Guild Wars 2

So I’m approaching the 20’s in Fractals and looking for input from the rangers that are higher up, possibly 30+.
I’m trying to find the right stats to optimize max damage output with shortbow, while keeping higher survivability.

I notice with shortbow, crits and crit damage do wonders. Maybe sacrificing power in favor of more toughness would be an advantage to anything that isn’t a dot, but is vitality worth it for condition negation if you can get several condition removals?

Anyway, right now I’m running a 20/25/20/0/5 build and relying on toughness for my main survivability, but I seem to be lacking in damage and think my 2000+ power may be the main stat waster I have right now.

Hi, I’m by no means an expert on fotm (I’m at about the same level as you) but I’ll speak of my experience and set out my reasoning.

First off it’s true that prec and crit (dmg) do wonders however there is a drop off point where power actually becomes more efficient than prec/crit (especially towards crit) meaning that if you’re going to drop one of your stats, crit is probably the best choice.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/gallery/image/515-403-power-precision/

Next, I do NOT believe rangers (and most other classes) should build around toughness or vitality for survivability. Imo it’s better to go with traits (giving protection/vigor/..) or utility skills, if you’re looking to increase survivability.
These views are shared by someone who linked guide videos in the dungeon section:

Everyone in the party is in full Berserker (I keep an extra set for WvW as well, since I prefer a different rune set for that anyways). I honestly see no need for survival stats in current exploration modes as long as you have good protection/weakness up time.

There are two ways of dealing damage damage over time (dot) and direct damage(dd) remedied respectively by vitality and toughness.

Let’s say you go with toughness, now you’ll survive 50% of the fights (dd) but you still won’t survive dot’s, meaning that if you want to get 25% more survivability you’ll need to sacrifice one stat for both vit and toughness (up to 50% for both since they are only valuable 50% of the time) so you won’t survive as much, and your damage would drop significantly.
The numbers if you go from 776 power/ 656 prec/48 crit (this has jewels) to 776 power/539 vit/464 tough/15 crit(this doesn’t have jewels with the same allocation so I took beryl jewels power/vit/crit(125/75/15) note that the crit dmg isn’t going to shine that much but is probably still the best choice since u can get 30% from traits).
So you just lost 656 prec and 33crit and you gained 539vit and 464 tough. Now the fun part.

Agony (the main issue in fotm since mechanics don’t change that much and there’s plenty of time to learn to play “perfectly” vs the bosses) does not get reduced by toughness so that’s a waste of 464 points there, vitality also doesn’t help since you agony is based on % of health so those stats are quite useless aswell. What you did increase is agony up time since the boss will be alive longer and thus will have more opportunities to put agony on you.
What does help vs agony are infusion and immunity skills, so you’re better off with those if you want to do well.

I’m mainly referencing this post about how people are specced post lvl 20 fotm
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13zhzg/just_got_out_of_1st_lvl_20_fractal_boy_are_some/

A big issue is that he doesn’t seem to think that shaving 2min of a boss fight is significant, the shorter a fight lasts the lower the risks meaning that dmg actually becomes a survivability stat.
An analogy: pacman only has 20lvls (I think) the difficulty to play for max score isn’t doing those levels since you can master them, the difficulty is mastering this and then playing for long periods of time without making mistakes.

Also his post doesn’t have any quantifiable data. The first time I did AC/TA/Arah/… I died (a lot) this doesn’t automaticly mean it’s my gear to begin with.

He literally claims: “The farther I get in these fractals the more skilled players I am finally seeing, players that are build for surviving and supporting other players and not just DPSing.” The issue I have with this is that he (and many others) will automatically assume that anyone who survives is built for survival which isn’t the case.

To me skill is surviving by using your skills. Popping sb+3 to evade so you keep your energy full etc is far more skillful than taking a hit and healing up afterwards, therefor since he’s meeting more and more skilled players those players should be better at dodging aswell.

