Tower of Stone needs removal of shield penalty.

[Lord Hackenslash]

<p>The Guardian ability Tower of stone needs the removal of the shield damage penalty. </p><p>Back when Tower of Stone was the only damage avoidance ability this was a meaningful penalty but with the current game environment this mainly serves to force Guardians with less than stellar resources to  avoid using this spell which is really for the benefit of the group as a whole. Most other tank classes have some access to stoneskin or stoneskin like abilities and this one really needs to be made a bit more friendly to the player. </p><p>Please consider making this change, I do not play a guardian but as I do play several healers I have seen many times when this ability was under-used for what I believe is the item damage penalty. Please consider this ability for a revamp. I feel it is a defining ability of the guardian and frankly its a bit silly that those who use it are punished with higher repair bills and forced to carry 5, 10, or more shields in thier inventories to compensate for the use of this ability.</p><p>Thank you.</p>

[Banditman]

<p>Most Guardians keep a craptacular shield (or 3) in their bags, macro'ed to the ability.  Equip Item, use ability.  Once it runs, you use another hotkey to pull out your "main" shield again.  Wouldn't mind if the damage was gone, but there are ways around it.</p>

[Thunndar316]

<p>Guardians need a lot of things and this is one of them.</p><p>Remove the 100% death on their save also.</p>

[Lord Hackenslash]

<p><cite>Banditman wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Most Guardians keep a craptacular shield (or 3) in their bags, macro'ed to the ability.  Equip Item, use ability.  Once it runs, you use another hotkey to pull out your "main" shield again.  Wouldn't mind if the damage was gone, but there are ways around it.</p></blockquote><p>Exactly, I did not want to mention that specific point but it does illustrate that this penalty is not relevant in the current gaming environment and serves no penalty other than to penalize the player directly rather than serve as a gameplay mechanic.</p><p>And yes I agree that the death save for guardians and berzerkers needs to be reworked especially since there are some exploits that can ignore it making it a penalty to the honest players. Again I do not want to get into details but this particular ability penalizes the guardian and berzerker unneccesarily.</p><p>Both tower of stone and the death save are relics of an older game that EQ2 has evolved beyond.</p>

[Macross_JR]

<p>only thing you forgot to actually mention is "most" guardians don't use craptacular shields for ToS as the procs could just get ate up faster.  If you use a decent-good shield your avoidance doesn't go down and can still avoid more hits, making ToS stay up longer(up to the actual duration of the spell).</p>

[Lord Hackenslash]

<p><cite>Gimbel@Permafrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>only thing you forgot to actually mention is "most" guardians don't use craptacular shields for ToS as the procs could just get ate up faster.  If you use a decent-good shield your avoidance doesn't go down and can still avoid more hits, making ToS stay up longer(up to the actual duration of the spell).</p></blockquote><p>This is the main reason I feel it is important to make this change. The solution most players have found makes them equip an inferior shield in order to no run out of shield durability mid fight thereby makin them weaker and more succeptabe to more damage and negating some of the benefit of the ability in the first place. </p><p>This ability needs a reevaluation buy those responsible for Combat art/Spell mechanics. </p><p>Please consider updating these spells and if you feel a revamp is not needed, please let us know so we can let sleeping dogs lie.</p>

[Lleren]

<p>I think this ability is one of the reaasons whwy there is such a large selection of fabled shields out there to use.</p>

[Wingrider01]

<p>remove the disadvantages of the action, lower the advantages that occur from the use of the action, only fair and equitable. Get the advantages by about 50 percent or more and this would be fair</p>

[Kordran]

<p><cite>Wingrider01 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>remove the disadvantages of the action, lower the advantages that occur from the use of the action, only fair and equitable. Get the advantages by about 50 percent or more and this would be fair</p></blockquote><p>I don't think it's necessary for them to nerf its effectiveness in the name of "balance" here.</p><p>As someone who plays a Paladin, I fully support the idea of removing the shield damage component from Tower of Stone, and I think they should also completely remove the delayed death penalty from Unyielding Will, and reduce its recast time.</p>

