In this Elder Ring Night Rain video, we're going to be taking a look at Guardian and how he plays in this game. We're going to be taking a look at things like his stats, his HP, FP, stamina growth, his skills. We're going to suggest weapons, as well as passive buffs on weapons, some relic suggestions, party compositions, and just generally how to make a decent build with him in this game, and what his strengths and weaknesses are. So, first of all, taking a look at Guardian's attributes, he has S and health, C and FP, and A and stamina. So, he actually has the highest HP of any character in this game, making him very, very tanky. And he has a lot of stamina, which is important because he will be blocking and attacking in this game. His primary means of defense is blocking. We'll get into that more in just a second. So, having high HP and high stamina and melee is going to allow him to tank very effectively, and he's typically the tank of the group when he is playing. It's not always true. He can definitely play offensively, but generally speaking, if you're playing Guardian, you're going to be trying to gain aggro on the target, block its attacks, and let your ranged and other melee DPS do the heavy lifting in terms of damage. In terms of his other attributes, he's got B in strength, C in dexterity, D in intelligence, C in faith, and C in arcane, meaning he's predominantly going to use strength-based weapons. These are typically slower weapons like great swords, great hammers, things like that. They can also be faster weapons like swords because he does have some dexterity scaling. And because he has decent faith scaling as well, he might be able to use holy weapons effectively or weapons that scale with both strength and faith. So you want to be on the lookout for those. And you can use the visual codecs to look through the weapons to get a better idea of what weapons have strength and faith scaling. However, his intelligence faith are not that great. Neither is his arcane. And he doesn't have a lot of FP. So you're not likely to cast spells with him generally. That doesn't mean you might not be able to pick up like a buff of some kind like golden vow or something on a seal. something that can buff your protection and damage would probably be very good for him and a good use of his FP. So, because Guardian is likely to use a shield since he begins with one and you'll be likely looking for better shields throughout the game, we're going to talk a little bit about shields and their mechanics, how guard boost works, what protection is, and just generally some information about shields that you may not be aware of if you're new to Night Reign. A lot of this stuff will be familiar to you if you've used shields at all or very much in Elden Ring. So, the first thing we're going to take a look at when talking about shields is guard boost. Guard boost is the stat that regulates how much stamina you lose when blocking an attack. The higher your guard boost is on a shield, the less stamina you'll lose when blocking an attack. Now, every attack in the game is going to deal a certain amount of stamina damage to you when blocking because bigger attacks will do more and smaller attacks will do little. But if you have higher guard boost, that attack will take off less stamina from you when blocking than it would have if you had lower guard boost. So, don't make the mistake of thinking every attack is going to take off the same amount of stamina. It's just that the amount of stamina you lose will be better if you have higher guard boost. So, that's the first thing. Look for shields with higher guard boost because that's going to make your life easier when blocking and give you more stamina to attack or to guard counter afterward. And guard countering is simply the process of holding block, letting an attack hit your shield, and then pressing the heavy attack button on controllers. This is usually R2 or right trigger. Not sure what it is on keyboard, but when you do this, you will actually do an attack into the enemy. And most basic enemies will be guard broken or stance broken from this, allowing you to do a critical strike. Some bosses will require multiple times to do this, but it's a great way to do this. And you should get in the habit of doing it when you can when you're playing guardian. Sometimes you can get interrupted or you don't have enough time to do one, but it's definitely a mechanic that you should learn to use and learn to use regularly when playing as guardian. Now, the next thing to note about shields in Elden Ring Night Re is that they all have a different amount of guarded damage negation. This means how much damage do you take when you block an attack versus a certain damage type. In Night Reign, every single shield in the game has 100% physical guard damage negation. Meaning that even the tiniest shields and shields that you had in Elder Ring that didn't have 100% now have 100%. So you can block any physical damage attack, whether it's a blunt damage, strike damage, or slash damage, or pierce damage, all those are blockable 100% with the shield as long as you have the stamina. But every other damage negation type, lightning, holy, magic, fire, has a value that is essentially the percentage. So if you see 18, that means 18%. If you see 50, that means 50%. That's how much damage will be negated when you block an attack