Guild Wars 2

good call unknown, I left it alone once to see if he would reward you for not damaging his car. Or at least say something different. No change of course =(

Current open world dragon fights or the LTs for the dragons have targeting reticles on the head and legs. Thing is, it doesn’t matter what you target just swing and the dragon’s HP drops.

I would hope the original intent was that you had to damage the legs of the dragon to bring the head down low enough to damage the head.

Or damage the leg of the dragon before it did some sort of stomp or super attack on you.

Some sort of target switching and maneuvering, but as it is now just dps and dps hard.

Even in smaller scale fights or normal mobs. It would be nice to run something closer to what we have in the SAB. Sitting there hitting a boar or a giant fire fly for 10-20 attack swings is less action oriented combat than dodging monkeys coconut throwing monkeys and break dancing spiders.

I remember a quote somewhere talking about how GW2 was going to take away the “you swing and hit the monster and you swing again”. Unfortunately look at a lot of our combat now.

Too many stats and HP pools and not enough action. I of course don’t expect a complete revamp of the current combat engine and world NPCs but it would be nice to see more action in our combat if possible.

Bee Dog Queens are trivialized if you do a 2-1 combo of stick and whip.

whip-stick-stick-whip-stick-stick…and so on.

Takes longer to kill but you never have to move.

When I first heard the term “Action Oriented Combat” I envisioned something more akin to what we have going on in the Super Adventure Box. Sure, I would want it a lot more complex than this 8-bit remake has us playing, but very true to that old school game with less stats and more moves.

I think this has captured the idea of Action Oriented Combat really well, and should be used as a foundation to build upon. Not everything has to be “auto attack” oriented or DPS.

Examples include the frog boss, where you have to maneuver around attacks while setting up to create an opening to do damage.

As it is now, we really still have auto attack on and just spam cool downs. A “little” bit better than older MMOs but the root of it is still there.

twibs, I have been up there too but found nothing. nugget. I have 7/7 items at the moment. last one I was missing was elite skill, breath of moto

tried the elite on the fire near the first merchant, nothing happened.

Also tried on log, again nothing.

Genius….they trolled us April Fools they win!

I"m stuck at 5/6 and last thing I need to finish up. I’ll post the locations that I know of.
Area 1:

• nothing
  which tells me that maybe a room in this area not found yet

Area 2:

• shop behind water fall by lily pad
• shop in corner of area, found by running along far wall

Area 3:

• secret villager house that awards elite upgrade
• behind tree stump under log with monkeys and power ups in it
• shop behind alligator right before frog king fight

Boss Fight:

Continue past it and turn around after climbing up a tree and walking the perimeter, I’ll post screens in a sec

Ran this new setup for a few games. Most I can say is it is very balanced.

Some synergies in aegis causes burning and burning removes attacker boons every 20 seconds with virtue of courage on a 30 second refresh.

Well known shout benefits via boons and condition removal with added remove conditions every 10 seconds through purity.

Retaliation is readily available with greatsword and shouts.

Scepter and focus give some utility via ranged attacks and immobilize as well as 3 blocks on demand for if you get stunned up or if you want to use for burst.

Combo Smite with Whirling Wrath for a little bit of burst as well.

Overall though, you will not be downing people quickly, but you have survivability without losing too much damage.

I think they did well with creating a starting point with this template but for sure not a setup I would normally play without tweaking it.

A patch or two ago they changed the default starting template for Guardians. Found the changes interesting and pretty drastic revision of the original template. Thoughts?

Original Template
(yes the elite was left off in the game too)

New Template
(aqua breather had a 3rd divinity rune on it)

Obviously they saw a need for change, the question is why such a 180 and is this a sign on how we are “supposed” to build?

Odd, just went in game and I can confirm that with 25 points into virtues you get a 71s cooldown on virtue of courage. So with 25 points you actually get a 20% reduction instead of 25?!?

Good initiative Obena, but I “think” condition removal clears a whole stack of that condition at the moment. Otherwise it would be impossible to get rid of 25 stacks of bleeding.

The innate problems with burning is that it is a single condition stacked in duration not intensity as opposed to say bleeding, which ticks very fast multiple times in smaller numbers.

Bleed works well for a few reasons. Multiple people can contribute to cause higher damage, versus multiple people apply burn just makes the burn last longer delaying the time it takes to reach full damage even more.

Burning is a slow condition for damage as it occurs in the 1’s of seconds. Long duration burning is only useful to apply a condition and/or burning so that we do more damage via traits Radiant Power and Fiery Wrath. So increased time in burning does nothing but maintain our secondary effects of damage though passive traits.

Increased intensity in burning does make it hit really hard, but that damage comes at such a slow pace it is easily not felt.

What if increased stacks in burning reduced duration?

So if I was going to do 1000 damage in burning in 3 seconds, applying burning again would cause me to do the same damage in 2 seconds. Although this would reduce the time we get damage modifiers from condition/burning effects.

Your idea would essentially change burning into another bleed stack style damage. I wonder why the devs didn’t have it like so in the first place.

