Guild Wars 2

First off, I have to voice this one. A name is just words and the least offensive thing. If I’m in a uproar about not being called what I want, I feel my priorities are in the wrong place.

What I feel the issue here is the mechanics. You can call them traps, or wards, or magical light bringing beacons of activation upon proximity of placement devices……“traps”, the mechanic is just not a popular one apparently.

In essence symbols were simply pre-activated “traps”. Now this new thing is simply a symbol that won’t activate till an enemy steps in it…not so offensive now is it? Maybe it is because symbol mechanics are mostly laughed at and unused.

The frustration is derived from the idea that we work our characters up and develop/grow/progress them to make them stronger, and when we expect them to go into a cocoon and come out as a beautiful butterfly, they show us an unveil of a fugly moth.

Let me counter argument myself now. These specializations are not inherently meant to be taken as a matter of fact. They are supposed to provide an alternative mechanic that was lacking on the class. Thus guardians had poor ranged and poor soft CCs.

The “creative thinking team” at ANet decided to throw us a curve ball and try to answer the solution that was not the contemporary way of thinking. I applaud them on that actually, but I feel the resistance as well. Did they miss the mark? Time will tell…

It’s funny how glacial heart was hated one for ever until the surge of hammer medi guards hit after seeing it work on a winning team.

Now people can’t live without it. I’m still underwhelmed by it, but it does provide some extra burst when tied together with a few more effects. Losing this gives us more soft CC (something we have been asking for a lot now)…so it is like a + and – at the same time?

Maybe I am being negative, but we have been complaining about shield for a LONG (since release) time now, and the fact that the devs were genuinely surprised and excited about an idea we have been asking for on shield is disappointing.

They are just NOW realizing that we would like an aegis or SOMETHING on shield? just now? Communication on the guard development side is lacking.

Still, new ideas are new ideas and maybe these changes will turn out more ideas and help push evolution of guards along instead of the stagnation I felt we had. Excited to come back when they happen.

brannigan.9831:

Altruistic healing semi-bunker build with soldiers, an offensive rune like pack, intelligence runes, and glacial heart will do close to as much damge as an kitten medi build be more durable and bring more to the group I crit for 5k with glacial heart against light armor frequently. Im talking about a “durable” medi build you should go all or nothing imo or what is the point? The mid way rarely works.

I always felt like AH builds were too inconsistent depending on who was around. Great in wvw, “ok” in pvp. Even in traditional bunker builds, the largest part of survival were dodge rolls. Without staff the AH was really not noticed, and with staff your damage is not noticed either.

As far as the mid way, isn’t that what celestial builds are? Midway of survival and damage. Largest difference is the alternate way of doing damage via conditions and/or might stacking.

We don’t have as effective of a might stack unfortunately.

Meditative Soldier

Trying a different approach with soldiers rune instead, less toughness but more damage. I couldn’t get valk to work the way I wanted to, lack of precision and little gain from healing power I felt.

While this is getting closer and closer to the older medi builds but with a soldiers rune, maybe it is worth revisiting?

Let me know how this fares versus the previous builds

Ran it last night, didn’t feel effective at all.

I think people are trying to concentrate on making the fight shorter, but there isn’t enough raw damage or soft CCs to manage the slipperiness of the most commonly encountered classes and fights.

So people ask for buffs in soft CCs mostly as no one wants to get insta gibbed by anyone, so for the most part I believe the guardian community is against crazy high damage buffs to compensate for what we believe our weakpoints are.

Guards have been balanced since the dawn of the game, we have been in a good spot and seen little to no changes. Maybe everyone else is just over powered then? But do you want to see the nerf hammer going around or do you want to see the buff machine? Maybe a little of both?

Without a target your orb will fire in the angle you were last “looking” so if you mouselook up (right mouse button moving your “character”) and then fire without changing your characters viewing angle, it will fire the orb up..or down or how ever you were looking.

