Guild Wars 2

i didn’t get a single crystal/sliver either till i was rank 16 or 17. keep trying!

only from back or the side

I am rank 21 and I found 30~40 slivers with tons more crystal than that. The drop rate isn’t based on the chests, per se, but the rarity of the pvp item you are salvaging.

For instance, if you are salvaging rabbit weapons, makeshift will never drop crystals, but peacemaker weapons have a very high chance to do so.

Hope that helped.

Here are some of the tips I wish the tool tips included:

1. Bird call can be casted while moving

2. Even if you start casting the bird call out of range from the target, as long as you are close enough by the end of the cast, the spell will be casted perfectly.

3. Same for chilling axe.

4. There is no casting animation for sharpening edges. It can be cast ANY time. (even while casting other spells like bird call.)

5. Being up close with splitblade puts more stacks of bleed. Being up close with poison arrow makes the poison last longer.

6. Pets can be switched, and given command when you’re in a down state. When your teammates are trying to revive you, AOE fear with wolf is great.

7. Guardians have aegis that sometimes block your number 2 interrupt while you’re down. Try to get the aegis down first with auto attacks before interrupting.

8. Wolf’s aoe fear can also be used to stop the enemies from reviving allies.

9. Stone spirit has a 2 second cast time. The mud pool also requires the stone spirit to channel for 2 seconds before creating.

10. Already mentioned, but using your elite for the second time after summoning it will revive you, if you use it right before dying.

11. Crafting with Tourney token + crystal + medium armor tokens will give you the Leather Set with a chance of getting Rugged Set pieces. Token + sliver + armor token will give you Rugged with a chance of Mist Walker Set pieces

http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fMAQNBlOD7EpiML7qQLIQLEArCC2ekpkYyUYIjuCleynqUD;TsAAzCpo+y8l4L7XuvkftqYUy+DA

EDIT: copy and paste link into browser

This is the build I have worked and reworked since launch and it works the best for me.

This build focuses on three primary attributes. Toughness, precision, and condition damage. While the HP is may not all be that impressive, you hit 1860 toughness with this build, which will keep you alive long enough. The precision is required to proc the bleed conditions, and condition damage is self explanatory.

WEAPONS:

Short bow – bleed from the back and side. Evasive shot for extra survivability, crippling shot for slow, concussive shot for stun, poison shot for healing reduction. Every skill is essential.

Axe – Winter’s bite for extra slow+ cooldown increase, splitblade for instant bleed stacks.

Warhorn – Gives you mobility ,fury, and might. Bird is excellent for engaging battles (you can use sharpening stone while casting the bird call, which is an insta 5 bleed stack for you)

I usually start the battle with bird call + sharpening stone, get up close, and land a split blade, which can easily give you 10~16 stacks of bleed.

TRAITS:

Markmanship -

Keen edge: just for the extra dps

Skirmishing -

Sharpened edges: the butter and cheese of the build. Chance to bleed on crit strike.

Quick draw – some people may argue against this, but 20% less CD means you can keep poison on longer, evade more often, stun more often (crucial when preventing revive), etc.

Wilderness Survival -

All these traits are necessary to keep you very hard to kill. If you feel like you rarely meet or have trouble against condition mesmer/thief/necro/rangers, then empathic bond may be switched out for bark skin. I prefer empathic bond though.

Take Vigorous spirit for X2 spirit health. You’ll need this for sure.

Let’s talk pets:

PETS:

I have tried virtually all the pets and I find that the two stand out.

Wolf – 2k toughness, charge that knocks down enemy, AOE fear F2 skill. The absolute ideal pet.

Black Widow Spider – The F2 immobilization procs off of the spider’s attack only. It doesn’t daze, only immobilizes. It made the list because of its poison attacks, along with its placement of poison combo fields occasionally. Heal reduction is essential.

SLOT SKILLS:

Sharpening stone – self explanatory, quick and nice dps skill

Stone Spirit – useful in group fights. Hide if possible! Gives allies and yourself a chance to gain the Protection boon while attacking (almost always up). Also may be triggered to create a mud pool that immobilizes nearby enemy (very useful against thieves, warriors, etc.)

