Guild Wars 2

Im watching poi 19 video where a warrior has 27k health and im just confused because a guardian is a heavy too but a average guardian player only has 15k health. Can someone explain to me what is with the health difference or should anet increase guardian health?

It’s this little thing call balance.

Warrior survivability is all about pure stats. High Hp and High Armor.

Guardian survivability come from different source. It have high armor, but low hp. But to compensate it have a hp regen outside of his healing skill and he have access to a large quantity of active defense : blind, aegis, reflection, protection, etc. All stuff that Warrior don’t have access or very limited access to.

Generalized Answer: Guardians have more proactive defenses that can mitigate/eliminate damage entirely to where a Warrior has the extra health to effectively soak the damage. Both classes can spec into DPS or support oriented builds. Though a Guardian will excel as defensive support while a Warrior brings superior offensive support to the team.

They gave us trait which increase vitality by 300. But only if you go heavy into vitality line. It’s some kind of compensation by them but it is really bad….

Ragnarox.9601:

They gave us trait which increase vitality by 300. But only if you go heavy into vitality line. It’s some kind of compensation by them but it is really bad….

kidding me the vitality line is great

Guardians having similar hp to a warrior’s would be completely game breaking. Guardians have so much healing (both the bunker and the dps roles) and they have the one thing no other class in the game has even a fraction of and it is the damage mitigation. Not only can you build yourself for alot of protection, you can outright block so much damage, blind so many times, and you even have an invulnerability to boot. Personally, I went down the honor line for the vitality bonus and with all the extra healing it provides, 1v1s are absolute cake.

I have a DPS guardian build with 20k HP, and still all the proactive defenses if you’re interested

King Noob IV.3560:

kidding me the vitality line is great

Vitality line IS great because we NEED to use it plus Toughness line. We dont have any diversity like all other high hp classes. Warrior with 18k baseline can choose power line easily and combine with other lines while guardians must have vitality and toughness full to be competitive and not oneshotted.

While there seems to be a common comparison on Guards vs Wars on their health bars the attention instead needs to be focused on what drives the two classes apart. It’s almost gotten to the point where I joke about seeing Warrior threads about, “Warriors need access to aegis and protection”. They are two completely different classes that are both balanced.

At the base level, Warriors have high health and armor but have very little mitigation and healing. When they trait into Tactics and Defense lines they have the option of gaining additional passive traits that enhance their survivability as well as obtaining non heal-skill healing. Guardians start off with low health pools but come packed with mitigation and superior healing skills. Honor and Valor both increase health and armor (via according stat increases and major traits), but additional utilities can be obtained through those line. Both classes dip into their Toughness and Vitality lines to close the gap from what they are missing from their counterpart.

At the end of the day Guardians cannot match a Warrior’s raw resilience, but a Warrior will never offer the utility and defence that a Guardian does.

So, based off the replies here – reasons behind guard’s low hp, is because we grant healing and aegis/prot. boons?
That’s one’s POV matter anyways, as for me – 11k hp doesn’t match the calling of “Guardian”, a “Cleric” would fit more, and all the talk of “damage mitigation” is really situational (we don’t even have frigging WATER fields). With lots of ground-targeted/unblockable abilities your “shelter” can be interrupted (leaving you with NO HEAL and full 30s cd), the amout of posion acces will diminish VoR to nothing, and 1 block each 40s (1 team-block each 90s) will never be equal to another 5-6k base hp (for me atleast).

Oh trust me, I wanted to break out a couple handbooks and bring up the comparison of Fighters vs Clerics. Then I realized that Guardians can’t cast Fly…

can we be blackguards?

if not, i want to lay on hands, it only makes sense w/ our virtues

http://dnd4.wikia.com/wiki/Virtue%27s_touch

Here is what I think:

Guardians have low HP and more active defenses because Anet know some people want a melee, heavy armor alternative to warrior class. They simply don’t play the same way Anet want to appeal to a wider base of players, hence, Guardians.

I can’t wait to see what part of the game Revenant fill.

Obtena.7952:

I can’t wait to see what part of the game Revenant fill.

