Guild Wars 2

Robert Andrews.7168:

Title says it all. Which Legion do you think a Guardian fits best into?

• The Blood Legion: Because they’re at the front lines, always. (Figuratively, of course.)
• The Ash Legion: Because they need to keep their faith secret?
• The Iron Legion: Because their faith is in technology.

What do you think? Going to be starting up a Charr Guardian soon, so would like the forumites input.

Blood Legion makes the most sense, but any profession can fit in with any legion. The methods a legion employs has nothing to do with the specific skills of those in the legion, but with the overall military strategies they rely on.

Blood Legion relies on blunt frontal assault type tactics primarily – ground pounders. Essentially zerging.
Ash Legion relies on more subtle methods – burnt earth tactics come to mind, at the very least, but also moving in upon a tactical weakness with a small assault force to take out an enemy’s leader.
Iron Legion often relies on technology – not just war machines – to get the job done, rather than fielding tons of soldiers on the field and risking their lives.

So you could be a Warrior in the Ash Legion, or a Necromancer in the Iron Legion, and still make it work from a roleplay perspective. You just need to figure out how your charr’s personality fits in with his warband.

Even Blood Legion warbands need scouts.

That’s not a racial armor set. O_o

wildmanfrost.3986:

All the other races yell something ambigious like “Eat my dust” or “I’m faster than a centaur”.
But us Charr, the warriors all other warriors strive to be like actully yell “Retreat”.

The first two are not yells for “Retreat!” but for when they gain the Swiftness boon at all.

All guardian races shout “RETREAT!” and I promise you, it’s something that no guardian is happy about. The boons the skill give are, after all, especially useful for charging in on the offensive.

The problem is that “CHARGE!” is an old GW1 Warrior skill, so I doubt they’ll use that.

Magic. Seriously, a wizard did it.

Okay, but seriously serious, Avan’s post is spot on.

They don’t even view the human gods as actually being gods.

Is it really THAT great of a DPS drop?

Nope. Our stealth has a “Revealed” effect when we break it. Can’t restealth for about 2-3 seconds. Has been this way since BWE2.

Otherwise perma-stealth would be possible, which is crazy OP.

Kain Francois.4328:

Does Healing Power make a difference when you have regeneration and skills like Signet of Healing or the Guardian’s healing Virtue?

I was generally planning to go toughness + healing power on my armor before. But should I have gone vitality instead?

That’s what this thread is trying to point out. Others have chimed in to note that Toughness is dramatically better, numerically, than Healing, as well.

Aza.2105:

You have a flaw in your observation, healing isn’t a defensive stat its supportive

It’s specifically stated in a developer blog that they added Healing in order to add a viable alternative to Toughness. There’s also the simple fact that self-healing is, in many MMOs a viable form of damage mitigation that many players do enjoy as a defensive option.

You have to be really naive to believe that self-healing is not a form of active defense.

Other weapons avoid being one-dimensional within their kit specifically, without having to fall back on traits/utility skills to fix that problem.

The main issue I have with this kit is that, if you think people are crying about super-burst glass cannon dagger thieves now, who have to get into melee range to pull off that kind of burst, how much crying would people do about the sniper rifle?

In that case, they’d have every reason to complain, as it’s ridiculously OP to be able to quickly burst down somebody from a safe distance without any real threat to your person, let alone with the possibility that you’re so far away they don’t even notice you.

Daecollo.9578:

If another melee thief decides to attack you, you cannot do anything but run away since you don’t do any melee damage.

You can swap to a weapon that’s actually useful.

One-trick ponies do not make for good weapon design.

Daecollo.9578:

300-2500 Range, meaning YOU CANNOT do damage in melee.

Keep in mind this would be the only weapon in the whole game that goes that far.

The max range possible is with a Ranger’s traited Longbow, at 1500.

