Guild Wars 2

Cats. Jaguar specifically, and the jungle stalker gets a nod because of the AoE might.

I think drakes are in the conversation if there are enough enemies it hits, but I also think cats outdamage drakes even then. Not too sure on it though, but it’s not worth the effort to surround your pet with enemies when we’re talking speed, IMO.

Edit: I think it’s also worth mentioning the eagle for it’s pretty large bleeds on a short cooldown, since we’re talking open world. The lynx is one to consider for the same reason.

A bird is one if not the best pet for leveling. The do the 2nd highest damage and they give you swiftness so you can go explore faster.

A lot of people have been hoping for hammers because of GW1. Thematically I think that’s a bit weird since we’re supposed to be these dexterous scout type fighters, but then again we also have a 12 foot long 2-handed sword option.

My guess is the staff will be AoE. I’m not sure why people don’t think rangers have support, it just needs to be traited for. Full spirits was the PvP meta for a very long time, and we also have pet boons, “Guard!”, spotter, MT, etc.

Killyox.3950:

If you bring pvp into matter I can make your ranger miss most of his attacks at 1500 range as well Hectic strafing is known to screw with aiming since beta. And for mobs I would say I got ~20% miss.

RtW, which almost all LB rangers take makes the arrow hit instantaneously.

Nope. You didn’t happen to be an asura did you? All races have the same size hitbox, so you’re the size of a norn. Can’t always use your eyes when telling if you can hit something.

Also the longbow skill 5 doesn’t require line of sight.

We have lots of fields, what we need are blast finishers. We only have one on a 30 second CD, not counting a drake (which is on another ~30 second CD.)

Best waterfield in the game and we can barely use it.

Gotejjeken is kidding by the way. People who use bears are a running joke. Most of your choices are on the right track.

Just keep doing your own thing and use this when you get to end-game:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Ranger_-_S/A_LB_Spotter

It helps to imagine where the thief is going based on empathy, even when you can’t see him. OP ate a backstab that ultimately put him in the downed stated because he wasn’t providing a difficult target for a stealthed thief (and also didn’t see the SR use to the south.)

A lot of the really good roaming videos posted on this forum will show the poster actually dodging an invisible backstab because they have a mental image of where the thief is.

I don’t mean to detract from OP, he just made a mistake that he recovered from and won the fight.

New music is fantastic.

I’ve been thinking about running SB + S/T in WvW lately. Seems like a solid combo since I’m making celestial ascended plus still have all berserker ascended. Those weapons are good for a mix n match of the two sets.

When a thief stealths, use sword 2 in two random different directions. As a former thief main, it makes it extremely annoying/impossible to land whatever special stealth attack.

I play almost exclusively ranger and I’m not sure I’ve ever had someone rage at me (for being a ranger anyway).

Put up a champ brawler title or something and people will probably leave you alone. I suspect a lot of the rage is directed at stereotypical bearbow noobs, and not at legit PvPers. I like watching Koroshi play his ranger and he doesn’t get raged at.

Geiir.7603:

I entered with a pre-made. When courtyard popped we all swapped to shadow arts p/d condition thieves with ricochet. We decided to troll the crap out of the opposing team (their entire team chose courtyard). We spent the first 14 minutes just running around, shadowstepping, stealthing with all our stealth skills and shadow refuge. The last minute we all focused one target and got a kill. One. Single. Kill. We won. Such skill.

You griefing people and intentionally ruining the game doesn’t mean it’s a bad map. I quite like it, but then I’m a big fan of roaming in WvW and run in to these small scale death matches all the time.

Blocked in US for copyright.

Dungeons using witcher’s links is the easiest way to make a ton of money. Lugh’s suggestion of earning gear through PvP is more fun once you’ve done the dungeons enough to get bored of them, or just for a break. Dungeons will get you money for all the fancy stuff like legendaries or ascended gear though.

Try s/d. Best switch for berserker LB WvW IMO.

I would take Jim’s point further and say the GS is not as useful for disengaging, s/d is better for that because of the high evade and mobility. GS is better for spiking, as is s/a.

Siobhan.3582:

Ehh not really sold about that. Cond build, sure you use torch no question. Power though, axe 4 can be really nice. 5 is just niche and not that great.. WH is better then axe in many of those spots..

WH 4 does less damage than just autoattack and you have to maintain LoS. WH 5 is only useful if you have healing spring, and even then it’s only really useful if you have allies on your position.

Axe 4 is one of the hardest hitting skills in the profession as well as a hard CC, and axe 5 can be used against almost every build. Don’t forget you don’t have to wait out the entire duration. If you want to use it as a melee attack you might, but once the Killshot/RF/Sneak Attack (<— one of my personal favorites since thieves never seem to expect that) or whatever goes off, you can cancel it and start moving again.

