Guild Wars 2

If 9 out of 10 people are running a bad build because they play how they want.. Does it matter? Chances are that they will be in the same group, take a bit longer to do the content, but have fun doing it.

The reason I say this is that when I turn up to a dungeon or fractal with my 10/30/0/5/25 zerk guardian, a lot of groups say I’m doing it wrong. Meta might be common knowledge on the forums but in game most people don’t care and run random builds.

I’m assuming a lot of people have more than one character..

So,
Which character/class will you gear out in ascended armor first, and what type of armor will it be?

Too unreliable for pvp.
Valor sucks for pve.

Trash.

What’s the cast time? Instant? If so that’s something.

Ugh. I don’t want to see meditation guardians in my pve groups unless the valor line and meditations themselves are made more group friendly rather than totally selfish.

Is your “fractal carry” build so named because the group will be carrying you?

7/10 for inclusion of troll druid.

Symbolic power is a rather poor grandmaster minor trait.
Consider the base damage of hammer chain being 296 + 333 + 370, and the symbol being 185 per tick (925 total with writ of persistence).
The total being 1924, roughly half of that coming from your symbol. That means roughly a 5% increase in overall dps from a 10% increase in symbols.
Mighty blow causes this overall increase to drop, as your dps comes less from the symbol and more from mighty blow.

100 power and just under 5% more dps is nice, but I think I’d rather have 10 in virtues for the consecration. The virtue of justice spam causing 3xMight alone will probably make up for the dps.

Perikittenor.1892:

Please sir tell me where you get your numbers, becouse Guardian GS is not 1016 base damage for one second, it is 925 / 5 for “1/4 second cast rounded down”. So please my good sir, if you want to post numbers. Get your fact right, cause remember kids. Knowing is half the battle.

Sure!

Damage done = (Weapon Strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

Weapon strength : Exotic 80 Greatsword is 995 – 1100 damage, and the tooltip uses the rounded up average of this, 1048.
Power : 916 is our base power.
Skill-specific coefficient : Symbol of Wrath’s coefficient is 2.75 over 5 ticks.
Target’s armor : The tooltip uses 2600 to determine damage.

Damage done = 1048 * 916* 2.75 / 2600
Damage done = 1015.35, or since the tooltip rounds down; 1015.

I don’t know the actual cast time, but it’s certainly not 1/4 of a second. Tooltip & wiki cast times are notoriously incorrect. Coefficients are believed to be correct on the wiki because you can reverse engineer them by doing what I just did backwards.

Anyway, adding symbol to your regular auto attack + WW rotation is a chunky dps increase. Anywhere between 5% and 10% depending on how efficient you are with your 1h sword swaps which you can probably learn more about in other threads.

This statement of yours implies you do not know how damage and scaling works in this game:
“It only scales 0.05 more than the other symbol from Attack, but the bonus base is atleast nice. Would mather where you compare it but in most cases the base value is atleast double, around 647 base damage over the ticks.”

Take another look at the damage formula:
Damage done = (Weapon Strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

Let’s compare 916 power to 1832 power, to demonstrate ‘scaling’.
1048 * 916 * 2.75 / 2600 = 1015
1048 * 1832 * 2.75 / 2600 = 2030
Wow look at that, doubling power doubled the damage done.

The same is true for say.. symbol of swiftness which only has a coefficient of 2.5.
1048 * 916 * 2.5 / 2600 = 923
1048 * 1832 * 2.5 / 2600 = 1846

Despite the coefficient on the wiki leading you to believe that wrath had better scaling as you put it, everything scales the same way in this game.

A final note on the above. The numbers are likely all off by 1 or 2 points. This is because GW2 calculates the damage of each tick, rounding where needed, and then adds it up for the tooltip. For example a coefficient of 2.5 over 5 ticks should actually be the above formula with 0.5 in the coefficient variable, and then the rounded output of that multiplied by the 5 ticks. I wanted to keep the math simple to read

Like you said, knowing is half the battle.

Simple question.

Do you spend more in gemstore than you would have done on a monthly subscription? Less? The same?

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

And understand that the best way for you to keep people alive is through reflects, aegis, blinds etc.
If you are lacking in agony resist, zerker gear will be painful for you. However once you can survive the occasional agony hit, you should be able to survive alright in zerker gear as long as you know when to equip a scepter.

Let me get this straight – if you purchase an armor skin for 800 gems, apply it… and then decide you’re bored of it a few months later, you have to pay 300 gems per item to take the skin back off or lose it permanently?
What are anet smoking?

