Guild Wars 2

I know I’m gonna get blasted for this, but….I think I’m getting burnt by TOO much content.

Every time I think I’m done and I can relax again, a new living story comes in and I get hurled into the rush of things. Self induced I know, and I can always take a break…but then you get that feeling like you are missing out because it is a one time only thing.

Maybe start inserting a minor living story updates that can repeat between large story archs so people don’t feel stressed if they are not on.

Something that is slow and easy going to give people a breather from the constant zerg push go go go. I don’t mean a grindy gather 10000 candies or something, but something simple and fun.

Epic is good, story is good, but you need a rise, climax, and fall for the audience to follow along, right now we are inconstant rise/climax and it is somewhat stressful.

Like a greek plays did, end on a comedy to relax the audience (by comedy, it doesn’t have to be jokes and silly, just something calm and easy).

Posted an idea in another thread in which I suggested that the events scale with the quantity of the number of players AS WELL as the previous win/loss ratio for the event, penalizing repetitive fails, encouraging more success.

Other details in that post but this response is focusing on another idea that you brought up.

What if they kept the high amount of champion spawns, but only awarded champion chests post event completion?

These rewards would only be given upon successful completion of the event, so the champions themselves don’t drop loot but the number of champions you kill during the event increase loot at the end.

This encourages the large group play still, for those who like it, and encourages players to complete events as well, instead of delaying events for possible failure because all they want are the champ chests.

The new champion counter chests can be awarded in stacked bags in a pop up chest like current achievement chests and the like.

I love the random lines from her, and I think my favorite is:

“Cannon balls!!! My only weakness!”

oh good! (extra characters)

kind of excited for it but also bummed, because it looks like it is reliant on asuran traits. So its more of an asuran build than a guardian build.

I need to do a recap and edit the first post eventually, but right now this is more turning into a rehash of theory and mechanics… which is not bad to do sometimes.

One of the more interesting posts on the forums is this one:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/zero-damage-it-s-possible/page/2#post2654556

While I don’t agree with the OPs tact and approach, I do appreciate his theory.

To cut through the BS and arguments, it sums it down to this: Maximize damage reduction and use healing to make up the difference to reach “zero damage”.

This is not really possible, but the theory does help in survivability. Things that are not addressed to the fullest extent is that conditions are not reduced in effect by toughness and I am not 100% on the sequence of damage multipliers being before or after the damage calculation.

Either way you can drastically reduce the incoming damage and make up for the majority of the remaining damage with heals per second.

Conditions like vulnerability will interfere with your “zero damage” or things that apply extra damage on a set of variables such as being knocked down or having burning on you.

The “zero damage” claim is a bit much and the resolve behind the claim is pretty strong, but you can vastly improve healing by damage mitigation, which is known, but nice to see with math and numbers to back it up.

This also helps explain those warrior videos where they take no damage and out heal everyone.

Going to quote myself here from another thread because I would like to see/hear more thoughts on it… also I really just like the sound of my own voice :

CMF.5461:

On a somewhat serious note, since the guardian’s trait line does not line up power, precision, critical damage together; we are now at a deficiency in our damage trinity.

Do you think the intended guardian damage set up to be based on precision/crit damage and have power as a tertiary stat, while emphasizing crit damage and precision to as close to 100% as possible?

Going full power/prec and putting left overs into crit damage you can get 100% crit chance with 1h weapons doing approximatly 737 damage on first attack of sword, factor in the crit damage at 92% you get 1783 damage every attack.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJAsOmIseAAA4vqHAAAA4qAFB-jQyAYrASEASeFRjtqhWKJiG11YKXioa79yqN4BSGA9xA-e

Switch it around and go full crit damage with 100% crit chance you have the sword doing 655 damage, but with 122% crit damage you will now do 1781 damage with every attack.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJAsOmIseAAA4vqCA46BFBAAA-jQyAYrASEASeFRjtqhWKJiG11YK3FVrdBs3FRrWIgRjBA-e

This only works if you include fury and 1h weapons, after that you will be suffering in crit chance at around 90ish%

Which kind of ties into what I think the original idea of spirit weapons was.

On release, the default pvp build for guardians when you went into the mists was a heal centric build with I think spirit sword. The lack of damag eyou have directly is made up by the spirit weapon.

As foodfad mentioned, you can heal them now, so having an AE heal build with mace and staff lets you buff them with empower, keep them fighting with heals, and let you spec for defense while they do your offense.

Problem is, it still isn’t enough and they are squishy.

And yes, they patched the spirit weapons with the same patch that gave us condition damage with power on zeal grandmaster. That changed it so they had more stun breaks in different utilities to provide more “build variation”….which hasn’t happened yet.

(skills that gained stun break with that patch)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_Judgment

(patch that introduced those skills and other changes made at that time)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/June_2013#Guardian

Spirit weapons are “ok” in theory, but seemingly bad in practice.

After the change to give them hit points, it becomes difficult to use them reliably for the duration of effect, thus reducing effectiveness. Beyond that, they are pets with long cool downs and short duration, so the impact they make in the long run is fairly small.

That said, spirit weapons provide some burst damage with hammer and sword, as well as provide good control with hammer, and great utility with shield and somewhat with bow.

Bow is often overlooked, but it does cleanse conditions on passive and it does provide a decent aoe heal, but the manipulation of it’s placement becomes an issue, same with shield.

