Guild Wars 2

I’m not going to argue the ‘refocus’ of retaliation; I can understand why you’d want to go that direction from a balance perspective.

I’m not going to complain about the rearrangement of skills on the bar, although I would ask you to minimize this sort of thing. It’s really going to screw people up, especially with pvp-trained twitch reflexes. I will suggest that you give us the ability to rearrange our weapon skills on our skill bar and save the order in a character-specific local game file. This will resolve the issue for those who surely will complain about it.

I am going to complain about the cooldown changes:
Symbol of Wrath – cooldown increased by 100% to 20s
Leap of Faith – cooldown reduced by 25% to 15s

Like I said, I get the Retaliation change, but if you are going to remove/reduce our ability to reflect damage then give us a better chance to get into melee and deal damage by hitting things. I request a 10s cooldown on Leap of Faith.

[Edit] I have to agree with several other posters who have pointed out that Guardian synergy is closely tied to symbols, including our traits, damage, buffs, debuffs, heals, and survivability. Doubling the symbol CD is a big hit to all of the above.

(re-posted to the appropriate thread)

Um, ok. This is disturbing. How often are they going to suddenly switch the skill order around? How could they think this wouldn’t be insanely irritating. The explanation made absolutely no sense.
It’s bad enough that we can’t control where they are in the first place. We suck it up and train ourselves to play their way. It’s even worse that they just randomly change the order without warning.
The bottom line is this: This proves that we need to be able to control where we put our skills.
Yeah, you’d think something this trivial wouldn’t matter but what’s next? I’d like to know how often this kind of thing will happen.

The change to buttons makes no sense. Changing the order of my skills does not improve combo fields.

Change it back or give us the option to change it back ourselves please. Thank you.

As a warrior this seems more in line with our savage leap, although IANAMMOD

I am currently annoyed to hell.

I request that Symbol of Wrath have it’s cooldown reduced DRASTICALLY, and then just change the way the retaliation aspect of it works. Don’t nerf the whole kitten skill (damage and all) just because of the retaliation aspect. The Anet devs who thought up of this change must have had their heads up their kitten

I do not like their solution for retaliation reductions, particularly for greatsword. If they wanted to target retaliaton on the symbol of wrath, why not simply target the retaliation aspect of it rather than just doubling the cooldown? The symbol has other uses beside just giving us retaliation – it’s a source of damage, can cause vulnerability if traited, etc.

This is a nerf not only to the retaliation boon, but a nerf to the amount of damage Guardians can do in general in PvE. From what I’ve gathered by observing other classes, we weren’t particularly competent at dealing PvE damage already — why further hinder us in this regard?

I’m extremely disappointed in this patch for a variety of reasons. I don’t understand how this was possibly pushed through testing and made it to live servers.

Zeph.5927:

I request that Symbol of Wrath have it’s cooldown reduced DRASTICALLY, and then just change the way the retaliation aspect of it works. Don’t nerf the whole kitten skill (damage and all) just because of the retaliation aspect. The Anet devs who thought up of this change must have had their heads up their kitten

Yeah i don’t get it, they doubled the symbol cooldown to nerf the retaliation part of it, it makes no sence at all – why not just keep all things as they we’re and drop the duration of retaliation instead, that way the leap reduction to 15 would be a nice compensation to it.

I want the order back. If the move’s too powerful, fine, change it. But don’t change the skill order after I’ve ingrained it into my mind.

Also I agree with GreyWraith. If our ability to stand still and punish attackers is reduced, our ability to chase them down and hurt them should be increased. 10s on the leap isn’t OP either, since that’s the same cooldown our 1H sword has on its closer.

Instinct kicks in, I go to hit whirl and I leap away. This is just not going to be fun for a very long time. If Wrath was too powerful wouldnt a dmg nerf have been good enough? Reorganizing the skills has only made it hard for anyone that has spent time on a guardian to adjust.

They could have at least made/fixed the symbol burn – like the tooltip states – at least then it would have worked with the 10% damage against burning targets.

To this day i don’t get why it states it burns foes, when infact it doesn’t actully burn foes or work with the +damage buring trait.

