Let's start talking about Guardians...

[Gorikon]

Having a viable DPS line is neat for landscape and smaller instances, but for the sake of lore, please don't make it competitive with Champs/DPS classes.

I don't see what the lore has to do with Guard DPS. The lore doesn't know Tanks and Damage Dealers. The lore doesn't even know classes.

No one asked for that

Care to disagree, this has been asked for multiple times. Why can't a DPS centric line be a true DPS line?

Yeah, blue line has to be priority. But for red, I imagine the following:
- effects that are underpowered or haven't been scaling are corrected
- yellow line becomes support line, and its DPS effects can be selected by red guards

This could bring DPS to competetive levels, while hopefully be close enough to the "fun line" yellow guards are enjoying so much.

[Fermongu]

blue line could inherit the yellow line debuffs and red could inherit flash of light as the actually inexistent redline perk/s

[Rino90]

Hi Orion. Many thanks to the team that before making changes you decided to collect feedback on the forum. I will not describe the problems with yellow line and useless skills and talents, Kotal has already done this perfectly. I will mention only some general aspects that, in my opinion, need to be paid attention to.

1. After rebalancing skill damage, bleeding value in total damage has been greatly reduced. Gameplay of the red line no longer corresponds to the original idea. Therefore, to increase guardian damage, you need to either focus on bleeding, or reconsider the concept.

2. Return of combat stances. It will be possible to add different effects to one skill depending on the chosen stance, which is important for red line of talents. Skills such as Guardian's Ward, Challenge, Engage, and Fray the Edge will be able to gain useful effects such as burst damage, group buffs, direct damage, or target debuff.

3. Utility. To seriously claim the place of a damage dealer in a raid, you must either deal much more damage than other classes, or have some really useful features. This is what we see now with hunters and warden. It is worth reducing the difference in damage between classes and adequately distribute useful buffs and debuffs among them. It would be especially good to limit the usefulness of the same effects from the same classes, which would encourage more diverse raid lineups. To some extent, this also applies to tanks, especially after a brawler was added to the game.

4. The problem with ignoring BPE. On many current bosses, guardian BPE saves are bad for survivability. Often there are situations when a well-timed Redirect or Catch a Breath with a blue set bonus is much more useful than Guardian's Pledge and Juggernaut. Regular saves with a short cooldown are prioritized over ultimate ones. I don't think this is good game design. Guardian saves need additional effects like damage reduction, or it is worth limiting ignore of BPE

5. Perhaps the developers should think about bringing back the old threat system? Current one is more like a half-measure, allowing not to scale additional threat on tank skills to match a constantly increasing damage of a raid. It works, but devalues some of the old skills, and makes tank gameplay a lot more boring.

[Technician46]

Hi Orion,
I just wanted to start with a couple of quotes from PrinceAladdin (another poster):
“I believe the guardian is teetering on the edge of irrelevance with the mantle being passed to the Brawler and Captain. The BPE-centric focus makes Guardian a decent adds tank, but the immense Damage Reduction skills of other tanks ensure they supplant the guardian in most instances. The Guardian, for example, has significant challenges sustaining against Boss 2 of HoA on higher tiers during the final phase because BPE is irrelevant for that portion of the fight.

I don't see a scenario where Brawler and Captain don't take over the main tank roles in the future. This has been a consistent problem with the Guardian for several years, where the Guardian becomes irrelevant in certain raid cycles because it is inferior to other tanks in regards to (1) mitigating boss-sourced damage and (2) buffing the group. Sure, Guardians are pretty sturdy, but Captains can put out ~150k HPS, they can Rez allies, they can shield fellows for massive damage reduction without harming themselves (i.e. shield of the dunedain vs shield wall), they can bolster everyone's morale pools, they can bolster everyone's survivability with banners/to-arms, etc. Brawlers rival Guardians in terms of sturdiness, they can stand nearly invincible for periods of time, they can Oathies every few seconds, and they have nearly equivalent taunts to the guardian minus engage. Guardians are better at threat generation, but …. does not quite make up for the sheer utility of the other tanks, who are still sturdy enough to do everything the Guardian does.”
“I am thankful to hear you will be putting some time into smoothing out the guardian. However, please allow me to caution you that it is critical you do not overlook correcting notable deficiencies in the blue line (compared to Cap Tank and Brawler Tank - please see my post above) in favor of updating the red and yellow lines. “

