NERF : Guardian Tanks

[Insidion]

Cries of "nerf the other guys" will not fix a broken class. I respect your opinions and I value you as a community representative, but I would think focusing on "let's fix shadow/assassin spikiness" would accomplish more than "nerf guardians/juggernauts".

 

I agree that the devs lack awareness of the situation. I find it hard to believe that their play testing hasn't indicated that the problem exists. I have all 3 tank classes at 55, and its pretty obvious that one is not like the others in regards to mitigation. Juggernauts are also quite obviously in third place in aoe threat, and my concern is that nerfs to saber reflect would put us even further behind in that regard.

 

The bottom line is that all 3 tank classes *MUST* be viable in HM/NiM content, and that currently is NOT the case.

Edited August 1, 2013 by Insidion

[MillionsKNives]

Cries of "nerf the other guys" will not fix a broken class. I respect your opinions and I value you as a community representative, but I would think focusing on "let's fix shadow/assassin spikiness" would accomplish more than "nerf guardians/juggernauts".

 

I agree that the devs lack awareness of the situation. I find it hard to believe that their play testing hasn't indicated that the problem exists. I have all 3 tank classes at 55, and its pretty obvious that one is not like the others in regards to mitigation. Juggernauts are also quite obviously in third place in aoe threat, and my concern is that nerfs to saber reflect would put us even further behind in that regard.

 

The bottom line is that all 3 tank classes *MUST* be viable in HM/NiM content, and that currently is NOT the case.

 

It's quite easy to believe that they didn't find it in play testing when you realize that they don't playtest Shadow/Assassin tanks. They outright admitted it to Kitru at one point.

Edited August 1, 2013 by MillionsKNives

[Insidion]

It's quite easy to believe that they didn't find it in play testing when you realize that they don't playtest Shadow/Assassin tanks. They outright admitted it to Kitru at one point.

 

Wow, just... wow. How could they not? Very disappointed to realize they remain willfully ignorant of the situation.

[Kitru]

How could they not?

 

My guess? They only test on their own characters and none of them play a Shadow at all. The balancing for specs they don't play is done completely ignorant of actual play because they only end up using pure theory for it (as demonstrated by their descriptions of Balance Shadow DPS pre-2.0: when people pointed out that Balance had terrible DPS on pretty much every parse out there, Peckenpaugh responded by saying that, according to *them*, Balance was actually the best DPS spec out there). It's a reasonably decent explanation as to why certain ACs/specs have no problems whatsoever: the ones the devs are familiar with actually get the quality development effort because the devs are actually familiar with/like them whereas the ones they're only tangentially familiar with only get put through theoretical analysis because the devs don't enjoy playing/working on them.

[Yngow]

Their stated method for testing tank survivability is TTK, they put the tank being hit by the boss and see how long he survives, if he reaches a minimum target survival time they consider it balanced, that was stated on PTS forums during 2.0 testing.

 

This is a very archaic method of evaluation for tank survivability since it ignores several variables, spikiness being one of them, as soon as they stated that we all understood where the problem came from. Also during PTS 2.0 testing they did changes on KW to try and solve the tank problems because the amount of complaints was incredibly high, in other words before the changes done on PTS the situation was even worse than it is now and that was the way they designed it to be released.

 

The shadow spikiness problem is a known fact and is definitely not up for discussion, the discussion is about how to solve it, the entire community is aware of it as you can see a huge number of complaints on forums, guilds ditching shadows for progression, devs stating that they are aware of the problem, logs, simulations and all else, the fact that some people think the problem does not exist based on their *feeling* or on the fact that they did content with shadows proves absolutely nothing, even if those individuals that state they don't have any problems with shadows actually don't have any they need only to look around and see the entire community having those problems, the fact that the majority have problems with shadows alone is a proof that there is a design flaw.

[Panzerfire]

Cries of "nerf the other guys" will not fix a broken class. I respect your opinions and I value you as a community representative, but I would think focusing on "let's fix shadow/assassin spikiness" would accomplish more than "nerf guardians/juggernauts".

 

The bottom line is that all 3 tank classes *MUST* be viable in HM/NiM content, and that currently is NOT the case.

