Guild Wars 2

I enjoy staff immensely. It feels responsive, has a variety of offensive and defensive moves for different situations, and the animations are snazzy.

However, I feel like ArenaNet wants to shoehorn it into a purely support role. That’s a bad idea that harms build diversity. Don’t misunderstand me; it should absolutely be capable of being a close-range support weapon if your build invests into healing power. Yet, should it not be capable of being a powerful melee weapon if we build power/precision/ferocity? In particular, the autoattack and number two skill seem very weak for a weapon that requires you to get right in the enemy’s face.

The number two skill also relies on you properly timing your attack based on your enemies’ attacks, but even upon successfully reading their tells, the number two attack chain feel like I am tickling foes with a baguette covered in a thick layer of packing foam.

Any thoughts?

I’ve got a pretty unorthodox signet build that makes use of a mix of celestial/berserker/valkyrie gear.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|1.1g.h2|6.1g.h2|1p.71j.1p.71j.1p.71j.1p.71j.1p.71j.1p.71j|311.d17.311.d17.211.d13.2s.d13.3s.d17.3s.d17|k27.u29c.0.k39.0|0.0|v.1b.1d.1a.1i|e

While you might notice the low-ish toughness, the Signet of Judgement will provide a flat 12% decrease to incoming damage, making my defense quite strong when taking the damage into account. Note that this calculator does not count signets into the final stats on the right-hand side.

I’ve got efficient condition-removal with the signets (it will be better when they fix perfect inscriptions). The trick is to use the condition damage signet first – you can do without that, though it does make your burns noticeably stronger. Next would be the power signet. You’re already quite deadly, so the loss of the Bane Signet is acceptable. You want to keep the Signet of Judgement around for as long as possible, though its low cooldown means that you can definitely use it in a pinch (say you get ambushed by a small roaming party and you’re hit with 20 stacks of bleed, a cripple, and a chill in WvW).

I had tended to be a hammer proponent for a long time. ~75% uptime on protection in PvE? That’s pretty sweet! But, lately, I’ve really noticed that I am simply able to squash things with the GS without giving up much tankiness. The Guard’s GS has a kit built for damage, while the hammer is focused on damage mitigation and crowd control. The issue is that crowd control (hammer 3, 4, 5) is simply not as effective as direct damage. IMO, the GS just wins out.

The GS kit also seems to mesh together better. 5 → 4 → 2, followed by 3 when the enemy begins to run. Autoattack during the ensuing pursuit, repeat.

The hammer’s basic combo might appear to be 3 → 2 → 5 → 4, but warding skills are too easily escaped. At best, they make someone use up an evade. At worst, they accomplish absolutely nothing as the enemy touches the edge and is inexplicably flung out on THE OTHER SIDE.

I’m saying that warding skills kind of suck, okay?

Spirits really need some quality of life tweaks. For something so squishy (even when traited – personally, I think they need a 50% base HP boost, and the trait will double this new, larger HP pool), why don’t they function as necromancer minions? They should persist until killed, when you must then re-summon. For most normal PvE circumstances, this means that spirits will always be around. For dungeons and WvW, you’ll have to be more cautious.

I actually think the spirit’s active abilities should be completely reworked. My proposal is that they all have their own ground-targeted fields. Stone spirit places a poison field, sun spirit places a fire field, frost spirit places a frost field, and storm spirit places a lightning field. How I envision it is this: you summon a spirit, get the passive effect, order it to place a combo field at X location, it does so, and then returns to your side. Simple, effective, but not without risk.

You may notice that I failed to mention the spirit of nature. “A persistent spirit with that constantly heals and can revive allies and remove conditions on a 30 second cooldown? OP!”

Some more changes need to be made to this particular elite skill, IMO. Reduce the cooldown to 120 seconds. The passive effect – the health regen – should remain. To keep the skill balanced for the lower cooldown and persistent nature of the spirit, the new active skill is on a 25 second cooldown. It will remove a condition from all party members (including pets/minions) and also act as a stun breaker for the ranger. The revive was the big lure for this particular skill, but its functionality was already rather broken. This gives a spirit build much needed tools to combat conditions and stuns.

As has been mentioned, the current actives of the spirits simply fill no role – they are inferior traps. If you want traps, roll with some traps. Spirits should allow the ranger to fulfill a support roll. Right now, spirits are just a poor man’s signet combined with a poor-man’s trap, with all the worst aspects of a minion thrown in for good measure.