Guild Wars 2

Lucred.1802:

Warrior has NO condi removal in current meta.
Necro has condi transfer galore.
Tempest has (I think) pulsing condi cleanse (10 seconds, 1 condition) no on-demand cleanse.
Druid has pulsing condi cleanse (10 seconds, 1 condition) and I think they have 1 on-demand cleanse, unsure of cooldown

Thief has NO condi removal in current meta.

Scrapper has ONE cleanse (all conditions) on a 40 second cooldown.

DH has ONE cleanse (2 conditions) on a 20 second cooldown.

I have no idea what chrono has, I won’t ever play one.

So that’s 3 of 8 with NO CLEANSE AT ALL, 1 (maybe 2) with a full cleanse on a long cooldown, and 2 single-condi cleanses on mid-long cooldowns.

Corrections:

Thief: Multi condi cleanses depending on build. Shadowstep alone removes 3 — D/P thief has the least condi counter, with only shadowstep (some traits/heals can remove crippling condis). S/D can remove extras per return skill. Staff thief can remove via dodge trait. I also believe stolen ectoplasm (from mesmers) can help cleanse a condi or it provides resistance.

Warrior: Condi cleanse isn’t quite as necessary with high amounts of resistance. Theoretically you can chain resistance for approx 20 secs with a down time of another 20 secs or so. You don’t need condi cleanse if you ignore condis in the first place.

I don’t know Tempest, Mesmer, or Herald, so I can’t speak for them. That said, I have seen more than “no or few” condi cleanses — I’ve seen tempests completely remove about 5 condis with one skill, on top of overcharging water and a few other skills. Herald builds can do something similar, removing several condis at once. I also don’t know druid that well, but I have seen their celestial form remove all condis and heal to full health.

Scrapper: You forget purge gyro. 2 condi cleanses every 3 secs for 15 seconds total. On about a 25 sec cooldown. Serious condi hate. And don’t forget elixir gun 5, and any elixirs used heal 1 condition on top of that (including the auto-triggered elixirs at 75% and 25% health).

DH: The jumpy skill (forget the name, F2), removes 3 condis, smite condition removes 1, and the healing trap skill removes 1. Admittedly, they’re all on long cooldowns. But it’s more than just one condi cleanse.

JTGuevara.9018:

I can’t believe there are people defending condis.

Conditions are not only strong themselves, with sigils they’re even stronger. HoT traits ESPECIALLY make them stronger. Added on top of that, with some builds you can spike them instantly as if you were playing a power build. Warrior mace primal burst is a good example. Conditions can be mitigated through resistance and regen, but resistance can be stripped and regen is just worthless. Cleansing only works once and in the blink of an eye, they’re reapplied. There’s barely, if any, a reliable counter or a method of immunity against them. Before anyone responds, yes, I know about condi conversions and skills like defiant stance, but that’s it. Conditions don’t have a reliable counter to them.

Power builds on the other hand, can be….blocked, blinded, inflicted with weakness, mitigated with protection, invuln AND negation . I mean come on! It’s out of control! There’s a LOT of condi BS right now. Nobody can deny it.

You’ve clearly never played a condi build…

Because blocks, invuln, condi cleanse, resistance, and more affect us too. If you use projectiles, god help you because of all the projectile hate.

There’s more counters to condi than there are for power. You can spike a person with a power build. Spike them with condi (which I do, 11 stacks of burning on my engineer), and they have enough time to react and cleanse it. Playing the slow game? Druids and eles say kitten you.

https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/756609788310675456

Thoughts? Looks like an improvement of the original map, with the underwater portion being raised up and made to look like the old LA.

Dahkeus.8243:

Vagrant.7206:

Heavy condi — think mace warrior kind of condi.

Yes, that’s what I was talking about. If elixir C, the scrapper can win. If not, the war should have the upper hand.

Even with purge gyro or elixir c, the warrior can SPAM that condi.

Sounds more to me like a modern politician trying to keep the charade running. Read very much like House of Cards.

Heavy condi — think mace warrior kind of condi.

Zynt.5769:

Vagrant.7206:

Regon Phoenix.8215:

Just bought new character slot and made a thief.
After trying it out on my new computer, i can say that AOE is real problem for thieves. That aside, how have i ever killed any of them? I am killing people 1v1, 1v2 and sometimes 1v3, if they lack AOE. Used to be guardian main, but i can’t even compare these two. If Anet aren’t going to nerf thieves, then i found my new main.

My question, though, how other thieves perma-dodge everything and why other thieves don’t view that as broken?

They really don’t — a good thief is in and out of the fight. Strikes hard and fast, sticks around to finish the job, and leaves. Some builds have built-in dodges that allow them to stick around for fights longer, but they sacrifice some of the burst damage.

The counter? AoE’s, reflects, and retaliation. Condis can work wonders too if you can get them to land. Thief has barely any condi cleanse besides shadowstep.

Yeah, AoE and retaliation are good against aggressive burst down characters. I’ve noticed quite a few players don’t seem to notice when you have retaliation and end up killing themselves lol.

Yeah, and people bursting ranged weapons often don’t realize that reflects are up until it’s too late. Overly aggressive thieves will find themselves in condi hell if they aren’t careful.

I’ve seen a P/P thief kill himself on my engineer’s reflects. Was hilarious.

Regon Phoenix.8215:

Just bought new character slot and made a thief.
After trying it out on my new computer, i can say that AOE is real problem for thieves. That aside, how have i ever killed any of them? I am killing people 1v1, 1v2 and sometimes 1v3, if they lack AOE. Used to be guardian main, but i can’t even compare these two. If Anet aren’t going to nerf thieves, then i found my new main.

My question, though, how other thieves perma-dodge everything and why other thieves don’t view that as broken?

They really don’t — a good thief is in and out of the fight. Strikes hard and fast, sticks around to finish the job, and leaves. Some builds have built-in dodges that allow them to stick around for fights longer, but they sacrifice some of the burst damage.

The counter? AoE’s, reflects, and retaliation. Condis can work wonders too if you can get them to land. Thief has barely any condi cleanse besides shadowstep.

Fixing bunkers requires looking at what makes each class really tanky and coming up with a counter to it.

For example — ele has a lot of self heals and aoe heals. What if it acted more like a conventional healer, and its heals were less effective on itself? Or what if the engineer’s blocks/reflects/evades were much shorter duration, and the purge gyro wasn’t so effective? Or If invuln on a mesmer meant they couldn’t perform any actions either? Or if berserker took longer to recover adrenaline after performing a burst (IE a delay)?

