Can we get some love for Guardians (please)

[Celticbunnie]

I don’t play a guardian so forgive me for butting in. But I play regularly with a guardian and I am worried that the lack of value they feel they can contribute when playing the game is increasing. The guardian should be the mainstay of a fellowship, a hulking brick wall of a player that can taunt and hold aggro. They open the fight and give focus but they are so nerfed now it seems the enjoyment in the game is shrinking.

Lotro over the last 14 months for many of us has been a little bit of light in dark days. We aren’t raiding really in our group but we enjoy the odd go. But for our guardian the experience is super frustrating. Not helpful.

Please make the guardian a focus, every class needs maintaining to make sure all players enjoy the game, as I said LOTRO has been so important as a social antidote to the crud that is happening, let’s keep it fresh and even for everyone.

#saveourguardians

[Braer]

You'll find a few pleading for alms in the back streets of Bree, signs telling of their having a tanking gear set to support. Don't believe them, they'll just be wasting it on crit they get off /trade for a brief high until their reality seeps back.

We can't know how the current changes will go. Maybe not yet time to park your Captains and LMs and harvest their Vitality Essence for your Guardian. But who's been keeping up with tanking gear if not raiding for years. Not an investment to make on a possibility! Bound to account stuff off your cappy, if you have one, might help but any seasonal essence would spoil that. Then there's the tanking ILs to upgrade and heavy shields to find and no telling if you're to get BPE, tact mit or Vitality essence; lots of resources on just a vague intent, no promises.

[JERH]

According to bullroarer in U30 red guardians get a dps boost from 50% of red champ to 75% of red champ. There’s your love.

[Joedangod]

With the nerfs to Captain in U30 Guardian becomes a pretty darn competitive main tank option. Blue Guardian doesn't really need to be singled out for changes regardless as it pretty much all works fine.

[Technician46]

With the nerfs to Captain in U30 Guardian becomes a pretty darn competitive main tank option. Blue Guardian doesn't really need to be singled out for changes regardless as it pretty much all works fine.

I'm sorry but is this fellow Trolling?...... w/ captain nerfs the guardian becomes pretty DARN COMPETITIVE?
Let's think about this....mmm?
who would I pick? a tank w/ 2 rezzes or one without? The correct answer = a tank /w 2 rezzes
who would I pick? a tank that can heal the group or a tank that can't? The correct answer = a tank that can tank and heal the group.
who would I pick? a tank that can buff the morale of the others or a tank that can't? The correct answer = a tank that can buff the morale of the others, tank and heal other all at the same time.
who would I pick? a tank that can shield a group member and take no damage to himself or a tank that can shield a member and take all the damage to himself and have a considerable lower morale pool? The correct answer = a tank that can shield a member and take no damage to himself and help heal that member and buff his morale.
who would I pick? a tank that that can use "last stands" and take no damage at all from the bosses for about 17 sec or or a tank that uses Juggernaut and it gets completely bypass by the boss or Redirect and takes 65% of boss damage? The correct answer = the tank w/ "last stands" that takes no damage from the boss.
who would I pick? a tank that when asked can switch to one of his other trait lines and 1) helps heal the group or 2) help buff the dps of the group greatly or a tank that can neither heal or buff the dps of the group greatly? The correct answer = the tank that can tank, buff and heal of course.
We can go on and on but I think (hope) you get the point! HOW is the Guardian pretty darn competitive ? HOW ? Really?

With regards to "Blue Guardian doesn't really need to be singled out for changes regardless as it pretty much all works fine." the real question is not whether it works fine but whether its competitive w/ the the Captain, take for example Juggernaut, does it work fine, yes but is it competitve to the captain's "Last Stand", NO. Even with the planned nerfs the cappy is still a much better option then the guard not only in raids but even in 3 and 6 man instances which the Devs. seem to either forget or ignore. The captain can literally tank, heal and buff (cutting out the middleman = a healer) 3 and 6 man instance by themselves, even the tougher ones on higher tiers (SK, Woe/Ago, to mention a few) which the guard doesn't even come close to doing without a healer and if one of captain's companion dies..... guess what? the captain can rez them. The captain w/ still have pretty much all his ability intact and will out perform all the other tanks by a long shot even with the nerfs so I really don't understand what this fellow is saying or how the devs can say,

"Regarding Guardian tanking, I'm waiting to see where the Captain changes fall out before I go and start tweaking them further.

