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LOL at all the Guards in here lamenting the demise of their “loot stick”. :-D
By your post history, you’re a WvW player and apart from the WvW forum, you appear to be most interested in thief and revenant…
So, from a WvW perspective… was there anything about staff in WvW that actually warranted this change? Because it’s been virtually unseen in PvE or sPvP for a while now. I’d genuinely like to know if there was an actual call that this was OP by anyone, anywhere, that justifies this, or whether it was purely a dartboard nerf.
Because this change has pretty much guaranteed it will never be used in any other mode, and even for WvW, mightstacking can be done by other means.
Now, if the damage had been raised to something like Lightning Whip levels, I could kind of understand it. But at the moment, it feels like ‘demise’ is an appropriate term. They’ve basically boonsmited it, but in all game modes, and as far as I could see, with no indication that it was causing a problem beforehand.
Lets all be honest here (and yes I’m primarily a WvW player), the basis of the complaints about this nerf has everything to do with the fact that pressing “one” no longer will automatically fill your inventory up with loots bags… basically gaining free stuff just by being tanky enough to run through an opposing zerg while tagging downs.
You’re right that no one really “complained” that staff one was over powered before. But it just comes across as hilarious that people on this forum are finding just about every excuse for why this nerf should be reversed while refusing to admit the real reason… that it affects their wealth gain in WvW.
Surely that’s the reason for some, but staff had a legitimate purpose in wvw. It was the only way to play a decent condi build in a zerg, as you could apply VoJ burning with every auto. Our ranged weapons were already bad enough, there was no need for this nerf.
And honestly, even the lootstick argument is pretty weak. It’s not like the game was affected negatively, and even so, they should have reworked the skill, not leave it like this.
Spirit weapons are bugged and don’t appy burning from the trait, hopefully Sword applies it with every tick of damage.
I’m not very impressed, guardian doesn’t have any pets now and they feel lazy to me when 2 of them are weapon skills we already have (sword, shield).
The cast times need to be reduced, hammer needs to be ground-targeted, otherwise the blast finisher is useless, and shield needs to be instant-cast and a stun breaker, like it used to be.
While this thread is 4 days old, and it’s obvious VoJ didn’t get gutted. This topic came up before when they buffed ‘Virtue of Justice’ and everyone who didn’t read clear enough lost their mind thinking they buffed DH’s Spear of Justice. Remember people Elite Specs have their own version of the profession mechanic skills.
Except that they did buff Spear of Justice. The passive applies 4s of burning, the tooltip is just wrong.
This change is only for sPvP. They changed while ago. I tested to confirm, the 4 seconds is still only on sPvP.
Yes, pvp only. VoJ was buffed, both the active and the passive, and the passive buff was applied to Spear, too.
While this thread is 4 days old, and it’s obvious VoJ didn’t get gutted. This topic came up before when they buffed ‘Virtue of Justice’ and everyone who didn’t read clear enough lost their mind thinking they buffed DH’s Spear of Justice. Remember people Elite Specs have their own version of the profession mechanic skills.
Except that they did buff Spear of Justice. The passive applies 4s of burning, the tooltip is just wrong.
Good luck with that. I don’t think 40 seconds (even more considering charge cooldown) of nearly 100% uptime projectile blocking in an AoE is very likely to happen.
I mainly just want the cast time reduced a bit so you can use it on reaction better.
That’s pretty much what I’m thinking. 3/4s is a long time when you have projectiles incoming, and the shield only lasting for 2s means it certainly does seem to be intended as a reactive skill rather than WoR or even SoA which do last long enough to create an effective (albeit temporary) ‘safe zone’.
Sure, but with a 3/4 cast time, you can’t react to anything.
If it’s to last 2-3 seconds, it should at least be instant cast.
Ashes is not a unique buff, or a buff at all, it’s just some burning stacks. It’s a venom.
Imbued Haste – Condition Damage +250, Healing power +250, Toughness +250
Thats for all allies affected by your Quickness which can help be maintained by Chronos if you cant keep it up most of the time. Its a Unique Benefit of the Firebrand which stacks with other stat boosting effects and benefits your Condition specs, Healers, and entire party with extra toughness.
And the fact you think Aegis is useless in Raids shows how little you actually know about it. If you are just looking to be a Healer the Druid seems more your cup of tea.
