Guild Wars 2

Spiders Spiders Spiders.8043:

And all that about running away… please. Good luck at catching a warrior with signet of rage + gs + shake it off. And good luck if you used your initiative or utilities to catch up with him.

A warrior is in the same situation if he used Shake It Off, which has a 20-second cooldown at least, and which removes one or two conditions, depending on whether he has Soldier runes. So you can just use Infiltrators Arrow and cripples, and if he’s got poison or bleed on him, he can’t even get out of that. So catching them is easy, granted you have at least some initiative. If you wasted it all, you didn’t leave room for yourself to escape and that is bad too. Now, a thief that needs to get out.. stealth. Done!

ZLE.8293:

“You start with Backstab”????How does one start with Backstab?You must be in Stealth…How you get in Stealth?What skill you use?What is this lame rotation you posted,this is total nonsense…

My rotation is nonsense? It works on pretty much everything for me, and if it doesn’t, I did something stupid such as attacking a Mist Form or Endure Pain. I get into stealth using a stealth skill, of course, such as using my heal. If I can get them in one go, it’s just a stealth button to me. I always leave Shadow Refuge for OH-kitten-THEY-DIDNT-DIE situations, and of course, endurance to dodge the pushes out of the refuge. Sure, the classes may be balanced more in the future, and I really hope they are, but that does not take away the current state of the game.

The fact remains, thieves (and as commented, the demigod guardian) can excel while played by mediocre players such as myself.

Guardian has way more than just healing, while we as warriors ‘just’ heal (in terms of non-damage supportive abilities). Our heal can be really good, with banners and healing shouting. I even dare say that I heal more than the typical guardian. But remember that the guardian brings a lot more than just healing, and can be loaded with amazing utilities and CC to support his allies, give boons and be extremely resistant to damage. Pick your poison.

I kind of did expect this kind of biased response. Yes, warrior can be pretty nice if you play it really, really well. Do note that you really need to be great to have a decent performance. If you are great on a thief, you have a great performance. So if you aren’t on-par with the best players in the pvp community, and it is no secret that I’m not all that great, the thief is a lot more lenient to make mistakes and escape. We have stealth, teleportation, consistent C.C. (depending on weapon setup) helping us out to recover from a poor attack and escape to have a great chance to try it again and learn from our mistakes. A warrior dies and has to respawn, re-run to the combat area, and that’s really a big hassle and not fun at all. Note that the warrior has really poor C.C. and those that played it know that hundred blades is totally worthless as it roots you and prevents even camera changes. That is why they need knockdown/immobile and those are very easily countered with a stun breaker/teleport/dodge.

For those that wonder about that simple burst, it’s really simple, start with backstab, then do 2 auto attacks, then steal with stealth trait and backstab again. Again, 2 auto attacks, heartseeker, CnD and backstab again. Pretty much anything would be dead, unless you attack a blocking character or something stupid, or they are good and will throw you around and start attacking ya. At any given time when you screw up, teleport/stealth and escape. Come back again to do it properly.

This is why the thief is perceived as OP. It’s easy to play and mistakes can be corrected.

If you look closely at the negative outings of each player, everything involves player-versus-player in one way or another (i.e. the new ascended tier, unbalanced classes, technological issues in sPvP/WvWvW, and so forth). If you’re not seriously into that, and are more of a casual player enjoying PvE, dungeons and occasionally some PvP, this game might just be best game of the year. If you are more serious into the player-versus-player combat (which has been promoted without vertical progression, pure skill-based, engaging, and so forth) these issues become huge and can ruin your experience. Besides the obvious technical issues (culling), the rest boils down to the standard in MMO world; grinding and rolling the OP class.

Arsenic.8259:

This is so true, it’s not even funny. And so many warrs complain about thieves.

Playing both a warrior and thief, I must say, the thief is a lot more powerful. A warrior, when fully geared towards bursting damage, has one trick up their sleeves every minute or so. That trick is easy to dodge, or when caught, you just need a single stun breaker (remember to keep one against a warrior). The thief, on the other hand, can just recover using stealth and try his one-shot-kill move again.. and again.. and again. Until you succeed, or give up and walk away (in case of bunker Guardians and Elementalists).

