Guild Wars 2

Check out Hyjaxx’s build. 0/0/30/30/10.

Build is better grouped with others as guard can give perma group regen + swiftness in a small radius. You can still solo supply camps relatively easily.

Hyjaxx goes axe/torch and sword/dagger but Faux prefers the opposite. He made a post that mirrors my thinking on the subject.

Also, unlike hyjaxx I go with Undead runes (he uses altruism). There are other choices such a Forge. You have no need for dwayana runes in this build.

Main weakness of the build is autoattacks are weak. You need to be swapping weapons all the time.

Join up with 3 other people and take camps/sentries and kill dolyaks. No reason to play with just the 2 of you, though 2 should be able to take every camp.

Or like others have said, run with the zerg.

Many of the more serious WvW guilds frown upon rangers because they don’t bring enough to the table aside from water field. The pet mechanic is hinders the class and ranged attack is better done by an elementalist or necromancer. The ranger is similar to the thief and engineer in that respect, as they make good roaming/small group class (depending on the spec) but tend to fall off in larger encounters.

Leveling is quite fast in this game, so you can have different characters for different activities.

From TC’s perspective, hoping for a better matchup this week. Facing recurrent map hopping 60 man blobs is tedious is there is less room for smaller fights and interesting gameplay.

I don’t think one can really underestimate the willingness of people to tolerate subpar gameplay when they (a) win and (b) receive receive rewards from it.

OTOH, nobody want to spend their time providing token opposition so the blob can be entertained.

I guess this is are fundamental flaws with WvW. Why else would there be GvG?

I only partially agree. You are telling this player that the only play style is to stand at the back of a large zerg and fire your longbow. The amount of bags you get is not entirely relevant as it just means that you tag a lot of players with your barrage. On a similar note, at some point people don’t care about winning or PPT but just having fun.

You can run a condition build and grab camps. A rabid/trap build with some regen will solo camps faster than you. I solo them in apothecary gear with a 0-0-30-30-10 build and I am no great player, though I usually fight in groups.

Your build is also not welcome in organized guild groups who take on larger numbers as you are rally fodder.

However, the OP seems like a more inexperienced player, so overall your advice is sound. Bear in mind that there is no one build and set of equipment for a ranger that does everything. I would try your build if I was running with a zerg, but I prefer to play my guardian in that situation.

(edit: DeadlySynz I didn’t mean to sound elitest, but I am having a lot of fun with hyjaxx’s build running in small groups)

OP: It also my be worth it to try different classes. This way you can have more options.

I agree with the above poster to a certain extent. However, I don’t think the build is a good one for roaming or for organized guild play.

It is fine for running with a large zerg.

Like many things in the game, it all depends upon what you plan on doing.

I am in a guild in tier 3 that runs small groups of 20-30 to fight larger groups.

We run no rangers or engineers. There is a thief or 2 for scouting. Medium armor classes get hosed in the meta with respect to larger groups. On the other hand, they are good solo roamers (though so are elementalists and mesmers who don’t suffer the same fate, though they have to respec and likely change gear).

As far as gear goes, just pick up green masterwork gear every 6 levels. The exception would be the blue trinkets at lvl 55 (not sure).

GS and LB are power/prec/crit weapons, so pick up power/precision gear armor. Trinkets – depends on what you are doing. Get hardiness ones for WvW (toughness/vitality).

Try sword/warhorn for a while as well. Warhorn gives nice support and sword is a fun weapon (I recommend you disable autoattack on sword1.)

Once you hit the lvl where you gear gets 3 stats – try a condition build using sword/torch and axe/dagger or shortbow. Rabid or apothecary armor works well with a condition build.

I tried out the build, 1st with green apothecary gear and then slowly added the exotic gear.

• I am using settler trinkets with the weapons/armor apothecary.
• 6 runes of Undead since they are cheap though might try others at some point.
• Going sword/torch and axe/dagger

Build is fun and certainly different.

