Guild Wars 2

Oh okay. That makes more sense. Good to know. I usually just use “Stand Your Ground” but he does his pull more often than that can recharge.

Lumines.3916:

Virtue of Courage is something I treat like another “Retreat!” if you will. I usually save it for Lt. Kholer’s pull in AC for example. When you absolutely need to block that hit, it’s a good way to go about it.

Sidetrack: How’s that working out for you? I’ve been under the impression that Aegis will prevent one hit of many, and the remaining damage would still kill squishies.

I want a Norn dance that doesn’t look kitten I don’t know of any ethnic Viking dances that might fit, and seeing as the kitty cows already stole the Haka, I’d love to see Norn get a cossack style dance. Veritable giants stomping and jumping. The Asura death toll from getting underfoot would be astronomical.

Gotcha, thank you.

I don’t get it. Maybe I’m just stupid, maybe the info is just missing or you thought it was obvious. Are these stats for X seconds of attacking? A specific skill rotation?

Mace is fine. Shield is actually… not the best defensive option for Dungeons, to put it mildly. Shield is great when dealing with groups of chaff but sub-par against single tough opponents outside of the group buff. Dungeon bosses will just walk through the pushback from Shield of Absorption and it will only absorb very few attacks. So you’re left with the Protection from Shield of Judgement.

Focus’ Ray of Judgement is a tad weaker than Shield of Judgement but has the Blind that will actually work, and Shield of Wrath is awesome.

I can only heartily recommend you swap between the two as needed. You’ll be even tougher for it.

As for your damage output, well, blame Mace. It’s, along with Hammer, the defensive weapon. That said, I don’t find Sword to be all that much better.

If you do want to do damage as a Guardian, invest in Radiance. Max it. The investment plus the top tier Trait Right-Hand Strength will summarily up your Crit Chance by some 30%. Invest in Toughness for Crit Damage and Retributive Armor. That’s IMO the best way to do it.

Retaliation is pretty much useless. For one, it’s most often triggered incidentally. I don’t use “Stand Your Ground” or “Save Yourselves” for Retaliation, I use them for the group Stability and Condition Removal. Okay that was a lie. I use Save Yourselves for Fury on demand. Symbol of Wrath was the only Skill out there where Retaliation was the main effect and somewhat controllable.

And even then you still need an enemy to attack you.

That works well when I can pull a few critters on me and watch them hurt themselves once or twice. It doesn’t work so well when I got one tough opponent who either hits once in five seconds or comes out with a high damage multi attack that I can’t afford to stand in to gain the benefit from Retaliation.

If Retaliation prevented the damage it put out it would be a definite step towards what the patch notes suggested it should be. Else the entire concept is pointless cause you’ll spike a bit of damage before you die and that was it.

I’d like to hear your reasoning behind these proposals.

And I too like the current iteration of Cleansing Flame.

I don’t know about ‘maintaining tanky DPS’. Your primary weapon loadout is the most defensive you can get, and you don’t have a single Trait that really helps a ton with DPS. So I’d say Cleric Armor is your obvious pick, as well as Sapphire Jewelry. However, you’ll want a bit more Vitality for maximum survivability, or so established wisdom goes. The Durmand Priory, AC, TA and HotW offer “Magi” armor that has Healing Power, Precision and Vitality. Since you already picked Retributive Armor, more Precision can’t possibly hurt and the combination of Vitality, Healing Power and Altruistic Healing will make you pretty tough on top of Toughness from Cleric’s gear.

More gathered thoughts on Eveningstar’s OP

Symbols in general

Regarding Symbols at large. I feel that there should be a way to Trait for more Symbols that don’t require weapons. Symbols are a core mechanic of Guardians only available through weapon Skills (and Zealot’s Speed but we all know that one’s a bit weird). If not all weapon Skills have a Symbol, then there should be another way of getting them.

This would circumvent turning Smite into a Symbol (though I’m not really opposed to that either) and also make Sword and Greatsword viable for Symbol builds. Such a Trait should obviously be in the Zeal line. A percentage chance on Crit like Glacial Heart might actually work for this because the two weapons that have no Symbols at all can make use of Right-Hand Strength. Plain proccing on Crit with an internal cooldown that ensures no more than 30-40% uptime might work just as well and is less random.

