Arathaert's Guardian Guide

[Arathaert]

Do you need essence gear? Depends on what you wanna do. It’s possible to have respectable stats and tank t1 stuff on instance-drop gear. But for really good dps or for tanking t2 stuff… yeah you need it. Good news is that it doesn’t take very long to get 4-slot essence pieces nowadays, and running the epic battles to get your jewelry will net you a nice amount of good essences too.

Just a bit of general tips and knowledge:

• Do the math! Remember that your goal is the raw stat, rather than the general one. If you're going for DPS, you could go Physical Mastery or Masterful Might - do the math and you realize that Masterful Might gets you more Physical Mastery. Do the math!
• You don't need the best. The Dol Amroth armour is still excellent, as is Osgiliath, and even crafted essence armour. Is the top raid gear the best? Yeah. But you can spend a few hours picking flowers and get similar results. If you want to go for the best, go for it, but don't feel that you have to.
• Measure things by essences. For example, let's say you've got a virtue slotted that gives you 500 morale. If you use Discipline, it basically gives you an essence's worth of physical mastery instead. Then you free up that essence slot for a morale essence, which gives more than the virtue did. Make sense?
• Don't freak out about supreme essences. Yes, they're better. But the difference is small and unless you're crazy about min/maxing your gear, it's not worth it. I do just fine with mostly greater essences. Note: Since the t8 essences came out, this advice might not be stupendous. I'm lazy with essences, though, as you'll see in a sec, and I've done just fine.
• Try and group essences together. It's easier to swap in armour pieces for different situations that way. I use a swap helm - I have one with evade on it, one with physical mastery and a couple with mits on them for the moors. Makes it easy to match my build to the situation.

Most guardians have two primary roles: dps and tanking. You’ll pretty much want to make two full sets of armour and jewelry - one for tanking, one for dps - and swap out as needed. (Start with whatever you’re gonna use most). The nice thing about grouping your essences is that it makes this super easy to do.

If I’m doing just straight dps on something comparatively easy, then I go with all the physical mastery pieces. If I run into issues I can try again, swapping in different pieces until I can do what I’m trying to do. I might swap in my evade helm. Or maybe my mitigation bracelet. You get the idea. By grouping your essences, you can customize your build on the fly for whatever the situation is calling for.

A good idea to start with is getting something that’ll serve you well in both dps and basic tanking stuff. For jewelry, focus on what you tend to do most first.

Just to give you an idea of one way to build your first essence armour pieces, here's one build I used back at lvl 100. I intended it as a survival dps build, and worked pretty well for tanking basic stuff too (all other jewelry is Hammerhand DPS stuff). This was my first essence armour build and it served me quite well for just about anything I came across:



Since then, I've changed things up a wee tiny bit, and here's what I generally run around the landscape wearing. I use this for DPS, questing and tanking easy instances:



You'll note I'm still wearing largely lvl 100 gear. You'd be correct. I've really not found a need to make a lot of changes on my DPS build. Stuff still dies in a few hits on landscape, and if I'm in a group I'm usually tanking anyway, so I've not bothered. Also I've been really busy getting married and stuff lately, so.... yeah.

If you wanna be tanking T2 stuff, you'll need an actual good tanking build. With recent instances especially, a lot of morale will help, but don't go for empty morale at the cost of avoidances, crit defence or mitigations! There are thousands of guards out there with more morale than I have, but I've had more than a few healers tell me I'm very easy to heal, and that's because of the things I have other than morale. Here's what I generally use for tanking - I'm an example of the fact that you don't NEED the absolute best stuff to get things done:



Is it the best? Heck no! Is there room for improvement? Absolutely! But it works for me for now, and I'm able to tank T2 things perfectly fine.

As you can see, there’s a lot of freedom to build how you want, and there are a lot of ways to Get Stuff Done in LOTRO.

