Guild Wars 2

Kharel Arhew.1437:

Depends on the situation. If you have 15 in honor, chances are you have permanent (or near-permanent) vigor anyway, so using a dodge every now and then for healing when your endurance is full isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and you’re rarely at full health in WvW except out-of-combat. That being the case, the extra healing power will help keep you topped off. You can dodge 4 times for every Empower you can get off if you have vigor (ignoring the cooldown reduction; that reduces it to 3 times per Empower).

Empower also heals for more than twice what Daring does. With 1k healing power you’re looking at 2.5k from Empower and 1.15k from Daring. Detonate an Orb of Light for an additional 1300 every 8-12 seconds. So if you’re rotating between Empower and Orb detonations and Mace every swap cooldown, getting in 2 full mace AA chains (500~ healing each), plus the regen from Mace (255/tick), focus, or another 1500 from detonating Shield of Absorbtion, and well…

Point is, Clerics with only Selfless Daring is not nearly as useful as Clerics with Mace or Staff, to the point of being silly without at least one or the other if not both.

Minor grammar update, apparently I can’t spell.

Empower scales 1:1 as well and doesn’t require you to throw away dodges that should be used to avoid big hits, imo.

Sadly there’s no such thing as an ideal do-everything build, and you’ve got a pretty broad range of activities there. If your goal is to hold things alone, you don’t have a whole lot of other concerns besides making yourself as powerful as possible, but any time you’re in a group you definitely owe it to your group to picket their defenses as well as yours.

That said: Both of these are group-centric and not solo minded at all. You’re sacrificing a lot of personal damage for a lot of group support. PoV and Absolute Resolution are generally thought of as some of the least selfish support options. The second build is a terrible use of Cleric’s gear since you have zero useful heals to take advantage of your healing power. You only really see Clerics gear used in conjunction with healing weapons like Mace and Staff on account of their direct heals and Regeneration output. So keep that in mind.

yLoon, I just checked in game and the damage is the same as it has always been. It has a coefficient of 2.25 before and after the patch. The burning ticks twice, the first is when the skill is first activated and the last is right as it ends. The first tick is for 9 seconds, the second is for 3 seconds. This is the same behavior it has always had. You can throw the fire before the skill ends to toss the last tick at your target.

Water Blasts give a lot more healing than Mace if you have them regularly in your group composition.

I added another sample build. I played around with it for a bit and had a good time in AC and low level fractals. Very bizarre to play though, the style is pretty radically different from the norm. Going to add a defensive pseudo-boonway/healway next.

Sorry, I’m an idiot. I meant Zealous Blade. Better, but you’ll save your sanity by having all of your armor be one thing and all of your accessories be another. Then when you buy more sets later for future builds, you won’t have to mix and match so much.

Ahhh, yeah. I should elaborate on that in the guide that once you hit the point at which you’re getting 100% burning uptime, there’s no reason to increase burning duration; If your rotation is such that you have so many VoJ procs and you’re using things like Purging Flame or a torch, if you’ve got enough individual sources that you burn them 100% of the time it doesn’t matter how much extra time is left on the stack. So you should shoot for 100% uptime, not 100% duration, basically.

And that 100% uptime only has to be during the expected length of the fight; you don’t have to generate a build that has 100% uptime forever.

Use Greatsword Power, not Shattered Aegis. Pure of Heart likewise isn’t useful for you. Switch your heal to Shelter, use it pro-actively to block. Switch Runes of the Guardian to 5 Citadel + 1 Ruby to get you some much-needed Fury. You have way too much toughness and way too little power; Frankly with a Meds build I always like to go for higher damage to take advantage of your mobility and durability, so I’d do Valkyrie armor and Berserker trinkets. Huge damage improvement. If you’re insistent on being sturdier, use Soldier and Berserker.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by “make it take longer to see results” for me? You kind of lost me there. I don’t see any kind of downside with increasing burning duration aside from the obvious ‘you could be using those runes/food/whatever for something else’.

It’s mainly your gear, but your traits aren’t set up for it either. 10/30/30/0/0 and all Berserker will get you something like 2200 power, almost 400 more than you currently have, which will contribute massively to your damage.

You’ll have to show us your build so we can actually identify what is going wrong for you. If you notice, the guy that made that video actually listed his build in the description of the video, so you can always just copy that and try it.

It’s fun. I usually run a might stacking DPS build in PvE and right now I’m working on various burning builds to see how viable that is. DPS guardians work fine. You can squeeze a lot of utility into them even while doing above average damage. They work well in WvW too – there’s a thread floating around with a video of a full berserker guardian bursting people down somewhere. Pretty cool.

