Do burn Firebrands need toughness/vitality for soloing most pve content?

[Gadzooks.4687]

I see many builds that are pure Power/Condition/Precision (and sometimes Expertise).

Zero defense stats on gear. Im new to guardian/firebrand... just wondering how you arent super squishy, especially vs non-normal enemies

[MichalAniol.5807]

@Gadzooks.4687 said:Zero defense stats on gear. Im new to guardian/firebrand... just wondering how you arent super squishy, especially vs non-normal enemies

By tons of aegis, retaliation or we just burn everything before it hits. Also - doging helps :D

[Klowdy.3126]

I use the condi rings and trinkets with toughness and vitality on them. My necklace and back piece, along with my weapons are core condi, and the rest of my gear is viper's. I feel a bit more sturdy this way, I still have 100% to burn time, and I have had very little problem with anything in PoF so far.

[Atlas.4509]

Its really a matter of personal preference and what you feel comfortable with; there isn't a wrong answer. My recommendation is to always have alittle bit of defensive gear in your build, especially when you are doing new content. Waypoints are few and far between in these maps so dying is a bit more punishing.

[RabbitUp.8294]

Condi firebrand is a good deal more squishy than Dh, but you shouldn't be using the 48k builds you see on youtube, anyway.

Forget about mantras and take Virtues (3,2,1) over Zeal and Loremaster instead of Quickfire. Take Shelter and Renewed Focus. For utilities, the condi signet and Purging Flames (you can take Mantra of Flame, but it's too much of a hussle for me recharging it with every map change). For the last spot, I a have a new-found love for Sanctuary, that brings heavy cc to destroy those breakbars, projectile denial, and some healing. It's a swiss army knife for pve.

You still very much have to kill everything before they kill you, but with the amount of area coverage Tome of Justice provides and by mastering the cooldown reset on kill, it's easy said and done.

[Tyche.4072]

My experience so far has been "kill it before it kills you".

[ZedEss.2041]

I've been running Seraph gear on my Firebrand which gives a little bit of survivability (majors in condi damage and healing off the top of my head), although healing maybe isn't considered a significant defense stat at all. Been having a reasonable amount of success but I do get slammed if I muck up a dodge due to having only base vitality and toughness.

Like Atlas says it comes down to preference and how you want to play.

[Atlas.4509]

@RabbitUp.8294 said:For the last spot, I a have a new-found love for Sanctuary, that brings heavy cc to destroy those breakbars, projectile denial, and some healing. It's a swiss army knife for pve.

Huh, I hadn't considered the usefulness of Sanctuary in ages, I'll have to give that a shot. Thanks for the advice Rabbit

[Jacobin.8509]

In open world adding survivability is fine. Its mainly just fractals which are more of a speed run where max dps matters.

[Kerivek.5740]

I have been using full Dire/Trailblazer gear and I still do enough damage that I see no need to switch. I can solo Elites and Champions pretty well and Veterans easily die from one rotation of burns. There really isn't a need to go full offense unless you are raiding.

[MidnightO.8632]

I tried experimenting with defensive traits but I had little luck. I usually ditch Zeal for them and in my experience the drop in DPS means I die anyway. There's a lot of CC and many mobs have very damaging autoattacks so it's kill before you're killed for me. Also, some of the fights I just wade in do massive burn burst, pop my def CDs and when I go down I usually instantly rally when mobs die to burn shortly after.

After a while I settled on Axe/Torch for brutal damage and Mace/Shield for defense (and utility). On tougher fights I switch to M/S and start with burn burst with burn tome combined with quickness mantra (after the initial proc) to offload all my pages fast. Then I switch to M/S and turtle, refreshing Aegis as I go. This also procs quickness so it keeps DPS up and speeds up the mace healing. All this in full damage gear.

This works for me, but that may be because I'm a thief main and I just prefer active defenses to passive ones. The weakness of the perma quickness sustain for me is that if I mess up the rotation at some point it can get me in serious trouble, so if I for example pop my entire mantra or pop aegis before the traited quickness proc is off cd. The nice thing about M/S is that I can support on events pretty well with nice quickness uptime and still do decent damage with burn burst without having to switch gear or build. Stability and aegis is also very nice now that bounties love to spam massive CC.

You could also go Scepter for range.

