Guild Wars 2

(part 1/1)

My most played profession is guardian and I got 3 guardians at lvl 80, have tried every single weapon combination multiple times so I feel like I got some idea where I’m coming from with this

And yes, this will be a long post but I’m not going to bore you with all the missing tooltips and stuff like that, if Anet doesn’t wanna read the wiki what’s bugged or just doesn’t have the resources to fix any of it that’s not something I personally can change. These are just my ideas how to tweak the guardian skills to be a little better fit for purpose.

I’ll move in the gw2 wiki order, starting off with:
Greatsword
-1. The autoattack chain
This one is fairly good auto chain with might on the last hit. The tooltip doesn’t state that it gives a stack of might for EACH enemy hit, maximum of 3 because it can only cleave 3 targets. A slight fitting change with the tooltip would be that the last hit gets a tiny bit more range (ie. from 130->160), just to increase the functionality of the cleave but this is a very minor thing.
-5. Binding Blade & Pull
First part has a damage over time effect that scales off of condition damage. Absurd effect that is not clearly explained in-game in any way. The condition damage part needs to be clarified or scrapped, honestly I’d change it to reveal stealthed targets for the duration as stealth currently has no counterplay and a skill like this would be a great tool for it.

Hammer
-4. Banish
This skill is simply amazing. The launch effect is incredible and fun, it has a clear tell unlike pretty much all the other hard CC effects in this game. Damage is nothing to write home about but it’s a great fun to knock someone off a cliff with this. Only change I can think of is to change every OTHER skill with launch or knockdown or something to have a clear tell like banish. Seriously this game has way too many strong control spells with barely any tell or way to react to them.

Staff
-2. Orb of Light
Your hardest hitting spell on the staff with incredibly low cooldown if not detonated. This skill should be able to be targeted on allies. What it needs is a change of the damage-heal distribution. Put all the healing to the pass through and all the damage to the detonation, greatly increasing the impact of both of these actions and making this skill feel like less waste of a time. The biggest downside of this would be that you couldn’t heal yourself with it anymore, so getting the pass-through heal if you hit an enemy with the second part would be an excellent compensation (reward for being good = good for PvP). With this kinda change the no-activation cooldown would obviously need to be larger but the explosion increase could be shorter. 8 and 12 seconds for example.

Mace
-1. The autoattack chain
The third hit of this chain only hits one enemy, which is a HUGE disadvantage for an autoattack, rendering it practically useless even though the damage isn’t that bad. Give it proper cleaving and up the healing power coefficient to something reasonable, healing power will forever be a terrible stat and bunkering in PvP will forever be cheesy if if you can be a bunker with practically no healing power investment. Up the coefficient on every single heal skill and lower the base heals, this skill included. It should be the main healers tool along with staff yet it isn’t.
-3. Protector’s Strike
This skill blocks only one attack, which renders it pretty crappy. For a defensive skill it does worse than the focus 5 skill. I’d say up the blocking amount to something more useful ie. 5 total in the AoE and it’s good. It blocks for allies too so it’s a decently powerful skill yet it only takes one hit, which happens almost instantly making the skill pretty useless. Maybe add a blast finisher if the shield is popped? Would grant you some nice area retaliation if you combo this with your healing symbol.

Sword
-1. The autoattack chain
The third hit is incredibly buggy, not working at all against enemies that are reflecting projectiles and completely fails to connect against graveling burrows for example. This really needs to be fixed, especially because your autoattack chain won’t start over if the projectiles miss, oh no, it will re-fire the projectiles and it will miss over and over and over until the chain resets on it’s own. Fix pls.

(part 2/2)

Focus
-4. Ray of Judgement
Increase the visibility of this projectile and add some sort of hitting effect. It’s a great skill but too often it gets lost in the cluster of effects going on.

