More Guardian Thoughts

[zipfile]

I haven't traded essence yet due to priority for my other characters. On the test, as far as I remember, the difference in APS with the essence was not very big. Apparently with the essence and the same rotation it will be possible to reach 520k-530k

Overall APS, no, but skills like Overwhelm and TTK will greatly benefit from attack duration buffs.

Guardians APS is inflated due to Sting spam anyway.

[Meshuggenah]

IMO, One of the most significant things to consider when reworking the Guardian is their lack of utility in a fellowship.

Captain, Beorning, Brawler and Warden all have various forms of incoming damage and/or mitigation debuffs, self/fellowship healing, combat revive, DPS, buffs, etc.

Guardians and Champions are sort of left behind when it comes to the utility they provide. Even if their tanking ability were on par, lack of utility will leave them less desirable than other tanks.

Also, I would personally prefer to see Guardian given the Minstrel treatment with a single tank and DPS line and yellow being supplemental. Blue Guardian should be equally capable in either single target or AoE encounters, as with any tank. Also seems like unnecessary work for the devs trying to balance a redundant secondary tanking line.

[Thunderblast]

IMO, One of the most significant things to consider when reworking the Guardian is their lack of utility in a fellowship.

Captain, Beorning, Brawler and Warden all have various forms of incoming damage and/or mitigation debuffs, self/fellowship healing, combat revive, DPS, buffs, etc.

Guardians and Champions are sort of left behind when it comes to the utility they provide. Even if their tanking ability were on par, lack of utility will leave them less desirable than other tanks.

I half agree on this. In my opinion, a Guardian should be a viable DPS (just like blue Warden should be a viable tank) but should be a superb tank (just like blue Minstrel is a superb healer). The primary utility a Guardian should provide to a situation is the ability to secure aggro on many targets at the same time and survive the consequences (including big boss hits).

However, Guardians should have one group utility advantage over the other tanks, one that they had at the launch of the game: the ability to reliably trigger FMs. While FM scaling has really fallen behind, with a little touchup to the effects/impact of FMs, Guardians would get the utility that they need in a healthy way, as designed at the game's launch in 2007. This is the best solution to what you're describing: a different type of group support. All the other tanks provide group utility in the form of buttons that give a buff. Guardians were designed to have something different.

Also, I would personally prefer to see Guardian given the Minstrel treatment with a single tank and DPS line and yellow being supplemental. Blue Guardian should be equally capable in either single target or AoE encounters, as with any tank. Also seems like unnecessary work for the devs trying to balance a redundant secondary tanking line.

I agree wholeheartedly here with everything you've said here. A blue guardian should be capable of being the only tank for most situations, except for ones that explicitly require a second tank (two bosses that need to be kept separate, a la Battle for Erebor), so there should be no need for a second Guardian tank line implying that you might need both.

Guardians are the original tank class and should be able to tank bosses and adds at the same time, in the same trait spec. It's other tanks who should be a little more specialized: Cappies and Brawlers for ST situations, Wardens and Champions for add-heavy situations. Guardians should be able to do both perfectly without a second trait line, just like a Minstrel should have both burst and AoE healing also without a second trait line, as is currently the case.

[Hephburz-2]

However, Guardians should have one group utility advantage over the other tanks, one that they had at the launch of the game: the ability to reliably trigger FMs. While FM scaling has really fallen behind, with a little touchup to the effects/impact of FMs, Guardians would get the utility that they need in a healthy way, as designed at the game's launch in 2007. This is the best solution to what you're describing: a different type of group support. All the other tanks provide group utility in the form of buttons that give a buff. Guardians were designed to have something different.

This would take... Some work...

Point 1 - Simply because, the rate at which an FM can be opened, specifically from a Burglar (With the high % chance on exposed throat, alongside their other skills), or even the Exposed Root skill from Bog-Lurker which could effectively be spammed with dismiss and resummon, FMs could realistically be opened way too frequently, and any adjustment to their frequency would then effect content which was designed with that in mind - Anvil Boss 1 (T3) for example.
Point 2 - You are "out of action" for the period in which you are contributing to the FM, which current game mechanics don't 'really' allow for, unless your contribution was made 'passively' rather than 'actively' as it is now.
Point 3 - Unless raid bosses can be FM'd, or bosses in general, there isn't much use to reviving them, but that in itself is a whole different problem, because you would be able to FM to stop skill casts, or delay skill casts, or in general, just interrupt the 'flow' of the fight, which could have even further unintended consequences.

So, reviving FMs would only work, on a fight that was designed to have FMs as part of its mechanics, and in which case we'd just end up with Draigoch 2.0 and I don't think anyone wants that?
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see them revived/revamped too, just not sure how feasible a mechanic it would be.

[Thunderblast]

Point 1 - Simply because, the rate at which an FM can be opened, specifically from a Burglar (With the high % chance on exposed throat, alongside their other skills), or even the Exposed Root skill from Bog-Lurker which could effectively be spammed with dismiss and resummon, FMs could realistically be opened way too frequently, and any adjustment to their frequency would then effect content which was designed with that in mind - Anvil Boss 1 (T3) for example.

This is definitely a fair point. It would probably require a minor lookover on all FM-triggering skills that are not currently overpowered, but would be if FMs became important again. None the least of these is TTK itself, with FM on crit. You can reliably hit TTK 3 times in about 12 seconds (twice plus a cd reset from War-chant) if you try, and with a 20% crit chance that's (probability-wise) about one FM every 20 seconds, not even counting a Brutal Charge for the autocrit. That's more FM-triggerability than Exposed Throat, which is only one FM every 25 seconds (more or less). Not 100% sure I did my math right though .

Point 2 - You are "out of action" for the period in which you are contributing to the FM, which current game mechanics don't 'really' allow for, unless your contribution was made 'passively' rather than 'actively' as it is now.

The "useless because I'm participating in a maneuver" period could easily be removed for passive contributions, as you say.

