Class Update - Guardians

[zipfile]

guardians bleeds are just too strong right now.

Meh. Compared to some others, they're fine. Base damage is still low, bleeds can be resisted/removed.

[HerpThatDerp]

guardians bleeds are just too strong right now. would be better if increased base damage and lowered the bleed damage cause its too high for a tanking class with survivability like guardian.

This is the DPS line of guardian. It's meant to DPS.

Also with the removal of the heal on prey there's a significant reduction of survivability in redline. I'm almost hesitant to welcome these changes because of that, but assuming the traits are changed to make sense (like all of the issues zip pointed out) and that I can actually do decent DPS, it's a trade I'm willing to make.

[HerpThatDerp]

Just looking at these changes I don't really understand what SSG is trying to do with the Red Guardian. I get that they want it to be bleed-based, which I think most red guards are 100% on board with, but the traits just lack any real synergy or punch. Things like bonus pulses to bleeds are not useful when the bleeds are constantly being reapplied and don't stack. If using sweeping cuts (edit: or any other skill with a bleed) didn't overwrite its own bleed and instead applied another copy that would make sense, but right now anything that gives extra pulses will just be dead on arrival.

[Madmanthief]

Rather than PoTW restoring morale or power, maybe a increase to physical and tactical mitigations, critical defense, and resistances for a short time, so that rather than healing, your defenses are increased making it harder for the mobs to pick you apart.

[commdorvis]

Right, a power restore from the top set bonus is laughable, especially when Guardians have pretty manageable power as it is. Having the Guardian do, say, 10% more damage to any target with a bleed on it would make more sense, you'd still be 'preying on the weak' (or wounded). If you want to be really ambitious you could have any target with a bleed on it take 10% more damage from any source, like the Champion's Devastating Strike, or do some sort of mitigation debuff. Just saying, you want to remove current POTW as a stop-gap, okay, but it should still offer something useful.

[HerpThatDerp]

Right, a power restore from the top set bonus is laughable, especially when Guardians have pretty manageable power as it is. Having the Guardian do, say, 10% more damage to any target with a bleed on it would make more sense, you'd still be 'preying on the weak' (or wounded). If you want to be really ambitious you could have any target with a bleed on it take 10% more damage from any source, like the Champion's Devastating Strike, or do some sort of mitigation debuff. Just saying, you want to remove current POTW as a stop-gap, okay, but it should still offer something useful.

I actually think this is a good idea for prey on the weak, and fits the theme better. Perhaps making targets take 5% more damage per bleed from the guardian, for a total of 15% with all three(?) bleeds up?

It would be an excellent capstone and really enforce the bleed playstyle.

[Piff]

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

Not going to lie, sounds lot like how Guard bleeds used to work before bleed stacks existed. In the old days, in the long long ago before helms deep.

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.

Incoming healing would be nice. Or perhaps, if might say, if I can be so bold, if this isn't an overstep, some kind of small flat damage reduction.

[siipperi]

Meh. Compared to some others, they're fine. Base damage is still low, bleeds can be resisted/removed.

Brutal assault should have highest bleed on this game. I have 29k tooltip on it.

[Rorrelm]

A big problem with how the bleeds currently work is that they do not stack with other guardians, this means playing with two red guardians is useless. Do not make the same mistake when the warden Dots got bugged and make them guard dots stack with other guards otherwise you take away half the damage from one guard if there are more than one.

[Vastin]

A big problem with how the bleeds currently work is that they do not stack with other guardians, this means playing with two red guardians is useless. Do not make the same mistake when the warden Dots got bugged and make them guard dots stack with other guards otherwise you take away half the damage from one guard if there are more than one.

This will definitely be addressed. Guardian bleeds are intended to operate separately from each other.

[Vastin]

Prey on the Weak. My, oh my...how far have you fallen.
No more healing, I welcome that.
No more damage, I don't like that.
Power restore is....well....why? There are no power issues in the Red line as it is, and furthermore, we already have Invigourating Parry trait.

