Guild Wars 2

Hello forum, I’m Rome and I’ve been playing thief in this game since time immemorial. However, upon my return from a short hiatus, I explored the ranger class (I tend to favour the medium armour classes a lot) and really like the build setup I’m currently running. I decided to post the build on the forum so other people can play around with it and provide me with valuable feedback.

Here’s the build.

F.A.Q.
See the following post.

Now I know I’m a very inexperienced ranger and the build has waaays to improve, which is why I decided to post it on the forums so people can give it a go and hopefully, together we can achieve rangers being the meta home defenders again.

F.A.Q.

• Why the lack of Shortbow?
  The one thing the Ranger class lacks is access to AoE. This makes its team fight presence not that great. You may be a hard target to focus down, but while you teammates are being pressured, your only option is to counter pressure with short bow while in team fights. This isn’t exactly ideal. Take the fight to the side points, however, and it’s a completely different story. With Axe/Dagger, you have the burst, the evades, a good weakness uptime and the immobilises to land your burst that comes from Spitblades. By not taking a Shortbow, you also get to pack in a Torch while not compromising on any of your evasive skills. This is a huge DPS and survivability boost compared to flanking with a short bow. Not to mention fighting on nodes makes it easier to land your skills.

• What’s your typical skill rotation?
  This depends on what I’m fighting and how aggressive and panicky with their cool downs your opponent is, but here’s an illustration. You start in Sword/Torch and land your Throw Torch. Swap weapons to Axe/Dagger and you have a Doom proc, which can make your Crippling Talon inflict bleeding, crippling, poison. This is enough to force their first condition clear. You may proceed with a chill and weakness from the axe, and after forcing a dodge, land your Muddy Terrain. This needs to be followed up by a Spitblade and your pet burst. After you’ve baited out all condition clears and dodges, you hit your I Win button (roots) and ensure victory.

• Where’s Empathic Bond? Why Poison Master?
  The random nature of Empathic Bond was always annoying to me. Now that condition rangers have another form of condi-clear with survivals, it’s okay to let go off this trait that gets your pets killed more often that not. And since you’re not in the middle of AoE spam fest at mid, you don’t require a whole lot of condition clear than the ones provided by survivals. On the other hand, Poison Master gives you a huge boost to your condition DPS and provides a good amount of poison uptime so you have a much easier time while fighting sustain classes.

• Why the birds? Where’s the wolf?
  The problem with melee ranger is those annoying ranged classes that try to fight you from off point (mesmer, power ranger, thief poking with short bow). With the birds, you can LoS around your point while making sure these zerker classes are always on their toes since the birds can take up to half their health before they even realise. You don’t need to worry about them dying since you’ll mostly be involved in 1v1s or 2v2s (or 1v2s). The immobilises you get from Muddy Terrain and Roots are, in my opinion, enough snares to land your skills that you won’t miss the Dog or Wolf anymore. The fear for stoping reses and stomps is something I do miss, since the build lacks any interrupts whatsoever, but I suppose this can be changed to however you personally see fit.

• Why Troll Unguent over Healing Spring?
  You take little poison, thanks to Evasive Purity. You have 0 blast finishers for Healing Spring. You already have a decent amount of condi clears. You need to keep your pets up. And you’re not fighting with your teammates most of the time. Along with all that, the regen heal works really well with the amount of evades you get, not to mention that combining it with Signet of Stone can make life hell for the burst classes that thought they had you.

• Why Keen Edge over Sharpening Stone?
  Player skill issue. I can personally never count when Sharpening Stone is going to be up, so I can never plan my bursts with it and neither can I rely on it as a condition clear. On the other hand, Keen Edge is a good added DPS and the swiftness from the minor trait by investing in this trait line gives me a good target uptime, which is essential when running a melee ranger.

F.A.Q. (continued)

• Why did you pick those particular utilities?
  Lightning Reflexes and Muddy Terrain are essential. For the third, I usually opt for Signet of Renewal to run a double stun break and as another full condition clear. However, Signet of Stone is another solid choice, especially if you know the enemy thief is going to keep rotating to help his home point. Signet of Stone and Troll Uguent make a great combination and along with Roots and our crazy down state can ensure quite a few 1v2 victories. Sharpening Stone is another choice, but I’ve generally found it inferior for its CD and have usually just ended up using it to clear fear or immobilise since it’s insta-cast. The third utility can be played around with. See what suits you.

