Guild Wars 2

Someone in the suggestions thread gave me this idea when I posted a suggestion about blind.

Right now aegis blocks one single attack and then disappears.. this is useful against single heavy attacks, but completely useless against rapid fire, because what’s the point in blocking one single blade in a 100B beatdown, or one single arrow in a rapid fire streak. Aegis now is completely useless against these rapid attacks, just wasted and pointless.

Change aegis to last for 2 seconds after it is hit.. this will not make it any more powerful against normal attacks, but it will make it useful against rapid attacks. This seems to be the perfect change, as it turns useless into useful without turning useful into overpowered.

Single heavy attacks only get blocked once, since aegis would only last 2 seconds, yet rapid attacks get blocked more often to place the damage mitigation on par with the heavy slow hitting attacks.

This would make aegis equally useful against fast and against slow attacks, I’m not sure why this hasn’t been implemented since the start, it seems quite obvious to me, but I might be missing something.

Right now fast hitting professions and abilities render abilities such as blind and aegis totally useless. It is an unfair advantage of those professions over guardians, because aegis should not be completely useless against certain professions, while being useful against others.

i’d prefer it to be more like 1 sec since its not supposed to be invulnerability… better yet if 0.5 sec to get the “practically” same instance hits counted (which is practically impossible with a single skill that spaces the attacks evenly but can be from multiple sources that is inescapable because its instant and you can’t react).

The temporary nature of aegis can sometimes be a good thing depending on how you manage. In your case you want “protection” rather than aegis, i suggest you look into that with duration extension and building duration stacks.

oh… so many attacks that proc multiple small hits… sure do hope some wrathful spirit helps me get back at those baddies…

Aegis is far from useless. Very, very far from useless as is. Rapid-firing attacks increase in damage with each hit, from what I’ve seen; an Aegis in the middle breaks that chain and restarts the damage cycle at the initial hit amount.

Not that I’d be against making Aegis block for two seconds at a time….oh, how sweet it would be to become completely unstoppable….

Aegis is good enough as it is, use your evade against rapid fire abilities.

I don’t really think Guardians need this.

If someone whirls up on me, I don’t just stand there and pop aegis. I do the normal thing and dodge. Dodging should always be used as your main form of damage evasion, and use skills like aegis to top your defence up to take those incoming “Uh Oh!” hits

SuperLuigi.3720:

Rapid-firing attacks increase in damage with each hit, from what I’ve seen; an Aegis in the middle breaks that chain and restarts the damage cycle at the initial hit amount.

I’m pretty sure the damage is consistent across each part of the attack (unless it explicitly says otherwise). What you’re seeing is an artifact of how the combat text works. For rapid-fire attacks, the total damage of the attack is displayed with every successive hit.

You choose what is appropriate. Aegis is fine, you use it to block huge attacks.

Rapid fire attacks go on bursts, dodge it. If its just sustained attacks, use protection.

The reason why guardian is fun for me is because you have to think what skills to use at the right time and not just use everything on cooldown.

I don’t think the Guardian really needs that.

You don’t get to control aegis, you don’t get to choose when to use it, it just pops up on a timer, and often it pops up on some useless weak attack and then it is completely wasted. If it lasted 0.5 seconds or 1 second, then it won’t be any more powerful against heavy attacks, but at least it wil be more useful against rapid attacks, I’m not sure why this is so complicated to see.

If you activate courage then you don’t get any aegis at all for one and a half minute, so I am not talking about that, I’m talking about the passive effect of courage. I just don’t think aegis as it is in any way makes up even anywhere near partially for the incredibly low health pool guardians have. Our virtues are supposed to make up for this, but they don’t even come close. Resolve regens for four times less than the warrior regen signet.

I don’t get what’s wrong with having aegis be equally useful against all attacks, not just the slow hard hitting ones, especially since you have absolutely no control over its passive occurence. This doesn’t make aegis more powerful, it just makes it useful in situations where it is now completely useless. I don’t think people realize how low the survivability of a balanced guardian really is. I don’t mind glass cannon builds dying fast, but if you try to find a middle way, you die in seconds just the same, the health is just too low with nothing to make up for it. Going full defense means you cannot beat even the worst click players, and what is the point in being hard to kill if you can’t kill anyone either.

This isn’t about looking cool on the forums by saying everything is fine just L2P, this early in a game nothing is “fine” yet, and that’s only normal, it’s about improving the balance of the professions as best as possible.

Right now in the case of the guardians, it is a simple fact that our profession mechanic is far below par in every part of it. The concept is cool and suited for this type of profession, it just needs to be tweaked. Nothing about the concept itself needs be changed, just the numbers and minor mechanics need to be tweaked. I also don’t think there is much point in commenting on these things if you haven’t played the other professions to compare.

I see your point. I’m not a fan of passive defenses either but I don’t think it needs a fix.

