Showing Posts For ScourgeMcDough.8071:
Holy crap. I think we have alot of ‘thieves trying different classes’ in the Guardian forums.
Prefacing all of what I may or may not write, I’ll say that you’re of course entitled to your own opinions on everything, and if you honestly think that your perspective is one that is valuable then good on you, and so I’m just throwing my two cents in.
THAT SAID.
Tome of Courage: ‘this is so stupid for 1v1, why do they make you a healer in a game that doesn’t have any and says it doesn’t’
The entire novelty of ToC, and in fact its usefulness, is that it does just that. There are no other classes in the game that allow you to just straight up heal. But if there is any class that is focused on supporting others (even though all the others technically can) it is, in fact, the class that’s name implies protecting and watching over others. Wait a minute, ‘Guardian’… huh, that implies something, doesn’t it?
ToC turns you into a monk from Gw1, albeit without energy costs. Light of Deliverance is even a skill in Gw1. The POINT is that before using it, everyone is reliant on a handful of skills that they have to use themselves in order to mitigate damage/heal/conditions. But then you use it, and suddenly, they don’t have to focus on those skills themselves. You have everything in your disposal to take care of those things. Also I find it laughable that people say ‘you only use 1 and 5’. I know it can be hard to get used to the skills since you only have a chance to use them on a long cooldown, but for those that didn’t know, a 2 second AOE daze that can be used twice if using elite focus is extremely, EXTREMELY useful in almost any situation. The 3 skill, providing protection and support in a huge AOE cone is also extremely useful for GUARDING your team. Hell, if you do want to push the whole ‘i should be able to 1v1skrubs wtf anet plz buff’, just set auto-run on and spam 1 on yourself. With perma-protection and an extra 10k health plus a constant 1.3k heal, you’ll look like a total goofball but you’ll survive anything that anyone throws at you. You can sit on a point and contest for 30 seconds and draw the aggression of the entire enemy team, or if you’re into PvE, you can tank the final boss of a dungeon for a good 30 seconds while your dead teammates rush back from a graveyard so that the boss won’t reset.
Tome of Wrath: People seem to be generally okay with this one, but I just want to again address the whole ‘1and5’ perspective. Let me introduce you to the most important boon in the entire game: Quickness. ‘All skills and actions are performed faster’ is actually an incorrect tooltip. It should read, ‘you become a bath-salts infused batshid insane maniac’. If you haven’t had the chance to really experience quickness (It is admittedly a rare boon that many classes don’t have access to…), then perhaps you don’t understand the magnitute of the power it provides. But… wait a minute here… tome of wrath’s 4 skill gives an AOE 3-4 SECONDS OF IT TO ALLIES?
yeah, the nuke on 5 is nice. yeah, spamming 1 is a great form of control by damage. Gaining a ton of health and retaliation is wonderful at keeping foes off of you. Inflicting weakness on enemies and might on allies is very useful, but BY BALTHAZAR’S BRONZE BAWLS, try and imagine your ENTIRE PARTY gaining 4 seconds of (and if you can’t understand the importance of this, I won’t try and sound elitist, but please… just find a class that can use quickness and make some inferences) Every Single Thing That They Do happening 3 times faster.
Renewed focus is pcool for virtue builds when you consider all of the boons you get to stack on yourself and everyone around you.
Again, you’re entitled to your opinions and I agree that more elite skills for EVERY class in the future will be (emphasis on will) awesome, and I also agree that only having one underwater elite is very kittening, but at the same time, people need to understand that the guardian, although very capable at being a fighter class, is really at the end of the day geared towards support. Do I have my own build that I use solely for fighting and flashing all over the place dealing damage and truthfully not doing much more than passively buffing my team in terms of support? Yeah. And it even works pretty well, even without an Elite that is geared specifically for it. But at the end of the day, the class is meant to be focused on support. Theorycraft! Come up with paladinish builds! Prove me wrong! But also keep in mind the usefulness of the buffs that the tomes and to a lesser extent Re-Focus provide, and the fact that you shouldn’t be playing Guardian if you don’t enjoy supporting others to at least some degree.
No hard feelings.
Speaking as a Norn Guardian, I can say that Bear form is actually quite useful in WvW. Granted, thats the only Form that I picked up, so I can’t speak for the others, but the fact that you gain a ludicrous amount of health and toughness and gain two hard CC abilities as well as a moderately useful aoe buff to ally damage makes Become the Bear seem more like Become the Tank. Its hard to compete with the rush and fun of there being a stalemate on one of the bridges leading to the supply path, then you shapeshift and go all NFL Linebacker on an entire wave of the enemy team with your 5 skill, which as far as I can tell is uninterrupteable and leaves a wake of knocked down opponents behind you. You flip the poor sap in the back that was trying to heal and hit him for upwards of 2k damage, then turn around to see the entire enemy team panicking and blowing their cooldowns on you. One of them channeling a big ability? Wreck his day with your 2 skill, which leaps a short distance and knocks down/interrupts anything that they’re doing. If you coordinated it well, your team is pushing forward in light of the knockdowns/general chaos that you just caused, and because of your health pool and tankiness you’re still at half health. Swipe any idiots that are dumb enough to not be looking at you and do respectable damage, use your 3 on anyone that your team has immobilized, give a 4 to power up your teammates now that they’ve reached your position, and then shapeshift back into your Norn form and heal/roll to the back-line in case you get downed by poison/bleed so that your teammates can rally you up. There; you’ve used an entire skillbar of your bear form to the greatest potential and were a great credit to your team.
Now, in one on one situations? For sure, the Forms aren’t that useful. But if you generally want to get the skalds’a’singin and the Valkyries’a’swoonin, Bear Down and jump into the fray.
I agree that AC is jarring and really quite a big dive for a first dungeon. But in response to some of the suggested fixes, such as making CM the first dungeon or adding an instance prior that ‘prepares’ you, I’d have to say that would actually really take away from it. Now I never played WoW myself, though I was a long time GW1 player and remember the dungeons in Eye of the North. As it is though, I remember finally reaching level thirty and discovering AC being unlocked for me. I remember the feeling the first time I walked up to it, with no knowledge of what I was in for. I remember finally getting a group together and entering. That very cool and ominous loading screen, the stylized introduction describing the foefire, and finally entering in to this dark pit that was unlike anything experienced in the game before. My whole group was so nervous, and we tried to reassure ourselves that it wouldn’t be so bad. Of course, it slammed us straight away. And as weird as it sounds, that was FULFILLING for me. All of the build up that subtly happened, either in my own mind or in game, didn’t turn out to be for nothing with an easy and short instance. No; AC perfectly framed the idea that a dungeon is an optional instance for a reason, that reason being it takes some firm stuff to muscle through it. It SHOULD be jarring, from an aesthetic perspective, and it shouldn’t be replaced with CM, because CM is frankly boringly easy (albeit fun).