Guild Wars 2

Fashion Mage.3712:

inb4 base virtues get nerfed to 300 range because of mantras.

Yep. Pretty sure that’s the number one reason for the Staff autoattack change. They want you to use it as a kind of target checker for your mantras. The idea was probably that you stand just behind the frontline and camp staff offering the real melee mantra support.

Sad truth is you’d be better off just rolling DH or Condi FB and getting stuck in yourself though (Mace/Shield or Hammer both offering better support than staff anyway). Rendering the mantras rather pointless for the most part.

Careful what you say.

You know as well as the rest of us that, when it comes to Guardian, Añets response will instead be to nerf DH’s Wings of Resolve, to bring it under the effectiveness of FB’s Tome of Resolve, rather than buff FB’s Tome of Resolve to have comparable performance to Druid’s Celestial Avatar.

Roller.9327:

I agree with you, also Zealous Scepter now stacks might on non scepter weapons, a 600 range cone could be stacking mights pretty darn fast too….granted once Anet gets permeathing wrath and zealous scepter working together correctly lol

Not sure about this one.

Permeating Wrath might be bugged with Zealous Sceptre, or maybe an oversight.

Not tried it with Staff yet, but when attempting to use Permeating Wrath and Zealous Sceptre on Greatsword in PvE, I got zero stacks of might from the usual Symbol + Whirling Wrath combo.

When I untraited Permeating Wrath and picked a different trait, Symbol + Whirling Wrath stacked a good number of might with the Zealous Sceptre Trait as you might expect.

It could just be an outlier, but I think it’s probably the way it’s coded and as a result Zealous Sceptre might not stack Might when you have Permeating Wrath trait with any weapon but Sceptre (which it still did before so I assume maybe it still does?).

Other people will have to test and verify if it’s just a Greatsword + Permeating Wrath + Zealous Sceptre thing, or if the bug/oversight affects more weapons with the trait combo (or rather, fails to affect).

Might be different from Dragonhunter also, only tried on core Guardian so far.

TLDR; Zealous Sceptre only seems to stack Might on Justice procs if you don’t take Permeating Wrath for whatever other weapon you are using,

iczek.9628:

I feel like I should bring a necro in lieu of my ele, warrior, or druid. I prefer to play the last three I mentioned but I feel I would do a disservice if I continue to not bring a necro. Every time I run with a necro especially two or more the runs feel more smooth and the mobs/bosses go down quicker. Am I feeling this way for no reason? Bring an ele, warrior, or druid would be totally fine? This is focused on T4 fractals.

Those three are totally fine, you’ll find lots of groups actively looking for Druid in particular for the heals (not uncommon to see groups forming specifically requesting 4 Necros and a Druid). Just on Druid be aware of how agony reduces healing effectiveness and the instability stacks agony at high levels if you stay close to other allies for too long.
Warriors are always going to be useful as a one-man Might generation machine – not to mention the DPS increase from Empower Allies and Banners – War Banner is also a life saver in near-wipe situations, and Headbutt is some crazy strong CC for those breakbars.
Elementalists can be useful in part for the same reason as Druids – the strong heals, and Elementalist DPS has always been very solid with the right build. Utilities like Icebow offer strong CC for breakbars.

You aren’t wrong though that more Necros make runs easier often. There’s a couple reasons for this – alot of Necros use condi-damage, which is more effective than power damage due to ignoring toughness and the Protection boon against several mobs in Fractals at high tiers.

They bring rapid frequent boon removal, which is key to speedy and efficient runs at the high level Fractals were mobs are consistently stealing your parties boons, especially if you have somebody providing perma-protection or stacking that Might up to 25 – letting mobs keep that Might at 25 stacks with Protection tends to make them particularly dangerous as you can imagine.

And finally, Shroud makes all Necros innately tanky and hard to kill, which is particularly useful for situations like Mai Trin when you’ve gotta hold her in the Lightning Field to removes her defensive Shield Stacks – it’s alot easier to do this if you can just tank the lightning field when she’s on you. But it’s obviously useful just for party survival in general. Access to meaty minion meatshields also makes certain bosses, such as the Golem fight half-way through Uncategorized, easier.

The fact a Necro can do all these three things is what makes them so effective at high tier fractal levels

I feel the real key is the boon removal though. Sure a Necro can do those three things all at the same time, so the more Necros the better, but so long as someone in the party has some rapid effective on-demand boon removal (Thieves, Mesmers and Revenants can do this too), if the players are good enough a smooth run should be possible when playing as any class so long as at least one of these is present in the party and is set-up to remove those Boons.

iczek.9628:

Would it be really okay if I went marauder on armor and weapons for a little more health or stick with all berserker and try to improve? I feel I do a pretty good job avoiding as much as possible but there comes a time with endurance is depleted and I’ve already used #4 fire staff to get out of the bad stuff.

Of course. Marauder DPS is still good and a dead player contributes far far less DPS than an alive one. I run some Marauder on the trinkets of any low HP class I bring to Fractals (Guardian, Ele, Thief, granted I don’t play Ele or Thief much), that little bit of extra survivability really helps when it comes to surviving the odd mistakes or unavoidable attacks.

Yeah, it’s good that they are working on it now, I just wish they had bothered to read the full thread on the unreachable challenge mote instead of only the first post in that thread (and judging by the dev response in that reddit thread, it seems that it was only then, with the reddit thread, that they realised they had removed the Geyser), because if they had it would have been fixed by now unhalting our progress to the backpiece, and they would have saved themselves alot of effort too.

By not being willing to spent an extra 2 minutes reading the bug report thread on the challenge mote, they’ve created alot more work for themselves. Now they’ve gotta open the map again – making sure they are open the post-challenge mote fix rather than the pre-challenge mote fix version of the map, re-add the mist geyser, rebuild the map again (for all relevant fractal scales), re-translate the map, test it again to make sure they’ve not broken any other interactive elements in the process, and compress it again within the game files, re-upload the sever-side interactivity of it, etc, etc, etc. Instead of just doing it at the same time as they fixed the challenge mote and only having to go through all that stuff once. I would say I hope it’s a lesson learned, but eh, you know…

At least they’ve acknowledged the bugs existence now and are working on it, so I’m grateful for that. So we can be assured a fix will come at some point. Just wish they’d pay more attention in the future, not just for our sake, but also for their own.

While we covered it in this thread Challenge Mote in Snowblind fractal 21-50 I guess you fellows at ANet forgot to read past the first post or thread title.

With the change to the Snowblind Fractal, many elements within the Fractal were removed or made inaccessible. The Challenge Mote was one, which has now been corrected, but the Mist Geyser Required for the Magically Charged Infusion Sample in the Ad Infinitum III: Unbound Collection is still missing from the Fractal and hasn’t been replaced.

It would have made sense to have fixed this the same time you fixed the incorrect location of the Challenge Mote (we did tell you with that thread), but as this is not the case, we are letting you know individually now. Despite the challenge mote being fixed, progression towards the Legendary Fractals Backpiece is still impossible and unacquirable in-game due to this missing element of the map.

Please take note and reintroduce it back into the map as soon as you can. Thankyou.

Guess we start a new thread.

Funny thing is, everyone that posted here for the missing challenge mote will soon be posting again when they realize the Geyser is gone too once they make it to the next collection :p.

EDIT: Thread up.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mist-Geyser-Still-Missing-Snowblind-Fractal/first#post6266486

Any idea if the Mist Geyser has been fixed though? It wasn’t in the patch notes. They fixed the Mote so they obviously saw this thread, but did they actually bother to read anything beyond the first post?

That’s not the only thing that’s gone – the Mist Geyser has too. Just spent an hour combing the place trying to find it, incase they had moved it, but no luck – so you also can’t complete Ad Infinium Tier 3 either.

Guess this was a last minute change that ANet forgot to test…

Searching on Scale 16 FWIW, though I expect it’s gone from all scales.

It’s not overpowered persay, seems much of its power comes from the insane damage on traps, and traps are flawed as a concept in sPvP because anybody with brains knows to go around them or dodge out of them (and you do sacrifice much of your sustain as a Guard to make significant use of them) – but it is far too rewarding for the incredible ease of use and lack of skill required to play it and get powerful results. It’s cheesy, more than anything.

I too am sad at the way sPvP is literally swarming with zero skill Dragonhunters at the moment…Guardian used to be a respectable class, but now the zero skill scrub train FotM players have commandeered the classes’ identity and will grind it’s reputation down to a point of no respect the way they did the once respectable Mesmers and Engineers before it, before those two classes also got their own brainless cheese-fest builds. It makes me sad.

Labjax.2465:

The following is a quick breakdown by class to show you some of your options (I want to make this comprehensive at some point, but I’m going to skim for now):

Here’s a few more common ones you missed:

Guardian:

Shield skill 5 is an AoE Knockback on activation.
Dragonhunter F1 Virtue – the follow-up Chain Skill is a piercing Pull.

Also less common in PvE, but, Hammer 5 and Staff 5 Wards, and Sanctuary utility, are a knockdown against any opponent that crosses them (will have to check but I’m pretty sure these work for breakbar damage).

