Guild Wars 2

Hey, I saw such list for Necromancer, and thought that it would be nice to have this for guardians too.

I’ll start with listing problems I have noticed, and will try to add to the list while others post.

Here it goes:

1) General issues

• Guardian and ranged combat. Sure, we have a scepter. But what If I don’t like it? Then I go with 2 melee weapons or melee and staff. Then I go into the dungeon and we have a boss, that if you get close -> you die. Or you need to roll out of the way very often. The highes DPS weapon for that is of course scepter. If I don’t have it, I’m crippled. Sure I can still use orb of light once per 3 seconds and cast empower/symbol of swiftness. It is boring, not fun and not effective. If I don’t have a staff nor scepter, then I can usually just place a combo field fire under the allies projectiles and virtue of justice them. There is always an option of /dance…
• Guardians and Condition Duration/Condition Damage stats. Because of small amount of various conditions guardians deal, and the way burn stacks, it seems very weak to invest in those stats. I feel I don’t get as much from these as other professions. Maybe I’m not right, but from my testing it seems that I kill much faster if going into Power/Precision/CritDmg than replacing any of these with Conditon Dmg/duration. Ok, Condition Duration does make my immobilize (which is on 3 skills) better, but in PvE I don’t see much use for this. Especially that other professions (Engineer?) can immobilize MUCH better.
• Guardians and Aegis -> I feel this boon is core of the guardian profession. Yet there is only 1 utility skill and 0 weapon skills that grant this boon. Seems weird.
• Guardians and elite skills -> Underwater -> just 1 elite, and that means 0 customization when it comes to elite skills underwater. Also Renewed Focus is great, but the way it looks is a little bit dissapointing. Elite should be something that my friends look at and say: WOW!. Transforms, mass invisibility, tornado, lich form are all examples of WOW! skills. Compared to that my guardian gets a little glow effect for 3s.
• Guardians and retaliation -> around 300-400 dmg per hit you get. Great answer for AoE damage in which you and your party stand, that deals low dmg per tick. Maybe good in some guardian builds that focus on healing and high toughness. Naturally overpowered in WvW, I don’t notice any difference in PvE. Sure we could use it on spider queen if entire party was having good toughness and I could heal them with mace for example. Maybe it would be fun to watch spider queen dying from retaliation. But what’s the point in this other than annoying elementalists in WvW? I especially didn’t like the change on greatsword for PvE. I would love to have retaliation removed if I could keep old recharges. Maybe I just don’t understand retaliation, but after few hundred hours playing guardian, I’d expect I will.

2) Weapons

[Greatsword]

• After recent changes, it has a symbol with 20s recharge. This makes it extremally underpowered in combination with traits that improve on symbols. Since you can have only 2 symbols available, in order to justify the trait choice, you will naturally want to take symbols that have smallest recharge times. After all if trait improves symbol dmg by 5%, you really want to keep at least one symbol up.
• Problem is that Greatsword is improved by Zeal trait line, which also automatically improves symbols.
• Zealous Blade seems extremally underpowered (heals for 25 and doesn’t scale with healing power). I expect that this trait will fill the defense gap I have while using greatsword, while now it is completely worhtless.
• I figured that the purpose of this weapon is to deal dmg to as large number of enemies as possible. (You get might for each opponent hit and multiply your dmg). Binding Blade/Pull is great because it makes hitting more opponents much easier. It is really a game breaker if pull doesn’t work. And as we know, this happens…
• Whirling Wrath -> projectiles are not powerfull despite the description. Hitting somebody with projectile from whirling wrath requires luck. Combo finisher whirl on the skill is very weak. It creates very small number (sometimes even 1) of combo projectiles that also fly in random direction. Hitting an ally with a projectile from whirling wrath executed while standing in Symbol of Wrath… well, it never happened for me. Hitting an ally that actually has a condition on him? Hmm….

[Staff]

• Wave of Wrath -> Hitting through the walls enables large number of exploits. It is also annoying when it aggroes several mobs from another rooms.
• Orb of Light -> When targetting large monster (Giant) it flies up. This means it will hit only a single target. Also the healing can not reach allies that are on the ground.
• Line of Warding -> I’ve seen normal mobs (without stability) passing through the line. Either animation is displayed longer than the actual duration, or after the first KD, mob becomes immune to the line. This happens often in the dungeons. I feel that the duration of the skill in PvE should be increased or cd reduced. Or functionality changed. Right now the usage of this skill in the dungeons is mostly offensive to line up mobs for some AoE at the begining of the fight. In the middle of the fight and chaos, it is hard to make a good use of this, other than retreating.

