Guild Wars 2

An interesting tweak would be to turn damage multipliers from multiplicative to additive. This would impact zerker builds more than other builds, lower overall damage, and promote trait diversity. As well as keeping all the shiny new ascended zerker gear useful.

thefantasticg.3984:

Seems like this shouldn’t be in the balance section…. more like GW2 Discussion….

You missed the not so subtle subtext. This absolutely has everything to do with profession balance, specifically professions that are geared towards offense and active blocks/dodges/reflects (aka the current meta).

The answer is there must be something to reward good dodges and skill, otherwise you may as well remove the mechanism.
The real question is how do we reward good dodges and skill?

Being able to dodge currently means you need less defensive stats and thus can take more offense, leading to good players creating the current zerker meta.

If the zerker meta is altered and mob damage becomes more frequent & smaller in size, you won’t be able to mitigate it actively through dodging or skills. You will be forced to take defensive stats.
In this type of scenario – where is the reward for bothering to dodge? Slightly less damage recieved?

Should skilled dodges and active defenses such as blind and aegis be rewarded?
If so, with what?

TPMN.1483:

The current meta for high level zones is 3wars+guardian+other (FoTM) or 4wars+1other(many dungeons). Mostly all are running zerker.

Early 2013 called, they want their meta back.
3 war 1 guard 1 mesmer hasn’t been the optimal setup for a long time. Multiple guards, rangers, engies, multiple eles and even thieves can all fight for a good spot in those groups. I actually find fotm49 easier with just 1 warrior.

Conditions getting buffed will not change anything.

People don’t pick conditions in open world bosses because the dragons etc stack to 25.

So what’s stopping you going condi in dungeons?
Your group may touch the cap, but only just. Your high damage burns/poison etc will be prioritized. In fact you probably have higher damage per action and therefore damage per second.

The reason condis aren’t seen much in dungeons is because the mobs die too fast. You want leaves and burst, not massive dps over 30 seconds.

Lots of people who appear not good enough to play glass cannons here seeming to like the prospect of them getting nerfed.
Should there not be a reward for being able to dodge big hits?

They can nerf zerker – as long as it is still top for dps I imagine people will still prefer it.
The problem is… what can they do to improve vitality, toughness and healing power?
If someone can already survive in zerker, they don’t need those stats and they won’t need them in future after they are buffed.

The only other route is to force people to want the defensive stats by adding damage you cannot avoid to the game. Which isn’t fun, punishes skilled players, and trivialises dodging & active defenses.

Difficult situation.

One tweak might be to make damage multipliers additive rather than multiplicative. Eg at the moment if you have two 10% damage multipliers, that makes 21%. When we’re hitting multipliers of 70% this becomes quite a large multiplier for dps specs/builds.

Something else I’ve noticed the game design – sometimes crit builds are useless.
Take hotw path 1 for example.
Do you need 5 zerkers? Not really. 4 zerkers and 1 non zerker to go and non-crit dps the totems down works just as well.

Lots of people who aren’t good enough to play glass cannons here.

They can nerf zerker – as long as it is still top for dps I imagine people will still prefer it.
The problem is… what can they do to improve vitality, toughness and healing power?
If someone can already survive in zerker, they don’t need those stats and they won’t need them in future after they are buffed.

The only other route is to force people to want the defensive stats by adding damage you cannot avoid to the game. Which isn’t fun, punishes skilled players, and trivialises dodging & active defenses.

Difficult situation.

One tweak might be to make damage multipliers additive rather than multiplicative. Eg at the moment if you have two 10% damage multipliers, that makes +21%. When we’re hitting multipliers of 70% this becomes quite a large multiplier for dps specs/builds.

I already said it is from a pve perspective. If I’ve missed reasons why they are better in other game types please by all means point it out to me (which you have done) . Thanks.

Thanks for the great responses guys hopefully devs are paying attention.

Spiuk.8421:

No banners.
No empower allies.
No spotter.
More than one guard having lots of reflects.
Soldier’s.

It’s a pretty bad group actually.

I’d pick them over the plethora of “meta” players I’ve found who can’t play properly. Like I said it was my smoothest run for a long time.

Sounds like a bad group to me. The best group I’ve had for days was a Dps guard, pvt guard, zerker mes, rabid engineer and zerker thief.