I could see both Vigor and Might working for this. But that’s kind of a recurring topic. And they’re pretty much the only Boons not already used in a Symbol, barring Fury or Quickness.

The addition would fix viability of Zeal for both Scepter and Sword and present an option to Symbol builders in general. The need to invest in Precision would keep the Trait in balance.

Improved Spirit Weapon Duration

It’s my impression that it’s in Virtues so as to have it congruent with extended Boon duration. But it’s just a guess. Combining it with any other Spirit Weapon Trait does however seem iffy to me. Swapping it with an Adept Radiance Trait would seem just as easy. Both Healer’s Retribution and A Fire Inside sound like good candidates for a swap.

plasmacutter.2709:

I also think the subtext of this entire thread is troubling. Guardians are supposed to be warrior-zealots, but we’re talking essentially about “fixing this trait line for a post-greatsword world” .. e.g. — retiring greatsword to irrelevance rather than holding ANet accountable and demanding they make it useful.

ANet’s forum mods have been very trigger happy with merging threads. That would be one reason to very specifically cut a part of the issue from the greater discussion and put it under a magnifying glass.

I’m sure everyone here would prefer if Symbol of Wrath was returned to its old cooldown. But even if that happened Zeal would still be a stinker of a Trait line. One isn’t exclusive of the other.

That said? Greatsword itself is still perfectly viable. Symbol builds are kittened, yes, but the hit to PVE AOE damage output didn’t break it. Claiming in a roundabout way it was useless now is preposterous. (Except where it refers to Greatsword Symbol builds, because 25% unmodified Symbol uptime is just useless compared to what you can get out of other weapons).

Drop Sanctuary. Don’t move. Pop Binding Blades… Pull! Never gets old for me.

I generally think your proposal doesn’t go far enough but it’s late here and I got plans for tomorrow. I’ll put those thoughts in more detail later.

For starters however, I think that Harmonious Might would need some beefing up for a Grandmaster Trait. Simply because Empowering Might is a Master Trait that can proc once a second. Harmonious Might, even in a GS/Hammer setup would be hard-pressed to even just match Empowering Might due to the cooldown on Weapon Swap. Never mind that you’d need a team to reliably set up Combo Fields.

That said, I like the basic idea immensely. I’m tempted to suggest… wait. I got it.

Instead of proccing Might it should proc Symbol of Might. Same or lesser effect (1-3 stacks of Might) plus the damage you’d expect from a Symbol, plus the ability to start a new Combo. This should by all means be a Fire Field, not a Light Field. It still won’t be possible to continue proccing endlessly but with some smart playing you’d be assured of a Combo Field without having to spec into Purging Flames and Hallowed Ground just to make the most of the Trait.

Plus, it would loop back into all the Symbol-specific Traits you may or may not have picked up (or had to pick up anyway) to get to Grandmaster. Of course, both Symbol damage and duration would need to be on the low end of the scale, but… well, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this suggestion.

2 full seconds of Blocking almost anything thrown at you is an eternity in this game. Shelter is situationally insanely powerful. That said, I feel it’s slightly underpowered. Guardians have a dozen ways to purge Conditions, so Condition removal is not a priority. It’s nice in Signet of Resolve but not a selling factor.

The advantage of Signet is that you can bring it down to almost the same Recharge as Shelter with Signet Mastery. While still healing almost twice as much. A Trait which happens to be in a highly desirable Trait line and in a tier without a lot of other advantageous picks. Without this Trait they’d be balanced.

If there was a Trait that buffed the healing of Shelter they’d be in balance again.

Oh. That said.

Guardians have some horrible Traits and the Zeal line which was always bad is now horrible as well. There are basically two weapon-related Traits that are really worth it, and the others just feel like filler. Said filler traits are badly placed on top of that, eg. Scepter in Zeal.

Shootsfoot.9276:

Nonsense. I’m able to take on 4-5 mobs with little problem in Cursed Shore with my Guardian.

If you can’t survive as you say, you need to take a serious look at your build.

