Guild Wars 2

Okay guys, I’ve really thought this one through. It’s almost your typical zerk LB ranger except with a twist. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQJATRjMq0ta5KurQ1ag8gadAkArN7Q4EaBXfRBbqA-T1BBABYp8DgLAAOq/kiuA03fohHAwZKBJEgutA-w

You sacrifice your runes and utility slots for trapper runes and traps on the utility slots. A lot of people will criticize this since trapper and traps alike are a condi style of play and counter intuitive to how Crit LB ranger should play. But I think the stealth and super speed make it invaluable. You become a very very fast roamer due to constant superspeed uptime and GS 3. You also are running around almost constantly in stealth making you very unpredictable when you decided to hit someone with some arrows. These traps come off cooldown so often that you don’t really need to worry about saving them for combat.

When you enter combat you play how you normally would, try to kite and stun lock them with pets and elite and LB 4. When you notice them closing in on you, place a trap to stealth away and use superspeed to reposition and continue your barrage. Be careful though because if they cross the traps you will become revealed so you have to be preemptive with when to place traps and position them correctly
(but even if you become revealed you maintain superspeed and can get away pretty easily). You can also use the trap stealth to shadow stomp downed opponents JUST BE SURE TO NOT PLACE THE TRAP ON TOP OF THEM AS IT WILL REVEAL YOU.

The reason I prefer the Crit LB setup is because it has amazing burst and playability and I believe it can play the niche of ranged thief. I’m not claiming this is the best build out there but it’s certainly interesting and fun to play if you can manage sacrificing your utility slots for stealth and superspeed. Let me know what you guys think!

This setup can be good to gank uplevels and some noob zerglings, but nothing more.

You also don’t have costant swiftness for when you roam in search of a prey and having every trap on cd before a combat is not smart, I would switch one trap with Signet of the hunt for when you are running from point to point.

As you have already said you sacrifice every utility slot for stealth/swiftness, so you have 0 stunbreaks and only healing spring to heal and cure conditions (1 condition every 2s), this is a big problem when you have only 2k armor and 16k HP, it also forces you inside the spring making it not ideal for a LB ranger.

Also the stealth from traps is not reliable against : ranger/mesmer/necro because of the AI.

This build IMO has too many counters :

-Heavy conditions (almost every roaming build has it)
-AI Builds (because the AI will trigger most of the traps)
-CCs, medi guardian, cele engi/ hambow warrior/ thief / cele ele/ shatter mesmer will eat you alive if only 1 cc is applied to you and they all got more than 1.
+Basically every roaming build can hardcounter this.

Actually with the trap rotation i have, each trap will come off cooldown just after the other one is over except for a small window in which i will use gs skill 3 to move. and as far as having the cooldowns blown going into a fight, they come back up so fast it usually doesn’t matter, but i can see taking a 25% movespeed signet over one of the traps to have better in fight movement without relying on the traps. Though it’s true it’s not very good for extended fights with most roaming classes, it excels in bringing them down withing 10 seconds usually if done correctly. As far as enemy and AI triggering stealth, you have to know when to trigger the stealth to reposition. A good time is right after using a immobilize/fear combo with rapid fire as they will either be stuck in position or far enough away from me that i can get the stealth off and create some space between us. It is true though that if they get on me and I don’t have any immobilize or fear then I run into trouble, but at that point i usually swap to GS and 3 skill away to plant a stealth trap far enough away to get distance between myself and enemy. Condi clear only being on the heal skill is problematic as you’ve stated because I have to coordinate when I use it tactically. Not good for extended fights against heavy cc or condi users, but exceedingly well at quick burst and ending fights quickly. Also extremely group friendly.

EDIT: an alternate solution to help fight against heavy cc users is to take the shared anguish trait in wilderness survival and drop the points in Nature magic. Only one instance of cc mitigation for every 90 seconds, but it helps.