Spirit weapons, are interesting ideas, but have limited use. At most you will see the most use out of shield because of the projectile absorption. Maybe some hammer in pvp scenarios to set up some control with knock downs and knock backs.

They have upped the life of spirit weapons in a few patches ago and it has helped a little bit in up time. Also if you are doing AOE heals/boons that will affect the spirit weapons as well, so things like Altruistic Healing will provide some extra healing while solo with spirit weapons.

I don’t want to count them “out” yet, but I don’t see a great use of them in most situations at the moment.

Brutaly.6257:

CMF.5461:

lies, everything is exactly the same as monkeys. I can’t believe a word you say now

Open minded is a key word and ofc some parts differ between tpvp, pve and wvw.
Just the fact that you dont think it does shows how needed the guide is.

I was being a sarcastic tool about monkeys comment, unless this was a reference to something real, which I don’t know about…unless you are being sarcastic as well and you totally got me with my own dull wit

But yeah I was just joking about monkeys like the kind that eat bananas…..nm I give up on these forums.

On a somewhat serious note, since the guardian’s trait line does not line up power, precision, critical damage together; we are now at a deficiency in our damage trinity.

Do you think the intended guardian damage set up to be based on precision/crit damage and have power as a tertiary stat, while emphasizing crit damage and precision to as close to 100% as possible?

Going full power/prec and putting left overs into crit damage you can get 100% crit chance with 1h weapons doing approximatly 737 damage on first attack of sword, factor in the crit damage at 92% you get 1783 damage every attack.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJAsOmIseAAA4vqHAAAA4qAFB-jQyAYrASEASeFRjtqhWKJiG11YKXioa79yqN4BSGA9xA-e

Switch it around and go full crit damage with 100% crit chance you have the sword doing 655 damage, but with 122% crit damage you will now do 1781 damage with every attack.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJAsOmIseAAA4vqCA46BFBAAA-jQyAYrASEASeFRjtqhWKJiG11YK3FVrdBs3FRrWIgRjBA-e

This only works if you include fury and 1h weapons, after that you will be suffering in crit chance at around 90ish%

Thoughts?

lies, everything is exactly the same as monkeys. I can’t believe a word you say now

Yaki.9563:

Guardians aren’t reliant on healing power. All of your heal skills scale poorly with heal power and AH scales poorly with heal power. You get defensive boons such as protection and aegis which have nothing to do with heal power at all. The only reason you can sort of make healing power work is because you have more tiny heals than other classes so you get more overall contribution from heal power, but by no means are you “reliant” on it.

Let me clarify, our provided game mechanic that was intended to make up for our lack of HP is reliant on healing power. Virtue of Resolve.

That one virtue is supposed to make up for our low HP, and then additional things such as regeneration, altruistic healing, monk’s focus, writ of the merciful, and I’ll even go as far as to say zealot’s blade are supposed to enhance that innate class based regeneration.

herein lies the problem though, in specing to improve our lack of HP you have the option of vitality, healing power, and toughness to some degrees. By doing so you are hindering your offensive stats which are typically tied to trios on gear sets.

So in order for us to make up for our low HP we lose out on damage. If we ignore our low HP then we are very flimsy and as some put it gimicky.

This is why so many people love AH, with no effort you gain a lot of healing, not so much in terms of recovering from damage, but prolonging the health pool.

Since AH heals for so little, increase and decreases in healing power only affect it by single digits, which in turn allows you to run AH with no healing power, as long as you have a steady flow of multi target boons, what it lacks in raw healing, it makes up for in quantity.

Now think about all the incoming healing and incoming damage. You already have VoR ticking for somewhere around 80-200 depending on your healing power, but we will say 80 since we are ignoring that stat.

Altruistic healing is also doing something around 70ish healing each boon.

If you have regeneration ticking, you are also getting somewhere around 130 healing a second.

Now add in writ of the merciful just for the hell of it and you are getting about 100 healing per second from that.

VoR+AH+Regen+Writ
80 +70 +130 +100 = 380 healing per second

or if you want to include up to 5 allies lets change the 70 to 350

80+350+130+100 = 660 healing per a second

Healing Signet
392 healing per second

We have to do a lot to make up for our lower HP which will in turn hinder your offensive traits/gear. Virtue of Resolve is should be able to keep up with the passive regen that healing signet does without any traits or gear.

Or you could ignore that and just go B to the W and not care.

Protection helps soften the incoming damage, but it will only do so much. Also, unless we only stick to hammer, we will not have 100% uptime of protection. Besides, boons should be situational and skill based, not passive and always on.

Aegis is not bountiful enough to provide long term fight sustinability. It is a boon which you should use to preempt big heavy damage while you let the passive regen handle the remaining attacks.

By making effective health pools our “thing” you put guardians in a odd situation where low damage can be completely ignored, but high damage will decimate us because the health pool can not handle it, or our regen will not keep up with it. That is where blocks, blinds, aegis, come into play.

Protection+passive regeneration is supposed to help us sustain via effective health instead of a large health pool.

The guardian is played in a tug of war with effective health and wanting to do more than sit there and heal yourself, and it gets frustrating to see the mechanics hold you back.

Coming back full circle to my original statement, we need VoR to have a much higher base heal in order to bring about more build diversity for the guardian profession.

As it is now, you either multi stack lots of different small healing sources and/or stack healing power. But we rely on heals, I feel, more so than most of the other classes in the game.

