Guild Wars 2

Part 1, Virtues, Utilities and Weapons
Part 2, Traits

Traits:
Zeal:
Minors:

• Zealots Speed: Changed to a Symbol of Swiftness (Staff #3).
• Symbolic Exposure: Will now also pulse 1/2 second cripple.
• Symbolic Power: no changes.

Majors:
Adept:

• Fiery Wrath: Increased damage to 10% up from 7%.
• Wrathful Spirit: Merged with Shattered Aegis.
• Zealous Scepter: Reduce cd of scepter skills by 20%, Smite’s Symbol will now also pulse 1 stack of burning.
• New Trait: Spawning Power: Increased to duration of Spirit Weapons by 33%.

Master:

• Blinding Jeopardy: Immobilizing, blinding or cippling a foe also applies vulnerability to them.
• Kindled Zeal: Increased Power scaling to 13% up from 10%.
• Zealous Blade: Increased Healing Power scaling by 100%.

Grandmaster:

• Expeditious Spirit: When you cast a Spirit Weapon, also cast one on up to 5 allies around you (360 radius). When you have more than 10 stacks of might in combat gain a Splinter Weapon (60 second icd)
• Shattered Aegis: Merged with Wrathful Spirit, increased radius to 360 up from 240. Will now also apply 2 stacks of burning for 3 seconds.
• Symbolic Avenger: Increased damage to 20% up from 10%.

Radiance:
Minors:

• Justice is Blind: Increased radius to 360 up from 240.
• Renewed Jusice: no changes.
• Radiant Power: no changes.

Majors:
Adept:

• Healers Retribution: Merged with Retribution.
• Inner Fire: no changes.
• Right Hand Strength: no changes.
• New Trait: Holy Cause: Increase the base damage of Retaliation by 50% (to 300 up from 200)

Master:

• Radiant Fire: no changes.
• Retribution: Merged with Healers Retribution.
• Wrath of Justice: no changes.

Grandmaster:

• Amplified Wrath: no changes.
• Radiant Retaliation: Retaliation will now scale from Power OR Condition Damage (Which ever is highest). Increased scaling to 0.15 up from 0.075.
• Perfect Inscriptions: Reduce CD of Signets by 20%, increase the passive effect of Signets by 50%, when you activate a Signet grant Light Aura to up to 5 nearby allies for 5 seconds.

Valor:
Minors:

• Valorous Defence: ICD reduced to 20 down from 30.
• Courageous Return: no changes.
• Might of the Protector: ICD removed, reduced might stacks to 1 down from 2.

Majors:
Adept:

• No changes.

Master:

• Communal Defenses: no changes.
• Stalwart Defender: Removed bonus toughness while whilding a shield.
  Shield of Judgement will now launch enemies hit (Launch Distance: 0, see Daredevil Impact Strike)
  Shield of Absorbtion will now reflect projectiles.
• Strength in Numbers: merged with Battle Presence.
• Added Glacial Heart from Virtues, added: Symbol of Protection is now an Ice Field (Overwrites “Holy Fire” from Honor).

Grandmaster:

• Altruistic Healing: no changes.
• Monks Focus: no changes.
• Retributive Armor: Gain toughness for a period of time when blocking an attack. Gain ferocity based on your toughness.
  Aegis now block up to 2 Attacks.

Honor
Minors

• Vigorous Precicion: no changes.
• Selfless Daring: Radius increased to 360.
• Purity of Body: reworked, the end of your dodge roll converts 1 dondition into a boon for nearby allies (10 seconds ICD, radius 360)

Majors
Adept

• Invigorated Bulwark: no changes.
• Protective Reviver: no changes.
• Protector’s Impact: reworked, gain precicion based on your vitality (10%).

Master:

• Empowering Might: removed ICD.
• Honorable Staff: Gain 20% boonduration, Staff skills recharge 20% faster (changed from only giving boon duration while wielding a staff).
• Pure of Heart: merged with Force of Will.
• New Trait: Holy Fire: All your Symbols are now fire fields (Gets overwritten by “Glacial Heart” from Valor).

