Doesnt f3 on DH got like,erm 80-90sec CD?Shelter like 40s CD?not like other classes got similar skills,right…. ?I personally dont have any problem with new elites,its way more funn lately,to meet new things to kill or to play with.
Yes, but the Renewed Focus Elite (also an invuln rofl) recharges the F3 instantly. It’s a heck of a lot of invulns for such an absurdly bursty class.
Seriously, I’ve been speaking to my guildies and friends on “enemy” servers who are all die hard WvW players and they all agree that Anet catered to casuals a bit too much and made bursty classes too easy to play. There used to be a time when we could say “Alright, that guy is their main DPS. Focus him!” but no more. It’s impossible.
Just to help you out, F3 only blocks frontal damage and worthless against ground targeted AOE.
I personally use it with male-Norn tier 3 chest, but if you aren’t Norn that could be a problem. The Inquest chest piece looks great with it IMO (http://i.imgur.com/Au91KmF.jpg).
You would get a small nudge in damage due to the small increase in power. You would cut your healing power in half, but due to the small healing coefficients it wouldn’t be that noticeable on most skills (also get a small nudge to toughness increasing your tankiness). I personally have a problem with gear that has ferocity, but doesn’t have precision to support it. I assume you are running Radiance Trait line to pick up the +25% crit chance, but if your not, the ferocity is worthless. At 30% crit chance it is okay, but not that great.
Haven’t done the math, but if you wanted gear that still had healing power, but noticeably increased your damage, it would be Zealot’s. If I’m wrong someone please correct me.
If you could get your hands on it (it is hard to come by), I think the new Commander gear would work well for what you are looking for. Good power, precision, toughness, and boon duration. IMO boon duration is going to outclass healing power.
You’re kinda missinformed. Zealots Flame is good with and without radiant fire as it’s a DPS increase on it’s own. Also focus dps is good cause you can cancel and reset your auto after the 2nd strike with RoJ and it’s a DPS gain if the bounce hits your target. You’re obviously right about cleansing flame which is a skill that might aswell not exist but oh well.
I knew Zealots Flame was a DPS increase overall, but the RoJ info is helpful, thanks (I assume this is only for mace since sword AA3 is good).
Zeal works for PvE by layering damage increases against NPCs who like to clump quickly and then stay in place. But it’s rather bland and falls flat on its face in PvP/WvW where players move out of red circle (and are probably already kiting you).
Zeal also has too narrow of a focus. It needs to reflect being a relentless zealot in pursuing foes. Retaliation-related abilities fit with that theme and work well with existing zeal mechanics far better than in Radiance. Retaliation isn’t amazing, but it does contribute some damage. Zeal would need to make Retaliation more beneficial to round it out. Zeal also needs to make symbol-based play a choice, rather than making minor traits useless if you don’t.
Like you said Zeal works great for PVE and not as well for PVP, but changing it to a Retaliation line makes zero sense. It would cripple it in PVE since Retal is worthless and PVP should not be balance around a passive unskilled benefit.
Torch and Focus are really nice strong DPS offhands (in PvE) so what the hell are you talking about? xd
Also sword doesn’t really provide that great mobility. If it would be warrior sword we’re talking about which is basicly a utility weapon maybe I would agree with you but guard sword utility is tiny, especially in PvE where you don’t use the meh projectile defense or the port at all, apart from skips.
They are good offhands, focus especially. Although I don’t understand how the 36s cooldown Shield of Wrath makes it considered a DPS offhand. Torch on the other hand is a mix. Zealot’s Flame is good, but only great with Radiant Fire. And Cleansing Flame is very lackluster in both PVE and PVP.
Our weapons are fine. Longbow should out damage a mace, since the mace is largely a defensive weapon (although it still outputs respectable damage). The sword is a fine weapon that specializes in mobility, it just falls short in damage because it doesn’t have a nice damage pairing offhand to fill in its weaknesses. If torch was rebuilt to provide a strong DPS increase in the off hand slot then both mace and sword would see a lot more play.
