Quick Facts
Author: Locurian Added: 2024/06/23 Views: 11.8k

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Inspiration Guardian : A How to.

Inspiration Guardian (CoA Alpha) : A How To.

So you want to learn Inspiration Guardian, you might of played with one if your screen was covered in dust and breaks in the ground, or you feel as though your DPS on the meter went higher than an average party.

This guide will be summarizing and teaching you everything there is to know about the class from build paths, play styles and core understanding of how this class works.

Mechanics:

Inspiration Guardian themselves and all their buffs scale primarily off Spirit.
You get access to alternative scalings off of Spirit with Inner Power and Harmonious Combat.

The starting capstone Inspiration Guardian and it's trigger Inspiration are the cornerstone of how the class was designed.
Inspiration when triggered with a melee attack or casted from other abilities, applies a party-wide Attack Power and Spell Power buff that scales off your Spirit.

You also get increased variety of Banners and Ballads than any other Guardian subclass.

Fundamentally your goal as a Inspiration Guardian is to maximize your teams damage over yours as much as possible and with that there are a couple of variants.

Variants:

There are 3 if not 4 core variants that you can play as Inspiration Guardian:

Banners: Utilizing multiple banners in combat to buff.
Legion Commander: Triggering damage from allies with Linebreaker-like effects
Ballad Switch: Using empowered Ballads swapped in rotation.
Ballad Mono: Empowering and allowing the same Ballad active throughout.

Some of the variants cross paths in terms of how they build, but the more support focused variants can also be played aggressively or just as a pure defensive buff supporter.

General Skill Tree Requirements:

Regardless of what Inspiration Guardian you want to play, Inspiring Speech and Song of Steel are MANDATORY takes and have use in rotations across all variants.

Inspiring Speech has the purpose of buffing others with a 10% damage boost with a charge mechanic similar to Inner Fire, with each stack consumed on a spell or attack instance.
It also enables Triumph for a targeted Attack Power and Spell Power buff that scales off your Spirit.
And is spread with Clanlord to apply effects party-wide.

Spirit of Battle is also a mandatory take in conjunction with Speech to give yourself another boosting 10% layer on Spirit.

Song of Steel will always have use as a party-wide Attack and Spell Power buff, but gets further use when playing as one of the pure support variants due to further buffing Ballads.
Warbringer's Manuscript also helps Song maintain a higher uptime.

Ballad Support:

Ballad Support as a variant serves to buff everyone else with persistent Ballads and maintain buff layers and Inspiring Speech stacks.
This will cover both Ballad variants.

For both variants you must take:

Ballad of the Hero and Ballad of the Conqueror
Glorious Chorus and Bark Orders as they function to buff the strength of your Ballads.
Tempo your final capstone needed to make Ballads your core.

The difference between Mono and Switch is purely dependent on whether you grab War Drums.

War Drums functionally changes the cooldown and effectiveness of your Ballads such that the duration has to be switched between 2-3 Ballads. Without it you can maintain just one Ballad active with Tempo on tree.

For skill rotation your goal is to maintain as many party-wide buffs as possible and maintain ballad effectiveness as high as you can with
Bark Orders.

Pre-combat you should be rotating: Bark Orders -> Bark Orders-> Bark Orders to maintain max stacks of effectiveness,
In combat rotation would be start with Banner and then Song of Steel (95% channel) -> Interrupt the end with Ballad -> Inspiring Speech repeating speech for stack maintaining and recasting Bark Orders to start the rotation off again when it has almost expired.

Positioning you need to be in melee range to auto for Inspiration.

Gear-wise you need to be min-maxing Spirit wherever possible, it effectively sources all your damage that your kit offers.
The secondary stat that affects a pure support playstyle is Haste effectively speeding up your long speech casts.
Good examples of best-in-slot items are: Hammer of Grace or Haunting Spectre Leggings

Banner Support similar to Ballad Support maintains buff layers and Inspiring Speech stacks.
However their goal outside of this is to maintain a cycle of shorter cooldown persistent effects from all banners being active.

For this variant you must take on the Guardian Tree:

And in the Inspiration Guardian Tree:

Similar to Ballad Support your goal is apply as many party-wide buffs as possible.
Fortunately all Banner skills do not cause a GCD however they share a cooldown of 2 seconds with Flexible Banners.

This forces you to sort of micro the banners casting them either with a macro setup on abilities or to press a Banner before you cast or cause a GCD.

The recommended order for Banners in terms of highest priority first is:

With the order in reverse if you need to prioritize defenses over offense.

Outside of the Banner management the combat rotation would be Song of Steel -> Ballad of the Conqueror -> Inspiring Speech repeating speech for stack maintaining.

Gear-wise the priority is similar to Ballad Support min-maxing Spirit wherever possible, sourcing all your damage that your kit offers.
The secondary stat that affects a pure support playstyle is Haste effectively speeding up your long speech casts.
Good examples of best-in-slot items are: Hammer of Grace or Thuzadin Sash

Legion Commander:

Legion Commander as a variant is purely focused on an unlabelled interaction with Legion Commander.

