Guild Wars 2

Talyn.3295:

Dragon Hunter – If your enemy is using a projectile attack and is attacking your allies, you can fire your Deflecting Shot in its path and, with the right timing, destroy all of your enemy’s projectiles along the way.

chronomancer – One such skill, called Tides of Time, launches a wall of compressed temporal energy from the chronomancer’s shield that travels forward a moderate distance, absorbing all projectiles that are fired into it.

Which would win out?

The one that is fired last I presume.

Azureflame if I ever get around to farming for it, otherwise Mystic Hornbow or Royal Ascalonian Longbow.

Aeolus.3615:

is it confirmed has longbow and not a shortbow? or these are speculations over the bow type?

I imagine bow being the Smiting Prayers equivalent.

Does anyone remmember the beam of god? http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ray_of_Judgment

Sadly it went from a giant beam of death to a bouncing ball of fuzziness. I miss being able to call down holy fury.

Ralkuth.1456:

Funny how Medi Guard was suboptimal from launch, criticized for intolerably long burst CDs, and while there was one change (Renewed Focus), circumstances made it into a scary counter-meta hero.
It’s just that the match-up versus the Medi Guard became easier for it to fight, is all. A friend has played Medi Guard from launch (2 months into the game he invented 21614); he notices that with Cele running rampant, Medi Guard has just enough control, defenses, and burst damage to overcome Cele builds’ sustain. The emphasis on more 1-on-1 showdowns also helps its survivability, because Guards can’t really run. They have to win it.
To add, Medi Guard is a fairly acquired taste, and you don’t really see many people run around with a Zerker Guard (for mental health reasons) – that is why you think they have too much burst when you get hit with basically all of the Medi Guard’s skills and lose a big chunk of health. You’ll think different when you fight them more.

My personal experience has been that most Guardians I see in spvp are running some variant of the Medi Burst build, rarely do I see bunkers.

Fashion Mage.3712:

brannigan.9831:

So how is this ability going to work? If its still channeled cone it will still be semi-worthless. It should be changed to instant with the normal range a shout has.

Honestly, Healing Breeze isn’t even worthless as is. It’s just not used on meta builds, but that’s still a big difference.

As for it being a cone. If people can’t even turn around to aim the skill (if they’re at the front), that’s their problem really. No need to dumb down the skill because people can’t put in a minimal amount of skill/effort to use it.

The thing about it is that the Guardian is a frontliner, having to turn around or move behind your backline to heal them is just weird.

Just slap some self-condi cleanse on it and it’ll be great.

Cracklerjack.4895:

brannigan.9831:

Vizardlorde.8243:

What nerf? ALL of the changes(excluding the gimmicky glacial heart) seemed like buffs heck they even trimmed a decent amount of useless traits or fixed broken ones into something interesting.

Glacial heat change will end up being a fairly big nerf. Its a big spike potential totally removed. I don’t even play a medi guard I play a altrustic healing bunker and believe me that and might blow together could wreck people if they both crit never mind the fact that even a 2 second chill is very powerful. It’s not the end of the world but it’s a nerf. Most other classes got more powerful as well you can’t just point out the fixes Guardian’s got it seems to me every class but Necro and Ele are coming out ahead after the revamp.

Technically, during the stream the Devs said they removed it only because chill seemed to not mesh with the whole guardian picture they were trying to paint. That being said they did mention that if enough people got upset about it they would find a way to implement it into the game. Time will tell but if it really bothers you that it’s gone, you really need to make it aware to the Devs.

They would need to read the forums first to know if people are upset. We all know they don’t come in here.

The Sword’s command needs to be changed from striking it’s current location to striking your current target like the Hammer.

Hmmm, how much baseline stats are they giving us since traitlines won’t give stats anymore? Losing the extra toughness and ferocity from Valor is pretty big IMO.

Turrets got a major nerf so any sort of AoE cleave can get rid of them now.

PeeKayz.4215:

Jerus.4350:

Don’t go exotic initially unless you know what you want. While it may save you money IF you know what you’re looking for, rares do the job quite nicely and allow you to seek your best option on a much smaller budget.