These are just ideas. Part of what makes each class tanky is different. Part of the problem isn’t the tank, but the damage combined with the tank. If you focus on the crux of both (IE bursting for warriors, or invuln/block for mesmers), you can find your solution.

I think we can all agree though. Thief is just too tanky.

Bad idea. Some races have decent skills, others are pointless. There’s no balance to them. The other thing is you can’t change your race, so you can’t change those skills.

It would be wonderful if we could place signposts and letters inside the guild halls for people to read. That way we wouldn’t have to fill up the MOTD with pointless drivel, while still providing useful context when needed.

One problem we have in our guild hall is keeping track of decorators and decorations. We tend to bump against the decoration limit and it causes friction.

Personally, for my guild hall, I build the JP’s, and it’s really hard to tell people where certain points of interest they can glide to are without making giant red lantern arrows (which sucks up a lot of decoration space).

StickerHappy.8052:

Vagrant.7206:

vesica tempestas.1563:

Vagrant.7206:

Fay.2357:

Sooloo.1364:

I have to wonder what you guys that haven’t experienced this get out of constantly trying to explain to everyone how bad these players are. Do you feel compelled to justify your own win streaks.

Just to be clear, are you making the argument that you have a 20% winrate and it’s not your fault? I just want to make sure I know what you’re trying to say.

You’re also making a huge assumption with your math that people with poor winrates can play 100’s of games. I’ve maybe played 130 this season and I’m in legendary right now. And now I’m stuck because the progression gives me 3 wins… then 4 losses, rinse and repeat.

the ‘progress fairy’ doesn’t ‘give’ you 3 wins and 4 loses, you have simply progressed to the point where you are slightly below average. How else could it be, at some point this happens to all apart from the most skilled teams in legendary.

Slightly below average? The player pool is so small in legendary it keeps pitting me against people on the top of the leaderboards. So I don’t play it any more. And now people are complaining of hourlong queues in legendary. Funny how that works.

That’s not below average — that’s below the top players’ average.

But, you are in legendary? what do you expect to face? noobs?

No. But being pitted against the very very top of the top players every time? I’m in legendary, not E-Sports League.

Ithilwen.1529:

@Vagrant

The 55 Monk says “hi.” On paper, this build is squishy in the extreme. Yet, I have tanked for minutes at a time using it. Guild Wars has a long and honorable history of tough healers.

When a healer is squishy.. ( the dead game City of Heroes comes to mind ) There’s normally also a strong protector class and we start working toward the holy trinity.

No, it is not true that healers are generally super squishy. There healing makes them tanky.

I actually expected someone to bring up 55 monks. Thank you for doing so.

Because 55 monks had plenty of counters. Not only were they handicapped significantly in their healing ability (because they had to continually keep up regen and protection which puts a serious drain on energy), but any serious hexing/conditions or boon strip would result in near instant death for 55 monks. They only really worked well in PvE or random arenas (where people’s builds were uncoordinated and you only had 4 players per team).

Usually when people realized a monk was kitten monk (really anet? A + 55 is filtered? Guess they’re thorough), they generally ignored them until they saw a weakness or the rest of their team was dead.

Ohoni.6057:

The solution to 2. would help with all bunkers, and that would be to give players better options to overturn points than just killing all opposing players in the ring. Things like Tranquility, but on a smaller scale, that would allow you to decap held points without killing the guy on it. Also perhaps making it so that an Ele’s immortality rotations would involve more abilities that make them unable to hold points, so that they can either stay alive in a 2v1 situation, or they can keep hold of the point, but they can’t do both at once and if you wear them down while staying on point then you’ll gradually steal it away from them.

A bunker should have the ability to make it difficult to retake a point, but not impossible, and you shouldn’t have to kill them to take the point back.

A simple solution to both problems in conquest is to make points decap rate dependent on the number of players on a point. So if a tank is surviving 2v1, there’s still an extra man who’s decapping the point, and the tank ele would need backup to hold the point.

Have you heard about knockbacks? Legend says they are very effective against auramancer and druids.

Only knockback skill that work consistently and reliably enough to keep people off a point long enough to decap?

Tornado. An elementalist skill. (Or engineer if they get lucky at the right time).

1: make a build capable of shutting down an ele, 2: run around the ele and outcap the enemy, 3: continue as you are.

1) People have tried. There’s no reliable way to bring an ele down with a single build. S/D Thieves and Corrupt necros usually can only succeed if they are outmanning the elementalist. The same cannot be said for other classes that tank, which you don’t usually need a hard counter to.
2) That works if the ele sits still and doesn’t move to the action, and your team has more mobility and better teamfight capability. In which case, you should be winning already.
3) You’re suggesting not to complain when we see something broken. If you don’t pipe up about a problem, nobody’s gonna fix it.

I ll give you a hint sir – ever you heard about outnumbering? Nooo? So it’s most basic thing in game – you create 1v2,4v5 and any of such team fights to quickly stomp enemy players and snowball rest of the match. Ow…you thought this FPS game….
And Mesmer is perfectly legit to kill ele 1v1 if he can moa him in right moment between cooldown, pin down him with sword 3 and blast him to oblivion with shatters…Rev and Thief can do this too…it’s matter of skill.

Have you played against a good tank ele?

We’ve been talking this whole time about outnumbering people. And even outnumbered a good tank ele can survive way longer than it seems it should. Does it take a lot of skill to do? Yes, nobody’s denying that. But it seems the potential is too high.

And your counters rely on perfect timing, when the conditions are just right. What if he popped invulnerability the second before moa or shatter, or popped a continuous condi cleanse when you try to immobilize him? Because on paper yours ideas work great. But the reality is so much more complicated than that.

Ithilwen.1529:

You’re mistaken. By definition, a healer will be able to tank. That’s one of the primary functions of healing.

The full healer ele does laughable damage. It’s also highly vulnerable to conditions and cc.

You got outplayed.

Actually, no, healers are not by definition tanks. In virtually every other game out there, healers often have very little damage reduction/armor and are very squishy. When they aren’t squishy, they also tend to suck at healing. Because the way stats are used in this game, it doesn’t matter too much what armor class you have (couple percentage points DR).

Other classes in this game can be tanky and do some healing (primarily druids), but nobody can heal a team like an elementalist can. But they’re also healing themselves, curing condis and stunbreaks on top of it all. Druids at the very least can be countered pretty consistently.