 

"Nerf Guardians/Juggernaughts" is the new tactics since it might get more attention. "Decrease the gap between Shadows and the other two" can be done by nerfing the other two or buffing Shadows, but "nerf Vanguards/Powertech" is quite silly so it's nerf Guardians. Devs have given Shadows/Assassins the absolute worst performance in any role out of any class at the start of 1.7, with only non-hybrid PT dps competing, and have been very reluctant about buffing them, reluctant used to discribe ignoring most of what was said on the PTS and after 1.7 launched.

 

Will they fix it? Maybe. Have they "looked into it"? Probably not, they're probably waiting for those community representatives to show "actual issues" since they consider everything on the forums dealing with mechanics a waste of their time. What will happen most likely is Balance dps being buffed for pvp, Infiltration dps reworked slightly so as to not really on weapon damage and crits as much. And Shadow/Assassin tanks will get their spikiness "fixed" by increasing the healing on Phase Walk to 10% and maybe adding 1-2% armor damage reduction.

[Berjiz]

You are forgetting the fact that Juggernaughts also did significantly less damage than Assassins, which meant that extra damage needed to be made up by the rest of your team. Due to the fact that Juggernaughts also required more outside healing to keep up, healers couldn't help with damage as much as well. Even completely discounting threat completely, using a Juggernaught tank lowered your team's damage overall. Thus, the Juggernaught was a strictly inferior choice for almost every fight in the game since spikiness was almost never an issue and was the sole significant benefit to bringing them. I know some people think tank damage doesn't matter, but they have been proven wrong many times as certain encounters had heavy DPS checks. Even the ones who don't, an Assassin tanking over a Juggernaught could have made up for mistakes that people made and passed enrages they'd have completely avoided just not being a Juggernaught. You could get around the Juggernaught's terrible threat through various means like skill, but there was absolutely nothing you could do to do the same damage as an equivalent Assassin and that's even including using the hybrid spec.

 

The past issues with Guardians were more significant than the current "spikiness" rant people go on today. The fact of the matter is outside of truly extraordinary circumstances, any time you die as an Assassin is due to a mistake made on the part of the Assassin and/or his team. If you can't handle the main weakness of your class, then it's your fault. The fact that some teams aren't having issues with surviving the content in NiM and others are on Shadows/Assassins alone proves that the issue is not a matter of RNG. It's due to a combination of skill and strategy.

They were considered the best enrage tanks though so that was something if you hit the enrage.

[DarthSpekulatius]

And Shadow/Assassin tanks will get their spikiness "fixed" by increasing the healing on Phase Walk to 10% and maybe adding 1-2% armor damage reduction.

 

[Vaidinah]

Guardians were pulling, at worst, 100 DPS less than a similarly capable Shadow or VG in top tier content. In an 8m ops group, that 100 DPS was 1% of total DPS (4 DPS at 1.9k, 2 tanks at 1k as baseline). You'd see a bigger difference out of conditional lag than you would out of Guardian DPS rather than the others. On top of that, on the split DPS fights that were all over EC, you'd actually see a DPS increase outside of specific compositions with several layers of redundant armor debuffs thanks to Guardians bringing an armor debuff.

 

No, that's not accurate. The vast majority of teams didn't have a full team of people hitting 1.9k single target damage on average in a real fight. If they were, they certainly weren't posting it on Torparse and they were certainly not doing during progression. That's not even counting the fact that healers could put more DPS since Assassins required less outside healing or could use that time to heal other players on your team that were making mistakes. Being an Assassin was a massive advantage over being a Juggernaught the vast majority of the time due to factors like this and Force Shroud being so ridiculously effective pre-2.0.

 

If you're blaming your tank for not dealing enough damage, you're doing something wrong. If you're hitting enrage timers, it's not the tank's fault. It's the DPSs fault. If you're blaming the lack of 100 DPS from a tank, you *seriously* need to look at the 100-200 DPS that's missing from the rest of your DPS.

 

If bringing in a different tank would have resulted in a kill, then technically, it is the tanks' fault even if Bioware's balancing was more to blame. The point is, Assassin make up for the mistakes of other players far more than a Juggernaught because they were better and easier tanks to play. When I started running an Assassin in place of my Juggernaught, I was blown away at how ridiculously easy it was and how much it helped my team get through encounters that would have taken far longer otherwise.

 

Do you even *have* a Shadow? The "extraordinary circumstances" you're talking about are common enough during boss fights that they're *expected* during a number of fights. Those are "extraordinary". Those are "ordinary".

