Guild Wars 2

MuchWaffle.2579:

Ranger free hate group

This is worded… oddly.

Carpboy.7145:

Healing spring doesn’t grant vigor on each pulse for a couple months now

I was completely sure you were wrong, went in to game to check and realized I haven’t been using that trait anymore. Huh. I have zero memory of that changing. Regardless, it’s better than pet condi damage.

Small suggestion Archon, take Vigorous Renewal instead of Expertise Training. Every pulse of Healing Spring triggers the vigor so that water field is a “fix everything” pit stop for your zerg: healing blasts, condi removal, regen, and more dodges.

Sarision.6347:

runeblade.7514:

Correction: Condition Bunker is good in PvP.

Every other build is bad.

Fixed that for you.

Fixed that for you.

Truest statement is Archon’s “be level 80 and don’t die.”

Most zerg builds fufill that pretty well. Rangers bring a few interesting things to zergs like healing spring, traps, entangle, MT, barrage, pets… whatever you can do and still not die..

ArchonWing.9480:

Anyhow, feel free to post any build that gives me the cornerstones of zerg combat (stability, condition removal, cc) which doesn’t completely destroy your ability to support nor simply relies on guardians or something for critical things.

This has stability, condition removal, cc and support.

You don’t really cleave all the mobs, you just go flying about wildly, hitting whatever happens to be closest. Perhaps not ideal in a dungeon run.

Pretty handy for WvW though.

I am constantly re positioning myself behind the heavies. You have a fraction of a second you can move during each sword cycle. It sounds really small and silly, but it makes a big difference.

I wouldn’t bother with a tank build. You’ll help keep everyone alive a ton better by killing the enemies.

RoyalPredator.9163:

Rapid Fire makes sense. It brings LB to the ROF what it intended to do by basic.

Rapid Fire shoots 10 shots over 4.5 second. At max range you hit for let’s say an average of 4k on an autoattack. That would be 40,000 damage over 4.5 seconds or almost 9,000 damage per second at over 1500 range. And it pierces. For comparison, a ballista hits for ~ 3800 damage per second.

The reason LB fires slowly is because it hits very hard with very little risk to the user.

Don’t go out on your own until you know exactly what you’re doing. Get a guild group or even just a few people you see on your time slot a lot and add to your friends list.

You won’t learn anything at all in a PUG zerg or in EotM, although if you insist on PUG zerging at least get on your server’s TeamSpeak so you can understand why the commander is running around seemingly randomly. It’s usually to respond to a threat.

So you have a super secret build no one else knows about?

All the builds I posted are very well known and are mentioned several times a week in response to these threads. Hell, the Anet sponsored tournament between the #1 NA and #1 EU had like 3 rangers in it who all posted their builds on the main site. These things aren’t secrets.

Valentin.2073:

stuff

You either linked to the wrong video or are trying to mislead people to watch your video.

Buffy.9246:

It’s cause hod is a squishy server. When I fought them on nsp, they were mindless blobs.
Everytime they moved up a tier, they got creamed and got sent back down.

That’s interesting. I always assumed lower ranked servers just had less population. Are the bronze league servers all fielding zergs? I kind of pictured them fighting in EBG with like 10 vs 10.

Wreck.2634:

@ Fluffball Would you recommend I level or instant 80 the ranger?

Eh, probably level. Ranger have some mechanics to get used to, like controlling your pets while simultaneously doing something yourself (I put the pet controls on keys I can reach instantly and not the F1-4 keys.)

If you level, take it upon yourself to play against the AI as though they were humans. Like get good at using weapon skill evades and CCing them rather than just hiding behind your pet. Throwing muddy terrain over your shoulder or hitting things with the drakehound howl is almost an art unto itself. :P

Edit: I agree with what Prysin said. Getting good at the sword is crucial. Although I personally wouldn’t take an uplevel in to WvW, especially during the season.

And +15 to what Rym said about the longbow.

obastable.5231:

on a side note, transfers aren’t really a factor in our na coverage as hod was able to queue all 4 maps during prime already.

How the heck were you guys ranked 12? FA rarely queues anything, and we were T2 for ages.

obastable.5231:

fa lost guilds, but they also gained some as well … and i do believe even in time slots where their coverage was previously less.

Did we? We’ve been ticking almost 0 in non-NA. It’s like a bell curve apexing at NA primetime and reaching zero at about 5am.

