Guild Wars 2

I salvaged a rare and it actually decreased the ectos in my inventory! :o

I don’t see anything that makes crafting fun in any game, unless it actually allows you to make gear or items you can use before you could earn the gold to buy them or farm them yourself.

Crafting in this game is actually a good way to make gold if you are clever and watch markets or even willing to gamble a bit.

I wish we could get some spirit enhancement or divine support through a warhorn. What an awesome idea to call lightning on your enemy by calling the gods through a massive horn! Otherwise, the selection is pretty awesome.

K thanks all … in the end I dumped the idea I had … even though the sword/torch still has the most PVE damage I’ve seen for farming so far.

Just as title indicates. I have traited inner fire and when used with torch #4, I don’t get a fury icon in my buff bar. Anyone else notice this as well? Is there another way to see if you get Fury when you trigger torch #4 with inner fire?

I’m willing to bet that guardian never came close to killing anyone either. That’s the balance part of being able to tank lots of players.

^^ I believe that anything referring to allies includes yourself as well. That’s why AH works even if you are alone.

Personally, I have found the self-burning from #4 to be an interesting aspect of the torch I haven’t explored yet. It actually makes something useful happen with Radiance 10 through Inner Burning.

I have to admit, I find the approach a bit flawed. I don’t know how any reasonable comparison of the weapons themselves can be made here with all the confounding factors you have put into the assessment. What you are doing really says more about the damage of a specific build than the individual weapons. I still see some value, but people should be careful about what information you are giving them here.

Ultimately, if you just want to compare just the weapons themselves, you have to keep the factors that impact weapon damage constant for each weapon test. i.e. if you test naked with no traits for hammers, you have to test naked with no traits for all the rest of the weapons too.

Though I think some of the attack effects could be looked at, there is no doubt in my mind that hammer does as much if not more damage than GSword. I think the main difference is that you can get more upfront damage on GS so for low HP trash, it’s more evident.

I’m one of the people that think building around burning as a focus works very well. I don’t think the fact that it doesn’t stack is very relevant for a class that can be built to outlast an opponent to begin with, unless you are losing out from other burners too much. The traits and gear to stack condition damage and survival stats do not conflict. I have found a Guardian balance between offense and defense by focusing on condition damage from spamming Virtue and Rad 15. That isn’t to say their aren’t other points of balance that are as good or better that don’t support unfocused burning.

So other classes that burst alot more has something to do with thieves having the lowest survivability? Maybe. I still don’t see how that’s relevant to the fact that burst makes sense for thieves so calls for it to be nerfed are nonsense.

That’s nice but how is that relevant to thieves? I’m not saying other classes shouldn’t burst or how often they should. I am saying that burst makes sense for thieves based on how the concept of initiative is implemented.

The idea that a thief shouldn’t burst is ridiculous in the first place. It should burst but perhaps it shouldn’t burst as often. The whole profession rolls on bursting because of its dependence on initiative. If you want to nerf this class, the initiative needs to be limited in ways that make initiative a meaningful resource. Of course, that’s a fine line to uselessness as well.

I’m on the fence with this one. There are things I would like to see a thief more useful for and less dependent on. I agree with one poster here … seems the recent changes are actually driving thieves towards this gimmicky build for a burst player.

Bad players nerf themselves. Good players simply persist and adapt. I haven’t seen anything done to thieves that would make good ones drop the class. If you are still getting killed by them in PVP, that’s proof enough to show good players make it work.

I was unaware of that. Where does crit chance increase attack power?

I’m surprised that coupling a weapon swap from bloodlust to force sigil isn’t being pushed for a good damage choice. Personally I think anything that is a chance that depends on another chance is garbage. For example, if you crit 40% and you have a sigil that give you a 40% chance on crit, your only going to benefit from that sigil 16% of the time. That’s a pretty conditional build for something that makes lots of hits, like a sword and trash for slower weapons like hammers. Consider that you can have a constant 250 power + 5% damage increase from bloodlust/force sigil combo or swapping.

I don’t believe you get enough return on your trait ‘investment’ by pumping up your healing power. You can make a pretty strong defensive PVE farming build (re. pretty weak offensive) with it, but that is the extent of it’s usefulness. It’s ironic that it might be more attractive if we DIDN’T have access to lots of heals.

reikken.4961:

not responding all day is obviously fine
no responses ever, and especially after a big patch drops, is quite another

I think it’s a fair question here: What do you think he should be responding to? I didn’t see anything particularly pressing that needed dev intervention for guardians this patch or any other patch for that matter.

Since most of the questions to devs is QQ about GS nerfs from a month ago, I’m not surprised.

A more reasonable answer … devs aren’t paid to respond to people on the forums all day.

People missing one time event and how I’m not going to care …

I would be much more interested in the results from that as it would be more accurate. As a burn-user, I would be generally interested in seeing how passive vs. active burning compares in damage from the Virtue.

