Guild Wars 2

BLTC still not loading. About a week of being unable to access it. Still no responses or feedback from a-net.

My Black Lion Trading Post stopped loading about a week ago. It worked again for one day on (if I remember correctly) Tuesday and hasn’t worked since. I’ve obviously restarted the client several times since then. I’ve restarted my PC, restarted my modem and router. I’ve deleted my GW2Cache, and I’ve run the -repair tool.

Still the same thing. When I go to https://gemstore-live.ncplatform.net/ I get an Error: Invalid Authorization message.

No such message is displayed in game, I just get the blank field where the BLTC should be and no spinning wheel to indicate loading.

I’ve reported this issue in game on four separate days, but have received no feedback.

Revendell.9036:

pdfrod.1948:

Nurien.4136:

What I keep seeing, maybe it’s a bug, is that she goes invisible at exactly the same point on her health bar every time, whether we dps fast or slow. And that point is right around 50% health.

Which means, even with a good spark run, she’s healed notably over 50%. Granted she may have only 60-65% of her bar, but she’ll still go invisible right at the 50% mark again.

Is this normal behavior, or did we find a glitch in the encounter? I timed the cycles between her invisibile phases, and it could be anywhere from 45 sec to over 3 minutes, but she’d still enter the phase at exactly 50%, just like the first time she is encountered.

Same here. We tried to do it the “normal way”, by bringer her down to 50%, run the sparks while she regened, and dps her again. But no matter how little she regened, everytime we brought her down to 50%, she went invulnerable and started regening. It seemed that we were stuck in a 50% endless loop. Is this a bug?

The only way we managed to bring her health below 50% was using the 4-1 sparks method, but that seems like a workaround rather the normal way of doing it.

Same thing here. I had my second attempt to beat Dwayna yesterday and no matter how hard we try, she always regen when her HP is at 50%, there is no period of time when she regens it’s just always at 50%. It also doesn’t help if your party is bunch of baby ragers who instead of listening to the strategy, are keep saying things like “OMG this is impossible” all the time and discouraging the party. And I had my lesson yesterday to never let anyone other than me open the dungeon, because guy who entered Arah just left party at Dwayna fight and all the progress vanished just like that, thanks to that stupid party system. I’m sad because Arah path 4 is all I need for my Dungeon Master Title.

The way I understand it, is you get her to 50% and she stealth + heals. Then once you get her to reappear by bringing sparks there’s a timer, something like 30seconds where she’ll stealth again, no matter what her life. She’ll heal again. If she gets BACK over 50% during this second stealth heal, she’ll stealth heal again at 50% once you’ve returned the sparks. If you keep her below 50% then it’s the timer mechanic again.

I’m not sure this is intended behaviour.

Individually I think we have some decent traits. But I’m not a fan of the trait placement among the trees. For example, I don’t think staff and minion abilities should be in the same tree. Wells and Spectral abilities are spread over too many unrelated trees for example.

Also, it seems to me like the major trait options in our survivability trees (Death and Blood magic) do precious little towards actually increasing our survivability. Minimal self buffing in there, no vigor, no stability. limited bonus condition removal, few automatic (at x% you gain y) abilities, etc. And most traits are only useful if you take wells or minions. There are very few universal traits that other classes get access to. There are a few, but they’re either not very good (ie deathly invigoration), or are pretty situational and probably won’t be of much help (like spiteful vigor).

It seems a pretty ambitious task to rejig the whole tree for Necros though, so it will never happen. But I’d like to see fewer minion and well traits and more universal traits.

Tried for about 2 hours a week ago with myself (power necro), 2 mesmers, an engineer (pre-grenade nerf) and a guardian. We took a break half way through to eat dps food and potions of undead slaying and still couldn’t manage the DPS to take her down before she stealthed the second time. We were all in full exotic gear, and on teamspeak coordinating.

