Guild Wars 2

This new patch has me excited for burn guards, I’m starting to thteorycraft the following (I’m sure there is already a burn guardian guide somewhere that’s more well thought out than my musings, but please feel free to put your input!) I’ll summarize the build below with emphasis on how that matters to the build. I did not test any of this yet, still in theorycrafting phase so if you have any experience using this build please let me know!

Gear: Vipers all (though sinister rabid or carrion should also work, carrion more so than rabid maybe due to zeal trait that gives u condition damage based on power)
Runes: Superior rune of the flame legion
Traits: Virtues, Radiance and DH
Weapons: Not sure actually, thinking Mace/Torch for the most part, with GS to gather people, dropping skill 4 symbol and racking up some quick hits with skill 2

Virtues:
-Inspired virtue: Gets 3 stacks might on each Justice Active (meh)
-Unscathed contender: More damage with aegis active (sure, why not)
-Virtue of retribution: Gain Retal on every Justice active (meh)
-Virtuous solace: Get the shield thing when rezzing (meh)
-Power of the virtuous: More damage for more boons + faster virtue recharge (YES pls!)
-Permeating wrath: Main reason why I’m excited about this build, burn every 3 attacks and burns are now AoE

Radiance
-All 3 minor traits are great for this build, justice is blind applies AoE blind on active, Renewed justice sounds AMAZING for this build, refreshes justice on each kill, and radiant power, 10% inc crit chance on burning foes
-Inner fire to give fury when foe has 3+ stacks of burn (should be pretty constant)
-Radiant fire is a must to inc burn duration and radiant fire each time you crit
-Amplified wrath to inc burn damage

Dragonhunter (though not sure if this is optimal)
-Nothing here seems to be really vital to the burn build itself but it does offer some quality of life I think. The access to traps I think will help tremendously because much of everything we do will be melee, big game hunter also increase damage to targets that are speared by 10%. Seems solid enough.
-Other option would be to go zeal here but none of the choices seem particularly sexy, increased burn chance when standing on symbols and more damage to enemies that stand on symbols I guess contribute somewhat but meh…

Thoughts?

I’d go Sword over Mace. Sword already pairs well with GS, and its symbol gives Fury so you can trait RHS. Go ahead and take Procession of Blades and Lights Judgement as utilities, but for traits you’ll definitely want 2-2-3. Extra damage from Cripple and Vuln stacking. This isn’t going to compete with raid builds, but for Dungeon tier pve it’ll be fine.

You could also replace Radiance for Zeal and take Scepter instead for a more Power based hybrid builds that stacks its own Might in addition to its own Vuln. You’d also get more damage modifiers.

If anything, this was a nerf to condi/hybrid guard, which was already awful.
Previously it was pigeonholed into a build, zeal virtues and radiance, to do any damage. The aoe burn was already there, and with an option to opt out of it when fighting single bosses while keeping the more frequent passive burn. Now, taking virtues means you basically waste the middle slot, since the offensive trait to take there was replaced by a support one, useless to burnguard.
So far this is all the same, but the change to smite made the number of impacts smaller, unless you take writ of persistence, which is in another line, forcing you to drop one of the previous ones. Radiance is mandatory, for the burn duration and damage. Virtues is necessary, as the passive burns is what made burnguard be considered in the first place. That leaves zeal, meaning you’re forced to trade your scepter trait, the power>condi trait, and the now more useful symbol trait, for a whole support line just to get the symbol enhancement, or just take the reduced amount of hits. Considering taking the symbol trait also makes the hits more spread, it was just an outright nerf.

Considering Power Sc/T can hit 30k+ dps, it looks like WoP-less Scepter will be just fine, even on small hitboxes.

The way I see it,the change is mostly aimed at improving the QoL of DH burnguard because Hammer is now a strong choice for their melee weapon. During the next patch I can see Fiery Wrath and Amplified Wrath merged and moved to Zeal to make Radiance a weaker choice for Burn Guard – because based on my knowledge of the game most people complained due to the lack of defensive abilities for burn guard.

Thing is these changes also buffed Hammer as the go to condi weapon for F2P Guardians as well. Using this outdated talent calculator as a point of refference: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQFACOiHq8K+kzoNEehHtGAbZ9C-TpAOgAA7PMXGAA

Burn Guards have the ability to both Burn and Chill their opponents with just 1 crit from Symbol of Protection. Personaly if they were to merge Fiery Wrath and Amplified Wrath I would rather they keep it on Radiance so we can get a choice between focusing on aoe burn or single target burn.

They were legit before, OP. Now even more so. Just don’t fight destroyers.