Guild Wars 2

Your build could use a little tweaking. if you like celestial, you will benefit more from signets of wild and stone. Speed is important as ranger but the signet of hunt doesn’t do much for you, so use travelers runes and drop signet of hunt for flame trap, protect me (high level fractals you will need inv), or quickening zephyr.

Drop the LB range trait and replace it with signet active effects trait. LB and SB work better at close range, just behind your heavies. You really benefit from their boons and combo fields (you are a finisher if you use bows), so you need to stay in the action.

Use healing spring because you are using celestial and bow. You’ll want to use it to heal allies more than yourself. It’s a combo field so you can shoot arrows through it to regen allies or leap into it with sword or GS to remove conditions from allies. I run LB and axe horn with celestial. Horn 5 will blast 2k heal to allies. Just pop it when you see heavies get in trouble. You should be right behind them so a step forward is all it should take.

Celestial armor and a mix of zerker and celestial trinkets will get your conditions high enough 500ish, so that your combo fields are effective. There is more, but this should get you started. Good luck!

Yeah, totally agree. Started with ranger as main and kept it that way. I’ve leveled everything except necro and thief (working on mes now) for fun, but enjoy ranger the most. No comparison.

Laugh, I carry 4 sets of Armor to switch builds whenever I feel the need for a change. Celestial, Carrion, PVT, and Apothecary. Seriously, there is no problem facing any content the devs can throw at us. We have so many options.

Sure warriors are smooth to play but we have so much more style for crying out loud! With pets, spirits, traps, bows, swords, and limitless evasion… Ah, nothing compares…

Prysin.8542:

HHR LostProphet.4801:

It was said often now, I’ll just repeat it: It’s not like the ranger is unusable, but it’s worse than all other classes at the moment.

^user error.

@OP
class itself is fine, but do need a lot of QoL fixes and some minor teaks. Most of it can be sorted out if the development team sat down and spent a month or two to fix ranger issues in particular. It is the amount of issues together that causes a lot of challenging and frustrating issues. Not one single issue. Albeit some incompentent and blatantly ignorant players that stubbornly refuse to play the class as intended nor listen to advice, still keeps saying pet is one big issue.

TL;DR -
Pet is mostly fine, needs some minor tweaks and QoL changes
Traits is fine, but need some minor restructuring.
Weapons are fine, but can be a bit bland/frustrating at first
Evasion spam is fine
Spirits need more HP/Toughness
Shouts need some love after all the nerfs
Signets are backwards and need fix
All other complaints is void.

Very well said. Up voted for telling the truth!

Sandpit.3467:

Yes, ranger is in a terrible place now and always has been. They are competitive in some of the game forms and suck in others, but the main problem is that most of their game mechanics just don’t work.

Bows are bad
Pets are really, really bad
Trait synergy is a complete mess
Sword 1 is broken

and a whole host of minor annoyances (that many other professions have) on top. The ranger CDI was massive and heated. Rangers are still waiting for some dev love but the devs are perm on their warrior/theif love trip so don;t hold your breath.

Sword 1 is not broken at all. It’s supposed to stick you to foe, and does it wonderfully well. It’s almost impossible to escape a ranger when he pulls sword on you.

Sasajoe.1509:

in wvw they r the most utterly useless .. don’t play ranger wvw until they fix it .. if ever

I love playing ranger in WvW… I don’t know what to do with all the badges I get. Ranger is fine for Zerg, solo capping camps, and you can squash almost anyone in solo roaming if you spec for 1v1.

Rangers are in great place for both tpvp and spvp right now. Probably the best 1v1 class out there at the moment, in serious competition. But, you will need to rely on passive damage to take opponents down so, if that’s not your thing, you should stay away for the time being. One of the players in the EU finals on 55HP Monks was ranger. Look him up and watch his interview when you get a chance.

Well, we could also consider that they wield the same power. The pale tree and Melandru both wield the power of the good side of jungle magic. Mordy wields the bad side of this same magic. It would come down to who has more control of this magic.

My suspicion is that it might be a close call. The pale tree only sees Mordy as a nuisance.

I don’t think I could have designed a worse build…

We you see someone add “heavies only” to the lfg post, translate that to “noobs looking for noobs only.” That, or prepare yourself for an extra lengthy run…

Good questions. I find pet does most damage when ranger successfully debilitates and roots enemy. Most pets move pretty slow compared to opponents, so you can help them land their attacks by using skills, sigils, and utilities that root your target.