The fight needs severe rebalancing to account for the fact that not all classes are greatsword warriors

lettucemode.3789:

I’ll add my opinions to the mix. I think that all our utilities are useful in some situation and I think it is unrealistic to expect each utility to be useful in all situations.

That’s fair.

I think my (and other players’) disappointment with the utilities comes from the fact that they are much less useful than other classes’ utilities, and since we can only pick 3 (not counting elites and heals) we really have to give up on something to get something else. Other classes don’t suffer from this as badly, in my opinion. There are many skills that are just SO situational that you would never run with them on your bar in the off chance that such a rare situation would pop up.

I think a good example are some of the stunbreaks that we have access to.

We have:
1) Stunbreak + swiftness every 60s
2) Stunbreak + protection every 90s
3) Stunbreak + condition transfer every 60s
4) Stunbreak + teleport with a cast time if you don’t have the wurm out already

Let’s look at some other stunbreaks in the game:
Lightning flash: stunbreak + teleport
Mistform: Stunbreak + 3 seconds of invulnerability
Armor of earth: Stunbreak + protection + stability (same cooldown as Spectral armor. Are we to believe that 6s of protection and 6s of life force gain when hit is equal yo 8s of protection and stability?)
Shake it off: Stunbreak + aoe condition removal + very short cooldown
Frenzy: Stunbreak+quickness
Endure pain: Stunbreak + 5s of no damage
Balanced Stance: Stunbreak + stability (shorter cooldown than any of our stunbreaks
Lightning reflexes: Stunbreak + vigor + evade back and create distance + shorter cooldown
Judge’s Intervention: Stunbreak + AoE damage + teleport gap closer
Shadow Step: Stunbreak + teleport + reverse teleport + shorter cooldown
Elixer S: Stunbreak + 3 seconds of invulnerability + either stability or invisibility (toolbelt)

Basically my point is, just using this one example the stunbreaks that other classes get are less situational and more universal. Lightning flash can be used offensively or defensively, Judge’s intervention can be used as a stunbreak, or a teleport/gap closer, or for the damage. Shadowstep can be used to confuse foes, and both offensively or defensively. Frenzy can be used as a stunbreak, or as a quickness as it offers both.

The abilities that can only be used in one way such as for defensive reasons (ie, endure pain, shake it off, elixer s, mist form, etc) are all a head and shoulders above anything we get. Either because of more utility, shorter cooldowns, or as fantastic panic buttons etc.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask to have spectral armor on a 30s cooldown for example, or also give stability. Or have another utility that gives a teleport stunbreak. I would just like to see our utilities brought into line with the utilities of other classes. I personally hate looking at my bit list of utilities and going ‘meh’ for all of them. I’m constantly switching them up for different combinations.

I have an 80 thief (among other classes). They’re hated because stealth is a broken mechanic. Simple as that. No other class can walk into a group of 3-5 people with the possibility of downing and stealth dunking one of them, and then walk away. Culling makes this worse.

Thieves have:
1) The best mobility in the game
2) The best opening attacks in the game
3) The best burst damage in the game
4 The best kiting ablity in the game
5) The best escapability in the game (Elementalists come close)
6) The best hit and run, or engage and disengage abilities in the game
7) Very good, but not the best wall defense
8) Very good, but not the best wall clearing abilities.

This adds up to a class that effectively has few, if any, weaknesses and even average/poor players can be incredibly effective.

It boils down to a very very low risk class with very very high rewards. They can contribute in almost every situation, and can escape from almost every situation that doesn’t suit them. Culling lets them stay in combat, deliver huge amounts of damage from a position where other players have an incredibly difficult time defending or responding. Honestly stealth should work differently than it does right now. It should either drop when the thief takes X damage or gets hit X number of times, or revealed should be significantly longer than it is now.

Only bad/tunnelvisioned thieves will ever die in wvw, but bad thieves can still get lots of kills. No other class can boast this.

