The Nimminas Rough Guide to Guardians

[Raedwulf]

Scribal Note: The bulk of this was written by the estimable Gan; back in the days when we hadn't got much past Angmar; though all of the senior Company Guardians stuck their oar in somewhere. Given that the average Guardian can start a fight even if alone in a locked room, you can imagine what it was like having to transcribe this!

The Captain has asked Eikinskjaldi to make some effort towards bringing it up to date. The grumbling started off with "How am I supposed to do that, when circumstances conspire to prevent me keeping in practice? He knows that! Ach..." & went on from there. I should bear this in mind whilst reading!

They Shall Not Pass!
The creed of any lead guardian in a group. Your duty is to keep the enemy's eye fixed upon yourself; keep it blind to all else that moves against it. Almost any other group member is a bigger threat to the enemy than you are; you are outskilled in dealing damage, your ability to bring a foe to a halt is almost nil, and unlike the minstrel, taking you out first does not make the rest of the party any easier to deal with. You have two great assets; durability and perceived threat. You look more dangerous than you are, and you survive longer than you should. Your aim is simple; maximize these assets, and use them to good effect.

There are times when you need not perform this task, since other, better, Guardians will be in the group beside you. In those situations, you are often free to move into Overpower stance, and deploy your full range - such as it is - of offensive skills. The rest of this guide will concern you little while you are in this position; though it may well if you are to employ threat 'juggling' should the need arise. If, however, you do happen to be needed for certain only as melee select your traits to maximize damage output, hit what you are told to hit, and let the main Guardians worry about keeping the group safe from harm.

Durability
There are three ways to lengthen your survival in any fight: get hit less often; make blows you receive less telling; and have higher morale. Ideally, you want to promote all three, but invariably some choices will have to be made. Your equipment and traits will determine what priority you give to each of these methods.

Virtues are many and varied, and which you should prepare depends on what challenges you are to face. Some creatures deal many wounds; others instil fear; still others inflict poison, or disease. The right choice of virtues can give greatly increased resistance to one or other of these threats; if one of them is likely to be predominant, prepare accordingly. If you face all manner of different risks, there is little point in being strong against only one of them, so a more general approach is indicated. That brings you to the stock virtues - those which will increase your total morale, and decrease the damage you take.

Valour, Justice, and Loyalty are the three main virtues to improve morale. Valour and Justice, indeed, do very little else; Loyalty also provides a small boost to power. Innocence - and, to a lesser extent, Zeal - will reduce your vulnerability to melee damage. In most combat scenarios, enemy ranged fire will be dealt in stuns, roots, fear, or other non-violent methods; reducing ranged vulnerability is far less of a priority. Discipline improves might, which in turn improves both your efficacy with the shield and your skill at parrying with a weapon. The more attacks are blocked or parried, the less of them inflict damage. Similary, Determination improves agility which improves evasion.

The preferred combination varies greatly from one Guardian to another. You must find a method which works for you. Remember, though, that having a high enough morale to withstand great damage is less preferable to not taking as much damage in the first place. Less damage inflicted means a given amount of healing will go further, which helps the minstrels in the party to avoid drawing the enemy's gaze; which is, ultimately, your reason for being there.

"Now, that was all true enough when the laddie Gan wrote this. But he retired to Bree a long time ago, and was last seen paring his remaining fingernails with his sword. The nature of The War changed when we moved into Moria. In these later days, it is more true than ever that taking less damage is preferable to having more morale. Firstly, the training of Virtues has not advanced at all. Secondly, the blows of the enemies that you will meet in Moria and beyond grow ever heavier. The result of this is that the mitigations grow ever more important, whilst the absolute value of a Virtue such as Valour diminishes.

You will find elsewhere in this library a treatise dealing with the finer points of Virtues. In brief, from your perspective as a Guardian, Valour is of much lesser worth, the King of Virtues now being Innocence. Justice has ever been valued by many, for reasons I have never been able to fathom, for it is a very poor choice indeed. You will likely want Discipline for its Might bonus; Zeal is attractive for its moderate Melee mitigation; Loyalty & Wisdom are also good choices; Fidelity is redundant in Moria, but useful in the various Dol Guldur encounters where much vile sorcery exists; and depending on the circumstances, Charity, Honour, or Tolerance you may briefly want. Stray from these, though, and you may find your fellows looking askance at you."

