Guild Wars 2

Look at all the resistance in the “be a ranger, not an archer” thread and you’ll see why everyone hates rangers. I love rangers more than anyone and I hate it when a ranger joins my group. Out of hundreds or thousands of dungeon runs, I can probably count on one hand the number of times a competent melee ranger has joined my group. It’s insanely rare to get something other than a bearbow or something like a mainhand axe and pink moa. Makes me a sad fluffball when I hate people playing my own class.

Don’t use the about face button twice, it’s way faster to use it once, then use your mouse to turn your view as you leap. Before you land, start running forward, which will automatically point your character towards the new direction. Now use your second leap.

The advantage is not just speed, but also control. Your second leap will go in the exact direction you want it to rather than just 2 leaps in a straight line.

Agree Eggyokeo.

There was a video on reddit a couple days ago of a guy on Blackgate running on the zerg frontlines completely naked, just to prove it’s positioning rather than equipment that keeps you alive. Which any melee ranger could have told you from experience, but that really hammers home the point.

Control-click your sword autoattack, you should see the autoattack arrows that usually circle it disappear. That’s crucial to using a sword. If you’re on exactly right now I can show you the sword quickly.

Spirits haven’t been nerfed at all, other builds have been buffed. But spirits are still really strong, people are just over dramatic about new things. Much the way people said traps were obsolete, and yet they’ve been around since game release or so.

1. You did turn autoattack off on your sword, right?

1. Spirits is not antique, and I would argue still one of the best PvP builds available, though it has gone through several iterations.

There are variations of spirits that you can see here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Let-s-Talk-PvP-Meta.

Edit: I have my #s numbered properly, no idea why this site turned them both in to 1s.

2 achievement points? Is that even possible? Sounds like a gold seller.

This is the meta zerg build. It’s slightly out of date, but close enough that can customize it to your own.

Relshdan.6854:

you probably should just be playing axe/mace + GS warrior instead…and save the ranger (and bow) for open world.

Unless I’m not current on the latest warrior meta, axe is not en vogue anymore and you should only be using greatsword for max damage.

At any rate, too many warriors gets redundant and you’re better off damage wise with a ranger.

Check out this thread, which has tons of viable melee WvW builds.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/help-with-a-melee-power-ranger-for-roaming/

After months of experimenting with it, I’ve finally settled on 4 0 6 4 0, with EB and then the usual other traits. I tried a lot of builds similar to X X 6 6 X, but I just felt like I was doing no damage, even in berserker. I do love and miss Bark Skin though. Spotter is nice since I’ve been running around with small groups or guild mini-zergs a lot more lately due to a population increase, and it gives others a decent damage boost.

FrouFrou, with those spiders, wouldn’t you be better off with Malicious Training? Also don’t forget that while you can’t dodge when you’re immobilized, you can still use all of your weapon skill evades. That’s saved me many times and it keeps SoR/PM! and LR off recharge for when someone didn’t make great use of an immobilize.

ProtoGunner.4953:

I don’t appreciate the fact that this game is so broken, that group play penalizes ranged combat.

It’s not broken, it’s too easy. The concept is melee is riskier and thus has to do more damage. Ranged is easier, so it has to do less damage. If ranged did as much damage as melee, there would be no point in melee.

The problem is that content hard enough to force good players out of melee is going to be absolutely unplayable for 99% of the population. You’ll wind up with a dungeon that almost no one runs.

In a similar way, the aetherblade path took a stab at changing up a typical dungeon run, succeeded, and now no one will run it.

Edit: I’ll also add, forcing good players or even mediocre players to range is just as restrictive as forcing every one to melee. Maybe even more so since most of the interesting build choices are a lot more fun than ranged one. Compare staff ele to dagger/dagger ele, or a poor guardian forced to stay in scepter.

It’s not ideal, but if you really stick on the commander and are ready to swap pets, you can keep your pet alive reasonably well. I mean like if you are on your commander’s kitten . There is the AoE limit, so the better you stick to the zerg center, the better your pet will fare.

Roaming, obviously pets are insanely good.

TurtleDragon.3108:

mtpelion.4562:

Which is why I want them to simply boost the power scaling for Greatsword or Longbow so that it can out perform sword for a pure DPS build against a single target while in party range. Then the PvPers can have their non-broken sword and PvEers can have their non-broken GS/LB.