[Hammer]

• Can’t interrupt auto attack with roll. Roll is cancelled, endurance lost, and you attack faster, which ppl start to abuse. Annoying and riddiculous.
• Glacial Heart -> 45s cooldown on randomly applying 4s chill seems cruel. The only way guardian can apply chill and unreliable. Especially useless in PvE.

[Sword]

• Flashing Blade -> skill wasted if target is not selected or on higher/lower elevation. It would be cool if this skill could be used as a movement enhancer, like leaps or elementalists Ride The Lightning. Instead you just waste time and remain in place.
• Zealot’s Defense -> A lot of ppl complains about not being able to move during execution or not being able to hit strafing target with it.

[Scepter]

• Quite boring. No combo fields, No finishers. I find little synergy between skills.
• I find its slow projectiles amusing in PvE, but is it possible to hit somebody with them in PvP?

3) Traits

[General]

• There are traits that strongly affect and empower each other giving/creating combo effect that I feel is so powerfull (At least in PvE) that no other traits can compete with.
  Here is the list:
  a) Justice is Blind
  b) Renewed Justice
  c) Altruistic Healing
  d) Vigorous Precision
  e) Inspired Virtue
  I feel ArenaNet either needs to make other traits more powerfull or nerf these 5.

[Zeal]

• Going into zeal gives me automatically: Improved symbols (5% more dmg and each tick does vulnerability for 3s? and auto symbol when i have 25% hp), But at the same time improves my greatsword, focus and scepter. Where is synergy? Scepter and Focus have nothing to do with symbols. Greatsword was nerfed and has symbol once per 20s.
• Grandmaster major traits are extremally weak. As was mentioned, greatsword heals can be ignored. Spirit weapon deal 10% more damage? Half of spirit weapons don’t do any dmg at all. This leaves 2 spirit weapons which swing once per 3s dealing dmg comparable to my auto attack only 6 times less frequent. If there was a DPS dummy in the game, we could test it, but I assume the damage increase from this trait will be around 1 or 2 % and only when both of my spirit weapons are active, which happens rarely. I believe author of the trait wanted to write 100% more dmg instead?
• Greatsword Power/Scepter Power -> boring traits affecting only one weapon with small improvement.
• Symbolic Power -> 5% boost in damage for symbols. Only a small part of dmg comes from our symbols and 5% of that is like 0.5%? of our overall damage? Again, boring trait.

[Radiance]

• Searing Flames -> What use it has on PvE?
• Powerful Blades -> Same problem as with zeal traits. 5% improvement to one weapon. Boring. Does it really make any difference? Or changes your playstyle?
• Perfect Inscriptions -> I guess it is bugged. Suffers from all issues that the sygnets have (more on that in utility skills section).

[Valor]

• Strength in numbers -> 30 toughness. No idea how much dmg reduction this is, but I guess not noticable amount. 1.5%? Unless this would be 30 toughness to each ally for each other ally in range
• Mace of Justice -> Same issue as with other traits empowering single weapon by 5%
• Glacial Heart -> Already mentioned in hammer section. However it is much better than if hammer gained 5% dmg increase instead

[Honor]

• Both grandmaster traits bugged at the moment?

[Virtues]

• Power of the Virtuous -> to get 10% dmg increase you need to have 10 boons. If you have 10 boons, you don’t need 10% dmg increase Well, maybe it would be overpowered to give us more dmg increase in so advantageous situation, but then I’d like this trait replaced with something different.
• A lot of retaliation improving traits and retaliation is something I don’t understand. See general section
• Unscathed Contender -> usefull only for ranged weapons? Is it meant to be that way?

Reserved for future updates…

I wish they just took the projectiles out of Whirling Wrath. I dont understand why you would divide the dmg of a melee weapon on to a projectile that randomly spews out and doesnt take effect on your target. Just keep it a melee skill and add the projectile dmg back to the actual whirl…

As far as this whole thread. Great idea RakaNishoo. Thanks for take the time to do so

This is what the devs should be looking at!
This is great!

i give you somthing to think

Zeal:
binding jeopardy: can be a good trait, but our bind option are on: hammer, scepter, signet of wrath, i think only few poeple invest on this.
shattered aegis its strange trais, i like it, but we have only few aegis that i feel its useless, but maybe im wrong here.
greatsword power this and all the traits with +% damage on a single weapon, sounds like a joke.
zealous blade i think this trait is in the wrong place, it cant be a grand master trait.

