Guild Wars 2

I’ve taken the liberty of sorting these in a more sensible fashion.

Underwater Skills
Refraction: This skill is now a light field.
Purifying Blast: This skill is now a blast finisher.
Purifying Blast: Added a radius skill fact.
[repeat] Added a radius skill fact to Purifying Blast.
Light of Judgment: Damage increased by 25%.
Spear Wall: This skill is now a light field.
Wrathful Grasp: This skill is now a projectile finisher.
Spear of Light: Velocity has been increased by 50%.
Spear of Light: This skill is now a small projectile finisher.
Brilliance: This skill is now a whirl finisher.

Staff
Empower: Skill fact has been updated to display the proper amount and duration of might.
Updated Empower’s skill fact to display the proper amount and duration of might. (repeat)

Traits
Unscathed Contender: Increased damage from 10% to 20%.
Resolute Healer: This shield of absorption now causes knockback, but can only trigger once every 60 seconds.
Vigorous Precision: Increased vigor duration to five seconds. This effect can now only trigger once every five seconds.
Strength in Numbers: Now activates more quickly when entering combat, and scales from 0-70 defense instead of being capped at 30.
Blind Exposure: Increased to three stacks of vulnerability.
Shimmering Defense: Increased burn duration from three seconds to seven seconds.
Binding Jeopardy: Increased vulnerability from three stacks at five seconds to five stacks at eight seconds.

My thoughts
So, lots of updates designed to make underwater play less painful, and add a bit of variation with fields and the like. All classes seem to be getting incremental underwater buffs. Some less-used traits got buffed, and Staff got a tooltip fix.

I’m glad they finally fixed the empower skill. The only things I see that are useful would be the vigorous precision and shimmering defense(condi specced) updates. I still find Unscathed contender to be useless(pvp) and the update on strength in numbers is still too small.

Edit: I was hoping they would buff the scepter, combine some of the symbol traits.

Vigorous Precision: Increased vigor duration to five seconds. This effect can now only trigger once every five seconds.

This is basically a nerf to altruistic healing.

enzoh.5302:

Vigorous Precision: Increased vigor duration to five seconds. This effect can now only trigger once every five seconds.

This is basically a nerf to altruistic healing.

Killed my entire build. And the gear I had based around it.

After reading it more in depth, yeah it is sort of a silent nerf to Altrusitic healing. =(

Yep, makes us a lot worse solo with AH.

Guardian Patch, Underwater Edition ;/, All i want are some bug fixes…

Vigorous Precision: Increased vigor duration to five seconds. This effect can now only trigger once every five seconds.

Nooooooooooo! Why?!!? Why didn’t you just fix pure of voice? Why did you have to nerf AH? We don’t deserve this

• The Guardian is a heavy armor class who relies on boons to make up for their low levels of innate health. They focus on area control and punishing enemies for the position on the battlefield. We want them to feel very powerful when their boons are active, but if those boons are removed, they will start to feel pressure. They can remove conditions more easily than the Warrior, but share the Warrior’s need to be in melee range to dole out maximum damage.

Line of warding, bubbles, and punting? That’s some good crowd control right there.

Unscathed Contender: Increased damage from 10% to 20%.

Now actually useful for burst builds.

Resolute Healer: This shield of absorption now causes knockback, but can only trigger once every 60 seconds.

Now much more useful in PvP/WvW.

Vigorous Precision: Increased vigor duration to five seconds. This effect can now only trigger once every five seconds.

Mega-nerf, that just killed the build I am running right now.

Strength in Numbers: Now activates more quickly when entering combat, and scales from 0-70 defense instead of being capped at 30.

Meh, still would rather use other traits.

Blind Exposure: Increased to three stacks of vulnerability.

Actually useful now with a sword and Virtue of Justice. (They really want to help our burst don’t they.)

Shimmering Defense: Increased burn duration from three seconds to seven seconds.

Awesome.

Binding Jeopardy: Increased vulnerability from three stacks at five seconds to five stacks at eight seconds.

I’m going to have to make a new burst build for sure.
—-
Majorly disappointed about the Altruistic Healing nerf. Monk’s Focus is looking a whole lot better now.

For someone who personally hates Monk’s focus, I am kinda screwed now aren’t I?

That’s a pretty hefty nerf to AH. Probably around 300 healing per second worth of nerf for my build in a big fight.

