Harkon Defense TLDR
About HD
Harkon Defense is a mini-game mode centered around tower defense and guardian. You can use this game mode to get decent/BIS equips (depending on your class) and exclusive fuses and pets. There also is a MS Stone exchange in CoraTO as well as an event-basis Token of True Trickster exchange. Check it out--it's worth it!
Pregaming!
To get to Harkon Defense, you first need to get a Popeye Anenome card
. Popeye Anenomes are in Ghost Blue Field 1 and drop the Light Pink Coral, NOT THE CASH BOXES. Speak to Eclipse in Event Garden and get the Mind's Eye skill. PLEASE NOTE: You do NOT have to give up your Eclipse Key if you want a free teleport to Mega--just talk to her only once!
Getting to actual HD
After you speak to Eclipse and get Mind's Eye, wait for a message like this to pop up: 
There is an alert in your chatbox and overlaying above the center-top of your screen 10 minutes, 2 minutes, and when it starts as well as the town you need to be in. Go to the town and use Mind's Eye. Look at the top right of your screen to your mini map before and after you do so--2 to 3 new red dots should have appeared--hover over them to find Stella (one of the new red dots) and go there. Depending on how quick you are, Eclipse may or may not already be there. You have to wait until you see this message to see Eclipse pop in and for you to talk to her to get into the Sanctuary.
You can enter at any point from this point on as long as the next message does not pop up; it means the sanctuary was lost.
HOW TO HD :
So in HD there's a lot going on. Your primary objective is to defeat the shadow monsters and keep the statues alive. You get a new window that shows the health, monsters, and players at every statue. I've labeled most of it in this diagram on the side so you can use it for reference.
When you first enter, assuming you go right away, you have about 2 minutes to buff. You also get pop-up messages indicating the type of Harkon Defense it is--Gloom, Normal, or Boss. I'll get into those later. After that, you must defend the harkon statues. The health is bugged to show more than is actually there, so be careful!
When the timer is almost up, a boss will appear--Chronos! Don't worry, this is not the True Kronos you have heard legends about from Tartarus--this is a different boss with way less health, but it's still annoying to kill if you're not a Paula. This monster is the only way to get Chronos shards.
Types of Modes
- Gloom; lowest difficulty; good for getting Shadow Equips(?)
- Normal; Not great, not bad for shards(?)
- Boss; hardest difficulty; best for shards(?)
Where to Exchange
There's the Custom Exchange for MS Stones and the regular exchange. I will cover the regular exchange only in this section; please click on the link for the other exchange.
You need to go to Mega Shop and use Mind's Eye. Next to Rosemary is Stella by herself, ready to exchange shards and equipment with you.
Poseidon's Blessing (Clover+Bonus)
When you successfully defend a Harkon Sanctuary in its entirety, you get a Poseidon's Blessing. This nerfs the monsters in a given area as well as increases SC chances with CID! Yes, it's true! Check your map before you CID!
Other FAQ
Q: What is the red Empathy Aura Combo Meter on my Build screen?
A: IGNORE IT. IT'S JUST A COMBO METER. It's information overload.
Q: Do the number of actions have to be exact?
A: Yes, more or less. You want to be as accurate as possible to reduce your margin of error. Empathy (EM) is exact, SEM is unknown (thought to be exactly 2k but guestimated at 1.6k with regular actions)
Q: Why Cookie-cutter?
A: Luckyfist is based off of enemy HP, not so much internal stats, making it ideal for something that can't exactly buff itself. This is meta for epTO because much of the end game bosses, including custom content bosses, are based around incredibly high HP bosses with over 300 million HP.
You tell me that you wouldn't want something that does basically 1/6 of that every 30 seconds for just a slight grind of an investment, versus you hammering at it with your Paula doing 3.5mil damage if you're lucky with PvP eqs+comps+tempers after waiting 3 1/2 minutes for CH5 to pop just spamming hammerspin/equake/rain and that monster STILL cures for half of the damage you just dealt on your Paula then OHKO's your Paula before you could deal more than a full bar of damage.
Yeah. Just make the Cookie-cutter build, dude. Save yourself the misery, especially for Tartarus and custom events.
Q: What is squiggle? What is 90 DA?
A: Squiggle is shown in the cookie cutter section--it refers to the picture emote of a jumbled squiggle made when your character exclaims "Nothing is here!" and makes an angry motion. 90 DA refers to the stat, DA, and how much you need in total. This allows you to always have a concrete result of the drill, which is either "Item is found!" with the lightbulb, or the Squiggle.
CREDITS:
Spooks for redoing the page for our current system!
Almora’s guide, which I got a hefty amount of information from thanks to how detailed it was. Thank you for my lead into my first guardian. Check it out here
Geepie, for another great guide
Infinity, the guild, for first helping me with my first ever guardian on rTO.
BeProud and JjaeQT, for helping give advice regarding builds.
Bunny, for good ideas for other hints and helpful tips to add to the guide.
All my friends that had no idea what to do about their guardians to the point where it became essential to create this guide.
The admin and mods for continuing to try your hardest to making this place worthwhile.
All my hats and fuses that inspire me to keep playing.
Only select images and content belong to me. I am in no way doing this for any reason but educational purposes. Thank you for reading.