Guild Wars 2

Thx swiftpaw. Ironic you posted that bc I figure I’ve taken the profession as far as I can and am moving on to getting back to things IRL. Good luck out there fellas

Lunchbox.9543:

I’d ask them why they made a new grand master trait that isn’t worth the investment (Nature’s Voice.)

Thirteen seconds regen / swiftness that can only be maintained with a Shout Mastery traited “Guard” and 40 point investment vs. Healing Spring and Nature’s Bounty (33% increased regeneration duration) for only 10 points that allows a combo field for 15 seconds that pulses to remove conditions, adds regeneration, and direct healing through blast or leap finishers.

The only thing lost is swiftness, and if that’s such an important boon to your build Birds / Warhorn can keep it up quite well while alone, and in groups there are many, many ways to keep it going.

Ya, I was high on Nature’s Voice for a minute until I realized the only thing I could come up with was Magi’s gear and companion’s might. It just seems like a token zerging trait because the swiftness and regeneration won’t really be useful for the ranger unless you want to go full bunker and hit like a wet tissue. Might as well go full healing and focus on reviving and stuff using this trait…I’m not sure. It’s pretty decent for a 5 man havoc squad in a healer/tank role I suppose, but if regeneration doesn’t scale off the caster’s HP I guess there really is no point to it.

Also, Lunchbox, I was wondering if you thought “Guard”, Entangle, Muddy Terrain, and traps should be instant cast. Right now I feel like they’re all quite a bit too easy to interrupt.

Broadicea.8294:

Chopps.5047:

I’m fairly certain you’re in the minority. There’s few redeeming qualities and no need to snare. All you need in dungeons are reflection, group stability, and DPS and the ranger can only do one of those things (reflection). Interesting how guardian does all three. Jon P wasn’t lying when he said guardian would be the cleric profession to end all clerics. Your best bet in any gamemode is always guardian. :p

Why so down on Rangers, Chopps? Where did this ranger-loving fellow from 4 days ago go?

Chopps.5047:

On the last boss fight, if you are doing a speed run, you have to alternate what you attack: Mai or her add. Doing this in the right order (google it) prevents a HUGE aoe from spamming the arena. Speed runs in this dungeon will want to aboid the time consuming aoe but also must be good enough to focus down targets with the right amount of power. You can’t just feedback land aegis while dropping 100b like they do on the kitten Lupicus video.

Now you DON’T have to play this way. If you run it like a pick up group you will just accept that you will be dodging aoe. There’s a chance to lose a pet. Swiftness, careful dodges, well timed swaps, and signet of stone are important.

Rangers must be strong. ANET is challenging us, not hating us. They love us. So they make it hard, forcing us to improve. It’s NOT an unfair fight to rangers.

I hope that helps.

Heheh, that guy isn’t around anymore :P

Ryan.8367:

You fought “A” d/d ele. I play best of their class both in pvp and wvw. Don’t get me started on your little fight you had with one d/d elementalist. No offense, you won’t win against a well played d/d ele like amyrlin serane as a ranger in WvW, no matter what build you put against it.

Like I said, it’s a shame we’re not facing DH as I could line up 10 people to duel you , and it’ll end with you coming back to the forums and saying a couple things along the lines of ‘this build won’t work in 1on1 situations with good players’. I hate to burst this little bubble you got where you’re fighting kitten roamers and calling the build good… It’s the same with faux’s build , all survivability no damage against someone who can cleanse well. You take the conditions out of the picture, you got nothing. The only class that can provide a GOOD d/d ele with condi pressure CONSISTENTLY is an engineer anmd MAYBE just MAYBE a necro now, but not ranger. Sorry =(

Things you need to beat a truly good d/d ele and not the trash you played against in WvW:

1. Extreme burst – Shatter mesmer burst/Phantasm hybrid burst with condition duration for immobs
2. Extreme Condi pressure w/ immobs – Any good engi with a condi build

Is 1v1 a thing? Because the way ANET is making ranger build, ranger is dependent on other professions being there. I think you need to look at it from a 5v5 perspective. Or you can do your duels or whatever, just don’t expect it to be balanced in any meaningful way. Of course, this game isn’t balanced in any meaningful way so what am I saying? >_<

At least they made it so mesmer can’t spawn duelists on keep walls. Thankfully, they fixed ‘obstructed’ on keep walls too for bow wielding rangers. Oh wait…they didn’t fix either of those issues. They want you to have stability to stand on top of the lip and not get pulled! Better have a guardian on your squad that wants to stand there and do nothing but give you stability. It’s not like they’d be more useful elsewhere or anything…

I mean, it’s not like Ele’s and Guardians can’t spam attacks through walls. Because if ranger could do any of that it would have been nerfed months ago.

