An easy tank and spank dungeon?

Hello dear community. Recently bought Path of Fire after abandoning the core game a couple of years ago. I was never a proficient GW 2 player but Im looking to become a semi decent one now. First step: an easy dungeon to farm a set. What is your recommendation? Also another noob question: what are the stats of said dungeons armor/weapons in relation to the free lvl 80 gear you get with the PoF expansion right off the bat? Is it worth farming a dungeon to replace Soldier`s tempered scale set? Thank you in advance.

Depends on what you plan on doing and what build you are playing. Ascalon Catacombs would be the easiest but most are not really all that difficult.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dungeon_armor

Citadel of Flame is fairly straightforward and popular, so if the stats from that one interest you, it would probably be easy to find a pug to run with.

If you have a lot of karma leftover from before you left, the Orrian temple armor may be another option, or you can mix-and-match between those and the dungeons.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Temple_armor

Attribute combinations for the various prefixes can be found here:https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Attribute_combinations

also, the easiest way to do dungeons is "kill everything before it gets a chance to get in good damage on you", with no tanking involvedof course, all 5 players have to be on board with that plan for it to work

Soldier's stats give you plenty of health and armor, but fairly low damage. It's a great set for surviving and you should be able to outlast most enemies with it. But survival isn't only about passive stats like toughness and vitality. Proper skill usage to avoid damage is far more important. This doesn't mean that vitality/toughness are useless. A player who has both strong passive and active defenses will be very hard to kill even when facing many group challenges alone. However, a full offensive stat set like Berserker's can (and probably will) produce more than double the damage output of a set like Soldier's. So, if you can manage to stay alive in something like Berserker's stats, you will be far more effective.

To illustrate the point, here are two videos. The first is an old video from 2016 from Dusk Dragoon's channel. At the time this video was recorded, this was a new boss and the mechanics weren't well-known. So, naturally they succeed by brute force rather than skill, with many players going down repeatedly. Due to the scaling and the fact that most players are dealing very little damage to the boss (they're probably more concerned with staying alive and rallying the dead to keep the bubble up!) it takes them over 11 minutes to finish the fight.

Here's a second video, recorded this morning, featuring my Mirage and a Deadeye doing the same boss. I am running a fully offensive build (Viper stats) with no extra toughness, vitality, or healing power, but I manage to stay alive because I understand the mechanics and how to avoid them.

If you watch closely, you'll see the boss repeatedly turns toward me, begins to whirl, and then quickly zooms toward my position. That's more of a feint than the main event. What you want to avoid is the hit at the end of that whirl as it causes damage, a stun, and applies a 5 stack bleed that will probably kill you if it goes uncleansed! Knowing that, the executioner is rather easy to survive. And if you can survive in offensive gear while effectively dealing damage, the fight will go much more quickly!

After the illustration above, here's what I suggest to new players: Start out using your Soldier's gear. You'll see how tanky you are and you'll probably do just fine.

Next, determine an offensive stat set appropriate to your build and start swapping in pieces as you go. The idea here is that you gradually adjust your stats until you find where your comfort zone is. Chances are that threshold will move toward the offensive side over time as you become more experienced. But since you're new and don't have a full set anyway, this works out great! You just add pieces as you go, learning as you go, until you figure out for yourself where you want to be!

Make sure you check out the GW2 wiki to see what stat sets are available and where you can acquire them. Dungeons are one way, but there are many.

A few things it might be helpful to know:

Gear in GW2 is relatively simple compared to many MMOs. There's only 6 rarity tiers (white/common, blue/fine, green/masterwork, yellow/rare, orange/exotic and pink/ascended/legendary) and all equipment with the same level requirement and rarity is equally good, no matter where it comes from. Which means getting a full set of exotics at level 80 is relatively simple and you have a lot of choices. Saving up dungeon tokens is certainly one option and if you enjoy doing dungeons anyway it's a good one to go for. But you can also buy it from the Trading Post, craft it, buy it from vendors at the temples in Orr with karma, or the WvW merchants with Badges of Honour, from WvW and PvP reward tracks, or if you're lucky enough to get some as drops you can use that. Or you can use a combination of methods if you want.

The important thing is what stat combination(s) you choose. That's what makes the big difference - it needs to work for your build. For example if you're not using many conditions then gear with Condition Damage or Duration stats is useless. If you're not the best player and not confident relying on active defence (dodging, positioning etc.) then you might want Toughness or Vitality (or both) to mitigate incoming damage, and so on. It's a good idea to choose your stats first because not every set is available through every method. For example each dungeon only gives a choice of 3 sets, so you need to make sure you're doing the right one for you. For example if you want beserker's (full damage 'glass cannon' build) you have to do Citadel of Flame, Crucible of Eternity or Arah.

(If you're not sure yet I recommend sticking with the Soldier's gear until you've settled on a build, it's chosen to be a safe choice for new players. Or maybe using dropped gear to experiment with different stat combinations to see what you like.)

Also - role and builds in GW2 are a bit different. You might already be aware of this but there aren't any dedicate tanks (or healers). There are more support based builds and more damage based builds (and variants of each, like condition damage vs. direct damage) but it's designed so that any profession can do either. As a result of that there's no such thing as a 'tank & spank' set up for dungeons, or dungeons suited to it. In fact as Reikken said the most popular way to do dungeons is simply for everyone to focus 100% on damage and kill things before they have a chance to become much of a threat. But that takes some practice, so at first it might be better to take it slow and learn your way around. Or if you're in a guild or have friends with more experience with dungeons you could ask them to teach you.

@"Danikat.8537" said:Or if you're in a guild or have friends with more experience with dungeons you could ask them to teach you.

Before I lost my core account I had a full set of CoF zerker medium armor on my thief. I did with pugs and it was... hard. The people were quick to punish if I made mistakes and not very helpful pointing out the mechanics. Personally I just want an armor set for aesthetic reasons so I dont look like a pleb while I spvp. I should probably get off my butt and start farming but without guild/friends I dont want to repeat my past ordeal. Also Id like an alternative to CoF that is preferably equally "easy" or more so. I hated with a passion the carry the boulder gimmick... Also Id like to thank each and every one who posted on this thread for their input, it is invaluable to me!

Citadel of Flame is both the easiest to farm as well as providing the always useful "berserker" stats.

For berserker you could just buy the full set of armor on the TP. 3 dailies worth of gold will cover the cost. That is probalby faster than getting the tokens to buy from the dungeon vendor.

The other two dungeons with Berserker are Crucible of Eternity and Arah. CoE has the laser grid thing, probably worse than the boulders. Can't think of anything in particular for Arah but there is the fight with lupicus.