Additionally you can move the camera (left mouse button) and even out your camera angle to watch it fire up into the air.

targetless aiming fire is useful for aiming ahead of moving targets, but you have to bring your angle down to fire straight and not into the ground. Most of us tend to play in an isometric top down view.

How often/long have you heard guardians and other players talk about how easy it is to just walk away from a guard? How long have we heard guardians have low mobility because we are meant to “get in a fight and stay there”?

What combat breaking and kiting do you see guards have? What evade/dodge skills on our weapon sets or utility skills do we have? At most we have a couple of aegis that block one hit each with moderate to long cooldowns and shelter, and we bank heavily on them.

Blocks and blinds are how we survive, and we are able to be effective enough with them, but I am far and away from your opinion that “we are going to eat everyone alive” if we get any buffs.

Our CC abilities are a second or two of chill and a couple of wards/knockdowns that people can easily avoid. Yet I see a lot of hate on the pvp forum about ring of warding being as strong as entangle and slick shoes….I totally disagree 100 and 1 percent.

Level the playing field is all I ask, not make us godly. Opinions differ though, so what I think and what you think will not commonly match up.

I actually mostly agree with what was said by Ragnarox. the estimated 30K effective HP for a fight is far less effective than completely avoiding damage consistently via kiting, dodging, combat breaking, and so on.

Our heals are the longest used, making our sustain mechanic highly relied on via utility skills and traits. Other classes do not have those traits but their sustain via heal skills and weapon skills are much more frequent, even if smaller in total. Giving “them” a much higher sustain and effective health by continuously regenerating life.

All is not lost/vain though, we do well enough and are dangerous in pvp, but I feel we are a step behind at times. Still everyone swears up and down that guardians have been and always will be so OP and have too many blocks/heals. I don’t feel that, or maybe I am biased?

Mostly agree with all that was said, will just reiterate for the sake of my own talking :P

I loved Ghosts of Ascalon, the adventure was more interesting to me. Writing style may have been somewhat more juvenile in the sense that they tried to mention specific game classes and such at the start, but turned into an actual adventure towards the end.

Edge of Destiny again tried to link specific abilities, skills, classes, and people into the book. It is the most book to game lore filled, so it is worth reading for the sake of better understanding the personal story. I liked Rytlock and Logan a lot more after reading it, and understand why Zojja and Eir are a bit off at each other now. I kind disagree with how Caithe was written, but overall it was fine. She is very different and naive in this, but much more determined and in control in the game. Maybe due to the hardships.

Sea of Sorrows was a more mature book in the sense of storytelling. Yet the big sea adventure didn’t pull on me the same as Ghosts of Ascalon. Still well written and explains Lion’s Arch in a great way. Actually made my appreciate the location in game a lot more afterwards.

All in all, if you like the game and you like reading, then those books are fun additions and worthwhile for enjoyment.

Updated/adjusted my zerker variation with more damage and hydromancy on both weapons.

Freezing Blast Build

Ran it in a few matches and it felt pretty solid. Of course squishier but did reliable damage.

In fact, going to adjust the Tough Meditations build to also include two hydromancy sigils instead of fire and air on greatsword.

Up to 5 targets within 600 range…feet…meters….“distance” in addition to adding stability.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/%22Stand_Your_Ground%22

I see what you did there

(he wants a solo friendly build where he can do damage but survive, he is currently not max level but leveling and having problems with story missions. Also he stated he is in all zerker currently in another thread and having a huge problem with elite/vet mobs in living story mission in drytop)

Again you are focusing on the camera changes and graphics, there were other mechanical changes made.

Lessons for life, you see what you want to see, no one can tell you different.

Yeah, I hope they fix it on both ends. WAY too inconsistent now.

BlackBeard.2873:

So apparently this is 1 bug and 1 positive change:

The bug: Conditions doing higher ticks. This is being worked on.

The positive change: Conditions now have partial-ticks at the end of their duration. Smaller ticks are your partial durations finishing up. Now a 1.9s burn is actually more powerful than a 1s burn and will give you 1 tick for full damage and a quicker (in theory) tick for 90% of that damage. However, it needs to be checked that the timing between ticks is actually being truncated too.