Yasi.9065:

Ram Banson.4081:

Hey Anet?!, do it , DO IT!!!! ad that in fractal, you all know its good.

Srsly if you dont want a challenge at all…. why you dont just read a book, take a walk outside, or just watch TV?
This thing is no Hardmode so just learn it -.-

Hey Reading a book or taking a walk can ALSO be a challenge, depending on circumstances

Chopps, I actually enjoy having a ranger in grp especially for boss fight. Pet rezz, nature spirit, bear pet… all nice things to have if used correctly. Stun, snare, also nice.

I’m fairly certain you’re in the minority. There’s few redeeming qualities and no need to snare. All you need in dungeons are reflection, group stability, and DPS and the ranger can only do one of those things (reflection). Interesting how guardian does all three. Jon P wasn’t lying when he said guardian would be the cleric profession to end all clerics. Your best bet in any gamemode is always guardian. :p

Ranger sword evades work on the teleport…assuming you’re taking a ranger for fun.

Arah…it’s not even a question in my mind.

Durzlla.6295:

@Talmor why piercing arrows?

Bags. Need dem bags. And badges too! Spiders and axe are good for this too.

Well, if by adapt you mean stop doing PvE, sure. I waste too much time on that cheesy stuff anyways. Whenever you see me play I’ll be in spvp or wvw. If you see me on…startig a project then grad school so time is running short. At least I got in some fun before they nuked the profession completely in pve. Later on fellas

You told me nothing I don’t know…thanks for proving my point that it’s an awful dungeon though. I’m not going to waste time playing a game that doesn’t cater to their gamers. Pretty simple for me. You can play awful content all day long for all I care, have fun. Gw2 designers miss their design goals too often for me to defend them anymore. :P

Good luck, and have fun out there. I already got everything I wanted out of this game so I don’t feel bad ripping on it now. It’s just not very much fun anymore. But, so what, right? You lose one here but you gain one there. The world keeps spinning…

• By the way, there’s thousands of players that agree with me on points 2, 3, and 4. ANET advertised this as a game where you could play how you wanted. That’s not true for a large segment of the playerbase right now. You’re not oblidged to care or agree with them. Nonetheless, they exist and in large numbers too.

Sure, Webba, thank you for asking.

1. Everyone exploits the first cannon battle by hiding in corner so no one learns the mechanic for the final fight
2. The bosses and golems are difficult to see in terms of animations with all of the energy walls, auras, particle effects, and small enemy models
3. This dungeon heavily favors professions with access to stability (stability means you don’t have to watch for the animation and dodge at the right time, trivializing the content)
4. This dungeon heavily favors slow attacking professions (confusion melts a thief or ranger). Ranger auto is so fast it’s unergonomic to take off the autoattack. For example, Crossfire must be spammed the entire dungeon so it’s either hurt your hand or accept a posssible confusion nuke
5. This dungeon puts minion/pet reliant professions at a huge disadvantage by killig pets in laser wall and barrage aoe

I don’t think you can honestly compare this to Arah, Molten Facility, or existing Fractals and consider it good design. You should play more of the game to see what good content looks like. Aetherblades is mildly entertaining and fun for a run or two but it doesn’t deserve it’s own Fractal.

You can swiftpaw. Another method is everyone taking a corner and 1 in middle, standing still until red circles appear, then sidestep (dodge if you have to). Running around is probably the best but only works with a tightly coordinated team.

When I ran it, I think I had 20 in BM though. Depends what you’re trying to do.

Xsorus.2507:

Durzlla.6295:

Due to the total disappointment of these other builds and a bit of pitty I’m probably going to post a link to my build later, it’s a 10/20/10/0/30 build, and it’s a death machine!

Keen Edges or Malicious Training
Companion’s Might and Pet Prowess
Expertise Training
Commanding Voice, Rending Attacks, Natural Healing

Am I close?

