Guild Wars 2

Hey guys.

Been a warrior for 230H now, and I need some more advices. Started as a berserker war, and then rolled for being tanky.

I absolutly LOVE being the “tank” in the group, and people I play with also love that. Res, heal, On my mark, remove condition etc…

Currently fully geared exo tough/vita/pow. 2 earing exo with beryl, 3 others exo jewels with emerald.

my armor is runed with 6/6 dolyak. My axe with +5% damage and my shield with “health on ennemy kill” which can give a little health when you have trash mobs not elite.

Soldier spineguard with soldier rune.

~29700 life
~2200 toughness
~3500 armor

Now my traits 10/0/30/30

10 : III (5% of power in vitality)
30 : II (200 tough when having problem), IX (90 tough with shield) & XI (endure pain at 25%)
30 : II (+70 pow to nerby allies), VIII (shout reloading faster), XII (shout heal)

Hotbar : Healing signet, endure pain, shake it off, on my mark, signet of rage.

There you go for my char. Now my goal would be to be even more tanking.
It’s indeed already a real fortress in PVE, my shouts heal for about 1.5k, got two of them. 6/6 dolyak rune is 33 healing per second and add on top of that the signet, it’s very rare I’m going down, and it’s generally when things are going really really bad anyway.

Would you guys have any more advice for taking damages even better? Would vampiric rune be better than dolyak for healing?

And please don’t tell me either of the answer “reroll guardian” or “you need to DPS too” my question isn’t there

Thanks lads

your a tank but you will not kill anything good for dungons with the rest of your team doing the real damage, for pvp wvw forget it tryed it failled hope u have more luck than me..

Get banners, some +healing, and go for dwayna runes or soldiers if you want to stay with shouts

Retooling significantly for knight gear, and eating omnomberry ghosts/pie would get you:

Slightly more toughness
Slightly less power
More healing and damage via crits
Less vitality

Which won’t solve the problem of: You’re already not going down until things are really bad…ie, your party is already half dead. So realistically, you need more group support without losing much personal defense.

A great support utility is Fear Me. Useless against bosses now, so use Endure Pain on bosses and Fear Me on trash. It’s also a long duration shout, so kinda works with what you’re doing already.

I assume you’re already using hammer. If not, it’s the most defensively support weapon we have. For offensive support, longbow.

Shield vs mace vs warhorn. Shield is mostly a personal defense weapon. A single target stun is meh for group support (PvE). I find warhorn to have much more group support value via long duration group vigor and medium duration AE weakness. The line-AE knockdown of offhand mace is also great group support

Soldier runes would also give you group condition removal

Juular.4729:

your a tank but you will not kill anything good for dungons with the rest of your team doing the real damage, for pvp wvw forget it tryed it failled hope u have more luck than me..

worked quite well, though you need to be with 1 or 2 more people indeed. Can’t damage them enough, just harass them and keep the focus/stop them.

I ran that build for a long time, 10/0/30/30/0 and it it a beast with full PVT and soldier accessories- I love it when people say, “but you won’t do any damage!” What does the “P” in PVT stand for? I’ve easily hit 3800+ Attack with a few might might stacks. 3500 armor and 30k hps…yeah, what a crappy build!

“But you have no crit!” – With Rage, that’s 24% up all of the time (with FGJ, SoR and 30% boon duration via Tactics). Throw in Omnomberry Pies (70 precision), Maintenance Oil (~200 precision) and now your crit’s up to ~37%. Now add in Sigil of Perception and you’re up to ~49%. Sigil of Accuracy and bang, 54%! Add a Sigil of Blood just because – I’d go Axe/Shield since the speed of the axe increases the effect of your lifetaps.

As for added tanky-ness, I’d go with Soldier Runes – Dolyak is a 30hp/sec meh heal. Better to to be able to purge conditions that will do 100x that per second.

I’m running a higher-crit build now, 0/0/20/30/20, but I might go back.

I think you should try swapping your shield for warhorn. Take the Quickbreathing trait instead of the shout cooldown. If youre feeling too vulnerable without the shield, consider main handing a mace instead of an axe. Take the mace trait instead of the shield trait. Also, since you have the auto-endure pain trait, you might want to swap out endure pain on the hotbar for balanced stance or something else situationaly.

Traited warhorn may be the single most significant thing you can do without really adjusting the guts of your build. AoE weakness in PvE feels more defensive to me than a shield. AoE vigor lets everyone dodge more frequently. Avoiding damage is ideal. AoE condition cleanse and conversion can go a long way towards increasing your and everyone elses survivability.

