The Quest for Guarding Skill
Perhaps the hardest skill to cap, guarding allows monks to block attacks and receive minimal damage.
While parrying might also seem somewhat hard to skillup, it can be skilled up on multiple jobs, and more importantly it's possible to skillup even while using ninja shadows. However for monk's guarding, skillup can only occur if no shadows are present, monk's high evasion failed, counter didn't kick in, a hit occurred, and it was guarded. And even then it's a very very small chance that a skillup will occur. In addition in most xp pts on the way to 75, monks getting hit is considered undesirable, since tank is supposed to be hit and monk getting hit will drain the white mage's hp too quickly.
I have been training extensively to try to skill my guard, it's been a slooow process but it has also been fun finding creative ways to speed it up. As these pictures show, for lower levels I often used red mage sub for phalanx and regen, used tons of minus evasion gear, sometimes even borrowing a friend's refresh cape (which also had nice minus evasion), and then agro 3-6 mobs, often picking them to have a bard in there to cast haste songs on all the enemies. With the damage reduction from phalanx, drain weapons (my vampiric claws), regen, and chakra recovering 360 hp every 5 minutes I could let the same 5-6 mobs pound on me for very long times in the hope for skillup.