It will never happen, but I would like for it to stay the same animation and just have torment added to it to synergize with its other mobility skills.
DH outside of invisible trap animation bugs is a pretty readable and predictable build to play against, for example ‘good players’ can pretty easily avoid/block/reflect true shot which has a reasonably obvious animation plus even for someone that can’t spot that, there is a pretty obvious tell in that the DH will stop moving and stand still meaning they will either be casting true shot or the number 5.
If your a female guardian you have no animation what so ever for true shot and with the same cast time as an auto attack it would be super easy to bait out a reflect by just standing still. DH has some problems in the pro scene, but having an “obvious animation” on true shot is definitely not one of them.
Can someone clearly explain how a decline in server pop is an indication of WvW dying?
My understanding is that your home server by and large only effects WvW, since everything else is mega servers or guesting. So a server losing population would only happen from players quitting the game (and deleting their characters) or server transferring. But since servers only effect WvW, you would only transfer to improve your WvW experience.
The lose of population from high tier servers seems like more likely an effect from borderlands being hated so much that it artificially increases the queue for Eternal Battlegrounds forcing large guilds to find new servers.
4. It’s really crucial and this should be the first thing, which is moving Glacial Heart trait to Honor, Valor or Zeal. (It should get reworked as well but I don’t think they will do that anytime soon).
I honestly don’t get why so many people think its crucial to move it out of Virtues. As it stands now, Glacial Heart is largely a PVP trait and if you are PVPing you are most likely going to go down this line. Although it would be great if it swapped places with Retaliatory Subconscious so it wouldn’t compete against the other tier-2 traits.
In my opinion, if you really want to help the hammer out, the trait that should move is Writ of Persistence to the zeal line. Wasting an entire trait line (Honor) to pick up Writ of Persistence for the necessary ~20% damage increase for hammer sucks and is terribly limiting. If Hammer builds could pick up all their offense in Zeal, utility in Virtues, then they could have a lot more variety with their last trait line.
Skip to 11:25 in this video to see a comparison of target dummy kill times between various classes. DH is by far the worst…
You do realize that is using PvP stats with no group buffs, some of them are using food and others aren’t, and that different classes scale differently when you add in those extra PVE stats… right?
Feel the same way. Guardians have okay levels of fury, but we have no might stacking, and our vulnerability stacking is linked to Spear of Justice. Put a guardian in a raid where you have constant 25 vulnerability, ~25 might, 100% cripple, and bane signet and that is at least a 40% damage increase. Sure, some of other classes benefit heavily as well, but guardians would be back up in mid level DPS not a distant last.
/snip
40seconds Traited down from 50seconds , if you are after a more Reasonable cooldown you’ll have to balance that with the fact you can use Power weapons with it.
so i’d suggest 40seconds is low enough + -8seconds if traited making this 32seconds.
If the long cooldown is because we can use it with power weapons, it would be a simple matter of lowering the base healing and increasing the healing coefficient to make it only viable in healing builds.
Also you only have to compare it to Wings of Resolve; which with very minor disadvantages you get twice as strong of a heal on a 30s cooldown, untraited.
I just jumped into HotM to check the numbers on a Heavy Golem using Marauder Amulet. (Without any boon, just with the vulnerability RF provides for itself) Rapid Fire maxed at 6.3k with full 10 crits. But since it is really rare, that all 10 attacks are critting and since it takes a lot of time for every arrow to hit, it leaves a lot more of counterplay than true shot.
Comparing numbers to a ranger/druid without a proper dps meter is not useful anyway, since you would have to include the pet damage.
DH without any boons/conditions only do about 4.3k crit True Shots. The big True Shot damage comes from all the Guardian’s trait modifiers like max range, against burning, while in symbol, against cripple, against tether; plus might/vulnerability stacks.
This thread should be renamed to just sPVP since that is all that people are focusing on. That being said, burn and medi guardians are fine and viable options. And even within the DH line (which is balanced around both strong offense and defense) there are a plethora of different builds, since running a DH line doesn’t mean you have to run all traps and a longbow.
