Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

[Vidia]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

You do have to be engauged but not to the one that you get guard skill from you only got the graphics before you were engauged cause you were and didn't have your weapons drawn yet on your screen so it looked like you guarded before you were engauged it's just the h2h version of Parry and shield so skill up the same way.

[Omni]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

no i didnt even engage at all. the mob was IT to me and my pt was else where. no point for me the engage it if there was no one to back me up. i actually zoned it.

at the point of aggro, i guarded the first attack. anyhow, i know others have said the same. /shrug

[Vidia]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

no i didnt even engage at all. the mob was IT to me and my pt was else where. no point for me the engage it if there was no one to back me up. i actually zoned it.

at the point of aggro, i guarded the first attack. anyhow, i know others have said the same. /shrug

not say that is not possible but very very unlikely... i've let mobs beat on me quite a bit and never once guarded them even when pulling bunches of random low lvl mobs for fun have never once seen a guard go off.... so i'd say to skill up guard better to engauge the mob :X

[Omni]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

oh, yea i agree that its better to skill up while engaged. i think someone asked if you had to be engaged to guard. that's what i was talking about. :p

[Auror]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

Just a quick question, does guard skill helps the skill activate more ofter or does it reduces the damage more, or both? With my guard around 80 which from wat i hear isnt so bad for a 62mnk im still getting raped even when my guard activates. I dont have great def+ gear or nething just normal mnk stuff and if a raptor hit me for 150-200dmg normally it hits me for something around 75-100. now ya thats 100dmg less and thats 100 less dmg that the whm has to heal and about 20mp worth of cure. but is it really worth it? with around 1400hp i can survive at 1000 for a little while. I tell mages that if im in yello hp dont bother cause i will prolly have chakra ready to go and i also use carapace bdy that has +12ata and +23def at 75% health so i dont mind being at a lower hp. if guard decreases the dmg u take when u gaurd then i can c it being more important but if it just reduces dmg then I wouldnt spend as much time lvling that as i would something else.

But farming in cnest has got me decent(relatively speaking) skill ups in gaurd and i make a decent profit from silkies, lizzy skin, beehive chips, and honey so its a ++ situation. I think the lizzies con EP to me so u can prolly get skill ups to 120 there thats my guess. And just for caution, as a 62mnk do go to bibiki bay and agro every eft there thinking u can take em all on cause u cant and u will die humiliatingly. Trust me, 8-10 efts r nothing 2 b messed with.

[Caspian]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

if guard decreases the dmg u take when u gaurd then i can c it being more important but if it just reduces dmg then I wouldnt spend as much time lvling that as i would something else.

I'm sure one of those was supposed to say "increases activation rate", but I don't know which one should be where.
Anyway, from what I've seen its a fairly constant % decrease in damage, and its a defensive combat skill (like shield and evasion) so I'm guessing that raising it raises the activation rate, the same way that having a higher evasion than a mob has accuracy helps you evade more, like on ep's and too weaks.

[Auror]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

wat im tryin to say is that if it increases the activation rate then its a plus because then u gaurd more often and take less damage. but if guard reduces the damage u take without increasing the activation rate then its not something to boast about. Example, say you have capped guard skill of 216 and a mob hits you for say 0 dmg cause u gaurded, if the guard skill activates every 200+hits that you take like it does at lvl 60 guard skill it would be like evading another attack. That IMO is not worth it. but if increasing guard skill increases activation rate then thats a different story

[Rujiel]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

I found this topic from a google search, and I find it necessary to correct some of the errors in this topic that've been irking me.

You can not guard unless you are engaged. Sorry, that's it. This isn't like evasion or shield, in which you have to only be under attack from a mob and under attack from a mob that you are facing, respectively. In order to guard a mob's attack, you must be engaged on that mob and more or less facing them (they can be a little bit to the side of your view, but if you can't counter them, you won't be able to guard their attacks, either).

I've been trying to skill this up obsessive-compulsively for over a year. Trust me, what you're saying about being able to guard w/o being engaged is wrong.

It was never possible to counter a mob being attacked by another party.

