Big issue with Grandmaster traits.
Most meditations suck? The two I use are two of the most powerful abilities in our arsenal (contemplation of purity and smite condition – no surprise there being former monk skills).
Also being able to grant the passive part of virtue of resolve to everyone around us is pretty major to me.
Some probably need work, but you can’t just lump them all under the ‘no good’ category.
I run a Shouting GS Guardian and utilize Altruistic Healing but not Zealous Blade (GS Healing) @ Lvl 80 PvE. Works amazing for me but it took me a lot of time to research all the traits/armor/sigils/runes to make that build worthwhile.
@60 I had a Sword/Focus/GS Burn/Blocking/Meditation Healing that closed the gap on enemies fast but didn’t have much defense. I relied on the Meditation Heal and Blocks from the Focus/Virtue of Courage Aegis/Shelter to activate Might of the Protector and hit back.
Think it all depends on the right set of skills on weapon, sigils on weapons, armor, runes of armors, jewelry, and traits to get a good synergy for any of the GrandMaster Traits.
Traited Smite Condition heals for 2k, on a 16 secs cd, remove a condition, AND deal a decent chunk of damage. No. Meditations don’t suck.
+15% crit chance is actually better than what most other professions have, especially as it affects three different weapons.
Meditations improved by the Adept, Master and Grandmaster traits are amazing, they are just not that useful for your teammates.
Both Honor Grandmaster traits are good.
Only Zeal has subpar major traits.
You don’t grant the passive part of virtue of resolve to everyone around you, you grant a crippled (my first choice of word seemed innocuous to me but apparently was not) form to three allied units (hope you don’t have a necromancer buddy).
Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.
When first we practice to deceive.
Not sure if these posts are jokes or not, anyways.
Zealous Blade heals are unnoticiable unless you have 10 mobs on you (in which case the healing is even more unnoticiable compared to incoming damage).
AHealing is only decent under very specific conditions and most of the time unnoticiable too.
These traits barely add anything to your character, have you checked other classes’ Tier 3 traits?
Grandmaster should be tide-turning, not a nuisance.
Pure of Heart (Aegis heal on removal) is a tier ONE trait and heals 650+ per application, more than both Grandmasters together, and for each aegis applied (even those from allies).
You easily get 4-5 Aegis per fight which means minimum 3k heal.
Valorous defense T1 minor trait negates a full hit on 50% health, can easily negate 4k to 12k dmg.
These are tide-turning.
And in regards of healing Meditations… I hope that was a joke.
Smite Condition or CoPurity are useless to your team and you almost never need that much condition removal especially if you have traited VoR.
Slotting 3 “meh”, team-useless utilities just to get some poor heals (1.3k to 2k) sounds a lot like a GW1 Wammo, if you’re running with that build stay away from teams for the sake of class’ dignity.
The only decent ones are 15% crit for 1-handers and, to a lesser extent, condition convertion on shouts.
I build an offensive guardian and my job is to damage. I don’t need to bring support utilities to my group because that is not my role (even though I still do with Inspired Virtues, Wall of Reflect, ToC, etc…). Monk’s Focus and Meditations increase my survivability and just what I need to go full glass cannon (all berserkers).
Inb4 “Go reroll warrior if you want damage”.
You don’t grant the passive part of virtue of resolve to everyone around you, you grant a crippled (my first choice of word seemed innocuous to me but apparently was not) form to three allied units (hope you don’t have a necromancer buddy).
Thats funny as when people are taking damage this one skill will heal anyone and everyone damaged around me. It doesent heal them as much as it heals me given absolute resolution does not work on battle presence but then again upwards of 20 people getting hit by it all at once for 150-175 a tick is quite powerful.
Almost all Zeal traits are terrible in my opinion, unless you go full Spirit Weapon build.
I – Applies 3 stacks of Vulnerability on Immobilize, we have almost no immobilizes and 3% is laughable for something on an at least 15 second cooldown, only the Scepter, Hammer and Signet of Wrath can immobilize
II – 10% more damage to burning, this is awesome and propably the best trait in Zeal, but if you don’t build for heavy burn it can be hard to keep burning on an enemy
III – reduced fall damage, seriously?
IV – increased downed damage by 50%, downed damage is almost never important, even if 50% is a lot, this trait won’t change a thing
V – removed aegis burns opponent, this is ok, it only lasts for like 3 seconds though I believe
VI – only works with spirit weapons
VII – 5% more greatsword damage is never bad, but compared to other weapon-specific traits it’s just too weak, see the warrior’s weapon traits (for example 10% increased greatsword and spear damage)
VIII – Focus skills recharge 20% faster is very good, but why is it in Zeal? Focus is a defensive weapon, with a blind block and heal, it fits into every tree except zeal
IX – 5% scepter damage, see VII
X – spirit weapons not destroyed when commanded, incredibly strong but again only works with spirit weapons
XI – 10% spirit weapon damage, same here
XII – greatsword attacks heal you, terrible, heals for a laughable amount and doesn’t seem to scale at all.
So If you want to play an offensive guardian, you either need to go with Condition damage in Radiance, or use Spirit Weapons apparently.
The only good traits in Zeal that don’t work with Spirit Weapons are II, V and VIII, although II and V fit far better into Radiance burn builds, and VIII would fit into defensive builds if it was an adept trait.
(edited by Bobnintendo.1256)
GS one is really bad, hope changes are coming
No denying that Zeal tree needs some love. I think some of the spirit weapon traits need to be combined.
