Guild Wars 2

EDIT: The original build i posted in this thread using A/WH was made redundant when i switched to krait runes since SB can now acheive the same bleed burst as A/WH with kraits bleed duration. Instead of A/WH I opted for S/T for extra burn/poison and evades. You can now potentially acheive 25 bleed stacks + burn + poison with the new improved setup.

S/D is also viable for perma poison and extra evades depending on if you need more evades. GS can also be used alternitively as a defence/mobility weapon in this slot. GS can still benefit from bleed on crit, and is OK but is not going to apply much condi pressure as alternatives so is not optimal damage wise, but can be useful for mobility/defence.

Hi. So I have come up with a solid condition burst/spam build. It capitalises on bleed on crit sigils and traits, plus the use of sharpening stone as util, and through trait procs. It uses SB for bleed burst/sustain + poison, and S/T for Burn/AOE/poison and evades.

I had previously theorycrafted a build with a simillar concept about a year ago, but had much less defensive abilities and lacked condi cleanse. The new traits have allowed for my old build to be modified and fix its shortcomings. Here is the modified build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV8fjMqUzaLLGsQ1iABhaVA0sGSWWJg789G+6MWpEZTA-TZRAwAKOIAAuAAUeCAlLD0b/BA

The build uses rabid gear, and relies on crit chance to maximise bleeds using trait and sigil on crit procs. The survival utilities are now active condi cleanses, and apply fury, increasing crit chance which in turn increases bleed stacks. additionaly you have access to poison, burn, AoE burn, evades, immobilise + CC from wolf pet.

S/T is usually better to open with. Use throw torch for burn damage. if in melee range use vipers strike to apply poison. At this point you switch to shorbow and activate your SB bleed burst which can potentially (and quite often) get up to 25 bleed stacks. Potentially, you can put 25 stacks of bleed + burn and poison on an enemy this way. S/T can also be used defensively for evades. In sPvP on point, Bonfire is great to apply extra AOE condi pressure. However your primary damage dealer is shortbow.

Shortbow is your Burst and sustain weapon. Pop sharpening stone and autoattack. You should quickly stack many bleeds like this, by comboing stone/bleed on crit procs plus any extra bleeds from flanking bonus. Once your opponent reaches a certain health threshold, you will have access to another sharpening stone through traits for an additional 5 stacks. Even without sharpening stone, you should easily be able to maintain 10+ stacks of bleed. Even if they cleanse, the 10 stacks will be back up within seconds.

Defence wise, sharpening stone LR and entangle are all active condi cleanses. Additionally, the sharpening stone procced by your trait also condi cleanses. You have reasonably high armor for a medium class using Rabid/Undead runes. LR is a stunbreak, immob break, evade and condi cleanse as previously stated. SB 3 is another evade that gives swiftness. Kiting in SB is another good form of defence. Wolf fear can also be used defensively as can entangle.

I moved the corruption to torch. Shorbow seems to benefit more from added bleed duration. Once you have max corruption stacks, It is not a bad idea to have an extra torch with smoldering to swap to for extra burn duration, as long as you have corruption on an underwater weapon.

Entangle has become very powerful with the modifications to the build. Its an AOE immob, bleed, poison, torment- acts as a condi cleanse and gives fury, while also being on a shorter cooldown.

Ive had good success with this roaming or in small groups in wvw and also seems to work well in sPvP with the testing I have done so far.

Any Input/advice/constructive criticism is welcome.

My only comments are, drop sigil of the hunt and pick up quickening zephir, you can apply massive bleeding with short bow by going behind your enemy, using QZ and dropping at least 5-10 shots on them. Works well if you use muddy terrain instead of sharpening stone. Even when not using sharpening stone, just hitting your enemy at an angle using short bow will apply bleeding. Not to mention that spider’s cripple + hitting your enemy at an angle will also give you free bleed stacks. I find it more a risk than a reward to not get bark skin in pvp as a ranger, but if you set yourself the role of roamer/killer rather than point defender then it works, especially if you use sharpening stone to drop a lot of bleeds after the enemy uses their heal. Ask yourself this: what’s warn horn good for that torch can’t overcome in every aspect of a condition build, other than speed? That burning damage is king.

