I settled pretty naturally into a PvE Longbow/GS build shortly after launch, and it’s been working quite well for exploring Maguuma. It’s somewhat similar to what Obal came up with for meta DPS, but I opted to trade some damage for more convenient gearing and better utility to handle the new content. Here’s what I’m running:
I’m using the Longbow and GS in both PvE and WvW, hence my sigil choices. Frankly, though, the extra dodges from the Energy sigils have been useful to have in the new content, and Air/Fire provide extra hits to proc Justice and improve the uptime on my damage modifiers. I’m unlikely to ever finish the collections for Arah and CM, so I’m sticking to Berserker until there’s a better way to get Assassin’s stats on those pieces.
I really just enjoy the build’s reliability and the internal synergy. The extra burn duration from Flame Legion runes and extra Justice procs from Air/Fire make sure that I’m always stacking damage modifiers, while Fragments of Faith and Retreat give me easy ways to set up Unscathed Contender when I’m ready to unload my DPS. Feel My Wrath and Procession of Blades give me respectable Fury uptime even when solo, and FMW makes Hunter’s Ward much more usable in the middle of fights if I start to get overwhelmed. Besides my damage options, I’ve got ample cleansing, Stability, and stun breaks to handle how much more common conditions and hard CC are in the new content.
I’ll also never get tired of dropping Procession of Blades and then setting up a Whirling Wrath burst on top of the trap. It’s just too satisfying to watch things melt in the storm of blades.
C’mon this nerf is microscopic. You guys act like the whole class was ruined. Instead of weeping over a small but needed change think about those who didnt get jack kitten.
Like thief, ele, ranger and warrior.
I feel like the reactions are pretty moderate so far, actually.
I agree that these nerfs don’t seem like that big of a deal, and we’re not the only ones who got the hammer on this pass, either. You can still drop trap bursts on people like this, but it’ll be harder to consistently control points by stacking DH’s. I do agree that Dragon’s Maw is going to face much stiffer competition now, but in a dedicated Trap build (should any still exist post-nerf), it’s still a decent choice.
Were Traps actually OP the way they were before, when people only had a few days to learn to adapt to the style? We probably won’t ever know, and as a Guardian, it does hurt to see new builds at risk of being buried by the Shout/Medi meta once more. I think Traps still have a chance to see some competitive use, though, and I’d still consider mixing both Test of Faith and Fragments of Faith into non-Trap builds for the extra damage, CC, and utility they offer.
Overall, it’s not the end of the world. DH still has lots of potential, and hopefully this shifts the ire of the PvP community elsewhere so that the Guardian’s unused utilities, weak traits, and broken weapons can get some love before Leagues begin (I can hope, right? Right?).
(edited by Soryuju.8164)
It feels like everything has to be re-balanced from scratch.
Really? I think some small balance tweaks here and there and then everything will be spot on.
It’s true that some nerfs (and buffs; I’m looking at zerker warrior) are probably needed, but in truth I’m impressed at how balanced the game is right out of HoT release. With only minor tweaks to a handful of skills/traits/classes, things could be nigh perfect!
Personally, I disagree. While many professions may be on a relatively level playing field, the overall health of the game is still questionable.
I posted something similar in another thread, but I personally hope that nerfs come down for all professions (some more than others) to cut back on the power creep that we’ve seen in the game over the past several updates. Anet is trying to market GW2 as an e-sport, but the game is almost unwatchable as things stand. AoE spam, dozens of passive procs, instant-cast abilities, rampant Quickness, and other viewer-hostile mechanics have just increased as time has passed. Power creep has also pushed most builds out of the meta that can’t either burst hard or bunker.
Elite specs have just exacerbated this, and while I understand that no one likes nerfs, Anet needs to take a hard look at the direction of their balance changes if they’re seriously going to promote GW2 on a competitive level. If Anet succeeds, that means more attention for PvP from the development team, so everyone has something to gain from it regardless of what class they play. If succeeding means things like splitting damage values between PvE and PvP, so be it.
Also, there’s still the issue where most elite specs are still plainly superior to the base professions, despite the fact that they were advertised as a “side-grade.” Maybe a better solution would be to nerf the PvE mobs’ damage/HP alongside the base professions and especially elite specs. This could preserve PvE difficulty while bringing everything else in the game back into line.
That said, I’m not against buffing some weak builds across professions amongst the nerfs to encourage more diversity in the meta. It’d be nice to see something like condition Thieves, Banner Warriors, Signet Guardians, or Shout Rangers having a turn in the meta, and it would help ease the sting of the global nerfs. That said, I doubt we’re going to see changes on that scale prior to the start of Leagues, so we’re probably stuck with what we’ve got for a while.
This change is the end of the nerf then that’s cool. If they go overboard, we can always go back to our burn builds!
I personally hope that nerfs continue for all professions to cut back on the power creep that we’ve seen in the game over the past several updates. Anet is trying to market GW2 as an e-sport, but the game is almost unwatchable as things stand. AoE spam, dozens of passive procs, instant-cast abilities, and other viewer-hostile mechanics have just increased as time has passed. Power creep has also pushed most builds out of the meta that can’t either burst hard or bunker. Elite specs have just exacerbated this, and while I understand that no one likes nerfs, Anet needs to take a hard look at the direction of their balance changes if they’re seriously going to promote GW2 on a competitive level. If Anet succeeds, that means more attention for PvP from the development team, so everyone has something to gain from it regardless of what class they play. If succeeding means things like splitting damage values between PvE and PvP, so be it.
Also, there’s still the issue where most elite specs are still plainly superior to the base professions, despite the fact that they were advertised as a “side-grade.” Maybe a better solution would be to nerf the PvE mobs’ damage/HP along with the professions/elite specs to preserve PvE difficulty while bringing everything else in the game back into line.
Just going to also point out that Hunter’s Determination was also nerfed/fixed to properly have an ICD on the Aegis portion of the effect. Previously, the DH received Aegis every single time they were CC’d, even if the Fragments of Faith portion of the effect was on cooldown. They should have significantly less sustain now when running bursty Trap builds.
I’ll happily take a nerf like that if it’ll help to reduce the complaints about DH. Against players who actually know what they’re doing, the change hardly makes any difference, and it just keeps bad players from farming themselves for us. The fix to Hunter’s Determination giving Aegis with no ICD is much more significant, though that was pretty clearly not intended, and it was only a matter of time until it was changed.
Only weaknesses are PvP, Fractals and Raids.
Dragonhunter Bunker is already shaping up to be incredible in PvP, so you can take that off of the list. I haven’t played DH in Fractals yet, so no comment there, and it’s too early to speculate on raids when we’ve only seen one boss in one wing (and when elite specs have received some notable buffs/nerfs since we’ve tried them last).
I’ll also confirm that it still blocks everything, so long as you’ve got the cone positioned properly. If melee attacks are getting through, it’s because enemies are flanking you.
I’ve definitely considered Minstrel’s, but haven’t had the chance to test it thoroughly. Based on quick, informal tests with golems, though, the damage loss is over 50%. Here are some rough auto-attack numbers on a Heavy Golem with Unscathed Contender and each Amulet (point-blank range):
Cleric’s Amulet
Scepter Auto: ~550 damage normal, ~900 critical
Mace Auto Chain: ~750-900-1250 damage normal, 1.8-2k critical
Minstrel’s Amulet
Scepter Auto: ~250-300 damage normal, 400-450 critical
Mace Auto Chain: ~350-450-650 normal, 950 critical
Criticals are somewhat relevant because of the guaranteed crits from Intelligence sigils and the potential spikes of damage from things like Protector’s Strike and Dragon’s Maw with the UC boost.
I have mixed feelings about the loss. On one hand, I can’t see any real reason why Minstrel’s shouldn’t be perfectly viable on a spec dedicated to bunkering and support. The extra boon duration and vitality are awesome to the point that I’m worried it’s going to dumb down bunker play and hurt build diversity.
On the other hand, I wasn’t having any issue surviving with the Cleric’s Amulet last night, and being able to apply counterpressure to glassy burst builds and force out some defensive cooldowns is valuable in its own right (especially if it gives you an opportunity to neutralize a capture point). It’s also really neat that the build can drop small spikes of damage on targets by combining Unscathed Contender with Intelligence Sigils and abilities like Dragon’s Maw or Protector’s Strike.
I think I’m biased toward Cleric’s right now because I disagree with Minstrel’s from a design perspective, but I can see legitimate reasons to run each one. Wouldn’t surprise me if Minstrel’s ends up being more popular, though.
I took some time to test the build I posted above for a few matches, and it’s absolutely insane. You mitigate massive amounts of damage, have some clutch CC’s, and provide great healing for your team. Your condition cleansing is ridiculous, since it seems that they fixed Hunter’s Fortification, and you get Aegis every single time you’re CC’d, since that part of Hunter’s Determination doesn’t seem to have any ICD. I may actually switch Retaliatory Subconscious out for Unscathed Contender because of that, since it could actually let you do some decent damage if you land something like Dragon’s Maw or Protector’s Strike with an Intelligence Sigil proc. More ranged pressure with Scepter, too.
I won’t name names, but I happened to find a well-known ESL Mesmer playing on Chronomancer during a hotjoin game and hopped in against him. He wasn’t able to kill me in any of the 1v1’s or teamfights we had, and in the 1v1’s, I was able to slowly cap the point from him each time by controlling his movement with my CC’s. Each time, he was eventually forced to retreat to a different point. I’m nowhere near being an ESL-level player myself, so I know that my build was absolutely carrying me in those fights, but I feel like that’s a good endorsement for the build’s potential. I can very easily see something like this being the DH meta.
I have to sleep now, but I’m really looking forward to further testing tomorrow. I’ll put the build link below one more time for convenience (updated with Unscathed Contender, tests pending):
Dragonhunter Fragment Bunker: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQRApd7ensABlChFdCuCBkdilKiCbACgIQe2z9fPL8Ov0D-TJBHwALLDA4kA0b/hBPBAA
Maybe something like this?
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQRApd7ensABFditCBmCBkdilKiCbACgIQe2z9fPb8Ov0D-TJBHwALLDA4kA0b/hBPBAA
Disclaimer: I didn’t try anything like this myself last beta, and not all of the proper tools were in place then, anyways. Swap the mainhand/offhand pairings to suit your preference. Hold the Line is also an option over Retreat, though I think the latter suits the goals of this build more. Renewed Focus and Feel My Wrath are also perfectly valid options for the Elite skill.
Fragments of Faith/Pure of Heart can make up for a lot of the sustain you lose from dropping Valor, and our new Virtue of Resolve heals for over 5k per cast while cleansing conditions. What’s also important is this build’s emphasis on blocks and the extra Stability now available from an instant-cast Fragments of Faith, since this will make VoR much more reliable.
Speccing Virtues over Valor lets us enjoy better passive healing over time and powerful AoE cleansing, along with an extra stun break/Stability/Protection source from Indomitable Courage. We lose personal healing and party healing from AH and Communal Defenses, but with better active healing for allies on WoR and Druid potentially entering the PvP meta as a dedicated healer, those losses seem more reasonable.
Without AH, Staff isn’t as desirable for personal sustain, so Scepter can enter the picture to give us better ranged fighting/point assault capabilities, an Immobilize that has excellent synergy with our Traps, and the potential to take the Focus in addition to the Shield (more blocks and cleansing!). CC’ing a target in a teamfight with Chains of Light, Shield of Absorption, or the new Hunter’s Verdict can let you drop your traps right on top of someone, letting you get your Fragments out at will or letting you consistently set a target up for a spike with Dragon’s Maw. Wings of Resolve can also be used to quickly gap-close to a target and put them in range of your traps.
You do arguably lose some AoE cleansing potential from the missing shout and smaller radius/longer cast on Resolve, but the lower cooldown on Resolve somewhat makes up for this if you’ve got good reflexes. Between Resolve and FoF, you also heal allies for significantly more with this build than a traditional bunker, so that’s something to consider as well.
Just my take on this type of build. I’ll be curious to try something like it out this weekend.
What game mode are you playing? If you’re talking about PvE, then I can see how you wouldn’t get much mileage out of Staff 5 in general situations, but it’s an extremely powerful area-denial tool in PvP and WvW.
Unlike Shield 5, Line of Warding can CC targets repeatedly if they continue trying to move across the wall (great if you can throw it down in the middle of the battlefield), which lets you peel enemies off of allies when they’re trying to retreat, prevent foes from reaching capture points and/or downed players, and block off escape routes when enemies are disengaging from a fight. Line of Warding is also currently our only ward-type skill that can be ground-targeted at 1,200 range (excellent for interrupting stomps, rezzes, and other long casts from a distance) and it has no limit to the number of targets it can affect, making it a staple of zerg combat in WvW (either to strip stacks of Stability en masse from players or to trap those who have already lost Stability).
