Guild Wars 2

bakalarko.4850:

P.S. Dungeons aren’t fun to play.

Then why are you even playing?

There’s no farming in this game at all except what you put on yourself. I get more than enough gold for everything I need just doing whatever I normally do.

I love that I can log in and there’s lots of stuff to do: explore the world, run dungeons, WvWvW, complete daily, etc. Compare that to say, WoW, where there’s nothing to do. Oh sure, you can do your raid once a week, then you just sit around and wait for the next week. Joy!

Grab hammer, spec 0/0/30/30/10 with AH and EM, wear knight’s gear, eat heal on crit food, turn on autoattack, go afk.

Psychatog.8246:

Full clerics/apoth gear with healing shout build using healing signet + healing sigil w/ no food

9241.625 per 25 seconds -> 370 passive regen from signet and adrenal
shouts heal for about group for 2k each

you can build sword/mace/shield, hammer, or longbow ideally
using apoth id say go sword/shield or warhorn + longbow
using clerics id say go mace/shield or warhorn + hammer

Yes and the only benefit to the group you’re getting from the cleric’s gear is another ~1000 per heal x3 every 25-30 seconds. That’s…not much. Adrenal health doesn’t benefit from +healing and the regen on signet scales very poorly, and it only affects you.

You’re far better off going Knight’s gear with the same build imo.

Red Falcon.8257:

Going 30 tactics for boon duration is like going with a blonde for an intellectual talk.

Seriously, rune of the monk/sanctuary/water = 45% boon duration = full upkeep of SoR.
And then you can go deep into the real Warrior trees.

This sounds like someone who’s never actually done this. 40% is the max boon duration you can get from runes. And the tactics line has some of the best major traits a warrior can get.

I’m not sure what you want. If you don’t enjoy dungeons at all, why do you even need the gear? I enjoy the dungeons. There’s a lot of them, do them for fun if you don’t want to “grind”.

They could have no gear, what would you do then?

Sadly, I don’t know of any which is odd given how many builds are based around PvE.

Her boobs are too big.

Is rifle damage all that good? It never seems good to me in PvE and kill shot hits for about 50% more than the last autoattack (if that).

When I tested it it seemed underwhelming. Does it work with the bleed on crit trait? I didn’t get nearly as many bleed stacks out of it as I expected, even with 50% bleed duration increase.

I didn’t know Warriors had a support build with healing gear. That adds what, 4k healing/25 seconds?

I just wish there were runes that added boon duration with something other than healing power.

The reason I’m not tempted to take boon duration in general (beyond the tactics line) is because Warrior doesn’t have many boons that apply to the party, unlike Guardians. 3 might stacks and short duration fury is all, vigor is up permanently anyway with warhorn 5 + all the bleed conversion.

Soldier runes seem great but removing just one condition invariably means you’re removing bleed which gets instantly reapplied, though it is nice on Shake It Off because you remove 2 conditions which greatly increases the likelihood of removing one that actually matters.

What’s dumb is not that some dungeons are longer than others, but that the reward is the exact same for all of them. 2 hour run or 10 min run, you get the same reward. That’s dumb.

Puandro.3245:

Yaki.9563:

Ioflux.4369:

Get a guardian, spec knight gear, go 0/0/30/30/10, use hammer, pop omnomberry pie/ghost and face tank him all day while you tell rest of your party to do the rest of the dungeon while you solo auto attack him.

You’ll die.

Umm no, you can facetank him while spamming 1, AND eat the spin.

Nope.

Raine.1394:

There is a good reason why financial advisors don’t recommend buying lottery tickets to increase wealth and certainly wouldn’t advise just buying more to increase your chances.

Yet financial advisors recommend investing in the stock market. It’s exactly the same except for one difference: the stock market has positive expectation and the lottery has negative expectation. I guarantee that if playing the lottery were profitable, regardless of the randomness, they would recommend doing it. In fact there would be a bunch of hedge funds that pool money to buy tickets.

The same goes with in-game versions of the same mechanic. Sure, there will be occasional winners, but the chances are it won’t be you.

It’s not the same, because it’s likely that the MF provides a positive expectation in the long-term. If you could pool enough money and do say, a million combines you could come out with a nice profit. Or not, we don’t know. But just because the short term results went against you doesn’t mean it’s a bad bet.

This kind of thinking is why so many idiots pull their money out of the stock market when stocks haven’t been doing well for the last few years.

Explore and do dynamic events. If you don’t do that you’ll quickly get ahead of the personal story and hearts, which kind of sucks. Make sure to pick up gathering tools and gather everything along the way.

