Guild Wars 2

So Guardian isnt OP yet we must change our setups just to counter this class?

Sounds like the Meta is starting to revolve around guardians huh.

They should add diminishing effects with toughness/HP, since it seems that their tankiness mixed with condition removal is what’s wrong with them. It really shouldn’t be an instant victory in tournament play because the enemy team has a Guardian and your team doesn’t have the only counter to them. Pretty ridiculous if it’s required to have a counter made for one class if you want to win.

seriously? they have a base toughness/vitality of 916 and hp 10,8k lowest hp in game now that is very low for a class without a viable ranged weapon. nerf their defense and they have nothing. just accept the fact that there is no easy cake spike build to kill a good guardian.

It’s not so much the array of knockbacks and skills to keep you out of a point that guardians have, it’s the fact that they can also give themselves stability to occasionally negate other classes knockbacks that make them so effective at point holding.

However I DON’T think they need to be nerfed, what we need is more maps and styles of game in GW2 where point capture isn’t the main objective. Also, if you nerfed guardian’s defensive orientated specs, I really think that then they’d become a class that not many people would want in their tourney roster.

Although I would say sometimes I feel that their spirit weapons chase me half away across a map…but that’s probably just me exaggerating!

tom.7468:

seriously? they have a base toughness/vitality of 916 and hp 10,8k lowest hp in game now that is very low for a class without a viable ranged weapon. nerf their defense and they have nothing. just accept the fact that there is no easy cake spike build to kill a good guardian.

The problem is you don’t even need to be ‘’Good’ to hold a point as a fully defensive guardian. A-net stated they don’t want people with pure def builds to stay alive forever and offence should strong arm defensive builds.

they don’t stay alive forever when i play guardian in pvp i do die a lot your making it sound like they cant die well they CAN. you know what go and play a guardian in pvp and see for yourself discussing with you is useless I’m done wasting my time in this thread.

Guardians are fine. L2P —-→WAY

Bring a mark/well necro and start laughing at how useless guardians become.
I guess having the hard counter to bunker guardians as the most underrepresented class makes people think that G are OP.

How people think: professions are OP if i need to change my build before i have a chance to beat them…

In my dreams, such people would not exsist but sadly this is earth and we will have to live with this. Every proff has an counter and if youre not willing to change your build to counter it.. Your choice.
Yust remember you can NEVER have a build that counters every single class.. Cause THAT would be OP

Usually I would be one of the ‘L2P pls’ people, but it’s kinda obvious that Guardians are too good at what they do. 24/7 uptime on Protection, Retaliation, Stability, with Knockbacks, Bubbles/Walls, Immobilize and their healing is enormous.

I don’t know why people go on and on about ‘building to counter Guardians’ when you don’t know if a Guardian will be in your game (which there probably are). I’d rather not have to roll a Ranger or Necro just for the purpose of countering a Guardian. It is not how the game should be made nor will I build SOLELY for the purpose of countering Guardians.

You don’t see Guardians building to counter Warriors, Thieves, Hunters, etc. because what they do is generally above all classes.

^ you don’t have to reroll a counter, you just need ONE person out of 5 that CAN deal with a guardian. Despell is as important as any cc/stun break/movement ability in pvp- period.

xloz.6280:

^ you don’t have to reroll a counter, you just need ONE person out of 5 that CAN deal with a guardian. Despell is as important as any cc/stun break/movement ability in pvp- period.

A Guardian is not there to counter a single class, nor should a single class be there solely to counter Guardians.

And what also is obvious is that, even if you can kill a Guardian does not mean you dealt with him; if you are capable of killing him in a 1v1 then you are most likely a Ranger/Engineer meaning you will also be Ranged. What you must understand is that although you may kill him, he has done his job of staying on the node for as long as possible while you are outside not neutralizing the point. If this was a premade, by the time the Guardian downs another will come to back him up and you will lose. If not, it doesn’t matter, the Guardian will revive and come back to take back the node. You can’t defend that node unless you’re on top of it with the Guardian which will put you in a disadvantage as a Ranged; you will lose that point, and maybe would’ve saved point ticks of 10 seconds with all the effort.

