Guild Wars 2

I don’t think it’s reasonable to dismiss the idea because it makes us a paladin (I’m not even sure what that is). I understand the concept to realization has some gaps. Even if it mimics some other thing from another game, I wouldn’t care. If the idea’s good, then existing use outside the game shouldn’t stop the devs from considering it.

Improving boons won’t address guardians because it would affect everyone. Mobile symbols would actually improve field control (if that’s indeed what the dev’s think Guardians should be). I’m unsure why you think it couldn’t be part of a solution.

I like the idea that symbols could move with a person, including yourself if it’s a defensive symbol. I think that would differentiate guardians nicely from other ground targeting effects and boon applications. I’m still struggling with Dev’s concept of guardian … the one where guardians have some unique benefit from boons. Frankly I don’t see it but the ability to ‘move’ your AOE boons around with you would be a very interesting strategy and uniquely guardian.

I don’t need to move faster. I need my opponents to move slower.

I play mostly soloing around Orr and such. I find AH lacking. I don’t need it in many circumstances and when I do need heals, it’s not enough. I’m at the point where I’m running full zerker’s gear and ruby gems. With hammer protection, the regular heal and 2nd virtue, I don’t even need any Valour 30 healing traits.

If you are swapping between dungeons and solo farming, then yes, continue with a build that gives you the AH option. If not, I suggest you dump the idea and push a little more offense. I feel that reliance on AH for heals in the solo farming content is ignoring the active heals available to you. i.e., you have a sub-optimal farming build.

I use 6 x Flame legion because I’m one of those weirdo’s that believes in burning stuff.

I used to run Undead for the same build because it’s way cheaper but The flame legion supports burning better, even when you aren’t the one doing the burning.

If it helps put the thread back on track, I say you’re right.

Now, I’m interested in seeing some discussion about how the coefficients can be used to assess the game. I’m going to look at some hammer and GS rotations tonight and at some point, see how crit and might stacking can be worked into this approach.

The beauty of this approach is that how your geared does not affect the coefficient calculation. Perhaps if you post what numbers you used and how you put them in the equation, we could help you. I will also provide you a very detailed example that may also help you determine where you are making a mistake.

Eg 1. Hammer swing – First thing to do is make sure you are in a zone where you are not downscaled from level 80. The co-efficient calculation will not give you the same number as the OP if you are downscaled.

I use an exotic hammer that has a weapon damage range of 985-1111. That means my average hit is 1048. My hammer swing tool tip damage is 562. My power is 1740. The calculation uses 2600 armor (Not completely certain where that number comes from).

Therefore, the calculation is:

562 = X * 1048 * 1740/2600
X = 0.8

To his credit Kaptain, you can’t really criticize him … he made no attempt to characterize damage over time comparisons nor did he make attempts to assess rotations. He’s simply comparing the auto attack of the various weapons using a statistical tool. It’s probably over alot of people’s heads but it’s not wrong to do so, especially if you can properly interpret the result.

The attempt here isn’t to model encounters by introducing nuisance factors you can’t control like mobs moving, etc… That mob is going to move regardless of weapon so the bottom line is that damage comparisons that factor it out can be done without affecting the relative damage between the weapons. Yes, there are cases where it will affect your damage output. I don’t find that a particularly interesting factor in the assessment. You can miss hits with any weapon. You can face the wrong way too, get crippled, hit a blocker, etc…. Those are nuisance factors and aren’t suitably quantifiable for these theorycrafting exercises.

^^ I was also under the assumption that the co-efficient should be static as well. I don’t think it’s worth a lot of investigation. Simply a point of interest.

I guess rotation calculations can be done with the rough animation times. I’m going to make a crack at it when I have some time. I’m pretty excited about it. If you take it to sophisticated limits, you can determine very closely how swapping gear impacts your damage for trading off between crits and power for instance.

Nice. I thank everyone …

now if someone is ambitious enough, you can start theorycrafting rotations for weapons and compare them. For example, an basic hammer rotation 2,1,1 to start with. Would that work something like this, keeping in mind that we have to normalize for execution time?

