This build focuses on blinding, medium DPS, and ties in altruistic healing to complement your shouts. It has high survivability and a decent amount of damage, taking advantage of the Valor’s critical damage bonus to go with precision.
While anchor builds on Guardians are always a plus in dungeons, sometimes you may want to go with a bit more damage. With this build, you can keep your survivability, up your DPS, and still be able to help support your party.
Gear and Stats at a Glance:
This is about what your stats should look like. These will go up significantly with your added food buffs and sigils. Right now I’m running with knight’s helm and coat with berserker’s shoulders, gloves, leggings and boots. All accessories are ascended berserker’s with the exception of an exotic berserker earring and a knight’s ascended ring. In the end, you’ll want to work towards all ascended gear to make the most of your gear stats.
Runes of the Soldier help with condition removal, removing one per shout.
Weapons:
- Berserker’s Hammer – Superior Sigil of Perception
- Berserker’s Greatsword – Superior Sigil of Energy
- Knight’s Staff – Superior Sigil of Perception
- Knight’s Scepter – Superior Sigil of Energy
- Knight’s Shield – Superior Sigil of Water
- Berserker’s Spear – Superior Sigil of Perception
- Berserker’s Trident – Superior Sigil of Energy
You’ll be using hammer/greatsword or greatsword/staff for the most part, but ranged options are a must. I prefer to keep a scepter, shield, and staff with me at all times. Staff has some nice support abilities and is great for tagging things (hence the use of an “on kill” sigil). Adjust your sigils to match the combinations you like best so that you have one weapon with sigil of perception and one with sigil of energy.
Traits – Blinding, Altruistic Healing, and Recharge Rates
Most of your blinding will come from Radiance. The 5-point minor trait makes Virtue of Justice blind on activation, and the 15-point minor trait keeps this virtue up by renewing it every time you kill a foe. Blind Exposure (VI) helps with your damage by inflicting 10 seconds of 3 stacks of vulnerability when you blind something. With the AoE blinds from Virtue of Justice and Leap of Faith on greatsword, this is a great way to mitigate damage through blinding as well as stacking vulnerability.
For the second major trait in Radiance, we’ll want to pick up Signet Mastery for the recharge rate increase on your heal.
Valor is where the bulk of our points will be. It’s an easy way to get some additional critical damage, and gives us access to Altruistic Healing (XI), which heals you every time you apply a boon to allies. Two more traits we’ll want to pay attention to are Purity (V), which removes a condition every two seconds, and Glacial Heart which makes crits with hammer chill your foe for 5 seconds. While this has a 30 second cooldown, it can still be useful in situations where you’re trying to immobilize/slow down foes.
If you don’t like the idea of using glacial heart, Retributive Armor (VI) is a good alternative. This gives 5% of your toughness as a bonus to precision.
Lastly, we’ll want to put 20 points into honor to pick up some things to make skills and utilities recharge faster. Superior Aria makes shouts recharge 20% faster, and Two-Handed Mastery makes skills on your two-handed weapons recharge 20% faster. The minor traits here are also really useful. You get 5 seconds of vigor for every critical hit (with only a 5 second cooldown), complimenting the other minor trait, Selfless Daring, which heals you and your allies at the end of your dodge. Combined with your shouts/altruistic healing and runes, Signet of Resolve, and Purity, this makes for steady healing and decent condition removal.
Tips, Tricks, and Food!
Keybinding:
Experiment with your keybindings if you’re still using the default ones. I didn’t really notice what a difference this made (since I’ve never really used the default bindings) until I switched to another computer to do some screen capture for this guide. Defaults seem really unintuitive, make you stretch your hand across they keyboard (or click) and doesn’t really provide the minimal effort to reach my virtues that I’m used to. It may take a while to get used to, but there are much better ways to bind your keys. Taugrim’s blog has a nice layout (similar to what I currently use).
Virtues:
If you’re not used to utilizing your virtues, this is the time to do it. Don’t be selfish with them! Keep your Virtue of Justice on cooldown for the blinding and ability to make your party’s attacks burn foes as well. Virtue of Resolve also provides a nice party heal in tight situations. If you see someone having some trouble, stay around them, pop resolve, and do some dodging. Every bit of support makes a difference.
For those of you that swear by the Tome of Courage and still aren’t satisfied with the party support in this build, don’t feel like you have to use Renewed Focus. Although this is mostly for added damage, your party probably won’t complain if you see an opportunity to fall back and heal them.
Get your food!
With a Bowl of Curry Butternut Squash Soup and some Master Maintenance Oil, you can bump up your precision to 53% and your critical damage to 81%. It’s a really nice bonus, and a good way to up your stats a bit. Just don’t forget to use them!
A useful substitute to the soup is the Bowl of Saffron-scented Poultry Soup. It gives +70 healing power and a 100% chance to remove a condition when you use a healing skill, so if you want to make the most of your condition removal, go ahead and throw this in.
That about wraps up this build. Some things to remember:
- Utilize your virtues: Keep Virtue of Justice on cooldown to make your parties attacks inflict burn to reapply blinding. Use Virtue of Resolve to heal your party when everyone is taking a lot of damage, and time your aegis on Virtue of Courage to help mitigate damage.
- Keep your food buffs up!
- Alternate your sigils: stack precision bonuses as quickly as possible and go for your primary damage weapon if you’re not already using it. Hammer and greatsword can do some massive aoe damage with the right boosts.
- Watch your combo fields. If you have a party member with fire/water fields, make the most of them. This is the great thing about having hammer. Frequent area might and healing can make for awesome added damage or healing.
- And of course don’t forget to adapt to a solid rotation of shouts. The more boons your party gets, the more you get healed. It’s a win-win.
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