Guild Wars 2

Currently it gives 4 pulses of 4 second swiftness durations. Which requires you to stand in the symbol for maximum swiftness duration.

Standing still is the opposite of swiftness and it’s ironic that this symbol of “swiftness” requires you to stay still for max effect. Modifying it to give a single pulse of swiftness of maybe 15 seconds seems more sensible.

I guess the problem with that would be, that it would stay active for such a short amount of time, that only those who stand in it/almost stand in it when it’s casted would get the swiftness buff. If you’d want it to stay up longer but with 15 seconds of swiftness at once, you would have to make it the way Temporal Curtain works… only get swiftness if you don’t already have any swiftness on you. And believe me, there’s a reason why Mesmers always wished for Temporal Curtain to at least work like the swiftness symbol used to work before it was changed.

This is a problem with all symbols not just swiftness, swiftness however is just the easiest to notice.

I have suggested for a while now that they make a simple change to symbols.

1: Cut the number of pulses in half.
2: Double the damage & boon applied per pulse.

This would do 2 things

1: Make symbols something enemies would want to avoid
2: Make it so the guardian & his/her allies do not have to stand still for 3-5 seconds to get the full benefit of a symbol (which can lead to them being easy targets in pvp & insta death in PvE)

I’ve suggested this before, but I’d just change the source of swiftness on the staff to the line of warding, so when you run over the line, it grants swiftness. This would make it easier to use on the move and would make LOW a more useful skill overall (it becomes a better escape and movement tool).

As for symbol of swiftness, they can change it to something else, like a symbol of fury, or a symbol of vigor, etc (I’m not sure what boon would work that either isn’t in use already, or isn’t OP for symbol use).

guardian symbold is just a way to deliver more to the masses, any other way symbols could work and provido more support to guardians?

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

I’ve suggested this before, but I’d just change the source of swiftness on the staff to the line of warding, so when you run over the line, it grants swiftness. This would make it easier to use on the move and would make LOW a more useful skill overall (it becomes a better escape and movement tool).

As for symbol of swiftness, they can change it to something else, like a symbol of fury, or a symbol of vigor, etc (I’m not sure what boon would work that either isn’t in use already, or isn’t OP for symbol use).

This is actually a great suggestion. So many good suggestions, I just wish Anet implemented them at some point.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

I’ve suggested this before, but I’d just change the source of swiftness on the staff to the line of warding, so when you run over the line, it grants swiftness. This would make it easier to use on the move and would make LOW a more useful skill overall (it becomes a better escape and movement tool).

That would be the mechanic of Temporal Curtain then. If you run through your Line of Warding even with just half a second of Swiftness on you, you will not get any Swiftness at all. Because if that’s not the case, you could stack ridiculous amounts of Swiftness by running through the same wall multiple times.

Saturn.6591:

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

I’ve suggested this before, but I’d just change the source of swiftness on the staff to the line of warding, so when you run over the line, it grants swiftness. This would make it easier to use on the move and would make LOW a more useful skill overall (it becomes a better escape and movement tool).

That would be the mechanic of Temporal Curtain then. If you run through your Line of Warding even with just half a second of Swiftness on you, you will not get any Swiftness at all. Because if that’s not the case, you could stack ridiculous amounts of Swiftness by running through the same wall multiple times.

That’s fine though. In fact, temporal curtain was what I had in mind when I thought of the line of warding idea for gaining swiftness. As far as I am concerned, the idea of running in one spot, or standing still to go “faster” is just absurd to begin with. You use swiftness because you want to move around faster, not so that you can stay in one place… faster… X__x

Also, there’s another severe mechanical flaw with symbol of swiftness that goes beyond just the concept of having to stand still to get a speed bonus, and that is that it also damages enemies. If you’re roaming around in pve or wvw and you pop down a symbol to go faster, then some random enemy creature walks into it, it immediately slows you down to combat speed because the enemy gets damage. Line of warding wouldn’t have this issue because it doesn’t do damage, it just blocks enemy movement, so you can pop it down without having to worry about slowing yourself down rather than speeding yourself up, which is the whole points of swiftness to begin with.