It’s good to see some constructive discussion here. Here’s what I conclude based on the few responses we have:

The Good:

Consume conditions: Seems consensus is this is a great heal ability and one of our best condition removal skills

Spectral Walk: I feel like this ability loses a lot of its luster in the light of Signet of Locust, but only because of the minute long cooldown. I’d like to see the swiftness last 15 seconds and be on a 30 second cooldown and change nothing else. Since this is a move-backward ability I don’t think it deserves to have the same cooldown as other blink abilities

Epidemic: Everyone likes this ability, although it is only useful for specific builds.

Blood is power: Probably our best utility. It is unfortunate that our best ability is a 10stack of might and 2stack of bleed though. Other classes can get might this high through weapon skills more often (ie guardian), or simply through the synergy of their traits (ie Elementalist). I think this demonstrates the poor shape Necro utilities are in as a whole.

Corrupt Boon: Considered great for pvp against certain classes, and anywhere between useless and ok in pve situations.

Well of Blood: A good skill but not better or equal to consume conditions unless you trait specifically for Wells.

The OK:

Well of Darkness/corruption/suffering: Consensus seems to be that this can be good for builds who focus on wells and only wells, and are middling/not good for anyone else. But even for well focus builds these seem to be weak compared to similar skills that other classes get, mostly because of the cooldown. This makes them unreliable to use as other players can escape them rather easily and then you’re left with a long cooldown. Compare to Ranger Traps which seem to offer more utility, are harder to avoid and are on much shorter cooldowns. Wells are close to being good, they just need tweaking.

Flesh Wurm and Flesh Golem: useful for a number of reasons but suffer from bugs (in the case of golem) and long cast times (in the case of Wurm, limiting its usefulness).

Plague Signet: Cooldown’s too long, and it’s only useful to a few builds, but is not a bad ability

Signet of Locust: Good as an option for those who don’t want Spectral walk or warhorn, but the active ability sucks.

Spectral Grasp: Only really useful in wvw and sometimes in spvp. Often misses the target. But is still good when it works.

The Bad:

Spectral Armor: poor utility, absurdly long cooldown to boot

Spectral Wall: difficult to land, offers middling utility, longish cooldown. Many other classes can stack vulnerability more quickly and easily on shorter cooldowns. Doesn’t act as a ‘wall’ like most other domes or wall abilities in the game. Lack of finishers for the class mean we can’t take advantage of the combo field it offers.

Bloodfiend/Bone fiend/Shadow Fiend/Bone minions: Poor ai, poor utility, low hp, lowish damage, requires you to put all of your skill points to make them viable.

Signet of Spite: Poor utility, poor active, long cooldown

Signet of Undeath: crazy long cooldown, crappy passive. I personally like it for some dungeons though.

Corrosive Poison cloud: Long cooldown for a poison field, can be simply walked out of.

Well of power: long cooldown like all wells, but requires allies to be around, not leave the small radius and have conditions on them to be cured. Only lasts 5 seconds.

Conclusions

We have 5 legitimately ‘good’ abilities that probably don’t need any changes to make players happy. Two of them are heals, and one of them (epidemic) is only really useful against groups for condition built Necros.

We have 7 ok abilities that only need some tweaks to be brought up to snuff. Mostly this deals with prohibitively long cooldowns.

We have 9 bad abilities: these abilities all suffer from poor performance (minions), offer minimal help to any build (spectral wall, armor), and have disproportionately long cooldowns (spectral armor, signet of undeath, corrosive poison cloud)

Pendragon.8735:

Could comment on a lot more, but just want to say I think wells are too much balanced around sPVP (like the whole game really) where there they can be good, because you are expected to fight on a small circle not much bigger than a well. In PVE they can also be good because mobs are dumb and come right at you. But in WvW the opens areas make these just not that appealing. Yeah you can blast them in the middle of a zerg, but you really don’t want to be there either too much.