The only change I can see is removing the passive auto-aegis completely and lowering the cooldown on the virtue by a lot, so that you can activate it when you need it without being afraid of a ridiculous 90 seconds cooldown.

The virtues are currently quite boring and their cooldowns are way too high while their actives are way too weak, so unless you specc heavily into the last tree their actives are barely worth bothering about. Activable aegis on a reasonable, lower cooldown would be great, though.

They could make it a activate it once = aegis only for you +low cooldown and activate it again in a short time (similar to longsword 5)= aegis for everyone around you + longer cooldown.

Or just replace aegis with protection. It helps with every kind of attack.

shedim.8504:

I see your point. I’m not a fan of passive defenses either but I don’t think it needs a fix.

The only change I can see is removing the passive auto-aegis completely and lowering the cooldown on the virtue by a lot, so that you can activate it when you need it without being afraid of a ridiculous 90 seconds cooldown.

The virtues are currently quite boring and their cooldowns are way too high while their actives are way too weak, so unless you specc heavily into the last tree their actives are barely worth bothering about. Activable aegis on a reasonable, lower cooldown would be great, though.

They could make it a activate it once = aegis only for you +low cooldown and activate it again in a short time (similar to longsword 5)= aegis for everyone around you + longer cooldown.

Or just replace aegis with protection. It helps with every kind of attack.

Yes, that would work as well, for sure, if you put courage on a 12 second cooldown then it might be worth it keeping aegis mechanics the way they are. It will still be useless in many rapid attack situations, but at least it will be more useful in other situations.

Retaliation is for dealing with lots of little hits.

Aegis is for defending against big hits.

Learning how to use the two correctly, learning when to dodge/blind to preserve our aegis, learning when to activate our virtue to give us an on-demand aegis and learning how to correctly time applying retaliation to ourselves, are some of the things that turn us from bad Guardians , into good Guardians.

Its fine as is.

Ahh, fair enough, Exedore. That seems like a very silly way to display damage, but fair enough xD

The only thing I can think of is what if all blocks counted as an aegis? I.e. Shield of Wrath would give you a stack of 3 aegis instead of three blocks. Imagine bonuses from traits….

Aegis is for large hits and the retaliation you can trait it as a great counter part to fast burst hits because of aegis, its rare a HB’s warrior hits me and does more damage to me than it did to him. ageis/retal tag team

The guardian desperately needs this.

yea retaliation is godly for hit ‘chains’.

But in terms of pve, it’s far more useless than an aoe blind :P

OP is mad for thinking 2 seconds invuln is balanced in any way.

.5 or .2 would be more balanced.

It was just a suggestion, the point was to make it more than just one single hit, 0.5 seconds is fine for me too.. tho with 0.2s nothing changes.

Nicholai.5169 obviously never fought against multiple opponents, preferrably ranged ones. Have fun preserving your aegis and stuff. I agree on your statement in 1vs1 situations or PvE, though, but this game is a mmo, not Streetfighter 2.

Aegis is worthless in WvW or fights against multiple opponents, since your means to preserve the passive aegis are extmely limited and mostly tied to being in melee range. Protection is superior to aegis.

Do you have any idea how absolutely ridiculous it would be if we could block all damage for two seconds on command as a base class skill with a short cooldown? No, we don’t need to have this, sorry to burst your bubble.

Aegis is fine as it is, it’s not designed nor intended to be your go-to defensive ability for WvW or rapid ranged attacks. For ranged mitigation, we have Shield 5, Mace 3, Focus 5, Sanctuary, and Wall of Reflection. If you’re getting pummeled by a warrior using 100 Blades, dodge away from him. He’s rooted in place, and the skill doesn’t send out waves like our Sword 3 does so once you’re out of melee, he deals no damage with it.

Aegis is meant to soak big hits. The only change I would make to it is for the game to somehow check for it against Blind. It is a minor irritation to use a blind, only to have Aegis pop up and get wasted blocking a hit that was a 100% miss.

I don’t think Aegis should be changed so that I can think LESS while playing the game. The intent of Aegis is to block one hit. It does that and it does it often in all situations. If you want to deal with multiple mobs or ranged people, use SoA or dodge them. I don’t believe all professions should be given a set of tools to deal with every possible situation with the effectiveness that Aegis does in a 1 vs. 1 situation. Some challenge is nice.

I recently had a go with a build concentrating on virtues and had some decent results in group play and pve group encounters. Even without speccing into virtues, I occasionally still use aegis to block stomp attacks that I cannot dodge and burning for extra group damage, though I feel more comfortable activating knowing my elite skill is off cool down.

I can see this build working very well in Spvp since activating a virtue also grants retaliation so that aegis being wasted on a chain attack isn’t so bad afterall.

Solo pve I still prefer going 20 in damage as a full defensive build wasn’t very fun to play.