Guild Wars 2

Acandis.3250:

Quick write-up on how this build should be played:

The shield can be taken down very fast by melee or AoE attacks so you don’t want to use it at the beginning of a fight or if there’s a lot of AoE around. You want to use this when a teamfight is hectic and it will typically be ignored.

Some pointers:

1. Great for 1v1 against engies or other classes that rely on projectile damage.
2. Great for teamfights against engies that are free-casting on your allies, rangers, or any other sort of projectile spammers.

As to why this is a great skill despite it’s obvious weaknesses, I’ll leave it up to you guys to come to the same conclusion I did, on your own time.

Enjoy the build, and say no to grenades!

Wouldn’t WoR work better? Shorter recharge and longer duration.

Dirame.8521:

Grenades goes through your bubbles, flamethrower goes through your bubbles, Fumigate goes through your bubbles… yea…

Grenades don’t go through SoA/Sanct, etc. They can land before the bubble and their AoE will hit the players inside, but if they hit the bubble themselves they are absorbed. The rest you are correct about.

Player Looking for Team!
Ingame name: Silven
Main Class / Potential Classes: Main: Guardian Secondary: Ranger/Mesmer
Region: NA
Practice Times: GMT 6am – 2am, pretty much anytime
Experience: r43, 3k+ games, 1.5k+ tournies, only play premade.
Other: looking for a serious team, in one month I’ll be able to play 10hours+ a day, at the moment I play around 2-4.

tarcheg.4872:

DrakesGreenEnvy.9683:

Silven already explained to you that there are diminishing returns on armor values over 2.9k…

which is not true at all…

Med.6150:

Jax.5261:

To clear up some more things:

• I meant armour not toughness (my bad), armour suffers from DR above around 2.9k, the maths is on the Guardian forums.

I just tested this theory and I’d love if you could point me to that math on the guardian forum, so I could clear up some misunderstandings and misconceptions. Armor scales linearly without diminishing returns.

The false conclusion is probably that people expect armor to reduce damage by X points for every Y armor they add, when in reality this is not how scaling works. Instead for every X armor you add, you reduce the damage by Y% in a linear fashion (if damage reduction scaled differently, you could reduce damage to zero given enough armor).

The formula is Weapon Damage*Power*Skill Coefficient/Armor

Was thinking of the wrong forum:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/60838-math-damage-reduction-toughness-and-vitality/

Raaka.9784:

DrakesGreenEnvy.9683:

Raaka.9784:

Thanks for your hate NA ppl.

Im bad player… i put wrong buttons sometimes ;D

but best build for guardian is 00203020 or 00302020.

No cleric amulet… better choice are shaman or soldier

Weapons set: Sw/sh – ma/fo, sce/fo or hammer

Kissessss :x

And why is focus a good off-hand to bring, and why sword?

Focus brings nothing to a teamfight except more survivability for yourself as well as a very gimmicky blind that rarely lands.

Please try and make some credible points.

Well, why focus? more survivability to you (how selfish these bunkers are!!), It’s in most cases a safe-stomp (if no stability is up), it’s soooooooo much easier to cap shrines on temple or orbs on SW. Is it really that bad?

Why Sword? It’s an instant port if you being knocked out of the point, it’s a blind, you are 3 secs immune to projectiles. And the best part: your third attack on it will hit 3 times. If you put +5% crit-chance on it this means you have 30 – 40% crit-chance. If you traited right you get vigor on crit-hits. Ergo you dodge more, ergo on every dodge you heal nearby allies.

That’s just my point of view and relies on my gameplay. So the good thing about bunker guard is you can pretty much trait everything. The only thing that is really necessary is “Pure of Voice”. No need to bash ppl down because they have a different meaning.

Most people prefer to run bunker/support rather than a pure bunker, just pure of voice to support means you miss out on Chains of Light, Banish, Sanctuary and Empower. If you know you’re going to win every fight without support then sure have more toughness to stomp, but I don’t understand the wasted points in Condition Damage. You can actually put out a lot of pressure with Cleric/Knight and I think Inner Fire/Blind Exposure are much better traits than Honourable Shield, you can still get the perma vigor from Vigorous Precision while playing more support.

A bunker Guard can kill a trap ranger much easier than a DPS Guardian, make sure you’re removing bleed stacks >9, poison when you need to heal and burning as soon as it’s applied. Most people don’t realise the ranger’s strength is from fire fields so getting them off the fire field will lower their DPS by a lot.
Unfortunately on DPS the odds are weighted against you and they have to really mess up to lose, I played around 20 1v1’s against a really good trap ranger last night and the success I had was interrupting his heal over and over until he lost.
tl;dr:

• Remove burning instantly
• Get them away from fire fields
• Remove poison when healing
• Interrupt their heal
• Pressure with damage

Whirl finishers do not remove conditions from yourself, they remove conditions from allies they come into contact with.
Focus 4 give you the regen and remove a condition if it bounces to you, which means you’d need to be near your target.

Of course.

F I F T E E N C H A R A C T E R S

Well you can be any class/build you want.
There’s no point practicing on a build I’m not likely to use in tpvp or I’m practicing for a non-existing game format.

Hey guys, I just returned from a gw2 break of one month due to holidays. Although I’ve played around 40 or so tournaments and a ton of hotjoins I’m still feeling really rusty.
So I invite you to PM me in game and come kick the living crap out of me until I play better.