It’s insane for condition builds. Whoever claimed it is useless is just another thief only capable of backstab.

So how do I counter stealth? Please do enlighten me. AOE is simply not an option (stealth+teleport…)

That is not a counter. It’s a debuff to prevent jumping in stealth again within seconds. I’m talking about pulling the stealther out of stealth WHEN NEEDED. For example, the mesmer is nearly dead and goes into stealth, I pop my ‘All Seeing Eye’ (for lack of a better name) and give the final burst. That’s a counter.

Quite some classes have stealth abilities, so why is there no (situational) counter-stealth? Example: In Aion there were two classes with stealth, Ranger with level 1 stealth and Assassin with level 2 stealth. Each stealth level could be revealed by other classes, such as the Ranger using All Seeing Eye to permanently see level 1 stealth, while a few other classes could see level 2 stealth for a short duration with a skill.

I’d like a similar counter-stealth in GW2. Perhaps a Ranger, as they are master trackers. Either way, non-counter-able stealth just makes it so that the stealth ability will always be unbalanced for quick getaways and so forth. This might also be a reason why everyone in low-level areas is currently rolling Thiefs, for pvp, as they are easy due to stealth.

You can deselect by selecting that ability on a different slot. Then swapping that out again..

Roll a thief or mesmer (I rolled thief, even tough I think they are boring and warriors are awesome). That way, you can win again. At least until ANet implements balance and you can hop back to your favourite class and be effective.

Size and skill is irrelevant if the enemies aren’t loaded.

Even if you have 20 ssd in raid-0 configuration, the bad networking protocol still makes it so you won’t see more than aprox. 40 total players (randomly being friendlies or enemies). I was running with ~20 people zerg and encountered the enemies, just a few, around the same size. We were wiped in under 20 seconds and when my zerg finally started to disappear, the enemies started to spawn in. It’s almost like there is, besides the culling issue, a pure issue in the network protocol preventing any serious large-group play. Stick to skirmishing!

I play one just for the sake of having a decent chance to win in WvW roaming encounters, but I do agree, they are boring. While boring, they are by far the most lenient characters with a load of options that cannot be countered (i.e. shadow stepping, stealth and related culling issues, ambush, thieves guild, …), and compared to my other characters it’s just so easy to roflstomp around. Mostly against other thieves..

There are two roles, healing/tanking and damage. Healing generates more aggression than damage does, being the first in allows you to take a very real tanking and healing role on any encounter. You will need some skill to dodge instant-kills, but it’s not excessive like some people make it out to be. Tanking is perfectly viable and can be the core of any damage-filled party.

If a coordinated attack is such a huge issue when there is no AOE-limit, why shouldn’t other skills be affected as well? Take for example resurrection skills of the Elementalist or Warrior. Having just one of them could counter that entire well prepared coordinated attack by dropping a banner in the middle. I do agree, that healing and such, should be limited (or rather, effectiveness reduced when the number of people increases), but there is no good reason for damage and utilities..

Unfortunately it is very hard to give exact numbers, because I have so many regeneration going on all the time. To illustrate tough, I am pumping about 30-40% of a glass cannon warrior health in a single shout. That’s just shouting, regeneration ticks are also influenced, but I can say with confidence that it is very notable when I heal with this gear compared to gear without the boosting. I wouldn’t recommend a hammer with this gear, you would be lacking power to give the hammer an ‘oomph’ and the hammer doesn’t build condition damage. A hammer would be better if you replace condition damage with power to smack people around with hammer/rifle (i.e. cleric) but you sacrifice health to do that (assuming this build).

You lost me at the speed and the fact you’re abusing mesmer issues and bugging into castles.

