Guild Wars 2

Hey all I’ve been playing as a guardian since late 2012. I’ve played both power and burn guard/dh since hot launched, mainly as a wvw roamer. I may not be the best but I win the majority of the fights I get into. But watching the last 3 patches each time I notice that I have to do more to achieve the same result. Today while fighting a scrapper I perfectly outplayed him landing my bursts and shutting down his. I get him to under 10% and in about 5 seconds he is able to fully heal, and since guards are still 2012 level cool downs my options are up and he stacks 20+ might to almost 3 shot me from full hp. Now I know engis can turn around fights but I have noticed this in most every fight I engage now. I still win the majority of my fights but to do so I have to outplay them on every level, whether they are the worst or the best. Many of the people I fight make a lot of errors but do not pay for them, each patch adds something that allows them to walk away without penalty.

Now here’s why I mention this. My latest roaming has been as a burn dh. This build has not been changed since before hot. However as the patches roll out it requires more and more to take down other classes. The same is true of power dh(which I hate and refuse to ever touch a trap unless the situation requires). Things being added to the game such as unblockable and adrenal health for warriors (which comes to 26k hp over 30s) is leaving the guardian behind. With low dps, hp and active defenses being decimated by unblockable the window to properly execute a takedown ends shortly after renewed focus. If you miss it, expect to die.

So for those who are continuing their guards as I am, what do you think is the most direct way to address the sustain and dps issues faced by the guardian. (Ignoring the plethora of F grade skills for now, unless that applies to a fix).
Imo making aegis a .25s block after trigger would go a long ways, balancing of course any absurdly fast way to obtain it.

Short of them changing a bunch of things both large and small there really isn’t a way to adapt because they keep nerfing everything the guard has whenever some way is found.

This problem is compounded by the fact that guardian has very few viable options when it comes to traits, weapons & utility skills when it comes to PvP (you pretty much have to go meditations with a possible splash elsewhere & only meditations are truly viable utilities with traps coming in second)

If you are truly attached to your guard and refuse to play anything else go ahead but the best suggestion I can give was given to me a while back.
That is play an engineer, ele or rev. You will have more flexibility of role, better ways to fill that role & less weaknesses leading to you being able to achieve a much better result for less effort.

I wish healing scaled better on guards. We have plenty of ways to sustain ourselves through traits that heal but they heal next to nothing. If you go down the healing stat then you sacrifice damage for minimal gains.

It’s not matter of healing. If you want healing its not hard, just slot meditations, the major problem is
Unlike other medium and heavys- our class have miserable health pool
We have a lot of active defense but next to none passive ones, this means that, in combination with our miserable health pool, makes our surival bas in Team fights
We are forced into Rune’s sets for run speed
We have a lot of useless utility-couple concentrations shouts and meditation are either situational or simply fail
We have a entire line of useless utility’s in the name of spirit weapons
Our melee weapons are weird with projectiles, which is unplayable in Many suituatins
Everyone knows how to dodge traps

Hi OP,
I’ve been playing guard for 3 years. I’m one of those stubborn people who really love the guardian class. Even with all the nerf and outdated skills and traits I still main Guard.

I have 4.1k hours playing that class alone and mainly play PvP and PvE. I was a WvW player the first 1 year of my GW days. When DH was introduced, I was not happy with it. I don’t like bows or traps, but I have to adapt. Even with it, the outdated core traits and utilities are still bothersome for me. I wanted to QQ but I did not..

Now, for the first time after 3 years, I finally gave in and changed a main class.
I am now using Herald, Scrapper and Reaper. Rev main now. It’s innevitable and just sad to see the class I love, totally forgotten because of the massive outdated stuff in it.

Guards are in good spot bullkitten.

Our miserably low health pool has always been bad but at least in the days of a Power Meta we could use our blocks and active defenses. In this condi meta our low HP is deadly. Plus with all the unblockable attacks out there our guardian blocks are almost useless.

Even classes with same health than guard, have more sustain.

~~:|

Our hp being so low isn’t justifiable anymore. We should be at mid tier health pool. We’d be able to use demolisher’s amulet reliably. It would be game changing for us.

Shield should be changed. #4 is actually cool, it’s #5 which is pretty useless. It should be a small bubble that reflects incoming projectiles, and absorbs melee damage, healing us for a small % of what we absorb.

Also, give us a trait in zeal which increases our movement speed. I bet you core guardian becomes viable with that one change.