Havoc.4053:

xloz.6280:

^ you don’t have to reroll a counter, you just need ONE person out of 5 that CAN deal with a guardian. Despell is as important as any cc/stun break/movement ability in pvp- period.

A Guardian is not there to counter a single class, nor should a single class be there solely to counter Guardians.

And what also is obvious is that, even if you can kill a Guardian does not mean you dealt with him; if you are capable of killing him in a 1v1 then you are most likely a Ranger/Engineer meaning you will also be Ranged. What you must understand is that although you may kill him, he has done his job of staying on the node for as long as possible while you are outside not neutralizing the point. If this was a premade, by the time the Guardian downs another will come to back him up and you will lose. If not, it doesn’t matter, the Guardian will revive and come back to take back the node. You can’t defend that node unless you’re on top of it with the Guardian which will put you in a disadvantage as a Ranged; you will lose that point, and maybe would’ve saved point ticks of 10 seconds with all the effort.

Mesmer shatter/engi/condi-ranger/ and marks necro should be able to burn 90% of the bunker guardians out there… That’s a lot of classes that can shut down one class- and you can just as easily use a bunker necro/engi/warrior that does the same thing any guardian can do. Sure guardians can do it easier but anyone who has played any real tournament pm vs pm knows exactly what I’m talking about.

xloz.6280:

Mesmer shatter/engi/condi-ranger/ and marks necro should be able to burn 90% of the bunker guardians out there… That’s a lot of classes that can shut down one class- and you can just as easily use a bunker necro/engi/warrior that does the same thing any guardian can do. Sure guardians can do it easier but anyone who has played any real tournament pm vs pm knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Mesmer shatter and Marks necro only work with fights involving more than 2 people. A Marks necro and Mesmer shatter will never attempt to break a Guardian bunker alone lol. Necro bunkers will never purely bunker, they will LoS while placing marks which places them outside of node radius. Engi bunkers are good, I have to admit but they are second to Guardians. Hammer/Shout Warriors Bunkers are easy to break with CC Removal and Stability.

I’m gonna have to agree with the OP on this one. Shouldn’t require 3 people to take down 1 class

Titus.9705:

Guardians are not fine, and if you have more than one good guardian you can easily lock down two points if there team supports them well. Please don’t comment if you don’t have experience facing such builds/teams.

Slow your roll man, no need to jump all over him like that.

Have you thought about ways to counter it? Or would you just like ANet to make Guardians completely useless.

And those 3 people better not be glass cannon build .. or u fail lol

the only way to counter a noob guardian is to condition the hell out of him … but if he’s not noob he’s gonna nulify that damage too :p

Apparently people are fine with guardians being able to hold a point against 2 (or even more) for a long period of time. In fact, in CT it’s even worse, they can knock down people back to stairs. Is this really intentional design? What’s the point of other classes defending points then? Pretty much the same issue happens with mesmers at Kyhlo treb.

Bring a mark/well necro and start laughing at how useless guardians become.
I guess having the hard counter to bunker guardians as the most underrepresented class makes people think that G are Op

This … and fact that people just suck at usin proper debuffs + buffs at the same time. Don’t know why people are just screamin over a tank doin his job.

If A.net gonna bring CTF mode, that’s gonna be so hilarious to read all the upcomin qq.

Guardians aren’t as ‘pet rock’ as people make out. I’ve tried to play a defensive spec Guardian for several weeks now, and I’ve come to realise that we’re essentially useless. The only thing that particular Guardian set up is good for is defending a King of the Hill type point from another melee class; and even then it’s only a battle of attrition. Any other class will eventually kill a Guardian.

We have no control over condition removal. Yes, we can remove conditions but it’s completely random and is entirely hit and miss. Mesmers, Necromancers, Rangers; condition based ranged classes immediately trump a defensive spec Guardian 100% of the time. We can not remove your conditions. We can not close the gap to melee you. We will die.

There have been very few times I have ever said this, but whoever genuinely believes Guardians are “OP” in any sense of the term really needs to take a good hard look at themselves and what they’re doing. Devensive Guardians are extremely easy to counter, especially in Tournament play where teams are coordinated.

