Hey all. Brief intro: I love the Warrior subclass. Simple, direct, and brutally efficient. I just wanted to ask what notable differences are there btw/ a Guardian and a Zerker ? A. I know the Zerker has self heals, which leads to better survivability. Does the Guardian have anything to compensate for this, and if so what ? B. Also, I took note that the Guard and Zerker seem to have fewer "cannon fodder/filler" abilities than other classes. Is this true ?
Guard uses stoneskins to absorb damage, zerk heals a bit of what he got hit. Zerk is more AE oriented and offensive, guardian single target and defensive.
Thx Regolas for the help. Can someone shed any light on the abilities question ? Also, possibly link a good solo build ?
I don't know what you mean by cannon fodder abilities. I only play a zerk out of the two, and we have enough abilities to press to be pressing almost continuously in a fight. I wouldn't call them "filler" abilities because they all have a purpose (ie at a minimum they add some damage and hate gain). I imagine guards are similar.
I'm guessing the "press here not to be killed by lots of swarm mobs" buttons... although tbh - isn't that the big blue buttons?
Guards have a ton of stoneskins, they just need to increase the damage threshold on them. Iirc, tower of stone triggers on anything more than 5% of your HP and last man standing triggers on anything greater than 10%. Those could be flipped around. Guardians can tank just fine, I just think zerks have an easier time of it since Adrenaline is so stupidly op in regard to simply reducing ALL damage by 50% for 34 of every 60s. Yes, it has a huger power cost to it, but ability power costfor the most part haven't scaled with the increased power pools players have. Add in all the ways to get power back instantly and you have nothing to worry about here. Manaflow twice for every use of Adrenaline. Then you have Battle Frenzy that reduces damage by 30% for 30ish seconds AND it heals you when you get hit. The chance to reset it by casting a temp MIT buff, and the 90s recast on it, you should be sitting pretty for the first minute and a half plus of any fight without so much as even getting to your other saves. I think zerks win hands down in the tanking department. That's merely based on their defensive abilities. Throw in extra stats for reforging cuz 100% as auto and not having to use a purple slot for wild swings, they just get better. Even their agro trumps guards. 20s recast AE 2 position snap on 8 targets. Another 3 position snap on a 90 second recast that hits EVERYTHING. Guards aren't really in the same ballpark. If plant affected epics, maybe. Or if reinforcement had its duration lowered to max 8s and was lowered to base 60s recast. Hell, even if Sentry Watch ir whatever their group death prevent is affected the raid. It would bring a whole new level of utility to them as they could then put a save on any member of the raid such as scouts who are tanking whatever silly mob that requires it. Don't see that happening though.
tbh damage threshold on stoneskins should be set at 90% max health really... nothing worse than loosing a stoneskin to a autoattack. although I'll agree that warriors do need a reliable "low damage save" such as dragoon's allowing you to cast spells.
Zerks already have that low damage save in Adrenaline and Battle Frenzy. Guardian's are the warrior that loses out of a reliable way of negating Ancient Dev or abilities like it as it triggers at such a low threshold.
Remember that adrenaline and battle frenzy heal after the zerk has taken the hit. It's not a damage reduction (although BF can have it added via AA). Therefore if the zerk is hit hard and dies, he can't regen half back. That is the benefit of a guard. It's like shaman wards vs warden heals. The wards or guards stoneskins effectively add additional HP to the tanks health, allowing them to take bigger hits, whereas a zerks self heals and wardens HoTs are only usable if some health is already missing. In current state, zerks are better for soft hitting groups like in most heroics and all trash, but guards are better for hard hitting mobs such as raid names or hard heroic named. But it swings around. Guards could do stupid single dps last xpac when they could convert AE auto to flurry. Prior to ToV and the major HP revamp, zerks weren't thought of very highly. It's all cyclic.
I'm looking at Adrenaline on my zerk right now and it says reduces all incoming damage by 50%. The only downside to it is it not being active if you're not berserk. I can't remember the last time I didn't instantly berserk upon entering combat or refresh it before it canceled.
Was thinking of blood rage. As you were... Edit - I have to lol at myself, it's been so long since I've looked at Adrenaline that I thought it gave 50% of what was hit back when up, not a 50% DR. I always use it when up and only use BF as an emergency. I rarely spec left side prestige so just rely on adrenaline and blood rage for most pulls. I don't need the 30% DR from BF for most encounters I do. I barely notice the power drain on adrenaline.
Adrenaline is a reactive heal, not proactive damage prevention or reduction. You'll find it in your heal parse. Ignore the description of the ability and look at its bullet list of effects: "50% of all damage received by the caster is instantly regenerated." kono
Hah. I knew it. I had checked on wiki because Eq2u wasn't loading and it said 50% DR but that's obviously wrong. Now Eq2u is working again it states the instantly regenerated bit. http://u.eq2wire.com/item/index/3191480335
Zerkers do immense damage. AoE, and just murder things. Went with my dad's 80 zerk into Chardok, he basically was 2-3 shotting all the mobs. Little squishy, though his gear is mostly quest loot, but otherwise, damage was crazy good. Guardians, I have one to 80, are fine up until thier temp stone skins wear off, then they die like a wizard. No self healing and if you get more then like 1 or 2 mobs, your toast. DPS is pretty bad, though I did defensive spec my guard as best I could, it still sucks.
It really all depends on what your want to do, I use my zerker for doing instances and power leveling. The guardian I use for high end raids. I have had 15minute encounters where I avoid 96-99% of auto attacks and take the least amount of damage in the raid.....and that is tanking the name the entire time. If you time your stone skins and avoidance abilities, you literally can't take damage for almost 3 minutes, with a 20-30 second downtime before everything is back up. Of course this is with max uncontested block.....and as far as holding aggro....even before they changed taunts to be op as hell...never had an issue even on aoe fights. I stopped playing after anyone spamming buttons could hold aggro.
I don't get to play my Guardian much anymore outside of Adv Solo runs, but he's doing fairly well. I can get him to peak at about 2m dps on a single target, and upwards of 3-4m dps on AoE encounters. You'll need a healer partner or merc to make it work, but otherwise it's not too hard to do the new fabled solos. Below is a link to my toon. I only recently started gearing him out again, so he still has some crappy gear and adorns, no MC weapons, and Rum Cellar is being hella stingy on belt drops. http://www.dragonsarmory.com/character/eq2/871881224697
No. We don't want changes to either of these. Guards are raid tanks. We don't need our stone-skins to proc on all the micro hits from mobs and not have it up when the big hits come. Please don't push for these kind of changes. The thresholds we have now on them are fine. The one thing that separates us from the other tanks is we can absorb the damage that other tanks cant heal or be healed through. The one shots. By lowering the threshold you allow the stone-skins you have to be wasted on damage that CAN be healed. Don't try and fix what isn't broken. No changes needed to our stone-skins.
