Guild Wars 2

after a bit of looking around, i’m liking how the shortbow/greatsword combo works, and i’ve been enjoying using it. however… i have absolutely no idea how to lay out my traits.

most of the recent posts i’ve noticed on the subject are from people concentrating on beastmastery. my pet is nice and all, but i’m not exactly the best micromanager in the world. sometimes i have enough trouble keeping myself alive. so i’m not 100% certain i want to put all my eggs in that basket… i see some abilities that look really good, that i think would be really nice to have in WvW, like ‘hide in plain sight’, and i can totally see the value of skills that reduce my cooldowns, but i’m having trouble deciding what would be of more worth to me… partially because i am rather new…i see builds with vids of rangers owning in WvW that totally ignored things i would have put points into.

i’d like some insight, in plain noob friendly english. XD are there certain abilities that look attractive, but aren’t as good as they appear, or are totally bugged. some abilities that sound lame, but are total must haves. fellow rangers help me out here.

In generic noob-friendly English, there are basically three types of functional builds right now.

• Raw damage: Marksmanship and Skirmishing.

• Condition damage (trap/bleed): Prioritize Skirmishing (for trap traits). Split rest between Marksmanship and Wilderness Survival as you see fit.

• Pet damage: Prioritize Beastmastery. Try to nab the pet traits at 20 Skirmishing, 10 Marksmanship, 10 Wilderness Survival.

You can tweak these a bit – take 5-10 points off here, add them elsewhere. But generically these are most of the ranger guilds out there. The Nature Magic line is severely hampered right now due to the ineffectiveness of spirits.

That said, I’ve tested out various different builds in the Mists and in most cases it really doesn’t matter. The variance in weapon damage and criticals makes it a toss-up which build will come out on top in a single head-to-head contest. In statistical terms, the standard deviation of your damage is much larger than the differences in the average damage of these builds. In English, luck matters more than build.

So play whatever you find to be most fun. If you like shortbow/greatsword, then use shortbow/greatsword. Don’t worry that you’re not perfectly min/max optimized. Pick the trait lines and trait skills you find interesting or feel add most to what you like to do. If you’re fighting lots of mobs which knock you down a lot, then hide in plain sight is a nice trait to have. As long as you know the strengths of the build you’ve created, and play to those strengths, you’ll do fine. IMHO, when leveling, having up-to-date gear matters more than build.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/New-player-Class-question/first#post1351770

If you try a build and don’t like it, it only costs 3.5 silver to reset it at level 80. And you’ll get “free” resets at level 40 and 60 when you have to buy the 1 gold and 2 gold books. So try out different things to see what you find most fun. For a long time I was running a crazy 10/30/10/5/15 build because I liked the traits it gave me.