And they heal npcs like nobody’s business too. If I can’t kill a tank ele, I should be able to at least stop the doorbreakers to stop the progression. But instead I end up with the ele healing them so much, it’s like I’m not even there. I’m not using a low-damage high tank build either. I do burst damage and plenty of AoE cc’s.

If you call that “outplayed,” fine. I don’t really care for pettiness. But to me, that’s just a gimmick. A cheap and easy way to score victories without trying particularly hard. It requires no teamwork or team coordination to do successfully. For a game mode that’s supposedly about teamwork, the current build makes them their own team.

vesica tempestas.1563:

Vagrant.7206:

Fay.2357:

Sooloo.1364:

I have to wonder what you guys that haven’t experienced this get out of constantly trying to explain to everyone how bad these players are. Do you feel compelled to justify your own win streaks.

Just to be clear, are you making the argument that you have a 20% winrate and it’s not your fault? I just want to make sure I know what you’re trying to say.

You’re also making a huge assumption with your math that people with poor winrates can play 100’s of games. I’ve maybe played 130 this season and I’m in legendary right now. And now I’m stuck because the progression gives me 3 wins… then 4 losses, rinse and repeat.

the ‘progress fairy’ doesn’t ‘give’ you 3 wins and 4 loses, you have simply progressed to the point where you are slightly below average. How else could it be, at some point this happens to all apart from the most skilled teams in legendary.

Slightly below average? The player pool is so small in legendary it keeps pitting me against people on the top of the leaderboards. So I don’t play it any more. And now people are complaining of hourlong queues in legendary. Funny how that works.

That’s not below average — that’s below the top players’ average.

Fay.2357:

Vagrant.7206:

Fay.2357:

Sooloo.1364:

I have to wonder what you guys that haven’t experienced this get out of constantly trying to explain to everyone how bad these players are. Do you feel compelled to justify your own win streaks.

Just to be clear, are you making the argument that you have a 20% winrate and it’s not your fault? I just want to make sure I know what you’re trying to say.

You’re also making a huge assumption with your math that people with poor winrates can play 100’s of games. I’ve maybe played 130 this season and I’m in legendary right now. And now I’m stuck because the progression gives me 3 wins… then 4 losses, rinse and repeat.

…are you seriously complaining about progression while being in legendary?

When the game keeps matching me up against the #1, #2, and #3 on the leaderboard while I’m solo queueing, yes.

Astralporing.1957:

Shifting goalposts already?

No, actually, that was an angry reaction to a match I had just had when I posted it. I watched a single elementalist steamroll the map because my CC/Damage/Burst could do nothing to slow it. Even the npc’s in the keep couldn’t damage the ele, when combined with my damage. All it took was a necro alongside the elementalist to down the lord and win the match in a matter of 2-3 minutes. Yes, I was the only one on defense (who wasn’t a complete newbie), but I was focusing on the door breakers and archers, not the elementalist. I only could kill them if I pulled them far enough away from the ele for the healing to not apply.

I understand the point of a tank is to outlast a 1v1 with relatively little struggle. But ele tanks not only act as a tank, they also act as a healer. And with a little finagling, I’ve seen them also deal moderate condi damage, enough to soften an opponent and make them an easy kill for a teammate who does more damage.

I’m not saying they’re super lethal or anything of that nature. But their design allows them to compose at least 2 of the 3 parts of the holy trinity and tip the scales in a bad sort of way.

I’ve posted it elsewhere, but my main suggestion to balance the current elementalist is to allow them to act as either a tank or a healer, but not both at the same time.

Fay.2357:

Sooloo.1364:

I have to wonder what you guys that haven’t experienced this get out of constantly trying to explain to everyone how bad these players are. Do you feel compelled to justify your own win streaks.

Just to be clear, are you making the argument that you have a 20% winrate and it’s not your fault? I just want to make sure I know what you’re trying to say.

You’re also making a huge assumption with your math that people with poor winrates can play 100’s of games. I’ve maybe played 130 this season and I’m in legendary right now. And now I’m stuck because the progression gives me 3 wins… then 4 losses, rinse and repeat.

Engineer can also stealth using bomb kit! So OP!

Astralporing.1957:

Vagrant.7206:

I’m certainly willing to admit skill disparity (after all, I still lose to people with identical builds because their timing is better and they make fewer mistakes), but enough skill disparity to outtank 4 players? I find that very difficult to believe without an imbalance in the mechanics.

I’ll put it delicately here. 4 players should be able to spam and burst any build in this game, assuming they have a clue. With the cc options available all around, no build has enough immunities and stunbreakers to survive that. So either those 4 players were really bad, they had some subpar builds, they had some really bad combo of classes/builds, had no coordination whatsoever (but that brings us to them not being too good), or all of the above.

I just played an unranked match.

Stronghold. I was the only one on defense, save for one newbie who realized something was wrong.

An ele tank rolled through and kept all the door breakers alive on top of not dying her self. Even when lording, the AI plus myself couldn’t do enough damage to threaten her.

This is broken. I don’t know how else to spell it out for you. Conquest is bad enough, but stronghold? It’s unwinnable vs. a decent ele tank. Tanks are normally only supposed to be good at surviving themselves. The tank builds I’m seeing are not only good at surviving, they’re good at healing teammates too.

I’ve made the point before, and I’ll make it again — when a build breaks a map, it’s a broken build, or the map is broken. The fact that an entire game mode simply cannot stand up to a single build? Really bad sign.

Astralporing.1957:

That’s some massive skill disparity there. Also, with 4 people, there should have been enough cc to finish that fight very fast, so it’s not only the ele being really good, but the 4 people not being very coordinated.

Tl/DR: yeah, spamming random buttons agains a good ele will not work. But then, it shouldn’t.

I’m certainly willing to admit skill disparity (after all, I still lose to people with identical builds because their timing is better and they make fewer mistakes), but enough skill disparity to outtank 4 players? I find that very difficult to believe without an imbalance in the mechanics.

In a first person shooter or strategy game, I can believe that such skill disparities exist, because the playing field is level enough generally, and there is large enough room for such skill disparities to grow. But in Guild Wars 2? There’s an upper bound on skill disparity based on build. You’re telling me the only difference is skill disparity, but what I see is a broken build.

