Guild Wars 2

Hello fellow Tyrians, I have a serious question: is there any point in being tanky? Most dungeon bosses seem to one shot you, so that 5000 toughness isn’t helping much, health pools usually just allow for 1 extra smack from Mr.boss man, so really, why not just go all damage or healing for dungeons? You could say that they’re good for holding out against trash mobs, which is true, but only in rare situations, and usually even then a skilled non-tank can.cover. I really enjoy tanking in RPGs but I’m finding it hard to know where my tankiness is helpful, and theres not many situations that come to mind, so in all, is building tanky really worth it for dungeons or would I just be useless and learn to dodge as a glass cannon?

If you are going full damage you are, in most cases, just a burden for your party members cause you probably will dy to the trash and some random damage. Being “tanky” on the other hand helps you alot if it comes to that random damage, but doesn’t change the fact that you are not supposed to get hit by bosses.

The most important thing is, that even with a “tanky” build you will never be able to tank in GW2, cause that’s just not how this games works.

The idea with melee and GW2 bosses is you are supposed to play flawlessly and never get hit, because it should be easy even with all the particle effects and shotty attack animations they have when fighting, or just go ranged and faceroll.

So does that mean that all players should have a somewhat balanced build? If so how would that relate to customization within the classes? Are some builds just not viable for PvE? And my main question was really are full tanks useless, you know, those guys who have max health, max armor, and pretty much no.damage

I’ve tried the +toughness +vitality builds and seen little effect. Now I have settled on “glass cannon” and make sure I use all my evasion skills. Working out well so far.

In PvE you can mostly use whatever build you like, but you also have to adjust to the mobs you fight, sometimes you need to/should switch your utility skills.

“Full tank builds” are not useless, unless you try to play them as a tank. Even if you max out vit, toughness and armor you are not supposed to survive multiple big hits. Also, having a huge health pool and big defensive stats is just half the battle, you also should use weapon sets and skills that grant you blocks, blinds or even invulnerability.

Some builds are not viable for some situations, e.g. being a glass cannon sucks if you are fighting Giga in Arah. You might do some damage, but that’s not worth much if you are a one shot for his mass es spams. A Thief with ~11k HP is not that helpful if he gets caught in an AE that deals 16k+ damage to him in an instant.

Rukia.4802:

because it should be easy even with all the particle effects and shotty attack animations they have when fighting, or just go ranged

You mention two of my biggest issues with this whole “dodge” mechanic..

I think animations for big hits need a bit more warning. Especially with all the particle effects going around. Sometimes I can barely see what we’re attacking, let alone the miniscule “charge” effect mobs use when they are prepping a big hit you should dodge (sometimes they don’t even give you any warning)

Then there times where I’d be in mid-roll, and for all practical purposes it looks to me like I dodged correctly.. But for whatever reason the game decides I didn’t and I still get face stomped. That really irritates me, I feel cheated, that dodge roll should have counted, but it didn’t.

To be honest I really dislike “Press X not to die” mechanic in games such as this.. Not because I suck at them (I’m about average as far as twitch gaming goes), but because there’s just too much working against you. What happens if you have multiple mobs at all directions? Then there’s particle effects and crowding by other people. Not to mention latency issues that may arise.

Dodging should have been a neat little feature you could use to help mitigate damage at a steady pace. Not a “Press X not to die” all-or-nothing mechanic.. But that’s just my 2 copper..

@Mantis, I agree. It shouldn’t be an end all live or die button but a damage mitigation button, and no dodging an attack that would otherwise kill you is not exactly what I’d call balanced damage mitigation lmao.

When I first played Tera and when I first played Guild Wars 2: And before I got the buttons assigned perfectly and the Dodge/Roll down to a fraction of a second, I really did not like playing GW2.

Once you get a macro with (Guardian) [220ms], 4440ms and 1440ms delays for 1,2,3 and the middle mouse button click for 7,8,9 with [220ms], 2440ms, 1440ms delays; and you have the Roll/Dodge button for the ‘thumb’ side-button on the side of the mouse, you can fight at L18, L26 single targets without any problem at all: The poison spitting mobs are difficult though if you don’t avoind getting hit [and if the bar is empty, but you timed it right].

PvP players know you can do this. PvE players like to stay rooted in place or they’re taking too long to move that finger and hit the right button: They have a 1 step [too long a delay, uncertain of it occurring] 2 step form of play, and Arenanet’s GW2 is going to smack them on the hand playing like that.

I use a Steelseries KANA and the Advanced Macro button assignment just changes this game completely – the first time I got it working, I wasn’t playing GW2 anymore – I was playing Tera (which really did work for Dodging and Rolling).

There is no way you can play GW2 with ‘fun being a factor’ by trying to F1-3, 1,2,3,4,5 and 7, 8, 9 and Strafe; And Roll/Dodge, without spending time on the floor with that Left 4 Dead ‘Animatic4You’ thing going on.

Which brings me to the next point: How many players are using the A and D to turn left and right; but not ‘Strafe’ left and right.

