Guild Wars 2

I just wish infused back pieces were a kitteneaper!

Not sure if druid or not..

Amusing that gw2 pvp 1v1 has been reduced to one maybe two populated servers. Shows how many people care nowadays.

Funny that all those mes traits are banned. Owner must have had a horrible mes bully him!

Guardian is probably the last class I’d choose to 1v1 someone on.

Big fan of stamina refill on kill. Once the loot bags start dropping in wvw a stamina sigil guardian with some healing gear can almost guarantee the victory with constant dodge heals.

OP, Nozdormu gave you some great advice. Just because it wasn’t what you wanted to hear doesn’t make him rude or arrogant. As jing pointed out above, there are far more efficient ways to focus on boon duration, allowing you to save your gear stats for better things.

I recommend sigil of stamina if you fight in large wvw fights. The amount of people dying means you can chain constant dodges for perma evade and heals.

Finally no good group will care much about your 18 seconds of might. In fact it will actually hinder great groups as they pre-buff might to 25 for 20-30 seconds using blast finishers before charging by overwriting or blocking better might stacks. Because of this and the lack of AH ticks from empower I’d definitely look to swap 2h mastery with pure of voice (and grab superior aria and use stand your ground).

Ditch the precision gear. With no precision gear whatsoever you will have 36% crit chance with fury and oil. This is enough to crit at least once per staff swing, proccing whatever traits or sigils you have on.

Finally – both cleric and soldier will both have higher dps than magi/knight while also having higher survivability.

People take guardians because of reflects, stability and good condition removal, not because they wear heavy armor.

Pve groups are created by throwing the top five dpsers you can find together and figuring out who loses the least dps for the most group support.

The answers are warrior with banner, fgj. Guardian with reflects and Condi removal, mes with reflects.

The reason people like these classes has nothing to do with the few percent higher damage reduction.

The answer is that you get a bunch more hp than the guardian and a bunch more utility that the warrior.

There’s a reason warriors don’t have loads of blinds, aegis, traited vigor, extra heals, teleports etc.

Besides, the armor difference is actually tiny.

It all seems pretty balanced to me, I play warrior, guardian, mesmer and thief

Please tease us with more spoilers anet!
What sort of challenges will we be facing?

BalkanLion.6045:

Guardians in full Cleric’s gear. Any guardian that is in my group and does not ping full cleric’s gear gets kicked.

Not sure if serious…

Zylonite.5913:

A good engineer makes all the difference in the world.

I’ve found this as well.
Plenty of might, vuln and water fields.

With the new fractals, this guide is more important than ever. Let’s hope people / pugs pay attention to it.

Just curious what class and build you guys are most happy to see join your pug fractal group

I wish people wouldn’t post builds like this. It makes me feel that my own improvement in wvw and gvg might not be because we’re getting better but in fact because more enemies are running horrible builds.

“Your target is unable to apply boons while burning”

I still think you can gain more personal survivability, more group survivability, more dps and more flexibility by ditching valor.

There was never any reward or incentive to grind to fractal 80 besides personal happiness. Anet can’t take that away from you.

Just name is “Fractal Level v2” and make it start at 30. Hard mode fractals start at 31.
Everyone keeps their pointless “Fractal Level v1” number, can screenshot it if they want something to show for their accomplishment, and stops moaning.

It’s still pretty rubbish even if the recharge is reduced. It’ll be competing against 10% 1h damage and 15% 1h crit. If you decide to stick with a 2h and grab searing flames one boon removal every 10 seconds is nothing when a) can’t be guaranteed it will strip the boon you wanted, such as prot/stab, b) boons are constantly reapplied.

I’m curious, would you prefer everyone be placed at level 49 after this patch, and the new ‘hard modes’ begin at 50?

I get that you’re annoyed with a number being taken away from you, but what do you actually want instead? A backdated reward of some kind?

There have been a few fantastic guides which show how to make the most of spirit weapons but spirit weapons are so bad that the threads get deleted. I suppose anet doesn’t want anyone to suffer.

Pyroatheist.9031:

As much as I love mesmer and wholeheartedly support how awesome the class is, I’m forced to at least somewhat agree with the OP.

Mesmer is the sort of class where you either get it or you don’t. It’s rare to find a sorta mediocre mesmer, you’ll either get a great one or a horrible one, and horrible ones dominate the spectrum, even though a great mesmer can easily carry a team.

Interesting. My mesmer is my least used character because I like it the least, but if I’m ever challenged to a 1v1.. I will always pick it, and I have always thought they were pretty easy to play.

This change is brilliant.

Thoughts?

Such burning
So power
Many kills
Wowe

Seriously. Needs to happen.
A lot of people don’t play fotm because they feel forced to use the character they originally used for fractals. Where is the fun in that!?

Seveleniumus.5973:

The only thing I really hope for is that they make fractal level account bound. There’s nothing to gain for me from fractals <28, why do I need to sacrifice 28+ hours for each new character I get to 80, to be able to enjoy fractals? It’s not like I need to relearn fractal mechanics all over again, just because I have new char.