[Arathaert]

NOTE: The info below has not been updated. I played in the Moors for a while, but the imbalance made it kind of boring - there's no way a lowly r7 Guard should be able to survive 3-5 creeps for as long as I could. It was fun, yeah, but lost the appeal after a whiles. I prefer a challenge. I've not been out to the Moors on either side in a good long whiles, partially because of time constraints. There is probably more updated information than the below, but my input on Guardian PvP is no longer up-to-date. I recommend poking around on YouTube for building and traiting ideas.

Guardians in the 'Moors are absolute beasts. A well-built, well-played Guardian can wreak total havoc on a group of creeps. And if you’re in a group of freeps, you’ll almost always be the last to die. Get used to being even awesomer than you already are.

Of course, that’s all based on the “well-built, well-played” thing :P So let's get started.

Just for reference, here’s the suggested stats from earlier (which might change come U16.2):

Morale: 25k+ (this will increase with rank, ideally to 30k+)

Phys Mastery: 45-50k+

Parry: 25%

Critical Rating: 25% <- ditto on the importanto

Critical Defence: 50%+

Resistance: 25%

Finesse: 25%

Physical Mitigation: overcapped enough to get your Orc-craft/Fellwrought mitigations over 60%)

Tactical Mitigation: 60%

And here’s a screenie of what I’m using at the moment (morale is about 25.5k with no rank buffs):



The trio of most important stats for you out there are your critical rating, your mitigations and your critical defence. They’ll all help keep you alive, and critical rating leads to nice hits too. My crit rating is just barely off cap and I expect I’ll get it there with a few tiny LI relic upgrades and finishing up getting my stat tomes.

I’m far from the best in the moors, but here’s a few tidbits I’ve learned:

• Watch guardian pvp videos on youtube. Seriously. See what other people are doing, watch what skills they’re using and when. Study who they target first. Try to learn something from every video you watch.
• Run solo. Yes, you can group. But you’ll learn far more about your abilities by running around by yourself than you will sittin’ in a raid and spreading bleeds ‘til either all the creeps die or your raid wipes and you’re the last man to go. I’m aiming for at least half my kills to be solo (k:kb of 2:1).
• Don’t worry about dying. It’ll happen. A lot. Get used to it. You’ll want a stack of hope tokens, but don’t worry about making sure you’re buffed to the teeth every time you step out of the rez. Guards are in a good enough spot that you really don’t need all that. I usually tend to just use a hope token if I think of it, the 5% man morale buff when it’s available and I know stuff’s about to happen, and sometimes stuff from da hobbits. But really - don’t worry about it.
• Get positional damage. If you’re behind the creep you’re fighting, it can’t block or parry your attacks. Also, Stagger will apply if you use it behind the creep. Fights in the moors are constant battles for positional damage.
• Learn situational awareness. I often see videos of folks looking almost straight down on their character. I’m guilty of it myself sometimes. Turn the camera so you can see what’s going on around you. Is anyone else coming toward the fight? Are you gettin’ pulled toward creep oneshotters? Is there a lowbie defiler hiding and healing your target? Be aware.
• Learn to mouse turn and use keybinds for your skills. I covered this earlier in the guide, but it bears repeating. It sucks to relearn if you have to, but it’s far superior in terms of mobility and being able to fire off skills quickly.
• Handy tip - if you wanna scout a keep without actually going in, ride up next to it (in the “elbow” corner) and hit F9. This will target any unstealthed players nearby. Of course, this won’t work so well if you’re with folks - you’ll have to Shift+F9 to toggle through. And it won’t show stealthed wargs or burrowed spiders. But it’s a lil bit more information that you can use.