 

I play my Assassin and Juggernaught almost as much (my Assassin more these days) and am equally skilled with either. Don't confuse me with someone like you that has multiple tanks, but based on all the posts made on Guardians/Juggernaughts, plays at a sub-par level compared to his "main" tank. Unlike you, I take full advantage of my utility as an Assassin and understand how useful abilities like stealth res and multiple medpacs are for my class.

 

I seriously have to wonder how the hell you can *possibly* equate having 100 lower DPS, which equated to a 1% loss in total raid DPS, to a tank randomly dying thanks to spike damage, which often turns into a wipe or, at the very least, a lot of lost resources. I never saw a *single* tank that got picked because of the damage they dealt. I also never saw a single attempt that failed because the tank didn't do enough damage. Enrage timers are the *DPS*. Yes, *on occasion*, the fact that a tank was pulling a bit more DPS is going to make a difference, but that's like bringing up the occasions where Focused Defense kept the tank alive: they're so few and far between and demonstrative of a crapload of *other* things going wrong during the fight that it's not question of what value they did but rather how much *else* got screwed up. Focused Defense isn't an amazing tool, just like the extra 100 DPS that Shadows and VGs brought wasn't an amazing tool. The times that it matters are so marginal that it's not even something that has real bearing.

 

No one ever said they are "amazing". *I* said they are both significantly important factors that can and have made the difference between victory and failure. Your inability to understand there is a very large grey area between amazing and marginal is showing. Just as it did when you dismissed stealth res, multiple medpacs, and Phase Walk for Shadows/Assassins.

 

If the "main weakness" of the Shadow is the need to be kept above 85% hp at all times or risk instantly dying for reasons outside of the tank's control, what's the "main weakness" of a Guardian or a VG? Right now, there *isn't* a "main weakness" of a Guardian and the only weakness of VGs is lacking a tank CD, which isn't really necessary for their success but rather for a desirable level of balance.

 

No, they don't need to be kept up that high unless you and your healers have no clue when the spikes can come in. If you don't know when spikes are likely to kill you without a cooldown and/or burst healing, that's not Bioware's fault. In any case, you should be relatively easy to keep near full since Assassins have a great deal of self-healing.

 

The main weakness of a Guardian is pretty simple. They require significantly more healing than an Assassin, which means your team needs to make less mistakes to make up for this weakness.

 

It's not a question of *whether* it's a weakness that can be worked around. It's a question of whether the *amount* of work that has to be gone into working around it is justified, in any sense of the term. Shadows, as a class, *don't* bring enough to the party to justify the amount of work they require and the risk they represent. The only reason they're still being brought along is because they're running with groups that they've always run with.

 

What constitutes hard work is extremely difficult to objectively answer as shown by nearly every discussion involving which classes are more difficult than others. When I started playing my Assassin and ran it in place of my Juggernaught for progression, it was significantly better for my team despite the fact that I had little practice with it on operations. There were many times where we'd have failed on my Juggernaught (who was better geared), but pulled through because my Assassin was a superior tank.

 

With the way people like you talk about Shadows/Assassins pre-2.0 , that should have been impossible since they were the "skill' tanks. People like me that learned virtually everything they could on both a Juggernaught and Assassin and played them on the same difficulty in operations knew the Assassin was much easier.

 

*Please*, show me an ops group that, when they lost one of their established tanks, *chose* a shadow tank to replace them. Just because they're being brought along *does not* mean that they're working fine. The fact that *so* many people apparently believe, as you do, that's it's a problem entirely on the players' end is simply emblematic of the sheer level of obtuse idiocy that exists on the other side of the aisle. You use anecdotes and flawed logic to justify a desire to maintain a status quo that has been *repeatedly* demonstrated to be fundamentally imbalanced while *ignoring* the actual evidence because it doesn't jive with your own worldview.

 

I haven't seen a single person that has been convinced that Shadows are fine without already believing so. Of course, I haven't seen a single person that looks at and understands the actual evidence without attempting to twist it around to justify their own opinions that hasn't been convinced that there's something wrong with Shadows.

 

I've seen multiple threads where established guilds were looking for Assassin tanks specifically even recently on my server's forums. Here is one by one of the top guilds in the world. I have no clue if it's to replace an *established* tank or it's non-A team. Even if exactly 0 guilds did, though, that doesn't prove it's anything more than a perception issue. Given the way Shadow/Assassin threads have been spammed all over the forums, it would be no surprise to me that people would perceive a class to be bad when it's not. Also, there are plenty of people who still think to this day that Scoundrel/Operative DPS is terrible when it's among the highest DPS classes right now. I don't see many people clamoring for Scoundrel/Operative DPS despite this fact due to past issues.

