Guild Wars 2

Now that we have heralds pulsing fury, would remorseless be a better trait to take than predator’s onslaught for a marksmanship ranger?

If 50% of your attacks are opening strikes then Remorseless is basically a permanent 12.5% damage increase.

I doubt that even in best case scenarios you’d even be able to get 40% of your attacks as opening strikes.

To put it a different way. Predator’s Onslaught is essentially a permanent 10% bonus. This is really good for situations that favor steady, continuous damage out put such as when you fight a boss with a high health pool.

Remorseless allows you to put out intense but infrequent spikes of damage. This favors situations where you face targets with lower health pools, such as other players in pvp or wvw.

jewishjoyride.4693:

If 50% of your attacks are opening strikes then Remorseless is basically a permanent 12.5% damage increase.

You can’t do the math like that, since triggering remorseless triggers opening strike, opening strike is a guaranteed crit and grants 5 vulnerability (and another 5 vulnerability from your pet + the pets attack crits).

You just counted the damage increase of the remorseless trait itself.

With a steady source of pulsing fury, remorseless should be the trait of choice, depending on weapon. If you can time it with attacks like maul, you’d be putting out some nice numbers.

You’d probably need to turn autoattack off on greatsword to have a good chance at intentionally lining that up. The pulse on the revenant facet is only once every 3 seconds. Probably toss in 2-handed training as well, and I think you’re just randomly mauling and hoping for the best. Also I don’t think it really depends on weapon, since maul is our only non-plinky attack that could benefit from this. Maybe PoS with quickdraw on 2 offhand axes or something.

I feel like there are too many drawbacks to win out on damage in the long run.

I think you have to account for already having 100% crit and 25 vuln, at least a good bit of the time, so that part isn’t as exciting.

You don’t really need to hope for the best. With quick draw and two-handed your weapon swap cooldown aligns perfectly with 3 mauls. The first maul is a remorseless proc from the weapon swap fury. The second one you need to get lucky with either revenant pulsing fury or two-handed training granting you there. The third one you can get fury from weapon swap with clarion bond, which also gives you quickness for the first rapid fire when you swap back to longbow.

The three mauls are ~60% of your total damage in greatsword, so doing 25% more damage of each of them is a 15% damage boost while getting 2 is a 10% boost and then you need to increase this number a bit from the first strikes on the auto attacks/swoop.
The real reason why remorseless isn’t that great in a group where you don’t need the additional vulnerability. Remorseless basically does nothing for longbow because of the numerous small hits, while Predator’s Onslaught is a 10% damage boost to longbow skills as well.

I agree, remorseless is best for burst damage, initial damage in pvp if you will. Not that great in pve where you would rather look for a consistent damage increase.

And just out of interest, Brazil’s max dps ranger is a remorseless ranger. But as mentioned above I find remorseless more useful for solo play, and predators for groups (using longbow).

Fluffball.8307:

You’d probably need to turn autoattack off on greatsword to have a good chance at intentionally lining that up. The pulse on the revenant facet is only once every 3 seconds. Probably toss in 2-handed training as well, and I think you’re just randomly mauling and hoping for the best. Also I don’t think it really depends on weapon, since maul is our only non-plinky attack that could benefit from this. Maybe PoS with quickdraw on 2 offhand axes or something.

I feel like there are too many drawbacks to win out on damage in the long run.

I think you have to account for already having 100% crit and 25 vuln, at least a good bit of the time, so that part isn’t as exciting.

You don’t just randomly maul, you maul immediately after switching weapons, which is fury due to the skirmishing minor trait, you use “We heal as one” to gain fury off your pet, then maul, and then switch pets to trigger Clarion Bond when possible, mauling straight after that, giving you 2 and a half reliable applications to ensure that your mauls benefit from the trait, as clarion bond will only be up every 2 greatsword rotations. The pulsing fury you basically randomly get from the heralds in the party or strength of the pack, and random fury from the greatsword trait, elementalists blasting fire fields, or auramancers giving auras etc. are there to boost the autoattacks, 3/4 of the path of scars (The first is free since you use it immediately on switching weapons triggering furious grip) and potentially 1 in 6 mauls.

