Guild Wars 2

For zergs I would suggest 1 of 3 things:

1) Play another profession, rangers are much better at skirmishing than zerging.
2) Play a tanky melee ranger. Keep your knights armor, use a greatsword as your main weapon for the evades and cleave. Take things like signet of stone or dolyak runes. Take as much group support as you can handle, like healing spring, muddy terrain, entangle, etc.
3) Get better at playing a berserker longbow. Do not stay directly on the commander; that’s for melee only. Use the ranger’s superior skirmishing to pick off thieves, necros, and eles, support the zerg with barrage and entangle, etc.

I’m sure folks will expand on the latter 2 if they sound appealing to you.

Rotasu.9782:

As a beginner ranger, as in lvl 1, is it good to start with bear since it is a good tank? Or better to start with wolf / dog / feline?

Felines* with maybe river drake on swap for PvE 99.99999999% of the time. There really is no need for pet tanking.

*Or birds if you want to run places faster.

Hopefully this clears things up.

I wonder if the next (if ever) new pet will suck though. If they had never introduced the wolf or jaguar and instead released them next week, everyone would be yelling “OP as fitten.”

Shadelang.3012:

Im not sure how theyd be “even more useless” Theyd have similar survival level against condi builds a little vulnerability against power builds and theyd deal significantly higher damage. If we increased the animation speed of the arctodus and poison bear(kitten im having a failure moment here I cant remember its name…Murfelow?) They might actually have a niche instead of the current “if you use this in any situation at any point at any time your a failure” stigma.

My comment was in the scenario where you implemented your pet, which is basically a drake. If you improve the bear, it obviously doesn’t get worse.

I wonder if bears could become usable if they made their F2s trigger 3 or 4x as often. A 3 second chill on a 45 second cool down with a 1 1/4 second cast time and the bear can’t move while using it; that’s complete and utter garbage. If he could roar every 12 seconds or so that might be usable.

That would also open up some condi removal options with the brownbear.

Shadelang.3012:

How bout a high power high vitality pet? Low precision and medium toughness. Kinda like an “Old Faithful” pet. One thatl survive almost anything and still deal decent damage but dont expect it to spike anytime soon.

We already have that decision with bears vs drakes or dogs. If your suggestion was implemented exactly the way you worded it, I’m not sure how those 3 pets would fit into the picture. Bears are already useless, and you’d make them even more useless.

Assuming you mean for WvW, I’d use the normal 02660 with sharpened edges. It’s barely any different from rabid, you’re just more fragile.

Travelers aren’t that great on rangers because it doesn’t apply to the pet, and we have so many options for mobility.

Moas are right on the border of being excellent and being useless. The daze is too hard to land, and their monking abilities are too small and short duration (I’d rather dodge roll to get a short duration prot up.) But I’m not terribly impressed with sylvan hounds either.

Fury is a weird boon for rangers, since we couldn’t not have fury if we tried. It’s nice that it’s AoE, but for dungeons everyone has fury up 100% of the time anyway.

When I saw they were neutral my first thought was to look for a juvenile.

Some people play 6-6-x-x-x LB trappers with the new stealth-on-trap-use rune. I can’t really comment on it since I haven’t played it, but that would allow you to use LB with celestial. My one comment on that is that traps completely ruin your utility slots.

Your second build is way more condi based, so I’d lose the greatsword. The old-school roaming weapons for condis are s/t and a/d, which coincidentally works just as well with with celestial — if not better.

Don’t forget the lake by red keep in EBG. I’ve actually had 1 or 2 zerg fights in that thing. It was weird.

One of the forum members who’s name I can’t remember mailed me his excel data showing the bird swiftness cast is so detrimental to their sustained DPS, it’s worse than cats on a moving target despite moving faster.

Whatever is correct, I think it’s safe to say don’t pick your PvP pet specifically for damage, but rather their boons, abilities, and attacks.

SB’s main strength is in small group fights. If you’re solo roaming, you can do better IMO, because it’s pretty hard to get behind someone. On the other hand, if they’re facing your ally, SB will light them up. It’s like 0 or 100 with the SB and not much in between.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Ah, this one again, this games’ best kept secret it seems.

Anyway, best way by far to deselect a target is by binding a key of your choice to “Lock Autotarget” in Control options. Personally, I’ve got this locked to my Alt-key.

What exactly does that do? Drop target and autotarget for you, then you immediately turn that back off to have both dropped the target and not autotarget?

At any rate, a drop target key would be life changing. Please go on.

Over the course of a hundred games, the two teams should average out to be equal, i.e. sometimes people on your team are messing up, but just as equally people on the other team are messing up. Best case scenario is everyone on your team is competent and at least 1 person on the other team isn’t competent.