 

In the meantime, try coming up with some actual evidence to prove your point. Nobody disputes that Assassins are the spikiest among all the tanks. People like me dispute that it is to an unmanageable degree that it forces much more wipes than other tanks. With all the information out there, myself and many others don't see any significant problems with 8 man content at all. There are few 16 man guilds so there's generally less evidence to check and it's possible there are issues there just because the level of damage in 16 man is much, much higher than 8. Other than that, the only significant issue that I've seen is that Force Shroud/Resilience fails 5% of the time and that should be fixed.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Vaidinah

[Ephesia]

How nice of some of the shadow representatives in this thread take their own problems about their own class and force a nerf on a completely different class to make up for their own class' shortcomings. After all since they believe they haven't received enough love already pre 2.0 they want to see the status quo from 2.0 where guardians are the least damaging, least hp'd, most dififcult class to play mantle continue.

 

Well, no. Go to your own thread and deal with your own problems. There is nothing wrong or unbalanced in no way whatsoever with Guardian tanks. They are just where they were supposed to be in the first place now.

[Panzerfire]

 

I meant the bonus healing done given to alies within Phase Walk.

[Leafy_Bug]

How nice of some of the shadow representatives in this thread take their own problems about their own class and force a nerf on a completely different class to make up for their own class' shortcomings. After all since they believe they haven't received enough love already pre 2.0 they want to see the status quo from 2.0 where guardians are the least damaging, least hp'd, most dififcult class to play mantle continue.

 

Well, no. Go to your own thread and deal with your own problems. There is nothing wrong or unbalanced in no way whatsoever with Guardian tanks. They are just where they were supposed to be in the first place now.

 

 

Please point out pre 2.0 when a Guardian was one shot by a boss or had a high chance of dying due to bad RNG? I will venture a guess and say never. Guardians were tough to play, granted, were they squishy like the shadow is now? None in the least and they got an ever higher buff in 2.0. So i understand you love your class and you like facerolling content. Your personal preference aside, guardians need a nerf to balance out tanking classes in the game.

 

 

Should I get into PVP where Guardians/Juggs are the best tanks by far as well? They are the no1 choice in RWZ as well and a jugg+operative combo is simply hilarious! Gotta love guardian players clinging to pre 2.0 things which have no connection to surviving as a tank. The class was either too hard to play or did not have enough threat. Nothing about being a liability in your raid due to bad RNG.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Leafy_Bug

[DarthSpekulatius]

I meant the bonus healing done given to alies within Phase Walk.

 

yea I realize that I simply wasn't sure if you seriously thought that would help or if you tried to make a joke.

Edited August 2, 2013 by DarthSpekulatius

[Ephesia]

Please point out pre 2.0 when a Guardian was one shot by a boss or had a high chance of dying due to bad RNG? I will venture a guess and say never. Guardians were tough to play, granted, were they squishy like the shadow is now? None in the least and they got an ever higher buff in 2.0. So i understand you love your class and you like facerolling content. Your personal preference aside, guardians need a nerf to balance out tanking classes in the game.

 

 

Should I get into PVP where Guardians/Juggs are the best tanks by far as well? They are the no1 choice in RWZ as well and a jugg+operative combo is simply hilarious! Gotta love guardian players clinging to pre 2.0 things which have no connection to surviving as a tank. The class was either too hard to play or did not have enough threat. Nothing about being a liability in your raid due to bad RNG.

 

Everyone knows Shadows are spikiest class and most vulnerable to RNG. This has always been the case yet they have some of the best utilities as tank in this game, provided with their large health pool and ability to hold aggro with quite comparative ease.

 

But the solution to your problem is in no way whatsoever connected with nerfing Guardians. You simply come off as a person who looks at guardians with gripes in a destructive attitude like if I'm susceptible to rng then I want guardians to have more shortcomings to make up for my problems. This is not the attitude you should have imo, it would have been much more proper to deal with Shadow spikiness in a thread in Shadow forums asking Bioware for change and get people more signatures as they wish for this change. Because it took that much for guardians to get their Guardian Tree fixed, proper Guardian Slash as well as a proper additional protection / aggro generating element of the Saber Reflect.