Have you tried krait runes? They are pretty fantastic now.

awge.3852:

My only comments are, drop sigil of the hunt and pick up quickening zephir, you can apply massive bleeding with short bow by going behind your enemy, using QZ and dropping at least 5-10 shots on them. Works well if you use muddy terrain instead of sharpening stone. Even when not using sharpening stone, just hitting your enemy at an angle using short bow will apply bleeding. Not to mention that spider’s cripple + hitting your enemy at an angle will also give you free bleed stacks. I find it more a risk than a reward to not get bark skin in pvp as a ranger, but if you set yourself the role of roamer/killer rather than point defender then it works, especially if you use sharpening stone to drop a lot of bleeds after the enemy uses their heal. Ask yourself this: what’s warn horn good for that torch can’t overcome in every aspect of a condition build, other than speed? That burning damage is king.

I have considered zephyr over hunt, but like the build is now I find hunt to be very useful for kiting, mobility and maximising pet dps, as melee pets generally have a hard time keeping up without any kind of speed buff. I will test zephyr with ranged pets as they can apply dps/utility a lot easier since they dont have to be point blank to hit, but i will also have to see how much the mobility loss affects my playstyle and roaming capabilities in wvw and spvp. What you say is definately a valid option though.

The warhorn was to increase the initial bleed burst and initiate the burst from a range, as hunters call hits 12 times from up to 1200 range with the trait, and with ~70% crit chance that equates to roughly around 7-8 of those 12 hits critting. So by the time I get point blank from having cast hunters, the initial sharpening stone util has put 5 stacks of bleed on, plus whatever on crit bleeds proc from traits/sigils. The CotW was just a bonus fury and swiftness duration stack, plus a handy blast finisher to use in healing spring. I will however try out the torch tomorrow morning when I log on and see what difference it makes and report my findings. I assume it will most likely give me less initial bleed burst, that makes sense, and im not sure id still be able to acheive 25 bleed stacks, but it is definitely possible that torch will end up providing more overall damage. [Edit]: I suppose it will also give me a fairly large AoE burn with offhand training as well which can be useful on point in sPvP.

@Dolt I have definately considered krait runes, and they are definately tempting. Id loose 100 toughness plus about 90 condition damage from the 6 slot bonus on Undead, but the added bleed duration plus the extra bonuses could be worth it. ill have to test that out tomorrow also.

Given that your main focus is to maximize bleeds I see why you approach things they way you do, especially if it is highly efficient. In my experience, having more condition sources that hurt tend to throw enemies into dissaray, plus its harder to cleanse multiple condition sources rather than 1. The combination of poison from short bow/sword, bleeding from weapon swap + short bow bursting, then burning which most enemies fail to avoid and its quite reliable once you learn to use it right, make it all the more worth it. FYI I would stick with troll unguent, since condi cleansing via survival utilities should be something that you should integrate into your combat, on top of not having strong regen with that build. That’s why I use the regen build in wvw, easier to survive and a speed buff every 10 seconds.

So after testing… wow, krait runes are definately a damage upgrade for the build. the bleed duration from sigils/runes food for wvw puts me up to 95% bleed duration, which significantly increases the stack size. slightly less tougness and condi damage but the added duration definately makes it worth it. Previously I had trouble bursting 18 or so bleed stacks on shortbow, Now I dont have any trouble getting 20 with shortbow and have seen it hit 25 multiple times.

I tested warhorn vs torch also. Without using sharpening stone, just through on crit procs, i averaged between 6-9 bleed stacks. I dont understand the math behind that, It doesnt make sense to me, but thats what I got, so ill roll with it. So WH is technically better overall damage wise. Bonfire can still be good in sPvP on point to apply AoE pressure, but single target WH is better.

Condi cleanse isnt really an issue as this build reapplies bleeds so constantly and quickly its kind of insignificant, and buffer/mask conditions are kind of pointless.

Quickening zephyr doesn’t seem overly worth it to me personally. It only added 3 or so bleed stacks non flanking and about 5-6 with flanking bonus. This is nice, but I personally dont think its worth the cooldown and loss in mobility.

If im solo roaming i will generally switch to TU, but if I am with anyone else, spring just seems more useful.