then I’ll follow by what I consider to be general problem w/ the Guardian in each line and move to some specifics:
Blue line:
? Need Damage Reduction:
? As Avoidance tanks (guard) we are taking significantly more damage than Damage Reduction tanks during boss fight specially in higher tier. Avoidance tanks are much harder to keep alive specially against bosses because they simply bypass b/p/e with their BIG hits and their tactical damage which guard don't have anything to counter that except their tactical mitigation which lessen when using particular skills (Fortification Cash Out). Not only do other tanks have b/p/e like guards but they have the added benefit of bigger damage reduction skills that guardians lack. We’re simply having a harder time surviving higher tier instances!!! To make matter worse, a lower morale pool than other tanks, “Fortification Cash Out”, “Share the Damage” system and dumb traits like Adaptability add to the problem(see below). And if that wasn't bad enough we have to either forego some blue line traits entirely or weaken them in order to have enough trait point to reach “Redirect” deep down in yellow line.. Which basically means that guards with lesser trait point HAVE NO DAMAGE REDUCTION EXCEPT 20% WARRIORS HEART.
? Need more Utility:
? Even if we were on equal footing w/ the likes of Captains and specially the Brawlers in damage reduction department, guards would still be falling into irrelevance as PrinceAladdin mentioned. Not only do we have very small damage reduction, but we bring almost NO UTILITY to the table. If it wasn’t for our aggro abilities, we would hardly be getting any work as tanks and much less as dps. The Captain and Brawler are not only able to survive better but are simply more useful to the group.
? Remove “Fortification Cash Out” system. (Litany of Defense and Break Ranks)
? As the title says, “The Tank that loses to gain”, we give the raid a benefit at the cost of survivability. We lose 10% of our mitigations when other tanks maintain 70% - 85% mits while benefitting the raid. I’m not sure if Warden can reach even higher mits. Just remove this system/thinking entirely from the guardians toolbox. Why do we have to lose survivability to bring benefits to the group. (See Simplification, Lag, and Other issues)
? Remove “Share the Damage” system. (Shield Wall and Litany of Defense)
? Here is another detrimental system to the guard. Anytime we help the group, we take extra damage. We call these the suicide buttons (Shield Wall and Litany of Defense). The truth is we hardly ever use these skills just because if we do, we die or pay dearly and strain our healers. Please just remove this system its of no use to us.
? Need Morale Boost: Hear me out please.
? The guards need a morale boost for several reasons but how much depends on the Devs next move:
? If we receive significant damage reduction boost/skills then I would recommend another 10% to 15% so we can accommodate things like Finesse, Crit Defense, Tactical Mitigation, Crit Rating essences, etc.….
? If they leave the Guardians as is, then I would recommend a minimum of 25% morale boost to help us survive the big boss damage and accommodate things like Finesse, Crit Defense, Tactical Mitigation, Crit Rating essences, etc.….
? Let say the average morale on a lvl 140 guardian is about 1,500,000
? 10% x 1,500,000 = 1,650,000 not even close to what captains can do
? 15% x 1,500,000 = 1,725,000 still less than Captains and other tanks I’ve seen
? 25% x 1,500,000 = 1,875,000 at or very near the average Captain. I’ve seen Captains w/ over 2million. NO JOKE. Plus, they have much bigger damage reduction skills then guardians.
• Remember this increase is not for the sake of stacking Vitality Essences like so many guards are having to doing just to survive but to add other needed essences and most importantly withstand boss damage and allow some breathing room for our healer.
? Need more Finesse/Crit Rating/Physical mastery:
? Apart from the need of these stats I recommended adding these stats as % not flat rates to our “Class Trait Set Bonuses”, you know the left most column on our Trait Tree. When added as part of a “Class Trait” instead of “Class Trait Set Bonus” you force us to use class trait that we may not necessarily want and limit the class trait point we would otherwise use for better traits. By adding them to our Class Trait Set Bonus you allow us the versatility to pick and choose traits we would like instead of being forced into having a certain trait that has a stat that we desperately need like Finesse. This will also help determine how much morale we should receive.
? Speed up Animation skills:
? This is self-explanatory. I do want to emphasize that this is particularly true of our shield skills animations even though the skills themselves are fast. These slow animations affect all other lines.