1. Average = 1.375 × 2 = 2.75 (in 4.5 seconds)
2. Average = 1.75 x 1 = 1.75 (in 0.75 seconds)

2,1,1 Rotation Average = 4.5 (in 5.25 seconds) = .857 per second

Now with GS #1 rotation only:

1. Average = 1.275 (in 1.5 seconds) = 0.85 per second

P.S. I went through the calculation myself with the numbers I had just for hammer and got a different set of co-efficients than the OP. Without boring details, I discovered that they change based on what zone you are in … I was able to reproduce the same values as the OP in Lion’s Arch. Clearly, it’s the re-scaling based on level but the results are interesting.

As example, In Malchor’s Leap near Waste Hollow’s Point, I have 568 for Hammer Swing Skill damage and 1599 Power. That gives 0.88 for a co-efficient. In Lion’s Arch I have 562 for Hammer Swing Skill damage and 1740 Power, giving the 0.8 the OP got.

I later went to Brisbane Wildlands, was rescaled to level 17 and I had a coefficient of 5.96 for Hammer Swing. That’s 7.5 times better performance than the same setup at level 80. I was surprised by that.

Anyways, bottom line is that you need to do the calculation based on a common level, 80 is obviously the most applicable.

I think the argument that burning is lackluster or not is moot. Either way, it’s not a reason to call for ideas to nerf the things that support burning in the Guardian toolset. SoW could be better but I don’t think it should be different.

I agree that many of the stats on things of this sort are a lot of filler. Adding more CD or whatever isn’t really that original.

This signet does fill a niche … it’s for burning builds. Anet made a dedicated signet for that because burning is a unique and interesting approach for Guardians with lots of support. Could it be better? I think so, but I don’t think it’s made better by abandoning the intent for supporting condition damage. I would make the passive give guardians an ‘edge’ for burning, like applying an AOE cripple that only affects burning mobs.

If you want to talk about nerfing signets due to applicability, have a look at Signet of Mercy ….

Nice. I would love to see this done for sceptre. If you can you explain how you determined these, we can do them ourselves as well.

KensaiZen.3740:

Burning funnily works best with 1h sword. On the lasr chain it will trigger a burn you dobt need to go heavy inti con damage to make ut effective either as its an extra damage to your melee damage

Burning is definitely good with a fast 1H weapon. I think people underestimate how much passive burn you can get from the hammer chain as well because the symbol also counts towards hits to VoJ.

I think people like the OP and myself don’t make condition damage builds because they do the most damage. I recognize that there are much better ways to get huge damage numbers on Guardian. The challenge here for me (and I suspect the OP) was to make a decent burning build, not prove it’s the best DD you can get. Why? Because the idea that you burn stuff is pretty cool.

akamon.2769:

@Obtena – do you feel you’re lackign in toughness if you’re using all pow/vit/CD gear?

No, because I’m running a typical 0/15/30/20/5 build and my primary weapon is hammer. My toughness is low but I make up for it with alot of protection. I could have a build like 30/30/X/X/X to increase my damage, but I find it has a more narrow scope of application.

My approach to weapons is as follows:

1. I use hammer with active VoJ for PVE events. I don’t think anything beats it’s ability to tag a lot of mobs, not even GS
2. I use GS with active VoJ for general PVE farming in Orr, etc … the added might is good and I still maintain enough defense with multiple adds
3. I will use sword/torch for veteran/champion mobs along with passive VoJ.

I will admit, I don’t find burning a very good approach for dungeons or WvW. I have separate builds for that kind of content.

Sounds like we have similar thinking because I have went through all those questions before. I’m at the point where I have a all Power/Vit/CD gear with the single exception of ruby amulet. I’m not a huge fan of crits and I don’t think it will allow you to get the most from a burning build.

I didn’t ignore duration either though … I use 6 flame legion runes which gave me +15% burning but that wasn’t enough to get the 6th second tick from VoJ so I added sigil of smoldering to a hammer. It’s probably not the best choice to max my damage but it’s a burning build so it fit with the theme.

