Originally Posted by
Cream_Soda
They'd actually have to make guard useful in order to make something like guardstance worth it.
You can parry w/ shadows up for example. Parry also blocks not only all damage, but lets you complete casting spells.
With shield, you still take damage, but it's reduced much more than guard, shield procs way more often than guard, and still prevents spells from being interrupted.
With guard, w/o stacking guard+ in every slot, on any mob higher than EM w/ capped guard, you have the same guard rate as lv 0 guard, 5%. From there, if you guard, utsu is still getting interrupted.
Plus, with 60%+ counter rate (up to 76 in abyssea), that's only a 40% chance that you're even going to have a chance to proc guard, then add in the low proc rate itself, and out of shield, parry, and guard, it has the least benefits of the three.
They need to fix guard itself before they just increase the guard rate, especially if you have to sacrifice something else for it.
Edit: Also, if the mob is EM or lower and you do have a decent proc rate on guard, it still doesn't make a diff because with monsters that weak, you can avoid the damage all together with evasion gear, so evading is going to be a priority to guarding there as well. Not to mention that they hit for much lower damage as well, so you're getting less utility from that portion of the guard proc as well.
From someone who had guard capped for over a year before they raised the level cap to 80, the only time I found guard useful was in ballista, which is pretty much dead on the majority of the servers now.