Feating a Guardian – Part 1: Survivability

The Soldier Tree

There have been a number of threads on the forums from both new and old players asking, “what is the best way to level a Guardian?”

Many people say that you should level as sword and board Guardian and some that a good polearm provides the better (i.e. faster) path to levelling.

My personal view is that you should use both. It is not difficult to change between your weapon slots and unlike Raids where you are looking to get in some early DPS, with the new irritate ability, there is no real reason for a levelling Guardian to equip a crossbow (or other ranged weapon of choice). With the abundance of multi-action bar UI’s out there, it is also easy to set up your hot-keys for your preferred weapon and allocate a second row of buttons to your secondary weapon.

When I started thinking about playing AoC, I began looking for all the information available out of the beta testing and created my build as soon as the feat calculators were first released pre-launch. This build was focussed on where I saw my role to be – that of a main tank. This build was purely a sword and board build focussed on raid tanking and running instances whenever I was at the right level.

More recently, I have been enjoying tanking Tier 1 raids with a polearm and after a few re-specs; have found what I consider to be a near optimal PvE polearm tanking build. Note that there will always be preferred feats for those who like a little bit of PvP or who are more interested in running instances rather than raiding, but this build works best for me in raiding.

These two builds will be discussed further below, but the first thing I will stress is that in PvE, the soldier tree should be populated first for any of the soldier classes. The feats available through the soldier tree will determine your survivability and amount of down-time in levelling.
What you need for either path:

The first 31 points you will get should be put in your survivability feats. This will mostly target the Soldier Tree and will allow you to use either the polearm or sword and board as required.

While you will not be getting any direct aggro-building abilities, this build will also grant you some of the group tanking abilities you will need by the time you start running 6-man group instances (rather than public instances which can be run as a raid) at around level 30, when you start looking to run Borderlands, Outflow Tunnels and Black Castle…At the early levels, before you learn any Stances, Manoeuvres, Tactics, you will be tanking straight up in Neutral Stance. Most mobs you will come up against will be melee or bowmen, so health regeneration and armour will be your main goal.

01-05: Toughness (Juggernaut - Increased armour and natural health regeneration)
06-10: Recovery (Soldier – Increased natural health regeneration)
11-12: Improved Defensive Stance (Soldier – Required to get Lifesaver)

Level 20 Build

13-15: Improved Defensive Stance (Soldier – Required to get Lifesaver)
16-20: Iron Skin (Soldier – Increased armour)
21-23: Lifesaver (Soldier – Increased natural health regeneration while in Defensive Stance)

From this point, you will spend most of your time in Defensive Stance. While it does slightly reduce your DPS, it will also reduce your downtime and hence allow you to kill more mobs more quickly.

Level 30 Build

24-24: Storm Blade (Tempest - for the additional DPS)
25-25: Cunning Deflection (Soldier – Retaliatory damage for increased initial threat)
26-26: Stone skin (Soldier – Increased protection against magic)
27-27: Ability – Volcanic Rage (Soldier - Increased burst DPS for initial hate generation)
28-31: Stone skin (Soldier – Finish off this ability)From here, you will move away from the Soldier tree as you have all the skills from there required to tank any instance or other group situation.

Level 38 Build

The Choice…

At level 39 you will need to choose whether you go down the path of the sword and board or the polearm Guardian.

Polearm Guardians are capable of tanking all content through to Tier 2. All of the Tier 1 Bosses (Champion of the Honourguard, Kyllikki, Vistrix and Yahkmar) are stationary fights for the Guardian tank and therefore it is quite simple to keep up the Guard combo which is necessary to survive when equipped with a polearm.

Similarly, a vast majority of 6-man instance bosses are stationary targets once positioned. A polearm guardian using a sword and board can easily tank those who aren’t.

Only when you reach Tier 2 raids, with the random fears and a high degree of movement, will you start having trouble applying the Guard combo as required.

My recommendation is therefore to go down the Tempest Tree and keep a good sword and shield handy just in case.

The Polearm Guardian will be the topic of Part 2 of this series with The Sword and Board Guardian following up as Part 3.

Verrence.