Now this looks interesting.

The Unnamed Dance

Boon Build for WvWvW Gardian

I have tested a boon duration build o and i think all our guardians should try it for a week.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUQQNApeWlYgyC3FyKEm4ERmiVWSMFYMjXPcoEZIA;TsAA1Cto6y4lwLrNuuk2s+Ysx8DA

Its powerful alone but the more people that have it the better. The principle is simple, using traits food and runes we get between 7O%%-90% increase in boon duration. I think the ideal is 80%.
In an ideal situation 4 guardians can keep  protection, retaliation, regeneration and swiftness and possibly might up on a party of 20 at all times.
In practice ofc these will drop off or overlap or missomeone but in general most of these buffs will be up most of the time on most of the people.
The ideal would be having 2 guardian per group. The ideal number of guardians is the total warband divided by the number of Guardians plus one.
This gives us redundancy in case some one misses is afk is dead etc. It also allows for the fact that you never stand beside the same people.
imagine a warband where everyone takes 30% less damage, gets 167 health back a second, does 300 damage to everyone that hits him and runs a third faster.
Married to this we reduce coldowns on staff and shield and increase duration of retaliation.
Its the basis for a tank wall. It synergises with other guardians having a simialr spec

Runes:

It also requires runes. it takes 5-6 dungeon runs to get them, one set is easily crafted.
Boon duration is a huge deal in support roles and one of the best traits a Guardian can spec into in my opinion. If you really want to go with another trait line though, you can supplement this with armor runes.
2 Superior Runes of the Water
2 Superior Runes of the Monk
2 Major Runes of Sanctuary
This combination will give you +healing, + vitality, and +40% boon duration increase.
This rune set along with +30 in Virtues will give you +70% boon duration increase. If you consume Chocolate Omnomberry Cream, that will add +20% to your boon duration for 30 minutes, for a total of 90% boon duration increase, which is beast mode for a support Guardian who’s throwing boons around to their teammate (Yes, your boon duration increases apply to those you put boons on).

The food :

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chocolate_Omnomberry_Cream

The raspberry version is a cheap alternative.

Traits:

The Valor Trait Line:

Valor starts out by giving you +10 toughness and +1% critical damage per point. At it's max, you can gain a total of +300 toughness and +30% critical damage
Purity – Adept Major Trait
This next adept major trait only benefits the Guardian themselves. Simply put it cures one condition you suffer every 10 seconds. It has good synergy with your healing skill Signet of Resolve which also cures a condition every 10 seconds. Combine these two and you will cure 2 conditions every 10 seconds instead of one.
Honorable Shield – Master Major Trait
If you are using a mace and shield combination, there's no reason you shouldn't pick up this trait. It will regenerate your shield skills 20% faster. This means more protection and more healing. The only problem is that this trait shares the same tier, Master, as Mace of Justice.
Altruistic Healing – Grandmaster Major Trait
This is also a very simple trait. It will heal you anytime you've placed a boon on allies. Considering how many skills and traits you get that will place boons on your allies, this is a very powerful trait choice. Use this skill especially if you plan on tanking the brunt of any damage.

The Honor Trait Line:

When you invest in this trait line you are going to directly boost your sustain by increasing your overall HP with +10 Vitality per point, while also giving you a very important +10 to healing powe
Selfless Daring – Master Minor Trait
Grants your dodge an AoE heal at the end of your roll. How epic is that? A free heal and it holds great synergy with Vigorous Precision. If your timing and positioning is exceptional,
Superior Aria – Adept Major Trait
Your shouts recharge 20% faster. There are so many important and useful adept major traits but I'd put this one in the top. If you recall my utility skills review,
Two-Handed Mastery – Master Major Trait
This trait grants all two-handed weapon skills a 20% quicker cooldown. It's a pretty self-explanatory trait but also a very powerful one.