This. When I see the DPS other classes can put out I often get jealous. Same with the CC. I envy the way Necros can manage Conditions (we have a ton of tools for those too, but Necros are so much more versatile in that regard). Water Elementalists are better support IMO.

The thing is, Guardian is still sufficient amounts of DPS, support, Condition management (maybe not CC but we’re not useless there either) and doing all of that in heavy armor and a ton of self-healing options with good (though not great) melee weapons.

Guardians don’t necessarily shine in any single category, but the mix of being pretty good at everything except ranged damage is often stronger than specialization.

The build I give here might work for you:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Viable-Pure-Combat-Build/

(4th post down)

It’s another Monk’s Focus build, but the post contains a bit of a how-to as well. I prefer the Altruistic Healing route these days but that works better the more people there are around you since it procs per person buffed.

Good luck. I tried to make a proactive thread in a similar vein and some illiterate kitten of a mod merged it into the big QQ thread. I’m bitter enough over this little gesture to assume that ANet doesn’t give a kitten about our opinion.

I definitely want to be able to give my Mesmer’s clothes the looks of leather. He’s just not the type to run around in a froofy robe.

I’d like to reiterate my point about not being locked into skills anyway.

Stability is an awesome boon. When it’s needed. Same with pretty much any other boon of course. Situationally however, some boons may be as useful as an appendix.

Take a look at -just as an example- Caudecus’ Manor, Story Mode. Fighting the Golem or the Door Guard, there is absolutely no need for Stability, and since they both tend to ‘spin to win’, even Retaliation is of dubious help. “Stand Your Ground” is plain not useful in those fights. On the other hand, when you come upon the dogs who do chain Fear and Knockdown, Stability is practically a must-have.

I’d suggest a Sword/Torch Crit/Meditation build. 10/30/30/0/0

In Zeal, pick Fiery Wrath and leave it at that.

In Radiance, pick up Signet Mastery and Right-Hand Strength as well as your pick.of Blinding Jeopardy, Inscribed Removal, Shimmering Blades or Radiant Fire.

In Valor you want Meditation Mastery and Monk’s Focus as well as your pick of Focussed Mind, Retribitive Armor or Purity.

Your usual Skill loadout will be Signet of Resolve Judge’s Intervention, Smite Condition and one of the offensive Signets. The other two Meditations are pretty pointless in solo PVE. Which is also why Focused Mind is optional. Both Judge’s Intervention and Smite Condition are fast out of the box. Smite Condition coupled with Signet of Resolve’s passive effect should cover you against Conditions but Inscribed Removal and Purity give you more purging options if you find them necessary.

This build basically capitalizes on critting often and high, and from setting enemies on fire. Your Meditations heal you when you use them even while dealing damage and/or engaging the next enemy.

To be efficient this build will however require some investment in Healing Power gear. How much depends on you. The sweet spot is when your four healing options keep you hale enough to move from target to target without downtime. The rest of the gear should be a balance of Knight or Berserker and Valkyrie, again depending on your tastes and needs.

Same here for the record. Sony Xperia Arc Android phone, standard browser. It’s a shame especially since these forums wonderfully conform to my phone otherwise.

Missing two actually. There are six Great Swallowers. The sixth would be a being of corrupted air, deception and subterfuge, all-seeing. A hidden master manipulator. Maybe the puppeteer behind an entire nation named for it…

Two thoughts.

One, Tyria still has a ton of unexplored areas on the map (eg. Far Shiverpeaks, Steamspur Mountains, Deldrimor Front, Magus Falls). Three of those have Dragons in them. I’d think it right and sensible from a storyline perspective that these be explored and the persistent threats be dealt with before Tyrians get any ideas of wandering. Mych as I’m curious about the current state of Elona for example. Once the four Tyrian Dragons are dealt with there will come a time to wander… and encounter and fight the minions of the Deep Sea Dragon and the unknown sixth Swallower…

…who might well be found in one of those other places.

Point being, the fight against the Dragons is the overarching setting of GW2. With the possible exception of Primordus and the Deldrimor Front I’d imagine they’d want to deal with those first. On this, an observation: Ever notice any weirdly placed Waypoints in awkward corners of a map? The far northern corners of Frostgorge Sound for example? I’m pretty kitten sure they are infrastructure for a zone transition to be placed nearby in the future.

