Guild Wars 2

So where do I start?

Since they buffed it not too long ago Tome of Courage with Elite Focus actually looks really good on paper. It would actually be a really good option for support builds if it wouldn’t be for the horrible placement in the Virtues line.

So basicly here is the problem:

To use Tome of Courage you drop Renewed Focus which recharges your virtues.

Then you trait heavily into Virtues without being able to reset them with Renewed Focus making all the traits you get in Virtues apart from Elite Focus half as good as they usually are.

Also you need to drop Altruistic Healing when you still want to have ANY cleanse to get Absolute Resolution (which you can’t reset because you don’t have Renewed Focus).

Without Altruistic Healing and Renewed Focus you end up being way too squishy for a bunker guard and you also end up being kind of a one trick pony because as soon as your virtues and your tome are on cooldown you really can’t do much anymore.

If Elite Focus would be in Valor or Honor you would be able to create a build that is tanky enough to run without Renewed Focus and doesn’t have this weird conflict between being traited for Virtues but being unable to reset them.

tl;dr: Move Elite Focus from Virtues to Honor or Valor. Thanks.

EDIT: I’m talking about bunker guard in PvP just in case some special snowflake wants to tell me about his amazing WvW roaming healer pseudo monk guard. c:

Sayoka Shinozaki easily c:

You don’t use the active f1 unless you know that your target has no cleanse anymore and he’s gonna die from the burn tick. Passive f1 is way more damage if you can constantly hit stuff.

Also I never doubted that condi guard is a good dueling build. But you won’t convince me with videos of random duels that it’s viable in 5v5 games with decent people.

My point still stands. As long as I don’t see a condi guard doing well in some weekly ESL tournament or smth similar I won’t agree with the statement OP made in the title.

“I want Unscathed Contender back!” would be a better name imo.

GS 4:
You can avoid the aftercast that roots you by stowing weapon without losing any damage.

GS 5:
The projectiles from binding blade can be bodyblocked. It still always creates as many projectiles as there are people arround you which means that it’s possible to hit one target with multiple blades if you’re inside of it when the cast finishes. I one-shotted a bunch of mesmers with this already because they tanked the blades that were supposed for his clones. :3

Scepter 3:
You can use this on targets behind you which helps with kiting. Your target still needs to be in line of sight though.

I’m sure I know more stuff that isn’t mentioned here yet but these are the only things I can think of right now. :<

It’s less that the traits for our class mechanics are bad, it’s more that the traits for our utilities (Monk’s Focus / Pure of Voice) are more important on some builds.

That said there are actually a lot of builds which go into virtues. The standard meditation build goes 4 into virtues for the cleanse on f2, the standard PvE dungeon build goes 5 into virtues for the damage and utiltiy, the standard WvW/GvG build goes 4 into virtues for the stab on f3. Not mentioning virtues bunker in PvP because I think it’s a terrible build.

People would go deeper into virtues if there would be a good grandmaster trait but there really isn’t one so you can pretty much always get the stuff you want in that line by putting 4 points into it.

Cool grandmaster traits would be stuff like

Activating a virtue heals you and people arround you. Reduces the recharge of virtues by 20%.

Run 25% faster when you have all passive virtues up. Chill targets arround your when you activate Virtue of Justice.

Idk just some ideas. The grandmaster traits we currently have in virtues are kind of a joke.

Terrorsquad.2349:

EDIT: input another point!
e) They need to crawl out of their “Meta-Cave”, making them feel insecure.

Implying that there wouldn’t be meta stuff in TDM. And it’s not like you get to try out new stuff. Most of the builds which are rly strong there are pretty much slight variations of WvW/GvG meta builds that have been arround for months.

I kinda like courtyard as well but it should never be in one queue with conquest maps especially not if it’s not possible to switch classes/builds which they want to make a thing at some point.

:<

Deathmatch in this game is mostly coordinated AoE clusterkitten. It’s fun to get it every now and then and pretty much reroll wvw builds but I really don’t think it should be an actual seperate gamemode. Half the classes aren’t viable in it and without objectives it srsly reminds me of wvw zergfights.

Pretty much wvw builds with more cleanses because there is no food that would give you almost condi immunity. Staff/hammer AH guard, shoutheal hambow with banner, staff ele, shadow arts thief. Everything else seems pretty meh.

