Mesmer is an arguably bad designed class just in terms of the clutter it might add to a fight.
IMHO shatter/lockdown builds are far from OP and, despite the clutter, offer a quite interesting gameplay.
Overhauling ranger (making Spirit builds subpar to, idk, traps or power specs) and nerfing necro minions (even if not competitive at all, they just have too much presence on SoloQ where rotations are more complicated and close defenders tend to be much more static) would be a far better approach for handling clutter issues.
The very nature of the class shourd force the balance team, however, to work around a really thin line (which we are currently quite a bit far from) where no more than a single mesmer should be viable for a good team composition.
Phantasm builds are probably in a sweetspot now, providing an easier to play but hardly competitive build for newcomers
PU mesmers, on the other hand, should probably be looked at if different game modes are likely to be released.
IMHO current issues with DPS Guardian are more about other classes offering too versatile and well rounded builds.
Guardian autoattack damage is quite high and allows an insane pressure at melee range. The class offers a fairly good gap closing skillset but, in the other hand, is completely lackluster, in terms of both speed boosting and soft CC, at keeping enemies close.
Most of the hard hitting moves are channeled or highly telegraphed, thus easily dodged without the aid of some controling tool, and it’s easy to mitigate symbol/smite damage just by moving out of the AoE.
All of this makes Guardian somehow reliant on soft/hard CC, something the class is arguably lackluster at, which IMHO is a good design in the sense that it requires an ally to provide it (just like the Guardian can provide those precious cleanses and stabilities other allies could be lacking) and promotes teamplay.
Some kind of speed boost / soft CC choices would be appreciated, specially for solo roaming purposes, but they should require sacrifices (having them on the underused Zeal traitline would prevent the Guardian from picking them on top of the current popular choices) and be overall inferior to the current teamplay reliant build (as long as that teamplay is properly done).
This would be a real issue if anything related to rewards in this game would actually make any sense. Expecting sPvP to be different would be extremely naive.
There are huge disparities on how profitable different activities are.
It’s not like each of them offers its own themed skins (which would be great for a game with “horizontal” progresion). Rewards are shared, tradeable and RNG driven for the most part and activities can only be measured by their “gold”/time income ratio, which happen to differ A LOT.
We know those differences aren’t skill/challenge driven for the most part.
Comparisons between high level fractals and some easy dungeons (like CoF1) are recurring over these forums. Loot realted rants about the recently released world bosses are fairly common too.
In PvP, hotjoin has been for months the superior choice for AP completion and both rank and glory farming (not even talking about Skyhammer farm servers or Birthday Booster issues, which ANet never seemed truly worried about btw).
Even after the last patch, which brought some deserved benefit to torunament play, rewards are still mainly a matter of grind.
We might think they are set up to lead the playerbase to some content devs could want to bring attention over, but this idea vanishes too once we notice how unpopular the new TA Aetherpath is or how wandering some mid level map mining random nodes is way more profitable than actually playing (exploring, completing DEs and JPs, and the like) it.
I wish we could have some video (like those about map design or gummy wurms) analyzing the current rewards across the game because, honestly, I can’t figure any reasoning behind them. I don’t think anybody does.
The game wasn’t designed with stacking in mind, it was around “play what you want”.
You can scream “I play how I want!” until you’re blue in the face, but there will always be an optimal way to play.
There’ll always be optimal builds for farming. I don’t think I ever said anything different (I currently use a fairly meta-ish build myself); just stated what IMHO has been the core idea behind dungeon/PvE design.
The game wasn’t designed with stacking in mind, it was around “play what you want”.
Classes were balanced mostly around sPvP and provided with enough different tools to, in conjunction with gear choices, allow a huge build diversity.
Dungeons, like any other piece of PvE, were designed isolatedly (no more than basic damage/hp number adjustments), tested for a few groups of random builds and delivered.
There never was any attempt to identify optimal strategies or balance things around dungeons.
Players had more than enough tools (everybody could play melee/range, dodge, cleanse conditions, break stuns, …) to overcome any situation in manyfold ways. That was developers’ goal and it was clearly achieved.
A zerg is a part of the game, but it’s not a compulsory one. Some people enjoy them some people don’t.
While it’s not compulsory fun wise, it’s extremely recommended loot wise.
GW2 loot system, which is IMHO a nice way to prevent players from becoming a nuissance to each other, has shown to be “exploitable” and allow the community to purposely force zergs at some specific points for better profit.
With the aid of scaling (another awesome feature on its own) some events have been forced for months to spawn craploads of lootable mobs. An insane manpower has sometimes proven to be enough to produce incomes far beyond what a single player could achieve.
Some benefit to grouping up is understandable, even positive, from the social aspect of the game. The zerg gameplay is, however, completely different, arguably lackluster (let us not forget that GW2 combat is designed and balanced around small scale PvP), and absolutely not to everyone’s taste.
Some people might like it and there’s no problem with that. The way looting works, however, implies that in order to limit the income for zerg players you also have to make single players, which don’t benefit from either scaling or manpower, to receive next to nothing from the same content, and that’s a slap in the face.
ANet seems to have learned the lesson and every recently released massive content has all the reward tied to event completion (with enemy spawns granting next to zero loot).
For every older content (which are the most), however, this side-effect is still truth and makes soloing open world extremely unrewarding. Even in those few cases where a small group can outperform a zerg (the ones with a decent completion reward, like some orr temples), the latter is still likely to appear and prevent it for happening.
Even if not exactly sensitive to scaling, WvW is no way free from this side-effect.
A 30vs30 fight is going to provide a lot more loot for everyone than a 3vs3 at some random camp. Even losing this massive battle is likely to give you a better income than winning a 2vs3 uneven fight.
When a player jumps into WvW, a zerg is going offer him more loot/WXP and a faster daily achievement completion. It might be not the most enjoyable experience for everyone, but at this point of the game, where every content is arguably old and has been experienced many times, loot means A LOT.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
I honestly agree with stacking being quite a problem and huntrting the potential challenge the game could offer. I don’t think, however, there’s an easy fix for this.
A cheap solution like the suggested one (granting boons to enemies when they are close to each other) doesn’t just nerf stacking, it would be a huge, and completely undeserved IMHO, overall nerf to meleeing. It’s something the game could have as special mechanic for some multi-boss encounters (like the lovers in AC story), but never as a regular one.
The best solution is all about enemy AI.
Make enemy groups smart enough to not get easily baited by LoS tactics and behave more like PCs and you might alleviate the current over-reliance on stacking and get a lot more challenging fights.
