Guild Wars 2

The Mace is pretty solid in PvP, if only by virtue of our other mainhands not being all that good for defensive roles :-)

Auto-attack is mighty slow, but does okay damage and heals.
The Symbol is interesting in that it has a low cooldown and syngergizes well with Altruistic Healing.
The Block is pretty awesome and does great damage.

Ezeriel.9574:

The first idea is interesting, the second is barely delaying the inevitable, once your blocks are gone (i’m imagining a ranger using rapid fire) your stuck in mace, and it’s over

You can’t expect any blocking skill to do something against Rapid Fire. Blocks (or Blinds, for that matter) are not the proper tool for dealing with Rapid Fire.

I tried out that build, but I felt it was decent regardless of the Spirit Weapons, not because of them. It’s a solid weapon combo so that makes it work.

I’m now trying out this build, for a more offense-focused style. It’s pretty good for roaming in PvP, since moving from point A to B negates the downtime issue the Spirit Weapons tend to have.

I’ll give it a shot tomorrow, but I’m not sure if “Stand Your Ground!” is worth losing a Spirit Weapon over. When your SWs are active, you don’t need to do all that much yourself :-)

I’m thinking about trying out the Hammer instead of the Shield.

The Scepter is definitely the right call. Together with the Greatsword it makes for a decent balance between damage and control. Slotting in “Stand Your Ground!” is probably a decent idea (lack of stability did hurt the previous spec) but I do feel it makes the whole build weaker. I must admit I’ve underestimated the Bow of Truth a bit and I’m thinking of trying out a dedicated healing spec just to play around with it.

Having played a few matches with the Spirit Weapons did highlight their problems again. They can be unpredictable and they aren’t that hard to kill. Especially the Sword is hard to control, since keeping track of it in the middle of a big melee is pretty hard (especially when you have the two other Weapons up) and it’s the only of the weapons that doesn’t target.

Another problem is the cast-time. I understand that this needed to balance the weapons, but having a cast-time for both summoning them and using the activated ability is a bit much, I think.

Conclusion about the build: It does decent damage in 1v1, but goes down too quickly in group fights. The build is also highly dependent on its cooldowns to the point that I’d advice running away if all your Spirit Weapons are on cooldown. This makes the build rather suited for skirmishing, but pretty bad for fights on a point.

Edit: Also, the amount of traits you need to take for the Spirit Weapons to become sorta viable is ridiculous and hampers the amount of possible builds.

It’s common in most games that Support players get shafted by any sort of ranking. It’s rare when support-based players can actually top point charts (with Team Fortress being a notable exception). Since experienced players don’t care about score, it’s something I learned to live since I was healing in WoW.

I’m sorry that you get that sort of responses. That can’t be fun, especially if it happens frequently. This thread, however, has no real purpose. I’ve seen people make similar threads, but in those they at least actually explained the weakness of their build, making the thread at least a little useful.

I played a match with it (didn’t have time for more) and it works pretty well when you can only focus on killing opponents that can’t really run away. The build is decent in group-fights, but goes down easily when you get focused.

If you’re aiming to do damage, take two points out of Honor and put them in Radiance (take Blind Exposure).

Apart from that, I doubt it’ll be a very effective build in sPvP. Spirit Weapons simply aren’t that good and in order to maximize you need to cast them before combat, which means you often lose several seconds of their uptime or lose the entire duration of the enemy ends up not engaging you.

I’ll try it out tomorrow, but I doubt it’ll do all that much for you.

I’ve played builds similar to the Shout-based variant, but it quickly ran into the problem that it’s just less effective than the standard Shout-build. When it comes down to it, you’re just using weapons that aren’t as effective as the other weapons you could be using. Not just the Shield (I find the Shield a viable replacement for the Focus with good teammates), but you also miss out on the Heal from Empowered or the heals and block from the Mace. Your survivability drops quite a bit for very little gain in either damage or your ability to cap a point. Come to think of it, Hammer/Staff is a pretty fun weapon combination and missing out on the knockback from the Shield might not be such a big deal.