that does that damage type. Often times attacks do a mix of different damage types like physical and holy. So in this case, if an attack did 50% physical and 50% holy and you had 50% on holy and 100% on physical, you wouldn't take any of the physical damage and you would only take 50% of the holy damage. So learning what negation each shield has is kind of important. And the downside to this is that when you're out in the field, you cannot see these stats on the shield. You can only see them in the visual codecs when you're in town or when you go into the chest and look at them. So you should spend some time in the visual codecs and familiarize yourself with what good shields are. Typically, the larger the shield, the better the damage negation is. So, if you're not sure, just kind of get an idea of the size of the shield. If you're using a bigger shield, it probably has better damage negation than a shield that doesn't. Or you can look in the names of shields. For instance, if a shield has something like fire in its name or lightning in its name or something like that, typically those sort of shields will protect more against those damage types. It's not always true, but if you just take a look again at like the smoldering shield for instance, it has 56 fire under negation versus the 14 37 and 37 of magic, that kind of gives you a clue that right away it's a pretty good shield against fire. The next thing to note about shields in Elm ring night reign is they have something called hardness. Hardness dictates whether an enemy is going to rebuff off your shield when they attack or not, depending on the type of the attack that they do. Great shields have higher hardness than regular shields and small shields. Meaning that a lot of enemy attacks will rebuff off them, giving you a safer opportunity to get a guard counter, a block counter, or to attack afterward, or for your teammates to attack afterward without the enemy continuing its attack chain. When you block with a regular shield, a small shield, and an enemy is doing a threehit combo, they will typically do the entire combo on your shield before stopping, and that can drain a lot of stamina and also not giving you a very good opportunity to counterattack. Whereas when they attack into a great shield, they'll be interrupted in their combo after the first attack, allowing you to return fire on them. So always look for a great shield in this game. There is no equipment weight unlike Elden Ring. So you don't need to be concerned with how heavy is this shield? Does it make me slower or anything like that? The answer is no. Try and look for great shields when playing Guardian to get that extra hardness. And great shields typically have much more damage negation than regular and small shields. So always, always, always prioritize a great shield over a lesser one if possible. And the last thing to note about shields is that many shields have their own weapon skills. And when you have a shield equipped in your left hand and you have a weapon equipped in your right hand, when you go to use your weapon skill, it will use that of your shield if it has one. So, you need to familiarize yourself with shields and what their weapon skills do in order to not inadvertently use a weapon skill that you don't want. Maybe you're trying to use the one on your weapon, but you can't because of the shield that you're using. So, in the case that you want to use your weapon skill, but you have a shield equipped in your left hand, you'll have to two-hand your weapon in order to use the weapon skill of your weapon, and then you can switch back to one-handing each in order to be able to continue to block with your shield. So, keep in mind what those are. Maybe spend some time learning what the weapon skills of shields are. The jellyfish shield, for instance, has a very fantastic skill called contagious fury that boosts your overall damage for I think it's like 30 seconds or something like that. So, there are shields out there that can do wonderful things for you and ones that have no skill on them to simply let you use your weapon skill without having to two-hand, which can be also very nice if you like the weapon skill you have on your weapon. Okay, with shields out of the way, let's talk about the abilities of Guardian. We'll take a look at his passive ability first called Steel Guard. And you'll see why it was important to go through this on shields when we go through this. What this passive ability allows him to do is plant his feet and brace with his shield for a more powerful guard that greatly improves his guard boost, but prevents running while holding up the shield. So, the way you trigger this is you hold block with your shield and then you press circle or whatever dodge is on your controller. This might be B on Xbox and I don't know what it is on keyboard, but whatever your dodge button is, if you press the dodge button while you're holding block, you'll go into steel guard mode, which will greatly reduce the amount of stamina you lose while blocking, which really lets Guardian face tank a lot of the attacks in the game, particularly if he's found a better shield along in his run. The major downside of this though is that you can't run while this is happening and it can put you into a situation where you can't get out of the attacks. So you when you're using it, you're almost forced to