Guild Wars 2

Just my 2 cents, the importance of reflection and blocking skills is really overdone in some dungeons, for instance grawl shaman. As a result, some professions like guardian is really essential in some high level dungeons and other professions that doesn’t provide good aoe blocking and reflection can find it really frustrating no matter how they play it and what their build is.

Is this really intended? Coz it gets really annoying in some high lvl fotm. Anet removed tank, healer and dps trinity and now what’s in its place? Guardian> the trinity?

Not really a class issue imo. The problem is that some builds are not optimized for dungeons (yet players still bring them/refuse to adapt). Each class has a few options for ‘cooperative builds’, its just guardians are more inclined to be either cooperative or tanky which is always good in cooperative situations. For example minion necros are very useless in dungeons because most bosses do AoE, drain life necros tend to get 1 shot a lot, however Well or condition necros provide very good suport. As far as guardians go, having more than 1 is inefficient anyways.

It is most certainly a class issue.

Guardians are awesome.

Orion the Cursed.1206:

Not really a class issue imo. The problem is that some builds are not optimized for dungeons (yet players still bring them/refuse to adapt). Each class has a few options for ‘cooperative builds’, its just guardians are more inclined to be either cooperative or tanky which is always good in cooperative situations. For example minion necros are very useless in dungeons because most bosses do AoE, drain life necros tend to get 1 shot a lot, however Well or condition necros provide very good suport. As far as guardians go, having more than 1 is inefficient anyways.

I have guardian, thief, mesmer, elem. I have no problem playing any dungeon with 4 other guardians all in zerker build. While in my thief or elem, I will have headache running any dungeon if I see more than 2 of my classes. Sometime its not about skill or build anymore, it’s about how many blocking or reflection you can bring to the team. No matter how good your build is, or how well you dodge or whatever, a class with zero such skill or with an inferior version of such skill i.e. smoke screen, is always gonna be unpopular. Have you ever tried doing dungeon with more than 1 guardians? It’s beyond awesome. Maybe we should rephrase your statement to, some classes are not optimized to do dungeons (yet players still bring them/refuse to adapt).

The difference a single Guardian brings to a party is huge.

No other class has such an impact.

As a Warrior I can just look on in envy.

i have a engineer[main](toolkit)80, mesmer(shatter)80, Guardian(shout+valor)80, necro(condition+well)80, thief(scout)32, & warrior(sniper)21. I use my guardian and necro to run dungeons.

Im not talking about good builds. Im talking about optimized builds. You refuse to accept that theres more than 1 build for each class. And that builds can be made for specific duties. In your case (an example) carrying a pistol/poison focused thief in a party that cant poison against a boss that can heal or regen will be more valuable than a guardian. If you “refuse to adapt” and stick with your dagger, then the problem is you.

5 Guardians cant stack valor, burning, protection, etc… Try a difficult dungeon and you will understand.

Yesterday i was using my necro and an greatsword guardian kept hiding/dying (forcing me to rez her) making my focus on DPS redundant. And i was lvl 78 yesterday and she was 80. (Today i’m 80).

Orion the Cursed.1206:

i have a engineer[main](toolkit)80, mesmer(shatter)80, Guardian(shout+valor)80, necro(condition+well)80, thief(scout)32, & warrior(sniper)21. I use my guardian and necro to run dungeons.

Im not talking about good builds. Im talking about optimized builds. You refuse to accept that theres more than 1 build for each class. And that builds can be made for specific duties. In your case (an example) carrying a pistol/poison focused thief in a party that cant poison against a boss that can heal or regen will be more valuable than a guardian. If you “refuse to adapt” and stick with your dagger, then the problem is you.

5 Guardians cant stack valor, burning, protection, etc… Try a difficult dungeon and you will understand.

Yesterday i was using my necro and an greatsword guardian kept hiding/dying (forcing me to rez her) making my focus on DPS redundant. And i was lvl 78 yesterday and she was 80. (Today i’m 80).

Congrats on reaching lvl 80. However if you keep dying in dungeon, that means you still got a lot to learn about your profession, says someone who got 5000+ dungeon token besides 3000+ fotm tokens. Maybe you should reevaluate your statement when you done more works with your lvl 80 toons? Which difficult dungeon you would suggest me to play, lvl 50 fotm?

I dont understand. Are you saying i die in dungeons? I guess i should rephrase. My mistake.

“Yesterday i was using my necro and an greatsword guardian (party member aka another player) kept hiding/dying (forcing me to rez her) making my focus on DPS redundant. And i was lvl 78 yesterday and she was 80. (Today i’m 80).”

I have 8000+ dungeon tokes tho. 4 full sets of exotic wep and armor.