Shield
-4. Shield of Judgement
Since guardian has absolutely no skills that let them stick to a target unless they are using 2-handed weapons and this skill is among the most underwhelming ones of them all, I suggest a chill effect on the affected enemies for 2 seconds and reducing the cooldown of this skill from 30 seconds to 20 seconds.
-5. Shield of Absorption
The second activation really needs to detonate the dome. The knockback is really good (or really annoying depending on which side of the bubble you are) but the second activation giving a free heal is just too much. Increase the visual effect to last the whole duration and not randomly vanishing after the first second or two

Torch
-4. Zealot’s Flame (1)
What were they thinking. The skill has barely any visual que, the range is extremely vague, it burns on the start and at the end of the skill and is overall a skill with extremely poor functionality. This skill needs a properly functioning pulsing fire AoE that is clearly visible to the user and the person affected. 3 seconds of burn for a 15s cd isn’t acceptable either, it needs a decent radius along with the pulsing flames — and a duration of 5 seconds instead of 3
-4. Zealot’s Fire (2)
This skill has an insane damage coefficient making it a really effective nuke. The worst part about this skill is that the projectile follows the ground for absolutely no reason, breaking the skill beyond use in most cases. For a 1200 range skill it often fails to land at enemies even from 600 range due to the projectile getting stuck on every single grain of sand on the ground. Airborne projectile is a must have on this skill.
Another thing to make torch a little more interesting is to add a secondary effect to this skill. Remove the burning this inflicts entirely but replace it with a knockdown for 2 seconds if the enemy was already lit on fire. This would give guardians a hard CC offhand skill with good functionality and great synergy with the first part of the skill. The 50% increased cooldown on activation should go in my opinion, the effect isn’t that amazing it needs to be punished for using it.
-5. Cleansing flame
Have this skill cleanse conditions from yourself as well but reduce the duration to 2.5 from 4.5 seconds and amount of pulses to 5 from 9 (no damage reduction though). The skill has amazing utility but is fiddly to use and is currently pretty much useless in PvP orientated gamemodes and only useful in very few PvE scenarios. It’s a channeled skill so it can be interrupted and would give torch a great defensive option against conditions, even though it provides no damage mitigation like the other two.
-Torch trait
Torch trait could make it so the pulses in 4 and 5 cleanse conditions if the innate condition cleansing in 5 is too much to digest

Underwater
-X. All skills & both weapons
These need damage. You are better off picking up a warrior banner and whacking enemies around with that thkittening any of your underwater weapons, I doubt anyone ever checked the numbers on these because they are just abysmal. Thankfully underwater combat is not in a big part in this game because guardians would not do too well.

Any thoughts or is this a ded subforum? If you want to tell me that I’m wrong please add some explanation why that is so and why my improvement ideas. I guess you could put this in suggestion forums but that place is about as dead as it gets and it would gather attention from people who have never played guardian yet think it’s OP because they lost to one in PvP, so that’s why this is here. Also I want to hear your opinions and possibly suggestions too

The light field on hammer auto attack needs to go.

Maybe a trait that makes third strike on AA for bladed weapons (sword/greatsword) cause cripple. Could put it in zeal to make that trait line useful. Though, adept in radiance would have the best synergy imo.

Meh… shield 4 should give aegis and protection and you should be able to use use shield 5 while rezzing. It’s pretty funny how resolute healer (honor V) that procs shield of absorbtion on rez is more useful than the actual skill itself. Then it will actually be worth it to think about taking shield over focus.
I don’t really get why you would want something offensive for the most defensive weapon on the most defensive class (class designwise). Don’t really think it would be fitting tbh.

Mace 3 should work like the blocks from warrior mainhand mace and offhand sword. I don’t really see why one range attack is already breaking it while the warrior blocks keep blocking until they block a melee attack or run out.

And meh… I like noscoping staff 2 on bunker guard. :<

I agree on most other stuff.

EDIT: Just read that part about you having 3 level 80 guardians… welcome to the club I guess.

right here with ya bullet

Shanks.2907:

The light field on hammer auto attack needs to go.

Maybe a trait that makes third strike on AA for bladed weapons (sword/greatsword) cause cripple. Could put it in zeal to make that trait line useful. Though, adept in radiance would have the best synergy imo.

That could be a nice idea to make a trait that would increase the one handed weapons capability to stick to the targets. I don’t like condi spam autos as a concept though, I feel like the game would be much much better off especially in PvP if the amount of conditions applied by spammable stuff would be reduced by a whole lot, especially stuff like cripple shouldn’t be constantly applied without some planning

I’m also biased against removing the symbol from hammer auto, it’s such a fun skill to use in PvP whe you are traited all for symbol effects and it’s your only way of having 100% symbol uptime, validating all those traits you invested in

Keksmuffin.1450:

Meh… shield 4 should give aegis and protection and you should be able to use use shield 5 while rezzing. It’s pretty funny how resolute healer (honor V) that procs shield of absorbtion on rez is more useful than the actual skill itself. Then it will actually be worth it to think about taking shield over focus.
I don’t really get why you would want something offensive for the most defensive weapon on the most defensive class (class designwise). Don’t really think it would be fitting tbh.

