Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone from the ranger forums ! today, I shall present you a build of a different kind

Here come the build and all the numbers, in the form of a nice build with the latest traits :
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/ranger/?6.3|7.1k.hz.g.1k.h1p.0.0.0|c.1k.hz.7.1k.h1p.0.0.0|1k.71h.1k.71h.1k.71h.1k.71h.1k.71h.1k.71h|1k.68.1k.68.1k.68.1k.68.1k.68.1a.68|0.0.a2.u13c.u3ac|4e.0|4i.4k.4r.4p.56|e

I assumed that one would use a long bow with a superior sigil of life first in order to get the healing power up to nearly 1800.

Before I start explaining my choices and whatnot, I shall first speak about why I decided to create a support build in a zerk meta, and above all, why I spent money in all this as it is mostly pointless and only aims at some kind of self-congratulation. In my guild, which shall not be named, everyone has to make every kind of build for their characters. As such, I have tanking builds, support builds and dps builds (which still represent the majority of the builds I use).

I decided that my ranger should become a healer after seeing the recent changes in our traits, and because I had no healing character before. I strongly believe that everyone should be dungeonning in zerk equipment and trinkets, but after trying this build out and seeing how much luv it could give, I just had to share it.

Here is a table of contents, for you to understand the build in an easier way:

1/ Equipment
2/ Traits
3/ Utilities
4/ Pets
5/ Skill rotation

1/ Equipment

This shall not be long: I opted for a full cleric set (Owww Gad, that’s bad for my dps ;_;). The reason behind it was the one that led the choices of all the healer wannabes in GW2 : heal for “a lot”, and remain standing, cuz a downed/dead healer heals for nothing (while this is not true with this build as we’ll see later). Power is kitten low so one should not expect to support with high dmg.

As I said before, use a LB and “mark” a lot of mobs with the 5th skill in the beginning of dungeons (trash mobs killing, which everyone does to get their own stacks up), so as to get the +250 boost to Healing Power, which will be useful for greater heal later on.

After this kitten is done, take your true weapon set, consisting of axe/warhorn + sword/axe. The reason for this is to get as much aoe heal proc as possible, through sigils of renewal on both offhand weps (it recharges in the time needed to recharge the weapon swap anyways). Mainhand weps can pretty much use any sigil so I went for to sigils of restoration, for a little self(ish) heal on mob death. That being said, you see that the weapons have a low range : this build is meant to be used at melee, there is no standing at 1500 range like a BearBow ranger. This way, you can get everyone in your aoes when you proc the sigil of renewal (396 heal, radius is 300).

For the armor, superior runes of Dwayna just didn’t cut it, so I went for runes of water. To be more precise, runes of Dwayna increased regen duration, while by using runes of water, the regen duration was enough, and I get one more burst heal when I use my own healing skill. I’ve also got a self condition removal, which helps from time to time.

2/ Traits.

I went for quite the understandable traits: I maxed healing power and boon duration. This provides greater regeneration and burst heal values, while increasing regeneration duration.

The selfish part lies within the 10 points spent in wilderness survival, in order to get endurance regeneration. But at the same time I took healer’s celerity, because a supportive role isn’t only about healing and buffing: you have to get your allies up (the toughness helps for this part).

With the 30 points in Beast Mastery, I have 20% faster shout recharge, pets that grant vigor when summoned (every 16 secs and in 600 radius) and pets that have passive regeneration.

With the 30 points in Nature Magic, I have a healing spring on death. While I do not plan on dying, especially with this build, kitten happens and this trait is there to make up for it. I have 33% more regeneration duration, combined with my 45% boon duration, and this leads to perma-regen on everyone because of shouts that grant regeneration + swiftness. This is the beginning of the luv in this build, and it continues in the next part.

3/ Utilities

As one could expect, healing skill is healing spring. It gives some nice extra regen (even if all the allies aren’t in it, they should have enough regen to continue roaming till the next shout), removes conditions and heals for 906 in a 300 radius thanks to the superior runes of water.

Next are two selfish skills, as I take signet of stone and signet of the wild for the extra toughness and self/pet regeneration.

Last but not least is the shout I found the best : “Guard”. While the skill effect totally sucks, the boons it gives when traited are awesome : every 12 seconds you get and give 17 seconds of luv regen and 14 seconds of swiftness. Perma regen + swiftness is there.

Elite is spirit of nature, because it gives 504 health per second in a cute area, and acts like the warbanner for quick reviving purposes.

