Some trait and skill synergies are seemingly a no brainer to go together, then you find that they are broken out of sync when taken together because cooldowns change and do not match up together.
Communal Defense + Invigorated Bulwark
I understand the need to buffer the outgoing healing/damage that can be applied by Communal Defense to a group of players. Innately that occurrence of aegis application would be limited by cooldowns, save for the healing skill, shelter.
Beyond that Mace was the seemingly best choice to go with Communal Defense as it provided the most consistent blocking and a decent refresh of cooldown. Yet now there is a 15 second cooldown to Communal Defense, and if you take Invigorated Bulwark it will not trigger on mace every rotation, as mace protector’s strike changes from 15 seconds to 12 second cooldown.
Adjust Communal Defense to have a 1-3 second internal cooldown to allow steady application of group aegis on intelligent usage of guardian blocking mechanics. Otherwise the skill provides little to no benefit to take and is a broken synergy.
Wrath of Justice + Virtue of Justice
I’m astonished at this one, Wrath of Justice’s sole purpose is to synergize with Virtue of Justice. Previously Virtue of Justice had a 30 second cooldown untraited, now it has an innate 25 second cooldown (and somehow a 21.25 second cooldown when virtues is a selected trait line).
This simply does not work with Virtue of Justice at all. I “think” I understand the want to limit successive immobilize stacking done by a group or repeated aoe kills refreshing Virtue of Justice on kills….but 30 seconds is a huge buffer of saefty against those two things from happening.
Again, lower the internal cooldown for Wrath of Justice to about 1-3 seconds (5-10 would even be acceptable if they are that afraid of quick successive procs from this trait). At least make it work on a baseline usage of the centralized guardian mechanic….virtues.
Rune of Resistance + Perfect Inscriptions
This one is less specific to guardians, but still has a limiting factor. Rune of Resistance applies aegis on signet activation with a 30 second cooldown. Baseline the fastest signet cooldown is 20 seconds for elementalists, 25 seconds for warrior, and 30 seconds for guardian, thief, necromancer, and mesmer, and ranger (sorry engineers, no signet for you).
Traited, the fastest signet cooldown is 16 seconds. I understand the fear of being able to proc multiple aegis applications in quick succession, yet at most people would be able to proc 4-5 signets, be out of passive abilities for a significant amount of time and then become vulnerable after blowing all of their cooldowns.
This rune become useless if any traits with seeming synergy are taken together with it.
I understand that the developers are trying to curtail overpowered effects or simply do not understand the synergistic application of multiple skills/traits/runes/sigils taken together and did not foresee the severe limiting factors.
Bottom line, there are a lot of things that punish and discourage you for traiting into a gameplay style and using skills and traits together, so much so that only few “builds” work and it creates less build diversity. Nothing should encourage players to do “less” with their builds in order to make mechanics work.
I am sure there are more broken synergies that I do not even realize, and far more beyond the guardian class. Share if you have more!