I have tried a WHOLE lot of guardian. So I decided to put my thoughts down on paper about it. Well digital paper, this. Have a look!
Guardians Review
Guardians are a class unique to the Rebirth server. They are a jack of all trades class that combines a mixture of melee and ranged attacks like a dominator with a unique secondary that fuses self-protecting powers with supportive powers. This archetype allows for playstyles one couldn't get previously. Closest option would have been the VEATs though this is quite unique in its own ways.
Guardians by the Numbers
Guardians are aggressively average with their attributes. Nothing really stands out as exceptional, but nothing is excessively weak either.
Damage wise Guardians are roughly in the same band as VEAT and dominators. VEAT have a multiplier of 1.0 for melee and ranged. Guardians have a multiplier of 0.95. Stalkers got a 1.0 too, but they can also make something cease to exist in a blink of an eye when stealthed. Your secondary powersets might have moves that leverage more damage out of you (♥ Anguishing cry), but leaving that off the table you're swinging at a notch behind scrappers and blasters, and the rest of the table is behind you (And brutes are either behind or ahead of you depending on their mood).
Defensively your toggles will give you about as much mitigation as a scrapper or stalker. But your HP will be more corruptor/VEAT tier, you can buff your HP higher then a corruptor, but anything offensive will have more hp then you, that includes blasters. Though the fact you have damage mitigation does let you take a hit better than a blaster. Also you got access to heals in a lot of your sets which does stretch out your survivability.
You'd think with support powers you'd have some multipliers for such things that make them solid. Generally though, you're bottom rung compared against any other support class. So while you won't make maneuvers or heal other rock especially hard, the fact that you got secondary pool powers that heal puts you above tankers and scrappers though.
While we are talking about healing, we need to be aware of one thing. While guardians tend to get the PBAoE heal out of whatever support set they riff off of, like healing aura. It's a special version of the power with TWICE the recharge time as the version every other AT gets. You are not going to support a squishy team with that power alone, spot heal a tank who is in a rough patch, sure, expect to save a team that's getting creamed, not happening, though if you combine it with your other powers and some offensive you got a chance.
Primary Powersets
Guardian primary powersets are generally the same as the dominator secondaries. There's some changes between them. All dominator secondaries have some sort of move that boosts damage and the effectiveness of controls. Guardians lack controls so they get buildup, or a buildup-like move instead. Some powersets are shuffled up a bit, guardian electric assault trades off havoc punch and voltaic sentinel for chain induction and lightning rod. Generally speaking a standard assault array for guardians is: 3 ranged attacks, 2 melee attacks, 1 cone, 1 PBAoE, buildup (or something similar), and one flex power (usually a sniper but might be a hard hitting melee move or a control or something else unique to make the set stand out). There are exceptions, like with electricity, it keeps its sniper, has only two regular ranged attacks. If we count lightning rod as it's PBAoE then chain induction (Technically a melee move) would be eating up one of its ranged slots.
Dark Assault
If you played this on a dominator you are familiar with it. Only change is swapping gather shadows for buildup. It has a sniper move, one of the three ranged attacks is life drain. No it does not have shadow maul, now weep. The -acc on the attacks means if you are stacking defense or have a defense based secondary you'll have far better suviveability. I generally slot that life drain for extra damage since I already have damage mitigation from my secondary, though you could slot it for healing if you prefer that.
Earth Assault
I haven't used this one yet. It has more melee moves then average at four and no sniper. Instead of the usual cone it has a targeted AoE an a PBAoE. One of those melee moves comes at the cost of mud pots which the dominator version has.
Electricity Assault
Already mentioned this one. Its PBAoE doubles as a teleport (which is neat), and has chain induction on top of a cone attack. This translates into more AoE options at the cost of melee. It does have a sniper.
Energy Assault
Almost all in on single target attacks. Only AOE at your disposal is whirling hands. Almost the same powers as dominator except total focus and power burst swapped order. I haven't tried this one to verify but in general single target attacks are substantially more efficient then AoEs, so it should be less taxing on your energy then other sets when you go all out.
Fiery Assault
Trades in dominator's consume for an extra melee attack. If fire is your secondary you'll have consume there. Stacks up like a pretty standard assault attack set under guardian with the secondary effect being moar damage as things catch aflame.
