Guild Wars 2

Human (fem), Norn (fem), and Sylvari are all quality aesthetic choices.

Having a mechanic that clears conditions on foes in exchange for damage/effects would be an extremely thematic element and provide a lot of team support.

Consider with me for a moment.
A mechanic that causes ~100 damage per stack of conditions removed from an enemy. Load someone up on conditions, burn them away for huge spike damage. Provides skillful interaction with epidemic bouncing to epi, purify, then re-epi back to that foe. Fits a bit of GW1 flavor of skills that provide benefits to an enemy at a detriment. However: Revenant. So I don’t think it would happen. I’m not really sure what direction they’d go with the “leaked” concepts, so until I hear something official its going to be as likely as my own hot brew.

P/P, particularly Unload, is good because its self-sufficient. In Raids and other organized group content, you need group buffs, not self-sufficiency. You’ll be getting your Might from someone else, so you’ll have no need to ever be in P/P do begin with.

The only caveat would be needing ranged damage. Just a Pistol/x would suffice in that case.

I just looked through my post history from the past 7 months and didn’t find it, so I can only imagine the thread was deleted.

The gist was:
Staff auto grants 88-100 hps (so not necessarily 88hp per attack obv) and scales like Absolute Resolution (0.075 coefficient per second). The premise is that while Druid does their healing in a burst and Ventari + Ele have smaller, more consistent bursty heals (chunks of a 2-3k) with a smidgen of hot (passive tablet and water), Guardians could focus on the hot heals with bursty supplements. Mace heals on aa, VoR (+AR+BP) is literal heal over time, symbols are hots, Sanctuary is a hot, etc. Even Receive the Light is a bursty heal with a hot component. So with that idea in mind, Guardian healing should fill the niche of the hot healer. The reason Staff 1 works so well is because its and easily spammable, wide aoe; just like Battle Presence. Staff already has heals possible on its 2-4, and they fit the bill. Whether or not you heal 1k per second, or 10k every 10 seconds, you have the same output.

Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if all of the above was unnecessary, but I do like to explain my reasonings. Why you do something is no less important than what you do. Also, the reason I like low base/high scaling, in addition to the above, is to reward investment. Some things need a high base. Healing skills most notably because classes are supposed to be self sufficient. Outside of those things, I prefer to reward investment because of the required opportunity cost. So some skills can get a large benefit from high investment, but investment might also be from stacking multiple effects. That’s where the other paragraph comes in. Even with high investment, a proposed Staff 1 heal can’t heal for too much because you can stack it with many other small sources to get that end result. That’s where my philosophy comes into play with both Guardian as a healer (its heal potential), and the skill itself.

I much prefer having low base and increasing the scaling. When I made my own mock up for changing the staff, I used VoR as my base for hps. Without investment, VoR heals for a literal 88hps so I felt staff should be close. With high investment, you can get into the 300s, and that seems pretty decent when combined with all the other sources of healing you can put with it. Staff 1 doesn’t take a lot of effort to drop on people, so it should be close to other, similar effects.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQRBMdlG2JPHQJpYnHgXIARpYZLwSGBRtOw7mN0eaR+bBgQHA-TVCFQB7T9nq9EAmm5n1pf4YKBx3+DDU53COJAAwEEpA+aqF-w

This is not a tank build. Tanks, both in the MMO and metaphorical sense still do hefty damage. However, what this does have is extreme defense. You heal ~6k per stun break, 8k if its from a Shout. Much of that also heals allies. You also brush up against 5k armor because why not?

For what you described you’re actually in a pretty good spot. Consider Warhorn since it gives larger aoe fields than focus (but focus has defense so that’s fully understandable). I’d also look towards focusing on both burning and bleeding since it gives you a lot to work with. Earth Scepter has a lot of long duration bleeds, and the way those skills work can help offset disadvantages of the Fire Scepter skills. You might consider swapping Water traitline for Fire. Fire has extra burn procs or auto condi clear, and blind on burn, which might be more useful depending on exactly what you want to do in wvw. These will all be things you’ll find out on your own.

