Is shroud really as good as arena net suggests it is? Is it the be all and end all that puts necromancer above the rest in terms of defense? So much so that just having it makes them the most sustainable unkillable force in the game? Does shroud make up for the lack of damage, utility and support?
Well lets answer those question.
Does necromancer have the best defenses?
Well lets look at all the types of defenses in the game, including barrier, and make a comparison to those defenses. Figure out their role and how well they function at keeping people alive.
Passive defenses: Passive defenses are defenses that don’t require skill use or timing to achieve their goal in keeping you alive. These would be things like Toughness and Vitality. Passive defenses are the lowest skill means of defending oneself and often the last resort for a player to use. Because of this, when they are built into a build they are put in there knowing full well that their active defenses might not be enough to keep them alive. If a play can avoid investing too much into passive defenses in order to maintain their utility, control or damage they will prefer to do that. But sometimes its unavoidable. Passive defenses can be good to fill holes in the player’s defenses but in GW2 especially shouldn’t be your primary means of defense. Passive defenses can only go so far in protecting you and these defenses are meaningless if this is the only way you choose to defend yourself.
Active defense: Active defense is an extremely broad catagory of different defenses that require more from the player. some active defenses are extremely complex in their usage while others are far more straight forward. Some of them people might not even consider as a defense but it is imperative that we recognize these as defenses as well for the purposes of its comparison. Lets go through them.
- Dodging: Dodging is likely the first active defense a player in GW2 will come in contact with. It is one of the most powerful defenses in the game as well as a good skill tester for players. Timing is everything for this defense and players who use this properly can avoid attacks that could fell a player wearing full soldiers gear. Although Dodging has been modified for some professions to improve its use, the vanilla dodge is still a powerful tool that also rewards high skill play. Example being the jump dodge.
- Blocking: This is more straight forward than dodging, but its defensive capabilities are lower than dodging at the same time. Blocks such as Aegis or counter attacks only block a single attack while projectile blocks and channel blocks can shrug off large chunks of damage for their duration, much like dodge. Though, blocks have more counters to them, such as unblockable attacks or traits that trigger if a skill is blocked.
- Invulnerability: The absolute strongest means of defense, there is almost nothing in the game that can interact with an invulnerable target this defense is usually linked to a long cooldown skill or has some negative to it such as mist form or elixir S. Their duration also tends to be much shorter than blocks as well.
- Stunbreaks: Inaction will lead to death regardless of how tanky you are. And because of this, defending against hard crowd control effects are extremely important for a player. In PvE these are less important because of the predictability of NPCs, but against players they become far better. If you are stuck flat on your face you can’t activate most other defenses so these are important to have to prevent you from being burst down quickly.