Guild Wars 2

Zenith.7301:

Oh, just stop. You don’t need SB to figure out the DPS output of gratsword or mainhand sword.

An elite spec isn’t going to close a 16k+ DPS gap. Just stop with the BS.

First off, I think the assumption that 35k DPS is the minimum requirement for use as a DPS slot in a raid is pretty silly. Raids in GW2 aren’t so tightly balanced that the absolute highest possible DPS becomes a minimum requirement. Players often seem to take the view that “optimal” and “viable” mean the same thing but they really don’t.

Second, the soulbeast’s damage output with the greatsword will improve over the core ranger’s not just because of the extra ferocity and other passive stats and traits, but because they’ll be able to fill time waiting for the weapon swap cooldown with soulbeast abilities instead of having to use the awful greatsword autoattack (which is the main reason the ranger greatsword has such terrible DPS.) So they’re likely not going to be using the same rotation.

Sifu.9745:

Btw is Symbol of Faith completely bugged or am i missing something?

You’re misreading the tooltip. It shows the maximum amount of healing the symbol can grant if you stand on it for the full duration, not the amount granted per pulse.

Obtena.7952:

While it’s unfortunate we lost our ability to have a non-weapon based condition damage build, I think it’s inevitable this happened because of the focused condition damage build we are getting with Axe.

The Tome of Justice itself can be sort of a non-weapon-based condition build in certain circumstances.

I know it’s situational, but with Renewed Justice you can often get ToJ to reset within seconds of closing it, so I was able to sometimes just chain it over and over again during the WvW test weekend, applying a ton of AoE burn damage without using weapon skills at all.

It was just about the only thing I really enjoyed about the new tome mechanics as I found the Tomes of Resolve and Courage to much more unwieldy.

The tomes either need to be less specialized or they need to not go on cooldown when stowed.

Yeah, the current design makes the tomes distinct from engineer kits, but it does so by making them a lot worse than engineer kits. You feel like you really ought to spend all the pages before stowing the tome since it will go on full cooldown anyway, but each tome is highly specialized so that’s really difficult to do.

I pop open my Tome of Courage and I can get stability, resistance and a projectile reflect, but I can’t even autoattack. So I just kind of run around doing nothing in between applying stability every few seconds until I’ve used all the pages, and then the tome is on cooldown for over a minute. This just feels so much worse than playing the base guardian profession and using the Virtues grandmaster trait to make my Virtue of Courage apply stability instantly on activation while I keep fighting.

Same problem with the Tome of Resolve. I pop it open and I’ve got 4 healing skills and one skill that applies vigor and swiftness. I almost cannot do anything but heal until I either run out of pages or just stow the tome and waste any unspent pages so I can get my weapon back out. It’s more powerful than the basic Virtue of Resolve, but it’s just so clumsy to use.

I really think the tomes need to just work like engineer kits. Let the firebrand open and close them at will with no cooldown, and gate the skills with individual cooldowns. If they wan to keep the pages mechanic, have a pool of them that regenerates over time like the mantra charges.

Right now I just don’t really like the tome mechanics. I want those overhauled before we even start talking about the problems with some of the tome skills.

I’m also not sold on the tomes at all.

Imagine engineer kits, but they have a channel time to equip, limited skill uses once equipped, and then a cooldown once swapped out. They’d have to be INCREDIBLY strong to be worth using with that many restrictions, and even then it’d be terribly annoying. And the guardian tomes aren’t really all that strong.

The abilities are short ranged, have cast times and many of them have pretty unimpressive effects. Each tome is also highly specialized, so you’re very limited in what you can do. Pop open your Tome of Courage? Great, as long as you want stability and resistance but NOTHING else for the next few seconds. You can’t even autoattack. And if you stow the tome without reading all the pages it still goes on cooldown for over a minute.

There’s undeniably a lot of power in the tomes, but they’re just so clumsy to use. I don’t think I’ll enjoy playing the firebrand as much as the normal guardian, no matter how powerful it is.

If you took all the whining, counter whining, justifications and accusations about zergs off this forum there’d be maybe a couple dozen posts left. And very few of them would be yours.

Ultrajoe.8674:

Loken.9724:

No actually we don’t draw pugs. Its not our job to hold some kittening baddies hand around wvw. We typically tell them to kitten off or we get our friends from other servers to come over and kill them and than we /salute and move on with our lives.

I’m not sure if you’re joking or not, but if you aren’t it would correlate with some of what we’ve been seeing from you guys. And quite seriously, that might be all that has turned the score into what it is, good use of pug resources. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got, unless you’ve discovered a way to preference your guildmates and WvW crew in the queue. I would say our pugmanders and community coordination have been our biggest asset this matchup.

