Guild Wars 2

And please no comments about if you wanna go full melee just go warrior or ranger without longbow/shortbow omg noob.

I think this is a pretty good build, might need some tweaking though as I don’t really know much about rangers in general, and haven’t really played it outside of PvE.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNBhYDbkRlOWbZxiFuWDYIUtbhQYYZFAuLiY4qLRHUB-TViHwACuAAw1N8UJoPlcEVO4R9HAPBgAHEAM7PQGAzFA-w

I went 0/2/6/6/0 mainly because I wanted to start off with good base survivability before building damage.

Bark Skin seems really good for those situations where I get really low. 50% damage reduction is a lot and I feel would help me against warriors and thieves especially.

Survival of the Fittest would give me the condition removal that I need plus the added fury is always a bonus.

I went for sword/greatsword cooldowns cuz it seems like a no brainer. Having reduced cooldowns for two weapons would boost both my offense and survivability/mobility.

I also went 2 in skirmishing for the swiftness while in combat to compliment my high mobility. As well as I got bleeding on critical hits. It seemed like a waste to have 300 condition damage but have almost no way to apply conditions. I know it is only 2 seconds, however I am hoping it works well with the warhorn #4 for some decent bleed stacking. That is also why I got the geomancy sigils. To apply some bleed stacking while dealing direct damage. The geomancy/hydromancy combo seems like an excellent burst/burst set-up combo which compliments the playstyle of the build which is up in your face.

You will also notice that I have picked up a lot of sustain. Mango pies provide 85 hp/s, runes of dolyak will provide around 50 hp/s and signet of the wild 62 hp/s. This is close to 200 hp/s, if I add regen it is about 130 more hp/s. And I also have a heal in which I can leap through twice and blast once for a nice burst of HP and gives me extra condi removal.

However, I am unsure of which pets to use and which ones would be the best for this build. I do not have most pets, let alone have tested any of them. So this is probably where I need the most help.

Also, I have thought about running an anti-condition variant of this build, which uses lemongrass as food and melandru as runes. I could then replace signet of the wild with Protect Me for an extra stunbreaker/pseudo-invulnerability. But not sure which one would be better. Only thing I am worried about is that would it be able to deal a respectable amount of damage. I have zero might-stacking capability and less than 2000 power.

I would swap Sigil of Hydromancy for Sigil of Renewal.
Take the Fern Hound for additional healing, and the Blue Moa for protection and another heal.

I like spiders for melee builds for there ranged CC it helps stop ppl for kiting you all day, if you went spiders it would be a good idea drop sharpen edges for pet condi duration in Marks.

Do you really need bark skin in this build as you have alot of evade. you could take WS down to 2 points for WS skills cool down and use those 4 point elsewhere such as BM for F2 cool down and spider buff or vigor or put in to skirmishing for vigor and/or Pet might or got all the way up in marks for signets and take stone

Wow this keeps coming up, so sorry if I am repeating myself from other threads.

I’ve been using a similar build. Things I do differently:

Take 100% offense with your gear. You simply don’t need any more defense and your damage is horrible enough to begin with. You really need that damage from ranger runes or something similar over the tanky dolyak. I don’t mean to scream offense all the time, but you can’t go full on defense and also kill people; they’ll just leave. Especially since thieves and mesmers are mostly what you’ll run in to roaming.

After trying it for ~ a month or so, SotF sucks. In this build, you’re getting on-demand condi removal, but you’re only getting it less than twice a minute. Unacceptable IMO. If you take SoR and HS I’ve found that to be enough for most encounters. If you see a necro in the distance of course you have more than enough time to swap to empathetic bond.

Warhorn isn’t actually benefitting you that much. The main boost in a 1v1 is fury, but you already have a LOT of that. CotW is horrible damage. I’ve been using offhand axe for an extra interrupt, something to snag fleeing opponents, and one of the few hard-hitting ranger skills available. A raven can get you some defense as well as the swiftness.

Gotta run so I will cut that short. Hope any of that helps you think about the build you want.

Fluffball.8307:

Wow this keeps coming up, so sorry if I am repeating myself from other threads.

I’ve been using a similar build. Things I do differently:

Take 100% offense with your gear. You simply don’t need any more defense and your damage is horrible enough to begin with. You really need that damage from ranger runes or something similar over the tanky dolyak. I don’t mean to scream offense all the time, but you can’t go full on defense and also kill people; they’ll just leave. Especially since thieves and mesmers are mostly what you’ll run in to roaming.

