Guild Wars 2

I think this was a reasonable way to do gliding in WvW, offer more reason to control territory, (only mostly, apparently) prevent people from gliding into objectives to take them… but… the WvW map looks… fugly.

If gliding ends up staying, please consider thinner lines or something so we can see the territory marks but not make it so prominent. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it seems harder for me to look at the big map and get a sense of the map – it’s too busy.

Too early for me to comment on balance and other impacts, but this impact was immediate. Just one man’s opinion and request; others may see it differently.

No system will satisfy all of us, because we all have varying principles about what the ideal state is. We should be having 2 different debates – 1 about the principles, and one about the execution against the principles.

Some people want the new reward system to be attainable in the same time period for someone who ignored WvW for years and someone who played it exclusively despite kitten rewards. Others want to be able to maintain their more exclusive flashy stuff for longer before every Average Joe can get it and make it not “exclusive.”

Everyone should accept that no system will satisfy everyone’s inherently conflicting principles, and that every system is going to have some fundamental unfairness to it even if we agreed on most of the principles.

Despite all the differences expressed here, I think it’s fair to say that none of us think ANET nails the balance perfectly on the first time out, so it’s fair to say there might be room for improvements.

I’m opposed to any change that eliminates the value of higher WvW ranks entirely, because I know many of us have spent countless hours in WvW with really 0 rewards – before WvW reward tracks, you could spend literally hours in this game and make VERY little progress even on WvW rank, if you were scouting towers that didn’t end up getting attacked, or spent time repairing walls after a siege, or escorting yaks… I LOST money many nights back when we paid gold to upgrade structures for the benefit of the team. I got 4 years worth of rank gain advantage on a new WvW player, sure, but I didn’t get ANY skirmish tickets for all those weeks – new players will start getting skirmish tickets while they’re leveling up to bronze and gold (and come on, it’s not that slow to get to bronze or even gold, at which point you’re only a 1-3 pips/tick behind most regular WvW players out there – not that many people are diamond rank).

That said, that doesn’t mean the advantage has to be the current system or none.

I’m platinum rank (+4) now after years of casual WvW play and my advantage over a rank 0 amounts to less than the pips you can get for judicious use of outmanned buff. That tells me the outmanned buff is probably too strong, even if not always available. That someone who is Diamond (which is pretty rare) earns 2 pips/tick more than me seems pretty reasonable.

Full-pop servers probably hate that the system incentivizes people to semiafk and goose participation while taking map slots from more active players.

Maybe the advantage in pips-per-tick is too high a percentage of the overall pips – maybe baseline pips for all should go up 1 or 2, but keep the current rank gaps. Maybe the skirmish tickets should skew more to the lower end, so that the advantage in what is reasonably attainable is smaller, even if it does exist. Or maybe that shouldn’t slow down at the top, but you shouldn’t even expose the top chests to people until they ARE a certain rank (making lower tier players focus more on getting THEIR max rewards, after which their focus should on ranking up instead of maintaining participation over time with minimal activity). There are hundreds of ways to adjust the mechanics, all which will have some fundamental unfairness to it.

New WvW players need to respect that the advantage for long-devoted WvW players should exist as one of those principles (though again, we can debate the right principles), and Veterans reaping the advantage shouldn’t dismiss charges that the execution is flawed to reflexively defend ANET’s first real appreciation for your devotion to the game mode.

Since a lot of this discussion has focused on whether cheater’s multiple accounts should be banned, let me say I go with the “all accounts” move, if it can be sufficiently proven that they’re the same person, or if it can be shown that the other accounts are directly benefiting from that cheating in a way that doesn’t pass the “smell test.” I’m prepared to allow for a modest amount of discretion on the part of the game company.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that we don’t know what’s real here. Is this user’s story true? Or are they just working hard to un-ban their main by denying all connection to the others and hoping it can’t be proven? We can’t know. ANet has to have a better idea, because they at least know what they detected and how certain or tenuous the connection is between those user accounts. But they’re not talking.

I suggest that we all take a step back from assuming we know what’s happened, and focus instead on how what happened is being handled. As someone who was falsely banned TWICE for different things, I have some perspective here. I was banned for botting once (and I have done no such thing) presumably because I was farming solo in an area in the corner of a map while watching TV, back when farming bots could be found commonly in the game and people would run by and report them… The other time was for receiving a legendary via in-game mail from a guild-mate who had run a month+ long in-game contest for it. I got banned within 15 minutes of receiving it for “real money trading” as though I had bought it. I was able to sort that out by providing the links to our forum discussion of the running competition and appealing it, and they must have done the research in game or outside of it to show it wasn’t paid for. In both cases, justice was done, but I know too well the panic of being falsely accused of cheating and how hard it is to be forced to give up the game cold-turkey through no fault of your own. I wrote several messages that sounded like the ones from the OP.

