Is guard too powerful?

[Justina]

I was thinking about the game, especially scenarios and cities and about the reason why it is often so one-sided. Either a complete stomp or getting stomped.

One reason I identified might be the tanks guard. Whenever there are guards around it becomes very frustrating to kill anything.

It's not the guard alone, it's the combination of people stacking -crit, tough, wounds, use detaunt, get bubbles and heals from healers, use their own bubbles, hots, disrupt/parry/block, cleanse, abilities, morals like bellow or knock downs, stagger, interrupts, punts. There is such a great amount of defensive tools but the dps classes on the other hand have very little to counter that or break through.

However, the guard seems to have the most impact on damage mitigation. Especially dps class with lots of smaller hits like the dot classes suffer the most from all that defensive stuff. Their damage is being reduced to almost zero while running maxed glass cannon builds.

With the change of how guards works for 2h tanks it has become even more powerful. They can guard the dps and add a good amount to the assist damage.

I think we are at the point now where melees are too powerful and one of the reasons is guard for sure. Take WEs/WHs for example. They are ment to be solo killers and have a lot of tools to survive solo. Now add guard, bubbles, heals, morals and all the stuff I mentioned before to that and you have a pretty much unkillable WE/WH that is wrecking everything in their way.

How do you wanna kill such target as dps? You won't unless you have all the same tools on your side. No guard? You are screwed...

Thus guard is having a huge impact on the outcome of fights. Everybody knows that. They know that they wont win city fights when there are not enough tanks. They know they need tanks... what they might not know is that it is mainly guard on top of bellow, CC and pushing power that makes them win the fight.

From my point of view guard doesn't have enough weaknesses. Tanks barely suffer from guarding someone and dps have no counter to that.

Maybe they should think about reducing the amount of mitigation from guard or add a weakness to it, like strike through for ranged dps or something like that.

What do you think about this?

PS: please try to explain why yes or no

[lastalien]

Throw out the tank with the guard and kill the target. Easy)

[Ekundu01]

Guard does have weaknesses though. The most major one is punting the guard away from the target they are guarding. Another thing that hurts guard is undefendable damage, if damage is undefendable the guard damage is also undefendable meaning the guard can't block or parry the guard damage.

[CyunUnderis]

From my point of view guard doesn't have enough weaknesses. Tanks barely suffer from guarding someone and dps have no counter to that.

Try to guard a red conqueror Slayer/Choppa or any DPS without FS3. Undefendable damage (like Rampage) is perfect to pierce guard.

Apply heal debuff, punt the guard, and then burst down the target.

[Vholrat]

guard is the most stupid invention i've ever seen in a mmorpg. was made, i guess, to make tanks "halfway" usefull (for example no one in wow spec tank for pvp due to loldamage and no protection compared to other specs.

[Noslock]

Your problem is not guard but having tank on ur side not using it properly or not having tanks.

[mynban]

I would say state of healing is more broken than guard.

A healer easily outheals a dps. There is not even a resource limit, they can do it forever.

[Battlefield]

The most important thing, Guard made for dps or more for melee dps but

why tanks are allowed to use Guards among themselves ? In other words

why is the archetype that has this ability can use it in fact for yourself?

Also i think Guard's damage reduction should be lowered a little.

[NSKaneda]

guard is the most stupid invention i've ever seen in a mmorpg. was made, i guess, to make tanks "halfway" usefull (for example no one in wow spec tank for pvp due to loldamage and no protection compared to other specs.

This is not WOW lol-pvp.

Problems with guard are l2p in my perspective. Assist, debuff, focus target, punt away guard or target: problem solved (and then we have ranked style with 10 mins clobbering in one spot. And it's not because of guard mitigation).

[Justina]

Throw out the tank with the guard and kill the target. Easy)

If you have ever played / watched ranked fights then you would know that it is not that easy.