Guild Wars 2

With all of the noise about the Vigorous Precision change in the recent patch and how that impacts Altruistic healing builds in particular, I feel like sharing a theory about why balancing the guardian seems to be so tricky.

Generally speaking, condition damage stats are terrible for Guardians, so if you want to do damage, you have a choice between Power/Precision/Crit damage stats on your gear.

With the low HP pool that a guardian has, going full Berserker’s gear is almost suicide, so your best two choices become Knight’s and Valkyrie’s if you want to maintain a balance of survivability and damage output. Unfortunately, Valkyrie’s gear gives you additional crit damage, which doesn’t help much unless you are already using a fairly high crit build.

Here is where I believe the problem lies. In both PvE and PvP, the Knight’s set offers 2 offensive stats and 1 defensive stat to help achieve some balance between survivability and damage output. The difference is, in PvP, you gain a significant boost in your most critical area (HP), while in PvE, you gain a ton of toughness.

The baked in class mechanics already do a pretty decent job of reducing incoming damage (Aegis, Numerous sources of Protection etc.), but don’t do a lot to mitigate burst damage or heavy condition damage sources.

The reason the AH builds are (yes, they were nerfed, but they are still) so powerful is that the steady stream of incoming heals compensates for the low HP pool, and allows the toughness/protection/aegis to multiply the effect of that healing.

Contrast the PvP Knight’s set with the PvE set and you can easily see why frequent PvP players might feel that Guardian survivability is out of line with the level of damage they are able to do, while in PvE (or WvWvW especially) a guardian is forced to give up more damage (by moving towards Soldier’s gear) or feels more vulnerable to burst/conditions.

I believe that if people had access to the same stat splits that exist on Knight’s Gear in PvP in the PvE world, the guardian would be in a much better place without any other changes to the class.

Fake Edit: I realize that you can mix and match Pow/Prec/Crit and Pow/Tou/Vit gear and get in the same ballpark from a damage/survivability standpoint, but having a high crit rate is arguably more beneficial (Vigorous Precisions, Empowering Might, Sigils etc.) than having a ton of bonus crit damage.

I think that if we could run around with a build like THIS one as a starting point for a balanced build, most people would feel that Guardians were in a much better state. People wouldn’t feel forced to rely on Altruistic Healing as a crutch. The PvE gear equivalent to that setup would have 13.8k HP and 3475 Armor. With the PvP stat splits, you get some flexibility to be more offensive without being suicidal, or more defensive without giving up damage completely.

Care to explain how exactly condition-damage is “terrible” on Guardians when we have a constant and steady supply of burn from Virtue of Justice?

It’s not something you invest everything in, but it sure as hell ain’t terrible unless I’m missing some crazy important number somewhere.

Because burn stacks duration instead of intensity

Basically, what Berengar said.

In more detail, no matter what you do, you’re not going to get enough condition damage to make that stat more effective point for point than putting points into power or precision. Guardians don’t have any reliable access to bleeds or poison, and at best you can get up to 100% uptime on burning, which would be about 750 DPS with basically fully stacked condition damage. That’s about 400 DPS over the base burning damage, at the cost of around 1700 stat points. Dumping those same 1700 points into Power or Precision would be significantly more effective from a damage standpoint.

To put it another way, it only takes 5 stacks of bleeds for the scaling on bleeds to be better than the scaling on burning. Any decent condition-centric build can easily maintain more than 5 stacks, not to mention poison/burning/confusion.

Where burning IS really nice is that the base damage is pretty high with no points invested into condition damage, so you get a pretty decent benefit from all of those free burns, without any real investment.