Guild Wars 2

ZeftheWicked.3076:

Just a short reminder. “Meta” is made by people who refused to accept previous meta, and believed they can do better. You know, the people most meta worshippers call “burden” at best;)

Just a short reminder that a lot of guilds and ANet themselves are putting up a LOOOOT of gold/cash to shove in your mouth. If you think you are any good, please enter these tourneys.

But there is a zero percent chance you win. I have over 1.2k gold sitting around I don’t want. If you win one of these PvE tourney’s I will give 100% of it to you. I will even give that gold to a third party on these forums if you don’t believe me.

*I should stipulate that you aren’t running a meta zerker build, which I took as obvious, but I’m putting 1,200 gold on the line after all!

dakotawilliams.5921:

Fluffball.8307:

I’m saying you’re definitely not helping anything by being selfish in your build. Actually I resend my offer to help. Dungeon runners will keep finishing dungeons in 5 minutes, and tanky people will keep finishing them in an hour with 4 dead party members thinking they’re doing something right. Nothing will change.

There have been a few dungeon running competitions in the dungeon forum featuring rewards of 4000 gold or hundreds of dollars worth of gems. If you think your build is up to snuff, by all means compete in them. Also the first one had a rule of “if anyone dies, they are out of the competition forever” and yet people still ran all berserker. Interesting.

I don’t claim to be the best and I posted this for constructive feedback. If you wanna show me a better build I’d be happy to run a dungeon with your ranger or something and compare playing style.

My rage wasn’t really directed at you.

I’ma step out of this thread because I don’t like the eternal struggle between berserker and play how you want groups, neither side ever is satisfied.

I’m saying you’re definitely not helping anything by being selfish in your build. Actually I resend my offer to help. Dungeon runners will keep finishing dungeons in 5 minutes, and tanky people will keep finishing them in an hour with 4 dead party members thinking they’re doing something right. Nothing will change.

There have been a few dungeon running competitions in the dungeon forum featuring rewards of 4000 gold or hundreds of dollars worth of gems. If you think your build is up to snuff, by all means compete in them. Also the first one had a rule of “if anyone dies, they are out of the competition forever” and yet people still ran all berserker. Interesting.

That is not a PvE build, that is a WvW build. Your party is wiping because they’re down a member.

This is an incredibly common misconception among PvErs, that if you are alive and the party dies, you’re doing it right and they’re doing it wrong. What it means is probably you’re not helping them.

Judging from your picture response, you will be hostile to that, but I’m not trying to attack you. If you want, feel free to message me in game and I’ll show you how effective a team can be. You’re doing PvE wrong.

Why don’t you consider 1h sword a power weapon? Especially since warhorn and offhand axe are both 100% power based. Offhand dagger is also self-support as much as it is condi.

The two ranger melee sets work so beautifully together. Back in beta or whenever it was I first tried PvPing on a ranger, the first thing I noticed was how you could sword3 behind an opponent and then gs5 bash him in the back of the head in to a gs2. It doesn’t work that well anymore since people aren’t ignorant of skills, but at any rate they compliment each other really well. GS isn’t just support.

You see the occasional LB video pop up, but I don’t think too many people claim to run berserker in PvP?

Substance E.4852:

Power builds are better for zergs. In small fights, you probably won’t kill people fast enough with one to make that much of a difference and the best ones need to sacrifice almost all team support to work well and most 5v5 fights come down to how well the players support each other.

I disagree with this on a bunch of levels.

Power builds don’t give up their CC at all, and generally have more CC than condi builds.

Glassy builds are at their best in small group play. If you have a guild team of 5, there is no way anything other than a zerg is going to be able to kill you. Even duos of glass are PUG meat grinders. I like to team up with berserker warriors or mesmers. Mesmers bring stealth and distraction, and warriors have mobility similar to ours, so both teams create a lot of chaos. I digress though.

This might be a per server or region thing, but also the typical tactics for small groups are to attack out of group stealth with a massive spike, where again a power build is going to do better. Condi builds suffer from massive redundancy. Your best weapons of burning and poison don’t work that great with groups.

Power builds just do more damage, so if there is very little risk since you’re with a group, by all means go for the better damage. The typical regen ranger is probably the lowest damage mainstream build available; it’s just super durable. That’s not needed for group play.

The two biggest things you can bring to group play for any profession are CC and boons.

If you go the CC route, you’d want Muddy Terrain, Entangle, obviously the wolf, and then another CC pet. Spider, one of the chill pets, or drakehound.