You don’t mention what content you’re after, if it’s PVE, zerker is the stat set to go for (power/precision/ferocity) if you want to optimize your efforts, though doing so has the price of being squishy and requiring a bit more effort to stay alive, but it’s very doable. So you’re on the right track there.

GW2 is about actively defending yourself. Support comes through the use of skills not through your gear, so you can gear offensively and use your skills wisely to still support your team. Guardian is the king of support. Learn the tricks of the trade and you’ll be fine. I’d add a little tip here, on projectile heavy encounters you can maintain a defense for quite some time by traiting Master of Consecrations and doing Wall of Reflection at 22/23 seconds on the recharge you pop your Shield of the Avenger, then when Wall o Reflection is off cooldown hit it, doing so you’ll have about 36 seconds of defense. Very nice rotation.

100% map completion is not necessary, but, it gives you the gift of exploration which is used in crafting legendaries as well as the bonus rewards for completing different maps. You can take it or leave it, depends on what your goals are. Nothing to stress about but if you find it fun, do it, if you want a legendary, you either do it, or save up money to just buy one. Though with Heart of Thorns, the new legendaries will not be purchasable so you will need to do your own exploration most likely.

Hope that helps. I highly suggest taking a look at Obal’s guides if you’re into PVE content. He is the Senpai when it comes to Guardians in PVE

Thank you, I will take note of what you said.
Sounds like getting 2 or 3 sets of gear with rares is the way to go for now.

One more thing, I understand that upon 100% map completion one gets access to a weapon or something like that. I see people running around with these amazing weapons and when I ask most people just say, get 100% map completion.
Not sure how that works tbh.

Finishing map completion rewards you with a Gift of Exploration which is required to craft a legendary weapon. Legendary weapon crafting is a lengthy and expensive process.

You can check metabattle for common builds for each profession. As Lumines said, bunker Guardians aren’t that popular anymore as they hit like a wet noodle while celestial builds can provide similar amounts of support and still have offensive pressure.

Xaylin.1860:

Askadia.4395:

They said they’ve increased in numbers the sources for retail.

They did. However – amusingly, if I didn’t miss anything – the additional Retaliation comes from a Signet trait which is in the same slot as Radiant Retaliation. What a twist of fate….

Of course, we do not know to what extent the devs might have changed the conversion on Radiant Retaliation. It might be very powerful. Still, I’d still prefer having an additional component. For example: Take x% less damage while being affected by Retaliation.

Regardless, Guardians need better access to Retaliation which is not linked to spamming VoJ (which would lock you into a x/6/x/x/6 set up) if Radiant Retaliation should ever be considered a valid condition replacement. Retaliatory Subconscious needs a higher Retaliation uptime or nobody will pick it. Healers Retribution has no business being in Radiance at all. They could turn it into ‘Gain 3s of Retaliation when landing a critical hit.’, 15-20s ICD. It would be miles better than it currently is. Retribution needs to provide condi damage as well.

It seems to me that all the retaliation skills/traits were balanced for release state retaliation but were never adjusted after the major nerfs to the boon, hence the short durations and fairly lengthy CDs.

An idea I have is that retaliation could be changed to a stacking boon and reflect however many number of hits in relation to the number of stacks and the damage reflected can be increased substantially (or changed to percentage of damage taken). This way you have a choice in whether to mitigate the incoming burst or face-tank it and reflect the damage back.

Hopefully they remove the kitten 33% damage reduction for retaliation in spvp/wvw or just bring it back to what it was at release. Then maybe retaliation builds and traits will see some actual play.

Nikkinella.8254:

Litany is terrible though and no one uses it.

Just give it either Quickness or the new anticondi boon on cast.

The new traitline will move Shattered Aegis from minor to grandmaster and to compensate the damage will be doubled. I don’t think the damage buff is enough to compensate the change as you can count on one hand the number of ways we can apply aegis and most of them are on a fairly lengthy cooldown. Unless the power ratio is getting buffed to some insane number, no one will ever takes this outside of some super niche World Boss builds.

The only way I can reliably get this message is using Phase Retreat at the location in HoM in the screenshot I’ve attached. I’ve gotten this message with other teleport skills (Steal and Judge’s Intervention) when teleporting various ranges, the skill fails and goes on full cooldown.