Grandmaster:

• Force of Will: merged with Pure of Heart.
• Pure of Voice Will now convert 2 conditions into boons up from 1.
• Writ of Persistance: no changes

Virtues
Minors:

• no changes

Majors:
Adept:

• Master of Consecration: no changes
• Retaliatory Subconscious: Changed to: Gain retaliation, aegis and Stability (1 stack) when stunned, dazed, knocked back, pulled, knocked down, sunk, floated, launched, taunted or inflicted with fear.
• Unscathed Contender: no changes.

Master:

• Absolute Resolution: SWITCHED PLACES WITH BATTLE PRESENCE Activating Virtue of Resolve converts 2 conditions into boons from nearby allies. Virtue of Resolve’s passive effect is stronger. (Base F2 converts 1, with this trait 3)
• Glacial Heart: Moved to Valor.
• New Trait: Unscathed Pursuer: While under the effects of Aegis you move 25% faster.
• Supreme Justice: merged with Permeating Wrath.
• New Trait: Virtuous: reduced CD of Virtues by an additional 15%, increased the range of virtues to 1200 up from 600.

Grandmaster:

• Battle Presence: SWITCHED PLACES WITH ABSOLUTE RESOLUTION and got merged with Strength in Numbers.
• Indomitable Courage: Increased Stability stacks to 5, passive effect now triggers every 15 seconds.
• Permeating Wrath: merged with Supreme Justice.

Part 1, Virtues, Utilities and Weapons

tl:dr
My goals with the guardian in short:
Increase build diversity (power dps, condition dps, support/heal)
Make every weaponset playable (for different roles/build)
rework spirit weapons and signets
update the “role” of the guardian to be sort of the “opposite” of the necromancer

I’m not sure how much I enjoy having to choose between Indomitable Courage and Absolute Resolution.

Frankly, and to clear up text, the 25% recovery boost to Virtue of Resolve could just be baseline. Then merge Battle Presence with Absolute Resolution. This would basically make it like Soothing Mists with the capability of removing condies on use. At which point it could be put into the GM slot, and Indomitable Courage could be made a Master-tier trait instead.

In which case, the stability stacks could go to 2 or stay at 1. Raising it to 5 is a bit much anyways if you ask me. The trigger time might be a bit low too. Guardians already have a lot of blocks, if they need better recovery (especially bunker guardians), I’m not sure more passive blocks would be everyone’s favorite. Nor do I think bunker guardians would want to have to decide between condition clear and stability/stunbreak Courage.

I still feel like guardian or at least DH should’ve gotten a perma 25% movement speed like chronos. I’m personally not rly feeling the move faster under aegis trait. It’s not like you have aegis in abundance for pvp modes where mobility actually matters because of how weak the the boon rly is there. Furthermore actually using retreat for aegis uptime would make the trait useless as it already gives you swiftness.

You just gave us like, 400 retal damages… considering we can apply it AoE, that’s quite OP.

You gave us perma might stacks. A DH running Altruistic Healing just became unkillable.

Might as well remove Traveling runes and “Retreat” from the game as they’re not needed anymore. Give us two Gyros and the ability to fly while you’re at it :)

Few critiques

The traits in zeal that are minors really need to be swapped out with some of the majors.

I say this because they concern symbols which only a few guardian weapons have high uptime on and and several dont have at all.
Minors should boost things that all specs of a class have access to regardless of weapon choice.
Majors should be about specialization and choice.

The traits Holy Cause and Radiant Retaliation are Op and would encourage a very passive game play would would be bad for the class.

Empowering Might Has a Cd for a reason due to how it works with altruistic healing. The only way to really improve it without making it OP is to increase the duration of might applied.

The new Pure of Voice would be a bit too powerful if save yourselves acted properly with the trooper rune and pure of voice as well as the Cd reductions you specified in the other thread.

Unscathed Pursuer, doesn’t really make much sense and wouldn’t be much use given how easy AEGIS is to remove.

Pure of Heart is actually quite nice where it is.

Battle Presence should really just be a base line effect to make it into an actual choice of weather or not to active resolve.

The new versions of Perfect Inscriptions, Stalwart Defender, Retributive Armor, Purity of Body, & Indomitable Courage vary between slightly overpowered to completely OP due to how strong they are and how some of them interact with other effects/traits.

Criticisms:

In general, you have overtuned many traits (some of which have gone on to the realm of being OP).

