Guild Wars 2

I don’t like how obviously rigid they are. If they flowed in the wind properly it wouldn’t be much of an issue.. but they’re rigid and often clip weapons.

I want light and medium PANTS, TROUSERS!

Profano… anything your scepter clones do on a condi build is done better by staff clones. Your scepter clones overwrite the more useful staff ones. That’s the problem.

Looks like you picked up 20 to 28 percent more damage modifiers depending on how many boons you have and 100 pwr/prec. Hopefully you’re seeing a lot more damage than what you got from 30 valor.
How do you feel about your survivability without that 300 toughness and ah?

I’m still on the fence about 20 virtue. A lot of people like it but I write like the idea of only 10 virtue, 10 more in zeal for gs 5 percent and 5 more in radiance for 1h traits. This way you can swap between 1h and 2h and both have higher dps than before. Like I said, I’m on the fence about this definitely like this build better than with 30 in ah though especially in dungeons

JonPeters.5630:

Scepter
Scepter is still missing something but we don’t want to overload the autoattack as we think that promotes more mindless play and are trying to move away from builds that focus so much on the “1” skill. I feel like that scepter should be the tricksy defender that can stop enemies from attacking and defend allies, but maybe it’s single target nature is keeping that from working.

I don’t know anyone who would seriously consider using scepter in a dungeon. It’ll need a LOT of tweaks to make that happen.
In PvP however giving it some kind of aoe won’t do much, how often do you see anything besides area denial aoes used in real pvp?
Remove clone generation. Give it something useful and fitting with mesmers. A condition application on the final swing would be nice, it would then be able to compete with staff on condi builds.

What are your thoughts?

Personally I’m sick of my useful clones being replaced by scepter clones because they are worse than every other clone we have access to:

Staff clones : Uber condition applications.
Greatsword clones : 3 x tick from range is good for applying bleed on crit proc.
1h sword : same as greatsword, high attack rate means decent bleed procs. Plus boon removal.
Scepter : Nothing.

If I could, I would remove the final part of the scepter chain from my bar and only use the first two ‘regular’ swings.

A note on the above. If you think the thief is a particularly good one, shatter your clones before you go into stealth. A good thief will use dagger#5 on your clones to invis while you are invis, rendering your decoy useless.

Phantasm from stealth followed immediately by magic bullet and your second phantasm works well.

Another method is to use F4 to buy yourself the time to get phantasms up.

Once the phantasms are up they will quite literally destroy the thief as soon as he comes out of stealth.

It’s okay. We’ve got tiny HP and good skills/utils/traits to make up for that low survivability. I’m sure they’ll replace it with something suitable..

or…
yeah…

I’m inclined to agree with you after considering your thoughts, but I think you’re underselling the illusion line. You get 6 stacks of confusion from cry of frustration and +33% confusion duration. That’s nothing to sneer at. I’m not saying you should be shattering all the time, but this build has a large amount of clone generation, inevitably you will be faced with a use em or lose em scenario at some point.

If illusionary elasticity fails, then yeah.. 20% duration > 200 condition damage. But (and I’m not certain about this) if the targetting of winds of chaos works as I think it does, then even if you’re 1200 yards away, as long as one of your illusions is within 600 yards then it should hit the target, bounce to the illusion, then bounce back to the target. You lose a very minor amount of dps for the illusions (their crit bleed and winds of chaos bleed goes from 8 to 7 with veggie pizza, but they get an extra 200 condition damage) but your own dps more than doubles. On paper, it works out higher.

But like you said, domination does have some very strong things going for it.

One more question. Why all the love for perplexity runes? I haven’t used them on any character so far, so you’ll have to excuse me. But wouldn’t torment sigil and torment runes be pretty kitten here?

Is the 20 in domination really worth it when you could get 200 condi dmg and illusionary elasticity? With the extra bounce considered your overall condition dps goes up by almost 25 percent, likely to be even higher when you consider that you attack faster than your clones. In addition to that you get afreebie 6x confusion shatter and extra confusion duration thrown in.