While this kind of changes would probably be welcomed for those looking for challenge as a mean of fun, those that see little more than a gold farming tool on dungeons (which are A LOT) and most average players (those that somehow die regularly on marionette platforms, which are EVEN MORE) would, however, dispprove them.
Such a resource investment in order to please a small part of the community is, needless to say, unlikely to happen.
Zerging is a completely different kind of beast, and it’s caused mostly by the AoE cap and the loot system. Rework both and you’ll get way less people interested on mindlessly following a commander tag / karma train.
The problem (on top of technical issues), now again, is that you might be disappointing more people than you’re pleasing.
If you make two players running the same spec to face each other, yes, it’s obvious that the more defensive that spec is, the better for the best of both players (since the loser will be decided by accumulating a higher amount of mistakes than when using an offensive spec).
Has nothing to do with same spec – it’s just in generall more def = less luck involved.
This also means that in a fight between 1gc vs 1 def setup, there is less luck invovled than between 2gc but still more than in a fight between 2 def setup players.
That’s the only way to ensure both builds are at even chances of winning.
If you make two different random builds fight each other, then there would be always one of them favoured by the matchup. On top of this, the odds on winning may vary extremely between ofensive and defensive specs.
Against a foe with really good healing capabilities, an offensive setup could be at higher advantage than a more defensive one.
On the other side, against an enemy with high damage output and few high CD defensive utilities, a defensive spec might grant you an easier time surviving and winning the fight once those CDs are blown.
In the end you’ll chose your build based on both your playstyle and the odds of winning against the most popular (meta) builds.
If you think on yourself as skilled and you can choose between a defensive and an ofensive build that perform equally and you’re confortable with, then yes, you’ll probably take the defensive one. This, however, is unlikely to happen, and in this case it’s not like you’re going to take the subpar one.
This has nothing to do, however, with “good” players prefering defensive gear.
A single duel between mirrored characters that can kill AND can’t run from each other is something completely unrealistic.I understand that this thread is not easy to understand when you started playing with GW2 and all you did was point capture mode.
But in any scenario where you can’t just disengage and cap some other point —> called deathmatch, found in every other game and also in GW2 (2v2 tournaments --> if you leave the graveyard area you’re being disquallified), a fight where you have to stay in combat is nothing unrealistic at all.
When you bring in a group scenario, even as small as a 2on2 or 3on3, roles are likely to happen.
If an uneven combination of defense and ofensie offers better results (and in this case it might indeed involve more skill than a defensive setup), you’ll go for it.
This thread makes no sense at all.
If you make two players running the same spec to face each other, yes, it’s obvious that the more defensive that spec is, the better for the best of both players (since the loser will be decided by accumulating a higher amount of mistakes than when using an offensive spec).
This has nothing to do, however, with “good” players prefering defensive gear.
A single duel between mirrored characters that can kill AND can’t run from each other is something completely unrealistic.
Any real scenario is far more complex than this and can perfectly cause the opposite to be true.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Personally, guardians continously shielding themselves with random aegis popping here and there kitten me off more than evade thieves. Not to mention they can heal from 20%->100% hp as opposed to thieves, and it cannot be interrupted.
Random Aegis is once every 30/40 seconds if Virtue of Courage is not activated plus another one at 50% health (with 90 second ICD).
Usually you’ll face 5 Aegis when fighting a Guardian: one at the very beginning (shouldn’t be a problem), one at 50% health (quite random), one right after Renewed Focus (shouldn’t be a problem), and 2 VoC activations (which are not random, but active like any blind or evade).
About the healing, please, tell me you’re not talking about Shelter …
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shelter
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Withdraw
Warriors have no real weakness.
If anything, we could tak about how telegraphed their meaningful moves are (which honestly should be an even ground for every spec and where Pin Down, receiving a hard nerf on March, is pretty much the only inconsistency atm).
With perfect execution there are high chances on beating 1v1 a warrior with a lot of specs, but that doesn’t address the issue with warrios being demigods for mid-low level play. An expected higher chance of “failure” during teamfights on top their “staying power” for conquiest mode makes them viable even for competitive play.
Extremely vulnerable to kiting and with their burst-setup CCs being really obvious, they were known as unplayable during the first stages of the game.
They were also recognized, however, as the best balanced class on the game. With the aid of some ally all of these weaknesses coud been overcome up to a high degree.
Any issues were more about other classes being too well rounded more than about the warrior itself. ANets just chose for some kind of powercreep, highly likely to deliver a lot of problems on the introdiction of new game modes, over ther most obvious and healthy solution.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Despite my horrible english, I’m going to trying to summarise what I honestly believe are the undeniable results on this change:
Actually, there are 2 main benefits gotten from berserker gear for PVE:
1) Obvious speedrun benefit: Stuff dies fester, so less time is spent on fights and higher reward/tme ratio is achieved.
2) Indirect defensive benefit. Stuff dies faster, so lesser the pressure it can be applied to the group and easier the content becomes.
The first benefit doesn’t change at all. Berserker is still going to be the best damage dealing available combination, so it’s still going to provide the best farming capabilities as long as the user is capable of actively countering every threat.
Everythig is about the second benefit. An 11% longer fight might force a dodge (or any other active defense usage) where it wasn’t needed before, and that might become crucial for players whose “dodging” effectiveness is arguably low.
The change is going to promote, in any case, the usage of defensive gear. On the other hand, since the average berserker player failure rate increases the less total damage output the party deals, it’s going to promote, exactly by the same reasoning, even more “elitism” (and less accessibility) among those PUG parties looking for speedruns.
For PvE the change is going to achieve nothing but a slight increase on both, defensive gear usage and the gap between optimized groups and PUGs.
As a guardian player (so I don’t try to relatively nerf other classes), a better result could be obtained by nerfing some direct culprits, like Aegis and projectile reflects/blocks, which should have smaller upkeeps and CDs for overall better results but a much more active usage.
For WvW roaming (which is the only gear-dependant PvP purpose for those who completely dislike massive combat), it’s going to nerf every power spec, probably undeserved for anyone not relying on some cheesy power burst (which is mostly about thieves), and give even a greater advantage to those already popular condition damage semibunker builds.
The change can be even more harsh for some hybrid builds (those sacrifying crit. damage, mainly slotted on extremely cost-efficient trinkets, for defense, like Knight + Berserker mixes) than on berserkers’. Dont’ even think on Celestial gear.
