Guild Wars 2

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage :
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

Lets assume the attackers power is 3000 and we will use whirling wrath as our attackers skill damage coefficient which is 3.389855239 (rounding it up to 3.39)
Also the weapon will be exotic quality so weapon damage is 995-1100. This is averaged out for the formula resulting in 1047.5

Now the variables. Lets say you, the defender, has 3600 armor and 10,805 health (no vitality at all).
(1047.5 * 3000 * 3.39) / 3600 = 2959.19

With 10,805 health you would need to be hit by 2959.19 damage about 3.65 times.

Lets flip that around and say you have 2127 armor(stated lowest stat for guards) and 25,000 health
(1047.5 * 3000 * 3.39) / 2127 = 5008.50

25,000 health / 5008.50 damage = 4.99 hits till death

So it seems that vitality will help you survive longer in general. These are pretty obscure and extreme examples though.

A more balanced set up would provide a larger HP pool to survive being hit, and a good armor rating to slow the reduction of that HP pool, while also providing healing that would replenish your HP at a rate that is sufficient to continue fighting.

I also disagree with the statements that a low health pool makes healing better. Your heal will still heal the same flat number. If you argue that it heals for a bigger percentage of your health pool, then I would respond back by saying:

If I gave you a really small pie on big plate you would be disappointed.

If I gave you the same pie on a tiny plate, you would think the pie is huge!….but your perception of reality distorts the truth that it is still a tiny pie, thus is your healing still exactly the same.

If anything toughness would accompany healing power better to reducing incoming damage to assist healing to keep up with the damage being taken. Health is just a buffer to survive being hit in the first place.

HP = Fuse Length
Armor = Water to slow the burn
Healing = Some guy frantically patching extra lengths of fuse to the bomb before it explodes in his face.

Awesome answers guys, thanks for the info!

I was digging around on wiki and various build sights when I was researching dodges and vigor.

What I noticed is that Necromancers have a pretty nice on dodge trait that gives regen and causes bleeds, but they have no way to increase energy replenishment.

There are no vigor skills that I can see which are readily available, short of converting conditions to boons every 60 seconds (48 if traited).

So my question is now, do Necros dodge? Seems like one of the least capable class at avoiding damage.

I guess Death Shroud is your form of avoidance to a good majority of damage? If so then, a Necro that focuses on survivability would want to maximize life force replenishment, correct?

(I main a guardian so I don’t know much about other professions. I have one of each, just don’t play them much)

Ran across a great post a while back talking about weapon damage coefficients and I just went back to it to take another look.

You can see the original post by foofad here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guardian-Skill-Coefficients-List-Partial/first#post1197118

So my “ah ha!” moment to me and why I wanted to bring it up again is:

Do weapon damage coefficients dictate what stats we should focus on?

Take for example the sword versus the mace.

The sword has damage coefficients that are generally higher than the mace with one of the damage coefficients being 2.65 for zealot’s defense. This means that the skill will benefit greatly from more power.

The mace has coefficients that are generally lower than the sword. This may indicate that power will not assist this weapon’s damage as much as it would the sword.

So what then? Would that mean that the mace will see more results by getting crit damage or precision? It sure does seem so based off of where traits are located and the defensive nature of the mace goes along with defensive trait lines such as toughness. Toughness in turn adds crit damage as well as a trait that raises mace damage.

It was observable before that certain trait lines intended to use specific weapons, but beyond that the characteristics of the weapon’s themselves can help us choose traits and stats to better improve the performance.

So the question is now, are the weapon coefficients balanced enough to do such a thing as having higher power for some weapons to work better than higher precision or crit?

Guardian coefficients are lower in general if you are to compare our weapon skill damage to other classes. Do you think they need a buff or are they good where they are now? Do you see enough of an improvement in stacking power or precision with certain weapons over others?

Just another theory crafting moment to ponder if anyone else likes calculate things like I do.

edit:
additionally, I noticed that All 1h weapons have an average weapon damage of 952.5
All off hand weapons have an average damage of 857.5
2h weapons are inconsistent in that Hammer/Staff have an average of 1048, but the greatsword has an average of 1047.5.

1h weapons and Hammer/Staff have +10 low end damage and -10 top end damage
So if mace is 895-1010 damage, sword will end up with 905-1000 damage. This is consistent.

