Best PVE/PVP Survival Class

[Scourge.1563]

ive been away for awhile and was wondering what is the best for PVE/PVP survival wise not so much DPS

[Esorono.1039]

From a bit of testing, I have found Tempest can achieve the best face tanking capabilities with a permanent 75% damage reduction, and sometimes up to 85%, near infinite stability, near infinite reflection, and able to fully restore its hp very quickly. It however does not have a ranged option and that cripples it a lot.

 

 Reaper/Scourge are both amazing when it comes to face tanking, they can take the most direct punishment compared to the other professions, with a bit more emphasis on Scourge, they have amazing ambient healing as well as some of the strongest barriers. However unlike the other options they don't have a way to directly avoid damage or CC.

 

Scrapper is much like a mix between Scourge and Tempest, it has good sustain with the use of barrier and self regeneration, but it also has multiple reflect skills, a long channeled block, good amount of cc, and if needed can be the best applicator of stability. Also like Tempest it can reduce damage taken by about 75%, but can also attack from ranged. Unlike the other two professions, there is no obvious downsides, so even though it cannot take as much direct damage as a Tempest or Scourge, I find myself leaning towards Scrapper for most difficult content.

 

And that is all the classes I have played and felt comfortable making a bunker build with, the rest I cannot say as I have not built and played with them enough to say. However, I am trying out a Dead Eye build that seems promising. But I wish to finish the build before I say too much. But if I am correct, it should have some of the best self healing in the game, where one attack should regenerate almost all its hp...maybe, needs testing and gold.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

When well-played, Tempest will always outclass everything else. The combination of insane damage-reduction from Protection, on-demand Stunbreaks and Stability, a plethora of CC and the ability to heal to full over and over. That's not even getting into the very high amount of reflection uptime they have for them & allies.

 

But its melee, has low health and slow hands or not moving around enough will get you killed.

 

I play my Tempest with 15k HP and 2.2k armor, D?WH in PvE and have mained it for many years. When soloing Fractals and such, I've even found it stronger than Scourge overall.

 

For sheer facetanking Scrapper takes top place, especially in condition-heavy environments.

Edited August 28, 2021 by Hannelore.8153

[Scourge.1563]

maybe i should give scrapper a try or even ele

 

[Esorono.1039]

Here is what I use for Scrapper, it may look a bit squishy but with scrapper the more you hurt things, the bulkier you are, so high damage is important. If fighting something CC heavy swap all the scrapper traits to bottom. Remember to save your hammer three for use after using either F1 or your healing Gyro if you are fighting something hard in case you lose some hp. If you can get away with it though and it has a break bar, use it when you set down a lightning field and it will drain away the break bar.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PegAIJlRwsYOsGWKO2T5tUA-zRRYBhBHch0UCEYFURIY7sknyG-e

 

And this is what I use for Tempest, with only a few trait swaps it can also do support as well, mostly in the water line. The damage is poor to say the least, but if the mechanic isn't intended to one-shot everything, it's most likely going to live it. It's also basically immune to ranged projectiles, which is neat. You will mostly want to stick in Earth, but if you feel up to it, you can go to fire and stack up to 25 stacks of might using F1, heat sink, and swap over to earth and use sand squall.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PGAFgEGaYZEMH2CrhVinrUfbH-zxIY1onvQyJBCMEioCkZW+dHA-e

 

Also something I wish to update, no you cannot make Dead-Eye tanky, it has too many weaknesses sadly. Well, I can make it take a hit, and a lot more than I previously thought it would, but compared to scrapper, tempest and scourge? Not even close. It's still fun though and I will definitely play it time to time. 

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

For PVE I always liked full berserker revenant.  Herald and Renegade both work, but right now the balance is in Renegade's favor.  Just take the following build:

 

Devastation:  Unsuspecting Strikes, Thrill of Combat, Dance of Death

Invocation: Rising Tide, Incensed Response, Charged Mists

Renegade: Blood Fury, All for One, Vindication

 

Sword + Sword as weapons, Shiro + Kalla/Dwarf for legends.  Take that setup and you'll give yourself an immense amount of healing, as well as permanent capped might and fury while in combat.  

