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The following is Monolith Productions official Early Game Ability Power Loadout Guide.

Early Game Ability Power Loadout[]

There are thousands of different ways to build Loadouts in Guardians of Middle-earth, and the decisions you make in which Relics, Commands and Potions to take can have a dramatic effect on the capabilities of your chosen Guardian. In this article I will discuss a solid Loadout designed to give you an early game advantage as many of the varied Ability Power-centric Guardians. The purpose is to provide a burst of damage to ensure early kills and help your team snowball into a dominant position. The Loadout rewards high risk plays but can punish you if you make even a single misstep.

The Relics[]

Composed of three Relics that fit snugly into all seven slots, in order they are:

The Light of the West Relic is an essential Ability Power Relic in a Loadout that encourages early game aggression. Slotted with Mithril Sapphires of Power, the Relic provides a hefty +118 Ability Power.

The Warg-Claw Relic opens up at level 10 and will begin stacking large Ability Power bonuses each time you score a killing blow on an enemy Guardian. This is where the big risk versus reward comes in. If you can secure several kills, you will continue to grow in potency. However, with very little built-in tankiness, it will be easy to get burst, losing several of your Ability Power stacks.

Lastly, the Seat of Seeing Relic will build off the foundation you’ve built in the previous levels, giving you Ability Power for each Sapphire in your Belt, which, by the time unlocks will be all seven. That means this Relic caps off your build with a respectable +84 Ability Power in addition to all the Sapphires of Power you’ve built in.

If you manage to take this build all the way to level 14, and assuming you have all Mithril Sapphires of Power, your final tally for Ability Power will be 522 (assuming max stacks on the Warg-Claw Relic).

However, the purpose of the build is not to get to level 14, but instead to punish your opponent out of the game long before that, or secure enough of a lead from early kills that finishing the build is trivial.

The Commands[]

Commands can have just as much of an impact on your ability to impact the game as your Relic Belt. In order, the Commands you want to pick up for this build are:

  • Heal[T1]
  • Speed Burst[T1]
  • Smite[T2]

As the build is centered on early game advantage, opting for high-efficiency early game Commands can help net some early game kills.

Heal is and always will be the essential Command for getting you out of a sticky situation.

The hidden gem here is Speed Burst, which you can pop as you enter the vicinity for a gank, to flee from an enemy gank, or to chase down a fleeing opponent who only has a smidgen of health left.

Smite is an awesome opener which will make your subsequent Abilities do even more damage. Opening it up will broaden the ganking possibilities and turn even the heartiest Protector into a quivering pile of goop.

Lighting is the final Command and will be used like Smite, except it won’t come into play until the mid-game when it stops being about individual lanes and becomes more of a team-fight-centric game. Landing it into the middle of the enemy team could potentially scatter them, providing easy kills as you pick off stragglers.

The Potions[]

You only get four potions over the course of the game, so you’d better pick and use them wisely. For this build, I prefer the four following potions:

  • Tower Dive Potion
  • Power Potion
  • Power Potion
  • Cleanse Potion

The Tower Dive Potion can help you secure that risky early-game gank. Most players’ natural reaction to an enemy popping out of the bushes is to fall back to the tower and assume that it will keep them safe from early aggression. What a surprise when you follow them in and finish them off and their precious tower does nothing!

The Power Potions are for boosting your Ability Power to even higher levels after you’ve unlocked the Light of the West Relic and your Ultimate Ability. It will bring your damage to extreme levels before their Guardians have had an opportunity to gain enough hit points or defenses to withstand such an assault.

Lastly, the Cleanse Potion is your safety button, to get you into or out of a sticky situation. Since you have no built in tankiness, even the smallest amount of crowd control could make you an easy kill for your opponents. Cleansing those deadly controlling mechanisms will frustrate your opposition and allow you to walk out of what otherwise would have been a very ugly situation.

Who is this Loadout for?[]

This Loadout is very specifically designed to give high Ability Power burst Guardians a significant early game damage advantage. With that in mind, the two Guardians that benefit from this Loadout the most are:

There are several other Guardians who could also benefit from this type of highly aggressive Ability Power Loadout. Some examples of those would be:

The great thing about Loadouts is that there are so many unique ways to build them and even changing one Relic can radically alter how you play the Loadout or what effect it can have on your gameplay. There is definitely no single best way to design your Loadout and discovering the Loadout that supports your style of gameplay should provide many hours of entertainment, both in exploring the Loadout system and putting them into practice playing matches.

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