Well… the other problem with sword is that the offhands they allow us to use are very good. Warhorn is mandatory for every good dungeon/fractal build. Axe is situationally great too, I’m not a huge fan of it but there are people who think it’s great too. Even if GS was buffed, you’d need to fit WH into your build and swap to it before/in combat for water/fire blasts and fury.

Longbow doesn’t have any sustained AoE (Can’t “cleave”) which is also a problem.

Also GS having sword-level damage would make sword basically obsolete (amazing offhands aside) due to the redonkulous amounts of evade on autoattack. LB being able to compete with the swords would mean it did like 20k per autoattack from 2000 range. This is regarding PvE.

Not good advice if he’s new to the game though. He’ll never play it again after about 3 hours of karma train.

Ya, the SotF condi count was way off, saw that right when I posted it but had to run. I still found I wasn’t ever intentionally removing condis with it. I don’t spam LR for obvious reasons, so it’s only MT doing the work, which seemed silly for a grandmaster trait. Whatever, if you like it, obviously keep using it.

Ranger runes will give you the biggest damage increase as far as I know. I’ve got them on my armor because I use it for PvE as well.

Offhand axe pairs nicely with MoC and maul, but that’s a fairly big trait change. If you ever decide you don’t SotF, or want EB instead, it’s something to consider.

Sube Dai.8496:

@Fluffball – s/d ranger maybe, but they’re not likely to be traps or spirits…its traps and spirit builds that are suffering.

No. You’re can take s/d as a spirit ranger if you want. What you’re choosing to do is take that for self supprt instead of warhorn for team support. Do you want self support or team support? You can’t have both and that makes sense.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

“We give you evades, but only one second after you’ve pressed the button” sounds logic…

And we’re back to this.

Fluffball.8307:

I think you’re drastically over exaggerating the problem.

Many people have over exaggerated, You’ve not only doubled the evade time but also made it seem as though this is the only evade available.

First, this topic continues in circles and second, it does not attempt to appease half of the … 3 million people? or whatever that play GW2.

It’s not hard to react when most PvE bosses have 2 seconds tells and hammer warriors have a minimum of half a second tells, and you know just when they’re going to use them.

This ties in to the thread of the guy who wanted more stunbreaks. You can’t just give rangers all the evades that can every possibly exist with no effort, and then give them a bunch of stun breaks.

Like I, and about 5o other people said, not compatible between PvE and PvP/WvW.

There are two solutions that I see: Make a third melee weapon or allow for a toggle on the leap.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Just combine Fluffball’s and my idea:
- Remove the leaps from the autoattack

That’s the crux of the problem, I’m not cool with this at all.

Wow this keeps coming up, so sorry if I am repeating myself from other threads.

I’ve been using a similar build. Things I do differently:

Take 100% offense with your gear. You simply don’t need any more defense and your damage is horrible enough to begin with. You really need that damage from ranger runes or something similar over the tanky dolyak. I don’t mean to scream offense all the time, but you can’t go full on defense and also kill people; they’ll just leave. Especially since thieves and mesmers are mostly what you’ll run in to roaming.

After trying it for ~ a month or so, SotF sucks. In this build, you’re getting on-demand condi removal, but you’re only getting it less than twice a minute. Unacceptable IMO. If you take SoR and HS I’ve found that to be enough for most encounters. If you see a necro in the distance of course you have more than enough time to swap to empathetic bond.

Warhorn isn’t actually benefitting you that much. The main boost in a 1v1 is fury, but you already have a LOT of that. CotW is horrible damage. I’ve been using offhand axe for an extra interrupt, something to snag fleeing opponents, and one of the few hard-hitting ranger skills available. A raven can get you some defense as well as the swiftness.

Gotta run so I will cut that short. Hope any of that helps you think about the build you want.

Sure, didn’t mean to imply I wanted you to never post again and put a hit out on your family.

I personally don’t like using LB without a hefty power and crit build since you already get the massive damage reduction from being too close and having one of the slowest attacks in the game. But like I said, I have been using a similar build so I get where you’re coming from. I can see you making up the lost damage by being annoying elusive with the longbow. People drastically underestimate the non-autoattacks of the longbow.