You should also mention my favorite combo field skill: Throw Gunk

There’s also Exploding Venom Sack

Engineers can also become “invisible” if they’re immobilized, don’t remember the trait name.

I know the Ranger has a trait where they stealth if they’re disabled at all.

Uhhh…. so the entire thing is applying vulnerability and doing burst damage?

That seems a little one-dimensional! You think a sniper would be capable of crippling or immobilizing foes from a distance.
Also, Quick Getaway seems out of place. No other skills cause us to pull out some other random tool and hit them. It should be more like a rifle-butt animation.

metaphorm.6904:

There are a couple of ways to shut down Daggerstorm

Oh, that one’s easy – put down your own projectile reflection. Wall of Reflection and Sanctuary especially would both work, but even Zealot’s Defense could do it.

Learn to recognize the Haste icon. If you see it on them, it means they can’t dodge, and they’re planning to spam high-damage moves that cost initiative, which means they also can’t use any evading moves (outside of certain utility skills).

If you see a Thief flipping upside-down in mid-air? That’s Death Blossom. He evades during it, while applying Bleed stacks. Wait until he stops it to try hitting him.

The moment a Thief comes out of stealth? He can’t stealth again for about 3 seconds, assuming he even has the initiative/cooldown to do so.

You don’t have to use Elixirs if you don’t want to. There’s plenty of explosive alternatives!

fires off his rocket boots, cackling

Karast.1927:

But don’t look down on the offhand pistol. It may need some slight buffs to be on par with shield but it’s still a great weapon depending on what your doing.

The blow torch does massive damage 6-7k AoE in condition specs. So it’s fantastic if your stacking burns.

The AoE cripple / immobilize is a bit broken since the animation seems to have some issue right now, but even it when paired with the AoE chill, or glue bomb from bomb kit, does wonders in pvp, wvw, and pve for kiting. Toss down the chill grenade then use glue shot and you can stop or slow groups at a time while siege cut them apart.

I love doing this at the gate to the fishing village on border land maps. Build a few carts and a balisita, bait the enemy thru the gate and then drop the multiple slows / immobilizes to lock them in the arch way so they can’t escape.

I’m not so much “looking down on it” as failing to see why I would ever pick it over the Shield.

The only logical response that I can come up with is Blowtorch, because the Shield does everything that Glue Shot does better. And then you have to realize that, while Blowtorch is useful, it’s only really useful at close range, even though Glue Shot is designed for keeping enemies away from you.

So then the real question becomes: Should the off-hand Pistol have something other than Glue Shot?

And I can’t help but think that if instead of an immobilizing Glue Shot, we could lay down a burning Tar Shot, which still crippled, then not only would the off-hand Pistol be more consistent with all the other Pistol skills, but it would actually be a real choice of offense vs defense.
And we could still do some ranged kiting if desired, we’d just be weaker at it in some ways, while stronger at it in others. (May not have an Immob, but now they’re crippled while moving through a puddle of burning tar? Delicious)

Spitwyld.1963:

Consider the stat bonus you’d get from a solid off-hand pistol. It’s worth it depending on what sort of gear you have.

I, however, use a shield in my off-hand for both PvE and sPvP. The knockback and stun abilities are too good to pass up.

Shields give stats too. O_o

In fact, it kinda gives “more” stats since it also boosts your armor.

Am I the only one who feels like the off-hand Pistol is completely worthless? I mean, most of the time I like to stick to using kits anyways, but when I use my “real” weapons, I can’t help but stick with Pistol+Shield over Pistol+Pistol.

Let’s look at this objectively for a moment.
Shield gives:

1. Magnetic Shield – reflect projectiles for 3 seconds
2. Magnetic Inversion – PBAoE knockback
3. Static Shield – Block a single attack, and stun if you are attacked (the block only lasts 2 seconds, but also only blocks a single attack)
4. Throw Shield – Ranged daze that hits multiple targets, and can actually daze twice because it boomerangs back to you

That, against what the off-hand Pistol gives:

1. Blowtorch – burns enemies in front of you, most effective at short range. (Short as in – less than 200. Melee range)
2. Glue Shot – ranged aoe immobilize on application, while crippling anybody who enters/remains.

