Guild Wars 2

1. Warrior
2. Ranger

3. Thief
4. Engineer
5. Necro

6. Guardian
7. Elementalist
8. Mesmer

I am going to read this a few more times again to try and understand it better.

Correct me if I am wrong. It seems like you are talking about using a different build depending on what class you are facing ?

Ranger
Warrior
Necro

Guardian

Thief
Engineer

Elementalist
Mesmer
(Thief)
(Engineer)

Depending on build, thief and engineer are right up there as well.

Thing is, as a ranger, you got to work immensely harder than any other class to earn your kills.
’ve never rofl steamrolled any other opponent, unless they are bad.

With players of equal skill, the ranger (and possibly the necro) comes out short every time in my experience. We lack in every aspect currently. We can’t jump in a take someone down in a few seconds since we lack the burst, we have to be better than the opposition to stand a chance. With other classes, you can win even if you play like crap.

The no#1 flaw with our class is the lackluster pets. They work decently in regular pve, not so good in dungeons, and in pvp vs skilled players, they simply don’t work at all, you should be glad if your pet hits once every 20-30 second. Noone fears a pet in pvp.

I run SB & S/WH. this is my interpretation based on WvWvW. using a full knights set up. carrion and invaders rings and amulets. i generally engage fully on an ambush, entering combat when they spring my traps. or just on 1v1 and we start running at each other. i focus on sustained damage (damage over time) compared to burst, with high emphasis on mobility, dodging and tanking ability. i run duel dogs.

Easiest to Hardest:

• Ranger – Depends on the Ranger. a good ranger is even, and we fight tooth and nail both downed, a bad ranger is dead and i move on.
• Warrior – if a random pug, is the easiest thing to kill. they run straight at you all the time. a only time i’ve ever died to a warrior (!v1), is when i’m one shot by a warrior, or i just kitten up on my dodges. 50% of the time you know they are running GS, or what ever the warrior FoTM is at the moment. and i dodge their rifle pretty easily.
• Necromancer – Necro’s are easy to kite. i’m not scared of engaging a necro what so ever.
• Elementalists – are either really good or horrible. it’s hard, to determine because if i see that my arrows are flying back at me i just switch to sword, switch to another dog to interrupt him, dodge like crazy. luckily for me i pretty much come across some really bad elementalists.
• Engineer – i have trouble fighting engineer’s who are set up, without that set up though i usually have a lot of fun duels against them. it’s about even for me.
• Guardian – if a guardian isn’t a bunker type, i find they are easy. but bunkers are the FoTM atm and they just are unkillable 1v1
• Thief – i focus on sustained damage over long periods of time. thiefs have the abiltiy to break that damage when ever they want and heal. i kill most thieves in a 1v1 in a downed state. and i’ve been getting really efficient at it.
• Mesmer – …

I didn’t realize you guys had such an easy time with Warriors.

Why have numerous Rangers rerolled as Warriors if they are so weak ?

Forzani.2584:

I didn’t realize you guys had such an easy time with Warriors.

Why have numerous Rangers rerolled as Warriors if they are so weak ?

It’s because they can oneshot people, yet it looks like they can’t kill “the weakest” class ingame, sort of funny tho
The 100B warriors build is for newbies, any half decent warrior won’t use that build.
I would switch necro with engi on that list, and make them a lower tier (hard tier is not really hard, just average)
The first paragraph is also pointless, being R25 doesn’t make your point more valid than anyone’s else. Playing pugs in sPvP will still be playing “garbage pugs”, being rank 1 or 60.

Forzani.2584:

I didn’t realize you guys had such an easy time with Warriors.

Why have numerous Rangers rerolled as Warriors if they are so weak ?

Various “rangers” rerolled because warriors are easy to learn, high burst, noob killers.

Warriors are slow, clumsy, and broadcast all of their big moves. If they are good, they’ll get away with their lives. If not, they will not. What they won’t do is beat a confident ranger 1v1.