[Snarkasms]

This is not the attitude you should have imo, it would have been much more proper to deal with Shadow spikiness in a thread in Shadow forums asking Bioware for change and get people more signatures as they wish for this change.

 

It seems you've missed the last couple months of the tanking AND shadow subfora, where there have been threads upon threads discussing, exploring, and modelling shadow/sin spikiness and pleading with devs to take a look at the issue.

 

Those were essentially ignored, so Leafy's throwing it the other way. The nerf threads get attention, the "something's wrong with our class, fix it" threads don't. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say, but apparently you need to have a specific tone of squeak to get attention.

[Ephesia]

It seems you've missed the last couple months of the tanking AND shadow subfora, where there have been threads upon threads discussing, exploring, and modelling shadow/sin spikiness and pleading with devs to take a look at the issue.

 

Those were essentially ignored, so Leafy's throwing it the other way. The nerf threads get attention, the "something's wrong with our class, fix it" threads don't. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say, but apparently you need to have a specific tone of squeak to get attention.

 

So you have problems, and the solution to your problems is to make sure other classes have problems as well.

It took Guardians 1 year to be fixed. Be patient and deal with it. You sort of over exaggerate the situation too. There is not one example where a guild would fall behind progression or perform poorly due to having a Shadow tank instead of a guardian or vanguard.

[Leafy_Bug]

So you have problems, and the solution to your problems is to make sure other classes have problems as well.

It took Guardians 1 year to be fixed. Be patient and deal with it. You sort of over exaggerate the situation too. There is not one example where a guild would fall behind progression or perform poorly due to having a Shadow tank instead of a guardian or vanguard.

 

Severity Gaming 16M NiM, FROG 16M NiM, Friendly Fire aka Not Good Enough 16M NiM would disagree.

[Berjiz]

No, they don't need to be kept up that high unless you and your healers have no clue when the spikes can come in. If you don't know when spikes are likely to kill you without a cooldown and/or burst healing, that's not Bioware's fault. In any case, you should be relatively easy to keep near full since Assassins have a great deal of self-healing.

Um the spikes can usually come at anytime due to bad rng. All cooldowns except overcharge saber reduced the chance of said spikes from happening, it doesn't eliminate it.

 

Also the selfhealing brings assasin migation slightly higher than the others and you need to use htkx3 as soon as you can. It is a reactive mecahnicsm with a 3sec channelt that you want to use as soon as it comes up. It has nothing to do with spikiness since if you survive another 3 sec after the channel it was probably not due to htk but rather the healers or lack of followup attacks.

 

Since you need to be so close to full it also means that assasins needs to be overhealed a lot more which in turn might make them need more healing that juggers/pt.

[Yngow]

Severity Gaming 16M NiM, FROG 16M NiM, Friendly Fire aka Not Good Enough 16M NiM would disagree.

 

So is my guild, not that they would not allow me to use my shadow on NiM but they prefer that I don't use it, and I agree

[Ephesia]

Severity Gaming 16M NiM, FROG 16M NiM, Friendly Fire aka Not Good Enough 16M NiM would disagree.

 

Sure I can ask Friendly Fire anytime what they think of your great ideas to nerf their main tanks.

[Yngow]

Funny how people fail to realize that the vast majority here does not really want a jugg/guardian nerf and want actually a shadow/sin fix instead, and the initial nerf thing was just an exaggeration to try and get some attention from devs

[Khaleijo]

...

Well, no. Go to your own thread and deal with your own problems. There is nothing wrong or unbalanced in no way whatsoever with Guardian tanks. They are just where they were supposed to be in the first place now.

 

This is an really interesting statement.

What do you mean exactly with "place supposed to be" ?

 

Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea of nerfing one class to the costs of another either, but your statement just reminds me of years and years of "tank balance" in WoW, where the one and only real tank was just the warrior for a very long time. The others could also tank but it was so much more work from the whole group needed that no one really bothered with bears or pallys.

Everyone arguing with that always got the answer, your class is not meant to be tank, roll a warrior if you want to, that is "the tank". The argument rerolling a guardian or jugger now in these threads is just the same idea.

 

The tank play is different with each of the three classes, for me the PT doesn't do the trick, the guardian is ok but i really like the assasin style. I don't run main ops with any of them because i like healing even more than tanking, but i'm interested in the classes and roles so i read the role forums regularly. That the devs seem to ignore these forums with some really substantiated discussions completely is worrisome in my opinion.