Source: Karl in Phantaram’s twitch chat.

The bug is the higher damage condition ticks, while the unreported buff are the partial ticks at the end. So we should be doing normal damage, and then finishing with fractional damage. Not doing double damage.

It sounds like with zero condition duration it is counting adding a tick of damage to the calculation when it is trying to round out the extra fractions of a second. So they need to clean up the damage calculation to remove some hanging numbers for “zero”.

Also it looks like if you have condition duration your damage is lower per a tick as it seems to try to spread it all out per each tick, so again they need to clean up the formula.

You are only seeing the long requested camera changes, and if the previous camera did not bother you or you have no interest in the first person camera, then you obviously don’t like the change.

The other changes (listed here)

Include changes to stability which many embrace on wvw level, and spvp people have shown it did not nerf them noticeably, and stability continues to work as before for the most part. On large scale though, it prevents zergs from being “invulnerable” to CC, now that we can burn through stacks and finally use area control to some extent. PvE, you probably won’t notice anything at all.

Blink/port changes to clean up code and prevent “null” teleports from wasting cooldowns while (maybe intentionally) allowing more blinks and ports to work if there is a valid calculated walking path (wont work if you need to jump to reach it, but some old ledges are now reachable, while others are not. Most see this as a buff to vertical mobility now.)

A couple of quality of life and bug fixes (with bug introductions unfortunately, but they are actively addressing them. Argue on if it should have happened in the first place another post)

Streamed patching to try to make updates more seamless to the clients, most won’t notice or care, but it is there to help reduce server load and mass download times and increase play time.

And then some expansion pre-groundwork to help setup for the new data inbound.

A lot of work, a few client side things, mostly them just tidying up their game and changing a few rules.

While it is providing some highly damaging potential, I am against pursuing condition damage at the moment which will capitalize on seemingly unintended buffs. Most players can’t help but benefit from the possible bug, so I doubt there will be any repercussions, but just saying…it probably won’t last, so don’t get too in over your head on this one.

omg…

that would be what a 9,100 heal? (edited, I mathed wrong)

I changed my mind, give us 25 stacks of stability! :p

Sadly enough, I used to read a lot when I was younger. Typically in bed, and that was another “no no” for sleeping. Because it creates habit forming queues for various activities, and some suggest that the bed only be used for sleep activities.

Otherwise you confuse your habitual pattern following brain into thinking, oh I’m in bed…it’s time to read a book and not sleep.

Of course reading in a chair is fine, just avoid doing “awake” activities in bed. (I have a long history of bad sleeping habits and have listened to a lot of advice on how to fix myself).

I often work a lot of night hours, and they have been doing a lot of sleep studies lately. It has come up on social media a couple of times too, but the blue light from monitors and screens like cellphones, tablets, and your computer disrupt your circadian rhythm. If I remember right it inhibits the production of melatonin in your body that helps trigger sleepiness.

In turn if you don’t sleep long enough or restful enough to hit REM, your brain does not repair itself from it’s daily wear and tear, which in turn leads to lack of concentration and possibly memory retention problems. Oh and you are tired a lot too.

At work they suggested at least an hour prior to bed time turn off all light producing electronics to let your body get tired. Don’t know if there is a scientific time, but they were trying to be reasonable and give us suggestions to help sleep better.

Oh yeah, retal on it too, good call Tarsius. Nice pic example Ezrael Nothing to go home and brag about but it is a nice little side buff if anything.

Do the 5 stacks of stability count as multiple boon applications? Altruistic healing with 5 allies and 5 applications of stability with maybe 70 healing per boon.

25 * 70 = 1750 healing per syg shout. Nice little burst heal for AH guards in wvw at least.

If hammer 5 (ring of warding) is such a detriment to your gameplay that you get shut down because of it…then I have no words.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Burn-Bug/first#post4883226

Burning appears to be bugged, and conditions in general are ticking inconsistently (making it somewhat op!)

Incoming burn guardian meta!

