Guardian sPvP | Tournament Mace/Focus, Greatsword | Team fighter JMA's Shiny Anti Spam Teamfighter
Table of Contents
Summary
Hey everyone it's JMA again with another team fighting build.
Here's a link to my first guide: http://intothemists....nty_teamfighter
The name comes from the whole light and holiness schbiel that comes with playing the Pally... I mean Guardian. Anti Spam is the most delicious part of the build as you will soon see. You will be valuable to your team and punish some of the more annoying builds (and players) with this build.
Your primary weapons are boons and condi clear, which is fairly standard fare for a bunker guardian, but the difference between this build and others is that you will be one of your top contributors to team DPS without needing all the risk of Zerker amulet! It won't be obvious to you at first glance, but when you see how much orange bubbles are on the screen you'll see what I mean.
This build is meant to help your team of course, and to make the following highly skilled (LOL) builds and weapons cry a river of delicious tears:
1) Bomb Nade Engis
2) Condition Necromancers
3) Shortbow on Ranger
Enjoy!
I. Weapons and Skills
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- Pure Strike½Bash your foe.Range: 130Damage: 336
- Faithful Strike1Hit your foe with a final strike and heal nearby allies.Damage: 470Healing: 463Range: 130
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Weapon and Skill Details
Mace and Focus
This weapon set is less bursty than Greatsword but provides great team support while you wait on your cooldowns from your DPS set. The #2 and #5 used in sequence gives your team AoE retaliation and regeneration, the #3 is a no lose damage or protection boon skill, and #4 provides AoE blinds and regen. The autoattacks provide AoE heals, but don't stand there auto attacking that's for Rangers.
Greatsword
This is your money set, with AoE Retaliation, a leap to add more Retal to yourself, an AoE pull and AoE burst damage skill. You want to make sure you hit your pulls before using Whirling Wrath or "Spin2Win" (: There are whirl finishers in each, but those are just an added bonus. They aren't really super good condi clear, since people are moving around in team fights anyway.
Virtues
The first thing to note is all of your Virtues will stack retal for your team, so using them often is a good idea.
Justice will blind nearby foes, so use it as efficiently as possible, like after pulling a couple of people. Even if you don't blind them, you're still adding burn and retal to your team's DPS output so it's something you want to use on cooldown.
Resolve clears AoE condis and provides heals, but only use this if you already used your shouts and still have condis on you and your team. The regen is pretty dope and worth keeping.
Virtue of Courage really gets strong with the traits and the long CD makes it something you also want to save for the right time. If you don't have Stand your Ground up to stomp someone, then use it, or if you have two bursty players training you, like a Mesmer and a Thief.
Shelter is used because it's pretty difficult to interrupt. There are some ways to interrupt it, but it's not common enough to be a significant problem.
Stand your Ground provides AoE retal and stability, and has the shortest CD on the Guardian Shouts. It's really one of the best utilities in the game and through runes and traits removes 2 conditions to boot! It's good enough to use on CD if you're up against a heavy condition team fight, like an Engi Necro combination.
Save Yourselves is actually great for the current landscape again, because Conditions are not as popular as they were. There are a lot of Warriors running around and all those boons can mitigate quite a bit of their direct damage. You also get a 2 condi clear from the shout.
Signet of Judgment is here because of a very useful 10% damage reduction passive and even more retal on use, plus weakness. It should be noted that the 10% reduction applies to everything that hits you. No other class in the game has this advantage, and once I tried using this I was pretty shocked at how much it really reduces. You really don't want to use this unless you have a situation like two bursties going after you, and you want to put weakness on one of them while you hopefully get peels coming from your teammates.
II. Traits
Zeal
Radiance
Valor
Honor
Virtues
Trait Details
Zeal 5 gives you a free retal symbol that does pretty good damage. There will be times that you're focused, and the more you can punish people without having to micro it the better.
Radiance 5 blinds nearby people when using Virtue of Justice, which is always useful for any Guardian build, the class being a melee oriented one.
Honor is all about the shouts and giving your teammates that fantastic res support you can get from Resolute Healer. You can trade this out for a couple other options too, like Two Handed Mastery or one of the symbol buffs if your team already has good res support like the Nature Spirit or Elixir R.
Virtues gives your Retaliation a whopping 25% duration boost which, as you'll see in the itemization, is pretty frickin sweet. The boosts to Resolve and Courage Virtues are pretty well known in the bunker build as being quite useful to a teamfight.
III. Stat Specifics & Effects
Primary Stats
- Health 23645 (+12000)
- Vitality 2116 (+1200)
- Armor 3027 (+900)
- Toughness 1816 (+900)
- Attack 3288 (+1425)
- Power 2341 (+1425)
- Critical Hit 15% (+15%)
- Precision 1091 (+175)
Secondary Stats
- Boon Duration 30% (+30%)
- Condition Damage 50 (+50)
- Condition Duration 5% (+5%)
- Damage 947 (+0%)
- Damage Reduction 10% (+10%)
- Defense 1211 (+0)
- Healing Power 300 (+300)
- Retaliation Duration 25% (+25%)
- Swiftness Duration 30% (+30%)
- Virtue Recharge Rate 30% (+30%)
Boons
Conditions
Control
Fields & Finishers
Stat and Effect Details
The Boon Duration bonus + Vengeful trait makes your retaliation last 55% longer than their base duration. That is HUGE. You can be sure that in a team fight, you will be keeping retaliation on your team almost the entire time with appropriate skill management.
