What would making kits into the profession mechanic accomplish? They are now additional weaponsets you don’t have to craft?
The problem with kits is how much overlap there is. Take the meta condi build for example, they use 4 kits, not because “kit too stronk”, but because all 4 have condi abilities.
Each kit should have a clear purpose, and as a result, you will have less reasons to slot all of them.
They say it’s hard to balance kits because it’s 5 skills vs 1. Luckily for engi, the regular skills come with a toolbelt, so they are 2 skills in one. Sure, kits have toolbelt skills, too, but balance them to be only complimentary to the kit’s use, while regular skills should have toolbelt skills as strong as the slot skill itself.
Kits take up slot skills, which should be used for actual slot skills. Also, there isn’t a fixed number of kits you can have simultaneously, so they’re harder to balance.
Yes, there is, it’s 5. And for every kit you take, you sacrifice 1 heal/utility/elite slot. Which is why pvp uses less kits.
The problem in pve is that all 4 kits used are dps increases over any other utility you could take in their place. We don’t use them because they have 5 skills, we use 1-2 skills from every kit and drop it.
And that’s where the design problem is, that there’s so much overlapping between the kits when skills that serve the same purpose are found in 4 different kits.
If bomb didn’t do condi damage, you would take Rocket Boots, simple as that.
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Maybe that’s what the balance team does. They are using their guardian once a year every Halloween to farm labyrinth and find the class to be in an excellent spot.
What would making kits into the profession mechanic accomplish? They are now additional weaponsets you don’t have to craft?
The problem with kits is how much overlap there is. Take the meta condi build for example, they use 4 kits, not because “kit too stronk”, but because all 4 have condi abilities.
Each kit should have a clear purpose, and as a result, you will have less reasons to slot all of them.
They say it’s hard to balance kits because it’s 5 skills vs 1. Luckily for engi, the regular skills come with a toolbelt, so they are 2 skills in one. Sure, kits have toolbelt skills, too, but balance them to be only complimentary to the kit’s use, while regular skills should have toolbelt skills as strong as the slot skill itself.
Druid should have more than just one aspect and thus variety in glyphs.
Now that’s an interesting idea.
They never said there’d be no healers. They said there’d be no need to wait for healers – there wouldn’t be one or two professions you have to wait for to get a healer, you can take a party with any set of professions and somebody will be able to go healer if they have the gear.
You don’t seriously believe that do you?
Leading up to GW2’s launch ArenaNet extensively, repeatedly and at length detailed how GW2 would have no holy trinity. Especially not healers. Of any kind. Everyone would have self-heals with big’ish cooldowns. Damage avoidance (i.e. getting out of red circles) and prevention would be key.
ArenaNet themselves seem to have taken this page down but it survives in the archive.
The various problems with condition damage in combination with the deliberate weakness of healing and other forms of support resulted in the least diverse PvE imaginable. Nearly everyone running with the same stats (berserker) and melee.
It was a mistake. Which is ok. To err is human. Why anyone feels a need to attempt to rewrite this history escapes me. GW2 was big news at launch and its lack of holy trinity is one of the things it was best known for.
They said they don’t want a holy trinity, which people took to mean that every class will do nothing but damage and stop to heal themselves when they are low, and they will only differ in visuals. That was never what they had in mind.
When they said they don’t want a dedicated healer, they meant they don’t want 1-2 classes to be the ones that have to take care of all the healing and cannot contribute damage-wise. And as someone that comes from City of Heroes which didn’t have a dedicated healer class, the concept of healers seems extremely shallow to me. Healing is just one way you can support your group.
And that’s what Gw2 did. From day 1, the game lauched with classes that could heal allies. Water Ele and Guardian especially had plenty of healing, and there were other support abilities. But the game was made in such a way that because you didn’t have to wait for specific classes or builds to do content, you took all that support as granted.
Druid is a support class, not a healer. If you are going by raw healing numbers, they don’t heal more than aura ele. What changed with HoT is that we are now motivated to build around apsects of our class instead of trying to do everything.
