Guild Wars 2

Vitali.5039:

This can be very educational

Rather not, since knowledge on aggro mechanics in this game is ridiculously poor and the wiki doesn’t help at all.

@OP: Sometimes it feels as if mobs love us more than anyone else. When it’s trash without a break bar, try to use blinds proactively (GS #3, F1, healing trap), that helps a lot. When it’s a boss, use your active defenses and when you’re out of them and don’t have a healer, try to kite with your scepter. Works on most melee mobs, even if it’s not very elegant.

I’m pretty sure pets have a lower priority than player characters when buffs are applied.

Can we have Heroes?

No. For good reasons.

Altair.8402:

Hope they add +Power +Ferocity +Precision +Condi Damage as a combination.

Yeah, that would be interesting to fine-tune power (berserker) gear due to ferocity as a main stat. I don’t think that this ominous griever stat will become relevant in any way – no point in making condi damage a main stat next to power, when power builds usually hand out few to no conditions.

If you want to go the full condi dps route, viper or sinister gear is probably a good idea if you want to make gear right now. For the support route, however, I’d definitely wait till launch. We don’t know what kind of new stats they’ll introduce and, what’s more important, it’s questionable whether support FB will be viable at all. In the state of the test weekend, it’s about as dead as a spec can possibly be.

For economic reasons, I’d expect them to introduce a new raid currency in PoF raids, which replaces magnetite shards. Consequently, I don’t expect PoF stats to be available via magnetite.

Sorin Noroku.5342:

These are also under best examples, and do not count in dodges and mechanics from raids, which is another reason why condi is favored, as damage still goes on while you’re doing mechanics.

Am I missing something important or is this frequently cited argument total nonsense? When dodges/mechanics prevent you from dealing damage, you can’t apply conditions. So while your present conditions will still tick for a while and prevent the sharp dps drop a power build experiences (unless the enemy becomes totally invulnerable, which screws condi builds), your condi build will have a ramp-up time afterwards, while the power build can go full ham as soon as mechanics end.

Breakbars are a thing in some fights. If every thief in Vinetooth Prime zergs slotted BV and knew when to use it, the world would be a better place.

The OP probably used the worst possible example, since BV is a shared effect, but that’s the exception to the rule. For the vast majority of hard CCs, he is completely right with regard to their uselessness for other things than break bars.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Reasons for short duration.
[…]

Those reasons aren’t very convincing. The entire interrupt thing suffers from one big issue: cast times. While 1/2 second or more may be justified for a powerful CC in PvP, it makes the skills rather pointless if you want to interrupt a certain attack of your opponent. By the time you’ve finished your cast, many attacks will have already hit.

With regard to the stunlock you fear for tougher opponents, diminishing returns have been invented for a reason. Implement them properly and the veteran/elite will have more than enough time to fight back.

However, I doubt that the amount of re-balancing required to make CC worthwhile outside of break bar situations is worth it. Those capacities should be used more productively, e.g. to finally get closer to proper class balance in PvE.

I support this. A colourblind mode like the one from Wildstar (you could freely set all indicators to the colors and transparency you want) would be amazing.

Ranged builds, with a few exceptions, have lower dps than melee regardless of boons. It’s the classic case of risk vs. reward, where rangeds usually have a dramatically lower risk.

As you (should) have learned in the threads on Shattered Observatory, difficulty scales don’t matter to the whiners. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have seen calls to nerf SO 100 NM. So there’s absolutely no need to replicate that in raids and dedicate development time to easymodes that won’t accomplish anything – except wasting time.

Firebrand: 2/10
Could be a great spec in theory, but in practice gets screwed by the totally failed implementation of tomes and mantras. At its current state, not worth playing over any other class.

Holosmith: 9/10
Felt fun, interesting heat mechanic, nice damage, great animations. That’s what a new spec should look like.

Didn’t really test the other ones, so no rating for them.

Locking HoT spirit shard gain behind the raid mastery is certainly not brilliant, but afaik it was originally designed in a way that experience gain after maxing out masteries generally yielded nothing. Only after changing that, raid masteries became a (minimal) issue. If someone is so desperate to max out all masteries, just buy some random kill or do escort once. It’s not as if that was particularly difficult.

