Guild Wars 2

Alright, with the Stronghold beta tourney up tomorrow, I felt I should share a build I know to be quite effective in it. There’s a few things you may find odd, but these are in place because it’s what I use, not necessarily what’s best. I’ll be adding a Variants section down near the bottom.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQJATRjMq0yaBLOsQ1ag+ga9DEAjNrK491uthbGH9xrI-TJBFwACuCAA3foaZAAPCAA

(At request, I put together a small build for when the Specialization changes hit. Check it out. http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgUFdAHcA-Q~ )

The basic gist of it is this – you’re a power longbow ranger with a twist. Your job isn’t to hunt down other players (though you can certain;y do that if given the opportunity) but instead to slam NPCs. The the pet can act as a tank for you when you’re assaulting enemy gates, to take out the guard NPCs, and can even tank the enemy lord for you for a little while.

Pet Choice: We’re using drakes rather things like canines or cats. The Drakes have an excellent balance of survival ability and DPS, helped by the fact that they can cleave. Damage-wise, River Drake and Marsh Drake are superior to the other types, but the difference is small enough that if you want a different type of drake, you can get it without too much lost. Beastmaster’s Bond makes it so that your pet becomes hard to kill the longer you avoid swapping it – this is important if you’re playing the pet as a tank, as any time you swap the pet, the aggro it’s accrued will be transferred to you.

Weapon Choice: The classic Longbow/Greatsword combo here is my preferred playstyle, but to be honest the Greatsword is optional. You should be spending at least 75% of your time with the longbow in this build, and only swap to the melee weapon when you’re getting overwhelmed. We have no traits related to the use of the greatsword, so if you have a weapon you’d prefer to use in its slot (perhaps a sword, maybe an axe? it’s up to you) feel free. The Longbow with the Eagle-Eye trait allows you to do two things. The first is sit back from a safe distance while your pet is tanking defender NPCs. The second is that you can play turret from your own fortifications – Doorbreakers and archers, at least from the last beta, simply didn’t have enough HP withstand the hail of arrows a longbow ranger can put out, allowing you to be a team’s best gate defender. The Fire and Air sigils shouldn’t need an explanation, but just in case – Rangers tend to have mediocre burst, so this adds some. Simple as that. They also combo nicely with Opening Strike.

Skills Choice: The power trait line gives us access to Signets as a strong resource. We should all know the power of Signet of Stone by now, and a 20% reduction in cooldown for other signets is useful as well, as that’s what we’re using. Signet of the Hunt gives both you and your pet a 25% speed increase, though because the pet also gains any speed boosts you do, your pet is actually getting a 50% speed boost, neatly solving the requirement of agility training. Lightning Reflexes is good as an escape mechanicsm, an immobilize cure, and a stunbreaker, mostly meant for use when you need to get some distance on an enemy player.

Healing Spring is important because it’s your only condition removal. With the greatsword skill Swoop, or the Jump combo from the sword, or maybe even the warhorn’s Call of the Wild, it adds additional healing to your party. A combo field is never a bad thing to have. The Elite skill, Entangle, is used for hindering enemy NPCs. To my knowledge, not a one of them has any real condition removal, meaning if you’re being overwhelmed by doorbreakers and archers you can pop entangle and hold them still for a moment to take the pressure off. Also effective against heroes, though they’re much more likely to be escorted by players who’ll go out of their way to break the roots entangling their Man-shaped super-weapon

Armor Choice: Berserker armor is important here. As anybody who’s aware of the old Bearbow paradigm knows, pets aren’t affected by your stat deficiencies, so it won’t cease playing tank just because you chose to spec for damage. This is important because while Rangers have a decent amount of damage, it’s sustained damage rather than burst. By making it more likely to crit, increasing ferocity, and the base damage through power… well, you probably know this spiel already. Suffice to say, there’s no reason not to go for this in the long run. Since you should always have your pet alive with this build, Rune of the Ranger seemed like a natural choice.

