Guild Wars 2

I’ve been running Rampagers gear with my Shortbow for a long time now but I just keep reading about people telling others to use Berserker, has anyone done any testing to find out which of the two actually deals more damage?

I’m currently running a 20/25/20/0/5 build with SB / GS or LS+Horn depending on the situation.

Berserker. Condition damage doesn’t scale like crit damage+power does at 50%+ crit chance.

What do you mean scale? Crit Damage basically adds to the default 1.5 critical, so if you have 30% critical damage you’ll hit 1.8x your normal damage in a critical.
And i heard that power has some kind of diminishing return.

If you have 100 power and add 100 power then you’ve increased your power 100%. If you have 200 power and then add 100 power, you’ve increased your power by 50%.

If you have 20% crit damage and add 10% crit damage you’ve increased your crit damge by 10%.

Now I’m sure someone can explain this next part better. Increasing power, precision and cd together improves your dmg exponentially. 1.8 of 2000 power is going to be a much bigger hit than 1.8 of 1500 power.

I’ve heard of successful condition builds, but never played one myself so I can’t speak to their effectiveness.

I’m sure that your preferred playstyle comes into this. Do you use rampagers for increase on bleed and the occaisonal poison, or do you also run traps? Do you prefer PvE, PvP, or WvW?

It depends entirely on your strategy . Berserker builds , at least for rangers , are really niche , as in made for PvE mostly , as berserker rangers are food in WvW .

Rampager builds , however , work really well with the best ranger weapon , namely the short bow . Rampager gear , also , gives you choice to freely swap trait distribution ranging from full trapper , even if a bit on the glass cannon side , and full on DPS . You can even do some crazy kitten hybrid beast master build with it and make it work… and then some .

So , my stance is that Rampager gear is better simply because it offers more flexibility when it comes to builds .

The current problem with condition builds is this:

• Runes of Melandru + Lemongrass gives a player -65% condition duration for those applied to them.
• That -65% “rounds up” since 0.999 seconds of a bleed will do 0 damage.
• Light fields are in abundance and remove conditions
• Plenty of classes have ways to remove conditions
• There is an abundance of 100% boon up-time on things such as regen … conditions take time to do their damage … that time gives your foe’s regen more time to work.

The closest thing to the -65% is protection which only reduces by 33%, doesn’t “round up”, can be removed, and requires traits/skills to be consumed. The -65% is something you can’t do anything about except increase your own condition duration.

That said, in WvW, it doesn’t seem many people are taking many (if any) defensive measures, so conditions can be quite deadly in smaller fights. It’s just the abundance of light fields in large fights that causes problems since people are constantly accidentally using light field finishers which remove conditions.

Honestly , ranger never were good in big fights anyway , maybe use of barrage + entangle + muddy terrain… but even then its just pointless .

However , rangers excel in 1-5 player skirmishes , and there is where most ranger builds shine , the mainstream builds , be it trapper or any version of the beastmaster .
Another thing to consider is the fact that rangers have quite poor chasing burst power . U cant really finish off a thief or an elemental , the two main dueling classes , if they choose to run .

So to put it plainly , you can take on warriors , engineers , mesmers who suffer to either AOE or considerable condition pressure , condition removal or not , but you cant really win against an equally skilled thief or elemental so the best result you can hope for is a draw .
By playing pure damage builds you will simply lose to the elemental or the thief , and have a hard fight against classes that a condition build would just walk all over . Beastmaster builds allow for attrition hence enabling you to at least fight to a draw in most cases .

This is why pure damage berserker ranger builds are not good .

PvE: Berserker
PvP: A mix of gear with condition damage

I was thinking about this today and was going to post a thread but I decided to wait on it a bit more.

Doesn’t a ranger benefit more from condition damage on the shortbow because the weapon’s DPS is lower than most class weapons to account for the pet, whereas you can still get competitive condition stacks from the shortbow and condition damage is based solely off of your condition damage stat.

Crit damage is a percentage increase of your damage but it does nothing to boost your pet (and some of the class weapon DPS is given to the pet). A 50% damage increase of a ranger’s shortbow damage is going to be less than a 50% increase of a warrior’s axe damage. In that scenario, wouldn’t warriors get more mileage out of crit damage and condition damage for a ranger (because it’s calculated off of the number of stacks you can get on your target and your condition damage) becomes more competitive than it would be on another class?

Berserkers has been my choice. Every time I think about trying out or switching to rampagers gear and condition damage I run into another ranger with his shortbow and condition build and pound them into the dirt somewhat easily.
I mix some berserker gear with some soldiers jewelry with exquisite ruby jewels in it.
While hammering them with crits and constantly moving I can wipe conditions enough and have the pet conditions off me while the other guy takes a beating and ends up running.

Rangers seem to get a lot of traits and skills that help direct damage. I think if you stacked some of them, you could do some decent damage with a short-bow. I always wanted to test signet of the wild with signet of the beast master, steady focus, hunter’s tactics, and runes of the thief. Seems like it would do some fast and decent crits. Although a longbow might be better. Guess I need to level my ranger.