Guild Wars 2

Hi I’d like to make a bunch of threads to sort suggestions for future readers and Devs.
If you have a better suggestion or would like to discuss suggestions feel free but keep it polite and constructive not defensive so people find it interesting to read.

Zeal is a in my opinion a fairly well designed spec but that might be linked to the relative power of the GS(even though that heal does nearly nothing).It’s link to Spirit Weapons ofcourse is a weak spot and the other thing that could be focused on is block mechanics.

In terms of SW please view the Guardian Spirit Weapons – Feedback but here I will explain the GM trait change I recommend. “SW burn foes they strike” is nice text but doesn’t work with half the weapons and the length of the cool downs anyway means we only ever use them once a fight.
I suggest “SW burn foes they strike and clense burn off allies they affect” This would make utility SW have a specific purpose in this burn condi meta.
If the utility set is advanced to 6 I give my suggestions in the other thread.

The second thing littered through all the specs is block traits, “Aegis gives retal” and “Aegis deals 200 damage” I am not a big WvWer and maybe this has a tiny place in WvW but it seems way underpowered given we can only apply aegis maybe once every 15 seconds if using utilities. As I understand it this doesn’t even work with weapon blocks? Something should be rebalanced with aegis related traits in my opinion.
Eg. Aegis -> any Block and Retal -> Prot or Damage Increase seems more appropriate.

I don’t have many ideas for this one so I leave it open to others.
Looking forward to other people’s suggestions.

Minors

All of them: All of them being symbol related yet you have WoP in Honor makes this line even more unappealing. All of these need to be overhauled or slightly buffed with symbol related weapons(hammer mostly)

Majors

Wrathful Spirit: Change this to protection or something else that’s actually useful.

Zealous Scepter: This discourages you from utilizing your Justice’s passive. Not to mention the duration is too short for any real might-stacking and keeping yourself ONLY in scepter is a bad idea. Change this to apply to all weapons.

Fiery Wrath: Still surprised this got nerfed to 7%. Buffing this to 10% might be too much.

Binding jeopardy: Without consistent blinds or immob’s, this is very underwhelming. Not asking for more access but maybe increase the stacks/duration instead.

Zealous Blade: Increase the damage to 10%, SIGNIFICANTLY increase the base and scaling. This thing is pitiful.

Kindled Zeal: Weird conversion trait.

Expeditious spirit: This one should be obvious.

Shattered Aegis: Just like Binding Jeopardy, unless you have consistent access to aegis, this is underwhelming.

Symbolic Avenger: 10% is pitiful for a trait that only really works with Hammer(consistent symbol access).

Zeal works for PvE by layering damage increases against NPCs who like to clump quickly and then stay in place. But it’s rather bland and falls flat on its face in PvP/WvW where players move out of red circle (and are probably already kiting you).

Zeal also has too narrow of a focus. It needs to reflect being a relentless zealot in pursuing foes. Retaliation-related abilities fit with that theme and work well with existing zeal mechanics far better than in Radiance. Retaliation isn’t amazing, but it does contribute some damage. Zeal would need to make Retaliation more beneficial to round it out. Zeal also needs to make symbol-based play a choice, rather than making minor traits useless if you don’t.

General

• Hammer#1c needs cleaned up. Reduce the symbol duration to 1s (still does 2 ticks) and reduce the activation time for this attack slightly. However, this symbol being on an auto-attack makes it a problem to add symbol-based effects due to the low cycle time. May have to move it to another ability.
• Writ of Persistence removed from Honor. It was limited to gimmicky PvE hammer builds which gave 100% protection up-time (and shouldn’t exist IMO), but Zeal really needs the radius increase to be effective. Those PvE builds still use Zeal anyway.
• Might need to cut down on Retaliation traits in Virtues a bit.

Minor

• Zealot’s Wrath (just a rename of current Zealot’s Speed)
• Retribution: Deal extra damage while under the effects of Retaliation
• When retaliation you apply deals damage, apply 2x 3s vulnerability to that attacker. No ICD since no extra damage is dealt directly.

Major1
Utilities

• Protectors Impact (the fall damage trait). Because ANet insists that each profession has one. At least it makes some sense in Zeal.
• Zealot’s Speed: Gain 2s superspeed when you create a symbol (5s ICD). Gain 2s of superspeed when you perform a combo finisher in a light field.
• Symbols are now fire fields instead of light fields. When creating a symbol, gain 2s fire shield (5sec ICD) This will address issues in PvE where players didn’t like getting retaliation in place of might, especially when a guardian used a hammer.

