Guild Wars 2

This is certainly not an op thread, just curious. I fought a Ranger in hotjoin. He was by himself other than his pet, and he used traps. Myself, a thief, and another thief on my team as well as 2 thieves guild thieves never took his hp under 3/4 due to tons of dodges and blocks during a 3 minute fight before I gave up and walked off. He had plenty of boons and his traps looked traited. How common is such a beastly build? If not for being able to shadow step past traps he would have destroyed us.

I have heard that that bunker trap build is quite common in Spvp (don’t know about Tpvp). I never do s/tpvp with my Ranger, since I’m much better at pvp on my Mesmer :P. But I think I have to try that build out at some point.

As you indicate, it is a bunker build. It is typical for playing in pvp matches, since you can effectively stay put on an objective tying down 2 maybe 3 opponents so that others can control other objectives. The build does marginal dps, so most professions should be able to heal through it; resulting in a nice stalemate.

Looks at time posted. Reads description of build. Thinks back.

You might have fought against me. I remember doing several 1v3s and winning fairly easily today. I run the heavy evade trap/bunker ranger. Although the only boons I keep on often are vigor, swiftness, fury, and a tad bit of regen. Actually fairly doubtful now though considering my fights don’t last that long unless I’m against an ele. Build isn’t very common amongst low level hotjoins but if you see a ranger in tpvp, assume they are using something along those lines. Most rangers run some variation of a kittenty bm build or equally kittenty dps build that is laughable in terms of pvp.

The Rangers name did start with an I. But hats off to that build. What’s its counter? Lol

Counter trap builds by not standing in their traps.

Forgot to mention I keep protection up quite a bit as well so I guess I do maintain quite a few boons. As for a counter… A d/d ele is a very tough fight as they can cleanse everything pretty rapidly while having both strong burst and decent conditions, but seeing as how that is about to be nerfed I would say my biggest counter is conditions when my pet is dead. As for countering bunker/trap rangers in general, a rule of thumb would be to try and kite the ranger while applying soft cc to the pet to keep it off of you. Trap rangers want you to close in so we can apply hard cc and blow you up with traps while evading any burst. Don’t waste time focusing the pet against this build as the condi damage the ranger will have is much too high and he will literally bleed, burn, and poison you to death at the same time before you can kill both his pets. Attempting to kill him with high up close burst is also a quick way to eat 3 traps and get chained cc’d. Honestly, I designed my build around being extremely versatile, something to be effective against every profession, no hard counter really exists, but I’ll still say if you have the survivability to kill both my pets, then I can get downed a lot easier, especially against conditions as all rangers need their pets to cleanse any reasonable amount of conditions.

For me the Ranger was doing the kiting but I had plenty of shadow steps. If not I’d have been blown to oblivion. The pet was keeping a ton of pressure on me though.

So what your saying is I need to pressure both the pet and Ranger at the same time, whilst avoiding traps? Will take some practice. A very solid build! Grats! Not op but very good!

Most experienced rangers know how to defend themselves against thiefs, because of all the horrible experiences we go through at early pvp, so yes we have evolved to be pretty nimble and tougher to kill. I guess like any other tough to kill opponent, all you have to do is time your condition damage well so that it interferes with their heals, time your bursts to land in between their healing cooldowns, try to taunt with attacks that will make the ranger to use their dodge while you prepare for the real assault. I personally mastered the art of playing 1 vs 3 long before Gw2 so that’s all I can say in terms of how I avoid the ranger’s pet, it just comes natural after tons of practice, but they are not unavoidable either. Try to find in your guild a ranger that uses the same style, so you can duel with them and get more familiar with how these ‘thief-killer’ rangers work.

If 4 thieves are not able to kill a single bunker ranger they should be ashamed. And the trap bunker is also less effective than the standard ones in terms of point holding (because traps are not really useful).

A single thief cannot kill this build, though.