Honestly Glacial Heart belongs in the zeal line since it is the line with symbol traits.
It would make the most sense in the Zeal line due to the hammer’s reliance on symbols, but as it stands Glacial Heart adds very little to PVE for the hammer and the zeal line already has strong contenders for good traits (except for tier 2).
I could also see it in the Honor line, since Writ of Persistence is mandatory for Hammers and the rest of the line is terrible. I think it would be interesting if they just merge it into Honorable Staff: making the trait give 20% boon duration and 20% reduce cooldown on staff/hammer skills (having all two-handers together makes more sense, but would really hurt GS builds).
1. Make each hit with the hammer chain pulse x second(s) of protection and do aoe damage. That would improve its user friendliness in both pve and pvp. It would also make hammer valid choice for burn builds due to permeathing wrath.
2. Increase range on skill 2, damage is fine. In a perfect world it should be 900 range and ground targeted. The animation is already in the game on the revenant hammer. This would add more mobility.
3. Increase damage on skill 3 so it fits into a damage rotation
4. Increase damage on skill 4 so it fits into a damage rotation and/or make it aoe, hitting three opponents in a cone.
5. Make it possible to move while casting skill 5 and make it a fire field. Warriors use the exact same animation on their hammer so its already in the game. Why not make wards be affected by symbol traits as well.
6. Move glacial heart. This is the most important one in pvp/wvw.
All set to go. No need to overhaul something that in essence is good but suffer from long cd, long casting times and low damage which makes the weapon dull in pve and clunky in pvp/wvw.
I like these changes.
Alongside Glacial Heart moving to a different line, I would like to see the Chill-on-crit-chance removed and instead the trait modify Symbol of Protection into an ice field. If Mighty Blow’s damage is kept the same it wouldn’t be worth using for a DPS gain, but it would be worth the blast finisher on ice for the additional 10% damage reduction and Chill when attacked. Dumb or overpowered suggestion, well maybe I have no way of testing it.
Well I think it would be hard for a ranger to give up some LB skills. DH has a good set imo as well but the feel to each is quite different. DH puts everything in single punches where Ranger has more defensive options.
In PVE DH is by no means the higehs DPS choice but a fun one that still can bring some hurt.
I moved to DnT condi guardian build yesterday, tweaked it a bit to my likeing and its pretty sick.
so if you want to shine in pve he longbow is not that of a good choice if you plan on camping it.
Granted longbow camping isn’t optimal, but from my experience the longbow feels like the second strongest weapon to camp outside of the GS.
You do realize devs work late hours for balance fixing and designing new skills and you are asking it to be free?
Anet decided to offer their core game for free, that is YEARS of development time given away for free. Big picture we are talking about hundreds of hours of playable content for free, but 9 trait lines in a single game mode (designed to promote fair and balanced PVP) gated.
Elite specs were always going to be stronger based solely on the fact that they were created with the current game in mind, not 3 years ago on what they thought classes should be. They will most likely due a balance pass 3-6 months from now and bring all the older trait lines in balance with the Elite specs, but they have to create incentive to buy the expansion currently.
This must be a bug, because while I get blocks for things that didn’t used to be “projectiles” I’ve still gotten hit by melee attacks (Example snowblind boss’ ice breath is blockable with VoC DH mode). My guess is that instead of using the same tech as WoR they went with any attack that comes from beyond the shield gets blocked (which means things at max melee range could get blocked as well as non projectiles). I tend to activate it in close melee range, so it doesn’t block melee attacks. Will have to test it out tonight to see.
If you are getting hit with melee attacks while Shield of Courage is up, I would guess it is because the attack is long enough that it also makes contact with the back of your character’kittenbox. Video demonstrating shield of courage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8fo5YMUdKw
As to the others. The reason why you would want aegis to be on the front end of the skill is becaue VoC does NOT block all attacks. It only blocks projectiles. The projectile block is nice, but most of the times you want aegis it isn’t for a projectile, it is for a hard hitting melee range attack.