Necromancer:

Staff skill 5 is a Fear

I’m having the exact same problem; I did actually post a forum thread right here on this very issue last night, but it quickly got buried to page 3, with no responses, of course -_-.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Help-Unranked-Arena-button-is-stuck-bugged/first#post5704249

Still it’s somewhat reassuring to find out that I’m not the only person suffering from this issue afterall; The more people that have this problem, the more likely ANet are to do something about it, at least.

Does your PvP Panel look bugged the same way mine is? (Check the screenshot in the link).

Hi, a little earlier tonight there was log-in server issues with Guild Wars 2, which caused all sorts of mayhem with the game client for a couple hours.

These issues finally seem resolved, but one issue is lingering with me (and asking around, it appears only me). The que button for unranked arena is bugged and no longer functional for me, and instead of just being disabled the ranked arena button has disappeared completely.

Screenshot is included.

Tried restarting the client and switching character but neither seems to help. I was in the unranked que when the log-in server issues began earlier, and it kept popping the dialogue to join an unranked match (tho never with any success), no matter where in the world I was, including PvE maps. This makes me wonder if now the log-in server issues have been resolved, the game mistakenly believes I’m already in the unranked match que and will refuse to let me attempt to start, even though I’m not.

I fear I my account may need a manual fix for this from ANet. Could I get any help? Thankya.

EDIT: Oh and I can still join Practice Matches freely…but I hate practice matches lol.
EDIT2: Had a friend join me and enter Unranked Que on my behalf as part of a team, see if that dislodged me. It didn’t. WHen she got the dialogue to enter the match, and clicked enter, it just immediately said “you have been removed from matchmaking que and must que again” for her after accepting, and for me it didn’t even ask me to accept, just immediately sent me the message. She however, is able to enter unranked que without me with no difficulties.
EDIT3: I also tried restarting my entire system (PC, etc), and repairing the GW2 game client. Neither has solved the issue. I’m pretty sure this is a server-side account issue now, and as a result, I’m going to need ANet intervention to fix it…please help!

Stuck at Map Load

Now having this problem also; Tried on multiple characters, in various maps, no luck on any of them. Stuck permanently at 0% loading on map load screen, or I get timed out with a network error. Can still login and go to character select just fine, though. Just can’t progress beyond there.

If I had known this was going on I wouldn’t have tried to leave Verdant Brink (which was still working fine while I was actually there, though I can’t get into it now) and head into Auric Basin (was only going to grab the portal WP then go back to Verdant Brink anyway lol). Now I can’t play any character anywhere :p.

On EU Server BTW, Gandara, if it means anything.

Just to update and put this back on the frontpage, as many other people have now also started a thread on this issue, I’ve posted a thread on it too in the bug/support forum, seems as I presume it is a bug, and was not intended for Revenant to have these gross inconsistancies with the way other classes work underwater.
If you can post your support here too, as maybe then ANet will finally take notice of these huge issue with the class and it’s incomplete mechanics:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Revenant-Underwater-Bugged-Inconsistant/first#post5681488

This issue has been raised multiple times in the Revenant forum, but appars to be being ignored there, despite many other less serious things being fixed in patches since HoT release, so I thought I’d bring it up in the bug report forum instead seems as I would presume it’s a bug and an unintended oversight, as it is inconsistent with the underwater mechanics for every other class in the game, for reference:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Water-Combat-Stance-Issue
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Revenant-underwater
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/UNDERWATER-REV-IS-HORRIDLY-BUGGY
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Any-dev-word-on-underwater-combat
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Why-no-underwater-herald-skills
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Underwater-stances

The Issue(s)

There is an inconsistency with the Revenant class over every other class in the game when it comes to in-game mechanics underwater (#1), which is compounded by the incompleteness of the class in underwater content (#2, #3), the issues are thus:

1: Every other class in the game has access to a different set of selected utility skills and pets when switching from land combat mode to water combat mode, as pre-chosen by the player. This however is not the case for Revenant, and whatever Legends you have selected while you were on land you will retain underwater.

2: This issue is made worse by the fact only two of the five possible legends have any access to a heal skill, three utility skills, and an elite skill when underwater. This means that if you have Jalis (Legendary Dwarf Stance), Ventari (Legendary Centaur Stance) or Glint (Legendary Dragon Stance) slotted as your Legends when you enter water combat mode, you will only have half a skill bar (your weapon skills only) available, even at level 80. It is not possible to swap these out for the two Legends (Shiro – Legendary Assassin Stance, and Mallyx, Legendary Demon Stance) that do have underwater skills if you are dragged underwater mid-combat, due to slot locking while in combat.

3: The starting Legend for Revenant’s is Jalis (Legendary Dwarven Stance). This means that before a new player unlocks their alternative Legend Stances, they suffer from a crushing inconsistent handicap in underwater that prevents them from healing themselves while underwater, as Legendary Dwarven Stance does not get a self-heal skill (slot 6), while underwater.

Please do try and address these issues (or at least acknowledge you are aware of them) as soon as possible (at the very least issue #1, which at least players could then use pre-equipping the Shiro and Mallyx Legends underwater as a workaround for the other issues); Much of the core GW2 content is underwater, and as Revenant has equal access to this content as every other class in the game, it is a major and crushing handicap to the completeness and effectiveness of the class in core areas. Thankyou.

roman.6390:

I’m sure when it came down to it, it was either a nicely polished class above water, or more bugs with the class and more underwater legends/skills. If that’s the case I’m fine with waiting for the rest of the underwater features since It’s not a huge part of the game, and from I’ve seen non-existant in HoT content

Soleiya Starbow.7013:

Fair point, roman

Not really. So sacrificing the quality of the overall product just to leave a more positive first impression? Sounds like immoral marketting to me!

It being a usuable and decent quality on both land and water originally, would have been better than being perfect on land but practically unusuable underwater.

I mean, if you are attempting world completion, this basically means you are now locked into Shiro and Mallyx on land too, just incase you get dragged underwater mid-fight, which hurts the land gameplay experience too, so as a side-effect of ANet deciding to ignore Revenant’s underwater, they’ve also destroyed the ability to have a perfectly polished class on land too.

And honestly, how hard can it be to just let us record two different builds, one for land, and one for water, like every every other class? The functionality is already in the game, we see it on every other class, they just have to turn it on…

I brought up this issue after BWE2 and again after BWE3. I knew ANet would be too lazy to address it. It makes me sad.

It’s fine if only Shiro and Mallyx work underwater, but ANet should make it so when you go underwater as a Revenant, that your chosen Legends automatically swap out to those two (then back to whatever else you had selected when you return to land), just like the way Rangers and their pets work underwater.

BWE3 Thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Underwater-Revenant-Broken-ANET-Overlooked/first#post5570971

BWE2 Thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Glint-utilities-not-available-in-underwater/first#post5465591

Can somebody like, nudge ANet and tell them to actually pay attention to these threads?

Focusing on the Dragonhunter specialization, and not the other core Guardian traitlines, I think the biggest issue with the specialization now is the traps. No, not that is has them, I quite like them in a melee build (glares at Pure of Sight Trait) as a DPS utility option, something the Guardian didn’t really have before, but the lack of flexibility they have is crippling.

It’s been said ad infinitum at this point but I’ll say it again;

TRAPS NEED A STUNBREAK. TRAPS NEED A CONDITION REMOVAL..

Now, of course these don’t have to be on every trap, but forcing a Trap Guard to use the Hunter’s Fortification grandmaster trait (it’s a pretty good trait, but not for this type of build), and then Fragments of Faith to manage conditions is just really clunky design, at best, and completely impractical or ineffective at worst, in no small part also owing to that it’s reactive rather than active, which leads to being an unreliable source for such a thing, as great as that trap may be otherwise.
.
As for stunbreaks, there isn’t even an option on that with them, and to make the skill-set truly viable both of these need to be somewhere. Doesn’t matter if its via Traits that affect multiple trap types or a trap skill itself that’s really good at that one thing anyway regardless of traits, but they need to be there somewhere, and in a reasonably effective capacity that will actually matter and could make a difference.

Heck, despite the name implying the Heal trap (Purification) should remove condi’s (even though, you know, it doesn’t), why not put the stunbreak on it? That’d be unique, and might even convince a few Guardians to take it as their heal of choice instead of Shelter, maybe even when not running a trap build! Imagine that?! It definitely needs something “real” though to give it some value, that Blind just doesn’t cut it.

As for condition management, ideally I’d just like to see “Lose 2 [or even just 1] Conditions on trap use” as part of the perks included in the Piercing Light trait;
But alternatively you could make Procession of Blades create a Light Field and Whirl Finisher on itself as a method of removing Conditions. Not the most reliable option, but better than nothing. You know; That’s assuming you are determined to just not put it on Purification baseline anyway (which, once again, the name of the trap implies it should do :p). Although the way Whirl Finishers actually trigger condition removal, will probably be needed to be tweaked a bit for this though, if you went for the Procession of Blades option, as right now Whirl Finishers on Light Fields are rather unreliable at removing conditions on the user.

