Guild Wars 2

Just google spirit ranger, many/most PvP teams run them and they all run roughly the same traits.

You don’t need a tanky drake, cats survive just fine anywhere. I’ve been working on soloing P2 Arah and my cats can tank just about everything. Granted there are only two of us so sometimes I’m “tanking”, but you get the point.

I learned sword by doing 100% world completion using nothing but the sword. Pretty hard to not learn the timing after using it that long.

That’s sort of a human psychology question. My guess is that there is a sense of leadership associated with making a group. The party creator sets the tone and is sort of a bouncer (“please ping your gear or be kicked.”) I would also expect a creator to know the path if I were new and didn’t have the path well memorized yet.

I think Howler is the best looking legendary in the game, and it’s super cheap.

Sandpit.3467:

Bows are bad
Pets are really, really bad
Trait synergy is a complete mess
Sword 1 is broken

These are your opinions, and I completely, vehemently disagree with every one of them.

I think I’m taking CM completely out of my dungeon rotation. The people running it are consistently clueless and it’s too frustrating.

Also, not to get too serious, many/most of the dungeon running builds do not spec purely in to the 3 attributes of berserker, but rather go for percent damage increases. For example rangers go 5 in to a trait line that provides vitality and boon duration. :-O

Gyler.8150:

Why would you do SE path 2???
My only guess would be dangerous amounts of boredom or masochism.

I like the path actually. It’s really not that long if everyone is in berserker gear.

If I’m only running a couple paths it’s probably going to be CoF1 and 2, but some times I’ll sit down and just play all the paths for everything.

I find the same thing with any of the not-commonly-run paths. I usually do a gear check for SE2 for example, because I got sick of carrying people in masterwork cleric’s gear who just wanted the achievement.

Corax.7381:

So how can you say that “zerker” isn’t a build when it’s clearly PART of a build?

Didn’t you just answer your own question?

His name is Robert Berserker.

Because it has nothing to do with your traits. However it is the best armor set. HEYO! Fooled you.

I assume you meant to put in a LB instead of a SB?

At any rate, have you tried this in WvW? IMO you’ll have a lot more fun with it there. LB in conquest is like shoving a turtle in to a sweater, makes no sense. Confined spaces which nullify the main advantage of a LB, the requirement of fighting on a point or being relatively useless, highly coordinated attacks on weak targets… it’s no good for LB glass. In WvW roaming LBs can shine a bit more.

Or if you meant for hotjoin, ya rock on. My record is 26 “kills” with a LB in hotjoin.

Edit: Oh, forgot the most important thing. WvW LBs hit like a mac truck. Food, ascended gear with infusions, higher ferocity, people with lesser gear… makes it so much easier to play glass.

Rangers don’t do spike damage very well (they can hit for outrageous amounts with a few skills or pets, but I’m talking normally.) But almost every build you can come up with will do good pressure damage.

And ranger bunkers are tough to beat. Even glass cannons have tons of evades, so true ranger bunkers are annoying as kitten.

Obsidian.1328:

There are too many other valuable traits in that line other than Spotter. EE + Piercing Arrows or EE + Read the Wind are both better combo’s than anything which included Spotter. Even Piercing Arrows + Read the Wind is better. Not to mention if you’re using Survival of the Fittest, you should have a lot of Fury uptime. Don’t get me wrong, I’d really like to use it, but I just don’t see how I could give up anything else for it.

You can always take the ugly Red Moa with you. :P

You never need PA and RtW at the same time. Also the OP said when you’re on your own, so EE + PA is pretty much the worst possible trait setup. RtW and spotter or RtW and EE if you want the range. Maybe PA for camps, but I melee those, so still spotter.

Spotter also affects your melee swap, pet, and any randoms that you run in to, presuming this is for WvW. It wins hands down IMO.

VitalSuit.1980:

I rarely use either bow and greatsword I just use for the mobility. Thanks for the response though.

Bow I just like to keep handy. There are a lot of encounters PUGs generally want to range, like the dredge carrier in SE…uh 3? or the bosses at the end of CM 1 and 3 blah blah blah.

I used to not use GS pretty much at all, but ever since I crafted my ascended GS, I’ve been using it quite a bit. The idea is to use swoop and maul, then switch to 1hS, but having it permanently on switch means a lot less manual weapon swapping. Most dungeons have places where I’d rather use GS, like circle strafing Seamus.

