Guild Wars 2

That’s not true Volkon. I have many friends who want to play fotm49 but are capped at fotm39 because they don’t have enough gold to buy ascended armor/weapons.. which would be the only way they could get enough agony resist. We are required to grind gold if we want to play the challenging fractal levels.

If I wanted a gear-gated pve experience I would play another game.

“we don’t make grindy games”

As long as you mind being locked into 1 spec on 1 character.

hmm.

At least you don’t have to grind grind grind just to get the ascended weapon/armor required for agony resist slots if you want to do high level challenging stuff.

Oh wait.

Yeah hammer is a really powerful dps weapon now. It gets less damage modifiers than other specs but the base damage is sky high.

My biggest issue with it is that 2/3 of the hammer dps comes from the final hit in the chain (which applies the symbol) so it suffers the most from inappropriate dodges etc. It can get you killed a lot if you’re not disciplined.

Also I feel whenever I spec for hammers and find myself in a group who are ranging a boss or I wouldn’t want to melee the boss myself, I miss the scepter dps.

To be honest at this stage I’ll take anything zerker over the altruistic healing tanks.

To be honest, even going 15/25/0/20/10 over 15/15/0/20/20 in order to increase your own dps is frowned upon if your group doesn’t have enough condition removal. You definitely could increase your dps by allocating the 10-20 points in virtues elsewhere, but you lose a lot of support. The first 10 points are semi-okay if you’re not fussed about condi removal because the dps increase is huge (100 precision, 10% dmg), which is why you see some people go 15/25/0/20/10, but to lose all of the points in virtues is unthinkable; spammable aoe blind/vuln/might is incredible. And 100 power & 10% dmg on symbols isn’t great, even if symbols do make up almost half of your damage.

Oh, the 10% damage trait elusive power doesn’t work well with the minor trait which gives vigor on crits. You’ll be critting a lot, so you’ll be regenning your dodge bar rather quickly. You don’t get a lot of damage out of it unfortunately.

I’ve used my standard testbed for these numbers, which is zerker/scholar, pwr/crit dmg food, dmg potion, spotter, discipline banner, night/force, 5% virtuous, 25 might, 25 bloodlust, fury, 25 vuln. I’ll pretend this build discussed is 30/30/0/5/5 because lol 5 valor instead of 5 virtue wtf.

There are 2 boss scenarios I consider:
We are fighting a boss whom I can melee. Ranged is pointless. Swapping between greatsword and sword is good.
We are fighting a boss whom I cannot melee. Ranged is required. I can only have 1 melee weapon.

In the first scenario with proper weapon swapping, 30/30/0/5/5 will out-damage 10/30/0/5/25 by less than 4%. That’s not enough to make up for the loss of consecration mastery and absolute resolution in my opinion. Also, the final 10 trait points in zeal were useless here because you weren’t using a scepter. Perhaps you could use focus mastery instead. If you were stubborn and kept your scepter equipped, 10/30/0/5/25 probably out-damaged you anyway because they swapped weapons.

If you decide you are going to be range attacking a boss (never range attack trash, cleave them!), not only is having both scepter AND greatsword AND sword damage traits a bit odd… but if you had to choose only 1 melee weapon for a boss fight, 1h sword is actually your best damage over time weapon anyway even though you have zealous blade. They’re almost exactly even though, it’ll probably come down to personal preference. So you’re probably going to be running scepter + 1h sword, and again using the final 10 points in zeal for 100 power and some useless grandmaster trait. Possibly focus mastery, that would be semi useful.

When you concede to only using 1 melee weapon, 10/30/0/5/25 is actually very almost the same 1h dps as 30/30/0/5/5 anyway. At which point you’ve given up 20% boon duration, absolute resolution and consecration mastery for nothing. The reason for this is that going above 10 zeal only gives you a decent boost when you know you’ll be weapon swapping.

I’d say 20/30/0/10/10 or 20/30/0/0/20 if you can deal without vigor is probably more viable than this. Swap between scepter +10% trait and GS +5% trait depending on the situation. For trash or bosses you melee, use GS/Sword. For ranged fights use Scepter/Sword. I can see no scenario where having 30 in radiance, and still taking both the GS and Scepter traits would be useful. At least this way you can bring -some- group support. Though realistically, I still prefer 10/30/0/5/25. Worst case scenario I lose a tiny bit of dps.. but the support is great. Finally if you are ranging a boss.. It is easier to keep unscathed up. In which case if you want more scepter dps it is a possibility.