Is that really worth less than 20 percent cd on torch and the measly condi removal?

It’s interesting to note that the pve junkies say dps is fine when specced for it, but the pvp junkies say the dps is there but the sacrifice in getting it mixed with the difficulty to get on and stay on target means it isn’t worth it.

Jon,

You are correct in thinking sword damage is fine already. Honestly once we’ve unloaded the greatsword’s burst abilities what we’re doing right now is swapping to our 1H sword while we wait for the greatsword’s abilities to cool down because 1H has higher auto attack dps even without going 30 deep into radiance.

1H is in a good place right now – it has slightly more dps than the greatsword but sacrifices aoe/cleaves. Boosting 1h sword’s aoe capacity would render greatsword useless, so I wouldn’t dare suggest that. I don’t know what your goal is for GS vs 1H but I assume aoe vs single target.

The bigger issue with the radiance traits is that the +10% damage grandmaster trait is good enough to aim for, but the surrounding major traits are completely useless unless you use 1h. This makes it completely boring if you’re 2h, and promotes passive play if you’re 1h. I would like to see more active mechanics like the refreshed virtue on kill.

Zeal grandmaster minor trait is dire.
+10% dmg to symbols?
That’s not even a 2% overall damage increase on your standard greatsword build, and the other dps (1h), doesn’t even have a symbol! If you want people to consider 30 points in zeal for the spirit weapons or this weird new condition conversion you’re pushing then that minor trait needs to be more attractive. Perhaps a bleed proc, if you’re really trying to push condi guardians.

Finally to promote more diverse specs you need to roll up some of the traits.
We have about 5 spirit weapon traits to pick up before they’re half way decent, and 3 symbol traits (and a bunch of minors) if we want to make our symbols worth paying attention to, and we have to burn our whole valor trait line just to get meditations to be viable.

Is it any wonder the majority of specs are now based around AH (1 trait, defines the build, pick whatever else you want), consecrations (1 trait to make them great) or shouts (1 cooldown trait to make them great, pure of voice isn’t even taken in dungeons anymore)?

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

We just don’t want this information spreading like the plague, advertising it as a good build.

Goes back to the Sonic Boon days.
It wasn’t optimal, but the popularity of it meant we had loads of sub optimal warriors running around dungeons.

I was a part of that thread on guru (Lilitu) and tried to steer it into a more optimised build, but it just wasn’t possible to do that AND keep what the OP wanted (shouts) in the build so we had to make do. Regardless, like I said the popularity meant we had an awful lot of shout warriors running around dungeons instead of the full blown zerkers we now know and love.

Yeah that’s the rotation I was getting at.

However something to consider… if you assume the first WW takes you from time point 0 to time point 2, and the symbol from time point 2 to time point 3.. WW is not available again until time point 12, and takes until time point 14 (assuming 2 sec cast time, I could be wrong but I’m keeping it simple). The swap to 1h lasts 10 seconds before you swap back to GS and start again. This is because the cooldown starts when you finish the ability rather than when you start.

This means that out of a 24 second rotation you have 2*WW (~4 secs), 1 symbol (~1 sec), 9 secs of GS auto attack and 10 secs of 1h auto attack. In comparison a pure GS rotation would likely look like 2 WWs, 1 symbol and 19 auto attacks per 24 seconds.

Knowing that the auto attacks are on par, and that the 1h has a ~10% effective power advantage, using the above base damage numbers I’m actually only seeing a few percentage different:

2 * WW @ 1036 min = 2072, symbol = 1016, GS#1*9=3726, 1H#1*10=4168. 10% bonus to 1H#1 from higher effective power assuming decent traits=416.
Altogether = 11398 / 24 secs = 475 base dps.