Finally, you could put either the Stunbreak or the Condition Removal (or both) straight-up baseline on Test of Faith, as this trap currently seems to offer the least practicality and usability of all the Dragonhunter Traps IMO, and this would be a change that would given it at least some value in trap builds, right now I feel like this is the least useful trap of the whole lot, and otherwise would require a complete rework to find it’s way onto some people’s bars, which is more work for you guys!

That’s my thoughts on the current biggest issue I see with Dragonhunter right now anyway.

First and foremost, I realise that Beta is Beta and doesn’t represent the final product. However, I’am concerned about the attention (or rather, the lack thereof) being given to the Revenant’s and it’s gameplay capabilities underwater.

After the previous weekend, there was a thread on this issue that recieved no response from ANet, and the fact the issue still seems to persist with no change, concerns me. I would not be surprised if ANet literally have overlooked it, and I feel it’s important we remind them that this issue is still around before the final release of the expansion at the end of the month.

I know ANet right now are trying to phase out underwater content, but the fact of the matter is, alot of the current game world is based underwater, and Revenant’s should have just as much right to play effectively in this water based content as any other class as a result. Especially because some of us actually like this game’s underwater combat system, and wish it would recieve a bit more attention from the devs, but that’s another issue.

Anyway, the problem is this:

Underwater, the Revenant only has access to two sets of utility skills; Shiro and Mallynx. This isn’t necessarily the issue itself, but read on. Now, most classes have a limited pool of skills to choose from underwater, so this in of itself might be fine. However, due to the way the Revenant works and is implemented, it causes problems for the class.

See, the other utility skill sets, Glint, Jalis and Ventari, don’t work underwater. However, as your chosen utility skillsets remain the same for underwater as they do for land, if your chosen Legends are Glint, Ventari, or Jalis, when you enter water you will literally have no access to any utilities (including no self-heal!) whatsoever.

This means that in any fight you will be at a massive and unfair disadvantage. In WvW (which does currently include and will still include underwater combat sections in the expansion), this is basically an automatic loss for the Revenant player if any fight occurs with a body of water nearby. It also basically prevents a Revenant from effectively running the Honor of the Waves explorable dungeon paths, not to mention all the heart quests in the world that require underwater activities.

You could switch Legends whenever you enter water, if out of combat, but this is not possible when dipping between land or water while in combat which happens quite frequently in some PvP formats (WvW). Plus, having to swap Legends whenever you go underwater is unintuitive and annoying anyway, not to mention then having to swap back to what you were originally using when you get back onto land. Once again though, this is not a possible workaround if switching into water mode while already in combat.

To compound this problem, the starting Legend for Revenant’s is Jalis; A Legend without any underwater utilities. What if the player doesn’t unlock Shiro or Mallynx’s utility skillsets till last when levelling?

A solution must be implemented to this issue before final release;
Possible Solutions
1 – Enable all Legends’ utility skills underwater. The best fix, but also the most work for ANet.
2 – Have the game remember a Revenant’s Legend selection when underwater, and swap between a different set of selected Legends whenever you enter water, or come up onto dry land, respectively. This is currently how the Ranger’s pet selection works, so it’s definitely doable and would be less work for ANet. It would also be more consistent with other classes, as other classes can pre-pick a different set of utility skills for underwater combat as opposed to land combat.

in addition, one of these must be implemented:
3A – Make Shiro the starting legend for Revenants instead of Jalis.
3B – Enable the use of the Jalis Legend’s utility skills underwater (preferable).

These changes are necessary to bring Revenant up to the same high standards of polish and general practical usability as other classes in the game in general. Don’t keep ignoring all underwater content ANet! Imagine how off-putting this issue could be to a new player who joins GW2 for Heart of Thorns and creates a Revenant as his first character. It could cause him to quit, or at least reroll with a bitter taste in his mouth, don’t risk losing players, new ones in particular, over this!

Please stop forgetting about the underwater portion of your game ANet!

So, with perhaps our biggest woe with Guardian solved, Shield finally being viable and becoming the iconic weapon for the class it deserves to be, and, trying to keep away from all the fuss (some warranted, some not so) over Dragonhunter, which I shan’t talk about much here, it got me thinking about a few more of the issues we still have with some traits for the core profession, and a way to address these.

Namely, the poor placement of the Hammer trait on the Trait tree, making it unusable for PvP (seems Absolute Resolution is a must have), the seemingly almost identical-function of Strength in Numbers and Stalwart Defender, despite being on the same trait line and even in the same mastery slot, and the woes we still have with no PvE passive-speed buff for getting around faster (even if I understand why we don’t have access to such a thing in PvP).

So I just came up with a basic way to address all these three things without adding any real power creep to Guardians in general, and without altering too much. I’ll just get to suggested changes.

VALOR
Stalwart Defense and Strength in Numbers combined into;
Strength of the Defender
Nearby Allies (and self) gain 150 Toughness.
Shield Recharge reduced by 20%.

A simple change that combines the almost identical roles of these traits into something that makes sense. You bring a Shield if you want to protect your allies, if you want to protect your allies, you aren’t going to take a selfish 180 Toughness bonus over a group-wide 150 Toughness bonus. Combining these two traits just makes sense.

Open Trait Slot (Major Master)
Move Glacial Heart here;
Critical hits with hammers chill enemies. Hammer recharge is reduced.

It’s not the ideal place for it, but there is some synergy with Altruistic Healing and Hammers constant-Protection application, and PvP builds will be taking this line anyway for the Meditation Trait. Also, this is a defensive line and hammer is a defensive weapon (Protection spam, CC, and a Ward), so.

There’s also not much conflict as it’s unlikely you’ll be wielding Hammer and Shield in one build; Both are defensive weapons that serve a similar purpose but in different ways (CC and group defense), and it usually makes sense to bring something that offers something a bit different for your second set.

You’ll then still be able to take both Absolute Resolution, and use your Hammer competitively, in PvP.

VIRTUES
So we now have an open trait slot here on the Master line, in competition with Supreme Justice and Absolute Resolution. This would be a good chance to get that passive move-speed bonus trait in, except there’s no way it could ever be considered as strong as either of those, so we tweaked it a little to make it seem just as appealing. We’ll also make it a bit more flavorful.

Open Trait Slot (Major Master)
NEW TRAIT:
Swift Justice
For each ready Virtue, gain 10% Movement Speed (Stacking) (Max +25%?).
Upon activating a Virtue, gain 3 seconds of Super Speed.

Taking the mobility focused trait idea to a logical conclusion, while also still encouraging active Virtue use when the circumstances call for it. Alternatively, if it’s decided Super Speed is a thing Guardian should just never have, which would be fair enough, alternatively:

Swift Justice
For each ready Virtue, gain 10% Movement Speed (Stacking) (Max +25%?).
Upon activating a Virtue, you gain Quickness. Durations depends on Virtue.
Justice: 1 Second
Resolve: 2 Seconds
Courage: 3 Seconds

This does a couple things; For a start, it gives us that precious passive movement speed bonus that we sorely lack. Second, it gives us a second offensive option in the Major Master Virtues slot, one that is less focused on Condition Damage and will have value to Power builds also, in particular burst builds. You could also see it as fair compensation for those wounded by the (rightly-deserved, mind) “Feel My Wrath!” nerf. They’d have an option to get their quickness up-time back, although it would just be for them and not their entire party. It also retains the encouragement of active Virtue use.

And yes, you could bring this to PvP, but as nice as it would be and as fun as it would be for some gimmicky burst builds, let’s face it, you wouldn’t be competitive if you took this instead of Absolute Resolution (you really need that exta regen and Condition Removal), and you can’t have both, so power creep is avoided in the place where it matters the most, and the Guardian retains it’s clearly intentional mobility weakness when it comes to PvP game-types.

Supreme Justice would of course retain it’s place in condition builds or for more AoE focused builds.

———————————

I have a few ideas for one or two other traitlines that could do with some tweaking (Radiance/Zeal), but don’t have time for those right now.

What are your thoughts or concerns on these ideas? Good, bad? Got some better alternatives that would retain a good amount of balance in the class, keeping in mind the weaknesses the class is supposed to have? Share your ideas!

Nike.2631:

KotCR.6024:

While I think most of us understand this, it’s not just an effectiveness thing, it’s a quality-of-life thing too, as it also affects out-of-combat performance and generally class enjoyability.

I realize people forget it’s there, but in WvW there’s no such thing as out of combat – you’re fighting or you’re MOVING to achieve objectives. One of the reason people want it so bad is because it’s very, very powerful.

And in sPvP, which is the main mode for balancing decisions, permanent out of combat speed is HUGE, because it lets you rotate and capture with much greater efficiency. It’s arguably more impact than any other ability in the game in the hands of an map-aware player.

It would only affect roamer’s in WvW, who currently seem to be happy just abusing the imbalanced Mesmer at the moment with full buff stacks, expensive food, and stealth spam to make up for their serious lack of skill and poor-play (seriously, in WvW 90% of roamers I encounter are playing Mesmer, it says alot about how poorly overtuned that class is right now, but that’s another topic – ironically, they don’t have that passive 25% speed bonus yet though, which should speak about how Guardian’s having a 25% passive move-speed bonus OOC may impact balance less than you think).

