Questions about Guard interaction

[Dezibagel]

Hello!

So last night, I got into quite a silly encounter that got me questioning how Guard mitigation interacts.

Pictured below: It was me, 2h Blackguard (BG), a Slayer (SL) a Witch Elf (WE, my guard) and a healing Runepriest (RP) in a conga line back to front in that order, with the WE trying to chase the RP, the SL hitting the WE in the back and me hitting the SL in the back trying to disable/snare him off my guard, to no avail since the WE was permaslowed as well. This went on for quite a few seconds until the WE inevitably died.



Now: What I found strange was that during this chase I took a ton of what I experienced as unmitigable guard damage, to the point where I almost died as well (down to ~25% wounds, which would roughly align with the pure wounds diff between me and the WE (I had low wounds, but very high parry)), until the WE died at which point they went for me and I suddenly had no problem tanking the SL, regen:ing back until a third party arrived and broke the stalemate.

Note: I know for a fact that this has nothing to do with some Rampage interaction since I had it shattered.

Now my guess/question from all of this is: Is the ability to avoid (Block/Parry/whatev) guard damage based on the facing of the guardee rather than the tank? Seems rather dissuading in that case that you can't mitigate incoming guard damage with proper facing the way you can incoming direct damage, and have to rely on your guardee facing the incoming attacks.

More general questions onto that:

How the * does Guard damage even work nowadays? All the resources I've found seem severely outdated and don't correspond to observations. It seems that Parry no longer works for all guard damage and is instead based on whatever the incoming damage type is (which I guess makes sense, but still makes me sad as 2h obv. since investing in any other defence is futile with strikethrough, available gear, and stat dependency). Is this correct? No, it is not apparently How does it work with toughness/resistances/armor? Is it the tank's or the guardee's being calculated, or some mix of the two? Crits - how do they work, is it you or the guardee?

Sorry if I put this in the wrong board

[Gravord]

Based on description of the events given by you:
- Slayer was hitting WE free in the back, ignoring her parry defence check, producing a lot of clean dmg
- Witch elf have light armor and its vulnerable to physical dmg (at average light armor have 1/3 of physical mitigation of heavy armor)
- Guard dmg you receive is not being debuffed by your armor/resist, that mitigation check happens on the original target of dmg
- Its highly possible WE you were guarding is not familiar with Futile Strikes and was taking frequent crits, hitting you for half of dmg received
- If you shattered Rampage your dmg taken from guard would be affect by your defence checks of Parry, perhaps you were really unlucky with those
- Your defence check is not related to position of the person you are guarding
- After slayer turn on you dmg taken dropped rapidly because your stats wereused to mitigate it

For general how guard works - Block always work first if you have a shield. If block wasnt lucky enough or you dont own a shield, all guard dmg is based on parry check. Chance to be crit, toughness, resist and armor only work when you are the target of the attack, they have no effect on guard dmg, as person you guard uses his stats for those checks and as guardee you are hit by half of final dmg after all those calculations take place. For simplicity you can think of guard dmg as morale dmg, but one your block and parry work against.

[Nameless]

Imo he imply that parry on guard damage is bugged somehow and works only if facing the damage dealer or something

[nocturnalguest]

I dont know how it performs exactly now as i havent tested, but guard dmg was always frontal physical dmg, it was like that on live, it was like that before ability rework patch and should stay same.
Your case is most likely a biggest promo to use detaunt i believe. Detaunt interacts with guard in a following simple way - it works instead of guard, so if WE would detaunt SL you would stop receiving guard dmg and WE would only receive 50% of what SL was attacking it with. Detaunt lessens the pressure DPS puts into its guard so in alot of situations it should be used even if you are guarded. Some may lobby jokes about detaunt being a wasted GCD you could use to apply dmg but keep in mind that it all depends on how competent your healers are and if they can deal with big pressure.
You dont share info about your avoidance stats (high parry you mention is what exact value) but if they are rather low its no wonder you drop to guard dmg, also SL could use Numbling Strike on you and reduce both your parry/block for 50%, it hurts. If you'd parse dmg logs on your orvr sessions you would know that guard dmg is actually toptier killer for a tank.

[Dezibagel]

Hey, and thanks for the extensive replies!

For numbers: In combat with weapon proc (25% on defence, almost always up, you know then one) and full Hate I have a raw/displayed Parry rating of 92% (new patch WS go brr), but that's the perfect world so assume slightly lower.

@Gravod

- Guard dmg you receive is not being debuffed by your armor/resist, that mitigation check happens on the original target of dmg
- Its highly possible WE you were guarding is not familiar with Futile Strikes and was taking frequent crits, hitting you for half of dmg received
"Last paragraph"

Tyvm for the clarifications. And yes, I have no doubt that WE wasn't rocking much defence.