GS is nice for the might (those add to your condition damage significantly). I haven’t really liked the sceptre/torch combo but that might be a nice approach if you want to use VoJ passively. I haven’t actually used spirit weapons. I think they stink.

Alarox.4590:

The reason it’s unpopular is because there’s no point in going deep into it…

It’s like saying we shouldn’t build a bridge here because nobody tries to cross this river. That’s because there’s no bridge yet.

We shouldn’t build a bridge here, simply because the whole purpose of making this bridge is an excuse to put a pot of gold at the end of it. If the idea here is to make Zeal more appealing, it’s going to have to be alot more than one trait at 30 to do that. If the idea is to give some stronger close ranged CC, then I think something more widely accessible is a better option for that, since all Guardians would benefit from something like it.

I like the idea of expanding the close range CC capability vs continually crying about lack of long range effectiveness (I’m betting Guardians are designed that way on purpose, so no reason to cry about it). I simply think the scope of the idea presented here is trying to hard to do many things.

I speculate that a build with 30 in Zeal would hinder my ability to have a sustained encounter in PVP, so the idea that I would chill someone in close range to me doesn’t seem all that appealing anymore. If I’m looking at a boon being put into Zeal 30, I would prefer swiftness or stability, so I can choose if I’m engaging OR running away. A chill or root if in a trait should find it’s way into a more defensive stance IMO.

I would rather see class improvements as a signet or a new Virtue. Not really a point in burying it 30 points deep in an unpopular trait line.

If it’s put in a trait, I think that the vulnerability application from Rad 10 could be more useful as a chill.

I find that as much as people don’t like it, you aren’t ‘bursting’ if you don’t spend some effort on applied burns from VoJ. I think typically, a burst consists of a high crit build with 1H weapons with an air or fire sigil and a lot of finger crossing.

I think that’s a good message to take from this thread. There really isn’t some ‘best’ way to play guardian. It’s one of those classes that add something regardless of the role you choose to fill in the team. I think the divergent views on what to do as a guardian make that more evident. It’s certainly not true of other classes.

^^ Good point. Without the traditional approach to holding aggro and having healers, maxing DPS in this game means you take alot of aggro if your class is really at the top of the DPS foodchain.

My thinking on builds … I trying to have a single ‘go-to’ build for three main areas:

1. “Max” damage pushing the limit of survival for PVE farming (running a heavy CD 2H weapon build)
2. A support/damage hybrid for dungeon running (running vanilla PVT with emeralds but don’t like it)
3. Something for WvW (haven’t decided what yet … probably some glass cannon high CD/crit thing with sword/torch)

I like my builds to be a bit off the beaten path so I can feel like they have my signature on them. As example, my PVE farming build has alot of condition damage for active burning. It’s not the max damage in the strictest sense, but it’s max for a burning build using 2H weapons.

To make a build I start with and idea, take it to the extreme, then try to strip and replace parts from it to supplement areas I think are lacking for it’s purpose and balance it out.

I like the ‘sure thing’ over the ‘gamble’ so I tend to avoid crit builds unless it’s a 10/30/30 sword build.

I like to know how things work (so I don’t like Toughness as much as I like Vit)

I like fast CD’s even if the effects are a little weaker.

I don’t like circumstantial effects, so I don’t use alot of sigils and runes that proc on crits unless they really add more than any other to the build.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Base DPS of a weapon is meaningless without a build to supplement it.

For the purpose of simply comparing base weapon damage, it’s completely meaningful because it’s a relative comparison. Of course, you will have a build to supplement your real damage output as you play but that build doesn’t change as you are actively swapping weapons in a dungeon or in PvE for instance. In otherwords, it remains constant as you play, so the relative comparison of base weapon damage is relevant. Again, how do I determine from your testing how a Mace compares to a Sword in a 10/30/30/0/0 build? The relative comparison is fundamental to understanding that.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

You’d inherently be favoring one over the other by choosing to take or to not take that trait.