Ranger itself can build around their healing output or go condi dps. They are not shoehorned into being the token “healer” or support class. When the group is low in this game, we don’t yell at the healer, we blast a water field, use our AoE healing skills, share some Skelk Venom or even make the group invulnerable. Or just dodge. That was the idea from the beginning.
It would be appreciated for some sort of response from a dev or staff member, because Guardian/DH is NOT in a good spot right now, when a class/spec is seen as a trash-tier throwaway, no one wants them in groups for raids/fractals/dungeons ect. Then something has to be done, please, help us thrive again.
We need help, we need respectable DPS, and specs/utilities that are seen as an asset to a team and not a loss.
Something will be done, it’s called Firebrand. And worst of all, if Firebrand proves to be a good party player, most of the complaints here will be silenced, as if having a good spec on a trash class is anything more than a bandaid.
The skills are not mantras, they are probably skills that have charges with seperate cooldown. If someone plays LoL here, there are several skills that work like that (like Akali R).
Reason being is that the skills in the UI shot had charges on them, so if they were Mantras, they would be in their charged mode. Mantras have different icons for charged and non-charged mode, so we wouldn’t be seeing the same icons in the specialization wheel, they should have been the default (uncharged) icons. So, they are not mantras.
Hybrid druid is a buff mule that is not dragging the team down as much as healing druid dps-wise. Experienced teams prefer average dps and mediocre healing than bad dps and good healing.
It’s not even our viability I’m mad at. It’s the absolute travesty of letting guardian, that was touted as the support more than any other class, became the selfish class that it is today. And not only that, it doesn’t even do it right, because it exchanged support for mediocre dps.
To be honest, most of the nerfs they did to guard were aimed at pvp. In pvp, it honestly didn’t get less competitive in a non esl level since pretty much everything except rev got nerfed in some way. As far as pve raids are concerned, the problem there is that other classes got indirect buffs to their dps and dh got none, leaving it behind, but it didn’t get nerfed because dh didn’t run lb in raids. In wvw, well there i don’t know but i presumed dh were just running stab there and that’s it.
The other classes got some very direct buffs, with rev and ele being the most extreme examples. It’s pretty obvious they said “let’s give a condi build to those classes”.
Guard was already in need of buffs before the patch, and after it, everything else was buffed, putting us deeper in the dirt.
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The sad thing is that any buffs to Guardian’s supportive aspects will come solely through the next elite spec and people will be too focused on the shiny new toys to care.
Can I get Irenio on Guardian please? He turned Ranger/Druid from a selfish class to the ultimate support, while the exact opposite happened to Guardian.
I just don’t understand how they can handle guardian so terribly.
Like, ok, you want to nerf True Shot again for the 3th time, sure, but allow us to move while channeling it as a counterbuff.
Just a small example, it doesn’t take much to throw a few perks here and there.
Well, they went through the trouble of making 3 different Tomes, they must have something in mind to differentiate them. Logically, at least, but I’m not holding my breath, either.
Personally, I just don’t want druid to remain the “healer”. Tome of Courage was our Celestrial Avatar before CA existed, and I will be disappointed if F2 is regen/condi removal/resistance only without any actual healing. At the very least, I want Heal Area to return.
Asking for both specs to focus on power is how you powercreep the old specs. It’s not like you won’t be able to use the old weapons with Firebrand anyway. Now, the traits could be an issue, sure.
All I gotta say is, IF they bring back Guard holding books in their hands and casting dps or support skills, they better be darn good. There was a reason why they removed them from the game.
Yes, because they refused to buff them.
Base guardians are probably one of the better core professions right now.
At what? Wvw, sure.
But they are total garbage in organised pve.
Could you link me to this thread on reddit? Personally speaking, my source told me it’s evenly split between conditions/offensive support, healing, and protection.
It wasn’t a clear statement, just weird comments here and there by people who are in the scene and know testers and have leaked stuff before.
Here's nike talking about it, and practically making a bet on it. (Read the responses and his answers.
