Showing Posts For Velkyn.9285:
It’d be nice if they could catch those with macros to avoid getting kicked by the AFK system, too. I know of many who avoid queues by logging in earlier in the day and then running a macro so they don’t need to sit in a queue at primetime.
I like how words that aren’t offensive (or at least not very offensive), get turned into kitten. It’s not like I was saying the elite skills were totally kittening pieces of kitten. But it sure looks that way, given how zealous the filter system is on these boards.
It’d be elite if it also cleared all conditions and did a full heal. I use RF, but it seems pretty kitten to me. Granted, it seems like all the elite skills are kitten for all professions.
I have level 45 Thief, 45 Ranger, and 25 Warrior. I tried them. They all have problems. They’re not for me.
I enjoy my L77 Guardian the most. I just wish it was more interactive. Here’s hoping A.Net agrees!
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Come play engineer or elementalist.
Actually, go take some piano lessons and THEN come play with us.
While I think those professions have a great deal of interactivity, and did find them engaging and entertaining when I tried them out (took both to L15), but I just couldn’t like the Engineer’s flavor, and my wife’s playing an Elementalist.
I think every class should be as engaging and exciting as those classes. Their Attunement and Kit mechanics open up a lot of options, providing fantastic levels of action! Maybe the Guardians Virtues could become stances that alter our weapon skills, instead of signets with huge CDs. That’d be pretty awesome.
Wow… Something must be very wrong. I’ll have to pay closer attention to the combat log the next few times I die. Taking 4x your health in damage before dying is pretty baller.
You’re seriously confused on what Control is and what Support is. Shield of Absorption, Shield of Wrath, and Wall of Reflection are all support skills not control skill…
You can use them as Support if you want. But they’re so much more than that. Those skills can be used to control the battlefield. That’s how I use them. I could use a Wall of Reflection to save someone from being downed, but I’d rather charge forward and throw it up forcing the enemy force to scatter to attack around it, or run. Same with Shield of Absorption. I could use it to save someone … but I’d rather use it to force a push. I use those skills to Control the battlefield.
Now Shield of Wrath has a tenuous place in either camp… it’s a self-mitigation skill that is extremely visible. I called it Control because it encourages an opponent to use low damage skills on you until it goes away. But it’s a pretty weak application of the Control concept.
But again, this is all irrelevant to the conversation. Support and Control skills both can have low CDs.
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Every skill you listed can’t be used proactively. They’re too crucial, have too high CD, and don’t last long enough to be used proactively.
Well, I think you’re looking at this with a PvE mindset. In PvE, many of the skills I listed are used reactively to mobs’ telegraphed attacks. And many skills that are Controlling in PvP are simply oh kitten! buttons in PvE. The mob doesn’t care that you triggered Shield of Absorption, or Shield of Wrath, or even Wall of Reflection. It just keeps attacking you, and those abilities lose much of their Control aspects. But a human player’s response to those abilities is often very different — they change what they’re going to do, hence those abilities are Control.
That aside, you’ve kind of proved my point I think. You don’t use those abilities proactively because the cooldowns are too high. You save them until you know they will be of extreme use. I bet you spend a lot of time with those abilities off cooldown because you can’t risk having them on cooldown when you really want them. I know I do. The cooldowns are so huge as to discourage using those abilities. I think that’s a symptom of bad design.
I don’t agree with your assessment of each skill, but it’s not germaine to the discussion. Regardless of the ability type (Damage, Support, Control), cooldown is simply a facet of the balance equation. All three types are equally valid with both high and low cooldowns.
I fail to see the justification for Guardian skills to have exhorbitantly higher CDs than Warrior skills simply because they are “Support” skills. Especially considering the Guardian’s highest CD skills aren’t “Support” skills — most of them are Control skills. There is no reason those skills’ effects could not be toned down or altered to allow for lower CDs. And in doing so, the Guardian becomes more interactive.
In terms of my thoughts for Shield #5 — I orginally thought about it just granting Aegis, but then I thought the idea of damage reversal to be a more interesting mechanic since Guardians already have an ability to grant themselves Aegis on command. Albeit they can only use that once every 90s without spending heavily into Virtues.
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The reason that guardians have longer cooldowns is because they have more support-oriented skills. Support often comes in the form of reacting to the situation to redirect it to a more favorable course, but dictating the flow of battle (control) is what a warrior does.
