Guild Wars 2

I posted similar ideas about removing “dps” from the equation and providing more utility in an equalized damage style of gameplay.

My ideas were inspired by the skill videos that were doctored up by the PR department, but I still saw more interesting ideas there than the stat/gear fest that we have now that seems to be lopsided to certain setups.

On a side note, I was playing Kingdom Hearts recently and I thought….omg this has it. While rudimentary and not MMO/Group oriented, it has action combat, gear upgrades, and “build diversity” (I use that lightly, but I mean how you can pick skills to change your combat some).

The damage doesn’t matter as much as “landing a hit”.

Posted these on the guard forums, but wanted to vet it through some more experienced s/tpvp players versus the feedback I might get over there. All of them are pretty much the same build, but with slight changes and tweeks that I did trying to implement feedback I got from others.

Blind Zeal
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;4JET4-16-5;009B;4UZl6;2KJG4KJG45Br

• What I started with, runs well, good damage and ability to stick to a target. Use shelter and RF to avoid burst and spread out meditations to save them when you burst back. Also you can utilize virtue of justice to get blind stomps and it refreshes for the next kill. Or you can use VoJ defensively as an aoe blind while fighting.

2H Zeal
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;4J-TJ-16;209B58;2UZl6;2KJG4KJG45Bi

• An attempt to put more pressure through cooldowns, was able to take down some bunkers due to quick refresh on WW, plays the same as the above build, Blind Zeal.

Balanced Mediations
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;49ET941;05;009B5;3UZl6;2KJG4KJG45Bo

• Taking Carpboy’s suggestions into mind, picked up 5 into virtues to provide more utility on activation. VoJ provides might for burst and VoC provides protection to get in the thick of things. VoJ still refreshes on stomps.

Daring Virtues
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;4J-TE416;209B5;3UZl6;2KJG4KJG45Bj

• Dropping radiance out of the tree provides a little more survival in the same tune as the balanced virtues, but you lose the blind utility from VoJ. More passive healing provided with Pure of Heart, Selfless Daring, and Zealous Blade (I know..only 25…. but it’s bonus with the 5% extra damage) to help bridge gap between meditation uses.

I have run all of the above builds all day today and they ran decently well without dropping over dead. Although that might be due to hotjoins and me just playing all day and being in the zone today.

Trying to make lemonade out of the lemons I felt this patch was for guardians. Feedback is great

Well I have been running a few variations all day with fairly good success in hot joins….but that does not mean much in tpvp or wvw.

Still, there is some merit to them and more tweeking might help. I urge those interested to try out some of these. The offhand sigil on focus is optional, anything you like could go there honestly. I went with might on crit to balance out the gs might on auto with sword procing might on auto as well.

Blind Zeal
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;4JET4-16-5;009B;4UZl6;2KJG4KJG45Br

• What I started with, runs well, good damage and ability to stick to a target. Use shelter and RF to avoid burst and spread out meditations to save them when you burst back. Also you can utilize virtue of justice to get blind stomps and it refreshes for the next kill. Or you can use VoJ defensively as an aoe blind while fighting.

2H Zeal
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;4J-TJ-16;209B58;2UZl6;2KJG4KJG45Bi

• An attempt to put more pressure through cooldowns, was able to take down some bunkers due to quick refresh on WW, plays the same as the above build, Blind Zeal.

Balanced Mediations
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;49ET941;05;009B5;3UZl6;2KJG4KJG45Bo

• Taking Carpboy’s suggestions into mind, picked up 5 into virtues to provide more utility on activation. VoJ provides might for burst and VoC provides protection to get in the thick of things. VoJ still refreshes on stomps.

Daring Virtues
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;4J-TE416;209B5;3UZl6;2KJG4KJG45Bj

• Dropping radiance out of the tree provides a little more survival in the same tune as the balanced virtues, but you lose the blind utility from VoJ. More passive healing provided with Pure of Heart, Selfless Daring, and Zealous Blade (I know..only 25…. but it’s bonus with the 5% extra damage) to help bridge gap between meditation uses.

Again all of these ran well, I survived while keeping pressure up. They of course can use more battle testing in rated tournaments if anyone dares step out of bunker or some wvw if you want to gear it up.

