Guild Wars 2

colesy.8490:

Rhialto.8423:

colesy.8490:

PvE is not a condition fest.

Awesome.

Foofad’s got it right. There are plenty of areas in PVE where conditions will destroy you without proper cleansing.

Oh yeah, like … nowhere.

If you’re dying to conditions in PvE you’re just plain bad.

So, this is the part in the grown-up discussion where instead of dismissing evidence, you instead formulate a counter-argument to our specific example of a situation which refutes your original contention.

Torch works okay with basically any burst build. 4→4 sequence is a pretty good spike ability, but other than that it’s a really lackluster weapon.

The reason being Battle Presence doesn’t apply a Boon, it applies a generic non-boon effect. AH only works off of boons. So by that same token, Strength in Numbers doesn’t affect AH either.

Is the pest control for you? Cause I’m seeing a lot of hostility coming out of you that is completely unnecessary. That goes for everyone, really. This isn’t the place to air out your frustrations. OP asked a question, it has been answered, and last I heard from him in game he decided on a Guardian for now. Thread over.

Female Norn, Male Human, either gender Sylvari look great.

That should be pretty obvious. If you just want the most damage possible, use Power gear, then Power/Precision gear as you get access to that, then Power/Precision/Critical Damage gear as that becomes availible around the late 50s early 60s.

It renews at the end of the channel, so bombing all your virtues during the immunity is definitely encouraged.

Aetherblade waved during invasions are impossible without cleansing, there are other areas that are bad too.

Well, to be clear, I don’t think it’s supposed to only apply one second. But who knows.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7;4NF-40M3NGF90;9;49;0TT1;617A18AU;017;1Tu8Soxtbo-Fi0-k7;2Vn5oao5pap5qa-L0L-2i;9;9;9;9;9;9;10-6z

Minor update to the boony-burny build. I’ll be updating the thread on Monday with some house cleaning and a few new tidbits.

I’m having tons of fun with this guy. It’s my do-everything build. Tons of might stacking, tons of boons in general. Hits reasonably hard, and you will burn everything in the room. And it heals pretty well to boot. Definitely my most fun build.

You can convert it to a Consecrations build with a trait swap. You can gut the might stacking part and use different runes too if you want. If you’re in a low condition dungeon you can also swap for Battle Presence. Lots of versatility.

Nothing has been mentioned that I know of, but for my part I hope never. It’s the only thing that makes condition damage worthwhile on my Guardian. Haha.

It’s a stacking issue. If you already have Swiftness applied, and you apply it again with Symbol of Swiftness, it only adds an additional 1 second instead of the full duration you would ordinarily get if you had none on you already.

You’re just mad because you didn’t have the skills to lob a goal from the other end of the map. It’s cool, it’s cool. We understand.

Astralporing.1957:

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

If every single recipe was given to every single player… then the entire concept of recipes would be obsolete.

Having all other different stat sets obtainable with discovery (before celestial gear was introduced) somehow didn’t invalidate the concept of recipes at all.

And yet what do you have to do to make exotic versions of those stats items?

Buy recipes.

Don’t worry about your build too much. You don’t have access to much yet. I’d get Honor 10 next at 30 for Superior Aria and pack on shouts. Once you get to 40 your options really start to open up; Something like 0/15/0/10/5 would be great, for the Justice spam whenever you kill something.

RF is still really good in WvW if you have Indomitable Courage. You can get two guaranteed stomps from popping Courage → RF → Courage.

Mace/Shield is more fun as a warrior most of the time It doesn’t help that Protector’s Strike is so buggy.

How did poison get broken?

I understand. The TP is an integrated part of the game, though. There’s nothing preventing you from getting the recipes other than money. You missed getting them in the event and that sucks, but nothing is stopping you from getting them now. If you couldn’t get them at all, I would be angry too. But you can.

All players do have access. You said so yourself, the recipes are on the TP. The recipes cost about a gold each – if you have trouble getting that, why do you think you can make the armor? The material cost for it is more than the recipe.

What you should be angry at is time-gating. It’s going to take you a minimum of five days per piece to craft.

(SoW -> JI) MB or WW chained to ZD typically kills glass builds instantly of they don’t see it coming. And it’s resistant to counterattack to boot.

For solo roaming definitely Warrior. You CAN as a Guardian but not as well. You have to work twice as hard for the same amount of sustain and half the damage. The difference is that you can swap a couple of trait selections and repurpose yourself into a small group or zerg fighter basically instantly whereas the Warrior is more or less stuck with the solo roaming build.

