Guild Wars 2

I changed a few things real quick to give you an idea of what I run. I also spend most of my time dueling, or small scale pvp. There are rooms/arenas in the mists where you can go duel. They usually have the name duel somewhere to let people know.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|c.1g.h1h.d.1g.h2|b.1g.h1h.e.1g.h2|1n.a1.1p.a1.1n.a1.1p.a1.1n.a1.1p.a1|1g.61.1n.61.1n.61.1p.61.1p.61.8g.61|0.u4ab.u15c.a2.0|15.1|w.15.13.18.1i|e

Armor isn’t as good as you might think it is. It provides no protection against the current meta, and to be honest most of our defense doesn’t come from armor at all. It’s not a bad stat, just not as good as I think you are assuming it is. Health is more important for what you want.

There are also two choices you can pick from One is burst, the other is bunker. The build I linked you is more middle of the road. It’s possible to get much higher burst but I didn’t want to change too much from your original build. This also includes buffs, and I don’t normally do that because in PvP you don’t get PvE buffs.

CMF.5461:

All “what if’s” aside, what I would like to see as a true solution to the stat issue at the core of the idea is to give us a reliable condition on crit to take advantage of the tree as it is now.

What condition, is the issue. More burning? Bleed? Torment? Poison?

Bleed or torment would be the most damaging solution, but do we need it?

Poison would cause more capability to kill other bunker classes, so a more strategic condition, but it doesn’t take advantage of condition damage as much.

Burning is already plentiful, and I just don’t see it as advantageous.

Thoughts?

Um no, as it’s been pointed out either option would push guardians into the OP category. Maybe something needs to be added, but whatever it is can not be damage. Guardians are already very strong as it is.

A defensive option would be cool, or a unique utility. This nonsense of more damage though is never going to happen. Not without some major nerfs to other parts of the guardian kit.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Radiance is balanced so Guardian DPS does not become excessive. It is the same reason why Rangers, Mesmers, and Thieves aren’t super DPS machines despite having precision and crit damage in the same lines, and why Warriors are able to output good DPS despite having the same overall stat spread as Guardians do.

Guardians already have the second-highest base damage in the game (second only to thieves) despite being an inherently tanky class; a build like 20/30/0/20/0 with no crit damage at all is already outputting massive damage. Putting crit damage in an accessible DPS line would only make them outrageously OP.

I absolutely agree with you. I don’t see how anyone who’s played Guardian can not agree. As a profession we are naturally tanky, but in a fashion that allows us to go glass cannon and blow people up. There is just no way they could link the precision/crit damage lines without making Guardians insanely OP.

I really don’t understand how people here can’t see that. If they linked the two Guardians would be stupidly strong because we would get massive damage boosts, and manage to be tankier than any other class. While that sounds “fun” on the surface, Anet would have to nerf guardians massively to make up for it. Right now we are a balanced, arguably the most “balanced”, profession. The only thing we need is some tinkering with our traits, and some bug fixes.

If they did anything to radiance X it would have to be something other than damage. At 5% it’s really strong right now in pvp. If they upped that to 10% they would have to either A) change the way damage is calculated ornerf us in another way.

Radiance X could get something like a “increases chance to proc crit effects by 10%” or something, but any damage increase would be too much.

Young Somalia.1706:

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Young Somalia.1706:

Sure, the tele is nice, but I would have a lot less reason to use sword if it didn’t have a blind (which is also traitable to inflict 3 stacks of Vulnerability, comboable with Focus blind, GS blind, and even VoJ blind if you traited it that way, so you may produce 15-21 stacks of AoE blindness for 10 seconds with proper skill chains).

Blind stacks in duration, so what you are actually referring to is a blind chain

Trimmed for tidiness. But I digress…

No, I was, at least I thought I was, very clearly outlining the secondary function of stacking blinds: a vulnerability spike, which is polar opposite to a blind chain seeing as you can only do it by casting them in rapid sequence to, of course, stack vulnerability.

To anyone who may invest a second to brush over their trait and skill descriptions, and who may observe the standard operation of blind, they will notice immediately that a rotation of blinds to mitigate hits versus a combination of them to spike vulnerability stacks are mutually exclusive; I don’t think anyone would be stupid enough to cast 4 blinds without allowing an enemy to cleanse/attack through even one of them, hoping to get their full vulnerability stacks and then follow-up by questioning why three of those blinds didn’t do their job.

At least… I hope not

You would be surprised.

I don’t run the vulnerability trait because I need inner fire. Fury is just that good. I can understand how in PvE a spike like that would work though. Setup a bunch of blinds each one causing 3 stacks of vulnerability. Seems like it might be fun. That’s kind of why I avoid PvE discussions, I spend most of my time dueling/pvp/wvw though lately my guild has started to do dungeons. (We just did AC story mode for the first time a few days ago). That was pretty fun.

I think what I said with the second part about ZD is still accurate in PvE though. I’m not too sure now, it might have some reflect or a trait that makes it reflect.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Queen’s Guantlet is 1v1 challenge against new bosses, not other players.

Solo queue is for 5v5 competitive PVP.

I’m not sure if you realize it, but conquest is boring. Are there any plans to actually implement pvp that is fun/watchable? Right now there are very few viewers, and mostly it’s because conquest is incredibly boring to watch.

We need a 1v1 arena.

How about doing a little experiment. Put in a team death match style pvp, and then let the players choose which one they want to keep DM or Conquest.

Stormleaf.1769:

biggs.4702:

lordkrall.7241:

And yet we have not seen the area, so we can’t really assume it will be bad, now can we?
By the sound of it I would say it sounds way more fun than just “venturing into a hole and find out stuff”.

