Guild Wars 2

Quick list I made running through the different trait calculators, mind you these are primarily heals, other utilities such as blind or blocks still apply but I did not intensively search each profession just yet. Was hoping to get educated players from each profession showing what they can do besides damage:

Warrior
Banner Regen and protection

Guardian
Boon/meditation self heal/shout regen/protection

Thief
Venom group application/venom heal/venom might

Engineer
Bomb heals

Mesmer
phantasm heals

Elementalist
water skill heals

Necromancer
deathly invigorate and transfusion for heals

Ranger ??? How much do pets support group?

Since not one class is supposed to be a healer or a tank and everyone is supposed to contribute as a group, what can you do for your group? Ideas like reliable consistent regeneration, blinds, heals, weakness. What can you do to help your group stay standing.

If everyone contributes a small part of passive/active damage mitigation will these be enough to make the encounter feel more controllable?

Ideas like thief with venomous aura combined with leeching venoms causing heals

Or guardians and warriors providing regeneration and weakness to reduce damage and provide healing with shouts and banners

spamable blinds to keep big attacks from hitting players.

Lets drop the glass cannon builds and make up team composition ideas for survivability.

Guardians can pull out some pretty good self healing for supporting the group with minor group support. Somewhat selfish on the healing end but still provides useful boons to the group allowing the guardian to stay up and fight. What else is there?

Initial thoughts on survivability and group sustainment focus on:
Aegis, Regeneration, Protection for boons (maybe even vigor for more rolling)
Blindness, Weakness for conditions

On longer cooldowns tends to be:
Fear, immobilize, and to some degree chilled (for running away and not getting hit by melee)

How do YOU bring things to the table?

TheUnNamedHero.4167

Umm….no one said anything about horde and alliance….except you.

LoreChief.8391

Pretty much what they said. What you’re suggesting is creating a horde counterpart of the alliance

Please read more intently TheUnNamedHero.

As far as the rest of the feedback from the idea, I get that the majority of players want to be the “hero” in this demographic. I have seen this in other responses on posts about how they enjoyed the story line until they lost focus and Trehern became the marshal of the Pact instead of you.

So that said it does not seem like anyone IS interested in expanding the idea of conflict and WvWvW other than it is there for the sake of being there. I personally really feel that having objectives and meaning behind “why” we are fighting make something more immersive and it also helps carry forward from story line game play into competitive goal oriented WvWvW combat.

Yes this would make a good chunk of the world unaccessible for any “evil” races and no this would not be easy to create or implement as it stands now.

I think if I would have posted this in another section it might have gained more ground say the pvp forums where a lot of players talk about eSports and how to make this game competitive.

Regardless, failed idea and as many of you point out won’t happen and no support, but I don’t think it is a bad idea that would have negative impact for the game, just not an easy addition is all.

I guess you are just very satisfied with what was provided but I had a different idea or view on how the game would play. I know I’m not completely alone with the general mood and discussions on these boards and in the game but I also see many player like yourself that have found that comfort zone and really do feel at home with the current mechanics.

I really feel that an adjustment would make both parties appreciate dungeons and combat in general more.

In the spur of ideas I posted additional thoughts on this topic on the suggestion forum. If interested.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Combat-without-tanks-and-healers/first#post453905

I don’t think I have the only and best idea but I was hoping to throw more perspective from another point of view and maybe adjustments by the developers would come up due to these talking points.

Just because it is too large and encompassing does not mean it will “never happen”. Ideas are ideas and it peeked my interest while doing the story line. Most likely it wont happen in this game because as you said it would double/triple the content. So I was throwing it out there to put fuel on the fire of maybe an expansion.

As far as the horde and alliance attachment, honestly I was connecting it to EQ2 with the good/evil/neutral groups of character races that players could be. There was even a quest that let you change factions, but it was long and tedious.

I really wish people could break the paradigm of all MMOs are WoW, because there are many more better and interesting ones that have come before and after WoW.

As far as team work, it is still teamwork but within that faction. IE WvWvW there are people still fighting with each other in the spirit of competition and to gain benefits for your world(faction).

Do I honestly think this will happen? No, but more ideas could spark from it and in a suggestion board you all shouldn’t be so quick to shut thing down

So no one else is interested in prolonging and epic battle of good and evil in wvw? sadface

But you mistake what I say, I am having success. I am not wiping and we are not constantly dying left and right. A few here and there sure but not where it feels like hitting our heads on the wall.

But you do not get a gratifying sense of what you did had significant impact.

In essence I feel like they have tried to shy away from the traditional roles so much that it is so diluted it feels weak and mushy.

For an action RPG when I push a button I believe we should feel/see the effect. Right now we do these damage mitigation and control abilities because we know it is there to help and it must help someway, but you can’t tell definitively if it made a difference.

Or maybe I need suckier groups so I can see just how well what I am doing IS helping? :p

Actually, no it isn’t. I have been doing more and more group oriented combat and I am having a hard time seeing the effectiveness. I can’t tell what would happen if I don’t give a boon of protection or regeneration cause I did it. Sometimes when I provide a boon or a CC people die anyway. Sometimes they live.

In the reverse, sometimes I don’t provide anything and they die or live regardless of what I do. (

The effects are so small and gradual that it is not registering as a clear and obvious positive action.

With more drastic life or death actions they players can see if they did something right or not.

As far as Andele’s response about we do have tanks and healers, I don’t “want” them. I don’t want to force a square peg into a round hold and call it a tank or a healer. Yes everyone has a survival ability such as a block or a stun, but that is not meant to gain agro and “tank” it. Those are meant for oh no big damage is incoming and I can’t get out so I will brace myself for impact.

Yes players are finding ways to “tank” with those and soak up as much of the damage as they can, but that is because we are stuck with the traditional roles in our heads and we want to make something out of nothing.

That was pretty much the point. More exaggerated to let players see the effect they have on combat. As it is now, boons and damage interrupts are there and this is the exact purpose they provide, to stop damage but it is not noticeable and almost unnecessary in many cases.

