Guild Wars 2

Hey there fellas,

I’m simply wondering if it’s viable to, for instance, role a tank build in a warrior or a guardian for a dungeon setup. I’ve played Ascalonian Catacombs and i seem to pretty much tank everything with the help of a supporter or 2. Meaning, so far i find the ideal team comp to be a tank or 2 tanky plus 2 supporters and one full dps CC or dps disabler.

Thing is, i’ve tried to run TA yesterday and i did it without probs, however, i didn’t find my tank build to work too well. What i mean is, i basically died WAY too fast for a tank. I mean, come on i had around 4 times more toughness in my warrior than the dpser + the banner heals and + the guardian heals and they still hit me pretty god dang hard i must say.

I’m not going full toughness+vit atm as i have power+toughness+healing power mainly. Do you think it is possible to tank dungeons with a full toughness+vit equip or something? Is it viable?

It just seems that nowadays people mainly go for glass cannon builds and kite until they get 1hitkoed and forget completly that you need a support since EVERY single class has it. If everyone used or some members focus on supporting besides just dealing dmg… it would be a lot easier.

Thanks in advance!

The team I usually run in is something like 1 tanky guardian, 1 berserker warrior, 1 shouts remove conditions full clerics guardian, 1 aura traited elementalist. The last is usually either a pug or another dps focused warrior.

With so much cleave damage you steamroll dungeons and my tanky guardian can indeed “tank” in many situations though the warriors need some survivability to survive cleave and aoe damage.

I was able to tank alot in AC on my guardian before Merciful Intervention got nerfed, I still can tank a bit in there but now I need to kite and dodge more. The build I ran used alot of healing, high toughness and low vitality so it worked kind of similar to 55 builds like in GW1 (although not nearly as effective).

Yes, you can kinda tank a lot of dungeons. Just be careful of using the “t” word on these forums though as, no matter how well laid out your post is, someone will sooner or later tell you to go back to WoW/GW2 doesn’t have holy trinity/etc. You have been warned!

Anyway the main problem isn’t so much that you can’t be tough enough as a tank – although there are plenty of abilities that will kill you quickly no matter what your gear, if you let them – but more that you can’t manage threat quite the same as in othe games. You can do quite a lot to keep mobs on you though – by pulling them to you or getting in amongst them first and dealing melee damage.

So you can tank. Eh, sort of.

The way I run my Guardian is with Cleric’s gear, so that’s Power/Toughness/Healing. Healing isn’t a great stat, but it works for me as a viable tankish/support build.

I normally run a AH Hammer Guardian build (go check the stick in the Guardian forum if you want to know more) and that’s about as tanky as you can get. But that aside the answer is…sometimes.

It really depends on the dungeon.

TA has stuff that will just kick you all over if you try to go and face tank it. Those dogs at the start, multiple knights, the spider boss, etc. But the path with the dozens of puppies, I can stand there and kill them all without even blinking.

AC, on the other end of things, I can (if I wanted to) stand right next to Kholer and not bother to dodge his spin. Even the path 1 and 3 bosses aren’t certain to kill me if they hit me with their scream. But some of the graveling trash there can hit really hard.

Alright some nice answers u guys got there, thanks a lot really.

So, as a warrior i can tank, right? Like you guys said, of course being careful with some tricky situations. I know guardian is like the top class for tanking or support, but i also think that warriors have a bunch of awesome tankish abilities and supportive.

Oh, and with what weapons do you guys actually go with for tanking? I usually go either for Mace+shield or sword+shield.

Thanks in advance

I can’t say I’ve played a warrior, so I’ll need to let someone else advise there. But some general things still hold true for either guardian or warrior: For tanking, you want to keep mobs in melee range of you and a little way distant from as many other players as possible. So any pulls/leaps/whatever that help you accomplish that are good. Or just be the first one in so they all swarm you.

For weapons – again this is on guardian but you can apply the idea to warrior – I use greatsword to start with so I can aoe pull everything to me, then hit them all with a symbol/whirling wrath, and change over to my proper tanking set (mace+shield) to take all the damage. Or if they’re weaker mobs just stay dps.

So try something like that – one set to open with and another to turtle up.

Then all the usual stuff – work your defensive cooldowns as needed and so on.

You can’t “tank” in the WoW sense of “I take all the agro so you other party members can do whatever you’re doing.” Almost all mobs and bosses will either target each player at least once or use a whole crapload of AoE skills, so everyone needs to be able to survive in some way. Everyone needs to be good at dodging and avoiding damage as much as possible, and if you want you can make a more survival oriented spec with toughness, vitality, etc.

I (warrior) just recently switched to Hammer/Shouts. Loving every bit of it. Great for “tanking”. I also just finished my power/vit/tough equipment, which put me at around 3k attack, 3k defense, and 30k hp.

-Healing shouts are awesome. With about 300 healing power, shouts heal for about 1.5k hp (@lvl80) each.
-With the 6/6 Soldier runes, shouts also cure a condition, not only off yourself, but off the entire party. Absolutely huge for any encounter with conditions. Seriously, It’s funny how trivial it makes some fights.
-With the reduced cooldowns talent, On My Mark only has a 24s cooldown, For Great Justice and Shake it Off are 20s. Super quick! ’cause long cooldowns are lame.
-Hammer skill 2 inflicts weakness. Weakness is totally boss, especially against bosses.
-Most of the other hammer skills are interrupts/stuns/just plain awesome (Earthshaker, a lunging AoE stun on a 10s cooldown. Yes please.)

