Guild Wars 2

Dirame.8521:

Alright I’m going to list all the possible snares that a guardian can have in a build and you tell me if they need more; 4 second immob, 3 second kd, 2 second kd, ring of warding, line of warding, Binding blade, chains of light, Zealot’s embrace and that’s not including the teleports they have but hey, they need more.

Out of all of those, they are not “snares”.

Beyond the mobility CC aspect of it, you have to think of ease of use and especially frequency of application.

Immobilize on scepter is probably our best bet, but it has a “short” duration on a moderate cooldown. (and you mentioned chains of light twice in that, unless you were referencing the signet mentioned below).

Zealot’s embrace is a 1200 range immobilize…great…but it travels in straight line and will not guide to targets, making it ineffective while mobile past maybe a range of 500ish? Also short duration with moderate cooldown.

ring and line of warding are “ok” but easily bypassed by walking around or even sometimes dodging through it due to knockdown animations sometimes getting you past it. Also ring of warding is slow and immobile, so you can almost never use it on the move, but mostly for area denial at chokepoints. Try using ring of warding while chasing a target and see how often it lands.

The 2 and 3 second knockdowns are provided by bane signet and hammer of wisdom.
I can’t say these are not useful, but they are difficult to incorporate in terms of available utility slots and trait points, as they are placed in slots that are contesting “better” traits to take. Oh, and you can cast bane signet, have the target walk behind you, and it goes on full cooldown….slightly irritating and not effective in melee range.

You left out signet of wrath which has an immobilize on it as well, showing how often people use that signet that it is not on the top of the mind of the players, or at least your unfamiliarity with the class. It has the same issues with bane signet as far as landing an immobilize in melee range due to mobile targets and having better utilities and traits to take instead of this.

Hammer is also prone to damage now, and while you could cast it and activate it right away, that means the hammer is destroyed (unless you spend even more traits on keeping it around after use) and it has really long cast times for summon while in combat and then a second shorter animation for activation of the knockdown.

Another CC ability you didn’t mention was the blowout from hammer, Banish….but this knocks our targets 750 range AWAY from us, so we can’t use that to chase….and it is longer than most of our gap closers (flashing blade and leap of faith).

Our various teleports are flashing blade, judge’s intervention, and merciful intervention.

Flashing blade is good, short at 600 range.
Judges’ intervention is good, long at 1200 range.
But you need a target to use the two abilities or you go nowhere, so you can’t use it as a mobility skill to get away, only to chase.

Merciful intervention is arguably horrible. While you do not need a target, it only teleports you to allies, and it is random in terms of who is closest to you with the lowest HP. In the past it had issues of targeting pets and friendly NPCs, unsure if this is still an issue.

The underlining issue with all the teleports though, is after I closed the gap, I do not have the speed to maintain the chase, nor do I have a snare to keep a target in vicinity to finish the kill. After that the gap closers are on a fairly moderate cooldown before use again. So you land a hit or two, but the target gets away with ease.

Our one snare that we have is Glacial Heart, which has a 100% chase to activate while using hammer on crit every 30 seconds for 4 seconds. This is pretty much a more restrictive sigil of hydromancy or ice. The frequency of application is bad, and the limitation of weapons is bad. The devs are looking directly at this trait as a means to provide guardians snares in combat and they have buffed/tweaked the skill at least twice now with no success.

Either provide more viable snares (not just knockdowns and teleports) for guardians or increase the burst damage done so that for the few short durations a guardian does close the gap, the target should be punished if they do not avoid damage properly with blocks/blinds/evades/dodges/or counter CCs.

I know people would be furious if guardians got more damage, so it seems the answer would settle better with more snares or something to that effect. Soft CCs.

I am “trying” to make a scaleable spreadsheet that gives allowances for stat input to show approximate dps.

The problem I"m running into right now is I began to include number of hits made in a duration, and was using that to determine the number of VoJ procs as well as to average out based on crit chance, just how many hits crit and how many didn’t (so you could split the difference and multiply the non-crit hits with non-crit damage and the crits with the crit damage)…………..but now I have a scenario where attacks of multiple hits of varying damage, so factoring in just exactly what hits are crits and not changes a lot of things

At most I could go back to assuming 100% crit chance on everything and still include the burn damage based on number of hits…but I"m not happy with that because different crit chances make or break various builds. I could have 200% crit damage and 0 crit chance and it would do no damage.

That’s fine, my own spreadsheets would make sense to no one, but I’m willing to put effort into your work because other points of view may show me something I didn’t even consider.

If you do have it available that would be awesome!

Curious about the data behind the chart. Would you be able to do a googledocs of it so I could poke at it and try some of my own builds and theorycrafts?

I"m pretty offensive, especially when I’m irritable.

But yeah, I agree that it is a double standard.