He’s not joking. We play for the entertainment of our own guild and aren’t interested in mentoring people with no WvW experience.

This is not to say that we don’t do useful things for our server. We capture and defend objectives all the time, relay scouting information, build and refresh siege, and deliberately hunt large enemy groups to waylay and harass them. But if BP also needs pug instructors in order to keep up in the points race, they’ll have to find other guilds to do it. It’s not our thing.

Kronyx.2570:

Learn 2 read. I said 15 of my guildies with pugs, which made around 40. And the pugs not in comms. So 15 guildies 25 pugs.

Usually when someone says “I was with my guildmates plus some pugs,” they mean something like 2 or 3 random guys who were following their guild group.

If the pugs in question comprise more than half the total force and bring the numbers up to 40 then you weren’t “with your guild plus some pugs,” your guild was with the zerg.

My experience is that most solo roamers are opportunistic hunters, not honorable duelists. If they see an opportunity to attack our group successfully (ie: if they see us already engaged in combat) they usually won’t hesitate to jump in and try to get some tags. Therefore, we don’t feel bad about chasing them away or killing them if they’re hanging out near us.

We don’t usually bother to chase them if they see us and immediately turn to move away, though. That’s just a waste of time.

Shinra.9348:

It would be interesting if the item you got was terrain based, and if the foraged item replaced the f2 button(much like steal) so rather than having to pick the item up where ever the pig may drop it I can just use the item.

These two changes would at least address the inherent unreliability of the skill, which would be a step toward making it useful, though not necessarily a fix.

Another possibility would be to just have the pig automatically pick up whatever item it forages and then use it when you activate F2 again.

Tibstrike.2974:

Hey Alaric. It says that’s your first 4 hours on BP. I see you wiped MEND, but what happened to the hour or so CORE wiped you?

Feel free to edit and post video of our fights if you like, but I don’t think it’s very impressive or entertaining. Who wants to watch a few rounds of 10 v 20 where the 20 come out on top?

We’ll apparently get a rematch soon enough since FA will be Silver League too. Perhaps we’ll get a more video-worthy fight then.

Banzie.5248:

[SIC] could improve a bit from what we’ve seen tonight.

After reviewing some footage from the last few weeks, I agree. For instance, as you can see in the fight at the 1:00 mark in the video Chaba posted, our engagement angle is overaggressive, our melee group scatters too much after initial contact and somebody knocks away a downed target, making a spike take longer. We’ll see what we can do to tighten things up.

You can math out the comparison between power and precision, too.

Since power is a direct coefficient, increasing your power will simply increase your damage by whatever percentage your power went up. You have 2092 power in the build you linked. A bloodlust sigil can add 250. (2092 + 250) / 2092 = 1.1195. The bloodlust sigil is just under a 12% damage increase.

Every 21 points of precision adds 1% crit chance, so each point of precision adds (1/21) * (crit damage) percent damage increase.

In order to get a 12% damage increase from 250 precision, you’d need 101% crit damage, so power gives you more bang for the buck than precision will at your current stats. As long as you have enough precision to keep your vigor up I wouldn’t bother trying to get more.

It’s much harder to model the value of healing power mathematically, so you’ll just have to weigh that one yourself. The nice thing about defensive stats like healing power is that it is possible to have “enough” of them, unlike damage where more is always better. You can just get a feel for the fights your guild finds itself in and whether your current healing output is sufficient. If it is, Bloodlust all the way. If you need some more staying power, Sigil of Life on a guardian does help quite a bit.

The attack stat is gibberish and means nothing because the game actually uses power as a coefficient instead of adding it to weapon damage. It’d be nice if Anet would remove it from the hero window because it’s just been confusing people since the game launched.

At any rate, since power is just a coefficient, you can multiply it by 1 + (crit chance * crit damage) to get an easy relative comparison for direct damage.

3102 * (1+(.35 * .74)) = 3905
3202 * (1+(.30 * .74)) = 3913
3202 * (1+(.34 * .66)) = 3920

Note that your real damage is based on power, not the completely useless attack stat, but substituting power into the equation won’t change which number is bigger. Setup number 3 is very slightly higher direct damage.

One thing that will effect the numbers a bit is the presence of fury or Spotter which could be provided by your groupmates and will give more benefit for higher crit damage. If you regularly have those 2 buffs then setup number 2 pulls ahead slightly, as follows:

3102 * (1+(.62 * .74)) = 4525
3202 * (1+(.57 * .74)) = kitten
3202 * (1+(.61 * .66)) = 4491

The bottom line is there’s not a lot of difference but if you have consistent access to fury from your groupmates you get a bit more out of the higher crit damage setups.