This is the most annoying this of all time. They completely screwed with months worth of muscle memory. You didn’t have to rearrange the skills anet. Also give leap of faith a slightly smaller cooldown did not help at all. We have still lost a large junk of our viability in PvE (really don’t act like this was a pvp nerf, if people are stupid enough to stand in the symbol or fire everythign at us while it was up, they deserved it).

My recommendiations;

A: reduce the cooldown of whirling wrath to partially make up for the large amount for damage we just lost
B: Reduce the cd of leap of faith even further
C: change it back

1. Reduce the cooldown on Whirling Wrath, and also reduce the cooldown on Leap of Faith even further if Symbol of Wrath is to remain as is. We currently just lost A LOT of PvE damage because of this nerf, something that guardians were already lacking in to begin with.

2. Change the retaliation aspect of Symbol of Wrath and put everything else about it, back to the way it was. Something like, reduce the duration of retaliation to 2 seconds of the total symbol time or something.

I mean seriously Anet? If this is how you’re going to handle balance changes in GW2, you will lose all credibility with your community. My above two suggestions are common sense when it comes to this change. I guess Anet is severely lacking in the common sense department with the dev team.

I completely don’t understand why Anet didn’t just change the retaliation part of the skill rather than changing them around!!

if the location of skills was changed in the first week it would have been less of a deal, but this far in your just messing with your player base. Who in there right mind would have signed off on this? any gamer could tell you its a horrible idea, please change it back asap

Absolutely AWFUL change here. I’ve practically 70 levels with the Greatsword, and to just switch them around completely messes with my muscle memory whilst in combat. I keep pressing the wrong dang skills because of this.

Seriously, who is going to thank you for this? New players? It’s definitely not the ones who have been using it for dozens of levels.

I don’t like the way they’re turning one of our staple boons (retaliation) into a situation-specific thing. I never kept retaliation up all the time unless I specced for it and lost utility elsewhere.

Now I lose retaliation, have less DPS due to less AoE from symbols and retaliation, and a massive knock-on effect in regards to the effectiveness of symbol and proc-per-crit/attack related traits. This is a bigger nerf than what it seems at first glance.

Why do we want to only use retaliation to “counter many hits”? That just means we’ll be god-awful against heavy-hitting enemies who hit less times for more damage.

I am not a fan of this change.

Funny joke, plz put skills back where they belong now, thanks.

Isn’t a Guardian without constant Retaliation just a kittened Warrior?

My suggestion:

Symbol of Wrath – removed Retaliation, increased damage (cooldown 10s)

That way we can get our arrangement of skills back the way they were and you can change the retaliation from the symbol so it simply deals a little more damage to those that keep on standing in it.

To me that simple change would have been a lot better than blatantly increasing the cd by 100% (and in doing so messing up our entire skill-set).

The logic behind the change to symbol is really quite flawed. Give that the majority of our fields are Light and that you’ve reduced the CD on our leap finisher, the net loss of retaliation is going to be…. very small. This raises the ‘skill cap’ for most players who wish to maintain retaliation, but is a glaringly contradicting point to your stated design philosophy.

Symbol of Wrath was one of the primary damage dealing abilities that greatsword has at its disposal. I would rather have it as just a source of damage with no retaliation than have its recharge time increased so drastically. Given the large amount of traits that synergize with symbols it would be underpowered (In that it would not grant its own buff) compared to the other symbols – at least we’d have more buttons to hit with in a particular interval.

I doubt they care about anyone’s opinion here. All that matters is nerfing. As if the Guardian hasn’t been nerfed enough already.

[Edit] Moved this up to the OP.

> Isn’t a Guardian without constant Retaliation just a kittened Warrior?

Funny thing… most near perma-retal builds didn’t rely upon Symbol of Wrath. What this change does do is destroy symbol-based builds for GS – I.E. those speccing into vulnerability/healing/large/longer/etc. symbols. Did they even consider that?!?!?

> They could have at least made/fixed the symbol burn – like the tooltip states – at
> least then it would have worked with the 10% damage against burning targets.
> To this day i don’t get why it states it burns foes, when infact it doesn’t actully burn
> foes or work with the +damage buring trait.

They removed the burn portion from the tooltip with this patch.

