I had this crazy idea come to me reading one of the recent threads on removing Guard from 2h tanks, playing RIFT beta for a little bit, and thinking about how awesome it is to actually have weekends off from work.
RIFT has Guard in it's game, but it functions differently from WAR. It's a 15s buff with a 30s cool down that redirects 25% of damage taken by an ally to the Warrior. This can be increased to 50% by spending 10 soul points in the Vindicator PvP soul. This prevents you from buying the better DPS abilities in the soul since that soul has a 21 point cap on it. One of the 15 point abilities caught my eye, the Art of Defense. This allows a player to block without a shield.
In real life, I work for an insurance company. In a lot of insurance policies, there are several restrictions placed on coverage. Oftentimes, these restrictions can removed from the policy for an additional premium payment.
So I propose a similar solution. Guard requires a shield to use. A tank may purchase the ability to use Guard without a shield with renown points. I would place this ability on ranks 4 and/or 5 of Hardy Concession. The 10% or 15% damage cut and the cost of 20 or 34 renown points would make it unlikely that the 2h tank would be able to put out anything remotely close to DPS classes, so it should be fine to let the tank use Guard. The main complaint was 2h tanks being able to output too much DPS while having the most powerful damage mitigation ability in the game. This handles the complaint while not degrading the psychological game the tank plays to get players to attack him instead of him teammates.
Thoughts?
My initial reaction was "omg ma deeps!" but I quickly realised that was the point. It's a good solution.
ReplyDeleteI think in the specific case of the SM, there still needs to be a utility bump. 2H or no.