Bottom line, a normalization of the critical damage stat might be necessary for overall balace. In short term, however, it’s likely to bring more problems than solutions.
The think in Anets mind: bunker > DPS > condition build > bunker, it just doesnt work out because DPS players invariably dont have enough condition removal (either by choice or simply not being able to get enough).
It’s hard for this to work when some condi specs are bunkers too :P
Boss fight in mmo are meant to take a while to kill. Maybe 10 minute is exageration but a boss typicaly at least need a good 30 second to at least start becoming challanging.
I completely agree with you on this. A 2 minute mark for an organized balanced group seems perfect to me (most bosses should need to be reworked though; there’s nothing interesting on hiting a meatsack for a couple of minutes).
I want to point that this is all about gaming experience. Since dungeon rewards could easily be adjusted to provide the same current gold/time ratios, it has nothing to do with farming capabilities.
I’m not sure, however, if you have really thought on how conflicting is this with your idea of “play what you want” builds becoming more “viable”. The required time for a dungeon run isn’t all about combat.
Speedrun groups can spend more time walking through some dungeons than actually fighting. They probably still move faster than a PUGs (specially if there’s skipping involved), but the differences are way smaller than those related to combat.
The longer encounters are made, the more weight combat gets on dungeon completion times ad the bigger the differences between organized groups and PUGs.
If you want someone to be left alone on a point a defend it, I don’t think you would pick neither a bunker Warrior nor a bunker Guardian. Engineers, Rangers and maybe even MM Necros are better at this.
Both Warrior and specially Guardian bunker specs are teamfight bunkers, assets you want to have wherever the teamfight is happening.
Guardian has better party wide support, specially condition removal, which make him shine on big teamfights, while Warrior offers quite better offensive capabilites and is probably superior for smaller fights (like 2 on 2).
Some people’s obsession with berserker gear is reaching really crazy levels.
The only clearly OP thing I can see in the video is the well known Fiery Rush. If you still want more “culprits”, then we probably should take a look at the amount of percent final damage increases those eles are making use of.
But no, for some people it’s still and will ever be about berserker gear. The players on the video could wear full soldier, finish the encounter lets say 5 times (probably more) faster than the average PuG, and some people would still be addressing berserker gear as the source of the “problem”.
OP wants this fight to last about 10 minutes.
Well, it’s hard to provide accurate numbers because the usual OP 2nd phase feedback is completely reliant on crit and crit damage, but I don’t think this fight would take more than 2 minutes for a full soldier gear team (even without reflect damage and FGS), so making bosses to have 5 times the current HP should do the trick.
That would, obviously, cause some “play what you want” PuGs spending over half an hour on the encounter, and there’s nothing we could do about it because, face it, they will NEVER be efficient.
A staff guardian, for example, will never be a good steady might source for a long fight. It can be useful if you have to deal with several trash pulls or when fighting bosses with invulnerability phases (like snowblind final boss), but for a long, continuos fight, something like continuous fire field blasting (using low CD blasts like warrior warhorn an the like) achieve better results and sacrifices way less DPS.
It doesn’t really matter if berserker is nerfed, fights are made longer or every single dungeon is completely overhauled; the “meta” will still be about having whatever is needed while keeping the damage output as high as possible.
Even if healing/sustain becomes a must, the best solution will be still about bringing just the needed amount of it and doing it by the most cost efficient way.
In the “play what you want” PuG world, however, players will try to develop some self-suficient well rounded builds (and I’m probably being too generous with this statement), leading to a utility overstack and/or a lot of potential wasted on selfish choices. Even with that, the random nature of the group makes it likely to be lacking on some important tool (lets say vulnerability stacking).
This kind of PuGs will NEVER be viable in terms of efficiency, they just can’t. That’s why meta compositions exist, and the main difference between the current situation and a more varied/complex meta would be the time spent on recruiting the key specs you could be missing.
I’m realy surprised. It’s not like Tequatl was some kind of casual-devouring monster before this patch (haven’t done it since the Elemental Powder change).
Since it requires a lot of people and some organization, the fight is unlikely to spontaneously succeed and needs to be somewhat scheduled.
Playing on a low population server where the community doesn’t program Tequatls kills can be a problem, as it can be not being able to fit the schedule, but once that barrier is overcome, the fight itself doesn’t require coordination at all.
Whoever is leading will assign 6 people to turrets, 2-3 parties to fight risen spawns and the rest of the players to the zerg (where there could be some group for killing fingers). For the majority of those zerg players, it’s all about runing a decent build and doing their job (a quite simple one).
Same could be said for the Marionette.
Players just need to know the fight and build apropiately for it (adjustable to each player capabilities). If these conditions are met, only some crazy split (like having about 10 other people on yout plantform while there are only 3 on the next one) can ruin the event (amd all of us hope this to be fixed).
There’s no coordination required and the organization is all about having the playerbase properly split between lanes.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
You have enough time to WW once the warden gets stunned.
Anyways, guardian single target damage with scepter should be quite decent.
Guardians with the purity trait lose a condition every 10 seconds rain or shine NO MATTER WHAT. With signet of resolve make that 2 conditions.
Mending has 271 HPS, while Signet of Resolve has 204 HPS (254 HPS if traited).
Mending cleanses 3 conditions on demand on a 20 second CD while Signet of Resolve removes one every 10 seconds as long as the heal is not on CD, which happens to be really high.
Honestly, Mending clearly outperform SoR both as healing and condition removal tool. This useless warrior healing skill outperforms even Consume Condtions whenever no more than 3 conditions are cleansed.
Purity is a nice trait, I agree with that. It can add a good chunk of sustain by removing some nasty bleed stacks or long lasting burning from time to time.
No sane guardian, however, will rely on Purity as the main form of condition removal.
Meditation offensive builds usually don’t slot it and invest 20 points in Virtues in order to have a 3 condition cleanse on demand (+ CoP is the enemy team is condition heavy) on top of Smite Condition.
Even as a bunker guardian (with A LOT of investment in party-wide condition removal), specially if playing 0/0/10/30/30, I have ignored it many times and picked Strength in Numbers instead when facing power damage based teams.
Warrior may need something like CI just for being viable, and somehow I guess we should thank ANet for bringing the warrior to the current state (CI + Berserker Stance + Lyssa many times), where he counters terrormancers, spirit rangers and no stun-break engineers to a good extent, saving us from the heavy condition meta we were in.
