Guild Wars 2

Prelude
This is the first time that i’m immensely unhappy with the state of Guardian. During the celestial amulet era, Guardian was still ok in soloQ. We were still ok in certain 1v1 scenarios. We had a bunker build. We had a niche 1v1 burn build. We had a more competitive power variant. Though improvements were needed, It was “OK”.

The Burn era hit and I was ecstatic. We had changes to a build that a lot of players loved, albeit, niche at times but it worked. Burn Guard was meta for a short while following HoT…

HoT
I shouldn’t have to say how little build diverse HoT made the game… that in itself is a topic for another thread. My main concern, presently, is how ineffective Guardian has gotten. More importantly.. how another game mode influenced our class changes.

A large portion of the changes occurring for the guardian are aimed toward reducing the dragonhunter’s group controlling and killing capacity in WvW…

How can Anet balanced a class around a Game Mode that had nothing to do with a Structured PvP?

There’s a reason why it’s called Structured. It is arranged differently, and should act differently, than any other game mode. There should not be any conflict of interests between PvE, WvW and Structured PvP.

Here is what DH can’t do in Conquest, compared to other classes
DH can’t assault or defend side points efficiently like other classes…
DH can’t roam efficiently like other classes…
DH can’t support better than Ele or even Engi’s Gyros…
DH can’t self sustain better than other classes…

And I’m not just talking about Guardian. Thanks to Reapers no longer being the Achilles heel to the classes we absolutely can’t handle, our overall effectiveness in TPvP has reduced substantially.

Current meta is looking at Mes, Rev, Engi, Ele & Druid with Thief & DH being an arguable 5th maybe. Guard can do “ok” in team fights but… how the heck can we deal damages when our LB#5 Fails to hit a group, or our LB#3 15% dmg increase doesn’t do enough in a sustain fight to be worth a talk, & we can’t sustain as well as the mentioned team composition above? Hard to rotate a class to home or far to contest the point when you know that class has a 0 chance of winning it and the class can’t sustain well enough by his lonesome self on point.

TL;DR
The patch’s 20% True Shot nerf & LB#5 “block negates the skill completely” addition… is more effective than the Dev’s planned. The changes were influenced by WvW rather than Structured PvP. We have no build diversity and Guardian is starting to play very sour overall.

With that being said, we want to keep the dragonhunter competitive and still dealing high damage, but we want the damage dealt a little less instantly than before.

You’re making a class who was not mechanically made to sustain very well, have less burst damages. If my well timed True Shot lands but doesn’t damage enough, our Traps can’t burst well enough (previous nerf), we can’t land LB#5 efficiently enough, and we can’t sustain as well as other classes in a team fight to do it all over again… How exactly are you keeping Guardian “competitive” in PvP? It all sounds very counter intuitive.

You have to ask the question why?

I honestly think warrior and guardians just switched spots. Guardians can no longer out sustain warriors and warriors got the beserker buff spec. Yet warriors still wont be able to beat necros and revs in 1 vs 1.

You mentioned old Pre HOT builds and you talk about diversity. The builds dont have to be great but the ability to have options in different builds/ play styles/ team support means alot and gives different players different levels of effect.

And i truly believe that anet has no idea how to fix balance atm. They pigeonholed themselves.

Eles can only use shouts to be effective, best support build in game yet is the only effective build.

Necro the overall best class but also the worst when put with bad team mates or yourself not able to deliver the damage your class needs. This is a class that cant be caught off point yet cant be caught int he middle if fights.

Revs are great if you use shiro and glint but what after that? A condi rev isnt as good as a warrior, necro, or mesmer now. So a top 2 build in season 1 is no longer even viable in todays PvP.

Your complaining about guardian and i agree but something has to bee said about the fact that each class has 1 legit APEX BUILD. A build that is better then any other build period.

If i ran a ventari/dwarf rev- the very best possible build right now of it and i was the best player ever at it. You could beat me if you are a average shiro/glint dps rev.

If i was the very best at using core warrior pre hotbuild and you used the condi beserker they have now and your just so so. You would beat me easy.

This is truly where anet lost there way and im 99% sure they dont know how to even these things out.

They don’t know what they are doing the game gets less and less diverse as we go on. Guardians are complete garbage against meta classes but they’ll probably tell you that Guardians are “in a good spot.” They made all the elite specs too strong and then nerfed some of them way more then others and refuse to buff any of the old traits and abilities significantly. It’s all horsekitten.

DH is F-tier against anyone who isn’t stupid enough to die to traps and has a defensive/dodge ready for LB5. Which is pretty much anyone above sapphire.

I think at the very least they should revert the Longbow5 (“LB5” change, or make it channel much faster. The one semi-unique role that DH had was AOE CC and area denial — no other class did it better. Maw, Hammer5, and LB5 gives DH three barriers that are impossible to escape without either stab or blink, and TOF adds a barrier that does heavy damage to people who try to blink out.

In my mind, that was pretty much the main reason for a team to take DH over a meta class. The nerf to LB5 basically makes the skill unuseable against decent players, and the additional nerf to ToF damage makes porting out of it less punishing (although it still hurts).

Otherwise, the class doesn’t seem to offer enough to fulfill any roles in this meta:
- Not enough sustained support or sustained DPS to be an effective teamfighter (relative to meta builds).
- The cooldown on burst attempts (the whole LB2+JI+TOF+F1) is too long to make it an effective assassin-type class (relative to rev and thief).
- Not enough self-sustain and sustained DPS to be an effective side-point fighter (loses 1v1s to rev, scrapper, druid, mes, and possibly thieves depending on the DH’s build and terrain)
- Not enough mobility to be an effective roamer

I personally think giving DH a stronger presence in teamfights would require the fewest tweaks.

This actually just hit me from last night.

I was playing warrior and i had a shield. I starting blocking and the other teams necro threw down staff 5 mark (fear) and it took me out of block.

Next match im playing a core burn guardian with meditations. I see a ele start to go into overload air. I miss the knock back ( i dont know why) and then the lightning strikes are going threw the shield 5 of the guardian.

I still have to say GW2 PvP is the best ive tried but im really looking forward to overwatch, For Honor, Paragon and a few others because i will literally trait for shield and other peoples skills will simply be better just because.

The only times I’ve trapped someone with LB#5 after latest patch is if they are finishing another downed player and don’t have time to dodge. It’s so easy to evade now that it’s not even funny.

Trueshot was nerfed removing any kind of burst, leaving us with traps for burst. So as I mentioned in another thread, people complained about traps being too powerful, so they nerfed trueshot leaving us with nothing but traps for burst. Logic much? Guess I better get some thick skin now that I have to listen to all the whispers coming my way with “kittening cancer build” “traps are for noobs” and “L2P scrubhunter”. I think I’ll just stick with my medi-trapper and hope that the devs realize they screwed us over.

And as people have mentioned, any decent player can avoid those traps leaving the DH very vulnerable and helpless. I’m not saying that nothing works now on the DH, but statistics don’t lie and if no one basically was using the DH on the pro teams before balance update, then that’s a pretty good indication that the class doesn’t need nerfs, more likely the opposite.