Sooloo.1364:

People have explained situations a hundred times and yet someone keeps popping up saying “Just win, it’s easy”.
I’d just won 3 games, 1 more and im into the next tier. I get a mesmer and a thief into my group, they sit at home the whole match, die every single time an enemy comes. We lose.
Next round, same 2 again.
We lose.
So I wait 10 min, queue again, same 2.
We lose.
And I ask myself why can’t they be separated or put onto the other side.
And this kind of thing happens so much it’s not even funny anymore.
You can’t progress when you win two, lose three.
I have an account in Diamond, and I’m happy there.
Another can’t get out of Sapphire because of the situation I explained.
It’s easy to accuse myself and others of being bad players, but nobody can deny that the MM is placing low MMR with high.

It can sometimes happen at high levels too. I’ve noticed (for whatever reason) the game tends to pit me against the top 5 on the pvp legendary leaderboards. Never switches up the teams. I solo queue, and they do as well. I’m only prestige 1.

BillC.4521:

Vagrant.7206:

I was gonna say, it seems a lot of their decisions are not based on people’s requests at all. It mostly seems to be determined by execs and whatever game modes the devs themselves play. There have been brilliant suggestions in the past (for everything, not just balance changes), and they have been largely ignored.

I think anet sometimes follow those request when people made enough complaint/nerf thread about them.
Example is DH true shot dmg nerf and Daredevil’s vault. why is it okay for skill with evade in it to do so much dmg while the rooted one got nerfed.

The thing I’ve noticed is that there are devs who do play WvW and PvP. They also notice when certain builds tend to be broken, because they experience it themselves.

And I think they try to look at what’s causing the OP/brokenness and change that. The aforementioned vault? It’s much harder to spam because it’s 5 initiative instead of 3.

Ellie.5913:

Vagrant.7206:

Astralporing.1957:

Vagrant.7206:

The people you’re killing on your necro probably don’t know how to handle the necro.

The same is true with eles. Yes, it is a tanky build, but it’s by no means unkillable. And to achieve that level of tankiness, it has to sacrifice most of the class’ damage potential.

I’ve played the supposed “hard counters” to tank eles (Necro Scepter, Thief S/D). The result is that it usually only takes 2-3 of us to down the ele. If they’re particularly bad, I can do it myself on a hard counter. But vs. a skilled tank ele player, it often takes 2 hard counter classes. When you have to plan 2 hard counters to 1 player, that results in a strategic imbalance, because those 2 often have to give up other abilities or strengths.

Vagrant.7206:

I’ve played against good and bad tank eles. The bad ones can only handle 2 people, if there’s enough CC. The good ones? I’ve seen tank close to 4 at a time (for about 30 seconds), assuming nobody’s helping them.

Unless those 4 people don’t know what they’re doing, it’s much less than 30 seconds. Specifically, it’s until obsidian flesh ends. If you said 3, i’d believe you, assuming ele is a bit more skilled (depending on class composition, and if there’s no cc flying around – but then, lately there’s always some cc flying around), but 4 people focusing properly are going to kill that ele very fast, unless they are really bad.

The best ele I’ve played against (#1 on the leaderboards right now, FYI) could tank 4 people by herself pretty handily. She might have to leave the point to return a little bit later, but generally won’t die unless there are 2 or more hard counters. The worst I’ve played against could handle 2 decent players who weren’t hard counters. Obviously there is variation based on skill, but a single player shouldn’t be able to make the entire match lopsided.

Really? By most accounts N+1 gameplay is considered bad, largely as I understand it because N+1 gameplay fails to reward a player for skill.

Not sure what you mean by this?

Ellie.5913:

Regon Phoenix.8215:

Ellie.5913:

Yea I don’t know what game you guys are playing but I’ve never seen an ele do that, not this season, most that I come across are very squishy. The most annoying things imo are druids with their constant seemingly non-stop cc spam AND healing,not to mention they can actually kill something.

Have you ever played against ele?
And yeah, druids is pretty broken too. Can’t fight them, can’t fight their pet. Only chance against druids is to reroll as ele or herald.

Yea like i’ve said, I’ve played against ele I’ve played as ele and i’ve had ele’s on my team….. none of them were very tanky, and didn’t keep anything alive either and sure as heck didn’t kill anything. You guys must be talking about ele’s in legendary or ele’s that have a premade team. I’m a solo player.

I also play solo queue, but I’m in legendary rank. Low levels were generally a joke until Diamond rank (nobody is particularly good at strategy at low levels), and after I hit Diamond and Legendary, you simply could not afford to not bring a hard counter to ele tanks, unless you brought your own ele tank(s).

So far I haven’t seen any really good ele’s that actually help keep their teammates alive & can survive too long against more than 1 person, usually if 2 people attack them simultaneously they die pretty fast( since I’m not in legendary and don’t play on premades) But if they do exist some where, I think that’s a good thing. I’d be VERY happy if I had some one on my team like that, all this going in and party wiping in 2 seconds rez go in die fast again and repeat over and over and over thing is incredibly boring and really makes me not enjoy playing. I find games that allow me to stay alive long enough to at least cast a few times way more fun. This game used to have MANY viable healer/supporters and they all got nerfed into non existence, they should un nerf all the support builds on various classes so we can have more of that and so ele’s who don’t want to play support don’t have to. Like I’ve said many times before, all the things that got nerfed over the years should get un nerfed so people can have a lot more builds to choose from on each profession, and put back all the amulets and runes that got removed. All the core skills/builds that have been nerfed to death REALLY need to be un nerfed since HoT builds are way stronger.

You’d be amazed, if you played from release of the core game. A lot of stuff has been buffed, particularly conditions. Originally, zerk meta was the only realistic way to do appreciable amounts of damage (and there was just as much condi/projectile hate back then too). There’s a couple core builds that are still viable today, and some have only slight changes with HoT. The current meditrapper build is actually just a reincarnation of the meditation build before HoT. There’s a necro build that uses only core skills that is highly rated on metabattle. The thief meta is just a slightly modified pre-HoT meta. There’s a condi engineer build that’s still viable since they changed condis pre-HoT. I wouldn’t say they’ve nerfed a lot, just the stuff that’s been OP. HoT adds some power creep though, which is never a good thing, because it begets more power creep.

And the eles you’re playing aren’t particularly good if they can’t handle 1 person on a tank build (especially given the current broken nature of tanks). That’s downright awful.

Astralporing.1957:

Vagrant.7206:

The people you’re killing on your necro probably don’t know how to handle the necro.

The same is true with eles. Yes, it is a tanky build, but it’s by no means unkillable. And to achieve that level of tankiness, it has to sacrifice most of the class’ damage potential.

