Thread: The invincible Guardian theory

THE THEORY:


the primary focus of this theory is that you (the guardian) are so incredibly difficult to kill and have so many means of not being killed (catch a breath with 6/6 of tank audacity set removes slows and increases run speed by 15% for 3 sec, and 17 sec charge) that the creeps dont bother to attack you since they have other targets to fry. so you run around like you have in-combat stealth, pick your target, hit them up with weak but still semi effective skills (ie normal skills, parry chain or can be activated by TTK re-parry relics [30%] or other non-chain skills that are enhanced by your weapon traits)

you can also have a belt exchanged were you have one "survival" belt & sword with CAB, ward, and reactive block legacies
and one "DPS" belt & sword that contains traits for increased shield damage and other attack damage that can be swapped when need be.

(and have survival on by default as when you are first attacked you can let the creep burn though whatever more morale the survival LI's have before switching to dps)


AS STANDS (reductions in incoming damage):
Normal vs melee: 79%
Outnumbered t1 vs melee: 87%*
Normal vs ranged: 89%*
Outnumbered t1 vs ranged: 97%*

* = unconfirmed






so im no expert on guardians but i have a certain theory that i would like some feedback on from the community if it is possible in the moors:

Guardian:

full Audacity gear (30% reduction in all incoming damage)

Full tank build spec for highest tactical mit possible without getting the-top-of-the-line-raid-gear (ie the best you can get without spending 8 hours raiding)

LI spec'd for Vitality and maximum defense



in short MAX TACT MIT/ HIGH MORALE/ BEST DEFENSE



my question is: with this kind of best-tact-defense build + 30% further reduction in damage, can guardian be invincible/semi-invincible/incredibly annoying to kill



Because a Guard friend of mine was thinking of going all out defense in the moors one he got all the gear and just be annoying to kill, since his mits and self heals will be so high and difficult to penetrate.


i doubt him, but what do i know? anyone know/think it will work?


Edit: i know about heal proc gear. will that work with a 3/3 build to make him more difficult to kill?

Well if he had full defensive gear, he'd be at about 70% tact miti. The extra 30% tact miti from audacity doesn't add on to this, instead of works on what is left over. So in total he'd have 79% tact miti.

That remaining 21% of damage wouldn't make him invincible, it would just take a little longer for him to die while he wouldn't be putting out much damage either.

Originally Posted by Dorothir

Well if he had full defensive gear, he'd be at about 70% tact miti. The extra 30% tact miti from audacity doesn't add on to this, instead of works on what is left over. So in total he'd have 79% tact miti.

That remaining 21% of damage wouldn't make him invincible, it would just take a little longer for him to die while he wouldn't be putting out much damage either.

errrr.... its not tact mit its everything mit..... you may/may not have a point as i may/may not have seen the dev say of all (after mit) damage

anyone can confirm that?




But you forget to factor in B/P/e

and catch a breath (heals for..... 600-700?)


even though if its around 80% thats still a huge chunk of damage reduction (only 20% damage left can be handled by guard self heals right?)

creep hits you for (their tooltip 500 damage)

you only have to deal with 100 damage
your morale pool is 15k
you have a (post finesse 10% chance to block that)
you have a heal for 600? every 15 sec?
warrior heal (??? decent amount)
pledge pbe for 15 sec i think

on a morale proc reaver (ie most reavers) i think their dmg for their devastating strike is 1.1-2k non crit

so you only take 240 damage!!!


obviously your dmg will be pathetic, but isnt it fun to be incredibly hard to kill?
fun: what the moors is all about right? RIGHT?

Audacity comes before mitigations, so it would be;

100 * .70 = 70
70 * .30 = 21

so T7 audacity + 70% tact mit means 79% mitigation.

Add in B/P/E and you are very, very survivable, but also ineffective.

A build that would work better (at least for 3-12 man private groups) is OP with ~16.5k HP, add up buffs and you have ~20k HP. Go in and dps, when ur healer needs a shieldwall switch to shield and provide a 20k HP buffer.

Or for solo ~13k HP with more might, more dps, still crazy survivability.

To be honest I don't think stacking tact mit is efficient. It's better to get 7 audacity and focusing on the vit pieces by mixing sets (disregarding the 6 pieces bonuses (which aren't all that awesome)). And then balancing out ur jewellery and relics to gain the stats listed earlier.