TRAITING FOR PVP

There are two main thoughts on traiting in the moors. One is to go nutso survivability:

This build is insane and rather overpowered. Your main survival skills here are the Bring on the Pain heal and a traited up Warrior’s Heart. The power restore helps in long fights, and To the King is adds a nice bit of dps. Just a tip - use Bring on the Pain as your go-to heal, rather than Warrior’s Heart, because of the cooldown. If you pop Warrior’s heart first, 1 minute later you’ve only got 1 heal at your disposal. If you do Bring on the Pain, 1 minute later, both heals are up. You could go even more survival-oriented with a build like http://www.lotrottp.lotrostatus.com/l.php?c=2zs, but in my experience I tended to have power issues in long fights with that build. That being said, it’s quite nice

The other school of thought on traiting in the moors is that Guardian’s really don’t need that Bring on the Pain heal to function well - especially true in groups. Instead, you can focus on single-target damage and a nice Overwhelm -> To the King -> Hammer Down finishing combo that often takes creeps by surprise, especially healers who think they have a lil more time than they do. Here’s what that looks like:

I mostly use this build - I don’t trait for Thrill of Danger because most times it’s not needed. Just pop a power pot early in a long fight and you’ll often be able to use another before you run out. And besides, in the moors you’ll usually either end up victorious or dead by then anyway. :P

Another thing to consider is how to adjust your armour in groups. If you’re the primary dps class in the group, go deep red. Take off your audacity gear and put on your dps gear, but keep enough morale that you don’t look squishy - aim for 30k and creeps’ll usually leave you for last. In my dps gear with a couple outposts and a hope token and man 5% buff I can hit 70k physical mastery and 30k morale pretty easily, and still keep decent mits to absorb any aoe damage flying around. With the kind of damage you’re pumping out in a build like that, you can put a real hurt on an creep raid.

If there’s plenty of dps in your group, you might be more help running as a cc class, believe it or not. Trait full yellow, dipping into red for damage purposes, something like:

In yellow, you can still do a respectable amount of damage in groups (again, with dps gear). But you’ll also be slowing and debuffing the creeps to within an inch of their lives. Flip to red line before the fight and hit brutal charge. Then pop back to yellow line, run into the middle of the creep raid, hit war-chant and laugh. Get behind a target, mark it with take to heart, Stagger, Engage, War-chant again. Your debuffs will all be permanent and the poor creep will look like it’s running through molasses. Then use your AoE skills to spread those debuffs and go to town. When stun immunity wears off, pop cataclysmic shout for yet another multi-target stun. You won’t do a ton of damage in yellow out there, but if there’s plenty of that to go around already you’ll be helping your mates. And it’s fun too!

CONCLUSION

Hopefully this Guardian Guide helped you! If it did, feel free to share it with your kinnies and friends. And if you've got any questions or comments, just let me know! The Guardian forums here are filled with excellent players and helpful folks - if you have a question, rest assured that you'll almost certainly find an answer.

Many thanks to the other Guards that helped inform and inspire this guide, especially Oaceen, Zonflux, ChromiteSwiftpaw and countless others. As the game continues to mature and as I learn things, I'm sure I'll be updating it again.

Peace,

Arathaert

[Arathaert]

*phew* that's done ... for now! Updated info on just about everything, including tanking and dps trait lines. Added new info on Mounted Combat, Legendary Items and Imbuement, Gearing Up at Cap and PvP.

[balmy_balmy]

FANTASTIC WORK! Thanks a lot!

Tomorrow will have plenty of reading to do!

[Galiodoc]

Thanks for the hard work on this, Arathaert! I'll certainly be sending kinnies (especially newer Guards) here.

I've been running very similar builds to yours and had one PvMP comment to share. The past couple of weeks I've been running with an essence build in the Moors instead of a 4 + 2 audacity/essence build. I've found the survival outcomes about the same, but really like the advantage of flexibility with the essence set to swap out gear as needed (for example, morale pants for physical mastery pants in heavy damage situations). We'll have to see how they compare in 16.2 though.

[Arathaert]

Thanks for the hard work on this, Arathaert! I'll certainly be sending kinnies (especially newer Guards) here.

