Guild Wars 2

I tried using a spirit ranger in spvp and was loads of fun. However I do not see a lot of rangers running this anymore in tpvp. This is also the reason why i cant find a lot of posts about it.

So my questions is:

1.) Any updated build now?
2.) Is water spirit any good, ive looked around but only found like 2-3 threads about it and were almost a year old.

Water spirits i find are Horrible, you’ll need your team to consistantly attack to maintain Hp and works wonders with Leech life type teams that use Attrition rather than Isolation>burst.

but when you use the Water spirit you also need to be able to keep hits up and survive with a lack of a decent self heal, so going this route it’ll force you into a Condi/heal support spec. or Condi Bm 0,0,6,4,4 with the pet doing support also with bleeds or Vigor, for more dodges.

thats pretty much water spirit in a nut shell its very situational and very rarely used out side of Organised team set ups.

though healing spring or troll ugent are still better choices but are ether confined to one area or are Selfish to the ranger.

There are a few variants, but I think that the most popular would be either of these:

1) http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV3YjEq0savKusQ1aADhq9JEslArAw9PMEXdBbqA-TJhHwAAeCAILDE4iAAa/BA

2) http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV8YjMq0savKusQ1aADhq9JEslArAw9PMEXdBbqA-TJhHwAAeCABuIAg2fwYZAA

A few of the components are completely interchangeable. Axe/Sword and Rabid/Celestial are the big ones, you can mix and match.

Spirits are being less used now because in general, the spirits themselves get nuked by the majority of the meta builds (hambow, engi, ele) which are a common core and even stacked on most teams currently. The spirits don’t live long enough to be beneficial, so people have started running more selfish utilities. However, when you start to run more selfish builds as a ranger, you end up just competing for output efficiency against classes like engi/ele, and in most cases, AoE is a huge deciding factor and the ranger builds aren’t as “swiss army knife” as just picking up another engi/ele.

All that being said, rangers aren’t ineffective. It’s more about knowing your role and strengths and weaknesses and playing to them.

Especially when using the shortbow/axe build. A good rotation will insta-down unsuspecting opponents or opponents with no cooldowns to deal with it. You CAN do a very similar rotation with sword as well, but you do lose out on that 5+ (crit bleeds happen frequently with axe 5) bleed stack in your rotation, which is why I tend to run celestial with the sword variant, so that the small power investment can be used to DPS in a damage rotation and make up for the lost bleeds.

I hope these are good starting points to help out!