For beginning guardians, try to get as much protection uptime as possible. Protection is really the only thing that makes the guardian a tank class. All the rest of the defensive skills like aegis, blind, invulnerability, and CC make the class really the only one that can stand in melee range in between dodges.
When leveling a guardian for keeps, I recommend bringing along Hold the Line and perhaps Signet of Judgment just to give yourself some breathing room while you learn how to space out your blocks and more importantly how to press the emergency button sequence correctly.
The third attack is mostly to get a good protection buff going, which unlike some other boons is something you’d want to have regardless of whether the attack connects or not. This is also why Symbol of Faith takes a long time to proc as well.
You can do toypocalypse with a reasonably active group provided that you pay attention to what they are doing and fill in the gaps.
Rifle: Shoot toys that make it through your defenses, kill Toxx.
Pistol: Stun Ventari (primary priority), scare melee off dolyaks, mind control and clone groups outside aggro range to delay them while they get killed by catapults.
Candy Cane: smash and grab siege supply from structures and remove defiant from Toxx.
Notes for siege equipment:
Siege can actually be placed on top of ice walls. This is the most important tip as it provides line of sight for the siege and makes them invincible to the majority of attacking mobs (except ventari, which pistolers should watch out for and stun repeatedly).
Upgrading ice walls also reorients them, so be careful not to make one useless by upgrading it from a weird angle.
Some destroyable structures refresh on each wave, so there is no need to go to the corners of the map to save siege resources. Hammer gatherers should just hit everything they come across since siege equipment never despawns.
Place forward siege in areas where the enemies will obviously have pathing troubles, like the maze. Don’t bother upgrading them.
Basic wave strategy:
Your priority for the first wave should be to set up a respectable number of ballistas near the dolyaks, preferably on top of ice walls spanning between each of the toy production pipes. Focus on making the ballistas more than the walls. You can put catapults on the ledges near the center pipe, but it is again preferable to put them on ice walls you have available. Watch to make sure there is enough headroom where you put catapults so the snowballs don’t hit the ceiling. On early waves, favor putting down more ballistas rather than upgrading, since dividing the weak enemy force makes destruction of siege very unlikely, and you get to repair them to full anyway.
Snowmen should be built somewhere more peripheral where at least 2 ballistas are watching – but again, the priority is building walls where you can put siege. Place more walls around the dolyaks with less health and more siege around the dolyaks with more health, as toys will try to do some pathing around walls before giving up and just attacking the nearest one.
On later waves, you may want to consider putting down a peripheral wall and laying a catapult and ballista on top of it. The dolyak line siege should be upgraded where applicable, and snowmen should be placed and upgraded well in front of your most copious and expensive siege to protect your investments.
When Toxx arrives, if you really have a vulnerable setup, have a candy cane and rifle player wear down the stacks and push Toxx away from the dolyaks. Toxx should then aggro a player who can keep her busy while everyone else fortifies. You can build siege where you’re kiting toxx to help you survive and make the fight go faster.
Learn how to react when you’re spiked. Guardians have tons of outs for when they’re receiving/about to receive high damage or stacks of conditions, and your survivability depends on not panicking when that happens and calmly executing the blocks or whatever necessary to cancel out the attack. You’ll die more to forgetting to activate savior skills at the appropriate time than anything else.
Can you get by with 10 in valor? Selfless daring and shout recharge would be kind of nice for those spammy fractal bosses that don’t even let you get off a combo.
The wiki states that there is either a 2 or 5 second cooldown on sigil activation. As such, for the purposes of healing, it’s hard to justify reliance on fast hitting skills when at that crit chance level any other weapon would work just as well. You could possibly get away with empowering might + altruistic healing for the bulk of it, but sigil of blood would mostly be consigned to topping off.
I guess I fit the profile of the exploiter. I was wondering about the drop in cost of ectos, and I heard a vague remark that recipes were doing it. I checked out the recipes and thought Orichalcum earrings were the way to go, since I mistakenly believed that exotics gave more ectoplasm for salvage. After like one whole mystic salvage kit, I finally accepted that ectoplasm is the same from exos and rares, and by that time I had about 10 gold left and pristine snowflakes were 20s (this was Sunday night). I did use it to salvage rare mithril earrings.