• Rabid vs Carion vs Celestial.
  This is an area that requires more testing to be done. From various games, it seems Rabid is the clear winner for amulet choice, but Celestial can also be interesting. A few tweak of traits might be able to make a celestial amulet with smiler weapon set into a team fight spec since the the axe auto is already pretty strong. Maybe the forum can help here!

• How does this build fair in various 1v1 match-ups?
  If you play right, every single encounter is winnable. The hardest is probably D/D Elementalist, but since D/D needs to be in melee range, it’s quite ideal for you and your birds to land their burst. Just be intelligent with your CDs. For example, it’s a bad idea to burst an elementalist when his water attunement is coming up. Rather, poke some conditions, force a water attunement, and once they are out, burst your conditions and land a double chill with bird and Axe 3 so they can’t go back into water anytime soon. Roots make fighting any class extremely easy once you’ve baited out CDs and dodges. What’s more is roots can be hit while you’re blinded since the condi clear from SotF comes first so it’s quite easy to land. Utilise your evades intelligently. Dodge roll when you need protection as well, and use Dagger 4 and Sword 3 to dodge and keep poison up time. Swapping Pets and immediately using their f2 makes the pets instant cast it, so use this technique when your enemy is immobilised. Hitting F1 on a target before battle engages will make the birds give you swiftness.

That’s the end of F.A.Qs. Please leave your feedback and feel free to ask me any questions.

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kiwituatara.6053:

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Hi, it should work now. I’ll put it up on GW2skills as well if it doesn’t. Let me know!

I run something similar to this when I sPvP.

I won’t get specific, because I have yet to officially announce my build here but – I wouldn’t suggest running duo birds with this build; they’re incredibly efficient in PvP because most players will ignore the birds – but – they also die in like 3-4 hits if you’re not super careful, and having 0 in BM trait lines will make it even harder to swap them faster.

My $.02, drop the Snow Owl, grab the Wolf. If you’re in a team fight, or on a point, the fear is ridiculously strong in that aspect. Also, if you’re running entangle; the knockdown and the fear can pretty much guarantee your enemy will be rendered useless.

You have answered a few of my questions through your FAQ – but I don’t like how you say the birds will be fine in 1v1 or 1v2; if you’re in a high end match that player is going to stomp your bird out if you send it to attack them from a far – say goodbye to 1/2 your DPS

All that said, it’s a sound build. It’s pretty kitten good, and I don’t have any issues fighting a specific class with poison master; unless an engineer has that bubble kitten on point, you might as well just walk away from that kitten. lol!

Its a good build. I run a celestial variation with emphasis on pet might and wh for mobility.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQRBHhx+1IhKts2viHLUtGIRoafC76TzKAc/CpQUfxDVJB-TZBBwAAOBAeeCAaOIA62fAcZAA

It turns the build into a powerful hybrid. With axe/wh and companions might it it only takes a few seconds to stack 20 might on your bird. There is also your powerful AOE condi bomb.

My favorite part about this build is how easy it is to tweak into different roles. For 1v1 side points I’ll use poison master and dagger instead of WH. If you don’t have a heavy, swap in bark skin and healing spring and you can sit in the middle.

On the whole I like celestial more than rabid. It simply gives you more stats. My rules of thumb is that if you’re going for 5 or more stats, celestial is better. Your physical damage will have more bite from str and ferocity. The extra healing and vit help with conditions.

I have run this in WvW for a long time where it is very strong.

But PvP I prefer 0/0/6/6/2 BM Regen bunker with Settler amulet.

I find rabid can’t hold a point for very long, and the added team support from nature’s voice is great.

Celestial – the might on axe doesn’t last long enough to be effective, even with might runes.

Pets – without an interrupt you pretty much have to take wolf. I take eagle and wolf on swap.

Sube Dai.8496:

I have run this in WvW for a long time where it is very strong.

But PvP I prefer 0/0/6/6/2 BM Regen bunker with Settler amulet.

I find rabid can’t hold a point for very long, and the added team support from nature’s voice is great.

Celestial – the might on axe doesn’t last long enough to be effective, even with might runes.

Pets – without an interrupt you pretty much have to take wolf. I take eagle and wolf on swap.

In defence of Celestial:

A lot of people approach celestial on ranger with the same paradigm as celestial engineer, ele or war; I.e. you need to be relentlessly might stacking for it to work, but this is wrong in several regards.