Yes, close. You’re getting warm; there’s more details than that. On the right track! Here’s a hint: drop pet prowess for agility training and pick up a Lynx. Durz can spill the beans, it’s his build after all. The cool thing about it for me is now, for pvp, I have a decent long range build, a solid mid range build, and, of course, traps/bunker to hold a point.

Durz! The mid range peeler??? You can’t reveal that T_T lol just kidding. Fwiw, thats the build I used versus theives in the soac tourney (thank you durz!)

Peetee.9406:

Galtrix.7369:

In what world are Rangers good in PvE? I want to live there, because I really want to like Rangers, but Anet is determined to make it a non-existent class in this game. Their dps is substantially lower than every other class in the game. It’s even lower than an Engineer’s which is very low to begin with.

I’ll take my rangers single target DPS over my ele’s single target DPS any day.

It’s not that low if you factor in traits and the pet. It’s actually pretty close to the rest of the professions. But if the pet dies in pve…

Nice job, Nikaido. This kind of stuff makes me respect you guys. Rock on dude

This would be the only fractal that insta-gibs pets. Maybe ANET’s plan is to get rid of ranger in pve entirely? I’m completely against adding this as a fractal. At least fractals are fun. This dungeon, aetherblade, is a steaming pile of kitten.

Hadrians.4567:

@ Chopps Spirits had never 40k Hp but in a dream ….

On the order of means “a factor of ten higher” in an estimate. I always thought it was in the 10k range like a normal player’s health. I think a bear is 40k health fwiw. I don’t know I don’t really use spirits except in dungeons vs mobs using vigorous spirits and they tend to survive those encounters. All i know is 4000 seems awfully low. Also just because I guess at something that ISNT SHOWN by anet in tooltips doesn’t mean I’m wrong about everything. I’d kick your kitten up and down the sidewalk in pvp ranger v ranger no doubt. See who knows more then?

Holland.9351:

shinreigari.7318:

Chopps: are you sure about the 40.000 hp? They seem to die pretty easily, even when traited for health.

It’s Chopps, of couse it’s not true.

You are wrog Holland. 4000 health is tiny. Nothing in this game has 4000 health. I don’t know the exact number but it’s not that low. Blame anet and their awful tooltips and terribad game design. People like you make me wonder why I ever try to help anyone here. It’s. fool’s errand to help you ignoramouses.

Also if youre so good, lets 1v1 rNger v ranger in pvp and see who’s boss? Message me in game i’m loggin on soon. Film it and post on youtube. I’m so sick of noobs like you tellinge what is and what isn’t about this profession.

Really? This is arguably the worst dungeon design in the game…

HELLruler.4820:

Talmaru.7865:

A boss who can shadow step every 5 seconds or so and then deliver at least 10k burst dmg

This is the only problem with this dungeon, and dont forget you cant dodge it

Meh, I thought the whole dungeon was a crapfest. They need to put the team that made Arah, Fractals, and Molten Facility back on dungeon design. This living story team is just awful at them. That team should stick to what they’re good at: making bashable dragon pinatas.

Leo G.4501:

I find it funny how people are all jumping to support that dungeons 1-shot all pets and there’s nothing we can do about it. That is certainly a problem in mid-high level fractals but in regular dungeons, it’s easy to keep pets alive with minimal assistance. Ranger can even solo dungeons thanks to tanky pets.

It’s actually less of an issue in FOTM. I’m more worried about my pet dying in Arah or Aetherblades than in FOTM. Fractals/Arah were actually well designed, though, unlike Aetherblades. The living story team is awful at dungeon content. They should stick to simple escort missions and bashing dragon pinatas because apparently that’s all they’re good at.

They have more than 4000 health points….more like 40,000 if I remember right. And spirit of frost has NO internal cooldown, despite the tooltip.

(I’m pretty sure the tooltip is an attribute for all the spirits so the way it’s programmed, they cannot make one tooltip different from the others. So devs either show no cooldown information or one incorrect cooldown info on frost. shrugs)

Pedra.4381:

And of course, all that retooling and regearing, etc, potentially funnels money into their store, doesn’t it?

Makes you wonder. But, of course, that’s just conspiracy kitten, right?

Might be the first time I’ve somewhat agreed with you, Pedra. While I don’t think this is necessarily on purpose, it’s a little bonus they get for not doing their jobs.

