Guild Wars 2

Debating on full Carrion gear, or Rabid armor set with Carrion trinkets. Not really considering Rampager unless you guys vote PRECISION over POWER in ranger condition skills, in that case I would consider Rabid armor with Rampager trinkets.

So basically would a ranger benefit from having more POWER from the Carrion armor, or having more PRECISION from the Rabid armor?

(This discussion is not about Toughness/Rabid or Vitality/Carrion), as either will help survivability.

Anyone have any insight?

Lower precision means lower crit chance, which isn’t too bad unless you are using a Sigil of Earth on your main weapon. I have used full Rampager’s for a while now, and I have something around 14k health which is waaaaay too little for WvW. Atm, I am considering getting Carrion trinkets and using (at least for WvW) huntsman oils which increase precision slightly (based on toughness/vit). They are really cheap/easy to make.

I don’t think having more than 60% crit chance is worth it, anyways. It’s a bit overkill, considering most of your damage comes from conditions rather than critical hits (as you have very little power to make them count).

I can vouch for Carrion, but from a sPvP stand point. Not only does it buff your malice +798, but I also increases your Vitality and Power. With my Ele Runes and traits, I’m sitting on ~2700 Power ~1300 Malice ~2200 Tougness and ~2200HP
Condition Damages
Bleed: 108
Poison: 214
Burn: 653

Not sure what malice is, and that didn’t really answer my question on if I want more power for auto attack damage or more precision for bleed on crit (sharpended edges + sigil of earth) or a mix of both power/precision from carrion AND rabid.

Look at the GW2G Blu’s guide on condition ranger.

Biggest stat is condition damage (malice), but precision comes in second because it will cause additional bleeds with the proper trait.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but I meant go with a Carrion gear for the malice/condition damage, in addition to vitality and power.

Hmm , was thinking of trying out conditions based ranger , does criti damage affect the bleeds ?
What is the ideal build you conditions ranger would recommand?

Once they fix pet condition damage (it has been brought to my attention that it is listed in the community made list of ranger bugs), i would recommend the following build
Marksmanship 20: Malicious training, spotter
Skirmishing 10: Sharpened edges
Wilderness survival 20: Expertise training, wilderness knowlage
Nature Magic 0
Beast Mastery 20: Speed training, rending attacks
Equipment: Condition damage (major), precision (minor), toughness (minor)

The real purpose of this build is to get as much condition damage as possible through. The use of precision and sharpened edges together makes up for the lack of power. In this build the pet is a major part of the condition damage, using a lynx on land or shark underwater is essential. I also recommend taking sharpen stone (which is pretty much a must for a ranger condition build anyways) and entangle (grand AoE potentially worth 170s bleed). wep sets obviously include short bow with agony or corruption sigil, runes krait, nightmare or afflicted. secondary set sword (geomancy) or ax (also geomancy) and a torch.

Yup, this is pretty much my ideal build. take it or leave it. if you want to try out some ideas of your own, GW2 Guru has a excellent build calculator.

Noted.. I try it out, hmm time to craft some gears with condition damage on it.

I’m going for Carrion Accessories and Weapons and then Rabid Sets for Armor. Imo you need some balance between stats while keeping Condition Damage as high as you can.
This gets me around 18k HP. enough to survive wvw along with that toughness you stacked. Btw do you know which runes you are going to use?

Koukin X.8912:

I’m going for Carrion Accessories and Weapons and then Rabid Sets for Armor. Imo you need some balance between stats while keeping Condition Damage as high as you can.
This gets me around 18k HP. enough to survive wvw along with that toughness you stacked. Btw do you know which runes you are going to use?

I have not looked at runes yet but here is what I was thinking.

this is for WvW btw..

rabid gear (from dungeons)

carrion trinkets and weapons (from crafting)

sigil of earth (for bleed chance on crit)

runes (undecided probably something with tons of condition damage and not duration)

shortbow for ranged bleed/poison
sword/torch for melee poison/burn

survival skills: 3 out of 4 of the traps, all 4 are good but flame/spike trap for sure then maybe viper/frost trap for the 3rd.

Trapper’s Expertise/Trap Potency/Sharpened Edges traits. Maybe Keen Edge from power. Maybe some wilderness survival for increased survivability since i will be using close combat traps and sword/torch.

this looks good on paper, but is it viable in WvW?

anyone have experience with the above trap build or a similiar condition gear build?

