Guard Priority

[peterthepan3]

Guarding a healer or a rdps should only be temporary switches, I.e. they get pulled or position badly or are overrun with enemy dps. As soon as they are okay, you should guard a melee. If you get suicidal healers or rdps that make a habit of getting themselves into bad situations, let them die so that they learn.

If you are with bad melee dps/low levels, but have some offensive tanks in your group that you know to be good, guard them instead. A well played dps sm is 10x more useful than a bad melee dps.

Also, to reiterate on earlier point: don't feel obliged to swap guard to someone who is CONSTANTLY playing recklessly. These people never seem to learn from their mistakes, instead blaming their team, and as such, swapping guard to them will make them feel as if they are doing no wrong.

[Glorian]

It's as simple as this:
Find a WL, WH or Slayer, guard the **** out of him, be his shadow, follow him everywhere he goes (except if the slayer in mention is Barracudax, that guy just loves to go Rambo style ). But also have your eye on the back line, and if somebody starts nuking your healer/rdps, switch the guard and run towards the back line.

Basically yes.
If you are a SnB and want to kill stuff. Find a melee Dps and stick to him. He chooses the targets. You follow.

Most fun so far I had as the butt wiper of a White Lion. He selects the targets and kills them. You get near, try to get a KD or some buff attacks and find the next poor lad.

That is in group environment.

In dwarf warbands we tell the Slayers to stick to their IB. As IBs they sometimes seems more laid back and fall less likely to melee tunnel syndrome.

Also it helps if you clear the job of the two tanks in your party. One should stick to one Healer, the other be a floating guard.

That reduces confusion a lot in rvr. And you have one Healer that is protected all the time without a double guard that doesn't stack.

[peterthepan3]

Good advice re slayers following ib:P

[Glorian]

Too much Slayers out there who scream for guard and heals. Or stop screaming and switching class.

Stick to your tank and have 3500 health extra.

[Dalgrimar]

A mdps should never follow the tank for guard.
Tank has to follow the mdps as he picks the targets.

[nocturnalguest]

You guard whoever is getting focused.

/thread

This

[Penril]

Also, if you are a mdps pugging SCs, you should stay close to whoever guarded you. Yeah yeah, elite premades will tell you that the tank should always follow the mdps, but this DOES NOT happen when pugging. You might get guard, but chances are your tank will do his own thing, or (if he is not completely useless) swap it constantly. So pay attention to his position and pull back if he does so.

It is easier for a good player to learn how to play with bad tanks, than trying to teach a bad tank how to git gud.

[Jaycub]

Guarding in PUG scenarios and in a premade are totally different skillsets almost.

In a premade you have voice comms, proper group comps, and setup/strategy. So for instance in our 2-2-2 groups we used to run we had our most defensive tank guarding the slayer/chop, and then the other on mara/WL duty. Voice comms lets us instantly know when for instance the slayers tank is punted so the other tank can instantly switch. Even going the extra mile a really good tank player can tell if another tank is attempting to punt him and letting the other tank know might decrease the time it takes to switch by a second or 2. The other tank can also make sure he wont be inside a GCD when trying to switch guard.

Voice comms also means you can have plans for what do to when your healers are swamped (who is switching guard, and how thie DPS should act without guard etc...), when to get back and when your tanks are CCed and of course tanks can communicate with their gaurdee's when they are out of range or putting themselves in a bad position. Shot caller also means people aren't running aimlessly.


In a pug you are at the absolute mercy of RNG for your group comp, virtually no communication, and it tends to bring out the absolute worst habits in even good players.

The first thing you should do is look at groups and find the best MDPS you can, switch if you can and put guard on them as soon as you load in because good players are going to have unit frames that tells them when they have guard, having guard before they leave spawn is going to make them much more confident and play differently.

Second thing to do is look at your healing situation, how many healers do you have? You need to play completely differently when you have 1 or no healer than when you have the proper 2 in party. And of course make sure everyone is together before you push backlines, don't Rambo at fort when both your healers are still 10 seconds behind. And don't run into backlines when there is a guarded slayer and WL tearing ass on your healers.

But of course since you are guarding someone else you have to pray they are doing these things as well, if you are guarding some mara and he runs after some BW while your healers are swamped it's really a **** situation because you need to guard healers, cc the DPS on them, but the mara is just going to run into his death. PUG tanking really is all about triage in that manner.

Since MDPS is ****, and 100x more **** in pug play you are going to run into a lot of scenarios where you don't have MDPS to guard and that creates a weird dynamic where you have to choose to either lone wolf it in (while spamming your assist macro on RDPS don't be a noob and try to solo kill ****), or to play back with your RDPS/healer and help them survive via guard/CC but losing most of your lethal damage. Usually you have to do the later in a losing scenario, or a scenario where you are low on healing.

Lowbies also present a pretty big problem specifically when there is a good WE/WH on the other team. If your only healer is a lvl 33 shaman and you have a high RR WH on the other team just instagibbing him you need to just suck it up and play to keep that shaman alive and keep the WH cucked.

Other than lowbies you need to be able to recognize bad players, specifically MDPS players that aren't going to be worth guarding. This is based on who the are targeting (if you are really good you can quickly switch between all the DPS in sc and spam assist and see who is assisting each other and picking good targets), and how they are taking fights and positioning themselves. obviously if you are guarding some choppa who just make a B line backlines bumrush 100% of the time and dies while trying to kill some rdps who doesn't even have someone assisting with him you might as stop guarding him if there is someone else too. If he gets mad enough he will go PvE which is actually a pretty nice boon. If you are ever up when mieles is spamming for a guard in /5 join him and see how a mdps should play.

Outside of tanking it's really up to the DPS in the SC to assist each other, really the RDPS need to be slamming that MF assist button on MDPS, and RDPS when MDPS aren't in the ****.

tldr PUG tanking is probably the hardest thing to do properly because of the almost infinite variables you need to learn and take into account.

Spoiler:

Or you can just throw guard on a healer so you can say you are guarding something then run in DEEP and play tankpug point and click NB rotation 1v1 adventure

[shaggyboomboom]

Sorry. But i would not suggest anyone taking advice from you. You always rush in, guard is a skill you barely use, you always run of solo to try and hold back destro(no succes) healing you is something i stopped doing a long time ago.

THIS!

[Ugle]

Aight, everyone stop trolling. Thanks.

This. Lol