. That’s why I suggested mine instead:

1) 20 points in Valor is pointless. The 15-point minor is pretty useless and Honorable Shield really isn’t that good. 90 toughness is nothing and shaving off a few seconds on skills you probably won’t be using on cooldown anyway doesn’t make a huge difference.

2) He doesn’t have Empowering Might. For solo and WvW, that’s fine, but for dungeon runs, Empowering Might is a huge damage booster. It is worth something like 3-4 stacks of might party-wide depending on your boon duration, which adds up to quite a bit when you have other guardians in the party with it (and warriors with FGJ, engineers with Bomb Kit, etc.). A guardian/warrior/engineer/mesmer group combo can maintain 100% uptime on 25 stacks of might pretty easily.

3) He’s got both Superior Aria and Master of Consecrations traited, which is kind of a waste, since if you’re taking Wall of Reflection + Stand Your Ground + Signet of Judgment, you’ve actually only got one shout on your bar. It’s okay to take Superior Aria for only one shout if you have 20 points in Honor for EM, but investing just 10 points into Honor means you’re basically taking those ten points solely to reduce the cooldown on one shout by a few seconds.

4) He doesn’t have Fiery Wrath. That’s a really, really big hit to DPS.

I’d rather see a WvW zerg of, like, 50 mesmers. Alternately, 50 engineers with turrets and grenades. That’d be hell for the defenders.

Also, I am interested in seeing exactly who is talking kitten about guardians in any format. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything bad about guardians.

Still not a huge fan of a paltry amount of might for a tiny duration. If you want defensive support, drop the Valor points altogether and go 10 into Virtues so you can take Master of Consecrations. Just going 5 points in is a total waste of a major trait.

Other than that, there isn’t really a ton of room to move points around if you want defensive support. Fiery Wrath is still pretty much mandatory for every guardian build due to the massive damage boost for almost no trait point investment and Empowering Might is a must-have for 90% of party compositions.

phaneo.4597:

Hi, really a great writeup. I’ve played my Guardian as my main for quite a long time and since then have been trying out other professions. I was thinking about changing to this build for WvW for both large and small scale fights:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|2.1g.h1b|6.1g.h1b|1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x|1k.61.1k.61.1k.61.1n.61.1n.61.1a.61|0.a2.u56b.k29.a2|39.1|v.17.18.19.1i|e

Would like to hear your opinion and any improvements I could make.

Hammer isn’t a very good weapon for 1v1 PvP because so much of its damage output comes from the stationary symbol, which is easily walked out of. Sword or greatsword should definitely remain your go-to options for 1v1 fights, even if you’re specced for hammer otherwise.

For zerg fights, hammers are less than useless, due to how suicidal it is to try to sit in at melee range in a zerg for 3.75s charging a slow symbol that will hit no one, and which won’t even affect anyone because enemies will avoid it, and allies won’t be close enough to benefit from it. I actually recommend staff for zerg fights due to the large spread on the attack being very difficult to avoid, and having much better options in general. If all the naysaying is confusing, just keep in mind that 1h sword rocks face for PvP, and is always a safe bet.

tl;dr Don’t use the hammer for PvP except to CC and swap to your other weapon.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/79899-the-ultimate-guardian-build/

Mine is probably objectively the best sword/anything build out there. You’ll probably do okay with that other one as well, but your DPS won’t be as good.

It’s impossible to actually die in the open world unless you fall off a cliff or something. Just go full zerker.

A tenth of a second is a hella long time. That’s like a 10-frame window to hit two keys. Lots of fighting games have 1-frame dash links, that is, 1/60th of a second to dash and attack to make a move combo with the last. And it has to fall within the specific frame, i.e. not one frame earlier or one frame later.

Now you know why fighting gamers always seems to be complaining about online lag or screen lag.

It’s impossible to tank in high level fractals. If you pull heavy aggro, you’ll just die, no matter how defensively specced you are. So it’s really just a matter of getting just enough defense to survive when targeted, and no more. If you overload on defense, you’re actually making it harder on both yourself and the party, because things will go down more slowly due to the loss of DPS and have more opportunities to kill you.

In other words, play smart and go with the bare minimum in defense, and no more. If you’re good, you don’t need any. If you’re not quite there yet, try to find the fine line and err on the side of offense, if necessary.

