[The Issue With DoTs, IMO]

Hear me out, before you start flaming.

 

I've been leveling a Sentinel lately, mostly because I've been bored of my Guardian since we cleared the raid content and wanted to try the double lightsaber style. I'm a big PvPer so I've been leveling up in PvP, and my server is balanced enough that you get Voidstar/Civil War pretty often.

 

Now the thing about DoTs is that they are a way to deny someone their reward.

 

If someone kills you, and the rest of your team, then you putting a 10 seconds DoT on everyone should not deny them their win because you'll be back by the time the DoTs wear off. This is IMO the primary thing they are being removed for; they're a way to deny people their achievement. If you want to deny people their cap, then you may try:

 

1- Killing the enemy team better than they kill you.

2- Not dying, and doing the above.

 

For example, I once went to a turret alone and killed a Sith Sorcerer 1v1, at level 30 against... I forget, must have been 30ish too. I felt pretty good because not only did I kill the guy but I could then cap the turret he was solo defending. Except...

 

Just as he died he put a DoT on me, and the DoT stayed there for so long that by the time I was capping the turret, he had taken his speeder back and could finish me off, since you can't recover your HP while DoTed.

 

IMO this is the main issue with DoTs no matter how you look at it. Some classes have DoTs that last a very long time, and not every class has a way to get rid of DoTs until 50 (and even then, some do not at all; I know Sentinels do if they talent for it). It's not very fair if a solo defender can prevent a cap while dead thanks to his DoTs.

 

Ultimately: someone who is dead should not have a say in whether or not you cap something. If they wanted a say, they should not have died.

 

It's also worth noting that faction balance also plays a huge role in how many DoTs you see. For example on my server, it feels like 75% of Empire players are Sorcerers in Warzones. Squishy they might be, but the lightning and DoT spam is really frustrating, and the DoTs alone make it very hard to cap points, which seems like an unfair advantage overall, since I don't have the ability to tell everyone to reroll Jedi Sages to counter the imbalance.

[Guarded by the Force, whyyyyy]

It's immortality for like 6 seconds, during which you can be stunned, pushed back, rooted, etc, meaning that as a melee class you don't actually get a whole lot out of it if people control you.

[Masterstrike, not very masterfull!]

Here's your problem:

 

Using Master Strike longer than the two initial attacks is a complete waste of a global cooldown. What you SHOULD be doing is hitting the Master Strike button and then spamming whatever ability you want to use next. Master Strike will get two of its three hits off, and then you immediatly follow up with more attacks.

 

The way it's designed, it delievers 2 hits in 1 second and then 1 hit in 2 seconds. Needless to say that last hit is a total waste of your time compared to what you could be doing instead.

 

Don't put talents into it, pretty much.

[Gaurdians STOP Complaining]

Guys, we honestly need to stop QQing about our class. I'm currently a lvl 27 Jedi Guardian(focus), and I can say as a fact (imo) that we are one of the strongest classes in the game.(Also most of the classes are pretty balanced)

 

Most QQers right now are around lvl 10-30, most of them complain how they get rofl stomped by other class ... Of course your going to get stomped on if your a low level class! Any class in the game will get owned by a higher lvl class. I have experienced this myself, however, I sucked it up and just lvled up some more before I pvp. And now I am having a ton of fun owning imperials who think they are good.

 

And here are my reasons why our guardian class is one of the strongest in the game.

 

(In no particular order)

 

1. We have one of the highest burst dps in the game, achieved through the focus build.

2. We have one of the best MAINTAINED dps in the game, through the Vigilance spec.

3. We can tank pretty darn well, and off tank any time.

4. The way we create mana ( focus, force bar) is unique in that we can create our own focus by just attacking guys instead of waiting for the bar to eiher to cooldown or regen.

5. Honestly, you so called Tankers( Soresu ) "think" your weak. Think again. You guys take forever to kill, its disgusting. And don't get me started on how many defensive CD's you guys have.

 

 

I just wanted to bring this to the Jedi community to stop the qqing monster which is in our forums. So please guys stop complaining and qqing.

 

p.s ( this thread is about me qqing about qqers , bring it on trolls)

Focus Guardians are fine.

 

Defense is where they are lacking.

 

Please actually read the complaints before making a "don't complain" thread, all you're going to manage is to make yourself look silly.