For an action rpg style combat you need to feel like when you push the buttons something happens and I feel that myself and many players have a hard time seeing that effect.

What if heals were taken out of the game and control was the only form of heals via a break in damage.

The idea is that players maintain a high state of health regeneration but damage comes at such a steady rate in combat that players can not sustain “tanking” that damage for any long period of time.

Attacks like stuns and blinds would stop damage for 2-3 seconds and allow for the natural regeneration to recover large chunks of life thus everyone has stuns/blinds/mobility control/pushbacks/blocks or some sort of damage stopping ability and everoney is responsible for keeping each other alive.

Or make heals more percentage based or increase regeneration rates to extreme degrees but very short duration with long cool downs.

This other idea gives everyone very strong heals but not spamable so that one person is not a healer. Now one person might make a clutch heal to keep people alive but they wont be able to do that twice, so now players have to coordinate as a group to do a rotation of heals to keep group survivability going.

I think there are more ways to make players feel more effective in a group than what is currently being played.

A few “make x race playable” posts and ideas have come up and I was thinking something along these lines but for a different reason other than that I want to play a fun race.

What if players could play the bad guys. We could see the otherside of the story if players could be orrian undead players, the jotun or the skritt or inquest.

Now imagine WvW combat. Instead of server versus server of humans, asurans, sylvari, norn, and charr you now have good versus evil with more of a storyline driven reason to fight. A third faction would have to be figured out though so maybe some of the more neutral races that are neither good or evil.

This idea came to me after listening to the story line about the mouth of the dragon eating magical items to send the power back and the transport ship of dead bodies being sent to a "factory" to be turned into abominations

All of the quests out in the dire straits were military WvW type objectives of resources and gaining ground. This can easily be translated into a WvW type game play.

TLDR: I can’t tell if what I am doing helps, how can this become more apparent to the players?

I have done a couple of dungeons and felt the muddy chaos that many players have expressed on these forums and in game. I understand the idea of breaking the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps and making all players responsible for the encounters and group dynamics.

I personally have not had a drastic failure in dungeons that I see some people express concern over where they have died 10-30 times just to get through a dungeon. At most maybe 1 or 2 times throughout the duration of the whole dungeon I had a complete death and had to run back as a group or individual, but I don’t count the downed state a death where others might.

What I think the problem is with groups is that players do not have any real tactile sort of feedback that what they are doing is taking any positive or negative effect on the group’s effectiveness.

If I am dishing out protections or regeneration on my group I know it is helping in some ways and anything is better than nothing, but is it worth it? I don’t want to develop a holy trinity and I am all for the idea but how do we give players the feedback they need to continue to perform a good thing or stop doing a non effective thing?

I have seen many times that all players need to be a healer/buffer, control/damage mitigator, and dps all at once (i.e. healer tank and dps) and many times the typical idea is L2P and or learn the fight mechanics. I understand and learn boss mechanics and learn to anticipate or read a big attack that needs to be avoided or blocked or when condition damage or CCs need to be wiped so that I or my fellow group members can live, but it does seem like beyond those big obvious mechanics the normal pace of combat auto attack damage is also so powerful that my regen or protection can not keep my group or myself standing and fighting effectively enough.

If we were to have more “clutch” save moves and tone down the regular attacks while keeping the “if you are not paying attention you die” attacks then that would allow combat to slow down and let players make more effective decisions. Normally in single target fights I feel this criteria is met, but in group fights you can only choose to avoid or block one or two attacks. Unfortunately there are three or four other enemies also ready to do attacks that you need to dodge/block/or CC so you don’t die.

Maybe the frequency of those attacks need to be regulated or a debuff and/or a buff when you avoided one of those attacks so as to allow you to not be hit by sequential spammed one shot type attacks or CCs on your group. Sometimes it feels like kitten if you do and kitten if you don’t.

I will keep doing dungeons and hope to find more sense of it all and maybe learn the secret way that we were meant to play and become more effective at the game.

skullcrusher, try to not get too negative and name calling before our post gets locked here. WoW is another game and it doesn’t make it a lesser game for people that are not good enough for your game. So it doesn’t have to be derogatory.

negative opinions are fine I’m sure as long as they are constructive and not emotional lashouts. The biggest problem is you could post something negative but constructive but the following posts you don’t have control over.

So moderators have to decide if they want to squash that early or not.

Voice a problem and if you can a solution and try to stay away from seeming like you are angry and fed up with things.

If we were at a store and a customer walks up screaming their head off and waving their arms in the air about how upset they are you try to calm that customer down and get them to talk calmly so that you can resolve the problem.

The tools to do that are to respond to posts and or lock/delete them. Sometimes responding just feeds the fire and sometimes it resolves the issue. Make it apparent that you want to work with the customer service and they wont put your fire out with a locked or deleted post.

The order of whispers storyline with the char that has a thing for apples has made me actually lol a few times. It is random, and different without being too cliche and not trying to be trendy and using internet memes.

Voice acting itself? convincing enough, it doesn’t sound like highschool kids reading a script and I hear emotion and good pace of conversation when they talk. Script is mostly good but some corny things for sure but I’m ok with that. This isn’t a movie that is going up for awards or anything.

I’ll be honest, I detach myself my a bulk of the drama and I don’t know what the hot issues are that people are upset about.

Some game balance or nerfs depends on how you view the changes
bots who are never going to go away so long as money is to be made
exploiters who cheat because they want to feel powerful and break things

Those things are going to be in any game such as this. I can’t do anything about the bots but report them and hope anet finds a way to make it less feasible to exploit their economy.

Cheaters are going to exists. Since the advent of rules there have been people trying to bend them. I can’t do much about them, they make me mad, but i can’t let them ruin my fun so I keep moving.

