Guild Wars 2

Hi guys,

I was wondering what everyone made of Searing Flames in Radiance. The description is that you kill a boon on your target when you apply burning to them, with an internal cooldown of 20 seconds.

The wiki is pretty sparse for this trait. My main questions are how boons are selected for removal – is it always the furthest to the left, like condition removal? Or does it select boons randomly? Can it be used to pierce Aegis before applying damage normally? Does it apply to the burning hit given to others when Justice is activated? It would be disgusting if you could completely deboonify someone with a mass Justice attack, but I’ve never seen that happen so I doubt it’s possible.

I run Shelter rather than the healing signet whose name escapes me at the moment, so I almost never pick the signet cooldown trait. Searing Flames is one of the better options for adept Radiance traits, though it’s something of a lesser of evils rather than a shining star. The thought of ripping Protection off of people, or even Regeneration, appeals to me greatly though. That said, I’ve never done any testing with it, so I don’t have any idea how effective it is. It’s very difficult to test on the bots in the Mists.

What’s everyone’s experience with it?

Javelins would be seriously cool. 900-1200 range javelins, one handed so that you can still use a shield or focus. Perfect.

Oh, great. I just checked the patch notes from a few days ago. Supposedly:

“Fixed an issue in two of the Arah chains where a door would remain closed”

Spoilers: They’re still broken.

Speaking of Arah bugs, on Path 3 I’m used to teleporting to the northern waypoint before heading to Giganticus, clearing that mass of weak mobs + the silver, and then killing the two silver door guards which used to open the door to the short-path to Giganticus so you can zerg him easier. I’ve done two runs today where that door failed to open. Is this a bug or was it patched to do that? If it was patched, why on earth leave the waypoint if you can’t leave? Blargh.

Quit whining. Not everyone does that, and if they do, find a group that doesn’t. They don’t need to add a cry button because some antisocial kittens are being mean and only let cool kids play with them.

I’m an 80 and I’ve never cared what level my group was in AC exploration. As long as they follow along and listen, I don’t even care if they’re first timers.

I like this fight when we can actually finish it in a reasonable number of attempts. It’s extremely manic – sometimes it takes my group 16 tries to kill him, and then tonight I completed it in two with a pug, and only two of us (myself included) had ever run Arah before.

It’s a really, really fun fight – I enjoy the dodging and scrambling for your life aspect of phase 2 a lot. The problem is, it’s just slightly too hard. Frankly, I think all it needs is dropping the damage of the snot rockets to about 80% of what it is to give people more chances to not be obliterated by them. The saturation of them is fine, they just hit a touch too hard. They should still be horrendous, I don’t want to trivialize the fight. But doing it 16 times in a row is no fun for anyone.

I do, thanks for catching that. It’s 2am and I’m sleepy.

Monks Focus and a 2/3 or Meditations build works about as well as Altruistic Healing (as long as you have Smite Condition slotted) but it’s more “selfish” because you aren’t encouraged to stack as many boon-granting abilities as possible. It’s probably as good or better than AH if you’re alone.

One of the reasons Valor is so critical (ha) to any Guardian build that wants to do damage and not die horribly is the fact that for whatever reason, Anet gave that tree Critical Damage. Crits without Crit Damage are pretty sad, and if you aren’t critting, you aren’t doing a whole lot of damage. If it were on Zeal or Radiance instead, people would flock to them like they were free candy. Alas.

That said, it’s possible to build an effective Guardian without AH or MF. You need good condition removal, long Protection and Regeneration uptime, and some vitality/heal over time food but that’s not hard to get. That’s if you want to be survivable. Conversely you can go full glass cannon and obliterate everything you look at and never have to heal. That works pretty well in WvW but I wouldn’t try it in dungeons. Greatsword or Hammer with points in Zeal, Radiance, and either Honor or Valor, plus Berserker and Knight’s gear… Lot of damage, real quick.

P.s., Scepter is incredible. The autoattack sucks but no one uses Scepter for the autoattack. Smite murders people and the easy access to Immobilize makes catching things a snap. Way better ranged damage and personal survivability from Scepter/Focus or Shield (prefer Focus with Scepter though because you can stay mobile instead of ducking under Shield of Absorbtion) than you get with a staff, even with the on-demand 12 Might stacks.