Can you read? Imbued Haste affects only firebrand, not allies.
With the changes to Radiance, we can cap our crit change for “free”.
15% for one-handed weapons, 10% against burning foes, 50% when having retaliation. That’s 75% total. Add 20% from fury and 5% base, and you have 100% crit chance.
So, precision is wasted on guardian. With valkyrie, we can exchange it for vitality, for almost 10k additional health.
It’s not ideal, as I would rather have an offensive stat. Maybe we can hope for a new stat combo in PoF, something with power, ferocity, condi (maybe expertise, too?)
Lesser Signet of Wrath seems to have its own cooldown, as expected.
And since the buff lasts for 10s and the cooldown is 20s, we can use them both to share +216 condi damage permanently.
If you went through all the trouble to have a pet chrono, why didn’t you do it on realistic?
34k on unrealistic is low. We are probably still lower than power engi, which seems to be buffed, and has an even easier rotation.
Our only hope is the signet trait now.
Edit: Actually, looking at the traits, we can get 75% crit chance from radiance alone. Add fury to that, and suddenly, precision is useless on guardian.
So, power guardian might be about finding the right gear set, because berserker is wasted on us.
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Tome of Resolve has 45s cooldown, i.e. it’s nothing like Celestial Avatar. It’s an emergency button.
Ashes is not a unique buff, or a buff at all, it’s just some burning stacks. It’s a venom.
In raids, aegis is useless, because it’s stripped by boss auras. Also, all the big attacks are unblockable. You also lose the healing of Receive the Light if you want to keep quickness up, in exchange for a heal with laughable low numbers, that’s only good for applying aegis.
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Daredevil’s dash is 450 units, I think Jaunt could afford to match it.
I applaud your enthusiasm. I, on the other hand, don’t see anything that supportive in firebrand. Aegis, stability, condi removal and minor healing are all things guardian had already and we couldn’t play support, because their use in pve is very limited. Firebrand is not changing that.
So, that leaves us with quickness, which while nice, it alone is not enough. A severely watered-down chrono with no unique buffs. I guess I’ll have to switch classes to play support after all.
With dodge jumps you travel more distance because dodging is faster that walking.
It’s like jumping with swiftness or superspeed. It will get you further than jumping normally.
Exactly, which is why dodge jumping doesn’t make a difference if you do have swiftness. And mirage gets superspeed when dodging.
Even if the spec works the way it’s advertised and it’s a condi PS for quickness… I just don’t want to play that.
Guardian is advertised as support and I’ve been waiting 2 years since the introduction of dedicated supports with HoT to play support guardian. And we are getting another flavour of DPS.
Worst of all, tomes were the perfect design opportunity for a support spec. Offensive support on F1, healing on F2, defensive support on F3. It’s all just a big waste.
Ohhh resource building mechanics… how about we lessen cooldowns across the board and tone down damage on some skills, and not kill the fast paced nature of the game by increasing cooldowns on our limited skills on the bar…
Why does this team think clunky stuff and resource management = engaging?
There’s no resource management. And the whole point of charges is to make combat more fast paced by giving you the option to either have low-cooldown skills, or spam more charges at the cost of longer cooldown.
The mesmer elite for example, you can either spend 1 charge at a time, so it’s a 20sec shadowstep, or you spend all of them for a triple shadowstep, but it will take 60s to get all charges back.
Are you talking about the Mesmer Blink skill?
Mirage’s elite, called Jaunt, is what I was describing.
Ohhh resource building mechanics… how about we lessen cooldowns across the board and tone down damage on some skills, and not kill the fast paced nature of the game by increasing cooldowns on our limited skills on the bar…
Why does this team think clunky stuff and resource management = engaging?
There’s no resource management. And the whole point of charges is to make combat more fast paced by giving you the option to either have low-cooldown skills, or spam more charges at the cost of longer cooldown.
The mesmer elite for example, you can either spend 1 charge at a time, so it’s a 20sec shadowstep, or you spend all of them for a triple shadowstep, but it will take 60s to get all charges back.
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Best part is that guardian has no dps elite, hope you are playing Sylvari.
Lets wait and see.
That’s not what we do here. We hit the panic button and start fires in trash cans.