To begin with, the off-hand Pistol’s two skills conflict with each other. One skill is designed to keep enemies away, while the other one is most effective when they’re in melee range.

The Shield’s abilities, however, work together, completely focused on protecting the Engineer from enemies – reflecting, blocking, interrupting, and just plain keeping enemies away.

Then there’s the simple fact that the “goal” of both weapons overlap, at least slightly. Why should I want a glue shot, when I can instead get the Shield’s knockback and ranged double-daze, and be much more effective at keeping enemies away? This suggests that the only reason for us to want the off-hand Pistol, is to get the Blowtorch skill that applies Burning – even though it’s only truly effective against melee enemies. It doesn’t even have an automatic backwards leap!
It seems to me that Glue Shot should be brought in line to match what the rest of the Pistol skills do – not just Blowtorch, but also the Poison and Confusion/Blind applications. It should be more offensive/damaging in nature.

And of course, it’s obvious that the Shield just plain gives more, even if the four abilities it gives are compacted onto two buttons with fairly long cooldowns.

I just don’t see the incentive to equip an off-hand Pistol, in any situation, over the Shield. I’m thinking they need to tweak the off-hand Pistol’s kit so that, not only does it have a different focus than the Shield, but that you have a desire to use it.

I’d love for Glue Shot to be changed to, say… coating an area with burning tar. A Tar Shot. Replace the Immobilize with 1 second of Burning applied every second the enemies in the tar, leave the Cripple… and also make it a Fire field while we’re at it.

That, imo, would give me incentive to use off-hand Pistol over Shield, and obviously only in the specific situation that I feel like I should grab skills that apply Burning (and can safely go into melee range to do so) over picking defensive skills. Suddenly I’m making a real choice.

Also, Engineer and Ranger both have one way to stealth themselves. It’s not a big part of the playstyle, as it’s from traits.

Revealed actually lasts for 3 seconds, AFAIK.

Worth noting that the minor trait “Swiftness on evade” needs to be reworded “Swiftness on dodge” as it only happens when you dodge, not during moves like Withdraw or RFI.

Aza.2105:

Yes Drake, its quite hard to comprehend what the word dedicated means.

I’m emphasizing that word because your posts suggest that you don’t. You understand that a dedicated healer means a person that heals, and does nothing else, right? Except maybe, say, cleansing off conditions from allies. All he does is sit in the back, throw out healing water, maybe cleansing conditions, and nothing else. Applies no conditions, deals no damage, strips no boons.

This would not happen just by making Healing Power actually scaling well on the 6-slot skills. The result of Healing Power actually scaling so that it’s worth using as a defensive stat would do nothing more than give players a viable alternative to Toughness and Vitality for defense – a defense that’s less passive and more active.

Well, you also have to wonder why it’s the case that… Elementalists have to equip a Focus or Dagger in their off-hand.

Why can’t they just use a Scepter by itself? Some people would prefer that aesthetic.

The only real question is how to balance it so that you still have the same stats as somebody dual-wielding or using 2handers. Perhaps when you have no off-hand, the game can simply double the stats from your main-hand, or something like that.

Lyuben.2613:

This is coming from someone who carries with him elixir R, and its thrown version Throw Elixir R. Its a ground targeted revive, which the necromancer also shares.

I don’t like how many times I’ve wasted that skill trying to save your sorry butts, only to end up with it being wasted, and the thief being killed in the end.

Examine the situation, know who has what in your group please.

You should try to inform Thieves in your group of when you’re tossing the elixir at them. A lot of times we’ll simply use our teleporting skill for the sake of surviving, and have no idea when a revive may be coming our way.