Toughness starts to scale more slowly the higher you go. The difference between 2600 armor (what I would consider poor toughness for a Guardian) and 3000 armor (what I would consider nominal and appropriate) is 13.3%. The difference between 3000 and 3400 (roughly what full Knights gear plus full Valor would give you) is 11.8%. So it’s still nice the higher you get, but it does slow down and become less valuable. 3000 armor is good and tanky with decent (15k) hp.

You can get around not having a lot of toughness on gear by pumping up Valor a good deal, same thing with vitality and Honor. You can also get a ton of extra health from runes that give 25/50/+90 Vitality – that’s a total of 1650 more HP, which is glorious. Guardians tend to struggle at getting HP and have plenty of extra toughness.

People who have a lot of health, in the range of 20k or so, tend to do so at the expense of toughness or damage. If it’s at the expense of damage, you’re not doing anyone any favors, including yourself. If it’s at the expense of toughness you can cheat by using Signet of Judgement and stacking Protection-granting abilities to simulate having more armor, but ultimately 20k health is just not needed for Guardians in most situations. You have so many drip heals coming in that it gives the illusion of having much more health than you actually do.

3k armor and 15k HP is a reasonably sturdy Guardian. More is nice but the tradeoff is always damage. Personally I have more but I’m always a little sad at my crit chance and unspectacular power.

Edit: semantic correction

“esp. concerning the claim that Zeal can stack up major portions of sustained might.”

Didn’t say it could. What I said was:

‘Anyone without poor gear selections should have no trouble hitting 2700 power before adding Zeal traits (which are going out of style these days). Surprise: Those people have access to the same Might sources you do. Which means you’re still doing less damage than everyone else, and that’s ignoring your lack of critical damage which brings you even further down.’

My mentioning of Zeal was offhand so that there was no confusion as to the fact that 2700 power comes from gear alone. When I said that “those people” have access to the same Might sources that you do, that was in reference to people who have the gear to support 2700 power, not that people who have points in Zeal have a Might generating trait or some such. In other words, people with the exact same setup as you but instead of +healing gear have gear that actually helps them do more than throw around green numbers. The point of course being that with 2700 power and 18 stacks of might, that person would have 3330 power – which is more than you. All things being equal, more base power means they do more damage – simple. That’s all. I can kind of see the confusion so I won’t make a snarky remark about your reading comprehension.

“Can you at least show a video or any reference that visualizes your, ‘better’ build? At least then you can show me and the community how so terribly wrong I am. Did I now show my credibility in my first post by the age of my account and, I hope you recognize the gear and badges in my inventory. I have already tried many different ways to play a guardian, and now I post method of full support guardian.”

There’s no point in posting a video. It would basically be me not dying easily and our team completing a dungeon successfully, which isn’t exactly impressive. You can swap traits and gear and see for yourself how much more you contribute to a fight. It’s not like there’s some sort of mystic quality to builds – anyone can try them. I’ve tried full Cleric armor and I know it sucks compared to other options. Full healing is unnecessarily removing your damage from the total party damage pool.

Your account age means virtually nothing, and if you’re proud of that number I can show you a bigger one. Don’t turn this into an kitten contest when it doesn’t have to be one.

“May I ask you why Zeal is going out of style ‘these days’? Are you a guy who only follows the builds of others? Is it going out of style for you or for other players? Last time I checked, virtues were never in style and I guarantee I am more effective than you. I’m willing to dungeon with you or others in this community and place my credibility on the line. Let me know when you are.”

Unique builds aren’t inherently more effective. There are no bonus points for originality. But no, my build is based on a working knowledge of the game accumulated through my time playing Guardian plus the amalgamation of the research I have done on the forums, wiki, and in game, plus theorycrafting I’ve done in order to support my concepts. Like any good nerd I have spreadsheets galore, including a fully functioning character simulator – which sadly I don’t have the web skills to put online.

Every once in a while I go Zeal and Virtues for Spirit Weapons and improved Wall of Reflection, and romp around WvW with them. They scare people more than they should, and it’s fun to watch people try and run away from them. But I don’t run dungeons that way.

Since you don’t have any idea what build I run, your guarantee that you’re more effective than me (at what? Beating up wooden dummies?) doesn’t hold a lot of water.

But this isn’t about me.

Rather than try and turn this into a contest, why don’t you just experiment with moving away from +healing gear and see how much better you’ll be for it? Don’t just set the goal of stacking healing so you can throw around green numbers, set the goal of being good at killing things and helping people not die. That’s what I did, and I worked pretty hard at it. The net result is that I kill faster than you, better than you, with more effective HP personally, while maintaining an extremely high level of party utility in the form of condition removal, healing, boons, and so on. Don’t compromise. It’s good to be a Guardian. Don’t mess it up by trying to be a priest.

