Guild Wars 2

I don’t think there is a wrong way but I find that playing guardian is about balancing your survival against your offensive capability, depending on your focus (PVE, dungeons, PVP, etc…) I’ve talked to a few other guardians in the guild. They run the x/x/30/30/x as well with GS. Why? because GS already gives them enough burst damage upfront that they don’t need any Zeal bonuses for PVE farming. I think with the recent changes to symbol of wrath, they might be rethinking that approach.

Personally, I’m running 25/0/20/20/5 in pure clerics gear with Dolyak runes and bloodlust sigils. I think my balance is almost achieved, at least for PVE solo farming.

I always liked hammer but there are a few things that bug me about it I would like to see changed.

1. There is too much happening in #1 You have good damage, symbol DoT and protection boon all in a single ability with the added benefit that you get protection %100 uptime if you just spam it.

2. There isn’t enough happening in #5 I have to admit, I don’t get this one, especially if you have a root ability in #3 that also does damage. When I use it in PVE, it’s in combo with #4 for fun.

3. The combo finisher with Symbol of Protection and Mighty Smash is weak I guess I’m not a big fan of retaliation. It’s already weak damage and it’s usefulness in team based application is questionable.

4. #4 has limited application I feel it’s way too situational. Unless I’m missing a trick, I’m only using it when I feel overwhelmed by too many mobs or want to buy some time with a single mob fight. Even then, I don’t see it’s advantage over exercising more effective mob control options or healing abilities.

What I would like to see:

1. Move symbol to #5. Would give option to bring symbol forward in rotation and get a little more burst. I don’t think it would be unreasonable given the execution times in #1.

2. Replace Total Retaliation with a stability or swiftness boon I would prefer stability myself. Hammer damage and support falls behind when the long execution times/chains are interrupted.

3. Add chill to #4 This would make a very situational tool more effective.

I’m interested in comments and ideas on how you would want to see Hammer changed.

It makes sense that most people are concentrated at Orr. The scaling of the level by the zone you are in was very cool. Now give those people a reason to go back to those zones. Add some low level crafting mats to high level recipes might help. May also be an idea to adjust event rewards to actual level instead of the level of the encounter to encourage high level people to spread out a bit more. Lots of events in Orr are extremely crowded actually.

Just to be more clear, I was referring to symbol builds in a team-based setting. The GS option was the weakest offering. I can imagine that if someone gets a guardian for running a team, the teams least desirable boon from a guardian symbol will be retaliation. Stability would be really nice though. I hope they drop the retaliation altogether.

Retaliation is a weak boon to put on a symbol in the first place. It’s very situational, requiring many mobs hitting many different members of your team who are all standing next to you for it’s greatest benefit. It also doesn’t really help your team that much. If you do happen to be in that situation, the damage as I understand is lackluster anyways. I can’t imagine how anyone would consider using GS in a team due to its symbol support. I can understand the disappointment due to the reduction of damage. It definitely takes away from the variety of the weapon.

The hammer symbol uptime is actually quite significant (each protection stack is 1s but they stack consecutively for 3 seconds of protection) I wouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t get a nerf too, unless spamming auto is already considered enough of a drawback.

There is more than one weapon for PVE that does effective damage. This change is annoying and hopefully it’s indicative of Anet adjusting retaliation to be a short term, burst reaction ability.

They are way to ‘busy’ for my tastes. I’m already using a plethora of different weapons, having to know all the various abilities for each. The elite skills are just more stuff I need to know and I don’t find them all that necessary. They don’t add to my build in any way. They are just different. I’ve defaulted to Renewed Focus all the time.

Honestly, I ignored it for now while I’m PVE farming. Base HP is a bit misleading on a Guardian because we have so many way to mitigate and regain health that it really depends on what build you intend to run. If you are going really heavy on HP regain with mace, you can probably get away with no vitality in your gear or traits. I find that works rather well for my playstyle. Fortunately, you get vitality for free with healing power in the Honor trait, so even that HP regain build nets you about 13,5K hitpoints.

Great work. I’m currently working to optimize my guardian for dungeon running. While the healing information is really good, I’m hoping someone will investigate the impact that healing power has on the Guardian healing abilities. It’s not clear to me what a certain amount of change in healing power will do to my various choices for healing abilities.

A fix to this would be to allow for a library of armor skins, similar to what we have for dyes. Transmutation stones would just transfer the skin to your library instead of combining them. Transmuting them to your library would make them soulbound so they couldn’t be traded.