Pros:

1. Build is well thought out and synergizes with the traits.

2. You save a free utility slot since you don’t need Signet of Hunt. You don’t need the regeneration traits since you can cast guard all the time.

3. Fairly easy to escape due to permanent swiftness, lightning reflexes, high armor, regen, dodges, sword 2 and 3.

4. Regen is approx. 250 a tick which is pretty good.

5. Conditions are not a problem with empathic bond.

6. Element of surprise. Tough to focus on with all the dodges. I can barely figure out where I am going some time. People not used to ranger meleeing so catch them off guard.

Weaknesses:

1. Weak main hand weapons: Sword 1 and 2 and axe 1 are power attacks. You have low power, no precision. This is the biggest weakness of the build. This makes the build less than useful in organized guild fights of 10+ and rather weak in a zerg battle.

2. Radius of the shout seems rather small. It should be increased.

3. Kind of finicky with the guard/blast drake mechanics when under pressure. Pet F2 still seems slow compared to other abilities in the game.

4. Not much AE. Entangle, torch 5 and axe1, the latter which does very low damage.

5. Aside from the weapon swap sigils, not much else helps. On other characters you might have a stacking sigil and then replace it once you hit 25. Hyjaxx uses sigil of stamina, but if you are killing enemies, you’re already winning. I have 1 sigil of corruption and use the ultracheap smoldering sigil on the torch plus 2 sigils of geomancy.

Questions for hyjaxx:

1. What are your thoughts of using a shortbow instead of axe/dagger. Would the bleeds on the dagger outweigh the benefits of axe/dagger 2, 4 and 5? Sword would seem to be a more logical choice to drop, but I think I would miss the evades from the sword.

2. What are your thoughts about dropping the 10 in beastmaster line for 10 in marks to pick up some power, condition duration and keen edge?

3. How would the build work with celestial gear?

General comment: I am using the ground target auto cast feature from the options menu. Since entangle and torch 5 are cast around the ranger, they are improved by using this feature.

Overall a fun build and kudaos to hyjaxx for his effort.

Axe/torch and shortbow would work well in a trapper build for wvw. You could use karma to buy armor and trinkets (they cannot be made, on the other hand it is free! The weapons need to be bought from the wvw vendors).

This build woulds be great solo (you could take supply camps by yourself no problem), ok in small groups and weak in large ones.

There might be other builds for you. I would buy lvl 80 green gear with cheap sigils and cheap runes/orbs/crests and try it out to see if you like it before you spend your money/karma/badges on it.

There is no one build and no one set of year that excels in all aspects of the game (PvE, dungeons, solo, small group, organized guild group, server zerg) for a ranger. This is somewhat true for most of the classes but especially true for the ranger.

I am of similar age and play mainly WvW.

My advice:

1. Guardian. Not such a twitchy class. I am largely a clicker and can play it effectively. Guardians are always welcome just for their buffs.

2. Do some PvE to get skill points.

3. Start at level 10 or 14. Buy blue rings and accessories at lvl 10. Go buy masterwork armor at level 14. Fresh green armor and jewelry at 20. Get trinkets with toughness and vitality.

4. Use a staff and either a mace/shield or a hammer to start. Immobilize, knockbacks, stability and retaliation (stand your ground), staff empower work regardless of your level.

5. Group with others. Especially important as a guardian. You also get more loot when grouped.

6. You will likely be strongest when you get the new equipment due to scaling and then drop off until you get the new equipment. So be sure to WvW at lvl 14 and 20, do PvE if you want at 19.

7. If you really want to WvW join a WvW guild and listen on voicechat program they use.
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An alternative would be a ranger. You could fire a longbow in a zerg or skirmish a bit. Thieves will gun for an underlevelled ranger. Rangers generally offer little support.

There is no way rangers are getting 1500 range as a standard duration. If you want to sit back and fire arrows from 1500 yards away at melee, you have to trait for it. The game philosophy is melee>ranged, so get used to it. The devs no doubt witnessed the ranged shootouts in World of Warcraft’s Alterac Valley where melee got pulverized when they took 3 steps forward and came to the conclusion that this is a situation that leads to a ranged standoff resulting in unfun gameplay. The longbow is the a user friendly weapon that can do decent damage if you trait and gear for it – but from what I gather you sacrifice survivability. This is how it should be.