I can appreciate what you are attempting to do here, but it’s a bit misleading and incorrect. For instance, from your first chart, you list GS, it has a damage for each skill and you simply multiply how many times that would hit in 60 seconds for each one of them and add them all up. In reality, that’s not what happens. There are execution times and if you are executing one skill, you can’t execute another so a simply linear addition of each skills damage isn’t reflective of how much damage you will get using that weapon over a period of time.

As a more simple example … if you are hitting as much as you can with GS skill1 @ 130 damage per hit with a 1.5 second cooldown, resulting in 5200 damage, you AREN’T using skill 2,3,4 or 5. If you aren’t using 2,3,4 and 5, you can’t add the theoretical damage you would get from skill 2,3,4 and 5 in that 60 seconds to the 5200 damage you get from skill 1 to get your stated 10K damage for using a GS.

It’s the same thing for calculating the number of hits you make in a second. It’s not that simple.

I don’t want to get entangled in the semantics of how you assessed the awesomeness of Vit. It’s not relevant. What I will say is that the premise of the original post doesn’t make much sense. The best armor set is the set that compliments what you want to achieve from the build you are using on your Guardian … or any other profession for that matter.

As much as the OP think it’s bad armor, simply because of it’s stats, I’m certain there is some build where Bezerker armor is optimal for a Guardian. Guardian is one of the MOST versatile classes in this game. If you can’t find a build that suits your gear (though I wouldn’t advocate that approach to making a build), you aren’t trying hard enough.

I had the same problem … trying to find the balance that gave me reasonable survival rates with good damage.

I found a happy place though. I found that 30/30/X/X/X builds were leaning too much into offensive and conversely, ignoring the first two trait lines was too defensive as well. Anything in between that felt lackluster on both aspects. Then I started to think about how I could incorporate better burning into my play since it’s free and I was largely ignoring it. At this point, I believe that the best balance between offense and defense requires some attention to condition damage and 15 in Radiance. Beyond that, you can pretty much put your traits where ever you wish.

Your traits give you lots of defense and you can tune your gear to where ever you want to be on that offensive/defensive spectrum. For reference, my build is 0/15/30/20/5 with full Pow/Vit/CD armor/weapons and a mix of Chrysocola/Coral Jewelry. I’m using a hammer with bloodlust sigil, then swaping to GS with Force sigil when I have 25 bloodlust counters. I’m also using full Flame Legion Runes but Runes with CD are the cheapest there are as an alternative.

I love it. It’s kind of like a goalie blocker. Must be a Canadian on that dev team.

While it’s frustrating, his angst is misplaced. Botters actually make items cheaper to purchase on TP.

If you want to know your enemy, you have to be your enemy. Want to know the best way to counter a thief? Just play one.

gamefreak.5673:

Obtena how can you steal a fear from a necro if they dont have a aoe fear to begin with.

I don’t see how realism is relevant to the issue (or any issue in an MMO for that matter). There is no ‘rule’ that says that when a thief steals a skill, it’s stolen EXACTLY the way that it manifests on the class they steal from. I think it’s interesting that skills that are stolen get a bit of thief flair added to them.

At this point, I’m pretty sure that what we are seeing is the vast number of average thieves playing average builds and beeing called out for nerfs by the vast number of average players being killed by them. The nerfs you all call for (or the concept that a thief SHOULD be bursty) won’t actually impact those talented thieves you should really be worried about in PVP. You can learn to deal with the stealth bursters … they have a repeatable pattern and limited resources to apply their one trick pony. You all should be more worried about the thieves that can do the things you don’t expect.

I’m all for nerfs too … the kind that make off the wall builds much more accessible so that people that face thieves won’t know what’s coming at them.

That bad thief using it is completely vulnerable to any melee for 8 seconds … more than enough time to get them killed. If you are ranged, you move away and that is rather easy to do. In fact, it’s damage drops significantly if you aren’t right beside your target so this skill should be a joke to any ranged class.

Bottom line: If daggerstorm kills you, it’s not because it’s OP. It’s because you are glass cannon melee or a bad ranged player that doesn’t use range to their advantage.

I’m going to venture this guess:

Because Thieves aren’t Necros

I think RoW does lack something. It has great things about it, but it’s still an attack that requires standing still, significant execution time and deals no damage. If it’s duration was extended another 5 seconds, it would be enough for me.

It’s purely semantics basing how you think a class should play based on what it’s called. If you can get past this minor hurdle, thief plays just fine.

Some people have no problems, some people think it’s the most OP thing ever. The fact that people are at both end of the specturm tells me this isn’t a game mechanic problem.

@ Artemis

The build you level with can be something completely different than the build you want to run endgame content with because you can reset it at any time with a guardian trainer for a very reasonable fee (max 3s 50c at level 80). That being said, I wouldn’t actually recommend such defensive builds for leveling unless you do alot of dungeon running. It will feel slow and painful, especially if you have experience with other more offensive classes.