The Virtues Trait Line:

he first and arguably the most powerful stat you receive per point in this line is +1% to boon duration.
Vengeful – Adept Major Trait-Any retaliation effect will last 25% longer
Elite Focus – Master Major Trait -your tome durations will increase from 20 seconds to 30

Shouts:

Shouts are very powerful utility skills that provide a great amount of supportive boons. When you use a shout, your character will actually shout out the name of the skill. I find this to be really cool and extremely useful in identifying what shout is being used. Hold the Line, the first shout, is one that I use often when supporting in a tough situation. When you cast this skill it will grant protection and health regeneration to all nearby allies. It's essentially an AoE heal effect that also provides defense. Retreat is the next shout and it provides your team the chance to retreat effectively. Casting this skill will grant all nearby allies Aegis and swiftness. What more could you ask for when attempting to disengage safely?
Oh, let's not forget the most important shout. Save Yourselves! I absolutely love this skill. This little beauty will pull ALL conditions from nearby allies onto yourself and then give you just about every boon you could think of. On top of that, it puts so many boons on you that it's difficult to break down what's going on in your buff area. Save Yourselves! Will grant you 10 seconds of fury, vigor, might, protection, regeneration, swiftness, and retaliation. Insane. The final shout seems to pale in comparison to the previous one but it has it's uses. Stand Your Ground will grant yourself and all nearby allies stability.
The second Elite skill is called Tome of Courage and when cast it will replace all of your active skills with new ones. It is essentially like you picked up a new weapon called a tome and wielded it. Its number 1 skill is called Heal Area and does just that, heals all allies in the targeted area. Number 2 is called Purifying Ribbon and is similar to the focus skill Ray of Judgment. When cast it will bounce off of nearby allies, curing them, while hitting enemies to blind. The 3 skill is really cool and it's called Protective Spirit. This will grant protection and regeneration to all allies in front of you in a cone radius. 4th is a skill called Pacifism and it will daze a target for 3 seconds. The 5th and final skill is one hellva spell. It's called Light of Deliverance and it will fully heal up to 5 nearby allies. Yes, a full heal, even if from 1 health.

Weapons:

Mace shield

Essentially, what makes the guardian a support type is the one-handed mace and shield combination. One of the best parts of the one-handed mace's skills is simply the auto-attack, which heals both yourself and all nearby allies upon the third strike. The mace's number 2 attack, Symbol of Faith, is the most important of almost any skills you wield as a support guardian. Symbol of Faith smashes the ground in front of you to create a ring which gives regeneration to all allies within it and does damage to enemies every second. . The third and final mace skill is Protector's Strike, which will channel a shield in a small area around yourself and allies. This shield will block the next attack which would hit either you or any allies within the circle and damage the enemies within range. If the shield is not hit and broken, it will grant protection to all allies within range. The protection buff gives 33% damage reduction for a few seconds. Note that while you channel Protector's Strike, you can not attack.

Staff:

The staff offers with it a good combination of range, damage, and healing abilities. The first ability, which is your auto-attack, is a short ranged burst wave which will hit up to 5 targets in front of you. It's a fairly quick cast and can put out some decent damage. Your second ability, on number 2, is Orb of Light. This will send out a fairly large and slow moving orb toward your target which will damage any enemy it passes through. You can activate this ability a second time in order to detonate this orb which will heal all nearby allies.
 If you are a fair distance away or even up close it can be difficult to determine exactly when you should explode the orb to heal nearby allies. I think this skill is very much something a new player will screw up a lot, but I also hope that players who spend a lot of time getting accustomed to it will be able to make it really shine in combat. The staff's third ability is called Symbol of Swiftness and just like Symbol of Faith, it can be enhanced with traits. I find this ability to mainly be good for traveling across a map as it's main function is to grant allies who pass through it swiftness. It's secondary effect is that it also damages any enemies inside it. When I am planning on doing a lot of traveling I always keep a staff in my equipped. The fourth ability for a staff can be considered it's most powerful and supportive skill of all of them. It's called Empower and it's a channeled spell, meaning you can't do anything while you are casting it. It's also got a fairly long cast time, at least 3 seconds I'd say, so be sure your not going to get killed while trying to use it. Empower will grant yourself and all nearby allies might while channeling, which improves your power. Once the channeling of Empower is completed, it will heal all nearby allies, which I think includes yourself but I'm not certain. This is a great spell for improving your party's effectiveness while also giving out a big burst heal. If you have a staff equipped use this skill every time it's off cooldown. The staff's final skill is something more situational than anything, but can be used to help you get away. It's called Line of Warding and does just about that. It makes a line across the ground where you cast it that will block any enemies from passing through.

