Guardians, blocks and unblockables.

[RUNICBLACK.7630]

Warrior's Signet of Might has caused your attacks to be Unblockable as earlier as 2013 (originally 10 seconds now only 6 seconds) and the trait Signet Mastery was put in 2015 and it triggers when you hit someone that is below 50% health for the same 6 seconds of unblockable attacks with a a 20 second cool down (considering 20% reduction).

[sephiroth.4217]

@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.

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.

Healing Signet was stronger than Resolve... and probably still is.

They never needed to imply anything because a long time ago a dev told us why classes were balanced the way they were, back near launch when they used to share thier visions of each class.

Iirc, thief is low hp due to evades and stealth, elementalist due to the amount of healing sources and guardian due to blocks and a few healing sources... Thief still has evades and stealth that work, ele has been given more healing skills and guard was given more blocks but blocks are ineffective due to the amount of unblockables that have been introduced.

[Lord Trejgon.2809]

@sephiroth.4217 said:

@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.

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.

Healing Signet was stronger than Resolve... and probably still is.

and should be because it ocupies dedicated healing skill slot - resolve does not

They never needed to imply anything because a long time ago a dev told us why classes were balanced the way they were, back near launch when they used to share thier visions of each class.

yes and back then they said not even word on blocks being factored in on aspect of hp - it was always lower hp - but with passive regen vs high base hp with these two "should balance out in prolonged engagement"

and guardian due to blocks and a few healing sources...

and guardian due to passive hp regen*

[sephiroth.4217]

@Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

@sephiroth.4217 said:

@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.

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.

Healing Signet was stronger than Resolve... and probably still is.

and should be because it ocupies dedicated healing skill slot - resolve does not

They never needed to imply anything because a long time ago a dev told us why classes were balanced the way they were, back near launch when they used to share thier visions of each class.

yes and back then they said not even word on blocks being factored in on aspect of hp - it was always lower hp - but with passive regen vs high base hp with these two "should balance out in prolonged engagement"

and guardian due to blocks and a few healing sources...

and guardian due to passive hp regen*

Im sorry but this is just getting to a nit picking stage that serves no purpose, I cant even tell if you are against the idea or not.

[Lord Trejgon.2809]

@sephiroth.4217 said:Im sorry but this is just getting to a nit picking stage that serves no purpose, I cant even tell if you are against the idea or not.

I am correcting the false assumption you based whole thread on....

as for idea of touching on that balance to make sure it's up with power creep that occured during this time - yes, that would be worthy of looking at by AN.

[sephiroth.4217]

@Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

@"sephiroth.4217" said:Im sorry but this is just getting to a nit picking stage that serves no purpose, I cant even tell if you are against the idea or not.

I am correcting the false assumption you based whole thread on....

as for idea of touching on that balance to make sure it's up with power creep that occured during this time - yes, that would be worthy of looking at by AN.

But you havent corrected anything though... If anything all you did was point out that guardian has resolve as part of thier balancing, resolve not actually contributing much to overall sustain but you were right about it being apart of it.

In my mind when I said "sources of heals", I was thinking about resolve, aegis heals traits, blocking to gain aegis for heals, staff, shield n so on, I probably should have explained that a bit better rather than just assuming people knew what I meant, apologies for that.

That also a good example I guess in terms to guard balance on blocks, theres a lot of traits that rely on successfully blocking attacks... in both core and DH.Block to remove condi, block to apply burn, block to heal, block for might, block for protection, block for aegis and so on, to me, the class feels 80% reliant on blocks.

[Lord Trejgon.2809]

@"sephiroth.4217" said:But you havent corrected anything though... If anything all you did was point out that guardian has resolve as part of thier balancing, resolve not actually contributing much to overall sustain but you were right about it being apart of it.

in your OP you stated that guardian had lower hp pool compared to warrior because of "launch time balancing" making it block reliant - I was correcting you that it was not because of blocks, but because of innate hp regen which is the correction of your assumption I speak off. I also refered to the fact that during that period "blocks" on guardian were not as prominent as they are now today with some specific builds being able to provide better block uptime than guardian did at the same time, therefore tying the issue to just increased amounts of unblockables is incorrect.

But, looking at how the balancing on this aspect aged with expansions, powercreep etc. etc. is something worthy of AN checking out.

[Indure.5410]

@"Lord Trejgon.2809" said:in your OP you stated that guardian had lower hp pool compared to warrior because of "launch time balancing" making it block reliant - I was correcting you that it was not because of blocks, but because of innate hp regen which is the correction of your assumption I speak off. I also refered to the fact that during that period "blocks" on guardian were not as prominent as they are now today with some specific builds being able to provide better block uptime than guardian did at the same time, therefore tying the issue to just increased amounts of unblockables is incorrect.

