[Poruku]

Bodyguard is really good, guys. I totally did not lose to bodyguard recently, so I'm emotionally stable I swear.

Seriously, that thing has slowly crept up into the PvP meta and now any tanky boy worth their weight in salt is rocking it. Now that you can have boulder heavy armors as well, combined with some varied DR, you basically enter the boss phase when they get low.

Hits of 200 can easily get reduced to below 50 damage, the only way to truly get through that stuff is by using multihits, which is something not everyone has access to. Damage over time effects are also good against it, but again, only a select few.

Now add in other factors that make it difficult to finish the fight such as last chance, phenex revive, the life saving charm, etc, and you're looking at a monster in red hp. Add in avalon and other healing, and it's going to be nigh impossible to ever kill this guy.

I would know, I play a phenex with pacifist boon who slaps on bodyguard (with 170 SR and 100 CE). I think most builds in this game could basically never kill this guy if he's played defensively. 

Anyway, point is, it's good. I think it only needs a small nerf to be balanced again though. There's other good armors out there, and it's competing with them, only recently resurfacing in the meta. I think a solid nerf would be to simply reduce the DR from 50% to 35-40%. Just something to make these people still take some damage.

[Shujin]

bro, just stab them with Divine Eyes. (yes this is a joke)

[Autumn]

If any balance change were to occur, it'd be this one, Body Guard is oppressively powerful ever since the GR2 update that changed it's DR to apply before armor values do, and while that did open up unprotectables to solving the issue, I think it can be rather silly that the way around the torso slot is I have to find the skills that do lower damage or multihitting first, for example it is a very large damage boost to use ki awoken in order to make ki blast hit 3 times, as it is far less likely to hit body guard threshold that way.

You also get punished for building too much single hit damage, if you somehow crack out your hirazuki to 400-500 damage, it's going to do more or less the same amount of damage as a Hirazuki at 250 damage vs a Body Guard user.

Something does need to change about this torso, I think one of the most egregious things is how well it bolsters tanks even regardless of their defensive spread, because it reduces pre-mitigated damage, further improving their already staggeringly high health pools with just 1 torso slot.

Nearly no other torso slot in the game has this amount of impact.

[Miller]

Body Guard needs a pretty hefty hit yeah, it should be 30~35% DR considering how it applies or be reworked into an effect that can be played around. It's a no brainer and outclasses even Akmedis as a whole even while that torso's niche is working which is pretty absurd despite the BW cost.

Armor as a whole should probably be adjusted considering how absurdly powerful it is right now too; but this isn't the thread for that. (Imagine if we had Zerans on Korvara)

[Kameron8]

Heavy Armors options:

- Functional immunity to physical damage at low(ish) health.
- Weapon specific crit-hate with free health and FP.
- Raw health.

Unarmored options:

- One wispy boi

(or you can run boring stuff like sarasha, caster gis or comc I guess)

Jokes aside, half of this issue is just the way the armor formula works and the amount of physical %DR that exists where magical does not.  I've lost track of how much stuff comes before armor at this point (all of it besides like wraithguard?), but it's hardly a surprise that numbers go from hundreds to zero when they get hit by two 50% DRs, an occasional 20% and 15% DR, and a parry before cutting out flat damage.

I'm not convinced chopping up Bodyguard will really fix anything besides the upper bound of armor stacking, but I guess that's not a bad thing in the short term.  Realistically though, I think at some point we should really stop and ask ourselves if we've got too many sources of %DR available to stack.





I would also never pass up an opportunity to post this Bodyguard hood classic:

Premier of Geladyne attacks Audacious Outsider with Kala's Promise!
Ring of Pearls! The ring of pearls gets in the way!
Critical Hit! Audacious Outsider takes 151 Pierce physical damage.

Premier of Geladyne attacks Soldier with Kala's Promise!
Critical Hit! Soldier takes 9 Pierce physical damage.

[Snake]

Heavy Armors need a more solid drawback of some sort, they're way too reliable and Body Guard has been by far the most surefire to save your life in pickle situations. 'Not being able to dodge' is not a drawback but a condition for their defensive options to work. Reducing the amount of Magic Armor they can get also does not work to fix the balance. The problem is how much Physical Damage they can chip, and how very little ways we have, as physical damage users, to get through them.

Salamander Sword with Rampaging is not as freely accessible in Korvara as it is in mainland, after all.

I share the same sentiments as Kam, given for dodging, you can't even choose to 'not use Unarmored Torso' as Base Evade is paramound to your overall effectiveness, which in the end excludes the use of most torsos but a selected few who can hit at the very least 25 Base Evade when fully polished, so 60 Scaled CEL translates to 150 Base Evade.

This (and tanking in general)? Slap a Boulder, Leviathan or Boneheart, and go BK for that extra weight reduction, parry and damage reductions, then enjoy godmodding against physical damage.

But since the OP is about Body Guard. Change the effect to let you endure death until your next round after you have been brought to or below 1 HP.

Quickest fix.

[Poruku]

I do think heavy armors are really good. The drawback is obvious though: battle weight. It means you need to be a strength character to effectively use them. Still, it means any strength-based character can utilize heavy armors and be very tanky as a result. It's a fairly low investment in the end, compared to an evasion setup. Then you have light armor/unarmored users that aren't strength based but don't use evasion either, which can be decent, but their tankiness is always gonna pale in comparison to heavy armor. Armor value is really valuable, and heavy armor makes it easy to get. It's especially strong when combined with damage resistance.

But honestly I don't think heavy armors as a whole are a huge balance issue, I just think evade suffers. And bodyguard itself is the actual problem here. If bodyguard wasn't so egregious, I wouldn't have an issue with tanks. Though maybe buffing unarmored and light torsos would be nice. A lot of it is simply the fact that you get that +9 armor upgrade at the blacksmith btw, versus 3 and 5 for unarmored and light. If it was 7 it would be more balanced imo.

[Miller]

Yeah the issue was never with heavy armor, the crux of the issue is how armor was adjusted to be after everything when DEF/RES was changed to be 0.9 per point instead of 1 per point which made people flock to bonus DRs from equipment and classes even more so than ever. As far as I'm aware, armor is after every single DR that is commonly used besides maybe jarmor. Even if you lowered the amount of armor heavy-armor itself can offer, you would still be capable of reaching 30-40 armor which is already enough to nullify hits up to 150 damage with 72% DR; a number that's achievable with wraithguard + indomitable and some stat investment (45%~50% DEF. A 50% DR would make it possible to nullify hits of up to 300 damage. (Like the topic of this thread)

Body Guard is one of the issues but not the entire picture as Kameron pointed out; we would still be seeing a ridiculous level of damage reduction even if it got nerfed to be a lower value. Even if you lower it to say, 30% DR? All it means is that you can nullify hits up to 210-230 damage instead of 300 when you hit Body Guard HP due to how armor works.

Armor and Body Guard both need to be adjusted to be way less potent than it is currently. IMO, it should apply after critical damage or generic damage amps are calculated.

[WaifuApple]

Body guard definitely needs the nerf. I don't, however, want to see armor take a hit without any course for return for tanks. If armor is hit or swapped in the calculation at all, defense itself needs to be given a kick back up. The nerf to the stat itself was undeserved.

But this is not about that, just bodyguard.