Edit: Why on earth is the number “four thousand, five hundred and fifty three” censored?

Sovereign.1093:

You can do that too if you wish with either warrior or guardian as long as you practice.

No amount of practice will make up for the fact that a guardian needs a very defensive trait build and 400+ healing power to equal the amount of passive healing that a warrior gets from just Healing Signet and Adrenal Health with 0 healing power.

There is no existing guardian build that combines the amount of damage and survivability that warrior has.

With that said, no, I’m not rethinking my decision, because I made my guardian specifically to support my group with stability, might and space control skills, which are still things a guardian does better than a warrior. But the fact that guardians still have a niche in team play does not mean that warriors’ current level of passive, low-investment survivability is balanced.

Yelloweyedemon.2860:

Here’s the situation. I play ranger (full berserker gear with LB) and i almost always roam on map (avoiding pve stuff).

I win about 90% of the 1v1 fights, and about 40-50% of 2v1 fights.

I personally consider this unlikely as a full berserker glass cannon longbow ranger matches up quite poorly against many of the popular solo roaming builds. There’s a reason bunkers and condition pressure builds became the dominant roaming playstyle and it’s not because nobody thought to try out full berserker.

If you’re making it work regardless, then kudos to you, but I think you’re either exaggerating or fudging your definition of what constitutes a “1v1 fight.”

Aeros.2046:

I wonder what IoJ is planning to do tonight in Borlis Borderlands. Could not POSSIBLY be a golem rush. You guys have just been obviously building golems where we all can see it for the last 3 hours to mess with us!

Actually we’re just going to play Rock’em Sock’em Robots with you guys. Hurry up and build your own so we can start.

Virtue of Resolve returns far more health over time if you never activate it unless you’re about to use Renewed Focus, so I understand that.

The Virtue of Courage passive effect, though, is very weak. Randomly but infrequently blocking a single attack does almost nothing for your survivability. You’re much better off trying to time the activation to negate big hits like Earthshaker or certain boss abilities in dungeons.

I guess I’m not sure. Anet’s never really said if any class was intended to be able to get 25 might on their own. I think there generally aren’t enough boon counters in the game and that adding more could be a way of making PvP more dynamic, but that doesn’t have anything specific to do with engineer might stacking.

Even if it is overpowered/unintended it’s difficult enough to do that most players don’t even try it, so I don’t think it represents a pressing balance concern. It’s not like the game is overflowing with flavor-of-the-month might stacking engineers.

The direct damage is on the low end compared to the max DPS builds of other classes. However, it pulls up to about average if nobody else in the group is applying a lot of bleeds so you can use most of the 25 allowed stack slots.

Grenade engineers are well above average at stacking both might and vulnerability, though, which are always desirable in groups.

NargofWoV.4267:

What I don’t get is, why is it deemed op if the issue is its long term (relatively speaking) condition removal, yet Anet is going to be pulling back some of the high numbers that Condition spamming classes are causing. Seems like talk out of both sides of the mouth.

You’re doing too much Cond. dmg, but we’re taking away the ability to cleanse it, cause it was taking to much Cond. dmg away.

Yikes.

I think they’re just trying to rebalance condition application versus condition cleansing in general, which means toning down the more extreme ends of both. They probably concluded that weakening the most egregious condition spam builds would leave the most powerful anti-condition builds nearly immune, so they’re weakening those too.

At any rate, I’m trying not to tunnel vision on one or two changes out of what should be a rather large patch. I want to wait and see the full notes. I’m particularly curious about their mention of changing some ranger weapon skills. I’ve always liked how power builds play for the ranger but it annoys me that they are so blatantly inferior to condition builds in smaller scale PvP right now, so I’d be thrilled to see some changes to improve power scaling on some of our weapons like the axe and greatsword.

The focus is our best overall offhand as it provides both offensive and defensive utility. You’ve got a blind, a condition removal, a block, a blast finisher and a pretty high damage skill.

The shield can be modestly useful for the knockback, which can be a pretty potent effect if you use it creatively. It’s usually easier to get more out of a focus, though.

The torch is mainly used only as a burst weapon in specialized PvP/WvW builds. The number 4 skill has good power scaling and applies a long-duration burn. It’s a bit more damage than you can get with the other offhand options but loses out in utility value.

Basically, just get a focus unless you want to try and do gimmicky things with knockbacks or burst combos.

