Guild Wars 2

Now that the dust has settled, do you think the class revamps and trait mechanics had any effective change? Why and why not?

Many skills are really getting pushed by ANet for us to use, but I feel after the first week or so, people are reverting back to pre-patch builds because those lesser used skills are still not worth it.

• Signets are still ineffective, if anything Bane Signet for the extra passive power if PvE
• Litany of Wrath is interesting, but we seem to need Shelter too much to move away from it.
• Merciful Intervention is clunky and worse off after they made it a targetable skill.
• Spirit Weapons are still sidelined
• Feel My Wrath works well in PvE, but Signet of Courage is just not enough.
• Burning builds are useful now, but I am seeing more and more revert back to regular power based builds.
• Damage modifiers are seemingly difficult to add into builds and very limited.
• ANet REALLY wants us to “love” retaliation as much as they do.
• The 3-line trait shuffle has some of our key traits in competition with each other, making us sacrifice even more synergies.
• Shield….

I’m sure there are a lot more to talk about, but this was just a top of my head list. Overall I feel the changes came out ineffective and I’m indifferent. Not horrible, but didn’t improve much.

I’m indifferent for much of it, but there was also some nice stuff.

PvE
- I like Mace way more than Sword. They could have fixed sword, but i’ll settle with that.
- Symbol rotation is more fun too.
- Hammer build are more on part with GS build.
- Removing stats from trait open up possibility since you can take some support trait without sacrificing as much dps as you used to.

PvP
- Glacial Heart is in an ackward placement, which hurt hammer build

Both
- Damage modifier are ok. Don’t know why they nerfed Fiery Wrath and they should have kept Symbolic Avenger to 20% (even if they nerfed something else) so that being good at placing your symbol would be important
- Burning was nice to try, but it’s just short to replace power efficiently. At least they are closer so you won’t be laugh at for playing a condi guardian.

I agree with most of what you said, but it’s a bit unfair to place the bad skills that are still bad on that list. The last patch was about trait only, they never pretented to fixed broken skills.

Pros:

-Burning rework makes Guardians an effective condi threat now.

-Having 3 full traitlines makes team support much easier to access, even on offensive builds.

-New traits such as Wrath of Justice and Radiant Fire bring some interesting new flavors to builds.

-Feel My Wrath is amazing in PvE, and quite effective in many PvP situations. It actually makes picking an elite for Guardians require some degree of decision-making.

-Litany of Wrath is now a viable option for medi builds.

-Ground targeted consecrations becoming baseline is a nice QoL change, despite what some baddies might be saying to the contrary.

-Splitting stats from traitlines provides non-Zeal builds with more effective damage output.

Cons:

-On the flipside, however, splitting stats from traitlines also took away our vitality from Honor, leaving cleric bunker builds with a whopping 11k-12k HP.

-Signet of Courage is cool on paper, but needs adjusting (particularly with that awful cast time/animation) to work.

-We lost a lot of damage modifiers. Compared to the damage increases Mesmer and Thief got, for example, our burst potential has dwindled.

-Sword has lost a lot of its effectiveness. An added cooldown reduction to RHS does not make up for the lost damage modifier because its damage has always been in the autoattack.

-None of the requested QoL changes for sword (mobile Zealot’s Defense, block procs on ZD, non-projectile autoattack, etc.) were implemented to make up for lost damage.

-For the most part, Guardians can still be kited far too easily. We really needed some sort of cripple access within the base class, but didn’t get it.

-Virtue of Justice’s active is pretty useless now, unless you’re running Wrath of Justice or need the blind to secure a stomp.

-Zeal minors are still entirely symbol-oriented. Traits such as Fiery Wrath, Binding Jeopardy, Kindled Zeal, and Shattered Aegis would all make for much better candidates for minor traits because they’re much more universally applicable.

-Honor adept traits are terrible if you’re not running mace or planning to be a revive bot.

-ICDs on block procs were entirely unnecessary. Bumping Might of the Protector up to 2 stacks per block and Amplified Wrath to 2 seconds of burn per block doesn’t come anywhere close to making up for the nerf.

-Signets are still underwhelming, especially when you consider the fact that they traded out the more useful condition removal for the less useful light aura on use.

-Signet of Mercy still continues to exist, despite our best efforts.

-Spirit Weapons are still pretty underwhelming, although to be fair any buffs should come at the cost of them being less AI-reliant.

-Retaliation is still terribly ineffective post-nerf, especially considering how little uptime we actually get from it with any build not using GS. 3s retal on a 30s ICD still does not make for an effective trait.

-Radiant Retaliation is still essentially a throwaway trait, especially since it competes with Amplified Wrath, which is superior for condition builds 100% of the time.

