Guild Wars 2

Alarox.4590:

foofad.5162:

It’s not overpowered. If you spec like that you’re a one trick pony. I have an 80 thief and an 80 guardian, I should know.

Apparently you don’t, because that’s not a 1-trick pony. To use that combo, all you need is D/D and damage gear, and you still maintain Stealth (which is the ultimate defense). By comparison, for their optimal burst a Warrior sacrifices 2 Utilities, an Elite, 2 weapon slots, and full damage gear, and really does become a 1-trick pony. If you block a Warrior’s burst, then they become easy prey. You block a Thief’s initial burst? They can still stay in the fight and win, or run without any fear. Hello stealth and initiative.

BTW we all have lv80 Thieves and Guardians, which means we also don’t need to provide an argument or any evidence to back up what we say.

Yes, it is a one trick pony. If you want high burst, you won’t be stacking condition damage. That means your bleeds don’t amount to terribly much. Further, no one is so good at stealthing that can get away without equipping Shadow Refuge and Blinding Powder – specced for stealth they’re so good you’re absolutely insane for not taking one or both of them anyway. Then all you need is Shadowstep or Roll for Initiative as a gtfo ability, Haste if you absolutely need to spam Heartseeker right now, or Signet of Shadows for run speed. That’s a lot of utilities that go directly toward being able to stealth and stab people and not a whole lot else.

A thief doesn’t have anything special that lets them stay in the fight post-burst, whether that burst is successful or a failure. No more so than Warriors. All a warrior has to do to burst again is wait for their cooldowns to reset, and they don’t have any awkward positioning requirements or enemy health percentage requirements. Thieves do get some tools, like Roll for Initiative that let you reset and try again, which is nice. But you still have to really work to pull off another burst, or reset completely by gtfoing.

Anyway, this entire thread is fairly useless. Armor is not useless. You’re still taking less damage than you would have taken if you had none. The fact that burst classes can do so much damage isn’t a reflection of armor’s poor scaling, it’s a reflection of crit damage being quite high if you are speced for it. No one specs for armor, there’s no such thing. You can spec for CC, blocks, etc though, which are all hard counters to burst. Armor isn’t intended to be a hard counter to burst.

Which brings us back to Stealth. People say you can’t counter what you don’t see coming. You have a permanent Aegis when you’re not fighting. The first move out of the box is guaranteed to fail. If your Aegis is already down for whatever reason, that means you were in combat anyway and getting bursted when you’re already in combat shouldn’t be a surprise. Once you’ve taken the first hit, you should know what’s coming if it came out of nowhere. Time to hit some more CC and blocks.

None of this should be a surprise to anyone.

P.s., I’ll just leave this here.

Traited size as default would be pretty great. I vaguely recall them being larger in Beta, was that the case? I can’t remember now.

It’s not overpowered. If you spec like that you’re a one trick pony. I have an 80 thief and an 80 guardian, I should know.

I hope the response is to increase the effectiveness of other build possibilities rather than to decrease the effectiveness of AH.

This is a cool idea, Stanholo. I’m gonna goof around with a glassier version though – Knight’s weapons, Berserker everything else and 0/30/30/10/0 with shouts and meditations (MF rather than AH for WvW roaming) and see if I can keep from dying horribly. It’ll be entertaining in any event.

Either way – Smacking symbols onto people would be a lot more entertaining than dropping them on the ground to be avoided and made useless.

Boon duration is great. Healing power isn’t, really. All of your healing is going to be “maintenance” in nature – you don’t have any big saves. That means it’s fine for trash, okay for bosses (infrequent hits) and abysmal for PvP. If you just plan on doing dungeons, then go for it, but you have to really love hitting like a wet noodle.

But you can give a lot of survivability to a party by just stacking boon duration. You can also do some absurd thing with might duration runes and still get okay damage by virtue of getting 75 power out of it rather than some healing power like you’d get in boon duration runes. You can easily get something absurd like 80% might duration without sacrificing too much, which means your Blasted fire fields are going to last 36 seconds. If you’re running with an elementalist, that means you can have 25 might stacks permanently just by blasting fire fields, not even including Empowering Might. Pretty sweet.

I don’t recommend healing power builds though. It’s pretty boring. I’m not just saying that, either – I have a healing set and pull it out occasionally. Not fun.

No, Marks are ground targetted. They’re basically traps. I’m suggesting that you literally plant the symbol on a person and it becomes inescapable, it’s on their body and harms anyone that comes near them regardless of where they go.

I can’t stand the way symbols work right now; They do too little damage to warrant even using them at all in WvW since anyone will just walk right on out. Blegh.

