I’m one of the people that happened to be on right when the event went live too, and didn’t get anything as well. Very sad. Oh well.
Well, don’t try it without a coordinated group. Good lord.
There are so many z-axis targetting issues it’s not even funny. Sword Wave isn’t the only one, Staff auto has issues too, particularly hitting things below the character. Greatsword leap still flings you into the air and drops you down instead of sending you directly at a lower target,
I don’t recommend going with +healing gear as a guardian, because of scaling issues and various other concerns. If you want to be a healer you can still get pretty far with normal gear and using mace/staff as your weapons. If you don’t use mace or staff, you’re not a healer.
Altruistic Healing is a good intro build to get your sea legs but you’ll eventually find that it’s something of a crutch build, and you’ll want to move on to something more specialized. It’s a good way to feel invulnerable in dungeons but the damage is not the best.
Yeah, it’s been like that since beta. Whack it with your alternate weapon.
Drop Strength in Numbers, use Purity. Then use Shelter instead of Signet of Resolve. If you aren’t traited for signet cooldowns and you have Purity, Shelter is the better option for its utility as a block.
So that means I have no right to an opinion then. Ok, fine.
No one told you that. No need to be touchy. Other people are welcome to their opinions too.
Personal opinion. I think Memory of the Sky, Whispers Secret Staff and the Guild Pillar are really cool looking. There’s a few others I like too. I do think that overall, a lot of the skins that launched on release for weapons are terrible. The new ones, particularly the guild models, are much much better.
Q E R T I get, but C with your thumb? That’s not comfortable at all if you have long fingers.
I use 1-5, alt 1 instead of 6 for heals, Q and E for first two utilities, mouse thumb button for third, shift-space for elite. Class mechanics are set to C (it’s not a big deal if I’m not spamming), Shift Q, Shift E, Shift R. R is set to autorun, V is dodge, and my other mouse thumb button is target nearest. Works for me.
Omnomberry Pies, Sigils of Blood, and not taking damage in the first place. “In your face” sounds like a full endurance bar.
Yeah, leave the rubies in the armor unless there is a rune set you like. Pack is very close to the same damage bonus and it has a cool set bonus. You’d probably get Soldier gear quicker in dungeons than you would farming Karma. A lot quicker. Some dungeons only take 20 minutes to complete, and with this build you’d be doing fine in them. It’s worth considering. They aren’t that hard.
As far as gear and other traits for standard RHS builds go, there’s a lot of variety, really. You see RHS + pure of voice, RHS + monks focus, RHS + power of the virtuous… It’s easy to get creative. The only gear that is absolutely bar none an abysmal choice for Guardians is condition damage.
There are loads of threads on this already. Search my username, I’ve left comments and guides on most of them.
Okay, having looked at your traits in the first and second builds (mace vs sword) the only major thing I would suggest is dump Healer’s Retribution for Signet Mastery if you’re going to be using Signet of Resolve. That’s a much better idea by a landslide. Also, if you don’t have a sword or a greatsword, your only blind comes from Focus if you use it, or Justice if you use it. You’ve already stated that you don’t remember to use your virtues often, so that’s another trait you can pretty much ignore. So instead, I would recommend Inner Fire or even better, Inscribed Removal. If you’re using a sword, switch to Blind Exposure (Flashing Blade is now a vuln skill) and Powerful Blades.
For sigils, Rubies aren’t the best. Grab a Force sigil and an On-Crit sigil of some sort. Blood is great because it deals damage and heals you, Air and Fire are good as well but naturally Fire is expensive as all get out so you may as well stick to Blood. Since you’re running RHS that will turn your mace into an even bigger self healing tool than it already is. Then you can use a scepter for your off set and be good for melee and range.
As far as the choice between Soldiers and Valkyrie goes, versus conditions it’s basically the same, defensively. Versus direct damage Soldier will be tankier. Your damage output will be better with Valkyrie. Those are your tradeoffs.
All told, for what it is, it’s a fine build. It’s not in the same league as full damage RHS builds, but if you don’t care so much about that, then go for it.
P.s. there’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t take this to dungeons, by the way. They might not take you on CoF P1 speedruns but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t do fractals or literally every other dungeon.
