Guild Wars 2

This are the Guardian changes if anyone is interested.
They look bland in my opinion and spirit weapons are still unusable in pvp thanks to their long cast times and slow animations. Enemies can just evade them by walking lol.
Some of the other changes are “acceptable” but still, nothing impressive. Seems support builds might be a little better.

What do you guys think of the changes?

Guardian
The addition of the ammo system also allows us to rework some old skill types. In this case, something we’ve long wanted to do—Spirit Weapons. These skills now immediately summon a weapon that performs a single, powerful skill and then vanishes. We also revisited some of the older skills and traits that have gone largely untouched in recent years to update them on the back end and smooth out some of their functionality. One example of this is Zealot’s Flame, which felt somewhat random in its burn application, so we’ve smoothed out the burning around you to pulse every second. In this update, we’ve also seized the opportunity to review a couple of trait lines, adjusting and reworking the Zeal and Radiance specializations.
Weapon Skills:

Zealot’s Flame: Reduced burning duration from 6 seconds to 3 seconds. Rather than burning once every 3 seconds after the initial cast, it now burns every second as long as the enhancement persists. Fixed a bug that could prevent the application of burning to nearby enemies after the initial cast.

Faithful Strike: The Healing Power contribution for this skill has been unsplit from PvP and will use the 100% increase in all game types.

Zealot’s Defense: Fixed a bug that caused this skill to continue blocking even if the skill was canceled.

Wave of Wrath: Reduced the range from 600 to 300. Increased the attack angle from 90 degrees to 110 degrees to better line up with its effect.

Orb of Light: Reduced the extended recharge time of this skill when detonating the orb of light from 400% to 300%. Detonating the orb of light now grants light aura to allies, in addition to its previous effects. This skill has been unsplit from PvP and will use the 20% higher heal scaling in all game types.

Empower: This skill now grants healing per pulse in addition to might. It will now heal for 17% of the previous healing value for 3 ticks and then 50% at the skill’s end.
Line of Warding: This skill has been unsplit from PvP and how has a 30-second recharge in all game modes.

Utility Skills:

Spirit Weapons: Spirit weapons have been reworked. They now use the ammo system.

Hammer of Wisdom: This now has an ammo count of 2, and using the skill orders the hammer to knock down your foe. Count recharge is 30 seconds.

Bow of Truth: This now has an ammo count of 2, and using the skill barrages an area with healing arrows. Count recharge is 30 seconds.

Shield of the Avenger: This now has an ammo count of 3, and using the skill creates a protective dome and flings projectiles at nearby enemies. Count recharge is 25 seconds.

Sword of Justice: This now has an ammo count of 3, and using the skill targets an area for the sword to repeatedly attack. Count recharge is 25 seconds.

Bane Signet: Fixed a bug with this skill when attempting to use it on a target behind you.

Hold the Line!: This skill has been unsplit from PvP and will use the increased 6-second duration in all game types.

Fragments of Faith: The detonation effect of this trap is no longer unblockable.
Traits:

Justice Is Blind: This trait now grants you light aura when you activate Virtue of Justice, in addition to its previous effects.

Radiant Fire: Fixed a bug with this trait in which it would fail to apply burning to nearby enemies when triggered.

Retribution: This trait now grants Ferocity while you have retaliation, in addition to its previous effect.

Zealous Scepter: This trait now also grants 1 stack of might for 10 seconds if you are using a nonscepter weapon when it triggers.

Expeditious Spirits: This trait has been reworked and renamed Eternal Armory. Eternal Armory increases the maximum ammo count of Spirit Weapon skills while reducing their recharge and causes strikes from Spirit Weapons to inflict burning.

Symbolic Avenger: This trait now converts 13% of your Toughness into Power, in addition to its previous effect.

Radiant Retaliation: This trait has been reworked and renamed Righteous Instincts. Righteous Instincts increases your chance to critically strike and grants 1 stack of might for 6 seconds every second while you have retaliation.

Symbolic Exposure: Increased the stacks of vulnerability inflicted by this trait from 1 stack to 3 stacks and the vulnerability duration from 3 seconds to 5 seconds.

Invigorated Bulwark: This trait has been reworked. It now grants increased outgoing healing percentage when you block and no longer requires you to wield a mace. This trait also reduces the recharge of mace skills and increases the duration of boons granted by mace skills.

Perfect Inscriptions: This no longer grants light aura but instead shares the passive effects of the activated signets with your allies.

Honorable Staff: This trait now grants up to 200 Concentration at level 80, regardless of weapon wielded. Removed increased boon duration while wielding a staff.

Protector’s Impact: This trait now casts Lesser Symbol of Protection when you use your healing skill in addition to when you take falling damage, and it has a recharge of 20 seconds. Fixed a bug that caused the falling damage reduction to not function while Lesser Symbol of Protection was recharging.