If some base condi cleansing was needed, however, they should have introduced it on a different fashion. There are still 3 unused F-keys available for warrior, enough for some built-in moderate condition removal to exist.
Some insanely powerful mandatory trait making every alternative (Mending, Shake-it-off, traited Warhorn, Signet of Stamina) look like a bad joke and unneeded for the most part is far from good design. When the trait favors some weapon choices, it gets even worse.
You must not be understanding the concept. Greatsword has no option to stun or immobilize. You rely on your second weapon set. Your options are: Mace 5 and Adrenaline. Shield 5. or use a hammer, which is only 2. Hammer 4 doesn’t count. Regardless, you get 2 stuns to hit the target. Any class can have 3 stun breakers. Most don’t, many have atleast 2, and most classes have escapes outside utility stun breakers.
If you don’t use haste with hundred blades, its extremely slow(3.5 seconds, stronger hits over the duration), and actually requires NO skill to get out of the way, yet a tremendous ammounts of “outplaying” the target to land just 1 hundred blade. All this time your target is burning you down.
1 second immobilize on a 3.5 second ability(the first second is actually pretty weak) does not make the ability require less skill. Especially with damage reduction, all it does is make it more effective, and less useless. It’s probably the most missed ability in the game.
You also have a 3 second immobilize on bow, and a trait for bringing down your weapon swap to 5 seconds (so you can perform weapon combos easier).
There’s also an interesting 4 second immob on utilities which could allow a full 100B landing.
In any case, I don’t think GS needs any serious change until Arcing Slice is reworked to something useful. Improving the weapon before that happens would only bring problems in the future.
ANet tried to make a gameplay based on identifying different attacks by their animations and actively reacting to them, more action based than other games where healing/cleansing the results of those attacks (still, just to a lesser extent, in GW2) was the only way to defend oneself.
The idea looks amazing and is probably the main reason for me to be playing this game. This is not, however, the only “innovative” idea ANet tried to bring to MMOs, and they ended overlooking a lot of problems with the combat itself.
The clutter generated by different effects has a huge impact on spotting and identifying those animations. The bigger the fight, the more clutter and the more annoying the system becomes.
This was overlooked in such an obvious way that they even released an overall harder to read player race.
On top of that, low cooldowns, weapon swap, lack of mana/energy, high damaging autoattacks and fast combat pace, all of it together, makes the game incredibly spammy and teamfigts become a mess.
Longer cooldowns or some resource to manage would have made the game a lot more about coordinated spikes that could work or be stopped and counterattacked.
Those spikes still exist in the current gameplay, and that’s great; the problem is that there’s still a lot of deadly short CD stuff on top of them. Even autoattacks can wreck people in this game.
Fights don’t get stale for a brief time. A situation where a team is playing aggresively and the other tries to defend doesn’t happen either. GW2 fights are about both sides trading blows and dangerous stuff happening ALL the time.
The result is fairly decent in a 1v1 situation, where contendants are focused on each other and can somehow track CDs. On teamfights (and not necessarily the biggest ones), however, the average player is completely unable to process what’s going on (not even think on working out an strategy) and starts playing instinctively.
There are too many things happening at any time, and they’re happening too fast
IMHO the game would had need either a resource system / longer CDs on top of quite less deadly autoattacks, so fast paced combat would take place in short bursts, or an overall slower pace for a higher awareness of the ongoing situation.
Currently, the game feels too chaotic, and seems to be lacking A LOT of in-fight strategy until downed control stuff takes place.
The funny thing is … if a 3on3 fight might be enough for the game to become quite a chaos, what should be expected from something like WvW or PvE massive events?
Combat becomes completely passive reliant. There’s just no chance for action combat to work in those enviroments, never was.
Even with that, ANet not only released that gameplay-conflicting content, but also tried to innovate with a shared loot system that encouraged zergs to happen.
The game as a whole is on a weird situation where the action combat style is supposed to drive the overall game balance, but where the majority of the playerbase (and the money) focuses on the most passive content.
Honestly, I have no idea of how they’re supposed to overcome this in the near future.
Just to clarify:
The current dungeon meta doesn’t use healing type support, and won’t ever do unless you make it so insanely powerful that many other things would become completely broken.
I’m speaking about a situation where we could see things like a Guardian getting the long term benefits of AH (which involves using a staff midfight, Empowering Might or a quite long party exposure to symbols), which belongs mostly to play-what-you-want groups.
If the idea is about increasing the survivability of guardians on DPS meta setups with little investment, I completely disagree.
Guardian is extremely powerful atm, one of the top classes without any doubt. IMHO it would be much healthier to decrease warrior base survivability than increasing guardian one (which is better than most, and should require a survival boost across the board).
I’m going to have to disagree with you on aegis being OP for multiple reasons. (a) aegis can potentially and often is removed immediately upon application…making it the shortest boon in duration. (b) the vigor nerf is going to significantly decrease evades. © your example of cycling aegis and the group not taking a single hit because of it is hyperbole/exaggeration at best.
a) That could be a good aegis usage in my opinion. Someone was lacking endurance or any other active defense source, you saw the boss attack incoming and you used Aegis … the attack gets blocked and nobody wastes a evade.
If you’re popping just for it to block “something”, that’s not skillful play and shouldn’t e rewarded.b) Vigorous Precision is currently out of the meta for most dungeons. If you still need vigor, pretty much everybody will meed it … something like a warrior using warhorn as offhand for that fight will be enough to solve the problem.
c) There are a lot of videos out there of bosses being exploded so fast that they hardly could attack 3 times before dying.
One of the best examples is probably a melee Lupicus first phase. It can be done perfectly without dodging any single kick, without timing aegis with kicks and without using every possible aegis activation.(a) Either way, the duration is a non factor at that point.
(b) Expecting the “have somebody else hold your hand” argument to be okay, is not okay. That’s why warriors got their self sustain buffed so much.
© That is nowhere near the average group. Balance is never done based on extremes.
a) Of course it is. In the situation I describe, when it behaves as a party wide active defense, it doesn’t matter if aegis lasts 2 seconds, 10 seconds or forever.
If it lasts a lot, however, it allows to be used passively too. Fire and forget, and then it will block something if someone messes with an evade.
b) That’s what support is expected to be. Denying that would imply that there’s no need for support in this game.
c) But full offense is nothing but the most efficient extreme setup. Should the game allow those average groups to run it or should demand a higher amount of skill and coordination to make it succesful?
Altruistic Healing is in a selfish traitline because it’s a completely selfish trait. The guardian is the only one getting any benefit from it.
