Guild Wars 2

Its my opinion the non-trinity and trinity aspect should be combined.

I like no needed to worry about the spec i do in dungeons. It’s really good for the Que Times also.

that being said i also believe trinity is highly important part of strategy for boss fights in raiding content.

What i advocate for is that we work on the classes a little so that it gets easier with trinity concepts. So No trinity system, with classes having the ability to excel at a role if spec/built correctly over the others.

This means

“tanks will always excel in holding aggression”
“dps will always excel in damage output”
“healing will always excel in healing”
“boon support/cleanse will excel accordingly”

But that also means that any spec-combination there of is still valid, just not as competitive.

to put it in numbers formatt to make it very clear

- Tank should take 700k damage, with a max of 0-3 deaths a rune (between him and a group) (not including standing in stuff
- Running with out should include the possibility of 3-5 deaths.

One of the issues i find with the non-trinity system is the overly high amount of healer spam that comes with it. I find that this really only over validates damage classes, and under validates tanking.

So in essence the trinity became a duality.

Shaogin.2679:

Anari.2137:

Shaogin.2679:

@ Anari
If you’d been around long enough you’d know that the players have offered many great suggestions in the past, most of which never make it in game. Some good suggestions have of course, and some bad suggestions have as well. But the majority of what has made it into the game has not been what the players asked for. They have been decisions made by Anet. Some good, some bad of course. But to say they are just doing whatever players suggest instead of doing their job is just plain incorrect.

But of course, you wouldn’t know that cause again, you haven’t been around that long and are clueless as to what has been going on here and even more clueless as to what changes need to be made to the game.

That’s funny because a mutli-legendary was just telling me that he and another person were directly involved in the balance choices of the game, In fact he stated very clearly
“the devs listen to this (player name) person for all the balance for the game and they pretty much do what he says”. Im not saying he is dong the balance himself, but im pretty sure that they are not doing all they can to fix the issues (if what gazzy says is true).

Additionally, If the devs were doing balance based on psychology and metrics like they should be, then we would not be seeing massive amounts of instabilities like this, especially if anet has their own “amazing Specialist team” full of statistics majors etc working on it.

What i learn from this is most likely 1-2 people are doing the balance on this game, likely with some decent level of math background. It’s been the norm in the past, because the specialist needed to make a game well balanced are not cheap (if you get a good one anyways) so i’m willing to bet john the coder back in the content box is not only making pretty dungeons with flowers, but is also running numbers for the balance based on what gazzy, john or who ever says.

So you are basing your statements off of assumptions and what a couple of guys told you vs what has actually happened over the past few years in the game……….

Seems like sound logic to me. Can’t possibly argue with those facts there.

Lmao, I love you man. I sincerely do. ^.^

They are not assumptions.

This person had direct interaction with the developer with the other person involved in helping make the changes. So either he is a liar, or you are ignorant of it.

As i have stated, I have no reason to doubt him, he seemed to really only be interested in being the best (ie ranked high in pvp).

Even if this is (true or) false, it does not matter. What does is that the game is clearly against stated design concept like “do it all”, which should of never been stated anyways. It needs a PR clean up of “were changing from this position to help stability in the game”.

Electra.7530:

I’ve been around this game quite a while and many other games too. And I see the same whining in here (called suggestions) that I see from multiple player bases in other games. Coincidence?

But, I could make a suggestion about allowing a warrior to have a one shot kill type skill and nerf it nerf it nerf it! And, if they did, warrior would be even less attractive to play that apparently it is now.

So, I’d say beef up the warriors a bit. It’s as good a suggestion as any other player (busy telling me how clueless I am) and it might not make it into the game. So, why wouldn’t it make it into the game? It’s a good suggestion. Why not put in game?

Maybe they are doing something else for warrior even better or maybe not so good.

But, no, devs don’t do their jobs, do they? So, here we are, needing the player base to tell them how to build characters, how to nerf them to our satisfaction — well, not really. Balance will never be achieved because your perception of balance is different than mine. So, if I think the game is imbalanced and you don’t, what do the poor devs do — besides their jobs apparently?

Players aren’t equal. Characters will never be perceived balanced between the skill levels of players. Devs know this. They know this even better than I do. They know this and they develop characters of varying degrees of complexity for the challenge and enjoyment of a diverse player base. You can balanced characters, but you can never have “balance” between players. Players are not equal and never will be.

Lets make something clear,

A Developer who is creating content like new dungeons, pvp maps, models for new bosses, etc are not equal to people that have climbed the ladder and become lead developers/designers.

You can bring me 100 developers from this industry, or even 1000 of them and i will prove the majority of them wrong in their positions, because the majority of them do not go out of their way to study games, their design aspects and so forth.

They work from week to week creating planets, models, dungeons, etc. While this does give you some insight on that process and maybe a few issues that will arise in the aspects of the system(s) design of the game, it does not make them an expert in the system(s) design of the game(s) they work on.

To put it in a more clear way,

A person understanding how to put a dungeon in a game, is not equal to a person who understand why the dungeon needs to be no longer then 26 minutes. People who spend time on controlling these aspects and directly the way the game is progressing is in no way equal in their knowledge to a developer working on dungeons, just as the one working on dungeons is not equal to them.

When you understand these aspects you will understand why i make the statement “the developers are not doing anything”, its not ment in the context of “sitting around” its ment in the content of making progress.

Their core positions seem to be non-existent, or very very illy founded. You say you concept of balance is different; Ok I get it.

So as a designer of a game (Literally, I designed a game) And someone who has spent 5 years studying AAA, and Indy games and their systems. I’m Asking you

“what is balance to you?”
“What balance system are you using”?

Because in my knowledge of this industry, it seems to be a really warped version of cyclical balance with forced spec game play (almost PRS But with the “flavor or the season” Built in). And like i said, “do it all” and “Play the flavor or suck” is hypocritical and detrimental for the game.

Shaogin.2679:

@ Anari
If you’d been around long enough you’d know that the players have offered many great suggestions in the past, most of which never make it in game. Some good suggestions have of course, and some bad suggestions have as well. But the majority of what has made it into the game has not been what the players asked for. They have been decisions made by Anet. Some good, some bad of course. But to say they are just doing whatever players suggest instead of doing their job is just plain incorrect.

But of course, you wouldn’t know that cause again, you haven’t been around that long and are clueless as to what has been going on here and even more clueless as to what changes need to be made to the game.

That’s funny because a mutli-legendary was just telling me that he and another person were directly involved in the balance choices of the game, In fact he stated very clearly
“the devs listen to this (player name) person for all the balance for the game and they pretty much do what he says”. Im not saying he is dong the balance himself, but im pretty sure that they are not doing all they can to fix the issues (if what gazzy says is true).

Additionally, If the devs were doing balance based on psychology and metrics like they should be, then we would not be seeing massive amounts of instabilities like this, especially if anet has their own “amazing Specialist team” full of statistics majors etc working on it.

What i learn from this is most likely 1-2 people are doing the balance on this game, likely with some decent level of math background. It’s been the norm in the past, because the specialist needed to make a game well balanced are not cheap (if you get a good one anyways) so i’m willing to bet john the coder back in the content box is not only making pretty dungeons with flowers, but is also running numbers for the balance based on what gazzy, john or who ever says.

PvP Map System

¹ A Unique Icon for “Sighted”, Likely a Yellow !
² A Unique Icon for “Inbound”, Likely a Class Symbol
³ A Red Icon for “Engaged”
⁴ Each Group members class icon colored Differently to distinguish between two guardians, for example

Inventory System

¹ A Sparkling Star graphics (similar to the effect around the level up icon) On the top left corner of each item in your inventory to display “a new skin to unlock”.
² A Sort by “category” option for inventory, with the options “Items” “junk” and “Rarirty”
³ Improvements to the GUI for Inventory, Specifically the Control Panel aspects (via a new window creation).

“Looking for Group”
This has to be the worst system i have ever seen for LFG, it massively turns me off to do pve

¹ An actually LFG Searching Que. (cuz the room approach is really tacky and unprofessional for a AAA game).

² Create a new system with a box, with a background graphic (to show the dungeon/raid) sort of mini-wallpaper art. Clicking on this button will launch the LFG to Find said group.

Guild System

¹ Ability to color Icons In guild
² Much Higher Quality of Icons. I would love to have things like the gems from pvp ranked as options.
³ The Banner creation has GUI lag. It’s really bad for some reason.
⁴ Split the permission “Admin lower ranks” and “Invite to guild” into two.
⁵ Expand Guild Rank slots by 5 more slots
⁶ For some reason my guild is stuck in “slot 2” when i am only in 1 guild, please look into the ability to have the game update it to slot 1 if your only in 1 guild and on a later slot. (its annoying imo).
⁷ The Guild message of the day has some display issues in chat that could be addressed possibly by 2 font sizes lower of text.
⁸ Having a “current building projects tab” for guilds would be nice so i dont have to jump between guild shops in guild, and the bank out side to figure out what i need to donate.
⁹ More Guild Icon options, and colors! And more ways to turn them.

