Make tomes like engineer kits

Probably been said before, but I think Tomes would be better as "kits". In other words, we can swap in and out of them at will (like an Engineer kit). In this case eliminate the charges and give the skills meaningful cooldown based upon the impact of the skill.

This way we can switch to a tome to use a skill when it's required. If I need a projectile bubble, F3 and bubble, then immediately back to weapons for DPS.

Right now it's an all-or-nothing kind of thing.

Virtues in general are meant to be all or nothing

My suggestion was to at least scale the cooldown of the tomes according to how many pages were used. The current mechanic makes you faceroll all the abilities because the cooldown for that tome whether you used 1 page or all pages is the same. A 90 second CD on Courage seems extreme if you only needed to use one page before swapping back to melee.

@Skyline Crash.6254 said:Virtues in general are meant to be all or nothing

And elite specs are supposed to change the class in ways like that. Attunements were meant to be exclusive to each other, Shroud was meant to be an extra health bar, pet was supposed to be a permanent ally for ranger to manage. You can't say all these can be fundamentally changed, but it's virtues that have to have big cooldowns.

Anyway, the ship has sailed now, we won't see a rework of the spec.

Why not reduce cd to 10s (instant) each and lower the amount of pages to 3? 5 traited.

That would make the choice of tome a strategic choice but still making them accessible.

Requires close to zero development.

Only if there are cooldowns on them still, because we got many traits tied to using our F-abilities, and jumping in and out however we want will make Guardian the most broken profession ever.

Lord, no. They're enough as is. The guild I run with in WvW doesn't have much trouble with cooldowns at all. People should really just learn to manage their time in them better. All removing the cooldown from them will is cause ANet to nerf them heavily which will probably make only the Cook Book worthwhile. Then we'd be stuck with a spec that only has about 1/3 of its intended functionality.

I totally agree. I feel that tomes should act like kits, and the 5 pages be a pool of charges that are shared between all of them. I was gonna write a long post about why I think this would be a good change, how to deal with things like certain traits in an intuitive manner and the virtue passives, but you're right in that this has probably been discussed a hundred times before.

edit: ah, nevermind, here goes:

So the 3 tomes should be psuedo-kits in that you can swap in and out of them without cooldowns, but using any skill in them consumes a "charge" (a page). These pages are a pool that is shared by all 3 Tomes. So if you activated a skill from Tome of Courage, you'd drop down to 4 pages. Then if you switched to Resolve and activated a skill, you'd drop down to 3 pages. Furthermore, pages would regenerate at a set rate, e.g. 1 every 5 seconds (and this could change with traits, just like the total number of pages). This would tie nicely into the Mantras that Firebrand can use as well, as it is a similar mechanic.

So let's look at Guardian mechanics this change would interact with:

• Virtue PassivesVirtues used to act like Signets - you either had the passive effect or you could activate them for a more powerful effect, but lose the passive for a while. So how should this work when the Virtues/Tomes will never be on cooldown?

Well, these are no longer virtue "signets" - elite specs are, after all, supposed to change the inherent mechanics of a profession. They're tomes. I have two suggestions, an easy-to-implement one that would require more balancing of the class overall, or a complex-to-implement one that keeps the "tradeoff" aspect of activating your Virtues/Tomes (and therefore would require less re-balancing, in theory).

SIMPLE IDEA: Part of the Firebrand's GM Loremaster trait ("Retain Virtues passives while they are on cooldown.") becomes baseline for the elite spec. As in - you're never without the passive effects, because the tomes are never on cooldown.

COMPLEX-TO-IMPLEMENT IDEA: The effectiveness of the passives are proportional to the number of pages you have at that moment. So if you have all 5 pages/charges, each attack of Justice applies the full burn, the Resolve heal ticks at full strength, and Courage recharges at the normal rate. But if you only had 2 pages at the moment the Justice burn was applied, you'd only apply 2 fifths of the normal duration (or perhaps, while you have less than the full number of pages ready, it takes more attacks to trigger Justice). The Resolve heal would only be 2 fifths as strong, or the rate at which it ticked would only be 2 fifths what it should. And Courage's recharge to Aegis would be only recharging at 2 fifths the normal rate.

This adds more flavour to using pages - if you barely touch them, just as if you barely activated your virtues in core Guardian/Dragonhunter, you just get the full benefit of their passive abilities. If you spam Tome skills, then you'd get barely any use out of the passives.

• TraitsHere are the traits that would need looking at if activating a tome had no CD.

• Justice is Blind — Gain a light aura and blind nearby foes when you activate Virtue of Justice.This could be tied to Justice Tome #5.

• Renewed Justice — Virtue of Justice is renewed when you kill a foe.This could be tied to Justice Tome #5 (it's a similar skill anyway to the activated ability of core Virtue of Justice - gives all allies the burning proc - so this is intuitive)

• Wrath of Justice — Striking an enemy with justice's active effect triggers signet of wrath.This could just be tied to Justice Tome #1. The trait has an inherent CD already.

• Courageous Return — Virtue of Courage is recharged when you revive an ally or rally yourself.This could be tied to Courage Tome #5

• Purity of Body — Your Virtue of Resolve passive effect also regenerates endurance.The effectiveness of this (15% bonus regeneration) is affected by number of pages remaining (1 out of 5 pages = 3%), or it becomes baseline.

• Inspired Virtue — Virtues now also apply the following boons to allies when activated: Justice-might / Resolve-regeneration / Courage-protectionTied to the #5 skill for each tome.

• Virtue of Retribution — Gain retaliation when you activate a virtue. Retaliation you apply lasts longer.Tied to the #5 skill for each tome.