Line of Warding and Shield of Absorption may both provide CC, but they serve very different roles in battle, and the current duration/cooldown for Line of Warding is justified. 10-second lines or 5-second lines twice as often (almost 33% uptime if you took the Staff trait) would make it too easy to control entire enemy groups just by stacking Guardians.
(edited by Soryuju.8164)
I also disagree with a leap on the Sword auto chain. As mentioned above, Rangers already have something like that, and it’s almost universally hated because of how hard it makes your character to control. I’d take our current auto chain over having to deal with something like that.
I think that the Sword really only needs simple changes to be in a good spot again, many of which have already been suggested here:
Sword Wave:
- Remove the “projectile” classification from the skill
- Reduce the reach of the cone and instead make it wider to improve accuracy.
Fairly self-explanatory. Not having melee autos reflected, having better accuracy while maneuvering around targets, and being able to strike objects properly are all basic quality-of life fixes that will make using the Sword feel much more natural. Otherwise, this is already a good auto-attack that’s unique for having 5+ hits per chain.
Flashing Blade:
- Apply the Blind instantly upon reaching your destination.
- Grant 3 seconds of Fury to allies within a 240 unit radius after teleporting.
Instant-Blind at your destination makes it easier to use this skill as a defensive reaction and can help the Guardian make clutch defensive plays. Right-Hand Strength helps make the Sword a critical-focused weapon, so giving it some source of Fury without help from utility skills or Pack Runes makes sense.
I would ask for a short-duration Symbol at your destination that pulses Fury, but given the usual rate of balance changes, minimal-effort suggestions seem more realistic.
Zealot’s Defense:
- Remove the root while casting
- Change the projectile destruction to projectile blocking for better trait synergy.
As it stands, using this skill can sometimes leave you in a worse position against projectile users because it allows them to gain distance on you while you cast. If we can move while using the skill, that also helps mitigate the poor accuracy it suffers from as targets get farther away. Changing projectile destruction to blocking shouldn’t make a huge difference now that our block traits have all been nerfed, but more internal synergy is always nice.
I wouldn’t really ask for much else on the Sword at this point. It’s a unique multi-hitting weapon that can be used in both power and condition builds, and it’s not really weak so much as it’s suffering from quality-of-life issues. Fixing those issues and giving it a couple small buffs would stop most of the complaints about it and make it feel much better to use.
I also think Berserker is still a likely candidate for Guardians going forward, but I’m curious to see if we’ll start mixing pieces of Valkyrie gear with Berserker for raids. Two reasons that could factor into that decision:
1) Druid is likely going to be a presence in raids, and they’ll be bringing the Spotter trait to give a Precision boost to the party that was often missing in dungeon runs. This could give us some more leeway for extra Vitality.
2) Supposedly we’re going to be dealing with more damage sources that can’t be dodged, and it’s likely that this undodgeable damage is also going to ignore blinds and blocks. This puts us in a position where we may need to have a higher HP buffer to survive, and Valkyrie is the best way to achieve that while minimizing the DPS loss.
That said, if we can survive well enough in Berserker, Valkyrie could potentially be a liability to the party. Having higher HP means that it takes more healing to top us off, and with the 5-target limit on heals, Valkyrie makes us more likely to soak up healing we don’t need while denying party members who could be in trouble without it. It just makes the Druid’s job harder.
As for our role as tanks, I think that’s going to depend heavily on how raid mechanics interact with our active defenses, but we can probably still put up a respectable performance with a PvP-style AH bunker. Soldier seems likely to me in this case, but Cleric’s could potentially make us a good off-healer with Selfless Daring, Pure of Heart, and Battle Presence, and we might even be able to get away with Nomad’s gear, depending on whether more DPS or stronger support comes out to be more valuable in a given encounter.
I’m not sure conditions will end up being a thing for us, since I feel like our utilities are going to be a big part of the demand for us in raids, and Burn builds are more inclined to fill those slots with damage than power builds are. It does depend on how many encounters discourage power damage, though I’d still question if we’d be more useful in a tank/support role during those fights instead.
Just saw, hopefully Daredevil is in good shape for launch. Anyways, like I said, I’ve made my points. I didn’t used to feel like burst conditions should be a thing either, but power creep in this game hasn’t left room for anything but burst, really. It’s either:
a) Let conditions do burst-level damage.
b) Kill every viable condition build in competitive play.
c) Globally nerf both damage and sustain to make non-burst strategies viable again.
Personally, I’d prefer C, but that’s never going to happen. I think that makes A the lesser of two evils. You think that B is. We’re not going to agree, so let’s leave it at that.
Well, if you did try playing a burn guard, you’d know that burning accounts for only 50% of their dps…Do you want to QQ about their damage coefficients too?
really????
What burn guard build does physical dmg as much as burns? Are they running celestial? are the numbers kinda low like below 50,000 dmg for each condi and direct?
smhYes, really. Any burn guard that uses a carrion amulet and a few Meditations will be doing a ton of power damage. When I run a carrion burn guard (GS, Sw/T), I typically clock in at ~200-300k power damage and ~200-300k burn damage. In most cases (~90-95%), the power damage exceeds or equals the burn damage.
Will post screenshots when I’m home later tonight!
That’s really good. Please do post your results. For me, physical damage is only around 1/3 of burn damage total. Ex if burns 150,000 direct is around 50,000 sometimes less.
The damage output really depends on your weapon choice, your traits, and your sigils, but when I play Burn Guard, I get similar numbers to those above (and before people jump on me, I play all types of Guardian builds, including power, burn, and bunker, in addition to power and condition builds on a number of other professions). Sword/Torch + GS is also what I use to get those balanced numbers, though my output skews more toward burning if I successfully jump into lots of teamfights with the Greatsword.
Not going to bother responding to people crying for Burn nerfs anymore. We’ve reached the point where people are complaining about Spirit Weapons and saying that Guardians have too much HP, so it’s pretty obvious that the discussion is over. I’ve made my points, very few even provoked a response, so I’m done now.
Aww I mentioned spirit weapons as a joke and he takes it as an actual argument that lets him declare victory.
It’s not “victory.” You’ve got what you want to believe, you’re entitled to that opinion, and it’s obvious you’re not going to change your mind no matter what people say. Now that I recognize that, I’m just calling it quits to save both of us some time and frustration.
I don’t know if Anet’s going to nerf Burn or not. If they do, I’ll just play my other Guardian builds instead and do just as well. My interest in defending Burn Guardian is because it’s the first new semi-competitive build Guardian has had since Power Medi and AH Shout bunker since the game launched. Over half of our utilities have been worthless in PvP since launch, and we aren’t sharing in much of the power creep that’s coming with HoT, so our builds are already going to become less viable going forward. Nerfing builds that are only barely considered viable in competitive play isn’t going to do our profession as a whole any favors.
They nerfed Hundred Blade Warriors in the past, surely they will nerf this stacking nonsense. Hell they even nerfed my bunker Thief build and no one played it. Burst conditions should not be a thing.
I did edit my post above, in case you didn’t see. Trust me, I’m not looking to get Thieves nerfed in their current state.
Well, if you did try playing a burn guard, you’d know that burning accounts for only 50% of their dps…Do you want to QQ about their damage coefficients too?
really????
What burn guard build does physical dmg as much as burns? Are they running celestial? are the numbers kinda low like below 50,000 dmg for each condi and direct?
smhYes, really. Any burn guard that uses a carrion amulet and a few Meditations will be doing a ton of power damage. When I run a carrion burn guard (GS, Sw/T), I typically clock in at ~200-300k power damage and ~200-300k burn damage. In most cases (~90-95%), the power damage exceeds or equals the burn damage.
Will post screenshots when I’m home later tonight!
That’s really good. Please do post your results. For me, physical damage is only around 1/3 of burn damage total. Ex if burns 150,000 direct is around 50,000 sometimes less.
The damage output really depends on your weapon choice, your traits, and your sigils, but when I play Burn Guard, I get similar numbers to those above (and before people jump on me, I play all types of Guardian builds, including power, burn, and bunker, in addition to power and condition builds on a number of other professions). Sword/Torch + GS is also what I use to get those balanced numbers, though my output skews more toward burning if I successfully jump into lots of teamfights with the Greatsword.
Not going to bother responding to people crying for Burn nerfs anymore. We’ve reached the point where people are complaining about Spirit Weapons and saying that Guardians have too much HP, so it’s pretty obvious that the discussion is over. I’ve made my points, very few even provoked a response, so I’m done now.
Aww I mentioned spirit weapons as a joke and he takes it as an actual argument that lets him declare victory.
It’s not “victory.” You’ve got what you want to believe, you’re entitled to that opinion, and it’s obvious you’re not going to change your mind no matter what people say. Now that I recognize that, I’m just calling it quits to save both of us some time and frustration.
I don’t know if Anet’s going to nerf Burn or not. If they do, I’ll just play my other Guardian builds instead and do just as well. My interest in defending Burn Guardian is because it’s the first new semi-competitive build Guardian has had since Power Medi and AH Shout bunker since the game launched. Over half of our utilities have been worthless in PvP since launch, and we aren’t sharing in much of the power creep that’s coming with HoT, so our builds are already going to become less viable going forward. Nerfing builds that are only barely considered viable in competitive play isn’t going to do our profession as a whole any favors.
I might as well add, I understand that as a Thief, you’re also in a fairly bad position going into HoT. I think there are going to be much more important things to nerf than burn once HoT lands, however, and I think both of our professions could use some attention if we’re going to keep up in the new metagame.
(edited by Soryuju.8164)
Well, if you did try playing a burn guard, you’d know that burning accounts for only 50% of their dps…Do you want to QQ about their damage coefficients too?
really????
What burn guard build does physical dmg as much as burns? Are they running celestial? are the numbers kinda low like below 50,000 dmg for each condi and direct?
smhYes, really. Any burn guard that uses a carrion amulet and a few Meditations will be doing a ton of power damage. When I run a carrion burn guard (GS, Sw/T), I typically clock in at ~200-300k power damage and ~200-300k burn damage. In most cases (~90-95%), the power damage exceeds or equals the burn damage.
Will post screenshots when I’m home later tonight!
That’s really good. Please do post your results. For me, physical damage is only around 1/3 of burn damage total. Ex if burns 150,000 direct is around 50,000 sometimes less.
The damage output really depends on your weapon choice, your traits, and your sigils, but when I play Burn Guard, I get similar numbers to those above (and before people jump on me, I play all types of Guardian builds, including power, burn, and bunker, in addition to power and condition builds on a number of other professions). Sword/Torch + GS is also what I use to get those balanced numbers, though my output skews more toward burning if I successfully jump into lots of teamfights with the Greatsword.
Not going to bother responding to people crying for Burn nerfs anymore. We’ve reached the point where people are complaining about Spirit Weapons and saying that Guardians have too much HP, so it’s pretty obvious that the discussion is over. I’ve made my points, very few even provoked a response, so I’m done now.
If certain someone in the derv team is wishing this topic will be quickly buried away by new threads, save your breath. I’ll push it up whenever it’s no longer in the front page.
that wuld imply they take the time to notice threads in guard subforum…
Now don’t say that! Look at how quickly they fixed Fragments of Faith for us – we even got a developer response dedicated to it. I don’t think I’ve seen a faster response time since they fixed “We Heal As One!” on the Ranger a couple weeks ago. You can be sure they’re reading our forums and planning the next Guardian fix.
Here’s a reference for the cast times of skills commonly used by Burn Guardians for burn application and/or burst combos. Every skill with a cast time has some associated animation with it to allow opposing players some chance to react.
Zealot’s Flame: Instant
Judge’s Intervention: Instant
Purging Flames: .75 second cast time
Smite: .25 second cast time
Chains of Light: .5 second cast time
Zealot’s Fire: .75 second cast time
Cleansing Flames: 4.25 second channel
Zealot’s Defense: .75 second cast time + channel
Whirling Wrath: .75 second cast time + channelThe only instant-cast parts of a standard Burn Guardian’s toolkit are Zealot’s Flame, Judge’s Intervention, and the same sigil procs that all professions have access to (and alsoVirtue of Justice, though you’ll rarely see it activated outside of securing stomps). The animation for something like Chains of Light isn’t quite as obvious as it is for Kill Shot or Eviscerate, but you actually can react to it if you’re paying attention to the Guardian.
