Guild Wars 2

Best support : Reflects, blinds, aoe vulnerability, virtues, stability.

I consider anything with 0 power on the gear to be unacceptably low damage.

Starting to thing that builds which hit the key points (15/15/0/20/20, 10/30/0/5/25) and just take selfish survivability gear (PVT) are probably the best bet for new/bad players.

Yes.
I know..
Most of us know pure DPS with our basic reflects/blinds/aegis is pretty much the largest portion of our ‘support’.

But I get asked a lot by people in my guild (casual, yet friendly <3) and we often discuss support guards.

Let’s say a player does not want to use zerker gear (and perhaps they are awful at avoiding damage). Hard to believe I know.

What’s the best way to salvage this sort of player into something useful for non-organised groups?

I really don’t know how to answer because I rarely play anything but 10/30/0/5/25 or 20/25/0/0/25 glass.

Empower bot? Dodge-roll-heal bot? Try and keep regen on everyone using a mace? IDK.

TLDR.
We often talk about how to maximise your dps here (and tbh… therefore how useful you are) but we don’t often talk about how to help bad players in bad groups.

Plx don’t turn it into a zerker thread. Imagine we’re trying to help people who would otherwise be eating dirt every 6 seconds in zerker gear.

Dredge is awful game design.

Ah. I posted this at guru but only just saw it here.

Very nice!
Did you decide to skip casting Tome #5 on prebuff for the might stacks? It’s a blast finisher and should also be affected by quickness.

Thank dwayna you had all those AH ticks to keep you alive through those tough times.

I would take penalty number seven and become scarlet’s harley quinn <3

So engineer and ranger are probably the two classes I know least about. Help me out here.
I see a lot of rangers in speedclear / high dps videos. Sometimes more than 1 per party.

What’s up with that?

Apologies if that came off rude then. It’s just that we’ve had a lot of people claiming these sorts of builds are the best pve builds lately.

It’s probably fine for wvw (I don’t play much wvw) but for general fractals/dungeons your team will be carrying you. Dungeons ain’t hard but you’ll slow the group down.

AH is considered selfish in pve, and weirdly you’ve paired it with a weapon with low boon output. If you really like that spec, I’d at least go hammer + writ of persistence. I appreciate not everybody wants to play with zerker gear on, but at the very least removing AH is a good start. You can get a lot of dps and group support out of those points instead of the selfish self heals.

Is this a troll?

Oh! I noticed your comment about whirling wrath at the end there. The tooltip is wrong (and so are the floating dmg numbers, I believe they suffer the same fate as mesmer izerker used to). What actually happens is all targets within melee range take 7 melee hits and you also fire 7 projectiles which can only hit one target each .. sometimes the numbers won’t appear or add up properly (which is why some people think GS is unreliable). When hitting from inside the target’kittenbox this results in 14 hits, 7 melee and 7 projectiles.

Yeah but your toughness & vitality are very low.
Worst of all you bring no healing to your group.

0/10.

Take altruistic healing at least. Dead dps do no dps.

I play how I want.

Wethospu.6437:

So many uneducated opinions here. Support builds and tanks are good and needed for lots of things, for example roleplaying and immersion.

Made me chuckle.

Same. I spent months following popular guides and figuring out the most efficient split of Dps to survivability (which I think is soldier gear, zerker trinkets) until I realised if I simply got better at the game I could go all out Dps and avoid most damage anyway.

I guess you could say it’s official, because everyone has 916 power when naked/untrained. When you double power to 1832 you simply do double damage.

The crit stuff is simple. If you have 10 ‰ chance to crit for double damage.. Well that’s an average of 10‰ more damage.

There’s not a whole lot more to it than grabbing your power and running it through crit modifiers and overall damage multipliers.

When you consider that aegis, dodge and blind will prevent tens of thousands of hp damage each time.. That these attacks from bosses are often slow and avoidable.. And reflects will prevent even more.. What is the point of increasing your healing output by a few hundred per second?

Also consider that poison will decrease healing effectiveness and when a party member is in trouble chances are that they probably just ate an agony attack.. In which case healing effectiveness is decreased.

Healing, toughness and vitality are not the best ways of staying alive. They help, but the largest portion of staying alive is dodge/blind/aegis/reflect/kill things quick.

The radius would be fairly large.

OP : The way I use to compare theoretical DPS numbers is to firstly take the power and divide by 916 which is your base power.

Eg : you have 1832 power? Divide by 916 and get 2. You are doing 2 * base damage.

Next up, crit damage.
50% crit chance, 180% crit dmg?
That.s a 1.4 modifier.

Next up, damage mods (multiplicative).
Eg zeal II 10%, radiance sword 10%, radiance 25 10%, virtue 25 5%
= 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 = 1.39755.

Now string them together:
2 * 1.4 * 1.39755 = 3.91314.
A player with 1832 power, 50% crit chance, 180% crit damage and 10%,10%,10%,5% damage modifiers will do 3.9 times as much damage as a naked character.