Point 3 - Unless raid bosses can be FM'd, or bosses in general, there isn't much use to reviving them, but that in itself is a whole different problem, because you would be able to FM to stop skill casts, or delay skill casts, or in general, just interrupt the 'flow' of the fight, which could have even further unintended consequences.

This could be fixed by making the current FM-immunity effect an immunity to FM stuns, but not to the FMs themselves. That way (with proper damage scaling of course) an FM could be used to meaninfully add to DPS, and so would be useful, but without actually breaking various raid and instance mechanics.

So, reviving FMs would only work, on a fight that was designed to have FMs as part of its mechanics, and in which case we'd just end up with Draigoch 2.0 and I don't think anyone wants that?
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see them revived/revamped too, just not sure how feasible a mechanic it would be.

I'm also unsure about how doable it would be for the devs, and I certainly don't want them to design encounters around FMs. That would be truly awful. I just want to let them know that there's interest in, if nothing else, at least scaling up the damage/healing/power values to be useful again at higher levels, even just for smaller 3-man groups and such.

[CaerArianrhod]

The Defender of the Free

On the surface, the blue trait line and the blue guardian is in pretty good shape. There are only a few minor changes that I think we want to make; and by minor, I mean really minor.

Purchased Traits

Relentless Assault becomes Skilled Deflection: which would change out the finesse increases, and replace them with a flat bonus to your parry.

Aside from that, there isn't much that we really think needs to happen.

• So we then need to use and waste a virtue slot for something like Wit or uses more essence slots for finesse? Or do you add somewhere else finesse into the blue line?
• You could fix Follow´Through that is targeting 8 targets at max rank again.
• No one is really using Improved Shield Spikes

[zipfile]

• You could fix Follow´Through that is targeting 8 targets at max rank again.

This wasn't a bug, it was a nerf from long ago.

And with a +4 AOE target tracery, 11 targets is more than enough so no need to waste development time on this.

[Hephburz-2]

The "useless because I'm participating in a maneuver" period could easily be removed for passive contributions, as you say. This could be fixed by making the current FM-immunity effect an immunity to FM stuns, but not to the FMs themselves. That way (with proper damage scaling of course) an FM could be used to meaninfully add to DPS, and so would be useful, but without actually breaking various raid and instance mechanics. I'm also unsure about how doable it would be for the devs, and I certainly don't want them to design encounters around FMs. That would be truly awful. I just want to let them know that there's interest in, if nothing else, at least scaling up the damage/healing/power values to be useful again at higher levels, even just for smaller 3-man groups and such.

Whilst this sounds great in theory, you would end up creating a situation whereby the group gets high reward, for no risk and no "input", which is another problem in itself.

[Rino90]

Overall APS, no, but skills like Overwhelm and TTK will greatly benefit from attack duration buffs.

Guardians APS is inflated due to Sting spam anyway.

Screenshot from the current test with class essence and the same rotation. As you can see, the effect of 10% attack duration on all skills and total APS is minimal and applies mainly to auto attacks.

[zipfile]

Screenshot from the current test with class essence and the same rotation. As you can see, the effect of 10% attack duration on all skills and total APS is minimal and applies mainly to auto attacks.

Yeah, that's a beautiful parse, nice one! Now you're bringing me back to when I was actually parsing with weapon swaps and hitting 25-28 To The Kings!

I'm far too rusty and ruined to pull these numbers anymore but happy to see there's others still

[Bjorngard_EU]

But to me, essence wins out overall as the -3% mitigation debuff with the 10% damage gives a very large bonus to damage on top of everything else.

Since you mentioned the Cardolan Essence of Retaliation, could you tell the details what exactly does "briefly" on it mean? What is the duration of the effect? And what is the uptime restriction: how often you can reapply it?
Basically, could you please show the tooltip box of the effect when it's up?

[zipfile]

Since you mentioned the Cardolan Essence of Retaliation, could you tell the details what exactly does "briefly" on it mean? What is the duration of the effect? And what is the uptime restriction: how often you can reapply it?
Basically, could you please show the tooltip box of the effect when it's up?

No cooldown.

Lasts 10 seconds on both target and self.

Effect is called Retaliating.

[Thunderblast]

In the autumn of last year, I posted my initial musings on some alterations that I wanted to make to Guardians. There was a lot of good feedback and discussion, and though, I let the thread lapse, I have been keeping up with things and making some alternative plans based on the feedback I've seen.

As we start to wind down on our first quarter, and turn our eyes toward the second quarter, I wanted to start the discussion about the currently line of thinking and some of the impetus driving the desired changes.

Before you read any further: these are the initial thoughts put before you to get some initial feedback. I have run this by the team internally and we wanted to start to get your feedback before we dive headlong into this development.

I love all of this! In case you haven't gotten started with the changes yet, some more feedback to consider:

The Defender of the Free
On the surface, the blue trait line and the blue guardian is in pretty good shape. There are only a few minor changes that I think we want to make; and by minor, I mean really minor.

Purchased Traits

Relentless Assault becomes Skilled Deflection: which would change out the finesse increases, and replace them with a flat bonus to your parry.

Aside from that, there isn't much that we really think needs to happen.

Please scrap these blue changes (we need that finesse desperately) and instead move Redirect + Vicious Rebuttal over to blue to replace Disorientation. Regardless of what happens to yellow line, its identity will most likely be some sort of AoE role, so a damage-reduction skill used for boss fights doesn't make much sense to be a yellow trait, especially given that blue Guardians have almost nothing else they can actively do to survive unavoidable big hits.

I would also love to see Shield Wall reworked to be less punishing, but that's less important.

The Keen Blade
Our main objective in adjusting the red line, is to get the damage output to a spot where it competes against other high DPS characters. Of course, we need to be careful to allow the guardian to keep all of their top line tanking - so there will be a trade-off.

The first step in doing this, is giving The Keen Blade an specialization perk. My current thought on this specialization is, to lean into the heavy nature of the guardian, while also using the changes to mastery. Along those lines the current thought is this: All outgoing healing is reduced significantly, and the physical mastery increases based off of your armour value. The trade-off here would allow for a measure of consistency in the combat hits of the red line guardian.

