The guardian Nov 29 "preview".

[draxynnic.3719]

On 11/12/2022 at 9:43 AM, Hallow.7368 said:

I mean if you enjoy being called a troll then: you're a troll. 

Please drop the ego lol. What you said is fact solely because you are correct that is has a cooldown. This, however, does not disprove literally anything about what I said. What do you think happens when tempest uses aftershock or druid uses F2 on white tiger? Were you under the impression that these abilities have no cooldown and are just spammed or?.. Not to mention the fact that these have large opportunity costs that would force you onto a pet that brings less damage or cc for druid or occupies a utility slot for tempest. Tempest also needs to use overload earth as part of their support rotation while using aftershock off cooldown in order to maintain protection so it's not even like they can reactively use the aegis and stability they provide without interrupting the flow of the rotation to provide their other boons since it would mean they inevitably would be using heatsync and sandsquall without prot (which means that no matter what boons are going to not have 100% uptime).

Here's another fact you can add to your aresnal though: Guard as a whole has been the most overwhelmingly dominant pick in fractals since the balance patch of March 2019 (DH picked more than FB) with FB becoming picked more often than DH in October of the same year. For 11 patches in a row FB sat at roughly a 33% pick rate meaning that firebrand specifically made up one third of all classes taken into a fractal. This includes the EoD launch patch and the exposed nerf patch that followed it. FB only started to drop after the balance patch in June this year when mech started to get picked up more often because it could actually rival FB in basically every way that made FB good. Mech has been the target of multiple nerfs recently though and despite any of that FB is still making up just over a fifth of the classes picked in fractals. That means that on average you could expect every group to have at least 1 FB in them. Very very high presence in raids and strikes too btw!

So yeah, excuse me for finding you and others utterly insane for crying and slaming your fists on your desk like children because I made the simple statement that I'd rather them get rid of sources of aoe aegis rather than pile on more to support builds. Clearly heal mech functions very well despite only having it on crisis zone I'm sure the world wouldn't explode if guard/fb got some of it's aoe aegis cut.

Also if you'd actually read anything you'd see that I specifically said that I'd be saying the exact same thing if it were any other class. So please.. don't mind me and continue to roll around in your troll cave if that is what you wish to do, troll . X)

Problem with using fractal numbers is that fractal builds are really, really 'sticky' due to agony resistance requirements. If guardian is what a player has agony resistance on, guardian is what people are going to bring to fractals. Firebrand was good for that primarily because quickbrand and condi guardian use basically the same equipment, so you can PUG as a quickness provider and switch to DPS if the group already has that covered. Raids and strikes are a better yardstick because people can more freely switch builds.

The number would also be artificially inflated because of how bad DH and WB are at the moment. Instead of someone flipping to one of those if quickness isn't needed, they stay on FB because while condibrand DPS isn't that high compared to what other professions can do, it's the best DPS guardian has. 

Which is my second biggest concern with the rework happening now - if FB gets knocked down and the WB and DH buffs don't make them competitive (and my read is that they probably aren't enough), guardian might be pushed out altogether.

(My biggest concern, incidentally, is the possible collateral effect on alacdps builds. A significant portion of the player base has already adopted the paradigm that alacrity should come from the healers, with at least one prominent content creator taking it to the point of proposing sweeping changes to enforce that paradigm. Healbrand is one of the few builds that presents the opposing case, and the others have playability issues.)

EDIT: Just remembered another reason for fractal choice to be 'sticky': Fractal potions. Unless you invest three shared inventory slots, it's easier to do fractals with one character, since then you don't need to move potions back and forth. So that's two reasons why fractal popularity isn't as good a measure of how a spec is performing as raid and strike popularity: a stronger incumbency effect, and being less convenient to switch characters.

Edited November 15, 2022 by draxynnic.3719

[deffy.1320]

Presently stand ur ground is broken, this wat i'm finding in wvw as a support FB, so ye to me stability is now broken, ur already punished in game running a support FB wit less rewards, i don't believe anet understands the class, i don't suppose they have several hours to play wvw everyday to know wat i mean.

Hunters ward strips stand ur ground so that needs a fix.

 

 

Edited November 27, 2022 by deffy.1320