Here's 1up who leaked the new torch a day or two before the patch.
Of course, both of them are raiders, and it could just be that they are focusing on what they care about, the quickness, and ignoring the more defensive stuff, like protection.
Weren’t you the one complaining that our quickness spam doesn’t compare to mesmer quickness spam?
No, I complained that they knee-jerk nerfed Feel My Wrath. I do not want a spec that all it does is copy mesmer and doing a bad job at that.
Personally I don’t really care if we don’t get what other classes have, especially in a PvE context, since all that matters in that mode is whoever DPS’s the hardest. If this spec offers long-range offensive support, healing support, and protective support (split between the tomes I’m sure), and it’s all viable, then it’ll be a dream come true for me.
Yes, it would be a dream come true for me, especially because like you, I absolutely loved the tomes.
But I don’t want all that to come from an elite spec. The base class needs buffs, at least the condi stuff should be baseline and have the elite spec provide a condi weapon in axe so you have better cover conditions in pvp.
I disagree – there’s some good stuff in there. There’s also some stuff in there that’s definitely underperforming and can use a boost. Mind you, core guardian has been receiving boosts over the past few balance patches (symbols on sword and scepter, core virtues being buffed), so it does seem to be something they’re working on… albeit not as fast as people might like. Meanwhile, every profession has its underperforming areas.
Laughable. They launched the new traits that were heavily focused on symbols without first adding symbols to our weapons. That was how incompetent they are, and it took them a year to fix it.
Mesmer had a clone and a phantasm on every weapon since forever, that’s what guardian needed too, it was a fix, not a buff.
And having symbols is not anything worth talking about, they are damage skills. And even with the new symbols, our dps sucks.
Now tell me what the good stuff are. Not for you as a guardian player, but for someone that wants to bring guardian to their team, tell me a couple of reasons you would bring a guardian.
First, I don’t see the relevance of it being through a base spec rather than an elite spec. Base specs are supposed to give you nice things too.
Base specs are always accesible. No matter what happens, or what elite spec Rev gets, they will always have their Ventari and its alacrity or well as a very good condi build. Those are strong foundations for the class that allow it to branch out without losing its viability.
Firebrand can be the best thing ever and base Guardian will still be the same garbage it is today. As soon as expac 3 hits, we are back to square one, relying on that new elite spec to be as good as Firebrand, because by that time, Firebrand would have became the Guardian, instead of its elite spec.
Almost all base classes have a competitive niche, Guardian has nothing to offer besides stability, and that’s only useful in wvw.
Second, and more importantly, I don’t think Ventari revenant really succeeds at granting permanent alacrity. The energy requirement is pretty high – you could possibly do it with boon length gear, but you won’t be doing much else apart from autoattacks and the heals. Combine it with something else that might appear in the future, however, and maybe it would.
Alacrity is not affected by boon duration. Ventari can still maintain perma alacrity but its true it takes a heavy toll on its energy. And if Ventari is bad at alacrity, there’s no guarantee that a third class will get alacrity and it will be any better at sharing it.
I expect that there will be tradeoffs, but it doesn’t take much to offer more DPS than a chrono.
No it doesn’t take much to out-dps chrono, but out-dpsing chrono is not enough to replace them.
Anybody can tank, it’s just that chronos can do it while still doing their other things (nobody cares about the chrono’s personal DPS, and therefore the fact that the chrono will lose DPS by wearing tanking gear).
Isn’t that exactly what I said? You need someone to tank without sacrificing anything, because chrono loses practically nothing by tanking. If you sacrifice something, chrono is immediately a better choice.
And how do we know that the new elite specialisations won’t have something with equivalent functionality? Possibly even on firebrand?
More assumptions. Yes, if we cannibalise chrono and give everything they have to other classes, then we can replace them. That was never the question, though, the problem is that unless exactly this happens, it will be very very hard to replace mesmers.
And if Firebrand brings a condition build, guardians will have a condition build.