Obviously, this would be easier if you could macro an announcement into your ability cast, but at least if you’re on a VOIP server, you can announce it. If you have a gamer keyboard, you should totally set up a gaming key macro for it.

Being melee in dungeons isn’t THAT tough, you just need to know when to get the hell out of Dodge. And, well, use your dodge skill.

JonPeters.5630:

These skills are intended to cover the tutorial as people have said. They were very low impact on the development of the game, taking less than an hour total to create. Their benefit (new thief players having more skills in the tutorial) is certainly worth that small investment in our opinion.

Have you considered the ramifications of designing all main-hand weapons to give 5 skills, instead of forcing people to either wield two small weapons, or one big weapon?

Consider, for example, the Thief sword. What if we don’t want a dagger or pistol in the off-hand? Why doesn’t the sword give 5 skills which are all designed as one solid kit?
And then, for those who do want the off-hand weapon, the last three skills (since our third skill is a “dual wield skill”) are switched to what we have now?

You’ve already shown that, with the dual wield skills, you can have the skills of one weapon change to something else based on our equipment.
Obviously, this would take more work in balancing the profession skills against each other, but I think the gains would outweigh the risks.

I still feel that, for ALL classes, wielding just a single one-handed weapon with no off-hand should be a viable playstyle that gives you 5 skills for that weapon. Would allow for more aesthetic variety.

If Ezio Auditore da Firenze and Altair Ibn-La’Ahad can kill people with just a single sword and a graceful flourish of style, why can’t we?
Okay, so technically they have an off-hand “dagger” or “pistol” hidden in their bracers that they can use, but that’s just a technicality!

StarlightGamer.9560:

And here are the results for the 20 points in Earth while naked test. Toughness and armor at 532.

514, 528, 516, 511, 529, 499, 516, 493, 491, 493, 483, 501, 531, 526, 531, 484, 527, 502, 532, 489, 529, 493, 528, 523, 508, 521, 518, 516, 534, 523, 502, 527, 490, 490, 520, 494, 504, 502, 488, 500, 518, 510, 518, 510, 515, 496, 524, 510, 523, 506, 532, 519, 484, 527, 496, 492, 506, 491, 496, 490, 508, 515, 521, 524, 513, 488, 532, 531
799, 756, 794, 733, 786, 791, 796, 799, 799, 798

An average of 510.3 for the normal hits. About a 36% damage reduction, and about what you’d expect from something slightly more than half way between the first and second test. It seems like it might scale linearly. If that’s true, I should be able to anticipate the damage I’ll take when I decide to go all out.

332 base armor, plus 407 from armor and trinkets, plus 200 from traits, plus 42 from being attuned to earth, plus 155 for Rock Barrier for a total of…1136. So like 80 to 82% damage reduction. So he should hit me for about 160 damage per hit. I’ll find out… just as soon as I catch the trading post when it’s out of maintenance again.

Good to hear that Toughness is actually prettykittengood. It also helps to highlight just how worthless Healing is as a defensive stat. If I can get 80% damage reduction from maxing out on Toughness, what’s the point in getting Healing? After all, no matter how much Healing I get, I can’t get my self-heal to heal up 80% of my total HP.

Frankly, I’m surprised that our 6-slot skill heals for a flat amount, instead of healing for a percentage of our total HP, which then can be increased by +Healing. Wouldn’t that make it effective, without allowing it to be OP?
It would also serve the purpose of our 6-slot skills not becoming useless when we stack up tons of Vit.

Aza.2105:

I can’t quote you drake since the page appears broken.

So, you want to be ignorant and attempt to tell me what I did or did not read? Like I told you I read your post, do you understand why I mentioned up dedicated healer? Simply put, if healing power was a attractive stat on par with vit, toughness it would create them. Thus, they would in time become mandatory. You would have players who spec for burst damage, those who spec to be tank like and then you would have those who spec to heal.