(link to another discussion about large health pools versus replenishing health pools)
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Play-to-Our-Strengths/page/3#post2601948

I hear you Aza, but as you said, guardians are very reliant on healing power and yet the game doesn’t want us to be, and the meta doesn’t use healers/support for the most part in pve, pvp on the other hand we still perform well in a defensive role.

Still it is frustrating as it is so contradictory, not to say we can’t be offensive. We see tons of people showing off what guards can do on the offensive side, but we pay a bigger price the others I feel.

I do understand the balance between ANet not wanting to make us “healers” and the players wanted to be able to use healing power to simply survive better.

Regeneration is actually really strong, but it has counter play in the terms of short duration, poison conditions, and boon removals. Each class has different ways to resolve those issues.

Other traits, skills, and utilities that heal separately than the regeneration boon do tend to heal to a lesser degree and scale less well.

There are two approaches, either increase the healing power coefficient on those abilities or increase the base heal.

By increasing the healing power coefficient you make those skills worth it, “IF” you invest into healing power.

By increasing the base heal, you make it accessible to more players and builds “WIHOUT” investing into healing power.

Increasing healing power across the board, I think, would be bad.

Selective changes to certain abilities would be favorable, as I indicated with my opinion about VoR needs to heal for more to accommodate the classes lower HP pool.

This change would make more builds viable without the investment of healing power, on the contrary, I think if someone wants to gain from regeneration, they would have to invest into that as it is a situational and class specific.

Things like the elementalist heal on skill use has been adjusted down I believe, but there is always room for re-evaluation of if it is too low or too high.

Healing power for the intent of healing others should be a heavy investment and sacrifice of offensive stats. On the other hand self healing abilities may need to be looked at without adversely buffing group healing abilities.

I also think healing power is scaling well enough as is. Although, I do think some of our class based abilities need to have a higher base heal for the given intention of the lower hp design.

Namely Virtue of Resolve. As it is now I think it only heals for somewhere around 84 hp a second. If you spend 20 points into Virtues you get a 1.25 better improved VoR that brings it up to 105.

I want to be really cautious about doing a class comparison with warriors, but hear me out. They have higher stats because they are supposed to be heftier and we have lower stats because our class mechanics are supposed to make up for the lack of health.

Yet the warrior Healing Signet heals for 392 health a second without any healing power or traits. I think this is backwards since warriors have a high health pool as it is. Was it buffed to make up for the lack of pvp survivability in a recent patch?

VoR should heal for as much if not more than Healing Signet as a class mechanic that relies on boons/virtues to accommodate for the lower HP pool.

I do know that early in beta VoR healed for more, but was nerfed because people found it difficult to kill Guardians, but I blame that on lack of experience and level of skill of beta testers versus 1yr+ release players.

VoR should be re-evaluated and given a higher base heal

I have found that the best escapes I have tend to be with greatsword/staff.

Swiftness and leap of faith gain lots of ground and tied together with renewed focus and shelter you can buy a lot of time and absorb a lot of damage. While running try to have regeneration ticking and your life will be replenished fairly quickly.

Other than that combo you have Judge’s Intervention and Flashing blade as others have mentioned.

If you are using hammer or scepter you can always try a setup of wards and immoblize to a limited degree.

Mace you are pretty much set in to hunker down and try to survive as it has no escapes.

Offhands you have shield to push back and buy a little time or a cliff

Focus will buy you some time with blocks but torch is another weapon besides mace that lacks escapes.

As far as the rest of utilities, retreat for swiftness, bane signet/signet of wrath/hammer of wisdom for some knock downs, immoblizes, and sanctuary as well as wall of reflection and shield of the avenger to minimize ranged damage and buy some time by putting obstacles in the way.

Merciful intervention will work if you have allies near by as well.

I believe those are all the tools we have for escapes, not pretty and fancy but that’s all we got.

Went back and messed with a build calculator and did more comparison between guard and warrior.

In almost every single instance, the warrior out “stats” us. They have higher vitality, higher toughness, higher power so on and so forth.

Yet I noticed something that I think we can call our “strength”.

In a somewhat related post someone was asking about how much toughness is 10% damage reduction. This is not a constant number as it changes from scenario to scenario depending on attacker and defender stats, but in general it is about 300+/- armor.

So taking that into consideration, we have reliable access to protection and signet of judgment which provide 33% and 10% damage reduction. Together that is a soft “1290” toughness (again not exact and different fights change that approximate number up and down).

As far as power stats, we have access to a lot of 10% and 5% damage modifiers in our traits, to make up for lower direct power stats.

Additionally we have access to indirect precision stats as well.

For our low health pool we have a lot of passive healing via VoR and Regeneration.

So to sum it up, Guardian’s strength really are our boons/traits. What we don’t have directly we have indirectly with smart use of boons and traits.

Going round circle, does this make up for our lower stats? It makes it somewhat more of an active play style in ensuring certain boons and effects are in play, but still majority of it is passive in just auto attacking and letting boons run.

I see good and bad, and we really are weak without those boons. I think we need MORE of those critical boons (might/protection/fury) to make up for our lack of direct stats in more accessible weapons/traits instead of “if you want protection run hammer, if you want might run staff/gs, if you want regen run mace”.

Those boons are critical in our play style, but we can’t access them in good amounts evenly.

Personally for me, the biggest issue with the script/voice acting, is the pace of conversation.

The actual script could be tightened up a bit and different words used to give characters different levels of depth and flare, but the biggest issue is how the voice acting plays off in actual game experience.