I’ve played the supposed “hard counters” to tank eles (Necro Scepter, Thief S/D). The result is that it usually only takes 2-3 of us to down the ele. If they’re particularly bad, I can do it myself on a hard counter. But vs. a skilled tank ele player, it often takes 2 hard counter classes. When you have to plan 2 hard counters to 1 player, that results in a strategic imbalance, because those 2 often have to give up other abilities or strengths.

Vagrant.7206:

I’ve played against good and bad tank eles. The bad ones can only handle 2 people, if there’s enough CC. The good ones? I’ve seen tank close to 4 at a time (for about 30 seconds), assuming nobody’s helping them.

Unless those 4 people don’t know what they’re doing, it’s much less than 30 seconds. Specifically, it’s until obsidian flesh ends. If you said 3, i’d believe you, assuming ele is a bit more skilled (depending on class composition, and if there’s no cc flying around – but then, lately there’s always some cc flying around), but 4 people focusing properly are going to kill that ele very fast, unless they are really bad.

The best ele I’ve played against (#1 on the leaderboards right now, FYI) could tank 4 people by herself pretty handily. She might have to leave the point to return a little bit later, but generally won’t die unless there are 2 or more hard counters. The worst I’ve played against could handle 2 decent players who weren’t hard counters. Obviously there is variation based on skill, but a single player shouldn’t be able to make the entire match lopsided.

Really? By most accounts N+1 gameplay is considered bad, largely as I understand it because N+1 gameplay fails to reward a player for skill.

Not sure what you mean by this?

Ellie.5913:

Regon Phoenix.8215:

Ellie.5913:

Yea I don’t know what game you guys are playing but I’ve never seen an ele do that, not this season, most that I come across are very squishy. The most annoying things imo are druids with their constant seemingly non-stop cc spam AND healing,not to mention they can actually kill something.

Have you ever played against ele?
And yeah, druids is pretty broken too. Can’t fight them, can’t fight their pet. Only chance against druids is to reroll as ele or herald.

Yea like i’ve said, I’ve played against ele I’ve played as ele and i’ve had ele’s on my team….. none of them were very tanky, and didn’t keep anything alive either and sure as heck didn’t kill anything. You guys must be talking about ele’s in legendary or ele’s that have a premade team. I’m a solo player.

I also play solo queue, but I’m in legendary rank. Low levels were generally a joke until Diamond rank (nobody is particularly good at strategy at low levels), and after I hit Diamond and Legendary, you simply could not afford to not bring a hard counter to ele tanks, unless you brought your own ele tank(s).

Ellie.5913:

Vagrant.7206:

Ellie.5913:

Vagrant.7206:

Ellie.5913:

Ubik.8315:

Vagrant.7206:

I’ve seen Tempest tanks merrily tank 3 skilled players by themselves.

I would hesitate to say that three players, assuming they’re not also aurabot tempests or healer druids failing to kill one tempest are as “skilled” as you want to believe.

All you need is 1 good necro to take out a tempest, my reaper sometimes solo kills 2 people at a time and quite easily.

You’re playing against some bad tempests then. All the ones I’ve fought on my necro can happily tank them (yes, I am using meta corruption builds and scepter auto attack) and then they kite away whenever they feel remotely threatened.

I would hesitate to say that three players, assuming they’re not also aurabot tempests or healer druids failing to kill one tempest are as “skilled” as you want to believe.

Ever played against Gin Heartily, #2 on the leaderboards last I checked? She runs some kind of staff tank build (I don’t know the specifics). I’ve seen CC hell warriors and meta necros stack on her… and she just tanks it all.

That just means that particular ele is better at his/her job than you are at yours, it happens. Maybe they’ve been playing longer than you or are just naturally better at the game than you, but it doesn’t mean EVERY ele in the game is as super pro as the one/ ones you are talking about. Most ele’s I’ve come across, including my own are very squishy.

I’m not denying that that’s possible, but the problem is that a single player shouldn’t be able to handle more than 2 players at a time, regardless of skill level. It makes the game ultimately dull.

Handle 2 players at once….what about my reaper who can not only handle/uselessly tank but can actually kill 2 players at once? Heck if we’re gonna get rid of 1 thing that people call over powered we might as well get rid of them all. Tbh I hate playing ele, I’m never very successful with it, I think it needs buffs, the current ele build everyone is using doesn’t kill anything and if you’re not REALLY good at it and have an organized premade to back you up it’s even difficult to stay alive on it. So yea I’d say the most successful tempests are the ones who have their own organized team the rest not so great. And anyone who has a really good organized premade is gonna beat most of their opponents, that’s something a lot of people seem to over look whenever they complain about a certain class/ build being over powered.

The people you’re killing on your necro probably don’t know how to handle the necro. That’s a matter of experience. I’m talking builds that require relatively little experience but can still tank 2+ people, and be obnoxious enough to add CC’s and condi to the mix.

I’ve played against good and bad tank eles. The bad ones can only handle 2 people, if there’s enough CC. The good ones? I’ve seen tank close to 4 at a time (for about 30 seconds), assuming nobody’s helping them.

Ross Biddle.2367:

XxsdgxX.8109:

Ellie.5913:

Crimson Shi.5047:

What some people have already said, and partly the reason why for the most part I had moved on from gw2. This whole community is a buncha of whiney, hand holding bunche of whiners I have ever seen. What’s worse is the developers will listen to everything the town cryers say. As again people have mentioned, none of you all will be satisfied until EVERYTHING is nerfed into the ground. People complain of the lack of build diversity yet don’t understand that it was their or their own peers constant belly aching that has made the pvp scene what it is today. Anet’s desire to please everyone. Honestly alot of things before all this nonsensical kitten could have been left alone. Yet Anet wants to please everyone, but in the pleasing lose people anyway who weren’t even complaining about alot of things to begin with. And it will continue until PVP is nerfed into the ground.

Couldn’t have said it better. What this game needs is dev’s who know how to make a game and not listen to whiners that just gets a game destroyed. It was a million times better in the beginning than it is now, never close to as fun as gw1 pvp for various reasons, but a WHOLE lot better than it is currently.

So much this, no doubt that this game has been getting worse as time passes thanks to the people complaining and asking for nerfs to everything since always.

I’d say it’s the internal structure of Anet and NCsoft myself. Bad tree, bad fruit. But sure, blame the consumers

I was gonna say, it seems a lot of their decisions are not based on people’s requests at all. It mostly seems to be determined by execs and whatever game modes the devs themselves play. There have been brilliant suggestions in the past (for everything, not just balance changes), and they have been largely ignored.

