Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure how others feel about the recent GS nerf, but what bothers me isn’t the lack of a reliable source of retaliation, or the reordering of the skills (albeit annoying as heck). What really bothers me is the 50% damage nerf to our symbol’s uptime. I’ll break down the reasons why.

Sure, nerfs always suck when they hit your class hard, but this nerf is a game changer for some Guardians, including myself. Symbol of Wrath used to provide a serious source of damage output, ignoring retaliation entirely. That damage has now been cut in half over the course of a long fight. OK so a straight up dps nerf…that’s fine, if it is well reasoned. Was this well reasoned? Was Guardian dps in dungeons and DE’s so high that it needed to be nerfed to this extent? I don’t have large-scale metrics but something tells me we weren’t exactly on the top of the totem pole when it comes to damage output.

Alright, so I can make my peace with the damage nerf, at least eventually I will. What I don’t think I can come to terms with is that a build that I have been working on perfecting for quite some time is now essentially no longer viable. I created a support build on the Guardian that relied on symbols providing a constant source of healing to my group. I won’t go into a full discussion of which traits I selected (they should be obvious for those who have delved into this sort of build), but my setup was 0/5/30/30/5.

At first, I was running this build with a Mace/Focus as primary weapons and then a Staff for my secondary set. The “healing” and “tanking” was unbelievable for a game that “did away” with the so-called Holy Trinity. I was doing both consistent healing and tanking for my groups and having fun with it for a while. However, once I started grouping up with more…“competent” players, I found myself unable to keep enemies on me because the damage output of the Mace/Focus was too low to “hold aggro” and enemies would endlessly chase after our squishies while I helplessly ran after them holding down 3 on the mace trying to soak up a hit or two (mostly to no avail, because I wouldn’t ever be targeted).

Then the Greatsword idea dawned on me. I replaced the Mace/Focus with the Greatsword and kept the Staff as my secondary weapon. My damage output was actually high enough to ensure that at least some enemies focused on me, and I was able to “tank” again, albeit without as many defensive abilities or as much healing. So I got my full Exotic Clerics set crafted and I was able to withstand just about any beating with my “Altruistic Healing” and Symbol build providing relatively constant healing to me and my group. Sure, any damage dealing oriented player would out damage me, but the point was to play support, and it worked.

My Greatsword Guardian was SO much more fun than running a Mace/Focus setup. For 90% (made up statistic, of course) of my dungeon encounters, I was able to run the Greatsword. It was hands on and very difficult to play, but like I said earlier, it was fun and it worked. On really damage intensive fights, I still swapped in my Mace/Focus if I really needed it, but I can only think of a few encounters off the top of my head that required the swap. Since the nerf, I have not been able to run the Greatsword effectively in dungeons as a support role. People can no longer take refuge in my Symbols and my ability to withstand a beating has been nearly cut in half.

It still gets the job done to some extent, but the support role has really been taken out of the picture, even though I’m still traited for support. I am now a lackluster damage dealer with the occasional mini group heal here and there (if my group can actually afford to run into my Symbol during its uptime). If I really want to play this role effectively again, I have to switch back to the Mace/Focus and start chasing enemies down again. There isn’t too much point to a tank that can take any beating if the enemies don’t even want to dish it out on me.

So there are my frustrations, now I’ll get down to the essence of my argument. ANet told us we would be able to play the way we wanted to play. Already we have seen that this just isn’t the case, as “glass cannons” who wanted to play that way are having a nearly impossible time in dungeons. I thought I found something unique here that I wanted to focus on, and now this build doesn’t work either. Retaliation builds? Dead. I understand ANet has their own vision, and it does seem to be an evolving (to put it lightly) one. However, this new vision is crippling build diversity even further. I guess if there had to be a TL;DR, that would be it.

To me it seems like a major developmental aspect was completely overlooked in this patch. When a change is made to an ability, even a fairly vanilla seeming ability such as Symbol of Wrath, it sends reverberations throughout the rest of the game that need to be completely understood before the change is made. Now, I realize that my particular build probably wasn’t very mainstream and there probably wasn’t too much data on it, but it worked and it was fun. It is now tedious and painstaking to make it work, if it does at all.