Poison and chill are also conditions that stacks in duration and not intensity. The thing with that is that they cause secondary effects which benefit from having them on longer, such as reduced movement speed on the target and reduced healing effectiveness.

What secondary effect to burning could be applied to make its current mechanic more enticing? Maybe reduced outgoing damage by the target for as long as burning is applied? We are a defensive profession after all.

Hmm, good call on the virtue cooldown reduction. I was using
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/
as my reference, so it seems the calculations on that are wrong. 20% of 90 is indeed 72, so that means we freed up another 5 points in his traits.

I’m sure he doesn’t have 15 points in radiance because his virtue of justice doesn’t recharge after downing a target. His symbols don’t cause vulnerability so not 15 points into zeal.

He also got some retaliation after a mesmer did a temporal curtain pull/knockdown so he must have retaliatory subconscious.

It is hard to time when Virtue of courage is refreshing aegis or if it was due to being 50% of life and valorous defense proced an aegis, but I can’t see any other trait line effects happening. So the remaining points are seemingly passive stat bonuses.

I did notice that in a few cuts of the video he stopped providing boons on revive, so I’m sure he changes it up depending on what he needs at the time.

So maybe 0/10/10/30/20 or 0/5/15/30/20

Hah, what can I say I do my research. Unfortunately I study the game more than I play it lately. Trying to find that magic formula and become amazing.

Well, breaking down the video I can see that he has a 72 sec cooldown on Virtue of Courage, which means he has 25 points in virtues (at 30 points the cooldown would be about 69 seconds).
Also he has a 28 second cooldown on Hold the line so he must have shout reduction.

His binding blades was on a 24 second cooldown so he also has faster 2h weapons.

His blind did not cause vulnerability, but his virtue of justice did cause blind, so he has points into radiance.

He also recieved regen, protection, and aegis for reviving his downed warrior buddy, and the warrior recieved those as well so he has protective reviver. Also I think he has all rune’s of mercy because it looked like he revives others quick.

On using virtue of resolve he removed three conditions so we know he has absolute resolution.

His dodge roll healed for 1064, which is around 935 healing power and his HP is around 18015.

So we know he is somewhere around a
0/5/0/30/25
Two hand mastery
Superior Aria
Protective Reviver
Absolute Resolution
With 10 points to spare somewhere, but most likely in radiance and or valor? Maybe in Zeal for 10% to burning.

935 Healing power
18015 Health
(Probably less base, since food and utility buffs are on)
So he must be sporting vitality/healing power gear as secondary stats, and a primary of probably power or toughness mix. Boon duration is another probable in his gear mix. He does not crit too much when fury is not active, so possible 5-10% crit chance.

For weapons he for sure has at energy and on kill stack healing power sigil as his roll heals went up as he got more kills.

Lets do a quick break down of the abilities:

Hammer:

• More symbols over time with auto attack chain
• More frequent AE burst damage with Mighty Blow
• Long range immobilize for “potentially” multiple targets
• Fairly fast refresh rate for knockback/control
• Area control with Ring of Warding

Negatives of the above abilities are:

• Auto chain to get symbol is predictable, weak as burst damage, and while the boon reduces damage taken it does not stay up long especially in a mobile fight. Any other actions besides auto attack delay the much needed defensive boon causing you to take even longer to gain the benefits (such as utilizing any other skill on your bar or having to move in and out of combat)
• Supporting to previous bullet, Mighty Blow interrupts your much needed defensive boon, causing even more damage taken. Although it does provide retaliation which contributes well to a defensive play style if you have protection up and doing “thorns damage”
• The only problem with our immobilize (zealot’s embrace) I feel is that it is slow and easy to be dodged, especially at longer ranges. This does work well to a knocked back target though.
• Banish is great as a knock back and is ready fairly frequently, but it is limited to a single target and it is a very slow ability that is often predicted and avoided.
• Ring of Warding again is a great ability but is slow to cast and not mobile. There are ways around the speed of it such as control abilities like knock downs or immobilizes, or even teleports, but this causes more utilities to be dedicated for one ability.

Greatsword

• Fast AE auto attack chain (more for damage than defense). Provides boon on auto attack like Hammer but gives might.
• Good AE damage on a fairly quick cool down, but again offensive based rather than defensive.
• AE blind and leap finisher that provides a longer duration retaliation versus blast finishers. This is great in stopping damage from multiple targets.
• On demand symbol placement that provides even more retaliation. Albeit with a longer cool down.
• AE control via Binding Blades and Pull.

The negatives of the above abilities are:

• This weapon is primarily offensive oriented, which at first glance isn’t what you are trying to do as a bunker.
• There is a distinct lack of the protection boon, which again would assist in bunkering.
• Area control is harder to come by and more difficult to pull off as you would have to move off the point in order to “pull” the targets to you. (Although you are able to pull multiple targets versus banish’s single target).

In the end I think the reason why a lot of people choose the Greatsword over the Hammer is because it is more dynamic with faster acting abilities.

