Guild Wars 2

The recent patch notes have brought on a lot of discussion about the Guardian’s flaws and the tools we’ll need to keep up with an accelerating metagame. In light of that, I thought I’d put together some of my ideas on how our upcoming Elite spec could help us accomplish this.

I know that the current Dragonhunter has likely changed since the last time we saw it, and I know that these types of topics rarely yield actual changes in-game, but it was a fun brainstorming activity for me regardless. I don’t think these suggestions are perfect, and I’m certainly not any sort of authority on the Guardian, so constructive criticism is welcome.

Let’s start with the Longbow!

Previous Version: The existing version of the Longbow has some quirks, but it seems like it’s intended for teamfighting from afar and thinning herds of distant mobs. For example, its autoattack has a conditional cripple, and True Shot self-roots. These aren’t desirable traits in single-target fights or duels. Furthermore, the recent Virtue nerf will make it harder to support our team from the back lines, and I think the Longbow needs to be more versatile to account for this change. This will require reworking both its skills and associated traits (discussed later).

Revised Longbow Skills (All skills have 1200 maximum range)

Puncture Shot: Fire a bouncing arrow between multiple nearby foes. If an arrow strikes a target with at least 2 stacks of Burning, the target is crippled for 1 second. 20% projectile finisher, 3/4 second cast time per shot.

True Shot: Effect unchanged, but base cooldown increased to 6 seconds.

Deflecting Shot: Effect unchanged, but base cooldown increased to 12 seconds.

Symbol of Energy: Chain skill. Fire an arcing arrow that Burns targets at its destination for 2 seconds and creates a symbol that grants Vigor to allies (5 second duration). 3/4 second cast time, base cooldown increased to 25 seconds.

Lightspeed (Chain from Symbol of Energy): Teleport to the center of your Symbol of Energy. Chain resets and goes on cooldown after the Symbol’s duration has expired. 1/4 second cast.

Hunter’s Ward: Rain arrows down on the target area for 2 seconds, pulsing damage to enemies 4 times and Crippling them for 2 seconds with each pulse. When the barrage ends, create an impassable barrier around each enemy still inside the area for 4 seconds. 50s cooldown.

Notes:

-Puncture Shot’s change was intended to make the skill perform more consistently across different types of encounters while retaining its conditional control. With the previous version, Rangers would have an especially bad time with it, while the skill would just be a slow, regular autoattack in 1v1’s and many boss fights. The number of required burning stacks could be raised if the condition’s too easy to meet.

-Everyone wants a ground-targeted teleport, but Guardians aren’t meant to run from fights. My solution is a slow, telegraphed teleport via Symbol of Energy. This will allow a Guardian to disengage from fights, but not immediately, and opposing PvP’ers will know exactly where we’re heading in advance. Alternatively, it can be used to engage from afar and bring the Guardian back into range for supporting allies with Virtues, Shouts, etc. This solves two problems simultaneously without making Judge’s Intervention obsolete.

-Hunter’s Ward was too long of a CC on too long of a cooldown, which is generally boring and not always desirable for PvE content. I sort of fudged the numbers here by mashing Ring of Warding and the Ranger’s Barrage together, and I’m open to changing the durations if people think they’re off.

Continued below:

Next up, revised Traits!

Previous Version: When we were last shown the DH specialization, the traits looked messy, especially compared to those from the Reaper specialization later on. Some traits, like Pure of Sight, seemed distinctly out of place. Others were much more polished, like the new Virtue traits at each tier. Aside from the Virtues and some vaguely synergistic Longbow traits, however, the DH seemed to be missing the distinct themes present throughout the Reaper’s traits. I wanted to establish these themes more clearly, so I picked the three most obvious ones: Longbow, Virtues, and Traps (with some traits more directly linked to these themes than others). Here’s what I came up with:

Minor Traits:

Virtuous Action (Adept): Unchanged.

Defender’s Dogma (Master): Cleanse one condition when you block an attack. 10 second cooldown.

Zealot’s Aggression (Grandmaster): Moved from Major Adept tier.