If you can’t use your skills, you can’t play control.
If you can use support skills too often, you’re probably OP.I see this as more of an apple-orange comparison than anything else.
This. You don’t have to read any more or post any more. This guy (or gal) gets the guardian as a class.
Guardians have lots of Control abilities. Staff #5, Focus #5, Shield #5, Hammer #5, and our Symbols just to list a few off the top of my head. These abilities all direct our opponent to do things — these are not REACTIONS to the opponent, they are PROACTIVE abilities that cause the opponent to do certain things. I’d have to review all the abilities between Warrior and Guardian, but a cursory glance would suggest to me the opposite — Guardians are CONTROLLERS, and Warriors are SUPPORTERS/ENABLERS. I think this poster doesn’t really understand what is Support, and what is Control.
You can be a controller or supporter with both long CD/strong effect skills, and low CD/weak effect skills. A great profession would have a healthy mix of both. Guardians have too many of the former, and not enough of the latter.
Cooldown and Effect Power are components of the Skill formula that are involved in balancing skills. A.Net certainly can, and must, adjust these so Guardians become more interactive.
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Main issue with this is your looking at the cd and not what the skill’s actually do. Guardian skill’s tend to be fairly powerful compared to other classes from my own experience and as such do deserve a longer timer.
The skill effects on the weapons I highlighted are not more interactive than the Warrior’s skills with the same weapons. I’m not asking A.Net to uniformly reduce our CDs while leaving the skill effects unchanged. I fully expect any reduction in CD to come part and parcel with a reduction in the skill’s effect. What I want is the ability to use skills more frequently — that is what (in my mind) makes the play feel interactive.
I personally think the skill effects are also lackluster in addition to being not interactive, but that’s not what this thread is about. The thread is strictly about how we stand around spamming #1 a lot, because many of our skills are oh kitten! abilities that have to be conserved and used at just the right time or be wasted.
Instead of that play style, I’d like to see abilities that can be used more frequently with less thought given to “I can’t use this ability again this fight, so is this the right time?” For example the Focus #5 — it’s on a 45s cooldown. You cannot even use it once a fight most times. And it’s rare that you really needed to block three consecutive hits. I’d rather it be more like a reactive “block” of one attack that we can use two or three times as often. I quoted Block because I’m thinking something like a “Heal” mechanic — you get hit for a boatload, and smack #5 in X seconds to heal (or reverse) the damage.
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My Guardian is L72. I like him plenty.
And yes, Torch is offensive, but I like it because I get to do stuff, not because it wrecks kitten (it does though!).
I really dislike Shield and Focus because the skills have such long CDs that you can’t afford to use them in anything but dire emergencies. Having a couple oh kitten! buttons is fine, but we already have 2 Virtues, Heal and 3 Utility Slots! Every Guardian has at least three oh kitten! buttons, and as many as eight (Mace, Shield/Focus, 2 Virtues, Heal, 3 Utilities).
I don’t mind that we have the ability to have so many oh kitten! buttons, but I want more options to have fewer. I want more weapons like the Torch, or the Warrior Greatsword.
I hope, and expect, that A.Net will address the situation. A.Net has already justified a host of nerfs to “overpowered” skills to encourage players to adopt a more interactive play style leveraging more abilities (e.g. the recent Ranger Shortbow nerf). I just hope we don’t get our #1s nerfed because we don’t use our oh kitten! buttons enough! The right solution is to get rid of some of the oh kitten! buttons and replace them with skills that are less situational and/or usable more frequently.
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I don’t understand how nerfing the damage on #1 is going to make people use #2-5. #2 is a poor AoE attack, #3 is a retreat attack which is rarely needed, #4 is a cripple with pet bleed, and #5 is a daze effect.
So #2 won’t be used more often. #3 won’t be used more often. Pets are pretty bad, but this might encourage greater use of #4. And #5 probably won’t be used more often either, since most of the time you just want the thing to die faster, not mitigate its damage output.
So yeah, maybe #4 will be used a little more frequently. Although Id’ have thought people would use it situationally for the cripple, not to increase DPS.
Haha, awesome! Guys, just use your F2 ability to recoup that 7% DPS loss. Oh wait, right, those skills don’t really work…
BTW, it’s a 7.4% reduction in just straight DPS. There is greater loss when considering bleed stacking.