For boons, Nature’s Voice + Guard is obviously very strong. You could also mess around with spirits; probably not full PvP spirit build, but the elite and maybe one of frost, sun or stone depending on who else is in your group.

The power build I’m currently using (4 0 6 4 0) brings spotter and healing spring, along with 2 CC pets and MT + Entangle. I’m using sword/axe and greatsword, which brings a lot of CC on the weapon skills. Tons of cripple and 3 interrupts.

Any combo of any of the above will work, and I’ve mix and matched everything with good success. For example you could change my current traits to 0 0 6 6 2 and run the exact same build only using shout regen. Or 2 0 6 6 0 and take a couple mobile spirits. Etc., etc., etc.

Your build covers all the major bases (traited frost spirit, spotter, cat, melee weapon) as long as you wind up in berserker gear. (Not sure why you specifically don’t want the best PvE build though?)

Here is the obligatory PvE guide:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Guide-PvE-Meta-Ranger/first

Rangers already have more condi removal options than the other professions to the point we can basically render ourselves completely immune to them, and that’s if the condis are even able to land with all our evades and other escape options. I don’t really see anet giving us more, no matter much I would want to use your proposed skills.

The devs mentioned in a live stream a couple weeks ago one reason we have limited stun breakers is because rangers are so hard to catch with anything in the first place. (And weirdly enough, it’s pretty common to have 2 stun breakers plus 20 some seconds of stability on a bar.)

Let’s also insist everyone call her a “crippled invalid” to improve immersion.

Back on topic (wtf are you guys even arguing about?), I can tell you FA usually has about a 13 person queue on EBG during NA primtime, and occasionally a queue on one of the BLs a couple guilds are pushing. But basically, no queue anywhere ever. I have a totally random play schedule due to being a contractor, so I see all 24 hours of the cycle.

This thread is depressing. I knew the bird was strong, but I didn’t realize it was “replace the ranger entirely” strong.

LughLongArm.5460:

Do you have enough survivebility with bersek?

Almost all of his traits are defensive. The damage has to come from somewhere.

I actually ran a similar build in WvW using dual melee set for quite a while. I found it so defensive I was running on the front line of the zerg while in 100% berserker gear. And I mean front line as in I was the 2nd person in after the commander. Terrible damage though, I eventually switched to 4 0 6 4 0, with almost entirely offensive traits.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/your-vote-decides-the-guildwars2-international-all-stars-teams/

Niah is the only ranger on the list. And if you’ve ever seen him play, he’s quite good. He didn’t even use spirits in the first ToL tourney. : O

I voted for him and so should you. Let’s watch a ranger play at the highest level!

Twinbros.5372:

it would provide something Tier 2 has been lacking, a challenge.

Last week’s T2 finished with all 3 servers within 16k points of each other. TC coming down would ruin the perfect storm T2 has become.

You want to beat up T2 because JQ is beating you up (and really not that badly either.)

IMO solo queue is a 1000 times more fun and skill based than hot join. Hot join should be renamed hot mess.

Try some of the meta builds in solo queue and I think you’ll find them working much better.

Semantics. For me there is the zerg and then there are roamers causing chaos by taking non-zerg objectives and cutting off reinforcements.

A lot of people call themselves roamers but don’t care about the matchup and just want to 1v1 people they randomly encounter. I consider them duelers.

The difference between ascended and exotic gear is not nearly big enough to save you from a bad build or playing badly.

Wildchild.7502:

I try to never go to EBG because its where most karma trains usually hangs but like Roe said above. Sometimes except a zerg you don’t find anything else in the BLs so you gotta try to hunt stragglers in EBG even tho most of them are not so challenging.

Oh, that’s the difference then. It sounds like you want duels. When I think roaming, I think something like 2 people trying to take a tower and seeing how long it takes their response team to reach critical mass to kill you, or if you take it.

If all PvP builds are failing for you, it sounds like you need a refresher on the typical PvP meta in general. Do you know the typical roles and strategies? Are you able to succeed on other professions?

Also are you playing hot join? It can be extremely difficult to get anything going on hot join because it’s just a clusterkitten of randomness. You might have the best build ever and know all the right strategies, but you’ll get steamrolled when the “zerg” comes to take your point. If you’re playing hotjoin, never do that again and do solo or team arenas.

Is that mainly as a joke, or are you planning on advancing? Or both?

No, not for a group running meta builds. But for 5 people playing a “casual, bring your own build” type of group, it’s fine, and better than most home-made builds.