• Absolute Resolution — Activating Virtue of Resolve removes conditions from nearby allies. Virtue of Resolve's passive effect is stronger.The condition removal is tied to Resolve Tome #5.

• Power of the Virtuous — Deal extra damage for each boon you have. Virtues recharge faster.The Tome Skills recharge faster. Works alongside the Firebrand trait Loremaster (Tome skills gain reduced recharge) - (together, tome skills would have a recharge of 56%, they wouldn't stack additively).

• Indomitable Courage — Activating virtue of courage breaks stun and grants stability to nearby allies.Courage Tome #5 breaks stun for yourself and allies.

(firebrand traits)

• Swift Scholar — Equipping or stowing a Virtue grants you quickness. (3s, on a 5s CD)Longer CD.

• Legendary Lore — Tome skills gain bonuses from scribbling in the margins by ancient bards.Additionally, increases the rate at which pages recharge.

WHY I THINK THIS IS NECESSARY/A GOOD CHANGEAt the moment, tomes are clunky to use. I want to use them. But what if I want to just make the projectile shield from Courage? That one has the lengthiest cooldown... it makes me feel like I'm wasting the skill if I just use the skill and then drop the tome. So I feel like I should spam all 5 skills just to get out of it with the most benefit... because it goes down on the same recharge all the same regardless of the number of pages you use. It feels like the game is punishing me if I don't just spam every skill (as quickly as possible) whenever I use a tome - if I stay using it for too long, gameplay suffers since you're stuck doing nothing as you try to conserve pages. If you don't want to stick around in it, you just spam all 5 skills without thinking, so you feel like you get your "money's worth" out of using the skill and putting your virtue on recharge, which doesn't feel like skillful play.

Having tomes as kits allow you to flit in between using tomes and not far more easily. You'd feel more like you can use one of the cool Tome skills without hindering yourself for the next 30/40/50 seconds.

Finally, with the increased ease of use of these tome skills, the numbers for them can ofc be revisited. I have some ideas for that, particularly regarding the #5 skills, but the post is already lengthy enough.

Honestly i was under the impression people were just over reacting with this.... and today i finally stepped into FB and omg .... i didnt have a single instant defense, or a good soruce of heal.... like if something with range was melting me by the time i pressed (and casted) f3 and then 3 and then target the floor.... no need to say it was too late .... the only way i could possible use the defense kit (wich yeah its really nice if defense is all you need to do, and that never ever happens) was starting on it and throwing all CDs as in spam festival, knowing that if i left early (with pages left) they would be wasted, but that also staying on that mode would only delay my CD since the timer starts when you leave the tome.... So for defensive thing is pretyt much a preventive use instead of a reactive (like courage from DH) wich you waste half of it 60% of the time..... Now for the healing, if i want to get heal i need to cast like 3 different stuff, and even so the healing is no that great.... the worse part is that you are pretty much locked out of any offensive skill (other than ulities) till you spam every single page, or just leave tome and trash those pages....i mean taking druid's CA as example, you can jump in, cast your big heals, leave CA and keeping dpsing, not only CAs heals are like x10 stronger, also if you leave it early, you would only need to refill the time you used, not start all over again (and even if you were to start over, it would be faster than tomes CDs)....

@Denar.3950 said:

At the moment, tomes are clunky to use. I want to use them. But what if I want to just make the projectile shield from Courage? That one has the lengthiest cooldown... it makes me feel like I'm wasting the skill if I just use the skill and then drop the tome. So I feel like I should spam all 5 skills just to get out of it with the most benefit... because it goes down on the same recharge all the same regardless of the number of pages you use. It feels like the game is punishing me if I don't just spam every skill (as quickly as possible) whenever I use a tome - if I stay using it for too long, gameplay suffers since you're stuck doing nothing as you try to conserve pages. If you don't want to stick around in it, you just spam all 5 skills without thinking, so you feel like you get your "money's worth" out of using the skill and putting your virtue on recharge, which doesn't feel like skillful play.

Exactly my point, too...because right now the Tomes have such a long cooldown, it's not worth going into them unless you're going to faceroll all the skills. It does not work as well as an Engineers kits or even an Elementalist's attunements where you can select one or two skills and then swap kits/attunements for another one or two skills and then usually swap back fairly quickly. As such, there is no mixing or even min-maxing of skill use for Firebrand...hit F3 to burn all your buffs...hit F1 to burn all your damage skills...hit F2 to burn all your healing...move on to weapons for damage as it'll be awhile for the first tome to recharge, which will be the damage one, so hopefully you didn't need healing or buffs inbetween. I guess it's fortunate that the mantras have ongoing recharges if you don't burn them up all at once, too. There has to be a way, though, of adjusting the benefits each page gives and their cooldowns so that we don't have to camp in one tome or speed-read to get the most out of it.

What if the tomes made use of the new ammo system?

Guardians could go in and out of the tomes at will, like engineer kits, but the pages regenerated like the ammo system, regeneration rate set to the same current tome CD divided by the number of pages. That way they could maintain the power of the current skills, while giving the system more flexibility and not forcing Guardians to use every page each time they activate a tome.

@Fracture.6512 said:What if the tomes made use of the new ammo system?

Guardians could go in and out of the tomes at will, like engineer kits, but the pages regenerated like the ammo system, regeneration rate set to the same current tome CD divided by the number of pages. That way they could maintain the power of the current skills, while giving the system more flexibility and not forcing Guardians to use every page each time they activate a tome.

Global ammo system for all three tomes, like 7 pages untraited and 10 pages traited. Every 10th second one page regenerates.

And instant swapping.

This would bring in complexity, accessibility and strategic thinking in playing the tomes.