Guild Wars 2

In my first assessment I, as many did, discarded the longbow as being useless. This is not the case. I have used a longbow for the past few days to run dungeons and my damage output is extremely high.

Take a moment to look over this setup and read the notes on it.

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mVRm0m9cMoRGmMoRmm0x0axcMqmokq8khs707khs7070M7kGI70z7kGD70z7kGo70z7ow270m

NOTES:

This build maintains 25 stacks of might 100% of the time while in combat, requiring about 10 seconds to get fully rolling after entering combat. It does this through rapid weapon swaps and signet/shout usage.
The fire field + blast combo is not utilized in this build to allow the 1200 range of the traited longbow to be abused; if fighting in close range, consider dropping one source of might and the range trait for other sources of damage/survivability.

The rapid adrenaline fill of this build through weapon swapping, critical hits, and area-of-effect damage allows it to maintain a fire field from Combustive Shot with a roughly 3 second downtime (accounting for skill activation and flight time). Maintaining this field creates the opportunity for significant party-wide might through blast finishers and ensures that burning will be constant on all foes being engaged.

The condition damage stat of a warrior using this build reaches about 1800 while in combat. This means that burning caused by Fan of Fire and Combustive Shot deals around 780 damage per tick and can be maintained easily on a group of enemies.

The critical hit chance of a warrior using this build reaches around 80% while in combat. At a critical multiplier of 30 and greatly boosted power value from might, each arrow from dual shot strikes for an average of around 420 damage against moderately armored targets. If Arcing Shot scores a critical hit (which it often does) it deals as much as 5500 damage to moderately armored targets at the center of the blast, tapering off only a little towards the edges.

The gear and traits of this build allow for an easy adjustment to a rifle-based build for taking down bosses that can make use of the same tricks to gain might.
The endurance signet is completely optional and can be traded for a banner or “On My Mark!” in WvW or boss fights respectively.

If anyone has suggestions or comments regarding to this build, please post them.

Love the longbow, will try this build it looks interesting except for the sharing of cd’s.

I love my long bow, best weapon for WvW.

What’s with the Arms III? I guess you put it there if you switch to rifle? Use I or V instead on a pure LB build.

You could either take precision bonus for signets or swap out stamina for SIO/OMM and take shouts give adrenaline. Then you shouldn’t have a problem of maintaining steady adrenaline source. Since Fast Hands is bugged and it’s not always 5s cd and that alone won’t be enough to grant enough adrenaline.

And your 25 stacks might 100% upkeep is grossly exaggerated. Though I use LB myself for buffing/AoE damage, it’s more around 15-17 stacks upkeep and I use the Area might buffing.

you should actually look at his build before you say anything psybunny

do you have all the runes specced the same as his build? and sigils also?

LB is good for dungeons and maybe WvW sieges.

It sadly has no place in spvp or small skirmishes. Problem is LB 3 and adrenaline are pretty easily avoided.

uh, doesn’t the AoE of the longbow’s adrenaline practically cover a capture point?

I wouldn’t call that “easily avoidable” in sPvP when avoiding it can allow the warrior to neutralize or cap.

@Inverse: Yeah I looked.
Swap sigils share internal CD, duration doesn’t increase past +100%, so stacking it to 120% is pointless. This isn’t about keeping steady might stacks, a lot of builds can do that. I’m just skeptical about 100% upkeep of might at 25 stacks. I might try it out if the buffing is doable, but until I see proof, I don’t trust any theorycraft.

Here’s the same build with a better calc:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQJATTjcO5uJPCPMxBizjkMeyreYn7EnUhzA;ToAg1Cqo0xEkIIbOOdk5sEZIC

It’s purely one gimmick (burning damage) glass cannon, that will die to a sneeze when focused, met by a rifle or when fought in close range. Sadly, it seems this build is around the best LB has to offer in pvp atm.

Sorry, but as the guy said it’s gimmick.

I ran longbow for a while, but as soon as anything focuses you you fall over, you have very little utility and no defence.

Pretty much everything else is more effective than a longbow in pvp.

Any sort of damage you do with aoes is completely negated by how little you do with Longbow 1’s miniscule damage.

I love longbow during sieges. Fire door, leap into it to you aura, flurry. A piercing rifle is better in most other situations.

You guys have to realize that this build is designed mainly with dungeon runs in mind, or so it seems, not PvP.

No mobility and 0 toughness gets you killed in dungeons.

Psy, I don’t know what to say other than that you are entirely wrong on all accounts. I appreciate your attentiveness and skepticism, but you are wrong.

The might from weapon swapping stacks twice each from the trait and the sigil, regardless of whether it is on both weapons or not. They do not have a shared cooldown; actually, they seem to have no cooldown at all, but are still limited to 2 applications. It is on both so that it takes only 10 seconds to reach the key 25 stacks rather than 15. It is possible (and I’ve since been doing this) to run an on-kill counting sigil on one and the might on the other as long as you make sure you always start combat with the counting one equipped. Note that while this does increase the startup time to 15s, the additional stats make up for the slight deficiency and once you get going it’s better in every way. So, you can definitely keep up 25 stacks of might throughout combat without using the fire+blast; I do it all the time.

Additionally, your comment that you will die in dungeons without toughness and mobility is not entirely untrue, yet I don’t die in dungeons. This is mostly because the build actually has a lot of mobility. Constant swiftness and 50% endurance increase means that you can quite easily keep yourself alive in dungeons, especially when you have two panic buttons in the form of blindness and immobilize.

As for the discussion of this build’s viability in sPvP, I would not recommend using it there. If you make it work, you are far better than I am because I cannot run a longbow in sPvP. Rifle seems better in every way and I apologize if I gave the misconception that this is anything but a waste of your time in PvP. It works nicely for WvW, though I prefer a melee ganking build and therefore have a second set of armor/weapons for that (I always use actual siege weapons to attack doors, though).

Hopefully those of you who have actually tried the build are having success with it.

I play longbow just cuz I used to be an archer for a while myself, and because I hate guns, and because I want a ranged option. I’m not sure what the designers were thinking when they put in the longbow auto attack numbers though.. the design of shooting two arrows is very cool, but them doing no damage at all, is not so cool. The whole point of shooting dual arrows is to do a lot of damage, or to hit multiple targets, neither of which it does.

The damage just needs to be increased by a lot… +100% at the very least.