I’ve been running a similar build in WvW in full ascended berserker gear with power infusions and consumables. I mention that because the damage boost is very substantial compared to PvP. I have been using dual melee, but occasionally need to swap to LB to take out siege, and get caught in a 1v1 with it equipped.

I find longbow hits like a nice caress of silky panties unless you put more in to MM and/or skirmishing. I’m a huge fan of power LB builds, but I have trouble seeing this hurting anyone, especially in a PvP bunker meta.

Have you tried using something like S/A and GS?

Unless I’m lying, they addressed this exact point in the last livestream. They said they don’t want rangers with too many escape options because we’re too hard to catch due to evades. I.e. the hammer warrior uses the LB CC, swaps to hammer and blows through all 3 hammer CCs and the ranger uses the /dance emote because he evaded all of them without even expending a dodge. If the warrior is able to land a CC, he needs to be rewarded.

Fighting a S/D + GS ranger with vigor, LR, and PM! is a kitten nightmare for most power builds.

jcbroe.4329:

I have no arguments against that setup at all, except that for a lot of people, Natures Voice is harder to pick up and use than other options.

I moved the “Guard!” hotkey to my middle mouse button, so I just double click that every 10 seconds (and then immediately recall the pet on ‘R’ for my left hand, in case I put him on top of a cliff or somewhere ridiculous.) That combo takes my fingers like 1/4 of a second, and things like that make all the difference.

I think you may have the better idea with the malicious training though. That probably provides more to the party than shout mastery. More CC in exchange for more AoE regen and swiftness, and the selfish healing boost on my own extremely high regen. I’ll have to give that a go.

I meant NV with spirits. Obviously you move towards healing bunker away from the Storm Spirit damage by going that route.

I typically use a healing condi ranger that can both bunker and support in team fights. It’s HS on top of Spirit of Nature on top of Naure’s Voice, couple with AoE swiftness and protection, and even use those AoE healing sigils sometimes (which heal for almost nothing, but it all adds up dramatically.) It just makes your whole team annoying to kill, and you’re a solid bunker in your own right. The regen boon alone heals me for 3.7k every 10 seconds if I remember right.

But anyway, none of what I wrote is important to this thread.

Vigor is obviously crazy good, but I don’t know if it’s 10-points-into-skirmishing-for-unreliable-vigor essential when you already have a permanent 25% regen.

People always yell at me when I bring it up, but Nature’s Voice is seriously underestimated for a group support (aka spirit) ranger. Ya ya, the meta is supposedly only insta-kill bursts now. In reality, you have to expect your teammates to be able to defend themselves, and permanent regen and swiftness on them plus the HS is really strong for keeping people up. Edit: Math was totally wrong. Same point.

And this will never be stickied. Turtle wrote his PvE meta guide months ago and it still isn’t stickied.

Read this and then customize it to your own personality and playstyle: (Ignore the “this is not meant for leveling”, I only post it because it shows you what traits and gear are good, and there is also a leveling discussion a few posts down.)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Guide-PvE-Meta-Ranger/first

This thread, presented by Fluffball.

Someone: Sword is unusable.
Second someone: It would be nice if sword had a solution that made both PvE and PvP happy, but until, then it’s still usable.
Third someone: You don’t get it, sword is unusable.
Fourth someone: It would be nice if sword had a solution that made both PvE and PvP happy, but until, then it’s still usable.
Fifth someone: You don’t get it, sword is unusable.

Ya I know. All these last several posts are revolving around me saying we don’t need to over dramatize the problem. Someone posted that you can’t dodge for 50% of a fight, but that makes it sound like the sword is totally unusable, when in fact you can effortlessly complete all content in the entire game while using it. It’s an annoyance, not a disaster.

This is about PvE. For PvP, you’re wrong about the leap not making sense, but that’s been discussed already.

Because I don’t see the problem.* Think of all the insta-gib scenarios in dungeon runs, almost all have tells longer than the entire sword autoattack chain.

If you see Subject Alpha put down a red circle, use your best judgement for when to stop attacking. If you have the sword rhythm down, you don’t lose any DPS at all (keep in mind you can dodge/sword 3 before the attack and you will still be invulnerable by the time it lands.) If you’re just absolutely terrible with the sword, you’ll lose maybe a second while you wait for the attack to land.

