Funnily I recently started a Guardian Willbender to eventually jump into WvW. Coming from a Power Reaper I was also feeling the change in lack of upfront damage. And actually hitting my utilities? Madness! 😆
got the same issue here 😂, 320h in the game and 300 of those hours are on power reaper, so now i tried willbender and damn do i gotta learn more about classes hahah
Willbender is absolutely my favourite Guard spec, while I play a power double sword variant which is pretty off meta, outside of PvP, having so much mobility is also fun as hell.
Double sword is fine unless you're bad like me, in which case the bit where torch 4 allows you to output aoe damage while downed on the ground from random rocks falling or whatever will outshine offhand sword novelty.
One thing I learned about meta builds is that sometimes they don't fit the play style one likes to play. Often, from my experience, I would kind of tweak it to fit the way I like to play and get similar results. For instance, I would pick marauder's armor instead of 'zerker's for the extra hp. Even have celestial trinkets to at a little bit of support. Optimal? No, but keeps me alive.
Very true! Even small tweaks can help a build feel a lot better for you. Sometimes even if it's "Less Optimized" if it fits your playstyle, you can even get better results than if you forced yourself to have certain things you dislike
Yeah I'm rocking out Celestial right now on my Revenant for the next month long video and it's been doing real well. Think it might be my new go to for my less played Alts, so I can just use whatever I feel like and have it be solid.
I like the video idea, but a bit disappointed after none of the takeaways being about the Willbender, besides the dashing around part. Would have loved to hear what it's about and how it felt in general for someone who has only played one other thing for the most part. Still great video I liked!
Hey thank you so much for that feedback! I'm in the middle of my next one of these videos and will definitely keep that in mind. Thanks for taking the time to watch & respond!
Thanks for the video, your channel deserve more subs! By the way correct me if Im wrong but from the looks of it, you were using a condi willbender build with maximizing dps for group instanced content. That build would be very squishy in open world. Adding some celestial or trailblazer would make you much more strong and damage will still be nice for casual gameplay.
Thank you for watching & for saying that! I do agree swapping some Celestial/Trailblazer in would definitely help with survival and still be great as far as casual content damage output goes! I think I'll probably be changing my couple of legendary pieces to that and upgrading the Jade Bot Core whenever I play it next to get it into a little bit better of a spot.
Speaking about stat lines, the most confusing stat to craft/buy would be Harrier/Mordant. It's not that the mats are hard to find particularly, it's just that if you dug around by searching for "harrier" stats, you would not find a tooltip on metabattle or anywhere, really telling you that what you actually want are Mordant inscriptions to stat change stuff.
When I first tried this spec in the beta, It was a power build and it just felt like a janky Dragon Hunter since it used the same weapons. Then recently a friend told me to bench one with him.. And since we've got 270ms, we won't be hitting bench.. But could regulary hit 40k on the golem. (I took a few things out such as F2 and Gun 5 full charge sometimes) and while that's great, the utilities in the open world are amazing Litany of wrath makes you basically unstopable for 6 seconds.. There's a ton of stun breaks and stab/cc .. And a ton of quick movement. Its now my open world and raiding toon haha
Maybe more gameplay if you’re playing one build? Strengths and weaknesses of the spec you played. More varied different builds could be fun to watch but expensive to prep.
The "effective vs highly-effective" is where it's at for me. If it's "just" effective, yet much more fun to play than "highly-effective" I don't even need to think twice which one to choose. I personally love MB as they offer alternatives, have clearer explanations and I oftentimes find their builds more fun and enjoyable. And a bit more food for thought, I'm a commander who appreciates good utility and group support way more than insane DPS numbers so, yea, bring that insta rez banner instead of Head Butt :D
Very very good point. When I was younger I was so obsessed with the 'best' thing to do because I was into raiding & rated PvP on various MMO's but over the years I've come to realize - if you find something that is the most fun for you, and still gets the job you want/need to do done, then that's the most correct choice. It's good to hear we've got commanders out there that appreciate utility and support like that! Yeah I've also almost always used Metabattle, between clearer explanations in general usually, and also some decent commenters offering other perspectives on things to try, I usually have a good experience on there.
Agreed with the last part, going back to Tyria one in a while and do hearts for map completion is actually super fun. Just don't burn out this game is too good to pass on
I'm actually running a poll right now to see which class I should do next! I'm already doing Revenant in April, and who knows for May? Scrapper is a strong contender for when I do Engineer!
I was the same way , guardian was hard to play for me but with willbender after I returned to Game loving it pve and pvp even bought a character slot n made another race for it 😅, willbender clicked for me it's amazing
Nice! No judgement on the Dual Characters, I've got two warriors and probably about to make my third Mesmer, myself (They're so great for Alt-Parking...)
Ive played Ranger for most of my GW2 career, but switched over to guardian and it was night and day in terms of survivability. It took a lot of awareness to stay alive with my Berserker Soulbeast and it felt like i was constantly going down in even story content, but when I swapped to guardian it felt like i would rarely ever die, and the sustain felt way easier (Cele guardian gear obviously helps over berserker ranger lol but still) I still love ranger, but i think guardian is my actual main now.
There's definitely something to be said for your survivability for an everyday play class/build. I've tried some builds over the years where I really like the way it plays but can't stay off the floor with it, and it's just such a drag. Reminds me of the first time I switched from Mage to Paladin in WoW wayyy back in the day and I was like wtf I can solo anything I want now, even group quests, I'm untouchable!
This was really nice to watch. I've been struggling to stay properly interested when playing GW2 lately, but I want to push myself to try out builds I've never really played before, and this is just the motivation I needed. PS. How do you play Guardian well? I've been finding it so difficult!