General

¹ The Gui in general is kind of outdated graphically speaking, can you please look into upgrading the buttons and so forth to be more graphic appealing.

² General Text notifications on the mid upper part of the screen need a better font/size/color. It’s kind of tacky.

*The biggest change i’d like to see"

I use to be a really heavy pver and pvper. For me this games story line is utterly annoying i just want to level. This is exactly why i hold negative opinions about anets dev team. You guys should be looking around for ways to improve your game.

A great idea to this aspect would be the following

“Make the individual “movies/scenes” and put the two characters down above the action bar one on the left one on the right, and then have them talk down there while the player plays. A small button above the life bar for option 1,2 for interaction."

This should allow the player to listen, become immersed and still have control over their toon, so they wont skip whats going on and will have more fun with the game and all that hard work and money that went into the voice overs, etc.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

So you’re saying guilds should band together to form… a PACT?

Something like that.
So it would ultimately be the same, but the chats of 5 guilds would be merged into “Alliance chat”

Seera.5916:

I’m for it. It allows for specialty guilds to exist.

Guilds can only have 500 people in them. By allowing for multiple guilds, a player can choose to join a small guild that only focuses on one aspect of the game. But still be able to join another guild for a different aspect of the game.

A great guild will be able to get and retain the best members no matter how specialized or how general it is. And no matter how many other guilds its members are a part of.

A great guild would deal with those leechers. The one who only asks for help but is never able to give help to other guild members may soon find themselves in a situation where no one in the guild wants to help him anymore. Because he doesn’t help them.

A guild just looking to keep its numbers up because there’s nothing special about it wouldn’t. And that’s why there’s nothing special about it.

You have some Good points, Guilds could manage the issues themselves, but the problem is not guild management its player mentality.

Lets take my guild for example,

We were created on the bases of “Hardcore PvP”. I have asked over 200 people to get on teamspeak when pvping, and none of them do it. I ask them to flag when in guild groups, None of them doing.

So the only think the seem to be using guilds for is LFG system, not actually guild.
I believe fully this will cause hte decline fo the game (i have no doubt about it actually).

Exedore.6320:

Anari.2137:

This forum is not about me. If you cannot come up with an argument beyond character attacks stop posting. I did not come to guild wars 2 forums to argue about if some random people on the interwebz approve of me or not.

We did. You ignored them and kept going.

Can quote the post that “refuted” my statements?

Exedore.6320:

Anari.2137:

Crinn.7864:

I don’t think you’ve ever actually had any real experience with the industry.

When you can provide evidence for that let me know.

Anari.2137, you’re the one who keeps bringing it up as a reason we should accept your ridiculous ideas. The burden of proof therefore falls to you.

I am not required to prove anything to you, you imply that your opinion matters to me and it does not. So you can take it at face value, or you don’t. Either way, I really don’t care if you believe me or not

Its not my objective in life to get the opinion of random people in the internet. Even if you were developers for this game, to be frank i really would not care.

So unless you offering my some better prospects then running my own studio and turning it in to a AAA Game Studio, with the money that comes with that, i really could careless if you approach of me as an individual or not.

Lastly

This forum is not about me. If you cannot come up with an argument beyond character attacks stop posting. I did not come to guild wars 2 forums to argue about if some random people on the interwebz approve of me or not.

Asrat.2645:

‘They do a great job’
‘They one of my favourite builds unplayable’
Makes perfect sense.
Why would we stop? Ofc noone is actually expecting to ever see proposed changes on the live servers, but this work we do is an important feedback.
How do you want to develop a game if your players just quietly accept every change you make and never tell you if they liked it or not. The forums are here for a reason.
If you wish something would become part of the game or you are unhappy you share those feelings with people who can make it happen.
And if you reason well enough, provide math, evidence, if other support you idea and back you up, if you present it in a convincing way, it eventually happens.
You have to see this as a source of inspiration.
(Thankfully) No dev will ever add ‘permanet protection’ to the guardian class (even tho they indirectly did it for revs) but the idea behind it: that melee guards lack sustain and should be able to stay in combat for longer might catch on and lead to another, better solution of the problem.

Yes They would, They’ve done it to many classes.
Example, Ranger’s “when struck gain protection”.

The entire statement in that is unfounded (unless you lead the dev team or the balance for gw2).

The game wont get fixed, I’m calling it because the players are the one telling the devs how to fix it, instead of them doing their job (or the ceo hiring someone that actually knows what they are doing).

From the position i sit in, I find the following problems to be an issue

¹ Classes Lack Identity.
* _It seems that classes really have no identity due to the nature of the abilities they have, specifically ultimate’s and trinkets (ability 6-ultimate). For example, You get boons from every class, when you could be designing a specific class to be a “support” who’s soul objective is boon application to group". There seems to be guardian talents geared toward this like the staff talent etc.

This is highly important, but my position is this, Classes should gain (role) identity something like that as follows:

Guardian: Healer, Boon Support, Direct Damage, Bunker
Ranger: Range Direct Damage, Melee Direct Damage, Healer, Condition Cleanse
Necromancer: Direct Damage, Condition Damage, Condition Cleanse
Elementalist: Direct Damage, Condition Damage, Healer.
Warrior: Direct Damage, Bunker, Boon Support
Thief: Direct Damage, Map Mobility, Condition Damage
Mesmer: Direct Damage, Condition Damage, Support (With lots of invisibility, movements like teleport, etc)
Revenent: Direct Damage, Tank, Condition Cleanse
Engineer: Direct Damage, Condition Damage, Crowd Control

With the above said, the classes should specialize in something:

Guardian: Boon Support
Ranger: Condition Cleanse
Necromancer: Condition Damage
Elementalist: Versitility (can do it all, talents just change each aspect to be stronger)
Warrior: Direct Damage
Thief: Map Mobility
Mesmer: Support – A unique type that is for movement/confusion & invisibility
Revenent: Tank,
Engineer: Crowd Control

So to be clear on this. Every class should have 3 focus’s from talents, and all talent tree’s should focus fully in that aspects. Weapon skills should be converted to native benefits for just having the spec as opposed to making people spec into them. A lot of the 6-10 skills should be deleted or reworked and every classes application should be unique.

If you only have white, black as options, all you can make is white black and gray.

Lastly on this topic, The Abilities (6 to ultimate) Need to also be more independent of each other. That means a class like Guardian should have trinkets (or aura’s) that automatically apply the same boon every x seconds. This is different then every class having some sort of 6-10 ability set that all provide boons.

Another great example is the healing trinkets. Everyone Heals. Why cant we get some other “Preventative” aspects in here? (like absorbs or blocks which play a hugely important aspect in balance).

² Bad Concepts of Power.
* _This one is a big strange to address but its very specific. Power creep is extremely dangerous to play with. Historically, It kills games. (no joke!). No game in the industry has been able to survive it’s effects. WoW Is the best fighter to the disease, but i would term wow a “hospital ICU” patient because of these aspects. I have to express it like this because it’s extremely important.

When we talk about power, we should not apply more then a variance of 10%. Small gains allow for the positive aspects to be in play with VP, but do not bring about enough of a change to implement the negative aspects.

Power in most cases should be found in in direct applications. For Example " your burns now chill the target". Power in this capacity are in effect, that reduce the other opponent down, as opposed to buffing you up. Now you might think they are the same, however you cannot cleanse a Power creep inflated enemy, but you can cleanse a chill_

³ Horrible Mechanics

• _ The Way that Conditions and Boons work in this game are horrid. If it was like WoW it’d be 100 times better, make 100 times more sense. I’m sorry, but this is one aspect of GW2 I find to be highly counter-intuitive and just down right wrong._

⁴ Balance around the melee.

• _ a while back blizzard caught on to if you balance the game around melee, the melee will be in a good position. This means that you need to get on reworks of the range classes and remove them almost all kiting, cc abilities, and move them to melee so they can catch up and get a hold of the range_

⁵ Lastly and most importantly.

• _ Stop lying to your player base. Don’t tell them “Do everything you want in your build” Then force them to play a specific spec as part of your “design philosphy”. Im tempted to write a really nice red post about this telling people why they should avoid GW2 and Go back to WoW. *ditch the “forced class play”.

If you want to keep people, I will tell you the secret to success in an mmo.

You make it so the guild has objectives (things they get along the way to the goal).
You make the goals worth the drive (but not overly hard to get)
You make the goals unobtainable for people out side of a guild
You make sure that above conditions apply to both PvE and PvP aspects

As long as you do this you will have a successful game (unless you do something stupid like massive amounts of power creep).

Crinn.7864:

I don’t think you’ve ever actually had any real experience with the industry.

When you can provide evidence for that let me know. I

Crinn.7864:

What actually happens is class balance is done a team usually consisting of mathematicians, statiscians, and some general designers. They work within the parameters set by the core design documents. (which typically aren’t super detailed)

Actually, that’s on true. I’ve worked for 3 major companies, 1 indy team, and i currently run a studio (with 23 developers). Out of all of those examples, The only time iv seen this applied was by EA (though i know blizzard does it).

