Guild Wars 2

I’ve been curious as to how to keep the heals from from the beastmaster build and get some damage from the ranger on top of it, and remembered the Magi armor set. I know this set doesn’t get much play as the ways you get it are very limited, and its not very nice to look at. Right now for the armor you can only get it through dungeons or through karma, the trinkets are from drops and there isn’t any magi jewel to slot them with. On top of that if you go for the ascended magi trinket makes a very lengthy process to obtain pieces for a build that may or may not even work effectively.

Now I haven’t obtained the armor or done any ingame testing but I think the most useful thing about this armor set is, that it uses precision instead of power/condition damage which may open up some more options in terms of sigils. With enough precision we can keep something like Sigil of Strength to give us a permanent power boost in battle.

The more ‘solid’ benefits for this is with 30 points into Skirmishing and 30 into Beastmastery, if we hit 65% crit chance and 50% crit damage (very doable as far as I can tell) we would increase out damage out put by about 60%. If you add fury into that, our damage will increase by about 80% and since we do not give up healing power nor the points in beast mastery our pet should still have high uptime.

I did do a mock up build here and the build does look worthwhile. However it takes a long time to obtain, and I would like some input from anyone on whether or not I should pursue it further. I may have missed something important that you may catch, and all in all would like to know if that this is a good idea.

First off, if you put 30 into skirmishing and 30 into BM, you won’t be getting the heals. Contrary to popular belief, the heals don’t come from the BM traitline (sure 300 healing power is nice, but it’s not the backbone). The healing comes from the WS and NM traitlines, so if you aren’t traiting there, you won’t get the most out of your build. NM also goes a good ways towards creating a “heal build”, but it’s still secondary to WS in that WS has amazings grandmaster traits and has so many defensive traits.

This is one of the reasons so many BM players spec into WS as well. The healing power in the BM line complements WS amazingly.

So, by you speccing elsewhere, you are missing out on the most important part of a healing build – the “activations”. You won’t heal without the skills and traits to apply them.

If you want a “heal build”, you need at least 20 in WS and 10 in NM. You will be much better off with 30 in WS due to the GM traits that become available though, but the x/x/20/10/x is absolutely necessary to go that direction. If you want to do it right, it’ll be x/x/20/10/30. That doesn’t leave much room elsewhere.

I hope that clears up something for you. Now that I can move past the first sentence of your post, let’s see what else you said…

i second what Fo Sho said. a million +healing doesnt to any good if you dont have activators to get the juices flowing.

also, faux. Im curious if i could pick your brain for about 30 min on some ideas ive had. perhaps on vent or some such. Im really into this ranger stuff now. so i wanted to run some mix/max past you.

Sure, in a bit. I’ll message you my Teamspeak info.

What about something like 0/20/20/20/10 or something along those lines? You give up some crit chance and crit dmg, but get more in heals and still keep a large bulk of the damage from precision.

The armor is quite low, i’d say you should try to aim for 2300 or more when on a ranger. Not because you should tank, but because it will help a long way from avoiding instadeath by backstab-thief

It’s worth a test. skirmishing has carnivorous appetite and agility training, both of which are good for pet survivability (faster call backs and healing attacks). I’d say you don’t really want permanent regeneration in a dungeon, especially because one shots reign supreme. Just get good healing power, like you’re saying, and with 15 in NM and 15 in WS you will be looking good.

It would be interesting to compare this build to the same build with rampager trinkets. Just to see how well you can stack might compared to how much damage your traps and torch can do.

Neat stuff!