But the majority of WvW fights in the zerg, and zerg always has 10 minutes of Swiftness (+33% speed, superior to the +25% offered in traits) all the time anyway from blasting Lightning Fields, Elementalist Staffs, Warrior and Ranger Warhorns, and Guardian Staffs, anyway, so the trait wouldn’t impact the game at all in this area – and it’s these guys that are usually the ones taking the Forts and the Keeps and the big objectives, not the roamers, the only people whom it would truly benefit.

As for sPvP, while I can understand your concerns there, and I might even agree with them somewhat, if it became an issue, there’s no reason they could literally just not have the Trait offer the 25% movement speed bonus in sPvP only, while it still offering it in other game modes. Other skills and traits have sPvP splits, no reason to not have one here at the cost of greatly inconveniencing Guardians over any other class in non-sPvP content.

Nike.2631

I do think we’re see it in an Espec one day, and when we do we’re going to hear shouts that “the new spec is MANDATORY!!?!” because of the speed buff .

Yes, I can see that happening too (though, it’s not true of course, taking the Mesmer example from earlier, again), but that’s all the more reason to put it on a core traitline, one that Guardians tend to take anyway, rather than limiting it to an elite spec.

Nike.2631:

Dual wield swords . Envision the glorious heavy armor symmetry of the fiery knight walking towards you with 2 swords ready and the image of an open book hovering behind them.

Paired Swords & Tome (kits) is a great visual for Guardians.

I thought about OH-Sword as alternative to OH-Dagger, but dual-wielding appearances is not really a thing for Guardian (I realise this is a specialization so can change thematics somewhat, but introducing a dual-wield on a caster specialization, which is what a Tome spec would be, rather than a physical specialization would make little sense), and if this was done, short of another casting-focused specialization, they’d be no-place to have a Dagger fit on the class somewhere anymore.
Likewise, if Guardian ever was to get a dual-wielding themed offensive physical specialization, OH-Sword would be the go-to weapon for that instead.

Same thing really applies to Warhorn; You could use it as a casting-focus, but it makes much more sense to reserve it for a Paragon-esque shouty/chanty specialization, if ANet ever decided we were never going to get land Spears no-matter what.

Black Box.9312:

Adrian Guardian.9480:

Hamartia.3421:

4. Longbow does not come anywhere near close to the DPS OR utility of current Guardian weapon combinations. I can see how it almost does, but it isn’t there yet. I’m not sure it even beats Scepter/torch single-target DPS.

I ran the number (and dummy testing) during BWE1: it does outdamage scepter/torch.

Anyway, I like the OPs direction, suggesting something to separate dragonhunter builds better from current mace/torch gruadian builds while also dealing with longbow’s currently a bit low damage.

Do you have these statistics on hand? Because the thought of longbow doing more DPS than scepter/torch with Radiant Fire has me pretty skeptical, honestly.

It won’t do more single-target damage than a specced-Sceptre/Torch, and it shouldn’t either.

Believe it or not, for a ranged weapon, Sceptre/Torch is actually pretty high DPS, but it’s for the most part single-target. Sceptre 2 can hit multiple-targets, but if it does it’s damage goes from awesome to lacklustre, and on it’s own it’s clearly not enough to be considered for classifying the weapon as an AoE weapon.

Longbow has quite alot of piercing abilities, a symbol and ward drops, it’s loaded with AoE’s, and it is clearly meant as a long-range multi-target weapon (the original design of the auto-attack should suggest that to you on it’s own).

As a result, as Sceptre/Torch is single-target focused, and Longbow is multi-target focused, Sceptre/Torch should be doing more damage, towards a single-target anyway…else otherwise, what would be the point of the weaponset?

Specialised long-ranged Guardians carrying Longbow on one set, and Sceptre/Torch on the other, should be, and will in some game-types, be a thing.

Electro.4173:

In terms of new weapons… wow, I dunno. Guardian has all the magic weapons already, and obviously something magical would be the most fitting. Maybe they’ll have added some new weapons to the game by then. But if not, and we absolutely have to choose from the existing weapons… offhand dagger, maybe? I mean, given the complexities of the Tomes I think an offhand is probably the most likely choice, and dagger could perhaps act as a pseudo “writing tool” of sorts, creating inscriptions or something.

That was pretty much my thought too. Guardian already has access to all the traditional “spell-casting” weapons the game offers, so barring any newly introduced weapon types, this makes the most sense for a number of reasons.

Thematically, Dagger as an offensive melee (or even ranged) weapon, doesn’t fit on the class at all, but being used as a channeling focus rather than an actual weapon, similiar to the OH-Dagger on a few other classes, does fit thematically and would make alot of sense.

The alternative would be Axe, but I think if Guardian got Axe, most people would instead rather see it as that extra offensive melee weapon added to the Guardian, rather than a casting weapon, and as a result it wouldn’t fit with the design plan of a Tome-specialization, and would instead be better kept under lock-and-key waiting for some Crusader-esque (or even Dark-Guardian/Knight-esque) specialization instead.

But the only way you are going to get Dagger on Guardian, is if it using it as a magical focus, so it’d make sense to tie it into a Tome specialization.

Nike.2631:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Much to your dismay, Revenant’s do need a weakness.

Every class needs a weakness. The lack of a 25% speed trait has always been one of those weaknesses for Guardian. Sorry it’s the straw that broke your back, but homogenizing the classes until the main difference is the color of their FX isn’t a desirable goal. Maybe you’ll see it on a Guard Espec at some point, but it’s not looking like this is that day.

While I think most of us understand this, it’s not just an effectiveness thing, it’s a quality-of-life thing too, as it also affects out-of-combat performance and generally class enjoyability.

Granted the Revenant’s weakness is low amounts of condi-removal, and we need one too (mobility, in our case), but does the Revenant’s lacklustre condi-removal affect it outside of combat? No, not really, as unless you are in combat you won’t be receiving condis, at least not in any way that actually matters enough.

This is why the tying it to the Unscathed Contender trait is such a popular choice. Aegis has minimal up-time in combat, and as a result this trait is actually rather weak despite it’s sizable damage bonus. But the theme of it is perfect for a passive 25% movement speed bonus, as having +25% movement speed while under the affects of Aegis, would mean you’d benefit from actually being to get around open world content at an acceptable rate, just like any other class, without being forced to spec Shouts and Staff, or use Traveller Runes, but Guardian’s in-combat mobility, the classes obviously intended weakness, would remain garbage as Aegis tends to drop the second in goes up in combat anyway.

It helps that it’s a traitline that pretty much all Guardians use too (as it’s the only way to make Virtues relevant), similiar to how the Warrior’s version of it (25% movement speed while wielding a melee weapon) is in a line that all Warriors use too (as it’s how they get their weapon swap CD bonus).

Sykper.6583:

1) Add a trait allowing for Spear of Justice’s Tether, when it fades to pull the tethered enemy to the Guardian.

Why? Well, aside from the familiar control abilities a guardian has, it would be a nice way to force the enemy into your trap at 1200 range. Oh boy actual synergy!

That’s actually a really good idea, I like it alot. I’m not sure I’d be willing to take it as a trait on it’s own (as it’d be useless against defiant or breakbar foes), but if it offered something else small in addition aswell (such as a reduced CD or a few stacks of vulnerability on F1 use), I’d definetly be sold on it.

The thing is, Focus is just as good at protecting allies as it is at protecting oneself, whereas the Shield is really only moderate for protecting allies.

Focus 4 will bounce to allies, healing them, granting protection if traited, and removing conditions. Aswell as blinding enemies, so your allies take less damage.
Granted, Shield 4 will affect yourself and upto 4 other allies instead of just you and 2 other allies, when it comes to applying the protection, the other benefits to it (condition removal for allies and blind to stop an attack too), should more than make-up for that. Of course, that’s before we get into Focus’ 4’s offensive application of being able to also apply Vulnerability with the correct traits.

Focus 5 doesn’t directly support allies the way Shield 5 might, but it is a Blast Finisher, which means it can protect allies still by blasting for heals in a water field, or blind in a dark field, or weakness in a poison field, all of which will help to keep allies alive just as good as Shield 5.

Knowing our luck though, ANet will read this and instead of buffing Shield, will nerf Focus :p.

Just because it’s not meta, doesn’t mean it’s not good. You aren’t really missing anything.
As others have described, both weapon sets have their advantages and disadvantages. It all depends what you want to do. Due to the all-out aoe stunlocking and interrupting on hammer it’s a great way to set up groups for your cleave DPS, but if you want a build with a bit more sustain and just as strong 1vs1 capabilities, there’s no reason why you can’t bring Mace+Shield instead.

A build can still be great and powerful in it’s own right, even if it’s not the current meta-standard. You’ve also got to remember, any meta build wasn’t meta until somebody created it and made it meta. New meta’s are in-part created by people trying new or different builds, and them catching on.

Lahm.7056:

The enemy Thief pops Shadow Refuge while giggling that he has 2 hours of sweet stealth awaiting him? Ruin his day!

Yeah, off-topic but I love doing this. You can almost see the horror on the Thieves face when you walk into the middle of his Shadow Refuge and pop Shield 5. Normally they panic :p.

