Guild Wars 2

If so, they must have added it recently. I’ll make a note of it.

Given that Valorous Defense has no internal cooldown, is anyone else seeing the potential for crazy, gimmicky chain triggers of Pure of Heart providing everything lines up correctly?

Valorous Defense grants Aegis every time you hit 50% health. Pure of Heart heals you and bumps you up above 50%. The next hit drops you down to or below 50% again. Pure of Heart heals you to above 50%, and so on, and so forth.

It’s not very likely to happen at all, and would require a pretty improbable alignment of rapid attacks at around the 50% mark, but it’s funny to imagine.

(Con’t’d, because I talk too kitten much.)

Reconsider your points in Radiance. Adept Radiance traits don’t really help you, but instead shoehorn you into taking Signets that don’t do much for you. Healing Breeze might actually fit your playstyle more, in which case Signet of Resolve doesn’t offer you much, and the condition removal can be replicated by 10 Valor for Purity, which also gives you decent Toughness.

I would even drop points from Virtues. You don’t need Grandmaster Virtues and you can live without the extra 10% boon duration. This opens up options though. You can put 15 in Zeal for a comfortable boost of Power, plus Fiery Wrath (enemies are almost always burning if you’re in a group) plus Symbolic Exposure (you use a lot of symbols, and Vulnerability stacks are useful in a group), plus 5 left over for either Valorous Defense or Power of the Virtuous or Justice is Blind.

I recommend varying your stats as well. Try to hit a comfortable baseline with your power, toughness, vitality and crit. 40% is probably a bit higher than I’d recommend (35%), and the rest is up to you.

Fundamentally, I agree with foofad. I think there’s a lot of value in his basic message that Guardian support relies on damage as well, and that signal may have been lost in the noise. You don’t have to agree with his tone or his choice of words, but the basic advice he’s giving reflects Guardian support philosophy: the sum of everything, including damage. Tactical power always trumps stats; don’t hamstring your playstyle by ignoring damage and synergy.

Leonard: The premise behind your build and the philosophy supporting your playstyle fascinates me. I, too, have run a 30 Honor 30 Virtues build before, albeit different from yours. In my experience, 30 Honor and 30 Virtues is actually a remarkably adaptable build, owing to the versatility of Honor traits and the playstyle-agnostic Virtues line, which is useful for any build and any playstyle on any day of the week and in any dungeon. ;)

Consequently I feel like the way you’ve realized your design philosophy is weirdly at odds with the potential of the Honor and Virtues trait lines. These are two powerfully versatile trait lines, and in their versatility, these trait lines reflect the design philosophy behind Guardian support: not through +healing and boons, but through a combination of everything, including damage, conditions, condition removal, aegis applications, Virtues, boons and—yes—direct heals.

Therefore the playstyle you’re submitting seems ironically hamstrung by a build that runs into issues of ‘soft’ diminishing returns. What do I mean by soft diminishing returns? Essentially this: By investing so deeply in +healing and purely support Traits, your capacity for offense and direct damage has become almost crippled; however, the loss of offensive capacity is proportionally greater than the actual, tangible, practical “support” you gain in return. Thus, ‘soft’ diminishing returns.

Let me give you some concrete examples. You’re swinging a hammer, but not really taking advantage of Writ of Exaltation or Writ of Persistence, both of which: A) Make it much easier for your party to actually trigger Combo Finishers off your Symbol of Protection and B) Take full advantage of your +60% boon duration and C) Make it easier for your party to pick up Protection and significantly improve your Hammer damage output as well. Instead your screenshot shows you with Pure of Heart. Now, I don’t know the numbers and I’m not sure how well Pure of Heart scales with Healing Power, but that’s not the point. Pure of Heart is a trait that really shines when you’re pumping up as much Aegis as possible (i.e, it works best with Valorous Defense, Might of the Protector and Shattered Aegis).

I feel like you’ve overemphasized support based on a traditional, Holy Trinity stereotype of support, hence your emphasis on big Might stacking, powerful dodge roll heals. In fact, your original post says that Protection, Hold the Line coupled with a powerful dodge-heal and Staff Empower gives you “not too shabby” survivability.

I submit to you that the use of dodge-heals and Staff heals to promote survivability is actually a misuse of dodging and staff. Healing is a poor way to mitigate damage given long cooldowns and low scaling, and is best used to keep health pools up and top off incidental damage rather than substitute for survivability or bring you back up after eating a hit. Your survivability is almost always going to come exclusively from two sources: 1) Well-timed use of specific abilities and 2) Good dodging and spacing.

Just taking AC Explorable as an example, the Lieutenant Kohler fight is almost entirely neutralized by having one decent Guardian of any spec (20% faster Shout recharge is ideal) using “Stand Your Ground!” the second he starts charging his Scorpion Wire. The timely use of a single shout utterly neutralizes the single most threatening aspect of this fight. No amount of +healing or boon duration can even come close to the survivability provided by knowing when to dodge and knowing when to use SYG.

You cite powerful Might applications, frequent availability of combo fields and good incidental heals as the keys to your success as a Supporting Guardian—and I agree with you. But I also strongly believe that you’ve overinvested in pure support, and your investment is going to give you very little return after a certain point.

My suggestion therefore is to trim the fat a little and cut some of your healing and boon duration in favor of offense. Damage, after all, is what wins a fight, and nothing is better for a team than a dead enemy. Sacrificing your damage for support will not give you a 1:1 return, and eventually you’re sacrificing more damage than you are making up through party synergy. Here are my proposals. Take them with a grain of salt:

Why listen to cost allocation plans when you could be learning about Guild Wars!

This should be ANet’s promotional tagline. Happy Halloween.

It’s a bit challenging, but you can do it. My friend and I did it together despite being way underlevel. Hang with a crowd if you can—there’s almost certainly going to be 3-5 people looking for the clue at any given time, and travel with them. Ask in /Map if anyone’s going after the clues, and that you’re a low level and would really appreciate tailing them.

Counterintuitively, being vastly outleveled isn’t as dangerous as you might think. It’s going to be hard for you to kill something, and you’re likely to take a lot more damage, but the nature of the game and the manageable aggro distance means that if you focus on surviving and letting your nearby allies pick up stray enemies, you’ll do just fine. Furthermore, traveling with people around you makes Downed or Death a nonissue.