Our secondary objectives, are to make the red line guardian sustained damage more consistent, make burst damage more reliable, remove reliance on combat response events, and have a capstone that is beneficial to the fellowship.

All of this is great. I will say though, given that you're trying to reduce reliance on avoidance responses, the better specialization perk would be that parry responses are opened by criticals? With most classes, specialization perks tend to be a mechanic rather than just a buff. Making criticals open parry responses would be perfect for this role.

Earned Traits

Reactive Parry: Adjust the damage upward to give value to the trait.

Bleed Them Dry: Moves to 15 points deep in the line

Protection by the Sword: moves to 20 deep in the line

Prey on the Weak: Moves to 25 deep in the line

Brutal Charge: Moves to the capstone slow of granted traits and affects only melee-based skills

Purchased Traits

Broad Strokes: moves up in the line but remains unchanged.

Relentless Assault: Swapping positions from the blue line, this now increases finesse and increases the tick count on all guardian bleeds.

Heavy Weapons: Flat mod on two-handed weapon damage by 2%/tier

Thrill of Battle : Damaging Attacks in combat increase your Critical Chance by 1%/tier, Caps at 5 stacks, Critically striking resets the benefit

Thrust: While specialized in Keen Blade no longer requires a combat response

Tireless Blows: 10% chance, on criticals, to reset Brutal Assault/tier

Invigourating Parry becomes Invigourating Critical: Restore 1% to your power on a critical strike

To the Rescue: Tier 6 no longer functions on every skill - this shifts to just melee skills gain the crit chance.

Honourable Combat is Replaced with Rupture: To the King gains, remove all current bleeds for damage based on the number of deeds present, increases incoming damage on the affected target by 3% for 5 seconds/bleed removed.

I like most of this, exceptions are:

Rupture. Please don't tie it to TTK. At the moment, TTK is the biggest source of damage we have. Making TTK remove bleeds would make us unable to use TTK like we currently do for fear of removing our second-biggest source of damage: our bleeds. Just make this turn Engage into Rupture, which would then be a separate skill, since no red Guardians will ever be using Engage anyway.

Reactive Parry. The problem with Reactive Parry is not that it deals insignificant damage. Rather than amping up the damage, rework Reactive Parry to instead cause critical hits to give a parry response, if that's not already becoming the spec perk.

Heavy Weapons: Why just for 2h? 1h + shield red Guardians exist, especially in soloing situations where Pledge is traited.

Other than that though, I like the red changes!

The Fighter of ShadowOur main objective with Fighter of Shadow is to define it's role more clearly. That is to say, not make this a supporting line, rather a line that gives the Guardian a third distinct role. That role is as an AoE Tank.

Our secondary objective, is to reduce the non-performant and abusive behavior that the line has without compromising the overall appeal of the line.

While I hear what you're saying, please just make Fighter of Shadow non-speccable. I really really don't think that ST tanks and AoE tanks should be a thing, especially not for Guardians. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: Guardians are the original LotRO tank class. They should be able to tank all situations, ST, AoE, whatever. Do Minstrels have two healing trait lines, one for burst healing and one for AoE? No, a Minstrel has one healing line that works in all situations, allowing them to actually do their job and be the main healer for a group. Guardians should be the same way, except with tanking instead of healing.

This is not to say that Guardians should be in all ways superior to other tanks. In fact, Wardens, Captains, Brawlers, and even Champions should all have their niche where they outperform a Guardian in tanking. However, a Guardian should be able to main tank all content, all tiers of difficulty. Other tanks might make certain things easier or harder, but a blue Guardian should be a baseline that should be able to tank everything, no questions asked (although higher-tier stuff will obviously not be easy).

This, as before, is the same situation as Minstrel vs RK vs Beorning (Captains are in the mix in here somewhere). While RKs might be better at healing over time, and Beornings better at burst healing, a Minstrel can do both and so is the default healer. Guardians should be the Minstrels of tank classes (I know I kind of just said this earlier in this post though ).



To the rest of your Fighter of Shadow changes:

I really like the idea of Take to Heart becoming a hotspot! Maybe a different name? "Face the Darkness" rings better and makes more sense with a Guardian standing her/his ground in a hotspot.

Please make this a purchaseable skill, costing 3 points. Other traits further down in Fighter of shadow reduce the cooldown (to a point where the hotspot can have 100% uptime), add additional debuffs, and add an effect where the debuffs persist for a short duration even after a target leaves the hotpot.

The rest of Fighter of Shadow should be pretty much as you described, except with Redirect and Vicious Rebuttal moving to Defender of the Free.

Flash of Light could be one of the enhancements to Take to Heart/Face the Darkness later on that adds a pulse of light damage to all affected targets every time you hit one with an attack.

Mark of Permanence should disappear. Like Sieze the Moment, it was a lot of fun (esp. for PvMP) but was kind of abusive and went against the original intention of the spec.


Thanks for reading!

The other most important things to me that Guardians keep are: War-chant cd reduction, lots of stun immunity from Turn the Tables, Bolstering Blocks (without a rate limit), and the best debuff remover in the game. The rest is just my two cents!

~Manace, Elf Guardian, Crickhollow

[Rino90]

All of this is great. I will say though, given that you're trying to reduce reliance on avoidance responses, the better specialization perk would be that parry responses are opened by criticals? With most classes, specialization perks tend to be a mechanic rather than just a buff. Making criticals open parry responses would be perfect for this role.

It seems to me that looking at the current red set and its bonus, the best solution for future updates would be to reduce the cooldown of "Force Opening" to 5 seconds.

First, the rotation of the red guard relies too heavily on parry responses and the sequence of skills associated with it, and any bad luck with a random response can critically affect the effectiveness.

Secondly, most parry skills have the same small cooldown of 5 seconds, and given their sequential use and the presence of other important skills in the rotation like "Sting" and maintain bleeding, the cooldown of the first skill in the chain ("Retaliation" or "Whirling Retaliation") is coming to an end at the time of using the latter ("To The King"), which reduces the usefulness of random parry responses opening more than once every 5 seconds.