I used to run BM bunker for nearly 2 years roaming and in sPvP. Its a great build, but I got bored with it and wanted to try something different that involved bows and was a little more agressive. I still go back to BM bunker or spirits for tPvP if my team lacking in point holders/bunkers. I am yet to try this build in tPvP but it does well in sPvP and can fight on point for a descent amount of time. Its by no means a point holder/bunker, but can definately assist with point capping and roaming.

Further testing has lead me to conclude that with krait runes, shortbow is practically just as effective at applying a burst bleed to 25 stacks, making the A/k*ttendundant. So alternatives to A/wh would be S/T for extra condi (burn/poison), AoE and evades. Alternatively S/D for more evades and perma poison. Alternitively GS for Mobility/defence. I know… i know… GS is a power weapon. But would still benefit from bleed on crit and sharpening stone, and the added mobility from swoop is great for any roaming character, as well as being great for engage/disengage. The block can come in handy too under pressure.

Updated… thoughts?

If you can bring down a bunker necromancer with bleed stacks alone I’d be impressed, same goes for burning/bunker guardian, despite the constant bleed applications you’d have to be able to solidly land all the bleeds and overcome the condi cleansing that other professions have. Not to mention that poison is much more effective at nullifying regen on enemies who depend on it to counter condition damage. Therefore, your approach so far seems really strong on paper, but you’d have to test it out yourself and see if its more effective than the one you ran for almost 2 years. Even though I have run bunker for a while, its 100% aggresive bunker, I just use different sources of condition damage and mix them up into a never ending loop of condition application. At the same time, this rotation works perfectly well with condition removal techniques, healing usage, evading melee and ranged attacks and pet synergy. If you can accomplish all that with bleeding alone then cheers

I run similar build with Short Bow[earth+agony] and Axe[ice/doom]/Warhorn[rage], using a 4/2/2/6/0 with Spotter for myself and helps team, plus 20% base Condition Duration and 5 stack of vulnerability on pet (Wolf+Reef).

Start fight with SS, A#3, WH#4, approaching, A#2, swap, SB#1AA, #3 (if enemy burst), #4, running around and shooting, if enemy cleanse, SB#2 to cut heal/regen and SB#5 to interrupt heal, swap, etc. etc. etc. Save WH#5 to blast finish H-Spring [with quickness, rage or zephyr is great].

awge.3852:

If you can bring down a bunker necromancer with bleed stacks alone I’d be impressed, same goes for burning/bunker guardian, despite the constant bleed applications you’d have to be able to solidly land all the bleeds and overcome the condi cleansing that other professions have. Not to mention that poison is much more effective at nullifying regen on enemies who depend on it to counter condition damage. Therefore, your approach so far seems really strong on paper, but you’d have to test it out yourself and see if its more effective than the one you ran for almost 2 years. Even though I have run bunker for a while, its 100% aggresive bunker, I just use different sources of condition damage and mix them up into a never ending loop of condition application. At the same time, this rotation works perfectly well with condition removal techniques, healing usage, evading melee and ranged attacks and pet synergy. If you can accomplish all that with bleeding alone then cheers

I somewhat ran into this problem in spvp with the old iteration of this build (only having one major condition), but the new variant that is posted covers those issues and adds defence. With S/T i have access to a long burn and poison with reduced cooldowns for the burn plus added evades from sword plus the bleed burst/stustain & poison on SB. There are also several cover conditions that (hopefully) get cleared before the damage ones (vuln and cripple). Condi cleanse tends to be a null issue since the bleeds reapply so quickly and the burn and poison is on a short cooldown. So generally, when they cleanse, my damage goes down for a few breif seconds, and then its back up to where it was and they wasted a cleanse.

The major flaw with BM Bunker i found is that while it does have a constant stream of multiple conditions, its fairly sustained damage with no burst, so against another good bunker, your damage is generally outhealed, or you are doing very minimal damage. This build gives burst and sustain, allowing you to apply significant pressure and damage to a bunker at the loss of some defence. This build doesn’t have the regen of BM so is less useful for holding/defending a point, but is great for roaming/point assault/skirmishing, and you can definately assist with caps. BM bunker is great, even top tier at its job, of holding/defending/staying on point, however you wouldnt want to use BM buker to roam and assault points as it is better suited at defence. This build succeeds at roaming because it has burst/sustain and constant condition spam/reapplication and reasonable defence.