My loose hierarchy is:

Warrior – Reason stated above. You have sooo much room for error against one.
Engi – I just haven’t run across any that can hang, though I’m sure they exist.
Necro – I have lost to very few… Tough to master this prof though.
Ranger – Good ones take all day. There aren’t very many good ones, but it’s tough to learn to be merely adequate, much less good.
Guardian – Same as ranger (though far easier to learn imo), but the sheer volume of them means you run across good ones more frequently.
Ele – Polar extremes. Godly or laughable. Against a good one, you really don’t have room to make mistakes with them (or the next two).
Thief – Decent ones are deadly. Bad ones are still pretty annoying. Depends on who attacks whom first to a large degree.
Mesmer – A good one removes you as a factor in a fight. Bad ones still have plenty of tricks to escape.

Honestly The class makes no difference to me with exceptions of mesmers and thieves. Anybody who plays worse then I do in a 1v1 will lose, excepting of course, thieves with high burst and constant stealths, cant kill what I cant hit. However, a greatsword #4 is my way of testing the thief, If they attack me during the channel I will usually win, had only 1 or 2 beat me after doing that. Then there are mesmers, I carry an axe at all times, an average mesmer with the whole decoy/illusion spam and stealth will still win, but its so much fun to pop them out of stealth with an axe.

In my book, if you stealth/run away from a fight I have won. I dont care if you come back in kill me, I already scored a win each time you stealthed.

Ranger vs. Blank perfectly describes their current state in PvP.

i feel the balance is pretty good. mesmer & thief are the hardest fights to finish ( if thief is tanky ), since our pet will not auto attack the air in order to hit a stealthed target like we can.

our pets should seek out stealthed targets, just like mesmer clones. if our pets are as easy to avoid as ppl claim, this should be np for mesmers & thieves to deal with.

CENSOR.6081:

The Elementalist just sent me into a paradox really. Asking myself whether it’s my skill causing these rotations of damage, control, defence, and healing. Or, am I just ludicrously OP bashing my head against everything off cool-down. And yet, their Forum’s asking for buffs because some of them have lost a 1v4~

Not trolling I play ranger too (73 atm if that matters). Ele is my main and honestly you must have just glanced at our forums because we ask questions like that too (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/How-do-you-counter-D-D-elementalist/first#post850000). I am going to take a guess and say the ele you have been fighting are D/D?

Now the best way to counter D/D is immobilize however you have to understand most D/D (ele in general actually) run with 2-3 stun breakers and have at least 2 condition wipes. So when I say immobilize I don’t mean stun I mean root. Our bane is rifle warrior with the immobilize on snare trait. The good thing is ele is not great at hold tanking g so mobility is key. If you can eliminate that you might win.

Here the thing to note. A good ele can and will run whenever they please. So time your immobile. The other thing is many eles run a rotation so you could possibly catch on to it and see when rtl is on cd.

For rangers dogs are your best shot. Drakehound’s immobilize could be a key in victory. The other thing is kd off dogs eats thought cantrips. Hope it helps umm sort of.

Sleepy.2647:

Forzani.2584:

I didn’t realize you guys had such an easy time with Warriors.

Why have numerous Rangers rerolled as Warriors if they are so weak ?

It’s because they can oneshot people, yet it looks like they can’t kill “the weakest” class ingame, sort of funny tho
The 100B warriors build is for newbies, any half decent warrior won’t use that build.
I would switch necro with engi on that list, and make them a lower tier (hard tier is not really hard, just average)
The first paragraph is also pointless, being R25 doesn’t make your point more valid than anyone’s else. Playing pugs in sPvP will still be playing “garbage pugs”, being rank 1 or 60.

while i don’t spvp, WvW is pretty much all i do. i have to agree with the 100b. the warrior was my 2nd 80 and like most picked up a great sword. i quickly found that 100B is easy to counter. once i put the GS away and went to an axe/shield and got away from a glass canon spec things have improved a lot. i have been pulling off more 2v1 and some 3v1 that i wouldn’t even come close to with that GS. now i am in no way saying i win all 2 or 3v1 just saying i pull it off a lot more now. and most 3v1 i didn’t kill all 3 but if i kill 2 and the other runs away, i still count that as a victory

whats sad is that if this post was made in any other thread rangers would probably be at the top of the list for each one.

Hi there.
1) I am pretty new to this game and especially to this class.
2) I know I am a sub par player.

Please allow me to ask you guys for some advice.

If I had been asked to create such a list, the warrior would be on the bottom of my ranger food chain. This is a class I manage to beat most of the time (or at least occasionally ).

