Guild Wars 2

Tyaen.5148:

Cleaning Formula 409. Elixir C, Fumigate, Cleansing Burst, Antidote, Super Elixir, Toss Elixir R

Which of these do you think cleanses retaliation off of a mass of WvW enemies so that I can resume doing some damage to them without killing myself?

Clearly you have some wrong ideas about how engineers work and I’d like to help clear that up for you.

This is really interesting. There are tons of threads on Guardian that go into why Hammer and Staff are good in WvW, AH and such, but both use at least some AoE (especially Staff). If retaliation is such a problem, are these weapons still good and if so why? Would Mace/Shield or Scepter/Focus work better?

I’m asking as a Guardian who utterly sucks in WvW. In a 1v1 against my 80 yr old grandma I would still have no chance! I want to get better. Help me out!

Midnightjade.3520:

This is really interesting. There are tons of threads on Guardian that go into why Hammer and Staff are good in WvW, AH and such, but both use at least some AoE (especially Staff). If retaliation is such a problem, are these weapons still good and if so why? Would Mace/Shield or Scepter/Focus work better?

I’m asking as a Guardian who utterly sucks in WvW. In a 1v1 against my 80 yr old grandma I would still have no chance! I want to get better. Help me out!

AoE is not generally a huge problem. Guardian staff can potentially proc retaliation five times if everyone in front of him has the boon on, which would be just over a thousand damage in rare situations.

Most of the complaints here are coming from people using whirling attacks ikittenerg (lol) or engineer attacks. Flamethrower does about 5 weak hits to a maximum of 3 targets every seconds, so sending flame jet into a group with retaliation would deal somewhere around 3500 damage per second back to the engineer, which is much more than his attack would hit for. In a freak scenario where an engineer throws grenade barrage into a portal bomb in which everyone had retal, the engineer would take somewhere around 10000 damage.

Here’s why that guardian died so fast. On my mesmer tank build, I routinely take out greatsword guardians from a single whirling wrath doing over 80% of their hp in retaliation damage.

The cause of this is simple. Whirling wrath produces multiple separate attacks, each of which are able to hit 5 enemies. On my mesmer, each attack ends up proccing between 3 and 6 hits of retaliation because of how my build works. In a situation with a zerg, each attack would probably proc 5 hits flat. I don’t know exactly how many of these attacks whirling wrath produces, but I can tell you that it is far more than enough to almost instakill a guardian from full hp.

It’s actually 7 projectiles + 7 whirls per WW cast. Each whirl can hit up to 5 enemies. All of this adds up to maximum of 42 hits per WW cast. Pretty amazing melee AoE dmg output for 3/4 sec cast / 10 sec cd, eh ).

The major problem with retaliation is it’s long duration and stacking, and the fact it is not based on a percentage of the damage dealt.

It becomes a problem when a whole zerg has it stacked on – if your zerg isn’t similarly stacked then it’s almost instawipe time.

But it won’t get changed anytime soon as this only occurs in wvw, and as we all know by now things don’t get changed if it’s wvw related.

Babinski.4207:

i have 2 200 toughness

Really? I’m more concerned about this than your issue with retaliation. My mesmer is a shatter mes, and I have 2100 toughness.. how do you as a guardian have only 22? And with regard to your issue with retaliation you’ll need to keep track of hp. Retaliation does not do massive direct dmg.. you can get away with a whirling wrath, heal, then just swing rampantly… you as a guardian should probably have regen and retal on you as it is. If I can manage with aoe shatters and blurred frenzy with my measly health pool of 17k I’m sure you can as well

Victory.2879:

The major problem with retaliation is it’s long duration and stacking, and the fact it is not based on a percentage of the damage dealt.

It becomes a problem when a whole zerg has it stacked on – if your zerg isn’t similarly stacked then it’s almost instawipe time.

But it won’t get changed anytime soon as this only occurs in wvw, and as we all know by now things don’t get changed if it’s wvw related.

Necros would really make that a problem for zergs… mesmers can also use null field.. etc I think it comes down to playing it with a little more caution