Guild Wars 2

Manimarco Devil.1790:

Interesting I did not know that as I usually was trying to use it to survive myself.

This is basically why we started “for science”ing this. My friend was messing around on DH and was telling me SoC was only blocking range attacks but I had played DH in fractals over the weekend and it was definitely protecting the people I cast it on there for melee attacks. So we messed around and figured out how it works because of the confusion. The tool tip or lack thereof didn’t really help at all, lol.

SoC does block attacks in melee, but only attacks on people with the buff active. Like I said this does not include the guardian that uses SoC…for whatever reason. I had my friend being attacked by a melee enemy while I was casting SoC on him and he was blocking.

Shield of Courage Activate: Create a shield in front of you that blocks attacks for you and allies.

After a bit of testing with a friend (and a severe lack of info from the tooltip) we figured out a couple of things about this skill. The block portion only applies to people standing in the cone forward but does not include the guardian caster themselves even though the description says otherwise. The block is a buff and has no name or description. SoC also acts like the new revenant hammer 4 skill that blocks projectiles but it’s not mentioned it does this. On this note, the other boons you get like aegis, stability, retribution, and protection from traits still work like intended but now they are all almost useless with a traited SoC. Traited lasts about 5 seconds to the best of my knowledge, but I didn’t stopwatch it or anything…since…you know, the duration is not in the tooltip. The only boon that outlasts the traited block is aegis, but the aegis is prioritized over the SoC block and is wasted similar to other blocks already present in game. This bit really irks me but whatever I suppose, not the point of this post. Basically the only time you’d benefit from these other boons would be when you’re up against something unblockable and in pve that’s almost never (unless HoT shakes this up a bit). This is assuming the guardian that used the skill is supposed to get the “blanket” block. If not the boons would still be useful but if we’re not supposed to get the block then we could really use that info in the description.

All in all, I really like this skill, it just sucks that it’s maybe bugged or at least lacks a lot of info on the tooltip and also renders a lot of other aspects about the virtue itself marginally useful.