Guild Wars 2

—Much—

“We are moving towards retaliation being more of a counter to taking many hits rather than a general boon to keep up all the time. We also wanted to improve the combo finisher of the guardian, so we reorganized guardian greatsword skills to the following:

Skill 2: Whirling Wrath (10 second recharge)
Skill 3: Leap of Faith (15 second recharge)
Skill 4: Symbol of Wrath (20 second recharge)"

What does this actually do? It cuts retaliation to 15 seconds per minute instead of 30 seconds per minute from this ability IF the person attacks the Guardian while he is on his symbol. However you can gain retribution from:

Save Yourselves 10 to 13 seconds.
Stand Your Ground 5 to 6.5 seconds.
Healer’s Retribution 3 to 3.9 seconds.
Retaliatory Subconscious 3 to 3.9 seconds.
Virtue of Retribution 3 to 3.9 seconds.
Wrathful Spirit 3 to 3.9 seconds.
Leap Finisher on Light 5 to 6.5 seconds.
Blast Finisher on Light 3 to 3.9 seconds.

These can all be increased by an additional 25% with vengeful.

So increasing symbol of wrath to 20 seconds and reducing the leap finisher to 15 seconds there is a loss of 15 seconds of retaliation per minute and a gain of 5 seconds of retaliation per minute for a net of 10 seconds per minute difference before utilities and traits.

What is more noticeable is the loss of around 5100 aoe damage per minute from the symbol itself which is not covered in the patch notes. Shouldn’t the damage the sign deals be doubled or the damage added into a different ability? Will GS Guardians get the damage back in the future or were they doing too much damage? (Excuse me while I laugh hysterically at that thought).

So is hammer 2 next? Should we make it 10 seconds, 20 maybe? It alone can allow 100% uptime on retaliation right now. A single backstab or heart strike can hit for 6k or more and returns maybe 400 in retaliation. Maybe I’m confused by this because it is a partial change but at the moment it seems unfocused. I hope we can get more comments and clarity in the future.

I think the problem is that retaliation seems to do a lot less damage than your regular GS attacks in both PvE and PvP. I’ll admit that when I fight 3+ mobs at a time I can see a little bit of the retaliation, but since I’ve put 15 into radiance most of my enemies will be blinded or blocked by my chains anyway. The 200 damage they deal “themselves” with an interval of approx. 2-5 seconds is small compared to the auto attack, and redundant when compared with the full GS potential.

Before the update my retaliation stacked to about 15 seconds while combat lasted about 10s in lower level Pve. Now both last 10s. Not really an issue. In higher level PvE you’re probably not going to stick to only the GS because of the lengthened cd’s with this update.

A better idea would have been to boost retaliation a little bit and make the separate durations shorter.

The thing is that retaliation is a lot more effective in PvP than PvE because most mobs attack really slow anyway. But if you fight like a D/D thief who already throws out a couple of auto attacks a second, Retaliation really adds up.

Or just put 10 into virtues for retaliatory subconscious – all spike chip classes will try to pin you down before whirling on you, so if you have enough health you can stand there and take it instead of stun breaking.