But anet clearly stated they do not want a healer in this game. So what is the point of taking healing power as a stat? Tbh, I don’t even understand why it is the stat, given the way healing works in this game. I suppose its to give the player the illusion of choice. But its not really a logical stat to take.

One of the only solutions I see is for the devs to re-evaluate how much healing power is worth as a stat. So when it comes to allocating item value, healing power should not be the same value as the other stats. It should be far less.

I can’t believe that it would “create” dedicated healers. I know Staff Elementalists, without being specced into +healing traits or wearing +healing gear, that can keep their entire party “topped off” in Expo dungeons, thus completely mitigating non-major damage. They don’t need +Healing to be effective at healing.

So it’s really null and void – they can stack boon duration, toughness, and vitality, be impossible to kill, and be amazing at healing the group.

For that matter, I’m not sure you understand what a dedicated healer actually is.

The important thing here is that there’s no incentive to get +Healing even when you build for support. It’s a worthless stat.

elithrar.7143:

b) deny the enemy a stomp on your ally (the stomp can miss).

Blind stopped working on the finisher long ago, last I checked.

Just because you’re stealthed, doesn’t mean they can’t interrupt your stomp with an aoe knockback!

Though not every profession has one when downed. :<

obtuse.8291:

still undecided on replacing it with pain response in my healing build… you do get added healing all the time which i treat as additional passive mitigation. seems like when you are getting hit with bad enough conditions to drop you that low the damage condition removal should be pretty effective. going to try it out this week a few times

The only problem I have with Pain Response is that it will proc whether you have those damaging conditions on or not. What if it procs right before somebody applies a heavy stack of Burning?

Oops.

Argh, yet another broken page!

RebelYell.7132:

City of Heroes has no “healer class”, yet almost all healing abilities in the game were potent, and responded well to gearing.

Umm… I beg to differ on the “no healing class” bit. O_o

Certain power sets for Defenders and Corruptors were very much aimed at healing/buffing/protecting the group. (Radiation Emission, Empathy, and Dark Miasma come to mind specifically)
Pretty sure Peacebringers/Warshades could too, but I never made one, so I’m not positive.

All healing abilities, however, did indeed scale exceedingly well when you slotted them with +Healing enhancements.

Dee Jay, who said I’m relying on a 1-minute cooldown to survive? I’m relying on a 1-minute cooldown to counter YOUR 1-minute cooldown.

Aza.2105:

You are mistaken, I read your post very well. Otherwise I wouldn’t of responded.

No, you didn’t, or else you wouldn’t have said anything about dedicated healers. What I’ve posted has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of dedicated healing, but with Healing Power as a defense stat.

Point for point, right now, Vitality is significantly superior to Healing Power for self-defense, and it’s possible that Toughness is as well, though not everybody is finding Toughness to work well.

That’s the issue I’m trying to point out in this thread. Right now, this stat just doesn’t scale strongly enough with my self-heals for me to consider taking it over Vitality or Toughness.

It may not necessarily be universally true, since different professions have different mechanics and scaling, but I know that for my Elementalist and my Guardian… it’s just not worth it.

ThiBash.5634:

Judging the effects on individual heals is nice but one should also take into consideration how often one can make use of a stat.

On each attack that deals damage, Power does something. On each hit you take, Toughness works. But on the same note, if you cannot land a hit, Power is worthless and if you dodge very well, so is Toughness.

My point in this is that measuring Healing Power on individual skills is pointless. For example, on an Elementalist that uses Signet of Rejuvenation (gain health each time you cast a spell), Healing Power has a lot more ‘active time’ than on somebody who only switches to Water Magic once a day because they’re bored. And in such a scenario, while the heal may be weak per cast, over time, it really adds up. Especially when considering the fact that gear set also comes with a bucket of toughness.

But that’s exactly the problem with how poorly these abilities scale. Toughness is always in effect. Vitality is always in effect.

