Guild Wars 2

Warriors can spam three shouts on sub-30 second cooldowns, do ton of damage, lots of soft and hard CCs (Hammer/Sword-Shield stun shout build). A lot of what people forget is warriors, speced right of course, have a 4th shout. Shrug it Off in their trait line gives them a 4th heal every 30 seconds that also heals, all they gotta do is get 2 condis on them.

Redscope.6215:

You won’t out-heal wars in the long run, and with a healing-built guard you certainly won’t out-mitigate them. With this healing build, if he takes healing signet and adrenal health, he’s sitting on a 350 regen, a 205 adrenal regen, and a 475 signet regen. He’s got over 1k hp/sec. All passive. You can’t even hope to come close to that as a guard.

.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-s;4NKFO0Y4FLVQ0;9;59JT9;13;018-16B3;8SqObSqOb30Fi0-g0U0;0Vl-sWv1-Z5_Ba-sVG-1T;9;9;9;9;9;9;14-6O

Shout build….

You can tweek it however you want… but that’s the basics… and by tweek I mean, less protection (IE – Grove Runes sitting at 6s of protection every 10s ~OR~ Dwyana – Regen).

A build like this is going to have:
1) Regen;
a) Dodged March 6/10s. (240 p/s) ;
b) Signet (438 p/s)
c) Adrenaline (166p/s)

2) AOE Shout Heal 600 range (vs Guard Dodge @250):
a) Shake it Off – 2308 every 20s
b) For Great Justice – 2308 every 20s
c) On my Mark – 2308 every 24s
d) Shake it Off Traited – 2308 every 30s

3) Condi Removal
a) 66% Reduction on Snares/Immobilize
b) 40% Reducution on normal conditions
c) Cleansing Ire – w/ Shout Trait-ed for Adrenaline on hit – basically always have 2 bars of Adrenaline for condi removal
d) Shake it off – Every 20s
c) Trait-ed Shake it off Passive – Cures 2 when you have 2 – every 30s

4) 1945 Power ; 30% Crit Change (Fury is 12s/20s) ; 80% crit change when stunned.

5) If you want Mobility in this build.. you just change out weapons… That’s it.

A) It lacks crit damage… but honestly.. you’re not burst’n, you’re sustain tank’n which is the builds we’re comparing…. (oh, and you can go celestial trinkets and get just as good stats).

B) It lacks Stability.

The guardian does NOT come close to these types of numbers.

EDIT: BTW… that’s 98,680 health over 1 min and over 23,080 for your team (600 range).

Just a side note:

If they continue to buff ~everyone elses~ condi removal, it will begin to take us out of the pigeon hole we’re currently in.

We’re already seeing ~some~ of this. Even though ‘we’ got hit hard w/ the POV nerf (yes, it was a nerf and a bug all at the same time), other classes did get some added stability/condi removal, which has helped a bit.

Here is the bottom line: Guardians are defensive by nature and our defense was already good. Everyone elses was HORRIBLE… now they’re buffing everyone elses Defense… they should be buffing our OFFENSE.

That’s balance.

I’d like to have pre-patch Pure of Voice back, after that I can’t complain about much if anything.

As to not being a warrior expert – that’s why I admitted it up front so that my comments could be put in context and invite this discussion.

I like some of your early points – notably that shout-heal might not be the right “meta” option for the healing war to compare against the guard for the purposes of the question at hand. However, I still have a hard time believing that warriors fill the healing/support role better than guardians. Can you post a link or structure to a banner build that you think out heals and out-mitigates a guard so I can see what I might be missing? I’m not seeing how it matches up to Prot, aegis, and blind-spam for mitigation and I’m still suspicious of the healing comparison.

Your last points are made in the wrong context for a support/healing comparison. 2/3rds of the passive regen options you list at the end only affect the warrior. You can’t compare self-regen only options against “5-allies” numbers. The warrior you describe only provides a 350 regen to allies in range of the banner, and as I see it has fewer other healing options to go with it. That weakened my perception of the strength of the rest of your argument, but I’ll try to ignore it.

One thing I should clarify is that I didn’t represent all the possible healing tools available – because I didn’t need to in order to outpace what I thought was the shout-heal comparison. Notably, since I can keep up vigor near-constantly, the dodgeheal is a huge additional heal I can toss out with alarming regularity for ~1250 pt heals. So if you’re comparing true sustained healing potential, that needs to be added to the mix. (Also, since you’re using 350pt/s heals from regen, you’re assuming 1760 hp on the warrior, which for comparison is a bigger stat sacrifice than the guard numbers I used which are from closer to 1000 hp which I find more reasonable considering scaling stinks on most healing skills.)

I should also say that I’m inherently suspicious of banners, because in my experience, fights cover too much terrain to count on them in WvW and I can’t count on people to stay in / retreat to a static location. Banner mobility requires someone to carry them (at the expense of doing something else) and you don’t have to play warrior long to know the pain of a well-placed banner getting hauled off by someone trying to loot. To be fair, maximizing potential is a challenge all classes have; “functional value” drops off if you can’t count on your allies to be in range or when you sit on a skill. As long as the fight is big enough, I can work to dance around close enough to the action to keep much of that potential realized, but I imagine that’s harder for a banner warrior anytime you’re outside the obvious choke-point battles. Maybe you can combo the right set of skills to keep a low dependence on that fixed position, and again, I’d be very interested to see what those well thought-out build options look like and what they can include and have to omit.

I’m also a little leery of treating regeneration at full face value because it stacks duration and not intensity. Regeneration is applied from multiple sources, and it can’t tick higher than the highest single tick. To consider it at full face value (especially if you’re counting it as perma from the war) assumes all other sources of regeneration are completely wasted. That’s why I favor a balance of damage mitigation, sustained healing, and burst healing. To be fair, Guardians suffer from this too, but less than a banner regen was would I think. We apply regen ourselves, and one of my common complaints about my own build is that if you put two of us in the same area, we’re bringing less than 2x net functional value since the Battle Presence passive VoR doesn’t stack (in duration or intensity) any time we overlap. True, mine isn’t the only support guardian build, but you won’t see mine as a WvW meta ever for that reason. (I suppose even more pro guardians might find other reasons, but that’s reason enough!)

