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

You are claiming they are absolutely, without a doubt, balancing the burst damage around Guard.

Have fun, because you're clearly still not understanding the issue. The issue isn't organization. BW can balance to any situation, including organized play.

The side effect of that is unorganized play becomes completely unbalanced. The op nerfs show they are clearly NOT willing to balance only to organized play.

I just want to OP to admit that he is really hoping to be able to focus down the healer first instead of the tank, rendering the tank's extra HP and mitigation impotent.

A tank's role in PVP should be at stopping others from taking damage through active intervention. I would be happy if taunts actually forced you to target the tank for a period of time, for instance.

Balancing with guard in mind, along with other stuff? Sure I am. And it's completely obvious.

If I said "they are balancing burst damage around HP pools and healing" would you also demand I provide a dev saying that? "I DEMAND YOU PROVIDE PROOF THAT IT ISN'T JUST A TOTAL COINCIDENCE THAT I CAN BURST FOR 5k AND SOMOENE HAS 15k HP!"?

Nobody says blindingly obvious things like that because people would think they were stupid for even saying it.

Guard is simply too strong. It is driving all the burst damage AND premade whines on these forums. Which means this one ability is causing probably 80% of the PVP balance discontent in the game.

There is a huge disconnect between people who have guard and people who don't. The 50% damage link guard provides means that burst damage has to be huge in order to be any threat to organized groups. But that means that all the unorganized PVPers who don't have guard get absolutely blown to pieces by burst damage.

As long as guard continues to function as it does you will just see a merry go round of burst whines and nerfs. Either burst damage will be tuned to guard, in which case it will be too high for the unorganized who will cry on these forums, or it will be too low and no one in organized groups will ever die, prompting whines about premades on these forums.

Somethings needs to change. I like the concept of Guard as much as the next tank, but the current implementation is just too strong. The obvious choice is to make guard not reduce damage but grant the tank's mitigation skills to the guarded person, but BW has worked themselves into a corner because most skills arn't mitigable.

Another option would be to put guard on a cooldown, but that has problems too. If they go this route the best option would probably be to give it unlimited duration but only let it be switched to a different target out of combat. This transforms guard into a very effective way to incentivize people to not hit the guarded target, but doesn't allow you to swap it around to whoever is getting hit.

I think the best option may be to make guard less effective, for example by having it reduce damage by 25% but continue to transfer 50% (or perhaps 35%) of the damage to the tank. This means guard is not always just a no brainer because it will actually increase the amount of damage the group takes, although it will spread it out better. Making it into an anti-burst ability but not an anti-damage ability.

This is easily the biggest problem in pvp balance, although most people don't realize it when they whine about things they don't understand are ulitmately all tied into Guard functionality. So lets get some other ideas out there for how to fix the problem.

Have you ever played a game with that mechanic? It's pretty unfun, imo.

And plenty of people have explained how you don't absolutely have to kill the tank first with the current system, but you ignored them