Warriors are surprisingly meh in fractals.
Dungeons though warriors are great.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Guardian-List-of-useless-traits-and-skills/

I’d really appreciate your comments in the profession balance subforum, as this seems to have a lot of devs looking at it lately.

Totally happy for you to use it Obal, I’d be honored. As for the spec suggestions, I’ll get you some numbers at my next opportunity.

I’ll see what i can do about the sharing. Hopefully I can find a way to set a standard testing scenario (eg 25 might, fury, etc) and lock it down on the spreadsheet so we don’t get confused with different peoples results being different.

I don’t know, sorrow. Hammer guardians suffer a lot from this. Blasting light fields is almost useless, yet that’s all they ever get to do. I’d rather ignore my own symbol field and blast my buddy’s fire field.

Preset Method
Similar to a personalized list in that there is a prioritization of fields to activate but there are also presets.
Eg : Offensive; fire fields are prioritised. Defensive; water fields are prioritised. Cleanser, light fields are prioritised. Crowd control, smoke/frost are prioritised. Custom, completely personalised.

Pro: You get to decide, players who are not advanced enough to understand full customisation can easily see the offensive/defensive splits.
Con: Probably hard to implement?
Unsure: Should we prevent switching it in the middle of combat?

Infusion method
Weapons have an infusion slot which allows you to prioritise a single field type.

Pro: Simple to use, you only get to pick one priority. You can swap in combat via regular weapon swapping – eg 1 weapon has fire blasting, another has water blasting. Makes gear more customisable.
Con: Yet another infusion slot.
Unsure: How would we handle dual wielders?

Utilities
Meditations : All except smite condition have a cooldown which is far too high. The teleport-heal one (merciful intervention) is especially useless.
Spirit weapons : All of these are completely useless except for the shield, which plays second fiddle to wall of reflect. Only intense projectile fights make you consider the spirit shield.
Signets : Bane signet (power) is okay for the passive. In PvP the knockdown is alright. Signet of judgement has a useful damage reduction passive. Wrath (condition) and mercy (healing) both have awful passives. Wrath has a half decent active but you have to put up with an awful passive if you want to use it. The active on mercy has a cast time far too long, the radius is far too small, and the cooldown is far too long. Why do so many other classes do utility revives better than the guardian?
Elites : Tomes are just meh. They need a real rethink.

Weapons I have issue with
Torch – useless. I don’t even know where to start.
Shield – #4 needs to do more damage and give more protection. Currently it’s barely worth using. #5 stops you doing other things and doesn’t last long enough, make it off the global cooldown and instantly pop up a projectile block around yourself which moves with you and lasts longer. Both cooldowns are far too high.
Mace – Awful dps, awful & slow auto attack heal, time wasting block which gives you either a tiny amount of damage after some seconds standing around like an idiot or a tiny amount of protection. Neither of which are worth hitting the #3 key for. Regen symbol is good in theory but suffers the same mobility problems as all symbols.

Virtues
Personally I think the cooldown on these is too long, and virtue of resolve is now too weak compared to where the game has come over the last year.

This is all in my opinion. This is coming from someone who primarily plays pve as a dpser. I don’t do much solo roaming, spvp etc on my guardian, though I do wvw at times.

Traits
Zeal
Binding Jeopardy : 5 vulnerability for 8 seconds on immobilize.
We have 2 immobs on a 15 and 20 second cooldown. This trait isn’t awful but if it’s damage you’re after, Fiery Wrath is much better.
Revenge of the fallen : People actually take these traits?
Shattered aegis : Damage is far too low to care about. We actually preferred the burning. A very poor change from last patch.
Spirit weapon mastery : Spirit weapons are garbage except the shield, which isn’t worth traiting.
Eternal spirit : See above comment on spirit weapons.
Wrathful spirit : See above comment on spirit weapons.
Kindled zeal : We don’t have enough conditions to care enough about 13% condition damage.
Zeal suffers from extremely poor high end traits. Going past 10 (15 for hammers) isn’t seen as very useful, with 20 for greatsword users only a half decent possibility. There’s almost nothing except straight damage modifiers.