? Remove that “Lose to Win” motto/system from Guardians.
? “Fortification Cash out”, “Share the Damage“, “Adaptability” (which allows you increase your b/p rating but as soon as you use a b/p response skill you lose what you'd gained) are just plain dumb and of no real benefit. If you want to keep your mits up, if you don’t want to take extra damage or commit suicide, or if you don’t want to lose the extra b/p rating you will just lose the use of skills attached to them. This is plainly not a good idea. Just remove these systems/ideas from the guardian’s toolbox. Not only are they of no benefit but worse they are a detriment to us as I’ve explained above. And please don’t tell me that without these the guardian would be boring/plain…….. I’ll take plain and boring over death, or worse, not being invited to higher tier raids because these systems are detrimental to our survival.
Red line:
? Increase Damage:
? Pretty straight forward.
? I feel we should be able to at least compete at tier 3 level raids and in the moors. (See moors)
? Increase Crit Rating and Magnitude.
• Increase these rating through our “Class Set Trait Bonuses”
? Increase Bleed Damage
• The problem I see w/ our bleeds apart from needing an increase is you have to continually spam them if you want to keep them up, either increase duration or just make them independent of each other (ex: Terrible Wound iirc).
? Add Utility:
? Increase Survivability Slightly: Hear me out
? Survivability for landscape or instance/raid in red line is not to much of a problem. The problem is in the Ettenmoors.
• As you all know our dps is lacking and to maximize damage we must slot physical mastery and crit rating essences foregoing Vitality, physical/tactical mitigations, and crit defense causing us to be squishier. If we increase our defenses, then our dps suffers making the guard even more useless in the moors. We don’t even provide any decent utility to the group as captain and brawlers do.
• So, for the sake of the Guardians and his QoL in the moors we need a big dps boost, slight survivability check and more utility.
? Speed up Animations specially shield skills animations.
? Simplification, Lag and other Issues:
? I think that by adding more and new raid wide utilities, +(pick a %) lightening, shadow, frost, fire, etc to skills as oppose to just straight out physical and tactical damage, and other similar skills that tier up/down forcing constant recalculations of stats to the caster and group is creating much more in-game lag.
? Simplification I believe is part of the solution: Simplification of things like damage types, tiering DoTs, tiering skills and unification of B/P/E into "Avoidance" as another poster suggested (great idea btw), would in my opinion reduce lag.
? BLUE LINE SPECIFICS:
? Places you can add damage reduction to:
? Juggernaut (remove the 100% block component and add damage reduction instead), Shield wall, Litany of Defense, or Redirect. If added to these skills, then you can remove the 20% damage reduction from Warriors Heart. (NO SHARE THE DAMAGE. PLEASE)
? Make Bolster, Tenderize and Warchant accessible to low level guardians.
? Get rid of useless or fix traits/skills like:
? Adaptability
? Disorientation
? Break Ranks: disassociate from Shield Taunt
? RED LINE SPECIFICS:
? Make our dps less dependent on parry responses. When in red line we are not tanking and therefore don’t generate many parry or block (sword & shield) responses because mobs are not attacking us. When we don’t generate a parry/block responses, we can’t start our chain attack skills including our bleeds. Lack of parry responses also affect other redline traits, just take a look to see how many parry responses are required for many of our redline traits to work. What saves us atm is “Force Opening”.
? “Reactive Parry” Trait Set Bonus: very weak. Needs rework it or replace it altogether
? “Prey on the Weak” is indeed weak. Needs damage increase or rework
? “Honourable Combat” being nearly a capstone trait its just really bad. Needs a rework or replace w/ something a lot better.
? “Hammer Down” also pretty sad damage. I’m not sure if its just because guard damage isn’t that great to begin with or if it’s just a sad skill. Increase its damage and make it multiple targets.
? In conclusion, there are many other things that can be talked about and improved, for example: “Protection by the Sword” instead of being a +5% pulsating melee damage increase why not a 15 or 20% non-pulsating, non-stacking on all damage types. I know you made it to stack with other guardian PbtS but the truth is nobody want guard dps around specially in higher end stuff so it doesn’t get stacked. But like PriceAladdin said, more importantly we hope that you don’t forget about our Blue line

