Guild Wars 2

I don’t have a Slyvari Guardian yet, but I assume it could be worthwhile in pugs where vulnurability isn’t capped on boss and/or short boss fights without FGS. Maybe other people can find some uses too, so I decided to make this thread.

Hey guys. As you know converting conditions into boons is an ability very few professions have other than Guardians. In fact, aside from Well of Power for Necromancers, Guardians probably have the monopoly on converting conditions of both himself and allies. Converting conditions on allies can be done through the Grandmaster trait in Honor tree, Pure of Voice. I admit though, that I haven’t given much thought about the trait until I saw the thread made by Bhawb and Blackmoa, listing the boon priority of all boon corruption mechanics Necromancer has. I thought that condition conversion probably too has a condition priority list and I intend to slot the trait to test it in dungeons and general content. Though it is fair to assume that the Guardian community is bigger than Necromancer’s, so if you guys have anything to share or such detailed list of priority is already found, please discuss here. Thank you

My question is, if you had a trait and utility slot for free, would you go with this combo?

Note: Free means when necessary trait/skills are already slotted and you have an option to choose anything else you like.

I don’t exactly know what you want so I am just going through some good boon/healing options in traits. Hope it helps.

Honor:

Honor has many good traits for a supportive gamestyle. Superior Aira decreases the cooldown of your shouts therefore is a very good to slot if you ever want to use shouts, which to support allies you probably should. There is Writ of Exaltation, which expands the reach of your symbol on mace’s second skill to ensure that your allies stay within. There is Pure of Heart which heals allies when Aegis is removed. This trait works very well with Communal Defenses which I will talk about later. There is Writ of Persistence which increases the duration of your symbol on mace’s second skill. With around %10 boon duration and with this trait, all allies standing in your symbol should have regeneration on themselves at all times. There is Empowering Might, which gives 5 seconds of might to nearby allies on 1 second cooldown when you crit. If you want to provide boon support this is a very good trait to choose, and the trait only gets better with more crit chance and boon duration. There is Writ of the Merciful, which allows your symbols to heal every second, ideal for your second skill. There is Pure of Voice that allows your shouts to convert 1 condition off of your allies to a respective boon. If you use shouts and Superior Aria, this is a very supportive trait to have. There is Battle Presence which allows your Virtue of Resolve to passively heal others. Aside from major traits there are 2 minor traits you might want to look at: Vigorous Precision and Selfless Daring. With more Vigor you can dodge more and with more dodges you can heal others more. However, never use dodges solely to heal others as you would be endangering yourself. Dead people can’t support others.

Valor:

Valor is a complimentary tree for Honor if you want to go supportive with mace. There aren’t many good options in here though, so you won’t have trouble choosing.

There is Strength in Numbers which gives you and your allies +150 toughness. This may not seem like a lot, but the lower toughness you have the more effective additional toughness is. Therefore this trait can allow zerker allies to have damage mitigation around %10-%20. There is Mace of Justice which gives you 250 healing power and %5 more damage. For a supportive mace setup this trait is a cornerstone for obvious reasons. There is Retributive Armor which gives you some bonus precision with more toughness you have. If you slot Empowering Might, you might need as much as precisiob as you can get. There is Altruistic Healing which heals you each time you apply a boon to yourself and your allies. You are aiming to boon support your allies anyway, so this trait would be a good option always. Note that this trait doesn’t provide supoort by direct means, it only helps to keep you alive to provide more support. There is Communal Defenses, which gives allies (but not you) Aegis each time you block an attack every 20 seconds. Aegis every 20 seconds for all allies nearby (no target limit) is nothing to scoff at and it synergizes well with Pure of Heart.

Virtues:

Boon support equals to Virtues. It is always a good practise to go for Virtues for any build setup. For your potential build however you have only few points left, and I would suggest you to pick Master of Consecrations as it improves the support of your consecration skills by a lot. If you wish to go further there are many good options such as Absolute Resolution which improves your Virtue of Resolve’s passive and makes the active a condition cleanse, Indomitable Courage which makes Virtue of Courage passive to proc Aegis more frequently and active to give Stability to allies and Shielded Mind which makes your Virtue of Courage a stun break for all allies. Depending on situations, there are many powerful traits you can choose here.

