Guild Wars 2

I tried out some Spvp last night using Jumpers build, and I thought I did fairly well considering I wasn’t even playing it to its full potential. Of course very game I jumped in had 5-8 Rangers in it. I know these guys are FOTM right but wtf? I fought a couple of rangers that were RIDICULOUS. Insane healing, and it seemed like they had more evasion than I did. Can anyone give me some insight or strategy as to what they are doing? I have seen many classes go ride the OP roller coaster, but this struck me as one of the most disturbing imbalances I have seen in this game yet.

One word for you: conditions.

Any class that has access to a build that’s based off conditions is ruling this game right now because conditions only have one stat backing them up. When you only need one stat for conditions, and conditions make up 100% of your damage, you are left with little else to choose from other than toughness and vitality.

Then you factor in the Ranger’s above average healing and regen, their much more powerful condition removal, and a pet that doesn’t scale off gear at all and will always hit at max damage and you’re left with an obvious choice. This is why the Thief can’t pull off the same thing… they have a 5k hp handicap, the regen is dependent on stealth, condition removal is reliant on stealth, damage is mostly melee ranged, no supporting burst.

And this is nothing new mind you. I was running full Apothecary on my ranger 4+ months ago in WvW. Shamans and Rabid in sPvP. The only difference was Eles, Mesmers, and Guardians significantly outshined rangers. Now that Eles are nerfed (they aren’t, but people are still crying. Give it a month) Rangers are more common.

Now what can you do against these types of specs? Not much. You can try to steal the Ranger’s regen and random protection, but the ranger isn’t exactly a slow target to hit. You can try to remove condi’s quickly, but the ranger can get 8 stacks of bleed on you in about 4 seconds all while remaining very mobile and evasive. Ultimately it’s kind of a lost cause unless the ranger is a total noob and tries to face tank you.

Yeah TONS of rangers and I ran mine for like 10 games the other night – they have buffed the kahoonas off of it… almost unkillable.

The thing with the ranger is, the pet…

The ranger (BM) can have huge survivability with tons of regen and evades doing some dmg and conditions but his pet hits like a truck. And no one, in pvp focus on the pet.
Some cats can crit you for more than 8k dmg with the right set-up (sic’em+signet+traits)…
He can also pick other pets to do different things:
some buffs with birds, heals with moas, control with dogs, etc… So rangers are very adaptable… And you dont want ever to go swim with them…

When you fight a ranger, remember about the pet. dont turn your back to a cat and dont let a dog jump on you!

Yeah the pets are a huge pain the kitten also. Mostly they seem to do nothing but get in the way and absorb most of my important attacks. Not to mention they will follow you over the hole map, making it nearly impossible to get out of combat.

As said, always be aware of the pet and try to avoid getting hit by them. However, the main issue with trying to kill a BM ranger is just getting enough damage in to overcome their healing. Ideally keep poison on them to reduce healing by 33%, although they have good condition removal as well, and time your burst damage.

I try to wear them down then apply poison as they heal. Wait for the heal to expire then hit them with as much damage as you can before their heal is off CD again. With the fear from their pet, lots of evading and skills to create a gap between you though, a good ranger can just avoid a lot of damage and kill time until they can heal again and you’re back at square one.

And don’t you DARE stop moving. This is huge. As a ranger, I can tell in spvp when someone knows how to deal with one as they won’t stop moving. My pet will still get a hit off every once in awhile and yes it WILL hurt but you’re doing a good job to mitigate the damage by staying mobile as pets are pretty terrible, despite all their speed boosts, in landing a hit on a moving target.

I’d say kill the pet but this is hard to do sometimes reliably without other people to help. Still, if they’re running cats or dogs, they are somewhat squishy pets even with all their healing.

So yeah, stay mobile and keep stealth spamming (not saying this in a bad way) because it keeps them off of you.

Also keep in mind if they’re using dogs, they’re going to try and knock you down. So if you see them charging back, they’re about to leap so don’t be in range. If they’re using cats, this is a very high bleed damage/raw damage so staying on the move is key here. If you’re fighting a ranger and don’t see a pet, MOVE! Its likely their jaguar in their 6 second stealth which guarantees crits on every hit AND stays stealth the entire time.

Most of this is redundant so tl;dr – Don’t stop moving.

Any class that uses AI ive adopted the philosophy of sharing that AI with them, especially rangers. If you want to bring help into the fight that is fine by me, just so long as I can CnD off of it we are good to go, those kitten wolf and dog tackles are annoying though.

Rangers are a tough fight for a thief. As someone who mains thief and alts ranger, I can probably give some advice to you. If you are playing spvp, there’s 2 types you’re going to see…

Bunker BM rangers are very common recently. They typically run 0/10/30/0/30 or 0/0/30/10/30 with some variation of SB, GS, or S/D. This means their pet hits like a truck and they can still build completely defensive. As a thief you really shouldn’t ever die to this, but you may have trouble killing it.

Their regen comes from signets and traits, and what boons they have are generally shorter duration, so a D/P thief fares better here than a sword thief. Whether or not you win comes down to how hard you can keep up dps pressure and how well you can avoid the pet.

The pet is very vulnerable to blinds, so make good use of BP with the pet as the target. You can stand in a BP field and avoid every pet attack. Alternatively if you are taking too much damage, try to kill their pet right after they do a swap. This’ll put their main form of dps on a large CD.

They usually run birds or cats, sometimes canines. Birds pose the biggest threat in the form of huge burst. If it lands, you’re gonna be hurt. Cats have heavy sustain but are easily countered by blind. Canines are more annoying than anything, but are also more sturdy.

If they use troll unguent, don’t waste a large amount of initiative trying to drop them with that up unless they are already near death. Instead focus on keeping the pet blinded.

Trap Rangers are still viable and, IMO, the more dangerous of the two to a thief. I have more trouble against them than bunker BMs. Although they go down much faster, they are a big threat to kill you before you can get the job done.

A sword thief will have an easier time of it than a dagger thief. If they are sitting on a point, assume there are 3 traps on that point and assume there will be 3 more after those are triggered. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO BURST THEM ON POINT. The traps will kill you.

As a sword thief, inf strike to them and immediately back out, then wait for the traps to expire. At that point you can fight them normally and be relatively safe. Just don’t ever let them get your flank.

As a dagger thief, it’s gonna be tough. You’re gonna have to blow a shadow step or a full dodge bar to trigger the traps and not take a bunch of damage. If they have another set already up, you’re in trouble. You can’t out dps them from range, and if they have 2 trap sets you’re best off running. If you do manage to bait the traps without going down, they are susceptible to burst.

Perhaps you should look at what Rangers got in the latest patch … nothing has changed to make us more survivable. Some of our pets can take 1 or 2 more direct hits before dying and some of our signets had their actives’ power toned down so that their cooldowns could be toned down as well.

Nothing was done to give more dodge.
Nothing was done to give more hp/sec.

The only thing that has happened is Menorah released information about one of our stronger builds and so the average and below Rangers are now using it.

BM Bunker has been around since last year..

Its not really changed all that much.

Cept people might use Signet of Stone vs Lightning Reflex now.

Hell in world vs world i’m actually weaker now then I was month’s ago.

alot has changed :P ….pets are beasts now….as in amazing

They’ve really only updated a few pets, and most of the updates have come from Vit/Toughness, and if you ever fought a BM before, you weren’t going to kill his pet anyway as he’d just swap it out before you did enough damage.

The biggest change i’d say is the reduced cast time on Drakes F2 abilities… but a BM today is still a BM from 5 months ago…Only now some have more toughness…

Just be thankful you didn’t run into the Pain Inverter version of BM.