This statement demonstrates what I’m referring to. You are comparing builds, not weapon damage, because you have combined the effects of traits and weapons into one test. The problem people have with this approach is that you infer conclusions for base weapon damage based on optimized builds that have combine effects of traits, weapon and gear. Furthermore, those conclusions aren’t relevant if someone wants to know how a pair of weapons perform for a given set of gear and traits that may be different from your tests, though your adamant your inference does that correctly.

A simple example: How does a Mace compare to a Sword in a 10/30/30/0/0 build? I don’t see how your testing provides that information.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

As you can see, I have to optimize around pure damage because people are running stuff like PVT and running “team support” builds. It isn’t unusual for me to join a pug and find out that I am literally dealing somewhere in the range of 75% of the entire party’s damage.

In all seriousness, though, no one’s ever proven my DPS tests wrong. I don’t see where you’re getting “inaccurate” from, unless by “inaccurate” you mean “proves you wrong”.

Just wanted to respond to these two particular items:

I don’t dispute you do a lot of damage. My point was pretty simple. Guardians are conceptually a team support class. While you CAN make a DPS build, it’s not the unique awesomeness that a Guardian brings to the team. If someone is inclined to build a team and needs melee DPS, they probably aren’t gambling on Guardians. The only reason it works here is because Guardian is an easy class to carry.

I recall the discussions about the testing. As you were told many times, you biased your testing because you changed the builds to favour each weapon. That doesn’t show the damage of the weapons by themselves, leading to false conclusions about how they perform, in general. If you changed the individual builds for each weapon, then you tested damage from a specific build, not the weapon itself. If you want to have the results from individual weapons, you have to test each one on as similar platform as possible, i.e. the same build.

It’s very hard to ignore the team-supportive nature of the Guardian class when considering dungeon running builds. I think having a guardian build that is about DPS optimization while ignoring this nature is actually a deterence to any team that takes you. If you aren’t building with that support in mind, you aren’t bringing everything you can to the table and probably aren’t meeting the team expectations for what you can do for them. While the game is pretty open for character development, I think it’s very safe to say that if people are inviting you to a team, they expect you to outlast and really bring alot of boon/condition support. I never had any indication that they were concerned about my damage.

My dungeon running build is very vanilla with PVT stats, some emerald jewelry and at a minimum, X/X/30/20/5 build. I will take a number of weapons but I will start with hammer, mace/focus or sceptre/focus, depending on what I see happening in the team. Teams I go with don’t really care what my damage is when I’m slapping boons and heals on them.

Typically, the first thing I ask is if someone hasn’t done the encounter before. Hopefully that clears 99% of my own questions for the capabilities of the group. I can’t say I approve of ‘testing’ the group that is helping me succeed in the game. A couple of wipes and jerky attitudes is enough to tell me it’s not the group I want to be in.

I’m usually not a numbers guy but I do want to know if something I’m doing is going to work or not. When I reverted back from the increase, I only counted 4 ticks. I guess that first tick on the VoJ is either really hard to see because of other spam or perhaps there is no tick on the 0th second. Either way, it appears the % increase is working as it should, even though there isn’t anything to indicate otherwise.

I’m trying to increase the VoJ active burning time. I have Rune of Balthazar and Sigil of Smoldering. That should give me 25%, an increase of 1.25 seconds. When I observe the damage ticks from a burning mob, I only count 5. Is there a way to see if I’m getting this burning increase? It’s doesn’t seem to be more and the tooltip for VoJ is still at 5 seconds.

It seems a little unfocused on the non-healing stats and dependent on using #6 a lot. If the idea is to proc AH much more, it would work but then you have to ask yourself what for as your already healing with #6 to proc the effects on the rune stacking.

I don’t believe many of us are overly impressed with the relationship between Healing Power and our heals either. This would be alot more appealing if it was +Power instead of +Healing Power

I’m not really offering a suggestion how to do it but the fact that Virtues are unique to Guardians makes it a really easy and interesting way to make it that uniquely powerful thing the description implies

Off the top of my head, there are a few ways to do this. Yes, it could be traits, but I think we already have that. It could be other things like:

1. Stacking boons in a virtue (not so original and questionable since it’s boons again)
2. A special ability in a virtue that isn’t a boon (e.g. passive condition removal, a condition ‘blocker’ or immunity to fear for instance)
3. Reductions on CD’s or increases condition duration
4. damage absorbing capability or a temp boost in HP.

