2.0 has significantly raised the value of bringing support classes to the table, and I'd argue tanking trees (Immortal, Darkness, Shieldtech) received some great overhauls. In turn, I anticipate more players will bring tank specs into WZs, and therefore more Guards to spread around. This leads to a noticeable quality-of-life problem for PvP tanking:

 

Guard buffs are currently mutually exclusive. If someone is being Guarded by a tank who's nowhere near (ie >15m away), they're not really being guarded at all. Yet that Guard buff prevents any other nearby, conscientious tank from applying theirs. You need the Guardee to manually click off the Guard buff before a nearby tank can apply theirs. Quality-of-life wise, this is pretty bad: it means a bad tank on your team can actively hinder the guard-swapping of a good tank on your team. The parallel for healers would be if healer A putting a weak heal on someone in need locked out healer B from burst-healing them: it's kinda silly.

 

A simple solution would be to allow multiple Guard buffs to apply, and only the nearest tank absorbs the damage transfer. If I recall, this is the system used in Warhammer Online, where the Guard system was coined (and incidentally whose PvP team got absorbed into Bioware when it acquired Mythic?). This change would allow tanks to better control their protection of teammates, and never find themselves penalised by the actions of a wayward tank. Insofar as quality-of-life is a major concern for improving gameplay - a stated aim of the devs going forward - I can't think of a good reason to not implement this. Please give it due consideration.

 

 

 

Edit1: Adding in the 3 suggestions we've had in the thread so far.

 

1. Tanks can apply Guard to anyone, even someone already Guarded. Only the nearest tank absorbs the damage transfer. The 5% bonus to mitigation from Guard should -not- stack from multiple Guards.

Pros: Clear and simple solution.

Cons: Gives tanks the highest flexibility out of any of the proposed solutions; arguably the 'strongest' change of the three.

 

2. Guardees whose tank has been out of range (>15m) for more than a set duration (say, 10 seconds) automatically lose that Guard buff, enabling a fresh tank to take over.

Pros: It'll pretty much take care of most situations where a wayward (read: newb) tank slaps a Guard on someone and then runs to a different node. It also still allows for set plays to shine, like pulling the Guard out of range to blow up the guardee healer (something you can counter in 1. by applying two Guards on the healer if needed).

Cons: Might have to reapply Guard more frequently in some situations.

 

3. Blue "out of range" Guard icon instantly makes Guard on that person overwritable by any tank. So, you can't take over Guard or double-stack Guards on anyone already being protected, but you can take over the moment they're not.

Pros: Would allow for some clutchier play: if you spot a Guard being deliberately pulled/pushed to assist down a healer, you can take over that Guard at once. No 10s window of waiting, but also no easy pre-placing of multiple Guards on sensitive targets.

Cons: Might find yourself occasionally losing Guard on someone due to the briefest periods away from them, in the presence of overzealous tanks.

 

Edit2: Also adding in the suggestion to take Guard off the gcd, allowing more clutchy responsiveness to damage (and mainly, to not have silly lag or ghost-gcd related delays).

Edited May 18, 2013 by Sidrath

Great idea. If only we could have more threads like this one and less QQ threads....

Great idea. If only we could have more threads like this one and less QQ threads....

 

/sign

Make it so another guard can guard a guarded guardee if the guardee's guard is out of range.

 

What a mouthful.

They should just make it so 2 players guarding the same guy is completely invincible. That would definitely make things better.

Make it so another guard can guard a guarded guardee if the guardee's guard is out of range.

 

Certainly an option too, if it's difficult for them to code the proximity-based damage transfer. They can simply have it so a tank can overwrite an existing Guard buff IF it is currently out of range, as signalled by the "out of range" blue icon. That's a simpler binary check and may be easier to implement, while still broadly achieving the desired aim.

They should just make all players to immortal gods who shoot sparkly fairy dust at eachother while merrily bunny hopping around the nodes.

Warhammer got this right.