I don’t have any exact math or applicable situations to back this up, but I’d be willing to wager that retal on a full power/condi build should not be hitting any more than 250 to 325 (balanced for 1v1), and your fixes would put it at somewhere between 500 and 650 (350 to 450 in pvp). This adds a HUGE chunk of damage and would be op especially considering that a guard could build to have near perma-retal up time.

Making guardians choose between Absolute Resolution and Indomitable Courage is a huge no-go. This would kitten off the vast majority of guardian players. I’m also against the Strength in Numbers and Battle Presence change as this leaves medi guards with weak choices for our master-trait in Valor. I’d prefer a communal defences (with reduced ICD) and battle presence merge if anything.

Having all of our symbols be fire fields would be op and not very thematic of the guardian class in my opinion. Perhaps an elite spec we’ll get in the future could focus on changing functionality of symbols which would be awesome, but I think they’re fine as light fields.

The aegis refresh for the virtue should be 30 seconds (down to 25 seconds if traited) imo. Having a base of 20 seconds with a 15s refresh would give us some very high aegis uptime.

That being said, you made some great changes that I REALLY like:

-Glacial heart. This is an amazing change, and would definitely make me use hammer again. It would solidify hammer’s role as a defensive/CC weapon, and coupled with your hammer changes in part 1 of this post, hammer would easily have a place in the pvp-meta (or would at least be competetive enough to make it fun to use). I honestly hope ANET considers your suggestions here, great job!

-Spirit weapons: I very much like your changes, and throwback to GW1, but at the same time I love the active effects of our current spirit weapons. I think a hybrid of current SW + your suggestions might work best: We receive a SW tethered to our current weapon that adds certain effects and boons. Activating the SW would cause an effect similar/identical to our current SW actives:
Sword would create a mobile-light field that applies vuln and damages, hammer would cause a leaping hammer to strike/knockdown your target/600 range, Bow would do the same as it does now, and shield would break stun/give aegis to allies and create a projectile-blocking bubble at your current location.

-I like your changes to the Zeal traitline. I think a better rearrangement of the SWs would be this though: Spirit weapon dura increase by 33% should be attached to the GM trait, and “spawn a splinter weapon,” should be the adept trait.

-I like your merges for Zeal and Radiance in general.

I rather like the idea of that “Virtuous” trait. I always thought virtues losing half of their range was completely ridiculous and uncalled for.

Most of what I’d say on traits has already been said. I would note, however, that Unscathed Pursuer does seem like an interesting way to give the guardian more out-of-combat mobility. I’d probably be inclined to just throw it in with Unscathed Contender, however. While the theoretical damage increase of Unscathed Contender is high, given the expected uptime of Aegis in typical situations I tend to regard it as being a trait you take when you’re running the Virtues specialisation and don’t expect the alternative adept traits to be useful. Adding a speed boost while Aegis is up would make it a valid, well, contender in its own right.

Frankly as far as unscathed contender goes I’d say rework it a bit.

Make it give + 7% damage while under the effects of protection.

I say this because in an organized group protection has a decent up time where as in any challenging content or PvP AEGIS uptime is near zilch.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Frankly as far as unscathed contender goes I’d say rework it a bit.

Make it give + 7% damage while under the effects of protection.

I say this because in an organized group protection has a decent up time where as in any challenging content or PvP AEGIS uptime is near zilch.

Alternatively could make it so aegis is the last block removed instead of the first, so you can at least protect the dmg buff for an entire SoC/SoW. That way it’s a decent dmg buff that requires more active play to keep up.

Warangel Eldrith.9408:

Part 1, Virtues, Utilities and Weapons
Part 2, Traits

Traits:
Zeal:
Minors:

• Zealots Speed: Changed to a Symbol of Swiftness (Staff #3).
• Symbolic Exposure: Will now also pulse 1/2 second cripple.
• Symbolic Power: no changes.

Majors:
Adept:

• Fiery Wrath: Increased damage to 10% up from 7%.
• Wrathful Spirit: Merged with Shattered Aegis.
• Zealous Scepter: Reduce cd of scepter skills by 20%, Smite’s Symbol will now also pulse 1 stack of burning.
• New Trait: Spawning Power: Increased to duration of Spirit Weapons by 33%.

Master:

• Blinding Jeopardy: Immobilizing, blinding or cippling a foe also applies vulnerability to them.
• Kindled Zeal: Increased Power scaling to 13% up from 10%.
• Zealous Blade: Increased Healing Power scaling by 100%.