We can’t be offensive because we are “so great at defense”, yet everyone else is “not viable” and tired of being glass cannon so they up the defense while maintaining that same degree of damage.

We have seen they are not looking to reduce survival on anyone but trying to tone down the damage at least.

So maybe they are trying to tune people down to guardian? It is a slow road, but that is where we are headed so far.

I would like to see guardian get to meet everyone else in the middle and gain some more offense viability though.

The “logic” behind shield is seen when you compare the cooldowns and abilities to other shield skills.

Engineer has projectile blocks, pushback, stuns
Warrior has physical blocks, and stuns
Guardian has a mix of both with lesser effectivness (jack of all trades).

Protection will reduce damage by 33% for the next 3 seconds give or take.
Block would stop 3 attacks, no matter the scale of damage, so it could block a 1 damage ability and then you get hit by the 500 damage ability.

So protection works longer for the “duration” of the fight, while block works better for the instance of attack.

shield of absorption is our “stun/knockback” that all shields have, with the added flare of mixing in engineer projectile blocking as well. and a minor burst heal to boot.

It is not what i had in mind for a shield, but it fulfills the requirements when you take a step back and think about it.

Oh and every guardian ever since the beginning of this game has wondered the same thing…why does my shield not block, swap it with focus…but as noted above they have a rhyme for the reason.

haviz.1340:

Oxxy.7068:

You sure? I’d like to see people fighting lupi or alpha for example in a non optimal (non zerker, not stacking boons) group without vigor, it sounds really painful.

Stacking only regen I guess.

All I gotta say is lol!

So there you go, either build FULL defensive or full offensive…don’t sit in the middle or you won’t get anything done.

JonPeters.5630:

Power guardian vs Condition guardian
I think Dec 10th will see the emergence of the power guardian, but I think that the condition based guardian still has a ways to go. Ultimately this is because it is hard to cover the burning and frankly you need a good reliable second or even third condition that guardians simply do not have right now. I think for those professions lacking that 3rd damage condition we are looking at supplementing them via runes and sigils rather than skills/traits right now but that won’t be something we attempt until the build that follows the Dec 10th build.

Went back and read the bottom line, and I revoke my thought about a new sigil/rune based off the last sentence here saying they are waiting to see what happens with the Dec 10th build.

In this paragraph I have to disagree that the lack of condition guardians is because of meaningful condition damage. Or at least I want to voice the flip side of that coin.

The lack of condition guardians is because of two things:

• Lack of ability to sustain in combat while speced for conditions.
• Lack of ability to apply heavy pressure/burst with burning as it is a “slow” condition to tick and stacks in duration not intensity.

If we are going for the slow burn but dangerous fire, we need to survive long durations. Current traits/gear does not readily support a condition bunker. Or at least we have not seen the emergence of one readily used in the guardian meta.

For an offensive burn guardian, we do not have a good way to heavy pressure a target, and that way would only be gained via bleeding or torment. Bleeding and torment stacking in intensity helps apply heavy fast damage to push life down and burning maintains the damage after the burst is gone to keep the life low after the burst.

Pressure + Burst = Kills

Right now we can apply decent pressure, but people can sustain and survive it.

Or we can flip around and burst with power based builds but people can recover from it.

Putting the pressure/burst together on appropriate cooldowns would allow players to time abilities and get those kills. A defender would be able to monitor the moves of the guardian and thwart the kill, and then combat resets for both players until someone makes a mistake.

The third side of the 2 dimensional coin is sustainability . If I have pressure and I have burst, do I have sustainability or should I?

With pressure+burst+sustainability you get overpowered. So the triad there should have a weakness to it.

Either we have:
Pressure + burst (glasscannon)
Burst + sustain (???)
Pressure + sustain (bunker)

As I’m winging it and typing. I really don’t know what role the burst+sustain setup would be. It could be a roamer/team fighter, but we are notorious for lack of travel speed. Maybe that would be best described as the dueling build or the balanced build.

Right now we have glasscannon, but I feel that could use a little more burst. and we have bunker, but without the pressure damage aspect, it is purely just sustain.

We don’t really have that mid ground build either. I think meditations comes closest at that, and it is decent but I think it needs a little more burst or sustain with it.

The devs are obviously afraid to give guardians damage as they view us to be tanky/hard to kill. Vocally and just by observing the changes they make, it has been a hard ride to justify guardian damage output.

Yeah, that is what I meant. I “think” the overall approach is via a gear mechanic and not a trait/class mechanic.

It may still yet be undistributed class changes specific to guardian, but I’m reading into his words a bit.

Brutaly.6257:

I asked him to clarify this.

Another thing about this build is that you do not have all of the information you need about this power guardian right now, but I can’t reveal more without spoilers. /tease

Imo the only thing, besides that condi builds are far away, that is really important. Hopefully he choses to at least comment on some sort of direction.