Thirdly, when resetting the cooldown with "War-chant" and using two chains in a row, there will be a problem with interrupting skills with a slow animation. We have at our disposal one interrupt every 5 seconds and once every 10 seconds (except for exotic ways to interrupt with "Catch a Breath" or "Guardian's Pledge", which have a long cooldown), and this is not enough for such a number of slow skills going in a row in the rotation, which in turn will rather reduce the speed of the rotation and therefore reduce the dps.

Back to the specialization perk. The option proposed by Orion will increase the red guard's physical mastery rating and allow the vacant essence slots to be filled with defensive stats like tactical mitigation, which is critical for accessing high raid tiers. In the event of a change in the specialization perk, developers should think about additional scaling of crit rating or physical mastery from strength or vitality.

[zipfile]

Back to the specialization perk. The option proposed by Orion will increase the red guard's physical mastery rating and allow the vacant essence slots to be filled with defensive stats like tactical mitigation, which is critical for accessing high raid tiers. In the event of a change in the specialization perk, developers should think about additional scaling of crit rating or physical mastery from strength or vitality.

Better to have specialization be something better than just a stat bonus...something that might affect the rotation or gameplay in a positive way.

Might should definitely get something however, as Guardian is the only class that gets nothing worthwhile from their main stat.

[Gamlieldar]

Orion, I enjoy what OnnMM did with the captain rework pertaining to Gallant Display:

#1: Make it a default skill available to all captains, regardless of specialization
#2: Allow the functionality of Gallant Display to change based on chosen specialization (stays the same if Captain chooses Blue Line).

Apply this method to Guardian's Ward in such a way that:

#1: The default skill remains the same if traited Blue Line
#2: The default skill changes name and functionality if traited Red Line (and only red line assuming yellow-line becomes brawlerized)

The end result for Red-Line keen Blade guards would be this:

Guardian's Might:
+5% Damage
+2.5% Critical Chance
+2.5% Devastating Critical Chance
+10% Critical Magnitude
Duration: 10 seconds

Opens Up Parry Response
Duration: 6 seconds

Retroactively, any traits that enhance Guardian's Ward would also affect Guardian's Might (such as -% power cost trait, Guardian's Ward Tactics, etc.). As far as traceries are concerned, I would recommend the two traceries we have on live have their effects be reorganized as such:

#1: Guardian's Ward Duration & Block Chance (Live) ---> becomes Guardian's Ward Duration & Avoidance Chance with the following effects:

+% Guardian's Ward Block and Parry Chance (same magnitudes as on live)
+Guardian's Ward duration (same magnitudes as on live)

#2: Guardian's Ward Damage & Parry Chance (Live) ---> Becomes Guardian's Might Critical Magnitude & Ability Damage

+% Guardian's Might Ability Damage (same magnitudes as on live for the Ward tracery)
+% Guardian's Might Critical Magnitude (new effect that improves the critical magnitude buff)

[Thunderblast]

It seems to me that looking at the current red set and its bonus, the best solution for future updates would be to reduce the cooldown of "Force Opening" to 5 seconds.

First, the rotation of the red guard relies too heavily on parry responses and the sequence of skills associated with it, and any bad luck with a random response can critically affect the effectiveness.

Secondly, most parry skills have the same small cooldown of 5 seconds, and given their sequential use and the presence of other important skills in the rotation like "Sting" and maintain bleeding, the cooldown of the first skill in the chain ("Retaliation" or "Whirling Retaliation") is coming to an end at the time of using the latter ("To The King"), which reduces the usefulness of random parry responses opening more than once every 5 seconds.

Fine by me, except Force Opening needs a reduced animation duration in order to make this work. Right now, whenever I use Force Opening I have to animation cut with ITP because Force Opening takes so long. It's actually so bad that, especially if you're solo, you can often get a parry while you're in the middle of using Force Opening, which makes the Force Opening skill play just a waste of 1-2 secs. In that case, it's best to just hit sting and then do something else and hope you get a parry response from something else. Long story short, devs should definitely look at Force Opening to get a shorter animation.

Thirdly, when resetting the cooldown with "War-chant" and using two chains in a row, there will be a problem with interrupting skills with a slow animation. We have at our disposal one interrupt every 5 seconds and once every 10 seconds (except for exotic ways to interrupt with "Catch a Breath" or "Guardian's Pledge", which have a long cooldown), and this is not enough for such a number of slow skills going in a row in the rotation, which in turn will rather reduce the speed of the rotation and therefore reduce the dps.

For one thing, a Catch a Breath animation cut is rarely used simply because Catch a Breath has an enormous animation itself. It's only really useful as an animation cut is if you were going to use it anyway, which a Keen Blade Guardian should never (hypothetically) need to do in a group. Pledge can be occasionally useful as an animation cut, but rarely: if I'm traited Keen Blade, then there's a good chance I won't even have Pledge traited, and if I'm traited Defender of the Free, it's because I'm tanking, and so probably want to save Pledge in case I need it.

Back to the specialization perk. The option proposed by Orion will increase the red guard's physical mastery rating and allow the vacant essence slots to be filled with defensive stats like tactical mitigation, which is critical for accessing high raid tiers. In the event of a change in the specialization perk, developers should think about additional scaling of crit rating or physical mastery from strength or vitality.

I hear what you're saying, but I really think the proposed armour=phys mastery change should be baseline for Keen Blade and Defender of the Free Guardians. Let me explain: what's the one gear-wise thing that Guardians have that Captains don't? Heavy Shields. Since Captains easily hit phys mits cap from armour anyway, having a better armour rating from a Heavy Shield is pretty useless anyway. Having armour effect more than just mits (which are, as before, usually capped anyway) for Guardians makes this gearing advantage actually worth something. Therefore phys mastery from armour should be something Guardians get anyway.

Then, the Keen Blade spec perk can be "critical hits open parry responses" and then everything works well together. Guards get extra damage and less reliance on parries and everybody's happy.