Radiance
Healer’s retribution : 3 seconds of retalliation? Are you kidding me? Useless.
Shimmering defense : 60 second cooldown makes it worthless.
Innner fire : How often are we set on fire? 3 seconds is nothing.
Searing flames : Boons are too commonly applies in both pve and pvp. 1 boon every 10 seconds is nothing.
Radiant fire : Nobody uses the torch.
A fire inside : Nobody uses spirit weapons.
Inscribed removal : 2/4 of our utility signets have awful passives, none of the on-use effects are great either. Possibly the knockdown in pvp.
Perfect inscriptions : 20% extra of 180 stats = 36. 36 stat points for a grandmaster trait? What a joke.
My biggest complaint with radiance is that if you try to put points in it and don’t want to use a 1h weapon.. once you go past 15 points for the awesome minor trait I challenge you to find a half useful trait.. go on!

Valor
Valorous defense : I know it’s a minor trait but 90 seconds is a very long cooldown.
Defender’s flame : Burn on block. We don’t have enough blocks to make this useful. I care so little about 1 second of burning that I haven’t even tested if it procs of aegis. I’m guessing no.
Strength of the fallen : People actually take these traits?
Mace of justice : Mace is trash.
Glacial heart : Recharge is too long, too easily removed.
Honorable shield : Our shield is rubbish. With some tweaks the projectile block could be useful.
Overall valor could do with some less selfish traits. It is a trait line frowned upon in pve.

Honor
Wrathful spirit : 3 seconds of retalliation after aegis? Not worth it.
Writ of exaltion : 60 radius is too small even for symbol builds. Have it turn symbols into mobile auras.
Pure of heart : Awful healing amount, not enough to care about.Plus if you’re on 100% hp and get hit.. aegis blocks it.. you then outheal.. great.
Resolute healer : Why can’t we get something useful like mesmer’s feedback on revive? And this only lasts 1 second? Trash. Make it shield of wrath (focus #5) and now we’re talking.
Empowering might : 240 radius is too small to be useful. Also the inner cooldown of 1 second reduces effectiveness with weapons that have a 1 second attack time like staff.
Elusive power : More damage when endurance is full.. yet we get perma vigor from having traits in honor. This is poor synergy.
I like honor, it can be very useful. With a tweak to elusive power (10% dmg when endurance is full perhaps) it could compete with other trait lines for a spot in meta builds and increase choice and diversity. Symbols turned into auras would be good, otherwise rolling the symbol traits into 1 trait.

Virtues
Retaliatory subconscious : Really? Other classes get things like shadowstep away on cc, mirror the cc back to the enemy, create a static field around yourself… we get.. 3 seconds of retal? SRSLY?
Improved spirit weapon duration : Enough with the small army of spirit weapon traits. I’m going to go copy paste what I wrote for the last several spirit weapon traits : they are trash!
Elite focus : I don’t know if many people use our tomes any more. Removing our utilities and weapon skills is a bit rubbish. Most of the time I see them used it’s for a quick zealot’s fervor (quickness) or 100% heal and then cancelled. I think tomes need a rework.
Supreme justice : Nobody cares about your burning.
Permeating wrath : Nobody cares about your burning.
Shielded mind : Decent I guess but highly situational and a long cooldown. Not great for a GM trait.

You have missed a lot. This is a very incomplete list. Very difficult to read..

I think you are going to have a hard time convincing people that we need an aggro system when one of the main promotions of gw2 was the removal of the Holy trinity.

I’m of the opinion that the trinity was a good thing, and I would actually agree that an aggro system based off who was built for defense would help pve diversity.

It may hit healers though. It’s harder to focus heal one person than it is to are heal a group of people.

Thanks for your thoughts guys. Very proud that it has not turned into a flame fest <3

I think the majority of players are saying that there should be a reward for being able to dodge those big attacks. Currently that comes in the form of higher Dps.

What would you say to frequent low damage attacks which are enough to kill you via attrition if you don’t bring enough toughness/healing, mixed with a dodgeable high damage attack?

I don’t think raising the condition cap would do much to pve dungeons and fractals.
The reason being – it is already viable to bring 1 condition user to your dungeon runs. They will probably get fairly close to the cap themselves and do a decent amount of single target dps. What they often can’t do though is burst and cleave.. both of which are incredibly important.

