Guild Wars 2

Sube Dai.8496:

alvarez.3159:

What I don’t like about celestial is the waste of most of the power stats, because unlike ele, engi and warrior, the standard weapon sets (a/d and s/t) have horrendous powerdamage attached to their skills. As it stands now, I feel like Settlers does everything Celestial should be doing, just even better.

I agree. Settler has so much more sustain than celestial, AND more condition damage. Plus you can still try and stack might with it if you want to.

Celestial is a good amulet, just not the best for rangers.

Ok, here’s why you’re wrong:

I agree celestial engi functions well because it has abilities that have high burst and whilst a/t s/d for rangers has no high burst ability, the auto attack on sword for example manages to put out decent DPS at a good rate. Sure, you’re not going to drop someone with it but it does allow you to pressure in times that you’re unable or it is inopportune to use your condition abilities – I’m thinking beserker stance, water attunement, bubbles/reflect on turret engi, engi has heal turret up (I.e. engi can cast it but hasn’t yet), warrior has f1 on longbow up etc. My point being is that power/percision/ferocity does all add up and does serve a function.

Secondly, whilst settler’s does have higher condition damage it will deal less condition damage overtime and you are less likely to kill someone through condition damage alone whilst using it.

Let me explain, the damage you do through conditions has three dimensions: base condition damage, condition application and condition cover. Celestial wins comfortably on the latter two because you if you’re running celestial and taking 2 points in skirmishing you’re going to be running at 30% critical rate (50% after you’ve activated a skirmishing skill) versus the 9% (and 29%) of settler’s then it’s going to make sense to run sharpened edges on celestial and not on settler’s.

Sharpened edges contributes considerably to your condition application, it changes splitblade from a 5 bleed stack to a 7-8 bleed stack for example. It helps with cover conditions too, say you’re in sword/torch you do: torch 4 -> sword 3 -> sword 1 × 2 with celestial that’s a guaranteed 4 conditions – burn, poison, bleed, cripple. With settler’s that’s effectively 2 since 1. You don’t have sharpened edges and 2. With such low power, it’s hard to justify using sword auto-attack. Most condition clears in this game work in the manner of: ‘clear X number of conditions’ rather than clear all.

You’re also going to be running Krait runes with celestial as it turns the bleeds from sharpened edges from 2 seconds into 3 seconds. Krait adds two additional cover conditions on use with entangle, the poison (which I accept you could have already applied before) and torment. Whilst you can run krait with settler’s, it has far better synergy with celestial/rabid + sharpened edges.

As for the sustain argument.

First of all, you gain 376 vitality which is good, we can all agree.

You lose 193 healing power. You’ll forgive my speculation, but that’s about 10 less hp/s with SoTW and I’d imagine about 20 or so on regeneration. So all in all, not much. Let’s not forget we only, in this spec, have 3 uses for healing power.

Now the big one, toughness. You lose 422 toughness. That’s a lot to lose.

I’ll be honest here, settler’s is a terrible amulet, it has been since the jewell/amulet change. And that’s why. No one ever needs that much toughness from an amulet, let alone a class/spec with access to 3 evades on short cool downs and an invulnerability on 80s cool down. Quite simply, it’s a bad allocation of stats. And with all passive defences it leads to bad play dependent on it, instead of teaching people to use their active defences ina smart and efficient manner.

And this brings me to the central fallacy of the sustain argument: sustain for what? What does more sustain bring you? Ranger as a class and certainly in this spec, contributes very little in group utility to a team fight., it’s not like that sustain gives you an extra 10 seconds and in that 10 seconds you can get off that crucial conditional clear on an ally or anything else worthwhile. No. You simply just stay alive longer. That’s it. And bear in mind, you’ve traded all that damage for that and the burden falls on the rest of the team to account for that lost damage. Effectively, you’ve lowered your teams chances of winning to just simply postpone the ending of the fight 10-20 seconds. That doesn’t seem like such a good bargain to me.

So no, I don’t agree that settler’s does ‘everything better’.

Sube Dai.8496:

I have run this in WvW for a long time where it is very strong.

But PvP I prefer 0/0/6/6/2 BM Regen bunker with Settler amulet.

I find rabid can’t hold a point for very long, and the added team support from nature’s voice is great.

Celestial – the might on axe doesn’t last long enough to be effective, even with might runes.