Separately, I was just reading back in this thread and saw an idea that I really like for blue line: Fortification maintenance. I think it was Rorrelm who posted about it originally. The way this should work:

1) Fortifications work like RK writs: they tier up every time you add to them, they have a duration, when the duration runs out they tier down and restart the duration.

2) To compensate for the added work this costs, each rank of Forts is worth 3% instead 2%.

3) Each rank has a different base duration until it tiers down:
1st rank (+3% mits) has 30 sec duration
2nd rank (+6% mits) has 20 sec duration until it becomes a 1st rank Fortification
3rd rank (+9% mits) has 10 sec duration until it tiers down to 2nd rank
4th rank (+12% mits) has 5 sec duration until tier down
5th rank (+15% mits and group-wide +2%) has 3 sec duration

4) This sounds like a buff but it's not. For one thing, tiers 5, 4, and to a lesser extent, 3 will tier down very quickly so it's quite likely that a Guardian will, at some points in a fight, have weaker mits than live today. For another the group-wide +2% mits that is 100% uptime for a group with a blue Guardian atm would become a rare thing, which itself removes a huge bit of Guardian utility.

5) It would make Defender of the Free Guardian gameplay more engaging. Right now, holding aggro of a single target is trivial on a blue Guard. Once Fortifications are up, that becomes trivial as well. In fact, most of the interesting elements of Guardian tank gameplay come from yellow anyway.

6) It fixes a hack. I'm honestly surprised I've never seen anyone mention this in a forum or anywhere, I'm sure someone has but I've never run into it. Anyway: today on live, Forts only expire after 9 secs out of combat. Same for blue Warrior's Fortitude buffs. So, what I often do solo is fight my first fight in blue, get my Forts up, then switch to red. Then, for the rest of my fighting, as long as I don't wait too long between pulls, I get to enjoy both Forts from blue and extra damage from red.

Making Forts require active maintenance would fix this hack.


Anyways, thanks for reading.

~Manace, Elf Guardian, Crickhollow

[Khluzainn]

At its base guys there is a simple problem and a simple solution.

Make blue a great tank and yes its already one of the best 'aoe' tanks in the game..

Make red a great dps.

Have yellow line be full of all of the unqiue utility, defences, and abilites that many people love it for but allow those things to be used by blue and red. We dont need TWO tanks lines folks please see reality here. The unqiue light damage and debuffs could still get woven into blue or red gameplay but actually just be more viable.

Of course all of this takes into account proper tuning of number for blue and red or any class for that matter to make them viable.

[SSG_Orion]

Good evening. I wanted to take a moment and let you all know where we are thinking the Guardian will shake out. After reviewing a lot of the feedback here and taking a step back to play through the current specs, we are looking at the following:

The Defender of the Free

Likely to be relatively unchanged. This is to say, that at this time, I am not planning on any changes to the Blue Line directly. Most changes will come as adjustments are made to the The Fight of Shadow - discussed later.

The first large-ish change comes to The Keen Blade

If a trait is unmentioned then there are no intended changes to the trait.

For choosing this specialization you will earn te Skill Overwhelm
This specialization will no longer provide the skill Force Opening - See change to The Figher of Shadow for more details.

Specialization: Reduce outgoing healing by some value (likely between 33-50%) And Parry and Block response events add 3% to damage stacking up to 5 times. Expires if out of combat for 9 seconds.

Thrill of Battle

5 Tiers
Damaging Attacks in combat increase your Critical Chance by 1%/tier
Cap of 5 stacks (5%)
Critical srikes removes the effect; effect lasts for 20 seconds

Heavy-weapons Damage
Adds +2% to Two-handed damage per tierin addition to skill damage.

Damaging Attacks in combat increase your Critical Chance by 1%/tier
Cap of 5 stacks (5%)
Critical removes the effect lasts for 20 seconds

Reactive Parry
Becomes Reactive Response and Adds the same effect to Block events

Thurst
No longer requires a parry/block event.
Cooldown increases to 12s

Inigourating Response
Renamed and now a parry or block response triggers the ability.

To the Rescue
At Tier 6, the 100% critical is restricted to Melee skills

Warrior's Fortitude
Adds Block and Partial Block

Honourable Combat
Becomes Rupture
Augment to the Hammer Down (Renamed) - 5 Tiers
Strips all current bleed for Damage Cashout
Increases incoming damage on target by 3% per removed bleed for 5s per bleed removed

Next up is the biggest change. After reading the feedback here and listening to discussions in game, we will be removing The Fighter of Shadow as a spec line. All of the functionality of the line will remain, though the tiers at which you gain them will change:

The Fighter of Shadow

0 Points

Force Opening

Now a trainable skill that triggers both a block and parry response event.

Bastion of Light
Formerly Take to Heart
Gurardian activates a toggle aura on themselves that marks up to 3 enemies within 5 meters. Marked targets have a reduced chance to hit and are more susceptible to debuffs applied by the Guardian.

Light-Touched
5 Tiers
Can Block with 2-hand weapons.
+1% Melee Damage/Tier
+1 Incoming Healing/tier

5+

Radiate

Requires Bastion of Light

15+

Protection

Trained Toggle Skill
Increases Fellowship BPE 1%
Can react to Block and Parry triggered by fellow members within 10m

20+

Flash of Light

Trained SKill

Transforms Damage on marked Targets to Light

25+

Strong Bursts

Move down to require more dedication to the utility line.
Considering setting the bonus to 3% per tier with the Tier 6 capstone going to 25% bonus

Manifested Ire

Becomes a Trainable Trait

30+

Mark of Permanence

Becomes a Trainable Trait

Incapacitate

Becomes a trainable trait.

That is the current thinking.

[zipfile]

The Defender of the Free

Likely to be relatively unchanged. This is to say, that at this time, I am not planning on any changes to the Blue Line directly. Most changes will come as adjustments are made to the The Fight of Shadow - discussed later.

So, no changes to traits like Disorientation and Adaptability which are utterly horrendous...

Specialization: Reduce outgoing healing by some value (likely between 33-50%) And Parry and Block response events add 3% to damage stacking up to 5 times. Expires if out of combat for 9 seconds.