After trying it for ~ a month or so, SotF sucks. In this build, you’re getting on-demand condi removal, but you’re only getting it less than twice a minute. Unacceptable IMO. If you take SoR and HS I’ve found that to be enough for most encounters. If you see a necro in the distance of course you have more than enough time to swap to empathetic bond.

Warhorn isn’t actually benefitting you that much. The main boost in a 1v1 is fury, but you already have a LOT of that. CotW is horrible damage. I’ve been using offhand axe for an extra interrupt, something to snag fleeing opponents, and one of the few hard-hitting ranger skills available. A raven can get you some defense as well as the swiftness.

Gotta run so I will cut that short. Hope any of that helps you think about the build you want.

What would be the best runes you think for this build? For offense? Or would ranger runes probably be the best? The point of this build as well kind of is that most players can’t just leave and disengage from me whenever they want. Except maybe if you are a thief.

Also, SotF removes 2 conditions when using a survival skill. I am not sure how this is bad in comparison to SoR. Muddy Terrain is on a 20 second cooldown so i can remove 6 conditions within a minute, the same thing as SoR except you also get the cripple + immobilize and fury. And add LR and that is 4 more conditions removed within a minute for a total of 10. Plus I have Healing Spring. I think i prefer to remove conditions whenever I want rather then one you have no control over.

I will definitely try the OH axe though, seems interesting.

Ya, the SotF condi count was way off, saw that right when I posted it but had to run. I still found I wasn’t ever intentionally removing condis with it. I don’t spam LR for obvious reasons, so it’s only MT doing the work, which seemed silly for a grandmaster trait. Whatever, if you like it, obviously keep using it.

Ranger runes will give you the biggest damage increase as far as I know. I’ve got them on my armor because I use it for PvE as well.

Offhand axe pairs nicely with MoC and maul, but that’s a fairly big trait change. If you ever decide you don’t SotF, or want EB instead, it’s something to consider.

Cool build with easy solutions to make it super good: change the 2 Skirmishing to Marksmanship. Take the “Malicious Training trait”. Change pets for the 2 spiders(forest and cave, you dont need the jungle one you have enough immobilise) BOOM you’r imba. Change signet of the wild for sharpening stones to make use of your 300 condi damage in addition to more fury more condi removal more fun. you have more then enough sustain in this build as it is. If you realy want more sustain change two handed training(it sux and i dont think it adds 5% damage) to nature’s bounty and matiral mastery(you won’t feel the difference) to oakheart slave. congratulations you have 100% regeneration up time in comabt( you need like 2-3 ticks from healing spring). Empathic bound is better then bark skin in wvw, you have 3k armor and tons of healing support, condis are your enemy.
you can always make aditional modifcations for sigils there are tons of better options(might benefits from your 30% boon duration), precision/might stacking wlawys fun, fire/air for brust etc.

Just want to add that QZ is a better than sharpening stones for your build if you know when and how to use it but i wanted you to feel that the 300 condi damage stats have a purpose. another interesting opting is fire trap, its got a short cooldown, you can leap in it for the fire aura or blast with horn for the extra might. You have 100% fury up time anyway so you basicly let go of 2 condi removal(which you have alot of) and the QZ\sharpening stones effect.All are solid options, take what suits your play style the most.

I run somethinf similar gear and trait wise but these are the things that are getting me a bit.

Geomancy Sigil
See now I understand you want to make use of the condition damage from wilderness survival but with that condi damage the 3 stacks lasting their full duration only do as much or less than 2 or 3 procs with sigil of air. It also is affected by your targets armour, any damage mods inc. Vulnerability. I have hiy someone with an air proc for over 1.5k. 56% crit with fury is more than enough to take advantage and it adds more pressure since things come in bigger chunks rather than a clensable dot.

Pet chocie
Why the drakes? As a power build with no ranged option using spiders or dogs would be a lot better. With 2 spiders you can net 6 to 13s of additional immobilize allowing you to land heavy hitting mauls or make an escape. You could even chance sharpened edges to pets prowess and take DPS pets like birds or cats. Both options I feel would be better.

But bar that looks good to me.

@LoughLongArm
The reason for 2 hand training is the extra fury uptime to make use of the 206% critical damage he has. Also for some reason maul gets more than a 5% boost for me whenever I feel like using that trait.
I do however agree with dropping skirmishing for marksmanship since the same thing can be achieved via the 5 vulnerability and the extra power. Also more use of SotF with keen egde or with a pet swap and ungodly amount of immobilise!

