Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone, I don’t post here a whole lot, though I wanted to bring up some theory crafting. I run a Tank necromancer, right now I’m pushing about 2500 toughness unbuffed. I’m wanting to see what people on here think about with the new Elite Specialization coming out, about being able to increase your level of tank. Wanting to see the different builds that people can come up with! Lets do this for both PVP, and PVE.

I was looking into it myself, regarding what you can manage with it. 2500 toughness is pretty powerful. If you want to go full tank, I’d recommend using the shouts that come with Reaper, but also Runes of the Trooper (they’re called runes of the soldier in pvp, for some reason). the reason for this is if you do, every time you use a shout the rune’s tier 6 benefit kicks in and gives you a condition cleanse, with no cooldown, in addition to all the other shout benefits.

After that, you’re going to want Chilling force and blighter’s boon in the Reaper line. chilling force makes it so that any time you hit someone with chill on them, you gain a stack of might – this may not seem like something important to you, since you’re going for a tanky build, but blighter’s boon is why you take it. every time you get a boon applied to you (such as through chilling force, or any number of your shouts) you gain 1% life force or, if you’re in death shroud already, you heal for 1% HP.

Reaper shroud #5 is a big cold field, applying chill to enemies and then hitting them more than once. Reaper shroud #4 turns you intoa necrocopter, hitting everything in the area – which are now chilled as well. Using this, you can apply boons to yourself something like 50 times in the space of 10 seconds, allowing you to heal healf your health while allowing shroud to tank the incoming damage you’re looking at. Additionally, keeping enemies chilled like this will work with your cold shoulder minor trait, which will reduce incoming damage from those enemies by 15%. It’s a win-win-win.

Conventional wisdom says you want Soul Reaping and Blood Magic as your other to specs. soul Reaping will make your shroud much more effective, and since it’s a whole second HP bar that means quite a bit for a tank. blood Magic, on the other hand, will allow you to add sustain to yourself while you’re hitting people – a little extra HP granted to you every time you hit is nothing to scoff at, since it really adds up over time. Vampiric aura and Transfusion can also be big helps to party support, allowing you to provide some healing for your teammates in addition to being nigh unkillable yourself.

I find it hard to believe that a little condi cleanse on shouts would be better for tanking than the protection proc on wells (as well as everything else you get by speccing wells).
From what I can tell of the Reaper, its for aggressive damage/condi specs, not tanking.

Reaper is interesting because it’s not locked into anything – Cold Shoulder makes tanking pretty viable, but since they’re chilled anyways, why not use Chilling Force to get might as well?

It’s what I’ve heard called a ‘brute’ style setup. Hits hard and is hard to hurt, but doesn’t get from place to place very well. Given the Necromancer’s other abilities, it’s actually an extremely versatile and powerful setup.

My Necro is more focused on dungeons, and PVE, though I still do a fair amount of WvW. Generally I’m not on my own, I usually have my wife with me, or my brother. I attempt to tank and cc the best that I can and try to be annoying to have them attack me, while they can’t really do a whole lot with the high amount of toughness, vitality, and through using death shroud. Generally we are in smaller scout parties then in the larger ones.

I was thinking that as far as skills go, the Freezing would work exceptionally well in movement reduction. Though it isn’t an outright tanking, it does provide movement impairment, which can negate damage and help the other people that I would be with to kill them. The melee focus of the great sword, being able to get close to the enemy, will help a lot with staying to them. Being a tank, this is great, it makes it harder for the enemy to kite you. This would be more focused on the WvW side of things though.

Anyway, it’s what I’ve come up with so far.

i think speced rightly, a necro can stay in shroud forever. perma tank ftw.

EremiteAngel.9765:

i think speced rightly, a necro can stay in shroud forever. perma tank ftw.

That’s impossible. LF regen from skills within DS is minimal, it will always drop from damage or skill use. You can drop in and out of DS for an extended period of time if you are fighting another bunker that hit like a wet noodle, but chances are you cant hurt him either.

Dawdler.8521:

EremiteAngel.9765:

i think speced rightly, a necro can stay in shroud forever. perma tank ftw.

That’s impossible. LF regen from skills within DS is minimal, it will always drop from damage or skill use. You can drop in and out of DS for an extended period of time if you are fighting another bunker that hit like a wet noodle, but chances are you cant hurt him either.

It’s technically possible as long as trait Unholy Martyr has condition to transfer and Shrouded Removal or other source removes them before they do serious damage.

But why would you want to make a tank necro without any other use?

Dawdler.8521:

EremiteAngel.9765:

i think speced rightly, a necro can stay in shroud forever. perma tank ftw.

That’s impossible. LF regen from skills within DS is minimal, it will always drop from damage or skill use. You can drop in and out of DS for an extended period of time if you are fighting another bunker that hit like a wet noodle, but chances are you cant hurt him either.

It’s actually entirely possible just highly unlikely. Unholy martyr+shrouded removal+ vital precitance = 4% lf gain every 3s as long as conditions are right. Again unlikely but not impossible.

Also with what we have been shown about reapers it will be entirely possible for them to stay shrouded just by auto attacking oraking use of chilling force. So more likely reapers will remain shrouded for extremely long periods of time.

Dawdler.8521:

EremiteAngel.9765:

i think speced rightly, a necro can stay in shroud forever. perma tank ftw.

That’s impossible. LF regen from skills within DS is minimal, it will always drop from damage or skill use. You can drop in and out of DS for an extended period of time if you are fighting another bunker that hit like a wet noodle, but chances are you cant hurt him either.

Reaper is going to have a DS generator on auto-attack, that gets +life force for every enemy hit, and can cleave up to 3 enemies. I’d hazard to say that it’s actually going to become very easy to maintain death shroud for a long, long time.

I think that with Reaper, I will be able to keep the majority of my toughness, though I might have to sacrifice some of my health. Though I do think that staying in DS will be a much, much longer thing. Which, in general will make survivability even higher, making you a better tank.

The problem with Necro tanks is that not-dying isn’t good enough for GW2, you either need enough support to help allies (bunker guard), and/or CC to debunk, and/or damage. We don’t have good enough damage yet, due to our weapons, and coincidentally we don’t have the right type of CC or support for the same reason.

We finally got the trait rework we needed, we have the right traits at the right strength to have the defenses for bunkering. Reaper will bring the damage to allow us to be bunkers, and hopefully a future specialization will give us a support weapon so we can do that too.

Sigmoid.7082:

It’s actually entirely possible just highly unlikely. Unholy martyr+shrouded removal+ vital precitance = 4% lf gain every 3s as long as conditions are right. Again unlikely but not impossible.

4% every 3s doesnt help when enemies take 20% off every second you know.

Dawdler.8521:

Sigmoid.7082:

It’s actually entirely possible just highly unlikely. Unholy martyr+shrouded removal+ vital precitance = 4% lf gain every 3s as long as conditions are right. Again unlikely but not impossible.

4% every 3s doesnt help when enemies take 20% off every second you know.

You said it was impossible and like it said its not impossible because mathematically it can but like I said its highly unlikely to happen. Regardless of situation it does result in you being in shroud longer.