Guild Wars 2

As a main guardian, I just wanted to present some ideas for some changes to some of their weapon skills that may help improve a few things and better balance them out overall. I can’t really comment with complete accuracy on how they compare to other classes that I am less experienced with, but I think overall guardians are in a decent position, and just need some polish (though the same can surely be said for some other classes as well). So, I’m just going to list some ideas.

P.S. If I haven’t listed a weapon, it’s because I think it doesn’t need any changes and is good as is.

1: Staff Changes

I think as a whole, the staff is a great weapon for guardians. It offers good support, reasonable damage for its purpose and it’s my go to weapon for mob tagging during events with lots of enemy spawns. The main change I’d recommend, however, is to rework the symbol of swiftness. As it is, it doesn’t make much sense for guards to have to stand still in order to move faster. The amount time you lose standing still actually negates the speed gained from swiftness in most cases.

I’d move the swiftness effect to the line of warding, so you gain, say for example, 15 seconds of swiftness when you run over the line. That makes the line of warding a better retreat skill, and makes it easier for guards to gain swiftness properly while moving. As for the symbol of swiftness, maybe change it to a symbol of fury that grants 2 seconds of fury for each pulse (just an idea, I’m open to alternatives).

2: Sword changes

Damage wise, I think the swords auto attack is in a good place. However, what irks me is that the third attack in the auto chain (Sword Wave) counts as a projectile. It’s annoying using a melee weapon and having your attacks redirected to you against an enemy with projectile reflect properties (like the crystal golems in fractals), and what makes it worse is that when the attack gets reflected in that manner, the guard tries to repeat it multiple times in succession after the first failure in an attempt to succeed, which really slows your dps significantly and compounds the reflection issue. I’d change it so Sword Wave just counts as a melee attack.

The only other change I think the sword needs is a rework of zealots defense. Make it block attacks instead of absorb projectiles. That way it opens up more synergies with gaurdian traits and makes the skill more worth using. Oh yes, and make flashing blade a leap finisher.

3: Torch changes

From what I’ve seen, torches are pretty mediocre weapons on most classes that use it, not just guardians. At least, that’s what I’m lead to believe because I rarely ever see anyone carrying a torch. Still, I think the guardian torch could become a much more viable weapon with just a few small tweaks.

First, make zealot’s flame remove one condition on use. It just gives the skill a bit more utility and makes it more worthwhile.

Secondly, I think cleansing flame needs to be reworked. The main issue with it is that it’s easy to hit enemies with, but very hard to hit allies with because of how it aims (unless your allies are sitting on top of your enemies in melee range), so the “remove conditions from allies” effect is rendered mostly useless. It’s damage is also far too mediocre to warrant using on that basis alone, so the utility side needs to be fixed to make it more viable. My recommendation is to change the “remove conditions from allies” effect to “remove boons from enemies”. Do that and suddenly, the torch becomes a much more compelling weapon that guards might actually consider using more actively.

Right now the torch has to compete with the shield and the far superior focus, so I think these changes are reasonable enough to help keep the torch competitive as an offhand alternative.

4: The shield

I personally don’t use the shield because I think the focus is better as a defensive weapon, but I’d personally change shield of absorption to block ranged projectiles rather than absorb them. It doesn’t make sense for the guardian to have trait synergies with blocking attacks and then have so many skills that absorb rather than block, thus rendering those synergies useless.

5: The spear

Damage wise, the spear is our best weapon underwater while the trident fills more of the support role. That’s perfectly fine, but what I don’t understand is why our main auto attack for the spear (spear of light) is a ranged, single-target projectile attack. Every other spear skill is either used in melee range, or, in the case of wrathful grasp, pulls enemies into melee range, so it makes no sense for us to have a weaker, ranged, single target attack for our auto when 90% of the time, we’re going to opt to go into melee range to use our other, harder hitting spear skills.

I’d change the spear auto to a melee, cleaving attack to better suit the rest of this weapon’s skillset. We already have the trident as a ranged alternative, so the spear should definitely be a pure melee weapon in my opinion.

6: The Mace

Honestly, it’s hard to put a finger on what the mace is doing wrong, because it fills its intended role as a weapon that offers a lot of healing and tankiness, very well. I think the main issue is that its role is unneeded as far as the mechanics for GW2 go. Even the hammer seems to be a better weapon choice for guards, because despite offering a good amount of tankiness, it also does decent damage as well, and offers crowd control skills and a low cooldown blast finisher on top of it. The mace just seems completely unneeded and in desperate need of a complete rework.

Staff: Nice idea to have LoW do more than block people, I personally never understood why it wasn’t also a light field or something. The other suggestions might be OP, fury is a very powerful boon.

Sword: Very powerfull weapon already, I do agree on the missiles → melee idea though. The Zealot’s defence blocking ranged instead of absorbing would be… awesome! Leap on Flashing blade would be nice too, leap finishers aren’t very poweful.

Torch: Good ideas! The 5 skill just need to apply burning or do more damage though, it leave you wide open for 4 seconds, no amount of damage justifies that.

