Guild Wars 2

Rethmar Stokestrike.1927:

Haters gonna hate. I’ve done 100% of the content with that build and it works like a charm. But you guys can go ahead and whine about how broke the class is while flailing around in full berzerk. The sad thing is none of you have even tried anything else, so have fun being bad you cheeky scrubs. 2mlg4u.

You should also see by precision warrior build that requires full knights gear. Never die and do top damage.

And I’ve done 100% of the content in less than half the time it took you with that build.

That aside, screaming ‘L2GUARDIAN’ when people are stating legitimate issues just makes you look like an kitten with nothing to contribute. So please, if you do not have anything constructive to say, then simply don’t say anything at all.

Rethmar Stokestrike.1927:

- Pigeon-holed into mostly support roles. I LOVE melee support paladin style roles and guardian certainly doesn’t fail at support. Unfortunately, GW2’s design favours support the least, to put it lightly. The guardian’s strongest role is the least needed and often mocked by others.
Guardians are supposed to be a support profession. Anyone who uses them for zerk are mentally kittened.
- Zeal is still really bad. It attempts to promote cross-trait synergy but it tries way too hard to the point that it can’t stand on its own.
If you put a majority of your points (or any, for that matter) in Zeal, then please reroll. You suck.
- Zeal seems to focus way too much on spirit weapons. Spirit weapons are also still rubbish so there’s a bunch of wasted traits AND skills.
Please reroll as Warrior. No one loves you.
- ANYTHING to do with condition damage is completely wasted on guardians. Until we get reliable sources of damaging conditions outside of burning.
Conditions are crap, I agree. Go reroll a warrior if you want melee DPS.
- Ironically, there’s a little too much emphasis on damaging conditions in regard to some zeal and radiance traits. Wasted.
Reroll warrior to make things better, you whiny $#^.
- I don’t see how a primarily front-line melee class still has no cripples and barely any other way of slowing foes. Warriors, heck, ANY other class can easily keep pretty much anyone in the intended range of their weapon for a decent amount of time. Conversely, they will all, always run circles around a guardian, regardless of how many teleports people claim we have.
Guardians have an insane amount of survivability if you build one right. If you’re getting rekd in PvP because you wanted to suck on the DPS nipple. Then reroll a warrior.
- Everything that was ever wrong with 1h sword is still there. Sword 2 may as well heal foes. I can talk for pages on my issues with sword. The only other sword skills in the game that don’t have a cripple or leap finisher belong to thief but at least they get immobilise, two teleports and condition removal instead.
Swords are for plebs.
- Almost zero combo finishers outside of GS and hammer.
L2Play.
- Only one ranged option, scepter. Which has no projectile finishers, unreliable pseudo-aoe that looks like a symbol but isn’t and an all too brief immobilise.
L2Staff.
- No stuns. At all.
L2Guardian.
- No dazes outside of Tome of Courage.
L2Guardian.
- Zeal again.
Reroll Warrior.
- Shield skills need love, still. Arguably the most iconic guardian weapon but barely used by any.
L2Tank/Heal build.
- Zero passive increased move speed traits/skills.
L2Retreat.
- Only three sources of swiftness across the entire profession.
L2Retreat.
- Almost no variety in the types of combo fields.
L2Guardian.
- Compared to the other professions, I find guardians traits to be far too stand alone. By that, I mean that outside of radiance 1, 3 , VI, Zeal I, the various the symbol traits and EM + AH, it’s hard to make a build where a lot of the traits play off of each other in meaningful ways. Unlike what I’ve seen on other professions.
L2Guardian.

Meta sux. Go look for a better build. Meta is for plebs and Mezmer/Warrior wannabes. They can all die in a fire.

… Wait. You’re not serious, are you?

EremiteAngel.9765:

also i love the shield because of its looks

AND

against thieves’ shadow refuge, i activate my bubble and they get knocked out!

Yeah, it looks really cool, but you’re honestly just hindering yourself by using it. The nuke from throwing your torch 4 does HUGE damage from range (when it doesn’t bug, at least), especially when paired with the immobilize and vulnerability from scepter 3. Most of the time if you’re crafty enough you can down a thief in his SR with scepter 2 and torch 5 anyway.