Grandmaster:

• Expeditious Spirit: When you cast a Spirit Weapon, also cast one on up to 5 allies around you (360 radius). When you have more than 10 stacks of might in combat gain a Splinter Weapon (60 second icd)
• Shattered Aegis: Merged with Wrathful Spirit, increased radius to 360 up from 240. Will now also apply 2 stacks of burning for 3 seconds.
• Symbolic Avenger: Increased damage to 20% up from 10%.

Radiance:
Minors:

• Justice is Blind: Increased radius to 360 up from 240.
• Renewed Jusice: no changes.
• Radiant Power: no changes.

Majors:
Adept:

• Healers Retribution: Merged with Retribution.
• Inner Fire: no changes.
• Right Hand Strength: no changes.
• New Trait: Holy Cause: Increase the base damage of Retaliation by 50% (to 300 up from 200)

Master:

• Radiant Fire: no changes.
• Retribution: Merged with Healers Retribution.
• Wrath of Justice: no changes.

Grandmaster:

• Amplified Wrath: no changes.
• Radiant Retaliation: Retaliation will now scale from Power OR Condition Damage (Which ever is highest). Increased scaling to 0.15 up from 0.075.
• Perfect Inscriptions: Reduce CD of Signets by 20%, increase the passive effect of Signets by 50%, when you activate a Signet grant Light Aura to up to 5 nearby allies for 5 seconds.

Valor:
Minors:

• Valorous Defence: ICD reduced to 20 down from 30.
• Courageous Return: no changes.
• Might of the Protector: ICD removed, reduced might stacks to 1 down from 2.

Majors:
Adept:

• No changes.

Master:

• Communal Defenses: no changes.
• Stalwart Defender: Removed bonus toughness while whilding a shield.
  Shield of Judgement will now launch enemies hit (Launch Distance: 0, see Daredevil Impact Strike)
  Shield of Absorbtion will now reflect projectiles.
• Strength in Numbers: merged with Battle Presence.
• Added Glacial Heart from Virtues, added: Symbol of Protection is now an Ice Field (Overwrites “Holy Fire” from Honor).

Grandmaster:

• Altruistic Healing: no changes.
• Monks Focus: no changes.
• Retributive Armor: Gain toughness for a period of time when blocking an attack. Gain ferocity based on your toughness.
  Aegis now block up to 2 Attacks.

Honor
Minors

• Vigorous Precicion: no changes.
• Selfless Daring: Radius increased to 360.
• Purity of Body: reworked, the end of your dodge roll converts 1 dondition into a boon for nearby allies (10 seconds ICD, radius 360)

Majors
Adept

• Invigorated Bulwark: no changes.
• Protective Reviver: no changes.
• Protector’s Impact: reworked, gain precicion based on your vitality (10%).

Master:

• Empowering Might: removed ICD.
• Honorable Staff: Gain 20% boonduration, Staff skills recharge 20% faster (changed from only giving boon duration while wielding a staff).
• Pure of Heart: merged with Force of Will.
• New Trait: Holy Fire: All your Symbols are now fire fields (Gets overwritten by “Glacial Heart” from Valor).

Grandmaster:

• Force of Will: merged with Pure of Heart.
• Pure of Voice Will now convert 2 conditions into boons up from 1.
• Writ of Persistance: no changes

Virtues
Minors:

• no changes

Majors:
Adept:

• Master of Consecration: no changes
• Retaliatory Subconscious: Changed to: Gain retaliation, aegis and Stability (1 stack) when stunned, dazed, knocked back, pulled, knocked down, sunk, floated, launched, taunted or inflicted with fear.
• Unscathed Contender: no changes.

Master:

• Absolute Resolution: SWITCHED PLACES WITH BATTLE PRESENCE Activating Virtue of Resolve converts 2 conditions into boons from nearby allies. Virtue of Resolve’s passive effect is stronger. (Base F2 converts 1, with this trait 3)
• Glacial Heart: Moved to Valor.
• New Trait: Unscathed Pursuer: While under the effects of Aegis you move 25% faster.
• Supreme Justice: merged with Permeating Wrath.
• New Trait: Virtuous: reduced CD of Virtues by an additional 15%, increased the range of virtues to 1200 up from 600.

