I wrote this awhile ago after getting tired of running hundreds of Damage Guardian builds and wasted over 1000 games trying to figure out a truly effective one. These are just my thoughts on the matter and i’m curious to know yours. Am i that wrong ? Am i right ? I don’t know.
Everyone wants to watch their ’’favorite’’ profession improve. With that in mind, we progress trying to find new builds and new play styles and that kind of variety is what is the main core of this game. You can’t simply run into a, let’s say Thief, or any class and know exactly what skills he has on his quick bar and what he is going to do, unlike most other MMOs.
At least, that was ArenaNet’s intention. I’m not going to get into the other professions here or WvW, our main topic here is going to be the Guardian and sPvP/tPvP. If you’re not interest on that matter, don’t bother to stay. It’s far too clear that ArenaNet thinks that Guardian is in a good position, and it indeed is. It can be a really tough profession that is hard to take down and hold a point for a few minutes with no great effort. But let’s go deeper into the class concept. Damage, tank, support and hybrid are the four general playing styles you can get yourself into when playing an MMO, Hybrid being any of the other three mixed with the other.
But when we open a new tab under those titles we can find quite a few new names. If you choose to kittenage you can be dps, burst, conditions and so on. If you choose tanking you can be healing, leeching, buff based, armor based, vitality based, etc etc. If you choose support you can be a buffer, debuffer, healer and bla bla bla. And ArenaNet’s great idea is to mix every ‘’sub-topic’’ on the playing styles in order to make a fluent and fun game, where no profession should have be stuck with only one style.
Now getting back to Guardian. We know that the Guardian can tank, we know it can support, but what about damage ? If we analyze the profession we will reach the conclusion that it is heading to a complete different way than it was intended, as well as the game in general. I feel like Guild Wars 2 is slowly turning into a game where every class has its own purpose instead of being able to play whatever kind of style you want. 9 out of the 10 times you get into a tournament, as a Guardian, people will expect you to bunk, because you’re a Guardian and you should tank. What are the variations we can have with the Guardian in order to play it competitively on tPvP ? Shout/Med Bunker, Tanky One-Handed Dps, and…uh…. that’s it. So most people don’t expect to run into a Guardian and get themselves bursted down in matter of seconds. That is because the Guardian is, actually, a healing/toughness tank. Most people run the ‘’generic build’’ and it’s slight variations, 0/0/30/30/10, 0/0/30/20/20 and, if you want to deal more damage, 0/30/30/5/5. If we take a good look into the three main generic Guardian built, we will easily reach the conclusion that Valor is the ‘’all-around’’ trait line, Radiance is the damage one and well…Zeal is the kittenty that nobody wants.
And there it is, in order for the Guardian to excel you need to be somewhat healing oriented. That’s why ArenaNet gave us the ‘’Zealous Blade’’ trait as Grandmaster on Zeal. ‘’Greatsword attacks heal you.’’ Wow, that sounds wonderful. You’re a Guardian, your strongest attribute is healing. With that trait you can be outrageous, you can have big numbers and heal yourself WOAH. But the trait sucks. Doesn’t heal you high enough to maintain you alive. It’s not worth to take it over Monk’s Focus or Altruistic Healing. Score for Valor.
But what would be a nice fix for Zealous Blade in order to make a burst build viable to Guardians ? Make it heal on crits only and escalate with healing power ? Only make it escalate with healing power ? Have a bigger base coefficient ? Who knows. These are simple ideas threw on the paper.
And not only that, in order to make the ’’Damage’’ builds on the Guardian viable, we would need a new amulet. The only hybrids we have right now are Soldiers (Pow/Tough/Vit) and Knight (Vit/Pow/Prec), which aren’t viable for a Guardian at all if it wants to be a hybrid. Soldiers has no Precision, and the Guardian needs precision in so many levels. Vigorous Precision, Empowering Might and such are key traits which are only activated by critical hits, so following that line, we should aim for Knight. But Knight has low Power and too much vitality, being vitality contradictory to healing, which will also lead to a low amount of toughness. What would make the Dps Guardian work fluently ? Pow/Prec/Tough or Pow/Prec/Heal, maybe with a little bit of Vitality like they did with Zerker and Valk or even mixing up a few of those stats more wisely, who knows.
(edited by Sorem.9157)