Nice effort here Hyjaxx. I haven’t played my ranger in months, but this group friendly build peaks my interest.

A few questions/concerns:

1. With the improved boon duration – is the reduced shout cooldown and the Nature’s Bounty regen increase better than nature’s protection and commanding voice/mighty swap. Mind you I can see you wanting swiftness 100% uptime.

2. I am wondering about the Runes of Altruism due to its 30 second cooldown. I can see it being better for a class with a lower cooldown heal (not thief but maybe mesmer). I suppose you could drop to a lower cooldown heal, but then you lose the condition removal and opportunity to blast finish with your pet/groupmates.

3. I would imagine autoattack on both weapons is very weak due to no power/precision. Sword 2 also has a cripple but no condition damage. I guess you need the sword for the evades as opposed to the shortbow, but the sword damage looks pretty mediocre. I can see why celestial gear might help this build in that respect. I guess you are trying to make the best out of a non ideal situation.

It seems like an interesting build to play as you have to micromanage pet with guard/swaps – though some complain that the constant casting of guard impedes the flow of the fights and makes it less enjoyable. I guess I should try it out with some masterwork gear before buying the equipment. Nobody seems to do Southsun any more, so I guess it is Apothecary armor and weapons and Settler’s trinkets.

Sandra Martino.3870:

Hi, i run full PVT armor, 4 pieces of ascended PVT jewelry and 2 pieces of ascended zerker jewelry. Coupled with zerker greatsword and PVT staff. This gives me a very sturdy tanking mix while still retaining great damage. Right now i got something like 22k hp, 3.1k armor 64% crit chance with max sigil stack + fury and about 55-60% crit damage.

2 pieces of beserker gear and 1 beserker weapon you have 64% crit and 60-65% crit damage – well sign me up!

You don’t have sigils at max all the time – you die sometimes unless you win every encounter which is either unlikely or boring and less applicable to roaming groups. You don’t have fury all the time. Only Save Yourselves gives it to you 25% of the time. I have 2 magi pieces of jewelry with jewels, a 5% crit sigil and maintenance oil and I get around 15-20% base crit.

I’m not trying to be confrontational but there are tradeoffs and the picture you paint is a bit too favorable. There are no free lunches.

Future large scale PvP games might not have it server based due to the problems faced by GW2.

They might have good (elves and dwarves) vs neutrals (humans) vs evil (orcs and goblins). This way people on different servers would fight together.

They might have fewer and therefore larger servers. Or there might be more matches with smaller numbers.

They will try and improve on GW2’s design.

The devs want people to try other games. My guild leader started playing BF3 last week. Maybe I should try it.

Matchup system is terrible. They should manually adjust things.

Bad idea. It goes against the design philosophy of being anti-grind and relatively easy accessibility.

I pretty much only play WvW and stand firmly against these changes. I also like to play different characters – this policy encourages one to play one character which is bad for the longevity of the game.

2500 hp can be 20% of a thief’s hp.

Solid advice here. One point I differ. I suggest that you buy masterwork gear on the trading post every 6 or so levels starting at level 14. You will be able to sell it back to the vendor for the same price that you paid for it.

I would try some WvW on your necro in a larger group. (Necros are poor solo roamers) Staff marks are useful even at lower levels as is Plague Form.

Guardians are one of the strongest WvW classes – if not the strongest. You literally can’t have too many of them. They also work well in small groups, sPvP and dungeons.

Whether you run an AH-shout build or a cleric’s build – guardians are seen on the front lines and are often the last to go down. Aside from heals they have access to blocks, invulnerability, stability, protection, regeneration, rejuvenation.