Radiance:
inner fire why someone have to take a trait that give you fury if someone afflict you with burn? too casual to be useful.
searing flame 20 sec cd, isnt it too much for strip a single boon?

Valor:
streght in numbers +30 toughness? wut?

Honor
wirth of persistance+writh of exaltation: maybe its time to create a only one grandmaster trait with these 2.

Virtues:
unschated contender: useless for me, aegis dont last longer in a fight a i dont need a +10% damage when im not fighting o.o
vengefulretaliation is a problem, so this trait is the mother of most of the problems… its not a bad trait for sure… but i think that can we exchange this with something more useful.
permeating wrath i tryed this trait and i think is kinda useless, supreme justice is better.

I like where this is going. Anet really need to revise the traits and give guardians a buff in skills and utilities. we are a soldier class and have the lowest health in the game with no added advantage in our basic stats. I believe we should look at the warrior class and other classes traits, skills,utilities to decide on a defensive improvement for the guardian class. for example signent of mercy’s cast time is long and can only revive 1 downed ally while oher clases can revive 3? What gives? Guardians are supposed to be king of defense and healing. Additionally, guardian needs more direct heals- a warrior wearing full clerics gear and speced for healing shouts can get direct heals of 2000+ every 20 seconds to allies. Furthermore, warriors get a 10% increase in weapon damage while guardians only get 5% increase. Understandable since we are supposed to be more defensive. But they should be grouped up instead of seperate. Like a grandmaster zeal trait would be increase all weapon damage by 5%…just an idea. Lets keep this going guys. Good job.

@Ganzo:

• Binding Jeopardy → I understand your concerns and share them. However I don’t want to jump into conclusions. During testing it turned out that it applied 3 stacks of vulnerability for 5 seconds. Since this line is about empowering scepter I believe this trait was meant for scepter. Since Scepter immobilize also applies vulnerability you get 6 stacks from 1 skill. Also it is possible that you have both scepter and hammer and took a utility signet. This means you can apply 12 stacks of vulnerability and if geared correctly maybe up to 10? seconds of immobilize. Also Zealot’s Embrace is piercing and has low recharge that can be further lowered by traits.

• Shattered Aegis → Think about what happens when you have full party of allies. Or mesmer friend with clones. Each will AoE burn for 2s. In perfect circumstances this means 10s burn on each enemy per aegis. Even if you apply it once per fight, it might be nice. With Retreat and Renewed Focus you can apply 3. With traits more.

• Greatsword Power → Agreed. First of all, this is not fun trait at all. Additionally it works only 50% of time unless you give up on weapon swap and that doesn’t seem like a good option. And finally 5% increase? Sure that’s always something but meh…

• Inner fire → I’m not sure I understand your concern. Burn is something that hurts guardian especially when applied constantly and can’t be removed (elementalist’s auto attack?) Gaining fury every time you are burned is a little counter to that. You have an opportunity to kill opponent faster to get rid of burn. In PvE I used it for example on mortar fire fields to stack fury before entering battle in Sorrow’s Embrace.

• searing flame → useless in PvE. At least I don’t know of any situation where that could be usefull. Unless it removes all stacks of defiant from the boss. I guess it is pvp trait. I don’t like that fact. If something is not usefull in PvE it should be split. As for the cooldown → I have no idea. I’m not a PvP veteran.

• Writ’s → I don’t know, both are quite good and I’m using them. Much better on Hammer/Mace though than on staff and greatsword.

• Unscathed Contender → I think the idea behind this is scepter? Cast a lot of slow moving projectiles, immobilzie, AoE dmg. For melee, it is useless and since we have 1.5 ranged weapon, it seems to fall in line with traits empowering just one weapon.

• Vengeful → I don’t understand retaliation yet. If the mob in the dungeons deals for example 5k damage and has 50k life? what does the 300 dmg mean? I’d rather avoid being hit and deal 300 damage less. Wall of Reflection? That’s totally different thing. I’d like retaliation to either decrease the dmg I’m taking or reflect % of incoming dmg, not flat amount. At least for PvE. But maybe it is just me and the fact I never tried it…

• Permeating Wrah → You can combine both of them for even better effect. AoE burn every 4th attack? And by attack I mean even a tick from AoE symbol? Whirling wrath → 2s AoE burn? Seems powerfull, but I never tested it. I’ll give it a try.

Hate to go about this the opposite way, but even with all these issues we are still pretty much the strongest class in the game.

Sure some of our skills and utilities suck, but generally we rock.

