The Guardian’s problem is that it was designed around defensively holding small circles.
Yet this is one playstyle for one game-mode in a game that has 3 game-modes and should have multiple playstyles.
But the Guardian is so vehemently designed around this principle that most of its traits and mechanics are useless outside of a group setting fixed around a small area.
Guardians have restricted mobility, which also makes it difficult to support other classes that have high mobility because the support is small ground based like Symbols and Consecrations.
Or slightly better with Shouts, but again, shouts are balanced around 5 allies receiving them, as soon as you reduce that to one or two allies, or a solo Guardian the shouts are a joke of boons vs durations and recharge, and the traits that affect them like Altruistic Healing also become useless.
Enter Meditations, because they have provided the only semblance of a solo playstyle for the Guardian since the beta weekends back in 2012, and since then I and many others have played the exact same playstyle, the only thing that has changed is Scepter Focus became Longbow with Dragonhunter.
Guardians need more options that work solo other than Meditations.
They need traits that aren’t utter crap because they are balanced around always having 4 allies, like Empowering Might which is horrible when solo compared to say Warrior’s Forceful Greatsword (no internal cooldown) and the combination of that and Phalanx Strength for great team Might generation.
Or a Herald simply using Facet of Strength and Shared Empowerment for huge group Might or self-Might stacking.
Zeal and Radiance offer pitiful trait choices for a solo player looking to do either Power or Condition damage, nothing much is gained, no mechanics changed and you’re simply better off going for Virtues.
Honor suffers terribly from being balanced around always having 4 allies near.
And the Guardian suffers from being mechanically old-meta.
We finally get a reliable ranged weapon that’s laced with projectiles just as everyone else gains lots of ways to reflect or destroy projectiles.
And we also have various skills that count as projectiles and therefore get reflected back or destroyed but carry no benefits of being projectiles, only downsides.
Sword chain 3, Sword 3, Torch 4, Staff 2, Focus 4, Hammer 3, Scepter 1. ALL get reflected
The game escalated a lot with various forms of personal survival through evades, reflection, damage immunity and blocks, Guardian was left behind.
Our attacks are slow and easily seen.
We are slow and easily kited.
We are balanced when everyone else isn’t
True Shot being the perfect example, immobilises the caster as they stop and crouch to fire, takes 1 second to cast, very easy to notice and either dodge or counter with a reflection.
Compared to say Relentless Assault – the auto-teleporting, Might generating, multi-hit high damage attack with a built-in 2 second evade on a 12 second cooldown…
The Reaper shouts use tech that reduces the cooldown depending on how many enemies are hit.
So why can’t the Guardian have the opposite tech, increase the cooldown based upon how many allies are hit?
That way you can have shouts with 12-20 second cooldowns when solo that scale up to 24-40 seconds when 4 allies also get boons.
And remove the internal cooldown from Empowering Might!
Now a solo Guardian could go for a boon based damage sustain build with shouts and Altruistic Healing that would also scale well into small group / team situations.
End 4 years of Meditations/Traveler Runes being the only viable solo/damage playstyle!