It “looks” like it could be double ticking, cause the first couple of ticks were 784 and 785.

Then you hit for about 1569, which is close to 784 × 2 = 1568

Now why do the numbers fluctuate somewhat? This could also be due to our hero panel now showing decimals and the calculations are inconsistently rounding up and down? You would think it is just a cosmetic change and calculations would be based on a database and not the numbers displayed in our hero panel.

All just guesses but it sort of describes the screenshots.

Stat wise, rune of ice does not add a whole lot, and probably get more by going for a power based rune.

Chill is not persistent enough but added as a quick burst of damage (unsure if it will apply at the same time as the hydromancy swap or after hydromancy and mighty blow gets 7% more damage).

I had gone with the melandru for the reduction in condition duration and to add to the idea of toughness at 3500 was a nice rounded out OCD number :p

Everyone is welcome to try different things, as the others have shown with valk amulets working well for them.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/quick-look-at-the-patched-blink/first#post4883054

Everything works fine, if anything they fixed it so you don’t waste a port if it is an invalid port (i.e. a buff/fix)

Lol, mak. I understand the struggle. Sorry I brought it up

While Mak’s break down shows that litany and shelter do roughly the same heals per second and his break down of offensive and defensive mirror what i believe the developer’s intent is….

The truth of the matter that shelter becomes a more valuable heal because of the capability to block multiple incoming attacks, thus in essence healing (mitigating) incoming damage on top of the recovery of 4kish health. It is markedly more defensive and gains a bonus to defense.

Litany is supposed to be more offensive, but it does not offer more offense, just reward if you are successful in your offense, by providing more healing back.

Litany is not strong enough for sustain to continue doing damage in said scenarios though, which is why it is seen as lack luster. The offensive bonus is not observed and game changing enough.

If litany provided a way to do “more” damage while utilizing it, thus reinforcing the offensive nature of it, it would see more utilization. Or if it provided a much higher healing to damage ratio (which is what the majority would like).

A much smaller buff, but one people would be pleased with would be if litany was instant cast like all the meditations now are. That alone may prompt more to use it.

At the moment litany provides so little return on it’s usage that it is often not enough to warrant it’s usage.

As it is now your choices are resolve and shelter. Resolve has a higher hps with better condition control. Yet condition control is not where guards are typically lacking, and shelter can make up for the hps by smart usage of the block function, so 90% of guards use shelter.

I understand the swap for hydromancy on GS, although you could have it on both.

I feel the swap burst with hydromancy and mighty blow are kind of key to the build. Of course you can tailor it to how ever it works for you and it was just a build idea I wanted to field for others to try, and I’m glad it is getting positive reviews

I’ll just link the OP’s other post

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Help-with-Fallens-Hope-Vets-mobs-Guardian/first#post4878778

You tell me if the max dps/utility build will help him or if he needs a different avenue.

I think we all agree that the meta is a meta for a reason, yet this individual is having problems even with the suggested builds and stickied posts. We could simply end this with a L2P I guess, but some of us are trying to offer alternatives for those that have not L2P yet.

BT-dubs…I play meta fyi, but I try to listen to the needs of others.

Posted on your players helping players post as well, but thought I would try to give you a general pvp solo spec you could aim for.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJASWl0ApWolCxXI8DRBARkjdBYu+fdXaGA-ThCBAB8o+zRK/mVJ4Cm/A4CAA/+DtoL4hDBADHBgAeAAkC4ilRA-e

or

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJASWl0ApWolCxXI8DRBARkjdBYu+fdXaGA-ThCBwA8U/R4+DHV+tw8HgLAQLdBPOEAMOCATUCG4BAQKgLWGB-e

Since you mentioned you tried the zerker set up and it was not meshing well with your play style, tried to find a lot of passive survival traits and gear setup for you to utilize. It is actually the old Altruistic Healing build that has fallen greatly out of favor, but tried to spruce it up a bit for you to use.

I HIGHLY suggest you learn and get used to zerker, as that will serve you well in the long run, but if that is not something you are interested in, try the above.

