Guild Wars 2

Harnel.6810:

Untrue Cuf! it depends on the situation – plus, when you swap pets, the aggro your pet had gets swapped to you, which can be devastating for a zerker who relies on their pet for tanking.

Master’s Bond has its place, it’s just not with squishier pets. Keep in mind that a drake or bear on a BM ranger can tank legendary bosses in mid-high grade fractals and Arah explorable for a considerable amount of time.

OK, I perhaps should have mentioned I am talking purely about WvW and PvP. I don’t do PvE at all so I have no idea, and you could well be right on that.

But when fighting other players there’s really no justification for this trait.

It’s been suggested often that HaO become a survival skill, but shout would work just as well too. Frankly all it needs is a way to reduce its CD.

With HS.. to be honest I wouldnt change it. It’s already a very very common choice of Heal and concidered one of the best in the game, so to reduce its CD by 20% and possibly give it other effects too would probably make it a bit OP.

With RaO… yeah could be good too. Again, like HoA, it would be nice just to be able to lower it’s CD a bit and being a shout would make perfect sense.

It’s just a terrible trait, especially when you start to consincider you could just take Might Swap and the 6 might (3 + 3 from you, assuming Fortifying Bond) gives your pet as much damage at 25 stacks of Master’s Bond and more overall tankiness because you will be pet swapping constantly. As well as access to both F2, and AoE might for you are your other teammates.

Just bad. All round bad.

I just hope they go back and re-think giving other classes boon stripping. There seems to be a lot of focus on Resistance being a nice not-so-hard counter to conditions because it can be stipped.. except that currently the majority of Classes can’t boon strip, and even those that can require specific builds for it.

(Sorry I know this is off-topic but somehow this is the only thread on the Ranger forum about these changes :P).

In regards to RaO… my initial thought it they will tie the Stability to the pet in the same way the Might stacking is. Get 5s Stabity for every pet attack, or something like that.

cafard.8953:

Because ranger/hunter/archer is one of the most popular archetypes in every mmo. GW2 is no exception.

This.

Got nothign to do with how good we are, or how fun it is to play. All the classes are a lot of fun depending what you want to do, and most people concider Rangers to be fairly weak as a class (rightly or wrongly).

People just like archers.

Of course it’s a work around, you are doing something the skill isn’t really intended to do. You see Thieves do it all the time with Withdraw, or Mesmers with Staff#2, and while it’s easier because it’s just one roll it doesn’t change the fact that this isn’t a Ranger thing. If you want to use a backwards roll to go forwards then be prepared to put in the effort.

Personally I think it works fine… use about-turn and hit #2.. then as your character is doing that you can turn your camera normally and by the time the second leap is actually ready to be used you are already facing any which way you want to go. It’s easy.

That said.. I agree the delay on the first leap is a little annoying, especially since it’s an evade. Having a delay on an evade is an odd design choice to me. I also wouldnt mind the #3 doing more forward-ing and less sideways-ing, like the Dagger#4 does. As it is, I don’t use the Sword#3 all the much except at point blank range or if my target is to the right of me, simply because it’s not in any way productive otherwise.

^ What they said.

This game has surprisingly little Power Creep. Obviously we have Ascendended gear, and with the Rune / Sigil changes we got there was an otherall power increase, but other than that it’s really not that different to how it was originally.

It’s actually quite normal in games for people to move towards higher risk higher reward strategies as they get better at the game, which means as a game gets older and the average skill of the community increases more people adopt these strategies. In GW2 this plays out as more Zerker or other DPS focused builds. This is not a GW2 thing or even a MMO thing. In RTS games you see new / low level players tend to prefer booming tactics where they play defensively and build up slowly till they achieve their lategame techs, whereas more experienced players tend to go for early rush tactics which offer quicker and easier wins in executed well, but are harder to pull off.

All normal parts of a game and it’s community’s evolution.

LB Rangers are a little cheesey there’s really no denying that, and yeah it is actually a lot easier to use than full zerker builds on some other classes, but hey-ho.

