Guild Wars 2

Hi

My Ranger is quickly approaching level 80 and I’ve begun looking at PvE Dungeon builds but having trouble finding one that takes my fancy.

As this will be my fourth level 80, what I’m after for my ranger is a Ranger build that brings something to the party other than pure DPS and preferably a build that makes use of the pet (being the unique class mechanic and all). So does anyone have a build/s that make people grateful they have you (and your pet) on their team for reasons other than big numbers?

Well, team support as a ranger is about crowd control and statuses. If you have a spider pet that can immobilize things ppl want to kite, or wolf for fear on bigger mobs, frost trap to give enemies 6 or 7 seconds of chill, barrage from longbow for a 1500 range pull (that also cripples). You could use a bear pet to block projectiles of a certain range (golem in the harpy fotm zone), you could apply buffs like might, rage, regen, healing (sortof, moas are weird for heal timing) from pets. If you use a condition set, you can spam shortbow’s crossfire from the side or back of a boss and do constant 10 stack of bleed (1k dmg per second added to normal attack dmg).

Ah, random suggestions, all workable, gl! Don’t get out of your comfort zone and try to run into melee range to revive a tank (when you’ll just die in 2 seconds), instead use nature renewal spirit’s res option or pet’s rescue, and if you go into melee to try and dps, be confident in your ability to dodge skills, specially with the nasty sword rooting from autoattack.

at first, forget about spirits, even traited they’re useless.

for your heal you should use the “Healing Spring” since it bring regen and a water combo field which can be used for massive AoE Healing (e.g. a Guardian with a Hammer can doe 3-4 AoE Heals. Mine does 1.2k or something with also no points in healing!)

for your Utility:
- QZ, still very good for ressing someone
- Search and Rescue, for when you need to stay in fight. GZ + S&R for super speed ress
- Frost/Spike Trap to slow enemies down
- Sick’em (with cats) for a great DPS boost, even better with QZ

for your elite:
- Entangle for things where you need to temprarily stop your enemy from moving
- Spirit of Nature for Instant ress. If you see one or more members downed and you can’t get them up fast enough, cast the Spirit and right after that it’s skill to ress them (make sure you’re near enough to them!)
- Rampage as One, if you want to boost yourself a bit more

Weapons: Shortbow + Axe/Horn
Shortbow for Singletargets and to let you live longer. when you’re dead, you can’t help your mates
Axe for AoE damage, does really good damage then. Even better when there are only 2 enemies
Horn for the Buff for all, 20% more crit is massive!

Pets:
Red Moa: More Fury. With Horn+Moa you can give your group almost 100% uptime fury which means, 20% more crits from your group, which is a massive boost
Jungle Stalker: for the might + some dps (don’t let it die, you don’t want to have a longer cooldown. Switch or call it back)

Armor:
go full berserker, thats the best thing you can do for your group imo. Also, since you’re ranged for most of the time you won’t die that fast anyway

Traits:
Here you can either go max damage or put some points elsewhere for more utility
Beastmastery:
5 – Zephyrs Speed, also great for in combat ressing
10 – III or IV for a faster cd on S&R or more healing from it
15 – faster Swapping. Means more Zephyr and less likely dead pets (if you use Sick’em too, you’ll probably take III)

after that, there are not that many traits that would really synergize with your skills or help the group in the first way. Maybe less cd on survival skills, but for one skill?
I’d suggest to just go into damage after that to help killing stuff faster

Most important thing
Switch things so you always use everything that can help your group in situation x, but change it to something other to be more helpful in situation y.
This applies to everything, Weapons, Skills, Traits, Pets, even Armor (ok, the last one will be almost never important if you don’t die because you don’t evade properly. Maybe for healing, but you’re a ranger and not supposed to try to heal your group anyways)

I hope I could help you and my english was good enough

I run a group-oriented buff build for PvE that I think makes pretty good use of our pets. Here’s a link:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNAV3fjEVd1lV+Vg2BimCNZ+niYxe3DRRqTVxd3A;T0AgyCuouxcj4G7Nubk3sEZIyRk9CvFA

