Guild Wars 2

adding 1 or 2k BASE HP AND DPS will balance the guardian to be in the best sweet spot.if you cant give both then one or the other.it will still make players who main guardians satisfied and at the same time its not a huge buff in dps or hp. we have only heard that guardians are really balanced and nothing else should be done for that class in a long time but to be honest how can you put a guardian in the front line if you remove mobility,health and dps.boons are good but that doesnt mean that it is all the guardian needs.we should remember that it is a melee class,not all guardians are shouts guardians so the boon can be kinda minimal if youre like a meditation build.just give it a thought.you’ll make a lot of people happy.? let me know what you think about it?

• Guardian is in a good place.

• Forget any buffs, the devs just did Ready Up 15 where they tried to justify the guardian’s current position, stating that they are happy with it where it is – any requests for buffs will therefore be in vain.

• Devs said Guardian is just for groups.

• Extrapolating on this, Guardians who spec away from shouts and boon-oriented traits, such as Meditation builds, are not playing as intended. Perhaps the traits need to be reworked?
  … I can’t see that happening because Guardians are in a good place, right?

• Reroll OP warrior like everybody else, the only thing devs see as wrong with them is their movement.

• Why does Guardian have cone abilities (shield #4 & torch #5 condi removal & Healing Breeze) when he is supposed to be in front of his allies?

Guardian > enemy > allies. Boom, cone skills justified.
1-2k HP won’t change anything about guardians, and 1-2k dps is a drop in the bucket.

Really, what we could use is some more access to damaging conditions through skills or traits, and since slightly better ranged prowess. The prior I’m starting to feel might come soon (I don’t have the link, but a Dev stated that before kindled zeal appeard, that they were looking into opening up conditions for guardians. First would come kindled zeal and guardians would have to rely on sigils and runes, but then later more options would come. Radiant retaliation is one, but I think there is more). The latter, maybe not so soon according to the ready up. We’ll have to see. Maybe we’ll get some melee stick instead. Who knows.

They are balancing class ( pvp ) around Top tier tpvp which the role is bunker / support.

Not wvw or any other thing.

1 – 2k hp would make a huge diff there and there is no use of condi guardian or dps guardian too. Although it would be nice if they can be available but Dev probably don’t want.

personally i wish they would * re work on Signets ( they are useless at the moment )

and * less trait needed for symbol

I’d like to see our offhand skills improve. Currently the best offhand by far is focus, with two great abilities. Ray of Judgement offers allied condition removal/regen, blind and vulnerability (if traited), Shield of Wrath gives 3 blocks and a blast finisher. Solid all round.

Shield and torch by comparison just feel weak. Torch in particular; Zealot’s Flame is just a Burning condition applier that can be done more efficiently through Virtue of Justice. Cleansing Flame offers some decent condition removal, but is kitten by having a long channel time, mediocre damage and not having it affect the player. The one good side of torch skills is low cooldown.

Shield feels bizarre as it’s the only shield with, well, no blocks. Instead we get a wave protection applier and a ranged attack absorb shield with a punitive cooldown for what you get. Shield I feel should be our support and defensive focused offhand. I’ve been trying to think up some ways to get it to that recently actually.

Shield of Judgement: Now allies Aegis in addition to Protection

Shield of Absorption: Now casts Symbol of Judgement inside the circle

Mind you, I come at this from a PvE perspective, not a SPvP one, which is the only one the devs seem to care about.

Svarty.8019:

• Why does Guardian have cone abilities (shield #4 & Healing Breeze) when he is supposed to be in front of his allies?

Quite frankly, the kind of guardian that would be using Healing Breeze probably wouldn’t want to position themselves on the front lines in the first place (despite the devs insisting that all guardians are front-liners). Healing Breeze is a very supportive heal and it isn’t all that good for a bunker build. For me, merely having it equipped should shift your role to more of a mid-ranged healer/support rather than a close-ranged bunker/support.

If you’re not playing with shouts you’re likely doing it wrong.
Guardian main strengths are tankiness and melee party support, specially through boons, so its obvious that you should use tanky/supportive gear (like clerics for example, maybe a few magi/soldier pieces if you want to slightly increase your HP), invest all your trait points on Valor, Honor and Virtues and provide as much party wide boons as you can, which is about using staff and shout/symbol centric builds.

Try to not think too much on alternative builds and roles because providing the class with damage and/or mobility on top of the strong sustain and support would be completely broken and won’t happen (It doesn’t matter if the trait system could prevent to pack all of it on the same build; it’s conceptually broken and won’t happen :P).
You should be probably thankful to ANet for understanding how the PvE meta works and providing the class with a good amount of damage multiplier through the placeholder traitlines. It’s quite obvious that, in any different scenario, such kind of traits should never exist for the Guardian.