You got it wrong Vigil, although everyone mention here and in other threads too that the problem is not guardians being OP …
The problem is the Control the Point game is too easy for guardians indeed they are wayyyyy toooo muuuuch efficient at it compared to any other classes. Of course we could say guardians are good at it and its normal/obvious and I have no problem with that basically. But when talking about competitive pvp, why implement a pvp game that is unfair by design since 1 class outshines all others :p

Guardians are ok, pvp battleground design is fail :p

Vigil.3408:

Guardians aren’t as ‘pet rock’ as people make out. I’ve tried to play a defensive spec Guardian for several weeks now, and I’ve come to realise that we’re essentially useless. The only thing that particular Guardian set up is good for is defending a King of the Hill type point from another melee class; and even then it’s only a battle of attrition. Any other class will eventually kill a Guardian.

We have no control over condition removal. Yes, we can remove conditions but it’s completely random and is entirely hit and miss. Mesmers, Necromancers, Rangers; condition based ranged classes immediately trump a defensive spec Guardian 100% of the time. We can not remove your conditions. We can not close the gap to melee you. We will die.

There have been very few times I have ever said this, but whoever genuinely believes Guardians are “OP” in any sense of the term really needs to take a good hard look at themselves and what they’re doing. Devensive Guardians are extremely easy to counter, especially in Tournament play where teams are coordinated.

Yes, it’s true. If you build completely defensive why should you be able to beat those classes? You’re built for defense and support, obviously you’re not going on a killing spree here. You will EVENTUALLY die. The problem is you can hold 2 people at one point for over a minute easily, and when teams only have 5 players that puts the rest of your team at a severe disadvantage. I’m okay with the guardians being tanky, and filling that role. I’m not okay with how good they are at doing it.

Also, if you’re denying the fact that guardians are OP you’re just a plain moron. There’s a reason you see them on every tPvP team.

I think I will reiterate my position on this. Guardians do their job well. Their tankiness comes mostly from their skills. Shutdown kills them, but the thing you have to understand when playing against a guardian is that once you take a point from them, it is difficult for them to get it back from you unless they too collapse to a point to capture it. A guardian is not that effective at taking a point (if you know in the slightest how to dodge their knockbacks which is pretty easy if you’re observant.)

As a guardian, every effective strategy against me comes down to spreading away from the point to spread the opponent out and attempting to control or contest one point. Then doing a collapse on the guarded point and take it quickly or at least neutralize it. From there it becomes difficult for them to get it back from you.

But honestly, it isn’t necessarily that a guardian is required, but what is required is some kind of bunker. The most op part of a guardian is honestly retaliation, I do believe that needs to be fixed badly. Other than that, they do their job well and you just need to coordinate you collapses better and take advantage of every second they don’t control a point.

By the way, in my opinion, sending just two people to handle a guardian is a bad idea. Send either 1 or 3. 1 if they can neutralize it 3 if you want to cap it quickly. 2 is a waste of your players time.

A guardian who can’t hold off two people for some amount of time becomes completely useless. If your argument is that a guardian is op because they can live against two people for some amount of time and eventually die, it is a terrible argument. Any good bunker build should be able to live against 2 people until either help arrives or they take advantage of extra person else where.

I don’t know why people say Guardians are not necessary when clearly they are. In every streamed/recorded competitive play there is always a Guardian in the game and that Guardian’s role if bunker. I also don’t know why you honestly think a Bunker should be able to hold off TWO people. That requires 3 people to try to break a bunker while the rest of the team has to fight 4 on other objectives.

If this was pm vs pm, there is no doubt that the Guardian would be calling for reinforcements if 3 are incoming to take his node.

The ONLY people who say Guardians are not stronger than other classes are Guardians themselves. I’m tired of seeing all these Champion Paragons like it takes some skill to achieve it.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say Guardians break anything (since if you just look at the cool things a class can do, I’m pretty sure every single one is imbalanced), but they are special. Even a not-absurdly-tanky support guardian will only die 1v1 to their own mistakes. Only in 1v2-3 do the counters come in, they allow you to kill the guardian fast enough for their allies not to arrive in time. Supporty guardians tank with the best of them and tanky guardians support with the best of them.