Hello all. I was checking the wiki about traits in the Zeal tree and I decided to learn more about “http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Binding_Jeopardy”.As you can see that the Slyvari racial skill, “http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Grasping_Vines”, works with this trait and supposedly applies vulnurability every second. Though I don’t have a Slyvari Guardian with this trait to test, I think if the vulnurability is applied each second and with careful timing and positioning (Vines are fragile) this combo could quickly cap Vulnurability on bosses. Maybe this has come up before but what are your thoughts?

Edit: Formatting

For most of the boss encounters, including Subject Alpha, the fight is focused on one target and the mob spawns are insignificant as they last for only couple of seconds. It is true some boss encounters require cleave but they are in minority. What we can do for the majority of boss encounters is to provide best damage as possible, and that can be done by using our best damage setup, D/D. As you said a good player should adopt and use best weapon sets depending on situations, I am only saying D/D can be very useful in single target where cleave doesn’t matter.

Skynet Railgun.9345:

If you are talking about fun, thief is by far the most fun class I played in gw2.
D/D is mostly a singly target weapon and don’t expect it to be good in most pve.

Also S/D has good damage IMO. Just the auto attack itself can hit a 3k-5k damage on the 3rd strike against subject alpha in CoE.

Indeed thief need more support from teammate to make them effective, but once you got some nice buddies, thief can be good too.

Why should a single target weapon set such as D/D be bad in most PvE? You can deal more damage on Subject Alpha – or any other boss – if you use D/D instead of S/D.

Gather some good amount of conditions on your target and spread it to all other foes with Epidemic. After Epidemic continue to build conditions; if your priority is your main target select another target to cast Epidemic again and swap to original target, if your priority is AoE cast Epidemic on the original target. Rinse and repeat this for good damage and healing. Make sure not to camp Death Shroud as heals won’t work while you are in.

Well if you really like him to have a minion build, then Flesh of the Master and Death Nova can work together. In PvP, a minionmancer is naturally dependant on his/her minions. It makes sense to increase their health, as they can take some beating and fight longer, thus giving him a chance to fight longer. Should it happens and all the minions are stacked together and killed (only eya to eliminate them all at once except Epidemic) then the minionmancer needs all the damage he can muster, and Death Nova is simply a good tool for that bad scenerio.

Except Fear all cc are non conditions and Shrouded Removal can’t help much.

Well of Darkness provides AoE blind every second for its whole duration. For fast attacks that blind may not be enough so that you can try to blast or leap (lol). I agree that I would like to see something more interesting for this skill, but at the moment this skill is our most prominent source of blind – and therefore active defence – aside from Plague.

All in all your ideas are cool but the skills you intend to change are backbones of most Necromancers. I hope at some point we will get new and interesting skills.

I guess thats fair. I just wanted for some of the appropiate skills to work with the minion traits so that they somewhat become interesting to build in. I guess I may be just bored of having so little change in build and gameplay for all this time.

What was your suggestion about TotM anyway?

I don’t want to fix MM, just want to make minion traits more accessable. The ideas were for builds other than MM actually. And I got the idea of multiple CDR from the Lich Form mark skill that summons minions which works quite well.

Even with these rewards, would Axe be powerful enough? At the end of the day, the Axe damage is just increased by %15 (%25 of Training of Master is %15 more than the alternatives in the same line) and the damage of Death Nova on auto. We are looking at 10 points of investment atleast here, all for Axe’s damage to be non subpar and some quality of life additions.

All in all why do you think this is bad?

The inaccuracies I found ars the fact that swapping weapons and using waypoints in an instance such as a dungeon (instances are not specified in the wiki) don’t affect stacks.

Hello, here are my thoughts.

Flesh Wurm active is one of our most popular and arguably the best escape mechanic. Its a long range teleport along with a stunbreak. I wouldn’t touch this skill because it is just too good.

Consume Corpse skill seems cool, but the idea of interacting with dead bodies seems to be abandoned for Necromancer design in GW2. I would love something like that or Corpse Explosion, but it seems much unlikely.

I have nothing to say about your Plague Signet idea other than I really like it. Maybe there should be a limit of the conditions copied? 3 seems a generous number.

Signet of Locust passive is used by many as good speed bonus so this idea wouldn’t be so good. The passive additionally can put you in combat when you don’t want to, maybe it can activate only on combat?

