Guild Wars 2

Guardian seems to have many retaliation giving sources, while suffering from few problems:
1) Guardian is mostly proficient at avoiding damage intake, not taking it head on
2) The best way to enjoy retaliation is to have it together with protection, but we do not have that much protection uptime.
3) low HP pool
4) retaliation damage has been lowered significantly to ~230 damage per hit (depeding on power) because of its potency in group fights, making it very bad for the guardian alone.

despite these problems, we have some sources that seem to treat retaliation as if it is the mother of all punishments, giving only us retaliation for a very short duration, making those traits and skills under-powered.

Examples:

• Retaliatory Subconscious – 3.75 sec of retal when we get CC’d on a 30 seconds cooldown -> its not like after we get CC’d someone would think twice to hit us because of retaliation we gained, duration is short, cooldown is long, no reason what so ever to take this trait, at all.

• Wrathful Spirit – gain 3s retaliation on aegis removal
  OR
• Healer’s Retribution – gain 3s retaliation when using a healing skill
  -> in BOTH cases gaining 3 seconds of retaliation after effects that are every 30 sec is uninteresting.

• Signet of judgment – gives 3 seconds of retaliation and 5 seconds of weakness on use, actually very nice combo, but would be nice to have more retaliation duration, 3 is just very low, 10 seconds would be more suitable.

Good example of retaliation use:
Virtue of Retribution- Gain retaliation when you activate a virtue -> attaches to 3 skills, applies to whole group, making itself a battle mechanic that rewards its use and gives presence to the guardian.

Conclusion – traits that give retaliation to the guardian alone, are not rewarding enough when applies only to the guardian, furthermore they are for too short of a duration for the low damage they apply.
For the traits : Retaliatory Subconscious, Wrathful Spirit Healer’s Retribution it would be nice to either have times extended by ALOT, at least 10 seconds. Or i suggest even better to replace them with 5 seconds of the protection boon for the guardian alone.

I’m mixed here. The last thing we need is high retal uptime again, but the traits ARE useless. Protection is too strong… aegis is probably also too strong, I’m not sure what to replace them with.

Like you said, retal is flawed.. it was supposed to be a DPS source for non DPS specs but has been nerfed because of aoe attacks and low hp builds.

Maybe it’s time to give guardian some more chill instead?

Most of those skills had retaliation uptime of 5-10 seconds, but were cut back as retaliation was a bit too strong in the old post release bunker meta. Duration was cut first (along with protection uptime in PvP) then damage took a hit later. I think retaliation damage nerf was more related to wvw, as it was one of the only aspects of the game where wvw and pve were different. I think in that time we were given a consolation buff to some of our vulnerability skills to help make up the damage loss. But that is pretty much the history of the current guardian retaliation situation.

I have a contention with the point of Retaliation only being useful for bulkier classes. There’s a reason why Warrior’s only source of Retaliation is a grandmaster trait.

Perhaps we can have retaliation damage also scale with toughness.