Guild Wars 2

Jimmyup.5236:

Shields are infinitely better when you fight in groups.
Small scale I would say focus is better if you want survivability.

This guy basically nailed it. Warrior an Engineer shields are meant to defend themselves mostly. For Guardians, we’re alnost sheilds incarnate, so our sheilds are sheilds^2, we use them to protect others plus ourselves. The focus now mostly protects ourself, whereas another’s focus is only a “slight” defensive help, instead of a main one. We move defence to the next level. Thats how Guardians roll.

Jimmyup.5236:

Shields are infinitely better when you fight in groups.
Small scale I would say focus is better if you want survivability.

This guy basically nailed it. Warrior an Engineer shields are meant to defend themselves mostly. For Guardians, we’re alnost sheilds incarnate, so our sheilds are sheilds^2, we use them to protect others plus ourselves. The focus now mostly protects ourself, whereas another’s focus is only a “slight” defensive help, instead of a main one. We move defence to the next level. Thats how Guardians roll.

In the spirit of making things simple, it would be easiest to just recycle weapons, animations, etc than to make completely new ones. Now, Orbs of Wrath, as far as I remember, aren’t actually projectiles, which gives them some uniqueness and usability along those lines. I’m not sure if I want those orbs to be/not be projectiles. Projectiles would give them an expected 20% finisher as per nigh every projectile auto attack, but would also make them affected (rather negatively I might add) by such glorious things as our own Wall of Reflection.
Now, the change that possibly would make the lest functional/visual difference would to keep everything as-is, but add piercing to the attributes, possibly making enough of a difference to account for the slow travel speed.
After having just read a “staff needs changes” thread, we could also try giving the scepter Wave of Wrath, but give it more of a Zealot’s Defense or Whirling Wrath (GS’s #3, I refuse to use GS for the moment) projectile functionality and animation. In my mind, it would work like an in-between of the Zelot’s Defense projectiles and Elememtalist’s water dagger (at least i think its for dagger, the one that leaves and returns, causing vuln. each hit) auto attack. Single direction, 1200 range, maybe/maybe not literal projectile, possible effect on hit (like a condition or what-not). The only question then, is how would we fix the now stolen soul of the staff #1. It couldn’t be a wave so much anymore, though we could make it into the orb launcher, 900 range, orbs explode on contact and do an aoe effect (like staff’s current #2, but geared for auto attack, but then what would staff’s #2 be? Anet could make another change like they did to add Empower, to help give staff a more solid identity, but I digress…). They could also just make the current scepter orbs explode, or have a 3 hit chain, with exploding, booning/conditioning 3rd hit?
Theres quite a few possibilities they could try, just by identifying an unfilled niche in “soul” and recycling current animations and whatnot.

Now for longbow…
I for one am a fan of Guardians possibly getting a longbow, but that’s about where my pondering has stopped. What would actually make the longbow (or any other currently used weapon) special to the Guardian? Not only does the Guardian’s Greatsword need to be uniquely purposeful compared to the Guardian’s Hammer, but the Guardian’s Greatsword needs to be unique to the Warrior’s Greatsword, or the Mesmer’s Greatsword, which they currently are. Same for the longbow. Now, the easy idea is for it to cause aoe fire/ burning. Wonderful! Guardians love burning, and (full) weapon based ranged aoe is something we don’t have right now (we don’t have a weapon designed around it, even if we have Smite and an Elite). Great, let’s impleme- but oh wait, Warriors stole that idea already. So what now…, single target pure damage? No, Rangers do that with their longbow. As far (and as little) as I’ve thought about this, I can’t really think of 5 skills that give the longbow an identity, synergy, and that doesn’t feel like blackmarket rip-offs of the other longbow ideas. Hopefully Anet will know what to do by the time they decide to gives us something shiny and ranged to play with.
tl:dr Suck it up and read it dangit! (and think like a dev too!)

30s Swiftness
5sec Quickness
Increases aggro range by 150%
Reflects incoming damage to all nearby allies for duration of shout
30sec recharge

Provides full stack of Poultry Meat in inventory. If inventory bags are full, Poultry Meat replaces most lucrative item as per Black Lion Trading Co information.