Throwing around the sentence “a dead dps does 0dps” isn’t a good viewpoint either. I know that stance due to WoW so I’ll go with my experience from that. What is ment by this sentence isn’t you need to stack stamina(or tough/vit here) it means “play smart” if you’re going to take a risk make sure you’ve got ways of surviving(skillwise). In wow you have the trinity and in serious guilds DPS are supposed to be built around dealing as much dmg as possible, you can raid succesfully with 15dps whos stack stamina (if enrage doesn’t exist) but there’s a big chance someone will screw up dodging and you’ll eventually die.

Now I know this isn’t the place but since he is a mesmer and references another mesmer build as expert regarding builds I’ll comment on them.
1. The build he runs can be played with any gear set, the mesmer “support” build is focused around feedback and signet of inspiration. You do not get any additional survivability from gear using those skills.
2. The person from who he got the build doesn’t really state how far in they are and how effective it’s being. For instance tanking mossman isn’t a feat, it’s a waste of time since u can completely ignore him.
3. As I’ve tried to explain before, the additional dmg npc’s do shouldn’t matter if you know what to dodge, sure most bosses will one shot you if you “fail” but there’s a limit at which even 3k toughness and 30k hp won’t save you so you will eventually have to learn to dodge everything.

If you check the vid of the CoF run in the dungeon section you can see how dmg increases survivability, the first boss drops in 18 seconds and they actually revived someone. (also note they are all glasscanons yet they have all boons up).

What I mean to say is that most dungeon fights in fotm revolve more around corruption than actual dmg taken, since once you have corruption you can not “tank” it in any way other than using an invulnerability skill.

EDIT:
In this post people reference glass canons to be at lvl 41+ http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tezt/looking_for_some_good_builds_for_fractals/c770n3v
As you see they say the same thing, go all out dmg and for survivability rely on (utility)skills

Meledelion.2513:

Next, I do NOT believe rangers (and most other classes) should build around toughness or vitality for survivability. Imo it’s better to go with traits (giving protection/vigor/..) or utility skills, if you’re looking to increase survivability.

Then you and I share VERY different views on survivability vs. damage. Protection is nice, but can’t be kept up constantly. Toughness on the other hand, is permanent, passive damage reduction. Combined with protection, it can increase survivability even more.

Some builds, like a ranger running a trap spec, can’t build for survivability using utilities and traits, because those utilities and traits are used offensively. Without my 1500+ toughness, I would likely die a lot more than I already do. You might say it’s a L2P issue, and in some cases, you’d be right. But in the face of enemies with persistent, and sometimes impossible to dodge attacks, it becomes more about numbers than learning to play.

Take the Eye of Zaithan. It’s “locked on eye laser of doom” stays locked on to you even if you dodge it successfully. Not only that, but you can dodge twice and it will still deal enough damage to down you. Built for toughness and some vitality, I can just barely survive it if I dodge twice. Now you can dive out of it’s line of sight, but you won’t always reach cover in time. You can interrupt it, but not when it has 10+ stacks of defiant. Having that extra safety net of toughness/vitality goes a long way in keeping you alive during a longer fight.

Quarktastic.1027:

1. Protection is nice, but can’t be kept up constantly.
2.Toughness on the other hand, is permanent, passive damage reduction.

3. Some builds, like a ranger running a trap spec, can’t build for survivability using utilities and traits, because those utilities and traits are used offensively.
4. Having that extra safety net of toughness/vitality goes a long way in keeping you alive during a longer fight.

1. Run with a guildgroup/friendsgroup (you’ll have to eventually), you don’t need protection 100% of the time, just for those high dmg abilities.
2. Yes it is but as I’ve said toughness only works vs 50% of the dmg, your toughness won’t help you vs conditions.
3. Maybe your build is simply sub-par?(I don’t mean this as an attack, I mean to say that you might get more dps and surv for a lower trade-off if you switch builds)
4. That’s a loop, you have more hp so you can survive longer fights but since you deal less dmg you now need more hp as buffer and so on, I gave an example with the CoF run to show that making fights shorter, increases survivability.

Meledelion, I’m curious, but what build are you using for this?