The other part of your argument that I don’t get is that most power-based Meditation Guardians use a very similar burst rotation to Burn Guardians. Immobilize with Scepter and teleport in with Judge’s Intervention while simultaneously casting Whirling Wrath, Zealot’s Defense, and/or one of our other burst skills (e.g. Shield of Wrath). Power Guardians will often also add Smite Condition to the combo which is an instant-cast(!) 3k damage crit if they’ve got any condition on them. Most of the same skills are killing you with the burn build as they are with the power build, and the damage is just coming from a different place. The difference in this situation is that the power build kills you up front, and doesn’t give you a chance to negate the majority of its damage.
Except pretty much everything you listed doesn’t actually burn but just adds hit count for justice to proc, why not list every single skill that counts as a hit.
Because most Burn Guards don’t just “burst” with Purging Flames, Judge’s Intervention, and nothing else, I guess?
I don’t get your point at all – burns are burns, why does it matter whether the skill applies them inherently or through VoJ procs? The ones I listed are some of the ones that proc VoJ the most, compared to something like Mighty Blow or Orb of Light, or the ones that contribute in some way to big burn bursts, like Chains of Light.
I gave you some numbers disproving your claims that almost all Guardian burns are instant-cast and an argument that a Guardian’s power build (which you don’t have an issue with) uses most of the same tools to kill as a Burn Guardian does. Is your statement above your only response to all of that?
Here’s a reference for the cast times of skills commonly used by Burn Guardians for burn application and/or burst combos. Every skill with a cast time has some associated animation with it to allow opposing players some chance to react.
Zealot’s Flame: Instant
Judge’s Intervention: Instant
Purging Flames: .75 second cast time
Smite: .25 second cast time
Chains of Light: .5 second cast time
Zealot’s Fire: .75 second cast time
Cleansing Flames: 4.25 second channel
Zealot’s Defense: .75 second cast time + channel
Whirling Wrath: .75 second cast time + channel
The only instant-cast parts of a standard Burn Guardian’s toolkit are Zealot’s Flame, Judge’s Intervention, and the same sigil procs that all professions have access to (and alsoVirtue of Justice, though you’ll rarely see it activated outside of securing stomps). The animation for something like Chains of Light isn’t quite as obvious as it is for Kill Shot or Eviscerate, but you actually can react to it if you’re paying attention to the Guardian.
The other part of your argument that I don’t get is that most power-based Meditation Guardians use a very similar burst rotation to Burn Guardians. Immobilize with Scepter and teleport in with Judge’s Intervention while simultaneously casting Whirling Wrath, Zealot’s Defense, and/or one of our other burst skills (e.g. Shield of Wrath). Power Guardians will often also add Smite Condition to the combo which is an instant-cast(!) 3k damage crit if they’ve got any condition on them. Most of the same skills are killing you with the burn build as they are with the power build, and the damage is just coming from a different place. The difference in this situation is that the power build kills you up front, and doesn’t give you a chance to negate the majority of its damage.
The first sentence is an opinion. The second is blatantly false because many people stating they don’t really play condition builds have said burning is not broken in this very thread. The only way I see you could reach the conclusion of the second sentence is if you literally think anyone who disagrees with you runs burn builds regardless of their own statements.
So apparently his statement is false and other peoples statement that they play don’t play condition builds is a fact based off absolutely nothing.
Do you really think that every player defending conditions in this thread plays condition builds exclusively across all the professions they use in PvP, and that playing a condition build somehow makes them unaffected by condition damage coming from the opposing team? Most people play a variety of builds, and they all have to deal with incoming conditions. Condi builds can have trouble cleansing too if they don’t incorporate enough condition clears into their build, so conditions aren’t a unique problem for non-condi players, either. If anything, you should be accusing all of the people defending condis of playing Diamond Skin Elementalist.
In response to removing the highest-damage condition first, I think we should also rework Blinds and Blocks so that they aren’t consumed by skills that deal damage below a certain threshold. I don’t want to negate autoattacks while Heartseeker is killing me, so I’d like Blinds and Blocks to only target the opponent’s most important damage skills. This would help reduce the RNG on these effects and help give players a way to counter the power builds that all the top teams are running.
You bring up a good point unintentionally. For direct damage attacks, an opponent has blocks, blinds, invulnerabilities,and dodges. For condition damage, the only counter play are dodges. Condi cleanse is the only other option and so it needs to remove the most damaging condition first.
Blocks, blinds, and invulnerabilities all work on skills that apply conditions the same way they work on skills that do regular damage. There’s also Resistance, which will be even more prevalent in HoT. I fail to see your point.
The first sentence is an opinion. The second is blatantly false because many people stating they don’t really play condition builds have said burning is not broken in this very thread. The only way I see you could reach the conclusion of the second sentence is if you literally think anyone who disagrees with you runs burn builds regardless of their own statements.
So apparently his statement is false and other peoples statement that they play don’t play condition builds is a fact based off absolutely nothing.
Do you really think that every player defending conditions in this thread plays condition builds exclusively across all the professions they use in PvP, and that playing a condition build somehow makes them unaffected by condition damage coming from the opposing team? Most people play a variety of builds, and they all have to deal with incoming conditions. Condi builds can have trouble cleansing too if they don’t incorporate enough condition clears into their build, so conditions aren’t a unique problem for non-condi players, either. If anything, you should be accusing all of the people defending condis of playing Diamond Skin Elementalist.
In response to removing the highest-damage condition first, I think we should also rework Blinds and Blocks so that they aren’t consumed by skills that deal damage below a certain threshold. I don’t want to negate autoattacks while Heartseeker is killing me, so I’d like Blinds and Blocks to only target the opponent’s most important damage skills. This would help reduce the RNG on these effects and help give players a way to counter the power builds that all the top teams are running.
Except signet of wrath is used on burn guard builds, replacing the condi damage increase with move speed would be a knock to burn guards while benefiting other guard builds. Maybe tweek your idea replace the highly disregarded signet trait to apply speed bonus while a signet is equipped, and just ensure its non stacking.
Super speed guards would be so reviled it would be hilarious to read forums after lol.
I’ve never seen a Burn Guard in PvP or WvW run Signet of Wrath, so are you talking about the burn build for PvE dungeons?
If we’re talking PvP situations, then Purging Flames, Smite Condition, Contemplation of Purity, and Judge’s Intervention are all much higher priorities for utility slots, and even if I’m passing on some of those for a free slot, I’m definitely going to go for Stand Your Ground before more passive damage. Signet of Wrath isn’t really even in the race.
If we’re talking about the PvE dungeon build, I was under the impression that Signet of Wrath was only used if you had a free utility slot with nothing better to run, and that the burn build in general isn’t well-represented because it’s hard to gear for and because Zerker is generally better DPS anyways.
The problem with tying the movespeed buff to a trait line is that it reinforces more “mandatory” traits for Guardians, so putting it on the Signet trait is a no-go unless you’re going to create a similar movespeed trait for every line (and let’s be real, that’s never going to happen). WvW roaming builds on Guardian would basically be locked into Radiance, Valor, and Virtues, in addition to having a utility slot locked for a Signet. That’s a massive blow to build diversity in that game mode when diversity already isn’t that great to begin with.
Shaving some optional DPS off a niche PvE build that only uses Signet of Wrath when there’s nothing more useful seems like a much less painful trade for the profession as a whole, and maybe something could be done with the Signet’s active effect to compensate (e.g. applies a buff that gives +~10% damage and condition damage for ~8-10 seconds after using SoW, for something simple that benefits more builds and synergizes with the Immobilize?).
I don’t feel like changing Signet of Wrath is a major loss for Burn Guardians, and our Signet passives as a whole need to be revisited, so killing two birds with one stone like this makes sense to me.
Rather than see it worked into DH or an existing traitline, I’d like the devs rework one of our useless Signet passives into a +25% movespeed bonus. Maybe Signet of Wrath, so you get the movespeed on passive and Immobilize on active, turning the Signet into a great anti-kiting tool. Maybe also add some sort of bonus utility to the active while you’re at it, since a single Immobilize on a moderate cooldown wouldn’t do a whole lot in open-world PvE, which is one of the two game modes where a permanent mobility boost is most desirable. You’d just have to balance the effect with the Wrath of Justice trait in mind.
Some reasoning:
Putting a movespeed bonus on a Signet would promote one of our underused utility types without forcing the Guardian to pick up yet another “essential” trait line, or forcing us even more deeply into Valor or Virtues, if that’s where it ended up. It wouldn’t wall off our movespeed boost behind an Elite spec, and it would be easy to switch out on the fly if you were in a situation where you didn’t need it (no Hero Panel required).
That said, mobility is traditionally a Guardian weakness, so there has to be some opportunity cost for a buff like this. I think putting 25% movespeed on a Signet also addresses this issue, because Guardian utility slots are at a premium in most builds, and a Signet dedicated to mobility/CC costs you one of them. This would prevent a movespeed bonus from just becoming a free buff for existing builds. I could definitely see it being splashed into Meditation builds, but you’re either giving up a great source of sustain (Smite Condition), one of your best engages and a stun break (Judge’s Intervention), or a critical defense against conditions/stun break (Contemplation of Purity). I think bunker specs would still prefer Retreat and Staff for mobility, so otherwise, I don’t think too much would change in PvP. The DH’s new options for healing and condition cleanse could potentially create a good opening for it in a Medi build, but looking at how some of the other elite specs performed this weekend, I don’t really see that being a major balance concern just yet.
My two cents. Anyone see any major issues with this approach to mobility?
Druid and Harold seam balanced… but to be honest I haven;t encounter them much.
Nah, Harold’s a jerk who’s been ruining the game for a long time now.
Lol 5 days ago someone was complaining about this being ‘bunker meta’ and now this.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/How-can-we-get-out-of-this-bunker-meta/first#post5547802
I think this is reflective of the larger problem, though – GW2 has become a game of extremes where there’s a perpetual arms race between burst builds and bunkers. It’s not a scenario where only damage or only defense is the problem, even if we appear to have settled into a “bunker meta.” Both bunkers and burst builds have been given stronger tools than ever before to carry out their respective roles (or a variety of roles, such as in the case of the D/D Ele), and while the overall result may be a meta where teams just try to tank burst while outrotating opponents, it doesn’t always look like that when you’re examining matches on a smaller scale. If you have the wrong build for a situation, or you get 2v1’d, or you make a mistake, the heavily polarized meta is going to make sure you feel the consequences quickly and sharply. Damage can still be too high in a bunker meta because of how it affects small-scale plays, and in this sort of situation, the solution isn’t just to nerf damage, because that just reinforces the bunker meta. You need to nerf everything, and since the community seems unhappy with the current state of bunkering, you probably need to nerf sustain harder than damage.
Personally, I think the goal should be for bunkers to generally die slowly in 1v1’s compared to regular builds, and have access to a certain amount of active defenses that protect them from high spikes of damage (rendering burst builds less effective than more stable DPS builds for killing bunkers). Burst builds would ideally still be effective at killing other burst builds and the balanced DPS builds that could take down bunkers. Of course, player skill, 2v1’s, and unexpected plays could still change the outcome of any of these matchups, so you’d have a soft “rock-paper-scissors” style of play that would encourage a variety of build styles to be present in a team (Burst beats balanced, balanced beats bunker, bunker beats burst). Of course, this is all extremely theoretical, and I can’t say how it would actually play out, but I think it sounds preferable to what we have now.
You’d have to nerf Meditations down to 1k heals and increase Resolve to a level of around 250hp a second traited for this to work.
But you still run into the issue of Guardian hp being balanced on a passive heal per second and are now seriously discouraged from activating it. Terrible mechanics really.
The Virtues Minor Grandmaster trait should make the Virtues retain their passive effects even after activation.
Then we would have the kind of mechanics we could look at using to help this profession diversify and create several usable builds instead of pigeonholing into Monk’s Focus Mediations and Altruistic Healing Shouts Empower.The problem Guardian has is that so many effects like Shouts and Virtues can also be applied to allies, so they are all balanced to be distributed to 5 people during a group fight. Which makes them utterly terrible when it comes to a 1v1 stand point.
Resolve can be shared with allies so it will never be buffed up to give us better solo survivability and build diversity unless we remove Battle Presence.
The problem is actually even more complicated, because the Guardian has multiple viable methods of sustain outside Meditations (specifically AH and the various healing traits in Honor), so just nerfing Meditations while buffing resolve would consitute a sizable buff to every other Guardian playstyle. You’d need to nerf the Guardian’s healing across the board while buffing Resolve to keep things balanced.