If you have trouble with the big bad monsters then I'd say work on learning their tells and then dodge/block/avoid them. After that you might as well run full damage gear to get them down quicker. If you have trouble with swarms of smaller mobs (which is my issue) defensive gear (from my experience) won't help you because you need to nuke them fast before they wear you down, which they will even with def gear. So either nuke them or sustain them or both. My issue is getting them nice and rounded up with FB so I kite them around corners when possible. Either way I do better in damage gear.

[Lalainnia.3598]

I personally use the raid build and just sub 2 traits and a few utility skills and different weapon swap for open world. I switch Symbolic Avenger with Eternal Armory in zeal and switch Quickfire with Loremaster. I take Sword of Justice for some extra damage and quick vul with Bow of Truth which is great healing if you kite around in its cast circle and I take Mantra of Lore to cleanse any annoying condis and lastly take signet of courage for some extra passive healing. Axe torch for my main hand and sword or scepter shield for weapon swap. One thing Iv'e come to learn is when using tome of courage make sure to always open with 5 and then go into 4 followed by 2 if you have more then 1 condi or spam 1 if no condis are on you. It's also not instant like base guardians or relatively quick like dragon hunters wings so it's best to use before you get dangerously low.

[Kanto.1659]

I'm not comfortable with 11k, so I have a mix of Carrion gear to up myself to 15k. Even so I find myself squishy and being downed a few times compared to my Scourge (who in full DPS gear has 21k) who is a beast and acting like the desert belongs to her. As much as the community maligns barriers they take a lot of flak when one of them is even tied to the top damage skill.

Your F2 is a ton of healing though, especially with the 8 pages trait (5, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 does a direct heal of 4.8k plus 7.3k over 12 seconds from regen) . It's easily a second heal on a 42 timer sinning only by the number of key presses to access it all. Having Mantra of Potence in your bar helps with that though.

You can also turtle up in your F3. Stagger your #1 while your regen is ticking for one aegis at a time. That's 8 Aegis, plus 4 seconds of Protection each time. All of this is a lot of key presses though, it can be worked out for a longer fight, but dodging out of the way is still the way to go.

That said killing fast is still your best defense. So abuse your Tome of Justice (5, 4, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1) and be ready to go out of it even if you still have pages left if you have the minor Renewed Justice in the Radiance line and a mob is about to die.

[Holgarf.6581]

@MichalAniol.5807 said:

@Gadzooks.4687 said:Zero defense stats on gear. Im new to guardian/firebrand... just wondering how you arent super squishy, especially vs non-normal enemies

By tons of aegis, retaliation or we just burn everything before it hits. Also - doging helps :D

I love it when people say dodge, like they think it's going to remedy the fact that some enemies in PoF have fire shots at high rates of fire that stack burn - not enough dodge for that.

PVE, Guardian is squishy af. You either go full damage and destroy them (unless there is loads) or spend forever healing yourself and chip away at them slowly. If there's lots of enemies, you're usually screwed. And Kanto, that regen is no help when enemies hit very hard. I wish there was attack skills in tomes 2 and 3 because then you could pick one tome, but with tome 2 and 3 only focusing around protection or healing your DPS plummets. It would be more useful having some form of attack in tomes 2 and 3 as opposed to dedicating ALL of the pages of one particular tome to a specific thing, i.e. heal only. protection only. damage only. It just interrupts your own damage output using anything other than your weapon skills or tome 1. If you use tomes 2 or 3, by the time you've swapped back if you're against a few enemies, your health as already gone back to the point before you healed, only now you've made your tomes go into a cooldown period.

[Gadzooks.4687]

Thx all.. very useful information.

Im learning to react to boss tells, and other signature moves of certain enemies. Dodging, or reacting with a quick Aegis.

What im finding takes my life down the most/fastest however, are just normal auto attacks from enemies. Specifically when there are 2 or more. I dont know if its just the enemies in PoF being much harder hitting or what. Its just frustrating to see my life drop so fast from auto attacks.

[Holgarf.6581]

@Gadzooks.4687 said:Thx all.. very useful information.

Im learning to react to boss tells, and other signature moves of certain enemies. Dodging, or reacting with a quick Aegis.

What im finding takes my life down the most/fastest however, are just normal auto attacks from enemies. Specifically when there are 2 or more. I dont know if its just the enemies in PoF being much harder hitting or what. Its just frustrating to see my life drop so fast from auto attacks.

Rangers on this game, that shoot fire arrows, 2-3 hits and I'm on my ass if I don't react quick enough. It doesn't help that Guardian has the smallest health pool.