Zealot’s Speed: Change it to 5s of swiftness on weapon swap, 1s if its already on you.

Why kitten it if you already have swiftness? I don’t understand the rationale.

Revenge of the Fallen: Make it deal damage to the killer of a spirit weapon

I don’t know if this would really make it used much more since spirit weapons are hardly popular either, but Anet definitely ought to replace all the various traits on every class that somehow improve the downed state. I’m sure these are the most infrequently used traits in the entire game because most players would rather equip a trait that gives them a 1% better chance of not being downed in the first place than a trait that makes them 100% stronger while downed.

Kindled Zeal: Make it block every 5th condition when virtue of justice is not on cooldown

The real problem with Kindled Zeal is it shouldn’t be a grandmaster trait. Something that blocks 1/5 of incoming conditions probably shouldn’t be, either. You know that most of the time this would just end up blocking a 3-second bleed or something. Still not worth going 30 Zeal for.

Signet of Wrath: Change the active effect to 3s of quickness

The reason nobody uses Signet of Wrath is because the passive doesn’t support any popular guardian builds. I don’t think anyone has a problem with the active, which is quite powerful already. If they just changed the passive to precision instead I think it would see more use.

Shimmering Defense: Change its effect from burning to symbol of judgement

Would this actually make the trait more popular? I think the real issue is people would rather have a defensive bonus activate at low health than an offensive one. Replace the burn with chill or protection and you’d probably see some people use this.

Inner Fire: Make it give fire shield when burned for a duration equal to the burning duration

This would be taking away one of the guardian’s extremely limited sources of fury and replacing it with yet another way to access might. I agree that this trait is pretty weak, but maybe it just needs a different activation condition, like triggering off taking a critical hit and giving it a small cooldown.

Strength of the Fallen: Make it give 2s of stability when a spirit weapon is commanded or killed

Any replacement for a trait that only works when downed is probably an improvement.

Eternal Spirit: Swap it’s position with Spirit Weapon Mastery

Would this just be to make spirit weapons better for a minor investment in Zeal?

Healing Breeze: Make it’s skill type consecration

Not a bad idea. Something ought to be done about Healing Breeze because it’s just not used at all even by support focused guardians.

Searing Flames: Lower the cooldown to 12s

Could even go lower, honestly. Even though the guardian is a really boon-focused class itself I feel like GW2 doesn’t have enough boon counters compared to the original game and it’s an unexplored area of complexity.

Smite Condition: Change remove condition to transfer condition

I’d like to see Cleansing Flame do this as well.

Binding Jeopardy: Make it trigger on blind, apply immobilize instead of vuln, cannot affect same target twice within 10s

We can definitely spam out a lot of AoE blind, especially with the Radiance minor traits. How would that per-target cooldown limitation work? If I were running in a WvW crew with 3 or 4 other guardians, would only one of us be able to AoE immobilize with VoJ every 10 seconds or could we all do it? That could be an awful lot of AoE CC with very low opportunity cost given that VoJ is instant. If each guardian doesn’t have a separate cooldown I might be annoyed when I try to immobilize an enemy in a vulnerable position and find them immune because some other guardian blinded them 8 seconds ago.

AgentChaos.4932:

full zerker in WvW blob. heavy risk, but the prize..

What prize? I probably get more loot in zerg fights running a bunker setup than any zerker guardian would get. I can actually survive pushing with the front line and still hit hard enough to tag people for loot with one or two hits. I’m also not a rally button that enemies can punch with only 13,000 damage.

I don’t think full glass cannon is a good idea for large-scale WvW on a class whose best damage options are all short ranged. You need to be able to survive a fair amount of random AoE to profit under those conditions.

Sylvari engineer since day 1 here. The sylvari storyline for the Order of Whispers was great and since the character model is roughly the same as a human most of the armor in the game looks good on me.

Mix of Aetherblade and Twilight Arbor armor skins makes for a great botanical steampunk look that fits the class nicely. I was pretty unique until Scarlet showed up and ripped off my style.

There is a general hate toward condition pressure builds in small-scale PvP right now because they are overpowered. There is a special animosity toward condition pressure builds utilizing Runes of Perplexity, which engineers can make particularly good use of.

A patch coming out in the next couple weeks is slated to “shave” down the power of condition pressure builds a bit, according to Arenanet. Details on how that will be accomplished are not currently known.

tanshiniza.8629:

Stice.5204:

tanshiniza.8629:

To throw in some numbers my Warrior hits for 12K Hundred Blades in comparison to the 4K on WW for my Guardian. Both have exactly the same set-up in terms of statistics.