Equipment can be chosen to complement your prepared virtues; for instance, if your Determination is high, wear armour that boosts your agility, further improving your ability to evade attacks. Equally, you might prefer to choose your Virtues to favour the areas where your kit is lacking. There are no right answers; we try here simply to get you thinking about what you are doing.

Equipment which improves in-combat regeneration, power, morale and such like, should be considered secondary to that which boosts your five basic abilities (or your melee mitigation); most importantly, the two abilities which are vital to a Guardian, might and vitality. Vitality has the obvious effect of raising morale, but also mitigates against damage of any type other than common; and at the highest levels, much damage that you suffer will be of a type other than common. Might, as mentioned above, increases your ability to block and parry blows, and also mitigates common damage. Agility improves your ability to evade, which is useful, but less so than Might, which boosts two defence options rather than one; moreover boosting those defences that trigger your response skills. Will and Fate cannot be ignored, though they are of lower priority; a Guardian with no power can generate no threat.

Racial traits should be chosen to improve your defences as the highest priority. Many people prepare the racial return ability as standard; in a fellowship, and certainly in a raid, it should be discarded, since you can rely on a party member to summon you, via acorn, summoning post or horn, to wherever you need to be. An oft over-looked point we feel it well worth bringing to your attention. Even the racial zero-power attack is more useful, given that your power may be a scarce commodity in lengthy fights.

[Raedwulf]

Drawing the Gaze
Your duty in combat is not to inflict damage, but to appear threatening. While damage inflicted is welcome, increasing your efficiency in this regard is the very least of your priorities. Do not be too profligate with your attacking skills; power must be conserved in lengthy fights, to ensure your threat generating skills are always available. Your stock attacking skills, in the sense that they add significantly to your threat generation as well as doing damage, are three. Guardian's Ward should be used at least once every ten seconds or so. Although it does not add directly to threat, maintaining the boost to your defences constantly raises the availability of Shield-swipe. Shield-swipe and Vexing Blow both generate threat as well as inflicting damage, so they can be used freely.

Upon successfully parrying a blow, you have the opportunity to inflict deep wounds on the enemy via Thrust, followed by Salt the Wound; or via Overwhelm. Thrust and Overwhelm each allow the use of To The King, if you have it prepared. Whether in fellowship or not, use it whenever you can. The opportunity to open a conjunction should never be ignored, except on explicit order from the group; solo it can still inflict a stun.

A successful block opens up what may be your most important combat skills of all - Bash & Shield-Taunt. These increase your perceived threat to nearby enemies. Some Guardians prefer to Bash (and, if prepared, Shield-Smash) for the stun effect, others prefer to concentrate on taunting the enemy (which we presume, as it does no damage / stun, carries greater threat). The key thing is can you keep the enemy attention? If the other aspects of your modus operandi – equipment, traits, & other skill usage – are sufficiently strong, then the ability to stun (when the block response is available) not only reduces the damage done to the party, it also, if timed correctly, interferes with all enemy induction skills, thus preventing serious debuffs & add summoning from taking place. And, both a plus & a minus, it must be remembered that Shield Taunt is an area effect taunt, whereas Bash is not.

You have two single-target taunts available, of which the mainstay is Fray the Edge. Use it frequently, as it will also slightly increase the chance of conjunctions. The second is the Engage skill, which immediately promotes you to the highest-ranking threat facing the target foe. Use this to tie a specific enemy to yourself, if it has become focused on another member of the party. Since it also reduces the movement speed of the enemy, it enables your fellow to escape immediate harm. It does, however, have a relatively long cooldown. Your other taunts - Challenge, Shield-Taunt, and Litany of Defiance, together with Challenge the Darkness if prepared - are area-based. Ensure that your fellowship knows this; do not let them waste time dazing, instilling fear upon, or otherwise disabling nearby enemies which you will immediately restore to the fray by taunting them. Equally, you must be aware of what is around you & judge whether the timing & postioning are right for you to use AoE skills. Speaking of which, do not forget the threatening property of Whirling Retaliation, which will transfer threat to you from party members within 10 metres.

Should you find yourself as the spare guardian of a party, in Overpower mode, then you are an ideal person, if not the only one, to draw away a troublesome adversary. Not only do you have the best array of skills to attract the attention of a single antagonist, but you are also then the best able to survive for long enough to manoeuvre it to a suitable place. Be alert for this, accordingly. Since you will never contribute to the overall damage output as much as many others, ensure that you are helpful in other ways where possible.