@Sunshine.5014, shield 5 is useless because game is all about aoe :\

Skill balance team is enforcing a broken class system on players, but works for new players since they arrive and find the game extremelly easy, players hate effort on winning nowadays.

Burn Guardian
There are several items wrong with the DH tree that us burn Guardians are saying, “what?”.

• Defender’s Dogma only works when you’re hitting the target multiple times to apply burning right after you block. So using F3, pray people hit you numerous times, then pray you can land Whirling Wrath to return the same number of hits. Worse yet – blocking an attack to refresh F1 will override an already existing F1 proc… so it’s over lapping each other multiple times . Too many perfect scenarios are needed for this poor minor trait to be at all effective.

Defender’s Dogma can be changed 100 ways for burn guardians to utilize better… i’ll let Anet use their imagination because it’s darn easy to make work if they wanted to, without breaking the class.

As for current dps Guard.. there’s so many blocks in the game that you’re needing to use, at the very least, Test of Faith trap. F1 pull & LB knockbacks works too well at times when you absolutely need to interupt+dps. Especially a JI + ToF on a Druid who uses his teleport rez, it’s quickly interuptable.

Power builds are better performing than burn guard but once we miss our very few burst skills, we don’t have the mobility on the field to last until cds are up. We have to make very very few mistakes to be any way viable compared to most classes who have room for mistakes and then some.

^ True, mistakes are costly

Guardians really don’t have that “oh sh**” skill that can get them out of a situation like most classes.

I’ll use Mesmer as an example as it’s really the only other class I play. They have a few ways to get out of those situations with one big one being Blink. The big thing going for this is that it doesn’t require a target. It mimics JI but with JI, you need a target… kind of useless if you’re stunned/cc and you have no way of getting out, Aegis application is minimal and only applies to one attack and Wings of Resolve can be interrupted (and no heal!).

Guardian falls short in a lot of places that worked when the game was first out but its abilities have not caught up with the times of today’s game.

I play only guardian since GW2 was released and i really dont like that idea, that i must play with a bow and traps, if i want to play class with bow and traps i can play ranger. When i pick guardian i was thinking that i will playing with melee tank/supp class something like paladin from wow (what kind of tank have the lowes hp ??), but now i must play with class with lowes hp in the game and right now only playable built for pvp is with bow, because with melee weapon is almost immposible hit someone………. guardian is so sad now

@Daniel.1204

When guardian’s came out they were more like early clerics from WOW. They could use heavy armor but were mainly a support class. But because of the (at the time) conceived plan fro every class to have a different type of holy trinity, guardians could still get up close and personal because of their loads off access to protective boons, and good power. If you every have the chance to check out guardians in their original set up you’d probably be shocked by how different they play than today. (Also, you’ll notice a huge power creep in the game since then.

I’m with you on everything you said though. Guardian’s don’t stack up very well in the current set up. Almost any build i put together with a warrior eats them alive. It saddens me, because I love guardians.

emkelly.2371, to many people loving guardians, if guardians were trully balanced this game would be guardwars2, even so they added DH to guard, a awfull weapon/utilities concept IMO, where any bunker spec classes can kill a squishy DH since spam traps and run away is all they know to do.
DH does not work if there no powercreep situation, any bunker spec on other classes still has much better sustain than bunker guard, and does much more damage than bunker guard.

XD, reason Anet hates the class, to many players would switch to the blue fire class.
So it needs to be outdated aka balanced to avoid huge population playing the class.

It is a class concept minor issue at the end.

>:]

DH-trap guardian is OP

As for condi builds; have fiddled with ‘m over the past week. They’re fun!!! but completely unusable against engineers with their massive passive condi removal…

It is rock-paper-scizzors against those sorts of matchups.

Now switched to a heal-sustain build. Burst thieves get burst back while my hp goes up to 100% consistently even against berserk warriors.

@Swimsasa Stoon.8936 your talking about spvp ?
I dont see other place where DH is that OP effective, (againts a niche of players offc), it works there due damage output, a thing that can be easilly nulified if there were defensive stats working on some classes (the removed trinkets), while those classes could stil do alot of damage…

Rock, paper, scizor is a nice model, but even that has some niche builds doing to much or without scrificing much as others do.

P.S: i actually think DH are quite weak and easy to defeat, since i play a more defensive aproach to DH, like i said DH works only when power creep exists, if i play a bunker spec form other class i would kill them even easyer since i would still have good damage output and probably mores sustain, and would not be pin holed to a slowpoke movement class, by the way, even the horrible and weak spirit weapon can give problems to a DH.

