Rocking a guardian right now and have been 100% club the whole way. Prof level 1 so far and thinking about if I should stay club or if something else is meta down road. Really going for max max damage

if you're going for "max max damage" step one should be getting off the guardian. Unfortunately the only way to do this is make a new character which won't have your prof (i wouldnt worry too much about this, 1 prof = 1%ee and your cheap weapon has 70%, so going to 71% isn't a game changer) or to reroll which loses the levels you built up. Either way you'll lose the levels seeing my recommendation is to use a different class anyway and you can't just swap class at level 23.

in short you're going to be stuck on clubs due to the lack of availability of heavy weapons which are the only other type of weapons guardians use. Heavy weapons attack at half speed so whilst they will show higher damage on screen, the actual damage dealt per second is half of that and in general clubs will easily be your highest dps weapon, due to higher ee usually costing significantly less.
The other entire point about guardians is they have high intel so if you arn't healing yourself you're just simply worse than using a barb which will have significantly more damage. to be precise, if you had used a barb and statted to 90 strength (60 base, 10 starting points and 20 level up points) your club would be dealing 40-182 damage instead of 30-135. The availability of both swords/axes are also higher than heavy weapons so you won't be necessarily stuck on using just clubs.

In short, guardians are in general not a beginner class, there are too few beginner level groups which would need a guardian and if they did, you'd also need to splash out on buying a much better heal charm. When you have a lot more knowledge of what you're doing, they can be an interesting class, however at that stage they're also not used seeing barb significantly outdamages them if a tank is needed and mage is much more efficient in dealing damage/casting which leaves guardian to be for all purposes a redundant class.

If your heart is set on using a guardian, focus on vitality/strength. The starting amount of intel is plenty and just note you'll mostly be stuck on clubs, you may be able to find some random heavy weapon with 60 or so ee for cheapish, but these generally arn't available at level 55.


I would also suggest you put an iso for gear up on the forums, in short you're looking for heavy armors with strength, clubs with ee, charms with strength.
Not only will there be more available out there, the prices will almost always beat whats on the marketplace. The only people who buy stuff on the marketplace are newer players who dont really want to post on the forums and muters.

Id like to get this char through a cycle if I can and then maybe make a Samurai o Barb? is that even how it works? Got my soul kinda crushed on being a guardian now lol :/

This post was edited by Springheels on Feb 13 2024 08:19pm

1 sec delay using normal weapons (club), however a Guardian uses every Heavy Weapon with a 1.8 sec delay and 100% more damage.

Don't worry about the Prof Rank, unless you want to be a prof rank hunter... there isn't anything special to gain from it, also, the higher Rank you gain, the longer it takes to gain 1% to your Enhanced Effect in comparison to buying an item that has 5+% and more instantly. Basically Prof Ranking is for Epeen, and the game has been out for way over a decade, and the old players that had high ranks, are mostly still high ranked even though they quit playing 7-9+ years ago.

Barbarian is my first off choice for a new player that is learning the game... but I would play the barbarian differently to the other 99% of DPS players.

In terms of getting samurai, you would need to pass the master quest, you have just as much chance of getting past it with your gear than i do with mine. Although on samurai you also get a bit crushed as either all the strength gear you have becomes redundant and use daggers, or you use strength gear and buy swords to realise there are no level 50/55 swords for sale so level 45+ is a nightmare. So getting a pass and using a samurai isn't necessarily a good thing for new players


i'll also put it this way, getting from 1-25 takes about as long as i'd expect 25-35 to take you. The goal is level 71. Changing now is less painful than doing it later on, with the right gear you can do 1-23 in a very short period of time.
Other points to note is how the level requirement/tier affects damage.

In general the maximum amount of levels any weapon should be used for is 10 levels, with the exclusion of level 50/55 weapons seeing there is not level 60+ weapons.
This leads to making sets, here's my club set as an example: https://forums.d2jsp.org/user.php?c=3&i=193561&p=200357 obviously having 200+ ee clubs isnt really going to be viable for you, but the point i'm trying to make is that set has a club at each level.

So to also put it into perspective, your level 15 70ee club has the exact same damage as a level 25 club with 27ee. so a lvl 25 club with 70ee will deal roughly 25% more damage than that level 15 your current weapon.
Another thing you can do is buy some strength armors/charms. As i said in my previous post, if you can get +45 strength your damage would increase by 25% in your situation, this should be very much doable at a reasonably cheap cost as a level 20 chain/plate with 25 strength should be 5-10 fg and a level 20 heal charm with 25 strength should be about the same as well.

Just post an iso up for level 20 strength gear, you'll notice a significant difference. The hardcore marketplace is practically barren most of the time so using the forum for iso's is practically a must. https://forums.d2jsp.org/forum.php?f=35


I still highly recommend you just reroll the guardian, it's not particularly beginner friendly for all the reasons i stated before and reaching level 25 isn't too bad.
Just noticed you went hardcore which also has its own problems of less gear availability.
There's about ~10 people actively playing hardcore in a way which actually finds new gear. Whilst softcore has closer to 40.

I appreciate the updates and the responses. I gotta ask this - as someone who likes a challenge and enjoys hardcore- is guardian completing a master quest doable ? Like period , doable

Yeah it's doable, and probably even easier than with other feeder classes if you have reasonable heal charms. People just avoid it because it's slower

I've played guardian quite a bit. It's limited, but it has it's uses.

certainly doable


I would ask about the price of the clubs in this topic:
https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=103070966&f=35&v=1
This is pretty much exactly what you need to reach level 71.

I'd then suggest you make a topic for a few strength or EE heavy armors and some strength charms
strength armors will increase your damage
ee armors will have higher defense.
strength charms increase damage
ee charms will increase the amount healed

attempting to do it on self found gear only will take literally about a month with a good amount of playing each day.

Just as previously stated by the following quote:



Guardian is completely do-able, as long as you know the game mechanics, and once you figure those out, you may change your mind as a feeder class.

I was going to do a tl;dr post (or a wall of text) but I held off because you need to experience the game mechanics for yourself and play the game that feels right for you.

Wish you the best and have fun playing.

This post was edited by izParagonzi on Feb 14 2024 08:27am

Hey Rex, stop misquoting me LOL

I only said the first line of that quote. The rest are your words

Oh okay you fixed it already. I shoulda just waited a minute

This post was edited by BWConformity on Feb 14 2024 08:30am