Class Traits
Class traits admit of little variety when guarding a group. Or do they? Now this is where opinions start to differ! The inarguable point is, ignoring solo outings, your function is to generate as much threat as possible. Moreover, the advent of Moria made a great deal of difference to the way in which these are used.

The Keen Blade is, quite simply, your Overpower trait line, and will be dealt with below. For the purpose of drawing enemies' ire down upon you, it is traits from The Fighter of Shadow & The Defender of the Free that will prove most useful to you. There are a number of useful traits in both sets, indeed you may well find that the temptation to use a combination of both means that you will never use the capstone traits. This is not necessarily a bad thing - whilst useful they are, perhaps, not so good as to be worth having 5 of a set. What is of more interest is the bonuses you receive for having 2-4 available. Shadow will improve your power situation and your mitigations the more you equip; Defender directly increases your threat, and eventually shortens the cooldown of Stamp, your interrupt skill, too.

Stoic and Quick of Foot are the best two of Defender, followed by Litany of Challenge and Shield of Fire. If you do equip 4 in this line, including QoF amongst them, you will reduce Stamp Cd by 25s; with the appropriate legacy fully ranked, you can actually reduce the Cd from 1m to 5s. Not to be sniffed at! Some will argue for the merits of Harasser, which turns Vexing Blow into an AOE attack. Opening up with Sweeping Cut and following it up with traited Vexing Blow will gain a group of enemies' full attention without using any taunts, which can then be used as needed. It comes into its own when grabbing aggro in raids where add's spawn in waves and you need to get their attention fast; especially as, traited, it has a mere 4s cooldown, so can be used regularly to keep building threat. On the other hand, you'll never keep that in the face of a determined Champion, let alone a Warden, so it may be better to equip another trait. Also, if you do equip it, DO remember it's now an AoE effect, and that any Legacies that affect AoE skills now affect it too.

However, on the whole, Eikin will argue that Shadow holds the more useful qualities, when causing the enemy maximum annoyance is your aim. The most important is perhaps Threatening Presence, which increases the effect of your shield taunts. Defensive Expertise increases your Armour, though this is less useful the higher you rise (unless you're a regular in The Ettenmoors). Much more importantly, it increases your blocking skills. That, combined with the extra threat, also makes this a must have. Some Guardians will see Selfless Defence in the same light as it reduces the apparent threat that its target poses to the enemy. The downside that makes it unattractive to some is that it does only protect one target. Guardian's Ward improves your common damage mitigation & reduces armour damage. Again, as you rise in expertise, you can argue that this becomes decreasingly useful - money for repairs is plentiful, & monsters doing common damage are rarer. If you are looking for a 4th or 5th Yellow, spare a thought for Final Straw & Controlled Breathing. CB allows Catch A Breath to restore power, as well as improving morale restoration. However, it remains a relatively small boost with a one minute cooldown. FS raises the chance that Fray the Edge will trigger a conjunction quite significantly.

Stoic, which adds a decent bonus to Vitality & to mitigations, & QoF are probably the most useful class traits, as they are just as useful with Keen Blade. Defensive Expertise & Threatening Presence are ones you will definitely want when you are the groups main guard, beyond that you will develop your own favourites.

Legendary traits are seven in number; two of them relate directly to your perceived threat, and two provide an extra method of attack. Nowadays, there are also the capstone traits. However neither Blue nor Yellow are especially useful, and the Red is not germane here.

Guardian's Threat increases your perceived threat by fully one-fifth (28% if you have 4 Blue traits), altogether and all the time. However it is a toggle skill - in other words, it will switch off your Defence (Block) / Parry / Overpower stance - and can therefore actually interfere with your threat generation, since it will reduce the incidence of your trigger skills (never mind that you'll also get hit more!). Challenge the Darkness combines two effects, that of a Challenge cry and the boosting effects of Guardian's Ward. It is a handy emergency alarm switch if your cries are unavailable and you need to draw the enemy's fire in a hurry. Shield-Smash enables you to throw two successive stunning attacks with your shield; the advantage of which is that you need not use both on the same target. Being able to stun two foes for three seconds each has great use. To the King adds a further attack to your parry-response chain, the chief benefit of which is that upon a critical hit it triggers a conjunction. Challenge the Darkness is certainly the least useful of these four traits; the crucial point to remember is that - while it is not useful most of the time - on those few occasions when you do need it, you need it very badly indeed. Any of the other options will generally be more useful more often, but rob you of an emergency measure. Your choice.