That said, the point defense business is complicated. A well-played engineer is at least on par with guardians as a straight point holder, and staff eles offer more powerful support. Engineer has the added bonus of beating guardian counters (Supply Drop, condition builds can’t kill those turrets) The most impenetrable defenses I have seen are some combination of these 3, not just mass guardians. A big reason why guardian is seen more is that it’s much easier to play and since everyone plays them, the good builds are widely known.

Basically, point defending is really powerful, in random PvP no one does that since it doesn’t award you with points and you can’t call for help on voice chat, and people get fooled by how guardian is the public face of point defense.

And keep this in mind… the bunker guardian is on point because he almost HAS to be… a full-tank spec’d bunker can’t really kill the monsters or Lord by themself where other classes can (not in any reasonable amount of time) and they can’t really take another point on their own unless you are just really bad and getting knocked off the point, and unless a guardian is working a staff into his out of combat weapon set, they are not very mobile.

Engineers and Mesmers as point defenders do just as good if not better a job at bunkering, but their ability to bunker while providing offense as well means they are better suited to move about as roamers or to take the middle point.

So I guess what I’m saying is, it’s hard to call a class OP that basically “has” to spec tanky to be viable in your average tPvP match when there are other classes that have more options on how to spec. Don’t get me wrong, you can be just as successful with your “spirit burn” spec in tPvP but if you’re joining your average pug they are going to expect the guardian to bunker. I bring up again that is might be a little easier to bunker as a guardian because of their defensive CDs but easier =/= OP.

So in that sense, you can look at it from the other side as well. Bunker guardians are everywhere because we are kind of expected to be. Neutralizing a point takes only a few seconds, so if you bring a few knockbacks before the guardian pops any stability moves, you just rendered the guardian useless. Don’t try to kill him, just knock him or fear him off the point.

Konrad Curze.5130:

the biggest problem is that a guardian’s natural and most dangerous enemy are necromancers

and necromancers are so utterly bugged, and even without they bugs they are so ridiculously underpowered and underwhelming at every-effing-thing but dealing with guardians, that practically noone plays them

so guardians dont have to worry about their natural counter, since there is none around the vast majority of the time

Didn’t read past this post because this person gets it.

The only thing necros do well in sPVP right now is counter guardians. And even that we don’t do a good job of 1v1. We shut down guardians extremely well but to kill them we need a partner who can actually dish out the dps.

Making necro a very frustrating class to play: you are only good at one thing and even that you need a friend t make it work right.

oh and for retaliation btw, steal boon / cancel, that’s how hard it is to counter it.

Eh, I don’t see any problems with Guardians, really. Yes, they’re strong, but they’re not OP.

I play Necro, Guardian and Warrior (mostly Necro these days, as it’s the most fun profession), and as a Necro I shred Guardians to pieces.
Also, I don’t see why so many guardians claim that “killing a mesmer is the true test of skill for a guardian”. I never had much trouble killing mesmers with my guardian in tPvP, although I don’t play full bunker on my guardian, I play a sort of hybrid spec with good damage and decent defense. Then again, I also know how the animation for Moa looks like, and just dodge roll it at the last second. That’s really the only dangerous ability Mesmer has for a guardian.

CeCaKonVeu.5734:

the only way to counter a noob guardian is to condition the hell out of him … but if he’s not noob he’s gonna nulify that damage too :p

Yeah… The big problem is retaliation. I got hit with 15K worth of retaliation last night in a 1v2 fight against a guardian. Yeah, we lost.. That’s just silly coming from a passive skill. People claiming Guardians are not OP are probably palying one themselves.

Condition Necro counters the majority of Guardian builds, especially the tanky retaliation one.

Basically, bring conditions and boons removal.

[quote]

A Thief can hold the attention of opponents just as well. When playing a Thief, I’ve gotten into plenty of 1v2 fights, and sometimes 1v3 fights, where my opponents existed on chasing me around all over the map, because they were convinced that I was an easy kill. At times this meant that I could get them of the objective, when they were trying to catch me, and then go into stealth and double back to take the objective again.