Trying to keep positive and make lemonade out of what I felt was a lemon of a patch, but feedback is welcome!

edit: bonus info, didn’t realize that greatsword auto chain gives might “per” enemy struck up to 5. That is pretty nice in a cluster….hi, welcome to a year later and I look more closely at my skills

while it does sort of end up that way, I would like to hope that it isn’t just “these two are pvp trait lines, the other two are pve trait lines, and then the 5th trait line is flavor”.

You would hope that all traits are different and applicable in all areas.

Like, I’m gonna build hammer, let me pick these traits that emphasize that play style.

Ok now I’m gonna go mace, wow I can synergize with maces self healing and high damage.

Right now it does not really revolutionize the synergy with weapons as much as it did with gw1 style builds…but its a different game. I duno…

I’m still not all the way sold on scholar runes in pvp, as you can’t maintain the health percentage as easily in pve.

I see it a lot though.

I am keeping the 20 in zeal…for now, trying to push more for damage, and the gs is the primary source of that with the set up, with teleports and leaps you can maintain some decent pressure and land it more often than not.

If I were to drop out of zeal, there isn’t anything really amazing calling out, besides maybe more condi cleanse in virtues, but I don’t think that is mandatory with the full condi drops with runes and meditations.

Still worth a thought.

I like the idea of energy for sure, as there are a lot of swaps at the moment as I play to maintain blinds. I definitely can drop the fury on burn for vuln on blinds so will test those out right now.

battle? meh maybe on off hand, meager but its there.

the bread and butter of guardians “is” support.

Might/stability/retaliation/condi cleanse is what we do best I think most would say.

well with the insta med nature you “can” cleanse fear…but not reliable, so I see what you mean. Will try it out.

Mostly it was the additional burst aspect.

So been testing various and random builds to see what we can pull off in terms of damage.

Went back to this one, which is actually one of the older builds from release but revamped a bit to deal with conditions more with lyssa runes

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;4JET4-16-3;009B;45RV0;2KJG4KJG45BJ

ye/nae? Seemed to run fairly decently with blinds for defense, crits provide vigor, and then mobility with leaps/teleports, all the while maintaining about 50-70 crit chance.

How would you guys develop the build to be even better, as I’m admittedly more of a theory-crafter and less application.

I know jax has a good list of builds for pvp, and he is updating it sometime this week/next week for the recent changes, but I got a couple questions on what I thought the new meta was for dps.

I didn’t really have a perfect answer as I am testing things out myself.

In trying to answer the question I went full dps 10/30/30/0/0 just to see where we were at with the meditation/fury set up. Was ok but really squishy as expected.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7FcBl;0NFk30G3wF-90;9;49TT;01;039A09B;45JV04;1sF04JF045ZM

After that I worked backwards to gain some balance and ended up with 20/15/30/5, and surprisingly I felt sustainable while maintaining damage

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;4JET4-16-3;009B;45RV0;2KJG4KJG45BJ

I am not really sold on sword though, as I don’t feel it is “bursty” enough since you end up stationary a lot and it misses, then all you have is auto attack. Mace is a good choice but relies on them hitting you back. Scepter is ok, but again easy to run out of.

I went with sword just for mobility and defensive blinds, and not really damage, but it works well enough.

So back to the point: how would you as the community mold this build? Or is it good where it stands?

small change, picked up energy runes for more survival, unsure of a “good” offhand rune still, so just picked up might on crit.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7Fcg;1NFk30G3wF-90;9;4JET4-16-3;009B;4UZl6;2KJG4KJG45Bt

hype, you need to use examples of what he did, and not just say “he insta KOed me”. Because that tells nothing.

What weapons did the guard do, were they using meditations or shouts, did they have spirit weapons? Were there high crits or was it, god forbid, burn damage?

What you just did is propagate the random and unwarranted hate for guardians by just saying “they are op and they kill people so easy and survive so great!” with no real merit.

no, as much as you might see me post about areas that I think we need improvement, I still believe that guardians are still in a good place.

Other professions may have been over buffed and are slowly being brought back down, but guardians are still effective and do the same things they always have.