In all other cases it is 2-3 people capitulating idea’s of where they think the damage / game play should go.

Crinn.7864:

Yeah, and now I know you don’t have any real experience.

It’s literally impossible to make everything balanced. Anytime you have multiple different ways to do something, one of those ways will be better than the others.

Anet marketed GW2 has a game that gives you a huge amount of choice in your build, and the game does exactly that. That doesn’t mean that every choice is competitive.

Broken Record much?

No one is advocating for perfect balance. You don’t want perfect balance. You want “Competitive” Game play, which means plus or minus 10% variance in class / spec performance. Though if you had any real experience in the industry you’d know that.

Are you For it? Why do you like it?
Are you against it? Why do you dislike it?

My Personal Position:

Guilds are an extremely (if not the most) important aspect of an MMO (Of any kind), but specially of an MMORPG.

It’s my belief as a designer, that a guild is the “heart” of the game. The Blood are the people that play it, and the nutrients are the Objectives and goals along the way.

When i first saw this system i was curious about it, I was hoping it would work out in a positive manner, but what i have experienced is negative aspects from it and no real benefit other then players “using” guilds to get something.

For this reason, I am strongly against it because it robs guilds of identity; it seems very spam-ish like many aspects of guild war two (you dev’s really need to do some quality control on these designs).

I believe the best multi-guild/clan/corporation/etc Option out there was presented by CCP’s Eve online “alliance”, where multiple guilds (with potentially different focus’s) banded together for community effort. Often this lread to people using one VOIP Program like Teamspeak, Ventrilo Etc to form a sort of Mega-guild.

I have really not seen any major problems from this system out side of the normal (drama) behavior that people have which is already present in the game(s) of late.

So I advocate for a system change to this aspect of GW2 to improve it, or remove it so we can give guilds back their identities, and help the community come together in its respective groups, with their respective goals and form friends.

the real thing that provides retention rates (are guilds with identities, and purpose).

Mightybird.6034:

Skype is 90% of the problem. Without it these kids don’t have a way of figuring out your IP.

VPN shouldn’t be needed nor am I sure it would work, at least the free ones.

The other ways are clicking links i(don’t think this works in gw2 but some games have html access)

Or they’d have to be hosting/own the server (again not applicable to gw2)

Or be connected with you some other way (mumble)

Basically if you are only connecting via gw2, short of hacking gw2 servers, they will not be able to get your IP. DDoSers being the least sophisticated, and lowest of the low brow script kiddies, cannot do that. Therefore if you get DDoSd you are broadcasting your IP in some way that has nothing to do with gw2. Same goes for any other game like LoL that hosts their own servers.

You don’t need a VPN to not broadcast your IP (for the purpose of this discussion). You just need to find all your services that might be doing it. VPNs are for hiding your IP and data from services you are connecting to. Neither of which is very important for preventing a DDoS.

To summarize, your IP becomes known by connecting to a service. In this case you are connecting to gw2 servers which keep it private. If they are getting your IP it is because you are using some other service which isn’t keeping it private.

ps @anari AFAIK blackholing would be done with some sort of ip route <network>command. None of which you have access to at a home router gui. He would also need to know the ip address range from which he was being attacked.

Source: studying to become a network engineer.

Actually this is not true.
You can obtain the IP/MAC info in the “Logs” Area of the network.
All you have to do is know how to log in, identify the spam (which is straight forward) and then blackhole it via cmd prompt.

Black holing something is not hard, but its tricky at time (not to hit the wrong stuff) not hat its hard to remove it, just can be touchy at times (thats the real down fall to it).

There is a new company that is working on being a new technology, that uses cloud to fish out DDOSING. Its expensive for the average person (i think another 80$ a month) but its capable at current of removing 76% Of the ddosing attacks.

Im sure they can get rid of these little kiddies and their games with that tech (if you have the money for it). Other wise black holing and similar approaches are needed.

Ranael.6423:

Ah it is more clear now : you are looking for a job and try to get attention.
Small advice : don’t start your discussions by saying the employer you want to work for is bad, it raises your chances.
And since you’re a good designer, can you unveil which game you designed in the past? Must be an awesome one

I don’t want a job, I run my own studio already.
What i want is developers (coders) to stop claiming they are designers, and then forcing upon the industry insane positions thinking they are for the good of the game.

Like “forced” Class play.

Do you understand how hypocritical it is for a studio to design a game saying “play any class” and then saying “By the way, you have to play this one spec to be competitive”.

Im regretting putting money in this game, im tempted to do a charge back.

Ithilwen.1529:

GW2 will never be balanced because it’s not intended to be.

There are multiple incidents of devs saying that they change things to “keep the meta moving” or similar statements. Classes and styles (condi, power, cc ) are made deliberately OP because that keeps people grinding/buying new gear.

Personally, I think this is very bad policy.. but it is born out in the way classes rotate to the top of the heap. I suspect Warrior is next in line. Perhaps we’ll see a return of the Hambow meta.

Its a horrid policy.

Cyclical Design would do this naturally if hey would balance it. The player should be doing this (like in league) Not the developers.

I am really sick of the other professionals in my industry. Coders thinking they know better about a game, while i sit and watch company after company die.

I am certain this will help with this game, a mass exodus will take place. I Believe it wont take long either, because i’m already hearing from many people in my guild
“i just play now and then, i’m really tired of the pvp unbalance of gw2, and the pve is garbage” or similar statements like that.

Anet is badly in need of a designer that knows their stuff. Good luck finding one, i know 4 of them exist in the industry, and i’m one of them.

Snr should have the pet teleport to the target, as opposed to the target to the pet.
It would remove the escape mechanic, the heal is fine, its the teleport that breaks it.

To protect from Ddosing is simple, Prevention is the best cure.
Skype is the major cause of Ddosing. Get rid of it. I could not begin to explain how easy it is to get an IP in skype and how this has been the main cause of ddosing in wow.
Junk the program and you will see most of the problem go away (change your name, picture etc before you do that).

There is a think called “Blackholing” which is a way to reject ip spam from a specific location. In general this will get rid of Distributed DDOSing attacks as they are more static then others (in general for the script kiddies).

Blackholing may or may not cause problems depending, but in general its ok for a gamer to use it. if you want to stop it, do that.

Another option is change your ip (5-10$ from isp usually) when you find out where its coming from. Dont forget, a server admin on your ventrilo/ts etc could be the cause. protect your information with a VPN if possible, it will help significantly.

This thread is dedicated to complaints about each spec, for each class.

I encourage others to list theirs, mine are as follows

Guardian
Great Sword, and Hammer

¹ High Cool downs. I feel melee should be much lower at 2-10 seconds, with the average ability being 3-5 seconds.
² Stability. One of the biggest complaints i have is the massive cc spam by ranged.
³ Cleave and ground effects. There is so much damage, and so little ways to deal with the loss
⁴ With the above stated we do not have the damage to off set the damage taken to have a fighting chance. I believe a buff to both 3,4 Is highly marrited
⁵ Control. Which makes matters worse is we have very little control (as melee guardians). The best option we have is a root, and a small circle which could stand to last longer and be a tad larger.

Dragon Hunters

¹ Trap Stacking needs to go. Traps should be permanently placed at the players location of choice, but at the same time should provide more power in CC especially and should have a min range requirement for distance between traps (min 900 radius).
Traps should be a strategic placement item on the map to help control the map better in a tactical fashion. This will give way to a new type of support.

Burn Guard

¹ Insufficient damage
² Insufficient Protection (damage reduction and reflection)
³ Insufficient self sustain (healing)

Healing

¹ Large Cool downs
² Mace heal is useless (due to melee hit requirement)
³ Would like it if mace was just straight healing as an attack (to allies) as opposed to enemies. Ie lack of diversity
⁴ Protection is insufficient
⁵ Cleansing is insufficient

Boons Guard

¹ Duration is insufficient
² More Buff granting abilities would help the concept
³ the bases for this build is in place but the talents supporting it (like heal per boon) are overly weak.

Bunker Guard

¹ Permanent Protection is needed
² More Vitality
³ More Control

More To come after pvp ranked match

Newly Updated pass above guys, have a look and gimme feedback.

Obtena.7952:

Even if the changes were reasonable, there is so much going on here that no one would ever even TRY to implement this stuff. Anet hasn’t made these many changes to the class over the last 3 years.

There is dozens or hundreds of changes be suggested and not a single explanation why for any of them. I just can’t see where this is going, even if it’s a serious attempt to discuss what Guardians could be.

Here is my feedback. Start over. Beging with the premise of why you think Guardian needs to change and suggest no more than 8 changes to accomplish that.

At this point i just want to fully redesign the class, and i am tempted to just wipe all i did, and fully redesign it (that means create my own abilities, etc).

The game needs a full design pass, but a full class rework will hold it over for a year or two. the smart thing to do is a fully design pass and call it a day.

