What makes Guardians hard to kill?
Tons of armor, healing, protection buffs and condition removal.
It’s very difficult to answer, because there could be a variety of reasons. Most generally, however, clever use of Virtues is something that all Guardians can do. With the right traits, they have access to blinds, high health regen, condition removal, burst healing, blocking and protection before any skills are even considered.
With a large host of defensive abilites at their diposal, a guardian can really hunker down. Especially 1v1, if using a defensive weapon like a mace, a Guardian can keep their blinds, blocks and dodges rolling to give them an incredibly small window in which damage will be recieved. This is the real power of Guardian that other classes can’t compete with – sheer stayability.
Aegis will make it a little bit harder. Next hit gets negated. Also, he might have used a blind to negate next hit.
The guardian is great against slow, heavy hitting enemies, but a thief should be tearing a guardian a new hole because you hit so many times it doesn’t matter if a couple of hits are negated.
Aegis is a boon, if that sigil could remove Aegis it would get you 1 more hit every 40 seconds. It’s not much especially, as I stated just now, you should be a class that hits for little* and often.
There are other things that he could have done skills/gear/traits/playstyle-wise that I wouldn’t understand (yet).
*The thieves I’ve encountered hit for a LOT and often.
Ok as a Guardian who doesn’t like the Thief class much I will go against my own sensibilities and tell you how to fight a Guardian:
Guardians are designed to absorb and counter other class abilities, if they succeed at doing this they are tough, if you circumvent this ability they are very fragile.
Guardians have base health below 11,000 at lv80 it’s something like 10,818 which makes them by default extremely susceptible to condition damage. Guardians also have innate healing per second (when geared can be as high as 300 a second, usually around 60), all Guardians will have an aegis up (blocks a hit) when you first attack them (so don’t backstab first if you see aegis buff) and can heal at least 1200 at will (second virtue). Even offensive Guardians have heals tied into using their abilities (heal on attack, heal on ability of X type use) as well which means in general every Guardian you fight has more total health than what is in their health bar as long as they are not CC’d.
How to mess with a Guardian:
Some Guardians can remove conditions well (based on ability and trait choice) some can’t. Most Guardians that are offensive will have Judge’s Intervention (gap closer teleport) a CC of some type utility, and an anti-stun/anti-condition utility. Almost every Guardian runs the Healing Book Elite cuz it’s OP. If its an offensive Guardian attack him, stun him, get him to pop his counters then stealth and run away. Regen yer initiative then attack him again now with his abilities down.
Defensive Guardians come in 2 basic flavors, high support and high defense. High support Guardians will attempt to heal the damage you deal so try to poison them repeatedly (once will not work). High defense Guardians are a hard counter to thieves so don’t expect to win, but if you start to lose run. Guardians suck at chasing you down particularly if you can cripple them before you leg it. If they remove the cripple or teleport to you just re-cripple or stealth and try again (Guardians have only so many tricks).
MOST IMPORTANTLY: Learn what the retribution boon looks like. If you attack a Guardian with retribution on you will lose guaranteed. If you see it either run away or remove it or kill the Guardian in the next 5 seconds before ret kills you.
EDIT: As far as the healing book ulti. If you see a Guardian with a book watch for casting animations and interrupt them with something. If you interrupt these long cast spells the book is wasted.
Okay thanks for the tips. Guardians and Eles are 2 classes I haven’t looked at whatsoever. (But I have no problems against eles anyway lol)
retaliation probably killed you
Svarty, the “60% chance to remove boon on crit” rune is useless against Aegis, which blocks the next attack anyway.
Oh yes, duh! ><
Guardians aren’t just about spamming abilities that “negate the next hit”. There are plenty of boons in which if you took them away from the Guardian he would be hurting. Guardians often have a protection buff up (-33% of all inc damage), they also usually always have some kind of Regen going as well (not counting their virtue regen).