[CasualActual]

Hi Orion,Turn the Tables. This is a very powerful stun-break, and if traited it becomes even more so, however the need to hit your enemy is quite debilitating at times. This may be a nothing problem, but in many recent instances, not being able to break a stun, even when you have saved your stun break, can mean instant death, which is not satisfying.

So much this. This was a huge problem in Puglak t5 because the mobs stunned frequently and before I could hit turn the tables the mobs would already be on the other side of the room destroying the healer and dps. Add a bit of l*g and it was game over.

[Hipenny]

General:
Increase duration of parry/block response by 1-3 seconds
Make Turn the Tables animation way faster; however it no longer does damage or stun, or require someone to be nearby.

Red Line:
+5% crit chance

Make Hammer Down bypass all BPE and miss chance.

Reduce Hammer Down cooldown to 30 seconds.

Reduce Overwhelm cooldown to 5-8 seconds.

Increase morale received from Vitality 4.8 -> 5.0-5.2

Switch Relentless Assault trait from Blue Line with Thrill of Battle in Red Line.

Buff Relentless Assault Sting parry/block response chance from 25% to 33%

Make To the King knock down instead of conj/fellowship maneuver. (Certain fights in the past Guards have had to stop using To the King entirely because they started them at inopportune moments)

Give Stagger increased positional damage.

While using Redirect in Red Line(or any) make it open 3rd response to use To the King and/or Shield Smash.

If possible in PvMP, make parry chance ignore a portion of Monster Players finesse. (For example in my combat analysis, in 28 minutes recording, 105 million damage taken, I have exactly 2 Parry's, and 8 Partial Parry's. Those were all against NPC's. In most fights you get exactly 0. This makes Parry completely useless, and subsequently makes Skilled Deflection, and Tenderize useless as well.)

Switch and convert Singular Focus with Honourable Combat. Buff Singular Focus to remove % based mitigation(s).

With max tier of To The Rescue trait, have Brutal Charge become immediate.

Give Terrible Wound -15% to -50% inc healing for its duration.

Yellow Line:
In the first row of traits add a stat buff that gives one of the following: Crit, Mastery, Finesse, Vitality, Crit Defence, or Mitigations

[Celadyl]

I'd like to give my 2 Cents.
I've been playing guard since SoA, it was my first lvl 50 character and my main eversince. I'm hoping with the upcoming guard rework, red-line will become comparable in power to other classes. I know a lot of lotro players have a one-trick-pony mentality when it comes to classes and think guardian is a tank, and should therefore have an underwhelming dps spec. I do not agree with this, and many other mmorpgs have shown that a system in which all classes can excel at multiple roles is very much possible. I remember a lot of updates and how guardian played in those, and the years have shaped my personal taste of what I'd like guardian to be, my favorite times to play red-line guardian being 65 and 85 level cap, when guardian had solid direct damage supported by its bleeds, instead of relying entirely on bleeds (like with lvl 95). Oh, and I will use pvmp as a reference, because I like the moors.

Some people I talked to said SSG should buff the bleeds and make them stackable again, like stacking a single bleed to 10 or similar things we've seen, and I personally wouldnt love to see this. When all class trees were reworked with the helms deep expansion was my least favorite time to play guardian. The bleeds were strong, guardian had very strong self heal, but hit like a wet noodle, didnt have any oomph and overall just felt bland and boring.
I also think as a DoT class, guardian will always be outclassed by wardens.That's why I see red guard as a ST powerhouse class, which also desperately needs some buffs/debuffs to become group viable. As of now, guardian has mediocre dps and no group support in red at all, which makes it a poor choice for both pve and pvmp raids. Yellow line has made some attempts of being a debuff class, and I think some of its ideas could be incorporated into red line.
Overall I would like to see guardian base damage of most skills increased, while bleeds can stay or even be nerfed and become a secondary dmg source to stabilize dps, or even be used as catalysators to "cashout" with other skills (for example: if overwhelm hits a target affected by wound x, it deals x amount of extra dmg). Guardian could also need some form of heal debuff, whch would help solidify it in pvmp.