As it is right now, Symbol of swiftness is pretty much a broken skill as far as its mechanics are concerned.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

That’s fine though. In fact, temporal curtain was what I had in mind when I thought of the line of warding idea for gaining swiftness. As far as I am concerned, the idea of running in one spot, or standing still to go “faster” is just absurd to begin with. You use swiftness because you want to move around faster, not so that you can stay in one place… faster… X__x

Funny enough, Mesmers asked for quite a while to get Temporal Curtain changed to the old Symbol of Swiftness mechanic, where Swiftness would get “refilled” to a certain amount of Swiftness. Which is indeed way better than Temporal Curtain right now… which in return means that you’d technically want Symbol of Swiftness to be reverted to its old functionality. Then again, it wouldn’t work as well anymore with multiple Guardians all dropping the symbol in a line.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

Also, there’s another severe mechanical flaw with symbol of swiftness that goes beyond just the concept of having to stand still to get a speed bonus, and that is that it also damages enemies. If you’re roaming around in pve or wvw and you pop down a symbol to go faster, then some random enemy creature walks into it, it immediately slows you down to combat speed because the enemy gets damage. Line of warding wouldn’t have this issue because it doesn’t do damage, it just blocks enemy movement, so you can pop it down without having to worry about slowing yourself down

That would make Line of Warding superior to Temporal Curtain then in terms of giving Swiftness, haha. That’s because Temporal Curtain very often puts you in combat due to it crippling every random mob that crosses it (can even be a bunny). Earlier, you could activate the pull to prevent that, but at some point they changed it so that the pull also puts you in combat. Meh. ^^

Saturn.6591:

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

That’s fine though. In fact, temporal curtain was what I had in mind when I thought of the line of warding idea for gaining swiftness. As far as I am concerned, the idea of running in one spot, or standing still to go “faster” is just absurd to begin with. You use swiftness because you want to move around faster, not so that you can stay in one place… faster… X__x

Funny enough, Mesmers asked for quite a while to get Temporal Curtain changed to the old Symbol of Swiftness mechanic, where Swiftness would get “refilled” to a certain amount of Swiftness. Which is indeed way better than Temporal Curtain right now… which in return means that you’d technically want Symbol of Swiftness to be reverted to its old functionality. Then again, it wouldn’t work as well anymore with multiple Guardians all dropping the symbol in a line.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

Also, there’s another severe mechanical flaw with symbol of swiftness that goes beyond just the concept of having to stand still to get a speed bonus, and that is that it also damages enemies. If you’re roaming around in pve or wvw and you pop down a symbol to go faster, then some random enemy creature walks into it, it immediately slows you down to combat speed because the enemy gets damage. Line of warding wouldn’t have this issue because it doesn’t do damage, it just blocks enemy movement, so you can pop it down without having to worry about slowing yourself down

That would make Line of Warding superior to Temporal Curtain then in terms of giving Swiftness, haha. That’s because Temporal Curtain very often puts you in combat due to it crippling every random mob that crosses it (can even be a bunny). Earlier, you could activate the pull to prevent that, but at some point they changed it so that the pull also puts you in combat. Meh. ^^

I prefer it when you can just run through the line and get the full duration of swiftness in one go, which will then allow you to move around freely, as opposed to having to stand in one place, or running over the same spot over and over again to get the same duration or to refill it. That’s why I don’t think swiftness should ever be applied to a skill with a “pulse” mechanic.

I mean, if you need to travel from point A to point B, and it would usually take you 20 seconds, and you use swiftness to grant 33% movement speed increase for the entire duration, it should then only take you around 15 seconds to get there. However, if you use symbol of swiftness, it means standing still for 5 seconds to get the full duration, in which case it would actually still take you 20 seconds to get there…

So, as you can see, having to stand still to move faster is obscenely counter productive, and completely negates the movement speed bonus outright in many cases. You don’t even benefit a tiny little bit from it, unless you use it on the move, in which case you may only get 4 seconds of swiftness at a time with a 15 second cooldown (not counting boon duration increases or traits).

When you consider how easy it is for some other classes to gain swiftness, or other passive movement speed bonuses (like signets or traits that give 25% extra movement speed), guardian swiftness mechanics just seem really meh. I will, however, be honest and say that mesmers are probably a very close second as far as crappy movement speed availability goes.