Here’s the question: how exactly do you balance the healing from something like AH (which can fluctuate dramatically depending on the skills you’re using at the moment) with a slow, steady tick from Resolve, while still keeping it balanced with the intermittent burst heals from something like Meditations? You have three completely distinct styles of healing that you need to account for with the Resolve buff, and you also need to factor in the various other sources of healing that can be stacked on top of these (Honor traits, Mace, Staff, etc.).
A Resolve buff would also be much more significant for PvE Guardians than Guardians in other game modes, since PvE Guardians don’t typically use Meditations or AH for survival. They’re getting a free, huge buff to Resolve that they can pass on to allies with Battle Presence, and nerfs to the Guardian’s other healing sources won’t bother them at all.
Lastly, I agree with you that we should be exploring options to keep our passive Virtue effects after we activate them, since too many of our traits discourage the use of our profession mechanic. That’s something Anet has actively worked to avoid with other professions like Mesmer and Warrior (removal of clone death mechanics and reduction in the number of traits that encourage you to sit on stockpiled Adrenaline, respectively), so it shouldn’t be any different for us. However, I disagree that this should be a Minor trait in the Virtues line, because we’re already tied enough to Virtues as it is. If we’re going to keep passive effects, that ability needs to be baseline, so that Guardians can take full advantage of all the traits spread throughout various lines that work with our passive Virtues. I won’t comment on how to balance that type of change, but just trading one design flaw for another isn’t going to help us much in the long run.
Just putting it out there, the Warrior’s Mending and the Mesmer’s Ether Feast are also unclassified, so Shelter’s not the only heal skill in the game that’s not assigned to a type.
Since you talking about condi cleanse. Would longbow projectile finisher through light fields not be good condi cleanse, or am i remebering wrong on how projectile finisher works(Mostly play guardian, so never used that finisher type much)
We good at putting down light fields, skill 1 has 20% to be finisher, skill 2 is on 4sec CD with 100% chance and skill 3 is 100% chance with 10sec CD.
From the wiki: “Projectile effects are applied directly to the skill’s target, or, in case of the Water and Light fields, to a single ally adjacent to the target.” So if you stood in melee range of your target with your longbow with no other allies around and shot through a Light field under your feet, you could maybe get a cleanse off. It’s not something I would rely on, though, and it won’t help much against a condition burst. I’m also not sure whether or not the cleanse still applies if you miss your target. Personally, I’ve never noticed any cleansing I may have received from projectile finishers in Light fields.
It works a similar way for Whirl finishers, and just using Whirling Wrath on top of a Symbol isn’t enough to get a self-cleanse. When you send out cleansing bolts, the bolts that strike your allies will apply a single condition cleanse in a 150 radius around the ally (slightly larger than the reach of a regular melee attack). Basically, to get personal cleansing out of the Whirl, you need to execute it when you’re right next to an ally and make sure you stay near them until a bolt flies in their direction. This usually isn’t feasible with offensive Whirls like Whirling Wrath, since your priority is to be moving toward enemies to deal your damage. Once again, this isn’t something I would count on for cleansing.
I personally feel that Light fields could use a revamp, with how awkward they currently are to use and how underwhelming some of the effects are, but unfortunately, that’s what we’re stuck with for now.
I’ve tried some theorycrafting for PvP Burn DH’s, but to be honest, I’ve had trouble coming up with a burning build that wouldn’t be better off as a power build. The main issue is that there are too many trait lines that are important for burning – Radiance, Valor, Virtues, and now Dragonhunter.
To clarify, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try to make a burn DH, but here are some things you should keep in mind when you’re theorycrafting and testing this weekend:
If you drop Radiance for DH, you’re losing 15% burn damage, 20% burn duration, burn on block, 25-30% critical chance, and a huge amount of free burning on the Torch (leaving it as a fairly mediocre weapon choice). The DH’s cripple, vulnerability, and Justice charge/cleanse on block aren’t nearly enough to offset this loss.
If you drop Valor, you’re losing a massive chunk of your potential sustain and will be depending on the healing from Wings of Resolve to survive. Wings of Resolve does provide better overall healing than the Smite Condition utility now, but there are a couple problems. The first is that if you trait WoR to cleanse conditions with Absolute Resolution, you lose Supreme Justice, which is especially important for a DH trying to maximize cripple/vulnerability procs. If you don’t take AR, you may be able to get by with the Focus (Ray of Judgment + blocks with Hunter’s Fortification) and Purging Flames, but your condition removal still isn’t going to be particularly consistent or effective. This is where the comparison to power builds becomes most relevant, because a power DH can easily opt out of the Radiance line and take Valor, Virtues, and DH. This lets them pick up Absolute Resolution, Hunter’s Fortification, and traited Meditation heals that can stack on top of the big heals from WoR. They sacrifice basically nothing for all of that, so it’s probably going to be easy for power DH’s to build for heavy damage with that kind of foundation. Burn builds without Valor will have a fairly difficult task ahead of them if they want to keep up with power builds, unless DH burn builds just specialize in massive, gimmicky burn spikes and hope they can kill opponents before they’re killed themselves.
Dropping Virtues is basically out of the question, since losing Supreme Justice is going to seriously reduce your potential for cripple/vuln application (the entire point of using DH), and losing Permeating Wrath slashes your damage output outside of 1v1’s and +1 situations. If PW affects Cripple application from Zealot’s Aggression, that’s an even bigger reason to keep Virtues. Defender’s Dogma isn’t nearly enough to make up for the lost Justice procs from these two traits, unfortunately.
Again, I won’t say that you can’t make it work, but I personally think that the condition side of DH needs some more love before its burn builds are going to be on par with its power builds. While the tone of this post may come off as being negative, I hope that my points here can help those who are committed to Burn DH develop some builds that I’m not seeing right now. Best of luck!
please keep passive effects when we activate them and increase colldowns if you must…
^^there problem fixed and now we gona see ppl actualy use them
That makes a WORSE problem – no trade off, less risk, and very little reason not to just mash and mash again.
Virtues are like Signets – activating them carries a price and that price makes the decision important.
Is there really such a big trade off the way they are now, though? Unless you’re a burn Guardian and depend on Justice’s passive as a major source of damage, the cost of activating your Virtues is pretty minimal. If I’m saving my Virtues in a fight, it’s because I want to make sure that the traited active effects are used to their maximum benefit. It’s definitely not because I’m concerned about losing a couple hundred points of damage every few seconds, a healing effect that’s weaker than Regeneration, and one block every 30-40 seconds. At best, I’ll prioritize using my other heals before Virtue of Resolve.
Letting us keep our passive effects does go against the original spirit of the Guardian’s Virtues, but a number of recent trait changes/additions seem to be encouraging us to avoid using our profession mechanic (e.g. buffing Permeating Wrath, not buffing VoJ active to deal more overall damage than VoJ passive, making Battle Presence only work when Resolve is off cooldown, making passive Resolve regenerate endurance with the Purity of Body trait, introducing the Zealot’s Aggression trait with DH, etc.). If this is the direction they’re going to go, letting us keep our passives doesn’t seem wholly unreasonable.
It’s true that the first CC from Heavy Light after you swap to LB will be consistent (hence why I specified that it can be difficult to predict in long fights) but the mechanic is still problematic in several different ways.
You can track the cooldowns on your other LB skills to get an idea of when the KB is going to hit, sure, but frankly, most of these skills are poorly suited to the role. True Shot roots you and has a significant windup, so there are going to be plenty of situations where you can’t fire it on cooldown. Deflecting Shot is best used to react to an opponent’s attacks, so it’s going to be worthless if you’re trying to sync it up with your KB cooldown. Symbol of Energy and Hunter’s Ward have longer cooldowns than the KB, and Hunter’s Ward roots you for way too long anyways. Besides all of this, being CC’d or not having a clear shot at the target can also disrupt the timing of your attacks. There are too many variables for cooldown-tracking to be anything more than a band-aid fix to a flawed mechanic.
Let’s argue that you play Longbow for a long time, though, and you get a good natural sense for the KB’s timing without needing to look at your skill cooldowns. The next problem we have is that there’s no guarantee that you’re going to want to proc the KB when it comes off cooldown. It may recharge when another ally has already CC’d your target and is about to burst them. There may be defensive boons on your target like Protection or Aegis to interfere with your burst, or debilitating conditions on you like Blind or Weakness. You might have a nearby ally at low HP, and you want to save the knockback for if/when they go down to prevent opponents from finishing them/create an opportunity for you to revive them. You might just want to wait until your target is in a position where you can maximize the strategic value of the knockback, such as pushing them off of a ledge. There are many more examples, but in all of these cases, the current KB mechanic forces you to either waste the CC or avoid using any of your LB skills until the stars happen to align for you.
The fact that they’re moving Stability onto this effect is also problematic, albeit not as much as the KB. Stability is generally going to be helpful to have, and it’s a 6-second stack every 10 seconds, so it’ll have good uptime unless you get chain-CC’d early on. Even so, I’d still rather be able to control when it activates in a prolonged fight. It’s just reinforcing bad design as it stands.
Whether you bind it to Deflecting Shot or give it some other activation condition, Heavy Light needs to be something you have some control over in a fight. In its current state, it allows for too many ways that your plays can fizzle due to circumstances that you can’t control, and having to keep an eye on your UI/cooldown timers whenever you’ve got your LB out is just a pain overall. It sounds like you did a good job of adapting to a poor mechanic in the last beta, but that doesn’t mean the mechanic is something we should have to live with.
(edited by Soryuju.8164)
@ Ghotistyx: Mace is definitely also interesting, especially if you’re stacking other on-block traits, but taking Shattered Aegis would mean dropping either Valor or Virtues if you’re still committed to a DH build. It might be possible with our new options for cleansing and healing to get by without one of these lines, but right now, I’m thinking that it’s more effective to stack Valor/Virtues/DH and just overload on the cleansing and healing (Mace even without SA could still be a powerful option, though).
It actually illustrates a fundamental design issue with the Guardian – if you want to improve our build diversity, you need to give us better options for cleansing and sustain outside of the Valor line, but you also need to design those options in a way that prevents people from just stacking them on top of the sustain tools our current builds have. That means either incorporating new sustain options directly into different utilities (e.g. giving us healing/cleansing on Signets, which don’t provide many boons and take up utility slots you’d usually use on Meditations) or moving more of our sustain from our traits into our baseline Guardian abilities. Otherwise, the meta Valor/Virtues builds will just become more dominant and continue to smother new builds.
@Arcaedus: I hadn’t intended the build I put up to represent some definitive “meta” build, and the weapon choices are easily the most speculative part. Mace could very well be preferred over Sword, like Ghotistyx suggested, and Longbow might end up falling short of the meta’s standards even after all the changes it’s seen. These are definitely possibilities I’m keeping in mind, and I’m interested in seeing what people end up using this coming weekend.
As a side note, the build I linked does use Focus, which is why I’m taking Hunter’s Fortification. Frankly, I dislike the current version of Heavy Light and hope that it’s iterated on again after next weekend’s beta. The fact that it can trigger on any LB attack makes it difficult to predict exactly when you’re going to land it in any prolonged fight, and lessens its value as a burst tool. If the knockback only activated when you used Deflecting Shot, I’d give it serious consideration over HF.
That said, a lot has changed about the DH since BWE2 that we haven’t gotten a chance to test. True Shot on the Longbow is 25% stronger now, and Symbol of Energy is 10% stronger and fires faster. Wings of Resolve now travels 800 range and can be used much more frequently (important for both burst and healing applications). We have potentially permanent Cripple uptime when using a Sword. We’ve got a melee block on Courage and massive healing/more frequent cleansing on Resolve. There’s more, but you get the idea. I don’t know if the specific build I posted above is what’s going to stick, but something using the build’s general principles is probably going to be at least viable and possibly very good in the post-HoT meta.
With all of the recent changes to the DH, I wanted to take a look at how the DH will impact power-based Meditation builds in PvP and start brainstorming some setups. With Valor locked in for Meditation builds and Virtues considered basically essential to Guardians (more so now that DH Virtues have been buffed), I’m going to work on the assumption that DH will replace the Zeal or Radiance line in any meta DH builds that emerge.