Lets say you have 55% tact mit, which is way easier to reach, leaving more room for other stats. You would have;

100 * .7 = 70
70 * .45 = 31,5
68,5% mit

It's all theory and I haven't tested any moors builds with audacity yet though. You'd have to do that urself.

of course he could go with the resonable builds.

but he mostly spoke of insane survival
i can imagine: some big shot r9 reaver thinks hes on top of his game after roasting a few squishes and hits a brick wall called a guardian

considering if a solo creep comes up and hit the guard for a few min without being able to kill him he will just run out and move on.

As others have pointed out mitigation from audacity is handled separately, but anyway, yeah, sword & board guardians would be an utter pain in the ### to kill, although nothing a few wargs can't handle at the moment, their damage output has been
raised higher than the creep main dps classes (reavers & BAs), and they will bypass your b/p/e almost entirely (including pledge).

Originally Posted by Equendil

As others have pointed out mitigation from audacity is handled separately, but anyway, yeah, sword & board guardians would be an utter pain in the ### to kill, although nothing a few wargs can't handle at the moment, their damage output has been
raised higher than the creep main dps classes (reavers & BAs), and they will bypass your b/p/e almost entirely (including pledge).

Isn't there a warg skill which is a channel that reduces b/p/e to zero and roots the target? If I'm remembering correctly, anyone who meets a pair of wargs with this skill can just say goodbye to life. I think it's something like Flayerpack.

Originally Posted by Angelicus

Isn't there a warg skill which is a channel that reduces b/p/e to zero and roots the target? If I'm remembering correctly, anyone who meets a pair of wargs with this skill can just say goodbye to life. I think it's something like Flayerpack.

I rofl at this post. Yes, wargs have a root they can use, but they do NO damage while using it. Further, as the numbers have shown: 79% total mitigation!!!
That's without block/parry/evade at ALL.
Do you know how long it would take 3 wargs to take you down?
Assuming only 15k morale, the 2 wargs doing damage would need to hit you for over 70 thousand damage to kill you!
Oh, sorry that's not quite right.
Add in 2x warriors heart... 10k more damage +.
Manheal? Another 10 damage (if you are a man)
Catch a breath? You get a minimum of one block response from ignore the pain (though I am pretty sure I would just bash the sucker holding root) 2.5k more damage,
2x pot? (because it WILL take more then two minutes in anything but a full focus of 4+ creeps) 15k more damage...

I think you are VASTLY overrating creep DPS to think that they can do over 100k damage in 1-2 minutes. Not with only 1-2 hitting you. Remember, if the warg locks you and a BA attacks you... you reduce incoming ranged another 10% (18% total incoming damage)
Then of course you have crit defense (lower damage from creeps attacking you) Creeps don't WANT to attack you because once they do they cant swap targets without getting slowed...
Of course the details, like that root only lasts 10 seconds on a 1 minute cooldown, so you WILL b/p/e a good bit (not much against a warg in stealth stance, but in flayer stance (the one with the root) figure perhaps 30% post-finesse avoidance?
More because you have 40 seconds of pledge invulnerability?
Don't forget brutal charge for 17 seconds if you get bored with them hitting you...


I play a hunter, if I get attacked by two R4 + wargs (or anything?) its likely game over. R7? One warg and I'm pretty much toast.
Please, Guardians have trouble doing enough DPS in the moors, but surviving is NOT an issue. Not in tank gear! (I do have a kinmate that drops to around 7k unbuffed morale with his full might gear, so I could understand a OP guard with some possible issues)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

reading that made me smile

but can you give me the calculation on those numbers?

(extra note: this is all S&B)


also thinking that all ranged classes (ba, weaver, and def) will get an extra 10% reduction....

that 89% (so 90% to round it off)

so VT will only do 100 damage


........
............
.............................. ......

Mwahahahaahahahaah



on another note: i ran into a warden today totally tank proc with all audacity gear..... it took 6 creeps 5-7 min with all the self heals he was spamming
we we'nt the most dps heavy bunch (2 ba + warg + defiler who only knew how to heal + 2 spider) but we just couldn't kill him.
he then proceed to later run among and hit a bunch of ungrouped creeps who didn't even bother to attack him, they just focused on a freep way far from the creep front line while the warden just ran among the creeps and annoyed a few ba's and made them hit their evade so he would go bug the next guy.

on a side note, no one has -inc heal debuff on him so that may explain it.


but reduced healing wont affect guard so much and if you got some monies on hand you can always buy pots









THE THEORY:


the primary focus of this theory is that you (the guardian) are so incredibly difficult to kill and have so many means of not being killed (catch a breath with 6/6 of tank audacity set removes slows and increases run speed by 15% for 3 sec, and 17 sec charge) that the creeps dont bother to attack you since they have other targets to fry. so you run around like you have in-combat stealth, pick your target, hit them up with weak but still semi effective skills (ie normal skills, parry chain or can be activated by TTK re-parry relics [30%] or other non-chain skills that are enhanced by your weapon traits)

you can also have a belt exchanged were you have one "survival" belt & sword with CAB, ward, and reactive block legacies
and one "DPS" belt & sword that contains traits for increased shield damage and other attack damage that can be swapped when need be.

