Guild Wars 2

I had a lot of fun on this celestial variant of a trapper build today. I was playing this in ranked. No Idea what my mmr is. Won 70% of my matches.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNAR3YjEqQLL2uCmrAVLGYEqec3gQgLgLPA8RfEO9CW1A-TpBHwAEOIAAuAAq3fQwRAYwDAAZZAA

This build has a lot more of that bruiser feel than many ranger builds I’ve played. The combination of bark skin and protective ward means you basically don’t feel thief or mesmer openers. Troll unguent and regen provide good sustain. You have a decent amount of personal condi cleanse. The dmg output felt good especially when doubling up on splitblades and mauls. You’ve got dodge rolls for days.

Mobility out of combat is slightly above average. In combat, doubling up on your swoops, the mobility is good enough to get ooc and reset a fight or go back cap.

I was really impressed at the 1v1 capabilities of the build. I had a fight with a diamond skin ele today and was actually winning before a couple team mates showed up to shut the fight down.

I do miss takin Beastly Warden, but double dogs still provide a good mix of utility, hardiness, dmg and reliability. With the Wolf fear and Spike Trap you can interrupt opposing teams rez attempts. Timing your cc right gives you plenty of self peels as well to help you gtfo.

Overall I’m really enjoying this as a well rounded alternative to the power shoutbow build I’ve mained since patch.

OK ok I know. All 139 of you guys who viewed my post are thinking this build looks great, but can we make it better? Sillier even?

I think I’ve done it. Sigil of strength on axe /dagger set means you have 12 to 15 stacks of might in team fights just for auto attacking. Your pet will be capped at 25 all the time. Healing spring is more than perma regen for your team. Because of how tanky you are as well as being able to pre cast healing spring , you can make nodes much safer for you and your team mates to stand on. It will only get better as well when they fix the bug where your pet doesn’t heal.

The magic happens when you double dip on your traps. I nailed the double healing spring a couple times tonight. Thats an 11k burst heal, plus sword leaps, plus regen. Double flame trap is really easy to get and obviously the dmg is pretty swanky.

Over all this build is really making me wish I was a better player. I think this build could probably be more effective than what I’m capable of currently.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNAR3YjMqQLL2uCmrAVLGYEqec3gQgLgLPA8RfEO9CW1A-TpRGwAAOCADuAAt3fowBBwwDAYZZAA

Healing spring gives it’s 5,5k heal when you cast it and not when the trap activates so there’s no way you can get 11k burst out of them.

I kitten that’s true. I was just trying to figure out the math of what happened earlier. Definitely hit double healing spring and went from less than 5k health back up to 20k. I could almost see the poor warrior scratching his head trying to figure out what happened.

It can burst for 10k. With quick draw he can swopp twice in less than 10 sec. each swoop = 2 leaps, each leap heal for 1500 with his healing power. Thats 6k heal from leaps(guss thats wy he took GS over -S-T). with 5.5k from the trap activation, its more than 10k heal+condi removal+prema regen. But, kinda hard to pull off.

Try out warhorn offhand. Call of the wild is great for blasting healing spring. If you go with the marksman track you can trait to give pet swap call of the wild. Double blast ftw.

Double Healing Spring is definitely not gonna happen often. When I did that last night it certainly wasn’t planned.

<3 blast finishers. This build would certainly benefit from having a couple of those. Aoe blast heals. Also Aoe might from blasting Flame Trap. What is the cost of including a blast finisher though?

Swapping off hand dagger for warhorn. I lose a 1.25 sec evade, and 3 stacks of poison. I also lose 3 stacks of bleeding plus long duration cripple. Both skills help me win fights by doing damage, suppressing enemy sustain, and kiting. What do I gain? Blast finisher. Pretty nice, but on a long cooldown. I also get swiftness which means maybe a different rune choice, but it’s not 100% up time on swiftness so maybe not. Aoe fury, good for the team, good for me, great for my pet. Ok, not bad. Skill 4 though? Does nothing for me. It does help a little with might stacks from the strength runes. It’s not a ton of dmg though, especially for what the cooldown is, and aside from proccing on crit or on hit effects does nothing.

Losing that evade on dagger is huge. A big part of any classes survivability in pvp comes from having weapon skills that negate dmg. You can spread your invuln out across weapon skills and utilities and cover many more of your enemies attacks.

As far as the marksmanship trait line I just don’t see it bringing much to this build. The traits are almost entirely offensive and pretty much only benefit power builds. Skirmishing just makes so much of this build happen, and not having to wait for long weapon cooldowns is just so huge.

Why GS instead of SW/A? Honestly the seed was planted way back a few months ago. On this forum was a thread, I think started by jcbroe? The idea was re assessing the ranger in light of the previous meta. What do we bring. What do we do easily? Where do we fit in? There was pretty much consensus that Survival condis with A/D, SW/T could 1v1 anything and that a big part of the success of the build was the A/D weapon set. From there it was suggested I think (memory?) that perhaps a great build could be had by pairing the GS with A/D. The GS would provide mobility, and utility the ranger needed to roam, fend off ganks, survive longer in team fights, while the A/D would allow the ranger to win any 1v1 match up they faced.

I dunno, the idea stuck in my head. I think with the new traits we have and the way things are laid out it all works really well. Yes S/T pair really well, but then you lose another interrupt, the GS block is great especially when you double up thanks to quick draw, plus now for a celestial build your dmg is almost totally reliant on condis which then begs the question why not just run a condi ammy?