Straight up 2h:
2 * WW @ 1036 min = 2072, symbol = 1016, GS#1*19=7866
Altogether = 10954 / 456

You can get rid of the noise by simplifying it to 19 secs of GS#1@414 vs 9 secs of GS#1@414 + 10 secs of 1H#1@~460, which ends up at~20 base dps different over the 24 second rotation. Before taking GS might procs into consideration.

Perhaps it’s more even than we think.

Just wanted to get a little discussion going on the above.

In theory the greatsword’s base damage of 296 + 296 + 443 = 1035 over 2.5 seconds is roughly equivalent to the 1h sword’s base damage of 269 + 269 + 504 = 1042.

Whirling wrath – A lot of people say this is unpredictable. I disagree. The floating combat text (and animation) is very misleading with this ability. What I have found is that as long as you are in melee range, 7 melee range strikes occur in the combat log. They do damage with a coefficient of 0.4 or 148 each at base, for a total of 1036 to melee range targets regardless of what the floating combat text tells you. Go to the mists and check your combat logs and golem hp bars. Don’t trust the tooltip! Additionally (and this is the random part) there are several projectiles with a coefficient of 0.15, for 56 damage each or 392 if you whirl from within the target and hit every projectile. Even if you only hit the melee portion, this is a dps increase. I’m only going to consider the physical portion of this skill going forward.

Symbol of wrath – has a high amount of damage (1016 base with a 2.75 coefficient) for such a low cast time. This too is a dps increase, and quite a decent one.

Those of you who have played warriors before will remember this part. To maximise dps you want to unload your high dps skills (100b, WW, symbol) and then swap away from your low dps auto attack weapon. Unless your build has zealous blade and not radiant power/powerful blades (which I can’t understand, going from 15 radiance to 25 radiance gives better returns than 10 zeal to 20 zeal) then I would bet your 1h sword #1 has more effective power and therefore does more dps than your greatsword #1 dps. What this means is that you unload your symbol, WW, and then swap to 1h while you wait out the very conveniently timed cooldowns. For example both 20/30/0/10/10 and 10/25/0/0/25 have roughly 10% more effective power with a 1h than with a 2h.

Keen to read your thoughts. Happy to be corrected too

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

Greatest supporting traits:
Master of Consecrations! (Virtues VI)<— Wall of Reflect, Purging Flames CD reductions is pro
Blind Exposure (Radiance VI) + Renewed Justice!<—- Blind Spams.
Superior Aria (Honor II) <—- More aegis blocking!<—- Can’t stress that enough

I urge any new guardian who is thinking of running a “play how you want type build”, to at least include those, and give your team something if it isn’t going to be high end dps.

Agreed^. I know I keep going on but imo the above makes the shell of a good dungeon guardian – zerker gear and 0/15/0/10/10. I would say the least important of the above is Honor II because only retreat is that brilliant, but combined with valor on crit and 1000 hp it’s hard to argue. Next you look at what bang you can get for your buck with your remaining 35 trait points.
You look at zeal and see 10% dmg and 100 power for 10 points – bargain.
You look at radiance and see 10% dmg and 100 precision for 10 points – bargain.
Now where for the last 15?
5% greatsword damage? Bleh. Not amazing.
Grand master radiance trait? Only if using 1h..
15 in valor? Nah, you get more dps out of zeal and/or radiance regardless of weapon choice.

It’s clear to see why the most preferred spec ends up being 10/25/0/10/10 +15. Hammer users take the symbol vuln and extra symbol tick (15/25/0/20/10). 1h users finish off radiance and grab 20 virtue or 20 honor. GS have a choice because zealous blade isn’t that great and 25 points in virtue isn’t a horrible idea (personally I don’t like 20 in honor unless you’re using hammer).

Overall I like 20/30/0/10/10. It brings great consecrations, the 10 most important Honor points, blind spam, and top greatsword AND 1h dps. This means you can use GS for burst or difficult aoe and then swap to 1h higher overall sustained. The result of this is similar to the 100b burst + 1h axe sustained switching warriors do.