I’m sorry, but im trying to be helpful and constructive but you seem more interested in venting your frustrations. If so sorry for wasting your time.

Orion the Cursed.1206:

I dont understand. Are you saying i die in dungeons? I guess i should rephrase. My mistake.

“Yesterday i was using my necro and an greatsword guardian (party member aka another player) kept hiding/dying (forcing me to rez her) making my focus on DPS redundant. And i was lvl 78 yesterday and she was 80. (Today i’m 80).”

I have 8000+ dungeon tokes tho. 4 full sets of exotic wep and armor.

I’m sorry, but im trying to be helpful and constructive but you seem more interested in venting your frustrations. If so sorry for wasting your time.

I guess I can try to make some sense to you. I am not sure if you run FOTM, let me use grawl shaman as an example. The boss does quite a lot of projectile with agony, you can dodge it for sure, but you only have so much energy, team definitely calls for aoe projectile blockers. We are fine with that. However, apart from the boss, the adds also does lots of projectiles with immobilize attached, which pretty much can 1 hit anyone at lvl 35+. And more projectile blocker is called for here. Is it a good design this boss does mostly projectiles? (with some aoe fire circle which is no threat) On top of that, if your projectile blocker reflects, it’s gonna help break the bubble in secs. With the mechanism explained, give me an optimized build for a 5 warrior group that can run this boss as easy as a 5 guardian group.
It seems to me you kept telling me there is different builds for each class like i am not aware of. But the thing is the mechanism of some bosses are really not balanced. It’s quite laughable if you claim an optimized build will close the gap between guardian and other classes in dungeons.
If you still think i am venting my own frustration, you can try to LFM with 4 guardian or 4 elem/thief/ranger in you group , and tell me how easy it is to find a 5th for a 4 elem group. Until then, please don’t waste time convincing me the average community opinion is overlooking the possibility of an ‘optimized’ build for each class. Your statement that having more than one guardian being inefficient is excuse me, BS. It really makes me wonder if we are playing the same game.

I dont do fractals(corrected) (i hate grinding) but you are saying the problem is with the boss, not just the class, correct?

What i’m suggesting is never have a 5 man group of the same class because most skills dont stack well.

As far as personal experience, (barring inexperienced allies) i feel that a balanced party can do better (clear faster with less deaths).

My suggestion is instead of saying Guardian is the best, we discuss what builds to carry that are more effective. I never said other classes are better than guardians, i said “its just guardians are more inclined to be either cooperative or tanky which is always good in cooperative situations.” in my first post.

Again you may have a point that certain bosses force players to “tank” or DPS, and that might be bad design on their part. We cant be sure unless we run more experiments. Dont forget recently there was a post that melee is useless, which contradicts what you are saying now.

It may even be because i lack experience as you said or i’m just like different builds.

“Your statement that having more than one guardian being inefficient is excuse me, BS.” This is my experience because:

1. burning doesn’t stack
2. Most single guardians can maintain protection/regen 80% percent of the time. Only might is stackable
3. Multiple valor spaming, because they dont stack.

In a similar situation, Warriors cant stack shouts and warbanners. Inefficient means wasted resources. Not undoable.

I’m sorry if i offended you.

Edit: as far as blocking projectiles, i think guardian and mesmers have the best options. Besides that every class can block/reflect projectiles. The problem is most people dont bring those skills.

Theives have an aoe projectile blocking skill and rarely do I see thieves use it. It completely befuddles me.

Orion the Cursed.1206:

I dont do fractals(corrected) (i hate grinding) but you are saying the problem is with the boss, not just the class, correct?

What i’m suggesting is never have a 5 man group of the same class because most skills dont stack well.

As far as personal experience, (barring inexperienced allies) i feel that a balanced party can do better (clear faster with less deaths).

My suggestion is instead of saying Guardian is the best, we discuss what builds to carry that are more effective. I never said other classes are better than guardians, i said “its just guardians are more inclined to be either cooperative or tanky which is always good in cooperative situations.” in my first post.

Again you may have a point that certain bosses force players to “tank” or DPS, and that might be bad design on their part. We cant be sure unless we run more experiments. Dont forget recently there was a post that melee is useless, which contradicts what you are saying now.

It may even be because i lack experience as you said or i’m just like different builds.

“Your statement that having more than one guardian being inefficient is excuse me, BS.” This is my experience because:

1. burning doesn’t stack
2. Most single guardians can maintain protection/regen 80% percent of the time. Only might is stackable
3. Multiple valor spaming, because they dont stack.

In a similar situation, Warriors cant stack shouts and warbanners. Inefficient means wasted resources. Not undoable.

