Guild Wars 2

I want to build a necro tank so i can build pugs faster, but i have never done something like that on gw2 already. I am afraid that, even with he help of guides, i will need a lot of practice on positioning, dodge timing and to train my focus and i can’ t just drop into a squad and expect other people to accept my fails.

Any tips on how i can improve that, either in the raid instance or not?

Unless you have a set raid team/guild where everyone can play what they wish, I’d strongly recommend learning how to tank on a different class. I would expect probably 90% + of pug groups want a chronomancer to do the tanking, even when other professions (e.g. thief) make pretty good tanks as well.

Now, regardless if you decide to keep building a necro tank or go with a different class, i would recommend you to practice soloing archdiviner in fractals. While that fight is different to raids, you will learn how to manage your blocks, dodges, invulns etc while maintaining dps – which is crucial for good team dps. Inside of raids, just practice spotting the boss attacks and learn how to time them with blocks/invulns/etc as well as the timings on when to dodge, when and where to move etc.

Honestly if you want to pug I suggest using a meta tank. But if you’re with own squad anything is fine as long as it works.

But definitely you need to learn the timing of the dodges most of all and the timing when to move bosses while worrying how to stay alive since if you go down, the boss stop following you. Also not all bosses require a tank. The 2nd wing does not require a tank at all

Actually surviving is not the hard part of tanking in raid at all. I mean almost zero. The tank itself doesn’t really have a big impact in term of dps. He will usually have an impact on movement, cadence, mechanics and buff. But it’s personnal dps is usually very very low.

If you don’t feel comfortable or are worry that surviving will be an issue take some extra trinkets just in case. For example, bring some Cleric or Knight trinket and keep them in your inventory or equip them and swap between them depending on how your first experience go.

The main thing you should be focusing on is the mechanics and I’m talking here from experience. At VG for exemple, you want to train to move VG at the right time so he doesn’t spawn a green circle in the wrong tier of the arena, you don’t want to get teleported, etc. At Gorseval, don’t want to hesitate and want to bring him as closer as you can to the wall, and you want to keep him immobile to make him easier to dps by your group.

I don’t have that much experience with tanking VG, but I’m the main tank for my group at Gorseval. I use Scrapper condi build and even with only 5 trinkets swap to rabid I rarely even use my healing skill. Maybe 2-3 times per fight only. Surviving with an healer and some toughness is really not hard. Keep in mind that the Healer always know where you are, so it’s easy for him to keep you alive.

I’ve had experienced with terrible healers that’s why I consider surviving to be a thing

VG is the only fight with an involved tanking role
positioning the boss in the later phases is absolutely critical, as it determines where green circles spawn, and then healer is on green circles and so frequently will be super far away from you, so you need to be able to keep yourself alive

positioning gorseval, on the other hand, is trivial, and the group is always all together (except during the 4 spirits phases, during which there is no tank)

thanks for your replies, could log in only now

I will consider soloing archidivinier, and in that regard i have to solo twilight harbor too to get the runes ( i can’ t find a proper team at all!) so it’ s added experience.

regarding the class, i thought necro was a good pick for the first wing because can afford to go totally full dps thanks to the thoughness given by minions, so it can go full viper/sinister and cover the condi dps role. But i agree that having a team-based class by start is quite helpful, like chronoi.

You can swap sinister trinkets for rabid if you need extra toughness to face tank things. If you wvw and have made trailblazer gear you can use that instead of viper with a likewise negligible dps loss.

Be wary of reaper shroud/death shroud, while in it your healer can’t give you heals. Try to communicate if you actually need to receive healing, or if you’re going to mitigate it with another health pool.

I really recommend chronotank. Instead of focusing too much on toughness you can simply evade/block with so many different skills. Shield blocking and f4 also help at luring VG to the next slice to avoid wrong green aoe placement. On Gorseval you can just facetank the swipe attack and shield block the smash one and do your magical quickness rotations so everyone is happy. Also staying alive is very easy and most likely don’t need to rely on healer at all.