Instead of flaming ANet for not considering the impact this would have on other builds (I wholeheartedly believe the only reason ANet made this change was to cripple PvP Retaliation Guardians), I will simply propose one more change. Return the symbol to its previous recharge rate and lower the amount of procs of retaliation it provides. Promote build diversity, don’t hamper it.

Thank you all for the read and I apologize for the lengthiness and long-winded explanations. I hope some of you out there agree with me.

Animus

seems legit. very legit

Hi Animus, nice to see a reasonable post instead of non-constructive whine. However, let me make two points clear:

1. The DPS nerf does not make GS any less viable. It is entirely possible that GS with a symbol build was actually too strong in AOE DPS it could generate. Anyway, it is not any worse after the nerf than anything other professions have.

2. Your suggestion (lower amount of procs) doesn’t work. The new design is to make retaliation a tactical choice, i.e. a tool you use when you anticipate multiple incoming hits. Your proposal would simply nerf retaliation, adding no tactical depth.

3. ‘play the way you want’ is a fantasy and could never work. This means that every possible setup does the same damage etc.

4. The GS after the patch is still a very good weapon. It just doesn’t make any sense to build it around symbols (which is not a bad thing – Hammer and Mace are more organic choices for a symbol build anyway).

@ Green

1. I do not want to come across as confrontational, but I am going to have to disagree with you. The GS Guardian was only on par with other DPS assuming you built all out glass cannon. With our base HP being as intrinsically low as it is, you are hindering your group with the amount of times you will be downed, if not killed, running a glass cannon GS Guardian. Assuming you do run that way and it works for you, your damage is now on par with other damage dealing classes that are either able to withstand more of a beating due to mechanics or hard coded statistics such as higher base HP. Even if it is the case that the damage was too high, which I doubt, it is a trade-off: damage for survivability.

2. I just came up with that on the fly and honestly I don’t think that would be the right choice upon reflection. Perhaps Symbol of Wrath isn’t the right ability to gain retaliation from…I really don’t know. All I know is that I made the Symbol work for me independent of the perk of on demand retaliation. I would like to see ANet come up with a way to give that back without infringing upon their views of the tactical decision to pop retaliation.

3. I don’t mean that you should literally be able to play however you want and still be as effective as other people who are min/maxing, but when you find something that works and it isn’t game breaking, you should be able to play that way if you want to. This build was a lot of fun and I was playing the way I wanted; now I have to switch to a style that I don’t really enjoy as much to get the same benefit out of my character.

4. Prior to the patch I would completely disagree with you. Take the Writ traits and you have larger symbols, symbols that heal, and symbols that last longer. Take 5 points in Zeal and you have another Symbol that will definitely be proccing a fair amount if you run a GS build in dungeons. So that is 3 Symbols, two of which can be put up every 8-10 seconds and last for roughly 5-6 seconds. The Mace and Hammer (particularly) Symbols don’t last nearly as long, although the defensive qualities of those weapons are nothing to scoff at.

Post patch, I’m very inclined to agree with #4. The Greatsword no longer makes sense to use in a Symbol build and you are much better off with a Mace/Focus or what have you. That is really the cornerstone of my argument. I simply disagree with the change based upon the impact it has had on build diversity.

Hey Animus,

well, I would disagree with you on 1 GS is very good melee AOE damage, with or without the symbol. Of course, both of us can only speak about gut feelings here.

Anyway, I think that your problem can be easily solved by slightly increasing the sword auto-attack damage. This way, you still get high DPS you want and the symbol remains a tactical choice.

BTW, there is one more reason why old symbol was OP IMHO. It made self-combos way to easy. You could do symbol + whirl + leap for two finishers in a row, and you could do it really often. I don’t think any other profession has access to self-combos such frequent.

Animus, you wrote a series of very well thought out posts. I agree with you on many of those points and want to thank you for representing my voice with your dissent to ANet’s lackluster changes introduced this weekend.