First, a quick sample build. Let’s take a very basic Power meditation setup and then swap a Longbow in for a GS and a Sword in for a Scepter.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQNAsdTlsAhqhY3QwcIwPELJE11yGAJgMy2v/LAB-TZBFABiXGggTAQN7PswhAAgnAAA
DH Traits: Soaring Devastation, Zealot’s Aggression, Hunter’s Fortification
How would this build stack up to the current Meditation build? Let’s take a look at what we lose by swapping out either Zeal or Radiance and what we gain from DH:
Losing Zeal:
1) +7% damage modifier from Fiery Wrath
2) +5% GS damage modifier, GS cooldown reduction, minor healing on GS hits
3) Shattered Aegis damage
4) Miscellaneous Symbol effects
Losing Radiance:
1) Blind (+ Immobilize?) on Justice activation, refresh Justice on kill
2) General crit chance (Inner Fire, Right-Hand Strength, Radiant Power, 25-30% total)
3) Sword & Torch traits
4) Optional +10% damage modifier
5) Amplified Wrath or Perfect Inscriptions
Other Losses
1) Range of heal/cleanse on Virtue of Resolve activation
2) AoE Aegis at 600 range on Virtue of Courage activation
Gaining Dragonhunter
1) Option to kite & fight at range via Longbow, indirectly boosting our sustain.
2) 3,890 HP heal to self and allies every 25.5 seconds w/ gap close, Immobilize cleanse, and damage spike + 3s Immobilize. Can also have a triple AoE condition cleanse once every 25.5 seconds with Absolute Resolution.
3) Continuous frontal block every 65s, traitable for stun break, Protection, and Stability.
4) 1.5s Cripple whenever passive Justice procs, blocking charges passive Justice, +10% damage modifier on crippled enemies.
5) Condition cleanse on block, sporadic 10% damage reduction.
Dropping Zeal for DH seems like a question of damage versus utility. Our Burning uptime will be more consistent than our Cripple uptime, which is going to close the gap between Fiery Wrath and Zealot’s Aggression. Zealous Blade for GS users offers another modifier and cooldown reduction on top of FW, so GS users are the ones most likely to feel the damage loss by opting to take DH. How the Longbow fits in to the overall damage picture is still uncertain, though Pure of Sight will help close the DPS gap for ranged attacks in general. The other sources of damage to consider with Zeal vs. DH are Shattered Aegis and Soaring Devastation. SA wins in raw damage for teamfights, but it’s easier to get damage from Wings of Resolve on-demand, and WoR offers far superior utility.
Overall, the damage loss from Zeal doesn’t seem too extreme, thanks to the other modifiers and effects we receive. The utility that DH brings seems like a very appealing trade, since we get an option for fighting at long range, high Cripple uptime and more Immobilizes, another gap closer on a reasonable cooldown, and a huge amount of extra cleansing and healing. If straight burst is the goal, Zeal may still be superior, but I think DH can give it plenty of competition.
Radiance seems most competitive with DH in builds looking to use 1-handers, since 25% free crit chance is on the line between RHS and Radiant Power, and Torch is significantly less appealing without its weapon trait. I think Radiance vs. DH could be a dilemma for Burn Guardians who would like the DH’s Cripple and Vulnerability procs on Justice, but power builds with a Marauder’s Amulet/Pack Runes already has almost 60% base crit chance and high Fury uptime. Losing Blind on VoJ is sad, but WoR picks up the Immobilize, and the rest of what Radiance offers is either already covered by DH or of minimal use to a power build.
I’ve got to be honest, DH is looking fairly incredible on paper for this type of build. A few main points:
-The new Wings of Resolve ability provides just under twice the healing of a traited Meditation to yourself and allies (3,890), removing Immobilize and providing an AoE triple-cleanse with AR, gap-closing at 800 range, and Immobilizing/dealing significant damage to targets at the location, all on a 25.5 second traited cooldown.
Just to emphasize, if we use WoR and our Meditations on cooldown, WoR provides almost as much healing per second as Smiter’s Boon, Judge’s Intervention, and Contemplation of Purity combined (152 for WoR vs. 160 for the others). It’s roughly equivalent healing to Shelter without Smiter’s Boon (152 for WoR vs. 151 for Shelter) and also exceeds the healing value of Smite Condition (152 for WoR vs. 122 for Smite Condition). We’ve basically got a second heal skill now.
-We have much better cleansing overall now between WoR/AR and Hunter’s Fortification. 3 conditions + Immobilize removal every 25.5 seconds, 2-3 every 30 seconds with Shelter/Smiter’s Boon, 1-2 every 36 seconds with Shield of Wrath, and so on. If Shield of Courage actually counts as a block, that’s yet another source. We still also have access to tools like Smite Condition, Contemplation of Purity, and Ray of Judgment, and we can take every single one of these tools without any significant sacrifice compared to current Medi builds.
-Our soft CC is far better than it’s ever been in a Meditation build. Besides a 3s Immobilize every 25.5 seconds, Zealot’s Aggression gives us significant Cripple uptime with weapons like the Sword and Longbow. I’ve included Air and Blood Sigils on the Sword in the build above, each of which can count as an extra hit for proccing Justice, and Defender’s Dogma allows us to apply an additional 1.5 seconds of Cripple to targets whenever we block an attack (Shield of Wrath and potentially Shield of Courage would be great ways to take advantage of this, since they allow us to keep attacking as Justice is repeatedly recharged).
-Regardless of whether it counts as a block or not, Shield of Courage is now another focus break/damage immunity skill that can be refreshed with Renewed Focus. This improves our burst resistance considerably, especially since it can still be traited to break stuns while granting Stability and Protection. Under heavy fire, we can even pop SoC to break focus and gain our defensive buffs, leap with Wings of Resolve while blocking to heal 4k and cleanse while counterattacking, activate Renewed Focus to heal 2k more and go invulnerable after SoC ends, and then get both of these Virtues recharged for more blocking/healing/cleansing if we still need it.
To wrap up my initial points, what I’m seeing with the DH is a new Meditation Guardian with a ranged combat option, better mobility and control, tremendous sustain, heavy cleansing, and various ways to break focus, all in addition to almost everything current Meditation builds already have. What’s more, the massive healing and cleansing boosts we’re getting from Wings of Resolve and Hunter’s Fortification could actually give us a chance to diversify our utilities. Survival isn’t really a huge issue for most Meditation Guardians, so instead of becoming immortal with a triple-Meditation build, we could opt to bring utilities like Stand Your Ground or Fragments of Faith instead.
I know there’s been a lot of negativity about the DH recently, and I agree that there are still some big issues with the DH (like the Pure of Sight trait, the lack of good reason to activate Justice, and the design of Traps). It’s frustrating that these issues haven’t been addressed after months of development, but I honestly think that we could see power Meditation builds come surging back into the meta with HoT, and I’m excited to see what the DH ends up bringing to the profession as a whole.
What do you think? How would you build a power build in PvP with these new tools?
1. Torch isn’t meant to be that type of selfish weapon.
2. Guardian’s are not hurting for additional condi defenses. We’re already getting another specialization tree that’s selfish in this way – Hunter’s Fortification (it needed it so bad, thx karl!)If the Torch of all weapons is going to get a make over then I can think of a million other ways to alter GS/Focus/Scepter/Mace/Sword as well. Torch already got a buff through Radiant Fire.
Torch is fine, now turn your heads to Shield – the most underutilized weapon.
How does my suggestion make Torch a “selfish weapon?” I’m not suggesting that you get rid of the condition cleansing on allies in the cone, just that you get Resistance each second while you’re channeling it, and that the damage and cleansing ticks occur faster. That makes the Torch a better support tool, because you can reach allies with the cone more easily and pull large amounts of conditions off of them more quickly. If anything, Torch is a selfish weapon now because of how difficult it is to use the #5 in regular play, making it a weapon that’s taken almost exclusively for the damage/burning on #4.
I agree that Torch is performing fine currently and needs less attention than something like our Shield, but the Torch’s current popularity rests entirely with the #4, Radiant Fire, and the general strength of burning. If burning gets nerfed and Amplified Wrath isn’t buffed to fully compensate, this type of change would be worthy of consideration. It’s also just bad design to have a weapon where only one of two skills sees any real use in any game mode, and they should be working on fixing these weapons across all professions.
How about for #5, we increase the base cooldown to 30-35 seconds, shorten the channel duration to 3 seconds while keeping the damage and number of hits the same, and have it grant 1 second of Resistance each second while you’re channeling it?
Reasoning: A single condition cleanse at the beginning or end of the channel still isn’t that appealing when you’re leaving yourself locked in a channel for 4.25 seconds, particularly when the effect of that channel only applies to a narrow cone in front of you and is a DPS loss compared to autoattacking with most 1h weapons. Resistance at least offers us protection aganst condition burst while channeling (which is important, since if you want to cleanse for allies using this skill, your team probably just got condi-bombed), and it negates movement-imparing conditions that would hinder us from getting in range of allies and enemies. It also gives burn builds a brief window for counterplay against condition transfers in PvP scenarios. The cooldown increase could be even higher if this is too much utility, and I honestly wouldn’t mind. Currently, the main uses for this skill are when there are downed allies/enemies nearby and when you’re chasing someone down. I use it maybe 1-2 times per match in PvP (if that) and in PvE/WvW, it’s even more situational, so you could put a 45-second cooldown on it and I’d still be using it more often than I do now.
I would think Hydromancy is for the Chill more than the damage, since it makes it difficult for opponents who are out of dodges to kite around Whirling Wrath/Binding Blade, and it can also give your allies brief opportunities for burst or recovery in teamfights. If I were going to take Geomancy, it wouldn’t be for the damage, either, since the three bleeds barely give you the same damage per tick as a single burn stack. Geomancy seems much more valuable for the bleed duration (more uptime as a cover condition) and the small burst of hits the activation can trigger for VoJ in a teamfight (which can be combined with Hydromancy for multiple burns on weapon swap).
I do agree about the need for burn duration, and I feel like the Pack Runes are unnecessary here with all the Fury you get from Inner Fire and Meditations. Swiftness and the extra power/precision are nice, but running with GS already gives you some mobility, and Saiyan is right that you’ll get much more mileage out of burn duration runes. Balthazar Runes are the most popular ones for Burn Guardians, but you could also experiment with Fire as suggested above.
I’ve actually run a fairly similar build since the specialization update, which I’ve posted on here a few times before, though it leans more heavily toward Burn than yours does. It also places more emphasis on the Sword/Torch as the main weapon set while using the GS mostly for mobility, CC, and AoE burst/downed cleave in teamfights. Here’s what it looks like:
I have Air and Fire sigils on Sword/Torch to maximize Justice procs while increasing physical damage output/consistency. With the extra hits from Air and Fire, you can maintain 4-5 burn stacks on a target just by autoattacking with the Sword. This will pressure an enemy to use their cleanses early on, especially since every cast of Zealot’s Defense or Zealot’s Fire can push this up into the 7-9 stack range. You’ll be able to pull off these mini-bursts multiple times within a 12-second interval (especially since ZD and ZF themselves can hit for 2-3k power damage, not counting sigil procs). By spacing out these burst skills, you can work around your opponents’ cleanses while sustaining continuous pressure. The combination of power and condi damage is tough to deal with even for builds that bring a decent amount of cleansing, especially since the focus is on rapidly reapplying medium-size stacks of burn, rather than blowing everything on one massive burst.
GS uses Hydromancy and Doom, and Hydromancy will proc Doom on its activation, allowing you to instantly Poison your target on weapon swap (great after a Sword/Torch burn burst to block cleanses and disrupt heals). Poison also slows revives on downed targets, which complements the GS’s natural downed cleave with Permeating Wrath. I opted not to run crit sigils on GS because I have less Fury uptime without Inner Fire, but instead I get extra utility and pressure during bursts, and the GS can still maintain respectable pressure (especially when combined with Judge’s Intervention).
Anyways, thought I’d share. Hope some of the ideas are helpful for improving your own build!
Pretty sure Messiah’s got it right. It debuted briefly with Orange Logo in the WTS, but if I recall, it was swapped out for other builds as the tournament progressed (Rampage Warrior and PU Shatter Mesmer were the substitutions). If anything, “Burst Burning” has gotten weaker over time because people are more prepared to avoid Purging Flames and cleanse/transfer its high stacks of burning.
I also personally dislike the build they’ve got listed on Metabattle and really don’t think Burn Guards overall should be ranked the same as bunker Guards in an organized setting. It’s not a natural fit with a cleanse-heavy meta and requires a lot of support to function properly, so if they’re going to bump the rating up, it should go under the “Great” category at most. You can’t just slot a Burn Guard into any team composition and expect it to perform consistently in the way that an Ele, Bunker Guard, Thief, etc. will.
Back for another round!
