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Not really. If it sucks as bad as everyone says it does, then no one is really getting much good out of it if they use it anyways no? Staff is still an option if you want some reliable ranged capability.
Still, this gets to my point … if we aren’t meant to have good long range weaponry, why would any one continue to use long range weapons on Guardian with minimal success? Embrace your strengths. Avoid playing to your weakness.
I not being obtuse here. Clearly they want us to have some ranged ability but it won’t ever be our strength and perhaps it won’t even be good enough to consider useful in many aspects of the game.
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It seems to me that if you left for 3 months and your just getting back, it’s not so much a gear issue as it is building your knowledge of the content and practicing using your dodge and healing skills.
As far as your gear goes, it’s not all that terrible. Your armor is not optimized for speed runs but it’s pretty decent for survival. I would say it’s a decent balance for now. You might want to swap the sceptre/focus for staff. It has a bit of range that will still allow you to stand back from some bad stuff and it won’t miss (scepter bolts can miss if you didn’t know). Not sure what your traits are but a good starting point is 0/15/30/20/5
I can’t really suggest any specific changes for what you desire because it’s not clear to me that you are at a skill level where running an optimized speed run build would work for you. As a general strategy, I tend to suggest people that struggle with group content start in a heavy defensive build, focusing on keeping themselves alive. From there they can work towards something more offensive or supportive as they improve their gameplay. The nice thing about that approach is that Clerics/PTV gear has a significant amount of power so your damage will still be very respectable.
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… how about you provide a build that exceeds AH build in effectiveness for supporting role so we can all see for ourselves how right you are?
Remove trait points in Valour 30, put them into Honour 30. This is one example of many. Any build that replaces a trait that gives no support with one that gives any will meet your challenge. I don’t see how overhealing yourself is going to fit within the best support build.
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You claimed AH was the best for support build absolutely. Regardless of whatever evidence you think you provided to support that ‘fact’, your biggest problem is that practical experience of other players proves it wrong. Ignoring that doesn’t validate your claim.
We know there are support builds that don’t need AH and be even more supportive than one that uses AH. That’s not theory; people actually have these builds. They are better because they don’t need AH in addition to the heals we already have intrinsically. That overhealing is wasteful stuff and if it’s waste, it’s certainly not the best.
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If you actually presented facts and evidence, tone wouldn’t be relevant. Here is a nice fact:
If you think AH is the pinnacle of all support builds, you do it because you don’t have the skills to use or understand the intrinsic damage mitigation to dump AH when it’s not necessary.
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It’s helpful to speak in absolutes when the reality is in absolutes.
There are no builds for guardians that outperform the AH build in support period.
Respectfully, your experience is not enough to solidify this as a fact, nor does it lend itself to an objective discussion. You may want to consider that your view isn’t absolute based on the feedback of other players who do not agree with your opinion.
AH itself doesn’t support the team at all and therefore, if you want to have a discussion about the best support build, one would have a very simple case to argue it wouldn’t include AH.
Where do you get off telling me whether my experience is enough or not? You don’t know anything about my experience.
I said AH build, not AH the trait. AH build is built around support. There are many variations on the AH build it’s just simply known as AH build because it’s the trait that is the most memorable in that build.
I answered you with respect the first time, you reciprocate with an aggressive response. The tone of this post will be more aligned to your apparent favoured tone of communication.
Frankly, I get off easy telling you your experience isn’t enough because your ego isn’t a replacement for an omnipotent and authoritative view of the game. Making absolute statements that are obviously subjective and out of context brings into question your background and experience.
There are builds that outperform the AH “whatever you want to call it” as support because the necessity and effectiveness of AH are not absolutes in every situation. It would actually be stupid to use AH in a build (including support builds) for any situation where you don’t need heals above and beyond all your other intrinsic damage mitigation tools.
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I agree with that the scepter isn’t meant to perform well, we as guardians are pretty strong in melee and arguably best in damage/sustain wise. However we are not so grandly overpowered in melee that its intentional to have NO ranged option.
Then perhaps the fix isn’t related to a range weapon. If we aren’t strong enough in melee range to justify weak ranged weapons, then one could argue we need more melee strength. It’s a matter of perspective.
I’m not personally conflicted by the poor ranged options, nor am I setting any expectation that it will be ‘fixed’ either. I honestly hope that the coolness of Guardian concept isn’t downgraded through stand-off mechanics allowed by ranged combat.
It’s helpful to speak in absolutes when the reality is in absolutes.
There are no builds for guardians that outperform the AH build in support period.
Respectfully, your experience is not enough to solidify this as a fact, nor does it lend itself to an objective discussion. You may want to consider that your view isn’t absolute based on the feedback of other players who do not agree with your opinion.
AH itself doesn’t support the team at all and therefore, if you want to have a discussion about the best support build, one would have a very simple case to argue it wouldn’t include AH.