You can trade out the Defender runes with maybe Melandru if they are too expensive, I have not looked. Melandru will help passively get rid of conditions for you as well.

My aim was for at least 50% crit chance and 2k power. After that I sunk stats into toughness and vitality to try to help you survive solo.

The idea of this build is to just auto attack with hammer for your primary form of defense, damage, and healing.

If you spam F1 in ae fights after you kill targets, it will provide you with blinds/vulnerability/self healing/might.

Hold the line and Retreat are ways to help recover life via regeneration and aegis will provide a small burst heal.

Wall of reflection is nice in a lot of PvE areas against ranged, but you can drop that for any situational use, such as stability, condition cleansing, or just more power.

Signet of Resolve will keep passive condition cleansing paired with Purity. 90% of the time players find shelter more useful, but this may work for you instead.

Renewed Focus is simply there to provide you with an invulnerability and virtue reset. Virtues can be spammed to get some burst healing off if you are in trouble then RF to get them back up again.

Staff as an off weapon will help you travel between point, and you can kill small groups of weak mobs to build power stacks and extend the swiftness boon.

The downside to this build is it has no damage modifiers, so your damage will never be as good as the other builds posted, and a lot of stats went into survival instead of damage as well.

In the end, if it serve you well, then I hope you enjoy the game more.

edit: I actually put the build I posted together and played it. As expected damage is poor, but survivability is really good. I was able to pretty much stationary tank a few champs and hold agro via high toughness and proximity. It’s a call back to the old anchor AH guard pretty much from early dungeon meta.

put an ascended version together too:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJASWl0ApWolCxXI8DRBBRkjdBYOefdVYEA-ThCBABRqEsLlfAcBAgf/BLVX5hDBADHBgMVpIgHAge6CCAcA87v57vBO/8zP/8z73f/93f/tUAXsMC-e

It’s easy and mindless if you don’t have the whereabouts to know how to utilize active defense.

Just ran through it a couple times, first as normal meta build and then some variations. Totally doable as meta, just have to really rotate blinds, blocks, and dodges. So with practice you should be able to get through it.

That said, I looked for alternatives for this instance.

Threatening combat mechanics encountered:
Conditions
Ranged Attacks
Strong Physical Damage
Multi Hit Attacks
Knockdown/Stuns

• For conditions, don’t be afraid to bring Signet of Resolve to help passively cleanse them, also you can pick up Purity for 2 points into Valor, that’s 2 conditions cleanses every 10 seconds passive.

• Ranged attacks, Wall of Reflection, enough said. One of the golems does a continuous punching action that shoots projectiles that can be reflected. The dust storms do a pushback that can be reflected, and the inquest throw grenades that can be reflected. If you have a hard time even with wall of reflection you can bring the spirit shield too if you feel you need.

• Strong Physical Damage, protection boon helps a lot, so consider equipping a hammer if you have having issues, along with Hold the Line for some protection/regeneration to maintain life for the duration of fight without having to blow your heal skill right away.

• Multi Hit Attacks, dodge and get out of the way. Specifically the golems as they wind up to spin their arms, simply don’t stand in them.

• Knockdown/Stuns, Stand Your Ground will provide you with useful stability to maintain control of yourself for the stuns and knockdowns. They are not overly threatening and you can avoid stunning yourself on the golems by not hitting them when they are covered in electricity. Also you can avoid the knockdown spins they do by just getting out of melee range for a bit till they stop spinning. The dust storms knock down frequently, but it is short duration and not worth it to try to stability all of them. Just put up with, but avoid edges.

For the sake of providing you with a build that is as passive and simple as possible, I ran this with as little dodging as possible and mostly just auto attacking.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQFASl0ApWoNCxXI8DVR8gkjdnqKA2P7m9qdA-e

Worked well for this instance, but don’t rely on it else where. I tailored it just for this encounter and possibly your play style. Just use what ever armor/runes/sigils you have. Not worth buying new things just to finish these fights.