They want us on the front line but not alive lol XD

Honestly, that trait was OP at the cost of only 5 points. AH is still good in big fights.

Yea vigorous precision really hurts AH builds :/

Still viable in groups with shouts and Empowering Might, but hurts solo alot.

Sad day indeed. Time to go test this…

Nirvash.3018:

Honestly, that trait was OP at the cost of only 5 points. AH is still good in big fights.

Its still OP now, just in a different way. Its basically perma vigor for anyone with halfway decent crit chance.

I think u overcry it too much. Ok, it is slighty nerf to healing but it is also a perma vigor, and more dodges is best way to mitigate dmg. Now instead of spaming auto to get healing u can do 2 more dodges, so 100% less dmg doing it. With so many boons we can stack and so many ways to add them via Sigils, Runes, traits (maybe time to grab Empowered Might) I think it will barely affect it. And as for me I like more dodges.

Chill out, always look at the bright side of notes ;]

fishergrip.4082:

Nirvash.3018:

Honestly, that trait was OP at the cost of only 5 points. AH is still good in big fights.

Its still OP now, just in a different way. Its basically perma vigor for anyone with halfway decent crit chance.

That’s exactly how I read it…

-Took away easy mode so we can distinguish between good/bad players.
-Gave us perma-vigor.

I automatically assume, since this is a game forum, and an MMO one at that, that my response will be trolled, but lets be honest, AH was easy-mode for sure, in a group. I switched to Monks Focus a few weeks back and still rarely die as a Guardian, assuming I play sober.

I already HAD perm vigor. my whole basis of my build was the self healing from that trait. at 75% crit with a 1h sword over 5 seconds i would crit 7-8 times with just auto attack, thats about 490 healing done. Now it is just 70 healing. It is honestly a huge nerf for me.

Bakitten291:

I already HAD perm vigor. my whole basis of my build was the self healing from that trait. at 75% crit with a 1h sword over 5 seconds i would crit 7-8 times with just auto attack, thats about 490 healing done. Now it is just 70 healing. It is honestly a huge nerf for me.

So almost 200 health a second (with virtue ticks), with just auto-attack isn’t at least semi-OP in some way? Considering that healing can be done solo? And as a Heavy Armor Profession?

I’m not seeing the basis for a just argument about it being an ultra-massive nerf. It’ll promote people learning to dodge properly and become better players, as I see it.

Yes it is a nerf, what I gave is the best case for what it could do before. That assumes that you are always hitting a target. The downside is that you HAD to keep attacking to keep the healing going. Also, I ran 0/30/30/5/5 The only healing I was getting was from that trait. I didn’t have anything to increase the healing from AH like Empowering might.

You are saying that those heals are semi OP yet the tankiness of our class is one of our class defining traits. We don’t get the escapes and whatnot that thieves and eles have, or the base health that necros and warriors get. We get self heals. Nerfing our self heals hurts.

Bakitten291:

enzoh.5302:

Vigorous Precision: Increased vigor duration to five seconds. This effect can now only trigger once every five seconds.

This is basically a nerf to altruistic healing.

Killed my entire build. And the gear I had based around it.

I had just hit 80 on my Guardian earlier this week and farmed up enough gold buy full exotic set for the AH build. Man, this really blows…((

Bakitten291:

Yes it is a nerf, what I gave is the best case for what it could do before. That assumes that you are always hitting a target. The downside is that you HAD to keep attacking to keep the healing going. Also, I ran 0/30/30/5/5 The only healing I was getting was from that trait. I didn’t have anything to increase the healing from AH like Empowering might.

I wasn’t arguing that it wasn’t a nerf, just that it wasn’t an incredibly huge one, it toned down the easiness and strength of a lot of (in my mind/opinion) far too strong builds.

I concede that your build will be hit quite hard, but your build is quite uncommon. It’s not the end of the world, just the end of some very easy-mode builds.

Quite sad about the vigorous precision change. I’ll see how it goes in term of survivability but it doesn’t look good.
“Empower: Skill fact has been updated to display the proper amount and duration of might.”
What does that mean. From what I saw they had buffed empower to last 10s but it still lasted only 8s. Are they updating the skill so that it lasts 10s or updating the tooltip back to 8?

Strength in numbers is very good now. I tested it and WvW and people report that it does work.