Against all other classes I hardly manage to be a worthy foe.
Reading through this thread and through the lines, you guys obviously do decent against most thieves… how?
Playing my ranger the only way I seem to have a chance, is when skilled all the way down the marksmanship tree and taking the “signets now apply to you as well” trait, as well as the stone signet…

If someone could share their insights on builds/playstyle and/or equipment, I´d be really grateful .
(searching through the forums didn´t really help me…)

Cheers!
P.S. Please excuse my english, I rarely get the chance to practise often.

You are talking about deuling…
Rangers are fantastic at that.
With my trap condi dmg spec (I’m rank 39 btw) I won next to every deul I played….
Ele’s where annoying for sure and so were mesmers, but still pretty beatable.

You just sick your pet on the mesmer phantasms or catch them in a fire trap or geomancy sigil so they can’t do much, then evade the shatters (on weapon evades mean you can evade even while immobilized). Bam. You just crippled their dmg and with conditions are easily beating them in life. A few heavy cleansing specs can be an utter utter pain and the fight lasts a good minute or more every time.. but that’ about the worst of it.

Elementalists… I’ve won more than I’ve lost simply by playing my pet well. The 2s knockdown and swapping->aoe fear have kittened up more eles than I can count, you can interupt either with ‘come to me’ so they should rarely ever miss. I do lose a number of fights though if I give them a chance to stall the fight out, they have far better self healing than my spec does so the longer the fight goes on the better off they are.

I’ve had tough matchups from every class so far, so can’t really throw out a decidedly usefull list. Honestly other rangers are a bad matchup for me, the solid dodging and empathetic bond beat on my dmg output like no other can.

Thank you, garethh for the information.
Just by posting, you made other written posts, that you have written earlier, easily attainable.
And this really helped a lot! So after doing some reading,my main conclusion is: you do prefer shortbow
over longbow… why exactly?
And you do probably prefer axe and whatever to whatever… for exactly which reasons?

And last but not least…:

obviously when doing random spvp, a whole lot of my enemies tend to be rogues.
Which build would you run to counter exactly this one class?
(Necros are a major problem for me also…^^)

I know that I am pretty new, I know that my questions probably have been answered somewhere else already…
but I am having a really hard time trying to search for decent information in these forums.

So to spare your time…. even posting a link would help.

Thank you for reading!

Cheers!

Honestly I would put rangers close to the top of the list in strength when it comes to duels or spvp play. They arnt the underdogs of pvp like everyone believes considering their built in defensive abilities and evasion within their attacks.

To answer your question ghandi, the main ranger build I use that beats a lot of people and their bandwagon perception is just a great sword ranger with either short bow or axe dagger. The great sword is your main beat down machine, and by beat down I mean you grind them down slowly like those ubiquitous dd ele. Shortbow has some nice needling capabilities for short ranged combat, it has a nice evasion dodge attack, and a nice cc number 5.

When I trait my ranger, I go 0/0/30/10/30 for increased survivability as well as a little bit of pet boost and what not. Reason for this is that, in pvp it isn’t like pve where it is whoever can do the most damage or have the highest output. It is more about outlasting and killing them before they kill you. It is surprising but sacrificing a few elements of the glass cannon and going into tank you can survive much better. To be honest your dps ONLY has to be greater than their healing capabilities.

So with your weapons and traits the last thing you need is gear. I use full clerics gear which is healing toughness and power. Sometimes I mix in vitality elements, but your natural hp with traits and toughness is good enough to survive pretty much anything. Factoring in your evasion and toughness, your regeneration and heals should be pretty hard to beat.

For runes and sigils, I use energy in my great sword and short bow. On switch might, bloodlust, are just extra tips on the iceberg, whereas half of ur endurance enables u to dodge their magic missile or wonder attack. For runes, there are many kinds you can use, but I use rune of Dwayna to compliment my healing and offer regen support.

For skills there isn’t much variation.troll unguents or healing spring. Quickening zephy, lightning reflex, and regen signet is what I use the most often with entangle as my elite. Sometimes I sacrifice and make room for the condition removal signet but that is circumstantial.

This has been one of my favorite builds for rangers for a long time and I havnt lost a duel ever with it. There has been cases of ties, when people build super tanks healing bunkers and such.

I would be glad to take questions in game or show them how well it works in spvp etc. for wv3 it is a bit harder since rangers… Like mesmers… Have trouble engaging multiple enemies especially if they are skilled enemies. There are no extremely hard matchups for this build, but there are a lot of unconventional and less commonuilds out the that can give this one a run.