The main issue is that some classes on sturdier specs can be very efective on offensive and defensive, guardian isnt, lacks damage, lacks sustain defensivly as other classes do, for offensive and defensivly does not had much other classes stacked to a better job.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

DH-trap guardian is OP

As for condi builds; have fiddled with ‘m over the past week. They’re fun!!! but completely unusable against engineers with their massive passive condi removal…

It is rock-paper-scizzors against those sorts of matchups.

Now switched to a heal-sustain build. Burst thieves get burst back while my hp goes up to 100% consistently even against berserk warriors.

Ele and scrapper can do that as well except when they do it they bring more defensive utility for their allies, more boon support & more mobility with either
1: Some reflects in the engineers case but tons of CC
or
2: Tons upon tons of reflects and group healing in the ele’s case.

All while maintaining the same burst potential or bringing pretty good condi pressure.

There is literally nothing in this game that a guardian can do that is not done better by an engi/ele/rev while also bringing better boon support, mobility and either CC or reflects.

The one possible exception is perma protection in PvE on the hammer which is so boring to do that you can watch TV/movies on your second screen while doing it without losing out on much if anything.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

DH-trap guardian is OP

As for condi builds; have fiddled with ‘m over the past week. They’re fun!!! but completely unusable against engineers with their massive passive condi removal…

It is rock-paper-scizzors against those sorts of matchups.

Now switched to a heal-sustain build. Burst thieves get burst back while my hp goes up to 100% consistently even against berserk warriors.

Ele and scrapper can do that as well except when they do it they bring more defensive utility for their allies, more boon support & more mobility with either
1: Some reflects in the engineers case but tons of CC
or
2: Tons upon tons of reflects and group healing in the ele’s case.

All while maintaining the same burst potential or bringing pretty good condi pressure.

There is literally nothing in this game that a guardian can do that is not done better by an engi/ele/rev while also bringing better boon support, mobility and either CC or reflects.

The one possible exception is perma protection in PvE on the hammer which is so boring to do that you can watch TV/movies on your second screen while doing it without losing out on much if anything.

group stability

Infusion.7149:

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

DH-trap guardian is OP

As for condi builds; have fiddled with ‘m over the past week. They’re fun!!! but completely unusable against engineers with their massive passive condi removal…

It is rock-paper-scizzors against those sorts of matchups.

Now switched to a heal-sustain build. Burst thieves get burst back while my hp goes up to 100% consistently even against berserk warriors.

Ele and scrapper can do that as well except when they do it they bring more defensive utility for their allies, more boon support & more mobility with either
1: Some reflects in the engineers case but tons of CC
or
2: Tons upon tons of reflects and group healing in the ele’s case.

All while maintaining the same burst potential or bringing pretty good condi pressure.

There is literally nothing in this game that a guardian can do that is not done better by an engi/ele/rev while also bringing better boon support, mobility and either CC or reflects.

The one possible exception is perma protection in PvE on the hammer which is so boring to do that you can watch TV/movies on your second screen while doing it without losing out on much if anything.

group stability

Herald with Jalis and scrapper with elixir ab has group stability
Herald can hand out boons like candies
scrapper and herald has group damage reduction on top of protection
Scrapper has mobile reflect
Scrapper has ranged res and stomp that don’t require casttime
Scrapper has group stealth

Zantmar.5406:

Herald with Jalis and scrapper with elixir ab has group stability
Herald can hand out boons like candies
scrapper and herald has group damage reduction on top of protection
Scrapper has mobile reflect
Scrapper has ranged res and stomp that don’t require casttime
Scrapper has group stealth

• Revenant’s road pulses stacks at a low interval. Elixer B toolkit is a projectile, 180 radius, and is only 3 stacks. Do they technically have group stability? Sure. Is it better than Stand Your Ground? I’d say no.
• So can other classes. Just because Heralds can pulse specific boons doesn’t mean that no one else has access to them.
• Scrapper’s mobile reflects don’t last particularly long
• Scrapper has a single ranged rez/stomp that has an icd, and can be aoe’d away
• So do thieves, and anyone with a blast finisher in a smoke field.

Just because you have access to something doesn’t mean its quality access. And just because a class has a particular quality of access to something doesn’t mean you have to have it also.