Quick question, why did the bird’s time go up with speed training (test case 4)? Seems odd.

With fury boon, berserker armor (exotic/ascended trinkets), and 25 stacks of 10+ precision from the sigil, and runes of the ranger, food, I was getting 100% critical chance if I remember right, which is nice to stack 25 stacks (permanent) might on pet with Companion’s Might (that one adept skirmishing trait that was buffed last patch). Here’s the template, you can probably use it to modify or test for the exact numbers:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Mighty-Ranger-High-Level-FOTM-Build-6-27/page/3#post2322799

ilr.9675:

Drake seems awfully bad on TTK in this … which Drake was that?
It wasn’t the Reef one was it?

Well, you can’t just look at the bars you should read the data and the cases (he talks about what 1 through 5 means in the post). Once you take into account the drake’s activated abilities, I’m sure you’d see a difference. Any chance we can see those too? In any event, here’s more specifics:

Drakes miss a lot on moving targets. So do cats. Remember, cases 1 through 5 are different tests. The ones were cats and drakes did poorly against moving targets was the ones without agility training.

Another example of this is spiders. Notice how agility training had zero impact on the spider’s ability to hit the running golem. See the feline? It’s best against stationary targets.

Thanks for posting this, very nice information.

• General Questions:

1. Why doesn’t Spirit of Nature revive dead pets?
2. Why doesn’t Evasive Purity work? If you plan on fixing it, will it clean torment?
3. Why isn’t pet damage shown on the combat log?
4. Why does Hunter’s Call require line of sight?
5. Why do pet utilities take so long to activate?
6. Why is stability training restricted by pet type?
7. In my view, confusion penalizes professions that attack fast or use weapon evades (ranger/thief) MORE than others? Is this “double whammy” intended? Torment functions in a similar way. What is the logic behind this?
8. Why does QZ negate healing?

• Dungeons:

1. Does ANET care about balance in dungeon content?
2. Why do pets have a death penalty in dungeons?
3. Why is there a disconnect between where ANET has spirits and what the community feels about spirits in PvE content?
4. Some have said ranger tends to get more aggro than other professions, is this true and can you explain this?
5. In general, are there any plans on making boss aggro mechanics more transparent?
6. Do you feel stability trivializes dungeons? Do you feel ranger should have more access to stability?
7. Rangers attack very fast so it’s to their benefit to use autoattack. However, this causes at least two issues. One is the infamous “rooting” issue with the sword. Another is with shortbow’s Crossfire. In the new Aetherblade dungeon, if the ranger gets stacks of confusion, Crossfire on autoattack will prove deadly. Of course, autoattack could be removed but this is at a great loss to ergonomics as, again, ranger attacks are fast and must be spammed for maximum DPS, something the profession is already limited in as shown by community consensus.

If you answer any of these questions, thank you for your time.

Stealth.9324:

Well, guess a full team of 5 Eles can win against a full team of 5 Necros. If you are Bunker Build, you can still 1v1 Necro, but if it 2 Necro, instead of lasting for a while, you melt instantly. That is my lesson from last SOAC tournament match when our team Eles vs Necro team.

Player on the ranger soac team here. I was wondering if you thought maybe fighting the wellomancers off point would have helped? Because they do this thing where they explode their enemies in four seconds on point.

I use agility training though so recall is actually really fast. Plus, you have signet of stone and teleports via swaps so pets double downing is not a problem. Of course mistakes happen, parties wipe in dungeons, etc. But with decent play and teamwork, it’s just not the issue you make it out to be.

“Beyond that, as great as shortbow damage may seem to you, it’s still really weak in contrast to other professions (with pet), even other ranged professions (i.e. see Engineer, Mesmer, Rifle Warrior, even Necro). "

Define “really weak” because it doesn’t have much meaning in this context. Please use timed kills or numerical estimates. Use my build to compare to theirs and videotape it. You must not like 25 stacks of might.

They should add torment removal to evasive purity when they fix it. It is “evasive” purity, after all, and if there’s anything you want to evade out of it’s Torment.

That’s awful, I’m really sorry that happened.

As far as I know, that skill works even when the pet is defeated. You were probably out of range. As far as Protect me goes, at least it’s a stun break.

Source: Discussion section of the wiki

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/%22Search_and_Rescue%22

My suggestion is to say what you mean and mean what you say

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1h6g2k/clearly_something_is_wrong_with_the_metrica/carjrrw

Last time I spoke to support I mentioned how I’ve been terribly disappointed in their customer service. See?