First time around I quit at lvl 10 because I didn’t know what to do and the next heart area was lvl 12. When I came back I set map completion as a goal which led me to many DE’s (mainly because I spending more time wandering).

The lack of DE’s can be a big issue though sometimes. I have gone for well over an hour and explored half a map without a single DE, other times you get them non-stop.

foofad.5162:

I’m racking my brain trying to figure out a way to have Battle Presence and Absolute Resolution while making up for the fact that I no longer have as much crit damage, toughness, or Altruistic Healing. I’ll think of something, but jeez. It’s so much better now, it’s really hard not to want to do that.

Presumably you’re tanking your damage by using healing gear anyway, crit damage doesn’t matter when you’re not critting or your power is super low. AH is a loss though.

I personally go 0/15/5/30/20, the might spam from killing enemies is somewhat nice though not really useful on bosses.

Reverend Doctor.6498:

In this case with a 440 trials with no drops we can say for a P value of .05 that the drop rate is less than .7%.

Statistical analysis of these results are invalid because the sample is biased.

ComeAndSee.1356:

Yaki.9563:

It’s better than PoV in a healing build imo. 200ish/sec to everyone in party is nice.

My only gripe, and this basically applies to all Guardian heals, is that it has a short range. It’s pretty lame when I gimp my damage to get heals that don’t even hit half the party if they are ranged.

Well, it’s free passive healing for people around you. In most dungeons you’re usually near your party and in WvW you’re guaranteed to have people around you.

600 range isn’t all that far away though. Next time you run a dungeon with some ranged players who are dodging out of red circles, check to see how often it is up on them. I think you’ll be unpleasantly surprised.

Same goes for traits like Selfless Daring, they become somewhat underwhelming when you aren’t actually healing the ranged guy who needs it.

Yet another reason to stack melee characters I guess, as if the superior damage wasn’t enough.

ComeAndSee.1356:

With the Greatsword +healing is not that good because most of your healing comes from AH which doesn’t scale that well with +healing.

The regen from mace and autoattack make up only a small amount of your total healing with cleric’s gear.

PVT gear is pretty much crap in PvE. You’re better off with either Knights (the best choice by far) or Cleric’s (2nd best choice) for “tanking”. If you want to go pure support, Magi armor (PVH) is better than Cleric’s because the precision proc’s EM/Vigor while Vitality is better protection against burst, and you aren’t “tanking”. If you want to do damage, go Berserker’s.

ComeAndSee.1356:

IMHO I rather have AH than Absolute Resolution. More toughness = better survivability.

Battle Presence is well worth it now though.

AH is one of the two OP traits, of course it’s better than AR. I personally went without it because I am focusing on a) healing my party and b) critting for EM/vigor procs.

It’s better than PoV in a healing build imo. 200ish/sec to everyone in party is nice.

My only gripe, and this basically applies to all Guardian heals, is that it has a short range. It’s pretty lame when I gimp my damage to get heals that don’t even hit half the party if they are ranged.

killahmayne.9518:

And yes it does make a difference. Try having 1400-1600 toughness as opposed to 916 with just a 20% drop in crit dmg and minimal power/precision loss…

You are gaining 500-700 toughness from just a handful of armor pieces/accessories? Even using the worst crit damage:toughness ratios on gear, 700 toughness is going to be about 45% crit damage not 20%. 700 toughness is about 25% damage reduction. 45% crit damage is about the same increase in damage output. With such an even trade-off, why would you go for toughness instead of damage increasing stats when your focus is dealing damage?

Anyway, even if you conclude that you’d like the toughness it doesn’t make the decision obvious by any means.

cloudysan.4397:

I went with mentioned set by Kokop except I take almost all emeralds and my Kraka shell. All just depends what you want to do. Going all Knight’s is fine too. Without going into crit tree I have 32% crit+10% from axe trait+9% full adrenalin+20% from perma fury allows me to support with my shout build and almost crit all the time.

The axe trait adds crit damage, not crit.

SteepledHat.1345:

Lol, it’s so funny trying to hear the folks that got their precursor on the first 100g of pitching or for 20g around launch try to defend precursor prices. It’s really really funny.

Earning 1g a dungeon run multiple times per day for months, you expect prices to remain at 20g? How out of touch can you be?

LITF.2576:

As far as I know Knights is available for Arah tokens

And Sorrow’s Embrace.

Alarox.4590:

1.) Tanks/Healers make up at the very least 25% of the populations of most MMOs. If they come to GW2, what profession do you think they’ll look at first?

I think you slightly overestimate the number of tanks/healers in other games. Consider that a 25 man raid in WoW takes 2 tanks and 5 healers (28% of the raid), but there is a very long queue for DPS because of the shortage of healers.