I have played quite a bit on every class except for engineer with majority being on guardian and mesmer and I can safely say that I agree that guardians are woefully lacking when it comes to spvp. Not a lot of mobility, not enough dps, and very little in terms of sustainability. Thieves and warriors in particular seem to melt me down with ease. I could almost deal with the low dps if there was more sustainability. A bigger health pool or more viable healing. For a heavy armor class I don’t understand the low hp pool. Like others I enjoy the guardian and don’t like that I’m kinda force to play another class to be competitive.

Spvp is only for game “propaganda” stuff also not a serious pvp mode as other games have, not ment to be balanced either, just run what makes easier to kill a target faster than the target kills u .

Reason why guardian cant play pvp w/o a cheap meditrapper build to be in pair with other noob friendly gimmicks, sadly meditrapper is the only thing that works..

Courtanis.1498:

I have played quite a bit on every class except for engineer with majority being on guardian and mesmer and I can safely say that I agree that guardians are woefully lacking when it comes to spvp. Not a lot of mobility, not enough dps, and very little in terms of sustainability. Thieves and warriors in particular seem to melt me down with ease. I could almost deal with the low dps if there was more sustainability. A bigger health pool or more viable healing. For a heavy armor class I don’t understand the low hp pool. Like others I enjoy the guardian and don’t like that I’m kinda force to play another class to be competitive.

What are you running exactly on guardian?

@OP:

DH and Vanilla Guard are still a high demand class for team play for the stability, blocks, and other great skills.

On top of that you say you still win most of your fights.

Honestly I don’t see a problem here.

juno.1840:

@OP:

DH and Vanilla Guard are still a high demand class for team play for the stability, blocks, and other great skills.

On top of that you say you still win most of your fights.

Honestly I don’t see a problem here.

Thread is from may. Before sword, scepter, and boon thf updates.

Kuya.6495:

juno.1840:

@OP:

DH and Vanilla Guard are still a high demand class for team play for the stability, blocks, and other great skills.

On top of that you say you still win most of your fights.

Honestly I don’t see a problem here.

Thread is from may. Before sword, scepter, and boon thf updates.

Gah, I was necro-trolled!

Courtanis.1498:

I have played quite a bit on every class except for engineer with majority being on guardian and mesmer and I can safely say that I agree that guardians are woefully lacking when it comes to spvp. Not a lot of mobility, not enough dps, and very little in terms of sustainability. Thieves and warriors in particular seem to melt me down with ease. I could almost deal with the low dps if there was more sustainability. A bigger health pool or more viable healing. For a heavy armor class I don’t understand the low hp pool. Like others I enjoy the guardian and don’t like that I’m kinda force to play another class to be competitive.

Yeah, what kind of build are you playing exactly? Guardians are mid-tier for sPvP right now, and are a direct counter for thieves. With warriors things should be around 50/50. The low healthpool is not to be understood, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Just the same as it is with eles and thieves.

Gwaihir.1745:

.

So for those who are continuing their guards as I am, what do you think is the most direct way to address the sustain and dps issues faced by the guardian. (Ignoring the plethora of F grade skills for now, unless that applies to a fix).
Imo making aegis a .25s block after trigger would go a long ways, balancing of course any absurdly fast way to obtain it.

I would suggest making aegis and retal stackable up to three and five times respectively. Aegis can be a three way block when stacked and retal dmg increases with stacking of course. Regen stacking would be interesting to bit this could be utterly broken with herald and tempest.
Additionally i wpuld improve torch for burn and improve cd ona looooot of skills (SW and concecration mainly) and SW only need a duration and not a life pool.
Guardian wpuöd have a lot more defenses and options to survive.

Holy Necro Courtanis.!!!

Gwaihir.1745:

and since guards are still 2012 level cool downs …

From a pvp/wvw standpoint:

While this post is old, this statement right here is sadly still very relevant. In the past 6 months we’ve gotten some nice but long overdue updates though: CD reductions to hammer, updated mainhand sword and symbols on 1h weapons just to name a few.

There is a lot about guardian right now that is just so 2012. It really needs a second look and reevaluation by the balance team. Here are my top picks:

-Cooldowns: Some are still very much lacking and reflective of their efficacy during 2012. Just to name a few though:
Greatsword is pretty guilty of this; literally all of its skills could stand to have lower cooldowns (7, 12, 15, 25 for skills 2-5 respectively). Focus 4 and 5 are great skills…. but their cooldown are a bit too long (perhaps 18 and 28 seconds would fit them well).