Healing in PvE is really subpar to just killing things for a ton of reasons. I don’t know what exactly your damage hit would be, but I’m thinking you’re down like 35% damage or so from a more typical dungeon build. Just a wild estimate. Damage is the most proactive form of protection since every second faster you kill something is a second that it’s not trying to kill your teammates.

Also someone will have to confirm, but I don’t think Compassion Training does anything in your build. Regen uses the healing power stat of the person it’s applied to, not the fern wolf’s. I don’t know if it affects Invigorating Bond.

Your utilities are a little more malleable, but S&R is taking up a slot waiting for your teammates to die, rather than you actively using skills to help keep them alive, and it’s on a crazy long cooldown. Stone Spirit is actually quite good, but it’s literally useless if you have certain other builds in your party, namely guardians. You run in to the same problem with regen, where it gets very redundant.

Those mobs also don’t count for a lot of things like daily kills, kill variety, stacking sigils, etc. Extremely annoying if you want to play the living story and get your dailies done before you need to leave.

I’ll also piggy back the fact that ranger pets don’t do damage to the sparring hylek, since that literally invalidates some people’s builds.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep taking away our game mechanics. Design monsters to be balanced around us, don’t penalize us for trying to play the content.

Edit: One thing they do right, often the main bosses are very high health veterans rather than champs (like the golem in the first story instance.) Which means we can use CC. VERY welcome feature for me.

No, but you don’t even need to know the mechanics of the encounter, just melee the boss.

Just fight him in melee range and you’ll get it without even trying. Only takes a few seconds too; you don’t need to kill him using only the golems.

Wildchild.7502:

So yeah I’m currently playing on Fort Aspenwood and it used to be okay for roaming I used to be able to meet a few good 1v1 1v2 often but now since 2 weeks we got into Tier 2 and hell man it kittenin blow

Theres no place here for solo roamers or group roamers. the smallest group you encounter are 10 mans and Obsidian Sanctum is always empty

so yeah I wanna gtfo out of there.

Any ideas of server where theres good roaming / small scale action ?

I don’t really care if its silver or bronze. I want good and fun fights. that is all.

Are you playing only in EBG? I’m on FA and I roam just fine all the time.

Ice of Dragons.1637:

And the crystal desert is now a green oasis. Thou i cant imagine how plants can grow on crystals.

Sand is made up of crystals on Earth.

Arleii.5304:

the dungeon would be the only other one for level 80.

Huh? There are 3 level 80 dungeons, or 4 if you count fractals.

I watched a little bit of it. My favorite part was the party wipe to the camp NPCs a few minutes in to the stream…

Anywho, I know it’s pure luck, but a bit more skill play would be nice. Ideally you guys would have had a 3 v 5 or something. Easier said than found.

Your underwater pets will retain the name of their terrestrial counterparts. I have my 2 cats as my underwater pets, so when I change out my WvW pets for my PvE cats, they still have their names.

TurtleDragon.3108:

The guide on dulfy’s website is pretty decent and should probably be linked instead of mine:

Not to toot your horn (I have a wife after all) but I think your guide is a lot easier to read. Hers provides some additional info, but you simplified it to get it the point across.

I flipped through your posts and didn’t immediately see your build, although I think I remember it being something I didn’t personally enjoy. Was it the trapper build? Or are you a SotF longbow? Apologies if I’m just randomly guessing here, I lose track of forum names.

I get angry when the new Drytop theme doesn’t play for me when I log in to WvW. It’s just gorgeous.

Re: Hologram, that was so minor and just flavor, I enjoyed that it was “hidden”. I mean it was WAAAAY WAAAAY less hidden than just randomly adding in something like a house or NPC and expecting everyone to find it. The hologram was in plain, clickable sight.

Addressing a couple points.

Spamming guard has a low downside and a big upside. SotF triggering only on your “oh kitten” button is a giant, unforgivable waste. Any use of “Guard!” what-so-ever would be better, even if it was just for the swiftness of moving your neighbors around.

You won’t kill anything ever, at all not even once, never with that build. No deaths will ever happen. Nope.

That’s an awfully high uptime. It’s effectively a little higher than 10% invulnerability. The 50% speed boost make its even higher as no melee player can do much to you (and a lot of AoE and ranged attacks would miss.)

There is a roughly zero percent chance of that being implemented.

I think the plate of roasted cactus is really interesting as well for LB glass cannon builds. (Let’s assume the person playing is not a complete idiot bearbow and has a decent build.)