I will be using this build:
http://tinyurl.com/cvb7lqb
So now you can counter me and screenshot it and post it here, or stream me getting owned.

Looking forward to relearning everything <3

IGN: Silven

To clear up some more things:

• I meant armour not toughness (my bad), armour suffers from DR above around 2.9k, the maths is on the Guardian forums.
• A Guardian’s job is not to purely bunker but to play the support role too. This means the scepter is one of the most amazing weapons you can bring. Chains of Light is the difference between your ally landing 4k damage and 18k damage.
  Saying you’re not going to bring a scepter/shield Guardian just means you don’t understand how a the Scepter works.
• The hammer is if you want damage and control on your bunker, the hammer can take the middle from other players easily, although it’s fine to swap between staff and hammer depending on how your team plays it’s really silly to say it’s a bad weapon.
• There is such thing as optimal builds, irrelevent to a playstyle, for example if you run meditation heals on your Guardian Bunker you’re actually not going to have a good day. Doesn’t matter how good you are or what your ‘style’ is, a good player is good at their class not 1/4 of their class. So saying well I like AH better it suits my style and you’re dropping indomitable courage or abs resolution is like saying “Here have the point I’m bunkering I don’t want it”, you may live but you’re going to get controlled off.

I have a few things to add to this discussion:

• Pure of Voice gives large amounts of AoE vigor, this means it’s super important in Guardian bunker builds. 302020 was the first bunker most people ran but it was ditched for Pure of Voice.
• Running the old EU meta build (SwSh / McFc) has a lot less team support or control than the current Meta for both regions due to weapon selections.
  Examples of this are no Empower (420power/420condi aoe), no Chains of Light (best set-up for a spike in the game) and no Banish.
• Toughness suffers from diminishing returns above 2.9k and although specing to about 3.2k can drastically reduce auto-attack damage, if you keep specing you actually are losing a lot of points that could be invested elsewhere.

The EU and NA current bunker meta seem to be very similar. Hope this cleared some things up so there’s less arguing.

Solution in Anagram:

Tastily Bi

kito.1827:

nakoda.4213:

kito.1827:

Rerroll.9083:

Soon

15 chars.

can someone please explain this 15-chars-thing to me?
srsly

thanks in advice

4srsly?

/15char

well, that was not the explanation i expected…

please?
anyone?

You can’t post on the forums with anything under 15 characters long.
A lot of people type that if their answer is under the character minimum so that the don’t have to say something else.

I wasn’t referring to symbol dps.

CMF.5461:

If it is no, then I feel that is a huge oversight. Retal should be the direct counter to conditions and smaller damage based hits, while larger hits should be counter by blocks and dodges.

This could be intentional since they have made changes to reduce the duration of retal as much as possible since at the start we could keep it up pretty much 100% of the time (still has huge up time).

I’m going to have to log into my wife’s account and test out retal on myself later.

---

Just went into mists and had an NPC stack bleeds on me. No retal damage via bleed ticks =( I really disagree with this.

Does it have a minimum required hit? Try burning or fear?
I remembered taking extra retal damage on my Ranger but I don’t know if it was just lagging a bit behind or actual condition retal.

All Sigils share the same cooldown, so it is usually better to use Energy Sigils as they give you a dodge which can dodge 5-10k damage easily.
Fire Sigils are good because of the element of surprise, if you deal consistent damage, your enemy is going to know when to pull out. If you ‘surprise’ them with the fire damage then you can force a kill easier. It may sound silly but it’s more effective for pressuring your opponent.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Jax.5261:

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

There’s a trait called Alltruistic Healing: It describes your job in a few words.

AH only heals you, which is why it doesn’t see too much play in bunkering due to PoV and the need for indomitable courage.

What I want to point out is that you need allies in range to bring this trait to its full potential.
And please speak english if you respond: [….which is why it doesn’t see too much play…] Is that a sentence?

That’s fair enough, clearly I didn’t understand your point.
I don’t have to write everything out in full sentences, you already know what I am saying.

AH only heals you, that is why isn’t seen very often in high level bunkering gameplay. Secondly, most teams use AoE condi builds which aren’t very easy to handle without Pure of Voice and you need 20 points in Virtues for Indomitable Courage. Unfortunately this doesn’t leave you with enough points to invest into Honour for AH.

You need to take a chill pill!

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

There’s a trait called Alltruistic Healing: It describes your job in a few words.

AH only heals you, which is why it doesn’t see too much play in bunkering due to PoV and the need for indomitable courage.

Andrea.2036:

Hey guys
I’ve been playing a guardian since the very first beta weekend, always loved the class to bits, and I’ve recently started being more active in the sPvP side of the game, specifically in tournaments.
What I usually run is the common 0/0/30/20/20 or the 0/0/30/30/10 bunker build.
I noticed, though, that I’m not as durable as I would like to be, or as I remembered to be (even though that was hotjoin, and much time back). I mean, I can hold off a 1v1 just fine, a 1v2 depends on some professions, in a 1v3 I’ll go down pretty quickly, if not immediately. Am I doing something wrong or is it the way to be? Just to go down if you don’t have any help whatsoever?
I also tried a bunker engineer lately, and, at least on last week’s map, I seemed to perform better, being able to run into a node with 4 people and managing to hold them and annoy the hell out of them for some time. Now, it could be due to Foefire’s having bigger spaces and everything, but I don’t really think that’s the problem, I may be wrong though.
If you have any suggestions, please, go ahead and help a fellow guard out

There are two important points here:

• You are running the old meta builds, these are not designed to fight well against condition spec’s.
• Guardians are much, much better bunkers because they can specialize in support/control aswell. Engineer bunkers can specialize in control while bunkering and Ele’s can specialize in damage. But only the Guardian can bunker with a load of support, that’s why the meta builds don’t look 100% bunkery, it’s because they aren’t.