4/ Pets.

In a ranger build, the pets are as important as the skills or equipment. I thus took :

- The Fern Hound, because it looks cute procs a burst heal of 2800 on F2 and gives almost 20 seconds of regeneration.
- The Blue Moa because Ninja Moa rocks it gives 5 seconds of protection on F2 and gives a burst heal *cough*randomly*cough* in battle, for about 3600 health.

/nuff said

5/ Skill rotation.

Erm… It should be something like “Guard” whenever it’s on cooldown and as soon as you drop healing spring, you go axe 5, then warhorn 5 (heals for 1209 ). Swap weapons as often as possible in order to give more health to the other meleeing group members. For the rest, it’s up to your liking. I prefer staying with sword mainhand as I’m more used to the mechanics, and because the leap in a water field heals me.

I shall now put my flameshield on and wait for the rest of the forums to comment on this build.

P.S : As I’ve already said, I mainly play zerk builds, this one was made because of a guild requirement.

P.P.S : Best ranger build awards must go to Brazil for his dps ranger build

P.P.P.S : Please, pardon my poor english skills :/

Nice build,!
I run a similar build for zerging :

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNBhYD7koiugLsQwCQLDIrHEy+NItCVi7Bq4Jh4FP90E-jUCB4hCyEEAE1w0HQZRFRjtupIasqHYKVER1uEFRrWGAztA-w

With this build you have more mobility, more healing combos and a bit more survival ability.

I prefer the jungle stalker with his might over the unpredictable moa.

p.s. I think the fern hound heals half of what the tooltip says.

I almost always run a build with lots of healing, but I don’t ever take the Fern Hound. It doesn’t actually heal for 2800, it only heals for 1000 (1350 traited). The 2800 heal and 20 seconds of regeneration you see on the tooltip is a bug (I’ve fallen for it before too). Also, a Fern hound has 0 healing power (350 traited with Compassion Training), so any regeneration you can apply yourself (with 1800 healing power) will always heal for alot more (infact, almost 3x more). If you can perma regen yourself and others, then the regen that the Fern hound applies is utter garbage and will get in the way of other stronger regens. If you can’t, then the Fern hound might be somewhat useful…

I normally take a more tanky pet, like Drakes, or pets with some crowd control, like Wolves. Drakes also have the bonus of having a blast finisher every 30 seconds or so on one of their skills, which can provide an extra 1,320 healing (and if you really have no better trait to be using,….1,390 healing, traited with compassion training).

Here are some more infos: With the 1800 healing power the rune of water proc (every 30 sec with healing spring) should heal for 1590.
The fern hound and all pets show wrong F2 details because the tooltip shows the value with the rangers boonduration/attributes.
Thats why it shows you 2800 (1000 + your 1800 heal rating) which is not true like Chrispy said.
Instead of the fern hound which regeneration is really weak you might want to use two moas like the red and the blue moa. The red moa grants a rather high fury uptime to the party and also has this 3600 heal which is especially useful if you are in melee range as you are because it will actually hit you
Drakes are also really nice – they have not bad AoE damage, the blast finisher for heal and they are really tanky.

Added to the compilation thread!

Been a long time since I added anything there XD We need more guide makers :P

As two people have said, the drake pet is an interesting alternative to the fern hound, even if the blast finisher is difficult to time with healing spring in order to get the combo done. I think it procs on pet switching if CD is right, but I wouldn’t be sure of it… Could someone confirm this ?

The regen is permanent as stated in the build : with a full 30 seconds skill rotation I can get up to 1 minute of regen on all party members I think, but it might even be more. I need to test it further to see if there is a cap on boon duration

Thanks a lot to jubskie for putting it in the compilation thread, this will prevent this thread from dying in the darkest part of the huge forums.

I may go on a make some other guides, as I’ve played a nice tanking ranger back in the days

Regen scales off of the one who has the boon regardless of the boons source. So you with your 1800 healing power are healing that zerker warrior over there for 130hp/s because he has no healing power. Same goes with the fern hound. The fern hound is healing you for 355 hp/s with your 1800 healing power but it is only healing itself for 130 hp/s (174 with the healing power increase trait). That being said, unless your zerg has healing power and no regen sources…. you are kind of overkilling the lame heals department but the swiftness is nice. Only nice thing you’ve got runes of the water heal, a water field, and a blast finisher heal…

That’s counting the fern hound regen not the actual burst heal it is supposed to have now.

Dual moas would be best for more healing with this build, like Arpheus said.