Since everyone loves to compare things to the flavor of the month dd ele. This build with good pet management, eats elementalists up. In most cases they run away and try to harass you again to no avail.

Vs rangers: just outplay them, Straightfoward and simple process. Bows and conditions don’t do enough damage in most cases.

Vs warriors: you have enough dodge to avoid most of their big attacks and burst skills and keep an eye out for bulls. Lightning reflex when you have to but evasion is more than enough.

Vs thief: evade during their burst damage, you have enuff survivability to take a few hits, but keep yourself in position so you don’t get hit from side or back. Use short bow to avoid skills if you need a breather to dodge. Your block kick and wolf howl is a great too against them. Then you just wear them down slowly.

Vs guardian: just an attrition fight, if they are super bunker then it will probably end up a tie. Ur damage isn’t too spectacular but it is possible.

Vs elementalist: attrition fight again if they a dd, but you should time ur cc and fear from pet and catch them off guard that way. Entangle for the kill once they use their escapes.

Vs mesmers, they become a headache with their phantasms but keep track of the real one. Whenever I play against them phantasms don’t really do enuff damage versus my regen and heal, but it’s just a pain in the kitten class to play against.

Vs necros: can be hard depending on build, but long as you don’t stand in wells and manage condition removal you should be fine.

Vs engineers: can be a pain sometimes if they go bomb build, but dodge them and you should be fine. Turrets are annoying but won’t kill you.

Kishandreth.2798:

Anybody who plays worse then I do in a 1v1 will lose… if you stealth/run away from a fight I have won.

This is pretty much the same boat I’m in. I don’t really have any problem with any particular class, it’s the quality of the player behind the keyboard. Sometimes I get absolutely crushed, sometimes I barely come out ahead, sometimes I totally stomp someone independent of the profession they’re playing.

One of the greatest advantages of playing the Ranger class is that most people think Rangers are awful and that it’ll be an easy kill. It’s always satisfying when you get a tell from someone who’s dumbfounded that they just died to a Ranger.

Any glass cannon builds are pretty easy to kill. Unless they’re running multiple stun breaks, they’re almost always done after the first knockdown from a wolf or drakehound.

Bunker builds always die too, it just sometimes takes a little longer than it should. A lot of times I win just because it’s someone playing a bunker build and they have the mentality that “I can’t die to one player” and “lol ranger!” so by the time they realize they need help it’s too late.

The builds that give me the most trouble are the balanced builds that have good survivability coupled with consistent damage.

Which is why I love my necromancer and ranger You summed it right up nldixon very well. It’s all about balance

Gandhi.3410:

Thank you, garethh for the information.
Just by posting, you made other written posts, that you have written earlier, easily attainable.
And this really helped a lot! So after doing some reading,my main conclusion is: you do prefer shortbow
over longbow… why exactly?
And you do probably prefer axe and whatever to whatever… for exactly which reasons?

And last but not least…:

obviously when doing random spvp, a whole lot of my enemies tend to be rogues.
Which build would you run to counter exactly this one class?
(Necros are a major problem for me also…^^)

I know that I am pretty new, I know that my questions probably have been answered somewhere else already…
but I am having a really hard time trying to search for decent information in these forums.

So to spare your time…. even posting a link would help.

Thank you for reading!

Cheers!

:)
Longbow just isn’t a good PvP weapon atm.
The projectile speed is too slow to be able to sit back, use that long range and pew away into combat… you won’t hit with near enough reliability to actually have worthwhile dps while doing it.
With that being the main setup of the weapon… it just isn’t worthwhile, pretty much ever, tragically ><

Shortbow has condition dmg on the spammable (flanking is a joke), which fits a condition setup, especially since I run carrion amulet and +bleed duration runes (4s bleed on spammable instead of 3).
Running axemainhand , though, on a condition spec is just a preference, it’s a weapon where you either get good so reliably land close range splitblade’s… or don’t use it at all. Allot of people like one handed sword on a trap setup since it gives ridiculous mobility so you can stall while your trap conditions tick out and pet beats on the guy.

