Guild Wars 2

So just for fun, I wanted to put together a fully support build for my Ranger.

So, for starters I’m thinking Sword/Warhorn, Axe/Axe. The idea being to provide a mix of range, evades, conditions and utility. Flexibility is the aim.

Trait lineup for a boon-style support doesn’t leave a great deal of room for debate, but i’d love to hear from you guys if you can improve on it! So 0/0/10/30/30 nets healing and boon duration, tougher, walking Spirits with higher proc rate, bigger pet heals, faster recharge, and swiftness for all on revive. Fern Hound and Red Moa for pets. Will post proper link to the build when I get home, using a phone atm, lol.

Using 3+1 Spirits as my skills since i’ve invested so much into them. Besides the obvious “Spirits are garbage”, any thoughts on a support playstyle that doesn’t use traps?

I am a 0/0/10/30/30 Ranger. It was my plan all along. I use Shortbow and Axe/Warhorn. Far too much survivability is sacrificed if you don’t have a shortbow to be able to stay ranged.

I don’t have my build up atm, but basically I have 3 spirits up all the time with bonus health, bonus to applying their buffs, having their effect go off upon death, and allowing them movement, however even with those bonuses the Spirits are still far to squishy and they will not survive for long if you try to take them into melee range of anything other than normal trash.

If you can manage to stay on the move and keep on the outside range of the fight I find the spirits to be very helpful.

I think they are going to find that in the near future they will simply have to make the Spirits immune to damage. Right now it is just far to difficult to keep them alive unless you spend your whole time staying as ranged as possible, but if you do that their activated abilities are pretty much useless.

So axe doesn’t cut it for ranged attacking? I’ve never really used it since level 2ish, lol. How do you find instances go with that many buffs flying around? Anyone else regularly run something similar?

The prob with axe is that your biggest dps move, Splitblade, is a bleed attack that if you want to get the most out of it you gotta come into melee range. This is because if you come into point blank range, you can hit the primary target with all five axes and get all five bleeds ticking. The rest of the attacks for mainhand axe are mediocre at best doing very average damage. However Winter’s Bite is great for setting up a target for Splitblade.

The axe will start bouncing from target to target making you prone to pulling aggro. This is not ideal when you have spirits up as inevitably that aggro is going to get your pet, the spirits or worse, get you killed. I personally just prefer the precision, safety, and overall better DPS of the Shortbow.

Unlike world Dynamic Events in a dungeon you are typically not under the benefit of overkill heal and dps, so managing your own survivability and aggro is of major importance and I find the Axe to be sub-par for both. The shortbow has such great utility with a stun, cripple, and the self-knockback. Even plate wearing warriors and guardians can get hit super hard by those dungeon bosses and we don’t have their mitigation.

For me the Axe (but I should look into another 1h as well) is good for a quick swap so you can use both the warhorn spells, then Winter’s Bite and like APaperbackHero said, try to get in close for Splitblade, then get back on shortbow asap and get out of range.

Until they make spirits (and our pets) more robust we simply have little choice but to try to stay ranged imho.