[Unfair Armor]

Do the first flashpoint until you have a full set of level 10 blue tanking gear, because yes, there is heavy armor in there.

 

Problem solved.

[Reverse Engineer a whole stack needs to be fixed IMMEDIATELY]

Doesn't sound like a poor game mechanic, but merely a human problem.

That.

 

You seriously did not think anything was wrong when, after REing a stack, you moved your mouse to a second stack to RE that one too? And then did it a third time?

 

You should have noticed your stacks vanished, that's your fault.

[Raiding Does Not Feel Like Raiding]

I'm not a hardcore raider, but i find it hilarious when someone wants "more visual indicators" (as in: make it easier!) and complains about the encounters being too easy - in the very same post.

Things being "more visible" isn't a matter of "easy or hard" in this case, but rather it's a matter of some things that are unreasonably hard to spot. For example:

 

The fourth fight in Karagga's Palace, the Fabricator Droid. He puts grenades on people that blow up for a fairly significant chunk of damage and knock everyone down for a few seconds in a not-insignificant AoE. Assuming your group has three or four melee DPS in it for 8man, there is actually only so much room to spread people in, and the overlap of player characters (and their lightsabers being damn shiny) makes it hard to spot the tiny little arrow it puts on your back when you have the grenade.

 

In 16man, this becomes even worse because you can have 7-8 melee DPS all clumped together. To make matters worse, using your debuff panel isn't even that easy because it's tiny. While the mechanic CAN be avoided, that doesn't mean it's not unfairly hard to see for melee DPS in a melee-heavy group.

 

The other example, Soa's pylons, stems from the fact that the pylons have a very very narrow range between "will hit" and "will miss". The camera angles of the game, especially from the tank's perspective, don't allow to easily tell if Soa is going to be under the pylon or if he's going to be half an inch too far back. Then again, this issue is made a lot worse by the fact the pylons will occasionally bug and not hit at all.

 

I don't mind hard encounters, but I mind when their difficulty is based on poorly thrown together gimmicks or bugs.

 

So to clarify:

 

I don't want things to be easier, I want the fight mechanics not to be based on luck, bugs, or near-invisible debuffs you have to avoid.

 

I want encounters to be harder, more challenging, but not because the game penalizes you for either being unlucky or being unable to see a grenade on your back in a group of ten Jedi wielding glowsticks. It should be harder because the fight requires proper execution using visible, obvious mechanics, not flawless execution on random, hard to see things.

[Raiding Does Not Feel Like Raiding]

On the contrary to the astoundingly positive reception received by this thread. I would like to criticize several points made by our OP. First off, I'd like to note that I'm responding from the position of a "casual" 16M raider's perspective (casual = raiding 3 times a week) and not from the "high-seated" hardcore raider position, and while my guild has completed all of this content on 16M nightmare - I would find it hard to consider myself a hardcore raider at this point in my raiding career. While there are a few points made in this post that I can come to agree with, I would argue that many of these "complaints" do not make a compelling case that there are legitimate flaws in the encounters themselves but rather, shows that the OP and his guild have approached bosses with a severe lack of strategic sophistication.

 

1. RNG: In response to the OP's concern over the RNG factor of bosses such as Soa, Karagga, and Bonethrasher: The spawning of the lightning balls (while they spawn in random places on the edges of the room in P3) are quite predictable in phase 2, as they appear in exclusively in one quadrant of the room. The strategic placement of the raid at the center of the room, on top of the boss, would allow the raid more than enough time to adjust to who is targeted by the lightning balls. For Bonethrasher, this mechanic of "random aggro" is completely intended, while it makes it no less an annoying aspect of the fight, it can be dealt with as long as the raid focuses on positioning the boss away from where others are as soon as they are targeted. Annoying? Yes. Difficult? No, if you're paying attention and have someone assigned to identify who the boss is targeting (through the very weak target of target). As for Karagga, I'm sure you're already spreading out, using the whole room as your floor - minimizing chances of being pulled into black holes - its more a matter of the healers being on opposite ends of the room so they don't get yanked in at the same time, especially in 8M.