Well, he said that they would not give us large lumpsums of conversion stats because that is not “by the numbers” as they have some rules on buffing/nerfing traitlines based on tiers apparently.

He did mention that we were meant to utilize sigils and runes to see the full potential of some of these talked about builds.

So the /teaser may be a new sigil or rune that will work well with the guardian. Although as silentstorm did catch onto, this would be an accessible buff for any other profession as well, so it still may not be enough for guardians.

JonPeters.5630:

Guardian:
Tanky and supportive guardians are in a strong position in many gametypes. We do feel that damage guardians are not as powerful as they could be. While we don’t want guardians to be as strong offensively as some of the other classes (given their powerful defensive abilities) we opened up more offensive guardian builds.

I think the misconception here is that all guardians have the same defensive capability and survival rate as a bunker guardian. Yet the bunker has to sacrifice pretty much everything in order to attain said status.

Buffing offensive guardians should either be a vast increase in damage or a moderate increase in survival.

Right now we are getting moderate increases in damage to the point where no one really notices…..

Personally I agree with the idea of keeping the guardian a defensive class so I’m not too keen on buffing damage straight up anyway and would like to see more defensive yet threatening. Not just a lump on a log that won’t die at a glance.

Oh yeah and those many game types that the supportive/tanky guardian seeing action in is pretty much just s/tpvp. Yet everyone still worries that we will lose that soon too.

foofad.5162:

Mace also has identical autoattack timing to hammer. It’s basically the same rhythm.

noticed it before and didn’t think too much about it, but looked at it again just now and it is kind of interesting.

mace/hammer have the same auto attack time

sword/greatsword have the same auto attack time

…staff/scepter differ slightly but are close to the 1s timer.

the 1h and 2h counterparts are similar to each other, which I’m sure was intended, but you would think they would emphasize speed for 1h and damage for 2h. Or is that just me?

While this has been done to death, I guess it is worth revisiting.

Past discussions on this have said sword was the best dps, then greatsword with the correct rotation. Scepter is theoretical best but its hits are inconsistent with smite, providing less damage done than on paper.

I’m positing that hammer, with a focus on zeal/symbol damage would provide a higher dps in a pve scenario. pvp is a different story!!!

http://tinyurl.com/meypka8

googledoc showing my napkin math, numbers were based on just full zerkering it in a build calculator

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQFASEChTIZFKQrHAAAAAVPiHAAAA-jwxAYfAqAQyrIasF3ioxqrxUuER127ioVLFQELjA-e

Timing of attacks was me sitting there with stopwatch on my phone and timing single attacks/attack chains, and then calculating total attacks in 10 seconds and then auto attacking for 10 seconds to see if it would match (since it is prone to human error pushing “start/stop” at the right time).

Feel free to point out mistakes or things I didn’t account for so we have better math.

edit: oh yeah and this is in a magical world where every single attack crits, just theorycrafting after all.

second edit, updated the spreadsheet to include more combination autoattack/cooldown attacks and automated a lot of cell reference so the whole sheet will change based on base numbers input.

the only attack that is higher than hammer on mace is faithful strike, IF you factor only the initial hit from symbol of protection.

Symbol of Protection has a base damage of 370 on hit and 555 for 3 ticks of symbol (185 a tick). A total of 925 in “3” seconds for symbol. A dps of 308 dmg a sec.

Faithful Strike has a base damage of 470, and if you want to add the symbol damage in as well it will do 840 over 5 ticks (165 a tick). A total of 1310 damage in a “5” seconds for symbol to tick fully. That is a dps of 262 dmg a sec.

That is with base stats and no modifiers, so the difference may be even greater fully geared.

Mace does hit well, no doubt. But it is more suited for burst response damage than persistent dps.

Hammer is actually one of our better dps weapons. I almost want to say it is better than sword auto attack, but I don’t have enough in depth numbers, and I’m sure someone would refute that.

Easily hitting 1-3k autos with the addition of 1k symbol ticks and a 5-7k mighty blow.

Trait down zeal (I know everyone says its bad) for 10% on burning, 10% with symbols and then you can go down radiance if you want and get 10% on targets with conditions…if you want to keep going you can get 20% from having aegis up. A lot of people run scholar in pve.

So that is 0.10*0.10+0.10+0.20+0.10=1.76%
extra damage on non-crits, then in zerkers you easily have 50% crit chance and 50% crit damage, giving you another 200% (150% base and 50% from gear) crit damage.

Then take it back a notch and you realize that hammer works really well with AH and you can taper back the traits for some survival and pick up 30% crit damage to have a minor trade off in damage for decent increase in group play survival.

The auto attack from hammer is consistent, puts a symbol down, buffs protection, and if you want AH it heals you frequently through the fight.