To further address that point, Guardians are meant to be in every teamfight, that’s what the builds are made for.
ie. When there’s a teamfight at your closepoint you don’t send the ele to make it so it’s 4v4, you send your Guardian to make it a 4v4 and the Ele to the mid point.
The most important thing is no matter how good you are at bunkering 2-3 good players will still kill you quickly, you just buy enough time for your allies to get to you and you can support them so you can win the fight.

akamon.2769:

hmmm. good points. i’ll give it a shot soon too and see if i can make it work effectively.

also, re: sanctuary, with consecrated ground, if i see someone about to stomp an ally, and i cast sanctuary on top of the downed ally, does the enemy get pushed out of the area as well and can’t re-enter?

Yes it does, because it’s half second cast that means you can use it just before they land too (which means they’re also not expecting it).
The Staff is an amazing DPS weapon with fire sigils.

Blasino.3128:

I used the defensive symbol build last night, and in a team its pretty epic. Dropping symbol of swiftness from a distance where ever I want was refreshing too (like on a point!).

Yeah it’s awesome as, and the best symbol build for sustained 1v1’s, heals a crapton. Was the ideal build IMO against 100nades. I remember dueling against a lot of 100n players and I’d always run this. (with hammer of widom or wall of reflection ofc!).

akamon.2769:

woot woot! ahha am sure you are excited Silven. and there are definitely a handful more of great WvWers who roam or do awesome in small group fights : )))

will have to check out the staff / mace+focus build. i’ve been having most fun with the symbol builds so far. quick question for GS / mace+focus builds, would hydromancy be a good alternative to fire as well? or perhaps just on the GS, while the mace sticks with fire. if you’re able to catch them off guard, they slow down, all skills CD recharge slower, as well as does AoE dmg. this helps with landing your big hits as well. just a thought! a nice fire & ice combo XDD

Super duper excited!!
Umm hydromancy has the problem of if you want to make the most usage of it you have to hit when they recieve it, the problem is they can just instantly dodge and you’ve got no fire to pressure later. The only success I’ve had with it is waiting for them to burn their two dodges (easily done by putting down a symbol and they’ll dodge prot strike) and then you swap to GS and WW, they’re forced to utility or take the damage.
You can do that if you want, I’ll be testing it out slightly more when I start playing again.

Updated! I forgot to say no heal/elite skills but I think it’s too late now XDDD

Laserbolt.6731:

As a professional musician, I know that you start with the basics, and add new things as you master the basics.

Can someone link me to the easiest, basic bunker Guardian for sPvP?

I want to start with that, and then start adding more sophisticated techniques and skill chains.

Something with “training wheels”…and a suggested path to the “real stuff” to follow as I get it down would be so helpful.

Thanks.

I can definitely help you out!
Although you can start with either an offensive or defensive build, teams will want you to run defensive builds for the most part. So first build you’ll need to learn if you want to get off and running is a defensive one!
First off you need to know the skill differences between wvw/pve bunker and pvp bunker.

• You must have “Stand Your Ground!” and Indomitable Courage (trait), you must be able to stay on a control point against another control player and be able to support your team.
• You don’t specialize in only one role, you fill out 2 or more, for Guardian you’d pick Bunker + Support + (control sometimes). This is because you don’t have that many players and you can’t be sacrificing other players to do something you can already do. In that way sometimes builds don’t look optimal because they’re filling out another role too.
• Dodging is super, super important. You have to start learning what skills to dodge and to not randomly dodge!
• ALL of your skills are dodgable too! Which means things like Whirling Wrath are actually unlikely to do much damage if your enemy can dodge correctly.

Building:
We’re going to build a Control/Bunker and I’m going to leave out some support options because they require being in a team, so there is a slight varient to this build when you find a team that plays together.
Renewed Focus/Shelter
These are your heal and elite skills, because we’re going to be running with a lower health pool we need these too skills to block/become invincible so that we can survive burst, because co-ordinated burst will actually be able to just kill us otherwise. Remember Shelter is used firstly for its block then if you desperately need the heal you can use it for its heal. This is due to the 2s block being able to block 10k+ damage, which is much more than it heals.

Triple Shout
We’re going to be running Hold the Line, Save Yourselves and Stand Your Ground with Soldier’s Runes, Superior Aria (trait) and Pure of Voice (trait), this means that when we use a shout it also removes two conditions from all team mates, gives a boon to them aswell and they recharge 20% faster (all of these affect you too).

Dual Energy Sigils
We’re going to bring 2 energy sigils on our weapons to have tons of dodge rolls, we’re also using Selfless Daring (trait) to gain vigor on crits and Pure of Voice will give us the Vigor boon A LOT. So we’re going to be dodging loads of things.
This also means we’re going to be running a Cleric’s Amulet with Knight’s Jewel to give us a gigantic boost to our dodge roll’s healing.

