Guild Wars 2

And this is why context is important.

Signet of Resolve is fine in PvE— they’re not going to be smart enough to interrupt you properly and the bigger bulk heal is a good thing.

In WvW, shelter I feel is far better because it can negate a lot of incoming damage, particularly in zerg play. In smaller scale, it’s easy for them to interrupt the heal and is also why I don’t bother with any other heal. In fact, i never even spent points to get healing breeze.

The other problem is the signet of resolve is pretty poor without the cooldown trait and many builds aren’t able to fit it in.

Of course, SoR has a certain niche because shelter block doesn’t stop everything. It gets completely destroyed by necro fears which are hard to avoid and causes shelter to go on full cooldown which makes it even worse than signet of resolve. Of course, to take advantage of this you’d need to swap skills just in case a necro appeared. So, I suppose the general consensus that shelter is better for an unpredictable scenario is most likely correct. Of course they may see a bunch of marks/wells and try to block through it anyways… ;p

I still think Shelter is superior if we were talking about commonly used builds and haven’t used the heal signet outside of 1 fractal I did a few months ago. I would definitely advise any guardian to use shelter. I think it’s sound to say that the blocking has saved many a guardian. I think in theory it may be a bit closer than it seems at first glance because there’s actually quite a few unblockable interrupts. (Hey, line of warding!) But it’s certainly possible xFireize has enough spare stability for it to not really matter with that sort of build.

oZii.2864:

Arken.3725:

Alright, lets take a look at the Majors:

Valor:

Glacial Heart: RNG based, long ICD. This felt like a poor attempt at giving the Guardian much needed soft-cc.

Focused Mind: A borderline useless one in the sense that since meditations are selfish builds, shouldn’t the effectiveness of the boons applied be stronger? A mere 4 seconds of fury when 3/4 of the meditations are on long cd’s doesn’t make much sense to me.

Honor:

Empowering Might: The ICD is what makes this trait useless. Now granted if it was removed, it could become op. Other options are far better in my opinion.

Force of Will: Just a very plain and boring trait to help Guardian’s deal with the low health issue. Seems very similar to the poor attempt at soft-cc.

These are just the ones I wanted to comment on the rest I agree with you.

Glacial Heart – 50% on Crit is pretty reliable, it’s aoe up to 5 targets, with a 4 second base chill which is very long. The icd is long though and you have no way to reduce it, maybe if two-hand mastery reduced this trait since it is with hammer it could see more use. It would then be 24 second cooldown for a 4 second base chill. I think it has potential to be powerful if you just went with base duration sigil of ice+hydro+glacial you could chill someone for 8 seconds thats with no duration investment.

Focused Mind – I agree with this one 4 seconds is short I think a bump up to 5 maybe 6 seconds would be better. 2 of the meditations are offensive in nature the rest are defensive with long cooldowns so 4 seconds is a bit to short. If you popped meds off cooldown with 20 virtues it’s about 50% uptime on fury but many times you aren’t just blowing them especially COP.

Empowering Might – Agree it could it’s not necessarily a bad trait it’s similar to Forceful great sword but that is tied to a weapon with cd reduction. Not sure how I feel about this one tbh.

Force of Will – It is bland yes but I personally like this trait it’s raw stats and raw stats are never a bad thing. If it was 300 power, Ferocity, or Precision I think people wouldn’t be so down on it.

I’m going to vouch for Ozii on Glacial Heart, its quite strong. With sigil of chilling and rune of ice with 30 in zeal it makes the chill duration go from 4 secs to a bit over 7 secs. That is in spvp. In wvw with food it will be even more with condition food. I feel the cooldown needs to be shaved a bit but aside from that due to the feature patch changes its indirectly better than it was before.