It’s seriously so bad. Even running a 50 person guild was a nightmare.

1: nearly, with Save Yourselves and Retreat + boon duration and Superior Aria
2: not beyond Swiftness
3: Sword, Greatsword, Scepter
4: Sword, Greatsword, anyhing if you have Judges Intervention

Weapon speed really doesn’t matter though. If you want mobility, have leaps, teleports, and Swiftness handy. If you want to stay mobile make sure you have stunbreaks and condition removal.

Eventually I’m gonna make a great big giant table with all of that kind of good stuff, right now I’m working on some other aspects, but right now in that sample build I have a “maximum DPS” listed which also includes full might stacks.

Hammer is the easiest leveling weapon in my opinion, but it can also be boring. Sword/Focus is another good set, much more engaging. Mace/shield is also sturdy.

As far as your gear goes, for leveling up just focus on power and precision.

Guardians don’t have to be tanky, by the way! There’s a lot of innate tank to them, so they can typically get away with going full damage specs pretty well.

I figured out what I was doing wrong. I was adding 1 to the critical multiplier; saying 1.5 was your baseline multiplier, when in this case it’s not, it’s .5.

Hey, can someone mathy (I actually hate math) check this for me?

DPS for autoattack chain is given as the following:
((((Autoattack 1 + 2 + 3)) * (1+(critical damage multiplier * critical chance)))/AA chain total time)+(Burning damage * Burning uptime * AA chain total time)

Seems right but I feel stupid right now.

Found a big fat nasty error in my DPS calculations, will be updating the appropriate sections soon.

Brutaly.6257:

@foofad

I see your point regarding duration and aoe but the issue is that ele/engi/etc covers our burns and when i played around with burning you had to max burndamage to see those number flickering by. In short i dont think its enough with duration.

As long as those Eles and Engineers don’t have more condition damage than you do, your burns should take priority over theirs. It doesn’t have to be maxed out, just greater. But it’s very true that they’re an issue; Burning is not a very cooperation-friendly condition, even among conditions in general. I imagine Necromancers and Thieves have the same issue with each other and Poison.

Your experience is still valid. I’m not quite to the point where I will directly advocate a build yet, but my thoughts so far are that condition damage is a bad idea for Guardians and you’re better off not gearing for it. Instead, I think the goal should be to increase duration for various reasons.

Also yes, Permeating Wrath is an AoE centered on the Guardian and not the target. This makes it a bit strange to use with Scepter, and slightly awkward with staff, but since Staff is practically a melee weapon anyway it’s not as noticeable.

Just a note, a lot of the analysis is still preliminary – I’m working on more, better metrics to compare builds against. Just comparing DPS doesn’t cut it.

NumenorLord.6539:

foofad.5162:

didn’t stand there and LET them apply 20 stacks of bleed to me.

If you play with SY and melee you’re gonna get the bleed stacks of the other party members cause you’re gonna draw them to you, thou if you were in zerker gear it’s not likely to use SY. I didn’t LET Mai Trin give me 20 stacks, I GOT them intentionally.

Aswell the thread said what has the dungeon taught YOU, it’s childish to think everyone can have the same experience. If you had an efficient run with full zerker good for you, people who runs similar setup might want to lookup in this thread for what you have to say, but not everyone is gonna agree with you and that’s what so cool about this game: Diversity.

For the german guy who says that has no friends, well that sucks. Thou I think what we all meant for friend is the people that appear on the list when you press the Y hotkey, not your lifetime blood-pact friend who grew up with you.

Absolute Resolution → SY works great. So does SY → Contemplation of Purity for even more boon fun.

akamon.2769:

just a quick note re: Staff and VoJ. i read somewhere, most likely Wiki saying that one attack that hits multiple enemies won’t count kitten hits, but rather 1 hit. which is what i assume the Staff #1 is. so it’s worth testing though. if not, symbol of swiftness traited larger / longer can do the trick, similar to the hammer mentioned.

I don’t know what it may have been like way in the past because I didn’t start really using staff until probably January, but VoJ always counts off of number of enemies struck and not individual attacks made. Staff is included in this, and if you hit 5 enemies with the autoattack you’ll 100% proc VoJ every time. Just double-checked in the mists.

It almost doubles the DPS of staff sometimes, depending on your condition damage.

I don’t even like math!

Err, 5k+ autoattack aren’t fake. Against 25 vuln with 25 might in a full berserker setup I’ve hit 6.5k Sword Waves before. I can math it out if you want but it’s completely doable. You can get higher than that too.

Blasino.3128:

I was curious on the effect of -condition duration food. If it were to drop burning to under 1 second does that mean damage does not apply?