Nobody said the content they created for this won’t be fun. I’m sure it will be. Neither does “venturing into a hole to find out stuff” have to be as mundane as you’re trying to portray it (isn’t that pretty much every dungeon crawl, ever? ). We don’t know what goes on during the creative brainstorming sessions for this. It could very well be that they just couldn’t come up with a story they felt was compelling enough compared to the idea of the Queen’s Jubilee/1st-year anniversary of the game. Or it would’ve involved the Dredge, in which case I would have had mixed feelings about it because I simply hate the Dredge.

We have seen the area to an extent: the hole has been simply covered up with the pavilion/arena. I hope maybe there’s a secret entrance to darkness below…

If you think the content will be fun, can you maybe avoid piling even more hostile criticism on ArenaNet before the patch is actually released? At the very least acknowledge everything ArenaNet already does for the game and its players with a “Thank you!” now and then, rather than claiming they’ve disregarded the desires of their players in a patch that you haven’t even seen yet.

If you’re going to nitpick about a patch that you think has a lot to be happy about, just try to do it a bit more respectfully.

Did I somehow get sent back in time to the SWToR forums before the collapse? I swear I read this same post there. Oh, never mind the names are different.

Calling a company on their mistakes doesn’t make you a bad guy. It makes you honest. If the company is worth a kitten they will listen. They might completely dismiss you and say “no this is our game, we are doing it our way”, but they will listen. Companies that don’t, well we’ve all seen the past. Even Blizzard is starting to realize this mistake, and they were so big no one ever thought they would lose out to a free to play game. (LoL)

lcpdragonslayer.7895:

Are you going to delete all the extra gold you have obtained through the gold find infusion in the days/weeks/months you had the infusion equipped?

I didn’t think so. So what makes you think you’ll get a refund for something you’ve already used and benefitted from?

So if Anet suddenly decided to remove crit damage from an item and people said “well then give us a refund” your answer would be “are you going to give back all of that loot your stats helped you get?” Gold find is a stat just like any other stat. I don’t have a single thing with gold find in it, but that doesn’t mean that the people who do have it don’t deserve a refund. They do, and that should be obvious to everyone. Sadly that means it’s very unlikely Anet will even acknowledge those players are alive.

Oh and to head off the people saying I must want a refund too, nope I spend very little time in carebear land.

Young Somalia.1706:

Why is nobody mentioning the blind? Is conpletely negating a potential 5 attacks on you and your allies completely inconsequential? Blind is perhaps the absolute best defensive support condition in PvE since mobs don’t cleanse.

Sure, the tele is nice, but I would have a lot less reason to use sword if it didn’t have a blind (which is also traitable to inflict 3 stacks of Vulnerability, comboable with Focus blind, GS blind, and even VoJ blind if you traited it that way, so you may produce 15-21 stacks of AoE blindness for 10 seconds with proper skill chains).

Yes, sword has it all. Great autoattack and sustain DPS (a modest combo may be 2k/2k/6k), a spammable blind linked to a tele, and a short reflect (though people say it doesn’t work half the time; I camp melee behind perma blinds and never really bothered to take use or note of that statement’s validity).

I’m not really going to discuss the PvE aspect as that’s my least favorite part of the game.

I will say that I think you are misunderstanding a few of the mechanics, unless there is a big difference between the pve and the PvP versions of the sword skills.

Blind stacks in duration, so what you are actually referring to is a blind chain. I always wait for the blind to be used, if it isn’t you can refresh it at .5 seconds remaining. So if they have 30 seconds of blind, or .5 seconds it still blocks one attack. In PvP you can take care of this with interrupting your own skills, or just hitting the air.

Zealots Defense doesn’t reflect ranged attacks, it also doesn’t block. It absorbs them. That’s why traits that grant might, or burning, on block won’t trigger for zd.

Sword has an amazing coefficient, and mixed with a gs burst chain it can do an astounding amount of damage in a short amount of time. Then with something like 5% bonus damage to the sword (trait), with a 5% sigil and how those stack with might it’s pretty ridiculous how high you can stack your effective power without actually stacking power.

To be fair 200 condition damage is only another 50dps on burning.

Enter the Crown Pavilion – Begins August 6

Test yourself in an entirely new mini-zone featuring mighty representations of humanity’s enemies. By representing various cities of Tyria, you can be named champion of a nation and gain access to unique reward vendors.
Fight in the Queen’s Gauntlet – Begins August 6

In the special Queen’s Gauntlet, you will face increasingly difficult challenges of single-combat against unique bosses. Cheer on your friends or show off your skills to the world. Take a risk with special gambit conditions to earn even more prestigious rewards!

Putting that there for anyone that hasn’t seen it yet. So at least one is a solo thing with unique bosses. The other might be solo. I just hope it isn’t another horribly designed mini game.

Proteus.6320:

I imagine this will be similar I the Brawler Arena that WoW has. Those (higher ranked) fights were focused exclusively around using a dps build because everyone can dps.

I think it will be the same here. I can’t see them trying to design different fights that would require a toughness or healing build. No trinity! But I’m not sure how they’ll utilize downed state either, if at all.

Ill be going in with dps spec and gear with gs/staff 20/25/0/25/0 to test the waters.

I never really got into WoW that much. I played somee/did some raids during wrath of the lich king/cataclysm but the pvp went downhill so fast that after that season I just stopped. It was pretty clear just from season participation that the PvP was coming to a rapid end (very little participation, stagnate meta etc). So I don’t know how that worked. I’m basing my build on what worked so well for the last “solo” content the trials.