Reducing the number of pulses would lead to the situation where your group can just leave the symbol and still get the full effect by touching the symbol once over its duration. Currently you either need to stay on spot to get short benefits, or you leave the symbol, which reduces the (mostly defensive) effects of a symbol on your group. A great boon of the current implementation is, that the short-duration boon spam kind of counters boon ripping but also provides good counter play via AoE boon removal and corruption.
That ultimately would destroy most builds which make use of Altruistic Healing as well, because the healing potential would go down significantly.

If you want higher swiftness uptime on your guard, get an ele or warrior in your group, or sacrifice 4 seconds on your way for perma-swiftness every now and then, if you lack allies to help you out.

maeggle.6021:

Reducing the number of pulses would lead to the situation where your group can just leave the symbol and still get the full effect by touching the symbol once over its duration. Currently you either need to stay on spot to get short benefits, or you leave the symbol, which reduces the (mostly defensive) effects of a symbol on your group. A great boon of the current implementation is, that the short-duration boon spam kind of counters boon ripping but also provides good counter play via AoE boon removal and corruption.
That ultimately would destroy most builds which make use of Altruistic Healing as well, because the healing potential would go down significantly.

If you want higher swiftness uptime on your guard, get an ele or warrior in your group, or sacrifice 4 seconds on your way for perma-swiftness every now and then, if you lack allies to help you out.

I severely doubt it would “Destroy” builds that make use of altruistic healing if the number of pulses on symbols were halved.

I say that because the vast majority of builds that use altruistic healing also make use of empowering might.

Besides even if it did lower the effect of altruistic healing too much they could easily bump up the scaling a bit to compensate.

In the end guardians would be better off anyway because you & your group wouldn’t be forced to stand still for 3-5 seconds to make full use of a symbol.

In a group, there’s often more than one person buffing Swiftness, though.

Also, with a single pulse, half the group might not be getting any Swiftness because they do not enter the symbols AoE fast enough to receive the buff.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

I severely doubt it would “Destroy” builds that make use of altruistic healing if the number of pulses on symbols were halved.

Five allies per pulse equals 350 HPpS without any Healing Power. For most symbols that’d result in a loss of 700+ HPpS for the guard if we talk about stacked play.

I don’t agree about your statement of EM being used in most AH-builds. My experience is quite the opposite: While AH ist often traited when using EM, AH is mostly used in pseudo-tank builds, both in PvE and several WvW group comps, where EM’s performance may be subpar compared to other traits and to what your group can do.

Currently, the equations for AH also incorporate stuff like shouts, traited virtues, boons on weapon skills (e.g. Empower) and boons from combos. Symbols are part of it, but not mandatory. If you push AH scaling just because you nerfed symbols, that’d lead to a total mess.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

In the end guardians would be better off anyway because you & your group wouldn’t be forced to stand still for 3-5 seconds to make full use of a symbol.

That’s the point of them, though. Just like consecrations, they provide a temporary and stationary area which benefits your team. If you want to play with symbols, you have to adjust your own and your team’s play-style accordingly to get the best use out of it.
In my opinion, it not only makes sense from a magic-lore PoV (symbols being areas which protect you, but if you leave them you lose the buff), but it’s also good design: You want powerful benefits from symbols? Stay in them. You want to fight your enemys while buffing up? Control them. You want your foes to not get the buffs? Control them!

Also, it was already said that team comps can mitigate problems like lacking swiftness up-time. If you want to solo-roam in PvE or WvW, you could always opt-in for some traveler runes, run a meditation sword+greatsword variation and / or use Retreat and Save Yourselves as well.

maeggle.6021:

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

I severely doubt it would “Destroy” builds that make use of altruistic healing if the number of pulses on symbols were halved.

Five allies per pulse equals 350 HPpS without any Healing Power. For most symbols that’d result in a loss of 700+ HPpS for the guard if we talk about stacked play.

I don’t agree about your statement of EM being used in most AH-builds. My experience is quite the opposite: While AH ist often traited when using EM, AH is mostly used in pseudo-tank builds, both in PvE and several WvW group comps, where EM’s performance may be subpar compared to other traits and to what your group can do.