I just wish it worked on myself though.

To be fair this has been coming. Whilst i thank players for posting their builds on these forums the AH build under the guardian section of this forums had over 40k viewers. And not to mention the video posted showing an AH guardian solo tanking Kohler with little skill or effort (just spamming skill 1 and rolling) It was inevitable that there would be a nerf to the build. Afterall Anet wants a balance to the classes not one build being overused.

This is a huge nerf to those who rely on critical damage. It was a massive trait for those who stacked high crits on the hammer as it allowed multiple crits on multiple targets = high boon generation (more healing), quicker dodging recovery (more healing) and thus more surviability.

But to say the AH build is broke is a bit much. You can get more than enough boons from other traits and skills and i think that this will benefit those players who prefer to use their dodges to heal their allies, as it provides greater endurance recovery. 5 seconds cooldown means that higher critical chance (50%+) is wasted as you would crit while the vigor is still on cooldown.

fishergrip.4082:

Nirvash.3018:

Honestly, that trait was OP at the cost of only 5 points. AH is still good in big fights.

Its still OP now, just in a different way. Its basically perma vigor for anyone with halfway decent crit chance.

That’s a good point. While it’s probably more of a nerf to very high crit builds the perma vigor makes up for it somewhat.

On the bright side, Zealous Blade probably heals more than AH when soloing with a greatsword now ;P

Ya acually i think i spoke too soon. this extra dodging posibility is really nice :o

“Ya acually i think i spoke too soon. this extra dodging posibility is really nice :o”

My point exactly. People use the AH build differently. Some like to stand there with high crit% chance auto attacking to heal themselves while dealing out damage. Others prefer to be able to heal their allies through the use of dodging (particularly useful for the hammer 1 skill) cutting the anamation.

A nerf to the majority? Probably. But the build itself it not broken. Just requires a different style of play. Hit and move rather than stand and take the hits directly

Almost everyone was using Altruistic Healing and Virgourous Precision. If you ask me, Vigourous Precision is about getting vigour not about applying a boon for a self heal. We can still throw out boons everywhere, we still outshine every other class (with the possible exception of Elementalist) in terms of self heals and possibly boon application.

Could it be that while everyone was so comfortable with their Altruistic Healing crit builds that it was actually overpowered?! Acceptable damage, heavy armour AND superior self healing for hardly any cost outside what a crit build would normally do? I think we’ll manage. To those that can’t, suck it up .

….I was really hoping for a change to scepter and/or sword though…
Rejoice, Guardians, for today we received our first ever projectile finishers! …Underwater.

To be honest, the build probably still works pretty good. dodge roll moar.

still owning in WvW.

Hmm…maybe I’m one of the few who are ignorant about the Monk’s Focus build. What exactly is that and what gear do you need to support it?

I’m currently running the AH build of 0/15/30/20/5 and looking to change anyway. Maybe now is a good time since I was already using staff mace/shield anyway. I was slowly warming to the hammer but had some difficulty with it. Especially around target control

My issue, not the class.

I was really hoping for the symbol traits to be combined. Three different traits in the same tree…ugh.

I am kinda confused to be honest, I see alot of people saying we can dodge more because of this change, but werent most builds that ran with those traits running with close to 100% vigor uptime anyways?

Staff changes are akward:

November 15th patch notes indicate:
“Empower: This skill’s might duration increased from 8 seconds to 10 seconds.”

The tooltip for the might duration was correct and indicated 10 seconds, however the actual duration was only 8 seconds both in PvP and PvE.

December 14th patch notes indicate:
“Empower: Skill fact has been updated to display the proper amount and duration of might.”

The Empower ability tooltip was reverted back to 8seconds instead of getting it’s duration correctly applied like the November 15th patch notes say.
Why is that? Working as intended or a bug?
What happened to the change in 15th November?

The slap inthe face that arena net does to guardians is insulting look across the map they increased almost every single projectile in the entire game except the slowest one of them it is ridiculous how they just keep laughing at us when it ones to range

Plenty of issues I think should still be addressed:

Lack of cripples and stuns
Mobility
Scepter speed(or a viable ranged weapon)
Symbol trait consolidation
Condition damage specs

Regarding the AH build:

1) Heals from boon giving like empower, shouts, and other skills will still be the same.
2) Heals from crits will be reduced, but ‘only’ by about 40% considering you can still put out might stacks on crit every second. So instead of 10boons in 5s, it’s now 6 boons per 5s.