There is no perfect class. If the dev’s give us something, they will take away something else.

@KensaiZen
Hey, I never said we are not the strong class. In fact I think we have some builds that are too strong. I list both issues, with traits that are underpowered and traits that are overpowered.

I created the list in the first place for the reason that I like to change builds. I like to experiment. And I encountered some traits or even whole trait line that were so weak compared to what I used to play, that I immediately became 2 or 3 times weaker by just taking them. I don’t want to go back to GW1, where you have 1 or 2 valid builds. Or where most of the skills are just not used. That would be boring.

You’ve touched on a lot of points here, and it’d be impossible for me to address them all. Many of your concerns also vary in scope and urgency—some of your complaints are Quality-of-Life issues, and others are more severe. I will say that I agree with you on Zeal.

I’ve been quietly advocating Zeal changes, but we’ll have to wait until the major content patch next week to see what’s available to us. I think you hit on some good points, though. Zeal does not offer any synergy between its Minor and Major traits, leading to a peculiar situation where Symbols builds go deep Zeal for Minor traits, but have little to no use for Major traits.

Part of the problem is because Zeal is loaded down with filler traits that add a small, flat damage increase, or Grandmaster traits that I can’t honestly recommend. I wouldn’t take Zealous Blade unless you absolutely have no other Trait combination you’d care for, and Wrathful Spirits is just a waste of 10 points on an already tight Spirit Weapons build.

A few more random points:

• Fixing Zeal would actually fix half the issues you have with Greatsword. The long recharge on Symbol of Wrath is really only a problem if you build around Greatsword Symbol use, which, if you go down Zeal, you do.

• The five “overpowered” traits you mentioned are actually pretty evenly spread around every tree, so that they’re rarely skewed toward one particular build. Tons of builds use Renewed Justice, Inspired Virtues and Justice is Blind because, in fact, the Guardian trait system encourages going down multiple lines instead of just going 30 in 2 trait lines. (Even if you did that, chances are you’d pick up 2 out of those 5 traits)

• Furthermore, your issue with having five “over-represented” traits just illustrates how underrepresented Zeal is. You actually missed a few traits in your list. I’d add Monk’s Focus, Right-Hand Strength, Pure of Voice and the two Writ traits to that list, which leads to an even spread … except for Zeal. If you want to fix the issue of having just five “must have” traits, then we need better Adept/Master traits for Radiance and better Master/Grandmaster traits for Zeal.

• Don’t take Power of the Virtuous to stack damage. Power of the Virtuous exists to help “even out” some of the damage you lose by going so deep into the Virtues tree. It allows deep Virtues builds to keep their damage at decent levels. I don’t think it’s intended to work as a straight-up buff for damage-oriented builds, since they aren’t likely to take Virtues anyway (except for oddball Boon Duration and Virtue of Justice builds)

• I’m still convinced Condition Damage is potentially a good way to go for Guardians—or at least a viable choice in PvE—but I haven’t figured out a way to prove it yet. I don’t have the numbers down and some of the math with condition stacking is very ambiguous. It’s a gut feeling though. Take that as you will.

• You’re right about traits that grant 5% more damage being horribly boring. I totally agree.

Stay tuned for the next big content patch. I’m willing to bet we’ll see changes.

Eveningstar.6940:

Stay tuned for the next big content patch. I’m willing to bet we’ll see changes.

i really really really hope this! but i have also fear, because problems on a great patch, are more difficult to fix instead of a lot of little fix relased in short time.

First of all I know it is kinda offtop but stills it bothers me xD so :
Pls Stop thinking of Guardian as “Soldier type” class wich warrior is.
Guardian isnt Physicaly based STR class as Warrior, he is Mage (Battle mage of kind ) who uses his natural str + magic enchancments to use Heavy armors and weapons (and those use magic too :symbols/blinks/burning etc ), in that case his low HP pool makes perfect sense

And to not be full offtop : I agree, lots of Traits arent good enough or too boring, it would be nice to see some changes (like chill on hammer 45 sec cooldwn ?! 10-15 sec max i would think )

Olej.5230:

First of all I know it is kinda offtop but stills it bothers me xD so :
Pls Stop thinking of Guardian as “Soldier type” class wich warrior is.
Guardian isnt Physicaly based STR class as Warrior, he is Mage (Battle mage of kind ) who uses his natural str + magic enchancments to use Heavy armors and weapons (and those use magic too :symbols/blinks/burning etc ), in that case his low HP pool makes perfect sense

Really no, guardian is a soldier that use magic to protect himself and the others.
The health pool thing is only for balancing purposes.

i totally dont agree with rakas problems, most listed points r simply not true or very very subjective and lack understanding of mechanics.
i love guardian as it is! i use all weapon sets depending on environment, they all have pros and cons… but hey thats the challange in gw2… learn 2 play ur calss its very very deep designed!