Supposedly they’ve tested it every profession, I’m still going to try and be the first guardian to solo it.

I think you are probably right though about it being a dps race. Which works out really good for guardian because we can keep 100% vigor up time.

Jax.5261:

Just a fun fact, you can one-shot people with Staff burst.
Ofc it’s not as strong as other burst builds and relies a lot on terrain but in DPS builds the staff is amazing (eg. Symbol DPS with Hm/St is the strongest guard DPS build in tpvp atm) and you can burst with it for trolls.

While true, I don’t think many of the guardians here have the skill to pull it off. I do not mean to offend anyone, so please don’t think that. I’m not being mean at all, but the reality is that most people don’t take enough time to work on pvp (actual player versus other players, not pve wvw) to know how to use staff effectively.

As Jax pointed out though staff is actually one of our best weapons when used correctly, and can have amazing burst. An example is most guardians don’t seem to know about the double hit on the orb. Which can be a fairly huge burst. Specifically you can time it with a JI/gs burst really well.

So I figure I will go ahead and start this ahead of time in preparation for the upcoming solo content.

Anyone have any builds in mind for a first try? I’m probably going with the same one I’ve been using for solo/pvp 0/30/30/5/5.

I might switch it up for a 2 handed tanky build, but it depends. Just interested in getting some other peoples ideas.

Reading this thread I’ve come to realize I will absolutely never understand PvE.

This is a l2p issue as I’ve beat warriors running this build.

Also, when the OP put PvP I thought he meant actual PvP and not WvW. There is a difference in the two. There is actually a dueling build that puts this one to shame. Seen it a few times in the dueling rooms, and kitten . Saw a warrior go 3v1 and still get 2 down before he lost. Great fighting all around. Only one that came close was this necro running a setup he wouldn’t tell me. Really fun to watch.

I will quit so fast. There is absolutely no reason to nerf either. It will prove one thing to me though, which I am not going to mention here.

It wouldn’t be the first time Anet nerfs pvp builds for pve (yes wvw is pve with incidental pvp). I hope they don’t because warriors are actually doing better now. Before they were pretty low on the the list of actually holding their own.

Instead of complaining people need to learn to play. That includes when to dodge, which seems to be some mythical thing that only duelists seem to know.

Ragnar Lothbrok.3968:

couldnt agree more, conquest isnt even near the coolest pvp mode i believe, we should get 1v1 arenas and team deathmatch, i know balance is a big problem, but knowing everyone would have the option to stick with conquest mode or create another profession character, i dont think its a problem so BIG as the lack of those kind of pvp =/

They could just make it clear from the start “hey we won’t be balancing around this, but if you want to do it then here it is”. That would be great. I don’t care if another class is “better” for 1v1.

As for the death match, yes. If GW2 ever wants to become an esport they have to move beyond this conquest stuff. People aren’t going to watch that, it’s just not fun. There is a reason LoL has moved so far ahead of every other esport (them getting the staples center for worlds is proof enough tbh). The games are complex, but still exciting to watch. GW2 may have some complexity, but it’s really boring to watch. Add in dm, ctf, any other modes that encourage direct fighting.

If you haven’t noticed there are a good deal of your players that enjoy pvp. Not the boring conquest system you have in place now, but actual pvp. You know,where we fight other players. That’s what PvP means.

At this point in time we use custom pvp maps, but it would be so much nicer if we could actually use the arenas. We aren’t asking for a leader board for pvp, though that would be great, all we are asking for is a dedicated map that we can use properly. This sounds like a perfect addition.

Allow players to queue into it, setup everything just like pvp and then fight.

Anet this is a please for actual pvp to be put into the game. What you have now isn’t even pvp most of the time. It’s boring hold a point, and that’s it. If you want GW2 to work as an esport it has to be exciting to watch. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the numbers on your viewers. People fall asleep watching it as it currently is. Look at what LoL is doing right and go from there.

Unpredictability.4086:

And to the people who say to complete it with less people/solo, well that goes against the design of GW2 – the manifesto

Please tell me you don’t seriously still believe anything that was in that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35BPhT-KI1E&t=1m40s

There is a little gem for you. Yeah we just don’t want people to grind..lol. 1 minute 40 seconds still makes me laugh

I wish I could have played the game they describe.

Purgatory Fire.4057:

Who cares about bugs when they give us free content every two weeks? end of sarcasm

LOL =). It seems that’s how it works “guys ignore all of that broken stuff, look something shiny!” The sad part is that it kind of works.

I would love their next “living story” to be a massive bug fix, and that is all.

Demeth.5816:

You dont have to clean the whole content, if you cant, you cant, gw2 was made for letting all the players doing everything, if you cant succeed this challenge, you can’t, that’s all, it doesnt matter. An achievement is for something you achieved ( as someone said previously), if you cant achieve it, it doesnt matter.Some players can, they will get the achievement so.

The majority of those players exploited. These people trying to get it now are being punished by Anet for what others have done. In the end I guess it doesn’t matter. Just one more example of how lazy they are.

Did you read my mind or what? Anyways I think casuals have more than enough content already.. And the game is actually ruined by these QQ’s on the forum.. People just don’t want to accept the fact that there are things which they are capable and there are also other things which they aren’t..

Same challenge for you. Solo T4, then talk. Just one SS with you saying at the end “I soloed t4 post patch”.

Demeth.5816:

For once, Anet didnt give the access of one content to the whole player base, For once we have difficulty, for once being skilled give you an advantage.

Please, do not start to complain, please just don’t, casuals have got content enough, do not take it from us, or this game will be ruined by casuals (or actually is).