I can recommend Sigil of the Hydromancer on the Hammer though.

Fashion Mage.3712:

Actually I don’t think that’s the case in PvP; it’s just that sometimes people make it seem that way because any build outside of the norm is often chastised by the community. Personally I find myself relying a lot on a bunker to hold a point during a team fight, and while healers aren’t a necessity to a team, there are perfectly good healer builds that can be used in PvP.
I do like the trinity though, and I wish builds could be even more specialized in this.

I frequently play a healer/support guardian in PvP, and from my experiences so far, my teammates very much appreciate my guardian, and it’s also the build with which I have my highest win rate (57% or something?).

Bunker-style healing/support works pretty good with a decent team, but it requires good communication and allies that can help you out when you get outnumbered. If you’re easily frustrated I wouldn’t recommend using a build like that with randoms.

Muchacho.2390:

Mhh i am the only one that likes the aoe knockback on shield?
It may only be me but i find it the most useful thing that shield gives, though the rest is kinda meh.

The knockback is the only reason the Shield is still kinda okay instead of downright horrible.

I’m not sure what builds you’re used to, Tobeyeus, but support builds are definitely a thing in PvP. The damage I do is mostly incidental, just a little bit of extra pressure so the enemy doesn’t get too comfortable. My allies live a lot longer with me around.

creepmatic.9435:

The thing is, nobody know what they want with the guardian shield, a lot of ideas had been thrown around on these forums and they are all different most of the time. I guess any change that will make the shield work different is going to be better than it’s actual form. I mean how can you break something that isn’t even used at all.

The biggest problem I think is to make something that will stand beside focus and not try to bite on the warrior shield, which is pretty hard if the resources are limited and no extra animations/mechanic is allowed on the change. Also, the idea of giving aegis to the shield is pretty meh.

Just, like, dropping the cooldowns on the Shield skills would improve it by a lot. Shield of Judgment could stand to lose 5 to 10 seconds and Shield of Absorption could easily be 30 seconds by default. Neither of these is likely to break the Guardian, but they would make the Shield a more viable option.

This has been asked since Beta, I believe. There’s no reason to expect it’s going to happen. My personal favorite is “Make Haste!”

Guardian’s Shield isn’t an excellent choice. It can shine if your team knows what they’re doing and you’ve talked about it beforehand, but without a good team, it’s really not worth taking.

If you really want to use those weapons (and I understand that need), you can just run with a Shout-Bunker or a Meditation build and those two weapons. I’ve done that with the Shout build for a bit and it’s not horrible.

Apolo.5942:

Dante.8456:

you would think the most guardian-related weapon conceivable would be one of the stronger ones for the profession. There needs to be some serious love given to the shield

Change the Wave thing for the focus 5, keep the bubble. Presto fixed. Fluffy AND Useful.

I mean, its a freaking shield that does not Shield you, on an iconic sword and board class, this was almost as kittened as the Mesmer using a grate sword as a laser cannon.

I love the Mesmer Greatsword design. It’s a modern look art spellcasting. Stuff like that keeps the fantasy genre fresh.

If you just swap the skills with the Focus, you end up in a situation where the Focus sucks.

The devs have done a good job tying specific colors to specific professions. This helps other players read the game. In PvP and WvW it would make things more difficult for your opponents (unfairly so, probably) and in PvE it makes things difficult for your allies.

Guardians do pretty good in WvW and there’s a couple of viable builds

Greatsword is an excellent option but Sword and Shield never really was. In larger groups, Guardians are expected to carry a Staff.

Pretty good trait. It helps with Altruistic Healing, although in WvW I personally prefer Two-Handed Mastery. You need to find what works for you.

The first build (with Altruistic Healing and Pure of Voice) is considerably better than the other one.

Unless you’re in a good organized group that provide steady access to Swiftness, you’re going to want to change one of your weapons to Staff.

You’re probably also going to want to use Shelter. It’s generally far superior to Signet of Resolve.

Finally, try to take note of how much you actually get out of Wall of Reflection. It’s not a bad skill, but if you find yourself not using it very much or it not doing very much, you could swap it out for another Consecration or maybe for a third Shout.