[Buran.3796]

   Condition  Herald can be almost unkillable in PvE while having good AoE damage output:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PmxAke7lhQKsIyiJRXMICjBSiMBqgj+SdrD-zRJYkRLfZ0RBESK49BJI6tsonG-e

   Condition Renegade is not as tanky but does way more damage and its heal burst can provide similar recovery. DPS variants will oftenly run Condition 1,3,1 Devastation 3,3,3 and Renegade 2,2,2 whereas tankier variants do use Retribution and sometimes Invocation. Renegade has the advantage of providing lots of ranged damage if is needed.

   You can go extra tankier with power Herald and Glint + Jalis, Devastation 3,3,3 Retribution 1,1,3 and Glint 1,3,2 or 2,3,2 but that route is much slower killing things and albeit you will endure solo bounties without dying you won't be able to kill them in the time cap in most of cases.

   Another extremely durable tanky builds are burn variants from Ele, but fire resistant foes can be annoying to del with them. The AoE damage is amazing, tho.

[Orack.9756]

On 8/28/2021 at 2:42 AM, Scourge.1563 said:

ive been away for awhile and was wondering what is the best for PVE/PVP survival wise not so much DPS

Easy : cleric scourge with axe/torch + staff ; Blood Magic, Death Magic, Scourge.
Slot all minion, use staff 2 and shroud F3 on CD and you'll never die and kill everything, slowly, but still.

Renegade condi  and Mirage staff/staff condi are also very strong option doing way more dmg and still be easy to play.
But when it come to staying alive, nothing come close to cleric Scourge + minion.

(That for PvE, I don't play PvP)

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

Condi renegade, mirage, or scourge, all with tormenting runes.

[SoundWave.9154]

On 8/28/2021 at 6:50 AM, Esorono.1039 said:

From a bit of testing, I have found Tempest can achieve the best face tanking capabilities with a permanent 75% damage reduction, and sometimes up to 85%, near infinite stability, near infinite reflection, and able to fully restore its hp very quickly. It however does not have a ranged option and that cripples it a lot.

 

 

 

How exactly can Tempest achieve permanent (or non-permanent) 75/85% DMG reduction ?

 

 

[Esorono.1039]

9 minutes ago, SoundWave.9154 said:

 

How exactly can Tempest achieve permanent (or non-permanent) 75/85% DMG reduction ?

 

 

It's a combination of things.

First and most importantly is Hardy Conduit, this is a minor trait in Tempest which makes it so your protection gives 40% reduction.

Next is the traits in Earth, this will add another 17% so long as you are up close and personal and in earth.

Then gear, Full Celestials will lower the damage you receive by about 7-9%.

Food such as fried oysters will reduce it another 10%. There are better examples, but that is a good baseline example.

This will give you about 75% damage reduction. But you also have access to frost aura, which you can get fairly easy as well, just not as easy as magnetic, which will reduce by another 10%. And Celestials will ensure that this aura spam will keep the protection stacks permanent, as well as strong enough healing to restore your hp to full rather often.

You can raise it by an addition 7% by using scrapper runes, but I suggest not doing that as damage is already rather low.

[Obtena.7952]

There has been some work done on this ... it doesn't appear as simple as just adding up damage reduction values to determine total. 

[Esorono.1039]

15 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

There has been some work done on this ... it doesn't appear as simple as just adding up damage reduction values to determine total. 

It is hard to say, most games use a combination of multiplicative and additive percentage modifiers. However, there existed for a short time where a revenant who got 100% damage reduction was immune to damage, where if it was just multiplicative would mostly just cut the damage in half. It seems the game has stuck to mostly additive damage reductions. Same for damage, which is why a 5% increase to damage actually feels like an increase. On the flip side however, stats like toughness and power seem to work off from multiplicative. This is all really hard to check without looking at the base code or spending a long time with an excel spreadsheet, so I found it easier to look into previous examples of what happens and base it off of that. Here is the example.

 

 

[Genesis.5169]

Your answer is Necro, because you said pvp and pve.

Edited September 5, 2021 by Genesis.5169

[TheQuickFox.3826]

In WvW:

Some Necro builds are extremely resilient with a big health pool, barrier and good self heals.

And if you want to troll around: There are some permanent stealth deadeye/thief builds that give you a lot of survivability from the principle: What you can't see you can't kill.