Hey Guardians! This is the thread detailing the upcoming class changes being posted to Bullroarer for you to play with and comment on.

These changes are not final! There will be an upcoming pass based on feedback, balance issues, and bug reports.

As Cordovan requested, please keep it civil, and stick mostly to your own thoughts and opinions on the update. It's far easier for us to go through the feedback if it doesn't devolve into people challenging each other's opinions.

-Vastin

Guardian
  • Guardian Keen Blade (red line) has been heavily re-designed! The reasons for this redesign were three-fold:
    • The prior implementation was very complex and buggy, and proved resistant to debugging.
    • The prior implementation was too server process intensive due to the way bleeds were being handled.
    • The DPS of the red line guardian was far too low to make it particularly functional for soloing or as a team DPS member.

  • The goal of this redesign is to strip out a lot of the underlying complexity of the tree, while retaining its general flavor and giving it a faster, more effective skill rotation.
  • The line is intended to be a functional soloing build for the guardian that will allow them to play through the game at a much more acceptable pace. It is not explicitly intended to be fully competitive as a raid-DPS line, though we'll see where it actually sits in testing.
  • The summary of the overall redesign includes:
    • Overall skill damage for the guardian has increased substantially. The blue and yellow lines will see some benefit from this through the base skills, but the red line will see the bulk of this benefit, through their tree specific skills and bleed effects.
    • The tiering bleed concept has been eliminated due to bugs and performance issues. Additionally, we felt it was not a good concept for landscape play, as it took too long to set up Bleed stacks to be worthwhile.
    • The new version has three separate bleeds associated with Sweeping Cuts, Thrust, and Brutal Strike, and the primary skill rotation revolves around keeping these up as efficiently as possible, while weaving in other skills as feasible. There are still some skills that play off of existing bleeds (such as overpower), or cash them out (such as Honorable Combat), but otherwise the bleed structure is much simpler and the interactions are fewer and much more explicit.
    • While the red line bleeds are now stronger, they no longer benefit from the yellow line Radiate talent.
    • Guardian bleeds are no longer applied or renewed by crits.
    • Several talent names were changed to reflect adjustments to their functionality necessitated by the redesign of the bleed skills.
    • Several other skills that had accumulated too many modifiers were streamlined a bit, such as Hammer Down and To the King.

  • Some changes to the way damage is assigned to skills and effects is being made. These changes are largely not visible, as they are low-level changes behind the scenes, but these adjustments will make it easier for us to make changes to the classes in the future, and should make future design updates happen more quickly.
  • Shield Smash and Warchant are no longer tactical skills and draw their damage from the primary weapon.
  • Brutal Charge should now cause the next skill to crit rather than knockdown (note that it can still be b/p/e'd).
  • Warrior's Heart bubble is now based on a % of max vitality.
  • Catch a breath LI bonuses now properly affect the skill. % change is now additive, and has been adjusted to reflect this change.
  • Shield Use is effectively obsolete for the time being (weapon damage applies instead). We're evaluating what to do with it currently as it has never scaled properly with our other systems.