10/25/0/20/10 +5 is my best bet for hammer. Less overall damage, less dancing between 1h/2h, but dat protection and blast finishers. Shout out to 10 less in radiance and 10 more in honor for 2h cooldown trait, as this means 2 blasts per fire field. Less solo dps but potentially higher group dps in pugs due to the lack of other sources of might. Like I mentioned earlier though, at this point going from 10/15/0/30/10 +5 to 0/0/30/30/10 is actually only ~10% dps loss. Of course you don’t actually gain anything useful out of it but if someone absolutely must have AH then I reckon 0/0/30/30/10 with hammer might stacking is probably the least bad way of doing it. That or 10/30/30/0/0 1h but that renders the whole point of AH useless as well as your support abilities.

If you have to wear soldier gear and zerker trinkets while you learn the ropes then so be it, but the trait outline everyone is talking about is probably the best way of squeezing the most dps, group support and survivability through reflects/protection possible out of the traits.

You could increase your damage by roughly 30% simply by removing 20 points in honor and putting 10 into zeal and 10 into radiance for the two +10% damage modifiers.

All you’d lose are shout cooldowns and 20% weapon skill cooldowns. And chances are you’ll never have more than 1 shout on your bar anyway because our best utils are purging flames, wall of reflection, avengers shield, retreat, hallowed ground, stand your ground.

5 in honor and 25 in valor would give you FAR more survivability than 0 in honor and 30 in valor. AH is pants.
25 in valor gets you nothing useful, so you may as well take another 5 out of valor and bump up virtues for master of consecration.

By going from 0/15/30/20/5 to 10/25/20/5/10 you’ve gained a huge amount of dps AND group support through consecrations at the loss of AH, 2h weapon mastery and shout cooldown which are all pretty meh.

From here you should take a hard look at the 20 in valor – at most you’d lose ~10% dps by taking the points out. Just 10 more points in zeal evens it out AND gives you 10 to play with in a supportive way, or you could put them all in virtues for obscene group support AND similar damage through power of the virtuous. Honestly those 20 points in valor are probably ahead in pure dps by a few percent, but they’re totally selfish. Another alternative is bumping honor up to 20 and using a hammer for the symbol. The extra tick means you aren’t penalised for not putting the points into a dps tree/trait, and it’s extra group support.

Dempsey, I meant that by bringing a mesmer with adequate condition removal and reflects, the guardian is better able to pump the dps and still keep baseline utils like reflect.
We had similar thoughts back in the summer over on guru when mesmers received their shatter condi remove trait but it never went anywhere.

Comparisons like that are useless because the usefulness of those skills goes up and down depending on their interaction with other skills, base hp, traits etc.

AoE condition damage on scepter #1 final hit please.

Staff clones spam conditions, why not scepter.

That might actually change if mesmers become the new condition removal + reflect meta for pve dungeons. We’ll wait and see.

For wvw all you need is aoe cleaves and survivability anyway.

To be able to outrun any threat is to be the fastest in the game. We just have to admit we cannot escape.

Honestly though we should always be with our zergs and guild groups. There are better choices for small scale roaming.

Berner.7289:

I don’t use AH, and I don’t agree with you. Stop yelling, and stop assuming.

+1

You can have AH and DPS. Just don’t expect to look like a guardian. DPS, AH, adequate support; pick 2.

^they don’t seem to know we’re probably one of the highest dps classes around if we want to be though the buff wasn’t really needed.

I’m surprised there weren’t any pve nerfs. To me this says anet clearly wants warriors to be the top pve dpsers.

Thanks
About 74 posts and 24 hours after the thread was created though, which makes it hard to spot.
I notice you’re the thread creator. If you want to edit your original thread to include the newly released info I’m happy to ask ask a mod merge these threads, but that’s not what the other thread was originally for.