I know this works because when the Story mode for “The Sting” started I could never complete it without getting completely destroyed once the friendly NPCs were down – there is no healing them or reviving them. And the bombers that go after blowing you away for 4 seconds floored to the ground. Game Over.
This way, I completed ‘The Sting’ with some effort, but with ‘fun being the factor’ with a L18 Guardian.

Dont know much about Dungeons, but general PVE is still useful.
I just spent the last 15 minutes of the game I played drawing agro from a Champion Troll, taking his hits, and avoiding his big hits, whilst the rest of the players hit him with range.
I play a support Guardian, plenty of toughness, vitality, and healing skills.
Standing still and taking hits doesnt work well, but active defence (dodging and timing skills well) works very good

OP, combat in this game centres primarily on range kiting. As a tank player myself, I feel your dissappointment. Tanking in inconsequential. You only need enough toughness/HP to survive from ghetting 1 or 2 shotted.

Then there times where I’d be in mid-roll, and for all practical purposes it looks to me like I dodged correctly.. But for whatever reason the game decides I didn’t and I still get face stomped.

That’s because when developers design combat systems like this, they don’t care whatsoever for the genre they are developing it for. One of the first things they should have asked was, if we have mob specials that have a .5 second reaction time to dodge, how much does latency affect this?

I’m sure they asked that and came to the conclusion it didn’t matter because the whole “downed state” basically reinforces the idea that the intent is to down the player as often as possible. That is why we have the downed mechanic and why everyone can res on the fly. They meant for us to be downed often, which is just the epitome of poor game design. they essentially designed a game to kill the player as many times as possible, even out of the player’s control.

And I’m certainly not the only one who noticed gigantic AOE red circles appearing AFTER you get hit by the AOE for 80% of your life and 2 DOTs that kill you shortly after you dodge out of it. On some encounters, the AOE circle appears at the instant or near instant the ability fires; I’ve said before that I see many players just randomly rolling – I didn’t know why until I got to 80. The red circles may or may not appear and you may or may not see the special ability wind-up.

It’s a completely impractical system even before you consider latency. I’ve pointed out that DCU online has a similar dodge mechanic, except their implementation is superior to GW2 because it takes into account latency and visibility. And it’s not that they can’t do it because in some mobs, it’s done properly. Other mobs, abilities are instant or near instant. It happens so fast that even if you dodge the second you see the animation, you’ll still get hit – latency on top of not having top-end 12 yr old kid reflexes.

Believe it or not, dodging randomly works much better in general than trying to dodge tactically <- that tells me, they clearly didn’t think it through and didn’t build enough redundancy into the system to support the practical application of it.

Whatever the benefits of specializing in vitality/toughness may or may not be, it’s just going to feel kind of trivial, at least until we figure out what it means to build to like that. That is to say, we all have the holy trinity gameplay in the back of our minds setting up our expectations of what ‘a good defensive character’ should be able to accomplish and how they should accomplish that. But that’s apples to oranges in a game where the role we traditionally associate with these stats doesn’t exist, and the alpha and omega of defense is mobility instead of statistics soaking.

For instance, when I tried a defensive build for dungeons, I found one of the more unexpected benefits of specc’ing defensively was something I normally wouldn’t associate with a traditional trinity ‘tank’ at all. It was the capacity to Rez just about kitten near anybody from just about kitten near anything.

Guy halfway across the room bleeding out on the floor among a horde of advancing little nasties as my allies skiddishly backpedal? Whatever. Excuse me, polygons, EMT comin’ through.

If the instant kills were changed to only take let’s say 90% of your health away, it’d still be plenty of incentive to dodge them.

But at least you’d be able to not play 100% perfectly once in a while.

Although the Tank in GW2 doesn’t really exist, but as a guardian I have built myself to be a survivor and help the party/team to survive in most situations. With my elite skill I have over 6 abilities to regen and buff players including condition removal, and the ability to insta res a player, using the skills wisely you can overcome most bosses. Lets also not forget that the game is made for you to go into down state often, a lot of people still dont know how to use those down state skills.

I think a lot of people are creating their character to pure dps and not utilising their defensive skills as much as they should be, I might not have the best damage output but I can out survive most fights even when I take on a group of 4 – 6 mobs, including Veterans in the mix, even my ranger can survive a lot more than some other rangers that I see around, so I don’t see its down to just this class is better than that class argument all the time.

I have run with people that are pure “heal” spec and pure “tank spec”…tank spec with a greatsword…

I pointed out to them that this game has no tank or healer, that the mechanics are not designed around one person absorbing all of the damage, and that purely trying to heal is fruitless as well(i.e. waiting for your long cooldowns to go off before doing anything else, thus kittening your group a little).

The damage being dealt out to your group is not made to be able to absorb it for 30 seconds until you kill the mob. If people are able to do this, then I think Arenanet failed miserably on their promise and this would be yet another major “hiccup” for the game where they said the game would be one way, and it really isnt.