GreyWraith.8394:

I have to agree with several other posters who have pointed out that Guardian synergy is closely tied to symbols, including our traits, damage, buffs, debuffs, heals, and survivability. Doubling the symbol CD is a big hit to all of the above.

Exactly. I don’t understand why they change the layout of the guardian skills “to promote more combos” but then make the ONLY field-starter on the Greatsword COMPLETELY unfeasible to put down?

I am not sure about this myself, I don’t care about constant retaliation however the amount of time between being able to put down the symbol I have counted on to be my combo field is worrying now. Maybe increase the length or the extended length of the trait improving symbols, this seems really inconvenient to those who actually get the combo field system and use it frequently.

The change also hinders builds like mine that are reliant on symbols and particularly symbol of wrath. Did retaliation builds really use this? I feel like I now have to build for retaliation to make the symbol worthwhile now. Could we not get a different boon or condition damage? Burning maybe?

I too pooh pooh on the GS change for the same reasons. I spent all night hitting the wrong button. Fortunately I was in a starter area and didn’t realize how badly nerfed it was.

The way I keep retaliation up is use the 2h hammer and use the #2 skill in my/other light fields. =O Sorry 2H hammer lovers!!?!

i just realized they really nerfed the greatsword.
leap on slot 3? 16s cooldown on symbol?
just another example of completely unnecessary nerf
so whats next move to destroy to the class? increase cooldown on hammerskills?

(I can’t quote…)
Keep in mind that light fields have more ways of giving Retaliation than just being there. That’s probably why they increased the cooldown.

Thanks Arenanet, whats next? Will you change our movement keys too? Or perhaps change the GS to a feather duster?

R.I.P Guardians. You are nothing more than seige operators. Enjoy!!

Time to /re-roll

Ynna.8769:

(I can’t quote…)
Keep in mind that light fields have more ways of giving Retaliation than just being there. That’s probably why they increased the cooldown.

I’m willing to bet most people knew about blast and leap finishers giving area and single retaliation. They could have changed the ability to give might instead by swapping it to a fire field. Still fits in line with Guardian, and doesn’t insanely nerf the only symbol on GS.

I really don’t give a crap about skill order. I hate the +10s on symbol cooldown. They really botched this patch in my opinion.

Stop whining you old people, how much time do you think it takes to relearn those skill orders? For myself I have always been bothered that whirlwind was not skill nr 2.

Yes I learned it all as it was before and have to relearn it but as an intelligent, flexible human being that should be no problem.

The cooldown on field of wrath means you use it once in a fight instead of twice.

We are guardians…we ll be fine!

All that work gone into my guardian over the last few weeks as a symbol/greatsword build guardian all now gone to hell. I’m greatly annoyed. Lets face it the Symbol of Wrath wasn’t the strongest skill available for the greatsword and it only had 1 second of retaliation! Its hardly anything. I never noticed its effect – ever. It simply wasn’t long enough to have an effect. They should have just removed the weak retaliation and left the rest alone.

Why don’t you just change the keybinds if it’s “in your mind” the old way? In that case you dont look at the buttons anyways o.O

ANET- you ruined 300+ hours of muscle memory. Being that this is one of the few MMOs that doesn’t allow its users to manipulate the positioning of their attack skills, please change this back. You’ve completely ruined the class for me, and it was the only reason I decided to transition from beta – release.

You’ve angered EVERYONE from guardian class, and benefited no one, and this change was definitely NOT suggested by a gamer. A GAMER would NEVER suggest that change without the ability for the end user to modify or deny the change in skill slots.

Secondly, any noob that says “OH JUST REBIND YOUR KEYS”, please get intelligent enough to try this yourself before suggesting. It changes your secondary weapon as well, it changes your underwater weapon, and your secondary underwater weapon. So by returning 1 weapon to the “old way” we’ve screwed up 3 other weapon rotations/skill locations.

The skill order change was unnecessary. I guess Anet is trying to order the skills with cooldown in mind or just to make the skill less used by moving it in the last slots(?!?!).

And about the retaliation change – just rework the boon, don’t ruin boon durations, skill cooldowns, it just messes up with traits, synergies, runes that give bonus boon duration, etc.

