Guild Wars 2

I appreciate the devs’ intention to break up the monotony of the zerker meta, but these changes seem confusing and kitten to me. Don’t center our condo builds around burning and only burning… give us bleeds, give us torment, give us poison, or something unique. Or maybe make burning matter for more than mild damage and dmg multipliers. How about having burning provide increased critical chance, increased ferocity, new passives that proc off burning. Make it more interesting.

No, Guardian should not get more condis because it makes no sense. Every condition Guardian can apply makes sense with the class. Burning, immobilization, vulnerability, and blinds. It all fits the Guardian image, though granted some chills in there wouldn’t hurt.

What Anet needs to do is make a “condi” Guardian more unique than other condi classes. The Radiant Retaliation is a good start, too bad Retaliation was so heavily nerfed in PvP/WvW so it’s still useless, that and our perma-retal builds are gone. A real condi Guard can not and should not exist, burning is enough for us, what Anet needs to do is get creative.

Burning should be a supplement to damage, not the main source. It’s the highest DoT condition, so you don’t need to stack so much condition damage to improve it, rather condition duration is enough and that doesn’t require heavy stat dedication. Think about the Pyro from TF2, it applies burning just like Guardian but because fire in TF2 can be so easily put out, it’s more of a supplement damage than the main source. No Pyro just sets someone on fire then sits back and wait for them to burn. However, if someone manages to slip away from them the fire, if not put out, will finish them off.

I’ve noticed this in my hybrid-burning power build, seeing how easily Guardians can be kited my high burning ticks ended up kill my opponent once they were out of my reach. This is what Anet should do. Give us more traits like Fiery Wrath that benefits if someone is on fire. Something like our attack speed increases on people with burning condition, or you are healed for a percentage of damage you do from burning someone, something like that.

Straight up condi guard is impossible, and even if it were it’d be boring and just like other classes. We already can apply the most burning than any other class, Anet should make burning a more important, supplement-type damage effect to the class.

The traitVengfull that has the rataliation duration, could increase more X% on retal damage.

They should make the Guardian burning unique compared to the other burn condition.

Name it Blue Flame or whatever.

Sounds like Guardian should change to Inquisitor :]

the trait should make retaliation to scale with healing power and burn duration with boon duration.

then we can have some fun

I agree with Kamikaze. Having traits that better utilize our current conditions would be far more interesting than just bursting people with conditions.

Farzo.8410:

They should make the Guardian burning unique compared to the other burn condition.

Name it Blue Flame or whatever.

Well now, wouldn’t that be an interesting trait to have? :p

Kamikazi.5380:

No, Guardian should not get more condis because it makes no sense. Every condition Guardian can apply makes sense with the class. Burning, immobilization, vulnerability, and blinds. It all fits the Guardian image, though granted some chills in there wouldn’t hurt.

What Anet needs to do is make a “condi” Guardian more unique than other condi classes. The Radiant Retaliation is a good start, too bad Retaliation was so heavily nerfed in PvP/WvW so it’s still useless, that and our perma-retal builds are gone. A real condi Guard can not and should not exist, burning is enough for us, what Anet needs to do is get creative.

Burning should be a supplement to damage, not the main source. It’s the highest DoT condition, so you don’t need to stack so much condition damage to improve it, rather condition duration is enough and that doesn’t require heavy stat dedication. Think about the Pyro from TF2, it applies burning just like Guardian but because fire in TF2 can be so easily put out, it’s more of a supplement damage than the main source. No Pyro just sets someone on fire then sits back and wait for them to burn. However, if someone manages to slip away from them the fire, if not put out, will finish them off.

I’ve noticed this in my hybrid-burning power build, seeing how easily Guardians can be kited my high burning ticks ended up kill my opponent once they were out of my reach. This is what Anet should do. Give us more traits like Fiery Wrath that benefits if someone is on fire. Something like our attack speed increases on people with burning condition, or you are healed for a percentage of damage you do from burning someone, something like that.

Straight up condi guard is impossible, and even if it were it’d be boring and just like other classes. We already can apply the most burning than any other class, Anet should make burning a more important, supplement-type damage effect to the class.

I wholeheartedly disagree with everything you’ve said.

A successful condi build cannot focus on just one condition, and no, retaliation is not a condition but a boon. Blinds and vuln are conditions but help very little in a condi build as they don’t deal damage over time nor do they scale with condition damage. Blinds and vuln is more valuable to a damage build anyways.

A good condi build will stack multiple conditions on a target making it very hard to cleanse. Bleeding, burning, torment, confusion and poison are the 5 core conditions and most classes have access to 3+. Focusing on condi damage when you only have access to burning is a huge waste in stats, regardless of how long it lasts or how hard it hits. One condi is extremely easy to cleanse.

For a guardian to have a viable condi build, we need an auto attack that applies bleeds and access to either torment or confusion. Though, I feel like the majority of our weapons ARE in a good place and would need something like a MH axe to pull off a condi build rather than changing our weapons.