Brutaly.6257:

@kensai
Just checking, got the impression that it was a general statement and not pvp exclusive.

@haviz
Really there is one and you need two runes to fully compensate, sure you have heals in symbols as well but those arent close to what ah does. Sure they are team wide but the heals are marginal at best.

But you didnt answer my question, how do you match 20,5% dps from valor with traits in honor, sure theoretically you do but in practice i dont get it.

You don’t get 20.5% extra damage from Valor. Your crit modifier with 0 Valor and 30 Radiance, full ruby orbs in zerker gear is 57% crit chance, 74% crit damage is 1(.57*.1.24) = about 1.71. Add in 30 Valor and Retributive Armor and you get 59% crit chance, 104% crit damage which equals a crit modifier of about 1.92. 1.92 / 1.71 = 1.123, or about a 12.3% damage increase.

By comparison, Writ of Persistence will increase your auto-attack’s base damage from 1554 to 1739. That’s an 11.9% damage increase. Empowering Might will provide an additional 4% or so from the ~2.5 extra stacks of might. Roll in whatever incremental damage you get from Elusive Power and it’s going to be about equal in terms of overall DPS, and Honor will have better overall DPS unless your group is already capping might without EM’s help, in which case Valor has very a slight advantage.

If you want the actual numbers:

10/30/30/0/0 = 2869/s
10/30/0/30/0 = 2937/s
25/25/0/20/0 = 3217/s
0/25/30/10/5 = 2463/s
0/0/30/30/10 = 2299/s

Feel free to do whatever you want with that information.

Fortus.6175:

can they chase people? no point in doing damage if you cant finish the job…

DPS isn’t really used to refer to PvP situations where the effectiveness of moves vary. When we say DPS we’re usually referring to PvE constants where damage is consistently measurable and sustainable, and things can actually take a burst before dropping.

If you’re asking if guardians are good in PvP situations, that’s a different question entirely, although the answer is still yes, they will wreck your kitten even if you try to run.

Sahfur.5612:

Broken records sound bitter to the ears.
Yet again you say I can’t survive on zerker on guardian or other classes, I’ve never stated that and I even stated that I CAN survive on zerker on glass classes and builds and was even proficient at it. Is it so hard to believe that people can move on in the opposite direction because they realize they can do more than just make big numbers? Knights allows -others- to survive on glass builds who are in the party. Your dps does nothing to help them survive in fractals. Don’t fool yourself. You are missing the point and have been missing the point all throughout. The fact you find stating such mistruths and slander necessary really shows you aren’t as good as you think -you- are. Not to mention you act all high and mighty after I previously very succinctly handed you your shattered sense of pride with the last post. I needn’t state anymore because I feel it isn’t necessary. Okietays~

If you can survive with zerker gear, why are you using knights? Simple question. You having less DPS isn’t going to help anyone survive in fractals better either. In fact, it’ll make it harder, since things will die slower.

Also, a 10/30/0/30/0 zerker hammer build gets 3k/s solo. A 0/0/30/30/10 knight hammer build gets less than 1.7k/s. 45% less damage for absolutely no benefit, since now you’re claiming you wouldn’t die even with the higher DPS zerker build.

So on one hand, either you’re trying to convince me that needing a crutch to survive makes you a better player, or you’re trying to argue that a build that grossly overcompensates on defense is the most efficient option.

Pick one, please.

First, to the first guy who honestly I’m not that interested in talking to, I’ll just say that if an AH build in full knights gear is the absolute extreme of how far you can go without dying, you’re not as good as you think you are. Seriously, if you can’t survive in zerker on a GUARDIAN of all classes, then there is no hope.

As for:

Silver.4798:

Unrelated to the topic as a whole but I humbly disagree on the grounds of guards having the best ranged DPS of all classes, although smite is really great. But from experience I can tell you that with my thief I can spam clusterbomb for higher DPS than smite, without going full zerker. Not to mention the general autoattack of trickshot >> guard’s auto attack. I haven’t played other classes too extensively to comment but my exp with the guard at range feels… how do I say this, it feels like I want to turn this into a melee fight asap lol.