@Black Box: Glad to hear you think these traits could help the specialization! I’m a little curious about what you mean more specifically with some of your comments, though. You say that you probably still wouldn’t use Traps, for instance – do you think that the loss of ground targeting is too much to compensate for, or is there something else you feel is missing from my suggestions? Also, since you mention that this version of the DH seems much improved, but still a little disjointed, is there anything else in particular you’d still try to polish?
@Noctis: A break bar would definitely be an idea, and it’d certainly be handy to have in teamfights. I’m not fully familiar with break bar mechanics yet, and honestly, I have no idea how to balance that kind of addition to the profession. I might try to do a little brainstorming later and see if I can also come up with some ideas to make the trait have a little more general appeal. Further suggestions here are welcome, of course.
For the auto-attack, I’ve seen similar ideas before and personally wouldn’t mind that sort of thing, though it would be good if the auto-attack still helped with both the DH’s positioning issues and its role as a teamfighter. I think the current version has the right pieces, and they just need to be made a little more useable (and a little more visual flair wouldn’t hurt, either).
@Mightymealworm: Cast times on Justice and Resolve seem all right to me, honestly. After reading the responses here so far, I’d agree with 1/4 second for Justice and the current 3/4 second cast for Resolve, so long as Resolve evades during the cast (reasoning for this in my previous post). Losing a free recharge on Justice during RF is a nerf, sure, but it’s easily offset by the fact that you can slightly extend RF’s invulnerability period by casting Resolve just before RF. Should you opt to take it, Big Game Hunter also reduces the impact of having Justice on cooldown. Avoiding issues with animations is another plus, so I’ll probably end up modifying my suggestion for Justice to incorporate the 1/4 second cast. I still think Courage needs to be instant, though.
@CandyHearts: You’re welcome, and thanks for the support! I’d love to keep gathering responses and refining my suggestions, since a red post over in the Tempest forums indicated that the Tempest devs (who I believe are also the DH devs) were short on time for this iteration. That’s at least partially responsible for the unsatisfying changes the DH received. Source here:
I’m not sure if that accounts for everything, since some dev comments on the DH were odd even with that context (Longbow generally well-received?). I’m still a little wary, but we’ll see what happens after the next beta. Hopefully the discussion here can help to clarify for the devs exactly what we’re looking for in the DH, and future iterations will go more smoothly.
Zealot’s March is the main thing I’m considering for revision now, and Justice is likely to go up to a 1/4 second cast. The other issues that people have raised with Courage, the Longbow vs. Traps, and the teleport on Symbol of Energy are still on my mind as well. Lots of the changes also haven’t even been covered in the discussion so far, so I’m curious if there’s any opinion on them.
Replying to a few more!
@Dirame: Some good criticisms here. For cast times on Virtues, I’d be willing to settle for 1/4 second on Justice, but I really think that Resolve needs the evade I suggested, and Courage absolutely needs to be instant cast. WoR is different from Virtue of Resolve in that its positioning is much less flexible, since you can only heal/cleanse allies in a small radius around the area you land. You can break focus with Shelter/RF/line of sight/whatever else as you cast Virtue of Resolve, ensuring your own safety as you support your allies, but if you want to provide support with WoR, it requires you to throw yourself into groups that are already under enough pressure to warrant an emergency heal/cleanse. To make matters worse, WoR has a huge telegraph that coordinated groups in PvP/WvW can exploit, since currently, you’re defenseless during the cast. The tradeoff between WoR and VoR is set up to be that WoR can be a gap-closer with offensive properties, while VoR has a far superior effect radius that will often allow more allies to benefit. Adding unreliability as a factor against WoR tips the scale heavily toward VoR and undermines WoR’s nature as a support tool.
Courage needs to be an instant cast time because of the 4-second stun break exploit. If you want to keep the 1/4 second cast on it, you have to instead make the skill go on its full cooldown every time it’s cancelled or interrupted, and the last thing the DH needs right now are changes that makes its Virtues less player-friendly.
I gave a more detailed response on Shield of Courage above, but by “conditional knockback” I was referring to this:
If foes inside the area of the shield deal damage to another player, they are knocked back (240 distance, 1 second ICD per target).
Enemies who were knocked back could be Crippled if you took Dulled Senses, which is maybe the part that ended up being confusing.
The idea of kiting with Traps is classic to the Ranger archetype in games, but unfortunately, the current implementation doesn’t work very well. One big problem is that most of our Traps don’t actually do much to slow opponents down, especially if the opponent is paying attention and quick to cleanse/dodge/pop Stability (or just walk around it/teleport past it after they see you set it). We currently get one 6-second Cripple on Test of Faith and the pull/ward on Dragon’s Maw. I agree with you that Dragon’s Maw is a neat skill (my suggestions for changing it were pretty minimal), but these two Traps just don’t do enough to consistently keep us away from attackers. If the opponent survives them, we’re left with a few subpar Cripples against their Swiftness and gap-closers. I tried to keep these sort of difficulties in mind when suggesting changes, hence the CDR on Test of Faith and the ability to autocast it with Piercing Light.
@Arcaedus: Thanks for the kind words! For Resolve, I think my meaning may have gotten buried in my walls of text, but the idea is that your personal healing/cleansing is done at the beginning of the leap, while healing/cleansing for allies is done at the end. That way, you’re likely to survive the leap, and you can deliver healing to distant allies in need.
For the shield, I kind of envisioned it flashing or pulsing when someone attacks inside of it, but it could be anything. As mentioned above, I’m mostly suggesting this rework with the assumption that we’re not getting a personal melee block from it, which is rather frustrating. DH is designed as a less-tanky backliner, so if we’re coming up to the front to protect allies, it’d be nice to know that we’re not likely to sacrifice ourselves in doing so.
I do agree that having better access to Resistance would be lovely, but honestly, I see that as an issue that needs to be addressed more with the Guardian as a whole, rather than just the DH specialization. In the scope of this rework, Resistance exists here as something to help incentivize the use of Traps over basic Shouts or Meditations, even if that just means splashing one or two in over things like Smite Condition or an extra Shout utility.
I wouldn’t be opposed to a 1/4 second cast on Justice – it loses synergy with RF, but the cooldown isn’t that long anyways, and it might not be bad to shake RF’s grip on the Guardian’s elite slot in PvP. I do think the velocity is still a concern, though. Check out this video posted on the feedback thread the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3mUpxxbM1Y
Thanks again for the responses! I’ll continue replying when I have the chance.
Thanks for the responses! My time is a bit limited right now, so I’m going to do my best to reply, but I may not get to everyone right away. I’ll respond in the order that people posted, and I’ll address issues that were brought up multiple times separately. If I forget anyone, just let me know!
@Exedore: Thanks, glad to hear that you liked them!
@Arken: Thanks! It took a decent while to put together, but it was a good thought exercise, and hopefully others will find the analysis useful. When you said you ignored Traps, I’m not sure if you meant you literally skipped over everything related to Traps, but the Trapper’s Resolve GM trait was my response to their poor sustain, and I made FoF a stun break. I agree that Traps will remain a gimmick until they have a way to consistently heal the Guardian and provide some type of defense against conditions.
@Lyger: Thanks! I’m not really counting on any of these changes seeing the light of day (much as I’d like them to), but maybe if I’m lucky, my topic will catch a dev’s interest, or a forum specialist will pass some of the feedback along. The missing trait themes that you mentioned also really bothered me – when Robert Gee described them for the Reaper, everything about the specialization suddenly seemed more cohesive and purposeful, and I’d love to feel the same way about the DH traits.
@Arricson Krei: Thanks for the feedback! Breakthrough ideas weren’t actually my goal. I wanted most of my suggestions to emphasize simple efficiency, since I figured that the more complicated my suggestions, the less practical they would be to implement and the more prone they would be to balance issues. There are some exceptions, of course – the symbol teleport, Zealot’s March, Trapper’s Resolve, etc., but I tried to keep those types of suggestions to a minimum.
It’s true that there could be pathing issues with “Lightspeed” but unfortunately, that’s going to be true of any teleport until they get the game’s bugs worked out. I left the projectile-based placement of the symbol intact despite potential hangups because of how much the skill can potentially offer to Guardians in PvP and WvW. If it’s too efficient, it’s going to erase one of our profession’s intended weaknesses and overlap heavily with Judge’s Intervention. The idea was that the teleport wouldn’t be the most efficient and would give opponents some time to react, but it would offer you flexibility that you couldn’t have otherwise.
I’m not sure what you mean about pulsing Cripple being counterintuitive – would you mind explaining more? The idea with this rework was that it forces opponents to make a choice – remain crippled in the area of the Trap for its duration, or move slowly to cross the perimeter and take damage/waste a dodge when you do. Regardless of what the opponent decides, the movespeed reduction will make it easier for the DH to maneuver around them and reposition/place more traps.
I actually disagree about Hunter’s Fortification. If you take the Virtues traitline, DH Virtues recharge in roughly 20, 40, and 60 seconds. That’s up to 5 Virtue activations in the space of one minute (not counting Renewed Focus), and Inspired Virtue already gives you 5 seconds of Protection when you activate Courage. You’re not likely to be using all of your Virtues on cooldown all the time, but if you did, you could average out at over 20 seconds of Protection each minute just from these traits. Without Virtues or IV, you get about 22% Protection uptime from using Virtues on cooldown, which is still quite decent coming from a minor trait. None of this accounts for Defender’s Dogma or boon duration, which will only boost these numbers.
Dragon’s Blood isn’t incredibly powerful on its own, but it’s fairly respectable in combination with other effects. Power builds that take Radiance with Dragon’s Blood get 20% extra critical chance when they burn a target, and cleansing one condition still leaves the crit bonus from the other one intact. Bleed is also a nice cover condition that works well with Big Game Hunter, helping you maintain stacks of Burn and Vulnerability on your foes while giving you more crit chance (or just more damage in condition builds using BGH). The stacks themselves can also add onto those procced from a Sigil of Geomancy, which basically allows you to maintain 6 stacks if opponents don’t cleanse them, and if you’re using Piercing Light, you can quickly turn 3 bleeds into 8 when Traps trigger (including the trait’s built-in Test of Faith). It’s not game-changing, but it contributes something useful to a wide range of builds.
General Responses:
Zealot’s March: This one seems to be getting a lukewarm reception, which surprises me a little, considering how many people want the rooting gone from the LB skills and how long people have been asking for things like a mobile Zealot’s Defense. I can understand how only affecting skills on half of the Guardian’s weapons may not be appealing, though, so perhaps adding an effect to benefit other sets could help this one to satisfy a larger crowd. It’s also true that coding for this could be difficult, since it would require redoing certain skill animations, but it would be a significant QoL improvement for certain weapons, so I felt like it would be worth the effort (and it’d be a great excuse to get rid of the awkward Empower animation for human males). I’m open to alternatives, and I’ll look through suggestions as they come up on this thread to see what sort of things people have in mind.
Shield of Courage: The redesign on this was based on the assumption that we’re not going to get another version of Shelter/Renewed Focus on our Virtues. If the lack of personal melee blocks was indeed just a bug, then this change would be less necessary. If it was deliberate and done in the name of “balance” then this suggestion provides a more elegant alternative that has synergy with the DH’s traits and general playstyle.
I’m out of time to reply for now, but I’ll continue to work through the responses on this thread as I’m available. The feedback so far has been great, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the discussion goes!
3) Reasoning for Suggested Changes
Virtues
- DH Virtues are meant to be activated, and they’re going to be a part of every DH build, so making sure they feel smooth and functional is essential to every player’s experience with the DH. I suggested fixes for any parts of each Virtue that felt unresponsive or awkward to use.
- Spear of Justice needs to be more reliable to be worth activating, and the slow cast isn’t helping. Making it instant, improving its tracking, and designing a number of traits to help improve Justice’s power and consistency (e.g. Defender’s Dogma, Dragon’s Blood, Big Game Hunter) will help keep it relevant. Some changes were also aimed at making it more practical to activate Spear of Justice in condition damage builds.
- Wings of Resolve leaves you too exposed, since the slower personal healing/cleansing was prone to getting you interrupted/killed in situations where regular Resolve would save you. Receiving your own heal and traited benefits immediately keeps this on par with regular Resolve for personal defense. The 3/4 second cast time remains because no other leap in the game is instant, so I’m not sure the game’s code is built for that. Instead, you now evade during the cast to offset the massive telegraph and prevent yourself from being sniped out of the air.
- Giving Shield of Courage a conditional knockback synergizes with DH skills and traits and provides more position control. At the same time, removing the melee block deals with potential concerns about the DH receiving full benefits from its own skill, since there’s now an ICD and more options for counterplay.