Just to reinforce your views listed above, the removal of a very well balanced build for guardians using Greatswords and symbols strikes very deeply at my continued commitment to this game. By in effect removing the use of SoW (going from 50% uptime to ~16% uptime) it reduces to a great degree the usefulness of Zeal and other symbol major traits for the GS, something many of us have been using for quite a while. And I find it difficult to imagine the symbols were too great in terms of AoE dps etc. If they had a problem with ret, fix ret. This “fix” or adjustment had too many indirect effects on many guardians and is not in any way a progressive or beneficial fix. Additionally, the ability to hard cast the symbol makes the GS SoW much more fun than the hammer Symbol which is auto cast. Worst case scenario, put ret somewhere else and have SoW grant might or something. Sheesh.

I don’t know, if Retaliation is to be an on demand tactical thing why not make it a virtue? Passive gain retaliation once every 20 seconds, activate Virtue of blah to give self an allies retaliation for 3 seconds. Remove it from the symbols and restore the symbol of wrath back to it’s intended use. Give it a might buff instead of ret.

It would give us a fairly useful but not OP virtue on top of keeping symbol of wrath usable.

green plum.7514:

Hey Animus,

well, I would disagree with you on 1 GS is very good melee AOE damage, with or without the symbol. Of course, both of us can only speak about gut feelings here.

Anyway, I think that your problem can be easily solved by slightly increasing the sword auto-attack damage. This way, you still get high DPS you want and the symbol remains a tactical choice.

BTW, there is one more reason why old symbol was OP IMHO. It made self-combos way to easy. You could do symbol + whirl + leap for two finishers in a row, and you could do it really often. I don’t think any other profession has access to self-combos such frequent.

Thief with shortbow? Ele with Fire/Earth? The point is that symbols gave a huge utility advantage. We could trait for +damage, +duration, +vulnerability, +healing etc. All of these made the symbols a tactical ability not because of ret but because of the additional upgrades we applied to the ability. The reduction, a drastic reduction really, of the duration of SoW and its uptime nearly eliminates the efficacy of not only the damage but the traited benefits granted to us through our major traits as listed above. Upping the damage of the auto attack I would not care about, having the ability to heal allies consistently, apply vulnerability etc. are things I deeply care about.

If they’re nerfing our damage, which was considered high enough to drop our health into the basement in beta, where is the health boost as this portion of our damage is nerfed?

i hate when people only pick certain things from a post as long as yours – but i still do. be ensured that i read it all.

“People can no longer take refuge in my Symbols and my ability to withstand a beating has been nearly cut in half.”

You said you have mace focus equipped as a second set. mace still provides a nearly permamnet symbol that gives reggen and heals. with ability three you are able to put protection on top. throw i Hammer as weapon swap and you have more symbols up then before. i do not see the how your playstyle is broken now.

it always sucks to loose stuff you got acustomed to, but its not like a they broke game or team mechanics.

@ Shieldbreaker

Unfortunately, I think you would be hard-pressed to make a case that the change to SoW warrants an increase in base HP. It simply isn’t enough damage to warrant a change on that scale.

However, your line of thinking is exactly correct. Where is the compensation? This was an out and out nerf. No two ways about it. The problem is that it is simply the byproduct of reducing the effectiveness of retaliation. A nerf intended to decrease the effectiveness of a specific boon, not even an ability, a boon, should never impact other builds and other aspects of the profession.

Asmodal.6489:

i hate when people only pick certain things from a post as long as yours – but i still do. be ensured that i read it all.

“People can no longer take refuge in my Symbols and my ability to withstand a beating has been nearly cut in half.”

You said you have mace focus equipped as a second set. mace still provides a nearly permamnet symbol that gives reggen and heals. with ability three you are able to put protection on top. throw i Hammer as weapon swap and you have more symbols up then before. i do not see the how your playstyle is broken now.

it always sucks to loose stuff you got acustomed to, but its not like a they broke game or team mechanics.

That said, it does not address the reduction in playstyle that affected Greatsword users. The ability to hard cast the symbol and have a more dynamic playstyle than hammer provided made it a well-received weapon within the Guardian community.

