Hey everyone,
I thought it would be a good idea to express our opinions of the Dec.10th patch in one single thread. What I’d like everyone to do is give their opinion of all the changes we received along with their overall opinion of the state of the class.
1. Zeal V – Shattered Aegis. Damage instead of Burning.
Negligible change, in fact the original was probably stronger than this. But I figured the numbers would be low since its a adept trait and Anet doesn’t want guardian doing dps. Its no surprise why Jon never got back to us when fellow players asked him how much damage the new shattered aegis would do.
2. Zeal VII – Zealous Blade. This trait now scales with Healing power (2%.)
A narrow sighted change, here we have a dps tree which is forced to take healing power in order to make a skill scale. It should of scaled on power, not healing. No one is going to have healing power with a zeal build.
3. Zeal XII – Kindled Zeal. Increased conversion from 10% to 13%.
This is a arrogant change by Anet, we’ve explained to them that guardian has no viable condition setup. They even know this, yet they continue to give us condition damage modifiers and skills. As before the change, this trait will go unused.
4. Radiance V – Searing Flames. Reduced cooldown from 20s to 10s.
Good change, but still hindered by the fact that it procs even when the target has no boons. This trait is more useful in pvp than pve however.
5. Radiance X – Powerful blades. Increased damage from 5% to 10%.
A buff, not a needed one. But it doesn’t overall change anything about the class. I’m sure players who love their 1h will appreciate the change.
6.Valor V – Retributive Armor. Increased conversion rate from 5% to 7%.
A buff, but it feels directionless. No one ever complained about this trait, neither does it bring forth new builds for guardian.
7. Honor VI – Pure of Heart. Increased scaling with Healing power from 25% to 40%.
Another directionless buff, players don’t take pure of heart because there are better traits. And that you never see the benefit of the trait. The initial lose of aegis usually means the guardian is at full hp. So the heal is wasted.
8. Virtues VIII – Supreme Justice. Number of attacks going from 4 to 3.
Once again Anet is enforcing their vision of a burning guardian upon us. Something that does not exist, something they themselves stated they can’t even get to work in internal testing. I wonder why?
9. Symbol of Swiftness: This skill now applies 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse, rather than 8 seconds if you have no swiftness and 1 second if you have swiftness.
Debatable. I can’t make a comment about it without it being totally ignorant since I wasn’t a avid user of sos nor am I a mathematician were as I can compare numbers.
Overall
I feel the developers have a complete disconnection with the guardian class and its problems. They stated that the goal was to open up more offensive guardian builds. But this patch has done nothing of the such. None of the changes even remotely offer solutions to core guardian problems. The changes actually do the opposite, they show clearly why guardian can not have viable dps builds nor condition damage builds.
The class has no mobility, no cc, one offensive condition. So how does the developers expect a emergence of something when the basic principles of such do not even exist in the heart of the class?
How did they expect guardian to take advantage of the new heal with no cc or no mobility? How did anet expect kindled zeal and supreme justice changes to be useful when the class only has access to burning? These are questions we probably won’t get answered because they themselves have no concrete answer for it.
I feel the state of the class remains the same as it since the beginning. Which is sit on a point while other classes sit outside of your positioning superiority and damage you.
Windows 10