Class/game changes are typically the biggest gripes and heart aches. People get very attached to their characters and how they play them. Developers need to keep people happy while making sure the game works the way they intended. Meaning, compromise and never making everyone happy. Are there things I want to see implemented or taken away? Yes for sure. Do I feel like i’m being ignored, well I see myself as a single voice and all I can do is submit my opinion and hope it doesn’t get lost in the masses. Overall the game works and it is not game breaking when my character can or can not do something.

Expectations are a hard thing to live up to, but should never be ignored. Just be understanding and keep giving feedback where you can. Ultimately if the game goes a direction you don’t like then you are free to go and the good times you did have will be the fun memories you can keep. Be weary of focusing on the bad all the time or that is all you will see.

Kind of a tangent but I think shows the idea of “undocumented events”.

I played Everquest way back when. The first big undocumented event was the legend of the Fiery Avenger. The lead game master used to sport the weapon and walk around towns while talking to people. It was a big flaming 2handed sword and everyone wanted it. No one knew what class could use it as the GM was a ranger wielding a 2handed sword which was impossible with the game mechanics.

Throughout the game there were little seemingly unrelated quests that eventually lead up to the search for the Fiery Avenger. It was a race and no one knew what the reward was going to be. You had to find NPCs and guess what to say to them since there were no guided conversations. Just text and a box to type in: “Where is the fiery avenger…..Who is miragul……How do find the sword”

This one thing brought whole servers together of unrelated guilds and people were scraping for clues on what to do next and where to go. It was amazing and truly epic. Later things became so predictable and everything was documented on webpages that everyone had epic weapons and everyone was amazing, but that first time was memorable and I still remember the first guy to get the fiery avenger. Gaunt, an erudite paladin on the Tunare server.

If this could be recreated on a smaller and repeatable scale all throughout the game world I think it would make players feel truly rewarded.

=( I like the longwinded npcs and the clip scenes. Again to each their own and for the most part you can skip all that talking if you wanted to (skip button or press esc)

If you need a path, follow the hearts on the map, they are level based and let you progress through an area in a logical format. You can do that in conjunction with your storyline quest and it keeps you on track level wise to keep up with the difficulty of the quest.

Dynamic events are meant to be a distraction and you don’t “have” to do them but they pay off in the long run via honor and or explorable areas becoming open or changing for exploration achievements.

I think of dynamic events more as something to do when max level as you wander around or a nice change of pace from linear storyline. I do wish the dynamic events were not so predictable though, they rotate so consistently, it would be nice to see a dynamic event have a few random options so it isn’t always centuars attacking the same village or thieves always poisoning the water hole.

They did do a good job at having dynamic events chain though so after you finish one event it may chain into another event, such as you help the seraph take over a outpost, then they ramp up an assault on the centaur encampments to fight over territory.

Again, more random events in the same locations so you don’t know what is coming next instead of the same thing every 10-20 minutes

If you can have everything without a wait then there is nothing to want. Having a lack of want leads to lack of incentive or goals. So in someways, a wait is good. Just as long as it isn’t so long you lose interest and don’t want it anymore.

Well the way point travel is there to be a economy drain so that depleting resources (your gold) stay important. Beyond that you don’t have to use them and there are asuran portals that take you to each of the racial cities that can be used to travel large distances at no cost.

Maybe this is overly cheap of me but I also use the pvp zone to get back to lions arch for free instead of using the fast travel way points =p

As far as the grindy portions of the game. Yes it is there. I feel the difference between these grinds and other games that grind is that you do not “have” to do them to play the game.

spvp gives you the gear for free and upgrades are just cosmetic, so that is instant plug and play.

wvw auto balances your level to 80 (your gear and skills are still limitations). The large scale of the battles makes individual inefficiencies less important and you can wvw as soon as you get out of the intro if you really wanted to. Less effective than a geared 80, sure but you can still move with the crowd and get credit of taking objectives.

As far as the pve aspects. Replayability can be limited as far as story. Dynamic events continue to trigger and you don’t have to do them, but the only way to get karma is to do dungeons or dynamic events. The question is why are you farming the karma? If there is something you are working towards then of course it will be a “grind” because you are “working” to an objective. If there was no work involved then you would get it instantly.

I know i"m stating what you already know and maybe the problem is the time invested to reach those goals that you disagree with. At that point it is all subjective. What is a long time to you may be shorter to others. The developers determine how long they want to gate those grindy objectives for and we are at the mercy of those decisions

Too many I am sure. If this became a primary way of getting quests and adventures it would make it more interesting instead of the guided interactions that almost every game has now, let the player drive the game instead of the other way around.

Goals are the reason to keep doing something. You have no goal or reason and no one can give that to you. All I can do is state some of mine:

-See the whole world
-Master/understand the game and profession mechanics and builds to enhance my gameplay better than average player (spvp oriented)
-Compete in wvw and spvp/tpvp
-Explore and learn lore

In the end I play because it is new and fresh still so I continue to feel that forward momentum. This feeling can wear off and if it does then I will stop. But for now, I am hooked.

As I have been wandering around the world doing 100% map discovery I ran into a couple of events that immediately drew me in and gave me that rewarding feeling for playing the game.

These events didn’t show up on the mini map, but simply were player initiated actions based on reading the conversation text.

One event had a crypt full of angry spirits. In one room there was an empty coffin, when inspecting it your only conversation option was “this isn’t worth my time I’m out of here”.

In another room there was a statue that when inspected stated that the makers of the statue spent a lot of time kneeling in front of it.

At initial look most players will shrug that off and walk out of the crypt as i almost did. After taking a second to actually read the conversation pop ups I thought to type /kneel in front of the statue.

That’s when the magic happened. A ghost appeared and told me why the crypt was angry, the coffin was guarded by a spirit and now that it has been desecrated he had enraged the rest of the spirits. The only way to stop him was to speak his name to summon him and put him to rest.

I was sucked in, I felt like I had a direct influence in the game and that my critical thinking skills and reading helped me come to a point that most gamers might not have seen.

I felt special.