Gun-Fu
A guardian only set that is absolute pain and misery in some ways for something that looks so cool. It has an array of kicks and gunshots. The kicks can be swapped for satisfying animations of thwacking your foe with your guns. This set uses a weapon that must be drawn, which is where the pain and misery comes in. Any time you use a melee attack, even though you keep your pistols out, using a pistol will force you to go through that pistol twirl animation again and again. You'll constantly be hitched up briefly on pistol draw animations, and while it's faster then a lot of other weapon draw animations, the fact that it's constantly happening makes it glaringly present in your mind. And then there's spinning kick, how I loathe thee. Spinning kick is a melee cone attack. So you would presume it takes a target, you presume wrong. If you click it and there's nothing in front of you, you just wasted endurance, which you'll do often, when you misgauge enemy positions or have enemies move out of range when you use it or forget for the 100th time that it's not targeted and click it assuming your character will turn and face the foe before sweeping the air like a derp. That particular aspect is only useful in edge cases where you're blind and you are flailing an AOE in front of you in hope of hitting a foe. That said, crippling axe kick something and then crane kick it away and load it full of lead as it tries to get back into melee range, slowly. That should lighten your mood.
Hellfire Assault
Ever look at the demon mastermind's whip and think "I want to use that without the pets."? Now is your day. There's some whip moves, some fiery melee moves and some fiery ranged moves. It almost shakes out to a standard array of guardian assault moves. Instead of a sniper it has "Wrath of Hell". Using wrath of hell locks you into a rather long animation, if you hit with the attack the enemy will be held for the duration of that rather long animation and take heavy DOT. If you miss your attack, you'll still be locked into that animation and look like a fool while you leave yourself wide open. Using this thing on foes agro to you and immune to holds, like bosses, is a dicey proposition, but a thing I will do on my hellfire/pain dom because she's a bit crunchy. Instead of buildup this set gets "soul searing". Soul searing instead of being a straight damage boost adds some toxic damage to all your attacks. It lasts significantly longer then buildup and it still boosts your to-hit. Given how fast it recharges I find myself using it a whole lot.
Icy Assault
While dominators get chilling embrace, guardians get bitter freeze ray. This gives you a control option that can be flexed as an attack depending on your preference. You get chilling embrace as part of your secondary powers if you choose ice for that, combined with the slowing aspects of this sets attacks and you can drive the enemy's attack rate through the floor. More or less a standard attack array for an assault set except the sniper attack is traded out for the hold that hits like a truck and leaves you wondering if you want to slot it for damage or control.
Kinetic Assault
I have not toyed with this one. It looks much like a standard array for an assault set. On top of various debuffs, these attacks generate stacks of impulse which you can cash in with whammy attacks to make them extra-whammy. Without some hands on I can't comment on how well that plays in practice.
Luminous Assault
Now you can attack with blasts of light without having space alien magic. It's more or less peace bringer attacks with the serial numbers filed off. This takes the standard assault array and trades in the sniper for a melee hit. It has -def and it has knock. The knock might be more useful for keeping the foe from hammering into you, though the -def has some edge uses for those occasional foes that are evasive.
Mace Assault
Arachnos soldier mace fun without the arachnos soldier. I haven't toyed with this personally so I only know what's on paper. And what's on paper is 3 melee strikes, a melee cone, a ranged cone, and a ranged AoE, two ranged shots, and your standard buildup with a whole lot of knock.
Martial Assault
This is a mix of shuriken and kicks. It's so odd it'll throw you for a loop. Of non-sniper single target attacks you have shuriken throw and thunder kick. Exploding shuriken is sort of a single target attack, sort of, in a "the AOE is a side effect" sort of way. Instead of buildup it has a longer lasting envenomed blades which adds toxic damage to your attacks. You may think trick shot is a single target move, but it has endurance use and overall damage more like the AOE it is. And then you have spinning kick, which if you came out of gun-fu would have you glancing at it suspiciously, but it actually behaves like a proper targeted cone when you use it, which leaves you looking at gun-fu spinning kick and going "Dammit! Why can't you be normal like martial spinning kick!" And then there's caltrops because you totally needed a slow movement over a darn single target attack. Thing is AoE attacks are expensive to use. So this powerset will leave you gasping for endurance, especially in the midgame. It's real hard to use without a team tossing you something to help keep your endurance topped. In a team with large crowds though, you won't have want for ways to mess up a crowd. It's more or less the exact same set as dominators get though, so if you played with that you know what to expect.
Military Asssault
I haven't toyed with this one, but if it has the same weapon draw issues as gun-fu, we may have a problem. It looks similar to a standard assault power array, except one of the ranged attacks has splash-as-a-side-effect. Lot of lethal with -def as you'd expect from a blam blam.
