How to Vanguard Basically

Overview

A jack-of-all-trades type that can employ different combat styles to fill diverse roles in parties. A good fit with lighter weapons.

Don't worry about the lighter weapons part: the true spirit of Vanguards, is to do whatever the hell you want! With decent offensive stats both sides, and the ability to use any Photon Arts at a barely acceptable level, Vanguards are a walking talking Gurhal's Greatest Hits album.

Pros and Cons of Vanguard

Pros

• Good stats in ATK, ACC, and TEC, which allows good performance on every type of weapons.
• Lv20 Photon Arts represents a 5% damage increase over Lv15 ones, and a 30 seconds extension to Shifta, Jellen, Zalure and Deband.
• Stun Trap EX.

Cons

• Less stats in ATK, ACC, or TEC compared to the dedicated types (Hunter, Ranger, and Force respectively).
• Lv20 Photon Arts represents 10% less damage compared to Lv30 ones, along with the lack of any tier 3 advantages, such as reduced PP usage, more shots, or wider hitbox areas.
• In fact, lack of any tier 3 Photon Arts all across the board, resulting in a lack of heavy hitters.

Notes

• Taking everything in total, Vanguard loses 10% to 20% in damage relative to the dedicated types in their areas, in exchange for a 5% to 10% damage boost in everything else.
• Since the primary drawback of Vanguards is the lack of Lv21+ Photon Arts, this means little for early to mid game players that does not have access to any Lv21+ Photon Arts yet. As such, Vanguards makes for a good intermediary class, with good Abilities that are useful on other types or Partner characters purposes, and a good stat spread for the player to try out every weapon with.
• Ranged Photon Arts applies to , and the 5% to 10% damage loss on is largely irrelevant to your damage output, and Charge Shots are generally unaffected by Photon Arts levels. Thus, Ranged Weapons are quite invaluable, due to being hindered the least by Vanguard's drawbacks.
  • However, the one exception to this, Shotguns, the best ranged damage dealer, loses around 20% damage due to lack of Lv20 Photon Arts, so Vanguards are still worse than Rangers.

Race Differences

Your ability and weapon composition is really just dependent on your race, more than anything.

Human

Humans are balanced in every stat such as ATK, TEC, DEF, MND, PP and ACC thus deal decent damage from just about any weapon.

Mirage blasts also provides a sizable range of utility, and their damage is relatively quite good, due to Vanguard having the second highest TEC out of all four types.

As such, humans can slot in just about any weapon, into just about any setup.

Notably, Kun'ne provides a 40% attack speed boost, which is a very significant boost to melee weapons, but means little to ranged weapons (whose attack speed is already very high) and technic weapons (as attack speed boost does not affect tech casting speed). For more ambitious players looking to take advantage of Kun'ne (which is perhaps human's one standout trait) a melee build is a great choice.

Newman

It's a newman, they have no redeeming factors besides TEC and PP regen, of course focus more on tech weapons. newman's ACC is okay too, so throwing in some ranged weapons, especially TEC based ones such as Longbows.

Also note that Newmans have very low DEF, which is dragged down by Vanguard's low DEF multiplier. Some defense abilities may be required to compensate.

Beast

It's beast, they have no redeeming factors besides HP and ATK, so of course focus more on melee weapons.

Relative to Hunters, Beast Vanguards has lower damage, but higher accuracy, and longer duration on buffs and debuffs. Prior to Lv30 Photon Arts and Rebirths, Beast Vanguards are potentially stronger than Hunters just because they hit more times.

Cast

Casts have good ATK, high ACC, which lets casts lean into both Ranged and Melee weapons, dependent on the situation and play-style.

Cast Vanguard sits somewhere in the middle of Cast Hunters and Cast Rangers, exchanging the damage output for versatility.

Deuman

Similar to humans, Deumans has well rounded stats, which allows them to utilize anything.

Theoretically. If Deuman didn't have a stupid amount of drawbacks:

• Deuman's low PP and extremely low PP regen, meaning much less uses of photon arts compared to all other races.
  • This especially doesn't help on Vanguard, which relies on mixing various photon arts to catch up in damage, all of which has a high PP cost.
• Atrocious defense stats, combined with low defenses on Vanguard, makes them arguably the most fragile class/race combination in the game.
  • While defensive abilities, such as Half Defense, can keep Deumans alive quite effectively. This means ability slots that cannot be used by other abilities, especially strong late game abilities such as Ignite Arts.

• Infinity blasts are tied to Type, thus deuman only has access to one blast, much worse in versatility compared to other races.
  • It also doesn't help that the blast is Blade Stream, which is quite infamous for getting the player killed for using it in tight spots.

The Greatest Hits of Gurhal

As per usual, we want a weapon to chain with, a weapon to break chains with, and some weapons for utility purposes.

However, unlike other types, Vanguards has the ability to pick whatever they want!

So here's a simple chart for some recommendations. Check the other guides for specific details.

	Melee	Ranged	Technic
Chaining	Twin Daggers, Twin Sabers, Twin Claws	Twin Handguns, Machine guns (Meseta Shot)	Foverse, Sazonde, Sabarta, Nagrants
Chain Break	Swords, Axes	Shotguns, Crossbows	Sazonde, Diga, Nosdiga
Utility	Double Sabers, Daggers	Rifles, Laser Cannons, Handguns	Zalure, Shifta, Deband, Resta, Anti

Chainbreakers and chain techs are oftentimes interchangable, dependent on your playstyle. Some utility weapons are also interchangable, for example, Rifles and Handguns, which, when used for the purpose of shooting buttons and weak points, doesn't make much of a difference.