I made these changes because i believe every aspect of a class should be valid. for gaurdian that is

- Tank*
- Condition (burning)
- Direct Damage (melee)
- Healing **

• = Level of importance via the expressive talents.

I fact, I think im going to do just that.

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

1. you buff burns all classes with burns get buffed unless the application of burn stacks increases (which Anet down toned a few patches ago for pretty much everyone across the board in the last big balance patch)
2. Guardains are protectors as thier ideal image DH is is a Protector but its focused on slaying those that bring harm and prevent it before a death happens , very basic or unsophisticated in terms of comfort, convenience, or efficiency pouring so much strenght into finishing to job quickly is also a form of protecting.
3. the way Anet see Guardains image is not as a healer so they will always be Sub-standard healers but amazing supporters coupled with damage.

from reading your ideas , giving these types of buffs and changes to a heavy armour class is a BAD idea in a whole game sense if you add up all the ideas you are spewing out the Game will be back to the Bunker meta where condis do not work and damage is reduced so much the visual of the game would be like watching two squirrels in a mexican stand off (note i said two because the third guy still can’t do anything)

If that was true guardians would not have 3 talent specs with massive healing and applications to it.

style.6173:

OP:

Nice try but I disagree with both of your classes so far. I want to see nerfs to elite specs are part of a balance. That’s the biggest problem with the game right now.

No, That is an insane amount of work it wont happen (its almost a gaurentee not to).

Your talking about reworked every math value in the expansion, from gear to mobs, to bosses to damage, and so on. You might as well forget that position.

I am inviting you to join us on teamspeak for a discussion about the pvp and pve balance aspects of the game, starting in 30 minutes. You’re welcome to join now!

Ts.voak.net

Additionally if anyone needs a ts home we have space for you (500 slots).

Salamander.2504:

There used to be a balance design philosophy that gw2 used, which was: you can never have it all. You were never able to take all of the traits that would make your build perfect. That is really the type of balance we need to strive for if we want to balance the elite specs.

Have it all is not possible, it would imply finite conditions. Have it all int he application of every role is not possible it would imply there is a healer thief build, and well that does not exist.

This is fairy tell idea, and it should of never been attempted to begin with. it waters down the game being it repetitive, It robs classes of identity, and it robs the game of balance.

Shaogin.2679:

Anari.2137:

Varezenem.2813:

Anari.2137:

You tell me to learn to play, but you dont even know that said classes have pierce effects that can go through said blocks, right?

Pierce doesn’t go through block it’s actually stopped by it. DH has 3 on LB that is unblockable, warrior has signet of might, ranger has nothing.

Data on Wiki Does not agree with this.

How much experience have you had with this game? I mean, the effects of piercing has been common knowledge forever now.

Really confusing when you claim to know what you are talking about and reference your experience as a developer, and then propose absurd balance changes and make blantantly false comments such as the effects of piercing.

I’m all for class reworks, but things like saying condi application is a problem, and then proposing an increase in cleanses instead of, you know, just toning down condi application……just really hard to take anything you say here seriously.

You Misunderstand my positions i recommend more thought, and questioning if you dont understand it.

Condition application is not a problem because its applied, its a problem because there is no dependable counter to it. for me play and counter play are foundational concepts, if you dont have one you should not have the other. Thus i did not say (or mean) conditions are a problem, 1 cleanse every 10 seconds is.

Necro does twice the damage of other classes because of power/codition combination amulets, which is why i suggested that there should only be 1 stay on amulets, not 2-3.

The Core abilities being improved would be less work depending on conditions.
Moving the elite specs down probably means more database work because you have to rebalance all of the mobs, bosses, gear, etc.

So most of it should be pretty easy value changes in the DB if its basically things like more damage, or something like that.

Salamander.2504:

Anari.2137:

Keadron.9570:

Anari.2137:

Keadron.9570:

So basically guardian using marauders will have insane burn damage, the same healing as an ele using clerics, permanent protection at 30%, enough condi cleanse to be virtually immune….. so God mode pretty much. Oh and why does a heavy armor class get 30% while ele a light armor get 10-15? It can’t be because of range as an ele using dagger is melee range. Did you think of how that would affect core ele such as leveling up before you can use tempest. Unlike other light armors it doesn’t have stealth, clones, or minions it survives by boons and sustain

At the moment with my guardian burn build, I do 5-6k Ticks. However, that being said there is a huge disadvantage being played here. Necros do way more damage. Think of it like this.

Burning is an alpha strike that can be cleansed (if your fast enough).

So because necro puts out more condi pressure the answer is God mode for guardian? They are also a light armor class, slow, not great at healing and vulnerable to focus fire. Using one classes strengths while completely ignoring their weaknesses doesn’t justify a complete overpower of your favorite class.
BTW you completely bypassed my original questions

Buffing Burn to be competitive to other specs is not God Mode, its called balance.
You cannot build burn guard, and get the healing these specs have, because the specs you need for healing is 3 specific ones, 2 of which are different the ones burn guard depends on, thus its not possible to build a guard with the healing potential, and damage rates in that capacity.

I havent ignored anything, I choose not to start a debate of trivia positions.

There used to be a dalance design philosophy that gw2 used, which was: you can never have it all. You were never able to take all of the traits that would make your build perfect. That is really the type of balance we need to strive for if we want to balance the elite specs.

It’s a good position.

Having choices, suggests more then 1 role for a class.
Thus you get multiple specs.
Having every class do the same roles, robs the class of real identity (other wise it’d just be the same thing with different graphics).

Keadron.9570:

Anari.2137:

Keadron.9570:

So basically guardian using marauders will have insane burn damage, the same healing as an ele using clerics, permanent protection at 30%, enough condi cleanse to be virtually immune….. so God mode pretty much. Oh and why does a heavy armor class get 30% while ele a light armor get 10-15? It can’t be because of range as an ele using dagger is melee range. Did you think of how that would affect core ele such as leveling up before you can use tempest. Unlike other light armors it doesn’t have stealth, clones, or minions it survives by boons and sustain

At the moment with my guardian burn build, I do 5-6k Ticks. However, that being said there is a huge disadvantage being played here. Necros do way more damage. Think of it like this.

Burning is an alpha strike that can be cleansed (if your fast enough).

So because necro puts out more condi pressure the answer is God mode for guardian? They are also a light armor class, slow, not great at healing and vulnerable to focus fire. Using one classes strengths while completely ignoring their weaknesses doesn’t justify a complete overpower of your favorite class.
BTW you completely bypassed my original questions

Buffing Burn to be competitive to other specs is not God Mode, its called balance.
You cannot build burn guard, and get the healing these specs have, because the specs you need for healing is 3 specific ones, 2 of which are different the ones burn guard depends on, thus its not possible to build a guard with the healing potential, and damage rates in that capacity.

I havent ignored anything, I choose not to start a debate of trivia positions.

Keadron.9570:

So basically guardian using marauders will have insane burn damage, the same healing as an ele using clerics, permanent protection at 30%, enough condi cleanse to be virtually immune….. so God mode pretty much. Oh and why does a heavy armor class get 30% while ele a light armor get 10-15? It can’t be because of range as an ele using dagger is melee range. Did you think of how that would affect core ele such as leveling up before you can use tempest. Unlike other light armors it doesn’t have stealth, clones, or minions it survives by boons and sustain

At the moment with my guardian burn build, I do 5-6k Ticks. However, that being said there is a huge disadvantage being played here. Necros do way more damage. Think of it like this.

Burning is an alpha strike that can be cleansed (if your fast enough).

Darknicrofia.2604:

Not that high of a priority, guardians’ elite skills are actually quite useful. Every class has at least 1 useless elite, guardian and more specifically, base guardian has a TON of things that needs reworked before a single unless elite skill.

Guardian Elites were changed in this post.

For example, the heal became instant cast, lower cooldown, and 50% Of Max Hp.

Rodzynald.5897:

Oh right, we are talking about what guardian could be ; _ ;
I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

EDIT:
Yes, I must agree. Having perma prot is a sweet spot though… I guess it should be a guardian exclusive for obvious reasons.
You know, we must use hammer and keep auto attacking but we get that sweet 100% prot uptime for us and our allies who stand in the symbol, that would be quite reasonable considering that we are GUARDIANS.
I just wish that protection could stack instead of pulsing and keeping there for one second. Though it can be achieved with rune of earth, It should be built in to stack.

Im of the opinion that there should be two types of protection, one that is group applied (10-15%) and one that is self applied (33%).

The reason for this is because some specs (like melee builds) need more reduction to deal with all the cleave and stuff, where some range builds having it are insanely op (like auramancers).

Thus, im of the opinion that the aura mancer buff provided should be 10-15%, not 30.

Lastly,

1500 Toughness (Base) = 33% Damage reduction.
If you have more then the base amount, its less toughness (down to something like 700).