Ninja Assault
The two ranged powers are thrown daggers. Everything else is sword with a side order of caltrops. I haven't tried this one personally. This means your AoEs consist of a cone slash, a PBAoE slash and caltrops. No, you don't get the +def attack, though a lot of the attacks have toxic DoT stapled to them. It's buildup is another non-standard one that converts some of your lethal damage into energy damage, which is handy against things like spooks.
Psionic Assault
I tried the dominator set for this a while back, so I had impressions based on that. Glancing over this powerset though tells me that it's greatly changed from the Dominator set and my experience with the dominator setup does not apply here. Psionic dart hits harder and recharges slower. Telekinetic thrust becomes the harder hitting telekinetic blow. It boils down to the standard array of melee attacks and ranged attacks for guardian with the cone nad PBAoE. One of the ranged attacks has a side effect of immobilize but its damage is heavy enough to use for offense.
Thorny Assault
Pretty much the same as the guardian version. Right down to having aim instead of buildup. Pretty standard array with the sniper power traded in for "thorntrops". It has been a while since I tinkered with thorn assault on a dominator, but I recall it being rather satisfying.
Secondary Powersets
This is where the unique flavor kicks in. Guardian secondaries are a hybridization of tanker/scraper/brute/stalker defense powers with powers with support. Almost every guardian support power is designed in a way to be beneficial to the guardian, this means you aren't sacrificing solo utility for your ability to support. Anything you do to benefit you teammates you benefit yourself. There are exceptions, like some resurrect powers. Generally speaking you are about as tanky as a VEAT really, though by combining your support powers and defense powers the right way some really potent combos can happen.
Atmospheric Composition
So what you are looking at is a bad time endurance wise until level 35, and then you are unstoppable. It's a mix of electric armor and storm support moves. You lack the traditional electric fire/cold toggle, only having some resistance from grounding. Steamy mist will have to be used to cover the rest if you want full blanket. This set gives broad range status protection, including confusion. Your immobilization and knock protection are stapled to grounding, which means interesting things may happen in the brief moments your feet ever leave the ground. You want to favor super speed on this. Mass energize gives you some endurance discount, it's not much, but until you get power sink it lets you fill the gap. Once you get power sink that combined with mass energize will cover your endurance nicely. Pay attention to gale winds, it isn't just a knockback, the guardian version stuns sub-lt enemies, great thing to hammer enemies with to keep the riffraff from fighting. Aim for a wall to keep them off balance. Save snow storm for real rough fights until you get your endurance situation sorted. Freezing rain is god. It makes the damage go up, especially in a team, it not only makes the enemy sprawl all over, it debuffs their resistance which means more damage. Use it early and often. Since this set isn't strong on self healing (mass energize has a hella cooldown) you get to play with more damage resistance then any other guardian set. THis is pretty rock solid if you can keep the endurance situation under control.
Dark Composition
Anyone who is familiar with darkness sets knows where this will likely go. You got the main defensive toggles from dark's defensive set combined with the excellent shadow heal: Twilight Grasp. It has a long windup and might miss, but it heals harder. Anticipate missed heals, always start healing yourself (and yourself) early enough that you can suffer a missed heal, because if you miss as a guardian you got a hell of a wait. You get tarpatch at level 4. That debuffs resistance which is always a good time. You want that thing firing off early and often. You do NOT have knock resistance, but you do have fear resistance. You'll be gasping for endurance until level 35 when you get soul absorption, at which point it's going to be your new favorite power. You do get the ever-so-versatile howling twilight at level 38 which is a mass disorient that hits hard that also raises anyone around you. In combat you're going to be largely debuffing enemy resistances, which occasionally harrying them with cloak of fear and twilight as necessary. You lack knockback resistance. Have fun with that.
Energy Composition
On the surface this is a energy armor combined up with kinetics. I haven't tinkered with this so I cannot comment on it strongly. There's no speed boost power, but you get an endurance boosting move at level 35. Also you get mass energize at level 20 much like storm composition. I imagine the endurance situation is going to be rather similar to Storms. You get siphon power and fulcrum flip, which means if the enemy rolls a nat 20 when hitting you, at least they won't hit has hard. Status resistances does include knockback, which is always nice. Weird stuff like fear and confusion aren't covered but that's situational. You do get slow resistance, so those artemis mercs can suck a lemon.