I’m in Tarnished Coast, and we have a high population. Understandably, some servers don’t, and finding company may be hard. If this is your situation, I suggest waiting until prime time. Having even ~2 people backing you up or near you as you search for the clues will help tremendously.

Good luck!

erock.1702:

Hi all!

So far my experience with the GW2 community has shown that the people playing this game are incredibly friendly and helpful. I’m wondering if a few of you kind souls could help me out with some info about the Halloween content?

I have an extremely demanding full time job that is consuming huge amounts of my time these last few weeks. I haven’t had the time to look around the game world or the forums to figure out all there is to do. Tomorrow evening I have the whole night free and plan on knocking out as much of it as I can. Could someone be so kind as to post a short list of all the Halloween content? I know about the scavenger hunts (completed #1 and got the book already).

This is what I know about:
-Scavenger Hunt: Act 1 – completed (where do I trade it in for the back piece?)
-Scavenger Hunt: Act 2 – need to do
-Scavenger Hunt: Act 3 – need to do
-Scavenger Hunt: Act 4 – need to do

-Pumpkin Carving – done about 20 or so of them

-Clock Tower Puzzle – where do I go to try this?

-Mad King Battle / Dungeon – Where is this?

-Haunted Doors in Human lands – When you enter these is there any specific goal or is it just running around killing the stuff in there?)

-I’m sure I’m missing more?

Before someone comes on here calling me lazy or telling me to look around – I know the information is on the forums and other sites, but I do not have the time to sort through all the posts and sites looking for this info. This is my first MMO and I am truly loving GW2 – I really do want to experience all the holiday event has to offer.

Being a busy person I do realize the value of time and want to send a big THANK YOU to anyone who responds to this post in advance!

Thanks

Scavenger Hunt Act 2: Head to the Ascalonian Settlement in Gendarran and follow the clues from there. The answers are: Martyr's Tomb in the Ruins of Demetra, Harathi. Shipwrecked boat in Bloodtide near Laughing Gull Waypoint. Seraph's Landing in Harathi; head to the storage room with haybales. Green bridge across Arca Lake, Harathi. Fort Cadence, go down to the bottom of the tombs, Sparkfly Fen.

Pumpkin Carving: Easy but time consuming. Pumpkins are all over Lion’s Arch and the northern half of Queensdale, and also in Kessex Hills and Gendarran. Remember that carvings are account bound. So a single character can carve a single pumpkin once, but another character can carve it again, and another character can carve it again, and so on. Overflow zones do not count against you, so if you carved one pumpkin in Lion’s Arch, you can carve it again on the same character in Lion’s Arch Overflow.

HERE is the circuit you run in Lion’s Arch. And HERE is the circuit you run in Queensdale. Run these circuits on multiple characters, and also in overflow, to get your 150 Pumpkins.

ALSO! Remember that the Mad King’s Labyrinth has a ton of Pumpkins scattered about. Feel free to pick up some progress on your carvings while traveling there.

Clock Tower Puzzle: Head through a haunted door. Near the waypoint, you’ll see an NPC. Talk to him, and he’ll take you to the clock tower. The clock tower does NOT count toward your Title achievement.

Mad King Battle: Lion’s Arch, broken fountain. Hard to miss. People will be spamming /map with LFG requests—join a group and hop in.

Haunted Doors: These lead to the Mad King’s Realm. In the Realm, talk to the NPC, who will take you to either the Clock Tower or two competitive minigame areas. Conversely, you can go into the Labyrinth, which has pumpkins, Halloween Events, lots of Halloween Enemies to kill, plenty of Candy Corn, and the occasional Champion Enemy who drops a treasure box.

Deadline for Mad King Battle is until Act IV. Everything else lasts until the end of the event.

Same. Guardian. Let me guess: Altruistic Healing build?

Honestly, it depends.

A lot of Tier 1 Cultural gear does not have a unique skin. So if you just want it for the skin, save your money; you can get the equivalent skin off the TP for a few silver.

However, there are exceptions. As far as I know, the T1 Lion’s Guard and T1 Ebon Vanguard gear do have unique skins. Furthermore, as rare weapons, they’re not exactly bad for that level bracket (L40-50).

9,800 is a lot of karma. However, it’s also incredibly easy to get karma these days. A daily nets you 4,500 karma on one character. So a single T1 Cultural weapon is worth about two dailies of karma.

Now this is a very cool exercise! Scepter+Torch! That’s a combo I honestly had not given much thought to. So, as far as build advice goes…

Scepter Torch is honestly a pretty neat combo. It doesn’t seem like it has much obvious synergy at first blush, but it does. See, I always think of Scepter as a mid-range or point blank weapon that also works okay at 1200 range on stable targets. So Torch actually has tools that let you spike at 1200 range, but it also magnifies Scepter’s ability to play at close range.

You can use Torch #4 to your advantage at any range, and in fact it is a relatively versatile ability in that you can burn an enemy at melee, then move out of melee and spike, or keep the burn going if you choose to stay in melee. Torch #5 also provides pretty solid “mid line” support in the form of readily available condition removal. And Scepter works great at any range. It’s a solid single target weapon and its DPS is actually pretty kitten high, especially if you nail an enemy with Smite and Auto at melee to ~600 range or so. The reason is that the slow projectile speed doesn’t penalize you at short ranges, only long ones.

So let’s talk builds. One of the seeming downsides to Scepter/Torch is that you don’t have very many traits that directly improve upon your weapon. You have Scepter Power, but 5% more damage is pretty paltry and Zeal doesn’t do much for you if you don’t use symbols. There’s Right-Hand Strength, which is fantastic, but remember that it won’t help you with Hammer.

If you really want to capitalize on Scepter, I’d go Right-Hand Strength and Empowering Might, giving you constant vigor and might, and allowing you to deal solid damage from range while also allowing you to support nearby allies. 30 Radiance and 20 Honor is reasonably versatile and lets you expand as you please.

The other option, and one I recommend, is to consider going for a more weapon-agnostic build. You could play a consecration heavy build with Consecrated Ground and Master of Consecrations, which effectively lets you cast Consecrations from 900 range, well suited to Scepter’s mobile playstyle.

