Karnos@Nektulos wrote: You would prefer to stay with the force target? I'm sure you have tried it and already realise its limitations. Yeah, you're right I may be asking for too little though. I was under the impression that the changes made so far was just the first step
aislynn00 9/20/2010 07:54:18 Subject: Relant, now more worthless in raids You know what Xelgad's stance on this is? He believes we are now balanced. This directly from the man via private message to my wife, who wrote to him to complain about the sorry state of the class. And you guys are enabling his delusions! If the above statement is true, then we're pretty much screwed. I've played my guard since launch, through the good times and the bad and it's going to kill me to betray him to a berzerker but I think it's going to have to be done if this is the conclusion of the long awaited 'tank balance'. We are far from balanced, our dps is sub par, tps is a joke and even after the 'improvements' our utility is still the least desirable to bring along to a raid. It's a real pity Xelgad didn't listen to the more sensible ideas from the guardian community instead of letting trolls and fools keep our class well and truly at the bottom of the tank heap.
Emlar@Storms wrote: Umm no the spell does not work on most epic mobs. It does not say in the tool tip that raid mobs are imune, but they are. Shard of Hate is the first raid zone they started to make raid mobs imune to taunt lock, pretty much everything after that is imune. My list is correct, if you don't belive me as a coercer what mobs are imune to thought snap, it will be the same. You will still get the taunt portion, but it will not taunt lock a mob to you. If you want to test it out let somebody else pull, then hit plant, you will notice the mob will not change targets. You won't get red letters telling you the mob was imune, because the taunt portion of the spell hits, and you get that big 4k threat; look out zerkers there is a new ae tank in town.
Twizty@Kithicor wrote: It is true. Feel free to message Xelgad yourself and ask for confirmation. Perhaps if enough people complain directly, he will come to his senses. He certainly doesn't seem to read our posts.
From a non-raiding perspective the new plant vs the old one is more useful, but its not iconically a guardian ability anymore for me. I'm fine with it remaining a target lock ability that does some threat, but I'd like to see the DPS reduction returned back to it. Since we are fairly poor in the AOE side of things it wouldn't be OP, but would give us a "we are the tank that mitigates the most" ability to make us stand out from more DPS/AOE heavy tanks. As for any extra DPS, I'd rather not have this added to plant, my reasoning is that we already have a boatload of other abilities that do DPS, and further spreading our DPS across more button pushes makes no sense to me. I'd rather see Assault or that AA blue buffed up to add in more DPS if its needed. (I'm of the opinion all fighters do not need more DPS, but rather less, but fighter balance is a seperate issue).
Karnos@Nektulos wrote: Holy Ground right now is +1 Hate position (first hit only) and +hate/dmg component, with additional hate/dmg on ever successive hit for 10 seconds. 10m Range on the hate positonal. Grave sacrament is better dps, and has 2 positions on the initial hit. Its not like its an instant ride to the top 24 positonal increase with a target lock...Infact brawlers and zerkers prolly have better snaps atm Just sayin...
IMO the only problem with the new plant is its very small range (should be increased to a base of 10m extending up to 20 with the AA). Even if you dump 5 points into the skill you only get the range to 10m. Guardians skills are all very small ranges, where as the other plate classes have massive range on their abilities. This is not to say that plant is the Saviour of our AOE threat problems, just that it is a decent tool. With that said, I think we need another blue open AOE +1 position + threat component taunt. The best ability to change this into is the taunting assault green AOE that none of us at the solo, heroic, or epic level even click due to its absurdly long cast time compared to all the rest of our skills. Obviously the cast time (down to 0.5s or less), recast (up to 1-2m), etc would need to be adjusted from its current state. Is it unreasonable for us to have both a blue target lock and a blue + 1 position, IMO no. Look at the other plate tanks and what they have for blue abilities. We would still have very minimal blue dps, but at least gain some threat.