There’s a lot of things that can be switched around in this setup, but the general idea is pretty simple. Run Stone/Sun for lots of Burning and Protection procs, Red Moa for group-wide 20+ second Fury, and Blue Moa for group-wide 6s-ish Protection. Switching between Moas (or Jellyfish underwater) also grants AoE Vigor, and Healing Spring will additionally grant AoE Vigor on top of Regeneration every tick due to Vigorous Renewal (for whatever reason this applies to everyone instead of just yourself). The third utility changes on a per-encounter basis, as does the elite.

Traits are pretty flexible and I change them depending on what weapons I’m running around with. The big ones are Concentration Training (this gives +50% duration to the already strong Moa buffs), Vigorous Training (for AoE Vigor on swaps), and Spirits Unbound as a general quality of life thing in dungeons (imo spirits are quite annoying to run static for anything besides pretty low-movement boss fights). Remember to change Off-Hand Training for Martial Mastery if you swap to GS instead of A/T.

I don’t actually run Dwayna runes, but Altruism for the double 3xMight/Fury procs that you’ll get from each Healing Spring usage (since their CDs are 10s and Healing Spring will tick once more after it comes up again). Gear and Sigils are also up to you; if you wind up going more Rabid-esque setup you can switch to some on-crit type Sigils.

Team support with ranger is all about combo fields. Try stacking might with bonfire/flame trap and blast finishers. I know thief and engineer and warrior and guardian and elementalist can all help either finish these fields or help keep fire fields at 100% uptime (ele has slightly more access to fire fields but they have to sacriice other play-styles to really make use of it). Other team support includes search and rescue, spirit of nature, and signet of renewal. Don’t forget meurellow’s poison combo field or moa’s protection/heals. Drakes do a blast heal in healing spring on swap with it’s tailswipe attack.

Thanks guys that is helpful. I’ve hit 80 and started gearing up with soem balanced stats. One thing I’m curious about can healing power be used to buff the water field up to a point where it is significant for other players?

Water field is already significant to other players. The condition removal is fantastic and any blast finisher in it gives a decent heal. One of the tricks you can use with a ranger is a drake pet and Healing Spring. I can’t find the thread right now, but there was a thread on GW2Guru which talked about how pets always use the same skill after initiating combat or being swapped in (this will be a little different now that cooldowns persist between swaps). This can function similair to a second F2 skill, an on demand pet skill (for wolves it’s their leap knockdown, for cats I think it’s maul, for drakes it was their blast finisher – usually their third racial skill – the fourth skill listed on the pet tab). With healing spring you can use this to pull out a drake (it will have quickness if you have five points from BM) to use their blast finisher for area healing inside of a water field.

The regen from the water field probably isn’t worth boosting to help other players. I don’t know if the blast finisher in a combo field uses the field owner’s healing power or the blast finisher’s healing power, if it’s the latter it won’t matter because rangers don’t have blast finishers (their pets can though, but your stats don’t have anything to do with pet stats). You could run 30 BM and a cleric’s set in PvE but at some point you have to kill your enemy and you will probably want to bring DPS stats rather than focusing all your efforts into heals. The ranger doesn’t have many sources of party healing and your stats don’t have anything to do with pet stats, so aside from building a tanky build (tanky BM ranger is very good in PvP because of the number of ways to heal yourself and your pet) I don’t think healing power is very efficient. Without it you can still get decent heals, but I wouldn’t build around it, it also tends to have a low pay off.

Aside from that, look at the buff pets. Moas have fury and protection which was previously mentioned, but they also have an AoE healing skill in the form of Harmonic Cry (imo this is dramatically superior to the fern hound because direct healing tends to be a lot more useful than regeneration which is such a weak boon).

Just be careful with pets. They are very difficult to keep alive in dungeons or big group events. The more you try to use one effectively, the more you will come up against AI and survivability barriers which will frustrate you.