Guild Wars 2

Hi,
my guardian is 60 and i tried a few CM runs with my friends to test/learn how to tank.
I’ve heard, that the aggro system gives you aggro for:
damage
toughness
wearing a shield
be close to mob

So i tried a “tank” build
0/0/30/20/0
first i tried all berserker like gear
then i tried a mix with armor berserker and rest knight
after that i tried all knight

with berserker i tried GS
with the mix i went for hammer
with the knights armor i tried: 1h/shield, GS and hammer

i was equipped with masterwork (green) items all the time and my friend a 49 warrior with berserker like gear (all blue) was the person with most aggro.

i managed to tank bosses now and then but every single bossfight my warrior friend had aggro for 50-80% of the time.

what did i do wrong?
if the aggro system really works as described before i should have got a lot more aggro with all knights and 1h/shield.

if that does not work is it best as a guardian to go full berzerker with GS and just support with boons?

i would love some advice

p.s.
this was the guide i was using for the spec
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/70142-after-100s-of-hours-my-final-guardian-build/

The problem is how aggro works in GW2. This game’s aggro system isn’t as rigid as other mmos. Some mobs will target the player doing the most damage. Others will target if you start to revive someone. Some have even claimed that mobs will target profession more often. My point is that not all mobs follow the same rules for aggro.

Basically you can’t hold the aggro of a mob as reliably like in other mmos. Sure you can spec to make your guardian really hard to kill. However if the boss is targeting your teammates your tank speck is pointless.

Now I am not saying your wrong with your trait points or your weapons. I used to run 0/0/30/30/10 with P/V/T armor knights and berserker jeweler with hammer, staff, and scepter/focus. Basically the AH hammer build floating around in the game.

As a guardian your job is not to hold the aggro for your team. Think of yourself as a boon generator that can remove conditions and deal steady damage on the front line.

You could also run the popular 0/15/30/20/5 build which would work great with your knights or berserker gear. The fun part about this build is that you can switch between running mediations or an AH shout build. You can also spam VoJ every time you kill a foe giving you and your team might stacks. You also get to watch your foes erupt into blue flames on a regular bases. Its fun for everyone.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Okay, well, I did a bit of structured testing between a knight warrior with full tank traits and a zerker warrior with full DPS traits, and it seems pretty much totally random. We tested aggro on a champ and were pretty much totally unable to control the direction of the boss’s aggro. If the boss wanted to go after the zerker, he would chase the zerker nonstop even if the zerker never attacked, and the knight was constantly attacking. Similarily, if he wanted to go after the knight, it didn’t matter what the zerker did. There didn’t really seem to be any real way to control who he went after initialliy either.

Just for an extreme test, I had the knight equip a level 5 white GS, and it still didn’t seem to make any difference. If he wanted to target the knight, I couldn’t get him off with my zerker, and vice versa.

The one thing I noticed is that if we both aggroed the champ but neither attacked, he would always target the knight first, but once we started attacking it would be a toss-up regardless who actually attacked first.

What that boils down to, I guess, is that aggro is pretty much random and trying to tank is equally unreliable. I think once the mob decides who it wants to attack, it’ll stick to that target unless some predetermined factor (maybe a timer?) makes it “reroll” for a new target. At that time, having more armor or more DPS make you more likely to be the target, but I don’t think it affects it to a significant degree.

tl;dr trying to tank is a total crapshoot. If Knight’s gear with AH is what you need to stay alive, go ahead and use it. Otherwise use something more offensive if you can manage it, but don’t try to run anything specific for the purposes of pulling aggro.

Given that my informal experiences have basically indicated that DPS matters more than armor, and my limited controlled tests have told me that it makes zero difference whatsoever, stacking toughness will, at best, enable you to pull aggro more often in some percentage of encounters, but not any more than if you just went full DPS.

For what it’s worth, it is my understanding that that guy didn’t test any of this either, he’s just basing everything off his own experiences. It is also my understanding that he just runs the same build for everything, so I don’t think he has any sort of basis for comparison.

Well it would naturally depend on what your friends build was.

Also specific mobs seem to have special rules. For instance, some will absolutely not ever change targets (except for very brief periods) from whoever aggros them first. Some behave like this but certain actions will trigger them to change targets, such as trying to revive.

Basically having high armor will give you a better chance that you will be chosen as the target whenever the current one is dropped for some reason. This is why thieves can be (used to be!?!?!) very valuable since cloaking squishier targets gives mobs a chance to switch. Normally you are going to be kiting bosses anyway; but I’d rather kite them with my guardian than have some paper elementalist or w/e get beat down.

There is no provoke skill, so good luck getting aggro it’s really hard for us. Warriors can both get aggro and facetank it better with someone else healing them.

Thats sad, it sounded like:
if you get much toughness and a shield you will get aggro.
But thats seems to be not the case then.