Trait Choice: Now, this is a bit of an oddball, I’ll admit. The reasoning is simple – all the longbow traits are in Marksmanship, and being our power line we take it to the top. the two points in Skirmishing are to increase the damage output of the pet. I know that Drakes have a comparatively low precision, but they still crit a decent amount and thanks to Opening Strike and Beastmaster’s Bond. A tail spin is an impressive source of damage when it crits, and drakes sometimes open with it. The trait points in Beastmastery are to make it so that when you send your pet off to take on enemy NPCs, it doesn’t get mulched. The trait choices themselves are a fair bit more fluid than the other two lines, though.

Variants: As I mentioned above, the Greatsword is an optional weapon at best. The longbow is important for its DPS and long range, but the Greatsword can be swapped out for a sword and [insert offhand here] without any real trouble. that’s up to your preference as a player.

Pets… Drakes are definitely to my preference since they’ll actually have more HP than you. If you want to be absolutely certain your pet won’t die, go for a bear, but that sacrifices a lot of damage and the drake’s AoE capability. If you care less for your pets survivability and more for murdering things as fast as possible, cats are a good choice, but they’re squishy and are only single-target. Same with birds. Canines can give you some additional battlefield control through their takedown ability and through their howls, but frankly in the PvE style scenarios you’re liable to encounter in Stronghold in my opinion being able to do that to a single target isn’t enough.

For Skills, if you feel the need for some additional healing for you and your pet and/or stability over a stunbreak, Signet of the Wild is a good choice. It gives you and your pet some additional tankiness, benefits from the Signet Mastery trait, and a damage buff at the right time can do wonders for you.

For traits, like I mentioned above the Beast Mastery Traits are the most fluid. if you find your pet is being downed too much or you’re swapping quite a bit, perhaps Beastmaster’s Bond should be swapped out for Compassion training, to improve the benefit of Natural Healing. Rending Attacks could be replaced with Speed Training to allow your pets to dole out their attack skills more quickly. Natural Healing could be replaced with Invigorating bond, which would allow you to have additional healing when necessary. If you’re not feeling Pet’s Prowess, Companions Might should mean you can maintain a good number of might stacks on your pet instead.

If you feel berserker armor is too squishy for you, try Knight’s. It still has high precision and power, but toughness in place of ferocity allows you a bit more defense when push comes to shove. Still, it is a DPS loss you’ll feel, so bear that in mind.

Now then. Any thoughts on this setup? It was originally built for PvE with some minor changes to account for a PvP setting, which in a strange way is exactly what Stronghold is. I felt it’d be best to have a build that reflects that.

Stronghold won’t be out before the trait changes have already come out, so you’ll have another full traitline to take condi removal.

I think your concept of fighting mostly NPCs instead of humans is wishful thinking though, and swapping pets is more effective for tanking PvE than investing in the BM line anyway.

Two things.

First, this was put together in response to the fact that we have a Stronghold Beta tomorrow, before specializations go live. This build is for tomorrow, not months down the road. I do appreciate the comment on what it should look like in the far future, yes, but that doesn’t matter for the beta happening now. Still, since you’ve pointed it out, I’ve whipped a build together using Dulfy and That_Shaman’s Specialization builder that I’ll edit into the opening post in a moment.

Second, did you play the last Stronghold Beta? While I was running around on my ranger, 80% of my fights were focused on killing NPCs, not fighting other players. There was times when opposing players outright ignored me to go about what they were doing. So, no, I’m going to have to disagree on that point.

I wasn’t trying to be aggro, just pointing out you have a fatal weakness in the current version that will be fixed for the actual release.

I played the last beta. Everyone was running around like headless chickens. I think once people get more familiar with the mode they’re going to put humans in useful places. No more smashing through gates while no one defends.

I still think swapping pets is a better way of PvEing than trying to buff your pet into a tank, and you make yourself more effective at the same time, with better traits.

Maybe, maybe not. I’ve found this setup more effective for me. Beastmaster’s Bond is one I pointed out as easy enough to be swapped out for something else, and it’s the primary reason to keep your pet out rather than swapping.

As far as humans running around with their heads cut off… maybe. We simply don’t know how the meta will develop there, so for now I’m going to stick with my own prediction over that of another. If it turns out I goofed, I’ll freely admit it.