Reaper Cavalier Tank (raids)
Current problem with toughness is, the more you have it the less effective it becomes.
Reaper has a really one of the best if not THE best defensive skill which is “Rise”. It cuts the damage we get by 50% both in and outside of shroud. If you want to tank you need good condi cleansing and toughness to get aggro from mobs. Death magic is best traitline to achieve that since it can give you 2500 armor in full exotic zerk. Ascended goes even further.
For cc-bar breaking flesh golem is much better than “Chill to the bone”. It takes 2-3 times more from bar.
You didnt take soul reaping line and yet you go with reaper onslaught. If you take this trait then you want to be in shroud for long time and use that dps increase. But if you want to go with tank then BB should be better.
For hybrid dps with tank flavor i would go with something like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQRBIhdu1JzmQNNY3mg7mA7NYxawkCAhsSWcGMEWCpWBxgJFA-TRSGABA8EAO4EAswBBAk9HiT/AgqvIlSwhU+poKEBAOAII8AgWA-e
For the food you can run with Bowl of sweet and spicy butternut squash soup for dps or Ghost pepper popper/Fried golden dumpling for more might (more lf and health thanks to BB trait). Sigil of hydromancy on dagger allows you to enter shroud already with debuffed enemy (-10%dmg from chilled enemies) and get proper mightstack or fast lifeforce gain.
Tested on DS map, 5 enemies around you allow you to heal for 4500-5000hp within 3s upon entering shroud. Enter shroud- trigger ~3s of chill from sigil of hydromancy, go Soul spiral or whatever skill you want- you are not bound to just aa in order to get might.
3 stacks of might from sigil of str, 3 from food, 15 from trait, 3stability stacks from infusing terror thats 24boons in 3s. Every single one of them heals fo about 200 with world bonuses.
Of course you can go for more toughness but then you will lose even more dps. And dont think that you will be able to just land an easy Gravedigger on any of raid bossess.
Current problem with toughness is, the more you have it the less effective it becomes.
Reaper has a really one of the best if not THE best defensive skill which is “Rise”. It cuts the damage we get by 50% both in and outside of shroud. If you want to tank you need good condi cleansing and toughness to get aggro from mobs. Death magic is best traitline to achieve that since it can give you 2500 armor in full exotic zerk. Ascended goes even further.For cc-bar breaking flesh golem is much better than “Chill to the bone”. It takes 2-3 times more from bar.
You didnt take soul reaping line and yet you go with reaper onslaught. If you take this trait then you want to be in shroud for long time and use that dps increase. But if you want to go with tank then BB should be better.For hybrid dps with tank flavor i would go with something like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQRBIhdu1JzmQNNY3mg7mA7NYxawkCAhsSWcGMEWCpWBxgJFA-TRSGABA8EAO4EAswBBAk9HiT/AgqvIlSwhU+poKEBAOAII8AgWA-eFor the food you can run with Bowl of sweet and spicy butternut squash soup for dps or Ghost pepper popper/Fried golden dumpling for more might (more lf and health thanks to BB trait). Sigil of hydromancy on dagger allows you to enter shroud already with debuffed enemy (-10%dmg from chilled enemies) and get proper mightstack or fast lifeforce gain.
Tested on DS map, 5 enemies around you allow you to heal for 4500-5000hp within 3s upon entering shroud. Enter shroud- trigger ~3s of chill from sigil of hydromancy, go Soul spiral or whatever skill you want- you are not bound to just aa in order to get might.
3 stacks of might from sigil of str, 3 from food, 15 from trait, 3stability stacks from infusing terror thats 24boons in 3s. Every single one of them heals fo about 200 with world bonuses.Of course you can go for more toughness but then you will lose even more dps. And dont think that you will be able to just land an easy Gravedigger on any of raid bossess.
As I said, only look at the gear, not the traits. The thoughness is for drawing aggro (at least in the Vale Guardian fight) rather than actual tankiness alone. In most if not all of the raid fights you will not have 5 enemies around you. Investing in even more thoughness will not be neccesary I hope, because my goal was to reach an exact 30% crit chance. The gear is all about stat-efficiency really. The Vale Guardian at least doesnt do much damage, so drawing aggro on a class that is naturally tanky seems more important to me than actually investing in tank-ish skills/traits.
I love this route, I have done it as well. It is nice being a tank with 210% ferocity and 100% crit in shroud. I only have exotic gear so far but it feels very powerful.
I use the spectral armor skill, Rise, and whatever for third utility.
If I were really good I would try to use vampiric signet and pop it right before shroud. Then I would get 5-6 seconds life steal on the boss and by the time shroud wore off it would be recharged.
I have been using the healing shout and it is good for building life force but I found between spectral armor and great sword spam I get life force back quickly enough as it is.
It could work, but might be overkill. I tanked the first boss and just threw on two Knight’s and two Cavalier’s trinkets with my zerk set, ran “Rise!” and Spectral Armor and had no trouble surviving. We swapped comps a lot as people came in and out, so I’m not sure if this was asking a lot of the Druid, but he didn’t remark on it being more difficult than helping to sustain any other comp.
One question: Why axe? Dagger is superior dps and ds gain. If you need to tag at range, you can use the 2 skill.
