Guild Wars 2

Sword does cleave. It’s just that the last attack in the AA chain is a cone, and not an arc. But it hits like a truck, truly. Actually, trucks hit like sword.

For WvW all that need be said is consecrations. Hallowed Ground and Wall of Reflection are incredible tools. The rest is more complicated, but the short version is that a Guardian is much easier to play as support than Mesmer. It doesn’t require any elaborate skill combos. It’s all one shot AoE kind of stuff, or built into your weapons. Shouts are a good example of this.

Well for starters, don’t use celestial trinkets. They are terrible. You’re better off with dedicated stuff. Leave your accessories as berserker and use whatever rings you need in order to get the stats you want.

Anyhow, that aside, if you’re interested in support in PvE dungeons then that pretty much means boons. Use a staff and Empower with boon duration for a net DPS increase for your party. Healing is only good in cases where your group is unfamiliar with the content and needs the breathing room.

WvW is a little different. Support in WvW means Might to some extent, but mostly Stability. Hallowed Ground, Stand your Ground, Wall of Reflection, and to a lesser extent Sanctuary are what you want to think about. So that means twenty points in Virtues for sure. The rest is basically up to you. If you want to be able to deal damage still you can pop 30 in Radiance for RHS, or stick with 15 and put the rest in Honor and Valor as you need it. Healing power works somewhat better in WvW – look at Chris’s Healway build. It can be tweaked for higher group utility.

Frankly I wish that there were more abilities with combos. For all classes, not just us. It really sucks to have a build that can’t produce any combo finishes AT ALL, like mace/shield scepter/torch, etc. Necromancers only have like one combo finisher at all, and it’s on staff.

Yep, sword’s great. It’s great in WvW too – ZDing Kill Shots is a lot of fun.

Yeah, ultimately that’s the most frustrating part of this, is finding ways to exploit it without dipping into condition damage beyond Radiance.

That’s a little closed minded. The power primary stat combo gear is all usable. Because of the reasons I stated, PVT actually has the highest power out of any gear combo. You can take advantage of that if you’ve already got high critical hit chance from things like RHS, for example, to give yourself some breathing room in defensive stats.

PVT isn’t the worst. It’s a power primary stat combo, and the toughness and vitality both contribute to your damage by proxy of consumables and Retributive Armor. Cleric’s, for example, is a lot worse.

The trick with Unscathed Contender is to use Retreat right before your main burst. Works great with single hit stuff like torch 4, Mighty Blow, Shield of Wrath, and so on – but it works well for Whirling Wrath too.

I’m trying to find it for you, it was on reddit a while back. I must be searching for the wrong thing. I believe it was just icons though, but they may have had names too.

Something like 5 additional conditions have been datamined, so it’s entirely possible we’ll receive a new one at some point. I’m personally an advocate of adding a new condition to our current non-damaging or low damage attacks, like Flashing Blade and Chains of Light.

Do whatever’s most fun for you. In PvE, with the exception of high level fractals, you can sleepwalk through most content. More damage is always going to “win” if your goal is the fastest clear times on content, but the tankier the spec the more forgiving it’ll be of your mistakes. If you go full berserker now, unless you’re used to being full berserker on other classes, you’ll probably be taking quite a few dirt naps. It might be worth it to transition over time.

It’s so incredibly awkward to use torch 5 for cleansing, I’d advocate PoV/Shouts or Purging Flames or something like that before torch any day.

Just FYI: Mace autoattack is slower than sword, so even though the total damage is just about as good if not a bit higher than a sword autoattack chain, the overall DPS is worse. It also doesn’t cleave on the last hit. You can sort of make up for this with extremely careful use of Protector’s Strike. As long as you block a hit within a second of casting it you’re generally looking at a net DPS increase, but if you don’t, you’re boned.

Also, Torch 5 is abysmally bad in terms of damage. It only cleaves 3 targets and it does extremely poor damage for its cast duration.

I agree that early activation on the mace would be nice. It would basically give you a reliable area condition cure. The problem is the mace whirl only produces one projectile. It needs to be fixed to fire more than that.

We already have a massively powerful blast finisher on hammer – asking for blasts on shield and staff is a bit much. Don’t forget that focus 5 is already a blast.

Might and Vuln. It’s not hard in a group, slightly more difficult solo but doable.

Pffbbghbtbtbtt. You call yourself a berserker convert and you don’t even use berserker/berserker trinkets?

Fun fact, Shelter used to heal about 30% more in Beta. Those were the good old days. Shouts were 1200 range, too.. *sigh*

There was no patch note to indicate it, nor does anything about the tooltip description suggest that is how it is supposed to function.

It does. Just double checked in the mists. BTW, I think you’ll find that you’ll do better without condition damage gear. You’ll still have decent burn damage while having way, way better direct damage.

Ditch the torch! You’ll be getting tons of burning even without it.

Except that’s not how it works. It’s one AOE heal. That’s how it was before the patch. Before the patch, if you didn’t successfully teleport to anyone, no one got healed.

juno.1840:

EM procs are capped at one every 5 seconds — it’s not that amazing and doesn’t improve much with symbols. You were probably proc’ing EM every 5s with or without symbols. I find 2H mastery much better than EM due to the 20% increase in skill usage (which is 20% more symbol action).

EM is 1 second internal cooldown.

Let me just remind everyone that the OP asked about PVE and dungeons – For roaming, you can run whatever you want, but with the exception of Shield being useful in certain fractals and dungeons with heavy range, I can’t think of any time when the sword and hammer would actually survive long enough to be any more useful than a shout.