 

 

They should learn from Mark Jacobs.

as soon as the guard moves out of range of his guarded target the guard buff should drop off, personally I would like to see the dopey fecker teleported back to the healer he was guarding so he is forced to do the job rather than hunt medals but that's just me In much the same way i would like to see the 3 muppets who chase to cap a node all explode the moment they run away from it

/signed

as soon as the guard moves out of range of his guarded target the guard buff should drop off, personally I would like to see the dopey fecker teleported back to the healer he was guarding so he is forced to do the job rather than hunt medals but that's just me In much the same way i would like to see the 3 muppets who chase to cap a node all explode the moment they run away from it

 

You'd be shocked how many times the "dopey fecker" is the healer,not the tank.

I really like this idea. It is pretty frustrating to try and guard someone to only receive the already guarded message and not see any other friendly tanks around. Would be a big QoL improvement. I would also suggest the auto guard drop from being out of range should have a 5-10 second countdown. If the tank only gets knocked back but is on his way back he shouldn't have to reapply his guard

You'd be shocked how many times the "dopey fecker" is the healer,not the tank.

 

Not necessarily. If the healer peels off to another node and the tank is staying, the tank should know enough to release the guard. I'll put it another way, something I was always curious about. Who leads (in pvp), the tank or the healer? In general I've always played 'follow the healer' unless we're the only two defending a node, then the node comes first.

 

Anyway, signed. Can we also have this same thing for tank on tank crimes? Too many n00b tanks slapping a guard on me to the point I have lost buffs a few times trying to get rid of it so I could actually guard someone who needs it. What I mean is if I'm guarded and I go to slap a guard on someone else that should override the guard that's on me rather than manually taking it off first.

Edited April 25, 2013 by Ridickilis

Simple fix to a simple problem. I like it. Signed.

They can simply have it so a tank can overwrite an existing Guard buff IF it is currently out of range, as signalled by the "out of range" blue icon. That's a simpler binary check and may be easier to implement, while still broadly achieving the desired aim.

 

This!

Thanks for the support so far! Sounds like I'm not the only tank to have found the current system more cumbersome than it ought to be...

/signed

 

Would like to see it implemented this way...but even having Guard automatically drop when the guarded target moves out of range for 10 secs would be better than what we have now.

Edited April 25, 2013 by TheronFett

god that used to annoy the crap out of me when i played tank.

 

that said, if your in a premade its not really much of a problem.

i dont see them doing the multiple guard thing because learning who to guard, when to guard, and when to take your guard off is all a learning process that is technically "skill".

 

toss out a friendly reminder in ops (or fleet between warzones) like "pro tip- when you guard someone and leave them, the buff your trying to apply is actually a debuff... something to consider" (avoid insutls & rants if you want people to listen & learn)

Interesting idea.... and original.

 

And I can't see anything wrong with it... I think it would bring even more diversity to PvP which has me thinking....

 

/signed

2.0 has significantly raised the value of bringing support classes to the table, and I'd argue tanking trees (Immortal, Darkness, Shieldtech) received some great overhauls. In turn, I anticipate more players will bring tank specs into WZs, and therefore more Guards to spread around. This leads to a noticeable quality-of-life problem for PvP tanking:

 

Guard buffs are currently mutually exclusive. If someone is being Guarded by a tank who's nowhere near (ie >15m away), they're not really being guarded at all. Yet that Guard buff prevents any other nearby, conscientious tank from applying theirs. You need the Guardee to manually click off the Guard buff before a nearby tank can apply theirs. Quality-of-life wise, this is pretty bad: it means a bad tank on your team can actively hinder the guard-swapping of a good tank on your team. The parallel for healers would be if healer A putting a weak heal on someone in need locked out healer B from burst-healing them: it's kinda silly.

 

A simple solution would be to allow multiple Guard buffs to apply, and only the nearest tank absorbs the damage transfer. If I recall, this is the system used in Warhammer Online, where the Guard system was coined (and incidentally whose PvP team got absorbed into Bioware when it acquired Mythic?). This change would allow tanks to better control their protection of teammates, and never find themselves penalised by the actions of a wayward tank. Insofar as quality-of-life is a major concern for improving gameplay - a stated aim of the devs going forward - I can't think of a good reason to not implement this. Please give it due consideration.

 

No

 

as it stands it means people have to pay attention, being guarded by a tank who runs off? Take the damn guard off yourself by right clicking the buff, its not rocket science.