On my ranger I run full berserker gear+divinity runes traited 30/25/0/0/15
iv ix xi (I switch ix for vii most of the time) outmarksmanship i v skirmishing vi beastmaster sb+a/wh and stalker+jaguar pet. Utilities are healing spring, signet of stone, signet of the wild and QZ my elite is RaO.
On my mes I run full berserker gear + scholar runes traited 30/30/0/0/10 although I feel it needs more tweaking. iii x xi, iv ii xi, iii
On my ele I run a rampager set based around giving might and dropping blind/weakness on the foes 20/0/20/0/30 iv v, iv vii, i v xii

Our team usually consists of one mes, 2guardians one thief and me.

Meledelion.2513:

On my ranger I run full berserker gear+divinity runes traited 30/25/0/0/15
iv ix xi (I switch ix for vii most of the time) outmarksmanship i v skirmishing vi beastmaster sb+a/wh and stalker+jaguar pet. Utilities are healing spring, signet of stone, signet of the wild and QZ my elite is RaO.
On my mes I run full berserker gear + scholar runes traited 30/30/0/0/10 although I feel it needs more tweaking. iii x xi, iv ii xi, iii
On my ele I run a rampager set based around giving might and dropping blind/weakness on the foes 20/0/20/0/30 iv v, iv vii, i v xii

Our team usually consists of one mes, 2guardians one thief and me.

In other words, the only survivability you have is your traited signet of stone. Your real survivability likely comes from the 2 guardians you constantly run with. Also, you don’t have a stun breaker. I would look into picking up lightning reflexes instead of signet of the wild. Signet of renewal is also a stun breaker, though with a longer cooldown.

I can’t comment on your other characters because I don’t play those classes.

Quarktastic.1027:

In other words, the only survivability you have is your traited signet of stone. Your real survivability likely comes from the 2 guardians you constantly run with. Also, you don’t have a stun breaker. I would look into picking up lightning reflexes instead of signet of the wild. Signet of renewal is also a stun breaker, though with a longer cooldown.

Ofcourse my survivability comes from my team, there’s no point in trying to do everything yourself when you can get a lot more survivability from your team.
Ele gives weakness/blind/protection aswell its not just the guardians that add surv and the mesmer copies his boons to others to give us all boons for long periods of time.

I can’t recall for what part I’d need a stunbreaker though, going over all bosses quickly I can’t remember what boss stuns.
The only reason I run sig of stone is to survive corruption If I screw up.

One thing that can really help a SB ranger out is stating toward pets if you set yourself up with high condition damage, toughness and healing power. Something like apothecary items may do the trick.

If you set up for high healing power and toughness then vitality can become a wasteful stat. Rangers and their pets can get a really good amount of passive HP regen along with some really good quick recharge high yield healing skills. If you can constantly keep your health going back to max at 15k HP then you never really needed to have 22k HP in the first place.

If you have a pet that can survive, made way more possible by statting beast mastery and focusing on healing power, that pet will deal damage for you even if your attack stat is low. With high condition damage you’ll also notice you can hit 600+ with burning (so make sure to bring a torch) somewhere around 300 with poison and bleed out 100s all at a rate that can put a power/prec shortbow to shame.

Unfortunately I have not been able to test that in PvE yet. What I am running in PvE is:

Soldier’s gear Power, Toughness, Vitality and Longbow/Sword+Horn which actually deals damage comparable to berserkers gear and I have survived as the sole melee character in many dungeons. People really underestimate how good Power really is, even without much Precision. Keeping fury on yourself (warhorn + moa [or supportive teammate]) brings your crit chance above 50% anyway.

i think it all depends on style of play. Building high vitality and toughness vs high Damage/Precision or conditional damage to me doesnt seem to make much difference which way you go when you are doing a dungeon crawl.

I build my character to use traps. But at the same time, i unsure that its got a good critical damage of at least minimum of 37% and some power for DD. And weather or not i am flanking , I want to make sure i get at least the 10% increase in damage. Then when i flank, i get a further additional 10% damage. Further increasing this with the rune of thief which also boost conditional damage as a trap user like me.