Greatsword instead of having +10 -10 has +10 -11
So it has a weapon damage of 995-1100

Ok so, 1 damage on high end is not crucial to balance and I know they rounded it off to make it a nice round number, I still feel jipped :p

Couldn’t find a super hidden one, but I guess it dosn’t have to be cause there are only so many. Can just be a nice looking view or a random spot that people have to use land markers to identify where you are. But here is my next one

hint
Crazed Quaggan in a hidden room full of rats.

“Quaggan hungry!” wham

!!!!
So after being jumped by enemy invaders and missing the jump approximately 30ish times, I made it!

That was a hard one, not sure if I can top that. Will find a new place to post.

I “think” I know where it is but can’t make the jump….or I’m just crazy and there is nothing there…lol still trying!

Gah, you are beating me at my own game. Still looking for it, is it always accessible or is it in a controlled area that may or may not be owned by my server.

Wandered around on an alt and found a little hidden bamboo grove in the Sylvari city The Grove.

Have you found it? If so post a pic of you and then post a pic of some other hidden spot and see if someone else can find it and post themselves at the same place. Then they can do the same.

A little forum fun of sight seeing and discovery

Adam Of Awesome.7802:

Jax.5261:

Conditions will absolutely destroy you.

You fail to realize mace 2 removes all conditions when standing on a symbol. Don’t believe me try it out. It does.

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. In fact I just tested it out and mirrored your traits to see if it was a hidden aspect not mentioned in any tool tips and it didn’t wipe conditions.

You may just be seeing them drop off due to duration ending, or someone else is removing your conditions without you realizing it.

Just wanted to say good break down and I gave you a +1. Game is good, but always room for improvements and my initial impression mirrored your analysis fairly well.

Some passionate debate and opinions here, but I did want to throw out the following link on crit damage versus crit chance:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crit

So 30% crit damage with 5-10 crit chance provides a 1.040-1.080 increase to dps.

0% crit damage with a 10-15% crit chance provides 1.050-1.075 increase to dps

about on par with each other, but I would probably argue with more crit chances as better since our traits provide boons on crit, thus providing more dodge rolls, AH heals, and/or might stacks.

But yes, AH is selfish for the Guardian, versus a boonway/healaway Guard who still gives out shouts/boons but maximizes healing and duration.

AH just wants to throw out many boons quickly and its biggest return is via crits/symbols and not so much shouts. Could almost do away with shouts and use other utilities since they are not the primary source of AH heals.

I think one of the biggest geniuses of your play style and build is that large AE attacks as seen with staff and greatsword that provide you with more rally attempts when playing with a group. This is good for large scale battles, but less good at smaller 2s-3s battles.

Other than that, the standard AH build is another great synergy with your build as your play style is with large groups and always having people around you increases the heal returns on AH.

Also very good observation on the sanctuary cast speed with ground targeting versus reduced cooldown. I did not know that fact and creates some good use of cooldowns even if on a long timer.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJASWlUgCBHFSPEfIFRWhRWVYfYKw4Hve4QKyQA;ToAA1CqoSykkIJbSukkJt+Y8B

or tinyurl if you don’t want to copy and paste

http://tinyurl.com/cvpkth9

Not really a huge fan of the synergy of staff and hammer as well as the spirit hammer. Also I like Ghotistyx build a fair bit more than this one, but wanted to give a different spin on it than he did so “tried” to be different.

If anything this Thackeray build is very area control oriented.

Very nice. Yeah when I did a few logan builds I kept going heavy in virtues because of those consecrations. Also went down Honor because of the dodge rolls. But that ends up being a healaway build for the most part so kept scrapping it. I like how you changed it up a bit.

But obviously he is a Honor/Virtues prime guardian.

Again I like the build and good interpretation!

Went through book again and Logan throws his hammer to knock down an ogre at one point. Will add up top.

As pointed out earlier I find torch troublesome in some aspects. It interferes with Virtue of Justice, so the burning applied with the fast attacking weapons such as sword become less important.

Also torch has a shorter range than scepter, so those that might want to do ranged fighting find themselves not using the torch to it’s fullest potential (I would argue though, that while the scepter has a 1200 range, its “effective range” is much closer due to its speed of travel and lack of homing in on target.). One thing that isn’t mentioned is that torch 5 goes well with scepter 2 for a bit of burst damage. Only 1h/off hand that can provide that synergy of attack for guardians.

I sometimes wonder if torch was meant to balance out the mace guardian’s damage levels. Torch applies burning to enemy targets in melee range of the guardian with skill 4. Mace guardians have slower attacks, even if they hit harder. Torch 5 cures conditions on friendlies (and not self), touting group play. Torch also hits through high toughness/armor targets since it is condition damage.