@Sigmoid
Hi, he uses hron, he got 100% fury up time even with 2 survival utilty skiils and without ulty. getting the 2h trainig for fury is not so effective.
with his build his damage will come from 1h sword horn, the 2h sword will be more for mobility, defence and if he’s lucky stun maul here and there. the 5% bonus which i think is bugged won’t make much of a difference, its noticeable in builds that have 2500+ power and high crit damage not the case here…..

@LughLongArms
I totally forgot the horn! I don’t count it as a great weapon so that’d probably why.
In that case replacing it with natures protection or evasive purity would be a much better choice. I was thinking the 2h was the main weapon not the sword.

Unlike Fluffball, I run with SotF and I couldn’t be happier with it. For me the immobilizes has always been the thing that gets me killed since I run a very dodgelicious build and it stops me from doing that. With SotF I can get out when I need to, rather than waiting for RNG condi removal to do its thing (which sadly for me usually seemed to be too late!). If you end up sticking with Sotf, then Bark Skin is something you might want to keep, those two works together quite nicely. I’d also move the 2 points into marksman ship and take Keen Edge as it counts as a survival skill.

As for pets, I run with double spiders because of the extra CC but also because they tend to stay alive longer than other pets. The other reason is that I’m not too good with the micromanaging, I tend to get carried away because I have attention span of an apple, so the spiders are pretty safe option in that sense too.

I ran with a warhorn for quite some time too but with one of the recent patches I noticed that the birdsy bird skill is extremely hard to get to land even if there is nothing between you and the enemy, it gets obstructed. Time after time. I’m not too fond of the axe so I switched to dagger and now I can’t really live without it. Now I just use warhorn out of combat for buffing and blasting, but that’s about it.

Here’s my build if you fancy taking a look.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAR8YjEq0xaLLGsQ1aABhaVA0uGShl1d+mDfdJj6J-T1TBABPt/gWKRwRFlKUCelygbUHoLlWdcQAawEUlqUAyFAAPdDoohZhDQAAPJgAAIA3cnpzASoFau5NH6NHayAwMGA-w

After months of experimenting with it, I’ve finally settled on 4 0 6 4 0, with EB and then the usual other traits. I tried a lot of builds similar to X X 6 6 X, but I just felt like I was doing no damage, even in berserker. I do love and miss Bark Skin though. Spotter is nice since I’ve been running around with small groups or guild mini-zergs a lot more lately due to a population increase, and it gives others a decent damage boost.

FrouFrou, with those spiders, wouldn’t you be better off with Malicious Training? Also don’t forget that while you can’t dodge when you’re immobilized, you can still use all of your weapon skill evades. That’s saved me many times and it keeps SoR/PM! and LR off recharge for when someone didn’t make great use of an immobilize.

Agree with FrouFrou, I would drop the horn for dagger since you’ll get your fury from SOTF anyway. That extra evade for a melee build is crucial.

I’ve tried a similar regen build with dolyak runes but I’ve since decided it doesn’t help much against the burst classes. In PvP I can dominate warriors/thieves with zerk longbow but I just can’t get it to work in pvp.

Power rangers just cant seem to get the same damage/survivability ratio in WvW.

Fluffball.8307:

After months of experimenting with it, I’ve finally settled on 4 0 6 4 0, with EB and then the usual other traits. I tried a lot of builds similar to X X 6 6 X, but I just felt like I was doing no damage, even in berserker. I do love and miss Bark Skin though. Spotter is nice since I’ve been running around with small groups or guild mini-zergs a lot more lately due to a population increase, and it gives others a decent damage boost.

FrouFrou, with those spiders, wouldn’t you be better off with Malicious Training? Also don’t forget that while you can’t dodge when you’re immobilized, you can still use all of your weapon skill evades. That’s saved me many times and it keeps SoR/PM! and LR off recharge for when someone didn’t make great use of an immobilize.

As I’m not really good at with micromanaging my pets (I try to keep the pet swapping going and using the f2 skill when it’s out of cooldown, shame on me I can’t get myself to do any fancy positioning for my pet or I’m never really paying attention if the f2 skill would be optimal at that point in any way) I thought it’s better for me to focus on something that I can at least control, which brings us back to SoTF. I picked the Keen Edge just for the sake of being able to squeeze everything out of SotF.

I know you can keep on dodging while being stuck, but sometimes I get stuck in half air where your toon is just twitching like it just had an epileptic attack and you can’t use any of your weapon skills. It truly sucks and is incredibly irritating, especially if it gets you killed. I do understand why you don’t run with SotF as before EB was always part of my build but I suppose it’s a matter of prefered playstyle really. I like to be able to control when the conditions gets removed, even if it means wasting my stunbreaker in a silly situation.