That in itself is my problem, we have not changed and remained stagnant, but that means we can still do the things we have done from the start.

It is not the end of the world yet :p

not the point of the thread, but. Been taking a break the last month, came back for this patch to see how things are.

Been going through various builds in some hot joins. Symbol builds, power builds, condition builds, meditation builds….. of course the one I had the most success with was the bunker build.

Oddly enough I had some decent returns with spirit weapons+bane signet. Single target CCs and lots of burst /shrug go figure!

I hate on spirit weapons so much and they work best for me besides bunker :p

that’s good and bad to hear brutaly

Well, sad to hear so far. Was hoping I would be wrong with with the hype pre patch and things would be different.

Have the changes of meditation revolutionized your gameplay any? Did it help? Lets hear some success stories!

Or is it minor and did not have any real impact to the class?

Here is the thread I think we are all talking about

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Fix-most-broken-autoattack-in-game/first

JonPeters.5630:

I’ll take a look at how it compares to Necro staff auto. I will say that when this does hit it is the highest DPS #1 skill in the game. We wanted it to feel this powerful but difficult to land but the effect may be too exaggerated. I’ll play some PvE and PvP scepter Guardian later today.

Jon

JonPeters.5630:

Ok Necro staff is 22% faster than this skill. I think we just missed upping this when we did our pass to up projectile velocity on skills that were absolutely too sluggish. That being said it looks like you can fire one of these orbs every .8 seconds whereas Necro staff fire rate is 1.3 seconds. Grasp does pass through targets in a line so I feel that differential is fairly warranted. I can’t promise when this is going to be fixed, but I can say I WILL fix it.

JonPeters.5630:

Fudge.9527:

I’m guessing he meant ranged auto. Glad this is getting looked at, I enjoy scepter but it’s weak atm

Yes ranged auto. Sorry.

So that is what was said about 6 months ago…

Yeah I remember that statement, caused a stir at the time. But I also remember that same thread that people recorded how easy it was to outrun your own orbs and easily strafed by wiggle strafing left right to throw off targeting.

Meaning in a mobile fight with swiftness, your orbs will “never” hit as they run away from you.

In response to that they said that it it will see improvements, in a vague sort of way.

I’ll try to dig up the post in a sec, as this is all memory and I may be off.

Lol, this conversation inspired me to go back and look at the guardian traits and weapons.

Ran across the description of scepter orb of wrath “Fires a slow-moving orb at your foe.”

That made me cry a little on the inside, it was purposefully made to be easy to avoid.

I haven’t logged in for the last month though, so I know the tooltips have been updated. Wonder if it still says “slow moving”.

I do see your point that gs and sword can be redundant, and sword does not bring a whole lot to the table that can’t be augmented by other weapons.

I think the reason why a lot of people like that combination is the readily available gap closer when we are admittedly easy to kite.

Also, the layer of blinds help survival to a degree as well. So sword/gs is still useful, but maybe not optimal in terms of damage?

Your point of pulling away from radiance and 1h strength is a valid one, and will allow for more freedom of stat distribution, and zeal already has gs as well as scepter, so it is a logical choice.

Still, there are problems with scepter, and most find zeal lackluster in terms of effectiveness versus traiting into other trees. Hence the disagreements.

Just kind of devil’s advocate is all.

:( we need to evolve this conversation past name calling and arguments and be more constructive.

I really appreciate stunningstyles and he has been getting a ton of attention lately, especially with being highlighted in recent tournies, but I do not really consider him a “dps” build.

He is more of a team fight build oriented on support (not bunkering). His whirling wraths do something like 2k damage, that is like 200 damage a hit. Not really huge bursty dps per say.

His build is great because of the group condition cleanses, stability, and retaliation. As is mentioned earlier in the strengths of a guardian. Additionally he uses staff to help his team fights win with extra might.

Some links to his videos:

build video (in comments):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP4b-zaMCJo&feature=c4-overview&list=UUTR1RaHwL3UEx4DB6SzoiBQ

tpvp break down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvKXjyI5ODY

He may have changed the build up a bit, but this is what he used when he came on the scene about 3 or so months ago.

You build is doing a potential of 1725 damage on a target with 2000 armor about 58% of the time (fury included) while auto attacking with orb.