Currently, the equations for AH also incorporate stuff like shouts, traited virtues, boons on weapon skills (e.g. Empower) and boons from combos. Symbols are part of it, but not mandatory. If you push AH scaling just because you nerfed symbols, that’d lead to a total mess.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

In the end guardians would be better off anyway because you & your group wouldn’t be forced to stand still for 3-5 seconds to make full use of a symbol.

That’s the point of them, though. Just like consecrations, they provide a temporary and stationary area which benefits your team. If you want to play with symbols, you have to adjust your own and your team’s play-style accordingly to get the best use out of it.
In my opinion, it not only makes sense from a magic-lore PoV (symbols being areas which protect you, but if you leave them you lose the buff), but it’s also good design: You want powerful benefits from symbols? Stay in them. You want to fight your enemys while buffing up? Control them. You want your foes to not get the buffs? Control them!

Also, it was already said that team comps can mitigate problems like lacking swiftness up-time. If you want to solo-roam in PvE or WvW, you could always opt-in for some traveler runes, run a meditation sword+greatsword variation and / or use Retreat and Save Yourselves as well.

it’s not just symbol of swiftness that is the problem though, its all symbols.

Look at symbol of protection. Because it pulses 3 times the swing timer for the hammer must be incredibly slow. (hammer is a good weapon but the AA swing being so kitten slow does make it feel horrible)

Look at symbol of faith. The fact that it takes so long to stack up regeneration means you will often take more damage then is worth standing there for due to enemies in PVE hitting so hard & the fact that in Spvp a target standing still becomes a sitting duck.

Symbol of wrath, well its more or less alright because with retaliation you don’t mind getting hit & it also does some nice damage.

Symbol of swiftness is bad because sitting around in it so long negates the usefulness of said swiftness.

I’m not saying symbols should be instant full effect & done but they should have a greater effect and be shorter duration then they are now.

That is why I suggest the simple change of halving their duration & doubling their boon per pule (and increasing damage per pulse)

This would make them something you truly want to get into if an ally casts, truly want to avoid if an enemy casts & get rid of the problem if needing to stand around like a clueless idiot for 3-6 seconds to get their full benefit.

As for this change effecting altruistic healing. Yes it would but there is no reason they couldn’t boost the scaling of altruistic healing to compensate.

Symbols are fine as is. I cannot see why you can’t benefit from them as much as I or my party / teams are able to do. In WvW roaming (solo, small group & full group) and PvP conquest mode we are / I am able to get the full benefit in most situations, no matter the weapon set and play style.

You seem to be in doubt about the ability to stay on a symbol for its full duration, and about the inability of your foes to not leave it. Well, just look at the whole spectrum of weapon skills, traits, utilities, self-sufficient and team-related synergies: You have lots of stationary control over your opponents in offensive play, and you can mitigate a great deal of (melee) damage via blocks (mace #3 even is an AoE block on low cooldown!), blinds, evades, reactionary control and melee damage pressure in defensive play.

In PvE, mobs are dumb enough to just stand in your AoE. State of the art dungeoneering relies on heavy stacking. The only problem with symbols might be, that – if you don’t know what you are doing or you’re not paying attention – you might screw up a whole might-stacking rotation. As long as you pay attention and communicate with your mates, it’s no big deal.

Changing anything about the current symbols would just break so much stuff and either make them over- or underperforming. I wouldn’t want that to happen, just for the sake of making some stuff more accessible in-transit. Please try to think more about how everything relates on a wider field of view than than your personal wish for better access to swiftness, and try out some different play styles if symbols don’t feel right for you at the moment. They are great, you can use them efficiently on every weapon set, and they are extremely powerful in team play, even without any changes to them.

maeggle.6021:

Symbols are fine as is. I cannot see why you can’t benefit from them as much as I or my party / teams are able to do. In WvW roaming (solo, small group & full group) and PvP conquest mode we are / I am able to get the full benefit in most situations, no matter the weapon set and play style.