My real point was that WH is not good in 1v1s, it’s more of a team fight for PvP choice. I personally take dagger 93% of the time.

My experience is the majority of rangers aren’t LB. Certainly a look at the ranger forum will show that most of us don’t use LB much in PvP. Not using LB — and my example — sort of shows that it doesn’t matter that they’re ranger by profession, there are a ton of different playstyles. The trapper I ran in to in the example wasn’t even throwing traps, he was melee.

I can’t even confirm the two LB rangers were primarily LB, they were on my team and I didn’t really ever see them since we were patrolling different points.

I was just in a match with 5 rangers: 1 shortbow condi, 1 trapper melee, 2 longbow, and me with a/d+s/t.

I say this every day, but people see a ranger and automatically assume they’re glass longbow, and that usually isn’t the case.

The warhorn is quite weak in a 1v1, borderline useless. Consider any of the other offhands, which are all outstanding.

Also your con that sword autoattack lacks mobility is not true at all. Lack of dodge, possibly, definitely not lack of mobility since 2 of the 3 skills are leaps.

20 games is too small to tell because you have no control over your teammates. Even if it was truly a 50% chance, you’d still expect streaks of 7 or so in a row of either losses or wins. Flip a coin a hundred times and watch it happen.

If you play 400 and have a record of like 50 and 350, then ya, it’s you.

Neither am I. But eles obviously have way more damage than the other professions, and staff eles are one of the higher DPS weapon sets. Each meteor in a meteor shower has its own 5 target AoE cap, so the potential damage from that is massive.

Sort of on topic, the all or nothing bursts of eles are just completely ludicrous. It’s not 1500 range, but you can scepter burst a heavy target from 100% health to zero in like .5 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wW2m4VeY4k

Well according to Nike, rangers were 4th in damage and warriors were … 6th or something?, with both running the max damage PvE berserker meta builds. I haven’t been PvE at all for a few months, so I’m not sure how everything has updated since. Pretty sure nothing has changed that would affect the meta rotations (don’t think arcing slice was used at all?) I also don’t know how much rapid fire at the start of a fight factors in to the sustained DPS.

Eles outdamage rangers in just about every way. If you’re counting AoE, eles out damage rangers at long range by a factor of like… 10 or something massive. If you want single target or piercing burst damage, warrior kill shot I think can outdamage a rapid fire. Engi grenades are another contender for huge AoE damage. Engi and ele can reach 1500 range and warriors have to settle for 1200.

Disclaimer: I’m not good at math and not that interesting in this subject.

Kaybosh.5183:

Ranger, remove the second r !
Anyway other then the name, ranger is specialized in long range combat, none of the class will ever be equal to it on long range, in the same way that ranger`s melee damage will never be better then Warriors/Thiefs melee damage for example.

Ranger’s do more damage in melee than warriors though, and multiple professions can compete with ranger at range, particularly ele which can out damage rangers.

And the name is not related to that type of “range”, although I’m guessing you were joking.

That’s for efficient 5 man dungeon groups. For open world or competitive (PvP and WvW) there are plenty of ranged options.

Crapgame.6519:

Side question if you will. I thought celestial was a bust after this patch, or that was the intent?

The celestial amulet was too strong in PvP because eles and engis and to some extent a few other classes used might stacking to buff themselves. Eles got all the healing and defense of celestial while still having the damage of a berserker amulet AND a rabid amulet. They toned down might slightly, which is actually quite a lot if you were a profession that could reach high stacks of might.

You could mix and match gear to reach exactly the stats you want, but celestial is just an easy way to have useful gear for any number of builds, and I want another set of ascended gear anyway since it can be used by the entire account. I plan on using the celestial on both my ranger and engi. Rangers and engis both have skillbars that have large amounts of physical and condi damage on them.

Celestial trapper longbow is semi-popular, you’re not alone there.

You’ve got some great team support but I see why you might lose 1v1s. If you’re going out by yourself, you might consider a more self-supporty build, like dagger or axe offhand. I don’t think you’d lose the flavor of the build by having an empathic bond variant for solo roaming, with one of the signets in place of guard, and troll unguent in place of spring.

Looks like a fun build though! I’m in the long process of making some celestial ascended armor myself.

Random Weird Guy.3528:

I don’t know how everyone seems to be having such apparently horrible matchmaking, most matches I’ve had for the past few weeks have been somewhat fairly balanced regardless of soloq or teamqueuing – although I only play during peak hours since I have a regular daytime schedule.

Even if it’s only .01% of matches that are bad, it’ll show up on the forums because there are more than 1000 players.

Also, as was mentioned, whoever was on the 0 team flat out gave up.

Are you sure this is legit? I’m pretty sure if you are a dragon, it’s basically impossible to get paired up with a rabbit. Also I see people all the time saying “just bought GW2 guise what do i do here???” as a joke at the start of the match and they have a champ title up.