Useless changes.

Nobody is going to pick Zeal V – Shattered Aegis over the 10% damage and 5% greatsword damage trait. And there’s no way anyone will put 10 more points into zeal just for it.

Zeal XII – Kindled Zeal is also still a waste of space. Along with our other grandmaster zeal trait (+50% spirit weapon dmg) until spirit weapons are better. Nobody will spec for condi damage while we only have 1 reliable condition available to us. And the +13% conversion doesn’t change the burn tick enough to matter.

Radiance V is the only interesting one. GS guards may pick it on their way to the 10% dmg trait now and start providing buff removal in dungeons.

Radiance X – Powerful blades. Totally unnecessary but okay thanks.

Honor VI – Pure of Heart. Increased scaling with Healing power from 25% to 40%.
Nobody will use this anyway. Not with the amount of cool stuff the honor line has if you’re a support guard.

This may be posted already, but it deserved a thread rather than being buried somewhere.

Warrior:
The overall goal here is to reduce the damage for the very high control warriors. This means reducing some dependency on going 30 points into discipline for Burst Mastery, making warriors spend 20 points in Arms to get the benefit of Unsuspecting Foe. We also reduced the damage on the hammer’s burst skill to separate the control from the damage. We don’t mind warriors doing massive damage, or doing great area of effect control, but we’re trying to prevent them from easily doing both. We also increased the readability of Skull Crack, which will allow opposing players to more easily react to it. Combustive Shot on longbow also saw some rework. It will scale better with adrenaline levels, and still provide strong burning per adrenaline level, but the raw damage was toned down slightly.

Strength 5 – Reckless Dodge. Increased Damage by 25%
Strength III – Great Fortitude. Increased conversion rate from 5% to 7%.
Arms IV – Unsuspecting Foe. Moved to Master Tier.
Arms VII – Crack Shot. Moved to Adept Tier.
Arms XII – Last Chance. Increased the threshold form 25% to 50%. Reduced the cooldown from 45 seconds to 40seconds.
Defense 25 – Armored Attack. Increased conversion rate from 5% to 10%.
Defense XII – Spiked Armor. Reduced the recharge from 15s to 10s.
Tactics 5 – Determined Revival. Now correctly displays the amount of toughness.
Tactics 25 – Reviver’s Might. Now applies 3 stacks of Might instead of 1.
Discipline II – Thrill of the Kill. Increased Adrenaline gain from 1 to 10.
Discipline XI – Burst Mastery. Reduced damage increase from 10% to 7%. Removed erroneous adrenaline gain fact.
Earthshaker. Reduced damage by 20%.
Staggering Blow. Reduced damage by 23%.
Skull Crack. Increased the cast time from 1/4s to 1/2s. Updated the animation and effects of this skill to be more clear.
Combustive Shot – Increased pulse duration to 3s. Increased burn duration per pulse to 3s. Normalized damage per pulse. Updated pulses per tier to 2, 3,and 4 respectively for tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3.

New look.
Black is zerker. White is wvw tank.

Silentstorm, I apologise if my post makes it sound like I am ganging up on you.. but I have some numbers here.

If we take your build as linked (celestial, valk, pwr/vit food) as build A.
20/25/0/0/25 in full zerker gear/food as build B.
Your build but with full zerker gear/food as build C.

Build B has roughly 34% more effective power than build A.
Build B still has roughly 27% more effective power than build C.

The above assumed you get no damage increase from power of the virtuous. In reality this could be up to 8%. If on the other end of the line you assume the full 8% bonus damage, the difference between build A and build B increases to 44%. And the gap between build B and build C increases to 37%.

The biggest problem comes when we look at what you gained in exchange for that huge dps loss.
3000hp?
300 toughness?
Might and burning when you block?
20% cooldown reduction on 2h?
AH?
None of the above help you kill the target faster or keep your group alive. The only benefits you get are self only, and they’re not great benefits at that. In fact by killing targets slower you endanger yourself and your group even more.
In addition to that you lose out on a bunch of boon duration, consecration mastery, and condi removal.