Xhyros.1340:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer

That should make you feel better.

My guess is that AI Necro in GW1 was such a popular and great pick that they want Necros to be non-existent in GW2.

SlayerSixx.5763:

So like, I read dulfy’s notes on the changes and I nearly cried when I saw how awesome guard was going to turn out. I’m seriously considering picking up sword/x when the update drops, but I have just one little issue with it and that is…….

Sword skill #3, aka zealots defence. Now, on paper, it does nice damage AND gives us the ability to smash projectiles, but the fact it roots you kinda irks me. I understand that there are other flurry skills that other classes can do with sword, but each of them has some way of rooting the target so they could land their burst, but ZD is so easy to dodge, you’re usually better off auto attacking and it sometimes leaves you open to some really dangerous business so my suggestion is this:

Either make the first hit immobilize the target for a second or two or make it so we could move with it, but slowly.

Well, we’re getting a master trait that applies immob for 3.5s when we F1.

CMF.5461:

It’s funny how glacial heart was hated one for ever until the surge of hammer medi guards hit after seeing it work on a winning team.

Now people can’t live without it. I’m still underwhelmed by it, but it does provide some extra burst when tied together with a few more effects. Losing this gives us more soft CC (something we have been asking for a lot now)…so it is like a + and – at the same time?

It was hated before as it was on a ridiculously long CD for what it did. It’s still pretty bad IMO but we gotta work with what we got.

CMF.5461:

They are just NOW realizing that we would like an aegis or SOMETHING on shield? just now? Communication on the guard development side is lacking.

I remember during the last big game balance an Anet employee (Jon maybe?) asked some questions about Shattered Aegis change, we gave some suggestions and he said he would get back to us with numbers, he never did. I think that was the last time Anet posted in here.

Vikkela.7261:

-
- Someone on the stream managed to tell them the shield trait was lame and gave them an idea of shield granting aegis and they actually wrote it down

That’s been suggested numerous times here in the Guardian forums. So that shows they don’t actually come here at all.

Ragnarox.9601:

If you didnt noticed they are removing atributes from traits so you are losing 6k vitality if you are vitality heavy…so what..guardians will be running around with 12k hp? You are joking if you are thinking this are good changes. Some of trait changes are good yes it needed to be that way in the first place. Simbols are buffed but everything else sucks. You will be oneshotted by thieves and eles while they slam you with poisons weaknesses and all increased dmg crits etc.

Weren’t they moving the stats lost from traits into baseline stats?

Instead of blowing air at you, the Guardian will shout at you until you feel better.

creepmatic.9435:

Buran.3796:

In the beta before the release of the game the guardian had the same HP than the warrior, but the testing in PvP fastly proved that with such base HP a guardian bunker could handle three foes at time. Between nerfing the proactive defenses and nerfing the health ArenaNet did chose to nerf the health.

This might be a clue why Zeal line is so underpowered. I mean it would have made sense for a heavy class with strong active defense and also warrior like base health to have a weak power line in comparison to other classes. But since our health was fixed all our other traits were left as if it were balanced for that type of base HP. And our trait lines were not balanced for our current health. This is actually scary if you think about it. We might be dragging this class the wrong way for 2,5 years now with minor changes only since redesigning the whole class is too resource costing.

I mean yeah sure, lot’s of retal, long CD skills on weapon sets, spread around traits (spirit weapons) would all made much more sense with 18k base health. Wow, I hope i’m wrong tough.

I’ve always felt that Guardian traits were “incomplete” when compared to the other class, a lot of their stuff feels more fleshed out.

morrolan.9608:

Well unless I’ve completely misinterpreted what is going to happen with HOT this will not be a problem after HoT.

HoT seems to be Anet going “oh kitten, we done kittened up with game balance, let’s just remake it.”

You don’t need the Hidden Thief trait, you just have to use Steal the split second you start leaving the ground, then start mashing 1, so if you’re in the air, it’s too late. I believe you can use Infiltrator’s Signet instead of Steal if you can’t get the timing down.