Believe me, I really wish guardian shield was worth using, because of how good it looks. But it’s just SO bad.

For a sword and scepter build I’d recommend going 6 into radiance instead of 6 into honor. Also don’t use shield; it’s absolutely terrible and torch is a much better choice for the ranged nuke alongside the scepter immobilize.

If you DO go 6 into radiance, you really don’t need any more than 30% crit chance because RHS and fury from meditations will allow you to crit enough anyway. Once you get to around 30-40% crit chance, start building power and crit dmg with valkyrie gear (pwr/vit/fer) so that you’ll actually be able to hit hard when you crit.

Every change should go into the patch notes, period. No exceptions.

Thaddeus.4891:

The Guardian is in a really good place right now.

Can you not

You should probably consider changing out Superior Aria, seeing as you don’t have a single shout on your utility bar.

Rothem.8174:

WvW ranger > guardian in terms of fun and utility. Ranged dps > melee in zerg v zerg, and guardian’s ranged attacks are sorely lacking.

Guardian is actually arguably the most highly desired class in WvW zerg warfare. When you have such large numbers it becomes less about how much DPS you do and more about how well you can spread it out. And nothing beats guardian staff in terms of dealing area damage.

Harbinger.8637:

It seems like the never really listen to the community for the most part. There has always been great feedback in this section, however Anet always does some weird changes. For example, making Renewed Focus a Meditation. I don’t think I ever heard anyone ask for that, I’m not going to complain about a buff, but it really doesn’t fix the issues med guard has. It took them two years to finally reduce the CD on Retreat, and that has been something that’s been asked since release.

Yeah, that’s kind of how I felt about the RF change. I mean, it’s awesome, but it didn’t really fix any of the glaring issues that the class still DOES face.

I feel like the nearly unanimous placement of guardian shield at the top of the list should speak for itself.

Anet pls

I’d say a reduction in the delay duration would be fair, but instant is too much IMO.

Sandrox.9524:

Black Box.9312:

Sandrox.9524:

I didnt resorted to any attack,as I didnt stated anything,I just said all the possible reasons to comment like you did.Saying that I called you stupid,is what you interpret from that.

You said this:

This comment could happen for one of these reasons:
1.This user is completely ret_rd
2.This user have diffculty reading English.
3.This user maybe have a user,but never played the game.
4.This user simply a bad troll.
5.This user have 8 characters level 80,all rangers.

Maybe all,but that is very rare.

That has zero informative value. If you honestly think that that is a logical argument and not a string of insults, then I fear you’re even worse off than I thought.

I agree that it has zero informative value,but it is very very very very logical argument,cause your comment was so narrow minded,there are worse things that could be said about it and there are nicer things,I chose this comment cause this is how I feel it should be.If you gonna be so kitten over this,by all means.I dont really care.All I know that my comment was standard.

I said that if you can’t see your enemy, then your enemy can’t see you. The exception to this rule is if they are simply out of your field of view (i.e. behind you), in which case you are at fault for not covering your six. There’s nothing narrow minded about it; it’s just very, very simple physics.

Geez, does anyone actually read anymore?

Dirame.8521:

Black Box.9312:

vincecontix.1264:

Black Box.9312:

Full condi guardian. Er, I mean- Anet is advocating for it, so it must be a real thing, right?

Condi guards are actually quite scary I’d rather vs a medi guard.

mango.9267:

Black Box.9312:

Full condi guardian. Er, I mean- Anet is advocating for it, so it must be a real thing, right?

Carrion guards are actually a legitimate threat. The burns they dish out are insane, on top of the solid power damage they have.

Hybrid guard =/= full condi guard. The only DPS condition a guardian has is burning, and any build that has decent active cleansing can render it near useless.

/Sigh. If you haven’t played against the build or played the build, you won’t know. Even Eles can find condi guards hard to deal with.

I theorycrafted builds for it as soon as Amplified Wrath was announced as a trait. I know it plenty well enough to know that successful implementations of it are in hybrid builds, not pure condition builds.