I’m a big fan of this company but you all dropped the ball on this one. Get it together.

jewishjoyride.4693:

30,25,0,15,0 has been very very good for dungeons for a long time. You just couldn’t use companions might before. Now it’s a bit silly if you don’t.

I’ve been using sigils of battle along with 2 runes of strength for a couple months now in dungeons. I also have knights armor and not zerker. You honestly do not lose very much dmg. Especially on a ranger, where our skill coefficients tend to be low.

Yeah with Sigil of Strength (30% chance might on crit) I had basically permanent 20 to 25 stacks might on the pet. And with the flattening of pet damage, I don’t feel bad taking a pig. With the pig, it drops elixir of heroes rarely. That’s up to 15s of invulnerability if you want it (elixir/protect me/signet of stone/signet of beastmaster). And with the seed pod that’s more healing spring uptime (10 MORE seconds) and even if you don’t get seed pod or elixir, you still get egg (5 initiative for your thief pal or health if you need it). Knights is a great choice.

What do you guys think of porcine? The pig gives

1) Egg with healing and 6 initiative for thief teammates
2) healing seed which is basically a healing spring if I recall
3) elixir of heroes…another 6s invulnerability!

The seeyamoth gives all boons (plasma) and a couple blinds/stealths.

I mean…if pets are normalized and with companion’s might we can pick any of them…

the porcine has Brutal Charge which is AoE knockdown AND leap finisher…

This could add defensive to the “offensive” template (if you haven’t checked the original post in a while, check again, I modified it today).

Based on the discussion around porcine, I might add that to the first post.

@Pulse

Nope, I play Ranger, Necromancer, and Elementalist. Although I’m really starting to like engineer. But I’m pretty sure feedback (reflection in general) was nerfed in dungeons a patch or two ago. :/ I used to kitten Lupicus with my offhand axe and get four or five 13,000 damage crits in succession. Now I’m lucky to get one 13,000 damage hit using the same technique.

By the way, I disagree about micro’ing pets and DPS. Because when I call my pet back, I’m still landing hits with shortbow. Let’s think about what that means for a moment.

Let’s put it this way: Did you know that whenever I call my pet it’s the same time the people melee’ing dodge?

And I’m using a LOT of shortbow and really only find myself swapping for the warhorn buffs. And my pet isn’t just sitting there being a damage sponge. Versus a single target I can keep ~8 stacks of might on the pet and it is really contributing. For these reasons, I think you’re incorrect to state such a thing as “known fact”.

Kain Francois.4328:

I don’t play Ranger much, but when I do, I wonder how your pets NOT stay alive!?

With a pet swap every 15 seconds and a decent heal, I’ve never faced a situation in FoTM where I cannot keep my pet alive.

In particular, Ranger excels at Grawl fractal. Not only can the Ranger solo his shield with Entangle, but it’s the most pet-friendly boss fight in the game because the boss rarely ever attacks Melee pets without his “flip” attack (which gives you more than enough time to call back your Jaguar.)

This really seems like a l2p issue.

QZ also melts the shield. Afaik ranger is the only profession that can easily solo the grawl boss shield without dying via entangle. But when I was told about that, I never knew if it was condition damage that I needed? Very interesting stuff indeed.

Why isn’t zephyr’s speed grandmaster material? As an example, natural vigor (5 in WS) is a grandmaster for engineers. Quickness is so good ANET had to cut it’s effectiveness in half a few months ago. And not many people know this but with traited quicknenig zephyr and zephyr’s speed, ranger had the most quickness uptime in the game. Now it’s even longer.

Not only that, zephyr’s speed at 5 points made master’s bond (celestiallust sigil for pet) look awful. Finally, it was so good, almost every build used 5 in BM. Now we’re free from that ball and chain. The only real difference this makes is in pvp because now quick stomps require QZ or 30 in BM for spvp.

As far as pve goes, simply use this build or a variant and you’ll be way more effective than with anything you had before.

• by the way, how about longbow for this build? Dat 10 stack vulnerability! Mmmmm

I heard from another player yesterday that evasive purity has never worked. :/

Which makes me a little sad that this slipped passed QA. You’d think they’d catch this stuff? I’ll test it tonight and report back.