This times a million.

Oh I just noticed a mistake with the labels on the graphs.
The gear combinations I tested were zerker/scholar, zerker/ruby, soldier/traveler and knight/ruby. I accidentally listed soldier as being tested with ruby orbs. I’ll update the spreadsheet but the attached graphs will still have the wrong label.

Can’t seem to attach two pics in one post.
Here’s the maxed out (scholar, might, vuln etc) comparison.

Notice that although the proportions between specs are similar, the numerical differences are actually quite big. And the numbers in general are much higher than the non maxed out ones for obvious reasons.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AlCaXk6xwXSkdGFBbHB2ZkF2a2luaFk5UVJlQUh6WHc

There’s the spreadsheet. It’s a port from excel so there might be some issues. There are drop down boxes for weapons, armor, trinkets, runes, sigils, food, consumables, and other variables such as bloodlust, might, fury, power of the virtuous, unscathed contender, banners, spotter, vulnerability,etc.

Some pictures of the graph output attached. One comparing soldier, knight and zerker across specs.. the other pic shows how the specs scale with a maxed out scenario.

Personally I’m not good enough to keep unscathed defender up.
I’ll include an option to toggle it on for you.

I can’t cater for every scenario. Data dependant on bloodlust stacks, might stacks, scholar vs ruby, different types of gear.. all these together would result in hundreds of results which I just don’t have time for. If you have any suggestions on the assumptions which you think would better reflect standard gameplay then I’ll happily swap to that. I’ll look to get the spreadsheet made available today so you can try things for yourself.

Nike, if you have any suggestions on what might offer better assumptions to create a better scenario to compare builds I’ll be happy to incorporate them.

The reasoning behind the 1h vs 2h averaging out was that if I take the standard rotation of ww, symbol, auto, ww… swap to 1h for ten secs then back to gs to repeat.. using the appropriate skill coefficients I found that the gs does a bit more than half your damage (roughly two thirds), even taking into consideration the higher stats of the 1h due to traits. Therefore I multiplied the gs figure by that amount and the 1h by the remaining percentage to arrive at an average. There may be a better way to do this, I don’t know.

Essentially all I’m trying to do here is prove the rather large gap between builds focusing on the damage percentage traits vs builds focusing on honor or valor. It’s fairly easy to guess and prove, but some people like to see in easy to view forms.

Ahh I’ll see what I can do tomorrow. It’s not pretty but the math is fairly simple and appears to work. I’ll need to make it look a bit more presentable and easy to use..

lunyboy.8672:

What type of calculations did you do to arrive at these projections? Were there actual damage calculations? Would you be willing to provide a link to the actual spreadsheet or calculator so that we could duplicate your results?

Thanks for your consideration.

It’s a bit convoluted since I don’t actually use the website but here goes.. I’ll get some reproducible results for you.

Go to gw2 buildcraft and put in exotic zerker armor, ruby orbs, ascended zerker trinkets, and an exotic zerker weapon, then go to the ‘manual’ tab and add 9 more power, 6 precision, and 1 critical damage. This is to emulate the ascended weapon without the damage modifier attached by that website.
For buffs pick 2 might stacks (to represent greatsword over hammer) and 100% fury uptime. For consumables pick truffle steak (pwr/prec) and master maintenance oil.
Then go ahead and trait 20/30/0/10/10, picking the relevant damage traits.

You should now be at 2469 power, 2200 precision, 916 toughness, 1016 vitality, 82% bonus critical damage, 85% chance to crit and a 27.05% damage modifier. This should result in an effective power of 6688 when using 2h and 7341 when using 1h.

916 is always your base effective power. If you reset that website you can see it gives you an effective power of 934 due to the base 4% crit.
Divide 6688 by 916 which is your base effective power as mentioned above and you get 7.3 for 2h. Divide 7341 by 916 and you get 8.

Consider that I said I believe greatsword to be 60% of your dps and 1h to be 40% of your dps in a proper WW/Symbol/1h auto rotation…
So (0.6 * 7.3) + (0.4 * 8 ) = 7.58

7.57 is the relative damage multiplier I have listed for zerker gear in the graph for the 20/30/0/10/10…. so allowing for rounding errors on the way there’s one of the reproducible results. You should be able to do a similar thing for the other numbers if you want to.

Scholar runes, more might stacks, vulnerability, damage multiplier sigils etc should all see the gaps between specs widening.

Obtena.7952:

Someone probably already mentioned it but I was thinking more about why I dislike the idea of Sword dominating our DPS if it were to get another 5%. I’m put off by the idea that if i want to do something, there will only be one optimal way to do it. I WANT to be able to have a competitive DPS build using a variety of weapons, not just one … and not just the one that has the least interesting interactions with the other Guardian tools and skills.

Please consider how more damage to the highest DPS weapon would further differentiate whatever build variety is left in PVE. There are plenty of good ideas to address Radiance Master Traits without focusing on a particular weapon to do so.

Sword will never challenge greatsword for burst or aoe. For this reason I think alternating between the two to make use of cooldowns will always be better than straight-up 1h sword damage.