The worst part of Symbols right now is that they are stationary AOEs. Guardians also lack meaningful conditions outside of burning and a couple of sources (only one of which is reliable – Scepter) of immobilize. Solution: “Mark” targets with symbols, don’t drop them on the ground. Have the AOE be centered on the target and follow them. Drop the damage somewhat to compensate for that particular target taking the full brunt of it. Result, Guardians gets a neat class mechanic beyond “this is my circle, enter at your peril” and don’t need to worry so much about options for conditions.

Exarthious.5792:

Armor is practically useless because the diminishing returns on toughness are to the extreme

This is just not true. If you have 3k armor and add 200, you gain 6.25% damage reduction. If you have 3.2k armor and gain 200 armor, you get 5.8% damage reduction. That’s only .45% less. Yes, it does diminish. But it’s not “practically useless” because the diminishing returns are “extreme.”

What is true is that you do have to sacrifice damage stats (specifically, crit damage, and to a lesser extent power and precision) if you want the highest possible armor.

Furthermore, the fact that you got beasted by a thief shouldn’t be a surprise. That’s what thieves are good at. This isn’t anything new. If the conditions were different and it was a zerg v zerg situation or even party v party, that’s not something that would happen easily. You have to really work to get that kind of a kill anywhere but solo.

I wouldn’t mind a Hundred Blades nerf.

I’m not bitter… :P

The problem is one of burst damage versus sustained damage. In short duration fights, burst damage will always win. Guardians have to work harder to get burst damage going than warriors do. Guardians do fine sustained damage over time, but the only occasion in which that matters is against large health pool enemies like bosses in PvE. In WvW, burst is king. Dead players deal no damage. Heartseeker thieves, rifle warriors, and so on have burst in spades, and they do quite well as Youtube will be able to attest. Rarely do you see burst Guardians do anything particularly noteworthy.

So: The shorter the fight, the more important burst becomes. Guardians are fair to poor in that regard. That’s not to say that Guardians are a bad class or poorly balanced or anything like that. But it’s something you have to deal with. It’s part of what makes Guardians such rocks in PvE. They do fine damage, it’s just spread out over time. Add to that the innate tankiness and you’ve got yourself a solid platform. It just doesn’t have the omg big numbers behind it.

Hammer. The autoattack + mighty blow are all you really need to power through most content. You can even kind of AoE grind with symbols, though not to the absurd extent of shortbow thieves.

The direction Orb of Light travels is based off of camera angle. Your character has an invisible “extra” axis that you can’t see which determines where the projectiles you fire without a target go. If you move forward while aiming the camera up, your projectiles shoot up. Most people play looking about 30 degrees down at the ground or so, so that’s why your shots go into the ground.

After a few days of being annoyed at the seemingly odd Sword coefficients I reexamined them and determined that I made a clerical error. The error’s been corrected, the coefficients are now accurate.

Too many defensive stat points, not enough offensive. Trade vitality and toughness for precision. Get your crit up to 40%~ or thereabouts, and keep your crit damage up around 60% or higher.

Sanctuary is pretty bad. If the radius were higher or the healing better it would be useful, but it’s not worth using. The heal in the tooltip looks powerful but the tooltip is wrong. It tics 6 times for 260 HP. It’s a slightly more powerful Regeneration. Swap it for wall of reflection in WvW or dungeons with lots of ranged mobs. Wall of reflection is amazing in WvW for combating zergs. Alternatively, just stick to all shouts, use Pure of Voice and only take 5 points in virtues with the other 5 in Radiance to give you more CC off Justice.

Having Empowering Might and only 25% crit chance is terrible. Despite what the rabble would have you think, it’s not 100% necessary, especially when your crit chance is substandard.

Get more condition removal. Seriously. It helps a lot.

Were you using the correct armor class? You can transmute any level to any skin but not across armor types. Also, the armor you were transmuting may have had an upgrade (rune, crest, gem, whatever) that had a level requirement. That can also prevent you from transmuting.

Oh, also – I forgot to mention, utilities like Smite Condition have no relationship to weapon damage, but they still follow the same formula. Instead, some sort of weapon damage is substituted in. I assumed 1000 and when I did, I was able to reproduce my results in game, but I didn’t test it rigorously. So those coefficients may be off.

Testing for significance in this case is totally pointless. You test for significance when you have a data set from which you are gathering statistics, and you are attempting to ascertain whether or not the data reflect a statistically significant change. We aren’t working with a data set here. Increasing power by 100 has an absolute effect on your damage. That damage is a % increase for a given critical chance and damage, and that’s absolutely true. There is nothing to test. You will do x% more damage with 100 more power. It’s a given. There’s no chance in a sterile environment like this of it being any different.