It’s not any more or less cheesey than the multiple other cheesey builds out there, and no matter what build you use there will always be someone who complains. If you go regen builds people will blame you for using passive healing to win. I get blamed for being a condition noob when I am on my hybrid trapper, even though I only have 800 condition damage.

There’s really nothing you can do which someone wont have a problem with. As long as a build can be resonably countered by someone who’s resonably prepared then there is no issue.

Dogs are not really tank pets so they will have issues. Swapping to drakes is a great choice for taking camps thanks to their tankiness as well as cleave.

General pointers though are to remember to use you heal to help your pet, if needed. Remember to swap pet before it dies so you don’t get stuck on a long CD. If it looks like your pet is going to die before you can swap / heal it just call it back, it should lose agro to at least some of the NPCs and give you enough time to swap it out. Or you can just keep pet of passive till you have drawn the agro to yourself, and then send your pet in. This is usually what I do since it’s easier to move the NPCs where I want them if they are on me, and it tends to split their agro between myself and my pet which keeps up both alive.

I have to agree with Jim on this. I don’t see any benifit from you build as oppose to using a more typical trait setup.

Just changing a few things can give you this

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAT8XjEq0waJLusQ1ag+ga9DEAJQrfw9VEEp9B/q9A-T1CBABPqEkHVN2S5hh6AmSJGOqlAwDAQFNBPYiBp9H0TjQAAEAO6Q3ZIFQELjA-w

Have much better condition control, much better Stun Breaking options, more or less the same tankiness (more Health, less armour) and more damage (more Power, same Crit damage, same Crit Chance when factoring in the fury uptime).

And the torch would be my very last choice for a power build. Any of the other 3 OH weapons would bring way more to the table.

Can’t say I have ever had this problem, but like others have mentioned, barrage, WH, Traps and piercing arrows are all good ways to instantly break the stealth if you use it wrong.

Also it is worth nothing that sometimes I’ve seen (on my Mesmer, but I imagine this happens to any class) a graphical glitch where you don’t appear to go invisable but are actually stealthed to you opponent. So the skil lis working, it just doesnt look like it to you.

If played well it’s surprisingly hard to focus the person down. I know because there’s a Ranger against me in my current matchup who runs around like this, or at least very simular.

I have to say most of our encounters so far he’s won simply because the extreme range and amazing access to stealth makes catching them a real task. That said though, you are right, that if you do manage to catch the person it can be over for them very quickly. I’m on my trap build and if I do manage to get him caught in my traps for 3-4 seconds that’s often a lethal dose of conditions, not to mention over 10 seconds of chill, none of which can be cleansed.

So, yeah… Has obvious weaknesses but it is not as easy to exploit them as you might imagine.

Sube Dai.8496:

Might be wrong on that. Something increases skull fear though.

Although it’s the pet summoning the skull, it’s still you the player who ultimately uses it, so the skull fear is effected by traits/runes/etc etc in the normal way.

Like everyone has mentioned it’s very dependant on your build, but really it’s just practice.

Theives (and Mesmers) are the hardest classes to learn to fight just because, like you say, you can’t see them a lot of the time. It does just take practice to learn to predict what they will do.

I’m not a fan of giving exact rotation to win fights, simply because rotations never go as planned and actually to win fights it’s far more important to understand your skills and react to the situation. Going in assuming you’re going to do everything in a set order is a sure way to get your kitten handed to you… But with that said, the LB, the GS, Traps and Canine pets are all great tools for fighting theives, so give some of them a try

I have to say I am very much of the opinion than Spiders are pretty much always the best pet choice if you are using EB as your only condition removal.

If you run dual cats/bird/dogs with EB as your only removal you are going to have real problems VS engis, necros and condition mesmers because you pets will very likely be killed, leaving you defenceless to their conditions.

Spiders offer decent damage and pretty good CC whilst being tanky enough (and ranged) so that they will never die from EB or random AoE.

In the build you posted you have the wolf and a spider which is a fairly common setup, and it works well. Just don’t forget the value of the spider because it’s not as obviously powerful as birds, cats and canines… It has great value when using EB.