The above shows that torch should work well against PvE targets and “tanking”. But conditions can be debatable in PvE since you have problems with condition stacking in groups.

I have not tested it, but does torch aoe burn have a target limit of 5? I would assume so. Mace is about clustering many targets close together in melee range, and torch goes well with that.

Oh, my mistake. I didn’t mean “offhand” I mean swaps to sword. I see how that is misleading.

I do note that the GW2 Wiki states that Lock Auto Target seems to be bugged.

As far as Promote Skill Target, I see how it works now. I had it turned on from day one, and turned off autotarget recently to see what it does. By itself it seems to do nothing, but with autotarget it keeps the target from dropping. Strange autotarget behavior.

What I wanted it to do was only select a target if I hit it with a skill. That way I could use a leap or a dash ability to run away instead of autotargeting selecting someone behind me and causing me to run INTO the fray… heh

Would seem to me that lock auto target should keep autotarget from dropping targets and promote skill target should only select a target if you hit it.

Just tested it out. The two do the same thing, just one is automatic and the other is a toggle. Together it cancels the toggle out. Almost a waste of code.

Two game mechanics that I can’t figure out, or they are broken:

Promote Skill Target – Automatically promote targets to lock targets when hitting them.

and

Lock Auto Target – Hold to lock your autotarget.

One would think that Promote Skill Target would select a target if a skill hits it. (as opposed to Autotargeting that selects a target regardless of hitting or not)

As far as Lock Auto Target, if you bind this to anything it deselects what you have targeted. If you have no target, it selects a target closest to you but when you release the button it drops the target…

Maybe someone else knows how to better use these options. Or they are broken =p

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Largos
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sayeh_al%27Rajihd

I only played GW1 for a little bit and bought no expansions, so I do not know if this was a race in the previous GW, but that should give you the background you are looking for.

Just for fun I went through the book Edge of Destiny and picked out all the moves that Logan Thackeray did in combat.

What I came up with so far is the following:

• Uses a “War Hammer”
• Does a lot of overhead Slams to take out enemies (Mighty Blow)
• Dodges…a lot
• Waves hand in air and creates a “blue curved wall” that stops projectiles (Wall of Reflection)
• Paints blue auras in air and blocks attacks, Rytlock says he is good at “Retreating” (Retreat!)
• Paints thin blue line on ground and trips following enemies (Line of Warding or Circle of Warding)
• Covers hammer in blue aura before a big attack (Not sure on this one, either Virtue of Justice, or some other “power up” like attack)
  edit: mighty blow, looked at it in game and the hammer glows blue as you jump up in air
• Covers hammer in blue aura and slams ground, pushing back Rytlock (maybe a concecration?)
• Puts up a barrier that stops Rytlock from running at him, but Rytlock can attack through the barrier (Sanctuary)
• Can heal others (generic Guardian description, maybe Healing Breeze, or any other heal other ability.)
• Swaps to a sword from time to time when dueling with his brother or when he uses his brothers sword later
• Covers Zoja and Snaff in a blue shield while they channel a spell and Logan fights undead (Consecrated Ground)
• Throws hammer to knock down an ogre (possible Hammer of Wisdom/command)

Additionally in the game I noticed Logan’s special abilities are:

• Divine Radiance (ae regeneration and blind)
• Divine Shield (channels a block and then unidentified boon lasts for a split second)
• Uses Sword/Shield

So it looks like Logan likes consecration builds and he utilizes wards and aegis. What builds can you make that mimic Logan Thackeray?

Our “oh crap” button is typically to either utilize Renewed Focus, which makes you invulnerable to incoming attack or even our block heal, Shelter, to buy more time.

Thing to remember on this is that you will still take current condition damage while using Renewed Focus, so you can still die while invulnerable…. Also Shelter is our smallest heal, but also our fastest.

It is debatable on which heal to use, Shelter provides you with more time to get vigor back to possibly roll and pop another heal, or get other abilities off cool down. It is also available more often.

Signet of Resolve is our biggest heal. This can be traited to be on par with Shelter as far as cool down (40s to 32s).

So the question now comes down to, is it better to stop incoming damage and heal a little more often, or is it better to recover from a lot of damage and continue fighting longer before needing a heal again.

Many times that becomes situational, but timed right Shelter can stop more damage than Signet of Resolve can heal for.