Adept Traits:

Dulled Senses: Moved from Major Master tier.

Soaring Devastation: Unchanged.

Piercing Light: Trap hits Bleed enemies for 8 seconds. Trap abilities have 20% reduced recharge.

Master Traits:

Heavy Light: Deflecting Shot pierces enemies and knocks back targets within 300 range of the user (Distance: 120). Longbow abilities have 20% reduced recharge.

Bulwark: Unchanged.

Dragon’s Blood: Apply 3 stacks of Bleeding to nearby enemies for 8s when you inflict Burning on a target. 360 radius, 8 second cooldown.

Grandmaster Traits:

Hunter’s Agility: You are no longer rooted in place while channeling any abilities.

Big Game Hunter: Unchanged.

Trapper’s Focus: Traps cleanse 2 conditions and break stun on the user when triggered.

Notes:

-The new Defender’s Dogma helps us a little with cleansing in a meta where conditions keep coming faster. It’s similar to the Purity trait, but less passive if you manage your blocks well.

-Zealot’s Aggression fills Pure of Sight’s role perfectly while being much easier to use. It’s somewhat weaker than our pre-patch Radiant Power minor, though.

-Dulled Senses will synergize with both Hunter’s Ward and traited Deflecting Shot, so the Longbow line seems like a good home for it.

-Piercing Light gives Traps some much-needed cooldown reduction, and I upped the base Bleed duration from 6 to 8 seconds to improve damage consistency slightly.

-Heavy Light gives Deflecting Shot better general utility at all ranges, and the brief knockback + Blind can let you set up skills like True Shot or Hunter’s Ward at close range. Symbol of Energy’s new teleport mechanic gives you flexiblity in using this skill for the CC or projectile defense as the situation demands. The cooldown reduction mostly offsets the increases I listed above while helping to bring Hunter’s Ward into line.

-Dragon’s Blood can fit with condition-focused DH’s while also supplementing Trap-based Bleeds from the Piercing Light trait. Traps have a lot of conditions incorporated, so I feel like this matches the theme while keeping the specialization flexible. Despite the potential for 100% uptime, 3 Bleed stacks shouldn’t be overwhelming.

-Hunter’s Agility fits the Longbow theme by removing the root from True Shot, but it could also help improve abilities like Zealot’s Defense, Empower, Ring of Warding, Shield of Absorption, and the new Signet of Courage. GW2 is a very mobile game, and being locked in place hinders many of these skills. Mobile RoW is a big incentive for Hambow DH’s, but they’ll pass up Big Game Hunter if they want to take it.

-Trapper’s Focus helps give Traps some defense and utility. Guardians often live and die by their utility skills, and running multiple Traps for burst damage is likely to make for some gimmicky builds. Traps are likely to trigger shortly after the start of a fight, so this can help you ride out the initial wave of condis and CC while you set up your burst. Defensive Traps like Fragments of Faith and Purification will also let you conserve some cleanse and CC protection for when you need it later in the fight, so you don’t have to burn all of your defenses while bursting. This trait also makes it more feasible to splash Traps into Meditation builds, but again, you’ll lose Big Game Hunter and potential Hambow shenanigans if you do.

Anyways, that’s all I’ve got for now. Would these sort of reworks be appealing, or do you think they’re way off base (underpowered, overpowered, not addressing the real issues, etc.)? I enjoyed coming up with them either way, but I’d love to hear the community’s feedback.

I don’t like increased cd’s on skills that you suggested so I stopped reading after that, we don’t need another nerfs.

I also don’t agree with the cool-down increases, however unlike the previous poster I did at least have the decency to read your entire post rather than throwing my opinion around after reading one line.

A lot of the mechanics you suggest have great merit, the chain skill idea for Symbol of Energy is fantastic, it provides emergent play and is counterable, it has both offensive and defensive options.

Some of your trait ideas are fantastic and provide real line synergy, something the current traits are blatantly lacking after the Chronomancer and Reaper were showcased with 3 clear paths.