I like the idea for Spectral Grasp. It was a projectile skill that we never had the pleasure to take advantage of it being a projectile so its good to remove it.

Many people use Well of Darkness for its blind. Its one of our few non life force centric defensive skills, and its not like we ckittene the Dark field to blind people. Blasts are scarce for Necromancers, and one needs to sacrifise much to get the same blind uptime of the skill itself from the Dark fields. However, I agree with the idea that we need to have more access to Torment. We could see it in other skills maybe or even on Well of Darkness along with the blind, but blind is already limited for a Necro so removing it wouldn’t be good.

Have fun

Not really. Your foe would surely like to get out of your Fear as soon as possible so he/she can cast a stunbreak to do so. But as he/she uses the stunbreak he uses a skill, so he/she will suffer all the damage from Confusion stacks. So to avoid the potential damage from only Fear, your foe has to cast both a stunbreak and a condition cleanse, not to mention your other conditions – especially bleed – now has a lower chance to be removed as you can apply one additional condition. The rune set also has %30 Confusion duration built in so the minimum duration of the Confusion (aside from condition duration decrease on foe from Lemongrass or runes) would be 10 1/4 seconds.

Hello guys. I am one of those people who started GW2 when I saw I could become a Necromancer and lead my army of undead. As it turned out, leading my undead army in GW2 didn’t exactly match my stereotypical expectations of the class: it was optional and for the game modes I intended to take part in, it wasn’t the best choice. I love my Necro regardless of the state of minions and how they take part in gameplay and because I love the class I also want to improve it. Here are my suggestions of how to make minion traits more immersive to general Necro gameplay.

The first two skills of Axe have us attack our foes with ghostly claws in which we summon (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ghastly_Claws). How about the claws we summoned were actually untargettable and invulnurable summoned “minions” and presumely died when we finished channeling/casting?

The second skill of Scepter has us summon skeletal hands to damage foes (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Grasping_Dead). Maybe those hands can be counted as a minion and that minion died upon attacking?

How about our “swarm” skills: Deathly Swarm, Locust Swarm and Deadly Feast? We summon a swarm of insects to attack our foes, so why shouldn’t they be counted as minions that died when their effect ended?

Imagine that all of those weapon skills that I mentioned – without any change – were now also minion skills (their tooltips certainly have some room of interpretation for it). And all of those skills were affected by the minion traits (except the health increase of Flesh of the Master because they don’t have health). One could use the fourth skill of dagger – Deathly Swarm – to rip boons and/or further cleanse conditions every 10 seconds, have little bit of more toughness while Locust Swarm is on while having a %25 damage increase for the skill, have each end of the Axe autoattack chain proc Death Nova to cleave foes, decrease the cooldown of Ghastly Claws even further to increase life force gain and much more. Tell me what do you think.

I have Force + Night on my Hammer and Force + Perception on my Greatsword on swap. So far I have never lost my stacks gained through killing on my GS by switching to my hammer, so I am not sure I can confirm the information that tells otherwise on the wiki. I can also tell for myself that using waypoints inside an instance such as dungeons do not make you lose your stacks.

If you want to change a weapon that you currently equip with something else you must either have a weapon of the same sigil on your off hand and/or offset. In my case, when I gained a Perception stack with my Greatsword I didn’t lose it when I put the Greatsword back to my inventory as I had swapped my Hammer with a weapon that had the same sigil (it can be any other weapon with the sigil) before doing so. If I then wanted to put my weapon with Sigil of Perception to my inventory, I had to wear a weapon (my GS but could be anything) on my offset, or if the weapon I wanted to change was mainhand on my offhand. You can do this indefinitely without losing stacks and in the end it doesn’t matter if you wear the same weapon you got your initial stacks, you just have to wear any weapon regardless of quality, level or anything that has the same sigil before replacing your initial and thereafter weapons.

There has to be some personal or additional gain of us being behind our allies to cleanse them. Healing Breeze sort of addresses this by healing more, so should Cleansing Flames. After all, why should I run behind and try to keep my long channel on some ally for cleansing only if I can do that instantly and arguably better through Purging Flames, Absolute Resolution, Save Yourselves etc?

