Guild Wars 2

Serious here. If a pistol(s) thief, gs mes, scepter ele, or grenade/flame thrower engi fights a retaliation guardian, it doesn’t matter how many times you hit the guy, odd are you’re going to lose. I remember a while ago I was testing p/d thief and had a long fight against a guard. He almost didn’t touch me the entire fight but since he was pure bunker with enough condi removals to make condition thief feel weak, there wasn’t anything I could do.

In the end I went through 3 heals or so and had taken well over 20k dmg from retaliation. I know the obvious answer is to stop attacking but when one of those beasts is camping a point and you need to get them off, you can’t exactly just ignore him and win the match.

Put this in general because this affects all areas of the game. PvE bosses with perma retaliation are, imo, the most boring and lazy boss fights of the game. I say this because EVERY ONE that relies on retaliation has awful mechanics and a near limitless health pool. The ret just makes people have to back off and heal after a little bit, only prolonging this horrible boss fight.

In wvw, the block and ret guards just walk into the middle of a zerg, tank hits for 10s, walk out alive with doing several thousand damage to everyone who thought that guard was a free kill. The guard doesn’t really do anything, just spams a few blocks/reflects and his invuln. Eles and engis do this too but in a much more controlled setting. At least when mesmers do it it’s off their illusions mostly so it adds a layer to the game (illusions on death traits). Everywhere else it’s just lazy and boring.

Mah retaliation isnt bad.
Confusion is what hurts.
Confusion should lose a stack everytime you do something.

randomfightfan.4091:

In the end I went through 3 heals or so and had taken well over 20k dmg from retaliation. I know the obvious answer is to stop attacking but when one of those beasts is camping a point and you need to get them off, you can’t exactly just ignore him and win the match.

Yeah, bunker guards can be super annoying. But hey, like you said they don’t really do anything most of the time. Sure they can keep a point locked up, but so can a lot of profs/builds. In a big fight they can basically be ignored other than to interrupt them from stomping or rezzing. I pity their boring, monotonous and innefective play-style.

If you really want to kill one, boon stripping and interrupts are very helpful.

I tried bountiful theft and the boon stripping sigil… it wasn’t enough. Just couldn’t possibly keep up with their perma stacking boons