AE blind can stop a lot of damage and buy you more time, versus protection which stops as soon as your auto chain is broken. In stationary PvE fights hammer performs really well since you can rely on your auto chain consistently landing and you will remain in the symbol to gain the full benefit, but the greatsword is a more mobile weapon with better “on demand” abilities.

This does not mean hammer can’t work, but it is all up to style and preference….and I think a lot of us have used hammer for so long some are looking for a change of paradigm. Even though I think hammer does provide better point control with the knock back and ring of warding.

If you think about it, our baseline damage with no “conditional multipliers” is around 5-7k.

Now add vulnerability stacks, might stacks, and more damage if: burning/has conditions/per boon/below a % of life or what not.

Now you have potentially 25-50% extra damage.

So if you are doing 7k damage regularly based on stats, having damage multipliers would have you doing 10k damage.

Of course, what do you sacrifice to achieve those numbers versus other professions? (answer is survivability and utility)

Screwing around for the last few days with traits in the mists and came up randomly with a 10k+ burst with whirling wrath off an unorthodox build. Granted it would never hold up in a real fight since it relies on aegis and over 90% life for another 30% damage, but fun to see big numbers.

Pretty much just took any +% to damage trait to see what we could dish out.

(copy and paste as usual)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQFAhE9dDCnQyZUgAgNDACAqUEP3DA;TkAg0Cno4ywlgLLXOukcNKA

You never know, maybe someone can tweak this to make it combat effective. Or just use it for one shot surprise ganking then die immediately after =p

just for the hell of it I ran around in spvp with the above setup and I didn’t die as often as I expected to. I just kept in mind I was squishy as hell and ran away right after blowing my attacks.

I did notice that in effect the burst is avoided either by dodge rolling or simply just walking away, since combat is highly mobile anyway and the whirling wrath animation is a big tipper to get out of the ae.

So missing mobility and control as it is, otherwise it is fun to spin that wheel on people not expecting it. Saved a few downed allies with this. Not for serious gaming for sure though.

Do you then feel that certain professions have been guided towards utilizing certain trait lines as they have better mixture of “wanted” stats and traits that better integrate with professions stats and mechanics? (i.e. there is no build diversity, we all need to do what was intended)

I think I have come full circle from when I started playing GW2 and now. Class comparison is a slippery slope, but…

I can make a warrior that has the same armor/toughness, more health, faster block cool downs, more knockdowns/knock backs, and faster healing cool down.

What a warrior doesn’t have that a guardian does have are:

Multiple sources of heal over times (reliable regen/virtue of resolve, or other trait oriented heals), boons, condition removals, and group support.

So what we see is that warriors can protect themselves better and survive damage better, while guardians can protect others better and recover from damage better.

Our strengths lie in support to others and heals, not “tanking”. The question is, do our heals result in equivalent “effective health” as a warrior? If not then I believe some adjustments are in line, as the argument on why we have a lower health pool is because we are “more defensive” than other classes (i.e. we can heal more).

The biggest problem with heals are the multiple sources of boon stripping or poisons which reduce our ability to survive vastly.

That said, our staying power seems to rely on healing more so than tanking hits…in a game without healers…. =(

Attached is a layout of each profession’s trait line and the stats associated within each line.

For primary stats: Toughness and vitality lines are defensive, while precision and power are offensive. The last trait line at the bottom is reserved for profession specific stats.

Secondary stats: Healing power and boon duration are defensive, while condition damage and crit damage are offensive.

The remaining stat is condition duration which is unanimously found in the power trait line for all professions.

My question is for players that are experienced in other classes besides guardians.

To go offensive or defensive, how do you mix your trait lines for different professions and do they match up with the trait lines?

For example, for primary stats guardians would want toughness and vitality to maximize defense. On the other hand secondary stats would suggest that healing power and boon duration are defensive stats.

Problem now is that those 4 stats are in 3 different trees. Both combinations of the bottom 3 trees have proven to work well for defensive healing as seen in the Healaway build and the AH/crit hammer build.

Would a defensive elemental pick the Earth and Water trait lines or the Water and Arcane trait lines? Or neither of those things?

One interesting side note is that the guardian class is the only one that has toughness combined with crit damage. Possible transposition mistake or intentional placement of that stat? Condition damage or boon duration seems like it would follow the trend of game play mechanics better.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAR8dlUgyCXFyvDf4ES2jVCBTQsHYUG1RXFUIA;T8AgzymEMJZS1kiJKvMeJ8y2lrLZXrPGfsbA
(copy and paste for link)

Or if you like the BuildCraft layout, which I can’t get used to:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|1.1k.h1j|c.1k.h1j.d.1k.h6|1k.a8.1k.a8.1k.a8.1k.a8.1k.a8.1k.a8|1k.68.1k.68.1k.68.1k.68.1k.68.1a.68|0.0.a2.u29b.u29a|0.0|w.16.19.18.0|e

99% sure this was the original build. A few points were tweaked over time as it was widely popular and the creator was active in it’s development.

