Guild Wars 2

Xaylin.1860:

I like the general direction but as others already pointed out those skills don’t feel like elites yet. Even if the cooldowns were low the effect aren’t impressive enough.

Light of Deliverance is pretty impressive by itself though, it’s just a matter of activation time that makes it useful often or rarely depending on how long it is.

I like suggestion of adding knockdown to “Feel My Wrath!” though, that would add a need for timing and more elite feel to it.

My suggestion; add might to “Feel My Wrath!” and it’ll be perfect.

Almost everything about tomes has already been said on previous pages, but I would really like this change. It would encourage a lot more build diversity, and people might actually move away from meditation guardians for pvp and wvw. Some thoughts on these 2 new elites though are as follows. The changes are great, but ANET, please be careful about numbers/scaling!

-As is now, Renewed focus heals 2k, provides 2 seconds of invulnerability, and pretty much gives you another block, another blind, and another 3 condis removed, which is a hell of a lot of utility all in one 72s cool down skill. Heck, even on 90s cooldown, this is amazing, and worth taking over tomes.
-Signet of Courage: The PBAoE heal will likely be the most attractive part of this elite. The full heal is nice, but 3 minute cool down will probably scare people away from taking this elite JUST for the full heal. I’d recommend the PBAoE heal be fairly significant (1.5k with good scaling, or 2k hp). As for the full heal itself: Let it function almost exactly like tome of courage’s current #5 skill.

-“Feel my Wrath”: I really like the idea! This would be amazingly useful for a well-organized group going in for a spike after a boss’ defiance bar drops, or a WvW zerg making a push forward against an enemy zerg. Considering the cool down and removal of boon duration that we previously got by speccing into virtues, I think a fair amount of quickness would be 3-4 seconds, and 7-10 seconds for the fury. If this skill is instant cast like most shouts (which it should be), then 3 seconds would likely be more appropriate.

Seem like great ideas to me, here’s hoping they get implemented as I don’t think many people bother using tomes at all. My only questions are what would the properties of both skills be? like CD, duration on “feel my wrath” and how much the signet passive would heal for and the radius of the heal.

I like the proposed changes. The tomes were inconsistent with other Guardian skills, while the new skills integrate perfectly. Guard also didn’t have any elite Signet or Shout already. It sounds like Signet of Courage’s activated effects could use further balancing, maybe let you move but not use other skills, like with Renewed Focus.

Bringing tomes back as kits for an Elite Spec, as many people have suggested, seems the most reasonable way to do it. The swap-on-demand nature of kits I believe would make them much easier to use, and is also more natural to pulling out a book.

I noticed a lot of people didn’t even know that Guard has AoE Quickness via Tome of Wrath currently. I guess that says a lot about how little the tomes are used now.

Please do this. The Tomes aren’t that effective now anyway and these new skills would be a lot more interesting. Tomes could work, but it would be better to redesign them and add them back in later with an elite specialization.

Maybe rework Ele elite skills too? Pretty much none of them are useful as of now and it would be a shame if the only good Ele elite belongs to an elite specialization.

Instead of the PBAoE heal, I’d like the signet to grant passive movement speed, Guardians desperately need a base movement speed buff that almost every other class has access to.

Did you know if you took a traited Retreat! with 0 boon duration and pop it on cooldown, you get an effective 25% movement speed increase? Or if you don’t want to trait, get a smidgen of boon duration. The cost of taking Retreat is the same as if we had a signet like many other classes.

turn them into spirit weapons that follow you and their command button lets you control them for a short time (so you can toggle in and out of using them without wasting them) changing your hot bar to the current ability then go over all of the abilitys and re work them change cast times and cool downs the tome of courage is pretty good where it is with minor changed the tome of wrath needs more work. job done everyone happy gives them some nice passive effects when your not using them. this would open up counter play “do i take out the book 1st or the guard” also this would give you an elite spirit weapon

Ghotistyx.6942:

Did you know if you took a traited Retreat! with 0 boon duration and pop it on cooldown, you get an effective 25% movement speed increase? Or if you don’t want to trait, get a smidgen of boon duration. The cost of taking Retreat is the same as if we had a signet like many other classes.

