Guild Wars 2

I am currently using exotic soldier for my armors and ascended berserker for trinkets and weapons. I use both bows for range and a greatsword for melee. My traits are 30/25/0/15/0.

Should I stick and make an ascended soldier set? Or should I make a sentinel one for survivability? I mostly play PVE .

If you do dungeons then make a mix of berserkers and assassins armor.

Assassins helmet, zerker shoulders, assassins chest, zerker gloves, assasins pants and zerker boots.

Toughness and vitality are absolutely useless in PvE when 90% of incoming damage can be avoided with dodges, evasion skills, blinds and other means.

Why make ascended armor for PVE? Sentinel is going to be overkill and rather expensive. I’d stick to what you’re using now if it’s working for you.

no ascended stuff for ranger. save them for your non-ranger characters

@felixdacat: Because I have nothing else to do.

@Taku: sounds nice but I want to use the armor for wvw as well.

Heavy. For your Guardian or Worrior

Taku.6352:

If you do dungeons then make a mix of berserkers and assassins armor.

Assassins helmet, zerker shoulders, assassins chest, zerker gloves, assasins pants and zerker boots.

Toughness and vitality are absolutely useless in PvE when 90% of incoming damage can be avoided with dodges, evasion skills, blinds and other means.

no need for assasins with all acended..get full bersi, take spotter and be happy

If you’re set on those 2 stats then definitely go for soldiers stats, you’ll want the extra power for attacking and you can always make up the vitality by investing in applied fortitude (guard defense line for WvW ranks)

For PvE, the extra power would be more useful since you’ll most likely dodge most attacks and you’ll end up killing enemies faster, negating the need for the increased health.

kiwituatara.6053:

no ascended stuff for ranger. save them for your non-ranger characters

ahahahah.. I was waiting for a post like this. I mean every thread here should include at least one!

You sir didn’t dissapoint me!

If you’re making Ascended armor you should be aiming for high level Fractals. If that’s so, then you’ll need the extra Infusion slots for Agony Resistance. In which case, you go full Zerker, as that is the Meta for all PvE classes. You should do some research on your own about this, but in short: the idea is to kill the boss as quickly as possible; avoid major attacks; toughness draws aggro; everything one-shots you at higher levels, no matter how much toughness/vitality/healing power you can possibly stack.

If you’re not planning on doing high-level Fractals, then stick to your Exotics. The pitiful stats gained from the insurmountable cost (approximately 1000g at the time of this post) upgrading for a less than 5% increase is not worth it.

Dulfy has put up a spreadsheet to show the breakdown of Ascended stats to Exotics here:
http://dulfy.net/2013/12/12/gw2-ascended-armor-stats/

TL;DR don’t waste your money on upgrading to Ascended unless you plan to do high level Fractals – if so, go full Zerker.

I got assassin gloves and boots, 100% crit sure is nice

But in all seriousness. I’d go apothecary, dire or rabid.
Why? Because our most powerful traitline is wilderness survival (and because its the only traitline that isn’t cluttered with junk and it also contains one of our very few condi cleanses). Also, any power build rangers are kitten by the fact that power scales terribly for us. Yes, I’ve seen very good power rangers out there, but kitten is kitten.

but you even get 100% with disi banner and spotter Oo

I’m going for zerker ascended set, and that is my recommendation, on my ranger (got helmet,boots and legs so far).
I don’t like fractals, I’m doing this because, well … why not? I can afford that and I like my ranger in PvE, it is my main, so why not aim for the best armor in game?
I’m running zerker amor + zerker/valk trinkets and weapons, I have max power/crit damage, 80% crit with fury (good enough for me) and ok HP for my WvW adventures, I’m totally satisfied with my current build.

If you’re going to get serious about WvW, then soldier/sentinel is where it’s at. I just finished making my full ascended sentinel set today and I play primariliy in WvW. Expensive as hell, yes, but with ascended cavalier trinkets and guard stacks I have no shortage of toughness and vitality. Often I am one of the last ones standing in fights, especially with Bark Skin.

Toughness? For PvE? Never. As others have said. The difference in stats between exotic and ascended is quite small and you can get plenty of agony resist through your accessories so I wouldn’t bother with ascended armor at all for PvE.

In WvW, soldiers and sentinels is almost never the right answer either. Especially for a class like Ranger where you’re already hurting for damage and you have almost no burst to speak of. Not a full suit anyway.

For WvW you’ll need to tell us what your goals are and we can go from there. Typically a player aims for 2.5k to 3k armor rating for WvW regardless of class. Front liners may want closer to 3.5k, but you’ll never realistically be a front liner and even if you were, you’d use a greatsword and that evade will compensate heavily for any deficiency in armor.

So tell us if you want to lean more heavily on the tanky side (closer to 3k) or dps side (2.5k). I would never play below 2.5k to be honest.

I made celestial, as i play a variety of different builds and play different parts of the game it’s working out pretty well. I use to use a mix of knights, caviler and cleric before so i chose celestial for ascended as i was going to be time gated anyway.

I still throw on the exotic PvT gear when I’m zerging in wvw