Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I’ve played about 130 matches with my ranger now (mostly tournaments) and tried out lots of builds. This is the build I had the most success with. Right now Trap and Beastmaster builds seem to be the only viable tournament builds for Rangers and as I like pets (they’re the reason I picked Ranger) I went for the BM. So here’s the build:

Link

Explanation:

Gear:

So as a Beastmaster you obviously want to max your survivability since pet damage doesn’t scale with your stats. So the longer you live, the more damage your pet can do, pretty simple.

So the three options are pretty much Soldiers, Shamans, and Clerics gear. I wanted to focus more on Toughness + Healing Power as opposed to Toughness + Vitality since it will ultimately make you more durable the longer the fight goes. To mitigate burst damage vitality is very good but the longer the fight goes, the better Toughness and Healing Power become which is perfect for this build, as it offers so much evasion that you can usually avoid most burst damage.
So Clerics or Shamans? I use Clerics because Power gives me more steady DPS in the long run than Condition Damage and as stated above this build is all about “the long run”.

For runes I use Dolyak for Toughness Vitality and heal.

Weapons:

The weaponsets are pretty standard, it’s what you see on the majority of rangers in tournaments.
Shortbow because it has two nice CC’s which are key for our pet and an evade.
Sword because it has two! evades and a crippling autoattack that can stick to targets very easily thanks to “Pounce”.
Off-Hand I use Dagger. Now a lot of people will use Warhorn or Axe here but I like the dagger best because it has another evade (that can be used even while immobilized) and another cripple which is very important. Additionally it has the lowest Cooldowns of all Off-Hand weapons.

Skills:

Healing Spring: I use this as my heal since it scales best with healing power (it gives me about 10k heal if I stay in for the full duration) and removes conditions. It’s also a water combofield —> even more heal. On top of it it affects your teammates as well.
One of the best heals in the game Imo.

Signet of Renewal: This functions as the second Condition cleanser curing a condition every 10 seconds. I only use the active if I’m stunned or immobilized in a dangerous situation or If i have massive piles of bleeds/vulnerability/poison/burning.

Signet of the Wild: This gives me and my pet constant heal in combat. The scaling with Healing Power is actually pretty nice. It gives me 135 Heal per second and 425!! Heal per second to my pet. I hardly ever use the active to be honest except when I send my pet to chase someone down while I cap a point.

Muddy Terrain: I didn’t know what to use in the third slot for a while so I tried out this and it’s actually quite good. It’s a 20 second! AoE cripple that also immobilizes for 2s on activation and it has only 30 second Cooldown. I’m slowly getting better at using this skill and I’m enjoying it more and more.

Rampage as One: I prefer this over Entangle since it is more reliable and massively buffs my pet as well. I have never tried the Spirit Elite to be honest, partially because I already have all the heal I need and partially because I consider the 20s stability to important to miss on.

Traits:

• 10 points in Skirmishing to get the 30% pet crit damage which make a huge difference in DPS on birds
• 20 points in Wilderness survival for Oakheart salve because Regeneration scales very well with Healing Power so we wanna get all the regeneration we can have.
  You might wonder why I’m not using shared anguish. This is because our main DPS comes from our pets and we don’t want it disabled when it is about to land a huge hit. It doesn’t matter if we get stunned in the beginning of the fight as long as our pet lands it’s first few hits and if we are stunned in a really dangerous situation we can still use Signet of Renewal.
• 10 points in Nature Magic again to get that regeneration and additional protection which is huge with all the toughness we have.
• 30 points in Beastmastery obviously to make our pet as strong as possible

Pets:

Finally the most important part of the build: the Pets! As stated in the title I use 2 birds. So why birds? Birds and cats are the pets with the highest DPS due to their high precision (with the 30 points in BM they have about 70% crit chance) so those are the only two pets I consider for this build as our main DPS comes from pets. The reason I prefer birds is: Cats deal their damage with fast strong hits while birds attack more slowly but deal even more damage with one hit. This is better for PvP because your enemies will always be moving and the pet roots itself on every attack. So birds will deal better DPS against moving enemies. Try it out yourself. Also, birds have swiftness so you don’t have to take the 20 points trait in Skirmishing to make the pet run fast enough.

I am using a hawk and a raven and I constantly switch between them. I usually run around with a hawk and as soon as I enter combat I switch to the raven, getting quickness and giving it 3 stacks of might. The raven has higher burst with its F2 which is why I use it first. The hawks F2 is weaker but has a much lower CD so when I use Rampage as One I usually switch to my hawk before that.