Longbow
- Guardians have been asking for a ground-targeted teleport for ages, but Anet’s stated in the past that Guardians aren’t meant to run from fights. My solution is a slow, telegraphed teleport via the new “Lightspeed” chain skill on Symbol of Energy. This will allow a Guardian to disengage from fights, but not immediately, and opposing PvP’ers will know exactly where we’re heading in advance. Alternatively, it can be used to engage from afar and bring the Guardian back into range for supporting allies with Virtues, Shouts, etc. This solves two problems simultaneously without making Judge’s Intervention obsolete.
- More consistent control options on the Longbow are also critical to offset our poor kiting. Puncture Shot can now cripple in 1v1 situations while remaining effective in teamfights. We can control exactly when we knock opponents back with the Heavy Light trait, and since it slows down as it travels, it’s more likely to actually block projectiles. Hunter’s Ward is more practical to use with its reduced channel time and the Zealot’s March trait, though it trades some damage and 1 second of duration to keep things reasonable.
- Lots of DH players dislike the frequent roots on the Longbow skills. Zealot’s March allows us to move when using self-rooting skills (also improving many weapons besides Longbow), but these skills still come at some cost. You also can use the effect strategically to help reduce the impact of Cripple and Chill on you, so it’s not all bad, but Swiftness and other speed boosts can’t offset the drawback. On an aesthetic note, I feel like the slowdown will help preserve some of the “dramatic” feel these abilities have while channeling.
Traps
- Traps are inconsistent utilities that need consistent sustain and some way to deal with conditions in PvP situations. Trapper’s Resolve is my attempt at a solution. The trait’s activation condition changes depending on whether or not you’re in combat, and this helps ensure that you gain the benefit from it whether or not you set up your Traps in advance. The trait’s effects all stack in duration, so the timing of the Traps’ activation is less likely to interfere with your sustain (e.g. it’s okay to set a bunch of Traps when you’re at 90% HP).
The Resistance uptime may need to be tuned some, since you can be immune to conditions almost 30% of the time with a full bar of traps. As justifications for this uptime, the healing TR provides is somewhat slow and can leave you exposed to physical burst, you lose access to cleansing utilities for each Trap you take, and using Traps for Resistance in reaction to condi bursts may force you to set them at times/places you’d rather not. The healing each Trap provides is similar to a Meditation heal spread out over 5 seconds, though it can be combined with AH. If you go that route, though, you’re giving up Shout utilities, which will reduce your access to defensive boons and your actual healing from AH. Overall, I don’t think it would be out of line, and the numbers on this trait can be altered in a number of ways to adjust it for balance. - Piercing Light was reworked to apply Bleeding up front, since only a few traps actually hit multiple times, and opponents aren’t likely to stand in those for the full number of hits. It can also now drop Test of Faith at range to slow down kiting opponents, and between this and the other buffs to Traps/Longbow, I’m hoping that the two styles will mesh more smoothly. I’m going with the assumption that Anet doesn’t want ground-targeting to be a thing again, but that would definitely be the simpler solution if it’s on the table.
- Purification needs to offer something to compete with Shelter, like all other Guardian heals. I’ve suggested reworking the healing mechanics to match the Ranger’s Healing Spring, making it much more reliable as an active heal. Adding a couple rounds of AoE blind to people standing in the trap gives the skill some additional damage mitigation and utility. It won’t block an infinite number of attacks in those 2 seconds like Shelter, but it can protect allies and gives you a safe-stomp option in PvP that doesn’t require canceling your heal.
- Some Traps were changed to have better synergy and flexibility. A Whirl Finisher on Procession of Blades can give condi Trappers a boost with Fire Fields (e.g. Purging Flames, Dragon’s Maw) or provide cleansing with Light fields, while power Trap builds get a flat damage bonus on PoB. Test of Faith can now help snare opponents in your other Traps and actually does something if your opponent stays in the ring. Light’s Judgment is now more useful against stealthing and kiting foes while boosting both the power and condition damage of your other Traps. I’m not sure how these would all fare in the PvE DPS race, but I think they’d have better odds than they do currently.
- A Trap that can break stuns is important for dedicated trap styles, and it makes most sense on Fragments of Faith.
- I’m omitting most of the recent DPS boosts to Traps and shaving the duration boost on Dragon’s Maw in favor of combo potential, and a number of other new traits I’ve suggested will help make up the difference. Numbers can always be adjusted.
Traits
- Longbow, Virtues, and Traps were the main themes of the new traits, but most of the traits in each lines were designed to benefit multiple playstyles. A Longbow build doesn’t necessarily have to run 1-1-1, nor does a Trapper always want to run 3-3-3.
- New minors emphasize using the active effects of Virtues and gaining personal benefit from them. Hunter’s Fortification actually makes for a rather nice minor trait (especially since DH’s crave better defenses), and while it no longer affects allies in a small radius around you, this change can be reverted if the DH still proves underpowered. Defender’s Dogma now helps you use the DH’s fancy new Virtues more often, which makes it a better fit for the specialization overall.
- Adept tier has a focus on soft CC to help improve the DH’s position control. It features a condensed Dulled Senses trait that’s suitable for all game modes and Soaring Resolve as a solid choice for most builds. Piercing Light can provide extra DPS for both power and condi Trap builds, but it can also be splashed into other builds that want extra damage, chasing power, and area control on a relatively low cooldown.
- Master tier helps to improve the consistency of your damage and control. Heavy Light makes Deflecting Shot more versatile and your knockbacks more reliable. While the Longbow changes I’ve suggested help the DH to be more effective when it’s not at long range, the trait’s damage bonus also incentivizes keeping your distance when your allies don’t need you close by (though it gives you some benefit at all ranges, unlike the old Pure of Sight). Bulwark simultaneously supplements your defenses and access to knockbacks, and the increased duration now synergizes with Defender’s Dogma to improve Virtue uptime. Dragon’s Blood synergizes with Piercing Light and provides a straight DPS boost for both condition and power builds, including Trap and non-Trap styles. It combos nicely with BGH spikes.
- Grandmaster tier offers playstyle-defining traits. The new Zealot’s March trait gives DHs the chance to finally move around while using skills like True Shot, Ring of Warding, and Zealot’s Defense. The benefits to the Longbow are especially notable, with its two rooting casts. There’s no way to offset the movespeed reduction on this trait, but it’ll also protect you from soft CC like Cripple and Chill (but not Immobilize).
ZM’s got stiff competition from Big Game Hunter, however, which now facilitates both power and condi spikes by giving permanent passive Justice. While BGH didn’t receive much of a direct boost for power builds, the new minor traits make Justice’s active inherently more valuable, and Dragon’s Blood can combine with BGH and Radiance traits to set up a large power or condi spike for up to 6 seconds. Condition cleansing can counter most of the spike, though, and the tether is a massive telegraph that gives opponents a chance to avoid/block the incoming burst.
Lastly, Trapper’s Resolve is mostly a PvP trait for Trap builds, though PvE Power and Condi Trappers still have good options in this tier (particularly BGH). Traps still have their effects split between two traits, but the needs of Traps vary so sharply between game modes that it seemed necessary.
4) Conclusion
I don’t expect to see these changes ever appear in-game, but I believe these sort of fixes were more in line with what the Guardian community was hoping for from the beta feedback, and I do hope that the devs are continuing to watch the forums and take note of the responses here. Feel free to comment on these suggestions below – what you like and dislike about them, what seems overpowered or underpowered, etc. I’m sure there are things I’ve overlooked, but I enjoyed designing these, and I’d love to hear what the community thinks. Thanks for reading!
2) List of Revised Skills and Traits (specific reasoning for changes below)
Note: The emphasis here is on the changes I’ve made to the skills, so if an existing effect isn’t mentioned, it’s probably the same as before.
Virtues
- Spear of Justice: Instant cast time, improved velocity/accuracy, keep current 1200 range. Related traits apply at the initial point of impact.
- Wings of Resolve: Evade for the duration of the cast (still 3/4 second), range increased to 900. Personal heal/traited effects apply at the beginning of the leap, while they apply at the end for allies.
- Shield of Courage: Instant cast, melee block for allies removed. Effect rework: Create a shield in front of you that blocks enemy projectiles for yourself and allies. If foes inside the area of the shield deal damage to another player, they are knocked back (240 distance, 1 second ICD per target).
Longbow
- Puncture Shot: Increased projectile velocity. Cripples targets for 1 second if they have 2 or more stacks of Burning (instead of crippling on bounce).
- True Shot: See traits below.
- Deflecting Shot: See traits below. Can be fired regardless of character facing, blocks projectiles instead of destroying them, projectile velocity decreases as it travels. Cooldown reduced to 8 seconds.
- Symbol of Energy: Can be fired regardless of character facing. Reduce current Vigor duration to 2s per pulse and increase cooldown to 20 seconds. Add a chain skill, “Lightspeed,” which causes you to teleport to the center of your Symbol of Energy (1/4 second cast time). Chain resets when the Symbol’s duration expires, but SoE continues to recharge while the chain is active.
- Hunter’s Ward: 2 second cast time (down from 2.75 seconds). Effect Rework: This skill pulses twice. The first pulse deals damage and Cripples enemies for 2 seconds, and the second pulse damages enemies, Cripples them for 5 seconds, and cages them for 5 seconds (down from 6). See traits below.
Traps
- General: Reduce cast time for Traps to 1/2 second (the same as all other traps in the game) and switch traited CDR for baseline cooldown reduction to all Traps. See traits below.
- Purification: Heal yourself and set a Trap that pulses 3 seconds of Blind and Burning to foes in its area each second for 2 seconds when it activates. The full heal is now delivered upon setting the Trap instead of when a foe triggers it. Cooldown reduced to 25 seconds.
- Test of Faith: Rework the effect to pulse 2 seconds of Cripple to foes within the ring every 2 seconds. Damage targets that cross the perimeter. 8 second duration. Cooldown reduced to 20 seconds.
- Procession of Blades: Now acts as a Whirl Finisher. Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds (tune damage to accommodate this cooldown).
- Light’s Judgment: Beams of light spread out and follow nearby enemies after the trap is activated. Duration reduced to 6 seconds, cooldown reduced to 30 seconds.
- Fragments of Faith: Breaks stun when setting the Trap, cooldown reduced to 35 seconds (Keep recent duration changes & adjust if necessary).
- Dragon’s Maw: Fixed to be unblockable, creates a Fire Field at its location. 5-second duration (keep 60 second cooldown and adjust if necessary).
Traits
Major Trait Line Themes: Longbow, Virtues, Traps
Minor Traits:
Virtuous Action (Adept): Unchanged.
Hunter’s Fortification (Master): Moved from Grandmaster Major. Now only provides protection to the user (tentative change).
Defender’s Dogma (Grandmaster): Moved from Master Minor. Recharge each of your Virtues by 1 second when you successfully block an attack (1s cooldown).
Adept Traits:
1) Dulled Senses: Moved from Master Major tier. Foes that you knock back, knock down, pull, and launch are Crippled for 4 seconds. Deal 7% more damage to Crippled foes.
2) Soaring Devastation: Unchanged.
3) Piercing Light: Damaging a foe beyond 450 range will cast Test of Faith underneath of them (20s cooldown). Traps deal 10% more damage and apply 5 stacks of Bleeding for 10 seconds to nearby foes when activated.
Master Traits:
4. Heavy Light: Deflecting Shot knocks back foes within 300 range of the user (Distance: 180). Your attacks gain a damage bonus based on your distance to foes. (Damage Bonus from Range: 0-300: 3%, 300-600: 7%, 600+: 10%).
5. Bulwark: Shield of Courage is larger and lasts longer. Increase the knockback distance on foes that inflict damage to 300.
6. Dragon’s Blood (New): Apply 3 stacks of Bleeding to nearby foes for 8 seconds when you inflict Burning on a target (360 radius, 8 second cooldown). Critical hit chance is increased by 10% on Bleeding foes.
Grandmaster Traits:
7. Zealot’s March (New): Channeled skills that would root you now allow you to move at 75% of your normal speed. You ignore all other movespeed modifiers while channeling these abilities (affects True Shot, Hunter’s Ward, Ring of Warding, Empower, Zealot’s Defense, Shield of Absorption, and Signet of Courage).
8. Big Game Hunter: Foes tethered by your Spear of Justice take 10% more damage, and striking them inflicts Vulnerability for 10 seconds. You retain your Spear of Justice’s passive effect after activating it.