Rangers have a ton of “soft” CC and enough “hard” CC, so they compliment other classes in small group fights really well. Muddy Terrain plus drakehound plus wolf plus entangle, plus lots of cripples and possibly some chill (apline wolf, axe 3, frost trap are sometimes used) will be quite effective, regardless of what the rest of your build is.

Rangers are excellent at annoying people to death.

Nick.6972:

Just feels so unreliable, when we’re up against weak servers, I can always find people to play even during the SEA time, when we’re against stornger servers, there’s absolutely no one playing.

That’s part of FAs success though. We have this massive reserve force of PvErs with a lot of WvW experience. The downside is they aren’t showing up during stuff like today. I just got off HoD borderlands and didn’t see anyone that wasn’t from a guild I recognized from WvW.

To be honest it’s actually kind of fun that way. I felt really confident taking on larger groups of HoD because I knew the guys next to me were good, even without knowing anything about them individually.

Chris.3290:

HoD appears to be T2 material, but I expect they’ll be at the bottom of the tier and will switch back and forth with FA.

Blob tactics work well against T2 because in our matchups 30+ is a blob. Compare to T1 servers where they don’t engage with less than 50+

If HoD is running with 50 man groups they’ll be tough for T2 to beat (20-25 is the average size of T2 zergs, usually with 2-3 per map on a busy night); but unless their skill improves dramatically it won’t matter much.

Or does HoD die after the season? Isn’t that why everyone moved there? From what I’m seeing, the overwhelming majority of HoD is very low WvW rank (it’s rare to even see someone in the bronzes), which makes me think the majority aren’t in it for the long haul.

At any rate, HoD isn’t going to get much respect from the WvW community until they aren’t hard capped at silver league.

That was me listing builds I thought should go in a sticky rather than being helpful.

http://ru.gw2skills.net/editor/?vMAQNBMhf6kRFKZxWBxVF4axAx6xe2/f4MOUi8HKVGPVisJ-z0BBYfC0EEAUBhOzsIasFXFRjVXDT5iIqGA-w

Sorry it’s in russian, I just grabbed the first one I saw on this forum.

Natronix.9827:

I’m more worried for FA tbh. If history proves anything, they have some clear symptoms of a server about to experience another drastic population change.

Take SoR for example. They lost their will to keep fighting in T1, lost some coverage, and decided to tank it out to “rest in T2”. Their first match in T2 they loose against FA/Mag and the drama/dissapointment started, and we all know how the rest of the story went.

Now FA who was unable to hit gold despise their attempts, now might loose in silver league despise thinking it’d be a snoozefest for them?

I’m also hoping HOD stays all big and all post season, Mag has a history of stopping bandwagons.

FA has been through this before. We’ve had to face ALL bandwagon servers due to our position on the leaderboard. They either go through us like TC (eh, maybe unfair to TC to call them bandwagon, they earned it more than most) or they stop at us like Kaineng. But we always stick around.

At any rate, the non-NA-primetime coverage of HoD has proven they will win season 2. No matter how much population they lose from PvErs, they’re ticking too high for anyone else to catch up. And that makes it even less likely PvErs will leave.

Wasn’t this supposed to be about zerker rangers?

You have a ton (the most possible I think!) of passive healing plus vigor, so I have no doubt you can just outheal or dodge most condis in a 1v1. Is it any good in an actual team arena match though? I don’t know if I’d want to sit on a cap point in an AoE storm with no condi removal.

Note to the ranger forum, I’m not sure why we don’t have a sticky listing the meta builds for PvE/WvW/PvP. It seems like things like the 30/25/0/15 dungeon running build are listed 4 times a week. We have two build threads but both are old and filled with random inefficient builds.

If a moderator is able to post something like this, it would take just a few minutes. I’d even be willing to collect the builds.

PvE – Brazil’s build
PvP – spirit, trapper, beast master
WvW – debatable, but something like condi bunker, zerg GS, zerg sword/axe, LB glass

Tricare.2946:

Esclfowne.3472:

Finally got a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN6x1NP7zE0&feature=youtu.be

I couldn’t get past 2 minutes of that video…….. horrible.

Maybe a little harsh. The average rank of both teams was like 18. Of course there are going to be a lot of positional errors.

Anyway, serious question. At one point he uses whirling defense on a downed engy while one of his teammates stands next to both of them (who failed to attempt the stomp.) Even though he wasn’t body blocking, because his friend was inside the radius of whirling defense would that have allowed the stomp? Or is it personal use only?

