I’m sure I’ll get a lot of flack since condition spec rangers are preferred and considered superior but after playing to 80, I personally like the longbow/greatsword combination the most. While the auto attack feels a little slow and isn’t the most interesting thing to watch, with enough power, crit, and crit damage, it has the potential to do very high sustained damage, and is even (dare I said) bursty on soft targets. Rapid fire is amusing but its real deadliness is shown when combined with quickness whereas it will do roughly the same amount of damage as hundred blades w/ quickness, yet still retain all the ranger’s mobility. The self debuff is always nice and knockback is even better. Although barrage won’t end up wiping the zerg, it’s nice to have when everyone else is throwing down their aoe’s so you can cash in as well.
The greatsword is a combination of solid damage (especially with quickness, signet of the wild, & rampage as one up), defense (evade on the 3rd auto-attack) and 100% parry w/ knockback, as well as survivability/escape (I use swoop more often to get away from bad situations more than I use it to actually hit things and I feel like a lot of people overlook it for that purpose). And hey, you even get a stun/daze, depending on where you are standing.
In any case, it’s a long range/close range spec with lowered damage in medium range, so you really need to keep your distance until you are sure you have no choice but to go melee. In that sense, I tend not to blow my utilities/elite until I’m forced into melee as they are a nice trick to have up your sleeve in a bad situation and most melee classes tend not to expect the potential damage that you can do with a greatsword and specific utilities.
Like I said, condition spec with shortbow and sword/horn or torch seems to be the preferred spec right now but the play style feels completely off in my hands, so I eventually went back to lb/gs and haven’t looked back.