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Thanks for the response Mr. Dev guy.
I was always curious to know why certain weapons got the obvious attention over others for skins. There is certainly no short supply of super-awesome GS skins.
Interesting none the less, but again not true conditions and no one would build so singularly in stats. What I think it shows is that in just stats alone, Guardian’s health is not offset by the innate healing built into the class.
The only time the Guardian had an advantage is when stacking vitality, which shows how effective that is in keeping players alive.
I like these sorts of threads because it does give an expression of how it feels to play Guardian as the base level. I’m willing to accept your findings, not because your approach is rigorous but because it’s inline with how it feels to play a stacked vit vs. stacked heal power Guardian. Your efforts corroborate with my experience.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find similar ‘generalized’ formulas used during the development of games either so devs can establish baseline stats of different professions resulting in similar performance.
I don’t see the potential to avoid it’s attacks in PVP as breaking the weapon. I simply view it as a weapon that shouldn’t be expected to perform well in PVP, similar to the way that some people view certain weapons as underperforming in PVM.
I’m just going to speculate here but there is the possibility that sceptre sucking in PVP is an intentional effect. Anet devs write the rules on what a profession is capable of, not us. I think there has been enough hints dropped to suggest that the drop in performance at long ranges is part of the class definition.
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There are NO other builds that outperform AH in support.
Not sure this is entirely correct though I think what is worth reminding here is that it’s not really helpful to speak in absolutes. I personally don’t feel that AH is the pinnacle in a support build if that is indeed what you are trying to say. If you use your other heals, dodges, blinds and blocks, you can easily dump it and take those points into other traits that enhance typically lackluster aspects of Guardian support builds.
AH is just Guardian 101. It’s there to get your foot in the door. It doesn’t take too long to get the skill needed to get past it if you want to explore of builds that are more interesting with a different focus.
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It sounds nice. The problem I have with it is that it doesn’t really have a theme to it. You can see where all the weapons have a particular strength. This one seems to be a little of everything, You have the applied burn, a heal, a knockback/swiftness and also a cripple/fury on a symbol. It’s too much IMO.
I get that the longbow fills the long range gap but If there is a theme this weapon is supposed to fill, then I can’t tell what it is.
Um, is there a third choice? HAHA, J/K
I think if people will throw away money, they might as well throw it at me.
Just talking to a few Guardians in my guild and having a light hearted conversation about where we spend our money. mine happened to be Guardian gear. Just out of curiosity, how many sets of armor/weapons/jewelry do you have?
I will start:
ARMOR: 5 sets (Full Cleric, Carrion, Traveler, Knights and PTV karma)
WEAPONS: about 12, mostly hammers
JEWELRY: Full sets for Emerald, Ruby, Chrysocola. Some pairs of Beryl, Coral and Travelers
Maybe I have a problem :p
Heals are like anything else. You have to build them up with traits and stats to make them shiny and nice.
All the great healing comes from all the healing abilities we have on top of all the ways they can be improved through stats and traits. The problem here is just a perception one. They don’t just fall in your lap uberbuffed. You have to make a build that exploits them to get the most from it. In fact, there are a few bouncing around the forums if you dug a bit deeper or simply looked at them yourself in a build.
Despite everything I hear and read, Guardian is not an easy class to build and play properly for W’s.
Am I the only one that uses the WASD to move and the numberpad for executing attacks? Of course, I’m not playing many ground targeting attacks but that’s a very natural feeling approach to me.
Oh and yes, I have Naga. I find that you need good muscle memory and a small thumb profile to use the numberpad on it effectively. I wouldn’t recommend it over something that has a more tactile sensation to differentiate the numbers like the new Logitech one.
I have a companion pet … minipets.
I don’t think by default all norns should get pets. Not all norns by default are hunters either. If there is anything all norns should have, it’s probably some spirit totem ability to replace the summon.
I think the point that I and wish are illustrating is that a thief doing that is not relevant to the overall state of Guardians. Even though there are some instances of annihilated or on the other hand, immunity, these are exceptions. They do not represent the overall performance of Guardians. Therefore, they can’t be used to demonstrate a need for profession improvements (or nerfs).
There is nothing cyclic about this discussion. You can’t have an objective discussion about the state of anything if you wish to dwell on exceptional, low frequency encounters.
Nothing to see hear. Everyone please stop crafting. It’s worthless.
Its a supply problem when 600+ g in the forge doesn’t result +1 supply.
That makes no sense. It’s not a supply problem because it’s rare. It’s that way BY DESIGN. If it takes 600G+ with no result, that gives you a really good clue on just how rare this item is INTENDED to be. QQing that you can’t get one doesn’t make a convincing argument for change.