Protect me – 60 sec cooldown, pet absorbs all your damage. This does NOT include condition damage. If the pet is low, remember to switch pet before using this.

Some people use a combination of signet of stone + signet of beastmastery. However, this requires 30 points in markmanship which we cannot afford, and signet of stone has a cooldown of 120 seconds. Just not worth it.

Nature’s Renewal:

Again, controversial, but it is my favourite skill of all time. You summon the spirit which heals everyone around it for a decent amount (about 460 per second). You can trigger it again to revive all the allies (including yourself) nearby. You cannot trigger it when you are dead. However, it has a cast time so you may trigger it a few seconds before you die. The result is that you come back magically revived, and your enemies are ‘finishing off’ the ground where you used to be.

Again, try to put this out of Line of Sight if possible. It is very easy to do so on Waterfall or Henge. Neither of the other two elites give you a chance to face a thief w/ guild alone. This one does.

RUNES/SIGILS

I use Sigil of purification on the short bow for extra condition removal, with sigil of earth on axe (60% chance to bleed on crit) with sigil of energy (50% energy recovery when switching to this weapon) on warhorn. Sigil of earth, rage, energy are also some viable sigils on the short bow.

Rune of nightmare is hands down the best for you. Condition damage, duration, and most importantly, chance to fear the attacker. 1 sec sounds short, but trust me, that 1 sec fear will make your opponentkitten blood.

Superior rune of the undead may seem like a viable choice also. However…

The undead one gives you +50 toughness and +95 condition damage than nightmare. Nightmare gives +10% more condition duration (applies to chilling and poison too) and has a chance to fear the attacker.

Since 10% more duration is more damage than 95 condition damage (without rocket science) it’s a matter of weighing 50 toughness to fearing attacker. The choice is clear.

And that’s about it! Please leave any questions below.

interesting. I personally never tried GS because of how much I love the warhorn + axe.

bird + sharpening stone then Axe’s 2 good hit (sigil of earth) usually puts 15~17 stacks of bleed within a few seconds. Excellent for condition. I’ll try GS with power build tomorrow.

I used to use sigil of energy on short bow as well as the horn but i found that i dont need that extra roll. I tried sigil of earth on bow for more bleed but this time i had a difficult time against condition mesmers/thieves

So now I use sigil of purity at all times.

trap rangers have very poor survivability due to slot skills being traps rather than other survivabilities that non trap condition rangers can run like protect me or stone spirit.

against a decent thief it would be very messy.

we had no one that could provide stability for the team. We had a couple of rangers, a thief, a warrior, and i can’t even remember the fifth

and what does experience have to do with getting gibbed? they had a glass cannon warrior with four guardian supports (not pure support obviously they did damage too)

it didn’t. i just died instantly.

are you sure 25 is cap? because both me and my teammates saw 27 stacks

I propose that some methods added for other classes to remove boons as well apart from mesmer/necromancer. for instance perhaps buff superior sigil of nullification

(60% chance on crit to remove boon)

Sounds fancy, but it has a 10 s cooldown. That means, every 10 seconds, you might remove that regen that the guardian has which has 3 seconds left. Which is kind of silly seeing how they put up 3~4 boons on themselves every few seconds.

Just had a match against 4 guardians and 1 warrior. During the fight, the warrior popped fury + hundred blades and killed 2 of us instantly in a 5v5. Why did we not dodge it? Well he had 27 stacks of might.

Guardians are ridiculously overpowered. Their only weakness is that they lack the hard cc’s that warriors have. That is, they are easily kited. But…are they?

Firstly, why does one kite? Of course, to kill another without dying yourself. This simple idea is completely ruined when your main profession is a ranger and the other is a guardian. Retaliation kills me faster than I kill the guardian.

Also, why, as a guardian, would it be a weakness that he/she can be kited easily? The guardian only has to hold a point. Not move from the spot. Does he have the tools to do it? The knock backs. The heal. The toughness, the health, the boons. Check. Weakness? Can’t chase people around. Big deal.