Tempest, Engi, Thief, Mesmer, Revenant didn’t need a new spec to get their condi build.
Against large hitboxes, dragonhunter is second only to tempest for power damage.
DH is significantly lower than tempest. Why would you bring a DH over tempest? You wouldn’t.
They’re low at the moment because they’re competing with condition builds and condition builds are just plain better than power for every profession that has them at the moment – problem being, of course, that guardian doesn’t have a proper DPS setup. Yet.
Yes, we’ve been through it already. Guardian will have to buy the expansion to get a proper build, when everyone else got one for free.
Also, on the professions doing what they do without using their elite spec… So? First, elite specs weren’t supposed to render core builds completely obsolete
Because their elites do other things
Is it clear enough? Rangers can have both condi base AND top tier support elite. Thief has the best condi build AND a better power build with DD. That’s the problem. Our base class does nothing, our elite does little.
At the moment, it feels like you’re looking for reasons to be pessimistic. At the moment, what we’ve been told is that there are two things that will be significant upgrades for guardians… and there is likely more that we haven’t heard. I’m inclined to think that what we’ve heard so far, with the assumption that there will be more, is at least enough to wait until the official announcement before we start the prophecies of doom and gloom.
That’s were we differ. Firebrand being good won’t solve guardian’s problem. Guardian is garbage, and it needs buffs. Firebrand cannot be the buff.
I did have a good laugh when I saw Revenant got a new perma swiftness option to replace Herald just in time for their new spec.
At least some classes get attention these days.
The alacrity monopoly has already been broken with Ventari, nothing changed. And notice how alacrity was given to a base spec, Revenants didn’t have to dedicate their whole elite spec into stealing mesmer’s toys.
Chrono does 4 vital things:
1. tanking
2. perma quickness
3. perma alacrity
4. AoE distort
Bonus: Portal
You will never replace them by doing just 1 of those things. If Firebrand is a full condi dps (like Ranger/Thief levels, not Condi PS), while also providing perma quickness, it will simply get nerfed.
But let’s say it does just that, then you have 1 dps slot that provides perma quickness, and Ventari provides alacrity. So far, you have 2 classes doing the same thing a single one can, but Firebrand has high dps, so we let it fly. You still need someone to tank that doesn’t lose dps or utility by doing so.
And all that is moot, because nobody else can provide AoE distort. Why would a raid party jump through all these hoops? To do guardian players a favour?
Chrono works, it’s simple as that. Unless you offer something equally attractive, and not just an imitation, you belong in the garbage heap.
(Also, according to the most recent benchmarks I’ve seen, DH is pretty high up in the rankings for power builds (behind daredevil, tempest, and power engineer for small hitboxes)
All 3 classes you mentioned have top tier condi builds. And 2 of them are base. It’s unbelievable in how bad a state the class is when there are 3 classes with 2 builds each that do more damage than the only real dps build guardian has. And we got a power dps elite spec, DH offers absolutely nothing else.
Condi PS warrior does more damage than DH on small golem and they are supposed to be a support class.
And like I said above, DH’s golem dps is super unrealistic. You have to have perma retal or aegis to even hope to match these numbers.
The problem is power builds in general having taken a big hit.
Power Tempest looks pretty fine to me. On large hitboxes, they outdamage all other builds, power or condi; the only real competition they have is their own condi build.
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Isn’t breaking the mesmer monopoly pretty much exactly what was being called for earlier in this thread? Sure, it covers the same ground, but assuming that the mesmer will be automatically better is a bit of a stretch. In fact, if the Firebrand is able to dish out better DPS than a chronomancer while also granting permanent quickness to allies, they’d probably be quite valued, especially if the alacrity monopoly is also broken.
If if if if
You don’t break Mesmers’ monopoly by giving exactly 1 aspect of the BASE class to an ELITE spec. Perma Quickness is the ceiling, you can’t get better than that, so guardians can only hope to match them.