Pretty much yes. Though that site does things in terms of effective power while I compare in relation to a base number of 1 as a multiple. In fact my numbers are effective power divided by 916 because 916 piwer and no other stats is the starting point of 1. Hope that makes sense..

I only really bothered with what I knew to be common choices, and tried to avoid duplication between specs with no huge difference.

I think the one you linked would slot in slightly less than the 10/25/0/10/25 build, due to it being 5 percent less dmg mods from zeal but 10 more dmg mods from radiance, plus the 100 power for 250 precision.

And yes, where applicable I only consider zeal 2, zeal 7, virtue 6, virtue whatever the condi removal is, 1h dmg/crit and sup aria.

Which one is that?

Thought this might be useful to some people.
I’ve put a selection of specs into my own personal effective power spreadsheet to find out each spec’s relative damage in comparison to base stats (916 pwr, 4% crit etc).

Some variables you may want to know:
I assume 5 percent damage from virtue 25.
I assume 100 percent fury up time.
All specs besides the obviously hammer ones (at least 20 in night honor) receive 2 extra stacks of might.
Gear is always zerker and ruby orbs or soldier and traveler runes, represented by either a Zor an S on the vertical axis.
Where weapon swap is worth it, I assume 60:40 ratio of greatsword to 1h sword.

The gaps would widen if you add might stacks, sigil of force, and scholar runes.

swiftpaw.6397:

When a druid guide is made but is then removed because obvious troll thread because who the hell uses spirit weps.

Please add your own punchlines.

I know I’m probably not going to convert you.. but if I compare one of my favourite builds (20/30/0/10/10) against 0/0/30/30/10, there’s a ~30% dps difference when using a greatsword and over 35% dps difference when using 1h sword. I know you use a hammer here but the point remains valid.

All that damage plus the super useful radiance blind + vulnerability spam in exchange for might on crit, heal on dodge, condi→boon on shout, 300 toughness and AH. Just doesn’t seem like a fair deal. You can get so much more out of those 30 points in Valor.

1 sec of burning damage to five targets in perfect positioning instead of 1 sec of burning damage to one target isn’t enough for anyone to care about, especially for a GM trait. The final nail in the coffin is that your staff #1 will hit harder than the burning damage anyway.

I think you are missing the symbol duration trait in the pve build. When using a hammer this trait is incredible. I also rate virtue 20 over honor 30 for condition removal in the current consecration fashion.

Useless unless they make fractal level account wide.

So we already know that in an organised group certain play styles work great.
But what about the times you’re grouped with a cleric warrior, cond bearbow, the thief who won’t stop dying etc etc?

Easy answer is to not group with these chaps, but sometimes they’re friends or guildies. So what can we do to help out a bad group?

WvW build:
The build itself is fine, it’s pretty much using the standard trait setup (that or 0/0/10/30/30). As others suggested, PVT gear really is the way to go. Using zerker gear in a zerg will only provide a free rally to the enemy team. The spearhead of your zerg ball has enough damage to knock down most people who get caught up in it, you don’t need a zerker as well. A lot of good GvG fights are decided upon who gets downed and finished off first in order to provide free rallies to the other team. This would be a zerker guardian and would likely only hinder your own team.

Roaming build: Won’t comment as I use a mesmer for this. Usually phantasm or something very similar to your blackwater build actually

PvE: Deleted. I know how you feel about people who recommend against running AH, and I doubt I will change your mind.

That would be pretty sweet.

15/15/0/20/20 with a hammer in soldier gear. Move to zerker gear as you get better, trinkets first.

Hi Teshtestyes & welcome to gw2.

“allowing other classes to focus on damage” – this part of your post is vital. To understand why you don’t need to spec healing etc you need to understand what will actually allow other classes to focus on damage.

Reflects : Less damage taken by the group, less time wasted dodging. Shield of the avenger, wall of reflection.
Aegis : It’s like a smart dodge. If the player dodges anyway, aegis isn’t used up. If they fail a dodge, the aegis saves them. Virtue, retreat.
Protection : 33% less damage taken is huge. If you have this, surviving in zerker gear is a lot easier. With hammer you can give your group perma protection.
Blinds : Like an inverse aegis. You completely negate an enemy attack. That’s like having infinity toughness or outhealing it. We can spam aoe blinds with F1 and 15 points in radiance in big fights, and our best weapons have nice blinds on short cooldowns.
And finally to enable the group to do more dps – Fire fields : AoE 3 stacks of might for 20 seconds. Very nice amount of damage. Usually about 5% for the group. All of a sudden purging flames, hallowed ground and hammer #2 look very attractive.

If you could rate your ‘adding to group survivability and therefore damage’ ability between 1-10 as long as you are running with some of the above, your rating will be fairly high. If you put all your stats into healing, precision etc in an attempt to sit there being tanky and providing support, that rating probably wouldn’t even budge up by 1 point. The core mechanics outlined above are by far the best ways you can contribute to your group, stats alone can’t touch them.