Sandrox.9524:

I didnt resorted to any attack,as I didnt stated anything,I just said all the possible reasons to comment like you did.Saying that I called you stupid,is what you interpret from that.

You said this:

This comment could happen for one of these reasons:
1.This user is completely ret_rd
2.This user have diffculty reading English.
3.This user maybe have a user,but never played the game.
4.This user simply a bad troll.
5.This user have 8 characters level 80,all rangers.

Maybe all,but that is very rare.

That has zero informative value. If you honestly think that that is a logical argument and not a string of insults, then I fear you’re even worse off than I thought.

vincecontix.1264:

Black Box.9312:

Full condi guardian. Er, I mean- Anet is advocating for it, so it must be a real thing, right?

Condi guards are actually quite scary I’d rather vs a medi guard.

mango.9267:

Black Box.9312:

Full condi guardian. Er, I mean- Anet is advocating for it, so it must be a real thing, right?

Carrion guards are actually a legitimate threat. The burns they dish out are insane, on top of the solid power damage they have.

Hybrid guard =/= full condi guard. The only DPS condition a guardian has is burning, and any build that has decent active cleansing can render it near useless.

These things have been reiterated a thousand times. As much as I’d love to see it, I don’t think there are any plans in the near future for it.

And while we’re at it, can we make flashing blade do some not-so-pitiful damage please? With such a blatant aftercast animation it’d be nice to be able to get some immediate damage on the target before they inevitably dash away again.

Booms.2594:

Keksmuffin.1450:

Black Box.9312:

Keksmuffin.1450:

If you’re playing with 1hsword it’s a different story since RHS and powerful blades make the damage difference between honor and radiance pretty big. But then we’re talking about gimmicky 1 shot builds without much sustain or utility again. We’re kind of moving in circles here.

Wait what? Sword provides the highest sustained DPS of any of the guardian’s weapons (barring scepter if every hit of smite lands, but that’s pretty much a no-go). It’s much less of a 1 trick pony gimmick than GS is, which is why I don’t recommend GS for small scale WvW roaming.

I’m not talking about sword being a gimmicky 1 shot weapon, I’m talking about 2/6/6/0/0 or 2/5/6/x/x with sword traits.

GS has something you could call an actual burst (scepter imob -> WW, binding blade + JI -> WW) while sword is basicly just gapclose auto auto auto, gapclose auto auto auto. Zealots defense isn’t really a big difference to autoattack. Also sword cleave is really awkward and it has no aoe at all which makes it worse in pretty much everything that isn’t 1v1. If you’re not going super yolo 6 radiance I really don’t see a point in running sword.

us sword mains know how to cleave using sword with correct targetting and placement but yeah GS is still better due to the symbol and WW being faster than autos

GS is just too easy to avoid IMO. It’s good for point control but in WvW people will just dodge away from the burst.

Sandrox.9524:

Bryzy.2719:

That was incredibly unnecessary and basically offensive. You could have just put forth your counter argument without resorting to ad hominem. You represent the more cancerous vein of the GW2 community.

Actually,it wasnt so offensive,and the people who represent the “more cancerous vein of gw2” is the ones which invented this term.Learn to accept critque,it is not like I offended on ethic level or on somthing personal.

You resorted to attacks on my intelligence. That’s incredibly personal and completely irrelevant to critique.

oRx.9584:

Hi guys!

Im oRx and I recently decided to roll a Guardian. I only play PvP and WvW, no other game content so I’m only interested in these aspects.

The reason I rolled a Guardian is because I want a heavy class, and Warriors seem too plain for my taste.

However, I encountered trouble as soon as I finished my introduction story.

Namely, I realised Guardians aren’t much of a solo profession, but much more a team one. Now me, I prefer solo play; to be self preservative.

So what I need is some tips on how to adjust my guardian accordingly, as I’ve really no clue.

Here’s what I mainly want to achieve:
1. Be able to 1v1 efficiently – I can fight on my own then, without the need of a team, and without wasting traits to compliment the team, since I don’t have one.

2. Dish out nice damage – Again, I prefer to dish out more damage and sacrifice a little bit of survivability than the other way around. I want to be on the offense mainly.