For zerging, both Warriors and Guardians can support with shouts to varying degrees. Warriors also get banners but you can very quickly move out of the banner AoE in the field and they are only really useful for fighting on objectives. Other than that everything else about warrior utilities is for helping yourself, with the exception of the CC you get in physical utilities. Hammer warriors are good AoE crowd control. Guardians have defensively oriented shouts, and some incredible zerg fighting utilities in Consecrations. Hallowed Ground and Wall of Reflection are bananas. Completely nullify enemy CC in an area the size of Texas for ten seconds or longer with boon duration? Yes please.

To give you an idea; I main Guardian and have since BWE2, and have two Guardians. One is my zerging and small group Guard and one is my solo roam burst Guard. I don’t play the solo roam one anymore, I play my Warrior for that, and do a hell of a lot better.

Definitely level while using the cheapest food and sharpening stone you can get your hands on – some cost pennies, and they yield exp boosts that help out a lot. It’s 20-25% more exp depending on the foods.

If you care about travel time, running Save Yourseles and Retreat gives you almost 100% Swiftness uptime traited for Duration.

While they suck at 80, Spirit Weapons are actually pretty good while leveling. Sword has decent uptime even untraited for, so you might consider that for keeping your damage up. You want to make sure you have at least one condition clearing ability like Smite Condition or Contemplation of Purity on your bar for preventing deaths from bleeds and confusion and the like. Later on you’ll need a stunbreak too, especially in the 40s and up. Doubly so when you start fighting Risen a lot.

I personally find the hammer to be the easiest one to level with. It does plenty of damage including great AoE, and gives you Protection constantly which helps tank. I leveled my second Guardian with Spirit Sword and a hammer all the way to 80.

Traits wise you can go almost any direction and be okay. The only mandatory trait is Honor 5 for Vigorous Precision. That’ll help you out a ton.

For gear, run a split of tank stats and DPS stats. When you start getting access to gear with critical damage, always put the crit damage gear in your shoulders, gloves, boots, and accessories (not rings) first. Those slots give favorable crit damage per stat point. Then you can put Vit/Toughness gear in the remaining slots. If you learn to dodge early on you’ll find that you won’t need too much of that.

It’s all good, it’s very poorly explained most places. Some skills also behave slightly differently. I think Mighty Blow is the only skill that behaves like a leap for purposes of field selection and priority, but yields a blast.

The Healway build can be adapted for zerg play pretty quickly. Swap a weapon to staff, and some of the utilities to the ones he recommends for group work.

Generally speaking the main difference with zerg builds is that you want to pack on the survivability stats so you can deal with all the AOE and cleaving going on. You also want group support, as much as you can comfortably run. That means at least 10 in Virtues for improved consecrations. Armor wise you’ll want a mix of Soldier’s and whatever else suits your fancy; if you want to heal, bring Cleric as well. If you don’t want to heal, bring Berserker. Shoot for 2500-3000 Armor, 16000 HP minimum so you can survive getting focused by burst classes.

Hammer is a PvE murder machine; the extra AOE damage off of the symbol is quite good, and Mighty Blow gives you access to Blast combos which are quite neat. So if you work with another person with lots of combo fields (like an Elementalist for example) you can stack lots of different effects.

It’ll probably never be fixed. I’m assuming you mean the fact that all the attacks root you in place. I’m not sure why, but with the exception of Snow Leopard they all do that, and it’s quite annoying.

The main thing to remember is that sigil cooldowns are global. If you have an on weapon swap sigil on one hand, and a sigil of blood on the other, your 9 second on weapon swap cooldown will prevent you from getting procs of blood until it wears out.

Proteus.6320:

foofad.5162:

10/25/0/10/25

10/30/30/0/0

10/30/0/30/0

Three common DPS specs off the top of my head. What are we lacking, exactly?

An actual condition bunker build. Or any build that actually uses condition gear… like every other class.

I wasn’t directing that at you as much as the OP. But even then; Condition bunker isn’t DPS. It’s condition bunker.

With 20 points in Honor for Writ of Persistence you can shotgun your traits all over the board and still win at PvE using a Hammer. It’s basically the sleepwalker’s choice. Use a Staff as your off-weapon for traveling and you’re good to go. Naturally you won’t be able to do this til you unlock the second level of traits.

One thing that I recommend you do is read the Guardian FAQ thread in the stickies section. That should answer your most burning questions. Beyond that, don’t worry too much – if you haven’t started dying horribly at every turn, you’re probably doing okay.

The two signets you’re using are fine, but I’d also pick up Retreat! for those times when you need to get across a map in a timely manner (just a sanity thing), and once you get to your second tier of utility skills swapping over to Save Yourselves! and Stand your Ground!. Those two shouts are in probably half of every guardian’s utility bar. They’re both stunbreakers so they’ll help you out when you get into content that likes knocking you down and out.