Either is totally fine. DnT is recommending 45050 but they’re basically identical.

Mostly using s/wh and GS, but as you know axe in either hand is nice for TA, bow on rare occasions like SE or CM, etc.

It warms my heart to come in here and see legit assessments of rangers rather than “reroll, anet hates rangers”.

I’ve got plenty of people on my friends list who want me on their team for PvP when I’m online. Yesterday I went on a marathon dungeon running session doing almost every dungeon in the game, and again, people were happy to have a ranger with FS, spotter and HS. We’re actually in a pretty good place.

For a few months people were calling trebuchets “terbs”. I put a stop to that with my belt and a good whuppin’.

The devs have not said one single word that I know of about the ranger updates/CDI. The thread was locked and that was that.

It’s not a good idea to run the same build in every aspect of the game. PvE is purely about damage, PvP is almost purely about surviving. WvW is a mixed bag.

Check out the typical PvE and PvP builds that rangers run and customize them to where you’re comfy and happy.

HoD is an interesting example of people’s answers. They are going to easily win silver league because of coverage, however there was a pretty brutal learning period where they got the every loving hell farmed out of them by several different servers. Many of their new numbers were trying to democracy zerg in full berserker instead of the typical follow the commander with tanky builds. I wish I could have seen it from their perspective the first few weeks of the tourney, it must have been pure chaos.

Pet’s can wind up having higher stats than your ranger, but I still think a more ranger focused damage build is faster. Not only do you cleave, but the attack speed is really important. Many times the mob has been cleaved to death before your pet even gets a chance to attack a single time. ZS helps, but not often enough when you’re wading through trash 100% of the time in the open world.

Beldin.5498:

For daily events now .. just look at the Worldevent List if Svanir Shaman is up in the time you have for playing. If you are there to do the pre-events you have your dailys pretty fast.

Well that gets you the AP, but it doesn’t make playing in the open world or leveling any fun. It’s just a work-around to complete a daily. You can also just go to WvW and complete it in seconds like I did, but it still doesn’t make the open world any fun.

This density of players is good for things like the Marionette, but not so much fun for anything else. Including the world boss train, which is now just a giant mess of particle effects.

Conaywea.5062:

What if u get out of Queensdale and explore the world?

No one is talking about Queensdale.

You’re right, I wasn’t talking about champ trains, however even random champs are pretty much instagibbed. I was looking for events in Snowden Drifts, which is a totally random map. I had 2 different champ events pop up in my UI, and both were completed by the time I got there (15 seconds away or so.) A third champ that wasn’t an event was instagibbed as well. I wound up completing all PvE achievements across 3 or 4 maps and still only having completed 2 events.

You know what I meant. :p

There are no events or bosses to kill. I run in to lots of players but there is nothing to actually do anymore.

This is pretty low priority, it’s just something I noticed while completing my monthly or doing the daily events achievement. It’s hard to find events in PvE now, I wound up playing some WvW (which is more interesting anyway, but that’s not the point.)

A weird consequence of the megaservers is that there are now few events on maps. Everything is completed basically the moment the event triggers, champions are killed on respawn… the maps feel very dead because all you run in to are other players.

I think this would be a great time to introduce some new meta events, especially on maps that don’t already have world bosses or interesting events.

It may be offensive somewhere in the world. They have an insanely overzealous language filter. At one point Spanish speakers weren’t allowed to use the word “kitten” which simply means black in Spanish. I dunno if they ever fixed that.

Oh for gods sake, they changed the word to kitten. Well google black in spanish if you don’t already know.

OP: if you’re a pretty casual player, LB might be very frustrating.

Holland: I also play a GC longbow, but I think you’re missing out enormously by not using your pets. Pets rarely if every die in small scale combat, let alone 1v1s.

I use “Protect Me!” as well, but I have a wolf providing triple the defense of a bear, and I can count on the wolf being alive up to about 9v9 (or whatever.)

I think that one little change would dramatically increase your effectiveness both in offense and defense. You’re getting literally zero attack out of a bear on passive and very little utility.

Masaru.1345:

You said you would not put points into Nature Magic. Where can I put the 5 points then?