When we speak of a celestial ranger we’re actually speaking of mainly a condi ranger because, ignoring the pet for one moment, most of the damage is going to come from conditions of which we have a wide application of and running celestial has a negligible effect on the application of them (e.g. Sharpened edges 30% crit vs 40%, cele vs rabid). Don’t forget that we have far greater access to bleeding than those classes – it’s quite easy for example to reach and maintain the bleed cap for a few seconds on ranger even in a non-gimmick, tournament viable spec.

If we compare against ele: A celestial ranger is always going to be running with 6 in wilderness survival due to it’s superior traits. Against the usual trait allocation of an ele, this puts us up by 200 condition damage straight away – add to this the fact that a celestial ranger is most likely going to be running krait runes for it’s synergy elsewhere in the build. That’s 375 more condition damage over an ele before might is a factor. An ele stacks might because it really has to, technically you can run celestial ranger without might and still have decent damage/pressure although I wouldn’t recommend it.

Now, I’ve played with strength/hoelbrek runes and they don’t seem worth it. But battle sigils grant 3 stacks of might and with 6 in NM those stacks last for 26 seconds, that means battle sigils alone allow you to maintain 9 stacks of might for the majority of the time. With axe, your might stacks above 9 are going to be erratic since it only lasts 4-5 seconds but let’s consider 3 things before we write it off: 1. It can be used to burst might on you because it can hit 3 times and grant 3 might per second when facing a minimum of two enemies. 2. Might augments condi damage retroactively, in other words you can apply the conditions then apply might and the following damage from the conditions is increased. 3. Might is applied to the pet, through fortifying bond, at a flat rate of 10 seconds per might regardless of the duration of the source.

You can argue against the viability of celestial ranger, but the lack of damage / lack of might argument doesn’t really stand up to any real testing or playing.

What I don’t like about celestial is the waste of most of the power stats, because unlike ele, engi and warrior, the standard weapon sets (a/d and s/t) have horrendous powerdamage attached to their skills. As it stands now, I feel like Settlers does everything Celestial should be doing, just even better.

alvarez.3159:

What I don’t like about celestial is the waste of most of the power stats, because unlike ele, engi and warrior, the standard weapon sets (a/d and s/t) have horrendous powerdamage attached to their skills. As it stands now, I feel like Settlers does everything Celestial should be doing, just even better.

I agree. Settler has so much more sustain than celestial, AND more condition damage. Plus you can still try and stack might with it if you want to.

Celestial is a good amulet, just not the best for rangers.

Haematic.4913:

My $.02, drop the Snow Owl, grab the Wolf. If you’re in a team fight, or on a point, the fear is ridiculously strong in that aspect. Also, if you’re running entangle; the knockdown and the fear can pretty much guarantee your enemy will be rendered useless.

Yes, the birds can put out immense pressure on targets, but you’re right that it requires a lot more micro managing where I have to keep calling them back when I know there’s heavy AoE incoming, like when fighting a warrior on point or something. I’ll try it out with other pet combinations to see what works better and if the DPS loss can be offset by having more crowd control. Appreciate your feedback.

As far as Celestial is concerned, from what I’ve seen, it isn’t exactly the best amulet for this kind of weapon set. However, put in a longbow and change the traits around, and celestial ranger does quite a bit damage while having a lot of sustain. The drawback with this of course is the fact that you need a longbow as a power weapon with a condition one on weapon swap, which isn’t exactly ideal. However, Sharpening Stone, Roots and Rapid Fire can make for quite a burst even with Celestial. Axe/Dagger doesn’t have much of a power burst by itself (with Spitblade doing the same power damage as Axe auto attack), which is why I went for Rabid.

Sube Dai.8496:

alvarez.3159:

What I don’t like about celestial is the waste of most of the power stats, because unlike ele, engi and warrior, the standard weapon sets (a/d and s/t) have horrendous powerdamage attached to their skills. As it stands now, I feel like Settlers does everything Celestial should be doing, just even better.

I agree. Settler has so much more sustain than celestial, AND more condition damage. Plus you can still try and stack might with it if you want to.

Celestial is a good amulet, just not the best for rangers.

Ok, here’s why you’re wrong:

I agree celestial engi functions well because it has abilities that have high burst and whilst a/t s/d for rangers has no high burst ability, the auto attack on sword for example manages to put out decent DPS at a good rate. Sure, you’re not going to drop someone with it but it does allow you to pressure in times that you’re unable or it is inopportune to use your condition abilities – I’m thinking beserker stance, water attunement, bubbles/reflect on turret engi, engi has heal turret up (I.e. engi can cast it but hasn’t yet), warrior has f1 on longbow up etc. My point being is that power/percision/ferocity does all add up and does serve a function.