Boss damage is generally going to be tuned for a somewhat lower throughput as well to adjust for the debuff reductions, so Guardians may find themselves in a more reasonably competitive position by default - if not, I'll look at further adjustments for the other tanks.

-Vastin

"So Guardians may find themselves in a more reasonably competitive position" REALLY? NOT BY A LONG SHOT

To me this is so painfully obvious that the Captain needs more nerfs then what they are currently planning. For one thing they should remove their ability to rez and heal in all trait line except their blue line and limit their blue line to 1 rez only !. How is it that a support class has more rezzes then healing classes even in their non healing line (w/the exception of RK's) ? why ?
By limiting the captain rezzes to 1 and only in their blue line I believe it will help solve 3 problems 1) act as a rez limit barrier that the Devs are seeking to artificially implement in raids and 2) give other tanks a better fighting chance of getting a spot CAUSE WHY BRING A TANK THAT CAN'T REZ, can't help heal and or do a bunch of other stuff WHEN I CAN BRING ONE THAT Can (of course ONLY if the captain gets nerfed further beside removing the 2 rezzes and group healing capabilites that the other tanks will genuinely have a chance. see above) and 3) allow for a more tradition group composition, tank, healer and dps (of course if these crazy "dps cks" in instance are keep under control cause then it becomes 2 dps and healer and tanks are not wanted w/ the exception of cappies like I am seeing with Woe/Agoroth) I mean think about this for 1 minute..... by electing to not invite a guard and instead bring 1 tanking cappy and 1 dps cappy u have 4 rezzes plus all the other benefits that cappies bring that guards don't have. I REPEAT 4 REZZES PLUS BENEFITS. They (Devs.) can easily limit rezzes in a Raid (and by default in 6 and 3 mans) by simply limiting the cappy rezzes. WHY DON'T THE DEVS SEE/UNDERSTAND ALL THIS ?????

Final thoughts.
Believe me I know it hurts when they nerf your beloved toon but its seems to me the only logical/obvious thing that must be done for the health of the game as a whole. They either need to bring the captain to about the lvl of the guard (which nobody wants including me and I am a guard) or bring the captain down halfway and bring the other tank up to meet the captain abilities in some way. I prefer this option as the guard is pretty bland and what that involves is going to be the next big great terrible debate/discussion etc...... .

Also in regard to dps increase to red line I agree w/ others that the devs need to do more then just increase our damage, they need to fix under the hood so to speak. Traits, relics, Crit chance and Crit magnitude for example. Also our bleeds wear out to quickly therefore we are constantly having to spam the same skills over and over to keep those bleed up for maximum dps and not allowing for much use of other skills in-between. One of our bleeds "Terrible Wound" just doesn't flow right when we are in a group w/ another tank. What I mean is that normally if we are alone landscaping the mobs they are hitting us and we have parry responses to those hits and therefore we can get off our parry respond skills plus bleeds and "Terrible Wound" in a natural skill progression. But when there is another tank in the group and they have aggro we are NOT getting parry responses and therefore we are constantly having to use "force opening" to active a parry response in order to active certain skills and bleeds making it somewhat of an unnatural flow to it if you know what I mean. Also as of now we have a bunch of useless traits and legacies base on blk/parry responses and seeing how useless Lotro has made b/p/e they need to give us something more useful in their place. Lastly, the increase to "Heavy weapon training" from 5% to 10%, well its a nice thought of wanting to increase our damage in other lines (and I agree they should) specially in blue line (which is pathetic cause we have to stack morale if we want to survive which again reminds me of another captain advantage cause even w/ the nerf he will still have more morale then us) but I think the implementation is wrong. We would have to spend 10 trait point from our main line ( losing 2 skills at least or weakening our other skills cause we have to dig deep into yellow line to get Redirect just to get a meagerly 10% more dps to a line (blue) that can use at least a 25% increase or more and still not do enough damage due to morale stack, and crit rating and magnitude being on the floor). I'm one of the opinion that tanks should be able to deal out some decent dps in tank line to help keep aggro better (of course w/ the help of some aggro modifiers cause otherwise we'd have to deal more dps then the dpsers) and not depend on taunt. Taunts should be for the beginning of the fight to get aggro initially and then for any emergency afterward. That just my opinion of course but I think it makes sense.