I dare you to post a screen shot of you finishing it solo after he patch. Very few of us can. Go ahead and try to join the club. Until then stop your qqing about “skill”. You are just using the same old lines spouted off by nonskilled carebears who want to feel good about doing something that they think someone else can’t.

Only one aspect of this game is about true “skill”. I can do it solo post patch, but you know what? I’m not sitting here going “yay, keep it hard so no one else can get it”. Do you know why? Because I like a challenge, and once I’ve beaten said challenge I’m done with it. I don’t care one little bit if anyone else has to go through the same trouble I did. That isn’t a challenge, that is pure ego. What’s worse is that it’s ego by the most unskilled players in the game, yes the carebears.

You probably exploited along with most of these other people, cheating your way to a victory you didn’t earn. It’s also pretty stupid that these people didn’t exploit so now they have to face much harder content. They could have done it on easy mode, but for choosing not to they get locked out of an achievement.

Azraeel.1238:

akamon.2769:

it’s definitely doable i want to say, albeit a LOT harder compared to pre-patch , not using the bug.

i will say though, at time sit still depends on luck. which is good and bad. cause you can get really lucky, or well. you know the other end of the spectrum. or perhaps someone who can shed some light on the experiences i’ve had myself.

so the vet spawn locations seem random to me? i’ve seen or heard how people do it without aggro-ing (at least not TOO much). i often have vets that spawn near the plunderer spawns. some at the middle flat rock. some even close to the left plunder spawn. so if i leash far enough to lose aggro , i might as well quit because the plunderers, especially if 2 or more are running, they could just walk and have all the treasure by the time i get back. :///

doesn’t help that i feel aggro range has been extended as well? sometimes i see the charr grenadier vet that will run across the entier map, heading straight at me until i run near the water between the armor repair guy and the plunder spawn points. :/// it’s scary whenever i see him come a-runnin’.

one time i had 3 vets spawn near the plunder camps.

I don’t know how accurate your description of the issue is, because it totally differs from my experience. The only time I’ve seen the NPC run back that much is when they successfully landed an attack on me. Otherwise, just moving a little back will make them reset. They even run afar where the treasure is leaving me to solo the plunderers.

His description is pretty accurate, between that and the vets spawning at the grenadiers it’s crazy. Like some others I’ve managed to solo this, but again it’s all luck. If you get lucky with the spawns on the vets it’s o.k.. Not easy at all, but o.k.. If you don’t, well that’s game.

This “fix” was just a punishment to people good enough to solo it. Which inadvertently punishes the hell out of people who didn’t get this before they “fixed” it.

I think the big problem I’ve having the most is that no one wants to do it because of the high difficulty. Therefore, it takes me 4 hours to get a group together and when I do they attempt it once and then disband from shear frustration. I’m all for difficult events but it’s not fun when no one wants to participate with you. As an engineer I don’t feel like I can or wish to solo it. This is group content in my opinion but the groups just aren’t willing. Hopefully it’ll get toned down just a tad. Even a small tweak could fix this issue

Unfortunately most events (just look at Orr) were made with a certain size for the player base in mind. Now what’s sad about that is that GW2 has already passed it’s “prime” with it’s player base, and that’s just not achievable on anything except 2/3 servers. What you are experiencing is the same thing most players experience when trying to do a variety of content in the world. Get it done on the first day, or the area becomes a ghost town.

You could probably guest to one of the high population servers and get it done.

Esplen.3940:

Instead of complaining, you might want to post in the bug forums with as much information as possible including screenshots.

I hope you are joking. These things have been reported since beta, and they are still in the game. I understand the need to defend Anet, specifically to defend them right now since GW2 isn’t doing very well.

Perhaps you would like links to the professions bug lists, the ones that are pages long and have been up/reported since launch/pre launch?

Torch 4 applies a good burn, but the coefficient on the actual damage part is only 2.25.
Torch 5 has a .33 coefficient over 10 hits

Akamon I’m not sure if you know, and please don’t take this as me being a prick, but auto attacking actually has a higher coefficient than sword 3. That and the fact that it’s skill info is a flat out lie make it kind of suck. For those that don’t know it says it blocks ranged attacks, but if I recall correctly it only absorbs. That means the traits for blocking that give might/burning don’t apply.

For comparison though focus ray of judgement has a .5 coefficient per bounce (if I recall correctly), and a 2.5 for every hit on shield of wrath.

Comparing the two for damage is a waste though, because they are your off hand and there to augment your main hand. That and each one has a different purpose. The reason so many burst builds run focus is because of the utility it brings to a build. Not so much the damage, though a precast shield of wrath is a huge amount of burst.

For anyone not familiar with the burst setup you use shield of wrath, count about 1 second, Switch to gs, then ww/ji at the same time. What happens is you actually teleport to them dealing damage, block the first attack they make, cause burning, then your shield detonates all while you are top of them with ww going.

It’s pretty awesome to kill people in a few seconds that way.

akamon.2769:

yea exactly doode. let me know how it goes! i was doing them with my wife too. we did them pre-patch together fine. then iw ent and solo-ed Kiel’s no problem (didn’t trigger the bug either so had spawns and 3 going). was challenging but still doable.

i saw the patch notes and i was like “uh oh, i may or may not get the evon achieve now.” tried with wife and it was clearly a lot rougher.

i’m glad i’m not the only one thinking that this was more than just a “fix”. as in, they didn’t just bring it back to how it was intended to work. they upped it because like you said, people were able to do it in a way counter to what they intended. now people can’t solo it as reliably, and i daresay, groups will be having an even HARDER time doing it. (i call it their miss first, over-fix later strategy :///)

and yes, the “luck”. see i saw other people’s videos doing it post-patch and they it’s just as easy. then i compaer what i experienced to what i saw in their vids. most of their spawns were where the treasure was. i had vets spawn where the plunderers spawn. so that’s where they “chill” and so it was basically near impossible for me to lose aggro. if i did, then i’d take too long to get back to the plunderers and with 3 running. lol.

took teh day off of gw2 yesterday lol, so will give it a shot again tonight.