Against thieves… condition dmg and well played canines/traps kitten them over.
Odds say, if the thief is worth anything you will eat a basilisk venom->mug spike the vast majority of the time, which means you either have to have protect me off CD or lightning reflexes or Signet of Renewal up or die (the tragedy) but short of that… they really aren’t a good class 1v1 atm.

Even before the dancing dagger nerf I tended to beat theives 1v1 (it was a lil close) but yeah, after…. they are oh so terribly kiteable. If you can get and keep distance and throw traps down while they are in stealth (to see when they get close to you) its a pretty easy win 1v1. Ironically the worst thing they can do to my condition spec is just sit in shortbow and kite as much as possible… they actually tend to pull more dmg like that than I can do to them…
If you’re curious, this is the spec:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNAV3YnEVUXZcFaBBaZgo9ITSCTsH83RP6VYWFspC;TsAgyCuo8xAjAGbROfkFtWYAy2DA

Oh that and if you really get good at coordinating your pets you can use the wolf’s fear to get them out of the shadow refuge pretty reliably… its good stuff.

I really need to see this stuff vs Thieves. Being involved in fights with them and watching their fights I don’t see how you can keep any distance against them. All this trap talk has me confused also. I have chased Rangers who throw traps at me. So easy to avoid ….which I also find weird that your enemy can see them.

I likely need to build a thief and see what they can or can’t do.

Forzani.2584:

I really need to see this stuff vs Thieves. Being involved in fights with them and watching their fights I don’t see how you can keep any distance against them. All this trap talk has me confused also. I have chased Rangers who throw traps at me. So easy to avoid ….which I also find weird that your enemy can see them.

I likely need to build a thief and see what they can or can’t do.

Don’t keep them at range. The only time I use ranged attacks against Thieves is while they’re running away from me.

Playing the classes you go up against is an awesome way to learn how and what to do against them. I’ve got at least 50-100 games on every other profession, with the exception of Elementalist (I’d rather slam my head in a car door than play an Elementalist) and it definitely helps.

Darkchlor.5348:

Honestly I would put rangers close to the top of the list in strength when it comes to duels or spvp play. They arnt the underdogs of pvp like everyone believes considering their built in defensive abilities and evasion within their attacks.

To answer your question ghandi, the main ranger build I use that beats a lot of people and their bandwagon perception is just a great sword ranger with either short bow or axe dagger. The great sword is your main beat down machine, and by beat down I mean you grind them down slowly like those ubiquitous dd ele. Shortbow has some nice needling capabilities for short ranged combat, it has a nice evasion dodge attack, and a nice cc number 5.

When I trait my ranger, I go 0/0/30/10/30 for increased survivability as well as a little bit of pet boost and what not. Reason for this is that, in pvp it isn’t like pve where it is whoever can do the most damage or have the highest output. It is more about outlasting and killing them before they kill you. It is surprising but sacrificing a few elements of the glass cannon and going into tank you can survive much better. To be honest your dps ONLY has to be greater than their healing capabilities.

So with your weapons and traits the last thing you need is gear. I use full clerics gear which is healing toughness and power. Sometimes I mix in vitality elements, but your natural hp with traits and toughness is good enough to survive pretty much anything. Factoring in your evasion and toughness, your regeneration and heals should be pretty hard to beat.

For runes and sigils, I use energy in my great sword and short bow. On switch might, bloodlust, are just extra tips on the iceberg, whereas half of ur endurance enables u to dodge their magic missile or wonder attack. For runes, there are many kinds you can use, but I use rune of Dwayna to compliment my healing and offer regen support.

For skills there isn’t much variation.troll unguents or healing spring. Quickening zephy, lightning reflex, and regen signet is what I use the most often with entangle as my elite. Sometimes I sacrifice and make room for the condition removal signet but that is circumstantial.

This has been one of my favorite builds for rangers for a long time and I havnt lost a duel ever with it. There has been cases of ties, when people build super tanks healing bunkers and such.

I would be glad to take questions in game or show them how well it works in spvp etc. for wv3 it is a bit harder since rangers… Like mesmers… Have trouble engaging multiple enemies especially if they are skilled enemies. There are no extremely hard matchups for this build, but there are a lot of unconventional and less commonuilds out the that can give this one a run.

Since everyone loves to compare things to the flavor of the month dd ele. This build with good pet management, eats elementalists up. In most cases they run away and try to harass you again to no avail.

What healing per tick do you get with that ?