Hi Guang, the difference between your base dps numbers and mine could be due to the cast times we allocated to specific skills?

For example – for hammer I used the three hammer swings as being 296, 333 and 370, followed by 5 ticks of 185 for a grand total of 1924 over 3.7 seconds, or 520dps. 505 might imply that you used 3.8 as the cast time?
For greatsword I used 296, 296, 443 for the auto attack (1035) over 2.5 seconds for the base dps of 414. I used 1428 as the base WW damage assuming all projectiles hit, and 1016 as the base damage of the symbol.
I then used a WW, symbol, 9 seconds of auto attack, WW, 10 seconds of auto attack and repeat 24 second rotation, as the cooldowns for skills begin when you’ve finished the skill. I assumed 2 sec cast time per WW and 1 sec for symbol.
This meant 1428, 1016, 3726, 1428, 4140 for a total of 11738 over 24 seconds, or 489.

I’m guessing you used slightly more favorable cast times for the greatsword skills?

Please don’t join my fractal group without consecration mastery.

I’m guessing you’re talking spvp?

Another anecdote on the whole zerker cleric stuff. I just ran a fotm38 as a 0/0/20/30/20 cleric. Regen, battle pres, symbols etc.. crazy healings per second. First three fractals almost nobody died. Then we get the molten facility end boss. My shouts, symbols, dodge heal, empower etc all become utterly useless thanks to the mobile nature of the fight combined with the small radius.

I was fairly comfortable with my own survivability, so I put on my zerker gear, equip unscathed contendor. Long story short I ended up soloing the first boss from 1/3 hp to 0 and auto rezzing the party.

In the right situations I’m finding cleric builds and gear to be fantastic. Static fights mostly. In the wrong situations you’re a total waste of space.

—
anyway back to the original topic..
Yeah I can see 25/30/0/5/10 being slightly better dps than 20/30/0/10/10 because it has 50 more power, and better than 10/30/0/5/25 depending on how many boons you have. I guess the difference is slightly under 5% assuming 5 boons. How much value you place on that honor trait.

Don’t forget though. The reason we don’t just go something like 10/30/30/0/0 for even more dps is because the gw2 pve meta is basically selecting 5 people with huge dps and asking who can sacrifice the least dps for the most support. You can bet if most other classes could trade under 5% of their dps away for consecration mastery, absolute resolution and 25% boon duration they would take it.

Oh, I will point out some serious disadvantages which people often don’t think about with support builds.

The radius on shouts is awful. Hold the line is a great heal in theory but with 600 radius unless your group is disciplined you’ll miss half of them.
Same with battle presence, 600 radius.
Same with your dodge roll, on paper a 1-2k heal is great but with 240 radius it really has to be ‘aimed’ at people who are dying.
Empower suffers the same fate with a 600 radius.
Symbols we all know about.

The best heal by far is the 1200 radius virtue, and that’s better used as a condition cleanse… which funnily enough can also be done by a zerker.

And finally, if you can’t get rid of poison or get hit by agony, the heals are chopped down. Support is very situational. Tank stats only work when you take damage. Zerker DPS is permanent

Agree, your own fun is one thing but there are 4 other people to consider.
The trick is to identify what the group is looking for..If you’ve got 3-4 other people all suited up in zerker stats asking for a speedrun, it would be really rude to show up in cleric gear and slow them down. Don’t do that!

If you can find a group who don’t mind taking it slower, perhaps who might also be casual/badly geared/specced themselves.. (friends, casual guildies, newbies perhaps) well then anything goes. It might make the run faster overall to go zerker yourself so you can help burst things down but nobody is going to get upset if you don’t.

I’ve been alternating between my full cleric build and my regular zerker builds in fotm for some time now. Only 10 minutes ago I stood besides 3 dead and 1 downed party members vs Mai Trin, got the 2nd guy back on his feet and we quite simply stood there and facetanked every single attack while we rezzed the party one by one thanks to regen, battle presence, healing symbols, virtues + renewed focus, some dodge heals, correct usage of purging flames, empower etc. Even hard fractals such as dredge and shaman become a joke (albeit slower fights). You can’t provide that level of team support to a bad group as a zerker. You shouldn’t need to. But hey, sometimes the group calls for it.