The new heavy light is a clever idea, Hunter’s Agility is very well thought out and provides excellent synergy with several skills, it would in fact provide a huge quality of life change for the Guardian with Sword, Staff, Hammer, Longbow and (Elite Signet) that would make the whole class feel much more fluid in combat. It alone could in fact be one of the best traits to Guardian simply because it makes it so much better to play.

Dont like the fact you tried to make it a close range weapon.

Its a frekin longbow, let it be long ranged.

There are only a few changes I would really suggest for the longbow at this point

1: Cut the immobilize duration of the number 5 in half but also cut the Cd in half

2: Split the number 1 into a duel hit like warrior longbow 1, but keep the bounce to additional targets behind the first.

3: Reduce the speed of deflecting shot by 25-30% but make it count as a block. In addition make it knock back any enemy that it hits by 130 units.

4: Change heavy light so that it reduces the Cd of traps by 30% and causes them to do a small AOE heal when triggered (say half of a water field + blast)

5: Make the trait piercing light effect all longbow skills in addition to traps.

6: Change dulled senses so it also effects launches, knock downs, sinks, flots etc…

Thanks for the feedback! To answer the point about the cooldown increases, the main goal was to make room for a cooldown reduction trait while keeping the changes to True Shot and Deflecting Shot minimal. If I hadn’t raised the base cooldowns, their respective recharges with the trait would be 3.2 seconds and 8 seconds. I felt like this would be too much in PvP situations when combined with the increased utility and improved mechanics each of these skills can acquire from the new traits.

For example, True Shot no longer roots you with Hunter’s Agility, and we’ve already seen that it can hit like a truck. It’s basically a Mighty Blow from up to 1200 range, and I think being able to kite while firing it every 3 seconds would be too much. Puncture Shot and Spear of Justice can provide a consistent stream of damage in the meantime while maintaining a lot of Cripple uptime on individual targets, and the new Symbol of Energy can work with Hunter’s Ward to help prevent opponents from escaping. I don’t think True Shot needs a 3-second cooldown for the revised Longbow to be effective.

Deflecting Shot is a bit less problematic on its own, but since the knockback can set up for True Shot, and Symbol of Energy makes it easier to control your distance relative to the opponent, I felt like the base cooldown increase was justified. One alternative solution would be to make Deflecting Shot’s piercing baseline and only include the knockback/cooldown reduction with the Heavy Light trait. This would justify some increase while improving the skill’s utility if you opt not to take Heavy Light.

In the case of both traits, I felt like the 2-second cooldown increases were worth the cooldown reduction on Hunter’s Ward, which can be reduced as much as 20 seconds from its current version. I also don’t think those cooldown increases would make the Heavy Light trait mandatory, though most Longbow builds would probably opt to take it anyways. Since you can’t run Longbow without the DH specialization, I don’t think that’s as much of a problem for build diversity as it might be elsewhere.

@ Ragnar the Rock: The idea was that the Longbow should have a flexible range, because all of our Virtues and most of our utilities lose their power when we’re distant from our allies (and you can’t use our new Spear of Justice at all from 1200 range, since it will miss/break if you go beyond 900). This version of the Longbow works just as well as the other one at 1200 range, but it tries to address the fact that always staying up close or at range isn’t preferable for Guardians. We need to be able to dive into fights to support our allies, but we also need options for creating distance and disengaging when we start feeling pressure. I believe that creating a weapon which provides a medium between the two playstyles is preferable to creating one which specializes in something we haven’t been built for up until this point.

Unless our support skills have their range increased and our general focus on support is broadened, I think that a compromise between playstyles is the best we can ask for, and I think it’s still addressing some of the big issues that the Guardian community has been dissatisfied with since launch (specifically our lack of ranged counterpressure and disengages).

Oh, I almost forgot to mention, I like the idea of Deflecting Shot blocking projectiles instead of just destroying them. Makes the Longbow feel a little more cohesive with the rest of the Guardian’s themes and gives it some synergy with other traits in different lines.

let it release before starting to rewrite it?