Here are a few tips for being efficient with the birds:

• Swap whenever possible. (Except during Rampage as one) That way you will always have 3 stacks of might and swiftness on your bird and get 2s Quickness as often as possible.
• Make use of the F2 abilitys!! I can’t stress this enough. They deal huge damage and are key to the birds. The raven F2 can crit for 10k on lights. You can actually 2 shot glass cannons with the raven! True story. One F2 crit and 1-2 autoattack crits and they’re downed. Try it out on the light golem.
• Time your CC’s. A logical consequence of the above. Your birds has to land those hits so time your cripples and immobilizes accordingly and don’t just spam them out.

Conclusion:

I’m having a lot of fun with this build and I still feel that it has even more potential if played better. You can easily win most 1v1 and you do fine in 1v2. Shatter Mesmers are currently the only class I sometimes lose to but I guess that’s mainly a L2P issue ;D.

Alright that’s the build! Try it out and let me know what you think!
If you have any suggestions what to do differently or questions why I use trait/skill XY please post it.

I hope you enjoyed this Guide!

Thanks great guide and some questions:

Cleric Vs Shaman I could use a bit more convincing, not seeing how Cleric is better.

Have players not figured out by now the BM Healer build is an outlast build, I mean don’t they just move in whatever direction as to negate your pet and leave you to last? I see a LB Ranger in PvP and I laugh and 3 shot her…I see a melee Ranger with healing signet and I just avoid them.

Edit: You used that horrible builder that requires us to watch a silly add :/ pass

Cempa.5619:

Thanks great guide and some questions:

Cleric Vs Shaman I could use a bit more convincing, not seeing how Cleric is better.

Have players not figured out by now the BM Healer build is an outlast build, I mean don’t they just move in whatever direction as to negate your pet and leave you to last? I see a LB Ranger in PvP and I laugh and 3 shot her…I see a melee Ranger with healing signet and I just avoid them.

Edit: You used that horrible builder that requires us to watch a silly add :/ pass

i have a ranger build which uses healing signet, melee and LB so what would you do if you saw me BTW i win 95% of duels with the build, you’d be laughing all the way to the respawn

Wanderer.5471:

Cempa.5619:

Thanks great guide and some questions:

Cleric Vs Shaman I could use a bit more convincing, not seeing how Cleric is better.

Have players not figured out by now the BM Healer build is an outlast build, I mean don’t they just move in whatever direction as to negate your pet and leave you to last? I see a LB Ranger in PvP and I laugh and 3 shot her…I see a melee Ranger with healing signet and I just avoid them.

Edit: You used that horrible builder that requires us to watch a silly add :/ pass

i have a ranger build which uses healing signet, melee and LB so what would you do if you saw me BTW i win 95% of duels with the build, you’d be laughing all the way to the respawn

The thing is every one says that, I have yet to see one post that says they have a 5% win rate :/

So if every one says they win 95% of the fights basic math says something is wrong :/

But you caught my attention and I’m intrigued, what’s this bunker healing build that uses LB?

Cleric is okay but without precision, power is really not that great. Shaman is much better and frankly I’m slowly dropping the amount of healing I use as well, all my main heals don’t use healing power and my main heal TU, doesn’t benefit that much from it.

I dropped my healing and it ticks for around 900 and before was about 1000, but with less healing and more precision I can still have over 1800 toughness, now with over 1000 condition damage and a 30% crit rate using chance to bleed or steal health sigils.

The other main heals, (from the BM tree and signet of the wild) don’t gain from healing. So my survivability is still high but my damage much higher.

capuchinseven.8395:

Cleric is okay but without precision, power is really not that great. Shaman is much better and frankly I’m slowly dropping the amount of healing I use as well, all my main heals don’t use healing power and my main heal TU, doesn’t benefit that much from it.

I dropped my healing and it ticks for around 900 and before was about 1000, but with less healing and more precision I can still have over 1800 toughness, now with over 1000 condition damage and a 30% crit rate using chance to bleed or steal health sigils.

The other main heals, (from the BM tree and signet of the wild) don’t gain from healing. So my survivability is still high but my damage much higher.

Signet of the Wild gains from Healing Power

It’s Natural Healing from the BM line that doesn’t gain from it.

Xsorus.2507:

capuchinseven.8395:

Cleric is okay but without precision, power is really not that great. Shaman is much better and frankly I’m slowly dropping the amount of healing I use as well, all my main heals don’t use healing power and my main heal TU, doesn’t benefit that much from it.

I dropped my healing and it ticks for around 900 and before was about 1000, but with less healing and more precision I can still have over 1800 toughness, now with over 1000 condition damage and a 30% crit rate using chance to bleed or steal health sigils.