Healer’s Retribution: Fixed a bug that was preventing this trait from granting retaliation when using Purification.

(PVE thoughts)
Actually I think these adjustments Push DH even farther into “Burst” territory but with the ammo system on spirit, it doesn’t have a lot of down time. The retal +50% crit is absolutely monstrous on greatsword if you get into a bosses hit box and whirl. In a good stacked raid situation with a chrono you’ll have perma 50% crit bonus, with zerks this puts you at nearly or possibly over 100% crit with fury etc. So you’ll see guards on dps meters spiking a lot but actually having reasonable dps over the course of a fight.

Scepter symbol is even better now which is a shame because sword is pretty garbage comparatively. Perfect inscriptions sounds good in napkin math but assuming you’re realistically in a squad with only 2 other dps it’s meh. The condition signet only has a bout 4 second downtime with alacrity. I see this as something Firebrand’s will take most likely but power guards right now will take Righteous instincts. I think this will all together will put power guard higher, symbolic avenger buff is just too good to take the new arcane foundry unfortunately for serious endgame stuff but openworld it’s nice. On pull, between using Spear of justice, Procession, and spirit sword, you have 22 stacks of vuln within 3 seconds of pulling. I love these changes and I think power guard will be viable.

Have been playing around with Sword of Justice a bit in PvE. It feels great to use, first off. A quick burst of relatively long lasting vulnerability stacks in a fairly enormous quantity in addition to some nice AoE burst damage is great, and arguably the most important feature of this skill being that it is a ranged burst damage utility skill which Guardian previously had nothing for. It will be even more valuable later when we don’t have to give up Retreat to put it on our bars.

Justice Is Blind: This trait now grants you light aura when you activate Virtue of Justice, in addition to its previous effects.

Retribution: This trait now grants Ferocity while you have retaliation, in addition to its previous effect.

Symbolic Avenger: This trait now converts 13% of your Toughness into Power, in addition to its previous effect.

Radiant Retaliation: This trait has been reworked and renamed Righteous Instincts. Righteous Instincts increases your chance to critically strike and grants 1 stack of might for 6 seconds every second while you have retaliation.

Perfect Inscriptions: This no longer grants light aura but instead shares the passive effects of the activated signets with your allies.

Great times for PvE radiance DH with Bane Signet, Signet of Wrath and Procession of Blades!

Vitali.5039:

Justice Is Blind: This trait now grants you light aura when you activate Virtue of Justice, in addition to its previous effects.

Retribution: This trait now grants Ferocity while you have retaliation, in addition to its previous effect.

Symbolic Avenger: This trait now converts 13% of your Toughness into Power, in addition to its previous effect.

Radiant Retaliation: This trait has been reworked and renamed Righteous Instincts. Righteous Instincts increases your chance to critically strike and grants 1 stack of might for 6 seconds every second while you have retaliation.

Perfect Inscriptions: This no longer grants light aura but instead shares the passive effects of the activated signets with your allies.

Great times for PvE radiance DH with Bane Signet, Signet of Wrath and Procession of Blades!

This is what I’m running now, I got put into the “condi” party and popping wrath on CD Is a huge bonus to their dps while still pulling 32k+. Life’s good

Any builds? being told Hammer Guard now the go to so am keen so what they are on about?

Le Paladin ESQ.5278:

Vitali.5039:

Justice Is Blind: This trait now grants you light aura when you activate Virtue of Justice, in addition to its previous effects.

Retribution: This trait now grants Ferocity while you have retaliation, in addition to its previous effect.

Symbolic Avenger: This trait now converts 13% of your Toughness into Power, in addition to its previous effect.

Radiant Retaliation: This trait has been reworked and renamed Righteous Instincts. Righteous Instincts increases your chance to critically strike and grants 1 stack of might for 6 seconds every second while you have retaliation.

Perfect Inscriptions: This no longer grants light aura but instead shares the passive effects of the activated signets with your allies.

Great times for PvE radiance DH with Bane Signet, Signet of Wrath and Procession of Blades!

This is what I’m running now, I got put into the “condi” party and popping wrath on CD Is a huge bonus to their dps while still pulling 32k+. Life’s good

What build you using? Sounds like its pretty decent!

Eternal Armory appears to be bugged in the fact that it does not cause burning. I made sure to pop my Virtue/Spear of Justice first with no target and switched away from Radiant Fire. No matter how many times I activated Hammer of Wisdom or Sword of Justice, no burning was ever applied.

Loving these changes though. I can’t think of the last time I played around with so many traits, skills, and even mixed up my weapons so much.

Shield of the Avenger bubble doesn’t seem to last as long with this new mechanic. Feels like it disappears within a second rather than lasting a few seconds now.