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1 chest
… all the tickets
/win
Too high based on what? What you are willing to pay? Not relevant. Market forces decide price for goods. If you don’t like it, don’t use the market.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of any.
I am experimenting with a 2 second passive VoJ build. Why bother?
1. It’s too short to bother removing actively
2. opponents don’t consider Guardian with burning a threat (so they tend to leave you alone more)
3. It’s long enough to give you a way to permaburn with Virtue 20.
Does it work? It has limited use roaming with one or two others. It’s pretty useless with siege or zerg.
I don’t think the thieves that do that care if you believe it or not.
Encounter with thieves are not indicative of the general state of guardians either. Presenting extreme cases is not convincing.
Sure it is, Thieves shouldn’t be able to do that to Guardians, especially bunker builds.
The general state of a profession is not accurately reflected by it’s performance against one of many professions in the game. If that was the case, then based on your thief evidence the conclusion is what … Guardians are terrible? That’s clearly not correct.
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The only enlightenment I can offer is that burning is an intrinsic part of the Guardian toolset and bleeding is not. It’s easier to work with the tools you have.
Yes, completely useless. Move along and let the people willing to rake in …err I mean, lose all their money to continue crafting.
If ArenaNet tried to cap the price of the Hunter, say at 200g, then there would be way too many people willing to buy the Hunter, but not enough Hunters.
So, what? If Hunters run out of stock, there will be eventually somebody who will loot it again and sell it, i don’t see any problem in that.
That’s not the problem that the OP is talking about. he just wants a precursor at the price he want’s to pay. I do see a problem with that.
Still, i think people have all the rights to ask for a way to obtain a Legendary Weapon that not only shows legendary luck in getting the precursor, or legendary farming skill…
Your correct. People do have that right and Anet is listening to that because they already eluded to some alternative method to obtain it. That’s what makes these threads something of a tasteless joke.
OMG no face melting perma burning build? HAH, J/K
Great work. Someone should sticky. Much more organized than the random ‘post your build’ thread. Thanks for doing this.
-Burning could remove boons on application and every X seconds after. It’d fit in with the purging nature of the condition.
Secondary effects like what have been proposed here are probably a better approach without affecting burning damage directly. I particularly like yours since it seems inline with some of the other thinking we have heard from the devs about boon hate.
I don’t think being able to keep a specific target burning for a whole fight really qualifies it as being viable in PVP. I know targets you won’t ever keep burning for most of a fight as well. Skilled opponents will not be concerned by damage from Guardian burning.
Hahahaha, people still use this argument? Okay then. Obviously everyone I’ve killed just needed to “learn to play” or whatever.
You probably think warriors who don’t use greatswords/axes are doing it wrong too, right?
Bottom line is that you can’t get enough burning damage/duration AND bunkering in the same build to support the claim that you can do significant and constant burning on an opponent to kill them without significant risk to yourself, provided your opponent isn’t completely devoid of any PVP skills or PVP focused build. Even if you can (or your opponent is stupid enough) to burn constantly, the 320 DPS you get is not much when you consider other damage-specific builds make up for that with crits and higher power and STILL get some amount of burning as well.
I would love to hear about how you do it though, just to tell myself I’m wrong. I would love to go with confidence in purchasing gear for a burning build in PVP.
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I don’t think the thieves that do that care if you believe it or not.
Encounter with thieves are not indicative of the general state of guardians either. Presenting extreme cases is not convincing.
I farmed my kitten off to get the hunter, I got up to what it’s price was when I started, now it’s 200 more g than it was.
Looks like you need to get 200 more gold then but as a warning, there are lots of people doing the same thing you are to get it. Unless you farm better and faster than they do, consider yourself in the que to buy at ever rising prices until a) more hunters hit the market or 2) alternate ways to get it appear ingame.
You regard the TP as a store where you go and buy something for a fixed price. That’s not how it works. If you don’t like fluctuating prices and people taking advantage of you, don’t buy your precursor from the TP. You can’t complain about trying to get an item through a method where the price is understood to undergo extreme, significant changes. Your expectations are simply unrealistic. I’m not trolling. I’m simply being honest to someone who appears to lack an understanding in how the game works.
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Right now without buffs, active VoJ gives 5 hits of 328 damage each second with a single burn. We are all aware of how easily this is mitigated in PVP, along with other burning applications (JI and Purge) as well.
What would happen if these burning applications were changed so that instead of one burn for X seconds, they gave X burns 9stacked in duration of course) of 1 second each?
The con is that it would be much harder to get extra burning ticks from increased duration. It would also be detrimental to have any burning increase whatsoever (unless you got 100%) but the positive aspect, much harder to remove X burns as opposed to 1.
A skilled Guardian player doesn’t get bursted unless it’s a unfortunately coincidence.
The rest of your post contradicts this final statement. Let me qualify that with the statement that guardians’ supposedly high “effective hit points” come from:
- active defence.
