Author Topic: Guild Wars 2 Tank and Blaster  (Read 2403 times)

Absolute

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Guild Wars 2 Tank and Blaster
« on: October 05, 2013, 10:14:48 PM »
Hello!

I bought Guild Wars 2 before the shut-down announcement and haven't played it since.  A couple of friends have started playing it again. I checked my characters and found out I have a couple of them have some scrolls that auto-level other characters to level 20.

I was wondering what combinations people think may resemble what I'm looking for.

I want 2 types of characters.

1 character that goes in and doesn't die, as his job is mostly to tank; he has enough DPS to keep aggro but sacrificing damage for survivability is completely fine. Something like a Invul tank, or Will Power, that, in CoH, gave up damage auras for more defense.
So far I've looked at a Mace/Shield warrior for this job. With Mace/Shield, it gives me a total of 3 stuns + 1 three second invincibility + 1 parry-like attack. The combination of disruption and invincibility/blocks seems to protect me a lot in fights.

The 2nd character I'd like is something that shoots from far away with small quick attacks and allows for some kiting. Something similar to a Fire/EM, Ice/EM or Psi/EM blaster. That could stand behind his teammates and blast away at a far range with little risk of getting into the actual fight. I've looked at elementalists, but I'm hoping there's something that's closer to a CoH Blaster.

I'm hoping since the people here have a good grasp of what exactly tanks and blasters in CoH excelled at, people who also play GW2 can point me in the right direction.

Last point; these characters are going to be around level 20. While an Ele/Shield scrapper was great at AoE, before the two big nukes it was not (Around level 20). I'm most likely going to stay around the 20-25 mark for these characters.


General Idiot

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Re: Guild Wars 2 Tank and Blaster
« Reply #1 on: October 05, 2013, 11:53:15 PM »
If you try to tank in GW2, you're probably going to end up disappointed. They're one of the few games which lacks the trinity - everyone's supposed to be doing a bit of everything rather than specific dedicated roles. Which, in my opinion, is a terrible system.

FatherXmas

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Re: Guild Wars 2 Tank and Blaster
« Reply #2 on: October 06, 2013, 05:56:47 AM »
Asked around my CoH Guild on GW2, Heroes of Paragon, and for a Tank the best you could get is a Guardian.  That said there were IOed out Blasters in CoH who could tank better than a Toughened up Guardian.

Blasters, well since skills (powers) are attached to weapons and vary I would peruse the various weapon skills of either a mesmer or elementalist.  Mesmer with a great sword has a range attack that is more powerful the further away you are.

But as for a fire;ice;psi/EM all you have is Elementalist.

Remember that the various classes in GW2 are jack of all trades.  Everyone has a self heal.  Everyone has a mix of range and melee attacks.  Everyone has buffs or debuffs.  The mix varies a bit but in general terms nobody is a traditional tank, healer or DPS class.
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Exxar

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Re: Guild Wars 2 Tank and Blaster
« Reply #3 on: October 06, 2013, 06:07:52 AM »
I'm sorry, GW2 does not support what you're looking for.

While you can certainly build your characters to be tanky, you can't just go in and not die like you could in CoH. Traiting for tankiness aids you just in the sense that it enhances your generation of boons, helps you with conditions and provides you with a couple automatically triggered survivability skills on long cooldowns. However, the more important part of surviving is to know when to use which skill and to know the mobs so you can dodge out of the most dangerous attacks. As a matter of fact, if you know the content well enough you can survive everything in gear and trait setups that are 100% optimized for damage.

As for the blaster, just like the tank there's nothing that matches it quite right. All classes have ranged weapons at their disposal and can kite using various helpful skills. Differences between classes in ranged capabilities are not very significant. Some have more ranged weapons than others, but even those that have few ranged weapons can use them to the same effect as those with more.

An important note is that when you're grouping, you're severely hurting both your and the party's performance if you stay at maximum range and plink away from relative safety. You'll be missing out on all the boons and won't provide any boons to your party, and opting out of the boon game significantly reduces your damage and survivability (although you have the latter covered by staying at range). Instead, you need to stay within "skirmish" range - just far enough so that the mobs' attacks don't catch you, or that you're at the edge of their most devastating attacks so you have plenty of time to react, but also close enough that you participate with boons.

Last point; these characters are going to be around level 20. While an Ele/Shield scrapper was great at AoE, before the two big nukes it was not (Around level 20). I'm most likely going to stay around the 20-25 mark for these characters.
Aaaaand this will be another problem for you. Staying in that range won't let you spec into pretty much anything since you have only 10-15 trait points out of the maximum 70, so what you get is purely which skills you have. Which makes you equally bad at everything, just a little better at some areas depending on your weapon skill availability and utility skill selection (you will be able to have all of your skills available since they're not directly connected to your level, except for the ultimate which opens up at 30). However, if you play with those characters at all, they won't stay at that level range since you get xp for pretty much anything you do, and it's always properly scaled to your level.




The problem with GW2 is that its mechanics are not like anything else on the market. To excel at it, you must let go of everything you have learned or became accustomed to in other games. Having prior expectations will likely disappoint you, and this is the reason for most of the negative reputation is gets. If you're a hardcore player it's really an acquired taste. Also, the game is 80% combat-skill/twitch based, while CoH for example was 80% based on efficiently building your characters.

Personally, I don't like twitch games except classic FPSs and would have quit GW2 a long time ago if they hadn't executed most other features besides combat in the best way since CoH. There isn't any other game where I can play and get appropriate xp in the whole world (unless I'm underleveled, which is fine). There isn't any other game with such painless travel. There isn't any other game where I don't have to spend hours on crafting when covering all of the professions. Hell, there isn't any other game I'm aware besides Cryptic ones that uses global chat handles. And so on.

IThey're one of the few games which lacks the trinity - everyone's supposed to be doing a bit of everything rather than specific dedicated roles. Which, in my opinion, is a terrible system.
In my view, a trinity-less game is much better than a trinity-enforced one if it's executed properly. GW2 is executed poorly in that regard - instead of all of the characters being able to spec into multiple classic roles and most team compositions of such roles being efficient, you can't really spec much into any role but instead always need to do a little bit of everything and have the most focus on damage. Other games go to the other extreme and enforce a required party compositon, even if each character can spec into multiple classic roles (even The Secret World which lets you spec into anything anytime and has one of if not the most flexible build system I ever saw). In CoH, you didn't have much choice in roles within individual ATs, but they got the other, seemingly much more important part right - most team compositions were effective. And there was more than just tank, damage and heals.




One last piece of advice if you decide to stick with the game. In dungeons, don't wear toughness gear unless you're traited and intend to tank. Aggro lists are sorted primarily according to the toughness values of players, and 90% of people run without any toughness at all (using a shield also puts you at the top of the list, so no, don't use it "just to get a little more survivability"). When I started doing dungeons with offensive specs and power/vitality/toughness gear in the hopes it would offset my suckage in doging at least a little bit, I was instead always hugging the floor because I would get all of the aggro. After I switched to purely offensive gear (berserker's - that's the one which is miles above all others in PvE, sadly) and a mixed offensive/defensive build, I very rarely die.

In the open world you can wear anything you like since you're either soloing or there's a zerg so you'll rarely get focused aggro anyway.
« Last Edit: October 06, 2013, 06:36:37 AM by Exxar »

Exxar

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Re: Guild Wars 2 Tank and Blaster
« Reply #4 on: October 06, 2013, 06:16:57 AM »
Double post.