It’s actually solid pvp removal for a master trait. What a shame.

Hahahaha

/15char

pulsecodesgnl.3470:

Sicarine.3985:

Thank you, Chopps, for not bowing down to the massive amount of mindless ranger hate on the web. It surprises me how much ranger “discussion” dissolves into slamming pets and DPS off of conjecture (with a few hyperboles thrown in). I was running 25/25/0/20/0 before, but with this in mind I might redistribute 5 points from nature into wilderness for the endurance regen. Quick question. Do you think using knights instead of zerkers hurts crit damage too severely?

Can we not circle-jerk the OP, seriously…

He posted a build with some interesting claims and understandably there is a lot of criticism warranted. Especially with the precedents ANet has established with Rangers. There is no Ranger hate here, only people want more out of their profession or feel there should be ways to raise the profession on par with the rest of the professions for certain aspects of the game.

There’s no reason we need to turn this into a fundamentalist bi-partisan debate that goes nowhere. The build by the OP is appreciated by most people that have posted here.

As for your question directed at the OP, most people can answer this and I’m sure he would agree. Zerkers is going to make you most optimal, if you find you need a handicap, then you can use other pieces like Knight’s, but will lose out on a decent amount of damage with the loss of Crit Damage which is needed in this build, badly.

What is “to circle jerk”? I haven’t heard that since the 3rd grade. Hehe

You’re right, knights is a rough call. You can do it but it’s less DPS and you’ll end up eating more aggro. Give it a shot, though, let us know how it works.

Thanks for saying “thanks” to all the circle jerkers out there. I’ll circle jerk with you guys about ranger all day long. Love the profession and the game.

Doug.9628:

are the people complaining about pets even bothering to recall/heal them correctly/switch pets based on the encounter? The only time I get double death is when I am literally not paying any attention whatsoever to anything that’s going on.

Pretty much this.

Someone asked if I ever get double deaths on pets. Yeah, I do. Sometimes a pick up group isn’t working out too well and I’m rezzing others every two seconds and my pets get blown to bits while I’m distracted. Sometimes I test a glassy pet in a fight and find that I struggle keeping it alive. No one is perfect: sometimes I just mess up. Overall, with practice, a decent team, and decent personal skill, one can consistently prevent double deaths. I try to prevent deaths period, but that’s not always the case (signet on cooldown and drake gets focused, etc). However, rarely am I without a pet and if I find myself without a pet, it’s normally just for 10 or 20 seconds, which isn’t a big deal anyways if you’re in a rough pick up group.

Wethospu.6437:

I’m looking forward for this fractal on tonight’s 55+ run. Actually something hard?

Why don’t you guys theorycraft an all elementalist run, run in whites or naked, use no traits, or any other method of increasing difficulty? Difficulty is not what you’re after, I guess?

To speed run the new dungeon it looks like you have to precision burst the First Mate then Mai to avood wasting time on the AoE cannons. Have you speed ran that yet?

Afaik you and your crew uses the easiest professions (besides mesmer) in full easy mode gear (exo/superior runes and sigils/ascended) while, at least while it worked, abusing feedback and wall of reflection to literally melt enemies. I just find it ironic that your crew always brings up harder content yet you refuse to challenge yourselves.

I do daily runs of 48, 38, and 28, if I can fit them all in. In a guild run, we play 2 rangers, 2 gaurdians, and 1 warrior. The other ranger is Skady Valda, maybe you’ve seen her posts? In any case, she never gets double death on pets and neither do I.

“How? How can this be, Chopps? My pets die!”

It’s a function of your teamwork, individual skill, and build. She runs double drake and I run red moa and either a bear or drake (really liking the new weakness on bosses since bosses do indeed crit). Don’t underestimate the survivability of calling a pet back (I like agility training for faster recall) or invulnerability like signet of stone.

Beleive me, if I thought pets died the way some of you guys claim, I’d be on here asking for help. I was, actually, before they buffed pets vitality a crapton and now I’m happy. Anet feels that if a ransr runs a glass pet and can’t micro it like a machine and/or won’t bother to use signet of stone, well, said ranger deserves to pay the price for taking that risk. And I feel the same way.

There’s two bosses. One fight happens in a circular room with beams of energy that act like “spokes” of the circle and rotate around repeatly, like a spinning diameter line of death.