I would like to see the cooldowns come down on these by about 25% at least.

Spectral Walk – The jaunt window is too short. Not only can enemies see where you are going back to, but much of the time you can’t even get out of LoS to ditch someone. A mesmer can put a portal entrance down and it last 60 seconds! The Necro should be able to return to his starting point at any time during the swiftness boon, now that would make it a tactical weapon. Though might have to diminish that bright green trail some then.

This is a good point and one I haven’t really covered regarding sPVP. I don’t do a lot of spvp so I can’t really comment on how useful abilities are there.

cznrhubarb.5946:

I’m a noob to Necro, but I was trying Corrosive Poison Cloud and didn’t think it was as bad as I’ve read a couple places here. I was using Scepter/Dagger and Consume Conditions as my heal, so I never kept the weakness on myself. Scepter 3 CD’s fast enough that I was always ready to give it away, or if I needed a little bit of extra health I could consume it. I was also grouped with a shortbow Ranger, so the poison field was a nice addition.

I was trying it out with some Blood Is Power and Epidemic so I could take advantage of the corruption traits, Consume, and Scepter #3.

But like I said. I’m a new at this, so I probably could have been some more optimal skill. I didn’t hate it though.

Fair.

Like I said, there are some situations where it can be useful. I just think they’re few and far between. You only get 3 utilities. And poison+weakness every 40 seconds, in my view isn’t really worth taking up one of those spots especially when your target(s) can just move out of it.

It’s one problem a lot of Necro utilities suffer from. They can just be moved away from.

Corrupt Boon 8/10

This is one of the better utilities we get. It can be great for wvw, and occasionally useful in dungeons. The cooldown seems fine, but frankly the self-poison seems unnecessary in a game where similar abilities, such as arcane thievery exist without similar drawbacks.

Epidemic 9/10

Right near the top as one of the best abilities necros have access to in wvw and spvp. It loses a few points for being useless against bosses where there are no adds. Even in a power build, this utility skill has a place.

Blood is Power 9/10

Another good ability. This also has a place in almost any type of build. It applies a bleed to the enemy that does decent damage, increases both power and condition damage for a good long time. Now if it only added fury as well…

OK that’s it for now. I hope we can get a good discussion going here with suggestions on how to make some of our utility skills more useful and fun. Because right now they just aren’t fun a lot of the time!

The TL;DR version is that roughly half of our utility skills simply aren’t up to snuff. They’re either objectively useless in almost all situations, suffer from prohibitively long cooldowns for what you’re getting, or don’t hold up to direct comparison against the utilities of other classes which do similar things.

Spectral Armor 2/10
Similar to Spectral walk above, but on an even longer cooldown in exchange for 6 seconds of protection.

Spectral Grasp 7/10
This is a situationally useful skill. I like it but don’t use it too often. It suffers from being slow, has odd tracking/obstruction issues, and doesn’t quite seem to go 1200 as the tooltip says. But it is one of the few ‘grab’ abilities in the game and does what it does fairly well.

Wells
Like minions I’m going to lump these all together. Personally, I dislike wells. They’re so easy to avoid, and offer negligible utilities when they aren’t avoided. Alone this would be fine, but they’re coupled with absurd cooldowns and a huge number of traits which are inexplicably spread out among several trait lines. Suffering and darkness are the better ones, but I find these offer just such minimal utility for such a short period of time considering the cooldown. Compare well of corruption to null field, for example. The main goal of both of these abilities is to remove the boons of foes. They share the same cooldown, but our well also does a small bit of damage and converts boons rather than strip them. Null field, however, is by default ground targeted, and also cures conditions on allies, while lasting longer. Combine this with the fact that mesmers have several combo finishers and the ability becomes more useful still.