PS Always have Wall of Reflection, always

nerf calls

I don't care if you make legitimate changes to the game in order to balance it.
But please, please, PLEASE... never make changes to this game based on people being bad at something.  I don't mean something legitimately being too difficult, I mean stamping out skill with subsequent patches like every other MMO in the last 5 years.  Brain-on gaming is finally making the comeback it should.

Invisible Enemies

This is what Arenanet have to say on the matter.

For a variety of performance reasons we limit the number of characters that are reported to any given game client. This report limiting (or culling, as it’s also been referred to) is generally distance based and limits both the amount of bandwidth and client side processing (rendering, etc.) required to play the game. Ideally this shouldn’t be something that you notice happening as characters will simply fade in when they’re “far” away from you. In the best case this happens far enough away that even if you’re looking right at them when it happens it isn’t too visually distracting. Unfortunately, there are some situations in the game in which this setup doesn’t work as well as we’d like and it seems that those situations come up in WvW rather more often than in other parts of the game. The higher player densities that we see in large battles are an obvious example of where this system goes awry. If only the nearest N characters are reported to you but there are N+100 characters within effective battle range then many of those characters will be invisible. There’s never a great time to be dealing with invisible characters, but I think that it’s fair to say that during a large battle is one of the worst times.

In WvW one of the things that we see exacerbating the issue is this: From the moment a character is first reported to your client to the first moment that your client is able to render it a non-zero amount of time passes. During this time your client is doing things like loading textures from disk, which can be (at least in computer terms) fairly slow what with all that accessing of spinning, physical storage media. So that means that a character who is moving towards you can potentially appear first at a much closer point even than the one at which they were reported because, of course, they were still moving during that load time.

MajorKong’s screenshot doesn’t immediately look like the situation I just described so it may be that there’s some kind of bug lurking in there as well. We will certainly be looking into that possibility.

That was a lot of detail but really I’m posting to let you know that we’re aware of the issues associated with invisible enemies and we’re working on finding both the root causes and effective solutions. I understand that these experiences can be quite frustrating but please rest assured that we do care and we are working on improving the experience.

Thank you for reporting your issues here on the forums and for your patience and understanding as we work to resolve them.

Also, MajorKong, that really was a great screenshot even if it does show a bug and bugs make me sad.

A good fix

from the patch notes

World-versus-World

• Retaliation: This boon no longer reflects damage received from siege weapons.

Great sPvP article

http://taugrim.com/2012/09/16/the-skill-cap-of-guild-wars-2-pvp-and-the-implications/

A quote

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/6710/Quest-Hubs-Are-Dead-Finally.html

I mean, of course, Guild Wars 2. The incredible success of the game has caused them to suspend digital sales, something I haven’t seen since WoW (which stopped shipping boxes so the servers could catch up in capacity).

Selfless daring

 Selfless Daring, which heals all nearby allies whenever the guardian dodges. In its base form it heals for 129, which is not that impressive, but the trait has a very impressive 1:1 scaling with Healing Power. What does this mean? It means that if you have a high Healing Power, each of your dodges will heal all allies within 600 range for 1.5k health. This alone inspired me to see how far I could push the guardian support capabilities.

I will be referring to this build from now on: http://gw2skills.net...4lwLbXuukdt/Y B 

The formula for calculating the health return of Selfless Daring is ‘Healing Power+129’. This means, that if you stack the highest possible amount of healing power (currently 1373), the trait will heal for 1502 health. The endurance it takes to dodge is 50 (half the bar), which takes 10 seconds to recharge. This means you can dodge 6 times every minute for a total healing of 1502*6=9012/min. That’s not very impressive on its own. But what happens if we equip Sigil of Superior Energy on both of our off-hands? This means that every time we swap weapons, we get a free dodge. The amount of dodges we can perform each minute is now 12, for a total of 1502*12=18024 healing/min. It’s getting better.

With 30 points into the honor line, we can pick up the trait Battle Presence, which makes nearby allies gain our Virtue of Resolve as well. With our healing power of 1373, our passive virtue heals for 166 (Formula: 0.06*Healing Power+84. The virtue ticks every second, which totals 166*60=9960 healing/min. With the trait Absolute Resolve, this is further increased by 25%, which sadly only is applied to the guardian himself. One cool thing though is, that the virtue is still applied to allies even though you activated it and have it on cooldown.

