Guild Wars 2

In September update anet changed the old light + leap combo ( retaliation to caster ) to retaliation + condition.

from wiki : http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Light_Aura

“When struck, you gain 2 seconds of retaliation. (Cooldown: 1s)
When struck, you apply 8 seconds of vulnerability. "

the problem that created is that it seems the retaliation stack too much with virtues skills ( f keys ) inside zerg “balls” and guardians have access all the time to retaliation , because all guardians that want use the tomes in zerg fights will have trained virtue of retribution from virtues trait line ,because of elite focus in master that gives stability now .

the melee zerg “balls” now are full of retaliation and make them immune to damage and they reflect a lot of damage back to the source when a player hit the melle train with skills that do repeat damage ( meteor , FT , static field , etc ) because it applies 8 seconds of vulnerability same time with retaliation damage.

personal feeling about light aura is that is wrong and the retaliation boon is something that should replaced from other boons like regeneration or protection or stability to fit more the role of guardians and to not destroy other classes game-play or lower the vulnerability time (8s) or to lower the retaliation damage that it will destroy the roamer builds that invested to retaliation training and i am not approving it.

UPDATE :

a guy in my server did some test with retaliation and seems now retaliation is not reduced after the update , as wiki says : http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Retaliation ….

read the reddit link and discuss : http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2g5f85/the_33_retaliation_reduction_for_pvp_and_wvw_may/

p.s. in the photo below we are seeing flamethrower damage on a guardians inside a zerg and that guardians reflect EQUAL damage back to the engineer without do anything ofc

any guardian using tomes in a zerg fight will die instantly…

Guardians can’t benefit from light aura since its a leap combo, and our leap is a blind, furthermore it only triggers the vuln once per second, not once per target per second.

WvW retaliation is reduced by 30% and maybe don’t go trying to aoe when you know this buff exists.

@Charak.9761
what you mean ? “any guardian using tomes in a zerg fight will die instantly” . i don’t understand ., because guardians use tomes all the time in zerg fights.

also, no need the guardian to do the leap on symbols and to all other light field skills …..

warriors can leap on guardian’s light fields with 1. savage leap ( swords ) 2. bull charge 3. shield bash ( shield ) 4. eviscerate ( burst of axe . lol now the most power warrior burst will do more damage ) and 5 dash from elite . some other classes have also some leaps , but warrior have the most leap skills

Because tome has a position requirement, zergballs run through the enemy staying together to reduce the aoe spread. Any guardian using tome leaves themselves open to die. Traiting elite focus over absolute resolution also leaves you open to die.

Yeah warriors can benefit from the leap, and a thief can spam leap, but they would gain retaliation even w/o the new aura.

The whole point of retaliation is to punish attackers. If you start hesitating attacking a group because they’ll return a large percentage of your damage back at you then its doing its job.

Also as others pointed out light aura because of its activation stipulations is not as prevalent as you seem to believe there are other better ways to already give retaliation to a group.

This class is so easy to kite and has so low health, so I think retaliation is fine if a guardian can bring others down with them.

As for the flamethrower, I thought that was a problem, and the autoattack is sort of sucky for that reason. However, I realized there is no reason why you should be spamming 11111 with a flamethrower build except to tag people in zergs— it should only be used when you have every other damage skill on cooldown, and considering FT 2 is a 6 second blast finisher, this shouldn’t really happen that much. You’d do a lot more damage and as an extra plus not kill yourself.

Understandably, engineers don’t really have much non-aoe skills either.

In any case, there is the possibility that when they changed the fields that the extra damage may not be intended behavior. Given the overall bugginess of the patch, it’s hard to tell.

First off, I think it’s odd that the guardian in the photo you posted is using locust swarm. Second I think your problem is more with retaliation than the light aura. I think it’s a nice aura to have for a few seconds and worth going through the combo for it, but I’m not so sure it’s wrong. I think it falls just in line with the other auras, magnetic aura vs ranger is just as harsh as the flamethrower vs light aura, if not worse. We just need to play around the auras