Guild Wars 2

I love my Ranger. I know we are lacking in many fields, but even so I kill a lot of enemies. The reason I feel people arent playing their rangers very well is because when I see an enemy ranger I get excited for my free kill (especially if i see a shortbow!!!). I use longbow greatsword (which I hear people say are aweful). I even learned how to kill thieves tonight which is something that has frustrated me to no end. Now im not one of those guys that crunch number or know everything about the game, I just love playing. If I die I ask myself why and what can I do better..With that said..this is how i play..any suggestions on making it even better I would welcome. If you hate rangers please dont post here there are pleanty of other places to post that stuff.

All my gear is power toughness vitality. My longbow and greatsword are power toughness healing. I also use quickening zypher, lightning reflexes, signet of the hunt, and mostly entangle. I use eagle eye and piercing arrows, agility training and quick draw, soften the fall and hide in plain sight.

My new way of fighting thieves…as they come out of stealth to attack, use lightning reflexes followed by point blank and rapid fire. At this point the thief seem to stealth and you can finish them with Barrage. If you have entangle up use that after lightning reflexes. That worked for me all night tonight for a total of 5 out of 6 wins vs thieves this evening.

In keep battles because of my range I can often take out cannons and things other people cant reach. I can entangle enemies that are trying to get in to defend or knock them back so allies can kill them. Barrage finishes off targets on the wall that go down when allies cant target them..also people tend to run from red circles so its a great way to get enemies to break rank and sometimes outright turn and run.

In open field battles where there are ten on ten or more people tend to think if they are getting damaged they can just run to the back or their lines and be safe..but rangers with our barrage and piercing attack can send multiple targets fleeing which for me has turned the tide of many fights. I also use my wolfs cone of fear to send people running. I also use the bear because its relentless and doesnt seem to ever die and well….I like bears

Now we really dont have a lot of ways to keep ourselves alive like a lot of other classes so i often run with my mesmer friend when I want to roam..the chaos he creates with his clones makes it very easy to stay alive and we often fight 4 or 5 enemies at a time and beat them.

Now the reason I use greatsword with my longbow is because Ill usually burn through my timers and not have an enemy dead yet, switch to greatsword, and if its a mele class and they are on me I counter attack to block their next attack and knock them down or if they are a distance class I swoop in to get on top of em and finish them that way.

Ive never lost 1 on 1 to a necro, guardian, engeneer, or ranger. Only 1 warrior has ever killed me 1 vs 1. Elementalists I have a hard time killing because they can get away but they have a hard time killing me too, If a mesmer plays their class right they can escape battle too but there arent a lot of good mesmers out there and usually are pretty squishy, and thieves are well..thieves. Except for tonight they usually get the best of me.

Im sure there are a lot of flaws in my playing style but Ive been very successful and I have a lot of fun doing it. There are nights Ill get over a hundred kills with only a single death or 2 and Im not a hardcore gamer. If you want to play a traditional style ranger I suggest giving this way a try Im loving the game. If anyone has any constructive critisism for me Id love to hear it.

Lots of hot air. Pvt is the worst gear you can get on the ranger, LB is a disaster and vastly outperformed by power/crit sb. I could poke holes in your fantasy, but I wont because all that matters is that youre having fun.

Love it. I play bezerker LB and GS in Paid tournaments. High DPS classes are a breeze with the GS counter → LB combo. All the 1 target CC is great! I use slightly different utilities and traits, however, we have the same issues with eles. If I can’t get the right stuns on them they can almost always get away. Don’t listen to the cookie cutter rangers. Run whatever you want! Except for offhand axe.

I knew Id see something like that. And i dont blame you its what everyone says. Well why is it you think im having a fantasy? Im having fun because Im killing enemies far more often than I die. And from what I read rangers tend to believe they arent effective and arent having fun in WvW. And maybe there are just a lot of poor players in the game, but i usually dont even have to heal myself in a fight with a shortbow ranger. Maybe its because I have that armor you dont like which makes me harder to kill… I see people all the time stating things like you are saying…like longbow is a disaster. Its only a disaster if you dont have a 2nd weapon to switch to once you burn your timers. No one kills enemies as fast as I do of the people I run with..by the time I go through my timers once Its almost all over. With the extra armor and health to keep me alive longer some night I feel invincible. Lol Im simply not making this up. Go ahead, poke a hole in it. If anything maybe Ill learn something

Eurantien.4632:

Love it. I play bezerker LB and GS in Paid tournaments.