Ranger is designed with many snare abilities. It’s one of our best strengths. Try ice ranger build for fun sometime. It’s very deadly.

mistsim.2748:

kicked for being a ranger, sounds about right. rangers are banned from organized WvW play. spvp is fun though.

Um, what? Kicked from organized WvW? Never had that happen. Maybe you should switch to the quarry…

The truth is most dungeon encounters can be four manned, quickly, with a good team. So there is no need to kick one or two beginners. Many dungeon runners haven’t mastered their classes yet and have horrible communication skills. They cant adjust what they are doing based on their allies’ weaknesses. These are the flamers that will kick you for doing x or using y, or whatever. Shrug it off and find a better group.

Most of the complainers are screwing up anyway. You’ll have an easier run without them.

ItIsFinished.9462:

The original concept was to bomb your enemy’s with conditions all while dishing out a decent amount of raw damage. The WvW version allows you to bomb them with Confusion, which is a nice touch to the build. The sPvP version doesn’t have that, but adding torment from the elite. It melts glass thieves and mesmers….

I really like your thoughts on ranger. Been using class since launch and feel that rangers are supposed to split damage with conditions and direct. It’s their speciality, so to speak. Carrion/Rabid/Celestial is where it’s at.

Holland.9351:

Bearbow is excellent for PvE leveling.

Also great for stomping warriors and necromancers in PvE and WvW!!! Most warriors run in fear when they stare down the bear of Doom! Bears steamroll warriors… Right?

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Enter Rata Sum to troll TP for free golds, see:

John: ranger is pretty pet-reliant so the best thing to do is get a bear and use it to tank while you dps with a bow from a distance
Mike: oh cool i’ll try it out, where do i cap bear

So I figure I should chime in before the poor newb actually ends up trying to run bearbow and I get:

John: dude wtf i am giving legit advice
Sam: man i dunno but my friend runs bearbow and he seems to do just fine
Phil: yeah lol i leveled my ranger all the way to 15 using bear + bow, havent had any problems yet
Tom: dude they’re ’range"rs, youre supposed to use a bow
Dave: lol literally every ranger in my guild runs bearbow, but im sure this random dude in map chat knows better than the meta

So there you have it, bearbow is the meta. Why haven’t you respecced yet?

I love going into high level dungeons and surprising everyone with the lethality of the ranger… That’s why I love the abundance of bearbow zerkanoobs rangers. Makes me look better! Don’t tell them rangers are best at close range (even with a bow).

Really powerful. Go all in on Carrion gear and nightmare runes. Bring torch and flame trap. Melee weapons.

With zerker celestial mix: Earth & Doom

I know what you are thinking, but with 500 in condition damage it does nice damage. The bleeding passes through targets and bleeds multiple, but doom only hits first.

I also use Air and Fire for fun but it damages a little less than earth and doom most of the time.

Ranger has always been most used class. It just has a nice feel.

Don’t worry about it, they surely sucked. In a good group, rangers can deal massive damage, as well as any other class. Many beginners don’t understand how to play and think it makes them look cool when they kick someone. It’s the sign of the noob!

We can spike just fine, and for conditions, try to find a way to be a triple threat. That is, make sure you keep bleed, poison, and fire up for the duration of a fight. You can do about 30k damage in 20s with only 500 in condition damage if you manage to average about 12 stacks of bleed and keep all 3 conditions up. Ranger has a variety of ways to do this.

…Yeah, I am still trying to figure out what Precision and Critical damage have to do with traps. Strider’s defense is there to give you better survivability in zerg fights (I think?). Most of the time you will be using GS is zergball.

Think of it like an added evasion to the GS which has a 33% (feels more like 40%) chance to “auto-evade”. The problem is that it appears to be in the wrong trait line. To survive in melle range, I run some form of 30/0/30/x/x. with GS and Axe torch. Don’t see how to get 30 in skirmishing and stay alive, so I don’t know how to use this new ability. Anyone have any thoughts?

Klonko.8341:

How a ranger is suppose to win against a necro?

Haha. You’re not! Your supposed to die a grisly death!

All joking aside, I can usually kill them by keeping them at range and widdling them down. Whatever you do, don’t condition bomb them! They will give it back to you. The best way is to kill them with conditions, but don’t bomb them. Just keep a small but steady amount of condition on them. They kill me a lot though. These are just as hard as warriors for me in PvP…

Good question. The trick is to get a set of traveller’s runes so you can drop signet of the hunt. Use Kitty for Might and red Moa for Fury. Bring Warhorn offhand and healing spring (you can blast finish your water field, or flame trap when survival is not an issue). I run this with a celestial Armour and zerker/celestial trinkets. Great damage, nice support, and decent condition damage in PvE. You can use signet of stone and Protect Me (with bear instead of Moa) to revive in situations others would be downed in. I run this in fractals and WvW. Very fun to play.