Much of the in game conversation is choppy due to coding cues to trigger a characters voice. Lag and poor timing create choppy conversations which kill the feel.

Speaking a line of acting is exactly like telling a joke. If the comedic timing and pace of word is off, then it looses a lot of its humor. So when there is too short of a delay or too long of a delay in characters talking to you or each other, or a separation from one paragraph of text to the next when the character is speaking, then it kills your immersion in them actually acting.

As far as the voice actors themselves, people have different opinions about what the characters should sound like. This is why written text is almost more powerful than spoken text. Each person can “hear” it in a way that pleases them and makes sense personally.

So there are technical and personal issues when “hearing” the voice acting.

As far as the story line itself, I actually find it interesting and compelling as far as ideas and how the world is evolving. The cities interact with each other and the events in the world are making impacts as the game progresses.

The personal story I am ok with, because I’m not so needy in the terms of having to have the story revolve around me. I understand that from a developer point of view it can be ridiculous to have every single player that ever logs in be the hero of the world.

So they took a step back and made you a hero by proxy. A catalyst? to greatness. Also they call you “slayer” or hero" constantly because it is voice acting, and the only feasible way to indicate that they are talking to the player without using the millions of names that we come up with is to give us a title to refer to.

If you take a step back, a lot of what is done makes a lot of sense. I’m not saying they couldn’t have done it better, but I am saying many are not giving credit where credit is due.

As far as for more serious story telling. Yes there is a lot of humor and there is still a lot of grit in this world. This is the first MMO in a long time that I actually laughed out loud at, so I appreciate the humor. I also am interested in the darker aspects and the greater threats out there. This new living story arch with the queens speech being defaced is making for some interesting story telling which will tie back in the separatists of charr and human factions that we have seen all over.

As I said, there is a lot of good story here, they are scattered maybe, but it is there. I have seen MUCH worse.

The other games that have been referenced such as from bio shock, mass effect, and elder scrolls, or what ever else is compared to. Those are single player games that are allowed to revolve around a single player, to tie in better interaction with one person.

This is trying to be all inclusive to everyone that players in a multi user world…..and I didn’t find t hose other games that deep and interesting personally. I think after a while you start to see how every story/movie/game rips off things we have seen in the past. This is old man talk but “nothing is original anymore and everything sucks!”

So the older you are, the less you like new things, because it contrasts with the things you originally experienced and developed a fondness for :p

Taking a slight shift in the conversation and trying to talk about the strengths of our weapons in the below break down:

Greatsword

• High damage coefficients (good with power)
• Retaliation
• Might
• Blind
• Multi hit procs VoJ (good with burning)
• Mobile
• Bursty

Hammer

• High damage coefficients (good with power)
• Frequent symbol damage/boons
• Control oriented Immobilize/ward/knockback
• Consistent high dps

Staff

• Low damage coefficients
• Medium range
• Good ranged AOE
• Swiftness
• Might
• Heals (empower/orb of light)
• Minor area control (ward)

Mace

• High damage coefficients (good with power)
• Regeneration
• Heals (Faithful Strike)
• Block (Protector’s Strike)
• Symbol ticks 5 times and heals 5 times to do damage and heal together

Scepter

• Low damage coefficients
• medium to far range
• Fast attacking (good with burning)
• Immobilize
• Vulnerability

Sword

• Moderate damage coefficients
• Multi hitting (good with burning)
• Mobile (Flashing Blade)
• Projectile absorption

Focus

• High damage coefficients
• close and far range
• Regeneration
• Blind
• Block x 3

Shield

• Moderate damage coefficients
• medium range
• Protection
• Pushback
• Projectile absorption
• Heal (Shield of absorption)

Torch

• High damage coefficients (good with power)
• Multi hit (good with burning)
• Burning

Toughts?

Actually, I think the simple solution would be that dynamic events scale to success and failure rates as well as surrounding players.

The more often the event is failed, the easier and easier the mobs should become till the point there are no champions.

The more often the success of the event happens, the harder it will be next time, causing incentive to spawn more difficult mobs and drawing in more possible rewards.

There will be a balancing point where players can’t push anymore and it will even out at a win/loss rate to stop spawning harder mobs and making it easier on the next try.

Hard core players could try to push the success rate higher and claim the accomplishment of hard challenges by winning “x” amount of successes on an event in a row, reaching a crazy high number of champions per an event.

Empty servers/zones with people not doing events could become soloable after a period of time that an event had no successes to it. This would allow more players to see more parts of the game…with less rewards of course because the event scaled down.

More can be done to make it different, and the more often you win an event it will not count towards DR because the event keeps changing and it isn’t a repetitive farm.

They could go so far as if you get multiple wins in a row, it will spawn a new event…but that’s for other talks to help improve the game.

I went back and tried a bunch of different scenarios with high power and low armor or with high toughness, and each time it is in or around 300 armor equivalent. It adjusts + or – a little bit but it is pretty close.

So it seems like 300 armor is about 10% damage reduction in general.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

Based on the above information, the equivalent amount of toughness that 10% damage reduction would be is dependent on the attackers power and your current toughness.

So for some attackers with lower power and you have higher toughness, you will get less out of the 10% versus someone who has higher power and you have lower toughness.

It is on a sort of sliding scale of change depending on the situation.

Since most people have armor around 1500-2000 at a random guess, I would give it approximately 200 armor give or take 50?