We know everything there is to know, except from 1 mantra. What is there to wait for?
Some of us have been playing this game for 5 years, we don’t need to press the buttons to get a feel of the class.
So we have seen that Weaponskills get ammunition mechanic.
What does that mean exactly?
Ammunition mechanic will drop with the big balance change together with a major trait overhaul and the barrier mechanic.
It functions like this: You have charges on skills and you can use them without a CD, but with a recharge rate of the charges itself. Lets say throw torch has 2 charges and a 8s ICD. You can use tgrow torch twice in a row but have to wait the ICD of 8s to get a new charge.no they still have cool downs in between use, just smaller than the charge cool down.
It’s different between each skill, some of them have none.
Yes, cds might change, but they would need to be at least halved, and I don’t see that happening, so..
Maybe next xpac, bois
Thanks Justine.
And how do you build up or earn these charges? Do you have a global ‘pool’ of them to spend on skills or what?
There are a select few skills that have charges, each of them has its own “ammo” and you earn it over time.
For example, the new Mirage elite holds 3 ammo and has a 20s ammo recharge. It’s a ground-targeted shadowstep. So, you can spend all charges back to back to teleport up to 3 times, and every 20s you get 1 charge back.
They are bringing that system to some core weapon skills and utilities.
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it should be an awesome support weapon after the upcoming core patch (warrior is getting one, so i bet y’all will too). it’s gonna be great for pvp bunkering & wvw zerging. loads of healing, might & area control- but not a lot of damage. pretty much a must have for bunker firebrand.
that’s assuming anet’s balance team have more brain cells than a two dollar bill. which ah, i hope they do. i really do. but ah, time will tell.
Did you hype yourself up for staff changes? Poor thing.
Tomes have huge cooldowns (30, 45, 90 respectively) so they can never be anything similar to Celestial Avatar.
Tomes have huge cooldown becuz they are essentially virtues. Yes, it’s disappointing that player couldn’t roleplay as a dedicated tome-caster, but you have to look at bigger picture; adjusting the CD on tomes meant that Anet have to re-adjust the core specs as well, it’s a cascading effect.
So what if they are virtues? The best thing virtues have trait-wise is stability+stun break on F3, when there’s mirage with a stunbreak on dodge.
Regardless, that trait already has its own 30s internal cooldown, so the cooldown of the F3 tome is irrelevant.
I explained this now several times in a row. If we do not come to an understanding now there’s no point in further discussing this.
It’s not a debate. Your suggestion affects gameplay, not just visuals.
If you change the animation and visuals of a skill then that’s enough.
Of course, like I’ve explained now three or four times, you have to change every attack skill to a meele attack if you’ve transformed to a meele beast, or to ranged for ranged beasts. But that’s mostly a visual thing.
How many times does it have to be explained to you that this is not a visual change?
You could just make the “beastform” a single trait. If you don’t want that you can still have your green aura.
I’m crossing my fingers that there’s something like this. That this is the reason we haven’t seen all of the soulbeast traits yet.
A trait which lets us actually assume the form of our pet could be a great solution. Let players choose which way they want to go with this.
Personally it would be extremely appealing to me. The ability to run around the game as a spider, or fern hound or wyvern would be extremely value adding to the expansion.
There won’t be such a trait.
You realize all your skills are available to you when you go into beastmode, right? That means all utilities and weapon skills.
So, the spider you transform to would have to swing a greatsword and shoot a bow, and do the animations associated with our utility skills.
They will leave distortion unnerfed, and make new raid nuke mechanics work with % HP (like 100-110% HP nukes), so that Scourge can use barrier similarly to distort.
Aegis will stay as is, if the new firebrand heal wasn’t hint enough.
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Looking at Peachy’s footage, it seems our fall damage trait is changed to proc Shield of Absorption, probably merged with the rez trait.
Lol, they are not going to give barrier to guardian until next expansion. But we will know in 2 days, though, so if I’m wrong, feel free to rub it in my face.
What’s happening in two days? There’s probably a balance update but I doubt that’s changing much (although I’m hoping it does).
They are changing core traitlines.
Sounds mildly promising. Source?
Woodenpotatoes made a video about barrier and said they are giving barrier to core ele (Earth traitline). The changes were in the server they tested the expansion on, and he also saw necro and Reaper changes.