Not having AH doesn’t prevent the Guardian from providing great support and spreading boons here and there.You talking about pve or pvp?
PvE, it’s what the thread seemed to be about.
Battle Presence should not be in the Honor trait tree but in the Virtues tree because it affects Virtue of Resolve.
Battle presence is perfectly fine in Honor. That’s the traitline with Healig Power and where most guardian healing tools are.
Moving it to a traitline that reduces recharge on virtues and grants boon duration, when passive VoR doesn’t grant any boon and you’re not going to activate it, doesn’t make any sense to me.I’ve actually tested Battle Presence in the past, and if it has not changed meanwhile…
Only the Guardian loses VoR upon the skill being triggered. The party members still get VoR through Battle Presence while your own VoR is on cooldown. With that in mind, you can spread an instant heal, additional regeneration, and only sacrifice your own regeneration momentarily. Shorter if it were relocated to Virtues, perhaps.
This paired with its Master trait Absolute Resolution, would give it some synergy – I’d have to test if that one’s effect also stacks.So it’s indeed fine where it is, though it would suffer only slightly by moving it to Virtues. I’ll admit that I was wrong: parking it in Valor would do it no good, at all, and lessen the odds of anyone ever bringing it again.
Good things to think about.
I’m a bit shocked; didn’t know about Battle Presence not being disabled on VoR activation.
I still think Honor it’s a better placement. BP + AR might be too powerful for things like sPvP, or even WvW.
Why power builds deal more damage if using a power based gear intead of a condition damage one? The answer is quite simple: you don’t invest in things you are not going to use/need.
And i’m saying there is a problem right there: compared to offensive gear, there is a lack of a proper return on its investment at the same skill level.
But that’s, as I said, because you shouldn’t have invested in that defensive gear from the very beinning, as the guy using the power based build shouldn’t have geared himself for condition damage.
You chose the gear you’re going to need. If you are evading every attack and don’t get any use for defensive stats, why on earth did you get a gear filled with them?
I’m going to have to disagree with you on aegis being OP for multiple reasons. (a) aegis can potentially and often is removed immediately upon application…making it the shortest boon in duration. (b) the vigor nerf is going to significantly decrease evades. © your example of cycling aegis and the group not taking a single hit because of it is hyperbole/exaggeration at best.
a) That could be a good aegis usage in my opinion. Someone was lacking endurance or any other active defense source, you saw the boss attack incoming and you used Aegis … the attack gets blocked and nobody wastes a evade.
If you’re popping just for it to block “something”, that’s not skillful play and shouldn’t e rewarded.
b) Vigorous Precision is currently out of the meta for most dungeons. If you still need vigor, pretty much everybody will meed it … something like a warrior using warhorn as offhand for that fight will be enough to solve the problem.
c) There are a lot of videos out there of bosses being exploded so fast that they hardly could attack 3 times before dying.
One of the best examples is probably a melee Lupicus first phase. It can be done perfectly without dodging any single kick, without timing aegis with kicks and without using every possible aegis activation.
You just answered your own question. You indicated that the defensive geared player has invested the majority of his resources in self preservation, while the offensive geared player has invested the majority of his resources in productivity. You also indicated that the defensive player’s investment largely goes unused if he actually uses his other resources. That is why the offensive player brings more to the table. More productivity versus more selfish survival benefits the group more…that is assuming the offensive player actually survives.
Why should the dps gear be “more productive”? It should just be different.
And why should the defensive player’s investment go unused if he plays well?
There is rather a large disparity there – it means a player in defensive gear isn’t rewarded for his efforts.
And that is something that should be corrected – all gears should be equally good, just with different uses.
Why power builds deal more damage if using a power based gear intead of a condition damage one? The answer is quite simple: you don’t invest in things you are not going to use/need.
Altruistic Healing is in a selfish traitline because it’s a completely selfish trait. The guardian is the only one getting any benefit from it.
Not having AH doesn’t prevent the Guardian from providing great support and spreading boons here and there.wrong keeping your self healthy is what makes you give more support
And who are you supporting then?
If your party wide healing is not enough to keep yourself alive, it won’t be either for the teamates supposed to deal damage.
If your healing is enugh for them to stay alive, then so it’s for you and there’s no need for AH.
There are 2 mitigations of damage that mostly responsible for the current state. The first one is aegis which guardian provides and the second are reflections. Decrease their abundance or uptime and it is much harder for glass cannons to play giving tanky gears more viability.
100% agree.
Aegis is fine, maybe even underpowered when looking at cooldowns, for PvP. For PvE, however, durations are insane and becomes completely OP on speedkill setups.
IMHO, Aegis durations should be decreased A LOT, probably on top of a CD reduction.
The biggest problem here is what to do with Unscatched Contender.Reflections (even regular area projectile blocks) are situational, but where they work, they are completely out of control.
Why do the two of you think its okay to try to make others play the way you want? Crab mentality?!? How dare I deviate from your face tank gear! Everyone should be reduced to only wearing pvt/clerics right? The only way anyone should be allowed to survive should be face tank gear/trinity. Lets get rid of any strategic utility use as well…I mean who needs that when you can just face tank. Lets throw that silly play how you want design out of the window because zerk’s playing how they want somehow stops you from playing how you want!
Aegis blocks one single hit…on a significant CD. It doesn’t matter if this is a 1hp hit or a one shot. That is in no way deserving of a nerf. There are exactly two skills in a guardian’s kitten nal that do this…and neither is on a short CD. Aegis also does not stack…so multiple guardians will just over write each other’s aegis 99% of the time. Not quite seeing the problem here or understanding how this is single handedly the ruin of GW2.
Reflect is a very useful utility, but again…not the ruin of GW2. This is a situational utility, that I would be fine with them removing….so long as they also remove the mandatory situations where it is needed. I don’t like getting pigeon holed into having to use that specific utility at the expense of other’s that provide more universal appeal.
We’re both probably running a full DPS build. We’re just pointing things that are clearly OP.
Aegis is fine, as I said, for PvP. It could block both the oneshot and the 1HP hit, probably the last one if the enemy is any good. That’s why you use it when the attack is incoming instead of precast it.
For PvE, however, boss moves are scripted and Aegis behaves A LOT of times as a fire and forget skill.
If a fight is short enough for, lets say 5 evades being enough to finsih it, a single Aegis application will last the whole fight and will cover one mistake for every party member. This goes clearly against the “risk vs reward” idea.