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Ah, my bad, I haven’t looked at it since I have a set of dungeon Soldier gear. Sentinel is a bad idea then since Power is so critical to damage. As for DPS, this is true for sword, mace, Greatsword, hammer, and staff – your autoattack is where your DPS comes from. Most, if not all, of the 2-5 weapon skills deal less damage per second given their cast and animation times than auto attacking. Especially when we are talking about single targets. But even when you are attacking multiples, that’s why cleave damage is so important. Whirling Wrath doesn’t out damage auto attacking unless you are hitting four targets or more. I’m going off of memory at the moment, but mace symbol doesn’t begin to out damage auto attacking unless you’re hitting five targets with it. Zealots Defense always does less damage than auto attacking. But we don’t use these skills for DPS, we use them for what they bring to the table in utility. Symbol for regen, ZD for projectile defense, etc.
As for Protectors Strike, it only does useful damage if, again, you hit multiple targets – and that’s assuming you immediately block an attack after using it which doesn’t always happen. It has a cooldown animation like everything else, so it prevents you from continuing to apply damage for a certain time span, which hurts its DPS.
I’m not trying to say mace is a bad weapon. Far from it. But it’s damage is really overestimated.
I’ll look once I get home from work, but some corrections: Soldiers gear can be bought on the TP, it’s called Sentinel. Mace is not the lowest damage if we are talking 1v1. What makes Mace less viable is groups of enemies, because unlike basically every other melee weapon, Mace doesn’t cleave 3 targets on its last hit.
I’ll help you ou in depth once I get home.
Mace/focus for solo, mace/shield in a group. Staff in off set. Don’t use the healing signet, it’s terrible, even post buff. Use Sanctuary traited for cooldown and range, Hold the Line and Save Yourselves. Trait and rune for boon duration. Spam Empower.
It stacks in the sense that (in theory) Protection lowers your incoming damage and then Judgement takes 10% off the remainder, yeah.
I bought twenty, and had five drop – had much the same results, though I did get a Faren and Kasmeer mini, so I guess it wasn’t a total loss…
Well, since you’ve gone and let the cat out of the bag: Jump and tap the dance ability at the same time. It takes some fidgeting to get the timing right and certain actions cancel it. You’ll be locked into it from the waist up and can then combo it with your racial /dance for added lols.
We have guns and cannons and tanks and you’re worried about a crane? The Charr are an industrial culture, and they are next door neighbors to Hoelbrak. Probably could have borrowed one to build stuff.
Piken Square is the other one, but it’s EU. There is a thread on guildwars2roleplayers.com that tells you when the server is not full if you can stand to wait a bit. Alternatively you can roll on a different home server then guest over to Tarnished Coast for RP. All you really miss out on is WvW.
I’d use Exaltation instead of Persistence since part of bads being bads is not standing in the prot symbols.
So use a sword. You get another blind for extra CC, you’ll do twice the damage, and ultimately need less healing. Mace is an abysmal damage weapon due to the lack of any cleaving on its third autoattack swing. It hits one target reasonably hard, and that’s it. Writ of the Merciful isn’t a very good trait anyway, you’d be better off with Pure of Voice since you’ve got shouts. This will allow you to run Shelter instead of Signet of Resolve since you won’t need the condition clearing from it anymore. Use Shelter strategically as another block.
Judge’s Intervention is likewise not a very good utility for PVE, I’d swap it out for Bane Signet when you don’t need to tank and Judgement when you do. You should also use that slot for Wall of Reflection when you’re up against lots of projectiles.
Purchase the Whisper armor on your Whisper character. Transmute the armor skins to white stat gear. Bank the now white stat armor and pick it up on your Vigil character. Transmute again onto whatever stat gear you want.
Go to gw2buildcraft.com and compare the effective power between the two builds. % difference in effective power translates to that much % damage difference, assuming same weapons used. It is indeed a huge difference.
They swap weapons with different sigils, they don’t destroy sigils by replacing them.
Tweaked your build, Beren. 30% more damage, higher effective health. Kept the life stealing, dropped the Altruistic Healing which you really don’t need, especially if you aren’t running EM, a staff, or Inspired Virtue. The piddly healing from Magi gear wasn’t worth the power sacrifice, especially if you aren’t going to take Selfless Daring, which gains the most benefit from it. Also, any time you’re in content that you don’t need to be tanky for, switch Judgement for Bane and gain another 9% damage or so. Give it a try.
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It’s abusive behavior, yeah. But the players are passively abusing it, not actively exploiting a bug, which is where I draw the line between “exploit” and “not exploit.” But yes, it should be fixed.
No, going off of tooltips is not bad. The tooltips don’t lie. Most of them, anyway.