Conversely, you could always play Offensive Spirit Weapons. Go 20 Zeal, 20 Radiance and 10 Virtues for Spirit Weapon Mastery, Eternal Spirit, A Fire Inside, and Improved Spirit Weapon Duration. At that point, you have 20 points to put wherever. You can max out Virtues for better Boon, better VoJ and 900 range Purging Flames. You can go 30 Radiance for Right Hand Strength. You can go 20 Honor for perma-vigor and Empowering Might. You can even max out Zeal for better symbols on your hammer and Fiery Wrath or Scepter Power.

You have options. My advice is to figure out a build that doesn’t rely so much on weapons as it reflects your playstyle. And Hammer + Scepter/Torch is going to be a very mobile (I’m not even kidding) playstyle that emphasizes moving between front and midline (100-600 range) while having a strong if limited backline (900-1200) option. In that case, Spirit Weapons, Consecrations, deep Virtues, Right-Hand Strength and Empowering Might are all perfectly viable focal points for your build. Pick a focal point and then build up from there.

Good luck.

Go to the Fields of Ruin, in the Ebon Vanguard stronghold. There are Karma vendors there who sell weapons.

All three tiers of Ebonhawke weapons have the same skin, so just buy the T1 and transmute.

Have you considered the Ebonhawke hammer?

http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ebonvanguardweapons1.jpg

The hammer looks amazing, and costs a paltry 9800 Karma. That’s two days worth of Dailies. It’s my favorite Hammer model, and the one I’m swinging now. Their staff is pretty nice, too.

Now the question is, are there any other cultural T3 weapon skins available from cheaper sources?

Yes—sort of. I recall being rewarded with weapons following a Hylek story quest. The weapon skins were all identical to Seraph (Human T3). Granted, the selection was smaller—being a Guardian, I was offered Hammer, Staff or Sword—but still.

Vittoria Agli Assassini!

Seriously, where did you get that armor? You’re making me want to roll a thief and play an Assassin’s Creed tribute.

Cool, thanks for the link. I, too, would love a return to Cantha. Factions is what sold me to GW in the first place. Shing Jea and Kaineng City took my breath away.

Hang on. Dial it back a second. Can I see your source? I’m not trying to sound snobby—I just honestly want to know where you found this bit of news, who this “unnamed artist” was and what context you took your quote from. Because going from “wanting universal rather than Asian themes” to “There will be no Cantha” is a magnificent leap of logic.

There’s a lot of ways you could interpret ‘avoiding Asian themes,’ but without the actual quote and the source, it’s all speculation.

However, a slightly simpler argument might say that they want to avoid Asian themes in the overall design philosophy of the game. There has to be a believable element of Western fantasy (which, believe it or not, has plenty of room for Eastern themes) in the design of GW2 in order to make the world more accessible, and do differentiate it from the stereotypical Korean Grinder.

The quote might have just been about universalism as a goal of the GW2 design vision and its relation to shying away from characteristically Asian themes. In which case, the evidence is all over Tyria. The world is variable and diverse and draws from all sorts of fantasy sources, and it’s hard to pin down in one specific genre.

Again, no idea what the original quote was, the context, or who even said it, but this is a simpler interpretation.

1. Will you or will you not be buying black lion trading company or random number generation materials again?

No

2. Did you buy them in the past?

No

3. If you would not buy trading post material/gamble, would you support direct to buy weapon skins and what general price do you find acceptable from a business standpoint both as a customer and realizing that they must make money as a business?

No. I have no interest in purchasing weapon skins for real money, though I have no inherent problem with this business model.

4. Do you believe that future events will also be handled with random number generation to make profit based on limited time item acquisition?

Maybe. I can’t answer this question substantively, since I don’t represent ANet and don’t want to speculate. This is kind of a loaded question, by the way. You’re asking us to make a prediction on ANet policy, which is something none of us are substantively qualified to do.

5. If you believe that the future events will be handled in the same manner, does this realization negatively effect your trust of Arena Net in regard to handling micro transactions for permanent content?

No. My opinion of ANet’s microtransactions model is unchanged.

6. Did you obtain a skin or whatever it is you were looking to get from the black lion trading chests? From the Mad King Chests?

I did not obtain a skin from trading chests or mad king chests. I did, however, obtain a number of cool items with which I am largely satisfied. I should note that having spent $10 on keys, I did not have a great deal of invested money to waste.

7. Have you bought any of the direct purchase, set priced halloween items. If so, will you be buying more?

No. And probably not. I give myself a pretty strict budget of $20 per month, maximum, of gems. This money is almost exclusively spent on character slots and bank slots, and not expendable items. I made a small exception for Halloween.

Fiscal responsibility and budgeting means my money is rarely wasted. Interesting survey, by the way, though not very scientific. I hope you take into consider sample size, sample bias and question bias when you analyze the final tally.

Outstanding guide, Brutaly. Thank you for your work. I really hope this gets stickied. I don’t know how, but I hope giving it a +1 will help.

I’m curious about your stats/build, Buzz. Do you go pure Knight’s on your warrior, meaning no vitality? When you say “regen build,” which one are you referring to?

say both reduce incoming damage by 50% to make it easy. that would make effective health for each class:
guardian: 21610
warrior: 36744

Effective healing is not Health + Armor. It’s Health + Armor + Healing + Avoidance Mechanics. You have to take into consideration the healing you receive when you talk about effective healing. This is because, unlike more conventional MMOs, most healing in this game is frequent, resource-independent and comes in a steady stream of small doses—with the exception of your #6 ability.

So when you say that Warriors have everything Guardians have and therefore are much more survivable, you’re only thinking of it in terms of armor and health, and you’re ignoring Virtue of Resolve, Altruistic Healing, frequently available Regeneration boons and frequently available Protection.

This is why, to use your own words, Guardians get by just fine with low HP, which is the entire thesis of my argument. This is also why, in my opinion, overhealing is more likely a good thing than a bad thing. Because healing costs you nearly nothing (again, with the exception of your #6 ability and maybe Monk’s Focus), you are always getting a steady rate of healing. So there’s no real issue of ‘wasting’ healing because you don’t waste any mana (or in this case, a cooldown) on a heal. You don’t lose any resources by healing ‘too much.’