If Tengu are to be a playable race, the Dominion of Winds is a perfectly placed starting zone for them either way, with access to Kessex Hills and Gendarran Fields.

Two, weapons of any kind. Current fighting styles are in no way representative of the way a sane person would use these weapons. Arrows or thrown axes don’t bounce, spinning in place with a greatsword will only make you dizzy, flintlock pistols need to be reloaded after every shot etc.

As such, any discussion about needing new fighting styles for new weapons similar to existing ones is rather pointless. Yes, swinging a katana is way different from swinging a sword -a katana is basically a really big knife and a sword basically a really flat bar- but then neither sword nor katana wielders are known to teleport or whip up a flurry of projectiles with their weapons.

When we get sensible seeming attacks for existing weapons we can talk about stylistic differences. Until then different skins are enough. There are after all already cutlass/sabre/scimitar like sword skins out there.

Though I’d love to see both halberds/glaives/naginatas if you must and spears on land.

This isn’t to say people shouldn’t hope, dream and suggest the things they want. Just trying to counter those with what I see as being realistic.

Warriors get pensions? This is an outrage. I agree that Warrior pensions should be nerfed into the ground unless other classes also get comparable stipends. This clear display of class favoritism by the Devs really takes the kitten cake.

“Stand Your Ground” is far superior for any group effort. If you want easy proof, go fight the Claw of Jormag. When he casts his Fear, hit “Stand Your Ground” and watch with satisfaction as your entire screen turns around to.attack again.

That said. Traits are locked while you’re out and about but remember that you can swap Skills at any time out of combat. When you know Stability won’t be needed in.an.upcoming fight, replaced it with something more useful to the encounter. You only have three Skill slots. You should make each of them count.

Cause it still fits in this rather vague topic header and I’m too lazy to start my own thread… Why can’t I put the looks of one class of armor (Light, Medium, Heavy) on another? I don’t see my Mesmer as the type who runs around in robes, but there’s really no alternatives. Conversely a Staff/Scepter Guardian might look more properly attired (read: less silly) in said robes.

What’s the possible harm? Not being able to tell someone’s class in WvW? Cause there’s no handy icon right next to their name when you target them? That is if you can see them at all of course.

Agreed. Though I would prefer it be mixed up with the WAR style of unlocking where you needed to do several things to unlock a full codex entry. For example, fully unlocking a zone entry might require 100% map completion and having done the Zone’s major event chain and Dungeon story where applicable.

Conversely, having fully unlocked a Codex entry should providea minor bonus. Nothing game breaking. Maybe a 1% damage bonus for enemies whose codices you’ve fully unlocked, or a 1% boost to Karma gain while you’re in a zone whose codex you’ve fully unlocked.

The only trolls here are the ones who counter the fact that the SoW change majorly affected various legit Symbol-centric PVE builds by citing that GS was still valid in PVP. Which is no surprise to anyone but the densest kittens around cause static fields have no use in a fluid combat environment. Which is part of the big disconnect that is the root of much of the current unhappiness.

A change to one skill made the entire synergistic potential of the Zeal trait line null and void. Not that there was a lot there to begin with. This would be acceptable if the patch notes said that they wanted to weaken GS symbol builds. But the change was supposed to specifically address Retaliation. Which it didn’t do at all. Hence the aforementioned jarring disconnect.

You’d know these things if you actually read into the ongoing discussion instead of flaunting your ignorance.

Speaking as an Armorsmith, Explorer gear goes up to L80 Exotic. Of course that’s definitely wasteful (considering the need for Orichalcum, Gossamer and Ectos) since all you ever get is 18% as Fabsm stated. Just wondering where the intimation Explorer gear was capped at L65 Rare came from.

Of course, nothing’s stopping anyone to have a L80 Rare Explorer set for open world PVE and another set of armor for dungeons or any other content that is actually challenging.