My Guardian is level 69 now — I left the Ranger wagon when they announced victory on the Pet issues…
I see these issues in PvE with some regularity. It’d be nice if it’d always connect. It’s really annoying when you end up jumping in a completely different direction from your target — I get this a lot when I do a quick weapon swap activation.
Looking at a main-hand sword between the two:
[… cut …]
I see this as more of an apple-orange comparison than anything else.
I probably should’ve just left Sword out of it. Main-hand Sword has virtually the same CDs for the two professions: 25s to 23s.
I don’t see how it’s an apple:orange comparison either — clearly A.Net was able to balance the support/CD pretty well for Sword. But they did not succeed for Shield, Greatsword, or Hammer.
I’m sure A.Net can provide support-themed skills that have lower CDs. That’s what I’d like to see. I could offer suggestions, but I don’t think A.Net needs my help in this regard. I’m sure they have lots of ideas — I’m just telling them that they should use ideas with lower CDs.
At least one of the 4/5 skills on almost every weapon need to be retuned to allow for a lower CD. The general functions of the 4/5 skills are fine, but the durations or effects should be reduced so they can be used more frequently.
I don’t think Guardians were provided utilities to compensate for the overly long CDs on many of our skills. They seem to be in line with most other professions’ utilities’ CDs. While you can use utilities to increase player interaction, Guardians are still less interactive than most other professions. Possibly all — I haven’t reviewed the CDs for everybody.
Why is it any attempts to suggest areas of improvements to a profession are met with a portion of the community suggesting the poster try another profession? I’ve tried them all. They all have issues.
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I’ve been feeling that Guardians only have a few weapon combos that feel active, and today I was looking at the CD times for all our skills and I think I know why it feels that way. It is that way.
Just comparing Guardian:Warrior same weapon skill CDs:
Greatsword — 75 : 53
22 seconds of additional CDs
Hammer — 85 : 74
11 seconds of additional CDs
Sword/Shield — 95 : 78
17 seconds of additional CDs
Mace/Shield — 93 : 80
13 seconds of additional CDs
Sword/Torch and Mace/Torch are the only weapon sets I feel are active as a Guardian. The rest are all rather boring, spending a lot of time auto-attacking. All of the Warriors 2H weapons have relatively low CDs, other than Hammer, which is why they feel so much more active.
I’d like to see #2 replaced. I fail to see how it fits the Guardian theme, and it’s not a particularly useful skill in general. I’d prefer if it were a faster moving projectile that applied a condition or boon around the target — Burning, Vulnerability, Protection, or Retaliation. It’d be even more awesome if it was a Symbol that applied a boon or condition.
I’ve just reached the conclusion that this game pretty much is a single player game. (perhaps a very good one)
What do you mean it’s a “single player game”? The only single player content is open world PvE, just like every other MMO in the past 7+ years. The last MMO I played that actually required multiple people to handle open world PvE was Shadowbane back in 2002/2003. And that was only at launch — after a couple months, everyone had gear (or leveling bots) that allowed them to plow through open world PvE solo.
WvWvW, Dungeons, and all forms of sPvP are very much multiplayer. What your allies bring to the table matters. You can play WvWvW and sPvP as if it were single player, but your chances of victory are greatly lower against those that play it as a multi-player game.
And I don’t know how you could possibly succeed in dungeons if everyone in the group was playing with a single player mindset. You might be able to squeak by playing that way, but I’m confident that at least one person in your group was not playing that way. I remember the first AC Story Mode I did — we wiped on nearly every encounter, sometimes multiple times. Now when I do them, we rarely wipe at all, and that’s because people are using their skills to aid each other, instead of just slotting their bar with DPS skills and hoping the occasional Dodge will see them through.
Why not just have the names show up with the color you got assigned? Red, Green, Blue. Seems simple enough.
I would still be with HOD if they were not a bunch of quiters.
The irony is just too much to not comment!
when the only really damage it can do is with great sword or normal sword + shield.
While I dislike the change to GS, you clearly don’t know anything about Guardians if you think shield is an offensive off-hand weapon.
To make Greatsword work now, you need to actually use a second weapon set that puts down a longish combo field. I use Mace to drop a symbol, then swap to GS and lay down WW and LoF. Then follow up with SoW and BB. If the mob is still up, I’ll swap back to Mace and do it all over again. You can do similar with Hammer, and Staff. Purging Flames is also a good skill to get a Combo Field to then Finish on with GS.
