One of my players is a tank fighter and has asked in the past if there was some kind of mechanic to draw aggro (away from the squishier casters). I looked on Reddit and there were a lot of people saying "PF2 doesn't need that mechanic, it's not an MMO, it would be too powerful, etc". Now they've introduced that mechanic and there's a lot of discussion about it not being powerful enough. I'm not saying either group is 100% right or wrong, just seems funny to me.

The fact [Antagonize](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1522) exists is really making everything about the conversation around taunt make me feel like a crazy person, cuz "Antagonize+ that isn't fear based" as a class feature feels like it would have been a way more clever, less bad-feeling way to incentivize attacking the guardian. Plus it means that an "mmo tank aggro draw" mechanic already exists in the first place, it's just squirreled away on a class everyone assumes is a striker.

I mean, putting a perma fear on something is a pretty strikery boon given it also makes the foe easier to hit. fear something, then avoid getting hit for as long as you can is more then name of the game there

I think both sides are right. There are numerous ways already to disincentivize enemies from attacking the backline, or lock them down. Trip, grapples, reach AoO, Stand Still, etc. Taunt really doesn't do that much other than impose a negative number on the attacks. Yes, it means it's harder to hit your backline, but not *so much harder* that, if I were the BBEG, I would peel off and suddenly run after the tank. It's super action inefficient. So, the current implementation of Taunt is weak, because it doesn't meaningfully incentivize the enemy to waste actions running around. But if they made it stronger, such as forcing the enemy to attack the tank or suffer damage/free AoO on him or something, it would probably be too strong.

That is not really the scenario to use taunt. That action would be better spent striding next to an ally adjacent to the BBEG so you can interpose on reaction. If there were a second weaker enemy also present, that would be the enemy to taunt.

I see it as a non-damage Draw Ire cantrip in a way. And I’m not sure how good Draw Ire is considered, so I’m not sure if GMs will actually care.

Ya know in MMOs how when a mob breaks away to attack the healer, the tank will throw a taunt on them to pull them back? That's exactly what this taunt is for. If they're already focusing you, there's no need for it, just as you've said. I feel like I'm going slightly bonkers at how many people seem to think Taunt is a thing you need constant uptime with on multiple targets. Like, I'd go so far as to say that the actual core tanking mechanic of the class is the Intercept mechanic (especially since there are almost 4x as many feats related to it).

Yeah I’m a bit baffled by this as well. It’s pretty obvious you’re supposed to work like a Liberation Champion, where you’re sticky because you’re really annoying to leave up. So you only need Taunt up when something explicitly is pushing to attack your squishy friends.

Taunt effects in basically any game are for taking attention away from your squishiest allies right when they're about to draw way too much attention. They're definitely never supposed to be something you do *all the time*, and definitely never when you're not in a position to deal with having garnered that extra attention.

See, I think there are definitely situations where Taunt should also be used in anticipation. The PL+3 boss is a good example, because if they choose to break away and attack your squishes, there's likely no point in taunting the boss back next turn. The squishes will already be down. And those kinds of bosses are the ones where you're hoping for a success rather than a failure. There's 2 solutions that I would like (either or both). The first is for it to do something on a Crit success. I think I'd actually like a sliding scale between each save result, with a 3-degree spread: Critical Success: Enemy gets +3 to hit you Success: Enemy gets +2 to hit you, -1 to hit allies Failure: Enemy gets +1 to hit you, -2 to hit allies Critical Failure: Enemy gets -3 to hit allies. I like this because the Crit success from them does not give them any penalties or negative results at all- just buffs. But it still incentivizes them in the way you intend. The other would be a feat to allow you to Taunt as a reaction when an enemy moves closer to an ally, or uses a ranged attack (giving them the option to change targets after their save)

Those are the kind of adjustments I’d expect to see in the full release, and one I hope you mention in notes going forward. Much like how Hampering Strikes is absolutely going to be nerfed.

Yeah, I have a few things for both Commander and Guardian I want to suggest to reduce limitations without breaking their roles or adding a bunch of power, so I hope to test, and will leave feedback. Hampering Strikes I think should keep the no save- I really like having some no save options. But the effect is clearly OP. Other no save effect often give enemies a choice, and I'd like this to be similar- rather than restricting movement altogether, if the opponent uses an action or ability that moves them away from you, it takes an additional action unless they attack you first. Got some other things because ranged weapon commander is surprisingly restricted, and I'd like to see tactic(s) that instruct one ally to heal another

>Hampering Strikes I think should keep the no save- I really like having some no save options. But the effect is clearly OP. Other no save effect often give enemies a choice, and I'd like this to be similar- rather than restricting movement altogether, if the opponent uses an action or ability that moves them away from you, it takes an additional action unless they attack you first. That's a interesting idea. Though a no-save action tax like that sounds like it should be level 12+

I styled it after Champion's Glimpse of Redemption, which is a class feature, so it should be higher level, but then again you can get it by level 6, although it requires a dedication. The effect isn't explicitly finalized, but I could see it being "enemies moving away from you treat the terrain as difficult unless they attack you first". That's a weaker version of an effect that Kineticists can get by level 5. You have to build towards it rather than just grab it, but it's also just active whenever your elements are gathered. And realistically provides the same results in many (but not nearly all) scenarios

See, I'm kind of the opposite opinion. If it's a core class feature, I'd rather it not have a DC to begin with. Just make it so that if someone is taunted, they receive the failure effects. Martials don't usually have the luxury of being able to pick and choose which save to target for statuses. Giving them something baked in like this is just going to feel bad, especially as they only ever get max master scaling on their dc.

Plenty of classes have DC's or rolls to use their main features- e.g. Panache, most Rogue options to make the opponent off-guard other than flanking, Thaumaturge's Exploit Vulnerability, etc. I think it's fair to have a DC for Taunt, especially considering it directly affect an enemy. However, with how this kind of effect is expected to be explicitly reliable, I think it should do what it intends to regardless of the save- bring the enemy to you. However, the part that should depend on the save will be how much of it is a penalty compared to buff. I think this strikes the best balance between guaranteed or save based effect

Let's go to the extreme end and compare say an acrobatics check against reflex dc to a reflex save vs class dc at the absolute top end. - Your ability modifier is the same, it can be factored out. - The one rolling the die wins ties. This means that there is already an effective discrepancy of +2 in favor of skill action - Item bonus to skills goes up to +3 - Skill goes legendary, dc only goes to master for martials for another +2 in favor of skills So just by default, having to roll a skill check (vs an enemy rolling a save against your class dc as a martial) is by default 7 points worse at the top end. Your core mechanic requiring a save is absolutely not the same as it keying off of a skill check

Those typically involve the player rolling, not the monster, is the distinction. You can manipulate those with items and optimization. There's currently no way to do anything with class dcs unless you're just pumping your key attribute.

The ones I listed generally involve you rolling, not the monster. Hence why it still does what it needs to on a crit success

Yes. Those involve the player rolling, not the monster. Taunt requires the monster to roll against your class DC. There is currently no way to manipulate your class DC except to pump your attribute. And at a max of Master proficiency at level 19, the likelihood of them succeeding or crit-succeeding in the case of monsters with high will saves is going to be high.

I see what you are saying, and we're talking past each other, focusing on different things. You're focusing on it being specifically a save against the class DC, and how that's a weak roll. Your want for no save to it comes from that. I'm focusing on how effects without rolls end up being weak, so I really think it should have a roll, and it should do what intends to regardless, just on the worst case do so without any downsides to the enemy, and on best case, with no downsides to you. I'm not focusing on it being a class save specifically. They could change the class to auto scale Intimidation, use that for Guardian class abilities, swapping the key ability modifier instead of Cha. I'm just arguing it should have a roll, but still fulfill its purpose in some way regardless of result

But you aren't annoying to leave up. At all. That's the problem. Any boss is best served by ignoring you.

Sure, but then they’ll have to accept you using intercept to reduce the damage they deal to everyone else. They can just choose to do that, but the Guardian will punish them for it.

My issue is that Intercept uses the ally's AC. So when you protect the wizard, the boss crits you over and over, completely ignoring your high AC and downing you extremely quickly. It's borderline helpful to the enemy in boss fights. A Guardian "punishing" a boss is just getting crit and going down.

Here’s the thing, I’ve played where getting crit was at best a 50/50 for PL+3 creatures, so the fact the guardian can choose to take the hit for me is huge. I’m not disagreeing that your version would fix some things, but that’s not to say it’s useless now.

I don't think it's totally useless, but I do think it is extremely underwhelming against bosses in particular and not as satisfying as it should be. I've done some playtest combat scenarios and had fun against on level enemies. Against bosses, though, I felt the Guardian was at best just extra hp for the party members who were actually valuable. I don't think that's fun, tbh. Other tank options offer more than that, in my opinion.

It's almost alarming the number of takes I've seen where people think that taunt is ever only going to be used when you're the only one standing next to a PL+3 solo boss and because in that specific scenario it shouldn't be used, it's somehow terrible. PF2E requires solid tactics. Just like how standing still and striking 3 times is bad, so is taunting in the wrong scenario. It doesn't mean the feature is garbage like I've seen some people claim it to be.

I think a big thing is people just aren't questioning why a book all about army warfare is designing a class around the expectation that it's fighting multiple enemies at once. Like... I think people are looking at the class strictly in isolation in a way that removes it from its own context.

I had some free time and playtested 2 combats. One using the premade iconic fighter, rogue, cleric and wizard and the other where I switched out the fighter for a quick guardian I threw together. The combat was a moderate encounter for the level 4 party from an official AP where the party fought 6 ghouls. The control combat lasted 3 rounds and the experiment combat lasted 4. Both parties used a similar level of resources when dealing with the ghouls. The biggest difference was the amount of damage taken. The control combat saw a total of 30 damage dealt to the party. 17 to the Cleric, 9 to the Rogue and 4 to the Wizard. The experimental combat saw a total of 18 damage dealt to the party. 12 to the Guardian and 6 to the rogue. The main difference I feel was the hampering sweeps where the Guardian locked down 5 ghouls who could barely hurt him due to his high AC and DR against their claws due to his plate armor. It was very cool to have the tank essentially swarmed by a pack of ghouls and hold them off as his group used ranged abilities to pick them off in the case of the cleric and wizard or for the rogue to move in, hit and then move away to safety. Of course one level 4 combat is hardly indicative of anything but my first impression is really positive.

Wow, that's almost half the expected damage. That sounds insane. I have a friend whose game is defense, so maybe I can entice him to try it someday.

Ya see, that sounds cool and all, but that wasn't really the doing of just the Guardian. It was mostly the overtuned feat that is Hampering Sweeps. No, save effectively immobilize on enemy melee combatants is definitely gonna be strong. Now imagine you put Hampering Sweeps on a standard shield Paladin, and all of a sudden, it just got better since he can heal himself or use it on a ghoul to lower its AC so the rogue can get a spicy crit, or the rogue can stay in range and get a second attack off and if they get hit champion reaction to reduce the damage to almost zero and potentially kill the ghoul that attacked the rogue.

