Guild Wars 2

While a lot of attention has been focused on re-working or completely re-building the 2 Guardian Shield skills, there is another avenue for making shields more desirable on the class that has a shield as it’s profession icon …

Stalwart Defender — the Master tier Valor trait for shields.

Instead of the comically bad +180 toughness, this trait could reduce the interval of the Courage virtue providing Aegis from 40 seconds to 30 seconds — giving a dedicated shield user more block events. Throw in “each time you block an attack you gain 2 seconds of resistance” and you’re looking at a trait that is strong enough to consider on its own merit and incentivizes carrying a shield with the 20% cooldown reduction.

isnt there already a trait in virtues that brings it from 40 seconds to 30?

Indomitable Courage. They’d need to be written to stack correctly, but otherwise…

Like all posts showing a good spirit about fixing shield although sometimes bad or unbalanced i offer a simple solution. Do not use shield and until a official post asking us “the player base” is posted by Anet them self, i believe it is a waste of time.

Shield for Guardian has been the worst design from the start and and more buggy than a flea infested junkyard. Anet only idea of fixing it is lowering the cool downs and as everyone else know that is not the issue.

It is the core concept of the skills them self and how buggy the skills and traits have been from launch, the last kick in the kidney would be the +180 Toughness trait competing with +150 Toughness for up to 5 people near you. it is clear that Anet has no intentions to understand what is wrong with Guardian shields, so all we can do is to stay away from that plague ridden object until maybe they open there eyes and read the forums.

I might be crazy here but what if ..

Stalwart Defender : Reduce cooldown on Shield skills, Reduce cooldown on Virtue of Courage passive AND active, while weilding a shiled, Virtue of Courage passive effect is shared with allies (ie allies get aegis evertime virtue of courage passive procs)

I might be crazy but that sounds like a kitten appealing trait to me. The choice becomes use Strength in numbers if you neeeded toughness, communal defenses if you wanted the blocks for allies but not use a shield, Stalward defender when using a shiled

What do you guys think ?

edit: After all shield is meant to be a support weapon .. reducing damage on allies fits that role by procing virtue of courage passive on allies while having a reduced cooldown.

edit: The goal is to make it the cooldown on virtue of courage down to 20s when using both Stalward defender AND Indomitable Courage.