ANet I think errs on the side of the customer in the eventual appeal, or at least has the tools to go back deeper and dive into things that prove or disprove their claim beyond the detection method, and I am grateful for that. However, my lone criticism from those experiences is how bad the communication is. You are told the ban is permanent, they’re sure, ironclad, they’re positive you cheated, no further tickets will be answered….. They tell you nothing or next to nothing about what THEY say happened, and go pretty much silent until they realize the mistake and unban you. (Or don’t, I suppose.)

There probably ARE cases where they have ironclad, lock-down, 100% proof, but nobody believes that message anymore because we all know they toss it around carelessly and then admit the mistake later… This company could do a LOT to improve its communication around these types of instances. I get that there are lots of reasons not to respond with details (because everything they say becomes the new point of argument) but it’s really hard when they KNOW false positives are a real problem.

I wonder about the OP being able to post too; I as I recall I couldn’t and had to have my wife post for me in the “tickets older than” thing. I also notice he’s been quiet awhile…. wonder if he gave up or he’s already back in game.

TL:DR; People cheat. They do and should get banned. Many will lie on the forums to wiggle out. Others get falsely tagged by mistakes. We can’t know which is which. Anet has to sort it out, and it seems they usually do, but their communication around that process stinks.

MiniEquine.6014:

Still, you don’t have to stay in the symbol of swiftness AoE for too long to maintain perma-swift. Balancing that placement with “Retreat!”s will give you it even if you just run through it.

It’s not really perma swift if you have to stop moving for nearly 4 out of every 15 seconds…. Even if you queue up the full duration, and try to recharge the 4 seconds every 15, you can’t build up enough swift to be anywhere near perma. It has group utility for sure, so it’s fine that Staff 4 isn’t a permaswift by itself, but let’s not PRETEND that it is.

Retreat combined with staff pretty well gets there, if you pre-stack some at the start to make up for the gap, have low shout duration trait (which isn’t uncommon), and boon duration… but then if you’re running staff in the first place, you’re probably planning on being in a group and can likely hope to fill in the gaps from other sources.

Personally, I gave up and put traveler’s runes on my roaming set. Stinks, but at least Guards can theoretically benefit (more than most classes) from the “all stats” options….

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

{… snip…}

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

How do you plan to measure this feedback? Because I can tell you right now as much as I support mixing things up, and trying things out, some design choices are just so bad as to not warrant such a test. The people here have illustrated why fairly clearly – scouting is boring, low-pop servers can’t do it, etc. How this isn’t obvious is incomprehensible to me.

I love the idea of lengthening the sword-appearance-time for outmanned or “behind score” servers on some threshold (it’s already on a list of tweaks I’m putting together to propose to help balance WvW through incentivizing players to do things that are good for game, the enjoyment of it, and server balance), but complete removal of that indicator is just plain stupid unless it’s coupled with some sort of compensatory system change. (E.g., Making sieges take A LOT longer so as to be detectable without swords, guards lighting some highly visible signal flare or some other alert mechanism, rewards for actually scouting, etc….)

How will you measure success or failure of this change? Do I cast my vote on the forums after? In-game poll? By sitting out those two weeks in protest? Because I can tell you this will fail as a stand-alone change, but I have limited confidence (given that you think this is a good idea to try in the first place without some of the types of corresponding adjustments to mitigate the obvious damage) that you will measure this effectively…. I’m not trolling here – I love this game and want it to succeed and it pains me to hear about this idea.

Megaserver pros: More people can team up for PvE content, world feels more “full” again as you run into people.

Probably less overall server instances, allowing cost savings that hopefully get spent on new content.

Megaserver cons:
My sense of shared purpose in helping those people I run into, as a WvW focused player, is diminished. Why take the time to coach and aid my opponents?

Guild recruiting is more complex, though it’s not hard to add the server to the broadcast if you do that. However, I don’t usually recruit by broadcast, and I have no mechanism today for seeing what server a person is on when I see someone I might want to chat up.

Calling your team to WvW for a sneak attack is now impossible other than within guild. This is dumb. Need server chat or server+map chat at least.

The system for sorting instances is fundamentally flawed. Why do guildmates still end up in different instances? The need to “taxi/ferry” people in using the group priority is dumb. I’ll accept it in EotM, but not for guild missions.

