Guard Needs Fixing Now, or Why We Have So Many Burst Damage Whines

You're missing the point. Solo TTK of 12 seconds doesn't mean 2v2 fights need to end in 6 seconds. It means that you need to balance to being able to burst a tank from full to 0 in 6 seconds with two dps.

Obviously in the context of this discussion the fight is gonna take a lot longer because you have to spend the time and cooldowns to either seperate the tank from the healer or CC the healer and burst the tank. The 6 second number is just an approximation of the maximum amount of time you can reasonably expect to get a healer and tank combo seperated.

But the whole discusison is kinda stupid anyhow because this isn't a 2v2 arena system. There are going to be other players involved. If you've got two tanks and 2 healers the "seperate them" mantra becomes completely ridiculous.

/sigh

I don't know how many times I can say it. It isn't about lack of organization. BW can balance to any metric.

Also your example is pretty funny because it involves 3 or more people against a tank/healer combo. If you can't beat a healer/tank combo with 3 people there is obviously something very wrong with burst balance.

It is unfortunate you cannot find strategies, think outside the box, adapt and overcome. Personally I never had this problem, this seems like a learn to play issue to me, you can come up with as many hypotheticals as you want (4 tank/4 healer team, 6 healer/2 tank team etc) it really doesn't matter. I have never lost a game because someone was "guarded". If you cannot manage your cooldowns to counter the enemy cooldowns, I really don't know what to tell you.

I think you are under the impression that tanks are hard targets, but in reality they are just as squishy as anyone when their cooldowns are down. It's a matter of forcing those cooldowns and then burning your own for the kill. I have 100-0'd battlemaster tanks in a knockdown ( 4 secs bro, better than 6) combined with the dmg of my sage friend. Real basic stuff here..

I don't know if it'll really help if I say it a 10th time, but it isn't about the current balance situation. It's about what situation you balance to.

Right now BW is sort-of balancing to guard and sort-of not balancing to guard. When the game was released damage was CLEARLY balanced to guard because you had things like adrenals stacking and op burst that only made sense if you were balancing to guard and you had a game that resolved around bursting down a target in the brief window you can beat the guard mechanic in.

They've nerfed burst damage tremendously since launch. The result is a move away from balancing to guard, prompted by whines by non-guarded people who were getting blown up. But the effect of that is to make it progressively harder to beat the guard mechanic. If they continue to balance to no guard non-op burst damage is going to get nerfed too and sooner or later you will end up with a situation where guard really is impossible to beat.

As long as guard exists in the game as it does it is going to continue to create these tensions.

I'm telling you from experience it's a non-issue. You can keep blowing hot air if you want, but BW won't change guard. When I stop dropping tanks in 4 seconds through coordinated focus fire, I'll start complaining about guard.

You really arn't getting it. Your comment about 4 second bursting tanks down illustrates you not getting the issue. That's a symptom of balancing to guard.

It's only a non-issue to you because you don't care about non-organized play. But BW clearly does care about non-organized play.

As long as BW is trying to cater to both playstyles guard is going to continue to create balance headaches.

People like you probably insisted dispells weren't creating problems in WOW too. The devs bought your argument for years and tried to find a way to balance around dispells. They discovered that math is just math and it can't really be done.

Guard is this game's dispel. There is no effective way to balance around it.

Thank you for this. I was guarding a healer at left turret in CW. An Op and Assassin opened up on the healer (after mezzing me), while a 2nd Sin went for the cap. I trinket, guardian lept the healer, Force Swept to stop the cap, then AOE taunted. After that, I focused on taunting the agent. We killed the agent, and a Sentinel came to mop up the rest.

We healed up and stayed put (me and the healer). This time, only two showed up. They mezzed the healer and burned me down so fast, resolve wasn't even an issue (6% expertise Guardian, 17/24/0, 18k HP unbuffed). They would have capped had we not had 2 DPS roaming under mid for fast reinforcements.

It's not tanks that are dangerous in this game, it's our abilities (available to DPS as well). Once that tank is toast, you no longer worry about the 30% damage reduction for taunt nor the 50% damage transfer of guard. And we are ridiculously easy to kill for being called "Tanks."

That 18K+ HP might look intimidating, but I routinely see myself getting hit for 3.5k even upwards of 4.5k. 4 GCDs of two hard-hitting DPS will end that in no time flat. And my trade-off for all that awesome extra HP? 1.5k crits (and I don't crit that often).

Did the thought ever occur to you that maybe because they had to balance around everyone having tanks guarding/taunting everyone is the only reason you can even drop people that fast?

I suppose this is related to the fact that a good guardian/healer combo with guard up can soak 3-4 people's sustainable damage for roughly 7-8 centuries? Since that's how I inevitably queue, I kind of like it. Nothing like having the 6 random guys in my WZ plant while me and my healer tie up almost the entire other team for 45 seconds.

Seriously though, it's only good vs unorganized groups. You can't balance for PUG and organized at the same time without separating them out. Certainly, adding a competitive PvP layer in for groups would probably fix the issue, as well as making things more interesting all around.

Giving Tanks a role through guard is one of the things that TOR gets right. Guard can be countered by stunning/interrupting the healer, removing the Tank out of range (Force push, etc), etc., and every Tank has died due to transferred damage (Dear PUG Healers, please heal me if I’m absorbing your damage). Tanks give up A LOT of damage for their minimal actual tanking abilities (I rarely do more than 1,500 on a crit lol, and Force/Tech ignoring Shields is still a huge issue), and Tank/Healer gives up even more DPS in return for greater longetivity.

It’s also wrong to frame this as merely a PUG vs. premade issue. A well played solo tank in a PUG can turn the tide of a match by paying attention and figuring out where to focus Guard. Pre-Mades will always synergize well, remove Guard and you still need to deal with Healer/[Anything else] once you;ve shot your burst. Guard is one of the few abilities in TOR PvP that isn’t about pure Zerg DPS. The OP seems like more sour grapes that DPS can’t burst down a Tank – you’re not supposed to be able to burst down a Tank, that’s why they’re called TANKS.