I've been running very similar builds to yours and had one PvMP comment to share. The past couple of weeks I've been running with an essence build in the Moors instead of a 4 + 2 audacity/essence build. I've found the survival outcomes about the same, but really like the advantage of flexibility with the essence set to swap out gear as needed (for example, morale pants for physical mastery pants in heavy damage situations). We'll have to see how they compare in 16.2 though.

From what I've seen from Bullroarer, the audacity essence armour is a no-brainer.

[Moriosi]

Thanks Arathaert, excellent update. I've already put a link to it on our kin page

[Arathaert]

Thanks Arathaert, excellent update. I've already put a link to it on our kin page

Awesome! Glad it helped



Also - updated to include hidden T2 mitigations info.

[HacyHo]

Hey Everyone,

I need some help from the very knowledgable Guard community here on the forums. My kin and I struggle pretty mightily with the T2 Osg instances. We regularly wipe on trash pulls and have been able to finish SL and RC a tiny handful of times only after 3+ hours and many, many wipes per run. I'm not sure if it is my stats or other issues (I know that I can't show my actual tanking but I basically do the same as other Guards I see in videos of the T2s and I can keep aggro easily with the occasional pull by the healer or DPS, however, I can recover those pretty easily). By the way, I always have to keep the pulls as small as possible and must use Juggernaut and Warrior's Heart on almost every pull or I will die and then, of course, we wipe.

Just a note on the Vitality Essences: I'd rather put morale there but I use them to have some fate to recover power. Each pull (even trash mobs) takes so long that I, and the DPS, have power issues and having these slotted seems to help.

Another note on the Crit Essence: I slotted it to try to get more self-heals on my block/parry response skills.

And yet another note on our runs: I, and only 2 others in our kin, use Combat Analysis. So, our DPS and Healers have no idea how they are doing. But I can tell you that it takes quite a while and nearly a whole power pool to take down a Crawler in SL... pretty lame DPS; I'm guessing in the 1.5 - 2.5k range.

So, my questions are these:

1) Should I change my essences to get some more mitigations or are my mitigations ok (what you're seeing is unbuffed and without the benefit of Guardian's Ward which I keep up at all times)?

2) Should I just stack morale and go with that?

3) Should I just get our kinship DPS and healers to, you know, actually DPS and heal ;-P (I'm being a bit facetious here)

Any suggestions that will help are very much appreciated.

P.S. I just recently imbued my weapon to try to help the situation out... not sure if I like the results but...

[Zonflux]

1) Should I change my essences to get some more mitigations or are my mitigations ok (what you're seeing is unbuffed and without the benefit of Guardian's Ward which I keep up at all times)?

2) Should I just stack morale and go with that?

3) Should I just get our kinship DPS and healers to, you know, actually DPS and heal ;-P (I'm being a bit facetious here)

Any suggestions that will help are very much appreciated.

Hi HacyHo,

Your stats are actually very respectable for the T2 Osgoliath instances.

You did mention adding critical rating to help with self heals but because you have 0 Finesse you will find that many of your skills get BPE'd. If you're not going to have Finesse in your build then there is no point to having Critical Rating. If that's the case then you can focus on more Morale and a taunt-based style of tanking. Or even investing in Incoming Healing if you are not already between at least 20-30%.

You shouldn't need to blow cooldowns unless you are doing large pulls or the troll/def mob pulls. If your healer is a Minstrel are they twiddling their thumbs playing a bunch of anthems instead of healing? It really doesn't take that much to heal a Guardian, so you can tell when you have a bad healer if your morale gets low on small trash pulls.

Your DPS has the easiest role in the game, there's a reason why DPS are a dime-a-dozen. Sorry, I just hold no remorse or sympathy for DPS classes because I know that my Guardian can out-dps quite a few of them but being considered for a DPS role in a T2 run will likely never happen.

