I keep seeing rangers in public struggle in dungeons so I thought I’d share a few things I do to be successful.
0) Always be aware of the location of your pet. If you do not know where your pet is, switch immediately. If your pet is away from you without your knowledge then you have made a mistake. This might be the most important rule of all: be aware of your pet’s health and location at all times.
1) Always use a dungeon potion (this applies to all classes). No sigil you could pay 12 gold for will give you +10%/-10% so, please, make that small effort to bring potions along. Heck, if you don’t want to spend silver, spend copper and go +9%/-9%.
2) IMPORTANT: When I fight bosses in this game I almost always have the pet on “avoid combat”. What I do is (roughly) every 10 seconds I’m cycling my pet from attack/“F2” (my pet utility is bound to the letter “x”) to “return”. Send and return, send and return. If you get into a rhythm, your pet will stay up a long time. And if you’re good, you won’t let a pet die. Albeit, it’s annoying that pets sometimes choose to sit in AoE when next to you so there’s nothing you can do but move (possibly into more AoE) but that’s a well known issue that should get addressed sometime in the future. It’s only a problem during boss phases of large AoE attacks. Anyways, your team will be amazing at your ability to keep your pet alive and some might even call “HACKS”! And you will have people asking you about your build…when in reality, it was you keeping the pet alive. *One last note: if you don’t trait in BM your pet will die much more often; a lot of rangers feel WS is a “requirement” for rangers…however, I don’t believe that at all. I feel that BM (the ignored, neglected trait line by most players) is a requirement. Almost all of my builds use points in BM.
3) When kiting mobs, rangers should have a good time—you have access to spike trap, frost trap, and entangle for crowd control. Keep your pet close by repeatedly calling it while running (keep on avoid combat too). If you need stealth for that one extra second of running in the clear, use siamoth. Use the 25% run speed signet and the condition removal signet and you should be fine for most kites.
4) A lot of rangers like to run glass builds and that’s fine. But if you are dying a lot, do your party a favor and use the combination of Signet of Stone and Protect me. When you active the signet and then use the shout, your pet becomes invulnerable (signet) and then it re-directs your incoming damage to itself. This makes both you and the pet invulnerable for a few seconds. Also, use the combination of shared anguish and stability training with a bear and you have some real survivability. A lot of people don’t know that combination but what that does is if a disable is coming to you, shared anguish sends it to the pet. If you have ursine (bear), porcine (forager), or armorfish equipped and Stability Training equipped, when the pet gets your disable, rather than being disabled, it gains stability instead. In other words, incoming disables (fear, knockdown, immobilize, etc) end up buffing your pet.
5) Turn of the sword autoattack if you have trouble with “rooting”. If you like the autoattack (I do because I’m lazy) practice with it so you get the lag between finishing autoattack secondary and initiating hornet’s sting or dodge. If you can recognize that you need to get out fast in a timely fashion, then this lag is no issue. If you wait too long, then you will die. If this happens, do not complain on reddit like I just saw people doing the other day. Instead, practice more.
6) Bark skin is underutilized and arguably better in many situations than emphatic bond, particularly in dungeons where damage reduction is great for tanking. You don’t always need perpetual removal.
7) Know the fights. In between fights in a dungeon, change your weapon loadout, utility loadout, elite skill, pets, and anything that will turn the tide on the next battle. Rangers are the ultimate utility class so you need to be constantly switching gear to tailor yourself for the fight.
8) If you or your group is dying a lot in a path, switch to healer’s celerity and compassion training and search and rescue, particularly if you have a lot of points in BM traitline.
9) Arah seer path: Run a hybrid build with two sets of gear: power toughness vitality with soldiers runes for the giganitcus lupicus fight (roughly 2500 attack is good enough) and defensive trinkets. Then, when you fight Simin, priestest of dwyana, switch trinkets and gear to full berserker stats with rune of the ranger and berserker trinkets (roughly 3000 attack now). This is the only way you’re going to be able to beat this dungeon path after the rez rush fix. Actually, this is a general strategy that I don’t think many people know about yet.
(edited by Chopps.5047)