My fudge numbers I ran to figure this out was to time the auto attack animations and calculate how much damage over time, and hammer/scepter come out on top (if you count smite). This does not take into account additional abilities like whirling wrath or symbol of faith since those are fairly hard interrupts on auto attack with a decent pause between up time. Whirling wrath/zealot’s defense are more “burst” abilities and less dps I feel, but I have not done those numbers which is why I won’t say hammer is our “best” pve weapon.

Now then, in pvp…….it is highly predictable and hard to do damage fast enough with such a slow weapon…..so pvp you may want something else, like sword/focus or greatsword. Those are mobile and quick attacking.

edit:

Also take into consideration that might blow is on a 5 second cooldown versus whirling wrath is on a 10 second cooldown, so you can mighty blow twice in the time you get 1 whirling wrath cooldown. You end up doing more damage with mighty blow.

And again, hammer has multiple things going on on the final hit, so it is a large hit and then 3 pulses of a symbol (all 4 hits get modified by symbolic power for 10%). So once you get the auto chain going you pretty much have a symbol ticking for 1k the whole time.

He actually runs a few different builds in the video.

First fight he has a x/x/x/30/30, you can tell because of reduced shout cooldown, 2h mastery, and pure of voice on shout. As well as reduced virtue cooldown timers. If you monitor the refresh timer after skill activation you will notice the timer differences between traited and untraited.

Later on he runs a build with nothing in virtues because his virtues are on full timer cooldown instead of reduced.

So it will have to depend on what build you want to see. Also his max HP changes from fight to fight, so he wears different gear sets possibly too, depending on if solo roaming or zerging.

I really feel that mace could be our version of the defensive but heavy hitting weapon like the warrior hammer.

The potential burst of Protector’s and Faithful Strike back to back are easily 2 4k crits back to back, couple that with a smart weapon swap or a useful off hand (torch has good 1 hit burst, or even focus, but thats a long cooldown).

Greatsword is nice because multiple hits add up to big damage, but the chances of landing every one of those hits and having them all crit appropriately diminish the effectiveness. Same goes with scepter smite.

Single hit large damaging abilities are great and amazing burst, but as you mentioned harbinger, it is difficult to use and easily kited. Mace also relies on someone hitting you while channeling protector’s strike. I think it could use some tweeks but overall it has great potential.

I keep trying to juggle moderate healing power with good crit/crit damage with mace to make it a defensive but damaging weapon, but healing power/precision/power or healing power/precision/crit damage does not exists :p

Not embarrassed, just felt it was superfluous and “ain’t nobody got time for that”.

It’s like watching a show on tv, learning something, then your buddy right next to you that watched the same exact thing turns to you and tells you exactly what you both just heard……

I’m kind of surprised people are still responding after a clear and definitive answer, including a information source link was provided by Aza (thanks Aza!)….. /boggled by others still posting opinions instead of reading what was already said.

Kind of on topic but turning it around:

So after noticing that, I was going through trying to find a way to utilize the burst potential.

Sequencing mace 3 → Torch 4(secondary) → Swap to Hammer → Hammer 2 = 15-17k crits total

Or can combo mace auto attack flowing into mace 3 then hammer/hammer 2 if you don’t want to use torch.

Repeatable combo every 15 secocnds, and while you wait for weapon swap you can queue it up to combo that backwards with

hammer 2 → mace swap → mace 3 → torch 4(secondary) or mace auto attack.

Now is it sustainable? Best option is probably meditations build for the crit/crit damage/medi heals.

Yes, but did we get skill fact updates?

Am I crazy and not remembering it right, or didn’t Protector’s Strike and the last hit of mace auto chain (Faithful Strike) used to have the same exact damage?

Was just looking at it now, and Protector’s Strike is a few 100 more damage now, makes for some interesting burst hits with crit/crit damage.

It is very possible I have old man memory though and they have always been different

Went back through my notes, I had 470 as base damage in mists for both attacks. Protector’s Strike base damage is now 672 with base damage/stats. I could have written it down wrong originally though.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

meditation guard. Reset traits to 30-1-30-0-0. Divinity runes
use greatsword-mace/focus
learn to animation skip mace 2 ward

Too many blocks. Too many blinds. Too much burning. They perish.

First time I heard someone afraid of dying to a guard due to burning, honestly.

1 block every 15 seconds, and 1 aegis every 45 seconds, so in 60 seconds you got about 5-6 blocks? Throw in a well timed shelter for another 5 maybe, that would be at least 10 seconds of burning. Burning will do a minimum of 328 damage a tick and we will say a modest 500 damage if they put some into condition damage. So that is 3280-5000 damage in 10 seconds, every 60 seconds.

Sounds like a killer.

Unless you didn’t mean the burning on block, and just burns in general, then it is still about 328-500 damage and every 5th hit, or for 5 seconds in a 30s cooldown.

Zanryu.3417:

Come to think of it you haven’t really stated why they’re OP, you just went off on this little talk about Guardians.