So .5s/hit is 500ms. Adding 40ms to that is an 8% DPS hit just on the damage component. Coupled with loss of bleed stacks, and it’s probably over 10% loss. That’s pretty significant.
Glad I quit playing a Ranger a while ago… although my Guardian (L57) got hit with the nerf bat, too.
I didn’t play Ranger all that much (got mine to 45), but I never noticed an animation bug with Shortbow. And 40ms must be between 4-8% DPS decrease — .04s longer per shot, and that weapon fired at least 1/s, and likely much faster (2/s?).
What video settings are you using? I’ve got a pretty strong rig (i7 920, dual SLI’d GT 580s), and even I have to tone the video settings in some zones to maintain high FPS.
If you’re getting <20 FPS at minimum settings, that does call into question the marketed “minimum settings”, though.
I’m on Jade Quarry, and there’s no lack of people in any zone I’ve gone in recently. I’ve been playing a Guardian for the past 3 weeks or so, at L55/35% Map Completion, and there’s always a bunch of people around to help with everything. Granted, I mostly play during EST prime time (7-10 PM), so that probably helps a lot.
Does Retaliation make it so you don't take damage for the duration?
in Guardian
Posted by: Velkyn.9285
While I don’t think Hundred Blades actually hits 100 times, it must hit a lot. This has to be why Retaliation wrecks GS wielding Warriors. It’s also pretty good vs. Thieves and Short Bow Rangers, as they hit fast for little damage on top of stacking bleeds.
I agree with the OP. I’ve run AC once in Story Mode, and we made it through with a Thief, Guardian, Elementalist, Engineer x2 I think. We were downed in every fight, and wiped multiple times. The story mode should not be like that. I was playing a Thief, and all I did the entire time was using Smoke Shot or whatever every chance I could. Spending 100% of my time blinding mobs and dodging is not what I consider fun.
Story Mode needs to be made much less difficult.
Going further, does +Boon Duration increase the duration of boons cast by others? It would be nice to have a little more clarity in the tooltip.
My only complaint is the slowness of the third attack in the Hammer #1 chain. Speed that up a bit (reduce the damage, if required), and I’d be very happy with the weapon.
I have a level 26 Norn Guardian of max height (second-most girth), and I notice the same issue. I never deal the full damage listed in the tooltip to any mob.
I approve this message. I only use the Traps for PvE.
I want to like Spirits, but they just have too many drawbacks (low health, don’t move, unpredictable procs).
I want to use Shouts and see my pet wreck face, but the pets have too many intrinsic problems to warrant spending additional resources on them. Even if the pets were effective 100% of the time (could attack on the move, F2 abilities triggered immediately, didn’t die immediately in WvWvW/Dungeons), I still don’t think the Shouts are strong enough. Pets need significant improvements in AI and survivability before Shouts will ever be worth using.
Terrible and needs to be fixed soon I am getting very frustrated and ready to just play my Thief all the time.
Haha, you and me both! My thief is 32 now, and will be main until something is done to fix Ranger pets. I’ll log in my Ranger just to maintain his crafting, but unlikely to get him to 80 unless they fix this nonsense.
Agreed here. I want to like the Longbow, and I do like #2-5, but #1 kills it for me. I still run SBow/LBow, but I only swap to LBow either as an opener or finisher, using #3 followed by #2, then switching ASAP.
I agree with every other poster. Pets are terrible. Here are the issues I see every day, as a level 43 Ranger:
- Melee pets cannot hit anything that moves, even with +30% speed boost trait. This makes the “striker” pets nigh worthless. They die amazingly fast if they get aggro, and they cannot hit anything if they don’t have aggro because most players are constantly moving, and thus the mobs are constantly moving.
- The pets’ F2 abilities do not appear to ever queue — it feels like I have to hit F2 at just the right moment to get it to trigger, and if I hit it twice in that window the ability gets cancelled.
- Due to pet animations, and the quick pace of combat, ability effects rarely occur when I need/want them. I have this problem regularly with the Arctodus, Brown Bear, Polar Bear, Snow Leapard, Eagle, Ice Drake and Raven. I’m sure many others also have this problem, I just don’t have them or don’t use them. The only pet that reliably executes its F2 ability for me is the Shark.
I had reservations about the Ranger at the start, and at this point I wish I had followed my gut. I’m very unhappy that one of the profession’s key abilities is largely non-functional.