Beyond that, utilize blinds and blocks to buy more time when low and maybe your heal will come off cool down so you can get back in the game. Just remember that blinds do not stack, so timing of blinds helps.

edit:
I think it is also worth mentioning that our elite skill Tome of Courage, is a viable “oh crap” ability as the #5 skill in it will provide a full heal for yourself and allies around you. Thing to remember is that it has a long cast time, 4 1/4 seconds. So if you are going to use it, use it early. Best used if you have a very large health pool, but useful all around when in the right situation.

Also, since this is PvE, utilizing your wards found on Hammer 5 and Staff 5, will buy you some time since NPCs will run straight into them without thinking. Not as effective in PvP, but it still works as a surprise to some.

At level 40ish, the only health maintaining traits you have available to you are:

• Regeneration
  Healing Power helps make this stronger, found on Mace, Focus, Hold the Line!, Save Yourselves! (Superior Aria provides 20% reduced shout cool down, II in Honor)
• Virtue of Resolve
  This can be augmented with Healing Power and Absolute Resolution (IX in Virtues traits)
• Shield of Absorption (second trigger of “5” on Shield)
  Can have 20% reduced cool down with Honorable Shield (IX in Valor traits)
• Selfless Daring (15 in Honor)
  Dodge rolls heal self and area. Scales well with Healing Power. Can be augmented with more vigor on crits with Vigorous Precision (5 points in Honor)
• Writ of the Merciful (X in Honor traits)
  All symbols heal, scales well with healing power. Fast refreshing symbols such as on Hammer or Mace do well with this, as well as traiting for longer symbol durations with Writ of Persistance (VII in Honor, but can’t get this at same time till lvl 60+)
• Pure of Heart (VI in Honor)
  Aegis heals on removal, scales decently with Healing Power, but long cool down on Aegis refresh. Works well if you use Virtue of Courage and Virtue of Resolve while having traits to increase Virtues as an emergency heal.
• Bow of Truth
  Heals for a fixed amount over 10 seconds for 42 ticks. At level 80 the heal is 92, unsure of lower levels

You can mix and match the above abilities as you feel works for you, but majority would find keep Regeneration up as much as you could while utilizing Dodge roll heals, Symbol heals, or improved Virtue of Resolve heals while wielding a Hammer or using a Mace with shield or focus to provide the most consistent healing potential.

Not as fancy and quick as killing with a greatsword though.

Messed around with Staff/GS for a bit and saw that the symbols combo well and create some pretty significant burst together. They are ready along side with the weapon swap fairly easily and create a substantial and not always noticed burst attack.

If you have the time you can Empower with the staff, drop Symbol of Swiftness, swap to GS, drop Symbol of Wrath right on top of Swiftness, then Whirling Wrath for some extra push.

Randomly downed a few people not expecting that in sPvP.

Although it is really hard to get someone to stay in both if its a mobile fight….and had really bad defense the way I traited to play with it (all symbol traits in Zeal and Honor)

Symbol play has potential, but needs tweeking.

Just wanted to point out that cleansing bolts do not purge conditions off yourself. 99% positive on that one, but I may be wrong.

Probably the biggest problem most will see in this build is lack of trait oriented health maintenance. Meditation/Healing Power/Altruistic builds provide combat sustaining health to continue fighting against classes with more health or more damage than the Guardian is capable of.

By not hitting the grandmaster traits, you limit yourself from some of those foundations that show up in every popular build right now.

This is not to say that your build will not work, but the majority would have a problem with it for those reasons.

Beyond that as far as putting forward higher damage, our damage increasing traits are:

• Fiery Wrath (10% dmg on burning target)
• Radiant Power (10% dmg on targets with conditions)
• Elusive Power (10% dmg when endurance is not max)
• Unscathed Contender (20% dmg when Aegis is active)
• Power of the Virtuous (1% per a unique boon totaling 9% extra dmg)

If you want to include vulnerability we also have on blind and on immobilize that will increase damage to targets as well.

Any combination of those traits and an increase in power/crit chance/crit damge will result in fairly high damage potential, but you often will have to sacrifice a lot of survivability to reach the levels of damage that are noticeable.

Greatsword is a good dps oriented weapon because it does single and AE damage very well, and arguably the best dps weapon we have. Some say sword or scepter are better, a few say hammer.

My biggest question is why staff? If it’s just for the swiftness boon, then that’s fine, but you limit your weapon swapping a lot if you do that. It does not have the same synergy with the greatsword if you are looking for damage builds.

