I wouldn't mind having to put up guard every so often if they had an icon or some kind of other onscreen visual to let you know when your shield was up, since enabling the message in the chat log enables a ton of other chat log messages I don't want. Evasion has a visible sidestep effect along with an Evade message come up over your character in case you're in motion or in the middle of animation frames that interrupt the evade one. It's hard to tell sometimes when you are Guarding or not depending on when you click on actions since your animations will override the "shield up" stance. Probably the best idea i can think of is hitting Guard when I'm not in active mode. You will go to active but your shield won't be up.