Chak i think you have a good setup for pure brick tank but in a PvE encounter a high toughness war with baseline hp can tank any burst short of being stupid. So i would reccomend switching to spifs suggestion of knights gear to pump up your crit so omnomberry ghosts will work on giving you more health recovery (66% on crit to heal you for ~350 no apparent icd) on the same note of substained healing i prefer banners over shouts as you can drop a 90 tough/vit banner for more raw stats and 130 hps from perma regen. And you may have to call me on this but if you are not running healing power the heal skill healing surge used at adrenalin 3 seems to provide more healing than the signet can. Finally the increase in toughness and raw damage will help to further concentrate the mobs ire on you as they really seem to hate the dude with the most tough whos hitting them in melee

Thanks everybody for the feedbacks, greatly appreciated.

For those saying “you don’t do damage” that’s (half) true, but you didn’t much get the purpose of the build. Tanking, support, res under fire etc… Anyway it’s clearly not doing as much damage as a DPS build, but it still does some, and you can see that as the downside of this build.

I’ll try answering people’s suggestion :

Fear me : Not a big fan of fear in fact. Aren’t scared mob aggro’ing other packs?

Warhorn over shield : Yeah well, honnestly I can’t play anymore without a shield. Stun, interupt, good way to get back in the fight with 4th skill. And 5th skill is A MUST HAVE for tanking, blocking a burst is more efficiant than any heal, cd remover or anything could be. Blocking 10k+ damage never gets old to me. Not that the idea is bad indead, I keep it in my mind, it’s just a matter of preference I guess.
Mace suggestion is great, was thinking about a mace for dungeoning too.

Food : never really interested in that, except omnomnom berries for +money on mobs. So i’ll clearly have a look into it if it’s not 2 gold a pie, thanks for the advice.

Soldier’s rune : I’m skeptical in fact, I’m kind of loosing 55 toughness and gain 55 vita. Sure the 6th bonus is great, and I’m not really sure I want to trash 20 gold of rune in a blink of an eye. Have you noticed any specific cooldown on the condition remover?
I guess it’s a solo remover only (not group), so shake it off would get kind of redundant, removing twice a condition on me (or does it remove 2 conditions???). I could trade it for something else, but then I’d lose a group remover. Tough choice.
If a fight lasts 1 min that’s about 2000 of life I get for free.

edit : okay so soldiers rune remove a condition to the group. That’s indeed marvelous. Still my question remains, does it remove 2 conditions or only one?
edit 2 : okay, it does remove 2, that’s a huge information to take in consideration

Banner : Yeah, well, problem is I only have 3 slots
Endure pain, can’t remove that one, honnestly, best friend for a tank.
Shake it off is kind of super important too, group CD remover + heal 1.5k.
The only one I could spare would be “on my mark”, though I’d lose a heal and +10% damage FOR THE GROUP on the bad guy. I don’t know if a tough/vita banner could compensate that loss.

Healing : I do have the 3 adrenaline thingy for healing, it’s indeed great and be sure I don’t press F1 until the very end of a fight :p
I’d like to get some + healing, but I’d lose some other stats, and I don’t want to spare much. Need vita/tough/+heal gear hehe.

Thanks for all your feedback anyway, it’s great having other ideas to think about.

Another question while we’re at it.

Is the healing shout considered as “a healing skill”? because II in strengh part is “when using a healing skill” removes chill, immobilisation etc…

Would be great to use.

Just a quick question,how is the dolyak rune set working out and how much toughness + armor gives it total ? i want to try it aswell,but the price is just skyrocketing for a simple test would end up losing about 26g for it.And no im not going spvp for it since its to different from wvwvw.

It’s a bit blurry to me, what your exact goal is. By becoming "tankier" you want to take more hits, want to live longer, want to have more hitpoints or something else? There’s many way to achieve these, but at the end of the day you gonna sacrifice so much for a bit better defense that it’s definitely not worth it.

For example: You took 5% power converted to vitality. With your gear your power should be around 2k which means 100 vitality, an extra 1k hp which is not so much. Not to mention your healing doesn’t scale with vitality, making even the strongest heal (Healing Surge) healing around 25% of your hp. Having berserker’s power instead which adds an extra 12% damage is a lot better choice in my opinion since what your build lacks is damage, and this increase will help your party or even yourself to finish encounters faster (and probably get hit less, since the enemy died faster).