Sartharina.3542:

The stupidity in this game is about characters that use Longbows and Rifles and other ranged weapons (They don’t even have to be Longbow Rangers – Rifle Warriors. Longbow Warriors, Staff Eles, Staff Necros, Longbow Guardians, Scepter Guardians, Staff Mesmer, Scepter Mesmer.) all end up having to stack in melee range, which everyone outside of Guild Wars 2 rightfully recognizes as Completely kittening Stupid.

That almost sounds as if people were all over the place in the dungeons/raids of other MMOs, which is hardly the case unless specific encounter mechanics enforce it. Having the group close together has always offered a bunch of benefits, and since melee characters are rather range-restricted, that has always been close to melee range. GW2 does stack a bit tighter than other games, but the principle is exactly the same.

Sifu.9745:

Depends on class and builds: as condi Guardian (condi/power/vitality) i can do the same burst or even more than berserker Guard, while having 9k more health Condi guard burst dmg (and sustain) is just insane.

I sincerely doubt that a burn guard gets even close to the PoB+SoW+WW combo’s burst damage. It may do a good job for PvP, but that’s another story.

As to the OP, power in general is hardly a joke. For anything that doesn’t live eternally (i.e. several minutes like a raid boss), power usually beats condi even if benchmark numbers are considerably lower. For raids, benchmark numbers could still be closer, but condi should probably always have a slight advantage at the golem, since target changes and such stuff in real encounters are a more of a disadvantage to condi than they are to power.

If you don’t have a guild or friends for that, I’d still try to form a practice group.

The new skin isn’t that bad, but I’d prefer the old version.

Sephylon.4938:

When I think exploit, I think of the old portal strategy in mo and escort. These break the encounter is some way. To me, distorting mechanics isn’t so much an exploit as it is an oversight in balance, wouldn’t you agree?

Exactly this.

It’s +216 power for the subsquad for 10 seconds, but -216 for the guard for the entire burn phase. One power dps will hopefully profit from it. However, mesmer, druid and PS scale so poorly on power that it’s highly unlikely that using BS will be a big win for the subsquad. If it isn’t a net loss.

Murdock.6547:

They google some exploit-tier builds and strats, and shrug away as much personal responsibility possible as a raider.

What’s this nonsense about the “exploit-tier builds”? I may have missed something (though I doubt it), but I can’t remember any build exploits being just close to widespread.

If you aim at the builds which are much more effective than they should reasonably be (i.e. stuff like chrono, cPS), that’s not an exploit. That’s just ANet’s incompetence to produce reasonable balancing.

A “samurai” with two swords as the great protector. I’m not sure what you have smoked, but it must be strong stuff.

Scipion.7548:

You are probably both true, but I think if Anet don’t bring massive overhaul for the next xpac, it will be more and more complicated to have a balanced and clear game and the situation of elitism and over optimization we know today will be worse. […]

That’s certainly true and I’m curious how, in the long term, they’ll solve the balance issue. Especially when the devs are already unable to properly balance a single set of elite specs. But that’s their problem, not mine. Maybe sweeping changes will have to be made at some point, but I’m sure the backlash will be epic.

PS: We seriously need those elite spec names you suggested!

Einlanzer.1627:

Basically this. It surprises me that melee is getting so much defense. It’s the most intuitively obvious thing in the universe that ranged just flat-out works better in most scaled content.

Melee is fine, scaling in some cases isn’t. Fixing the root causes of the issue would be much more beneficial than some band-aid pseudo fix for melee.

It’s way too late too bring such massive changes together with PoF. Actually, I strongly doubt such a complete overhaul of the class system will ever happen in the lifetime of this game.

I wouldn’t mind a CM for every fractal (but please not all on the level of Arkk CM), but first the rework of certain old fractals should be done. Solid Boredom and Underwater come to mind.

How can PoF “clarify” anything when HoT elite specs and core specs remain?

zealex.9410:

A faster flow of content imo is essential to balanc out the lack of a gear treadmill that generate playtime on its own. I understand that this isnt a sub based mmo but im not making any unreasonable requirest i believe. Id love to see 4 or so new fractals per year and the old 6wings be a thing.

Six wings per year in a game that has its focus quite far away from raids? I’m sorry, but you’re delusional. That would be an ambitious goal for a game with absolute focus on raids.