Rune of the Undead is one of the best runes i found for Condition Damage. I think you do enough burning damage from the torch and just for go Spike Trap. I’d go for Frost Trap incase you need to escape or when you need to flank for SB. Last utility i’d use is QZ, Its good for finishing people off/stacking bleeds.

Carrion is the best choice for pve condi rangers. In wvw carrion too coz you don’t want to be 1 shotted by a treb or 3 shoTted by a zerg. Just be mobile or position yourself properly so you will apply the bleeds. Even at 14% crit chance a crit can still pop out.

I run a trap based condition build. I had originally decided on rabid armor with carrion accessories, but to prepare myself for the dungeons I had to endure to get that armor, I crafted myself some exotic knight’s armor, and found myself liking it.

So now I use knight’s armor with runes of the undead and carrion accessories. Going full tilt on condition damage is a good thing if your build is primarily focused on applying and maintaining conditions, but not all of the rangers weapons are condition focused. Knight’s armor sacrifices condition damage for power, and slightly higher toughness. That extra power allows rangers to use other weapons without completely kittening themselves.

None of the above posts answered my question on if I should use rabid or carrion for my armor and why. I feel rabid/carrion or carrion/carrion is superior to rampager because condition damage is not the primary stat for rampager, and the rabid/carrion give vit/tough which are both good for WvW.

So rabid armor or carrion armor (must use carrion trinkets there are no rabid trinkets, not sure why you would use knight’s because they don’t provide condition damage)?

Rabid gives precision which is good for sharpened edges (which i am not positive if this trait is bugged or not) and it helps proc sigil of earth bleeds. So far these are the only things I gain for stacking precision.

Carrion will boost my autoattack damage when condition skills are on cooldown.

Then there is always the vit/tough debate but either helps and is not working deciding on gear alone.

I googled up this thread while trying to figure out whether a combination of Rabid gear and Knight’s jewelry would make for a viable semi-tanky condition build.

So … would it? I see that Knight’s gear for rangers got some love in this thread, but also some criticism.

My traits are all in Wilderness Survival and Skirmishing.

Is there any point to an off-tanky condition ranger, either in WvW or dungeons?

I run mostly Power / Condition / Toughness gear with a bit of vitality. I typically run Greatsword and Shortbow, spike trap, poison trap, QZ, and depending on the situation Rampage or the Elite AoE Root. My bleed damage is somewhere between 115-125, about 250 poison damage from the trap (keep in mind poison reduces healing by 33%)

I used all 6 runes of Undead to make 5 % of toughness turn into condition damage.. I find this build extremely viable in spvp and PVE but a little lack luster when it comes to WvW. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing when you’re able to cleave a few a players at the same with with Maul or get some bleed stacks up on someone with the short bow.. you just don’t have that much of an opportunity to do so in WvW. The more I run WvW with my guild (KnT) I’m finding sword/horn and Long Bow to be much more viable.

The Best burst I’ve found on a single target so far for a ranger is using the cheetah pet for the 5 stacks of might, use the warhorn, use rampage, and then switch to long bow for a QZ Rapid Fire.. this is sort of risky because as well all know, the longbow isn’t the hardest weapon to dodge, but QZ does help quite a bit with this (especially unloading on someone in the middle of WvW)

So in my opinion it really depends on what you mostly plan on doing. For spvp and pve i’d say condition damage all the way, for WvW i’m currently thinking on a knights set for more burst with the longbow.

I would also add that toughness, in any build, is necessary.

Hm, well that’s good to hear for a tangentially related reason: the legendary I’m going for is Kudzu, and since it seems like most people run shortbow – and that’s what I’m using myself – so I was a little afraid I was going to get locked into a suboptimal skill set by my legendary. Glad to know that’s not the case.

Yeah, i’m with you there. Right now i’m currently just gathering the mats common to all legendary’s. Luckily the Kudzu precurser is much much less expensive than than the Great Sword precursers.. though I have heard they plan to change the way these are gotten.

A bit of necroposting…
For consistent DPS with shortbow stats priority are: Power > Condition damage > Condition duration > Precision > Critical damage.
Condition dmg is only a tiny bit “worse”, than power, and if you stay behind the target and apply bleed with every shot, it’s even better. Condition duration is also pretty important, but it has “soft caps” – 33%, 67%, 100% etc – all this values increase bleeding duration by 1 second and thus explosively increase DPS.

If you want, I can post appropriate formulas, but there’s a lot of math.