End result is, if it works for you and you are satisfied…use it!

LastShot.4762:

If we only compare overall EFP/EFH:

warrior will be the most OP class(heavy armor with high base hp)
ele/mesmer will be awful(light armor with low base hp)

Very good point, LastShot, but that is why I compared a heavy armor with a heavy armor while trying to attribute the health regeneration via virtues. Originally Virtue of Resolve was stronger, but it was scaled down in beta because of how easily Guardian’s survived.

I think it was scaled down too far personally, or the game has developed more and other classes have found a better play style since then that may be able to accommodate for the regeneration of Guardian’s.

As many have pointed out and I pointed out in my own original thread, although it seems most don’t like to read or take note that I acknowledged that already; True game play would take into considerations boons/traits/gear/dodges/aegis/blinds/etc. but I was only making the most simple of comparisons as possible to create something called a “foundation”.

After establishing our knowns and understanding the foundation, we can begin to build upon that to develop the Guardian more. Helps us understand where to go if we know where we are.

Aegis would only remove 1 or 2 hits depending on if you want to activate it or not, since these are such drastic numbers and the fights do not last long enough for VoC to refresh in 30-40 seconds. VoJ would add 400-600ish damage, but not skew the time that drastically.

Again, just take this at face value and don’t dig too deep into it. It is a simple look that is not true to real conditions. It was just a theory crafting moment I had and came up with interesting results.

The only take away I have is that Guardian’s don’t do damage as good as Warriors. But we knew this. Problem now is do Warrior survive damage as well as Guardian’s do.

By numbers yes and better, but factor in skills and that becomes debatable depending on who you talk to.

Exactly, I tried to caveat that as much as possible. THIS IS TO BE TAKEN LIGHTLY AND SHOULD NO WAY DEFINE WHAT YOU SHOULD DO AS A GUARDIAN This is only stats and not abilities. I did not factor in traits or weapon skills, but merely doing as simple and dumbed down a comparison as possible to see what kind of advantages or deficiencies we do have.

I still contest that we are some what pigeon holed into being defensive due to our inability to match up damage wise and lack of base health. I think this does show a defensive guardian “should” fare better though, which I am sure the community knows by now.

Just some random theory crafting and should be taken with a grain of salt, but:

So I was messing with gw2buildcraft.com to see what I could come up with on effective health (EFP) Effective Power (EFH) on a guardian versus a warrior. Also factored in the the Damage Reduction (DRE) for calculations below.

Guardian
EFP – 5088.47
EFH – 13106
DRE – 17.56%

Warrior
EFP – 5228.32
EFH – 21284
DRE – 13.68

Then I wondered how long it would take for a Guardian to kill a Warrior and vice versa. Additionally I factored in Virtue of Resolve (VOR) ticks at a minimum, accounting for healing power per each build.

So in essence
(GEFH+(VOR*(GEFH/(WEFP-(WEFP*GDRE))/(WEFP-(WEFP*GDRE))
Guardian health + Virtue of Resolve * time to kill warrior v. guardian / new time to kill with added effective health from virtue

It’s kind of cyclical but the formula worked with no errors.

So it takes a max EFP Warrior approximately 3.09 seconds to kill a max EFP Guardian (or hits how ever you want to consider damage incoming).

In reverse it would take that same Guardian 4.84 seconds to kill the Warrior.

Well lets factor in a full EFH Guardian versus that EFP Warrior:

Tank Guardian
EFP – 2539.22
EFH – 40649
DRE – 44.14

Guard dies in 14.37 seconds
War dies in 9.71 seconds

What about a full Healing Guardian?

Heal Guardian(1442 healing power)
EFP – 2011.38
EFH – 22111
DRE – 36.84

Guard dies in 7.00 seconds
War dies in 12.25 seconds

Interesting none the less, but again not true conditions and no one would build so singularly in stats. What I think it shows is that in just stats alone, Guardian’s health is not offset by the innate healing built into the class.

The only time the Guardian had an advantage is when stacking vitality, which shows how effective that is in keeping players alive. If I were to run a test with a full EFH warrior, I think it would show the warrior surviving the fight as they have a higher built in health pool.

Keep in mind if I factor in protection boons or regeneration boons that can vastly change the outcome and give the guard more survivability. I didn’t do this because it was not purely profession mechanics but cross all fields.

One could argue we have more availability of protection or regeneration than a warrior does, as well as trait lines that provide more healing back, which would increase our EFH. To that I would completely agree, but not sure if it’s enough.

