Guild Wars 2

The scepter is a viable option for ranged combat for the guardian.
I was just curious regarding the 2nd ability – Smite.

Why does smite announce 15 blows but doesn’t always hit? This makes it’s damage less than it should be. I’d understand if the opponent was moving away from the cast area, but if the enemy is standing still, why don’t all blows hit? It’s base damage is around 15×450 in some 3seconds. Nothing that OP so why don’t have all blows hit the target if it’s not moving?

A 2nd question, why isn’t this ability a proper area attack? I’ll explain. You cast the ability on the ground and if an enemy is in that small area it gets hit. If several enemies are in that area, they all get hit but, you don’t get extra damage as you should from an area attack, instead, if you have say 5enemies standing still in that small area, and you get say 10 hits, you’ll have damaged each one for some 800-1000hp over 3 seconds….wow. Even regen abilities easily nulify this. It actually is better for the enemy to have more people in the area of the attack to distribute the damage. This is not how area attacks should work.

If this were a proper area attack, you might see some 4k on each target, given that they stayed in that small area (which is not OP, it’s a small area, easy to move off of it) and yet it would make the ability a bit more useful.

What’s the downside to having this attack perform like a proper area attack? It basically works like Lava Font (Elementalist) where that skill does about 4×1000 with a 4-5sec CD. But that skill hits all that are near it!

Yup, we’ve been asking for Smite to become a symbol for a long time.

I assume that Anet wants Smite to have a lot of hits, to blow through defenses, or hurt when someone has retaliation. However, I agree that it’s pointless when the hits don’t connect.

It is basically a PvE focussed skill – If it were to become a symbol I wouldn’t be surprised if Anet also reduced its damage by 80%.
The question is, do you want another symbol AoE skill that does mediocre damage to up 5 enemies, 1 tick every second or a very high damage single target skill ( I believe it’s the highest damage skill in the game in ideal circumstances ). In its current form it procs on-crit effect like nothing else, flame bursts, might, vigor etc.

I would be more inclined to fix its reliability.

Tarsius.3170:

The question is, do you want another symbol AoE skill that does mediocre damage to up 5 enemies, 1 tick every second.

Yes, I would like another symbol that can be casted at range.

Smite is one of the hardest hitting abilities guardian’s have. Spec’d and geared properly, it demolishes people in WvW. 1.5k-2k damage per individual hit. Try dropping it into a group of people and see what happens.

Against a single player its effectiveness is diminished, but still quite large. Against larger enemies/world bosses/killable objects it is one of the hardest hitting moves in our arsenal.

The ability itself isn’t weak, but in order to maximize its potential you have to gear and trait for it.

@Tarsius
Probably not the hardest hitting in the game, but definitely in the top 10 in the right circumstances.

i’m quite split between it becoming a symbol or not. i think i am an advocate for it, but i would really, really, really miss the fast hitting skill that it is now. also, like Tarsius mentioned, they’ll probs cut back on the damage dealt as well. if you ahve multiples in your symbol, then the damage overall mgiht be on par but versus single target, your DPS can potentially drop a few times.

DDDD: can’t decide. lol. i actually love it as is.

Kelnis.1829:

@Tarsius
Probably not the hardest hitting in the game, but definitely in the top 10 in the right circumstances.

Yeah, probably not in terms of DPS – but I remember we calculated its max theoretically total damage in the max dps thread – under ideal circumstances (all guardian buffs, debuffs, 2600 armor target) it would do about 75k of damage ;-)

At the risk of repeating stuff that has been discussed a lot already in historical threads, I’d be tempted to keep its fast hit damage baubles, but have it also proc a symbol for a secondary effect ( 1 sec cripple for instance )

Lol, yeah it is has some monsterous potential. We need to make a proper theorycrafting thread, but I don’t think the official forums is the most constructive venue. I think they’d have to make it something like “10% chance on hit to cause 1s of cripple.” That would give us an unpredictable, but powerful cripple effect. The potential to have all of the hits proc cripple is there, but on average you’d see 2-3s of cripple from it. The only issue about anything like that would be balancing. Right now it has a very generous cooldown of 6s with an active time of about 3s. Having a >50% uptime on cripple might be too much.

Kelnis.1829:

Lol, yeah it is has some monsterous potential. We need to make a proper theorycrafting thread, but I don’t think the official forums is the most constructive venue.

just remember to let me know where you guys go talk fun stuff, okay? okay. lol.

My favorite skill against bosses ^^. Doesn’t work well in pvp tho.