Not sure if it’s luck or what, I didn’t get the ss but I had 5 vets camping where the grenadiers were at around 30 seconds on t4. At that point it’s just stupid. It’s moved beyond being difficult content. I enjoy the difficult, and I enjoy the challenge. This is just a b/s way of “fixing” a problem though. They are doing it really lazy by just removing strategy from it and throwing numbers at it. Oh, numbers plus crowd control.

I’m glad I got it, but it’s pretty stupid that people who didn’t get it before will have to deal with this nonsense because some people exploited.

Meriem.3504:

Seriously, I know nothing is perfect but the amount of bugs you have in this game and unfixed is crazy! Just did FoTM for my first time to do the support achieve and the last boss had a visual bug with was an issue for when people had to do stuff.

I won’t go on but the list goes on and on and on and on. Many since day 1 are still untouched. Your bar event broke yet again. Take a month, sit down, look at your coding and fix the stuff that you currently have and maybe it will also prevent future bugs happening like with these events breaking. This isn’t the first time your DE’s have broke.

Fix you current stuff please!

Won’t happen. Anet is pretty much known as being worse than blizzard for fixing bugs. The last time I logged into gw1 they still had bugs from when prophecies was released..yeah that many years ignoring the same bugs.

You might as well get used to it. It’s just one of many reasons people have refused to play GW2. I was hoping that they would show they had changed.

lordkrall.7241:

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

I assume you’ve soloed it since the patch? Screen shots of it? Video? I won’t hold my breath.

Nope, I have not tried it yet, not before, nor after the patch.

I simply find it funny when people whine about lack of challenging stuff in the game, and then when something is challenging people whine about it being challenging.

I really don’t see all the arguments about doing it solo either, since it is supposed to be done with a group.

If you haven’t tried it, why would you think it’s challenging?

See that makes no sense to me. If I do something and I post a video showing me doing it easily that’s great. If another person posts saying “oh it’s too hard”, and I respond with “it’s easy” then that makes sense. If a person posts “oh it’s too hard” and I haven’t done it, probably can’t do it, then I need to wait about expressing my opinion.

This content isn’t about difficulty. It’s about having to exploit to get through it. Then it was found out that there was an exploit, Anet decided to punish people. I imagine doing this as a group to be nearly impossible because Anet went for the lazy wow rip off way of making content hard “more numbers”. It was lazy then, and it’s even lazier now when we see what other companies are doing.

ArcTheFallen.7682:

They really should show Anet devs or QA testers completing some of these things so we know it’s possible. I doubt a regular anet dev can actually do this.

As someone that’s done this solo I can guarantee you that you won’t see Anet, or QA testers doing this solo/group. I have serious doubts if any of them could do it solo before the patch, much less with a group before patch. As of right now this is incredibly hard, and requires luck to finish solo (though possible). I can’t imagine this nightmare as a group event.

Personally I think they should award the achievements to everyone, because what they did was create a group that got their achievements through exploits (at least a majority, I have screen shots proving I did it solo without the exploit)

It seems incredibly unfair to people just now trying it that didn’t get it done before the fix was put in.

- “OMG there is nothing challenging in this game!!”
- Patch hits
- “OMG this is too hard, make it easier!!!”

I love these forums sometimes.

I assume you’ve soloed it since the patch? Screen shots of it? Video? I won’t hold my breath.

Brizna.5612:

I don’t know of anyone who beat it legit the way it’s suposed to be done: going in, killing the bad guys who steal treassure and killing and/or enduring the rest of mobs, attempting to do that results in failed event and armor repairs, the only way to do it before the patch had nothign to do with tactics, your skill with your character, your knowledge of combos, build you used or party composition, all of those only decided how soon your party wiped. To succeed you had to exploit AI flaws and event scripts to make it cake easy that’s not being good or skilled at GW2 that’s being gamey. After patch it is the same, only being gamey is harder.

Does this game need difficult content? YES
Is this the right type of difficulty?? NOPE

I played GW1 for years, when DoA came out almost no one could beat it and those who did needed litrally hours to do just one out of 4 zones, later all 4 were done in 1 hour with better builds. But the difficulty wasn’t solved by jumping over edges, making mobs stupidity clear or abusing scripts, it was overcome with a few great team builds and tactics, that’s the kind of difficulty I want, not having to study the underlaying scripts of of a challenge to abuse the AI.

And yes I did both T4s before patch, my understanding for all those who have been caught by the “fix”, and I use the word “fix” loosely.

Actually that’s not true at all. I managed to solo it entirely differently than the exploit manner. In a few of my screens you can see me on the right side, fighting the mobs+plunderers.

I’m going to solo it again for the second time today in a bit because I didn’t get the screen shots the first time.

First, I should let you know I’m curious about this because I’ve seen it used in some duels lately and it looks fantastic. I primarily duel, seeing as it’s the only real pvp we have, and I’m interested in running this on my necromancer.

Second, unfortunately no one seems to be willing to give me the info on this spec. The posts I’ve read seem to be fairly outdated. I’m hoping by posting here some of you guys might know the build and share with me.

This is for dueling purposes only. I’ve managed to beat it, but I don’t think that was due to my skill I think it was more due to luck. So I figure the only way to beat it is to figure out how it works. Plus it looks really really fun.