Shield of Courage has a tooltip error and it indeed blocks all frontal damage not just projectiles.
While this would indeed be a QoL change, it cannot be done without exploits involved. Any skill that would have a benefit during the casting period of the skill would allow a player to interrupt said cast in order to receive the benefits at a higher frequency than intended. This would then require internal cooldowns to prevent such events from happening. These internal cooldowns may not properly sync with the original cooldown of the skill. Alternatively, Dragonhunter’s Virtues would have to become instant cast which defeats ArenaNet’s desire to have offense-oriented Virtues.
Imagine for a moment all of the runes in the game with the “when you use a heal skill” ability. These rune effects have a cooldown of 10-20 seconds, and the majority of healing skills in the game have a cooldown greater than 10 seconds. If players could interrupt the heal and still receive these benefits, it would create several balancing issues. Thus, ArenaNet would have to increase the internal cooldown on runes which would break the balance for professions with short-cooldown heals. The same could be said about the “when you use an elite skill” runes.
The above examples are the same reasons both Shelter and Renewed Focus lose their healing and recharge effects respectively when interrupted (either by self or by crowd-control effect). If the player receives a benefit, the skill should not receive the interrupt cooldown.
My understanding is that the new Virtues don’t have interrupt cooldowns associated with them currently, so they wouldn’t be exploitable like you mentioned.
Some classes don’t have access to protection at all (like warriors) and yet guardians gets freaking 7 sec for a trap on 24 sec CD (when traited) along with several other sources of protection)
The rest I explained.
Warriors are about passive defenses and raw stats, guardians are about active defenses.
Warriors have 19k health baseline vs Guardians 11k health. Even with protection up 100% of the time it would only increase a guardian’s effective health to ~15K.
None of the weapons left fit a runepriest, but warhorn seems like a logical step for the next Guardian weapon and wouldn’t be completely out of line for a runepriest.
I’ve placed traps a couple times and they didn’t go down. In particular I had a problem in one specific area in HOTs … I wonder if its a terrain problem.
I played a Charr ranger for a little while and it always felt a little bit off, due to the industrial and war focus culture.
I would recommend Sylvari. The guardian is suppose to be “devoted fighters who protect their allies and smite their enemies by drawing from the power of their virtues. True guardians are brilliant tacticians and selfless defenders who know when to sacrifice their own defenses to empower their allies to achieve victory.” Which I think fits fairly well with the communal and bonded nature of the Sylvari.
But more importantly, you wont be accessing your Dragon Hunter trait line until 80. Which is when you are turning to Heart of Thorns content and it makes thematic sense for a Sylvari Guardian; who after watching his people get corrupted by Mordemoth, decides to rededicate his life to that of a Dragon Hunter, in order to slay the Elder Dragon and save his people.
Personally I play a Norn Guardian and as a DH I look rather ridiculous holding my toy-sized bow and using Wings of Resolve to bunny hop around.
/snip
So ya core guardian could use a ton of adjustments or even improvements to encourage build diversity.
Don’t disagree, but you can go to every class forum here and see the same complaints for every single class in the game. There are countless worthless skills/weapons/traits/utilities and in comparison to other classes Guardians have on average a higher degree of build variety and utility/weapon choice.
Really guys, just dodge it? Every time there is a DH QQ thread, there is a horde of “L2P L2Dodge noob” comments.
Thus far, we’ve been instructed to dodge (1) true shot (4s CD), (2) hunter’s ward (45s CD), (3) dragon’s maw (60s traited), (4) ToF (24s traited), (5) and Spear of Justice/Hunter’s Verdict (~20 s).
If I wanted to dodge all of these, I would need 7.6 dodges in a 20 second period. Instead, I have 2 dodges in this time period (or 4 if I’m starting fresh). That means at best I can dodge 4/5 of your true shots (hooray), but facetank hunter’s ward, dragon’s maw, ToF, and Spear of Justice (did I mention heavy light?). There is a reason everyone and their grandma is rolling a DH.