[Raedwulf]

Take the Lead
Threat perception works in two ways. Not only are you doing your utmost to keep yours high, but you need your fellows to do what they can do keep theirs low. Moreoever, your chief skill for threat generation depends upon a successful block, which you cannot achieve if nothing is attacking you. If your fellows know nothing else about the path of the Guardian, ensure that they know this: it is far easier for you to keep the enemy's attention, than to draw it away. Ideally you should have the enemy to yourself until you have used Shield-Taunt at least once. Should its gaze then be drawn by another within the party, you must do all in your power to pull it back; but your fellows should be assisting you. A hunter or champion who draws threat by deploying his most deadly attacks should desist from using any more of them until he is no longer the focus of attention. The burden is yours to carry, but do not accept the refusal of any other to help lighten it. If you are to do your job most efficiently, then they must make their contribution.

The Lonely Sentinel
Now then, I have done my best with what was there before, out-of-practice though I be. But creating mayhem under the Red Mist is something I have come to love, and the laddie Gan said naught of that, so perhaps I can add something useful...

It is perfectly possible to solo in a Blue / Yellow line. I have done it often enough! But these days it is the Keen Blade (or Club, just at the moment) to which I turn most often. In truth, I rarely bother to change it even if I do find a little company. Although it is more difficult to keep the undivided attention of the foe, in smaller groups it is usually enough that you mostly can keep its eye on you, and there's the tricks of your trade that mean that you can always draw them back, so it works well enough.

Of course, if this is to yer taste, then you'll be dispensing with your shield whilst you're at it. Nor will the glittering belt that draws the enemy eye do you much good. A red belt of war will you be wanting to help lay him low. Finally, if you are puissant as you can be, then you will want the best of weapons - what was good enough in Moria, you will find dull & unhandy when it is the hordes of Gol Guldur that you are facing. Since you will be seeking to Overpower them, it is obvious which legacies will serve you best - those that improve damage, not those that increase threat, and certainly nothing that aids your shield work!

Once you have secured the arms that you require, traits are straightforward enough. It is simpler to say that I have never felt the need to use Blocking Force, Strong Lungs seems peculiarly pointless, and a second glance at Stinging Blow will show you how little it is worth. Therefore use the other 5 & equip the capstone too, since what you desire is to wreak as much destruction as possible. I invariably keep Stoic & QoF, with the advantage that you do get a bonus to Shield threat, should you need to suddenly switch.

A word on the use of Sting. This is our anti-corruption skill & is a trifle peculiar, since the effect is delayed 10s from the blow itself. However, it is well worth using often, since the delayed effect will remove a corruption that has arisen after the blow was made. As for the traited version, I see no point shortening the Cd from 6.2s to 3.2s when it takes 10s to actually activate.

There's little else for me to say, except that Overpower works perfectly well in groups if you are not expecting to be the lead guardian. Whilst you cannot match a Champion or a Hunter in the damage you deal, you can nevertheless make a significant contribution. If the presence of an Overpowering Guardian makes fights a little longer, you bring other qualities, such as durability, the ability to protect the less well armoured from the attentions of the foe, and even, frankly, just allowing the lead to take a rest for a few precious seconds! We have raided Barad Guldur with no less than 6 Guardians in the group and not only did we quite happily defeat Durchest, we actually made it to Morgaraf & Cargaraf for the very first time. Which only goes to show...

In the Service of The West,

The Guardians of the Company of the White Tower

[Raedwulf]

And that's another one up-to-date. As always, any comments, feel free...

[Hirion]

Thank you for a very nice an enlightning read!

It's been especially useful to me who've *slaps own wrist* level to 65 without more than a handful of tanking experiences at most. And out of those half proved to be the frustrating kind - often finding myself very underpowered and missing my warden (on which tanking is now recalled as a dream). I think some of that is related to something you also mention in your article - guardians are good at keeping on top of the threat list, whereas a warden in my experience can sit back and slowly bide his time by letting his threat grow - if it is frustrating when fellow-members attack too soon or too hard on a warden, as you have no forced taunt, then you can at least still work up your threat, whereas if a guardian is unlucky on not getting any response skills during a forced taunt, can do little but wait for the next option at forcing something on him to get those precious block or parry events.