3. I want to use two handed weapons as much as possible (staff, greatsword, hammer) as I really prefer these to any other, but this isn’t that necessary.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards, oRx.

Try running a meditation build. While generally sword and scepter rule out hammer for offensive builds, you could probably find a GS/hammer variant that you could be successful with.

Keksmuffin.1450:

If you’re playing with 1hsword it’s a different story since RHS and powerful blades make the damage difference between honor and radiance pretty big. But then we’re talking about gimmicky 1 shot builds without much sustain or utility again. We’re kind of moving in circles here.

Wait what? Sword provides the highest sustained DPS of any of the guardian’s weapons (barring scepter if every hit of smite lands, but that’s pretty much a no-go). It’s much less of a 1 trick pony gimmick than GS is, which is why I don’t recommend GS for small scale WvW roaming.

Keksmuffin.1450:

Radiance gives you nothing but damage. Honor gives you sustain, more utility with the cooldown reduction (and maybe resolute healer if you roam with a friend or smth) and still a decent ammount of damage from elusive power.

Going into traitlines to get nothing but damage is something you can do with PvE builds or with gimmicky 1 shot builds but in every decent PvPish build you can’t just stack damage multipliers. The stuff you get in honor is definetly stronger in actual fights, 1v1s and stuff. The only time I would agree on radiance being better would be fighting NPCs.

But what sort of utility does honor even provide for a meditation build? Your utility comes from meditations and valor; other than the vigor on crit at a whole 1 point there’s nothing valuable enough in honor to make a significant impact on the build, so you’re basically trading out less damage for hardly any sort of gain at all.

GS and S/F are good for small scale meditation builds, but shield is still just as bad as ever (or worse, technically, after the ‘bug fix’).

Saturn.6591:

Black Box.9312:

Greatsword is really bad damage in solo WvW roaming. It only deals damage if you have someone to keep the enemy in place. Also the blind, vuln, and extra 10% dmg to condition-afflicted enemies all in Radiance far outweighs the cooldown reduction.

That’s right, although I’ve heard people use Judge’s Intervention as soon as they start Whirling Wrath. Also, you can pull people with GS 5 and then use it. Or you can close the distance with the teleport on sword and then weapon swap for chill (if you use a Sigil of Hydromancy on GS) and then use Whirling Wrath. Mind you, I’ve not been able to test all this myself yet, but those are the general strategies I’ve read about. And they seem to work quite well for those players.

You can do those things, but it’s all very situational. Even with Binding Blade, the enemy will still have ample time to open a gap that will avoid most of the damage of GS.

Corvette.5687:

Any guardians that is not in meta always interest me.

It’s just a variation of medi guard. Hardly non-meta.

Desvio.9026:

Black Box.9312:

You’re better off going in radiance over honor and trading the zerker pieces in for valk IMO. Radiance provides much more to DPS-oriented builds like a meditation guard, especially one that runs with sword.

Most damage come from greatsword.. so i think the 20% reduce in CD is a good choice

Greatsword is really bad damage in solo WvW roaming. It only deals damage if you have someone to keep the enemy in place. Also the blind, vuln, and extra 10% dmg to condition-afflicted enemies all in Radiance far outweighs the cooldown reduction.

Full condi guardian. Er, I mean- Anet is advocating for it, so it must be a real thing, right?

Sandrox.9524:

Black Box.9312:

Sandrox.9524:

but when the ranger is not in your LOS you pretty much screwed.

When the ranger is not in your LoS, then that means that their rapid fire will be obstructed.

Argument dismissed.

This comment could happen for one of these reasons:
1.This user is completely ret_rd
2.This user have diffculty reading English.
3.This user maybe have a user,but never played the game.
4.This user simply a bad troll.
5.This user have 8 characters level 80,all rangers.

Maybe all,but that is very rare.

lol? I prefer not to argue with ad hominem, so I guess I’ll just be on my way.

Carighan.6758:

Black Box.9312:

It really shouldn’t be asking too much to assume that a player will take the time to learn the game to be successful at it.

Most do.
Then they move from -10 to the -9 to 0 territory. They’re still far far far away from the top end. And for virtually all of them, they’ll never get there. For various reasons, lack of time, lack of physical ability, lack of mental acuity and most importantly, lack of drive. They don’t play these games to be a superb sPvPer at pro-gaming level.