Where you would use a test for significance, is if you smacked a monster 100 times and then had someone else smack a monster 100 times, compared your data sets, and then tested to see if the fact that your numbers are seemingly x% higher than his is in fact statistically significant given the sample size or whether that x% is just noise from your sample. That’s an appropriate test for significance.

Edited to add: I don’t even know how you would do a t-test on something like this. You need a standard deviation and a sample size.

Of course you can. The transmute trick works fine for it. Do it all the time. Make a guardian with the shoulders, buy a white shoulderplate, transmute the stats of the white shoulderplate onto the skin, pop it in your bank and hey presto you can use it on your main. Not just your main, any heavy armor character – my warrior has the guardian shoulders.

Pure of Voice is very buggy and doesn’t convert boons properly for some shouts. So in reality what will happen is you will cure 2 conditions on yourself and allies and then absorb the remaining into yourself.

Obtena.7952:

P.S. I went through the calculation myself with the numbers I had just for hammer and got a different set of co-efficients than the OP. Without boring details, I discovered that they change based on what zone you are in … I was able to reproduce the same values as the OP in Lion’s Arch. Clearly, it’s the re-scaling based on level but the results are interesting.

As example, In Malchor’s Leap near Waste Hollow’s Point, I have 568 for Hammer Swing Skill damage and 1599 Power. That gives 0.88 for a co-efficient. In Lion’s Arch I have 562 for Hammer Swing Skill damage and 1740 Power, giving the 0.8 the OP got.

I later went to Brisbane Wildlands, was rescaled to level 17 and I had a coefficient of 5.96 for Hammer Swing. That’s 7.5 times better performance than the same setup at level 80. I was surprised by that.

Anyways, bottom line is that you need to do the calculation based on a common level, 80 is obviously the most applicable.

What’s likely throwing you is the change in average weapon damage for the lower-leveled weapons when you get scaled down. Coefficients should be static, but it’s not clear what the scaling does to your weapons. If you’re so inclined, you can test this by comparing them to a low-level character of the same class not being scaled.

In any event, level 80 is all that really matters.

Empower is on the worst damage weapon Guardians get.

Sanctuary as already stated has a long cooldown, is too small to keep monsters from hitting people inside of it, and heals for less than the tooltip displays. Much less. It heals for 266 per tic, times six, for 1596 total over 6 seconds. It’s about 100 more healing than Regeneration.

Protective Spirit is on an elite with a 3 minute cooldown. It gives 10 seconds of regeneration, which is ultimately not much when you consider that you can only cast Protective Spirit twice during the elite’s duration.

Wall of Reflection is indeed good.

Look, I realize you want to be right, but there’s a lot of Guardians in this thread who are telling it like it is: Guardians are not the be-all and end-all class for anything in this game, be it condition clearing, boons, burst or sustained dps, tanking, or healing. I’ve spent 800 hours on mine and I know that for a fact.

FYI: The actual animations are longer than the tooltip-listed cast times for the various attacks. This should help, thanks to GuanglaiKangyi on the Guru forums. In other words, it takes longer to execute an autoattack chain than if you just add the tooltip times. Your effective DPS is lower than you would be led to believe. Here are the rough animation times:

Hammer:
Auto chain: 3.6s total
Mighty Blow: 1s

Greatsword:
Auto chain: .83s per swing, 2.5s total
Whirling Wrath: 2.5s (startup .5s, spins for 2s)
Leap of Faith: 1s
Symbol of Wrath: .83s
Binding Blade: 1s

Sword:
Auto chain: .83s per swing, 2.5s total
Zealot’s Defense: 2.5s (same as Whirling Wrath, see above)

Scepter:
Auto: .83s per swing
Smite: .83s

Staff:
Auto: 1s
Orb of Light: 1s
Symbol of Faith: 1s
Empower: 4s

Mace:
Auto: .83s for first two swings, 1.33s for last, 3.33s total
Symbol of Faith: 2s
Protector’s Strike: .83s upon triggering

>implying staff does damage

Kidding

Wave of Wrath [.6]
Orb of Light [1.2]
Detonation [.6]

Dynnen.6405:

8 + (4 * Level) + (0.25 * Condition Damage) per second

2.5 + (0.5 * Level) + (0.05 * Condition Damage) per stack per second

Burning is quite a bit better damage wise, however bleeding usually stacks faster.

at 1k condition damage burn ticks for around 700, and bleeds tick for around 100, so you need to maintain 7 stacks of bleeds constantly to maintain the same damage as burning.