This doesn’t mean that valor is useless though. In fact you could do a 10/30/30/0/0 build and have dps similar to build B listed above AND have the option of dancing between 2h and 1h/focus. The problem is exactly the same though – you lose out on a bunch of boon duration, consecration mastery, and condi removal. Your big problem arises because you didn’t take valor as the third and final part of a dps beast (the first two parts being zeal and radiance) you took it and honor with the intention of defensive play.

When building good groups you put 5 of the highest damage dealing people together, notice that they lack condi removal, reflects, utility etc and then ask “who can sacrifice the least dps for the most group condi removal/reflects/utility?”. The answer comes in the form of the dps guardian. What your build has done however is stripped off the dps and provided none of what the group wanted in exchange.

haviz.1340:

Anyone putting points in valor for dps does not how to make a decent dps pve build.

err… 10/30/30/0/0 1h is the highest dps guardian build out there. That or 20/25/25 2h.
Or do you mean the lack of support?

Of course people can play whatever spec they like when playing with friends. If you’re happy for the dungeon to take longer because you’re fooling around on teamspeak, messing around etc then of course you can turn up with a suboptimal build. However to do that to a pug group or people you don’t know is just rude. You’re wasting your time and wasting their time.

There is no drawback for a massive dps build or at least a very high dps build plus good support (eg 15/25/0/10/20… which is less than max damage but sacrifices a small amount of damage for fantastic group support) that cannot be rectified by a skilled play or a split second res by other skilled players.

Silentstorm, I don’t understand why you have 20 in honor. The only reason I take honour is 30 honour 10 virtue for hammer cooldown , consecration and symbol duration, meaning you get two blast finishers per utility instead of one. The only other reason for honor would be 20 deep for symbol duration and letting the cooldown trait go.

Can’t see a reason to take it if you’re using gs though.

10/25/30/0/0 +5 would give you 20% more dmg modifier and a loadd of pwr/prec in exchange for the 2h cool down trait, the heal on aegis trait you have, and some hp. That’s a good deal for me. I’d be tempted to put the 5 back in honor for free vigor.

I don’t think AH is great especially if you’re using gs and not spamming shouts (bad playstyle anyway tbh, more mileage out of well timed reflects and retreat). However I do think the valor line gets a bad rep because of ah. It is actually a decent dps line with the crit dmg, but it’s not quite as good as anything with a dmg multiplier in. This means that while something like 20/25/20/0/0 +5 is probably top for max dps, it loses a lot of key guardian functionality and you end up trading for a warrior instead. 20/25/0/0/10 rectifies that somewhat and leaves you with 15 points to go back into valor if the goal is dps without caring about AH. Honestly though the valor line will only be for 15 percent crit damage at this stage. Nice, but you could get vigor, 10 percent boon dura and condi cure on virtue instead, which combined with renewed focus and purge flames makes you just as good as the old pure voice shouters for cleansing.

Tldr: my builds are 20/25/0/5/20 for gs, 15/15/0/30/10 for hammer boonstack, 15/25/0/20/10 selfish hammer. The only deviation for my gs build I am tempted by is 20/30/0/10/10 for the 1h traits (swap between 2h and 1h when whirling wrath and symbol are on cd) and some cooldown on retreat. Or 20/25/10/5/10 with the valor toughness to precision trait. This is purely to maximise dpsin the event I don’t need the extra in virtue for something and unscathed is not an option.

lol no.
Mesmer is not much use anywhere tbh. Portal and veil bot is all. Anything else is better done with another class.

Obviously never seen a good hammer ele.

Guard/ele/thief can indeed out-dps warriors as mentioned above.
However they end up very glassy and often don’t contribute as much to the group as the basic warrior + FGJ + banner does.