On a really short bossfight (or in one where the boss has a really slow attack rate), I could even cycle Aegis for the combat to be over without anyone having to use a single evade.
I’m not proposing getting rid of Aegis at all, just making its duration A LOT shorter (around 2 seconds) so I’ve to somewhat time it with boss moves, and probably compensate this with a CD reduction.
Not a lot to say about reflections, it’s clearly obvious that they trivialize many fights.
Solution should probably be more related to the encounters themselves than to the reflection sources.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
I think AH is already in a good position and should not be changed as it is a very strong trait that should not get too powerful. However, I agree with the lack of alternatives to provide the party with heals. That’s mainly because the other traits that are supposed to heal the party are currently not at the right place.
I don’t get the “Alternatives to provide the party with heals” thing. AH doesn’t heal the party.
Battle Presence should not be in the Honor trait tree but in the Virtues tree because it affects Virtue of Resolve.
Battle presence is perfectly fine in Honor. That’s the traitline with Healig Power and where most guardian healing tools are.
Moving it to a traitline that reduces recharge on virtues and grants boon duration, when passive VoR doesn’t grant any boon and you’re not going to activate it, doesn’t make any sense to me.
Writ of the Merciful is a master trait but it should actually be moved up to Grandmaster trait and should heal a lot more than Battle Presence because it requires the placement of a symbol. Also nobody in their right mind would pick Writ of the Merciful over Writ of Persistence and it doesn’t make sense to put them both as Master traits.
I don’t see why nobody would take WoM over WoP.
Damage wise WoP is clearly better, that’s for sure, but support wise there are many chances for WoM to outperform WoP:
- With enough Boon Duration you easily get permaprot from hammer without WoP. If you are more interested on providing sustain than on dealing damage (or sustaining yourself through AH), WoM is better choice.
- For mace, WoP and WoM both provide similar party wide healing outputs.
WoP benefits more from boon duration, while WoM has the benefit of not being a boon (so you can cover the regeneration lost with different sources).
WoM also means a lesser symbol uptime, which is bad for damage, but really good if your party want to reliably blast different combo fields.
IMHO a Mace/Hammer pure support guardian would work quite better picking WoM over WoP.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Altruistic Healing is in a selfish traitline because it’s a completely selfish trait. The guardian is the only one getting any benefit from it.
Not having AH doesn’t prevent the Guardian from providing great support and spreading boons here and there.
True dungeon balance would require classes and game mechanics to be balanced around dungeons, which is not the case.
Designing dungeons to be consistent with a fixed ruleset is the only viable approach.
So 20% crit in pvp equal 315 stat points, while 71% crit in PvE equal 745 stat points.
1% crit in PvE is equal to 10 stat points, while the same 1% crit in PvP equals 15 stat points.
This is mostly due to trinkets and jewels having such absurd crit damage, which will get corrected in the patch. PvE crit damage can remain untouched, while the
PvE gear will be brought back in line.
But sPvP still provides the amulet itself (15% every 284 stat points, so 1% evey 19 points) and an interchangeable jewel (5% every kitten 1% every 9).
And then we have traitlines (1% every 10).
If they made every 15 ferocity points to grant 1% critical damage, that would reduce the amount gained from traitlines to 30% to 20%. Gear mixes, like soldier amulet with berserker jewel would aslo get a nerf.
The disparity on the jewel may deserve that correction, but what are they going to do with the critical damage traitline?
If it grants more than 300 Ferocity (or just 30% direct damage), that would like recognizing the stat as overall weak.
If it grants 300 points, thus 20% critical damage for being consistent with the amulet, that would be a hard to justify nerf.
Even if critical damage is granted at a better rate (so full crit damage power builds don’t get nerfed), the most probable change IMHO, there would still be a selective boost/nerf for several builds.
Dogged march I would consider on par with cleansing ire. You don’t want your ire to cleanse off movement effects which you should technically be geared for. Bleed, torment, burn, confusion, vulnerability (less extent) are way more important than cripple and chill.
But again, it’s condi based again. All defence runes and food are taken to minimise conditions, yet condi builds can gear hard towards that duration without hinderance.
But then we are not talking about Dogged March alone, but about the combination of Lemongrass + Melandru + Dogged March.
This can’t be applied to sPvP (where consumables are non-existant) and even for WvW roaming, a warrior could prefer running Lyssa for a full removal (or any other thing). Is DM that powerful when we lack either the runes or the food (or even both of them)?
It’s not a “mandatory” trait, it’s core part of a popular build used for WvW, where it’s taken on purpose to achieve something (in this case, being next to immune to movement related conditions).
Dogged March is hardly a mandatory trait.
Can it be really useful for some specific tasks? Sure. But it’s not like you need it for every build (not even in PvP ones) nor it does clearly outperform every other choice.
Talking strictly about PvP, Cleansing Ire feels A LOT more irreplaceable.Just for clarification, I used my situation as an example. Cleansing ire is also mandatory which stops other choices such as passive balanced stance and endure pain. While I like choices. Have 4 choices, all of which are essential isn’t the same as having 7 or 8 choices which have an impact but aren’t essential.
We have traits for different builds to exist.
When you design a build for a specific task or to overcome certain situation, you’re going to look for the best available tools (weapons, utilities, gear choices, traits, … ). Some of the choices might not be set in stone, allowing a bit of tuning (from a still quite small amount of alternatives), but it’s obvious that some of them will be a core part of THAT BUILD and completely irreplaceable.
As I see, a “mandatory” trait is the one shared by a huge amount of quite different builds. Thd one that make players to deviate from more natural choices (offensive traitlines for a damage oriented spec, defensive traitlines for a bunker one, …) just to get it.
Currently, the most clear mandatory traits I see for Warriors are Cleansing Ire (automatic choice for almost every PvP build) and, to a lesser extent, Fast Hands.
I’m really confused about this.
During the livestream devs said numbers won’t going to change for sPvP. However, in some thread about “new amulets for sPvP” we got an official response implying that Ferocity could allow amulets with it as primary stat to exist.
If Ferocity exists in sPvP too, I don’t get how are they going to keep overall numbers unchanged. Critical damage is just not equally cost effective for amulets, jewels and traitlines.
So, either they “lied” to us (they’ll attempt to keep things as unchanged as possible, but that won’t be 100% possible) or the damage formula is going to suffer substantial changes. Probably a combination of both.
Dogged March is hardly a mandatory trait.
