Guardian;
consecrations rarely get used because the CD are exhaustive and they are entirely situational. They often give a defense area that if other players try to take advantage of, it only groups them tightly for AoE damage and reduces their ability to move.
Meditations do subpar damage in comparisons to their recharge.
All signets are vanilla, but lacking vanilla flavour. Signet of mercy healing benefit is dramatically too low. Its group rez is patchy if it works or not. Bane signet sounds good, but its secondary knockdown does dreadful damage in comparison to its cooldown. The other signets follow this suit..they provide what seems like a good passive that isn’t altogether that great and their secondary effects are unimaginative.
Their weapon skills are horribly transparent and easy to avoid. Too many stalls, slow and painfully bright animations and much like the warrior, their gap closers apart from flashing blade often over shoot or rubberband. Self rooting on a channeled skill that only does 1.8-2.2k damage, even if it does reflect projectiles is damaging them. In fact self root on any melee is damaging them.
Their heavy armour provides no real advantage. In gw1 a heavy with shield took 50% less damage than a squishy. The armour meant something, and hence, so did armour penetrating skills and armour affecting conditions.
Their elite use apart from renewed focus is clumsy and blind. The first time a player uses any of the books they don’t actually know what it is going to do. The cast times on the books and self rooting again make it out and out ugly to use.
Too many inferior, unimaginative traits, also too many similiar traits. One to make wards bigger. Another to make them last longer. Another so they heal. Another so they damage..but no description of how big, how long, how much. In a fast moving game, which you describe in your own pre release video has describing as having aspects of F.P.S..a ward you place on the ground is begging that people will come stand in it for it to do anything useful, or require you to stand it. Considering 5 out 8 professions are ranged..this is perhaps as useful as making the edge of the dart board bigger. Making the wall the dart is on bigger, but doing nothing to make the bulls eye more accessible or any scoring area’s more easily targeted. Also skills that require you to be set on fire to work, so you do set yourself on fire, and then realise, this only works if a enemy sets you on fire..not when you do it to yourself with your own torch skill. Burning has the shortest duratons usually of all conditions..again,..too many traits like this that are just not useful in any way to controlling how you want to position and play.
Spirit weapons are dead as dead. All I will say is that I saw them used in tpvp by a pug team. The guardian in question got laughed at in chat panel. Their damage is low, their HP even lower and require heavy spec in grand master traits to make less laughable in pvp and dungeons, but still laughable.
Aegis gives a single block…not exactly game changing, or over powered. Blocks across the board need better after affects. A thief in stealth that gets blocked gets to try again, a channeled skills first tick gets block, nothing after that. The stand alone block provides nothing of substance that would make a person want to use blocks in timely manner. So far they are used preemptively to upset chained attack sequences..there is no strong reason to sit on them for very specific use. Hence why guardian take retreat from the movement buff..the aegis is just a tiny extra bonus.
No swiftness apart from shouts.
Hammer is clunky and painful to use against all high attack speed professions or ranged professions..so basically anyone..it only becomes useful in 1 vs 1 node attack/defense. Not to mention the huge knockback now places the target out of your reach if you manage to hit them.
Hammers 5 skill “Create a barrier enemies cannot pass through.” Engineers rifle knockback will knock them out of it. A guardians own spirit hammer will knock them out of it…again, too many skills that are worded badly and don’t follow the function they are stated as.
Despite all this, I quite guardian..they’re not entirely broken,..just subpar at everything but standing still in a node and not moving much…they are just very badly bend in many places…but little tweaks would make them far more enjoyable to play.