“Minor burst”
1016 base damage for a 1 second cast.

Symbol of wrath is amazing and one of the reasons dps guards switch from 1h to greatsword during their rotation. 1h has the higher auto dps, gs provides the spike. Just like the 100b + 1h axe warriors of old.

Zinebot.4250:

Unfortunately they’re making too much profit from it to care.

You leave our greatsword alone! Incredible dps weapon.
Plus I think you’re forgetting that symbol of wrath is one of the highest dps moves we have on a per time spent casting basis.

If it’s not happening, it should be. There’s a lot of money to be made by denying cash spenders things they want. No tin foil hat required to see that. But then part of my job irl is to identify target customers like this.

You say tin-foil hat, but I work for a financial company which uses tactics just like this to make a lot of money. Being able to predict who will drop cash on the gem-store when they don’t get the drops they want is incredibly powerful, and if I were in charge at anet I would fully expect us to be using that sort of analytics.

Gizmo.9178:

Evidence? I doubt you can prove that.

Anecdotal. To be added to by people in this thread.
Unless people like yourself provide comments with no use.

huggles.5271:

No, that is not true and it for you to even consider it to be a possibility is kind of sad.

Not really sure why you would think that. Companies spend a lot of time and effort figuring out how to make the most money from certain types of people.

Just something I’ve noticed with most people I speak to.

Those who purchase gems are always the guys who get nothing from MF, whereas people who never purchase gems are swimming in precursors.

It would make sense for anet to reduce your internal ‘luck’ or precursor drop chance based on how likely they think you are to purchase gems instead.. but do you think they would stoop that low?

Obviously this isn’t fact, duh. I’m looking for additional anecdotes.

Full zerker gear has been scaring me more and more lately in fractals.. especially since I can’t dodge properly. You guys are ballsy.

Do the new fractals and their difficulty change any of the merit (or lack of) you previously placed on certain utilities, classes, gear, builds etc?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/do-combo-fields-need-reworked/first#

:)

Is that YouTube video a troll attempt?

That would be a nice way to add personalised tactics to a group.

As a guardian, I am tired of ny hammer symbol being down so often that I can’t combo anything else.

In the above scenarios where pugs are ruining your day, do you still feel zerker builds help you rescue the run more efficiently than other builds?

Lots of fantastic quality of life changes lately anet, thank you.

In hectic blobs of players.
People trolling in wvw by putting the ‘wrong’ field down when the group is trying to attack might or water heal.
Less useful fields generated on auto attacks.

Etc.

Do we need a way to pick and choose which combo fields to prioritize? It’s becoming increasingly annoying to compete with other players putting the wrong fields down in the wrong places.

Mine was bugged, I tried to play my new character and it said account level 1. Relogged to my old mesmer and it went back up.

And people still try to disagree with your build advice!
Nice job guys, very impressive.

Looking forward to your tips and insight.

Agree the combo field is annoying. Anet need to rethink combo fields.

If all you want is the biggest number on screen at one time then go 100b warrior.
Engineers, rangers, thieves, guardians can all hit similar damage over time to a warrior with proper group buffs and debuffs, it’s just easier to do on a warrior so people think it’s more common.

The problem in pve is that your group probably would have had perma burn and poison on a pve boss anyway, so I’d imagine you only added a few hundred dps over 10 seconds on top due to your higher condition damage.

That’s not a survivability build.
What I’m telling you is that you can spec and gear almost completely for dps and still bring all the best support and defense of a guardian. Warrior is more forgiving (hp) and does similar dps to a guardian but is not as essential as the guardian’s plethora of blocks, blinds and reflects. Many classes bring group dps buffs and personal dps similar to a warrior, but not many people bring what a guardian brings.

Survivability and group support in this game:
Reflects
Aegis
Dodge
Blinds

Notice the above all are based on avoiding damage rather than mitigating it. This is because if you take damage it will be huge damage anyway, so dodging/aegis/blinding just one of these hits is better than loooads of mitigation.

Luckily you can have all of these and still do top dps.
10/25/0/0/10, 25 spare.
Gives you two 10% dmg mods, spammable blind, 20% longer reflects and 20% quicker reflect cooldowns.

I believe hammer to have higher slightly higher dps if you have the symbol trait, but greatsword takes the lead once again if you factor in what else you could have done with those 10 or 20 trait points.