These are not really comparable numbers, though, because the Hundred Blades channel takes 3.5 seconds while Whirling Wrath executes in 1 second. If they did the same damage Whirling Wrath’s DPS would be much higher.

Guardian DPS is higher however singular skill Burst damage is much greater for the Warrior. I won’t deny as a burst skill I prefer Whirling Wrath but by the definition of a Burst skill the Warriors deals more ‘in this single moment’ damage.

Burst Skill: A singular skill that allows for maximum damage in the shortest period of time possible for example 100B and WW. In this case 100B is superior hands down in terms of damage.

But it’s not a “single moment.” As I said, Hundred Blades takes 3.5 seconds to channel. It’s actually one of the longest skills in the game, and locks you in place while executing it. It’s so long that you have to be careful about using it in dungeons or the target might force you to cancel the channel by doing something you have to dodge.

Calling Hundred Blades “singular burst” is really kind of dubious when any other class could get off about 3 skills during its channel time. It’s really not as good of a burst as people think.

tanshiniza.8629:

To throw in some numbers my Warrior hits for 12K Hundred Blades in comparison to the 4K on WW for my Guardian. Both have exactly the same set-up in terms of statistics.

These are not really comparable numbers, though, because the Hundred Blades channel takes 3.5 seconds while Whirling Wrath executes in 1 second. If they did the same damage Whirling Wrath’s DPS would be much higher.

NoTrigger.8396:

SchuMidas.4782:

in max berzerker build lv 80 warrior can do 25k damage
while guardian can do 8k

soo…. yeah go figure

you need to understand what dps means.
big damage numbers dont matter.

if your warrior deals 25k 100b, that means he deals like 7142k per second.
a guardian easily beats that with autoattacks only.

and if you want to compare warrior autoattack vs guardian autoattack, guardian autoattacks are stronger.

This is probably correct. It’s really difficult to model DPS in GW2 because combat is so fluid and so many things can effect it (like how often you have to dodge or how the terrain can make certain skills more or less useful), but the best theorycrafting and testing we’ve managed to come up with so far suggests that warrior and guardian sustained DPS is roughly equal assuming both are using a maximum DPS builds under optimal conditions.

So basically, do not get hung up on Hundred Blades. Your guardian’s DPS is about the same.

Since you have 10 points unspent, consider putting them in Valor and using Altruistic Healing. It returns a small amount of health every time you give someone a boon, but when you’re using a staff and have 20 points in Virtues you give out a lot of boons in group combat.

The big one is Empower, which gives 12 stacks of might to up to 5 people. That 75 or so heal from Altruistic Healing gets pretty impressive when you get it applied 60 times over 3 seconds (and then Empower throws out another AoE heal at the end.) Empower is like having a second main healing skill on your bar.

Playing multiple characters will make you more knowledgeable, but if you really want to get better it helps to narrow your focus. Get a really good feel for things like how much damage you can take, how quickly your skills activate and how long your cooldowns are so you can make better decisions in combat.

Full soldier’s gear is really not optimal for small-scale WvW combat. Your damage will be severely lacking and you won’t contribute much to your teammate’s sustain or damage pressure that way. I would strongly recommend trying to get some more offensive stats and healing power into your setup as your resources allow. This doesn’t mean totally ditch your soldier’s gear; guardians are a low health class and need to get some vitality from somewhere, but try to get a few pieces of celestial, cleric’s, magi’s, cavalier’s or berserker to round out your stats better.

If you have been playing for a long time, you may have a lot of karma, badges of honor or laurels. You can buy magi’s jewelry from the Temple of Lyssa and Cavalier’s jewelry from the Temple of Balthazar for karma any time those temples are open. Websites that track temple status can be googled to find one to guest to for the Temple of Balthazar, which isn’t commonly done.

Cleric’s and berserker’s weapons and armor can be purchased for modest amounts of gold plus badges of honor from the merchants in the WvW borderlands.

If you have a stash of laurels, you can use them to get some ascended jewelry pieces to help modify your stats.

A source of stability is important in small-scale WvW. I would recommend running Stand Your Ground or Indomitable Courage. These will help your allies as well. Learn to time stability to negate enemy disabling effects and make it safer to stomp downed enemies.

Condition management is also very important. I see you have a good amount of that in your build already with Contemplation of Purity and Runes of Lyssa. Learn to use it well. You have low health as a guardian and cannot afford to let large stacks of damaging conditions sit on you.