It’s also worth noting that the balance at the moment seems to be veering strongly towards condition builds for raids. They may rebalance back away from that before the next expansion hits, but if they don’t, then Firebrand might well be what saves guardian from the garbage heap for high-end PvE.
Are you for real? All the other classes got a condi build for free, I’m not buying an expansion so I can have the same thing the other classes already have.
No, thank you, guardian is officially dead if that’s all Firebrand is. DH is useless at power DPS, if all Firebrand does is give us a condi DPS build, even a raid-worthy one, we are still 2 elite specs behind every other class, especially those that have a condi build as base, a good HoT spec and are geting another. We are starting with 0 good builds and hope Firebrand can solve all of our problems. We are being asked to buy our buffs.
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There was some discussion on reddit that this spec will be about condi DPS and permanently quickness. The person who said it has shared insider info before (like the new legendary torch recently).
So basically, an elite spec whose “support” is already invalidate by mesmer.
If this is true, it’s another garbage elite spec for guardian, can’t wait for 2 more years of patch notes of nerfs and cooldown reductions.
First my forward to the guys and guilds, that do put the effort of testing / sharing the benchmarks and scoreboards. I really appreciate it. No joke.
This is what qT has to say about guardian after the patch:
“Guardian: Nothing really changed for guardian. The rotation is the same and the changes made in the balance patch are irrelevant for the pve guardians. It’s damage is so low, that unfortunately it can’t keep up with any dps class anymore. Guardian is basically the new rev in terms of bad dps and uselessness. "
And this:
“We also think Hammer Guardian and Power Rev are too weak dps wise so we excluded them from benchmarks aswell”
I’m not saying that we should all follow qT’s word as gospel, but some commanders in raids and people in fractals will do just that, and when they put an LFG ad up, they will say “lf tempest” instead of “lf dps”.
And really, it’s not like they are lying. DH was a dps focused elite spec, that offers absolutely nothing else, and what’s the result? We have lower dps than base classes, like ranger who got a ridiculously strong support spec.
Now the part where you hook up the power supply and switch it on: What you people don’t get is that these benchmarks are done ON A STILL STANDING GOLEM. Read that again. Realize what i am saying, im serious. In a real scenario, there are more elements at play.
Funny you say that, because Guardian loses more dps in realistic conditions than other classes. They rely on having retaliation or aegis up to increase their damage, which golem bechmarks take for granted at 100% uptime, and lose dps to moving bosses and boss adds. Condi ranger is close to unaffected by all that and condi rev gains damage when the boss moves.
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That wouldn’t even work, because longbow is a DH-only weapon, while Bow of Truth is a base guardian skill.
Then you have the issue of being forced to certain weapons to use spirit weapons.
TBH, I play a class because I find it fun, not because it’s some top-tier DPS class/spec, odd huh?
Gettin kicked out of group content is crazy fun, I know.
If I played the class for chart-topping DPS, I would have abandoned ship years ago. You can still have fun while doing good dps. You can have more fun if the condi spec is buffed to viability because you have a new way to play the class. The ‘fun’ buzzword is not an argument.
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Don’t worry, you will be able to buy the next expansion to fix the class.
As long as Radiant Retaliation stays unchanged and a grandmaster at that, it shows the devs don’t have any intention on reworking guardian’s traits.
Your suggestion is a sensible one, which is why it won’t happen.
Not if it’s your only class. It’s fun, the skills look cool, but if you are limited to only playing guardian and you want to try organised pve, you should be prepared for suffering.
How can traits propose different playstyles when there’s only 1? It starts with that limitation.
Don’t you dare say that again.
Revenant was a meta staple ever since HoT launched. It was in every group. Where was guardian at that time? Oh that’s right, in the garbage bin, because gaurdian didn’t have any dps build, besides hammer, which was and still is very low dps. Guardian wasn’t accepted in fractals because it gave the opponents retaliation.
Guardian was “the new rev” for a LONG time before revenant became one. So, don’t come here and tell me guardian is as bad as revenant now. I main guardian, I know bad.
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All summons should be permanent until killed, like minions are.