I sort of build my character to maximise damage. Every shot i make, i want to make sure that i consistently get the best out of my traits. Also my traps are set where the condition last twice as long. I use them a lot in the dungeon when the enemy turns it focus on my mates. Thats when i come from the back or side and dump my traps. The traps will ensure that I am still doing some form of damage when the enemy turns its attention to me and i am dodging about. I find this way, i am maximising my rangers use. I dont want to be dodging to survive while doing zero effort in damage. When i get far enough for the enemy to put its focus back on my mates…my cooldowns for the trap are done. Thats when i again i run up and dump my traps and cycle through all weapon skills. By this time, the sequence of event will cycle through with the enemy putting its attention on me again.

I guess it’s really situational also, if no one in my party has vulnerability, I’ll use LB instead of axe/warhorn to give everyone the extra 10% damage from 10 stacks of vulnerability.
I did notice that healing power mostly feels useless, and even if you went all out with it, wouldn’t be too beneficial to a party.

Meledelion.2513:

Quarktastic.1027:

In other words, the only survivability you have is your traited signet of stone. Your real survivability likely comes from the 2 guardians you constantly run with. Also, you don’t have a stun breaker. I would look into picking up lightning reflexes instead of signet of the wild. Signet of renewal is also a stun breaker, though with a longer cooldown.

Ofcourse my survivability comes from my team, there’s no point in trying to do everything yourself when you can get a lot more survivability from your team.
Ele gives weakness/blind/protection aswell its not just the guardians that add surv and the mesmer copies his boons to others to give us all boons for long periods of time.

I can’t recall for what part I’d need a stunbreaker though, going over all bosses quickly I can’t remember what boss stuns.
The only reason I run sig of stone is to survive corruption If I screw up.

The legendary archdiviner in cliffside has a very long stun every time he picks up his hammer. A stun breaker isn’t strictly necessary, but signet of renewal is still worlds better than signet of the wild.

DarkWasp.7291:

If you have a pet that can survive, made way more possible by statting beast mastery and focusing on healing power, that pet will deal damage for you even if your attack stat is low. With high condition damage you’ll also notice you can hit 600+ with burning (so make sure to bring a torch) somewhere around 300 with poison and bleed out 100s all at a rate that can put a power/prec shortbow to shame.
Unfortunately I have not been able to test that in PvE yet. What I am running in PvE is:

Soldier’s gear Power, Toughness, Vitality and Longbow/Sword+Horn which actually deals damage comparable to berserkers gear and I have survived as the sole melee character in many dungeons. People really underestimate how good Power really is, even without much Precision. Keeping fury on yourself (warhorn + moa [or supportive teammate]) brings your crit chance above 50% anyway.

The idea of your build is good but the issue is you’re building around making your pet survive better and deal more dmg while instead you could be building around helping your team survive and deal more dmg, imo 4man+pet(occasionally)>pet.
You are sacrificing 2stats for no reason other than make your pet “viable” which it still won’t be the moment a boss runs around.

And no you don’t do dmg comparable to berserkers. Power/prec/crit scale very very well, to the point that almost 70% of my attacks seem to crit and deal 1k+dmg. If you’re counting on fury you can make that 100%.

i think it all depends on style of play. Building high vitality and toughness vs high Damage/Precision or conditional damage to me doesnt seem to make much difference which way you go when you are doing a dungeon crawl.

To you personally it won’t make much of a difference but this game isn’t built around soloing stuff. If you get a group where everyone is built around tough/vit vs damage/prec you’ll notice an insane difference for the simple reason that all the survivability you get from tough/vit can be brought to you by utility skills (which are probably even better than passive stats)

And if you’re going to sacrifice a skill for a stun breaker just for one boss I’m at a loss for words.

TL;DR stop thinking in terms of you personally and starting thinking as a team.

