Guild Wars 2

Wow, people don’t like rangers for wvw! I think the problem is the way a lot of people play ranger, rather than it’s a bad class, people tend to think of it as a purely ranged class and they go for the bows and they barrage and pew pew away at 1500 range and unless you’re running glass cannon you’re not doing any worthwhile damage. Personally I think it functions best as a medium range/melee class, you have a crazy amount of evades, 50%+ endurance regen and some great dps on the sword but I see lots more bow rangers then I see sword, dagger/axe, axe or torch. It’s also one of the best classes to bunker with and it’s up with Guardian for survivablity.

I can’t comment too much on usefulness in zergs because I prefer roaming and small groups but I’ve always found traps, when traited properly and the axe to do good aoe damage that the ranger normally lack (excluding barrage).

Superior runes of the Undead, I also trait 0/30/30/10/0 and use Chrysocola jewels on my trinkets, this puts me at like 2950 armour and 17.5k health which is enough to keep you alive while you whittle them down with conditions.

I’ve been running a trap ranger with great success in wvw for about three weeks. Thieves are a piece of cake with this build and aside from some guardians and memsers (phantons trigger traps) i’ve had no problems with any classes/builds.

I run Axe/torch + Sword/Warhorn, it might seem to make more sense to run sword/torch but the axe is a weapon that excels at close range anyway, it’s nice to get up close hit them with all five splitblades attacks and the torch 5 aoe. The warhorn on the sword makes it great for chasing down or finishing off with warhorn 4 attack which easily gets six stacks of bleeds and follows them.

The best strategy as mentioned above is to place traps before hand so your traps are off cooldown by the time the fight is underway and people have a tendency to run through all three traps this way, they don’t turn around and run back through the trap they just triggered but instead run past you usually trigging the other two.

You do need toughness to run this effectively so i’d recommend some armour and trinkets with toughness as a minor atleast, I run full rabid armour and trinkets, with the trait in Skirmishing for chance of bleeds on crits, as well the Sigil (forgotten the name) that gives a 60% chance to bleed on crit and the 47% crit chance full rabid provides, you dish out some decent damage with the autoattack and are able to apply and reapply conditions really fast, so don’t worry too much about condition cleansing.

I’ve had no problem defeating the various champions upto this point, taking only one or two attempts but i’ve had no luck with Salazon after 10+ attempts.

My gear loadout has been full zerker/sword+torch/horn and I can’t dps him down fast enough. Even with the traited toughness signet to give me 6secs of invulnerability and Protect me!

There’s videos of other zerker rangers taking him down fast enough like:

But i’ve never got him past 30% even when I circle after Protect me! and SoT has worn off.