It will replace 5 classes and then will be replaced by it’s specialisation but it’s okay the 3 classes left are ranger, war and mesmer it’s all good.

I like being the cleric more than the paladin, just sayin’.

Ragnarox.9601:

They gave us trait which increase vitality by 300. But only if you go heavy into vitality line. It’s some kind of compensation by them but it is really bad….

I’ve been trying it out lately and actually I find it kinda amazing. It’s close to a 25% increase in HP. You can get a lot more of your tricks into play with that extra buffer.

When that +300 Vit trait came out I was just learning Berserker guardian and to me it felt compulsory (used it on every build I tested). Once I tried the Meditation DPS build for PvP I was shocked by only having 14k HP and felt it was wrong, thought I wasn’t going to stay alive most of the time, but as I tried it out and got used to it, I never noticed my HP again. It really is as advertised, all about active defenses.

In the beta before the release of the game the guardian had the same HP than the warrior, but the testing in PvP fastly proved that with such base HP a guardian bunker could handle three foes at time. Between nerfing the proactive defenses and nerfing the health ArenaNet did chose to nerf the health.

I think that is ok: despite being weird to have the same HP as a cloth based class (elementalist) a fight between dps guardians and warriors oftenly favors the first ones.

But must be asid another thing: in this game classes names has low meaning outside the looks of their armors (and even less with the new attires). A celestial elementalist has more sustain than any heavy armor user.

King Noob IV.3560:

Ragnarox.9601:

They gave us trait which increase vitality by 300. But only if you go heavy into vitality line. It’s some kind of compensation by them but it is really bad….

kidding me the vitality line is great

It’s great if you want to build as a shout bunker. It’s not nearly as great for the DPS guardian players who asked for such a trait in the first place.

Guardian having low hp? Nice joke, while they have low “sheet” HP they have very high “effective” HP. With the built-in regen, blocks, invuln, blinds, cc etc. They are actually one of the most tanky classes when played right even going full Medi DPS in PvP and PvE.

From my experience, Guardian will survive longer than a Warrior with a comparable spec everytime.

Titanimite.2534:

Guardian having low hp? Nice joke, while they have low “sheet” HP they have very high “effective” HP. With the built-in regen, blocks, invuln, blinds, cc etc. They are actually one of the most tanky classes when played right even going full Medi DPS in PvP and PvE.

From my experience, Guardian will survive longer than a Warrior with a comparable spec everytime.

Well you mention “effective” HP so we have low “effective” dps and cc, what about that? No condies except fire.

As guards we have access to knockdowns, knock backs, push, and pulls. We have access to soft cc such as immobilized. Chill would be the limited soft cc we have access to through Glacial heart trait.

DPS we have access to flat % damage modifiers as well as the godly UC trait. In UC is easier to keep up time on it. To where roaming and PvP make better use of it for burst/opening strikes. We also have Wall of reflection that can be devastating to projectile based opponents. Lupi being the extreme cheese example of reflective DPS while the CoE Golem boss being a more reasonable example.

Ragnarox.9601:

Titanimite.2534:

Guardian having low hp? Nice joke, while they have low “sheet” HP they have very high “effective” HP. With the built-in regen, blocks, invuln, blinds, cc etc. They are actually one of the most tanky classes when played right even going full Medi DPS in PvP and PvE.

From my experience, Guardian will survive longer than a Warrior with a comparable spec everytime.

Well you mention “effective” HP so we have low “effective” dps and cc, what about that? No condies except fire.

What about it? How much HP Guardians have has zero relation to their DPS and CC capabilities.

Titanimite.2534:

Guardian having low hp? Nice joke, while they have low “sheet” HP they have very high “effective” HP. With the built-in regen, blocks, invuln, blinds, cc etc. They are actually one of the most tanky classes when played right even going full Medi DPS in PvP and PvE.

From my experience, Guardian will survive longer than a Warrior with a comparable spec everytime.

And yet shoutbow warrior is meta and bunker guardian is not.

Food for thought.

Thaddeus.4891:

It’s this little thing call balance.

Warrior survivability is all about pure stats. High Hp and High Armor.