Before Burning can even have a place as a semi-viable effect, it needs to be player specific (i.e. 15 guardians = 15 burns). The debuff icon can merely be a placeholder to inform the players that burn is active (or maybe even player specific icons, such that only those with a burn will see it).

Condition goodness found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Conditions/first#post676794

I agree with a few of these, but not all. The guardian is fairly strong at the moment. I would like to see the hammer’s damage go up though. Slow weapons are supposed to hit like trucks. It is slow but hits for less than the GS on average? >_>

-Hate

Anyone noticed some of our skills wont effective agains bosses like shield of absorption and wall of reflection. Whats the use of putting skills if they wont work on bosses i dont get it.

And with hammers pushing skill sometimes kick out bosses away. I mean stability buffed bosses.

Hateborne.7942:

Before Burning can even have a place as a semi-viable effect, it needs to be player specific (i.e. 15 guardians = 15 burns). The debuff icon can merely be a placeholder to inform the players that burn is active (or maybe even player specific icons, such that only those with a burn will see it).

Condition goodness found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Conditions/first#post676794

I agree with a few of these, but not all. The guardian is fairly strong at the moment. I would like to see the hammer’s damage go up though. Slow weapons are supposed to hit like trucks. It is slow but hits for less than the GS on average? >_>

-Hate

Agreed about hammer. I’m currently using hammer and love its skills but dealing very low damage than any other weapon in total. Plus 5th hammer skill even doesnt deal damage. CD’s on hammer skills re very long and most of the time i’m hitting with 1st auto.

This may be controversial here but the following small post is my defense of Retaliation.

Traits
30 Valor – Purity, Strength of the Fallen, Altruistic Healing
30 Honor – Writ of Exaltation, Writ of the Merciful, Superior Aria
10 Virtues – Vengeful

Gear – Full power/toughness/vitality. Weapons – Hammer/Greatsword
Utilities – Signet of Resolve, Stand your Ground, Hold the Line, Signet of Judgement.

So, heres how it goes.

Open with 3x Hammer swing basic attack for Protection symbol, use Hammer Mighty Blow for Retaliation, use Stand your ground for more retaliation, do 3x more Hammer swings for another Protection symbol, switch to Greatsword and use leap of faith through the combo field to gain more retaliation, use Symbol of wrath for more retaliation, use Blinding blade for the DoT then use Whirling Wrath. Swap back to Hammer and repeat the entire combo.

And thats how Guardian achieves the second highest PbAoE damage currently ingame, second currently only to warrior. Please note that this is intended for PvE.

Thats my small defense of the current way that Guardian can function in PvE with Retaliation up 100% of the time and Protection up about 70% of the time. Removing Retaliation from the game would be a huge mistake and would basically destroy this Guardian build which is perhaps the most useful PvE build currently available for the class.

Note: For many situations in PvE you can swap out a utility of your choice for Wall of Reflection, which is an extremely powerful spell in many PvE situations.

@garm
Please elaborate a little and help make this thread better then.
Which things are not true? What points you don’t agree with? Why?

@Hateborne
Same thing -> which ones you don’t agree with and why?

@Pragmatist
I’ll check your build and compare it with mine in term of effectiveness on pve. I’ll take on 4-5 mobs in orr and measure time it takes me to kill them and how much hp I have left. My current problem is that I don’t have access to Power/toughness/vitality :/ so this might take some time.

@Eveningstar -> the problem of my “overpowered” traits is that by taking them all you become really strong. And taking all of them requires so much trait points, that other traits (for example Right Hand Strength) don’t fit. You can’t exchange any of these with Right Hand Strength because you will end up having worse build. RHS is cool, and there are a lot of other cool traits. The problem is that IMO there is no place for them in the ultimate build. Of course thats only the problem in pve when you have allies. So for example dungeons.

I’m afraid what will happen if I have access to combat gear, since now I’m overpowered in Magic Find gear.

I’m really struggling to find another build that is at least comparable in power…

BTW we already saw that there were no significant changes in patch apart of buffing staff which I used from the begining of the game and can’t force myself to replace it with any other weapon :/
Maybe next month?

