Guild Wars 2

So, I just hit level 80 on my Ranger, whom I leveled solely for the purposes of WvW roaming. At the moment, I’m running a stealth trapper build with trapper runes and full dire gear, S/D + A/T. It’s a lot of fun.

I have a few questions regarding the profession.
For my purposes, what is the best heal skill?
What are the best pets for my build? I’m currently running brown bear for condi clears and jaguar for pet stealth, but I feel like there may be better options.
Also, anything else I should know as a new ranger?

Troll onguent is overall the best heal for condi specs, as their tankiness allows the full heal to tick, that’s an insane regen over time. For pets, you’ll need at least one canine. Wolf or hound are the most powerful pets in pvp, because they have cc. I use spider on switch, but that’s a personal preference. Birds have quite a few bleed stacks.

In general you can try metabattle.com when looking for builds – they list pets too.

And 1 golden rule of rangers, never use bears :P

oxtred.7658:

Troll onguent is overall the best heal for condi specs, as their tankiness allows the full heal to tick, that’s an insane regen over time. For pets, you’ll need at least one canine. Wolf or hound are the most powerful pets in pvp, because they have cc. I use spider on switch, but that’s a personal preference. Birds have quite a few bleed stacks.

I have found that a stealth build means very little when you have a pet showing the enemy where you are, so I have opted to definitely take jaguar.

witcher.3197:

In general you can try metabattle.com when looking for builds – they list pets too.

And 1 golden rule of rangers, never use bears :P

What makes bears bad?

kaikalii.4198:

oxtred.7658:

Troll onguent is overall the best heal for condi specs, as their tankiness allows the full heal to tick, that’s an insane regen over time. For pets, you’ll need at least one canine. Wolf or hound are the most powerful pets in pvp, because they have cc. I use spider on switch, but that’s a personal preference. Birds have quite a few bleed stacks.

I have found that a stealth build means very little when you have a pet showing the enemy where you are, so I have opted to definitely take jaguar.

witcher.3197:

In general you can try metabattle.com when looking for builds – they list pets too.

And 1 golden rule of rangers, never use bears :P

What makes bears bad?

It’s bearbows that suck not bears!
Bears have steady dps cause they never die, and brown bear has condi clear. She is also cuddly.

They are warm and fuzzy no doubt. But other pets provide better dps / party utilities.

I know about bearbow hate, but there are situations where i simply need that nice little condi cleanse… am i supposed to feel bad for it?

Try switching your weapons to S/T + A/D. That way you have evades on both sets instead of an offensive and defensive set.

I would not say there is a best heal or pet choice, it really comes down to what you want your build to be able to do.

TU is generally the most popular choice (I think) for roaming, but trap builds can have condition cleansing issues relying on EB, so there is a very valid arguement for HS if that’s a problem you are having.

For pets again it does come down to condition cleansing when you’re using traps (and thus EB). In a perfect world you’d always want canines for hard+soft CC or birds/cats for DPS, but when you’re relying on your pet to be alive and take conditions for you it’s often just not viable to use such defensively weak pets, especially VS engis or necros who will throw out a huge amount of AoE and kills your pets very quickly.

So with that in mind, Spiders of a very common and effective pet to use with EB because they have high vitality (so they wont die easily to the conditions), they are ranged (so taking soft CC conditions onto themselves isn’t a huge issue for them and it keeps them away from random AoE) and they are still pretty effective at immobilising your opponents and doing some damage.

But like I said.. there isn’t a best for every situation.. spiders are just generally a good all round choice if you’re using EB.