Guild Wars 2 Guradian:Shield vs Focus & Mace vs Sword

Here’s a crash course breakdown of these weapons.

Sword
In PvE, this is a very high DPS weapon, which makes it inherently strong. Generally, you can max DPS by using your GS skills, then swap to 1h sword to autoattack until the GS skills are recharged. In PvP, this is a good all-around weapon for many builds and GS + Sword/Focus is generally the weaponset of choice for meditation DPS builds.

Mace
In PvE, this is a very low DPS weapon and the healing/defense that the weapon provides is really never needed if you play smart and/or know the content well. In PvP, this is a good weapon for bunker builds because of the defense it provides and it can give a decent amount of burst as well. I don’t think this is a particularly popular weapon for WvW, but some guardians do like it for sPvP. Personally, I prefer Scepter or Sword for 1h weapons when I bunker.

Focus
This is generally considered the best all-around offhand for guardians. Contrary to what you may expect, it is more defensive than the shield because of the #5 block skill and it also brings blind and condition removal which can be a great help almost anywhere.

Shield
While this weapon isn’t completely useless, it’s sadly only really a strong weapon in sPvP and this is almost entirely due to it’s knockback. Use this to knock enemies off point to gain control or just to cheese Skyham. The scepter tends to pair well with this since you can knock someone off point, then immobilize them and keep DPSing them while standing on the point. The AoE protection is really negligible, particularly when you consider that the hammer gives more protection with the auto-attack and the projectile absorb of #5 is very short and doesn’t reflect

I’m sure we can all agree that Sword + Shield would be really fitting for Guardians from a stylistic perpsective, but sadly this pairing is rarely ideal. The one place these two weapons really do well together is in Battle of Khylo since you can teleport to an enemy in mid with the sword, then knock them off with shield.