According to Anet their game is 100% bug-free. They don’t acknowledge any bugs at all unless it crashes the game and only after they patch it.

Maugetarr.6823:

But does it stop you from stealing? Like I said, I have yet to get this message

I got this using JI once, from about 600 range? Skill went on CD.

Don’t worry, it’ll be fixed in three years time.

I’ve seen this on other target teleport skills too; often when I’m teleporting down from above them.

SoulSin.5682:

Snip.

Don’t bother arguing with DarkSyze.8627, he’s either a really good troll or just someone really bad at the game.

Because for some reason active defense doesn’t work against backstabs.

Nephrite.6954:

alchemyst.2165:

Technically “thieves” won’t be getting rifle. The new specialization will be getting them.

And rifle will probably be a sniper weapon, suiting the Assassin or Operative playstyle. Maybe even a bandit playstyle.

+1 yup I agree. Specializations will change every classes traits, utility & overall machanics. So the ‘thief’ wouldn’t be a thief anymore once you’ve unlocked the specialisation. I’m betting with what alchemyst stated, think we’ll be an assassin theme sniper killshot awesome camo Counter Strike guy.

So the Commando class?

1) Consolidation/remvap of symbol-related traits.
2) Movement speed trait.
3) Condi spec.
4) Power spec.
5) Revamp of virtue traits.
6) Spirit weapon buffs.

As long as it doesn’t break the game or can be exploited, Anet doesn’t care. There’s tons of broken things in the game that needs some fixing. For example, Guardian’s grandmaster trait Radiant Retaliation has been broken for several months now and has seen multiple posts (and probably a lot of bug reports) but no fix or news about has been seen.

Turret engis.
Pewpew rangers, and for some reason, they seem to appear in droves after midnight.

of course guardian drain all death shroud. death shourd is darkness but guardian very bright. guardian shine giant light on dark and drain all away.

yiksing.9432:

I want a one handed katana, rapier swings doesn’t make much sense

One handed Katanas [&AgGADQEAAA==] and Tantos [&AgFcDgEAAA==] were datamined from the most recent patch.

Or shield could become the CC off-hand, add a small push to shield 4 and remove the channeling to keep the bubble up on shield 5 and call it a day.

Saiyan.1704:

Fashion Mage.3712:

They’re mostly just underrated imo. If their cooldown started on cast (like it should), I think they’d be extremely good.

If a spirit weapon elite was made, I think it should be a powerful pet rather than something like Fiery Greatsword.

I’m annoyed by the fact Ranger’s Spirits are twice as better. They stick to the Ranger 100% and they only attack when the Ranger tells him to… which is almost always a hit because the spirits are always beside him!

But no… our spirit run around all crazy. The sSword stalls to hit sometimes! They’re just bad compared to everyone else’s AI.

My biggest complaint is that the sword spirit strikes it’s current location and not your target unlike the hammer, which flies to your target and strikes then.

Hunter.4783:

Here is what we need:

- A snare, preferably trait related so they don’t pigeonhole us into a single weapon. Half of our traits are garbage so it shouldn’t be that hard to fit that in

- A source of bleeding. Again trait related, can be added somewhere down in radiance

- MERGING OF THE STUPID VIRTUES TRAITS. Especially the ones related to VofValor, and VoJ to a certain extend. its stupid to have 2 different traits for an extremely similar functionality.

Unerfing of SY and selfless daring which i have no idea why haven’t been reverted to this day…extremely silly

Symbol traits could do with some adjustments too.

Does Sanctuary now constantly remove stacks if enemies stand in it?

Dondarrion.2748:

Farewell days of blinking from ground to inside Clock Tower in Battle of Kyhlo…

Still works. The patch actually gave us more teleport spots, for example, you can now teleport up the platforms near the Keep point in Forest. It also made your teleports not go on CD if it fails outside of combat.

Keksmuffin.1450:

Did you guys get a different patch than I did? There are like 3 times as many portsports in PvP now and JI and FB still port you to stuff that is out of your range. :T

I’ve seen people teleport up the platforms at the Keep point in Forest by hugging the wall though I haven’t tried it myself. That’s a pretty big buff imo.