Feiry Composition
Much like a fire tank your resistances aren't so hot (pun not intended). But like a fire tank you got a healy clicky, except yours is the AOE soothing flames, and it will heal everyone around you at the time. You don't have immolate so you can't cancel immobilization, so yes, this is a powerset that lacks not only knockbacl resistance but also immobilize. You get rooted your life sucks. Do you get fringe resistances like fear or confusion? Hell no. Not even slow resistance. Let's face it Feiry composition's status resistances ABJECTLY SUCK. So you may be asking what this has that makes it worthwhile? Well, it has a PBAoE Reforge (+damage +tohit), that's nice. Cooldown is much longer to make up for the fact that it's not single target. I find it's much like having a second buildup... that buffs the whole team. You get consume, which handles the endurance situation very nicely at the low low level of 16. You can stack that with melt armor to debuff foe resistance and defense, heat exhaustion keeps their regeneration down. This makes sure those big nasty bosses melt nicely. The level 38 power is neat, it's a PBAoE disorienting Rez, you can even use it when defeated to self-rez while simultaneously raising everyone around you. You'd be practically unstoppable... until someone uses an immobilize on you.
Force Composition
What if invulnerability but force field too? It's an interesting concept. I haven't tried it but I am tempted to. Actually the only real invuln power you get is Temp Invulnerability. The rest are force-specific stuff that gives various damage resistances, and then dispersion bubble giving the status protection and some defense. You got a max HP buff that's team-wide and various shield shenanigans like repulsion bomb and suppresions feirce and a stunning force bolt. WHile smashing lethal is resistance gets stacked up, pretty much everything else doesn't get near as solid a boost. Being as I haven't tried this one yet I'm unsure how that pans out to taking non-physical abuse. YOu do not get knofckback resistance or any esoteric status protections, but you do provide AOE status protection, which every squishy can appreciate.
Ice Composition
As you might expect it's a lot of the cold domination powers mixed with ice armor. Your only heal is a team-wide max HP buff, so you'll be leaning heavily into the debuffs. Like ice armor you got very solid status resistances including nice slow resistance and a perception buff allowing you to laugh off smoke grenades to the face. You also have ice armor's chilling embrace, which is a nice solid attack speed debuff coupled with a damage debuff. You got a team-wide stealth/defense/resistance aura in the form of arctc fog (which I ended up slotting for resistance to keep my fire/ice resistance viable). What really makes this set sing is sleet, which debuffs enemy resistance and defense while leaving them tripping all over themselves. Big problem is this powerset is a SERIOUS energy hog and will be until level 38 when you get heat loss. Heat loss is going to require you to be near the target (and the team too) to benefit from it the most. In fact chilling embrace wants you in close to your target to hinder them the most. As an ice guardian you pretty much want to be up close in melee range, smothering the enemy with your debuffing aura. Except getting up in there carelessly can get you flattened. It's pretty fun and satisfying to pull off.
Infiltrator Training
I had so many endurance problems with this set. I have caused an absolute amount of chaos, and also had a ton of infuriating deaths when the enemy rolled a nat20 with a hard hitting attack, obliterating me. It's a mix of ninjutsu powers and traps and web grenade... at least it has an attack speed debuff I suppose. You lack knockback protection, but you do pick up confuse and fear protection in its place as well as a perception buff, so it's a pretty fair trade. Your stealth toggle is odd in that it gives an endurance discount and a pretty solid regen boost. Traps take getting used to. You waste so much time deploying them and leave yourself wide open. Though some of them, like the poison trap, can be surprisingly incapacitating to things that resist most other controls.
Organic Composition
You know all that stuff I said about guardians having endurance problems? That doesn't apply here. Inexhaustible has you covered, and if you get your endurance handled better you can shift some of those slots in it off to healing instead. It's a versatile little move with slow resistance and END DRAIN resistance. Even then you get DNA siphon which can kick over more endurance at 28, which is lower then the level 35 most other secondaries get their succor at. You can see why this powerset is a pretty easy one to work with... also it has knock resistance. To top it off one of your toggles is a -res debuff. The only real "drawback" is this powerset doesn't debuff resistance as heavily as some of the other ones, though you get overgrowth at level 38 which you can use to boost damage for the team. Your heal is a non-targeted cone, so get used to manually aiming your heals. It's a very solid and easy to work with set, one of the better guardian sets, especially if you want to lean more into defensive and do solo shenanigans.