Meditation guard is pretty terrible in this tbh.

Sigh… Another random change nobody asked for. Why would you change this NOW after it got used for 2 years by absolutly everybody. Oh well.

I had to listen to shad and texbi trying to play with hidden UI because of this so I can confirm that this is a problem. :<

Saiyan.1704:

Keksmuffin.1450:

Some random montage in which you beat mediocre/horrible players in duels won’t come close to convince me. Play and do well in one of the weekly tournaments with this build and I might start taking you srsly.

You just saved me a whole lot of editing and footage time. And a goal to work towards

Nice to hear I guess.

AGGabriel.9230:

Condi guard hmmmm….. are you serious we lack conditions we have one ONLY 1 and even that its just a light up of the opponent for 1-3 sec burning 1K in total while other classes have near 5 condi access, yes we have chains for it but there all spread in the trait system and we cannot access it to use the full potential of it

Geo/doom is a thing. Also guardian has a bunch of ways of aplying burning. Burning from passive f1, burning on block, JI, torch 4, balthazar runes and potentially even purging flames. If you add all these together you have a bunch of short burning ticks that aren’t easy to cleanse since you keep reapplying 1-4 seconds burning ticks that hurt pretty badly if you’re running amplified wrath.

I still think it’s not good for anything but dueling since most of the damage is just too slow and too passive while you’re not really gaining a lot of defense over the usual zerker meditation build.

Some random montage in which you beat mediocre/horrible players in duels won’t come close to convince me. Play and do well in one of the weekly tournaments with this build and I might start taking you srsly.

Condi guard barely has any active damage apart from burning and sigils/runes. In everything that is not 1v1 condi guard will have way less damage output than zerker. In teamfights your burning will keep getting cleansed and you can’t rly focus targets since most of your damage is burning on block and burning from the passive f1. It has less support as well because it is forced to go 6 points into zeal.

The only things condi is better at than zerker is killing engis. It kind of freekills thieves and mesmer but you already have an advantage against them on dps guard anyways. It has a better chance against dd ele but it still shouldn’t beat it.

>PvE armor
>WvW roaming armor
>useless soldier stuff

Darude – Sandstorm

The people who won this weeks go4 thingy are not as new as you think they are.

You forgot the most important thing: Evon Gnashblade Representation Buttons are still not usable in PvP servers. You have to leave the arena, activate the button in HotM and rejoin again when you want to represent Evon Gnashblade during ESL-finals and it just ran out. Unacceptable.

Obsidia.5127:

It’s not going to work out at all. There are not enough players in GW2 sPvP for it.

I honestly don’t see what was wrong with Hotjoin, SoloQ & TeamQ.

I personally barely played soloq and I’m prolly gonna play a lot of unranked q with one or two friends and I know many people who feel the same way. I’m not gonna miss soloq in the least.

My win rate would change from 75ish% to 70ish% so I guess I don’t really care too much.

Both win rates don’t really tell you a lot about the player though. Most somewhat high ranked players have like 70-80% winrate in teamq from stomping pugs and mediocre teams way too often and they have like 50-60% winrate in soloq depending on what classes they are playing and how much luck they had with matchmaking. Srsly it’s funny to see how almost everybody decent who used to main warrior before the nerfs has like arround 60% winrate.

They even took the jewels out of the amulets which was like the tiny bit of stat customization we had in PvP. So ye… won’t happen, forget it.

It’s prolly better this way though, more stat combinations and customization would make PvP way harder to balance. When you look at what they did to celestial you don’t really want to imagine what they would do with way more stat combos and variations available.

c:

Rethmar Stokestrike.1927:

I do everything this build instructs. Hell, I even lie to people and tell them that I’m running a DPS build, but still go all the way through dungeons. On occasion I have people ask where the heals are coming from, then I’m all like, “oh yeah, I forgot to say I do reverse DPS on your health bars.”

I wouldn’t have judged you for running a terrible build if it wouldn’t be for this. If people ask for zerker meta builds bring zerker meta builds or don’t join the group.

If you’re trolling congrats, I just took your bait. I really hope you’re trolling though.