Aseir.2046:

I don’t like “Save Yourselves”, because the buffs it supplies you with (besides fury) are easy to get through other means, and 12 seconds isn’t long compared to “retreat!”’s 20+ seconds of swiftness.. And if you time it well, Aegis can also save your group from being one shot (Kohler comes to mind). Also, “Save yourselves!” Only applies the buffs to you, which is an important con for the spec, which is focused on group content!

Save Yourselves is our only source of reliable Fury, which goes a very long way in increasing burst damage. It’s also ten seconds of protection which while you can get it from other sources, I mean… come on. Ten seconds more of 33% damage reduction. It’s also a stunbreaker which will save you from knockdowns and fears, and it’s another source of condition cures if you have Soldier runes or Pure of Voice. My understanding is that it cures conditions before it pulls them to you, which means often times it won’t even negatively affect you. If it does, the effect is minimal.

That said, none of that helps against certain boss fights like Giganticus or other one-shot heavy bosses.

“Well yes I do know the damage mitigation. The question is… do you understand my topic and concept? I did post about my Full Support playstyle and concept. Last time I checked, I can’t dodge roll 1088 toughness to the party now can I?”

While fantastically impressive, your dodge roll heals are not valuable enough to merit the severe lack of personal damage you bring to the dungeon. With 300 healing power from nothing but traits, you will heal for about 40% of that, while at the same time having room in your available stats to both take less damage during a fight and put much more damage out personally. This will raise your status from “well meaning hindrance” to “valuable team member.”

“I have little trouple keeping the majority of nasty conditions off myself. See photo for refrence. Also, Combo Field Light, last time I checked it helps remove conditions. Please someone correct me if im wrong. Also if party needs more condition removal, please refer to my video just for you.”

What you have is 3 conditions removed every 42 seconds for your party. That’s great. What happens when they get feared immediately after you pop Resolve? It’s not like it gives you an anti-condition field that prevents more conditions from being applied. Conditions are applied all the time. If your goal is party support, you have to be able to deal with that. You sort of are with Purging Flames, but not as cleanly as if you went with something like a shouts build with Soldier runes and Pure of Voice, which doesn’t have a positional component like Purging Flames does. Multiple shouts, on a shorter cooldown (two conditions removed on Stand Your Ground every 24 seconds for up to 5 people within earshot is incredible enough as it is) than Resolve are going to completely obliterate it in terms of condition removal. Which, by the way, translates directly into damage your party didn’t take. Which means you don’t have to heal them as much. There’s a lot more to support than green numbers. Oh, and this way you don’t have to suffer a downtime in your personal drip heal, which will go toward helping you not die.

“Unfortunantly the video did not come out as good as I had hoped. One thing I wanted to show in the video was the sustained stacks of might and the affect it has on my power raiting. Without Might: 2,559 power. With 18 stacks of Might: 3,189 power. Sustained at 12 seconds, then dwindles down.”

First, some semantics. Attack is different from Power. Power is the meaningful stat, whereas Attack is functionally useless (Attack = average weapon damage + Power stat, and is not actually used in any damage calculations ever. Only Power is).

Anyone without poor gear selections should have no trouble hitting 2700 power before adding Zeal traits (which are going out of style these days). Surprise: Those people have access to the same Might sources you do. Which means you’re still doing less damage than everyone else, and that’s ignoring your lack of critical damage which brings you even further down.

“Also my second point: what I was saying the in the chat long in response to foofad. I traded the Signet for the skill ‘Stand Your Ground’, then attacked the wooden post. I then typed in the chat about how useless ‘Stand Your Ground’ is because the wooden post are not knocking me down. It was in hopes to poke at foofad about every situtation requires different skills. Last time I checked this is not GW1, where we cannot change skills on the fly.”

While your stick smashing abilities are to be commended, Signet of Judgement is a terrible skill in virtually any situation considering how much better just about everything else is in both keeping you and your party alive. The only interesting part of it is that it’s a source of Weakness which we don’t have anywhere else as far as I can recall. The benefit of this is debatable given your other options.

Everything you do with the build you’ve cited you can do better with less healing power and more personal effectiveness. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t need healers. It needs people who contribute, which despite your green numbers your build doesn’t do enough of.