I didn’t think of it as an exploit at the time I started, because I did it wrong and thought it was ArenaNet’s way of recovering orichalcum profitability, which of course was dispelled when I finally realized that rare salvage was where the action was. However, this did not stop me from speculating on continuing the action with mithril with my remaining money.
After reading the official response, I became very saddened and ashamed that my greater sense of justice did not kick in. I am confident that if I had thought of (or if someone told me) about the rare jewel salvage earlier, I would have fully taken advantage of it. Clearly I am not blameless and I hold myself accountable for my decisions. I did not cycle ectos through the market to generate gold, but I did effectively buy as many as I could afford at a discount from the trading post prices.
That being said, any measure of action taken or not taken against those who salvaged rare pristine snowflake earrings in bulk I will accept. The developers of this game dictate its code of conduct, and if they expect their playerbase to hold to a standard of intuitive justice, that is their prerogative and a noble goal. I will of course be saddened if progress is taken away and if my account is banned, as like everyone else I do legitimately play and like this game, but I will understand if such an action is for the greater good. My account is a small price to pay to keep this MMO from falling into the inevitable trap all MMOs succumb to in the meta-market, social engineering, and min-maxing. I don’t want that to happen to this game, even if I’m not around to see it flourish.
Should I be allowed to continue playing, I will take a more active role in asking for an official response where I even suspect a slip-up has occurred instead of making assumptions that coincidentally end up in my favor. That’s not my call, though. Good luck with whatever you do to dampen the impact of this event on the economy.
The 30 courage group stun break is excellent for dungeoneering and helps increase DPS by reducing the amount of time you’re not attacking the boss because he just group CCed you (aside from its obvious defensive purposes).
Evacuated sub-80 zone populations have always been a problem, and finding a solution that doesn’t open the exploit floodgates is hard. However, one idea I’ve had is to base reward balance on people who prefer sub-80 zones on daily HUD chests or something similar. This would echo hard mode vanquishing from Guild Wars.
The rough idea is to set a requirement for chest disbursement each day, probably by dynamic and/or meta events or something similar, and once a person has completed X events in an area, fulfilled a linked dynamic event chain (meta or non-meta), or contributed in a meaningful way to some objective like % of waypoints liberated, they get a reward that makes up for not being in Orr.
This would give people incentives to explore the map rather than repeat quests over and over ad infinitum. If a person does a plinx run, they can keep doing the same run over and over and risk diminishing returns, or they can travel to other zones and find lucrative quests there with supplemental daily chests to offset the penalty for visiting non-80 zones. If a person wants, they can trigger tons of dailies by doing a world tour, but obviously such a thing would take most of the day and would probably be unbottable.
The objective is always to increase player distribution throughout the world and upkeep novelty without including the frustration of unproductive wealth generation. MMOs have always had a problem with wasted content due to the mathematical min-maxing that controls the economy, and getting out from under this shadow is just another way we can revolutionize the flawed MMO paradigm.
I thought this thread would be about how people weren’t locked out of the game for 2 hours on event start, which is well done compared to the Halloween event.
One thing I appreciate about this puzzle more than the Mad King one (and I loved the Mad King one) was the increased randomness. I believe replacing technically challenging timed marathons with reactive traps was the right way to go and meshes well with the fluid paradigm of dynamic events and dodging.
So basically a rich man’s retreat is what you’re saying, where you use it to cross no-man’s-land both ways.
I think it’s a wash for greatsword since it has a third hit boon already and is a good combo finisher.
I’m wondering where you’d need it in WvW aside from cliffside battles since – oh, I see, for dunking.
Doesn’t empowering might make up for that, though? When I think of AH, I think of 0-0-30-30-10; I haven’t seen may builds with 10 in honor that didn’t also use some alternate method of healing, like faster signets or Monk’s Focus instead of AH.
When do you cue to pop indomitable courage anyway? I can’t think of any DOT CC other than twister off the top of my head.
hah
The wool items will forseeably stay till Jan 3rd, and I have a hunch they’ll be available as useless items afterwards, like the lost coast scavenger hunt.