Edit: somehow forgot Drakes. Drakes are also a great choice because they also bring a lot of tankiness and shouldn’t die easily. They have a bit more damage than spiders but no CC. Personally I prefer Spiders but I couldn’t honestly say I think one is better than the other.

http://youtu.be/gG7Bi4OYaFs

The biggest thing I want to point out is how you use Barrage.

For the love of all things holy let yourself finish the channel. If you stop it part way through the barrage ends immediately, but if you finish the channel the arrows keep raining for quite some time after you’ve finished shooting. Waiting that extra 0.5 second (since you continually cancel it right near the end) will make a huge difference.

Obviously there can be special cases where you really can’t wait, but in most of the cases I saw in the video you didn’t need you cancel it.

Otherwise quite enjoyable

Aaah the old Entangle debate.

I’m still a die hard supporter of it, but there’s not much point in spending ages trying to convince everyone to agree.

But go Team Entangle!

Never use it. Like others have said it’s an interesting trait but ultimately not very good, especially since full melee rangers are not that common. Almost everyone using one melee and one ranged weapon, and the melee weapon is commonly used for mobility / survivability more than fighting anyway, so the whole trait is a little redundant.

Even on a full melee build I wouldn’t use it though. Many other traits I’d rather have.

To be honest I like EP as it is.

It’s old and tired advice but it remains the best… just go and try them all and find which works best for you.

For me I never liked Viper’s Nest for the reason Fluffball mentioned… Rangers have a ton of Poison already it becomes unnessesary (although I use S/D+SB+Spider pets, so I was fully covered on the poison front).

I also tend to prefer Frost Trap over Spike Trap because of the pulse / field it gives. Spike trap often gets dodged or triggered by illusions / pets / summons / random NPCs and whilst you can do a lot to avoid this with good placement, it remains an issue at times.

Natural Purification would be hilarious with MH Axe. Oh god.

Welcome to the game

First off though you need to let us know what game mode you are intending to play the most. Your options are Open World PvE, Dungeons/Fractals, sPvP or WvW.

They all require quite different things so it’s hard to help properly without knowing.

I’ll leave someone else to help you with farming because all I do in WvW.. gets me enough gold to buy what I need but it’s by no means fast or efficient

Based purely on the look of the vine attack we saw, I’m going with AoE / Control, which would be very nice indeed.

I’m not a huge fan of supporting roles so I quietly hope it isn’t that but any big change is always fun regardless.

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you’re about to face a Mesmer?

Really need to work out what build they are on. Zerker Shatter Mesmer is totally different to Condi Mesmer, so the first thing is picking up on what they are going to try and do (this is true of all classes, but particularly important with Mesmers).

How do you feel about your odds of winning?

Assuming equal skill level.. 50/50 I’d say. Personally I find Mesmers to be one of the harder matchups.

Strategies and tactics?

High pressure I feel is the key. I am generally quite passive in my playstyle ankitten ot in any great hurry to win a fight (infact I quite enjoy dancing around warriors for unnessesarily long) but with Mesmers it’s not the same. You need to get up in their face and stay there.

Which type of Ranger build do you feel best fights Mesmer?

Probably a LB Ranger. Totally wipes out their ability to kite with teleports and seriously hinders the use of stealth. Also Mesmer illusions make a great target for Hunters Shot, and Barrage is great to. Really the LB has everything you need to take down a Mesmer.

What Ranger skills (weapon or utility) are most important to have in this fight?

Really depends on the Mesmers build, your build, and all that stuff… But like I said, I think the LB skills are all ideal for fighting a Mesmer. That and LR is always great to avoid a shatter burst.

How do you feel about Mesmer in general?

Interesting class. It’s the only other class I play reguarly so I find it particularly interesting to fight against them. The reason I find them hard is really just because they kite really well when played right, and if you don’t have the tools to handle it properly on your build it’s a challenge to keep the pressure up.

But with that said I’ll say I find Mesmers one of the more annying classes to fight, simply because

I’M THE BEST!