This event ended by her telling me the name of the spirit, but instead of having me type the name at the coffin I was given the option to say it via conversation options. I would have liked it if the player was forced to have to remember the name and type it personally as another reward for actually reading.

I come from an older generation of online gaming. Where you had to type everything and figure out the key words in order to interact with NPCs and get that next quest. This harkens back to that idea without making it overly tedious.

More events like this that reward players for role playing or actually reading the quest text and feeling like a detective without handing it to the player on a silver platter would be highly welcome and I feel greatly give a sense of reward to the player because instead of just clicking away at random text options they feel like they did something and solved a riddle.

This is the same reason why I love the jumping puzzles. No one is giving you a quest and telling you to explore it. It is there to discover as you adventure. Little pearls of fun hidden away.

Bring back the quests and adventure!

single trigger “burst” of damage. As I stated at the end if you were to factor in cooldowns and durations you would get different numbers. Steady weapons have low damage with no high/low end so it does “steady damage”. This removes variations in the damage results and shows you how the weapon performs.

the stats show:
-total damage for every attack skill triggering only once(not counting scepter or staff as they do not have a chain attack so it is the 1 ability triggered three times as if it was a chain)
-total number of hits that struck the target to account for how many burning conditions would apply
-Damage divided by hits to show what all the abilities combined would do as an average per a hit on that weapon
-Burning damage and weapon damage together based on number of hits in the attack chain

Compiled weapon stats using steady weapons in the mists without any traits/armor on. Results are interesting:

Weapon
Damage / Hits / Average Per Hit / Damage with Burning

Staff
256 / 9 / 28 / 670

Staff (with might)
376 / 9 / 42 / 704

Greatsword (not counting binding blade dot)
503 / 24 / 21 / 1815

Greatsword (with binding blade dot)
2103 / 24 / 88 / 3415

Hammer
376 / 9 / 42 / 704

Scepter (auto firing 1 for duration of smite)
273 / 13 / 21 /929

Mace (with block damage)
313 / 8 / 39 / 641

Sword
258 / 14 / 18 / 914

Torch (9s burn from torch 4)
160 / 10 / 16 / 3768

Torch (activating burst from torch 4, 3 sec burn and direct damage)
274 / 11 / 25 / 1914

Focus (explosion from focus 5 timing out)
121 / 3 / 40 / 121

Shield
38 / 1 / 38 / 38

Interesting bits of this are that staff with might buff does an equivalent amount of damage as hammer does. Staff and Hammer both have high damage per hit and are good for short duration bursts of damage but not sustained damage.

Greatsword has a large amount of small hits but does the most damage not counting torch off hand combined with 1-handers. Against retaliation/confusion , greatsword will hurt the user a lot.

Focus has good “burst” damage if you can let the block time out for an explosion.

Mace is a heavy hitter but bad dps over time

Scepter is the most damaging 1-hander, combined with torch you will get the best damage over time.

As far as accurately assessing “DPS” these need to factor in time to attack, which this does not. Scepter may do the most damage but it takes approximatly 10 seconds for it to complete an attack. Other less damaging weapons could get more hits in during that time resulting in more damage in the course of a fight.

Burning damage takes effect every 5 strikes, so weapons with multiple strikes gain more benefit out of condition damage. Is it worth it to stack condition damage on fast hitting weapons versus power? Initial looks make that idea look promising.

If I have the will power/time to do more testing and math later I’ll figure out the dps differences.

Guardian related skills as seen in the pvp zone (the mists).

I noticed that what is shown on the tooltip and the actual amount healed for is inconsistent with the following skills:

Sanctuary heals for 269 per a tick for 7 ticks totaling 1883 healing (tooltip says 2690 healing)

Save Yourselves! heals for 136 per a tick for 10 ticks totaling 1360 healing (tooltip says 1363 healing)

Hold the Line! heals for 136 per a tick for 6 ticks totaling 816 healing (tooltip says 818 healing)

Empower heals channels for 4 seconds then bursts a heal for 1550 then 1505. The ability describes it as healing yourself and allies for 1550. What I think is happening are two things. First it counts yourself as a target and it also applies you as an ally so it heals you twice.

Secondly the “ally” heal seems to invert the last two numbers. So instead of 15 50 it heals for 15 05.

All of these tests were done with 50 healing power. When completed with 0 healing power all the tool tips matched the result.

Following is a list of Guardian abilities but it may delve into other professions/skills.

First issue is with Virtue of Justice. The skill description says that upon activation the next hit will cause burning for 5s. In game while in the Mists(PvP zone) on using this skill you only see 4 ticks of burning damage instead of the expected 5.

Other skills that cause burning are:
Judge’s Intervention, 3s for 3 ticks of burning
Purging Flames, 5s for 5 ticks of burning
Zealot’s Fire, (see notes below)
Zealot’s Fire applies a burning effect to enemies in range of the player. It first applies 5 seconds of burning then refreshes itself for another 4 seconds of burning. Logic would say that the second application should be for another 5 seconds if it is the same skill being refreshed

The seconds and the ticks match up for the other skills.

Secondly when improving condition duration these skills start to show inconsistent values. Burning duration of 5 1/3s or 5 1/2s are seen in the tool tip but it truncates the split seconds and you do not see any burning effect for the additional fractions. Possibly this is intended?

When increasing the duration of burning the tool tips do not update the damage even though a whole second of burning was increased. What this is showing is that whole numbers are not whole numbers when calculated by the game.

Googledocs Link to my working papers on these stats:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au1z6TUkf93KdHppTXZ4RURoczRmSDE1cTZKbldUa0E

Some of the interesting notes/highlights from this list.

Empower ticks twice, I believe this is because it tries to heal you and then it heals allies to include you. The bugged part is the first tick matches the tooltip but the second one seems to have the tooltip numbers inverted (1550 and then 1505).

It is almost not worth it to pop your Virtue of Resolve because the ticks provide more healing than the heal itself. Only time you may pop it is if you are at 1% life and you have nothing else to save you.