There apparently is a hard cap for Power. But I have no idea where it’s at.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power

Eveningstar.6940:

• Symbol of Wrath contributes less overall damage in fights that last longer than 20 seconds provided your enemy stays within the radius of your Symbol for the entire 5s duration, and provided you use Symbol of Wrath precisely when it’s off cooldown. This is roughly equal to losing one auto-attack chain worth of damage in perfectly static fights every 20 seconds. In practice, roughly speaking, in a 30 second fight, this is the equivalent of losing one string of attacks, tops.

While I don’t disagree with the rest of your post (unless we want to get into how badly designed the Zeal line has always been; it’s just worse now), your above assessment is plain wrong.

Symbol of Wrath was always the most useful (I daresay the only time it was useful) in mass PVE encounters. I keep mentioning ‘farming’ groups of enemies (usually for Fine Material drops) or dealing with Event zergs. If you have a lot of enemies in Symbol of Wrath, the Symbol damage and Retaliation damage potentiate to wiping out groups in short order.

Faster than the new 20s cooldown of Symbol of Wrath at any rate. The thing is, it’s not just fights over 20s length where the change comes into play. It’s fights over 10s in length. Which is probably most in a solo environment unless you’re just picking on Grubs.

Of course, at a point this is all anecdotal evidence. I haven’t gone out and gotten metrics on my solo killspeed, nor do I intend to. But I do run the ‘Minotaur farm’ in Frostgorge Sound now and then when I don’t have anything better to do (I can try and grief the bots while I’m at it too; I definitely do get my daily reporting in, precious little good that it does). I’m definitely noticing a slower killspeed since the SoW change. It’s an issue of seconds, but there’s an impact.

I’m using a similar Altruistic Healing build. 0/15/30/20/5.

In Radiance I leverage Renewed Justice with Blind Exposure (and proc Altruistic Healing when I do).

Valor is the same as above.

Honor uses Superior Aria and Empowering Might (which again procs a lot of Altruistic Healing).

Skill loadout varies a bit from encounter to encounter. Hold the Line and Save Yourselves are mainstays. I use Stand Your Ground when Stability is called for, Purifying Flames or Signet of Judgement for extra damage and Sanctuary to create a bulwark against chaff.

Knight’s gear goes pretty well with this setup, though you want to mix it up with some Cleric’s or Magi gear for more Healing Power, and the build still manages to do okay levels of damage. 2 Runes of the Monk, 2 Runes of Dwayna and 2 Runes of Hoelbrak in this case cause I’m stacking Might.

Funnily enough, I still feel pretty squishy in this build. Mostly because the way the game works, a lot of Boss type encounters are specifically set up to counteract defensive Boons and Healing out of the gate (big multi-hit attacks that walk all over Aegis for example). It usually turns out that I’m not. I PUG a lot so occasionally, something goes pear-shaped cause of miscommunication. When I get disgruntled cause I’m down and nobody comes to rez me it’s usually cause the rest of the party is long dead.

Yup. Been considered. The change factually is a nerf to PVE AOE damage above and beyond anything else. It also hit Zeal builds focussing on two out of Zeal’s three focal areas, Greatsword and Symbol (ie. presumably using the line what it was intended for) pretty badly. But. If they specifically wanted to lower the AOE damage output of the Greatsword in PVE, why didn’t they just say that?

“Our metrics showed that Greatsword was performing higher than we want Guardian damage to come out. We want people to not feel railroaded into using one weapon over the others.” People would have QQed anyway but the change would have made sense at least. Of course, if that were the case it might be more sensible to give the underperforming weapons an AOE option. Right now it’s practically non-existent with one-handed weapons.

But taken at face value, the statement said the change was to address the way Retaliation works. You are correct that with 30 points in Honor you could get 7 Retaliation ticks out of Symbol of Wrath on an 8s cooldown. However. As you already pointed out, having the time to stand in one spot for 7s is pretty rare unless you’re farming chaff in the open world. Players in PVP and Bosses in dungeons don’t stay in one spot. And moreover, this locks you out of many other useful Traits, including Writ of the Merciful (Symbols heal those standing in them) which I understand is a mainstay of Symbol-centric builds and both Grandmaster Traits.

