I am the worst Guardian! Please help

klixan · May 2013

I have come to the sad conclusion that I am the worst Guardian in Neverwinter. I have managed to level up to 20, but in all that time I have never once used Block, in fact, I don't really know how to use block or when to use it in a battle.

I know, I know, everybody point and laugh, but if I could get some tips on exactly how to play this class I would be extremely grateful.

So far, I just lunge at the strongest enemy and cleave it to death, while chugging pots like crazy. Needless to say, I'm really struggling and I've died numerous times.

So please, someone take pity on me and give me some advice. How do you play your Guardian? What skill rotations do you use? When/how do you use block? And anything else you think might be helpful.

Thanks muchly.

PS: I forgot to mention, I mostly play solo.

dragon47 · May 2013

First off, I'm hoping you have your companion out, it's the cleric, and she's trained up. :-)

After you charge in, use your taunt (not sure of the name... I'm at work and don't have access). It's AOE, so it should draw anything in the vicinity to you. What I do at this I is use Cleave and the at will shield skill, interposing my other attacks as I can, including reapplying the taunt as it comes off cooldown.

For the more difficult mobs, I will go into Guard. When you do so and keep Shift pressed, your at will attacks will change. Your left button will now attack over your shield and increase threat, the right button will shield stab, which helps rebuild your Guard meter. If you see a red circle at your feet, or the mob animating a big swing, press your Shift key and hold it until the mob settles back down, when you can release it and regain some Guard stamina back.

Also, get into some skirmish and dungeon now and learn your role in group settings... Cloak Tower and the Crypts are rather fun, challenging and, from what I understand, a bit more forgiving than later excursions. Above all, have fun. I have played tanks since I started playing MMO's and, quite frankly, I've had more fun here than any other game since I left EQ about 8 years ago. :-)

aetam1 · May 2013

Hi

Companion
First you should use a companion. You get one fore free at lvl 16 and you should pick the cleric. You summon your companion by pressing c, switching to the companion tab and pressing the summon button. If you chose a different companion you might want to go back and buy a cleric for 2 gold. It really helps a lot.

Block
As dragon47 mentioned you can actually attack while blocking. Your left button will be a stab over the shield and your right button will be a shield bash that recovers a bit of your guard meter. Once your guard meter reaches zero your block is broken.
You should block an attack that produces a red circle. Further some mobs have hard hitting single attacks. You might want to watch out for those and raise your shield in time. Or you can simply always block as long as you have a guard meter left. Just hold shift an stab them to death

Abilities
As encounters you can just use your first 3, they are pretty good. The charge is your main movement tool but do not hesitate to use it in close combat simply to do damage. The next skill will be your aoe taunt. It does decent dmg and it helps keeping mobs of your cleric companion. Griffins wrath will be a nice single target dmg and once you put points in it you gain even more charges meaning you can use it more often. The stun is very short but it interrupts. If you see an enemy using a potion, scroll or sometimes casts use griffins wrath. You can also use it simply to do dmg.

Tactics
Choose the strongest mob of the group and charge it. Use your aoe taunt next to prevent the adds from swarming your cleric. Now start with killing the trash mobs first. While they do have low hp they will do normal dmg in my experience. If your health drops too fast or you see special attacks coming your way use block. Just hold shift and keep attacking while you block. If you run out of block just smash your shield in a few faces and continue to block.
You might want to drop block a few times to use our encounters. And dont forget your daily in stronger fights or just to speed things up a bit.

I hope that helps

murdoche · May 2013

I stumbled upon all this just by playing the game and ironically, i think im rather good at a guard lol Since I got my companion who i did make a cleric(woot go me) i've never gotten lower than 1/8th of my health dropped. Cleric comes in handy for that.
What I will suggest is that you check out your skills. Hitting the C and 2nd tab i believe. This is all the skills you can use. Up till you've abused 20 points in your skills(meaning only up to 2 levels of the skill) you cant hit that 3rd level. After that its all gravy. You can switch up what at-will attacks you have by click/drag method to the combat bar. I tend to go for the more powerful ones, bit slower mind you but they make a huge difference too.
Also your q e r skills, you want to arrange them for you, granted mine are set up as they came available the way I want. q is the rush attack, real fun for starting a rumble. E is a power attack and r is my aoe threat. I tend to start a fight with Q, hit up e and then finish with r. At that point the whole group has my attention. The mini bosses I tend to leave till last cause they take a bit more time to kill while the fodder I smack around. And I come back to the mini bosses with q and e then retaught with r and smack them again. This is what works for me honestly.
That red circle, that means hold SHIFT key down(left shift key easy enough to hold with your left pinky finger like typing) as soon as the big word BLOCK comes up, you can start hitting again with either a q e r or at-will attack aka rt mouse or lft mouse. I tend to come out of a block with a power attack. Its really rinse and repeat there. Learn the shift key pretty quickly because that does help. And if you have 1 mini boss or LT with a group of 3 fodder mobs, take down the easy cake ones first then turn to the harder one. I suppose in my mind the mini bosses are considered just elites. not sure what this game actually calls them.