In terms of where my skills are at now, training wheels defn is an adequate description. I’ll use the AH hammer build as a learning experience and tweak as needed, so for the time being I’m theorycrafting and gathering gold/mats I would need for the gear. It’ll probably take me a good 2-3 weeks before I can hit level 80 in the first place so I have plenty of time to ponder and stew!

Regarding empower, I trigger might EVERY time I crit to ALL allies? Does range matter, i.e. do they have to be really close to me for this boon or can they be like 1200 units away and still get the boon? If this boon works the way I think it works I might have to rethink my staff as my offset, sounds like scepter/shield might be the better option. If I have about 50% crit (with food and whatnot), assuming all 15 hits of smite lands thats ~7-8 crits. AH base healing is 69*0.01 (healing power), and since getting AH takes 30 points thats at least 300 healing power, so per activation thats 72 heal.

So, if it works the way I think it works, for one smite that hits for lets say 10 hits on avg, that’s 5 triggers of might on 5 players including myself, and 1 tick of vigor off of vigorous precision for critting, so 26*72 = 1872 heal, per ONE smite?! That sounds so broken, I must be mistaken

I’ll just go with bullet points. It’s easier.

- One cluster bomb deals 168×3 = 504 base damage, and rate of fire depends on flight time. At max range, it can take as much as 2 full seconds for the bomb to reach the target. The variable flight time makes it somewhat hard to calculate damage potential but suffice to say you get 504 per Cluster Bomb, at the cost of 3 initiative and 1s cast time, which averages out to one Bomb per 4s with natural initiative regen. Trick Shot is approximately 1s (wiki says .95s, let’s go with that) and hits for 185 per shot, twice if it bounces. That’s 370 per .95s on auto (389/s) and 504 per Cluster Bomb. By comparison, scepter is 224 per .83s (270/s) and 1665 per Smite per 6.83s. That means that Guardian Scepter deals 481/s average, compared to Thief Shortbow at 418/s. That’s before traits, of course, but it gives you the general idea.

- AH for beginners is fine. In fact, I recommend it. The problem is that I absolutely do not, and I cannot stress this enough, want you to feel like it is the “optimal” build for guardians. I used to think AH was mandatory for all guardians, too, way back at launch. A lot of the people on these forums are at the same place I was at a few months ago, and that’s not necessarily a problem, but you should also be ready to move on when you’re able.

- EM has a one-second internal cooldown. That means, at best, you will get one proc every second even if your crit rate is 100%. I actually run (and recommend) a build that does that (100% crit rate) but even with that it’s rare to get more than 3-4 stacks of might from EM without boon duration, due to swing speeds not matching up with the internal cooldowns (i.e. sword hits every .83s, so you’ll be proccing it every 1.66s, not every 1s). It is still very good for getting a chunk of healing (350+ per proc) in a group setting, although that’s not actually that different from just using a lifesteal food with a high crit rate (66% chance of 325 per proc).

Sahfur.5612:

bunch of bullkitten

So basically, your contention is that you die all the time even with a full tank build, so you need to justify it to make yourself feel better.

Let me give you some objective facts, which you may not be aware of:

1) A greatsword guardian with a DPS spec does equivalent damage (~7.8k) as a greatsword warrior (~7.8k), and a sword guardian (7.5k) actually beats an axe warrior (~7k), while a hammer guardian is slightly lower (6.6k), provided both classes are getting 25 might/fury/vulnerability.

2) A scepter guardian far outclasses every other class in the game in terms of ranged DPS, so long as the target is big enough to get all hits of Smite on. Even if the target is small, scepter DPS is still much higher than anything a warrior puts out with that crappy rifle weapon.

3) Guardians get passive regen, passive blocks, instant on-demand blocks and blinds, and permanent vigor on a DPS spec, on top of having naturally high armor. Warriors have a high health pool but don’t get any of the above, without having to take specific weapons or utility skills.

What that boils down to is that you absolutely should run DPS guardian, if you want to get the most out of your class. Warriors and guardians serve comparable roles, except warriors provide “offensive” support (fury, banners, some vulnerability) while guardians provide “defensive” support (basically all the defensive boons). Both are equally capable of dealing damage. Don’t just look at how much damage you deal solo. Warriors look like more damage because they self-stack might and fury better solo, but when you give that might and fury to the guardians, the difference totally disappears. Also, HB has big numbers, and people are easily impressed by that sort of thing. Never mind that it’s a four second channel that barely does any more than the scepter’s Smite in total damage.

