Guild Wars 2

I’ve been running this build lately as a midpoint ranger. I created it out of frustration over how ineffective typical homepoint ranger builds are once you get to mid.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV8YjMqUzazK+qQ0aABhaVA0+Fu3Ww9RsEfdJrIK-TpRFwAMOIAAeAARLDw+CAo4IAka/BA

It is designed to provide a high pressure teamfight build that can keep spirits alive by keeping them out of aoe. This is not meant as a 1v1 build, although it can win against a good amount of builds.

Earth sigil, sharpening stone, and shortbow provide up to three sources of bleed per shot along with other assorted conditions. Spirits provide additional pressure and sustain. Sword/Dagger is brought as a backup set used in case you are being focused down.

I opted out of sharpened edges (skirmishing 10) because I would have to drop empathic bond (never drop empathic bond), or lose the survival of the fittest trait, which gives 55% cit chance vs 35% (with fury). If I dropped survival of the fittest I would see a decrease in damage because of the abysmally low crit chance without fury.

Provided you had a team comp that could pump fury you may consider the swap, but you will lose condi clear which is useful to winning 1v1s against some builds. It is just a tradeoff that can be personal choice. I opt for more survivability and fury than the 3s bleed on 66% of crits.

Even with 35% crit chance it’s still pretty nice. I run something very similar to this, tho I opted to take Troll over Healing Spring simply because if I did not invest heavy into Healing Power I wouldn’t really see the payout in healing potency out of the base + regen.

Agony Sigil on Shortbow would make people rip their hair out too, though I see the merits in your condi-clear.

I know you only have dagger as your offhand, but I still feel like Offhand Training makes the dagger so much more meaningful. 8s cooldown on Stalkers, but more importantly is that you can use if after Hornets > Monarchs > Stalkers to get an extra boost of distance away from your foe if you needed to disengage.

I bring healspring in the hopes my teamates will use it. Maybe someone someday whose name isn’t JTan will call out a blast finisher in my water field. In this wvw players have it down better than the pvp ones.

As to the second shortbow sigil. I’m torn. Agony is extremely effective, and an obvious choice, but I’ve been testing other options to see if I’m missing out on something better than 20%. One thought is to bring vuln on crit as a cover condition. Maybe sigil of ice or sigil of blood as well. Still can’t decide.

I don’t bring offhand training mainly because I should never be in that set except to spam evades. The extra distance may be nice, but I’d rather have the regen.

On the other hand I’d bring off hand if I ran torch, then I can start a fight with throw -> bonfire -> shoot through the fire field with shortbow. I have not tried that extensively eough to judge it vs dagger.

Frailty sigil got a buff so it procs on non-crits now! Might be nice for covering your bleeds.

The father of spirit rangers, Deku God, used to run a very similar build to this. (This was long ago so the traits have changed) He used sharpened edges and used warhorn. The crit from the warhorn 4 allowed him to stack around 18 stacks of bleeds, if he landed his opener right. Runes of rata sum can also crit and stack bleeds, which he was also using at the time.

Man, I haven’t seen Deku God in forever, I’ve 1v1’d him plenty of times, and we were both using runes of rata sum :] spirit ranger vs. spirit ranger was pretty fun

He’s still around. I saw him last night in a 5v5 hotjoin. He was running LB/GS with zerker jewels.