what is the best guardian survival build for PvE

[Starpilot.7312]

i am a level 80 guardian with full zerker armor and i was wondering what is the best survival build for HoT and PoF pve

[Ojimaru.8970]

Berserker's armor and full damage is plenty survivable. All the way on the other side of the spectrum, you have Minstrel's gear that will allow you to solo Champions.

[phor.7952]

I can only assume that by "PvE" you mean Open World or maybe some Dungeons with friends and not raids/fractals, correct?If that's the case, then looking at WvW builds is actually pretty helpful.
The playstyle between WvW and open world can be fairly similar.

As Ojimaru said, you CAN go full berserker and make it work.In fact I usually run a Burst Bow DH build when soloing in the open world.But it's hardly what I'd call "survival". You can mow through a string of normal mobs like a hot knife through butter. You can also pop Save Yourselves and Feel My Wrath together to melt a Veteran or two. But it only works when you're fighting a couple at a time. If you mess up a dodge or aegis application or get one too many at once (as is often the case in story instances), then you have very little time to swap to your defensive weapons and try to make a run for it with blocks and Wings of Resolve. Even having a good deal of experience with the build, I end up spending a healthy amount of time facing the dirt in the new zones when I'm out soloing. For me, the kill speed makes up for that. But some people just don't like dying.

So back to the WvW builds. Most Guardian WvW builds use Celestial gear.Why? Because they want more survival, but they don't want to tank their dps.

For power damage you really need not only power, but precision and ferocity as well (because multipliers are important). So swapping out berserker gear for something like soldiers to increase your survival stats will toss your dps directly in the garbage.For condition damage you just need condition damage and burn duration. So on paper it seems like you could swap out sinister/viper gear for Dire and do the same or more condition damage while gaining survival. But since we only have 1 main condition (burning), even if you build and spec for condition damage you end up doing a healthy amount of power damage incidentally. So dumping the power/precision in a condition damage build tanks your dps anyway.Celestial gives you Power, Precision, Ferocity, and Condition Damage (only leaving you to deal with the burn duration).The totals will be smaller, but because it spreads out to all of the stats, it ends up keeping your total damage much higher than soldiers/dire while also giving you way more survival stats (toughness, vit, and healing power) than berserker/sinister/vipers.

And since Celestial gives you a bit of everything, you get less of the "locked into a specific build" feeling.
That makes it easier to try out a bunch of different weapon and trait sets to find what is fun.(I'm actually in the process of grabbing a full ascended Celestial set myself)

^ This might not be the type of information you were looking for. Reading through the question I can see that you might be asking "what traits/skills should I use with berserker gear in order to survive better". If that's the case, then I can't really help. I've tried a bunch of different builds with berserker gear, and I wouldn't say any of them had good survival. But hopefully the above information is helpful anyway.

Cheers.