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Guardianism 101 or How To Play A Guardian

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Guardianism 101 or How To Play A Guardian Empty Guardianism 101 or How To Play A Guardian

Post  Dreadd Sun Sep 06, 2009 3:42 am

Guardianism 101

Step 1: Denoobification-

You have made a Guardian, and now you are ready to take on the world, right? Wait, step back, put the big club down and listen. There are some things you should know about Guardians before you begin.

So, what does it mean to be a Guardian? There are several things it can mean, but we will only be looking at the traditional Guardian, lovingly known as the tank. Perhaps later, someone with more experience (hint NaughtySauce) can teach you about the wonderful world of Battle Guardians, but not me.

To be a Guardian, you are the core of the party. If you die, the party will either follow you into oblivion, or scatter in the face of the furious monsters. You are the one that directs the party through dungeons, since there is no point in fighting mobs that your Guardian cannot tank effectively. You are the savior of Pagans and Oracles alike, by virtue of your talents for attracting a monster’s attention. The party should follow the Guardian, not the other way around.

Also, there is no ‘rule’ about this, but it is my opinion that the Guardian should also be the party leader. This is my reasoning: the Guardian should have final say as to the structure of the party. If I am the one out there getting mercilessly beat on by various bloodthirsty critters, I want to have the people I choose helping me out. If there is a party member not doing his or her job, such as an Oracle not healing, a Warrior or Assassin not protecting the casters, or a Pagan not attacking, kick them to the curb. As a Guardian, especially at higher levels, people would love to be in your party, since they won’t be taking the damage. This allows you to be picky.

Furthermore, if you do die, which is pretty rare, the rest of the party will most likely die too. They can then leader resurrect to you, and you can lead them back to wherever you were when you were killed and exact your bloody revenge.

A Guardian is not a Warrior. True, by using alternate builds and specific lapis, you can create a Battle Guardian which works similar to a Warrior, although I wouldn’t personally recommend this to anyone unfamiliar to the class. As a Guardian, it is not your job to inflict damage on the monsters you will face. Leave that to the Pagans and Warriors. Your job is to protect your valuable damage dealers.

So how do you protect your damage dealers? Simple. The Guardian is allotted skills which work in tandem with that specific purpose. As a Guardian, your skills are the lifeline of the party. Your Taunt skill will keep monsters stuck to you like glue, allowing Pagans to strike ruthlessly. If a monster does escape your Taunt, you have various tools at your disposal to regain the errant monster’s attention such as Panic, Curse Raid, or Arouse Blow. We will delve into skills in a moment however.

The most important part of being a Guardian, is understanding how to ‘shape’ the mobs. Its all fine and good to run around and gather them up and Taunt them, but by doing so, you will have monsters that attack your damage dealers as soon as they strike. First and foremost, the biggest thing you need to learn as a Guardian is once you have the mobs gathered up, step into them before Taunting. This is critical, as the range of Taunt, especially at low levels, is short. The tighter you can crowd the monsters together before Taunt, the better chance it has to work successfully. I find the easiest way to do this is to run past all the monsters you want to gather, wait until they are at your back slavering for your blood, then take a step or two backwards. That will give your Taunt the utmost effectiveness when used.

Don’t be discouraged if some ‘leakers’ get away. They almost always do. If you use the skills Panic or Curse Raid to try and bring them back, it will take a few seconds at best. Arouse Blow works well, and immediately, IF you can hit with it. The best solution is to explain to your party that if a monster charges them while you are tanking, they should run TO you. That way, not only are they bringing the monster back in range for you to try and aggro again, but they are also placing the monster back inside the ‘damage zone’ created by the rest of your party.

Another critical thing to keep in mind when playing a Guardian – when tanking monsters that have AoE attacks, pull them far enough away from your casters that the Pagans and Oracles are not caught in the AoE. Ideally, if you know the monsters ahead have an AoE attack, pull them completely out of range of the Pagan’s farthest attack. Once they are Taunted, the Pagan can then attack from his or her greatest range, usually keeping them clear of any AoE of the monsters.

That is all for the Denoobification section. Next installment – Builds!!

Dreadd
Dreadd

Posts : 59
Join date : 2009-08-29
Age : 48
Location : Houston, TX

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Guardianism 101 or How To Play A Guardian Empty Guardianism 101, Part 2: Builds

Post  Dreadd Thu Sep 10, 2009 3:55 am

This is simple for a Normal Mode Guardian. As a Normal Mode Guardian, you will not have the luxury of enough stat points to play around with. I recommend that you simply dump all of your stat point into Rec. This will allow you to have a high enough defense, and enough hit points, to be able to tank well for parties throughout the game, whether questing around the various maps, or delving deep into the dank, dark dungeons. Any other placement of points for NM Guardians is a waste of points. As a Guardian, you will be sought out by parties, pagans, and oracles for your aggro skills and high defense. If you skimp on the Rec, then your defense and aggro skills suffer, and you will find yourself partyless very fast, not to mention insulted by every pagan or oracle that parties with you.

For Hard Mode, again I recommend putting all your stat points into Rec. This will simply allow you to tank in tougher places at lower levels, thus increasing the amount of experience you will gain per mob, which is a very nice trade off considering the increased amount of experience needed for levelling in Hard Mode. Granted, you could build your Guardian 5 Rec 2 Wis every level, which would increase your magic resistance. That is a good thing. But on the other hand, most monsters you face through the first 30 levels or so, at least, do not have much of a magical attack to speak of. The magic resist actually begins to come into play heavily around the time you start venturing into Kalamus' House (a little) on map 2, more heavily in places such as Fantasma's Lair/Aidion Neckria. The mobs there have fairly significant magical attacks, and if you skimp on the resist, they will hurt you. To compensate for this, I stand by my recommendation for a full Rec build, but it is also important to throw a few Wis/Resist duals and Rec/Resist duals into your gear. This will make it to where magical attacks don't hit as hard.

For Ultimate Mode, my Guardian build was, once again, full Rec. By Ultimate Mode, you have enough points per level to try new things if you so choose, but I wanted my Guardian to be virtually invincible and incredibly resistant to damage. With a full Rec build, and a few pieces of high quality gear, I can easily tank anything red or below. Green mobs don't even enter my threat radar. One other thing to be said about Ultimate Mode Guardians - if you were to choose to make a Battle Guardian (which I personally have yet to do), I would definitely wait until Ultimate Mode to do so, since in UM your stat point amount per level is maximized. The more stat points you have the better, when approaching a class with a non-standard build.
Dreadd
Dreadd

Posts : 59
Join date : 2009-08-29
Age : 48
Location : Houston, TX

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Guardianism 101 or How To Play A Guardian Empty Tee Hee

Post  Dreadd Tue Sep 29, 2009 7:55 pm

This is a placeholder for something cool i'm gonna post as soon as i figure out the formatting.
Dreadd
Dreadd

Posts : 59
Join date : 2009-08-29
Age : 48
Location : Houston, TX

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