Guild Wars 2

Hello rangers.

I created a ranger alt last night to mix up my spvp gametime. I am using GS because lets face it, rangers have the coolest GS animations.

Some questions then ill briefly go over the builds I tried.

I read that GS is a ‘tanky’ weapon? I get that it has evade and block but last night I was struggling to maintain a consistant rotation of my GS 1 chain. It didn’t seem to take much for me to be considered to be out of position. Admittedly I do not main melee I. Spvp so perhaps this is just me?

Adding to the above my first thought was increasing boon duration to +50 so my protection off of dodge would be 3 seconds. This is because I thoughr my ‘tanky’ chain would be the full GS 1 chain followed by a dodge , then repeat. Is that thinking on the right track?

When I did engage I typically went 3, 4, 5 to open finding my way to sword 3, 2 (unfinished) finishing with horn4. Is that a proper ‘outline’ or plan?

I tried 0-0-15-15-25-15 with mud/evade/‘protect me’ first and it seemed to work ok.

I tried 0-0-15-30-25 with spirits and I think the distribution might of been ok but I don’t care for the spirits at all. Their pathing drove me nuts and I felt like it was better to dip in and out of engagements and let the pet carry the dps load over just throwing myself into the fray.

I finished with 0-20-30-0-20 with mud and the twp pet damage buffs (signet and shout) and that seemed ok too.

Any advice, especially gameplay, would be fantastic. This GS endeavour isn’t a serious exercise but I prefer the tournies and i’d like to pull my weight as much as possible.

A Tanky Ranger gets plenty of sources of health regen (traits, signets, regeneration) and has high toughness. Please see the other builds floating around to for a longer explanation.

You get the GS mainly for Swoop, block, burst and control. The evade on autoattack is a bonus.
I like to run a glassy LB/GS ranger(30/25/15/0/0) in spvp, built around opening strikes at 1500 range to rain down death on opponents duking it out with our bunkers in the circle.
PLaying GS in full defensive builds is a waste, as sword+dagger will typically do better there. The big plus of the GS is the absurd mobility, you get, that’s, why I feel, it should be a defensive sidearm for a skirmisher build and not the main weaponset.

It is a tanky weapon, which doesn’t need you to be tanky and doesn’t help you to tank much, it just allows you to wait for an opening and then strike, as opposed to the sword, which I’d consider a really defensive weapon.