Your weapon choices are fine for group play. Learn to use skills like Binding Blade and Line of Warding to seize initiative from enemies and help your group coordinate their attacks on targets. Communication is key and using a voice chat program is an immense help. Calling out to your team when you land a good pull or wall will help them punish the enemies you have caught out of position.

Skill arises from experience and diligence. Try to pay attention to what’s going on and make intelligent decisions instead of reflexive ones. As you become more experienced, you will find yourself making correct choices more often and more quickly. That’s being skilled.

A guardian in my guild who runs a greatsword and staff setup has made several videos of us running smaller groups in WvW. You can see them here if you are interested: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV6azSCyyjhrcNy2WAGKm7w?feature=watch

runeblade.7514:

Warriors use Healing signet active: Heals him for 1/8th the hp pool and loses the ‘OP’ active.
Mesmer uses mirrior: reflect projectiles, and heals around 1/4th the hp pool.

So you really are arguing that having less health makes your heals better.

Here’s something you seem to not be aware of: Having a smaller health pool doesn’t make enemies do less damage.

Healing yourself for 3500 cancels out the same amount of enemy damage no matter what your maximum HP is. Healing Signet is not weaker than any of the 5 other healing skills that return a similar amount of health just because warriors have higher base vitality. Do you seriously not grasp this concept? If warrior heals returned the same percentage of health as thief heals, the fact that warriors have 70% higher base HP than thieves would represent a gigantic imbalance.

So no, I do not accept your argument that Healing Signet is a terribly weak heal because it refills a smaller percentage of your health pool than a thief’s Signet of Malice which heals for exactly the same amount.

So when you say over and over again that you’d have to be an idiot to activate Healing Signet, you are admitting the passive effect is is overpowered. You’re saying that the passive is way too good to give up for something that would just be the smaller one of their three healing options to half the other classes in the game.

Rigel.3092:

Guardians are like the knights of the Medieval Age, they do not use bows because it is an honor thing to them – they kill by honorably looking their defeated foe in the face.

Or by rapidly swiping a scepter at them like a tennis racket from 50 feet away and hoping said foe doesn’t move in the 2 seconds it takes the little orb to wobble its way over and smack them. Because that’s honorable too.

runeblade.7514:

If you read the next sentence, you would’ve realized that Healing signet…

I saw your next sentence. You’re trying to dodge the fact the Healing Signet is overpowered by deciding that it’s not really a healing skill and therefore it’s unfair to compare it to the healing skills of other classes.

This is almost beyond ridiculous given that all of the following are true:

It’s one of the three skills that can go in a warrior’s healing skill slot.

Its function is to provide both passive and active healing.

It triggers rune effects that work on heal.

Anet classifies it as a healing skill.

It’s got the word “heal” right in the skill name.

Seriously, nobody is going to buy your argument that it’s not really a healing skill. What is your argument anyway? That it works differently from other healing skills? Here’s an interesting fact for you: there are 26 healing skills in the game and all of them work somewhat differently. You can’t arbitrarily decide that one of them somehow isn’t a healing skill, though.

Healing Signet isn’t even the smallest active heal among the game’s healing skills. It heals for only slightly more than the mesmer’s Mirror, and exactly the same strength as the elementalist’s Signet of Restoration and the thief’s Signet of Malice and it’s actually stronger than the direct heal on the engineer’s Healing Turret and the mesmer’s Mantra of Recovery.

So there goes your argument that it’s ok for the passive effect to be overpowered because the active effect is so weak. It’s actually about the same strength as five other healing skills found on other classes.

And finally, even if we did accept your argument with a straight face that Healing Signet is really just a regen skill, that only makes it look even more stupidly overpowered.

Some other regen skills in the game:

Soothing Mist: 80 HPS +5% of healing power.
Backpack Regenerator: 117 HPS +5% of healing power.
Signet of the Wild: 62 HPS +6% of healing power.
Virtue of Resolve: 84 HPS +6% of healing power.

Healing Signet: 392 HPS +5% of healing power.

So this “giant sacrifice” you’re making by not having a burst heal (ie: you’re using a heal that returns about the same amount of health as the smaller direct heals on several other classes) is being counterbalanced by the equivalent of Virtue of Resolve with more than 5000 healing power.

runeblade.7514:

Healing signet is NOT a healing skill.

Seriously? That’s where this debate is going now?

Do you realize that Healing Signet, when activated, heals for only about 1300 less than Shelter (one of those so-called “burst heals” that warriors allegedly don’t have) if you have no healing power on your gear?

I think it really is bizarre that we can block with a focus but not with a shield.

Shield of Judgment’s cooldown is too long for what it does. Either reduce the cooldown so it can provide significant protection uptime or add some other effect to it like making it daze enemies it hits.