Laylie.5703:

Ques dropped significantly this week I don’t know what FA’s ques are but we do not have T1 ques except on reset night maybe even then it wasn’t huge.

That’s the thing though, FA almost never queues anything. Even if your queue is only one person, that’s indicative of what the score is right now.

I don’t think any number of guilds leaving FA mattered, and this is definitely not an organized double team. HoD has T1 numbers of people playing, and FA has never had that. We almost never queue any map, we just have a good bit of dedicated people that jump from map to map.

This will simply come down to if HoDs population sticks around or not. Nine weeks is an awfully long time.

Our killshot is the autoattack. RF is a utility skill for tracking thieves.

I think it would be fun, if totally impractical, to see how hard you could get LB1 to hit. I am picturing 5 digit numbers easily.

LB range is quite a bit more than 1500. I’ve heard between 2100 and 1800 quoted on the ranger forum. Not sure how you would go about testing it.

Your server will have a teamspeak channel. They’re not going to be particularly happy with you if you’re not level 80 though. If you get killed, everyone your zerg has downed will automatically get rezzed.

If you plan on doing any group activity at all, you need to be a power ranger. Condi bunker damage is pretty much nonexistent.

There are some pretty good tanky greatsword builds on this forum, it sounds like that is what you’re looking for.

Edit: Here is the one I was thinking of. There are lots others, and I don’t know which is best or most up to date, but this is close.

I said “someone who doesn’t want you behind them.” Standing in place or running away if just giving the thief your back.

I played my thief in PvP a lot more than WvW though, I could definitely see some lost guardian just standing there wondering why the thief disappeared.

The numbers HoD are putting up are just outrageous. However, most of them are “recruits” or uplevels it seems, and they are dying in absolutely ridiculous numbers.

It will be interesting to see if they stick around. If they continue to throw that many dead bodies at everyone, I could see them taking first place. I suspect the morale will break though.

Been some fun couple of days so far.

Edit: I should add their morale is irrelevant if they’re karma training, so any downtime in their opponents coverage will be bad.

Ok got in there for a few hours, it’s too early to tell. HoD is getting murdered by both FA and YB in fights, but coverage will win the match. We have to wait and see. Not looking good for HoD though.

Edit: Actually it may be early enough to tell, HoD is losing some fights where they seriously outnumber people. I’m talking 5 vs 20. Not sure why this is happening, presumably if you stacked a server you’d go in with a WvW char and not an uplevel.

Does anyone have any info on what’s going on in the FA/HoD/YB matchups? I can see the score, but I’m curious how the fights are playing out.

Bear.7803:

I have been in the FA ~ SBI ~ IOJ match for more hours than I care to admit. I have seen how the Zergs have met and what decided the battles.
I can not wait to see how things turn out for all.
Out of our match’s progression, I think that FA lost ground as the other two teams gained. I also think that IOJ showed the most improvement of the 3 for this match.
So lets see what happens!

I love this game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

… and I LOVE SBI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To be fair, and I kitten love SBI and IoJ after the fights you guys put up, FA always quits halfway through the week because lot of our matches are blowouts. I am really hoping this week proves different.

Aseus.6403:

I for one am really hoping FA and YB bring a good match up, and that a tough match up will cut our queues. More fights for us! Plus being matched with CD and NSP every week is getting to be just a little bit stale.

Really excited for tonight. It seems like all 3 servers are going to bring it. May be the best fight of the silver league season!

Forzani.2584:

To add to that it is my nature to be defensive.

I’m a bruiser, the martial classes account for 96% of my PvP wins (just added them up.)

Forzani.2584:

Still, for it to work you need to play well with your dodges.

Surprisingly you don’t. What you need to do is break the C&D BS combo. This is where my first main as a backstab thief comes in to play. It’s friggen hard to get behind a player that doesn’t want you to get behind them. Like really hard. I have so much respect for the best thieves that can do it. And the best thieves don’t play backstab haha.

Love your build and it’s right up my alley, the two melee sets are beautiful together. I just wonder if you could steal 10 points from anywhere to get Nature’s Voice since you already have 2 shouts and on a reduced cooldown? Might give you a tad more sustain, although the regen wouldn’t do a ton without healing power.

What is the motivation behind the eagle? Maybe one of the cats or dogs would suit you better?

Also, hide behind your pet when you stomp warriors to block the hammer.

Common misconception that if you can play one class at the highest level, you can play all classes at the highest level.