Secondly, whilst settler’s does have higher condition damage it will deal less condition damage overtime and you are less likely to kill someone through condition damage alone whilst using it.

Let me explain, the damage you do through conditions has three dimensions: base condition damage, condition application and condition cover. Celestial wins comfortably on the latter two because you if you’re running celestial and taking 2 points in skirmishing you’re going to be running at 30% critical rate (50% after you’ve activated a skirmishing skill) versus the 9% (and 29%) of settler’s then it’s going to make sense to run sharpened edges on celestial and not on settler’s.

Sharpened edges contributes considerably to your condition application, it changes splitblade from a 5 bleed stack to a 7-8 bleed stack for example. It helps with cover conditions too, say you’re in sword/torch you do: torch 4 -> sword 3 -> sword 1 × 2 with celestial that’s a guaranteed 4 conditions – burn, poison, bleed, cripple. With settler’s that’s effectively 2 since 1. You don’t have sharpened edges and 2. With such low power, it’s hard to justify using sword auto-attack. Most condition clears in this game work in the manner of: ‘clear X number of conditions’ rather than clear all.

You’re also going to be running Krait runes with celestial as it turns the bleeds from sharpened edges from 2 seconds into 3 seconds. Krait adds two additional cover conditions on use with entangle, the poison (which I accept you could have already applied before) and torment. Whilst you can run krait with settler’s, it has far better synergy with celestial/rabid + sharpened edges.

As for the sustain argument.

First of all, you gain 376 vitality which is good, we can all agree.

You lose 193 healing power. You’ll forgive my speculation, but that’s about 10 less hp/s with SoTW and I’d imagine about 20 or so on regeneration. So all in all, not much. Let’s not forget we only, in this spec, have 3 uses for healing power.

Now the big one, toughness. You lose 422 toughness. That’s a lot to lose.

I’ll be honest here, settler’s is a terrible amulet, it has been since the jewell/amulet change. And that’s why. No one ever needs that much toughness from an amulet, let alone a class/spec with access to 3 evades on short cool downs and an invulnerability on 80s cool down. Quite simply, it’s a bad allocation of stats. And with all passive defences it leads to bad play dependent on it, instead of teaching people to use their active defences ina smart and efficient manner.

And this brings me to the central fallacy of the sustain argument: sustain for what? What does more sustain bring you? Ranger as a class and certainly in this spec, contributes very little in group utility to a team fight., it’s not like that sustain gives you an extra 10 seconds and in that 10 seconds you can get off that crucial conditional clear on an ally or anything else worthwhile. No. You simply just stay alive longer. That’s it. And bear in mind, you’ve traded all that damage for that and the burden falls on the rest of the team to account for that lost damage. Effectively, you’ve lowered your teams chances of winning to just simply postpone the ending of the fight 10-20 seconds. That doesn’t seem like such a good bargain to me.

So no, I don’t agree that settler’s does ‘everything better’.

Sube Dai.8496:

alvarez.3159:

What I don’t like about celestial is the waste of most of the power stats, because unlike ele, engi and warrior, the standard weapon sets (a/d and s/t) have horrendous powerdamage attached to their skills. As it stands now, I feel like Settlers does everything Celestial should be doing, just even better.

I agree. Settler has so much more sustain than celestial, AND more condition damage. Plus you can still try and stack might with it if you want to.

Celestial is a good amulet, just not the best for rangers.

I actually don’t think that Settlers gives more sustain than Celestial because of the way that damage is calculated. Its attack damage over armor. Celestial will give you 2700 armor vs the Settlers 3200. Essentially, above 2700 you’ll get diminishing returns against all but the strongest hits, which you should be dodging. Celestial also provides about 4k additional HP. As Silvio stated, the extra healing power provides a negligible benefit unless you’re running a regen spec.

Stacking might is far more useful with Celestial. In part because of diminishing returns to condition damage, but also, your stacked might is a more effective power boost because of the crit% and ferocity.
Based on my Celestial build, with the 9 stacks of might that Silvio mentioned, you’ll have a decent 1679 power and 1228 condition. Keep in mind that above 1200 condition damage is about where the diminishing returns kick in.