Shield of Absorption would be a lot more interesting if its duration was reduced to only 2 seconds but it caused all allies within to block all attacks for that duration. That would have powerful teamplay implications and would finally allow guardians to block with their shield (something players generally expect to be able to do with a shield.)

Also, let’s do something about the torch. It’s specialized to the point that almost nobody uses it right now.

Cleansing Flame’s effect of removing conditions from nearby allies but not yourself is really underwhelming. It should either effect the guardian too or be changed to a different effect. If it transferred conditions from the guardian to targets it hit I think you’d see a lot more torch use, even if they had to raise the cooldown to keep it balanced.

Zealot’s Defense is not fine as it is. It deals less DPS than the autoattack, only protects against projectiles and you can’t move while using it. One of those restrictions should be lifted because as-is it’s very limited.

As for the scepter, Chains of Light should have a shorter cooldown and Smite should be improved in some way. Maybe it should cripple for 1 second with each hit?

Both shield skills should have their cooldowns reduced.

Staff.

Line of Warding is one of the most impactful skills in WvW. I’ve gotten 20+ enemies killed with it more times than I can count.

Empower with Altruistic Healing is like having a second heal on your skill bar.

The autoattack tags everything around me very easily for lots of loot.

It’s got the best source of swiftness available to the class for when you have to get somewhere.

What’s not to love?

I suppose it depends on how you play your guardian. I can say that personally, as a defensive/support guardian who spends most of my playtime in WvW running with a group of about 5 to 10 allies, the staff is the weapon I would never drop.

Empower is a 10 to 20 percent damage increase for me and several others around me with a fairly short cooldown that also heals me for nearly 8000 thanks to Altruistic Healing. That alone pretty much makes the staff my favorite weapon

Line of Warding is spectacularly useful when holding chokepoints, creating breathing room for allies mid-fight, stopping enemies from escaping, running away from overwhelming enemy numbers and preventing enemies from getting into door portals.

Symbol of Swiftness, when used by the 2 to 3 guardians we normally have in the group, provides continuous swiftness uptime for everyone. It also contributes a bit of damage when our leader calls an AoE bomb at a designated location.

The autoattack hits a very broad area and is great for tagging enemies to make sure I get lots of loot when a big fight goes down.

Maybe it’s not nearly so desirable for other playstyles, but for me it’s the best weapon in the game. In fact, I practically made my guardian so I could use staff skills in support of my group because they are so powerful and useful for the small-group WvW playstyle.

Edit: Ah, I see you mean mainly PvE. The guardian staff skills are, in my opinion, extremely good for organized group play in WvW. I think it’s ok for certain weapons to be used only in certain playstyles, as long as everything is very strong within its own niche.

Relentliss.2170:

Change the meta and then make this ‘fix’.

That is all I ask.

Isn’t changing the PvP meta the main reason they’re doing a balance patch in the first place?

This is hardly surprising. Anet can’t be expected to leave a major bug with significant balance implications unfixed when doing a balance patch.

I’m going to wait and see what’s in the patch notes. You really can’t judge the implications of a change like this without considering the other things that will be changing along with it.

Agreed with Aegis being very lackluster. Sure, sometimes you can see a big telegraphed attack coming and time the Virtue of Courage activation to negate it, but that’s not very common in sPvP/WvW, where most high damage is delivered as a rapid volley of many smaller hits and dodge rolling is far more reliable as a defense. (Blind has the same problem as a condition. It’s very difficult to blind your enemy’s one big attack instead of just getting one of the ten smaller attacks he’s about to throw out in rapid succession)

The cooldowns on all 3 virtue activations could be lowered to 20 seconds and none of them would be overpowered on their own, although it might cause a balance problem once you factored in the Virtues trait line. Still, you shouldn’t need trait support to make your class mechanic worthwhile. Buff the base virtues and then nerf the traits a bit if necessary.

Also, you are completely right that having an attack blocked from stealth should reveal the attacker. Anet has said they want stealth to have more counterplay and that should definitely be a part of it. If a backstab fails, the thief should not get to simply try again until it connects.

AndrewSX.3794:

While that would be cool, it would mean

1- make glacial heart a grandmaster trait, which leads to
2- moving it somewhere else. Which grandmaster could be removed/repositioned? in which line? wht to place in the void left in Glacial Heart spot?
3- guardians have so many sources of burning that chill instead of burn would have a way too high uptime for how powerful it is.

Definitely intrigued by the design idea tho.

Put it in the Zeal line. That would achieve two things.