just keep blocking or maybe dodge backward if you can, but you're not going to be able to move very quickly at all. Your mobility is greatly reduced. So try and use this when you know lots of big attacks are incoming and you can't get out of the way. Additionally, one of the biggest downsides of Guardian in my experience is the fact that he doesn't have a typical dodge roll like the other classes in the game do or most of the other classes in the game do. He has kind of a little side step. And this doesn't allow him to dodge out of the way of very large AoE attacks easily because he just can't dodge far enough to get out of them. So, a lot of times he's simply forced to block them whether he wants to block them or not. And depending on whether he's found any better shields or not, that might mean you're taking 60 50% of the damage that you block with, which can be a lot if you have to block repeated strikes simply because you can't get out of the way. So, it's really really important when you're playing Guardian to try and find a shield that has other damage type mitigation that's much higher than his base shield because when you're in these situations, you don't want to take any more damage than necessary. Another important thing to note is that when you're using steel guard as well, you will drain stamina constantly over time that you're holding up the shield. So you can't do it forever. And having a larger stamina pool will make it easier to do this for a longer period of time and will also give you more stamina that enemies can block into before you get guard broken because if they attack too much, you don't have enough stamina, you will be guardbroken and vulnerable. His character skill is called whirlwind and it has about a 15-second cool down which is longer than a lot of other characters skills, but it's very effective at handling groups of enemies because it does an AoE around guardian that will deal damage and knock enemies into the air and down a lot of times if they're smaller enemies or can pull them towards him. And if you hold the button when you do it, it will like take a little bit longer to do and it will do it in a much larger radius hitting more enemies. So, I highly recommend using the charge version of it. And it's really good for clearing packs and like camps and forts and things like that where you don't want to waste a lot of time taking out each individual enemy. You can just go in and kill all of them simultaneously, especially if they're weak or at least deal a lot of damage to them or group them up. Or even if you're fighting like some of the bosses where it's like a knight boss or a humanoid boss like a fire monk, you can knock them down with this, giving yourself a huge opportunity and your team a huge opportunity to attack without having to worry about taking damage at the same time. So, that can be a really good use of it as well. And next, we'll take a look at Guardian's ultimate art, which allows him to leap up into the air and then crash back down on enemies, dealing damage in a large AoE. And also, it can res all even from being three full bars. So, this is a really, really good skill if you have one or two downed allies that are going to be very difficult to pick up, which is why a lot of times during boss fights, if you're guardian, especially if there's only one boss, you're going to be hanging on to your ultimate in case your teammates go down so that you can pick them up very, very easily. Additionally, if you hold R2 while you do this ability, it will consume more of the gauge and it will raise a protective area around you in a large AoE for as long as you continue to hold it. That will make you and your allies immune for damage for up to about 5 seconds. I think that's about the longest you can hold it. So, good guardians will will not only learn to use this to res their allies, but will also use it preemptively in situations where they know maybe their allies are prone to taking a lot of damage to prevent that damage so that they don't gain a, you know, little blip on their downed wheel and they can be resed easier in the future. I also really love using the AoE for trash mobs when you're like running through a fort or a camp and you just want to wipe out like a bunch of them very very quickly. Especially if you don't have any difficult boss battles coming up and you have time to recharge it or if you run into like multiple bosses, bosses that have like two or three, four of them at once. You can hit them all simultaneously and deal a much more damage than you would if you use this on a single target. But generally, you don't want to use this for the damage unless you can hit many many targets. Otherwise, you want to save it for its protective properties. And it can also get you out of a pinch as I mentioned earlier that Guardian has trouble with mobility sometimes, especially when he's using his passive ability. And he doesn't have a dodge that can get him out of the way of a lot of attacks, but he can eyeframe through a lot of attacks using this and get out of the way if he needs. It's not always the best use of it, but it can prevent you from going down in a pinch. Now, when you're talking about what weapons to use when you're playing Guardian, again, as I mentioned earlier, he has predominantly strength scaling for his stat, but also dexterity. If you use thrusting weapons