The Celestial Hybrid Ranger utilizes all of the stats at their peak efficiency.

P.S. Here is neat breakdown of relative survivability:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/60838-math-damage-reduction-toughness-and-vitality/

By this metric of armor*health, on a 0/2/6/6/0 spec, celestial actually provides more survivability, but they are both in the top end of the spectrum.

I see and understand your points and I will give Celestial another look. It’s just that personally I had better results with Settler’s, though I changed my build slightly after switching to it. It may work as well or better with Celestial.

Well like I said I do run regen bunker, with natures voice. We’ll see. I am going to try celestial again as well.

I can personally attest that this build is really strong. I have only recently starting getting into solo queue, but I have something like an 8-0 record with this build over the last couple of days, including an amazing 4v5 victory on Spirit Watch.

This build is an absolute beast in 1v1. I have also found it not too shabby in team fights. Showing up to a fight in progress and dropping entangle and bonfire on the point, followed up by a wolf fear can really swing things dramatically.

Poison Master is really strong. However I still prefer shortbow over sword/torch for the more reliable Poison Volley and bonus of an interrupt. I miss that burning from Bonfire and sword mobility but I find it wierd to have to stay on a melee weapon while kiting or be stuck on Axe.

“Why the lack of Shortbow?
The one thing the Ranger class lacks is access to AoE. This makes its team fight presence not that great. You may be a hard target to focus down, but while you teammates are being pressured, your only option is to counter pressure with short bow while in team fights. This isn’t exactly ideal. Take the fight to the side points, however, and it’s a completely different story. With Axe/Dagger, you have the burst, the evades, a good weakness uptime and the immobilises to land your burst that comes from Spitblades. By not taking a Shortbow, you also get to pack in a Torch while not compromising on any of your evasive skills. This is a huge DPS and survivability boost compared to flanking with a short bow. Not to mention fighting on nodes makes it easier to land your skills.”

Believe me when I say this, short bow is very underrated. Short bows strength comes from positioning. While this is just my opinion, I have never found any build or weapon that will apply more pressure than simply auto attacking with the right build/position with the short bow.

Another personal taste is taking the new revised Great sword with the short bow. For a ‘disengage’ and ‘mobility’ between points/fights. The evade on the swoop + block makes it the perfect compliment to the short bow now.

Not knocking your build just speaking from my experiences using short bow as a ranger and testing builds for a while now.

Three Minutes

Well naming it after yourself is slightly pompous. This is probably the closest thing we have to a meta build right now. Tons of people are running this or slight variants of it, myself included. It’s effectively the old spirit build without the spirits, since spirits got indirectly nerfed by eles and engies.

Someone, I think it was siroso, convinced me circle of life was better than nature’s protection.

This build is a slight variant of the one on metabattle, APeX ran that in the ToG.

Sebastian Knight.4736:

I can personally attest that this build is really strong. I have only recently starting getting into solo queue, but I have something like an 8-0 record with this build over the last couple of days, including an amazing 4v5 victory on Spirit Watch.

Hey, thanks for trying it out and glad it worked for you. I’ve personally really started enjoying the play style of ranger ever since I’ve been playing this, and yes, it’s hella strong.

Dead Muppet.9718:

Believe me when I say this, short bow is very underrated. Short bows strength comes from positioning. While this is just my opinion, I have never found any build or weapon that will apply more pressure than simply auto attacking with the right build/position with the short bow.

Hi, thanks for the feedback. The reason I disagree with that is because I choose not to participate in team fights as a Ranger. I feel like out of the roles I could perform with this trait setup, home point defending is the best. Now after I’ve caped home, I could go into mid fights, but even with a short bow, I don’t feel that much useful outside of Entagle. However, if I take the fight to far point and win my 1v1s or hold out 1v2s, it can pretty much snow ball solo queues. Still, I see where you’re coming from, and I’ll give Shortbow another chance to see how effective I can be in team fights.

Fluffball.8307:

Well naming it after yourself is slightly pompous. This is probably the closest thing we have to a meta build right now. Tons of people are running this or slight variants of it, myself included.

Haha, maybe you’re right. I should have called it Rome’s Slight Variation to the Meta Ranger Build, but that just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Alsooooo, since I came up with this and was using Poison Master before it was “meta” (aka Entangle buff), I feel like I have the right to call it my own, even if people have now come up with variations that are quite similar to this. Or maybe not. Let’s just call it a community build that I like to use a lot. :p