9. Trapper’s Resolve (New): When you set a Trap in combat, gain 1.5 seconds of Resistance and begin healing over time. When you set a Trap outside of combat, these effects apply when the Trap is activated (Tentative healing values: 5-second healing duration, 400 HP/second).
The reasoning behind these changes is in the following post.
Now that we’ve seen the notes for the Dragonhunter in the next beta, I wanted to put out my own thoughts on the DH and make suggestions for the direction of changes in future betas. In hopes that the devs are watching the forums for feedback, I’ll try to present a clear picture of why so many players are dissatisfied, and potential ways to proceed from here.
I’ve compiled a list of suggested changes in the second post of this topic (basically a TL;DR), but I’m going to start with an analysis of the DH as it stands.
1) Specialization Overview
- I believe there’s good potential with the DH, but agree with many others that it feels unfinished. Quality of life improvements are needed in many areas, such as letting Longbow users turn around when they try to shoot something behind them.
- My honest opinion of the most recent changes is that they do not address many of the issues that players raised with the DH, and that boosting numbers was favored over addressing the issues at the root of the complaints.
- Virtues feel clunky in combat, and their concepts seem underdeveloped. Losing instant casting on them restricts the types of plays we can make and hurts our theme of “active defenses.” Not being able to channel our new Virtues during Renewed Focus also feels like a significant downgrade.
- Justice is inconsistent, and doesn’t provide enough of a reward for landing the slow cast. The nerfs to the pre-beta duration and the Big Game Hunter trait make it much less appealing, though I do appreciate the recent increase to 1200 range. Condition Guardians will still never want to activate it.
- Resolve’s benefits are now delayed, leaving you exposed during the leap and making its regular version safer/more efficient. The leap distance also feels short. Just increasing the healing doesn’t fix these issues.
- Courage has various balance issues. The cast time makes it a spammable stun break. The shield blocks melee attacks for allies, but not the DH (I’m assuming this was actually deliberate rather than a bug, since Guardians don’t need another channeled block/invulnerability skill). It’s lacking polish overall and needs another look.
- The Longbow seems at odds with the DH’s supportive nature as a Guardian. While the DH was designed to be more selfish than the Guardian, it still has a sizable range of support tools that help to distinguish it from other snipers. Since other Guardian support skills are limited to 600 range, trying use the Longbow’s range to full potential is only feasible when your allies are close and your enemies are far away. This is fine in WvW zergs, but can create conflicts for the DH in other game modes, since we have limited tools for managing our position in fights (few disengages, ground-targeted gap closers, etc.).
- Lack of mobility/position control is one of the Guardian’s intended weaknesses as a profession, but this makes the DH a ranged attacker that has a hard time kiting. Kiting is one of the most basic defenses for ranged attackers and one of their most sizable advantages over melee foes, but the DH has to rely on inconsistent Cripple skills and the occasional knockback/ward to keep ahead. At this point I’ll be surprised if we ever get a +25% movespeed trait, so if that’s not on the table, we need a solution that at least gives us some sort of reliable position control without giving us too much disengage potential.
- The Longbow has a number of mechanical issues including Puncture Shot’s slow projectiles, lots of self-rooting on a profession that’s already hurting for mobility, long cast times, and of course, the inability to fire #3 and #4 behind you. These issues only exacerbate the Guardian’s issues with position control, and unlike Warriors, Guardians caught at close range with their Longbow are easy pickings. These issues were ignored in the recent changes.
- Traps are better now that they’ve gotten cooldown reductions and damage boosts, but they still need lots of work if they’re ever going to do more than fill an empty utility slot in PvE. CDR for Traps should really be baseline, because Traps are one of the least consistent types of utilities, requiring setup, positioning, and often CC on targets to function well. It’s important that Trap builds across all professions have many opportunities to reposition and activate their Traps, and faster cooldowns also have better synergy with Trapper Runes. Activation time for DH Traps should also be brought down to 1/2 second so it’s consistent with other Traps. I’d happily trade some damage for these changes.
- In PvP scenarios, Traps will remain a gimmick for Guardians until they’re given some form of sustain. Fragments of Faith is nice, but dedicated Trap builds are still going to be hurting for consistent healing, condition cleanse, and stun breaks if they don’t get more support. There are also still issues integrating Traps with Longbow gameplay, but since ground-targeted Traps seem to have been deliberately driven to extinction, the solution here is likely going to have to come back to improving the DH’s position control.
- Lastly (but perhaps most importantly), DH traits are underwhelming compared to the Reaper’s and Chronomancer’s. Many are too specialized and/or have weak effects. Others are placed awkwardly in the line (e.g. Pure of Sight). There’s also no hint of the themed trait lines that the devs discussed back when they introduced the Reaper, which makes the lack of polish here even more evident. Like its Virtues, the DH’s traits will continue to hold the specialization back if they aren’t revamped.
Specific suggestions for improvement are in the post below.
I tried this this morning and it worked pretty well. Definitely one of the few viable builds for PvP with the DH.
Glad to hear it worked well for you! Hopefully future betas will see improvements to the DH, so we can enjoy greater build diversity across all game modes. I’m rooting for Trap DH and more options for condi builds, but I just don’t see it yet.
Have you tried Smite/JI/SYG, full medi trait and Soldiers? You trade swiftness for more potential engagement utilities with JI and burst damages with Smite. JI is another stunbreak when the going gets tough too.
When you say Soldiers, do you mean the runes (to work with SYG), or the amulet? I did try out a couple Medi builds early on with the DH, but I had mixed results, and I suspect that part of it was because I was still getting used to the DH’s clunkier Virtues. I don’t see why Meditations wouldn’t work, and the first draft of this build actually used JI instead of Retreat to help close gaps quickly when switching from LB to Hammer. When I tested out Retreat instead, though, it felt like the build really came together. Retreat allows me to rotate quickly between teamfights while engaging and disengaging more freely (instead of just letting me close in from a distance). It makes it much easier to kite opponents, and it also gives me two consecutive blocks for allies thanks to Communal Defenses (in addition to condition conversion from PoV). JI did let me set up Hammer CC with minimal risk, but Feel My Wrath already fills a similar role, so I ended up dropping JI.
I leaned toward Shouts when designing the build because I feel that LB mostly excels in teamfights (at least until they improve the slow, rooting casts and the inability to cast skills behind you), and I wanted to maximize the utility I was bringing to the team. I can definitely see the merit in your suggested setup, though unfortunately, I won’t have time to try it out before beta ends.
Hey all, with beta drawing to a close, I wanted to share a DH Longbow build I had reasonable success with in PvP. This was tested primarily in Unranked matches (mostly because I didn’t want to get grief for bringing a beta character into Ranked matches).
Partial Build setup (excluding DH traits/weapons):
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQFASlsAhahYrQwUIQQEGMEFuCSuR4WsdZAA-TJBFABFcBAEvMQN7PAwDAAA
Other Components:
Longbow (Air/Blood or Air/Fire sigils)
Alternate Rune Set: Soldier, specifically for fighting condition-heavy teams, or if your team is lacking cleansing. I like to run Pack Runes when I’m able, though, because they synergize with AH while giving you almost permanent swiftness and 80% crit chance (which is awesome for Mighty Blow, True Shot, and Hunter’s Ward).
DH Traits: Soaring Devastation, Hunter’s Determination, Hunter’s Fortification
Concept:
This build was born mostly out of frustrations with the new DH Virtues and Longbow, and in the end, I built for the Longbow while turning my focus away from Virtues. My intial tests were with Meditation builds, but I found that Meditations weren’t offering me the setup I needed to compensate for the Longbow’s long cast times and self-roots, and that I lacked the mobility needed to properly kite with the Longbow.
As it happens, Shouts fix most of these issues. They provide Quickness, Stability, and Swiftness for the DH, which work wonderfully with both the Hammer and Longbow skills. The loss of the Virtues traitline gives you less sustain than AH builds that aren’t running DH, but the ability to kite and position freely with the Longbow offsets this and lets you focus on pressuring the opposing team.
It’s fair to ask why you shouldn’t just drop DH for Virtues and run Scepter/Focus instead of Longbow. My answer is that Longbow is devastating in teamfights when paired with Quickness and Stability. I would generally approach teamfights with Symbol of Energy and Deflecting Shot, and then when I was at mid-range, I’d cast SYG/FMW and follow up with Hunter’s Ward. That alone ended more than a few teamfights, since opponents aren’t expecting such a fast cast from HW. Most of their team gets snared while your team receives Quickness, Fury, and Stability, and since Hunter’s Ward is coming off of 75-80% crit chance, it’s also pumping out an easy 4-5k damage to each target. Seeing 3 or more people go down on the final pulse isn’t unusual, and it’s easy to clean up anything that lives with True Shot, your Hammer, and the leap from Soaring Devastation.
That said, good positioning is important with this build, because you need to balance your personal survival and your team support. With the Longbow, you usually want to be kiting around the edges of a teamfight, rather than sniping from 1200 range, since your Shouts won’t reach your allies if you’re beyond 600 range. Dropping surprise True Shots and Hunter’s Wards from 1200 range before entering the fight can be effective, but that’s not how you want to spend a majority of your time. Hammer sustains well enough in most teamfights, but being able to switch to Longbow for kiting, extra Vigor, and Deflecting Shot is always a good fallback when pressure starts rising too high.
To wrap this up, I felt like I had a significant presence in most teamfights using this build along with respectable sustain, damage, and mobility. Feedback on the build is welcome, since I’m sure some improvements can be made, and hopefully some people have a chance to test the build out before the beta ends. Thanks for taking the time to read!
You lost me at increasing a cool down to 120s. Nope.
(Utility)Warden’s Faith
Activation: Instant
Cooldown: 45
Duration: 45
Your Arrow hits reduce the cooldown of your Virtues by 1 Second, ends when your Health drops below 75%.Why even add that playability to begin with? I don’t want to stay on the bow longer than I have to while also be dependent on the bow hit rate at 1200 range. I most definitely don’t want to feel like I’m penalized by not doing so.
Sorry for the harsh criticism but if you develop your games around your own personal playstyle, it’s going to fail. My original post still stands.
Your argumentation makes no sense.
You don’t want to stick with the Longbow (which is the core of the specialization) for long, that’s fine. But why would I lose you at the 120s CD for Shield of Courage then?
It’s not like the SoC is that essential for your Melee Combat and if, you can still get it off CD and save it before you go in.
The problem is that you’re taking a base class mechanic that can be incorporated into all playstyles and nerfing it heavily unless players take a specific utility along with a specific weapon. That’s not good design, and it would do needless harm to DH build diversity. Furthermore, even DH’s who take the LB and your suggested utility are still going to be utilizing their weapon swap, which disables the effect of the utility that you’re trying to balance the specialization around.
by AA with scepter I can stack 1 burn every 1.5 sec. It’s more or less 5 stack every 7.5 seconds.
But you’re talking about 5 stack at the same time, right? What kind of skill is that? I want to have it!
And with GS is even hardly to stack it with AA (it’s animation make it take longer to hit than 1/2 sec), and skill 2 stack only 2 burn every 10 seconds.
With sword I can stack on the enemy a lot of stack, but not more than 2-3 at the same time, frequently not more than 2 at the same time.
Sword can maintain 4-5 AoE burns with only its auto-attack chain if you take the Supreme Justice trait and Air+Fire/Blood sigils. RHS and good Fury uptime are important to ensure that the sigils proc consistently. This isn’t part of the “meta” burn build that’s being discussed in this thread and others, but it’s possible to achieve it. I like it a lot better than the WW/JI/PF version because it’s not as dependent on an all-or-nothing burst that fizzles after a single Shout cleanse.
That said, the fact that Burn Guardian still hasn’t made any headway in the competitive scene after all this time makes it seem like an odd thing to nerf. If they nerf burning as a whole, I’m hoping that they’ll compensate the Guardian somehow so that the build doesn’t fall out of play completely. Buffing the damage bonus from Amplified Wrath and maybe (finally) making improvements to the Sword and Scepter seem like good ways to keep Burn Guardians relevant while also helping out Power Medi builds, which have lost ground recently compared to other professions.
As long as any proposed changes do not negatively impact other game modes, sure, however, since condis are still completely kittened in comparison to zerk in pve, and also larger scale group fights in WvW, I can not support any ideas to even further bring them down.
Please come up with something that will achieve what you have in mind without negative impact outside of this game mode, then it will get much better support.
Nerf Burning base damage, buff Bleeding and Poison damage, and maybe throw some buffs to condi Guardians and Engis to compensate for the significant DPS loss that they’ll experience from the Burning nerf? Would that be a good compromise?