If I take the Glyph heal, I’m only going to be able to use it once every 25 seconds. Obviously, the Signet scales the “worst” simply because of how often it can be used and how frequently the passive heals you (and especially if you take Written in Stone to keep your passive always present – for that matter, should it be balanced with the idea of you taking that trait? Or without it?), but why do the others still scale so poorly?

My point being that, because the benefit of Healing Power only helps me when I specifically use an ability that heals me, it should scale better than Vitality or Toughness.

That pet wasn’t a proper pet. It was a magical panther summoned from another realm using a magical statue. Rogues can use magical devices, and are quite proficient at it.

He may have trained under a ranger, but he often operates more as a thief/assassin type.

Einlanzer.1627:

DrakeWurrum.6049:

Doom.8647:

Sword offhand would create 5 more skills (4/5 skills + dual skills with dagger/pistol/sword), which is more balance work for ANet. I personally feel like a dual-sword thief wouldn’t feel like a thief.

Why wouldn’t it feel like a thief? =\

It’s easy to be a very agile dual-sword sneaky type. Just look at Drizzt Do’Urden.

But Drizzt is a Ranger! In all seriousness, I wouldn’t mind the option of using dual swords on my thief, but I really think single-wielding smaller weapons is more “thiefy”.

To me, dual swords would actually feel more appropriate to rangers.

Eh, I don’t think he’s so much a ranger as a thief.

Far as I’m concerned, it’s not necessary. I don’t feel that Thieves, aesthetically speaking, are meant to be part of big sieges. We’re more fringe/skirmish fighters.

Though, to be fair, if WvWvW was designed so that straight-up melee combat in massive zergs against each other was more common gameplay, instead of resorting entirely to max 1200 range, firing arrows and bullets and bombs at each other from a “safe” distance, this wouldn’t be such a big issue.

Doom.8647:

Sword offhand would create 5 more skills (4/5 skills + dual skills with dagger/pistol/sword), which is more balance work for ANet. I personally feel like a dual-sword thief wouldn’t feel like a thief.

Why wouldn’t it feel like a thief? =\

It’s easy to be a very agile dual-sword sneaky type. Just look at Drizzt Do’Urden.

Krathalos.3461:

Hide in Shadows clears burning, poison, and bleed. That is three conditions. That is not all conditions.

That’s all the damaging conditions, except for Confusion.

Fury.6248:

No class currently depends on quickness bursts. They will be toned down.

God forbid one profession actually be different from another.

Let’s also all pretend that Hundred Blade builds don’t exist for Warriors. That Quickening Zephyr builds don’t exist for Rangers.

Sheesh, don’t any of you understand the concept of glass cannon?

Lord Kelvin.8217:

The point is that “Healing Power” seems to have no significance and no weight in the economy of pg… or better if I want to spend points on this attribute “only” to improve my self-healing, this is not the way. In some cases this attribute can increase significantly the weight of support healing skills…
In conclusion “Healing Power” is well balanced or not? With the present situation seems that also for support build is quite usefulness invest points on this attribute.

I suggest to put this thread in the Suggestion forum group.

:)

I mainly didn’t want this in the suggestion forum because it would get buried in the hundreds of other, smaller, and more useless suggestions. This thread wasn’t so much “Hey, make this stat not suck!” but a discussion thread put here for the sake of pointing out that it sucks, and hoping that the devs notice, agree, and do something about it.

I don’t get why everybody is demanding a long-duration stealth when the stealth we have already is crazy effective. We don’t need to initiate combat from stealth to be effective.

It sounds like all you want is the ability to catch enemies off-guard without them seeing you coming.

If the Mesmer acts like a clone, he’s not doing anything dangerous.

bwillb.2165:

I could be wrong, but different speed boosts seem to have different weights in-combat. My signet speed seems to drop to almost nothing as soon as I’m in combat, but the swiftness from dodging is still really fast.

You need to remember that your base speed drops when you enter combat, for all players.