Atan@Unrest wrote: OK so now that you have a mini amends you want holy ground too? Are you going to complete the trade and give Paladins Reinforcement? and mini TOS? Nor is Amends any more so whats new? The Paladin class defining skill for which every other part of their character was gimped for so long, guess what!, guards now have it. I see many illusionist spells that don't read: "does not effect heroics", nor do many read "does not effect epics"... and yet lo and behold 90% of heroic and epic mobs all you hear as an Illusionist is, immune ding, cast noise, immune ding! Rinse repeat. Seriously Paladins have better snaps? than a guard? Paladins hate over time is awesome, paladins and snaps they have HG, rescue and sneering assault. Rescue and sneering every fighter gets. HG is +1 position with hate over time. Thats it. Any mob them has a memwipe portion sucks to be a paladin. Reinforcement? +1 position every hit for 13 secs base. Cry of the warrior +2 pos. You can reduce rescue recast on a guard further than you can on a paladin thanks to the guardian tree. So what exactly is the better equivalent tool that a paladin gets. Hate over time we used to have Amends, HG and Sigil to give us better hate tools than any other fighter over time but Paladins never had snaps. We used to have HG version 1, but 12 secs of hate lock was too much, and here you guards are crying that you got a hate lock that doesnt work on 100% of mobs. Guess what neither does any other tank on those same mobs and paladins certainly don't have any hate lock on those that yours do affect, for the simple reason no Paladin spell reads :"Forces target to change their selected target to caster" or "Prevent targets in area of effect from changing targets". Guards just got amends in a reduced form. I guess we should give you HG and Sigil too. But apparently +1pos plus taunt over time isnt worth considering, even though it is a Paladins LVL 80 Endgame Special Spell. Throw a Crane Twirl or Grave Sac in there coupled with a Rift, a Dispatch, an epic Mez, and mini Channel and maybe that might work for you? Now about you being better in some respect, somewhere... you have the best sodding saves in the game and more of them than any other fighter class. More defensive stats than crusaders and brawlers, not sure about zerks, you just got a massive set of boosts to aoe hate and dps and your not happy. You just got a whole set of changes and your unhappy because you got an aoe taunt that doesnt 100% of mobs force them to target and lock them to you? If it did it would be 8 secs in every 45secs with reasonable reuse. Better reuse and you could get that down to what 40 secs? So with one 98 pwr cost spell you could permanently lock any mob to you 20% of the time. Add in Cry of the warrior and its target lock for anothr 8 secs every 3mins45 or so and you could reliably hit 30% target lock. Add in Thought snap for another 7 secs every 1min. Then add in all your snaps coercive shout and so on and it would be a joke to lock any memwiping mob to you, negating the whole mechanic. There is a reason a lot of mobs are immune to that sort of stuff. If anyone should get a target lock that effects every mob in the game it is coercers not guards.
Ive seen the new plant effect a epic mob. I recently boxed my guard on HM twins and was using him to help manage/round up adds on the melee side and figured plant would be perfect since the adds are heroic.........lol when I hit plant and locked the 4 adds and the named =P As for the new plant........I like it but the radius really needs to be abit larger...at least 2x what it is now with AA.
LivelyHound wrote: I don't have mini-amends as its worthless to me. I also strongly disagreed with it being added to the class as it solved _nothing_. We do however lack an aoe over time hate ability. Previously plant would atleast proc reinforcement, so it could be chained to give some meaningful aoe hate utility for us. Target locks are known to be buggy, and with that knowledge in hand, I fail to comprehend why another one was dolled out by Xelgad. I do agree with others and feel the revamp from Xelgad largely missed the mark. The class is only really relevant in a tiny section of content. The further rollback of the mitigation tweaks further demonstrates missing the mark on our pointless mitigation buffs. Plant should have been changed to be more aoe threat relevant rather than less, and our mitigation buffs should have been replaced with straight damage reduction buffs so that we in all scenarios take less damage than our counterparts, since well, in all scenarios, we also do less damage.
Not that it matters i guess, but plant does work on raid mobs, and it gets resisted/parried also. Not consistent enough to spend 5aa on but it works well when it works. So no its not worthless. It worked less as its previous incarnation.
Atan@Unrest wrote: The point ----> . I think you missed it. You may not spec for mini amends but that does not mean that the class does not have it. Also it does allieviate some of your aoe agro issues, in other words it was a solution to aoe hate over time. Whether you liked the implementation or not.
LivelyHound wrote: I have it, my reasons have nothing to do with AOE threat over time, it did almost nothing for my AOE threat over time. Guardians already have far too many passive agro tools. The only situations I have found plant of any use at all are on Ark (which by the way, the 36% snare resistance we got does absolutely nothing, nor does it do anything on Horaastaas), Twins United, and R&R. I like it better than the old plant, but I still feel its range is not as large as it should be, even with 5 points dumped into it. We are also in need of an AOE snap.