That’s the playerbase you’re making the game for. You’re not creating a game for the 4 tPvP teams meeting in some event, you’re creating it for the average couple who gets home from work, hops on, gets on a voicecomm server and does Tequatl, maybe a dungeon, maybe some open world, maybe some WvW, maybe some sPvP, while chatting with guildies. Or doing it in chat, actually (part of why a too fast-paced game is bad for your sales, too).

The two aren’t mutually exclusive. As a Dota 2 player, I find the game to be pretty nicely balanced as a whole, even though I have no chance of ever playing it at a professional level. Yeah, there are pub stomp heroes, but they only do well if they’re fed, which all comes down to players making mistakes, and not a fault in the game. A pub stomper will always lose to a team that knows how to play against one.

With this game, since things are balanced around the casual player, there’s no reason to play a difficult build if you can be just as successful with much less effort while running an easy build. The idea behind balancing around the competitive scene isn’t to make things too difficult for a casual player to be able to pick up; it’s about rewarding skill, strategy, and practice so that time spent improving yourself can pay off. It’s definitely possible to achieve this with a game that can be easy to learn, but difficult to master.

Pregnantman.8259:

Hammer is quite strong even with its slow nature and shield already has one CC – few or none of the off hands I know have CC in both skills.

Engineer shield.

Sandrox.9524:

but when the ranger is not in your LOS you pretty much screwed.

When the ranger is not in your LoS, then that means that their rapid fire will be obstructed.

Argument dismissed.

Carighan.6758:

Black Box.9312:

Obviously you don’t balance around the bad players that don’t know the game.

Yeah, this assumption is popular among players. It has a few key upsides, as it allows the following observations when you start from this assumption:

• “It’s no wonder the balance is so bad, the devs aren’t focusing on the highest-end players enough.”
• “I’m really good at this game. The game should be balanced for me, and balance should be made for the best, hence I am one of the best.”
• “Balance is easy to judge. As the highest-end players only play game mode X, and only in format Y, there’s no variance and all can be judged easily.”
• “You just have to look at the team compositions of the last tournament, was painfully obvious who is OP and who is UP.”

Only problem is: That’s how you get your company bankrupt, not how you balance your game.

What you actually want to do (speaking from work experience here, sorry :P ) is balance the game for your target audience.
If you make a game for a pro-gamer audience (say you’re making SC2 or DotA2), then you want to be in constant contact with your pro-gaming audience (since they’re small) and keep making adjustments based on their input.
On the other hand, if you’re making a game for a very broad-spectrum audience like Call of Duty or well, Guild Wars 2, then you need to actively develop for the non-perfect knowledge and skill of your target playerbase.

After all, a game not optimized for its intended user is bad either way. And no, “baddies” can’t just become “pros” randomly. Well they might, but long after you closed down the company after they all left out of frustration.

It also adds in GW2 terms that the people who play a lot and who optimize a lot are the ones who buy their gems for gold. Good to balance the ingame economy, but not as lucrative as the active but average players who more readily pay in cash. In a game like GW2 whales are of limited use (due to the offerings of the AH), so you need to keep your paying majority happy.

It really shouldn’t be asking too much to assume that a player will take the time to learn the game to be successful at it. If your game is balanced so that a low skill player can be just as successful as a high skill player, then there is no incentive to improve and people will resort to the easiest methods possible, because learning more difficult builds won’t be worthwhile when you can do just as well with much less effort.

Just take a look at small-scale WvW roaming battles. Condi PU mesmer and dire p/d thief builds are rampant because they can be incredibly successful with minimal effort. There’s just no reason to get invested into a game enough to work towards getting good at it when the skill ceiling is 6 inches from the floor.

coglin.1867:

They do. They play it to.

Which people are we talking about? the same people who have made a thread for nearly every weapon skill, heal, utility, and elite, in which at some point or another, have deemed, and demanded, everything in this game “ridiculously OP” at some point or another?

No thanks. I will take the current team over the community for balance any day of the week.