Ragnarox.9601:

If they make changes like to staff auto then we are kittened

Certainly, but on the other hand, I think it’s pretty difficult to surpass support mantras (and tomes) in uselessness. In its current state, FB is a spec I’ll touch just once to confirm it’s still bad, so I’d hardly care for any further FB nerfs. If they produce some reasonable fixes in the meantime, maybe I’ll even buy PoF after my holidays.

At its current state, the mantra (like all support mantras) is pointless as a support tool, since you won’t support anyone with it if you can’t hit people. Nevertheless, I agree that FMW feels lackluster. The easiest way would probably be instant cast, CD reduced to 30 s and maybe even increase quickness duration.

ButterPeanut.9746:

Now lets talk about DPS roles. Giving a list of which class should do most DPS based on a tiny subset of factors is incorrect, especially including survivability.
[…]
IMO, an ideal state is where every class has a DPS build/builds that are relatively close to one another (5-10%ish), and then the meta is determined by the players skill on that class and the utility that is required based on the encounter design. This means that no DPS class is systematically better than any other, but they may be on specific encounters.

I definitely agree with the first part, but only partly with the second. All classes should have an effective dps spec, but there should be some differentiation. That would be more healthy for class diversity than trying to bring all dps specs very close.

If we take a range of 30k (effective) to 36k (optimal), then a class that already has two guaranteed support slots should not have a dps spec that gets significantly above 30k. On the other hand, classes that bring nothing except raw dps should be balanced close to the optimum.

It’s already bad enough that three classes block 6/10 raid slots. There shouldn’t be any objective reason to have those even in the 4 dps slots, which are contested by 6 classes.

cat.8975:

YuiRS.8129:

If they buff Glacial Heart in a good way it could lead to the resurrection of the old Hammer medi Guard. Don’t know about you but I’d love that.

That’s exactly what I’m hoping for, with maybe an additional change that makes it viable for PvE as well :>

That would have to be an extremely strong effect besides the cooldown reduction, which is nearly worthless in PvE. I don’t see that happen in any way – there’s just no space for the virtues line in a PvE hammer build.

I think (and hope) that they’ve abandoned underwater stuff for good. An underwater expansion would probably be the workload of three regular ones (due to the necessary rework of all underwater gameplay systems), so it’s simply not economical.

skeeman.3140:

They did state though that there have been a number of changes/bug fixes based on feedback, they just weren’t including those in the stress test.

Yeah, would have been a surprise if they brought the stuff into a mere stress test. I guess I’ll find out after PoF launch whether they get something reasonable done with FB.

Thanks, I didn’t really expect anything else.

I assume nothing has changed about the big issues from the test weekend?

You’re talking about different red balls. The one that just rolls on the floor is announced by the small red arrow under Arkk’s feet. That’s different from the triple balls of doom, which appear ~1 second after the ball above his head disappears.

Looks more like a bug or whatever else, though I never bothered with buying keys.

Noah.4756:

I foresee major problems applying quickness with a 300 range cone in front while at the same time trying to deal damage with a 130 range mace or axe. Taking a step back or being forced to stand on the opposite side in order to reliably apply quickness will be a DPS/Heal loss and I have my doubts whether it will work in practice.

That’s been consensus since the start of the test weekend. At its current state, support firebrand will be dead on arrival.

Twyn.7320:

[…]Anet’s ‘build diversity’ preaching […]

… is, first of all, a pile of steaming bull manure. If their balance team did their job, it might be worth arguing about build diversity, but not at the current state.

As to your concept, it’s still bad. Apart from the fact that some classes lack a usable power or condition build, it’s no fun if you have to change your build every day because some arbitrary, pointless restrictions get thrown at you. Besides, your concept is more harmful to build diversity than the current state – with such instabilities, class restrictions would reach a wholly new level.

Twyn.7320:

But if you want to swap builds now with Ascended Armour, you have to pay upwards of 30g-40g every single time… so I’m not sure what the issue is with my proposal regarding Ascended Stat-Swapping.

While I wouldn’t mind the ability to swap stats on ascended gear more easily (though rune swapping would be required in addition), I think that this idea is so far off that it isn’t worth putting much thought into it. Such a change would make legy armor obsolete, so it simply won’t happen.

My expectations? From experience, I expect nothing useful, so I’ll probably slot FB once to confirm how bad it is and then remove it and leave it untouched for a long long time.