But, looking at how the balancing on this aspect aged with expansions, powercreep etc. etc. is something worthy of AN checking out.

It was not because of innate HP regen though, because in terms of numbers that makes zero sense. Warriors have ~7,500 more health than Guardians. You think VoR 84 health per tick is valuable against that difference. A fight would need to go on for 4 1/2 minutes for VoR to catch up to that health difference. Keep in mind the healing coefficient for VoR is a measly .06, so we can't even offset its weakness by investing heavily into healing power.

[otto.5684]

@Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

@"sephiroth.4217" said:But you havent corrected anything though... If anything all you did was point out that guardian has resolve as part of thier balancing, resolve not actually contributing much to overall sustain but you were right about it being apart of it.

in your OP you stated that guardian had lower hp pool compared to warrior because of "launch time balancing" making it block reliant - I was correcting you that it was not because of blocks, but because of innate hp regen which is the correction of your assumption I speak off. I also refered to the fact that during that period "blocks" on guardian were not as prominent as they are now today with some specific builds being able to provide better block uptime than guardian did at the same time, therefore tying the issue to just increased amounts of unblockables is incorrect.

But, looking at how the balancing on this aspect aged with expansions, powercreep etc. etc. is something worthy of AN checking out.

Does the original design of how Anet balanced guardian matters at all as of right now?!

Beside that, with the exception of FB, guardian has limited blocks. You get maybe 3 aegis in a minute? And outside of SoC (DH only) the only other reliable block is focus 5, which has a 35 sec CD and only blocks three attacks. Add the million unblockable skills into the mix and you see how useless this block one hit is. Honestly, if they drop aegis all together from VoC and SoC it would barely matter.

The only reason gurdian dps builds are still somewhat afloat in PvP is LoW.

[Deimos.4263]

Boosting the health pool might help, but we're already trying to do that indirectly with vitality/Valkyrie builds. It's an ok workaround, but just ok.

IMO the real issue is that toughness just isn't all that effective given the amount of power creep and damage. You don't need a huge health pool if toughness is an effective option to diminish unblockable bursts. Armor/toughness used to be a secondary "block" -- absorb what you cannot block. What we really need is toughness that works well enough to be a solid choice again.

[coro.3176]

It'd be nice if the game could go back to pre-HoT, or even HoT burst power levels. Back then, it used to be like "WHOA, I just got hit for a 9k backstab! That's crazy burst". Now people barely blink if an autoattack does 6k or a skill like CoR does 15k.

40k quickness unblockable rapid fire is the norm now. That's lethal damage for most non-tanky players in half the channel - 0.9s.

.. but I don't think we can go back. There's been too much power creep, too much support creep, too much defense/invuln creep.

The best band-aid for it from Guard's perspective would be to (IMO) stop applying unblockable to skills that shouldn't have it.

[Lord Trejgon.2809]

@otto.5684 said:Does the original design of how Anet balanced guardian matters at all as of right now?!

only as much as sepiroth claims it being reason for lower health pool of guardian, and uses increased amount of unblockable skills as an argument why guardian needs more health ;)

Beside that, with the exception of FB, guardian has limited blocks. You get maybe 3 aegis in a minute? And outside of SoC (DH only) the only other reliable block is focus 5, which has a 35 sec CD and only blocks three attacks. Add the million unblockable skills into the mix and you see how useless this block one hit is. Honestly, if they drop aegis all together from VoC and SoC it would barely matter.

which supports my point of correcting sepiroth on his OP's (as in opening post's) assumptions, thank you :)

EDIT:

@Indure.5410 said:It was not because of innate HP regen though, because in terms of numbers that makes zero sense. Warriors have ~7,500 more health than Guardians. You think VoR 84 health per tick is valuable against that difference. A fight would need to go on for 4 1/2 minutes for VoR to catch up to that health difference. Keep in mind the healing coefficient for VoR is a measly .06, so we can't even offset its weakness by investing heavily into healing power.

it was according to ArenaNet themselves, and yes playerbase have thrown those exacly numbers back at AN when arguing against it.

[Arcaedus.7290]

At this point, does it really matter what the justification was for guard being placed in the lowest health pool?

Since vanilla GW2, increasing amounts of unblockables has offset guardian's primary defence of blocking, and power creep has offset their passive regen.

No matter the reason of why, the point is guard could use some health. To keep the effect on overall balance minimal, I think a good buff for the time being would be a buff to the minimum health pools just for the sake of fairness since the gap between them and medium health is larger than the gap between medium health and max health pool.