Bow of truth is actually a really good heal, activate and pop it right away.

All of our over time heals seem to be bugged as they do not reflect the correct heal as shown on the tooltips. When done with 0 healing power they match up right so this seems to be a problem with calculating stats above baseline. This has been seen as a problem with burning damage and duration as well.

For self healing while solo, meditation healing provides more healing out put, but while in a big group and your boons are being applied to more people than yourself, then boon healing should provide a bigger output than meditations alone.

Some more number crunching, this time on our heal abilities. All the heals were based off of the stats I had at the time which was 50 healing power from armor and no traits selected while in the Mists. First the numbers:

Heal Name
cooldown / heal ammount (Healing done in 180 seconds)
-additional notes-

Signet of Resolve
40s / 8213 (32852)

Shelter
30s / 4590 (27540)
-Blocks all attacks for 2 seconds-

Healing Breeze
40s / 6575 (26300)

Virtue of Resolve
1s / 87 (15660)

Virtue of Resolve (activation)
60s / 1663 (4989)

Virtue of Resolve (w/ Absolute Resolution)
1s / 109 (19620)

Virtue of Resolve (activation w/ Absolute Resolution)
50s / 2479 (7437)

Sanctuary
120s / 1883 (1883)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 2690 (Possible bugged)-

Merciful Intervention
80s / 2252 (4504)
-Only heals others-

Hold the Line
35s / 816 (4080)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 818 (Possible bugged)-

Save Yourselves!
60s / 1360 (4080)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 1363 (Possible bugged)-

Bow of Truth
60s / 4032 (12096)
-42 arrows heal for 96 each, does not scale with healing power-

Symbol of Faith
8s / 680 (14960)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 545 (Possible bugged)-

Faithful Strike
3s / 344 (20640)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 468 (Possible bugged)-

Tome of Courage
180s / 18690 (18690)
-14 casts of Heal area possible-

Empower
20s / 3055 (27495)
-Ticks twice, one for 1550 and another for 1505(Possible bugged)-

Altruistic Healing when traited provided 75 health for each boon applied, the following is a list of each boon heal possible with Guardian skills:

Empower
20s / 300

Swiftness
15s / 300

Shield of Judgement
24s / 75

Symbol of Faith
8s / 300

Save Yourselves!
60s / 525

Hold the Line
30s / 150

Stand Your Ground!
35s / 150

Empowering Might or Vigorous Precision (with 35% crit)
4725

Total heals from boons in 180 seconds = 21900

Heals via Meditation by taking the Monk’s Focus Trait:

Smite Condition
20s / 2019

Judge’s Intervention
45s / 2019

Contemplation of Purity
60s / 2019

Total heals from meditations in 180 seconds = 32304

I am noticing the same effect for whirling wrath on the greatsword too. So far it always totals 14 total strikes to include blade hits and projectiles, but the number of blade hits changes.

I know there was posts about race size and number of hits from whirling wrath, as well as standing “IN” the target versus infront of the target. I am doing my testing inside the target.

What it “seems” like is that the speed of hits precludes some attacks from counting.

Many people have heralded or complained about the scepter abilities. On paper the scepter is our most damaging weapon, in effect it can be lack luster due to slow flying orbs being easy to dodge and what many people may not realize, but Smite never hits for full damage.

By doing a log of number of strikes done by Smite never reaches full damage potential due to the number of strikes being random. The targeting circle was never moved and this test was done in the Mists on a targeting golem (if you have your mouse in the chat box it puts the target circle at your character’s feet).

The tooltip states that it will strike 15 times for a total of damage shown on the tooltip, but in effect the most strikes done in a log of 50 skill usages shows the following data:

Highest strikes – 13
Lowest strikes – 3
Average strikes – 9.5

The following is a log of how many times Smite struck for that listed number of hits.
1 strike – 0
2 strikes – 0
3 strikes – 1
4 strikes – 0
5 strikes – 2
6 strikes – 2
7 strikes – 2
8 strikes – 9
9 strikes – 7
10 strikes – 10
11 strikes – 5
12 strikes – 10
13 strikes – 2
14 strikes – 0
15 strikes – 0

I do feel that when a skill says 15 hits it should hit 15 times.

Take aways that I can gain from initial look:

-Scepter is pure dps
-Mace is defensive with low dps
-Sword is mid ground with moderate dps and defense via blinds

-Greatsword is highest dps
-Staff is pure defensive with lowest dps
-Hammer is the mid ground with good dps and good defensive via protection and knockbacks

-Shield is group oriented defense
-Focus is self oriented defense
-Torch is pure dps

Using “burst” abilities like staff attack 2 or torch attack 4, will lower overall damage but you gain a “utility” out of it. Either a heal or a ranged attack.

Revised the damage list and updated the original post.

*EDIT*with the below recommendations I have revised the damage list with more notes*EDIT*

With no gear or traits on I evaluated the tool tips of each weapon as well as went to a target Golem in the mists to count the number of ticks of damage and time between each attack to see which attacks were faster or slower (namely for chain type attacks with no cooldown)

I combined all the skills from each weapon, to include chain attacks as a total number of damage, then I took a 300 second time line(5 minutes) and totaled the number of times each weapon could fire off their individual skills based on cooldowns. So the following list is theoretical damage, since in reality you cannot do all the skills at the same time.