Pain Focusing
Willpower meets pain domination and let me tell you it is Damn. Glorious. You get quick recovery at level 4 and you pretty much won't have much in the way of endurance problems after that. Suppress pain will generate more Heal per second then spamming your nullify pain, so once you get that aura just keep it up. You got nice rock solid defense against a wide variety of things, toxic is your main defensive hole. You got knockback resist AND repel resist, AND confuse and fear resist. Oh yeah, you have boosted perception too. Oh yeah, you can ignore placates too with world of pain. This powerset is unstoppable. Want to do damage? Anguishing cry has you covered. Only real "drawback" and it's a weak drawback is it's raise isn't useful in solo play, but with everything else you got going for you with this set you'll scarcely notice the issue. My level 50 pain focuser has world of pain up 24/7 without having to resort to haste, that extra resistance and damage stacked on top of anguishing cries (enhanced with the witchcraft debuff) means I can cause atrocious amounts of damage, and if I'm in a team, the entire team is doing that atrocious damage too. This is one of the best secondaries, you'll be hard pressed to find a downside. Since your regen is rather high with this set, stacking max hp buffs when slotting can be awfully gainful. Good recharge goes without saying.
Radiation Composition
Radiation armor meats radiation healing. Since you ahve a PBAoE heal your defense is going to be a little soft, expecting you to use your healing and particle shielding to weather assaults. This does have knock resistance as well as slow resistance. Like the rad defenders you got accelerate metabolism, and like a rad defender you're going to want to min-max as keeping this thing up as much as possible, likely snagging hasten in the process. You have one of the rad defender debuff toggles, and fortunately it's the -def -res one, so you can use that ot help make things fall over faster. Play your cards right with that and ground-zero and you might actually leave things that become infuriatingly hard to hit like wounded paragon protectors, actually vulnerable.
Reconstructive Healing
Empathy meets regen. This is by far the most unique set. The regen gives you resilience and integration and a self-rez. The empathy gives you recovery aura, regeneration aura, and a PBAoE version of fortitude, all 3 of which you'll want to min-max to keep up as much as possible (yet another set that loves hasten). Defensively it sort of plays like a regen powerset with one unique twist: Pain absorption. The first time you use pain absorption it eats up some endurance and gives you some damage absorption and a buff to regeneration and incoming healing. It also is immediately reusable. But using it a second time increases the endurance cost but increases the potency of the absorb shield and regen. You can tap it up to 3 times at extreme endurance cost to give yourself an extremely strong absorb shield and enough regen tank an awful lot of things with only a couple small purples. My recon guardian has pretty much gone toe to toe with a ton of preatorians in EB mode and flattened them rather handily thanks to that. This powerset requires you to be very pro-active about your defenses. You can't just wade into a rough fight and survive like other sets, you need to anticipate when it's going to get rough and tap pain absorption the right amount of times to match the inbound pain. You may wish to just give it occasionally weak taps so it's there when you need it, or just go all in 3 levels (putting it into proper cooldown) to weather a hard hitting assault. Stack enough recharge buffs and you might be able to keep those auras up most of the time, and since one of those auras is a PBAoE fortitude, that's a serious boon.
Stone Composition
One half of this is stone armor. The other half is rather unique stone support moves. I haven't used this, but it's got a few interesting things, such as a PBAoE absorb power instead of a heal, quicksand, earthquakes, and eruption. There's a lot of -def and eruption boasts some -res from eruption. Leans heavier into debuffs. I'd have to tinker with this more to see how it works. I don't see a lot of endurance management in it at a glance, it does have knock protection on top of some confuse protection with some +perc, making it almost as good as ice in the status effect resistance game.
Temporal Reaction
Another one I haven't touched. Mixes super reflexes with time shenanigans. Chronoshift at level 38 is the endurance mitigation move, so prepare to suffer until late levels. No healing, so it's all on your defenses and damage mitigation. Would need to try it to get a more solid opinion.
Gameplay
Expect to suffer on the endurance front, a lot. At later levels you become feirce once you get your endurance under control. It can be an awful fun archetype. Almost every secondary has some sort of shenanigan that boosts damage, allowing you to do respectable damage.
You can fill multiple gaps in the team. If the team's staying alive well, focus on attacking and using moves that amplify damage. If the team is taking a beating stick near the squishier people and use whatever you can to mitigate damage. If you want an easy first go, then go for organic or pain, they won't sucker-punch you for endurance and give solid resistances and buffs. Pain focusing can be especially terrifying because it boosts damage and debuffs resistance for a one two punch of absolute pain.