If you’re dying, that’s your problem. I don’t die, ever. Especially not when I’m running hammer, of all things, and getting permanent protection on top of all the other stuff I listed. Because YOU die a lot running a build doesn’t make it not efficient. It just means you’re not cut out for that particular build.

AH with PVT gear is pretty much full tank mode. I assume that’s your goal, so I don’t see the problem.

If you wanted DPS, you’re better off just starting from scratch.

I think it’s hilarious you think a class that is getting constant protection on top of already being the tankiest class in the game even before all the potential defensive options you could be getting via utilities and weapon swaps is squishy. I’d hate to see you play a zerker thief or something. Sure, if you’re at the point, skill-wise, where you can’t survive without stacking tons of defensive stats, then fine. That doesn’t mean everyone is in the same place as you, though. Plenty of people do just fine with a “glass” greatsword build (20/30/0/20/0), which is comparable to warrior in raw damage output and much less defensively oriented.

Hammer is good because it gives a very strong party support boon (protection) and retains high DPS. If it was JUST the protection stacking or JUST the DPS (which, I will note, is still lower than greatsword) you wouldn’t bother with it. There’s a reason why you never see anyone running “healer” builds, even though an elementalist or engineer could probably pull it off. It’s just not a good tradeoff to give up all your damage for some questionably useful buff, especially when there’s only five people in one party.

Also, yes, “good” is a subjective term. If your hammer is dealing 5 damage per second, that may subjectively be “good” to you. If I offer you a build that literally does 1000 times more damage, that may not, subjectively speaking, be “better”. That said, it’s probably still a reasonable adjective to use.

I’d take 25 out of Valor and put it into Radiance instead. That’ll give you substantially higher DPS output and you probably won’t even notice the difference in terms of the amount of regen you’re getting. Put 5 more into Honor for Elusive Power and roll into every fight. Elusive Power sucks for dungeons because you have no opportunity to burn endurance without losing DPS, but in open world you spend so much time running between weak mobs that that isn’t a problem. Also drop EM for Two-Handed Mastery, most mobs will dead before you even get more than one or two stacks anyway.

So basically 20/25/0/25/0, run around and faceroll.

Silver.4798:

Thanks Guanglai!

Let me clarify what I have in mind. I want to be THAT guy rushing to the front lines, dishing out sustained DPS but is really really really hard to kill with all the heals blocks and (sometimes) blinds.

So in a spectrum of “bad, medium, good, great” I want my DPS to be medium or, ideally, good. My survivability (I’m combining toughness vitality and healing all together to be what I mean by “survivability”) to be great. I want my support to be great.

Now regarding what you’re saying @Guanglai, I defn see the benefit of empowering might (I might get rid of the healing symbol for empowering might now to be honest), but why is writ of persistance so vital in your opinion?

The symbol at the end of the hammer chain accounts for quite a bit of the hammer’s overall DPS. Simply in terms of optimizing overall DPS, it’s the one of your best options for hammer.

On top of that, it gives you 4s protection (up from 3s) per hammer chain. At 3.75s total swing time on the hammer chain, this means you get 100% protection uptime, which is really good to have in general. In fact, just having that 100% protection uptime pretty much means you don’t need AH or any other defensive stats, at all.

It’s not like AH actively hurts you or anything, but you need to consider the tradeoff you’re making. Is an extra 70 health per second SOME of the time worth 30 points in Valor? There are a lot of people out there now who are realizing that AH isn’t really worth it even if you multiply that healing number by 5.

Open world is easy. There’s no doubt about that. However, the fact that you’re soloing also means that it’s that much more important to consider the tradeoffs you’re making in terms of DPS. If you’re operating at 50% potential DPS and running in a group of five, your group is at 90% potential DPS assuming everyone else is still running max DPS. That’s a loss you can overlook, but when you’re soloing, half your own DPS is half of all the DPS, which means everything will take literally twice as long to kill.

There was a time, a long time ago, where I tried running solo AH hammer. It took me about ten minutes to drop the build because vets were taking literally ten minutes to kill.

