Guardian stealth nerf: talent completely removed on test; no mention in 1.2 pnotes

It's despicable that they would stealth remove Protector and not let us know in the patch notes. The least they could do is fess up to it.

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Thank you for understanding.

love this idea

That and/or move the talent to the defense tree. Or at least the 20% DR part to make the higher tier defense a bit more desirable.

I'm not happy they removed Protector but here is why they removed it.

When they designed this talent, they wanted it to be a survivability boost for DPS guardians. That's why they put it so high up in the Vigilance tree. They wanted tanks away from that talent.

Then the game releases, someone figures a way to use this talent as the pivot for a hybrid tank build, and everyone starts using it. BW developers obviously didn't think we'd use the talent that way, hence it's removal.

There is nothing more to it, someone at BW went : "WOAH! WTH!" and they just redesigned the trees in a way that you can't so blatantly abuse a talent that wasn't meant to be used that way.

I'm all for hybrid builds. Like if you wanna make a tank build that gives away some survivability to get more DPS, it's fine by me. It should give you more survivability and more damage at the same time though, that's just lame. There has to be a tradeoff somehow.

I personally find that my build will be stronger when 1.2. goes live, not weaker (I'm a DPS Vigilance). The focus tree is getting a bit nerfed, although I always found it a bit strange that the 31 points you put in there serve the only purpose of making a single big AoE crit.

Hopefully now, all trees will have a bit more depth.

Source?

Are you a Bioware Dev?

DPS Guards NEED that survivability and quite frankly, so do tank Guardians. Our cooldowns are lackluster compared to Shadows, or hell, even Sents.

Hybrids aren't a bad thing if you actually make the top tier talents useful, which defense completely lacks. I don't see the logic of removing Protector at all, quite frankly. At the very least it should have been moved somewhere else or infused into other talents, or put into the defense the tree. Maybe then PvP tanks would actually be ok with giving up unremitting.

What's the reasoning of removing the 4% endurance buff altogether, though? It's laughable that Scoundrels get this talent and Knights don't any longer.

Besides that, Protector was hardly game breaking -- you're post is hyperbole in that regard.

But this is indeed a ridiculously massive nerf Bioware snuck in the back door. I'm not surprised one bit that it wasn't listed in the patch notes. No one is buying the "typo or oversight" excuse people are peddling in this thread.

The talent that reduces FD's cost is in the focus tree and is too high up for anyone to get unless they're focus spec. So yes it does cost 4 focus.

And focus def requires you to TAKE DAMAGE to be healed. In tanking gear and tank spec I will have roughly 30% defense. This means I won't be hit 30% of the time by bosses and thus won't get healed. Sorc bubbles and blade barrier bubbles that absorb damage will also prevent FD from healing us. So that heal on FD is even more worthless. This is why I didn't bother counting the heal when comparing protector to it, the heal is so worthless. Protector has 5% more DR (which is better than the 3% heal when fighting bosses) and almost 50% greater uptime than FD.

Oh and you can't get both blade barrier and force rush if you're gonna get commanding awe. GG.

As some one asked the point of these changes its simple.
They dont want you to have great defense with out sacrifice to offense and vise versa.
The way the talents have been moved and the new focused defense ability are big flags for this.
1. No protector means you dont have the extra 20% resistance for 6s per 20s with no penalty to damadge done. Now instead you have to use focus (something you would normally use for offense) to reduce threat (PvE tanks will want to avoid using it at all as it will mean they will lose aggro on the boss) and reduce damadge but uses up focus everytime being hit for a heal (so useing focus to survive longer).
2. if you want all the best dps talents you have to skip most every survival talent now since zen strike will now be better for PvE sundering throw was always good and now master focus (going to make master strike even better which helps make zen strikes even better) means for maximum dps you need to skip survival talents.

all in all this fits with the appeared theme if you want survivabilty you will have to give up some offense for it. You will have to manage what you are focusing on when if you arent getting focus fired dont use focus defense. If you are use it till you can get team mates to pull the enemies off you. What they are doing to other classes doesnt really matter this is the jedi knight theme it seems choose what you want offense or deffense and go all out. you can shift back and forth but not quickly and not with out being less efficient at one or the other.

I don't think you got my point.

You say, not actually giving any figures or calculation towards your conclusion which ends up being your qq opinion again and still ignoring that Focused Defence offers 15% DR and a 3% heal over 10 seconds and Protector offers 20% DR over 6 seconds.

Which you base on a 45 second cooldown vs a 15 second cooldown, totally ignoring Focused Defence is useable while stunned and off GCD, Protector requires a friendly target to use and potentially removes your ability to move back to your healer quickly when they need it. Keep on ignoring those little parts in your "math".

You simply have no evidence to back up anything you say because both have advantages over each other that are hard to test outside of a live environment.

Yet again, lots of opinion and baseless fact and missed off information where you assume I disagree with you simply because you can't back up your opinion with either accurate maths with an actual calculation, or testing.

*shock* you mean, one build does less damage than another build that focuses on maximum survivability? THE HUMANITY!

I get a kick out of the psychoanalysts in this thread who tell us, with all authority, BW's reasoning behind this change: they want to kill the hybrid spec's and/or they want you to give up survivability in order to gain DPS.

Pure trash.

Vanguard tanks make no such sacrifice. My Vanguard tank out dps's my Guardian tank by a wide margin. Not only that, but if my group doesn't need a tank and would like me to switch to DPS I don't respec, I just swap in my DPS gear and pound away with the dps'ers, no such luck with my Guardian tank, his dps is a joke in tank spec even with DPS gear. It's the main reason why our threat generation sucks so bad.

Bottom line is that BW is freaking clueless when it comes to the design of so many aspects of this game, chief among them the Guardian class.

LMFAO...The problem with YOU is no matter what non-sense Bioware throws out there, you're licking it up off the floor.