Hello! I only recently started playing this game seriously and am reaching almost full ascended on my ranger. Here are my 2 cents.
I play my ranger on full zeolot. At literally a weapon swap I turn from a pretty decent zerk to a pretty decent cleric.
Both my damage and heals are good and I use this build all the time in all situations because that’s how I like to play. I only swap 1 talent tree in raid healing.
For pets I use a hawk. It has great precision and good power (2nd highest I believe). I have the taunt trait and even tho his health is lower he often survives better and deals faster dmg then some other popular dmg choices.
1. His animations are fast and with the extra movement speed from trait and signet I can send him in and out of the fray very fast and cancel some of his animations very quickly. If your good with micro-management your hawk/eagle will stay alive in almost any situation.
2. He has great damage. No fancy buffs to give but while traited his bleed/taunt (F2) is on a 5 second CD. This means not only does he stack bleeds constantly but you can peel mobs off of yourself every 5secs. Combine his movement, your longbow survy skills and good positioning and you make an incredible team.
I dislike taking cats for example because their animations are long and it takes longer to cancel them to make it come back to you if it’s dangerous.
3. My second pet is the one that’s situational. Usually it’s fire wyvern (really only because it’s cool and has pretty decent dmg + knockdown),
Smokescale (murder dog) is my go-to second pet because his smoke field is excellent for survy but on a longer CD, it helps that he has the shadowstep ability to help him and also he uses shadowstep right away on attack, meaning he gets to enemies faster than most pets due to porting before he gets into melee.
For healing/raids I use Fern Hound because of healing talent tree his f2 howl gives a great amount of regen aswell as a good burst of healing, very dandy to keep him on boss to help you burst heal your melee’s.
Closing words:
I haven’t done a lot of WvW and I think my whole build wouldn’t be so good, but I haven’t tried it.
PvE is great because I go from a decent zerk to a decent healer with just a flip of a button.
PvP I rarely heal, only when I have no choice to survive and I kill a whole lot and my hawk by itself deals INCREDIBLE damage. I love kittening over rangers who have cats or dogs (anything other than hawk/smokescale/bristleback rly).
If you are good at pet management Hyena is also a great option because with his F2 you can pull off 2 seperate knockdowns or a double-knockdown on a target.
That’s it, feel free to discuss and if you want I can post my build.
Cheers!