Guild Wars 2

I’ve been trying to build a condition damage guardian recently, and it’s been proving ineffective. I’ve seen the posts/sticky on the permeating wrath build, but after trying variations of it for the past week, I can easily say that even our best condition dmg builds are inferior to every other class. No doubt, Burning is a strong condition, and we have a lot of access to it through virtues. But one damaging condition (That only stacks duration, not intensity) is simply not enough.

Lets look at the condition options other classes have (this is strictly speaking about damaging conditions):

• Elementalist – Bleeding, Burning (a LOT)
• Thief – Bleeding, Torment, Poison
• Ranger – Bleeding, Burning, Poison
• Warrior – Bleeding, Burning, Torment, Confusion
• Engineer – Bleeding, Burning, Poison, Confusion
• Necro – Bleeding, Burning, Poison, Torment, *Fear (through trait)
• Mesmer – Bleeding, Burning, Poison, Torment, Confusion

Now I know some of these classes don’t have strong up-times on all of their conditions, but the variety of conditions they can apply makes up for it. Also, Guardian is the ONLY class that has no weapon with a condition-based auto attack. In fact, the only damaging condition applied at all through weapons is with Torch offhand 4. Not to mention our cover-conditions are pretty limited too (basically just blind and vuln).

My suggestions are a few simple changes:

• Mace 1 – change the first 2 strikes of the chain to apply torment (4-5s duration). To fluff it up, think of it kind of like an “Inquisitor” role, where the the guardian’s righteousness torments the impure.

• Mace 3 – On a successful block, add either an AOE weakness or an AOE cripple. This would give us a 3rd cover condition to work with, in addition to the blind and vuln we already have. I like the weakness idea, because if you don’t block, you get protection, if you do block, they get weakness. The end effect is damage mitigation either way. Also, currently, we have no access to cripple, and I’m not sure if that is by design. Maybe the devs don’t want guardians to have access to many movement impairing effects. Either way, a cover condition would be helpful.

I think the addition of torment to Mace 1 would really widen the builds for guardians, and we’d see a lot more play with Mace. Currently, it’s very rare to see anyone using Mace because it’s been resolved as basically a buff weapon. With this, we could at least get extra damage out of it while working a support build.

Bear on the job.6273:

I’ve been trying to build a condition damage guardian recently, and it’s been proving ineffective. I’ve seen the posts/sticky on the permeating wrath build, but after trying variations of it for the past week, I can easily say that even our best condition dmg builds are inferior to every other class. No doubt, Burning is a strong condition, and we have a lot of access to it through virtues. But one damaging condition (That only stacks duration, not intensity) is simply not enough.

Lets look at the condition options other classes have (this is strictly speaking about damaging conditions):

• Elementalist – Bleeding, Burning (a LOT)
• Thief – Bleeding, Torment, Poison
• Ranger – Bleeding, Burning, Poison
• Warrior – Bleeding, Burning, Torment, Confusion
• Engineer – Bleeding, Burning, Poison, Confusion
• Necro – Bleeding, Burning, Poison, Torment, *Fear (through trait)
• Mesmer – Bleeding, Burning, Poison, Torment, Confusion

Now I know some of these classes don’t have strong up-times on all of their conditions, but the variety of conditions they can apply makes up for it. Also, Guardian is the ONLY class that has no weapon with a condition-based auto attack. In fact, the only damaging condition applied at all through weapons is with Torch offhand 4. Not to mention our cover-conditions are pretty limited too (basically just blind and vuln).

My suggestions are a few simple changes:

• Mace 1 – change the first 2 strikes of the chain to apply torment (4-5s duration). To fluff it up, think of it kind of like an “Inquisitor” role, where the the guardian’s righteousness torments the impure.

• Mace 3 – On a successful block, add either an AOE weakness or an AOE cripple. This would give us a 3rd cover condition to work with, in addition to the blind and vuln we already have. I like the weakness idea, because if you don’t block, you get protection, if you do block, they get weakness. The end effect is damage mitigation either way. Also, currently, we have no access to cripple, and I’m not sure if that is by design. Maybe the devs don’t want guardians to have access to many movement impairing effects. Either way, a cover condition would be helpful.

I think the addition of torment to Mace 1 would really widen the builds for guardians, and we’d see a lot more play with Mace. Currently, it’s very rare to see anyone using Mace because it’s been resolved as basically a buff weapon. With this, we could at least get extra damage out of it while working a support build.

Mace is already in a very good place as a Cleric’s weapon, and is actually one of the few sets that doesn’t need to be tampered with.