Remember that pure damage builds are fun for clowning around but will nerf you when fighting in good PvP or PvE content. A good rule of thumb is that Armour overpowers damage output. So, even if you like high damage builds, you must bring a little Armour.

I would like to point out that the pre-set amulet stat combinations are designed specifically for traited builds in each class. The developers design the traits around the amulet stat combinations for certain roles each class can fill. I suspect this change is because many players are accidentally weakening themselves by switching out the jewel. It is very enticing, but a pitfall I believe. ANet can see this by analyzing match results.

I am thankful they did this. It confirms my suspicion that swapping out the Jewel is a mistake.

It is also a mistake to assume the developers are clueless about the game mechanics they designed. A careful analysis of the balance added to PvP can help you make incredibly powerful WvW/PvE builds. Knights and Celestial* combinations are excluded from PvP because they are unbalanced. I won’t tell you in which direction, but if you experiment you will see.

The same is true for rune sets as well. Find the ones that are PvP excluded and ask. Is it too strong or too weak. I hope this post helps someone. Just try and see.

*Celestial in PvP is very different.

Criminal.5627:

so they strictly mentioned on the readyup done on the 21st that a warrior with healing sig will need to worry about burst skills and not so much about sustained damage.
that is broken imo because it is literally saying rangers cant do kitten to warriors who have healing sig since we are not meant to do burst dmg and only do sustained as mentioned in our CDI… also that “sic em” has the potential to grant a thief 200 power.

Why is it rangers get over looked?

I don’t know, but I squash 9 out of 10 thieves in PvP and WvW so they could use some help. It’s funny, but kinda sad, how they B-line to me for their own demise… Warriors give me much more trouble.

Prysin.8542:

DeadlySynz.3471:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Um, you get that it’s across the board right? This isn’t a thing that was done to us specifically.

This change hits the Ranger harder; it’s not just the Ranger but their pet as well. They are also subject to the ferocity change which means their damage is also taking a hit. Do you think Anet will buff the pet to compensate? Wishful thinking.

screw crit damage, jump into the water and you got more DPS then what some of the others can get on land. True story, and you know it is true.
So grab your wetsuit, diving goggles and dip your toes. There will always be that final frontier were we excel at everything.

Yeah, the best way to survive in WvW is to stand by the water and jump in when some unfortunate peon wanders your way. You’re like a shark in the water! Get those tasty seals! Chomp! Don’t forget to put that second sigil on your bow either…

AEFA.9035:

40 new traits. 8 professions. 5 new traits for each classes.

1.) Read the Wind

Ranger: Your arrows are swift and deadly, but in some scenarios they are not as fast as they need to be and your enemies can dodge them easily. With Marksmanship’s new Read the Wind, your longbow arrows will fire at twice their base velocity, allowing for supreme accuracy at long range.

2.) Empowered Training

Beastmaster: Your pets will now be able to hit any moving foes within its 300 radius without missing.

3.) Tree-jutsu

Nature Magic: You will be transformed into a Seed Pod for 260 seconds to heal nearby allies and cure conditions on them.

4.) Arrowcart-jutsu

Skirmishing: You will be transformed into an Arrowcart for 260 seconds to provide real impact in WVW. Ally friendly.

5.) Ranger’s Gift

Nature Magic: You and your pet sacrifice your lives to resurrect down allies to 100% health and 100% stamina. Max 5.

Number 5 is my fav.

2.) Suicide Mud Trap

If you take more than 75% damage in under 3s from dual wield warrior, commit suicide and cripple nearby foes for 10s (unblockable).

kiwituatara.6053:

Archon.6480:

I understand how some say it feels clunky at times. It took me about a year to get a feel for the skills and unique movement. Warrior and guardian feel great out of the box, however, Ranger is actually much more mobile when mastered. It just takes a ton of practice and Travelers runes

I beg to differ, warriors are more mobile. And its not “when mastered”, its when you have the right skills and weapons put on.