It does “suck to lose(sp) stuff” that I am accustomed to, but in an MMO there should be a serious give and take methodology. In this case, if ANet considers ret too strong they should at least give us full reasoning behind their very broad strokes of change. I personally hate the form of GS now with the increased cooldown rates because it makes GS feel much more passive, akin to the Hammer. I certainly do love spamming auto-attacks… oh wait.

green plum.7514:

Hey Animus,

well, I would disagree with you on 1 GS is very good melee AOE damage, with or without the symbol. Of course, both of us can only speak about gut feelings here.

Oh and the OP is right on. The damage nerf is my #1 reason for hating this change. I could care less about the retaliation boon.

Anyway, I think that your problem can be easily solved by slightly increasing the sword auto-attack damage. This way, you still get high DPS you want and the symbol remains a tactical choice.

BTW, there is one more reason why old symbol was OP IMHO. It made self-combos way to easy. You could do symbol + whirl + leap for two finishers in a row, and you could do it really often. I don’t think any other profession has access to self-combos such frequent.

Greatsword damage was good before the nerf, now it’s pretty average and not that great at all. Hammer is better dps now b/c it also generates a symbol after every chain. For PvE dps it looks like we’re going to be pushed to using a Hammer.

Asmodal.6489:

“People can no longer take refuge in my Symbols and my ability to withstand a beating has been nearly cut in half.”

You said you have mace focus equipped as a second set. mace still provides a nearly permamnet symbol that gives reggen and heals. with ability three you are able to put protection on top. throw i Hammer as weapon swap and you have more symbols up then before. i do not see the how your playstyle is broken now.

I think you misunderstood me, or perhaps I worded myself incorrectly. I have a Mace/Focus that I use for certain encounters (a lot more now since the nerf) but my actual Weapon Swap setup was Greatsword/Staff. If I knew the encounter was going to be very damage intensive I would go into the encounter running a Mace/Focus as primary and Staff as Secondary, replacing the Greatsword entirely.

How does this affect anyone who was working toward GS legendary weaps?

Seems to me like the real problem in actuality, is another deliberate gold sink.

kidbs.8920:

Greatsword damage was good before the nerf, now it’s pretty average and not that great at all. Hammer is better dps now b/c it also generates a symbol after every chain. For PvE dps it looks like we’re going to be pushed to using a Hammer.

Like I said, The Greatsword was probably our go to damage dealing weapon and with the right traits and gear setup, you could dish out some serious hurt. Of course, you would be sacrificing survivability to pull this off, but there is a give and take.

Pre-nerf I would have said the Greatsword was the better PvE weapon and the Hammer was the better PvP weapon. Now I feel like the Hammer is outshining the Greatsword in both areas. Again, build diversity has been seriously impacted by this change to SoW and I hope ANet plans to do something about that.

Afkjosh.3912:

How does this affect anyone who was working toward GS legendary weaps?

Seems to me like the real problem in actuality, is another deliberate gold sink.

I don’t think so. This was a pretty deliberate attack on retaliation focused PvP Guardians. The change had nothing to do with PvE in its intentions, but it definitely has mitigated the Greatsword’s effectiveness in a PvE scenario. Will it deter people from getting Sunrise or Twilight? I don’t think so. I still plan on making one and I would encourage other Greatsword Guardians to do the same. I really find it hard to believe that this change will stand in its current iteration.

I’ll still probably continue to use GS for pvp b/c of it’s utility (Leap of Faith and Binding Blade), however I feel like I’m totally being pushed into using Hammer for PvE now. I wish a dev would take a precious moment to explain what their intent of this nerf was.

It was clearly either a misguided attempt to further nerf retaliation (in which is doesn’t do a kitten thing to stop it), or they wanted to nerf our GS dps.

Tarathia.1306:

Asmodal.6489:

i hate when people only pick certain things from a post as long as yours – but i still do. be ensured that i read it all.

“People can no longer take refuge in my Symbols and my ability to withstand a beating has been nearly cut in half.”

You said you have mace focus equipped as a second set. mace still provides a nearly permamnet symbol that gives reggen and heals. with ability three you are able to put protection on top. throw i Hammer as weapon swap and you have more symbols up then before. i do not see the how your playstyle is broken now.

it always sucks to loose stuff you got acustomed to, but its not like a they broke game or team mechanics.