Shield: Shield 4 is pretty bad, would either increase damage done, make it a knocback or add regen on top of defence. Shield 5 blocking… again, would be awesome!

Spear: Nobody cares about underwater weapons. :p

Mace: Epic weapon, doesn’t need a change!

@Aedrion

Yeah, I was wondering about whether fury was the right boon for the staff symbol, but it’s really the only boon Guardian’s struggle to gain access to aside from swiftness.

Still, when I look at other class skills, some of them have easy access to group fury. Elementalists with the right traits can literally give a party unlimited fury through blast finishers on fire fields. Warriors have a low cooldown shout that gives 8 seconds of fury and 3 stacks of might and the battle standard can give over 65 seconds of fury, on top of might and swiftness. I don’t think it’s too unreasonable for a symbol to give fury as well, but I guess the duration would just have to be balanced relative to the cooldown of the symbol, so as to not make it OP. Still, any boon on a symbol is better than swiftness.

As for the torch, if their intention is for it to be a pure damage weapon, then they really need to reduce the channel time for cleansing flame. Four and a half seconds is just a ridiculously long channel time for so little damage and a utility benefit that’s almost impossible to implement properly. At least if it removes boons from enemies it would kinda justify the long channel time a bit more, but even then, that’s situational. I don’t think adding burning to it would be really beneficial either, because guards can already upkeep burning forever without much effort, especially in group situations with the virtue of justice.

Shield 4 knockback would be awesome. That alone would make the skill more worthwhile in my books. The only problem is we already have a knockback with shield of absorption, so I doubt they’d give us another. If anything, just reducing the cooldown of shield of justice would make it better.

And lastly, I know people don’t care about underwater weapons and if they never change it, it’s water under the bridge. Lol. Still, if they’re gonna balance stuff out, might as well squeeze it in as well. I personally wouldn’t mind seeing more underwater content for the game, if water combat was refined a bit and made more fun, but I reckon that would be a long time coming.

Staff:
Not to say its a terrible proposal, but the fury on symbol, is that even without boon duration, you can get anywhere from 8/15s or 12/12s uptime on fury, on a support weapon, and only that support weapon. You don’t really get Fury as a guardian from any source other than SY!. Also, does the swiftness from LoW stack? If so, considering swiftness can stack in duration 9 times, that’d be giving a zerg 135s+ swiftness indefinitely, or if it doesn’t stack, then its worse than Temporal Curtain in that regard (trading a pull for block, but without potential reflects and a much worse cd.

Sword:
I do agree here. The projectiles from Sword auto 3 should be considered a wave just like staff’s, but at a much smaller range (like 300, which it is at now. Its also called Sword Wave). Zealot’s Defense should probably also block rather than absorb, unless its also preventing certain “unblockable” projectiles (which looks like Static Shield, Shadow Shot, Phoenix, and Mirror Blade). Maybe it could block and absorb, in which case give that to Shield of Absorption also.

What I’d really like to see is a symbol on sword (and scepter, so that every loadout has a symbol). Now you could make a case for Symbol of Fury, maybe give it a low duration like 3s, and tack it onto Flashing Blade, or have a Symbol of Blocking and Absorbing Projectiles and tack it onto Zealot’s Defense. W/e works, just as long as there’s a symbol for sword (and Scepter).

Torch:
Its not really as kittenome people think, but its still hard to really want on the Guardian. Zealot’s Flame doesn’t stack as much burning anymore, which is unfortunate. Its still decent at dropping some burst tho. Cleansing Flame, ticks 10 times, and removes conditions from allies, on a 15(12)s recharge. It could be a fantastic condi cleanse for the party (zerg), but its really hard to see the effect when none of it happens to you. It also has the problem of only hitting 3 enemies (which hurts its burning capabilities via VoJ passive), having a long channel time for not too much damage, and putting the Guardian in a fairly vulnerable state. Maybe having it remove one condition per 3 ticks from the Guardian (or maybe everyone else too.) would make it more noticeable. Also, considering the torch trait increases burning time, Cleansing Flame should have some way to apply burning outside of VoJ.

Shield:
Like was said, SoA should be blocking things, or at least allow absorption to count as block for trait purposes. It could also probably afford kitten cd reduction for both skills.

Spear:
Considering I have Kamohoali’i Kotaki, I very much care about underwater combat. Honestly though, I think Spear is fine how it is. The only problem is that it uses Powerful Blades and Two-Handed Mastery, which provide no synergy at all. Maybe moving the Spear aspect to Zealous Blade and have it borrow the damage and healing from that trait (then Powerful Blades could afford something more interesting than 10% damage).

Mace:
Mace is pretty decent, but it could use a few tweaks to make it feel better. 3rd chain on Mace auto should hit 3 enemies. It doesn’t need to heal from 3 enemies, as having that one heal makes it better healing for 1v1 situations, but not having a cleave on the damage hurts it. In the very lease, divide the heal into 3, and let all effects cleave at the normal 3 targets for AA (still though, one heal and 3 damage would be best). Protector’s Strike also needs a “cancel” button for the channel. Canceling the channel should just provide the current end effect like many of the other block skills. The delay between block and strike could afford to be sped up a little.