I read somewhere around the forums a speculation that the main reason for nerfing retaliation is people not seeing it and suiciding. Just make the boon icon red or something.

This is called simply “Balance” you don’t want it? Funny.

Seriously, a big NO.
Anet is free to change and balance skills as much as they feel is required, but do not mess up the order of the weapon skill bars without giving us the ability to rearrange them.

I still must test if this is a rly big hit to my muscle memory – but what bugs me is cooldown times swaps from: 10,10,20 to 10,15,20… why not make a Leap on 10 sec ?
This is duble nerf… i’m not happy with that.
All i see in those updates are slow guardian nerfs…
About the retaliation – if it will be situational, can we expect at least more dmg from it?

This was a pointless change. If people are killing themselves on retaliation in PvP that is their fault for not watching the enemies buffs (you CAN see them) and for not attacking in ways retaliation can’t really have an effect (necromancer pets/wells, elementalist meteor rains, etc). Also it was not hard taking people who relied upon retaliation if you knew how to kite them (seriously it was never hard to kite a guardian endlessly as 90% of guardians fail to put a scepter in their offhand as a ranged attack or to make use of the chains to immobalize an enemy kiting them).

Thus this is nothing but a nerf to guardian PvE damage, while a guardian already has incredibly low HP compared to other classes and the guardian is well known to being a low damage class already. This entire patch leaves nothing but a bad taste in the mouths of guardian players everywhere who liked using the greatsword.

Anet needs to adopt a policy right now to never, ever, alter the location of skills upon weapons unless they give us the ability to change where those skills are located ourselves.

My main was a guardian and thanks to this I now have to abandon the greatsword and look for a different weaponstyle I enjoy ontop of altering my entire build. I enjoyed being able to keep wrath down for most of a fight not because of retaliation (that only worked for a single second making that argument truly moronic) but because it would keep vulnerability up on everything my group was fighting. I am very likely to just abandon the class altogether.

The change to buttons makes sense – it’s in order of recharge times.

It is, however, a very short-sighted change, in my opinion.
Greatsword Guardians lost a ton of damage with the change.

ANet say in the explanation they want the finisher (Whirlwing Wrath) to feel more powerful… but the only thing they changed about it was its place in the skill bar…
…and then give a huge nerf to Symbol and a slight buff to Leap.

Runiir.6425:

This was a pointless change. If people are killing themselves on retaliation in PvP that is their fault for not watching the enemies buffs (you CAN see them) and for not attacking in ways retaliation can’t really have an effect (necromancer pets/wells, elementalist meteor rains, etc). Also it was not hard taking people who relied upon retaliation if you knew how to kite them (seriously it was never hard to kite a guardian endlessly as 90% of guardians fail to put a scepter in their offhand as a ranged attack or to make use of the chains to immobalize an enemy kiting them).

Sorry, but while ranged can indeed “ignore” someone’s retaliation by doing some other thing in the meanwhile, melee aren’t that lucky.

I simply disagree with the insane increase in cooldown… why double it?
They could’ve increased from 10 to 15… but they went to 20…
They say they want to make the combo finisher (Whirlwing Wrath) better… but didn’t change it at all.

This is a pretty big loss.

Slower symbol+whirl = much less condition removal for everyone.
It also greatly reduces the value of Altruistic Healing for GS.

Addtional feedback note: as pointed out in the links below, this change does not prevent a near-constant Retaliation build. What it has accomplished is a general nerf for GS symbol builds.

I only see two possibilities. Either:
1) The change reflects design error because it simply does not do what it is supposed to, while simultaneously affecting numerous traits/abilities not related to Retaliation.
or
2) The patch notes reflect gross miscommunication which is the result of incomplete/incorrect information.

About near-perma-Retaliation: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/You-can-still-do-endless-retaliation-its-just-harder-guide

About symbol builds: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Greatsword-change-making-symbol-builds-no-longer-viable

I am disappointed Anet. Why didn’t you just remove the retaliation component off Symbol of Wrath and make it give might instead? Or even fury? Seriously, change it all back, and leave the leap a 15 sec cd if you want, but just change the retaliation from the symbol to either might or fury and put the skills back in their proper order. Please.