Persistence is generally better than Merciful for the reason Akamon just stated; it lets your Protection carry into your mace rotation. It doesn’t heal THAT much, and longer durations of Regen will aid you just as as much.

Edit: Qualifier: if you already have permanent regen and prot, Merciful resumes being better.

Keep in mind, Empowering Might is very good with symbol builds because typically you’re getting very regular, AoE hits off which allow you to get consistent EM procs even if you have bad critical hit chance. Symbol builds are much more forgiving of low crit (in terms of synergy) for this reason.

Psychol.5783:

K, I figured out that I can sacrifice 10 pts from radiance, how many pts in Virtues do I need to stack up 25 might?

Virtues alone won’t cut it. If you want perma 25 might, you need to build your runes and traits very specifically. Boon duration, multiple might sources, etc etc. I outlined the basics in my earlier reply.

Yeah, you’re completely disregarding the fact that if you block anything more than about a thousand damage with Shelter then your effective healing with it eclipses Dwayna. Dwayna is terrible. Use Shelter proactively, not retroactively.

Which is also pretty bad, as it only affects two of them and 50% of bad is only 50% less bad.

Hate to be a Debbie Downer but Spirit Weapons are awful nowadays, things were much better when they were invincible.

Deep in Zeal, which makes it basically useless.

Actually in his defense Scepter is awesome in trials. Immobilizing the looters is a godsend. But yeah, if you were doing fine without it don’t worry about it.

Might is easy to stack. Greatsword auto gives it, as does Empowering Might and the staff skill Empower. With some boon duration you can get quite a lot. With Battle or Strength sigils it can go even higher. Vuln is also easy to stack with sword/focus + Greatsword and the Radiance trait whose name I forget that causes you to apply vuln when you blind things.

If you’re talking about autoattacking, absolutely. A zerk Guardian with decent boons and vuln on target can hit for 12k or higher with a full Sword autoattack chain. That’s 3.5k/3.5k/5k.

Tarsius.3170:

foofad.5162:

In case it wasn’t clear, Monk’s Focus does NOT stack with Merciful Intervention’s heal. MF only works with Smite Condition, Judge’s Intervention, and Contemplation of Purity.

I thought I’d test this in the mists with 0 Healing Power, and I’m seeing some very bizarre behaviour.

Without Monk’s Focus you’ll consistently get a 1960 heal from MI with or without an ally in range to teleport to.

But with Monk’s Focus you’ll get 2×1960 heal without an ally available and 3×1960 if you successfully teleport. That’s almost 6k of healing!

The question being, is this confined to just sPvP or does this behaviour carry elsewhere?

In previous versions Monk’s Focus used to completely fail if there was no target to teleport to.

That has to be a bug – before this patch it did nothing. Well, enjoy it while it lasts.

Sentinel is horrendously expensive, use Soldier’s. You’re overtanked, I’d exchange some toughness for power. Be prepared to do very little damage, with very little party support beyond healing. IMO, figure out a way to give your party might to make up for your poor damage output.

In case it wasn’t clear, Monk’s Focus does NOT stack with Merciful Intervention’s heal. MF only works with Smite Condition, Judge’s Intervention, and Contemplation of Purity.

Welp, glad there’s new skins, but I’m also equally disappointed in the lack of rapier action. Lame.

Which bug are you referring to?

That’s why switching it to only display in combat is the best solution. No balance issues, and it solves the vanity/visual problem.

Yeah, Sword autoattack chain is about 10-12k buffed as a zerk guardian.

And in classic Guild Wars 2 forum style, the first two responses are polar opposites.

Check out the Healway Guardian thread for why healing in WvW can be extremely effective. Generally speaking the only time Healing Power is worthwhile in dungeons is to carry poorly performing teammates. If your group is competent, you can forego it entirely. If you pug a lot though, you might get some use out of it, but be prepared for runs to take longer.

In dungeons, it’s not worth it, no. In WvW it’s nice though.

That’s kind of like asking if you should roll a Necromancer if you already have an Elementalist.

I’m still holding out for a laser longbow.

Sandra Martino.3870:

60k+ in 4 seconds? Explain please and what chain?

Devils has already come off of the 60k claim, he was just misreading how the combat text is rendered.

Hunter.4783:

Its called common sense Brah. Now, how about we stop talking about BK (though im pretty sure his ego is through the roof right after reading this thread) and focus on the matter at hand?

So not only would you rather kitten-talk someone than provide substantive evidence, you dismiss the need for substantive evidence all together in favor of making baseless assumptions.

Appealing to the masses does not constitute proof.

Hunter.4783:

CptAurellian.9537:

So I suggest that you think twice about your anti-berserker rants. That kind of rubbish is as annoying as Guanglai’s permanent anti-AH rants.

GK loses all credibility the moment he claims Guard DPS > Warrior DPS. I was thinking of registering to that scrub site (gw2guru) just to try to contest him but considering how he spams it and thinks the guard page belongs to him, i decided not to.

So instead of proving him wrong, you kitten-talk him.

You stay classy now, you stunning example of persuasive argumentation.

Projectiles have a flat 20% chance to trigger combos.

“Rant” is a value judgement used to discredit an argument based purely on its delivery. Inelegantly delivered proof is no less valid, regardless of how offensively it is rendered.

At least GK backs his rants up with math.