Guild missions are a lot busier. This could just take getting used to. I still don’t like deciding to cooperate or play nice with my WvW enemies when I see them. (Also, you set up no easy chat across servers in WvW for a reason. I can only hope you’re keeping common matchups away from the same megaservers, but since you didn’t prioritize guild members right, I am not optimistic that any more than party is actually reliably taken into account.)

I get that this is hard – you don’t know when the first few from server x join a zone than 50 more are about to follow. But you needed better solutions before pushing this out, IMO.

Consensus here is right; you can’t take away this trait if you don’t give a lot of survivability in return.

I also wanted to make one thing clear: you can’t perma-dodge just because you have perma-vigor. Once your “preloaded” 2 dodges are spent, even if you had absolute 100% uptime on vigor (which you can’t though you can get close with high crit and staff auto or well timed multi-hit skills when they’re not on cooldown) you would be limited to 1 dodge every 5s, and vigor doesn’t stack with the food buff. (which IS perma-vigor, and yet I don’t see other classes using that "OP vigor food…. so why is THIS the thing they want to “fix” on the guardian again?)

Easy access to vigor, combined with the heal on dodge trait, is critical to my survivability and to my healing output for the team. I’m fine with moving it up or reducing it… but it definitely needs to come with some pretty nice easy-access buffs to the problems with the class that it is not-quite masking.

JonPeters.5630:

Symbol of Swiftness
To clarify the new Symbol of Swiftness will give you 4 seconds of Swiftness every single pulse regardless of if you have swiftness or not. This is a improvement in many situations and a slight loss in the situation where you were using the Symbol as just a one time buff. I think this makes it feel more like a Symbol, which is good. We are still discussing the idea of it being 5 seconds, but there is some danger of that going pretty high with boon duration.

While I agree with the analysis that it’s a group buff and it will be very welcome in WvW zerg-trains… I don’t find this a welcome “improvement” for the guardian himself as long as you can now only get a single 4-sec (pre-boondur) tick without stopping in it. Both when on the move and when using Line-of-warding+SoS to get separation. If you’re intent on improving the irritating 1sec stacked limit , consider making it 8sec if no swiftness, 4s stacking per tick with swiftness. You could even double (or hell, more!) the damage on the first tick and remove a tick to keep from expanding the max total swiftness delivered when compared to your current proposal and keep the same damage… without making it so much worse for the guardian personally.

As for the rest of the proposal… Not much to convince me I should play a more offensive guardian yet, but I applaud the goal. Only my 1H sword build got enough of a boost to even really consider dusting it off and trying it again. I think you have to buff the heck out of some of the offensive trees preferably not just weapon dependent skills, and mostly in the middle/high tiers so that you have to trade some of the common support/utility for it…. I don’t think you went far enough here, but the 5% boost to 1H sword trait is the right size/scale of the changes you are seeking IMO.

Ozoug.4158:

Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane VIII – Blasting Staff. Moved to Adept tier.

I can live with this. Most true support-minded staff users had these two traits anyhow. I see why that’s a powerful 10 pts for cheap support I guess.

Ozoug.4158:

Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina. Moved to Master tier.

I don’t D/D, so I won’t dwell on why this doesn’t just force D/D to use end-regen food and forgo this trait. I suppose that will happen, and they’ll just miss the other food they used. I see the D/D folks don’t like it.

Water I – Aquamancer’s Alacrity. Moved to Master tier.
Water V – Cleansing Wave. Moved to Master tier.

This one hit the true staff support players hard, and leaves no useful minor water trait for a support staffer. I understand the argument behind moving Alacrity, and I won’t presume to know the impact to non-staff builds. I would find this less painful if there was anything interesting in minor water. I would miss the lowered recharge on the water fields, but that’s it – or I’d miss the extra cond removal for support…. but I could get over it if you made something useful in minor water. Or, like you said, leave them and just change that weak master trait.

Ozoug.4158:

The base cooldown of the attunement that you just left is now reduced from 16 seconds to 13 seconds. Attunement cooldown rate now increases by 1% per point in Arcane down from 2%. The end result is that now Attunements go from 13s to 10s instead of the old range of 16s to 10s.
Base global attunement cooldown is now 1.625 seconds. Global attunement cooldown rate now decreases by 1% per point in Arcane down from 2%. The end result is that now global attunement cooldown goes from 1.625 to 1.25 instead of the old range of 2.0 to 1.25.