-Staff: This weapon has one purpose: loot stick. Seriously? This thing needs some love imo. Cooldown reductions are definitely called for, staff 2 needs a serious buff, staff 3 could use a fair buff and staff 4 should really be mobile.

-Guardian being in the lowest health pool: Pre-HoT guardians had the sustain and burst-healing to make a low-health pool work very well while still remaining deadly. This is certainly no longer the case. We have mediocre healing over time and our “burst” healing is carried by Purification which has adequate counterplay.
To compensate, guardians must invest in vitality (to at least around 15-16k hp from my experience) whereas you have the mid and high-tier health pool classes who don’t pour even a single stat point into vitality and can instead afford to invest into toughness and boon duration.

- Spirit weapons. I don’t think I need to say much about them. They need a rework rather than a buff which is why I placed them last on the list

I would say, Spirit weapons Falled Behind Fast!!!!
SW sword and shield,1 minute CD….
Traps… after cast 20ish seconds

The class could still have a few CD changes rigth???

In PvE spirit weapons can be decent. Shield is one of our best tools for projectile defense while Hammer is one of our best tools for CC. Sword is OK for a filler role. Bow definitely sucks.

On other modes they can be just spiked down immediately. I don’t think long cooldowns are problem if skills have powerful effects (Shield and Hamme definitely do). I think the main problem lies in skills being AI and buffing the AIs in anyway wouldn’t be really healthy for us.

Pregnantman.8259, SoASW is actually almost decent in WvW but 1 minute cooldown is to much for the shield if we cant control the shield position and dies in 1 hit weapon runs out of combat sometimes even goes to frontline as a melee doing nothing just to the middle of all aoe…., while Anet dont fix the A.I,

And the bow is completelly useless completelly agree with that :\.
The bow does no damage it is a defensive weapon, and yet ive seen the bow atacking enemies while no damage occurs and ignore my condis, was it removing condis form the enemy (i missed that part)? since even defensive SW use offensive A.I, reason shield goes in melee range and runs out of combat.

Must admit SW shield is very good to fight against longbow druids, when the shield dont go to protect a ambient creature… XD

A way to fix SW is to make them with Decent A.I or reduce thm CD to compensate for lack of A.I.

Edit.. just look at gyros CD… Ç_Ç 15-20 sec CD…

Mate don’t run power guardian and cry that guardian is getting left behind cause it really isn’t. At least the power variant isn’t, power dh is one of the better specs right now, sure you need more effort to kill them as the OP stuff dh had were nerfed (and don’t even say they weren’t op cause they totally were, all classes had nerfs). Guardian is pretty freaking great in small group or solo roaming right now as you provide lots of healing, cc and damage. God, why does everyone in this forum believe they are the poor ones that Anet hates and other classes are infinitely better than theirs.

Every class has builds that are meta and the ones that aren’t. Ever heard of rifle engi? He’s a lootbag to you as a guardian. Ever heard of power necro? He’s even easier to beat. What about fresh air ele? Or core power ranger?

Btw: power dh is very good against engi, remember, their stability was nerfed, warrior is very easy to beat, just dodge their eviscerate, forget about dodging greatsword F1. You can’t. You can kill everyone as power dh, everyone pretty easily just git gud.

I think after all this nerfes atm DH and Core Guard are really balanced, neither OP nor under powered. Core guard is the better supporter (heal/buff) and viable in greater groups.
Dh ist a good dmg dealer in small groups or solo. and have good gap closer with judge intervention, f2 or GS 3 but is slower than many other classes (thief, warri, druid)
you can play burning or power. its all okay. more nerfes would be hard. i think some adjustments would be good on all classes, for example better scaling for healing power+ lower baseheal.
against most skills of DH there are possibilities to counter them.

Tomiyou.3790:

Mate don’t run power guardian and cry that guardian is getting left behind cause it really isn’t..

A little ‘git-gud’ in the form of situational awareness would do you well. Post is 6 months old.

Gwaihir.1745:

Tomiyou.3790:

Mate don’t run power guardian and cry that guardian is getting left behind cause it really isn’t..

A little ‘git-gud’ in the form of situational awareness would do you well. Post is 6 months old.

Oh, didn’t notice. Yeah, guardian was in a pretty whack spot back then. Tho I don’t see the reason why anyone would bump such an old thread.