Guild Wars 2

Named after Durzlla mentioned during one dueling night that watching my tanky build was like watching The Terminator as they kept throwing damage at me and I just kept ignoring it and coming on.

I see potential for even more ridiculous tankiness for our beloved Ranger class with the new Specializations.

Wilderness Survival

• Minor: Natural Vigor – Increases 25% endurance regeneration.
• Minor: Companion’s Defense – You and your pet gain protection when you dodge roll.
• Minor: Bark Skin – You and your pet take 50% less damage while your health is above the threshold (90%).
• Adept: Ambidexterity – Gain 150 condition damage while wielding a torch or dagger. Torch and Dagger skills recharge 20% faster.
  – or -
  Adept: Expertise Training – Pets deal 350 extra condition damage and have their condition durations increased by 20%.
• Master: Oakheart Salve – Gain regeneration when you suffer from bleeding, poison or burning. While you have regeneration you take 5% reduced damage.
• Grandmaster: Wilderness Knowledge – Use Sharpening Stone when you strike a foe below the health threshold (75%). Survival skills have 20% reduced recharge and remove 2 conditions.

Nature Magic

• Minor: Rejuvenation – Gain regeneration when you health drops below the threshold (75%)
• Minor: Fortifying Bond – Any boon you get is shared with your pet.
• Minor: Lingering Magic – Boons applied by your and your pets last longer.
• Adept: Nature’s Wrath – Gain 10% power based on your healing. Your pet gains extra stats.
  – or -
  Adept: Bountiful Hunter – You and your pet deals 1% more damage per boon on you.
• Master: Evasive Purity – Dodging removes blindness, cripple, and poison from you
• Grandmaster: Protective Ward – When you receive damage nearby foes are weakened and you gain protection

Beastmastery

• Minor: Instinctual Bond – When you are downed, your pet gains quickness
• Minor: Loud Whistle – Reduce recharge on pet skills and swapping by 20%.
• Minor: Pet’s Prowess – Pets move 30% faster and deal more damage on critical hits.
• Adept: Rending Attacks – Pets inflict bleeding when they critically hit with their basic attacks.
• Master: Natural Healing – Your pet gains natural health regeneration and improved healing (+350)
• Grandmaster: Beastly Warden – Your pet taunts foes near them when executing a command [F2] ability
  – or -
  Grandmaster: Zephyr’s Speed – You and your pet gain might and quickness when you swap pets.
  – or -
  Grandmaster: Honed Axes – Gain 150 ferocity while wielding an axe in your main hand. Winter’s Bite is now AoE. Axe skills recharge 20% faster.

Skills 6 through 10
Healing = Troll Unguent
Utility #1 = Muddy Terrain
Utility #2 = Lightning Reflexes
Utility #3 = Signet of the Wild
Elite = Entangle

You can run this as a power build in Cleric’s gear or as a Condition build in Apothecary’s. * Power will benefit from the conversion of Healing Power to Attack Power.

• Condition will benefit from the fact that condition builds don’t really need Precision/Ferocity the same way that Power builds do in order to have good DPS.

For Pets, I recommend taking Canines (they have good power and solid CC) or Birds/Cats. Whatever you take, it’s going to be powerful due to you taking Beastmastery but also because of the extra stats from Nature’s Wrath.

You have an enormous amount of healing from:

• Regeneration
• Natural Healing (check wiki, it heals the Ranger too)
• Signet of the Wild
• Troll Unguent

NOTE: You can already get this as a Ranger with the current trait system.

Your healing is protected from poison by:

• Cleanses from all your survival skills
• Removing poison when you dodge roll

NOTE: You can already get this as a Ranger with the current trait system.

You have quite a large amount of damage mitigation via:

• Protection on dodge rolls
• Protection every 12s when hit
• Weakness every 12s when hit
• 5% damage reduction when you have Regeneration
• 50% damage reduction when your health is above 90%

While the Barkskin here is a bit easier to “get through” with a different threshold than it’s current form, an opponent now has to first get past your combination of heals and Barkskin to get you below 90% hp as opposed to before needing to get through them in order to finish you from 25% to 0%. This can be beneficial in that the previous Barkskin could be somewhat mitigated by those classes with +%dmg against foes with health below a threshold.

My two favorite weapon sets for this are:

The tankiest version w/ Greatsword / Sword + Dagger due to the sheer amount of evasion and mobility you get. When you have this much healing, merely chaining the blocks and heals together is often enough to get you back on your feet and induce a face-reddening rage in your opponent(s). It also benefits from poison on the Sword and Dagger so you can out-sustain many other similar tanky builds. The Sword is great for sticking to your target while buffing your pet and helping them also stick to your target. With the sword you are essentially “tackling” your target and holding them for your pet to utterly destroy.

The more damaging version w/ Shortbow / Axe + Dagger due to the condition damage that you can put out with this puppy. It has less evasion, but it still has some poison to from Dagger. The Axe, Dagger, and Shortbow can kite pretty well between the Chill and 2 Cripples. The Axe Chill also causes your pet to apply more weakness to your target. Lol!

As I said in other topic, Protective Ward’s tooltip gives different info to what devs said during AMA. They said protection is for pet, not ranger. I don’t know if they were mistaken or tooltip is wrong, but I’d assume the latter.

Aside from that details, build looks interesting.

