I'm sad

[Fermongu]

The title says it. Nothing change for guards with new expansion, we are in the same broken state (mainly concerning red and yellow lines). Not much reason to log in my guard beyond doing the tiny book 9 of the epic and applying SoE's and exp runes to my ILI's

[Old_Relic]

On the upside we have a major rollout, with a lot of changes and they do not seem to have broken anything else about the Guard.

[Stormtower]

On the upside we have a major rollout, with a lot of changes and they do not seem to have broken anything else about the Guard.

It is a sad state of affairs for Guards that your (accurate) post is now considered good news. The window of expectations has moved over the years, yes?

[Old_Relic]

It is a sad state of affairs for Guards that your (accurate) post is now considered good news. The window of expectations has moved over the years, yes?

I think that they bricked up the window a long time ago.

I play an average guard and am now running around Mordor as a red Line SnB - I get sod all DPS, just about the same as if I was running around with a 2H, but I take far less damage myself.


I guess it is another problem/issue we could add to the list. The extra stats added to a 2H weapon do not scale well, so while a maxed 2H has an additional 35DPS (around 8%) over a 1H the stats from the high level shields are of far greater value. Even the most basic Mordor dropped shield is adding stuiped amounts of crit def and block.

[zipfile]

There were changes to the Guardians but were undocumented. While I have posted them elsewhere, I'll copy here for knowledges sake.

Guardians:
- Shield-taunt is now resistable
- War-chant is now resistable

[Joedangod]

War-chant should always have been resistable, probably only noticing it now since finesse requirements took a large bump.

Shield taunt shouldn't get resisted though, generally only skills that do damage or apply debuffs get resisted. Perhaps more noticeable with forced taunts: Challenge/Fray/Threatening Shout/Defiant Challenge never got resisted whilst the Beorning forced taunts (all of which do damage) were prone to being resisted unless you stacked enough finesse.

[zipfile]

War-chant should always have been resistable, probably only noticing it now since finesse requirements took a large bump.

Shield taunt shouldn't get resisted though, generally only skills that do damage or apply debuffs get resisted. Perhaps more noticeable with forced taunts: Challenge/Fray/Threatening Shout/Defiant Challenge never got resisted whilst the Beorning forced taunts (all of which do damage) were prone to being resisted unless you stacked enough finesse.

IMO all taunts, regardless if they do damage or not, should be resistable.

Edit: taunt=forced attack, shield-taunt doesn't apply that

[Joedangod]

IMO all taunts, regardless if they do damage or not, should be resistable.

Edit: taunt=forced attack, shield-taunt doesn't apply that

Hence me not including it in the list of forced taunts. Regardless, this is only a bug if stacking finesse doesn't help.

[Marxlne]

IMO all taunts, regardless if they do damage or not, should be resistable.

At the current state, yes, i agree with you, resistable force taunts would certainly add a flavour to current tanking mechanics. Even with capped finesse it should be resistable to some extent at lvl 115 (hint for dev for upcoming raid - do some forced taunt debuff or something ,wink-wink :P)
But ... ideally i would see the whole taunting mechanics reworked like it used to work during SoA/MoM days. Ditch the ridiculous perma force taunt percentage, increase the cooldown of force taunts, make building aggro through dps skills viable again ... but then again i understand SSG now is so understaffed for class reworking it probably won't happen near future. There are actually aspects of the game that needs more attention right now (PvMP, other class fixes etc)

[Joedangod]

At the current state, yes, i agree with you, resistable force taunts would certainly add a flavour to current tanking mechanics. Even with capped finesse it should be resistable to some extent at lvl 115 (hint for dev for upcoming raid - do some forced taunt debuff or something ,wink-wink :P)
But ... ideally i would see the whole taunting mechanics reworked like it used to work during SoA/MoM days. Ditch the ridiculous perma force taunt percentage, increase the cooldown of force taunts, make building aggro through dps skills viable again ... but then again i understand SSG now is so understaffed for class reworking it probably won't happen near future. There are actually aspects of the game that needs more attention right now (PvMP, other class fixes etc)

Resistible forced taunts sound like an excellent way to introduce RNG frustration into your life. The entire aggro mechanic of the current game is centred around tanks abusing the threat multiplier on forced taunts to hold aggro, you quite simply are not going to hold a targets attention if you cannot forced taunt it. The main result of such a mechanic would probably be Beornings becoming utterly useless (completely incapable of generating aggro by itself), captains being weakened to the point where they would struggle tanking 6 man content and Guardians would be dropped from raids in favour of Wardens who unlike the other 3 tank classes can generate a large amount of aggro without the aid of forced taunts.

They could potentially add bonus threat on top of each skill to make it possible to hold aggro without forced taunts but that'd take about as much time/effort as revamping the system in general.

[Macdui]

I'm surprised there were even undocumented changes. I thought we had scared off anyone from touching the class, they don't tend to stick around to long afterwards when they do.

We got the moronic threat mechanic because they'd sacked anyone who knew how the old mechanic was coded, we are in the same boat now, no one can make a change without messing it up.