Greatsword is probably the go-to weapon. I like to complement it with the Sword/Focus combo.

insaneseagull.7063:

Ynna.8769:

See, I run a Shout-based Altruistic Healing Build in sPvP. If I face a team with a lot of Rangers/Engineers (or a combination of Rangers, Warriors, Engineers, Thieves…) I don’t swap out my Focus for a Shield, I swap out “Stand Your Ground!” for Wall of Reflection and take Master of Consecration in favor of Justice is Blind. Taking the Shield is more of a sacrifice than losing out on a very important utility skill and an extra blind.

And of course communication and a good team makes the Shield better. Communication and a good team makes everything better.

But….but…..shield Shield 4 heals for a nice amount with AH if you hit 3+ players with it ;O Why not take shield AND utilities?…

It only heals for a nice amount if you position yourself perfectly during a chaotic teamfight and if your teammates are actually in its cone. And if you take the Shield and Utilities you miss out on the Focus, which is just way better than the Shield. It’s a sad state of affairs, but that’s how it is.

witcher.3197:

Ynna.8769:

I swap out “Stand Your Ground!” for Wall of Reflection

No. No no no and no. Don’t. SYG is one of the most important skills a bunker guard has, if not the single most important one.

Whoops, I meant “Hold the Line!”

See, I run a Shout-based Altruistic Healing Build in sPvP. If I face a team with a lot of Rangers/Engineers (or a combination of Rangers, Warriors, Engineers, Thieves…) I don’t swap out my Focus for a Shield, I swap out “Stand Your Ground!” for Wall of Reflection and take Master of Consecration in favor of Justice is Blind. Taking the Shield is more of a sacrifice than losing out on a very important utility skill and an extra blind.

And of course communication and a good team makes the Shield better. Communication and a good team makes everything better.

insaneseagull.7063:

What’s up with all the shield hate? :P It has 6 seconds of AOE protection (33% less direct damage) and a projectile absorb(very useful against all these pesky power rangers) /heal/knockback-interrupt.

I frequently feel I’m the only player who actually likes the Shield, so thanks for your comment.

The Shield isn’t as horrible as people make it out to be, but that doesn’t make it any good. Its skills don’t make it into an unplayable nightmare, but they are substandard.

Shield of Judgment is worse than “Hold the Line!” and utilities have a lower opportunity cost than weapons.

Shield of Absorption has it’s use, but it’s buggy and the cooldown is way to long compared to it’s effect. It’s moderately useful against ranged attacks, but not more so than Wall of Reflection. It locks you down and the secondary effect is hard to time if you want to get the full effect of this skill. The knockback is really useful though, but not enough to justify the whole skill.

Long story short, the Shield is less effective than pretty much all of the alternatives.

Apolo.5942:

Base HP pool at 15k

I dunno, I feel like that would make me virtually unkillable.

Just one. I don’t see a particular point in getting another.

I still kinda want a Rifle…

I’m not going to make a detailed list for the umpteenth time.

• Rework the traits, especially Zeal needs some work.
• Shield needs work. The 5 skill is alright, but could use some tweaking.
• Torch needs work.
• The Staff is kinda okay, but could have a “tighter” design.
• Scepter needs work.
• Spirit Weapons need some looking at.
• Signets need to become more interesting.
• Our Tomes need to be either redesigned or scrapped and replaced.
• Heals besides Shelter need to become more viable.

Greatsword doesn’t offer enough for Bunkers. I ran it a couple of times (a few times by accident…), but you’re missing out on too much by taking it.

I believe it heals at the end of Renewed Focus. Can’t test it right now.

I find Guardian very fun. The only warning I should give is that you will spend most time in the frontline so if that doesn’t sound appealing Guardian isn’t for you.

For open-world solo content, Sword/Focus and Greatsword is my favorite combination. Because of this, your first traits should probably go in Radiance (for an extra blind and vulnerability on blinds). For utilities, you should give everything a try, but you’ll probably stick to Signets, Meditations or Spirit Weapons. Your healing skill should probably be Shelter. It’s by far our most useful option. Your Elite Skill needs to be Renewed Focus, it’s the only one worth taking, especially in open world content.