At the end of the day if you want to be a full cleric or something, go ahead… but make sure you only join the groups who don’t mind it. Do not go around thinking you are optimal and deserve to be in the level 49 meta speed clear groups, because they will hate you for it.

I don’t think dodging fits in with the heavy armor style of a guardian, and tbh it’s a crutch for bad players to avoid damage. I’ve taken the keybinding off and facetank everything like boss.

It’s perfectly playable if you are good at dodging, don’t waste aegis, know when to blind, when to reflect, when to cleanse and when to shelter.
The question is – will your team mates decked out in celestial gear running a condi spec keep themselves alive? If the answer is no then the damage and attacks aimed at you increase, and you’ll have a tougher time.

In short, in good groups, you could probably get away with 1k health most of the time. Getting hit is rare. In bad groups? There are a few trains of thought. Some say you should double the group’s dps by being one of the only decent players. Some say otherwise. For example I am likely to do a few fotms today. One at 40+ which I will almost certainly use a glass zerker for, and one at 30+ with friends who don’t follow the meta and like to take it slow, for which I will probably use a cleric to ensure nobody dies and everybody has fun.

People actually play char or asura and think they look pretty!? :o

Yeah you’re not reading it right. The forum formatting tools messed it up. Sorry.

For the 1h+2h rotation I use the following:

(
( (Sword EP/916) * (416.8*10) )
+
( (GS EP/916) * (1428+1428+1016+3726) )
)
/24

This estimates 10 seconds of sword dps which is the sword’s effective power divided by base power to get your ‘multiplier’ (example : someone with 1832 power does twice the damage a 916 power player does, so the multiplier is 2). You then multiply that by how much base damage you see yourself doing in 10 seconds. In this case I have estimated the sword base dps as 416.8. Over ten seconds I see myself doing 4168 base damage, so I multiply that by the effective power multiplier.

Same for the greatsword, except instead of simply using 416.8 as the estimated base dps thanks to only using sword’s auto attack, I have to factor in active skills. 1428 is the base damage for WW assuming you do it from within the mob, 1016 is the base damage for symbol, and 414 is the base damage of the greatsword auto attack. During the typical perfect rotation you’d use WW to take you from time point 0 to time point 2, Symbol to take you to time point 3, and then need to wait 9 time points before WW was off cooldown at time point 12. You then use WW again to take you to time point 14. I have conservatively estimated 2 seconds per WW and 1 second for the symbol.

This means that you get 2 WW, 1 symbol, and 9 seconds of auto attack dps at a base of 416.8 over a total of 14 seconds, and a further 10 seconds of the 1h auto. Add them all together using the weapon specific effective power multipliers and divide by the total time taken, 24.

I’m not 100% sure on the precise cast time on WW/Symbol, but the base dps figures are taken from both the wiki and in game tests.

To answer your question about how I reached a base of 489 dps for the greatsword by itself:
1428+1428+1016+19 seconds of auto attack dps @ 414dps per 24 second cycle = 11738. 11738/24 = 489. The reason swapping 10 of those seconds for 1h auto attack dps at 416.8dps is so beneficial is that usually the 1h effective power multiplier is a lot higher.

There is obviously something to be said for perfect rotations.. they are unlikely.. but this is the best way I have of giving some kind of estimate. The other flaw is obviously that auto attacks rarely slot perfectly into set amounts of seconds.

To answer your question about middle ground, I’m happy to run any suggestions you have. However I might argue that the middle ground you might look for would simply include the best bang for buck traits mixed with a bunch of survivability gear. Eg 10/30/0/5/25 in pvt if you don’t want to go zerker.

It was incredibly hard to solo cleanse all the conditions in that nightmare place. With a large party the amount of conditions stayed the same but the amount of group cleansing in theory increased. If I remember correctly though, reflects were very useful in there for completely avoiding the conditions.. More shouts means less reflects.

Yeah what foofad and said. Purging flames and absolute resolution do a better job of condi removal than shouts and give you the flexibility to run alternate utilities depending on the situation.

Elusive power works against the vigorous precision minor as you will rarely be low endurance thanks to the vigor.

Try swapping in some valk, knight or pvt armor or weapons while you learn to survive as a zerker.