Ellie.5913:

Vagrant.7206:

Ellie.5913:

Ubik.8315:

Vagrant.7206:

I’ve seen Tempest tanks merrily tank 3 skilled players by themselves.

I would hesitate to say that three players, assuming they’re not also aurabot tempests or healer druids failing to kill one tempest are as “skilled” as you want to believe.

All you need is 1 good necro to take out a tempest, my reaper sometimes solo kills 2 people at a time and quite easily.

You’re playing against some bad tempests then. All the ones I’ve fought on my necro can happily tank them (yes, I am using meta corruption builds and scepter auto attack) and then they kite away whenever they feel remotely threatened.

I would hesitate to say that three players, assuming they’re not also aurabot tempests or healer druids failing to kill one tempest are as “skilled” as you want to believe.

Ever played against Gin Heartily, #2 on the leaderboards last I checked? She runs some kind of staff tank build (I don’t know the specifics). I’ve seen CC hell warriors and meta necros stack on her… and she just tanks it all.

That just means that particular ele is better at his/her job than you are at yours, it happens. Maybe they’ve been playing longer than you or are just naturally better at the game than you, but it doesn’t mean EVERY ele in the game is as super pro as the one/ ones you are talking about. Most ele’s I’ve come across, including my own are very squishy.

I’m not denying that that’s possible, but the problem is that a single player shouldn’t be able to handle more than 2 players at a time, regardless of skill level. It makes the game ultimately dull.

Regon Phoenix.8215:

Because something always has to be broken.
This time it is immortal ele.

Well, part of it has to do with the fact that it’s not just the ele that becomes unkillable… their whole team gets part of the healing factor too. This makes the ele the group healer and tank. 2 parts of the holy trinity in one? That’s not good.

Ellie.5913:

Ubik.8315:

Vagrant.7206:

I’ve seen Tempest tanks merrily tank 3 skilled players by themselves.

I would hesitate to say that three players, assuming they’re not also aurabot tempests or healer druids failing to kill one tempest are as “skilled” as you want to believe.

All you need is 1 good necro to take out a tempest, my reaper sometimes solo kills 2 people at a time and quite easily.

You’re playing against some bad tempests then. All the ones I’ve fought on my necro can happily tank them (yes, I am using meta corruption builds and scepter auto attack) and then they kite away whenever they feel remotely threatened.

I would hesitate to say that three players, assuming they’re not also aurabot tempests or healer druids failing to kill one tempest are as “skilled” as you want to believe.

Ever played against Gin Heartily, #2 on the leaderboards last I checked? She runs some kind of staff tank build (I don’t know the specifics). I’ve seen CC hell warriors and meta necros stack on her… and she just tanks it all.

Yep, keeps happening. Keep getting dishonor because I was in the queue for PvP

Ellie.5913:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Ellie.5913:

I think this is a troll thread…. seems like it’s meant to get people upset…and it’s working

You’re so dour. What’s wrong with a thread dedicated to raising qualms with balance?

People are already upset. This thread has nothing to do with it ;D

People are upset because their favorite builds keep getting nerfed to the point that they can’t use them anymore, so of course they are gonna get more upset whenever people suggest they continue getting nerfed, you’re just throwing fuel onto the already blazing inferno. If anything we need buffs not more nerfs. I’d suggest buffing all the core skills & traits that haven’t been used by anyone in ages… and leaving it buffed not continuing with this merry -go-round of oh lets nerf then buff then nerf then buff then nerf even more. And put back all the amulets and runes that got removed over the years so we can have more viable builds.

That and people get upset when there are players better than them playing builds in a synergistic way. For example, I main engineer, and as such I have played both condi and scrapper.

The nerfs people suggest for both condi’s and scrapper would make engineer completely useless in pvp except for tanks, which is the state of affairs elementalist seems to find itself in. Small changes have large consequences for gameplay, but people are too eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Ideally, more counterplay is better than nerfing everything.

Ubik.8315:

fishball.7204:

Unranked is a totally different story. I’ve gotten 3 signet rangers and people that are totally new to PvP on my team (and against). That’s not really fun for me either and I’ve rarely if ever had a close game out of the past 50 unranked matches I’ve had since this season started.

They just need to scrap everything and rework it, right now both ranked and unranked are messed up

I have less competitive ranked games than unranked.

Normally in unranked it’s a case of which team has the fewer new players has a player who can hard carry on a hard carry class.

In ranked it’s just which team has the better MMR.

This is often my experience. In unranked a good individual player can change the course of a game, but in ranked it’s very unlikely for any one player to influence the outcome, as the outcome was already predetermined.

The other thing is that people are more likely to be playing for fun and screwing around. It’s harder to be annoyed that you’re beating your head against a wall, unlike in ranked. Fewer people leave me incapped to die later on.

The problem is that at higher levels there’s such a small pool of players already, that any such blacklist would make the queues take FOREVER. Other changes to the matchmaking system need to come first.

Sooloo.1364:

You’re wrong, GW does do something when you are on a losing streak. It puts you in even worse games so you’ll lose more. Working as intended I think.

That seems to jibe with my experience too, although I don’t have any kind of statistical rigor to back it up.

General:

Resistance works as normal, except condition’s timers don’t decrease until resistance disappears. (You’re still on fire bro.)
While invulnerable, from any skill, you cannot stomp.

• Warrior: Longer cooldowns on berserker stance and head butt.
• Necro: Reduction on how quickly life force generates.
• Ranger: I honestly don’t have any complaints. I think they’re in a mostly good spot.
• Revenant: Sword skill 3 has some kind of counter besides block or evasion.
• Elementalist: Reduction in personal healing/condi cleanse/stunbreaks, increase in output healing (to allies). Reduction in ability to reflect projectiles.
• Engineer: Hammer skill 3 has a much faster cast time, shorter evade time, does less damage. Hammer skill 4 does more damage, blocks for a shorter period of time.
• Thief: I think they’re in a mostly good place.
• Mesmer: Reduce the length of time shield mesmers can block for.
• Guardian: Increase casting time and cooldown of traps.

I honestly think some minor tweaking can get the meta more under control. Reduce some of the tankiness of some builds, and increase the casting times/cooldown times for others.

Ithilwen.1529:

I think that ANET is moving in the right direction by adding sustain and lengthening fights. Now you need strategy and cool down management. I remember when the main strategy was: “sneak up on somebody and burst them as fast as possible.”