Major2
moderate damage increases

• Re-worked Symbolic Avenger: Symbols are larger and apply 1s burning each tick. You deal extra damage while inside your symbols (it can stack, but would only happen with weapon swaps and a few triggered traits in Zeal).
• Shattered Aegis: Deal damage to nearby enemies and gain 3s light aura (or maybe just retaliation is better) when Aegis you apply is removed. Up-front damage is less than current. High up-front damage is too hard to balance since Aegis can appear and be consumed quickly and hit a player who didn’t trigger it.
• TBD damage trait.

Major3
Utility and small damage increase.

• Spirit Weapon trait: Spirit weapon command abilities have reduced cooldowns and create a symbol. Sword->Wrath, Bow->Vigor, Shield->Faith, Hammer->Protection.
• Two-handed weapons have reduced cooldowns and increased damage. Two-handed weapon attacks heal for 15 (0.015) and heal for double when they hit a target within 180 range (note: melee is 130). Re-work of Zealous Blade.
• When you use a healing skill, create a Symbol of Wrath and gain 3s Quickness (trait triggers when heal completes the cast).

Honestly zeal has some major issues, possibly more so then any other guardian trait line.

The minors make it so that unless your using a weapon with extremely high symbol up time you feel like your missing out on potential.

Several of the majors also are clearly superior to every other choice no matter what your doing.

Knowing this my suggestions would be thus

Wrathful Spirit Change it to grant something useful like might stacks when AEGIS ends or is broken. (As is guardians have retaliation in a ton of places and this retaliation is of such a short duration as to make no difference)

Zealous Scepter Give it a secondary effect when justice is activated. (As is it encourages you like a decent number of other traits to never actually use your virtue)

Fiery Wrath Move it to the second minor slot. (No matter how much you boost other traits they will not compete with this, just make it the second minor to encourage actual trait choice)

Symbolic Exposure Just delete it, other classes can apply vulnerability for much longer & with better ways of application. Fiery wrath will be taking its place anyway.

Symbolic Power Round it into Symbolic Avenger so as to encourage a wider array of weapon choices.

Shattered AEGIS Move it to the 3rd minor slot. (I suggest this because every guardian regardless of build has access to AEGIS)

After that all that is left to do is create some new traits that encourage a variety of choices (IE don"t suck & aren’t clearly greatly superior to other choices)

As far as spirit weapons go the easiest fix would be to adjust their health, damage & toughness scaling at 80 so that it is increased.

They die extremely easily if focused and are still pretty crap.

If Zeal is about being well…. zealous and unrelenting and if we want it to be a symbol friendly trait, then:

1. Symbolic avenger could get merged with writ of persistence or writ should get moved somewhere in the zeal line.

2. To give it more sense we might toss out Binding jeopardy (really, is there someone who has real use for this ?) and throw glacial heart in it !

I’d like to remind people in this and the Honor thread that each spec would ideally have 3 themes, and focusing too hard on one is not beneficial to the theme.
For example I think there should be 3 different specs that focus on Symbols, one that increase damaging aspects Zeal, one that increase utility aspects Honor, and one that gives more options by tying symbols to a utility(radiance thread for my suggestion)
Same with block in my opinion there should be 3 specs affecting block in a major way, one for offence(unscathed contender grants 20% more damage to any ally that has your aegis and for 5s after it pops, moved to GM,Honor or Valor) one for defence Communal Defences, and one for Aegis on utilities(signets seem good too)

If you suggest moving Writ of persistence to Zeal, explain why there would be a healing trait in Zeal? And if you think that could be dropped then you probably haven’t tried tanking or heal supporting in raids as that is a must have aspect.
Larger symbols is a utility aspect to symbols so in my opinion should stay in Honor.

The entire point of using Writ of Persistence in PvE is the symbol duration increase. It gives hammer 100% protection up-time with little effort. That simple, effortless 100% protection up-time is not good for a healthy game. And therein lies the issue with any symbol trait: you can’t do too much with it or else hammer auto-attack becomes too powerful in PvE.