The hidden effect triggers a Linebreaker proc that is triggered every-time you cause a melee hit with a weapon* with Into The Fray.

The build does not scale with your stats rather the Attack Power and Spell Power of your Allies that the proc comes from.
Because of this the build should be optimized for stat buffing with Spirit, and maximizing your attack speed and hit rate.

The core points on tree needed are:

The core points all serve the same purpose, increasing your chance of triggering Inspiration on enemies.

Because of the high requirement for hits you must prioritize dual-wielding two Hedgecutter or any other low speed weapon, as even though it disables other base Guardian abilities that require a shield, the reward is worth it.

For other points that are required we need:

Battle Bard: To trigger instant cast Inspiring Speech from melee attacks.
Inner Power and Harmonious Combat.
A Hero's Tale

These points just serve to function the buffing side of the rotation, which does affect the damage your Linebreaker's that allies use.

On the base Guardian tree, you should be grabbing every Linebreaker upgrade and every Sunder upgrade as well as grabbing Valiance.

The core rotation is to open with Banner of Swiftness -> Linebreaker -> Ballad of the Conqueror.
You then Sunder on repeat to instant cast Inspiring Speech and restart the rotation when Linebreaker is off cooldown.

There is more you can do with rotations using Song of Steel ,however you have to cast for full duration to keep 100% uptime so it's better to rotate it in strictly for bosses or when stacking multiple Inspiration Guardian in a single party.

Yes, you can stack Inspiration Guardian in a single party to proc not only more Linebreaker but also off each other.

Additionally there are custom macros to sync certain abilities together which will be in the macro section making the play-style less complicated.

*further testing is on-going to whether Legion Commander occurrences are dependent on a PPM system or just a flat percentage chance.

Base Guardian Tree Notes:

Any specific changes needed on the base Guardian tree will have been mentioned in their respective builds, the general use of tree isn't really that large of a concern.

Guardians get access to One-Handed Axes, Swords and Maces, Shields, Guns and Bows, restricting some of the more valuable and accessible Spirit on weapons.

Enchants and Consumables:

There are some notable consumables and enchantments on specific pieces of gear that I would recommend.

For Legion Commander I would recommend going Mighty Spirit on both weapons, it's +40 why not.
For any support that more frequently casts Inspiring Speech I would recommend Grovewarden's Blessing instead.

In Dire Maul (North) after a tribute you can purchase Kreeg's Stout Beatdown for an extra 25 Spirit for 15 minutes.
In Un'Goro Crater after finishing Making Sense of It you can farm 10 Green and Blue Power Crystals to hand in at the Eastern Pylon for Crystal Force giving 30 Spirit for 30 minutes.

Macros:

The following macros have been made to simplify certain aspects of builds as most of the buffs do not apply a GCD.

Legion Commander Linebreaker:

#showtooltip Linebreaker
/cast Linebreaker 
/cast Ballad of the Conqueror -- casted after linebreaker gives a motivation buff
/cast Warquake
/cast Valiant Strike --optional: requires target

Feats of Strength Banner:

#showtooltip Banner of Swiftness
/cast Feats of Strength
/cast Banner of Swiftness --any banner will do

Weak Auras

For those that need to take some of the mental load off of buff management, there is a basic informational WeakAura available here.

Team Composition

An interesting point worth mentioning is that depending on the variant of Inspiration Guardian certain classes get highlighted as better or worse.

Pure Support's including Banner and Ballads, definitely prefer stronger DPS classes such as (currently) Templar and classes that get rewarded with having better scaling than most.

However Legion Commander are exceptionally picky with what classes are needed, especially Reapers, Black Knight Witch Hunters, Influence Cultist just to name a few, reward staying close to mobs to enable procs to deal damage. And works the inverse with classes that either have low Attack Power and Spell Power such as Sentinel Starcaller or are ranged by default Ranger, diminishing damage.
This can be circumvented with understanding of how the build works and positioning correctly.

Alternatively you can always just stack more Inspiration Guardians with Legion Commander and be rewarded with more procs but less damage overall.

Final Notes:

Where are Decrees?

Even though this build covers most concepts it really only covers the core backbones of specific builds and not point-for-point builds, you will have excess points and there are some very valuable points I've dodged over that you can definitely grab yourself.

Isn't Legion Commander a bug?

I'm not sure, but it really does create a very unique playstyle even if it's a remnant from a previous version. My fear is the developers might nerf an aspect that heavily guts it without analysis on what makes it strong at the moment. It also needs a visual change to become less cluttery.

Understand that this guide will have changes in terms of numbers or functionality over-time, it is representative of the current state of CoA Alpha and hopefully this guide serves to further understand and test some of the design choices on such a unique playstyle.

Thanks:

Huge thanks to Zelthaz (Cannonfodder) for contributing testing with interactions, gear optimizing, dummy testing and abusing teammates screen clutter in Heroics.

Also thanks to the Guardian subcommunity in the CoA Discord for discussing information and builds.

If you see me in-game Locurian(Yobo) feel free to say Hi.