That’s like saying if you can swarm like Rocky Marciano, you can also counter strike like Muhammed Ali. You have to work with what you’re good at.

For a lot of people, mesmers are easy mode in 1v1. I struggle to kill ambient wildlife with mine, yet I get how pets and ranger evasiveness works.

Forzani.2584:

snip

You make some good points, but the answer is simple. Almost all roaming rangers use a condi bunker build, which is good for dueling (required even; I play condi bunker 98% of the time in sPvP.) It’s a solid build that gradually whittles people down.

That, unfortunately, is simply NOT going to beat a thief most of the time. I run a berserker build that is specifically based around roaming, and not dueling. This is exactly the kind of build a glass cannon thief does not want to face — another glass cannon. Yes, the thief can kill me if he lands the C&D, BS and HS HS HS combo, but that’s effectively never going to happen. I’ve played hundreds of hours on a backstab thief and know how it works. But he has no other options. He sure as hell can’t go toe to toe with me because my damage comes from autoattacks.

Can I kill a thief every time? Nope, they are really good at resetting and no one can deny that. However, since my build is based around CC, those 3 seconds that the thief can’t stealth from revealed give me an excellent opportunity to catch him. As I mentioned, it takes me a mere 3 autoattacks to kill a GC thief (2 if you’re lucky.) Other builds like a maul build could potentially do it in a single attack.

What I’m really advocating here is that rather than just rolling over and dying to thieves, give roaming in your PvE berserker gear a try. Who do you expect to lose to? You won’t lose to lost zerglings if you were naked and the only other genre of players you’re likely to run in to are thieves or guild groups. Run from guild groups obviously, and fight the thieves. Don’t knock it till you try it. With the upcoming removal of repair cost, you’ve got nothing to lose (perhaps after the WvW tourney if you’re worried about getting constantly stomped out.)

As an added bonus, berserker rangers are just plain awesome when they’ve got a few buddies with them. Just absolutely devastating when you pair with a shatter mesmer or nike warrior due to the chaos they create. Give it a whirl!

And the usual disclaimer, I’m talking about GC backstab thieves. I will lose most times to a condi thief who hides in stealth as I slowly die.

Dream In A Dream.7213:

4. Real content for WvW. such as new core maps, or changes to the current ones.

I really appreciate the effort that went in to EotM, but it also highlight for me just how amazing the original maps are. They’re just beautiful and elegant. The simplicity allows the focus to be on the WvW and not bouncing noobs off a bridge.

I’d swap the warhorn out for a torch or dagger, since you’re a condi ranger and you already have plenty of swiftness.

You might also want healing spring. A big benefit of HS is that it pulses Vigorous Renewal, which you are already using. That’s a group wide-vigor, regen, condi cleanse and water field = <3 crazy good.

Probly lose the sylvan hound since you heal way better than it does. I’d take a wolf and something else. Spider or cat or something.

Twinny.9304:

And I’m sure NA has it’s servers that correspond to it’s EU counterparts in regards to play styles.

NA servers definitely have their own personalities. The one most people are probably familiar with is YB’s tendency to siege the ever loving kitten out of their towers. If they have 20 people defending a tower, they have 25 ACs in there.

Blink.9361:

When is “Guard” even useful? I don’t main ranger but I was looking through the skills today and I don’t think I’d ever carry it. Maybe if they add some sort of “revealed” when someone stealths nearby.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Nature%27s_Voice

Allows for permanent regen and swiftness on you and everyone around you. Very useful for PvP.

kRAVen.4195:

Not a server one but I like to yell “Wipe their as_es”.

Is your server made up of a lot of registered nurses?

I didn’t mean ‘power’ strong, I meant they are incredibly effective for fighting another player. They both have a lot of movement and defense built in to them.

Your clock changing didn’t affect the server reset time. So it’s going to be an hour later for you.

Uh, you’re a month late. That happened in early March.

awge.3852:

It’s not rocket science, how does anyone expect to defend themselves against the potential for very high damage by wearing kitten see through panties for armor? It goes both ways.

Exactly. That’s why I was saying ranger vs thief favors the ranger, since we have slightly more evasive techniques (whatever those may be, not just evades) than thieves do. We may not kill them, but at least they go away.

It’s just important to remind people. So many people think backstab thieves have 4k armor and 30k health.

(And on that note, good lord are tank thieves annoying to fight.)

Edit: Also your thief trap is hysterical.