The only way shouts do a better job of cleansing is if you load up your bar with them which ends up causing you to take things like stability shouts on a fight which might not need stability. When instead you could have taken something more useful like reflect or shield. It also encourages poor thinking of retreats aegis.

Both. I forgot the possible second banner.
Please don’t make me recalculate everything .. /cry.

Having things like a weapon or armor as assassin increases the ep by a fraction of a percent in the best scenarios (15.15.0.20.20) and is a loss at worst (anything with rhs). The value increases If you don’t have spotter/banner and becomes an increase even for 1hs. If you’re rich buy both and alternate, if you’re poor it’s not enough difference to lose sleep over.

Just spotted the Anet forum messed with my formulas via formatting. I’ll fix that later..

I moan about the game a lot.
But gw2 has a lot of logical people behind it and a huge amount of potential.
Any indication of the potential being realised gets me excited.
Looking forward to it!

Hi all, thought some might find this useful.

I have used my excel client of gw2 to calculate effective power and then estimated dps of a variety of specs while using a variety of gear setups.

The specs I tested were:
*15/15/0/20/20
*15/25/0/20/10
*10/30/0/5/25
*10/25/0/10/25
*20/30/0/10/10
*20/25/0/0/25
*0/0/30/30/10

The gear setups I tested were (sigils were always force + accuracy unless otherwise specified):
*Full zerker with night sigil, night + force when duel wielding.
*Full zerker.
*Valk armor/weapons, zerker trinkets.
*Knight armor/weapons, zerker trinkets.
*Soldier armor/weapons, zerker trinkets.
*Full valk.
*Full knight.
*Full soldier.
*Full celestial.

Assumptions I made:
*Scholar runes at all times.
*Spotter (150 precision).
*Banner (170 precision, 15 crit damage).
*25 might.
*25 stacks of bloodlust.
*100% fury.
*100 power, 10% crit damage food.
*+10% damage potion.
*5 active boons power of the virtuous where applicable.
*No unscathed contender.
*25% vulnerability.
Radiance X, Zeal II, Zeal VII for GS & Zeal IX for scepter. Writ of Persistence in Honor whenever possible. RHS whenever 30 in honor.

How did I calculate dps?
By using the effective power / base power to find an overall modifier to the base damage of a weapon. I used 416.8 as the base dps of 1h, 420 as the base dps of non-WoP hammer, 520 as the base dps of WoP hammer, 489 as the base dps of greatsword, 467 as the base dps of scepter. (Note on scepter : I assume all orbs connect. This is highly unlikely unless you’re fighting a large stationary target. This is the best case scenario). All of these numbers reconcile with the skill coefficients and numbers found on the wiki or through testing in the event that the wiki was incorrect (such as whirling wrath).

For average 1h+GS rotations I used:
(
( (Sword EP/916) * (416.8*10) )
+
( (GS EP/916) * (1428+1428+1016+3726) )
)
/24
..where the 1428+1428+1016+3726 shows the two whirling wraths, symbol, and 9 seconds of auto attack.
I also found that even in the typical hammer specs, swapping from hammer to GS for some burst resulted in a dps increase in some scenarios.

All effective power numbers should be reproducible via websites like buildcraft, which I believe uses the same behind the scenes mechanisms as I do.

Anyway, here’s the results in a jpg format:
http://s27.postimg.org/nf571pco3/guarddps.jpg

As you can see.. for gear zerker is obviously the highest dps, usually followed by valk/zerk, then knight/zerk, then soldier/zerk, then full valk, then full celestial, then full knight, then full soldier.
All of the specs performed close to each other besides the 30 val 30 hon spec. The 15/25/0/20/10 hammer build manages to keep up with the 1h/gs ones, being only ~5% or so behind, while the 15/15 variant drops another ~10% or so in exchange for the perma prot & everything else which comes with that type of build. For single target fights I’m a fan of the scepter, but it loses a whole lot of dps when the target is moving or small enough to avoid most of the orbs. I would like to see this turned into a real symbol which guarantees the damage.

I also added damage reduction, hp, and effective hp.. which should act as a way of indicating how much burst damage you can take before you die (otherwise I would have included healing, which becomes far too variable). From this you can see that valk not only out-damaged knight but has more effective hp without heals. I suppose the question on valk vs knight for a touch of survivability comes down to a question of what you see yourself dying from most – burst 1shots etc or a slow war of attrition.