Thoughts? Oh and be sure to tear up my math, cause yeah I’m sure there are problems there :p

Good catch on the Virtue of Courage every 5 attacks is blocked. I wonder if that proved to be overpowering or not. I do feel like they intended for us to block a lot more than we do now.

Overall I think we are in a decent place, but I can tell that there are old ideas that are not effective anymore and dragging us down due to the way Guardian’s have developed. We need a clean sweep to update our traits and skills to where we are now.

Noticed a few skill effects in official videos or from fighting with Logan Thackery that didn’t match up with how Guardian’s play today. This prompted me to look up beta and earlier abilities to see what has changed with Guardian’s and I came up with this interesting list compiled from Qazaam.

Source:
http://guardianslight.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/handbook/

• Virtue of Justice – 3 sec burn on activation
  (5 sec now[only does 4 sec tick in game])
• Virtue of Courage – Blocks every 5th attack
  (in game creates aegis every 40 sec)
• Virtue of Resolve – Removes all conditions from self and allies and provides a larger regeneration heal for a short time
  (in game at most trait for 3 boons removed, heal is direct heal not heal over time)
• Protector’s Strike (mace) – Blocks, damages, and knock backs enemies
  (in game only blocks and damages)
• Orb of Wrath (scepter) – Fire damage on auto attack
  (in game just direct damage)
• Sword of Wrath (sword) – provided a double attack
  (chains have been improved and now does 1,1,3 strike)
• Shield of Absorption (shield) – Knocks back enemies attempting to enter shield
  (in game only knocks back on activation)
• Ray of Judgement (focus) – passes through allies providing regeneration and bounces off 3 enemy targets to blind and damage
  (in game allies count as bounce targets now)
• Symbol of Swiftness (greatsword) – Movement speed and damage
  (in game this was replaced with Symbol of Wrath)
• Faithful Strike (greatsword) – Leap to enemy doing damage and healing allies
  (in game this was replaced with Leap of Faith which blinds targets instead of heals allies)
• Blinding Blades (greatsword) – Throws out chains that cause enemies to teleport to Guardian if they move too far away
  (in game the Guardian has to trigger a pull, and if targets run too far it loses effect)
• Purge Conditions (hammer) – Burns enemies and removes 5 conditions from allies
  (in game replaced with Zealot’s Embrace which immobilizes targets in a line)
• Symbol of Protection (staff) – Places a symbol that provides protection boon
  (in game replaced with symbol of swiftness)
• Martyr (staff) – Removes ally conditions and places them on Guardian as well as gives you every boon in the game
  (in game replaced with Empower which provides might and heal after channeling)

Some interesting changes, and some things I would have liked to see remain in the game.

Some more info on changes during beta which apparently happened three weeks before launch. So Guardian changes were fairly new at the time of launch. Does that show?
http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/vanguard-guardian-beta/

So started a charr warrior in the blood legion who has a gladium for a father and named him Valius Razorclaw after reading the wiki and trying to come up with a “roman” sounding first name.

Got up to personal story where my father goes AWOL and what do I find out his name is? Vallus Smokemane.

Lol Valius-Vallus… If only my surname matched somehow. Maybe I’ll restart my character now and name him Razormane, or Smokeclaw… :p Razorsmoke?

Never understood trash talkers, but its just a sign of an ugly personality in or out of the game. They just use the anonymity and detachment to do things they could’t do in a real social setting.

Normal reaction for me is ignore and or report if its really vulgar. Talking back just escalates things, and I’ve been online since ’96 so all this leet dude-ism is just tiresome now.

On a side note, some of the older games I played we used to /bow after a good fight, or some of my favorite competitive play was saber dueling in Jedi Knight 2. Would bow by ducking and looking down so the character animation looked like a bow. A lot of respect and healthy game play go a long way to making a competitive but friendly environment.

Sadly we have a lot of tea bag face crouchers from counter strike or halo era games now. So “keep calm and carry on”.

On a sort of related tangent. I took an Aikido class that was very into spiritual balance. One of the things the sensei would talk about is how to let go of anger. If someone walks into a room and you get angry, then you have just lost control over yourself. By allowing them to cause those emotions in you, they “win”.

One of our assignments was to find someone you hated and apologize to them for what ever conflict you had. If that other person wants to continue to be mad, then they are all alone in that and you can continue on calmly.

Hard to do, but if you can, it is very relaxing.