It’s a little bit less than 1:1 but basically. It has a very poor baseline healing and really good healing power scaling. I suspect it’ll be nerfed or changed such that it has significantly better baseline and worse scaling with power. That would put it in line with how most of the other heals scale. Regeneration on its own is not bad but it only scales based on 12.5% of your healing power. So the most you can do is double it, which sounds like a lot but regen is a drip heal and isn’t as helpful in short fights.

It reads as soulbound in the tooltip but it is in reality account bound. You can transfer it via the bank.

No one has ever declined to do an activity with me because it would cost money to waypoint to where I am.

Furthermore, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with suggesting ways to defray the cost of travel. When all you have to do is kill a few monsters or mine a few nodes in order to recover the cost, that’s a very small price to pay considering how much time you saved by quick traveling.

Sure, it may cost 4 silver to waypoint to a dungeon on the other side of the world. But you get 26 silver for completing the dungeon, and that’s before you include drops.

You have awful armor, awful power, and awful critical damage. The reason you were having a hard time burning down the burrows is that for all intents and purposes you weren’t contributing meaningful damage to the fight.

This wasn’t death by support. This was you fellating yourself while your group finally got their act together.

You’re wasting a utility slot with Signet of Judgement, using it as a crutch to lower your incoming damage when you should instead be packing on armor and using an actual worthwhile utility instead. Stand Your Ground would be a much better option along with Superior Aria in order to – you know – actually support your party instead of tacking on a signet so you don’t die as quickly.

All your +healing is very poorly capitalized on with respect to healing yourself as a result of your low armor. +healing does not scale well enough to be used as a primary stat, especially not when the cost is you having abysmal armor. 2500 armor is what a medium armor class expects to get with modest survivability.

Meanwhile, your power is absolutely anemic. Your damage contribution is embarrassing, it’s no wonder you guys were having trouble burning down the burrows. The smaller the party, the more important each individual’s contribution to the overall damage of the party becomes. I don’t care if you can briefly stack 12 stacks of might from your staff and maybe another 4-5 from crits with Empowering Might and three from Justice. Your damage would be that plus a lot more if you actually had decent power.

40% crit chance is basic but acceptable for a guardian – the problem is that your crits hit like wet paper towels. You have no crit damage gear, which is further contributing to your already awful damage contribution.

Get rid of the +healing gear. You seriously aren’t doing anyone any favors by kittening yourself in order to eek out more healing. Your utilities are two thirds crap. You would get a lot better condition removal and a lot better personal survival and group survival with the addition of Stand Your Ground with Soldier runes and/or Pure of Voice (Stability is incredible and you don’t have any stunbreaks which blows my mind) and getting rid of Purging Flames. When you get rid of the +healing gear and pick up some Knight’s or anything else with Toughness (Power/Vit/Toughness would be good too but doesn’t address the crit damage problem) you can also junk that signet (seriously, it only reduces damage by 10% – you know how much damage 500 more toughness would reduce?) and replace it with something that would actually benefit your party and not just you. Triple shout with Save Yourselves and Pure of Voice would remove two conditions every time you shout. That’s gonna help your party an awful lot more than Signet of Judgement. At that point though you could replace the third utility with just about anything and it would be a better choice than Judgement.

So, the point here is: The whole idea of “death by support” is that you act as a force multiplier. Your presence increases the effectiveness of everyone around you. There are much, much more effective ways of doing that than what you’ve got going on. Kittening yourself that badly in order to heal a bit better is doing your dungeon party more damage than you’re able to compensate for.

While you guys are whining about Sanctuary being useless I’ll be completely facerolling Giganticus with it.

Animus.6073:

My issue with increasing boon duration is that it can actually lower your effective healing if you are running a shout build with altruistic healing, or some other build that benefits from quick application of boons. Since stacks of the same boon do not proc AH, it lowers your ability to heal yourself from it.

Pretty sure that’s incorrect. It’s absolutely incorrect with respect to might – adding might stacks heals you with AH just fine. Almost positive refreshing other boons also heals you with AH.

I’ll bite! Here’s hoping.

I really want to know as well.

If night capping is okay, then why bother with region based servers? Lump everyone together so that the population is mostly spread out. If you do have region based servers, then the natural inclination in order to achieve victory is to stack as many players in your enemies off-peak hours as possible so that you can faceroll with no effort. That’s a very basic idea, it’s viable, it’s doable. Except that it’s not fun, at all. This isn’t war, this is a game which people play for entertainment and waking up to a losing battle is not entertaining at all.