Also, you don’t need every single achievement to get the title. You can skip two.
Why would a 1 second cooldown be better for the game as a whole?
The monthlies also count towards completion.
Heavy can camp the middle and scare off the opposing party to be the only one there when the gift spawns, and support can easily intercept gifts. Warrior scout gets the first gift, but you need 3-4 gifts to win, which leaves room for the other classes.
This will become less of an issue as people will care more about the presents later on.
You can really say the same of every other class and skill, but one thing you can do is leap to a swiftness buff, put away your gun, and run ahead for an intercept. Heavy does just fine behind enemy lines and will probably be the only class that can DPS an incoming gift carrier. What I usually do, though, is focus on taking out the escort as they won’t retreat, which is usually a death sentence for them.
Oh, a gem shop keyless chest which contains only holiday themed items varying in rarity that can be obtained by other means. You can check the patch notes or the wiki for full details.
No wintersday items, but there are a lot of other new things. The wintersday chest is like the consortium chest.
It’s been so long since I’ve used AH that i wasn’t aware.
Pulling out the rifle takes no time, and you can do the leap + skill 2 which devastates their health. Use your regular shots after that and depend on your other teammates for knockdowns and spikes to finish the job.
I use the ZXC keys for my utility skills, G for heal, Q for auto, E for F1, and B for elite. Not the best key config and I am getting hand cramps, but I at least don’t have to click.
To tell you the truth, if the patch notes are any indication, AH was headed for a nerf anyway, since it depends on boons expiring. Obviously boonless guardians are going out, so there’s too much of a risk of overlapping duration stacking boons cancelling out AH anyway.
I would also enjoy the bell choir ensemble a lot more with friends.
Tome of wrath for meat truck bosses and for times when you absolutely need ranged, like lupicus or WvW keep attack if you keep your head clear and don’t need the 3s invulnerability. Tome of courage is absolutely the most useful in the jade sea fractal to totally negate the agony phase changes.
It’s a buff to low speed weapons like the hammer and mace, as you only have to make one crit every 5 seconds.
Really when it comes down to it selfless daring is a lot more helpful to the party than altruistic healing and can do very well (at the cost of DPS) to keep the guardian afloat with permavigor.
Have you tried putting away your gun?
I just wish there was a lag compensation setting you could use for the activity.
what are you using the alternate keybindings for?
For some reason all three servers have been doing weird dueling rituals in the JP. This is absolutely fine by me and is a refreshing change of pace from the arena camping we all do.
Well guild wars has made a conscious decision to move away from the build meta that was the first game, which also had its fair share of duds (like almost all the ele energy storage elites). This is I think the first time where they’ve stated future goals for each class, so I guess a future update is incoming that will be more zealous in making class changes to fit some paradigm.
The problem is the lack of a beta to test overhauls, which is unfortunately an issue because GW2 is not an instanced game and needs every bit of its playercount to thrive.
snowflakes are probably going to be the reason since they’re not going to be as abundant as candy corn.
Lay down the snowman on top of the gift instead of picking it up.
I think that off all the classes, the warrior’s is the most powerful since swiftness is golden there, but I get by all right as a mesmer with cloak &clone + sniper shot, with the clone done preferably behind an obstruction. Really though, if you know how to use the classes (support = heal whenever the option’s up and fire through your own ice fields, sit on downed guys and presents with the ball or the wall, heavy = go on leap rampages with powder spray follow up, then just stand there and auto them to death or put away your gun if they manage to get away, save overcharged shot for package carriers and snowball, scout = stealth + sniper shot, rapid fire when they’re downed and evasive shot when they’re dodging) and you remember not to dunk a person as soon as they’re downed (general rule, don’t dunk the person you down), the class skill is hardly a make or break.
You can’t always expect a red response to everything, especially when guardians haven’t suffered much from not having a decent ranged weapon. I cannot remember the last time that a ranger could out DPS my heal without messing up their kiting enough for me to turn it into a melee superiority battle.