Bunker is still the better option for holding/defending a point as with regen you can survive 2v1 or 3v1 for a descent amount of time until help arrives, whereas my build would be dead, but then again, this particular build wasnt designed to defend points solo, and rather attack them, generally with other teammates.

For running this build in WvW would you recommend all Rabid stat type for armor?

Edit: On second reading I see that you do, I was thrown off by the link to a PvP build with no PvE gear.

JRoy.7180:

For running this build in WvW would you recommend all Rabid stat type for armor?

Edit: On second reading I see that you do, I was thrown off by the link to a PvP build with no PvE gear.

Yes rabid is reccomended. If you are feeling especially brave you could go rampagers for additional damage but would lose out on a bunch of defence and this build already does impressive damage. If there were a Condi/crit/vit set then that would also be viable, but i dont know of one.

This build is even more potent in WvW due to koi cakes or rare vegge pizzas & tuning crystals. Increasing your condi duration by additional 40% means your bleed duration is at around 95% essentialy doubling the length of your bleed stacks. Shortbow generally applys constant 3 second bleeds on average. Increasing this to 6 seconds is a huge benefit as it allows for more stacks to build. This benefits both burst as sustain as your bleed stacks will be effective for longer meaning more will stack. Your burst (20-25 bleed stacks) will also last significantly longer if they dont cleanse (about 8 seconds or so) dealing significant damage. If they cleanse, that is no problem as you have a second burst up your sleeve, and you can reapply and maintain sustain in the meantime. Your burn and poison will also benefit from the additional duration from koi/pizzas giving you practically perma burn/poison if it isnt cleansed.

Also for wvw i highly reccomend the corruption sigil on S/T. You can build stacks fairly quickly with S/T in WvW and then have more potent condi damage. Precision stacking is also an option, for a higher chance to bleed on crit, but your bleeds wont be as potent as with corruption. Any GS is also reccomended to be kept in the bag for between combat mobility. Swap SB for GS out of combat to move around more effectively, as swaping 1 handers with 2 handers os a bit of a pain and requires more inventory management.

Thanks for the tip on koi cakes. They are quite cheap atm!

Filterkat.2143:

JRoy.7180:

For running this build in WvW would you recommend all Rabid stat type for armor?

Edit: On second reading I see that you do, I was thrown off by the link to a PvP build with no PvE gear.

Yes rabid is reccomended. If you are feeling especially brave you could go rampagers for additional damage but would lose out on a bunch of defence and this build already does impressive damage. If there were a Condi/crit/vit set then that would also be viable, but i dont know of one.

This build is even more potent in WvW due to koi cakes or rare vegge pizzas & tuning crystals. Increasing your condi duration by additional 40% means your bleed duration is at around 95% essentialy doubling the length of your bleed stacks. Shortbow generally applys constant 3 second bleeds on average. Increasing this to 6 seconds is a huge benefit as it allows for more stacks to build. This benefits both burst as sustain as your bleed stacks will be effective for longer meaning more will stack. Your burst (20-25 bleed stacks) will also last significantly longer if they dont cleanse (about 8 seconds or so) dealing significant damage. If they cleanse, that is no problem as you have a second burst up your sleeve, and you can reapply and maintain sustain in the meantime. Your burn and poison will also benefit from the additional duration from koi/pizzas giving you practically perma burn/poison if it isnt cleansed.

Also for wvw i highly reccomend the corruption sigil on S/T. You can build stacks fairly quickly with S/T in WvW and then have more potent condi damage. Precision stacking is also an option, for a higher chance to bleed on crit, but your bleeds wont be as potent as with corruption. Any GS is also reccomended to be kept in the bag for between combat mobility. Swap SB for GS out of combat to move around more effectively, as swaping 1 handers with 2 handers os a bit of a pain and requires more inventory management.

Is it still viable if i split the armor.. 3 piece rabid .3 piece soldier (or settler). I want to add in some health with that toughness.

If you want to add some health in your best bet would be dire. You would lose some crit, but gain vitality and keep the condition damage and toughness. With PTV the power trait kind of goes to waste as the build focuses more on conditions, so Dire would be the better option. I will have to try this out myself as it seems it may be a good way to add HP. It all depends on how much it will affect crit chance/bleed procs.