P.S. I wanted to add – using a cavalier build with blighters boon and soloing camps in wvw is extremely fulfilling. I realize it is not tough to do but I have seen groups of people stressing about fighting the supervisor and running away when with this build you literally go into the middle and face tank everything.
I would definitely say that blighters boon needed to be nerfed as its current state is so extremely powerful now I almost feel god-like at times. And even though spite/soul reaping/reaper is a common build, I still very rarely see people running it as I think many players of this class tend to prefer ranged in general.
Before the patch I ran dual daggers lol. So, it is nice to have a real melee weapon.
It could work, but might be overkill. I tanked the first boss and just threw on two Knight’s and two Cavalier’s trinkets with my zerk set, ran “Rise!” and Spectral Armor and had no trouble surviving. We swapped comps a lot as people came in and out, so I’m not sure if this was asking a lot of the Druid, but he didn’t remark on it being more difficult than helping to sustain any other comp.
One question: Why axe? Dagger is superior dps and ds gain. If you need to tag at range, you can use the 2 skill.
Again, I plucked the build out of metabattle without much of a thoucht. Only the crit chance modifiers are relevant
I too think a cavalier tank would work. Something like this
You have survivability for yourself, huge DPS, CC, a lot of vulnerability stacking and you have support in the way of signet of undeath and signet of vampirism which is also a DPS heal for allies. Signet of undeath can save a wipe. You will also be granting allies might, swiftness and fury. Not too many things grant fury.
Could possible switch out spectral armor with wurm or something to teleport back out of the “lava”.
It might be possible to have a tank that also heals and does DPS with another class but no tank is going to do everything really well. A cavalier necro should be able to tank and DPS really well.
I too think a cavalier tank would work. Something like this
You have survivability for yourself, huge DPS, CC, a lot of vulnerability stacking and you have support in the way of signet of undeath and signet of vampirism which is also a DPS heal for allies. Signet of undeath can save a wipe. You will also be granting allies might, swiftness and fury. Not too many things grant fury.
Could possible switch out spectral armor with wurm or something to teleport back out of the “lava”.
It might be possible to have a tank that also heals and does DPS with another class but no tank is going to do everything really well. A cavalier necro should be able to tank and DPS really well.
Do you actually NEED that amount of thoughness? And for the fury, a single fire ele provides tons.
You only need more toughness than the rest of your group. That means it can be as small as a single toughness infusion in theory. I was tanking with toughness food. So i literally only had 100 bonus toughness. Before our other reaper had to log he was doing the same with 60 toughness food.
The only caveat is that the rest of your group needs to avoid any additional toughness.
Can you literally sit there and facetank the boss with that cavalier build? If you’re kiting, the entire rest of your team is losing dps because the boss is walking out of their fields.
Alternatively, you can play this build, which can facetank the value guardian almost completely unsupported. If you’ve got an engi in the raid they can drop their heal turret to blast you with water every so often without sacrificing anything. This allows you to run 1 tank 9 full dps and beat that enrage timer more easily. Not to mention you, the tank, do reasonable condi damage. Not as much as if you were playing a full glass dps, but easily around 3/5ths of that.
Full rabid gear
traits:
death 332
curse 312
reap 222
Scepter/dagger, don’t really need anything in weapon swap, maybe bring greatsword in case you need to contribute to a break bar and flesh golem is on cooldown
Tuning crystals and koi cakes, since your damage is your sustain
Skills are consume conditions, signet of spite, blood is power, corrosive poison cloud, and flesh golem. If you really need even more survivability you can trade the signet for rise, but this is unnecessary.
Try to rotate through corrosive poison could then soul spiral and you’ll jump up to 6k poison ticks for a few seconds
I’ve been running with +20% bleed and +20% poison sigils because I’m not willing to spend 30 gold on the global condition duration and damage sigils, but if you like to go balls deep then that’s an option for you.
You can literally sit there with just toughness food and berserker gear. So i dont see why you wouldnt be able to with cavaliers.
You can literally sit there with just toughness food and berserker gear. So i dont see why you wouldnt be able to with cavaliers.
I highly doubt that without the sustain from parasitic contagion, just based on how much I was having trouble surviving without that and the death magic traits.
(edited by Tobias.8632)
It depends on each boss, how often they attack, and what those attacks do. If you can successfully tank hits then yeah that setup looks fine, but if they are 1 shots then no you need something with aegis/blinds/dodge spam.
Team Deathmatch for PvP – Raise the AoE cap for WvW – More unique events for PvE
You can literally sit there with just toughness food and berserker gear. So i dont see why you wouldnt be able to with cavaliers.
I highly doubt that without the sustain from parasitic contagion, just based on how much I was having trouble surviving without that and the death magic traits.
Well we killed Vale guardian with me doing just that. And i didnt have much more of an issue surviving on Gorseval either. I even dropped blighters boon.
You do need to dodge some stuff. In vale guard phase 1 you can dodge everything because you can dodge into the wall. In phase 2 and 3 you have to be a bit more careful. But because you are kiting you have an even easier time sustaining and you can dodge backwards while kiting. When you get a bit low just use dagger 2 to fill your bar back up. And make sure you use rise whenever you can.
All what you need is Rise+Bloodmagic Traits. Go max Berzerker if possible. Need only more toughness to get the aggro.