Tooltip damage = (average weapon damage * ability coefficient * power)/armor. Tooltips use 2600 as reference armor. This is the amount of damage you will do, on average. There will be high swings and low swings due to the damage range of your weapon, which is why your damage varies from swing to swing. If you want to compare abilities, comparing them by the tooltips is absolutely appropriate, unless the tooltip is wrong – and a couple are, but not these. Comparing actual hits using non-steady weapons will introduce variation. If you were to compare thousands of real non-critical hits, they would eventually average out to what the tooltip says, assuming you’re hitting a target with 2600 armor. The heavy target golem I beleive has 2600, but I’m not sure.
Why are people talking Torch? i started this thread to get other guardians like Lightrayne.7829 to say yes people scepter is bad(99% of the time). i know Anet put it in so new player could get use to the game and learn how fights worked(Yes i did this also). I just want to encourage players to say “Hey i’m a melee class and that its how i will learn to play to benefit my team”. If it dungeon dps you want why are people talking sword torch? GS/staff delivers the most substained AoE dps with the right build. With dungeons AoE is what you want and i can still hit for over 10k on single target. Thats without full zerker as we need to stay on our feet.
Look, I’ve been playing Guardian for about a thousand hours now, since BWE2. If you don’t have a scepter in your inventory, you are ridiculous. Every guardian should have one. It’s extremely useful. You don’t have to use it all the time, but it’s fine for what it is, which is a ranged option for those fights where ranged is a better idea. I don’t understand why you need to go on a crusade about it. Maybe it doesn’t fit with your idea of what a guardian is supposed to be. But the reality is it serves a purpose and if you completely disown it you’re hurting yourself, not helping anyone else.
It takes 2.5 seconds to complete it’s chain, yes. That’s including the full begin and end animation times. But there’s only a half a second between the actual hits. Hit 1 happens almost instantly, hit 2 happens half a second later, cools down, hit 3 happens half a second after that. All told, from first damage to last damage, is one and a half seconds. You can sanity-check this by actually looking at the tooltips – First swing has no cast time because it’s instant (but does have an animation before damage is applied and it can be interrupted). Second swing has half a second cast time, third has half a second cast time, and then what isn’t show is the wind-down animation at the end of Sword Wave.
But we don’t care about chains, we care about burst, as you said. And when you compare the damage values, Sword slightly edges out Torch in terms of how much damage is applied in the one second it takes to activate, cast, and lob Torch 4. We know this, again, thanks to the tooltips. With a Berserker amulet and no traits, Sword Arc and Sword of Wrath do 562 damage, and Sword Wave does 1053 (each projectile doing one third of that). Add it, multiply it by .66 (because we only care about two thirds of that because our time frame is one second) and you get 1436 and change. The tooltip on Torch 4 is 1422.
So no, it’s not more burst damage. It’s virtually the same, or less if you’re being critical. It’s even doubly less because no one, in reality, is going to interrupt their sword auto attack.
And Torch 5 is still terrible.
>implying torch has better DPS than autoattacking
A) he said burst, overall sustained dps auto attack is higher than any other damage ability
B) try torch #4 sometime, one of the highest single target burst a guardian has (only second to maybe a well done ZD)
Torch 4 takes a second to cast with its animation. Sword autoattack takes one and a half seconds. If you add a full sword attack cycle’s worth of damage and take two thirds of it, it slightly out-damages torch 4. In other words, the only thing worthwhile about torch 4 is the burning, and since you have Virtue of Justice anyway it’s basically pointless. Its only saving grace is being ranged… but it’s a projectile and can be blocked and reflected as such. Scepter hits just as hard due to its fast attack speed. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about burst damage or DPS if the time-frame is the same and you deal the same amount of damage. Torch also doesn’t have a dedicated damage multiplier trait, so it’s even further behind in damage than what I said if you pick up the Sword or Scepter power traits.
Torch 5 does less than a third of the damage in its 4.25 second cast than autoattacking does, and it doesn’t even cleave 5 targets like a regular AOE, it only hits 3.
Lastly, where burst damage is most important is in short fights and PvP. Burst damage is meaningless against bosses and large groups of trash. Since we’re talking about PvE here, burst is much less important than sustained damage.
In summary: Torch is bad, don’t use it.
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>implying that people that use scepters only use scepters and nothing else ever
If your goal is to just not die and you don’t care about damage, just grab all Soldiers gear, go 0/0/30/30/10 or some variation thereof and run Save Yourselves, Contemplation of Purity, and Signet of Judgement. Take a shield and a mace for your offset, or a hammer. Pick traits to maximize your damage mitigation, condition clearing, and you’re good to go.