=D

Thanks Eurantien for the support! I just hear so much complaining about the ranger and Im havin a grand ol time. It seems to me that if you do the same thing over and over again and it doesnt work try something new…even if the math doesnt work out And with the dang Ele’s…the only way I can finish em is if I can time a pet fear just before they take off on me. I cant rely on it but its fun to try and Im sure it shockes the daylights of of em when it works

Centhis.5071:

No one kills enemies as fast as I do of the people I run with..by the time I go through my timers once Its almost all over.

So youre referring to the rapid fire + qz gimmick? The most easily avoided burst combo in the game (with one dodge)? I played a full pvt/zerker lb/gs ranger for months…and I wanna have some of what youre smoking

But please, do continue. Tell us how to do it right.

Don’t want to ruin your party, everyone can play the way they want, and having fun is of course the whole point of the game…

BUT

You really cant judge a class balance on a personal experience basis, without doing some analysis and number crunching, and looking at the bigger picture. You can run full soldier, use the lowest dps weapon (GS), hit like a wet noodle and still kill a few thieves 1on1, but chances are those thieves are part of the 90% that in dungeons just spam daggers at bosses, going down every 10 seconds.

I leveled my ranger doing wvw (a dozen levels), running with my guild and staying behind zergs, only dieing to lag, invisible zergs and groups of stealthed thieves. I had fun, and still have in wvw, but there is a very big ocean beetween that and arguing that the ranger is OP (or even balanced for that matter).

Sounds like i use very different stats and traits to you in all my builds, but i also favour the LB and greatsword combo for many and have a lot of success in Spvp – with some builds i win 95% of 1v1s. As for the QZ and LB2 combo remark – it’s not the only way to use the LB, firstly don’t waste QZ, just get quickness from pet swaps, secondly only use quickness with it if the enemy is ccd so can’t avoid, otherwise let it attack normally, they can’t avoid every shot then as it’s spread over too much time, but will still waste all their endurance trying, then swoop in with GS and use daze and quickness swap for some burst.

Am i the only one who thinks all such matters should be settled with a link to a youtube video of a duel between the person professing the strengths of their build and the person saying it’s weak? lol… a man can dream. Though that wouldn’t work as the game is a bit too rock-paper-scissors in most instances. Do people have to be on the same server to duel? what with guesting and all.

It could be my sleep deprivation but I dont know whether to laugh or cry. This entire thread is like one giant troll…I feel like im trippin here

What makes me wonder is that you don’t have any condition removal slotted/traited and you don’t have 5 points into beastmastery which give you 2 sec of quickness every 20 sec (16 if 15 points in beastmasterys).

How do you handle long lasting conditions? Do you use healing spring to remove them and rely on your high vitality?
I will give this a try and see how it will work out. I was already using longbow/gs with zerker gear and the damage was really decent. But I also died alot more often than you do. Let’s see if it really works out with the pvt gear.

And which runes/sigils do you use on armor/weapons?

LB is indeed viable, but that doesn’t mean it could still use work (which it does)

But LB skills are pretty nice actually, but the speed and damage could use improvement. Honestly I think those two alone would have a flock of people using LB which is a good thing. Provides more variety

Aegis.9724 hit the nail on the head but I guess that’s part of the appeal of GW2 and WvW, character strength is in our heads so we can pretty much spec any way and still ‘feel’ like gods….Anet are smart indeed

Wanderer Thanks for the quickness advice, Im gona try that it seems much more effecient than how Im curently doing it. Arpheus, you know Ive read so much about how great condition damage is, and maybe it is my high vitality but conditions just dont seem to effect me enough for me to the degree I want to use points to have to remove them. I use Troll Unguent to heal and if Im low health I click it, and Ill heal faster than any conditions can burn me down..while healing if I really need it Ill use my dodge to avoid further damage combined with lighning reflexes which give me 100% endur regen which burns up a lot of time and once my timers are back up I try to burst them down fast enough with zephyr and rapid fire. Ive noticed most people I fight when they get me running and doging they get kitteny and go on the aggressive so if I can stay alive long enough to have my timers reset they have blown their load and Im at half health ready to burn and my enemy isnt fighting quite as smart as they were when I was at full health at the beginning of the fight. Now Ive been really low health in larger fights where I notice im bleeding down and Ill have to back away from the fight, a few straggelers will usually chase me but Ill try to entangle them and keep backing away until I can get a heal off…thats it though, not really effected by conditions. I use 4 runed of divinity and two runes of speed (speed for when I am using rampage as one to chase enemies.

