Idea for reworking Guard Skills

How about skills that generate "charges" the longer you don't use them. Such as for Molten shell...

Applies a buff based on the number of charges that adds to your armour, and can take some of the damage from hits for you before being depleted. When the buff expires or is depleted, the skill deals reflected damage to enemies around you based on the total damage that was taken from the buff. Shares charges with other Guard skills.

Spell, AoE, Duration, Fire, Physical, Guard
Level: (1-20)
Cost: (8-12) Mana
Cooldown Time: 0.5 sec
Can Store 10 Charges
Cast Time: Instant
AoE Radius: 15
Requires Level 4

Base duration is 3.00 seconds
Guard Skill charges do not recover during effect
Buff grants +(5-85) to Armour per charge
75% of Damage from Hits is taken from the Buff before your Life or Energy Shield
Buff can take Damage equal to 1% of your Armour per charge, up to a maximum of 5000
Reflects (100-3000)% of Damage taken from Buff as Fire Damage when Buff expires or is depleted
Base Maximum charges is 10
All charges are removed on use

Charges regenerating maybe 2/second or something like that. Guard skill cooldown recovery would be charge recovery. Could also have nodes/items that grant +# max guard skill charges. This fixes the issue where people just want to passively use these skills without nerfing or even changing it's core ability. Assuming the charge rate is around = to the current cooldown. The nice thing is you can still get partial effect when you really need to, even at 4 charges it will do something for you.

the problem with guard skills is, as it is, its always better to get out of the way. you cannot rely on guard skills to deal with any long telegraphed slams. the huge attacks in the game are so high that for most players, guarding might not be enough to survive a huge hit.

another problem is how do you make guards significant enough that they are not abused by automation.

the charge suggestion can help a great deal and encourage people to self cast. but then the first problem pops up. how do you make guards reliable? if we have to get charges, the guard skill cannot be relied on for defending and players still would do better getting out of the way

i would suggest making it in a way that makes guards into a more reactive skill

no charge usage.

base duration is 3 seconds max and cannot be increased by any way.

can take damage amount is buffed by 3-4 times if manually cast.

if at least 50% of this unbuffed damage amount was consumed by the end of the guard skill, the cooldown is decreased by 1 seconds

if the damage amount was totally consumed before going into cooldown, the cooldown is decreased by 2 seconds

the reasoning here is that if your absorption was utilized to 50-100% it means you were really taking time tanking a huge hit. and as a reward for being brave, you get to tank another hit sooner.

if the damage absorption utilized was less than 50% it means you timed wrongly or the encounter is too easy for you, thus you dont get any cooldown bonus.

this works with automated guard too. while automated guard keeps being reused on cooldown, the cooldown will be longer if they were not in danger, so theres a bigger chance of dying if a huge attack slips thru. but if you keep hitting the absorption threshold, it will have more uptime.

the 3x absorption buff for manual guard i believe is warranted as players should not be abusing guard skills in the future. GGG should just rework guard skills so that if on cooldown, pressing the shortcut does nothing. not even moving the character.

the entire point of contention GGG has with guard skills stem from player abuse.