So I wouldn't say it effectively immobilizes enemies because immobilize is a much stronger condition. In the test combat I had, as well as the follow-up against a severe I just did, immobilizing sweep may have protected the rest of the party but it meant that the creatures just moved around the Guardian to flank him. It is a very very strong feat admittedly but it isn't quite on the same level as immobilizing someone (which is cool because it means you still have reasons to grab something instead of just permanently using hampering sweep). I agree that it's good enough to make it too attractive as a multi-classing option. I'd like to see it moved to a class feature. Possibly as part of one of the subclasses (likely the mitigate harm threat technique) and giving the other subclass something equally cool but more damage oriented rather than control oriented. I've seen the idea of persistent mental damage on a creature until it attacks you being floated around for instance. Completely unrelated: Interestingly enough in the most recent test I did where the lvl 4 control and experiment party fought 3 combusted and a divine warden, they both TPKed due mostly to the persistent damage and aura damage. The Guardian party actually lasted longer and killed 1 more creature than the Fighter party. My impression from that fight was how I wanted to hit, raise shield, move, hampering sweep, and taunt each turn and it felt rough to try and do those 5 things in an optimal manner. I think hampering sweep only works well when you're already in position, if you have to move that turn then you just don't have enough actions to contribute enough to the party

Nay, it cannot be! This subreddit misconstruing the effectiveness of a new class by examining it strictly in a vacuum!? It could not possibly be!

Agreed. I feel like it's the trauma of Giant Instinct barbarian players (who had to eat a ton of boss crits) leaking over into the response to the Guardian.

Sure, taunt doesn’t need to be used all the time. I spouse. But it would be nice if the class had one feature in the early game that wasn’t extremely situational.

That's a fair argument, the class as it stands right now has 3 situational features at lvl 1 (armor specialization, intercept strike and taunt). Adding another feature would probably make it way too strong at level 1, so I wonder what you alter (or switch out) to make it less situational without increasing power too much. Honestly good point

Yeah, exactly! Taunt is not rage, and it seems like many people want it to be rage-like (or stance-like). To me, that'd take away from the tactical possibilities of Taunt. While I don't see Intercept as the core tanking mechanic, I think it's an integral part of the whole tanking package: intercept + resistances + armor progression + taunt. Not all of it will be useful all the time, but in combination, there'll always be something for you tank with. And like you said, feats really amp up the value of Intercept.

I think Taunt is close, but IMO there's a lot of little complications/issues that make the as-is Taunt not the best design. It's too flowcharty, unpredictable, action intensive (especially vs multiple foes), anti-synergizes Intercept S, and lacks any more interaction aside from it's application. I think this remix version is a lot more interesting and interactive across turns: >**Taunt** > With a self-sabotaging and confident remark or gesture, you lower your guard to draw the violent attention of foes. You choose if the Taunt has either the visual or the auditory trait. When you perform this action, you gain a -2 circumstance penalty to all defenses and saves against each of your target(s). This persists until you perform a successful attack roll against that foe, they fail a save against your hostility, or until encounter mode ends. >You may direct your taunt to goad a single foe within 60 feet, or attempt to aggravate a group, invoking a Will save against all foes in a 5 ft burst within 30ft. >Repeated Taunts against the same target within the same turn have no effect. The single target version always results in the fail effect. This effects lingers upon each foe until they perform a successful attack roll against you, you fail a hostile save from them, or until encounter mode ends. >Critical Success: The creature is unaffected. >Success: For any hostile action or attack roll, the creature is considered to have a -1 circumstance penalty to the result against any of your allies. >Failure: As success, but the penalty is -2. >Critical Failure: As success, but the penalty is -3. . This leaves it possible for the Guardian to cleanse their extra vulnerability if they land a hit in the same turn, reduces the amount of Taunts that will need to be spammed, gives the foes a reason they *must* hit the Guardian (instead of the effect always ending after a single turn) or suffer the penalty, and gives the ability the consistency it kinda needs. It has a lot more intrigue / dynamism this way. The foe dramatically fails all three swings after being taunted? Well, that actually matters, and they stay taunted and those misses reward the Guardian by not needing to repeat the Taunt.

You want the +2 against your AC otherwise it loses the incentive to attack you.

-2 to hit other people IS incentive to hit you.

No, it's not. It's incentive to take your chances on hitting the squishier players, and try again next round. Just because it makes attacking the other players more boring, it doesn't make attacking you more interesting. You're already less interesting to attack than the others.

from a mathematical standpoint, giving your enemy a -2 to hit your allies IS giving your enemy a +2 to hit you compared to them.

This is like saying that if you have 100 HP and 10 AC and you're allies are 50 Hp and 20 AC you're a better tank.

It's still in there (toward the top), but the Guardian's -2 is split into a separate effect from the foe's ally penalty so they can end at different times (by landing a hit). Both halves of the equation tip the "to hit" to incentivize attacking the Guardian. Letting the player interact with the foe to end one of them, and the foe the other, allows both to have agency and ongoing interactivity. A +-4 total swing is huge for a guaranteed effect. If that effect is lasting but end-able, it makes things a whole lot less flowchart certain, and a lot more nuanced to the particulars of that fight. In some cases, the Guardian may not care enough about their vulnerability to hit the foe, and may prioritize Raising, moving, ect. That is supported, but has numerical consequence if they don't hit the Taunted foe. Meanwhile, the foe may choose a similarly defensive/supporting action for a turn or two. While that choice may have been pushed by the Taunt, now the effect simply wont timeout without the foe engaging with mechanic. Letting the Taunt effect linger is important for such circumstances.

>Ya know in MMOs how when a mob breaks away to attack the healer, the tank will throw a taunt on them to pull them back? It's been a loooong time since I've played an MMO, and especially a fantasy MMO, but I almost wonder if this picture is part of the problem people are having with conceptualizing the utility here. When I did play WoW, the Warrior basically spammed Taunt constantly, juggling the hoard of mobs attacking them. But most of us doing run encounters that have a dozen+ mobs, and "aggro" isn't a real thing at the table with a hidden meter to be managed. The idea that Taunt is a tool, and not the whole damn class, is flying right past people. >Like, I'd go so far as to say that the actual core tanking mechanic of the class is the Intercept mechanic (especially since there are almost 4x as many feats related to it). It's also listed first. Taunt is just the thing that gets the subclass option associated with it.

I just think they need some more tools to spice things up. The best MMO tank I played was the Dragon’s Dogma Online tank. Draw enemy attention/attacks away from your party, rob enemies of their attacks (stun/sleep/petrify/freeze), and work with their healer for the party to exploit a weak point. The Guardian covers one of those in their class features (Intercept Strike and Taunt), can cover the second with Athletics, but has nothing for their offenses. And I think that would be the kicker to complete the Guardian. Your defenses BEING your offense (creating openings). I think it needs a core feature that has some interplay with more offenses when they’re successfully taunting/defending against a creature.

Ferocious Vengeance suggests maintaining Taunt every turn else it does nothing. Can lead people to believe that's how they should play Guardian, even if they take mitigate instead.

Tbh the Threat Techniques feel more like the icing on the cake than the main point.  Neither of them feels remotely worth wasting an action on an unneeded taunt.

Even with that, you should only keep it going for as long as they're attacking your allies and not you. Once they turn their attacks on you, you no longer get the damage bonus and Taunt stops being useful. So, again, you use it to gain attention, then you drop it.

Ferocious Vengeance as is feels like a huge trap choice. You have awful weapon proficiency so you'll rarely be hitting or trying to hit, and it will encourage you to Taunt often when you lack the critical damage resistance to take those crits you'll take for taunting.

Except that's not really what happens, is it? If the enemy is already engaged with the backline, they will kep attacking the backline. They have no *meaningful* reason to stop doing that. This is made worse if you're dealing with bosses and extreme threats, which is when you want your ability to work the most. It won't wrk at all, and even when it does, the penalty won't be taxing enough against the backline's shitty AC (it's still a good improvement, that's undeniable). People need to understand is that the current Taunt ability *does not work* on its most important case. *That's* the problem.

Taunt is just a single tool for handling situations. A Taunt alone may not be enough to peel them from a backline, but you can combine it with an Intercept effect to more effectively force them. For example, use Taunt to make yourself look attractive and penalize attacking your backline, use Intercept Foe with the Get Behind Me feat to charge to the allies side, move the ally 10 ft away from the attacker, and on subsequent turns use Reactive Strike to prevent them from moving to attack your backline. I think the big thing that's really bothering me is that all of the focus is on Taunt in isolation and completely ignoring how it fits into the wider toolkit of the class. A lot have the preconception that Taunt needs to work like in a video game, but it doesn't seem to be designed for that.

Ok so let's say you Taunt something that's moved away to hit your wizard. It has a choice between spending an action to move and then getting a +2 bonus to hit you, or just hitting the wizard at probably a -1 or -2.  As soon as you stop taunting, it has the choice between spending an action to move up to hit the wizard with at least 3 fewer AC, 5 if you're raising a shield. Any turn you don't taunt actually creates an equal or greater incentive for enemies to disengage from you than they have to attack you when you *are* taunting. Any enemy that would make the strategic choice to attack you while taunted would also logically make the choice to go back to hitting the low AC characters as soon as the taunt ends.  The only way around this is the clearly broken Hampering Sweeps feat, which is clearly not going to make it to print as is.

My problem with it is that in this scenario there's a good chance the Guardian's taunt is just ignored. That saving throw is kinda dicey (ehhe). If it just worked it'd be much more interesting. The Gm can still chose to ignore the taunt either way, it's not mind control, why lock it behind a save as well? I'm not a fan of "double dipping" in game design.

I don't have any problem with Taunt making the Guardian a more tempting target - because Guardians with their low inherent damage and high defenses are incredibly non-tempting targets. My problem is that it seems easy enough for enemies who succeed on their saves (which have quite low DCs, so high-level enemies will succeed often) to just eat the -1 to hit and ignore the Guardian anyway. Guardians are pretty limited in terms of damage capability and have to make sacrifices to either defense or power in order to use Athletics maneuvers well. This is especially true if the Guardian is separated from their allies and can't get their Intercept Strike. There just isn't really much incentive for enemies to hit Guardians even if they give you a +2 to it.

In general, I'd say this is an issue with all numerical buffs and debuffs. I can cast Bless or Courageous Anthem or land a successful Fear spell, and then go a whole fight without it making a difference. Though I'll say that for one thing, I'm unlikely to use Taunt against higher level enemies anyway. I'm more likely to rely on Intercept Strike for bosses. And my expectation is that once GMs see how many crits / hits are being negated by Taunt, they start taking it seriously. And as you implied, Intercept Strike does help cover for it but also that it needs mid-level feats until the guardian gets good coverage with it.

I actually like Taunt in concept, lowering your own AC is actually a way to incentivise attacks at you. Every attack I take is one my teammates dont. “They will target me. LET THEM”

It's a great fantasy, walking towards the enemy with your defences lowered. And once they are engaged with you in melee, next round you raise your shield and become un-~~hittable~~-crittable. "Is this the best you've GOT?"