Also, preview of warrior changes on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6ruxy8/upcoming_warrior_strength_trait_changes_ripped/
Lol, they are not going to give barrier to guardian until next expansion. But we will know in 2 days, though, so if I’m wrong, feel free to rub it in my face.
What’s happening in two days? There’s probably a balance update but I doubt that’s changing much (although I’m hoping it does).
They are changing core traitlines.
We know almost everything about firebrand already.
We know every single trait, all axe skills, all tome skills, the page cost of all skills is 1, you start with 5 pages always, we know all mantras except 1.
Tomes have huge cooldowns (30, 45, 90 respectively) so they can never be anything similar to Celestial Avatar.
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You: We are talking about visuals
Also you: Change all weapon skills when transformed
Lol, they are not going to give barrier to guardian until next expansion. But we will know in 2 days, though, so if I’m wrong, feel free to rub it in my face.
I didn’t say they are put there by mistake, but they didn’t work the quickness in the elite spec like they did with chrono. They just put 2 traits there and called it a day. Nothing else about firebrand has to do with quickness.
You are very much describing a different elite spec. Changes to the profession mechanic, changes to skills, changes to visuals, a kit-like mechanic based on the merged pet.
This is not what traits do, you don’t change the entire spec based on a trait. Nor would they ever develop 2 different specs and have one hidden behind a trait.
Neither your suggestion of purely visual changes makes sense. Traits are not fashion toggles.
You want a transformation-based elite spec. It wouldn’t work for the reasons stated above.
There is no gameplay theme. The base of the spec is “loremaster” which has nothing to do with the gameplay. The spec is a bunch of random skills that are dressed with fancy tooltips about the lore of Elona to pretent like they belong.
The tomes are tacked on like an afterthought. Nothing synergizes with them, they could be removed and the spec would be exactly the same. You could have DH virtues there, and they would belong more, since they are themed after Paragon. They also have huge cooldowns to make sure they are as ignorable and forgettable as possible.
Axe is a purely condi dps weapon. Mantras pretent to be support, but offer nothing the class doesn’t already have. Aegis, burn, stability.
Then the traits are like they are pulled from a different elite spec, as they are all about quickness, when there’s nothing quickness-related in the rest of firebrand’s design.
A mess. It’s clear firebrand was phoned in.
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Give us a trait that reduces the remaining CD of a tome when you stow it, based on how many pages you left unused.
It’s not like you guys are the only “poor souls” with victim syndrome. Engineer, Necro, Thief, possibly Mesmer sub-forums have nearly identical posts, depending on the game mode.
And yet all of them are meta in both pvp and pve. Necro might have a slight excuse since they fell out of favour in raids. In wvw, necro is staple. The rest are great roamers.
Also, not all game modes are equal. Pve is a lot more popular and thus matters the most. I don’t care if guardian is good at wvw when it’s garbage in pve.
My biggest doubt is this, the trait description says: “Stance skills grants
their effects to nearby allies for a reduced duration” but actually, our Stances have multiple effects. Will EVERY effect be shared to our allies?
Example, Dolyak Stance: “Gain stability and retaliation and remove conditions that impede movement. Prevent application of such conditions while in this stance.”
This mean we will share stability and retaliation like a guardian? Or the effect includes only the condi-removal thing?
Another example, Bear Stance: "Heal yourself and your pet. Lose conditions while in this stance, healing for each condition lost. "
This means we will heal allies with our healing skill aswell? Or only the condi removal effect is considered?
Too many doubts, not enough answers.
Probably only the effect that’s applied as a buff is shared. Like, Dolyak Stance, the actual buff is the one preventing movement impairing conditions.
The old tomes were far more interesting to me and actually offered something guardians didn’t already have. Current tomes are just power-creeped shouts as far as I’m concerned.
I’m with you. I wouldn’t even be mad if they just copy/pasted the old tomes.
They were my favourite skills; I doubt I’m even going to continue to play unless something like them comes back. I don’t care if the two elites that replaced them get reverted, or if the new tomes get replaced by the old tomes, I just want them back.
I’m to abandon the class after 5 years, it’s obvious that the ship is sinking and we are in for another 2 years of nothingness. I’m waiting to see if soulbeast or scourge are interesting, otherwise I’ll quit the game.