I basically have a few simple rules when I run T2 Osg runs..
1) If you cannot survive a Poison Breadth then you need more Morale and Physical Mitigation.
2) I want the Healer to actually heal and not play around with anthems or whatever.
3) The DPS class must have 60-73K Mastery.

All three of those requirements that I listed.. that's sooooooo easy to gear for, and cheap.

EDIT: I thought that I would also mention; in SL the Defilers only drop a totem if you let them get off an induction. Any DPS class worth their salt should have a 5 second interrupt traited / geared.

[HacyHo]

... If you're not going to have Finesse in your build then there is no point to having Critical Rating. If that's the case then you can focus on more Morale and a taunt-based style of tanking. Or even investing in Incoming Healing if you are not already between at least 20-30%.

You shouldn't need to blow cooldowns unless you are doing large pulls or the troll/def mob pulls. If your healer is a Minstrel are they twiddling their thumbs playing a bunch of anthems instead of healing? It really doesn't take that much to heal a Guardian, so you can tell when you have a bad healer if your morale gets low on small trash pulls....

I basically have a few simple rules when I run T2 Osg runs..
1) If you cannot survive a Poison Breadth then you need more Morale and Physical Mitigation.
2) I want the Healer to actually heal and not play around with anthems or whatever.
3) The DPS class must have 60-73K Mastery...

Thanks so much for your reply Thatabguy. I've learned a great deal from your contributions to the forums, your videos and now this response to my plea for help. After reading your reply I slotted another morale and an Incoming Healing Supreme and took out the Crits to see if that helps. Also, I decided to make some swap-out pieces with the gold Pelargir rings so that I can have different rings to boost Resistance, Tactical Mits, Finesse and even more Incoming Healing if the situation calls for it.

I get pretty frustrated watching my health get lower and lower on trash pulls (I can't pull more than one area of slugs in SL or, God forbid, a couple of rats and a slug area) waiting for heals to roll in then having to resort to blowing my WH and Juggernaut; It's exhausting! I am a firm believer that DPS MUST have Combat Analysis installed and understand what it is indicating. Just because you are firing off a heavy hitting, long induction skill doesn't mean that you're going to have high DPS!

I encourage our healers and DPSers to watch videos of others doing these instances and generally the comments are something like: "Look at how that tank grabs up so many and burns them down". I don't think they realize that other tanks CAN grab that many because good Heals AND good DPS are going to be happening to "burn them down" and to prevent a wipe.

Anyway, thanks again. If anyone else has any helpful suggestions please feel free to vent them.

[ChromiteSwiftpaw]

EDIT: I thought that I would also mention; in SL the Defilers only drop a totem if you let them get off an induction. Any DPS class worth their salt should have a 5 second interrupt traited / geared.

So here's the thing - Hunters have a 12 second interrupt (Blindside) that they cannot shorten. They also have Dazing Blow which has a 1 minute cooldown. There's also Bard's Arrow which is 30 second cooldown (this is a fear), Cry of the Hunter is a 2 minute cooldown and finally there is Distracting Shot which is a 3 minute cooldown. All of those skills (except perhaps cry of the hunter) are affected by Finesse. In Tier 2 instances you want to have your Finesse rating at least around 9000 or more otherwise almost all of those skills will be blocked, parried or evaded quite a lot.

The interrupt on Defilers in the Sunken Labyrinth is very important. Not only do you have to interrupt the defilers you have to be able to burn them down and be able to take hits from them.

5 second interrupt? How many classes have interrupts that low? Guardians can only get their Stamp down to 10 seconds. It used to be that we could get it down to 5 but that was changed with the Helm's Derp class changes.

[Armorin]

Interesting topic and conversation. Very useful.

