Guardians, blocks and unblockables.

I dont know where to post this so I pisted it here due to being a player v player situation.

I want to ask about guardians balancing too.

To get started:Guardian has a very low health pool due to the sustain of the class coming from blocks...This was a launch balancing thing.

Blocks being a counter to a lot skills, say using shelter for example at the start of a rapid fire....

My issue is that the class sustain has been heavily outdated with classes packing a multitude of unblockable attacks and some are graced to have 6-10s of pure unblockable attacks... When playing something like DH, I find myself asking "well what was the point of blocks then"...

Is there any chance that Guardian as a whole could recieve a very small vitality increase to compensate?

What do the players think about this?Im not a fan of having counters to counters such as shadowmeld or this but it may be viewed differently by others here...

Thoughts?

Honestly, considering the way game developed i think that both Health pool differences and Armor differences should be completely revisited by developers

not really

@kasoki.5180 said:Honestly, considering the way game developed i think that both Health pool differences and Armor differences should be completely revisited by developers

I agree.Most other things have evolved since 2012 but both armor value and healthpool are stuck at launch levels. Not all classes need to be touched upon but some do. I wish they'd just completely scrap their sense of symmetry with the class design as it's already partially done. Revenant was meant to not have weapon swap, and engi was meant to have a large healthpool like necro and warrior.They've done a few small things lately to address the discrepancy like giving Herald the +10% max health minor trait, but I don't think it's enough, and these solutions are hotfixes at best. With Toughness based amulets almost completely gone from PvP at this point, I'd say elementalist needs a larger healthpool to be competitive again.

Edit: I don't think Unblockables are a huge issue even in PvP. Realistically there's only 3 builds that have those.

@Yannir.4132 said:

@kasoki.5180 said:Honestly, considering the way game developed i think that both Health pool differences and Armor differences should be completely revisited by developers

If Ele had larger health pool I could probably drop healing amulets or roll with ones that dont have vitality

I know this may come as a surprise to some, but guardian ability to block damage outside of FB is pretty meh. Guardian ability to mitigate damage as well outside of FB tomes is pretty weak. And the ability to avoid damage is non-existent.

What keeps gurdian a float in PvP is healing. More accurately boon and heal spam for FB and LoW for everything else. If LoW is removed tomorrow gurdian dps builds would have the worst sustainability among all classes in PvP.

Many players, I included, suggested before that Anet review the purpose of HP pool. It is not a guardian specific issue, but HP pools overall do not make any sense at all currently. They are a relic system from the game release that serves no purpose.

Evasions and invulnerabilities are the new block, take it from engineers and mesmers.

Guardians are easily the first class I target as a gunflame warrior.

@sephiroth.4217 said:

@Yannir.4132 said:

@kasoki.5180 said:Honestly, considering the way game developed i think that both Health pool differences and Armor differences should be completely revisited by developers

While I do not think hp pool is a huge issue for gurdian (still limits diversity significantly in PvP) it is surely the number one issue for ele. Most ele builds are forced to take HP and healing to be competitive, which leaves no room for damage.

I suggested this very thing in the pvp forum here.

The gap between the minimum health pool and medium health pool is 4.3k while the gap between the medium health pool and maximum health pool is 3.3k.

An appropriate buff would be to just give the minimum health pool a flat 1000 hp buff. This by no means would solve all our problems or even push unviable into the territory of viable but it would certainly help guardians wishing to take non-vitality amulets in pvp and build more armorsets without needing to invest as much into vitality for wvw.

And that's all from just a fairness aspect. If we really start looking at the current game balance, OP, kasoki and Yanni are absolutely correct; HP pools need to be revisited. They shouldn't remain static over time considering the power-creep and arms race this game has with increasing amounts of counter measures, counter-counter measures and such that are being added with each expac.

