Guild Wars 2

So this seems to be one of the Gyros that grabbed some attention. From the preview videos he seemed to have about 11-12k hitpoints which is quite the extension of your own health pool. The toolbelt didn’t seem terrible either.

Ofc in a pvp situation with lots of AoE going on you will never get the full effect out of it since the gyro itself will eat some cleave but this creates interesting counterplay where the enemy really wants to hit both, the player and the gyro, at the same time. Also in general it will die really fast when it has to tank multiple allies as opposed to just the player because also there cleave will happen more likely.

What really matters is how the cooldowns perform for the sustain imo.

There’s a reason no mesmer takes iDefender in their utility slot.

Renny.6571:

There’s a reason no mesmer takes iDefender in their utility slot.

Checking the wiki this one only has 7.2k health though which is a significant difference. Also no associated toolbelt skill and remember that mesmer playstyle is more focussed on avoiding damage differently compared to engi.

Bulwark cuts damage in half on a E-Spec that revolves around being up close and personal. iDefender is on a class that 90% of the time is attacking from range or different angles with ample clones for distractions. Different class concepts so iDefender kinda falls out there. Bulwark’s lifespan is going to scale with your toughness. The more toughness you have, the longer and more effective it will be. i ran some numbers with this and a Dolyak/Knights scrapper in Firearms/Inventions/Scrapper will have 50% crit, 3900 armor (full adaptive armor stacks) and 2200~ power with mass momentum. at 3900 armor zerkers are not going to hurt that much, and add the 50% from bulwark (and maybe even 33% from prot) have fun trying to burst that down with power damage. At 3900 armor a full glass thief backstab deals 1.3k damage without a crit. with its like 3300. if prot is up its 2200, and if bulwark is up its like 1100 damage from a high damage attack. it will probably force the enemy team to focus your gyro instead of you because of dmg mitigation.

Renny.6571:

There’s a reason no mesmer takes iDefender in their utility slot.

Only because there is a trait for summoning one now after an evade / block.

iDefender is a great phantasm against the mossman or the arch diviner, when you just dont need anything else but to survive some surprise buttseks

It’s a great skill and so is the Bulwark. The bulwark is in fact much much better since it’s a stronger iDefender combined with a feedback. The bulwark is the only balanced and therefore worth taking gyro we have.

Bulwark is alive for 15seconds(less since there’s no way it’s surviving 15 seconds – if it is, you’re using it for the wrong reasons) followed by 30s cd. iDefender starts its CD straight away. Like others have said, I wouldn’t even take iDefender on my mesmer to begin with. Bulwark viability doesn’t even exist in my mind.

IDefender got a 25sec cooldown base with a reduction trait available, mesmers got more traits to synergize with phantasms since they where designed with them in mind, mesmers are more based on evasion, meaning fewer hits to actually tank, the cooldown starts right away, it does not need to hug you and take your cleave.

And its still not considered viable. So as much as i would like this to be good (being a bruiser/support player at heart) i remain skeptical. I like the goal of the skill, but just like IDefender would need it one wonders what would happen if its a straight up damage reduction and not transfer given that it can be destroyed quickly if focused (and it really is the only thing the drone itself does) or even accidentally cleaved as it does hover close to you. Not to mention that it is indeed limited in duration.

the bulwark needs quite a lot more health and a defiance bar and its ready to roll out.

With more health, the ability to hover at range (Defender charges in and dies all the time or just gets shattered) and instant cast time instead of 1.5 seconds, bulwark gyro might be quite useful…

That said, it’s still going to be balanced around smaller fights where it will be much more useful – in builds based on teamfights it will get dropped. Buffing it enough to make it useful in a 4v4 would make scrapper impossible to kill in 1v1s.

TsukuZankaze.6951:

Bulwark cuts damage in half on a E-Spec that revolves around being up close and personal. iDefender is on a class that 90% of the time is attacking from range or different angles with ample clones for distractions. Different class concepts so iDefender kinda falls out there. Bulwark’s lifespan is going to scale with your toughness. The more toughness you have, the longer and more effective it will be. i ran some numbers with this and a Dolyak/Knights scrapper in Firearms/Inventions/Scrapper will have 50% crit, 3900 armor (full adaptive armor stacks) and 2200~ power with mass momentum. at 3900 armor zerkers are not going to hurt that much, and add the 50% from bulwark (and maybe even 33% from prot) have fun trying to burst that down with power damage. At 3900 armor a full glass thief backstab deals 1.3k damage without a crit. with its like 3300. if prot is up its 2200, and if bulwark is up its like 1100 damage from a high damage attack. it will probably force the enemy team to focus your gyro instead of you because of dmg mitigation.

If I recall, from the POI livestream, when the Bulwark Gyro absorbed damage from the player, the damage it took was greater than the damage the player took (when it should be taking 50% of the damage). This suggests that the Gyro has it’s own armor value, so it won’t necessarily scale in effectiveness with the player’s armor. I’m not completely sure about this though, I’ll need to check the livestream video again.

The whole CD thing is anyway screwed up for the whole gyro family. The CD need to start after build, not after destroyed.