Agreed that the current version of PotW is a bit underwhelming at the moment. I'll be re-examining it.

[zipfile]

Agreed that the current version of PotW is a bit underwhelming at the moment. I'll be re-examining it.

I have a bug to report.

New Hammer Down is broken if you use the raid set.

Basically, stun threshold doesn't increase, however, you get the old/removed bonuses (if it defeats an enemy, you get 5% melee damage and cooldown is refreshed)

Honestly, could we make this a normal behaving mechanic though? Stun is meh at best, and having Hammer Down as a finisher is a lot more satisfying.

[Joedangod]

Guardians: A Review of the Changes

All in all, I have to say I like the changes. The class certainly feels a lot more streamlined and the removal of the radiate interaction makes everything a lot clearer to new players. It's not a competitive DPS by any means but it's certainly a good start on the path to making it work in groups. Still, there are a few issues with this update that I'd like to go over.

Self Healing and General Survival Capability

With the Prey on the Weak and other changes implemented red Guardians currently have the following notable defense skills available to them:

• Honorable Combat.
• Catch a Breath.
• Warriors Heart.
• Skills from other trees that don't require much investment to grab:
  
  • Guardians Pledge.
  • *Bring on the Pain.

*Does require a hefty point investment in yellow but it's pretty much worth going down that tree once you finish speccing red anyway.

Honorable Combat is the smallest heal of the selection offering a 3-12% morale/power heal on a 45 seconds cooldown. I like this as the primary heal for guards as it forces them to cash out their DPS potential in order to recoup their health. It is however, a little bit weak and I'd strongly advocate tweaking a few of the values. For starters it currently can only affect up to 4 targets whilst sweeping cut (the skill that applies the bleed Honourable Combat consumes) hits up to 6 targets, bumping HC up so that it can also hit 6 targets for a max heal of 18% seems like a fair improvement to me. I would also say that the cooldown for honorable combat is a bit too long. Currently a 45s cd on a up-to-12% heal seems a little excessive and as such I would recommend it being reduced to the region of 20s or so that it can operate as the go-to heal rather than a weak panic button.

Next up is Catch a Breath. The change here is rather welcome, the skill was pretty useless before only restoring about 1k morale on characters who were frequently 100k+. Still, I'm not sure I like having the cooldown reduction and heal potency legacy with this due to the fact that it's going to scale poorly in the future as the catch a breath heal gets even larger, as such I would suggest removing the legacy entirely and setting the morale restore to be ~25% by default with the 60s cooldown.

Now we come to warriors heart. This skill is available to all traitlines and with the legacy that pretty much everyone always has offers an 83% morale heal. It's an excellent panic button and pretty much rounds out the defenses for red Guardians here.

The last two possible defensive abilities are going to be a lot rarer. Guardians Pledge can be pretty excellent but I'm not sure I would run it by default, still I think it should probably be dropped further down into blue line to block red Guardians from chasing it. Perhaps swap it with Smashing Stab?

Bring on the pain can be very powerful in some instances due to some parts of trash not dealing a whole lot of damage and thus allowing you to recoup almost all your health from a single activation. That being said I don't think we run into that kind of thing much these days and since traiting the morale restore on Bring on the Pain prevents you from ever traiting Strong Bursts I think this ability is fine as it is and needs no changes/movement.


Now, part of the revamp to red Guardians removed the Prey on the Weak healing. Whilst this was certainly a necessary change the placeholder you left behind is quite lacking. I don't think guardians need any more survival abilities so as a replacement I would prefer to see something that buffs damage or offers group support in some way.

Red Guardian DPS

Kudos to you devs here, it's a dramatic improvement and now the class finally focuses on single target DPS like the trait tree suggests. The new bleed setup is certainly interesting to manage although so far my testing has frequently devolved into cycling thrust as much as possible in order to refresh brutal assault so that I could keep that primary bleed active. All in all I think that the damage output on the bleeds is fine; whilst the Brutal bleed does seem pretty large you're never going to be able to stack it on more than one target so it ends up being a pretty reasonable amount of single target DPS rather than something overpowered.