This has been such an issue since the expansions came out and the counter argument to this is that the Guardian has so many blocks but when they are considering blocks they are also counting Aegis which is insanely overrated on it usefulness(and as a side note Unblockable blows right past it also). Because it isn't controlled by the player with regard to the passive one from VoC and barely controlled by the player on the active from VoC, one hit from ANYTHING and it goes down be this the first hit off of a multi hit attack or a hit from a B.S. trash mob while facing the boss, we also are the only class that has no Evades available in any of our weapon skills or utilities (Elites included). What hits the base Guardian class so hard is that we were primarily designed to be heavily oriented towards support when the game was released but we have been pretty much over shadowed in many ways that we could fill those roles by other classes , this doesn't make us unplayable but it does make us to dependent on the whatever direction the Elite class puts us in with very little variation. Not sure of what ways to address this are but some more options would be nice.

@RUNICBLACK.7630 said:This has been such an issue since the expansions came out and the counter argument to this is that the Guardian has so many blocks but when they are considering blocks they are also counting Aegis which is insanely overrated on it usefulness(and as a side note Unblockable blows right past it also). Because it isn't controlled by the player with regard to the passive one from VoC and barely controlled by the player on the active from VoC, one hit from ANYTHING and it goes down be this the first hit off of a multi hit attack or a hit from a B.S. trash mob while facing the boss, we also are the only class that has no Evades available in any of our weapon skills or utilities (Elites included). What hits the base Guardian class so hard is that we were primarily designed to be heavily oriented towards support when the game was released but we have been pretty much over shadowed in many ways that we could fill those roles by other classes , this doesn't make us unplayable but it does make us to dependent on the whatever direction the Elite class puts us in with very little variation. Not sure of what ways to address this are but some more options would be nice.

I agree with this. Aegis is so overrated.

.

I honestly don't think Vitality would really make that much of a difference, I've always thought that giving a 1 to at the most 2 seconds of Protection when Aegis drops would be more useful without going to overpowered, but I'm not sure because it's kind of a delicate balance there. It could be made into something you trait to gain, possibly add to Tenacious Defense which I personally thought was under powered for a Grandmaster trait.

@MyDisLegend.1678 said:Guardians carry most conquest games and are really strong tanks. Why do we need a vitality boost for them again?

Theres no doubt a Firebrand, which is a PoF spec, has the nessecary tools to survive, even just via tomes.

Its the other 2 specs that are having trouble, like what is the point of the F3 Shield wall when everyone has unblockables? Whats the point of Shelter?Both of those blocks arent really used by FB but they are essential to DH survivaiblity

@MyDisLegend.1678 said:Guardians carry most conquest games and are really strong tanks. Why do we need a vitality boost for them again?

Mirage is awesome so we should never consider any buffs to core Mesmer or chrono.

Just because one build for an entire class is meta, or even outperforming, that does not mean that the entire class should not be considered.

@sephiroth.4217 said:

@MyDisLegend.1678 said:Guardians carry most conquest games and are really strong tanks. Why do we need a vitality boost for them again?

I have been playing a bit of DH lately after I mostly stopped for 18 month. I was surprised of how inefficient SoC is now with all the unblockable shit thrown around.

Beside HP pools all the blocks and unblockable attacks need an overhaul.

Totally agree with OP. Guardian needs to have a base HP boost. I'm too lazy to calculate but i would love to know how many unblockable skills/traits have been added since the game launch. Especially on HOT/POF specs.

If there was a way to give only core and DH a vitality boost in sPvP, I'd support that. FBs survive by their massive healing and ability to actually prevent damage via tomes, and more vitality would just make the class a bit too easy to troll nodes with, imo.

@voltaicbore.8012 said:If there was a way to give only core and DH a vitality boost in sPvP, I'd support that. FBs survive by their massive healing and ability to actually prevent damage via tomes, and more vitality would just make the class a bit too easy to troll nodes with, imo.

1000 more hp isn't going to push FB from balanced to overpowered. Plus they can always tune FB skills to compensate.

1000 more hp to compensate block is just bad.Look at the necro complaining for years with their 30k pool. Whith the current dps increase and the rampant power creep this will bring nothing on the table.The problem is that they have murdered a game mechanic by providing by far too much access to unblockable attack. This is bad design and should be addressed without lazy workaround.Block / Aegis should bring something. Otherwise delete them.