Meledelion: That makes a lot of sense. I see why you made the choices you did, even though I was skeptical of them at first. I’m still not sure I would take SoS over LR even if there aren’t really any stuns since you still get an extra dodge that doesn’t lower your endurance (keeps up the 10% damage from traits) and grants vigor to top off endurance if you do have to dodge roll too, but it may just be splitting hairs. I also haven’t put much time into FotM either, so it’s possible I’d have a different opinion if I did.

All in all though, I like your philosophy of relying more on talents for defense and making decisions based upon what helps the team as a whole. I only wish Rangers had more talents that did this effectively.

Ty for the update Dahkeus, usually people aren’t only skeptical they simply won’t hear me out.
Sadly I have to concur with you regarding Rangers being very “unhelpful” towards to rest of the team apart from healing spring and warhorn/pets we don’t have many ways of helping the team so my team is asking me more and more often to bring my ele and I can’t blame them

Meledelion.2513:

Ty for the update Dahkeus, usually people aren’t only skeptical they simply won’t hear me out.
Sadly I have to concur with you regarding Rangers being very “unhelpful” towards to rest of the team apart from healing spring and warhorn/pets we don’t have many ways of helping the team so my team is asking me more and more often to bring my ele and I can’t blame them

Traps provide more team support than people think. Spike trap provides a 1 second immobilize, and 5 second cripple (traited), frost trap provides an AoE chill as well as a frost field. Viper’s nest provides a long lasting AoE poison. Flame trap provides a 3 second fire field on a 12 second cooldown.

Stacking poison on a boss that heals brings more to the table than simply hitting it until it dies. Keeping multiple trash mobs slowed for long periods makes them easier to kite and kill. Flame trap is arguably the worst trap for support, since all it really does is damage, and the combo field it creates only lasts 3 seconds.

Quarktastic.1027:

Meledelion.2513:

Ty for the update Dahkeus, usually people aren’t only skeptical they simply won’t hear me out.
Sadly I have to concur with you regarding Rangers being very “unhelpful” towards to rest of the team apart from healing spring and warhorn/pets we don’t have many ways of helping the team so my team is asking me more and more often to bring my ele and I can’t blame them

Traps provide more team support than people think. Spike trap provides a 1 second immobilize, and 5 second cripple (traited), frost trap provides an AoE chill as well as a frost field. Viper’s nest provides a long lasting AoE poison. Flame trap provides a 3 second fire field on a 12 second cooldown.

Stacking poison on a boss that heals brings more to the table than simply hitting it until it dies. Keeping multiple trash mobs slowed for long periods makes them easier to kite and kill. Flame trap is arguably the worst trap for support, since all it really does is damage, and the combo field it creates only lasts 3 seconds.

If you just need an AoE immobilize and CC, you can take any build and swap in Muddy Terrain. Traps require at least 20, but more realistically 30 points in skirmishing with investment into the talent that lets you drop them at range.

A frost field is nice, but it’s not big enough to warrant the big investment it requires.

AoE poison isn’t really that useful and even if it was, you could simply bring in a spider or carrion devourer without needing a big point investment.

A fire field can be brought just by having a torch that requires no talent investment, but really if you have an ele in your group, you’ll have plenty of fire combo fields.

So basically, by bringing a trap build, you’re making a big talent investment for slot skills that are only useful in a handful of situations. While this isn’t terrible or anything (you can certainly get through dungeons while doing this), it’s more optimal to bring a build that focuses on more of our core role and to simply swap in something like muddy terrain for the pulls you need it so that when you run into that single target boss encounter, you’re not stuck with a bunch of useless skills on your bar.

^ Dahkeus “gets it” to add to this trap range is very limited and the cast time just is beyond anoying.
Also consider that one ele can do pretty much exactly the same (apart from poison) whilst also adding might/swiftness/protection/regen blind/weakness/vulnerability + “designated” heals

Meledelion.2513:

^ Dahkeus “gets it” to add to this trap range is very limited and the cast time just is beyond anoying.
Also consider that one ele can do pretty much exactly the same (apart from poison) whilst also adding might/swiftness/protection/regen blind/weakness/vulnerability + “designated” heals

I regularly play with my fiance who is an ele, so I’m very familiar with being showed up on combo fields, lol!