I just bought some dire peices to check what the difference/tradeoff would be. Your most optimal tradeoff would be switching the chest legs and shoulders. This would give you aproximately an extra 2k hp, at the loss of 7% crit chance. In this instance I would suggest taking accuracy over corruption so you can stack precision to make up for the loss in crit chance from armour, but you will lose some condi damage. Personally I feel that nearly 19k hp base + almost 3k armour is a good amount, but if you wanted to add health, this would be the best way to go.

Alternatively In WvW, I dont know what rank you are, but have you considered maxing out defence against guards? at max level, when you kill a guard you gain a vitality stack, up to 5 stacks. With 5 stacks you will have aproximately 22.5k or so health in full rabid.

@Filterkat, I agree with your approach but I have to say that we truly are speaking at the peak of combat. The success of any bunker – condition damage focus – approach is all skill based, I’ve demolished too many bunker to know why. One day you will find one that has a bleed build and, although it should be certainly obvious their approach, when the player behind the ranger takes the upper hand it’s not because of the build its because of how they work around yours. How bonfire can be avoided by taking a few steps back, how lightning reflexes can be used to avoid root/bleed spam in one shot, how Rampage as One can easily eliminate the threat of spider-root condition spam, or how wolf fear wolf stun condition spam followed by drake hound spam-root condition spam threat.

The same approach which can be used by any profession under their own standards. So how do I see your approach working best? In situations where you have the ‘ranged’ upper hand, the melee version of the build can be best applied when you know you have an enemy who will do all they can to keep you at their melee range, then you can exploit via bonfire and all the above described. Then again not every player plays at the peak of their game, even if they are top players, so the build is good for I’ll dare say 90% of the situations. However its fun to see that even in this discussion, your approach will only be as good as you are, and same goes for my approach.

I wonder though if dropping bark skin is really worth the extra bleeds, I’ll have to try and see.

Filterkat.2143:

I just bought some dire peices to check what the difference/tradeoff would be. Your most optimal tradeoff would be switching the chest legs and shoulders. This would give you aproximately an extra 2k hp, at the loss of 7% crit chance. In this instance I would suggest taking accuracy over corruption so you can stack precision to make up for the loss in crit chance from armour, but you will lose some condi damage. Personally I feel that nearly 19k hp base + almost 3k armour is a good amount, but if you wanted to add health, this would be the best way to go.

Alternatively In WvW, I dont know what rank you are, but have you considered maxing out defence against guards? at max level, when you kill a guard you gain a vitality stack, up to 5 stacks. With 5 stacks you will have aproximately 22.5k or so health in full rabid.

I’m working on that. rank 83 right now. So still have a long way to go to get the last 2 in that wvw line.

My wvw ranger is only lvl 60 right now so I haven’t gotten the chance to fully experience it. I have one other ranger that i like to pve with. so I’ll respond back once i get there. probably another day till i hit 80.

@Awge Yep totally agree. Sometimes guildies and I muck around in our custom PvP arena just dueling etc. testing builds, and on multiple occasions, with builds I normally beat them with almost 100% of the time, they find a way to beat me, either due to bad combat decisions by me, smart play by them, or them speciffically modifying their build to counter mine (they can be kittens sometimes). Other times, both in tPvP or roaming out in WvW, I get bested, and have no idea how/what happened, and sometimes I make critical mistakes under pressure, or was simply outplayed leading to my death. I agree that bonfire and generally speaking S/T is only useful if you will be fighting in melee. I do usually open with S/T however since with offhand training, throw torch has 1200 range, and its nice to get at least a burn on them before I dump a crapton of bleeds on them. I found that poison is uncommon to apply with this build (even with 2 sources) unless you find yourself in melee at some point in the fight. The poison shot from SB has a fairly pitiful duration, and only stacks to a reasonable amount at point blank range due to the spread. At that point, you are better off switching to S/T anyway which has access to a better source of poison, but I have found vipers strike to complete the dodge but miss the attack frequently, thus not applying the poison (this has been a known issue for a while).

As for the tradeoff with bark skin, if you still wanted to take bark skin, personally I would rather have the bleed on crit trait over Keen Edge. If you already have a sharpening stone in util slot, by doing this you technically lose your second burst, but gain significant sustain in the meantime. The bleed on crit trait has no internal cooldown, so with krait runes & bleed duration sigil on shorbow (if my math is right) It should mean that you have a straight 66% chance on crit for a 5 second bleed in sPvP (longer in wvw with koi cakes). This means that without flanking bonus, and without sharpening stone, you are still able to apply significant amount of bleeds to the target between bursts, due to the high crit chance and fast attack speed. Good positioning will almost double your off burst bleed stacking (flanking bonus) also.