You won’t do good DPS with a hammer with AH. The 30-point investment into Valor just for that one trait gimps you hard, damage-wise. Hammer also basically requires at least 20 points in Honor for Writ of Persistence (ideally 30 so you can also take Empowering Might in dungeon runs) so you’ve got at best 20 points left to actually invest into DPS. That means you can’t take both 10 in Zeal for Fiery Wrath and 25 in Radiance for Radiant Power, which is a huge hit in damage.

If you do want to run AH and retain DPS, you can go 10/30/30/0/0, but you’ll lose group might stacking and symbol duration, and still not do as much as a 10/30/0/30/0 spread. The benefits of AH without Empowering Might and Writ of Exaltation are questionable at best, but that’s your best option if you feel you NEED the trait.

HGH isn’t actually that good. You get equivalent might from blast finishers using Bomb Kit, and it’s AOE might, not just for you.

KensaiZen.3740:

You can easily spot a really good Guardian easily. He’s the one with the hammer lol

I’ve found that hammer is actually quite legit as long as it’s not AH hammer. It’s a good balance between group support via might and protection stacking and raw DPS.

Full support is still bad, though.

Isslair.4908:

Yeah, forgot to mention, that I’m talking about dungeon runs.

That’s what I think too about Empower. Giving 10 stacks of might to zerk-guys is always a nice idea. And currently I’m always trying to switch to staff and use empower whenever possible.

But I’ve done some runs with other guardians and they tend to stick to GS whole fight. So I began to doubt my actions.

I would also like to point out that a lot of GS guardians (something like 98% based on the ones I’ve run with) don’t have the slightest clue what they’re doing, so I’d not worry too much about trying to emulate random pugs.

If on the other hand you see a really good guardian and he’s doing something that appears legit, you can look into it. Just keep in mind that most pugs aren’t that good, they just throw random things together and hope their allies will carry them through things.

Your damage will be far too low to ever hold aggro. In my experience, aggro is determined by the following factors, in order of priority:

1) Order of acquisition: Whoever goes in first tends to take most of the aggro, and it’s pretty hard to shake it off for a while regardless of what you do.
2) Proximity: Closer players almost always get targeted first.
3) DPS: Players who deal more damage become high priority targets.
4) Armor: Players with high defense ratings will get targeted more than players without.

As you can see, toughness is very low on that list. It will only really make a difference if you are putting out enough damage to roughly compete with the “pure DPS” members of your party, as it serves as a tiebreaker of sorts. If, on the other hand, you are hitting for 2k/s with your hammer and the warriors in your party are hitting for 7k/s, you won’t pull any aggro even if your armor rating is through the roof.

As such, if you want to tank, you need to maximize DPS first, then look at what tradeoffs you can make for survivability in order to survive actually being targeted, without losing too much of aforementioned DPS. A DPS-specced hammer build is good for this, because you get permanent protection as well as other potential boons, on top of hefty damage reduction from Signet of Judgment, which makes you very hard to kill, but you retain relatively high DPS (about 3.2k solo, 5.5k with all buffs).

So yes, taking AH will make you live longer, because mobs will never target you due to your low DPS, and you’re basically doing nothing but healing yourself. That’s when you’re already running a super defensive weapon on a class that already never dies, even without any defensive stats at all.

You want to make sure to use Empower so it finishes the channel right as your weapon swap recharges. This will enable you to carry the might stacks back over to your main weapon, preventing excessive loss of damage. I still would not recommend you switch constantly to staff on cooldown, but rather save it for when you are switching targets or stunned or something and your DPS would be zero anyway for a few seconds.

Yramrag.3026:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

If you want to run hammers don’t use AH, it just doesn’t work.

I run AH build with hammers, all the time, with success. Please elaborate why you think we should not use AH if running hammer.

Your damage ends up being very, very low if you invest 30 points into Valor just for AH. It is massively overkilling on defense with a weapon that already gives you permanent protection on the tankiest class in the game. Your ability to spread protection and other boons is also not affected by your investment in AH, so you’re not contributing anything to the party either.

