Guild Wars 2

Now a couple days have past and here I am forgetting the change ever happened. That’s right, I’ve gotten used to the changes! Trust me, I thought Id be scrapping greatsword and possibly guardian forever, instead I gave it a shot.

I admit, at the time 3 seconds of downtime on a retaliation buff on top of a stronge aoe damage source was a little much. Now I find myself actually using the ability the way it should have been, at the right time, at the right place, rather then spamming whenever possible.

All the flaming about the rearranged skills is far overdone. It’s been two days and I’m already used to it! It only makes sence to follow suit and place them in order, according to their cooldown.

It took me maybe 20 minutes yesterday to not only download the patch, but to get used to it.

Bads will be bads and they’ll never stop complaining. People also whine about the Guardians DPS from start to end-game, but I do as much as any other profession.

Except that now, GS play is even more dull and boring than it was before. Now it’s literally nothing but auto-attacks and WW. That’ s it. You only throw in SoW now when it’s appropriate and you only use LoF as a gap closer (because it’s a loss of DPS to use in the middle of a fight unless you REALLY need the blind for some reason). So yeah…you may have gotten use to the change, congrats….you can autoattack like a king now. rolls eyes

Wrath you definitely do not do as much DPS as any other profession. When you can crit for 25k come back to talk.

Really this is more of buff in my eyes then anything else.

Still doesn’t change the fact that i’d like my question of why SoW was targeted answered. And how retaliation stacking really isnt affected. Its confusing sometimes when we dont get “developer theory” and insight from their perspective on how they see it.

I can come up with all sorts of reasons on my own about why they changed SoW and Leap of Faith, but it still doesnt change the fact that i’d appreciate a statement from them ellaborating on it. Peace of mind really.

Making a thread like this is only hurting Guardians. You are one of the many people who refuses to take a good hard look at the actual repercussions of what the nerf actually did. It isn’t the damage or the retaliation we care about. We want our build synergy and active gameplay.

What do you think is more fun out of these options?

1. Longer cooldowns on our on demand damaging abilities.
2. Shorter cooldowns on our on demand damaging abilities.

Considering we only have 2 of them (bearing in mind that leap and BB are situational abilities), I think the choice should be obvious. The Greatsword is now very similar to the Hammer in terms of PvE combat.

Auto Attack and hit the damage ability when it comes off CD… You are literally hitting one button and letting Auto-Cast take care of the rest.

I won’t ever go back to WoW, it has changed too much in ways I completely disagree with, but my god do changes like this make me miss my Retribution Paladin.

Obviously, all whinging aside, it’s a non issue to get used to a layout change. Feel free to take a dim view of them. But if the OP looked closer he could see the underlying problems caused by this change. AOE damage output in PVE was greatly reduced and Zeal/Symbol builds were greatly impaired. What didn’t happen was the stated goal of addressing Retaliation. If anything, the shorter CD on Leap of Faith now makes it easier to stack Retaliation from various sources as you’re not limited to having to stand in a Symbol this way. Cause Guardians can’t take a kitten kitten without leaving a Light Field behind. How is that so hard to see?

Zeph.5927:

Except that now, GS play is even more dull and boring than it was before. Now it’s literally nothing but auto-attacks and WW. That’ s it. You only throw in SoW now when it’s appropriate and you only use LoF as a gap closer (because it’s a loss of DPS to use in the middle of a fight unless you REALLY need the blind for some reason). So yeah…you may have gotten use to the change, congrats….you can autoattack like a king now. rolls eyes

Do you not Weapon Swap?

You’re given 2 weapon sets for a reason.

If you’re auto attacking for 10+ seconds waiting for CDs to pop… you’re a bad. Learn to swap. Combat can be fast paced if you pull your head out of the sand and stop with all the butthurt.

Everytime I see a post about how people spend most of their time auto attacking I physically wince. Because I feel so sorry for your teams and guilds to be cursed with such self pitying drama queens.

Reach down, grab hold and be a man.

Adapt, overcome or GTFO of the way.

Re: Weapon swap. While I’d generally agree this isn’t universally true. Let’s say your other weapon is Staff. You swap, hit Empower, Orb of Light and then? Three or four auto attacks before you can swap over to GS again. Granted, if your other loadout is Hammer or Sword/Torch for example you’ll be fine. But what uf it’s Mace/Focus and all you want is more damage? In those cases auto attack might be more sensible unless you have an awesome on swap Sigil in your backup.