I do not feel orb auto attack is that amazing, Smite has tons of potential but some flaws in the “bolt” type system that misses targets, and easy to run out of.

Immobilize will help set up some of that burst with smite, but fairly long cooldown for a fight that relies on get it dead or I’m in trouble.

Guardians do not really have the same kind of burst that I feel they need, not that I think they are worthless, just I see a lot of potential that isn’t there just yet.

Factoring in full bloodlust stacks, you can do 1929 damage, for the sake of clarifying your previous statement of 2k damage on squishies.

Also, I feel your larger symbols could be something else. Your only symbol is on the greatsword, and when you drop to 25% life.

Maybe put it in justice is blind for a blind stop or more survival or in inspired virtues for some on demand might/regen/protection? That or some other trait in honor.

Here is your 2k damage on squishies setup with scepter.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQFAbEBhTEWPAAA8X1j4pPAcVgiA-TkAg0CnIQShkDJDSSksINKA

If you land a crit, and the target is burning with about 2000 armor, you have the potential to hit for 2079 damage about 51% of the time.

Scepter base damage, 939
33% crit damage bonus (183% crit damage with base included)
10% from burning
10% from condition on target

939 * 1.83 * 1.1 * 1.1 = 2079.2277

Now, experienced guardians, morph that build into something that can actually be effective and survive to do that damage and we can talk.

taking your point on stacking damage in zeal and dropping out of radiance

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQFAbEBhTEWFAQ1j4pPAc9giRshA-TkAg0CnIQShkDJDSSksINKA

same damage, but varying crit chance.

with fury up you have a 62% chance to crit, without you have 42% chance. (had to take toughness to precision trait, so meditations are a little slower, can swap that out and drop crit down a little lower to 39% and 59% without/with fury).

Great, it looks the same, with now some fluctuating crit chance. We did gain some survival on meditations heal though.

So again, time will tell. I’m not saying the fury/meditation change isn’t nice, but I am not sure yet if it is what the guardians were needing as a fix.

MrBig, do you even play a guardian?

You should try it out before making a lot of claims. I avoid making claims about other classes unless I have first hand experience with them. Otherwise I am just blowing hot air with no real substance.

The scepter immobilize is called chains of light (not ethereal chains), smite splits damage between multiple targets within it, and does not land all 15 hits, making the effective damage of it much lower, and the auto attack orb of wrath can be outrun and strafed, making it easily avoided.

the BEST reason to bring scepter is for team play honestly. Immobilizing a target for your team mates to set up burst can be devastating.

We have videos of people out running their own orb of light because of how slow it is.
There was a post by devs months ago saying they would look into it and agreed that orb of light was broken, but there hasn’t been a fix, even with other professions getting projectile speed increases.

The fury on meditations was not really an amazing fix for guardians. If you are going down meditations anyway, a lot of guards build into radiance and use 1h weapons, which gives 15% extra crit chance along with the 14% that you already had for going down the precision tree. Put on your choice of damage gear, which typically gets your crit to 50-65%+ along with that 15% for 1h weapons, now you are at a potential 80%.

If anything the fury change may allow guards to build away from precision, but I don’t think it is enough still…..time will tell though, and we will see what happens to the meta, but that is my analysis.

The warrior regen/condition builds I have seen need healing power to a degree, and building with settler or apothecary worked well for them.

Bunker guardians survive purely on healing power and the ability to sustain the small HP pool that they have via self heals.

I have never played it, but people said rangers could use condi/heal pow/xxx type armor and enjoy it well.

Elementalists are supposed to have great healing via water abilities are supposedly are the “best” healers in the game.

So yes, healing power is valuable. No I don’t think it is worthless. Yes I think it needs a revamp so it does not pigeon hole people so much into one stat that makes them ineffective in terms such as damage.

Hammer is great in terms of letting guardians build for dps and still maintaining a degree of survival.

Only problem is that scenario works best in PvE because of the mostly stationary fights and predictable attacks.