Race doesn’t matter.

Mikau.6920:

Ynna.8769:

Defensive Build

Offensive Build

A build that isn’t really good but is fun to play in hot-join

Neither of these will be very effective, but honestly Sword and Shield just aren’t that useful for most builds. I understand that you want to use them. I love their aesthetic and I just got a really nice Shield skin.

That’s not to say that this build are horrible. They’ll just never be as effective as the more popular meta builds.

I’m interested on your defensive and offesive builds. If they chage the shield to something useful, I will try them.

For the defensive build, I recommend changing the Shield for the Focus. In the offensive build the only option is Torch, so use that.

I occasionally do use the Shield in my Shout-Bunker build, mostly when group-queuing. If I can rely on my team (and since we’re all kinda new at playing together, I often can’t) to peel, I don’t need to extra survivability from the Focus and the Shield becomes more appealing.

Defensive Build

Offensive Build

A build that isn’t really good but is fun to play in hot-join

Neither of these will be very effective, but honestly Sword and Shield just aren’t that useful for most builds. I understand that you want to use them. I love their aesthetic and I just got a really nice Shield skin.

That’s not to say that this build are horrible. They’ll just never be as effective as the more popular meta builds.

Possible? Maybe.
Worthwhile? Probably not.
I’ve build some builds with this strategy in mind when I just wanted the “Interrupt X players” daily achievement out of the way, but your knockdowns are either on a long cooldown, on weapons that aren’t worth taking for this strategy or on skills that aren’t awesome. On top of that, you have little in the way of actually keeping people of the point when you actually get them off.

If you do end up playing the build, you’re going to have to focus like crazy on positioning. Mistiming Sanctuary is going to mess you up.

In terms of weapons Hammer will be a must. It’s your most available knockdown skill with Banish and Ring of Warding and Zealot’s Embrace help you keep the enemy off-point. Apart from that the Hammer gives you a small amount of extra survivability with the protection boon but that’s not something you can rely on in PvP.

Your other weapon choice would probably be Scepter/Shield for the knockback on the Shield and the immobilize on the Scepter. It’s a shame the Staff doesn’t offer more control options, because Line of Warding would be useful.

With utilities you don’t have a lot of options. I’d say Sanctuary is a must-have skill. Other than that you probably want Bane Signet for the knockdown and Signet of Wrath for the immobilize. And since you already have two important signets, you might as well take Signet of Resolve as well.

Traits leaves you with little options. You need to lower your Signet cooldown, so Signet Mastery gets taken. Both Consecration traits are really, really useful to get the most out of Sanctuary and you want to hit that skill as often as possible so both Consecration Mastery and Consecrated Ground get taken. Might as well take another trait in Virtues to get Absolute Resolution since we’re at it. Inscribed Removal gives you another way to make the most out of your Signets. The extra traits are a bit more free, but I’d certainly pick up Binding Jeopardy since you’ve got every immobilize you can take. This gives you this build.

The other option, relying a little more on your weapons is this.

All-in-all you’re creating a pretty suboptimal hybrid build that does the same job of a Hambow warrior, only worse.

I’m not saying it can’t work in PvE. Just that other people likely will. I have no experience in PvE (I’ve done 3 dungeons runs and Fractals once since launch). For World Bosses you can bring pretty much whatever as long as you stay alive. It’s like with big enough zergs: it stops matter what each individual brings because it’ll likely be redundant.

First of all, most people are probably going to tell you that this sort of thing doesn’t work in PvE because good players don’t need support. I don’t play PvE, so I have no experience with this, but, you know, it’s going to happen.

The build is similar to my WvW build, but makes some odd choices. Let’s go over those:

Utility Skills:
I don’t think you’re choosing optimally here. With Pure of Voice (and, as we’ll discuss later Runes of the Trooper) you shouldn’t need Contemplation of Purity. Instead, you should probably want to take “Stand Your Ground!” so you don’t miss out on the stun break. With “Retreat!” and “Save Yourselves!” you’ve taken the Shouts with the highest cooldowns, which sorta lowers the effectiveness of Pure of Voice. I’m not saying you should swap them out, but just think it over. I personally don’t use “Save Yourselves!” when zerging because it hinders me too much (a lot of conditions flying around in zerg-to-zerg combat).