 

2. Personally, after seeing Nightmare Bonethrasher in both 16 and 8M, I can honestly say I have never seen Bonethrasher "one-shot" a player. He hits very hard for sure, but never for 40k all at once - at the very least, it's two hits. Not saying that you're wrong here on this front, but its something I've personally never seen and if it was my raid - I could only conclude that the healing just simply isn't strong enough to keep up with the raid damage. Also, considering that you use the phrase "one of our tanks," suggests that you are bringing more than one tank to this encounter - which I would strongly recommend against, as only one tank should be used to pick up the Manka Cats.

 

3. In general, I agree with your assessment of Bonethrasher on this point - his cleave is much larger than it appears it should be. I've never really had an issue with the other two bosses in which these abilities had the potential of wiping the raid, as the cleave on XRR-3 is easily avoidable as long as the tank is holding aggro and has positioned himself away from the raid (it has a very large cone - anyone behind the tank is liable to be hit).

 

4. Agree completely. Very annoying to deal with these bugs, haven't had the issue with Annihilation Droid spamming his abilities though.

 

5. This is the argument I disagree with most vehemently. As each point displays more of a lack of understanding of boss mechanics rather than a legitimate complaint. You should be able to identify which lightning ball belongs to you in Soa (especially in 8 man, and especially since the game announces who has been targeted by one) through proper strategic adjustments of where the raid is during each phase. Pylons shouldn't need to have ground indicators where it is going to drop if the tank holding Soa has the requisite awareness to look around for themselves. Also, if grenades or tracer missiles are difficult to spot, especially in an 8M, then it poorly reflects on your melee's situational awareness, as the crowding is nothing in comparison to a 16M raid with up to 5 melee at a time (which can easily be countered as long as melee spread around behind the boss). This should be a non-issue for melee. And you can also see who Bonethrasher is targeting, contrary to popular belief there is a target-of-target system in this game, it is in your keybindings under "Targeting," you can bind ToT to anything on your keyboard to figure out who the boss is attacking.

 

6. I find it ironic that you still make an argument that this content is easy after stating your issues with these encounters, however, I will come to agree with you on the point that 8M is indeed far too easy considering how the rewards are proportional to doing a 16M raid, leaving very little incentive to pursue the additional challenge in a larger Ops. However, if you are like us and find that 8M raids are just too easy, I suggest you pursue the route we took and engage in 16M Ops as it is significantly more challenging, and I dare venture to say rather well-tuned in Nightmare mode considering 8M difficulty. I however suggest you do a bit more homework on boss encounters and their abilities before dismissing them as flawed or bugged.

While I applaud the lengthy and detailed analysis, I feel I have to bring some corrections to misconceptions:

 

1. We do in fact approach the encounters as you say. It's still fairly frustrating when the ball lightnings spawn in positions where if you head out to the wrong one, the other one is going to go right through melee. It's annoying, yes-- not impossible to deal with, but annoying. Bonethrasher's random aggro would be completely fine by me if he did not randomly switch it in the middle of using his swipe, which is the real danger.

 

2. We just had a pretty rough wipe night and after 10 attempts of Bonethrasher repeatedly one-shotting people at full health, we just gave up on him for that night and decided to go back Monday. We had been, at that point, paying VERY close attention to how much he was hitting people for, and on at least three separate occasions, he killed three melee DPS with one swipe, all of them in mostly Rakata gear (so ~18-19k HP), after deciding to turn around in the middle of using it on the person who was actually in front of him.

 

3. I admit I oversold the abilities a fair bit-- Bonethrasher is the only wipe boss if he decides to screw around. However, the fact his swipe can hit people behind him is ridiculous. The droid's pushback-cleave can also do the same thing, and we can't figure out how it happens. It just seems random. One minute he's only pushing the tank back as intended, the next his pushback knocks the tank and the other three melee people away even though they were clear and behind him (behind the droid, not the tank).

 

4. Bugs, bugs, more bugs. Etc.

 

5. We DO do 16man! We started late on it because we wanted to clear 8man before we touched 16man with some of our less experienced raiders, most of which did not join us until a week ago anyway. However, we raid we 3 melee DPS and 2 tanks. There is only so much room to spread out around, say, the Fabricator, and in those circumstances the grenades are near-impossible to spot. In 16man, it's pretty much guaranteed raid damage because there is no way to tell it's on you when you're in a cloud of 8-9 jedi using glowsticks. The pylons having a ground mark would be useful because of how sensitive they seem to be. They can miss by one inch (to say nothing about that bug where even a successful pylon drop makes it miss anyway), and that's REALLY annoying. Some kind of indicator on the ground, or even the pylon's SHADOW, would be much appreciated.