Just set it to 50% and look into doing something with Warriors Heart heal so it's not a full-heal. A DPS role doesn't need a full-heal in any sense.

Thrill of Battle

5 Tiers
Damaging Attacks in combat increase your Critical Chance by 1%/tier
Cap of 5 stacks (5%)
Critical srikes removes the effect; effect lasts for 20 seconds

...why....why the reset? Why not just make it a standard 5% critical chance trait?
What's going to happen in practice is that you'll keep triggering the crit so often already due to Legendary Item traceries that you'll almost never see higher tiers consistently to benefit from it.
Only thing I can see this helping is very low levels....and even then, a Guardian will start to utterly demolish landscape very quickly.

Heavy-weapons Damage
Adds +2% to Two-handed damage per tierin addition to skill damage.

So, if I am reading this right, this goes as follows:

• Increases skill damage by 2/4/6/8/10%
• Additionally increases damage of Two-handed Weapons by 2/4/6/8/10%

...or am I missing something here? I mean, okay...I guess...just a bit weird on the wording and formatting....

...speaking of which....

Damaging Attacks in combat increase your Critical Chance by 1%/tier
Cap of 5 stacks (5%)
Critical removes the effect lasts for 20 seconds

Deja vu?

Reactive Parry
Becomes Reactive Response and Adds the same effect to Block events

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, ENOUGH WITH THIS UTTER GARBAGE OF A TRAIT, JUST SCRAP IT ENTIRELY.
In the context of a DPS trait line, there is no practical sense in which this trait should exist, there is no practical point of this trait period.
I would rather have a trait that has a clown emoji image calling me a fool every time I spec into Red than have this trait. Extending the functionality to blocks is just insulting.
Feedback was given regarding this, why are you so insistent on making this a thing?
Damage is garbage, in practice its irrelevant, it doesn't help any of the Guardians core issues regarding the specialization.

Thurst
No longer requires a parry/block event.
Cooldown increases to 12s

After some thinking, I've stopped trying to make it reasonable....so I'll write this:

Currently, the rotation flows very well if you have parry responses. You can reliably cycle To The King every 5-5.5 seconds after the first Parry chain because you have the double options due to Thrust/Overwhelm 2nd stage choices.
What's going to happen by doing this is that you'll brick that entirely. You will get locked out of To The King cycle because it's locked behind 10s Overwhelm with no alternative, causing a massive drop in DPS.
Not even going to mention the massive damage loss on an already not-really damaging skill cause you'd lose the Parry Response tracery damage bonus from it.

Reconsider this.

Inigourating Response
Renamed and now a parry or block response triggers the ability.

Still as useless as a chocolate teapot.

To the Rescue
At Tier 6, the 100% critical is restricted to Melee skills

I'm okay with this, you could cheese War-chant crit with it.
I'll get back to the trait point having 6 skills later....

Warrior's Fortitude
Adds Block and Partial Block

...okay...whatever....doesn't solve the issue the trait has....

Honourable Combat
Becomes Rupture
Augment to the Hammer Down (Renamed) - 5 Tiers
Strips all current bleed for Damage Cashout
Increases incoming damage on target by 3% per removed bleed for 5s per bleed removed

So, in the context of changes aforementioned:

• We'll lose the reliability of cycling To The King off-cooldown, which is a massive damage drop-off
• We'll lose the ability to quickly re-cycle 4 Bleeds back up after using Overwhelm.
• We gain the ability to remove our main damage sources for 12% incoming damage debuff that lasts for 5 seconds, on a 45 second cooldown, tied to HAMMER DOWN

No. Rethink this.

Moving on....

Next up is the biggest change. After reading the feedback here and listening to discussions in game, we will be removing The Fighter of Shadow as a spec line.

So, just formalizing what was already known, this is good.

Force Opening

Now a trainable skill that triggers both a block and parry response event.

Huge upgrade as it allows a reliable Parry even for Blue.

Bastion of Light
Formerly Take to Heart
Gurardian activates a toggle aura on themselves that marks up to 3 enemies within 5 meters. Marked targets have a reduced chance to hit and are more susceptible to debuffs applied by the Guardian.

What's the cooldown if the aura if toggled off?
What's the power cost? Does it have a power-over-time cost?
Does the aura toggle off if the Guardian is stunned, mezzed, disabled or defeated?
Does it benefit from the AOE Target Count tracery?

Light-Touched
5 Tiers
Can Block with 2-hand weapons.
+1% Melee Damage/Tier
+1 Incoming Healing/tier

./agree

Radiate

Requires Bastion of Light

./agree

Protection

Trained Toggle Skill
Increases Fellowship BPE 1%
Can react to Block and Parry triggered by fellow members within 10m

Just remove it, it's worthless. Rework the tracery into something else.

Flash of Light

Trained SKill

Transforms Damage on marked Targets to Light

Does this affect all damage, like Bleeds?
Does this interact with Shield-taunt, a non-damaging skill?
What happens if you War-chant, does it simply not work with it cause it's already Light damage?

Strong Bursts

Move down to require more dedication to the utility line.
Considering setting the bonus to 3% per tier with the Tier 6 capstone going to 25% bonus

I'll touch up on the points later.

Manifested Ire

Becomes a Trainable Trait

This is, without a doubt, the worst trait the in the entire tree. It's so horrendous that I'm physically ill this is going to stay in the game.
Just remove it, or rework it into something else, like extra damage reduction for War-chant or extra Light Damage trait.

Mark of Permanence

Becomes a Trainable Trait

Okay....seems kinda pointless considering we're getting a toggleable aura....

Incapacitate

Becomes a trainable trait.

That is the current thinking.

Regarding Blue

While overall the trait line is fine and doesn't need major work, there are still a few things that can be done to iron out some issues.

• Guardian requires a ton of Finesse to work and the 75k you get from Relentless Assault isn't enough. Consider adding +1 Finesse per Might for base stat as Guardian gets nothing practical from their main stat.
• Break Ranks needs to become it's own skill, being locked out of using the skill when you're at 5 stacks of Fortification isn't nice.
• Disorientation needs a rework of some sort, it's a horrible trait.
• Adaptability is useless, rework this.
• Warriors Fortitude needs its Incoming Healing either converted into a small % or scaled up considerably.