Forewarning about trying to exclusively farm each of these areas, you will hit Diminishing Returns and get a negative return on your farming attempts.

Supposedly rotating around geographically in that time frame helps offset the chance of hitting DR. Also it is reported that DR is character specific (except for dungeons) and changing characters when you start to feel your DR has kicked in will also help reduce the trash loot. Good luck!

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Diminishing_returns

I kind of laugh at the idea that spirit weapons are any “good” in the first place, but after that I do understand the angst at the idea of more ai builds.

That said, spirit weapons could be more “useful” and dynamic. Right now they are mostly used by non serious players who think they are cool. Opponents that get “rekt” by spirit weapons and complain they need nerfs should try to play a spirit weapon guard and then come back and explain how powerful they are.

In the end I would like they to be useful somewhere instead of a burden on build diversity options.

Awesome, feels good getting some positive feedback. I will try out the Valk ammy and see how I like it.

For sure there are better sustain/pressure dmg classes, but I wanted try to achieve something close to that for guards, and I am constantly trying to adjust builds to find something better/faster/stronger.

Glad it works for you, hope we can keep evolving things!

I feel the field combos could use more work and versatility.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

Light fields are largely worthless and most people want to avoid them.

Many of the bolt mechanics are so random/minuscule that it has no impact what so ever.

Projectile combos are a byproduct of masses of fields strewn across the ground, and what ever happens happens.

At most we look to have fire and water fields and people want to blast finisher them. A couple of leap finishers are useful, such as smoke for stacking of invisibility, but that is limited to thieves.

I would like all finishers to have much larger impact and used skillfully to push fights and have an awesome WOW effect from group utility. That is how they were sold, but I was less impressed when I played the game in the end.

@GSiege

I pondered 2h mastery as well, but with the lack of power on knights, I was trying to maintain “some” might stacks to keep damage a little higher.

I also played with larger/longer symbols, and it seemed decent if you wanted it.

Resolute Healer is good group support, but I went with Pure of Heart to try to maximize virtue utility. Totally viable either way I feel, PoH helps with self sustain a bit more though.

I don’t feel extra healing power helps monk’s focus enough to warrant it, and the lack of precision is killer if trying valkyrie.

Lyssa is I think a good alternative.

As far as being eatten up by conditions. Currently conditions apply so much and so quickly that any amount of condition clearing is never enough. Burst condition cleansing is what gets you through to may be the next cooldown on your heal skills to avoid burst condition damage, but persistent condition overlaps like a constant 3 stack of bleed will always be there no matter what you do.

That said, with higher vitality than a normal medi build, you are better off on soaking up conditions, additionally the choice of melandru helps reduce condition duration, and we have our condition cleanses as well. I considered dropping 2 points out of honor and 1 out of radiance to get absolute resolution in virtues tree to help with conditions. The HP loss is big in numbers, but the effective gameplay is so so? I think that would be preference.

@Aether the Nob
Like you said, group fights I felt more durable and effective in holding a point and continuing to fight, contesting a point longer. Also I didn’t end up as downed fodder for a quick stomp revive by the opposing team.

Solo, it is “ok” and fights last longer, but you have to really time and outlast your opponent. I did run into a classic hambow war that just better outlasted and damaged me on point. So there are for sure counters as always, but I feel it helped keep me in team fights more.

I want to find a way to push the damage more, because surviving and not doing damage is worthless, it does “ok” damage but not enough I feel. Maybe more integration of burning somehow to keep pressure damage going, duno yet.

Tough Meditations

Ok, I have been doing my own test runs with this, but wanted external non biased input from others (not my own opinions but others).

The idea started with a zerker hammer/gs build utilizing on swap burst damage to hammer then back to gs for continued ae pressure.

After that I was looking at the tankier celestial builds and trying to come up with something “survival” based while still doing “ok” damage.

This build will provide you with 3500 armor and 17255 hp.

Damage rotations will provide a 3k weapon swap/mighty blow on hammer with glacial heart + mighty blow + sigil of hydromancy as well as a 3k whirling wrath potential. nets you a somewhat reliable 6k ae damage burst.