A more sustained fight forces one to do more than just hammer buttons and I imagine it makes balance more predictable.

Part of the problem with the current HoT builds is not the sustain, but the fact that some builds seem to have infinite sustain. I’ve seen Tempest tanks merrily tank 3 skilled players by themselves. Even the best players should have some weaknesses other than a CC hell. E/Mo’s in GW1 could die, and even the 55 Monk tanks could die with boon stripping or enough conditions/hexes. On my scrapper, I can survive 2 players provided there’s no CC hell. That suggests that defense is simply too powerful right now — I’m not a tank, but I can handle 2 people.

And the sustain breaks maps like Temple of the Silent Storm — Tanks make it near impossible to capture meditation or tranquility (and you can’t leave either, lest they capture it). People simply last long enough for somebody else to come along. If the boons weren’t interrupted by any damage, it might be better.

As others have suggested, this is power creep in a nutshell. By swinging the pendulum so hard to sustain, anything that isn’t sustain becomes inferior. It makes maps like Spirit Watch and Temple of the Silent Storm out of date and incompatible with the game mechanics.

As a preface: I’m at legendary rank, prestige 1. The game keeps putting me tantalizingly close to prestige 2 and then I get a massive string of losses. I solo queue.

I’ve played a lot of games that are “competitive” in nature — Call of Duty, Mario Kart, WoW PvP, so many Half-Life deathmatch mods and Team Fortress. I enjoy playing competitive games at their core. And Guild Wars PvP is no different to me.

But there comes a point when the game ceases to be fun. Those moments are obviously when you keep losing, but also when you keep winning. Facerolling people is only a slightly slower way to lose interest than to keep getting facerolled.

Most competitive games learned this problem long ago. Call of Duty gives you some boosts when you’re on a death streak. Team Fortress has short matches (so if you do get facerolled, no big deal) and randomizes the teams every game. Mario Kart gives better boosts to the people in the back, and less useful boosts to the people in front.

What does Guild Wars 2 do? Absolutely nothing. In fact, it almost seems like it revels in exacerbating the problem. Among other legendary players, it’s almost a running joke that the system already knows who’s going to win the match based on whatever stat the game keeps hidden from us.

I hear you trolls shouting: “So what? Working as intended. Stop being a carebear” And you may be right.

But the way the system is designed is the best way to discourage people from playing. It drives them away. Last night I got pitted against a team that had #1, 2, and 3 on the leaderboards against my team. Needless to say, we lost.

What reason did I, or the rest of my team, have to continue playing the rest of the night? We knew the system would do it again. The result is the game gets abandoned by the very people you need to keep it interesting, and queue times get longer. Have you noticed that queue times at the beginning of a season are often short (<30 secs), and by the end of the season, queues can take an excess of 10 minutes? The reason is that people stop playing, because the game stops being fun.

Yes, I am aware that GW2, being an MMO, has a much more complicated system to balance the ranking/matchmaking system. But there are simpler short-term solutions even if you do nothing to change the matchmaking:

1. Don’t let people backslide down tiers, regardless of rank. This is a very nice feature at lower ranks, but disappears later on. If the system already has a predicted winner for a match, it is humiliating and insulting to keep backsliding against a predetermined fate. Putting in the safety net stops the worst part of high level PvP. People who are exceptional will still rise to the top, and the rest of us won’t suffer for it.
2. The system should grant partial credit for a match well played. IE: If scores are within 100 points of each other, instead of penalizing you. Currently, losing a match 494-500 gets treated the same as losing a match 0-500. They’re simply not comparable.
3. If the system has predicted the match outcome with relative certainty (IE probability of 75% or higher) it shouldn’t penalize the losing team a point.

And if you include refinement of the matchmaking system to stop producing matches where the winner is already predetermined, you end up with a system that is a lot more fair and lenient to players who may simply be getting a bad hand.

/rantover

For now you’ll find me in unranked, where the matches actually seem to be more balanced, for whatever reason.

Could we possibly make a gold ad infinitum in the future?

Something like 20 gold fractal relics, all gold frac weapons unlocked, something to that extent.

Marxx.5021:

Wrong forum. Balancing is done by PVE guys with slightly different priorities ;-).

PvE would say differently. Balancing is done by WvW people. The fact that there aren’t separate skills for pvp, wvw, and pve is evidence.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I would say Guardians are unkillable, because everytime I get near one, my HP drops to 25% because of traps. For Eles, just make sure you bring a lot of Conditions. They wear down because they have limited mass condi cleanse. Interrupt their heals, and they die.

I’ve seen tank eles — in particular staff tanks, survive heavy condi. A good ele tank build is impossible to kill unless you have at least 3 people who can spam cc.

Guardians are obnoxious to kill, but so are engineers. It’s just a matter of catching them off guard or focusing. Stability really helps against Dragonhunter blenders.

Ignoring my complaints about MMR (I keep getting matched against the #3 on the legendary leaderboards, and I’m only T1 Legendary), I wanted to talk about the current meta builds that pop up frequently.

If you look at build websites such as metabattle, most of the top ranking builds in PvP have absurd levels of tankiness. There are exceptions, of course. Thief has never been particularly good at tanking, especially in large group battles. Even with all the evades, AoE simply does them in.

Tanks aren’t inherently bad — it is a winning strategy to bunker down on a held point after all. But with the current level of tankiness in the meta, point capturing and exciting fights simply slow to a crawl. I have seen fewer interesting fights in this season than I’ve ever seen before — and that’s including the OP turret engineer build in the past. Most conquest matches simply boil down to the large group fight and which side can tank it out the longest, not about fast reactions or clever tactics.

PopeUrban.2578:

Dinosaurs.8674:

PopeUrban.2578:

Dinosaurs.8674:

PopeUrban.2578:

The whole point of instabilities is to require you to make build and playstyle adjustemnts to counter them. If you refuse to adapt to instabilities, then you’re missing the whole point of high level fractals.

I think that virtually everyone would agree with this in principle, but requiring the same “build and playstyle adjustments” for 20 of the 25 t4 scales also seems to be off the mark. It’s not really “adapting” if it’s what you do 80% of the time.

As a daredevil, I have zero problem with the instability that halves end regen. I fail to see how this is any different. I swap a few traits and utilities, by damage and defense is compromised, yet I can still complete the encounters. Certain instabilities will hit certain classes/builds harder than others. it is simply not possible to design an instability (or any content really) that treats the myriad number of builds available exactly equally. That’s why its group content. When your build is severely down, another one is covering for you.