To talk about the match more, the guardians and the warrior, just to demonstrate how we can’t kill them, sat in a neat pile in our group. We would pop all our skills, couldn’t kill one. If we down them, they’d just revive him/her with their million knock backs. The actual didn’t match didn’t go like that, of course. They’d just have one guardian per node, with the others roaming between the points.

Whether add limit to the number of people that are affected by the guardian buffs, or make them harder to stack. This pvp system does not work.

there are some strengths of the class too

for example, we’re extremely strong against blind because of fast attacks, and we can kite guardians all year round because we can use evasive shot even when immobilized

but again, we kill ourselves faster by attacking guardian. and sometimes kiting around isnt really an option…

First I’d like to state that yes I do have experience with ranger pvp. I have pvp’d as ranger since launch, and now with full Mist walker set I think I am getting the hang of it.

Let me also quickly add that right now condition ranger is really the only viable path in pvp, whether it’s trap or not.

Much of my frustration is that ranger pvp is a lot like rock paper scissors. That is, we can absolutely destroy some classes while against others, we do not stand a chance.

We can very easily beat warriors, some necros, elementalists and other rangers. We CANNOT beat a good thief/ condition mesmer/ tanky guardian. It’s just not possible.

The problem comes from the fact that rangers suffer greatly from conditions or boons like retaliation and confusion. We attack extremely fast, and that means extreme damage from confusion and enemy’s retaliation for us. There’s no real benefit from attacking fast either. The arrows are also weak in that they cannot hit any enemies that are stealthed. This makes the fight almost ridiculous if the thief puts down an aoe stealth, or just dealing with mesmers very difficult.

Another problem is that our arrows do not penetrate. Of course usually with condition damage you’re also given an option for a lot of toughness. My ranger has 1860 toughness without even runing for toughness. However, this is a big problem when facing mesmers because you’re basically expected to eat all the shatters with your face.

There are two weaknesses to Thief’s stealth. It is still vulnerable to aoe and that your conditions stay with you in stealth. The strength is that you cannot be targeted when in stealthed. As rangers we depend almost purely on our ability to target an enemy and do single-target dps. I cannot say the same for trap rangers, of course, but if you are not, thieves can very easily take control of the fight very easily. This is made worse by the fact that the guild of thieves cd is shorter than our nature’s spirit cd.

In conclusion, this rock of paper scissors match up of ranger makes it somewhat less enjoyable to play ranger. This could be intended of course, like how good necros can eat up guardians oh so easily (corrupt boon on stability, anyone?). However, that is three classes out of six that rangers cannot even hope to win against (without elite) and that is sad.

Elementalist is a very tricky class to play and was overpowered when used by pros not long ago. Though it was nerfed it is still very much viable.

Watch a player called phantaram play. Elementalist is generally considered underpowered right now in public games but when played right, it can still be very strong both in 1v1 situation and teamfights.

I think it’d be amazing if we could pvp on player made maps from the community but fat chance that’s ever gonna happen, huh?

i’d assume it’s because charr’s warmachines are widely known to be extremely powerful (their siege weapons are everywhere in their capital city) while asura’s technology focuses more on utility (devices that aid them, golem for heavy duty, etc)

can you imagine heart seeker strike spam from a thief way more geared than you are? No thank you to that!

if you see all of those things yeah I guess it could be overwhelming but it’s rare to see many of those in a single game

weapon guardian and minion necro are newb builds you won’t see outside mega low tier pvp so scratch that. Support ranger summons are distinctive enough that I don’t see how it would distract you from killing your target, the ranger, at all.

I agree that mesmers can be frustrating. Seeing 3 mesmers on the other team in a 5v5 tournament already invokes a sigh. Elementalist’s elemental is its ult, and it’s just one minion, big deal.

Engineer’s crates and turrets aren’t even targeted by your target button.

Honestly I don’t see what the problem is here. Apart from the mesmer, you can target or find any of those classes very easily and very often the builds that focus on getting as much crap as possible usually lead to very weak gameplay (with the exception of spirit support ranger and mesmer)

Unless you have some kind of OCD that needs your screen neat and tidy with only the players present, I personally don’t see what the issue is.

