Im a player playing a guardian and i find, as many other guardians, that the shield is really badly designed as none of its skills actually BLOCK! shields are made and used for blocking and since Shields dont have a block rate per se many people that do like using a shield find it kinda pointless cos in GW2 it doesnt actually block, in fact it blocks even less than the other off-hands available. Please GW2 devs and team look into this and consider suggestions and a re-design. I leave a post in which its better explained by Dragonhero.1852:
I love the guardian for the most part but one thing bothers me alot about its design. You can only block with one weapon. You can’t even use a shield for that it’s vary purpose?
The Guardian is melee class without block skills. Sure we have Aegis but due to its difficulty to control and long recharge time we often cant use it when we actually need to. Yes some of the weapons have blind skills but those cant be used to trigger our blocking traits. Probably the biggest issue is that you cant even use a shield to block. A shield is a device created specifically for that vary purpose and the guardian cant use it for that? Sure we can block ranged attacks with it but thats a mute point when we are usually fighting in melee range. You can say your supposed to dodge all you want but thats not the point. Their are some times when its a much better option to block than dodge but when you cant do it that can become a real issue. You can argue about originality but the when a design choice gets in the way of functionality it becomes a big issue.
Their is even a way to fix this easily. The mace a weapon that is terrible at blocking in real life is the only weapon that you can block with as a guardian. I purpose swapping the Protectors strike and the shield of Judgment ability’s. Giving the block to the shield and the buff/attack to the mace this wont mix up the mace/shield style it will just swap the functionality of 3 and 4. While adding a block to the Sword/Shield and Scepter/Shield styles. Creating three styles capable of blocking.
I would further suggest not swapping the names or cool-downs just the skill functionality. As the names would better fit each others functionality and having the guardian being able to pull off a manual block with Aegis might be a little Op if the block doesn’t have good cool-down. Also I have read complaints about the Shield of Judgments protection buff having too short a duration for its cool-down.
Thank you very much!