Mikuchu
Member
Vanguard is a unique profession that was created to fill the gap left behind from the profession purge that happened when the game transitioned into the NGE.
For NGE standards Vanguard falls someplace between Officer and Medic. But if you played PRE-CU/CU then its more like a Squad Leader with a dash of Combat Medic mixed in. It is definitely a support class, but with the right expertise you can have big heals and also do some pretty impressive damage.
On the profession wheel as a Vanguard you have the choice of using a melee or ranged (pistol) weapon. As you level up you will also receive a heal, debuffs, a DOT, an AOE special and a few unique abilities.
A few notable abilities you receive are: Vault, Reverse Thrusters, Fortify and a heal that can be used on yourself or on another player.
The expertise is broken up into two pages, Bodyguard and Warlord. The Bodyguard page is where you will find most of the buff/support abilities and Warlord is where you will find more combat related abilities.
Vanguard has two heroic jewelry sets, Praetorian and Kismatos’s Wrath. Just like the two pages of the expertise, Praetorian is angled towards buffs/support and Kismato’s Wrath leans more towards combat abilites.
Without having played the profession previously its hard to know what expertise to choose, so below is a sample Vanguard expertise that would be used with the Praetorian Set.
BM accompanies this class beautifully. If you choose your expertise carefully, you can find the right mix between support, and BM damage. Here is a sample BM/Vanguard expertise provided by a community member. This expertise would also be used with the Praetorian jewelry set.
Vanguard is our first unique profession and we think it’s pretty amazing! But we also want it to be perfect, so you may find that we fine tune and tweak things here and there, but the spirit of the profession is everything it was designed to be.
We are always looking for constructive feed back from community members, so if you have an suggestions or comments about Vanguard we would love to hear from you!