As for comments I have spent a lot of time in Overpower, full-fledged Keen Blade red haze, in fact using the two traits ruled out by you, Blocking Force and Deep Lungs, instead finding the two parry-related traits less usefull. And instead of the two blues I've been using two yellows, namely Controlled Breathing and Brave Heart - together these four give a nice steady flow of morale and power from both Catch a Breath and a fast turn-over in using the long term 'emergency' cool-downs (which compared to other classes is really not that long-term at all, ranging from 3 minutes to 7 minutes on Warrior's Heart, Pledge and Deep Breath).

However... I'll have to add that my build is based on having done a lot of skirmishes - a LOT - and that means that there will be more than just me competing for threat (my soldier, Warrior, and allied NPCs) meaning I'll get less parries or even at times prefer on of my allies to do some of the off-tanking. It also means I have no idea what waits around the corner - or rather what might come storming my way - so a steady flow of those emergency skills makes me more durable in the more 'interesting' counter-attacks.

Having said that, this build depends on the synergy of those four traits and I've just realised that one of them, Brave Heart, has been somewhat broken in the recent level 64 skill upgrade of the associate skill, so I'll be trying out your recommendations and I'll advice people to hold back on my own suggestion.

[Raedwulf]

As for comments I have spent a lot of time in Overpower, full-fledged Keen Blade red haze, in fact using the two traits ruled out by you, Blocking Force and Deep Lungs, instead finding the two parry-related traits less usefull. And instead of the two blues I've been using two yellows, namely Controlled Breathing and Brave Heart - together these four give a nice steady flow of morale and power from both Catch a Breath and a fast turn-over in using the long term 'emergency' cool-downs.

The flip side of that coin, though, is that you need that steady flow of morale & power - your mitigations are down, so you're taking more damage; your fights are taking longer, so you're taking even more damage & using more power. In most fights, I don't even use Force Opening, and I certainly don't use it often enough to feel that a 6s / 28% shorter Cd is going to bring me much benefit. I'm not saying you're wrong, by any means. In theory, what you propose is certainly sound enough. It's one of those where it comes down to playstyle. I've never acquired the knack of getting pets to tank when playing an LM, but it's a perfectly viable way of doing things, for example.

[Hirion]

Could you elaborate on the bit with fights taking longer?

[Raedwulf]

With that combination, you've lost your attack buff from Quickness, and your interrupt skill is signifcantly less available. The latter means you'll receive more stuns, summoned enemies, mobs will heal themselves & others, heavier induction-based attacks are more likely to succeed, etc.

[Culler]

I though this would be the right place to post this. I apologise if not :)

I wanted to demonstarte something I have seen with the Guardian skill 'Whirling Retaliation'. Firstly, it seems like it transfers a flat amount of threat from all fellowship members to the guardian (as opposed to a small %), Secondly, the attack is multi-target and does not have to actually hit the mob for threat to be transfered. Thirdly, it does not seem to have a 10m range as suggested by the skill description. Please see the following youtube video for a demo (720p helps to see what is going on)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcOBZ6DiW1w

To sumarise, whirling retaliation is (IMO) one of the best guardian skills for multi-mob tanking. This is because it is is multi-target skill, does goodly damage to tragets in range, has a significant threat transfer component from nearby mobs, and can cause a wound.

[Eiyja]

great guide :) I´d say especially useful for guardians who do not know the full spectra of traits available in the traiting tree and the skills tied to them.

One never learns as much as when one experiments first handed, but this gives a solid ground of facts to build that self earned experience upon. Well done I say!

[Awerth]

I would like too add a small part about guardians agro passing, if you have two guards you can use threat mode switching, it is very simple, main tank grabs mob and starts agroing as much as possible, when secondary tank needs to come in thry use engage then hit threat stance making them 20% more annoying than the main tank now the main tank can keep agroing and when the. Secondary tank wants to drop ahro they just switch out of threat stance, giving threat back they also keep building threat too, when switching. Back just hit threat stance again and ypu can flick agro back and forth every few seconds rsther than waiting for challenge or enga%es cool down.