You can go one further and attempt to estimate each weapon’s base dps. Eg : hammer auto attack is roughly 420 without WoP, 520 with. 1h sword is roughly 416. 2h sword is roughly 460 by itself but becomes more difficult to think about when you consider swapping to it for burst cooldowns only.

As mentioned above, I believe 20/25/0/0/25 (2h/1h), 10/30/0/5/25 (mainly 1h) and even 15/25/0/20/10 (hammer) to be top dps builds which still retain useful support.
You could probably pump dps to the max by going something like 20/30/20/0/0 but you’d lose an awful lot of support and probably not gain all that much dps.

I won’t derail this into another heal/support/zerker thread.

Sometimes I equip this signet when grouped with people I think are going to die somewhere awkward, but even with the best intentions it’s difficult to pull off. If you’re ever in a situation where signet rez would be better than a normal rez such as heavy red circles on the downed player… chances are they’ll die before this casts.

I did have a WIN moment the other night with this though, rezzed the only other 2 remaining party members during fotm38 molten facility bonus boss after red circles downed them.

Cast time should be quicker, radius needs to be bigger (or it needs to be PBAoE).

Obtena.7952:

they deserve to lose their gold for not doing more research, asking, etc …

Problem is – research too commonly leads to popular ‘guides’ like this one and other poor pve ones. You’ll notice often a lot of bad builds have more youtube views than what better players know to be optimal.

The average player is bad, this causes them to gravitate towards selfish, tanky builds so that people have a harder time realising that they’re bad (since dps meters don’t exist). This in turn causes bad tanky builds to appear more popular and ‘meta’ than they should be.

Mace is why I originally asked if he feels the 10 points in valor for AH aren’t needed.
Surely the symbol ticks give you an insane amount of hp in return.

Do you think this is tougher than putting 10 more points in valor for AH?

I’d like to see elusive power changed to be +10% damage while endurance is full. It’d open up a lot of interesting options for dps guardians. Alternatively if anet take away vigor on crit and make vigor in general more sparse, meaning dodges are less frequent and/or energy slower regenning… the current state of honor might become attractive again.

As for the assassin/zerker stuff – it’s worth keeping a variety of assassin, zerker and even valk gear because when you’re in a group with ranger/warrior it’s easy to hit the cap. I use the valk gear rather than waste points on precision over 100%.

Even without unscathed, the build with 25 in virtue is higher dps than the one with points in honor.
Did you take the effective power from a website which automatically adds the 10% extra damage from evasive power? (25 honor).

I like builds with 30 in radiance because fotm (especially in pugs) calls for a lot of range damage. Scepter can use all the help it can get.

Much prefer the 10/30/0/5/25 build even without unscathed cont. The ~5% extra damage from power of the virtuous, consecration mastery, might x 3 on virtue spam and condition removal on virtue make those points amazing. Nothing in honor can touch that imo.

Warriors are the best class to invite to your pug.

If you invite a ranger expect it to be a bow bear.
If you invite a Guardian expect it to be an awful tank support one.
If you invite a thief expect him to die every 10 seconds.
If you invite a necro… Um mm..
If you invite an ele don’t expect a skilled one.
If you invite an engineer don’t expect a skilled one.
If you invite a mesmer don’t expect them to use reflects.

Basically people love Warriors in Pugs because they are almost guaranteed to be the best spec (Dps is the best spec regardless of class) and it is extremely easy to perform adequately.

If you can find skilled friends, it matters less what class they are.

I only bothered using litany of wrath once.

In a fairly high fractal, I took a hit and needed to heal.
Cast litany.

Ooh boss is charging another attack.
Better dodge.
Oh, my heal duration is gone.

Unequip litany.

Take points out of valor and use zerker gear.

Oh, wrong thread :o

Merry Christmas and smorgasbord to all Guardian!

I don’t often find four people with the sense to stand in my hammer symbol though.

Anyway, absolute resolution is really useful.

Guys this changes guardians forever stop laughing.

What game play are we talking? Pve, pvp , wvw?

The only place you can take points from is virtues, since Radiance and zeal are so powerful for Dps. You do gain a fair bit of Dps, but you lose a portion of that Dps through power of the virtuous. You also lose consecration mastery and absolute resolution which are both very handy. You also may lose vigor from honour depending on build.

Dps is great, but that’s a huge amount of group survivability you give up in exchange for a tiny bit more Dps. Valor is a rather selfish line.

^ What are you supposed to kill with that build, critters?

^Makes sense. The longer the fight goes on, the more damage overall you do.
Right?

I saw that video a while back but didn’t comment because, honestly, he sounds like he has issues. Everything is crazily overwhelming and exciting for him. Should be a sports commentator or something.

Play how you like, whatever you think is fun.
But if I’m trying to run an efficient group I won’t be happy if somebody is wasting my time with a bad build/gear.
If I’m not trying to run an efficient group at that point in time.. if I’m just casually chilling out.. you’re welcome to join.