If you are just doing solo PVE and the odd teaming for world events, I would focus on 15 in Radiance and 5 in Virtue at the beginning. that should give a good balance of offensive and defensive improvements. Past that, it depends on how you play.

PROTIP: If you don’t like being backstabbed, move around more. Most of the people I kill are just standing there … and they know I’m around. Positioning for backstab is pretty critical. Just being mobile makes it much more difficult to use.

Low actual HP != High effective HP

Our damage mitigation and HP regen options are tremendous.

I though I was almost maxed in healing power sitting at 1063 with 20 in Honor, full exotic Cleric’s and Sapphire Mithril Jewelry. I have been told that it’s possible to get about 1400. I know I could get another 100 from Honor 30 and a little more with Exotic Jewelry as well which would bring me to about 1200. Where does the other 200 points come from?

@ Major

It’s pedantic because it wouldn’t have an impact on the change ingame. The patch notes set expectation for change and it did that. Just because people don’t agree with how the patch note statements impact game play doesn’t mean the patch notes aren’t accurate or reflect Anet’s intentions for game changes.

That’s just being pedantic. So you’re real issue is that the patch notes don’t match the change? That’s an easy fix … adjust the patch notes.

The intentions for the changes were pretty clear and Anet did communicate them to us as well as why they did it. A discrepancy in the patch notes isn’t really that significant of an issue. I see all this as posturing to find fault with the retaliation nerf itself. That’s a fallacious approach to invite people to discuss it.

There isn’t a problem here. There is no value add to the development of the game for Anet (or any other MMO publisher) to respond to every single group of customers negative feedback for all the changes they make to the game on the forums. The process for considering customer feedback to changes does not need this step to be effective.

People need to have more realistic expectations about the interaction they will have with Anet. The forums aren’t here for you to initiate conversations with Anet staff. That is Anet’s prerogative if they choose.

This is a solid build that I use as well when I anticipate a challenging dungeon run where I’m really being counted on to bring a lot of help for the team.

On the other hand, I personally find it rather painful to grind out PVE with a defensive-focused build like this because a good PVE spec needs offensive and defensive balance. When soloing PVE, this much defense is really overkill and if you are teaming, you can get away with even less of it.

Still, it’s interesting to see the enthusiasm that people are having towards guardians for trying a lot of different things. That’s what makes this one of the great classes in this game.

I don’t get this thread … anything you do in an MMO IS unique to you, unless your letting someone else play your account. No one is going to take the same path of play or even play your guardian the way you do it.

I can provide some information that could help you out. I did a test to see what influence healing power had on the stated healing values shown in the description for Virtue of Resolve and Signet of Resolve at level 80. I did this by adding subsequent pieces of gear with healing power. The following were my results:

Heal Power/Virtue Heal/Signet Heal
0/84/8150
101/90/8276
168/94/8360
236/98/8445
315/103/8544
494/114/8768
640/122/8950
863/136/9229

My own conclusions from this is that healing power doesn’t really give the sort of boosts to healing I would expect for the investment I’ve given to it in gear. I’m full exotic clerics with lower QL sapphire jewelry. What you do see is that the healing power increases linearly.

Velkyn.9285:

Why is it any attempts to suggest areas of improvements to a profession are met with a portion of the community suggesting the poster try another profession? I’ve tried them all. They all have issues.

While I agree that some of the CD’s and execution times are long (though not unreasonable), I believe your approach to the assessment is overly simplistic.

When I read your original email, something strikes me: The weapon combos you feel actively engaged with use torch, an offensive offhand weapon. Much of the guardian weapon combos are support or defensive play so it seems to me that as a whole, you aren’t going to like the class.

This thread could be posted in ANY MMO game forum. Bottom line is that there are things to do once you hit 80, it’s simply a matter of if you wish to do them. I’m really doubtful there are people out there that have nothing left to do once they hit level 80. What’s even more juicy … why does everyone expect a new MMO to drown you in end game content? That doesn’t even make sense. It might not be the trend but new MMO’s may want to think about developing low and midrange level content to encourage replay value.

Not every item should be an option for most players. Anet got this one right. Regardless of whatever sensibilities people have to the label ‘legendary’ and how to obtaining, It’s hard to get for people that want a way to differentiate themselves but it’s not improving your performance compared to the ‘regular’ people that will use exotics. There isn’t an issue here.

I’m glad I only see my female norn from behind. Would be awful to look at a pretty face all day. :p

Seriously though, I think more options in scarring and tattoos would address this. The faces are a little too cutsy but it’s better than being ugly.

The OP forgot to add %100 immunity to damage and %100 uptime to stability and swiftness boon. KTHX.

I guess some of my suggestions make it clear that I haven’t. No honestly, I haven’t used hammer in PVP environment. I wouldn’t mind hearing how it performs compared to PVE. I can imagine with the large damage and CC capability to immobilize, interrupt and grapple with some, it’s a decent option.