It’s a relatively weak sigil, but it fills in some nice holes. For example condi rangers have average condi application and pretty limited AoE, so it’s a nice fit there. Not sure if I’m going to use it over some other staples like geomancy, but it’s fun to play with.

If someone is going to condi spike you, 1 torment isn’t going to be what breaks you. Also condi removal is so, like, meta, yknow? /pops gum

PCG: Another thing you announced was profession specialisations. The one you revealed was the Druid. That the Ranger was getting a staff weapon. Beyond having a different weapon, how different will the druid specialisation be from a ‘standard’ Ranger?

Colin: We’re really trying to make it feel like it’s almost a sub-profession or a secondary profession if you will, and not just a new set of a couple of skills. It’s not just opening up the capacity to use a staff. When a ranger becomes a druid, they have an entire new set of skills and traits that come available to them. And their profession mechanic changes as well. That’s true with all the specialisations. You actually play the profession differently, not just in skills and traits, but in the core mechanics of those professions. Some of them will change an existing profession, some of them might give them entirely new profession abilities and remove other ones. It really varies specialisation to specialisation, but it really should feel like you are playing a new version of your old profession. And players can actually mix and match a little bit. If you are playing as a Druid you will be able to use a lot of the Ranger’s skills, and you can actually slot them in to make a lot of creative builds. But a Ranger can not use any of the stuff a Druid has unless they become a Druid.

That’s more or less one of the meta builds. Cleric’s is a bit defensive for my tastes at the moment, but ok.

It’s completely down to personal preference at this point. Nature’s Protection is a good alternative to CoL, it’s usually one or the other. Sharpened edges is an alternative to the 2 in MM, especially if you were to use a rabid amulet. I hate the pig family, but a small minority of good player like them. I also always take sigils of energy.

Thaddeus posted the ideal PvE build and guides to get you pointed in the right direction, but as you level up just play what you have fun with. You’re likely going to just pick up whatever new gear drops and start using it, so making a true “build” probably isn’t going to happen. Also you can change your traits whever you want, so don’t be afraid to spend them.

That’s the build for fractals. I highly advise you also have a warhorn and greatsword in your inventory, and you’re golden. The guild KING put out a pretty good beginners guide to fractals on twitch, you can probably google it or find it on the dungeon forum.

Also this: http://gw2dungeons.net/

Even after watching some guides, you might want to start out using the greatsword as you learn fractals. Some of them can be pretty unforgiving. After you learn them, use the 1-handed sword as much as you are able.

Zenith.7301:

Not really. A half decent thief will never die to anyone in WvW if he doesn’t want to.

Ugh, I’m so done with that phrase “a good _.” No one can ever hope to defeat a good ____. A good ____ blank will own you, if and if you’ve ever beaten a ____ you’ve never faced a good _.

You can significantly up your fights-per-hour by practicing in a PvP duel server. You could even take a friend in and just working on fighting him over and over until you figure things out. Try to think things through and not just spam buttons, like use your stealth to set up a maul or entangle, etc.

I think all of your pros and cons are off. It sounds like you’re new to the game; I think you’ll learn to appreciate all the professions more as you get more experience. It’s shockingly complicated for also being so simple, and I don’t think you’ll suddenly love ranger just based on our forum posts. There is a LOT to learn about each of the professions.

Aren’t you the same guy that posted numerous times he was unable to 1v1 a thief?

People see any ranger using any build and assume he has a LB, when the majority of rangers I run in to are actually condi.

What the dang heck are you talking about, are you stuck in 2012? Rangers have quite high DPS, above warrior and guardian. The last thing we needed was a high DPS melee weapon.

I use 200660, 06620 (can’t remember? I haven’t used this one much) and 00626.

SotF, MoC, and BM with a crippling bird, in that order. Berserker amulet for all 3.

The traits are going to explain themselves, take things like martial mastery, 2-handed training, etc.

We have no idea what skills it will use so far, just a vine that does something, so I don’t see any reason to compare it to a mesmer.

I feel like they would have used a pet other than alpine wolf in the trailer if we were getting new pets. They knew people would be analyzing every scene for hints.

I specifically did not want staffs with rangers because we are so martial, but I love the way they got around that, by having us learn to be druids.

Hamturr?

About 14.

Edit: Sorry, you haven’t asked that question yet. You will in the future.

nagymbear.5280:

1 new set of utility skills however sounds great.

I haven’t made a ranger build in like 6 years that didn’t use SoR and LR. I would love something that can compete with them.

So how are they going to differentiate this from other weapons? Power? Condi? CC? This could finally be our AoE weapon? Like an ele staff.

And Engy hammer.

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2

PAX expansion announcement happening now.

There was a video segment of a ranger using a staff to cast a sort of vine entangle.

Edit: Colin just said out loud rangers get staffs.

Looks like we has them!