The other main heals, (from the BM tree and signet of the wild) don’t gain from healing. So my survivability is still high but my damage much higher.

Signet of the Wild gains from Healing Power

It’s Natural Healing from the BM line that doesn’t gain from it.

Yes you’re right, it’s a small amount though, but yes you’re right I think it adds about 5/6% from your healing power.

capuchinseven.8395:

Xsorus.2507:

capuchinseven.8395:

Cleric is okay but without precision, power is really not that great. Shaman is much better and frankly I’m slowly dropping the amount of healing I use as well, all my main heals don’t use healing power and my main heal TU, doesn’t benefit that much from it.

I dropped my healing and it ticks for around 900 and before was about 1000, but with less healing and more precision I can still have over 1800 toughness, now with over 1000 condition damage and a 30% crit rate using chance to bleed or steal health sigils.

The other main heals, (from the BM tree and signet of the wild) don’t gain from healing. So my survivability is still high but my damage much higher.

Signet of the Wild gains from Healing Power

It’s Natural Healing from the BM line that doesn’t gain from it.

Yes you’re right, it’s a small amount though, but yes you’re right I think it adds about 5/6% from your healing power.

yea, it doesn’t do much, with 1000 HP it’ll double it basically.

just wondering why this thread was created. this is one of the most well known, effective and popular tpvp ranger builds, and it’s been around for a long time. usually, build threads are created when you figure out something new. not being a dick, just sayin.

Xsorus.2507:

capuchinseven.8395:

Xsorus.2507:

capuchinseven.8395:

Cleric is okay but without precision, power is really not that great. Shaman is much better and frankly I’m slowly dropping the amount of healing I use as well, all my main heals don’t use healing power and my main heal TU, doesn’t benefit that much from it.

I dropped my healing and it ticks for around 900 and before was about 1000, but with less healing and more precision I can still have over 1800 toughness, now with over 1000 condition damage and a 30% crit rate using chance to bleed or steal health sigils.

The other main heals, (from the BM tree and signet of the wild) don’t gain from healing. So my survivability is still high but my damage much higher.

Signet of the Wild gains from Healing Power

It’s Natural Healing from the BM line that doesn’t gain from it.

Yes you’re right, it’s a small amount though, but yes you’re right I think it adds about 5/6% from your healing power.

yea, it doesn’t do much, with 1000 HP it’ll double it basically.

Actually to be fair when you put it that way that’s not that bad if you’re already stacking healing, it’s not something I’d want to just stack healing for, but that’s not bad.

Cempa.5619:

Wanderer.5471:

Cempa.5619:

Thanks great guide and some questions:

Cleric Vs Shaman I could use a bit more convincing, not seeing how Cleric is better.

Have players not figured out by now the BM Healer build is an outlast build, I mean don’t they just move in whatever direction as to negate your pet and leave you to last? I see a LB Ranger in PvP and I laugh and 3 shot her…I see a melee Ranger with healing signet and I just avoid them.

Edit: You used that horrible builder that requires us to watch a silly add :/ pass

i have a ranger build which uses healing signet, melee and LB so what would you do if you saw me BTW i win 95% of duels with the build, you’d be laughing all the way to the respawn

The thing is every one says that, I have yet to see one post that says they have a 5% win rate :/

So if every one says they win 95% of the fights basic math says something is wrong :/

But you caught my attention and I’m intrigued, what’s this bunker healing build that uses LB?

haha, it’s true – maybe the percentage of good players is higher on the forums than in-game? Seriously though, “everyone” doesn’t say it, it’s just that people only mention their win ratio if it’s high for obvious reasons which creates the perception that everyone has good ratios, because those are the only reports seen. As for my build, i’m gonna make a thread at some point addressing that lol

capuchinseven.8395:

Xsorus.2507:

capuchinseven.8395:

Xsorus.2507:

capuchinseven.8395:

Cleric is okay but without precision, power is really not that great. Shaman is much better and frankly I’m slowly dropping the amount of healing I use as well, all my main heals don’t use healing power and my main heal TU, doesn’t benefit that much from it.

I dropped my healing and it ticks for around 900 and before was about 1000, but with less healing and more precision I can still have over 1800 toughness, now with over 1000 condition damage and a 30% crit rate using chance to bleed or steal health sigils.

The other main heals, (from the BM tree and signet of the wild) don’t gain from healing. So my survivability is still high but my damage much higher.

Signet of the Wild gains from Healing Power

It’s Natural Healing from the BM line that doesn’t gain from it.

Yes you’re right, it’s a small amount though, but yes you’re right I think it adds about 5/6% from your healing power.

yea, it doesn’t do much, with 1000 HP it’ll double it basically.