Naturally, if you have far too small a health pool, then you run the risk of being crushed once conditions start stacking or you take one or two strong attacks while CC’d, low on Endurance, whatever. But this is a pretty extreme case where a player deliberately chooses to stick to, say, Berserker’s gear at the cost of low vitality. It’s a glass cannon choice (although, frankly, low health + high mitigation + good healing is usually more of a “fiberglass cannon” build, but that’s another topic…)

The issue we’re not talking about, and the issue you glossed over, is that at high levels of health, you encounter fewer and fewer scenarios where you’re actually healed back to full, or close to full. There’s a “tipping point” at which you’re just not likely to get back to 100% health, because your health pool is so high, and your heals are small. After that “tipping point” all your vitality is basically ablative defense, which means once it’s burned away after absorbing a big hit, it’s not going to come back to absorb another one.

You can think of it as a kind of diminishing returns on high health pools. And on a clean sheet of paper where Guardians and Warriors have an equal amount of armor and base HP and an infinite supply of heals, of course Warriors are going to be more “tanky.” My argument is that, in reality, and in practice, this is rarely the case. There is simply a point at which you have more health than you need, and in fact, Guardians get by just fine with, say, 15k HP. (I’m pulling out a random number, but that actually seems pretty decent.)

his post should have nothing to do with comparing to warriors, and everything to do with why having low base hp is COMPLETELY MANAGABLE with the guardian class.

I get a bit sad when I write these excessively long posts, and people seem to gloss over them entirely. :P Because that was my entire point. That’s the crux of my TLDR section, too: Having a low base HP is completely manageable with the Guardian profession. It’s even in the title of the topic.

The reason I brought up warriors is because the “Warriors have more HP than us! What gives?!” topic comes up over and over again—and with good reason, because it does seem counterintuitive, at first glance, that a defensive profession should have low HP. But given the way healing works in GW2, this actually works out fine for us.

If I brought up Warriors, it was because they’re a readily available and familiar example of a profession with high HP, and I use them to illustrate a greater point. That point is this: Low HP is not a bad thing, and once you understand that there’s a tipping point past which your Vitality is just ablative defense, you start to understand why Guardians have the HP that we do.

Afterthought: Ablative Defense is not a bad thing in and of itself. Svarty made an interesting point about its utility in WvW, and this is something other players have talked about too. Being able to withstand huge amounts of incoming “alpha strike” damage is certainly an advantage! Just so long as you realize that ablative defense doesn’t come back, and you’re not likely to heal back to 100% unless you disengage entirely. Similarly, “glass cannon” builds are not as fragile as they may seem provided you have high mitigation through armor and Protection—glass cannons just have a far smaller margin of error.

I hope this cleared up any discrepancies. If you still disagree with me on every point, I’d love to hear the rebuttal. I’m tossing this idea out there specifically to foment discussion.

@Everyone
Im writning a guide regarding hammer and AH and hopefully i will post it this evening and there will be a lot more info and and it will be more comprehensive then this thread

Sweet! I look forward to it.

It…wasn’t stickied.

That really would be something, though.

This sounds like the “Millionaires have nothing to aspire to, so it’s better to be poor.” argument. Nonsense.
Otherwise, I think you’re right. While we have very low hit points, we are at a disadvantage in PvP/WvW and by splitting our powers (just “Save Yourselves!” so far, but now there’s a precedent) between PvE and WvW/PvP, Arenanet appear to intend to have Guardians in PvE only.
What’s your PvP/WvW alt going to be?

So, this is a pretty important point to make. Because in this case I think the theory still applies in PVP, PVE and WvWvW.

First of all, the millionaire line doesn’t make sense. Warrior/Guardian mitigation is not analogous to rich and poor. Warriors come with a much higher health pool, and it exists to make up for their limited healing and mitigation options. It’s true that Warriors can spec for good HP/S, but it’s never going to match what Guardians can do almost universally, regardless of our own spec. If Guardians are jealous of Warrior HP, Warriors are jealous of Guardian utilities. There’s a reason for that.

Guardians don’t need Warrior level health, because our health level isn’t a problem. Health is just a measure of how much front-loaded damage you can take before you bite the dust. Therefore, there is such a thing as having too much health. You’re just never going to be able to get back to 100% in a real fight. If Guardians did have Warrior level health, we’d be overpowered. Like, grossly overpowered.

Why? Because then Vitality would be a totally useless stat to Guardians. Every Guardian would just go Knights and Berserker and ignore Vitality altogether, and we’d still be just as survivable as we are now, except much more dangerous. A very high health pool for Guardians would actually not contribute significantly to our effective survivability; it would just turn Vitality into a dump stat and make us super-efficient with our stats in a way no other profession is.

RE: PVP

PVP is really a very difficult topic to talk balance on a forum, because the climate of PVP varies dramatically. Success in PVP doesn’t depend that much on stats. I’m just going to be blunt about that. In other MMOs, the gear you hauled with you into, say, Warsong Gulch more or less decided your efficiency in the absence of good teamwork.

In WvWvW, success depends on numbers, terrain and macro-coordination. Not stats. If you’re outnumbered 2:1, you’re going to die, and I don’t care how much vitality you have. Your contributions in WvWvW depend less on your stats and more on being at the right place with the right people, and staying coordinated with the group you’re roaming with.

As for sPVP, we’re a great class. I can’t get into the details of what makes us strong and where our weaknesses lie, because that’s a very long discussion for another topic. It’s true that the current sPVP metagame favors conditions (although this is steadily changing), but the answer to conditions isn’t vitality. It’s condition removal. And we have a lot of that.

Long story short, warrior level health isn’t going to help you in any form of PVP nearly as much as good coordination and tactics will. There is absolutely no level of vitality which is going to nullify the need for good tactics. What high vitality will do is act as ablative defense, a kind of ‘buffer’ that lets you take more punishment and make more mistakes and stand up to higher odds a little longer, but it won’t give you an advantage you can’t duplicate with good tactics.

As for my alts, it’s a bit off topic, but I’d really like to have an 80 of every profession at some point in the future. It’ll probably take forever, but I’m not in a hurry and there’s no gear grind to keep up with. When I’m not on my Guardian, I play Mesmer and occasionally Warrior, and I think Engineer and Elementalist are next. I WvWvW and PVP with all of them.