Yeah, honestly it’d just make alot more sense to role the Strength In Numbers and Shield Master trait into one. Have the Trait grant 150 Toughness to the party and reduce Shield CD by 20%, which would be perfect for the party protector playstyle. No need for that selfish 180 Toughness nonsense that that you are never going to take over protecting your allies all with 150 Toughness, if you are attempting to guard them, which is the only time you’d use a Shield instead of a Focus anyway in PvE.

This would open up a Trait spot that could be used to fix some of our other issues instead, too.

Actually, people underestimate the power of some of the Banner skills.

Skill 5 is a blast finisher, and you can never have too many of those. If everybody in a party would remember to use it, that’s enough Blast Finishers to stack 15 Might on one-skill before you even get started, rather than letting the poor Ele faff about weapon swapping constantly and trying to aim his Blast Finishers correctly.

Discipline Banner Skill 2 offers 50% Fury up-time alone (so if two people in a team remember to pick it up and cast it, that’s your 100% fury up-time for everyone right there).

Also the Heal on Tactics Banner 2 scales rather well with healing power compared to most non self-heal skills, and does make a difference if people remember to pick it up and use it (often see the benefit of this at Fire Shaman Elemental boss in Fractals). You are usually looking at a 1k+ heal even before adding Healing Power (not forgetting the Banner itself will be giving you extra Healing Power), which is enough to make a difference, especially if everybody grabs the Banner for a second and uses it.

Obviously, the Skill #3 Swiftness on all Banners speaks for itself in usefulness.

So yeah, the rest of the Banner skills are a bit meh but these four are pretty nice and it’d be nice if more people would educate themselves on them and use them from time-to-time; On occassion I’ve seen people complain about lack of Fury up-time in a fight in some PuGs and the Discipline Banner is right there!

But, that doesn’t change the fact that Banners could do with a little more love to encourage more active play and to be frank, noticible play value, such as giving them a reduced CD and reintroducing some of the old Banner traits somehow.

root.2859:

Shield of Absorption #5
change knockBACK to knockDOWN (2s) (-back is a nope for 99% of pve, -down is still nice for offensive pvp builds)

The knock back should stay, it’s better than a knock down for the shield’s defensive role. Considering one of the biggest uses of Shield in PvP is to push enemies off point, to prevent them capping/decapping/contesting it, if it was just a knock down this would no longer be possible, as they’d still be on the point and still contesting it.

And honestly with defiant stacks you normally aren’t going to see the effect in PvE either way, nor will you see it with the HoT breakbar, which means that the mob will never receive either affect in PvE anyway (it’d just reduce the breakbar which has it own’s individual specific effect upon ending, or remove a single-stack of defiance).

Decreasing the PvP utility of the skill greatly for a tiny, tiny, added convenience in PvE is not a good tradeoff.

I can get behind the other ideas though.

Mo Mo.1947:

I think they wanted to avoid having people staring at the UI (like the red bar game with healing) and watch the actual game more.

Yes, this is exactly why they removed it. I remember them saying as much when somebody mentioned it around the time of the original GW2 pre-release Betas.
Can’t remember if it was via a post or in an interview though, and I don’t care enough to look for it, but I know this is what they said.

Personally though, I’d like to see the return of the enemy ability bar too. No need to have it in PvP if they want to prevent ping-interrupt wars though. It was a cool feature in the original GW1 that made the interrupt playstyle far more viable, and with the incredible strength and neccessity of dodging mob attacks in GW2, IMO I can’t see how it’d do anything but benefit the game and increase the possibility of skilled play (as seriously, with all the particle effects you really can’t see what’s going on otherwise many a time).

It’ was also interesting to see the names of the enemy’s attacks, there was always a couple ones with funny or amusing names in GW1 that if the same was done in GW2 you’d never know that what they were.

If I remember correctly, this issue was brought up on the livestream preview to the trait overhaul before it actually came into game.

Their answer was something along the lines of they didn’t want it possible for one Warrior to maintain 100% Banner uptime, and they wanted to increase the neccessity of people picking up the Banners and carrying them from one conflict to the next, rather than them being left behind and the Warrior simply recasting them at the new combat location.

I don’t remember them mentioning anything about the range increase trait going missing though, though I’m aware it has, aswell as the old Powerful Banners trait that made Banners do damage when summoned. I’am disappointed these two didn’t get rolled into the currently existed Banner regeneration trait, it’s not like the damage was large but it was a nice bonus to encourage active combat banner placement.

I suppose it’ll never happen if they wanted to encourage carrying banners between conflicts rather than just recasting, but would have been nice if they wanted to keep the no 100% up-time thing if they at least halved the time a banner persists in exchange for halving the recharge. I feel they’d be a bit more usable in PvP at least, then.

Skill 5 is good in PvP. But Skill 4 is terrible and completely outclassed by any equivalent skill, which do the same thing but more (Hold the Line, Traited Focus 4, or the Revenant’s Shield 4, all good examples).

Yes, it needs help. However, we’ve gone over this multiple times in multiple threads, sadly, it appears ANet are quite happy to continue ignoring this one.

Now it’s 360 range threshold instead of 600, it’s alot more practical.

It’s still an incredibly weak and situational trait (which is why it belongs on a Major line and not a Minor line, but w/e), but now at least every weapon in the Guardian’s kitten nal can use it for at least one skill with some practicality, with the exception of the Mace.

Still not saying much though, because, as I mentioned before, many of the skills that can benefit from it…Hammer 3, Focus 4, Shield 4 and Greatsword 5, tend to be very weak in the direct damage area anyway, so the difference is negligible. Sword 3 does decent damage, but you won’t hit with all the bolts from that at anything but point-blank range anyway either (under 360, therefore not triggering the bonus), so once again, the damage bonus you receive from it there will also be negligible. But eh, at least it’s something I suppose.

On the plus side, it’ll be relevant to Torch 4 users, and is far more likely to kick in for Sceptre and Longbow than it was before, aswell as now even working with Staff 1 (so, zerg tagging will be even easier! lol). I guess it’ll help out Dragonhunter F1 active too. So there’s some application to it in a wider variety of situations now it’s 360 instead of 600 threshold.

However, it’s still rather limited and a weak overly-specific trait for a Minor in general regardless, and while the threshold reduction helps, it’s not enough to save the trait.

Avigrus.2871:

If we take Reaper Shroud, where is our ranged pressure coming from?

Haha, Axe I guess. Apparently it’s being considered for a rework though, so one can hope :P.

Either way, I’m with Diovid and others. This is actually one of the reasons Reaper is one of the best if not thee best designed elite specialization. They are supposed to be side-grades, and not an upgrade, and while I think most of us can agree that Reaper probably is a whole lot stronger than default Necromancer, the fact you can’t access a Shroud mode with ranged-combat options while taking the Reaper spec is actually good design and means that there is still some reason to use purely base specialization lines rather than always having Reaper in some circumstances. It’s prevents base Necromancer from becoming totally obsolete.

As a result, personally, I’m against Necromancer having access to both Death Shroud and Knight Shroud at the same time. Pick one or the other, and it should stay that way.

Don’t forget, mobility (and by extension, lack of ranged combat prowess), is clearly supposed to be one of the key weaknesses of Reaper. Afterall, that’s why it’s such a beast in up-close and personal melee combat.

Armour and specifically toughness is definitely a factor but it’s not everything. Alot of things can matter and it varies from mob to mob, as others have mentioned. Some simply go for the first target that approaches them with higher priority and don’t switch, other’s might go after whomever is at range with preference or whomever is kicking out the most DPS or simply boons.

For example, I’ve always run my Ranger in full Berzerker gear, and without fail the mid-dungeon CoE Golem boss will focus on him every single time I fight him, no exceptions. This has always been the case and I’ve never been sure quite why, especially seems it happens even if I’m in a team full of other full-on Berzerkers with both better defense stats (Warriors) or inferior defensive stats (Thieves). Stealthing doesn’t seem to help either, after the stealth ends he’ll just focus entirely on me again regardless.

Likewise though, when I used to run full Clerics gear on my Guardian, the HotW p2 end-boss would dogedly chase him down and focus on him the entire fighting, without so much as even blinking at anybody else in the party. This actually worked to my teams advantage usually though because it literally meant I could just swim around in circles (as this boss is almost entirely melee focused with his hard hitting attacks), and he would relentlessly follow me enabling the rest of my party to literally beat on him with no fear of repurcussion. It was totally impossible to switch his aggro to anyone else, everytime, without fail.

Since I’ve started playing my Guardian always in Berzerker gear however, he’s not so relentless in his pursuit of me. Don’t get me wrong, he still focuses on me more than other party members, and does still spend most of the time following me around, however, these days if a party member does a CC on him (float/sink, whatever), he will now attack that party member for a bit, before returning to chase me (whereas before, after the CC ended he would just come straight back after me when I ran full Clerics),

I’ve also noticed with Guardian, that your high reflect potency tends to be a factor that draws much mob aire too. This is something I’ve noticed while using Whirling Defense on my Ranger on occassion aswell, mind, usually if there’s no superior reflectors in the party (basically, Guards or Mesmers). In many cases, it seems the more projectiles you reflect, the more likely mobs are to focus on you. That appears to be a factor too. Just something to think about also.

