Rolled a guardian, 1st time tank, what stats do I prioritize? Pot? Fervor? ADC? Crit Bonus? Ability mod.? Reuse Speed? Max Health? Mitigation? Flurry? Multi-Attack? Parry? Block? etc.
What a character needs at different level ranges is dramatically different and very specific to what they are doing, so I'll only answer for VoV at level 125 and in group/raid content. Potency is the highest priority until over combat mitigation, which is set by the mob. Otherwise a character will be doing like rounding error damage and unable to hold aggro except for the brief fleeting seconds after using positional threat changes and cry of the warrior for target locks. To be honest, you can't really go much wrong just by using the highest resolve option in every slot, regardless of secondary stats. Potency could really just be used as a benchmark for how you are going to perform relative to the content, more often than not. Probably like 500k in h1, 600k in h2, 800k in challenge before you can really think of sacrificing potency for other substats. Fervor and Crit bonus both will give more damage than potency generally speaking if you have enough of it to be well over combat mit, I usually weight a point of fervor to around 900 potency and a point of crit bonus to around 30 potency to give you a metric for comparison. Ability mod on the other hand is pretty weak, I tend to see about 10,000 ability mod as roughly equal to 1 point of potency. For lower substats, you'll want to keep reuse and cast speed capped at 100, juggling around gear to do it. Max health is typically extremely weak because with the prestige for giving max health based on potency/aa you get like 6000% max health and most things are giving you single or double digits at best, so they are pretty marginal. Auto attack is basically garbage unless you hyper specialize into it and have groups built around it, and even then I think it usually is not worth it, so can tend to ignore it except in the sense of getting more procs (which ofc run off your potency, fervor, crit bonus, etc). For most people autos be the difference of say doing 1% of your parse or 1.2% of your parse or whatever. Other people will disagree and make it work but I really think you need to hyperinvest into it and give up a lot to do it. Skill mods aren't really meaningful for defensive stats, though block raises unmitigated avoidance so you see some gains. But fighter defensive temp buffs are so strong that someone could skip every defensive option for gear and they just live or die based on how well they do their temps, or based on some group buffs. Like if someone is marginal for the content you'll notice a difference with mitigation from mob autos but honestly as a tank I literally could not tell you the last time I died from actual mob damage rather than a failure mechanic. I still stack on some defensive stats like mit and block for a little more breathing room when given the choice between something with like microscopic increases to auto attack or defenses, but unless someone forgets to hit temp buffs on the handful of situations that are truly dangerous, you'll probably always be okay in survivability.
If you have just rolled a guardian, then I am assuming you are levelling from 1 so much of the following will make little to no sense and I would suggest to just grind through the levels w/o much worry about your stats or setup as on the live server it will be unlikely you will be tanking a group until you reach max level. All the following becomes relevant when you are at max level and are looking to tank groups/raids. Solo play, again I would not worry much about maximising stats. Reuse/cast speed should be at 100%. This should be easiest to get. You can buy adornments with +15 reuse or +15 cast speed to get to the cap for these. Same goes with hate mod which should be 100% self-buffed and again very easy to do. You can get some through the AA lines, an adornment for the hand slot and a scroll you can buy from broker that gives up to 67% hate gain for 11 minutes – buy a bunch of these and you are set for hate cap yourself. Potency/Fervor/crit bonus as high as you can - these stats drive pretty much every class in the game and it requires time/money sink into your character. You will need a good familiar levelled up 10 max; a good mercenary to max. A mount (either pay for the premium expansion or get one from a raid) and max it out with potency bardings and fervor/ability double cast parts. Your potency will go up with each item you wear as well so the logical extrapolation from all of this would be to go after the highest resolve gear you can get which currently is at 390 with ethereal items and the 390 shield/cloak from trakanon. Ability double cast is extremely useful for guards for one main reason and that is your taunts – Provoke and Shout – for an unknown reason act as spells (for years I might add) and they happen to be your highest damage dealing abilities that benefit from ADC. ADC, like other stats, are tied to mobs combat mitigation and other checks and require equivalent amount as stated on the mob’s description at the very least. Melee is disabled so flurry/accuracy/strikethrough also have little meaning. Experienced insight gives 100% strikethrough for its duration and if you time your buffs right then you can 100% ST a lot of the time with EI resets. Once you have the stats, you would immediately want to get “Irresistible Force” (guardian epic 2.0 spell) to Ancient along with “Dissociating limbs” – which will be your biggest hitting combat art that is not an AA spell. Defensively, I would not even bother with any stat priority because the way damage works is that for the most part, mechanics are designed in fights to kill you outright regardless of what your defensive stats are. As a guard, you have a lot more defensive abilities then most other tank classes so you will learn how to rotate them but for the most part the content really does not hit hard. Mitigation can help somewhat, and block is completely useless but in either case it really does not matter. There really is no reason for any tank class to be completely defensive in gear with mit/block items. I honestly cannot think of any reason. Your AA setup for certain abilities will play a huge role in your aggro generation but since you have just rolled a guard, level up first, follow the instructions to the above and then when you are decently equipped and ready to tank, you can ask in this thread again. If you have not already been put off by what you need to do, then there are a few things you need to bear in mind. Guardian is lowest dps tank in the game and since the game is all about dps at max level, you will have aggro issues the most out of all other tank classes and this can happen even when you are fully tricked out in stats and at that point you just need to know your guard well to survive as a tank in the game. Guards also really don’t bring much utility to the raid force as an Off-tank because (a) the content does not require it for the most part and (b) our defensive buffs are just not that great for the group/raid. So if you really want to tank on a guardian and go to the endgame, make sure you aim to become a main tank at some point. Lastly, the next expansion is around the corner as well and who knows what they will do next with the guardians or tanks in general but one thing you can count on is the grind. So, starting out now could be educational but spending on your character this late in an expansion is probably not the best idea.
a month since the creation of my char and i'm tanking Den2CM currently but where do you get the epic 2.0 spell 'irresistable force' again? forgot its been a while
You can have them crafted by anyone who has the recipe book. You really want the Ancient level one because at that tier, if i recall correctly, it unlocks the "hit all melee abilities for max damage" on the spell.
