Guild Wars 2

Seeing this trait left out of the upcoming balance patch makes me sad.

It could be: A solid tool to address kiting, helping defensive players keep enemies off their teammates and offensive players stick to targets.

It is: A piece of trash.

Problem: 30 second cooldown, made harder to use by weapon swaps. You don’t need a particularly long duration for soft cc, it just has to be easily and repeatedly applied with good uptime. This trait does none of those things.

Solution: Melee weapons chill on crit. 2 second duration, 10 second cooldown.

Just barely enables hundred percent chill uptime with hydromancy every swap and 100% bonus chill duration. Also frees up usage of other melee weapons, as hammer was probably the least in need of more control.

I agree that the trait is a bit lame. I would argue, however, that the trait was only created because Guardian has no reliable snare. Ironically, the trait itself was originally unreliable and the fact that it’s still tied to crits technically means it still is unreliable.

I don’t have a problem with traits offering snares, however, I don’t think that our only snare outside of immobilise should be offered exclusively via a trait, that creates a dependance on the trait.

The core issue is that Guardians just don’t have snares and I think the smoothest way to deal with it is to give them access to something the every other profession in the game already enjoys: cripples on almost every weapon*. I do quite like your suggestion and I’m not denying it would be awesome but I think it would be good in addition to having other snares. Kind of like how Warrior’s have Leg Specialist and still have a million cripples.

I truly don’t understand why a profession that is designed to perform better in melee range has such a limited array of skills to keep foes in melee range when every other profession can throw cripples around everywhere, in a lot of cases, without even trying. The fact that Guardian excels at support does not warrant the lack of snaring options as plenty of other professions can be remarkably good at support and have incredibly easy access to cripple and/or chill.

*Note: I said, “almost”.

Cripple and chills are slows, whilst immobilize is a snare. Maybe you’ve come from different games than I have, but usually snares are understood to stop all movement, and cripple and chill only slow movement. It might be confusing for some people so i’m just pointing that out.

So did you mean that guardians don’t have enough immobilize and thus need more slows? Because if so then I disagree. Guardian immobilize on scepter and hammer are pretty decent. Hammer was never supposed to effectively snare people at 1200 range anyway, and it works pretty reliably out to midrange.

Or did you mean that we don’t have enough slows? I’m not trying to be a nit picker here, I’m just actually not understanding.

Either way, agreed that we need more control, but disagreed that our immobilize needs to be stronger. I think good chill uptime would be really, really strong for guardians.

Linnael.1069:

snip

He does mean we need more slows, in some other games snare and slow are used interchangeably.

My apologies if I was too ambiguous, to clarify, I’m completely fine with the immobilises we have. I was referring to cripple and/or chill. I know a lot of people want Guardian to have more chills but I think cripple not only fits better, thematically, but because it also doesn’t affect enemy skill cooldowns it could stand to be applied liberally to Guardian weapon skills. You know, like how other professions have it already.

GLACIAL heart… it needs to be a chill.

It also needs a little bit of a buff, I want to use it in the zergs!

Clarifying again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have access to chill via Glacial Heart but I think Glacial Heart as it stands at the moment is just a bandaid fix for a profession that has almost no access to chill/cripple. What would be truly amazing is if Guardians had cripple available on weapon skills in similar amounts to other professions as well as the option of choosing Glacial Heart for even more slows. That removes the reliance on Glacial Heart being the only slow we have but keeps it as a viable option if someone wants to build that way.