Guild Wars 2

Not the most optimal, but with this build you should have something quite useful and reliant.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Busting-the-Myth-of-Useless-Pets/first

Well, you don’t have that much response because you choose probably the easiest class to level up. Signet of the hunt (run 25% faster) and the pet speed the all process.

I’ll try to help you for each point :

1. Try every weapons and stick to what suit you best. Short and long bows are good choice if you feel lasy, but knowing to use them well is not that simple. Short bow come with good evasive skills and add a nice bleeding if you shoot from the side or the back. Long bow is a good source of damage if you stay far from your target, the second skill is good to apply some vulnerability and barrage is just awesome in leveling.
Axe is another good weapon to get ride of trash mobs in pve with bounce, and I find it pair well with torch or dagger.
Great sword is probably good, it comes with good mobility, maul do decent damage with a short coolddown and the autochain has an evade, but I never like it.
Sword is our most powerful weapon, but the learning curve is high. The autochain kind of root you but when your target move, you are glue to it, and you give might to your pet. #2 and #3 give you free evade. Very good with all of our off-hands (torch or axe for more dps, dagger for an extra evade, war horn for buffs). Search a little and you’ll find some good guide for sword usage.

2. For trait, everything work, but I find investing in beastmastery is a good start. Each point will boost your pet’s stat. With 15 point in Nature Magic, every boon you have will be transfer to your pet, with WH5, that’s mean double might and fury (1 for him, 1 from you). With Skirmishing I, your pet crits very hard. The rest is kinda up to you and your playstyle.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMUQBYAgV4w/Ba9HQF-e

3.Don’t bother with rune and sigil until 80, you have a pet

4. The most important part. You need to kind of pet, a DPS one, and a tanky one. The most damaging pet is jaguar (and feline in general). Use his f2 skill and use sick’em after and watch your target melt. But feline or birds don’t hold aggro, that’s why they synergise much when you use a melee weapon. Sword + jaguar + quickening zephir is a very good burst.
Bears are good tanky pet and the longbow + bear combo is the lasiest way to play ranger. I personnaly prefer devourer for my tank option, they come with more armor, ranged, and I find them funnier to play with bow.
Another good option are drakes and dogs. The fern hound has a very good heal, and every dogs come with a knock back that is quite usefull (but it’s much a pvp pet than a pve pet).
Try to catch them all though, because different situations means different pets, it’s our core mechanic and you have to learn to play with them.

5. It’ll vary a lot with what you plan to do. There is a very good post by jubskie which is stickied. It have a lot of guide and good builds.

6. Stats wise, go with power / precision / %crit on leveling. It’s the fastest way to kill things.

And don’t forget one thing, ranger doesn’t mean ranged class. The core of our class is our pet, knowing when to use one pet, when to call it back etc. is the way to mastering the class.

I run pretty much the same build with only 25 point in BM. But it allow me to pick fortifying bond with 15 in NM. With it, I’m sure my pet get all the possible buffs.

I also run with the cooldown reduction on shout wich allow sick’em and stalk to have a similar cooldown (which mean every 32s my pet is on frenzy).

The difference then come from my equipment as I have a mix of magi / cleric / berserk on armor (full berserk on the other stuff) with hunter rune (but i’m poor, and going more into berserk stats will render the BM25 quite useless … or not, i’ll have to try some day).

I think you nailed the point by saying it’s a high risk and reward weapon.
MH sword is our best weapon but it comes with a high skill cap, which I find normal.

I mainly play my ranger, but I tried to level up a mesmer (with a sword), and it definitly feel more powerful, more speed and more fun with my ranger.

Ok, the root thing is weird, but it comes with a very powerful ability : the chasing function it offers us. As long as you have a target in a fairly good range, you can chase it down and shred it. Last but not least, being stuck in melee means our target doesn’t move, which mean our pet can deliver 100% of its DPS.

For me, the sword is fine, it’s our hardest weapon to master, but the result is just fantastic.

This is my level 80 ranger, finally finish

And it’s quite a good thing. It allow us to go full bunker and still get some DPS cause a dps pet is still a dps pet.

Hi fellow hunters,

What is the best armor for my build (link in sign) :

• full set “of Lyssa”, i.e the rubicon armor set from the Karma Merchant wich is mainly build toward +regen with some pieces pack with precision or condition damage
• a mix of different karma set which gives clercic stats (i.E HPT) ?

I mainly play open world PvE with some dungeon when I have the time. But in a near futur, I’ll try WvWvW to have some savage PvP.

Just watch my sign ^^

I heavily played a hunter in wow (from vanilla to burning crusade), and first, they weren’t broken (at least not in burning crusade where we were the best dps class pve-wise).

Second, and more important, you can’t compare wow and gw2, and from an ex-hunter, the gw2 ranger is totally different.
First of all, you can’t trait your pet lightly, he is part of your dps, even if you trait your stat with no dps, he still have one (the BM-tanker his a great exemple of good synergy with your pet). Second, there is less theorycrafting in gw2 than in wow (I remember the huge spreedsheets with the good rotation of your skill when you have a rapid firing rifle or a slow bow), and we don’t have access to the numbers of the game. It’s more a feeling of your class and your weapons and your pet (switching between weapons AND pet is crucial in this game).
And in this way ranger is probably the hardest class to master in gw2 …

But I really think you are making a mistake by thinking you could play a ranger like a hunter, you should probably trying a rifle warrior …

Jaguar
Love the damage

@Sorean : I love cats pet, but honestly, while I was leveling through my 80 ranger, my second choice was always fern hound ! His dps isn’t that bad (ok, not like jaguar, but nothing beats him ^^), he’s quite though and he has ones of the best f2 (especially with 30 BM) imho.

Birds are cool, but i don’t really like them :/ they take sooooo long to attack a target …

Xylith.4873:

I get what you’re saying, fixing the pet while moving while attacking will hopefully give it a solid damage output. That’s fine, but then we need to fix the fact that pet’s get obliterated from AoE. Ok so we fix that, that’s cool, they get some sort of trait or something that reduces inc damage from AoE. That still isn’t fixing the poor AI on the pet’s for movement and the plethora of bugs people have encountered.

When I was playing WoW, we had the same problems with pets. It takes almost two years for Blizzard to fix it by reducing AoE damage to pet in dungeons and lattely scale our pet with a percentage of our stat.
After that, you could finally play a beastmaster (i.e. a ranger who deal damage equally with his pet).