Still, the main issue I'm seeing during parses is the low base damage on most of the skills. The 3 bleed types are contributing slightly over 50% of the DPS on all my parses and just leaving the basic melee skills in the dust. You can see for yourself below:

It honestly doesn't feel like what I'm doing outside of refreshing the bleeds matters much due to the low base damage on most of those skills. There's also a big issue with attack duration amongst guard skills with most of the AoE skills taking ages to go off only to hit like a wet noodle. In general I think Guardians need a lot more damage given to their base attacks here. A lot of skills have tooltip values under 10k which come off pretty bad when you take enemy mitigations into account. It's also worth noting that guardians have no way to go through fire mitigations and as such are at a large disadvantage when it comes to competing with Hunters and RK's. There's also an issue with long cooldown skills like hammer down not actually dealing much damage, would love to see that increased by a reasonable margin.

Parse above came out at 27.6k DPS over 3 minutes with a 180k Mastery build. Will see about improving the gear for further parses.

Red Traits

There are a few traits that are somewhat useless in most scenarios now. The worst offenders are listed below:

• Thrill of Battle: There just isn't any use for this. It's a small heal with a long cooldown, it won't save anyone and it's not worth investing 1 point never mind 5.
• Invigorating Parry: Whilst red Guardian does actually consume power at a reasonable rate this trait isn't useful, the power usage on a guard is covered easily by power pot usage or catch a breath.
• Deeper Wounds: The duration increase on the Deep Wound pulses just comes off as excessive and doesn't really fit the ST DPS ideal of red guard since it's only really useful in AoE (stack it on multiple targets at once).
• To the Rescue: Not a lot of value in this one, charge already lets you catch up with most things so you probably don't need that extra speed. The set bonus traits were also reworked to give you the crit by default so that aspect doesn't mean much.

Summary

I like what you've done so far and I'm certainly curious to see where you take this next.

[Joedangod]

On a somewhat related note is there any chance we could have 2h passive stats upgraded to be more in line with the stats gained from offhand weapons? Currently you lose out on a whole load of stats if you roll with a 2h LI and it causes a notable disparity between some classes.

[Happychappy]

On a somewhat related note is there any chance we could have 2h passive stats upgraded to be more in line with the stats gained from offhand weapons? Currently you lose out on a whole load of stats if you roll with a 2h LI and it causes a notable disparity between some classes.

Yes this needs to happen.

[Bhorn_EU]

I like sword and board, I LIKE 40K crit shield smash and stun on lots of mobs, my LI's are focused round this. Have the hundreds and hundreds of scrolls and crystals (not hundreds, but you know what I mean) now been rendered useless for effective solo play? Also please for the love of dorf bowling please please please, don't remove the knock down from brutal charge.

[Vastin]

I have a bug to report.

New Hammer Down is broken if you use the raid set.

Basically, stun threshold doesn't increase, however, you get the old/removed bonuses (if it defeats an enemy, you get 5% melee damage and cooldown is refreshed)

Honestly, could we make this a normal behaving mechanic though? Stun is meh at best, and having Hammer Down as a finisher is a lot more satisfying.

Yeah, interactions with older raid sets and the like are definitely going to be some of the touchier points bug-wise, so do keep an eye out for those.

We tried to chase down such loose ends, but we will inevitably have missed several like this.

[zipfile]

I like sword and board, I LIKE 40K crit shield smash and stun on lots of mobs, my LI's are focused round this. Have the hundreds and hundreds of scrolls and crystals (not hundreds, but you know what I mean) now been rendered useless for effective solo play? Also please for the love of dorf bowling please please please, don't remove the knock down from brutal charge.

It was bugged, broken and overpowered. It had to go and I more than welcome the change.

[zipfile]

Yeah, interactions with older raid sets and the like are definitely going to be some of the touchier points bug-wise, so do keep an eye out for those.