Terravos.4059:

Fairly trolly build I think,

100% troll build that is completely useless, however I could see that being used in a guild party. Perhaps take a longbow and bear (black for any use out of it, and for FSM’s sake why do you have SotF with only 1 survival skill??) You could bait people in to attacking you while your party of berserker thieves and mesmers destroys everyone.

Not a new idea, but what else are you gonna do with that food on a ranger. It’s made for other classes I think. Oh please, give me more regen and swiftness uptime.

Aggrostemma.1703:

Fluffball

Good grief no, I just like to read the ranger forum.

Jamais vu.5284:

So you think if you swapped the current users out for a new megaserved bunch like a set of batteries the map would suddenly not incentivize karmatrainining anymore?

Arenadrones will go to any length to justify major flaws with the game I swear.

I didn’t see the failure coming either. Honestly I thought EotM would be the end of imbalanced WvW when I first heard about it. Obviously in hindsight the obvious problems are obvious, but come on, it’s not like they made the map specifically to kitten you off. It doesn’t hurt that NA WvW has drastically evened itself out lately, all the way down to T4.

I’m going on record as saying the next WvW map will be nothing like EotM because I think Anet is capable of learning.

Kibazuka.1390:

reducing its field of application to bosses you pull, because using the skill after walking up in melee range when the fight started is already a dps loss.

Want to see a party scream at you? Apply chill or cripple to a boss someone is pulling. I’m especially thinking Subject Alpha at the column room. Someone always CCs him here, or you get a necro sending his golem in…

Barrage has its uses, but using it on pulled bosses is not one!

The sword leap combo isn’t much faster than someone running with swiftness OOC, but it’s mobility is pretty dramatic when you’re fighting someone.

So you get the best of both worlds. You’re faster than the swifted-zerg OOC once you get the motion down, and you’re way more mobile than the guy you’re 1v1ing (unless he uses his own movement skills, which is of course why fighting people is fun!)

If you’re going to pick one, it’s definitely better to be good at sword. If you’re going to be bad at sword, greatsword is easy to be good at and still a great weapon.

I totally disagree with those suggesting a second use of about face. There is a fraction of a second where your character will completely stop moving. If you rotate the camera as you’re pushing 2 the first time, your character will never stop moving. That makes a huge, huge difference, despite being an almost unnoticeable length of time you’re standing in one spot. Especially if you’re running for your life.

Why not both?
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Moment_of_Clarity

I don’t view anyone in the WvW/PvP scene as being terribly influential. That area is all about personal skill, not so much your build. As long as you have an idea of how the game works and how to accomplish the goal you’ve given yourself, you can make anything work. I guess whoever came up with the stock spirit build would be the most influential, but I have no idea who that is. Probably Anet, since it’s painfully obvious when looking at the skill tree there is a spirit build available.

For PvE it’s a lot simpler, because there is a mathematical answer. There are one or a couple “correct” builds that mathematically do more damage than other builds. I’m not sure who exactly came up with it (not Brazil), but Brazil has definitely popularized the current ranger meta build.

Substance E.4852:

The easy fellow Ranger kills in WvW are pretty sweet though.

I find that just plain weird. No other class in WvW do I consistently annihilate like I do to rangers. And I’m playing a ranger. ??? On a wide variety of builds, too, so I’m not just running pure cheese.

I know I’m not just an amazingly ridiculously better player than every one else, because other classes are often able to put up a fight. It’s like the skill level of rangers in WvW is roughly -27.

TheSoothsayer.7439:

I’m just getting back into GW2 after over a year of absence. I want to start up a new main and Im considering ranger. I like PVE and dungeons most of all (my first main was mes, then engi later on) so I want to know if GS survival w/spider is a viable build. I threw in frost spirit even though Im not traited for it because it seems pretty good dps boost even untraited. Heres a link for what I was thinking, Id love to hear suggestions/opinions http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNBhYDbkRlWVbZxmFqWDsHULDgAu5QcDu3ijotPZINDC-e

You’ve taken away quite a lot of your potential damage for several things you don’t need. Read the link at the bottom of Turtle Dragon’s signature (post right above you) for a detailed explanation.

Maybe I misunderstood the point of the thread, turtle. I thought it was ‘crappy rangers make people hate rangers.’

I pretty much never wait for any length of time to find a PUG. A few weeks ago I was kicked for the first time I can remember for joining as a ranger, after months of doing almost all dungeon runs every day. I thought my game bugged out I was so confused. A couple party members whispered me saying I started a big argument because the leader kicked a ranger with a cat and s/wh showing and everyone was yelling at each other about it. Ha.