I’ve got a condi S/Wh Ele myself and I have a great time messing around.

Why not P/D Trapper?

Metabattle has a working condi build for zergs. Probably not nearly as useful 1v1 roaming, but depending on the size of your small group it could find enough use.

Anet was quoted (but I’m not going to dug up the quote because it was… pre-HoT? Paraphrasing instead) as saying Sigils should add additional options. Guardians, as an implied example, could take Earth, Geomancy, Doom, or Frailty to add conver condis they previously never had access to (and then DH happened to offer more perfect covers).

A build defining feature means that a build either doesn’t work or isn’t the same build without that feature. No build falls apart because they don’t have their Air or Blood on hand. The aforementioned reveal sigil isn’t a defining feature of just any random build, but it might be if it was in a Tools Scrapper for max reveal Engi. Slotting it into Meditrapper doesn’t fundamentally change how Meditrapper acts.

Semantics, but its useful and I have nothing better to do with my insomnia.

I farm xp to level my chars for fun. I’ve probably leveled 25 chars, each around 24 hours game time (my record is 1-80 just under 13 hours) without using crafting or tomes. A notable exception is tomes earned in wvw/eotm. If you have a good karma train map you can get tomes from the reward tracks at a pretty decent rate. Here’s some advice I can give:

Priority 1: AoE damage. It doesn’t matter how you get it, but sustained aoe allows you to kill more mobs faster. Every aoe weapon will suffice for single target, but the opposite isn’t always true. Fortunately for you and Guardian every weapon has a symbol, so you can choose literally anything. I personally like Sword, GS, Hammer, and Staff for their aoe capabilities.

QoL 1: Speed. Having an IMS (increased movement speed) is always useful, and you can afford to, at minimum, slot Retreat! somewhere in your bar. At worst it provides around 22% IMS. With Staff or Save Yourselves, you can reach that delicious 33% IMS, but if you don’t want to add those options you don’t need them.

Priority 2: Damage type (Power, Condi, Hybrid). The mobs you end up fighting will determine which damage type performs better. If you are are equal to or a higher level than the mobs you fight, Power is preferred. If the mobs outlevel you, then conditions win out (they’ll grant more xp up to a limit of +9 levels. 10 levels above you and you won’t apply conditions and you won’t get kill credit). I prefer to get hybrid armor anytime I’m leveling just for the flexibility, but being able to apply the conditions is generally more important than stacking a lot of condition damage (its hard to stack to useful levels early on, but once you get tri-stat gear it pays off more).

QoL 2: XP boosts. These are so incredibly useful. Buy as many cheap boosts as possible. Halloween food gives 15% and any nourishment gives 10%. The Gemstore XP Booster can grant you 150% for 2 hours, so make good use of that prime mob farming time. Speaking of mob farming, try to go to maps and kill mobs that you don’t think anyone has killed recently. Mobs that haven’t been killed start accumulating an additional XP reward on death up to an extra 250% after 2 hours, so combined with all the other xp boosts you can stack you can get some really heafty numbers. When all the starts align and you’re killing mobs 9 level above you, they’ve been untouched for 2+ hours, and you have max reasonable xp boosts, you can gain a level every 8-10 minutes. That’s extremely fast leveling only outshined by crafting money sinks and pre-earned tomes.

Have fun.

More headcanon than the 1812 Overture

Lumpy.8760:

Why should new players be punished for choosing these things without even knowing?

You’re just looking for a fight.

After just doing some math on an average Magi Ventari healer: Monk runes should heal allies for more than Water (especially if you aren’t going to spam Ventari’s Will) at the loss of 5% boon duration, and you yourself will get healed for just about the same hps from the #4 bonus assuming both are constantly procced. Sigil of Life should heal for more than Benevolence by a decent amount, but I think Water would be better than either of those. Water+Life should give better hps, but Life+Transferrence would be best for max Natural Harmony.

Ventari’s Will is the most efficient heal, so that should be the primary source of healing.

