Guild Wars 2

The Guardian class is severely underpowered in dungeons. The primary role of this class is to assume tanking responsibilities. This entails receiving large amounts of damage.

When equiped with mace and shield, a supposed tanking configuration, there isn’t a whole lot a Guardian can do to be a stalwart tank. Even with maxed defensive traits and defensive abilities on standby, the Guardian finds himself at a deficit of hitpoints and resistance to many boss abilities which result in the level 80 Guardian with respectable equipment, full defensive traits, and defensive abilities on standby being ONE to TWO HIT KILLED against many boss mobs. (And I’m not talking about charge up hits from bosses, but just normal abilities that cannot be evaded by melee.)

The Guardian needs MORE HP and more healing capability.

The primary role of any class is to do whatever you want with it (though admittedly no one likes a glass-cannon running in and dying all the time).

That said, mace and shield is a good way to block damage. It’s arguably the most powerful damage-avoidance weapon set a guardian has purely in terms of skill utility. However the combat game is about avoiding damage, not soaking as much of it as you can. I say the role of a profession is to do whatever you want with it but genuine tanks are just flat out infeasible and this has been implied by ANET. A Guardian can take more consecutive hits than any other profession just because it has the capability to spam Aegis with the right build, but even that won’t last and even the sturdiest Aegis Spammer needs to dodge once in a while and not just sit there waiting to see if an attack is happening before trying to dodge it.

The guardian is arguably the most powerful profession in dungeons simply because it has so much versatility. It can group mobs together, it can dish out significant damage whether single-target or AoE, it can avoid tons of damage whether through a build for dodging (you really don’t even need to build for it, it should be a thing regularly done) or a build for spamming aegis (plus Wall of Reflection), it can heal and support extremely well (even while dodging) and it can even do a lot of those things in the same build.

Hardly anyone can take more than one of the bigger hits dungeon mobs can dish out, which is why most of those are so obviously telegraphed (and why no other player I’ve seen has insisted tanks are a thing in this game). Since you qualified that you’re just talking about regular stuff though I’d like to point out that while the regular skills enemies use don’t have such lengthy animations they are still very dodge-able and a lot of them are still extremely easy to notice in-action before the damage is incurred (meaning time to dodge them).

Guardians don’t need more HP or more healing capability. We’ve got so much more survivability than most Professions that the HP would make us nigh-unkillable if built properly and our healing capability while not the very tippy top of the chart is pretty good anyways (ever hear of Monk’s Focus or Altruistic Healing?)

Also, have you looked into Toughness? It sounds like you have zero of that stat on your equipment.

Is full gear = full exo “tank” gear? (and i mean the whole thing from rings to helmet)

As a guardian i find it laughable of what this topic is about. Guardian’s are by far one of the most powerful classes in the game. There are very few classes with just a couple pushes of a button can turn the tide of a dungeon battle single handed. The thing about a guardian is you cant just mash away and expect to be good. It actually takes skill and intelligence to play one correctly. Another major facter is traits. If your running a for example 30/30/0/10/0 trait build and trying to be a “Tank” your seriously doing it wrong.

Have you ever had a guardian run a dungeon with a staff in your party? Yeah, practically won the dungeon for us by himself.

I can’t agree with the OP at all about this topic. There is only one profession that I hope to be in every dungeon party I join, and that is at least one guardian…preferably two guardians. Those are the smoothest runs for me every time. The group healing output, damage absorption, condition cleansing, etc is just amazing. I actually just rolled a guardian because I was so jealous of guardian’s survivability over my warrior. The difference in traits alone is huge in terms of survivability. The amount of group support from traits is huge, and they don’t have to worry about awkward mechanics like banners. Granted, I trait primarily for dps on my warrior, and a similarly traited guardian has less in terms of dps. I cannot see the “underpowered in dungeons” issue that you are talking about at all.