I’m sorry if i offended you.

Edit: as far as blocking projectiles, i think guardian and mesmers have the best options. Besides that every class can block/reflect projectiles. The problem is most people dont bring those skills.

None taken. Just felt a little trolled. I am all for class equality, but the reality is quite far from that, not even close. Again the problem is not tank or dps, Anet tried to eliminate the idea of tank class or dps class, any class can be tank or dps, some might be easier to do a certain role but the other role is not entirely impossible. The thing that annoys me the most is too many dungeons are having projectile blocker or reflections as choke point, while the availability and quality of such provision is incredibly skewed towards certain class, while some other classes only have self blocking, or an inferior version such as smoke screen which is shorter, lower and only last 7 sec vs 10 sec of refection wall, on top of that, reflection wall also reflects and it’s only one of Guardian’s blockers while smoke screen is all thief has. Aren’t they both utility skills that takes up 1 slot? Why is one yielding significantly more benefits than the other version. If anet wants to provide blocking/reflection as one of the team support mechanism only guardian has access to on top of other team supports guardian already has, then please don’t design a dungeon having blocking/reflection as the only choking point. It totally ruins the effort to bring class equality into mmorpg.
The current situation is 5 guardian group beats any other group hybrid or not. If you want to argue with that, give me a valid build and strategy that runs grawl shaman as easy as 5 guardian with 1 ranger, 1 necro, 1 warrior, 1 eng and 1 whatever.
btw, just out of curiosity, how did you get 8000+ dungeon tokens without running dungeon?
A correction to your statement regarding burning doesn’t stack. It does, but it stacks in time which is arguable better than stack in intensity for dungeons since 1. so far afaik no boss cleanses, 2. No burning is wasted, while the 26th stack of bleed, chaos, invul wasted.

I agree with the OP, any team for a hard dungeon should have 2 guardians (or more). The difference in utility a guardian can bring vs the utility other classes can bring is big. My guardian is a tanky faceroll crithammer guardian. Not only can i afk auto attack through half the boss fights in the game i can bring the best projectile protection in the game, i can bring the best aoe stability in the game, i can bring the best condition removal in the game, permanent aoe protection for anyone in range of my symbol plus on demand aoe protection/regen for the whole team (except for the ranger pew pewing off in the background somewhere). List goes on.

What support don’t guardians have that other classes can do better? AoE weakness, aoe blind (my guardian does this too actually), auramancer fury…..? These come from quite specific builds other classes can do where my guardian can do any of the support listed above based on the situation just by swapping a couple utilities.

All while being one of the most tanky builds in the game and doing respectable damage.

I corrected my self (fractals, not dungeons). I have never done fractals so i cant provide an example for that encounter. I have done CoF with 5 guardians and that took a bit longer than with random classes. Burning stacks duration but even when we maintain it 100% of the time, its overall damage is sub par compared to multiple conditions in tandem (guardians cant bleed or poison at all).

As the person above mentioned 2 guardians are more than enough to tank(trinity 1). An additional engi/ele/necro can help heal/ aoe for harder situations(trinity 2). Any remaining players should focus on DPS (trinity 3). Again, i hav never done fractals, so in some situations the presence of tankers might me more vital than DPS in certain areas.

Would i troll with such long sentences? If u want a troll look at Oglaf. He is trying to troll me.

CoF (paths 1 and 2) is so faceroll you should only have 1 guardian, the tanky crithammer guardian. Ideally the other guys are 100b warriors and possibly a mesmer, yet another beef i have on the class balance in this game, 100b warriors far outshine anyone else in the role of trinity 3 for any dungeon outside of high lvl fractals.

climhazzard.5897:

CoF (paths 1 and 2) is so faceroll you should only have 1 guardian, the tanky crithammer guardian.

What about SE,1&2? HotW? Arah? I used CoF because i have yet to run another dungeon with 5 guardians. I dont want to fake experiences. I’ve done SE with 3Guardians+1Warrior+1Engineer.

My group usually runs 2 guardians except for AC and CoF. SE1 you definitely want 2 for the 3 golem fight. We mostly use warriors and sometime a mesmer or auramancer depending on our mood for the other slots, same for every dungeon including arah. For everything outside of high lvl fractals i feel more than 2 guards is redundant and you might as well bring dps for the other slots or a different kind of support like a well necro or auramancer.

That doesn’t really change my opinion that gaurds are the best to have by quite a bit. If i’m joining a pug its on my crithammer guardian who can carry bad pugs like no other character i have (I have 5 80s).