Well, I must admit, you got me there…

I think the description on our amazing new trait is more acuratetly:

Ranger: Your arrows are slow and underpowered, and in most scenarios they are not as fast as they need to be and your enemies can walk sideways to avoid them easily. With Marksmanship’s new Read the Wind, you can sacrifice signet affects, damage, and range so your longbow arrows will fire at twice their base velocity, allowing for acceptable accuracy at medium range when you are bearbowing.

Yes, go 30, 0, 20, 0, 20. Mix apothecary carrion and soldiers. Keep pre/crit damage at 0. Really fun build. Use cats and GS, sword torch. Keep all 3 conditions up. Signets.

I understand how some say it feels clunky at times. It took me about a year to get a feel for the skills and unique movement. Warrior and guardian feel great out of the box, however, Ranger is actually much more mobile when mastered. It just takes a ton of practice and Travelers runes

Full set of ascended celestial with zerkers trinkets works fine, for now. Knights armour is great as well, but you loose out a little on natural condi damage. Celestial eventually will loose out out on OP crit damage but they will probably add boon duration or something to compensate. Full zerkers armour will make you start to hate ranger when you get to difficult content, so I would avoid it, but it’s up to you… Some enjoy the damage and such.

DarcShriek.5829:

Don’t simplfy Sylvari, kill them. Kill them all. Sylvari are dangerous. Look what they did to Lions Arch. Start with the pale tree and hunt down the rest.

Sylvari can’t be druid descendants. Sylvari came from seeds. They were created by the previously unknown god Monsanto. Which of course means that if a pale tree grows in your yard, you will be sued for patent infringement.

LOL, this had me in tears! Yes, and if you squeeze the too hard Canola oil comes out!

Nike.2631:

Why all the hub-bub? That skill is in the game. Its called Warrior Longbow #3.

…you had to bring that up!

Oh that would be sweet! Maybe a utility instead of sharpening stone…

Longbow is fine in any dungeon. Make sure your crit damage is around 100% and your power should be 3.1k. With a decent warrior and guardian you will be close to 100% crit chance with 15 – 20 stacks of might. Just stand 4 – 8 ft behind them when they stack. You need to leach their boons. Everything will melt. Both guardians and warriors will need help with Fury duration, so bring warhorn and moa.

Very nice suggestions!

Another slow pet that can’t land a hit? Na I’ve got dozens of those…

I used to run entangle on pwr/condition build. It works great in many situations. Especially sticking opponents in traps… And anytime you are facing 3 or 4 opponents. At a minimum, you will make each put one condi removal on cool down…

The range on Greatsword Skill 5, Hilt Bash, is too short. It should be increased to 400, from 300.

I can rarely ever land a hit on a fleeing opponent as they simply walk away from the short range that it has. In addition, Knockback pushes opponents out of range—most of the time—so one can’t follow up with Hilt Bash effectively. This combo rarely works for me. The skills seem kind of disjointed as they currently are.

Any thoughts? Am I missing something?

Yeah, good idea to wait a while. Just keep crafting your ascended mats. I am really worried about what will happen to all the celestial and zerker stuff I made…

I feel like the damage output is better if you don’t use eagle eye and stay just behind heavies in WvW. Swap some of the zerker gear for celestial so you don’t get insta gibbed by the thief or warrior that manages to stumble past your commander. The job of a LB ranger in WvW is to keep the enemy ranged at bay until you commander yells charge!!! try to have armour around 2600, and power at 3200ish. Most things will squash you if they get in your face and can stay there for too long, but that’s the point. The opposite is true as well.

I understand the frustration with the axe but actually like the way it is. I use it in power build with Warhorn and find it quite usefull in PvE and WvW. I think the trick is finding the right skill sequence. If you open with 2 at PB range, you will have just enough time to use 2,3,5,4,1,1,2 before swapping back to main weapons. The issue is that the damage seems a little underpowered vs a single target, so I swap out of this as soon as it lets me. 1h sword will do much more damage vs single target, but is many times not ideal as it keeps you at PB range too long for some things.

It was a good beginner guide. He never said anything about advanced gameplay. No talks about synergy with other classes, etc… This is meant for someone who is still getting their feet wet. Nice guide, but nothing advanced was included…

TurtleDragon.3108:

Archon.6480:

It depends on what you are doing. If you are face stomping easy content, who cares, right?

5 people with that attitude is the difference between a dungeon taking 10 minutes and 20 minutes. It’s not an excuse to play sub optimally.

Archon.6480:

If you are playing more difficult content, a little party heal, here or there helps team keep pressure on, without loosing damage over time evading and ressing downed allies.