I ran a tank build for a very long time, with full Pow/Vit/Tough gear with Soldier runes, to remove conditions, soldier jewelry, with soldier crest. I used Mace+Shield\Longbow, and it worked pretty well. I was really hard to bring down, but at the same time I had a moderate damage (mace trait +10% weakness trait +5% berserker power +12%) also used sharpening stones which add power based on your tougness+vitality which a perfect match for your gear.

But here’s the catch: The day I’ve found out that omnomberry pies exist everything changed. With the proper setup, you are harder to kill than a tank and deal a lot more damage. So if you want to live long go for it. But if you like seeing that you got lots of hp and armor, and the enemy slowly chips away your health stick the tank build, but I’d advise to go into a bit more damage oriented direction, since it helps a lot more and hardly hurts your tanking capabilities.

@Caedmon
Dolyak is terrible (regen is 30hp per sec) if you want runes with toughness as main stat you might want to try Melandru (reduces stun and condition duration) which can be quite useful in WvW

pilot.8460:

I think you should try swapping your shield for warhorn.

But the point of using a shield is keeping aggro, a tank without shield is indeed only a deadweight for the group because the mobs will not go for you at all times.
With a shield you hold aggro, tried it many times and it works.
That’s what makes tanky build viable, the DPS don’t need to kite and can go all out!

Tank warrior for the win! With improved toughness when reviving I become kitten near invincible, locked in a battle with the victims health and those attacking them, with the hits merely pinging off your armour. Also in certain destroy object challenges (e.g graveling burrows) just bust out the GS and you’ve become the biggest damage dealer there, with the exception of frost bow slingers of course.

Granted, with a well oiled dungeon running machine team, being a tank becomes quickly unnecessary. As most people go high DPS and have long since mastered dodging at crucial times, it’s more of a race to tear through to the end. However with green players its much more practical to have that one player always standing to res the others.

Juular.4729:

your a tank but you will not kill anything good for dungons with the rest of your team doing the real damage, for pvp wvw forget it tryed it failled hope u have more luck than me..

For Spvp I agree, warriors do not make good bunkers and are better off going damage, for WVW that is another kettle of fish altogeather. A small group of hammer warriors can very quickly cause an enemy zerg to get rolled over by a much smaller force. Yes the warrs themselves are not doing the massive damage of a frenzied 100B but chain stuning large numbers and general disruption can break the moral of a zerg. however your going to want a bit of tankyness or jumping into enemy lines like that will just get you killed.

ChaK.3254:

Fear me : Not a big fan of fear in fact. Aren’t scared mob aggro’ing other packs?

Warhorn over shield : Yeah well, honnestly I can’t play anymore without a shield. Stun, interupt, good way to get back in the fight with 4th skill. And 5th skill is A MUST HAVE for tanking, blocking a burst is more efficiant than any heal, cd remover or anything could be. Blocking 10k+ damage never gets old to me. Not that the idea is bad indead, I keep it in my mind, it’s just a matter of preference I guess.
Mace suggestion is great, was thinking about a mace for dungeoning too.

Soldier’s rune : I’m skeptical in fact, I’m kind of loosing 55 toughness and gain 55 vita. Sure the 6th bonus is great, and I’m not really sure I want to trash 20 gold of rune in a blink of an eye.

Fear me generaly does not last long enough to send a mob out far enough to agro anything. If your close enough to do so your probably going to agro whatever it was mid fight anyway.

warhorn vs shield. you are underestimating the power of dodge roll. Yes blocking a 10k burst is better than any heal. You know what? not being there when that 10k burst goes off is just as good. You get 1 or 2 extra dodges per CD off the warhorn 5 skill not only for you but your whole group. You can still compleatly negate that burst and if you traited for warhorn remove an extra condition as well. its about 13s duration and 16s cd fully traited as well so uptime is stellar. The weakness reduces your targets damage output. The other skill “Charge” also removes all the movement impairment conditions by default (+1 bonus if traited) makeing warhorn an amazing group suport package that is hard to beat. I’m not saying there isnt a place for shield block but it really only offers protection for yourself, protection that can be equaled or surpassed by a simple dodge roll. There are very few things that you can block shield a companion from that they shouldnt have just dodge rolled away from themselves.

trashing 20g of rune: so dont. It is quite possible to get a compleatly new set of gear to put a different set of runes in for little more than a small time investment. Particularly if you want Pow/Vit/Tou gear. Run all three paths of AC every day and you can buy a full suit of the stuff in a bit over a week and make enough gold in the proccess to pay for a good % of the new runes. takes maybe an hour and a half in a mediocre pug. Do this and you now have both options avalible to you as the mood suits you.