like spears or thrusting swords or larger thrusting swords, you can actually poke and block at the same time, which can keep you protected. So, you might want to consider one of those weapons if you're playing guardian. Or you're just going to simply want to pick a weapon that is very effective for you that like you're good at that you know very well. But typically, these are going to be like great swords or a great hammer or something like that. I even use a straight sword sometimes when playing guardian just to be able to attack more reliably. But you're going to want to be able to use something that you're predominantly planning on blocking with and then counterattacking with or doing guard counters with. And some weapons have longer guard counters than others. Typically, the larger the weapon, the longer the guard counter animation is, and the smaller the weapon, the faster it is. So, you probably want something in the middle in terms of size in order to be able to have good reach on the weapon when you do a guard counter and to be able to make sure that you can do it fast enough that you're not interrupted. Bonuses you want to look for on your weapons are anything that boosts you while you're guarding, like whether it is going to give you more protection or more attack power. Anything offguarding is good because you're going to be guarding a lot. You also want to be looking for anything that's going to increase your stamina or your protection or maybe health back on attacks or give you health on critical strikes. Anything that's going to improve your survivability as guardian, damage is kind of secondary for you. you can still deal fantastic damage, but staying alive is more important because if you stay alive and your teammates go down, you can res them. And if you go down and your teammates are alive, it's much more difficult. So staying alive is what you should prioritize. Anything that's going to make your survivability higher. You can also look for things though that like improve block countering or guard counters, increase the damage of those, that can be very good, too. And when it comes to relics regardian, again, besides the class specific ones that you know, obviously if you find you'll probably use, you want to look for things that are improve his health or his stamina, like endurance or vigor. Both of those are good. Or anything that gives him like threat while guarding is good because it's very difficult sometimes as guardian to hold aggro against the constant relentless DPS of ranged characters and other melee characters. So, if he has a way of increasing his threat by like holding block, that can make it easier for him to hold the attention of enemies. So that's definitely relics I would look out for as well. And anything else that can apply status effects like if you can get poison on your weapon or bleed on your weapon or any relics that apply this, it can be good because that can allow you to do a lot of damage over time on a target while you continue to block and hold aggro and you're not so worried about going crazy on the target. You're doing just enough hits to trigger the status effect. then prioritizing defense while it does its work and then trying to trigger it again and kind of alternating be a great way to help out with damage but also not have to go crazy in order to hold it. And there are also buffs that replenish your health while you have poison on a nearby target or scarlet rot and also there are talismans that improve your damage when this is the case. So if you like have a poison weapon, you set poison on a boss and you continuously gain HP that just makes you even harder to kill and that's a nice synergy. When it comes to party composition with guardian, he fits well into just about any group. I think probably the biggest problem he might have is if he's in a group with other guardians because they might all be vying for aggro in order to play the way that they're playing. Doesn't really make sense to have a shield block counter hold threat if other characters in your group are trying to do the same thing. And he also might have a little bit of trouble if he has an exeutor in his group because exeutor wants aggro on him as well in order to use his parry and deflect mechanic because that's what's going to charge up his sword and allow him to use his special attack. So if you have another exeutor in your group, that exeutor is going to have to kind of shy away from that play style and be more aggressive like attacking normally or you guys are going to be competing for aggro which is not great. Otherwise, just about any other combination is good. Having other melee characters is fine as long as you're the one trying to hold aggro on bosses and things like that. And obviously having range characters is also really good because you can just sit there and hold the boss where they range into it. So that wraps up our video on Guardian. I hope you found this one useful. He is an exceptionally good character for firsttime players. Almost every group that has a guardian in the runs that I've done has succeeded. So I definitely recommend this to a lot of people and it's really really fun to play. And as always, if you have other Guardian tips, things I forgot, or if you have questions about Guardian, you can leave them in the comments and I will try and get to them as soon as I can. [Music]