At first I though, “Meh, this won’t be too whatever of a thread”, but then, cruising around a bit and watching the video, that mod, or a similar implementation of it, would make combat like another game I recently played, the never mentioned DDO, or Dungeons and Dragons Online. This game has been awarded “Best combat in an MMO”, and to be honest, it’s fantastic. That mod, from what it looks like, nigh exactly mimics it, the only difference being the Shift key doesn’t block attacks (The blocking only adds ~1 number to the blocking and damage reduction values unless built for tanking, which could be roughly equated to something like, 5% reduction. Anet could implement it in a way that roughly mimics the effects, and could then give every class an active damage reduction (or block, or make something work. Also in DDO, attacking while blocking performed a shield bash)).

tl:dr, +1, implement the mod, either support or Anet’s own version that does exactly this, optional of course

I’m of these opinions:

1. Yeah, it’s fairly annoying when even in melee, I’ve ran into mobs that just want to say, “Hold on, I wasn’t ready.” or “I bet you can’t do that much damage a second time” and decide to repath to their spawn point. An easy fix would be similar to waht I say in GW1 when you could attack a mob that really did have no chance to damage you back, run away. It makes sense in a common sense standpoint and should avoid a possible concern to aggro mobs into an area (like what runeblade mentioned), but farm them instead. They run away, and continue to run away until you can’t hit them any more. Then the natural rejuvenation takes over and things are otherwise reset.

2. I do think mobs should chase after one close to death, but they should also realize when they’ve left home. Once they’ve gone a certain distance from their spawn point, they should turn back to avoid a “real world” fear of being ambushed on the pursuit.

3. Here I think the spawn rate is mostly fine. Sometimes I feel it’s a bit too quick, but runeblade has a valid point on timing. Too fast and it overwhelms the player(s), too slow and event x may take too long.

Basically, just change the invuln. and repath into reverse aggro. Have the mob run away until the mob either doesn’t take damage, or until the player moves into attack range/-ability.

Rainydays.5368:

okay, so Aegis lasts for what… 9 hours I think? You can’t have a buff like that stack. Just keep hitting the virtue on cooldown. 90 sec.. you have 9 hours to stack a ridiculous amount and go solo a Dragon. Something like that happened in WoW vanilla a long time ago. I can’t remember what the skill was, but Pallies had a way to keep stacking a damage multiplyer type of buff. And there were (maybe still are) videos of pallies killing Lord Kazzak (big bad world boss) in 1 hit of an auto attack.

Only passive aegis lasts for x amount of hours. Easy fix would be to make active aegis last ~40 secs. That would give only a relatively small window to stack active aegis boons, at most, maybe 22 secs (30 sec courage trait, +30% boon length. It’s not actually too small at all, but, that means the stacks would drop off after that time, so if you did happen to stack some, from like say, passive VoC, active VoC, and retreat, you have 3 blocks which once used (or drop off) are on cd for 30-40 secs and 60 secs).

I suspect Anet has already looked into this, and probably think its more “tactical” (and better for game health in whichever way they determine) to only allow one aegis at a time. In that way, you can’t just stack a million aegis (even if for a short time) with a group of 5 guardians and team tank a bunch of whatever trying to kill you (PvE/PvP/ WvW), though you could almost get the effect of a million aegis if you pop one right after the previous gets used. It’s all in all, probably better how it is now, though it could work.

I agree somewhat, the scepter is boring. It’s not terrible, it’s not whatever, but it is… not too distinct maybe, it’s just there. Now, I’ve used it almost since hitting lvl 7 as my secondary (up until yesterday, where I got a staff that had slightly better attributes for what I want, and that wasn’t 20 levels below my own. Once I find a decent scepter though, I’ll go back mind you).