Mace 3 should work like the blocks from warrior mainhand mace and offhand sword. I don’t really see why one range attack is already breaking it while the warrior blocks keep blocking until they block a melee attack or run out.

And meh… I like noscoping staff 2 on bunker guard. :<

I agree on most other stuff.

Yeah that trait is really strong in comparison. The idea behind the chill is that you would have at least some way to do something to your opponent. It wouldn’t be nothing too major but if you are running the most defensive setup of mace+shield you’d have at least some CC you can contribute outside your huge-cooldown shield 5. Also chills are cool and I find the visual of shield4 to be pretty nicely fitting to a chilling wind effect. Aegis would be a cool effect too and of all the weapon skills being able to apply it this would probably be the best

Mace 3 blocking ranged would be an even better fit. I haven’t played around with warrior too much so I didn’t recall only ranged permablock mecahnic. As much as I hate duration-based blocks this would be a really nice fit for it and perfectly fit the defensive guardian theme and give mace some use in all gamemodes

And yes I love noscoping with staff 2 as much as anyone else but the amount of power locked in this skill for staff just makes me sad. It’s such a high nuke if you do the pass-through + detonation on one target – better than hammer 2 – and it so often gets unused just because of how fiddly it is. A complete rework or some sort of tuning would be in order. Heck maybe even give it something special if you hit both parts of the skill on the same target like a knockback or burn or chill or anything. Something to reward skillful use of it rather than ‘i might as well press this button because spamming auto isn’t too effective and everything else is on cd’

I could have commented on all the other skills that could use tuning like ring of warding also revealing stealthed enemies inside it but I felt like it’s better to focus on the most problematic ones. Didn’t want to make it any more of a wall of text than it already is

Honestly A-net would could solve so many hassles just by going back to the guild wars 1 system where they had separate versions of skills for pvp and pve. Expecting all skills to function the same at the same level of balance in two completely different types of gameplay is pure insanity.

With that said my personal changes would be to the shield as it seems to be the main source of many guardians frustrations.

Shield

Shield of Judgement: Completely remove this skill from the shield, switch it to the focus and give the shield the ‘Shield of Wrath’ instead. (plus it fits with the other focus skill ‘ray of judgement’ and just makes more sense)

Reasoning: Currently the shield is the if not one of the most useless items any guardian could have. It focuses less on defense and more on buffing your team, something you would think is completely backwards. Giving it to the focus would allow the focus to become more of a ‘support wand’ type weapon while making the shield a defensive style choice. It makes sense.

Balance changes:

Shield of Wrath:
Cooldown reduced from 45 seconds to 24 seconds in pve. This is unchanged for pvp.

Shield of Absorption:
Duration increased to 4 seconds with cooldown reduced to 24 seconds. This is unchanged for pvp.

Reasoning: Guardians currently aren’t really a ‘Guardian’ in any stretch of the word. Due to the lack of trinity, weak support gear and long cooldowns there is no real protection element to this game besides stacking buffs with shouts, which as anyone can tell you is not very engaging. Reducing the cooldown of meaningful blocks not only allows the player to be more engaged in whats happening but also feel as if they have actual options in combat rather than sticking to a rotation. Using a proper shield of absorption in the right place could be a life saver to your team or yourself and when encountering an enemy threat blocking it should be an option for Guardians currently we; the armored defenders of the world, spend more time rolling in the dirt to avoid an attack rather than standing up to face the enemy like one would expect from a class titled the ‘guardian’.

Look guys, I realize balancing for pvp is difficult. But we don’t need to attempt to balance the game in such a way that your pvp experience should be the same as your pve one. Some skills which have no business having long cooldowns have incredibly large ones simply for the reason they would be too powerful in pvp otherwise, and the pve content suffers for it and becomes stale.

kitten do you need more than 1 guard