The beauty of that boon is that you can stack Power without having to do Critical Damage and Precision, making yourself more tanky. With 2054 power you're doing very good damage to your opponents with the boon on at all times.
You also have quite a bit of health for a Guardian, making it really hard for Condi builds to burst you down with their highly skilled button pressing.
IV. Runes, Sigils, Accessories & Jewels
Armor & Runes
- Power: 25
- Swiftness Duration: 10%
- Power: 50
- 25% chance when struck to grant nearby allies might, fury, and swiftness for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
- Power: 100
- +20% Swiftness Duration; +125 Precision
- Power: 25
- Swiftness Duration: 10%
- Power: 50
- 25% chance when struck to grant nearby allies might, fury, and swiftness for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
- Power: 100
- +20% Swiftness Duration; +125 Precision
- Power: 25
- Swiftness Duration: 10%
- Power: 50
- 25% chance when struck to grant nearby allies might, fury, and swiftness for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
- Power: 100
- +20% Swiftness Duration; +125 Precision
- Power: 25
- Swiftness Duration: 10%
- Power: 50
- 25% chance when struck to grant nearby allies might, fury, and swiftness for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
- Power: 100
- +20% Swiftness Duration; +125 Precision
- Power: 25
- Swiftness Duration: 10%
- Power: 50
- 25% chance when struck to grant nearby allies might, fury, and swiftness for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
- Power: 100
- +20% Swiftness Duration; +125 Precision
- Power: 25
- Swiftness Duration: 10%
- Power: 50
- 25% chance when struck to grant nearby allies might, fury, and swiftness for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
- Power: 100
- +20% Swiftness Duration; +125 Precision
Rune Stat Totals
- Power 175
- Swiftness Duration 30%
- Precision 125
Rune Bonuses
PvP Rune of the Pack- Power: 25
- Swiftness Duration: 10%
- Power: 50
- 25% chance when struck to grant nearby allies might, fury, and swiftness for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
- Power: 100
- +20% Swiftness Duration; +125 Precision
Accessories & Jewels
- Power: 0
- Precision: 0
- Ferocity: 0
- Vitality: 0
Accessory Totals
- Power:1200
- Toughness:900
- Vitality:900
- Precision:0
- Ferocity:0
Weapon Set Sigils
- Weapon Strength: 895-1010
- Weapon Strength: 832-883
Weapon Set I
Sigil of Superior EnergyYou gain 50% of your endurance when you swap to this weapon while in combat. (This effect cannot trigger more than once every 9s)
Sigil of Superior Accuracy+7% crit chance.
- Weapon Strength: 995-1100
- Weapon Strength: -
Weapon Set II
Sigil of Superior EnergyYou gain 50% of your endurance when you swap to this weapon while in combat. (This effect cannot trigger more than once every 9s)
Upgrade Item Details
Soldier Amulet is there because of how much survivability and power it provides, but there are other options as well. You could do Valkyrie's for a damage buff with extra crit damage (yes that stat is useful with low crit chance, that's one of the less known and powerful things to know about the game's mechanics). I recommend Soldiers the most though because you really are tough to take down with that much health and armor, defensive mechanics, and retaliation. It does no good to be stacking retal if you aren't alive long enough to keep the pain going.
Pack runes are great because you're dispensing more boons for just being there, taking damage. It's also the highest total of power and precision you can get from a single rune set.
Energy Sigils let you dodge more, doing some light AoE heals, but these are up to you. The defensive advantage is always nice, but Battle sigil is a great DPS boost in combination with 30% boon duration. There's incentive to use either, but since the build is likely to be new to you the defensive cushion is nice to start with.
V. Basic Gameplay
Like my other build, this is a teamfighting build meaning you are not a 1v1 hero. Your effectiveness comes from helping your team fight together.
Unfortunately, one drawback of the build is that you are pretty slow. All you have for mobility is GS3 and the procs from Pack that require fighting to get, so you want to have a Bunker Guardian mindset about engaging and disengaging. This means you've got to pay attention to where your teammates are at all times and only rotate to points where you know your teammates are going.
This makes the build more tricky to run in Solo Q, unless you're in higher ranked parts of the leaderboard where people know how to play the game intelligently. That does not take away its effectivness though, because of the Anti-Spam benefits.
If you get matched up 1v1 vs. a build like those mentioned up top get your game face on and start stackin the retal. If you manage your stability and clears correctly, they will not be able to kill you and you will be doing enough damage to them with retal to make it damn near impossible for them to win a 1v1.
If you play against Necros a lot, get a friend to use Corrupt Boon on you in 1v1 duels so that you instinctively dodge it when it's show time. That skill really wrecks this build, so if you can consistently dodge it you'll make it really hard for them to be as productive.
This build works pretty well with the Warrior build as well, since both people on the point are clearing conditions and providing team support with their shouts. This build is a bit more defensive than the Warrior, but the yin-yang combination, if executed, will make it more of a sure thing that you'll win those fights.
A pull can interrupt people, so if one called the pull and the Warrior set up an immob, they'd be eating a Whirling Wrath AND Hundred Blades at the same time! That's vicious!
So stay near your teammates, crank the situational awareness to 11, clear condis, and stack the retal!
Main Skill Rotation
Rotations aren't really that big a thing in GW2 outside of Elementalist (the irony of the class that requires a skills tutorial being bottom tier).
You want to these combos to get more retal and to use GS 5 and 2 to do some nasty AoE damage. Switch to mace/focus when your GS stuff is on cooldown and try to land all those skills between swaps.
Enjoy the build and use it with my other one if you can get a friend to!
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@ 10:51 AM, Sun January 12 2014
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