Besides, I think if conditions were just as effective as direct damage… we would be having the talk of “is dps too powerful?” rather than simply “is zerker too powerful”.

For open world bosses though.. if the cap were removed, conditions would instantly be the top dps specs. Generally damage over time has the higher damage inflicted per second spend doing it assuming it’s not cleansed in this game.

Sorry foofad I didn’t see that.

A very early version of my work is on google docs somewhere from an old thread (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/visualized-dps-difference-between-specs/) I think there were a couple of minor errors though. It’s not what generated the numbers in this thread though. I don’t really know how to allow contributions on a google doc though. With the testing, it can get confusing with different people testing unless it’s definite that they have all used the same scenarios. Happy to let people play with it though if that’s easy to do.

I’m just going to leave a topic about zerkers here.
You all know the discussion points.

Most people agree that the fastest and easiest way to clear pve is to go all out dps.
Is it a “meta” we want?
Should non zerkers be buffed? How?
Should zerkers be nerfed? How?
Are healers and pure support too rubbish in comparison? Is that intentional?
Same for people who focus on crowd control? Is that intentional?

Etc.

Exactly. 2 seconds less on the reflect and 8 seconds longer cooldown, and 3 x condition removal every half minute or so isn’t going to ruin my pug.

A pvt altruistic healing Guardian might do.

BeoErgon.9107:

More and more in the lfg we find demands for zerk/scholar warriors and gear ping. You are as free as you want to claim this. After all it is the most effective combination.

But it should not.

Your post is one massive contradiction.

What you are saying is that you don’t like the zerker meta, and other people shouldn’t like it either. They are not free to play how they want, they should be playing how you want.

You then go on to point out that the majority of groups are sadly becoming LF4M ZERKER.
Well did you stop and think that actually what this means is that the majority of people have realised zerker is ftw, ARE playing how they want, and are voting with their feet by organizing zerker groups.

If indeed casual, ‘fun’, poorly built style builds and groups are becoming rarer, “proper” dungeon clears are rarer, and full zerker + trash skips are becoming more popular… I think you will find that it is because a lot of other people are indeed playing how they want.. It just doesnt match how you want to play.

Scepter suffers a large dps loss purely by not being in range for friendly banners, fgj, might blast finishers etc.

I know we all hate on staff but the dps is actually fairly similar if you discount smite. Larger aoe, more convenient range, better burst with symbol.

Agree. It saddens me to see people stacking on easy fights like the ac bosses. Just have fun?

Soloing a dungeon usually means doing so in order to sell it.
In this scenario the kickers do it for the lolz and have nothing to gain or lose, they don’t care that they get kicked out as well.

I’m sick of soloing dungeons only to have a couple of punks join and kick me out.

Also, I did fotm 49 earlier today and with the final boss on 20% hp, a couple of guys kicked the poor warrior in my group and replaced him with a guildy for free lootz. Fortunately they liked me or the same would have happened to me.

Thanks.

Dead dps do no dps!

10/10 good troll.

The main problem stems from the fact that you will run scepter + 1h for ranged bosses, gs + 1h for melee bosses, and gs + 1h (mostly gs) for trash. None of these scenarios require scepter +10% AND greatsword +5%.
20/30/0/5/5 +10 caters for all the above scenarios just as well as 30/30/5/5/0, just gotta swap around the zeal traits every now and again.

Please give me something useful in radiance if I don’t want to use a sword. Half the time I leave the master trait empty when running with my greatsword only.

it’s designed to trick new players into spending 1600 gems on stuff they don’t need

What do we do if we have suggestions about the guardian class?
If I remember correctly we got 1 dev post during the last balance “discussion” which promised to return to us at a later date with numbers about one of the changes (which never happened).

I’m pretty sure no devs go on the guardian forums, and no suggestions there will ever be reviewed as you said.

40+ fractals if the group gearcheck you.

“We do recognize that cloth prices are a bit high this is a factor of how hard it is to focus farm for leather and cloth. This is something we are looking into.”

If wool, cotton, silk and linen are made more abundant, will damask drop in price? Possibly.

Valor and Honor are far from fine. They’re great in wvw, but severely lacking in pve.
I would like to see more group support added to valor, and elusive power in honor changed to something which makes more sense such as +10% damage when endurance is full.