Wells have the potential to be great utility skills, I just think that their cooldowns do not reflect the actual utility we get from them for 5 seconds. If the wells were larger, or their traits were more focused, or the cooldown was between 25-30 seconds we’d be on to something. (I’d give darkness and suffering 6.5s and corruption and power 4 and 3 out of 10 respectively).

Signets
Personally I love the new Locust change. This gives us some much needed options. I no longer feel like I have to use spectral walk and warhorn to get around. So I give this an 8/10. It loses marks on the active ability which is again hampered by too long of a cooldown for what it does.

Undeath: 7/10 underrated in my opinion. In some dungeon fights such as Lupicus, this signet is a team saver. The cooldown is oppressively long, but not any longer than similar signets (guardian’s for example). Outside of dungeons it’s not really useful though.

Spite and plague I almost never use to be honest. Their cooldowns seem too long for my tastes, and I don’t run condition specs for the most part so I don’t find them too enticing. Can anyone weigh in on these?

I’d like to see one of our signets get stability on active since we have so little access to it.

Corrosive Poison Cloud 3/10

Think a Thief’s Choking gas, but add in weakness, self weakness, and a ridiculous 40 second cooldown. This field lasts 15 seconds, but will rarely, even against dungeon mobs, be effective for more than 5 seconds before whatever you’re fighting moves out of it. There’s a good chance the self-weakness will be on you longer than it will whatever you’re fighting. This is one of the few utilities in the game that has the potential to hurt you more than the person you’re fighting. It doesn’t get a 1/10 for a few reasons: against some bosses who are immobile, the weakness can be pretty good. It’s ranged, which is nice. And Necro’s get a few forms of condition removal which mitigates the self-weakness. Also, against globs of enemies (for example in a zerg v zerg wvw fight) it puts up a nice combo field. It can be useful in some scenarios but is so situational that I can’t see myself running this for most builds.

I’d like to see the duration cut to 7-8 seconds, the self-weakness to 3 seconds, and the cooldown to 20-25 seconds. This wouldn’t really change the ability in any real way to make it more powerful. But it would allow you to readjust it to account for enemies that move which account for the majority of enemies in the game and everyone in wvw.

Hey everyone, I was hoping to get a bit of constructive discussion going regarding Necromancer Utilities. In my opinion, it is the Necro’s utilities that represent the biggest weakness the class faces.

A number of problems plague our utilities: some are nearly useless or so situational that few people would run with them on the off chance they would make a difference (ie spectral wall, or corrosive poison cloud). Others are good but are too easily avoided or ignored to justify the long cooldown (Most of the Well abilities for example).

So I thought I’d quickly take a look at all of the utilities we have access to and hopefully get some community thoughts going about how we can improve them without being overpowered. (note, I will not be considering Elite skills or healing skills at this time. But feel free to talk about them if you have feedback)

You may disagree with my assessment of some of these skills and that’s a good thing. If you can show me how I should be using/approaching an ability then that will only help with my understanding of some utilities that I may have overlooked. I really hope this can be a constructive thread with a focus on utilities. I want to be able to bring some concerns of the community to the devs who will hopefully keep an eye on this thread. Our utility skills suffer from a number of the same perceived problems that ranger utilities suffer from (useless for many builds, boring, ineffective, etc) and I think many Necromancers are concerned that a disproportionate amount of attention is being shown to Rangers in this regard, while the Necromancer’s concerns are being overlooked/ignored.

I will give these all a number ranking from1-10, 10 being must-haves, and 1s being must-avoids.

(note: my perspective comes from someone with thousands of wvw kills, and 4 level 80s – necro, engineer, thief and guardian. I also have a mesmer and elementalist in the 60s, and I’ve done a lot of wvw with all of these characters. I’m not an expert but I do play a lot and so I think I can offer a pretty good opinion)

Minions 1/10 or 10/10 (see below)
I’m going to deal with these first hopefully quickly. We all know the problems that minions suffer from (they’re weak, die quickly, buggy, etc). That’s all been hashed out before so I’m not going to do it again. Instead I want to point out something else that bugs me about minion utilities: With the exception of Flesh Wurm, these are an ‘all or nothing’ utility skill. What I mean is that you either spec entirely towards minions, or you ignore them all completely. So if you decide not to spec for minions, you can immediately cross 1 heal skill, 1 elite skill and 3 utility skill off your list of options.

