Guild Wars 2

The game’s simple, post your ideas for making the Guardian’s shield skills useful, no matter how big or small.
-Full Reworks
-Minor Tweaks
-Reasons why the current Shield is garbage

All are welcome.

ANET will hopefully, one day, look on this… or one of the 1000s of other threads and utilize one of them and we can all be the shield totting paladin many of us want to be.

My Idea: The core of the skills stay the same, with added mechanics new to HoT.

4: Shield of Judgement- Create a shielding wave in front of you that damages foes and gives protection and resistance. to yourself and up to five allies. Enemies hit by this wave are taunted for a short duration (up to 3-5 enemies…that may be a bit too much?)
-Traited this could give Aegis? Blind enemies as well?

5: Shield of Absorption – Create a dome around you that pushes foes back and absorbs projectiles (this is a channeled spell, but you can move while casting it) (slightly smaller dome to account for movement).

Shield of Absorption (active) – Detonate the dome to heal nearby allies. Healing ramps up after absorbing X amount of projectiles.

What does the community have to offer? How can we make this fragile plank into a BULWARK FOR JUSTICE AND TRUTH

Play a revenant. you gonna get good skills with shield.

Shield #4 – Allies that are hit gain Protection, enemies that are hit gain Weakness. Now it has strong incoming damage reduction and it will require good positioning to get the benefits from it for your allies

Shield #5 – Add protection, Resistance, Blind, Cripple, Chill or something at least

A blind with the detonation of 5 or even a vuln would be an interesting touch.
Knock em down then detonation to cause an even further moment of weakness.

Hell, why not try causing the detonation to spread your boons to allies as well as heal?

We’re talking about guardians. Guardians are a simple lot. We want the shield to do what its supposed to do now but effectively

Shield 4 Problem- Requires allies be standing infront of you. Why would a shield defend from behind?

Shield 5 Problem- Roots. crummy absorption shield for that loooong CD. Knocks people back making it miserable for melee weapons

Shield Trait Problem- Increases your toughness….If a player needs personal survivability they take focus. Shield is for group survivability.

Shield 4 solution-Cut back its protection power and give it some kind of debuff for the enemy as well. A blind or a daze. This way it gives abit of protection for the back line players by disabling the enemy and PLENTY of protection for frontline players in the fight with you because they get the protection too

Shield 5 solution- Remove the root, lower the radius, reduce the CD(but that’s already been done) and increase the projectile bubble time. That way you effectively have a projectile shield watching your back after you break up the enemy and go after your specific target(or ally).

EDIT:Shield Trait Solution- Refracting Altruism- Heal allies in a radius whenever you apply a defensive boon (Protection, Aegis, Resistance, Possibly regeneration but thats double dipping) With your shield equip
^Now THATS a choice worth taking and trying a few different ways.

P.S. But lets be honest. We’ll never be happy until our shield gets a block. BECAUSE SHIELDS BLOCK.(Also if you put a block on the shield somewhere it gives people the choice to pick a shield trait OR communal aegis. ~Build Diversity~)

I might be crazy here but what if ..
Stalwart Defender : Reduce cooldown on Shield skills, Reduce cooldown on Virtue of Courage passive AND active, while weilding a shiled, Virtue of Courage passive effect is shared with allies (ie allies get aegis evertime virtue of courage passive procs)
I might be crazy but that sounds like a kitten appealing trait to me. The choice becomes use Strength in numbers if you neeeded toughness, communal defenses if you wanted the blocks for allies but not use a shield, Stalward defender when using a shiled
What do you guys think ?

edit: After all shield is meant to be a support weapon .. reducing damage on allies fits that role by procing virtue of courage passive on allies while having a reduced cooldown.

edit: The goal is to make it the cooldown on virtue of courage down to 20s when using both Stalward defender AND Indomitable Courage.

x indigo x.6981:

I might be crazy here but what if ..

You are crazy (No offence). Having shield interract with a virtue would cause some serious balancing issues. That being said it would be great if it somehow covertly benefited from it more the same way rapid attack weapons benefit more from voj

P.S. That would also kind of put it in direct competition with communal defense.

Edit- Thinking about what you said gave me an idea. TY Indigo