This complexity is why I didn’t try to account for an exact comparison of healing and mitigation potential. It’d be real easy to say that I can dodgeheal for ~1250 every 5s and add 250/s to my healing potential, and point out that I can frontload 2 of those – but the reality is that while I try to use my first dodgeheal anytime I have full endurance, I also try to save a dodge to save my butt, and I can’t always find a good spot for a dodgeheal immediately on reaching full endurance.

All that said, I hope you’ll share some well thought out options that you think meet the previous poster’s assertion. I’d be happy to benefit from any buffs that come as a result of me being wrong.

Sorry about the bump – I was on vacation. Also sorry I’m a forum newb and don’t know how to properly quote in this forum. Most of that was in response to Redscope.

To Amis – thanks for posting the shout-heal build – I’ll look more closely at it but the core to that is about what my wife’s warrior ran. “23,080 for your team” is the part I care about, since we’re talking group support/healing here. Hopefully, Red or someone can post some banner options.

Again, with the understanding that we’re talking support to allies to fill the support/heal option that I took issue with in Redscope’s original comment, this statement rings false: “The guardian does NOT come close to these types of numbers.”

You ran “over 23,080” for your team over 1m, but my own post will show healing potential well over 30k for allies over that same minute, even ignoring protection, aegis, and blindspam for damage mitigation on allies that I don’t see in that build. Now, a warrior with that build can still KILL THINGS, and I’m not saying they’re useless by any stretch – just that they don’t seem to outclass a guardian for support/healing.

Using mostly numbers from my earlier post since I’m lazy and tired, you’re around 11,000 from battle presence/absolute resolution over a minute. Let’s say just 3 empowers a minute because you swap or don’t use them all, that’s still over 7500. Even if you only dodgeheal once every 10s (which I swear to you is low for me) that’s well over 6,000. HTL twice is another 4,000 potential from regen with cooldown to spare. VoR active just once, say, is 2,000, plus 6s more regen for 1,500. That’s a conservative 32,000 without any of the prot/aegis/blindspam value factored in. Also, that ignores any use of Renewed Focus to recharge virtues or the alternate healing tome elites, because it makes my head hurt to try.

I’ll say this, though, and this is worth pointing out in opposition to my argument…. My build doesn’t use PoV, the nerf of which was the cause of the original post, meaning you’d need soldier’s runes to have much group condi removal. I run hammer secondary in most WvW settings even though I hate it, for the spammable blast finisher and CC, meaning I can’t even count on the greatsword combo for group condi-removal. I have to choose when to pop VoR with its big condi-removal carefully, since the cooldown is long unless Renewed Focus is available.

It’s late, I’m tired. Hopefully I didn’t kitten the math here.

What you’re failing to understanding or just flat out ignoring, is the build that I quoted is a DPS/Sustain build…

The build you quoted, is the Guardian Support build: x/x/x/30/20

Now you can take off the blinders and see it for what it really is…. unbalanced.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

And people always say “PVE is easy”, but then they can’t melee Lupi or Do high level fractals. Whats up with that?

This^

There’s nothing in this game that isn’t easy but pvp’ers generally say stuff like that to somehow make it seem that they have more skill or require more consideration.

CMF.5461:

Other professions may have been over buffed and are slowly being brought back down,

When was the Warrior brought down? I missed that.

ODB.6891:

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

And people always say “PVE is easy”, but then they can’t melee Lupi or Do high level fractals. Whats up with that?

This^

There’s nothing in this game that isn’t easy but pvp’ers generally say stuff like that to somehow make it seem that they have more skill or require more consideration.

Not this….

You do know people are pugging 50+ level fractals now, right? The only time PvE is difficult is when the game is designed from the ground up to be so. Furthermore, it is also difficult when new content is gated by gear. However, once the person behind the keyboard gears up to meet the content AND the few fringe players beat it and create guides, content then becomes easy once you have completed it. There is always the first or second time that is a bit difficult but once you know when to avoid poo on the ground or jump, or when to attack or use what skill it becomes nothing more than a means to the end…to get the shiny object.

I believe when most people say PvE is easy they have either come from a game that has a higher degree of raid content or this game is simply gated by AR or iterations of said dungeon. Just my personal opinion based on what I’ve done. Outside of fractals, PvE in this game is 10x different than anything I’ve played in regards to ease. Past experience is heroic wow raiding and master levels 1 though 10 DaOC Trials of Atlantis.

When it comes to spvp at least, where you can just roll up any class/build on the fly, if your goal is to be effective you really shouldn’t play a Guardian as anything but a center point bunker. Other classes do all the other roles better and its not just Warrior. For example as a roamer and dps there are multiple classes that do it better then Guards. I perosnally just feel its bad class design that has a class do one role at a 10 and then all there other roles at about a 6. Ideally every class would do a couple of things at a 10 level and then all other things at about an 8 level. This is all just theorectical using a 1-10 scale with 1 being the worst and 10 the best. I would be happy if they would just change the fury duration on meds to 5 or 7 seconds and give us some more swiftness. Not really asking for much.

Crapgame.6519:

ODB.6891:

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

And people always say “PVE is easy”, but then they can’t melee Lupi or Do high level fractals. Whats up with that?

This^

There’s nothing in this game that isn’t easy but pvp’ers generally say stuff like that to somehow make it seem that they have more skill or require more consideration.

Not this….

