Combat rating vs Armor Penetration
At what rate does one out weight the other for stat # vs added DPS. There may be allot of variables, but these are the technicalities some people love to dig into.
I just want to know what is worth putting more points into.
I main a Guardian so Ill use my PVP build and Pole Tank builds I currently use.
(Pole tank is fine for almost all content so don’t loose your minds. Sword and Shield all the way when things gets real.)
Do I put them into Precise Attacks (armor pen) or Fortitude (combat rating)? before anyone says it I don’t feel a good build can afford both. Share if you believe otherwise
The idea here is that the guardian gets both call to arms, ardent battle cry in order to buff their team’s weapon damage by 87% for 15 seconds every minute. To put it in perspective, that’s like giving bear shamans and barbs 2x frenzy damage.
Additionally, this spec uses Stand your Ground, a crazy strong anti-cc which gives your entire team knockback resistance for 10 seconds every 2 minutes. It’s very strong when focusing targets, as knockback is one of the best defensive and offensive CCs, and negating it has huge impact for your team. Additionally, most players don’t even know it exists, and will waste their KBs on targets when they have Stand your Ground up.
You do lose a little survivability with the protection from general missing. Storm strike is trash most the time, and investing so many points on it is a waste IMO.
When you rock this hybrid build, you need to call out your buffs. If your teammates all pop their weapon damage buffs with you, melee actually 1 shot everything with a single combo.
Rampaging horse + Call to Arms + ardent battle cry + rune of aggression = ~200% team wide weapon damage.
Also, you gain two more high frequency stuns, and a nasty snare on your sword and board KB. Stunning charge is a great tool for catching fleeing targets or interrupting people chasing your teammates. Shield Strike is another great quick stun (up every 45 seconds) which gives guardian the most CCs out of any tank. However, both require sword and board to be the active weapon, so it adds a lot more interactivity to the class with constantly weapon swapping to CC for teammates.
I would never feat Wrath (it’s ■■■■■) over the cooldown reduction in charge. Only 20 seconds cooldown on the charge is incredibly powerful, and one of the many reasons why a “support” guard is so strong.
IMO 27,5% crit chance on disable is not something to scoff at either, so for that I’d give up one point in master pikeman or shield strike cd reduction.
EDIT: oh and I guess you need impale as well for the super low CD charge
and yes, that build you’re proposing is crazy strong. it even boosts dots and procs from melees extra much because of the bonus “spell” dmg. also real magic dmg from casters a little bit as well.
@Danvancool
Armor penetration is much better than combat rating (talking about the feats in question), so it’s very normal to skip the combatrating feats altogether.
This is the build you normally go into if you go the storm strike + general route. stamina drain is a very niche thing, but the problem with disable is that it has a shared cooldown, so it’s nothing to go for imo.
Maybe 1 point redoubt is a thing as Stygga’s build has, but I don’t know the spesifics about that one.
Do not drop general until you have gear, AA and feel comfortable with the class. Otherwise you’ll just melt whenever you go frenzy (aka whenever you want to do damage, on a guard).
Thanks you guys, I like the idea behind all the support and CC’s available.
Ive got a decent amount of aa’s and gear.
-Pressing and decisive maxed
-CC break and avoid entanglement maxed. some people use resolve which I have
-4 points in counter weight & master at arms, 3 in deliberate repraisal ( I put on sometimes to replace master at arms) I like the double tap stun, so many fast hits/chances to stun.
If Im not using the PVPLEVEL app
I have a T5 polearm
Teir 2 pvp set, but Teir 3 pvp chest
I’m not sure if T5 raid gear is superior in pvp at all, but I have T5 head chest and legs. It might be better than t1 pvp gear but at what point does it fall short?
Thanks to you 3 for the build suggestions. Armor Penetration > Combat rating check!
There is nothing wrong with switching to polearm as a guard mid fight, be it for the guard buff, mob positioning or an additional CC.
The thing that you won’t really be able to do in those tiers is going polearm full time, with a polearm tanking spec or something like that. It’s simply putting you and your team at an obvious disadvantage and makes your teams life harder for no benefit in return. In a long run polearm will 99% of the time be inferior to S&S due to obvious shortcomings.
But again, it totally fine and probably even beneficial to switch to polearm every now and then in the right situations.
check!