 

6. Considering we had 9/10 down in nightmare mode after only three weeks of raiding twice a week (one day for EV, one day for Karagga, 2 hours a day roughly), yes, I have to insist it really is too easy when the RNG doesn't screw you over. 16man is going to be made even easier come 1.2, so that won't even be a viable way to get a challenge.

[Raiding Does Not Feel Like Raiding]

Simply having Target of Target would be nice and solve a whole lot of problems.

It absolutely would, yes.

[Artifice: What did YOU do with it?]

Did you level it after you hit Level 50, or find enough use while leveling?

I actually did level it up alongside myself, because I played with a shadow friend from 1 to 50. It did cost me a fair bundle of cash to keep it at appropriate levels, but doing my daily space missions covered it for the most part.

 

It was useful for crystals and hilts, and off hands. The enhancements were not really worth it because you can use your planet commendations for those (and arguably you could use them for hilts too). It was no more or no less useful than any other trade skill you'd pick up in other MMORPGs, which is to say "kind of useful but nothing to bust a cap over".

 

Synthweaving, on the other hand (that's what my shadow partner had), provided us with decent sets of gear all the way to 50 where flashpoints and commendations could not.

 

Also, treasure hunting reliably gave us relics while I was trying to level it up to get rare mats for artifice, which was really neat.

[Artifice: What did YOU do with it?]

Magenta crystals until I had more money than I needed.

 

Epic hilts/crystals for my sentinel and shadow alts, because I mained guardian. I might roll a sage too, so hey, more hilts/crystals for free.

 

The enhancements are okay.

 

The offhands are also not too bad.

 

The relics are fricking amazing because Rakata relic + augment slot = win.

[Raiding Does Not Feel Like Raiding]

Crit???

Crit???

Crit???

 

I have never ever ever ever seen a mob/npc crit me in SW:ToR. Never ever. Where are you getting this?

Pictures or it never happened!

Every single tanking guide pretty much explicitely agrees that you CAN be crit, and that crits bypass your defense/shield entirely, such that only armor reduction is going to save you.

 

Most bosses presumably don't hit hard enough for it to be noticeable, but with Bonethrasher, you can and you will see random one-shots from his swipes, even on people he did not debuff. His swipe-damage is NOT 18k+, making crits the only explanation for the random one-shots unless there's a bug somewhere.

[Weapon Crits]

I recall reading somewhere that you could crit orange-quality weapons into having an augment slot, but not orange-quality armor.

 

Is this still true?

[Guardian Vs Shadow tank]

Alright so these builds you have been given are all standered boring builds and like they say a normal guardian tanks dmg is not great but what I will tell u in reality a shadow tanking vs a guardian is a joke question shadows will never have the dmg reduction we have in heavy armor and they can not hold aggro of multiple mobs well.

 

I want to show u my build i use for tanking and for dpsing most likely people will flame me for how terrible it is but if u want to be a good tank as a guardian this is what you should use. Your dmg will be much higher and boss fights will be a lot quicker killing trash mobs is great when u run around hitting for 2k and PVP in **shien** and u will still live but u will be able to destroy those guys that used to piss you off (like the BM healers)

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500cMhZfGMRrhddMR.1

 

To anyone that disagrees I dare u to try it and tell me it does not do More dmg and u didn't rly miss warding call that much because it doesn't help enough to really worry about it

 

will add numbers when i get back to my computer later sry i don't have them on hand

 

------------EDIT-------------

Self buffed in Tank Gear(all champion atm) and Sorensu Form

18600 HP

7355 Armor

50.51%dmg reduction

22.34% Defense Chance

30.32% Shield Chance

28.87% Shield Absorption

 

Basically in columi gear your looking at about 20k self buffed but i have be gathering dps gear so far cause i only tank when i have to.

I'm sorry, you lost your cred as someone who knows anything about anything else when you said Shadows can't hold AoE threat.

 

Shadows and Vanguards have a dozen times more AoE threat than Guardians do.

 

Moving on.

[Raiding Does Not Feel Like Raiding]

Posting this in the morning did not encourage visibility; up you go, thread.

[Raiding Does Not Feel Like Raiding]

Raiding is boring and pointless regardless of what game it's in

That is an opinion, not a fact, and it is counterproductive to this thread. Nobody is forcing you to enjoy raiding, however, many people myself included do enjoy it.

