Guild Wars 2

In light of the recent nerf/rework to the Guardian’s Tomes, and the general dissatisfaction with our Elite skills, I’d like to suggest enabling movement during the channeling period of these skills or their associated sub-skills.

Let me begin my explanation for this suggestion with the Tomes. The loss of Stability is a nasty blow to each of these, since using a Tome now basically means painting a bulls-eye on yourself when you try to use their big skills. It’s possible to use “Stand Your Ground!”, Hallowed Ground, or even Sanctuary to compensate, but two of these skills have very long cooldowns, and the other packs so much utility that it’s not always easy to save it up for casting a Tome.

That said, I understand why Stability needed to go. The window for disrupting the Guardian’s cast was simply too short, because unless you could strip the Stability, the only way to stop the skill was to kill the Guardian. When you had multiple Guardians on a team chaining these hard-to-interrupt full heals and AoE Dazes, it became more than a little absurd. Taking away Stability makes this sort of abuse much less viable, and that’s a good thing, but the problem is that the longer casts on the Tomes can be tough to use effectively when rooted and vulnerable to CC. Tome of Wrath can speed up its casts via Quickness, but opponents have the option to simply run out of range in addition to CC’ing the Guardian. For Tome of Courage, the odds of avoiding interruption while rooted for 5 seconds are slim to none, especially with the nerf to Pacifism making it harder to protect your own cast.

This is where my suggestion comes into play: by enabling movement during the channels of these skills (and Renewed Focus, which I’ll get to later), you solve lots of problems all at once. Tome of Wrath, as mentioned above, currently suffers from the mediocre range on its Judgment skill, but it’s hard to increase the range without making the skill overpowered. By enabling movement during Judgment’s cast, you make sure opponents can’t just slip out of range while you’re charging up (thus making a powerful skill worthless), but you still need to position yourself carefully to maximize your effect in a team fight. Once Zealot’s Fervor and Judgment are cast, ToW doesn’t bring much to the fight besides some decent AoE damage and control, so I don’t see the skill becoming overpowered from this change – frankly, it’d probably still need some love afterward.

Tome of Courage just benefits in that you can actually avoid some of the CC thrown at you, while still remaining vulnerable to it. Being rooted makes a huge difference in the amount of control that affects you, and at the moment, trying to get off a 5-second channel without setting it up with one of the Guardian’s utilities beforehand is just unrealistic. No other elite skill that I know of needs to be “set up” in such a way for it to work effectively, and making utilities a requirement to use these skills properly just discourages build diversity. Enabling movement while channeling both Pacifism and LoD could also make Pacifism more practical for setting up LoD again – right now, all you accomplish is splitting a 5-second rooted channel into two parts, since Pacifism’s cast time is equal to the Daze time. If I can move while casting Pacifism, though, and I’m not just a sitting duck when using LoD, the Daze starts to look meaningful again.

Lastly, Renewed Focus. The main reason I’m suggesting enabling movement during RF’s channel is simply because it feels fairly underwhelming in its current condition, and because you need to take Virtue related traits to really make it useful (otherwise, the elite consists of getting a couple weak buffs along with a few seconds of rooted invulnerability – not a skill that makes me feel particularly cool or powerful). Enabling movement during the channel would give RF some decent utility, allowing you to use it to wade through heavy enemy fire or to escape from fights that are going poorly, and such a change might help to justify taking it over one of the Tomes.

To conclude, let me just say that since the Tomes were introduced, people have hated the lack of mobility inherent to the Guardian’s elites. There was a collective cheer from Guardians when the Tomes were made mobile, but making us stay stationary while casting undermines this mobility. Enabling movement does not lend itself to the abuse of the skills we previously saw, and is much less powerful in general than Stability, but it gives us a more realistic chance of making our elites useful in tough situations.

I’m honestly not a fan of either Tome and only take them in sPvP out of lack of a better option. In PvE, I almost always run with a racial elite. They’re one of the most lackluster aspects of the profession. The loss of stability just puts the nail in the coffin for me.

Evidicus.5134:

I’m honestly not a fan of either Tome and only take them in sPvP out of lack of a better option. In PvE, I almost always run with a racial elite. They’re one of the most lackluster aspects of the profession. The loss of stability just puts the nail in the coffin for me.

I admit that I was mostly concerned with the sPvP perspective, since I haven’t focused quite as much on PvE. Being a level 54 Guardian who hasn’t reached Orr, Tome of Courage is still a very powerful PvE elite, since monsters hit slowly and don’t have many control effects to stop the full heal. I’ve heard there’s tons of CC flying around in Orr, though, so I can see where both tomes would become lackluster.

Any opinion on my suggestion about enabling movement while channeling? Too little to make a difference, too powerful for sPvP, or perhaps a good solution?

Well thought out. I don’t feel safe using my elite anymore under fire. The heal spam and protection isn’t enough to keep me up even with my heavy healing and toughness build. Pacifism nerf was particularly bad since it was hit with the double wammy of increased cast time and decreased effectiveness. The big heal is too hard to use without the pacifism. Your best shot is just hoping that they blew their interrupt on interrupting passifism and trying to heal. Most of the time you’re just wasting your time by letting them beat on you until someone interrupts and kills you while you’re a sitting duck. I think they should take the big heal cast down to 4 seconds to compensate for the lost Pacifism daze up time.

I pretty much just heal spam and buff and maybe attempt the daze at the end of its duration for now.

Making Renewed Focus mobile would probably make it too OP, in my opinion, when combined with all the other Guardian blocks available.

Letting it grant stability (or other buffs) to your allies might be a possibility, and bring it up to par with what is granted by the other elites.

(Or reducing its cooldown by 10 or 15 seconds).