@voltaicbore.8012 said:If there was a way to give only core and DH a vitality boost in sPvP, I'd support that. FBs survive by their massive healing and ability to actually prevent damage via tomes, and more vitality would just make the class a bit too easy to troll nodes with, imo.

I think in the case of Firebrand, if we got like 2500 more health baseline, what would probably happen is some Firebrands would change to Harriers Amulet. That would in turn force ANet to reduce baseline boon duration in F3, and that would force every Firebrand into Harriers to get anything at all. Wouldn't be too much, probably a -1 second shave to Stability and Protection uptimes.And we'd be balanced again. They wouldn't even need to touch healing values as Harrier has lower healing power than Mender's.I don't really want to speculate what it would do to core and DH builds. It's harder to predict as adding something those builds aren't reliant on wouldn't necessarily do much more than make them last a few seconds longer in fights.

@"sephiroth.4217" said:To get started:Guardian has a very low health pool due to the sustain of the class coming from blocks...This was a launch balancing thing.

this is inacurate information you are running on.

"launch balancing thing" for guardian was that it has lesser hp pool than a warrior that was being compensated by passive HP regen (virtue of resolve) at no point during the launch phase did AN ever implied blocks being taken into consideration on the balancing side of this (and frankly back then it was not uncommon to see certain warrior builds to facilitate more blocks than guardian, at least as far as block uptime is considered)

as for thoughts in how the design aged - damage per second did obvioulsy powercreeped up during this time unfortunately, but can't say if there were any changes to resolve's passive to balance it out. didn't pay attention to it tbh.

That feeling you get when you're running DH and a half-decent soulbeast comes into view

@Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

@"sephiroth.4217" said:To get started:Guardian has a very low health pool due to the sustain of the class coming from blocks...This was a launch balancing thing.

Guardians were design to be direct opposites to warriors. Warriors had large health pools, great passive bonuses from traits, little to no active damage mitigation, weak access to defensive boons, weak healing and regen, and utilities focused on applying conditions. On the other hand guardians were created with low health pools, weak traits, high active defenses, heavy defensive boons, high healing and regen, and utilities focused on boons and support.

Elite specs change things though and the early limitations of classes no longer hold true. Base health really should be something they look into because it allows Anet to make large balancing changes without having to inflate traits like they have been doing with Valor and Radiance for the past couple of years.

Unblockable should be reserved for skills which:

• are a single attack that can be dodged, not a drawn out chain requiring multiple dodges
• preferably have a cast time of at least 3/4s, as this allows reactive counterplay with average latency.
• have a clear, telegraphed animation and/or sound effect
• or a ground-targeted aoe that can can be seen and avoided

Good examples: Gale, Magnet, Static Field, Mirror Blade, Death's Judgement (although, this is a bit too fast, esp. with quickness).

For the most part, Anet have been good about making unblockable skills follow this rule. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unblockable

So where do we run into trouble? Mostly, it's traits and skills that apply unblockable to skills that shouldn't have it.

For example:

• Basilisk Venom applying an unblockable CC to steal, which is an instant 1200 range teleport which can't realistically be dodged without some kind of telepathy.
• Unstoppable Union / Call of the Wild applying unblockable to rapid fire, which is normally blockable. Since this comes from extreme range (1800, sometimes even more) and with quickness, it's not often possible to tell that the unblockable effect is active until it's too late and you've wasted a block.
• Malicious Reprisal applying unblockable to revenant attacks (especially on Unrelenting Assault, where block is the preferred defense - it requires 2 dodges otherwise).

Since Guardian relies on block so heavily, it suffers the most from this. Other classes tend to rely on passive or active invulns (Warrior, Engi, Mirage), or stealth/escape (Thief, Mesmer), but it can still be frustrating. Eg. On my engi, I often reflexively swap to Toolkit, then use Gear Shield for a 2 second block in response to an incoming rapid fire from off-screen only to realise too late that "oh ffs, it's unblockable", and have to waste dodges, being left with no defense now and at low health.