Well I hope this is food for thought for the Devs....... I feel I'm already forgetting something to mention about other issues w/ the guard and the update. Oh well.

[SniperCT]

*snip*

I'd rather not lose the ability to res my wife when we're duoing and I'm in redline lol

I generally prefer the idea of bringing an underperforming class up a lot and an overperforming class down a little so that they meet in the middle, but closer to the overperformer. And I've always felt that way regardless of what role we're talking about.

I'm looking forward to even a little bit of a guardian DPS buff, since I primarily run around with my wife's minstrel on that class and it could use some more dps for sure, at least in overworld type stuff.

ETA: We don't generally do group content in this game(can't even say why, I've done high end raids in other games, something about the class structure and dungeons in this game intimidate me lol), so the only dog I have in these fights is a desire to not lose any survivability or dps in the content we duo! I do agree from what I've read that cappies are way overtuned for group instanced content.

[Joedangod]

I'm sorry but is this fellow Trolling?...... w/ captain nerfs the guardian becomes pretty DARN COMPETITIVE?
Let's think about this....mmm?
who would I pick? a tank w/ 2 rezzes or one without? The correct answer = a tank /w 2 rezzes
who would I pick? a tank that can heal the group or a tank that can't? The correct answer = a tank that can tank and heal the group.
who would I pick? a tank that can buff the morale of the others or a tank that can't? The correct answer = a tank that can buff the morale of the others, tank and heal other all at the same time.
who would I pick? a tank that can shield a group member and take no damage to himself or a tank that can shield a member and take all the damage to himself and have a considerable lower morale pool? The correct answer = a tank that can shield a member and take no damage to himself and help heal that member and buff his morale.
who would I pick? a tank that that can use "last stands" and take no damage at all from the bosses for about 17 sec or or a tank that uses Juggernaut and it gets completely bypass by the boss or Redirect and takes 65% of boss damage? The correct answer = the tank w/ "last stands" that takes no damage from the boss.
who would I pick? a tank that when asked can switch to one of his other trait lines and 1) helps heal the group or 2) help buff the dps of the group greatly or a tank that can neither heal or buff the dps of the group greatly? The correct answer = the tank that can tank, buff and heal of course.
We can go on and on but I think (hope) you get the point! HOW is the Guardian pretty darn competitive ? HOW ? Really?

Rezzes are becoming irrelevant in high tier content, rez token timers are pretty slow to build and healer/RCappy covers all the bases there.
Morale buffing is not something the YCappy is needed for anymore as motivating speech is raidwide so the RCappy again has it covered.
Shield is pretty useful but typically only relevant in a 2 tank scenario, with the latest changes going 2 YCappy likely isn't a great option due to the non-stacking auras and BGuardian/YCappy was the meta tank duo even before U30 tweaks thanks to Break Ranks + Fortifications.
Last stand is now 10s duration and you really should be using Warriors Heart as the comparative cooldown, not Jugg. Swapping to group 3 to pop Litany would also allow for a reasonably comparative cooldown.
Picking a spec for a role because it does other roles as well is a strange way to choose your group composition.

Pretty much the only thing a YCaptain has over BGuardian right now on beta is the ability to throw out a respectable amount of healing whilst tanking...although in any scenario where you need to hold constant aggro of multiple targets the Guardian comes out on top simply because it actually has reasonable aggro generation. U30 still has a ways to go around tank balance but it has certainly started to close the gap between BBeorning/BGuardian and YCappy although BChampion, YGuardian, BWarden continue to lag behind.