[Rahatmattata]

<p>I don't have a problem with the shield damage tbh. I never hesitate to use ToS if I feel I might go down and I have never had to go through more than 2 shields before a mender bot was popped or my armor was busted and I had to repair anyway.</p><p>Would it be nice to have the damage removed? Sure. Then I could just use my main shield for ToS. But it will in no way "fix guards", so to me it is a minor issue. Exploding heart would be nice to remove as well, but again... not a pressing issue IMO. It can still save a raid, get a mob dead in heroic content, and allow you to solo things you might normally not be able to.</p><p>I would love an AA or piece of gear that gave one more proc to ToS and increases the duration by 5-7 seconds though. But, meh whatever. Maybe that would be OP.</p>

[Wingrider01]

<p><cite>Kordran wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Wingrider01 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>remove the disadvantages of the action, lower the advantages that occur from the use of the action, only fair and equitable. Get the advantages by about 50 percent or more and this would be fair</p></blockquote><p>I don't think it's necessary for them to nerf its effectiveness in the name of "balance" here.</p><p>As someone who plays a Paladin, I fully support the idea of removing the shield damage component from Tower of Stone, and I think they should also completely remove the delayed death penalty from Unyielding Will, and reduce its recast time.</p></blockquote><p>Sorry I do think it needs to be done, if you remove the disadvantages then the advantages need to be alter to match the reduced faults, it is in the name of balance. If they "nerf" the damage then the effectiveness needs to be "nerfed"by halving it's effectivness</p>

[Lord Hackenslash]

<p><cite>Wingrider01 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Kordran wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Wingrider01 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>remove the disadvantages of the action, lower the advantages that occur from the use of the action, only fair and equitable. Get the advantages by about 50 percent or more and this would be fair</p></blockquote><p>I don't think it's necessary for them to nerf its effectiveness in the name of "balance" here.</p><p>As someone who plays a Paladin, I fully support the idea of removing the shield damage component from Tower of Stone, and I think they should also completely remove the delayed death penalty from Unyielding Will, and reduce its recast time.</p></blockquote><p>Sorry I do think it needs to be done, if you remove the disadvantages then the advantages need to be alter to match the reduced faults, it is in the name of balance. If they "nerf" the damage then the effectiveness needs to be "nerfed"by halving it's effectivness</p></blockquote><p>Normally I would agree however the penalty in this case is not in any way related to the gameplay. If the penalty was that the player was stifled or something then that would be a direct correlation to gameplay, Combat benefit to Combat penalty. Currently the penalty is a combat benefit to merchant penalty. The 2 are just not relevant. This ability comes from back in the days when a Mastercrafted shield was the best a player could get and they could have a dozen of them in thier bags if they wanted to put in the effort of obtaining them. Now however a Guardian will only be able to get 1 or 2 viable shields for the content they are engaging in, and they have no way of aquiring multiples of them as they are all lore. no matter how hard they work at it.</p><p>Also this is not a fix guardians thread. This is a response to observations on a specific ability that I am somewhat familiar with and regardless of the class that it was given to is broken in my oppinion and needs to be corrected. About a year ago they said they were going to do this before the fighter revamp and I believe the revamp and the insuing debate sidetracked this fix. </p><p>I also agree about the death save needing to be fixed and perhaps the paladin death save needs some work as well and I suggest threads specific to those abilities be started to discuss the merits and flaws of those abilities.</p>

[Thunndar316]

<p>Yay Kiara buries another thread</p>

[Yimway]

<p>Heh, remove the need for a shield in general since most of the time we can't even use one.</p>

[Terron]

<p>Apart from the unaturalness of swapping shields mid fight (which I don't do) I don't see any real need to remove the penalty from ToS.</p><p>The cost has never been an issue (and my guard is not rich - he has never had more than 50p</p><p>I have had a shield break mid-fight but I have an alternative hot keyed.</p><p>I usually fight with a shield.</p>