Personaly I run my warrior sword/warhorn(Sword is mostly for the mobility, that and I love my dragonsword skin) +whatever suits my fancy and have for a long time. Right now that happens to be hammer for the CC options it brings. Runing soldiers armor/runes, knights jewlery, soldiers for hammer/warhorn and zerker hammer. I can basicly face tank most bosses, dodgeing the big hits when needed, interupt like a champ, and provide excellent group support. Outside of bumrushing a wvw zerg I’ve also never felt the need for defy pain either and never run with it sloted in pve. Agian anything that skill could save you from would also be avoided by a well timed dodge.

I rolled a guardian :p Though I like tanking on my warrior too. To improve your set up you should get soldier runes (3 aoe condition removals with no internal cooldown is too good to pass up) and use a mace instead of an axe as it has a block and a stun

Don’t yout think that dolyak runes are very weak?
All what they give is a boost to stats. That’s not what you are looking for in runes I think.
Note: Last bonus is non-existant, 30 HP/S is nothing. Compare to your shouts heal for example. and shouts are aoe too.
Soldier’s runes would be better imo for such build. Also, signet of rage seems to be far off the mark compared to warbanner( it doesn’t suck, it gives actually very decent bonuses!). Not like you get many benefits from might stacks and crit chance in your build, now do you?

Evalia.7103:

Don’t yout think that dolyak runes are very weak?
All what they give is a boost to stats. That’s not what you are looking for in runes I think.
Note: Last bonus is non-existant, 30 HP/S is nothing. Compare to your shouts heal for example. and shouts are aoe too.
Soldier’s runes would be better imo for such build. Also, signet of rage seems to be far off the mark compared to warbanner( it doesn’t suck, it gives actually very decent bonuses!). Not like you get many benefits from might stacks and crit chance in your build, now do you?

Well Dolyak is a good chunk of toughness and some vit but your right about that 6 piece. I tested it in the mists and never looked at that rune agian. Wasnt even a third of healing sig.

Banner vs SoR kinda comes down to your preferance and what your trying to do. The signet gives a fairly decent personal damage boost as well as long duration swiftness with a very respectable uptime, 50% with no traits and can be pushed to near 100% with traits and enough boon duration. Banner has the rally effect on summon as well as what ammounts to signet of rage on the whole party but has an abysmal uptime due to the long CD and fairly short duration. The banner itself only lasts for about 1/4 to 1/3 of its CD depending on if you traited it or not. Banner is amazing for a clutch rally but is not that great as a buffstick considering if you have more than 1 warrior around you probably have all the buffs it provides because a majority of warriors burn FGJ on CD. If the banner stuck around longer so you could have it out a majority of the time (all other banners traited expire about 3s before the CD) or if the stability pulsed along with the furry might swiftness it would be more worthwhile to take for its buffs but as it is its more about the rally and the 65s of buffs are just bonus.

with 30 in tactics it’s gonna be more than 65 seconds though.
Buffs persist after banner vanish, and it’s for entire party.
Can you count again?
Signet is the same, for 50% uptime is what you want to tell me.
But banner is the same but for 25% uptime(actually more), yet for entire party.
25×5 > 50×1. or something like that.
Plus, resurrect effect which is precious. And he doesn’t benefit all that much from excess might/fury since he’s focused on defending his mates rather than damaging(he plans to help his teammates to do damage)
Pretty much an obvious choice.

Evalia.7103:

with 30 in tactics it’s gonna be more than 65 seconds though.
Buffs persist after banner vanish, and it’s for entire party.
Can you count again?
Signet is the same, for 50% uptime is what you want to tell me.
But banner is the same but for 25% uptime(actually more), yet for entire party.
25×5 > 50×1. or something like that.
Plus, resurrect effect which is precious. And he doesn’t benefit all that much from excess might/fury since he’s focused on defending his mates rather than damaging(he plans to help his teammates to do damage)
Pretty much an obvious choice.

Does not mater if you have 0 tactics or 30 tactics the banner disapears after 65 seconds. yes the buffs persist a bit longer, 10s+ your boon duration buffs before all the might falls off. Could be a bit longer for the furry to fall off depending on how high that stacked. Either way asumeing your not stacking extra boon duration on gear might from the banner will be gone 78 seconds after you drop the banner and your still looking at another 2 minutes traited before its off CD still at best 1/3 uptime. IF your the only sorce of might in the party maybe thats worth it during a burst phase. In pratice however I find might gets tossed around like candy and if I’m not the only warrior in the group I’m seeing my stacks siting up in the high teens low 20s because every one is spaming FGJ on cd and the war banner if hauled out would just cap us out more constantly for a little while.