I think mighty blow would be enough of a finisher, and if you’re fighting a lot of enemies at once greatsword is a prime choice to cut back on kiting and generally get the vigorous precision crit boon.
Last week? That was 3 days ago.
Actually, guardians haven’t changed much in this recent patch (unlike the greatsword update) and it has been said that they will be a lot more dependent on boons. Currently there are several ways to play the guardian – AH, 100% prot, VoJ + Block/blind spam, Monk’s Focus, JI Spike, and Staff + ground consecration caster support.
Downed state is not at all useless unless you’ve made a mistake in WvW. A downed mesmer is arguably more powerful in that form due to the fact that they can stack confusion on threats really fast, which will force people to try to dunk you instead of whittling you down, at which point you can cloak away and rally off them when they have to face the rest of your team (and of course, this works triple for PvE). Downed guardians are great when healing power + toughness traited, because they’ll usually ensure a res if they get the healing symbol out.
Zeal could use some work, but this is mainly because spirit weapons have the potential to become so powerful that ArenaNet is perhaps too cautious in providing buffs in that line.
With the recent change, is the viability of AH compared to just selfless daring affected by level 20 fractals at all? I’m a boon guardian (who obviously can’t use AH because most of my boons are 100% and won’t trigger the heal) so the changes don’t affect me. Given that enemies just stand there and take hits, is there enough of a buffer from might healing?
what about the adept toughness → precision trait?
I didn’t know that about WW, that’s interesting.
I would still like to see a calculation redone with the top trait metas comparing every weapon, mainly because I’ve never seen an honorless GS build.
I suppose I could do range; I’m just paranoid that doing so will give less control over where he actually goes, and the more he tries to do PBAoE, the less he’ll be shooting agony arrows (theoretically).
I usually can’t depend on my teammates to be as well equipped to deal with the add phase, and the AoE attacks are dodgeable enough to allow full utilization of greatsword DPS, much like a battle against Subject Alpha. The mace is just there to help my survivability when I binding blade all the adds, which is really the only reason I have a greatsword in the first place. Mace+Focus is what I take whenever I really don’t want people to stay downed for very long and I’m the only one who can afford to revive them, which is usually the case in that fractal.
Symbol of protection is mainly there for your protection, really. More often than not (especially if the enemy is a thief or warrior) people will get up close and stay there for as long as it takes to unload their high damage combo. In those cases, you can count on the strikes, otherwise you can take one of the many symbol enhancing traits (like larger symbols, which is actually pretty formidable) to really make it a no-fly zone. This is important because one of the guardian’s key strengths is defending from ranged attacks. Absorption and reflection make short work of damage kiters, and ideally some sort of light symbol with a few party members would help with condition spam.
The problem I have with Binding Blade is that it’s as easy to dodge as the hammer’s primary attack, and since the combo timer on the hammer’s main is very lenient (try it against someone who CCs a lot and you’ll be surprised), a proper CC on blades is not so easy. They can dodge the initial hit, move out of range before the pull, or dodge on the equally obvious pull animation to nullify a critical component of a GS only strategy for 30 whole seconds. In addition, they can stun whirling wrath while it’s being activated, which is really the downside of any damage over time skill.
If you want to kill someone, you snare them. Immobilize is a lot harder to negate than stun breaks, which is why many do the chains of light-JI-WW combo and it does just fine. That combo is pretty expensive though, and mighty blow is not. Moreover, when a person is in a critical phase, the binding blades-pull takes more time to execute than most heal skills. Mighty blow does not.
The main fallacy here is that we are assuming a scenario where all your attacks hit. This is rarely the case, and truthfully a person that doesn’t utilize weapon swap is crippling themselves when PvP is concerned, because the inability to adapt to when situations go wrong is what kills you. The case being made here is that the hammer remains a formidable PvP weapon and should not be discounted.
If you put points in boon duration, prefer power because you’re basically covered with SYG (unless this is PvP, at which point still prefer power because you’re not going to be able to not have 100% retaliation).
If you invest in Crit Damage, go precision and go honor to dodge forever. If you’re going spirit weapon, you’re pretty much an anti-kite guardian who’s doing Staff Scepter, and Smite is pretty much a crit dependent spike.