Tomes were one of the reasons I chose guardian, but the problem runs much deeper than that.
And then you have countless rage threads in the forums about how the shapeshifted models look ugly, they block fashion and hide legendary auras.
Did you install the game yesterday?
You could just make the “beastform” a single trait. If you don’t want that you can still have your green aura.
Makes no real difference if you’re in beastform or not, all that would change are the attack animations and that in some beastforms all (or almost all) of your weapon skills get converted to meele skills and in some forms your weapon skills get converted to ranged beastform skills.
Without beastform, with just your green aura, you can use raged/meele depending on your weapon type and you would still get your extra 3 beast skills+ buffs etc.Believe it or not but there are ways to make almost everyone happy.
So the should have developed a second elite spec and put it behind a ttait.
Talking about realistic expectations.
Did some1 already ask the actual most important question? What is with dodge jump? As I recall ‘dodge jump’ jumps a bit higher than normal jump (at least that’s what we figured when doing the adventure box thingy). So will ‘mirage cloak jump’ also jump higher?
Dodge jump is overrated. What it does is that for the duration, you move as if you had swiftness. It’s good in SAB because you can’t have movement speed bonuses, but if you do, there’s no benefit to it. And of course, in competitive modes, if you are airborne, you are vulnerable, so dodge jumping gives you evade frames.
From what we’ve seen so far, you can move (and probably jump) freely while dodging as mirage, and you get superspeed, so movement speed is not an issue.
We are the class with the lowest DPS after Mesmer, and that’s after getting a purely DPS focused elite spec. We have no other pve build worth of note.
There are more than enough reasons to call guardian’s balance a kittenshow besides an unreasonable nerf.
The 33% trait affects tome skills. The tomes themselves are virtues, they don’t have the tome skill tag.
They are napkins, not tomes.
healer guard is kind of a niche forebrand brings it in line with druid tempest and scourge.
The only healing firebrand has is locked behind a 45s cooldown tome, good luck with that.
That cooldown can be reduced quite a bit via traits I think.
The main issue is that healer guardians are not even remotely tanky, and thus will not be able to function with the minimal range from the new tomes. If you’ve ever played a healer guardian in PvP, it becomes clear that standing in close-range for too long will get you killed almost as fast as a glass staff ele. If something is squishy, they either need mobility or long-range to survive. The Firebrand has neither and doesn’t look remotely tanky to me.A damage/support spec will never, ever function in close range (outside PvE) unless it’s also tanky, in which case it’s broken because it just excels at everything. Bad design is bad, as usual.
It can be reduced by 15%, down to 38.25s. Hardly any difference. Then the tome itself have very minimal healing. You might as well play DH and use Wings.
The only perk is the trait that lets you keep Virtues’ passive effect, which should have been a core class trait.
I mainly pve, so I mostly judge the spec for that content, but I don’t see anything promising. It’s the same thing they did with alacrity on Ventari, the bare minimum, with Chrono still being the better choice for both buffs.
And then you have countless rage threads in the forums about how the shapeshifted models look ugly, they block fashion and hide legendary auras.
Did you install the game yesterday?
Wondering if your pet is dead if you can even go into beastmode. If not, imagine if both are dead. 45-60s of no beastmode? That would be 45-60s where you can’t even get the benefit of Eternal Bond. Warrior would never have that issue. They would have gone through multiple cycles of Berserk mode.
We used to be able to rez our pets but that was squashed when players complained of targeting issues when your pet was above an ally you wanted to rez. We were never compensated for that change.
Can’t you activate beastmode to save your pet from dying? Though you have to have good reflexes to pull it off.
Yes, because we all know anet only makes the best possible choices, after hours of brainstorming and follow that up with meticulous testing.
Like giving mesmer phantasms might, when they are unaffected by it. Or when condi tempest was hitting over 45k dps and had to be hotfixed.
That might be a sensible reason if every other class in this game was at the pinnacle of balance and performance. They aren’t though; unfortunately, I see all other classes get the same sort of changes as we are seeing here. I guess by your reasoning, every dev is just lazy. Oh well.
Funny, because I see them getting buffed.
I doubt they are going to stack, like venoms don’t stack.