If any of you can post the build, or just give me a link to an up to date one I would appreciate it very much. Thank you.

Azure.8670:

The Staff with the Guardian is like the auto beat down weapon. You hit 5 targets in a huge area at once, can hit through walls and the damage is extremely decent. You can kite using one hand and take down a mob while reading something on google. I do it often. To be fair, I think Guardian is lazy/fun mode by design. When i play my mesmer and engi I dodge roll and use every skill… Guard, sword/focus and Staff or GS/staff and just mow the lawn

To be fair I feel the same way about mesmer. Constant clone spam and hide, use decoy when they find you. While Guardian is much more involved if you actually want to get a kill.

akamon.2769:

GSS, you were able to do it post patch still right?

i did T4 Kiel the other day pre-patch, and did it more than fine (the build i tried didn’t work though lol) so i just went full DPS to drop the plunderers fast. avoiding the vets weren’t too much of a problem.

i KNEW i shoulda went and got Evon done as well fast. knowing ANet… and they went ahead and fixed whatever people were “tricking” the system into doing,.. and i can’t help but feel they did it overboard. as in they added more waves than intended, even though pre-patch, certain waves just weren’t showing up.

i never got the “bug” that a lot of people described when i did Kiel’s T4 and was still manageable. now though? 2 vets spawn from the get go with incredible aggro range. and others follow me past the water sometimes when i try to leash. so killing plunderers again, no problem, but it’s the vets i have trouble with as well. and since i ignore them, they pile up. so maybe that’s my problem.

GSS or others who’ve done it post-patch, do you guys take down the vets too?

back to the drawing board, might have to retry again. :///

Yes I kill the vets too, that’s pretty much always been my “strategy” was to kill anything that spawns near me. I always ended up with three plunderers going at once, plus the vets. I think you can see it in one of my screen shots.

The annoying thing about Anet is that they are being real jerks about this. They didn’t just “fix” anything, they went for a “oh so you can solo this, fine we will fix that” strategy. You can still solo it, but the frustration level is stupidly high. That and apparently there is still a measure of “luck” which makes no sense to me.

I probably got lucky, I will try again today. GF still needs to get hers done too, she refused to let me solo it for her the other day.

Charak.9761:

shelter is for wvw/spvp
resolve for everything else

So shelter is for anything that matters =P

I want Anet to just go ahead and release a dueling area. Seems the stomping trolls are getting more popular. Frustrating as hell, the only good thing is that they mostly suck. Easy to kill, but still annoying little things.

Christos de Soufre.3802:

A full bar of signets with Staff and Scepter/x is pretty much as lazy as it’s going to get.

Thank you =)

I was like oh come on someone’s gotta do it. He’s being serious, I’m not really sure why you think he isn’t.

Mikau.6920:

The shield is really very bad at PvE, but good at PvP and WvW.

No, the shield is good at a specific gimmick build that doesn’t rely on the players skill to work well. It’s horribly designed. It would be awesome to have shield actually useful for anything other than gimmick bunkers, but that’s just not likely to happen. To many people rely on that crutch for it to get changed. For now if you want a cool shield effect go engineer, warrior is alright, and then we have lolguardian.

Op you need to realize that almost everything that was said pre launch was a lie designed to draw players in. The only thing to do is accept it for what it is.

jalmari.3906:

ohhai hunam gaurdian here

never going to use anything else than shelter or in rare occassions signet. maybe it’s a secret but shelter in many times effectively heals you more than any other healing skill when you take in account that you also block attacks at same time while giving them nasty burning and retaliation.

hunam racial skills are not really very useful in general.

The hounds cause burning on basic attacks, at least that can be used with the trait to give 10% more damage.

It’s not much but it’s something. Asura probably have the best utilities for us, but as a profession our weakness is in our ultimates (forgot what they are called in this game)

Wolfheart.1938:

@GSSBlunaspike:
Well, basically we are saying the same thing. Races aren’t supposed to influence your profession choice, but they may do.

Of course, I was just being a bit funny the first time. Though I suppose having to explain it means I faied =(

I think that they really went in a bad direction with racial abilities. I wish they would improve them. I don’t like that some racial abilities are simply better than others, and some racial abilities are in fact better than profession abilities. I originally thought that they would simply make racial abilities be cosmetic in nature. Similar to the asura aoe racial abilities simply being how asura aoe’s looked.

I’ve seen some posts about the change that was put in. I honestly didn’t even know it existed when I did this with my build so I never took advantage of it. I’m still capable of soling it with the builds I put into the first one. Same everything as the first time.

For those that don’t know apparently there was a glitch where you could stall the first plunderer and the others wouldn’t spawn. Each time I soloed it I had all 3 plunderers spawning on me, so yes it’s still entirely possible to solo.

chaosmesmer.9857:

Hey fellow guardians, I’ve been meaning to try out a new build lately and wanted to know the viability. To date, I’ve been running a AH build 0/0/30/30/10. Soldiers Armor, Zerker accessories/weapons. (Mainly, Hammer/GS/Staff) and its been great.

But how well would a MF build do in comparison? Without changing too much gear (just runes, sigils), trait-wise 10/30/30/0/0 or 0/30/30/10/0 and using mainly 1h weapons – sword, scepter, shield. How much survivability is lost? and is the drop in survivability made up for in the increase in damage, DPS and power?

As some context, I mainly play WvW, with some dungeons and PvE on the side. I rarely delve into fractals.

Thanks

Edit: MF = Monk’s Focus

Yeah, I think most of us know what MF means….obviously not everyone =P

It offers superior healing in smaller groups.