So isn’t soloq just a listing of people who didn’t fail, rather than those who succeed?

Jim Hunter.6821:

Did he forget to put on any armor that morning?

Mesmers are commonly berserker, and GS rangers are usually berserker, so that seems like a pretty run of the mill maul. With some buffs, OP could have gone WAY over 9k damage. 25 might, MoC, SotW, SotH, things start to get out of control very quickly. On occasion I like to demonstrate that at the south windmill by having someone let me 1 hit them. It’s always good for some laughs.

Amir.1570:

Mesmer still has too many evades honestly, all of their stun breaks should just get deleted. You shouldn’t be allowed to have everything.

Ya, they should at least take away the mesmer’s heavy armor and max health pool. When anet combined their heavy armor and max health pool with them using smoke and mirrors as their only defense it was too big of a buff.

Amir.1570:

Instead of nerfing Warrior adrenaline they could’ve nerfed Warrior stun breaks, too bad ANETs too illiterate though.

Agree here too, with the amount of boon spam warriors crank out, it’s too much. Once I get through the warriors aegis, then I have to deal with his prot and regen triggering. Just ridiculous. And all the while he’s sitting in the dark fields he keeps throwing down spamming blind everywhere, I can’t hit anything. Kitten anet!

You’re over thinking it, just make an effort to land skill 2. Stealth, CC, whatever. And if you forget, who cares, it’s on a 6 second cool down.

Shadelang.3012:

Fleshreavers

Baby fleshreavers are sewn together with spare meat their parents carve off their victims. I don’t know if caring for a juvenile fleshreaver would work out.

Sort of off topic, but coyotes are quite small. They weigh less than most house dogs, like 20 pounds-ish. If you’ve ever seen one in person, many of them could pass for skinny gophers.

Anywho, I like that there are 2 different types of wolves right now. I would love to have a 3rd or 6th wolf option. Maybe a black wolf that howls a skill interrupt? I have no idea, some sort of new CC would be fun.

Group buffs will always outweigh individual buffs. Spotter is a tremendous damage buff, and it’s compounded by the fact that LB is extremely low damage compared to sword.

BlackIsleDragon, yes, 1-hand sword is the main PvE weapon.

Mixing armor will give you more a more customized build. Celestial is nice in PvP because it’s all on one amulet, but in WvW you might as well adjust the stats to the ‘perfect’ amount. I.e. you can probably afford to give up a little vitality in exchange for a bit more toughness… or whatever.

The only way this would make sense is if there were a) a Berlin Wall-esque divide that prevented players from choosing their own region and b) a fundamental genetic difference — entirely different species of humanoids living in the Americas and in Europe — that created a substantial difference in video game playing abilities.

Yup, you are mistaken. If your pet runs in ahead of you obviously it’s going to pick up some aggro. Is that what’s happening? The enemy AI prioritizes the closest target, and then also considers high toughness and high damage when it thinks about what to attack. And finally it randomly switches targets just to keep everyone on their toes.

But consider yourself lucky if the AI is targeting your pets instead of you! If you’re pet swapping appropriately, they basically don’t die in PvE.

And as mentioned, it pretty much doesn’t matter what your pet is set on because you can and should (or at least be able to) control them with the attack and heel commands. Things like attacking different targets than yourself, getting them out of AoE, microing important skills like blast finishers or KDs via forcing the pet to move, etc. I wind up basically spamming the pet controls.

Why do you want to bind the pet agression to a key? You can keep it on whatever setting you prefer, and then use hotkeys to have it either attack or heel. Calling a target for your pet overrides it being set on passive and recalling it overrides it being set on aggressive.

Pretty much all classes fit that description, which is the point of GW2. I’m just going to ignore your last bullet.

I hit the look behind button about once every 3 seconds or so. Most roamers deaths are from being ambushed. If you see the enemies you can either run from the big group or fight them starting on equal footing (or even ahead if they aren’t using their look behind button enough.)

That’s not my screenie, I just wanted to demonstrate that the end goal is to land the extremely telegraphed maul because it can hit so hard, and to use whatever buffs you brought to accentuate maul (moment of clarity, signet of the hunt, signet of the wild, whatever you want.)

Ya it’s a pretty old screenie, but even a “normal” maul will hit for like 6k.

Edit: I’m wasting time looking at maul builds on youtube. Pretty fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS_9IaxKHps

For PvE it’s pretty straight forward, just swoop maul and autoattack with as many enemies on you as possible.

Against humans, it’s mostly about getting the maul to land. Typically you set it up with hilt bash or pet CC. You can also bait their dodges and land it when they’re out of endurance. Another trick is to maul from stealth on longbow skill 3.