You can try and go with it. Just because Necro is undesirable in speed clear groups or maybe max level fractals doesn’t mean you should sit out on PvE with your favorite class. Avoid jerks and you are good to go.

The problem is that it is easy to “land” Ether Renewal as it is self targetted, but Cleansing Flame is a low range cone skill that needs both you and allies to remain in the appropiate position, which can be clunky on occasions.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Also lol @ comparing “utility” necro to utility warrior, you can’t compare the utility on a warrior to something that doesn’t exist.

What is being compared is the best PvE build each profession has to offer. On theory, the best build should be an optimal combination of utility and damage, but as you said yourself building on necro “utility” can be counterproductive as by comparison to other professions, it doesn’t exist. Therefore, the Necro’s best option is to go max dps as there isn’t much worthwhile support to combine his dps with. Warrior on the other hand can adjust his build for worthwhile support and create a more efffective (PvE wise) build than his max dps build.

Did you put it to bug forum? Cosmetic and tooltip bugs are fixed quite a lot these days.

It seems that all of our skills/traits that are dubbed with “siphon” works by doing something negative to foes to gain advantage. Who do we siphon the power from exactly? From ourselves because reasons?

I think taking max damage necro build and taking a somewhat utility based build for warrior and comparing them is fair. The best utility a necro can bring for PvE can be done by the max damage build already because as spoj would say, what we bring on the table unfortunately is outclassed by other professions. A warrior on the other hand can bring good and unique offensive utility such as Phalanx Strength, Empower Allies and banners. Therefore the builds compared here between warrior and necro are not selected because they are max damage, but because they are the builds that combine the best damage and utility each profession has to offer. Again, for Necros it is the max dps build, but for Warriors you actually have choices to decrease a bit of your own damage to improve the whole group’s damage, which can be more favorable for PvE.

With Well of Power you could have cleansed the poison and break your stun. Its l2p.

Obal and his calculations with other people suggests that it is possible for Hammer/Greatsword to beat Sword + Focus/Greatsword – without the use of Unscathed Contender – with the right build. So Sword + Focus/Greatsword isn’t necessarily the best choice. Two setups are very close in damage, so pick what you want. I prefer the Hammer/Greatsword as I don’t like sword skins and how it moves.

Another way to make it more Altruistic Healing friendly as you proposed is to make it convert conditions into boons instead of just cleansing them. I think I already have said this in another thread, but still…

Now that I think about the skill again, it may actually be enough to adjust the range for it to be less clunky or have it cleanse conditions off the caster as well.

If you want to add dps to your build then you have some good choices, in fact you have 3 of them.

First one is 2 points in Zeal for Fiery Wrath. You shouldn’t refrain from slotting Fiery Wrath because it doesn’t really matter if you can’t burn it as often. When in a group I find that my targets almost always has Burning and if not, just activate Virtue of Justice for a long Burning. You will additionally have 100 more power for more damage.

Second one is 2 points in Radiance for Blind Exposure. While the trait itself isn’t a damage modifier, you must also remember that a Guardian has a variety of options to blind his targets. For your GS/Hammer setup however, you have only 2 sources of blind and pretty low condition duration to maintain the Vulnurability. Radiance is best slotted with atleast 3 points in for Virtue of Justice to reset itself often so unless you are willing to sacrifise one more points in this line the major benefit you recieve here is the precision.

Third one is 2 points in Virtues for Unscathed Contender. The trait is the biggest damage modifier Guardian has at the moment, but relies heavily on your awareness to be worth it. That is, you have to keep the Aegis on yourself as long as you can manage for maximum effectiveness. You additionally get %10 boon duration and Virtues recharge from here, and that can be useful for might stacking along with Virtues’ first minor trait.

