Guild Wars 2

If december 10th update goal was to make offensive guardian builds more viable, then it failed. Here’s what’s wrong with your changes:

Zeal V—Shattered Aegis: This trait now applies damage instead of burning.
Joke damage. Burning was fine, or add vulnerability here.

Zeal VII—Zealous Blade: This trait now scales with healing power by 2%.
Weak!! . Make it scale with power or something.

Zeal XII—Kindled Zeal: Increased the conversion from 10% to 13%.
Who cares? Burn is far too weak to make a build around it for pve.

Radiance V—Searing Flames: Reduced the cooldown from 20 seconds to 10 seconds.
10 secs is better then 20, but still nothing to scream about.

Radiance X—Powerful Blades: Increased the damage from 5% to 10%.
Finally something meaninful. Now we’re cooking with gas!

Valor VI—Retributive Armor: Increased the conversion rate from 5% to 7%.
A nice upgrade to a small but nice trait in valor.

Honor VI—Pure of Heart: Increased scaling with healing power from 25% to 40%.
That’s not a bad news for healing guards. Not offense ones.

Virtues VIII—Supreme Justice: Decreased the number of attacks from 4 to 3.
Other traits on this tier still eat it alive.

Symbol of Swiftness: This skill now applies 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse, rather than 8 seconds to players without swiftness and 1 second to players with swiftness.
Idea of switness is to run for the hills, not be a sitting duck inside a symbol, or else your buff ends before it even begun.

Ok now for my solutions to this guardian revamp:

1. Condition damage builds:

Grandmaster zeal trait – Engulfing Flame

Your continual burns grow in intensity over time, dealing more damage but lasting shorter.

A continual burn inflicted on the enemy will make your burning damage shoot up, but at cost of negative burn duration for you, that grows with each “rank” of burning. And the moment burn ends, even if for split second, burning damage and duration return to base value.

Example (with this trait on):
0-7 sec of burn – damage = 0.25 condition damage
7-14 sec of burn – damage = 0.5 condition damage, -15% burn duration.
14-21 sec of burn – damage = 0.75 condition damage, -30% burn duration
21 sec + = 1.2 condition damage, – 70% burn duration

Also this applies only to your burns and burns inflicted by other players do not count as keeping the fire alive. Only your own burns add up to longevity of the flame.

With this guardians get real reason to care about both condition damage and duration, and look at those burn inflicting traits and skills.

2. Virtue of Justice traits in Virtues line.

Absolute Justice (master tier) - rename it to “Swift Justice”. Passive stays as is (every 3rd strike a burn), active adds 4 seconds of quickness with one minute internal cooldown to you and party.

Quickness “ready state” is displayed by flames around your weapon skillbar burning a lot faster.

Permeaning Wrath - rename it to “Furious Justice” – adds 5 seconds of fury with activation with 30 secs internal cooldown.

Fury ready state is indicated by flames changing their color to visibly more white hue (red doesn’t fit with guardian theme so…)

Passive can stay as is.

Those changes put a carrot at end of virtues trait line for offensive guards – fury accessible with virtue of justice. It won’t replace professions that are meant for the job, like warriors or rangers, but will give you a short window to unleash pain before it runs out.

Quickness in 2nd tier doesn’t hurt either and gives a meaningful alternative to the other two awesome virtue buffing traits.

3. Shattered Aegis - The buning was fine, but it can be staks of vulnerability for your lost aegis. Anyway something that does not end up in fixed number, because it’ll alwas end up with “that’s so op”, or “i prefer tickling them – more damage”.

4. Glacial HeartThat running joke of a trait for 2h hammer in honor line. Lower it’s cd from 30 secs to 15 secs. Give hammer guardians a reason to get those chilling sigils and condition duration to hunt down some frozen tv dinner and cook up in their flames:)

5. Spirit Weapons.

Shield of Avenger just owns. Putting it in my skill slot makes a huge differece. Why is it the other 3 fail to do that for me?

Sword of justice. Should be executing it’s attack all the time, not once per x seconds. I know it can draw aggro, but it’s also on nasty cooldown during which i have neither damage boost nor an ai ally. Passive from bane signet looks better.

Hammer of wisdom - i accuallly like it’s chain a lot. Give it a lower cooldown and we’re home free.

Bow of Truth. That thing is supposed to follow me everywhere i go, like a stalker on perole. Not root iself while i run away from condition field or risen.

Symbol of Swiftness - Old one had a good idea behind it – run in, run out – true to nature of swiftness.

Information overload do you think boon duration is less or more important now.

Thanks for your feedback:) I took your advice and chopped off a lot of this wall of text, hopefully making it an easier read.

Boon duration always matters, and i’m very glad that hollowed ground gives 20% buff to that while it’s active and virtues line is so good to have.

Offensive guardian is not a guardian who loses his defense. On the contrary – offensive guardian is a guardian who has mastered his defense, and needs not to rely oh high vit or toughness because he can mitigate incoming damage with his skills and knowledge, as well as swiftly deal with conditions that would kill an unprepared, low vit guard otherwise.

And since most our skills are party friendly, we don’t really lose out on much other then our own threshold of making mistakes in a fight:)