(and have survival on by default as when you are first attacked you can let the creep burn though whatever more morale the survival LI's have before switching to dps)

I don't have a Guardian but I'd love to see a guardian get this build and post it and try it out that I would be interested in.

You will have more then 15k morale when having capped mitigations, because you will have so much vitality, like 2.3k. I would love to try this build but with no pvp on my server I can't earn commendations unfortunately.

In regards to the -10% ranged damage, I think that is handled separately aswell just like audacity, but not sure if that becomes
100*.6 or 100*.7*.90

Edit: You might even get outnumbered buff aswell, adding another 8% or so, not entirely sure.

I'll check if ranged damage is separate tomorrow.

I run Overpower in the Moors. If I get ganked I'll swap in my tank gear (while keeping my Audacity pieces on) and tank jewellery, hit Charge and quite often I can get away as long as I'm not being ganked by too many guys.

Without retraiting, just by swapping in gear, shield and jewellery I can max out my common mitigation and have my tactical mitigation over 66% unbuffed. As long as I haven't blown my cooldowns when I decide to bail then I should be able to run away to safety. If there's other Freeps around me when the fleeing begins, I'll often be ignored.

Originally Posted by Lendas

of course he could go with the resonable builds.

but he mostly spoke of insane survival
i can imagine: some big shot r9 reaver thinks hes on top of his game after roasting a few squishes and hits a brick wall called a guardian

I can imagine a R9 reaver has played long enough to know they stand no chance in hell to kill a guardian that doesn't want to die, whether or not said guardian is in Overpower or using sword & board.

It would be fun to try, and experiment with different builds. It would also take a monumental amount of time and effort to get all the pieces you'd need and be frustrating as hell if it didn't pay off. I would love to think that I could be viable sword and board in the 'moors. As it is in OP, I need a complete change of wardrobe if I'm going to be competitive.

Can't say much for running it with audacity, but pre-Great River I ran into the moors once in full raid tanking and survivabality spec, 5y 2b, and sword and shield. Probably around 16.5k morale and 65% mitigations. I was only out there for a few minutes but managed to get a 1v1 with a rank 9? warg. Yes I survived a while, but I couldn't deal any amount of damage and I was eventually killed with only bringing the warg down to about half morale, whereas in OP build I would have been able to beat the same warg, or at least come much closer.
This was before audiacity so my defenses could have been even higher now, but so would the wargs defenses which would lower my damage output by even more. I also used no major cds in the warg fight (pledge, fortitude, man-heal, pots). They would have made the fight much longer, but I'm still not sure if my dps would even be enough.

Just my experiences with sword and board in the moors, it wasn't as tough to kill me as I had hoped, and damage was terrible. But if I was in the middle of a big fight I assume the creeps would have ignored me until everything else was dead because I wouldn't really be able to do anything to them unless it is a very, very, long fight. So yes, I would almost never die in big fights, but I wold gain renown and commendations very slowly also.

Originally Posted by Kaern48

Just my experiences with sword and board in the moors, it wasn't as tough to kill me as I had hoped, and damage was terrible. But if I was in the middle of a big fight I assume the creeps would have ignored me until everything else was dead because I wouldn't really be able to do anything to them unless it is a very, very, long fight. So yes, I would almost never die in big fights, but I wold gain renown and commendations very slowly also.

you may have a point but here is some food for though:

when i ran with my guard buddy back in SOM has once went turtle for a few days with some sub par pieces of crafted gear ( common damage abs shield, common damage abs chests, 3 heal peices) and i think he had less than 50% common mit

he was virtually invulnerable to BAs.

now of course this is totally different now with just plain mit. and your right that it may not work out, but i could, the only way to find out is for someone to try


now i'd make a guard and go try it out, but i dont have time/resources to make a total turtle and i doubt my guard friend will get the best defensive gear in the game.




so any hardcore guard want to step up to the plate and take a swing at it?