It’s already been tested, by the way. The Symbol of Wrath change does not hamper a mobile Guardian’s ability to keep up permanent Retaliation at all. There are several ways to skin this cat, but suffice to say that even my Dungeon build which doesn’t center on Retaliation at all can get about a 60, 70% uptime without trying.

What this means is that the patch notes fly in the face of reality.

Either they were just badly worded. Maybe something got cut from the statement, maybe there was a mixup. I don’t know. But this could be easily remedied in a matter of minutes, and it hasn’t happened yet. So I find that doubtful.

Much worse possibility is that the people who made the change didn’t know what they were really doing. At least in so far as they didn’t consider the impact on Symbol-centric builds and the Zeal Trait line. Most everyone who has spoken out so far would have preferred the Boon simply be changed to Might or something else. One stack of Might, even if made near permanent at great cost, is far less overall damage than Retaliation in those conditions where Symbol of Wrath was strongest (pulling 4, 5 enemies onto you and AOEing them down). But Symbol builds would have been unaffected.

Third and most troubling is the possibility that the patch notes were simply disingenuous. Luckily I find that unlikely. ANet has so far had no qualms about being vocal about unpopular changes (also see the various Diminishing Returns mechanics being implemented since launch or the great Butter Flood of 2012). But the sheer possibility is… troubling, since I don’t want to believe that they knee-jerk changed Symbol of Wrath cause of some errant metric, not considering the cascading problems that arose from this move.

Crit-based builds are perfectly viable. Especially if you intend to pick up Empowering Might (Honor Tier 2; procs 5s of Might to allies and you on Crit). However, you might want to rethink your weapon loadout. If you really want to focus on crits you might want to use two one-handed weapons to make use of Right-Handed Strength (Radiance Tier 3; 15% Crit Chance when using one-handed weapons). Especially since you pick up Renewed Justice and Radiant Power along the way.

15% is a lot in case that wasn’t obvious. It’s the equivalent of 300 Precision at level 80. Just from picking one Trait. And you get another 300 Precision just getting there. Mix in some Toughness with your gear (via, say, Knight’s gear which also adds Precision) and pick up Retributive Armor for another 100 Toughness via Valor, where each 400 points in Toughness adds another ~1% Crit Chance. It’s not a ton, but it’s free, and Valor also adds Crit Damage.

Re: Weapon swap. While I’d generally agree this isn’t universally true. Let’s say your other weapon is Staff. You swap, hit Empower, Orb of Light and then? Three or four auto attacks before you can swap over to GS again. Granted, if your other loadout is Hammer or Sword/Torch for example you’ll be fine. But what uf it’s Mace/Focus and all you want is more damage? In those cases auto attack might be more sensible unless you have an awesome on swap Sigil in your backup.

Obviously, all whinging aside, it’s a non issue to get used to a layout change. Feel free to take a dim view of them. But if the OP looked closer he could see the underlying problems caused by this change. AOE damage output in PVE was greatly reduced and Zeal/Symbol builds were greatly impaired. What didn’t happen was the stated goal of addressing Retaliation. If anything, the shorter CD on Leap of Faith now makes it easier to stack Retaliation from various sources as you’re not limited to having to stand in a Symbol this way. Cause Guardians can’t take a kitten kitten without leaving a Light Field behind. How is that so hard to see?

The problem with using active Retaliation to counter multi-hit attacks is twofold.

One, currently a lot of the sources of Retaliation are incidental or reactive. Outside Symbol of Wrath, “Save Yourselves” and “Stand Your Ground” it’s all side effects. And even on those three skills it may be a side effect. I personally use “Stand Your Ground” more to give my party Stability than anything else for example.

Two, when I hear multi-hit attack, I think of Lt. Kholer from AC. Standing in his whirl with current Retaliation will kill you. While this is an extreme example, there are several such enemies in dungeons. In fact, it seems like a lot of heavy hitting attacks are set up as multi-hit specifically to counter Aegis and other forms of Block with a counter (everything but Shelter). Without Retaliation having a component that reduces incoming damage, this is an utterly silly statement for the Devs to make.