NeXeD.3042:

ill hit your button

l-lewd

Nothing changed with GS symbol except for +22% damage, so I don’t know why the uptime would be different.

lLobo.7960:

LUST.7241:

• Impact Savant: Needs to be reworked…Engi doesn’t have that many lasting stuns…especially since Gyro’s Daze was removed for whatever reason…

Purity of purpose

Your implication means nothing

I picked up a Rev to be support

I also picked it up for a lot of other things. And as it turns out, I have all of those covered over 3 Revenants. Now, without being specific to the patch notes, you can increase the support capabilities of Rev without diminishing the other roles and vice versa. Now, of course Rev has its things it’ll need to work through, but these notes don’t mean you have to invite Chicken Little over for tea.

Cerberus.5864:

Does this open up really weird builds (example below):

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQRArd7YnMbCt2gVbCmbCs3gFcBDaAEAaBxVxu4YMaDMBGBA-TxRAQBhU53NVCCgnAAC3fIiq/EQ9Df4kAQKgFVWB-e

You’d have Chill and therefore 3 bleed stacks from each:
Spinal Shivers
Deathly Swarm
Your Soul Is Mine (Rune of the Reaper + yay lifeforce?)
Spectral Grasp (yay lifeforce?)
Nothing Can Save You (Rune of the Reaper)
Suffer (Rune of the Reaper)

Would the above plus RS5+4+3 (the fear = chill = bleed) potentially be something worthwhile filling in any downtime with Scepter auto/Grasping Dead/etc…?

That’s the general idea behind one of my apathetic necro builds. GS, Rune of the Reaper and 6 shouts for full flavor. Incidentally its pretty decent I have to say. Its difficult to test out a lot of combos because the bleeding ramps up so quickly.

Its at like, 278hps traited, afk, and without hpow.

Rezzet.3614:

everyone celebrating that FT 2 now burns and ignores the fact that FT 2 had 66% damage reduced

yeah, lower power for Burning. We can read patch notes.

Straegen.2938:

I don’t know where Ricochet being buggy is coming from. After its removal, the devs made a vague statement about the bounce RNG being factor and about the “purity” of the weapon set but it worked fine.

Vital Shot: Worked as intended (wai)
Sneak Attack: Wai
Body Shot: No interaction
Unload: Wai
Shadow Shot (D/P):Teleport+Russian Roulette
Shadow Strike (P/D): No interaction
Headshot: How many people do you interrupt? 1? 4? who knows
Black Powder: 1 smoke field, but random people blinded

Ricochet was all over the place, both in interaction and damage (how do you balance for 0 vs 3 bounces?). Unload and Sneak Attack made sense as they averaged out pretty well, but Headshot could interrupt any amount of people while Body Shot just plain didn’t work. And then there was Shadow Shot where Jesus had to take the wheel.

Purity of Purpose was simple. Pistol would be single target so that SB could take over for multi-target. Ricochet was fun, don’t get me wrong, but its not needed.

Sheik

“Time passes, people move…. Like a rivers flow, it never ends… A childish mind will turn to forum posting… Young Alacrity will become Ventari’s domain… The clear water’s surface reflects growth… Now listen to the Complaints of Posters to reflect upon yourself….”

GDK the White Hawk.2604:

So, I’m not an engineer main. I barely play mine, if I’m honest. However, while looking at the traits and working on building a hybrid power/condition flamethrower build, I noticed that Juggernaut and Incendiary Powder are mutually exclusive traits. This seems like an odd thing to just leave lying around with this flamethrower semi-rework. Whaddya think? Would moving one of these traits to another slot make sense/help?

Sounds like you have a meaningful choice to make

Eponet.4829:

Something like Blurred Frenzy? CAT YEAH.

Also bolt should totally be usable by elementalists.

You have no idea how much I need Bolt ele

I dig the changes for everyone. It feels like they tried to buff things one step horizontally from meta and tweak some QoL with the rest. We’ll see some of the others eventually, but too much change at once isn’t desirable.

mrauls.6519:

I really, really hope that LB/GS becomes the burst combo I’ve wanted it to be. Balls to the wall DPS!