This problem stems mainly from a wvw perspective, but it does apply in other scenarios too:

This has sorta been mentioned, but my biggest gripe about guardians is the fact that it seems as though about 90% of guardian builds have between 50 and 60 points in the toughness and vitality lines. The reason for this is that guardian’s are very much in big trouble if they don’t invest the lion’s share of their talents into their survivability trees.

As far as I can tell, no other class suffers from the need to spec this heavily for survival. This leads to a rather unfortunate lack of class spec diversity. While many other classes can choose to spec this way, they also have a plethora of options available to them in pve and pvp should they decide to play differently. This either means that defensive builds on the guardian outstrip the other builds by a wide margin, or that the defensive builds are required in order to survive.

I personally believe this comes from the fact that guardians lack much in the way of a ranged option, have rather poor to middling mobility and escape options, and an itty bitty health pool. The end result is we will find ourselves in melee more frequently than other classes (again, because we have a dearth of ranged options), but lack both the instant burst damage and the extraction ability of many of the other melee classes.

Basically it comes down to this: Guardians cannot hit and run or skirmish very well. Every other class has the option available to them to hit and run, be it a warrior’s ability to fire long range rifle and bow shots, or a thief’s ability to stealth and escape after closing in on melee. When a guardian engages with an enemy, it’s a very deliberate, often all or nothing approach. Which means we must have that survivability in order to do anything at all.

TL;DR: Lack of ranged option is starting to pigeonhole most guardians towards one or two variations of heavily defensive trait builds.

If there is one thing I wish Anet would look at is Guardians and range… the scepter autoattack is so slow and easily dodged, especially in WvW.

In PvE I have to agree with your point. When it comes to large boss fights in dungeons I feel completely useless, but if I go in for melee it’s instadeath. Usually I just end up kiting around adds, pew-pewing at the boss with my twig while the rest of my team carries me through to the end.

The lack of a viable ranged option was painfully obvious this weekend during the Lost Shores event, specifically during the final event. Again, if I went in for melee it was almost certain death while, if I tried to stay ranged with scepter I couldn’t get a proper tag on mobs for exp/loot because the scepters damage is so low. It became a dance of roll in, not be able to see anything because suddenly my screen is full of particle effects, hope I hit something with melee enough to get a tag and roll out without dieing (maybe).

first of all i think YOUR list is not very usefull. its a load of gimme gimme and i want to r0xx0r bad. If all the improvements you suggest are applied at once guardian would be OP. I am not saying that you suggest that but tweeking a class is not as simple as putting down a list and hope for some changes. the strongest points you have made are already discusse din various other posts.

Ganzo.5079:

i give you somthing to think

Zeal:
shattered aegis its strange trais, i like it, but we have only few aegis that i feel its useless, but maybe im wrong here.

Radiance:
inner fire why someone have to take a trait that give you fury if someone afflict you with burn? too casual to be useful.

Honor
wirth of persistance+writh of exaltation: maybe its time to create a only one grandmaster trait with these 2.

Virtues:
unschated contender: useless for me, aegis dont last longer in a fight a i dont need a +10% damage when im not fighting o.o
vengefulretaliation is a problem, so this trait is the mother of most of the problems… its not a bad trait for sure… but i think that can we exchange this with something more useful.

most of that stuf is just not true. i picked your post to show how the usefulness of every skill/trait can endlessly debated. In the end its what you make of these traits. not all lines are supposed to synergize well with every other. heck if i had 10 more trait points i could make tons of cool builds.

shattered aegis is a great trait. If you aim for a constant pbao burn its a must have. entering a fight you are able to apply 3 pbao burns with this trait if you want to. (one is already on you, retreat, + activating VoC) a build that tries to utalizes this trait would go for long duration burn making the 10% more damage on burning targets in the same traitline actually worthwhile in combo with Whirling wind. pepople always pick fiery wrath but it is actually only useful on singel targets. in pve where you fight multiples its a waste of points. aegis is very strong thats why you do not get it a 5th time… since it activates at 50% if you trait for it.

inner fire – its a wvwvw trait ..you get bruned constantly there. with AH this trait will work as a 30% damage reduction on a 1 second burn and gives you fury… – its all about perspective

unsceathed contender: great trait when trying a ranged build. scepter/focus + WoR and the 10% will affect your attacksa lot better then fiery wrath

vengeful: retaliation gets really usefull when you trait for boon duration. a simple 3sec retaliation can be pretty useless in pve. mobs swing slow and retal mostly only refelct one attack.

not trying to “diss” you just giving some perspective on what to make of some traits that seem not very usefull.