Schakal.6091:

Re: Weapon swap. While I’d generally agree this isn’t universally true. Let’s say your other weapon is Staff. You swap, hit Empower, Orb of Light and then? Three or four auto attacks before you can swap over to GS again. Granted, if your other loadout is Hammer or Sword/Torch for example you’ll be fine. But what uf it’s Mace/Focus and all you want is more damage? In those cases auto attack might be more sensible unless you have an awesome on swap Sigil in your backup.

Quoted for absolute truth. If I know I need to pump out a bit more damage by auto-attacking rather than swapping to my Staff, or other defensive set up, weapon swap isn’t exactly going to solve my problem. If you are the sort to run with two very offensive weapon sets, then you have made the conscious decision to use both of them to maximize damage. I highly doubt these people are not weapon swapping if they put the forethought into it.

Staff wouldn’t help, no, but given the current situation wouldn’t you want to re-assess your weapon sets? Is staff the best compliment for a Greatsword, or do you run it purely because it’s defensive?

If it’s because it’s purely defensive, and you see how much time is spent on CD with Greatsword, maybe it’s not a good combo for the moment. I’m not saying that’s so, because I don’t know how it’s all working out or what ANet’s plan is. As it is now, though, it seems like Staff is handicapping yourself if you’re truly wanting an effective break from auto attack.

PsionicDingo.2065:

Staff wouldn’t help, no, but given the current situation wouldn’t you want to re-assess your weapon sets? Is staff the best compliment for a Greatsword, or do you run it purely because it’s defensive?

If it’s because it’s purely defensive, and you see how much time is spent on CD with Greatsword, maybe it’s not a good combo for the moment. I’m not saying that’s so, because I don’t know how it’s all working out or what ANet’s plan is. As it is now, though, it seems like Staff is handicapping yourself if you’re truly wanting an effective break from auto attack.

It really depends on your build and the situation. There are certain instances where I wouldn’t drop my staff if you paid me. There are others where I would rather be running with a Hammer or potentially a Scepter/OH if I need ranged options. The reason I liked using the Staff pre-nerf was because it provided me with an on demand Symbol, granted swiftness, had 2 healing abilities built into it, and provided a fairly reliable source of might for me and my group.

Honestly, I haven’t played my Guardian too much since the change, but not because of it. I have just been busy with other things. I want to keep using my Greatsword, and I want to keep my build as close to it is as possible, but I’m considering dumping some points into Zeal now to make up for the lost damage and pick up the extra Symbol of Wrath from the 5 point Minor Trait. We’ll see how that works out.

To the people that are saying “just weapon-swap”…

Most people use their other weapon-set for other utilities besides just pumping out additional damage during their main weapon’s cooldowns. For me I use scepter/focus as my second weaponset. This allows me to switch to ranged if for some reason I am taking too much damage in melee and it gives me utilities such as a block, a blind, and a root.

I shouldn’t have to constantly switch weapons just to maintain decent damage (most other classes don’t have to do this).

Seems like the base of a lot of arguments stem from the ideas that greatsword is now useless, does no damage or doesn’t pair well with many of our weapons. I know for a fact greatsword still does awesome dps with a smartly placed SoW and whirling wrath and pairs well with mace and shield, and is my primary build for tourney pvp.

Turns out the change hadn’t effected me much at all concidering I swap weapons often. The time it takes me to switch to mace, apply all my support and heal spells and switch back to greatsword, symbol of wrath is already off the 20 second cool down. This goes without saying for my other toons as well, swapping weapons is an integral part of getting the most out of your spec.

There is rarely a time I stay in greatsword for more then a full skill rotation, like I said, a well placed symbol and whirling wrath do massive damage.

@ Eden

Yet again, we are not of the opinion that the Greatsword is useless, does no damage, or doesn’t pair well with many of our other weapons. Some people might think that, but they would be sorely mistaken.

The Greatsword is still capable of the same damage output in the scenario you are referring to because you swap it out after unloading all of its abilities. For PvP, you won’t be hurt all that badly. In PvE, your damage is going to be cut pretty heavily, unless you run a double melee dps weapon setup (which is foolish on the Guardian imo).

Damage aside, considering that isn’t really what the problem is, our synergy with the Honor and Zeal trait lines has been almost entirely broken by this change. You would not be wise to make a build that centered around buffing an ability that was on a 20 second CD.