The block will defend against an infinite amount of AoE or ranged attacks until it runs out of time if you aren’t hit with a melee attack (which triggers counter attack.)

There isn’t a ton to the weapon, just don’t waste your skills, i.e. don’t spam 5 on recharge but use it on a heal or something.

Edit: Image attached. This is an extreme example, but the idea is to maul people with maul.

Benjamin.8237:

I don’t want to start an argument but I have played ranger since launch, and the survival build more extensively since the Sotf patch. Either way people aren’t playing shortbow because it is here from the survival meta, they use it because it is more effective than axe. The Sb axe/dagger build has more survivability and is more viable for pvp play, as the OP asked, and it will also beat an axe/dagger sword/torch ranger due to the bleed stacks/kiting. The double weapon build works great in an apothecary set up but it isn’t meta for pvp anymore.

One thing I will argue is that on the metabattle site axe is a waste. It doesn’t contribute to the build as much as sword does, I believe axe is only on there since the build was posted the night rom used it in a tournament, most use sword.

Well who knows why people play SB. I imagine almost all the ranger weapons are seeing roughly equal play because they’re all reasonably good.

SB clearly doesn’t have more survivability than the usual s/t a/d combo, although it’s probably close enough that it is more up to the player than the weapons. As siroso said that’s very situational. I.e. it’s inarguable a SB + MT is inferior in 1v1 but that’s not the point of it. In the end I’m going to be pretty happy if I see a condi ranger on my team running SB and …. let’s say sword torch? Whatevs.

Walk for a few seconds, press F(FS).

Looks fun. Don’t forget to body block downed skill 3s on warriors and engies with your pet.

Some pets (canines, felines) are so much ridiculously better than other pets (ursines, porcines) that it’s as though Anet wanted us to only use certain pets and put the others in there as flavor for roleplaying.

Did they add sinister to PvP? That could be really interesting. I don’t play regularly enough to have noticed.

Dhampyr.2104:

If things like this get implemented, more pve junkies will likely come in, the wvw population goes up, more fights, more fun, etc………

Because PvErs already love getting the kitten kicked out of them while they map, we should add other opportunities for people not interesting in PvP to get slaughtered.

Ryan.9387:

This is why you don’t post builds when people ask for help.

No one has criticized any posted builds in this thread. They all look pretty reasonable to me.

Daniel.2301:

So if I focus on wvw, which gear do I need?

That’s a pretty complicated question. You can use the same berserker PvE gear, do a lot of damage, but be extremely fragile against (presumably) intelligent humans that know exactly how to kill you. You just have to figure out how you personally want to go about killing and staying alive. This may get you started:

http://metabattle.com/wiki/index.php?title=MetaBattle_Build_Wiki

No you are not one of the first to play a survival condi ranger. The build has been around in some form for more than 2 years. The SotF was added to the build the second it was added to the game.

My evidence for this is the fact that I read the forums, and almost everyone here plays a condi ranger in sPvP.

As for the shortbow, it was obviously the default weapon when spirits were big. Now new people are using it because that build got added to meta battle.

witcher.3197:

On the topic, this is the strongest condi build in PvP atm: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Ranger_-_Condition_Survival

Strongest is debatable. Many (most?) rangers prefer s/t + a/d.

Berserker, power major, precision and ferocity minor.

Ferocity major doesn’t exist yet.

WvW and PvE have extremely different requirements, so you should think carefully about what WvW gear you want.

Eh, lose the SB.

Celestial is just a good choice for PvP rangers. Almost all of our weapons are hybrid power/condi. The power damage of a shortbow is not outrageous, but its fast ranged attack definitely adds up. And the condi element is effectively non-existent in 1v1s.

I’m terribly sorry IoJ and CD, nothing but love to you guys. Two of my favorite servers.

-Fort Aspenwood

One thing to consider is are you weak to power builds or condi builds. 8k toughness won’t help you versus a condi necro. I guess “all things in moderation.”

Flitzie.6082:

Difficult.
Getting away with a ranger is – Difficult. And a major problem.
The Short answer is: You dont.

Well this is completely wrong on all points. Mobility is zero problem for rangers and escaping even thieves is fairly simple. In OPs case it’s as simple as hunter shot, LR, sword2 sword2 and he’s more than out of combat.

http://youtu.be/7AkX6q_kV-s?t=3m40s

You make combat harder by requiring MORE active defense. More passive defense makes combat very stupid and not fun.

I think the new mordrem enemies show Anet understand this. If you don’t know their mechanics, they’ll melt you.

1, 2 is for lamers, I count to 1 and then spam the ever-loving kitten out of my ranger sword evades.

The PvE mobs all over EotM are absolutely awful. No one wants to PvE in WvW. Even the ambient creatures annoy me.