But really, there is no best. And is there was, the chances are it’s someone noone has ever heard of. I mean we have what, 20ish regular forum users and probably 20ish Rangers who’ve made a half decent video in the last 6 months… the chances of the best player being in those 40 (less if you concider the overlap) is tiny. Personally I know at least 2 people who I’d concider among the very best players I’ve ever met who don’t post on forums or videos so…

Well… from what I can see there either needs to be more than one specialisation per class, or there needs to be some serious drawbacks to becoming a druid, otherwise everyone will be a druid and it will pretty much just be Ranger v2.0 and frankly there’d be no point calling it a Druid other than for shiney marketing, which would be pretty underwhelming.

Personally, I am hoping for multiple specialisations per class Even if they don’t add them right away, it’s something they could / should build on in future updates which would be awesome.

First Video:

Not that interesting, honestly. Whilst bursting people down is fun to do yourself it’s pretty boring to watch montages of other people doing it, especially because everyone will watch it thinking “ya that’s great, bro, but what happens when you don’t insta kill them”, which is what you already found. Also I hate intro’s. If you want have an intro then 5-6 seconds max. I don’t need or want to see you slowly pan round your character for 20 seconds, and neither does anyone else.

Second Video:

Much better. Longer fights, more interesting fights, and fights where it wasn’t always 100% clear you’d win. Much more engaging to watch and also much better for viewers to see how you play and reacts to things. Intro was gone to Music was questionable.. I know some people will love it, but probably something more neutral like in the first video is better, IMO. My biggest suggestion would be to go one step further and actually include some close fights which you end up losing… That will make it that little bit more interesting (maybe even exciting) because then the viewer wont know how it will end, unlike at the moment were even though there was some good fights it was still a given that you’d win in the end. It also makes the video feel more natural and not so cherry picked.. because we all know EVERYONE loses sometimes, and watching videos of people who never ever die just makes it feel fake somehow.

All IMO

Without listing every possible build for every profession it’s a little hard to answer.. but in general I think the most important thing to remember is that you are on a mid-range build which relies heavily on your AoE fields.

This means you are inherently going to be strong against pretty much any melee build because they will have no choice but to pass through / stay in your traps for most of the fight and can be kited pretty well thanks to you being ranged.

On the other side it means you will often struggle with long-range opponents, most notably are GS mesmers and LB Rangers, because they can pretty easily avoid your traps for the most part, can’t be kited and will make you be the one chasing, which is not ideal.

Of course this is purely in general, because GS mesmers and LB rangers are builds which are often played by low skilled players and are also builds in which some variations take little / no condition removal, which means once you do get in range it’s an easy fight. But if they are equally as good as you and have a rounded build, a LB ranger will probably give you the run around and there is not a lot you can do about it.

From my own personal experience on traps, my order of preference to fight (from easiest to hardest) was Warrior > Guardian > Ranger > Thief > Elementalist > Engineer/Necromancer > Mesmer, but again it varies with build, and most importantly, player skill.

All nice improvements but nothing that will actually change anything. In other words, nice little buffs to people who already use these things but nothing good enough to make people who don’t want to.

I haven’t played for a few months now, but before I left I was playing a 0/2/6/6/0 celestial build and I have to say I REALLY enjoyed it.

Really powerful 1v1, very flexible, great survivabilty and very high damage potention. Honestly I couldnt have wanted more from a build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV8YjEqUzaJLusQ1aADhqdLEslArAwdR8CXdBTOA-TBSFwAnV/BwDAI++D9VC24iAUV5HedDJOCAkCAihRA-e

It was something along those lines, but one of the things I loved was there are many variations all of which I’d say are equally good in their own way. If you prefer A/T over SB then go for it.. you’ll give up your ranged pressure but gain more burst bleeds, more might, beef you pet the hell up and get that all important burn.

You can take any of the WS GM traits you want, they are all awesome traits for obvious reasons, but you have enough poison, condition removal and armour to not 100% need any one of them so you really to get to pick what you want.

I played with SoH + Lyssa runes for quite a while which is also really great… full condition wipe every 48s plus a ton of boons and a very nice precision boost makes those Runes well worth giving up a utility slot if that’s what you want.

You can move those 2 points from Skim in to BM if you want more Might and a more kitten pet. With Traveller Runes and 6 into WS you’ve got 45% boon duration.. so even just with Mighty Swap and Battle Sigils you can have a tidy amount of Might fo doing very little.