I have understanding and sympathy for the motion sickness but was referencing:

Awesome Didn’t know they sang songs.

So what I get from all this is that some people have a hard time at taking things as they are and instead put a lot of extra meaning where there may or may not be. Maybe some are just finding reason to not like the game without realizing what they are doing.

A lot of random “made for kids” comments throughout here too. I’m 33, first MMO was when I got in on the EQ1 Phase 4 beta and been hooked on MMOs since. This one has refreshingly connected story elements that draw together to a final conclusion. The lore is some of the best I have seen since EQ1, and that is probably because GW1 was around to set most of that stage.

Hell GW1 had a big thick book that came with it talking about history and races…games don’t do that anymore. There are light hearted moments in this game and I enjoyed them and laughed a few times. There are very dark moments in this game where I pushed forward and wanted to find resolution to them if possible.

Was the voice acting perfect? Maybe not. Was it so horrible I covered my ears and turned off the sound. No, and I waited to listen to every moment of it. Probably an artifact of the actors not being together when doing the lines. Evident in many voice acting scenarios. If you ever played the Uncharted games you see how well the dialog went between the actors and that is because they were in the same room feeding off the energy of each other.

Someone made a very good point that in text you can use your imagination and apply the ideas that you come up with to the words you read. So you would read something differently than others. In spoken word, now someone is reading the lines in a way you don’t agree with, so it puts you off.

Another thing I really enjoyed was reading the two books that have been published. Those really set the stage and tone of the current cast of characters and state of the world.

Sometimes you have to just learn to enjoy things because they are fun. All dark and gloomy is tedious, even sad and angry people smile every now and then… Unless you have no lips

whirling wrath tooltip factors in all 7 whirl hits + 2 projectile hits, so the actual damage is inconsistent depending on how many projectiles hit (with a total hit possibility of 14).

Unfortunately you all don’t see the guardian profession in the same vision as I would like to see it. A zen like, defensive aikido style flow of energy redirection in which you use your opponents strengths against themselves.

I can see the majority does not like retaliation, but I find it laughable that you retort to the “you must be trolling” mindlessness. Or that you believe that classes have been “destroyed”.

Also, cleansing bolts don’t cleanse yourself.

You guys look at one side of the problem and not both. I recommended retal to reduce in damage/duration to rid of us the mindlessness and make it more of an activated calculated ability.

In it’s current state retal would be too strong with conditions applying damage back. Devs have stated they wanted to change retal to be more active and less passive. I think having it as a short term condition reflection could be its niche, if there would be large windows of opportunity to not have retal be mindless and auto kill people.

I am trying to look at both sides, and some only look at one side.
I voiced my unpopular opinion already so I guess I am done as this isn’t going anywhere and you can’t make people think the same as you.

Ok, how about this one. Guardian’s are supposed to be defensive fighters. Guardians do not have any real condition damage save for burning damge, which most feel is laughable and just bonus to our auto attack.

Retaliation gives Guardians a form of condition damage via defensive posturing.

As I stated this is a two pronged solution:

• Reduce the damage/uptime of retaliation
• Play smarter

If retaliation were to reflect 1/2 of the damage taken back to the target would this be more acceptable?

Course now when someone does a big huge crit hit, retal can hit for an amount equivalent to that damage. Versus the fixed damage it does now, it can never hit for the same as a crit hit, but it returns really good damage versus smaller hits (i.e. conditions?)

What I am getting from everyone so far is that they don’t want to have to think about when they apply conditions, they just want to use everything on cooldown and dps dmg fast hard now.

I thought GW2 was supposed to inspire players to be more skillful, not just mash buttons. What happened?

I agree that in it’s current state, retaliation would be far too powerful versus the shear amount of conditions applied today.

In counter argument, I would contest that retaliation is about as skilless and thoughtless as the mass amount of easily applied conditions available. There is little to no thought in applying conditions, much as there is little to no thought in applying retaliation.

“IF” retal were to be condition aware, then it would cause the players with conditions to have to stop and watch boons before applying conditions.

For the above to be a practical situation, retaliation would need a large gap between available boons (i.e. skill based application and not blanket mindless buffing).

Think of it in a different scenario. You are low in life, and need to heal. A quick glance at the conditions applied on you show that poison has been applied to you. With a condition removal available you clear out poison and then cast heal.

A non-skilled/aware player will waste the heal regardless and get little to no return on the ability. A skilled player would be aware of the conditions on them and know what they would do as they make real time decisions.

