Guild Wars 2

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV8YjEqUzaBLusQ1aAAhaVA0OHahYwd/uDjdJrIK-TpRAwAAeAAUuAAdOCAeOIA92fYcZAA

I have been playing this for almost a week now and am having wonderful results. This is a very very flexible build. It excels at 1v1 and small group fights. In fact I have flat out kittened kitten up A few people have asked me about my setup so I thought I’d share it with everyone here and why I made the decisions I made. Also; who knows? Maybe as a community we can better this build

I’m sure there are many out there running similar variants of this and please feel free to customize to your personal style. This is just what has worked out great for me.

The general idea behind the build is to be the best kitten ed kiter in the game. You do not have great burst. You do; however, have great sustained damage. So when you are in a team fight the idea is to stay on the fringe and flank your opponent stacking a massive amount of bleeds (celest ammy makes short bow, s/d physical damage respectful as well).

If anyone decides to focus you there are many options at your disposal to re-position, keep stacking bleeds, or begin your kite. Pets are a great option. Malicious training is a very underrated trait with the bug fixes to pets. The cc jungle spider/ wolf provide is excellent for both offense and defense.

The success of the kittening of kitten up in my opinion comes down to the sword. With martial mastery you cannot be hit for a very long time in s/d if played right. Take auto attack off so you can stop your chain at will to execute your other abilities. Sword 2 on a 5 sec cd is op. If you can get really good at sword 2 you can get away from anyone. Here is a vid with tips on how to abuse it.

S/d buys you so much time in a fight, with troll unguent up and so many evades/ dodges while maintaining poison on your enemy not allowing them to recover has swung many fights to my favor. I’ve tried s/t quite a bit but your survivability and kiting go way down without martial mastery, I don’t think the damage is worth the trade off.

Short bow has amazing synergy with krait runes, agony/ earth sigils. You can also lockdown your opponent with sb 4 & 5 in conjunction with your pets cc.

For gear krait runes have served me best, I’ve tried chill/ poison set ups (a/d, s/t) but krait and shortbow with s/d have just been so good. As already mentioned earth/ agony sigils on sb has nice synergy with survival of the fittest granting fury on your abilities.

I like geomancy/ engergy with s/d. When you swap you can crippling talon right away to stack with geomancy giving an instant 6 bleeds/ cripple. Energy is great because many times you will be swapping to s/d to get the hell out of dodge.

Celest ammy was the biggest surprise, I was originally rocking a rabid ammy and tried celest on a whim. I actually found the damage to be better, not to mention more health and the healing with unguent is awesome. It makes the build so steady.

Pets are the only thing I’m on the fence about. Wolf is a must, the three sec fear (malicious training) has won me many fights/ saved my kitten . Widdle the villain down to 40%, then pop wolf for knockdown/ fear/ all while flanking and stacking massive amounts of bleeds. Been a nice finisher for me.

So for the second one I keep going back and forth between drakehound and jungle spider. Empathetic bond is pretty crucial and I find my hound dying more than I’d like but is an amazing 1v1/ 2v1 pet. I wish spider immob had a shorter cd but malicious training makes it a hell of an immob.

So this is my build. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. You can troll people all day long and just kite, don’t even need to fight back, lol. Sorry for the lengthy post, go wreck some face.

I’ll definitely have to try this out. It’s almost identical to my build except I run 6 in Skirmishing and 3 traps instead of Nature Magic. I’ve been goofing around trying to find something that doesn’t use traps and this looks promising!

You know….for a build Called “the Skirmisher” I was expecting some points in Skirmishing :P, at any rate this looks like a celestial variation on Krait rune Burst bleeding, I’m excited to give it a try I usually run such a build with Carrion stats.

Sorry for the pre-conceived notions. It is a take on krait burst bleed build! Was originally trying for a poison master build and came full circle to this.

I’ve tried carrion and I don’t think the trade-off is worth it for my personal style. With that being said carrion is a completely viable choice for this build.

While you gain 200ish attack and ton of condi dmg. Your crit drops to the floor which hurts the shortbow’s ability to apply bleeds. A roughly 2k health increase isn’t worth losing 450 toughness over, and your healing goes from 430 to 0.

If I were to run carrion I’d probably take keen edge over malicious training to help my bleed stacking/ lack of crit out (free fury with this set up on ke activating). This means I lose out on cc which hinders the builds survivability even more.

It’s odd, upon originally coming up with the build I was rocking either rabid or carrion… just feels like celest performs much better, my 2c. Enjoy the set up guys

Icha!!!

I will try the build some more, I just think the ranger class just hates me

Good write up!

I like it. I run a “Harasser” ranger that is similar in concept but executed differently. I run short bow about 80 percent of the time, carry sword/torch offhand for the evades, burns and fire field. I trait for short bow cooldown since I use it so much. I use all survival skills on utility/elite and also use Troll Unguent.

Do you always use empathic bond? It must be so tempting to go poison master instead.

I like this type of build!

Actually I run bark skin every over EB sometimes. When you’re facing a lot of hammers for instance. The great thing about bark skin is it applies to your pet as well. So unlike EB which makes your pet take a lot more dmg it’s the opposite.

This allows you to chose a very glassy pet like a bird upping your burst by quite a bit. If you do run BS i would switch malicious training for keen edge giving a free condi cleanse/ more bleeds. Allows you to be more offensive basically.

Poison master is a cool trait, but doesn’t work as well in this setup as EB or BS. To really max it’s potential loud whistle seems to be the trait to best compliment PM. Toying around with the idea of a perma poison/ chill build. I believe others on this forum have already started that though

I had also been trying to get a poison master build to work with almost that same set up, but to no avail. It got me thinking about a chill build as well. It would make sense tactically to try to get the chill and poison together, but it doesn’t really work with our skill lines.

I think you could make a really good signet perma chill build with a power set up; 6/x/6/x/x, Axe/Axe, GS or something. … Like this

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAR3XjEqUxaBLOsw1aA/gadDEALQ7cIGqhXXbBTqA-TphBwAAuAAaeAAWOCAkLDwb/hIHEAA

Sigil of intelligence on swap for burst.

A little off topic but always down to theory craft. Off of a whim this is what I would try out for a PM build.

Non-stop poison, weakness, and chill.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQRAnY8fjEq0xaBLusQ1iAAhaVA0OHa2w+5Yctu63S20TA-TZxFwAJOJAo2fAwDAwwRAoZZAA

Thats the spirit!

But, I think that build would get leveled by conditions. The original post build was a lot closer to what I was thinking for poison and chill with survival of the fittest for condition removal and all.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQRAnY8fjEq0xa/KusQ1aAFhqdJkrNNrAwd6eCPdJb6J-TZhBwAAOCAaOJA52fIyDAwbZAA

Also, Can you get two weapon swap traits at the same time?