Somebody in this made the argument that necros have Death Shroud. Death Shroud lasts 3 seconds against any decent group, lose access to your main skills and can’t heal. When necros have to rely on Death Shroud to save themselves, they are often delaying their inevitable defeat.

The problem the OP might have faced is charging or simply facing a sufficiently superior enemy force(whether by numbers or skill). In that case the guardian can’t really frontline well as he will go down fast and can’t run away well. So if you are going PUG vs an organized group – you might not do so well – but that’s more a problem of your team/group/server.

TC-SoS-CD provides awful unfun gameplay for all sides.
I’m on TC and I find myself rooting for SoS and CD when I have been in WvW, which is minimal. I couldn’t get my daily done because nobody kills a sentry.

On the other hand, I RP more these days.

Thankfully this matchup is over. Horrible unfun gameplay.

TC, which normally has a spirited militia defending – gave up at times. Some probably joined our zerg which spent the nights in your BL with all 3 keeps held while your zerg held all 3 keeps in TCBL.

SOR doesn’t seem to run havoc groups. My view is that people in SOR who want smaller fights have largely deserted the scene or that the dynamics in tier 1 preclude such an approach. SOS is certainly organized, but then again so is the activity of installing part 143-K on an assembly line.

Kudos to SOS for focusing your efforts at holding your share of EB. Makes sense and does not encourage such boring gameplay.

Agreed.

I was thinking about buying extra character slots at some point but I shall keep my wallet shut until this serious bug is fixed.

As I log off, I just witnessed one SoS ranger trying to solo the TC starter camp in SoS BL. This is a dangerous business as it takes time and it is near our starting position. Take skill to pull something like that off.

We didn’t stop him. Instead a 30 person SoR zerg just steamrollers the poor guy.

I’m sure SoR people are fine citizens in RL, pillars of the community and fine humanitarians – but you can take your giant zergs and stale gameplay back to tier 1. It can be tough to find fun fights with you guys. You never send 5 guys to take a camp – always 20+.

I guess the huge numbers in tier 1 necessitate fast moving huge zergs – but I just can’t see the fun in it.

Oh FA, my dear FA – where aren’t thou atm? (I can’t beleive I just said that!)

I’m on TC and I agree 100%.

We had near perfect matchups with DB and FA.

Now we have 1 server than runs around in a giant blob of 90 with relative ease and another with barely any coverage.

Who really cares if one fights SoR, SoS or SoT? It’s not like we get to say, “Oh look at SoR, I can’t believe the way Tom Brady runs their offense!”. It’s just a bunch of nameless people no matter who one is fighting.

And nobody wants to play stressful defense for a week so the server with huge coverage gets to steamroll the opposition.

It wasn’t broken before. This is variety for the sake of variety.

1. Necros have significantly less hit points in down state compared to other classes.

2. We have no blink, teleport, stealth, invulnerability, etc. compared to other classes so it’s not like we can run away.

3. When you die the other side rallies.

4. Because of your significantly down state lower HP, it is far easier to rally. Some classes (ele, thieves, mesmer) actually have decent abilities that make it harder for enemy to kill you.

5. This state of affairs obviously gives the enemy an advantage, especially when you move forward and have to cast spells aside from the 1200 range staff spells 2-5. Staff 1, as well all know, is pretty useless.

5. Necros have a fear spell, which might have some use IF WE EVER GET TO THE POINT THAT WE CAN CAST IT!

Great game, great value for the money, but in the part of game where downed state and rallies play such a huge role (WvW) – it is kind of embarrassing that they have not fixed this bug 9 or 10 months after launch.

They shouldn’t move servers more than 1 tier, if any all. I prefer “none at all”.

Opponents are pretty much amorphous mob. People don’t play that differently on different server. Classes are the same, strategies are fairly similar. it’s not like in sports where one server runs a wide open offense while another exhibits a tight defensive game. This is a cosmetic change – variety for the sake of variety.

The numbers between servers however are different. And to a large degree – WvW is about numbers.