So a support staff ele going 20 arcane for the same blasting staff / Elemental attunement goes from 9.6s swap to 10.4s. The overall swap cooldown goes from 1.2s to 1.3? That’s not terrible and its an extra nerf to Elemental Attunement which I suppose is OK if people really see it as borderline Grandmaster. It’s going to make it more obvious than before that I rarely swap to an attunement for more than 2 skills in that attunement but it’ll challenge me to learn to get more out of each attunement’s less powerful skills I guess.

TBH I’m mentally pretty committed to the support staff builds, but if you wanted to reduce the heavy focus on water/arcane, try putting some interesting and powerful traits in the other lines for the various roles… e.g. find a supportive skill in air that would attract a support style player to try that line. Try a tanky-type skill in fire. Just make them such that you can’t get the air support skill alongside all the existing support skills in water and arcane, or the tanky fire skill and still have water and earth pumped for that…. stop being so pigeon-holed by the idea that fire must be AoE DD, Air must be single target DD, water must be healing/support, earth must the tank/conditions…. give a player with a given playstyle a variety of types of options in the different lines.

I’m never straying too far from ~20 water and ~20 arcane because my support mindset dictates those lines, and the recharge reduction that allows me to use the fields in each line rapidly.

Amins.3710:

You’re absolutely right… I have no idea how much healing/support a guardian can do:

Odd that you would argue with a position I clearly didn’t take. You’ve made it clear that you do and I even explicitly pointed that out to you. Amins, I promise I’m not trying to get under your skin, and TBH I think you actually agree with me if you’d stop ignoring the context of the argument you walked into.

Amins.3710:

Honestly….You should have just taken out the “Support” from your comment and stated “Healing”:

As I’ve pointed out already, and you seem to keep ignoring, the original position from Redscope’s post that I was arguing with defined these roles – his breakdown, not mine – and said the warrior was better at each:
Bunker
Damage
CC
Condi
Healing/Support

I’m arguing in the framework of that role classification someone else laid out. I am therefore considering the role under dispute to be mostly healing, damage mitigation, and boons to allies, and, looking at his original examples of skills in each (go re-read his post on page 1) considering mostly healing. I took the liberty of adding damage mitigation and other boons to allies to his list because he didn’t explicitly put that into a different category, and so I presumed he means to include that in the “support” half. Seriously, look back at his original post. He DOES seems to include almost entirely healing in his description of that last role, and he made the argument that Warriors were better at it. So I took issue with that. And given the arguments you’re making, I think you would too.

Amins.3710:

But since you added in “support”… I really stopped paying attention to anything you had to say, as “support” encompasses many different ways in which it can be performed.

We agree there – that it can be defined differently, which is why I went through great pains to define the one I was using and why. I’m honestly not sure why you aren’t seeing that.

Amins.3710:

And if you missed what I said: Guardians are better Healers than Warriors… which was never the argument.

Saw it, understood it, and even explicitly repeated it back to you as something you stipulated. Except that it kind of was the argument I was having with Redscope. I made it a bit more complex by adding mitigation and boons to allies into the mix to make it more realistic, but I think that was a fair place to include them given his breakdown and word choice.

You already agree we outheal warriors. And I don’t think you are saying that warriors provide more damage mitigation than guardians (though I think you weren’t considering the full utility of the 15 pts in radiance for that part when you wrote one of your responses above, whether or not you knew it) or that they apply more beneficial boon value (offensive and defensive) to allies, either. So it’s really hard to see where you think you disagree with me except where I’ve pointed out that you’ve misunderstood me (e.g. what I meant by the fire proc).

It really seems to me that you’re choosing to argue with my argument against Redscope’s assertion even though your real problem isn’t that you disagree with me but just that you don’t like where Redscope drew lines between what he saw as the roles to compare warrior to guardian. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Amins.3710:

Radjan Majere.4208:

Amins.3710:

You’ve pigeon holed support as in a ‘defensive’ capacity and although that’s how most people see it, it doesn’t encompass the entirety of the meaning…

Guardians can apply far more might and the offensive burn proc to offset not having fury. A traited support guardian can apply far more vulnerability and blindness by F1 spamming than a warrior can do vulnerability and weakness for damage mitigation, and can do it with any weapon (though staff tagging helps). Guardians supply more regen, protection, and critical AoE stability not to mention retaliation because it doesn’t factor much into the support/healing side.

Now you’re blending builds.

If you think so, then you aren’t paying attention. Everything there I do with my build. Can do all that with 0-15-0-30-20 and adding the last 5 wherever you like. (Radiance for signet trait if you like healing signet, valor to offset the lighter toughness of this build, virtues for some extra dmg/boon dur are all viable options.)