For a look at the numbers MF heals for 1960 with .4 hp. So if you run with 100 hp it heals for 2000 health when you use a meditation. You will run the 20% cdr on meditations so 16 seconds on smite condition. It puts JI on a 36 second cd.

That is a video by stunningstyles running a build similar to the one you are talking about.

The thing about the meditation build is that it’s designed around killing, where as the AH build is designed around sustaining. The Meditation build heals for more (and deals damage) in solo/small groups, but the AH build gives a huge amount of healing when you can get your buffs onto a group. The downside to AH is you sacrifice damage for the sustain.

Both are good, but again they have different jobs. I’m not going to try and tell you which one suits your play style better. That is something you will have to decide on your own.

As for builds you can run with something like stunningstyles has in his video, I prefer the 0/30/30/10/0 build because I can pick up shout cd making my SYS! on a much lower cd.

As for traits you will want IV, X, XI in radiance. This gives you 15% more crit chance on your one handed weapons, 5% more damage on your sword skills, and Fury when facing 7 out of 8 professions in the game.

In Valor I, and XII are pretty mandatory. The last one is entirely up to you depending on your play style. You can get the extra precision debatable if it’s any good, you can grab group toughness (won’t be of much help since you will be solo/small group roaming), passive condition removal is a great choice since you will be taking shelter.

For your heal, you will take shelter. Every time you block you gain might, 2 seconds of blocking every attack + the heal is great. Use it proactively. If you see an opponent going in for something big, block it. You will learn when to block with time.

You can switch out shoulders/gloves/boots for zerker gear. It isn’t expensive and it will give you a boost in your burst.

AS for the healing MF will heal for 2k every meditation with 100 hp, AH would heal for 79 per boon. Roughly it takes like 25 boons to equal one meditation heal. Now that is a ton in a small group. With 2 people that’s ~12 boons over that time, with 3 people it’s only 8. At around 3 people it offers more heals to go with AH. AH outheals the hell out of MF in a group setting. Now this changes a bit if you go with any Magi gear, and I’ve found there is a sweet spot with celestial rings, a few celestial gems that can get you more hp while taking a relatively small hit to burst damage. If it’s worth it is still something I’m experimenting with.

Edit:

If you look at the forums you will kind of find Guardians are split into two groups. The first group is more dps oriented, this would be what most MF Guardians are in. The second group is more defense oriented, and this would be what most AH Guardians are in. Neither is exactly better than the other, as each offers it’s own strengths and weaknesses. They are just different play styles, with different objectives in mind.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Signet is generally best just because of Signet Mastery making it 32 seconds, and the fact that there isn’t really anything good in that line short of Radiant Power (which is still basically mandatory). Prayer to Dwayna is an average heal but it’s nothing special compared to the signet’s near-full heal, and is only 2 seconds faster CD. Even comparing 30 seconds to 40, Signet is generally better just because it’s a large burst heal. Guardians typically only need to heal once or twice a fight, tops, anyway, due to their natural regeneration and high innate defense.

Wait..what?

Radiance has some of our best trees. Inner Fire is amazing. Now Zeal, yeah that tree needs a rework. It’s almost entirely useless. Fiery Wrath is good, but it’s debatable on getting more for those 10 points in another tree.

Inner Fire is decent only if you are in a dungeon where you stand to get burned a lot, i.e. CoF. It is pretty much useless elsewhere. The only other good traits short of 25 points are Blind Exposure (average) and Powerful Blades (only if you are using a sword). Otherwise you just take Signet Mastery and Inner Fire and forget about the rest.

I also think Zeal has better traits than Radiance. It’s just that Radiance has Radiant Power and RH Strength, both of which are insanely good. There’s no reason to go 30 in Zeal, but there’s not really any reason to go anything short of 25 in Radiance either.

Honor is probably the best line in terms of overall trait selection.

This conversation would be much easier if my posts would stop being removed. This is getting annoying. I’m not putting anything bad in them, and yet they continue to get deleted.

This is about the third time it’s happened, and only on the Guardian forums. O.k. rant over.

I pointed out in my post that out of the professions available Thief is the only one that doesn’t cause burning. The others do with a good frequency. Inner fire also has no icd. Meaning you can gain 100% fury uptime from it. Then of course their is RHS/5% damage with sword, which is a staple of most burst builds because of the massive amount of burst you can get from a fc5/gsww/sword 2/3 or AA chain combo.

Remember that sword chain has a 3.1 coefficient only if all of the projectiles from the third part of the chain hit. If they don’t you fall down below zd which has a 2.65 but can hit them as they run away. Shield of Wrath (focus 5) has a 2.5 coefficient on it. With proper timing the burst is really strong.

Shown in several videos, two on the front of the forums.

I guess I should say that Radiance has some of our most important talents for burst builds. It’s different if you run a bunker build I know,

tom.7468:

Direksone.3867:

So when are we getting a nerf for this?

Never. i finished so its possible.

II think he meant that it should be nerfed when there is more than one person. Right now it’s incredibly easy to solo, but much harder with one person. It increases with difficulty because of the lazy “more hp, more damage” philosophy that Anet seems to have adopted from WoW>

Elbegast.6970:

Gery.2718:

Grimwolf.7163:

RainbowSyrup.4130:

why do I have a feeling 80% of the ppl voting for kiel only votes for her for the cheaper waypoints?

More likely, the majority of people voting don’t use the site and have no idea what either is actually offering, and simply like the person they know and view as the “good guy”.

Did you know if you talk to Kiel or Evon INGAME you can ask them what they promise?
If people can’t read, it’s their problem, but it’s not an excuse for why Kiel is winning.