Rodzynald.5897:

Oh right, we are talking about what guardian could be ; _ ;
I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

EDIT:
Yes, I must agree. Having perma prot is a sweet spot though… I guess it should be a guardian exclusive for obvious reasons.
You know, we must use hammer and keep auto attacking but we get that sweet 100% prot uptime for us and our allies who stand in the symbol, that would be quite reasonable considering that we are GUARDIANS.
I just wish that protection could stack instead of pulsing and keeping there for one second. Though it can be achieved with rune of earth, It should be built in to stack.

It was my intent to Buff Burn Guardian, and Buff the condi Cleanse. The reason for this is because it will offset the necromancers damage rates, as well as other condition classes.

Lets do some math so you can understand the situation a little more.

Lets say assume the following are the norm (Which they should be).

- Necromancers Apply between 900-1100 Conditions a game
- Necromancers deal 400-500k Damage, and Condition Damage a Game (around 800-900k total damage)
- There is no dependable cleanse in the game or counter to condition damage
- Passive Cleanses are weak, generally being 1-2 every 10 seconds
- Active Cleanses are generally 5-10 cleanses, but have around 40 second CD’s

If we assume the above be true, then we learn the following

If 1000 conditions = 400k Damage, then 500 conditions = 200k damage, and 250 conditions = 100k damage.

If you apply cleanses to 50% of the conditions applied by a necro, you will reduce the over all damage of the class by 50% Or 200k damage. This will move the necromancer into a position of 600k damage a game, which puts it slightly higher then other classes. Additionally it helps shift the desire to build power builds, as well as conditions builds.

So by upping the condition cleansing in the game (not to much) via 1-2 classes we will improve the counter play verse conditions.

Think of it like this

Condition cleanse = damage reduction vs conditions

At the moment you think of it as

Condition cleanse = Necromancer does no damage
But this is not true, as all necro skills have impact damage on it, and its doing exceptionally well (in fact if we took condi’s off necros, they’d be 10% short of perfect damage rates).

DeceiverX.8361:

Game programmers do not do design at all. I assure you of this. Game designers and active game developers, however, must know some code in order to make simple scripts to interface with things like animations and frameworks designed by the programmers.

Of This i am aware, as i mentioned, I am a designer (now).

DeceiverX.8361:

ANet uses metrics. Actually, I believe the lack of balance is because of overuse of analytical data, and too little mathematical application use for simulation for basis for development.

That is very likely not the situation, as if they were balancing for that they’d have reduced the massive instabilities that are in class variations of various types of output. For example, Guardians not healing as well as druid/ele or tanking as well as ele, or necros and dh’s doing massive amounts of damage. These causes of this is probably likely due to a simple fact that they dont make class changes frequently enough, and havent had time to do a pass on the elite specs yet. I’d be willing to bet this is the reason for this.

DeceiverX.8361:

OP keeps referencing design which favors trinity-style play under the guise of concept-invalidation. Too much power creep and bad design ideology of letting the same builds get everything (tempest, rev, scrapper, condi reaper) through fixed-bonus effects and instead not modifiers to amplify builds creates these environments, not the capacity for each class to deviate.

Not true. I am advocating that each class has options in terms of roles. Some classes (like guardian) should be oriented toward healing and tanking, where other classes (like Elementalist) Should be healing and damage. In the case of healing, i believe damage-healing hybrids should be the role style (as per example). I am in no way advocating for trinity, as i believe the no trinity position is actually interesting and meriting a lot more investigation and use in the industry.

DeceiverX.8361:

The game isn’t balanced because of a multitude of reworks which holistically removed the skill ceiling from the game via passive effects, as well as disregard for stat integrity through sweeping changes made to stats and the math behind balance not being constantly verified with each adjustment.

A full rework of the system needs to be done, not just some changes. Its merited at this point after 3 years in wow, there was a full rework. A few years after (About the same time) a second was done.

I disagree here.

I’ll use Guardian as an example, Guardian can beat every class except Druid, Rev, Engi. You can’t simply upgrade DH to a “10” to be on par with these 3 classes because DH will be way too OP for the other 6 classes.

You would literally have to main each class and understand why class A can’t beat class B then change that class mechanically… not necessarily the dmg numbers associated with them.

It’s why some of your changes doesn’t make sense… you’re thinking too linearly and making the DH power creep explode.

Part of my suggestions for DH and ranger is to prevent trap stacking. I think they should be more about stategic placement, as opposed to “trap stacking”. I advocate for a core mechanic change to prevent these effects, or at the very least make people spread them out (with out the circles crossing each other). However, i would look at changing the purpose people use them for to something like “long term slow/stun” “major healing reductions” or so forth.

The reason for this is because if you put a trap in the door way on the keep map, you will get a huge time advantage for the opening cap, or slow down enemies in a way that you have time to get to the node. These sorts of aspects empower traps to be incredibly powerful in their strategy value, but not in their battle oriented value.

This is opposite of what it currently is.

Additionally,

Numbers come down into an aspect of conditions. These conditions (design logic) i have is as follows

- Survival Rates Should be as follows
¹ Glass Cannon : 15-20 Seconds
² Range/Caster: 20-25 Seconds
³ General Melee: 25-30 Seconds
⁴ General Tanks: 35-40 Seconds.

- Damage Types in game should follow logic as follows
¹ Continuous condition Application: The most consistent damage type over Longer Duration [None Burning/Torment]
¹ Does not exceed the Target Time frames of live expectancy
² Generally is used as a form Main source of damage.

² Non-continuous Condition application: High Condition damage over short duration [ Burning/Torment]
¹ Does not exceed the Target Time frames of live expectancy
² Generally is used as a form High Pressure Damage Support Damage to secure a Kill.

³ Alpha Strike (aka burst) – Highest Damage over Shortest Duration’s.
¹ Does not exceed the Target Time frames of live expectancy
² Generally is used as a form of execute for the last 30% HP.

When we look at DH Trapping, and a few other things we see that condition 3 violates the survival rate aspect. This tells us that the trap stacking effect is breaking the game. Now we have two options:

1. Nerf the damage
2. Change the mechanic

If we nerf the damage the DH spec will become largely invalidated (because he relies on trapping massively as part of the core build concept)

If we change the mechanic, we may be able to provide a much more impact and new aspect for the dh, which is strategic trapping. These sorts of things will be very powerful in the hands of the more skilled players, but will just be a slight damage source for the less tactically inclined.

This means that the pro players will have better application and use for the class; largely due to timing a good stun, slowing enemies down, preventing boss steals, etc.

Ranger Class Rework

Trinkets
Troll unguent: Now heals passive, 300 Hp a second, and can be activated to heal for 5500 hp.
Healing Spring: Cool down reduced to 15 seconds.
Shouts: All shouts have 30 second CD.
Survival: All Survival abilities have 20 Second CD
Signet: All Signets have 25 Second CD.
Traps: All Traps have 15 Second Cd.
Sharpening Stones: Improved Bleed damage to 300.

Ultimate
Strength of the pack Cool down reduced to 50 seconds.
Entangle: Now also inflicts Poison (1400 damage)
Spirit of Nature: Now (Directly) Heals allies in 1000 yards, for 4500 HP. Detonate to apply regeneration, remove 2 conditions from each ally, and resurrect the dead.

Nature Magic
Logic: Self, Pet Boons. Support.
Trait:
Tier 1:
Bountiful Hunter: 1% Damage per a Boon, and 5% Damage for your pet.
Instinctive Reaction: When you drop below 50% Hp, You Gain Quickness, and Regeneration. [5 second CD]
Tier 2:
Vigorous Training: Your Pet grants near by allies 15% Endurance Regeneration.
Tier 3:
Nature’s Vengeance: Spirits now last longer, and grant a boon to allies around them.
Water: Direct Heal every 3 seconds.
Stone: Vigor Every 3 Seconds.
Air: Quickness Every 3 Seconds.
Frost: Chill Application Every 3 Seconds.
Sun: Blinds Enemies. 3 Stack Application.
Protective Ward: Swapped Places Into Beast Mastery, With Zephyrs Speed.

Beast Mastery
Logic: Pet Buffs,Melee Buffs
Trait:
Loud Whistle: While your health is below 50%, your pet gains 20% more damage, and 50% Reduction in abilities.
Pets Prowess: Pets move faster, and gain a unique attribute depending on type:
Bear: HP
Cat: Ferocity
Birds: Precision
Wolves:Boon Duration
Other: Power
Tier 1
Go For The Eyes: Blinds The target and causes bleeding.
Companions Might: Grants an additional 5% Damage to you and your pet.
Tier 2
Wilting Strike: Inflicts Weakness on F2 Command, And Grants Stability.
Natural Healing: Pet Gains 20% More Hp, And heals 150 HP per a second.
Tier 3
Beastly Warden: Taunts the target, and grants Protection. Pet Gains 500 armor.
Zephyrs Speed: 50% Chance on attack to gain Quickness and Swiftness.
Honed Axes: Now Grants 500 Ferocity, and 250 Precision.