Guardian survivability come from different source. It have high armor, but low hp. But to compensate it have a hp regen outside of his healing skill and he have access to a large quantity of active defense : blind, aegis, reflection, protection, etc. All stuff that Warrior don’t have access or very limited access to.

Trade ya aegis for endure pain

Black Box.9312:

Titanimite.2534:

Guardian having low hp? Nice joke, while they have low “sheet” HP they have very high “effective” HP. With the built-in regen, blocks, invuln, blinds, cc etc. They are actually one of the most tanky classes when played right even going full Medi DPS in PvP and PvE.

From my experience, Guardian will survive longer than a Warrior with a comparable spec everytime.

And yet shoutbow warrior is meta and bunker guardian is not.

Food for thought.

Shoutbow Warrior meta for support.
Zerk Guardian meta for dps
My have the roles changed…

Buran.3796:

In the beta before the release of the game the guardian had the same HP than the warrior, but the testing in PvP fastly proved that with such base HP a guardian bunker could handle three foes at time. Between nerfing the proactive defenses and nerfing the health ArenaNet did chose to nerf the health.

This might be a clue why Zeal line is so underpowered. I mean it would have made sense for a heavy class with strong active defense and also warrior like base health to have a weak power line in comparison to other classes. But since our health was fixed all our other traits were left as if it were balanced for that type of base HP. And our trait lines were not balanced for our current health. This is actually scary if you think about it. We might be dragging this class the wrong way for 2,5 years now with minor changes only since redesigning the whole class is too resource costing.

I mean yeah sure, lot’s of retal, long CD skills on weapon sets, spread around traits (spirit weapons) would all made much more sense with 18k base health. Wow, I hope i’m wrong tough.

CaptainDerp.2167:

Im watching poi 19 video where a warrior has 27k health and im just confused because a guardian is a heavy too but a average guardian player only has 15k health. Can someone explain to me what is with the health difference or should anet increase guardian health?

I complained about this and Arenanet implemented that “grandmaster” trait that nobody picks and gives us 3000 hps.

/facepalm. I don’t complain about it anymore.

Well unless I’ve completely misinterpreted what is going to happen with HOT this will not be a problem after HoT.

creepmatic.9435:

Buran.3796:

In the beta before the release of the game the guardian had the same HP than the warrior, but the testing in PvP fastly proved that with such base HP a guardian bunker could handle three foes at time. Between nerfing the proactive defenses and nerfing the health ArenaNet did chose to nerf the health.

This might be a clue why Zeal line is so underpowered. I mean it would have made sense for a heavy class with strong active defense and also warrior like base health to have a weak power line in comparison to other classes. But since our health was fixed all our other traits were left as if it were balanced for that type of base HP. And our trait lines were not balanced for our current health. This is actually scary if you think about it. We might be dragging this class the wrong way for 2,5 years now with minor changes only since redesigning the whole class is too resource costing.

I mean yeah sure, lot’s of retal, long CD skills on weapon sets, spread around traits (spirit weapons) would all made much more sense with 18k base health. Wow, I hope i’m wrong tough.

I’ve always felt that Guardian traits were “incomplete” when compared to the other class, a lot of their stuff feels more fleshed out.

morrolan.9608:

Well unless I’ve completely misinterpreted what is going to happen with HOT this will not be a problem after HoT.

HoT seems to be Anet going “oh kitten, we done kittened up with game balance, let’s just remake it.”

I don’t agree that guardians having such incredibly low HP is balanced at all. Sure, you have your protection, you can block attacks, you have aegis and other neat stuff, but how do you protect yourself against condition damage? With Mordremoth’s minions applying conditions one after the other I can barely manage to stay alive anymore. I’ve tried all sorts of different gear setup (and I put a lot of gold in it, making all my gear ascended), but nothing helps. Some of the minions one-shot my guardian and that makes me very sad (and I’m not even talking about high level zones, just a few wolves jumped me and bang! instant death).

If anyone can give me tips on how to not suck against condition damage I would feel much better and not consider deleting my guardian (who was my all time favorite up until the new DLC). Note: I’ve even tried Runes of Melandru.

The Necro is strong in this thread.