Eurantien.4632:

Regen scales off of the one who has the boon regardless of the boons source.

As I’ve taken everything previous people saif into account, I would like to know where you read this. Empiric experience goes towards me being correct as I’ve put a regen of 372hp/sec on a zerk guardian…

Enaretos.8079:

Eurantien.4632:

Regen scales off of the one who has the boon regardless of the boons source.

As I’ve taken everything previous people saif into account, I would like to know where you read this. Empiric experience goes towards me being correct as I’ve put a regen of 372hp/sec on a zerk guardian…

LOL. I apologize. I… just tested it and you are correct… how did I not know this? I’m speechless lol.

Eurantien.4632:

Enaretos.8079:

Eurantien.4632:

Regen scales off of the one who has the boon regardless of the boons source.

As I’ve taken everything previous people saif into account, I would like to know where you read this. Empiric experience goes towards me being correct as I’ve put a regen of 372hp/sec on a zerk guardian…

LOL. I apologize. I… just tested it and you are correct… how did I not know this? I’m speechless lol.

yes both boon duration and the strength of the boon is off the givers stats :P

I don’t think i’ll commit to the cleric weapons just yet. Unless i missed a cleric weapon karma vendor (only abundant resource i wish to spend on this build). Still something about runes troubles me: Do the 4th 6th set bonus really compensate? I don’t know… 5% seems unreliable for condition cleanse and how big is that AOE heal.

I already swapped one of the sigs for renewal but still…

Cleric weapons cost less than 2 gold each, not that big an investment if you’re truly going to play with this build. We did some fun testing with friends : they stood without dodging in front of HoTW’s Aldus (P1 second boss), and I managed to keep them alive for the duration of the fight (hopefully it didn’t last for too long as they were in full zerkers).

As for your question, the 4th and 6th bonuses of the runes of water are more interesting than those of the runes of Dwayna (regen is already permanent without them …). The aoe must be something like 300~450, but since the meta goes towards melee, it isn’t a problem and you almost always get everyone in it. Condition removal goes well with HS’ s effect and is kinda good for rushes where you end up getting hit (Arah P1’s oozes come to mind).

Rune of Water #6 is 690 + 0.5 x healing power healing in a 600 AoE
So at 1200 Healing power thats a 1290 AoE heal
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Water

After some testing, this should really be added to the ranger sticky. Great job.

On further note (sorry for double post, just thought my vouch for the build to get into the sticky, deserved it’s own post), i’d like to offer a small switch to this concept.
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-F;4wEFu-_2wDk-0;9F33;39TT;41;003B29AT;07;2UytbUytb;0kPkI-ZP;1VMVRWWXa2g3m4I

most importantly is the choice for apothecary instead of Cleric, since i think it synergizes with the main hand weapons better even more through the usage of condition sigils (Doom and Geomancy, to complement each of the weapons) and even the off-hands can be switched to better synergie condition ones.

As you can see traits are all there, this suggestion can easily be converted to Enaretos’ design, which i loved. In my opinion though, i wouldn’t go for fern hound (regen is repetitive), instead going for the raven (blind also very in tune with the build theme) grants vigor on every pet swap due to the trait including Birds and Moas (double moas isn’t out of the question either) and the fact i don’t fancy signets too much out of a Beastmaster Active trait from Marksmanship and i love Spirits. It just that i have this decease of thinking about builds that even though focused in one objective still offer some manuver to spice things around.

Just my two cents, anyway my thanks to Enaretos for the inspiration and for making me utterly bankrupt (don’t have much playtime to farm stuff unfortunately).

Ariete.6509:

most importantly is the choice for apothecary instead of Cleric, since i think it synergizes with the main hand weapons better even more through the usage of condition sigils (Doom and Geomancy, to complement each of the weapons) and even the off-hands can be switched to better synergie condition ones.

Well, I do prefer using a sword MH, so a good old cleric set was the way to go for me… If you want to do dps, go for it, but that build was intended only as a dedicated healer, so now it’s up to you to share the luv !

Ariete.6509:

Just my two cents, anyway my thanks to Enaretos for the inspiration and for making me utterly bankrupt (don’t have much playtime to farm stuff unfortunately).

Meh, cleric’s are almost free :/ Just come farm arah with me and use the money you’ll get there

Idd, just scratched some mats and bought an entire Zho’s set… i mean… since i went all in on the build… about 9g, plus 2.5 for the runes. I don’t mind aesthetics so much.