One new build, but it really is just another variation of Meditations. So just the old AH Bunker, Virtue Bunkers, GS Meditation, and Hammer Meditation.

So the change just means you can’t teleport up Clocktower/Keep anymore correct? But now you won’t have to waste a CD when the skill fails.

creepmatic.9435:

You don’t even need 4k hours on Guard to see that it’s broken. And by broken I mean trait synergy wise.

People play “medi hamm” with 0.1.6.1.6 take hammer and call it medi hammer build. How?
You can play that specc with other weapons and it still doesn’t change your gamestyle. All our hammer traits are in Zeal. And you need 5 points to trait hammer for offensive symbols and and vuln on immob. Taking Glacial heart does not define a guardian hammer build. It’s an RNG element that procs without any strategical play involved.

But no one goes 5 deep in Zeal. Why?

Because you can’t play guard in this meta without 4 in Virtues, 1 in Honor and 1 in Radiance. So you have x.1.6.1.4 as the base build. And you have 2 points left to customize it which sadly is not enough to make a proper build.

All you do is get the basic survival skills, slap a Zerker amulet, get some traveler runes and fill the slot’s with air/fire sigils to make up for the dmg loss.

It surely works decent enough. But how can you call this not broken when you need 12 out of 14 points only dedicated for survival.

Anet just needs to suck it up and give Guardians actual base HP. They’ve stated Guardians have squishy level base HP due to our sustain then they give Warriors Adrenal Health and Healing Signet.

KotCR.6024:

I think it’s highly likely to be a ranged condition damage weapon. Three reasons for this:

1 – Guardian lacks viable ranged combat options, currently only having Sceptre (the staff range is way too short for most skills to count). I expect this weapon will have access to Bleed, in addition to Burning, if not Torment too (or perhaps Torment instead of Bleed, to set Guardian Con-Damage apart from the main-damage source for other classes’ Con-Builds). As powerful as Sceptre is (that DPS!), it’s also pretty boring and doesn’t really do anything except straight up damage.
2 – The Guardian lacks any effective condition damage builds, due to only having access to Burn natively, and a condition-variant Retaliation via Traits.
3 – As others have said, it was the only Spirit Weapon that a Guardian has that they couldn’t equip a martial variant off.

I would have rathered another 1H ranged weapon instead, but I’ll settle for this.
Will look forward to using it; the Two-Handed Mastery trait also just became even more versatile, if they remember to update it :P.

I’m also curious what weapon Guardian will lose to gain access to this with specialisation. Perhaps Staff? But maybe even Greatsword to force you into a Con-Damage role rather than letting you have a Pow-Damage role. Sword+Torch and Longbow could be a pretty effective Condition Damage spec.

@Drennon
That certainly sounds like a Guardian skill, considering it’s a Symbol. By the description, I’d say it fits pretty well.

They have to fix our kittenty/broken condition traits first for them to be effective.

I’m hoping for another Ward skill on the longbow though.

I don’t think it would hurt spvp that much but it will put a dent in pve/wvw mobility.

Sagramor.7395:

Well as per google translate all teleport skills appear to have a change of, “This ability when unable to find a valid path between the target will no longer start.” with a few variations.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2yrugo/1332015_original_patch_note_from_china/

According to that, it seems more likely it just means if you try to use a teleport and it fails somehow, it won’t go on CD., but another person on Reddit translated it to:

Guardian: Flashing Blade, Judges Intervention and Merciful Intervention will no longer teleport without line of sight.

So it just means we can’t pop in out of nowhere on Clocktower/Keep point anymore. Hopefully them touch this also means fixing the random rubberbanding and random fails when you teleport up ramps using JI.

Zoltreez.6435:

we always needed a target to teleport with them.

if there is no target it would not teleport you.

It would change it so that you can only use JI/Sword #2 when you’re in range of the target.

nightblood.7910:

Now, the other question. Why are finishers and quickness bugged?

It probably became bugged when they reduced quickness’s speed. I seem to remember haste stomping being quite popular around release and you didn’t have to stand still after the animation.

Either that or they wanted stomps to take a certain amount of time no matter what.