Skirmishing
Logic: Direct Damage, Conditions
Trait
Hunters Tactics: Grants 10% Critical Strike, and an additional 10% if Duel Welding Weapons.
Tier 1
Sharpened Edges: Now Grants 20% Chance to cause 100 Bleeding on Hit if using a range weapon, or 50% if melee.
Primal Reflexes: Every 5th Attack grants Vigor.
Tier 2
Spotter: Grants 250 Precision
Striders Defense. 20% reduction to sword abilities, and 20% Chance when hit to grant reflection.
Tier 3
Quick Draw: Weapon swapping is reduced by 20%.
Light on your feat: Short bow abilities recharge 20% faster, and have 300 additional range and pierce.

Survival
Logic: Conditions
Trait:
Bark skin: You and your pet take reduced damage when below the thresh hold of 50% Hp. Player Reduction: 20%, and 50% for pet.
Tier 1
Soften The fall: 50% Reduction to fall damage. 200 hp a second when incapacitated.
Oak heart salve: When you are stunned, dazed, etc. Gain regeneration.
Tier 2
Refined Toxins: Every 3 attacks applies poison.
Tier 3
Emphatic Bond: 2 conditions every 2 seconds.
Poison Master: Critical Strikes apply poison. Poison Healing Reduction Improved to 50%, and duration is improved by 20%.

Marksmen
Logic: Long Bow, Pets
Trait:
Tier 1
Tier 2
Moment of Clarity: 30% Change to gain clarity on critical Strike
Tier 3
Note: Long Bow Ability 3 (invisibility) Now takes you out of combat if you successfully cloak.

Druid
Logic: Healing, Celestial Form.
Trait
Tier 1
Druidic Clarity: Reduced conditions removed to 3.
Tier 2
Tier 3

Weapons
Axe
Ability 1 now applies bleed effects.
Ability 5 now hovers around the player, and no longer needs to be channeled. 10 second cool down, and 5 second duration.

Great Sword:
Ability 3 cool down reduced to 8 seconds.
Ability 4 improved channel time to 10 seconds.
Ability 5 cool down reduced to 20 seconds.

War horn
Ability 4 reduced cool down to 15 seconds.
Ability 5 reduced cool down to 20 seconds

Sword
Ability 2 Reduced cool down to 5 seconds.
Ability 3 Reduced cool down to 5 seconds.

[quote=6090913;TheBravery.9615:]

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unblockable

Refer to link

TheBravery.9615:

With all due respect, your suggested changes are all buffs and I fear what ideas you would bring to other professions when you start creating reworks of them. I am strongly against power creep and these changes will buff guardians to high heaven (and other professions if you decide to do them too)

example:

Shelter: Cast: Instant, Heals 6500 Hp, and blocks attack to you and allies for 3 seconds.

Why is this change even necessary in the first place? It’s meta in WvW.

food for thought: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Poll-Power-creep-vs-nerf-bat-vs/6019508

If a Elementalist and druid do 800k to 1.5m Heals a game, Is it power creep to bring a guardians healing in line? No. Its “Equalizing”.

I would recommend at this point you stop commenting on the math behind these classes.

Because you can do 4475 HPS in a burst, does not mean you will always do 4475 HPS. You forgot to calculate Cooldowns.

So 4475 HPS will happen every 30 seconds, If you decide to pop everything in your kitten nal.

Other wise the Heal is something like 700-800 (from basic ability every attacks) + the 600-800 from Resolve, every 3 seconds.

I gave you accurate math with the cooldowns calculated.

Varezenem.2813:

Anari.2137:

You tell me to learn to play, but you dont even know that said classes have pierce effects that can go through said blocks, right?

Pierce doesn’t go through block it’s actually stopped by it. DH has 3 on LB that is unblockable, warrior has signet of might, ranger has nothing.

Data on Wiki Does not agree with this.

Exedore.6320:

Looking at your guardian changes, you clearly have never played GW2 PvP at a competitive level. Nor do you have any depth of understanding of its mechanics. I suggest you stop with your current effort and learn to play the game first.

Let’s look at some of your guardian changes:

• Smite Condi to 10sec CD with 3 conditions removed. This screams power creep. Condition clear is supposed to be limited, rewarding judicious use. The current meta is problematic because a few builds can crap out conditions continually. Nerf that instead
• Wall of Reflection with a 20sec CD. This is just LOL. So you want to push ranged projectile weapons completely out of PvP?
• Sanctuary at 35sec CD which offers complete protection. This is just laughable. ANet nerfed Well of Precognition to the ground after last season for doing less.

Asrat.2645 had a good list of general rules in his first reply.

Oh, and I’ll re-iterate. This is not WoW. Stop trying to make it more like WoW.

I do not believe conditions should be freely unchecked like they are, so part of my design philosophy is to put strong passive, and active counters to it in.

if you want to talk about op, lets start by addressing how necro is doing almost double or tripple (if not more) of almost every other class (saver 1-2 builds like DH trap spam)

More condition cleansing will lower the damage output, and provide more of a challenge to condition based damage users which will put their damage in check, but still allow them to be a threat.

You tell me to learn to play, but you dont even know that said classes have pierce effects that can go through said blocks, right?

The Sanctuary provides a negative aspect to it, you cannot deal damage or negative effects from inside. It is purely an escape mechanic, or a support mechanic (for resurrections Which might i add can still be pierced by special talents.).

Math it as follows:

Base Abilities
750 Hp Every 1 Second = 750 HPS (225,000HP Per every 5 minutes)
1600 every 1 second = 1600 HPS (32,000HP Per every 5 minutes)
1500 Hp Ever 3 seconds (Ultimate) = 500 HPS (150,000 Per every 5 minutes)

Special Abilities:
Hold the line: 2200 HPS over 7 seconds = 315 HPS ( 3150HP Per every 5 minutes)
Save yourselves: 4000 over 13 seconds = 308 HPS ( 3100HP per every 5 minutes)

Total: 4475 Regeneration / Second (like if you burn everything together)
Over a 5 Minute Match: 413,250
Over a 10 Minute Match: 826,500

This by far does not seem to be OP

Edit: i forgot to add Resolve, which is another 250 HPS, 25,000 per 5 minutes, or 50,00 HP for 10. This means that The guardian will actually be lower then a elementalist (which i do 1.1-1.3m heals a game with).

Lets assume we buff it 40% (30% for the talent buff, + another 10% to make sure we are have breathing room for mistakes in math).

That means

Total Regeneration peak: 6265
Total Healing per 5 minutes:578,550
Total Healing per 10 minutes:1,157,100

This means the target 30% i added, Will be just shy of what the current elementalist is healing for!

Asrat.2645:

…
Ok. Math. If I try using some of the passive healing sources, like mace, virtue of courage and altruistic healing, additionally receive the light. And assume I am just autoattcking and occasionally searing symbols.
I will have an effective health of 79000 over 30sec. That not considering aegis, aegis traits, protection or any boons, utility or elite skills, the benefits of stability and permanent cleanses, virtue actives, traits for damage reduction or toughness…
And that is on a a marauder. Since I dont know how well your stuff scales with healing power.

On a druid I calculated 60k effective health/30 sec all in. Including uninterrupted celestial avatar, on a shoutbow mender.

Taking into account the stability, perma protection and utility skills you should be easily able to outtank the current ele healbot on a marauder guard. And still pump out massive boons and healing to allies around you. Not forgetting about the damage ofc.

Will you Post your metric Data? I would like to see the math. I guesstimated the buff changes (because i was expecting testing if the devs took this into consideration).

Additionally, if the guard is at 80k and the druid is at 60k, i am ok with it but it may need some reduction.. the reason for this is because a druid is ranged, and a guard is not, so he will have to run along chasing people, and is more liable to be cc’d if he does not have symbols out to protect vs it, so the slight increase of healing is merited. Though id like to see your math.

keep the feedback coming, they will help me tailor the skills to where we are all in agreement.

Fire on hit is not 3k, its 200 something damage a hit so adding it in would be like 3000 on 10 stacks.

I do 5-6k Ticks right now with my burn build, its really strong, but very quish but almost all of that damage is in 7-9 talents. so that tells me the talents need a buff to bring up the specs to be competitive.

condi guardian gets strong when you build it purposely for condi damage (it will be something like what the current necro is but a little weaker, about 100-200k less damage a game). So it wont be op, but it will hurt because the damage comes faster then necro damage.

mace autos are not 900 range, the third skill (which is a heal) no long is an melee attack, its just a strait cast heal (like turning on f2 active but frequent)

i will be doing reworks of all classes to the best of my ability, and tailoring my positions based on feedback presented here (or relative class post)

Asrat.2645:

As I said before Im generally against powercreep. You said you wanted to make melee guards and tank guards more viable, but why don’t you try nerfing other op stuff, planning a full class rework anyways, instead of adding more op stuff to a class that doesn’t need it.

Power Creep is like adding gas on fire, the more larger it (the fire) gets the more likely you are to get burnt.

I have a firm stance against massive amounts of power creep. In fact in general i believe a game should be composed of something like 80-85% of horizontal Progression, and 15-20% Vertical. I Put it in a condition which is The moment a new player cannot compete with a vet player is the moment there is to much

For the healing

I don’t agree, I want every ability to be very hard to choose between. the condition i give for that is “constant changing”. When you change abilities a lot, you know your classes are solid (provided they are not broken which is an issue of a small change).