Hammer DPS may be better than GS now. Of course, someone with better math skills should verify…

is there any way to reverse the spirit weapons as they use to be?

Praffy.4091:

is there any way to reverse the spirit weapons as they use to be?

No, they are actually good now in pvp.

i’ve never play pvp and ill probably never will.
In PVE, before the change, this nice sipirits weapons were good to get agro from you also to do some damage.
now they are pretty much useless for me:
1) i can’t do kitten while summoning one (if your lucky and don’t get interrupted while trying). so you are basicaly a sitting duck
2) no more change to lose agro
3) time to wait for recharge (before that spirit weapon was always around you)

And probably there is more. i just noticed the change 30-40 min ago while got crashed buy a mushroom waiting for the sword to apear lol.

Why the change to Spirit Weapons? It’s not a small change, it is a huge change. It completely destroyed the identity of the Spirit Weapons. Previously you summon a weapon which basically acts like a pet with an active ability but limited time span. Now, there is no real different between them and any active ability except the cast time. The new Spirit GS is mostly the same as Procession of Blades, but activates immediately rather than being a trap. It’s not a fun change. The Spirit Hammer is terrible since it has the cast time, the hammer then appears next to you and then flies to where the enemy was a some point between starting the cast and now and misses half the time. Another change that ruins the fun.

This is a bad change because it wrecks an old play style. Since I began playing GW2 during the early access period I have played scepter/sword condi with SW and Hounds of Balthazar. It was a great build for what I like to do, mostly solo play. It also gave me the tools to be able to almost solo the Molten Front Bosses. It was a lot of fun having the challenge of juggling aggro with my various summons while dodging attacks and snaring the boss/champion to help maintain distance. The change to break bars and how snares worked on champions really hindered that play style when HoT launched, but if you timed things right with the hammer knockback, knockdown and chains you could handle most break bars.

Now, that play style is dead. I cannot play like that anymore. It’s over. My nearly exclusive playstyle for the past 5 years is blown up and gone for no reason. You could have nerfed the damage, reduce the duration, increased the cool down, all sorts of changes that may have made them not a great choice for min/maxers but still left the core game play intact. Instead you just break it? Why? To add ammo counts? If you want ammo counts, just add them to the activated parts of SW. You don’t need to break them. It makes no sense.

Again, this is a really bad change. And it is a bad change because is fundamentally alters a functionality which has been in the game for 5 years. It wrecks a playstyle. Destroys it. You only should be adding new playstyles, not destroying old.

I doubt that you will care that this change wreck my fun, but it does. I cannot figure out why you made this change since it makes SW worse. SW were never strong in the meta anyway. I rarely see other Guardians use them. If the change was meant as an improvement this is an unequivocal failure. If it was meant as a huge nerf, which it is, why not remove them altogether and put something functional in their place?

Change for the sake of change is not good.

And for the people who like the changes, the SWs can be buffed in PvP without neutering them in PvE. The change is deleting an old ability and replacing it with a categorically worse version. If you didn’t like the SWs before it’s because the activated ability didn’t do enough burst damage, not because you hated that the SWs stuck around. Increased burst for decreased utility is a bad trade off long run.

stone cold.8609:

Hammer DPS may be better than GS now. Of course, someone with better math skills should verify…

I happen to have a commander tag, so I did some tests on the golems.

Added boons: max might and fury.
Bane Signet equipped.

Hammer build: Zeal 2, 3, 3. Honor 3, 3, 2. Dragonhunter 1, 2, 3.
Using Mighty Blow, 8,168 DPS
Just using Auto: 8,334

GS Build: Zeal 2, 2, 3. Radiance 1, 3, 2. Dragonhunter 1, 2, 3.
9,071 DPS

Nope. Looks like Greatsword still does more damage. This was only using weapon skills, too. Greatsword’s ability to burst with Spear of Justice and Retribution + Symbol of Wrath means that all of the traps hit a lot harder. Also, alacrity really benefits the Greatsword.

Sword/Torch build: Zeal 2, 3, 3. Radiance 2, 2, 1. Dragonhunter 1, 2, 3.
9,738 DPS.

Sword/X build: Radiance 2, 2, 1
8,319 DPS

Mace/X build: Radiance 2, 2, 1
6,032 DPS

Scepter/X build: Radiance 1, 2, 1
8,724 DPS

I’m pretty sure the PVE meta tactics are untouched. Camp scepter/torch, swap to greatsword for massive burst, then go back to scepter/torch.

They nerfed food which made me lose 500 power, from 2700 to 2200. Mighty blow now crits 4200 to mobs in wvw and that is like wet noodle.

Just had half an hour to beat the dps golem so far, but I like what I’ve seen. With more or less no build adjustments compared to before the patch, it looks like a ~15% damage increase for the standard GS/Sc+T dps build. I’m curious how the big picture looks like when QT update their benchmarks.