Not even close; signets are passive 25% untraited, retreat is 20sec duration 40 sec cooldown untraited, so 50% uptime on 33% movement speed is equivalent to a 16.5% passive speed bonus. Traited its a 5/8 (62.5%) uptime so it equivalent to a 20.625% movement speed passive. You need 20-25% swiftness duration to make it roughly equal to a signet on top of the trait or 50-55% siftness duration without the trait.

Just on a sidenote: It would be pretty neat if Light of Deliverance could charge up the Necro’s Deathshroud. It would be a buff to support guard and would bring necro into competitive. Please, maybe? =)

Ok sorry first thoughts as I’m still working my way through all the posts.

First I like the idea of rounding out each skill category and was what I was looking at in the topic Unclassified-Skills-Guardian. The only problem I have first up is the lost of the other skills in the Tomes.

Now with regard to the idea’s put forward;

Tome of Courage -> Signet of Courage
Passive: PBAoE Heal every 10 seconds.
Active: Light of Deliverance

Tome of Wrath -> “Feel My Wrath”
Shout that grants Quickness and Fury

JonPeters.5630:

I don’t have the heal/boon duration numbers in my head but the current test cooldowns are 180 on signet of course and 30 on “feel my wrath.”

Signet of Courage – Signet gameplay is usually selfish with next to no group support. Adding a PBAoE healing & Light of Deliverance increases Signets ability in group support. I also like that it’s another option to provide passive PBAoE healing other then Battle Presence.

This could create some other interesting support builds not requiring the Virtues Specialization but I would be interested in seeing how Battle Presence & Signet of Courage play out together, as this could be too much PBAoE passive healing.

I also feel unless the PBAoE heal is strong (causing problems maybe if combine with Battle Presence) the passive feels too weak to be an elite. Two option I see are:

• A weak PBAoE heal also with a PBAoE Condition Removal (1 maybe 2, 2 could be to strong). Now only if PBAoE heal is weak but this brings back part of Purifying Ribbon’s favour.
• Or Remove PBAoE heal but add 2 pulsing boons, Protection & Regeneration. This adds Protective Spirit’s Favour.

Feel My Wrath – This adds the 2 boons not normal available to Guardian’s except through Tome of Wrath. I will miss the AoE knockdown from Judgement but as a Shout feel Zealot’s Fervor was a great choice. As an elite skill I’m not sure if just getting Quickness & Fury is enough. I feel either Quickness & Fury boon duration needs to be large or another effect is needed;

• Another Boon – Might (Increasing the offensive feel and adding the Smiter’s Boon favour).
• A Condition – Cripple &/or Weakness (Weakness foes to further feel your wrath and adding Affliction’s favour).
• Or Control – Knockdown (very short but bring back some of Judgement’s favour)

I would also definitely look to bringing back the playstyle of Tomes through an Elite Spec if these were removed. I so can see these Kit Tomes being a very interesting playstyle that Tomes hint at now but only for short durations of play. This would bring the Engineer’s kits gameplay to Guardian’s.

Vizardlorde.8243:

CMF.5461:

Vizardlorde.8243:

Courage I can see people wanting to keep it wrath,not so much. Conflagrate did less damage than symbol of wrath + whirling wrath in the same time frame to multiple targets. Zealots fervor was the only reason to use tome of wrath when mesmers were not around and a shout makes it better than the tome. binding blade, wards, heck even shelter make better AoE CC not taking into account the new DH AoE CC.

Agreed, which is why I propose to increase damage or number of targets on Conflagrate. By increasing damage it is an easy fix to make it threatening. and/or increasing number of targets helps its use in large fight situations (wvw). Less damage per target but more damage done to a whole group.

Tome of Wrath was one of our few ranged targetable aoe skills that could be useful to keep opponents off a point in sPvP or keep doing damage from a wall in WvW. It just needs a boost to make it more worthwhile.

Now we dont need it because we have a bow not on a 3 minute cooldown and these elites do not criple us by locking out our class mechanic or our utilities.

Well, the question is can the bow with a 15s cooldown ranged symbol and a 60s cooldown ranged trap, put out as much damage to a group as tome of wrath can with conflagrate in 20 seconds of tome duration up every 180s cooldown?