Undorett, I was just using the fact that it can be used in conjunction with an aoe class to provide aoe over time threat as a solution to aoe agro problems if necessary. I appreciate that is not what most would use it for. For Atan to say it solves nothing is disingenuous as it can be used to solve problems. It was also in response to my earlier point of a paladins class defining ability for so long being given to Guards which was the initial point that he ignored much like the fact he is now asking for holy ground too. It seems to me that he wants Guards to have all their unique defensive abilities plus all the nice things Paladins have. In other words, he wants his cake and to eat it , and to have my cake and eat that to. Except he wants it easier than HG where you get no threat over time component if you are stunned stifled dazed charmed becuase you have to actively hit things to proc the hate. He wants just a hate over time secondary passive effect. Sheesh. Now as to the new plant versus the old plant, the both had and have uses. Should it have been something different maybe. But if you want different then ask for it don't keep asking for Paladin, SK, Chanter, abilities as he does, because that is not different its treading on toes and annoying every other community in the process. Hence the current backlash. Furthermore you Guards need an aoe snap, fair enough, but you can always use assault + reinforcement for an aoe snap so there are ways available to you to deal with it as I'm sure you are aware. And yes that is only +1 aoe, but then that is exaclty what a Paladin gets from HG. It's the only non all fighter snap they get, so apart from the hate generation after from HG threat increase you already have identical aoe snaps, single snaps, plus an extra snap as shown before and the mainstay of rescue is on a faster timer for a gaurd. So as I pointed out, Guards, have better snaps, they have better spike prevention, better base defenses and your dps and threat have been greatly increased, without yet enough time passed to see just how up to par Guards dps or threat have come. In the same amount of time Paladins have had over 40+ pts of aa abilities made useless, they have had 3-6 core spells made useless. Guards may not have it great but I do not think they have it anywhere near as bad as most would have us believe. My guild guard never had a problem except for low dps, but he has completely closed the gap with my Paladin on the content we do through no change in gear. The day after the changes all finished he jumped to right next to me on the parse, with substantially more chance of not dying thanks to all Guard saves. Incidentally I would not mind in the least if the range was increased however I believe Xelgad outlined the reason for its range is to be inline with other similar fighter abilities but I cant recall which thread I read that in. (In-testing forum i think maybe)
I don't nessasarly disagree with you. However if your guard is is equal to you in DPS then either your group make up is bad are you need a lessen in how to DPS a pally.
15% agro transfer is VASTLY different from your amends, in fact, its lower than coercer transfer, lower than assassin transfer, lower than swash transfer, in fact the only transfer it is larger than is the sorcerer transfer. This is why it doesn't help with AOE threat in the way it needs to. Furthermore, it is not an active skill, guardians are plagued with passive abilities to the point that bards and chanters are and complain about it in the same way that they do. We want active abilities. You point out to Atan that your hate over time is stunted due to stuns and stifles, yet you have an ability that cures and makes you immune to stuns and stifles usable on a very short recast. Holy ground is not your cake. Every time you push holy ground, you are eating some Zerker cake. They are the original AOE threat masters. SKs, Bruisers, Pallys, and Zerkers all have blue AOE + positional threat increases with added components (damage or threat). Monks can turn their taunts into positionals with their end line. Guardians had something that did this (plant + reinforcement) but no longer do. You say to use reinforcement plus our Blue AOE, but what you don't get is that we are using that Blue AOE every single time it is up just to maintain some illusion that we are attempting to hold agro on multiple mobs. The reason some think that plant was so great was that you would never even dream of pushing that button, unless you had reinforcement rolling. We cannot afford to hold off pushing our blue AOE to wait for reinforcement to be up and still attempt to hold agro. In addition to this, look at the range on Holy Ground, Gibe, GS, etc and then look at the range on our blue AOE skill (5m radius) that you want us to use with reinforcement. It is unreasonable for us to use this skill to snap back multiple loose mobs. As for your DPS comments, you need to look into the buttons you might be pushing compared to those your other pally friends are pushing. I can tell you without a doubt pallys do far more dps than guardians in every situation. And to "jump right next to you on the parse" a guardian needs to give up their shield, which means they give up 35% uncontested avoidance (that you don't give up) and 2 of their saves do not work without a shield. So in fact, we have a substantially more chance of dying than a pally thanks to that. Xelgad's outlined reason for its range was a terrible reason. Due to bruisers having an ability that has 2 positions and 4k damage with a range of 5 meters, then guardian's plant skill which target locks and does 1k threat should also be 5 meters...I don't understand his reasoning, I never will. When you fight a mob and the healers/casters are standing at max heal range and a mob or two gets loose, as a guardian you have two choices. 1. Let that person die and it comes back to you. 2. Have an off tank go get the mob. Because 3. go get that mob yourself, is not an option, your mob will just AOE the group / raid and kill them all.
Can we consider Zraxth's Unseen Arcanum as a raid zone ? Because in this case, Plant proved to be VERY valuable in raids. It's our key feature to counter 1st name mem wipes. With a 50secs recast, I've been able to use it 3 times before Rhee'Gorr went down. Of course, I wished I had a zerk or SK dps on this fight, but managing mem wipes is already a good step forward.
Guards are still worthless, buddy of mine finally betrayed to zerker because of revamp being utterly crap. Xeglad or what ever his name is will be fired in a few years like the rest before him for being well like the rest before him. I closed out my Sub yet again after being dissapointed yet again by SOE. Word of advice guardian class eq2 has left you behind, return the favor. Mabey then youll see some changes but doubtful until then I wait for Rift and Guildwars 2
Torum76 wrote: Looking seriously at RIFTs but I ahve been waiting on a Velious xpac for a long time - might play the both of them before I just fade off eq2 forever. Hoping for a glimmer of hope from EQ3 as no other MMO out there is developing any large scale EQ1 type enviornments. RIFTs even ahs that dreaded and feared Bword class + the ability to respec on the fly as needed. But Velious brings back some fond memories. Damn you SOE for playing on fond memories of yester year.