The “guardian image” is a terrible excuse for us to not have conditions. Why do we have the one image out of 8 classes that has subpar condition application?

Shanks.2907:

I wholeheartedly disagree with everything you’ve said.

A successful condi build cannot focus on just one condition, and no, retaliation is not a condition but a boon. Blinds and vuln are conditions but help very little in a condi build as they don’t deal damage over time nor do they scale with condition damage. Blinds and vuln is more valuable to a damage build anyways.

A good condi build will stack multiple conditions on a target making it very hard to cleanse. Bleeding, burning, torment, confusion and poison are the 5 core conditions and most classes have access to 3+. Focusing on condi damage when you only have access to burning is a huge waste in stats, regardless of how long it lasts or how hard it hits. One condi is extremely easy to cleanse.

For a guardian to have a viable condi build, we need an auto attack that applies bleeds and access to either torment or confusion. Though, I feel like the majority of our weapons ARE in a good place and would need something like a MH axe to pull off a condi build rather than changing our weapons.

The “guardian image” is a terrible excuse for us to not have conditions. Why do we have the one image out of 8 classes that has subpar condition application?

Seems you missed the point of just about everything I said. Like I said, a straight up condi build with Guardian will not work, should not work, and Anet even said they would not do it. If you want to play a class that mindlessly stacks condis, you have plenty of other choices; Engineer, Necro, even Warrior. Guardian has all the condis it needs, save for a better amount of chill.

The point of what I said is that Guardian should have a “condi” like build that has condis benefit Guardian’s main source of damage, power rather than condis itself be the main source of damage. Traits like Fiery Wrath are a good example of this. Condi damage is a useless stat for Guardian, seeing how they only have one damaging condition and even that would benefit more from condition duration rather than condition damage, especially thanks to traits such as Amplified Wrath and Kindled Zeal. We need more burning abilities, and traits benefitting from burning as well as more chill to actually stick to our target.

Kamikazi.5380:

No, Guardian should not get more condis because it makes no sense. Every condition Guardian can apply makes sense with the class. Burning, immobilization, vulnerability, and blinds. It all fits the Guardian image, though granted some chills in there wouldn’t hurt.

What Anet needs to do is make a “condi” Guardian more unique than other condi classes. The Radiant Retaliation is a good start, too bad Retaliation was so heavily nerfed in PvP/WvW so it’s still useless, that and our perma-retal builds are gone. A real condi Guard can not and should not exist, burning is enough for us, what Anet needs to do is get creative.

Burning should be a supplement to damage, not the main source. It’s the highest DoT condition, so you don’t need to stack so much condition damage to improve it, rather condition duration is enough and that doesn’t require heavy stat dedication. Think about the Pyro from TF2, it applies burning just like Guardian but because fire in TF2 can be so easily put out, it’s more of a supplement damage than the main source. No Pyro just sets someone on fire then sits back and wait for them to burn. However, if someone manages to slip away from them the fire, if not put out, will finish them off.

I’ve noticed this in my hybrid-burning power build, seeing how easily Guardians can be kited my high burning ticks ended up kill my opponent once they were out of my reach. This is what Anet should do. Give us more traits like Fiery Wrath that benefits if someone is on fire. Something like our attack speed increases on people with burning condition, or you are healed for a percentage of damage you do from burning someone, something like that.

Straight up condi guard is impossible, and even if it were it’d be boring and just like other classes. We already can apply the most burning than any other class, Anet should make burning a more important, supplement-type damage effect to the class.

Thanks Kamikazi. I disagree with you that the devs could not make a viable condi guardian. I think bleeding, chill, and confusion could easily be woven into the Guardian mythos, but I agree, maybe torment is a bit “dark” for the class, but the others would work.

However, I agree with what you reiterated from my original post—that burning needs to be made more interesting and provide benefits to the guardian’s primary means of damage. I also think that just giving guardians a condi build like what other classes have would be more of the same, boring. I would really like to see more interesting things built around burning that props up the guardian playstyle. Like I mentioned: give us traits that give us increased ferocity, crit chance, healing power, toughness, etc, or something new and unique against burning foes or when we have a burning stack applied to an enemy.

I agree with most of the people posting about the Apr 14 patch: that it was pretty much pointless. We didn’t really get any new gameplay choices and it basically just nerfed the zerker meta somewhat, which most people will still probably run with.

Kamikazi.5380:

The point of what I said is that Guardian should have a “condi” like build that has condis benefit Guardian’s main source of damage, power rather than condis itself be the main source of damage. Traits like Fiery Wrath are a good example of this. Condi damage is a useless stat for Guardian, seeing how they only have one damaging condition and even that would benefit more from condition duration rather than condition damage, especially thanks to traits such as Amplified Wrath and Kindled Zeal. We need more burning abilities, and traits benefitting from burning as well as more chill to actually stick to our target.

This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about! Burning stacking duration already works for this kind of change: stacking burning on an enemy increases duration and thus increases the duration of the buff on the guardian provided by the burning. Also agree that chill would be nice.