The Medium class, introduced in the Occult Adventures book, has a pretty wide selection of skills and abilities, but hasn’t been well supported since release. Only 4 feats interacting with the class at all - Legendary Influence (& it’s improved version), Spirit Focus, and Channel Spirit. I certainly like it, but there are a few aspects of it that are pretty much universally disregarded as unusably bad, that probably could’ve used some buffs and extra features to support it.

Like the Guardian spirit.

The guardian spirit is two of twelve spirits a medium can potentially channel on a given day (One base Guardian, and one Legendary Guardian, of which 3 have been published… none of which are particularly noteworthy). These spirits focus your Spirit Bonus into your AC, Con checks, your Fort & Reflex saves, and thaaaaat’s it. Nothing active, only passive defenses. The Seance boon bosts your CMD… Which again, not something that helps you interact with the world. Your lesser spirit power grants Armor and Shield proficiency. Who has enough money to buy a second fully enchanted suit of armor they don’t wear most of the time? And you don’t need shield proficiency if you find a shield with no ACP.

To summarize, it’s not a great foundation. Barely better than not channeling a spirit at all.

So what if you’re hanging out in a castle and it’s your only option for the day? Just give up and go to sleep? No, that’s silly. You’ve got a world to save or something similar, so let’s make the most of this spirit with as little investment as possible, because I KNOW you’d much rather put the rest of your build towards support the other spirits.

To start, I would ask that you dedicate precisely ONE feat exclusively to the guardian spirit. This is a tough ask, but I think it’s worth it. That feat is Nature Soul. That’s right, the +2 Survival and Knowledge (Nature) feat solves the Guardian’s issues and it is now a completely viable spirit! Thanks for coming to my post.

I kid, it’s just a pre-requisite for your Legendary Influence feats. When you hit Lv 4, you qualify for Animal Ally, so retrain your Legendary Influence to Legendary Influence, replacing whatever you picked initially for the ability to pick up a new Animal Companion that only exists when you’re Guardian’d up.

Since you don’t have the feat and don’t gain it until you Seance up, you can “prepare” a new companion as if you were gaining the feat for the first time every time you channel. Horses, Birds, and Wolves are my main 3 recommendations. Horse with the Bodyguard archetype is a good “Default” pick, but on days you know you’ll be delving indoors, prepare a Wolf. On days you know you’ll need an aerial scout, prepare a bird. Easy!

At lv 9, you gain access to Improved Legendary Influence. Prepare “Blades Above & Below” as your Guardian feat, acquire a Horsemaster’s Saddle, a pair of Training Spiked Gauntlets attuned to Outflank & Paired Opportunists. You might not have a spirit bonus to anything worthwhile, but now when you ride your temporary ally, you have an always-on +5 to hit medium or large enemies, and whenever you crit, you provoke an attack for yourself and gain a +4 bonus to that swing!

Your ally can come with the feat “Intercept Blow,” letting it sponge 50% of incoming damage as an AoO-equivalent. It’s unclear if you can proc Paired Opportunists off of this, but what you can do for sure is make much greater use of that DR and ER that comes from Guardian’s Intermediate Power.

If an enemy wises up to your companions tricks and targets them, great! That’s actually ideal. You have effectively “pulled aggro” off your team an onto what amounts to a summon. Remember that you do not have Animal Ally on days you don’t prepare the guardian, so it doesn’t matter as much to you as it would a ranger or druid if your buddy makes it the whole day or dies. You gain a new companion every time, as if you were gaining the feature for the first time. You can use Paladin’s Sacrifice to protect them if you want to preserve them for another encounter, too.

You don’t end up ever really needing to spirit surge on a Guardian, so you can Propitiate from Influence 3 to 2 at the start of the day and just never touch the Influence Penalty, enjoying the benefits of having this bonus buddy instead.

This is a lot of words to say “Get yourself a guardian for your Guardian”. I hope this might be helpful to anyone who just doesn’t know what to do with their weakest spirit.