Traits:
Anything with Meditations is weird here, even if you end up keeping Contemplation of Purity. Neither Contemplation or Renewed Focus are skills so good you need to lower their cooldown in this build and their cooldown remains to high to get real value out of Monk’s Focus. Monk’s Focus only really shines because of the short cooldown on Smite Condition. Altruistic Healing will give you more healing for less effort.

You can theoretically keep Meditation Mastery but without Contemplation of Purity, it won’t do that much.

Weapons:
No real comments, but in WvW Sigil of Energy is really, really good especially since you got Selfless Daring for some extra healing.

Armor:
Knight is a respectable choice if you want to mix damage with support, so you can totally keep that. For runes I would totally pick Trooper, even if you don’t end up swapping a utility for a Shout with a lower cooldown (which I strongly advice).

In conclusion:

I see very little reason to take the Meditations. They do very little in this build and what they do can be done better with only small modifications to the build. Otherwise, solid build for WvW.

What Keksmuffin said. It’s not a hard thing to avoid.

Can we recycle this topic to talk about how we only have on Elite Skill worth using and while that skill is pretty decent it doesn’t have the impact other professions’ Elite Skills tend to have?

You only really need two interrupts at most in that scenario. (Assuming they get one ress of by default.) Or the Guardian was using Runes of Mercy, which I find really unlikely and if they were, you should be able to get them down easily as well.

It’s really just nuking the ele after the Guardian has blown his stability. Or, I dunno, just down the Guardian. If three people coordinate their damage that shouldn’t be that hard, especially if you have some way to spam conditions.

No offense, but if the Elementalist really was “a sucky glass ele”, you three are the problem. Or are you packing no interrupts amongst the three of you?

Okay, thanks for the feedback :-)

Jerus.4350:

Arken.3725:

It’s a little more than just mobility Jerus. It’s also lacking anyway to control your opponent. If you look at how the Guardian plays you’ll notice that it has the least meaningful passives of any other profession and has a more active role. If you were to take out the Virtue’s passives, i’d probably never notice it since they seem to be so underwhelming.

Balancing a profession that plays a primarily active role needs to be stronger than its passive counterparts. I went off-topic a little bit but I wanted to explain my stance on why the Guardian is considered so balanced.

Back to what Ynna was stating is that designing a class around 1 role is terrible and if that’s here to stay, get rid of all the damaging traits/skills and just have more support ones.

I see what you’re saying, and I agree on some points.

I just have to comment on the last paragraph. Don’t you feel that is a bit extremist? Get rid of everything for personal offense because we’re a support/defensive focused profession? just sounds silly to me.

If Arenanets vision for Guardians is that they should do support, they should disregard everything else, give Guardians the most annoying leveling experience ever, and boost our current support capabilities significantly.

If their vision is that we should be able to do damage as well as we can support, they need to make sure we can actually fulfill the damage role on par with other professions.

Saiyan.1704:

Being the Guardian class, we automatically bring support rolls to the table, whether guardians like that concept or not. I WILL bring Absolute Resolution because some classes simply have very poor condition cleanses. Same for Resolute Healer for high sustain medi celestial builds.

I’m more or less okay with that. Guardians bring support to the table, not matter what (or at least, you need to go out of your way not to). That’s okay. Just like how other professions might bring some offensive support no matter what.

I just think that shouldn’t be an excuse to pigeonhole us into one specific support role.

This post is, in part at least, a response to what Obtena is saying in this thread. It also fits with the broader question of what a Guardian is and what it should be.

I’m going to start by (very) briefly summarizing the position I’m arguing against, both so that people can let me know if I’m misrepresenting it and so that not everyone has to read another thread to get up to speed.