First, there’d be an actual incentive to put points in Zeal, which is currently by far the least popular guardian trait line. You could downgrade either of the existing Zeal grandmaster traits to master. They’re not good enough to warrant their current status anyway, which is part of why nobody puts points in Zeal.

Second, this revamped grand master version of Glacial Heart would synergize with the Zeal stat bonuses since you’d want power and condition duration (but not condition damage) in a guardian build that spams chill but has no source of damaging conditions.

To keep the trait numbers even, move Focused Mastery to Valor to replace the missing master trait. Focused Mastery would synergize better with Valor anyway since our focus skills are a source of on-demand block and Valor has other blocking-related traits.

As to the problem of this probably being overpowered…Well, at least it’d be fun and unique. It’s also not like this would be a huge DPS build since there’d be no burn damage and having to put 30 points in Zeal would not allow for maximum power DPS setups.

If balance proved to be impossible you could modify the trait to read, “All burn effects are replaced with a chill effect of equal duration or 2 seconds, whichever is lower.” Then you could still use some condition duration stuff to get the chill up to 3 or 4 seconds but you couldn’t get 14+ seconds out of skills like Zealot’s Flame and Shimmering Defense. That would probably not be stupidly overpowered, at least.

SchuMidas.4782:

guardian ability mostly burn,
what if Glaicial heart change element to ice instead, and it have the 60% chance to proc chill on 5th burn atk

That’s an interesting thought, actually. What if Glacial Heart replaced all guardian burn effects with chill instead?

Virtue of Justice chills for 1 second on every 5th attack and chills for 4 seconds on activation. Permeating Wrath turns it into AoE chill.

Zealot’s Flame applies long duration chill in a small radius around you and a decent duration ranged chill if thrown. (Would turn the torch into a powerful soft CC option, something guardians currently can’t get from an offhand.)

Purging Flames creates a chill field.

Shattered Aegis applies chill when aegis is removed.

Fire Inside makes spirit weapons apply chill.

Defender’s Flame applies chill when blocking.

Shimmering Defense applies long-duration chill to nearby enemies when you reach critical health (people would actually use this now.)

Judge’s Intervention chills targets near the impact point.

Superior Runes of the Forge would chill nearby enemies when you reach 50% health.

You’d sacrifice burn damage from any of those effects you were using in exchange for a strong disabling condition. That would be a tempting new option and would certainly at least cause an unused trait to get some use.

Daecollo.9578:

So ya want it to be 250, then be able to 1250 hp/s (to 5 group.)

On a non-#6?

Sure, as long as you buff every single passive heal in the game to compensate.

Daecollo, I’ve seen you doing this before. I think it was over in the ranger forum where you were arguing that ranger healing skills were overpowered by adding up the healing received by both the ranger and their pet as if those were of equal value.

This isn’t quite as stupid but it’s in a similar vein. 1250 health per second spread out over 5 people is not very much (and it requires a Grandmaster trait to even do that) especially when you consider that incoming enemy attacks will often hit all 5 people and have their effectiveness multiplied by 5 too.

I think warriors’ current level of passive healing is dubious from a balance standpoint and will probably be nerfed in the future so I’d be reluctant to use it as a comparison point.

That said, Virtue of Resolve could probably stand to be buffed a bit, especially the activation, which seems pretty weak for such a long cooldown.

I’m usually reluctant to use the F2 virtue unless I’m about to hit Renewed Focus because shutting off a fairly powerful continuous source of regeneration for a small heal is a questionable tradeoff. If I’m in continuous combat I really notice the loss of staying power after activating it.

With just 5 points in Virtues the F1 and F3 virtue activations are quite powerful and well worth using almost any time, though.

Glacial Heart is a pretty lousy trait that almost nobody uses, and I don’t think Anet’s currently proposed changes will fix that. Allowing it to work with all weapons would at least slightly improve its appeal.

As a general design, I don’t like melee characters with tons of gap closers AND snares. I don’t want to see some kind of inescapable guardian build that can chain skills together to make it almost impossible for an enemy to disengage, but it should probably be a little bit harder than it currently is. This is a very difficult balance to set.

Your guild thinks a weapon with a 5-second cooldown blast finisher, an AoE immobilize, a stomp-interrupt and an area-denial skill is bad for GvG?

Building a guardian for high damage output in GvG is questionable. The low base hitpoints on the class versus the kind of focused damage an enemy guild is likely to output makes that a risky proposition. If I were attempting to set up a GvG squad I’d want my guardians to be in fairly tanky gear. But the skills on the hammer are well suited to organized group combat regardless of the stat combination you’re using.