-We are still very much pigeonholed into Valor for sustain from either AH or MF. The new Retributive Armor looks like a cool, interesting trait, but nobody is going to use it at the cost of not surviving long enough to deal more damage.

-Barring Revenant potentially (which my guess is they’ll get this with the Shiro traitline), once HoT releases we will be the only class without skill or trait access to +25% movement speed. This is especially a slap in the face when you consider how much more melee-dependent we are than most of the other classes.

-Shield is still the butt-end of Guardian-related jokes.

Pros

-Condition damage changes help make Burn-Guardian pretty decent.

-New flavorful and useful traits(wrath of justice) are always welcome.

-Focus’s base cd was reduced, I always believed the cd’s were a bit too long to begin with.

-Our RF now has a contender in Feel my Wrath(Though it’s only really useful as a bunker instead of dps)

Cons

-Loss of 4 damage modifiers(radiant power, powerful blades, evasive power and scepter power) and a nerf of one(fiery wrath) was completely unnecessary. Guardian burst was never unreasonable to begin with and easily noticed/telegraphed.

-Offensive symbol builds are still incredibly weak for how limited they really are.

-Most prominent traits still don’t have decent competition so you’re stuck with many of the same ones you used to use.

-ICD to Might of the Protector was also unnecessary. You never saw Guardians with 25 stacks of might.

-Scepter AA still misses most of the time due to its slow velocity.

-Signets, Spirit Weapons and most Consecrations are still not utilized (spvp).

-Retaliation traits(retaliation in general), can’t really expand on this one aside from the fact that it’s a terrible boon.

-Still the slowest profession without any real ranged capability.

-Shield…

-Traits that require you to never trigger your profession skills(Zealous Scepter and Purity of Body) make no sense.

-Traits that only work upon revival/kill(Courageous return, Renewed Justice) are completely useless in combat.

Black Box.9312:

snip

all of what he said.

Overall I feel we gained a lot and lost only a little. I’ll stick to the Con’s though, pros are numerous and I’d just be repeating others.

Cons:

• Shield: Please make the 5 a blast finisher and have it not stop our movement. That change alone would make shield reasonable to me, I feel its’ getting close with the cooldown changes, but it still lacks. 4 needs a bit of a damage boost as well IMO.

• Signet of Courage: god I could write an essay on what I think is wrong. Either way, it needs work. I’ll leave it to one point though. This is a harder to use “ohh kitten” save button compared to Warbanner, but Warbanner is sitting pretty with less than half the cast time. I’ll leave it there for this summary, but at the very least a cast time reduction is needed

• Wrathful Spirit: What the kitten? 3s of retaliation on aegis removal? How is that supposed to compete at all with the other traits, even if I were a fully nomad’s geared 0 dps build I’d still take the 7% modifier.

• Zealous Scepter: Just lacks oomph. I would rather my strait 10% come back. I don’t see why they needed to nerf the scepter trait. We’d need to proc VoJ once a second to exceed the gain of our old scepter trait. The flavor is nice, but it’s simply not good and rarely if ever will it exceed Fiery Wrath. Making the projectiles faster would go a long way for us, or just give us some of our % modifier back with it.

• Spirit Weapons: …

I won’t list pros and cons as they are pretty much covered. But my general feeling is this, for the most part we stayed the same, maybe a bit nerfed (spvp).

The so called “burn meta” is a one trick pony, i.e. will only work on scrubs who don’t bring condi clears. Bunkers are outclassed by Ele’s, and medi hammer is no longer feasible due to the placement of glacial heart on the trait tree.

Signets are still garbage, spirit weapons are still garbage, shouts are ok, however are mostly used in support/bunker builds (see above for bunker feasibility). Shield is still garbage, scepter is still too slow, hammer is still too slow, Littany of Wrath still can’t compete with shelter, and none of the other elites still can compete with renewed focus (Spvp). And yes, Anet continues to force Retaliation on us for some unknown reason.

This is the reason why most guardians are coming back to the standard med dps build. The only problem with this is most of the other classes were buffed to such a degree it’s harder to compete. You will get insta gibbed by Mesmer, Necros can tank your damage forever, Warriors can one shot you if you miss a blind/block during Rampage, and Eles will win a war of attrition against you.

Maybe the bow will be our saving grace, that is if your willing to spend the $50.00 to get it.

I won’t cover everything but I’ll just say what I think has been interesting as enhancements.

1. Wrath of Justice is a nice way to add more cc.
2. Smiter’s boon is a nice way to add more healing on a meditation build. You get additional healing and fury if you went full medi. (Bugs aside), I use it with purging flames instead of smite condition for more cleansing, healing. burning.
3. Feel my Wrath is nice for stomps and paired with hammer since they take the most time to cast.