Again this changes depending on the attacker.

I’m sure someone can come up with a more complicated exact number via math that is smarter than me

also….there is already another topic of this exact name talking about 10% damage reduction and what it does.

edit:

came up with a simple test with the build calculators

take the weapon damage * the armor to figure out what the unmitgated damage would be, so say the first attack with great sword which will do 296 damage to a target with 2600 armor and you have 916 power.

296*2600=769600

So 769600 is the damage without armor

now if you normally will take 296 damage from that strike, and Sig of Judgement would make you take 10% less damage, lets figure out what 10% less damage of 296 is…which is 266 damage.

296*0.9=266

So now we would have to figure out how much armor above 2600 would have to be gained in order to change 296 damage into 266 damage.

The answer for this scenario ends up being 2900 armor, which is 300 armor more.

769600/2900=265

So signet of judgement would have provided you with about the equivalent of 300 more armor.

Easy answer to the original question about conditions.

Get a stack of bleed on you, then remove the signet to see the difference.

Tested in mists and the chieftain does about 74-75 damage on bleed ticks with or without the signet on.

You can renewed focus, shelter, and roll to avoid the aoe damage. but it does I think 2 or 3 hits, since I see the block message pop up a couple times when using shelter, so I don’t think a single aegis or protector’s strike will stop you from getting downed.

I think the core of making a good build is having a good foundation to build around. Normally it seems like a good foundation revolves around can you survive. Second to that is what do you want to do in combat.

A lot of builds fall apart when you realize that you will die in seconds in pvp or pve. Pve can alieviate a lot of that by predictable attacks and familiarity with the encounters, so investing in survival skills at the moment seems to get in the way with the needed damaging aspect…but thats for another discussions.

In wvw and s/tpvp being able to survive is paramount in creating a build since you can’t kill people if you are dead yourself.

This is why so many people have revolved around the AH builds or the meditation builds, and to some extent a lot of attention has gone back to the healing power builds again.

After crunching more of those numbers with vitality versus healing power, I found that a full vitality warrior and a full vitaility guardian that traits for absolute resolution, full honor tree, and improved mace while having the signet of mercy on are very similar up to the 1000 damage range.

Guardian HP 24935
VoR Heal 178
Warrior HP 33552

Dmg – Grd / War
100 – -319s / 335s
200 – 1133s / 167s
300 – 204s / 111s
400 – 112s / 83s
500 – 77s / 67s
600 – 59s / 55s
700 – 47s / 47s
800 – 40s / 41s
900 – 34s / 37s
1000 – 30s / 33s

The guardian has better survivability up to the 700 damage per second range, then after that the warrior slips forward just slightly.

So what that shows me is that guardians do have an advantage, against a raw hp warrior if you count VoR in and provide healing power as a secondary to vitality.

Here is the only caveat….Warriors have healing signet which I haven’t accounted for, so it may be that they can reach similar levels with passive regen as well.

That said, guardians and warriors are really close, but I think it limits our builds because of what we have to invest into survival.

This is a black and white/all or none style comparison though, so you don’t have to invest THAT deep and can sacrifice some survival for more damage, but trying to just understand the synergies and mechanics to a deeper level so I/we can better build our guardians.

I am starting to get really convinced that we need to find a way to make VoR better in order to faciliate more build diversity, but right now it is too heavily invested just as AH or MF.

I do see why we have vitality and healing power traited together now though, because healing power alone can only make up for so much of our lack of vitality, we need that extra buffer.

As Obtena stated, I do not want this to be a “guardians suck” thread, but ways to discover and exploit our strengths.

:( yeah was messing with it on a build calc and it wasn’t looking too great.

The trick with brazil’s build is that he had up to 100% crit chance and just about 100% crit damage, while double to seemingly low number of his attacks into 1k+ hits pretty much all the time without going deep into zeal or valor.

But that relies on berserker gear, and there isn’t a healing power/crit damage/precision armor set to support this.

I would like it if people had battle tested and well used builds that they could represent for the guardian under the following categories that we could dissect:

Power
Condition Damage
Support/heals
Bunker/tank/anchor or what ever names you guys give them now :p

other build? support? healing? what categories of builds do people have for other builds? Pretty much we should have a build that emphasizes each trait line…ideally.

I know that we have bounced around condition builds and there are none that are really widely used, but obtena, foofad, and a few others represent them still.

I want to focus on a sort of brass tacks talks on all aspects of guardians and the strengths we have, not just bunker/healing.

I see what you did there…
http://youtu.be/14IRDDnEPR4?t=1m9s

edit: oh you want german….hold on
http://youtu.be/jQYQTFudrqc

I <3 the 80s

Keep in mind, that passive health per second is only part of the thing that helps us sustain against attacks. Also, attacks can happen faster than once per a second, so you have things like bleeds or flurry attacks that strike multiple times in a channel that will do more strikes in a second than what you are healing for.

Remember that we have blocks/aegis/blinds/dodges to handle the heavier hits that our regen can’t out heal, and we can stack regeneration, as well as ah/mf/symbol heals on top of that if we want to get more healing per a second out.

Also we have a ready supply of protection to reduce incoming damage if you go hammer, and a decent duration with shouts and shield. Weakness would be nice in other areas, but guardians are defensive boon based, not offensive condition.

