Guild Wars 2

So I decided to take my 17 gold and finally upgrade my junky gear into full exotic. I wanted to be a support/bunker role in wvw. I got full settler armor and weapons (axe horn and sword axe) superior runes of the flock, 2 sigils of water and 2 sigils of benevolence.

6 in wilderness survival for shared anguish, hide in plain sight, and emphatic bond. 6 in nature for nature’s bounty, nature’s protection, and nature’s voice.

2 in beastmastery for shout mastery.

Using healing spring, sic em, guard, and signet of the wild.

Using the sylvan hound and the insect spitting Drake.

I can manage to make my regen and swiftness last for minutes but the regen seems a little anemic. It makes me wonder if I should’ve gone into the beastmastery tree instead. And I didn’t really focus on any condition abilities so I wonder if settler was a bad idea.

Any suggestions? Is there a better build for the equipment I purchased? Because I am dirt poor now and can’t make changes except maybe substituting in some cheap runes.

Thanks!

I would suggest off hand dagger instead of axe. Provides an extra evade, cripple,bleed and poison.

in my opinion off hand axe feals clunky with the sword.

Thanks, would you suggest any trait and skill changes?

It is tough to be really support-y as a ranger. Don’t try to force things that are not there.

You have perma regen with shouts and pets – you might not need Nature’s Bounty and the fern hound. I believe the fern hound regen gets overwritten by your own regen from the shouts, as fern hound regen does not benefit from your healing power. It still is there, but it gets pushed down in the regen queue by your superior regen – so if you keep casting the shout, it will never be used.

Wolf and krytan drakehound might be better pets in smaller encounters. I tend to go with troll ungeant as I find that people move around too much in wvw for them to stand in the field, plus you need your heal for yourself. I know the drake can blast your fields, but the wolf fear and dog immob. might offer better support for your team in small scale action as they hit 5 targets.

As far as zergs go, it will be tough to make your build work – since rangers lack stability and sword is a tricky weapon to make work in a zerg. I run something similar and find it difficult to work make it work compared to my other classes. In a 5 man group, you can keep swiftness and regen up for all. Works well solo because of the perma swiftness from guard.

As the other poster said, I would drop the axe for the dagger. I would also think about using the torch over the warhorn if you are doing small scale stuff. Your already have swiftness. Warhorn is more of a power weapon, or can be of use with a rabid build since the birds can crit for each hit. I’m not sure if it the best for your present build and gear. Torch 4 is nice when it hits. Torch 5 is good to drop into thieves when they go into shadow refuge. You can also jump back into it with sword 2 and get fiery aura. Both work well vs NPCs. You can solo camps with sword/torch and axe/dagger no problem. If you are going to dual wield 2 weapons, I would also think about offhand training.

I would also think about a weapon swap sigils. Geomancy is nice for the 3 bleeds. I thought about Hydromancy but they recently nerfed it down to 3 seconds and chill doesn’t work too well on thieves.

Don’t worry about the money. You will have more soon enough, especially now that they eliminated repair costs in wvw.

Thanks for the input (both of you), I will make those changes. I experimented with going full beastmastery and the regen ticks barely increased despite +300 healing power.

By the way I think the pet regen adds 10 seconds to the current regen and the regen remains the highest of healing powers of those that contributed. I could be wrong!

It adds to the duration of the regen, but I believe once your regen runs out it uses that of the fern hound. Otherwise, one could piggyback on the regen of the person with the best healing forever. But with your own basic regen from rejuve. trait 1 in nature, nature’s bounty plus the shout, the fern hound seems redundant.

I slot Nature’s Protection, but I am rarely hit for 10% of my health as I have high toughness though I haven’t played my ranger much since the newest patch (which might make this even less likely to occur). I also slot evasive purity which is of some use as it removes poison and blinds – which thieves tend to apply. The NPC guard scouts also blind.