Also remember with the at-will sword attack, if you hold teh mouse down for 3 attacks, normally that last attack is the most powerful of the 3. I tend to hit with sword 3 times and then bash with my shield unless I need to intrupt for a block. The attacking is really smooth and you can flow with it really easy once you get use to it.

Frankly with the dang pugs you find in the dungeon crawls, its almost worthless for me to be a guard tehre, its disorganized and scattered, the morons dont explore every room and miss treasure chests and they all attack without really understanding one bit. Only twice have I been with a competent cleric, rest of the time its with idiots that hack hack hack. One of these days I might find a guild to join but right now is not gonna be the time.

My final suggestion is you to look over your character, go back to a lower level area and start playing with suggestions I and others have made till you feel comfortable. A guard should not be guzzling pots at all, they should be mitigating hits and that block is your main problem right now.

klixan · May 2013

Fantastic advice! Thanks so much guys.

I never even noticed that big red circle before, I was too busy watching my health and cooldowns. Anyway I followed your advice and finally started using block. Wow, what a difference!

I'm still not very good with it, and I often miss-time it, but at least I now know what I should be doing and hopefully, with practice, I'll get better at it.

I do have another question, you mentioned the 'Guard Meter', is this like the health bar? Where is it on the screen? How will I know if it's about to run out?

Again, big thanks for all the help.

rhazael1984 · May 2013

The block meter is on the left of your character. it diminishes when you block damage, when it's fully empty you cannot block till this meter refills (hint it's a light blue bar).

skozen · May 2013

Ever since I hit 10 I rarely drop my guard against enemies. I can take no damage and poke them to death, only going out of guard to unleash a stun followed by some damaging abilitites/AoE taunt. It's rare to have my guard broken against solo content enemies. IMO, if you're not guarding, you're taking damage you don't really need to be. Also, guard only protects you from the front and sides, so try to get all enemies in front of you. This also means you'll hit them all with your at-will stab (while blocking) or cleave. If your guard meter is low and you're only facing one or two foes, use your shield attacks to restore you guard or encounter powers that restore guard. If you're facing many foes it is often better to stab the little guys to death ASAP since it's an AoE and then go back to single-target shield bashing. You take literally 0 damage doing this right against pretty much everything, though you won't kill things as fast if you're only using shield attacks to keep your guard meter up.

If you want to be more aggressive just save your block for red circles/obvious wound-up attacks. You'll take damage but you'll be fine with a hireling healer.

gravityx19 · May 2013

Saw the level, posting from a previous reply to another thread:

At level 20, you are missing some of the base tools that will help you in end game tanking, but the above person is correct. Once you hit 35 (where tanking truly starts to matter) Threatening Rush combined with Mark and the passive that makes Mark generate threat will make your tanking live so much easier. Also what you may need to realize is the following (said this many times):

- Guardian is a bit lackluster at the earlier instances and zones. What I would suggest doing is not focusing on trying to tank everything, but tanking the mobs with the grey border on their HP or the big *** looking mobs. The small trash will get AoE'd down without issue and should be able to be face tanked by anyone (including your cleric). Once I started to learn this and focus on this, the instances became so much easier to deal with.

dragon47 · May 2013

klixan wrote: »

Fantastic advice! Thanks so much guys.

I never even noticed that big red circle before, I was too busy watching my health and cooldowns. Anyway I followed your advice and finally started using block. Wow, what a difference!

I'm still not very good with it, and I often miss-time it, but at least I now know what I should be doing and hopefully, with practice, I'll get better at it.

I do have another question, you mentioned the 'Guard Meter', is this like the health bar? Where is it on the screen? How will I know if it's about to run out?

Again, big thanks for all the help.

It's like anything... You'll get better at it with practice. I was pretty much in the same boat. First couple of dungeons I did, I got really frustrated with all the ping-ponging going on (bosses moving between different group members). Some of this could have been other group members getting a little over enthusiastic, but I'm sure a lot of it was me also. Once I got the hang of keeping the shield up as much as I could, it got much easier to tank the boss. Now, it's not unusual for me to be #1 on damage taken (sign that you're tanking effectively) and to not have to move around so much.

Keep at it... It quite a rush to get through a dungeon or skirmish and know that you contributed heavily to its success.

klixan · May 2013

Honestly, I can't believe the incredible difference using Block has made to my gameplay. I decided to re-roll from scratch, to really try to learn how to play the class, and this play-through is so much better than my first.

The Guardian has suddenly gone from being the hardest and most frustrating class to play, to now being my favorite. I'm enjoying it even more than my Cleric.

I've never played an action game like this before and for some stupid reason, I thought Block was a passive stat (like Defense). It just never occurred to me that you had to actively BLOCK.

Anyway, now that I'm finally learning how to play the class, I'm having a blast with it!

Big thanks to everybody who replied. You guys rock!

icy8s · May 2013

Also the block STAB mechanic is better than cleave. It hit pretty much everything in the front of you in a fairly sizable arc. It does more dmg then cleave. At 50 i never use cleave anymore.

I am the worst Guardian! Please help

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