Last Stand is fun, but I really do favor more skill usage with the shield. Interrupts and blocking is invaluable to my playing style. Toughness, in my opinion, is not worth it. It does reduce the direct damage you receive and that alone is both great and horrible. In dungeons and player-versus-player combat, condition damage cuts right through whatever armor you have making the stacked toughness pointless. Besides that, in Wv3 you encounter a lot of thieves and they have no issue with bursting your toughness. You’ll receive less damage at most bosses, needing to heal less, and thus generating less aggression. I too have a toughness set, but I can’t keep aggression on me with it (unless I do major healing on friendlies).

As a side note, if you go power/toughness you can get a Rifle instead of a Longbow and do consistent damage that way. I don’t really like it since you have less survivability, but it might work better for your style.

Never compare a scaled up toon to an equipped level 80 toon. If both of these were proper Thiefs, you downed one and would have gotten ganked by the other Or they could use hide+teleport tricks to get back up… point being, low level and unskilled toons are not worth mentioning.

Nerevar.2875:

Passive regeneration and lifestealing are by no means mutually exclusive. If you’re going to max regeneration, why not max all methods of restoring life?

Sure, if you can do that, it is just fine. However, let’s say you don’t have a high critical rate (power/toughness and vitality/condition builds come to mind) you shouldn’t take a single life steel item, be it sigil, consumable, rune, or whatever else you can come up with. In that case, it is better to pick regeneration/healing (i.e. sigil of water, mango pie, dolyak runes, …).

Both are fine, they are just different.

Life steal makes a lot of sense if you run with a decent critical rate (i.e. at least 40% without buff). Otherwise, regeneration takes the cake.

Toughness reduces melee damage and that works extremely well versus the many, many, many thiefs that you find while playing Thief Wars 2. However, there are some condition damage thiefs as well (and, albeit rare, other classes with condition builds) and toughness does nothing against that. So if you want to fight against direct damage opponents, toughness is great, pair it with insane healing and you’re in for a laugh. However, if you want to deal with condition damage builds as well, you probably want vitality instead of toughness. (and again, insane healing).

As a warrior, dealing with a thief is not the issue at hand. The problem is that they, and their party members, are permanently invisible due to the model load time. When I play as a thief, I can hide my position due to this on a very permanent basis. This is wrong, and holding down a fort due to this is even more wrong.

Morthis.3968:

Too bad this combo hits for a ton less than the complained about combo’s and it’s a near melee range combo as well. I’ve also never seen flame grab crit for 13k personally, even as glass cannon.

100% crit after attunement swap and 9 stacks of might; oh yes it does.

XtalDelphium.5679:

I think yours provides more damage than mine, and I would like to try out the GS with it, but I am hesitant to give up my warhorn’s ability to remove movement impairment. Have you run into any trouble with getting stunlocked? Also do you use the longbow much outside of keep defense?

It does happen, sometimes, but that usually implies that I did not pay attention to my surroundings. When the need arises to get out, you can use a shout pretty quickly to remove movement restrictions and switch to the greatsword to quickly make ~1600 range distance. It requires more situational awareness but a horn can only remove the restriction once when attempting to run, and many classes can restrict you in more way than one (especially against multiple enemies). I also use the longbow almost exclusively for the burning damage, with the greatsword on the switch for a quick get-away. When roaming, bleeding with your sword is awesome.

Major Kaldash.3542:

Stronger Bowstrings doesn’t give Combustive Shot additional range.

Yep, but Arcing Arrow will match the range and allows for a great finisher.

Palinois.1064:

Not a huge fan of condition builds but I might try this out, looks fun. BTW do you try to stay at range in dungeons or fight face to face?

Depending on the boss or situation, but when possible I favour the sword and shield combination. In your face is the most fun style in my opinion, and is stronger than a longbow. When not possible, then yeah, the bow is the only real option. I’d consider a Rifle, because bleeding is still great, but when considering the two options I’d favour the longbow because of the burning and finishers. It felt much stronger, but you sacrifice your adrenaline for it, and thus one regeneration.