Friendly reminder that Burst isn’t DPS, but often is the antithesis of DPS.

toaster messiah.7320:

Patch notes claim to be targeting under-used things

Valor trait line untouched

Pick one and only one

LUST.7241:

• Shrapnel: The chance for this trait to activate has been increased from 15% to 33%. Reduced cripple duration from 2 seconds to 1 second. Reduced bleed duration from 12 seconds to 6 seconds. Fixed issues with this trait that caused it to activate at lower-than-expected rates for some skills. Updated the description to specify that this trait only activates on hit.

Sort of a nerf since the duration has been decreased…but at the same time, it can trigger more often. Don’t think this actually went anywhere other than losing 1s of cripple.

Its burstier for Grenades, but ultimately should be equivalent DPS. The big key is that its much more relevant for non-Grenade explosions.

• Flame Jet: The duration of burning inflicted on the final hit of this skill has been increased from 2 seconds to 4 seconds.

Finally. The ideal Flamethrower skill actually burns longer than the time it takes to channel like one would expect!

• Flame Blast: Reduced the base damage of this skill by 66%. This skill now inflicts burning for 3 seconds.
• Detonate Flame Blast: Reduced the base damage of this skill by 57%. This skill now inflicts 2 stacks of burning for 3 seconds.

Like the burning addition…dislike the base damage nerf. Counter productive to the “Hybrid” approach to balancing Engi.

I think, similar to Shrapnel, that they were moving the damage from power into condi to make the hybrid more palatable. And with the AA change, that’s a straight DPS increase, so the damage needed to be reduced from Flame Blast. That also means that the damage attacks 2 different kinds of defenses. Its less burst but also requires a cleanse to remove lingering damage. Whether or not the burning damage makes up for the lost power will depend entirely on your condition damage. There’ll be some breakpoints somewhere, but I bet Hybrid will end up being more total damage in the end compared to pre-patch Power.

Overall I really like the patch from an Engineer’s viewpoint. I can’t expect every patch to hit every single target, but there’s definitely a general theme for each profession’s changes and I think its pushing for an option right next to the meta

Pride.1734:

Rather than “a step in the right direction” i think this is the last cookie we will get before the next expansion. Don’t expect medkit to work anytime soon.

Are you expecting the next Expansion to drop within 3-6 months?

SB can be run as Power or Condi. Power would focus on Detonating Cluster Bomb which can be spammed for surprisingly high burst. Condi SB would focus on Choking Gas or Detonated Cluster Bomb as desired.

P/P can be run as Power, Condi, or Hybrid and is really quite flexible. Power P/P is the most common, focusing on Unload for ranged power burst and Might stacking. Condi P/P uses Bounding Dodger from Daredevil to gain on demand access to Sneak Attack while Hybrid combines aspects of both.

P/D can also be Power, Condi, or Hybrid, but Condi is seen most often. Cloak and Dagger into Sneak Attack is the bread and butter for any build along with Shadow Strike for gap opening and really good torment/damage coefficients.

naturesoul.3578:

ANet you are quick to say you listen to your community, but your actions speak for themselves, what are we to gleen from your actions to date after over a year of ignoring the thief community on this and your failure of bringing back Ricochet. By saying something is in the expansion then moments before release you remove it after a vast majority has pre ordered the expansion has a name, its called bait and switch and it is illegal. Sure you can qoute the ToS back at us, but it does not change how it was conducted from being shady and dishonest.

wew lad

I’m wondering what this might look like.

Commander’s is replaced by Seraph, but otherwise would look like this. Power goes into Condi Power and Toughness goes into Healing Power, so you’d have 1.1k Condi, 500 hpow, Precision, Concentration, and Expertise as stated.

Easy Might stacking, lots of initiative for Unloads and Sneak Attacks, Boon rip, and CC. You could always swap in Mug (which really might be the better option), and if Sigil of Agility just isn’t doing it for ya then Doom instead for a nice ~16s poison. Agility is nice for Sneak Attack(especially out of trap stealth)>Swap>Quickened Unload for bleeds and might. Also helps with swiftness uptime from Steal.

