Guild Wars 2

So this build is something I tossed together, I think Ross took some footage of it the other night. This build, from what I’ve experienced, is an incredibly strong bunker. I’m able to sustain 2v1s against high damage builds (chrono/reaper/rev/engies) without much difficulty. Depending on the classes and player skill ofc, I can often sustain a 3v1 indefinitely.

Here’s a link to the build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAseWncfClfi1fC+fCEgilej6cDKhVzMAugMqeUb1XF-TJxHABPXGIgTBwJ7PAwTAAA

The general principle of this build is to maximize the amount of time spent either in block, in blur, or actually evading. To this goal, the following specifications:

Weapons

Sword/shield + staff. Sword has blurred frenzy, shield has the blocks, and staff has chaos storm for aoe cc and aegis, as well as providing ways to get chaos armor for more protection from chaotic dampening.

Utilities

You need permanent alacrity in this build, so I’ve taken a bunch of wells along with the well trait and improved alacrity. Additionally, these wells all allow me to expand my utility and support into an aoe for my teammates. I’ve taken the heal well, action, precog, recall, and gravity.

Gear

Sentinel amulet because 28k hp is amazing. I have enough mitigation and sustain that the massive hp pool allows me to eat a lot of damage if necessary, then sustain it back up over the next 20 seconds or so. Melandru runes are the obvious defensive choice. Energy sigils give more dodges, and hydromancy is effectively aoe mitigation of pressure whenever I swap weapons.

Traits

I take insp, chaos, chrono.

Insp provides condie removal and healing on shatter. The res feedback and pDefender now and then are just added bonuses.

Chaos provides stability on shatter, as well as protection whenever I get chaos armor. Since I almost permanently have an ethereal field up, this means I have extremely high uptime on chaos armor from my leap finishers. Not only is this tons of protection, it’s also roughly a 33% damage mitigation, as 33% of hits on me will cause blind for the next hit to miss. Damage reduction from active illusions is just an additional bonus.

Chrono provides me alacrity uptime from all 3 traits. Chronophantasma also allows me to pump out quite a lot of slow from the shield phantasms.

Mitigation Rotation

The name of this game is mitigation and avoidance. You have 4 primary ways to avoid damage: blurred frenzy, shield 4, active dodging, and well of precognition. These should be used in the priority I just listed.

Blurred frenzy ends up on a very short cooldown with permanent alacrity, and is your primary mitigation source.

Shield 4 is your longest sustained source of mitigation, and comes loaded with the phantasms for more utility as well. It has a fairly long cooldown, so use it carefully.

You get 2 dodges, then an additional dodge every time you weapon swap. These go quick, so be careful with them. Use dodges to avoid one-off stuff like true shot or magnet pull.

Well of precognition is your ace in the hole. This well is a stunbreaker, provides additional endurance when it expires, and puts any ally in the radius into blur for up to 3 seconds. The strength of this well means you want to save it for when you need it. Don’t be afraid to use it, but remember that it has more uses than just dropping it on yourself, such as protecting stomps, protecting ressing, or even throwing on a low hp ally that you see is in danger of dying to give them breathing room.

You want to rotate all these mechanics. Try not to spam them back-to-back unless you actually need that solid wall of defense. In total, if you rotate well, you should be in a mitigation state for ~23out of every 30 seconds.

Indirect Mitigation

Direct mitigation is nice of course, but this build has a lot of indirect mitigation as well. You can do both aoe and aoe chill from your wells, and this is pretty potent defense. Your phantasms do aoe slow, which helps too. Weapon swap is aoe chill, so use that as best you can. Shield 5 is a massive stun+quickness. You can also use it for temporary projectile mitigation. Chaos storm is great area denial, and gives lots of nice defensive goodies to you.

Your most powerful indirect mitigation tool is gravity well. This is incredibly strong aoe cc for its duration, and you can leverage that in a lot of ways. I personally like to try and save it to protect ressing/stomping, as it makes it incredibly difficult to approach an area. You can also just drop it on a point if you’re getting hit with a ton of melee pressure to get a breather.

Your condie removal and healing sustain comes from the heal well and shatters. Try to keep a solid cadence of shatters going while you’re in a fight, as that allows you to save the heal well for when you really need it.

That’s pretty much it. A possible variation I haven’t tried is to ditch chaos/insp in favor of illusions to pick up persistence of memory, but I don’t really think it would be worth it considering what you’d lose.

Video

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to record last night, and I don’t have access to a computer for the rest of the BWE. Ross recorded some matches that we played together in though, and posted the video in the main feedback thread.

From what I saw, it was boss.

Yup, I had similar set up which worked well.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAseWncfC1fiFqBeoBUrhlej6MFKhVzMAugMqeUb1XF-TJxHABPXGIn9HM4UAAwTAAA

Alternatively, Dolyak Runes, though I enjoy that little bit of extra burn with Echo of Memory.

This is my version.

It’s a more offensive variant. Compared to yours it sacrifices Protection and Stability for condition pressure and lower CDs across the board, particularly to Echo of Memory. Health pool is much lower but IMO for a healing-heavy build that doesn’t matter, and the somewhat higher Toughness plus a bit of Healing Power makes up for it.