Also keep in mind burst versus dps.

I think making the tomes more accessible would have gone a long way into making them more useful. They were clunky and too little used to become crucial in common gameplay.

BUT

There are moments when they shine, we needed to make those moments of opportunity occur more often and I think tomes in their current inception would be more popular. Shorter tome cooldowns may have provided that, or increasing healing/damage potential while they are active could prove to do the same thing of increasing risk vs reward.

I might be the minority, but i’ll really going to miss the Tomes (mainly for the animation rather than the mechanic itself).
If they could find a way to turn them into kits, man that’d be so so awesome..

Wait wait wait…. a tome using Elite Spec in the future?? HECK YES!!! I like!!!! XD

I also think that working on all Elite Skills (including racial ones) is a good idea considering some are completely pointless, strategy wise.

And I know it’s not related at all but FOR THE 6’s SAKE, make people able to attack and move while transformed by elite skills (ie: Norn, human, etc.)!!

To Jon Peters and Karl McLain

The reason why Tomes weren’t so popular, besides they’re huge CD’s, is that somehow you guys designed the guardian to be too heavily depended of Renewed Focus in order to survive.

Virtues base CD of 30, 60 and 90s is just insanely stupid for a profession mechanic, more so for a Profession that has 11k base HP, no base movement speed and no escape mechanic, no healing skill that removes conditions and no other way of sustain besides AH/MM which are GM’s in Valor.

If this is not believable enough go and ask evey guardian what heal they use and you will see that 90% of the answers are going to be “I use Shelter”. Or why focus is so popular over off-hand shield.

Why? Because a Guardian cannot function properly in a competitive environment without Renewed Focus, Shelter or Absolute Resolution

I would suggest you guys check the cool downs of our base virtues before bothering with the tome changes. I know that reducing the cool downs to (F1)20s (F2)40s and (F3)60s base might be to strong coupled with Shelter, RF and Virtues, but in the same time, higher that that will be too much for other heals/elite skills to be used.

More like 99% Creep. I was telling my friends earlier who wanted to learn Guardian that even if they buffed Litany of Wrath to being instant AND return 100% of the dmg to healing, I still wouldn’t take it over Shelter.

Arken.3725:

More like 99% Creep. I was telling my friends earlier who wanted to learn Guardian that even if they buffed Litany of Wrath to being instant AND return 100% of the dmg to healing, I still wouldn’t take it over Shelter.

I would love to use Litany, trust me, and i’m afraid that Litany will get scrapped like tomes because they have no idea how to balance it and make it a viable choice.

I bet you Arken that Litany will be scrapped and Shelter will become a meditation and it will be balanced to compensate for the extra heal from Meditation Mastery. That would be pretty sad.

The main problem is that the heal doesn’t jive with how the profession works. We’re slow and bursty. This heal requires constant damage which the Guardian lacks due to being slow. Defiance stance made more sense to be a Guardian skill and Litany should have been given to Warriors.

Edit: And yeah, they might scrap Litany but with its current iteration, i’d be fine with a do over.

I actually disagree, Defiance Stance is fine on warrior. True it could also work on Guard, but we already have shelter and it synergizes with valor.

The person who came up with Litany of Wrath it’s on the RIGHT track. It creates a concept where the guardian has to land hits and capitalize on Burst Dmg to heal.
This is 10 times a better concept (more skillful play also) than having to hit our medis for sustain. The same with Zealous Blade it goes hand in hand with Litany. But for this to happen you need combat mobility, attack speed (!!!) and some reliable snares.

The Dream.

Edit: A passive that gives % Life on Hit
Increased Attack Speed when using CC to capitalize on the passive
Litany + Fury for when you use a burst skill to maximize healing potential.

At least we’re getting snares. Honestly, I think if Guardians had both, we’d be too strong. I personally preferred mobility over soft-cc but i’ll take it. Zealous Blade’s healing is so..meh that I can’t justify it at all.

