Guild Wars 2

My current ranger is a mix of soldier and sentinel (lb+sw/a) that I got following www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/84933-sentinel-frontliner-next-level-wvw-ranger-guide/

Problem is, I’m kind feeling it underwhelming at the moment. It’s kinda expensive, so I was not really wanting to just get rid of it. I also haven’t had much time to mess around and theory craft. So, my question to the ranger community, is were I to keep my current equipment, what are some build ideas I could try to use? I can change weapons and traits, but preferably keep the armor either soldiers and sentinels (mines currently a random mix).

I’m not necessarily asking for full builds, mostly just ideas that I could build around. Namely, what kind of advantages could I use by having high vit. Thanks for your consideration.

Honestly there isnt much you can do. Sentinals is the most defensive armour there is, and soliders isnt far behind. No matter what you do your damage will be low.

All I can really suggest is maybe traiting into skirmishing instead of WS. The traits are much less useful for you, but you already have so so much armour and vitality, you really just need the Prec and Ferocity from that traitline to increase your damage, and the Minor Master trait for Skirmishing really is an incredible and under valued trait giving 50% fury uptime for nothing at all.

I dont know how much you have already changed the original build posted.. But also maybe take QZ over MT, WH over OffHand Axe, and RoA over Entangle. This basicly cuts out your area control ability, which is what the build was originally designed for, but will give you a lot more fury and damage in general, and I think its better,

But really.. the best thing you can do is go buy Knights armour. Sentinals is very meh armour on any class. Warriors and Guardian can sort of pull it off, but rangers not so much.

I’d also agree with Cufufalating, go get Knights armour. There is a variant of this build that uses Knights armour and puts out a fair amount of damage while also being quite defensive, I’m not sure if you saw that or not? I use a very similar build to that and have a lot of success in WvW, but as Rangers we just won’t have the damage output others have.

Swapping weapons out a lot as well as skills to what each situation calls for can really boost the build, in my opinion. Utilising all of the viable weapons available to us is one of the best things you could do, so I always advise to carry one of every weapon we can use around with you if bag space allows you to do so. I’m not sure exactly how the build you’re using performs, so this is all based from my experiences with the variant build that I’ve tweaked myself to suit how I like to play. So maybe the Knights variant is more of what you’re after? I know it’s a shame because you spent so much on the Sentinel gear, but using Knights armour is probably the best option for you, however you could keep your Sentinel accessories equipped if you’re really concerned about that, also it’s a combination that’s working for me currently.

I can swap out the soldiers for knights easily enough. I knew my damage would be particularly low by going with sentinels, and I’m not completely worried about that. I just had some bad wvw runs where it felt like I wasn’t helping whomever was around me, which is what Umie’s build was built for. I’ll just have to mess around with a few variants more and perhaps I just need some more time to get accustomed.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNEQNBlYDbkRlWWbYxmFuWDkHUrngAogbHEb7PwaDA-TlSAwAKuAAUeCA/U/ZmuBAHEAxKfYu/wDTItVCGVJEhAWsGA-w

This is just something I threw together so I can’t guarantee it’ll be incredibly effective. But given that you seem to be shooting for something on the defensive side with offensive capability, and that it also seems to be directed towards WvW, I thought this might make sense.
A ton of toughness so physical damage shouldn’t be a huge concern. All your utilities and a lot of your traits can be changed as you please, I just designed this as how I would use it if I were going to be using this build.
Because condition damage isn’t a main stat (or one at all) on Knight’s armor, Undead runes synergize really well with the high toughness in Knights and the secondary toughness stat in Rabid. Which will mean you’ll have a good balance of defense (mind you low vitality) and offense through condition damage and power/precision. Fortunately Rangers make good use of hybrids so if you decide to run a trapper build you should hit quite hard. Traps are pretty nasty if they have more than just condition damage behind them, throw some power in to the mix and those will hurt. So I could very much suggest taking Spike Trap and/or Viper’s Nest with you.