11 replies to this topic

[Dr Gonzo]

Hey guys, been wanting to play more frontline and I was looking to better my guards build, currently running whats on metabattle but I'm questioning some of their choices and I know you guys probably have a better idea of whats actually good! Any tips on gear mixes, utilities and if there are any traits other than what they have listed on meta-battle would be greatly appreciated!

[Dr Gonzo]

Some thoughts:

Is "Save Yourselves!" worth it? it seems like a really long cd for some group condi cleanse, considering most of these buffs should be rolling in a good group anyway. 1 weakness I felt when I played with hammer was a lack of mobility, so i've been running Merciful Intervention as a way to get back to the com with some heals, and it pairs well with pre-casting RoW, but the 50 sec cd and fiddly targetting make it hard to use so I'm open to suggestions.

As far as gear goes I'm mostly using soilders with a few clerics tinkets/neck to get ~350 healing power, but I cant find recent discussions about healing power so again I'm not sure if its worth it. I've seen some talk about getting around 200-300 efficiently using some cele gear, but this was from more than a year ago so might not be relevant.

[UltraEM]

I personally don't like "Save Yourselves!" as I run a shout build ("Stand Your Ground!", "Hold the Line!", "Feel My Wrath!") with Trooper runes and Pure of Voice trait, which gives me good group condi-cleanse without having to put condis on myself. Pure of Voice will convert condis on your allies into boons as well, but this won't work with "Save Yourselves!" as it will draw conditions to you first before Pure of Voice activates, so if you run Pure of Voice with "Save Yourselves!", your allies will miss out on the boons (I'm actually not too sure about this; someone confirm). Other than that, "Save Yourselves!" is not desirable simply because there is always the risk of killing yourself with it haha, unless you take Contemplation of Purity, which I wouldn't recommend because then you'd take up 2 utility slots with long CD (SY + CoP) and I see it as selfish for group play, as you could be doing group condi->boon conversion with other, shorter CD Shouts in conjunction with Pure of Voice.  

Regards to gear and other skills, I can't really help you as I am not very knowledgeable in that regard. I don't have a lot of time to experiment, unfortunately.

[Slein Jinn]

Save Yourselves is a popular choice for smaller-scale stuff, mostly for the long duration Protection buff, but it's really not a good choice for large-scale WvW.  Stand Your Ground and Hold The Line are mandatory, and you've got three clear options for the third slot: Wall of Reflection, Purging Flames, and Signet of Judgement.  My personal favourite is far and away Wall of Reflection, but there's greatly diminishing returns on the value of adding more and more Wall of Reflection cooldowns into your comp, and you can easily exceed the saturation point long before you fill out your quota of Guardians in larger raids, so you'll want to have some diversity.  Purging Flames is overall a more effective tool for allied condition removal than Save Yourselves would be.  Signet of Judgement is a very underrated utility for Guardians; the flat damage reduction is huge, and effectively plays out to be one of the most substantial offensive utilities in the game because of how much more damage-orientated gear it allows you to build; if you have room in your comp for a selfish utility choice, Signet of Judgement is the only sensible option.  

As for gear, Guardians scale very well to Healing Power.  I've posted maths on it on these forums before--feel free to search for it--but Virtue of Resolve (with Absolute Resolution) and the Staff skills in particular have really good coefficients, as does the Regeneration boon.  Blasting Water Fields scales reasonably well, too.  Basically the only thing in your kit that doesn't get much out of Healing Power is Shelter.  That said, I wouldn't really recommend Cleric's gear, as the DPS loss of only having Power as a secondary stat is huge.  I'd build Healing Power on a Guardian by taking Zealot's pieces in the slots where you'd otherwise make use of Berserker's pieces following the general cross-class rule of "Wear as much Soldier's gear as you need to survive; wear as much Berserker's gear as you can survive wearing."  The DPS loss of Zealot's against Berserker's is minuscule, but the healing gains are substantial; slotting Cleric's gear requires a much more sizeable sacrifice in damage, and Guardians are actually a really important part of your raid's damage output.