But truly if we did go back to SoA day mechanics how much raw threat would our skills have to be increased to combat the explosion in dps class damage.

I still have my +5 sec force taunt legacy waiting to be useful again. I still have my bleed critic damage legacy, waiting to be useful again. Now that the Pelennor bonuses have gone are they going to roll back the nerfs they made to accommodate the bonuses? Those nerfs and the knock on bugs is what really killed the fun for most, a roll back might save things.

Mac

[Macdui]

I just reminded myself, Acid Wing ToO CM.

We faced the first really tough DPS race (if you didn't stack burglars). We had a finely tuned forced taunt rotation some help from the Ebbing Ere Champ and the pinnacle of working with the threat mechanics.

Now that kind of fight is turned into Fray, wait a bit, Fray, wait a bit, Fray, wait for the end, by a complete plonker.

[Macdui]

It is a sad state of affairs for Guards that your (accurate) post is now considered good news. The window of expectations has moved over the years, yes?

It's really been that way for several years, praying that no one touched the Guardian. Even before HD and the change to threat and trait trees I was forever looking on BR forums hoping not to have a "Guardian Changes " section, mainly because our dev at the time was a warden fan and just wasn't interested.

Mac

[Zonflux]

I am sad that you are sad. My best advice is to try and find ways to make your Guardian fun to play. My motivation to keep playing my Guardian is because of support from the community, as otherwise constantly comparing my Guardian to my Warden would just result in negativity.

Honestly, I'm hoping that +Vastin holds true to his words and follows-through with some major Guardian changes, for better or for worse. What I want is a class code that is easy to make changes to, not our current code that makes changes extremely difficult to make. Once that is done, then I am more personally open towards calling for changes.

[Fermongu]

It's very frustrating to have a class that didn't have major problems (besides yellow bugs, but no one really cared much about yellow line before u12) and was fun and decent at melee AoE DPS, as alternative to only tank. But then comes loved EdgeCase, broke guard bleeds and then go away (fired?), and then throne raid comes and SSG/Turbine nerf guards even more and killed red guards until today.

The saddest part is that all this was unnecesary. Red guards were not OP in DPS terms, just reducing POTW healing potency by half could have been done for balancing purposes, in my opinion. Time and resources could have been spent on fixing class bugs for bears, LMs, guards, etc.

I'm all for changes to the class, I will gladly adapt to any (bug-free) changes to red line that makes it decent like it was. I was hoping for fixing bleed crits and increasing Insult to injury and Radiate %, also better balance of thrill of danger (really useless!). Now my expectations are so low that I think SSG will simply remove bleeds entirely and buff base damage, if anything at all is done. Sad.

Vastin, our hopes are on you. Get red guards out of the (orc-infested) pit they are in right now.

[Aineas.]

I just reminded myself, Acid Wing ToO CM.

We faced the first really tough DPS race (if you didn't stack burglars). We had a finely tuned forced taunt rotation some help from the Ebbing Ere Champ and the pinnacle of working with the threat mechanics.

Now that kind of fight is turned into Fray, wait a bit, Fray, wait a bit, Fray, wait for the end, by a complete plonker.

uhm, during ToO times you didn't need force taunts to keep aggro... you could easily do it on the leaches and your own threat generation. But ye, I agree that sadly those epic and dynamics mechanics have been dumbed down to what? Rotation of like force taunt spamming monkey's. Let alone the problems in dps (still refuse to say dps and guardian in the same sentence because simply they do not work and go together). Result: the biggest epic fail of a class you can ever have, slow on lvl'ing and not needed as a red liner making effectivily that trait line useless and in tanking you can go from force taunt to force taunt in ultra boring spamming mode. OP says he's sad?? I'm way past it, if you look at the class it's depressing and makes you cry considering the potential it had.

I really don't get some devs and how they get hired, or turbine for that matter. If you balance warden vs guardian well and have mechanics like during mirkwood/too in the classes you can build so many fun dungeons for that tank combo to work... it's just so sad they lack any creative thinking behind anything they do. For now best advice for your sadness: delete your guard and reroll. They will never ever fix or balance guard anymore at this point. As long they find filters in quests more important you can simply just forget about anything related to the guard (they would put other classes before guard to rebalance anyway). So won't happen, ever.

[Macdui]

I haven't tried the new filter system. I'd like to filter out Morivals for sure. Mordor archers too. A few people who think SSG can do no wrong could do with getting filtered out.
LM fires could go in too, they blind me and complain they got all the adds agro.

Mac

PS I see the 6 man is a two tank fray ping pong across the room... makes me sad too.

[Fermongu]

For now best advice for your sadness: delete your guard and reroll.

I have a hunter at cap too and I'm enjoying him more right now, running around and shooting, it's very simple to play too but at least I kill things and I secretly enjoy it when I steal agro from tank in pugged featured instances XD.

I had a capy at 105 too, I liked to heal with him and was my actual t2c character in that era, but I read somewhere that capy healing didn't scale well to lv115, and that keep me from levelling him on purpose.