Kyouhei.2341:

Why don’t you just post a Link to your Build on one of the websites? gw2builds.net is a good one or Intothemists.com

Because the build changes on your preferences and situation. Hence, I explained all the choices, the reasoning behind them and when you should choose for one configuration or another. It’s not a drop-in-and-win solution, no good build can be.

Vital Tanking Healer (Dungeon/Wv3)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/Build-Vital-Tanking-Healer-Dungeon-Wv3/first#post845546

Banner of Tactics: This is where it gets interesting, and a bit more complex. You can keep this banner up at all times due to the trait Inspiring Banners (V) and is used every 10 seconds to apply a Regeneration boon for 7 seconds. The complexity is hidden in the fact that you cannot see the cool-down of the ability since you drop the banner immediately after applying the boon, so keep track of the boon and add 3 seconds before grabbing the banner again. Also note that you need to track the banner position, do not leave it behind, even in player-versus-player. Once you get used to it, tracking your banner is almost second-nature. Besides, wielding the banner also allows you to cast swiftness so if you are running slow, you know you forgot something.

Fear Me: Fear me is great for interrupting resurrections, doing resurrections and generally being a pain in the kitten You can equip this utility when you are not using the banner (i.e. when defending a castle) and this might be a better choice when fighting glass cannons while roaming in Wv3. Ensure you switch out your trait, Inspiring Banners (V) to Stronger Bowstrings (II) for the additional range you might need.

Battle Standard: Battle standard, like other elite skills, is pretty much useless in terms of offence or boons. However, this ability can resurrect up to 3 friendlies that are in a downed state and this makes it a wonderful ability to completely turn a fight around. This applies to dungeons and grouped Wv3, so there is no reason not to use it unless you are sure you are completely alone.

Signet of Rage: Most warriors I encounter are running around with this, it gives 3 boons that are pretty nice for glass cannon configurations, but not for us. Swiftness is the only thing that we might be interesting in, and, seeing as the banner can provide 14 seconds of swiftness we keep slowing down for 1 second plus the duration of the cast. Using this signet corrects that and ensures permanent swiftness. Again, when there are friendlies around, there is no good reason to use this.

Consumables
This is a very important part; use Rare Veggie Pizza and keeping using it. It adds 40% duration to our condition damage; that is basically just +40% damage at all times. That’s way too much to ignore or swap out for the minor benefits we can get from other consumables. Make sure you also take Master Tuning Crystal, which converts 6% of our Toughness and 4% of our Vitality to Condition Damage. You might want to consider swapping the Rare Veggie Pizza for Mango Pie in a dungeon for that additional health regeneration. It’s not often necessary, but there are times when it can relieve some pressure.

Tactics
Dungeons: You are the tank! Remember people saying there is no real trinity in this game? Well, that’s wrong. Healing abilities build aggression, just like damage abilities do. The difference is that healing builds a lot more, ensuring that a tanking healing warrior such as you will naturally gain the attention of each monster and boss. I usually PUG, so it is easy to find glass cannons to add to the party. Usually, it is nice to bring one utility/control build player to relieve some pressure, or you know, another one of this warrior build.

Player-Versus-Player: It is important to use your banner, even in player-versus-player. Your massive health pool allows you to absorb most damage, but it is smart to absorb the initial burst of a cannon with Shield Stance. Exclusively use your longbow to throw Combustive Shot (F1) and Pin Down (5). Your health percentage should go down slower than your enemies in most cases, just keep the pressure on and keep healing.

Conclusion
If you find this useful, please leave a message. I’m open to suggestions, I too want to improve this build when possible. Please don’t leave messages saying that other classes do condition damage better than a warrior; we all know that, but none has the utilities (healing, durability, escapes, buffing) similar to the warrior. If you want me to expand or correct certain parts, do let me know.

This build has the primary focus to have a massive amount of health, great area-of-effect healing and consistent over-time damage through conditions. Using this build, you will have the ability to tank and heal through most punishment, both in dungeons and in player-versus-player combat. Dungeon parties can be formed around this build as the primary tank and healer, as monster aggression can be taken away from any glass cannon build.