Pets – without an interrupt you pretty much have to take wolf. I take eagle and wolf on swap.

In defence of Celestial:

A lot of people approach celestial on ranger with the same paradigm as celestial engineer, ele or war; I.e. you need to be relentlessly might stacking for it to work, but this is wrong in several regards.

When we speak of a celestial ranger we’re actually speaking of mainly a condi ranger because, ignoring the pet for one moment, most of the damage is going to come from conditions of which we have a wide application of and running celestial has a negligible effect on the application of them (e.g. Sharpened edges 30% crit vs 40%, cele vs rabid). Don’t forget that we have far greater access to bleeding than those classes – it’s quite easy for example to reach and maintain the bleed cap for a few seconds on ranger even in a non-gimmick, tournament viable spec.

If we compare against ele: A celestial ranger is always going to be running with 6 in wilderness survival due to it’s superior traits. Against the usual trait allocation of an ele, this puts us up by 200 condition damage straight away – add to this the fact that a celestial ranger is most likely going to be running krait runes for it’s synergy elsewhere in the build. That’s 375 more condition damage over an ele before might is a factor. An ele stacks might because it really has to, technically you can run celestial ranger without might and still have decent damage/pressure although I wouldn’t recommend it.

Now, I’ve played with strength/hoelbrek runes and they don’t seem worth it. But battle sigils grant 3 stacks of might and with 6 in NM those stacks last for 26 seconds, that means battle sigils alone allow you to maintain 9 stacks of might for the majority of the time. With axe, your might stacks above 9 are going to be erratic since it only lasts 4-5 seconds but let’s consider 3 things before we write it off: 1. It can be used to burst might on you because it can hit 3 times and grant 3 might per second when facing a minimum of two enemies. 2. Might augments condi damage retroactively, in other words you can apply the conditions then apply might and the following damage from the conditions is increased. 3. Might is applied to the pet, through fortifying bond, at a flat rate of 10 seconds per might regardless of the duration of the source.

You can argue against the viability of celestial ranger, but the lack of damage / lack of might argument doesn’t really stand up to any real testing or playing.

Okay, those were just the reservations I had. At this point I play almost exclusively spvp/tpvp so that colours my opinion significantly. No doubt you’ve looked at and seriously considered a lot of the trait options and went a different direction than I would have. I personally wouldn’t run with that low condi removal but that necessitates running either empathic bond, evasive purity and/or generosity sigils which then further necessitates changing the spec more to compensate for loss in other aspects. I actually ran without empathic bond for a few weeks post patch (using poison master and then bark skin) before turning back to it.

Correct me if I’m wrong but this is a pretty common spec post patch, right? So this thread seems rather redundant to me to be honest.

Even then, I can see several questionable choices within the build. But then, I haven’t played this exact spec so maybe they’re just weaknesses on paper.

1. Lack of condi removal, both sustain and burst. You have only the condi removal from survival skills on 36, 36, 32, 48 seconds; and even then, one of those skills you have no control over – two are best used offensively and third is your only stunbreaker. Each one only removes 2 condis. A well played condi spec is going to eat you alive. In the first clip at the end you ate a full 8 or so second burn which is unacceptable.

2. Barkskin. In my opinion your build fails to utilise this trait properly. Barkskin is best used when a. Empathic bond is not required and b. you have enough sustain to maintain your hp at low levels – I.e. if you had access to a reliable source of regeneration and enough heal power to make the passive bonus of signet of the wild effective. So really barkskin just seems to simply delay the inevitable against a tough opponent.

3. I seriously don’t get why you would take enlargement over evasive purity consider your lack of condi removal and the prevalence of poison in this meta.

4. Signet of wild. This seems pointless; you don’t have enough healing power for the passive to be useful. And considering, 60-80% of your damage comes from your conditions – the damage increase from the active doesn’t justify itself. Stability is nice though but you don’t seem to be using it for that.

5. Keen edge. Sorry but, sharpened edges is far more effective especially since you have such high precision. In fact, I can’t see why you’d have that high precision without sharpened edges. With your condition duration that’s an extra 4 second bleed with no cooldown; that turns the splitblade + sharpening stone combo from 10 bleeds to 12-14 which is a disgusting amount of pressure to put on an enemy.

