Guild Wars 2

I’m very new to Guardian end-game/PvE/fractals, but I’m loving it so far. I’ve been goofing off on the forums a bit, looking for good builds and gear choices. I keep coming across this idea of an “Anchor Guardian” but I can’t seem to nail down a definition for what an “Anchor” is. Is it someone who is capable of remaining stationary and keeping aggro while maximizing survivability, or something else?

Thanks for your replies.

It’s basically something people made up to justify pretending to be a tank in a game where you can’t hold aggro. Basically just go full tank spec and try to convince yourself that you’re being attacked more than everyone else.

Ya, what Guanglai Kangyi said, though full tank spec is nice, a few points or work arounds to get some nice damage output will help with the agro

Well from the way Guanglai described it, it’s not a useful ascription because it doesn’t do what it says it does. But I’m still not sure what it’s theorized to do or be. What is an Anchor?

An anchor is basically a tank (pull all the aggro to yourself so everyone else can just attack without being targeted), except since everyone knows you can’t tank in this game someone had the smart idea to change the name to “anchor” to signify the fact that you’re, like, sorta tanking, but not.

1) You can’t hold aggro, because aggro is largely determined by DPS and proximity as the major determining factors, with toughness being a sort of tiebreaker (the higher it is, the more likely you are to be targeted). This basically means that if you want to be able to pull aggro away from the other zerker warriors and guardians in your party, you need to either drastically exceed their DPS output, or match it and somehow still have a ton of toughness. Both are hard unless your allies are all in green gear or something.

2) Even if you do managed to pull aggro, you won’t survive. If you want to tank, you pretty much have to facetank the target without ever dodging, because dodging usually resets aggro and causes the boss to go after someone else. And of course, since you need to build for full DPS to get aggro in the first place, trying to facetank is dumb.

So basically, if you actually want to try to tank, you need to have higher DPS than all the other zerkers in your party, and enough defense that you can just eat everything without moving. If you could actually do that, though, you wouldn’t even need a tank, you could just have everyone run that build and faceroll everything.

Well I’m running with tanky guardian in party almost all the time. He doesn’t call himself anchor, but he does manage to get aggro most of the time and survive it. Yeah it’s about dodging. blocking and abusing AH, but he still manages to hold bosses in one spot so 100b won’t go into thin air.

And armor influences aggro A LOT. To the point where you draw aggro just by getting closer to mob. And I know it from using both knights and zerkers gear.

Toughness does indeed have a great influence on aggro. In most cases, it outweighs damage done by a lot, so Guanglai’s statements regarding the feasability of an anchor are way too negative. However, the usefulness of such a build is debatable since facetanking is rather impossible in places where you’d really need it.

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.

Aggro is different for different monsters. The mechanics change for various enemies (perhaps even different for each encounter with the SAME enemy, but I don’t have data to support that). It does seem that bosses tend to retarget more but in a game that’s trying to eliminate the trinity that would make sense.

There is no point in this, everyone should bounce the aggro around so that the person with the most health gets chased after while everyone else goes to town on the boss.

An anchor guardian strikes fear into the hearts of his enemies by wielding a large anchor.

Anchor guardian is simply risen putrifier, he wields an anchor.

I think this definition of anchor from the dictionary makes the most sense:

“a person or thing that can be relied on for support, stability, or security”

i see it in a different light. and closest to what Lightrayne mentioned. someone that is able to provide stability, support, remove conditions, control mobs, maybe even outheal / outlast. though again, just get bogged down by “labels” in gw2.

just find the build you find most fun and most effective, go with it. : )) and you can name it whatever you want.

Typical anchor guardian http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/gw2-the-briny-deep-hammer1.jpg