I'm glad the video was inspiring for you! I'm certainly no expert on Guardian, but I can explain my process. For Willbender, the key was to understand what skills are my critical skills to use, what skills are used after critical skills for damage, and then what skills are used last and/or for utility. Once you start to cement that idea in your head and get a tier list of activations, it got easier for me anyway. Berserker warrior is very constant button pressing and Willbender condi felt a bit like that, so I can see it being difficult to pick up for some. In WoW I used to have actual full rotations memorized like 1-1-1-1-3-2-5 repeat, but with GW2 I tend to use this 3 tier list for most classes and with enough practice you'll slowly feel out a rotation, and when you're not in perfect rotation you'll begin to instinctively know what to press next based on which buttons are blacked out.
Well, I'll never argue that the meta isn't effective, for sure. There's people much better at math and theory-crafting than myself who can mathematically destroy me for trying to do that, and I'm not that crazy. But I do have some thoughts on it outside of effectiveness. This also isn't just from a Guild Wars 2 perspective, but an overall gaming perspective. For starters, I think one trap a lot of newer players fall into is copying meta builds without understanding what actually makes it work that way which can lead to performance loss when things happen to upset that. For example if we look at Helldivers 2, where a small section of the community was so hyperfocused on the meta weapons and strategems that they would kick players for using anything but that, even over marginal loss of 'optimal' numbers, even when not on the highest difficulty settings. Like kicking someone not using a Snowcrows benchmark build when you're running T1 Fractals kinda stuff. The other is just a general siphoning of that creative feeling of throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what works. Or just having the freedom to do things you want to do for fun. As I said in the video, maybe don't show up to your weekly raid night with some duct-taped together scrapmetal build, but the amount of WvW PUG commander's I've seen trash people for not using a meta build when they're just hanging out in WvW for fun is wild to me. I think there's absolutely a time and place for optimal, Meta builds. I think there's absolutely a time and place to let your friend play some awful condi build he made while you're doing T1 Fractals, because he wants to try it and it'll cost you maybe 2 more minutes at the end of the day, and everyone's having fun. Obviously there are also some people who find min-maxing and meta building *fun* and love to break things and just have stupidly strong builds and super-high numbers. That's perfectly okay too! My issue with the meta is the smaller minority of people who force the meta in as some sort of fun police, in situations where it is absolutely not necessary. A worship of the meta, I suppose, rather than a use of the meta.
I've always loved the idea of mesmer but it's never really felt right to me when I was playing core. I'm looking forward to experimenting during my Mesmer month to see if I can find a niche in it!
!:00 "i can never grow more if i just do the same thing every day" so your answer was to do the same thing every day, but with a different thing XD but i fully agree with your summary about ignoring the meta and trying new things :)
I recommend trying condi geomancer elementalist build essentially a ele that bounces back and forth between fire and stone and focuses on bleeding, ritualist gear my bleed ticks hit like 6k
I swear the meta doesn't really work for open world content, not without some tweaks at least. Because those builds are focused on perfect uptime on all boons, food buffs, rotations, and optimizing damage. In open world you have a lot of different needs and you need to have a more diverse tool kit. Especially if you need to solo something big unexpectedly.
Very true. I mean, I typically carry a ranged weapon no matter how bad it is when I do open world PvE, just because sometimes melee is an awful idea, or running in tagging etc. Open world content is a lot more wild wild west IMO.
Nothing wrong with that at all! The more builds and classes you play, the more you'll start to realize what makes builds good & fun for youand eventually be able to make your own!
Definitely not too late, appreciate the tip! New challenge starts this weekend for me so I'll have to take a look! At this point I think I have enough ascended chests lying around for a full medium set but this'll definitely help for the light classes/ any gaps
@@syzxgamingx Glad to have helped! Think each pc is like 1g-ish and ave of 75 badges of honor. These can be attained through Skirmish Chests, 20 each too!
I literally play every game I have, and especially GW2, never following the meta. Anyone who follows meta honestly has one of those small brains I think "they" often speak about. It's worth trying new things and feeling out your own way to play, and feel that the character is YOUR character, not a shadow of someone else who created the build you used. You know what I mean?
Loved to hear there are others who are not at all on the Meta train. It makes my teeth ache that so much of the media about GW2 is utterly focussed on min/maxing the fun out of the game.
Not to be rude but....With 2400 hours in the game, with over 60% on warrior....shouldn't you have legendaries for the main armor slots at least? Or do I not understand how legendary armory works? (That being that if you have it unlocked any character on your account can use it.)
A bulk of my playtime was from far before legendary armor existed, and a lot of WvW time before the current ranking system existed. I played mostly Vanilla, came back for a little bit after HoT and PoF and didnt recently start playing a lot until EoD/SoTO. If i played 2400 hours since PoF then yes, I'd probably be much, much further along in terms of legendary progression. The game didnt exist forever in its current state. Just the ability to craft precursors for legendaries rather than mystic forge gamble them was something that didnt even exist.
@@syzxgamingx Fair play man, and thanks for the reply. That makes a lot more sense for sure. If it makes you feel any better I have almost 1100 hours played and am just now getting into legendaries because I always pictured them as something far outside my reach that only "super dedicated" players could get. If it helps you out, BlishHUD has a super helpful module for tracking progress on every legendary in the game and it has made my progress on the 6 I've made so far SO much easier.
@@syzxgamingx So true. I've got over 3600 hours in the game and not one single legendary, because most of that time was pre HoT. And legendaries were definitly not the norm back than.