As a bonus I added a full cleric/boon 0/0/30/30/10 selfish build to show that at best it can use hammer + WoP to achieve just under 1/3 the damage a real zerker will do. Not great. With staff camping I’d guess less than half of that, so you may as well just assume this guy is doing 0 dps. Better hope the heals and boons are worth it.

Any questions please ask.

ipan.4356:

Shield and Torch do their job,

If their job is to be terribad.

I played a warrior at release and have always been a warrior in most other games. I still have the most pvp games played on my warrior.

Op in wvw zergs , op in wvw roaming, have always been op in hot join, pretty much op in tourney nowadays, definitely op in pve. Incredibly easy and boring to play too. Any reasons I can give will likely already have been said or will be said soon so I won’t bother. Can’t believe anyone hasn’t by now admitted the above.

CptAurellian.9537:

There was an awesome build guide around here (Spiritual Burning Druid), but ANet considered the spirit weapons to bad to be advertised and thus deleted the guide

swiftpaw.6397:

Tbh I refuse to take pug guards at all now. I go on mine, and if one joins I insta-kick them like the plague. I’m done. I’m 110% done with pug guardians. Filthy leeches, all of them >:(

Staff clerics the lot of them.

I did four fotms today at 29-39. Not high by your standards but all pugs or friendly guildies. Most runs had no blast finishers besides a banner & myself using banner 5, no might besides my virtue/empower, no fury. Nobody using food or consumables besides me. I think a couple were zerkers. This is fairly standard for a lot of casual groups.

The group rarely died when I ran 0/0/10/30/30 and camped with staff. Everyone had perma 15 might, everyone was almost always full hp or quickly brought back to full hp. The runs took a really long time and were dull, but very smooth.

When I ran zerker with the same people, same lack of boons etc, the speed of things was a lot faster. Overall damage wise I could tell I made a huge difference to group dps. Like I said even unbuffed my WW was hitting 15k (without unscathed) and I could burst whole packs of mobs down which would have taken us longer to do before. I suspect in my estimations above where I figured the might on allies would make up a decent portion of dps I was wrong, that only really works when they are as high dps as I would have been if I were a zerker, or higher. Which honestly in these sorts of groups is rare.

Ultimately I think a cleric staff support guard is a decent choice for a bad player, it’s not hard to stand there and provide a boat load of healing to everyone, and if you refuse to play a zerker it’s probably the best of a bad situation. The empower stacks really didn’t add as much as i had hoped, probably for the reasons mentioned above. You could give all the might stacks in the world to a bunker being played by a poor player and it won’t help much.

There were situations however such as mai trin where we simply weren’t good/disciplined enough to stack on her. This lead to more incoming damage than people could survive, and although when she became vulnerable I could burst her down in seconds.. I really felt the staff bunker would have been able to keep everybody alive and provide a much easier fight.

Anyway, I’ll continue playing both sides of the coin for a bit. I like to know both parts to the story. Still think staff cleric is useless in an organised group but surprisingly useful in a bad group. I think it would be surprisingly good in a group of 4 good zerkers who otherwise have no way to stack might, cba to stack might, or want a very strong safety net. I’d probably recommend 4 zerkers and a staff cleric sooner than I would recommend 5 players mixing zerker gear with pvt gear or something to try and get some survivability. Either way if 25 might can be achieved without the guardian the usefulness diminishes.

I gotta say my fractal pugs are smooth but really slow when trying out cleric gear.
Boring as hell.

Swapped to my dps build and hit 15k WW completely unbuffed though. Then we all died to trash mobs :<

Kudos to you for that. Personally I find it more difficult to stay alive as a zerker in a bad group than I do to stay alive as a zerker in a full zerker group. For obvious reasons I suppose. It’s hard to get yourself killed when the bosses die in 30 seconds.

I think that in order to clear a dungeon/fotm smoothly you need to hit one of these:

-Massive dps, enough to drop the target(s) before they can hurt you. Aegis, blind, reflect, invul frames etc. This is proven through speedruns.
-Low dps, low sustain, but perfect evades and avoidance. This can be proven by people like Obal Gandalf-ing Lupi to death.
-Low dps, awful evades, high sustain. Slowly but surely. Very slowly. If you’re lucky some of the group might be zerker, in which case it’ll go faster. But they will still have unbound their dodge button and need help. A decent cleric guard (again; not AH) aims to provide the sustain to a group of otherwise dodgy pugs and is imo, a good candidate to provide this role. I know it’s difficult to keep careless players alive but tbh as long as they’re not completely suicidally awful, it’s doable with the right build.