I don’t feel like its a build-breaker, but some dps might need to be sacrificed for tank if your skills are lacking.

The Vigorous Precision change nerfs AH builds hard, AND nerfs dodge builds.

Vigorous Precision used to grant 1 second of vigor on crit, with no internal cooldown. If you had an AOE attack, or a channel that pulsed multiple times per second, you were easily critting multiple times per second. Since vigor extends the buff duration, you would continue to add 1 second to your vigor duration, multiple times per second. This easily led to perma-vigor, and sometimes I would leave a fight with 30+ seconds of vigor still remaining from what I had built up.

Now however, you get 5 seconds of vigor on crit, with a 5 second cooldown. In a best case scenario, you crit on your first attack, gain 5 seconds of vigor, then time your attacks perfectly so exactly when that vigor ends, you crit again and refresh it. In practice though, you will probably have a 1 second gap between when your vigor ends and you land your next attack. On top of this, it may be longer than that until you land your next CRIT attack. So no, this is not perma vigor. This is effectively guaranteed to not be perma vigor, but instead vigor in 5 second intervals with gaps in between.

All this crap, and both Pure of Voice and Battle Presence are still bugged. Inconceivable!

Arken.3725:

Plenty of issues I think should still be addressed:

Lack of cripples and stuns
Mobility
Scepter speed(or a viable ranged weapon)
Symbol trait consolidation
Condition damage specs

Yesterday I was quite happy with guardian. But with the improvements to other classes, these things are really becoming glaring weaknesses now and I am tired of them not being looked addressed.

It’s funny too because the issues I’ve listed were present even before all the other classes received buffs. We’re literally the only class that has no cripple, our ranged is pretty bad, we’re stuck with one condition to trait if we do decide to go condi specced, and our mobility is the worst in the game.

i’ll be scraping guardian via this patch, its either go a walking boon or go home, anything else its just a wanna be warr that glows blue.

wookalar.8952:

Regarding the AH build:

1) Heals from boon giving like empower, shouts, and other skills will still be the same.
2) Heals from crits will be reduced, but ‘only’ by about 40% considering you can still put out might stacks on crit every second. So instead of 10boons in 5s, it’s now 6 boons per 5s.

I don’t feel like its a build-breaker, but some dps might need to be sacrificed for tank if your skills are lacking.

Except my build didn’t use Empowered might, so that doesn’t really apply. There is one thing that this build has given us though, and that is more damage. We gain ALOT of vulnerability with this new patch, and honestly it does show very quickly. Sword + Focus now does a ton of damage when speced for it, and scepter actually did get a tiny bit of love in the form of the increase of vuln stacks on the zeal trait.

Also, if you have an Ele in the group laying down fire fields (or elemental powder) the hammer blast skill will still heal you a bunch with AH as well. 5 stacks per ally is a lot of healing every few seconds. Blasting in some other fields will heal you too (like your #1 chain) but not as much. You have to think outside the box and not just read the patch notes and /delete Guardian.

Bakitten291:

We gain ALOT of vulnerability with this new patch, and honestly it does show very quickly. Sword + Focus now does a ton of damage when speced for it

Yeah, I’ve reverted back to my sword+focus, mediation, monk’s focus build for now. Near instant 9 stacks of vulnerability (12 if Ray of Judgement hits twice). I never run glass cannon, but with Unscathed Contender our burst is better than ever if you blow all your defenses at once.

Kasei.8726:

Yeah, I’ve reverted back to my sword+focus, mediation, monk’s focus build for now.

Do you mind please give me a link for this build/thread? Can’t seem to find it (or im just stupid to search).

Thanks!

It’s a very powerful build just I hate how Unscathed contender works. It would make sense if it worked based on protection and reduced the damage boost.

The reduced healing from AH is quite noticeable. I the 5s with a 5s cooldown is indeed leaving me with gaps of time where I don’t have vigor : / I’ll play around with it some more but I may well switch to another build. It’s odd they would nerf this one as the guide to it has been stickied >.>

Also… why in the kitten did they increase movement speed of other players/ranged weapons… but not guard scepter? Their speed buff really makes scepter #1 suck even more than it did before…