You seem to be in doubt about the ability to stay on a symbol for its full duration, and about the inability of your foes to not leave it. Well, just look at the whole spectrum of weapon skills, traits, utilities, self-sufficient and team-related synergies: You have lots of stationary control over your opponents in offensive play, and you can mitigate a great deal of (melee) damage via blocks (mace #3 even is an AoE block on low cooldown!), blinds, evades, reactionary control and melee damage pressure in defensive play.

In PvE, mobs are dumb enough to just stand in your AoE. State of the art dungeoneering relies on heavy stacking. The only problem with symbols might be, that – if you don’t know what you are doing or you’re not paying attention – you might screw up a whole might-stacking rotation. As long as you pay attention and communicate with your mates, it’s no big deal.

Changing anything about the current symbols would just break so much stuff and either make them over- or underperforming. I wouldn’t want that to happen, just for the sake of making some stuff more accessible in-transit. Please try to think more about how everything relates on a wider field of view than than your personal wish for better access to swiftness, and try out some different play styles if symbols don’t feel right for you at the moment. They are great, you can use them efficiently on every weapon set, and they are extremely powerful in team play, even without any changes to them.

I don’t think there’s any problem with the mechanics of symbols as a whole. The only symbol that actually has a mechanical issue, is the symbol of swiftness. While it makes sense to stand in an AOE to get protection, regen or retaliation, all of which suggest a bunker-type, “hold this position” style of play, swiftness is another matter altogether because it promotes movement as opposed to promoting holding an area or stacking with your team.

Swiftness on a symbol is just poor gameplay design. In no way does it benefit stacking and standing still in one place in the manner that regeneration, protection and retaliation do. In fact, standing in one place to get the benefits of swiftness, which allows players to move faster, is completely contradictory and counterproductive. That’s why I believe that swiftness should be moved to the line of warding, and that the symbol of swiftness on the staff should be changed to something else that promotes stacking or staying in an area more. A symbol of aegis would be epic of course, but it would also be OP.

maeggle.6021:

Symbols are fine as is. I cannot see why you can’t benefit from them as much as I or my party / teams are able to do. In WvW roaming (solo, small group & full group) and PvP conquest mode we are / I am able to get the full benefit in most situations, no matter the weapon set and play style.

You seem to be in doubt about the ability to stay on a symbol for its full duration, and about the inability of your foes to not leave it. Well, just look at the whole spectrum of weapon skills, traits, utilities, self-sufficient and team-related synergies: You have lots of stationary control over your opponents in offensive play, and you can mitigate a great deal of (melee) damage via blocks (mace #3 even is an AoE block on low cooldown!), blinds, evades, reactionary control and melee damage pressure in defensive play.

In PvE, mobs are dumb enough to just stand in your AoE. State of the art dungeoneering relies on heavy stacking. The only problem with symbols might be, that – if you don’t know what you are doing or you’re not paying attention – you might screw up a whole might-stacking rotation. As long as you pay attention and communicate with your mates, it’s no big deal.

Changing anything about the current symbols would just break so much stuff and either make them over- or underperforming. I wouldn’t want that to happen, just for the sake of making some stuff more accessible in-transit. Please try to think more about how everything relates on a wider field of view than than your personal wish for better access to swiftness, and try out some different play styles if symbols don’t feel right for you at the moment. They are great, you can use them efficiently on every weapon set, and they are extremely powerful in team play, even without any changes to them.

After your saying this I have to wonder how much you actually play a guardian.

First you act like its easy for a guardian to lock down his/her foes inside the symbol.
Second you act like its worth it to stand inside a symbol for 3-5 seconds instead of continuously moving around to avoid damage.
The thing that really makes me wonder is when you say mace block is worth using. (little hint, it’s the only melee reactive block in game that is triggered by ranged attacks)

I do agree that in Pve they aren’t much of a problem, the problem mainly resides in WvW & pvp.

The only real problem that could arise by reducing the pulses on symbols but increasing the boon & damage per pulse is that altruistic healing would not work as well anymore,
That ^ is a problem that is easily solved by a simple numbers change.

After my Ele, Guardian is my second-most played character with ~1500ish hours of active play time (mainly WvW roaming, but also running dungeons every now and then). I feel quite confident when playing my guard and having a deep understanding of its mechanics, thank you for asking.