^Seems like a close-minded way to view things to me. Even if shouts might be optimal (I don’t believe they are personally), it doesn’t mean they’re the only things that are viable or competitive. This especially goes for certain game modes.

A guardian that deals high damage as well as having high healing/support (ie. zealot gear guardians) would be extremely squishy because they’d have extremely low hp and armor as well as few-to-no escapes. They’d be bursted before they can reliably heal by pretty much everything that isn’t full-bunker unless they’re positioned at a long range or have fail-safe abilities like Hallowed Ground or Sanctuary (both of which have long CDs). That’s not to say they’re bad necessarily, but they have big weaknesses to offset their advantages and they play pretty much the opposite to how guardians typically play (super squishy mid-long ranged dps/support). So it’s not “conceptually broken”, it has clear weaknesses and is easily countered by anything with a little burst.

ok very interesting points but i’ll just put it out there.see i do pvp and pve,love it but to me i like seeing high dps numbers and i dont mind sacrificing hp or toughness.once you get to elite levels you know that youre a really good player when you can rely on utility skills to keep you alive rather than health or toughness .being able to dodge and use appropriate skills to keep me alive makes me feel like im at the edge of competitive gameplay.guardians is a need in most parties.specially in fractals and dungeons for the amazing utilities they bring to party excluding their boons.see adding 2k hp or dps to guardians will not make them overpowered in comparison to the other classes like warriors or elementalist.but it will keep at a sweet spot to push their capabilities.also the above posts about off hand weapons also intrigued me,im about to make my second legendary for my guard.i really want to make a torch,i feel its better dps than a focus but i could never prove that.does anybody have any thoughts about this.

I man a guardian since the start of the game and have all 8 professions at 80 full exotic or ascended and I agree with Anet that Guardian is in a good place right now. But sure, there is some small things that should be work on.

- Conditions are lacking on the guardian. Ya burning is awesome and its probably the most powerful condition in sPvP. Still, we are lacking for everything else in the condition department.
- Shield need some change. The skill 4 do as much dmg as an GS auto-attack with 5sec of protection but on a 30sec CD. That’s useless. Either reduce the cooldown to like 20sec or boost the dmg so it become a burst DPS attack. Make a purpose for that skill because right now it have none. For the Shield of absorption, same things. Right now its only a push back, the absorption part is rarely use since you can’t move. Either allow the player to move and attack (but not switch weapons set) while using the skill 5 or scrap the absorption part and reduce the cooldown to 25sec to be equal to the banish.
- A new off-hand would be nice. A offensive direct-damage off-hand because that’s lacking right now. Maybe like a off-hand sword.
- I don’t like torch, but its alright for a sPvP condition build so. I guess its ok.
- 1 more range weapon. We only have 1 real range weapon, the scepter. The staff is close range so it doesn’t serve the same purpose. We need another choice than the scepter even if that’s a good weapon.

I like thad’s list, but i’d add spirit weapons. They just seem so… /bleh. Maybe kill 2 birds with one stone by giving them additional condition damage, even if through a trait, hammer = chill, sword = bleed. bow /shrug.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Guardian > enemy > allies. Boom, cone skills justified.

Eh? What just happened?

We need abilities to keep our targets in the melee zone. I’m talking cripples, chills, etc.

Svarty.8019:

Ghotistyx.6942:

Guardian > enemy > allies. Boom, cone skills justified.

Eh? What just happened?

The guardian sits on the left facing the enemy, while his skies are on the right. Any cone skills can now hit both the enemy (if necessary) and his allies.

Jerus.4350:

I like thad’s list, but i’d add spirit weapons. They just seem so… /bleh. Maybe kill 2 birds with one stone by giving them additional condition damage, even if through a trait, hammer = chill, sword = bleed. bow /shrug.

I really like where the sword is, and adding bleed even if through traits could throw it’s balance off and result in nerfing.

If we’re going to kill two birds with one stone, why not give us a bow for range and conditions? Bleed AA, chill AOE blast, etc.

Medi is the best solo build for Guards
Shouts for fractals/WvW/BunkerPvP

Condi/Spirit/Etc for sPvP

What I want for Guardians:

Soft CC
Burn Protection (either ignite the damage on cleanse, or provide other condi)
Torch/Shield Changes
Spirit Health/duration
DPS Elite (tired of renewed)

Svarty.8019:

• Why does Guardian have cone abilities (shield #4 & torch #5 condi removal & Healing Breeze) when he is supposed to be in front of his allies?

This one seems to elude most players.

I feel the cone abilities are related to the old basics of tanking. That the tank/meat shield is suppose to face the boss away from the party. The party stands behind the boss.

This makes the cone skills make more sense. So if you have aggro and the party is behind the boss its easy to give them protection with shield #4.

