Smite: How to play guardians in Joust

Are Guardians good?

I always welcome guardians in a game of Joust on my team. If I see someone who picks guardian in my game I get really happy because guardians help the team a lot. Guardians are good, just not at killing other gods. They are good at helping the team.

Guardians strengths and weaknesses

Strengths:

A guardians strength is their health and protections, they should build to upgrade them. The strengths list seems smaller than the weaknesses side, but a guardians health and protections are huge for them. They are why they are called “guardians,” because they “guard” others.

Weaknesses:

Guardians have some weaknesses that allow for them to be killed easier. The most prominent weakness that guardians have is their low damage. While this is not always the case with aggressive guardians, they still have less damage than a mage, assassin, or hunter. Another weakness that guardians have is their low mobility. Nothing can really be done about this, just stay in position and don’t get caught out. You will most likely die because you can’t get back to your side quick enough.

Guardian stats.
Ymir’s stats

How to build guardians

The items you should use while playing this class are varied and should be built differently in different situations. You want to build based on the enemy teams composition and your team’s comp. For example: If the enemy team has a lot of physical damage and your team in full of squishy mages, you want to build physical protection aura items.

health

Guardian’s health are the highest in the game. If your protections are set, you want to maximize the damage you can take. If the guardian you are playing is supposed to be played aggressively, than you want health items that give you offensive effects. Some good health increasing items include:

aura items

Aura items help your team and you, the guardian. They provide an aura to buff your team. There are also aura items that debuff enemies. Those can be useful to your team as well. But you will most likely be buying buffing aura items, because those compliment your kit more than debuff aura’s.

Protections:

Physical

Physical protections are items that reduce damage from physical attacks. Physical attacks include: hunter attacks, assassin attacks, and warrior attacks. Those include basics and abilities by those classes. Another physical attack counts as damage dealt from Hide of the Nemean Lion.

magical

Magical protections reduce damage dealt by magical attacks. These reduce damage from mages and guardians. You want magical protections against mages not guardians. So only get magical protections for mages, because guardians don’t deal that much damage.

guardian build
Guardians build

Types of Guardians:

AGGRESSIVE

Aggressive guardians are my favorite type of guardians, they can carry, like an ADC. However, they are a lot more tanky, so they will stay alive longer. They also typically have less mobility than the AD carry. Examples of aggressive guardians include: Ares, Bacchus, Cabrakan, Fafnir, Kumbakarna, Sobek, Ymir. The guardians that can be both aggressive and defensive, a mixture of them both are: Xing Tian and maybe Ymir, but Ymir is more aggressive than defensive.

defensive

Defensive guardians are the kind of guardians you want defending you lane while you are dead. They are more tanky than the aggressive guardians, and have more supporting abilities. They most likely will have better clear than the aggressive ones, and less power and damage. Examples of defensive guardians are: Athena, Geb, Khepri, Sylvanus, and Terra. Some of these guardians have team heals. Some may have short dashes. And most of their kit’s are geared towards helping an attack damage carry get the most damage possible and being able to heal them. Most defensive guardians have crowd control, as it helps peeling quite a bit.

Term to know:

Peeling: Peeling is when a god (mostly guardians) stop an ememy from attacking another god. They “peel” the enemy off your ally. Peeling is typically done using crowd control.