What I think Obtena is saying is that because the Guardian is supposed to play support (as is: mainly using your skills to increase the effectiveness of other players) anything that isn’t specifically for supporting other players or can be gotten through other players (since to support we need to be coordinating with others) can’t be considered a weakness. For example: Guardian’s don’t need a reliable way to keep enemies close, because their allies can provide that.

And don’t get me wrong, I love support and it’s why I started to play a Guardian during beta, but I don’t think support should be the only focus for the Guardian.

The first, and most obvious, reason is that for a good chunk of content, you can’t rely on other players. A lot of players like simply exploring Tyria and doing solo WvW, and even with events or small, unorganized, roaming parties (or unorganized PvP) you can’t comfortably rely on the skills and moveset of other players. And by now leveling a character is also mostly a lonely activity. By mandating that Guardians need other players nearby to be effective, you shut down a good part of the content or at least make it a lot more fun. So while I don’t think the game should be balanced around some things in this category (solo roaming, hotjoin…), I do think it’s important that Guardians have the same level of access to others (exploring, leveling…).

Secondly, some of our skills go blatantly against the idea that we’re only supposed to do support. Meditations, most Signets, and most Spirit Weapons are examples from our utilities and Sword, Scepter, Greatsword, and arguably the Hammer are examples in our weapon selection. If we are indeed supposed to only do support these weapons are in need of some serious changes.

Similarly, our traits aren’t all about helping allies either. We’ve got plenty of “selfish” traits that only help our own (solo) effectiveness. And with the way traits are set up in GW2 it’s almost impossible to design a profession for a single role.

And finally: Designing a profession to suit a singular role is just a horrible idea. I’m not going to bore you with the details of my previous MMO experience, but World of Warcraft used to try that with Priests. Nobody was okay with it then, nobody should be okay with it now.

You’re playing EU? I’m a 0/1/6/6/1 Bunker Guardian. My availability is pretty spotty, but I know how to play.

Thanks. That looks interesting.

As a follow-up question: is there a build with an ax that is more supporty (I know the ax itself doesn’t really lend towards that).

Yeah, I’m not having this discussion again… I’m backing out if nothing more interesting gets said.

Arenanet are the people who ultimately decide on what a Guardian is capable of, but they’re not always right about what a Guardian should be capable of and even if they were they’re extremely inconsistent about it.

Ages ago, I’ve created a Warrior to do WvW with. I named him after a warlord of a book I love (this becomes relevant later). Recently, I’ve been dusting him off, but I’ve actually have no idea how to play Warriors.

So now I’m looking for a build that’s pretty effective in WvW. I don’t really care how it works or what it does *as long as it uses a Main Hand Ax." The character in that book wields an ax and it’s a big part of how I want to play my Warrior.

Any ideas?

@Obtena: If the Guardians aren’t supposed to do DPS, they should change all the traits and skills that don’t provide team support. There’s no point in allowing Meditation Guardians to be a viable build if that doesn’t fit the Guardian class concept.

You’re normally more intelligent than this. Do you really believe Guardians should only be allowed to be good at team support? That Guardians should only be allowed to be effective when they’re surrounded by allies?

And even if we grant your premise, we’d still need runspeed, because lagging behind your team isn’t going to give you the best chances to support them.

Disclaimer: I only play support Guardian and only PvP and WvW.

Guardians are most at home in the thick of combat, surrounded by both allies and foes. It’s a profession that requires you to think things through more than it requires you to spam buttons. Your defenses are proactive (requires you to know the fights), but most of your skills are reactive (action X happens, so you’ll need to use skill Y).

Your support skills are good and for the most part interesting. Pretty much every weapon you’ll equip will offer something that allows not only you, but also your team, to overcome challenges. If you’re into support, the Guardian has plenty to offer.

Downside of the Guardian is mostly the speed. Compared to other professions, the Guardian feels slow. Not just in the movement speed, but also in the way the weapons work (this is better if you use stuff like the Sword, Scepter or Greatsword). This might put certain people off. I like it.

The reason we’ve been giving is that Arenanet doesn’t want to give Guardians a good way to disengage from combat.