I feel there is room to add a virtue as well.

It really could be anything you can imagine, but the point is that it’s a Guardian thing that’s unique that can be adjusted with minimal impact to other classes. That can’t be done with boons.

After reading the Guardian description provided by the devs, I was a little underwhelmed, especially about the ‘powerful boons’ statement. How does a guardian feel more powerful with boons than any other class in this game? I don’t feel we get anything really exceptional when it comes to boons compared to others, so what is the differentiators that makes that statement significant for Guardians? I don’t see it.

Bottom line here: I think if the devs were to adjust their description of guardians to say that they are more powerful because their are virtuous (i.e., they get a special ability to apply power through virtues) then they have a way forward to give guardians that something special that is lacking from the boons that everyone else has access to. The difference is perhaps subtle but basically, virtues have parameters that can be adjusted ONLY for guardians and for ALL guardians. Boons do not.

Proposal: If the virtue system were expanded or made more customizable, then Anet would have a real way to allow guardians to differentiate themselves in power with a unique ability.

I don’t really think it’s a practical approach to have a tiered approach for boons. Frankly, I think the only way to make guardians relatively more powerful with boons compared to other classes (that’s how I interpret the language of the dev’s description) is to tone down the ability for other classes to access boons. That way, the impact of receiving them will be more significant if someone is imparted boons from a guardian. I do argee with the sentiment of the OP though … it goes without saying that people feel more powerful with boons than without. That statement sounds great but it has zero significance.

The other method is to make a boon that is awesome can only be given to others by a guardian. Aegis is a bit close to that idea.

Bakitten291:

Obtena.7952:

I’m unsure what you’re trying to say. My whole point is pretty simple .. AH builds still work well enough that nothing should really change in people’s builds. It’s simply over-reactions here.

You are COMPLETELY missing the point. 0/30/30/5/5 was my build, running high crit. Every crit I landed healed me, providing a constant flow of healing. Now instead I get ONE heal off it per 5 seconds.

I don’t really get where you are coming from. Good AH builds try to get many boons. If your Ah build is only getting one heal from only procing VP, that doesn’t really sound like a build that was taking advantage of AH in the first place, so it’s hard to see what your issue is. You can’t really complain about AH builds getting screwed if your AH build isn’t that good to begin with.

I’m unsure what you’re trying to say. I only provided examples of things that stacked HA heals … VP isn’t one of them. My whole point is pretty simple .. AH builds still work well enough that nothing should really change in people’s builds. It’s simply over-reactions here.

I honestly don’t know what builds you guys are using to claim this is a devastating blow to AH builds. Vigor is certainly not the only boon that procs on guardians. Even more significantly, it didn’t even proc on your allies so it didn’t stack AH heals like protection from hammer symbol or virtues with Virtue 5. I dare say it but it’s probably the boon nerf that has the least impact on an AH builds.

It seems the people that are really upset about this have little history playing MMO’s. Just some friendly warning … very few MMO’s achieve a satisfactory balance of character abilities within the first year of a games release. Some never do. There is always a lot of changes happening and some of them may even be fundamental to how players perceive the classes and build their characters. I don’t think GW2 will be any different. So far I’ve only seen rather superficial changes to this class.

Everything brought up is a valid concern. I’m just saying those changes are not outside the scope of the description for Guardian. They could nerf Guardian to the point of uselessness but still make the class fit that description. In the end, it’s not a very useful approach to complain about balancing changes by referring to the description.

I don’t see anything happening that isn’t inline with that description.

1. Heavy armor class relying on boons: check
2. Area control and position domination: check
3. Condition removal: check
4. Need for melee range: check

Admittedly, I would like to see #2 a more significant aspect of the class (and have a larger impact on ranged weapons) but I don’t believe the specific details you mention are not inline with the overall feel of the class based on the given description.