So for Honor, that means you are either going to want to pick up different traits or use a different weapon. For Zeal, well…it just doesn’t make sense at all. Almost every one of the Minor traits is a Symbol based trait and the Major traits lean heavily in favor of the Greatsword (since it is really the only trait line that does anything for the Greatsword other than Two-Handed Mastery in Honor). However, now your access to a Symbol is contingent on a 20 second CD or if you drop below 25% HP to trigger your Minor trait. If you are running with a heavy Zeal build, you do not want to be spending a whole lot of time around the 25% mark, if you ask me.

It is interesting, though, and I hadn’t really thought of it like this until I read your post. It does seem like PvP is the area where the Greatsword was hurt the least, and PvE was where it was hurt the most. Ironic, considering that ANet’s intention behind the change was to hinder our access to Retaliation, a very PvP-centric boon.

I wonder if anyone has thought that Anet’s decision on Retaliation wasn’t geared towards Retaliation as a whole, but just that ease of access on the pre-patch GS + Signet of Judgement.

(I haven’t crunched the numbers, but…) It seems like with longer symbols and +25% Ret uptime (and maybe even shorter 2H cooldowns, which are all often commonly taken traits) that you could keep up Retaliation nigh indefinitely with just those skills, while you could still build the rest of whatever you were doing as you saw fit, thereby gaining all the benefit of a build geared towards 100% uptime, and whatever else you wanted.

Granted still, that would mean you’d need to stay in the symbol, which is much easier to do in PvE than PvP, which would make it more of a PvE change than PvP, unlike what others have complained about, and what we’ve already considered above.

Yup. Been considered. The change factually is a nerf to PVE AOE damage above and beyond anything else. It also hit Zeal builds focussing on two out of Zeal’s three focal areas, Greatsword and Symbol (ie. presumably using the line what it was intended for) pretty badly. But. If they specifically wanted to lower the AOE damage output of the Greatsword in PVE, why didn’t they just say that?

“Our metrics showed that Greatsword was performing higher than we want Guardian damage to come out. We want people to not feel railroaded into using one weapon over the others.” People would have QQed anyway but the change would have made sense at least. Of course, if that were the case it might be more sensible to give the underperforming weapons an AOE option. Right now it’s practically non-existent with one-handed weapons.

But taken at face value, the statement said the change was to address the way Retaliation works. You are correct that with 30 points in Honor you could get 7 Retaliation ticks out of Symbol of Wrath on an 8s cooldown. However. As you already pointed out, having the time to stand in one spot for 7s is pretty rare unless you’re farming chaff in the open world. Players in PVP and Bosses in dungeons don’t stay in one spot. And moreover, this locks you out of many other useful Traits, including Writ of the Merciful (Symbols heal those standing in them) which I understand is a mainstay of Symbol-centric builds and both Grandmaster Traits.

It’s already been tested, by the way. The Symbol of Wrath change does not hamper a mobile Guardian’s ability to keep up permanent Retaliation at all. There are several ways to skin this cat, but suffice to say that even my Dungeon build which doesn’t center on Retaliation at all can get about a 60, 70% uptime without trying.

What this means is that the patch notes fly in the face of reality.

Either they were just badly worded. Maybe something got cut from the statement, maybe there was a mixup. I don’t know. But this could be easily remedied in a matter of minutes, and it hasn’t happened yet. So I find that doubtful.

Much worse possibility is that the people who made the change didn’t know what they were really doing. At least in so far as they didn’t consider the impact on Symbol-centric builds and the Zeal Trait line. Most everyone who has spoken out so far would have preferred the Boon simply be changed to Might or something else. One stack of Might, even if made near permanent at great cost, is far less overall damage than Retaliation in those conditions where Symbol of Wrath was strongest (pulling 4, 5 enemies onto you and AOEing them down). But Symbol builds would have been unaffected.

Third and most troubling is the possibility that the patch notes were simply disingenuous. Luckily I find that unlikely. ANet has so far had no qualms about being vocal about unpopular changes (also see the various Diminishing Returns mechanics being implemented since launch or the great Butter Flood of 2012). But the sheer possibility is… troubling, since I don’t want to believe that they knee-jerk changed Symbol of Wrath cause of some errant metric, not considering the cascading problems that arose from this move.

I do agree the large Cool-down added to SoW to combat Retaliation was not the best way to fix retal it had very little effect on retaliation. Partly because i dont know if A-net knows what the current meta is for Guardians being they are super busy working on the game.

they need to employ people like me to work for them and do just that.

XD wink,wink you to my email A-net. i will not let you down

and if you do have people that do that already, i’m better and can prove it. just email me and ill show you what i mean!