If I were you I would go for 2 points in Zeal for the extra points and definitely slot Writ of Persistence instead of Two Handed Mastery. Zeal is a safe bet for more dps as it provides power and a steady dps increase from Fiery Wrath as Burning is much easier to maintain on enemies in a group environment. As for Writ of Persistence, it will increase Altruistic Healing’s potential by a great bit. With Writ of Persistence, your Hammer will now provide permanent Protection to all allies who stand in the auto attack symbol, and therefore you can proc Altruistic Healing for all the party every second at all times. Combined with Empowering Might, you can have 720 healing per second without additional sources of boons. Hope this helps

I basically used the 3 points in Radiance to get the damage multipliers in both Virtues and Honor, with the addition of 2 handed mastery when I use my GS along with hammer or Empowering Might for Hammer camping. Is the %10 damage multiplier along with crit chance in Radiance that better than Evasive Power and Power of the Virtuous given that I run pugs so I have to dodge a lot (I usually have atleast 4 boons on me too). It is true that I am missing the blind spam and might and vulnurability along with it, but I find that kills of trash mobs on pugs are either too widely spread or too fast in order for the 3 points in Radiance to matter.

So with atleast %10ish uptime of Unscathed Contender can have 3/5/0/4/2 hammer camping superior to that of 5/5/0/0/2? That is nice.

I am using 3/0/0/6/5 for pug runs with my hammer with sigil of perception until 25 stacks then swap to sigil of night. It enables me to effectively stack might as pugs usually don’t, opportunity to slot some utility along with UC or Master of Consecrations like AR, Stability on VoC activation or additional projectile defense through increased spirit weapon duration. If the situation demands, I drop 1 point off Zeal and get more utility from Virtues. Though it has lower precision than 3/5/0/4/2, with Evasive Power and Power of the Virtues, how would the build compare especially on unoptimized setups?

Unless you are doing high tier PvE – high level fractals – you should be fine. The dps is not bad at all and as people say here its right after thief. You should bother to play with Necromancer if you bother to have fun with playing the class you like.

Unfortunately most of the best dps classes/specs can cleave with their attacks. That is, they can do around the same damage to both single target and the trash. I hear a lot of this “condition melts trash” argument. Even if you have 25 stacks of bleeds and all on all mobs can you melt them faster than the max damage specs that can cleave? Can a condimancer even AoE better than a power Necro who has access to DS piercing, wells, warhorn and whatnot? In the “stack and kill fast” norm, I doubt if a condimancer’s sustained AoE is capable of beating a powermancer’s burst AoE.

Lets also remember that other classes can apply random bleeds, so that even in a dungeon setup a conditionmancer’s damage could be less than ideal in an optimum setup (all unique buffs, 25 might and vulnurability and Fury) as he is bound to lose his bleed stacks to others.

In conclusion, condimancers can really shine in demanding places like Triple Trouble and by all means will always be useful in all content, but the content of PvE in which power specs are more useful are in majority.

How about give might to allies on crit – the Necro version of Empowering Might (Guardian)? Or give might to allies when you gain might – the Necro version of Phalanx Strength (Warrior)? Or something new entirely like give Fury when you gain might or +150 ferocity to allies? Anything is better really.

Obal do you by any chance have the numbers of 5/5/0/4/0 Hammer camping? I am assuming these numbers are calculated without Unscathed Contender, is that right?

If you also use a big norn for your Guardian, sword animation looks silly – as if you are trying to swat a fly buzzing over. Mace has more manly animations for my norn.

If sword had its 2nd and/or 3rd skill it could break the tie with mace/staff, but one must also remember how better is cleaving on staff, and even on mace. The third attack of the AA chain of sword isn’t widely spread and can miss other opponents if they are not in the cone of the target but for example right by its side. Even if no targets are missed, the 3rd skill of the chain can only hit 3 foes (well technically 9 foes but all foes have to be in the lame projectile line) and can easily be reflected through projectile defenses. Not to mention how it can miss environmental stuff. It doesn’t make much sense why a melee weapon uses projectiles in its auto attack. Mace on the other hand can hit up to 5 foes on its 3rd attack on chain, can not be reflected and can actually heal. With the symbol traits available, mace can also provide perma regeneration and more vulnurability than sword’s, while providing some burst through the shatter of the third skill.

There are benchmarks for the duration of boons. That is, the duration is always rounded to the nearest quarter of a second, which means that during this “rounding” some part of your boon duration may become redundant. You are so close to %50 boon duration which is a very good number, so I’d say you may want some more boon duration to play safe. Mango pie regen is somewhat low to consider anyways.