TLDR; You can cool your jets with the L2Dodge rhetoric.
Personally I would suggest: reflect the true shot, walk (slowly) out of the hunter’s ward, dodge the Dragon Maw, eat the Test of Faith initial damage, and stability the Spear of Justice.
Or, use your class’ unique mechanics of charge/stealth/pets to neutralize the traps and put so much pressure on the DH that they can’t stay on their bow, alleviating the true shot damage and hunters ward (although HW was never really a threat).
That would be awful. It’s already possible to cap burn duration with only a little bit of Viper gear. We don’t need more burn duration this would just kitten condi guards.
I’m unsure how this would hurt condi guardians. They would lose 15% damage on burns (their burst; odd to say for condi damage), but if they are getting an extra tick on their burns their overall DPS would be higher. Although the GM trait would have to give a tick to all your burns, so a flat % wouldn’t work.
I’m sorry you just don’t understand damage multipliers at all. In the first place again you can cap burning duration as it is right now so another 15% would be completely wasted. And let’s say you use it for that last 15% it’s still much less damage than a 15% burning damage increase. On one hand you have 185% duration burning with 15% increased damage. On the other we have 185% duration with 15% increased duration. The difference is 212.75% damage vs 200% damage making duration much less.
I never said that if it was changed to +duration it should stay the same percentage, I specifically said that a flat percentage wouldn’t work. But I think a change to “1s increase to all burning damage” would, because it would guarantee a tick of damage for all your burns.
Assuming a proc of your passive Virtue of Justice = 350 damage x2s = 700 total damage. Currently Avenging Wrath gives 15% increase so it would add 105 bonus damage for a total of 805 over 2s. By changing Avenging Wrath to a 1s duration increase, it becomes 1050 damage over 3s. This would be a 30% DPS gain, but it would stretch the damage further over time thus keeping it somewhat balanced compared to the current Avenging Wrath. Since burns now stack in intensity (capping is irrelevant) this is a straight DPS gain and synergizes better with Fiery Wrath, Radiant Power, and Inner Fire.
Overall this is the same argument you can have over sinister vs viper gear. Sinister is going to give you an earlier DPS gain, but will ultimately become much weaker the longer the fight persist.
Also, I agree that keeping burning capped on berserker guardians is already doable, but it falls off easy in some of the harder content and especially in PVP.
Now onto the real stuff:
I’ve played Guardian in every game mode since launch. Movement is not a huge issue. However, it’s worth mentioning is an intended weakness of the profession. Just like Revenants with condition removal or Thieves with active defenses, Guardian has a weakness in mobility. However it’s extremely easy for the Guardian to overcome that weakness. Even if you don’t want permanent Swiftness, you only need 75% uptime to equate +25% movement speed. After that, we have all the combat mobility of blinks and to a lesser extent leaps. It’s not as huge of an issue as it’s being made out to be.
I feel like if you can make the argument that lacking 25% movement isn’t that big of a deal, then the counter point, that having 25% movement wouldn’t be a big deal would also hold true.
I think thieves are in a bad spot right now and I wouldn’t suggest a nerf, but how can Anet watch footage like this and think, hey this looks like fun; lets create a class that either evades all damage or gets instantly nuked if they ever stop jumping all over the screen.
That would be awful. It’s already possible to cap burn duration with only a little bit of Viper gear. We don’t need more burn duration this would just kitten condi guards.
I’m unsure how this would hurt condi guardians. They would lose 15% damage on burns (their burst; odd to say for condi damage), but if they are getting an extra tick on their burns their overall DPS would be higher. Although the GM trait would have to give a tick to all your burns, so a flat % wouldn’t work.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think there is any reason to take Retaliatory Subconscious (RS), if you also take Hunter’s Determination (HD) since they overlap and RS will only give a little of retaliation.