thinking about the 2 seconds of quickness when swapping pets..I dont know what I would want to lose to gain that. Piercing arrows is so nice for crowd control, quick draw to me is a must when using a long bow, and hide in plain sight is one of those things that saves me about a dozen times a night…and it offers me the next attack from an angle and buys me more time to reset my timers. Ill probably lose that one though and try the 5 points into beastmastery to see if I gain enough extra damage to lose that extra defense.

And lol Im not just fighting wet noodle thieves…Im right at about 5000 WvW kills and can tell a well specced/played thief from a pve guy.

And dont get me wrong, I love you guys doing all that math and figuring our things that work on paper but there are so many in game factors that those things just dont factor in like which attacks cause fear and panic and there are tactics that you can use that crunching numbers wont help you with. On test dummies I may not be specced perfect though Ill give you that.

It would sure be fun to be able to duel you Nurva. Im on EB, you?

Hah, finally someone said it I’m running with similiar config – just a bit more dmg oriented.

My advice: don’t waste time for ppl. You know it works, I know it works. No reason to explain others your build works and class isn’t broken (waiting for ppl quiting this sentence and saying how they got owned by class X in thing Y…).
Noone seems to care about 1500 range, that can go 2000+ when shooting from tower. Noone cares about 4 interrupts (2 wolves, LB4 and GS5). Noone cares about 3k+ crits on glass cannons (lvl 80 exotic) with auto attack.
It’s fun to see all this rage about how easy it is to dodge attacks or evade them by moving quickly – ppl seem to forget it’s W3, not sPvP, in all the chaos I can kill enemies with autoattack alone, staying out of range.

But as I said: don’t bother, ever if someone tried it and changed his opinion (yeah, it’s opinion, not fact), he wouldn’t have balls to come here and admit it.

haha Terkov nice! Yah I just figured with all the negativity out there Id share something that I havent seen people posting that has been fun for me. Im glad to see im not the only crazy one

nerva.7940:

Centhis.5071:

No one kills enemies as fast as I do of the people I run with..by the time I go through my timers once Its almost all over.

So youre referring to the rapid fire + qz gimmick? The most easily avoided burst combo in the game (with one dodge)? I played a full pvt/zerker lb/gs ranger for months…and I wanna have some of what youre smoking

But please, do continue. Tell us how to do it right.

I have found the rapid fire +qz burst is best when you first use the knock back shot, this gives enough time to get the full rapid fire burst onto you’re target (assuming they get knocked down)

Yah Paz thats the best way to do it. And I took Arpheus’s advice…dropped hide in plain sight, picked up the 2 second qz with weapon swap and it was awesome! I found myself paying much more attention to my pets and the extra qquickness really helped me set the pace of the fights. Add 50 kills to 2 deaths this past hour Loving the ranger and for the most part, the ranger community

I play the mesmer that the OP runs with on a regular basis and I can attest to the fact that no ranger has ever killed him 1v1. Even without crit damage he burns enemies down real fast when he has the opportunity to lay into them. With all the distractions I create, he has impunity to QZ/Rapid Fire people down without being dodged very often because they don’t see it coming. But this strays a little off-topic, as this thread is about playing the ranger, not duoing with the mesmer. Anyway, just my 2c: He mops the floor with other rangers in WVW every single time.

Centhis, can you post your build? I would be interested to check it out …. out of interest and not to troll it.

I’ll try to get Centhis to log on and post his build, but I’ll make an attempt at describing it here:
His points are spent. 30/20/10/0/10 in that order. He has 30 in the first line to get piercing arrows, 20 in the next line to get longer range and faster rest timers on longbow. I think also +10% damage when endurance is full. 10 in the next line, I forget what that gives him. 0 in the fourth line, and he just put 10 in the pet line to get quickness when pet swapping and something else. Also, somewhere in there he has +33% pet speed.

Not a great description, I know, but I hope this helps. :-)

Centhis.5071:

It would sure be fun to be able to duel you Nurva. Im on EB, you?

im on dragonbrand, will duel any ranger. i wont strafe your arrows and will let you get me down to 60% health.