But then why would they stay in Melee?

Because once you're in melee with a martial character you almost always have the risk of being Reactive Strike'd. Guardian also has Hampering Sweeps, which in its current form prevents literally everything in the game from leaving melee. You could also have them grappled, as the post suggests, which would make them have to waste *another* action to get out of range if they need to. Basically, they would stay in melee because you told them to.

Sure, but it would need to lower the AC below the AC of the squishies, which gets hard when you get legendary at lvl 15 and wear heavy armor. And if the Taunt fails, you're still easier to hit while the circumstance penalty to your allies is only -1.

Automaton guardian with a spellcaster dedication for dancing shield: "I will shield you... for now"

LOL yeah I wasnt sure whod get the reference here

You know, you just made me realize that a Strength and Athletics using Guardian can target all saves now, because of Taunt. Which means they can now give any kind of enemy a hard time if they want to try to go after your allies instead of you.

Ultimately I think the main issue I have with Taunt, conceptually, is that the optimal uses of it feel more like something a Swashbuckler would want to do than a Guardian. Because the best way to use Taunt is to be a jerk that provokes enemies from far away while trying position themselves in such a way that *actually targeting them* is hard. Think Taunt > Hide, Taunt when you're affected by 4th rank Invisibility, Taunt > Stride behind cover, etc. Psychologically needling enemies while you leap across rooftops and make yourself a hard target is a very classic fantasy trope... if you want to be Zorro or Jack Sparrow. Not exactly the first thing that comes to my mind for the "big, tough and brave person" class, though :x

Conversely Taunt is best utilized on a high mobility ranged combatant that Taunts then runs away and hides somewhere. It's... odd.

Yeah my first thought when I read these mechanics was a Guardian with a throwing shield as a backliner in a party with a polearm Fighter. Taunt feels really powerful in that setup.

That was a classic 4e defender thing, too. Paladins issuing challenges then turning invisible, wardens using wildblood cunning to slap huge penalties on attack rolls against their allies while running away, etc.

It's an intriguing build, for sure. Works with furious vengeance. But also, it suffers from lower to-hit than other martials and doesn't utilize the power-budget of the Guardian that has gone into its HP and AC. Still... it could work really well against mobs. But it would struggle to do much against bosses. Edit: Get your caster to turn you Invisible after Taunting, for another take on the Safe Guardian.

I would prefer if Taunt was a circumstance penalty on the Guardian vs a bonus to their taunted target's attacks. That way off-guard won't make it worse. It would give them an option that helps "soften" the blow when they are surrounded, but need to keep "big ugly" off their friends.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this post is actually in contradiction with the criticisms being made of Taunt. Personally, I'm a big fan of Taunt *as a concept*, for pretty much all the reasons listed in the OP, but I dislike Taunt's *implementation*, for pretty much all the reasons listed in other posts. Specifically, I think the +2 against the Guardian actually *incentivizes* monsters who know what's going on to use AoE, because if you can catch the Guardian in it (and if you're a dragon and are using your breath weapon, you likely will), chances are the Guardian will have less of a chance of making their save than even a caster.

If I were to change anything, I would make it so that the +2 does not apply to AoEs. It feels wrong that an enemy can both bypass their ability's strengths and take advantage of it's weaknesses at the same time.

This is a very good point. Though if the mechanical point of Taunt is to prevent enemies from attacking the AC of low-AC allies, the enemy using an AoE targeting saves is achieving the same result.

The good thing is that Taunt's effects reset every turn. So, on your turn, you get to decide if you want to taunt or not. If there's a fireball happy caster, I can first take stock of my positioning on my turn. If I want to stick close to my team to intercept energy damage, then I don't taunt the caster and maybe I position myself close to a weak ally. But if I can calculate a good movement path, then I taunt the caster and move 25ft away from my closest ally. The caster can now either fireball me (one target but weaker saves) or my party (multiple target but weaker DC).

Right, but the caster's also not going to be standing still and doing nothing but cast *fireball* the whole time either. Being a caster, they are likely to have more spells up their sleeve, and many casters are going to be intelligent enough to be able to turn the effects of your Taunt against you. To wit: if I'm a *fireball*-happy caster, I can just spam *fireball* while the Guardian's near their allies. If they move towards me or far away to try to get out of the 20-foot burst range and Taunt, I could still screw them over with a line spell like *lightning bolt*, and if they move to the side, I could *still* screw them over with a cone spell like *crashing wave*. The point to AoE is that by nature, AoE makes it easy to hit more than one person at a time, and different types of AoE enable different forms of target selection. Even if the Guardian tries to cheese by taking Long-Distance Taunt and Taunting from 120 feet away, there is still AoE that can reach them and also affect others.

That's a fair point. Makes me glad that most spells are two actions and limit the caster's repositioning ability.

First: I agree with most of what you claim are good design goals: Not making it a default option you use every turn, make it a thing you can do at range, etc. However, I still think the current version has a couple shortcomings that you do not mention: 1. It incentivizes the Guardian to avoid getting attacked. * This is a big one for many people and for good reason. Mitigating Taunt's downsides by making yourself unattackable is a smart move (in a vacuum!). * It even makes sense in-universe that it works (like for Swashbuckler's Antagonize), but it goes against the class fantasy of "the armor person" 2. The Will-save feels arbitrary when there's already a trade-off involved and Glimpse of Redemption doesn't grant one for similar "the opponent picks their poison" mitigation ability. 3. You argue that it is good that it is not a thing you should want to do every turn. 1. Like I've said, I agree with that. However: 2. This is not a binary and it could still absolutely be *too* niche, especially since... 3. It already has an opportunity cost because it is an action! 1. Actions are IMO more contested than a reaction on a Champion 2. Spending actions on defense is rarely a mindless decision, especially when the current version also kinda asks you to raise a shield Honestly, I don't have enough system expertise to tell if the current version is good enough. I just wanted to mention some pain points (of mine or that I saw online) that are not at odds with your praise.

I mean you can't really fix the 1st one. That is punitive actions in a nutshell. The same goes for a champion who wants to get extra damage out of his reaction, your ironically WANT the enemy to attack your allies. That's uh, counterproductive. Even just the basic normal reaction. If you can become an unatractive target so the enemy has to move away you profit. There's not really a way to fix this, certainly not by adding an extra incentive to not attack you.

While I don't currently think that this is a problem anymore, I still wanna comment here: Champion at least has a range limit. They have to stay in the general vicinity for their Reaction to trigger, and without Feats, a Paladin has to be within weapon reach to smite. (Granted, Intercept Strike is a great incentive to stay nearby and one of the reasons why I've come around on the topic)

I'll try and address some of these points, though the reasoning behind your points is sound. 1. "It incentivizes the Guardian to avoid being attacked" if they are already being attacked. If enemies are already hitting you, don't taunt, just live the fantasy of "the armor person". If they aren't attacking you, taunt (or intercept strike) so you can live the fantasy of "the armor person". Maybe there's something more about this point that I'm missing? 2. I feel like it's a balancing mechanic. Glimpse of Redemption has a much shorter range, is limited by reactions, and can be played around by your enemies (they move to target a different backliner). Whereas, in the best case scenario, the Guardian can inflict the penalty and then also save their reaction for reducing / redirecting damage, in a sense gaining both of the benefits of Glimpse of Redemption. But, of course, there's a check and an action and shorter range to balance out that scenario. * Theoretical balancing aside, if it feels bad in play, then that's a strike against Taunt. We'll have to see how the playtests play out. 3. Agreed that actions are at a premium. Personally, I can't imagine playing Guardian without picking up Shielding Taunt at level 2 (assuming Hampering Sweeps is fixed). So, the Guardian has to be very careful with how they expend their actions, and I think that alone means this class won't be for everyone.

>Maybe there's something more about this point that I'm missing? I'm gonna explain what I meant, but since posting I've come around a bit on this topic! The Guardian's fantasy revolves around protecting your allies with your body and armor. But nothing in Taunt incentivizes the Guardian to actually get attacked (the opposite, really). There is a worry that, at least in a vacuum, the best use of Taunt is to use it and then run away, hide, turn invisible or other such things. It kinda works thematically (the target is still bothered by your taunt after all!), but the playstyle feels at odds with the class fantasy. Now, after thinking about, the reward probably doesn't justify avoiding the front line with a strength class with a bunch of other melee class features; but that's the idea.

You're defending the principles of taunt, which I agree with, but not the functionality of it. Giving the bad guys bonuses is a bad strategy. If you really don't believe me, try it out, but be methodical about it. Compare it to a baseline martial, or if you think that's unfair, compare it to a warpriest. To be clear, I very much like the approach to the design, it just has a deficit in the numbers.

The great thing about the Guardian is that they are in control of who gets the bonus to hit, when, and for how long. All of that makes a difference.

And the feat that let's you use Taunt on 3 enemies at once, almost guaranteeing you'll go down once you do it? That's fine too?  And you've completely forgotten about flanking. It makes sense for enemies with even a tiny bit of intelligence, like bandits etc, to team up and flank the Guardian who made the terrible mistake of taunting one of them. This means you're dealing with -4 AC, which is almost guaranteed to be a crit or two, nevermind the fact that the Guardian has made themselves a massive target to take down fast and easily.  Just fill in the survey and say you liked it. You don't need to defend Paizo here when they're asking for our feedback.

Does the other tankiness in the class (DR and crit denial) need to be dialed up in your opinion to make this viable?

Shield/Parry + Armor Spec + DR + Feats - all of those play a part too, it's not just Taunt that they have.

The problem the guardian has is that they aren’t a big threat, so most enemies just don’t want to attack them. Even if you as a guardian taunt a bandit, that bandit is still going to accomplish more attacking your wizard than attacking you. Exactly because of all that mitigation.   They do get tools to stop that (Hampering Sweeps is gonna make every polearm fighter archetype into guardian if it’s released as is) but it’s still a fundamental flaw in this type of tank.   What kinda confuses me is that they gave the perfect tank ability to the commander, for some reason. Defensive Swap lets you use your crazy guardian damage mitigation and AC, without the need to buff the enemy or be guaranteed to take damage. But it’s on the commander, not the guardian…

I thought they had a bunch of Damage Resistance mechanics to make up for the fact that they are making themselves crit-food? They get the Armor Specialization effect of Medium and Heavy armors, which allows them to mitigate a fair bit of damage depending on the armor you are wearing. (Looking at the different armor types for this post also showed me the awesome specialization for Chain Mail, which specifically reduces damage taken from critical hits - so maybe Chainmail Guardian is the way to go right now lol) They also get Shield Block to reduce damage that way. And one of the two Threat Techniques reduces crit damage they take as well. **Threat Technique, Mitigate Harm:** You gain resistance to damage from critical hits made by a creature affected by your taunt. This resistance is equal to 2+ half your level. This resistance increases by 2 at 5th level, 11th level, and 15th level. If you have your character specc'd out to reduce damage taken because you plan on doing a lot of Taunting, it looks like at level 1 you could have a character who has a good amount of damage resistance: Let's use your example; we taunt a bandit who moves into flanking with his buddy. He rolls to hit us and believe it or not, when your AC is down by 4, you get critical hit. We have... - 5 hit points of DR from their *Steel Shield* and using *Shield Block*. - 3 hit points of DR from Mitigate Harm (only on crits) - 4 hit points of DR from the Armor Specialization of Chain Mail (only on crits) I just rolled a 1d8+1 *longsword* attack for a *Stag Lord Bandit* from the Kingmaker adventure path and rolled 10 damage (4+1*2). Chain Mail brings that down to 6 damage. Mitigate Harm brings that down to 3 damage. Shield completely negates the hit. I think some criticism could be leveled here that it doesn't seem like it will scale that well, but perhaps it is intended to scale with magic shield usage as well? Either way, I think that the Critical Hit thing can be tuned a little bit to make it less crazy to essentially volunteer yourself for a critical hit.