I reccomend testing your bleed stacking with just the bleed on crit trait, from the front of a target (so no flanking bonus) and additionally from the side/back with the bonus, and you may be pleasantly surprised at the results.

this build has been around for awhile… lol, since the patch came out, ive been using this in wvw:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV8fjEq0yaBL2sQ1iABhaVA0sGSWWJg789G+6CW1A-TlSAwAYUCq4gAIU9Ha6Go8AACcEAAcBAeY+r3+DRV+RKAYWWB-w

personally, I open with sb aa with sharpening stone, that usually stacks around 10 bleeds right in the first few seconds, then I stun to stop their opening move, aa some more, 3, then 4 if they get close and swap…

if ur fighting more than one person, a good combo to do is try to get them bunched up, have drakehound immobilize, entangle, and drop bonfire right on top of them, this kills very fast lol

Edit: I fixed the build link, I misclicked the bloodlust sigil and the jewels, my bad

shadowpass.4236:

this build has been around for awhile… lol, since the patch came out, ive been using this in wvw:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV8fjEq0yaBL2sQ1iABhaVA0sGSWWJg789G+6CW1A-TlSAwAYUCKU9Ha6Go8AACcEAgY+DwFA4xBBo3+DRV+RKAYWWB-w

personally, I open with sb aa with sharpening stone, that usually stacks around 10 bleeds right in the first few seconds, then I stun to stop their opening move, aa some more, 3, then 4 if they get close and swap…

if ur fighting more than one person, a good combo to do is try to get them bunched up, have drakehound immobilize, entangle, and drop bonfire right on top of them, this kills very fast lol

Really? I havent seen anyone post anything about it before, and I came up with the build through my own theorycrafting/testing. It is definitely possible, actually quite likely that other people came to the same conclusions and were using the same build before me. But no one has posted about it yet to my knowledge, so I thought Id share it with the ranger community seeing as it is such an effective build.

Nice touch with the toxic crystal. I completely forgot about that and will have to swap tuning for that now. Will also have to test Drakehound over wolf for immob, but definately sounds promising. In PvP however i still see wolf fear being useful, so maybe i will swap jaguar for drakehound and run wolf/drakehound instead.

Im curious however as to why you take P/V/CD jewels and stack bloodlust instead of corruption or perception. Wouldnt you be better off maximising your crit and condition damage instead of gaining a bit of power and HP? Since the build relies on conditions and crits, I would think it would be more effective to min/max those stats.

If you wanted to gain some HP your best bet would be to swap some armor peices for dire (chest, legs, shoulders) for 2k hp gain and 7% crit loss, and then make up for the lost crit by stacking perception. The power your gaining from those jewels & bloodlust is rather insignificant damage wise and is basically a lost stat IMO.

hehe, yeah, idk, I don’t think anyone has actually posted it yet, u might be the first, but all I know is that ive seen this build around for awhile, and it was one of the first builds I made post-patch

regardless, thanks for telling me about the sigils and jewels, I chose the wrong ones by mistake, haha

btw, if u do swap out the rabid for dire pieces, u don’t need perception lol, corruption is still better, since u have fury from survival skills, ur basically sitting at around 50% crit chance… imo, its more than enough

and 2k health isn’t much either, I mean, w/e works for u but I don’t rlly need the extra health, its like 1 tick if a necro unloads condis on u, 1 aa from a warrior, it won’t even matter if u fight a thief, ele’s can drop that in 1 aa as well, etc. etc.

Filterkat.2143:

I found that poison is uncommon to apply with this build (even with 2 sources) unless you find yourself in melee at some point in the fight. The poison shot from SB has a fairly pitiful duration, and only stacks to a reasonable amount at point blank range due to the spread. At that point, you are better off switching to S/T anyway which has access to a better source of poison, but I have found vipers strike to complete the dodge but miss the attack frequently, thus not applying the poison (this has been a known issue for a while).