Cons
1. Spirit weapons need to add more health when you choose that in the trait line. There is so much AoE in this game that while on a burning guard, it can be fun, in practice they don’t work so well.
2. Symbols are in an ok place, I would increase their base healing by adding .025*healing so they heal a bit more if you are tanky and provide some extra support
3. I think buffing focus and not shield was not a way to help the cause. Shield should be there to help support being ranged. If Anet wants it to be more support focused, that’s fine, but then make it do something. There are pages on fixes so look at those.
4. I kind of liked the old mace trait. Getting enough stacks of healing to make it worth as much as the old one is not there.
5. Signets..why retaliation? Make it an pop sigil of hydromancy so that you can slow enemies since we left glacial heart in there. At least then you could counter mesmers and elementalists with a decent condition. Chill plus weaken would be a nice non condition based way to hold a point.

My aegis sharing build using the old communal defense was broken by the introduction of the ICD. Other than that so far so good.

Jerus.4350:

• Shield: Please make the 5 a blast finisher and have it not stop our movement. That change alone would make shield reasonable to me, I feel its’ getting close with the cooldown changes, but it still lacks. 4 needs a bit of a damage boost as well IMO.

And reflect dmg, that would be a must at some dungeos, or high level gameplay

RevanCorana.8942:

My aegis sharing build using the old communal defense was broken by the introduction of the ICD. Other than that so far so good.

The old Communal defenses had an icd of 20s (ever since the trait was created). I don’t know what you think is broken by now having a 15s icd.

I feel that the burn application potential is rediculous for guards especially compared to every other class, they can quite easily hit 12 or 13 in a second or two, and then cause 4-5k dmg per sec, this obviously is out of hand, and everyone knows it is and runs it themselves. A single condi should not do 5k a sec, no matter how much you trait for it. That hits harder than peoples regular burst easy, and plus, you remain a defense.
The damage buffs to greatsword were appropriate however, but no one even plays with that anymore becuase they all join in on the burnnnnnnnnn.
JI should not inflict 3 stacks, that’s just silly, it’s already a huge teleport, gap closer and a stunbreaker, not to mention provides all the medi bonuses. Torch throw is already heavy burst, and applies another 3 stacks, I mean, mesmer’s torch only applies 1 stack, rangers only applies 2 stacks and does nearly no damage, and both of them have a cd the same or longer. This is rediculous. It really limits the build viability for guardians as its far superior to the rest.

Good

• Specialization system feels a lot less restrictive.
• “Feel My Wrath!” is very powerful in PvE and sees use in PvP, though limited by build.

Indifferent

• Guardian isn’t much better or worse than it was before throughout PvE, WvW, and PvP.
• Condition damage seems viable in PvP, but it’s more of a cheese build than anything effective on a real team.

Bad

• Traits still seem scattered or in “incorrect” places. For example, Zeal could really use larger symbols, but it’s in Honor. However, Writ of Persistence is very lackluster for a support build. It’s only good with hammer in PvE and that build uses Zeal anyway. The scepter trait is in Zeal, but would probably fit better in Radiance.
• Many trait slots only have one worthwhile choice. Some have two, but usually only one is good in any particular game mode or is very niche.
• Sword is weak overall. It needs something to distinguish it. Greatsword has damage and movement and Wall of Reflection is way better than Zealot’s Defense.
• Shield is okay, but it feels like #4 needs something more. Maybe just more damage and a projectile finisher.
• Spirit Weapons are still niche at best. They die to cleave too quickly and the melee AI is clunky.
• Signets almost seem useable for more than a stat boost, but are just a tad too weak. The long cooldowns hamper them more than anything else.
• Consecrations don’t work well. They’re supposed to be powerful buffs for a small area, but aren’t nearly strong enough to warrant staying in them and taking incoming damage. I should want to stay in a consecration while it’s up.
• Offensive power builds need a way to stick to a target better in PvP and to peel for allies. Swiftness access is limited, and so is CC.
• In PvP, the low base HP combined with the PvP amulet system severely limits possible builds and makes others weaker than they could be.

Black Box.9312:

Pros … / Cons …

I whole-heartedly agree with every single bullet. Well said.

Agree completely with Black Box.

Some of the changes were nice but the fact that they didn’t really fix any of the long standing issues like spirit weapons, signets, & weapon skills is just sad.

There is also the zeal minors & honor adepts that make you wonder what exactly they were thinking.

Am i the only one who has still a problem with the issue, that all our symbols are light fields? At least in PvE it is often the case, where light fields are not liked because nearly everyone wants to have a fire field – especially in fights against world bosses. This reduces also the use of symbolic avenger and of course hammer :-( .