[Omen_Kaizer]

https://youtu.be/UWhs8Hc65_Q

Start at 16 minutes to hear them talking about guardian. Short answer is it's not nerf cappy and done.


Not sure where this is going to all land since we haven't seen the results of lore/disable nerf + the planned boss damage adjustments. I can say reports from one T5 raidgroup I know in this past week of Bullroarer--with lore nerfs but no boss adjustment, making mid tiers not feel so farm mode--indicated Shelob spike damage would take (near) invulnerability cooldowns like old SotD and LS to survive through. Which a guard does not have; Juggernaut and Pledge help against autoattacks but not boss special attacks. Also as it was on BR (pre damage pass from Vastin) guards have no answer to the Daughter's jaw cleave (no worthy one incl redirect). By another token, the same people were tentatively thinking guard for Durin's Bane.

We dont know what live U30 will look like yet, whether things will be easier or the same or whether farm content is retroactively made progression again, so I can only speak in broad strokes: Yellow cappies are going to remain a lock in 2-tank comps because shield bro and unselfish SotD. As it always has, boss spike damage will favor choosing tanks with big working cooldowns and that includes nerfed captanks with just LS and beornings (hot take: best tank for Thoss now) but does NOT include guards. And high sustained over spike damage favors guards with their superior passives and their increased relative support (since some but crucially not all captank support has been made redundant).

[Technician46]

Picking a spec for a role because it does other roles as well is a strange way to choose your group composition.

Pretty much the only thing a YCaptain has over BGuardian right now on beta is the ability to throw out a respectable amount of healing whilst tanking...although in any scenario where you need to hold constant aggro of multiple targets the Guardian comes out on top simply because it actually has reasonable aggro generation. U30 still has a ways to go around tank balance but it has certainly started to close the gap between BBeorning/BGuardian and YCappy although BChampion, YGuardian, BWarden continue to lag behind.

"Picking a spec for a role because it does other roles as well is a strange way to choose your group composition." and yet it's done and that's what make the Cappy so powerful and preferred.

"Pretty much the only thing a YCaptain has over BGuardian right now on beta is the ability to throw out a respectable amount of healing whilst tanking..."
THIS IS A COMPLETE UNDERSTATEMENT, as if a tank that can both tank and heal isn't going to get preferred and add to that the ability for rezzing while tanking plus all the other benefits I mention earlier. The captain will continue to be the one to rule them all not only in raid setting but also in 6 and 3 mans if these issues are not addressed. .

Again, the captain with the current planned nerfs will not be enough to make the other tanks competitive. As I mention before the devs must nerf the captain to around the lvl of the guard (which I don't like that idea) or nerf the captain halfway and bring the other tank up to meet him (I prefer this idea). ONE THING IS CERTAIN THAT AS LONG AS A CAPTAIN CAN TANK, HEAL, REZ AND BUFF ALL AT THE SAME TIME NO OTHER TANK STANDS A CHANCE.....

[oldsneakers]

shield use rank

did they fix it?

[StinkyGreene]

No, Shield Use Rank does not work.

[Strider5548]

*playing a sad violin on a rainy street corner for my blue warden*

[Technician46]

Rezzes are becoming irrelevant in high tier content, rez token timers are pretty slow to build and healer/RCappy covers all the bases there.

Just found out through some friends that play in Bullroar that the Captain's 2 rezzes ONLY COUNT FOR 1 REZ TOKEN. Can someone please double confirm?

Rezzes in higher tiers will not become irrelevant if anything they will become even more relevant and if the Captain's 2 rezzes only use up 1 rez token then they become even more indispensable and ALL OTHER TANKS WILL PRETTY MUCH BE LEFT OUT.

This might also affect Minstrels seeing that Runekeepers can have 2 dnfs.

Again I just want to bring up the point that Captains rezzes should be limited to 1 in blue line only and limit their group heals to blue line also otherwise you can simply forget about guards being part of much specially higher tier stuff including tougher 3 and 6 man instance like Stairs/Woe/Agoroth.

[Syranthian]

shield use rank

did they fix it?

Hahahaha, oh we got jokes in here.

Seriously, give them some time people, it's only been *checks calendar* THREE YEARS AGO THIS MONTH that Vastin trashed it.