You do know people are pugging 50+ level fractals now, right? The only time PvE is difficult is when the game is designed from the ground up to be so. Furthermore, it is also difficult when new content is gated by gear. However, once the person behind the keyboard gears up to meet the content AND the few fringe players beat it and create guides, content then becomes easy once you have completed it. There is always the first or second time that is a bit difficult but once you know when to avoid poo on the ground or jump, or when to attack or use what skill it becomes nothing more than a means to the end…to get the shiny object.

I believe when most people say PvE is easy they have either come from a game that has a higher degree of raid content or this game is simply gated by AR or iterations of said dungeon. Just my personal opinion based on what I’ve done. Outside of fractals, PvE in this game is 10x different than anything I’ve played in regards to ease. Past experience is heroic wow raiding and master levels 1 though 10 DaOC Trials of Atlantis.

You should probably re-read what I said. I said there isn’t anything in this game that isn’t easy. Meaning that it is all easy. There isn’t much in this game that you can’t just overpower with dps and a few dodge rolls. The only thing i’ve seen so far in pve that requires actual strategy and group composition is maybe a successful teq kill. Even then the strategy is pretty simple. Pvp isn’t much different than pve in that respect….except for the problems created by the condition meta. Pretty much rock, paper, scissors with a bit of coordination thrown in. They didn’t design this game to be really difficult.

Yes, btw….fractals are pretty much just gated by AR. The mechanics from entry level fractals pretty much persist all the way through the higher levels. There are a couple changes as you get higher..but most things are the same.

Yes again, most players have come from games with higher levels of raid content. Including myself. This game is intensely easier than doing coordinated raid content. I’m pretty sure that was a design goal.

Only things Guardians lack is consistant damage to keep up with condition builds. Or a proper way to combat them. Everything else people say is really over reacting to have to try hard or show some skill.

Amins – No, I see what you’re saying – but you’re right, I’m ignoring it. I’m ignoring it because even if it’s true, it’s not relevant to the disagreement I had with Redscope’s comment that warriors are better at all the roles he listed. I’m not claiming Guardian is balanced to warrior, so I don’t need to refute claims that it isn’t. I’m claiming that despite any imbalance, Guardians are still superior in the support/healing role.

I think you’re viewing "Support’ from a skewed perspective.

You’ve pigeon holed support as in a ‘defensive’ capacity and although that’s how most people see it, it doesn’t encompass the entirety of the meaning…

Guardians support via:
- Healing
- Boons (Regen/Protection/Stability/Might)
- Damage Negation (Walls, Sanctuary, Shield, Blocks [arguable for sure… 1 block can either take 10k dmg or 60 dmg]).
- Area Control -> CC from Lines/Rings
- Condi Removal

Warriors do the same thing, differently:
- Healing
- Boons (Might, Vulnerability, Weakness, Fury)
- Damage Negation & Area Control in 1 weapon: Hammer
- Condi Removal (Warhorn/Shouts)- though not as good

It’s already been shown that a Shout Build Warrior can heal almost on par w/ a guardian in terms of HPS… what they do ~better~ than a guardian is ~on demand~ Burst Healing…. the guardian has to set up for it.

And again, the build I posted does all this AND incredibly good damage.

I still dont’ know why people seem to thing that Guardian “Healing” is soo great. It’s not. What makes guardians so good is the Damage Negation, Stability, Protection & Condi Removal.

What most people are arguing currently, is that other classes do not have to sacrafice the same point distribution to fulfil their support role, while maintaining something resembling other than a wet noodle when it comes to damage: IE, suppor/shout build warrior can out heal the guardian support build dmg… whereas the opposite is not true.

yosslives.1345:

Kreslin.6832:

Redscope.6215:

Kreslin.6832:

username.4932:

Guardians aren’t bad, warrior is just a better choice and more versatile.

I wonder, in which cases warrior is better choice?

Bunker
Warrior > Guardian (Healling sig, perma-regen, high HP, 100% condi immune)
Damage
Warrior > Guardian (Hundred blades, eviscerate, killshot, perma-fury)
CC
Warrior > Guardian (3 hammer stuns, 2 mace stuns, 1 shield stun, cc utils)
Condi
Warrior > Guardian (bleed, cripple, blind, burn, torment, weakness, immo)
Healing/Support
Warrior > Guardian (perma-regen, banner buffs, shouts heal, AoE group rez)

But don’t worry guys, you can still burst Courage and give everyone ONE block on a 90 second cooldown! That counts for something right? … Wait, blind condi does the same thing? … Crap, I guess you’re SOL.

In the brackets you brought only warrior’s capabilities. It’s only a half of a picture. Where the guardian’s, so we can compare?

So, as I’m reading this I’m moving a bunch of my stuff over to my warrior, but here are some things guardians do provide:

Wall of Reflection, when traited, has a pretty good use to reset ratio (almost 1:3, 12 seconds up time on 32 CD). It blocks a huge number of ranged projectiles and stays on my hot bar for almost every single encounter in a Fractal.

Shield of the Avenger is very good as well, offering a similar 1:4 ratio (20 seconds of use on a 60 second CD, which starts after it has expired). It feels clunky sometimes and, in my experience, will block most projectiles (some slip through between the spirit weapon’s casting sequence).

Stand Your Ground is good, though it is situational. Save Yourself and Hold the Line are useful only for those running 0/0/30/30/10.

Too many Guardian abilities offer boons that just are not very useful. Protection and regeneration are nice, but they do not make a significant impact on fights.

Who the hell keeps shooting against wall of reflection? are people that bad? also not all range weapon/kit are relected.
Try to apply a necro well removing boons on a guardian symbol, no boon for you now.
Shield of the avenger dies with one hit, and like wall of reflection easy to counter.

There are to many counters and easy ways to kill a guardian , that is why they are always my first easy target.

ODB.6891:

You should probably re-read what I said. I said there isn’t anything in this game that isn’t easy. Meaning that it is all easy.

If that is the case, then yes. I was incorrect. I’d like to blame global warming, lack of sleep, my parents, the current president, et al

However, it is my lack of reading comprehension I’d wager if I was to be honest.

