Guild Wars 2

I simply don’t get why Anet is pushing so hard to make condi guardian a thing. Guardian has one condition that deals damage (burning), which stacks duration over intensity. It has no weapon skills that actively apply this condition, and the main source of it has at least 15 seconds of downtime (which would be building your traits to maximize both virtue recharge and condition duration, which would leave room for only 10 (2?) trait points into the condition damage traitline, thus handicapping the actual DPS in the first place).

It doesn’t matter how strong the burning damage is, because it cannot be consistently applied enough in solo play to be an effective source of sustained damage. Not only this, but also in a group when VoJ is applied to allies it uses their condition damage as a multiplier instead of the guardian’s, and since it doesn’t stack the damage together it shuts out the burning damage of the guardian.

It just doesn’t make sense that the guardian is being given all of these kitten attempts to make it a part of the condition meta. If the condition meta is being embraced and encouraged, then guardian needs more diversity in damage-dealing conditions and more active ways to apply them. If the goal is to move away from the condition meta, then there’s no need to be working toward a condition build at all.

As a class, the guardian has a lot of things going for it. They are top-tier bunkers in sPvP. They are one of, if not the most, desired classes to have in WvW zergs. Medi burst guardians can take down unsuspecting foes very quickly. On top of that, they are a crucial part of strong PvE groups because they have strong direct damage output and highly valuable support-based utilities. But even these builds have their weaknesses. Defensive guardians often rely on allies to keep them sustainable. DPS guardians suffer from a lack of mobility and ability to stick to the target. And then there are things that hardly anyone worth their salt ever bothers to use because they’ve been woefully neglected, like spirit weapon and signet builds.

So please, Anet, let’s just put the idea of a one-trick pony condition damage guardian to rest. Because one non-sustainable source of damage just isn’t enough to make it work, no matter how much it ticks for each second.

It doesn’t matter how strong the burning damage is, because it cannot be consistently applied enough in solo play to be an effective source of sustained damage.

What?

glaphen.5230:

It doesn’t matter how strong the burning damage is, because it cannot be consistently applied enough in solo play to be an effective source of sustained damage.

What?

To clarify: It doesn’t matter how much the burning ticks for each second, because once it’s gone the enemy can simply heal it back up while you’re left whiffing at them with your lack of direct damage.

And seeing as we’re currently in a condition meta where most players will pack the condition removal on pretty heavily, it WILL be gone quickly.

not viable, because we have no reliable cover conditions…..we only have one reliable condition.

it baffles me why they keep buffing our condi damage without giving us access to more conditions to cover the burning damage.

Guardians need confusion, to match their user’s current state of mind… only then will their user’s be cleansed.

Hi I don’t play guardian but thought id theory craft a build.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vUAQFARlsApXoNDxeI8DNhk9QkQQF0qgAV9Iekn6B-zUBBIhAZoFRjtArIasKZER1KlYkCwilRA-w

With this you will always have burn on the enemy even if it gets cleansed. You have 3 light field for condition removal as well. You have decent power to help with the lack of conditions.

Light field cannot be used for condition removal on ones self.

Silhouette.5631:

Light field cannot be used for condition removal on ones self.

Yeah it can. Be in melee range.

A Guardian can definitely spec in a way that he’ll have tons of different ways to apply burning. I would say it’s not even too much of a task to maintain perma burning on a specific target.

The problem is that even with around 1200 condition damage, you’re at best only doing ~628 damage per second with burning.

That’s…not very much. An Engineer can static shot something and he’ll deal that much damage from one tick of the confusion stacks.

Also, even if a Condi Guardian manages to get you to low health, you can typically just heal and run away from them. They don’t have any burst, they’re low on soft and hard CC to prevent escapes, and their mobility is low. This retaliation buff is an interesting change, but overall I think the issue is that Condi Guardians need a way to finish off an opponent. Their sustained damage is actually decent, especially factoring in retaliation. They don’t need a lot of cover conditions because they have a huge number of ways to apply burning. The issue comes with finishing off their enemies. If they got a GM trait that caused burning to be a soft CC like a cripple or something, that would be really interesting.

I just.. Wat? Tell me have you ever TESTED a condi guard? or at least a hybrid? The damage you can get, and the amount of burning you can put on targets is insane.. Especially in a group.

Thadrin.7586:

I just.. Wat? Tell me have you ever TESTED a condi guard? or at least a hybrid? The damage you can get, and the amount of burning you can put on targets is insane.. Especially in a group.

Compared to a Staff Condi Mesmer who can easily maintain perma burn + 15 stacks of bleeds, how is that condi guardian working out. Staff mesmer is also one of the toughest things to kill.

I agree on condition guardian not being viable, but for different reasons.

If it were possible to reach 100% bruning duration increase without heavy sacrifices, a guardian could spec in order to constantly apply low duration burning in a way that the enemy would get pretty much perma burnt, with condition removals and covering conditions not being a problem at all.
The new burning related rune sets seem to provide 45% bonus burning duration (we’ve only seen Balthazar, but we could expect Baelfire and Flame Legion to work on similar fashion) and Sigil of Smoldering is going to be more effective. If Smoldering would provide a 25% duration increase, then that 100% increase could be achieved either by going 30 in Zeal (and increasing the burn damage by 33%) or 10 in Zeal and 20 in Radiance.