Until they improve zealots defense and/or the 3rd autoattack just use a Silly Scimirar. It just feels so right to use the 3rd autoattack for the 3rd time and still miss because your target is absorbing projectiles or to flail arround and see only one out of 8 projectiles actually hitting your target when you’re using this skin.

oxtred.7658:

Wrong game?

9/10 I agree with most of this.

For zealots defense to be good it would probably be enough if it would actually hit anything on the range that is displayed in the tooltip. When you use zealots defense on 600 range atm you hit half of the projectiles at best. On moving targets it’s even worse.

Black Box.9312:

Keksmuffin.1450:

If you’re playing with 1hsword it’s a different story since RHS and powerful blades make the damage difference between honor and radiance pretty big. But then we’re talking about gimmicky 1 shot builds without much sustain or utility again. We’re kind of moving in circles here.

Wait what? Sword provides the highest sustained DPS of any of the guardian’s weapons (barring scepter if every hit of smite lands, but that’s pretty much a no-go). It’s much less of a 1 trick pony gimmick than GS is, which is why I don’t recommend GS for small scale WvW roaming.

I’m not talking about sword being a gimmicky 1 shot weapon, I’m talking about 2/6/6/0/0 or 2/5/6/x/x with sword traits.

GS has something you could call an actual burst (scepter imob → WW, binding blade + JI → WW) while sword is basicly just gapclose auto auto auto, gapclose auto auto auto. Zealots defense isn’t really a big difference to autoattack. Also sword cleave is really awkward and it has no aoe at all which makes it worse in pretty much everything that isn’t 1v1. If you’re not going super yolo 6 radiance I really don’t see a point in running sword.

Glacial heart is like 1,5-2k damage, why wouldn’t you use it with hammer especially since you get fury from pack runes anyways.

The damage difference between lyssa and pack runes is actually pretty big, especially on autoattacks it’s like a 10%ish damage loss and that’s not even considering the fury and the swiftness which definetly helps with 2 melee weapons. Also making really good elite like renewed focus to a lyssa-trigger-button never was a good idea, not even back then when lyssa was ridicolous.

Black Box.9312:

Keksmuffin.1450:

Radiance gives you nothing but damage. Honor gives you sustain, more utility with the cooldown reduction (and maybe resolute healer if you roam with a friend or smth) and still a decent ammount of damage from elusive power.

Going into traitlines to get nothing but damage is something you can do with PvE builds or with gimmicky 1 shot builds but in every decent PvPish build you can’t just stack damage multipliers. The stuff you get in honor is definetly stronger in actual fights, 1v1s and stuff. The only time I would agree on radiance being better would be fighting NPCs.

But what sort of utility does honor even provide for a meditation build? Your utility comes from meditations and valor; other than the vigor on crit at a whole 1 point there’s nothing valuable enough in honor to make a significant impact on the build, so you’re basically trading out less damage for hardly any sort of gain at all.

You get the cd reduction on gs which means you can pull and leap more often. You get a decent sustainboost from healing dodges and heal on aegis which actually makes a difference in wvw since the healing dodges are unnerfed and you gain healing power from stuff like traveler runes, wvw boni and stuff (and the 5 points in honor ofc). You still get the 10% more damage thingy which basicly means that 5 points in radiance don’t really boost your damage a lot compared to honor, at least as long as we’re talking about gs scepter/focus. The only real difference is actually your crit chance. Also you can get the knockback on rez trait if you’re playing with a friend which is amazing utility in 2v2s and stuff.

If you’re playing with 1hsword it’s a different story since RHS and powerful blades make the damage difference between honor and radiance pretty big. But then we’re talking about gimmicky 1 shot builds without much sustain or utility again. We’re kind of moving in circles here.

Lyssa runes? Knight amulet? Meh… you gonna end up with pretty bad damage like that.

If I would be forced to run gs/hammer for some reason I would play smth like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJARSlsApcoVDxbI8DNRDRlZ8dfY+BZw1HwFGAA-TpBFwACuAAMOEAIOCA12foaZAAPAAA

If you want to be useful you should still just use scepter/focus but oh well.

hi c:

I’ve been maining meditation guard since forever, been top 50 teamq since last leaderbord reset with it, played it in a bunch of bigger tournaments and won a bunch of 2v2 and 5v5 ESL weeklies with it. I would dare to claim that I have more experience with meditation guard than some random wvw roamer that writes a guide for his random throwtogether of traits.