Kwll.1468:

When it comes to spvp at least, where you can just roll up any class/build on the fly, if your goal is to be effective you really shouldn’t play a Guardian as anything but a center point bunker. Other classes do all the other roles better and its not just Warrior. For example as a roamer and dps there are multiple classes that do it better then Guards. I perosnally just feel its bad class design that has a class do one role at a 10 and then all there other roles at about a 6. Ideally every class would do a couple of things at a 10 level and then all other things at about an 8 level. This is all just theorectical using a 1-10 scale with 1 being the worst and 10 the best. I would be happy if they would just change the fury duration on meds to 5 or 7 seconds and give us some more swiftness. Not really asking for much.

When I played sPvP, I played a meditation guard — scepter/focus, sword/torch. It has decent spikes, decent condition removal, and at least decent sustained damage; and I could take most of the people I played against (all classes) in 1v1. True, I melted quickly once done with defensive skills in 1v{2,3} … but I was often the top scorer or second for soloq.

Not saying I’m great at it, or that guard is the best class for this — most of the people I faced may have just been worse than me — but I find found the spikes from the above pretty good, along with mobility from sword 2 and one of the meditations. And since meditations are all instant now, I’d have a bit more flexibility with my build … (either keep the old trait for constant fury, or look at other trees).

I did play with a few people who thought that the only role guard can play is bunker — but they generally really sucked (i.e. couldn’t 1v1 or bunker or … anything that I saw).

Aeolus.3615:

Who the hell keeps shooting against wall of reflection? are people that bad?

I have had many people almost entirely kill themselves on my Wall of Reflection. Some people only bring ranged weapons so if they are smart enough to move around the wall, you can just jump to the other side of it.
It’s fantastic area denial, they’re either shooting themselves in the face or not attacking a whole lot for 12 seconds. I love it.

There are a couple facts that remain apparent.

A warrior has high starting health. A guardian’s is ridiculously low. Yet their self healing is somewhat on par.

A warrior can spec healing and still retain some damage and innate tankiness. A guardian will have to sacrifice one of these in his gearing.

A warrior can spec healing/support with 30 points. A guardian must spend at least 50.

Some of the numbers people are throwing around assume a 100% uptime of protection and regen for the guardian. Which is not the case at all. Our buffs last on average 5 sec. To get these to last 100% of the time requires us to give up some seriously important stats either in tankiness or damage.

This is where the fundamental problem atm lies. The warrior does not have to invest as much in gear or traits to be as effective. There is an underlying unfairness that we have put up with for 12 months.

Amins.3710:

You’ve pigeon holed support as in a ‘defensive’ capacity and although that’s how most people see it, it doesn’t encompass the entirety of the meaning…

I’m simply arguing in the context of the person whose original assertion I’m attempting to counter. You can argue that a character the kill all your opponents before they can attack anyone is “support” but most people would say that it fits under “damage” in the list below.

The original position I’m arguing with defined these roles – his breakdown, not mine – and said the warrior was better at each:
Bunker
Damage
CC
Condi
Healing/Support

Based on that, I do not consider those other things (such as CC) to be healing/support as we’ve defined them for the present conversation. Those are by definition “other” roles. I am considering healing, damage mitigation, and boons to allies.

Amins.3710:

Guardians support via:
- Healing
- Boons (Regen/Protection/Stability/Might)
- Damage Negation (Walls, Sanctuary, Shield, Blocks [arguable for sure… 1 block can either take 10k dmg or 60 dmg]).
- Area Control -> CC from Lines/Rings
- Condi Removal

Warriors do the same thing, differently:
- Healing
- Boons (Might, Vulnerability, Weakness, Fury)
- Damage Negation & Area Control in 1 weapon: Hammer
- Condi Removal (Warhorn/Shouts)- though not as good

[…]

It’s already been shown that a Shout Build Warrior can heal almost on par w/ a guardian in terms of HPS… what they do ~better~ than a guardian is ~on demand~ Burst Healing…. the guardian has to set up for it.

So by your own admission, shout build warrior doesn’t heal as well as a support guardian – though I get that you think that it’s closer than it should be.

Guardians can apply far more might and the offensive burn proc to offset not having fury. A traited support guardian can apply far more vulnerability and blindness by F1 spamming than a warrior can do vulnerability and weakness for damage mitigation, and can do it with any weapon (though staff tagging helps). Guardians supply more regen, protection, and critical AoE stability not to mention retaliation because it doesn’t factor much into the support/healing side.

Your most compelling RELEVANT point is actually the max burst heal (truly the overall balance point is the most compelling, but again, that wasn’t the argument you stepped into. And the most compelling point you’re not making is why warrior can be so much better at offense and still be better at raising allies with warbanner albeit on a long cooldown. I’ll admit it’s annoying that a shout Warrior has a higher instant-spike heal with multiple shouts. But, then that’s pretty well it for healing for awhile. The guardian has a smaller instant heal with VoR, but that is offset by the fact that they can insta-apply blindness, protection, regeneration, and aegis along with that heal as instas. Dodge heals can follow in short order and then be repeated every 5-10s. Empower’s spike heal can add a burst, abeit a little slower, and then whatever the 3rd utility slot brings by preference. Add in the VoR passive heal if the Guardian skips PoV for Battle Presence as I have for more sustained healing all the while. Tack on Renewed Focus for the option to re-do that virtues burst on a short delay or the tome for burst healing (which to be fair is on a long cooldown like Warbanner)… I think it’s worth the tradeoff when evaluating what we bring in the role under discussion.

Amins.3710:

And again, the build I posted does all this AND incredibly good damage.

And again, you miss the context of the argument I was having with Redscope’s statement. Say that guardians should have viable offensive options comparable to other classes , and I’m on board as long as we have to sacrifice some support for it. Say that warriors are better in each of those other categories while not being terrible in this one, and I might agree. But we’re better at this specific role.