Respect his request for privacy though, and do not link his name or any posts by him.

I agree that some of our core mechanics break down in actual game play. My goal is to find ways to enhance and emphasize these things the devs keep telling us we can do.

What weapons/skills/abilities are most effective in maintaining our staying power? I personally feel that we have these tools available to us, but we are not as superior and above average as we are told. For sure we are a hearty and defensive profession, but sometimes it feels like it is not enough.

So I want to push the boundaries and reach that holy grail of what the Guardian was envisioned to be by the devs.

All good points, but not really supposed to be a focus of a build. Was just pointing out an additional trick players could use or maybe integrate into an already working setup. Again, more of a “oh that’s cool” post.

Continuously we are told by the developers in interviews and various updates and posts that Guardian’s are melee oriented, boon-centric, front line fighters that are supposed to stay in the fight once engaged.

We are not highly mobile and not supposed to run around. We “punish for positioning” and so forth. The developers believe that Guardian as a profession is pretty well situated and need no real adjustments.

The above rhetoric that has been provided to us has me thinking about our mechanics available to us that help us maintain that staying power to keep engaged at the front line of a fight.

Are healing power and heals the main function that keeps us in a fight? Should we focus on healing? Poison reduces healing by 33%, so this is a big hindrance to Guardian staying power. Conditional removal is mandatory if you want to focus on healing, but is the arms race between how fast we can remove conditions and how easy it is to apply poison equal or is it a pointless fight.

Blocks and blinds? Should we focus on avoiding damage and now just recovering damage? With the flurry of attacks coming in and blocks/blinds only stopping one hit out of many, it definitely helps but I’m not so sure this is staying power.

We are also supposed to be hearty due to our toughness and heavy armor. Do we feel superior to other classes due to our armor and toughness?

In the end I do believe that all of those things combined help provide us with staying power, but I wanted to voice our different mechanics to spark more build thought and ideas based on those three core mechanics: Healing, avoiding, and mitigation.

One last thing that Guardian’s are touted at having a niche for is from the main GW2 page:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/professions/guardian/

“True guardians are brilliant tacticians and selfless defenders who know when to sacrifice their own defenses to empower their allies to achieve victory.”

To that point it states that we are defensive, but we sacrifice our defense to help others kill. It seems we are not intended as being the killers but the support to the killers. Or maybe I’m just reading too far into their virtue description…

Been a while since I have played but came back to do more theory crafting and “what if’s”.

What I came up with is a sort of interesting support guardian trick that can give us and our allies 20+ stacks of might for about 20 seconds.

Purging Flames and Hallowed Ground gives a fire field that you can use Mighty Blow in to trigger a blast finisher which provides 3 stacks of might for 20 seconds.

You can do this about 3-4 times providing 9-12 might. After exhausting those field combos switch over to staff to cast Empower for another 12 might for 12 seconds.

At best one person can give 24 might for a good set up of group burst. Not really amazing solo, but fun trick in groups.

Enjoy!

A lot of you have pointed out you would not categorize symbols as area control. The logic behind that was of how it was crucial for positioning in order to utilize symbols to the fullest extent.

I could have categorized them as boons support, via regeneration, protection, retaliation, swiftness. I still think that they are a positional directed tactic that should help us gain/hold ground in combat. At the moment they don’t have a lot of umph behind them.

That is not to say symbols are worthless as is seen with the AH hammer build. Just not as dynamic as I would have expected them to be as one of our more unique abilities.

Also I do not think Guardian’s are under powered and a bad profession. They are my favorite profession, which is why I put so much effort into understanding them. I think they are in a very good spot right now, but need some lose ends tidied up. Also I would like us to grow a bit as I do feel pigeon holed into being a AH/MF defensive support build.

Being tanky goes against the idea of the rest of the game and being a healer goes against those ideas as well. So it is like the rest of the game is trying to encroach on what the guardian does and we keep getting bumped or adjusted to fit our surroundings.

Power through defense, is what I chose the guardian for. Right now we have defense and longevity, but not a lot of power.

As far as hammer in PvE or PvP, it works great in PvE but it also works well in PvP. This is due to the fact it is the fastest refreshing and shortest lasting symbol we have. By lasting a short time it allows us to stay mobile in combat without losing out on the full effect of the symbol, versus say mace symbols.

Side thought, toughness versus protection.

Figuring out damage mitigation is slightly different in this game in that toughness does not reduce damage by a fixed amount, more so than it reduces damage versus the attacker attack value. This does not reduce condition damage however.

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

Protection reduces damage by 33%. Does this include condition damage as well?

Can we correlate the loss or gain of toughness to find a sweet spot that protection can accommodate for, thus giving up some of our toughness for other stats? Or are they apples and oranges.

If you have protection on 100% of the time you in essence change your health pool to be 33% larger in effective health. So an average build of we will say 15,500 health now really equates to 20,615 health.

Introduce our multiple regenerative capabilities for more effective health and our health pool (on paper) doesn’t look so bad.