Shotgun Rifle, Shotgun Pistol, or Hammer

Hand cannon > headcanon

Years ago there used to be a Lightning Hammer build in PvE that would fight in Water for max DPS. You can also see a basis for Air+Water synergy in the traits already, so I’d want to enhance that.

As of right now, you can drop some pretty mean Ice Spikes when built for it.

Staff 1 really just needs a healing component added into its current functionality. 80-250 hps would be ideal.

Staff 2 needs a timer to auto destruct/skill flip after it reaches its max range. It could also benefit from ray targeting instead of enemy target.

GS4 is a huge outlier compared to the test of the symbols. Other than that it’s really just number tweaks I think.

Hammer and Mace could use some aftercast reductions and a few sped up animations.

I’d do that first and then see where Guardians stand afterwards.

I need ele sword. I will fite u

Both Sword and Scepter are higher dps (Scepter being higher dps for quite a long time, it just lacked comparative utility), but Mace isn’t far behind.

Like I mentioned earlier in the thread. I think Mace and Healing work best on a pve Guardian when they fulfill a Tank/Healer role in the melee party. Many of Guardian’s heals are ranged perfectly for melee and you can easily cover both of those roles with a single build style. It might not be optimal, but its certainly viable.

Also consider P/D with Dash or P/P with Bound

Zerker for higher end pve content because its a numbers game.

Marauders for everything else. You’ll lose about 9% damage, but gain around 54% more health. The damage/defense tradeoff is obvious.

Don’t feel obligated to take screenshots when we can just run the numbers through the wiki.

Specifically in a wvw context, I personally was able to keep myself and 4 allies alive under AC fire indefinitely with my Guardian. We only moved when our siege was destroyed.

I’ll admit I wrote my previous post in regards to Raiding, but the concepts can still be applied to other areas.

Guardian Healing is perfectly viable from a numerical standpoint. You can bring plenty of heal over time and chunk healing applications. Any build’s effectiveness depends on the party composition that’s supporting it. You’re not likely to see much variation if people aren’t willing to experiment, but even the top raiding guilds say you can complete raids with very different comps and builds than what they run.

As I see it, the best place for Guardian Healing is as a Tank/Healer combo. You can support a melee party on your own and cover two roles at once, allowing for other party members to focus more on damage.

And a supported Mace provides a lot of healing. You can get 4 sources of healing out of 3 skills with traits that would be common with a Guardian built for healing.

Just because there’s no/unseen representation doesn’t mean it cannot work.

Also, there’s the argument that the top 250 is not the only place something can be viable, but that’s a separate discussion.

All that extra initiative is useful for dropping a Body or Head Shot as needed, but if you absolutely need an ini dump then unload would by far be the best option. Increased damage in all cases.

I remember hating the reveal of Thief’s Pistols way back in development, but its by far my favorite weapon pair now. There’s now at least 3 distinct ways to play it, with only more on the way.

There’s nothing stopping you from playing P/P ‘rupt, it just wouldn’t be the same build as posted here. You could mix Viper and Dire or Soldier+ Dire to get some of that power for PI and make a few other changes as needed to get full use out of PI and PS.

Obviously Vavume’s build is built around Sneak Attack instead of Head Shot, so it wouldn’t have the needed Head Shot support. I did try out some variations of P/P ‘rupt in HotM and I had a great time. There’s definitely something there, if not yet fully formed.

loving this spicy rhetoric

Good to see two people are in agreement.

If only all changes were that easy.

If you had to make a budget version, what changes would you suggest both in equipment and possibly playstyle?

I’m introducing a friend to Thief, and while Condi P/P is perfect thematically, they don’t quite have the resources for Trailblazer or ascended yet.

freeman.7315:

the shady removal of the Ricochet trait

Keep telling yourself that.

Conditions will tick for partial seconds, so you aren’t losing out on any damage by not hitting thresholds.

I’m not sure if there’s a specific bug with Flaming Flurry though. You’ll have to test for the total damage itself rather than the tick count.

I like it. Close to something I drummed up for an alt account.

Virtues is a great traitline, but Permeating Wrath and Big Game Hunter actively oppose each other. Indomitable Courage would be a better choice for that grandmaster slot.