Guild Wars 2

I was wondering if anyone had a build for a straight up Warrior, sword / shield Tank

What’s the purpose of playing some meatshield? What do you want to achieve?

Well a PvE defensive Warrior Is the best descrpition I guess I could give

Armuun.8154:

I was wondering if anyone had a build for a straight up Warrior, sword / shield Tank

Yes, and players may aswell 4 man the dungeon than bring a waste of time like that.

Since im new to this game I guess it is my time to waste.If asking questions here on the forums bring about such negativity then plz paron my ignorance

It is important that you say that, because otherwise many people in the forum will react in such a way like Flissy.

That’s why I asked you what you want to achive with a meatshield to see your thoughts, so I could explain what could be better.

You actually can play defensively if you want, but if you reach Lvl 80 and get exotic gear on a Warrior, even with a Full-Berserker setup you are capable to eat enough damage. The Warrior’s health pool is one of the highest, and as a heavy class you have quite high armor, even without any extra toughness.

After some time the PvE content will get so easy and predictable, everything is done most effectively with fierce damage. It is the way how ArenaNet made up the PvE – unfortunately it is more effective playing as a damager, because mobs will die faster than they have time to harm you. Defensive builds in comparison take so much time to kill things, that the mobs over time do more damage to you than they would have done with a damage build. It is a bad design. Only in some high LvL Fractals it can be good to play a bit more defensively, but even there nobody ever goes meatshield.
I also expected things to be much more intelligent in PvE, so that defensive builds could find their place, but they don’t.

The elimination of the trinity and the aggro system in GW2 also disfavour too defensive builds. You can play very tanky, but you will never be that kind of a tank you see in other MMOs. Also, playing very tanky, aggro gets influenced. Mobs may even avoid you, because there are many factors like health, armor, range and damage. My experience was, that if you do too less damage and have too much defense, they damage dealers are favoured targets. So you basically just stand there, eat no damage and do so low damage.

Hey Armunn, please excuse the trolls, there’s frequent arguments here about going max dps here. Let me help catch you up:

1. -Going tanky in this game is not very rewarding, because bosses have attacks that hit so hard they can’t be eaten, even by a tank. You have to dodge/block/blind for survival. This leads to point #2…

1. -The optimal way to run pve content is with all high dps characters, especially the warriors. In GW2 the best defense is a good offense. That said, you don’t have to be the most optimal build to clear content, it just will be slower and arguably less reliable.

So back to the original question: Sw+Sh is a solid PVP/WVW option, but sword is not a strong pve dps weapon. Axe is really the king there. I would recommend picking up an axe, a mix of zerker and toughness gear, and practice your dps and avoiding damage, phasing in more zerk gear as you improve.

If you were dead set on being tanky, you might consider something like toughness/healing/condi damage gear, and focus on generating high bleed stacks with sword while being super tanky. You could take something like shout healing or banner healing with that. Just note that condi damage isn’t very desirable because multiple people using condi stacks pooly.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vIAQNAseRjMd0FarHGewJaABpQDvCzjfAIMikixYAB-zgCBofERjEEAUHYkIgUBJK1sIasVNFRjVZDT7KxqXCqBAQAOPfTn3H7bf7bfrclrclrcltxNuxNuxNWKgAFGB-e

there you go.

Keep in mind you would be BEST off using condition build with sword shield and having S/S off hand if your looking for DPS. This is more of the Tanky Meatshield though so you are getting more health with it. Course all aspect in this game require more dodging and timing than anything to stay alive. This is a really strong build though for just being tough to take down, try not to use your heal let the regan keep you up (use block when health getting low and regan take you back up to full health, also this has an auto shake off (remove conditions) as well as a regan when conditions put on you. Swap weapons often to use all abilities and you will gain a 20s might when going from sword shield to GS. Your crit chance is VERY low on this (which is not what people normally do) but you have good flat dmg and kitten ton of health (i suggest using adrenaline on you sword shield for extra DPS rather than getting fury with GS). This is a fun and unique build though.

Brigg.6189:

Hey Armunn, please excuse the trolls, there’s frequent arguments here about going max dps here. Let me help catch you up:

1. -Going tanky in this game is not very rewarding, because bosses have attacks that hit so hard they can’t be eaten, even by a tank. You have to dodge/block/blind for survival. This leads to point #2…

1. -The optimal way to run pve content is with all high dps characters, especially the warriors. In GW2 the best defense is a good offense. That said, you don’t have to be the most optimal build to clear content, it just will be slower and arguably less reliable.

So back to the original question: Sw+Sh is a solid PVP/WVW option, but sword is not a strong pve dps weapon. Axe is really the king there. I would recommend picking up an axe, a mix of zerker and toughness gear, and practice your dps and avoiding damage, phasing in more zerk gear as you improve.

If you were dead set on being tanky, you might consider something like toughness/healing/condi damage gear, and focus on generating high bleed stacks with sword while being super tanky. You could take something like shout healing or banner healing with that. Just note that condi damage isn’t very desirable because multiple people using condi stacks pooly.

That kinda sums it up best why people will troll you over this type of build. 35k health or 10k health you are gonna be one hitted by a lot of stuff still. Thats why despite being tanky as F you will still go down as fast as a glasscannon ele if you do not dodge and such. ALSO no matter what way you look at it Axe is better than sword (PVP PVE WvW) which will also add to the trollness towards your sword shield build. Thirdly, and I am not trying to talk you out of the build I made you.. but… ANET put a ton of work into the combat system to get RID of the trinity (DPS,HEAL,Tank). So although there are some small ways to heal others and some ways to tank things here and there, there is no real option to be a ‘TANK’.