Keep in mind that GW2 is supposed to be tank and healer-free. I expect many of the tanks and healers in other games aren’t even trying GW2 or created a character with the understanding that they won’t be tanking or healing. And they’d be correct to do so.

There are other options for healer/tank wannabe’s, like elementalist, and that class certainly isn’t flooded with players.

2.) All I did was give 3 reasons why people use AH builds. I never said how much of the Guardian population each makes up. Guardians could be 99% the third reason and 1% the other two, and I still wouldn’t be wrong.

If your reasons have no likelihood attached to them they are worthless. I can give you 100 random reasons and be “correct”.

Berserker. Or Knights. Depends on the group/dungeon but anything else is sub-optimal. Given how much depends on crits and how little actual survivability you need in this game if played well.

Alarox.4590:

Yaki.9563:

Alarox.4590:

It’s part people being idiots, and part people knowing that most Guardians run healing/support builds.

AFKhammer isn’t a healing build. I’m not sure why people keep thinking that AH makes them some kind of group healer.

AH itself has absolutely nothing to do with benefiting allies.

However, the purpose of AH is to make yourself tanky, and to do so you have to spam boons. Using a Hammer means you’ll be spamming Retal+Protection, and you probably have Shouts, Empowering Might, and points in Virtues. Therefore, it’s a support build.

Most Guardians run this kind of a build because:

1.) They’re used to being a tank in other games.
2.) They’re used to being healers/support in other games, and 30 Valor allows them to stay tanky while still being heavy support.
3.) They’re offensive minded but recognize that 30 Valor trumps almost everything else.

It’s still not a healing build. Support, sure…but what Guardian build isn’t support?

I’m pretty sure most people play Guardians because they get to swing a big hammer/sword and do DPS while being loved by groups. It’s the best of both worlds. If you took away the damage and forced a real heal role or real tank role on them, most Guardians would bail and go play Warrior (which is the other “swing big weapon” alternative and equally as popular as Guardian).

Tanks and healers are scarce in other games. All of a sudden the most popular class in the healerless and tankless game is because people like to tank and heal? I think not.

Ioflux.4369:

Get a guardian, spec knight gear, go 0/0/30/30/10, use hammer, pop omnomberry pie/ghost and face tank him all day while you tell rest of your party to do the rest of the dungeon while you solo auto attack him.

You’ll die.

I’m running Axe/Warhorn and enjoy it for the most part. I’m just always feeling that I’m not doing as much damage as I could be with GS and there’s nothing crazy like the GS traits for Axe and the Warhorn trait conflicts with the shout traits, so you lose out on that. I also feel like the Warhorn condition removal is quite weak as it usually removes one worthless condition which gets immediately reapplied.

100% protection for 1/2 the melee that are standing right next to you. Considering how many buffs with 600 range don’t even hit all party members, the hammer protection only really consistently applies to you.

Alarox.4590:

It’s part people being idiots, and part people knowing that most Guardians run healing/support builds.

AFKhammer isn’t a healing build. I’m not sure why people keep thinking that AH makes them some kind of group healer.

LordByron.8369:

Also just look at mapchat or gw2lfg
“looking for guardian…..” everywhere

Only in fractals, and it’s all because of a couple reflection skills.

What’s dumb is the “30 Ascended Amulets” is really just 10 amulets with 3 different types of infusion slots. They managed to choose some of the worst possible stat combinations as well.

That said, +healing is bad so maybe they are doing you a favor in the long-run.

Zarovich.7285:

tanshiniza.8629:

My balanced build:

Attack: 3K
Armour: 3K
Crit rate: 49%
Crit damage: 79%
Health: 15-16K

all without food and I run 0/10/30/30/0 with either AH or Monk depending on the situation so being able to deal damage and survive is more than possible.

I don’t see how this is possible without Food buffs or oils/stones. My traits are the exact same and its tough to get these stats with the buffs and all the ascended pieces currently available.

I doubt it’s possible even with food and oil.

Alarox.4590:

If we assume that 500 Vitality = 500 Toughness in terms of raw survival, then 500 Toughness works better the more healing you have (which Guardians obviously have a lot of). This is because you get to your maximum health sooner.

That assumption is wrong.

Ignore numbers and look at this in terms of %. Vitality and Toughness do the same thing in a different way: they decrease the % health lost from X damage. Toughness decreases the incoming damage, and Vitality increases your overall health; both have the same proportional effect.

If they did, it would never be worth taking Vitality. They don’t have the same proportional effect. Vitality adds far more to survivability in the short term because it has a much larger increase to your health pool than Toughness does damage reduction. This is even more the case for heavy armor classes.