Actually to be fair when you put it that way that’s not that bad if you’re already stacking healing, it’s not something I’d want to just stack healing for, but that’s not bad.

i’m going into the BM line, so i’m stacking healing either way…So the extra healing power is very useful to me.

It’s not a huge increase on the signet of the wild on yourself, We’re talking going from like 80 point tic to 150 point tic, The big increase is on your pet, which goes from 200 to 400 a tic..

You might not think it adds up, but trust me..you run without healing gear once, like Carrion for example, and you notice very quickly how kittenty it is.

Hi guys, thanks for all the answers!

Cempa.5619:

Thanks great guide and some questions:

Have players not figured out by now the BM Healer build is an outlast build, I mean don’t they just move in whatever direction as to negate your pet and leave you to last? I see a LB Ranger in PvP and I laugh and 3 shot her…I see a melee Ranger with healing signet and I just avoid them.

Pretty much all players do that but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they negate the pet. That’s why all the CC is so important to me to make sure they can’t run for a while to allow the pet to hit! Besides if they don’t have swiftness the bird is faster anyway.
But yeah some classes can mitigate almost all the pet damage such as Mind Wrack mesmers which is pretty annoying. Those classes are usually the ones that give me trouble. However when they actually manage to down me in 1v1 they often get 2 hitted by my bird while trying to finish me and I usually win the resulting downed fight.

capuchinseven.8395:

Cleric is okay but without precision, power is really not that great. Shaman is much better and frankly I’m slowly dropping the amount of healing I use as well, all my main heals don’t use healing power and my main heal TU, doesn’t benefit that much from it.

I dropped my healing and it ticks for around 900 and before was about 1000, but with less healing and more precision I can still have over 1800 toughness, now with over 1000 condition damage and a 30% crit rate using chance to bleed or steal health sigils.

The other main heals, (from the BM tree and signet of the wild) don’t gain from healing. So my survivability is still high but my damage much higher.

As for Clerics vs Shamans: It doesn’t really make that much difference to be honest. I just prefer Clerics because in a long drawn out fight it will ultimately do more damage than Shamans however if you wan’t a bit more immediate damage with those poisons and bleeds I guess Shaman works too. I actually had Shaman myself before I changed to Clerics. However you might then opt for a torch instead of the dagger.

And now about the Healing Power: When I first started thinking about what gear to take I was a bit sceptical about Healing Power because it seems quite weak at first glance. The reason for this is that it doesn’t scale very well with your standard Healing Skill (usually 1000 HP increase it only about 10-20%) It does however scale very well with Regeneration and other Regeneration like effects such as Signet of the Wild, doubling their effectiveness!

Here is some calculations to demonstrate the Power of Heal:
Let’s assume I get into a fight that lasts 30 seconds during that time I usually receive the following heals:

• Healing Spring
• 5,5s Regeneration from the Rejuvenation Trait
• 5,5s Regeneration from the Oakheart Salve Trait
• 30 ticks from Signet of the Wild
• 30 ticks from Natural Healing
• 30 ticks from the dolyak runes

Without any Healing Power this would equal:

• 1430 from Rejuvenation and Oakheart Salve
• 7260 from Healing Spring
• 1860 from Signet of the Wild
• 1950 from Natural Healing
• 900 from Dolyak Runes
• Total Heal over 30 seconds: 13.400

With 1223 Healing Power that this build has however:

• 3012 from Rejuvenation and Oakheart Salve
• 11.235 from Healing Spring
• 4061 from Signet of the Wild
• 1950 from Natural Healing
• 900 from Dolyak Runes
• Total Heal over 30 seconds: 21.158

This is 63% more Heal, which in my opinion makes it worth stacking.

nerva.7940:

just wondering why this thread was created. this is one of the most well known, effective and popular tpvp ranger builds, and it’s been around for a long time. usually, build threads are created when you figure out something new. not being a dick, just sayin.

I’m well aware of that, as I wrote in the beginning of the post. This is just my version of this build and I haven’t seen it so far with the double birds. Just wanted to show it to you and gather some opinions

Yeah it’s always been double raven. Anyway ill chime in. I actually ran a bleed stacking shaman bm build (axe dagger sb cats) and found it to be very effective for roaming and taking down bunkers.

But the reason u go clerics is for sword/dagger/gs and healing spring. 3 leap finishers on the HS gives you and extra 6k heals. Sword gives a little extra burst with quickness when switching ravens.

Shamans requires condition weapons and even if you go sword torch ure gimping your damage, leap finishers and sword cds. Think of shamans as a tanky dps. It allows for some very versatile builds. But it doesnt have the sustain of a cleric sword ranger