Weapon/Skill1/Skill2/Skill3/Skill4/Skill5/Total in 300 sec(Strikes causing burning damage from VoJ every 5 hits) (total with burning)

Sword/1042/67/888/49588 dmg in 300 sec 276 hits doing 18040 burning (67628 w/ burning)

(Sword 1 attack will always do 5 strikes, thus giving burning on a full rotation. Sword 3 has 8 strikes)

Mace/1075/840/470/55600 dmg in 300 sec 123 hits doing 7872 burning (63472 w/ burning)

, but target needs to stay in field for full effect

Scepter/224/1665/60180 dmg in 300 sec 420 hits doing 27552 burning (87732 w/ burning)

(this one is hard to determine since there is a travel time for the first attack, theoretically it is 1 second per a strike, but distance changes that time. The cooldown used is 1 second per attack for a melee range strike. Additionally I notice that scepter 2 never hits a single target for all 15 strikes, so the actual damage differs in use)

Staff/222/444/925/44400 dmg in 300 sec 168 hits doing 10824 burning (55224 w/ burning)

(staff 3 has 5 strikes, initial hit and 4 second field. Needs target to stay in field for full effect)

Staff Burst/222/222/925/36260 dmg in 300 sec 138 hits doing 8856 burning (37716 w/ burning)

Greatsword/1035/925/1251/406/1969/77824 dmg in 300 sec 258 hits doing 16728 burning (94552 w/ burning)

(Greatsword 5 attack has a dot associated with it which does a surprisingly good amount of damage. Also Greatsword 2 has a 5 strike field but target needs to stay still and greatsword 3 has a 9 strike attack but added projectiles can push damage higher)

Hammer/1739/647/296/370/71842 dmg in 300 sec 106 hits doing 6888 burning (78730 w/ burning)

(Hammer 1 attack does really good damage by itself, but has a 3 second field that hits 4 times. Need target to stay in field for full effect)

Shield/302/1208 dmg in 300 sec 4 hits doing 0 burning (1208 w/ burning)

Focus/151/756/2539 dmg in 300 sec 6 hits doing 328 burning (2539 w/ burning)

(Focus 5 damage is based on if no one hits you and the block wears off)

Torch/3280/1000/34240 dmg in 300 sec 88 hits doing 5567 burning (39816 w/ burning)

(Torch 4 damage is based on letting the burn apply and not pressing 4 again for a ranged attack, burn lasts for 5 seconds and reapplies as self burning buff wears off, for a total of 10 seconds of burning)

Torch Burst/681/1000/12737 dmg in 300 sec 14 hits doing 656 burning (13393 w/ burning)

(Torch 4 can do a ranged attack that increases cooldown)

While the above list shows a damage comparison of all the weapons, what you do not get is the utility of each weapon. Some weapons have none damage components that make them very powerful, such as pushback on the shield, or teleport/blinds on sword and focus. Do not take those lightly as they have huge impact on combat.

Hopefully the compiled information here will help people make good choices for weapons they want to use.

Well, played a bunch of spvp games with the above build utilizing retaliation via aegis break. Retal was up a lot for no effort. It is really hard to evaluate just how effective it is since I don’t get a damage report of people I killed and condition damage type things are not listed in the combat log.

What I can say is that I don’t feel I lost any survivability by changing. If anything I got better control over my character with 2 stun breaks via meditations, an addition heal via the third meditation added instead of signet, and I gained stability with virtue of courage.

I think I"m going to stay with this one for a bit longer to see how it plays, but 1v1 and some 1v2s I played it out fairly well. Majority of the time even if I did fall to the ground they did too or right after due to retal and burning. Most of the time I didn’t drop unless it was a large zerg, and well. can’t do much against that.

I did fight a bunker style guardian with a staff, shield/scepter I think it was. I couldn’t kill him, he couldn’t kill me. Was just the two of us in the map so we stood there pummeling on each other at one of the nodes. The advantage he did have was the pushbacks with shield and sanctuary, so he had better control over the node and was able to cap it over me. Neither of us died but he won due to points.

Food for thought.

I agree that 105 extra damage to burning sounds nice, it isn’t always reliable. As far as is retaliation worth it? I guess I think of it this way: most condition damage ticks for around 300-500 or so but ticks fast. Most people can get around 300-400 damage out of a retaliation proc, so for damage you can’t dodge or block, retaliation helps in keeping you productive with that incoming damage.

Should you stack power and focus on only retal? No because then handicapped yourself to not be able to survive long enough for retaliation to work, but with an easy way of putting it on when condition damage is present or other faster/smaller hits and maintaining your defensive capability, then why not have retal to supplement your blocks/aegis and rolls.

I originally tried with the shaman amulet as you mentioned because of the added toughness, but I have found that I die faster with toughness than I do with vitality.

In a couple of tests by only stacking vitality or toughness I noticed that I could take approximately 32 hits of various damage before I died with with 991 toughness, 24685 hp, and 2202 armor.

With 2304 toughness, 10805 hp, and 3515 armor, my hp pool dropped but what I should see is lower damage with what I expected to be equivalent survivability. With only toughness I could only take 24 hits of damage before I died.

Toughness did reduce the damage by about 32%

Moral of the story is vitality gives more survivability but you need toughness to make your already good hp pool better. Toughness by itself is not enough.

The healing signet versus the blocking heal is still a judgement call for me. I really like timing a good heal with someone trying to do a flurry/spam attack on me and stacking tons of burning damage on them. I use the heal offensively so for me it works. My defensive tactic is to roll around/block and keep my hp as high as possible before I even get low enough to “need” a heal.

I think it depends on who you are fighting and how you play which will determine which heal to bring.

I did find a post on another topic that has me re-evaluating how I want to integrate retaliation into this build, but this reply is getting too long as it is. I will link the post I’m refering too and simply state that I want to drop Signet of Justice and get retal via aegis breaks. 13 seconds of retal off aegis, aegis at 50% = 26 seconds of retal, 30 second cooldown on Virtue of Courage = 4 seconds down time of the retal boon.

down side is I lose condition damage by building that way.

-The referred post is by Lilbeezy.8134:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Guardians-are-Breaking-Tournaments/first#post274824

The new build idea is:
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#Mcc9fa0xaGVzMbzMa

With this I gain stability via Virtue of Courage, passive retaliation synergized with aegis, an extra utility button for another meditation heal+more condition removal.

I lose condition damage, Virtue of Justice blinds, and burning removes enemy boons.

Will see how this goes tonight and report back.

Thanks, I was toying with the idea of getting more survivability out of the build.

Either take away retal via improved signets and go for the dodge roll heal, or get more aegis’ in the build.