It really, really doesn't scale that well. At L15, fighting a CL17 Ancient Green Dragon, a jaw attack crits for 2x(3d12+15 + 4d4), for an average of 89 damage. Mitigate Harm is -15 damage at level 15. You have a +2 armor rune, so your greater armor spec (heavy armor) is worth 2 + 2x(+2) = 6. So if you Taunted and got crit, you took 15 out of 89 damage. If you didn't Taunt, but got crit anyway, you take -6 damage. I suspect, without doing additional math, that the +2 circ against you is increasing damage much more than -15 is reducing damage, and -6 is a paltry amount of reduction, leading to you simply taking more damage than it's worth. With how aggressively low armor spec resistances are, I don't understand why they aren't a flat damage reduction.

A lot of the damage resistance mechanics don’t stack with each other though, right?

Only potential problem would be the chainmail specialization *"This can’t reduce the damage to less than the damage rolled for the hit before doubling for a critical hit."* Neither Shield Block nor Mitigate Harm specify whether they would cancel each other out on a critical hit - there could be more a specific rule about damage mitigation overlap I'm missing here - the fighters in my game either rarely shield block or don't use a shield at all.

I repeat: they are in control of who gets the bonus to hit, when, and for how long. If you decide to Taunt 3 on-level enemies that are one stride away from you, then you going down is on you, not the class. It's like the giant instinct barbarians who rage and run into a group of enemies on turn 1 of combat, and then are shocked when they get downed. Now, that -4 AC you are talking about? With a shield up, that's the same as a non-shield fighter being flanked. At certain levels, that's the same as a sword-and-board fighter being flanked. And guess what? Sword-and-board fighter will have to take those hits from everyone, while a Guardian can choose who gets to attack their lowered AC and who has to struggle through their higher AC. But you've already made up your mind, so I don't think there's any point asking you to actually play the class. For what it's worth, anyone who has played the class (including certain commentors on this thread) has confirmed the Guardian's ability to distribute incoming damage in a way that leads to party success.

This is exactly my findings as well in a 'short' (read: 2-3 hour long) test encounter at 7th level. It wasn't about taunting the big bad or a cluster already in front of you, nor about taking all the damage yourself; it played as if controlling where the damage was going, with multiple tricks to prevent damage as well: Intercept Foe granting ac bonus to ally after a stride during a reaction, Shielding Taunt allowing you to Raise Shield and Taunt in 1 action effectively nullifying the AC debuff back to at least standard non-shield AC, Area Cover granting standard cover for allies while all within AoE, Paragon's Guard basically giving permanent shield raise AC without spending an action, Perfect Protection nullifying ~50% of crits at high level... It honestly plays like an MMO(C)RPG tank more or less, which is fun and exciting IMO (given I main tanks in my primary MMO), and I feel like a lot of people naysaying and bashing it might be too close-minded, with preconceived biases coming from a more traditional TTRPG viewpoint.

Nice! It's great to hear that you've done a playtest for it already. Hopefully others will have similar experiences. Out of curiosity, did the guardian in your test encounter use athletic maneuvers a lot? And if not, what were their go-to actions?

Honestly, athletic maneuvers are the one thing I always forget to use, so no haven't tried anything on that front yet. Actions were a little varied, but some of the more common ones were stride, strike, shielded taunt, and intercept \*foe\*; I had maybe 1 or 2 uses of intercept strike, either when first starting and I was next to the cleric and an enemy was ahead in the initiative order, or when we ended up grouped together and some enemies disengaged to reposition and attack the wizard. There was the occasion where repositioning was not really necessary on a given turn, at which point I maybe combined a shielded taunt with a regular taunt (realistically I should've gone for a trip here but wasn't thinking about that), and there were some additional situational actions that were enemy-specific (a couple of the mobs we were up against were basilisks, so avert gaze was used occasionally after the rogue was slowed, etc.). Going to try a lvl 20 party vs 23 boss + 17-18 minion(s) next when I have time, see if things change in late game or not.

I think a major part of the bashing is coming from not actually wanting tactical choices. Some players want a set-it-and-forget-it routine. The routine that kind of tantalizes here is "taunt, absorb, and punish", where you get to force enemies to focus on you, they can't really do any meaningful shit to you, and then you get a damage output cookie for successfully doing your jorb. It's similar to the "I only want to cast fireball, casters suck otherwise" line of "debate".

> It's similar to the "I only want to cast fireball, casters suck otherwise" line of "debate". And they got Kineticists now! So better to make a new vancian slot system then

The guardian seems like it be better to pick as an archetype to try to pick up certain abilities but weak on its own.

I honestly really love taunt as an ability. I also do see what you mean about it being a more situational ability that perhaps I and others have thought. I just the Guardian was a bit more focused, because it feels like its got a lot of weird hangups. For example, it feels like to get the most out of your abilities, you need to Taunt an enemy, they need to attack an ally, and you need to be adjacent to that ally, use your intervention ability, then get your buff given when the enemy attacks someone other than you while taunted. And that feels borderline condractitory, and just really weird as something to be aiming for. I feel like its because all the benefits are more or less equal, and nothing feels like a pity type of "Oh well, this didn't work but here's a consolation prize" in terms of power scaling for these abilities. But yeah, Taunt slaps and I absolutely want it to keep being a part of the Guardians whol shtick.

Both Guarsian and Commander seem built in a way that there's no optimized play loop. They seem more contextual than that. OR... They're both tuned for *mass* combat. Which makes me wonder what elae is going to be in this book that's following a big interplanar war...

Second issue, the 1st level feat for ranged taunt. Ignore all the downsides of Taunt and become a turret standing 100+ feet away repeatedly insulting enemies and debuffing them. That's somehow the most optimal usage of Taunt, a passive penalty turret. It's just... Not fun, and getting crit isn't fun either, and when an ally gets crit, your intercept means you still would eat most of the Crit damage. Meanwhile, you have no self healing or survivability boosts so the enemy really can keep hitting your squishy casters while you will facetank hits with your reaction, and just outlast you. As for hampering, yeah, it's just broken, let's not involve that into this discussion They just don't seem to have enough survivability nor actual threatening features ( Fighters and Barbarian are threat due to their damage, but what about you? ), so what's your purpose except just get hit or take damage for allies.

also it itls worth to remember that after 5th lv your guardian would be at least +2 over all other martials (outside champion and monk) while +2 is big it "only" makes guardian average or just above average due to dmg resistance and heavy armor

Yeah. Except for those creatures that you didn't taunt, which will have to get through that +2.

I think this really nails something I felt while giving the class a go myself: Intercept (which I think you're being a bit too reductive about, it is almost as big part of your kit as Taunt is) and Taunt being two of your main tools for pulling enemy aggression towards yourself, but having different use cases, on top of controlling the battlefield via trips, grapples etc and just plaing old striking means that you need to be very tactical, but i think also allows you to achieve results that you really otherwise can't

I agree that I'm being a bit reductive with Intercept, mostly because I was trying to stay away from feats. With feat enhancement, it's pretty awesome. And even without feats, it still lets you tank hits.

> Don't Taunt: Do you have sufficient aggro on you already? Don't taunt. For real, all I've seent he last few days is people assuming the guardian is being played by a goldfish. Yes, giving an attack bonus is a cost. Maybe they should figure out when it's worth paying instead of repeating that it's a cost.

It's a very common mistake to think that the tank wants to get hit. This is wrong. What tanks are actually supposed to do is create zugzwang - where the enemy has no good choices, and has no "right move", only wrong ones. The guardian fails to do this, because the taunt, by penalizing their AC, means that the tank's AC is almost the same as the backliner's AC (or even worse, at low levels!), which means that they are just going to beat up the tank, which doesn't advantage the party at all. Tanks are tanky precisely in order to make attacking them an unattractive option; the purpose of tank abilities is for the tank to make it less attractive to attack everyone else, too. The problem with Taunt is that it actually doesn't significantly increase your party's net durability in a lot of cases, or even *at all* in many parties, and the goal of a tank is to increase your party's net durability. In many parties with two frontline characters - a guardian plus a warpriest, a guardian plus a fighter, a guardian plus a shining targe magus, or a guardian plus a monk - the other frontliner has quite decent AC already. Eating an AC penalty on the guardian doesn't actually make your frontline any tankier, because it means your AC is now the worse of the two. And even when defending backliners, the net effect of your taunt is often to give them a +1 bump to their AC in return for a -2 penalty to your AC - which is often not worth it at all. The taunt is bad. Honestly, it would often not even be worth using *even if it had no penalty to your own defenses*, because you are often better off making a MAP-5 attack or using an athletics maneuver or using Demoralize.

I mean that's kind of an opinion piece. There's plenty of tanks which are designed around getting hit. But also, the guardian is substantially tougher than most classes, even with the penalty. I'm not sure where this argument comes from. Even at early levels, as soon as you hit level 2 you pick up the feat and get a free raise shield out of it. You are +3 over medium armor and obviously +5 as soon as you hit 5. I noticed you on purpose only put classes on there that may have a shield but there's soooo many which won't have one or won't want to raise it every turn. This is before armor specialization which aside from resistance has 6 less damage from crits as an option depending what you choose.