[Dr Gonzo]

Awesome, thanks Slein, yeah I kinda knew in my gut that clerics was bad, I swapped all my clerics gear to cele the other day and had some success with that, keeping ~250 HP while upping my dmg a bit, but I'm gonna grab some zealot's, didn't even know that stat set existed

Edit: starting to see why I didn't know about zealots, does anybody make these? can't find this gear anywhere, and I dont have JCing   anyone know a way to get trinkets/accessories of this stat set?

Edit2: yeah its all crafting, which I never have the money to do, le sigh. If anyone has the recipes for this stat set hit me up in game (exotic obviously, ascended trinkets dont even exist yet for this set) Dr Gonzo.6259

[Slein Jinn]

Celestial is actually really really terrible for DPS on a build like that.  Celestial is incredibly strong on builds that both use the Healing Power well and have clearly hybridised damage.  D/D Elementalists in sPvP or WvW roaming contexts fit that bill perfectly.  But a frontline Guardian in large-scale WvW deals basically only Power damage.  And for pure Power damage, Soldier's gear is actually about 11% higher DPS than Celestial gear... plus about 50% more Toughness and Vitality.  It's no contest.  

As far as how to get Zealot's stats, get the insignia recipes, then use the mystic forge to convert other ascended gear to Zealot's.  The recipes for the end-products are staggeringly expensive by now.  If you get the select-a-set Ascended boxes from achievements (or one of the really rare drops from fractals... I forget which fractal drop it is, but the wiki knows), you can also choose Zealot's from those.

[Dr Gonzo]

Keep in mind im not replacing any soilder's gear with cele, only the 3 pieces of exotic cleric's with ascended cele, I did lose some power but gained crit, vit, ferocity. I do see what you mean about the wasted stat budget on condi and it overall loses me the HP which was the entire reason I was using clerics in the first place, I'm really frustrated that I cant get access to zealots without any crafting, the only ascended pieces I have are the amy/rings/trinkets. I hate having sub optimal stats, this is making me want to just focus on my warrior for frontline, at least that is straightfoward

[Slein Jinn]

Dr Gonzo, on 16 October 2015 - 10:25 AM, said:

Keep in mind im not replacing any soilder's gear with cele, only the 3 pieces of exotic cleric's with ascended cele, I did lose some power but gained crit, vit, ferocity. I do see what you mean about the wasted stat budget on condi and it overall loses me the HP which was the entire reason I was using clerics in the first place, I'm really frustrated that I cant get access to zealots without any crafting, the only ascended pieces I have are the amy/rings/trinkets. I hate having sub optimal stats, this is making me want to just focus on my warrior for frontline, at least that is straightfoward

But the point is that using Soldier's gear would do more damage; even Cleric's is almost a wash with Celestial--only about 4% less Power damage.  Celestial is good for very specific builds that actually utilise every stat simply because it's massively over-statted compared to other sets, but for most builds, it's one of the lowest-DPS sets in the game.  What you're likely failing to appreciate is just how completely disproportionately valuable Power is as a stat.  It is by far the most individually powerful stat in the game.  Again, I've posted maths on this stuff in the past--there's also a lot of info on the wiki--but the takeaway is that, if you want to improve damage, sacrificing Power is almost always a bad way to achieve that.  

Oh, and Zealot's is probably optimal on Warriors right now, too, actually, and for essentially the same reasons.  Vigorous Shouts has one of the best Healing Power coefficients in the game, and the base was nerfed by like 30% or something on 23rd June, so without any Healing Power, it's not doing a whole lot.  Like Shelter, Healing Signet also has a shitty coefficient, but Adrenal Health scales well, too, and like Guardians, Warriors are also blasting Water Fields.

[Dr Gonzo]

Thanks for the info Slein, again though I'm well aware that soilders or anything that prioritizes power is best for damage, but is a guardian with 0 healing power viable? Im just trying to find the most efficient way to get some HP without totally gutting my dmg, so of the two evils clerics is the lesser in this case? assuming I cannot get access to zealot's. And in this situation, how much healing power is worth it, considering I will be dropping a pretty substantial amount of power to attain it (200? 250? 300?)

edit: here is what I was running originally: http://gw2skills.net...AABg28ohMAMbB-w

[Slein Jinn]

Guardian gets good value from Healing Power, but it works fine without it.  The general rule of thumb for most builds in general--and basically all builds in large-scale WvW--has basically always been to strike whatever balance between Soldier's and Berserker's suits your play style, role, and ability level.  Guardians are no exception.  The addition of Zealot stats a while back shook that up very slightly, basically replacing Berserker's in that equation for tanky builds that effectively utilise the Healing Power.  