Relentliss.2170:

Some of the numbers people are throwing around assume a 100% uptime of protection and regen for the guardian. Which is not the case at all. Our buffs last on average 5 sec. To get these to last 100% of the time requires us to give up some seriously important stats either in tankiness or damage.

I agree with pretty much everything else you said, but since I’m the one throwing around most of the guardian numbers I’ll say my numbers for healing potential over 25s vs shouts or over a minute in the other scenario were taken with actual uptime over those intervals. I’m factoring in the multiple sources of some of those, and boon duration, but not assuming sustained permanent uptime to reach the numbers I wrote.

You might have been addressing someone else’s argument – but I wanted to be clear.

If they truly don’t want to up our hp pool that’s fine. They said it recently that is the case. Then they need to fairly compensate us else where. I’m looking at healing give us a baseline boost there. That we don’t have to invest largely into. I don’t agree with the whole blinding path. Because that way we would end up thieves with plate on. Which will quickly get nerfed as soon as we get it.

Radjan Majere.4208:

Relentliss.2170:

Some of the numbers people are throwing around assume a 100% uptime of protection and regen for the guardian. Which is not the case at all. Our buffs last on average 5 sec. To get these to last 100% of the time requires us to give up some seriously important stats either in tankiness or damage.

I agree with pretty much everything else you said, but since I’m the one throwing around most of the guardian numbers I’ll say my numbers for healing potential over 25s vs shouts or over a minute in the other scenario were taken with actual uptime öover those intervals. I’m factoring in the multiple sources of some of those, and boon duration, but not assuming sustained permanent uptime to reach the numbers I wrote.

You might have been addressing someone else’s argument – but I wanted to be clear.

Wasn’t referring to your specific numbers but some of the general per second calcs here and in the spvp forum that seem to have a 100% uptime of regen.

Radjan Majere.4208:

Amins.3710:

You’ve pigeon holed support as in a ‘defensive’ capacity and although that’s how most people see it, it doesn’t encompass the entirety of the meaning…

Guardians can apply far more might and the offensive burn proc to offset not having fury. A traited support guardian can apply far more vulnerability and blindness by F1 spamming than a warrior can do vulnerability and weakness for damage mitigation, and can do it with any weapon (though staff tagging helps). Guardians supply more regen, protection, and critical AoE stability not to mention retaliation because it doesn’t factor much into the support/healing side.

Now you’re blending builds.

You’re also saying that Group Distributed Fury is offset by a guardians “Burn Proc”. Ridiculous.

All you’ve done in your “argument” is further define how you value “support”.

Conversation, done.

Guardians are fine. I still see more of them in wvw than warriors. Yes warriors and necros are the fotm. What does that always mean. It means they will be nerfed into the ground like every other fotm has been. So just be paitent and warriors will be garbage again when they nerf healing singet and nobody uses it anymore and they mess with the traits so you don’t get everything by taking 1 trait line in warrior.

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Guardians are fine. I still see more of them in wvw than warriors. Yes warriors and necros are the fotm. What does that always mean. It means they will be nerfed into the ground like every other fotm has been. So just be paitent and warriors will be garbage again when they nerf healing singet and nobody uses it anymore and they mess with the traits so you don’t get everything by taking 1 trait line in warrior.

Have you played alot of MMO’s? All of them have had the golden childs that the devs love….IE the pobcast with class buffs the devs were giddy when they talked about warriors… and the ones who stay black sheep and never get help for years why? Easy they sit back with the attitude “ohh they will get to us” and it never happens class becomes played very little and then the devs go.. why spend time on a class no one plays.. thus it is perma black sheep.

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Guardians are fine. I still see more of them in wvw than warriors. Yes warriors and necros are the fotm. What does that always mean. It means they will be nerfed into the ground like every other fotm has been. So just be paitent and warriors will be garbage again when they nerf healing singet and nobody uses it anymore and they mess with the traits so you don’t get everything by taking 1 trait line in warrior.

I really hope that they instead of nerfing warrior, they buff everything else to its level. What is good in warriors is that they have a lot of options (zerker, tanker, zeker/tanker, conditions, hybrid, support, …), 90%+ good traits and skills and arent boring to play (everything has low cooldowns). All classes should be like that.

Irsei.6802:

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Guardians are fine. I still see more of them in wvw than warriors. Yes warriors and necros are the fotm. What does that always mean. It means they will be nerfed into the ground like every other fotm has been. So just be paitent and warriors will be garbage again when they nerf healing singet and nobody uses it anymore and they mess with the traits so you don’t get everything by taking 1 trait line in warrior.

Have you played alot of MMO’s? All of them have had the golden childs that the devs love….IE the pobcast with class buffs the devs were giddy when they talked about warriors… and the ones who stay black sheep and never get help for years why? Easy they sit back with the attitude “ohh they will get to us” and it never happens class becomes played very little and then the devs go.. why spend time on a class no one plays.. thus it is perma black sheep.

It really shows too, with the races too. Charr are in need of good armor that doesn’t clip or shave mane/remove horns. Anet’s logic is obviously if it’s the least played or it isn’t popular, the way to fix it is to put more work into the popular classes/races, and forget about the less popular ones. The OCT 15 patch was a huge letdown aside from the meditations becoming instant and a fury buff. Purging Flames is okay.

Lucentfir.7430:

Irsei.6802:

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Guardians are fine. I still see more of them in wvw than warriors. Yes warriors and necros are the fotm. What does that always mean. It means they will be nerfed into the ground like every other fotm has been. So just be paitent and warriors will be garbage again when they nerf healing singet and nobody uses it anymore and they mess with the traits so you don’t get everything by taking 1 trait line in warrior.