The exception is Flesh Wurm, which I would give a 6/10. The teleport is great, but the cast time makes it impractical as a panic/escape button. I’d like to see the other summons get utilities that could be practical in application to non minion spec builds. For example: perhaps, instead of blinding, the shadow fiend sacrifices itself to grant stability for 8s to the caster. Suddenly some non-minion builds might find a reason to run it.

Spectral Walk - 5/10
SW is a good ability but the cooldown is what kills this for me. The tether CAN be useful, but our overall lack of escape abilities makes this only delay the inevitable in wvw if we’re trying to use it to juke someone (they’ll probably catch up anyways!). The spectral ability that allows you to refill lifeforce, to me, is a bit of a waste. Most players getting beat on will go to deathshroud. If they come out of or have DS knocked off, 8 seconds of life-force generation on hit is only going to matter if they’re getting hit a lot, which means it is more likely they will die before deathshroud comes off cooldown anyways. So I see the lifeforce regen as a bit of a non-factor (which might sometimes be useful). Otherwise this is 30s of swiftness and a stunbreak on a 60s cooldown. It gets downgraded to a 5 to me because signet of the locust makes the swiftness redundant. Which makes this a stunbreak every minute. Compare to ‘Shake it off’ a warrior shout that is an AoE condition removal and stunbreak every 25 seconds. I’m not sure swiftness, the most common boon in the game, justifies this as being more than twice as long of a cooldown.

Spectral Wall 3/10
I have never really found this ability to be worthwhile. It doesn’t really act as a ‘wall’ since it neither blocks nor reflects projectiles. Which effectively makes it just another non-damaging aoe field that’s harder to hit with. As an ethereal combo field it can find some use in groups, but a lack of combo finishers from the necro make this hard to recommend as useful skill.

I think Necro utilities need to be lowered across the board, personally.

And here’s another real quick.

Here’s a picture of my Charr.

He’s not done yet, still hunting a few final bits.

I’ll post a pic of mine when I get home if I remember. I’m covered in skulls, it looks fantastic.

I love the idea of the signet speed boost. 10% was negligible and the active wasn’t good enough to take it on its own so it was rarely (if ever) used. Now it has a reason to find a slot on my skill bar.

Alternatives are always appreciated. As it was I felt like I was forced to use either warhorn or spectral walk (and usually both!), now if I want to replace one or the other, I have a backup option for mobility.

We tried this last night with a very skilled group. All of us were in Teamspeak, we’re all fully kitted in exotic gear, and we all specced damage. The group was 2 mesmers, a guardian, an engineer and a necromancer. We were well coordinated, with the tears being used the second anyone was petrified, and the timewarps being perfectly timed one after the other.

We spent an hour and 15 minutes on the fight and still couldn’t complete it. We got her to 10% three times. Note, this isn’t one hour and 15 minutes of attempts. This was a single hour and fifteen minute attempt. Not one of us could die or and we were rarely downed. There is no danger in this fight. We tried getting her to 50% letting her regen with only 4 sparks in and then bursting her down and we couldn’t do it.

This is a horribly designed fight. It offers no danger to the players and suddenly introduces a buggy DPS check which completely limits which classes are optimal for doing it. Either her regeneration needs to be reduced by 75% or her hitpoints need to be reduced by about 1/2 (if a full exotic group, specced as glass cannons in DPS food and superior potions of undead slaying could not meet the required DPS necessary to down her, how is it reasonable to expect anyone else to?), or the sparks need to be replaced by something you can pick up and move to the required locations instead of buggy sparks which sometimes don’t get trapped, reaggro and run the wrong way, or won’t travel in a straight line.