Correct, any time your duration drops below whole seconds you lose a tic due to it only applying at the end of every second.

Massive revision in progress, please be patient while the thread is updated.

Massive revision in progress, please be patient while the thread is updated.

Exedore.6320:

You used to be able to remove multiple conditions with it by moving in and out of the circle. I don’t know if that still works.

I believe it does, because you can apply multiple applications of Burning that way.

Massive revision in progress, please be patient while the thread is updated.

Massive revision in progress, please be patient while the thread is updated.

Massive revision in progress, please be patient while the thread is updated.

Massive revision in progress, please be patient while the thread is updated.

Massive revision in progress, please be patient while the thread is updated.

While you wait, take a look at some of the burn-conscious build threads people have been coming up with since the update:

messiah.1908: Why hybrid is the new you

Power-Melting Guard

Blasino.3128: Blasino Burning Build

Sammpo.2763: Condition Guardian PvP Build

Unless it has been fixed, it doesn’t pulse every second. It only removes one condition immediately on cast, and possibly every time you enter and exit the ring. I’ll test it again at some point.

Edit: Just tested in the mists, does not pulse at all. It applies all burning immediately, and cures one condition on everyone in the field immediately.

Oh! That makes perfect sense. I had that during the middle of the week so we had a decent bonus.

Drop one tick off of Symbol of Swiftness – you’re guaranteed to miss the first pulse no matter what you do because you are required to be using Staff in order to cast it initially. First hit always deals damage immediately on cast.

Edited (after all this time!) with an accurate Whirling Wrath coefficient.

Uhhh, I guess whatever 2200 power + 25 might stacks is.

What do you mean about life stealing dual scaling?

To clarify what Blix mentioned, if you drop a Staff Symbol of Swiftness and then immediately swap to your Greatsword, you will get healed per enemy hit on each remaining pulse of the symbol after you swapped. Same deal with Smite (Scepter 2), and other symbols.

It’s kind of strange actually, I don’t have any healing power beyond like 5 points in Honor and I was getting ticks of 27 off it.

I bound it to C, myself, since I do use WASD for movement. I can hit it with my index finger or thumb.

Target the gate directly. It should go directly into the center of the gate. If it doesn’t strike any players on the way, you can directly control the direction it travels, but it takes getting used to. Basically, imagine that on top of your character having a direction that he or she is facing at any one direction (yaw on the Z axis) your character also has a direction that it is currently pitched (pitch on the X axis). This pitch is determined based on where your camera was pointing when you last moved. So try this: Point your camera 45 degrees in the air, walk forward briefly, then cast Orb of Light. It should fire into the air. Repeat, only this time face the camera directly forward when you briefly walk forward, and it’ll fire directly in front of you. It’s strange but it works.

The detonation does indeed have a visual effect. It bursts into light and makes a “sparkly” sound, but it’s not super obvious in heavy fighting.

For Ray of Judgement, you’ll have to target the gate. It’s basically a Chain Lightning-like spell that bounces between targets. If you’re looking to apply more direct healing like you would in other MMOs, you’ll be mostly disappointed with Guardians. All of our healing is tied to point blank AOEs of various sorts, including Empower and shield #5 and Sanctuary and so on.

If you want to get more healing and support in for people on rams, I’d spec into ranged Consecrations and drop sanctuaries on them. You can also stand next to the ram and pop shield 5. Also, Tome of Courage’s heal is spammable and good in a pinch.

Hope that helps.

Nekroseth, before you get all kitten about not having any IRL friends that play the game, consider that all they mean by “play with friends” is that you play with people you’re friendly with in game and can cooperate with to beat a dungeon.

Secondly, nothing about running full Berserker means you can’t bring appropriate utilities. You can bring everything you mentioned – Condition removals, reflection, blocks/shields, and all the other options a team needs… in utility slots. It’s not like you gear for Wall of Reflection.

Seconding Inspired Virtue. It’s spammable might due to synergy with your Radiance minors.

Just so you know, Attack is a meaningless stat as it isn’t included in any damage calculations. Power is what matters.

Unless it was changed, A Fire Inside doesn’t use your condition damage. It’s something on the order of 600~ condition damage, which is typically higher than you will ordinarily achieve. To give you an idea, for me A Fire Inside ticks for 450~ whereas my personal burning is 330~.

If you are after damage, A Fire Inside is mandatory for SW builds. Massive damage increase.

Edited to add: Shield is incredibly good in range heavy fights. Giganticus Lupicus and Grawl fractal boss spring immediately to mind.

EDIT: I lied. I think it was changed at some point, possibly when they made Spirit Weapons vulnerable to damage. I no longer deal more burning damage with spirit weapons than I do personally, it’s the same.