Asmodal and Dark Kain both bring up good points, which is why I want to reiterate that there’s probably a Guardian “sweet spot” with Vitality/Toughness balance. Remember that we’re limited in what stats we can equip. If we go full on Vitality and Toughness, our other stats are almost certainly going to suffer. Vit/Toughness/Power is a nice combination, but in order to make the most out of our most efficient self-healing build (Altruistic Healing), we need a lot of Precision too, and we won’t get much of it from Radiance.

RE: Losing a ton of health

Yep, this is pretty much true. No combination of Toughness/Vitality will let you eat more than a couple of powerful attacks from bosses. That’s why I mentioned Avoidance mechanics being by far the best form of mitigation.

RE: Overhealing

This is an interesting concept, and I think it varies from situation to situation. Remember that Overhealing is going to be an issue regardless of your health pool. Because, at least with Crithammer, you’re constantly taking in a stream of health, even if you’re at 80%-90% health, you’re going to overheal.

The question is, does overhealing become an issue at 20k health? At 25k health? What’s the “sweet spot” of Guardian HP where Overhealing is not a big issue, but your healing is also keeping up with your health levels? In other words, what’s the point at which your Health is just excessive and acts as ablative armor?

The issue with Overhealing is that it’s going to happen. Always. Regardless of your health level. Overhealing is a problem in other games because, in other MMOs, healing usually costs mana of some sort, so overhealing is inefficient. In this game, at least for Guardians (and defense-traited Warriors), overhealing is a reality. Heals are a constant stream of passive, linear mitigation that costs you nothing in terms of resources and has no recharge associated with it.

So the question is not “Am I overhealing” but rather “What’s the sweet spot of Toughness/Vit/Other Stats at which point I actually do overheal?” You want to constantly reach as close to 100% as possible. If you go over 100%, it doesn’t cost you anything.

So the problem occurs when you either:

1) Have a disproportionately high Vitality at the cost of toughness that you can’t possibly heal yourself to full regularly, in which case the extra health is just ablative, or…

2) Have an excessively low Vitality despite very high toughness, in which case your heals become super efficient, but you’re so vulnerable to conditions and high spike that you’re just depending on your “6” ability anyway, or…

3) Have a high vitality and a high toughness, but your other stats are low, in which case you aren’t dealing damage and therefore actually taking more aggregate damage because your opponent is alive longer.

Summary: I don’t think that overhealing is itself a problem. Overhealing is inevitable, given how crithammer, regeneration and passive healing works. In fact, you want to overheal. Going over 100% health is preferable to never reaching 100% health. However, if you’re constantly overhealing, then chances are your vitality is pretty low, and you can safely afford to add more of it.

Addendum: It’s really all about finding that sweet spot between vitality, toughness and your other stats. Coming from other MMOs, where tough heavy-armor tanky classes always needed more health, remember that in these games you almost always had a healer class at your back, constantly filling and refilling your HP. That’s not the case here, so you definitely need to strike a balance between Health and Toughness to make the most out of your own healing.

Cynical.2097:

Reaching the end of this game, i’ve realized that Anet has done worse than Blizzard’s Diablo 3 in terms of loot.

I can spend all day doing dungeons and farming and find nothing worth any value. Even blizzard notice that having a end game with low drop chance on items is a bad game design.

Spending large amounts of time attempting to hunt items with no avail is turning me further and further away from the game…

Diablo 3 suffered a great deal because the fundamental expectation behind Diablo is that it’s a loot pinata. This is what Diablo is all about. This is what every single Diablo clone has ever been all about, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. You play Diablo so that you can hit things until they die and shiny things fountain out of their corpses.

The basic problem with Diablo 3 is that it stopped being a loot pinata once you started approaching the more difficult areas of the game. We can talk about the viability of its revamped stat/ability system, but the core of the matter is this: You got your loot from the Auction House. Not from random drops. The Auction House.

The implementation of the Auction House created a sense of staid, stolid predictability to a game played primarily for its slot-machine unpredictability. You play Torchlight, Diablo 2 and Titan Quest for the loot. Because you want to kill bosses and farm areas and see what kind of haul you drag in. Once we had an Auction House, all this disappeared, and all we did was farm loot so we could sell it for gold so we could save that gold to buy exactly the right item we wanted. There was no sense of chance. No addicting gamble. No loot pinata.

Therefore, fundamentally, your comparison between Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 is a false analogy, because Guild Wars 2 is not played primarily for loot, at all. It was never advertised as a game that depends on random loot mechanics. It is not a franchise known for its shiny loot. Nothing in the history of ANet or Guild Wars suggests that this is the sort of game you should play if you want to trick yourself out on phat lootz.

Is there a problem with loot not being all that rewarding? Arguably, yes. And the devs are working on that. We just got the addition to karma in dungeons, but expect to see better loot on world bosses, dungeons, mini dungeons and chests.

Your basic premise is flawed though. Comparing Diablo 3 to Guild Wars 2 on the basis of loot is a false analogy, for the reasons mentioned above.

…or, more accurately, why high base HP is possibly overrated.

The topic caught your attention, didn’t it? I want to toss out an idea I’ve been thinking about, although credit where credit’s due: I’m not by any means the first person to think about it, and this is something I’ve been dwelling on after listening to other players talk about toughness, effective health and survivability.

I want to advance this idea that the Warriors’ high health pool is overrated, and that the Guardian’s low health pool is actually a good thing. But in order to convince you of this idea, consider the following:

1. HP is Ablative Mitigation

Think of a high health pool as a form of ablative defense. It’s a buffer. Having a huge health pool can help you absorb front-loaded damage, but you’re not likely to get back all your HP over the course of a fight. A warrior with 25k HP can survive frontloaded, burst damage, but will likely spend the rest of the fight bouncing between 4k and 10k HP. Being healed back to full just doesn’t happen often in this game.

2. Armor/Toughness is Proportional Mitigation; Healing is Linear Mitigation

The damage you take is inversely proportional to your armor/toughness. The higher your armor, the smaller a percentage of damage you take from any given attack. Likewise, the value of your healing received is inversely proportional to your vitality. So a warrior with 25k HP gains a much smaller proportion of her health back from a 5k heal than a Guardian with 15k HP. Keep this in mind.

3. Avoidance Is The Best Mitigation

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In GW2’s case, an ounce of avoidance is worth a potentially infinite amount of mitigation. Dodge roll, missed attacks, block mechanics and invulnerability completely mitigate any incoming attack, to say nothing of absorption and reflective walls. Remember that the Guardian has a lot of these.