Now the trick is to take this knowledge and craft it into a more offensive build to create more build diversity. I am thinking a crit/healing power build may be the answer since condition damage is not threatening enough, something like brazil’s build but adjusted for more self sustain while maintaining that damage.

Going back to the sustain aspect, I think if they went back and looked at the base healing for virtue of resolve, that could provide a lot of more viability for other builds to make up for our lack of HP, and then if traited we have even better sustain.

I know in beta they nerfed VoR because they felt it was too strong and guardians were “impossible” to kill, but again I think this is a L2P issue, because a lot of the early players were either not skilled or didn’t have the experience that this larger and more mature player base has now.

We have figured more things out in this past year than the beta testers could do in those last few weeks/months before release.

If someone could figure out the EFH math with guardian hp+VoR versus warrior HP pool, that would be interesting to see. (I only pick those two classes because we are both heavy armor wearers, not that I want to pit guard vs war all the time)

edit:
Went back and threw down some numbers on a spread sheet.

Base line warriors get 18372 hp
guardians get 10805 hp
vor does 84 hp a sec

So now we factor incoming damage, and I did a range of 100-500 a second

Guardian Time to Die = HP/(damage – vor)
Warrior Time to Die = HP/damage

Time to Die:
Damage – Guardian / Warrior
100 – 675s / 183s
200 – 93s / 91s
300 – 50s / 61s
400 – 34s / 45sec (it filtered 45 and “s”….)
500 – 25s / 36s

So somewhere around 300 damage vor loses out. Lets trait for improved VoR which is 25% more making it heal for 105

100 – -2161s / 183s
200 – 113s / 91s
300 – 55s / 61s
400 – 36s / 45sec
500 – 27s / 36s

Again, somewhere around 300 damage vor loses out, but at 100 damage, we are healing faster than the damage can happen, which gives us overhealing of +5hp a second (ignore the number, dividing by a negative number makes it wonky).

What this is showing me at a baseline level is that guardians do well against small frequent hits and less well against larger hits.

So the question is now, are we able to get acceptable levels of healing out of VoR when geared/traited, or is it not healing enough for the current meta of damage a second?

Just for the hell of it, I put on clerics trinket and factored for Improved VoR and we get 173hps out of vor which provides this:

100 – -148s / 183
200 – 400s / 91s
300 – 85s / 61s
400 – 47s / 45sec
500 – 33s / 36s

Gearing for clerics puts us real close to warriors on higher ends of damage and makes us pretty much invincible against lower ends of damage (+73hp a second versus 100dmg), but that hampers the rest of our stats.

I have always been a fan of more directive and controlled gameplay instead of passive.

So a boost to retal damage with a reduction in up time sounds like a good way to provide some offensive pressure while being defensive.

And yes, I agree that we need more sources of weakness than just Sig of Judgement, especially with the longer cool down now.

Retal though, If we could gain it for self only and not for group, it may not be as overpowered as it was before. Group vs AE does make it a little ridiculous.

If we were to get a trait that helps us gain self damage via retaliation, would that bring us back to our former glory?

Would better/more healing give us the lost ground we have with the lower HP pool?

I don’t think they are too keen on giving us more hp to be honest.

So how can we work around that to achieve success?

Hotter than the backside of a hairy gorilla wearing rubber pants in the congo at noon….

Numbers? Pffff I use colorful and descriptive words to loosely associate feelings in less than exact terms that are open to interpretation…..You guys and your ridiculous systems.

Ok, enough of that. Yes Arken said things that didn’t set well earlier, but he is being more constructive right now and showing us what he sees on warriors. Also I believe he does want to help the guardian class and is trying to indicate areas he feels needs work. It could have been worded differently perhaps to not be so upsetting.

Take it, evaluate it and then compare. I think right now we have seen that guardians still set better off in the self sustain role, but we are lacking a few things to push us forward.

Warriors have been buffed a lot, and maybe some balance needs to come in and adjust things. Either down for them or up for others, we will see. No one likes nerfs though and warriors got the short end of the stick at the start of pvp for a long time, so keep that in mind as well.

The best we can do is show how the game is being played and highlight areas that need looking at. Hopefully the devs will take note and agree.

Dynnen.6405:

@CMF, Warrior buffs have made them just silly. Heres a video =P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEMxajr1mrA

Good lord that is a little ridiculous….

Lots of condition ticks happening quickly while not having a problem with life.

Some of that comes into L2P I think since some of these players are just running around rampant with 3 stacks of torment and such.

I do find a larger majority of WvW players not as skilled as spvp/tpvp players though, not to insult anyone.

I understand Arken, and I appreciate it. I do think you discount the guardian abilities a little bit, but I think we all here agree that there needs to be a second look at guardians as the game has matured a bit.

While Dynnen has pointed out a few things you missed, please guys lets keep it constructive and not get into a flame war.

Arken.3725:

It ticks every 3 seconds instead of every 1. I’m suggesting that with such a mobile combat system, if one is forced to stay within a small circle to gain maximum benefit, it should be much stronger than those that do not. I also believe that if your abilities require long windups/animations that they should be very damaging or provide a significant benefit.

So that would make it:

410 passively with healing signet?
Adrenalin gives 135 per sec (405 every 3)
Regeneration every 10 on snares/roots with 175 a tick.

Total possible: 720 hps

That sounds more reasonable but still really defensive without having to sacrifice a lot.