You can pick up that sigil which applies poison on first hit after weapon swap, its very useful to time the weapon swap just as they’re about to heal so you reduce their effectiveness. Also about S/T, if the enemy does not have aegis, try opening the fight with throw torch and before the torch hits quick swap to shortbow, no cooldown will be involved since the torch hasn’t hit the enemy yet, but they will get burned.

awge.3852:

Filterkat.2143:

I found that poison is uncommon to apply with this build (even with 2 sources) unless you find yourself in melee at some point in the fight. The poison shot from SB has a fairly pitiful duration, and only stacks to a reasonable amount at point blank range due to the spread. At that point, you are better off switching to S/T anyway which has access to a better source of poison, but I have found vipers strike to complete the dodge but miss the attack frequently, thus not applying the poison (this has been a known issue for a while).

You can pick up that sigil which applies poison on first hit after weapon swap, its very useful to time the weapon swap just as they’re about to heal so you reduce their effectiveness. Also about S/T, if the enemy does not have aegis, try opening the fight with throw torch and before the torch hits quick swap to shortbow, no cooldown will be involved since the torch hasn’t hit the enemy yet, but they will get burned.

Interesting… Definately an option. Wouldnt be able to fit it on SB because SB needs those sigils to maximise its effectivness. However, once corruption stacks are max, it would definately be an option to switch offhand for one with that sigil considering I have Corruption on my underwater weps. But then theres the problem of the sigil being activated on a primarily melee set, and I preffer to stay ranged if I can help it. Decisions, Descisions…

Yeah I quickly figured out that torch/swap trick after I made the build. Its great, basically gives you a free weapon swap.

Also, bleed on crit and sharpening stone works with entangle, so as someone said above, drakehound immob in a bunched up group>Sharpening stone>entangle>bonfire… I killed 4 people in 1 combo with this yesterday in WvW… plus with krait runes/food your entangle also applys torment and poison and extra bleed stacks and they all last for a while. deadly kitten…

Started ranger 4 days ago and have been using this build in pvp the whole time. I’ve actually been doing decently well. I’ve found myself using sb pretty much the whole time, though I find the learning curve of sword a bit high so far. =oP

PlagueParade.7942:

Started ranger 4 days ago and have been using this build in pvp the whole time. I’ve actually been doing decently well. I’ve found myself using sb pretty much the whole time, though I find the learning curve of sword a bit high so far. =oP

The use of sword is a bit delicate, but you want to be patient when using its skills. It’s mostly a dodging weapon with which you can apply pressure with, so take that apart and let’s understand it better… dodging weapon #1, apply pressure with it #2.

1. skill on sword is the only thing you will need to use to apply pressure, use it when you do not want your enemy to run away, as it applies cripple very frequently. You can also use it to detect hidden enemies as you will begin to fly around all over the place and likely throw off their attack / retreat.

1. skill you use to get away from enemies… un-select them and use #2 again to fly into a different direction, thus throwing enemies into further confusion (works quite well so practice with it). #2 is also a good option to use to get far away from enemies or to jump straight into their face (hopefully not unintentionally!). #3 is great to use in a ton of situations, it is the ace of the sword skills.

Let’s go into #3: use it when an enemy just healed, poison reduces their healing power, or just before you can predict they will heal to reduce how much they will heal. Use #3 to dodge + apply poison + #2 to get out of a sticky situation and #2 again to further get out / or jump back in if you feel that you should; this combines to two dodges and creates / closes the gap.

I have been runing this build in PvP (except I prefer dagger for perma poison/Zephyr over the speed signet). Doing great so far, i’ll try the warhorn tonight.

Hadese.4382:

I have been runing this build in PvP (except I prefer dagger for perma poison/Zephyr over the speed signet). Doing great so far, i’ll try the warhorn tonight.

WH is redundant since switching to krait runes kitten can acheive the same bleed burst plus has sustain to boot. Instead of A/WH i run either S/T or S/D.

S/T is the more offensive option, adds another condition, and with offhand training/bonfire provides great point pressure in sPvP. S/D is the more defensive option. Perma poison and extra evades. No need for WH with krait runes anymore. They were previously used to capitalise on bleed on crit stuff and increase burst, but krait + SB provides enough bleed stacks.

I recommend sticking to S/D or maybe trying out S/T alternatively.

Then I say Kitten de WH and stick with my S/D! Thanks for info on WH.