In general, AH is a very selfish option because it significantly reduces your group contribution (DPS, support, etc.) in exchange for a little bit of self-healing. It is suitable for beginners who are still learning the game but if you can survive with it you absolutely should. And there really isn’t any reason why you wouldn’t be able to survive without it when you’re using a hammer.

You may be unkillable, but how do you actually intend to kill anything with a build like this? At the very least you should run with Apothecary gear, then you can dish out some burn damage.

If you want to run hammers don’t use AH, it just doesn’t work. I recently wrote up a long guide with a few viable builds for hammer, pick one you like.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/82449-guide-to-hammers-in-pve/

Mazer.8923:

Ill agree that for pve I love the scepter and its uses. In wvw/pvp it’s pretty crappy but back to pve. For single target smite is great if the mob stays still or if you hold it in place. However the warriors rifle is right there as well (huge killshot crits as well). For groups of mobs the scepter gets overshadowed by the warriors longbow in a big way. The dmg fom smite goes down considerably while the longbow lays down combo fields for your allies to take advantage of and does some aoe dmg as well. Staff is great in cettain situations but I wouldnt run around with it out all the time. Not when there are much better options for what im doing.

Kill Shot is a 2s channel for a skill that does less damage than Smite and burns all your adrenaline, causing you to deal less damage for a good while until you can build it back up. Not even a comparison. It’s pretty much purely for WvW when the target probably can’t even see you due to culling.

Meanwhile longbow does less damage to a single target, with a slower attack, than staff does in AOE, and otherwise only has one skill that does any real damage, and it does less than either of the guardian’s two skills. The longbow’s only real purpose is to make fire field blast finishers, but one blast finisher every ten seconds at the cost of doing pretty much no damage isn’t really worth it considering the staff can regularly output 12 stacks of might with a tidy heal attached.

Guardians are the best ranged class in the game, at least for PvE. Warrior is probably the worst. I don’t know where this comparison is coming from. Smite is probably the best DPS skill in the game bar none (its base damage is the same as HB and it’s a 1H weapon so you get two sigils) and staff is amazing in PvP due to the fact that the wide cone on Wave of Wrath is pretty much impossible to avoid without dodging, so you can just chip your opponent down while healing yourself constantly with Orbs.

There is no “best” number for any given stat. You don’t need “at least” so-and-so much power, or crit chance, or crit damage. People don’t seem to understand this. I see so many posts asking “How do I hit this arbitrary threshold I made up” and every time I just facepalm.

To make a good build, you need to look at your character in terms of marginal advantage, not threshold stats. If you’ve got a choice between 10% crit damage and 10% crit chance, you shouldn’t be trying to hit some arbitrary number, you just go with whatever increases your damage more.

In terms of traits, 10 precision equals 1% crit damage (ou already have 50% crit damage, so you need to add this to the number it shows on your stats page). As a rule of thumb, 10 points of precision will add more damage when your crit chance percentage is LESS THAN HALF of your crit damage percentage. 1% crit damage will add more damage when your crit chance is MORE THAN HALF of your crit damage.

Phira.3970:

Approximately 2.5 seconds to complete 1 combo.

It’s not “approximately”, it’s “exactly”.

If you’re not full DPS in COF it may not be ENTIRELY your fault but you’re certainly part of the problem. COF is one of those dungeons where the tankier you are, the harder the run gets. Slave driver hits you for 2-3k per swing really quick, to the extent you can’t just dodge everything, so the easiest way to kill him is just to burst him down as quickly as possible. The longer you take, the more people are going to go down, because it really isn’t possible to just tank him unless your entire party just goes full clerics and wears him down over the next half hour. Which most people don’t want to do. Along the same lines, slower acolyte kills means more time standing around while five mobs beat on you, slower controller kill means more time people have to tank constant mob spawns, and effigy takes exponentially longer because he heals, so if your DPS is low it may actually become impossible to kill him without killing the crystals, which is a pain in the kitten

Yeah, you might not need 5 people in full optimized zerker specs, but you can’t just have only one person doing it either. To put it differently, the people in zerker specs are basically doing the dungeon for you, and you’re just leeching off them. That’s not exactly fair to the rest of the team.

That said, four people should be enough to easily handle the slave driver without wiping if they know what they’re doing. If you were wiping you probably weren’t the only one who was undergeared. I don’t know why he singled you out.

