Guild Wars 2

The latest Ready UP Webcast has some Devs giving a really good rundown of each classes roles and player feedback.

Guardian discussion begins around 38:00 if you want to skip most of the beginning. For me the key takeaway is what they touch upon two main deficiencies: mobility and lack of ranged. Their justification is reasonable and links the role to why these deficiencies exist.

What I didn’t hear that some other classes did have in their discussions was any mention of tweaking or changing some of the Guardian tools to improve the class.

Bottomline: They agree with players general assessment of the Guardian class strengths and weakness and reinforce the intended design of the class through what they want the role of the Guardian to be.

I refer to PvP:

Guardian: Very good at providing boons and sustained – general group support and very tanky even with a low health pool. Generally act as a frontline support – first in and last out. Different from warriors who have a more of a selfish sustain.

All this is only true as a bunker guardian. If we try to play him more offensively we loose our group support and general tankyness. I can not understand how no one at Anet sees a problem, if you loose everything that makes a profession if you play him as anything other than support bunker.

It is so bad that an Ele fits the design of an offensive guardian better than the guardian himself. Just think about it: Good at providing boons to your teammates while dealing damage. Quite tanky even with low health pool. Ele fits this better than offensive guardian.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/282wjy/balance_philosophy_developer_livestream_notes/

Reading off this, My understanding is that they really think that guardian is nothing more than support, and is the only class that is listed at all that way.

Yes guardian is a support class only. That should be apparent. Over 50% of their skills (not including traits) are supportive. The only problem with their philosophy of the class is that it doesn’t apply to all aspects of the class.

For example guardian is suppose to have sustain by design, but this is missing in radiance and to a degree zeal and of course signets.

But why do they give us new traits for our offensive capabilities then? Is it just to feed on our tears? Do they love to see us suffer as we struggle to make it work somehow? Do they give us hope just to crush it while they laugh?

I think it goes back to what they said in the video. That they do not want a class to be completely hard countered. So the way to apply that saying to guardian is that they do not want them to be 100% supportive, they have the options to not be supportive but it won’t be good as other classes who are designed to be selfish.

I’m very disappointed with the whole ready-up episode.
Their envision of not only Guardian but pretty much every other class is extremely onedimensional, covering only a small subset of variations around a, lets say, meta build.

Main Guardian boon sources are symbols, shouts and, to a minor extent, some specific weapons (like staff) or trait improved virtues. Trait wise, we could say that the boon centric gameplay is allocated in Honor and Virtue lines.
Main Guardian self-sustain improvements outside of boons are allocated in Valor and Honor, while supportive sustain is mostly in the latter.
Most of the good condition removal, another guardian strength, is also allocated or tied to utilities that are improved by these three traitlines.

In the Guardian case, as we can see, the meta build would be a heavy Honor based one with additional improvement from either Valor or Virtues (or a mix of both).
Zeal, Radiance and quite a good amount of utilities and weapons behave just as placeholders and get completely out of the discussion.

Since these meta builds are the ones we will see the most on competitive enviroments, it makes total sense to have the developers looking closely at them, shaving, improving and making small modifications here and there in order to achieve a better competitive balance between all classes.
What doesn’t make any sense, however, is to have these builds imposing conceptual limitations on many others and preventing them from becoming a thing. It makes the game easier to balance, that’s for sure, but what was the point on having the current trait, weapon and utility choices if most of them are going to be subpar on purpose? Wasn’t that exactly the reason behind fixing weapon skillbars and cutting the amount of utilities we had in the original Guild Wars? Do we need even less options, just slight variations of a pattern build?

For example, their reasoning about the Guardian lack of mobility is quite a little vague, but I guess we could summarize it as:
- Preventing the guardian to easily reinforce different fights around the battlefield with overwhelming support.
- Preventing the guardian from easily disengaging and topping their health.
Ironically, most Guardian builds designed around that archetype of sustained heavy forntline support are actually using a staff, which provides swiftness, so it’s precisely when we build a Guardian outside the box (on a more selfish or less support oriented way) when we really felt and suffer the lack of things like speed boosts or soft CC despite we might not be presenting the original risks anymore.