Both mace and sword can shine in the right builds but they seem to be close in terms of damage when both are untraited. If its looked from the untraited perspective then what is left out is the comparison between the weapons’ utilities. If you are looking for projectile defense and some good blind (and a gap closer with it), pick the sword. If you are looking for a low cooldown block (and the burst that comes with it), sustainable heal and symbol synergy pick the mace. Its entirely personal preference. In my hammer setup for PvE mace is more favorable while in my PvP meditation build sword is much better.

Shields just look plane awesome and although I am not saying they are bad, the utility of shields are somewhat gimmick and in my opinion somewhat unpractical. Focus has this round.

I have never tried the trait myself as Virtues have pretty good utility traits already. Therefore, I have some questions about it:

Does the endurance regen stack with Vigor?

I know that even though VoR is on cooldown, with Battle Presence it continues to heal allies. Does the trait’s effect remain as well?

Does the effect stack with other endurance regen effects and among other Guardians who use Battle Presence with this trait (e.g with 2 Guards do we get %30 regen?)

I am unable to get in the game at the moment so I cant answer these myself. As for the reason why this trait is so weak: its Battle Presence. Just by seeing the %15 I can guess that it stacks with other endurance regen effects and maybe even Vigor as well, so the fact that it can be shared makes it somewhat good on paper. If it additionally stacks with other Guardians’ – probably not – then there is your theorethical group of Guardians that devs were afraid of while designing this trait: 5 Guardians goofing around with %275+ endurance regen on top of energy sigils.

Bumping my own thread Come on people let this be seen!

Even if there isn’t a condition build present, bleed is still an abundant condition that can be applied randomly by your teammates. A bleed stack that is applied randomly is a stack of bleed you couldn’t maintain because of the cap. You can still melt through trash with your power builds: I use DS “cleaving”, wells, Locust Swarm along with Epidemic.

Direct damage, regardless on what it scales from, is direct damage. We should have condition builds with conditions as source of damage, not direct damage scaled from condition damage.

I think instead of just nerfing our bleed capabilities without a second thought they can and could have replaced some of our bleed applications with unique effects. Are you bothered with Necro’s high condition pressure? OK, just gradually remove the amount of bleeds we can apply like what happens in every patch, but also give additional effects like Binding Blades so it remains balanced for both parties.

People all cry about how they can’t remove conditions and they should be nerfed, but don’t realize that for condition builds conditions are the source of damage just as direct attack is the damage source for power builds. If nobody cries about how they can’t get rid of direct damage and ask for invulnurability phases, noone should be a drama queen about conditions either. I am saying this because the problems of conditions are overlooked too many times.

Lets assume that you are in an optimized party; where you have perma Fury, 25 stacks of might, Spotter and Precision Banner. Considering what is written so far and the forementioned conditions, it seems that a good benchmark for all three attributes would be 2125+ power, %60-70 crit chance and %200+ crit damage.

Anything can go well with dagger. Warhorn is the obvious choice, but Focus provides high vulnurability uptime and fast life force regain along with a long duration chill and boon removal on demand. Dagger offhand on the other hand is one of our few sources of blind and provides excellent condition management along with passive defense and bleeds. Its personal preference.

As for the torch, I am fine with anything as long as it provides us a means to gain life force outside of combat. We shouldn’t be slot killing our minions or hunting ambient creatures just to be as prepared as everybody else.

It seems that for Medi builds there are only 2 options in Virtues Adept traits, with Vengeful being in my opinion somewhat unnecessary. UC would not only be great for openers, but can also punish others for noticing you in time. For bunker builds however, I d go with Vengeful.

I think Torment can go pretty well with Guardian theme. When you smite or judge your foes, you torment them with the memories of all the pain they brought upon others or just essentially bringing justice to those who were caused pain by your enemies by making your enemies suffer as their victims/opponents did. In other words, Torment can be used by the Guardian to have others penance for their actions.

What can you say about my setup then (above)?

While the trait has good intentions, it may cause some other problems regarding balance and cause many dispute among players. Personally, I think we can recieve some unique effects similar to Binding Blades (Guardian Greatsword 5). As far as I know, Binding Blades damage over time effect is never written off (even another Guardian was to cast the same skill they stack) and scales from Condition Damage. It can not be removed by cleanses or condition reduction food, but it cant also be spread by Epidemic or have its duration increased. Correct me if I was wrong in anywhere, but wouldn’t this solve some of the problems addressed here?