Regarding Red

No, if these are the changes you're planning on making, I'd rather have you make no changes to the Guardian, period.
I'd rather play a line that has a good and fun rotation when RNG smiles upon me than play whatever the and mutilation this is.
I am pleased to see that so many pages of good feedback were utterly ignored and that, in my absence, people that had good ideas as well were ignored for concepts that make no practical sense.
Vastin captured lightning in a bottle during U22.2 rework, and while some issues remained, it remained a much, much better trait line with the changes than whatever this is.
It saddens me that this is the case and, while I remain hopeful it can made into something worthwhile, I'm probably not going to stick around for much longer if we go down this way.

Red didn't need half of this. Red was perfectly fine, if a bit underperforming at the least.

• Changing Thrill of Battle into a Critical Chance trait is a good start, not a fan of the reset.
• Skilled Deflection is a meme.
• Invigourating Parry/Combat/Whatever will still remain a joke. Attaching a small % heal could make it see some use in fights with AOE attacks and puddles.
• Hammer Down > Rupture is a huge NO. It's good that you're looking into giving the class a cash-out option, but this is far too underwhelming.
• Reactive Parry is an insult and I'm not liking the fact that you keep double-downing on it. Reworks were proposed that would help far more.
• Protection By The Sword:
  
  • It still doesn't work, it doesn't refresh the damage buff in combat
  • It's still only melee damage
  • It's still only 10m radius for both damage and parry event and considering how often you are NOT near a tank...yeah...no...
  • It's own description in the trait tree doesn't match what it does and this has been a thing since 95, an update which was released a decade ago.
  • How is this going to fit in the context of Protection changes from Yellow? Guardian is going to have....3 toggles. Bastion of Light, Protection and Protection By The Sword. Why not just make Protection as a trait enhance either of the two?
    
    • If in Blue, Protection trait decreases the damage Guardian gets redirected to by 20%.
    • If in Red, Protection trait increases the damage Guardian deals by 10% when the Protection By The Sword target takes damage
    • Just spitballing numbers....
• Prey On The Weak is basically Latent Light from Brawler, but worse in every single way possible.
  
  • Damage is far weaker
  • Dependent on Slashing Wound
  • Doesn't proc reliably, bug that wasn't fixed since U22.2 rework. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it can proc on non-crits, sometimes it procs if a single target in an AOE skill crits, even if you don't have the bleed active on them etc.
  • This needs work of some sort...

Regarding both....or well, all traits.

• Why does Guardian have so many traits that take up so many points to increase the chance of something happening?
  
  • Relentless Assault (this is kinda fine, considering the low cooldown of Sting and Force Opening being a traitable skill)
  • Disorientation (Just reworking the trait from the ground is fine too)
  • Stoic
  • Tireless Blows
  • Haemorrhage
  • Blind Rage
• Akin to the aforementioned, why do so many traits also have such a high cost? Why can't most of these be cut down to 5, with traits always giving something, but adding a scaling magnitude to the trait.
  
  • Haemorrhage example: Brutal Assault skill causes a Bleed on target. Bleed damage is increased by 4/8/12/16/20% per tier.
• What happened to the Tireless Blows idea? That was a good idea which seemed nice, having all skills give a chance to reset Brutal Assault cooldown.

I'll stop here for a bit, I didn't even touch half the things in Yellow I wanted to write about as this Litany went on for far too long and I can feel myself saddening by the minute.
What promised to be a 2nd renaissance, something like after U22.2, is going to turn into something ... well, objectively worse.

Thanks for reading.

[Thunderblast]

First, the minor changes:

The Defender of the Free

Likely to be relatively unchanged. This is to say, that at this time, I am not planning on any changes to the Blue Line directly. Most changes will come as adjustments are made to the The Fight of Shadow - discussed later.

Awesome! Except, why keep Redirect + enhancements in yellow line? No Keen Blade Guardian is ever going to spec it, because a DPS in a group should never get hit, and so the reflect damage is useless. In my opinion, it would be best to move Redirect over to Defender of the Free and move Disorientation to Fighter of Shadow. Slightly tweak Disorientation to be reduce crit defence as well as BPE and have it apply on all skill criticals. That would make it something that Keen Blade Guardians might plausibly purchase, to replace a trait (Redirect) that a Keen Blade Guardian would never purchase.

The first large-ish change comes to The Keen Blade

If a trait is unmentioned then there are no intended changes to the trait.

For choosing this specialization you will earn te Skill Overwhelm
This specialization will no longer provide the skill Force Opening - See change to The Figher of Shadow for more details.

Specialization: Reduce outgoing healing by some value (likely between 33-50%) And Parry and Block response events add 3% to damage stacking up to 5 times. Expires if out of combat for 9 seconds.

Most of this sounds good. I especially like the +3% damage stacking mechanic to be a parallel to Fortifications.

Thrill of Battle

5 Tiers
Damaging Attacks in combat increase your Critical Chance by 1%/tier
Cap of 5 stacks (5%)
Critical srikes removes the effect; effect lasts for 20 seconds

I understand that this is not a universally popular trait, however I love it. For anyone confused, my understanding of how this would work is:

You use Sting (30% chance to crit) with no stacks yet. It hits but doesn't crit, so you gain one stack.
You use Sting again (35% chance to crit this time with the first stack of Thrill of Battle). Another non-crit hit, so another stack.
A third Sting (40% chance to crit), this time it crits. All stacks of Thrill of Battle are removed.
A fourth Sting (back to 30% chance to crit) and a lucky crit. No stacks are built.

Overall this is far more interesting than a standard-issue +% crit trait.