Amins.3710:

You’re also saying that Group Distributed Fury is offset by a guardians “Burn Proc”. Ridiculous.

Not as ridiculous as you think. First “offset” doesn’t have to mean “equivalent,” second, you’re ignoring the group might that is triggered by he same skill (traited) but mostly because you seem to think I mean the every x-hit self proc because you seem unreceptive to actually absorbing what other people are saying instead of just assuming you know their argument is crap. I’m talking about the Group Distributed “give-everyone4-sec burn on their next hit” proc that you incorrectly think I’m blending builds to get, which along with group distributed might is recharged every time you spam the F1 skill which you spam every time something you sufficiently staff tagged dies when traited, as I’ve stated. I’m telling you, in a large group fight when things start dying, I hit F1 so often and reflexively that I have trouble not wasting my F1 skills accidentally on other classes. In many situations, the extra criticals from group fury may outdamage 20s (max potential) of distributed burn…. but I apply the F1 proc to allies WAY more frequently in an average fight than that shout can trigger.

Amins.3710:

Conversation, done.

If you say so. Probably best, if you’re not going to open your mind to the idea that someone else might have a point.

Relentliss.2170:

Some of the numbers people are throwing around assume a 100% uptime of protection and regen for the guardian. Which is not the case at all. Our buffs last on average 5 sec. To get these to last 100% of the time requires us to give up some seriously important stats either in tankiness or damage.

I agree with pretty much everything else you said, but since I’m the one throwing around most of the guardian numbers I’ll say my numbers for healing potential over 25s vs shouts or over a minute in the other scenario were taken with actual uptime over those intervals. I’m factoring in the multiple sources of some of those, and boon duration, but not assuming sustained permanent uptime to reach the numbers I wrote.

You might have been addressing someone else’s argument – but I wanted to be clear.

Amins.3710:

You’ve pigeon holed support as in a ‘defensive’ capacity and although that’s how most people see it, it doesn’t encompass the entirety of the meaning…

I’m simply arguing in the context of the person whose original assertion I’m attempting to counter. You can argue that a character the kill all your opponents before they can attack anyone is “support” but most people would say that it fits under “damage” in the list below.

The original position I’m arguing with defined these roles – his breakdown, not mine – and said the warrior was better at each:
Bunker
Damage
CC
Condi
Healing/Support

Based on that, I do not consider those other things (such as CC) to be healing/support as we’ve defined them for the present conversation. Those are by definition “other” roles. I am considering healing, damage mitigation, and boons to allies.

Amins.3710:

Guardians support via:
- Healing
- Boons (Regen/Protection/Stability/Might)
- Damage Negation (Walls, Sanctuary, Shield, Blocks [arguable for sure… 1 block can either take 10k dmg or 60 dmg]).
- Area Control -> CC from Lines/Rings
- Condi Removal

Warriors do the same thing, differently:
- Healing
- Boons (Might, Vulnerability, Weakness, Fury)
- Damage Negation & Area Control in 1 weapon: Hammer
- Condi Removal (Warhorn/Shouts)- though not as good

[…]

It’s already been shown that a Shout Build Warrior can heal almost on par w/ a guardian in terms of HPS… what they do ~better~ than a guardian is ~on demand~ Burst Healing…. the guardian has to set up for it.

So by your own admission, shout build warrior doesn’t heal as well as a support guardian – though I get that you think that it’s closer than it should be.

Guardians can apply far more might and the offensive burn proc to offset not having fury. A traited support guardian can apply far more vulnerability and blindness by F1 spamming than a warrior can do vulnerability and weakness for damage mitigation, and can do it with any weapon (though staff tagging helps). Guardians supply more regen, protection, and critical AoE stability not to mention retaliation because it doesn’t factor much into the support/healing side.

Your most compelling RELEVANT point is actually the max burst heal (truly the overall balance point is the most compelling, but again, that wasn’t the argument you stepped into. And the most compelling point you’re not making is why warrior can be so much better at offense and still be better at raising allies with warbanner albeit on a long cooldown. I’ll admit it’s annoying that a shout Warrior has a higher instant-spike heal with multiple shouts. But, then that’s pretty well it for healing for awhile. The guardian has a smaller instant heal with VoR, but that is offset by the fact that they can insta-apply blindness, protection, regeneration, and aegis along with that heal as instas. Dodge heals can follow in short order and then be repeated every 5-10s. Empower’s spike heal can add a burst, abeit a little slower, and then whatever the 3rd utility slot brings by preference. Add in the VoR passive heal if the Guardian skips PoV for Battle Presence as I have for more sustained healing all the while. Tack on Renewed Focus for the option to re-do that virtues burst on a short delay or the tome for burst healing (which to be fair is on a long cooldown like Warbanner)… I think it’s worth the tradeoff when evaluating what we bring in the role under discussion.