WvW zergs it works decently enough in, because you are not being focused per say and can swing around with less punishment.

s/tpvp it starts to be harder to pull off the same level of survival because of the mobile fights, protection not being up due to moving a lot, and the interrupt in auto chain (that gives protection) due to utilizing the other abilities on hammer for CC (which are also slow and easy to avoid).

Hammer is so weird, it has so much CC on it, that never gets used in PvE, yet its strength of letting us build for damage and maintaining survival is ineffective in PvP.

30s icd for 5s chill (I forget duration but it is short). Not reliable, and hammer attacks are fairly slow in relation to that chill. Hammer is consistent slow high damage, not burst that the short chill would provide.

You could do a weapon swap to GS or something else to get out quick burst, but long gaps between chills and randomness is meh.

Also if you meant Zealot’s Embrace, it travels in a straight line and is highly ineffective at a distance as targets can just strafe out of the way. Maybe add tracking to it, or increase travel speed.

ring of warding is nice, but easy to get out of with stability or just before the guard even drops it if you are already running out of the area.

last cc is banish, and again this one is nice, but someone pointed out single target long distance knock back is troll ability, ae close range knock down is CC. Guardians have a lot of single target focus it seems, and maybe that is part of the problem.

In PvE, healing power may be pointless, but what about PvP? Consider more than just one section of the game.

Harbinger.8637:

I’d love to see more soft CCs or just CCs on Guard, but there’s a reason why Anet has been so reluctant to this idea. It would be straight up broken if they don’t implement it right.

I agree, I don’t think they know how to “fix” guardians without making them more broken.

Unless there is a complete revamp to how they work, anything they do has potential to go wrong, like those necro, ranger, warrior changes they made a few months back :p

Mathias.9657:

Apparently ‘top level’ guardians are weaker.

That can be looked at a few ways.

Top level guardians are against top level players, who know the weakness of guardians better than low level player, thus making it feel like at the top level you die more than you did at a low level.

or

Top level guardians have abilities that work well to a certain skill cap, but then they find it difficult to push higher, while other classes can continue to grow.

I really feel guardians get the “paladin hate” that somehow derived from D&D, through any MMO ever made. Everyone thinks that they are so overpowered and can do anything without a real thought to a degree of prejudice.

That said, guardians have a very stable mechanic (bunkering) but it requires some specific conditions (building healing power typically) to make up for the low health pool. The other thing guardians do well is provide group stability, group retaliation, and group condition cleansing.

That is our niche.

What some of the guardian community feels is that we are stuck, and would like to branch out to more than just mid bunker.

There are DPS guardian builds, but they are not as solid as the bunker build, due to building away from survival traits and gear, then the guardian has less ability to survive and being more glassy without the same amount of escapes and avoidance that other low hp tier classes get.

“THE” survive and sustain mechanic of the guardian is self heal via AH if in a group, regeneration if you build to healing power, or MF if you solo.

AH/MF are both down the same tree, and MF is “decent” but somehow not enough in terms of long fights. AH is great, but only with allies around. Regen as we discussed will hinder your damage output due to building to healing power.

Guardians “can” do some amazing damage, but a lot of the guardian community feels we can not “stick” that damage very well, and in turn our dps oriented survival is situational to group fights or short lived combat.

So either guardians need a way to

- do more damage in less time to match the fight duration effectivness of meditations (read I do not mean 1 shot people, but slight increase in damage).

- soft CC targets in a way that keeps them in the effective range of combat better, to land the bigger hits (probably a reliable snare mechanic)

- increase defensive ability in an offensive build (expand reliable protection boons beyond just hammer and/or base healing of virtue of resolve to allow guardians to heal through more damage without having to go heal power)

None of those solutions are agreed upon and have potential to make the guardian class OP.

Guardians have the lowest HP because they are supposed to heal better than anyone else, yet as the game has evolved, everyone else has continued to see changes and improvements while guardians have stayed the same. So the status quo is now different, and the players who picked guardian for its class defining abilities now see it as lack luster and can find those same things in other classes.

My request is to see more diversity in build for guardians. I do feel we are pigeon holed. We are not broken or worthless, but maybe stagnant is a better word.

Guardians are probably the most balanced class out there….but then that makes everyone else OP ;P

If you broaden your perspectives a little, and expand the thinking to more than just “those mobs died in 1 hit….it was overpowered and boring”.