My guardian is a ferry. Mace/shield, shouts and valor, full soldier gear. Applying boons heal me and remove conditions on allies. Keeps ppl alive while they do their things in PvE and gives bonuses on WvWvW. Cant kill PvP because of lack of CC and consistant damage. I can keep burning up 50% of the time with 30 points in valor and my elite. the rest of the time i can block with the heal and elite. I can also shout when im channeling block (etc) so i do that often.

Now that i got my necro to lvl80, i can use him for situations where there is too many tanks. As i mentioned ideally there should be at least 1 guardian in every party. However you cant say that having 5 is the best option.

I play a guardian and a ranger, both level 80. Both mediocrely equipped.
The guardian indeed is a very good survivor and support class, while the ranger is better in rapid burning of foes.
I’m still learning to play with both, but my impression is that it’s easier to learn how to benfit your party with a guardian, since lots of the class’s abilities are towards support.
The ranger can assist the team, but the usage of these skills is less obvious.
For example, using a revive ally skill for my pet can make a huge difference, but it should be timed correctly.
Another, is that while with my guardian I can go in the mayhem, and revive an ally while taking damage, with the ranger I’d probably die doing the same, unless I wait for the downed player area to clear.
The weapon choice also helps that with the mace being a self healing weapon for example, in which case, there is no other skills I need, it just heals me while I fight. There is no learning to do there.

However, the guardian does significantly lower damage than the ranger, since my build and armor are directed at survival and support.

I think that in terms of support, there is a balance. If a party of 5 rangers, 3 out of which use a bear for tanking, and the other 2 use healing pets and mix up the abilities for support and damage, they can perform well.

Getting back to the post, there is no balance in the learning curve. Guardians are very easy to learn.

@omerk

Yup. valor affects allies so you can run away from being “helpful” as a guardian. As for utility, more than 70% of guardian skills benefit cooperative play.

As far as learning curve (PvE), Heave armor classes have it easy. Melee light/med have it the hardest. But when you enter WvWvW, its the opposite. In dungeons, having “tanks” helps because if the foe(s) isn’t running all over the map, the DPS can focus on dealing damage.

the majority of all content is built around Guardians and Warriors right now.

for example, very few enemies actually run or kite players, the only ones that come to mind are Dredge bombers, because of this a warrior built for Hblades has very few issues in killing waves upon waves of enemies because they just stand there and take it.

way back in BWE3 i distinctly remember that enemy AI avoided AoE, i would drop Radiation Field on my Asura and enemies would refuse to stay in the cricle, they would leave the circle as quickly as possible, this meant i had to do something to keep them in the circle, but now w/e they did to change the AI means skills such as Cripple/Chill/Root are mostly wasted on enemy ai it’s just a case of
>Binding Blade
>Stack AoE fields
>Collect Loot
>repeat

shame really because the ranger elite Entangle is absolutely amazing for keeping enemies bunched up, but because they never run what’s the point.

Ursan.7846:

Theives have an aoe projectile blocking skill and rarely do I see thieves use it. It completely befuddles me.

well tho there is no space left in skill slots i must have shadow refuge because my allies gets downed all the time at that boss, then i need 1 condintion removal skill (usually signet since it has lowest cd and the endurance refill is pretty good too especially there) which leaves us with 1 slot and thats usually the movement speed sigili because for theif mobility = survivability also allies are almost always spread out on this boss because its easier dodge projectiles from shaman so i dont think the 7 sec smoke screen would save the fight….ofc iam not using this build all the time i usually change weapon sets and skills few times in each fractal but with what i described i never gets downed on that boss….Also thief guild is great for fast bubble destroy and it also distract the lava elementals a bit…

BadHabitZz.1856:

Ursan.7846:

Theives have an aoe projectile blocking skill and rarely do I see thieves use it. It completely befuddles me.

well tho there is no space left in skill slots i must have shadow refuge because my allies gets downed all the time at that boss, then i need 1 condintion removal skill (usually signet since it has lowest cd and the endurance refill is pretty good too especially there) which leaves us with 1 slot and thats usually the movement speed signet because for theif mobility = survivability

I was on board with your point until you hit the movespeed sigil. Unless you’re signet-synergized or actually effectively using the active this thing has no place on your bar. A large portion of thieves use it out of laziness and because they’ve become reliant on passive runspeed while leveling. There’s no problem with admitting you’re blowing a utility slot so you can be lazy, lots of people run convenience stuff, but you can’t act like you’re doing it in the spirit of combat effectiveness. There’s definitely room for projectile block on the bar if you’re blowing a utility slot on SoS.

As for thieves’ guild on the grawl fractal, Dagger Storm applies about the same hit volume while having a much shorter CD, no channel downtime, and damaging adds simultaneously.