Have you played alot of MMO’s? All of them have had the golden childs that the devs love….IE the pobcast with class buffs the devs were giddy when they talked about warriors… and the ones who stay black sheep and never get help for years why? Easy they sit back with the attitude “ohh they will get to us” and it never happens class becomes played very little and then the devs go.. why spend time on a class no one plays.. thus it is perma black sheep.

It really shows too, with the races too. Charr are in need of good armor that doesn’t clip or shave mane/remove horns. Anet’s logic is obviously if it’s the least played or it isn’t popular, the way to fix it is to put more work into the popular classes/races, and forget about the less popular ones. The OCT 15 patch was a huge letdown aside from the meditations becoming instant and a fury buff. Purging Flames is okay.

Fury buff is to short to be of any use… now if warriors had a buff like that it would last 3 secs on a 12 sec reuse.. ohh wait they have that on the off hand axe and I read alot of warriors saying its useless..12 sec use timer 3 sec up time and we get a 2 sec up time on a what 20 to 30 sec timer?

20 kitten and 60 sec reuse for a fury that last 1 sec less then warrior get on a weapon! Hello devs you cant see how this is just wrong?

Purging flames was not a buff, it was a mechanic change. Old version could remove more conditions by re-entering or could be walked into by a zerg (or player if cast at range) removing conditions for anyone who entered or passed by. New version is more bursty initially and rewards stationary play. Its not better, just different.

Same with Signet of Resolve with perfect inscriptions traited. Not a buff, just a mechanic change. Used to remove 2 conditions every 10 seconds, now 1 condition every 8. More frequent, but less potent.

Same with Signet of Mercy, you can now target it, but you can also now miss and waste it.

Hallowed ground, smite condition, merciful intervention, glacial heart were buffed. Fury on meditation is a new trait.

Healing breeze was also buffed, just in time to be practically replaced by new antitoxin skill. (no channeling aoe heal with similar power for allies and condition removal on a shorter cooldown.)

Irsei.6802:

Lucentfir.7430:

Irsei.6802:

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Guardians are fine. I still see more of them in wvw than warriors. Yes warriors and necros are the fotm. What does that always mean. It means they will be nerfed into the ground like every other fotm has been. So just be paitent and warriors will be garbage again when they nerf healing singet and nobody uses it anymore and they mess with the traits so you don’t get everything by taking 1 trait line in warrior.

Have you played alot of MMO’s? All of them have had the golden childs that the devs love….IE the pobcast with class buffs the devs were giddy when they talked about warriors… and the ones who stay black sheep and never get help for years why? Easy they sit back with the attitude “ohh they will get to us” and it never happens class becomes played very little and then the devs go.. why spend time on a class no one plays.. thus it is perma black sheep.

It really shows too, with the races too. Charr are in need of good armor that doesn’t clip or shave mane/remove horns. Anet’s logic is obviously if it’s the least played or it isn’t popular, the way to fix it is to put more work into the popular classes/races, and forget about the less popular ones. The OCT 15 patch was a huge letdown aside from the meditations becoming instant and a fury buff. Purging Flames is okay.

Fury buff is to short to be of any use… now if warriors had a buff like that it would last 3 secs on a 12 sec reuse.. ohh wait they have that on the off hand axe and I read alot of warriors saying its useless..12 sec use timer 3 sec up time and we get a 2 sec up time on a what 20 to 30 sec timer?

20 kitten and 60 sec reuse for a fury that last 1 sec less then warrior get on a weapon! Hello devs you cant see how this is just wrong?

You need at least Save yourselves and some boon duration to make make it better. Though I think from a warrior’s perspective too since I own one, off hand axe may give good fury, but the 5 skill does less damage then axe 1 chain

The amount of fury is so-so, not too bad if you consider it is on our burst skills. Personally i rarely even run it with my med build as I use RHS instead to free up some more sustain in stats. Meditations weren’t meant to be sustained dps skills.

cheshirefox.7026:

Mikau.6920:

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Guardians are fine. I still see more of them in wvw than warriors. Yes warriors and necros are the fotm. What does that always mean. It means they will be nerfed into the ground like every other fotm has been. So just be paitent and warriors will be garbage again when they nerf healing singet and nobody uses it anymore and they mess with the traits so you don’t get everything by taking 1 trait line in warrior.

I really hope that they instead of nerfing warrior, they buff everything else to its level. What is good in warriors is that they have a lot of options (zerker, tanker, zeker/tanker, conditions, hybrid, support, …), 90%+ good traits and skills and arent boring to play (everything has low cooldowns). All classes should be like that.

all classes can’t be the same

What I tried to say is: Make all classes fun and viable in multiple choices. I cant say about all classes but now Guardian have a lot of useless/ not viable utilities:

• Spirit Sword;
• Spirit Hammer (does not worth its uptime);
• Spirit Bow;
• Sanctuary (some uses it, but I’ll never use it couse its CD);
• Bane Signet (active – useless only on PvE);
• Signet of Mercy (active – useless, too long cast and CD);
• Signet of Wrath (passive – we don’t have a cond build);
  (…)

And a lot of useless traits. Now Warrior, all utilities are good, all trait lines are viable and so on. I don’t want to all classes be the same, but they all should have a lot of options.

Our burst survivability isn’t high enough to outweigh the fact that any enemy that doesn’t stand still always can outrun us as if we were a penguin who forgot to pay off their penguin loan shark and got penguin baseball batted to the penguin knees. Hobbling around like some sort of degenerate failure of applied velocity…

Meanwhile most classes skip around like some sort of ninja ballerina on speed or have alternative options like loldps and lolcc.

Gladly I picked asura so I have the illusion of being a bit faster. If I was a huge race snailing about… I’d probably gouge my eyes out with sporks when going from point a to point b, out of boredom.

Fox.2785:

Hello. I play guardian on SoS. My quistion is, this being the forums and such people tend to overact when stuff isn’t all that bad. I recently felt like doing WvW again (Mosly roaming) But alot of people are saying that guardians have been nerfed to the ground, some saying that there’s absoulty no reason what so ever to play a guardian over a warrior.