The whole thing becomes even funnier when we realize that just a couple minutes before they were talking about opportunity cost, something their trait system really excels at and they repeatedly fail to fully deliver.
Don’t get me wrong. There might be reasons for an offguard to not have access to this kind of tools. If provided with them a Guardian could outperform another class on their main conceptual role, then it would be clearly a bad idea to so.
The truth is, however, that we haven’t even reached that point of the discussion.

They have just explained how broken would be to provide some capabilities to an specific subset of Guardian builds FOR FREE, which is something that pretty much every player would agree with.
Once the opportunity cost kicks in, which is basically everytime on a real scenario, the reasons that might suggest to negate some utility subset to a given class might not be valid anymore and they fail to realize this basic principle over and over.

I also felt the profession overviews were one dimensional and feel I was listening to another game’s descriptions were the profession’s are only designed around 1 or 2 roles. And a profession is only ever to do only these roles. I always thought Guild Wars 2 professions were for favour and it was the builds which decided the roles.

True no one profession should have everything in a build but I thought a profession could have overall access to almost most options and was denied access to everything by their traits, sigil, runes and skills choices.

I can understand an overall philosophy of the favour of a profession but I thought roles came from builds and that each profession should be able to fill each role. I don’t mean the exact same way but with the professions favour in mind and the overall roles descriptions eg. physical damage, condition damager, debuffer, buffer, control, burst, sustain, bunker, roaming, frontline, midline, backline.

My dream would be that a profession has an option for each role.
I feel they maybe there needs to be ready up discussing roles in GW2. What roles does Arenanet see in each game mode & what roles are they aiming for in each game mode?

Is the Guardian in a good place? I say maybe (they is much I would like done) but I would say that the Guardian is a great template for roles & holes build wise which they could look at for each of the other professions, as with any Guardian build there is holes & weaknesses. Go bunker no dps (phy or condi), go burst (med build) weak to conditions in a sustained fight, go condition damage 1 dmg condi (Guards still trying to figure out a condi guard) requires sigil & runes for more dmg condi.

Looking at a profession what are the overall roles a subgroup of utility skills is mean to fill. Eg Guardian;

• Shouts (group support/boons)
• Meditations (damage/solo sustain)
• Signets (Control?/solo sustain?)
• Consecrations (group support/area denial)
• Spirit Weapons (damage/control/support, what is their focus, can you be a spirit weapon only build)

I believe overall roles should be decided by build not professions and what I got from the ready up was that a profession decides the roles. This is not what I thought.

I thought that the overall roles were Damage/Control/Support. Were profession builds used 1 or parts of the overall roles to fill player created roles;

• Bunker
• Burst damage(phys/condi)
• Sustain damage (phys/condi)
• Offensive support (debuffer/buffer/area denial/control)
• Defensive support (debuffer/buffer/area denial/control/healing)

Examples:

• Bunker Guardian (Support Bunker) provides group support through shouts or consecrations and condition removal relying on boons, condition removal, healing (self & group) and blocks for self survival.
• Bunker Warrior (Control Bunker) has little group support but relies on self healing, hard controls & soft controls (stun, immobilise..), area denial (long bow), stances (damage denial) and self condition removal.

So even those these are both bunkers one uses the overall support role to bunker and you could say the other uses the overall control role to bunker. The build decides the role but the profession decides the favour.

TLDR: Profession equals favour, Build equals role.

Guardian is probably the worst support pick over Eles and Rangers to be honest.

Charak.9761:

Guardian is probably the worst support pick over Eles and Rangers to be honest.

Not even close. Ele nor ranger are on the level guardian is on when it comes to support.

Aza.2105:

Charak.9761:

Guardian is probably the worst support pick over Eles and Rangers to be honest.

Not even close. Ele nor ranger are on the level guardian is on when it comes to support.

It all depends on the situation, water fields are freakin fantastic in some situations. Really unmatched.

Jerus.4350:

Aza.2105:

Charak.9761:

Guardian is probably the worst support pick over Eles and Rangers to be honest.

Not even close. Ele nor ranger are on the level guardian is on when it comes to support.

It all depends on the situation, water fields are freakin fantastic in some situations. Really unmatched.

Water fields are great but still no match for what a support oriented guardian does. One skill does not equate better support. Why do you think guardian does not have water fields?

Who says Guardians can’t have water fields?
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Healing_Seed_Pod