 

I do not think raiding in SWTOR is boring, but I think it's frustrating as often as it's entertaining, and I'd rather it be only entertaining.

[Raiding Does Not Feel Like Raiding]

While i agree with most of your post...

 

just so you know, bonethrasher hitting someone for 30-40k isn't a crit. It's the result of a debuff he puts on them after smashing them into the ground.

 

After you're smashed into the ground, I'm sure you are aware that you have a movement speed decrease. In hard/nightmare this debuff also causes you to take massive damage from the next swipe.

 

It's the first tier of content, I'm not saying that bioware shouldn't be held to account...but at least for the moment I'm willing to see what the next tier has in store. After all, the first tier of raiding in other MMOs wasn't very good either (MC anyone? fights with only 1 mechanic, fights where melee dps weren't able to get in melee range of bosses, etc...)

We are aware of that mechanic, but it has happened on some occasions that Bonethrasher hit 2-3 people with a single swipe and that swipe caused three one-hit-kills from full health to dead.

 

Unless the pound debuff affects his swipes so that all targets eat the damage, not just one, then either he's scoring some crits, either the mechanic isn't working like it should.

 

It's also important to note that, consistently, the swipe bypasses most defensive cooldowns, making Saber Ward for instance a pointless ability to use during that fight. And, well, as noted in my post, there is also the very real issue that his swipe/cleave's range seems to arbitrarily change, a lot, and at random. Either he turns around mid-sweep and hits tons of people, either the sweep hits people behind him, or FAR in front of him.

 

Although I do agree otherwise it's only the first tier, so there is some leeway to excuse mistakes.

[Raiding Does Not Feel Like Raiding]

And I mean this in a very, very negative light.

 

First of all let me open by saying I'm a 9/10 Nightmare Mode Jedi Guardian Tank (Soa is the last one on our list of things to kill), in 8man. I have experienced all of the current content, and thus, would like to think this means I can formulate a decent (not necessarily true) opinion.

 

To continue, I would move on to my actual point.

 

Raiding does not feel like raiding. It feels like praying to the RNG gods.

 

1. The RNG itself. While in many fights it is not really a presence you can feel, in fights like Soa, where terrible ball lightning placement and luck overall can mean the difference between a wipe or a win, it is especially hard to ignore. These mechanics, while not impossible to defeat, make it so that no matter how geared you are, no matter how much you know the encounter, there is a chance you will die anyway in a bloody manner which nothing can overcome. Soa's ball lightnings are not the only example, though; Karagga's vortexes coupled with a stray missile volley, or Bonethrasher's randomized aggro, are both also huge culprits.

 

2. The crits. If Bonethrasher crits you, you're dead. Period. The end. You cannot survive. While it is very uncommon for him to crit, lately all of our wipes have been because he decides to hit one of our DPSers or even one of our tanks for upwards of 40K damage in one swipe. Other bosses also have the nasty habit of throwing nasty crits out, but they are generally survivable. This is incredibly frustrating, because I'd like to think if we can kill Karagga on nightmare we damn well can kill Bonethrasher on nightmare-- but nope, tonight, he's going to crit twice, every single fight, and sometimes on more than one person at once.

 

3. While we're on the subject of Bonethrasher: mechanics that do not work how they should. Bonethrasher, Karagga and the Annihilator Droid are all major culprits here, because they have fairly long range frontal AOE attacks. Sometimes, Bonethrasher's swipe will hit people behind him. Sometimes, Karagga will snap-turn toward the raid, missile, and turn back to the tank for no reason. Sometimes the Droid's pushback-cleave hits every single person around him even if they're behind or at the sides. And worst of all, sometimes Bonethrasher will change targets mid-sweep. I'm okay with frontal cone attacks, if they actually behave like frontal cone attacks. Right now they behave like "maybe frontal cone, maybe your whole raid dies instead" attacks.

 

4. Bugs. BUGS. BUGS. BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS. From the Pylons in EV suddenly deciding they're done responding, to Soa's shield not breaking like it should during Phase 3, ball lightnings going invisible, platforms not respawning, the Annihilator Droid spamming his moves without pause (this only happened to us once, but it was -weird-). They might not make the encounters unwinnable but they make the experience frustrating instead of fun.