Personally I think ppl vote for Kiel because it’s “against RNG boxes” and not really because of cheaper waypoints. On the other hand, most Evon supporters are voting for the fractal, which is more stupid imo, maybe Abaddon sounds better, but it doesn’t mean it will be actually better.

Since we don’t know the true numbers, Anet can chose whichever candidate they want. Maybe they’ll be honest with the election, maybe not. We will never know. The only thing I know for sure that whichever candidate wins, the other party’s biggest supporters will cry and whine about it and will accuse arenanet for cheating…

Of course ANet will cheat. You don’t honestly believe that the players have any real influence on the outcome of this election, do you?The outcome was decided weeks ago. That’s why Facebook’s vote count appears to be so close and why you cannot view the vote count in real time in-game. It’s all a sham meant to draw players into the game to grind for hours upon hours in hopes of deciding the fate of Tyria.

And you guys bought it…hook, link and sinker.

It appears some people do…which worries me greatly for the future of this world. I would be curious to take a poll on how many of us have an education and believe this is a real “vote”.

Yeah the facebook exit poll was a real give away. Those exact numbers, yet completely opposite to the numbers people are showing in game. For those that don’t know you can link your support buttons.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Votes so far:

Kiel – 1,249,185 (52%)

Evon – 1,153,093 (48%)

While these early exit polls are not indicative of the final result, it doesn’t mean that Evon supporters are done. It just means we’ll be buying a lot more votes.

Please don’t bother. The winner has already been decided in advance so that the living story could be made. This was a clever tie in to make the players think they have a say, but I think most of us are smart enough to see through the illusion.

To give an example though I recently did my own test by standing there and asking people to link their support buttons, not the tokens but the actual buttons that show the vote. 1153 for gnashblade to 237 for kiel. Sure it’s only one server, over 1 hour so it’s not scientific at all. I know that, and yet I’ve not seen more than a few people that are actively support kiel over hours of play. The majority seem to get enough to get her achievement, and then that’s it.

Maybe Borlis Pass is just heavily leaning towards Evon Gnashblade, and the other servers are equally tilted in other directions. I think that it’s far more likely Anet has decided the winner in advance in order to keep their schedule for the living story.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Signet is generally best just because of Signet Mastery making it 32 seconds, and the fact that there isn’t really anything good in that line short of Radiant Power (which is still basically mandatory). Prayer to Dwayna is an average heal but it’s nothing special compared to the signet’s near-full heal, and is only 2 seconds faster CD. Even comparing 30 seconds to 40, Signet is generally better just because it’s a large burst heal. Guardians typically only need to heal once or twice a fight, tops, anyway, due to their natural regeneration and high innate defense.

Wait..what?

Radiance has some of our best trees. Inner Fire is amazing. Now Zeal, yeah that tree needs a rework. It’s almost entirely useless. Fiery Wrath is good, but it’s debatable on getting more for those 10 points in another tree.

Elbegast.6970:

Steampunk garbage.

Whoa there, I like steampunk. Alot, but this I’m not so sure even qualifies as steampunk.

LetoII.3782:

It’s a fairy wand that shoots big pink puffballs and fists people.

What is? That sounds pretty kitten cool. Would love to use something like that on my Charr.

LordByron.8369:

Astralporing.1957:

LordByron.8369:

Its also strong in WWW and PvP and seems to not risk nerfs……for some reasons.

Because they are pretty much the golden standart for class balance already. There’s no reason to nerf/buff them too much (besides some minor tweaks here and there).

tell me whatever you want but don t put the words balance, PvE and guardian in the same sentence…

A Golden standard in balance don t let you ignore 99% of game mechanics.

Um…what? If you mean the group stability then your problem isn’t actually with guardian. Instead your problem is with the devs who have an over reliance on mechanics negated by stability to create an artificial difficulty. Once they start actually developing challenging content that isn’t based around gimmick styles then you will see the real problem that the rest of us have. That problem isn’t with the guardian, but it’s inherit in the way the game is designed. Movement is supposed to be the pinnacle of combat for this game system, yet they continue to contrive ways to deny that from the player. Guardians have a way to restore that balance, thus negating a good deal of the challenge.

As seen with the new trials (ridiculously easy to me) they’ve fallen back again to the standard blizzard fare of “more hp, more damage” difficulty. I would encourage them to consider some of the interesting things they did with gw1 that made it so much fun. The enemies you fought in many ways acted like players themselves. Yet it seems they’ve entirely forgotten what they did in gw1 to make the “difficulty” so much fun.

Anyway just my perspective on the entire thing. Again though if the other professions had class forums like ours they would be in a better spot. Fewer QQ posts about how “we can’t do this, or we can’t do that” and more “o.k. lets theory craft this stuff till we know everything”.

I think it’s because Guardians have seen a number of buffs the past updates.

A lot of people like (good) shiny new things, and buffs are one of them. (The guardian is also a shiny good thing )

It’s a lot like the Necromancer buff, and when a lot of people made Necro’s to see how good they were with the new change

I currently use a terror necro, and I can tell you that for the amount of control I have their damage is crazy. Does that mean it needs a nerf? No, what it means is that the game needs to evolve better to provide more accurate forms of counter play similar to league of legends.

Korval.3751:

Blissified don’t listen to ANYONE. The best advice anyone can offer is situational builds. For example I wrote a post providing Trait, Weapon and Skills that are helpful for Trials T4. But they are not the best bestest in the best kitten world! They just worked really well for the instance.

We have one on these forums too. You should repost there. I’m not sure if any guardian soloed it before I did, not that I personally care, but I did create the thread on it for a reason. I want other guardians to see the different builds that can do it easily.