 

But back to yor statement:

Is "the place supposed to be" alone at the top or is it 3 classes that are more or less at the same place.

If it's the first, thank you for telling your understanding of class balance... If it's the latter, why are you ranting against the intention of balancing that is behind the "Nerf ..." scheme as declared in the first post and don't help in the probably more constructive "fix xy..." threads posted here for weeks and months to alert the imbalance to the devs.

As stated by Kitru, Leafy and others in the "fix" threads several times, they don't really want a nerf for the guardians, they want all three tanks to be evenly matched to each other for the whole content. But no dev wanted to hear or react, so this is just another route to get attention or at least a statement about the whole situation. As other nerf cries proved before, this is in fact a way to get the attention of bioware. Sad but true.

 

When i started SWTOR pre 2.0 i was really happy with the tank and healer balance (don't play dps so no real idea with that). There was no "no you are the wrong class you can't come with us because your class can't do this or that" Even if you got a negative answer it was more like sorry but we have already your class and want/need to diversifiy. There were small advantages and disadvantages with each, but as long as you didn't stack the classes it didn't really matter. If you had a player with certain playskill an understanding of mechanics it didn't really matter what he was playing. The disadvantage of guardians was certainly the threat, while sins were spiky and PT lacked CDs. Stuff you had to adapt to with your tactics but nothing you couldn't work around and once you found your way to deal with it it wouldn't cause further wipes.

 

Past 2.0 there is also no "no we don't want your class because it's a hindrance" in the part of the content my guild plays.

At least not yet, but there is already reluctance with some classes, they have to prove themselves more than others, just because of their class.

 

Even we, running the HC Ops most of the time and rarely NiM, experience the different amount of work needed from the whole group when we are running with our sin+ juggernaut team or with the 2 juggers on other evenings. Especially we healers notice the difference, it may be right that the sin doesn't need as much external healing in sheer numbers, but due to the "jojo" effect of RNG spikes on the healthbar we are overhealing the sin most of the time just to be sure he lives. Our sin is rotating his bigger CDs in a "normal" fight and we healers really notice when he screws up, whereas the jugger often tells, "oh, i didn't even use a single one, never fell that deep HPwise to be worried." and we don't even notice that we had to heal more this time.

The Operator in Asation HC is an example where the differences sometimes decide about wipe or bosskill, while the sin player is playing the same way he is always playing. Sometimes he just dies without anything he or the healers could do, other times the same tactic, use of cds ect leads to a perfect kill.

I would never say we are perfect players, so part of this is probably lack of skill, but not everyone in the game is perfect, so that is also a sign of imbalance if you have to be perfect with one class to achieve the same what others can do with only average effort.

While pre 2.0 we just adapted the tactics to the tank team, this is much more difficult now, because there are runs with no problems with our sin and then some evenings we just have really bad luck doing stuff the same way as always and getting problems with the RNG spikes. You can't plan for them by precasting or pre acting with sniper shield for example, its RNG. Most of the time we can only hope that our operative healer is there because his hots smoothen these effects. Having two sorc healers make it even worse, mercs i don't know for sure because he is in the team on evenings the sin isn't there. But from the healers point of view running with 2 juggernauts is easier.

 

The real question is, how long does it take from these current "minor differences" until we have a situation like it was in WoW for years and classes are cast out just for being the class they are? As the current content is designed in a way that a spiky tank is an disadvantage you have to count in and it doesn't seem that this will change in the near future, it will probably get worse for sins, whereas jugger tanks that are better designed to meet this kind of damage profile will succeed easily and becoming the first choice even more.

 

That is a legimate question because this special problem with shadows/sins is discussed and analized by the community for months now and there is no real reaction or any sign at the horizon that the current path of content design is changed or even officially acknowledged that there could be an issue. Even if the devs would have stated this is how we want the sins to be that would at least something, a sign that the devs have a plan and stick to that, that we as players have just have to accept what we get. And that this is another game where balance is only a matter of "favourite of the month"

But the theorycrafters were mentionend positively before for their deep insight in mechanics, why not use this knowledge and work they do for real long term balance but ignore it?