The NM points in the meta build are mostly for frost spirit, which is not that great for killing trash in the open world. I’d base your leveling build off the 6 5 0 3 0 build, and then put those extra NM points in to BM and take Master’s Bond. That’s basically an optimal trash-killing damage build. That’s just me though.

Alugjen Darlas.5329:

First Dragon Rank eu

Wait what? EU doesn’t have any dragon ranks??

DeceiverX.8361:

First off, you can’t spend any points in beastmastery or plan on being a beastmaster.

The ranger in the team that placed second in the EU ToL had 30 (edit, er sorry, 6) points in beastmastery.

Anything to that skill would be nice. I’m confused why it exists. The damage is atrocious and the aftercast is even more atrocious. The only thing it can do is overlap other sources of damage since it’s DoT, but the aftercast makes that awfully difficult to do efficiently.

A lot of people call them minionmancers in a lot of different games.

At any rate, what difference does it make if you kill anyone as a home point bunker? Conquest is not a game of killing, it’s a game of stalling. Your goal is to stay on point and not die. That’s it.

Head to head you can kill many FPAs, but they’ll simply leave instead of letting you finish them. The other scenario is a duo comes to attack you, and in that case your goal is to hold out long enough for your roamers to come kill them.

Edit: Actually, are you talking about soloq? Where team support is unreliable at best? If that’s the case maybe try a trapper. They have more condi pressure than spirits.

Bleenko.2763:

just like the title says any tips guys ? thank you

Well according to the thief on the winning EU tournament team, the most important thing is sorting out your keybinds. And I totally agree.

Build wise, conquest lends itself towards being very tanky.

Before megaserver it was never defended, I think that was the premise they were working with.

I still do not have the Grenth trait. Not one single time have I seen the temple out of player control since the patch released.

They’ve had plenty of WvW friday shows. Hugh and Jessica are regulars.

You might consider axe instead of warhorn. The #4 skill hits quite hard and it pulls people in to melee range. With 2 swords, you’re already quite mobile and you can always swap the WH in for traveling.

Here is a guide to the PvE ranger:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Guide-PvE-Meta-Ranger/first#post3975802

For WvW obviously you need to focus more on staying alive.

I didn’t even really care about the skin, I just wanted to put some armor on my guardian. That didn’t work out so well though…

Tom Gore.4035:

Fluffball.8307:

Durz’s post was in response to me saying I liked Ice on the LB. My WvW roaming build is based around CC, and adding that much extra CC is a big boon to me. It really is a lot of chill. I wouldn’t want to roam with a LB using only Ice as my CC/defense, though.

What do you do when you run into a warrior with -98% reduction on chill duration?

That’s a question you’ll like to answer

Like I said, the SoI is purely added benefit. My build works without it. So to answer your question, I kill the warrior.

It’s kind of absurd to think chill is not a viable condition because you came up with a scenario where it isn’t very useful.

I opened up my Arah armor from the reward path on my main character, but choose a reward to be used on another character. Now I have soulbound heavy armor in my ranger’s inventory. Needless to say, that’s not very usefull to me.

shadowpass.4236:

whoooooo it worked

Ya but you still didn’t fix that damage :O :P

Both. Crazy powerful trait.

AEFA.9035:

Well lets see how our Asian gamers play. Old meta or new meta. Someone needs to set up the standards

The interesting thing is, and I brought this up more relevantly in a WvW thread, the meta in competitive play is whatever the kitten people are running. If WvW zergs weren’t hammer trains, let picture they were 20 grenade spammers or whatever you feel like.

If 4 million chinese gamers decide the PvP meta is warrior axe spike, that is the build you have to build against when you PUG.

AEFA.9035:

Fluffball.8307:

I’ma go on record as saying SotF never becomes PvP meta without further buffs. It’s in too weird of a line.

Ranger needs to evolve. All of you are stuck 6 deep into WS for EB? Random 10 seconds condi clear > On the go 2 condi clear. Outdated.

But that trait line provides toughness and damage, the two most important things in PvP.

runeblade.7514:

It is awful. You lose damage for chill that barely procs.

If you’re running full berserkers, which a lot of people aren’t (presumably you) you don’t need any more random damage. You can use some CC though. If you’re running full knights or something I can see why you’d need more damge. It’s situational.

I also find it hysterical that people are telling people who are using it live in WvW that it doesn’t work. You can make that argument in PvE, you can’t make that argument in competitive.