Guild Wars 2

Hi!

I really like classes/professions that have high survivability (can evade/deflect/etc. attacks, high defense, self heals, etc.) and no real burst damage, but rather decent sustained damage and aoe damage. This usually comes in the form of dots (multidotting + active mitigation).
The type of character to simply outlast someone in a duel instead of “who can burst who down first”.

I’m wondering what is a profession that can do this? If there even is one.

Thank you!

Edit: Knowing the “best possible” would be nice, but I’d also like to know the ones that can simply do it well.

Well everybody can dodge, mesmers have a lot of decoy, deflect and blink around stuff, but are light armored. If you want to be able to take hits directly, either play a Power, Toughness, Vitality (PVT) guardian or a PVT Warrior with shield and axe and the right traits.

This game really does boil down to a DPS race in most cases. From your description, you probably want to play guardian (reflects, blocks, self/group heals).

Most of the damage mitigation comes from dodging in this game. The rest comes from stats based on your choice of armor and weapons.

In PvE a build that outlasts enemy’s is very viable (though slow). In PvP it is slightly different. dots is mainly done by conditions. They are armor ignoring but also removable and it takes a lot of stats from both gear and traits to be a real threat. The other dots is aoe, but foes can simply get out of them. Besides that, no defensive gear can survive heavy damage spikes forever. So if your foe is any good you can’t outlast them forever. This makes such kind of builds less viable for one vs one. In WvW and tPvP it is more viable. for example a hammer guardian can deal a good amount of cc (knockdonw) combined with a strong survivability so the rest of the team can nuke the hell out of the enemy. There are however no permabuilds so you should always have some balance between the amount of damage you deal and the amount of self protections. Cause most of the damage can be avoided through dodging and moving, these players skill can tip the balance. That is the reason that most strong players go for high dps combined with good dodging skills to avoid damage through dodging/moving. The better you can prevent getting damage, the more you can invest in your damage output,

Thanks for speedy responses, but I’m not too interested in just being able to take hits. I like this game because of the dodging. Is there a class that can dodge more often than others through traits, evasion abilities? What about “invulnerability” moves? Even something like the necromancer’s death shroud, boosting their survivability considerably.

I don’t care about simply being able to shrug off hits, rather than the ability to stay alive and be able to get out of a sticky situation instead of just getting bursted down instantly.

I did see something about the “Medicat” or something like that for Engineer – pretty much just a distraction that uses confusion for the people to kill themselves. I like that, are there any classes that don’t necessarily use the same tactics, but can fill that “distraction” role? Or is that pretty much just the guardian as a whole?

What about water/earth elementalists? Death shroud necromancers? Sword and board warriors? Stealth-a-lot rogues? Evasion rangers? Mesmer clones (are they really that good?)
I just threw out a bunch of things I know nothing about. Are any of them a thing?

I just don’t like the look of a guardian. I want SOME viable range and it seems to be the only one who can’t go with full ranged build and be able to do anything – particularly in case I do want to switch to doing ranged damage at some point in time.

(In all mmos – ranged dps and tanking has always been my favorites.)

Edit: Oh yeah – and for leveling I’ve always love “AOE Grinding” – can any class do this? The monsters in the game seem to be a bit stronger than some games.

I truly think you are looking too much to builds on the internet. The beauty of this game is that it is easy and straight forward to master but there is no viable build. This has been since GW1 and is even stronger in GW2.

Any good build has its pros and its cons and the classes are pretty good balanced and competetive towards eachother.

Ranged classes can dodge better. Most skills are projectiles, so you can see them coming. being ranged means you can easier dodge or take other measures (mist form, deathshroud, blink, etc.). ‘Melee’ classes (though specially the warrior is pretty good ranged) miss that offcourse. But to counter that they can withstand more damage.

As for Aoe Grinding, again AoE damage is pretty balanced as well. the better the skill is the longer the casting time (preventing you from dodging and having a higher risk of being interupted).

This results in that all those builds out there on the internet are very limited. You can call them the flavour of the month. Build A gets a lot of love from the players. A lot of people start to play it. victums are unhappy by it and find the best counter for the build, and so the build gets useless.

This is why the best builds for PvP are not found on the internet but from personal study. On top of that you keep them for yourself to prevent them for getting too popular and you adept them all the time.

Welcome to the best PvP game around

Lucky Charmz.5089:

Hi!

I really like classes/professions that have high survivability (can evade/deflect/etc. attacks, high defense, self heals, etc.) and no real burst damage, but rather decent sustained damage and aoe damage. This usually comes in the form of dots (multidotting + active mitigation).
The type of character to simply outlast someone in a duel instead of “who can burst who down first”.

I’m wondering what is a profession that can do this? If there even is one.

Thank you!

Edit: Knowing the “best possible” would be nice, but I’d also like to know the ones that can simply do it well.