Thurst
No longer requires a parry/block event.
Cooldown increases to 12s

Why? Separating it from the chain sounds like overall a mistake. It sounds like a buff, but it's overall a nerf. It means that Thrust would lose 3 very important things: War-chant cooldown reset, TTK follow-up, and Reactive Parry Damage Tracery. Overall, a huge hit for a Keen Blade Guardian. Thrust is a huge skill in our toolkit that allows us to reliably access our other skills and advance our response chain. We would be losing the essence of Thrust: a low-cooldown skill with a quick animation that can be spammed in a short amount of time to go Thrust (for Deep Wound) => Overwhelm (Deep Wound turns Terrible) => Thrust (get Deep Wound up again).

Thrust also gives us reliable access to TTK. Especially given that Overwhelm cooldown isn't reduced by War-chant for some reason, and Redirect doesn't open TTK for some other reason, we need Thrust to stay the way it is badly.

Honourable Combat
Becomes Rupture
Augment to the Hammer Down (Renamed) - 5 Tiers
Strips all current bleed for Damage Cashout
Increases incoming damage on target by 3% per removed bleed for 5s per bleed removed

Sounds good. If I'm understanding this right, each bleed increases the +% incoming damage and the duration, so a stack of four bleeds would be +15% incoming damage for 20 seconds?


Now on to the big one:

Next up is the biggest change. After reading the feedback here and listening to discussions in game, we will be removing The Fighter of Shadow as a spec line. All of the functionality of the line will remain, though the tiers at which you gain them will change:

Yes! Thank you thank you so much! This is exactly the essence of what the Guardian needed. I thank you again so very much for listening to the input from the thread.

Force Opening

Now a trainable skill that triggers both a block and parry response event.

Also good, very good change, adds continuity throughout the class.

Bastion of Light
Formerly Take to Heart
Gurardian activates a toggle aura on themselves that marks up to 3 enemies within 5 meters. Marked targets have a reduced chance to hit and are more susceptible to debuffs applied by the Guardian.

Good-ish. Why a captain-esque toggle? Why not a placeable area, as was originally mentioned a couple of months ago? If I understand correctly, the primary purpose of making Motivating Speech not be a toggle was because it was a lot of load on the servers to have to constantly be calculating distance. Having Bastion of Light be a toggle instead of a placeable hotspot sounds like it would add to the in-game lag, rather than remove from it?

Light-Touched
5 Tiers
Can Block with 2-hand weapons.
+1% Melee Damage/Tier
+1 Incoming Healing/tier

Yes! I love this! Extra damage, healing, and 2H blocks!

Protection

Trained Toggle Skill
Increases Fellowship BPE 1%
Can react to Block and Parry triggered by fellow members within 10m

Sounds good, I like it. Some group utility that can be useful in some situations, and can be an incredible tool in PUG messes when everybody has aggro except for the tank .

Flash of Light

Trained SKill

Transforms Damage on marked Targets to Light

Sounds ok. Does this mean that the +light damage traceries would effect attacks against marked targets? That being the case would be the only reason anyone would ever purchase this.

Alternatively, make this a pulse that hits all marked targets whenever the Guardian hits one of them with an attack. That would be a lot more valuable.

Strong Bursts

Move down to require more dedication to the utility line.
Considering setting the bonus to 3% per tier with the Tier 6 capstone going to 25% bonus

Sounds good. Moving this down also sounds like a good idea.


I do wonder though, what is the purpose of Mark of Permanence considering these changes? Maybe instead a trait called Persistent Light that gives the debuffs applied to marked targets a short trail-off effect when a marked target leaves the area of Bastion of Light. Eg, the debuffs don't immediately expire if you have this trait purchased. Maybe give it additional ranks that increase the duration of the trail-off.


Other than that, though, these changes sound awesome! Roll with it! I look forward to trying the new Guardian!

PS: In case you're considering it and haven't mentioned it, please don't add a rate limit to Bolstering Blocks. I was seriously worried you'd do that. Again, please don't. It's great as-is. Please please please don't make it a "cannot trigger more than once every 3 seconds" trait.

[Bagrash]

First, the minor changes:



Awesome! Except, why keep Redirect + enhancements in yellow line? No Keen Blade Guardian is ever going to spec it, because a DPS in a group should never get hit, and so the reflect damage is useless. In my opinion, it would be best to move Redirect over to Defender of the Free and move Disorientation to Fighter of Shadow. Slightly tweak Disorientation to be reduce crit defence as well as BPE and have it apply on all skill criticals. That would make it something that Keen Blade Guardians might plausibly purchase, to replace a trait (Redirect) that a Keen Blade Guardian would never purchase.

When yellow is utility, its completley fine that redirect is in yellow, you are supposed to trait blue/yellow, the problem is disorientation, that trait is just completley useless, changing this trait would be enough for blue line. And no one needs bpe reduction, finesse took care of this long ago

[Bagrash]

Honourable Combat
Becomes Rupture
Augment to the Hammer Down (Renamed) - 5 Tiers
Strips all current bleed for Damage Cashout
Increases incoming damage on target by 3% per removed bleed for 5s per bleed removed

So 12% for 20 seconds if you remove all four bleeds? Or 12% for 5 seconds?

[SSG_Orion]

Nothing is set in stone yet. Still very much in the formative phase. Redirect is a possible shift.

And yes, the cash out would increase damage per bleed removed and each bleed removed would add the inc damage buff for 5 seconds. This would be a 20s buff and 12% as it stands. Potentially a 50% uptime.

For Thrust, it would only remove the requirement that it needs a retaliation response. It would become a direct access to TtK. If it proves that the cooldown is a bit too high, there would likely be ways to adjust that.

More later.

[zipfile]

Still very much in the formative phase. Redirect is a possible shift.

Meh....honestly.

Look at horrible traits aforementioned, those need work

...the cash out would increase damage per bleed removed and each bleed removed would add the inc damage buff for 5 seconds. This would be a 20s buff and 12% as it stands. Potentially a 50% uptime.

Okay, now it makes sense, this is potentially really strong and 100% worthwhile.

For Thrust, it would only remove the requirement that it needs a retaliation response. It would become a direct access to TtK. If it proves that the cooldown is a bit too high, there would likely be ways to adjust that.

More later.

8 second Thrust would be a good spot to start with, then adjust according to parses.