[Capt.Hunor]

I would say, instead of grab on the Captain all the time to nerf, because the Guardian is weak, the Devs should fix the Guardian to be the Nr.1 tanking.
Finally, is the Captain as it should be from starting the game and some frustrated guys screaming to nerf. As I said before. FIX the GUARDIAN, not nerf other classes.

[fealegwe2]

I would say, instead of grab on the Captain all the time to nerf, because the Guardian is weak, the Devs should fix the Guardian to be the Nr.1 tanking.
Finally, is the Captain as it should be from starting the game and some frustrated guys screaming to nerf. As I said before. FIX the GUARDIAN, not nerf other classes.

even if the captain IS brought down to the level of the guardian..its utilities will still trump the Guard.
besides if the rezz counter gets fixed then the many points a yello captain spends in Blood of Numenor can go into something else.. say red mark ( even better group advantage now from the captain)

[fealegwe2]

But i agree, why drop the current Meta tank to lower levels? are the instance designers running out of ideas to make challenging content? or are top raiding kins completing T5 too quickly and the numbers of logins are dropping?

The captain has always had these skills!! why have they now become a problem? when did the Guard become redundant? what happened to the Blue warden?

these are the questions that should be addressed and not " what skills has the captain that are too powerful ?"

[Technician46]

I would say, instead of grab on the Captain all the time to nerf, because the Guardian is weak, the Devs should fix the Guardian to be the Nr.1 tanking.
Finally, is the Captain as it should be from starting the game and some frustrated guys screaming to nerf. As I said before. FIX the GUARDIAN, not nerf other classes.

In order for Guard's to be the #1 tank again you would STILL have to nerf the captain otherwise the Devs would have to give the guardian along with other tanks the capability to double rez and heal groups in their tanking lines plus add a bunch of utility to them. This scenario would absolutely be ridiculous. Again I stress the obvious/most logical REMOVE THE CAPTAIN'S ABILITY TO DOUBLE REZ AND HEAL IN ALL BUT THEIR BLUE LINE AND ALLOW THEM TO ONLY 1 REZ NOT 2.

Just an update to captains and rez tokens for those of you that are curious it was mention in bullroar by one of the devs that at present the captain double rez only counts for 1 token but in the next update they will be correcting that along w/ Rk's double dnf's.

Keep in mind that captain's double rez doesn't only tip the balance in his favor in raid BUT ALSO IN 6 AND 3 MAN INSTANCE and not only that but his ability to heal the group further tips the scale to his advantage. TANKS SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO REZ AND HEAL GROUPS IN THIER TANK LINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can not stress this enough, not only does it affect other tanks to get a spot but in a lot of cases it eliminates a healer spot in 6 and 3 man stuff. This should not be, not only for the sake of tank balance but also for traditional group compositions.

Also I am not really sold on the REZ TOKEN thing, why not do like they did in OD? If your group dies more then 6x the boss just wipe the entire raid or better yet (and I truly believe this is a much better way cause as I mention before they can kill 3 bird w/ just 1 stone. See my other post) just leave it the way it is and remove the captain's ability to double rez in all but blue line. In doing so they automatically remove 4 rezzes and help the other tanks to have a fighting chance.

[JERH]

But i agree, why drop the current Meta tank to lower levels? are the instance designers running out of ideas to make challenging content? or are top raiding kins completing T5 too quickly and the numbers of logins are dropping?

The captain has always had these skills!! why have they now become a problem? when did the Guard become redundant? what happened to the Blue warden?

these are the questions that should be addressed and not " what skills has the captain that are too powerful ?"

There are many threads with in depth details on why but my personal summary is that captain and guardian haven’t really changed but the rules and scenarios that they work under have massively changed since around U18 through ered mithrin (multiple combat revamps) through MM (massive unbalanced stat bloat). Bwarden and bguardian are bpe tanks. Bpe has been significantly downplayed and morale stacking plus escape skills are now preeminent due to changes in gameplay not changes in class.

We will see if anything comes out of U30 that changes the basis of assumptions on tanking.