Guild Wars 2

Just so you know I only play PvE, so all of this is from a non PvP perspective. Anyhow, i’ve been enjoying my hammer guardian for a while now. I use every skill quite often except Ring of Warding. The only time I find myself using it is when trying to keep something from running away, which isn’t all that often especially since you have to be right next to the mob for it to be effective. It’s on a very long CD for a weapon skill (40 sec) and is extremely situational. I was wondering if there was any way to improve this skill to make it more useful in a larger variety of encounters.
The first thing that comes to mind is, the ward should do damage to those inside of it. Personally, I’d like to see it lay down a symbol. Given the 40 sec CD I don’t think this would be OP in any respect. If you can’t justify doing that just make it burn foes inside or something. Perhaps you can do a pulsing area blind or something. I dunno. I just know that this skill needs to do something more than a crappy 5 sec barrier. It feels like its wasting a weapon skill slot. Anyone else have any ideas on how to improve RoW?

i guess it has more limited uses in PvE. or rather, it shines a lot more in PvP areas. a similar discussion has been thrown around before. a few improvements:

• make it an instant cast while rooted; or
• allow the Guard to be able to cast while moving with a similar cast-time

making it a symbol would be extremely powerful i feel. especially since we have one on the hammer already, which can happen quite often.

the RoW does act as a lightfield (not on tooltip), so sometimes if i want to give AoE retal and don’t have time for hammer 1 chain or want to save my other utilities, you can drop, and then #2 to combo retail, then go into chain 1 or what not with retal up already.

i think foes definitely shouldn’t be able to walk / jump / dodge through it without stability. though again in PvE, not as applicable.

can be fun using it to trip enemies up. say for eg. you aggro them at range, they run towards you drop RoW, they run into it. move behind them and then banish them into the ring again. it’s just fun to do. and a little game i liek to play sometimes is to take mobs down without losing any health. so little “tricks” like these, if you will, help with that as you’re able to keep mobs off their feet, i.e. unable to attack you.

Ring of Warding actually counts as Combo Field: Light, so you could use it for an on-demand combo if you want. IE, you don’t have to wait for Symbol of Protection in the Hammer chain.

In terms of PvM though, I mainly just use #1 and #2 on Hammer.

Oh I didn’t realize it was a light field, but it still seems very lackluster in PvE. But you’re right about only ever using the #1 and #2 skill on the hammer, those are the only damaging skills. This is why I would like to see the Ring of Warding do damage. Its on a long CD so even if it did do symbol damage it wouldn’t be OP. Even the GS has a symbol on a shorter CD.

you have a point in it being a long CD, while the symbol from hammer chain #1 is conditional in pulling off 3 hits on a mob to drop a symbol. whereas the other two 2h weps you can drop on command. i guess ANet had planned to only have one symbol on each of the two-handed weapons.

i wouldn’t mind it if it wasn’t a symbol or didn’t do dmg, but rather, inflicted some sort of condition like you mentioned. OR if they do use stability, dodgeroll out of it, then they receive dmg, or get dazed or something.