So instead of having TC, FA and DB in my bracket, we have SoS who moved up not 1 but 2 tiers. They are already outmanned on at least one of the BLs – and it is opening night. What do you think will happen later in the week. Nobody wants to play outmanned defense all week. If the 2 top servers focus on the weaker server for a while, the weaker server gets steamrollered.

I am on TC. Give me back DB. I don’t want to kill outmanned SoS players.

If you played MMO’s before, it shouldn’t matter which class you play aside from a mesmer maybe. Open world PvE is pretty easy compared to other MMOs, though fun on the ranger.

Dungeons are more complicated, though from what I hear they are easy compared to other MMOs aside from the Fractal one. (Never did one, as I did enough in EQ and WoW – got hooked on WvW)

End game at level 80 are dungeons and world v. world. I would dabble in world v. world a bit once you hit level 20/30 or so to see if you would like playing a ranger in WvW. You won’t have all the traits/utilities/equipment but you will have your core abilities and can see what others are doing.

One of the weak elements of WvW is problems finding balanced, fair, fun fights and you are making this problem substantially worse. This is because WvW has always been to to a certain extent a numbers game or about “coverage”.

This new system will result in even more blowouts. PUGs on the weaker servers will refuse to log in as nobody wants to be annihilated. Then the stronger guilds will stop logging in as they can’t have fun being constantly outnumbered, especially without the PUG support.

Do you guys actually WvW – and I’m not talking a solo thief. Do you ever face overwhelming odds?

Do you have a clue about human psychology?

The servers are largely faceless entities. While they differ somewhat, things change so fast from week to week that the continuity is not really there in terms of opponents. You are overestimating the benefit of variety and underestimating the willingness of people to handle blowouts. When a server is winning, more peeple log on. When they start getting blown out, they stop logging in.

I can’t see this working. It’s not a 1 hour tennis match with a different friend. It’s Mini-me playing basketabll against LeBron for a bloody week.

In WvW and PvP, necromancer is an attrition on class that doesn’t have the tools to facetank anything. No stability, blocks, vigour or stealth/blink/clones/etc.

The 3 most popular classes in WvW – guardians, thieves and elementalists have good condition removal.

Rangers, warriors and other classes with weaker condition removal can also eat lemongrass food and equip Melandru runes to cut condition duration by 65%.

I don’t recall my guardian ever being killed by a Necromancer in WvW.

Will I get a 2 second fear?

Will I get 2 seconds of damage?

SR trait: 50%
Pizza: 36%
Lyssa runes – 10%

I don’t have nightmare runes and don’t want to buy expensive +40% food.

mambastik.8735:

Samis.1750:

In my opinion, mace/shield synergizes best with cleric’s gear/trinkets since mace 1 and 2 heal (mace2 has 2 heals when traited).

Wouldn’t it be 3 heals? The Regen itself, the heal from symbols, and AH from applying Regen?

I don’t use an AH build with cleric’s gear. I find I have enough survivability without it (Sigil of Energy on at least 1 weapon). I take Battle Presence and Absolute Resolution and usually grab increased retaliation trait as well. YMMV.

In my opinion, mace/shield synergizes best with cleric’s gear/trinkets since mace 1 and 2 heal (mace2 has 2 heals when traited). Your damage will be low because of low crit. I think mace/shield is underrated because 2-5 are all AE effects but in my opinion you really need 1000+ healing to make it work. You won’t need AH for a mace/shield build with cleric’s. Go 20-30-20 with battle presence and absolute resolution (drop writ or persistence). Send me a tell if you want to discuss this further.

If you want to go with knight’s gear, go 0-5-30-30-5.
Forget the symbol traits. Take improved shouts and superior aria. Middle honor trait is improved 2h weapon or empowered might. You could use a hammer or a great sword along with staff.

One thing about thieves is that they get to pick their build to maximize their 1 on 1 skills. Other classes usually have skills for small group/zerg fights and it is impractical to retrait/change armor/weapons every time you run around the map. Some of us change utilities, but that is about it.