If ToC is going to be dumbed down so that babies can use it, it should at least not become a signet. What about signets is supportive exactly? The most supportive signet is Signet of Mercy which is widely regarded as garbage. Is there even a huge demand for signet builds on guardians? Making Heal Area a spammable consecration elite would be nice (compared to the signet), doubt that’d happen though.
I feel that ToW should also be dumbed down differently.

signet of courage
So if it retains the huge 180s cooldown, and the 4s+ cast time, make it also affect downed allies? Reduced cast time to say 2-3s would also be nice to make it a bit more usable though.

Might be awkward but IMO just class them as transforms and leave them alone.

Plus if you start down this path then you need to think up repacements for other skills. Skills other professions might not be so happy to have tinkered with.
Skills like lich form, which at this rate is the only thing that even makes me feel powerful on my necro anymore.
Those look neat, ofcourse i’m not gona lie but i’d need/want/like to see a list of all the proposed changes before it goes through… ofcourse i’m just one lowly player, so i can only hope others will agree with me.

Making tomes into a signet and one shout is the best idea ever. Will turn 2 useless skills into solid options for guardians.

xDudisx.5914:

Making tomes into a signet and one shout is the best idea ever. Will turn 2 useless skills into solid options for guardians.

Will they be solid options? I have a strong feeling that these two new abilities will still be insufficient in terms of survival/utility to take over renewed focus.

Still waiting on the numbers of the proposed skills, but Heal Area will put out more healing in burst quantity than a 10 second ticking heal signet will. They are trying to encourage signet usage which we never ever ever take. So nerfing an under utilized elite and trying to promote signets in one swift movement, yet it is ultimately a nerf in team support.

Tome of Courage Confagrate will push out more damage to a group on a specified point than we will gain from fury/quickness from a shout. We are not in a drastic need of critical chance or fury. Quickness will likely be in short duration (3-5 seconds?).

Both of these new proposed tome replacements are nice sounding but ultimately nerfs to a potential ability we have with current tomes.

The issue is that the tomes did not provide enough reward for the risks. Renewed Focused is seen kitten instrumental in our survival that anything else is a huge sacrifice.

I personally have seen great use of tomes in wvw, and some clutch moments in spvp. PvE they are almost never used.

Making tomes MORE accessible I think is the answer to making them good, not scrapping them and trying to put out a diluted version of them in a shout and signet.

I think conflagrate will rock when combined with burn stacking and some of our other new traits and skills – this might be why they want to drop those skills

Signet Of Courage sounds good.

The shout will offer a solid offensive elite in pve which we currently do not have as tome of wrath is more restrictive and crippling than helpful. Meanwhile the Signet will offer a WvW option but I agree that RF will be used over it 100% of the time in PvP.

We should not be settling for such weak elite skills. I’m assuming their cooldowns are going to be like the current elites.

JonPeters.5630:

MiniEquine.6014:

Any idea for Cooldowns if these would be put in place? The Tomes are pretty cool, but Courage, currently, is almost useless.

I don’t have the heal/boon duration numbers in my head but the current test cooldowns are 180 on signet of course and 30 on “feel my wrath.”

Jon

I dont know…. I feel a 180s cooldown on the signet in exchange for a party-wide full heal is a bit large. Particularly since it’s still 180 seconds before you can use the passive again. All things considered, something closer to 120 seconds might be fairer for the signet. It’s not a short cooldown, but it’s also not excessively long.

If it ends up being possible to heal via a % of an ally’s health (since currently I think the tome’s skill just has that high of a healing amount that it’s a full heal no matter who you are), it might be worth taking a smaller amount of healing, say 50% heal, for a cooldown around 90 seconds, or lower. Ideally the cooldown time will take into consideration the traits that affect signets, particularly decreased cooldown.

JonPeters.5630:

Wanted to run a potential idea past you all. Comments welcome.

Tome of Courage -> Signet of Courage
Passive: PBAoE Heal every 10 seconds.
Active: Light of Deliverance

Tome of Wrath -> “Feel My Wrath”
Shout that grants Quickness and Fury

We like the idea of tomes and if we did this we would hope to bring them back in a future Elite Specialization.

Thoughts? Comments?

Thanks,

Jon

Sound absolutely great, and like they’d actually compete with the current non-tome Elite.

Obtena.7952:

We should not be settling for such weak elite skills. I’m assuming their cooldowns are going to be like the current elites.