Still semi-broken. Just did it now.

- Transmuting a legendary now retains the “purple name” label. However, if you link it in chat, it shows as exotic.
- Equipping a transmuted legendary before equipping the legendary itself first does not count towards the achievement.
- Rarity shows as “Transmuted”.

I’m guessing it’s not actually a legendary anymore, it just looks like one to you when you mouse over it. Which is all that really matters, I guess.

You guys. You realize there’s an extremely easy, safe, and fast way to get a precursor?

JUST BUY IT.

How much is a precursor right now even? Like 500g? That’s like 60 hours of farming COF. That’s not even that bad considering the OP just said he spent 5 hours a day for a month to get his precursor, which is like 2.5x that much. If anything, people like him are subsidizing the rest of us by farming things as a loss to sell to us. We should be thanking him.

Considering how most pugs in dungeons actually have no DPS and thus are not contributing to the fight, yet get the same rewards as those of us who are glass cannoning specifically to fill in for those people, I’d say the opposite needs to be true. In fact, loot drops should scale better with damage dealt, and it needs to be more obvious so people actually know they need to contribute.

A simple bronze/silver/gold reward upon killing a boss would be sufficient. Deal 10% of the boss’s maximum HP for bronze, 15% for silver, 20% for gold. Seems reasonable. Also, make it visible to all players in the party, so you can see who’s dead weight and who isn’t.

Really, please. I’m sick of being the only DPS in every pug.

Archer.1658:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

You guys realize warrior range is almost as bad as, if not worse than, guardian range? Guardians at least has staff to keep pressure on kiters and they’ll last much longer in a straight melee dps race. Warrior has nothing but rifle, which is crap damage even if it hits, and snares are pointless against a guardian because you getting close to him is already doing 95% of his work for him.

I would one shot you with kill shot. Hows that for a crappy rifle? Hell my volley would net me 6k easy.

@ Op. Time your shield blocks and enduring pain. Pace yourself and you will never lose to a guardian or at least die by one. Also, constantly use cc’s of any kind to make the guardian blow cool downs to either heal or stun break.

Have you ever actually hit anything with Kill Shot or Volley? I think Orb detonation to staff auto actually does more than Volley in the same amount of time, even.

You guys realize warrior range is almost as bad as, if not worse than, guardian range? Guardians at least has staff to keep pressure on kiters and they’ll last much longer in a straight melee dps race. Warrior has nothing but rifle, which is crap damage even if it hits, and snares are pointless against a guardian because you getting close to him is already doing 95% of his work for him.

Grenade engineers have to ground target everything constantly. Tome of Wrath is only 20 seconds every 180 and you only have to ground target 2 of 5 skills and the AoE is much bigger to boot. Just deal with it.

Nox.8967:

@Thz

huh? there is no point traiting symbols with hammer (or any build, that trait is just bad, but that’s another discussion entirely). Untraited that symbol is down all the time, giving you and all other melee practically constantly protection if you’re using mostly autoattack. You dont need to be standing inside the ring to get the prot. If we’re talking melee heavy PvE, hammer >> GS for group support. And if you’re still AH build after the nerf, hammer is much more viable than GS due to that near perma prot. Yes you probably do lose some dps (I havent checked the actual numbers) but you get a huge increase in survivability and group support with hammer. If I’m the only guardian in group, I go hammer. If there is another guardian who is GS, Ill go hammer. If there is another guardian who is hammer, Ill swap out for GS.

But yeah, I agree that hammer 3-5 is pretty weak and highly situational in PvE.

You trait it because otherwise the hammer symbol deals crap damage. It’s not about getting good uptime, it’s about getting MORE uptime.

Note that speeding up animation =/= actually making the attack faster. You still attack at the same rate; dodge canceling was just for burning endurance and proccing roll traits. The nerf hits Hammer much worse than GS because GS can take the last 10 points in Honor (since Elusive Power is useless now) and put them into Zeal instead to offset the damage loss, while hammer has to keep them in Honor to keep Writ of Persistence.

Kumakichi.2583:

Interesting that they required zerkers gear. Stuff in CoF dies so quickly I didn’t think it would be an issue but I guess you never can tell. Does running a CoF p1 in 6 minutes or running it in 7 minutes make any difference in the world…. when you come back out of CoF and the gate is contested? I’ve seen the gate close in as little as 4 minutes so…. maybe someone can help explain this to me?