4. In PVE, Incoming Attacks Are Predictable

Solo a Guardian long enough and you’ll catch on to an enemy’s hidden “rhythm” of attacks. Enemies attack you at relatively fixed intervals. Their biggest attacks are almost always telegraphed, and red circles tell you exactly where you don’t want to be. The conclusion is that it’s easy to avoid attacks you can see coming, provided you have the tools to do so.

CONCLUSIONS

• ….Warriors don’t necessarily have it better than us. Their health pools are much higher, true, but high health usually just serves as a buffer, absorbing the first few big attacks but never really getting back to 100%.

• ….Lower health pools means greater vulnerability to conditions. Luckily, a Guardian can hardly sneeze without removing conditions, but it bears mentioning that our low health pools do come tacked on with this basic weakness. Conditions are potentially our undoing provided we’re not smart about removal, or lack removal options (certainly possible).

• …Guardian self-heals come in steady streams of small values rather than big bursts, making it ideal for builds with decent health/vitality but very high armor and toughness. Our readily available Protection boons multiply this effect. Guardians are therefore capable of much higher sustained survivability with lower health pools.

• …You don’t have to sacrifice damage for defense. Guardians do need Vitality, but not as much as you may think, and survivable builds probably don’t have to build purely on Power/Toughness/Vitality. If you have enough vitality to survive big attacks, you’re good to go. You have more than enough raw mitigation (Protection boons) and Avoidance (Blind, Vigor, Block, Invul) to handle telegraphed attacks.

• …There is a sweet spot for Guardian health, and I don’t know what it is, but it seems to be about 15k to 16k health. This is usually enough ablative defense against frontloaded damage, but also relatively easy to heal back to 100%

Sorta TL;DR Version: High health pools are basically ablative defense. They let you survive big, frontloaded damage, but you’re almost never going to be healed to 100% in an aggressive fight. The lower your health pool, the more mileage you get out of each individual HP healed. The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to condition damage. The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to spike damage. The higher your proportional mitigation (armor, toughness) and the more options you have for total avoidance (dodge roll, invul, block, miss), the less vulnerable you are to predictable damage. Most spike damage in PVE is predictable. Therefore Guardians actually don’t need that much health to perform well.

Thoughts?

It’s a difference in philosophy. Without getting too deep into minutiae, the difference is essentially this: Mesmer playstyle operates by creating controlled chaos, and Guardian playstyle operates by bringing chaotic situations under control.

Mesmer playstyle emphasizes misdirection, damage setups (which is different from ‘frontloaded’ damage) and creating lose-lose situations (confusion, for example, either forces you to not attack or punishes you for attacking) for the enemy.

Guardian playstyle emphasizes defensive setups (i.e, good timing with Aegis and frequent Combo Field: Light), acts as a force modifier (i.e, makes nearby party members stronger), leans toward sustained rather than front-loaded damage, and brings control to chaotic and messy situations (via shouts, wards and condition removal).

They’re essentially opposites in every possible way.

Well…

Mesmers tend to be pretty sexy. So are Guardians. That’s probably their one area of similarity.

If Renewed Focus isn’t making you immune to CC, it’s bugged. Invulnerability provides no protection against existing conditions, but it makes any attacks directed toward you automatically fail, including any crowd control effects.

At worst, Renewed Focus is an emergency reset button that lets you burn all your virtues for party-wide Aegis, Burn and a modest heal followed by invulnerability, and that’s if you don’t spec into it at all. However, many builds will include 5 Virtues, in which case Renewed Focus grants nearby allies 3 stacks of might, 5s of Regeneration and 5s of Protection, and then personal invulnerability, and then lets you do it all over again immediately after.

If you’re 20-30 Virtues, Renewed Focus grants all nearby allies Might, Protection, Regeneration, removes 3 conditions and either breaks stuns or grants stability—twice. And this is on top of 3 seconds of personal Invulnerability. Measuring it up against Endure Pain is pointless when you consider just how formidable a well-timed Renewed Focus can be with anywhere from 5-20 points in Virtues, let alone 30.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of some amazing synergy between Renewed Focus, 5 Virtues and Altruistic Healing. Plus Renewed Focus + Deep Virtues + Stand Your Ground and Hallowed Ground = A kitten-ton (kitten-ton being a very technical term…) of stability for everyone.

Prior to the patch, Renewed Focus was situationally strong for some builds and universally decent for every build. After the patch, and the removal of immobilization, Renewed Focus is universally strong for every build and situationally outstanding for appropriate builds.

I’m struggling with it a little. Played for an hour this morning and managed to get about 12 kills. I could probably do better if I played smarter.

The worry that a split between PVE and PVP skills will proliferate and become status quo is a bit of a slippery slope, though not entirely out of the question given that it did happen in GW1.

The question is: Is this a bad thing? What do you lose from a (purely hypothetical) PVE/PVP split in this game?

I want to make a case for PVP/PVE split for one reason: PVE and PVP operate by fundamentally different rules. PVE is about situational awareness, memorizing a strategy and good timing. It’s about not standing in fire (i.e, red circles) and knowing how to dodge.

PVP is different because the nature of the encounter changes dramatically from fight to fight, depending on team composition, degree of coordination, player skill, mind games, etc. The Mesmer Profession alone is a testament to how different a single ability (clones) functions in PVP than in PVE.

So the metagame for PVP almost always develops based on player choice. Right now, the metagame leans toward heavy condition removal. That affects the way sPVP looks right now. It affects builds. It affects team composition. It affects professions. Did ANet create the condition removal metagame? No. The players did.

So that’s the difference: ANet designs all PVE content and can control all solutions to any given PVE encounter. However, the players control all PVP content and ANet can only balance in response to to the evolving metagame. ANet is in complete control of PVE design, but their attempt to balance PVP is necessarily reactionary and controlled by the players.

Consequently, it actually makes no logical sense that a skill function in exactly the same way in sPVP/tPVP as it does in PVE. These are arguably two completely different types of gameplay with different goals, different dynamics and different objectives.

The Pros of PVE/PVP Splitting:

• Finer, more precise control. ANet can adjust certain abilities that work very differently in PVP without damaging or disrupting the balance of PVE. Retaliation is an absolutely perfect example. Perma-retaliation is a problem in PVP, but not so much in PVE. But because both game modes share the same set of skills, solutions are necessarily clumsy and byzantine. Splitting PVE and PVP is an elegant solution.