Equipment
The primary weapon for this build is a longbow. In player-versus-player combat, you will be using your massive health pool to absorb damage and build adrenaline quickly (through a trait). Use Combustive Shot (F1) to create large-area burning damage and use Pin Down (5) to immobilize enemies to ensure they absorb more burning damage. Throw Arcing Arrow (3) to create a massive finisher explosion and run into the fire to ensure each Dual Shot (1) applies additional burning damage.

Your secondary weapon is either a greatsword or a sword/shield combination. The greatsword is used to escape in a horrible player-versus-player situation using Whirlwind Attack (3) and Rush (5). The sword/shield combination is used in dungeons and smaller scale player-versus-player and applies bleeding damage. Use the shield as a tactic to absorb the initial bursting damage of glass cannon enemies.

Your armour and trinkets should consist of Vitality/Healing Power/Condition Damage configuration. The Jalis’ armour is an armour set that can be bought from the trading post. For weapons and trinkets, search for Shaman’s equipment. The exception is the Accessory trinket, which does not exist as Shaman. Instead, attempt to get Ashes of the Effigy for the required statistics. I recommend the Rune of the Soldier runes to enable shouts to remove conditions. Your main-hand weapons should have Sigil of Water for additional healing and your off-hand weapon/greatsword should have Superior Sigil of Life.

Traits
The trait configuration is versatile; the build is configured around Defense and Tactics. Depending on your situation, you will need to change trait selection for the most optimal experience. Each selected trait will be explained further into the other sections. Please do note that it is not required to refund your traits, the things you will be changing are the selected bonuses.

Core Configuration: Put 10 points in Arms and select Deep Cuts (III). Put 30 points in Defense and select Embrace the Pain (I), Shield Master (IX) and Defy Pain (XI). Put 30 points in Tactics and select Inspiring Banners (V), Lung Capacity (VIII) and Vigorous Shouting (XII).

Wv3 Castle Assault Configuration: Change Shield Master (IX) to Turtle’s Defense (II). Since you are assaulting, you want the +200 toughness to shrug off most assaults thrown at you at a castle gate. This configuration ensures that weapons such as Arrow Carts are virtually useless against you, while you can throw Combustive Shot (F1) back at your enemies.

Wv3 Castle Defense Configuration: Change Inspiring Banners (V) to Stronger Bowstrings (II). Since you are defending, the additional range allows you to more easily throw your Combustive Shot (F1) into assaulting enemies. Use the regular tactics to deal additional damage (i.e. throw _Arcing Arrow (3) for the finisher damage).

Utilities
Healing Signet: Do not switch this out, it allows for a great passive regeneration and your durability ensures that there is enough time to benefit from its constant regeneration ticks. There is no real reason to ever switch this out on this build.

For Great Justice: This is one of the core abilities. The applied bonus is good for friendlies, but the main point is that this is a low cool-down shout which, through our equipment and traits, heals for a good amount of health. Do not over-heal, you have two shouts both on a 20-second cool-down so try to use one every 10 seconds when necessary.

Shake It Off: Besides breaking stun, this is also a low cool-down shout and is used to heal and remove conditions from your yourself and your allies. Just like For Great Justice, attempt to rotate between these two shouts to remove conditions and have persistent and regular healing.

Geewoody.2017:

There are no tanks in GW2, best to get that idea out of your head now.

The build I posted above will gain aggressive of all monsters despite having glass cannon warriors in your party doing massive damage. This is due to the abnormal amount of healing you’re throwing around (on yourself and on allies) and healing will gain aggression much more so than direct damage. I usually want 3 cannons and 1 CC in my party; I know I’ll keep aggression, so let the cannons do their thing and we can move along quickly.

Glass cannon is fine if you have a good dedicated healer/tank. Playing as a Warrior support, I love having 2 cannons for their insane damage output with good survivability. I’d take a Warrior glass cannon to fill a damage role over anything else. Pair that with some form of CC and an off-tank (i.e. Engineer and ‘cannon’ Guardian) and you get a wonderful party. It’s all about the utilization of the cannon players

Thief in PvE should learn to use a pistol off-hand and spam blindness. Problem solved.