Weapons
Finally we’re going to be using the Hammer for control, Banish is going to be one of your best skills, use it to knock the enemy off the point and then Zealot’s Embrace → Ring of Warding to keep them out. You can then chain it with your second weapon Scepter/Shield to Chains of Light them and Shield of Absoption to try and completely capture a point (it will capture it from neutral if you get it all off, and neutralize it if they have it capped).
Keep in mind the enemy Guardian will often run Banish too and you’ll defnitely want to dodge that as your first priority!

Final Build
http://tinyurl.com/buem4cq

Enjoy! If you have anymore questions just ask!

Blasino.3128:

Jax, the staff, mace/focus symbol bomb build… how would that work 0.o?

I’m guessing not so much burst but a continuous stream of damage?

All of them are designed to be DPS, although you can definitely compact all of the skills to kind of ‘burst’ (which was the original idea of the build), I’ve definitely stretched out its utility a great deal so that it can be used for more of a variety of roles. Including support, DPS also is better in 1v1’s than burst due to dodging evading 100% of the damage. If you stretch it out you actually do more damage.
With dual zerka the staff does up to around 1.2k per hit (and hits a larger AoE than GS) and the Staff 2 hits 2.something (can’t remember will have to test in a few days when i get my new graphics card for my gf’s pc >:) ) so you’re only missing whirlign wrath. And against decent players they’d dodge it 100% anyway, not to mention the 420 power/condi you give everybody from empower, this is why I’ve been liking the staff a great deal more now.

Kwll.1468:

I just wanted to thank you for the defensive symbol nuke build with staff and mace/focus. It really is a great all around team fighting build. The steady aoe damage and healing it puts out is pretty unique and the 12 might stacks from empower are just clutch. I have been using purging flames instead of sanctuary because I have to admit im just bad at using sanctuary lol. I seem to waste it at the wrong times or don’t put it quite exactly where I want it and then Im looking at the long recharge wistfully.

No worries, it’s also one of the best Guardian 1v1 builds that exist. You can defnitely use purging flames, the synergy with Ele’s and Rangers is insane (for some reason people just don’t realise that) and a lot of people don’t know if you just spam walking in and out of the circle it removes a load of conditions.
But you really should practice with sanctuary! It is really clutch when you get good at it, no skill is better than resing a team mate. By that I mean an entire ally player is not going to be less useful than Save Yourselves or Purging Flames, which is what sanctuary can give you!

Wispy.8679:

Most people who do wvw roaming make videos rather than stream for the large downtime between fights but here are a couple links.

Team Riot – http://teamriot.org/streams/ They don’t really stream anymore but the past vids and their youtube accounts still have good content.

[AD] guild – https://www.youtube.com/user/RaggokOozo/videos?view=0 Don’t think these guys have a stream setup, but good small force gameplay.

B Sty – http://www.youtube.com/user/YouGotOwnedTT/videos Similar to [AD].

Some more duel orientated vids:

Targaryen – http://www.youtube.com/user/StrawHatPC

Xsorus – http://www.youtube.com/xsorus Good ranger roamer.

Turkish Krul – http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnRxcbIhjX0QIq56gRMU7zQ/videos?view=0&flow=grid Ranger beastmaster gameplay.

Yishis – http://www.youtube.com/user/bemeric1/videos?flow=grid&view=0 Very talented roaming thief.

These are just a couple off the top of my head, I’m sure there are still active wvw streamers that focus on roaming and duels but I don’t really keep up with it anymore.

Thanks for these! I’ve been watching a lot of the thief’s videos. It would be nice to see 20 players of this standard vs another 20 players of this standard in wvw and see how that goes >.

In other news I will be playing GW2 on the 4th of April, I just bought a new gcard/ups for my gf’s pc and can play. So add me in game and we can get some 1v1’s in to get me back to speed <3

George Steel.1804:

Jax.5261:

George Steel.1804:

Show me how we can cripple an enemy, and I’ll send you in-game gold.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune_of_the_Grove

> : )

kinda cripple

But not a cripple, and also not a Guardian based ability.

Ya I know I was jokin’

George Steel.1804:

Show me how we can cripple an enemy, and I’ll send you in-game gold.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune_of_the_Grove

> : )

kinda cripple

I’m going to just put up the top 5 tallied ^^

Guardian Engi
I like this idea ^^

Wispy.8679:

Gives 3% vulnerability for each enemy hit, to each enemy hit, with Leap. Which means if you hit 3 enemies it will give 15vul to all of them

You mean 9vul to all?

I’ve seen some of your guides around for a while now, always helpful info for guardians. Thanks for putting them together and for focusing on a wide variation of builds rather than just one or two.

As for the WvW streams, are you looking for good micro work (duels and roaming) or good macro (zerg busting guilds like VoTF and RG)? I can link you some via pm if you are interested.

I’m pretty sure that’s a mistype, but since I haven’t played in a month due to holiday it may be the bug. For some reason I can’t for the life of me remember, you may want to try it quickly on the golem group in HotM sorry!
And thanks I wanted to have a group of builds that I update regularly so people don’t have to fear looking on the forums for one and getting an out-dated build.

Just link the WvW streams here I don’t mind, I’d be looking for micro due to it involving the actual player gameplay. Thanks! ^^

I’ve done this on another forum as a fun break from our serious Guardian discussions! So here we go! Name your top 3 Guardian Skills in this format:

1. Flashing Blade
2. Mighty Blow
3. Whirling Wrath
Then you can write a brief explanation why if you want!! Just keep the format above so that I can easily tally up the points. Number 1 is worth 3 points, 2 : 2points, 3: 1point.