There's no way to mathcraft the relative values of Soldier, Berserker, and Cleric stats, because they all do fundamentally different things, and there aren't any "critical mass" numbers to aim for in any of their unique stats.  Moreover, each set is more or less equally efficient in the area where it excels.  Thus, for basically any build that would utilise two or more of those three sets, it's a matter of differences in kind rather than in degree, so in the end, it comes down to priorities.  As a Guardian in large-scale WvW, your foremost priorities (in terms of gear--forget about things like condition removal and reflects in this context) are generally being tanky enough to stick to the driver without dying and keeping pressure on the enemy frontline.  The reason Zealot's is such a strong choice is because of how disproportionate are the values of the different damage stats.  Sacrificing Ferocity for Healing Power is a way better trade than sacrificing Power and Vitality for Healing Power, so there's a huge mismatch in the relative advantages of Berserker's and Zealot's: Berserker's offers a very small DPS advantage over Zealot's; Zealot's offers a very large healing advantage over Berserker's.  Cleric's gear doesn't give you the opportunity to squeeze out that same disproportionate value, though.  

I like Cleric's stats on Guardians in smaller-scale contexts, where more of your overall team healing comes from individual abilities rather than stacking Blast Finishers on Water Fields, and where you can more readily get away with having lower Vitality numbers.  In large-scale contexts, though, we never found it to be worthwhile, because it didn't align as well with what we wanted from our Guardians.  

As far as acquiring Zealot's stats, it's kind of bullshit in my opinion that there aren't better options for acquiring it currently.  It certainly is by far the least readily available stat combination, at least from those that have practical relevance.  Because the recipes no longer drop, it's only going to get worse in the future, though, unless ANet specifically re-implements it somewhere, which they've given no indication of planning to do as far as I've seen, so I'd try to acquire them sooner rather than later.  With the new Mystic Forge options, you don't need to buy the recipes for the final products, because you can convert other stat combinations to Zealot's if you have the insignia/inscription.  So my recommendation would be to try to get your hands on those recipes ASAP, and if that's all you can afford, just sit on them until you get random Ascended drops with stat combinations you don't want, then convert them.

[Dr Gonzo]

Yeah I was running with Plainsman last night after reset in a smallish group using my few pieces of clerics, I seemed to have a nice amount of sustain and was able to help keep us up as the only guard in the few fights where we werent outnumbered 5 to 1 lol. Lot's of good info here and way more than I expected, I can see why you are our go to theorycrafter on this board

and yeah I hope they re-implement some way to get these recipes, I grabbed a few just to be safe, I can always sell them later (probably at a profit too) if I'm desperate for cash.

[Slein Jinn]

Dr Gonzo, on 17 October 2015 - 08:12 AM, said:

Yeah I was running with Plainsman last night after reset in a smallish group using my few pieces of clerics, I seemed to have a nice amount of sustain and was able to help keep us up as the only guard in the few fights where we werent outnumbered 5 to 1 lol. Lot's of good info here and way more than I expected, I can see why you are our go to theorycrafter on this board

Another thing about Cleric's in small-scale fights is that you can go Mace/Shield instead of Hammer or Greatsword, and that gives you three more skills that are capitalising on that Healing Power.  As a Bunker Guardian, your role in small-scale contexts is a lot more focused on direct support, peeling, and getting the revives and stomps.

Dr Gonzo, on 17 October 2015 - 08:12 AM, said:

and yeah I hope they re-implement some way to get these recipes, I grabbed a few just to be safe, I can always sell them later (probably at a profit too) if I'm desperate for cash.

Just to reiterate, the key is the inscription/insignia recipes.  If you haven't got the recipes for the end products, you can bypass them with Mystic Forge conversion, but if you haven't got the recipes for the inscriptions/insignias, then the recipes for the end products have no value.  Pick up both the Exotic and Ascended versions of both the insignias and the inscriptions and you're in a safe position for the future.