Guild Wars 2

I don’t think I’m alone in being confused all the time with ranger weapons and how I’m supposed to build my stats to support them. Obviously some weapons are better for conditions (like the shortbow with it’s auto-attack bleed and poison volley) but the main hand axe just confuses me.

I see it has the ability to spread a few bleeds across multiple opponents with sharpened edges and it’s auto attack. Splitblade can further throw up a bunch of bleeds on anything right in-front of you and if you are using a Sigil of Earth you can get bleeds from your crits (same goes for any weapon, but if you are going conditions it might worth considering). In addition you can also use warhorn 5 to boost crit chance and warhorn 4 to get a bunch of hits and crit chances again.

Alternatively, the axe is our AoE weapon and it just feels like the bleeding it offers is so ineffective at dealing AoE damage, if you don’t put points into power, your AoE axe attacks aren’t doing what they should be doing. To further boost the emphasis on how important it is for the axe to have power you have the trait Honed Axes which boosts critical damage by 10% with an axe in the main hand. Increased critical damage will work off of your base damage. With no points in power it won’t mean a whole lot, so building power is something you’d want to do if you wanted to make this trait count.

I don’t believe in diversity for weapons. I think, for the most part, there is an intended way for each weapon to be built. I think the shortbow can be used as a power/precision damage weapon but it’s better as a balanced precision/condition/power weapon. The axe seems to want to be somewhere in the middle with some ways to spread conditions (but nothing compared to the shortbow, never mind earth scepter elementalist) but also needing a strong power investment to boost it’s AoE and crit damage.

What kind of attribute set ups do you guys bring when building specifically for mainhand axe? I know most weapons seem to have a baseline acceptable performance, but I really want to find the sweet spot with the axe as a strong and enjoyable weapon to use.

Currently I’m looking at either power/precision/condition or more likely power/precision/+crit damage. I feel like those are the two optimum choices atm but I’m not sure how much value I’m going to get out of the latter if I don’t set up my gear as full glass cannon or at least massively invested in crit damage. I also don’t want to kitten my shortbow damage. How do you build your ranger for main hand axe?

Didn’t read your post, i’m just going off the title, sorry if i completely miss what you’re going for i’ll repost AFTER reading it when i have more time…

The Axe is both really, the “Axe Mastery” trait thing increases your crit DAMAGE making it more of a Power weapon, yet due to how much bleeding you can inflict, and how often you can afflict it, it makes for a GREAT condition weapon!!

So it really just comes down to what you want to do with it because from my experience it works really well with conditions, power, and crit builds!!

Power/Prec/CritDmg for Axes and Longbows, ConDmg for shortbows.

I believe the axe is a precision weapon.

The main reason you’d use an axe on a ranger is for Ricochet, not Splitblade. Ricochet gives us the ability to tag multiple targets very quickly in PvE or WvW and to deal very high damage to the first of two targets by scoring multiple hits per throw. We also have the Honed Axes trait which directly supports a precision build.

The shortbow also actually works quite well with a precision build because it has very high single-target DPS even if you ignore the positional bleed on the autoattack. It can be quite effective with either berserker or condition damage stats.

The only ranger weapon that really seems to require condition damage for maximum effect is the torch.

Power/Precision Damage: Longbow, Axe (main), Greatsword, Sword, Warhorn, Axe (off)
Condition Damage: Shortbow, Axe (main), Torch, Dagger

I base this of how many condition effects each weapon has, and how much base damage it deals. Axe main hand can be used for both, as it can be traited for more critical damage, and has bleed and chill on it. I see axe as being more condition damage based though, because it has such a great synergy with torch, and because sword/greatsword have higher base damage.