My 2nd Warrior would fall under the “tanky” cateogory. The goal was to create a character who could help tank the various trash mobs that you might encounter. Then against a boss, I’d usually switch to more of a ranged combat style with some AoE support.

So far, this seems to be working out. Now it will make me pick x2 different gear groups for the character. Trash mode gear will focus on Power / Toughness / Vitality. Then boss mode gear will focus on Power / Condition Damage / Vitality. By having two different gear pools to work with, I will also be able to mix and match them depending on the content that I’m facing.

(Basically I’m having to deal with the old gear issues that affected my melee healer Inquisitor in EQ2. It’s a royal pain to accumulate the neccessary gear, but it will give you a lot of versatility. Also since GW2 doesn’t have a traditional gear progression system, it actually makes it relatively reasonable to keep a couple of Exotic grade gear sets around.)

If you get two shotted even with 30 points in the vitality and toughness trees then what do you think? There’s probably a reason why glass cannon builds are far more popular than chance would permit.

Somewhat.

There needs to be a tertiary defensive stat akin to critical damage or maybe condition damage, but I don’t know where Anet would put it. IMO the best would be condition duration as a defensive stat, making conditions and crowd control applied to you have lower duration.

While I agree with the whole “there is not trinity” mantra, and love it, I would say that my experience in explorable dungeons suggests there certainly is a point in building a “tanky” setup. Often explorables go much easier if someone steps forward to soak a lot of the damage and hold most of the aggro. It’s pretty viable if a warrior/guardian knows how to play it. Almost all of the best runs I’ve had have been this way. I don’t think it necessarily detracts from Anet’s design philosophy because I’ve also done several runs of TA exp lately, for example, and in the absence of those types of tanky players, people have just adapted and played the dungeon in a different way (and it was fun for th variation).

I’ve been doing dungeons on 80 Guardian 80 Warrior.
I stack 3000-3200 armor, usually no Vit or not much.

The thing is, bosses have a mechanic I call dodge check.
They will have some skills that you either dodge or die no matter your defense.
It’s supposed to be like this, and it is awesome (except in those cases where the boss one-shots on instant cast, but most of those were fixed).

Stacking Tou is very valuable, but it doesn’t allow you to not use dodge.

So yeah I would really love to dodge….

…shortsword ranger here. You physically can’t dodge during your melee cycle because auto attack 2 and 3 are ranged leaps so after you dodge you just leap right back in. The only thing you can do is use your “2” which is a leap backwards with enough range to stop your auto attack… but it doesn’t cancel your ongoing auto attack so you have to mash the button until your current attack ends.

Or I could just get out my longbow, send in the indestructibear, press “1” and afk.

I made my guardian a pure tank from creation. Used vital and toughness gear and relied on traits and inherent stats to give the power i needed to kill things, as well as the power/prec signets. Once you hit 30, you can simply jump in dungeons or look for crafted gear, which has vit/tough/power on it.

I could EASILY handle groups of 5-6 mobs or more that were 1-2 levels higher than me, and kill them the same speed it takes a normal player to kill 1-2 of them.

I even took on 2-3 lvl 34 vets at level 32 and didnt have much of an issue.

I liken it to a pally tank in wow. Play defensively, use your skills well, and youll never die or come close to dying.

I’m working on a tank based warrior atm and so far it seems to be working out pretty much the same. Especially since warriors seem to have a higher health rate. Guardians rely on the regen factor and toughness more.

When i get chance, i’ll write up a guide for levelling as a tank specced guardian. It’s pretty fun, and proves that people who say that levelling as a tank is a bad idea, wrong.

Tanking in the usual physical interception way, yes. Tanking free-form (intercepting by range or with a bag of tricks) is still useful and yeah it does waver on the definition of “tank”. I wouldn’t try too hard to interpose yourself between other players and mobs and expect it to work the same as always.

Your utility skills, your weapon conditions, those are the resources you want to deploy to help protect other players. As a necro I frequently deploy healing circles and snares in events, to help mitigate players getting overwhelmed. The clever ones roll out when they’re in danger, the less cautious ones … well they at least get a little HoT.

I believe that being tanky or healy is not useless as there are no dps-meters yet.

arrownin.3128:

Hello fellow Tyrians, I have a serious question: is there any point in being tanky? Most dungeon bosses seem to one shot you, so that 5000 toughness isn’t helping much, health pools usually just allow for 1 extra smack from

Tbh, *In the dungeons I have run so far* I have yet to be one shotted by bosses. It just doesn’t happen to me. Maybe it is the mace/shield combo with max Tough/Vita + Banner buffs + decent tank gear (Note: I am NOT full exotics, I have two pieces missions of exotic gear which are legs/hands).

Done: All story mode
One AC explorable (Ghosteater iirc)
HoTW – Path Butchers/plunder
TA – Spider / Bee’s

I know these are easy paths I am quite sure, so if I am wrong do bring out the rope to hang me with as I have yet to experience all the dungeon content.