• More dynamic combat. Right now, skill recharges are balanced primarily for their efficacy in PVP. Why does Line of Warding have such a long recharge? Probably because it’s a very potent area denial tool, but its potency is much more evident in PVP. What about Binding Blade? Illusionary Wave? Banish? Ring of Warding? All of these abilities are much more powerful in PVP than in PVE, therefore accounting for their long recharge. A PVP/PVE split would safely allow for short recharges in PVE, creating a more fluid, dynamic combat system.

• Better builds/traits. Each trait line provides access to a finite number of traits, which include both PVE and PVP centric traits. Creating two versions of your trait lines—one for PVE, and one for PVP—means greater build diversity, fewer wasted traits and more interesting options for everyone.

The Cons of PVE/PVP Splitting:

• Potentially Cumbersome/Complicated system: Splitting PVP and PVE essentially creates two different game rules. Your abilities would all function differently in sPVP. Presumably, so would your traits, and perhaps even your stat coefficients. Therefore you’d have to learn two variations of the same game, leading to added complexity and potential confusion.

…But my rebuttal to that one point is: So what? Don’t we re-learn our skills, muscle memory and builds every time we switch between alts? If the only argument against the PVE/PVP split is the complexity of the system, I would argue that it’d only seem complex at first, but over time, we’d learn it.

If it’s done well, I’m all for a PVE/PVP split. The game already goes out of its way to divorce PVE from PVP by making sPVP tightly controlled in terms of gear and putting everyone on an equal playing field. Splitting traits and skills between PVE and PVP is a big but elegant solution to a number of issues.

“Get Over Yourselves.”

Sorry, I just have to ask: Do you think we could successfully petition ANet to change the name of “Save Yourselves” to “Get Over Yourselves”?

The class isn’t dead. If anything, the buff to Renewed Focus shifts out metagame toward Virtues use in a positive way, despite the change to Save Yourselves. Mobile Renewed Focus will do more for you in sPVP and tPVP.

There’s this weird a posteriori fallacy that keeps popping up in these forums. In order to illustrate it, consider the following question:

If Save Yourselves was released at launch with a five second duration in sPVP/tPVP, would anyone be complaining?

Probably not.

So the problem isn’t the Save Yourselves nerf. The problem is the community’s knee-jerk reaction toward nerfs in general. If SY was always a 5 second duration in PVP, no one would care. No one would declare the Guardian dead.

That’s fine. If you think the Symbol of Wrath buff isn’t worth much: great! Let’s have a civil talk about it. Maybe we’ll come to the conclusion that the issue isn’t SoW’s damage, but SoW’s cooldown and availability.

That’s constructive disagreement. Click the back button and take a peek at the handful of threads on the forums’ front page decrying ANet for destroying the profession, declaring the Guardian profession dead and whining about more nerfs. That’s not constructive at all.

You’re right that the 10% damage buff to SoW does not fix lost synergies. This is why I’ve been advocating changes to the synergies itself, rather than changes to Greatsword. The problem isn’t Greatsword so much as Greatsword’s synergy with Zeal is greatly reduced. So it’d be better to take a second look at Zeal.

The changes you proposed for SoW are all potentially possible through the Zeal tree, provided ANet gives Zeal a second look. Which they should.

I really agree with you, Brutaly. Frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of logging in to the Guardian forums after any patch that nerfs us in any way. It’s just exhausting watching a half dozen threads pop up declaring the Guardian dead, useless, broken or being slowly destroyed and nerfed in every patch.

Yes, Save Yourselves in sPVP was nerfed. Let’s talk about what that means in civil, rational terms. By the way, Renewed Focus got a pretty massive buff—is anyone talking about that? What about the fix to Leap of Faith? Is it working now? What about the buff to Symbol of Wrath?

We should be having critical and rational discussions about these things. Instead half the topics responding to patches declare that the Guardian sky is falling, that we’re being nerfed to the ground in every patch and the devs are ignoring us and don’t want to talk to us and the customer service is terrible.

I really think the Guardian community and the new players who chance across this forum would be better served if we dropped the hyperbole and tried to be sensible.

I play GW2 with—and have been playing with, since beta—a close friend of mine, who occasionally has to work very late hours. GW2 is one of our best ways to relax and have fun together. Tonight we didn’t get to play together until very nearly bedtime, but logging in to the Halloween Event was just spectacular.

We spent a half hour in Lion’s Arch checking out all the cool new stuff, and then roamed around leveling our characters in Harathi Hinterlands. The first time we saw a Raw Candy Corn mode was very much an “OMG!” moment. I’ve been loving all the detail that went into this event, including the great art, the scattered pumpkin carvings, the scavenger hunt and especially the Trick or Treat doors. The new achievements are all a whole lot of fun, and I’m very happy with the unrelated changes as well—4500 Karma from a single Daily was a huge surprise.

Thanks for turning what could’ve been a long and tiring night into a fun one for us, ANet. I’m really looking forward to checking out the rest of this content, maybe getting my hands on a rare recipe or two.

Harpoon Gun skill. It’s mislabeled as Rifle.

Leopardo da Vinci is pretty brilliant.

I liked Banana Karenina.

That doesn’t seem right, it’s not considered to be a projectile (not even 20% like some other skills) when it comes to combo fields ? projectile finishers.. why would it count as a projectile for reflect :\

Not all projectiles are actually projectile finishers (see: Scepter Auto), but Sword Wave’s definitely a very short range projectile. It probably does that in order to create the ‘triple hit’ effect on one swing.

There’s a bug where blocking people doesn’t stop them from broadcasting emotes.

but Anet is just another dev team in a long line of idiots that cant manage to learn from the failings of other

How is this fundamentally any different from players who can’t manage to learn from their own failings? AC is very manageable once you have the strategy down. That’s kind of the whole point of dungeons, which separates it from open world leveling. You need some coordination, or you’ll be crushed.

AC is one of my favorite dungeons, by far. I’ve run it dozens of times with pickups of all sorts of professions and level ranges.

If you let us know where you’re having trouble and give us some details on how the encounters went down, maybe we can help? It’s really pretty easy once you get the strategy down.