Thieves are really annoying 1 on 1 since they can disengage and reset the fight/flee. When I play my guardian, there is no point in fighting a thief since they can choose to flee at any time. So I don`t bother fighting them.

That said, thieves are one of the weaker classes in the zerg and are not exceptional in a 5 man fight as you need to be fighting and not hiding.

I can see thieves deterring new players from WvW. One is all excited play your ranger your new exotic new bow and then easily killed by a stealthed thief. A guildie of mine doesn`t like WvW, no doubt to some extent due to her being killed by thieves. At some point, the game will become less popular and a lot of the remaining players will be thieves since it is fun just to roam around. This would end up being the death knell for the game.

With the revealed debuff increased back to 3 seconds, I see a lot more thieves running around.

They need to add more objectives worth points. The 2 upper corners of the BL maps are empty of players.

Swiftness could use a WvW nerf as 2 mesmers and 2 guardians can keep 60 people moving non-stop.

Happening to people from Tarnished Coast in FABL as well.

I am saddened to hear that some of the guilds on KN are leaving. I find it difficult to believe that when guilds leave a server, they can really reach the promised land because the game is a pretty casual one. People get burned out easily and ties are far weaker than in older games such as Everquest of World of Warcraft. I have only been playing on TC since early January and my guild which once had a dozen people on out of many more on during weeknights now has only 2 or 3. Not sure where they are. Maybe people are enjoying the spring? I see some of the guilds that are leaving KN have already moved once and the game has only been out for 8 months.

Going to tier 1 with huge zergs and queues seems like a recipe for burnout. Going to any server runs the risk of not hitting the sweet spot. You could join a lower tier server and then find the fights/matchups too easy or too hard. Player turnover is pretty heavy so who know what things will be 4 months from now.

My view is to try and build up relationships with the people on your current server.

KN is a great opponent to fight in tier 2, and from what I have read, they have zero or the occasional minimal queue during North American play hours as opposed to the other 2 servers in their bracket.

Tier 1 is giant zergballs and long queues so you don’t want to go there.

I’m on TC, but if I wasn’t a roleplayer and wanted to play in one of the top 2 tiers during NA playtime, I would go to KN without hesitation (who likes queues?).

Dram Ironforge
Twin Chalice Collective
Tarnished Coast

This means you don’t get AH. 0/0/20/30/20 build. I play staff and mace/shield with over 1000 healing. From what I read here, group rejuvenation from Virtue of Resolve is approx. 200 a tick with my build. Personal health is not really an issue as I have 2 energy sigils and mainly power/toughness/healing with some vitality to get me to between 17-18k hp. Using crests and orbs at present until I figure things out.

Crit% is low – approx 12% on staff and 17% on mace with Sigil of Accuracy – mainly to take advantage of vigor on crits and +20% crit damage in valor. it has been as low as 4% at times. Thinking about dropping crit from build entirely.

I love the shield and don’t mind playing a support class, both for gameplay and RP reasons. Traits include larger symbols and symbols heal.

I use hammer on occasion. If I went with it more often I go with AH, add more crit and drop symbols. My build, though no doubt dull to many – fits my playstyle rather well.

I’m old with poor reflexes as well (and I am a to some extent a clicker – somebody who clicks skills instead of hotkeying them) . Rangers are relatively weak in zergs as pet contributes a significant amount of damage and dies very quickly in medium to large scale events. They also got somewhat nerfed with this patch. They are fun to play.

Engineers are rarely seen but got buffed today.

You seem to be leaning towards a staff elementalist. It look like the way to go in temrs of effectiveness. They always desired as they offer nice support and can remove defenders and siege from walls.

As we all now, pets die to AE in WvW since they can’t dodge, block, etc.

Pets should not be rally fodder.

I just had a garrison fight where players had trouble staying alive. Pets would never survived, but then again I did not see many pets as owner likely didn’t bother summoning another after the 1st died.

FYI, I was on my guardian at the time, and have not touched my ranger in a while, but I post in the interest of fairness.

My apologies if the devs have changed this since I last played.