Like I said, Brazil doesn’t even turn the autoattack off on arguably the most difficult PvE encounter in the game (using him as an example because I usually have autoattack turned off, and I think he’s actually pretty bad with the sword, just really good at Lupi.)

*To clarify, I DO see why people don’t like it, but I don’t see the problem because as Turtle said, it’s so easy to work around.

I’m not missing the point, I meant that you just hit dodge when the bosses do their tells. Most bosses have massive tells, so it doesn’t matter if you’re currently airborne when the tell starts. The lupi grub is what, 2 seconds or something?

I think you’re drastically over exaggerating the problem. You don’t need to be able to dodge constantly during every PvE fight. (You don’t need to be able to dodge at all usually, but whatever.) In the case of the vet giant, you need to dodge only the foot stomp IIRC. So you can attack normally, and for the 1 foot stomp he’ll do before he dies, you have plenty of time to dodge no matter where in your attack chain you are. So you’ve lost no time and no damage.

What Brazil in any number of vidoes use the sword against lupi, he doesn’t even turn the autoattack off. (I mean the ones where he fights it “normally” and not explodes it in 12 seconds or whatever.)

For regen, you only need guard. Protect me is a good shout if you need an invuln, but it’s not good for regen.

I personally don’t like LB for PvP, but I guess a lot of people do. When I’ve used power builds in PvP in the past I usually used dual melee sets. Or mainhand axe is not terrible for team fights when you need to drop back for a couple seconds to survive before diving back in to melee. I’ve used s/d and a/wh for a sort of best of both worlds.

Edit: I mentioned offhand axe because MoC needs an interrupt to trigger.

nearlight.3064:

Do you guys know of any power based regeneration builds that are decent?

I’ve been using Nature’s Voice in WvW lately on a berserker ranger. The healing isn’t nearly as strong as my condi PvP ranger setup, but 2k heals every 10 seconds or whatever it is plus the regular heal skill is not too shabby.

It really doesn’t matter what traits you take other than the 6 in NM. Maybe 6 in MM for signets. Or 6 in skirmishing for MoC and then take offhand axe and/or greatsword. Any number of things you can do with it.

FenrirSlakt.3692:

“73.6% of all Statistics are made up”
-Jeanne D’ Arc

“get rekt noob”
-Abraham Lincoln

See this is why I love the internet. I honestly didn’t know those quotes. Learn somethin’ new every day!

You really should look over the PvE guide I posted if you haven’t. Your weapon combo is barely off meta if you went berserker with it, and honestly I think it will make your solo open world more enjoyable if you can easily kill things.

Also, by the time you want to get in to playing with other people, you will have slowly acquired the equipment and build familiarity to do so.

Edit: Here, I plopped together something that is relatively meta using your choosen weapons. If you decided to do a dungeon run, you would just need to take frost spirit and the trait Vigorous Spirits and you would be 90% meta.

I used the PvP amulet for simplicity, and the open world utilities are anything you want. There are several that could bump up your survivability or damage.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQJARViMqGYPoWHABcDwsDGBnbxRkxPnM7B-TpAVQAg9HqlBAA

Andrew Clear.1750:

FA does have a great core, and it is that core that has kept them stable. I just don’t want to see that core get rocked some, like HoD just did (and SBI and YB was after season 1).

I doubt HoD’s core got rocked. They’ll go back to 12th place or wherever it was they came from.

FA’s core is especially immune to bandwagoners because we don’t have much room to go up. We could get a big influx of guilds and move to… T2? We’re often there anyway due to the core FA.

Killsmith.8169:

They just need to change the sword so that the auto attack only makes you leap when you aren’t in range to hit your target. I think that would make everyone happy.

Not a bad idea. One concern would be if you’re fighting someone who is moving around but still in range of the sword, you would lose out on the leap to stay right on top of them. No matter where you run, the ranger is directly on top of the opponent, which makes it harder to juke him out to miss the next attack.

I wonder if a toggle would be possible. YES I want to leap on the autoattack, NO I don’t want to leap.

Pure Heart, killing a thief may require effort from the ranger, but scaring them off is easy, and then the thief is just wasting his time.

