Mitigation and the Guard skill

FrancisCrawford

As we PvEers try to decide how far to bother going in Alliance skill lines, there's an obvious question for some specs -- is it ever worth slotting Guard? Guard shifts damage from one player to another, which could obviously be a good thing ... but the details matter. How does mitigation get applied to the shifted damage?

A post from 2017 lays it out, but is that still accurate? https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/4662974/#Comment_4662974

Summarizing that post, if I understood correctly:

• The player being Guarded gets a simple reduction to damage as per the tooltip (30% if the skill hasn't been leveled or morphed; I didn't check what increases if any were possible).
• The player doing the Guarding gets that damage double-mitigated (i.e. reduced by both the Guardee's and Guarder's mitigation), except that ...
• ... blocking doesn't mitigate.
• What happens with shields is so weird that it must be a bug.

If that's accurate, I presume it's been changed somewhat since then.

So what is the current situation for Guard mechanics?

MerguezMan

Hi,

From previous patch notes, that's the contrary ( https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Guard_(skill) )

- the initial target mitigates the damage as usual, but 30% of the remaining damage is transferred to the caster.
- the caster receives directly remaining damage and cannot mitigate a second time.
- it doesn't prevent the caster to receive damage in parallel.

FrancisCrawford

MerguezMan wrote: »

Hi,

From previous patch notes, that's the contrary ( https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Guard_(skill) )

- the initial target mitigates the damage as usual, but 30% of the remaining damage is transferred to the caster.
- the caster receives directly remaining damage and cannot mitigate a second time.
- it doesn't prevent the caster to receive damage in parallel.

So it was completely changed.

How does this work with the Guarder's damage shields, if any?