Sounds like you’re looking for an engineer. They’re hard to learn but they have a lot of options that you describe: lots of dodging through traited vigor, elixir R, and good synergy with sigil of energy. Good blocking and blinding capabilities (more active defense). Also quite a bit of healing.

They also do very well with condition/sustained damage. They’re very flexible, so you can choose to be incredibly hard to kill with some pretty good sustained damage, or pretty hard to kill with incredible sustained damage. Or anywhere in between.

Good luck! Hit me up with a message if you run into questions! (I’m not sure if I’ll remember to check back on this thread…)

In this game, DoTs are called Conditions.
They are generally weaker than you’ve been used to in other games. In this game, the ability to kill fast is more desirable. Conditions are useful for hampering your opponent rather than outright killing.
A fight generally evolves along burst-and-recover lines with the ability to husband your cooldowns being the final decider.

Sounds like youre looking for a phantasm mesmer!

For this playstyle, you let your phantasms do damage, and all you do is survive.

You have 2 blocks, perma vigor, blurred frenzy, 2 stealths, and you just troll/kite your opponent to death while they waste time trying to:

1. hit you
2. kill your phantasms

The whole style is “outlasting” your opponent (which is extremely easy on a mesmer, we have some of the most actuve defense)

If you want more information or a build/guide, feel free to whisper me or send me a PM.

Alissah.9281:

Sounds like youre looking for a phantasm mesmer!

For this playstyle, you let your phantasms do damage, and all you do is survive.

You have 2 blocks, perma vigor, blurred frenzy, 2 stealths, and you just troll/kite your opponent to death while they waste time trying to:

1. hit you
2. kill your phantasms

The whole style is “outlasting” your opponent (which is extremely easy on a mesmer, we have some of the most actuve defense)

If you want more information or a build/guide, feel free to whisper me or send me a PM.

Oohhh I like that. The whole idea of “outlasting” the opponent. Is Mesmer pretty much the only prof that does this? Or can other profs do it well too?

I’ve been doing exactly this whilst leveling my thief. In open world, I’m spreading aoe bleeds and cripples while stealthing, dodging, and evading attacks. It’s so much fun to kite away watching 4 enemies limp toward me as dot numbers bounce around my screen.

Mesmers.

You use confusion (both the condition and actual act of confusing your enemy with clones) rather than relying on toughness.

I’m hearing a resounding mesmer, as well as thief and engineer.

I know engineers are considered the “least played class”

But where do theives and mesmers lie in that? I don’t like playing overplayed classes.

I’m namely thinking in terms of WvW roaming.

Edit: And just out of curiosity, because I’ve heard Warriors, Rangers, and Elementalists are good at WvW solo roaming, are any of those over played or “most played”?

If you like Dodging, you need to check out the Thief Acrobatics Trait line….

If you like ganking and trolling, Thief is the obvious choice but that’s pretty well all it’s good for. Mesmer is good at solo roaming, as is Warrior. Both good all-round classes.

Elementalist? No.
Dagger/dagger has good survival 1v1 but is more at home in a crowd. Staff Ele is lost without it’s zerg.

Can’t speak for any of the others (except Guardian but that’s definitely not your specification).

Lucky Charmz.5089:

I’m hearing a resounding mesmer, as well as thief and engineer.

I know engineers are considered the “least played class”

But where do theives and mesmers lie in that? I don’t like playing overplayed classes.

I’m namely thinking in terms of WvW roaming.

Edit: And just out of curiosity, because I’ve heard Warriors, Rangers, and Elementalists are good at WvW solo roaming, are any of those over played or “most played”?

The devs made a fun article called “gw2 in numbers” or something. I currently dont have acces to my laptop, so i cant look it up :/.

Mesmer is the least played profession, 10% of the whole population. Engineers were 7th with 11%, warriors top played with 17%, I think.

All professions have “outlast” playstyles, but all require you to attack. In the best scenario with a duelling phantasm build, you never attack, just summin phantasms and focus on surviving :P

Ranger is very “outlasty”, simply because they have no burst spec :/. With mesmer you have the freedom of changing from outlast to burst with a simple trait reset :P. (although most professions do).

Id recommend trying them all out in spvp, you indtantly have acces to best stats + traits, so you dont have to grind or anything :P

Again, feel free to whipser/PM if you need anything

As an engineer in rabid / dire armor you can get up to very high condition damage values, while having high toughness and hit points at the same time. Pretty much what you described in your initial posting.

I play such an engineer in wvw, with grenades, bombs and rocket boots he is a condition spamming machine, can escape very well (or catch up to runners) and kick people off cliffs if they position themselves badly. A very versatile and fun class in my eyes.

Uh…roaming…conditions…survivability….

Engineer. Perplexity build.

Sir Koroshi really popularized this for me, I don’t think he plays much if at all currently, but to watch him roam in action was poetry.

I checked his twitch and youtube channels but he doesn’t have any of his good footage, but I found this, which is more of a survival vs zerg video:

http://www.twitch.tv/sir_koroshi/c/2797933