Judah.5420:

I’m interested in hearing more about the Vitality/Healing/Condition build.

What does the condition damage actually effect?

What weapon type(s) do you use with this build?

Thanks again.
-Kinz

General Idea
Build a massive health pool that can absorb an insane load of damage, providing adrenaline for Combustive Shot, and doing some psychological warfare against glass cannons often panicking when you lose less than 40% of your health (without shouting). Also have a lot of regeneration for yourself and allies. Remember; shouts and regeneration are area-of-effect, meaning that multiple Warriors running this build is beyond annoying.

Weapons
The primary weapon for this is a Longbow. In PvP situations, you will be using your massive health pool to absorb damage and build adrenaline quickly (trait). Use Combustive Shot to create large-area burning damage and use immobilization to ensure your enemies absorb more burning damage. Stand in the fire to make auto-attacking burn and throw arcing arrow for a finisher area-of-effect blast. Use Fan of Fire point-blank for massive damage.

On the switch, either have a Greatsword or Sword/Shield. The Greatsword is used to escape a bad/zerg situation in a PvP encounter, using Whirlwind Attack and Rush. Ensure that you disabled automated targeting, otherwise you just might rush into whatever you attempt to escape. Escape to a castle, and if that is attacked, burn the attackers with Combustive Shots. Absorb damage they throw at you to fill your adrenaline for more Combustive Shots.

The Sword/Shield combination is used in Dungeons when melee is possible, or when roaming in WvWvW. Keep stacking bleed and use the shield to interrupt high-damage skills. Use your shield to absorb all the damage of glass cannon attacks, such as 100b Warriors or Thiefs. Never take the role of doing direct damage in a timed event, such as destroying the gate in CoF. You will suck in killing objects that can’t take condition damage; don’t even try.

Traits
Put 10 into Arms or Power. You choose! With Power you can take falling damage reduction for WvWvW or 5% power to Vitality. With Arms, take Deep Cuts to ensure your bleeding stacks last a lot longer.

The rest goes into Defense and Tactics. In Defense, take Embrace the Pain, Turtle’s Defense/Shield Master (depending on your weapon layout) and Defy Pain. In Tactics, take Inspiring Banners/Strong Bowstrings (depending on your utilities layout), Lung Capacity and Vigorous Shouting.

You’ll be swapping your traits depending on your situation.

Utilities
Shake It Off and For Great Justice are your two primary low-cooldown shouts, both healing a massive amount of health. Your third utility is either another shout, such as Fear Me (Great for interrupting resurrections, and healing your own), or Discipline Banner. Besides regeneration, the banner allows permanent Swiftness when you wield it.

Use the banner every 10 seconds to apply regeneration. This is easier if you run with another Warrior, since you can both apply a 7-second regeneration for 10 seconds, making it a lot easier to keep it up. Don’t worry about the lost time in PvP, you will continue to do burning damage and you regenerate enough with the boon.

The elite skill should either be Rage Signet if you are alone or a Warbanner when in a group. Truth be told, our elite skills are all pretty horrible, but Rage Signet is fine for the 30-second swiftness and Warbanner is good to resurrect friendlies. That last part can really turn a fight around, as it can resurrect up to 3 friendlies all at once. Now imagine having 4 of these Warriors all resurrecting one another, and remember, you have 50% of your life after a rally — that’s ~18K life. Not bad.

Equipment
Jalis Armor (Vitality/Heal Power/Condition Damage) and Shaman trinkets/weapons. Note that there are some unique weapons with the same statistics that are often cheaper to get at the trading post. Use a Sigil of Water for additional healing and Sigil of Life to build healing stacks. Sigil of Life can go on your Greatsword and Shield, and Sigil of Water on your Longbow and Sword.