Really got to disagree with this. Minions are just set up too differently (traits etc.)
That happened right before HoT, when the trait system was reworked.
Prior to that, both spirit weapons and turrets had multiple traits, now they only get 1. But minions have multiple traits, and got more support with the addition of “Rise”.
So, yes, they are set differently, but that’s because it was a deliberate decision on anet’s part to push minions as a core component of Necromancer, while spirit weapons were left to gather dust.
Like Fashion Mage said, no effect was made to improve spirit weapons. The old traits became baseline (increased duration and the active skill doesn’t destroy the weapon), but apart from that, not a single number has been tweaked for 4 years now. And now, we are talking about full reworks.
This is what happened with tomes all over again. No effort made to impove the skill, and so we declare it unsalvageable. Like we don’t all know that if tomes had like 30 sec cooldown (without the passive boons and stability), they would see heavy use.
The only reason I’m acceptive of a rework is because I hope they become more supportive, like Ranger’s spirits, offering some unique buffs to the party.
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Necromancers have “Your Soul is Mine” which is 20sec. And regardless of Blood Fiend’s suckiness, it exists.
Well, mixing 2 attunements together is a pretty basic idea. Still, on that concept, I’ve seen a lot more suggestions that resembled Tempest, i.e. mixing elements for one big attack similar to overloads, while Weaver seems to be more intricate.
I’m not going to bother replying to you anymore. It’s clear you are too stuck on the hipster mentality, where good skills are brainless, bad skills are underappreciated and people just don’t bother enough.
Just wait for when and if guardian gets that healer/support spec and see how not even that build will bother ever using SoC in its current state.
The spec was leaked, it’s on the reddit frontpage.
If that post is real… that would mean that anet listened to many of the suggestions ppl made in the past in this forum…. and that would make me really happy.
On that point… I think it is fake, or an old prototype… Toooo many coincidence with the major suggestions that where made in this forum… Anet listens, but not that much. I would be cautious you don’t fall in love with it.
What suggestions?
It’s just a pretty picture and a name, how do you get what the spec plays like from that alone?
The spec was leaked, it’s on the reddit frontpage.
The buffs most certainly did add to their viability, and by quite a bit. Most guardians won’t be able to see that simply because that’s just the kind of crowd DH draws. I mean the best argument people have for SoC being bad right now is “It’s the best burst heal in the game, BUT THE PASSIVE IS USELESS THEREFORE THE WHOLE SKILL IS USELESS”.
That’s what you think the argument is?
Being the best burst heal in the game doesn’t make it a good skill, it makes it interesting trivia. There are a lot of “best at” skills, not all of them are good.
There’s no use for a full heal on such a ridiculous cooldown, when druid can heal the party to full every 12 seconds by going into Celestial Avatar and popping 1 or 2 glyphs. Yes, druid uses multiple skills to achieve what SoC does alone, but Signet takes the place of your elite and you can only do it once every 90 seconds. And druid doesn’t have to do it alone, everyone has a way of healing their own health, and a lot of classes have AoE heals.
And that’s where the passive portion comes into play. As a signet, it could at least have a good passive so that until you get a chance to use the active, you can at least benefit from another effect, but SoC’s passive is worse than the regeneration boon.
SoC is a skill that doesn’t belong to the game in its current implementation. In other games, where not every class has a heal, there’s no out-of-combat regeneration, and the damage is not one-shot based, then it could be useful.
In gw2 though, even if the perfect moment arrises, it’s very possible that by the time you finish the 2 1/2 cast, the people you are trying to heal are already downed or dead.
You have to jump through a billion hoops to make this skill work, that’s why the skill is bad. And even when it does work, it’s hardly a game changing effect. I would much rather have a Rebound over a full heal, at least that effect has a place in the game to avoid one-shots.
When everything else (“everything else” being elite specs) becomes better, that’s called power creep, and the solution to that is to nerf the things that have been power creeped, not just buffing things to add to the power creep.