Lets face it warriors are boring and dont require much skill so I’ll pass. Now it comes down to where I was going with this.

Is it true? Are guardians just plain bad now? Or are people overreacting.

People are over-reacting.

Silentstorm.7531:

Only things Guardians lack is consistant damage to keep up with condition builds. Or a proper way to combat them. Everything else people say is really over reacting to have to try hard or show some skill.

They lack damage to keep up with condition builds because:

• They can’t keep targets in melee range
• They lack multiple conditions to apply during combat
• They have low DPS in general
• They have to stay in symbols in order to get vital boons
• They have very little available regen from passive traits
• They have to sacrifice much utility to remove conditions
• They have to rely on a lot of active healing to make up for lower HP levels

Every single bullet point made there could be fixed by simply giving the guard more damage, and all of that has been said. So yeah, you’ve just summed it up in a very over-simplified way and then said people are over-reacting. They’re not; they’re being more complex than your “more dmg pl0x” post.

I don’t think Anet just wants to blanket-increase guard damage to the point where all of those crippling weaknesses are balanced. I could be wrong though.

Amins.3710:

Radjan Majere.4208:

Amins.3710:

You’ve pigeon holed support as in a ‘defensive’ capacity and although that’s how most people see it, it doesn’t encompass the entirety of the meaning…

Guardians can apply far more might and the offensive burn proc to offset not having fury. A traited support guardian can apply far more vulnerability and blindness by F1 spamming than a warrior can do vulnerability and weakness for damage mitigation, and can do it with any weapon (though staff tagging helps). Guardians supply more regen, protection, and critical AoE stability not to mention retaliation because it doesn’t factor much into the support/healing side.

Now you’re blending builds.

If you think so, then you aren’t paying attention. Everything there I do with my build. Can do all that with 0-15-0-30-20 and adding the last 5 wherever you like. (Radiance for signet trait if you like healing signet, valor to offset the lighter toughness of this build, virtues for some extra dmg/boon dur are all viable options.)

Amins.3710:

You’re also saying that Group Distributed Fury is offset by a guardians “Burn Proc”. Ridiculous.

Not as ridiculous as you think. First “offset” doesn’t have to mean “equivalent,” second, you’re ignoring the group might that is triggered by he same skill (traited) but mostly because you seem to think I mean the every x-hit self proc because you seem unreceptive to actually absorbing what other people are saying instead of just assuming you know their argument is crap. I’m talking about the Group Distributed “give-everyone4-sec burn on their next hit” proc that you incorrectly think I’m blending builds to get, which along with group distributed might is recharged every time you spam the F1 skill which you spam every time something you sufficiently staff tagged dies when traited, as I’ve stated. I’m telling you, in a large group fight when things start dying, I hit F1 so often and reflexively that I have trouble not wasting my F1 skills accidentally on other classes. In many situations, the extra criticals from group fury may outdamage 20s (max potential) of distributed burn…. but I apply the F1 proc to allies WAY more frequently in an average fight than that shout can trigger.

Amins.3710:

Conversation, done.

If you say so. Probably best, if you’re not going to open your mind to the idea that someone else might have a point.

Dirame.8521:

Fox.2785:

Hello. I play guardian on SoS. My quistion is, this being the forums and such people tend to overact when stuff isn’t all that bad. I recently felt like doing WvW again (Mosly roaming) But alot of people are saying that guardians have been nerfed to the ground, some saying that there’s absoulty no reason what so ever to play a guardian over a warrior.

Lets face it warriors are boring and dont require much skill so I’ll pass. Now it comes down to where I was going with this.

Is it true? Are guardians just plain bad now? Or are people overreacting.

People are over-reacting.

Says the engineer troll…. no need to keep kicking us while we are down…

Radjan Majere.4208:

I know warriors can offer support beyond the shorthand list above, but they can’t match a guardian’s ability to provide healing, support, and damage mitigation.

Your words, not mine.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

Dynnen.6405:

1 Aegis on a 48 second cd? Come on =P

Aegis through Virtue and Retreat gives you two quick blocks. Really only need to use blocks for any given bosses’ 1 hard hit. Blocking through a time warp lets your party not worry about dodging, and just do max dps in that window. So blocking is very powerful, when used correctly.

Also the guards blinds should not be taken lightly, it can burst down many silver mobs without taking any damage due to blocks and blinds.

I don’t get people who don’t want to play to guard’s strengths. If we don’t. then we end up as a second rate warrior. I prefer to not do that. Also stop saying a 10/30/0/10/20 build is crap dps. Running Zerker Gear with Scholar Runes keeps the output nice and high. Also the 20 in virtues gives higher passive HP regen, which synergizes with scholar runes by keeping that hp above 90% with more ease.

Aegis doesn’t really work half the time where it would be actually beneficial.

For example, Arah P3, boss is broken as heck because condi removal goes for immob. last. Aegis would be helpful right?

Wrong. Since his partner constantly hits low-damage attacks at you, its basically impossible to time Aegis to his 1HKO attack.

Amins.3710:

You’re absolutely right… I have no idea how much healing/support a guardian can do:

Odd that you would argue with a position I clearly didn’t take. You’ve made it clear that you do and I even explicitly pointed that out to you. Amins, I promise I’m not trying to get under your skin, and TBH I think you actually agree with me if you’d stop ignoring the context of the argument you walked into.