I actually never tried using Natures voice myself because I am not a huge fan of regen builds or spamming guard every 15s, but I see no good reason why it wouldn’t work out well if that’s what you want.

With 2800 armour, 23k HP, plenty of Condition Removal, 4 evades and sword for mobility it’s more than you’d ever need defensively for 1v1s or small scale fights.

Damage wise it really is deceptively dangerous. If you think that in your current Settler build you likely have 1600ish condition damage, meaning your bleeds tick for 123 damage. In this build, you bleeds tick for 98. That’s 23-ish% drop in actual damage from your conditions (excluding any might), but when you consider you have more condition application though crit procs, plus a solid amount of direction damage, your overall damage is going to be far far higher in this build.

So to conclude.. 100% recommend you go for it, try things out and see what works for you. There’s lots of fun tinkering to be had and it all works great

One thing I’d point out (besides the good points which have already been made) is make sure your stratagy suits who you are fighting. You seem to naturally have a defensive playstyle which is no bad thing, infact with traps it’s often a great way to go, but it doesn’t always work which is what you saw with the Mesmer.

Against a Warrior or any other melee fighter, you can play defensively / passively and let them do most of the work since they will always be coming at you, and thats the perfect situation. But against a GS Mesmer.. he’s more than happy to sit at 1200 range (or even further if he already has phantasms up). He’s never going to coming to you as he has nothing to gain from doing so, which means the jobs is on you to be the one chasing and pressuring him. Playing passively against someone who clearly outranges you will never work, you need to either properly back off out of the fight or properly commit and go at them. Hovering around in range of them but not close enough to effectively use your traps / split blade / flank for SB will only get you killed, and thats exactly what we see happen in your video.

So that’s my advice. Make sure you’re playing in the correct way to get the best out of your build depending on what build your opponent is using, because your playstyle will need to change.

kaikalii.4198:

I leveled my ranger specifically to play melee condi builds for solo roaming, but I am slowly seeing the allure of the pewpew longbow build. Should I try it? Is there any way to play it and feel like I’m doing something difficult?

It’s certainly worth trying. 100%.

As far as “feeling like I am doing something difficult” is concerned, it’s as simple as finding decent opponents and not blindsiding people who don’t even know you’re there. It is probably the easiest build to rek terrible players with, but when you get into a fight with a real opponent it’s got the same risks and skill requirement that comes with any zerker build.

To be honest I think all traps really need is (like Spirits and Signets in the past) less reliance on their GM Trait.

Traps build are great but because you need 6 in the SK line, and then 6 more in WS to have any hope on dealing with conditions, all trap build end up more or less the same trait wise, and it does get boring and predictable.

Moving the Trap Traits to WS does NOT solve this problem and infact it makes it conciderably worse because then trappers can’t use either of our Cleansing GM traits.

They should put the 20% CD reduction as a stand alone Adept Trait, leave the Master Trait as it is, put the x2 condition duration from the current GM as default and then create a new GM which adds something a little different but not entirely nessesary. Boon stripping isnt a bad idea, or boon giving to allies would be neat too.

That way you could quite easily have a trapper build with only the Adept trait, and while going further in for the Master and GM would make them better, it would not be totally nessesary.

Cele > Rabid > Dire/Carrion.

IMO.

Try them both. Try them all

Perma-Chill is something thats been tried / used by quite a few people here, myself included, though I admit it’s never really caught on as a mainstream build.

The first thing I’d say it Predators Onslaught isn’t a great way to go about it. It’s a fun trait but since the chills we have is on the MH Axe and on a Trap, the whole idea lends itself much better to a trap / condition / pet build rather than a power build.

With that in mind, you can easily play a standard 2/6/6 trap build with frost trap over spike trap, an axe as one of your weapons (which is standard a lot of the time anyway), a couple of chilly pets, some Grenth Runes for good measure and you are all set without really deviating from the bog standard trap setup.