The one people complain about is the lower beam. It’s coincident with the ground and thus kills pets, or at least that’s the thought, however, properly timed swaps can prevent this. You really only get into trouble with the beams once every 30s. When you are about to lose the pet, on swap the next pet will appear in front of you, usually to your left. Use this to “teleport” a pet to other side of beam. In other words, swap before your pet gets pinched. Another possibility to avoid the ground beam is birds. Has anyone tested that?

On the last boss fight, if you are doing a speed run, you have to alternate what you attack: Mai or her add. Doing this in the right order (google it) prevents a HUGE aoe from spamming the arena. Speed runs in this dungeon will want to aboid the time consuming aoe but also must be good enough to focus down targets with the right amount of power. You can’t just feedback land aegis while dropping 100b like they do on the kitten Lupicus video.

Now you DON’T have to play this way. If you run it like a pick up group you will just accept that you will be dodging aoe. There’s a chance to lose a pet. Swiftness, careful dodges, well timed swaps, and signet of stone are important.

Rangers must be strong. ANET is challenging us, not hating us. They love us. So they make it hard, forcing us to improve. It’s NOT an unfair fight to rangers.

I hope that helps.

I keep pets alive by using heals at the right time, using high toughness / vitality pets (red moa, river drake, reef drake, black bear are all good options now. Maybe a cat versus the grawl shaman that rush the captives assuming you can reliably chain CC the shaman with your group. If not, a dog would be better. I try to think on my feet.

As far as boss fights go, the imbued shaman I think is worst on pets (besides Jade Maw where I try to hold a crystal out of combat with the pet stowed…in high levels there’s so much going on this isn’t really an issue but at low levels you can speed it up this way.) Going back to the Legendary Imbued Shaman, I like to keep my bear out in that one because it can melee the boss. When the boss does big aoe bomb underneath himself, call the bear back.

When he goes invulnerable, use QZ to break the shield. Hide behind the guardian’s wall of reflection. Then the elementals must die so use your brown bear to pull all your teams conditions. After that, swap to drake, attack and right after the tailswipe you should have built up some might via peircing/companion’s might. Now hit the drake utility. By now most of the elementals are dead and you just repeat.

The other one that kills pets a lot is Captain Ash in ascalon. Use a devourer there because te Captain’s agony (same is true of Mossman) hurts a LOT when in melee range.

If you’re good enough at dipping your pet into and out of melee range, your pet will survive. If you find yourself looking down and “huh? My pet’s dead?”, then take personal responsibility. It’s not the pet’s fault, it’s the ranger’s. The ranger could have swapped, used a different/less glassy pet, used signet of stone, used Guard, healed, used Bark Skin, or any of a number of ways we have to make pets survive.

The cool thing about the so-called pet “nerf” is that damage is a little more normalized across the pets. So you don’t have to feel bad about picking a bear anymore.

Personally I run Protect Me, black bear, drake, signet of beastmaster, and signet of stone. If I know I can stay alive, I open my hero’s tab and adjust my traits so I get Spotter instead of Signet of Beastmaster.

Rock and roll!

I am NOT used to seeing this many crits. I am loving life right now.

Spark Angel.2145:

I’m curious to see your feedback on this build Chopps. I designed it myself with survival skills in mind instead of an extreme pet focus (your build opened up new doors for me that I’ll try later though). In general, your traits buff you while your skills cause greater damage in bursts. I’ve been using it as a PvE/WvW hybrid and it’s been working well for me. http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=VG;4wE-y-r2JEV-0;9F8j;1TJJ;027B19-45;55JV4;2udbTudbTo-Fz0;06;2Vd-i0o1sYzZ352o-G-2i;9;9;9;9;9;9;0V8k3z

That’s an interesting build. I’d say do what gives you the most synergy (I hate that word but can’t think of a better one right now).

So in the mighty ranger build, the keys are

• precision
• companion’s might
• Spirit buffs/fortifying bond for dungeon buffs

Will these elements be useful in your build? That’s up to you to decide. I would note that you seem to be a power/bleeds hybrid and bleeds tend to spike cap in dungeons (not always, depends on group/weapons). So there’s advantages and disadvantages in trying to find one build for all situations and all gametypes. The cool thing about gw2 is that because so much of the game is based on skill, even hybrid builds can be successful, like you anecdotally point out. Good job!