[sephiroth.4217]

@Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

@otto.5684 said:Does the original design of how Anet balanced guardian matters at all as of right now?!

only as much as sepiroth claims it being reason for lower health pool of guardian, and uses increased amount of unblockable skills as an argument why guardian needs more health ;)

Beside that, with the exception of FB, guardian has limited blocks. You get maybe 3 aegis in a minute? And outside of SoC (DH only) the only other reliable block is focus 5, which has a 35 sec CD and only blocks three attacks. Add the million unblockable skills into the mix and you see how useless this block one hit is. Honestly, if they drop aegis all together from VoC and SoC it would barely matter.

which supports my point of correcting sepiroth on his OP's (as in opening post's) assumptions, thank you :)

EDIT:

@Indure.5410 said:It was not because of innate HP regen though, because in terms of numbers that makes zero sense. Warriors have ~7,500 more health than Guardians. You think VoR 84 health per tick is valuable against that difference. A fight would need to go on for 4 1/2 minutes for VoR to catch up to that health difference. Keep in mind the healing coefficient for VoR is a measly .06, so we can't even offset its weakness by investing heavily into healing power.

it was according to ArenaNet themselves, and yes playerbase have thrown those exacly numbers back at AN when arguing against it.

The time of being polite is over, you only need half a brain to see Guardians have been balanced around blocks, you corrected nothing. All you have done is argue semantics because you can't comprehend something that everybody else can.

I honestly thought you were smarter than this but you proved me wrong, either that or you're being a troll.

[Math.5123]

I've been talking a lot about this on my stream lately (core guard perspective).Guardian in it's core has no access to vigor unless you drop meditations, it also has very little access to blocks. It actually has less block uptime than; Staff mirage, Holosmith, Spellbreaker and comparable to rev.

The lack of viable healing skills is laughable on guardian, the go to being a 1.6k base heal untraited. The amount of damage is the only saving grace.

This being said, core guard (and DH to a lesser extent) survive by pressuring your opponent into playing defensively. You'll never win an attrition fight.

Being one of two classes without innate evade frames tied to weapon skills doesn't help either.

I don't think a health increase would be needed so long as we're forced into radiance in order to do damage. Valkyrie is a strong enough option. I would rather have higher protection uptime tbh.

[otto.5684]

@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:I've been talking a lot about this on my stream lately (core guard perspective).Guardian in it's core has no access to vigor unless you drop meditations, it also has very little access to blocks. It actually has less block uptime than; Staff mirage, Holosmith, Spellbreaker and comparable to rev.

The lack of viable healing skills is laughable on guardian, the go to being a 1.6k base heal untraited. The amount of damage is the only saving grace.

This being said, core guard (and DH to a lesser extent) survive by pressuring your opponent into playing defensively. You'll never win an attrition fight.

Being one of two classes without innate evade frames tied to weapon skills doesn't help either.

I don't think a health increase would be needed so long as we're forced into radiance in order to do damage. Valkyrie is a strong enough option. I would rather have higher protection uptime tbh.

I don’t think the issue with HP is that core guardian power build needs HP. It does not. But the HP pool could significantly help DH and other non-radiance builds that do not use Valkyrie.

And I suggested this before. I think VoC should do more than 1 aegis. This is quite useless. It should also add 1k toughness for 5 sec. And this is not much by any means. Warrior gets 4 secs of 1k toughness with EVERY CC BREAK.

[Math.5123]

@otto.5684 said:

@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:I've been talking a lot about this on my stream lately (core guard perspective).Guardian in it's core has no access to vigor unless you drop meditations, it also has very little access to blocks. It actually has less block uptime than; Staff mirage, Holosmith, Spellbreaker and comparable to rev.

The lack of viable healing skills is laughable on guardian, the go to being a 1.6k base heal untraited. The amount of damage is the only saving grace.

This being said, core guard (and DH to a lesser extent) survive by pressuring your opponent into playing defensively. You'll never win an attrition fight.

Being one of two classes without innate evade frames tied to weapon skills doesn't help either.

I don't think a health increase would be needed so long as we're forced into radiance in order to do damage. Valkyrie is a strong enough option. I would rather have higher protection uptime tbh.

I don’t think the issue with HP is that core guardian power build needs HP. It does not. But the HP pool could significantly help DH and other non-radiance builds that do not use Valkyrie.

And I suggested this before. I think VoC should do more than 1 aegis. This is quite useless. It should also add 1k toughness for 5 sec. And this is not much by any means. Warrior gets 4 secs of 1k toughness with EVERY CC BREAK.

While I would love to be able to run demolisher on DH, the issues with the spec runs so much deeper than base health. I just don't think health is what needs to be targeted.