Amins.3710:

Honestly….You should have just taken out the “Support” from your comment and stated “Healing”:

As I’ve pointed out already, and you seem to keep ignoring, the original position from Redscope’s post that I was arguing with defined these roles – his breakdown, not mine – and said the warrior was better at each:
Bunker
Damage
CC
Condi
Healing/Support

I’m arguing in the framework of that role classification someone else laid out. I am therefore considering the role under dispute to be mostly healing, damage mitigation, and boons to allies, and, looking at his original examples of skills in each (go re-read his post on page 1) considering mostly healing. I took the liberty of adding damage mitigation and other boons to allies to his list because he didn’t explicitly put that into a different category, and so I presumed he means to include that in the “support” half. Seriously, look back at his original post. He DOES seems to include almost entirely healing in his description of that last role, and he made the argument that Warriors were better at it. So I took issue with that. And given the arguments you’re making, I think you would too.

Amins.3710:

But since you added in “support”… I really stopped paying attention to anything you had to say, as “support” encompasses many different ways in which it can be performed.

We agree there – that it can be defined differently, which is why I went through great pains to define the one I was using and why. I’m honestly not sure why you aren’t seeing that.

Amins.3710:

And if you missed what I said: Guardians are better Healers than Warriors… which was never the argument.

Saw it, understood it, and even explicitly repeated it back to you as something you stipulated. Except that it kind of was the argument I was having with Redscope. I made it a bit more complex by adding mitigation and boons to allies into the mix to make it more realistic, but I think that was a fair place to include them given his breakdown and word choice.

You already agree we outheal warriors. And I don’t think you are saying that warriors provide more damage mitigation than guardians (though I think you weren’t considering the full utility of the 15 pts in radiance for that part when you wrote one of your responses above, whether or not you knew it) or that they apply more beneficial boon value (offensive and defensive) to allies, either. So it’s really hard to see where you think you disagree with me except where I’ve pointed out that you’ve misunderstood me (e.g. what I meant by the fire proc).

It really seems to me that you’re choosing to argue with my argument against Redscope’s assertion even though your real problem isn’t that you disagree with me but just that you don’t like where Redscope drew lines between what he saw as the roles to compare warrior to guardian. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Irsei.6802:

Dirame.8521:

Fox.2785:

Hello. I play guardian on SoS. My quistion is, this being the forums and such people tend to overact when stuff isn’t all that bad. I recently felt like doing WvW again (Mosly roaming) But alot of people are saying that guardians have been nerfed to the ground, some saying that there’s absoulty no reason what so ever to play a guardian over a warrior.

Lets face it warriors are boring and dont require much skill so I’ll pass. Now it comes down to where I was going with this.

Is it true? Are guardians just plain bad now? Or are people overreacting.

People are over-reacting.

Says the engineer troll…. no need to keep kicking us while we are down…

My main currently is an Engineer yes but am I not entitled to my opinion about a class? (that I also actively play btw)

I didn’t really read the other posts (T.T) but I’m just gonna throw my 2 cents in here. Most people are overreacting, but I feel like they do have a point. Feel free to correct me (like you wouldn’t….) but the main complaint I see alot is the PoV fix and the Purging Flames consecration. For the Pure of Voice fix, we all got used to shouts removing two conditions basically. The bug lasted for quite a while and we rejoiced that it was left for so long. Now that its gone many don’t like have to use utility skills to remove 1 condition. The reason for this is that we are in a heavy condition meta which preeeettyyy much makes it mandatory to have strong condition removal in most builds to be effective against most builds 1v1 and small man. The second is also a personal complaint in that the purging flames consecration only gains its most effectiveness if you and your party members stand close together and STAY close together to benefit from its condition duration reduction buff. As you can guess, it would be a bad idea to stay stacked (obvious reason is aoe condi bomb which defeats the whole purpose of the skill).

So to be max condition removal you would have to run Focus Weapon and HOPE it comes back to you, have 20 points dedicated to your 5th traitline (name escapes me atm) and run the Contemplation of Purity Meditation. Another route includes running soldier runes to have shouts remove two conditions again but it also means running 30 points in the 4th traitline.

So to look at it with the said suggestions, you only have 20 trait points to your role (be it dps or support) which makes you miss out on alot of useful traits. You also lose 2 (or 3) utilities dedicating them to condition removal leaving only your weapon skills to deal damage for DPS roles. Support roles suffer from the fact that they require party members to stay within close range to benefit from the extremely small range skills AND most of the condition removal only works for yourself (the Virtue Cleanse and Focus condition removal) excluding shout builds. The cooldowns are extremely long (contemplation of purity being a minute , purging flames being 30+ seconds, and virtue cleanse you lose your passive heal now only having regen buff {unless traited}). You don’t have pretty much any build options in terms of traitlines.

So in short, Yes. We are mega qqing hard and overreacting. BUT, there is a perfectly valid reason for this qq.

this is funny.. they have their own agenda. so heads up

Is it really a overreaction if there is a valid reason behind it?

Not sure if valid is the right word here. Does anyone realize that the things we are deficient in might be inline with the concept of the class?

Well it all depends on how you look through it, Most of our consecreation are either bad or extremely situational. With a big exception on wall of reflection(altough it scales bad against smart people.)

Meditation took a huge hit since we use it for burst healing and quick transport back and forth, and im not talking about making them instant. That was actualy rather nice, but now warrior got a buff to there own so not only will they heal more with shout(our base is higher but scale worse). But they will heal everyone on a shorter cooldown than all but one meditation and if they are smart and use soldier rune,
they also remove condition on allies(and shrug it off, already removes.)

Our spirit weapons are terrible and good at maybe SPvP, never used them there but everywhere else, they instant die. And a kittened AI and long cooldown does not help.

Signets are. Meh.

And finnaly shout, the only good one i have yet to see any viability in. Yet they keep buffing or adding more condi cleanse to other classes so our defined role keeps getting obsolete. Not saying it is bad, it is still rather good but what does that leave us?

We lack mobility(don’t get me started on staff and retreat).
We lack damage(Can have nice damage but our survivability becomes less than a none dodge evade thief whitout stealth and movement speed)
We lack Condition control
We lack soft cc(same as above i guess).
And we lack in most aspect Hard CC(We do have a few Hammer / staff)
And we lack a viable range weapon