I think that now the devs have comprehensively outlined their concept for the class, there should be no debate on suggestions that players make that match up with this concept. No longbows or other ranged weapons (because supporting team and leading form the front = weak ranged options), probably not condition enhancements (I get the feeling from seeing statements related to how powerful burning as a condition itself can be). I don’t rule out more HP enhancements; it appeared that the one guy was actually a little surprised Guardians filled their role so well with the HP we have.

I’m still hopeful spirit weapons (seemingly glossed over) can still be reviewed for how they can be applied.

I think Guardians should start with the highest base armor. That means the low health is still weak to conditions.

Make inspired virtues built into the class by default and let virtues 5 boost passive effects instead.
Buff “Retreat!” by giving it a shorter cooldown
Let the guardian move 1 second after casting shield 5. Shield 4 has to have less of a cooldown, and torch 5 could use some extra damage.
Spirit weapons need to not expire and/or die so fast.
Make glacial heart have a shorter cooldown.

That should be enough.

• Contemplation of Purity is changed to match Pure of Voice condition conversion table

• Zeal and Radiance more access to boons
  
  * For Zeal spirit weapons could be slightly revamped to apply boons to surrounding allies: Sword of Justice has a chance to apply Fury, Hammer of Wisdom has a chance to apply Might, Bow of Truth has a chance to apply Regeneration, Shield of Avenger has a chance to apply Protection

• Perfect Inscriptions now grants regeneration upon using a signet in addition to increasing signets passive effects by 20%

• Bane Signet, Signet of Wrath need their cast times shaved slightly, from 3/4sec to 1/2 sec

• Orb of Light being stuck in terrain needs to be fixed

• Hallowed Ground is now a stun breaker or Sanctuary can become a stun breaker

• Tomes of Wrath/Courage base duration changed from 20s to 30s

• Spirit Weapons cooldowns have all been changed to 25secs

• Bow of Truth is now a stun breaker

Fashion Mage.3712:

^Seems like a close-minded way to view things to me. Even if shouts might be optimal (I don’t believe they are personally), it doesn’t mean they’re the only things that are viable or competitive. This especially goes for certain game modes.

It’s extremely close minded, yes, but that’s what we can infer from the last Ready Up video (I tried to be sarcastic for my whole post; don’t know if I achieved it :P).

For example, they provided reasons for the guardian to lack mobility, but all the reasoning was done from the perspective of a tanky supportive spec. I still can’t realize how a “25% movement speed increase while wielding a melee weapon” as an adept major in Zeal could hurt the balance.
It doesn’t look like a great choice for supportive builds. Staff, which is a quite usual pick for them, already covers the speed boost, and even without that, it might not worth the tradeoff on Valor, Honor or Virtues.
On the other hand, it’s an incredibly QoL improvement just for casual PvE gameplay (I was using both Staff and Retreat! when I started playing this game just for map exploration) and an interesting option for offguard PvP builds (which still would need to trade something, like a 10% bonus damage against burning foes), specially on a solo enviroment (having a WvW prey fleeing away from you just by walking faster can be stupidly frustrating).
Currently, we’ve no real altertive to Traveler Runes, which very nature is much more prone to unbalance btw.

It seems, however, that we can’t get something like that, not because we could outperform another class on their conceptual main role (which would be a fairly reasonable point) but just because it doesn’t fit the concept behind the class, which is extremely onedimensional.

Vargamonth.2047:

For example, they provided reasons for the guardian to lack mobility, but all the reasoning was done from the perspective of a tanky supportive spec. I still can’t realize how a “25% movement speed increase while wielding a melee weapon” as an adept major in Zeal could hurt the balance.

Well it would be adverse to their holes in roles philosophy. The only reason why guardian doesn’t have great mobility is because of that philosophy. From the perspective of how most users view balance, it wouldn’t hurt anything.

But Anets idea is that no class should be able to do all things. If guardian can do support, big damage, have the best ranged weapon and have great mobility then why choose another class like thief who doesn’t have great support?

I feel what they said about thief applies to guardian and likewise all classes. That thief can have better survival but they will have to sacrifice damage. Guardian can have mobility but it will require giving up many things to achieve it. Like staff, retreat and lots of boon duration is a definite sacrifice to other aspects that can be increased.

Aza.2105:

Vargamonth.2047:

For example, they provided reasons for the guardian to lack mobility, but all the reasoning was done from the perspective of a tanky supportive spec. I still can’t realize how a “25% movement speed increase while wielding a melee weapon” as an adept major in Zeal could hurt the balance.

Well it would be adverse to their holes in roles philosophy. The only reason why guardian doesn’t have great mobility is because of that philosophy. From the perspective of how most users view balance, it wouldn’t hurt anything.

But Anets idea is that no class should be able to do all things. If guardian can do support, big damage, have the best ranged weapon and have great mobility then why choose another class like thief who doesn’t have great support?