>implying torch has better DPS than autoattacking
Yep, that’s right. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Some fights in dungeons are much, much easier when done ranged. Some fights are flat out impossible in melee. Some fights are possible, but you spend so much time running you might as well just range them (I’m thinking of the ranger fight in AC Story here).
There’s nothing wrong with using a scepter. It’s good DPS (when it hits) and swapping to it for certain fights or situations is fine, trying to attack people on a wall with a staff won’t get you anywhere in WvW but you can clear a wall off with smite alone.
You are definitely gimping yourself. The question is whether or not your utility adds enough damage to the party to make it worthwhile.
You probably aren’t, but we can dream.
Definitely do 10 points in Zeal for Fiery Wrath if you want to do damage. 20 points for Greatsword Power also isn’t a terrible choice, but generally you’re gonna want to put those points in something else. As already stated, Altruistic Healing is actually a better choice because of its synergy with Empowering Might – Altruistic Healing will also make you heal on the third swing of your Greatsword autoattack chain by virtue of its Might proc, so it’s much the same thing.
Power’s probably a better bet for you. Precision doesn’t really start to come into its own until you get access to crit damage from three-stat gear in later levels.
Try swapping that signet for Bane and see how much more damage you do. You probably won’t miss the old one.
Did you die a lot? Because if not, then you’re golden. I haven’t had more than 15k HP in months and I do fine in dungeons.
Oops, just checked the link I gave – replace first Radiance trait with Blind Exposure.
I’m not going to argue with you. It’s what I run, and it works. Pugs, zergs, bounties, roaming, whatever.
Berserker for the extra damage. Between knights armor and Valkyrie trinkets (or the reverse) you should have more than enough tanky stats.
Forgot to add – Using a sword really helps with things that proc on crit, because the last hit hits 3 times, improving the chances dramatically.
Omnomberry Pies, too. I heal myself for about… 1.5k every 5 seconds, I think. Something like that. Have you ever tried? If you know when to dodge, when to blind, when to stability, etc etc etc it’s really not that hard. Also, Judgement is worth 300 armor or so. And anyway, dead trash deals no damage.
Nothing wrong with shields, they’re a good weapon. Assuming the gear you linked is correct, you’re massively overtanked and those Shaman weapons have to go. Also, Sigil of Agony? wat?
You’re basically going to be doing less than half as much damage as anyone else out there. Very poor DPS, which is ultimately going to hinder you and your group in dungeons and fractals. You should consider switching from mace to sword, picking up Empowered Might, dropping two handed mastery for Fiery Wrath (zeal 10) and replacing your gear with a combination of Knight/Valkyrie if you’re looking to stay tanky. Empowering Might synergizes with Altruistic Healing very well… if you have the crit to back it up. That’s basically 5×69 HP in a group, once a second, every time you crit.
I’ll just give you the link to my build. Currently I’m running: http://tinyurl.com/bakbo8b
When I’m feeling more adventurous I swap out the signet for Bane, which gives me an additional 9% damage increase. I forget if this is with Bane or without, but with full might and vuln my Sword autoattack chain hits for 3.2k/3.2k/2*3k.
GW2Buildcraft’s calculation is either wrong, or they know more about the damage formula than I do. My understanding is that it goes (skill coefficient * power * weapon damage) * (multiplier 1 + multiplier 2 + multiplier 3) / armor but GW2Buildcraft is saying ((((coefficient * power * wpn) * (multiplier 1)) * (multiplier 2)) * (multiplier 3)) / armor. If GW2Buildcraft is correct, then it further reinforces what I was saying – the more unique multipliers you have, the better off you are.
As far as effective power translating to damage goes, you can essentially say that if you translated all of your critical chance, critical damage, damage multipliers, and so on into raw power, that’s what you’d get. In other words, if you had 0 crit and no multipliers and only had power, you’d deal the same damage if you had your effective power as you would if you had the stat combination that equaled that effective power. Just glancing at one of my builds, it has about 35% in multipliers, 2182 power, 80% crit chance, and 62% crit damage, for 6051.39 effective power. If it had 0 crit chance, 0 multipliers, and 6051.39 power, it would do the same damage as if it had the mixed stats.
Then you can compare damage between builds very simply. Because of how damage is calculated, any % increase in effective power between one build and the next translates directly into that % more damage. If you have a build that has 5500 effective power compared to one that has 6050 (a 10% increase) you know for a fact that the latter build will do 10% more damage on all its abilities, across the board.
As for dying in WvW, I’ve been running all berserker for a long time now and haven’t had any issues. GS + S/Sh.
(edited by foofad.5162)
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