Rikimaru.7890:

Err ehm you are forgetting that these 2 missions were done with 2 parties to be consistent by lore. The first is Mhenlo and co. Catching up to Master Togo while the other is Mhenlo and Togo getting the support of Kurzicks and Luxons respectively and meet up in the same location.

I’m not forgetting that at all, but Eldbrand’s comment was spoken as if it was factual and he was stating it will be only one party because it’s instanced. There’s no way he can make such a comment with any certainty unless there was technical limitations to the engine which prevented it (which he seemed to be suggesting with his point it was instanced), and I was merely pointing out that there isn’t any technical limitations preventing multi-party instancing or forcing it to be only a single party of ten people.

It could be one party of ten people, or it could be two parties of five people. We still don’t know one way or the other yet.

Rikimaru.7890:

More over don’t you remember what happened if there was no party on the other side?
You would get a team of henchmen only as this is a 2 team mission for the better or worst.
So are you sure you want to run raids with a team of 5 players and 5 NPC’s?

Once again, I remember, and stop putting words in my mouth, I never said that that’s what I wanted. I really doubt they’ll do it this way anyway, but if they did want to they’d be absolutely nothing stopping them from requiring there being two parties entering for the raid to actually kick off, with no substitute NPCs available.

Infact, if I’m not mistaken, when Vizunah Square/Unwaking Waters were first introduced in Factions, this is exactly how they worked – you had to have two human-lead teams entering for the mission to start, I specifically remember not being able to do The Unwaking Waters at one point because noone was on the other side, so the countdown timer to mission start kept restarting, the all-hench substitute team was added later when the player population for the game in general started to die down.

Personally, I think they’ll do two parties of five that just enter the Raid as normal and are linked via the squad system or something similar.

But what I actually hope for is that it is indeed one party of ten, because otherwise all you’ll get are the usual 2x Ele + 1x Guard + 1x Warrior + 1x Speedclear Utility (usually Thief/Mesmer for Stealth/Portal or a third Ele for DPS) meta teams doing it, simply doubled over (the same set-up for each party), rather than actually giving some of the lesser-used classes a chance to shine, which would be more likely if it was just one party of ten.

Eldbrand Charging.8902:

maddoctor.2738:

Eldbrand Charging.8902:

maddoctor.2738:

Eldbrand Charging.8902:

maddoctor.2738:

Buff have higher priority to affect party members. For example, if all 10 players stay together, each party will use a different might stacker to get might stacks. AoE support traits will affect the party of the user.
In other words it will be 2 isolated, different groups in terms of buffs.

10 players 1 party in Raids.

Since Raids will be instances it will not work with 2 parties in the same instance.

Source?

According to this: http://heartofthorns.guildwars2.com/game/raids
It’s 10-player content, not 10-player party. That might well be 2 parties of 5.

It will be an instance so it will only work with 1 party, they did the same in GW1 when Urgoz and The Deep had 12 player parties

We are in GW2 though… not to mention how having 2 parties eliminates the problem the OP mentioned.

Raids will be instances so it will not work with 2 parties.

Why will it not?

To continue using GW1 examples, seems GW2 is an upgraded version of the same engine, therefore it should still be possible, GW1 had two story missions (which, like everything else in the game outside of cities and outposts, is instanced content), that consisted of two different 8-player parties for a total of 16 players. Vizunah Square, and The Unwaking Waters, for reference.

Kumion.7580:

As far as I can tell, Rev gets only spear underwater and two legends — so far.

Also, when you jump into/out of water, your water build is not saved. You have to manually switch legends when you hit the water and again when exiting water.

I was about to create a thread on this very issue; It’s a crippling inconsistancy in design choice for the Revenant. Was going to have that as a flashy thread title to get the dev’s attention: “Revenant Underwater: Crippling Inconsistancy”.
But seems as this thread is sort of on the same issue, may aswell post here instead.

Basically, other classes have a different set of utility skills underwater from when on land, and the game automatically switches you from your land utilities to your water utilities when changing combat location on the fly.

However, as the Revenant’s utilities are locked to it’s class mechanic, it uses the same utilities underwater as it does on land.

This wouldn’t be an issue if all the Legends worked underwater, but they don’t. Only Mallyx and Shiro work underwater. Jalis, Glint and Ventari have no utilities underwater.
This means that you are severally handicapping yourself on maps with water if you choose anything but Mallyx and Shiro all the time.

Sometimes, you can just swap your legends out for those two whenever you go underwater, but this is rather tedious and time consuming when you are constantly bobbing in and out of water on maps like Timberline Falls, but that’s best case scenario.

Worse case scenario, you are in combat, in WvW. In WvW, running into water is a common tactic to change up the combat dynamic a bit, and perhaps give you an advantage (some classes are significantly stronger underwater, others weaker, and half the player base is just too stupid to think in three dimensions overall which is why half the player base dislike the underwater combat, personally, I like it, but ah, back on topic). However, if you were using Jalis/Glint/Ventari on land, if the fight gets dragged underwater by you or your opponent, suddenly, you are screwed. You are in combat, so you can’t swap out your legends for Mallyx and Shiro, and you are now stuck in combat with a foe without access to any utility skills what-so-ever, including no self-heal. This basically means you are as good as dead.

I realise underwater combat these days is an afterthought for ANet, but it is an important and integral part of the base game (and a highly touted and complimented feature pre-launch of the original GW2), and as the Revenant has just as much access to the base game as any of the other professions, they really need to fix this.

They could either make all Legends work underwater, or, if they CBA/don’t have enough time, let the Revenant have a pre-set selection of Legends underwater (basically, Mallyx and Shiro), that you automatically get swapped too whenever you enter the water (whether you are in combat or not), with then your main terrestrial choice returning whenever you get back onto dry land. As legends control what utilities you currently have access to, this would then be functionally identical to how we see all other eight profession react to entering water, with their own unique chosen set of utility skills for underwater combat. We also know it’s possible to have class mechanic pre-sets alter specifically for underwater combat, because this is what we see with Ranger, as the pre-selected two pets for Ranger change whenever you enter water.

Better yet though, how about ANet let us have both? This would be the fairest way to do it, but, for proper in-game working viable functionality for the Revenant, we need at least one or the other to be implimented.

Considering you focused on Revenant, and in particular, the Herald, this last beta weekend, you didn’t appear to have paid that much attention to it or how things work, really.

Sernius Alathar.6538:

- Facet of Strength is a great mid range party buffer, I found it’s about half as effective as PS/EA warrior or a might stack Ele, but for small encounters it can sit you passively at about 9-11 might, 11-15 in combat. (Factoring in Strength Runes, and Strength sigils). It’s more like engineer’s Juggernaut ability with party wide pulsing. It’s a good balance, and with -2 energy cost it keep it’s balance by making it a little more costly to maintain. It’s secondary effect Burst of Strength is a bit lackluster, damage +weakness, but there really is no incentive to use it, if it was damage x might stack level, + weakness duration x might stack level. It would probably be more of a functional burst skill, as it stands it’s better to maintain the might.

The active doesn’t cause weakness, it causes 10 stacks of vulnerability – to targets in an cleave AoE. This is powerful in and of by itself, and has high synergy with the passive too. The passive increases your damage by buffing you and your allies (at roughly 10 stacks of might, with the Trait), and the active increases your party’s damage by instead debuffing enemies (at 10 stacks of vulnerability). This seems like a good tradeoff when you need your energy regen back for something else, and correct tactical use of this ability could be highly effective.

Sernius Alathar.6538:

Facet of Nature (Utility Facet) – TBH, this isn’t really needed. I didn’t find myself using this facet in any situation, 50% boon duration isn’t really needed when you’re primary facets pulse their boons to be maintained. It needs to be reworked as it currently has no place on the bar apart from decoration, or to burst One with Nature for some quick boons. It could probably be easily removed from the bar completely without any afterthought.

It’s not supposed to be needed, it’s an option, and there’s definetly benefits to using it, even with boons you are pulsing, to say otherwise you are just demonstrating a lack of mechanical understanding of the game here.

The biggest example would once again be Might; If you are pulsing/generating enough Might to maintain up 10 stacks without 50% boon duration, then by increasing the length of each of those pulsed/generated Might stacks by 50%, you will be able to maintain up to 15 stacks of Might with the +50% boon duration, as each stack lasts longer meaning more will be existing at the same time without expiring. That seem’s pretty good to me; And personally by combining it with Sword 3 and a Sigil of Strength I was able to maintain 25 stacks of Might on myself (without Strength Runes). I didn’t test within a party (didn’t really have a chance with having two 15-hour shifts to work this weekend), but with the right set-up I could see it enabling the Revenant to maintain almost Phalanx Strength levels of Might on a party (I doubt quite as high but it should be somewhat close), if combined with that Revenant trait that grants Might to allies each time you apply a boon to them.