I’m not saying it’s inappropriate to have certain classes/playstyles be impacted more by certain instabilities, or even that they need to be “fair” in any sense. I’m saying that it’s stupid and lazy to have the same instability for every one of the last 20 scales, especially when those 20 scales encompass 80% of fotm play for players who only do dailies (which is most people).

You say “when your build is severely down, another one is covering for you”. Yeah, and for scales 81-100 if your build/class sucks against boon thieves then you have to be covered by something else. In general there’s no problem with having to switch builds to face various challenges, and obviously it isn’t impossible to get through t4 fotm with guardian or other classes bad against boon thieves. But even if you can complete the encounter, it gets old when your favorite class/build is subpar for almost everything you do in fractals, and it gets old steamrolling with the exact same comp every single time because of the way instabilities for t4 scales are set up.

If it were up to me there would be a different instability (or set of instabilities) for every scale in t4, or else the instabilities for each would be randomized daily.

Absolutely true, and furthermore a lot of the new instabilities are just plain less interesting than the old ones. Boon this, condition that, but we’re missing the interesting ones. In fact, here’s a reddit thing where I collected (and invented) a bunch from a couple separate threads.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3wv4ak/collected_compendium_of_player_designed_fractal/

I’d much prefer a system in which instabilities were tiered by difficulty, and the fractal level simly adjusted the difficulty tier and number of instabilities present. having the same one for 10-20 fractals is a bit dull no matter what the balance is like.

Fractals are about randomness after all, shouldn’t the instabilities reflect that?

Some of those are really clever, others are horrifyingly unbalanced.

The V.8759:

Isn’t higher fractals supposed to be more challenging? The challenge here is to synchronise boon revomal in your team with the enemy… Its a good thing

Nobody’s arguing that it’s supposed to be more challenging.

The problem is that one particular class gets shafted by this particular instability, and makes them a liability to everyone else. It doesn’t just shaft the person playing that class, it can shaft their entire team for even having them on the team.

You guys really avoid picking up guardian only because of the boon strip? Lol
I play with hammer even for the tougher encounters and yet somehow I don’t get my fields blasted.

It’s not the boon strip. I can deal with boon stripping all day.

It’s the retaliation that gets stolen, and the fact that guardians are the primary source of retaliation. I don’t know how many guardians I’ve had to argue with to stop putting light fields on the bosses. It ends up being a greater liability taking a guardian over some other class.

Dinosaurs.8674:

I don’t know, boon thieves is annoying but it isn’t anywhere near as bad as it used to be. You know when you are elegible to have your boons stolen again (i.e. it shows the cooldown on your buff/debuff bar), so you can just not use blasts leading up to that point. Or just not use blasts at all…I think OP is greatly exaggerating the need to use blast finishers on engineer. Swap healing turret to medic gyro or just pick up the turret; don’t use big ol’ bomb; don’t use orbital strike or egun 4. You’re not even losing DPS if you’re playing condi. Not to mention a couple classes can just remove their boons anyway, making the whole issue irrelevant.

The blast finishers aren’t just for straight damage/condi. I use them to blast might, which increases the whole team’s DPS. Additionally, sometimes it’s hard to avoid using them — not blasting the healing turret lowers my overall healing, which can be dangerous.

I don’t think boon thieves needs to be removed altogether as it is easily manageable, even if it’s obnoxious. There just needs to be more instabilities applied over fewer scales in general, because currently the instabilities are promoting the exact same playstyle for 80% of the t4 fractals. The problem is made worse by the fact that the daily system encourages players to only do t4 fractals, so someone completing their dailies optimally will be playing with boon thieves active 80% of the time. If boon thieves was only on 85/90/95 or something I’m pretty sure that no one would care.

I don’t think it needs to be removed. Just needs retaliation excluded from the list of stealable boons.

The whole point of instabilities is to require you to make build and playstyle adjustemnts to counter them. If you refuse to adapt to instabilities, then you’re missing the whole point of high level fractals.

Nobody’s denying this. The last laugh is a great example of this — you have to be very careful how you play. But it hurts everyone evenly. The problem is one particular class gets singled out because the boons it generates are directly harming the entire group. The instability doesn’t just harm the one class either — it harms the entire team.

insanemaniac.2456:

leaps dont generate retal and auras cant be stolen

its been mentioned twice now and it isnt a thing

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Light_Aura

“When struck, you gain 2 seconds of retaliation. (Cooldown: 1s)”

Ummm….

Razor.9872:

What about a mystic forge recipe to upgrade one’s Ad Infinitum to gold as well? :O

Oh helllll yaaaaassss.

Like Eternity combining two legendaries, making a gold ad infinitum could be the same.

Absurdo.8309:

I also rarely encounter this problem. That said, I also play reaper.

If it’s such a problem, why don’t you just not use blasts in combat with a guardian?

I can, but that hamstrings some of my DPS and CC’s (as well as might stacking). Even my heal (Healing Turret) can act as a blast finisher. And that’s assuming everybody else in the team is avoiding blast finishers or leap finishers, which is unlikely. I notice the problem more because I play engineer (which makes heavy use of combo fields), but other classes can generate the problem just as badly.

Ultimately, the responsibility lays at the feet of whoever’s putting light fields down, which is almost always the guardian.

That’s why my suggestion to ANet is to simply exclude retaliation from the list of boons stolen by enemies. Guardians can already get tripped up by a lot of stupid things, but this makes guardians a liability to the whole team.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Vagrant.7206:

I’ve seen retaliation wipe a skilled team in less than five seconds,

Just gonna point out, this is an oxymoron.

Actually, it’s not. If you do AoE skills (such as fire bomb or napalm) that are persistent, you can have retaliation hurt you even when you’ve ceased attacking. The AoE attack continues to rack up retaliation on you. I’ve gone down from this before — I stacked fire bomb and napalm on a boss about a half second before he got retaliation from somewhere, and it downed me. I imagine necromancer wells and elementalist AoE spells can do the same thing.

Delayed effect damage can have this effect too — bomb kit suffers heavily from this problem, and I believe the thief’s pulmonary impact has this problem.

The guardian could also use a greatsword instead of a hammer.

Yes, and then they can’t use one of their weapon skills (symbol of wrath), thus hamstringing their DPS. The only guardian weapons I’ve seen that don’t feature some kind of light field on the weapon bar is a scepter, sword, or focus. That’s really constraining to guardian builds.