What, for me anyway, the problem with going all in on chill is is the same problem I have with going all in on anything. You end up in a giant game of roack-papper-scissors were your chills destroy some people, usually Guardians or Elementalists or Mesmers, but because your build relies so heavily on it you are left open to build which bypass it, such as Thieves (all thieves to an extent, but especially Sword or Pistol thieves), or Longrange opponents like LB Rangers, or just builds which have an insane excess of cleanses.

But to answer your question, yeah the idea of a chill build is certainly viable, can be huge fun and can have fantastic results, but in my experience / opinion it’s better to just use some chill here and there as it fits in with your build (such as using an owl over a raven if you’re using a bird anyway, or taking frost trap over spike trap if you’re using traps anyway, or taking hydromancy sigils on your melee weapons, or perhaps reconsider using an Axe in your build if it could work, or other small things which you can slide into the build without drastic changes), rather than single-mindedly making a build entirely for the purpose of maxium chill.

Edit: But thats not to say don’t do it… as I said… can be very fun and rather trolly

Can’t say I fully understand your build (or approve of it), and there were some really obvious mistakes in there… But for whatever reason I actually quite enjoyed watching that and even watched the entire thing (which is pretty rare).

I think it’s some combintion of just having the ingame sounds and music, the random anotations, a few funny moments and generally not trying to show you’re the best but rather showing what you actually get up to when roaming made it a very nice video

Have to agree with most of the above… There wasn’t much worth watching in there. It’s just showing the LB burst potential, and frankly 2-3 clips is enough to show that, not an entire video where no sensible opponent is found.

One particularly cringy moment was when you were approaching a thief and activately RaO to prepare for your burst, and all I could think was “on my theif build, I would own you right there with steal. Take all 3 boons, daze your RF, PBS would no longer work since I’d have your stability and it would be goodnight nice ranger.. goodnight..”.

The moral of course being if you are playing all your cards instantly in the fight with no idea as to your opponents build you are playing wrong. You’re basicly just gambling your opponent doesn’t have a counter to you, because if they do you’ve screwed yourself right from the start.

Lol.

100g says he’d hate a tanking guardian / warrior who did just stand in once place and beat the kitten out of him just as much.

As others have said, your stats and weapon choice seem a little at odds. If you want to play Celestial (which I can highly recommend as well) you would be much better off with some combination of Sword / Dagger / Axe / Torch / SB or even maybe WH. The GS and LB are pretty much the worst options because they have no damaging conditions at all which means your Condition Damage is wasted.

Purely looking at the numbers, a standard exotic headpiece gives 109 stats spread over all 3 skills. An exotic celestial headpiece gives 105 stats when you exclude Condition Damage and Healing Power, which you’re not really using them. So, while theres no real disadvantage to using celestial in this build, you’re not really gaining anything from it either.

You can get round this by getting Skirmishing II and using on-crit sigils to proc conditions, which I have seen work surprisingly well, but I still wouldn’t recommend it personally.

Trait wise, generally OK but I really think Beastmasters Might is a waste, especially since the one signet you don’t have is the one it’s best with (SoH). You’d be better off with Spotter, or Piercing Arrows, or Eagle Eye, or frankly taking those 10 points and putting them into BM for Mighty Swap.. you’d get more Might from that anyway.

Final thing.. Strongly consider Rune of the Traveller. The +25% speed is well worth the stats drop, and if you are stacking might somehow (Runes of Battle are really great in a celestial build) then the extra boon duration doesn’t hurt either.

Generally quite an enjoyable watch^^

Curious as to why you have clerics gear though, since you only make any use of your Healing Power in one fight. Maybe you use HS more often than is shown in this video?

If I had to pick one I’d pick Toughness, although generally I like to aim for 2750+ armour and 19-20k HP rather than picking one over the other entirely (this being in WvW and excluding exceptional builds such as full zerker).

I don’t want the Ranger to be anything in particular. I don’t see what’s wrong with letting ANet take the theme in their on direction. Not every game has to be a carbon copy of all previous architypes, and infact one of the main points this game was sold on what trying to break from a lot of the typical MMO stereotypes.

With that in mind, I can’t understand people who come here expecting the game to be designed around their definitions.

I agree with most of the above posters… I don’t see an merit if your argument for a Rifle based on any pre-difined notion on what a Ranger should or should be lore wise. God forbid ANet are just making their own definition in their own game.