The advantage of Vitality: condition’s % effect on health is not affected by Toughness. Meaning, Vitality is the only alternative of the two.

This is not the only advantage.

The advantage of Toughness: healing’s % effect on health decreases with Vitality. Meaning, Toughness is the only alternative of the two.

This would only be true if the game were a race to full health via healing, but it’s not.

It is never an advantage to take longer to go back to maximum survival (full health). If you get the same proportional affect from Toughness and Vitality, then as a Guardian you want the one that allows your healing to bring you to maximum survival sooner, and that’s Toughness.

Again, you don’t get the same proportional effect from T&V. That’s the biggest flaw in your reasoning.

Toughness would be great if the game were consistent small amounts of damage that kept you below full health, so that as time progressed the efficiency of toughness would come into play. That’s not how the game’s damage actually works though. Yes, you’ll get to full health quicker with Toughness (less damage taken + lower max health) but it is usually the case that Vitality will also get to full health. Vitality also protects far better against short, large bursts of damage which the majority of danger in this game come from.

2.) You saying “you couldn’t be more wrong” to him without any reasoning or evidence is the same as me saying “unicorns are real” without any reasoning or evidence.

You mean like him saying Vitality is useless without Toughness? I have better things to do with my time than write multiple paragraphs in response to an ignorant troll’s one-liner.

killahmayne.9518:

Obviously going full glass cannon or full tank aren’t really the most optimal builds for a warrior.

It’s not obvious at all. Not to mention you really aren’t gaining all that much survivability anyway from a few toughness accessories and armor pieces. Maybe 10% damage reduction? Big deal.

Alarox.4590:

Yaki.9563:

KensaiZen.3740:

Vitality without toughness is worthless. Choose wisely.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

Unicorns are real.

---

The more Toughness you have, the more effective your self healing abilities become, as your healing stays the same while the amount of damage you take decreases. Conversely, if you have a lot of Vitality you’ll start strong, but it doesn’t make your self healing abilities any more effective. That’s simply obvious.

And seeing as though most Guardian builds have a lot of self healing, Toughness > Vitality.

Funny, didn’t realize we were soloing.

Here’s how most fights go: you sit at near-full health, take big spikes down, get back up near full health, etc. All that toughness is worthless if you keep resetting to full health. Toughness is good when you never attain full health for an extended period of time so that the damage reduction becomes greater than the extra health gained from vitality. This is often not the case. I don’t care how “efficient” you think it is, that efficiency gets tossed out the window every time you get back to full health.

Not to mention you spat out a ridiculous hyperbole in the first place.

Oreoginal.1580:

Kokop.6715:

Seems like best thing to do is mix my flame legion armor with knights, does anyone have an idea how i should mix it up?

[Optimized Build]

Knights
Head
Chest
Legs
Rings
Two Handed Weapons

Berserkers
Shoulder
Hand
Foot
Amulet
Earrings
One Handed Weapons

Accessories
Exquisite Ruby Jewel on ALL pieces

This “optimum” build is based on the assumption that if crit damage is more expensive than average, it must not be good. That is not necessarily correct. It could very well be that all berserker pieces are a greater increase in damage output from crit damage than you’d gain in damage reduction from toughness.

Just because something’s cheaper doesn’t make other cheap things a bad deal.

phantomFury.9168:

I don’t mean any disrespect, but why did you buy an entire set of gear from a dungeon without first deciding what your build focus would be?!?

Because it’s cheap and easy to get?

KensaiZen.3740:

Vitality without toughness is worthless. Choose wisely.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

They needed to update the effects for legendaries that already had them. Shooting rainbows wasn’t good enough.

Not at all. DPS is still the only role and berserkers is still the only gear worth using for knowledgeable and skilled players.

You might dodge to heal allies or to move quickly.

Guardian is always nerfed because it is one of the strongest classes. Your only surprise should be that it isn’t AH or EM that has been nerfed. Why they bothered with spirit weapons is anyone’s guess, but to suggest that Guardians are completely undeserving of any nerf whatsoever is ludicrous.

Arthas Zeitgeist.9062:

the issue is not whether the guardian is strong or not,

Sure it is, you titled your post “Why the guardian is always nerfed?”

Wait, a non-warrior/guardian team is actually better at a path for once!? Say it isn’t so!

Healing power is junk, maybe they are sending you a message?

What the heck is with people thinking PVT is anything but trash?

“Hey, let me do bad damage for some mitigation that is mostly irrelevant because I can achieve the same by just playing well instead.”

Hmm, guardian is one of the best classes in the game and certainly one of the two most played. Yet you make it sound like they are the worst class.

BTW, they fixed some important traits people will actually use (well, maybe once AH gets nerfed…).