Amins.3710:

And again, the build I posted does all this AND incredibly good damage.

And again, you miss the context of the argument I was having with Redscope’s statement. Say that guardians should have viable offensive options comparable to other classes , and I’m on board as long as we have to sacrifice some support for it. Say that warriors are better in each of those other categories while not being terrible in this one, and I might agree. But we’re better at this specific role.

Amins – No, I see what you’re saying – but you’re right, I’m ignoring it. I’m ignoring it because even if it’s true, it’s not relevant to the disagreement I had with Redscope’s comment that warriors are better at all the roles he listed. I’m not claiming Guardian is balanced to warrior, so I don’t need to refute claims that it isn’t. I’m claiming that despite any imbalance, Guardians are still superior in the support/healing role.

Sorry about the bump – I was on vacation. Also sorry I’m a forum newb and don’t know how to properly quote in this forum. Most of that was in response to Redscope.

To Amis – thanks for posting the shout-heal build – I’ll look more closely at it but the core to that is about what my wife’s warrior ran. “23,080 for your team” is the part I care about, since we’re talking group support/healing here. Hopefully, Red or someone can post some banner options.

Again, with the understanding that we’re talking support to allies to fill the support/heal option that I took issue with in Redscope’s original comment, this statement rings false: “The guardian does NOT come close to these types of numbers.”

You ran “over 23,080” for your team over 1m, but my own post will show healing potential well over 30k for allies over that same minute, even ignoring protection, aegis, and blindspam for damage mitigation on allies that I don’t see in that build. Now, a warrior with that build can still KILL THINGS, and I’m not saying they’re useless by any stretch – just that they don’t seem to outclass a guardian for support/healing.

Using mostly numbers from my earlier post since I’m lazy and tired, you’re around 11,000 from battle presence/absolute resolution over a minute. Let’s say just 3 empowers a minute because you swap or don’t use them all, that’s still over 7500. Even if you only dodgeheal once every 10s (which I swear to you is low for me) that’s well over 6,000. HTL twice is another 4,000 potential from regen with cooldown to spare. VoR active just once, say, is 2,000, plus 6s more regen for 1,500. That’s a conservative 32,000 without any of the prot/aegis/blindspam value factored in. Also, that ignores any use of Renewed Focus to recharge virtues or the alternate healing tome elites, because it makes my head hurt to try.

I’ll say this, though, and this is worth pointing out in opposition to my argument…. My build doesn’t use PoV, the nerf of which was the cause of the original post, meaning you’d need soldier’s runes to have much group condi removal. I run hammer secondary in most WvW settings even though I hate it, for the spammable blast finisher and CC, meaning I can’t even count on the greatsword combo for group condi-removal. I have to choose when to pop VoR with its big condi-removal carefully, since the cooldown is long unless Renewed Focus is available.

It’s late, I’m tired. Hopefully I didn’t kitten the math here.

As to not being a warrior expert – that’s why I admitted it up front so that my comments could be put in context and invite this discussion.

I like some of your early points – notably that shout-heal might not be the right “meta” option for the healing war to compare against the guard for the purposes of the question at hand. However, I still have a hard time believing that warriors fill the healing/support role better than guardians. Can you post a link or structure to a banner build that you think out heals and out-mitigates a guard so I can see what I might be missing? I’m not seeing how it matches up to Prot, aegis, and blind-spam for mitigation and I’m still suspicious of the healing comparison.

Your last points are made in the wrong context for a support/healing comparison. 2/3rds of the passive regen options you list at the end only affect the warrior. You can’t compare self-regen only options against “5-allies” numbers. The warrior you describe only provides a 350 regen to allies in range of the banner, and as I see it has fewer other healing options to go with it. That weakened my perception of the strength of the rest of your argument, but I’ll try to ignore it.

One thing I should clarify is that I didn’t represent all the possible healing tools available – because I didn’t need to in order to outpace what I thought was the shout-heal comparison. Notably, since I can keep up vigor near-constantly, the dodgeheal is a huge additional heal I can toss out with alarming regularity for ~1250 pt heals. So if you’re comparing true sustained healing potential, that needs to be added to the mix. (Also, since you’re using 350pt/s heals from regen, you’re assuming 1760 hp on the warrior, which for comparison is a bigger stat sacrifice than the guard numbers I used which are from closer to 1000 hp which I find more reasonable considering scaling stinks on most healing skills.)