Another advantage you get from going 2 into skirmishing over 2 in marksmanship is the minor trait. The swiftness on weapon swap helps with your kiting and your chasing but most importantly it transfers to your pet with fortifying bond which boosts the pet’s dps immeasurably. Compare this to the garbage minor trait you get in marksmanship.

Suggestions: swap bark skin for empathic bond, swap enlargement for evasive purity, swap keen edge for sharpened edges, and swap signet of the wild for signet of stone. This should net you more dps, more survivability to conditions and more surviability to burst direct damage because of your new 6 sec invulnerability.

As for your play in the video I can only say the following:

1. Stop with the random dodging. You dodged unnecessarily about 90% of the time there. You need to think about what you’re dodging. If you were facing better players they would have waited for you to waste your dodges on their autoattacks and then burst and drop you. It’s that simple.

2. Running sword/dagger, axe/torch is personal preference but please be aware that it creates for you a defensive weapon set and an offensive weapon set. In some situations you’ll be in sword/dagger set and lack the necessary pressure to force the other player on the backfoot and really gain the iniative in a fight or worse, you’ll be stuck in your offensive axe/torch set and without a weapon evade and really susceptible to burst and immobilise and since by then you’d have probably evaded against the thin air and left your self with no dodges so you’d be rather kittened.

3. You’re using hornet’s sting wrong. When you’re using sword, hornet’s sting is an an amazing ability for repositioning, because it’s a two step leap you can be incredibly precise with your positioning with it. Like almost 90% of rangers, apart from when you used to to gain ground on the enemy in the first clip, you seem to just go backwards and then immediately go forwards, gaining no fire shield (from torch 5 + leap), no positional advantage, no evasion of any real damage just quite simply a pointless loss of dps and pressure.

4. If you’re not close enough to hit an enemy with at the least 3 bleeds, then don’t use splitblade.

5. Please take off sword autoattack, although you didn’t use it once in the clip – it’s a death sentence waiting to happen if you leave it on.

Hope this helps.

I tried it a bit in spvp and it’s a solid build but from playing it and looking through it I have a few critiques:

First of all, if you’re going that high in healing power it makes a huge amount of sense to take signet of the wild – you’re looking at a ~120 independent heal every second for you and around 350 for your pet which is rather invaluable for survivability.

Looking at traits, there’s a strange synergy in your build: ‘protect me’ works incredibly well with spiders but rather poorly with cats; due to the fact that the damage the pet takes is calculated from your toughness and absorbed by the pets hp. ‘Zephyr speed’ on the other hand, works amazingly with cats but it’s not great with spiders, this is because with ’zephyr’s speed’ you’re looking for burst – cats are good because their first two attacks should be their F2 and maul; spiders however, waste a lot of the quickness on casting their aoe poison so you lack burst there.

So pet wise, I don’t think cats work with ‘protect me’ unless you barely use the invulnerability – but then again you might as well run lightning reflexes instead – as they lack the hp (they have around 16k) and by the time it’s needed they would have absorbed some ambient damage. I think river drake would work a lot better as you have the burst from the f2 and tail swipe (around 3.5k crit and burst finisher with heal spring and the added benefit of weakness which you currently lack access to) in addition to having 24k hp which would allow them to work with ‘protect me’. I think spider is fine as you’re clearly using it for the cc and poison but other options are cave spider (for the weakness + cc) or marsh drake (burst, use of ‘protect me’ and they have poison). Canines are an option – good cc and good damage but problematic with their low hp.

Flame trap has been already covered so I’ll skip that but I will mention that it probably makes more sense to take ‘off hand training’ over ‘oakheart salve’ as the difference in bonfire size is huge but then again you might not feel you have enough access to regeneration with heal spring being your only other source.

Sigils are largely personal preference but I do feel energy can be a waste if you’re not constantly getting focused to justify them especially since ranger have no offensive mechanic that takes advantage of dodge – i.e. unlike mesmer or ele.

Finally, I would personally move the 10 points from Skirmishing into Marksmanship. I don’t think you need as much vigour as you seem to think. This will give you 10% extra condition duration allowing you to drop the sigil of burning, freeing up a slot for something else. The important fact if you’re going for burning duration is to have >50% burn/condition duration as, if I recall correctly, it allows damage conditions to reach a threshold allowing an extra tick – which will turn bonfire from a 1 second pulse burn into a 2 second.

Either way, it’s already a solid build and it was rather fun to play. Even got a hate pm!