What if the players also could die in a similar fashion?

So if the players and the mobs could die that easily, then it turns into a game where maximizing your damage isn’t a concern.

It turns into a game where maximizing your survival is more important.

This then evolves into utilizing control abilities and such to manage situations.

Multi target fights would become risky with long cooldowns between AE abilities, because targets that survive can close the gap on you and then you have to rely on either team mates to pick up the rest or survival and skill.

A good example are the elementalist lightning and water attacks. They stun and pushback to buy time before the gap is closed.

Yes these abilities were buffed to make it look fancy, but the “ideas” shown here were interesting. Unfortunately the reality is a bit more stat based and less action.

Go back to oldschool games, you typically had 1-3 “hearts” till you died. After that it was all skill on knowing distance, positioning, and maneuvering correctly.

I like the videos, I know they were glammed up, but I hope one day we see something similar to it. If not in this game, another one in the future.

Well, good and bad news about the content. I really could care less about the back item, but I think the general idea still persists, that missing things sucks

It does sound like they are listening though, and this shows some compromise!

@Aza

I see what you mean about confusion now. Especially considering the GW1 history of abilities and the translation into GW2.

@MercenaryK

Wow, I really like some of those ideas! I really do agree, that burning itself does not have to be a source of damage, but more a mechanic to trigger other effects. I totally +1’ned your post of ideas!

I can see and agree that if we have too many blocks and full damage negation, it would be a bad thing.

It can be argued that multi hit attacks would negate that problem, and “frenzy” style attackers that do lots of little hits would counter the blocking playstyle, while power hits would be countered by the suggested play style. So is it “all” bad?

Still I see what you are saying.

Boons are not unique enough, I feel and are not signature to “guardian” to call it a playstyle of defensive damage.

a lot of people hate retaliation with understandable disdain as it is so passive that can give such a great gain in group situations.

I do think we need more reliable protection spread throughout the guardian abilities besides hammer and shouts.

Burning has proven to be not enough, so not sure I want to emphasize burns, but more rather augment them to make them better.

Bleeding+burns has shown good, but not sure if that is the fix for guardians…and condition spam is a problem right now so don’t really want to add fuel to the fire per say.

Not trying to be a negative nancy, but just bouncing off your suggestions for discussions sake. Not saying I don’t like them, I appreciate the involvement

long thread I didn’t notice till now, and copying my post on the main forum into here to add to the discussion (but I’m sure it’s been said before plenty of times.)

So I made it a point to skip this previous event and I haven’t logged in for the last two weeks. I have to tell you, it’s killing me.

I know the temporary content will be gone in a few days and I completely skipped it, making me feel like I missed out on things.

We have had the achievements discussion before, but it still weighs heavy on me knowing I have a full tab of living story content that will never be completed.

This is fairly detrimental, to the point that I almost want to continue “not” playing.
I liked the original idea of the game where I could stop and start again and not miss much if anything at all.

Now in the sense of competitiveness, yes sure I missed out on dailies and laurels or behind on crafting components and such for ascend…and that does not bother me “as much” it can be an issue for others.

I think this problem is/has been a growing issue and needs to be considered for the future of GW2.

How do you make continuously developing content, that does not remain and become stagnant, yet does not punish people for not doing it in time?

I understand the developers concerns of keeping things fresh and active, but it is having a fairly strong side effect on some players such as myself.

For now, I went back to GW1 to experience some of that lore that I missed out on back in the day.

Love the game, but have concerns.

Thanks randulf, went and looked at the mega thread in living world forum. I’ll admit I skip that one most of the time and just look at the current living world forum, not the primary one.

MercenaryK.4180:

You should put focus on the trait that allows burning on block – there you can really define the Guardian’s contribution to damage by defensive style – we have a lot of ways to create block – but the burning duration of 1 second is minimal and pretty weak and doesn’t really support the idea of maximizing your blocks to cause a little burn.

Start there and see what you can come up with.

Like I said, I really liked the idea of the trait “defender’s flame”, but as you pointed out it is just not there yet.