Can it be really useful for some specific tasks? Sure. But it’s not like you need it for every build (not even in PvP ones) nor it does clearly outperform every other choice.
Talking strictly about PvP, Cleansing Ire feels A LOT more irreplaceable.
Not a good idea.
Traits, weapons and utilities (and runes up to some degree) are still the most build defining choices, with more impact on the end result than gear stats will ever have.
Moving gear stats, which can also be mixed, to traitlines would achieve nothing but a far less flexible character building.It would be much better if you could change your stats more flexible. Not saying to tie them to trait lines but more flexible than they are now.
The more flexibility, the better.
Devs are already aware of most players wanting this … that’s why they’re releasing more legendary gear in the future :P
I’m probably more concerned about Sigil/Rune flexibility. Being able to change gear stats at any times sounds great, but what’s the point if I still have to carry half a dozen berserker greatswords with different sigils.
You increase your support via traits (pure of voice, elemental attunement, etc) and that’s a better option than to have it tied to gear. Let’s imagine a new dungeon (yes, I might have taken that too far) where support is very efficient and sought. You want to play with a group of friends but all of you have offensive gear and traits. Is it easier for 1-2 people to retrait for 3.5s each or get a new sets of gear? As long as anet wants people to randomly create successful parties while giving the incentive to play more supportive we need to have a gear that doesn’t influence said support.
I really wish that the gear to trait line ratio for stats were reversed. Right now some 2/3 of the stat total come from gear.
Not a good idea.
Traits, weapons and utilities (and runes up to some degree) are still the most build defining choices, with more impact on the end result than gear stats will ever have.
Moving gear stats, which can also be mixed, to traitlines would achieve nothing but a far less flexible character building.
There are 2 mitigations of damage that mostly responsible for the current state. The first one is aegis which guardian provides and the second are reflections. Decrease their abundance or uptime and it is much harder for glass cannons to play giving tanky gears more viability.
100% agree.
Aegis is fine, maybe even underpowered when looking at cooldowns, for PvP. For PvE, however, durations are insane and becomes completely OP on speedkill setups.
IMHO, Aegis durations should be decreased A LOT, probably on top of a CD reduction.
The biggest problem here is what to do with Unscatched Contender.
Reflections (even regular area projectile blocks) are situational, but where they work, they are completely out of control.
Imho, the real problem is that defensive stats have no impact on active defensive skills.
Thus a char geared with offensive stats still gets the same active mitigation of a defensive-geared char. And this mitigation often consists of a full negation of the damage received, or in a consistent reduction, thus making the passive mitigation even less important.
Some people may think that any gear other than zerk should be “training wheel” gear, but i disagree. All gear should be equally important, just doing different things for different roles.
You’re trying to take a game which is balanced around sPvP and where the majority of the playerbase, both in PvE and WvW, focus on zerg combat, and making it balanced around dungeons.
You can’t mess with game mechanics because dungeons just are not developer’s focus, not even close. For some roles to more clearly appear and every gear to matter, we would need a complete redesign of dungeons, which would both require an insane amount of work and keep most PUGs out of the content, and which, for the same reason, is unlikely to happen.
By the way, every gear has its uses.
Several times when I was using an AH build on my guardian, after a couple of wipes in a given bossfight I swapped my for the most part berserker gear to a knight/cleric combination, reallocated traits, grabbed a mace and a hammer and pretty much facetanked the boss.
After I realized how important damage increasing traits were and my build changed, I can’t do it anymore (well, I could do it through regular evades and some block here and there, but doing that reliably for, idk, lets say 2 minutes, would require a better player than myself). Many times (specially for those AC bosses were everybody, no matter what build and gear is using, stack in a corner where it’s almost impossibe to spot what the boss is doing), however, I’ve swapped my berserker armor in favor of a soldier one.
Are this build/gear choices “optimal”? No way. Can the content be done with them? Absolutely.
You can build a group around heavy damage, slotting no more than the required amount of support. You can also build a group around sustain, which is going to be slower (not really that slow if you avoid overstacking support) but is going to have an easier time for the most part. You can even build a group around control, using 5 ranged characters and slotting craploads of AoE chill and single target immobilize.
All of them can complete every content, and all of them can do it in a reasonable amount of time (even if berserker melee will still be the fastest one).
Point #1
For WvW: This change will have no effect on WvWzergbunker Guardians. Mine has 5% crit chance.
You need an average of 20 hits to trigger Vigorous Precision. On a massive battle, this can easily achieved by spamming staff #1 as long as you hit multiple targets.
If you get Fury, lets say from FGJ or Warbanner, permavigor is almost ensured.
The upcoming change is a really good one, with the 10 sec ICD and 10 sec ICD of DS, it gives DS a purpose for conditions other than blocking damage.
I can’t see condition Necros losing that much dps, they just need to pop in and out of DS and fire a lifeblast every time the DS cooldown is up.
But you can’t know when enemies are going to burst you. If you go into DS for a Dhuumfire proc as soon as CD is ready, you won’t have it when, lets say, a warrior starts smashing you.
With the changes, Dhuumfire will be used whenever you enter Death Shroud for different reasons (mitigating a burst, using a fear, …), which would probably happen less often than every 10 seconds.
Life Blast can also be avoided and has a whole second cast time. The skill hits really kitten power builds, but for a rabid condi necro, with arguably low life force generation, even with the bonus power from Spite and a high crit chance from precision I’m not sure at all on about 2k burning bonus damage being worth the investment.
The trait looks great for some kind of hybrid build, but no as appealing for Terrormancers as it is currently. It’s not, however, like condi necros could give it up after so many nerfs applied to other condition sources.
I don’t like the proposed change at all.
It moves the burning to some low casting skill a condi necro wouldn’t ever use otherwise, which is also on Death Shroud, a tool the necro could want to save for defense and which rarely will be used exactly every 10 seconds.
Even with burn duration increased to 3sec (afaik), it sounds like a nerf to me.
It has been obvious for a really long time that Dhuumfire required a nerf. A completely unavoidable (it was going to trigger sooner or later) burn proc was bad design since the very beginning.
Getting it nerfed now, after so many compensation nerfs on bleed sources and (afaik) terror, is quite a nonsense.
I would, honestly, nerf it a bit more (make it behave as an Incendiary Ammo charge granted on leaving death shroud, so the proc gets lost if avoided and it gets some sinergy with Near to Death)
Then, I would revert some past nerfs on different skills and move Terror to Curses grandmaster, probably improved.