How about instead of calling out the “selfish” player, we call out the “ignorant” player? By which I mean players that think there’s such a thing as a “DPS Guardian” and a “Support Guardian” and the difference between them is clearly delineated. Let me make something clear:

There is no pure support Guardian that doesn’t deal damage.

There is no pure damage Guardian that doesn’t provide support.

If you’re the type of Guardian who hangs in the back and waits for the right time to use Sanctuary or Staff Empower and never does anything else, you are wasting your resources. You aren’t a “Support Guardian;” you’re just wasting your abilities. Damage and defense and support all work together, and just about every single Guardian spec in the game emphasizes this synergy.

Similarly, even if you play a pure Spirit Weapons build in dungeons (and I did, with great success), you are never without party support. I provided party support through Empowering Might; I provide it through hard knockdowns, through Purging Flames or Stand Your Ground, and through timely use of my Virtues—which every Guardian has.

We really need to fight back against this pernicious and fallacious argument that there’s such a thing as a “DPS spec” and a “Support spec” and these two things are somehow mutually exclusive, and that professions traited for heavy damage offer no aid to the rest of the party and are somehow selfish.

I cannot begin to overemphasize just how immensely damaging this kind of thinking is to the metagame, the community, and especially to newbies, who just don’t know any better and will take your word for it.

As a Guardian you can spec into GS and trait for support OR you can trait into pure DPS. The same applies for every other profession.

I’m sorry. I don’t usually say things like this, but this quote is SO wrong. It’s so categorically and completely wrong that it’s actually damaging. Don’t spread this kind of misinformation.

It’s Human Cultural Tier 3. Logan Thackeray wears it, in fact. Very impressive, but like so many impressive things, also very expensive.

5 in virtues I can understand, especially for the synergy with 15 radiance. Do you get much mileage out of 5 Zeal? Wouldn’t 5 Honor work better? (Free vigor on crit means more dodging, but also one more buff to trigger Altruistic Healing)

Khift,

Thank you so much for this. I gave it a good read, let it percolate in my mind and didn’t come back to it until I’d had a sudden “aha” moment. I’m pretty terrible at math, but I got the gist of what you’re saying, and this totally transforms the way I’m looking at mitigation and healing on my Guardian (a profession which offers an interesting anomaly, being a high armor low health profession with access to constant low-level healing). This really gives me a much more sophisticated justification for Guardian health pools.

Elegant work. Thanks!

Harbinger.8637:

Blackout.3247:

Harbinger.8637:

Majority of my gear is Berserker.

Only 10k health?!?!

How does that work at all in wvw/pve? won’t you just get insta-killed before you’re able to react to anything? (Thieves especially, Cloak in Shadows > Steal > Backstab)

I can acutally take quite a beating.

Perfect Inscriptions and Purity means I lose three conditions every ten seconds. Plus I take 30% less dmg thanks to Signet of Judgment. I’m running the crithammer build for dmg and heals. It might not look like it, but I hit very hard and can take it too.

Plus I running x6 Runes of Rage which means I can get close to 60 seconds of fury, thanks to the Runes and Inner Fire. So I’m running around for close to a minute with 80% crit chance. lmao

This has me contemplative. Very interesting strategy you’ve got going. The one thing that had me raise my eyebrows is your use of Perfect Inscriptions + Crithammer. So both those traits require 30 radiance and 30 valor. Where did you put your other 5 points, out of curiosity?

The part that really fascinates me is the synergy between Perfect Signet of Judgement and Crithammer. Lower health pools + high flat damage reduction (from toughness and judgment) = much higher effective health from Crithammer provided you don’t die.

Fascinating. Thanks for the food for thought.

Guardians can use a gun? Did I miss a memo?

Xriah,

Intriguing idea. I’m going to give this a try. I was tempted to just go deep Arcane because common wisdom seemed to insist it and decry any build that didn’t. But your arguments make sense, because speaking as a fanatic for the Guardian class, I can definitely appreciate the stance that well-timed skills often trump frequently-used skills.

Okay, but your argument is that soulbound is an inherently bad mechanic and encourages using a single character while discouraging multiple alts and the sale of character slots.

But in practice, this isn’t true. A single character could, conceivably, provide for an entire gallery of alts. Any dungeon tokens you win at the end of explorable mode can go to any given character, so if the only dungeon set your 80 Warrior wants is, say, the Koda armor, you can still run the other dungeons and collect the tokens to gear up your alts.

Furthermore, it’s important to remember that having high-end (i.e, 80 Exotic) gear soulbound on use rather than soulbound on acquire is a big deal. This means that you could pick up all the gear you want directly off the Trading Post rather than having to run dungeons ad nausuem for your desired stats.

Soulbound on use isn’t a problem. Soulbound on Acquire may be, depending on what it is you acquire and whether or not you have any reason to hang on to it. But removing soulbound restrictions from gear you’ve already equipped means you’d never have any reason to gear up after the first set—ever. If you had an Elementalist, a Mesmer and a Necromancer at 80, you’d only ever need one set of gear between all three of them.

Soulbound items have a purpose, usually. Soulbound-on-use exotics keep a healthy market for these items without restricting them as random drops off dungeon bosses—which is the formula a lot of other MMOs use. Having account-bound dungeon rewards is an especially big incentive to keep multiple characters rather than just having one.

In fact, account bound dungeon tokens is a recent change, which illustrates that ANet is willing to reconsider some of their soulbound restrictions. I think you’d be better served by suggesting changes to specific instances of problematic soul-binding rather than decry the mechanic in general.

Zenith,

I get where you’re coming from (the soulbound harvesting tools baffles me too—I imagine it has something to do with getting harvesting tools from karma, and then playing them on the Trading Post, which will then potentially warp the overall cost of gathering) but…

You’re neglecting the frequency of items and tokens in this game that are account bound. Guild Wars 2 definitely encourages multiple characters and rewards you for it. Your bank is account bound. Your Collections are account bound. Rare/Exotic Gear is almost exclusively account bound. Even your dungeon rewards are account bound—an anomaly in MMORPGs. And if you count intangible rewards, your achievements are account bound.

If you want to make a case for account bound harvesting tools, I could get behind that. I don’t know much about soulbound siege equipment, though, so I can’t really comment. Still, most of the rewards in this game are very much account bound.