Hall of Fame
1. “Stand Your Ground” – 25 points
2. Judges Intervention – 22 points
3. “Save Yourselves!” – 15 points
4. Smite Conditions – 10 points
5. Wall of Reflection – 9 points

I’ll Start off!

1. “Stand Your Ground!”
2. Banish
3. Empower

Explanations!
1. The Guardian’s best utility skill, ran on 95% of builds purely because of its usefulness. Anti-control, burst, has retaliation, break-stun an amazing skill. Definitely worthy of top spot!
2. Banish is crazy, the blowback is crazy big, the most important skill to counter when playing against a Guardian, can change the direction of the entire match!
3. Empower has always been an extremely strong ability, if you co-ordinate it with your allies +420 condi/power is crazy good, you’ll have your entire team with a significantly larger damage output, a lot of teams base their team play around this build.

Here’s a list of really good pvp streams:

• http://www.twitch.tv/matchlesspowerr
• http://www.twitch.tv/thundercatshoooo
• http://www.twitch.tv/phantaram
• http://www.twitch.tv/chaithh
• http://www.twitch.tv/gasmaskftw
• http://www.twitch.tv/loljumper
• http://www.twitch.tv/narcarsis
• http://www.twitch.tv/teldoo
• http://en.twitch.tv/dantoqt
• http://www.twitch.tv/xephtp
• http://www.twitch.tv/helsethgw2
• http://www.twitch.tv/azshene
• http://www.twitch.tv/silentlowell
• http://www.twitch.tv/jaxsilven

Are all good players, just to name a few!

style.6173:

You are probably right about the streams. If you are watching a guard trying to 1v1 in WvW, most likely they are out of place and don’t know what they are doing. WvW is mostly a zerg fest for guards and the way to play a guard in a 40v40 is way different than playing a bunker control guard in a tPvP match.

That said, these specs are all REALLY great for PvP. I remember using one of your roamer builds last fall and had a great time.

As I said I haven’t seen any, feel free to link me to some, I honestly would really like to see some good wvw play. But so far, especially when I play wvw it hasn’t been a challenge at all, very one sided.
And thanks, I’m keeping them constantly updated so nobody has to worry about them being outdated!

You need another category: Bad Mesmers
I’m a bad mesmer.

Amins.3710:

Jax.5261:

Enzo Kensei.9850:

Jax let me start by thanking you for help me with your guides/build on my new Guardian and let me say that you’re balanced roamer build in pvp is a must! Great balance in offence and defence and single target…let the crits fly.
I wanted to ask you one question, in PvE what i should use? I will try it in PvE the same roamer build and what stat’s the armor must have and the type?
Thanks once again keep up the good work ;D

Well it’s super strong in PvP for having the ability to 1v1 very well and do well in group fights while having crazy survivability. In this way it’d work in WvW too. PvE I don’t run meditations because symbols just do more for your team and enemies don’t move, so you always get the most out of them. So yeah, it would still work but I think there are better builds. Idk the exact stats, not a PvE guru, but something that has a lot of power 45% crit chance and 17k hp (I’d try for 3k armour too).

Blasino.3128:

Silven I agree with you that there are generally less skilled www players. I think that is why we tend to think X build is awesome because we can 4v1 terrible players.

I use PvP to improve my skills against very skilled players as I’m a WWW’r first. Like you said, in WWW I drop symbol of faith they sit in it trying to melee me. In PvP they get out of it quickly.

Also, I’m not a fan of Bunker Guardians in WWW. That is why I run a WWW version I made of the symbol build. It has a lot of survivability with a lot of damage. In WWW you can the best of both worlds since gearing isn’t standardized (we can min/max) and we can use consumables.

Akamon and I actually converse a lot, sharing guardian ideas =). We learn from each other with different perspectives on things.

Yeah I realise, which always confuses me, I try think of if my enemy was a robot how would they counter me. That’s how I build to in pvp, in WvW there’s no point, Rage sigils in PvP are a must if counting on WW to hit, in WvW it will just hit. So I haven’t specifically made anything for WvW yet, I run symbol DPS but I know Bunker works too with a friend. But you have to rely on your ally, remember bunkers support too, most people don’t know but it’s the immobs/snares which make a bunker such good support.

Amins.3710:

I completely disagree w/ the WvW comment.

The reason we get it off so much is because there’s soooo many people around you ~all the time~ where you can change to a closer target and still get the 3rd strike off.

That’s why.

Not because there’s “horrible players”… to which there are, but you can still get it off in good guildvsguild encounters.

Well I understand what you’re saying, but you can’t really disagree with me saying I’ve never seen a good WvW player XD. On the rare occaision that I WvW or watch a WvW vid/stream, I’ve never seen another player who can dodge correctly, uses their skills effectively or reacts well and fast. Maybe it was just a fluke I’ve never seen a good stream, but it’s fairly safe to say there’s quite a large difference between tpvp and wvw.

Now you’re just being an egotistical kitten.

Show me a stream with good play then, I’ve already said that.
If the gameplay is good, sure I will accept that WvW does have good players, I’m not against that. But so far I haven’t seen any, all you have to do is link me to a video, I may end up watching their stream a great deal.
I keep saying MAYBE I JUST DIDN’T CLICK ON THE CORRECT STREAMS, but I’ve yet to see a good WvW stream.