Bakitten291:

I already HAD perm vigor. my whole basis of my build was the self healing from that trait. at 75% crit with a 1h sword over 5 seconds i would crit 7-8 times with just auto attack, thats about 490 healing done. Now it is just 70 healing. It is honestly a huge nerf for me.

This kind of capability is probably part of the reason that it got changed … permanent 490 Heal per second? I like guardian and I don’t like nerfs but that’s pretty OPed in a game where healing is rather limited.

I’m partial to Power because it applies more widely to most situations equally. Getting good damage from crits depends on two stats and it’s chance driven, making it less likely for a slower weapon to crit in a given time than a faster one. Bottom line is that it’s easier to get more from it than crits.

Just so you are aware, Rune of Dolyak regen is 30 HP per second and I don’t think it scales iwth healing power. That’s rather weak as a level 6 rune skill IMO.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

That’s not an objective test lol.

It certainly is an objective test because it holds factors that would influence the raw weapon damage constant across all the tests. Your tests bias the results of assessing raw damage by selecting the optimal traits and stats for each one. When you do that, you are mixing the factors of traits, stats and weapons all together, not knowing how each one contributed to the overall damage. Because you do this, you can’t ultimately conclude that a specific weapon has the most raw damage since those other factors are contributing to that damage in different amounts over the various weapon tests you do.

Your approach is more suitable for a discussion about optimal setups, but overreaches anything that could be used to have a reasonable discussion about the damage the weapons themselves do.

Brutaly.6257:

I perform(ed) all dps tests with 0 (zero) point in the trait trees and i also activate virtue of justice as soon as its off cd to eliminate the difference in attackspeed.

So no, the test(s) isnt made with a favorable build and this is the case for both weapons.

I think any test with builds, or traits, are biased to begin with and the only way to actually display some sort of objective result is to test them untraited with eliminated VoJ.

Bravo to you sir, for understanding how to build an objective test. Would you be kind enough to link your results again? I believe I have missed them, or simply forgotten.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

The problem is that I run too many dungeons with guardians who turn out to be using hammer then we’re basically 4/5 for the dungeon, dps-wise. It’s the same problem as warriors who use longbows and pretty much any necromancer build. If you want to want to gimp yourself, that’s fine. I’d rather you not gimp the entire group though.

That’s very little to do with the specific choice of playing hammer. Hammer isn’t a bad weapon because you team with guardians that aren’t successful with it in dungeons. I’ve seen guardians that are successful with it in dungeons, so my conclusion is that it’s just a matter of perception and proper use. As a pure assessment of weapon damage, hammer is a good choice.

^^ Not sure why you have so much hate for hammer. It’s certainly not crap damage if you know how to use it and set yourself up to use it. Other weapons are certainly worse.

But yes, #5 seems to not be working as intended and it would be really nice to have some more frequent purpose for it in PVE.

I get where the OP is coming from as well. I just think that’s it’s an unreasonable position to have. Guardians don’t have ranged options for a reason, as well as any other deficiency you want to say they possess. I can’t believe that a lack of some ability is just a frivolous decisions on the part of the devs. If you feel trolled, it’s because it shows a lack of comprehension to why certain design decisions are affecting Guardians.

Furthermore, people are capable of performing very well with Guardians so the statements being made are not representative of the general capability of Guardians. In other words, the OP is making biased predispositions with the intention of turning players off of the class. Those players need to figure out what works for them. It’s the player, not the class.

Confirmed: the two have no synergy.

I read the thread for about 10 seconds:

My conclusion: It’s not the class, it’s the player. OP, find a class that works for your playstyle because Guardian doesn’t. Don’t expect to play any class, mold it to how you like to play and be successful. That last statement is true for any MMO with a class-based character development system. Make a sign and put it on your desk.

If your build was worth a crap, you would rarely hit 20% HP in PVE anyways. I love haste but the implementation in the rune is almost worthless. While it appears good for dungeons, I don’t tend to build around the chance that I’m near death, I build to avoid that situation in the first place.