Since Lord of the Rings Online launched in April of this year, many classes have gone through a lot of changes. With Book 10 the Hunters and Captains received another pass and several skills were changed and some added. With the upcoming launch of Book 11 the Minstrel and Lore-master class will get some attention, but with the coming of Book 12 it will be the day of the Guardian.

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The Guardian can be defined as the pure tanking class for LOTRO. They manage the aggro to defend their groups and they are great at mitigating damage, but the Guardian is not to good at dishing out the punishment. While Guardians can take one heck of a beating, they pail in comparison too the damage output of most other classes. This will be changing a bit with the upcoming Guardian changes in Book 12. Guardians will be receiving a new stance as part of their update that will allow them to use two handed weapons with its own set of skills. This new change will allow Guardians to play a more damage oriented role if they are not tanking for a group. What will this mean for Guardians? It will mean that for now you don't have to be restricted to a low damage output and it should increase the desirability for more than one in a fellowship. The option to play in both an offensive and defensive stance will add a much needed and desired layer to the Guardian class by allowing them the option of trading off defense for extra damage output.

The new stance won't be the only change coming to the Guardian. Shield Taunt will be getting a work over to. It seems the original version is not quite what the developers had intended and it will be changing. Guardians everywhere should be aware of this change. Shield Taunt for now serves as a panic button for Guardians to almost instantly pull aggro off any group members that happen to draw the enemies attention by serving as a threat catch up skill. The current Shield Taunt has been compared to the Guardian Legendary skill known as Challenging the Dark and is considered to powerful in that respect. The new change will make this taunt a little less powerful by decreasing its ability to simply tear the enemy away from your allies, but the new version will allow you to build threat against a group of enemies. The ability to use Shield Taunt to build threat right now does not work so this will be the counterbalance. Using Shield Taunt in its current version against enemies already focused on you will not increase your threat at all. That will actually end up making this change a good one even though on the surface it may not sound like it.

While this is by no means the only changes slated for the Guardian it is the only confirmed information available for the moment. The Guardian has been needing some love for quite some time now and we are finally about to get it. All we have to do is wait a little while longer. A new stance is enough to get any Guardian excited, but to add new skills to go along with it only makes it all the sweeter.

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You can read Chris "Hakai" Clay's official post on Guardians Here.