The warrior has the highest health pool along with arguably the best passive regeneration in the game, without having to invest heavily into healing power or gimping the other stats.

Zanryu.3417:

The thing about a Guardian is it’s far bunkier than a Warrior. It has superior defenses, access to multiple blinds, and good condition removal. It can outlast even a regen banner Warrior. If anything that should show how Warriors aren’t as OP as everyone thinks. They’ve got good skills and builds to be sure, but anything they can do outside of stun and temporary condition immunity others can do better. Condition damage? Necro or Engineer. Direct damage? Mesmer or Theif. Bunker? Guardian.

As for the guardian having superior defense versus a warrior, The classic bunker guard will probably be using staff and mace (no blinds), there are others that might have scepter, or even hammer for a weapon swap for terms of control (no blinds).

Condition removal “is” one of the strong points of guardians, so there isn’t a lot of argument there. I would say current state of condition removal versus current affairs of condition application need to be balanced more, but there isn’t a warrior is OP topic, so won’t go into that too much.

Everyone says warrior do not have the damage mitigation that guardians do, and that is why they are not bunkers yet. Warriors have good access to blocks (maybe more than guards), good access to weakness (guards have protection), and good access to stuns (guards do not have a comparable mechanic to this in frequent use as stuns).

The one thing a guardian excels at over the warrior is group support for team fights. I think that is what keeps guardians on top over warrior for the role of bunkering.

Zanryu.3417:

CMF.5461:

……at one point your friend says

“it’s like fighting a giant HP pool”

and you respond with

“Yeah, pretty worthless if you can’t kill anything”

…………..you just described a guardian though…………so is it worthless?

Oh and you stand in practically everything and ask to die.

Guardians don’t have a giant HP pool. They have the lowest HP in the game, tied with Elementalists. Also, I’m pretty sure they’re known as a bunker class for the most part. You have DPS variants but usually people run them as bunkers. People complain that Warriors sacrifice very little in order to be effective at both killing and sustaining, and as you can see that’s not too true. They’re still able to be beaten.

Guardian’s have the lowest in the game, but are supposed to excel in defense and staying alive. While they are focused on “bunkering” they do little to no damage at all.

Thus the guardian’s job is to have a “huge hp pool” through healing, blocking, avoidance.

When is the last time you were afraid of a bunker guardian killing you? Unless you were smart enough to die to retaliation.

As far as for the damage versus bunker and warriors sacrificing nothing to achieve tanky status, most success I have seen with warriors doing this is through conditions, though the stun-100 blades has caused some people some problems.

The warrior has the highest health pool along with arguably the best passive regeneration in the game, without having to invest heavily into healing power or gimping the other stats.

Is it unkillable? No obviously not, but it is adverse to how much others have to sacrifice to come into comparison to what the warrior is able to achieve just by having healing signet and adrenal health.

Is it OP? Well in hotjoins you see a lot of it, but tourney play meta has not become overly inundated with warriors that I have noticed, yet.

……at one point your friend says

“it’s like fighting a giant HP pool”

and you respond with

“Yeah, pretty worthless if you can’t kill anything”

…………..you just described a guardian though…………so is it worthless?

Oh and you stand in practically everything and ask to die.

This is the split personality from the mechanics of the game and the core of this profession at play here.

There are no “healers”. The group oriented healing will be weak, and you are better off with self oriented healing, stated so in their own interviews and game descriptions.

That said, we are supposed to be support/defensive, and since a lot of our abilities become group oriented, they are reduced in effect in order to not create the “healer” role.

So fine, we can support a little bit in the healing aspect, but for the most part everyone should worry about their own health….but then things like healing breeze never see use.

So how do they try to fix it? They make it heal allies more……….but we shouldn’t be healers?

So beyond the fact that the mechanics are backwards, and we should be upfront fighting and not behind our allies healing, it is also fulfilling a role that no one is supposed to take, and that is to pretend to be a dedicated healer.

Devil’s advocate here….we “could” use this ability while everyone in melee range is on one side of the fight, and we are on the other side of the target, thus healing through the target being hit….ok PvE maybe this works, PvP of course it ends up being pointless due to mobile fighting…among other things.

In a group fight with tons of burning and other professions that have more condition damage than you anyway, your burning is never noticed.

Either the mechanic of burning needs to change, we need a more drastic condition damage stat revamp that allows more synergy of condition damage into our survival or power play…..similar to what they “tried” to do with Kindled Zeal, but more numbers…maybe 50%? I would say 100% but I know that can be abused…but its the only way to give us effective condition damage without gimping the rest of our gameplay I feel.

If they add a secondary mechanic to burning to reduce damage done by burning targets, or make every second of burning have a 25% chance to blind the target?

Might on VoJ I think would be very interesting and a good trait choice, drop supreme justice and swap 4 hits to burn for kittens to gain might for…10 seconds? AE fights you could easily get 15-20 might, solo fights you could maybe maintain 5-10 is the goal…..but now the passive is REALLY strong, what would the active be?