That was during the Pure of Voice meta and when people still thought anchoring worked though. Also pre purging flames buff. Back then the best condition removal and support (reflects, aegis) we could get was 0/0/0/30/10 (possibly 0/0/0/30/20). The dps difference between 30 in valor and 15 zeal 15 radiance would have been within several percent, the real question would have been around virtue/blind spam vs the points in valor. Back in anchor days I guess that’s why he went with AH – the tankyness. The real gamechanger was a nerf to pure of voice and a buff to purging flames, leading to our consecrations being top pick for both reflects and condition removal and pure honor no longer needed.

Defiant boon just disappear when the boss uses important “interrupt this!” skills.

My children play how they want!

Quick! Let’s shout at non zerkers while we still can!

It is clear from the start that in a game where it in possible to completely negate damage through dodges it is going to be optimal to dodge as much damage as possible and return-fire with all out dps.

This is aided by blinds, aegis and reflects which are seen as the top defensive measures. Because bosses and mobs hit so hard, a single well placed blind/aegis/reflect/dodge returns more than a whole spec focussed on toughness and vitality.

Thus we are left with zerkers + dodge + blind + aegis + reflects.

When you can fully negate the majority of the damage coming your way, it seems silly to build entirely around mitigating the portion you can’t negate.

This is further proven in wvw where damage is extremely frequent and extremely weak.
Blinds and aegis become far less effective, and we see people running PVT/Cleric gear a LOT more.

The reason for this dps-fest in pve stems from the removal of the trinity, the root of all min maxing.
If you can’t guess who is going to be taking hits, why build for taking hits? If 5 people run tank gear, only 1 of those players will be getting use out of it each time the boss attacks. If 5 people run dps gear, all of those players will get use out of it all of the time.

We saw it in games like WoW. When raid buffs became plentiful and raid-wide hybrid classes were replaced by rogues and mages. As content became easier (either due to incoming damage decreases or people having learned the fights) people replaced healers with more dpsers.

The solution appears to be to make incoming damage difficult to avoid – multiple small hits. But then the counter to that is to finish the fight through superior dps before it can kill you through attrition damage. I think if there were fights which you could not burst down before they deal more attrition damage than you can heal you might see a cleric guard mixed in with the zerkers or perhaps some toughness gear assuming the incoming damage could be mitigated.

Damage reduction:

Imagine the output of the damage formula is 1,836,000.
A elementalist/mesmer/necro has a base armor of 1836.

The damage formula ends by taking the output of the damage formula and dividing by the target’s armor value.
1836000 / 1836 = 1000.

Now take the guardian’s base armor of 2127.
1836000 / 2127 = 863.18
aka damage reduction of 13.68% which is what you see listed in the picture for glass builds (I just noticed some of the DR numbers on my spreadsheet are still shown as decimals rather than %s, woops).

On the other end of the spectrum, 0/0/30/30/10 has 3322 armor, which is 44.73% damage reduction.

Effective hp was just an extension of that. If you and the ele listed above both have 1000hp, while he effectively has 1000hp, in comparison you have approx 1158. It will take 1158 worth of damage (1158 reduced by 13.58% is 1000) to kill you. To use the 0/0/30/30/10 example above, it will take 1809 damage to kill someone with 1000hp and 44.73% damage reduction.

I took the character’s base HP (plus traits and gear) and did not assume any heals. Heals would increase the impact of damage reduction on the overall effective hp.

I did not take protection into account, even for hammer builds.

If the picture is too small I can try and take a better one. It was just a screencap from an excel page.

You’re talking mechanical limitations. I did 49 when I had 20 resist (post patch).
I’m talking player imposed “you must have 65 ar to join” ones which are common in fractal groups and are a barrier to people who don’t want to grind gold for ascended gear.

With each post you make, you make it more clear that you don’t do fractals yourself.

VOLKON.1290:

fadeaway.2807:

I like doing high level fractals.
I don’t like grinding for gold.

What now, Volk?

Then do Fractals. Your choice.

I don’t grind for gold. I loot it off the dead in WvW.

Ah that’s where your wrong.
In this situation I cannot do fractals because the agony resist slots which allow you to do level 40+ come on ascended gear.

I like doing high level fractals.
I don’t like grinding for gold.

What now, Volk?