 

I loved warhammer onlines system, I ran a pair of cross guarding dps tanks that wrecked up the place but that was a clear indicator as to how broken it was, warhammer devs wanted to prevent cross guarding and for dps (2 hander) tanks to lose the ability to guard but the playerbase is now small and set in their ways.

 

Warhammer got killed because they constantly dumbed it down to appease the I want it now crybabies the only reason EA wont shut down the servers is to prevent any other development house from doing something useful with the licence, lord knows swtor is simple enough as it is without making it more basic.

as soon as the guard moves out of range of his guarded target the guard buff should drop off, personally I would like to see the dopey fecker teleported back to the healer he was guarding so he is forced to do the job rather than hunt medals but that's just me In much the same way i would like to see the 3 muppets who chase to cap a node all explode the moment they run away from it

 

yeah but it's annoying if you get pulled or something (or if you accidently just get out of 10m), because then you have to reapply guard, which requires you to reselect your original target, target your friend, GCD, etc.

It is a simple and elegant solution. Fully support this thread!

Thanks! So far it sounds like the 3 main solutions we could propose are:

 

1. Tanks can apply Guard to anyone, even someone already Guarded. Only the nearest tank absorbs the damage transfer. The 5% bonus to mitigation from Guard should -not- stack from multiple Guards.

Pros: Clear and simple solution.

Cons: Gives tanks the highest flexibility out of any of the proposed solutions; arguably the 'strongest' change of the three.

 

2. Guardees whose tank has been out of range (>15m) for more than a set duration (say, 10 seconds) automatically lose that Guard buff, enabling a fresh tank to take over.

Pros: It'll pretty much take care of most situations where a wayward (read: newb) tank slaps a Guard on someone and then runs to a different node. It also still allows for set plays to shine, like pulling the Guard out of range to blow up the guardee healer (something you can counter in 1. by applying two Guards on the healer if needed).

Cons: Might have to reapply Guard more frequently in some situations.

 

3. Blue "out of range" Guard icon instantly makes Guard on that person overwritable by any tank. So, you can't take over Guard or double-stack Guards on anyone already being protected, but you can take over the moment they're not.

Pros: Would allow for some clutchier play: if you spot a Guard being deliberately pulled/pushed to assist down a healer, you can take over that Guard at once. No 10s window of waiting, but also no easy pre-placing of multiple Guards on sensitive targets.

Cons: Might find yourself occasionally losing Guard on someone due to the briefest periods away from them, in the presence of overzealous tanks.

So it would be practically impossible to shut down guard in a rwz, cause cc'ing the main tank will only result in having another one guarding instantly without the need of taking away guard...notsigned.

Thanks! So far it sounds like the 3 main solutions we could propose are:

 

1. Tanks can apply Guard to anyone, even someone already Guarded. Only the nearest tank absorbs the damage transfer. The 5% bonus to mitigation from Guard should -not- stack from multiple Guards.

Pros: Clear and simple solution.

Cons: Gives tanks the highest flexibility out of any of the proposed solutions; arguably the 'strongest' change of the three.

 

2. Guardees whose tank has been out of range (>15m) for more than a set duration (say, 10 seconds) automatically lose that Guard buff, enabling a fresh tank to take over.

Pros: It'll pretty much take care of most situations where a wayward (read: newb) tank slaps a Guard on someone and then runs to a different node. It also still allows for set plays to shine, like pulling the Guard out of range to blow up the guardee healer (something you can counter in 1. by applying two Guards on the healer if needed).

Cons: Might have to reapply Guard more frequently in some situations.

 

3. Blue "out of range" Guard icon instantly makes Guard on that person overwritable by any tank. So, you can't take over Guard or double-stack Guards on anyone already being protected, but you can take over the moment they're not.

Pros: Would allow for some clutchier play: if you spot a Guard being deliberately pulled/pushed to assist down a healer, you can take over that Guard at once. No 10s window of waiting, but also no easy pre-placing of multiple Guards on sensitive targets.

Cons: Might find yourself occasionally losing Guard on someone due to the briefest periods away from them, in the presence of overzealous tanks.

 

I'm feeling 1 and 3 really good.

 

Bioware should hire you, and at the very least read this thread.