No need to overhaul too much, I think the problem could easily be fixed with a trait. Something along the lines of 50% chance to cause 6s of bleeding on critical hit. Sword can already get very decent burning uptime using Surpreme Justice, as a fast hitting weapon. Since Sword can also achieve good crit rates and hits fast, it would be a great choice if you added an optional trait that allowed it to proc bleeds. I think this would push a condition build over the top. There’s a Sigil that already does this, but with kitten duration and a 2s ICD, it really doesn’t do enough. The Sigil plus the trait would make it viable, however.

The current problem is, even if you can apply the burning, we can really only put out 2 conditions with regularity (excluding blind, which falls off too fast), and those are vuln and burning. So even once we get burning up, it’s pretty easy to cleanse. One more condition (bleed on crit) would do alot to protect burns and make the whole thing more viable.

The reason I suggested torment on mace is mainly because of flavor (bleeds aren’t a traditional “cleric” thing) and it would make the weapon unique (only thing that can apply torment on auto attack). A bleed-on-crit trait would be OK…but again I don’t personally like the flavor, and there are so many other classes that get that trait already (War, Necro, Engi, Mesmer kinda…).

And as for mace being a good Cleric’s weapon, I agree. But if you are focusing on Healing Power for support, you are going to sacrifice greatly on your damage potential. Which is fine if you are truly aiming for a full support role. But if we splashed condition damage into the weapon, it’s easier to add more damage potential to the build while maintaining the support role.

And yes, cover conditions are an issue. Currently, we can mitigate that somewhat since our burning applies so frequently. But with any other conditions we try to apply through runes/sigils, they get cleansed practically immediately. Again, I opt for the weakness on Mace 3 block because it fits the flavor very well, and again is a “support” condition.

Bear on the job.6273:

The reason I suggested torment on mace is mainly because of flavor (bleeds aren’t a traditional “cleric” thing) and it would make the weapon unique (only thing that can apply torment on auto attack). A bleed-on-crit trait would be OK…but again I don’t personally like the flavor, and there are so many other classes that get that trait already (War, Necro, Engi, Mesmer kinda…).

And as for mace being a good Cleric’s weapon, I agree. But if you are focusing on Healing Power for support, you are going to sacrifice greatly on your damage potential. Which is fine if you are truly aiming for a full support role. But if we splashed condition damage into the weapon, it’s easier to add more damage potential to the build while maintaining the support role.

And yes, cover conditions are an issue. Currently, we can mitigate that somewhat since our burning applies so frequently. But with any other conditions we try to apply through runes/sigils, they get cleansed practically immediately. Again, I opt for the weakness on Mace 3 block because it fits the flavor very well, and again is a “support” condition.

Weakness is a thematically correct cover condition, and would synergize well with bunkering abilities. Tormet on Mace 1 though? Honestly, the mace chain is very powerful. You can’t just bump the power of it without throwing off the balancing. To add Tormet, you must nerf this skill chain in some other way, and that would hurt Cleric builds that use only Power/Healing, because you’d have to reduce those base numbers somehow.

Modifying existing attacks via traits, factors the cost in someplace other than the base attack, and is optional. It also can’t be abused on weapons that only use power, because you’d have to spec for condition damage in order for it to be any good. I don’t think there’s any problem with Guardians doing bleed, especially since this would have the most synergy with swords. Why shouldn’t a sword cut cause bleed? I understand that it makes a bit less sense on a mace, but using any based trait on a mace would make much less sense (since it attacks slowly). Incidently, I’d also be fine with a “Tormet on Crit” type of trait.

Personally, I wish we had access to more chill. Some people have a problem with their weapons shooting fire AND ice, but I think it’s fine. Further, it’d give us the much needed slow that we desperatly need, and slowing up enemy recharge also helps sustain builds. I think Guardians synergize quit well with Chill, but they won’t open up Glacial Heart to anything but Hammer, a weapon which traditionally does not care about crit.

Personally I’m not a huge fan of retrofitting a current weapon into being an official condition weapon. All of our weapons save Torch are fairly well defined already. I would prefer simply adding access to a new weapon and making that the official Condition Weapon. I’m still rooting for Longbows in that regard, but perhaps Axe would work as well.

The main thing is that any condition weapon would need to allow for two things: The ability to consistently apply a second condition other than burning, and the ability to spike that condition. Consistency helps with overall DPS, but real condition builds rely on being able to dump a large amount of stacks on a target at once. Trickles tickle, spike damage is what gets kills. We will never have a real condition build without being able to spike conditions. It’s one thing to maintain burning and a couple of stacks of bleed. It’s something else entirely to dump 15 short duration stacks plus burning.

I like the idea of a new weapon for guardians to inflict torment but I prefer melee.