Altruistic Healing – You’re using this WAY wrong if you think it’s laughable without a ton of people. My build has 30 Valor, 30 Honor, and 10 Virtues. In Valor I took: Retruibutive Armor, Honorable Shield, Altruistic Healing. In Valor I took: All of the Writ traits (Longer, larger, heals allies) In Virtues I took: Vengeance
I use Mace/Shield and GS, and my utility skills are: “Hold The Line!”, “Save Yourselves!” and “Retreat!”. I gear for Healing Power and Toughness mainly, with Vitality and Power as secondary stats. This build works like this: Run in with GS and use BB to pull everything to you. Either A) Use Whirling Wrath if you have no or one condition on you, or B) Use Symbol Of Wrath and then use Whirling Wrath. Continue until Symbol Of Wrath is up again and use it. Now IMMEDIATELY switch to Mace/Shield and throw down the Symbol Of Mercy. This allows you to get one boon EACH SECOND for EVERY PERSON inside of it multiplied by TWO for the duration of the symbols. This also STACKS with the Writ Of The Merciful, allowing for MORE healing. Consistently switch between the two weapons, using the symbol twice between each switch: on entry and exit. This doesn’t sacrifice damage either, because both Symbols do damage every second as well, and those count towards the Virtue Of Justice. Combine all that with Whirling Wrath and you get a LOT of burning as well as healing. I run this build all the time and almost NEVER need to dodge. I use the Signet as my heal and Tome Of Wrath (Sometimes Tome Of Courage) as my Elite skill.
Both of these symbols combined do decent damage (when combined with normal attacks) and can make you near invincible together. Let’s not forget to mention that “Hold The Line!” and “Retreat!” also give you another two heals. I won’t talk about “Save Yourselves!” because we all know what that does.
(edited by Dolothane.4306)
You don’t grant the passive part of virtue of resolve to everyone around you, you grant a crippled (my first choice of word seemed innocuous to me but apparently was not) form to three allied units (hope you don’t have a necromancer buddy).
Thats funny as when people are taking damage this one skill will heal anyone and everyone damaged around me. It doesent heal them as much as it heals me given absolute resolution does not work on battle presence but then again upwards of 20 people getting hit by it all at once for 150-175 a tick is quite powerful.
From my testing (and the wiki agrees with me too for whatever that is worth) it heals a maximum of 5 things, doesn’t benefit from absolute resolution, and ticks once every four seconds. It heals for 84+.06/healing power per 4 seconds. Compare that to symbols that heal 117+0.075/healing power every second in a symbol, or Elixir-Infused Bombs from engineers that start around 180/bomb and it just seems pitiful.
Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.
When first we practice to deceive.
Altruistic Healing
I know how to use the trait.
The heal is still laughable in any serious content, I know you’re killing trash easily with it but we can kill it with no traits slotted at all you know.
Also, to get that to work properly you’d need at least two Symbol traits, and we all know this means sacrificing either GS trait or Shout trait.
I hope I don’t need to tell you why this would be very bad.
Now, if duration/radius symbol traits were merged into one like the shield have recently been, and moved to Valor where they belong, then it would be a viable choice; until then it’s a major waste of great traits for little benefit.
Erhmm… It’ really hard to agree with you.
Altruistic Healing – Have you ever tried this one with 20 points in virtues, and Staff/Mace+Shield (or Mace+Focus, both are fine) combo? While it is most powerful in WvW environment, even in dungeon setting it creates a massive heal everytime you use Empower on stuff, which is well – every time it’s off cd. Add to that Symbols from mace/staff, Possible protection from mace, protection from shield or regen from focus and Might/Retaliation from Virtue of Justice and you are supporting the hell out of everyone else while staying top health. And that’s without using any shouts as utility yet. It may be a bit useles if you want to go pure dps I agree, but for a supportive/defensive builds it is a game changer.
Meditation – Improved by Adept and Master traits, with Sword/Scepter build and 30 points in radiance they are powerful. Just take Smite’s Condition and Judge’s Intervention. Both are combination of condition dmg (which in turn boosts our weapon damage) and heal, with some utility. I probably wouldn’t touch it in PVE, but for sPVP this skill is gold.
(edited by Wiking.2084)
It’s really hard to have a nice discussion when OP adopts such a dismissive attitude.
First of all, grandmaster traits not being the strongest traits out there is not a “problem” specific to guardians, all classes have some really whimpy grandmaster traits. I don’t even think that grandmaster traits are designed to be the strongest traits all the time, but anyways…
Altruistic healing is nice because almost everything a guardian does puts a buff on someone: you made a symbol? Heal. Shouts? Heal. Activated a virtue? Heal. Self-buff? Heal. Not to mention there are skills and traits that amplify this even more. It’s not so good while soloing, but if you have people around you, each symbol/shout/virtue will heal you at somewhere around 300-500 HP. Given how many such kind of actions you take during a fight, all that healing really adds up, and no, you don’t need to run a symbol build to take advantage of this. You heal basically just by doing things.
Yes, the GS attacking heal trait is terrible.
Aegis healing trait barely makes a difference in a fight. You might get 3-4 of them up, but chances are, one of them is useless since you are probably at full health when you lose the first aegis. So you get around 1800 healing from that trait per fight. You can get that from using one meditation skill with Monk’s focus, and 1/3 of that from AH just for doing something. Meditations are not useless: how many times and you activate VoR per encounter? What if you don’t want to put 20 points into the virtue line? Remove a condition while doing damage on low cooldown is not a bad thing, neither is a stun-breaker teleport that deals reasonable damage.
Yay! “aegis can negate 4-12k damage!”. You best healing skill only heals about 8000! Healing skills are so useless! I can pull up 4 aegis in one fight and negate 16-48k damage! Who cares about healing!