- good play on the part of the guardian.
The guardian has to generate the “effective hit points”. They cannot have high hit points if they get bursted by surprise or shafted by cooldowns.
Being shafted by cooldowns is precisely what I meant by unfortunate coincidence. Other than that scenario, I feel that if a player is even averagely skilled with Guardian, they should never be losing in a manner that makes them feel like they were ‘bursted’ in 3-4 hits by another player. Therefore, I don’t believe that being bursted in 3-4 hits is an accurate description for the state of Guardians.
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I don’t think being able to keep a specific target burning for a whole fight really qualifies it as being viable in PVP. I know targets you won’t ever keep burning for most of a fight as well. Skilled opponents will not be concerned by damage from Guardian burning.
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I’m sure you had a point but you certainly lost me on what it is. I’m simply identifying something that isn’t completely obvious to most people. It’s important that people don’t associate percent increases in duration directly to percent increases in damage from conditions. It’s even that much more important to Guardians because of the short burning times you get with passive and active VoJ.
I’m not advocating such a build BUT, if you are so inclined you can get an extra second from passive VoJ:
+40% from rare veggie Pizza
+10% sigil of smoldering
+30% (2 rune of flame Legion, 2 rune of Balthazar)
+20% in Zeal 20
That same would give you 10 seconds for active VoJ but make no mistake, if you aren’t hitting the 20% increases, you are missing out on that extra second for active VoJ. The warning is simply to be aware that achieving burn durations that don’t fall on the 20% marks are actually inefficient.
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Yeah, but look at the offhand skills you get with shield already … One is protection. Other is a knockback + group heal. You want to add on demand Aegis to that with a mainhand sheild, not to mention the on demand aegis you get with Virtue of Courage? Aside form the obvious “!?!?”, This isn’t even my primary hangup with the idea.
My main problem is what kind of offensive ability would you give a main hand shield? I do think there needs to be a limit to how much defensive capability you want to impart on a Guardian, even if you think their offensive capability in a certain setup should be next to nothing.
I’m a little irked by the gracious amount of stats imparted to banner warrior. 170 of anything is ALOT, too much in fact. Such ridiculous buffs do put other group sharing stat abilities to question.
I wasn’t aware that people left. Regardless, if you left on a whim previously, I don’t see anything particularly exciting that would bring you back now.
GW2Spidy isn’t realistic? Care to elaborate? It’s a pretty accurate indicator when I have used it.
Yes, I would love to see Volume. No, I don’t need it to convince myself GW2Spidy is accurate and realistic.
Nothing to fix here. You have 3 ways to get your precursor. If the fluctuating prices on the market is something you can’t handle, make it yourself or gamble the MF for it. The people selling on the market aren’t theives at all, no more than anything else you buy. They post a price, you decide if you want to buy it at that price. That’s all there is to it. Time for some people to grow up a bit.
I had to think about the brass monkey comment for a bit. LOL
I conceptually can’t see a shield main hand ‘weapon’.
It’s hard to balance duration vs. damage for conditions. For burning specifically on Guardian, I set my self the following rule of thumb:
Duration is better than CD in PVE if you have Zeal 10 and you are active VOJ. If you don’t, I think the favour leans towards condition damage. You give up alot of potential CD gaining burn duration so you better make the most of that duration with Zeal 10.
Be mindful that if you decide to try to increase burning duration with active VOJ, you must set your increase targets in intervals of 20% because burning only ticks on whole second.
A little off topic but a reasonable aside. WRT the OP, I think Virtue 5 is too good to pass up. It’s meta-build stuff to me.
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Aren’t we supposed to get a 10% damage reduction in the next path? And which class is this that can burst a Guardian in 3-4 hits? I haven’t come across anything like this in WvW… well there was this one guy that hit like a truck.. Thief then I take it. But they are super glassy if they spec that way.
You are close but, all classes can make alot damage to guardian due low health pool as example w/o being glass cannons and mantain some good defense
Health pool isn’t the only factor that affects how much a beating a Guardian can take. Effective health is a combination of armor, health regain, HP, and blocks. Every guardian gets that. In addition if spec’ed for it, you can add in immunity and damage reduction. I’m limited in my experience with other classes but we probably have some of the highest effective HP a class can have because of all of those things. A skilled Guardian player doesn’t get bursted unless it’s a unfortunately coincidence.
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Oh, it’s rubbish in WvW? Based on what?
Based on how easy it is to remove (or ignore it), how infrequently you can apply it, how difficult it is to boost the damage, how relatively uneconomical it is to focus gear into improving it over other stats.
The only applicable approach to burning in WvW is with small group tactics using boosted passive VoJ (Virtue 20 at least) with sword/GS sporting Carrion gear. That’s a very narrow application. I would love to tell you burning was worth the effort in PVP.
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