With a few more changes here and there, this could allow to reliably build both a Terrormancer that doesn’t use Dhuumfire and some kind of 30/-/-/-/30 Carrion hybrid which doesn’t have Terror.
When we tak about PvP, a “perfect imbalanced” game completely relies on “counterplayability”, and as we get closer to the “competitive” scene, the ability to counterplay must be given to players.
Otherwise, the outcome of a match could be greatly predertemined by the match-up itself, which is not fun at all (not at least for competitive players).
On a regular MOBA game, different champions start being clearly unbalanced.
A huge part of character building is done, however, during the game itself through the item shop and skill point allocation, allowing players to overcome some of the random imbalance.
In competitive gameplay, there’s usually one step more on top of this. Banning/picking phases prevent matchups from taking place on such an absolute unbalanced state that not even playtime-building could overcome that.
Even if champions are clearly unbalanced, the game offers enough tools for the match to be fair and somewhat “balanced”.
The video describes Starcraft as a “balanced” game.; I disagree with that.
Of course every race needs to offer a fair, call it balanced, matchup against each other. Otherwise, it would be like flipping a coin.
Different units for each race are, however, quite unbalanced and, unlike chess, you’re not assigned with some fixed numbers of them. You create them at your own choice, usually based on the “counterplay” idea belonging to unbalanced games.
There’s a point, of course, were every strategy has been tested and every counterplay move become somewhat set in stone, but that’s something that can be applied to every “perfectly unbalanced” game that also tries to accomplish “fairness”.
In order for this kind of games to not become stale, there’s the possibility to introduce little changes which can easily shake the whole meta up. Introducing new champions and items (or modifying existing ones) is the way to achieve this for MOBA games, while RTS ones can get the same result through units or even maps.
In the end, the rate these changes are made at is what decides how stale the meta becomes. Some developers might want their game to be as close as possible to the absolute fairness (which is closely linked to “balance”), so they won’t mess a lot with the “ruleset” once they feel they’re on a good spot, while others may prefer to lose a bit of that in favor of an ever-evolving scene.
Where’s GW2?
It’s and will ever be a clearly unbalanced game . The amount of classes and customization for each one just can’t deliver anything but that.
Where GW2 fails is, IMHO, on delivering tools to overcome that unbalance.
You can swap characters before the match starts, you can even have all of them completely untraited and carrying multiple gear options for 100% adaptability.
However, since the opposite team can also do that and there’s nothing like turns for this changes to happen, the process becomes a mess and quite unreliable.
On top of that, a lot of information is also hidden to you.
When playing a MOBA, you know almost everything about enemy heros and you can spot and react to any item based customization during the game. There aren’t surprises either with RTSs like SC2.
In GW2, you get just the enemy class combination and it’s up to you to guess what strategy lays behind it. Once the game starts there’s no chance to go back or react; if your guesses were wrong (for example, the necro was power based instead of the expected condimancer), well, you’ll need to outplay any possible unbalance.
In this situation, the more viable diversity you bring to the game, the more unfair/random it becomes. There’s just no chance for counterplay when you can’t know what you need to counterplay at all.
Ironically, counterplaying is one of those things that bring diversity to a game.
IMHO, ANet should embrace that “perfect unbalance” and deliver tools for counterplay to be an option (like a picking phase providing a good amount of information).
Balancing around this would be a lot easier than trying to achieve some delusional even ground, shared not only by every class, but by multiple specs for each one, and then expect natural and regular shifts in the meta, which won’t ever happen without a big enough competitive scene.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
It’s really interesting to see how those that defend the change completely ignore that crossroad called WvW :P
I honestly don’t think anyone cares about WvW after the disaster that was season 1…
And even if for some reason they do care, spamming 1 while stacked in a 100 person zerg is not changed at all by nerfing zerker gear.
There may be the 0.00000001% of players who do roaming WvW on a regular basis, but since they are such a tiny tiny minority I don’t think any balance decisions should be made based on them.
In fact since the vast majority of people only ever PvE I personally think they should never balance around anything other than PvE.
From my own experience, the percent of people that roam in WvW is A LOT higher than what you think (which is next to no one). My numbers are clearly biased, but yours are just a huge overstatement.
The majority of people plays PvE, that’s completely true. The people who plays dungeons on a regular basis and are really interested on them is, however, also a minority.
Most casual players will run each dungeon once and, after that, won’t touch anything but CoF1 and maybe some AC path for easy gold. Those will never be worried at all about what gear/specs is optimal (since they haven’t the slight intention to modify the one they’re using). They will get annoyed, however, whenever you make any content harder (or even just differet), like the new Tequatl or when AC was modified and the current stacking tactics and safe-spots weren’t common knowledge.
Maybe we should ignore dugeons at all and focus on what really matters: champtrains and open world zerging in general (where berserker is more a risk than a benefit)… Oh wait, that’s already happening :P
And I completely disagree with you last statement.
Whenever a game includes some form of PvP using the same gear/skills/whatever available for PvE and wants it to be competitive (like wanting to become esport * laughs *), then the balance should be made ALWAYS around PvP (and then you design PvE to be coherent with that balance, something were GW2 fails too).
If not, you should advertise PvP as a minigame, just for fun and with next to zero chances to be ever balanced (pretty much like WvW), or just don’t include PvP at all.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
It’s really interesting to see how those that defend the change completely ignore that crossroad called WvW :P
On a whole I believe they looking to reduce active defence across the board. One of their first steps to improve roles, build diversity, events & encounters.
Do I like losing the easy permanent vigor NO. On a hold I don’t think the game was balanced around permanent vigor but if this can help improve the above aspects them I take the hit.
Permavigor chanes are sPvP related. Too much dodging leads to spam, since it heals you and you’re going to regain 3 dodge woth endurance every 10 seconds anyways, with some attacks (even instant ones that you can’t avoid on purpose) randomly missing.
Less dodging implies a weaker class, both because the obvious decrease on evasion time and less healing from Selfless Daring (losing half dodge is about a 30HPS reduction for a bunker guardian in sPvP, the same amount reduced on Healing Signet and pondered as quite significant by devs), but bunker guardian is still strong enough IMHO to remain competitive.
A (quite possible) Sigil of Energy nerf on top of that (with still no changes on Selfless Daring), however, can easily make warriors more interesting as mid-point bunkers.
Even if offensive guardians, which are barely competitive, will also get nerfed, if guardian bunker loses his place in favor of warrior one, they could get benefit as party wide condition removal assets.