GreyWraith.8394:

Addtional feedback note: as pointed out in the links below, this change does not prevent a near-constant Retaliation build. What it has accomplished is a general nerf for GS symbol builds.

I only see two possibilities. Either:
1) The change reflects design error because is simply does not do what it is supposed to, while simultaneously affecting numerous traits/abilities not related to Retaliation.
or
2) The patch notes reflect gross miscommunication which is the result of incomplete/incorrect information.

---

About near-perma-Retaliation: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/You-can-still-do-endless-retaliation-its-just-harder-guide

About symbol builds: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Greatsword-change-making-symbol-builds-no-longer-viable

The problem with those builds (in that Anet will see them and unjustly nerf them) and what Anet is doing is, with each Ret nerf they hurt builds that don’t stack ret in an attempt to cut back on full on ret builds (which sacrifice a lot to get a full ret build i might add).

Basically some builds only use 1 or 2 ret skills (my build for example only used the now nerfed signet for my ret), and yet these nerfs hurt those builds aswell with nothing to make up for it (nerfed the ret part of the signet BUT didn’t buff any other aspect of it).

They should at least balance the buff and nerf. They doubled the recharge of the Symbol, but only dropped the recharge on leap by 5. Give Leap a 10 second recharge, and we’ll call if even.

gloombot.3519:

Secondly, any noob that says “OH JUST REBIND YOUR KEYS”, please get intelligent enough to try this yourself before suggesting. It changes your secondary weapon as well, it changes your underwater weapon, and your secondary underwater weapon. So by returning 1 weapon to the “old way” we’ve screwed up 3 other weapon rotations/skill locations.

Isn’t the “noob” the one who can’t adapt?

Nurvus.2891:

Runiir.6425:

This was a pointless change. If people are killing themselves on retaliation in PvP that is their fault for not watching the enemies buffs (you CAN see them) and for not attacking in ways retaliation can’t really have an effect (necromancer pets/wells, elementalist meteor rains, etc). Also it was not hard taking people who relied upon retaliation if you knew how to kite them (seriously it was never hard to kite a guardian endlessly as 90% of guardians fail to put a scepter in their offhand as a ranged attack or to make use of the chains to immobalize an enemy kiting them).

Sorry, but while ranged can indeed “ignore” someone’s retaliation by doing some other thing in the meanwhile, melee aren’t that lucky.

I counter that with the simple fact that a melee that doesn’t have ranged weapons in the weapon slot is a fool that limit’s themself to all options. He who wins on the battlefield does so because they are not tied down to a single strategy.

I would support simply removing retaliation from wrath as long as they revert everything else back to how it was. Seriously it only provided a single second of retaliation after all. As for the light field, if it provided such a benefit then change it into a fire field as it falls perfectly in line with the flavor of the guardian skills.

After the patch, I could barely play the way I was playing in WvW. I mean, I jump in, pull them in, drop symbol of wrath, then spin to win. I can do it every 10 seconds (without the 5 skill key*) Pretty fun, but MANY MANY players escape, like guardians have any viable skill to chase down someone. Leap? LEAP*, “oh we are both running at the same speed.” Judge’s Intervention*, yes few hits on him, OMG he’s running away again, can’t hit him anymore… CD on leap ends*, LEAP*… and repeat the greatsword swing.
TLDR: I don’t feel OP, I don’t feel like there’s something where when I see a guardian, I know I’m going to die. I don’t see any of that. It’s not like a stupid thief, runs up to us, dagger storm a group of us, down 1-3 of us, and stealth to execute them. Or the warrior where they bull-rush and then hundred blades us to pieces. Where in our greatsword build caused us to go nuts like that and guarantee us a kill when we do something like that? Retaliation should’ve just stayed as a utility, not in any of the greatsword skill.

Don’t get me started in PvE with this changes too. Multi-hits? Walks around in Orr, crap there’s 4 risen behind me already… Another story for another time.

Re-arranging the skills was pretty stupid IMO, but if they were going to do it they should have at least arranged them in an order that makes sense. I would have merely swapped 2 and 4 so it matches the 1H guardian sword better.

As for the balance changes I can see wanting to reduce the uptime on retaliation, but this isn’t the way to do that IMO.