If not, it won’t be possible to reach that increase without investing heavily in both Zeal and Radiance, which is unviable because, against popular belief, guardian base survivability is quite lackluster.
Guardian are known for their high survivability, but that can’t be achieved without a quite big trait investment. That’s why bunker guards deal almost no damage and why somethig like a 10/5/30/5/20 on berserkers is considered an offensive Guardian despite more than half of the traitponts are used for defense. Even a 10/30/30/0/0 burst build (which still has more defensive variants) has always taken Monk Focus for a bit sustain (even before medis were able to provide Fury).
A hybrid guardian investing 40-50 points into Zeal and Radiance can probably reach quite insane damage outputs, but it would be just too squishy and not viable at all.
On the other hand, without that 100% increase there’s no reason at all for going the hybrid path. It would need to hit too often to make Justice procs meaningful (and one of the main guardian issues is actually sticking to the target and consistently hit it) or rely on long lasting burns (like torch or purging flames) which would be easily cleansed without covering conditions.

If the 100% duration increase could be reached with no more than 30 trait points, however, something like Settler side node defenders and Carrion hybrids could be seen. Even Celestial might be viable if it’s going to get improved.
In any case, even with the 100% burning increase, these builds seem fairly vulnerable to coditions and hardly competitive. PoV is not an option anymore once you slot burning duration runes, and going 20 into Virtues for Absolute Resolution is unviable after the Zeal/Radiance investment. A medi build using CoP (so no Stand Your Ground) or a healway one using Purging Flames (probably untraited) seem to be the only viable options at first glance, and that’s not exactly a lot of removal.

Relshdan.6854:

it baffles me why they keep buffing our condi damage without giving us access to more conditions to cover the burning damage.

You know, Einstein once made a statement on two infinite things. I think that’s the explanation for this stuff.

Thadrin.7586:

I just.. Wat? Tell me have you ever TESTED a condi guard? or at least a hybrid? The damage you can get, and the amount of burning you can put on targets is insane.. Especially in a group.

I count 4 skills that apply burning. VoJ, Judge’s Intervention, Purging Flames, and Zealot’s Flame (which requires you to stay in melee range for the full duration, which isn’t exactly easy for a guardian to do).

Maintaining it consistently requires heavy trait and gear compensation, and it is very easily removable. Players are building for a condition meta where access to multiple condition removal abilities is common. Against any decent player, it will be nearly impossible to keep any decent uptime on burning.

You don’t need cover conditions for burning as long as you have more ways of applying it than they have of removing it. Bleeding needs cover because it needs to stack in intensity in order to deal good damage. Burning does applies full intensity with 1 stack.

Keep in mind this single trait is equivalent to about 500 condition damage. This means you could build a solid hybrid build with this trait alone. No condition amulet required. Itsw like getting a zerker amulet with 500 condition damage on it to boot.

Covering conditions aren’t an issue with guardian burns. With burning, important thing is the frequency at which they are applied. Guardians are very good at rapidly applying short duration burns, so cleansing means nothing when the burn is back in 2 seconds anyway.

The issue with a condi guardian is two fold:

#1: lack of conditions overall
#2: high investment requirements to be competitive.

It is really that simple. The reason why condi engineers and condi necros are so scary is because they have a lot of conditions to do damage with. Burning, bleeding, poison, confusion, torment, terror, when all these things are being applied, and all of these things are doing damage, it translates into a lot of pressure, even alongside of their direct damage.

Because of this, engis/necros get a lot of use out of condition damage. But guardians get burning, and only burning. Do you know what 33% of a burn is in extra damage? 2 bleeds. That’s it. No matter how much you invest in condition damage or condition duration, that burning will only make up a small amount of damage when compared to other classes.

Since burning only stacks in duration, the moment you are with another class that causes burning, the burn becomes a redundant condition that contributes little to nothing as far as total DPS goes.

So, the second problem is the investment required to get it that high. Burning has the lowest proportional scaling out of any condition, so make burning a viable strategy, you have to put a whole lot into condition damage. This gives returns to only burning… making investing in condition damage nigh useless.

Now, the interesting trait for guardians isn’t the increase in burn, but the retaliation change. Now, this is where Anet may be on to something. Currently, retaliation scales with power, but does so very poorly. Only about 50% higher than bleeding, and this changes depending on the game mode. For high power builds, this is a useful boon…

But if Anet does what I think they’ll do, then they’ll make retaliation scaling insane with radian retaliation. Just to go for the baseline, at 300 condition damage (the minimum needed to get the trait), to match regular retaliation it would have to scale at about 25% of the stat (on par with burning). This means that, with 1400 or so malice from a dedicated condi build, retaliation would hit for 548 a pop.

That is… quite high, actually. A dedicated retaliation condi guardian can be an incredibly scary fight under these circumstances. In PVE this might be nearly useless still, but a condi support guardian in WvW with massive retal would be a frightening thing.

Though this is all just guesswork. I don’t know how this will really turn out.

To anybody claiming that Condi/Hybrid Guardian has ok DPS, please kill giant veteran in orr in under 20s and post vid.

Bargaw.4832:

To anybody claiming that Condi/Hybrid Guardian has ok DPS, please kill giant veteran in orr in under 20s and post vid.

The hybrid thing is, if anything, about sPvP. For PvE it’s obviously a complete waste :P

My guardian is condi. I love it.

You do realize there’s a trait that applies burning every 3 hits instead of 5, right?

Deku.3129:

You do realize there’s a trait that applies burning every 3 hits instead of 5, right?

That’s 20 in virtues if memory serves correctly, which lacks other traits that boost conditions. Besides, how often are you able to get successive hits off on a single target quickly enough for the 1 second burning ticks to deal adequate damage?

I think with runes, sigils and some of these upcoming traits it could certainly be possible with the appropriate build. Burning could tick at 1000 per tick and be reapplied almost endlessly. A proper carrion build could give some direct damage too.

I certainly wouldn’t call it the meta but it seems like something that could work.

Everything is about the duration increase on Sigil of Smoldering. If it’s 25%, a pretty decent Carrion build should be possible; if not, I can’t really figure anything truly viable.