Ayestes.1273:

If a Bunker Guard can last 2 to 3 minutes against an Condi-Burst Engineer, then the Engineer is doing something wrong. That’s all there is to it. A really good Bunker Guardian can last probably on average of about 35 seconds against a good Condi Engineer (and probably other things like a Necro too, but I don’t interact in that kind of fight so what do I know). Heck most of the time people have no clue what’s going on and the Bunker Guardian can be dropped in under ten seconds.

Bunker’s tend to be vulnerable to sustained condi-dmg output. With high Toughness, Protection, Blocks, Dodges, Invulns, and the like they tend to counter out direct-dmg burst. Condi-Removal only slows it down, it doesn’t make them survive forever.

As for the claim that Burning is doing that much damage, there is obviously a perception issue at hand here. Condi’s can do a lot of damage, but until people understand how the death log works and actually plays them for themselves they won’t have an accurate picture as to what is going on. Burning for 1.3k is one of those percpetion mistakes.

If the Guardian dies that fast he’s screwed up, simple.

Aight so with banners
2809 + 170
= 2979 condition damage
For Burning:
2979 * 0.25 +328
= 744.75 + 328
= 1072.75 damage per tick from burning
MAX (maybe )

On wiki it says Ele conjures increase condition damage, if somebody could confirm that we could break 1.1k ^^

Geff.1930:

It seems like everyone who is DPS is currently running a condition damage of some form or another because conditions do such massive damage.

For example, in the past I’ve been burned for upto 1.3k damage per tick.

Every time, without exception, the highest post-death damage display always shows Bleeding followed by Burning.

I run condition removing shouts to no avail.

http://tinyurl.com/cvbd4e2
EDIT: Forgot 2 traits, seems the rune set on this site doesn’t work properly so:
+ 100 condition damage for rune of the Undead and strength in numbers, kitten this website is buggy

1514 (build) + 250 (corruption) + 875 (might) + 170 (SiN + Runes) = 2809 condition damage maximum on a Guardian (Pretty sure, maybe somebody else can find another way)
Burning:
2809 * 0.25 +328
= 702.25 + 328
= 1030.25 damage per second from burning
MAX

Ostricheggs.3742:

what guard runs the signet heal anymore? Absoltue res is strong, but it won’t matter if you leave a guard alone with me. Absolute res becomes substantially stronger in team fights were AoE condi removal and heals stack on themselves to create a self-sustaining bubble of anti-condi-ness. THAT’S where guards shine, removing condis for their teams, not themselves. Any good guard will tell you that their weakness is condis. Forcing shouts at bad times because of condis is just the icing on the cake

If I come against a guard with 25 stacks of corruption and no sanctuary I can promise you that he will die in under 30 seconds, absolute res or not.

Although you’re correct in saying that Guards are weak to conditions. And forcing them to use shouts at inconvenient times is super important, especially if you can get them to use Stand Your Ground.
Only problems I have with what you’re saying is:

• Good Guardians won’t use sanctuary against you so you’re not going to have that problem (they save it for downed allies, it’s only if sanctuary will save you in time for an ally to help you out)
• I can defnitely last longer than 30s against a condition engineer, around 2-3 minutes, if you screw up I can defnitely win that 1v1.
• Symbol DPS builds don’t rely on Shield of Wrath to land, if it does it’s just a giant bonus, the real danger is in the DPS of the symbols and the auto-attack. Not to mention the newer builds are stronger against conditions (they’re in my link in sig).

Everything else was spot on though.

Taym.8326:

Jax.5261:

• Guardians don’t have access to swiftness or teleports.
• Guardians cannot be bursted due to their high health pool.
• Guardians have great condition cleaning on Symbol DPS.
• Guardians are targetted first in team fights but are too strong so die last.
• All weapons are viable on all types of builds.

Also

• Symbol DPS is secret and OP.

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

I DON’T THINK HE PLAYS GUARDIAN

I don’t mean to sound rude, however I need you to explain some things to me as I do not play a Gaurdian. Why are there utility abilities that grant swiftness when you have said they do not exist. Why do teleports not exist, does the sword teleport and Judges/Merciful Intervention not count? How can Gaurdians possess a high health pool when they are in the lowest bracket for HP pools (last time I checked). Condition Clears for the class exist in more than symbol DPS builds, or are we talking about crazy amounts of condition cleansing. Why is the gaurdian targetted first when it is most likely to be the bunker? Your last point I have no insight into as I have said, I do not play Gaurdian at all. I have made sure and read over the post that you have quoted in order to make sure you were just pointing out things in the post that you found ridiculous, but none of them matched besides the 5th point. Thank you for the perspective you can give sir.

I was indeed being sarcastic, I hate when people try to make newer players perceive as class as something it is not.
It’s where all the whining about Mesmers and Thieves comes from, the misunderstanding of a classes abilities and limits.
I just wrote out in points what he was saying so people could see the rediculousness of it, if anybody were to believe any of the points were true it would be pretty sad.
Also:
http://tinyurl.com/cakleuc
Isn’t overpowered, nor is it secret. Or any other form of Symbol DPS.