The worst part is how many people love it.

You’d get a far better return from AH if you just went with Writ of Persistence and used a hammer or mace imo.

Guardians were horrified with the lack of interaction. Even when we said certain buffs weren’t even needed, they still happened. The guardian changes were a complete waste of developer time, none of them mattered. 13% power to condition damage conversion on a traitline nobody uses anyway? Great.

foofad.5162:

Provide links?

I’m not trying to derail the thread into another zerker or gtfo thread so I apologise if it appears that way. Just showing what you give up in order to get the bonuses of this build. It’s not a small dps loss, and spammable aoe blind / vuln is missing. I just don’t know if it is worth it. I

No links, just step by step
Your link has 4027 ep. Links don’t include manual alterations.
add the 5% power of the virtuous modifier.
the base build now has 4228 ep.

swap to ascended weapon.
take off 10 honor trait points to remove elusive power.
equip power/crit dmg food.
equip 10% dmg potion.
25 might
25 fury
add 170 precision and 180 precision for spotter/banner
add 15 critical damage for banner
you’re now at 8194 ep.

now swap everything to zerker, and swap to a 15/25/0/20/10 spec.
you’re now at 12999 ep.

Increase of roughly 60% effective power (from 8194).

Not a fan empowering might. The buff radius is kind of small. Pugs are often very spread out.
I will concede that gs5 pull is a great way of forcing Pugs to bunch up mobs.

spoj.9672:

Max dps is achieved through a gs + sword rotation.

In a perfect world with full boons I disagree & have shown why with some numbers I feel to be correct
In a pug world, greatsword takes more advantage of the times you notice you’ve actually received some might stacks. The aoe capability will always be a reason to pack greatsword if you are so inclined though.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

SplendidDust of AncientSuns.8453:

Ah let’s you spec for insane damage

Aeolus.3615:

5 guardians with AH it isnt that bad.

Oh baby Jesus please save our souls….

The ultimate play how you want group.

CptAurellian.9537:

foofad.5162:

Do you have an actual DPS figure for 15/25/0/20/10? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hard number. It would be nice to get an actual comparison.

Comparing the effective power of the builds should do the thing (as long as you just look at the hammer, ofc), since you already used buildcraft. There, I get a 34% difference, assuming 5 boons for PotV, which sounds reasonable.

Take away the 10% freebie dmg multiplier that website gives to elusive power, and then give both builds real dps food, fury and might. I’m easily seeing a 60% plus increase in effective power for the 15/25/0/10/20 build over this one. That’s before considering the gap-widening effect of night sigil, damage multiplier potion, vulnerability and more boons.

Although if you’re adamant about using hammer, losing WoP isn’t a good idea. Huge dps boost, that.

Aza.2105:

fadeaway.2807:

Who are you hoping to support with those 30 points in valor? AH is self only.

Most of guardian’s weapon sets and utility is embedded with ally support in some way, so I do not see how taking AH is a problem.

Our best support skills are 15 radiance, 10 virtue and 20 virtue without thinking about honor which can be very strong.
That’s a 0/15/30/0/20 without touching honor.. and if you’re really focusing on support.. ask yourself why you’re taking 30 valor over 30 honor.

Depends if you insist on carrying a greatsword I suppose. I prefer the 15% extra crit as it allows night/force sigils, bloodlust stacks, power/potion consumables and power food while keeping 100% crit. Overall the EP is higher unless you ever switch to greatsword… which I don’t. Even for aoe I just put a little more effort into lining up the sword auto penetrations. I really like that I can use a scepter as my weapon swap with this build without losing anything, which means in pugs that insist on ranging everything I can still bring huge dps without fear of instagibs.

Shout cooldown trait is overrated. Zealous blade is not good.

Melandru seems to be the favourite even though we lack speed.

I have no idea why you would not take 1hs. With full zerker gear, scholar runes, fury, ranger spotter, banner, precision oil, precision critical dmg food and 25 Radiance you will not hit 100 crit chance. You’ll be close to it.. Like 97%.

Don’t think of it as using 5 trait points for a few extra crit chance.. It allows you to use 200 per or pwr/crit dmg food and sharpening stone instead of oil (or a potion). Well worth it.

Sry for typos, on phone.

That’s why I love my 10.30.0.5.25 build. Great 1h Dps and great scepter Dps for when the group is range heavy.

Who are you hoping to support with those 30 points in valor? AH is self only.

If I run into anyone I recognise from the forums I’m equipping my staff support trololol gear.

A regular zerker 15.25.0.20.10 spec will do more than two thirds more damage, but you probably already know that and it isn’t the focal point of the build.

You do gain absolute resolution, symbol heal, roughly 2k more hp, roughly 500 healing power, and over 10% more damage reduction. I’m not sure I found this is worth it.

Wouldn’t battle presence mixed with that healing power and absolute resolution heal for more while also ignoring weapons set limitations and the symbol radius?