I understand your being drawn toward playing glass ranger.. glass ranger is fun! But if a thief fart is killing you, then you play a glass character but you don’t play them like they’re glass, if that makes any sense.
If you can’t get hit, your weapons/utilities have to be focused toward not getting hit otherwise you’re going to die over and over. In other words, if you want to go full glass, go for it, but you need to sub in skills that absorb damage or help you avoid it.
You said not to ask you to change your weapons, so I won’t (not too much), I’ll just make a very friendly suggestion—with mainhand sword you have 2 evades with relatively short cooldowns, including an evade that can chain into a leap which you can point in any direction you want for defensive OR offensive (mark target which you can now do solo, drop target, flip camera, press Sword 2, reacquire marked targed, press Sword 2 again, to leap and cripple them as they run) purposes, plus an auto attack that chases down targets (which isn’t as bad as people make it sound on here). And if you were Sword/Dagger you would have 3 evades, one of which is very long, and again, all pretty short cooldown, especially with traits. Longbow/GS may be the kind of dps you want, but you can’t dps while dead, and you are noticing that already.
I guess the point of this post is, how glass you can go is related to how many hits you can take, and your current setup takes more hits than your glass build allows.
I don’t know your rune setup but currently you can use Traveler runes to give yourself the 25% speed increase without having to take the speed signet, which would free one of your utility slots. Now the signet ALSO lets you burst harder one one attack, since you’re using it with the trait, but look at your playstyle, are you actually doing that with the signet or do you just have it on for the speed boost? If the answer is the second one, I would suggest dropping it and getting the runes instead. Because if you have a free slot, you can run Protect Me ALONG with Signet of Stone for 12 seconds of invuln (to non condition damage) which is very awesome as glass—as long as you keep your pet alive. Which leads me to another thing.. pets. Your post didn’t mention what you’re using but for glass I would recommend Red Moa on passive. Use the Fury screech and then call it back so it doesn’t run anywhere. All I do is buff myself with it and use it as a secondary HP bar. Secondary pet is Wolf for fearing people away from either yourself or allies when they are downed.
You can survive and kill things in WvW as pure zerker Ranger. But if you don’t want to change your playstyle to get hit less (and negate more damage), then yes, you should probably change your gear.
Phaynel – recently voted the hottest Ranger in GW2 by everyone
married to Railspike the Red Alpha Golem
[PiNK] Toast Forever.
