'Guardian's Sky Shield' needs a buff/tweak

(Maharic) #1

Sky Shield needs to straight up hard counter ‘artillery/airstrike’ spam.

Right now, you have to stand directly under the dome for it to actually protect the player/friendlies. If you stand anywhere near the edge of the protection dome, the splash damage from the artillery/airstrike will still kill you.

Ether increase the dome size or make it act more like a shield that once you’re inside it, just protects you, or increase the dome size.

I was also thinking that it would be awesome if you could turn on the Sky Shield on your back and run around with it for the active duration but also be able to throw it down.

The very minimum I would buff is how quickly the Sky Shield turns itself on after being thrown down and possibly increase the duration for 5 secs.

(Mustang) #2

Yea, would be nice if it just worked as expected.

(Meetrock) #3

Or maybe get better? Guardian’s shield is as good as it is, I’ve seen players stopping airstrikes from 3 to 4 skyhammers and arties perfectly, because they understand how to use it (Skyhammer’s airstrike has a line marker and arty shows a red dot where the airstrike will be, you probably miss those the most of the time as Guardian). The shield is powerful when it’s deployed 100%, even with its 0.65s deploy time, it can sometimes get destroyed during the airstrike because it was not fully deployed. And the idea behind having a sky shield and not really a “dome” is to force other players to look for shelter when they hear the airstrike coming, you can’t expect one player to protect everyone at 100% effort, that player deployed a sky shield, your job then is to actually go beneath it, and not on its sides (look up if you can’t tell you’re on the edge). However, if you still insist on having a full dome that covers all edges, I’d say make it a 1s ish deploy time and 20s cooldown.

(K1X455) #4

The activation time of Guardian’s Skyshield makes it ineffective against Arty’s Artillery barrage whereas Skyhammer’s airstrike can easily be countered because of the long delay before the strike happens.

(Your worst knifemare.) #5

Ever since the buff I’ve had no problems using the Skyshield against arty strikes.

(PariahDog) #6

Except I’ve put down a skyshield on reaction to seeing Arty’s doom dot.

(Press E) #7

Guardian’s shield definitely needs a buff, but turning it into a hard shield really isn’t necessary when you can just stand in the middle. Also projectiles that hit the shield don’t blow up, so yeah

Thing is, it needs a drastically decreased deploy time. Speeding up the throwing animation was a step in the right direction, but even as she is, she’s incredibly hard to counter arty with (who’s still one of the mercs who needs countering the most). You just have to hope the arty puts his marker right next to you, otherwise good luck throwing it somewhere useful. She needs to be able to counter mercs like stoker as well, who are currently being spammed everywhere.

On another note, I’d also like to see her drone given the ability to hover to the side out of the way of the EV, rather than just getting run over by it. Since the EV is usually what she’s defending, having it eat the drone if it gets too close seems kinda stupid. Especially since there are a lot of maps where the EV drives very close to walls, leaving very little room for the drone to pass. The drone shouldn’t be able to be destroyed by the EV, even if thrown directly on top of it.

As she is now, guardian does her job, but not very well at all. I feel like the devs wanted someone to help with explosive spam, but not make things too difficult for the arty and stoker mains even though they need it, so now instead we have her as a sort of half useful merc. She either needs to go all the way, or stay useless in competitive.
I’ve been playing guardian regularly since she was released, along with all of the mercs she counters. She’s fun, but she’s really just not practical at the moment. She needs a buff. Not only would that help her, but it would also help lessen the stoker/arty meta

So ultimately what I’d like to see from her:

  • Deploy time drastically reduced, perhaps at the cost of AoE, since that doesn’t matter as much when you can put it anywhere more quickly.
  • Drone HP reduced back to its amount at release, cover should still be a part of it
  • Up time increased, so that she can become a viable counter against nader/fragger/fletcher/etc
  • The ability for the EV to push the drone to the side, rather than just run over it and blow it up
  • Cooldown increased so that projectile mercs can still play around her
  • The drone’s deploy path smoothed out. It should act like a sticky grenade really, none of this dropping it behind an ammo station and have it bug out of cover into the open
(HadronZodiac) #8

Id like if it did that, and even hovered in the direction the ev is moving to actually keep defending the ev, instead of just stop one arty strike and then be rendered useless

(Press E) #9

Idk, I feel that if it moved with the EV it might end up a bit OP, especially if the duration was increased as I suggested, which is why I figured getting pushed to the side might be better. The range is still pretty large too, so it’s not really the end of the world

(DarkangelUK) #10

I find the EV stages a bit of a meat grinder for defense, attackers must flock to the EV to either escort or fix it which makes them easy pickings, especially when all defense need to do is stand back and hammer it with air attacks. I’d be happy if the AARG moved with it just to make the EV stages pass a bit quicker and get everyone back to shooting instead of ability spamming.

(HadronZodiac) #11

Thats true, but realistically unless you have a kira, and the attacking team has any common sense, just flushing the ev with nukes wont do much, since its a rather short time for an engi to repair the ev

(Your worst knifemare.) #12

This can work.

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(K1X455) #13

why not just make it stick to the EV?

(HadronZodiac) #14

my question is how u even got it in there

yeye that would be cool too

(Press E) #15

Probably because it would be more difficult to program. SD has had a lot of trouble with the EV and things like stickies or the snitch after all

(Mr.Cuddlesworth) #16

Would be nice if the dome very slowly healed you as well.

(Press E) #17

I don’t think it really has to with a ranged revive ability. Sparks can pretty much get away with not healing any teammates so long as she’s on the point with her revives.

Though I’d definitely like to see some improvements to guardian’s revive to justify her lack of healing

(Jigstraw) #18

Am I the only one that feels like guardian is already in a fairly strong place? Her hitbox size, max HP, movement speed, and weapon options are easily the strongest combination in the entire game. I think people just need to accept that she’s not a solo-medic, and shouldn’t be “balanced” to the point that she’s able to function as a solo-medic. She’s really more of a DPS-support hybrid, and that being the case, she’s perfectly fine (if not a bit overtuned) as-is.

I also still think the hurtsall could do with a proper nerf. It’s like the hochfir of assault rifles, but with better DPS and longer damage falloff range. It just doesn’t perform poorly in any situation. I think my major gripe with it is that it still inflicts aimpunch at ranges where aimpunch is actually noticeable, due to its damage falloff range, even with the nerf to aimpunch a few updates ago. I think it would be perfectly fine if they just reduced its range to somewhere between SMGs and ARs. There’s no reason the hurtsall should have better range than the M4A1 with its otherwise SMG-like function, and yet it does.

(Your worst knifemare.) #19

Hard work, determination, and a shared hatred between the shield and the EV for Arty.

(Press E) #20

She’s not a bad merc no, but in a competitive situation it’s still usually better to pick someone else over her. When you’re going 5v5 or whatever, sometimes it can be better to pick a full medic like sawbonez or a full assault like fragger, rather than having a jack of all trades merc. She’s just not really good enough at what she does to justify her over other mercs. She can counter arty and skyhammer, but also can’t heal, has her revive on cooldown, has bugs on her revive too, and has no assault ability