He’s mentioned 180 for the signet and 30 for the shout. If the shout is 4+ seconds of Quickness/Fury that’d be a really nice cooldown.

When do we get those changes?

I’m curious if the changes are going to go through too, I wanna know if I should bother to keep playing or not.

If you don’t want to play then don’t

I’d assume we get the elite skill changes when we get the specialization change.

We get specialization change before HoT

So basically, sometime between Soon™ and When It’s Ready™

Making the tomes as a signet and a shout is a great idea

The signet could heal PBAoE like the actual virtue, based in healing scaling. So you as guardian could get around 100 heal by virtue and another 100 heal by elite every second. Same if you trait the virtue. Even with the trait for signets you could get around 120 heal that is not that much in terms of heal/damage. Adding more than that could became OP if not carefully planned and doing the PBAoE every ten seconds is too slow to became usefull, even if is like 3-5K healing. I could take down the CD however, 180 secs seems too long i could put a CD of 90 secs same as renewed. The actual problem with signets is that the active effect have too long CD even traited for the active effect.

The shout seems too weak for a elite. I would mix smiters boon + zealot favor and increase CD to 60 secs.

Interesting.

However, i’d like “Tomes” could be a new weapon for all classes in future. I like the ideas of Mesmers, Necros and Eles with their Tome.

Maybe I should stop trying, judging by the trend of changes and the overall feedback of my peers, but these new ideas seem weaker than current tome capabilities.

What they are doing is stripping off what was seen as unused and trying to streamline the tomes to perform without a transformation.

ToC will lose it’s burst heal potential and daze.

ToW will lose it’s burst ranged aoe damage potential and knockdown.

The secondary skills on both tomes (2 and 3 skills) were underused because of such little return and clunky mechanics (bounce mechanics on affliction and purifying ribbon are suboptimal, and suffers targeting los and aiming issues much like focus ray of judgement).

We are gaining a slower more persistent heal (augment of VoR? just make VoR stronger if we need it then!). Also we are gaining a streamlined quickness and another source of fury.

Quickness across the board is under utilized after launch nerf because it was too strong apparently. Fury and crit chance is far from an issue on guardians, so these are unneeded and will augment our ability little to none in my eyes.

Many are just excited that guardians are getting attention finally after long bouts of neglect. New is not better!

The new proposed elites are weaker than current options, and do not solve the problem of Renewed Focus being so instrumental in survival/support/virtue mechanics that it is the top choice.

I fear we are championing this change because we know current tomes are insufficient and accepting a lemon in return

Yes please to the “Feel my Wrath” shout. I play a shout dps guardian and really haven’t found an elite I enjoy using yet. Feel my Wrath would be absolutely perfect as an elite. I always wished the guardian had a couple more fury generators! The quickness would be awesome too!

Tome of Courage outclassed Wrath mostly, but i not sure if i like the “improvements”..

I do not like this change at all. I am discouraged to see so many players ready to just give up on Tomes.

Tomes are one of the coolest elites in the game, yet here we are talking about removing them from an expansion and replacing them with what, a signet and a shout? Those are such boring and generic skill types compared to Guardian-unique spirit weapons and consecrations.

Tomes aren’t even bad, they were widely used after launch but suffer two big problems:
1) Power creep via Renewed Focus getting 2-3 major buffs since launch; I don’t recall if it always recharged virtues, but it used to root you and was NOT considered a meditation for a while. Also I think the CD was longer.
2) The major trait that made Tomes viable (pulsing stability + longer duration) competed with one of the best Guardian traits in the game (Absolute Resolution) in the Virtue line, the same line that benefits massively from resetting your Virtues via Renewed Focus. You just had to give up too much to take it.

I vote keep Tomes, with Elite Focus built into the skills by default and offering another trait for them outside of the Virtue line. I’d much rather have that than a 3-minute (!) CD signet with a rooted 4+ second cast time that offers no intrinsic stability, no intrinsic protection, no extra 10k HP and no AoE daze. Horrible trade.

I’m also not comforted by the thought that tomes may return as a new specialization, when the current specialization and expansion is coming 3 years after launch. Rework tomes when that specialization is actually in development and not just some abstract, “that would be cool” idea jotted down on a notepad somewhere.