I feel what they said about thief applies to guardian and likewise all classes. That thief can have better survival but they will have to sacrifice damage. Guardian can have mobility but it will require giving up many things to achieve it. Like staff, retreat and lots of boon duration is a definite sacrifice to other aspects that can be increased.

Having a class being able to perform at every role better than any other would be completely broken. I agree with it and that’s why I say that preventing the guardian from outperforming another classes in their main conceptual roles would be a valid point for denying some ideas.

In regards to the last paragraph, I don’t think I’m asking for anything different.
Going 10 into Zeal isn’t exactly free in most cases. Support focused builds will lose either support or survival by doing it, and the trait is completely unnecessary for those using a staff.
For damage oriented builds, the natural tradeoff is a 10% damage boost against burning foes, which is quite easy to achieve on a group enviroment. Solo roam, where the damage bonus from fiery wrath is harder to mantain, is probably where the trait could become useful, and even with that, I don’t think it will be enough to otuclass a thief.

I might be wrong and an improvement like that could start filling the competitive scene with offguards. As I already said, that’s a point I can easily accept, but it hasn’t been discussed yet.
Every point against Guardian mobility was done from a bunker/support point of view, so all of them become nothing just by setting an appropriate opportunity cost.
If a change can’t affect the currently competitive builds or produce a meta shift, if it just decreases the performance gap between classes for certain roles without taking the lead, then I can hardly see what could be wrong with it.
The current alternative, which is about forcing people to reroll, looks clearly worse to me.

Vargamonth.2047:

Fashion Mage.3712:

^Seems like a close-minded way to view things to me. Even if shouts might be optimal (I don’t believe they are personally), it doesn’t mean they’re the only things that are viable or competitive. This especially goes for certain game modes.

It’s extremely close minded, yes, but that’s what we can infer from the last Ready Up video (I tried to be sarcastic for my whole post; don’t know if I achieved it :P).

Sorry, I only realized you were being sarcastic now that you mentioned it. I thought it was kind of odd considering the views you expressed in the post you made a few days ago about the ready up. :>

Honestly I don’t really care if ANet has their own personal tunnel-vision on the classes, just as long as they don’t balance things based on that tunnel-vision (even though they probably will).

Hmmm. I’m not the most experienced Guardian player, but I could see one (potential) method of adding another damage condition.

• Considering that a lot of the class’ abilities relate to Fire and Light, perhaps a method of Light-based condi damage? Could put it in the Radiance line, for instance.

Regarding ranged combat, my own opinion is that it’d be interesting to add a Crossbow weapon.

Aza.2105:

Vargamonth.2047:

For example, they provided reasons for the guardian to lack mobility, but all the reasoning was done from the perspective of a tanky supportive spec. I still can’t realize how a “25% movement speed increase while wielding a melee weapon” as an adept major in Zeal could hurt the balance.

Well it would be adverse to their holes in roles philosophy. The only reason why guardian doesn’t have great mobility is because of that philosophy. From the perspective of how most users view balance, it wouldn’t hurt anything.

But Anets idea is that no class should be able to do all things. If guardian can do support, big damage, have the best ranged weapon and have great mobility then why choose another class like thief who doesn’t have great support?

I feel what they said about thief applies to guardian and likewise all classes. That thief can have better survival but they will have to sacrifice damage. Guardian can have mobility but it will require giving up many things to achieve it. Like staff, retreat and lots of boon duration is a definite sacrifice to other aspects that can be increased.

We cut short with the recent change to Guardian…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/June-17th-Patch-Addendum/first#post4133816

As much as I know they wont change us at all, it is still good to hope.

1. Chance for torment on crit it radiance. The reason i suggest this is that currently we have no AoE source of condition damage in WvW, and it is pretty much impossible to run some type of condi spec in anything other than roaming (and even that is meh) In spvp the hybrid condi specs are coming along very nicely, simply because of it being conquest, and smaller numbers/less incoming damage overall. Also, it would synergize will with radiant retaliation in group fights.

2. Change shield, PLEASE

3. fix spirit weapons.

4. Soft CC. While I completely support the idea of being able to get into a fight easy but not being able to get out, that idea does NOTHING when people can get away from you whenever they so choose. If we are going to be forced to stay in fights, give us the tools to keep people in fights against us.

I’d like to see changes made to Guardian Mace and Shield skills. They just haven’t been worth using over other weapon/build types. Yes, I know there are a couple builds that have them – But they are so very few.

They have to add a precision signet. Guardians have very, very low base precision. A precision signet would help alot, and make up for the lack of good signets except Bane Signet.

I would like to see Meditations and Virtue of resolve with better Healing Power scaling. Reduced cooldowns for some of our weapons. Writ of Persistence and Writ of Exaltation being combined into one Adept trait would be awesome.