- Slayer was hitting WE free in the back, ignoring her parry defence check, producing a lot of clean dmg
- Witch elf have light armor and its vulnerable to physical dmg (at average light armor have 1/3 of physical mitigation of heavy armor)

Yes, I have no doubt the WE was taking an absurd amount of raw damage. Still, if my avoidance was even close to being in full swing then not much of that should have translated to me and the WE should have died long before I took much damage no?

- If you shattered Rampage your dmg taken from guard would be affect by your defence checks of Parry, perhaps you were really unlucky with those

That's the thing, this went on for a bit so the amount of bad luck seems highly improbable considering the numbers above. Which is why I'm thinking there must've been something else going on here, hence the questions above. How would something like Inevitable Doom interact here? "Proc" dmg from Reckless Gamble? Something else?

- Your defence check is not related to position of the person you are guarding

Thank you. Sorry for being pedantic, but I'm assuming this means it's not related to the relative positions and facing tank<-->guardee<-->attacker then? But is it related to my own position/facing relative to the attacker in any way then? In this case I'm facing both the attacker and the guardee so if I'm interpreting correctly my avoidance should be in effect here no?

---

Some follow up questions:

- Is Guard avoidance affected by strikethrough in any way and in that case how?
- @nocturnalguest mentioned Numbing Strike, but if (somehow, shouldn't be the case here) used on the WE that shouldn't affect my guard no? (I.e if the attacker applies some extra strikethrough on the guardee (ex. Pulverize) does that affect the tank?)

And yes, as a tank I'll join in on the "please Detaunt" train, but tbf saving it for eventual punts is good play to me.

Imo he imply that parry on guard damage is bugged somehow and works only if facing the damage dealer or something

I'm not implying a bug, I'm just asking how it should and does work. If there's something wrong here then I wouldn't know since I have no idea how it's supposed to be, even more so with the recent big changes.

[tazdingo]

that is weird, guard damage never cares about the direction anyone involved is facing. maybe spine crusher has some inherent strikethrough that's not listed in the tooltip? like it technically cannot be blocked/parried but there's no point listing that as you have to hit the target in the back anyway

strikethrough is applied to the guard too, so if your guardee is being hit with "cannot be defended against" attacks like cleave you as the guard cannot block or parry those either. so if spine crusher has a hidden "cannot be defended against" that might explain this

[Dezibagel]

More anectodes/observations/questions:

1. Paid attention to it in WB play, and standing behind my guard in a ranged skirmish, not taking any direct fire or aoe, I'm taking quite a few dmg ticks and getting occasional "disrupt" messages, with barely any "parry". Is it DoT effects? AoE? How do they interact with Guard?

2. Undefendable Cleave? Care to elaborate @tazdingo?

I'm sorry for the poor reporting, computer is not good enough to record and haven't tested properly yet. I'll try to get that together.

strikethrough is applied to the guard too

Cool, good to know!

[tazdingo]

abilities such as chosen's cleave or any attack made under rampage that cannot normally be blocked/parried also cannot be blocked/parried if someone you're guarding is the target. so say for instance you were guarding someone that a chosen hit with cleave, you would be hit by the guard damage 100% of the time, you wouldn't roll block/parry against it

my thinking here is that maybe spine crusher works the same way without explicitly saying that it's undefendable in the tooltip (because why bother mentioning that an attack that can only hit someone in the back can't be blocked) and as this would be the ability a slayer would spam in the scenario you outlined, this is why you didn't parry anything

[Dezibagel]

Ah, yeah sorry man, reading comprehension 2/10. I read that as cleave effect having some sort of undefendable tag when you were talking about the Chosen skill in particular.

Yeah, might be. I'm trying to figure out what's going on since I feel like more of a drain on healers than my stats indicate that I should be based on how i think things work.

[nocturnalguest]

Grab someone (would need 2 more) to test it out in Garden. If position matters or not its pretty easy to figure. It should not, guard dmg was always considered as front hit. You describe quite suspicious thing. If i happen to have some spare time ill check it out too.
Numbling on WE shouldnt matter in terms of you parry more or less guard hits, yes. But numbling on you definitely means it.

Im not sure about strikethru, believe its a false claim. Undefendable attacks were undefendable for guard dmg as well here in RoR, however it wasnt the case for live but it has nothing to do with strikethru, iirc before ability rework attacks that cant be defended had unique additional tag (rampage and undefendable attacks bypassing morale avoidance etc).

I did notice myself that 2h tanks kinda feels like slightly squishier after patch with stats change. But i dont run 90%+ parry (tbf at around 60-70+% previously it felt almost like being immune to guard dmg in small scale) on any of them or stack WS. So not sure on this, could be just my feelings or rustiness or just encounters ive been or bad heals.