Slightly better feedback, yet you still can’t help but add personal insults in there and act like the amazing internet dude.

I completely understand what you mean about changing small numbers result in huge impacts because there is less room to push and pull between the synergies in the game. That said, if there were no “stats” you wouldn’t have numbers to push and pull between, after that you would just have skills which landed hits, control, or support abilities.

Now bringing it back to reality, you can still do similar aspects of what I suggested with the current system. The boss can now hit for 10,000 damage (no auto attack or does little to no damage, maybe 100-500 damage or just acts as pushbacks and interrupts) but only has about 100,000 health himself.

He is invulnerable till dizzy phase, and each attack that lands heals for about 5,000.

Players still have the stat spread that they have today, so low health tiers only have about 10,000-15,000 health, mid tier has 15,000-20,000, and high tier has 20,000-25,000 (probably average health not counting vitality stacking).

Why play low health tier? Well now game balance comes into play, low tier should either be highly survivable via active gameplay or do more damage than the other tiers could do.

Mid tier is the balanced equation and can go for more survival or more damage, but sacrifices more if they budge for the mid point of balance.

High tier has a more comfortable time going full damage and surviving, but they can stack on survival abilities and be the “tankiest” of classes.

Of course this is not how the game plays now, but it was the original profession concepts that were described to us…..this is not a problem with my idea but a problem with the current game.

Damage output of players should be around 5,000-10,000 in a attack or combo, but higher damaging abilities are on longer cooldowns, while control abilities are on a moderate cooldown. Heal abilities could be on a very short cooldown (integrate healing into regular attacks) only if they heal for very little and act as fillers to survive if done right, but can’t top out life with ease.

That is all PvE in a single boss fight mechanic……..add in multiple mobs, that die in 2 or 3 hits, but can also kill the players in 2 or 3 hits. Now AE abilities are on long cooldowns, and you have to either group up to layer AE to kill the horde of mobs before they kill you via sheer numbers, or you manage mobility and damage mitigation/evades to survive long enough to AE again.

Put PvP in the mix and you have a potentially devastating mix that could seem unbalancing, but if the 1-shot kills are highly telegraphed and block/evasion mechanics are frequent enough to use but not available to spam, you have reactionary gameplay at a slower pace where the players are trying to find gaps to land hits or force the player to blow abilities and then land the death blow when done right, but if not played right insta death.

Again, what I am asking for is way out of left field and I know it won’t happen…a softer version of this could happen if they up defensive and control abilities to happen much more frequently, and reduce the spam of damaging abilities. After that they have to change PvE content to be more about surviving to land your hits, and not about doing as many hits as possible.

+1 Arken, the passives just not worth it in the long run. Hell with shorter cooldowns I would pop them more because that is what i really want, especially if I’m traited down virtues.

VoJ is a decent passive, but when grouped with at least 5 it is better to pop it as it will be up again before the group burns go away. Additionally if I go down virtues I get might/retaliation on it. Also if I go down radiance, I get a blind to boot!

VoR is ok, but just not enough. Even traited the passive is excusable. I trait VoR for the 3x condition cleanse honestly.

VoC aegis passive happens so infrequently with so little return when it does that I don’t notice that I don’t have it up. I use it for the emergency protection boon or even stability. If you have pure of heart, it works in conjunction with VoR active to give a little bit more burst heal back.

If VoJ was AoE on your target (not self cause then ranged attacks would suck with VoJ) by default or provided more damage, especially solo then ok. But if I wanted to help allies do some sort of on demand burst then I could pop it.

If VoR had a stronger passive heal without specing and gearing into it, then I would want to keep it up unless I really had to use it for myself or group.

If VoC created a block every 5 attacks or vastly increased my damage mitigation while passive, then ok. If I want to save my allies I can pop it for an on demand aegis to help others.

Oh wow, such hate.

Your criticism pretty much said:

• Old idea from an era of games that were harder than today….ok, I guess that’s a compliment?

• Too hard to do
  I don’t ever think it would happen due to the complete revamp of the game, but introducing aspects of this and adapting it to the current game…i.e. more control oriented combat…would be nice.
  They had pretty much this with the frog king fight where you threw gem shards into it’s mouth and then you could spam attacks on it…beyond that you had to learn how to avoid and survive

• You like meaningless inflation of numbers
  I say 5hp to get the idea across, but in essence think of it like a zelda heart…you can only take so many hits before you die….but you didn’t concentrate on the “numbers”

• previous bullet

• Balance issues (not fleshed out idea, but was trying to capture the idea of no dps and more action/skill oriented combat, so I know it needs more thought)

• you don’t like it

• see previous bullet and add more insults.

Please try to be constructive and bring more reasons why you don’t like it other than “you don’t like it”.