For Runes, I suggest keeping the Runes of Dolyak on the Jadis armor at first (I still run with them, they are good in Dungeons but are lacking in PvP). Swap them out for something more PvP-orientated if you desire, such as Soldier. This is largely up to you.

Consumables
This is a very important part; use Rare Veggie Pizza and keeping using it. It adds 40% duration to our condition damage; that is basically just +40% damage at all times. That’s way too much to ignore or swap out for the minor benefits we can get from other consumables. Make sure you also take Master Tuning Crystal, which converts 6% of our Toughness and 4% of our Vitality to Condition Damage. Oh holy kitten!

End Note
Have fun! Let me know if this was helpful

There are a lot of viable options and one that isn’t mentioned for armour is the Vitality/Healing/Condition build. I mentioned my build before, and it works well combined with this set. It’s a bit more difficult to get, however you can gain a massive health pool with insane healing to keep it full (Note that your party members have much less health, meaning if they get hit once in a while it’s trivial to heal them; one shout recovers 40% of a typical glass cannon thief health).

Psybunny.8906:

Swap out dolyaks (only 30hp/s) for something else (melandru, soldier or earth are good alternatives) and it’s an excellent support warr.

Good point. Soldier is probably one of the most viable for dungeons due to condition removal, which is a blessing when dealing with poison interrupting your healing abilities. Melandru is a great choice in PVP, but I don’t really see the point in Rune of Earth (Am I missing something important judging on the stats alone?).

Psybunny.8906:

Longbow in pvp, seriously?

Psybunny.8906:

Warrior bleed builds have been useless since BWE2-BWE3.

Condition damage allows for very effective use of bleed and burning, for which you need a longbow. So yeah, a longbow in pvp. Seriously.

You’re not an off-tank if you can’t heal. The damage you soak up is irrelevant if you have enough regeneration to recover it. We can get up to 4 permanent regenerative abilities and shout for several thousands of health every few seconds. I use a tanking sword/shield build with bow as ranged weapon. I have Signet of Healing, Adrenaline Heal, Runes of Dolyak and Banner of Discipline Regeneration (-20% CD). I am build on healing and condition damage, and I rarely get downed (save the 1-shot kill abilities I fail to dodge at times). Be sure to grab Shouting Healing, +90 toughness with a shield and Defy Pain in case of oh-kittencenarios.

There are plenty of heavy armors that have a ‘lighter’ (or more naked) appearance. Just shop around for a better looking one

I would swap Stronger Bowstrings for Inspiring Banners. Use FGJ/Shake It Off/Banner of Discipline as your utilities for shout healing every 10 seconds and permanent regeneration through your banner. Move the 5 points from Arms to Defense for Endure Pain at 25%. You want to focus on Condition Damage (Sword bleed, Bow burning. Your axe is pointless) and survivability (toughness/vitality/healing boost). Pick your own favorites, Toughness is good versus melee while Vitality allows you to soak all kinds of damage, but less effectively. Tactics are easy, survive, keep healing and burn/bleed your foes while you harass them. This is great if you partner as well, as up to 5 people benefit from your shouts. Throw combustive shots at WvWvW to inflict massive AOE conditional damage on entire armies, if you combine multiple people doing the same you can burn an entire army into down state (~6 warriors or so) in a second.

Well, FoTM makes the ‘old’ dungeons redundant. We’re being forced to grind for Ascended gear, because it is necessary for Wv3 (which it going to take ages), and the ‘old’ dungeons don’t help us do that.

Am I the only one that noticed the fact that Ascended rings drop from chests at level 10-11, and are account bound? This is Aion all over again, grind for better gear by doing the same thing over and over with a small chance to get an item, and even smaller to get the item you need. I guess NCSoft attitude grew on ArenaNet. Well, I guess this is the end of Wv3 for me. Too much boring grinding to PVP.

These suggestions are technical and are not about game changes. That said…

1) Allow character models to be forced to a generic character model. Everyone is aware that not having your enemies and friendlies rendered is a huge issue. It takes a while to load the character model and render it onto the screen. Assuming the networking protocol is working as intended, this problem could be solved by allowing generic character models to be loaded instead of their real appearance. It will drastically decrease death-by-invisible-player and improve memory usage. We care about defeating our enemies, not their appearance.

