Guild Wars 2

For the past few balance updates, every other class has been getting huge amounts of changes. But Guardians get barely anything. Hell, we can probably count the number of major changes for us in the last couple of months on one had (Meditations buff and Consecration buff are the ones I can remember off the top of my head).

There are tiny, tiny, tiny hints of Guardians getting large changes next year but I’m probably grasping at straws here.

Guardians still have issues that need to be addressed, but they are also better conceived and better off than many other classes. Given the quality of Anet “updates” and “attention,” we may want to be grateful that they have been leaving us relatively alone.

I have yet to hear someone complain because the opposite team has a guardian, it’s alway “kitten an engie” “dam a necro” “omg 2 spirit ranger” I wouldn’t even say guardian are balanced in PvP anymore, they are really lackluster in every aspect.

Because guardians are in a good spot right now. They have a bunch of different specs and armor combos that can be adjusted between pve, wvw, pvp, or fractals. They don’t need a lot of changes.

I was disappointed with the staff 3 change though. It should have been 8 seconds of swiftness whether someone had swiftness or not.

guardians are good.

they were good many months ago

they are still good now.

can they be improved? yes. but other classes need much more work (ranger anyone?).
honestly, i’d rather they not tinker with us too much…..play wit improving spirit weapons and making some Zeal traits good………..other than that, leave us alone.

full meditation bursty builds are viable. thats one thing they did for us. zeal tree – still epic fail.

Guardians have been fine for a while.

Guardians are fine in Pve because mobs stand still, guardians are fine in sPvP because people have to stand in rings, which will be changing, and will honestly show some glaring flaws. Guardians in WvW are pretty much limited to one build in group play, and gimmick burst builds for roaming. But considering everyone plays that one build in group play, half the people don’t see any issues -.-

Bash.7291:

Guardians are fine in Pve because mobs stand still, guardians are fine in sPvP because people have to stand in rings, which will be changing, and will honestly show some glaring flaws. Guardians in WvW are pretty much limited to one build in group play, and gimmick burst builds for roaming. But considering everyone plays that one build in group play, half the people don’t see any issues -.-

Basically this.

Well you know… this could be worse you could get nerfed dead like necro are or get one of your spec owned like thief and warrior have or just get a little of both like rangers do (poor sods are hardly making it trought). Instead of complaining about getting little buff you should be enjoying not getting any downsides. Ive never seen meditation guardians any better then now. I play all class in the game and check about every forum… all forum cept guardians and mesmer are complaining against a nerf this one complains about having not received enought.

kyubi.3620:

Well you know… this could be worse you could get nerfed dead like necro are or get one of your spec owned like thief and warrior have or just get a little of both like rangers do (poor sods are hardly making it trought). Instead of complaining about getting little buff you should be enjoying not getting any downsides. Ive never seen meditation guardians any better then now. I play all class in the game and check about every forum… all forum cept guardians and mesmer are complaining against a nerf this one complains about having not received enought.

Crying nerf doesn’t mean the class is in a bad place, just as us crying about getting nothing doesn’t mean it is either. The issue is that for over a year we have pretty much been in the same place. Meds got a buff, that’s great, does nothing in group play at all, hell doesn’t even do anything except for in WvW roaming, which still has issues as a build at times. Meanwhile, almost every class has gotten significant changes, that have lead to new builds.

As I quoted in another thread, from the Devs-

“We do feel that damage guardians are not as powerful as they could be.”

“we opened up more offensive guardian builds.”

“I feel like there is a build here, but TBH I haven’t gotten it to work in our internal testing yet.”

“Another thing about this build is that you do not have all of the information you need about this power guardian right now, but I can’t reveal more without spoilers. /tease”

“I think this makes it feel more like a Symbol, which is good. We are still discussing the idea of it being 5 seconds”

“I think Dec 10th will see the emergence of the power guardian”

“The fact was this was a lackluster trait and this is a lackluster change to it. I would love to do the right thing here and have a change that MH sword wants rather than just 5% more damage.
Thoughts?”

Can you really blame us for being disappointed?

Yeah, that was a load of misleading statements and false promises.

Bash.7291:

Guardians are fine in Pve because mobs stand still, guardians are fine in sPvP because people have to stand in rings, which will be changing, and will honestly show some glaring flaws. Guardians in WvW are pretty much limited to one build in group play, and gimmick burst builds for roaming. But considering everyone plays that one build in group play, half the people don’t see any issues -.-

And two or three other points here.

A. If you don’t put down the enemy with your burst when roaming, you will die.
B. If you don’t put down the enemy with your burst or they mitigate/dodge it, they will reset the fight and you will again die
C. If you fancy a uneven fight or find your Guardian in a 2 vs. 1 situation and you don’t put one down upon initial burst you will die

This is, of course speaking about the “average Joe player” in a DPS build. The point is that running a DPS spec has a Guardian in WvW forces one to make some hard choices. Making an error is just not that forgiving which I think is my complaint.

Not sure how to thread that needle other than maybe becoming a better player.

Mightymealworm.8409:

As I quoted in another thread, from the Devs-

“We do feel that damage guardians are not as powerful as they could be.”