One of the main problems I see with guard is how stat gimped the class is. As a champion, might gives you physical mastery, crit, physical mitigation, parry, evade. Vitality gives you morale, block, resistance, morale regen. you can get 30k might from yellow tree, 150k finesse from yellow tree, 19,900 and 5% parry vitality from blue tree, 5% crit from red tree, 5% tactical mitigation in blue.
As a guard might gives you physical mastery, parry, evade. Vitality gives you morale, resistance, and morale regen. From trait lines you can get 75k finesse in blue, 87k tactical mitigation in blue, 5% parry in red, 5% incoming heal in yellow.
This comparison is an absolute joke. We dont get mitigation or crit from might, and while block from vitality is useless in red, it adds to the insult. I do understand why guardian defensive boni in trait lines are not % based, because it can go over the cap etc. but we also get the short stick with offensive buffs.
If you have 100k might, that's 6 essences worth of stats that guardians lose compared to champions. I'd propose might giving critical rating and possibly finesse to guardians, or make might give a LOT more parry to guardians, like 2x or 3x the amount (would be worthless in pve though). red line needs a critical rating % increase like every other red tree. give a bonus (like extra might) to the 5% parry trait in red, as its kind of useless on its own. in pve, you will likely never parry, in pvmp finesse negates basically all of your parry rating anyway.

Brutal assault is in desperate need of attention. currently the skill uses up 11 trait points and offers very little in return. low to mediocre impact damage (despite its impressive animation), and a short dot that is fine but clunky. currently, other than refreshing the dot, there is no reason to use brutal assault, and having to reset it so the dot doesnt expire doesnt feel very rewarding at all. It would need to do a lot more direct dmg or DoT, and I could see it apply a stackable mitigations debuff to the target, to make it more worthwhile. My idea is to give it a stackable effect that reduces targets physical mitigation by 2% per stack (up to 3x) and reduces incoming heal by 5 or 10% per stack. On top, it should have its initial damage doubled. In this case, the dot wouldnt need to change, as it is strong but short.

Honourable combat is obviously a complete joke and never worth using a trait point on. I'm honestly not sure what the idea behind it is, as it has always kind of sucked imo. I'd prefer to see it become some kind of group buff or something that makes guardians attractive for groups, instead of making it another strong heal.

Thrill of battle is pretty bad too. It only works if a parry chain skill crits. Im not sure what to do with this, I think guardian doesnt really need passive healing, I would just change this to give 5% crit chance and maybe 10% crit dmg at a 6th tier.

Invigourating parry. If this would work on any crit it could maybe be more useful. It's pretty telling that both this and ToB require critical hits (and specifically only works on 6 skills), while guardian doesnt get any crit from its trait tree or main stat. However, I'd still like this to stay a power-recovering skill, as guardian really needs this to avoid having to stack fate on top of being stat gimped.

So concluding, I would prefer to see red-line guard to become a more offensive, direct dmg spec, not a poor man's warden, and not the wet noodle it currently is. It's role could be to debuff a single target (boss) while giving some minor buffs to the group, like a redcappy-light. single target DPS is probably the most vanilla role there is, but its always needed. Level 85 was the one time that I felt like guardian was almost there, I remember tanking a skirmish with 10 champions in red line, without using any taunt skills and keeping aggro throughout the entire instance. In pvmp we were squishier than hunters, but the damage was very satisfying.

A Turbine quote from some lvl 85 update: "Wir sind überzeugt, dass durch diese Änderungen die Wächter den gleichen Schaden verursachen können wie die Waffenmeister-, Jäger- und Runenbewahrer-Klassen in der Schaden über Zeit-Haltung und, noch wichtiger, dass sie diesen Schaden aufrechterhalten können." (roughly translates to: We are convinced, that with these changes, the guardian class can deal the same amount of damage compared to the champion, hunter, and runekeeper classes (in damage over time stance), and more importantly, that it can sustain it.")

[Mordimac]

I would love to see shield boni in red line. Maybe make shield smash a core skill and have traits to add targets/buff mitigations in blue for every target hit and add targets/buff dps traits in red for each target hit, make sword and board a viable dps spec but not at the expense of those who prefer the two hander style.
As others have stated, Brutal Assault for 11 trait points is not very brutal. Hardly worth using the skill even fully traited it does pathetic up front damage and is only used to apply the bleed.

Can we get updated sounds, most of our skills sound like we are swinging and missing with big whooshes, give us sounds that actually sound like you hit something.