Vs common damage you could very well be invincible. Pre-U6 I was basically "immune" to common damage wargs and certain npcs (the shadow howlers outside grams). That was with 4 heal proc pieces and 2 75% chance negate 20-27ish common damage pieces (chest & shield). I wasn't quite immune to common damage reavers but it would take like 5 mins for them to kill me. I imagine a guard could solo the whole bottom floor of TR/lug in one pull.

Vs noncommon damage you'd still be pretty hard to take out with audacity and crazy mits + 1-2 heal proc pieces.

I forgot to mention: the thing with a survivability build is 5 fighter of shadow + heart of fire +shield geatly improves critical hit avoidance. So instead of 5% it jumps up to over 13%. Many of the low ranked creeps don't even have that high of a crit chance and the higher ranked creeps have about a 1-2% crit. This means it'll be a steady flow of small hits and heal proc gear is even more beneficial.

Originally Posted by timmyloo22546

That was with 4 heal proc pieces

Is that counting the medium armour boots?

Originally Posted by Gattsu_EU

Is that counting the medium armour boots?

Do they have medium armour heal-proc boots? I used the light armour boots from skirmish camp.

I went out there a little bit last night with the 4 heal proc + 2 common negate pieces and R1 audacity freeps automatically have. I didn't have stacked vit jewellery and I didn't have a nice tactical mitigation necklace so with all the heal-proc/negate common damage pieces I was at about 66% common mitigation & 56% tactical mitigation, 13k morale (only 1409 vit). My melee offense was about 44%.

First thing I encountered:R9 spider. My sword&board could not out-dps it's healing and that was without the spider kiting me to death. I dev'd with shield smash for 1317 common damage (lol). Solo vs the limlight elite npcs devs would have been around 2500-2800 with that build. My finesse was less than 2k + spider brought my agility down to 1 so there was lot of misses/b/p/e on the spider's part. Took the spider 5 minutes to kill me, er...make me sprint away.

Another encounter: A R6 WL with ~5 mid-ranked wargs killing a CG. I couldn't even annoy the WL enough to cause the CG to kill a warg even with the wargs attacking me giving me block responses for shield interrupts. It did take the wargs a fair amount of time to kill me but nothing "omg invincible" and I couldn't even prevent 1 WL from healing wargs against a CG.

Another encounter: R10 BA + spider vs me and 2 burgs that kept coming back (freeps were definately solo). It was just me initially then a burg jumped out and they killed the burg. Then went back on me and killed another burg. Even when I was down to 4k morale if a different freep showed up they'd immediately switch to them and stop attacking me.

All in All: I think if jewellery was stacked towards vitality + tact mitigation and you had at least 2 audacity pieces --shoulders always + chest piece to switch out vs noncommon damage -- guard would be a beast to take out but not invincible. I wouldn't expect to solo anything except maybe reavers. And as mentioned earlier the R6 WL barely noticed I was doing anything and didn't really hinder his ability at all. With sprint + pledge you'd never die. For best results fight at crude lug or steps of grams. Those shadow wargs heal more than damage so it feels more epic.

If there are better pieces let me know.

Originally Posted by timmyloo22546

Do they have medium armour heal-proc boots? I used the light armour boots from skirmish camp.

My mistake, they are indeed light armour

S and B guards are worthless in the moors spent a month refitting my guard for over power youll just get kited to death. sure your tough but slayer wargs will just eventually where you down..i do miss that old healing gear it was a awesome setup.that was fun in he moors the new suff..go all dps your way better off

There are 2 uses for S+B guard and both can be fulfilled with the same defensive spec being suggested, they're just not offensive in any way:

1. Shield-wall anyone in your group and prevent bursting down of that player; the cooldown makes the use limited, especially if interrupted by a cc. Only really useful to add stability to your specific group and that's only useful if the targetted healers are in your group in the raid, or if you're in just a fellow with/without heals.

2. Sit at the front of the freep group and make yourself a target constantly. Soaking damage and effort in this way requires you to have heals to rely on, but the impact is pretty large as creeps tend to slow themselves on your block stance for when you're pushing and it's very discouraging to them to be unable to kill you. This role needs to avoid inc healing debuffs like the plague.

So, it has a use, but only for 1 in the whole freep side, and mostly only if you have heals. Otherwise you can pack near to 60% tact mit in a tidy full-aud OP build anyway.