2) Keep character models of players in stealth in memory. A player going into stealth is removed completely, which makes sense. However, the issue is that once the character appears again, the game client has to deal with their appearance again, meaning it likely has to receive their appearance information again and start building a character model. A thief can jump in and out of stealth several times making it impossible for directional attacks to affect them, thus forcing a player to rely on area attacks. Please cache the character model until the character is really out-of-range and at that point let the game client know to release the character model. If considered, please don’t make a classical NCSOFT mistake (Lineage/Aion) by sending information about players in stealth. That would give cheaters a huge advantage by allowing them to pinpoint the position of players in stealth, and nobody wants that.

3) Render names of enemies as soon as they come within range and allow selection and attacking of non-rendered enemies. If a group of players runs into the range we would like to see their names appear, even if their character models are not loaded at that point. Allow us to select them and attack them without waiting for character models to load. I’m not sure what the range is, tough, it appears to be between ~2400 range and about five times that much. That said, appearances may be deceiving due to the slow loading speed on a player-by-player basis.

4) Please implement a possibility to hide character models of friendlies and/or enemies. In WvWvW you often come in situations where you fight group versus group. At this point, nobody should care about character appearances, meaning that we do not really need their character models. Combined with point #3, this would allow players on a slower machine to properly participate in WvWvW without running around with 5FPS. After all, character models and animations are the most intensive rendering requirement in any game. Aion, for example, had this and allowed massive castle sieges (200+ attackers) even on moderate hardware.

I hope that these suggestions will be implemented as soon as possible.

Why is there an assumption that the player wants to make distance? There’s nothing wrong with a melee-orientated Ranger and it would be horrible to leap back when you’re a close combat build. The only change that is necessary is the ability to break the automatic chaining to doge, use different skills, etc.

Just found one slightly south of Kessex Hills near the Vista in the water.

I’m currently working on a Ranger as an alternative character to my Elementalist, which is ironic, but you can get a high damage and survivability if you focus on conditional damage. This means that Fire, Poison and Bleed are your new best friend(s), and your pet is not. Forget about sustained bow damage and using your pet to assist.

Your pet is nothing more than a way to migrate damage away from you, thus you should be using two Bears due to their massive health pool and high toughness. Swap them out when they are about to die, and use the following utilities, Signet of the Wild, Signet of the Stone and Flame Trap. Flame Trap is used after you run into the enemy to apply AoE fire damage, not to actually set a trap and lure.

Next you need is a Shortbow for Crippling Shot, which is exclusively used to apply bleed, and Poison Volley. When using Poison Volley, do it after you come close and personal because you want all 5 bolts to hit for a long duration of poison. Your switch weapon set will be a Sword with a Torch. Serpent’s Strike is another source of poison, Throw Torch is a good flame source and Bonfire is an AoE flame source.

Whenever you fight against normal monsters, don’t go overboard and use only two types of damage and then finish it with automatic attacks of your sword. This allows you to chain almost indefinitely due to a proper use of your cooldown. Example like this, Flame Trap and Cripping Shot, switch to sword and kill, Serpent’s Strike and Throw Torch, kill using your sword, Bonfire and Poison Volley after switching, repeat at the first combination.

Against Veterans and Champions, you just do all of those chains and use Hornet Sting/Monarch’s Leap to do a combo finisher to gain a fire aura on your own bonfire. Remember conditional damage? That’s just another source of it. Of course, in 1vMany or 1vChampion you have to remember to switch your pet when it is about to die and throw as many healing springs as you can. As a side note, having 100% critical chance is largely useless, look for Conditional Damage as your primary statistic. If you are the appropriate level, use Ravager or Rampager equipment. If not, just use whatever you can grab that has Conditional Damage.

You’ll appear a bit unorthodox using this play style, but it works. Good luck!