It’s getting better yet. With the mace as main weapon, every 3^rd auto-attack hit heals all nearby allies for 582 (Formula: 0.18*Healing Power+335). The auto-attack chain takes 3.25 seconds to perform, which means you can perform it 60/3.25=18.5 times every minute, for a total of 18.5*582=10767 healing/min. The mace auto-attack actually hits harder than the scepter's auto-attack, and you have a few traits to increase damage as well. Elusive Power (10% when not full endurance) & Power of the Virtuous (1% extra damage per boon).

The mace also includes this skill called Symbol of Faith that places a symbol which pumps out regeneration every tick. Even though the duration is 4 seconds, it actually ticks 5 times. With your +60% increased boon duration, this means that you get 8 seconds of regeneration on an 8 seconds cooldown, which allows you to maintain almost permanent regeneration, except for the 1 second cast time the symbol has. You can easily fill this with “Hold the Line!” though. It’s With 1373 healing, your regeneration heals for 302 (Formula: 0,125*Healing Power+130) each tick for a total of 302*60=18120 healing/min. With the Writ of Exaltation trait, you symbol is 50% larger, which allows you to dodge inside of it and makes it much more beneficial for you allies to use.

Putting those four together, you have a total of 18024+9960+10767+18120=56871 healing/min for you and your allies. Now, I understand that this number is not very relevant: You want be able to use your auto-attack and Symbol of Faith at the same time, it’s unlikely that your allies will fully benefit from your Symbol of Faith and you can’t use any skills while dodging either. The actual number is probably closer to 40k/min, but that’s still quite impressive considering all of it is AoE and you are dealing damage while healing.

The healing from these 4 methods is just one of the many useful things you can bring to a team. I’ll once again be referring to the build above:

• 50% upkeep on protection through “Hold the Line!” and Shield of Judgment and a 8s protection on Virtue of Courage.
• 33% upkeep on stability through “”Stand Your Ground!” .
• 67% upkeep on retaliation through “Stand Your Ground!” and Virtue of Justice (with Virtue of Retribution trait).
• Tome of Courage(30 seconds thanks to Elite Focus): Spammable 1687 AoE heal, 16 seconds of AoE protection and regeneration on a 15 second cooldown, x2 3 second dazes and of course the full heal.

I know some people will be worried about the low health pool, but I honestly don’t think that will be much of an issue. With 3000 armor, you are very resilient to direct damage, and you have enough stability and stun breakers to counter those heavy burst builds. The passive condition removal from Purity and Signet of Resolve along with the on-demand condition removal from Contemplation of Purity and Virtue of Resolve should also be enough to handle most condition pressure, except if you have multiple necromancers, engineers and rangers on your back. Your dodges make it very difficult to effectively chain anything on you to take you down fast, and honestly, with the heals you can end up having much more than 20k health, depending on the length of the encounter.

This turned out to be more of a guide than I had originally planned, but oh well. I will see if I can get some tournament footage in the next few days, as I’m curious as to how the build performs in such an environment. Thanks for reading, let me know your own thoughts/ideas on this. 

Vitality or toughness

Vit vs Toughness is heavily debated but here is the math reality for those who want hard numbers over opinions.

First off, different armor classes get different amounts of armor by adding toughness.
Heavy armor classes get +36% armor by adding 798 toughness
Medium armor classes +39% armor by adding 798 toughness
Cloth classes +42% armor by adding 798 toughness

Result: low-armor classes get larger armor bonuses by stacking toughness than heavy armor users.


Second, different professions get VERY different amounts of health by slotting vitality.
Warrior and Necro get +39% health by adding 798 vitality
Mesmer, Engineer and Ranger get +47% health by adding 798 vitality
Ele, Guardian and Thief get +64% health by adding 798 vitality

Result: Ele, Guardian and Thief get huge benefits from Vitality whereas Necro and Warrior get almost half the benefit.
Mesmer, Engineer and Ranger are in between.



This is why there is little point in slotting full defense and sacrifice health on say, a Guardian that would get huge health amounts from vitality (which would end up largerly outperforming toughness stacking).
Slotting your Guardian with +798 VIT means he can take +64% damage than normal.
Slotting your Guardian with +798 TOU means he can take +36% damage than normal.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/39575-toughness-or-vitality/page__st__30