The higher your guard skill, the more often it'll go off. The rough percentage of damage reduced by guarding remains constant, though it may be somehow dependent on the level of the mob whose attack you are guarding.

It's unproven that any particular stat other than +guard will help you out. Stubling Sandels, for all intents and purposes, are just -5 evasion; good, but overrated. They don't have some sort of hidden "guard skill" stat.

The fastest guard skill occurs levels 80ish-100, in which you take hits from multiple mandies in Yuhtunga and Yhoator while engaging a far-away mob. I went from 92-ish to about 99 in two or three hours this way.

I'm currently 71 MNK with 127+27 guard, though using Adargas isn't preferable in most situations where I'm taking hits.

Out of evasion, parry and shield, guard is the hardest to skill up. Parry is cake compared to it; from getting WAR to 37 and NIN to 18, my parry is already over level 50 or 60--and this is when I wasn't tanking half the time on either job.

[arkaine23]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

Chigoes should be good to skill it up for a 75, bc they never miss and don't hit too hard. They'll die pretty fast to counters though. And you'd need to sub something for damage mitigation and maybe even need a rdm or whm friend to help out with regening you.

I can fight 3 at once as a rdm using phalanx, stoneskin, aquaveil, and regen/refresh but naturally high enhancing magic is what makes that possible, because the buffs are strong and can be recast under fire against EP's with ease. Still a monk should be able to handle one chigoe, by /rdm I'd think . Just engage some other distant mob and face the chigoe. Use Protect II, Phalanx, and Stoneskin before you begin. Juice would help. A red mage buddy would be even better though you'd have to hold hate against him refreshing and curing you, maybe blind would do the trick.... Gear and eat defensively of course, and avoid +counter and + acc items.

Chioges attack fast, have triple attack, and as far as I can tell, never miss. They took my red mage's shield to 170 and parry to 140 in a few hours of letting 3 beat on me. This process will be slower and more dangerous for a monk, and chigoes will die from your counters, but it should still provide a fairly decent skillup rate. You'd basically go to where they spawn or where people are fighting marids or sheep in the expansion zones, buff defensively and let a chigoe beat on you as long as possible, then kill it, recover, repeat.

[Widowmaker_bismarck]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

currently 225 base atm. most important things for skilling guard:

1) fight mobs that can hit you
2) yes, you have to be engaged.. fists drawn out, facing the direction of the mob hitting you. you dont have to be fighting the mob that's hitting you... for instance, you can target the RNG mob in the back row behind the mob that's hitting you.

a general rule of thumb for lv75s... with our high evasion a good place to start off is EP coffer mobs. I was in davoi from 120s - 200... davoi is great because no mage type mobs, easy zones... good chance for random key parties.

from 200-225 i was at Boyahda tree on the white sprouts. first the easy sprouts then the tougher ones up at the hill/tunnel towards the big tree.

good luck ^^

[arkaine23]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

Just to reinterate- Chigoes do not miss. Ask any ninja or theif how fast a chigoe will strip his shadows.

[Minaku]

Re: Guard Skill Ups.....Painful!

Actually, yeah Chigoes do miss. They've missed me many times. Of course they still strip shadows fast due to the speed of their attacks.

I was hoping Chigoes would be this awesome way to skill guard, and I've spent a lot of time as MNK/WHM killing Karakul, which spawn EP chigoes after every TP move. They've only given me one skill-up though in the time that I've gotten several from the much slower-attacking sheep, even though an EP is closer to my guard level than the DC Karakul.

My overall recommendation for Guard leveling is to only do it while you're doing something else. I've gone from about 90-152 by going out and farming EP mobs. I equip for guard with guard skill, DEF, VIT, and AGI, but otherwise I focus on gil/exp/seals/whatever. Also as someone else mentioned, its more important to fight mobs that can hit you over mobs that are the "appropriate" level for your skill. At 75, you literally have to train about 10 level ~40ish mobs to even have a chance of guarding that occasional hit that you don't evade.

This way you don't get the unavoidable dissappointment of heading out to level your guard and getting like .1 skillup in 3 hours. Just focus on other things, but keep guard in mind when you plan out what you want to farm.