First thought in my head: “Embargo the Largo”

Not that I don’t like the, but because it rhymes :p

How about this,

Remember the frog king from SAB 1? Hell just all of SAB, there are no real crits or dps. Just landing hits.

Now what if fights revolved around landing solid hits and not every hit doing damage and trying to do the most damage per a hit?

What if a boss had 10 hit points. But could only be hit if you make it to the “dizzy” phase.

This boss attacks players by rushing at them and knocking them down, then spinning in place. The players also only have something to the effect of 5 HP, and the boss attack does 1 hit per a second for a total of 5 while spinning (thus killing a player).

The only way to survive is to time dodges, immobilize the boss so he can’t run at you, or utilize blocks/blinds so his attacks miss.

Group heals also recover 1 hp to surrounding allies on a moderate cooldown, self heals replenish life to full but on a long cooldown.

After the boss runs around and does this 5 times he becomes dizzy for 2 seconds, at which point the players have a chance to attack. If the players don’t land 10 hits then the boss continues up with the invulnerable phase again.

For every hit the boss lands on players, he heals 1 hp back.

Room for some error, but still have to be on your toes, yet now you don’t have to worry about doing the most dps possible…just have to land a hit at the right time.

Now the game is all about CC and support.

………lol needed to make a video about “play nice”……..well I guess the fact that the internet as a whole can’t play nice, I shouldn’t be surprised. /sigh the glory days of gaming before all this crud.

They are still fun reads, don’t get me wrong. I’m just being hyper critical. I didn’t ever feel forced to read them.

Pretty similar to one of jaxs old mace burst builds, but tried to stick to the trait line synergies and sword/mace were in those trees, so picked them up.

This runs slower than a gs/sword setup, as you don’t have the second leap to get around.

Sw/F and blind exposure has about 9 stacks of vulnerability on opener with ray of judgement and flashing blade

M/T has large crit hits with zealot’s fire and protectors strike…which cleansing flame helps to supplement the slow auto attack from mace while stuck in it.

Favored energy sigils for more dodging, and fire sigils for lack of something good? More damage I guess.

Really stuck on lyssa runes lately because of the precison/condi clear/boons. 10% from being over 90% life with scholar just does not maintain long enough for my typical encounters.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7FcBl;0NFk30G3wF-90;9;5TT44;159A09B;4UNl6L;1KJG4KJG45Bm

biggest down side is I can’t help allies with shield knockback….so used to that it is hard to give it up.

I think popular opinion is that was the best out of the three.

I feel that writer had more freedom because they were not tied to a specific event or set of people to write about, so they had more room to explore people and ideas.

I liked reading the edge of destiny, but you know how it is going to end, so its a tragedy waiting to happen, and honestly felt they breezed through everything that came at them. The characters were a tad shallow in terms of depth, but I think I like them still over all.

Sea of Sorrows was a fun read and I respect/understand lions arch more now, but it spans so much time in a short book it can feel rushed as well.

All three of them had corny “video game descriptions” in them, about how someone is a ranger, or a guardian, or a mesmer and so on. Out of the three, edge of destiny had the most video game references which kind of turns me off.

Personal preference, I don’t need to be given verbatim moves in the game and describe generic things about a race, but I get that they are trying to keep to the original lore and design.

Stop all work on guardians! we just reached perfection! #spintowin

Not really practical, but off the wall.

……….So I went all out with hydromancy and glacial heart….on two hammers just for fun.

Lots of chills, and I was able to keep my targets close, even took runes of ice for good measure cause why not.

no real application of this, but thought the idea of weapon swapping to the same weapon created some interesting synergies with hammer. The best thing about it is auto attack, which you can maintain after a weapon swap, and hammer 2 is on a low cooldown. rest of the abilities are CC on a “decent” refresh.

if they added weapon specific expertise like this so that people may want to stick to one weapon throughout combat, it would be interesting.

Absolutely no diversity in this at all, but just silly to mess around with :p

Tarsius.3170:

CMF.5461:

I had to agro (hit 2 training dummies so they turn red) first then I could tab target between them.

Yeah got it working first try ;-) I feel like an olympic hammer thrower

rofl!

I had to agro (hit 2 training dummies so they turn red) first then I could tab target between them.

at that point I just hit tab and 2 at the same time a bunch of times and it would cancel the animation but keep the spin going.

in lions arch not sure if the training dummies up in the fort will let you tab target, I never go there but worth a shot to look silly

interesting, was able to recreate it too and I get the added bonus of being stuck in a whirling wrath animation while I walk around…. :p Good catch!

on a side note, oh thank god a dev looked at the guardian forums!

I agree with the dmg dmg def def flavor break down.

While stats are not everything per say, I was trying to look deeper into the breakdown and logic that the devs may have used when assigning different secondary stats to each profession tree.

Maybe it was random, but I doubt that.