Regarding whether people should go for primary stats on essences (might e.g.) or secondary stats (PM, BPE etc) consider the following:

1 point of might contributes to 8 physical mastery, 8 tactical mastery, 3 block rating and 2 parry rating.
A greater might essence has 136. BPE or greater mastery essences contribute 1229 to the rating.
So, 1 might essence contributes 1088 to both PM and TM, 408 to block and 272 to parry. That is equivalent to 0.89 PM and TM essences, 0.33 block essences or 0.22 parry essences. So one might essence is worth 2.33 secondary stat essences.
If you ignore the tactical mastery component (I don't, as I pick up war chant in every trait line as it is a hard hitting quick cool down skill, and it is also very important for high light damage on a yellow line guard), then 1 might essence is still worth 1.44 secondary essences. It is a no brainer for a tank gear to go for might instead of PM, block and parry.
Raw morale and resistance at a greater level will give better stats than can be picked up from vitality. However, at a supreme level the essence comes with fate as a secondary instead of power. Then the difference is much more marginal. I run my guard with about 1000 fate, and when buffed I can fight for eternity with full power as long as the healer can keep me healed. Incoming healing essences can help significantly. In a long fight its all about the healing, so enough morale to cover spike damage is required. Incoming healing increases the effective morale from the pure morale pool figure. The healer can keep you topped up easier.
Agility and Will essences simply don't give enough, so it is better to go for pure critical rating, evade, and resistance essences instead. However, if supreme vitality essences are used, there is no need to add resistance essences and very few fate essences are needed.

[Zonflux]

So here's the thing - Hunters have a 12 second interrupt (Blindside) that they cannot shorten. They also have Dazing Blow which has a 1 minute cooldown. There's also Bard's Arrow which is 30 second cooldown (this is a fear), Cry of the Hunter is a 2 minute cooldown and finally there is Distracting Shot which is a 3 minute cooldown. All of those skills (except perhaps cry of the hunter) are affected by Finesse. In Tier 2 instances you want to have your Finesse rating at least around 9000 or more otherwise almost all of those skills will be blocked, parried or evaded quite a lot.

The interrupt on Defilers in the Sunken Labyrinth is very important. Not only do you have to interrupt the defilers you have to be able to burn them down and be able to take hits from them.

5 second interrupt? How many classes have interrupts that low? Guardians can only get their Stamp down to 10 seconds. It used to be that we could get it down to 5 but that was changed with the Helm's Derp class changes.

Yeah, I'm still stuck in the level 65 cap days...

Still, what you proved is that each class potentially has multiple options to deal with interrupts if they are paying attention. I guess I'm still a bit bitter about the one Update that happened where it felt as though everything suddenly became this whole DPS Race instead of controlling the flow of battle.

[Armorin]

For my approach to tanking in yellow line, considering a cluster of mobs:

When approaching a mob, I active take to heart. This has quite a long animation and can be used at range.
I hit warchant which provides a bit of aggro and grabs mobs attention over a large area.
I then hit challenge when they close in to lock them into a force attack duration situation.
I then spam AOE skills. With Imbued ILI's I do enough damage to hold the aggro and can keep the rest of the threat copy skills for an emergency.

This can lead to a huge damage spike situation at the start of the fight. There are several skills to deal with this:
Hit Thrill of Danger/Ignore the Pain. Against weak hitting mobs, this is basically a morale heal function. Against harder hitting mobs it will slow down the rate of damage.
Hit Cataclysmic shout. This stuns the mobs for a while and gives the healer a chance to catch up.
Hit Warriors heart. With the ILI legacy, this has a +49% heal on it, and can take you 15.6% over morale cap.
Pick up pledge from the blue line and hit that to bpe attacks.
Remember not to use cataclysmic shout or pledge at the same time as thrill of danger, as the latter requires mobs to hit you to work. Thrill of danger also has a short cooldown and so can be used frequently during a fight, leaving the other options for the real oh sh situations.

I run a full yellow line build (although points could probably be saved on the pretty much useless bolster trait). I then use 5 points of parry from red, 5 points of block from blue, and pick up guardians pledge from blue.

Edit: Forgot to mention to spam deflect as frequently as possible throughout a fight. This greatly reduces the damage taken.