[ChillyKoti.1928]

Guardian's sustain is a bit weak imo. Especially if you play Dragonhunter. A lot of skills and traits are just unused by everyone. Also, too many times I died with Shield of Courage active. Also, with all those unblockable attacks beeing added in the game, I abandonned the shield on my warrior in pvp because of this. Not much use now. Guess I have to addapt.

[Deimos.4263]

@Edge.8724 said:Guardian's sustain is a bit weak imo. Especially if you play Dragonhunter. A lot of skills and traits are just unused by everyone. Also, too many times I died with Shield of Courage active. Also, with all those unblockable attacks beeing added in the game, I abandonned the shield on my warrior in pvp because of this. Not much use now. Guess I have to addapt.

That's what I was trying to say above re: toughness, but it's really about sustain. When I started playing in 2015, pre-HoT, guardian sustain was pretty darn good. People often played defensive tank/bunker guards with Power/Vitality/Toughness because it worked. Now, it just doesn't. Running a PVT build you'll give up significant amounts of crits just as before, but you won't sustain/survive like you used to. You do see the odd Celestial build, but other than that, toughness/sustain as an option is dead. You have to try to burst them down before they burst you down. Add in the unblockables and it's even worse.

[Deimos.4263]

@otto.5684 said:And I suggested this before. I think VoC should do more than 1 aegis. This is quite useless. It should also add 1k toughness for 5 sec. And this is not much by any means. Warrior gets 4 secs of 1k toughness with EVERY CC BREAK.I think you're really onto something here.

Improving the effectiveness of toughness itself across the board as I had suggested would have too many far-reaching consequences, but applying some amount of toughness for several seconds in addition to aegis makes a lot of sense to me. We're trying to improve guardian sustain, not toughness for all.

But maybe instead of adding toughness to VoC specifically, it should be a feature of any application of aegis? (Stack on duration in the event of multiple applications.) The original issue sephiroth mentioned is that aegis alone just isn't doing enough, so buffing aegis itself this makes sense to me. Maybe protection works better here? I don't know.

[Celestia.9128]

I'd prefer if we have something that punishes over-aggressive enemies...like VoC granting a buff for 5s that quadruple the damage of Retaliation...

[Math.5123]

@Deimos.4263 said:

@otto.5684 said:And I suggested this before. I think VoC should do more than 1 aegis. This is quite useless. It should also add 1k toughness for 5 sec. And this is not much by any means. Warrior gets 4 secs of 1k toughness with EVERY CC BREAK.I think you're really onto something here.

Improving the effectiveness of toughness itself across the board as I had suggested would have too many far-reaching consequences, but applying some amount of toughness for several seconds in addition to aegis makes a lot of sense to me. We're trying to improve guardian sustain, not toughness for all.

But maybe instead of adding toughness to VoC specifically, it should be a feature of

any

application of aegis? (Stack on duration in the event of multiple applications.) The original issue sephiroth mentioned is that aegis alone just isn't doing enough, so buffing aegis itself this makes sense to me. Maybe protection works better here? I don't know.

Having it applied to aegis is a huge blunder. Staff mesmers and conversion Holosmiths doesn't need any more added sustain. I like having it tied to f3.

[sephiroth.4217]

@Celestia.9128 said:I'd prefer if we have something that punishes over-aggressive enemies...like VoC granting a buff for 5s that quadruple the damage of Retaliation...

Thats not a bad idea... if Guardian has the block up then say something like a Soulbeast would have to decide between dumping damage on him with unblockables at the risk of hurting themselves or waiting for the block to end before dumping damage.

I also like the the toughness Idea people have mentioned

[Deimos.4263]

@"AngelLovesFredrik.6741" said:

Having it applied to aegis is a huge blunder. Staff mesmers and conversion Holosmiths doesn't need any more added sustain. I like having it tied to f3.

That may be so. I didn't consider that other classes have access to aegis application directly. We're trying to buff guardian's sustain, not everyone's. (Unless that application is provided to those other classes by a guardian, in which case it's a feature.)

[RUNICBLACK.7630]

Here is a thought how about when you have Aegis up your Retaliation damage is improved like you mention (although I do think quadrupled may be a a bit much I'm not sure myself ) and lets say when you have Protection up every time your hit you gain a bonus to Toughness kind of like the trait that gives you a bonus to your healing power. These could both be something put into a trait or not . Possible answer on the multiple for Retaliation , say the first hit while under its effect gains a times two for damage and the second is a three times and the third is a four times so for those heavy multiple unblockable multiple hit attacks this could really add up and if you add that to the increase in Toughness from the Protection modification it could add up to some real Tank effect but both could be offset by knock off the Guards Aegis and either stripping the Protection or Corrupting it along with the weakness that none of these helps against Conditions