1. At first I thought, #1 needs to be a 20% projectile combo like any other self respecting projectile looking #1 skill. That way we’d have at least one projectile combo finisher. However, after more thought, I realized, “maybe it isn’t even a projectile (mechanics wise)!” and as far as my testing goes, it isn’t. I’m now of the mind of what a few people recently posted about a chain that just has a nifty 3rd effect, like a non-exploding trident #2, or inflicts another condition we don’t have yet/much of (like a 1sec chill?). The speed is a toss up, as both faster and it’s current slow both have advantages for different situations. The traits seem to make scepter as majorly a damage dealer (scepter +5% dmg, +15% crit for pow/prec based builds), so any effects would probably have to be along those lines. I haven’t tried traiting for scepter main yet, so I’ll have to see what that looks like.

1. Smite. This should definitely become a symbol imo. After dropping my GS before level 10 at least, I’ve been 50 levels without any sort of combo making or finishing (sword+torch / Scepter+sheild. I’m not really counting sheild #5 or my utes (no one combos off my sheild #5 anyway)) I’m not sure what flavor the Symbol should have, but something that either exemplifies the scepter’s purpose, or adds to its effectiveness.

1. This one seems kind of meh, as I don’t get much use from any of the effects. The immobilize seems too short (though any longer and it would be op no doubt, I’m just not a fan of short duration anything). The vulnerability also seems not to really do much, and drops off before too many orbs hit (maybe it would work better if I traited to add vuln.). I don’t really have any ideas on what to do with this. It could be redesigned completely since they just use a generic chain animation.

I wouldn’t mind seeing the Guardian with a longbow (long over short, and guns seem quite out of place. They could even make us Cpt. America with a throwing shield, that would be fun) however, I don’t think they’ll implement new weapons any time soon. And then again, suggesting something like that would make me useless, as per vydia.

I tried Hammer out in the mists a bit ago and I quite liked the build I had. I decided to play along with glacial heart and added the chill on crit to the weapon along with the trait to see how much chilling I could get (now, the movement speed is obviously a snare that fits in with the area control the hammer has, and an added benefit of slowing recharge wait, but I don’t really have an idea of how much this helped). I do think the cd on Glacial Heart is probably a bit too high, but I don’t really have a way to see the full effect of what it does.

Now, when I heard all these complaints about the hammer’s #1 chain, I thought my char would be cooking dinner in between strikes, but honestly, I thought it was fine hitting things. You can chain #1 and #2 to give near constant protection and retaliation. Fighting each of the training professions in the mists, I didn’t even use #3-5 much at all actually (or at least, not to much effect).

I don’t know how it’ll fair with people trying to interrupt you more than the training mobs did, but so far it’s second behind sword+torch for me.

Build I used: http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.3.11.7.0.0.23.32.0.0.54.74.61.68.78.10.10.17.0.0.0.0.0.0.185.189.191.198.202.204.212.0.0.0.0.30.30.10

nah, I’ll do what everyone else does in this game, and look after myself and not care about others.
I constantly ressed people, but they dont return the favor, and to add insult to injury, you get rewarded less for ressing people so Anet are actively discouraging people from doing it.

No, you are encouraged and rewarded for rezzing. Your main reward is that you have another player back at your side. The credit and xp you get is just icing on the cake, whereas most other games wouldn’t give you that in the first place.

I pop my Justice mostly on cd, though my other virtues aren’t so effective for my spec. I do actually try to help those around me, though it usually comes from my weapon skills and wall of reflection. I rez people in between killing trash, which seems to be Anet’s intentions behind their system. do enough damage for Gold credit, keep other people alive long enough for them to get gold also. GW2 just has a slightly different style of winning, where you have a specialty, but you also do more of everything than another mmo per se.

Coming from the top of my head, I do believe each person’s burning (from say, VoJ pop or their own source etc) deals damage based on their own cond. damage. Now, when I pop my VoJ, I stack an eternity of burning on the target, but the damage numbers no longer pop up, so that may be what people are referring to when they say “overwritten”. Other than the numbers not showing for each tick, The burning still seems to be working the same as if only I had applied it. The only difficult part is determining who’s burning it’s count at a given time. Basically, it still works, it just doesn’t quite show you its working.