Zeal has a few other problems, while we’re on the subject. The Major Master Trait holds the improvements for Scepter and Focus. Neither of which creates a symbol, but to get at them you’re forced into Symbolic Exposure which requires a Symbol to use. In fact the only other synergistic Trait for Scepter in Zeal is Binding Jeopardy and none for Focus.

Mind you, my personal take right now is that the only worthwhile Trait in the entire Zeal line is Fiery Wrath. But objectively it’s a mess if you want to build for anything but GS, Symbols or Spirit Weapons.

In the case of Empowering Might it clearly says ‘allies’ but you get the Might stacks as well. While this doesn’t make the case for all other abilities that state ‘allies’ but not ‘and yourself’ it’s a less clear-cut case as Writ of the Merciful seeing as the latter is a persistent AOE you can walk into to get the effect.

Agreed. Why I fired off a PM asking for an official clarification first thing this morning. But by the time a Dev dares to take a look at this kittenstorm I’d rather have some ideas for them to mull over. I’m as prone to raging against the dying of the light as anybody, but at the end of the day I’d rather at least try and be proactive.

Elementdot.6081:

Hammer drops a symbol every 4 seconds. That isn’t too spammy at all? Boon duration increase barely affect that 1 second of retaliation. 30% of boon duration? 1.3 seconds.

For the sake of reference: With Writ of Persistence and Two-Handed Mastery -an admittedly heavy investment that locks you out of some other desirable Traits- you could keep up old Symbol of Wrath 7.5s on an 8s cooldown. That’s 7s of Retaliation on an 8s cooldown. The 30% Boon Duration you mention would result in a Retaliation surplus of over a second per 8s cycle.

Again, that’s a 30 point Investment in Honor that locks you out of stuff like Empowering Might, Battle Presence, Pure of Voice and most notably Writ of the Merciful. So it’s nothing casually done. But totally possible.

I hope we’ve all cooled down a bit by now. I figure it’s time we start discussing the matter ourselves before the next unwanted and unwarranted change to a Skill rolls along in the name of bringing Retaliation in line. Through the many threads, alternate fixes for the perceived problem with Symbol of Wrath as the apparent poster child have been named. Some of them were pretty good, others problematic. Following this likely long-winded leadup I’d like to list them and invite people to discuss the merits or lack thereof or make their own suggestions.

The only problem we have with this potential discussion is that we’re operating in a vacuum. It’s hard to take the reasons given in the patch notes at face value because the change to Symbol of Wrath affected AOE damage potential much more than it affected potential to keep up Retaliation. We can either assume that the Devs consider Retaliation too powerful or easy to maintain in good faith, or we can assume that the real reason for this change was to lower Greatsword’s AOE damage output and Symbol builds.

But that’s just a level of uncertainty we have to live with for now. Hopefully someone comes in and clarifies this.

TL;DR: The current fix to Symbol of Wrath is not in line with the reasons given in the patch notes and hampers various playstyles not revolving around Retaliation. As the people who know the Guardian class best, we should take it upon ourselves to suggest a better fix to the issue.

What then can be done?

1) Change the effect on Symbol of Wrath from Retaliation to another Boon

If Retaliation in Symbol of Wrath is the problem, replacing it with a less complicated (for the Devs to balance that is) Boon might allow for it to be returned to its old cooldown. AOE potential takes a small hit due to missing out on Retaliation damage but Symbol builds are unaffected, possibly even improved.

• Might has been suggested as an alternate Boon.

One stack of Might in five 1s pulses doesn’t seem overpowered, and it’s in line with Greatsword’s auto-attack already giving out Might. Might is universally useful but one stack only comes down to about 30 additional Power at level 80.

• Fury has been suggested as well.

I’d love this, but I realize that Fury is an insanely powerful Boon. With the right Traits, a Guardian could give an entire party constant Fury. While I’d love to see it, it stands to reason that the Symbol’s duration would need to be lowered to even out the flat 20% Crit chance boost. Some builds could massively profit from this, GS Symbol builds might lose out.

• Vigor has also been suggested.

I feel that Vigor is a defensive Boon and doesn’t fit the style of Greatsword. That said, a Symbol that granted Vigor could be extremely useful in certain situations which require a lot of dodging.