Havoc.4053:

xloz.6280:

^ you don’t have to reroll a counter, you just need ONE person out of 5 that CAN deal with a guardian. Despell is as important as any cc/stun break/movement ability in pvp- period.

A Guardian is not there to counter a single class, nor should a single class be there solely to counter Guardians.

Fatal flaw in your logic is that you’re not countering Guardians, you’re countering Bunker players.

And yes, you do have to have a class to counter a tactic. Is Guardian the best at bunkering down? In the right hands, yes. And there always will be one class that’s best at a specific type. Sorry, but that’s the way the world works. The only way to make a game truely blanced like that would be to remove professions all together, and that’s not happening because people like to be ‘unique’.

So keep that in mind. You’re building against a bunker, not against Guardian specificly. But Guardian’s are not the only bunker class. Engineer, Mesmer heck even Elementalists fit this term. But Guardian’s got the best knockback, retaliation, and anti-burst equasion in his kit, which is why it’s popular.

It’s not the most effective according to the full span of game mechancis, because it does have hard counters – they’re on unpopular classes. Most of these classes, however, preform well in their own rights.

Again, my biggest complaint about structured PvP isn’t class balance right now. It’s elo. This section needs it. Both for the players and the developers. The players so that the good players can actually explore and discover powerful tactics, and the pub-stomping in hotjoin begins to settle out. For the developers where they can actually analyze the PvP game better for more accurate adjustments.

And that’s really got to happen before sweeping nerfs happen. Buffs? I can understand.

Heartseeker, Heartseeker, Heartseeker, Heartseeker, Heartseeker, Heartseeker, Heartseeker, Heartseeker, Heartseeker…

“What, this guy isn’t dead yet, he must be hacking or he needs a nerf, I’m so confused!”

RamzaBehoulve.5640:

Condition Necro counters the majority of Guardian builds, especially the tanky retaliation one.

Basically, bring conditions and boons removal.

As stated above, no it doesn’t. Conditionancer shuts down guardians well, but it can’t kill them on its own in a decent amount of time.

Right now the only counter to bunker guardian is 1 conditionmancer + 1 high dps class. Until conditionmancer gets a second damaging condition and therefore the ability to do anything besides shut down one class it is gonna be underplayed and therefore guardians are going to stay the top of the pile.

2 decent guardians defending a node and ressing downed players 24/7, any one else? Not that it happens super often but the frustration when you cant kittening stomp anyone T.T

@Aelona, stripping retal from a guardian is useless. It’s like using Corrupt Boon vs a staff ele. It removes it for a few seconds, then it’s back up.

Guardians get retal from Aegis being removed. They get it from Stand Your Ground. They get it from activating a Virtue. They get it from Save Yourself/Retreat.

All those apply retal for at least 10 seconds. Not to mention the other boons they apply.

You can’t strip retal from Guardians.

Then again retal needs to be removed in general. Passive damage reflect on a tank class is the worst thing you could ever add to a game.

Retal is just a bad mechanic right now. The flat damage makes very little sense because it makes it extremely powerful in some situations and very weak in others. It means something like a shortbow ranger blows themselves up in seconds against retal whereas a class like ele barely feels it.

It could make sense as a very short duration boon which hits back for 50-100% of the damage done to you. But not as an effectively 100% uptime ability on one class.

I think there are a couple things that are making Guardians OP right now. The first is that Conquest mode is basically tailor made for a bunker Guardian, you have a static location to stand on so their weakness of lack of range/mobility means zilch. The second is that their big counter, Necros are effing TERRIBLE right now so no one plays them even semi seriously.

tPvP needs at least another game mode that focuses on mobility/movement. Look at TF2 for good examples of map types and game modes that require diverse skill sets and different classes to be balanced to play all different kinds of maps. Just one additional map type would make Guards less likely to focus only on bunkering.

Right now, Guards are 100% OP but its silly to nerf them, just buff the counters that are already in the game or CHANGE THE GOD kitten GAME MODES.