For instance Power is always augmented with condition duration for all professions.

Precision on the other hand either comes with condition damage or critical damage.

Logic would then surmise that those professions would be a mix of either raw damage oriented build or conditions on crit builds.

Those would be damage.

Toughness and Vitality are obviously defensive, but would what mechanic would benefit each of those professions in utilizing that defensive posture?

As broken down above you have a mix of condition damage, healing power, boon duration…and crit damage randomly in a defensive tree.

So maybe the crit damage and condition damage are supposed to be viable ways to do damage while defensive?

Vitality has a mix of healing and boon duration. Seems to be all survival oriented for every class.

Then for class specific you have a mix of boon duration, crit damage, healing power, condition damage.

So I guess back to my original question, do the themes of the trait lines match the stats and give an idea of “how” to be offensive and defensive with each class? Or is it like you said, mostly just ignore it and trait for mechanics then drop either zerker, clerics, or even rabid/carrion in and screw the rest.

Been playing since release and I’m constantly theory crafting to this day, and looking for synergy in my chosen profession the guardian. That said, I’m also constantly looking to other classes to understand how to combat them better.

Would it be safe to say that the trait lines “meaning” is consistent throughout all the professions? I.E The toughness tree for each profession contains the “best” utilities for survival?

In taking that a further step, would the auxiliary stat be a tell tale sign of what you were intended to do while being defensive?

Ele – Tanky with condition damage
War – Tanky with healing
Rng – Tanky with condition damage
Ncr – Tanky with boons (boon duration??)
Grd – Tanky with high crit damage
Thf – Tanky with healing
Eng – Tanky with healing
Msm – Tanky with boons

Or does this not really follow the meta and builds that everyone has been running? Granted there is another 30 points you can use to run a secondary tree to supplement, like power/precision together does physical damage. Condi dmg and duration are condi builds…so on and so forth.

Bunker guards don’t give a kitten about crit damage and more about healing and boons, so that doesn’t seem to persist for guards at least.

Just some Sunday morning theory crafting and ideas while I try to find that hidden secret that no one ever found in builds before

So decided to stream fights as I test these builds to see how they fare and go back to study them. Never really looked at twitch before, so it is my new little entertainment that I will never keep up :p Easy to setup though, and free so that is kind of nice. Was expecting subscription fees.

Just hotjoins so nothing special, did some solo queue with the build but it didn’t work well with the random team setup. Very selfish and does not support team fights at all.

Maybe just need the right comp to support a meditation guard, but seems like it is only good for hotjoins and maybe wvw roaming.

Anyway, here is my goofy self and some spvp I been running all day (deleted first set cause audio was clipping way too loud).

http://www.twitch.tv/1cmf/b/471772173

perfect inscription + purity + signet of resolve was potential 3 clear every 10 seconds…that was pretty strong even though no one really ran that. Sad to see that go Huge nerf I feel.

While not “efficient” as going out and farming gold.

It is nice to get “something” back for the hours of pvp I do….even if it can be RNG.

I really don’t think its the burn that is the problem, but a combination of burn + bleeds.

Bleeds can spike damage pretty high with 10+ stacks.

Burn on the otherhand works like a moderate stack of bleeds, I think it was 4 bleeds = 1 burn?…..but as pointed out above, you see burn stack into the 25+ second range…..remember it takes 25+ seconds to see those burn ticks.

The burn is not what is bursting you down, it is the burst of bleed caps “ALONG” with the burn.

When bleed isn’t there, burn is around to provide pressure, then combine that with high bleed stacks and now you have the 1k+ bleed ticks per second as well as the 500-700 burn ticks.

That puts you at 1.5k+ damage a second.

Then factor in that we have a lot of AOE condition spam, so now everyone in that area is getting bursted down with conditions that are readily available to reapply.

Then combine the condition damage with the weapon attacks, you are easily at 2k+ damage a second…meaning most people will die in 5-10 seconds.

All the while, it is more difficult to time dodges and blocks against conditions than it is to avoid the old physical damage burst builds that had visible tells and cooldowns.

Think globally and not just one aspect of the game.

PvE dungeons at the moment do not worry about protection and regeneration.

PvP/WvW do rely on accurate use of those boons to mitigate damage

Have to think on both sides, and figure out how to meet in the middle (because wvw shares pve skills/gear)

Some decent feedback in it, but mixed in with some normal forum arguments. I think it is worth a read if you can filter the BS.

Or you can just do like everyone else and talk about it without really knowing what was said :p

yeah, eles have been on a big roller coaster of amazing, then suck, then amazing, then more suck…but you don’t need to divert this thread.

Guards as a whole have stayed pretty stagnant and mostly “tooltip updates”. Majority of guards right now feel the fury on meditation was worthless, but we are trying to make due.

Anyway, there are pages and pages of opinions on how good/not good guardians are. Read them and try to not be such a hater.