I’m trying to decide what to do with my warrior and ranger, so what better way than a test. I took them up to the Mists and timed a bunch of kills. These were pure weapon tests — no utility skills, no traits. I don’t know the warrior utilities and traits well enough yet to make for a fair “good build” test IMHO.
The results surprised me.
First I did the naked tests. No jewelry, no armor, no traits. 916 power, 4% crit chance. I timed 3 kills of the heavy golem (adding a 4th or 5th if the variance between the three was more than a couple seconds). The longer times I only measured to the nearest second.
70.7 sec – warrior LB autoattack only
52.0 sec – warrior LB 3, 2 spam
36.7 sec – warrior LB 2, F1 spam
35.7 sec – warrior rifle autoattack only (the bleed stack is killer and other skills slow it down)
52.3 sec – ranger LB autoattack only
46.0 sec – ranger LB barrage spam
Well that was disappointing for my ranger. I tried adding hunter’s shot and was confused when the kill times increased. I did some math and it turns out it’s fairly worthless if you’re solo. The skill has a 0.4 coefficient vs autoattack’s 0.9, which costs you most of the extra damage you get from the 10% vulnerability. If you time it perfectly, you only gain 3% damage over plain autoattack. If you don’t time it perfectly, it interrupts autoattack wasting your time and lowering your DPS. Add in a pet and it’s marginally worth using, or add a party and it’s a great skill. But solo it’s not worth using.
Ok, so what about more realistic builds? I loaded up both characters with a rampager’s amulet (pow/pre/cond/vit), and added mesmer runes (pow/pre) to the armor. I put 30 points each into the power and precision trait lines. No major traits selected, though the passive minor ones were unavoidable. Final stats were:
Warrior: 1710 pow, 2189 pre, 65% crit, 2185 armor, 944 cond dam, 21662 hp, 0% crit dam
Ranger: 1710 pow, 2189 pre, 65% crit, 1980 armor, 644 cond dam, 18372 hp, 30% crit dam
22.0 sec – warrior LB autoattack
16.7 sec – warrior LB 2, F1 spam
14.0 sec – warrior rifle autoattack
18.7 sec – ranger LB autoattack
14.7 sec – ranger LB barrage spam (well, once)
Hmm, ranger isn’t looking as bad as I thought it would. How about warrior melee weapons?
11.7 sec – warrior GS 2 spam (again, once; I tried other combos but they were slower)
10.5 sec – warrior axe (tried all sorts of skills, times were about the same)
Ok, that’s a bit more like what it feels playing a warrior. Not as big a difference as I was expecting. Oh, I forgot the pet. What happens if I add the pet? (Note that this ranger build has zero points in BM.)
8.7 sec – ranger LB barrage spam w/ jaguar (running to golem from max LB range)
Yowza! How about some of the other ranger weapon combos?
18.1 sec – ranger SB autoattack, no flanking
11.3 sec – ranger SB autoattack, flanking
7.2 sec – ranger SB autoattack, flanking, w/ jaguar
9.4 sec – ranger sword, torch
6.1 sec – ranger sword, torch, w/ jaguar
As I said, these are purely weapons tests. No utilities nor traits used. Maybe warrior’s utilities and traits are a lot better than ranger’s. But in a straight-up weapons test with identical armor, amulet, and trait allocation, a ranger with sword/torch and not using a pet beats out the best I could manage with warrior. Add the pet and the ranger kills almost twice as quickly as warrior.