Before going into the levels of 20-30 for my characters, I wanted to give a bit of thought process on how I felt about the leveling of characters through 1-20.  Take for granted that these are just my opinions and you can take them or leave them as you wish.  Unfortunately, this will be somewhat incomplete as my Lore-master and Guardian were both leveled quite a bit ago time wise (when I first bought and played at release in 2007), so I can’t really tell you what it’s like currently.  Perhaps some of our readers can chime in there.

My advice for Guardians would be to stick with a main-hand weapon and shield and always be using Guardian’s Defence as it’s your only real “stance” until 12 when you get Guardian’s Parry (which, good or bad, I never have had much use for) and then level 20 when you can try getting used to Overpower.  Just a thought though:  If you are primarily going to be tanking with your Guardian, it’s best to use Guardian’s Defence as much as possible with a shield and main-hand weapon as this is what you’ll be using when tanking.  A good way to practice tanking is to always fight as if you were actually tanking; albeit a much slower way of leveling.