Plus, you are also forgetting that Facet of Nature applies it’s passive bonus to nearby allies aswell. That means if you don’t want to consume energy on on maintaining Might and Fury for the party yourself, using this you could let other classes in your party do it for the party instead. With Fire Fields and Blast Finishers, even without using Staff, a Guardian can maintain 15-16 stacks of Might on a party by himself – this will let him do upto 24 Might; Or a Phalanx Strength Warrior, won’t be locked into Greatsword to maintain 25 Might and will be free to swap out to Axe/Mace on CD to increase his personal DPS and just make things a bit more fun and interesting for him; Or classes that can’t maintain full Fury up-time on a party may have some application of it, able to generate enough of it round the clock for everyone (I’m thinking of Ranger or Guardian again here, but will help out Warriors too). You could do these things yourself as a Revenant Herald, but at high energy cost (2 upkeep for Fury, 2 upkeep for Might), using just this one passive skill frees you up alot.

Let’s not also forget the potential of increasing by 50% party-wide Quickness up-time for more DPS from Mesmer’s Time Warp or Guardian’s Feel My Wrath too (not 100% sure how Quickness stacks since it became an official Boon, as Time Warp pulses it may not work with it, but it will definitely work with Feel My Wrath).

Then of course there’s increased length to party members granting other useful boons that Herald doesn’t have access too, such as Vigor and Resistance. In short, there’s alot of application for Facet of Nature, and it’s just ignorant to see it as redundant.

Sernius Alathar.6538:

Facet of Chaos [Elite] – This needs to be reworked completely, it’s the only facet that feels unusable as a maintainable facet with it’s -5 cost, it should probably be reduced to -2 like might and fury to be on par, as it stands atm facet of chaos is basically double activated to use Chaotic Release. Envoy of Exuberance does a better job of providing protection and a heal. As for the Burst, Chaotic Release, very nice CC, not over the top damage wise, and is excellent for bunching up a group of enemies for a spike, interrupting skills on a large scale or just clearing them from allies to help rally.

Not going to argue it’s expensive, sure, but once again, you are greatly underestimating the power of Protection. Won’t go into too much detail this time, but will point out a few things: Protection reduces the damage affected allies take by 33%. The Facet of Nature applies it to the entire party. For comparison, the most it’s possible to stack Vulnerability up to, is 25, for a 25% damage recieved increases; This completely counters that and then some. The most damage reduction individual traits give for certain situations, tend to be only between 5% and 10%. Considering what else is on offer in this game when it comes to damage reduction, short of active defenses (Blind, Aegis), it doesn’t get any better than Protection.

The idea is that you don’t maintain it around the clock of course, but use it temporarily to protect your party easily from heavy spikes or rapid incoming damage.

Sure, Guardian can maintain perma-protection on a party too, but this requires him to maintain an auto-attack chain with Hammer, reducing his overall DPS potential from proper rotations, is more positional (because, Symbols), and the Guardian could be CC’d ending the bonus for the party until the Guardian is back up on his feet and can start his auto-chain again. Locking you out from other skills (due to no energy regen) by maintaing permanent Protection for the party with your Herald is similar to the price a Guardian has to pay for doing it; The advantage you have though here with Herald, is that CC’ing you will not stop the party benefiting from the perma-protection the way it would if you were a Guardian. The protection will still pulse to party members whether you are up and fighting, or stuck on your kitten on the floor.

Nemesis is often right about alot of things in this game, however, the way he presents himself is very unfriendly, arrogant and unapproachable, and I think if he wants more people to take him seriously (and that’s actually something the community could really do with), he needs to tone it down alot.

He also needs to get off his little vendetta against Warrior DPS that he has when always comparing his Necromancer to it, it makes him look a bit petty. He’s quite correct that both classes have similar DPS, and both classes are in the bottom 50% of classes for DPS output, anybody that isn’t a scrub knows that Warrior DPS actually isn’t too hot over a sustained encounter, it just has a high amount of front-loaded burst damage (that the big numbers often misleads the scrubs to believe they are doing more than they actually are).

There’s a reason for this though – the two classes are also the two most naturally resilient classes in the game, sure other classes can be super tanky, but not the extent of these two with so little effort. As a result, these classes have to be lower on the DPS spectrum to balance things. It wouldn’t be fair if they put out as much DPS as a Thief or Ele when both are far more fragile unless you don’t put the effort in to make them not so. Afterall, this is the whole reason between pre-release and final release the Engineer lost it’s high HP pool and went down to a medium HP pool (originally, there was one class in each armour category with low HP, medium HP, and high HP, but you may notice that Medium Armour now has two classes with medium HP instead).

So why do people always want a Warrior? It’s for the passive stat bonuses provided via empower allies and banners, and it’s ability to maintain 25 stacks of Might. It’s not for it’s personal damage. If it wasn’t for these things, Warrior would be in the same place as Necromancer right now. As small personal off-topic remark, Phalanx Strength I believe is overpowered and the Warrior being able to maintain 25 party Might all alone is too much, it should be around 15-16 like the Guardian and the Revenant are capable off. This already would encourage more diversity in team set-ups. But that’s something for a different discussion I suppose.

If you’d want to argue that Necromancer is a strong class for DPS, you’d have to compare it to Thief, Elementalist, Ranger (including the Pet!) or Engineer, in which case, it wouldn’t even come close. Of course, the fact Ranger is also often frowned upon by groups is yet another example of how, as Nemesis does explain, the current scrub meta PvEers really have no clue.

If you take the party bonuses away from Warrior, the only real advantage it has over Necromancer is it’s greater cleaving potential, something ANet are quite aware of, which is why the only huge change Necromancer is getting in HoT, is access to a strong cleaving weapon with the Greatsword and Knight Shroud. Other than that, I think you’ll find in HoT Necromancer will function very similar in potential to what it is now, which to be fair, is perfectly fine.

I’am disappointed he didn’t put a focus on the specific gear the meta uses more though, Scholar Runes being the big target here. This is one thing you can say for sure is only popularized by the Icebow Freeze Meta, otherwise, without a hard-core healer in the group (in which case you are losing alot of DPS by having someone specced like that anyway), that PLUS 10% DPS at 90% PLUS HP will very, very rarely be active in my experience (even on Necromancer, when you can hide your HP behind Deathshroud), and 95% of the time you are better off with a more generic +4% to +7% damage bonus that you can benefit from consistently, including target under 50% HP bonuses if your party is front-loading alot of burst (Warriors again).

Which reminds, Nemesis did seem to forget that Guardians are regularly providing group quickness now, and it makes sense for them to use it upon entering a fight seems it’ll probably be recharged before the fight is over in their case too, seems the recharge on Feel My Wrath is pretty good. He should consider that before he rages at the Mesmer for using Time Warp early.

Purple Miku.7032:

Good players tend to already know pugs are morons, berserker gear doesn’t magically make someone a good player because all it does is just give you better attributes for dealing damage. There’s really nothing special to it.

This, so much. I don’t know how many times I’ve struggled to try to make random PuG scrubs understand that having someone who knows and has experienced (or failing that, someone who will actually listen to instructions, if they don’t know it), is 10x more important to a fast and successful run than what gear someone is using and what class they are playing as. This goes hand in hand with the whole “we can start now with whatever classes and be done in 30 minutes thing, or we can wait 30 minutes for the perfect composition and end up taking 45 minutes total to finish the content instead of just 30” thing.

EDIT: Just typing PLUS instead of using the symbol, because post formatting is weird.

Yeah, it’s gone.

I covered this a bit in my comments on the stickied upcoming Dragonhunter balance changes thread. It seems like there’s quite a few good places it would fit on the Dragonhunter, and it fits in with the theme of the classs really well. Would be the perfect thing to add to any of those incredibly underwhelming or unsynergetic traits the Dragonhunter has to add a bit more value to them and make them much more worthy of consideration, especially in sPvP (an area of play the Dragonhunter is very notably lacking within).

Alas, it appears my thoughts on the subject have fallen on deaf ears.

Turtle Dragon.9241:

I agree with you, but I also want to point out that:
Saying Staff and saying Damage together makes no sense in the first place.
The end.

Yeah, I struggled to word it, but there is a few cases you use Staff for ‘damage’. Mostly, in cases you want a broad ranged cleave that can hit multiple weak targets. Most often, when you want to tag mobs for farming (more damage = easier tags), and a few specific circumstances like clearing out the Bomb Golems in CoE explorable and the like.

sam.4681:

Disappointed on Staff AoE
Number of target only 3
even one handed sword can hit 3 target
staff is two handed only hit 3 target =(

Three targets is consistant for any cleaving weapon, even 2Hers.
The only difference is 2Hers usually get at least one ability which can hit at least 5 (as opposed to cleaving 1Hers which tend to be stuck at 3 max targets), and this rule is consistant for Thief’s Staff too.

Warrior GS only hits 3 targets max on all it’s skills. The only reason it can hit more is due to the multiple strikes on 100b and WA; 100b is 9 strikes that can each hit 3 targets, that’s why you can hit more than 3 with it, but each strike still only hits 3.

Guardian GS only hits 3 targets on most of it’s autoattacks. It does have 5 targets hit on #2, #4 and #5 though. #4 and #5 will only do significant damage if they hit with all their pulses though.