For me the deal breaker is Shield 4’s interaction with Persistence of Memory + Chronophantasma + Disenchanter/Mental Defence/Warlock. You mentioned that it’s on a rather lengthy CD so it should be used carefully: in my variant I basically get Echo back a few seconds after Deja Vu finishes, or even immediately if I hold off on using Deja Vu.

Main problem is, of course, Necromancers. Not only can they turn conditions against you (although that’s really not a problem with the cleanses and active mitigation you have), they also potentially have a lot of unblockable attacks (more troublesome).

I use Signet of Humility because I feel a long CD elite takes the most advantage of Continuum Shift, plus the stun reduction isn’t shabby (and by using it with Continnum Shift it’s basically always active even if I Moa people on CD).

Nice, it seems that chrono and bunker go very well together. Interesting choice on sentinel but makes sense. Zeromis rocked that amulet in his bunker just after the June patch to great effect. I think this one is even better though (dem wells). Hm…mantras or wells? Yeah.

This has striking similarities to the soldier build I posted; I just went more offensive with it. Really nice that there are so many effective tankier build options with chrono now.

Played a build akin to this yesterday. Except with Cele Amulet and it was a duel, but very high sustain. So much survivability it’s actually sick, boons and cleanse on shatter, double heal and invuln well. Thief couldn’t kill me because of the amount of protection I was able to stack, but who cares, Cele was also viable and adds more of an edge to staff condis. Like the build #chronobunkermeta

yeap bunker support chorno is the thing now

any lockdown slow build and video i can see?

@Embolism: Necromancers are actually specifically why I went with chaos/insp instead of PoM in illusions. Wells and often marks go right through those blocks, as do bits and pieces of stuff from other sources. Taking chaos/insp broadens your sustain and defense into a more well-rounded state than doubling down on the single block.

There were a couple situations I wished for moa, but gravity well is just amazing, and on a rather low cooldown with permanent alacrity. The amount of denial you can get with it is incredible. Just drop it on a downed body to totally stop everything happening. You can lead it with shield5, which will strip 4 stacks of stability and let everyone get tossed by gravity well.

It’s also just incredible at mitigating melee pressure. If you’ve got a reaper and a rev and a scrapper or something on you, drop the well, maybe even twice, and they’ll take a moment to rethink standing on a point with you.

messiah.1908:

yeap bunker support chorno is the thing now

any lockdown slow build and video i can see?

I’m working on Lockdown Anguish.

No video again (sorry), but I was running sw/sh+gs with dom/duel/chrono. I took ether feast, MoD, and precog, along with gravity well. I traited CS, shattered concentration, power block, phant fury, blind, de, slow interrupts, improved alacrity, and chronophantasma.

It’s quite strong. You’ve got a lot of access to aoe interrupts along with solid defense, it’s pretty fun to play. If you need cleanse you can swap out ether feast for the heal well.

A possible modification would be to drop dueling for chaos and CI. I regret that I didn’t get the chance to try that version out.

The problem with Gravity Well in a Settler Bunker is the lack of Power to take advantage of its direct damage. That said I’ve come to appreciate double-casted Gravity Wells, 6s of AoE CC is generally better than 10s of single target CC. Plus it’s something else for AWTEW.

I do feel it should have a larger AoE though. It’s fine for most points but for Foefire’s central point it’s a bit small. And without Pull on the first pulse it’s not too difficult to escape.

Personally I’d be willing to take a CD hit (say to 120s) if its radius could be increased to 360.

Pyro, i wanna test this vs my dps necro non reaper when HoT hits

@Pyro: I used this build for pvp recently but really struggle to hold ground against DH power-based traps (ranger traps are condi and can easily mitigated thru cleansing).
Any tips?

keenlam.4753:

@Pyro: I used this build for pvp recently but really struggle to hold ground against DH power-based traps (ranger traps are condi and can easily mitigated thru cleansing).
Any tips?

DH traps aren’t too bad, they have pretty short durations. Just use some mitigation to avoid them. You can block them all except the ring-trigger one, so that’s an easy way to avoid them.

Just an idea but what do you think about using Rune of the Scrapper (+175 Power, + 100 Toughness and “Incoming damage reduced by 7% when within 600 units of an enemy”) as a more direct damage reducing version instead of the Runes of Melandru?

Yunalesca.9850:

Just an idea but what do you think about using Rune of the Scrapper (+175 Power, + 100 Toughness and “Incoming damage reduced by 7% when within 600 units of an enemy”) as a more direct damage reducing version instead of the Runes of Melandru?

Absolutely a possible choice. I like melandru because the build only has 1 stunbreak on a rather long cooldown, but the 7% damage reduction is really strong too.

I haven’t messed with Chrono yet, and in fact I have been away for awhile, but what about Distortion? I know its a long 50 sec CD but there is another 3-4 seconds of damage avoidance per minute.

benhamann.9570:

I haven’t messed with Chrono yet, and in fact I have been away for awhile, but what about Distortion? I know its a long 50 sec CD but there is another 3-4 seconds of damage avoidance per minute.

Distortion prevents capturing points. Use distortion on a point and you lose that point. It’s obviously still an option in a last-ditch survival effort, but should be avoided at all costs.