Obviously you don’t balance around the bad players that don’t know the game. You balance based on the knowledge of the interaction between classes during fights. The easiest way to obtain this knowledge in practical form is to observe high-skill play and listen to feedback from these players who know the game.

From what I’ve seen of Anet, they have not played their game enough to know it. Otherwise we would not be seeing condi mesmers in dungeon livestreams.

You’re better off going in radiance over honor and trading the zerker pieces in for valk IMO. Radiance provides much more to DPS-oriented builds like a meditation guard, especially one that runs with sword.

Kako.1930:

Power Ranger vs. Mesmer

I dominate power rangers with my CI mesmer build, so I’m not quite sure where you’re getting this from.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

sinject.4607:

that being said, perplexity is a rune set that has been in the game for a long time now, so the usual reason you see gear not available in sPvP just doesn’t apply. in fact, I believe the devs have even publicly rejected the idea of including perplexity runes in sPvP when it was suggested.

Wrong. The Devs did want to add Perplexity to PvP. They felt it was balanced for the game mode.

However, the announcement drew tons of hate from players, and they decided against it. Keep in mind that they were to be added in the same patch that all of the runes got revamped, so players made that decision without context or experience.

Yes, because it’s quite clear that the devs know so much more about balance in this game than the people who have experience playing through it.

Prodiax.8645:

Norjena.5172:

Probably he can´t?

Well….i can see a giant "bugfix"hammer over Lupi….probably destroying this games only funny boss with uniqe animations and phases.

@Topic, gear/build and all doesn´t rly matter (zerker/assasines, perfect runes/sigils), wall on wall kills the boss. Even if u´re soloing it…

I can solo it on my warrior.
I’m trying to help my guild mates. They are all new to arah. I taught them how to dodge the grub and they got phase 1 down. but they can’t do the other phase, so I wanted to know the gears i need to one shot lupi.

Your guildmates are not going to learn how to do arah if you use exploitative mechanics to hold their hands through it.

Why not just fight lupi normally?

Super Wilson.7408:

If they remove perplexity runes, the mass exodus of neck beards from the game would be too great to recoups from. AMIRITE?!!!

WILSON!!! <3

Anyway yeah I agree. It’s too late to remove them entirely, so they really should just nerf plex runes into the ground so that nobody will want to use them anymore.

The charrdian hate in this thread makes me sad.

sinject.4607:

Black Box.9312:

Ah yes, the classic “you guys are all dumb and haven’t made any valid points” defense.

but it’s true. if it wasn’t, you would be able to quote someone’s post in this thread proving me wrong.

Unfortunately, the burden of proof is currently on you and not me, my friend.

Don’t make a stupid title, and you won’t get stupid responses.

Ah yes, the classic “you guys are all dumb and haven’t made any valid points” defense.

insaneseagull.7063:

Block on fellow shield user

It’s ironic because guardian shield doesn’t block! Ba dum tsh

Carighan.6758:

Black Box.9312:

I wish it was possible to deal the full damage without literally being inside the hitbox of your target.

That makes no sense though. As projectiles visibly fly in all directions, obviously some won’t hit the target unless you’re inside of them.

Exactly. That’s the problem. The skill should be reworked so that it can deal the full damage from any point in melee range. The current iteration is simply poor design.

I’ve leveled 3 total, but I deleted the first one, so I have 2 left. An asura and a charr.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Black Box.9312:

I wish it was possible to deal the full damage without literally being inside the hitbox of your target.

hmmm indeed, for a ranged skill with a range of 600, we actually need to be within melee range in order to deal full damage.

i have not tried whirling wrath in a fire field before, does it shoot out x1 burning bolt as well?

No I’m referring to the fact that even in melee range, you still aren’t hitting the target for the full damage unless you are stacked on top of the enemy’kittenbox.

EDIT: kitten this censor is ridiculous. I’m sure you can gather what I have typed.

I wish it was possible to deal the full damage without literally being inside the hitbox of your target.

There was never a point in having Kindled Zeal.

Okay I’m sorry, but I just can’t ignore the fact that you’d be better off with something that isn’t shield. There just isn’t any adequate justification for such a terrible weapon.