NaturalPortman.9562:

Sleepy.2647:

Still other classes have much more movility than rangers.

If i had to make a ranking i’d say:

1- Thief
2- Ele
3- Mesmer
4- Warrior
5- Ranger
6- Guardian
7- Engi, necro

errr, ranger is definately above warrior

Warriors can have the best mobility next to elementalists if the player is good and doesn’t mind weapon switching out of combat to maximize. This requires swapping to GS to dash, swapping to horn to swiftness, swapping to 1hs for another dash, etc. In combat, they slow down a bit of course.

Necros are definitely in last place, and should be behind engineers who can spec for perma-swiftness (speedy kits), and have a jump ability if they use rifle.

Mesmers are super slow as well, and need focus for swiftness, but they do have the advantage of several teleports and invisibilities, which give them great in-combat mobility, but poor out of combat mobility.

Not to mention the fact that so many other players were upleveled. Not as many full-exo level 80s in Sept.

The same thing happens to me.

thisolderhead.5127:

I have this theory – if you are one of the people out there who believe that Guardians are lost without a ranged weapon addition, “Guards need guns or we are uselessssssss!” types, can we see your builds too?

This is the problem in my opinion. Lack of ranged options for guardians means that they are almost ALWAYS in melee combat. Add to this a small hitpoint pool and you have a scenario where 95% of the builds that people use put 50-60 points in the vitality and toughness traitlines. In the end, the lack of ranged option means that guardians are pigeonholed into one or two variations of the same tanky build.

There is a rather appalling lack of variation between guardian builds. Especially compared to other classes that have 4 or 5 or more viable builds for any given scenario. Without 50-60 points in your survivability trees, guardians get blown up in melee combat. Guardians are also pretty much the only class that has no choice but to be in melee combat most of the time.

This problem stems mainly from a wvw perspective, but it does apply in other scenarios too:

This has sorta been mentioned, but my biggest gripe about guardians is the fact that it seems as though about 90% of guardian builds have between 50 and 60 points in the toughness and vitality lines. The reason for this is that guardian’s are very much in big trouble if they don’t invest the lion’s share of their talents into their survivability trees.

As far as I can tell, no other class suffers from the need to spec this heavily for survival. This leads to a rather unfortunate lack of class spec diversity. While many other classes can choose to spec this way, they also have a plethora of options available to them in pve and pvp should they decide to play differently. This either means that defensive builds on the guardian outstrip the other builds by a wide margin, or that the defensive builds are required in order to survive.

I personally believe this comes from the fact that guardians lack much in the way of a ranged option, have rather poor to middling mobility and escape options, and an itty bitty health pool. The end result is we will find ourselves in melee more frequently than other classes (again, because we have a dearth of ranged options), but lack both the instant burst damage and the extraction ability of many of the other melee classes.

Basically it comes down to this: Guardians cannot hit and run or skirmish very well. Every other class has the option available to them to hit and run, be it a warrior’s ability to fire long range rifle and bow shots, or a thief’s ability to stealth and escape after closing in on melee. When a guardian engages with an enemy, it’s a very deliberate, often all or nothing approach. Which means we must have that survivability in order to do anything at all.

TL;DR: Lack of ranged option is starting to pigeonhole most guardians towards one or two variations of heavily defensive trait builds.

Hey Daphoenix, I roll on FA with the [NICE] guys. I’m going to be leveling this build. I’ve always wanted to play an elementalist, but their lack of weapon switching was always a bit of a downer, mostly because I wanted to play D/D but everyone I talked to said it sucked for wvw (which is where I spend the vast majority of my play time).

I’m only level 13 but I actually had some success last night playing conservatively with d/d. I’m running with mistform and icebow for some range during the larger battle/skirmishing.

So if you see Manos Hansofayt running around, that’d be me!