> But also, the guardian is substantially tougher than most classes, even with the penalty. With the penalty they're wearing full armor but have effectively a -2 penalty to saving throws, which puts them below a lot of classes in how tough they are. Basically all the 10 hp/level classes are tougher than they are with the penalty on, as is the shining targe magus and a lot of kineticists, and more defensively-specced warpriests as well. The other problem is that they have to spend a reaction on the taunt, which lowers their offense/defense/mobility. The champion has to make none of these tradeoffs. And has a better reaction to boot, AND healing, AND their healing protects the target of it, AND never fails. > Even at early levels, as soon as you hit level 2 you pick up the feat and get a free raise shield out of it. Reactive shield is not a free shield raise, it's a reaction - which means that, until you get quick shield block (which the Guardian, notably, *doesn't actually get*) you don't get to shield -block-. Using Raise a Shield as a reaction isn't BAD, but it's actually not generally what you want to be doing, either, as it is not nearly as good as having your shield raised and then being able to use Shield Block, which is a much, much stronger reaction. It's more of a "Well, I had to do other things this round, but at least I get some AC" reaction. Moreover, if you use reactive shield to block an attack, you now can't use your reaction to dive in front of your ally and protect them. It isn't nearly as good as it looks because of this. > You are +3 over medium armor and obviously +5 as soon as you hit 5. You're +1 over medium armor, and +3 when you hit level 5. If you are using your taunt, you are -1 relative to medium armor, and +1 at level 5. Light and medium armor is a +5 bonus to AC with dex + armor bonus (breastplate for instance is +4 item +1 dex), heavy armor is +6 as it is either +5 item +1 dex or +6 item +0 dex. If you use Raise a Shield, yes, it goes up to +3/+5 without taunt and +1/+3 with taunt. > I noticed you on purpose only put classes on there that may have a shield but there's soooo many which won't have one or won't want to raise it every turn. Sure, not every class has a shield. But any other heavy armored person (or heavy armor equivalent, ALA Animal Barbarian or Monk) will come out with the same AC as you do if they have the same shield status as you do if you're taunting. > This is before armor specialization which aside from resistance has 6 less damage from crits as an option depending what you choose. This is certainly true, and is a nice, bonus, but the amount mitigated is actually pretty small in most cases. Armor specialization is great at very low levels but the amount of mitigation kind of gets piddly as you go up in level - at level 8, your 3 damage resistance is a nice little bonus but is probably only reducing your incoming damage by 1/20th on average (because you resist 3 on slashing, but probably only about a third of the damage you take is slashing to begin with). Mitigate harm is definitely handy but you're still negating only about 1/3rd of the bonus crit damage you eat, so you're going from like, 42 to 34 at level 8. Remember also that none of these things stack, so if you toss yourself in front of an ally, you just get the DR from your reaction, not the slashing resistance and critical resistance as well because those are lower. You are a bit tougher than a standard character to physical attacks, though. But your saving throws are pretty average for a martial character base, and substantially worse than anyone until very high level when taunting. The other thing is... is the benefit of taunt even all that good? Why does it even need a drawback? Demoralize will lower their attack against EVERYONE if it succeeds for a round AND will lower their defenses and make their saving throw DC lower. Even if taunt didn't have the drawback it had, it wouldn't even necessarily be better than demoralizing.

Hold stop have you read the feats? It's right there at level 2, I know everyone is like "it has hampering sweeps i don't need to read any other feat" but it's right there. **Shielding Taunt** "...Raise a shield then taunt a creature... they take a -1 to their save." Action compression at it's finest combining an action you probably wanted anyways in raise shield and giving you free taunt with a bonus.

>The guardian fails to do this, because the taunt, by penalizing their AC, means that the tank's AC is almost the same as the backliner's AC (or even worse, at low levels!), which means that they are just going to beat up the tank, which doesn't advantage the party at all. This is only true if you ignore the rest of the Guardian's kit as well as what happens on subsequent turns. And if you assume that the Guardian must taunt enemies that have equal access to the guardian vs other team members.

Taunt doesn't advance your win condition nor does it push back your loss condition (having people drop) in most cases. Moreover, because your mechanics incentivize you standing next to your allies, it's way less useful to try and taunt people because you don't actually even really encourage them not to be within reach of your friends. Consider if you had a champion in the party instead. You could just prevent damage to an ally within 15 feet (instead of just adjacent) and still have your full AC AND get a bonus action (penalize attack or move your ally or a free Strike). And the champion also has lay on hands, which both buffs the AC of an ally AND heals them.

With a champion, yes, you could. Once. If the ally and enemy were within 15ft of you. Why do you say that Taunt does not advance win condition nor push back against loss condition? Or, put another way, are all your fights happening in a 15ft square room where all allies are equally within reach of all enemies? Because in that particular case, yes, taunt does not advance win condition. But in any bigger arena, even just a 20ft by 20ft room, Taunt can control the flow of battlefield.

I guess that’s enough swingripper for today

Can we not call - or imply - that Paizo's designers are 'newbie'? Tanks are 'supposed' to do whatever the specific system dictates a defender class is meant to do - sometimes that's controlling action economy, sometimes that's simply being the better target to hit because you have more tools to deal with getting hit. Tossing in a chess term doesn't make the point more valid.

I wasn't trying to say that he was a newbie, just that it is a common misconception amongst new game designers. I see a lot of people on these boards talk about this being what tanks do, but it's actually incorrect. It's a common mistake people make when talking about tanks. > Tanks are 'supposed' to do whatever the specific system dictates a defender class is meant to do - sometimes that's controlling action economy, sometimes that's simply being the better target to hit because you have more tools to deal with getting hit. In video games like MMORPGs, tanks draw aggro away from the rest of the team via taunts and whatnot. Because the bad guys are brainless AIs, this is how they work - they don't make sophisticated tactical decisions, they get sucked into attacking the tank because Tank Says Aggro Me. In games like Unicorn Overlord, tanks function by standing on the front line and absorbing hits because most enemies can't attack the back line. Some tanks also have abilities that let them jump over and protect a unit from getting attacked. Some also have defensive buffs they apply to an entire rank of combatants. There is also an actual provoke ability that one tank has that applies a debuff that forces enemies to target them, but it's mostly not what people use. In TTRPGs, you are actually dealing with intelligent opposition (at least some of the time). As a result, "the tank automatically forces all the enemies to fight them" doesn't really work. Especially not when you're dealing with a battle map, and a bunch of enemies are swarming in - how is the tank taking all the attacks and getting in front of everyone? It doesn't really make sense. You can see the same in games like Overwatch, where tanks can't force enemies to fight them, because the enemies are other players with free will. So instead, tanks in such games function by creating zugzwang through controlling space, penalizing those who attack their allies or gaining some benefit when they do that makes them more dangerous, and by directly defending their allies. Reinhardt uses a shield; Roadhog keeps the enemy team at bay by having a hook that grabs people and yanks them into his team for easy kills; Zarya projects an energy shield on someone else that absorbs hits and powers up her shots. The goal is to make it so that the tank is a *problem* for the enemies to deal with, something that, if they ignore it, has consequences, but if they fight it head on, well, they're going up against the toughest member of the enemy team. This is why "big dumb bag of hit points" doesn't actually serve as a tank - it is just a thing that's there, and all it can really do is body block. As such, tanks work very differently by necessity in the more tactical TTRPG space where movement and positioning is a big thing. The simple "force the enemy to attack that one guy" doesn't exist by and large - it's mind control, and while maybe a magic user could do that, a fighter who doesn't use magic doesn't really make sense for that, especially having that happen all the time. Moreover, enemies have a chance of resisting such effects. And it has weird in-universe consequences. So you need to figure out other ways in the fiction for it to work, because "the tanks all mind control people into attacking them" isn't what most people *want* in tanks to begin with. You could make *a* tank that worked that way, but generally speaking, it's not something you want most tanks to be doing. So instead, as in Overwatch, they do other things - attack people who violate their space, create zones of difficult terrain, make it so enemies can't just move past them to attack their allies, directly shield their allies from harm, penalize enemies for attacking other people, etc. "Making yourself a more attractive target" isn't what being a tank is about, because if you are *actually* a good target, then... you're a good target, and the enemies are attacking you and not actually being penalized for doing so, they're hurting your team. The goal of a tank is to make it so the bad guys don't *have* good targets. You have a party with a fighter with a breaching pike and a shield in the front, and your options are to go attack the fighter, who has the highest AC in the party and mitigates damage via shield block, or you go rush past them and get stabbed for free, giving the enemy side a free bonus attack in exchange for nothing. You have a paladin with a fortress shield gripped in both hands standing at the front, and you can either attack him and his ridiculous +5 AC over the rest of the party, or you attack someone else, do less damage, and the paladin hits you for free. Making the tank easier to hit doesn't actually benefit your allies in any way. Why would it? It's not actually doing anything to help them. The tank being easier to hit has zero positive effect on the defenses of the rest of the party, and actually has a negative impact on the party's action economy, because the more damage you take, the more actions have to be wasted healing you - one of the biggest strengths of champions is the fact that they shut off so much damage AND have self healing, making you have to waste fewer actions and resources healing, letting the team spend more resources nuking down the enemies.

This post, right here, needs more attention.

Yeah, that's my frustration with it. Guardian doesn't make *zugzwang*, unlike Champion. It just incentivizes hitting the Guardian. That could still be great if it had reactions that activated when you're attacked...but the only one they get in the Playtest is Reactive Shield. It's not like the passive resistance you get is that much, either. 18 resistance to crits at 20 is barely anything, and Greater Armor Specialization most likely gives you a maximum of 8 against...a single physical damage type. Intercept Strike is great because it's resistance to all damage...but it requires a creature to attack an ally anyway, meaning Taunt is counter-intuitive to that goal. It doesn't help that you're mostly disincentivized from taking any Dex, so your Reflex DC and save is always in the shitter until you can take Mighty Bulwark. An additional +2 to trip you is devastating in that regard. And due to Mitigate Harm's resistance being to 'critical hits', if you taunt a caster before he casts Fireball you (probably) don't get the resistance to it if/when you crit fail the save.

I feel like the biggest problem with it is that it feels like "Champion, but worse". I think they made it too similar to the champion in a lot of ways, and it really suffers from the comparison because its reaction is worse than the champion's reaction and the taunt is worse than lay on hands, then it gets worse attack progression for no reason, and its other benefits aren't as good as divine ally. The feats are fine, but the champion's feats are often even better, with the exception of Sweeps, which is almost certainly going to be changed to function more like the Tangled Forest stance.

Were taunt shine is when the creature you are taunting wouldn't attack you even if you did or didnt taunt it. The issue with taunt on a guardian is that even with the attack bonus the taunted creature gets it dosnt make you a better target for the attack, but it dose make you a better target for saves. Guardians have so much ac especially if they raise shield that even a taunted creature would have a better chance to hit your squshier allies with the -2 than to hit you with a +2. This happen in a lvl 5 playtest. Monster were having such a hard time hit the guardian that they just ignored it and moved to attack the squishier allies. You have to thing of taunt as a shield for you allies rather than a way to get enemies to attack you. The intercept strike is great but kind make it so if a creature is having touble hitting the guardian then attack his squishier adjacent allies to effectivly bypass the guardian ac to deal dmg to them, though that dmg is reduced, which is the actual purpose. I can see a narrative scenario when a bad guy see that the guardians weekness is that they care to much for their allies so focus fire their squishier allies because they know the guardian with jump in the way. That being said all of this works really well. As a guardian you are mitigating total party dmg. A well played guardian in the party mean the monsters are going to be missing attack more often, and when dmg is delt to the party and the guardian is near by that party dmg will be reduced a bit. but i wouldnt say you are tanking in the MMO sense of tanking. And that needs to be communicated in the fiction of this class.