Arken.3725:

I made a small video showcasing a Berserker warrior with its potential healing due to traits/healing skill. Notice I sacrifice zero mobility to attain it.

http://www.twitch.tv/elricalphonse/b/443785381

This isn’t to bash the balancing of the game but rather to show that there isn’t anything sacrificed to gain such regeneration. At times I was getting nearly nearly 1k health every 3 seconds.

I also did a test for the Guardians regenerative abilities with symbol of faith, VoR, symbol heals and AH. It came out to be 550hp/tick.

Awesome, thanks for the video, lets me see whats going on. Also lol, I forgot I’m logged in so I’m afk on the forums (saw the whispers to me in video).

So you heal for 410 passively with healing signet?
Adrenalin gives life for 405 passively with max adrenalin
Regeneration pops every 10 seconds when crippled/chilled/immobilized which does 175 a tick.

That is about 990 a second if all of them are active, but regen is not persistent….although you could go for banners like you mentioned before and get even more healing per second.

The kicker here is that you have a reliable form of weakness to help reduce damage done and keep healing more effective. I think that is one of the big things guardians are missing.

Although we do have a frequent application of protection, so maybe that is just as good?

Also, how does the adrenalin heal work, it seemed to not tick sometimes and other times tick frequently. Is it supposed to be every second?

As far as the guardian build, try this and see if it performs to your liking:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNApeWlUgyCXFyJEm4ESmiVCBxegRfUHdpwheIA-TsAgzCmIASBkDIDQSgs3MaY9x8DA

The down side is that you lose all offensive pressure. As you mentioned before, the warrior can still be offensive while doing those things, and you speced 100% full into heals and took into account a full stack of sigil of life and the warrior still out healed the guard

I see the defense is our offensive in a lot of our abilities, but it doesn’t play out in most areas of the game.

Retaliation is supposed to have us outlive attackers, burning on blocks is supposed to let us punish big hits with return damage, condition conversions is supposed to provide us with more boons to make us stronger the more you attack us.

Problem is those things are not enough to be offensive and we mostly just scrape by with defense.

Do they need buffs, or are we using the wrong?

Yeah, I don’t think doing a flat 33% back would be good for balance, as much as I liked the idea originally when I started playing on release and felt retal was weak.

To mix things up, while we are talking about bunkering and defensive guardians, I do not want to neglect the offensive guardian as well.

So lets keep up these discussions, but this is not only about defensive guardians, but strengths as a whole.

To respond back to the warrior bunker and self heal responses, I have a hard time with some of those numbers, and I would need to see them for myself.

Guardian’s also have a fairly high self heal rate with Virtue of Resolve and Regeneration ticking, add in symbol heals as well (although not mobile, but frequent enough to place again).

To just crunch some numbers, full heal traited/geared in pvp with full stack of sigil of life, signet of mercy, and traited for mace healing power as well as improved VoR should provide around 2093 healing power:

Regeneration: 392 hps
Virtue of Resolve: 262hps
Writ of the Merciful: 264hps

Total of 918hps for the guardian (could be traited to share VoR to allies if you want).

Also factor in dodge heals that are half of healing power in pvp and 100% of healing power in pve. So that is potentially an 1175 in pvp and 2359 in pve heal on demand.

What were the numbers broken down to the second and skill for warriors? Remember, to divide regeneration down to a second and not the total done, that is misleading.

I think the biggest problem with retaliation is that it only hinders fast attacking low damaging abilities, which not all classes/builds use.

So the slow/hard hitting abilities out pace retaliation, which kills us faster than we can kill them.

To answer that we need something that we can apply directly back, which would seem to scream burning damage as our response, but it has been shown time and time again it isn’t enough to warrant a threat when coming from guardians.

Maybe we should do more research into condi bunkers? Or find a hybrid with condi/retal bunkers. It has been done before in the past, but always lacked survival, but maybe we are smarter now with game mechanics.

You said spirit weapons and I immediately got turned off, still I looked at the build and tried to not be biased.

Ignoring spirit weapon life and lack of damage, they do bring good control and projectile blocking.

You have traited for Altruistic Healing, which arguably would go great with self heals and spirit weapons nearby, but you do not have a frequently applying boon source such as empowering might, hammer/mace symbols, or even staff empower.

Condition removal is mostly passive 2 removal with signet and trait, and on demand with renewed focus and lyssa runes, which is actually decent, but still can be overpowered by condi builds…can’t help that much lately though. Not sure i"m sold on the purity sigils but again it may be working for you.

You have no self sustain save for your signet heal, as we already addressed that AH isn’t doing the most for you at the moment.

That said, there is a difference between on paper and actual use. I’m not ecstatic about it, but I won’t discount your build without trying it first. Still maybe some things to consider and you can tweek it a bit?

Maybe explain the playstyle and there is something I didn’t consider.

Not sure if we have an overwhelming CC ability, area denial is mostly in the form of wards, which are fairly good but not sure if it is a trade off since it is on a decently long cooldown and short duration.

As far as knockbacks, hammer has a decent cooldown, shield is fairly long though.

It would be nice if mace protectors strike had an ae knockback like it looked like it did in some of the promotional videos before release ><

Trying to avoid comparing to engineers, warriors, mesmers, elemntalists, and maybe even necros as far as area denial/CC. At most I would say we have good group area denial/CC, but others might have more frequent single target area denial/CC.

I do feel retaliation is pretty powerful, and works well with clerics gear since you don’t need critD/precision to make it work. The only downside is that again it is not specific to guardians, but that confuses what we do well with what we do uniquely. Fine line to walk when looking for our strengths.