Grandmaster:

• Battle Presence: SWITCHED PLACES WITH ABSOLUTE RESOLUTION and got merged with Strength in Numbers.
• Indomitable Courage: Increased Stability stacks to 5, passive effect now triggers every 15 seconds.
• Permeating Wrath: merged with Supreme Justice.

Part 1, Virtues, Utilities and Weapons

tl:dr
My goals with the guardian in short:
Increase build diversity (power dps, condition dps, support/heal)
Make every weaponset playable (for different roles/build)
rework spirit weapons and signets
update the “role” of the guardian to be sort of the “opposite” of the necromancer

Just some things:

1. Retal damage increase is a bad idea, remember it already was up and got nerfed way down to its current state and for good reasons.

2. Increasing overall effectiveness of passives and passive AOE spam cleanses is extremely bad, currently, as it is, condi is completely, totally and utterly useless in large group fights exactly and precisely because of AOE cleanse spam. And you wanna make it worse ?

I would avoid buffing passives and passive effects, instead would remove many of them and instead add some cleansing into ACTIVE skills to the classes that lack them, so that its up to each individual player and their build to decide how much cleansing to run and when to use it thus better reflecting player skill instead of passive spam.

3. Stability vs CC – currently things are somewhat imbalanced in favor of CC spam, while certain active skills are severely underused or unused (for example Hallowed ground). I would like to see a trait that specifically buffs Hallowed Ground for guardians, to either give more stab, or seriously lower its CD or provide some additional survivability for a second or 2 when affected by it.

This being an active skill would promote smarter gameplay while helping to address the above mentioned imbalance while at the same time give guards another actually good option to be running on the utility bars. Can’t lose here.

4. I disagree with your change to Retributive Armor. It would make it completely OP in small scale encounters (small patato WVW and SPVP) while promoting dumbed down gameplay. If the 2nd block was tied to an active skill + had maybe a 10 or 15 secs ICD, then maybe, as that skill would now become defensive in addition to its primary role (whatever that may be).

Overall you have a lot of stuff that dumbs down the game and further promotes “hiding in zerg” mechanics as well as completely nullifies condi builds even further and provides max insta might stacks when combined with effects from other players on top of too many burn stacks if you change all your fields into fire fields. That would be super bad + extreme power creep. Keep in mind condi builds currently are only effective in small stuff and SPVP. Sometimes in PVE, but in PVE they are still sub par to power builds with few exceptions (specific encounters).

“Zealots Speed: Changed to a Symbol of Swiftness (Staff #3).”
I’d rather change the name to Zealot’s Wrath and leave it as a Retaliation symbol which is more useful.

“Radiant Retaliation: Retaliation will now scale from Power OR Condition Damage (Which ever is highest). Increased scaling to 0.15 up from 0.075.”
So… the only builds that really benefit from Radiant Retaliation now… the high condi, low power builds… will get no buff at all, while Power builds with their free 1000 points suddenly become retal gods. Goofy.

“Stalwart Defender: Removed bonus toughness while whilding a shield.”
I wouldn’t want to see the toughness removed.

“Empowering Might: removed ICD.”
Kinda OP when combined with Altruistic healing.

Some of the virtues stuff also looks OP. I’m not thrilled with the spirit weapon direction. Spirit Weapons right now are clunky ways to deal burning damage at long range… they could be made less clunky and be useful. Consecrations could really use some new aspect/effect on their trait to make them more appealing.

cranos.5913:

I still feel like guardian or at least DH should’ve gotten a perma 25% movement speed like chronos. I’m personally not rly feeling the move faster under aegis trait. It’s not like you have aegis in abundance for pvp modes where mobility actually matters because of how weak the the boon rly is there. Furthermore actually using retreat for aegis uptime would make the trait useless as it already gives you swiftness.

I would kill to have a speed buff on guard and would give up almost any trait to get it except for meditation mastery.

MaximillianVonSchatten.6278:

cranos.5913:

I still feel like guardian or at least DH should’ve gotten a perma 25% movement speed like chronos. I’m personally not rly feeling the move faster under aegis trait. It’s not like you have aegis in abundance for pvp modes where mobility actually matters because of how weak the the boon rly is there. Furthermore actually using retreat for aegis uptime would make the trait useless as it already gives you swiftness.