Zeal needs the size increase portion of Writ of Persistence for PvP/WvW. The duration increase should be dropped in order to stop easy hammer 100% protection up-time in PvE. The healing from symbols is laughable outside of hammer auto-attack and I would recommend simply dropping it. Removing Writ of Persistence leaves a slot in Honor which could be replaced by a trait which is better for all-around healing and doesn’t depend on a single weapon to be worthwhile.

Really the size increase writ of persistence provides should be a base effect.

Necro marks, ele staff skills & engineer bombs all got their traits that effect radius made base line not long back, why not do the same here.

As for the healing & longer duration, That’s debatable.

As for hammer, it needs a rework so that the auto chain is faster.
If that means moving the symbol & protection elsewhere on the hammer then so be it.

Exedore.6320:

Zeal works for PvE by layering damage increases against NPCs who like to clump quickly and then stay in place. But it’s rather bland and falls flat on its face in PvP/WvW where players move out of red circle (and are probably already kiting you).

Zeal also has too narrow of a focus. It needs to reflect being a relentless zealot in pursuing foes. Retaliation-related abilities fit with that theme and work well with existing zeal mechanics far better than in Radiance. Retaliation isn’t amazing, but it does contribute some damage. Zeal would need to make Retaliation more beneficial to round it out. Zeal also needs to make symbol-based play a choice, rather than making minor traits useless if you don’t.

Like you said Zeal works great for PVE and not as well for PVP, but changing it to a Retaliation line makes zero sense. It would cripple it in PVE since Retal is worthless and PVP should not be balance around a passive unskilled benefit.

Indure.5410:

Like you said Zeal works great for PVE and not as well for PVP, but changing it to a Retaliation line makes zero sense. It would cripple it in PVE since Retal is worthless and PVP should not be balance around a passive unskilled benefit.

Read my suggestions. It doesn’t expect Retaliation to do amazing damage. Instead, it makes having retaliation more beneficial.

Exedore.6320:

Indure.5410:

Like you said Zeal works great for PVE and not as well for PVP, but changing it to a Retaliation line makes zero sense. It would cripple it in PVE since Retal is worthless and PVP should not be balance around a passive unskilled benefit.

Read my suggestions. It doesn’t expect Retaliation to do amazing damage. Instead, it makes having retaliation more beneficial.

I did.

“Minor

Zealot’s Wrath (just a rename of current Zealot’s Speed)
Retribution: Deal extra damage while under the effects of Retaliation
When retaliation you apply deals damage, apply 2x 3s vulnerability to that attacker. No ICD since no extra damage is dealt directly."

Retribution: Just another boring 10% damage modifier. If I had to choose between fiery Wrath or Retribution it would be Fiery Wrath since only GS provides Retal (not counting other trait lines), while burning comes from so many sources.

Retaliation applies vulnerability: Helpful in PVP, weak in PVE, makes more sense in Valor line where you are traited to take a beating.

I think everyone is taking the role and largest contributing atributes of guardian and throwing them to the gutter to make it something it was never supposed to be. Guardian was never supposed to be a strong solo class. It is best in groups, even more so in Guardian rich groups. There are several traits that allow for insane aegis up time IF used in a guardian rich enviroment. Sometimes you have to think outside the box and read between the lines. If you want a class that has uber surviva and dps in a solo operation then war seems more appropriate but Guardian is not a solo strong class. No other class has more access to more radius aoe dps/condi burst. before HoT patch I ran a 5 guard group in wvw for havoc. 1 bunker (shout build 2 condi cleanse per shout and strong group sustain and plenty of age for everyone) 2 medi burst, 2 burn the stability , aegis , and aoe dps/condi AND survivabilty up time was insanely strong. Our only weakness was open field combat if the apposing group was good at pick and run targeting . but if the team stayed within a 600 range of each other it was kitten near unbreakable by anything less then 10 apposing players. Skill of players do play a role but in a full guardian group, the guardian traits are insanely strong. Not sure if this was intended or not but it works. Zeal is useful in everything but a bunker shout guard. Although I would agree that the heal from zealous blade could use a bit of a buff, and burn guardian specs could use a source of more consistant heals. but over all, 5 guardian group comp in wvw , 2 guard comp in pvp , and 5-10 guard comp in pve would be really really strong in both dps and survivability. so, in conclusion, it is my opinion, if you can find a few good players who love to play guardian, you have a opertunity for a strong team.