It scales poorly with condition damage in this way:

With 0 condition damage, 8 stacks of bleed roughly equals burning.

With 500 condition damage, 7 stacks of bleed roughly equals burning.

With 1000 condition damage, 6 stacks of bleed roughly equals burning.

That’s what I’m talking about. The more condition damage the two parties have, the burner and the bleeder, the more bleeding is favored. Burning is slowly outpaced in a dedicated condition build.

Furthermore, sources of Guardian burning are typically very short in duration, on the order of a couple of seconds, to five seconds from Justice. Maintaining burning can be a challenge, moreso than maintaining bleeds for any kind of dedicated bleeding build on say a Thief or a Warrior or what have you. Most classes that can bleed, can do so for anywhere from 3-10 seconds at a stretch, which means that the total damage done over the course of the condition is also higher. When you add all of these factors, Burning is a very lackluster condition to gear condition damage for.

Added the last weapons. Should be more or less complete now for most uses.

You’ve got food on in that SS, which kind?

The typical greatsword skill combo is to drop a symbol, pull with Binding Blade, and then whirlwind. That’s bog-standard. Any Altruistic Healing/Two Handed Mastery build will work. Then it’s just gear selection. If he wasn’t taking much damage, he probably had around 3k armor. With 3k armor you have some options on how to lay out your stats but typically you see something on the order of 1800-2000 power and 13-16k HP with 30-40% crit and 50% crit damage or so.

It’s also fairly typical to drop 10 points in Zeal for the 10% extra damage on burned targets multiplier.

Krytan (Human T1) is literally the only hammer skin I will ever use. All the rest are hideous. It’s also the only one that looks like an actual weapon.

Scepter
Orb of Wrath [.66]
Smite [4.95 (divided over hits)]

Well, I basically already told you – Skill damage = [(coefficient) * (weapon damage (which is a range)) * (power)]/armor

So you can solve for coefficient algebraically for each ability, if you know your power and tooltip damage and weapon damage. The only missing part is that the tooltip uses 2600 as the armor value. It also uses the average weapon damage instead of a range or the top or low ends.

It adds 25 damage per 100 condition damage, to be specific. Bleeds add 5 damage per 100 condition damage, and you might think “but that’s less!” And you’d be right. But that’s per stack. So at 5 stacks, that’s 25 per 100. Six stacks is 30 per 100, and so on up to 25 (which warriors can hit, albeit briefly) which is 125 damage per 100 condition damage. Hence, Bleed scales better the more bleeds you apply.

To be fair though: Signet of Wrath’s Immobilize at 1200 range is really awesome for chasing people down in WvW to finish them off. Beyond that…

Hey guys, was doing some unrelated calculations and figured I’d go ahead and post these since I had to figure them out in the process.

Hammer
Hammer Swing [.8]
Hammer Bash [.9]
Symbol of Protection [Seems to be 1.0 for base strike + 1.5 for the symbol (divided by hits)]
Mighty Blow [1.75]
Zealot’s Embrace [.8]
Banish [1.0]

Greatsword
Strike [.8]
Vengeful Strike [.8]
Wrathful Strike [1.2]
Whirling Wrath [2.8 for primary strikes (.4 each * 7), .15 for secondary projectiles]
Leap of Faith [1.1]
Symbol of Wrath [2.75 (divided over hits)]
Binding Blade [1.0]

Staff
Wave of Wrath [.6]
Orb of Light [1.2]
Detonation [.6]

Sword
Sword of Wrath [.8]
Sword Arc [.8]
Sword Wave [1.5 (divided over hits)]
Flashing Blade [.2]
Zealot’s Defense [2.65 (divided over hits)]

Mace
True Strike [.8]
Pure Strike [1.0]
Faithful Strike [1.4 (only hits one target)]
Symbol of Faith [1.5]
Protector’s Strike [1.4]

Scepter
Orb of Wrath [.66]
Smite [4.95 (divided over hits)]

Shield
Shield of Judgement [1.0]

Focus
Ray of Judgement [.5]
Shield of Wrath [2.5]

Torch
Zealot’s Fire [2.25]
Cleansing Flame [3.3 (divided over hits)]

Smite Condition
Without Condition [.58]
With Condition [1.31]

Skill Damage = [(coefficient) * (weapon damage (which is a range)) * (power)]/armor

So with this you can calculate the damage of any of the above abilities for any given power.

NOTE: Symbol of Protection hits three times, not four as the tooltip states.

Vitu.3580:

Just because the only condition we have is burning doesn’t mean condition damage is worthless. If played right you can have nearly constant burning on you target.