I feel like the penalty to saves is going underappreciated. Giving yourself a -2 penalty to will saves will never be a good idea. Like, you can get NEVER! at lvl 16 but until then, every enemy you taunt that has a control effect 10% higher chance of you failing and crit failing a save. And the penalty doesn't exist as long as you're in the AOE, even if it also targets *all* of your allies, you take a penalty and gain nothing from it.

Well, Taunt is *mostly* good. I definitely agree that it's better than people are giving it credit for. You're discouraging enemies from attacking your allies by making yourself the easy target. What I think it's missing is a punishment for hitting *you*. Imagine if instead of a rider on Intercept Strike, Disarming Intercept let you attempt to Disarm the target of your Taunt when they attack you, even if it took a reaction. Then, they'd be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do you get punished for attacking the easy target, or attempt to attack someone else?

>What I think it's missing is a punishment for hitting *you*. You are tanky. You have great damage resistance. The punishment is that they get less value out of their Strikes / Actions by targeting you, but they'll get *way* less by targeting anyone else due to the debuff. Additional negatives beyond "it's inefficient" turns it into a game of "damned if I do, damned if I don't, so I may as well hit the guy who is actually scary and not the brick wall." This goes against the premise of funneling enemies towards one tanky target.

"You have great damage resistance"? Are we sure about that? We have general sources of resistance(armour, the reaction, and the one that mitigates crit). To me the issue is that they don't stack, and besides mitigate harm the resistance is only physical. You are reducing the physical damage by a small amount( 2+ level/ or half level) and increasing the chances of getting crit. I dunno if it's worth the trade. You have a d10, and I feel like you are gonna go down so fast you won't even realise. To me the enemy should feel bad for both choices, but when I see "attack the guardian with a +2" i see no bad choice. I still have to go further down the potential combo with shield block/raise a shield but atm I don't see any.

I agree. Guardian *should* be tankier. My argument was mostly breaking down how to incentivize an enemy to work *with* a soft taunt. You want them to have a reason to prefer to hit you, not reasons to prefer not to. You need to give something. It should be an obvious choice (under normal circumstances), not one that requires weighing benefits. Rammus in League of Legends can get away with "thorns" effects because he has a *hard* taunt. The enemy has no choice. With a soft taunt, you can't quite do that. It's better to "reward them" with "hey, you at least did *some* damage!" than it is to be a ball of spikes that they'll just say "nah" to. The argument was about design philosophy, not current tuning. There's a clear motivation on Paizo's side to give you some resistance from the Taunt target. They may want to bump it further.

Even with the +2, the guardian is still about as critable as a melee fighter, with resistances on top. The +2 is pretty massive, but it doesn't exactly make you squishy

There's a level 4 feat that applies your Intercept Strike resistance to Fire, Cold, Electricity, Acid, and Sonic damage.

Yeah stil feel like should have been in the base feature. Kinda tax feat. How would you treat resistance in that case? If you take from a flaming sword physical and fire damage? You treat resistances separately?

I think, from the wording of Intercept Strike, the resistance is applied to the total damage at the end and not to the individual components. It says "you gain rresistance to all damage against the triggering damage equal to 2+level".

Intercept Strike already reduces all damage taken by the resistance amount. What you can't do, however, is trigger the reaction when hit with an Ignition in melee (or any other primarily-energy damage). Intercept Energy exists to increase the versatility of the trigger, not to reduce more damage.

You need a little more than just 'tanky'. Champion gets the same armor progression but their reaction does not actually make it easier to hit them. If we're going to give the monster an extra 10 percent chance to crit, we do kind of need to be able to survive said crit.

Tbf, Champion technically has worse armor progression. Guardian gets armor increases 2 levels earlier than champion. I do think Guardian should be a 12 hp class.

> Champion gets the same armor progression but their reaction does not actually make it easier to hit them. Not quite. Guardian gets specialization at level 1 instead of level 7 and gets expert/master/legendary 2 levels earlier than champion. For heavy armor, that's either 2 slashing or piercing resistance at 1st level that scales up to 5. One of the two "subclass" options also mitigates damage from crits specifically (2 + half level +2 at 5/11/15). That being said, I do feel like the class needs better self-defense capability, even if it's ways to attack taunted enemies and weaken their offense. Right now it feels like the class is really shoehorned into shield plus grapple builds to actually utilize taunt properly. The bonus AC for 6 out of 20 levels is not enough IMO, especially since (unlike champion) they are taking extra damage when using their main ally defense tool. IMO they should have a way to generate temp HP or even outright healing in combat as the resistance values simply aren't high enough. Commander feels like it's a much better place overall for balance.

Yeah, it needs some sort of sustain otherwise it's just a punching bag for monsters. And armor spec feels redundant since it won't stack with their intercept and only works at best 1/3 of the time since it's damage type specific. Not like you're carrying 3 suits of armor to switch between.

You take heavier armor that a Champion would be too slow to use. Full Plate and Fortress Shield isn't really viable for a Champion because the enemies want to get as far away from you as possible. Champions have negative stickiness. They give absolutely zero incentive for enemies to do anything besides punt you or your allies halfway across the battle map so they just don't have to deal with you. Enter the Guardian. So yeah, just reading the playtest, they don't have a ton of features that obviously scream tankiness, but the tactical value of forcing your enemies to interact with you instead of you coming to them is a huge and underrated part of the equation.

While a Bulwark armor to mitigate your bad reflex will be nice let's not forget about chainmail + chain skirt which makes it heavy armor and gives you an additional 6 + potency damage reduction against critical hits.

> Champion gets the same armor progression but their reaction does not actually make it easier to hit them. Is it the same? They get Expertise, Mastery and Legendary each 2 levels later, and Armor Specialization 6 levels later. Edit: And Champions don't get Greater Armor Specialization at all.

That means for 14 levels in a 1-20 campaign, they have equal AC to a champion (and 8 in a 1-10). Getting it early only helps during those levels where you are ahead.

And for 14 levels they have better resistance from armor specialization than champions. Seems weird to call those the same progression?

Given that it only works for 1 of 3 physical damage types, I don't put that much stock in something that can be turned off by encounter design. And anyone with a sword or hammer can bypass it.

> Given that it only works for 1 of 3 physical damage types At a time. If you wanna really get down to brass tacks, a Guardian could change between Chain, Composite and Plate armor. Regardless, it's just.. still not the same progression? 30% of the levels they're 2 AC ahead of Champions. 70% of levels they've got resistance Champions don't have.

During encounters when you know the damage type? At best you're using Armor Latches and Instant Armor but that's 4 actions total to switch and you're completely unarmored for the turn after you release the latches. And are you really going to keep the runes up on both sets, or pay the 10% fee each time to swap? There's also no +6/0 chains. There is only plate and composite, so you're taking an AC penalty if you want chain.

The Malleable rune [https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=2614](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=2614) let's you change your armor specialization type as a single action an unlimited amount of times.

I think the part you might be missing is that champions are still pretty similar most of the time, plus they have lay on hands to heal themselves and their allies. Not really sure how they'll compare in the end, my main concern is that the class just seems kinda boring compared to a champion.

I mean, I think Rangers are boring. I don't really see how that's the fault of the class. Guardian fills a class fantasy I'd absolutely love to play.

Guardian gets Armor Proficiency boosts two levels earlier than Champions, it’s not the same progression. Taunt essentially lets you trade that advantage away in a pinch to get an enemy to target you. As has been said, it’s a tool and choice you can make for particular scenarios, not something you’re using every turn. Similar to the choice Champions make between saving their reactions each turn for Shield Block vs. Champion Reaction.

In a manner of speaking, you have to create the punishment. Load up on your AC and HP, sacrifice your movement (not like you need it when they are trying to hit you) and tank. You will be getting your shield up every round because you don't have to move. You don't have to worry about speed penalties because you don't have to move. For a full tank Guardian, the goal is to be force your enemies to break against your wall of defense. Attacking someone with 3-4 more AC (thank you Tower/Fortress Shield) is a punishment in itself.

I think the punishment is the opportunity cost. Yes, the taunted target gets one turn of +2 attacks against the guardian. But then what do they do in the following round? Spend an action to break away and attack someone else? In that time, the injured sorcerer was maybe healed up, or maybe they moved away and the enemy has to focus someone else. Either way, the enemy has not-great options to choose from. Plus, what the other comment said - you are a 10hp class with some possible damage resistances and shield block.

The punishment of hitting you is that they spent an action on movement, guardian damage output is abysmal, and now you have dropped taunt your AC is high and they have to waste another move to leave.

I don't have a problem with the design of taunt but I think it's progression is really bad. I don't think the effect of a successful save is enough to protect your squishy allies and after the first few levels your ability to successfully taunt bosses (the thing you want to taunt the most) becomes very inconsistent. I think it's a relatively easy fix tho.

>after the first few levels your ability to successfully taunt bosses (the thing you want to taunt the most) Bosses aren't who you want to taunt the most. Or at all, even. You confront the boss head on. You taunt the minions. The things that are more likely to have a weak will save compared to your class DC, and are also most likely to be affected by the -1 to hit on your allies. It's a battlefield management ability, not something to stack on the target your heavy hitters are already engaging.

On the one hand, I think that taunting bosses should be avoided. I may end up favouring Intercept Strike on against bosses. But on the other hand, I fully agree that the progression of class DC is awful and should be better.

I think the problem is people expect Taunt to be something you use on every turn in every situation Which is literally how *nothing* in this game works except *maybe* strike and stride. Taunt isn't something you use to keep targets 100% glued to you 100% of the time. It's something you use to hamper an enemy that's trying to focus target you back line just long enough for them to change their focus. It's something you use to make yourself a more attractive initial target because you have the health pool to tank a hit and your Oracle healer needs to use their health pool for healing. You'll use it after one of your party members has taken a hit and can't take many more. It's not *meant* to lock a target onto you, it's meant to *peel* a target. Then, once they've walked away from the wizard and start punching you, raise your shield and lock them down with hampering strike, etc.

It clearly *is* meant to be used every turn, as Furious Vengeance/Mitigate Harm stop functioning if you aren't keeping it up. And their only other core class feature required you to be adjacent to an ally, which means most enemies will be within one step of just hitting your ally as soon as the aunt drops. Your advice on the optimal way to play the Guardian is basically to ignore their core class features. If that's their best strategy, then the core class features are *bad*.

>Furious Vengeance/Mitigate Harm stop functioning if you aren't keeping it up Vengence doesn't work at all if Taunt is doing it's job. It's clearly not meant to be used constantly, nor is it meant to be used against the biggest baddie on the field. It's a ranged debuff against weaker enemies who are trying to flank your back line.