Down side to that is the only way to maintain protection like that is we would have to be a hammer build, which is what I want to move us away from and grow a little more if we can.

@Judge Banks
Eatting boons, like a necromancer eats conditions could be an applicable solution. We have such a wide verity of ways to stack boons, but I think they were attempting to give us something to that effect in the trait, Power of the Virtuous. Which is seemingly lackluster.

I think it provides 9% extra damage with a full set of boons, but if you are down that tree you already lost out on damaging stats from power/crit/crit damage. I don’t know if 9% makes up for what you lost.

This is all assuming the wiki is accurate.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Virtuous

@Alarox
I too find myself theorycrafting more than playing. More often than not I’m on a spread sheet/build website or in the mists trying different setups to feel out a new play style.

We do not “need” AH and MF, but they are really effective and hard to pass up, like you said.

This is exactly why I wanted to have this discussion. Can we break the mold or are we so ingrained with our class mechanics that we are stuck with bunker and AH/meditation builds?

Can someone find a better way to maximize our strengths? How can you utilize and extrapolate the information given to us by the developers idea of class balance and make us stronger with what we have? Or have we reached our pinnacle for the time being.

I placed symbols in area control for the sake that they are very stationary and contribute to stationary fighting. I would like them to be more on par either offensively or defensibly with other area peaceable effects as I think the are negligible at the moment.

I have been doing too much spvp lately to see how easy it is for rangers, and necromancers to put a full stack of almost every condition possible on me, I wipe them and everything is right back on me.

If there was more than one enemy then it is hopeless to remove conditions. A speed bump in condition damage at least. In PvE on the other hand, condition removal is amazing and a huge utility to my group.

There is/was a sort of arms race between condition application and condition removal I feel. Now it seems they have negated each other out in terms of smart application and removal and you just do what you can.

The boons we can reliably keep going to maintain our combat effectiveness are vigor, protection, regeneration, and retaliation. Depending on the weapon/utilities you are using you can have some or all of those.

We also have a good amount of sources of stability and I believe the fastest recharging ones as well.

I would be interested to see stronger boons with possibly shorter durations? Something to really give an obvious show that you have boons active.

Elites I agree with you there. They can be amazing but for the most part they are not activated regularly as they tend to be on other professions. I think it is in the nature of how they were designed they completely change what you are doing and rely on that certain situation to arise.

Other elites integrate into already existing combat mechanics of the profession so they can be used as big cooldowns on a regular basis.

GW2 combat survival relies on a couple of key things.

• Watch for red rings on the ground and avoid those
• Watch out for big charge up abilities (a glow will be seen on the attackers hands typically). You can dodge out of these or sometimes just move out of range or behind the attacker
• Utilize defensive measure to block/avoid damage when dodge is not available like guardian aegis, warrior shield block, or thief roll attacks
• Not every skill on your action bar is meant for on cooldown dps, some are utility that you should save for a setup for burst or protection from damage

Combat is fairly simple, knowing how to avoid damage is the key. To avoid damage you need to watch the enemy’s animations and learn them. Sometimes a foot will raise up like when fighting giants. This mean a stomp is incoming and you have about 2 seconds to respond. Or when fighting centaurs they will reel back on their hind legs, this means a knockdown/charge is incoming and you should move/dodge (they go in a straight line).

When you see pop up messages like block that means you just performed a block, not a cue that you should try to block.

I really feel that symbols are not as effective as they could be. If a necromancer or a mesmer put stuff on the ground, everyone knows you NEED to get out of it. If a guardian puts a symbol on the ground its just kinda lol.

Our best symbol synergy comes with hammer and altruistic healing + writ of the merciful, as it is a constant application of symbols that only last for a short while, but that’s all you need as it will reapply soon.

We are very good at condition removal, but the rest of the professions are very good at applying conditions. So while you can remove conditions or convert them reliably, it is hard to justify it when they are right back on after our skills are used. I still run condition removal because I want to slow down enemy damage some how and we can do it better than most I think.

As you said, boons don’t make you godmode, and you don’t feel useless without them. So that reads to me that they don’t have a significant impact. You even stated you just think it is annoying and you keep smashing face.

Biggest problem with that is that these boons are what define a lot of our class mechanics and if they don’t matter then our class mechanics fail at the core.

Been mulling it over for a few days and going over weapon damage and different utilities.

In my mind, burst damage is sudden hard damage. Best and easiest example to understand would be 100b warrior or a backstab thief.

We can mirror the 100b warrior in a sense of a lot of attacks adding up to a lot of damage via attacks like whirling wrath, smite, zealot’s defense, and cleansing flames.

Problem is they do not do an unmanageable amount of damage alone, and often times we are left with the cooldown used and nothing else but auto attack to go on.

So I thought about combining these burst skills and using them in a rotation.

WW > ZD > CF > WW > ZD > CF and so on.

going full crit/crit damage in spvp you can achieve about 5k unmitigated damage per a skill and a rotation of the three would provide somewhere around 10-15k damage.

The limiting factor on this is weapon swap cooldowns unfortunately.