Since we have maces already and some of the maces in games are called
Morning Stars much to my disappointment that leaves Flails which are pretty cool in their own right. Also I can see other professions using chained weapons, like Flails such as Warriors and Necros. Since Flails are spikey and have chains this has torment written all over it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flail_%28weapon%29

Of course granting access to an existing weapon like a Long Bow would be easier to implement than a whole new weapon. I’d still prefer the Flail, we might actually get cool new stuff like this if we ever get an expansion.

Well, if we’re inventing entirely new weapon types I’d like to +1 poleaxes/polehammers. Heaving around a bardiche or lucerne hammer or something like that would be baller.

Yep halberds and other pole weapons would be excellent CC weapons for guardians. Something similar to the Hammer that Warriors currently have.

I’d love some more push back, and just some plain knock down and daze options with Guard.

Mace is great…except the third hit only striking a single target. 66% damage potential lost.

Honestly I wouldn’t be shocked if they gave some of the underwater weapons some land capability, Trident could easily turn into a long range condition weapon for us. While spear could be turned into… well something nice? lol Either way, it would be alot easier than just making new weapons for characters I would think, and wouldn’t create any “well this weapon doesn’t belong on this class” simply because they use them already.

Adding new weapons isn’t necessarily a bad idea…I would just prefer to not wait years for Guardians to get a viable condition weapon. Adding an existing weapon to their armory may be a better option (Axe seems the most reasonable). But again, I don’t have high hopes for such a large change.

To me, Mace is the weakest Guardian weapon currently available. It has it’s merits as a support weapon, but not much else. For any role other than pure support, there is a better weapon choice available. I wouldn’t want to add conditions to weapons that are already viable, especially DPS ones (like sword, GS, etc). So it seemed like the best option is to take the lowest DPS, lowest CC weapon we have, and augment it with condition damage.

As far as providing a condition burst ability…I’m not sure about that. A Mace/X build is probably going to be a sustain build by default, so it may just work out as a battle of attrition. Other than that, possible rework Signet of Wrath as a utility to provide us with a spike.

The passive of the signet already provides increased condition damage, make the active ability attractive to a condition build as well…something like “Double the current conditions on your target”. Kinda like the inverse of Necro epidemic. Instead of copying and spreading the conditions in an AOE, copy and reapply them to the same target.

I personally hate when people of any religion bother me at home. You might say they torment me. It would be even worse if they were carrying a mace!

Try mace with a med burst build. Protectors strike is beatiful, and the auto attack hits hard. Although, I haven’t used it now that powerful blades has been buffed.

Yeah. Mace actually has some really nice burst hits from Auto attack, and #3’s counter. the added healing from AA is also nice. Honestly it really doesn’t need a change other than some soft CC as far as WvW is concerned. sPvP wise It is beyond awesome on a point were people need to stay near you, on the symbol, an within attack range.

Longbow with Burning, Torment, Vulnerability and a hard CC would be awesome.

I certainly hope so. Maybe I’d start a 3rd guardian just to build a condition guard.

My preference is leaning towards Guards getting axes as their condition weapon. My ideas for the skills:

1. First two attacks are nothing special while the third strike places a symbol that lasts 2- 4 seconds and immediately inflicts 1-2 stacks of torment while adding 1 more per pulse.

2. Some flashy spin attack that cripples

3. Toss your axe at your target pull them to you (or vice versa, but I think pulling them to you would work better with the symbol). A cool effect for this would be to have a spirit chain attached to your axe that you pull on when it hits the enemy.

Man, as a side note, is bleeding the only major thing they could have though of to do damage? >.> And sharing those 25 stacks with everyone else.

I don’t think it’s needed. I don’t even think it’s good for the game as a whole.

From a sPvP point of view, the most “interesting” thing condition damage brings to the table is being able to keep a decent (but usually slow) damage output while wearing a fairly defensive amulet.
Besides Necromancers and Grenade+Bomb Engineers, which have a innate ability to spam AoE conditions into a capture point, most condition based builds are about attrition dueling and usually perform as close/far bunker/assaulter.

Guardian doesn’t really need this. Bunker guardian is awesome as it is: a pretty tough character with craploads of support that, even with next to zero damaging capabilities, it has been the preferred option as teamfight bunker/support since the game launched.
Give him a reliable condition weapon (staff is probably the only real must-to-have one for this kind of templates), and he will just switch to Settler and become some kind of monster.

For WvW, where Selfless Daring is way stronger, a condition guardian could be even worse. It’s not like there aren’t completely OOB builds roaming out there thanks to a sPvP based balance and some ridiculous PvE-only runes, but I don’t think throwing a few more on the mix is exactly the best way to handle that.

IMHO some kind of ability to keep enemies at close range , probably through a Zeal trait so something (healing through medis or dodgeroll, damage through Radiance, condi cleanse and retaliation through Virtues, whatever) must be given up as a tradeoff, would be much more desirable.