I am assuming that OP is looking to min max a damage build for pve content. Since he’s min/maxing it’s pretty safe to assume that this is group content such as fractals or raids. Since he’s in a group it’s also safe to assume that the target will be capped at 25% vuln, and that the OP will be at or close to 100% crit chance. This means we are looking at Remorseless for the bonus damage.

Predator’s Onslaught is a 10% damage modifier 100% of the time because the ranger player alone can permanently cripple a target. For Remorseless to match this, 2 out of kittens have to be opening strikes. Really though we want to beat Predator’s Onslaught so ideally more than half of our attacks need to be opening strikes.

Maul has a 3/4 second cast time. The auto attack chain takes 1 3/4 seconds to complete. This doesn’t take in to account after cast, which only makes the whole thing take longer. You can manage 2 mauls and 3 auto attack chains before weapon swap comes off cooldown. 11 attacks total. An opening strike every 1 1/2 seconds would be about right.

Is it possible in a party to hit that? Maybe. Is it practical? Not very.

PO is better in any situation that isn’t perfectly set up with ideal rotations and procs, but if you’re going to go that far to min/max, you might as well just be going A/T Viper’s to be completely honest.

jewishjoyride.4693:

Maul has a 3/4 second cast time. The auto attack chain takes 1 3/4 seconds to complete. This doesn’t take in to account after cast, which only makes the whole thing take longer. You can manage 2 mauls and 3 auto attack chains before weapon swap comes off cooldown. 11 attacks total. An opening strike every 1 1/2 seconds would be about right.

Is it possible in a party to hit that? Maybe. Is it practical? Not very.

Your assumptions here are incorrect. You can manage 3 mauls because of quickdraw. If you actually take the aftercast into consideration the rotation goes:
Weapon swap —> maul —> first 2 parts of auto chain —> maul —> full auto chain + swoop —> maul —> weapon swap. The rotation changes a bit depending on alacrity/quickness uptime, but basically just spam maul every time it is on cooldown even if it means disrupting the auto chain before the final hit.

Eponet.4829:

You don’t just randomly maul, you maul immediately after switching weapons

Ya I know how to trigger remorseless as a ranger controlling my own boons. The conversation was about the pulsing fury, which you would have a very hard time lining up.

Hazka.6503:

jewishjoyride.4693:

Maul has a 3/4 second cast time. The auto attack chain takes 1 3/4 seconds to complete. This doesn’t take in to account after cast, which only makes the whole thing take longer. You can manage 2 mauls and 3 auto attack chains before weapon swap comes off cooldown. 11 attacks total. An opening strike every 1 1/2 seconds would be about right.

Is it possible in a party to hit that? Maybe. Is it practical? Not very.

Your assumptions here are incorrect. You can manage 3 mauls because of quickdraw. If you actually take the aftercast into consideration the rotation goes:
Weapon swap —> maul --> first 2 parts of auto chain —> maul --> full auto chain + swoop —> maul --> weapon swap. The rotation changes a bit depending on alacrity/quickness uptime, but basically just spam maul every time it is on cooldown even if it means disrupting the auto chain before the final hit.

Not an assumption. This was based on rotations I tried out in game. I didn’t cut the auto chain off early. I guess you and some other players do. That’s fine. That’s not really what the discussion is about.

The point that Fluffball and I are trying to make is that for Remorseless to be worth it in PVE it has to be as close to a permanent 25% damage modifier as possible. Good luck finding players to do that with. I’d actually go as far as to say that the current pve meta is worse for Remorseless than the prior one as there are fewer fury applications going around. Yes Revenants pulse fury every 3 seconds, but that means that fewer eles are going through might stacking rotations which granted fury more frequently than that.