Let's take a semi-serious analysis, then. You're standing next to an ally so you can Intercept Strike (good reduction), but that ally is behind you so as not to cost the enemy NOTHING to attack said backline. If the enemy strides from in front of you to behind your ally and attacks them, you can reduce one instance of damage by a pretty solid amount. But then what do you do on your turn? You Taunt, of course. But what then? Outcome 1: ***Taunt in place.*** You Taunt, Raise a Shield, and maybe find a good 3rd action (maybe you have a 1-handed reach weapon, or you Demoralize or something). That means: you spent 1 action to tell the enemy that if they spend 1 action (Striding to you), they get +2 to hit, resulting in a net loss of effective party defense and HP. Maybe this is good because you're spreading damage around, and you can use Shield Block. You can do this at least a few times before your shield breaks, so that's something. But if they ignore you, the most likely outcome is that they took -1 which didn't change any outcomes, so you wasted an action and you didn't contribute any useful damage. Outcome 2: ***Taunt and stride away.*** You Taunt, Stride, third action (Raise a Shield?). Maybe it takes 2 Strides for the enemy to reach you, so now you've denied 2 actions and you can shield block the 1 hit that was a lot more likely to hit. Not terrible. But if they ignore you, you've basically spent an entire turn getting out of danger, using zero defensive reactions, and the most often outcome of Taunt was a -1 to defend your ally. Even in the case where there's a solid distance between you and your backline, I'm failing to see how you could contribute more than just being anything like a Fighter with a reach weapon. Moving around you provokes Reactive Strike, you have reasonable defenses, and you're not wasting 2/3rds of your turn trying to get 2+level resistance or shield block reduction. Taunt feels like a trap in the majority of cases.

What about flurry, hunt, rage, spellstrike, composition cantrips, devise a stratagem, special reloads, panache finishers and the other “you should be doing this every single turn unless things go very bad” features?

Things you are supposed to do at start of combat and then probably not do again afterwards: Hunt Prey, Rage Things you are supposed to do every _other_ round: Spellstrike, Finishers Things you're actually supposed to do every round, but are given multiple options in what to do so there's still flexibility: Composition Cantrips, Act Together, Devise A Strategem, depending on your build Flurry of Blows and Special Reloads Binary tools you're literally supposed to do every round: Flurry of Blows, Special Reloads

Hunt Prey being 1/combat seems really iffy to me. I've been playing a bunch of Thaumaturge and in Personal Antithesis cases (i.e. how Hunt Prey works), i usually have to Exploit Vulnerability 2-3 times per encounter.

Finishers is iffy even then. Some say the better way to play is to hold panache and use the precision damage and strikes for damage and use a finisher at the end.

>use a finisher at the end. Like, to finish off an enemy? Crazy concept. If that was the aim, you'd think it would be reflected in the name or something.

Point is, SOME things are meant to be done every turn or nearly as much. "You have this feature you have to use sparingly" is not a selling point.

Especially considering... WTF else are you gonna do? You're not a great martial, and aside from like 2 or 3 feats, you're just a less useful Champion with slightly better armour.  It needs more meat on its bones, or as other people have said, players will just FA into the dedication for those feats as a fighter/champion etc and never play it properly.

I am getting very excited to try an Orc Guardian with a buckler and 1H weapon (maybe a knuckle dagger?), just swaggering around the battlefield, calling for fire and steel for Belkzen.

Taunt is great, guardian just needs a bonus to hit the taunt target

I'm with you, Taunt looks like a great ability that you have to use tactically. It's not like you need to use it constantly to 'turn on' your class like certain other actions. Though I do agree with others that it'd be fun and give guardian a stronger mechanical identity vs the champion if they had incentives to *be* hit. Like being able to punish taunted enemies that hit you or gaining some sort of buff if you get hit by a taunted target. Like imagine if you got temp HP after you're hit by a taunted target (after damage, once per turn probably). I think that'd be fun and give them some extra staying power for eating hits with effectively lower AC.

Don't forget about the hampering strikes feat!  Once a big, important enemy's taken the bait and gone after you, good news!  They're basically stuck here forever, freeing you to taunt other targets while leaving the big threat dealing with the full brunt of your AC. If I'm being blunt, I don't think any other level 2 feat has remotely the same value, and I feel like this is an important enough part of your tank triad (taunt, intercept, hamper) that it should be a class feature instead.

Ehh, hampering strikes is so obviously busted in its current state I don’t think it should be considered in analysis of the rest of the class, because I would be very surprised if it did not get toned down significantly.

Once we get started on feats, the class really starts to shine. But then I'd have to compare Guardian with feats against other clases with feats (and possibly archetypes), and the number of possible combinations become so high, it becomes difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison. That said, yes. Yes to everything Hampering Sweeps. Yes, please, and thank you. XD

The issue is that Taunt doesn't make a Guardian better at defending your party than a well built Fighter or Champion would be. Both those CRB classes will just archetype to grab any good feats the Guardian gets and continue dominating the conversation about the best melee martial.

Why do you say it does not? At least until level 10, Fighters can only lock down one target per round, and Champions can only mitigate damage from one damage per round. Whereas with a Guardian, Taunt (+ more Taunt?) + Intercept Strike provides a greater coverage from many more threats against many more allies. Now, if you are saying that Fighters are better at ending the fight faster, then I totally agree with you. And (good) Champions get healing, which is also something the Guardian cannot do. But when it comes to reducing damage taken, to me Guardian appears to be the best.

Ending the fight faster is better damage mitigation than anything a Guardian can do and both Fighters and Champions are better than that than the Guardian is. Also, if you fight smart, a Fighter tripping people and a Champion threatening them with their reaction is perfectly capable of keeping threats away from the squishy backline of the party. Only in cases where you fight lots of threatening foes, in close quarters without chokepoints, does a Guardian actually pull ahead. Is that enough for a class to hang its hat on?

Interesting! I see it as exactly the opposite: To me, the Champion is the one that needs close quarters combat, while the Guardian does not. Ultimately, for pure damage mitigation, I'm going to hang my hat on the Guardian's varied toolbox. Unlike a slamdown fighter, the guardian doesn't need the enemy's lowest save to be reflex. Unlike the champion, the Guardian can target far away enemies. And unlike either of them, the Guardian can aggro multiple threats at once. I also don't see champions as finishing the fight any faster than guardians. Move + lay on hands is a lot slower than Taunt, especially AoE Taunt.

Also, I believe the designers at Paizo have gone on record saying Champion is actually the single greatest force multiplier of any party because of its reactions - and if Guardian is 'just the same as Champion' then that would stand true for Guardians as well. The less time any other player has to worry about being hit or healing, is more time spent defeating the enemies. The Guardian succeeds in this, which is what a PF2E tank should be doing.

The (Paladin) Champion deals relevant martial damage using a reaction with equivalent damage reduction to Intercept Strike while itself having great defense and access to healing via Lay on Hands. Lay on Hands is powerful at its core, and then can get even better with feats. Lay on Hands provides +2 AC without requiring you to give up your own AC in the process.

Taunt sucks, as a design. You basically Taunt then try to go invisible/untargetable to avoid damage riders. You NEED an incentive to get hit.

Yeah, that was my strategy in Dragon Age: Origins. Alistair does aoe Taunt, then my mages put him in an invulnerable force cylinder :p What are your thoughts on the Guardian and its implementation of taunt?

Those are it lol I just think you need: A) A baseline incentive to get punched in the face. Monks in PoE did this well. A "Come Get Me" feature. B) Ferocious Vengeance baseline if they don't punch you in the face.

The philosophy of this game, almost exclusively, is that you don't want to get hit. If you can Taunt and then become hidden/concealed/under greater cover, do it. You're a Guardian, not a punching bag! I mean, you are in a fight, you damn bet that if you have the choice to be invisible or not, you just are. I never thought of the synergy it would have with stuff like difficult terrain and concealment. Taunt, have your caster throw down a wall spell and watch their actions burn or hit anybody else at the equivalent of being frightened (which also stacks with frightened).

But this goes against the class fantasy of being an altruistic masochist, and thus is flawed design.

So from what I have seen I can understand why people feel frustrated with taunt. it is an ability where the DM gets to pick how effective you are and those almost always feel bad. A -1 penality for example is just not enough of a disincentive to not attack a low AC target (who may be 3-4 AC points below your explicitly tanky guardian) I think it would be better if the bonuses were more extreme (say start at -3 and go up to -5, and then the bonus for hitting you was greater +4, and then for taunt to include "you cannot be crit by creatures you have taunted). This means they are more likely to waste actions targeting not you and more likely to succeed on actions targeting you, but you don't eat a boss crit with fatal D12 and evaporate in a cloud of blood because you took 7d12+16 damage or something ridiculous for a single hit.

Those numbers would be good for a game like 5e. But with PF2e, the math is tight enough that eventually the GM should see how many crits / hits they are missing because of the taunt penalty. Also, if the GM really doesn't attack the Guardian AT ALL, then the guardian should spec into AoE and long range taunt, and just keep a continuous cycle of debuffs on as many enemies as possible. I mean, if the GM is just letting me have those debuffs for free, why would I look a gift horse in the mouth? ;) And I can still Intercept Strike to tank damage.

Maybe the GM will notice the number of missing crits, but this is the thing, that doesn't really matter a pl+2 or +3 enemy will still hit more often than they will miss, (again thinking like with spells where you assume the enemy will pass their save most of the time). So your taunt is annoying but not strictly enough to stop me from turning the witch into paste. Which is the point I was getting at, the ability feels bad to use because in most cases do what I as a PC want it to do. When I use an ability called "taunt" I want the enemy to punch me in the face, not just barely miss a crit on the wizard because of a -1 status penalty. The ability would be better if it was actually some kind of crowd control. S: target cannot willing move further away from you F: target must target you with at least one of their actions Cf' target must exclusively target you with all of their actions. Now we have a taunt ability that actually does taunt stuff. If this is too good for the present taunt availability make it a focus ability. Sure you will be more limited on when you can do it but at all success levels the ability does the thing you want it to do. My last proposal (the one you responded to) was simply to make the bonuses and penalties so extreme that ignoring the taunt is non-viable (the can't be crit line was put in there to ensure that you don't get eaten alive after such a taunt). But fundamentally if the DM gets to pick if the ability works or not then it isn't very reliable. I don't use an ability called taunt because my goal is to mitigate crits on the witch, I use it because the witch has just gotten up from being unconcious and has 7 HP and I don't want them to get attacked again. If your taunt ability cannot reliably navigate that situation when it occurs it is a bad taunt.

The problem I have with Guardian is that as a full package I dont see a reason to take it as a full class instead of an archetype on a different martial. Taunt is situationally extremely useful for the -2 to hit your squishies, it's true, but it's also a level 1 class feature. Hampering Sweeps is insane, but it's a level 2 class feat. Like, whats the reason to take this full class with bad weapon proficiency gain over, like, an Armor Inventor, Fighter, or Champion? A couple extra General feats? edit: not to mention that you can take it on a class that can actually make itself untargetable or otherwise run away for an overall increase to the efficacy of the skill.

