Guild Wars 2

I’ve been trying to improve my PvE ranger play lately, looking at meta builds and working on test golems and going in some dungeon PUGs and so on. One thing has me puzzled:

In the metabattle “power glyph buffer” build…
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Druid_-_Power_Glyph_Buffer
… the rotation says to use your CA skills on longbow.

But it seems to me that once I’ve done Rapid Shot + Barrage + Rapid Shot + Glyph of Empowerment my 10 seconds are up, and I could swap to get a strong Path of Scars ASAP, then do the CA skills in place of low dps sword auto-attacks.

Is it perhaps that metabattle assumes quickness, and that with quickness I’d have to use longbow 1/3/4 to fill out the 10 seconds if I weren’t using CA?

I had trouble testing this for myself because I can’t charge CA fighting the test golem, and dungeon PUGs are not a controlled environment.

I’d appreciate any insight. I’m just back from AFG since before HoT, and I may have missed something stupendously obvious…

Quickness does help tremendously, and is nearly always assumed for raids. That said it should still be doable without quickness.

Barrage will not always be off cooldown when you switch to your longbow. In those cases there’s plenty of time to jump into CA form between your rapid fires.

For a “buffing” rotation you’d normally quick draw rapid fire, barrage, enter CA form and cast rejuvenating tides followed by a seed of life then exit the transform as quickly as possible. Your weapon swap should come off cooldown just as you’re firing the second rapid fire.

For cases where you want to heal, I’d actually recommend consuming quickdraw on barrage, then using rapid fire before entering your CA form. You can then stay in CA form a little longer to use a healing rotation (Something like #3,#4,#2 etc) then cast barrage a second time upon exiting the form.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to enter CA form on your sword/axe set. It’s not a rule set in stone and the healing is often much more important to prioritise. After all if we want pure DPS we’d be much better off bringing the condition set instead.

Thanks, that was roughly what I was hoping to hear.