Without the sustain in the third option I find dodgy groups just die. For example if I’m doing Mai Trin in fotm and the group is all over the place, half bunker, half ranged, half all sorts of weird stuff.. and a couple of people are zerkers.. unless those zerkers are good at dodging (for clarification I am not) then they may take more than their fair share of shadowsteps to the face, take more damage than they have sustain, and die. Ultimately you need to take less damage than you can heal over time. And your heal amount over time is finite. You have a set amount of mistakes you can make.

All I’m saying is that in certain groups, a cleric guard is a decent addition, and imo a boon duration staff cleric is the best variation. Staff guards get more criticism than they deserve, but a lot of that criticism comes from players who would never get any benefit from having them in their party in the first place.

Again to swiftclaw though, she has struck a note with me there. You’re not helping the party or the community long term by being their healbot. The ultimate goal for any group should be a smooth full zerker clear.

That’s a very good point, lead by example.
You know very well how much it feels like talking to a brick wall though when telling Pugs, casuals etc that they should be zerkers. Most of the guardians I speak to in game who were fotm70+ before the patch and are now 50 consider me incorrect and bad for running zerker. Do you honestly feel that’s a war of advice you’ll ever win? Wishful thinking but I suspect there may never come a time when good, well built players of all classes are plentiful.

I don’t call it defeat when grouping with play-how-you-like style players because many of us have friends who got that category or even sit in casual guilds..

Absolutely you’re right that staff guard and bear bow would be laughed out of a good organised group.. But it’s not difficult to figure out whether or not you’re in that sort of group beforehand and build accordingly.

If I sat down and attempted to form a high quality group and ended up with bads then yes that would be defeat.. And I would be a kitten to show up with a staff support guard or bearbow.

But for every day pug/bad/friend/guildy roulette? Staff Guardian does just fine imo.

Not really a fair comparison. Bow bear brings nothing decent in exchange for the loss in Dps. I’m arguing the loss in Dps with a boon dura/cleric staff guard isn’t as horrible as you might think to a group who does not stack might, and brings a huge amount of mitigation and healing to a group who may not otherwise be able to remain alive.

It’s all about tradeoffs and whether you think they are worth it.
I still maintain the view that zerker for organised groups is the best way forward, but I think well used staff guards in less organised groups or Pugs are getting a lot of criticism which should instead be aimed at pvt AH staff guards.

Fror.2163:

Please, post numbers to give weight to your “I think”s. How much damage do you lose in several party setups? Because right now, you’ve convinced no one.

Sure, I like talking numbers. I’m not out to convince anyone of anything really, just trying to demonstrate that I don’t think staff support is completely useless. Healthy discussion.
What I can’t do though is give examples for dozens of party compositions.

Take these two simple scenarios:
916 additional power = 1832 total base power.
50% crit chance, 200% crit dmg = 2748 effective power.
Two 10% damage modifiers (1.21) ? 3325.08.

If I add 20% more power (366.4)… what happens to my effective power?
2198.4 total power.
50% crit chance, 200% crit dmg = 3297.6 effective power.
Two 10% damage modifiers (1.21) ? 3990.096

3990.096 – 3325.08? I gained 665.016 effective power by adding 20% more power. Funnily enough, that is 20% of the effective power I had when I
originally ran the first example. 20% more power resulted in 20% more effective power even after the crit and damage multipliers.

35*12 = 420.
420/Character’s power = % increase in damage as a result of Empower.

In my original post I used a sw/focus guard 10/30/0/5/25 in full ascended zerker gear, magic find food, sharpening stone and 10 points in the power tree.
His power is 2348. 420/2348 = 17.887, which is why in my original post I recorded an increase of 17.9% in his effective power when he goes from 0 might stacks to 12.

In my original post I used a warrior 30/25/0/0/15 in full ascended zerker gear, magic find food, sharpening stone and 10 points in the power tree.
His power is 2560. 420/2560 = 16.4, in my original post I recorded an effective power of 16.4% which again matches my simple formula of 420/character’s power.