I ran this set up with some success in spvp without being too squishy and still able to kill shatter mesmers and various thieves.

http://tinyurl.com/alysqvu

Powerful blades, retributive armor, signet of resolve, runes of divinity, and the 10 points in zeal can easily be changed. I was simply trying to see what kind of damage I could dish out.

I even neglected to select a sigil to put on the weapons.

I did notice that the best way to increase our burst was via crit and crit damage. power and crit did not provide as much damage increase.

Added a couple of pictures just for show and tell, only 3-4k crits but that is a constant rotation of the 3 skills doing 3-4k on players each time…and its sPvP so not as amazing as you could get in wvw =p

I wanted to readdress this post describing Guardian strengths and weaknesses and then try to categorize our abilities in accordance to the vision described to us.

JonathanSharp (Game Designer)

Class balance philosophies

• Guardian
  • The Guardian is a heavy armor class who relies on boons to make up for their low levels of innate health. They focus on area control and punishing enemies for the position on the battlefield. We want them to feel very powerful when their boons are active, but if those boons are removed, they will start to feel pressure. They can remove conditions more easily than the Warrior, but share the Warrior’s need to be in melee range to dole out maximum damage.

So lets break up the class balance philosophies into categories of: Health Pool, Area Control, Boon Power, Condition Removal, and lastly, Melee Utility.

Health Pool

• Regeneration
• Aegis
• Protection
• Virtue of Resolve
• Dodge/Vigor
• Various self heal traits (AH, MF, etc.)

Area Control

• Wards
• Consecrations
• Symbols
• Knock Backs
• Stability

Boon Power

• Fury (only two sources, but one is too situational for most use)
• Might (Shout, crits, and blocks)
• Retaliation

Condition Removal

• Shouts (Pure of Voice)
• Meditations (Contemplation of Purity and Smite Condition)
• Absolute Resolution
• Passive (Signet of Resolve, Purity, and Perfect Inscriptions)

Melee Utility

• Knock Downs
• Teleports
• Pulls
• Immobilize
• Swiftness

I started off by naming specific abilities, but the list was getting kind of long so tried to generalize them…

At first glance it shows we have a lot of health pool augmentation resources, but I would contend that they are readily negated by the use of poisons, which then we have a lot of condition removal capability as well.

Conditions may be too easy to apply/reapply, but that is another discussion to be had else where.

Area control I think we do fairly well with after listing them out. I don’t know about that whole bit about “punishing” the enemy for ground though.

Support of melee range damage looks good, but I find others can too easily get away from us still, so either I need to L2P, or we need better melee utility skills.

Previous discussions when the quoted statement about Guardians first came out brought up the opinion that boons did not make us feel powerful enough versus any other profession, and I hope our outcry was heard. Time will only tell.

What do you as the Guardian community think of our capability to fill the roles listed by our developers? How can we better utilize our skills to meet said roles?

Symbols are problematic in that if you are moving you do not get the benefit out of them, and if the target is moving they are not affected to full duration as well.

Stationary PvE style fights gain more benefit out of symbols than a PvP fight. Not to say symbols are worthless in PvP, just not as effective in a majority of fights. Bunker style point protection uses symbols fairly well.

Spirit weapons are pretty unique. The sword and hammer do fixed damage that can only be increased by the traits, so for builds with low damaging stats such as power/crit/crit damage, these can help provide extra damage to “keep up” with everyone else.

Also for builds that are higher on damage they provide just that extra push if you really want them.

Hammer is great control and CC. Sure it sucks having the target get knocked around but it is really easy to walk over to them and continue to beat them while they are down.

Shield is highly effective in stopping ranged attacks and the weakness debuff it can do bounces between multiple targets, so it is good at melee damage mitigation in groups as well. I am not 100% sure but I think ranged attacks within the shield are still prevented from landing also.

The bow is often overlooked but still pretty strong in certain scenarios. The healing it does is not affected by healing power, but it can provide fairly good healing over time without needing to dip into healing power at all. Also the condition removal it provides is a nice passive, but I wish I fired off more frequently or to the whole group at once at least.

Now to the original topic, they don’t work well together. I agree that the placement of spirit weapons in the zeal line that increases power an awkward choice. The default guardian build in sPvP that you are given when you first go into the mists has a staff/mace/shield build that focuses on symbols for defensive measure and spirit weapons for offensive measures, so that is possibly what they were trying to imply.

Having defensive symbols and offensive spirit weapons?

In a way, direct damage is “capped” by the extent the targets armor value versus the attacker attack value. A hard npc target could have an armor rating much higher than is currently possible by the available gear/stats that players could achieve thus reducing possible damage done. Conditions bypass these mitigation barriers, thus the only cap on them doing damage currently is the stack cap and duration times.

I’m guilty of pressing roll whenever jumping off a high ledge, even though I know it will not avoid any damage at all. It just feels right and looks right instead of a hard land on my feet…or face.

A change like this could allow (like the parkour video showed) a 60% reduction of damage from falling. So extreme heights would still cause damage or even death, but we could smooth out some of the damage.