I’m not understanding the incentive to fix this. I have a condition build thief and if I’m at an event and the mob already has 25 stacks, my gameplay or chance to get a reward isn’t impacted at all. In the end, the mob still dies, I still get some loot, whether it was my bleeds or someone elses. I don’t see how anyone is penalized by this limit. What I do hope is happening is that high damage bleeds are stacking above lower ones which still means you should be trying to apply your bleeds even if the stack is at 25. Not trying to troll here, just curious why this is getting attention as a player that uses a condition bleed build.

Please allow an option to arrange your dyes in alphabetical order. Thank you.

Deserved nerf? Definitely. 10 seconds was way to excessive, considering aegis can be obtained once every 40 seconds by doing nothing and more often if you trait accordingly. It’s clearly not a boon that’s meant to be up so frequently.

In general, retaliation doesn’t work properly. It should mitigate bursts, not act like a passive unmitigated damage buff. Of course, this change doesn’t fix that either, but it’s a move in the right direction.

I don’t think Aegis should be changed so that I can think LESS while playing the game. The intent of Aegis is to block one hit. It does that and it does it often in all situations. If you want to deal with multiple mobs or ranged people, use SoA or dodge them. I don’t believe all professions should be given a set of tools to deal with every possible situation with the effectiveness that Aegis does in a 1 vs. 1 situation. Some challenge is nice.

It’s an interesting approach but it’s slightly flawed. You should take a longer time for your damage analysis. At 30 seconds, there is going to be a bias towards weapons that squeeze in those extra hits in that short time.

For instance, say you have a weapon X has an attack with a 20 second recharge that hits for 200 and weapon Y has an attack with a 15 second recharge that hits for 100. With your approach, they look like they do equivalent damage in 30 seconds. Now, take those values over 1 minute: Weapon X will do 600 and weapon Y will do 400.

There are improvements for shield that I would like to see but frankly, if you are of the position that there is no reason to use shield over any other offhand because the other offhands do everything shield does and better, you simply aren’t using your toolset to the fullest capability (or being entirely honest either). There is a reason for the ability to swap weaponsets in combat. You should learn to use them and make builds considering this ability. The premise is that focus is better than shield individually. That’s a overly simplistic way to examine the usefulness of the various weapon choices. For instance, Focus doesn’t set up combo fields, the shield can. That’s a worthy consideration. None of these weapon choices can be considered in isolation because that’s not how they are used.

I was thinking about this kind of build but not specifically for farming large numbers of mobs. While it’s easy to make a damage build with DoT or Crits, I haven’t seen anyone attempt a healing build based on hits with Signet of Malice and vit/toughness/healing gear. I’m interested in hearing how this build works on single mobs as well.

I think it went that direction simply from your assumption that the design of thieves is inherently flawed. It’s not initiative that encourages a lack of variety, it’s a lack of equivalent damage attacks across the various weapon combinations and frankly, I don’t see that happening here.

Thieves are about resource management. The fact you oppose the implications of this on the calss means that you shouldn’t play thieves.

Having one good spamming damage with some utilities is how the thief is conceived and it makes sense because of the coupling with initiative. It wouldn’t work any other way. You only NEED one or two attacks per weapon combo (considering you have 5 slots, that’s quite a few IMO). It’s not flawed and it’s not simplistic either. This class makes players manage resources and to some extent, timing. A few classes barely engage you at all. Thief is as simple or as complex as you want it to be, depending on how you play it.

I think what the OP suggests is interesting, but then, it wouldn’t really be stealing anymore. Personally, I would have liked to see the stealing of attributes or boons instead of skills. I’m too old to remember what skills are gotten from the various NPC’s in the game.

I disagree with most of the OP with the exception of poisons (and traps). I like the way that stealth gives an edge instead of defining the class. I don’t see gimmicks but I do see ways that weapon skills could be improved (hint: traps and venoms) and I hate the idea of glass cannon. There are multiple ways with every build that give thieves survival though I do think that there is an excessive focus on evasion and it would have been nice to see something more clever.

Back to poisons and traps. That’s thievery to me and it’s pretty limited because it’s not pushed in the weapon attacks. Even if I fill my 7-0 with traps and venoms, most of them aren’t all that impressive in the first place. I think some more work needs to be done their.

Though thief is a very broad designation, I think it’s more appropriate to think of this as assassin. The ‘cleverness’ of out of combat thievery is lacking.

The fix to heartseeker was in the wrong direction:

If it’s a finisher, it should do more damage, cost more initiative and maybe even be conditional, perhaps only useable from the front or with a bleed or poison applied. That would make it a skill that talented players would use while locking out ‘2’ spammers. It was a no-talent skill to begin with, this put the nail in the coffin.