Try 6 minutes versus something like 15-20. In the worse case scenario I may be the only person in the group actually dealing damage. I’ve had it happen plenty of times and it’s downright ridiculous to watch a PUG (who usually insists he is omg god tier dps because warrior longbow deeps so good) take ten minutes to kill the gate controller. Then die. Because of course.

Actually, that warrior number is a bit outdated, since it didn’t factor in might or vulnerability. I updated it now. Warriors do in fact do a fair bit more solo, but since their high numbers comes from being able to stack lots of might and vulnerability on their own, and have a comparatively low base damage (especially if you take out Whirlwind Attack’s unrealistically high number), they have much less room for growth. If guardians are getting other offensive buffs from other players, particularly fury, they actually output more than warriors.

The ideal team composition for DPS is actually three guardians (for raw DPS), one warrior (for group fury), and one engineer (for vulnerability stacking and condition damage). Good luck telling that to people who only know how to look at their own numbers though.

Run in with mace or staff, drop a symbol, switch to GS and drop another symbol, auto-attack it. Guardian is actually better and faster than thief since you can’t backstab the controller and you don’t die nearly as easily.

If for any reason you’re really having problems with the hellstorm killing you, bring Shelter and block his flamethrower burst for a free 25 stacks of might. Should make the controller go down a lot faster.

Cast Empower, Symbol as you run in, switch to GS.

Works just fine.

1) Run a dungeon once.
2) Get bad luck on one dungeon run.
3) Blame stealth nerfs.

Right.

Kain Francois.4328:

Reading various forum posts and playing with various players ingame, has it ever occurred to people you can switch armor mid-dungeon?

Meaning if you use Magic Find in Grawl FoTM for example, you can swap to that gear during the first few Grawl waves, and then to serious armor during the bosses?

You can even swap Jewelry!

So why do so many players carry just one equipment set and use Magic Find during the Legendary Imbued Shaman?

It astounds me how many players do not realize switching equipment is possible…

Same reason people run PVT gear. They don’t care about contributing, they just want to sit there and let other people do the work.

Lol that’s even worse than getting nothing at all.

Unless the animation is really subtle (Legendary Archdiviner), the boss has the same charge-up animation as an ele or necro skill (champion grawl shaman), or you’re afk (me in every COF run), there’s really no excuse for not dodging if you know what the move looks like and you have time to react. Offhand I can’t think of any boss with an OHKO move that doesn’t have an obvious animation or red circle, other than the aforementioned two.

For what it’s worth, I don’t give a kitten about rangers and I agree they’re a terrible class, objectively speaking. The only thing they’re really good for is having the pet take aggro in lowbie runs. Otherwise they’re pretty much dead weight.

Necromancer is pretty bad too though. Engineer, on the other hand, is amazing. Best condition damage and vulnerability spam from a safe 1500 range is a little bit too good, even. They’re the only class I consider worth taking over 5 guardians.

5 guardians will get you 25 stacks of might too and you don’t have to force the thief to use a low-DPS weapon in conjunction with another low-DPS class to get it. You don’t even need a mesmer since a group of guardians chaining tomes rips through bosses absurdly fast. It’s 6s quickness, overlapping 5 stacks of might, and 20s of fury on one elite; Timewarp has nothing on that.

On top of that, guardians generally have the highest effective DPS of all classes in most dungeons due to their high base damage and relatively few ways for damage to fail (enemies moving out of symbol or Smite being the only real ways to lose DPS). Warriors have a marginally higher theoretical DPS but it’s very hard to achieve in practice; you need to be landing HB completely every time on cooldown (can’t miss or be interrupted by anything) and you need to space Whirlwind Attack perfectly so it lands all hits without moving you out of range for an immediate followup attack, which is generally impossible unless you’re crippled or the target is up against a wall. Otherwise the greatsword’s base DPS on the non-HB skills are actually lower than the guardian’s. A guardian actually kills the gate controller faster than a warrior since the warrior’s big damage skills don’t work too well on it.

That said, people don’t know math, they just see big numbers and assume that means big DPS.