Counter argument to this is that the world developers may have put specific heights in the game on purpose, specifically for jumping puzzles that this falling roll would mitigate or eliminate the challenge presented. It could also let us reach areas we were not intended to reach.

If they do integrate this, I do not feel it should be automated at all. This goes against the ideas of the game and should be a player action to keep in line with the active/skill based game play.

I’ll bump Amins’ post here for the sake of curiosity. A majority of the builds here focus on survivability, a few posts tout our damage capability though and how amazing we are. I know Trungalung, Guanglai Kangyi, Brutaly, Silentstorm, as well as others have made posts on guardian burst/dps, so lets see what is out there

this still falls within the lines of the stated wiki rules, but adjusts the mention of a cap.

Only one speed enhancement will be taken into consideration and the highest one will be selected. Out of the list of movement speed enhancements you have a range from 5% to 50%.

In general the highest boon you can get is swiftness which is 33% which is why it must have been thought to be the cap.

A majority of the traits that give movement speed are limited to bursts of speed of 25% with the exception of thieves who can reach 50% when stealthed.

Lastley, Superior Rune of Speed gives 7% runspeed when using swiftness.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_Speed

Now here is the possible bug. Can it be confirmed that the 33% from swiftness is correctly combining with the 7% from the rune bonus which should give 40% runspeed.

Easy test on this is to have two people race one with the rune and one without and they are both given swiftness.

For practical applications though, 33% is the norm.

This was asked earlier in another way, but the short answer was no, it takes the highest run speed buff and they do not stack. Additionally there is a cap of 33% runspeed.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Movement_speed

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Yes, actually. Note how 800k and 846k are not very far apart.

I went back and that point myself, but it is balanced only if the number of players it took to reach 200 stacks meets the number of players to do that much backstab damage. So you say that like you were disproving me when I made that point “for” you.

Rin.1046

Why did your thief stop attacking while they wasn’t stealthed?

I pointed out in my post (tldr for some I guess) that I only factored in backstab and there should be more attacks supplementing that attack, this was simply an attack for attack based scenario that isn’t true combat conditions but trying to evaluate how good stacked conditions really are.

Rin.1046

Another thing you missed in your equations is that you are comparing 200 stacks (something no one player can achieve) vs ONE direct damage player.

Go back and look at the bottom of my post about if there were 8 engineers stacking 200 bleeds then if you have 8 thieves doing backstab the damage seems to equal out.

Simply put, I am evaluating “both” sides of the conversation here. The player base that wants conditions to be better (I am included in this) and the developer side who I believe put a cap on conditions to have better control on large group fight balance.

This is all pivoting on how much condition damage can one person actually stack. If one person can feasibly get up to 200 damage by themselves then that is too much. (dont think this can happen with bleeds dropping off at a rate of 2-3 bleeds every 15 1/2 seconds not counting crits and what not).

I think my own posts help disprove the possible dev answer that conditions are too strong if left uncapped. If anything they look really balanced.

Now as far as what Kwishin.5124 said.

Kwishin.5124

The trade-off would be that power builds are better for shorter encounters, and against opponents that can remove conditions.

This is the traditional thought about damage over time versus direct damage. It seems to be the case here too, in that my Guardian can stack burns all day long, but it prolongs the fight for 1 burn tick per a second. It is faster if I just direct damage a target no matter how high I get my conditions to stack.

In the end it looks like conditions were never meant to be a primary form of damage, but a supplemental form of damage. They help get through armor and provide small periods of burst for short times.

Group play allows for conditions to be stacked for prolonged periods of times to maintain steady damage no matter what the targets armor is.

On paper that sounds good. In effect, we as the players get frustrated that we can’t go all out in a group and stack more and more conditions because there is a cap.

Should there be?

What happens to professions that are not able to stack bleeds at all, or just simply not good at condition stacking. Guardian comes to mind in not having access to bleeds and the mechanic of burning buffers it to only happen once a second versus bleeds that will allow each stack to tick for damage at the same time.

Stacking in duration conditions are bad versus stacking in intensity. So a group doing condition damage would only want other bleeders to join possibly?

Lets try some numbers:

• Bleed Damage
  2.5 + (0.5 * Level) + (0.05 * Condition Damage) per stack per second

So a level 80 with a build something like this (not an optimal build just stacking condition damage)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQBRExKiA6BAAAAwnHvVaBhA;TgAAzCpoay0koJbTumkNB
(copy and paste into browser, link will not work on forum due to semicolon in the link)

They would have 1406 condition damage with bleeds that last for 15 1/2 seconds.

2.5 + (0.5 * 80) + (0.05 * 1406) = 112.8 damage per a second of bleeding per a stack.

at 25 stacks that is 1800 damage a second.

Now remove that 25 bleed cap and give it 200 stacks of bleeding, that is 14102.5 damage every second. (remember stacks drop off so how long can 200 stacks be maintained and how many people would it take to keep it at this rate or higher).

if a fight lasts for 60 seconds that is 846,150 damage done.