I still think that the best build goes into virtues for the utiltiy (2/1/6/1/4, 0/1/6/1/6, 0/1/6/3/4), sustain and support but 5 points in honor are definetly better than 5 points in radiance especially since he wants to use celestial armor. 2/1/6/5/0 trades a small part of your damage for a lot of sustain compared to stuff that goes 5 or 6 into radiance.

Radiance is only good for gimicky one handed 1 shot builds. One point in radiance for the instant blind is something every dps build should have but apart from that there isn’t any decent utility in this line.

Focus is just ridicolously good. Both skills can get used for offensive and defense. Focus 4 is alright damage, two blinds and two condi cleanses. Focus 5 is more damage on top of your burst or 3 instant blocks when you’re cc’d or out of dodges or smth. So it basicly has everything dps guard is about. Blinds, blocks and burst.

With hammer/gs you take two pretty slow melee weapons with only 2 gapclosers on not all that short cooldowns. You will have a harder time with connecting damage than if you would take sword or scepter/focus and on top of that you will also have less defense. It’s probably enough to kill backpedaling, keybordturning people in hotjoin but you won’t kill decent players with this.

Radiance gives you nothing but damage. Honor gives you sustain, more utility with the cooldown reduction (and maybe resolute healer if you roam with a friend or smth) and still a decent ammount of damage from elusive power.

Going into traitlines to get nothing but damage is something you can do with PvE builds or with gimmicky 1 shot builds but in every decent PvPish build you can’t just stack damage multipliers. The stuff you get in honor is definetly stronger in actual fights, 1v1s and stuff. The only time I would agree on radiance being better would be fighting NPCs.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNAR7dlsApcoVDxbI8DRRDBlZ8vvN49hrPQCCAA-TVCEwA23fgwTAYrSQmK/McBAYp+THdOt1EA4gAQKgnWGB-w

This is what I’m using when people force me to run arround in wvw with them. It would lack damage with celestial gear though so I wouldn’t recommend it to OP.

Blood sigil can do more damage on targets with high armor since it ignores armor while fire doesn’t.

The reason why you shouldn’t take fire on both sets is that they share their cooldown. When you proc fire sigil and swap weapon it’s still on cooldown while blood sigil doesn’t share its cooldown with fire. The point is not the 5 seconds cooldown, it’s the SHARED 5 seconds cooldown. (Same with air sigil but it’s not as bad with only 3 seconds cooldown. Also there is no sigil which would compare damage-wise)

And scepter is a ranged weapon. The autohits are easy to avoid by sidestepping on max range, yes. But in a range of ~600smth that isn’t possible anymore. Also smite and the imob have no travel time. The imob makes it possible to actually hit a full whirling wrath which is basicly impossible otherwise if your target has a brain. Smite might not have the best damage on moving targets with a small hitbox but it has no travel time so the first few hits usually hit if you place it well and if your sigils get triggered by that it does pretty good damage.

I would take scepter over sword because two melee weapons are pretty bad (for what I’m assuming to be a wvw roaming build?).

I would replace fire sigil on your focus. Having a sigil with 5 seconds cooldown on both weaponsets is not really optimal. I would take bloodlust since your power is kinda meh or if you don’t want to use a stacking sigil you can use blood sigil. It does arround the same damage as fire, sometimes more, sometimes less since it’s ignoring armor and it doesn’t share the cooldown with fire sigil. Also it’s a small sustain buff and your build seems like that’s kind of what you want.

I would definetly take the point out of virtues and put it into radiance. The instant blind will let you avoid way more damage than the protection from that trait if you can use it right.

Also you should consider taking pure of heart over wrathful spirit. Not really the most relevant thing but it would be some more healing on top of all the other heals.

Tyreal.5230:

I don’t know why anet insists on putting aegis on ridiculously long cds.

Imagine an ele with written in stone and 4 signets with that rune if it would have no cooldown :<

.

Because I have nothing better to do I’m gonna link some typical builds here.