Yesterday a thief tried to gank me. After I hard CCed him a couple times and took him a hit away from the downed stage, I saw the totally expected shadow refuge come out. I just wandered off because I had a camp to take. He didn’t follow. Not only that, I ran in to the same thief several other times and he didn’t even try to attack me.

Out of 3 thieves I ran in to during that play session, two were unwilling to engage me after the first encounter (the third just died and I never saw him again.) Generally thieves aren’t looking for difficult fights, they’re looking for 2 or 3 hit kills.

(I also think CC is a lot more effective than Sic ’Em, but whatever works for you.)

For PvE, you definitely want to go berserker. Even if you’re not playing with other people, there is no advantage to having any stats other than damage.

Andrew Clear.1750:

FA, I just wonder how many of these guilds will stay with you, when season 3 hits? Will they enjoy last place in gold league, or will they jump ship for first in silver again?

I think I speak for FA when I say we couldn’t possibly care less. FA has a very solid WvW community that isn’t going anywhere. If others want to join and leave, that’s fine, but most of us have been here a very long time.

For PvE? Read this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Guide-PvE-Meta-Ranger/first

If it’s for WvW, it’s not a terrible combo. I would ignore the condition damage and use the SB as a power weapon. Adding condi damage will be a waste when you swap to GS. You can get “free” PVT exotic armor from the armor NPC if you have a few badges of honor, although you probably want at least some berserker gear from the TP or your damage will be quite low.

I almost always take lightning reflexes and muddy terrain in WvW, regardless of my build. 6 in nature magic could also get you nature’s voice + guard, for perma regen and swiftness, which is handy since you won’t have a warhorn equipped. And that would let you take two-handed training for your GS. “Protect me!” is another good WvW skill. So is Signet of Renewal.

2 and 3 are extremely important, both in PvE and PvP. I don’t want them to change, but someone did bring up the idea of having sword 2 never reset, just alternate backwards and forwards. So if you wanted to leap in to a fight first, you would leap backwards before the fight. I’d be ok with that. Although again, I don’t see any need for a change.

If a third pet dies underwater, I think you’ll swap to a dead pet when you’re on land. I’m not exactly sure what the specifics are, but were you underwater shortly before this?

I have all classes fully geared up in exotic and ascended equipment. I only play ranger. If it’s for you, it’s for you.

In PvE if you want to roll with the best, there is a best build. You need to run the PvE meta build.

In PvP there is mostly spirit ranger, with a few others sideshows like traps.

In WvW roaming it is just WIDE OPEN. There are literally dozens of viable roaming builds.

In WvW zerging, the options limit but as long as you go tanky, you need to rely on skill more than build. You can also “zerg surf” as a glass cannon longbow ranger.

Pet almost NEVER die, both in PvE in PvP. You may need to swap pets every 20 seconds in bad situations (I’m thinking heavy AoE on a point in PvP in a full on team fight) but ya, pets really don’t die if you pay attention. Newbie rangers will lose their pets, but you really need to learn to watch it and put pet swap on a convenient button. Also learn to recall your pet out of heavy AoE (again, rebind your buttons.)

There is an AI pathing issue, where the pet struggles to reach the target before it moves. This is effectively nonexistant in PvE, however it does exist in PvP. People generally use CC pets to make up for that.*

*I guess I should expand, pets often have pauses before they make an attack, and a human will simply move. To make up for that, pets like dogs with cripple and knockdown or spider with immobilize (and ranged attacks) are very popular.

I tried out SotF for about a month. I think it’s just terrible. You get on-demand condition removal, but it’s REALLY low. Muddy Terrain is effectively the only condi removal in a normal build because you don’t want to spam LR lest you need it, Entangle is on a massive cool down and you need to save it for specific situations anyway. The last slot is probably either not a survival skill or QZ, which is again on a pretty heft cool down. So MT, 1 condi removal once every 20 or 25 seconds.

You get way more condition removal, plus a stun breaker, plus an “oh kitten” button just from taking Signet of Renewal. Or using HS with the horn or leaps. Or hell, literally even a bear would be better condi removal.

It’s hard for me to not compliment you Frou Frou; we have almost identical play styles. We favor the same weapons and skills and melee, only difference is I am berserker no matter what!

When I compliment you I’m complimenting ME.