Beyond that, the world’s your oyster.

10/25/0/10/25

10/30/30/0/0

10/30/0/30/0

Three common DPS specs off the top of my head. What are we lacking, exactly?

Greatsword is always going to have better area DPS. Especially with Permeating Wrath. It just tends to suffer against single targets although that’s not always the case. There are some good threads on PvE DPS on the Guru forums.

ArmoredVehicle.2849:

I don’t want to sound rude but you’re being childish to complain about this. The guild’s armor changes according to it’s banner and you knew this risk and besides, there are many other armors to choose from.

The point of this thread is not that his guild ruined his style. It’s that Anet screwed him.

Ignore the Attack stat, it’s functionally useless. Damage is based on a skill specific coefficient which is a multiplier of your Power stat.

Axe autoattack has higher coefficients than Sword autoattack; it hits harder when your stats are otherwise the same.

You have plenty of options. 10/25/0/10/25 shouts and Greatsword, 10/30/30/0/0 meditations Sword/Focus, 10/30/0/30/0 shouts Sword/Focus, etc. Main thing is: stack as many multipliers as possible. Fiery Wrath, Radiant Power, Power of the Virtuous, Force sigils, and so on. Virtually every DPS build worth its salt uses at least 10/25 for +20% damage to burning things.

You mean the retaliation boon? It’s not the greatest for PvE because monsters don’t swing at you as quickly as players. You can get tons of retaliation with any build using a Greatsword and the retaliation uptime trait in Virtues. Leaping out of fields of light gives you retaliation on top of the symbol.

4 works because you get the first combo field you encounter along the leap regardless of your start or end point.

A poor Charr’s For Great Justice.

You’re a little off. Leaps will activate the first field they encounter at any point along the path traveled, prioritizing the oldest first any time there are multiple fields in the path traveled. Same deal with Mighty Blow. It’s confusing because the combo on Leap of Faith activates immediately on casting and the combo on Mighty Blow doesn’t activate until the hit, so it often looks like it’s behaving differently.

Ex 1: Light field is dropped, followed by Fire field – you GS leap to a target and both you and the target are within the field. You gain Retaliation.

Ex 2: Someone drops a fire field on your target that you aren’t in. You drop a light field under yourself. You GS leap to your target. You gain Retaliation.

Ex 3: You drop a Light field under yourself, and your target is not in the field. You use Mighty Blow and strike outside of the field. You gain Area Retaliation.

Edit: Oh, also that’s already partly covered on Q29.

Also the artillery barrage skill is super neat.

To be fair, GitHub isn’t a dodgy filesharing website, it’s a well respected programming resource. But you shouldn’t need third party tools to do something this basic.

Mesmer is very entertaining once you get to 80 in WvW and PvE, and can be really tricky to play against in SPvP. Problem is I have never been more miserable in actually leveling up a class than I was with my Mesmer. Oy vey.

But don’t let that stop you, it’s great fun.

Snow Leopard is a little overrated, frankly. It’s a 4 minute escape ability and that’s basically all it is. And if you forget to untarget your attacker when you Charge, well… so much for that.

I hear Hounds of Balthazar are pretty good, and the Asura utilities can be useful since they apply conditions.

Yeah, there’s a tourny. They won’t change any balance til after that.

You are preaching to the choir sir. Even my small 50 person guild suffered from this.

I have always been a big fan of the Krytan mace, and the Guild mace is nice too although I wish the haft were longer.

Solo roaming WvW. Virtually no reward but the adrenaline shakes are fun. Exploring is also fun – picking a map and just wandering around off the beaten path. Trying out new wonky builds in dungeons. RP. There’s lots to do.

Vol.5241:

You bought those skins without ever considering that they were going to be sold.

Actually I didn’t find out until after I got the skin that they were account bound. I always intended to sell it and was disappointed I couldn’t.

But that’s neither here nor there, really. The issue is this: I didn’t do anything wrong. I purchased the skin with my ticket as Arenanet intended me to. Because I didn’t want to use the skin, and in hopes that it would eventually become sellable, I never used it. Now, Arenanet is allowing people who did something unintended – that is, never redeem the ticket – to now take advantage of that fact to make money. In the case of the fused weapons, a lot of money. While it is true that I haven’t lost anything in the sense that nothing was taken away from me, you can’t tell me not to be a little upset to pull up the trading post and see that the item I hung on to in case this very thing happened can’t be liquidated into 250 gold like others can. Other people are being rewarded for their patience and I am not, over a minor technicality. It’s not fair, and it’s upsetting tome as a customer to be treated differently – however unintentionally – than others.

Apologies for typos, I’m using my phone.

PvE or Mists? Things can be broken on one and not the other; wouldn’t be the first time.