This is not EVE.

I am absolutely for region-based “quiet hours” in which WvW can’t be entered. Start it at 2AM server, end it at 8AM server for example. Night capping becomes a nonissue. Simple.

Downed itself is fine, it just needs a bit of tweaking. If we didn’t have downed, burst classes like thieves would be absolutely OP.

@Trungalung who I cannot quote for some reason: Almost, not quite.

Imagine 100 hits of 100 damage. Total damage: 10,000. Now imagine half of those are critical hits (50% crit rate) with 50% bonus crit, for double damage total. 15,000 damage total. That’s our baseline.

From there, imagine that you increase your base damage through power by 5%, to 100 hits of 105 damage. 10,500 damage without crits. 15,750 damage with crits now, 750 more than our baseline.

Now imagine 100 hits of 100 damage, but 55% bonus crit damage. Without crits we are at our baseline of 10,000 damage. With crits that becomes 15250.

The reason for this is pretty simple. Power increases non critical damage and critical damage, so an increase of power is more valuable more of the time. This supposes that you are able to get a 5% damage increase worth of power for the same stat ‘exchange rate’ kitten crit damage. In the case of a 50% critical hit chance however, power remains more valuable up until the exchange rate becomes 2.5% power to 5% critical hit, or 1:2. I don’t know off the top of my head what the power to damage calculation actually is, but you can test things out yourself on dummies to get an approximation using steady weapons in Heart of the Mists.

The figures do change based on your critical hit percentage. Power becomes more valuable the less critical hit you have, for obvious reasons – you get nothing out of critical damage if you aren’t critting. The reverse is also true, if you crit all the time the value of critical damage increases.

I raged hard when I heard quay pronounced kway for the first time.

At least it’s not as bad as TOR – “legate” was pronounced “laygatay” and some other abominations. It’s like the voice directors didn’t know how to speak.

It would be way, way more useful if it didn’t freaking root you for the majority of their attacks.

Do you have the thing in options set to show area of effect rings? Friendly AoEs have a white circle around them, enemy AoEs have a red circle.

Be careful though, because crit damage is not worth as much as precision and power. Crit damage is a compliment but shouldn’t be mistaken for a primary stat.

Whiskyjumper.6190:

It was my understanding that support down’t really get you anything in WvW. True?

False. Guardians can put out a lot of regeneration, protection, blind, aegis, might, blind, and more blind, as well as lots of AoE heals. They can do this while remaining effective in straight up fights, and while keeping themselves healed well. The only thing better than another guardian is two guardians.

Condition duration is pointless, for starters. Burn stacks in duration, not intensity – and since we already have a million ways to apply burns, duration is rarely an issue. Burn is not worth relying on heavily at all for damage (i.e. don’t bother with condition damage) because so many classes can apply it and all it does is make them burn longer, thus wasting most of that potential damage.

With that out of the way, most Guardian builds involve crits. Not involving crits would be the strange choice. The baseline critical chance most people shoot for is 40% before sigils and traits and whatnot. Greatsword and scepter/focus are fine choices in PvE, though your mileage with scepter in WvW will vary greatly and you’ll probably want to swap that for staff instead.

Generally speaking, if you don’t have at least some critical, you’re missing out on a ton of damage. Especially when you start factoring in things like sigils and traits that operate on crits. Right now, Guardians have an amazing synergy with critical hits in the form of Altruistic Healing and Empowering Might which gives might on a critical hit. Essentially you heal yourself on crits, and it’s lovely.

So yes, you’re doing fine. Though I would advise against building for burns specifically.

I would gladly take less damage per hit and zero travel time, like the Necromancer’s scepter attack. Then it would be useful.

Hey guys,

One of the things that always bugged me is trying to keep track of trait cooldowns. What I mean is, things like the Thief’s Critical Haste which has a 30 second cooldown. Instead of leaving players in the dark, I’d really like to see a “condition” applied to my character describing the fact that I won’t be triggering that ability for the duration so that I know what’s going on. When it’s gone, I can change tactics accordingly. This would really benefit Guardians too, with that new chill hammer trait that has a 45 second cooldown. Pretty much every class has one of these.

You could even extend it to sigils too, like Sigil of Rage. 45 seconds on that one.