Not amazingly high, but what I was enjoying was the 3.5k armor. I feel the survival is noticeable (better than full zerker) and the damage is decent (better than a full cleric bunker build) so it was a happy middle ground for me.

Using knights amulets loses out on vitality that the zerker has, thus the push down Honor to make up for the lost vitality.

I sometimes swap elite for tome of wrath for AE point pressure, and it actually helps a good bit as long as I stay on the sidelines.

If you do swap around and go zerker I would suggest either of below:

Frozen Resolution

Freezing Blast

x/x/6/x/4 is the goal and then flavor after that to your liking. With this your WW/mighty blow swap gives you closer to 10k ae damage combo.

Feedback appreciated. Do you think the knights build does “enough” damage with decent survivability? I felt pretty strong on team fights and useful in ranked and unranked queues.

edit

Added Meditative Soldier discontinued

Let’s go with in a good place shall we?

Lol, I won’t argue there

it’s not really a “ranged” weapon either, kind of a close to mid range thing as well as scepter (that strafing!)

I watched the games, and tage was singled out and downed, because I believe that he as the guardian (not the player) was the weak spot. I tried to look for clutch plays, but mostly it was an onslaught of focus fire on a point.

Tage was playing the role of a point roamer mostly, which could have been better suited with a more mobile class, but mobility wasn’t too much of an issue. After that he played the role of target CC with scepter and hammer immobilize, another war could have covered that either with hammer ae CC or another shoutbow sword immobilize on a shorter cooldown.

Proabably not an optimal choice but another thief could have replaced a medi guard for roaming and target burst lockdown kills. Rangers make good +1 to group fights as well.

I wouldn’t want to advocate for another engie or ele heavy group though, so overall I am glad for the diversity, but felt like something else could have subbed in.

What they did have for them are players who are good at their class playing together as a team, which is probably why they went with a medi guard over any of the other things I suggested.

No one was saying omg don’t use this build it should be zerker dungeon meta, what was said was….“why is there even a need for it to have a build guide?”, but w/e to each their own I guess.

I guess it all comes down to your not being able to grasp the meaning of the OP.

The utility is in my opinion minimal at best. For CC reasons a hammer war can keep people stunned up and off a stomp body better and multi target, as banish is a single target and that is all we have.

Ring of warding cluster kills are nice and all, but far too infrequent to be critical to game play.

Auto attack/symbol are exceedingly slow with I would say minimal damage return and not very noticeable protection boon (wears off quickly unless you stay in one spot and continue auto chain).

Zealot’s embrace is pretty decent if you drop target and manually aim, but it becomes a cluster trying to hit a far target and even a point blank target. Mid range targets are best or aiming ahead or down a ingress route are where it shines.

Back to the reason why hammer is nice, Mighty Blow. Good strong hit with short cooldown, but it I feel it is best utilized on swap and blow it then get back to another weapon quick after throwing out your CCs.

I have been playing guardian since launch and I hate to admit that I love the class but I criticize it constantly. I feel another class could have brought more to the team than the hammer guard.

The argument is that the stability on VoC was “clutch” to team fights, but I’ll leave that open to debate.

The public is fickle and masses are easy to influence. Nature of humanity.

Get someone to win a tourney with that and people will follow for sure :p

In time sequencing, they gave us Kindled Zeal as they combined Zealous Blade into what it is now (used to have a trait that provided healing with greatsword strikes and a trait that increased greatsword damage by 5%, now they are all in one).

A few months after that they came up with Amplified Wrath, thus negating any “benefit” that Kindled Zeal provided power/condi users.

It is useless trash that hasn’t been cleaned up and probably forgotten about by now when they tried to give us options and put a stamp of “good place” on the cover.

And Radiant Retaliation apparently is broken and does not change your retal damage at all, or so reports are made. I have not used it myself as retaliation is not significant enough to try to “buff”. (You can argue in wvw zerg scenarios, but I argue again, that isn’t the tipping point).