That said, it does not address the reduction in playstyle that affected Greatsword users. The ability to hard cast the symbol and have a more dynamic playstyle than hammer provided made it a well-received weapon within the Guardian community.

It does “suck to lose(sp) stuff” that I am accustomed to, but in an MMO there should be a serious give and take methodology. In this case, if ANet considers ret too strong they should at least give us full reasoning behind their very broad strokes of change. I personally hate the form of GS now with the increased cooldown rates because it makes GS feel much more passive, akin to the Hammer. I certainly do love spamming auto-attacks… oh wait.

Exactly. You hit what is my biggest issue with this change: it’s not the shifting of the key position or not the reduced retaliation (or even lower dps), but the loss of an active feeling skillset. Having two skills with 10 second cooldowns and ways to combo them went a long way to making greatsword feel like a really “action” oriented weapon. While when I use something like Hammer I get bored waiting on my auto-attack and cooldowns, greatsword always felt very active. It really was the single weapon that determined my decision to roll a Guardian instead of a Warrior. Now, however, it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t feel as active. Now it’s just auto-attack and wait for Whirling Wrath to cooldown. It’s become a more passive skillset imo (Leap of Faith lowered CD is nice but I honestly don’t see it as a huge boon in PvE, at least not compared to what Symbol of Wrath offered my symbols build Guardian).

I agree that the nerf has really slowed down the temp of the weapon – it doesn’t feel as active. Waiting for auto-attacks is the reason I don’t play with hammer (and why I forged a Mystic Claymore).

green plum.7514:

BTW, there is one more reason why old symbol was OP IMHO. It made self-combos way to easy. You could do symbol + whirl + leap for two finishers in a row, and you could do it really often. I don’t think any other profession has access to self-combos such frequent.

Previously, you could do the Symbol of Wrath + 2 finishers every 20 seconds because Leap was on a 20 second cooldown. Now, you can do the Symbol of Wrath + 2 finishers combo every 20 seconds because Symbol of Wrath is on a 20 second cooldown. :P

The frequency of Symbol of Wrath + Whirling Wrath combos was cut in half, though.

EDIT: I suppose that you could have tried to time everything so that you’d get Whirling Wrath + Binding Blade on one CD, then Whirling Wrath + Leap of Faith on the next CD, and then alternate from there. But I was going on the “symbol + whirl + leap for two finishers in a row” comment, which didn’t account for Binding Blade.

Is no one else bothered that without the 20% reduction in CD trait that you’re simply standing there spamming 1 for 10 secs straight in PVE? I love the GS and have no issue with changing it to reduce retaliation uptime but I think the CD for WW needs to be reduced to 8 secs. This makes up for the reduced symbol damage from SoW with the new longer CD.

Kwami.4356:

green plum.7514:

BTW, there is one more reason why old symbol was OP IMHO. It made self-combos way to easy. You could do symbol + whirl + leap for two finishers in a row, and you could do it really often. I don’t think any other profession has access to self-combos such frequent.

Previously, you could do the Symbol of Wrath + 2 finishers every 20 seconds because Leap was on a 20 second cooldown. Now, you can do the Symbol of Wrath + 2 finishers combo every 20 seconds because Symbol of Wrath is on a 20 second cooldown. :P

The frequency of Symbol of Wrath + Whirling Wrath combos was cut in half, though.

EDIT: I suppose that you could have tried to time everything so that you’d get Whirling Wrath + Binding Blade on one CD, then Whirling Wrath + Leap of Faith on the next CD, and then alternate from there. But I was going on the “symbol + whirl + leap for two finishers in a row” comment, which didn’t account for Binding Blade.

True, you got me there It seems my comment wasn’t that thought out after all.

@Sol: that’s the major issue. I don’t want to be forced to take a trait to make a weapon more responsive.
Especially that trait where in the Honor line there are so many good other traits that are more valuable.
Some say that greatsword was not intended/designed to have symbols. Well I say look at the traits: zeal is better symbols + 5% greatsword damage. Honor is 2handed mastery + writs.
So to me, yes greatsword was intended to drop symbols, simply the retaliation might not have been the best choice.
Anyway we need to get lower cds, especially on the symbol. Currently auto-attacks represent a too big proportion of our rotations.