I like the separation of stats from the trait lines – even if it leaves me with an even lower health pool.

As mentioned above shield is really disturbing … a guardian without a shield …. i really hate it – and for a melee based class it shouldn’t have knockback – it’s not really helping. Also already said – sometimes there is no real competition between picking a trait because all the other option are not worth it – even when ICD (also for empowering might … 5s might with 1s ICD … :-( ) are nerfing some traits so much.

WvW support guard here. I’m super happy with the changes except that:

• Shield 4 needs something more.
• Shield 5 needs a Blast Finisher and correct duration.
• Mace 1 should Cleave.

Otherwise, the changes put support guard in a great spot. Where before I had to choose, now I can run AH, Symbols and Battle Presence. Coupled with Signet of Courage and Pureof Heart/Communal Defenses, I am cranking out tons of support. I frequently am the last man standing, usually rezzing the downed commander until I’m dead. This finally feels like the bunker mode support guard I wanted from the start.

Shadowwarrior.7159:

Am i the only one who has still a problem with the issue, that all our symbols are light fields? At least in PvE it is often the case, where light fields are not liked because nearly everyone wants to have a fire field – especially in fights against world bosses. This reduces also the use of symbolic avenger and of course hammer :-( .

I like the separation of stats from the trait lines – even if it leaves me with an even lower health pool.

As mentioned above shield is really disturbing … a guardian without a shield …. i really hate it – and for a melee based class it shouldn’t have knockback – it’s not really helping. Also already said – sometimes there is no real competition between picking a trait because all the other option are not worth it – even when ICD (also for empowering might … 5s might with 1s ICD … :-( ) are nerfing some traits so much.

would it be cool if we had a GM trait that changed symbols from light fields to fire or water?

Jaxom.7310:

Shadowwarrior.7159:

Am i the only one who has still a problem with the issue, that all our symbols are light fields? At least in PvE it is often the case, where light fields are not liked because nearly everyone wants to have a fire field – especially in fights against world bosses. This reduces also the use of symbolic avenger and of course hammer :-( .

I like the separation of stats from the trait lines – even if it leaves me with an even lower health pool.

As mentioned above shield is really disturbing … a guardian without a shield …. i really hate it – and for a melee based class it shouldn’t have knockback – it’s not really helping. Also already said – sometimes there is no real competition between picking a trait because all the other option are not worth it – even when ICD (also for empowering might … 5s might with 1s ICD … :-( ) are nerfing some traits so much.

would it be cool if we had a GM trait that changed symbols from light fields to fire or water?

I would find it fantastic – i mean both are used in longer fights – one for damage / stacking might and one for healing. I would even welcome it if the symbols wouldn’t be a field of any kind – just a symbol.

Jaxom.7310:

would it be cool if we had a GM trait that changed symbols from light fields to fire or water?

That would be much better for Symbolic Avenger. A real game-changer of a GM trait, especially since it would do wonders for the Hammer Guard with the Mighty Blow blast finisher.

Genesis.8572:

Jaxom.7310:

would it be cool if we had a GM trait that changed symbols from light fields to fire or water?

That would be much better for Symbolic Avenger. A real game-changer of a GM trait, especially since it would do wonders for the Hammer Guard with the Mighty Blow blast finisher.

guards have said for a long time they’d like more access to fire and some water fields.

we already have trait that changes what retal scales off of, so seems like it might not be too crazy to have a trait that changes the field that symbols drop

Henrik.7560:

I feel that the burn application potential is rediculous for guards especially compared to every other class, they can quite easily hit 12 or 13 in a second or two, and then cause 4-5k dmg per sec, this obviously is out of hand, and everyone knows it is and runs it themselves. A single condi should not do 5k a sec, no matter how much you trait for it. That hits harder than peoples regular burst easy, and plus, you remain a defense.
The damage buffs to greatsword were appropriate however, but no one even plays with that anymore becuase they all join in on the burnnnnnnnnn.
JI should not inflict 3 stacks, that’s just silly, it’s already a huge teleport, gap closer and a stunbreaker, not to mention provides all the medi bonuses. Torch throw is already heavy burst, and applies another 3 stacks, I mean, mesmer’s torch only applies 1 stack, rangers only applies 2 stacks and does nearly no damage, and both of them have a cd the same or longer. This is rediculous. It really limits the build viability for guardians as its far superior to the rest.

Wow, did a Mesmer just actually come in and complain about a Guardian’s damage output? LOL!!

Many thanks. That made my morning.

Black Box is the Guardian we need right now.

Everything Black Box said.

And I still think Virtues could be slightly faster as the profession mechanic when fully traited.

Around 18s / 36s / 54s