Danto.6748:

Zodian.6597:

Guardian

• Pros: Immortal, OP dps build is OP (shhh -sub to tvesportsgaming on youtube and stay tuned), lowest skill floor in game, great peals, great support capability, best wep skills in game (all weps are viable), great condi clear, tons of blocks/invulns, perma vigor in many builds, you’re usually the last one to die in team fights, low individual skill cap.
• Cons: SLOW – will take you 5 hours to run from mid to home, low hp pool, low dps in bunker builds, can be boring bunkering a point that isn’t being contested, takes patience -if you blow all your defensive skills 10 seconds into the fight you’re screwed (if you freak out and button mash when attacked this isn’t the class for you, try ele).

What ?! Please teach me how to be Immortal. All weps are viable? Perma Vigor? Low skill cap? :S Five hours to get from point to point ? (W00T ?!)

I must have played Guardian wrong all this time, kitten :/

• Guardians don’t have access to swiftness or teleports.
• Guardians cannot be bursted due to their high health pool.
• Guardians have great condition cleaning on Symbol DPS.
• Guardians are targetted first in team fights but are too strong so die last.
• All weapons are viable on all types of builds.

Also

• Symbol DPS is secret and OP.

The above poster is correct, here is a quick suggestion:
Level 25
http://tinyurl.com/dxnv45b

Level 50
http://tinyurl.com/ctqzwr7

Level 80
http://tinyurl.com/but26lk

These are purely suggestions, by level 80 you could have figured out your own builds/strategies, this is purely a basic example of a very easy to play build. Good luck, feel free to ask more specific questions!

You have to decide how aggressive you want to play your Guardian and how many defensive skills you are going to pick up. If you have an idea of what you’re going to be playing against you will have a slightly different build.
Remember that when playing 1v1 you’ll find some skills that aren’t viable usually become really strong, such as Hammer of Wisdom.

First thing we’ll do is decide on the Heal:

• Signet of Resolve
  If you think you’re going to be up against condition damage, DPS or bunker builds you’re going to want to use this heal.
• Shelter
  If you don’t know what you’re playing against or you think you’re going to be playing against burst or that they won’t be able to maintain high DPS for too long, you’re going to want this heal.

These two skills are optional for all builds. Next you have to decide on your elite, fortunately there’s no options, the only elite you will be using is Renewed Focus. The other 2 skills which are non-optional are Stand Your Ground, which has massive amounts of utility, anti-control and gives you retaliation to boot, and Hammer of Wisdom. Most people think that HoW isn’t worth bringing due to its low Health but due to the nature of a 1v1 the enemy will not have enough time to kill it before it does the controlling and thus becomes extremely amazing at shutting down spikes, chaining control skills and setting up your own spikes.

Now you have to decide on how you’re going to mitigate your enemy’s damage, through DPS + Burst OR DPS + Heals OR Heals + Dodges.
Which presents 3 builds:

• Symbol DPS
• Meditation Burst
• Control Bunker

Symbol DPS
http://tinyurl.com/c4wfkzz
Provides a ton of healing through Writ of Persistence + AH while also being able to tick over 1.2k per symbol hit and every single weapon can crit over 1k per auto-attack (staff included <3).
Optionals:

• GS > Staff
• Energy Sigils > Fire Sigils
• Sigil of Life > Sigil of Accuracy (if expecting to kill enemies for stacks beforehand)

Meditation Burst
http://tinyurl.com/chktu38
Your healing on this build is through meditations, I didn’t included Stand Your Ground in this build due to it being extremely focused on burst but it can be swapped out for Judge’s Intervention. It has a very strong amount of dodgerolls due to the high crit rate and a large amount of DPS. Also the best able to kite at range out of all these builds.
Optionals:

• Stand Your Ground > Judge’s Intervention
• Contemplation of Purity > Hammer of Wisdom
• Energy Sigils > Fire Sigils

Control Bunker
http://tinyurl.com/bvet5dg
Master of Dodge rolls, this build is extremely strong if you know how to make the most out of your damage, it is a bunker build but that doesn’t mean it can’t do damage at all, you simply have to realise the opportunities to deal damage to your enemy. By far the best against condition builds, but if you don’t know how to make the most of Mighty Blow or Banish you’re not going to do well.

I’ll write up some nice combinations of skills you can do, but I have to go somewhere. If you got any questions ask ^^ I’d recommend the Symbol DPS or Meditation when starting off.

akamon.2769:

Blasino.3128:

Hey Jax,

With the latest patch, I’m seeing more condition builds lately. When holding mid I’m ok 1v1. 1v2 gets dicey I die about 50% of the time. 1v3+ I’m going to die pretty fast.

Any tips or is this sort of the rock paper sicsors of pvp.

I’m thinking almost at this points something like melundru runs could be helpful to prevent stacking of conditions so easily?

hey Blasino! just adding onto what Jax told ya. since i’ve been messing with PvP more (which is AWESOME fun. i don’t know why i didn’t start earlier), i’ve realized that condition builds are galore and fighting against ranger + engi 2v1 is pretty tough. :///

i was playing one of the symbol nuke builds, and after a few rounds, i switched up the Honor traits a bit. i took Pure of Voice over Writ of Persistence. I felt it was a decent trade off as i was able to handle conditions a lot better, while losing some DPS and boons from the symbols, i at least wasn’t dying as much, even against more heavy condition opponents.

It seems a lot of people are having trouble with condition classes, so I’ve updated all the Symbol DPS builds to be much stronger against them. Writ of Persistence was never actually needed, I usually ran 2 handed mastery over it, just forgot to update XD.
But yes you’re correct in saying that PoV is very good over WoP.
^^

And signet of stamina doesn’t stack with Vigor, I give up Warrior theorycrafting, I’m too bad.