As it is, I have fairly long fights against necromancers/mesmers that are really close calls. Against elementalists. Lately I have been getting into trouble with elementalists as well.

This may be due to blowing all my burning damage too early and they wipe it off either by skill or luck. What tends to kill me are conditions. block stops a lot of the burst abilities, but a condition will just keep ticking. That was the original reason why I put retal into the build.

Every time I try to do a “glass cannon” build with a guardian it just ends badly. I push out amazing damage….for a guardian….but other professions just do damage better in a shorter duration, so I keep defaulting back to a sort of defensive/redirect damage build. Hitting me hurts you, and most players want to hit me a lot without thinking so that helps make this build work.

Anyone with feedback on adding more heals/defensive capability while still being able to do damage back are more than welcome to add input.

Shelter is used because it provides multiple block possibilities. Think 100 blades, pistol whip, rapid fire or things of the same nature. This has the potential to mitigate more damage than Signet of Resolve will purely off of the full block effect on more than one attack. Timing is everything but this could be personal preference on which heal to use. I figure if I’m going to get multiple blocks and blocks give burns, then the synergy for what I want is most gained out of Shelter.

Renewed Focus instead of one of the tomes can easily be replaced with probably tome of courage, but I have been finding more often than not players are interrupting you on the max heal, especially if I am trying to stay in melee range for blocks.

Which leads us to the lack of stability. If I had stability it would allow for tome of courage better. Judge’s Intervention was picked to help provide mobility and stun break. This will not stop all problems that stability helps with, namely daze. This could be swapped out for Stand Your Ground, but with Monk’s Focus, I found that having that extra heal has provided more survivability than breaking a control effect on me every 30 seconds.

The synergy with meditation trait benefits gained from the valor line has me leaning towards that extra effect. Judge’s Intervention provides: A moderate heal, stun break, mobility from with a teleport, and extra burning benefiting from added condition damage every 36 seconds.

It depends on who you are fighting and if you want to help the group or yourself more.

Reading about it on the forum and theory crafting is one thing, I suggest you hop into the mists and try it out. Costs you nothing and you can see if it works for your play style like it has for mine.

unless you can get the condition duration to round up to a full extra second, it is not worth it to stack duration. More often than not the safe bet for burning is to stack for condition damage.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fUAQRApd8flUgSDXESOEf4Eh1DCCwCWVYeXPgoCbIA;TwAgyCuowyglALLWOskYtEZswWk5CA

(copy and paste link for it to work, ANet has said there is a problem with links with semicolons in them on this forum)

edit—- (had wrong link in there, was an older block build I made)

I had tried a “hot block” build before and it was limited in many ways. From feedback I got from that first build I integrated mediation heals and retaliation into the build.

Other defensive builds just seemed like a slow death to me as no damage was coming out so I couldn’t hold a point very long before I died.

With the monk’s focus and smite conditions a decent heal and condition removal ability gives you the ability to keep fighting long enough for other cooldowns to come up again such as your heal.

By adding perfect inscriptions the retaliation duration from signet of judgement changes from 5 seconds to 10 seconds. Coupled with signet mastery you now have a 16 second cooldown on the skill. This leaves you with 6 seconds of down time on the retaliation.

The reason I added retaliation back into the build is because I was fighting a necromancer who ate all my burning stacks for heals and loaded me full of more conditions than I could cleanse off myself. So without burning damage I can at least hit back with retaliation. This seems to work well with lots of condition stacking fighters.

The reason for using blocks at all is because of the big hitting abilities that retaliation can’t possibly keep up with. Taking 10000 damage and doing about 300 damage back is pointless, so blocks from shelter, shield of wrath, and protector’s strike help to stop bad things from happening.

Beyond that everything else in the build is utilized to keep burning on the target. Switch between primary and secondary weapons to get 3 stacks of might, highest you can get might by weapon swapping is 6 stacks and it drops back to 3 before you can hit 9. Also have Sigil of corruption on the other weapon to keep adding to condition damage.

Rune of the guardian and shattered aegis put a 3 second burn on anyone who picks a fight because the first thing they will hit is your aegis, so that is a block burn/aegis removal burn/and an armor block burn.

The only ability I am unsure of is Blind Exposure. This could be replaced with searing flames or even radiant fire as it only provides 1% extra damage with vulnerability on blind.

I did find that running with the carrion amulet is a game breaker on this build. Tried running with soldiers amulet and knights amulet, but without the added condition damage the burns were not threatening enough and always ended in me dying just slightly before my opponents. Carrion amulet seems mandatory.

This set up has been closer to my idea of what defensive fighting should be. So far I have enjoyed it more than other pure dps setups because I am able to survive longer while still a threat to the enemy. The only time this build won’t work is when they realize to stop hitting you or time the condition removals right. So the answer to that is know when to pop the blocks and save the burns for when they can’t remove them if you can.

And as an added bonus, I found that blocking projectiles while having Defender’s Flame traited will not apply burning with with skills like:

Sanctuary (only projectiles)
Shield of Absorption (only projectiles)
Zealot’s Defense (only projectiles)

TLDR: Stack for condition damage and not duration if you want the most out of burning

So I was testing burning damage and believe I ran across a bug in how burning is applied or it is a game mechanic that makes condition duration less useful for burning.

In the pvp zone (mists) with no gear or traits selected and auto attack off, the baseline for burning is: 328 damage a second. Burning stacks in duration not intensity so applying more stacks prolong that burn time allowing for more ticks.

Virtue of Justice does 328 per 1s of damage. On 5 attack proc you get 1s of burn and on activation of the virtue you get 5s of burning totaling 1640 damage as is shown on the tooltip.

While testing I notice that Virtue of Justice activation only ticks 4 times instead of 5 times so the actual damage is 1312.

this leads into the condition duration problem. when you increase burning duration you get a tooltip that states 1 1/4s of burning damage. This gets rounded down to only 1 second of burning with only 1 tick.