And burning is the highest damage condition in the game

Just saying….

Burn is worth about 5 stacks of bleed. Bleed however scales better with condition damage and quickly eclipses it. Burning sucks.

Apraxas.3685:

foofad.5162:

I don’t see this on the OP – Purging Flames does not have its duration increased by Master of Consecrations.

Remember you should not trust tooltips as they are mostly bugged, did you verify the actual duration or just based on tooltip?

I tested this extensively, it doesn’t get a duration increase.

Oh, bummer. Well, I already had a ticket up for recovering my GW1 account in the first place, hopefully they’ll be able to help me link too.

When I try to link my Guild Wars account, I get the following error (in both Firefox and Chrome):

<Error code=“48” module=“3” line=“339” text=“callback (): ReferenceError: links is not defined ReferenceError: links is not defined at Templates\EJS\Account\link.ejs:58:1 at Object.render (Library/core-template.js:185:15) at Object.reply (Library/sugar-reply.js:96:25) at Object.<anonymous> (Account/link.js:144:24) at Library/sugar-sts.js:114:78”/>

What do? =[

I have a single 660ti and I get 35-40 in Lion’s Arch and 60 on average everywhere else. I’ve heard some mixed things – try disabling SLI and see what happens. I’ve heard the game doesn’t cooperate well with SLI. Also try turning Reflections down to Sky and Shadows, and also – this is the bizarre one – try turning Supersampling on. For some reason that gets me another 15-20 FPS, as counter-intuitive as that is.

Driver update didn’t help, I already run everything default and I haven’t overclocked this card.

It might be enough, sure. But what it will absolutely be is a waste of money. When he buys a new computer that card won’t do him any good. He’s so far behind he needs to start from scratch.

You can build a decent gaming computer for five hundred dollars or so, certainly one that will run GW2. Not great, but it’ll work. You already have a monitor so that defrays the costs a lot.

Good lord. Homie, save up for a new computer.

Aside from this I run the game at about 60 fps average, I don’t think reflections are giving me a hard time. I’m hoping to find a solution that doesn’t involve lowering my settings… weirdly though, I’ve been running with supersampling on since I took that video and not only did it fix the issue but for some freakish reason the game runs way better now. I don’t even…

Yes, well… It’s a recent issue – bugs don’t appear out of nowhere unless something changed, and the only thing that has changed is the gw2 software version >_>

Some extra notes: Turning off shadows disables the dark splotch in the center. Subsampling and supersampling prevent me from seeing through the walls like that. Disabling reflections also fixes it. Obviously, disabling these isn’t exactly a great solution. I’m running a 660ti on Nvidia’s 306.97 drivers, and the problem started happening this past week for the first time. I believe it started happening with one of the recent patches.

I’m also extremely baffled because running the game with supersampling enabled seems to cause it to run better which makes no sense to me.

Mostly in snowy areas, I’ve been getting a very annoying graphical problem. When I move my camera through a certain elevation, I’m suddenly able to see through walls and it presents a dark splotch in the middle of the screen. Words can’t really describe it so I put up a video.

Anyone know how to fix this?

I don’t see this on the OP – Purging Flames does not have its duration increased by Master of Consecrations.

Merciful Intervention, because it’s bugged and doesn’t work. We can start with that.

Asura and Charr have the best racials out of anyone for any class, frankly. If I didn’t enjoy being a nine foot tall giant amazon woman I would have rerolled Charr in a heartbeat. Battle Roar and all three elites are awesome.

I have no idea if it works, but 30 toughness translates to approximately 1% damage reduction depending on how much you already have.

@Istaril, the description for Empowering Might clearly says it applies might to allies and yet it works on yourself. I stopped paying too much heed to tooltips a while ago, because they’re often wrong.

The trait isn’t really powerful enough to expect it to remove all of a target’s boons. That said, plenty of classes have the ability to stack longish to nearly permanent boons – Guardians with no boon duration can stack 20 seconds of protection or more with the right combo of skills, Rangers get something absurd like 20 seconds or 30 seconds of fury off their horn skill, and so on. There are plenty of opportunities to negate someone’s expensive cooldown.

I think the skill is pretty build agnostic because of the fact that everyone’s got Justice and is applying burning every 5 attacks anyway. That’s pretty regular, especially if you’re a sword user.

The nice thing about your suggestion is that it would automatically proc off of manual Justice usage, so you’d have control over it.

I suggested cooldown timers on traits and such in the Suggestion forum ages ago and got no responses. I think it’s shameful that they obfuscate those timers so badly – half the time you can’t even tell if something is working because it’s so rare.