 

The official statement that the only tank really being tested by playing is the guardian/juggernaut, is just the tip of the iceberg. And it's not only the tanks that have this problem, those DPS specs not played and tested are in the same boat. No matter what the dev are saying the reality ingame proves them wrong that just running simulations and some numbers is enough to balance the classes.

 

The problem is, if there is a significant difference how much difficulty a certain group setup in the game poses, most people will go for the easiest way. It doesn't matters that the real effect for example with sins occurs only in the NiM, because almost everyone discussing this in-depth in the forums is probably a better than average skilled player running with other better than average players.

 

But the majority of players running ops is rather average skilled, so with their groups the differences may occour already in HC due to their lack of experience or inability to counter the disadvantages with skill and may lead them to change their tanks (or DPS or healers for this goes with every class or spec that is significant out of balance).

 

A skilled player could outplay this with more effort, but if he is able to do that, he would achieve even more with a class that doesn't need this extra effort, why should he play the "weak" class/spec in the first place? Except for fun of course, but you have to admit that people in MMOs tend to play the "strong" classes, even if one considered weak could be more fun while still being sufficient for the played content.

 

So the outcry isn't only just for the special situation of the shadows and assasins right now, it's also about the whole concept of testing and balancing by the devs.

[Dragonexadon]

I went through every page of this. I don't claim to know the numbers like many of you do. That stated I have issues with the context of the first post.

 

"We had two guardian tanks that rolled a HM, nerf Guardians"

 

Later on I read post from Kithru who said they developed programs winch shows a reasonable fix, proves all the numbers , and so on. Great. Yet the original post that spawned all this discussion is so lack of proof, lack of context, lack of anything that it does look very much like a

 

"My class sucks, buff me and nerf my counterpart" post.

 

Using only the context of the OP as argument one could easily counter it where Shadows rule at boss fights. Such as Xeno HM, using phase walk to avoid 90& of the channel attack stacks.

 

Later I saw post claiming lack of dev response. I see this no reason to create a post that simply states "two guardians facerolled, nerfed shadows".

 

Also post stating that development should not take as long as it has. I have never developed professionally for video games. I do however do ASP.NET web forms and MVC development. When I create a website for my own it is always faster than doing it professionally. To consider that the timelines would be anywhere close to the same is just lack of professional development knowledge.

 

Things have to be annualized, planned, budgeted, quality checked, and so on. Building an app at home to prove a theory is much different than implementing it in an MMO that has 1/2 a million users or more.

 

My main request is as followed:

 

1) If you don't care about the Guardian class then please don't suggest things that would change it. Otherwise I feel you wont give it the proper attention as someone who does care *noting back to the op saying they give a rats *** about Guardians*

 

2) If your true concern is about nerfing Guardian tanks then , in the OP, give real reasons why. Going through 11 pages of debate to find out the context is something I doubt forum mods will spend the time to sift through.

[Kitru]

Later on I read post from Kithru who said they developed programs winch shows a reasonable fix, proves all the numbers , and so on. Great. Yet the original post that spawned all this discussion is so lack of proof, lack of context, lack of anything that it does look very much like a

 

"My class sucks, buff me and nerf my counterpart" post.

 

There's a certain assumption of common knowledge concerning the numbers/balance/etc that have been on the forums for the last 3 months, especially since they've been plastered over *numerous* threads on the subject. You can't really assume that *every* time someone references said numbers that they're somehow obligated to link them just for you when pretty much everyone that's been in the debate for longer than an hour is cognizant of them. Don't complain that the numbers weren't presented to you right away when everyone else has known about them since 3 threads ago (some of us from *8* threads ago). Go do some research or do some math yourself if you want to argue against them. It's not that hard.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Kitru

[Dragonexadon]

Go do some research or do some math yourself if you want to argue against them. It's not that hard.

 

The burden of proof is with the person who is making the claim. My argument more so is the need or importance of another topic that claims Guardians need a nerf and buff shadows. More so when the context of the OP is lacking of anything NEW or anything of real substance. You said there is common knowledge and I agree.

 

I agree Shadows are spikey and need some love. I have read several of your post and others about the subject. Can you really claim this post has added anything new?

 

You are correct, it's not that hard to look at the research that has already been done. I like the OP post overall as I often lurk on the forums. Yet this post seems to add nothing to the topic.

 

Edit: With the argument of common knowledge one could simply post forum threads of

"Title : Nerf Guardians"

"Context: It's common knowledge"

Edited August 2, 2013 by Dragonexadon