If you have 5 1/2s of burning damage you only get 5 ticks. Well what if you combine two abilities with the same burning duration such as Purging Flames and Virtue of Justice.

Putting 8 points into the Zeal trait line you get a 5 1/2s burn on both of those abilities. As stated earlier Virtue of Justice only ticks 4 times instead of 5 times, but Purging Flames ticks the full 5 times. The expected result when combining these two abilities should be: 5 1/2 + 5 1/2 = 11 seconds of burning with each second ticking for burn damage.

End result is you only get 9 ticks of burning. Subtract 1 tick because Virtue of Justice seems to be bugged and you would expect 10 ticks from the original 11, but the two 1/2 second burning duration did not add together resulting in a lost tick due to being rounded down to the nearest second.

Game mechanic, or overlooked bug? Either way shoot for burn duration by whole seconds not fractions of a second because they do not count.

It sounds like from your experience in dungeon/pve with this build has been productive.

I have run a similar build minus the weapon sigils to try to roll/heal as much as possible. While the heal while rolling is one of the best heals per healing power gained, it just isn’t enough and I did not have the needed endurance to maintain to any worthwhile extent.

I did identify the 50% aegis and tested it a few times in the mists/pvp section and it was not triggering on successive attempts while keeping virtue of courage down to not confuse aegis effects (I would let myself drop below 50 and then heal and drop again). This shows that there is an internal cooldown on that 50% aegis even though the tooltip does not state that fact.

If there is one thing guardians can do it is blind the enemy. We do that well, but that is just one attack every 10/20/30 seconds, versus an environment where you have 4 or 5 or 10 attacks flying at you at one time. Saving yourself from 1000 damage only to be hit by another 9000 damage no matter what you do, then having no more answers for being “defensive”.

I do think what is limiting me in the endurance regen in pvp is that players have a downed state, so I don’t get that immediate refresh of endurance as soon as someone hits 0 hp, because you have to keep hitting the downed player or do a finisher move before they “die”.

As I said, in pve I have had great success with the guardian and can do things my other professions can not. PvP on the other than I feel it is lackluster. Not worthless, just not as competitive as it could be.

Just tested the extra damage if burning trait and it does not appear to help symbol of wrath.

As far as I can tell, the symbol of wrath damage is based on power and not condition damage. At least I know it does not apply a burning condition by itself the last time I tested it.

There are some less than obvious effects that don’t get shown in tooltips though, so I don’t know if targets in symbol of wrath will take extra damage from “burning” if you have something like fiery wrath traited.

Red Falcon, I know exactly what you mean and that is the typical response anyone gets if they raise these same concerns, and I assure you I am watching big power up moves and rolling to my hearts desire. I am getting out of red rings on the ground and poping blinds/blocks/protection when everything else fails as far as avoiding damage. I also try to save my team mates whenever they are getting ganged up on, I want to heal them or block attacks, or help them run away.

I “want” to do those things they provided for us, but they provided them to us in a I would dare say weak manner.

And a semi counter argument to not “tanking” damage might be the whole idea of warriors having more base HP than us, but we make up for that in our ability to “heal” and “mitigate” damage better than any other class. So theoretically we are more durable than a warrior due to our self heals (namely virtue of resolve is what is often cited as the reason for having less hp). The problem with this is that in any situation where you are worrying about surviving damage, you would want a bigger health pool versus running in circles waiting for regen to tick the whole while you are getting beat on harder than your regen ticks for.

It almost seems to me that they designed a ranged support class around melee oriented abilities.

I do feel guardians perform well in open world pve. I have only done a few dungeons so I do not have good feedback on the performance there, but I played primarly a defensive role and tried to block/blind/heal for my team as much as possible. First time I ran I mentioned it felt like I didn’t do much but the team said that they had very few downs compared to other runs so whatever I was doing must have been helping.

My biggest concern is in pvp/wvw. Our situational abilities become laughable as there are 2 or 3 or 50 situations happening all at once and our abilities only let us respond to one individually.

I think we need some more tangible form of defense or utility/support to bring to the table besides buffing protection or single block or blind every 20 or 30 seconds in a practically point blank range or providing weak healing that the game itself says you are not supposed to be a heal bot.

The one thing we can do well is provide might to large masses of people. Doing that one thing is far from being what I would consider a “support” role.

Initial thoughts on how to improve our defensive plays style would be to change block and blind to provide protection for a 1-3 second window versus simply the next attack. Or lower the cooldowns on blocks/aegis or even protection boons so they are more than a simple gimick.

Honestly I’m noticing the same things in pvp. No one is supposed to be able to front load a lot of damage and our mitigation abilities are typically 1 shot and then down for a 20-30 sec cooldown or a very very minor heal that is not noticeable on either myself or my team members.

The flip side of the coin I find that while I can go “glass cannon” and try to stack power or crit/crit dmg, it does not have the same results if I were to go to a more offensive oriented profession, as the guardian is renown for being “defensive” the whole time the games paradigm is to make it so there isn’t really any reliable defense, but situational defense.

Downside to situational defense in pvp is that you are fighting 2 or 3 or more people so you can’t possibly utilize your defensive abilities against all of them spamming various attacks at once and you don’t have the fearful damage to make them back off.

While I have run into numerous people who swear by the guardian profession and excitedly show case how much they can survive, I have yet to “see” any of this in action and in spvp I tend to see the guardians dead or not even a threat.

World pve I feel fine, pvp and wvw I feel somewhat worthless. I want to be as defensive as we are supposedly touted to be and I think the problem lies in our mechanics themselves.

In a game where there are no tanks or healers, and everyone is responsible for keeping themselves healed and alive, but we have a class that is supposedly defensive. It is supposed to survive better than others because of healing/buffing/tanking or it can help others stay alive because of healing/buffing/mitigating. So the result is the guardian profession loses out on damage and has low hp because of this “tankieness”.

I see no positive results because the game ends up defeating the profession as it was built to be something that the game does not want.