I don’t really think there’s much to say in regards to “tanking strategy”, since no one really knows/understands if there’s a threat system of any sort. As far as I’m concerned, my main contributions are mob pulls, shouting near allies, debuffing/interrupting foes (Bash them), and standing in the line of fire.

If all of that isn’t “Guild wars 2 tanking”. I don’t know what is.

One more thing, my friend is a support Warrior most of the time, and he adores a healing build centered on banners. Yes, banners! You can trait them to give regen and other various boons, all of which last as long as the banners are up and you’re near them, and you can have mobile regen if you pick up the banners and run with them. This also works very well with my Mesmer, because I get a 2s boon that grants me -33% damage each time I get regen, so if there’s more than one banner down I have the boon permanently.

In case anyone hasn’t seen it before, you might get a few pointers from the wiki entry on aggro:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggro

It is just the wiki, but they at least base it on interviews and so on. It broadly holds true for most normal NPCs. As ever things are a little less predictable in GW2 than some games though!

I run a guardian and I can tank almost everything standing still using a mace/shield + hold the line + smite condition and shelter as healing.

(when I say almost everything I mean all the dungeons except arah, 2 bosses from Hotw and 1 from CM)

Middle of the road is the way to go. Glass cannons get kittentomped in this game, and tanks are useless. Try to approach this game as a videogame virgin. I run an ele, with gear favoring pow > tough/vit. I can’t tank, I can’t top the DPS charts (which don’t exit), but I do decent damage and I don’t hinder my team by having them res me every 15 seconds.

You cannot Tank, but you can Control. Control effects seam to carry a higher threat priority to monsters, even bosses when they are immune to the controlling effect. Make sure that you pull and are the first person the mobs see, as this will also throw you up the priority list, this is of course in general, some times mobs will just out right ignore you.

Controlling is done differently with each class, some are chill, cripple, immobilize others are Daze, knockdown and knock back and another way is via blocking and shutting down general out going damage from enemy npcs.

Warrior Control:
http://www.noxxic.com/gw2/warrior/control/pve/core-build-and-traits

Guardian Control:
http://www.noxxic.com/gw2/guardian/control/pve/core-build-and-traits

These are base line builds, so feel free to change them to suit you more but the base idea behind these builds is solid and works well via just using the templates. Keep in mind control builds require good timing, making sure you get blocks, and knock downs in at the right time, don’t just knock a mob down when it is not doing anything, knock it down when it is mid swing, to maximize your cool downs.

Takes a lot of practice to be a good control class, but if you do master it you will be extremely valuable too your party.

P.s:
If doing heavy control for your group requiring you too take both weapon sets as melee control tools such as Mace&Shield + Hammer, do not forget to switch to ranged weapon in one slot when facing a boss encounter that you feel you need to range.

I’ve been able to tank with my guardian even till level 24 in fractals (Haven’t progressed any further so far). I can usually pull a lot of damage from a boss onto me so my teammates don’t get hit. The great thing about this is that most spells you would use give you boons but also help your teammates, giving them protection, healing and blocks (altruistic healing trait is awesome).

I usually run wall of reflection on bosses with projectiles. Combines with your shield, you can really negate and reflect a lot of ranged damage from some bosses. On most strong melee bosses I can survive a very long time if I play well. All I need to do is this :

- Keep protection up for my and my party as much as I can
- Use evades when I dont have a block or something isn’t worth blocking
- Be smart when using my heals
- Renewed focus is the best thing since sliced bread, you have basically 4 blocks and 2 heals if you need them, 4/6 is even partywide. Plus you become invulnerable for a few seconds (great stuff against agony)

The only time you shouldn’t try and soak damage is when you are low and all you’re spells are on cooldown. You should also be careful and kite for a bit when you use your heal and renewed focus for healing your party. The charr fractal end boss and the one with the hammer can instagib me though if I’m not carefull. The first one can do upto 34k damage with his whirl and its not really avoidable and the second one got a 20k hit on me a few times when I was too slow to avoid it.

I honestly prefer gs + mace/shield with power/vit/toughness for versatility. They have great synergy, one set pulls enemies towards you and the other one can push them away. Not to mention I find the aoe blind 10x more useful than anything hammer offers me. Be sure to carry a scepter though, sometimes you just really need to go ranged, but you are far from useless if you do (the snare works on most bosses afaik).

Don’t worry about glass cannons in your party, no one can keep those alive if they don’t know how to play. You can soak damage and help your team when they take or are about to take damage, but you can’t soak ALL the damage.

I have a shout heal warrior with soldier runes, my best friend runs a 100% clerics shout guardian with dwayna runes. The guardian has more sustain and he can stay in the fight when I can’t.

Guardians are better tanks from our experience. Plus I seen him get stay in the kite room in path 2 COF from 1% to 100%, impressive.

Tanking really sounds as if you wanted to take damage.

You can successfully run any of the dungeons except Arah and Fractal lvl 20+ with any team mates or personal traits/build.