Base GS auto attack dps works out at just over 400, when factoring in the burst of WW/Symbol it takes 24 seconds to use 2 whirling wraths, 1 symbol and ~19 seconds of auto attack dps. Using base damage numbers this comes out just under 500. Swapping to 1h is useful but realistically only changes 10 seconds of gs autos for 10 seconds of 1h autos, which isn’t enough to change this paragraph. Using nothing but the hammer auto chain over 3.7 seconds works out at just over 500dps. It climbs slightly with mighty blow usage.

Consider 10/25/0/20/10 +5 as the dps orientated hammer build and you can see the greatsword variant can drop 10 honor and use the 5 spare points to go 20/30/0/10/10 for both superior 1h and greatsword, or pile it all into virtues for 10/25/0/10/25. Either way it picks up 5-8% more damage and either 100 power or condition removal.

As mentioned above, if you can deal with slightly less dps, perma prot is fantastic. Sword blind/vuln, gs blind/vuln, focus #4 (more burst vuln) and #5 are all great as well.

Hammer, 1h and gs are all really good right now for different reasons. I think we’re in a good place. One hammer guardian and one gs/1h guardian in a single group should work fantastic.

I notice more and more things starting to pop up on the gem store these past few months.

What sort of things would you guys pay money for?

I would pay to change the color/animation of certain skills.
I would pay to change the voiceovers of shouts.
I would pay for priority wvw and zone queueing.

What about you?

I believe it to be our top dps weapon now, and the 15/15/0/20/20 build is even more fantastic. More prot, more dps, more vulnerability.

I’d go so far as saying 15/25/0/20/10 could challenge greatsword/1h users for the crown.

I think he means adding the 5 agony/5 power type upgrades is causing the native +5 agony granted to pre-existing infused rings to return to a +1?

I wonder if the infusion upgrade still requires :

1 Glob of Coagulated Mists
1 Gift of Ascension

Without trait:
Hammer swing
Hammer bash
Symbol of protection (this is the 3rd swing) + Tick 1 hits at the same time
Tick 2
Tick 3

With trait:
Hammer swing
Hammer bash
Symbol of protection (this is the 3rd swing) + Tick 1 hits at the same time
Tick 2
Tick 3
Tick 4
Tick 5

This takes the total auto attack chain from:
296, 333, 370, (185*3=555 ) = 1554
to
296, 333, 370, (185*5=925) = 1924

Meaning ~23% dmg increase over not having the trait and roughly 10% dmg increase over the previous bugged version.

It also means perma protection is easy, and it’s even possible to provide perma protection AND regen to static groups via hammer/mace swapping.

Guardian
Symbol of Protection: This symbol now has the appropriate duration increase when traited with Writ of Persistence.
Purging Flames: Updated the skill fact to show the correct condition duration reduction (33%).
“Stand Your Ground!”: Added a skill fact for number of targets.
Binding Jeopardy: Facts from this trait will now show up on skills that immobilize.
Ring of Warding: Added a skill fact for the light field generated by this skill.

Hammer is now very very powerful if the symbol trait is to be believed. Possibly even our highest dps weapon.

Cringeworthy…..

Don’t bother pulling it apart for dungeon use as the op requests.
I already explained how terrible it was and all I got for it was an infraction.

Fact is this is terrible for use in any serious dungeon/fractal group. I fear by promoting this build so close to the fractal patch you will cause a lot of suffering to a lot of groups because their guardians were foolish enough to try this build.

Fully expect the advice of good players to be ignored in this thread, and those players to be labeled elitist and rude.

None of this applies to pvp. I don’t know enough about thatto bother commenting.

Mesmer dps is fine. 1h sword and ten points in illusions.

I had the quickest and easiest fotm run for some time last night. I had a necro and a ranger in the group.

I voted kiel because chars are smelly.

Zerker melee groups should avoid fractal 39 then.

I suppose it could be worse, you could be promoting it as a dungeon guide.

Valor offers the least dps and least support per trait point spent.. so people optimise the trait spread by using the more efficient radiance and zeal trees, then grabbing a huge amount of support from a minimum of 10 virtue. After that you gain so little dps from valor that more support via virtue 20 or honor 10 are far better choices overall.

If you refuse to be a zerker, going all in boon duration and keeping 12 stacks of might ona group which might otherwise have none permanently is actually a half decent way to go. You’ll increase everyone elses dps by like 20 percent. Assuming your group doesn’t have might anyway.

Your own dps is terrible though.