No, you buff things to match the powercreep, or nerf the powercreep. Instead, you are asking to keep the bad things bad and ignore the powercreep. You didn’t say WtPA is worthy of a nerf, you just say we don’t need a better RtL.
Oh, okay, so now aiming your camera at allies is apparently too hard. Sounds like why tomes got removed, “too clunky”. Alternatively, in PvE, you could literally just take a step back from the stack of allies and then use the skill.
The skill animates for 2 1/2 seconds, if I take 1/2 sec to reposition, it’s a 3 sec cast. That’s my problem first and foremost.
And who says that isn’t intentional? Not everything is available to every class, and for good reason.
Somehow this only applies to guardian.
We don’t need accesible movement speed increase for every class, nevermind that literally every other class has it.
We don’t need low cd heals for every class, nevermind that again, literally every other class has at least one.
This is not what “flavour” is. Flavour is incorporating something to a class in a way that makes it thematic. Not trying at all is called “laziness”.
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DH deserves it because its a garbage low skill cap build and always has been and always will be and it doesnt fit with the original class theme at all. I wish they would put diminishing returns on traps of the same type being thrown in succession to kill it off even more. I just with they would make meaningful positive changes to base guardian so I could play my guardian again. The buffs to signets are a joke. Nice renewed focus nerf not.
This logic is beyond stupid. Yes, let’s remove DH from the game completely. Surely, base guardian with no spec will be able to compete with all other classes having a usable spec.
Thing is, CoP can also give you resistance, because if you are condi bombed, it’s almost 99% certain you have chill on you.
SY is strictly a support tool, or used in niche solo pve situations. I wouldn’t use it for the resistance alone.
The powercreep argument is myopic, you don’t keep a class down for the sake of “balance” when everything else becomes better, because that’s how guardian ended up losing all their ability to support the team.
I always have a giggle when I go to the DPS golem and in the section with the profession-specific buffs, Guardian is empty. But support class, amirite.
RtL has the problem of being unusable in melee range without wasting even more time repositioning, and being able to miss allies who move away. You are looking at it entirely from a pvp angle, as if guardian is always hiding under their teammates’ skirt. They are called “guardians” kitten , not maids. In pve, you want to be in the boss’s face as much as possible, which makes RtL clunky to use.
As for the other heals, yes it’s burst vs sustained heal, that’s why classes get options. There are weaker low cd heals, or longer burst heals. Guardian doesn’t get options and you are actually defending this.
They said they are reworking them last patch, now this patch rolled and nothing changed.
A healing elite spec will probably come with its own healing elite.
If you play hammer guardian, you camp hammer.
If you want to play the dps build, which doesn’t use hammer, then it’s scepter/torch + greatsword.
It’s best that you carry a shield, too, since the knockback is useful in very specific scenarios.
WoR traited and with perma alacrity has 6 seconds downtime. Without alacrity, it’s 50% uptime.
It might become useful in a niche boss fight in the future, although mesmers could just cast multiple feedbacks, too, if necessary.
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Wash the Pain Away had its cd increased to 25.
In pvp only
RtL needs to go down to 2s or lower cast time. Maybe the cd reduced to 25s. I mean, if Wash can be 20s, RtL doesn’t need to be 30s.
Guardian is the only profession along with Rev with no <25s heal, only that Rev gets 2 heals to make up for it. Until recently, Guardian didn’t even have a 25s skill, but we did have the record with 2 40s heals!
Search and Rescue pulls them out of harms way, and both you and other allies can manually rez them along side the pet. It’s also a lot harder to interrupt the pet than it is to CC a guardian channeling Signet of Mercy.
Especially in pve, there’s absolutely no comparison between Search and Rescue and Signet of Mercy. SoM only saving grace would be having a good passive, so it’s not a dead skill while unused, like the other revive skills are, but SoM has a bad passive.
Of course ticking faster will make it better, you or an ally can die before you recieve a single tick, 10 seconds is a long time.
They need to add more damage elsewhere in the longbow, especially Hunter’s Ward which tickles the enemies with the first hits.