Fudge.9527:

I’m also not comforted by the thought that tomes may return as a new specialization, when the current specialization and expansion is coming 3 years after launch. Rework tomes when that specialization is actually in development and not just some abstract, “that would be cool” idea jotted down on a notepad somewhere.

This, ANet please. The idea of the guardian’s next(?) specialization using tomes is amazing to me and I’m really excited for it (if it ever happens), but tomes should only be reworked at that point, not now and then players who love tomes are left with no tomes until 2-3 years later.

Sebrent.3625:

For Guardian, these looks like they could be fun and interesting.

However, if you’re going to let Guardian apply Quickness to the party, then I hope you are upping Mesmers’ ability to do reliable damage in PvE. Otherwise you could possibly be edging Mesmers completely out of the speedrun meta. Guardians already do more damage more reliably and have higher uptime on their reflects … not to mention heavy armor and no worries about AOE/cleave killing their phantasms (back to the reliable aspect of damage).

This. But honestly, I think these changes sound awesome. On paper, Tome of Courage sounds great for WvW applications, but it is severely cumbersome and often not even bothered with now. Renewed Focus is the only seriously viable elite for WvW, being that it recharges virtues, hence another Stability usage.

If there were other skills that took the place of Tomes that were actually useful, Guardians may see more build diversity on the battlefield. However, as Sebrent mentioned, be mindful how these changes affect all applications of the skills I’m all game types. Balancing would need to occur on a broader scale.

JonPeters.5630:

Wanted to run a potential idea past you all. Comments welcome.

Tome of Courage -> Signet of Courage
Passive: PBAoE Heal every 10 seconds.
Active: Light of Deliverance

Tome of Wrath -> “Feel My Wrath”
Shout that grants Quickness and Fury

We like the idea of tomes and if we did this we would hope to bring them back in a future Elite Specialization.

Thoughts? Comments?

Thanks,

Jon

On: Tome of Courage -> Signet of Courage
Seems way too similar to Warrior Healing Signet/Adrenaline Health
--> Suggested change/improvement (more Guardian-like replacing lost Elite), make it an AoE Regeneration Boon for ~3s base, 600 range, 10s between application; the Active is fine (cooldown should be 90s-120s)

On: Tome of Wrath -> Feel My Wrath Shout
Seems way too similar to Warrior Signet of Rage (which includes Might and Swiftness in lieu of Quickness (which is turning into a Boon)
--> Suggested change/improvement (more Guardian-like replacing lost Elite), add a Fire Storm -like effect (reuse graphics) that does AoE damage for a targeted area that also burns targets hit AND provide Fury or Quickness Boon (but not both) to you (cooldown should be 60s)

Eurhetemec.9052:

Obtena.7952:

We should not be settling for such weak elite skills. I’m assuming their cooldowns are going to be like the current elites.

He’s mentioned 180 for the signet and 30 for the shout. If the shout is 4+ seconds of Quickness/Fury that’d be a really nice cooldown.

Agreed, but that’s still not feeling like an elite skill. I have no problems if elite skills are in a category of skills. What I have a problem with is if the elite is equivalent to other skills in those categories.

I think a quickness/fury buff with 4 second duration on a 30 second cooldown is a shout-level skill, not an elite-level skill. Anyone that thinks giving up an elite skill slot to get a lesser shout skill is not thinking about how that downgrades our available skillset.

-Tome of Courage -> Signet of Courage
Passive: PBAoE Heal every 10 seconds.
Active: Light of Deliverance
-Tome of Wrath -> “Feel My Wrath”
Shout that grants Quickness and Fury
Give a passive of 25% movement speed.

Ragnarox.9601:

-Tome of Courage -> Signet of Courage
Passive: PBAoE Heal every 10 seconds.
Active: Light of Deliverance
-Tome of Wrath -> “Feel My Wrath”
Shout that grants Quickness and Fury
Give a passive of 25% movement speed.

Agree that +25% movement speed could be added we need that!

Sounds good. You could bring back tomes in a new specialization: Monk.

tome ideas?

anything will do…just add passive 25% movement speed….i care more about that…

please?