In summary : the more power you already have, the less 12 stacks of might will benefit you in percentage terms.

Considering a 30 strength full asc zerker warrior with 250 bloodlust will still only have 2810 power before other might stacks.. I’d say at the least you’re looking at a 15% effective power increase per party member. The key word there though is party member. What if that party member is shockingly bad or is wearing pvt gear? 15-20% extra to his dps is not going to be worth much. In fact you could increase dozens of bunker players’ dps by 20% and still not come close to just adding 1 proper zerker (yourself). If your group is a decent mix of players.. perhaps has a couple of zerkers.. and struggle to stack might permanently.. then I can realistically see an empower guardian adding a respectable amount of dps and a great amount of sustain.

I wonder if AH is the single biggest mistake a Guardian can make.

Sure I much prefer my zerker gear and meta groups.. But when I find myself in a group of casuals my cleric /boon duration 0.0.20.30.20 guard can keep permanent protection, regeneration, 15 might, almost 2k healing per dodge, 600hp per second from battle presence and regeneration combined.. Empower and virtue for 3k burst, and the tool tip for healing breeze is horribly confusing.. I am bursting almost 10k healing to each party member with it. My suicidal pug group were able to facetank butcher in hotw and kohler in ac.

Oh and skale venom consumable on a non zerker.. Allowing all other zerkers to use sharpening stones. That’s a nice efficency touch.

Overall I think in an unorganised group as long as you’re not an ah camper.. You bring a decent amount of Dps to the group via might and a ridiculous amount of sustain and mitigation.

Do you think it is incorrectly implemented then?

There is a difference between complaining and pointing out something which is obviously incorrectly implemented and could even be labelled as a bug. The “zerkers are fine” comments are the funniest replies. People are funny.

If you ever want to improve something, first you must fix any faults. You can’t just build over the top of broken foundations.

I would think the soldier runes worried them more than the knight pieces. Knight really isn’t going to keep you alive much longer than zerker.

Chances are it’s either a one or two hit kill for you.. I you’re lucky you might survive a second hit with knight but it’ll be close.

Scholar runes should be on all zerker gear.

I think staff guardians get a lot of undue hate. If your group can keep 25 stacks of might up at all times then sure they’re a waste of space.
If you’re not an pro organised speedrun group though… if you’re in a pug group.. probably with a pvt shout warrior, condi ranger, bunker ele and dead thief.. those might stacks become a lot more useful.

Don’t get me wrong I completely prefer full zerker groups and enjoy playing my zerker guardian most. I’m fully aware of the benefits. But I’m not in a pro meta guild, my friends mostly don’t know about or care about optimized builds, and I end up pugging and having a laugh most of the time.

I’ve used what I consider fairly common pug loadouts below.

A Sw/focus guardian in zerker/scholar gear, 10/30/0/5/25, banner of disc, 5% power of virtue, 50% fury uptime, magic find food, sharpening stone, zero might stacks sits at 9175 effective power. After 12 stacks of might he’s at 10817. That’s +17.89% effective power.

Likewise a 30/25/0/0/15 warrior using zerker gear, banner of disc, 50% fury uptime, magic find food, sharpening stone and zero might stacks gets 9363 effective power. After 12 stacks of might he’s at 10900. An increase of 16.4% effective power.

If we’re talking about a full pvt/melandru/altruistic healing camper.. ugh yeah they’re no use to anyone. But a good boon duration/cleric staff can be useful.
In a pug group which has half decent player but lacks the coordination to fully build might stacks.. sacrificing almost 100% of the guardian’s dps in exchange for a 0/0/0/30/30 (no AH!) staff camper with 100% boon duration & cleric stats will bring back most of the dps the group lost via perma 12 might (15 if you use 2h mastery) to your group members, add a ridiculous amount of health/sec to your group members and bring large amounts of protection/regen. It’s honestly not a bad deal for groups which aren’t pro. I mean half the time I lay down fire fields and I’m the only person stacking might using focus #5 in pugs anyway. Believe it or not there are even warriors who don’t use FGJ/Banners etc.

laokoko.7403:

The whole point of downscaling is to make sure a lvl80 player have the same power as a low level player.

Low level armor only have 2 stats. That’s why a huge chunk of crit damage is taken out to even the play field.