I also have mentioned I thought our burning effect should have some sort of secondary attached to it, such as reducing damage done by burning targets by x%, making us more “defensive” and bring more “utility/support” and “survival” to the group as a whole, while still working solo.

Also, we do not have enough blocks that happen frequently enough to really use the trait I feel.

Aegis (30-40s VoC passive, 69-90s active, retreat 45-60s)
Shelter (fairly good one…probably only good one, but not focus of damage through a fight)
Protector’s Strike (15s, decent but not enough alone)
Shield of Wrath (3 every 36-45 seconds)

lots of access to retaliation has never been an issue, but the effectiveness of retaliation is “mostly” limited to AE situations as well as PvP.

Hammer autochain symbol I would not really call defensive damage, but mindless auto attack. I do see what you mean in terms of it giving us “protection” and thus it is “defensive” but not in line with my original intent. Also it is not “zomg” damage (though it can be fairly good high pressure…but again not really what I was going for).

Warriors are not “just” banners, but yes in a group situation, that is what they bring. Fury and might (and damage).

We bring protection and stability (and projectile reflects/condition cleanse).

In the terms of the “mechanic” of warriors, they are an in your face run up and attack, chase things down, kill kill kill.

In the mechanics of a guardian we are inherently defensive and are supposed to survive a lot of things. A lot feel we can be pigeonholed into a defensive support build though.

There are plenty of dps guards, so don’t misconstrue what I say as being guards can’t do damage.

What I wanted was to bring the theme of “defensive” damage to the table, instead of just throw more damage and buffs at the guard, I wanted to look at playstyle.

And yet, confusion really only works well in PvP. Also I am not thematically on board with confusion for the guardian, but that can be overlooked it need be I guess.

I agree though, I don’t think we will see much of what I would have liked happen in the game. Sad.

Well, been playing since release, posted similar stuff before, but was resurfacing this concern for the sake of the game.

While I am amazed at how much they have done and highly appreciate it, the living story thing has had back lash for a while, but again, it causes these problems.

Up till this point, I have 100% everything for the living story. Some of the events really stressed me out on the difficulty but I got them all finished and I felt really accomplished.

While I worry about the quickness of the content, I admitidly finish the achievements in the first day or two and then the remaining week+ is mostly a free ride.

Yet in the midst of all that, I have this heightened state of stress that I need to “keep up”.

Yes, this may be a personal thing and a lot of people say “ignore it, you will feel better if you stop trying to keep up and just play for fun”.

So I did….and it’s not going well for me. #withdrawls

As far as a backpack and 25 achievement points, I don’t care about the “points” or the skins too much, but its that sense of “doing it all” that is causing lament.

I want to do it all, on my own pace.

Yeah, I dabbled a bit in GW1 back in the day, but never made it far past post searing. (was playing another mmo at the time..I think EQ2?)

But the old mesmer is actually a fairly good representation of defensive fighting.

I wonder how that can be utilized to be more “guardian” like.

So I made it a point to skip this previous event and I haven’t logged in for the last two weeks. I have to tell you, it’s killing me.

I know the temporary content will be gone in a few days and I completely skipped it, making me feel like I missed out on things.

We have had the achievements discussion before, but it still weighs heavy on me knowing I have a full tab of living story content that will never be completed.

This is fairly detrimental, to the point that I almost want to continue “not” playing.

I liked the original idea of the game where I could stop and start again and not miss much if anything at all.

Now in the sense of competitiveness, yes sure I missed out on dailies and laurels or behind on crafting components and such for ascend…and that does not bother me “as much” it can be an issue for others.

I think this problem is/has been a growing issue and needs to be considered for the future of GW2.

How do you make continuously developing content, that does not remain and become stagnant, yet does not punish people for not doing it in time?

I understand the developers concerns of keeping things fresh and active, but it is having a fairly strong side effect on some players such as myself.

For now, I went back to GW1 to experience some of that lore that I missed out on back in the day.

Love the game, but have concerns.

Mostly polling community on what ideas they could come up with to be defensive while still putting out damage without making it OP.

I really like the idea of centering ourselves around more blocks and reflects, but would take more rework of our weapons, so I don’t think it would happen any time soon.

Things like protector’s strike but spread across all of our weapons and shorter cool downs, yet have it an actively defensive play style.

