Who am I:
A 746GS Awakening Guardian main. I do a good mixture of PVE and PVP, mostly Node War and Guild League (RIP), but with some red battlefield and AoS experience.
I'm also one of the top Boss blitz clearers for my class, and you will usually see me taking rank 1 for Pig King C6/7 among other top clears.
I play from Australia with around 200 ms, so some of my opinions may be colored by this.

What this post is about:
This is a list of changes I would like to see implemented on Guardian, awakening mainly but with some pre-awk skills too. Keep in mind that these are not necessarily accumulative changes; I am not proposing that we change ALL of these at once. For example, if two ideas seem broken together, they are meant to be taken as if only one idea were changed at a time.

I love the awakening guardian and her playstyle. I want to preserve the core idea of the class and the enjoyment I get from her, but there are various things that I think she needs to be more viable. Prior to the DR and SA changes, I would have had a much more aggressive list, and while she has benefited from these changes to the uncapped PvP meta, I still feel like she is a class that suffers in PvP at higher levels of gear due to mainly her slow speed and the way her healing functions.
The PVP changes I propose are mainly with Nodewar or other group content in mind. 1v1 combat with her is essentially a 'do I get grabbed? question, sadly.

BUG:
I will start with a small..well, im not sure if its a bug, but it is something a few others (with better ping than myself) have noted. When holding down inputs to complete the three attack chains for Searing Fang and Dragons maw->flow, on occasion the skill will simply...stop mid-chain as if the input is released, when we are quite clearly holding that input. This also seems to happen when attempting to slide and continue into the i-frame portion of Frigid Wind, though the reduction in hit stagger since the hit changes has somewhat alleviated this issue.

CHANGES:

Fierce Disdain (A/D + RMB) is a main-hand skill that has a transition of an incredibly brief i-frame into an SA. While I do believe that the normal I-frame portion should be extended slightly, the main issue I have is that this is listed as 'Invulnerable during the skill (PVE ONLY)' or a PVE i-frame. However, despite being able to repeatedly use the skill, I can assure you that there is a very large portion of the animation on the back end that is not invulnerable in PvE. This should be extended considerably to give guardians a usable PvE i-frame spam in line with what most classes have (Maegu, witch, wizard, shai, etc.). Most classes have this option, and I believe all classes should have it as it is entirely PVE-related.
Frost slide (Shift+W/A/S/D): The standard in class dash, it somewhat baffles me that this is a skill that cannot be used on cooldown, with nullified effects of course. This would be a nice alternative to the above, having this as a'spammable' PVE iframe. and giving the guardian just a little more repositioning and movement options. Admittedly not a big deal, but on occasion it would be nice to have access to a second side dash, for example. 

Dragons Maw (Shift+LMB): This skill is, essentially, only cast directly following Cleansing Flame. While it would be nice to see increased options for casting this skill, I believe the best thing for this skill is to lower the cooldown. Currently, the CD is 10 seconds long, in comparison to its 'preceeding' skill cleansing flame at 6 seconds. For PvE purposes, 8 seconds would clean up her combo considerably. 6 seconds would of course be ideal and likely would not be problematic in PVP, but 8 would suffice.
Infernal nemesis: our primary escape, and when we are 100% engaged,. probably could be cut down from 18 to 16 seconds to give her a faster disengage tool.

Infernal Steps: One of two skills that I have clearly locked. Awkard, slow, low damage, unprotected, and no PVP CC—I'm really not sure what the intention for this skill was. This skill is and has long been 100% useless, and even making it a full SA or FG wouldn't help its case by much. This likely needs a total redesign, replacement, or a string of damage, CC, and protection buffs to make it more than a meme.

Scalding thorn: See above. This is a little better, as in theory it could be improved to be a cancel out of some skills and then flow more smoothly into others, so there is potential as an unprotected CC/cancel. But as it stands, this is locked and forgotten about until my pit daily of undying daily comes knocking.

Juggernaut: As guardians primary movement skill over a distance, there was a time where only a FG would have been fine. But more and more classes are easily able to knock you out of FG from range, let alone by instantly moving behind you or swinging wide. I believe this should be at least changed to an SA or a FG SA to have her better fulfill her duty in engaging enemies.

Axe-throw: it feels like the range is remarkably short, and the speed of the skill does leave you surprisingly vulnerable. could probably use a slight increase in speed, but certainly needs a huge range increase; right now, it's shorter than a cleansing flame!