This is also similar to when I am planning a knock down/knock back on a target. I look for stability on the enemy and I wait for that to drop.

So coming back to retaliation being too strong. I disagree to some extent that it is too strong, but I believe that it is too readily available. I still contest that conditions should be affected by retaliation, and by that it would cause damage dealers to have to play as smart as defensive players. Thus enhancing the quality of the game and pushing it forward to something less mindless.

So in direct response:
If retal returned damage from conditions, then simply don’t stack conditions when retal is up or available.
As far as dodging the application or removing the condition, there is an arms race with a flurry of various attacks and reapplications of conditions, that it becomes a futile effort to dodge/remove conditions, as well as CCs or other attacks.

Nerf the uptime of retal, buff the damage return versus conditions.

just tried burning, no damage. Multiple hit attacks like 100 blades will do retaliation damage, but conditions will not return damage. The attack which does the initial application will return damage and that is it.

Again, I think this is an oversight and should be adjusted somehow. But how do we get dev attention and agreement on this. =(

If it is no, then I feel that is a huge oversight. Retal should be the direct counter to conditions and smaller damage based hits, while larger hits should be counter by blocks and dodges.

This could be intentional since they have made changes to reduce the duration of retal as much as possible since at the start we could keep it up pretty much 100% of the time (still has huge up time).

I’m going to have to log into my wife’s account and test out retal on myself later.

Just went into mists and had an NPC stack bleeds on me. No retal damage via bleed ticks =( I really disagree with this.

Oh, I completely agree that progress has been made. I just wanted to give praise where it was needed and hope that positive feedback sparks more of the same, instead of just negative feedback.

Since this has turned into a feedback location that is getting attention, I wanted to mirror the thoughts I had in another post about this content.

I feel you have captured the “action oriented combat” in this little mini game very well as you based it down to its simplest form, old school games.

I would like to see more of this style of “avoid getting hit” style combat integrated to the rest of the game. Faster action, less auto attacking, and more thinking about enemy weaknesses and strengths.

(my original post if more discussion is wanted there in reference to combat)
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/sab/SAB-Combat/first#post1758946

Yes I have, and no I do not think a “tank and spank” fight would be more fun. That is my own opinion though, and I guess not shared by you.

Now the mechanics they do have in I still have a problem with because they do not require player skill so much as playing knowledge of buffs/debuffs with the molten metal/lava being poured on the suit to do reasonable damage to it.

The other aspects of the fight as far as dodging the bombs is more along the line of what i see as player skill, based off of timing and situational awareness. Just as I mentioned the alpha fight is interesting with the mass amounts of red rings of death on the ground and relying on player timing to dodge roll (or walk out if you are close enough to the edge).

A lot of complaints from combat when GW2 first came out was when players started doing dungeons and being faced against trash mobs with huge HP pools and no real reasonable way to “skillfully” react to the attacks.

That is somewhat alleviated now because of familiarity and better gear/dungeon tactics by the player base as a whole, but you can’t deny they replaced “challenge” with “large hp pool” with some of these fights.

Good point on the wider population aspect. Challenging but achievable by the majority, otherwise no one would play.

Still I do want more of this “idea” integrated into the game somehow, but as you and I both pointed out, I don’t think they are going to totally revamp what they already have any time soon. I just want it on the radar as a “positive” action that they accomplished with the SAB.

I have run that, and yes the alpha fight is a great example of more action oriented combat. What I am saying is there needs to be more.

There was the idea at the start, but I feel they lost sight of that in development. What I am acknowledging is them trying to make a rudimentary old school game that performs better on the action oriented combat than the majority of the “real” game.

Why does it do that? Because it based down combat to the simplest form.
Don’t get hit.

In MMOs and other games, you are expected to be hit and soak up a couple of points of damage. Even in our modern day FPS games you have a tolerance for being hit.

In the older games I grew up with they were really hard. If you made one mistake you died. Sometimes you had extra lives or continue points…sometimes you don’t.

When you have mechanics where 1-3 hits is a death the enemies have to have interesting way to threaten you with being hit other than standing there and swinging at you.

Now the player has to think about attack timing and pattern before they get in close. Or if there is a ranged attack or a flurry of attacks that leads to a “dizzy” phase that opens up the target for attacks.

The old games were harder because the rules were simple: Don’t get hit.

Crocodiles and the whip remind me of pit fall. Course I guess you don’t “need” to use the whip on them but I do =p