Guardians Class - Full Breakdown & Review - Skills & Trait Tree - (Update 37) 2023 | A LOTRO Guide.

Yellow Guardians were able to block with a two-handed weapon pre-u37. The ability to block with a two-handed weapon is now purchasable in Yellow by Blue or Red Guardians.

Leaving Retaliation and Force Opening in the skill list when specced Red is an error, they will be removed in a corrective patch soon. Retaliation is replaced by Breach (as Whirling Retaliation is replaced by Whirling Breach). Until that happens you should pull Retaliation from your bars. You should pull Force Opening from your bars unless you purchased it in Yellow. Note that a Red Guardian can sill pick up Force Opening in Yellow if desired but remember that Red's only Parry-response skill is Catch a Breath so it really isn't worth the Class Trait Point. You'll get plenty of Parries if something is hitting you, you'll almost always be able to use Catch a Breath if it isn't on cooldown. You open your Parry-response chain with Breach or Whirling Breach when you're Red, so no need (or even any use) for either Force Opening or an actual Parry to do your damage.

Brutal Assault remains very disappointing. It requires 11 (ELEVEN!!!) Class Trait Points to make it useful and it is not something that should be used at all in most questing/landscape battles. It does very low instant damage. The bleed is good if it's fully traited with its 11 (ELEVEN!!!) Class Trait Points but the bleed doesn't matter if you're going to defeat the mob in just a few seconds anyway. In a raid where a boss will survive for 10 minutes? It's a must--have. Fighting an elite on the landscape? OK, it's helpful. Otherwise, do your best to ignore it because almost any other skill does more damage and has a shorter animation. It's really painful to have 11 (ELEVEN!!!) Class Trait Points invested in something that has only situational use. I wish they had reduced it to 6 for full effect.

Protection by the Sword/Shield: These existed before but required a friendly target. Now, as you demonstrated, they are basic toggle skills which do not require a target and apply their primary buffs to the Guardian itself. The effects are better as well. Big improvement for both Blue and Red, in a group and especially a big improvement for soloing. Note that the effects are listed as an "aura" but they are actually buffs which get automatically cast every 10 seconds. That sounds like a difference that makes no difference and usually it doesn't, but if you have group members running in and out of range it will not affect them unless they are in range at the moment the buff is recast every 10 seconds.

SSG is making a hard distinction between "debuffs" and "bleeds" now. Bleeds are not debuffs, so anything that says it will spread your debuffs or do something else with your debuffs will not affect your bleeds. That doesn't mean that things like Insult to Injury aren't useful, but Insult to Injury specifically DID apply to bleeds pre-u37 and now it does not. Developers have said that the pre-u37 behavior where Insult to Injury refreshed bleeds was a bug. (I have not been able to personally test this very much yet but that's the way it's supposed to be now.)

Something you might not have noticed because you went straight to the Class Traits of each tree without examining the base "description" of each tree: Red has a -50% penalty to all self-healing. That is very punishing, especially since two healing abilities (one passive, one active) were removed from Red. All you have in Red is Catch a Breath and Warrior's Heart until you are high level and choose to invest a lot of points in Blue or Yellow. When doing trivial things this won't matter, trivial things do not require you to use healing abilities at all. When doing challenging things such as playing at a high Landscape Difficulty or trying to solo instances, well, that's a different story now. Naturally, when things get tough enough you switch to Blue because you'll get higher mitigations (i.e. take less damage) and additional self-healing skills. It's just that now, with the -50% self-healing penalty in Red, the threshold where you need to change to Blue is much lower. I'll also note that while Wardens have a similar self-healing penalty in Red (although theirs applies only to certain Gambits and is -40%) no other class's DPS spec has this kind of penalty: Not Champions, not Minstrels, no others. Frankly, this change is making Guardian less fun to play – I like playing Blue but I prefer to be in Red except when things are really, really tough or I'm actually tanking for a group but now I need to switch to Blue far more often when soloing.

I'll also note that the Heavy Weapons trait in Red has more than double the effect when using a two-hander than it does when using a one-hander+shield combo. Just switching from a two-hander to a one-hander+shield combo when Red was often enough to give you the survivability you needed to tackle tough challenges. Now you'll take an even larger damage penalty than you did before because one-handers do less damage than two-handers and now there's an additional -5% penalty to your damage from that trait so you might as well just switch to Blue at that point.

Sorry to be a bit of a party-pooper on the Guardian revamp. It's a total buff for a player who wants to take a Guardian as a DPSer in a raid. It's generally a good redesign. But I have major issues with the Red-line -50% self-healing penalty and the Heavy Weapons trait which pretty much forces the two-hander style on Red Guardians over the weapon/shield style.

Suggestion for the future: Use a standard Training Dummy Stand at your own or someone else's house for demonstrating skills. The training dummy in Mossward is Level 2 and has very, very low mitigations. The training dummy spawned by the Training Dummy Stand will be the same level as your character and will have "normal" mitigations, providing more realistic examples of expected damage output from your character.

Everytime I hear "belenar" when you're trying to say Beleriand, i feel like i missed some rare damage type that got added to the game

Thanks so much for this sir!

What Virtue Traits you use? just wondering

i am so so glad the Guardian is getting the love about time its my main and my top fav class in the game i have 3 guardians for now lol

Thank you for the Guardian update, very useful...we assume that the Beorning update video is on it's way as well?

Well, I tried it out and Guardians still suck, but they do suck a little less. At least for soloing missions. Man I regret ever making one I'm just going to delete the ones I have. I wish LOTRO had something like WOW has where you can use a level boost to try out a class at max level in a little mission, and if you dont like it you can choose not to continue at the end of the mission and get your token back.

5th!

Groan .... another update for another class. And, of course, I have a Guardian too ....

Akk them Hobbitses helping you defeat the wooden enemy. 👍👍 5⭐ Even Leerodee Jennnkinz was there. 🤣

So many Nerfs and Changes they keep making. If it ain't broke. Don't "fix" it. comes to mind.
Sing to 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Ohhh 99 Bugs we have stomped in this patch! 100 and 1 put back innn. We take one down, swing it around, then 100 and 1 nerfs put back with this patch.

Oh yes! Thanks for the video. Much appreciated! :)