I should also say that I’m inherently suspicious of banners, because in my experience, fights cover too much terrain to count on them in WvW and I can’t count on people to stay in / retreat to a static location. Banner mobility requires someone to carry them (at the expense of doing something else) and you don’t have to play warrior long to know the pain of a well-placed banner getting hauled off by someone trying to loot. To be fair, maximizing potential is a challenge all classes have; “functional value” drops off if you can’t count on your allies to be in range or when you sit on a skill. As long as the fight is big enough, I can work to dance around close enough to the action to keep much of that potential realized, but I imagine that’s harder for a banner warrior anytime you’re outside the obvious choke-point battles. Maybe you can combo the right set of skills to keep a low dependence on that fixed position, and again, I’d be very interested to see what those well thought-out build options look like and what they can include and have to omit.

I’m also a little leery of treating regeneration at full face value because it stacks duration and not intensity. Regeneration is applied from multiple sources, and it can’t tick higher than the highest single tick. To consider it at full face value (especially if you’re counting it as perma from the war) assumes all other sources of regeneration are completely wasted. That’s why I favor a balance of damage mitigation, sustained healing, and burst healing. To be fair, Guardians suffer from this too, but less than a banner regen was would I think. We apply regen ourselves, and one of my common complaints about my own build is that if you put two of us in the same area, we’re bringing less than 2x net functional value since the Battle Presence passive VoR doesn’t stack (in duration or intensity) any time we overlap. True, mine isn’t the only support guardian build, but you won’t see mine as a WvW meta ever for that reason. (I suppose even more pro guardians might find other reasons, but that’s reason enough!)

This complexity is why I didn’t try to account for an exact comparison of healing and mitigation potential. It’d be real easy to say that I can dodgeheal for ~1250 every 5s and add 250/s to my healing potential, and point out that I can frontload 2 of those – but the reality is that while I try to use my first dodgeheal anytime I have full endurance, I also try to save a dodge to save my butt, and I can’t always find a good spot for a dodgeheal immediately on reaching full endurance.

All that said, I hope you’ll share some well thought out options that you think meet the previous poster’s assertion. I’d be happy to benefit from any buffs that come as a result of me being wrong.

OK, so I’m willing to admit I don’t know warrior that well, so this is tough for me. But you’re making two points other than the subjective boring comment and the “I don’t feel the love compared to warrior” comment, which I’ll ignore for now:

1. Their shouts heal for a lot.
2. Offensive support best in game.

1. may be true, but not for more than we can heal/mitigate. Running the numbers on all the healing/dmg mitigation output is a bit complex, but I see someone above say warriors can shout heal at 3,000 per. Let’s say they have 3 shouts (meaning no banners, or other utilities) every 25s? If it’s more, do let me know.

That’s 9,000 hp every 25s, or 360/sec. Someone up there said something about a trait proc for 3000. I’m assuming he means Shrug it off? Let’s say that’s it, and that you can fit it in a typical shout-heal build, and that it goes off in the same timeframe. That’s 12,000 /25s or 480/s.

Now the warrior does have a few ways to add boons to allies like conversion off warhorn maybe, but I think that pretty well covers their healing. Again – I freely admit I don’t know the nuances of the class so maybe I’m missing obvious skills that fit into a shout-heal build, but I’m guessing that’s close.

Just Abs Resolution/ Battle presence is 4500-5000 over 25s. If I stay on staff, I can drop empower twice in that timeframe for over 2500 a pop. (While supplying my own pretty useful offensive support people NOTICE) Regen for 8s off HTL! is another 2000 pts (admittedly on 28s not 25s). That’s already pretty close before you count 2,000+ from active VoR and the 6+sec regen from that for 1,500+ (which to be fair are on longer timers, unless you count that you can reset them with renewed focus) Or the staff 2 heal. Or try to calculate the mitigation from the prot that came with HTL! and VoC, or the aegis from the latter. Or the AoE blind you can get from traited F1 (which again, adds offensive support too and can be spammable once people start dying).

All that while leaving one utility spot open for Wall of Reflect, Hallowed Ground, Signets, SY! or more healing utils, even though the warrior #s used all 3 slots for shouts in the example. I didn’t get into the Healing Breeze either since I don’t run it (haven’t seriously tried post-patch). They might heal/mitigate more than you think a DPS class should – but it seems unquestionable that we outheal/mitigate warriors.