Regardless of that, however, Rangers currents have 3 Ranged options but only 2 melee ones. I’d much rather see a new melee option such as a hammer, OH-Sword, MH-Dagger or melee staff.

I’ll go ahead and recommend Hybrid :P

Rampagers weapons + armour with knights trinkets.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV8PjEq2yiJLUtGwQoa3CvbVzKAcHvvwVD-ThhIwAe1NMXJIgLCQH1f+p8jz+DkCAilRA-e

Your conditions will do around 29% less damage than with full rabid, but you will have 1800 power allowing for some actual direct damage. Throw Battle Sigils on each weapon set and you’ll be laughing with both Direct and Condition damage, not to mention them also helping your pet a bit.

You lose a little armour as well, but 2860 is more than enough IMO.

Nice video

If you’re looking for feedback I think the main thing I noticed which really bugged me in most of the fights was you actually use your melee set too much. It’s an unusually problem, most LB Ranger struggle from not using their other set enough or well, but you clearly can use them you just seem to do it unnessesarily and it makes fight longer and harder than they should have been in some cases.

The problem is that the LB is where the vast majority of your pressure / damage is. As soon as you swap to S/D you are giving your opponent 10s of relative freedom. That’s fine if you need to avoid a burst rotation or get out of a sticky spot, but when you have the upper hand and need to keep pushing swapping to your defensive set just gives your opponent the break they needed to recover for no reason.

I think this was most obvious in the team fight towards the end and VS the engi at the very end. In the team fight you were never being focused and could easily have sat on the sideline and done a ton of damage, but instead you continualy swapped to S/D and then went and evade through the fight hitting virtually noone before dodging out and going back to the LB. Against the engi at 12:39 it looked like you have him in a good spot on lowish health with you are full with RaO up and whilst he had his healing engi voodoo ready and healed hismelf back up if you had just stayed on LB you could have kept up the pressure and kept the advantage, but instead you swapped weapons and spent the next 15s running around doing 0 damage whilst he shot you up.

So that is my advice. Don’t swap to your melee set just because you can, use it when you need it

Lazze.9870:

It’s a love-hate relationship.

Pretty much this.

It’s obviously annoying when you’re trying to dodge or move and it’s that bit more difficult / slow to do it because your character is going yolo at the enemy and doesn’t want to stop.

But then when I go only my Mesmer or Theif (where I use a sword on both) it’s suddenly very noticable how much more easily my oppenents can avoid my attacks and run around / through you. For all its frustation the Ranger sword does prevent that to a very large degree so… Yeah.

Fair? Yes.

Every class has something they are just outright the best at and range is our thing. It’s no more or less fair than theives borderline abusive ability to stealth access, or Warriors having the best heavy armour and highest natural health as well as having the highest (at least in theory) damage. It might be slightly over the top, but like I said, every class is slightly over the top in their own way and that’s not nessesarily a bad thing.. it’s what makes for varied classes.

Looks pretty cool. I think I’d also prefer S/D and then lose Viper’s Nest (either for LR or Frost Trap). I’d rather plan to win than plan to be able to escape :P

I would not say there is a best heal or pet choice, it really comes down to what you want your build to be able to do.

TU is generally the most popular choice (I think) for roaming, but trap builds can have condition cleansing issues relying on EB, so there is a very valid arguement for HS if that’s a problem you are having.

For pets again it does come down to condition cleansing when you’re using traps (and thus EB). In a perfect world you’d always want canines for hard+soft CC or birds/cats for DPS, but when you’re relying on your pet to be alive and take conditions for you it’s often just not viable to use such defensively weak pets, especially VS engis or necros who will throw out a huge amount of AoE and kills your pets very quickly.

So with that in mind, Spiders of a very common and effective pet to use with EB because they have high vitality (so they wont die easily to the conditions), they are ranged (so taking soft CC conditions onto themselves isn’t a huge issue for them and it keeps them away from random AoE) and they are still pretty effective at immobilising your opponents and doing some damage.

But like I said.. there isn’t a best for every situation.. spiders are just generally a good all round choice if you’re using EB.