Would it be fair to say that the aoe weakness from protective ward equals a 25% damage reduction? If so then the protection isn’t really needed.

I’d take Protective Ward even if it only provided the weakness. We’ll be able to have a really high weakness uptime if we build for it. Plus protection for your pet is hardly a BAD thing. To that end I actually feel like Wilting Strikes would be better than Natural Healing. The tooltip for that trait is worded strangely though. Every other trait just says on F2, but this one says “activated skills”. Could mean any skill used by the pet aside from auto attack.

It’d also make the F2 for your pet really strong with Beastly Warden, which is probably the trait I am most interested in trying out. A river drake’s F2 taunting the enemy and causing weakness while dealing substantial damage would be pretty sweet. River drakes already apply weakness on tail swipe too, and when combined with Winter’s Bite (I’ll be using axe/axe or axe/dagger over sword since latency issues tend to make the sword almost unusable for me) it would mean the enemy is suffering from weakness more often than not.

All things considered this seems like a natural evolution from the cleric beastmaster build I already use. I do wonder how hard hitting those pet bleeds will be, though. Even traited they only have 350 condition damage.

Most of this build can already be taken with the current trait system (apparently Ehecatl has been using it or something similar too), so if you want to get a feel for it, just put on some Cleric or Settler(sPvP)/Apothecary(WvW) gear and try it out.

If Protective Ward is only providing the protection to the pet, I agree, it is still a good trait given the Weakness. a 50% chance to fumble and do 50% damage is a 25% damage reduction … before you factor in the fact that a fumbled attack can’t crit … so it’s actually more … by how much is dependent on your opponent’s stats :-)

I think I’d probably stick with the Natural Healing over the extra Weakness, especially if I’m already running an Axe with the condition version. That extra healing can’t be cleansed and you have plenty of ways to remove poison. Healing is pretty darn powerful. Even more so when you can buy it extra time via kiting, evading, etc. so you can quickly jump back on your opponent who likely didn’t heal nearly as much and is being worn down by you and your pet.

I agree that Beastly Warden could be a fantastic trait. We’ll have to wait and see the numbers though. I think this build could benefit from any of those 3 Beastmastery GM traits.

A nice side-effect of Beastly Warden is that we could take some pets whose F2 isn’t a CC like the Canines’ and turn it into a CC on top of what it already does.

Sebrent.3625:

I agree that Beastly Warden could be a fantastic trait. We’ll have to wait and see the numbers though. I think this build could benefit from any of those 3 Beastmastery GM traits.

A nice side-effect of Beastly Warden is that we could take some pets whose F2 isn’t a CC like the Canines’ and turn it into a CC on top of what it already does.

I imagine Beastly Warden is Anet directly responding to how overused the canine pets were. It’s not that the other pets aren’t great in their own way, it’s just that fear is so effective that you’re hurting yourself by not taking it. With Beastly Warden every pet has a similar level of control on their F2. Could open up a lot of possibilities for the more creative use of pets.

Granted Quickening Zephyr is one of my favorite traits right now. Fast stomps and a near instant drake F2 is pretty hard to beat.

Don’t discount our lovely Drakehound either. That AOE immobilize on a base 20 second cooldown is pretty darn nice … be even nicer when it’s a 16 second cooldown just for picking Beastmastery

If trying to get us away from the dog pets was their intent, I’m curious to see if it works. The canines still have their non-F2 cripple & knockdown and they are made of sturdier material than cats/birds while having good power (like Drakes).

The canines also might be better at landing Beastly Warden given the AOE nature of their F2 as opposed to the more cone-shaped nature of other F2s like the Drakes’.

I’m with you on Quickening Zephyr. It’s so useful and it provides Rangers with the highest uptime on Quickness of any class in the game … not counting Mesmer Quickness on-interrupt which will be getting kitten ICD.

I do admire the drakehound. It’s a much better immobilizer than the spider I use for my trapper build. At least in group fights. The only real reason I don’t use it is for flavor reasons. I play a charr ranger when I run beastmaster or power, so it feels weird to have a human bred dog as an animal companion.

That knockdown is pretty great. It’s saved me from a stomp many times when using the wolf. I mostly gravitate toward drakes for the free blast finisher and the cleave. Plus the sheer tankiness lets me now worry too much about them. It is possible the taunt will be easier to land with a canine, but we’ll have to see in what way the taunt activates. If it’s on hit then you’d be right, but if it’s on activation it may not matter.

Quickening Zephyr’s synergy with the river drake is probably my favorite part. One game in particular I just had to laugh. I got jumped by a thief and a zerker guardian when most of my utilities were on cooldown. Didn’t last long. They downed me and the guardian immediately left to go fight on point as the thief went to stomp. Thief was still at full health and for whatever reason he decided to NOT stealth stomp. My snow leapord pounced him hitting for about 4K. Then I swapped pets to river drake and interrupted his stomp with thunder clap. River drake uses a quickness empowered lightning breath and downs the thief a split second before he gets the stomp. I was then able to win with lick wounds and the downed auto attack. It was hilarious.

You guys over here talking about your drakehounds and wolves and i’m just over here like “My Fernhound and Brown Bear are going to become amazing!”

Durzlla.6295:

You guys over here talking about your drakehounds and wolves and i’m just over here like “My Fernhound and Brown Bear are going to become amazing!”

I don’t even know what the hell the fernhound is let alone if I’ve ever used it