You can do all that with the meta build and berserker gear. You don’t need to run clerics with 0/0/30/30/20 or whatever to heal your party.

Archon.6480:

Slightly decrease damage output by dropping eagle eye for spotter. Team will do more with 750 precision than you will with 5% extra dmg. Should be obvious.

Not sure why you’re agreeing with me? Builds like the ones you were promoting don’t take spotter.

Archon.6480:

A ranger will get one shoted at PB range by most things, so the risk is not worth the reward. Pure dps builds don’t work well past 30 either, too much unblockable damage

It’s always worth the risk because the difference between melee and ranged damage in this game is very big. Everything is avoidable if you know how to.

No, everything is not avoidable. You will run out of endurance in any good fight, unless you are noobing at max range. If you can’t take a hit, you can’t res and are that much more useless to a team. I’d always rather have an AH guardian over a zerker who can’t res. Biggest let down are zerkers who take a dirt nap every 10s because they “lagged” in the .25s window they had to dodge something that was easily avoidable.

kiwituatara.6053:

Well, we all know that zerker builds are the most optimum pve builds. Honestly though? Its much better to stick with what you enjoy playing. Hell, if I wanted the most optimal pve build, I’d have deleted my rangers and played zerker warrior.

Besides, I’d hold on to my money right now if I were you. Inc likely nerf – crit dmg. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Balance-Developer-Livestream-on-Friday-at-2pm-PST/first. Hoping the zerker elitism will go away

It’s funny, as I was finishing dungeon master title, a friend kept telling me the only way to beat dwayna on arah p4 was with 4 zerker warriors. “Nothing else would do enough dps.” He wouldn’t even run it with me because I wanted to do it with ranger. I ended up beating it the first time with a pug of mixed classes all running group traits and skills. Melted everything. :-) I think dwayna was easier than Lyssa priestess for crying out loud!

Stx.4857:

If I want a range option for a standard sword spotter pve build, is longbow the best choice for single target dps or is it shortbow?

Depends on how much damage you have split into condition damage, and how much bleed you can get from flanking. With less than 800 in condition I feel better with LB. Try to stay within 8ft of your allies or you’ll nerf your damage a bit.

Bambula.3649:

lb and combo fields deal more dmg than sword auto?
okay..now i want to know how this work with combo fields

and than tell me why you dont need frost-spirit if you want to increase your team dps more than personal?

and sorry guy, only cause you lvl 50. it has nothing to do with your a pro..i saw so much people that suck so hard with their classes, BUT i dont want to evaluate you know.

and i want to know why 30/30 would deal more dmg than 20/25/0/25

I’m not sure that 30/30 would deal more damage and frost spirit is great for some things, love it for temple runs. I just don’t run it in fractals. Sword makes use of leap finisher for fire aura which I don’t find helps too much with might stacks in fractals. A ranger will get one shoted at PB range by most things, so the risk is not worth the reward. Pure dps builds don’t work well past 30 either, too much unblockable damage. So the steady 2kish/s Armour ignoring condition dmg leached from combo fields is more beneficial with LB.

I’m not saying your build is bad, btw. Frost spirit does increase team dps more than individual damage. The trick is to stay alive and keep it alive long enough.

TurtleDragon.3108:

Archon.6480:

Very well said! There is more to team play than individual dps. Slightly decreasing your individual damage output in favor of support will make team damage higher in most cases.

I dont see how

perma regen, a waterfield, over 33% uptime on vigor (from me alone, likely much higher with others there), extremely fast and safe rezzes that put them at 50% of their healthbar instead of a measily 30%, a large uptime on protection, and perma fury.

increases your team’s overall damage. All the optimal meta builds already include the traits that increase group dps while builds such as the one Durzilla uses actually decreases team dps compared to a 30/25/0/15/0 build.

In most cases deviating from meta builds for more support is going to lower your groups overall dps. Only exception i can think of is Empower Alllies for warriors

It depends on what you are doing. If you are face stomping easy content, who cares, right? If you are playing more difficult content, a little party heal, here or there helps team keep pressure on, without loosing damage over time evading and ressing downed allies. Slightly decrease damage output by dropping eagle eye for spotter. Team will do more with 750 precision than you will with 5% extra dmg. That sort of stuff.

I use assassins LB in WvW Zerg until sigil of perception is charged. Then equip zerker. Seems I do more damage this way early on. I mix celestial and zerker so base crit chance is 48% without sigil of perception charged. With 100% crit damage, I feel like assassins does slightly more damage until sigil charged. No hard numbers, just a feeling.