Now what about weapon skill damage. Not sure what profession/weapon you want to use, but I’ll take a thief as an example because they can do similar numbers of damage in a short time, but with longer cooldowns (a buffer in damage that a high stack of bleed would not have).

Backstab has been seen to do damage from 5-20k in one hit. I’ll go somewhere in the middle and say each backstab will do 10k damage.

Backstab relies on being stealthed so if it is a double dagger thief they can stealth every 6 seconds with offhand (other sources of stealth but making simple example).

So every 6 seconds a thief can do 10k damage. In 60 seconds they could do 10 backstabs.

10*10,000 = 100,000 damage done.

That is 846,150 damage versus 100,000 damage.

Put that in terms of DPS then bleed will do 14,102.5 dps versus backstab will do 1,666.66 dps. So there does seem to be a disparity on direct damage and condition damage if you let bleeds stack too high.

This is not a complete example as there would be other attacks to supplement the backstab damage, and maybe it is not the best damage per a second attack. So if someone has other ideas to compare direct damage versus condition damage please share.
_

In retrospect if you needed 8 people to stack 200 bleeds then lets take 8 thieves doing backstab, that would make the outgoing damage fall closer together. That is around 800,000 for each.

Balanced?

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I don’t need thanks and it never stresses or hassles me unless the person is being belligerent and all knowing while I’m trying to help. But that is not an issue with me helping, that is an issue with people being rude :p

Understandable but sad. I never lose my patience with players and I try to be helpful all the time.

Maybe because I like helping people and when I explain how things work and assist people it makes me feel good to help someone else. Versus when you had to explain things you did it to get the group to work so you could complete your task to help yourself.

We both had a self interest in explaining things, just mine was more fluffy

Guild Wars 2 Official Wiki

A character’s movement speed can be increased or decreased via several methods. Speed is measured in units per second (u/s). Both speed buffs and debuffs do not stack, the effect with the greatest value will be used. Having Swiftness and Signet of Air active will make you move 33% faster, not 58% faster. The movement reduction while in combat will stack with movement speed debuffs.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Movement_speed

While a wiki can be edited by anyone, I would hope it has more validated information than a forum post. It does seem to have more information to help validate what Kuruptz.4782 has already said.

You are focusing on a single player, but what I was trying to get at is the bigger picture. If you have a group of 5 people who can stack bleeds/burning/confusion/poison higher than what is currently available then damage potential is increased.

If you have an open world fight where there is no limit to the people available to hit that target, then you could have a few hundred stacks of bleeding with ease.

Depending on what action you would like to see taken you could have 25 stacks per a character, or more if there isn’t a cap and everyone’s bleeds stack together.

Put 8 people together that can stack bleeds and you have a stack of 200 bleeds potentially. Now like you posit, is this a bad thing? Would 200 bleeds increase damage drastically, or would the loss of power/precision/crit damage balance the condition builds? (In every trait list, it seems that power/precision/condition damage/condition duration are easy to obtain together. Crit damage is harder to factor in on some cases)

I suggest that if there is no limit on condition damage then a combined group of people can break the damage per a second limit of melee/ranged hits which are on an animation timer and attack cool downs. Maintain the stacks at a high rate and you have damage ticking consistently and pretty fast.

Individually, conditions are not dangerous. As a group, they can be unbalancing. If conditions have no limit, then they possibly could be reduced in base damage to accommodate for more people using them, making them pointless for solo builds but required for group builds.

Again those are two extremes of the scenario as I’m just debating both sides of the problem. Personally I want conditions to have more impact in group play, but I don’t want to break the system and balance so we need to find the right avenue.

So here is another side of the coin look.

What happens when you allow condition damage to be stacked indefinitely, or independently by each player?

You now have outgoing player damage fluctuating on a very large scale depending on if there are lots of condition or very little.

Now think about encounter balances.

Do you adjust the encounters to anticipate very high damage or low damage? In order to not trivialize encounters and keep things challenging and not having overpowered players, game developers often err on the side of harder encounters.

Now think about the build diversity, everyone must go condition damage because the encounters are developed with higher damage output in mind.

With a condition cap ANet can have hard control over the encounters and balances can be made that account for a smaller diversity of outgoing player damage.

Is this right though? Should we be limited so everyone can be the same so that balance is easier? Or will giving us free reign cause us to limit ourselves and only one build is good.

For sure a middle ground must be found.

Was just doing more thinking. The great thing about conditions is that they are not affected by armor and will do full damage to higher level and higher armored targets.

The bad thing about conditions is that they are hard capped and your damage output diminishes when other players stack the same condition. Additionally conditions can not crit.

At initial looks, it looks like conditions are used to supplement low attack versus high armor.

This gives defensive builds that stack toughness and/or vitality and have no room for power the ability to still do damage at a fixed rate. Also this allows us to maintain damage on harder targets.

Question is now, are conditions worth it, and can you get high attack and high condition duration/power and still be effective? Or is it only good if you go one or the other depending on the encounters.