I’m not sure about what you mean with the offensive support argument. Certainly they have more offense (though I assume specing for shout-heals softens that). I don’t see so many actual offensive support skills available in the shout-heal builds I’ve seen, though again I have to admit I don’t look at warrior builds that much. Fury we can’t do, but we stack way more might for allies than they do. What else does a Warrior bring to make allies offensively stronger that fits in a shout-heal build, that makes this argument hold up?

I agree PoV users got hurt with this patch, and it hurts to watch warriors keep getting better/more options, but I stand by the assessment that a support guardian isn’t sub-par at that one role to a warrior. We still have lots of condition remove options if that’s the concern – we can wear soldier’s runes, and use PoV, and light combos, and utilities, and traited VoR actives… not like we’re lacking there, even though we got one trait softened in that regard.

Please remember that I’m responding in WvW context and that of the OP and subsequent comments about support role versus warriors. I’m not arguing there aren’t issues here on the overall comparison between the two.

OP: No, people are overreacting, at least for WvW medium to large group support. (I can’t speak for PvP) Mostly because either their specific skill/build got adjusted down or they are trying to be a “warrior plus” and are realizing that warriors make better warriors. The problem is, we only really have one role where we’re the best choice, and it isn’t a high-demand role by definition.

List the top 5 things you want to do with your guardian or describe your playstyle. If “DPS” is on that list as anything other than the afterthought/leftover, then you should probably be playing another class.

Guardians get balanced based on their support role. I agree, it’s not right and anet needs to add some love to the areas that go totally unused on this class. I’d like to see Zeal (for example) with better options that make a DPS guardian viable as long as it mostly nerfs support build options closer to the level of a warrior. But until then this is what we are, and what we’ve been since launch.

Redscope earlier compared us in various roles. I’ll concede that for most of those roles, the guardian is inferior to the warrior. But he’s wrong here:

Healing/Support
Warrior > Guardian (perma-regen, banner buffs, shouts heal, AoE group rez)

Yes, warriors can shout heal. That’s nice for them and their allies and maybe it’s worth the tradeoffs (I don’t know warrior at a level that I feel comfortable claiming to know that.) But banner buffs don’t move in a real fight. Warbanners are useful, but not having downed allies is better. That perma-regen can’t be broadcast. I know warriors can offer support beyond the shorthand list above, but they can’t match a guardian’s ability to provide healing, support, and damage mitigation.

Take a guardian with Battle Presence/Absolute Resolution, running staff/hammer like yours truly:

Can radiate ~ 175-200 pt/sec heals passively with no cooldown, can dodge heal for 1000+ with near-permavigor (given decent crit% and fast staff auto to re-apply), burst heal+group cond remove+group regen with VoR, heal using staff 2, heal with staff 4 while buffing true DPSers with 12 buffed duration might stacks, provide group aegis+prot with VoC (admittedly on a long CD). Throw in a short-CD blast finisher of hammer when the need is enough to come off staff, and the obvious meta utility skills for more group prot/regen/retal/stab on 24s/28s CDs. Toss in an under-appreciated traited F1 AoE blind+vulner+might+long dur burn that you can almost spam if the group around you is actually killing. And yes, everything above can be found in one build. If we’re counting Warbanner, then you can add the big heals from the tome or the virtue recharges and all they bring with renewed focus into the comparison.

There is simply no way a warrior can match that for group support. HOWEVER: You can’t do any real DPS with the build that does that. People won’t recognize the value you bring more often than not because they’ll just think they’re more awesome. You won’t win many 1v1 fights (how OP would it be if you could?) and even 3v3 you’re wasting a lot of potential utility (esp since people tend to wander out of range). Worse, this doesn’t scale. That is, 5 warriors would pwn 5 guardians with my support build, and 4 warriors and 1 support guardian beat 5 warriors. Swapping in even a second support guardian into that mix weakens the group in part because the passive heals don’t stack, there’s a cap on might stacks, and the reality is you can’t afford to give up that much group DPS. That’s unfortunate. We’ll never be “the FOTM meta” that everyone runs, because someone has to put up the dmg numbers and it isn’t going to be us – we need an otherwise effective group to support.

Until we get some better offensive options, let the number-chasers and the kitteners play warriors. We need more of them than guardians anyway. But if you’re here to be a true support tank, and be unheralded by most while you help your team bust a zerg… enjoy the class as it is and tune the naysayers out.

I concur – this is still broken. I’m assuming adding to an existing thread is better than starting a new one. At a minimum, there is no icon or display of the effect, and it does not show in the hero panel of my allies that it is working.