I agree. It is very boring and this is coming from the gw2 pvp fanatic. But hey, it’s been out for a month. Remember WoW when its pvp first came out? Give it more time and I’m sure more interesting maps will come along.

also, not letting friends queue together is just a cheap and lazy way of dealing with ‘pub stomping.’ It’s rather disappointing because I expected more from Arenanet. Not only is it very easy to bypass (hence almost completely ineffective against those who really do intend to ‘pubstomp.’) it ruins the pvp experience for many people. Really, what fun is there in smashing things without your friends there with you?

Matchmaking system

- There is sometimes such huge gap in skill between players that it can be frustrating for the newcomers

- ANet argues that the friends queueing is restricted because they don’t want the premade teams pub-stomping’ by joining games together. This becomes much less of an issue with the match making system as demonstrated by the popular game League of Legends. (in LoL, premade teams are matched against higher rated players, to account for the advantage of having played together before and/or having better communication)

- The rewards can be given according to the rating. Of course some people would be enraged at the idea. They would argue that it isn’t fair how some very good players would have access to some of the armor pieces that look better.

But my argument is this. If they put in the time and effort to master the game beyond others, why should they not be rewarded more than others for it?

Also, I could make a similar argument for the reward system as it is now. The pvp system in GW2 is by far the grindiest I have ever seen. It is ridiculous just how much glory one must farm to get access to better looking gear. I pvp a great amount and I am still rank 16.

From rank 10 to 20 it takes 4000 glory to rank up once. 20 to 30 is 7500 per rank, 30 to 40 is 15000 per rank. I almost feel bad for casual gamers because it won’t take them just a couple of months to reach rank 30, even.

As of now the PVP rewards players who commit to grinding the arena rather than master the game itself. Sure, people can get some cool tournament exclusive armor pieces too by being good at the game, but that itself is grindy as well, while the majority of armor sets being part of the ranking sets.

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/665/flamelegionheavyarmorgzv.jpg

http://i50.tinypic.com/10pd98g.png

do those look bad to you? those are just some pics i got when i specifically searched for flame legion set.

of course your tastes may be different from mine but you really should look at more armors, both pve and pvp

not sure how 10% extra on crafting crit proc is not enough of a motivation to win wvw. i also noticed you only mentioned wvw to explain your stance on pvp. your arguments are one dimensional. also, you mentioned you didn’t enjoy wvw castle sieges knowing that it’ll happen again the day after? what do you expect then, to be once a month event? can you imagine how much of a zerg fest that would be? I agree with you that organized pve raids can be boring as 5 man dungeon is as big as it gets and world bosses are mechanically too simple to bring forth any sort of challenges. Also to argue that devs need to look at other pvp’s like alterac valley because ‘gw sucks right now’ is like saying they’re stupid for not agreeing with you. I personally never enjoyed alterac valley because it was just a zerg fest, the two teams usually never even fighting each other. It was always about which team can cap two towers first then kill the boss first. You could completely avoid pvp and still succeed in the battleground. Again, throughout your arguments you had the one dimensional ‘if you don’t agree with me you’re wrong’ sort of attitude that makes it very hard to take you seriously.

there are plenty of swashbuckler styles. i don’t know if we’re even playing the same game

as an extension to the last post, also casting the pet’s skill multiple times (to counter the ‘bug’ mentioned above, spamming the skill seems to sometimes be helpful…) sometimes causes the spell to not go off even if I’m standing still

I’m not sure if this is a ‘bug’ per se but this is extremely frustrating in pvp and I think it needs a rework.

Any kind of pet skill that the pet must channel at a target like Birds’ screams of wolf’s howl or pig’s forage are hardly casted when required. Even the slightest move by player (specifically, any movement that require movement from the pet to follow me) will interrupt the pet’s F2 skill, making it almost impossible to use in pvp unless I am standing still on top of the pet / making tiny circles around the pet. Thank you arenanet for your wonderful game!