PvE meta: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNAR8dlsApXolCxZI8DNR8QlbKOG2+BtQlBQDA-ThRBABXt/o8DPdD5dRAA4JAQp6PmpEEA-e

PvP support meta: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNAW5dlsApWo97wVI8DRBDRkjNYnFOedxRAA-TZBHAB4eQAWqMAAXAge2fYgnAAA

PvP dps meta: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNAR7dlsApcoVDxbI8DVR8QlZK+i2UVAgz1/QQkDA-TZBFwACuAAEOIA12foaZAAPBAA

PvE meta is dps for every class. That doesn’t mean that you’re not bringing utitlity and support stuff but the main focus is dps. Warrior usually uses GS + axe/mace, guardian usually uses GS + something/focus, mesmer uses sword/something. Mesmer and guardian utitlity in pve is mostly reflects and condi cleanse, warrior “support” is basicly just raising the damage of everybody arround them with banners, might and stuff.

In PvP warrior is usually more of a tank, being able to tank stuff and still kill stuff with cc. Apart from some obscure stuff like offhand axe or rifle pretty much everything + longbow is more or less viable. Guardian is usually either a dedicated suporter with staff + something or dps with GS + scepter/focus. The only really viable mesmer build is all out dps with GS + staff or GS + sword something. Guard utility is mostly heals and cleanses, warrior mostly cc, mesmer boon removal, mobility and portals.

Strength and energy sigils are both pretty bad on dps guard. A big part of your survivability comes from having stupidly high damage which makes it almost impossible to trade damage with dps guards. Air/fire/blood sigils help way more with that.

Sigil of strength is worse than sigil of battle in 90% of the pvp situations, especially with 2 melee weapons you will never proc them on cooldown. Since dps guard relies more on burst than on sustained damage air/fire/blood sigils are a way better option on most builds anyways. I guess on this build stacking might with battle sigils could make sense.

The build itself is not really good though. Less damage and less support than the usual 2/1/6/1/4 gs sc/f build.

Pack runes are the better option for pvp builds imo. Having swiftness in combat can help with kiting and chasing a lot, almost perma fury from the runes + the meditation trait and the extre precision from the runes helps proccing air/fire/blood sigils more often. If you really want to run this empowering might stuff and sigils for might (which I really wouldn’t recommend) strength runes are probably still better though since the might duration would actually do something.

tl;dr: In actually good builds pack runes and air/fire/blood sigils are definetly better than what you have. On this build it’s hard to say. In longer fights the mightstack stuff might actually make a difference, in shorter fights air/fire-proccerino is still better.

I got my 4th guard to 80 the other day which made me wonder if there are people who have more than me. I mean I pretty much know that there are. I just want to see some pretty screenshots and I’m bored. :<

I like the idea, the build seems solid if you consider what you want to do with it but eh… You’re kind of a healing bot without much utility. Since you have no shelter, no renewed focus, only one stunbreak and no AH you could get killed pretty quickly when people realize you’re not as tanky as your healing dodges make it look like.

You can’t really do what guardians in pvp usually do which is rezzing and stomping while being able to facetank all the cleave on the downed body and cleansing teammates. I mean you have the cleanse on f2 and that’s about it. Not having renewed focus means you can’t just reset and use it twice either.

I guess it’s a build for just-for-fun-stuff for wvw so everything is viable anyways but I would not run smth like this in any serious or competetive enviroment.

Nice idea though, Seing green numbers popping up is fun I guess.

no

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-DPS-Guardian-for-PVE/first

Meh… it’s nice to run arround in pve with it, pretty decent swiftness uptime from just one skill. Also nice for dungeons since the pve meta build already used retreat before the buff.

I still don’t think one aegis and some swiftness is impactful enough to be viable in pvp though.

glock.6590:

What is the logic behind repears protection? There is no skill spamming auto fears with no counter play.

You can block reapers prot by using aegis while pulling, you can put it on cooldown with stuff like headshot or other ranged cc while being out of range for the fear, you can use zerker stance before you cc stuff.

Most classes have counterplay to it tbh.

Pretty sure they said the brackets would be random.

You don’t really have to go as far as playing a terrible build, you can just take the standard bunker build and slap sword/shield in the 2nd weaponset next to the staff. It’s alright, especially on Khylo it can be a viable alternative against comps that have a lot of stuff that knocks you off the point like engi, mesmer, staff ele or smth.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNAW8elsApWo97wVI8DRBDRkjNYnFOedRTAA-TJBHwALLDA4iA0b/hBPBAA