I’m not only suggesting that, as a guardian, you have several tools to keep your foes in melee range, I actually know that you can (if you want to) because it’s something I’m doing all the time when I’m playing guardian. If nothing helps, your team will, anyways. And yes, sometimes staying in your symbols is exactly what your group should do to win fights, and sometimes it is something you just set them up and then forget about them after a second. It really depends on the encounter.

I already listed several things which would be hugely affected by even the smallest changes to the AH-formula, which are unrelated to symbols. Also, halving the pulses or doing some other stuff to them, would make traited symbol effects not only worthless but would reduce their effectiveness in both their defensive and their offensive capabilities.

On another note: Mace is one of the go-to choices in dungeons and fractals atm. You have to wonder why that is? Probably has to do with the short-cooldown AoE-block and the strong AA damage coefficients…

maeggle.6021:

After my Ele, Guardian is my second-most played character with ~1500ish hours of active play time (mainly WvW roaming, but also running dungeons every now and then). I feel quite confident when playing my guard and having a deep understanding of its mechanics, thank you for asking.

I’m not only suggesting that, as a guardian, you have several tools to keep your foes in melee range, I actually know that you can (if you want to) because it’s something I’m doing all the time when I’m playing guardian. If nothing helps, your team will, anyways. And yes, sometimes staying in your symbols is exactly what your group should do to win fights, and sometimes it is something you just set them up and then forget about them after a second. It really depends on the encounter.

I already listed several things which would be hugely affected by even the smallest changes to the AH-formula, which are unrelated to symbols. Also, halving the pulses or doing some other stuff to them, would make traited symbol effects not only worthless but would reduce their effectiveness in both their defensive and their offensive capabilities.

On another note: Mace is one of the go-to choices in dungeons and fractals atm. You have to wonder why that is? Probably has to do with the short-cooldown AoE-block and the strong AA damage coefficients…

Guess we will just have to agree to disagree.

I can see where symbols are more or less fine in PvE but in PvP and WvW (wrath excluded, its fine everywhere) I feel like they could use the change because they take so long to gain the full benefit & standing still that long often causes more problems then they are worth.

Can you at least agree that the following changes would be beneficial

1: lower the pulses on symbol of protection to 2, & increase the damage per pulse slightly but lower the cast time to 1/2 second (this would net the same over all damage in the AA chain & keep protection uptime the same but make the AA chain much faster)
&
2: Cut the number of pulses on symbol of swiftness from 4 to 2 in exchange for increasing the base swiftness uptime to 7 seconds per pulse & increasing the damage per pulse.

1. wouldn’t effect altruistic healing at all & would make the hammer much more enjoyable to play with.
2. would cut the number of proc’s swiftness causes for Ah by half but it would result in much more mobility & burst when using the staff.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

I mean, if you need to travel from point A to point B, and it would usually take you 20 seconds, and you use swiftness to grant 33% movement speed increase for the entire duration, it should then only take you around 15 seconds to get there. However, if you use symbol of swiftness, it means standing still for 5 seconds to get the full duration, in which case it would actually still take you 20 seconds to get there…

So, as you can see, having to stand still to move faster is obscenely counter productive, and completely negates the movement speed bonus outright in many cases. You don’t even benefit a tiny little bit from it, unless you use it on the move, in which case you may only get 4 seconds of swiftness at a time with a 15 second cooldown (not counting boon duration increases or traits).

Maybe you’re using the symbol wrong, what if the symbol isn’t thought of as traveling from point A to point B the fastest, what if it’s main idea is to get your group to keep up maximum speed during combat. Cause if you put SoS down under you during fighting you are most definite going to have swiftness on you all throug the fight. Maybe you sohuld use retreat for traveling 20 sec distances between A and B, and if you need more one tick of SoS on each cooldown will increase it pretty substantially.

Well, we know the system can tell if you have swiftness or not and apply an amount of swiftness based on that. Like before, you’d get 8s with no swiftness and 1s with. Since patched, it gives 4s flat.