I want all heals to heal around 7000-9000 HP. However the lower end i want to offer some sort of protection to that. I could advocate for a lower (5000-7000) Range, but with the current speed of the game i think the will really be better at the higher 7000-9000 range.

Hard Counter CC (Stability)

This is absolutely needed in the current meta. Having ground effects you have to stand in for 5-10 seconds is a good solution to melee problems. It puts them at a disadvantage to range (where caster/ranger comes in) while making them free of cc troubles. The real way to do this is to rework the entire system, which would require the devs to do a full pass of the pvp system, but i don’t think they will be open to that much change where as the class reworks are just value changes for the most part.

protection
I believe there should be a reduction to protection, but a permanent application from guardian for it. I do not support 30% Protection rates, i think they should be at 15%, but at the same time i think in some cases they should be 30% (like shield usage).

For a guard to have perma 30% i am ok with, if he is using a shield.

Absolute resolution
My approach to the tank aspects of this class was to move it to have a dependable heal. 1650 HP / 3 seconds. is not 500 HP a second. Its 1650 every 3 seconds. The heal is strong for an intended reason; it was designed this way to make the class depend on healing to be tanky, as opposed to DR.

Larger amounts of DR with higher Healing rates is one of those things i call “the deadly combinations” and i generally stay away from them. So i am advocating that the over all armor of this class is around (if 4300 is what i have now, + another 1500 with protection, then the target tank of this class is around 4750). This means the over all tank of the class with the reduction (if i get what i want for protection boon changes) will actually be getting a DR nerf, but a heal buff.

Additionally, i want to mention that if this heal is to strong in testing, we can look at lowering it a little (to say maybe 1250 or possibly every 6 seconds). Every 3 seconds is a long time you can be bursted in that amount of time.

I think that sums up most of it.

Supreme.3164:

You may have been doing this for 5 years but I still don’t see any resemblance of proper balance, at a first glance with your guardian proposed changes I immediately notice two things:

Increase in instant activation skills
An increase in lower CD skill

Both these factors only contribute to an even less skillful game because people are far less concerned about their own mistakes and the enemy capability to predict their actions ( hallo dragon hunter-reaper etc etc)

First of all,

If you owned a business, and someone came in and told you you had to ignore the complains and desires of 85% of your customers, what would be your reply?

Next,

I am not trying to make guardian over powered. The entire class system is massively out of wack, and needs a stat squish.

There is so much to involved in this i don’t know where to start with someone who (presumably) is not a developer; In fact this is why guild wars 2 is failing because the development team seems to be taking feedback from players, and not working out the problems.

Next in regards to my changes,

• ¹ Long casting times is not viable in this very fast game play. This is why i removed or reduced a lot of casting times.
• ² To off set the power that was assigned to these long cool down, powerful effects i reduced their power, and their cool down (for more up time).
• ³ Large amounts of the options are not mechanically a viable option
• ⁴ In regards to traits (talent spec bonus’s) a lot of them seem to be really useless, so i put them more into line with a specific address. When we spec in the game we build for condition, or power. It’s really not in our mentality (out side of damage/heal) to do power/condition for example. Most of the time we are being efficient and trying to maximize our damage ratio and get the most out of stacking for big numbers (its a psychology issue). As such i moved talent specs into options. This means, there is 3 talents in each talent spec in each collumn, and i built it so that each one had 3 different variations of focus. For example, Talent row 1, Option 1 = healing, Option 2 = damage, Option 3= Defense. This will make hybrid specs more viable and will help to encourage new meta builds.
• ⁵ Lastly, I wanted to help make some build options more viable, like melee aspects. So far because of all the cleave, condition damage, Cc and so forth melee is having a really hard time. I actually believe a lot of this has to do with the speed of the game but i am cautious to play with these aspects as much as i am to provide more healing and support against cc to make melee viable. for this reason i added more stability, and more health options as well as some more damage to really help encourage those builds.

Supreme.3164:

You are both wrong, overbuffing and overnerfing wil never balance anything

The aim of any class rework should be :

-Make all classes fun to play and fight against

-Make sure that each class will give different rewards based on the skill level of the user, the better and more experience you are, the better the results ( not like now where you have very easy to use builds with vast rewards and other whose reward is non existent no matter how you play)

Powercreeping/Nerfing to oblivion won’t change anything, what it’s 10 now, will be the same whether you reduce it to 8 or increased to 15, the difference between professions would not change if you simply tweak numbers considering your personal bias

For the record every person that try to propose these class rework always end up cutting ele healing by 50%+ and add few sprinkles of dmg there and there, on skills whose main problem are the obvious animation are extremely long CD, and ofc anybody who make these suggestions never take in consideration the relations between professions.

I mean nobody of you can imagine how each profession can interact with each other one, given its kitten nal and in a given situation….it takes more than a simple wish list to become a renewed game designer

I really want to slap you for a comment you made in this. First i have been doing this for over 5 years now. I know what i am doing. There is intent behind my suggestions, to raise everything to a competitive equal play with out really nerfing crap to much.

Nerfing something from a 10 to an 8 does change the situation, because op is not always op. Op is only op if its a 10, and not an 8. Its all subjective to its value verse the other options.

my balance philosophy works like this

- Every build is fairly good at what it does, but it does not mean that it is not competitive with other guilds. For example, a melee healer can be the best melee healer, but it may not be the best healer.
- Keep everything in a smaller range (say 4-6 on the scale, as opposed to some 2’s with 10s).To much power creep breaks the game (and is breaking it)
- Try to make everything unique.

Asrat.2645:

Im working on stuff like this too, and what Ive found out is that it is almost impossible to do only one class at a time.
You have to work on the entire picture, balance everything respectively and in comparison to other classes mechanics.
One thing I can definetly recommend you to do is: try to create builds. Several/class.
You will have to do tons of math for that, but it is the only way you can make sure, your balance patch is better than anets. Ive the final goal to include 36 viable builds, but of course you will have to exponentially do more work the more builds you have to compare.

From my first look at your guard it looked like incredible powercreep(will add detailed feedback over there). If thats the intention of your balance: ok, but dont expect to see much love for it.
From the current state of the game it should be your goal to make each and every profession weaker than it currently is, exept for warrior maybe.
Best ways to accomplish that:
-Less access to boons
-Less access to hard CC
-Elite specs should not prove a significant upgrade
-Less access to high damage AOE and ranged
-Less access to blocks, invulnerabilities and evades
-No or very few completely uncounterable mechanics.

But of course that is just an advice, strongly influenced by my own perspective and my own thoughts about the game and far from observant.

Actually its a lot of changing, but im doing a few key things

¹ In general all trinkets (abilities 6,7,8,9) are getting more up time.
² Guardian melee specs are under powered significantly, especially healing ones that require you you build healing, but still have to be survival. My initial thought was to create range attacks for the mace, but i negated from that because of the point because it would just make it another version of the druid. I have recently updated the text to change the third ability on basic mage to heal 900 range, it requires no attack just a straight fast cast heal. This will make that more dependable and give more livability to the healing concept.
³The buffs to toughness etc, was to help melee based builds which get nuked to fast. I can tell you even with a bunker build at 4300 toughness, i am by no means not squishy. (largely due to conditions hence the cleanse buff).
⁴ for all class reworks i will be looking at improving the stability to condition cleanse, making it a more active version of passive cleanse, as well as more stable passive cleanse. my thought is that passive should follow 2 cleanses every 5 seconds, and actives should cleanse more like full cleanse every 15-30.
⁵I buffed the condition based fire aspects of guardian, giving it a very unique fire/burn role in meta. It got slight buffs in most cases, but all around we should see about 22-23% more damage out of it. (Which will buff it to around 400-500k a game)
⁶Hammer, and great swords got some serious buffs, lots more stability, and significant increases to damage. I have also buffer swords to be a good pair for defensive aspects with it. Thus the general logic of builds should be 2hander + torch/scepter (condit) or sword/shield (Power).
⁷ Lastly i gave healing a slight buff to help it be more competitive to the other support specs, to offer a third option for support combinations to help new meta’s.

I do not agree with removing boons accessibility. I think they should be consolidated into 1 buff however, and have significantly more uptime, but these is a core mechanic rework which i will not include here. For the most part, i want to see classes that are tank oriented, but their soul objective is boon application. I especially hope guardian will be good for this (as i have a build now that i apply 15,000-20,000 boons a game).

New Guardian Design

Virtues: All Virtues now have a 20 Second Cool down.

Talent Tree: Radiance
Roles: Conditions
Preferred Weapon: Scepter
Traits:
Justice is Blind: When Activating Justice, Near by Foes are Blinded. 900 Radius.
Renewed Justice: When Critically Striking a burning target, they become dazed. [10Sec Cd]
Radiant Power: Apply Burning Attacks Every 3 Strikes.