I used to think the same thing, but honestly the cooldown on RS is shorter, so after a while there may not be as much overlap. It’s honestly hard to benefit from Unscathed Contender in PvP since it just takes 1 hit to remove aegis. Might as well run double aegis.
What’s the internal cooldown on Hunter’s Determination can’t find it on anything.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think there is any reason to take Retaliatory Subconscious (RS), if you also take Hunter’s Determination (HD) since they overlap and RS will only give a little of retaliation.
Personally, I think the DH is great in both PVE and PVP. The longbow is a nice addition especially in the new HOTs area and actually having some threat at range is great for PVP. The trait line for DH is pretty strong and has some interesting traits for both damage and defense. The new Virtues take awhile to get use to, but are incredibly strong. Traps are a nice change of pace and add some real damage to our otherwise defense-oriented utility bar.
For PVP, the overall consensus I have heard for DH echoes the other posts above me that DH destroys newbs, but suffers against high skilled players. But, I personally think the trap builds will slowly disappear and the new DH medi guard will be a strong competitor.
Amplified Wrath is good, but only really shines with a condi build. A change from +burn damage, to +burn duration I think would be more helpful to both condi and power Guardians since you would have higher uptimes for your other “while burning” traits.
Perfect Inscriptions isn’t that bad of a trait, but I think it only illustrates how underwhelming our signets are compared to other utilities; which I think is a positive for our profession.
Radiant Retaliation is such a bad trait, since the only build that would pick this up is a condi build, but a condi build will always get Amplified Wrath over this. It would make more sense if they made it scale from toughness for Knight’s armor wearers, but it would still be in the wrong trait line.
I run a Norn and I can guarantee we have a kneel animation. Which by the way is far more obvious than a humans.
See, this is the problem with DH players defending an obviously overpowered skill. They have no clue what they’re talking about. This is a norn casting true shot. Looks like every other bow animation. Don’t know if male norns do it any different so please post a screenshot if so.
No, just looked it up … all males have the kneel animation while women don’t. Race doesn’t matter. Although due to height differences the kneel is hard to tell on asura and charr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEzicX2NeoM
except they DO have a kneeling animation and a bit of a wind up cast time.
No, it doesn’t. Only the humans do a sort of kneeling animation for like .0000002 seconds before casting an 8-10k attack that pierces and is on a 4 second cool down. Not sure why only the humans do it but the other races don’t kneel.
The animation needs to change and become super obvious, casting time increased, and cool down increased. Right now when I use DH it’s such easy mode that I feel bad running the spec since it’s the FOTM for guardians.
I run a Norn and I can guarantee we have a kneel animation. Which by the way is far more obvious than a humans.
Shield of courage blocks all frontal damage, not just projectiles and according to tooltip still applies Aegis to 5 allies.
Overall really like the bow and more importantly I like the set-up of DH traitline. Every tier feels like there are some interesting options that have a real impact in gameplay (especially compared to a trait line like Valor).
Looks good to me. I think the mace has a weird fit with the build and I believe you would be gaining more pressure with a longbow, but that comes down to playstyle. Judges Intervention also would provide a little more movement/utility for you and has 12s lower cooldown compared to Contempltion of Purity (you already have crazy amounts of condition removal). But again, it comes down to playstyle.
so yes Choose. changes , no peircing , lower damage, higher cooldown and or A real Visable Animation ether or something must change.
ps you’re not my mother comment is childish even beyond my commnet which is Constructive.
Make True Shot not pierce: Still going to wreck in single combat like it is now and get complained about.
Increase the cooldown for True Shot: Still going to wreck in combat, but at longer intervals, *cough rangers Rapid Fire.
Give True Shot a super flashy animation that you can’t miss: Still going to wreck if your CC, in a large group battle, or just not looking at the guardian for 1s.
Lower True Shot damage: Great everyone is happy … except for the Guardian that is better off auto attacking since the mobility is worth more than a minor DPS gain *cough sword #3.