 

5. Poor visual indicators. Soa's phase 3 pylon drops should have a mark on the ground where they're going to hit. His ball lightnings should put a line between them and their target so people can actually tell which one is theirs. The grenades that various bosses put on players should be visible enough that you can see them even if you're in a sea of melee characters trying to dps with glowsticks. GROUND INDICATORS SHOULD BE THE CORRECT SIZE TO REPRESENT PROPER DAMAGE RADIUS. Bonethrasher should announce who he fixates on.

 

6. TOO. EASY. Assuming bugs and 'working as intended' designs don't get involved, the fights are not challenging enough and can be cruise-controlled for the most part. If you fix the above issues, they will become even EASIER. The solution here should be to fix the above issues AND increase difficulty through some other means, possibly by actually adding new mechanics to bosses in nightmare mode instead of just scaling their damage up.

 

And so and so forth.

 

I'm not saying raiding isn't fun; it's fun when things go the way they should. But right now there are tons of factors that can cause even groups who know the encounters and who are fully geared to auto-wipe no matter what they do because they didn't get lucky.

 

And that's frustrating, because it wastes our time, and then it risks costing you players. The PvP scene has been seeing a LOT of redesigns and fixes-- most of which I enjoy, being a heavy PvPer myself. But for the love of Yoda, fix the raiding scene too.

[Guardian Vs Shadow tank]

hi there celeitia, could i see your hybrid build. Im unsure of which talent to pick for pve/pvp. Right now im full vigilance for leveling and its pretty darn good even without overhead slash.

> full vigilance

> without overhead slash

wat

 

Anyway, it's this: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500dMG0uZhGMMrhdzMM.1

 

Which AFAIK is the standard 14/27 defense/vigilance hybrid tank spec.

[Guardian Vs Shadow tank]

The actual stat scaling should be the same between both classes, but the screenshots won't show bonuses for things like Blade Barricade or Kinetic Ward

 

Your Best bet would be to compare the effects of their talents and abilities. I think the tank class forum already has a post that does this, although it only list it from Defense, not Vig tanks.

Shadows and Vanguards get about twice as much from their skills (they're skills, not talents) as Guardians do; there is, in fact, a detailed analysis of this floating around somewhere.

[Is Force Kick bugged?]

Mercenaries and Operatives have an ability that makes them immune to interrupts for something like 15 seconds. I dunno about Sorcerers, they might have a proc for it.

[What class is Kira Carsen and why is she more powerful than my jedi guardian?]

I've done some tanking but I'm vigilance and it seems true she has more hp than i do.

Oh. Huh. That's your problem them.

 

When you first get your companions they come with level-appropriate equipment, which puts them slightly above you. This doesn't last very long, though.

 

If you want to actually not die in fights, try a 14/27 spec (defense/vigilance). You lose almost no DPS but you gain all the important core tanking talents that make you really hard to kill. If you're going pure-vigilance, well, no, you're not going to be MUCH better at surviving than your DPS companions.

[What class is Kira Carsen and why is she more powerful than my jedi guardian?]

the tanking aspect is confusing, it really feels like she can take more punishment...

A Jedi Guardian tank will not start feeling like a tank until roughly level 30 or, AT LEAST, until you've spent 14 points in Defense. Until then you're gimped melee DPS in heavy armor, pretty much.

 

Kira is going to outdamage you, but she won't outsurvive you if you're smart with your skill use and cooldowns. (IE, use riposte everytime it comes up for the 6% buff, stay in Soresu Form, and use Saber Ward and Warding Call every other fight).

[Using.... C2-N2 as a healer??]

If you get him some REALLY GOOD droid parts, he's alright until you get Doc. But be ready to spend a little fortune on getting him all those droid parts and stuff, or else he really really sucks.

[I'm a tank, why does my BM saber have more endurance than my Rakata saber?]

^^Well to get to the point where you are actually obtaining Rakata drops, you need to everyone in your Ops over 18k ideally. Just makes it a lot easier all around. Once your at the point where you are farming bosses for rakata pieces, then you wil be getting all the stats requirements you need easily.

 

Also, does anyone have all the soft cap numbers for defensive stats for Guards?

Eh. The only encounter that actually needs your group to stack endurance specifically is Soa on nightmare mode. For the rest you don't need raid-wide 18k HP, although going below 17k is certainly a risk. Your full Columi set should already provide that though.