Guild Wars 2

Hello people,

I decided to give Ranger a try and since I was sick and tired of the strong Condi builds on other professions, I wanted to go with LB direct damage and a melee weapon alongside it.

I find the Sword a very interesting weapon with lots of evades and the auto attack is quite unique with that gap closer every third strike. But unlike with any other weapon on any other profession, I can not strafe using Sword auto attack and I feel like I have limited options.

Could I please get some hints and insights on to how to use Sword the most efficient way possible?
How and when do you use it?
Which traits go along well with it?
What off-hand weapon do you prefer?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of MH Sword over other melee weapons?

Thanks in advance!

(I love the animal animations on Ranger skills!)

Disable auto-attack so you have complete control.

A cool thing you can do with sword is remove auto targetting, thus every dash will be performed to its full length unless you select a victim manually. If you’re quick with aiming each strike you can dance circles through your enemy and give them little chance for counterattack.

Hitting your opponent then deselecting your target grants you the ability to dash away very quickly with two kicks or pounces. Combined with Hornet Sting and Monarch’s Leap, this can allow you to create huge gaps very quickly.

For offhands, power builds usually carry axe, warhorn or dagger. Axe is for the high damage interrupt of Path of Scars, sometimes you’ll be able to Whirling defence a kill shot though. Warhorn is for the group swiftness, fury and blast finisher on Call of the Wild. Dagger is for the low cooldown evade and long range cripple, the high condi damage from Stalker’s Strike and Crippling Talon is just a bonus, not the reason for the weapon. I highly recommend the warhorn if you want to learn the sword, as it’s the easiest of the three and puts more pressure on you learning to dodge with the sword.

There’s not really any great traits I for it, though one of its best traits Predator’s Onslaught you have to choose it over the Longbow trait or the gorgeous trait Remorseless. Remorseless/Rampage as One/Sword is an incredibly fun thing to do. I’d say the sword just works with whatever you trait really, it’s an incredibly self sufficient weapon.

Thanks a lot for the elaborate answer.

" If you’re quick with aiming each strike you can dance circles through your enemy and give them little chance for counterattack."

Do you mean I select the enemy, attack with the first two chains, deselect the enemy and do the third sword attack, pouncing through them before selecting the enemy again? If not, can you please elaborate on what exactly you meant? Sounds very cool, for sure.

I really liked the off hand Axe. The whirling is great in PvE of course, very useful against ranged attackers in both PvE and PvP, and the interrupt hits very hard, as you say, and is ranged. But easy to dodge, unfortunately. It seems to me that Axe is rather a PvE off hand weapon?

If you start the auto-attack chain – the whole sequence will complete to your 1st selected target.
If you, however, make a pause / the target dies / or the sequence gets delayed/interrupted by any mean – you can get your proposed effect of travelling past your former target (to another, or just into the distance).

Axe, in my opinion, is a PVE offhand. it hits pretty hard if you can get it on a player but the animations are easy to tell. warhorn is good for a power build, torch for a condi build and dagger OH can fit in either plus the evades are great for dueling.

What I meant was, if you don’t have a target selected, your attacks will always move based on where your character/camera is facing and not to any target in particular. One of the most hilarious things you can use this for is flying around WvW deathballs. If you use skill one and land a hit, you’ll move on to attack 2, which you get two chances to hit with, and finally attack 3 which you also get a second use of if the first doesn’t hit. Since attacks 2 and 3 perform short dashes, you can land attack 1 on a nearby opponent and short hop on attack 2 to close the gap with a little bit away, then use your two uses of attack 3 to close the gap on their backline. In this example, you would need to deselect your target if you wanted to dash in a direction that wasn’t straight towards your target. If you learn the hitbox on kick and pounce, you can aim it manually and dance around teamfights more easily than constantly reselecting your target.

That’s what I mean by dancing circles around your enemy. It’s a bit easier to show than explain, so I highly recommend seeing what happens against the test golems in PvP.

Youkay.5294:

Do you mean I select the enemy, attack with the first two chains, deselect the enemy and do the third sword attack, pouncing through them before selecting the enemy again? If not, can you please elaborate on what exactly you meant? Sounds very cool, for sure.

Assuming they haven’t changed it, the entire mechanic is a very wonky, but very powerful if you have the dexterity and awareness to time your attacks and targeting.

Autoattack skill behaviors:

• If you land a hit with sword autoattack (doesn’t have to be targeted, just a hit), it rolls over to the next AA skill.
• AA2 (kick) has a small leap, and AA3 (pounce) has a medium sized leap.
• AA1 (slash) normally does not leap, but can under circumstances I’ll describe below.
• If you don’t use AA2 or AA3 within a short time, the skill will revert back to AA1.
• If you don’t hit anything with AA1 or AA2, the skill reverts to AA1 and the cycle begins again.
• Using AA3 causes the chain to roll back to AA1 regardless of whether you hit. When it does this, AA1 will also leap (about as far as pounce in fact) even though it’s not a leap skill. The only way to avoid an AA1 leap when you’re at AA3 is to not hit 1 until it times out and reverts to AA1.

Consequences of above behaviors:

• If you have a target when one of the AA skills leaps, you will leap toward the target. If the target is closer than leap range, your leap will be cut short to melee range of the target – no further.
• If you have no target, your leap will travel its full distance in the direction you’re facing.
• Maximum leapage would be if you’re faced with a room full of mobs. Simply don’t target anything, face forward, and hit the 1 button manually. Each swing will hit a mob(s), causing the skill to roll over to the next AA, causing you to leap forward with each button press.
• This is particularly dangerous if you’re pushing 1 manually and your target dies. Since your previous swing was a hit (which killed the target), and you now have no target, you will leap forward with the next press of 1. Sometimes off a cliff. Autotarget can save you from this, but has other drawbacks.
• If you killed the target with AA2, then your next press of 1 is AA3 which will leap. Furthermore, since an AA3 to AA1 always results in AA1 leaping, you will leap again with the next press of 1.

So if you need to escape and you have enough awareness to deselect the target after AA1, then the following will give you a lot of distance very quickly:

• AA1 to hit the target, then deselect target.
• AA2 for a short leap which also hits the target because you’re still standing in cleave range. (Doesn’t always work – sometimes you leap out of range. So safer method is to deselect after AA2.)
• AA3 for a medium leap.
• AA1 for a medium leap because the previous skill was AA3.
• Select original target (you called it with ctrl-t earlier in the fight, right?). The 2 skill (hornet sting) will leap you away from the target. Since you are running away and the target is behind you, “away” is forward a medium amount.
• Deselect target. Hit 2 again. Monarch’s leap normally leaps you back towards the target, but without a target it will leap you forward a medium amount.
• Switch to Greatsword, hit swoop for a huge leap.

Altogether, you chain a short leap, 4 medium leaps, and a huge leap together in a few seconds. That should put you around 3000 units away from your starting point.

Like I said, very wonky, but very powerful in the hands of a skilled player.

a technique ive seen and have been trying out:
How to Monarch’s Leap without the rollback of Hornet Sting.

Simple demonstration of where it can be used
https://youtu.be/yplHkISciZU

Holy cow, that sounds like a lot of key press coordination o_O

I will give it a try though Thanks for all the advice.