“we opened up more offensive guardian builds.”

“I feel like there is a build here, but TBH I haven’t gotten it to work in our internal testing yet.”

“Another thing about this build is that you do not have all of the information you need about this power guardian right now, but I can’t reveal more without spoilers. /tease”

“I think this makes it feel more like a Symbol, which is good. We are still discussing the idea of it being 5 seconds”

“I think Dec 10th will see the emergence of the power guardian”

“The fact was this was a lackluster trait and this is a lackluster change to it. I would love to do the right thing here and have a change that MH sword wants rather than just 5% more damage.
Thoughts?”

Can you really blame us for being disappointed?

This should be its own thread title “The crap devs tell guards…”

Guardians are in a good spot…. my kitten! If they’re in a good spot, then what’s with this change to staff 3 that nobody asked for?

They were in a good spot when PoV was bugged. That’s kinda telling? The class was doing fine due to a bug, and not genius design?

What’s the compensation? A boost to condition grandmaster trait, when our only condition gets overwritten so easily? A heal that, lol. To actually explain it out loud why that is bad would be insulting your intelligence, so I won’t start.

The balance patch is quite a disaster simply because we were told in advance and NOTHING was done about feedback since most stayed the same and it’s not just this class either. I have the suspicion they’re trying to drive certain classes into the ground so people will stop playing them, thus they can remove it and spend time on balancing less classes. Kinda like how there’s only 1 good stat combo in PvE excluding World Bosses.

Alright, so I’ll say that perhaps I lack the knowledge to achieve balance. But please, anyone who thought of the changes can look at the mirror, play this class at level 80 in any of the commonly played environments and say with a straight face that these are good changes that involve deeper gameplay, or invoke a higher skill cap, or leads to more engaging gameplay, or screw it, just anything reasonable that involves things in practice rather than actual concept with a straight face, then I will accept their position somewhat. Or I’m just going to assume 5 minutes were spent testing in Queensdale. If even that. :/ Perhaps it hurts to read this as it might have a little basis in reality? If it does, don’t get mad at me; then consider that things might have to change.

It’s something that needs to be understood. On one end, players are tunnel visioned and resistant to change, including myself. They will only look after their own interests and not seek to adapt, thus they will not place priority on creating good gameplay. On the other hand, developers simply are not capable of beating the player base at the metagame, because the collective skill of players will always be higher. Your players are always going to be better at the game than you, and thus you need to adapt your concepts and gameplay to that assumption. Actually you don’t have to, but nobody here wants Gw2 to go into the trash bin. TL;DR You can’t possibly know everything, so open your ears. This applies to everyone! I’m not saying that Anet should listen to me in particular, but there’s just so many people out there that spend so much time exploring the depths of the game that really should because they just know better, and even excluding their biases.

styx.7294:

Bash.7291:

Guardians are fine in Pve because mobs stand still, guardians are fine in sPvP because people have to stand in rings, which will be changing, and will honestly show some glaring flaws. Guardians in WvW are pretty much limited to one build in group play, and gimmick burst builds for roaming. But considering everyone plays that one build in group play, half the people don’t see any issues -.-

Basically this.

Dbl Support.

so sad

ArchonWing.9480:

Alright, so I’ll say that perhaps I lack the knowledge to achieve balance. But please, anyone who thought of the changes can look at the mirror, play this class at level 80 in any of the commonly played environments and say with a straight face that these are good changes that involve deeper gameplay, or invoke a higher skill cap, or leads to more engaging gameplay, or screw it, just anything reasonable that involves things in practice rather than actual concept with a straight face, then I will accept their position somewhat. Or I’m just going to assume 5 minutes were spent testing in Queensdale. If even that. :/ Perhaps it hurts to read this as it might have a little basis in reality? If it does, don’t get mad at me; then consider that things might have to change.

It’s just that Guardians are a class Hard To Balance.

We are by Nature a class that i’ts, on paper, more focused on Survival and Support than any other class in the game.
That said, a Guardian strong point is that:
- it has a good sustain using any kind of Armor (you can play Berserk on a Guardian and still tank)
- we can support other players unintentionally (have you ever pop a “Hold the Line” when anyone besides you needed regen? Well I didn’t and people still love me when I only use it for myself).
- Some of our skills deals damage, heals and give boons at the same time!

The Catch on balance (and the problem) is that everyone thinks a class is good or bad based on efficiency on killing other players.
I mean, my thief can deal 12~15k damage every 3 seconds with backstab meanwhile my guardian need to use Shield Wrath + Intervention to do that damage on a 40s cooldown! Guardians are so weak right?

I have no idea how a Thief can kill my Guardian at all. I have so much sustain and resistence that I can’t imagine the scene happening unless I am really distracted and with all skills on cooldown.

If we get too much damage we will be BROKEN since we are committing the biggest mistake for a class in a MMO: Mixing Damage / Defense and Support in the same place.
We would be USELESS if any GC/ConD class could take us down before we even have time to react, since we clearly are not followers of the “kill Before being Killed” line of thinking.

At current meta we are a Defense class that still survives quite fine.

That said, concludes that Guardians are in a good spot.
If you want damage, you have your options. But you really should be using another class for that.