I agree 15/25/0/20/10 is superior, but going 30 in valor isn’t the end of the world as a lot of people would have you believe. As long as you stick with the zerker gear that is.

A lot of people like 20 in virtues for the extra condi removal, in which case you’ve only got 30 points to play with in zeal/radiance. So it’s either 15/15 or 30 to valor, which is actually a fairly close call if you ignore the usefulness of blind spam.

Cat – you assumed the 10 spare went to radiance (15/25/0/20/10) whereas I put them in honor (15/15/0/30/10) for the additional blast finisher on every purging flames/hallowed ground. To clarify – going from 15/15/0/30/10 to 0/0/30/30/10 results in less than a 10% dps drop. If your starting point is 15/25/0/20/10 and you are happy with that, then putting the points into valor 0/0/30/20/10 with 10 spare – probably for zeal… is not such a great bet.

I’ve found that if you’re going to be using a hammer anyway – 30 in honor is vital for the symbol duration extension AND the 20% cooldown trait. This means you can blast twice during purge and thrice during hallowed ground.

This gives you a base of 0/0/0/30/10 with 30 spare. 15/15/0/30/10 is a good bet. 0/0/30/30/10 isn’t actually far off in terms of dps (assuming you’re still in zerker gear) but you do lose the blind/vuln spam.

What I find most odd about all the AH hate is that while the 15/15/0/20/10 with 10 spare build is seen as a decent combination of dps and support, switching to 0/0/30/20/10 results in dps only around several percent lower in exchange for 450 toughness and AH.

I’ll admit the hp gained from AH even when using purging flame+mighty blow and extended hammer symbol isn’t amazing, and neither are the minor traits in valor. In fact, 15/15/0/x/x is probably better than 0/0/30/x/x due to the spammy virtue.. but realistically if the hammer build is seen as good, there’s no reason the ah variant should be labelled as trash.

Anyone else using this combo of traits to enable 2 fire blast finishers in one purging flames?

I’ve noticed this as well. It goes from 2 seconds to 3 seconds. I expected 2 seconds as per the trait description.

Nike.2631:

My Guard has shifted to a pseudo-light armor look also…

Anyone know what chest this is?

Ah I see negative posts are getting deleted.

Congrats on the MLG Esports win to team Denial. Can’t wait for the next one.

Any thoughts on tournaments which give small prizes to many players? Like all in the top 1000 solo q or so.
Boxes of energy drinks, mousemats etc. I’ve seen tournies like that go down well before.

TLDR:
For PvE grab as many of the +dmg % skills as possible and ignore survivability. Zerker gear and 25 radiance if using 2h or 30 radiance if using 1h. 10 in zeal. The rest wherever. Valor is decent for the crit dmg, virtues is decent for the consecrations and +1% dmg per boon.

For WvW go all out defensive. 0/0/30/30/10, 0/0/10/30/30, 0/5/30/30/5 etc with soldier gear are all fine.

^Until you enter a fashion contest with the person next to you.

The comparison being WvW style PvP or being picked for PvE groups.

I play for fun. The moment I feel as though I have to do something I don’t want to do in order to remain on the same footing as other players I’m out.

That said, I’m logging off and playing something else. I’ll return when it’s reasonably fun to do the above.

I’d sit back and seriously consider what you want a mesmer for first. I rarely see them nowadays.

TLDR version of that article:

So why might it be so low?
A : Because PvP in this game is garbage, full of passive play rangers and aoe spam necros or just hideously unbalanced in general.

That’s not to say GW2 as a game is bad. I think the world itself is amazing. The PvP is just terrible. And that’s from someone who usually loves PvP.

Massive thanks to Runa for the inspiration.
My major gripe about my beloved guardian is how the heavy armor breaks the immersion while swimming and running around. This looks like I’m actually wearing light armor, so I love it!

Just wondered how many people prefer healway and how many people prefer the valor/honor (AH) approach, and why.