Amins, that is pretty astute and insightful concerning what gives us sustain. Lately I have been messing around in pvp with a 0/0/20/30/20 setup or a 0/10/10/30/20 setup, but it always revolves around regen, symbols, and vor (depending on if I want more crit or not for endurance).

We do get encouraged to go down the honor and valor trees a lot, which do not have a lot of offensive potential. This in turn makes us 99% defensive.

With no meaningful condition damage and no threatening way to do that burning damage, we find ourselves punching bags and boon bots. Still this brings up another point, while we have an abundance of burning which hasn’t been very threatening while bunkering, we DO have retaliation, which has proven threatening to some classes. This is especially true in group fights.

So the next question is two part: Does our retaliation make up for the lack of offensive ability while bunkering? Can we improve our burning damage while being a bunker to make it threatening to attack us?

On other fronts, I was checking out some of the offensive based builds again and I have noticed a lot of people touting Brazil’s PvE dungeon build. This build revolves around radiance as the core of its offense while going down honor for group utility.

Another strength of guardian’s I think is our ability to get high amounts of crit with 1h weapons. Do we have the highest possible crit rating out of all classes?

In essence we can ensure that 1h weapons always do 1.5+ extra damage, which in essence allows us to gear for crit damage and reach near 100% crit damage and ignore power for the most part. This changes the 500 damage attacks on the tooltips into 1000 damage crits with 90-100% crit chance.

All of this while ignoring the zeal tree and emphasizing survival traits (blinds, voj refresh, shouts, dodge heals, endurance).

Just like to say, retal eats her up pretty good, swapped over to a heal set and it make it tons easier. Still have to watch positioning and such but the damage she does to her self is great.

Thanks for the tip Odin.4093

I am seeing some of these same holes as you Aza, I don’t think it is all totally bleak and in dire straights, but there is room to tighten things up and give us a proper strength that isn’t hindered by the no trinity philosophy.

Also, please refrain from flaming each other and bragging. I wanted this to be constructive not destructive.

Let me try to turn this thread around and clarify my intent.

Stealth, burst, and escaping are a strength of rogues which define the class and make them strong
Conditions and control are a strength of necromancers which define the class and make them strong
Illusions and evasions are a strength of mesmers which define the class and make them strong
Mobility and pets are a strength of rangers which defines the class and makes them strong?
Diversity and fluidity (jack of all trades) is a strength of elementalists which defines the class and makes them strong
Offense and attacks are a strength of warriors which defines the class and makes them strong.
Mobility and kits/gadgets are a strength of engineers which defines the class and makes them strong.

So in general, group support and healing are a strength of guardians which defines the class and makes them strong?

Or is this statement not true enough?

What do we have that makes other players worry about if confronting us or celebrate for bringing us?

Granted I’m not fully knowledgeable at all the other profession, so the other statements may be off as well. But that was the intent at my original post.

What do we guardians do that makes people fear/want us?

I do agree to some degree that healing/support are not as high on the appreciation list at the current junction of this game, but hopefully we will start to shift the meta away from just damage eventually.

This whole topic comes on the heels of the zerker is everything mindset, and the overwhelming orientation on defensive mechanics the guardian has. While guards still have a good spotlight in groups for pve and pvp on being supporty and defensive, and we do have a good crowd going offensive….should we bother going offensive, or just play to our strengths? Do we have offensive strengths? or are they just mediocre overall?

Are we still “fine”, as everyone says?

Every AMA or Dev talk/interview I watch the speakers bring us guardians and the consensus is kind of a shrug and a non emotional “guardians? they are ok”.

Nothing real strong or weak, just ok. I think we deserve better/more attention.

There is always room for improvements and I want to push the envelope.

Great, now we are going to get nerfed due to the oversized bubble exploit

A quick look at the build calcs that others have used to show new builds or a easy google search could have gotten the same results…..but here:

http://intothemists.com/calc/
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/
http://www.gw2db.com/skills/calc

edit: added quam’s as well
Although, pay attention to which ones are up to date with traits and gear. Not sure how often these get updated, but I know gw2skills.net, buildcraft.com, and intothemists.com get updated frequently enough.

Well consider our current signets

Passive

• 10% less damage
• 180 Power
• 180 Condition damage
• 180 Healing Power
• Condition removal every 10s

Active

• Retal/weakness/stunbreak
• Immobilize
• Damage/knockdown
• Group revive
• Self Heal

Also consider our current elites

• Invulnerability/virtue recharge
• Healing oriented
• damage/condition damage oriented

So for an elite signet we would need to have something that differs from what we already have.

My initial thoughts for a passive on elite are:

• chance to cause condition on attack (chill, cripple, torment or some mobility control)
• have swiftness while boons are active
• 180 vitality
• 18% reduced virtue recharge rate
• chance to gain aegis when struck
• block every 5th attack

active might be:

• inflict condition (chill, cripple, torment or some mobility control) to enemies around you for 10s
• clear all boons from target (or maybe all boons from enemies around you)
• another big self heal
• reduce virtue recharge time by 30 seconds (this could bring virtue of just off recharge immediately and drastically reduce the time to get courage and resolve back)
• grant fury for 10s
• the next 5 attacks will stun the target for 1 sec each

I’m liking the positives getting posted and very good point that our strengths don’t have to mean better than everyone else, but simply what we do well in our own rights.