Guild Wars 2

A week or two ago there was a thread talking about mace guardians, it was said that while the mace and hammer share the same auto-attack speed the mace somehow “felt” slower/clunkier.

I was thinking about this while playing around with the weapons, and I realized that the mace feels “clunky” because it’s symbol has a horrific 1 and 1/4 second cast time. I compared this to the cast time of our other symbol cast times (GS clocks in at 1/4 of a second and staff clocks in at 3/4 of a second. Hammer technically takes 1 and 1/4, but it’s a part of the auto attack chain anyway).

I’m wondering what the rest of y’all think about this: does the relatively high regeneration up time warrant such a long cast time? Would a cast time reduction be over powered? Would it make mace a more viable option? Or is it totally irrelevant?

I think the trade off between cast time and recharge is quite well balanced. I don’t think any changes to the symbol would encourage more use than it is now. It’s hammer-light and until healing is more of a ‘thing’ in PVE, it simply won’t get used more often than it is now, regardless of cast times, etc…

Maybe if symbols got some cool PVE-related traits, Mace would be more popular.

Mace is actually a solid DPS weapon in a lot of guardian rotations these days. Its similar DPS to sword, but the heals/regen/block give it far more utility, which can be nice with certain parts of the game.

It also makes certain solo’s brain dead easy when combined with meditations. Can be full zerk guard solo with amazing survivability, decent fury, and solid damage.

Haha! Well that’s that then! I was just curious what other people thought, and I’m actually pleasantly surprised to hear some support for the mace!

Things must have really changed around here since I last visited the forums: used to be you’d get shanked by a baker’s dozen if you even mentioned weapons other than GS/Sword, lol xD

Yeah I guess it started when some people asked calculations comparing sword and mace dps. After the calculations showed both weapons have almost the same dps without considering additional vulnurability from mace symbol and burst from the third skill, mace became more popular and obal’s pve guide changed sword/greatsword builds to 1-hand/greatsword builds. Funny thing is I think I remember it was also calculated that sword camping had equal dps to staff camping and how shocked I was along with many others.

Anyway, mace has almost the same dps with sword but because your symbol keeps ticking when you swap to other weapon it has more burst capabilities than sword. The symbol has a long cast time, however I think its not much of an issue considering the slowness of the auto attack itself (synergy). Instead a nice addition could be tweaking the third skill like the adding the ability to end the channel in demand to get the protection and/or blast finisher at the start of the channel or from the manual ending.

Eh the only problems I see with mace are

1: The last auto attack’s healing scales horribly. (Should start very low and scale better with healing power)

2: The melee block on number 3 can be triggered by ranged attacks (its the only one that can be in game)

3: The pulses/duration of the symbol should be halved while the damage per pulse & boon applied per pulse should be doubled (true of all symbols except perhaps protection & wrath)

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Eh the only problems I see with mace are

1: The last auto attack’s healing scales horribly. (Should start very low and scale better with healing power)

2: The melee block on number 3 can be triggered by ranged attacks (its the only one that can be in game)

3: The pulses/duration of the symbol should be halved while the damage per pulse & boon applied per pulse should be doubled (true of all symbols except perhaps protection & wrath)

that would make mace a very cool weapon :], as Anet stated mace was almost not used by warriors, for sure mace under guardian is even lesser used, all we see is 2h sword, hammer guardians.

Not only the symbol (in my opnion it should be reduce to 1s or even 3/4s), but also the last hit of auto atk that scales very badly with healing and have an insane cast time (it should be reduce to 3/4s – IT ONLY HITS A SINGLE TARGET, so don’t make sense to be so bad).

The long cast times is what keep me away from using it.

What i would like to see, would be that the mace abilities on 1 and 2 would be like the ones on the hammer.
So i could create a symbol (regeneration) with every last hit of the combo chain.
And maybe the 2 could become a single target hit with powerful direct aoe heal.
I´m really into mace + shield ( although shield is not the best off-hand)but would also like to play it with crithammer build.
So sadly i´m forced to hammer =(

Pregnantman.8259:

Yeah I guess it started when some people asked calculations comparing sword and mace dps. After the calculations showed both weapons have almost the same dps without considering additional vulnurability from mace symbol and burst from the third skill, mace became more popular and obal’s pve guide changed sword/greatsword builds to 1-hand/greatsword builds. Funny thing is I think I remember it was also calculated that sword camping had equal dps to staff camping and how shocked I was along with many others.

Anyway, mace has almost the same dps with sword but because your symbol keeps ticking when you swap to other weapon it has more burst capabilities than sword. The symbol has a long cast time, however I think its not much of an issue considering the slowness of the auto attack itself (synergy). Instead a nice addition could be tweaking the third skill like the adding the ability to end the channel in demand to get the protection and/or blast finisher at the start of the channel or from the manual ending.

^^ This, sword is a small bit better on longer fights, mace seems to win out on the burst going Mace2 → GS rotation. Sword offers blinds/projectile defense while mace offers some healing and a block. I’ve been loving mace in dungeons where blind just doesn’t really help. The one big drawback though is those pesky light fields, so personally if I have an Ele that knows what they’re doing, I try to refrain from using mace/hammer and be a bit more restrictive on my use of gs4.

Krestfallen.8025:

Haha! Well that’s that then! I was just curious what other people thought, and I’m actually pleasantly surprised to hear some support for the mace!

Things must have really changed around here since I last visited the forums: used to be you’d get shanked by a baker’s dozen if you even mentioned weapons other than GS/Sword, lol xD

If you havent tried a full writ build with mace and gs/hammer i highly suggest you do! No other build has given me similar results.. if you have symbol duration the clunkiness wont be as bad

By the way, the block in Mace 3 is technically AoE so making it block ranged attacks for the entirety of its duration may be a bit over the top, atleast to devs. What is possible could be adding a blast finisher, making it a “fire and forget” skill like Focus 5 (I don’t like this) or a proper cancellation skill.

So after some of the comments and advice I got from this thread, I’ve spent the past few days trying out a mace+focus/hammer build and holy wow is it a blast!!

It seems so obvious now, but it had never even occured to me to use Mace as a burst weapon— I had always seen it as some sort of sustain weapon. Like a lesser version of the hammer or something.

Thanks for setting me straight y’all! It’s always fantastic to find new playstyles for my favorite class! ^.^