Ranger GS only hits 3 targets with all it’s attacks; The exception being it’s heavy-hitter, #2 Maul, which hits 5. This is similar and consistent to Thief Staff, which hits 3 with all it’s attacks, but it’s heavy hitter, Skill #5 Vault, can hit 5. These weapons actually have similar design, with built-in evades and some strong mobility options.

Even the new Necromancer GS only hits 3 targets with it’s autoattacks, like other cleaving 2Hers, only it’s heavy hitters or utility abilities hit 5 targets (Gravedigger being the heavy hitter, NIghtfall and Grasping Darkness being the utility abilites on the weapon, basically following a design similiar to Guardian GS).

If any class has a right to complain about target limit on their cleaving 2Her, it’s Revenant, not Thief. From what I can see, the Revenant Staff’s abilities all have a max target limit of 3, with the exception of Renewing Wave which looks like it’s a combination of a heavy hitter ability and a utility ability. I suppose Surge of the Mists can probably hit 5 targets too though, due it’s multiple hits, in a way similiar to the Warrior GS 100b (3 hit per strikes, with 9 strikes each with it’s individual targets).

Saiyan.1704:

Pure of Sight at least works with Hammer#3, Scepter#1, Scepter#2, Scepter#3, Torch#4, Staff#1 and Staff#2. I’m not sure if traps are effected by the increased dmg modifier but it needs to be.

I wish people would stop saying this. The trait isn’t as good as you think it is. It does NOT work with Staff #1. Staff 1 is only 600 range, the damage bonus only kicks in at 600 range, unless you keep an enemy precisely on your max range with staff (which you aren’t going to do, especially considering the way the weapon is used specifically when it’s actually being used to hit things), you aren’t going to benefit from the 10% damage. Staff #1 would need to be 700 range to even have a mediocre chances of benefitting from the trait.

If it did work with Staff 1, the trait would be a bit more valuable (thought still incredibly limiting, for sure), seems as I could see Longbow+Staff support Guardians being a thing, but it doesn’t, so.

Literally it’s only Hammer #3, Torch 4B, Focus 4, Sceptre (all skills), Staff #2 and #3, and the Longbow itself, that benefit. Signets and possibly Traps too if you count utility skills. Unless you are wielding Sceptre/X and Longbow, preferably together (which has a whole lot of redundancy in and off itself), this trait is incredibly weak.

The effect doesn’t fit the name of the Minor Trait anyway. Pure of Sight would make more sense for a Minor Trait that removed Blind on attack once every 10seconds or something instead. Would be a far more useful trait to to any Guard not choosing to wield the Longbow.

As others have said, this thing would be fine as a Major Trait that you opt-into, but as a compulsory Minor Trait it’s totally wasted on the vast majority of build possibilites, making it a dud-minor.

@RebornbyFire/OP
Robert Gee, is that you in disguise? Have you come to save Dragonhunter? :p

Hehe, in all seriousness though RebornbyFire, I really like your proposed rework. There’s alot there and it seems very well thought out, kudos too on resisting the urge to go overboard, for the most part everything seems like it would be quite balanced with just a few tweaks here and their, and your proposals improve the synergy with the rest of Guardian ten-fold over what we currently have with Dragonhunter, I’m really impressed.

It’s a shame that, while it does keep alot of the themes that Dragonhunter introduced, it is still quite a large overhaul and as a result it’s probably highly unlikely ANet would change the Dragonhunter that significantly at this point in time. But I guess we can try to hope for the future, post-release HoT though, at least, right?

@Ghotistyx
There’s not really many significant ways to deal damage at over 600 range with Guardian though, including some of the stuff you mentioned actually wouldn’t work (for example, you mention Sword – the longest range ability on Sword is 600 range, it does not go beyond that so it does not benefit from the trait, even if it was 700 range it would be very hard to take advantage off).

Let’s see…you’ve got Longbow, Sceptre, and Traps. Other than that, it’s just scattered skills – Hammer 3, Staff 2+3 (Staff 1 is, once again, only 600 range so does not benefit), Torch 4B, Focus 4, then the odd Signet. Damage modifiers don’t usually affect Conditions so Purging Flames wouldn’t benefit either. That’s it really. The thing all these abilities have in common is that they are really low damage anyway (with the exception of Torch 4B), and as a result, a 10% increase on just one or two already very low damage abilities is incredibly insignificant.

For it to actually be useful to pre-existing Guardian stuff (except Sceptre/Torch, again), it would need to be a significantly higher damage bonus seems as it’s really only affected one or two weak skills. You are probably talking 30%+ to make any real difference (which would then become OP with Sceptre/Torch, Longbow and Traps).

I get that it works for Traps, which the specialization line comes with, but it’s very niché and as a result, has little synergy with currently existing Guardian stuff, which is what people are complaining about. That sort of thing works as an optional trait, in one of the major traitlines, but not one you are forced to take, essentially wasting a potential minor trait slot.

As a sidenote though, Guardian does seem to be cursed with this sort of thing consistently. Look at how the Sceptre specific trait is in Zeal, a line where the Minor Traits offer Symbol bonuses, when the Sceptre does not have access to Symbols (nor do any off-hands), essentially wasting the traits if you were building your character around Sceptre usage or taking the 1H Sword as your other weaponset.

I’ve not tested Dragonhunter yet as I only pre-purchased a few days ago, but from what I’ve read and seen alot of these seems like positive changes (that’s the second list we were given, I also feel the OP with the first list of changes completely missed the mark), but there’s a few more things you could do that I think would be beneficial and not imbalanced to making the Dragonhunter and the Longbow a worthwhile spec.

True Shot – Instead of upping the damage constantly till people are happy with the fact it roots (which, for a big hit skill like this, I’m perfectly happy with – it makes sense to stop to line-up a big shot, so long as the pay-off is worth it – look at Warrior’s Killshot for example), how about giving it Boon Removal on the target?

Boon Removal on a Guardian, you say? What sorcery is this? Well, for one, technically we already have Boon Removal access via the Boon Removal weapon sigil, but more specifically at one point it was an inherent part of the class too – we used to have a trait that would remove a Boon from the enemy on application of Virtue of Justice, that got removed with the specialization patch (the trait was called as Searing Flames).

Considering the name of skill, it seems like it would thematically fit – “True Shot” would remove your targets enchantments and render him his true-self. It goes with the whole “nothing can protect you from the light of justice!” thing. A big hit that prior to applying it’s damage also removes your opponent’s defences? Sounds like it could work.

Alternatively, the old Searing Flame trait could literally be reapplied to Pure of Sight (making it giving you +10% damage at foes at over 600 range, in addition to removing a boon on Burn proc at under 600 range, with a 10-20sec ICD). This would finally give this compulsory, unoptional minor trait some more synergy with core guard specs other than it being totally wasted on any existing Guard other than Sceptre users, or the new Longbow, and as Dragonhunter seems like it’s rather lacklustre in sPvP, this would really help it have a place there too.

Traps – I’m with Nike.2631 on this, the biggest issue as I see it with Traps is that by taking traps you are sacrificing all your utility, and when you are a class like Guard with the low HP pool we have, you really need that utility you find on your typical Meditation or Shout Guards – namely condition removal, and stun breaks.

I wouldn’t know exactly which ones to pick for what, but while the actual numbers and amounts are off a bit, Nike’s list:

Purification. Add the following: When this trap is placed cleanse 1 condition on yourself. When this trap is triggered convert 2 conditions on you to boons.
Light’s Judgment. Add the following: When this trap is triggered the pulses also cleanse blindness and confusion from up to 5 allies in the trap radius.
Test of Faith. Add the following: Setting this trap is a stunbreak. When this trap is triggered it creates a light field.
Procession of Blades. Add the following: When this trap is triggered it pulses whirl finishers.
Dragon’s Maw. Add the following: Setting this trap also creates a water field for 10 seconds.

Seems to be roughly along the correct lines. At least one of the Guard Traps needs to be a Stun-Break, and at least one needs to be able to remove multiple Conditions (or as Nike suggested, have them all remove conditions when traited, though I’d probably go with 1 To Boon Convert or 2 Removals each instead of 1 Removal + 2 To Boon Converts each – that seems a little too strong). You could just change the Healing Trap to Remove Condis the same way Healing Spring does for Rangers if you didn’t want to go down the Trait-method instead. Guardian could do with a direct on-demand condi-removal Healing Skill anyway, the Signet’s passive 10 second removal really doesn’t cut it (it’s not always going to proc at the time you need it).

I think if Traps were given access to these two things (Stun Break and Condition Removal), you’d find they suddenly become a tonne more viable and less people would be complaining about them.

Having a Combo Finisher or two in there wouldn’t hurt either, would certainly make them more interesting, though I don’t think it’s strictly neccessary. Dragon’s Maw seems like a solid place to stick a Blast Finisher (which would also give the skill some more worth, most people seem to think it’s rather lacklustre as an elite skill at the moment), and Procession of Blades a Whirl Finisher.

TL;DR: Add Boon Removal to True Shot and/or Pure of Sight. Give Traps access to Stunbreaks and Condition Removal. Either via specific traps, or for all traps via Traits.