I would kill to have a speed buff on guard and would give up almost any trait to get it except for meditation mastery.

Personally I would be in favor of them changing signet of wrath to provide a passive run speed boost on the passive effect.

Then they could change the active to immobilize the target and apply 3-5 stacks of bleeding for 5 seconds and immobilize for 3 seconds.

Arcaedus.7290:

Making guardians choose between Absolute Resolution and Indomitable Courage is a huge no-go. This would kitten off the vast majority of guardian players. I’m also against the Strength in Numbers and Battle Presence change as this leaves medi guards with weak choices for our master-trait in Valor. I’d prefer a communal defences (with reduced ICD) and battle presence merge if anything.

Glacial Heart would be the go-to trait like it was before they swaped it to virtues

Zealot’s Speed: Its less damage, but it would be fine if it uses Staff’s cd

Symbolic Exposure: The Cripple isn’t needed, and 1/2s is weird.

Fiery Wrath: Doesn’t follow convention (which is more important than you think).

Zealous Scepter: Current is vastly superior

Spawning Power: Irrelevant in relation to Part 1 feedback

Blinding Jeopardy: Cripple isn’t particularly blinding, nor would we want to mix this with Dragon Hunter

Kindled Zeal: Again, doesn’t follow convention

Expeditious Spirit: same as previous Spirit Weapon feedback

Shattered Aegis: Range isn’t really necessary, and you’re just asking for 4 stacks of burning per block, in addition to the Shatter, Retal, and likely Might. Retreat will become the defensive burst it should never be.

Symbolic Avenger: Unnecessary

Holy Cause: Probably not needed, but its not the worst idea I’ve seen.

Radiant Retaliation: Instead, make it scale from Power and Condition Damage using ~0.1 coefficient.

Might of the Protector: You’ve made it even better than the original offending iteration.

Stalwart Defender: I’d actually prefer reverting the bonus toughness to 180, but having it and the Focus trait swap places. Then you could have some interesting interactions with original SD, SiN, and RA.

Glacial Heart: The idea of changing the fields is fun and interesting, but this isn’t really the best place for it. Glacial Heart doesn’t need to be in Valor, in can survive just fine with a little scenery change in Virtues (or even somewhere else)

Retributive Armor: This is too much. Aegis would need a redesign for that functionality. just give it Retaliation on block to align it with naming conventions (That might not play nicely with you Shattered Aegis, but its something that can be discussed. Probably better to just remove the retal on aegis entirely and apply it to RA’s block effect).

Selfless Daring and Purity of Body: The radii don’t need to be 360, and the conversion and just be removal.

Protector’s Impact: Hold on, I’m still chasing it in left-field (at least it hasn’t left the park yet).

Empowering Might: Warriors are locked into 1 weapon and 2 trait lines for their equivalent effect. This requires comparatively nothing and can be paired with AH.

Honorable Staff: Staff already has this functionality.

Holy Fire: Similar to Glacial Heart. This is more appropriate for an Elite Specialization

Force of Will: Well isn’t this an overloaded trait.

Pure of Voice: Probably too strong. Definitely with your Shout changes.

Retaliatory Subconscious: Better idea. Swap it with Glacial Heart and make it activate Virtue of Courage.

Absolute Resolution: I’d rather not

Battle Presence: It doesn’t not belong where you put it.

Virtuous: Crazy cooldown reductions and increased range will not fix the problems you’re attempting to fix.

Supreme Justice: The active could stand improvement, it doesn’t need to be merged.

Indomitable Courage: Its intended to keep the same idea going after your virtue changes, but they need something different, which makes this trait too much to change right now.

draxynnic.3719:

Most of what I’d say on traits has already been said. I would note, however, that Unscathed Pursuer does seem like an interesting way to give the guardian more out-of-combat mobility. I’d probably be inclined to just throw it in with Unscathed Contender, however. While the theoretical damage increase of Unscathed Contender is high, given the expected uptime of Aegis in typical situations I tend to regard it as being a trait you take when you’re running the Virtues specialisation and don’t expect the alternative adept traits to be useful. Adding a speed boost while Aegis is up would make it a valid, well, contender in its own right.

I was thinking of that aswell, would also open up another trait slot in virtues.

I noticed a large spike in interest in these sort of thread since the last “balance” patch so bump.