Frigid wind: The recent nerf to the linger i-frame here was a terrible choice and should either be reverted entirely or at least partially restored to roughly halfway between the old and the new.
Black Bloods Descent: The Gap in SA at the end of this skill, which is only mitigated by performing the follow-up of Flow:black blood eruption, should be removed for at least chaining the skill into Omua's Objurgation. Ideally, we would see it removed for chaining in other leaps and movement skills and i'frames, but I feel this at least would give her a sufficient movement chain that is slow but covers quite a distance.
Rockslide and Mountains Echo: slightly awkward skills to flow into; they are fine as is, but the CD on them is 21 and 22, respectively. I can understand Rockslide as a series of protected movement CC's, but the echo is simply too long. I think 16s would be a fair number for the RABAM skill.
Omua's Circle: for the love of all that is holy, cut the CD and/or make this a force taunt for mobs. It's a lovely tagging skill as is, and while it does practically no damage, making it a taunt would be a very nice utility added to her. If not, then this could be a 4-second CD, and it would barely matter.
Gate Crasher: A very nice addition to the kit, the CD feels roughly 2 seconds too long for appropriate usage in PvE and PvP. In my wildest dreams, the addition of a knockback effect being added to the secondary hit (that works in PVP, of course) would be amazing, but of course I see why this isn't the case, even if I wish it were.

Dragons calling healing and SA reduction
There was a time that guardians healing was a very powerful aspect of her kit, as healing a massive 200 HP per (100 HP for one handed) skill was absurd! and more on some skills too! but with damage being so absurdly high, let's take a quick look at that math. In 30-man Nodewars, for example, the HP is capped at 5000. At this level, the most effective level of pvp for her healing is that she heals 4% of her HP per skill. and these skills need to hit something. In a class this absurdly slow, that is not a lot. and it doesn't even scale with the number of enemies hit! This needs a massive boost, especially with the absence of Drakania making her healing look like a health pot in comparison. It's frankly a joke. (Part of me wishes she got an 'overheal' effect, but just making it a good flat rate or percentage of her total HP on hit would be nice too.)
And for those that complain about her slow being annoying, realize that her slow is at best evening the playing field by bringing you down to her already slow level. If you have never been hit by a slow as a guardian before (which happens ALL the time), give it a try. You may as well be standing still.

Alternatively, the SA damage reduction was a very nice change, but I really think guardians should be moved up on the scale to 25 or even 30%. On a large scale, she still dies from the huge amount of overlapping AOE damage, and in duels, well, she is probably the easiest to grab class in the game considering how many slow, locked-in animation skills we have. Even Dosa can dash, cancel, and cast his slow skills.

CLEANSING FLAME, FIREBOURNE RUPTURE. AND CORE SKILLS:
Oh boy, now we get to the weird, nitty-gritty stuff. Cleansing flame is, by all accounts, the best skill in the kit (sorry, God, incinerator, I still love you). So much so that it is the only core skill choice in PVP. And that's no shade on the other two choices; bound on the incinerator is amazing, and dragonsmaw being a huge knockdown would be powerful, but the cleansing flame is too pivotal to the kit to ignore. To the point that I think we need to make one of two choices.
1: Remove this core skill and have it naturally be a PVP float.
2: Change the CC to a knockdown
Option 2 is the more powerful choice by far. Right now, catching someone with a cleansing flame leaves you unable to follow up with a dragon's maw or howling light unless they would result in a kill, as the float doesn't last long enough to re-cc afterwards (and that isn't accounting for situations where nemies stand up significantly faster for various reasons). In this situation, moving to a different re'cc leaves you lacking overall damage, and even off of a grab, it is still highly questionable to kill even the squishiest of classes in 30 Nodewars (well, now that we lost our chimeras and kaia).
Option 1 is the more flexible choice, in my opinion, allowing a variety of core skill options. What would I replace it with? Well, I would love to see Firebourne rupture given the option of being an SA or a PVP KD, as it flows so well in our grab-kill combo.

This above is a big change, and I have plenty more to say about how utterly terrible the core skill options are overall when you truly look at how they interact and play with the class, but this is already quite a long post. so I'll leave it with two simpler buffs.
1: Add a down/air attack to the cleansing flame to increase the kill potential.
2: Add a down attack to the Firebourne rupture and make it a natural, unprotected PVP KD. also remove the airsmash. because I'm really not certain why it has an air smash on it in the first place. As far as I can tell, it's practically impossible to trigger yourself. If anyone has insight on that, let me know!

I have many, many more thoughts on issues with guardians, and I understand no class can be perfect, but consider these changes and ask yourself: would any and all of these being done make her better than Zerker or Drak?

EDIT: There are some slight changes to sentence structure and spelling. probably still horribly written; apologies.

May the favor of Ramius forever shine upon you.

to bad they will never see this or make these changes