We tried to chase down such loose ends, but we will inevitably have missed several like this.

Wouldn't it be better to keep it like that? Lock it behind (difficult) group content as a set and it's fine. I don't belive anyone can really say that it's breaking the game or somehow makes Guards amazingly good.

[-Spunkie-]

Yeah, interactions with older raid sets and the like are definitely going to be some of the touchier points bug-wise, so do keep an eye out for those.

We tried to chase down such loose ends, but we will inevitably have missed several like this.

Reverting Hammer Down back to what it was but adding an armour/inc damage bebuff to it when used at 25% of mobs health would be better than a stun, this would give guardian some added fellowship support and also you wouldnt need to fix the raid set.

Bump the base damage of all skills effected by Shield use rank and change it to inc healing, this benifits both tanking and dps builds and will make up for the light damage legacy not working any more. Change light damage legacy to shield skill crit chance (rating) + shield damage crit multiplier.

For PoTW how about:
1) increase critical chance by 1% against mobs with bleeds on them, or is this too messy keeping count of the number of bleeds you have on the target and your trying to get away from this?
2) return 2% of damage delt as morale and power to the guardian and his Protected target (Protection by the Sword).

Also more general for all classes but with legacy changes please add legacy replacement scolls to T2 Challenge chests or just the skirmish camp

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

bleeds are too strong atm, the dps boost is needed and welcome, but more dps should be shifted and spread out to the initial skill damages of other skills.

[Joedangod]

bleeds are too strong atm, the dps boost is needed and welcome, but more dps should be shifted and spread out to the initial skill damages of other skills.

As a reference point I've been comparing Haemorrhaging wound with Essay of Fire. Whilst the tooltip value of Haemorrhaging wound is notably higher than that of Essay of Fire it tends to only have a ~75% uptime vs Essay's 100% due to reset luck. It also doesn't have quite the same range of crits as essay seems to do. The end result is that you only pull around 7-8k or so DPS from the bleed with 200k mastery. Meanwhile Essay pulls in the region of ~10k DPS.

The other skills certainly need a buff to get away from the ~5k hits but I don't think the bleeds need a nerf.

[iambadbert]

Its nice seeing guardians getting some love. However I honestly hope the bleed ticks don't go live as they are presented currently. Way to strong imo

[srit]

Its nice seeing guardians getting some love. However I honestly hope the bleed ticks don't go live as they are presented currently. Way to strong imo

They have redesigned bleeds to be more effective as before they were far to low, If they take away bleed damage then the damage of the skills them selves must be increased substantially. Thus bringing us back to worthless bleeds. At that point they may as well remove bleeds and completely re work the class. At this point the damage is nice but again not as high as other classes . What exactly are you wanting? are you looking at the entire DPS or just one aspect? The damage right now is low in comparison but is fine as they don't want redline to out damage other main damage roll classes

[siipperi]

As a reference point I've been comparing Haemorrhaging wound with Essay of Fire. Whilst the tooltip value of Haemorrhaging wound is notably higher than that of Essay of Fire it tends to only have a ~75% uptime vs Essay's 100% due to reset luck. It also doesn't have quite the same range of crits as essay seems to do. The end result is that you only pull around 7-8k or so DPS from the bleed with 200k mastery. Meanwhile Essay pulls in the region of ~10k DPS.

The other skills certainly need a buff to get away from the ~5k hits but I don't think the bleeds need a nerf.

I have had parses where I probably have good 90-95% of up time, just dropping once or twice the haemorhaging on such parses, for like under 10s so its certainly possible to keep it pretty much permanently on even without good crit luck with polished rotation and so on. One already did 33 or 34k dps as red guardian.

But as I said before nerffing haermorrhaging by 20% and other bleeds 10% while buffing initial damages 15% would be relatively close to whats needed. It would still have about 20k tooltip with proper gear which seems fine tbh.

Your rotation is lacking atm, retalition is bad, so should use whirling one and in generally should get way more brutal assaults used in that time tbh.