I agree with Vince. While I wouldn’t mind some rotation in the instabilities and maybe a few new ones, such a system would have to be implemented very carefully. I don’t want to see another disaster like boon thieves and your suggestions are exactly on that level. Also, that stat swapping stuff is just bad. There’s legy armor for stat swapping (what would be the point of it?) and it would be incredibly tedious if you had to swap every bloody day because some new stupid stuff has popped up.

How fortunate we’re going to a desert in PoF. I guess even when, at some distant time in the future, we’ll encounter Steve/Bubbles, it won’t be underwater.

If you want a safety net, use scepter+x. It has orders of magnitude more damage in exchange for being just 900 max range, but that’s more than enough for any fractal boss. Longbow damage on a guard is just abysmal and its CC actually isn’t good – scepter+shield comfortably beats longbow CC. GS is fine, though.

For PvE, shield is a nice offhand if you need CC.

Hoboboots.2137:

Also appreciate the honesty Sadly people seem to fear that these days.

At least in this forum, there are some comprehensible reasons for that behaviour. Unfortunately.

Good question, I don’t know whether there’s a definitive answer. When you get your ascended armor, I’d go directly for scholar. If you still have exotics, maybe it’s not a bad idea to think economically. Do you have some spare black lion salvage thingies to get your scholars out? Use scholar. Otherwise, maybe use the cheaper rune.

But, you know, the most important thing is that you seem to be capable of thinking for yourself. Go on like that and you’ll probably be one of the rather few valuable guard players in T4.

With regard to the valk gear, it depends on what you want to achieve. I didn’t address that issue since valk probably isn’t bad as_some kind of “training wheels” (or lazyness buffer) and I assume you should still have some reasonable reta uptime in order to get your crit chance. Berserker gear, for obvious reasons, makes you independent of reta and is the better choice for damage, especially when you play well enough not to need valk’s extra vitality. It’s been my first ascended set on my guard, so I never entertained the thought of using valk. You still have quite some way to go until you hit F100, so just adapt on the run.

To your last question(s), the elite trap offers some nice CC, but for group damage the shout is better unless you have a competent chrono (that’s a very rare species). Adapt :P

If you don’t feel overly attached to mace and/or GS, I’d recommend to always have scepter in one weapon set. It’s good at damage and there’s quite a bunch of fractal bosses you don’t want to melee all the time, at least not in a typical fractal PUG. Offhand doesn’t really matter, they all have their advantages and disadvantages in fractals. Choose what you like. The other weapon set can be chosen freely, hammer and GS are certainly good candidates. Hammer damage is just ok, but it offers probably the best utility among all guardian weapons. When you take it, Honor is a must-have due to the symbol GM trait. For that reason, hammer probably doesn’t fit really well with valk gear, since you’ll now lack reta uptime.

100 words or less? fine, that’s possible.

I mainly tested firebrand. It’s obvious that it has been designed as having the choice between going full condi damage or going for support. The condi dps route might work in the end, but support is dead on arrival. Tomes suffer from ridiculous cast times and cooldowns, while mantra cones are a joke and not worth the hassle. Theory behind the spec is ok, implementation is just bad. This has been discussed ad nauseam in the guardian forum.

Since you asked for honest opinions, you’ll get one. With that build, you’d probably be one of the guardians I’d love to kick from T4 fractal groups if I cared a bit more. It’s one of those builds that try to do many different things, but are good at nothing.

There are two glaring things in your modified build. First, the Honor trait line is pretty pointless in that setup. Empowering might is, unfortunately, a joke and has always been one. Supplementing that joke with strength runes hardly helps, guardian simply isn’t good at keeping up might on a fractal party. I would recommend replacing Honor with DH and the strength runes with something more damage-oriented.

Second, shouts are bad. It’s unfortunate, but that’s their current state. I recommend replacing one with bane signet and the other one with procession of blades. The last utility slot is usually the one that should be adapted to the current fractal/situation.

With those changes, you’d probably be able to deal reasonable (though not great) damage, keep the weapons you apparently like and still be rather tanky and a bit more supportive than the standard build.

Oh, and some preventive advice: please learn when to bring what kind of utility in fractals. Few things are worse than all those wannabe guards out there who never change the content of their utility slots.