Tier 1:
Inner Fire: Heal for 15% of Burning damage done to enemies.
Fiery Wrath: Every 4 Range Attacks, and Every 2 Melee Attacks Trigger Burning.
Zealous Scepter: 10% More Condition damage, and 10% Burning duration wielding a scepter.

Tier 2
Kindled Zeal: Gain Condition Damage Based On Power. (10%)
Radiant Fire: Gain Zealots Flame on Critical Strike. Torch CD Reduced by 20%.
Retribution: Passive Burning is now always active, even while justice is on cool down.

Tier 3
Amplified Wrath: Burning Damage is Increased by 15%, and Duration is increased by 10%.
Expeditious Spirit: Weapons Apply Burning, Move 50% faster, and have 20% reduced Cool down rate.
Radiant Retaliation: When Critically struck, you gain [2 stacks of] Retaliation. [10 sec CD]

Talent Tree: Virtues
Roles: Boon Application
Preferred Weapon: Staff

Traits:
Inspired Virtues: Boons applied to yourself are also given to near by allies.
Virtue of Retribution: No Change.
Power Of The Virtuous: Boons last 20% Longer, And Virtues recharge is reduced by 5 seconds..

Tier 1
Unscathed Contender: Your boons last 20% Longer.
Healers Retaliation: You Gain Retaliation on a Heal.
Master of consecrations: 20% Reduced Recharge, 5 Second Duration.

Tier 2
Supreme Justice: You and allies gain an application of might and swiftness every 6 seconds.
Absolute resolution: Passive Heal increased by 300, and triggers every 2 seconds. Removes 3 Conditions from you and allies near by.
Honorable Staff: + 10% Power, and cool down of Staff abilities reduced by 20%.

Tier 3
Altruistic Healing: (Directly) Heals for 120 Hp every boon applied to you.
Battle Presence: Resolves passive is improved by 400 HP, and all healing ranges are increased by 300 Range.
Indomitable Courage: [No Change]

Talent Tree: Zeal
Roles: Direct Damage
Preferred Weapon: Great sword or Hammer
Traits:
Zealots Speed: Triggers every 3rd strike with Great Sword or Hammer.
Symbolic Exposure: Applies 10 Stacks of Invulnerability to foes when hit an a symbol ability.
Symbolic Power: 80% Chance when Controlled to Stability Aura.

Tier 1
(Fiery)Ancient Wrath: Damage with Two handed weapons Increased by 15%.
Right Handed Strength: 15% Critical strike with 1 hand weapons, 20% reduction with Sword and 10% Damage with Swords.
Retaliatory Subconscious: Gain Stability & Protection When CC’d. [15 Second CD.]

Tier 2
Wrath of Justice: Striking an enemy with Justice Activates Signet of Wrath.
Zealous Blade: 10% Damage, and heals for 200 HP Every Attack. Reduced CD by 20%.
Glacial Heart: Critical hits with Hammer Stuns Enemies. 20% Reduction to CD.

Tier 3
Permeating Wrath: 50% Chance on Critical Strike to deal 800 Damage.
Symbolic Avenger: 10% More damage Standing in symbols.
Perfect Inscriptions: [No Change]

Talent Tree: Honor
Roles: Healing
Preferred Weapon: Mace + Shield
Traits:
Holy Light: Healing Increased by 20%. Faithful Strike Heal range increased by 300 Yards.
Selfless Daring: End of Your Dodge Roll Heals near by Allies for 165 Hp.
Purity of Body Virtues of Resolve also increases Endurance regeneration by 15%. and vitality by 150.

Tier 1
Invigorated Bulwark: + 10% Healing 20% Cd Reduction for Mace Abilities.
Protective Reviver: 20% Revive Speed, Created a Bubble Absorbing Attacks.
Protectors Impact: When both Shield Abilities are on cool down, a symbol of protection is created.

Tier 2
Pure Of Heart: Aegis Heals 850 When Attacked:
Healing Ward (New): Healing Received is increased by 30% When aegis is active.
Empowering Might: When you critically strike Heal near yourself and near by allies for 450 HP, and gain might.

Tier 3
Pure Voice: Allies Affected By Shouts have Conditions 1 [Per Boon] Converted Into Boons
Writ Of Persistence: Symbols Last Longer, Are [150 radius] Larger And Heal Yourself and Allies for 550 Hp.
Monks Focus: Heal When using a meditation. Meditation CD reduced by 20%. Grants Regeneration to allies.

Talent Tree: Valor
Roles: Protection
Traits:
Valorous Defense: Virtue of Courage Now generates an Aegis every 15 Seconds.
Courageous Return: Virtue of Courage Recharges 20% fast.
Might of the protector: You Gain Might When you block and attack with aegis. + 10% Power.

Tier 1
Strength of the fallen: Cure 2 Conditions every 5 seconds
Smiters Condition: When you heal yourself or an ally, Remove 3 conditions. Deal 500 Damage if no conditions are cleanses or 1100 Damage if conditions are removed.
Focus Mastery: 20% Reduction in CD. Shield of Wrath duration + 5 Seconds. Generate Aegis on using focus ability.

Tier 2
Stalwart Defender: 35% Protection (always active). Shield CD reduced by 20%.
Strength in numbers: Grant 10% damage Reduction to allies, and 200 Toughness.
Communal Defenses: Grant aegis to allies when you block an attack or dodge roll an attack. 5S CD.

Tier 3
Force Of Will: Vitality Increased by 250 and + 500 Toughness
Shattered Aegis: When blocking an attack, return 800 damage and gain stability.
Retributive Armor: When being struck by an enemy, return 300 damage to them.

Talent Tree: Dragon Hunter
Dragon Hunter is in a good position, and will be left unchanged.

Trapping Changes

Trapping in the game has been massively reworked. Trapping will now last 3 minutes, and will be permanently kept at a location. A simple [F key] Usage will reset the traps. Activating a trap after being placed will preposition the trap to your current location. Traps will reset themselves if triggered by an enemy, but have a short [10 seconds] Cool down.

Traps will have significantly more damage, or effects.

Additionally, Traps will no longer be stack-able, and will have a limit of 600 radius from each other. If they traps are in this radius they will trigger, and do a “dud” animation, and will not trigger their effects against hostile enemies.

Weapon Changes

Mace:
Ability 1 : Attack 1,2 will now have ¼ Second Cast time. Light of the faithful [no longer faithful strike] Will now heal all allies with in 600 radius by 450 base healing. This will be a direct cast, and will not require any target to be hit, etc.
Ability 2: cool down reduced to 5 seconds.
Ability 3: Radius increased to 600.

Staff
Ability 1: Range increased to 1200. Now Grants a random Boom every 3rd Attack to near by allies with in 900 radius.
Ability 2: Detonation will now only take 6 seconds instead of 12.
Ability 4: Cast time reduced to 1 second.
Ability 5: Changed to teleport. 1200 Range.

Great Sword
Ability 2: Reduced Cool down to 3 Seconds.
Ability 3: cool down reduced to 10 seconds.
Ability 5: Reduced Cool down to 15 Seconds. Damage increased to 1100 Base.

Hammer
Ability 1: Symbol of protection now has a ¼ second Cast time
Ability 3: Reduced Cd to 8 seconds.
Ability 4: Cool down reduced to 5 seconds.
Ability 5: Duration increased to 10 seconds.

Sword
Ability 2: cool down reduced to 5 seconds
Ability 3: Duration increased to 5 seconds.

Healing Signets
Receive the light. Range of healing spray increased to 900. Initial Heal improved to 5250.
Shelter: Now Blocks yourself and allies for 5 seconds. Cd IS now 30 Seconds.
Litany of Wrath: Initial Heal is now 6500
Signet of Resolve: Now cures 3 conditions every 5 seconds. Healing reduced to 5500. 30 sec CD.

[Major Change] Concentrations have been reworked. Now Called Aura’s. Aura’s will provide boons to allies every few seconds.

Aura of Light: Passive: Regeneration and aegis every 8 seconds.
Aura of Might: Might and fury every 8 seconds.
Aura of Judgment: Quickness and Swiftness every 8 seconds.
Aura of Redemption: protection and Resistence every 8 seconds.

Meditations: cool downs are set to 20 seconds.
Shouts: cool downs set to 15 Seconds.
[Major Change] Spiritual weapons: Removed, Replaced Blessed Weapons.

Holy Hammer: Hits now heal your allies for 150 HP.
Flaming Sword: Hits have a 50% chance deal burning damage
Bow of repentance: Hits have a 50% change to cleanse 2 conditions of allies. 600 radius.
Shield of Protection: Grants Retaliation every 6 seconds.

Ultimate:
Feel my Wrath: Cool down reduced to 10 seconds. Now Activates on a melee critical strike.
Renewed Focus: Virtues are reset. 3 seconds of invulnerability, and removes 10 conditions.
Signet of the courage: Heals allies by 700 every 3 seconds. Activate to heal all allies for 8500 hp. 90 second CD. ¼ Second Cast time. Passive heal is always active.