As to the revive your milage may vary. the glairing problem is if you save it for the revive you are drasticly reduceing the uptime of the buffs it provides and if you bring it for teh buffs chances are it wont be up when a good opertunity for the revive comes along. Idealy you shouldnt ever need to use the revive in pve so its a StuffHTF (apparently that accronym is also a naughty word) CD that may be key or utterly worthless. Baring situations like reviving a camp/keep lord in WvW or stupid kitten like 3 people failing to dodge on kholer I find very few situations where its useful. . Even when saveing it I find it would have been almost as fast to just revive the person by hand more often than not. often you cant get more than one person with it and if you can its probably like the kholer example, a total waste because those same 3 people are probably going to fail the mechanic agian in 30s.

imo the best ‘tank’ warrior is clr gear with hammer/X. you get toughness and 2k shout heals, with strong aoe CC. alternate wpn can be GS for dps, or rifle for range, or mace/shield for more blocking though hammer is already weak dps. we don’t have barriers, but the extra healing from shouts can really help you and the group.

I’ve been trying to build a tank warrior myself after the long hours of DPS and trying to find one that could also be relevant in WvW, I came up with something similar to this and might give your choice of skills a try.

Now I did skip over a couple posts, and i understand you use sword and board in your set #1, but what weapon do you use in set #2 or do you not change weapons at all? I took to using the warhorn in set #2 solely for the extra speed boost.

I really like my Tank/group support build.

10/0/30/30/0. Strength V. Defense VI X XI. Tactics V IX XI.

Currently have P/T/V armor (will be changed to cleric’s). Sapphire Orbs on armor. Cleric’s jewelery (masterwork currently) with Sapphire Orbs. Hammer and Mainhand/Warhorn.

Utilities: Healing Signet, For Great Justice, Banner of Defense or Discipline, Banner of Strength, Battle Standard.

This uses Vigor and 2 sigil’s of endurance for damage avoidance, and lots of regen (like 2K+ health every 3 seconds with full adrenaline) and you give your group more damage/defense at the same time

I have to second azmodeus about using cleric’s gear for power, toughness and healing power.

While it might not seem obvious, having a large HP pool doesn’t actually help that much in PvE because it doesn’t influence how much you recover through heals. The extra 6k-7k HP you’d have through pure vitality gear is a buffer and it tends to get burned through rather quickly. While there are some encounters that make it handy to be able to absorb the extra hit, that only works if you’re able to keep your HP full or near-full at all times.

For example, from the GW2 wiki, the formula for regeneration is 5 + (1.5625 * Level) + (0.125 * Healing Power). Or 130 + Healing Power/8. I run with about 740 healing power from my current gear, which yields another 91 HP/s in this example. That’s a 70% increase.

The Healing Signet has a different formula, 200 + (Healing Power * 0.033). The same numbers would give you 21 additional HP/s, for a bit more than 10% gain.

In a long fight damage mitigation and healing make a much bigger difference. This is particularly true if you have Tactics 30 and healing shouts, since it also applies a multiplier to your shout heals. Also I’d suggest running with Healing Surge instead of the signet. If you happen to have either the adrenal health trait or the adrenal damage trait and run with your bar full most of the time, Healing Surge will deliver 8440 HP with a 30 second cooldown. The Healing Signet by contrast gives 6000 HP over 30 seconds. If you pop it active then that’s only netting you 3220 over 20 seconds.

Soldier runes are also a great thing to have, because not only does it greatly improve your condition removal, but it does so for the entire group. Running Shake it Off and any other two shouts allows you to shed 4 conditions, as well as remove that many conditions from any party member within range. It vastly outweighs the little bit of extra toughness you get from Dolyak runes, as well as the added regeneration. Removing conditions will mitigate vastly more damage.

While we’re talking numbers, also keep in mind that armor doesn’t mitigate all types of damage. Having 10% more healing is better than 10% more armor in any situation your HP can’t outlast, since the net effect vs conventional damage is the same, yet you gain benefits in recovering from hits the armor doesn’t reduce. If you’re a Tactics 30 warrior with healing shouts, the effects get compounded since suddenly you have four skills that can heal you, all of which are gaining benefits. Applying that healing to the group as well will be more beneficial overall than you personally being able to absorb more damage.