A good fix would be 10s if you have no swiftness, and 4s if you have swiftness. This would allow for combat mobility (place a symbol and keep moving) if you have no swiftness, or allow you to supplement it. It wouldn’t effect any scenario negatively, like zerg spamming SoS or reduced AH procs. It would however fix the need to stand in the same place to get a reasonable amount of swiftness.

All while using the tools in place and not requiring a rework of how symbols work.

Xhean.3452:

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

I mean, if you need to travel from point A to point B, and it would usually take you 20 seconds, and you use swiftness to grant 33% movement speed increase for the entire duration, it should then only take you around 15 seconds to get there. However, if you use symbol of swiftness, it means standing still for 5 seconds to get the full duration, in which case it would actually still take you 20 seconds to get there…

So, as you can see, having to stand still to move faster is obscenely counter productive, and completely negates the movement speed bonus outright in many cases. You don’t even benefit a tiny little bit from it, unless you use it on the move, in which case you may only get 4 seconds of swiftness at a time with a 15 second cooldown (not counting boon duration increases or traits).

Maybe you’re using the symbol wrong, what if the symbol isn’t thought of as traveling from point A to point B the fastest, what if it’s main idea is to get your group to keep up maximum speed during combat. Cause if you put SoS down under you during fighting you are most definite going to have swiftness on you all throug the fight. Maybe you sohuld use retreat for traveling 20 sec distances between A and B, and if you need more one tick of SoS on each cooldown will increase it pretty substantially.

Even if the point is to give your party maximum speed in combat, it still doesn’t function properly, because it still requires your party members to stay in one area, which limits movement and leaves them vulnurable to enemy attacks. The point of fast movement speed in combat is usually to either chase enemies or to kite them. You won’t be completing either of those tasks efficiently if you’re busy standing in a symbol while your enemy runs away, and you certainly can’t kite efficiently if you’re trying to stay inside a small area to get max swiftness duration.

As for retreat, I was wondering when that skill would come into the discussion. Personally, I don’t think it’s a very effective swiftness skill, because it’s overall swiftness up-time relative to its cooldown is quite low. Sure you could combine it with SoS to extend the duration of swiftness, and thus the uptime, but all that means is using two skills to serve the same function that other classes can already achieve with just one skill, or even with just a single trait. I don’t see how that could be considered balanced.

with 8 guardians placing SoS in a spread out pattern during combat it’s not hard keeping swiftness up without hampering movement, also used during regroups.
In the example of going from point A to point B in 20 secs I think that retrat is a really good alternative…
Is every aspect of the game suposed to be considered balanced? I think it doesn’t hurt the game to have different skills for all classes, for example no other class can give as much aegis as guardians can, should they all be able to do it as good?

@Xhean

I was under the impression that light fields are frowned upon in wvw and zerg play, because they interfere with blasting fire fields and water fields for group healing and might. This goes for regrouping and stacking as well. Also, for group swiftness during zerg roaming, lighting fields from eles are far more effective.

You are correct about the light fields, it all comes down to teamwork and using them in proper rotations so they don’t interfere with each other. SoS and lightning fields have different cooldowns and the lightning fields are used more for the stun effect on attacking or fleeing targets, while putting them down mid fight under the zerg for blasting would interfere as much with the fire and water fields as a missplaced SoS.

Symbol of Swiftness grants 4 seconds of swiftness if you run over it and 17 seconds if you stand in it. I don’t see the problem.

runeblade.7514:

Symbol of Swiftness grants 4 seconds of swiftness if you run over it and 17 seconds if you stand in it. I don’t see the problem.

Various people have pointed out the problems above, but to summarize:

1: To get the max swiftness duration, you have to stand still inside the field. Standing still is the complete antithesis of moving faster, so it’s easy to figure out why that is a bad mechanic.

2: If you’re on the move, chances are you’ll only get 4 seconds of swiftness at a time running through the field. 4 seconds of swiftness on a skill with a 15 second cooldown means less than 30% swiftness up time while on the move. That’s really poor compared to other classes with permanent passive movement speed increases from traits or signets, or superior up times on their swiftness skills.

3: Because the symbol does damage, if any random creature runs into it to try chase you while you are roaming, you get slowed to combat speed and thus your movement speed bonus is not only negated, but is actually worsened as a whole.