However, there are also a few weapons which provides utilities that other weapons cannot match:

Laser Cannons: Charge Shot II can easily and safely stunlock all enemies within a fairly sizable area.

Machine Guns (Meseta Shot): allows you to chain quickly at range even with 0pp. Meseta consumes at a completely irrelevant rate (around 40 per shot, apparently). Slicers can also attack at range with 0 pp, it chains much slower but recovers pp much faster.

Zalure: basically a free damage multiplier that lasts 1 minute and a half. Why the heck not? Weapons with Zalure effect doesn't cut it: they have a much shorter duration and doesn't hit 100% of the time.

Of course, these are just recommendations. Try all the weapons out: finding something you are more comfortable with is more important than anything else.

Traps

Vanguards have a proficiency with Traps, and is the only type that can use both EX traps, so let's go over them.

Trap have a couple properties: their damage scales to the player's level, they don't add chains, and all of them has a chance to inflict a specific status aliement when used. They go onto the item palette as opposed to the weapon palette as well, which allows the player to bring a whole bunch without interrupting the normal gameflow, especially if the player opts to bring Auto-med abilities.

Single-hit Traps are quantity over quality, and can be used early game to quickly melt bosses: even problematic enemies, such as Bag Deggas, would die to a dozen traps or two exploding under their feet. However, their damage becomes irrevelant towards higher-levels, as its damage does not scale as hard as enemy HP does. It's possible to attempt inflicting statuses with them, but generally they are too inefficient for that.

Burn Trap EX produces a persisting hitbox that hits 10 times when detonated, and has a good chance of inflicting Burn. While it can't chain, it's useful for inducing Burn on problematic enemies, such as Boosted enemies. Burn deals percentage based damage every other second, and can cause quite a bit of damage if it persists for a long time.

Stun Trap EX produces a persisting hitbox that hits 10 times when detonated, and has a good chance of inflicting Stun. While its use is largely replaced by Sazonde nowadays, it can cover some situations that Sazonde does not: it has a higher amount of locks (to deal with larger mob groups), can stun boosted enemies (who will ignore Sazonde), and can deal with enemies that can't be launched or knocked down (such as Komazlis). As such, it's still a useful tool to have on the palette.

Note that Traps don't drop from the vast majority of containers, meaning that the player cannot replenish their traps in the middle of a mission. Thus traps should be saved for particularly problematic enemies.

Ignited Arts

Weird to mention a Lv50 Ability in the beginner's guide, but this is worth a write up. Unlike other Types where their high level abilities are a simple beneficial buff that doesn't really change your playstyle all that much, Ignited Arts is instead the absolute endgame for Vanguards that fundamentally changes how they work.

Ignited Arts costs 7 slots, and increases the level limit of all player Photon Arts from 20 to 25 (with the exception of Zalure, Jellen, Shifta, Deband, Anti and Resta). This may sound like a massive cost for something that seems insignificant, so let's go through what exactly it covers.

First, 5 more levels consistutes around a 5% increment to all Photon Arts damage. This is a decently sizable boost for Skills and Technics, although not so much Bullets.

Second, going from Lv20 to Lv25 moves the PAs up a tier, which gives them additional properties.

For Technics, this means an expansion in size, range, and even hit count in some cases. The most notable of which being Foverse, which upgrades from 2 hits to 3 hits, and upgrades it from a good chaining tool to one of the best chaining tools in the game.

For Skills, getting a skill to above Lv25 usually reduces some of their stages' PP use by 10. Some Skills, such as Assault Crush, has both Stage 1 and Stage 2 reduced by 10 PP, which reduces its total PP use by 20. This is a huge help to PP economy, and improves the viability of high PP weapons, which are very common at high levels.

Getting Bullets to Lv25 doesn't mean all that much. Besides the aforementioned damage bonus, it also provides a 5% range bonus for Long-Range bullets (from 125% at Lv20 to 130% at Lv25), as well as a 5% elemental bonus for Elemental bullets (from 20% at Lv20 to 25% at Lv25). Neither of which are that important to be honest.

What Lv25 bullets does provide, is an additional bullet to Cards, and more importantly, Shotguns, which becomes a 50% damage bonus to Cards, and a 25% damage bonus for Shotguns. Shotguns are already one of Vanguard's most powerful chain break tools even at Lv20, and is absolutely nuts at Lv25.

When put together, an Ignited Arts Vanguard is someone with the potential damage of Hunters and Rangers, while retaining all of the best chaining tools of Forces.

However, Ignited Arts costs an insane SEVEN slots, which can be a huge issue for some cases.

The player has a maximum of 12 slots. 7 is allocated for Ignited Arts, and 1 is for Full Charge Shot (if you are using Shotgun), and there's only 4 slots left, which isn't enough room to fit all of the great abilities, such as PP Skill Save (2 slots), PP Tech Save (2 slots), Half Defense (3 slots), Damage Convert PP (2 slots), various technic hi-speeds (1 slots each). Most notably, Deumans' viability with Ignited Arts is severely hindered, as they really want both PP reduction abilities and defensive abilities, which they can't fit with Ignited Arts.