Guild Wars 2

It is inarguable that the Guardians Focused Mind (X valor trait: Makes meditation skills cast instantly) is useless because two of the Guardian’s mediation skills already have instant cast times and the other two have a 3/4 & 1/4 casting time! Please Anet we beg of you fix our skills and traits. There’s a good amount of other traits and skills that need fixing as well :C

The trait honesly does need to be fixed. I think it is there because the meditation that converted conditions to boons originally had a cast time i believe. (rarely used it so i could be wrong) would love meditations with ground targeting to replace it to be honest. Would give us some mobility and a way to control something like MI instead of the random teleport.

I believe that it also turns Smite Condition and Merciful Intervention into stun breaks but I have not tested that out personally. I like the idea of ground targeting, although I’m not very experienced in PvP so I can’t say if that would be too powerful. MI would become an amazing retreat that I assume would heal yourself if no one was nearby, as well as an amazing support skill. It’s a fine line between MI being useless and godly.

I agree that Focused Mind could use a bit of reworking now that Judge’s Intervention and Contemplation of Purity are instant-cast normally, but ground targeting…how would that work with, say, Contemplation of Purity? Whatever it’s changed to/what’s added to it should be compatible with all Meditations.

As it stands, some builds do still find reason to take the trait for its effect on Smite Condition, and these applications are interesting enough to make me still want some way to make SC instant. When you’ve got Monk’s Focus, an instant-cast 2k heal is much more useful than a 2k heal with a cast time, since you can use it while stomping, reviving, or performing other actions, and in general, you don’t have to worry about dying while waiting for the skill to fire. Besides that, being instant cast lets you work it into burst combos, and glass cannon builds can use this to considerable effect by activating SC in the middle of Zealot’s Defense or Whirling Wrath. Add Judge’s Intervention and Virtue of Justice (also both instant-cast) into the combo, and you can put out some serious damage in the time it takes to use a single attack. I think that versatility is pretty cool, and if SC lost that, it’d hurt some of the Guardian’s offensive builds (which already struggle to find a place in anything above casual play).

As has been noted – it increases the number of stun breaks available to the class, while allowing you to slip half (or 2/3) of your meditations in between chain attacks.

This discussion is occuring in a thread which is exactly one above another discussion where a key point raised was that guardians don’t have enough stun breaks, which is interesting and perhaps indicative of how much there is still to be gleaned about some abilities and traits.