[Lalainnia.3598]

Alot of the PoF mobs have boons or at least the forged such as might or fury and others even have prot so power is weaker on them. Some of the most also have special armor or unique buffs.

[Malthurius.6870]

I've been running around in a full Viper/Sinister set and have had no issues surviving. The trick is to take the stun break elite mantra, healing mantra, and condition cleanse mantra.

You can wipe condis off of yourself very effectively with the mantra, so those aren't a big deal.

The healing mantra grants aegis, and you can mitigate a lot of damage with it by using it pre-emptively instead of using it solely to heal. Usually by the time you need a heal, you have the initial charge for the aegis back.

Your Tome of Resolve is very powerful and can get you close to a full heal if you use 4 then spam 1. If you need extra condi cleanse, use 2.

Tome of Courage is stupid ridiculous with Legendary Lore; you can stack enough protection on you to last an entire fight and then some. Not to mention very few attacks are likely to get through to you if you're spamming the 1. Use the 3 to reflect projectile heavy mobs.

Tome of Justice can melt a crowd, especially with permeating wrath. When outnumbered by a bunch of non-veteran/elite/champion mobs, they'll usually die before they can do substantial damage to you.

And of course, learning enemy behaviors and dodging at appropriate times really does have a profound impact of your survivability.

I'm runningVirtues - 2, 2, 1Radiance - 1, 2, 1Firebrand - 3, 3, 3Axe/Torch, Scepter/Shield

Scepter/Shield is the emergency set for phase shift bounties, especially danger melee situation, and utility; projectile block, heal, and break bars.I'm using 5 mantras; all but the weakness/cripple/blind one.

[Kerivek.5740]

@Holgarf.6581 said:PVE, Guardian is squishy af. You either go full damage and destroy them (unless there is loads) or spend forever healing yourself and chip away at them slowly. If there's lots of enemies, you're usually screwed.

This isn't really accurate at all imo. You can go very tanky with a burn build and still absolutely melt anything you encounter in open world PvE. As for lots of enemies being an issue I don't really understand that. Firebrand very easily clears out entire crowds with all of its AoE burn.

[Gadzooks.4687]

@Kerivek.5740 said:

@Holgarf.6581 said:PVE, Guardian is squishy af. You either go full damage and destroy them (unless there is loads) or spend forever healing yourself and chip away at them slowly. If there's lots of enemies, you're usually screwed.

This isn't really accurate at all imo. You can go very tanky with a burn build and still absolutely melt anything you encounter in open world PvE. As for lots of enemies being an issue I don't really understand that. Firebrand very easily clears out entire crowds with all of its AoE burn.

Think you could link a build that fits this description? The ones i come across are all pure DPS, or mostly dps, with a tiny bit of utility.

[Kerivek.5740]

This is the build I have been using:http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQRAnf7elsAhKhY5QwZIwPEL+DWWSoClhsCAVg60+FtjOSB-jRyCQBbUZQFV6dsnAAg0PMvTAAAOIArUJYBV/5E7PQIgFrBA-e

I mainly use this gear because I like the durability when I go into WvW. That being said, I have never felt like I lacked the damage to do anything short of raids. The AoE just melts any groups I encounter and I can solo most Champions that are tuned for groups.

[Jacobin.8509]

Why do people think soloing champs is so great? The shorter TTK from full dps on the thousands of trash mobs far outweighs the benefit of being able to spend 20 minutes soling a champion.

[Kerivek.5740]

The point is I can solo champs much more easily than I could on a full DPS build. This comes in handy when I need to kill a champ for any of a multitude of reasons and the thousands of trash mobs still die to one round of burn applications. Clearing trash is not slowed by a significant enough margin for it to really matter.

[Esquilax.3491]

Guardian and Elementalist are the glass cannon classes in this game. They have low HP with high damage output. Firebrand is very true in this regard.Unfortunately from what I've played of Weaver, they have the glass part true without the cannon. So be thankful Firebrand at least has the damage.

[setdog.1592]

i am running an exotic shaman draconic set with balth runes, axe torch, shield mace. zeal/virtues/fb, i like it because i got tired of dying in higher damage gear

i like it, its slower damage, but its actually alot more enjoyable. i like it because i can solo roam and take on multiple veterans at a time. still die when vastly outnumberd, but its actually nice casual set up, hard time killing anything that heals tho, i kinda tried to model the build after the gw2 fb intro video,a zealous lorekeeper, and they had him with shield, so what the heck i chose zeal and the lore talents

and did mention its cheap!! like super cheap.