If you check the other armor with 3 stats. Similar things happened. I don’t see anything wrong with it.

Unfortunately that’s not correct.
Here are stats for a completely naked, untraited level 80 guardian with 1 ascended amulet on.

Soldier amulet:
LA
1042 power
1001 vitality
1001 tough
916 precision (4% crit)
0% crit damage

Kessex
196 power
188 vitality
188 tough
172 precision (4% crit)
0% crit damage

Zerker amulet:
LA
1042 power
916 vitality
916 tough
1001 precision (8% crit)
9% crit damage

Kessex
196 power
172 vitality
172 tough
188 precision (8% crit)
2% crit damage

In all cases apart from the crit damage… the downscaling was to 18.8% of the original stats.
With the soldier amulet your average bonus damage went from being +2% in LA to +2% in Kessex. (No change).
With the zerker amulet your average bonus damage went from being +4.72% in LA to +4.16% in Kessex. (My zerker gear gave me a bigger boost in LA than it does in Kessex).
Scale that up to a full gearset and you see the loss in damage caused by incorrect scaling of crit damage.

Not really. The mob armor will impact a pvt user in the same way it will impact a zerker user.

What if I told you that your +40% condition duration food only gave you +20% condition duration on certain maps? What if I told you that your force sigil only gave you +2% damage on certain maps? What if I told you that your +15% damage modifier from warrior GM strength trait only gave you +7% damage on certain maps?

That is exactly what is happening here.

Crit damage is unfairly downscaled. As most people know, the way to calculate your ‘effective power’ is to run your power through a series of crit chance/dmg modifications followed by overall damage modifications (eg +10% dmg traits). Obviously players need to be scaled.. and if you are in a zone which demands players do half their 80 damage.. then of course power will be halved. Crit damage should therefore remain static if we want to achieve the same benefits from those stats wherever you are in the world as is the case with precision, toughness, vitality, power etc.

Here are my stats when in different places around the world:

LA
51% crit chance
107% crit dmg

Straits of devastation
51% crit chance
90% crit dmg

Fireheart rise
51% crit chance
84% crit dmg

Sparkfly fen
51% crit chance
78% crit dmg

Shatterer
51% crit chance
52% crit dmg

Dredgehaunt cliffs
52% crit chance
37% crit dmg

Harathi hinterlands
52% crit chance
37% crit dmg

Gendarran fields
49% crit chance
24% crit dmg

Kessex hills
48% crit chance
20% crit dmg

Queensdale
33% crit chance
5% crit dmg

At 80 my stats show a 80.07% increase in my average damage thanks to my crit chance and crit damage.
When I fight shatterer or travel in that zone, my stats show a 52.02% increase in my average damage thanks to my crit chance and crit damage.
When I run around dredgehaunt cliffs my stats show a 45.24% increase in my average damage thanks to my crit chance and crit damage.
When I run around kessex hills my stats show a 33.6% increase in my average damage thanks to my crit chance and crit damage.

See the problem?

When I see super fast mob spawns I think “this looks like a good farming spot” not “better not kill the mobs, anet might ban me” and that line of thinking is pretty much exactly what any gamer who has player mmos for the last decade would think.

Maybe it’s because you just banned a bunch of innocent players. Maybe that got you guys in the crosshairs.

We’re all friends until someone mentions tank guardians.

For fractals I have started requesting experienced zerker with decent specs, and gear checking people.
Why? I’m sick of carrying signet rangers, cleric Warriors, etc. Why do players who Cba to read up on correct specs or want to ‘play how they want’ feel they can waste hours of my precious time? That’s ruder than a gear check.

For easy dungeons I’m not so fussed because they’re relatively fast even with bads/bunkers.

Chrazel.7085:

fadeaway.2807:

1h sword and focus. Both

When you have it on both what is the dmg % increase?

Damage modifiers :
zeal, radiance minor, radiance major, potion, virtue, force, night
1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 * 1.05 * 1.1 = 1.7755

zeal, radiance minor, radiance major, potion, virtue
1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 = 1.537305

1h sword and focus. Both

Night on gs when in night dungeons. Otherwise force.

Dem stacking frost spirits.

I was all excited when a ranger joined my fotm today.
Then saw he was full signet and no spirit or spotter :<

CptAurellian.9537:

Empower allies? Did I miss something?

You guys don’t run full shout warriors?