2) Change the way Retalation works

Since the problem obviously roots deeper than one power, if we take the Dev statement at face value, it might be sensible to rework Retaliation from the ground up, and not change individual Skills or Traits.

• The main suggestion I’ve seen here was to make Retaliation a single lasting stack that will be expended by the first hit the bearer takes, like Aegis. In this scenario, the damage dealt by Retaliation would be ramped up, but it would now not be possible to simply have it up all the time but would require timing and active gameplay to keep it up.

I personally feel this would be highly workable in PVP but suck in PVE where most enemies have smaller health pools unless the Retaliation damage was delivered in a PBAOE when it happened. Otherwise, when fighting several enemies it might be utterly wasted by being triggered by chaff, or an enemy that is almost dead anyway.

Not sure how this would interact with Symbol of Wrath since it could still be rendered persistent.

• My personal take would be to make Retaliation damage scale with the damage taken. So big massive hits would trigger massive Retaliation while small scrapes only triggered small Retaliation damage. This is a PVE-centric consideration based on the belief that the Symbol of Wrath nerf was actually intended to reduce Greatsword AOE potential. The idea is to keep Retaliation feasible for boss fights but reduce its efficiency as a farming tool.

All apologies to anyone whose ideas I lifted from all the other threads. I really couldn’t be kittened to go back through, sift the grain from the chaff and give proper attribution. But to make it clear: Only the last idea is mine; all the other ones were had by the excellent people around here.

What’s feasible, what’s not? What are your ideas on how to fix this mess? Did I misrepresent anyone’s ideas?

casper.2947:

Schakal.6091:

Been saying that all night last night. The ability to keep up Retaliation in a dedicated build is unaffected. Radiance 15, Honor 10 and Virtue 15 is really all it takes for PVE. That’s only a 10 point deviation for a lot of people.

Honestly I just pvp, but your right, you don’t need to do all of the traits exactly as mine. Only certain ones are for the retaliation, the rest are for the build

Oh yeah. Why I specified PVE. Didn’t want to contradict you, just support what you were saying.

Height they could jump without falling? Isn’t the second part of every jump a fall?

Been saying that all night last night. The ability to keep up Retaliation in a dedicated build is unaffected. Radiance 15, Honor 10 and Virtue 15 is really all it takes for PVE. That’s only a 10 point deviation for a lot of people.

Gods. If they smacked Fury in SoW I’d immediately change to a Symbol build. ~50% uptime with Two-Handed Mastery and Writ of Persistence? Please.

Well, I’ve never personally played a Symbol-centric build. Writ of Exaltation usually seems to cover all my needs there. But I’d assume one would want to leverage all options there. ie. Vulnerability via Symbolic Exposure (though I personally have a love/hate relationship with Vulnerability) and healz via Writ of the Merciful. While Symbol of Protection is lovely beyond measure (as is any Protection Boon) I can see why someone would have gone with GS and SoW.

Not that that matters anymore.

See, I never played like that. Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong. But in my experience, Conditions are not all that prevalent in regular PVE. At least not compared to Stuns and Dazes. My basic combo was always 5-5-3-F1-2-1-1-1-4. There’s a Fire Combo Field going down either before or after the pull from Binding Blade. I realize the Blind just before I pop Retaliation is not ideal but survival > DPS.

Well, technically speaking…

The Hammer Symbol is what? 1s every 3s, so it has 33% uptime? 50% with Writ of Persistence. The OLD GS Symbol was 5s every 10s, so 50% uptime. 5s every 8s with Two-Handed Mastery, which would be 62.5% uptime even… and with Writ of Persistence it would be almost permanent — 7.5s out of 8. (I had to look up Staff. 4s every 15s, every 12s with Two-Handed Mastery or 33% uptime , 6s out of 12s or 50% with Writ of Persistence… but admittedly freely placeable.)

For Symbolic Exposure and/or Writ of the Merciful it was actually at least the 2nd best choice. 2nd best because the best choice IMO would be Mace. 50% uptime (4s on an 8s CD; 6s out of 8s or 75% uptime with Writ of Persistence) and Regeneration. Not the best in anything but the best bang for the buck.

Still. The possible near permanence of old SoW is quite a thing.