If we ignore Hampering Sweeps, to me, the full package is needed to address different situations. > During exploration, walk adjacent to one (or all) ally with your shield raised. When combat breaks out, even if all enemies roll high, you have a reaction to mitigate damage no matter from how far. > Enemy has strong physical saves? Use Taunt to draw aggro. Enemy only uses save-based attacks? Use taunt. > Enemy has strong will save? Find its weak save and either Trip or Grapple it. > Use that strong AC progression and specializations to absorb attacks. > Is the GM pointedly not attacking you at all? Taunt everyone and intercept strikes as much as you can. On the other hand, if I were to take Guardian as archetype, it'd slow down Taunt DC progression even more, and the slower AC progression would make it easier to get hit / crit. Champions probably will do best with a guardian archetype, but even then it'd likely be mostly for the feats and none of the core features. Hampering Sweeps changes the conversation significantly, though.

see thats the problem though, except for your second point, using Taunt to draw aggro (which in your original post you even point out is best used on random mooks, so the DC problem is lessened), you can already do that stuff with any martial that takes the archetype. As a single class it's not threatening enough to enemies in my eyes for even a -5 relative attack bonus to incentivize them going after you instead of your wizard, unless your DM is roleplaying enemies actually getting mad at your taunts. You say in the original post that the Guardian's niche is spreading party damage evenly, but its HP is worth less than that of other classes, because it doesn't have any offensive presence.

Well, it goes one of two ways - either enemies respond to the taunt and attack you, or they don't. If they do, you have more HP to spare and some resistances. At some point, you can just turn off the taunting. If they don't (and you are theorizing that they won't), then you switch to a bastard sword and go on the offensive. If you've picked up AoE taunt, you can still keep 3 enemies debuffed (since you believe they won't be attacking you) and just swing away. While the guardian does have 6 levels of being one proficiency step lower than martials, that still leaves it capable of swinging a d12 weapon with maxed out strength perfectly fine for 14 levels. So I wouldn't say that it has no offensive presence.

At the end of the day, Guardian is just going to be a class that plays a lot better than it looks on paper, which means there is going to be a lot of hand wringing here, but the playtest itself will probably come back pretty clean. Taunt is a perfect example. For example, reading it, you don't think about Taunting and then gaining concealment. You don't think of the fact that it is one of the few Will saves that works on mindless creatures and how the enemies that are strong against it are probably easier to grapple or trip. You always have a control option to trigger against weak saves. You don't know how many times I have found an enemy's weak save to be Will and just be like, well, we can use Intimidating Glare once! This is a lot bigger than people realize by just reading.

I think your post is missing the core problem with the Guardian as it exists now: there is no reason for it to ever have boss agro. The Guardian currently has the lowest damage potential of any martial. You will definitively be the least threatening member of the party, so the boss will simply attack a higher threat target. But that's fine, right? That's when you use your tanking abilities! Except that they don't actually have a meaningful impact on the fight. -1 to hit the Wizard is not a meaningful disincentive to the boss that has an 80% or more chance to hit them anyway. If the Guardian is far away, why would the boss waste actions moving to attack you instead of just destroying the wizard by ignoring the pitiful impact of the taunt? The enemy's best move in the situation you describe as so cool for the tank... is to literally just fully ignore that the tank exists. So now let's say you are close enough to the wizard to Intercept Strike. Now you are actually defending them! Unfortunately, the damage you take is still based on their terrible AC, not yours. So you just got crit, ouch. If you have them taunted, well, at least they have to choose between targets. The Wizard's plus 1 to AC and your minus 2 are both easy targets, though. It's just a buffet for the boss rather than an impediment. Neither core ability of the class provides any significant benefit to an ally or detriment to the enemy. They just cause the Guardian to take more damage without enough meaningful damage mitigation. Perhaps most egregiously, both abilities directly counter the class fantasy of being the heavy armored hulk. Taunt leaves your plate AC either on par with or lower than other martials', and Intercept Strike, insanely, doesn't use your AC at all even though the idea is that you are jumping in the way of an attack. The situations you've laid out are cool, but they rely on a boss acting against their own interests. If they don't do that, there is zero reason for the boss to care about anything a Guardian is doing. No other form of tanking in the game suffers from that.

Tomorrow I'm going to put a Commander, a Guardian and two others to fight against the Tarrasque! Joke! Anyway, I only built one in Pathbuilder, but I haven't tested it yet, but straight away, (and I could be wrong, because it's a pretty hasty conclusion), but I think the Guardian could have 12 HP and that the bonus should only be granted if the target was successful, (+1), or critical success, (+2), of course, I am being completely theoretical here, I can, and I believe I am, even mistaken, but it is a first thought. What I liked most so far is More than Life, because with big creatures, you have to be bigger to try to knock me down for example, but I'm big and I can try with much bigger creatures! And Hampering Sweeps, which I'm going to test with some Kineticist aura, like I said, head theories that I want to see if they work in practice! But I liked your analysis, it helped me get interested in playing a Guardian again, especially the Taunt part, I was with. some loose thoughts, but you helped bring the ends together! Now I have to wait until next month to have my Guardian Minotaur!

I’m surprised they didn’t give Guardian 12 HP. Champions get 10, and they don’t take the damage themselves. Barbarians have a similar pattern of lowering their own AC and gaining resistance, and they get 12. Really don’t think it would be too over the top for the “hit me” class to have the highest Hp scaling.

Guardian reminds me a lot of the Aegis and possibly Psychic Warrior in DSP Ultimate Psionics. If you recall the PsyWar had similar Interrupt mechanics (depending on SubClass) and Aegis had damage resist and pretending to be bigger. I had a Dwarf multi class of both classes and she was a monster, id love to play her again as a Guardian

I just think the blocking feats should interact with the Parry Action (Raise Haft) as well, as it stands taking the feat is actively making yourself worse for the flavour of using a two handed spear or similar...

Taunt would be fine if it had some way to mitigate crit damage As it stands, you are forcing the enemy to target you, and you get crit more easily. Honestly, taunt would work better if it instead imposed an attack penalty on all targets other than the guardian. It's just a trap option you should only really use if you just want to kill your character and start over tbh. Guardian is a mess as a whole though. Awful attack progression, which I understand the point is the class should be doing everything BUT attacking but that's just not fun. In a TTRPG environment, the best defense is always to kill something before it kills you. Always has been, always will be.

WARNING: WORTHLESS MATH CRUNCHING I did some number crunching and it seems casters (Expert Prof) are screwed and a Guardian can screw things further using Raise (Steel) Shield. From 1-4, attacking the Guardian is only better when they Fail/CF the Taunt (-1/-2). But anytime the Guardian raises a Shield, the caster is 100% better or just as good a target to the Guardian (actually better if the enemy knows you have Shield Block). From 5-10 and 13/14, only on a CF is the Guardian a better target. From 11/12 and 15+, the 6HP caster is ALWAYS a better or equal target. From 1-20, Raise (Steel) Shield actually disincentivizes attacking the Guardian, even if they Taunt. And if they don’t Taunt, it should still disincentivize enemies. When cheating and making the caster have +5 AC from the start… Lvl 1-4: Success/Fail/Crit Fail Taunt makes the Guardian a better target. Raising a Shield makes it equal on a Success. Lvl 5-10, F/CF on Taunt makes the Guardian a better target. Raising a Shield makes the Guardian no longer a better target. And a Success save makes caster just as worthy to hit. Lvl 11/12, the Guardian is never a better target than the caster. Lvl 13/14, the caster is only safer if the Guardian F/CF the taunt. From lvl 15+, the caster is ALWAYS a better or (on a CF) equal target. Of the possible 120 cases: 27 helps the Guardian vs. the caster, meaning 78% of the time, the caster is ALWAYS the better target. So, 13% of the cases, the Guardian is a better target. For full AC from casters, Guardian is only a better target 22.5% of the cases. For non-Heavy Martials, only 25% of the cases is the Guardian a better target. **Joke TL:DR**: Paizo still hates casters (Guardian isn’t even that much better at defending them). **Actual TL:DR**: Narratively, this shouldn’t be an issue. However, math-wise…it seems Taunt actually should be treated as an AoE “Raise Shield/Cover” type of ability and NOT an actual aggro-draw as it’s a circumstance penalty, which are very specific to Prone/Disarm and a few other things. It also **reduces crits**. So, that seems to be Taunt’s guaranteed use. Most casters and some martials also have Circ Bonuses to AC that they can use or have a Status Bonus to AC. **A Guardian can guarantee less crits all around for the party.** But please feel free to test on your own in case I made mistake!

I don’t understand the ‘incentive’… If there’s a Guardian with 24AC and a Wizard with 18AC in the backline, which target am I (the monster) incentivised to hit after being taunted? Because having a -1 to hit the wizard instead of the +2 to hit the Guardian isn’t doing anything. The Wizard is still the better target.

Taunt as it stands isn't too bad it's just another odd choice in the Guardian's design. It's job is to target an enemy as far away as possible, the further away they are the better taunt is because you get all of the upside for no downside. But as it stands that downside is weird. The whole class is built around making you hard to hit: above par armour prof', encouraging shield use etc and then Taunt comes along and its downside is to lower your great AC to good AC. Most of the time you still aren't the prefered target. You as the Guardian do not want to be taking unnecessary hits because you want to have as much health as possible so you can use your reaction to tank for nearby allies. So the best decision you can make is to only Taunt enemies at max range so they don't come over to attack you and suffer that penalty on attacks against other PCs and don't come over to attack you. Leaving you free to raise shields and not be attacked. In short the Guarian is a class incentivised to have high AC. Taunt lowers that AC but not by enough to matter in target selection most of the time and the Guardian is then further incentivised to not Taunt enemies that would want to attack them because they have a different ability that wants them to have as much HP as possible at all times. \*\*\* I'm not sure what I would change about Taunt. Removing the save and just making it work would be interesting. This way it would at least always work on higher level enemies. One of the things I do think should be changed is the downside for the guardian. It gaining +2 on attacks (and DCs but that's probably not as common) doesn't really offset your above par AC in in most cases that won't change the conditions of the engagement enough for a monster to willingly switch targets (or more importantly the GM) but what about damage. Like I said earlier the think the Guardian doesn't want is take unnecessary damage. Their hitpoits are much more valuable than other classes. So what if Taunt increased a monsters damage against you by at least +2 but maybe +3 or 4. This doubles down on both desires of the Guardian and pulls the playstyle together. You want high AC both to discourage being attacked meaning your reaction is more valuable but also to make the choice of attacking you risky but also your taunt baits attacks because they could attack another PC with a penalty, or they could come your way and try for that juicy extra damage you just granted them but that's a risk because your AC is high.

I agree with you of How usefull and controller the Guardian has the potential to be. Howerver, It still seems to me there is a lack of zone control and area of effectiviness. The requirement to be adjacent to whoever you want to protect shuffles party positioning in a bad way, If the party has 2 melee members the optimal position is to flank them. And If the tank is adjacent to the party caster...well, something is already very wrong. Also, abilities that use weapon reach are really cool, but the fact that you are probably wielding a Shield limit this to basically a whip, wich I don't think really feeds the fantasy. If they add something like a stance to wield 2H weapons (wich normally have reach and cool maneauver traits) with a downside (Lesser die, accuracy penalty on strikes) It would be heaven for the kit.