If played right we avoid/block a lot of damage as well as return it back, but not leave it at a passive thing so that you can outplay someone if they time things wrong.

Kind of an “Aikido” redirection of flow style of fighting.

Use the attackers strength to redirect the flow of energy back at them, causing them to hurt themselves.

Most likely just a flavor of the month type thing, and while I myself had made various comparison posts with guardians and other professions, most of it was in attempts to nudge balance either up or down, or to fill gaps I felt there were in the playstyle.

Lately I have been seeing a lot of “warrior does it better” with the exception of support or namely stability/protection.

This coupled with the ideas that this game revolves highly around the ability to do damage, especially in PvE, but to some degrees PvP/WvW would be more satisfying to a lot of guardian players if they could have more of a return in their gameplay besides standing around staying alive (i.e. killing players more reliably).

Pulling this all together into my main point:

I have always felt that guardians should have a strong and reliable way to do “defensive” damage, much the same way that warriors do “offensive” damage.
And yet still maintain the guardian theme without making it a clone of each class.

By defensive damage I mean things like our burn on block, or retaliation. Interesting ideas, but they have obvious flaws.

Burn is limited on guardians for various reasons and is not extremely punishing against attackers.

Retaliation is less effective solo but can be devastating in groups against AoE.

What are some ideas that we as the community can come up with to enhance our defensive damage to be comparable to some degree to offensive damage? What mechanics would you use to get us there?

Keep in mind, defensive damage can’t be totally overpowering, because you inherently will live longer than your attackers as you are defensive, but right now our defensive damage can sort of be ignored for the most part.

It needs to be a situation where you want to kill the guardian but it would hurt to kill the guardian. Making it a combat choice.

Do we need more survival to make our existing defensive damage work better over a longer duration?

Or do we need more damage while defensive?

Would conditions help answer this problem?

brain storming ideas, may not come up with a valid solution to the problems, BUT it does highlight areas that may need to be looked at because they are deemed as a “problem”.

Lesser used abilities are that way because they are either pointless and need to be reworked, or something else is overpowered and needs to be toned down.

So polling the community will not directly help and provide us with the fixes that may be suggested here, but they help the developers get a more broad perspective, who may not play as much or in the same areas that we play in.

Also, if there is a commonality of problems from a specific mechanic of the class, that can draw attention of the devs for a fix as well.

So while, our ideas are sometimes worse than the problems themselves…they are still useful in identifying where the problems are in the first place.

A quick glance at the above suggestions help the devs look at:

- Spirit weapons are very under used due to up time and survival/vs effectiveness
- Untraited virtues could be adjusted in effect and/or refresh time
- A want to have more survival outside of 1 or 2 specific builds is desired by the community
- Signets are still undervalued
- More diversity and ease of access in movement speed is desired

What the devs decide to do to address those topics could be off the wall as opposed to what “we” feel the fix is….maybe it will be better, or maybe it will be worse, or no need to adress at all.

…… first off I’m a fool for even coming back here.

That said, tiny rant:

Hyperbole, ad hominem, straw man, white knight, and rhetoric are all regurgitated pseudo intellectual forum debaters “meme” words for “you mad bro”…….

Please stop using things you learned on the internet to try to look smart. Although I give you props on the gish gallop, that was a new one for me. I’ll be sure to tuck that one away and never use it because I don’t have to use other people’s words since I have my own.

To the topic, Thanks CachoDm, for trying. Completely valid points on unblockable skills, but I am sure Darnis will retort with lack of availability due to cooldowns, or that they are not meta enough (I also hate using the term meta….but oh well) or something to that effect.

For the sake of argument, dropping smoke screen would provide a comparable amount of frustration for some if they have problems getting 4-5+ hits off on a target before they pick up an orb.

Heck, even mesmer distortion would cause the same problems. I’m sure we could dig around and find similar mechanics to shield of warding that help players strategically get the orb with less interruptions.

I give up, you are right, I don’t know what I was thinking!

I shouldn’t have tried to argue with such insurmountable and compelling counter points, that do not deflect and dismiss the suggestions and the solutions presented by others.

I’m sorry you are losing to every guardian in the game.