I don’t play Warrior very much and I’ve only played HB and Cond DPS, but I decided to make a build anyway!

http://tinyurl.com/btznjyz
Spam dodge rolls, Guardian Style.

Looks decent at least, tell me how bad it is =D

According to my friend Warhorn has vigor on it so swap that for Shield, did not know (because I’m the best warrior of all time).

I assume I’m the only one getting fair matches, usually I get against ‘rank’ 200 – 250 team and I play in a ‘rank’ ~220 team.
When I solo Q I usually get a ‘rank’ ~123 while my enemies get around ‘rank’ 100-180. And I win most of my Solo Q’s, even during dead times I don’t get against co-ordinated premade teams, although I play a lot more with a team than solo Q.
I haven’t played in the last few weeks due to vacation but I don’t think it’s died that much in that period of time..

Svarty.8019:

Thanks for the tips, I will work on this. Dodge when you hear the portal sound fx.

Blink sound* <3

Xystus.3241:

Good info and ideas for sPVP. I’ve been itch for a while now to try out my guardian and have been hesitant.

Guardians are awesome man!! Never hesitate!
All these builds have been tested tons so they’re not just ideas.

Revenant.5498:

I may have missed where this was discussed or something

But with the Roamer build, I see that accessories you’d use but what Armor stats would you go for? Beserkers or Soldiers?

Thanks

Edit : And whats a rune I can use until I can afford a full set of Divinity lol
This is more for WvW and PVE.

Thanks again!

My Build are all for pvp, they may work for pve (I posted up my updated pve set) but they may not so I suggest looking at some of the other threads if you want people to help you out with gear. I don’t play enough pve/wvw to know the gear sorry! Any gameplay though I’d be happy to help pvp or wvw. I’m very good at 1v1/teamfights.
Also divinity aren’t good in WvW/PvE, I know that thanks to Blas ^^

PS: Updated my PvE build on the OP.

Should definitely turn the screen upside-down!

Blasino.3128:

Hey Jax,

With the latest patch, I’m seeing more condition builds lately. When holding mid I’m ok 1v1. 1v2 gets dicey I die about 50% of the time. 1v3+ I’m going to die pretty fast.

Any tips or is this sort of the rock paper sicsors of pvp.

I’m thinking almost at this points something like melundru runs could be helpful to prevent stacking of conditions so easily?

The two standard team builds before this update were:

• G E R R Me
• G E E R En/W/T

Which means the new meta will be:

• G E R R Me
• G E E R R/N

There isn’t really much change at all in the meta, the same builds do still work. At the moment I’m working on builds using Soldier’s amulet which play much better against condition classes but pressure builds are really strong against them.
I’ll probably be posting them soon (I have to get friends to test the new builds I think of becuase I’m overseas so it takes a bit more time) and if you really are feeling pressure from conditions in solo fights I suggest:

• Smite Conditions > Sanctuary
• Contemplation of Purity > Sanctuary
• Purging Flames > Sanctuary
• Focus > Shield

Smite can put more pressure on your enemy while keeping poison off, contemplation gives you a giant condition stack removal, Purging Flames removes each time you walk in and out of the field and combos really well with Mighty Blow and Eles/Rangers (I love this skill) and the Focus will block the attacks you need to so that you can avoid some of the stacks.

And remember pressuring your enemy is sometimes the best form of defence, the sword totally owns Ranger traps, it doesn’t look like it but you can keep teleporting past the fire fields so that they don’t deal that DPS and the ZD will block the spam the rest of the time.

I don’t suggest switching too much out, but when I play I read my enemy’s classes so that I can know generally what I want to be playing as.

tl;dr: the general population feels the meta has shifted but higher levels of pvp already relied a lot of condition AoE and that’s what these builds are made for.

(PS. not saying you’re low level but the players you’re up against wouldn’t have followed the meta shift before the update since its harder than burst to play and less effective against the bad players they’re hoping to play against)

Svarty.8019:

Does nobody else get hit for about 15k damage by mesmers? I usually find I’m okay for most of the fight then suddenly get bursted for nearly all of my HPs.

In most fights I’m panicking because I’ve got about 2k HPs all of the time.

This is due to the Mesmer running a shatter build with a Zerka amulet. The two simple signs that a Mesmer is shattering you are:

• The Mesmer’s close are running towards you all at the same time (the sword clones will stop inbetween auto-attacks so you can’t confuse it with a shatter) they will also stop midcast to sprint at you in this way.
• You hear the universal Mesmer teleport sound, if you don’t know what it sounds like get on a Mesmer and blink anywhere, that sound is what all Mesmer teleports share in common.

Good Mesmers will teleport onto you and use their Mirror Images skill along with their Shatter and Sword 2 (Blurred Frenzy), this means you get no chance to dodge their Sword 3 (Illusionary Leap) so dodging when you hear this sound is vital.
Another important thing to note is that if you do dodge when you hear the sound, you will actually dodge before the immobilize from Sword 3 hits you and thus be out of range of the Mesmer’s burst.
If you do get stuck in the immobilize of Illusionary leap, use your Shelter or Renewed Focus to stop 100% of the burst, failure to do so will almost certainly kill you.

This means save your dodges correctly, if you waste them you literally have killed yourself.