[Arathaert]

Hey Everyone,

I need some help from the very knowledgable Guard community here on the forums. My kin and I struggle pretty mightily with the T2 Osg instances. We regularly wipe on trash pulls and have been able to finish SL and RC a tiny handful of times only after 3+ hours and many, many wipes per run. I'm not sure if it is my stats or other issues (I know that I can't show my actual tanking but I basically do the same as other Guards I see in videos of the T2s and I can keep aggro easily with the occasional pull by the healer or DPS, however, I can recover those pretty easily). By the way, I always have to keep the pulls as small as possible and must use Juggernaut and Warrior's Heart on almost every pull or I will die and then, of course, we wipe.

Just a note on the Vitality Essences: I'd rather put morale there but I use them to have some fate to recover power. Each pull (even trash mobs) takes so long that I, and the DPS, have power issues and having these slotted seems to help.

Another note on the Crit Essence: I slotted it to try to get more self-heals on my block/parry response skills.

And yet another note on our runs: I, and only 2 others in our kin, use Combat Analysis. So, our DPS and Healers have no idea how they are doing. But I can tell you that it takes quite a while and nearly a whole power pool to take down a Crawler in SL... pretty lame DPS; I'm guessing in the 1.5 - 2.5k range.

So, my questions are these:

1) Should I change my essences to get some more mitigations or are my mitigations ok (what you're seeing is unbuffed and without the benefit of Guardian's Ward which I keep up at all times)?

2) Should I just stack morale and go with that?

3) Should I just get our kinship DPS and healers to, you know, actually DPS and heal ;-P (I'm being a bit facetious here)

Any suggestions that will help are very much appreciated.

P.S. I just recently imbued my weapon to try to help the situation out... not sure if I like the results but...

Can't add too much to what others have said - it really does seem as though your problems are your mates :P

However, just an observation: your tact mit is rather low - the regular cap is 16700, and T2 instances have mitigation penetration, so in Sunken Labyrinth you'll be getting hit very hard. Couple quick ways to do that ... you could swap the might essences or even the crit essence for tactical mitigation essences (if you want to be capped even with the penetration you might even swap all three), or maybe consider swapping one or both westemnet devices of battle for the westemnet device of protection.

That might help a bit in SL specifically, but overall your problem here definitely seems to be less-than-stellar healing and dps.

[Grammulka]

123123123123

[Arathaert]

Updated to include the recent DPS nerfs, new traiting ideas, essences and other changes. Any questions, input or feedback let me know!

[Razor6566]

Is it still viable for Soloplay. I read that Red Line is very bad now and my Guard just hit Level 50.

[mattspencer]

Red line for PvE is the quickest way to kill mobs, it just isn't as good as it used to be. If you have to, you can stack Might/PM and go blue line and kill mobs with shield skills, it just won't be as fast as Red. For PvP I wouldn't bother playing a Guardian in the Moors, but if you had to I think Red would still be better. It is significantly worse than what it used to be since creeps can pot your bleeds (wound).

[Joedangod]

Red line for PvE is the quickest way to kill mobs, it just isn't as good as it used to be. If you have to, you can stack Might/PM and go blue line and kill mobs with shield skills, it just won't be as fast as Red. For PvP I wouldn't bother playing a Guardian in the Moors, but if you had to I think Red would still be better. It is significantly worse than what it used to be since creeps can pot your bleeds (wound).

Up to about level 60 or so I would say yellow line is vastly superior to red for dps.

The flash of light effects often do more damage than the skills used to trigger them and with take to heart bugging with radiate you can easily deal out high aoe damage, I ran my guard through annuminas on level just pulling 8+ enemies at a time, spreading the mark and watching as every enemy suddenly starting taking over 1k damage each per aoe skill.

Of course, flash of light seems to stop scaling around level 50 onwards and that's about the point that redline starts really developing the bleeds.