I use a mace in wvw, but I’m a lazy old guy.

As Lala. said, mace has a few flaws. Reach is only 130 as opposed to 150 on sword. There is also a short cast 1/2 second cast time on base attack as opposed to none on sword

Mace works best with healing gear, larger symbols and symbols heals allies. Might not be an optimum set-up, but there is some synergy there. Mace symbol 2 with large symbols helps make conditions a minimal problem for you and helps others, as there is often a ranger, warrior or other class tossing a projectile through your symbols. Mace 2 also for some reason makes people wary of you – I guess they see the red mark and slow down a bit. Mace 2 and 3 are AE type abilities, so they aren’t too bad in WvW though ability 3 is pretty slow.

For me, using a shield is the fun part as you get to run into some enemies and pop shield5. I prefer mace over sword, but I might change at some point.

Absolutely not. Mace is already a relatively low damage weapon.

Your suggested changes would reduce the damage of the mace to next to nothing. The mace would then become worthless in most game modes (PvE, WvW) except as a secondary slotted defensive “niche” weapon after you run in with the “real” weapon or as a purely defensive weapon which goes against Arenanet’s design philosophy.

If you what you want is blocks, I suggest sword/focus.

For the record, I play a wvw support role and use a mace/shield and would drop it in 5 seconds if this change was implemented.

I like the idea of 10 in virtues but with a caveat. I guess a key question for you is, if you lose the signet cooldown and then keep the Signet heal or go with Shelter (which is nice with 2 blocks and a lower cooldown – my preferred choice without the signet trait), is your survivability satifactory? Might depend upon the type of fight. I have plenty of healing but low crit, so I don’t have the base numbere of dodges as you.

This allows you lower cooldowns if you grab 1 or more consecrations. 5 point trait is nice or you can get +25% retaliation which goes nice with your Greatsword symbol, SYG and you can even pick up Save Yourself.

No idea about Shield of the Avenger. Does it get clobbered by AE in WvW? You also already have WoR.

Not sure about the shout cooldown trait with only 1 shout. Why not grab 2-3 shouts and take the 30 point Pure of Voice instead of Battle Presence? With the AH trait, the shouts will heal yourself with each buff. I am uncertain how good Battle Presence is with 300 healing and without the 20 point virtue trait to go with it.

I am inclined to agree with you regarding Tome of Courage with only 300 healing. But don’t underestimate Renewed Focus as an emergency button.

Look for synergies and don’t spread yourself to thin. You can’t build for everything and you need to keep yourself alive as well.

There are two separate issues to respond to here. Zergs are bad because (1) they result in boring gameplay and (2) the game engine doesn’t deal with them that well.

A related issue is that it is most efficient for zergs to clump up due to boon stacking, easy reviving and the 5 person AE target limit. Open field battles are generally more fun since they people don’t clump as much so their is the more maneuvering and less lag.

If you showed your friend the open field battles, he might say, “that looks cool”. If you showed him a group clumping up or a huge zerg overruning a smaller one in seconds, he would likely ask, “Dude, why do you play this game?”

I would like to reduce the TTK for zergs but keep it intact for smaller groups. Wishful thinking, I know.

But bear in mind, I’m on a tier 2 server. Tier 8 server has different issues. The devs have a lot to balance, PvE, SPvP, WvW (roamers, small groups, zergs, different servers).

Personally, if somebody created a WvW game with equal number of players on each side and a more efficient game engine (less graphics – WoW graphics would be fine), one would ask the question if there is any point in playing WvW aside from the relationships you built up.

I’ve been following your guide in the Guardian section and even watched a video or 2. Good stuff! I leveled a ranger to 80 (5 pieces of exotic armor). Honestly, my guardian at level 50 in green gear seems more effective. I will be playing him more going forward.

Rangers have a few problems:

Pets in WvW are an example of bad game design, though i assume they will get fixed at some point. They can’t dodge/block/heal when in trouble, abilities are not truly instant, get clobbered by AOE – and when they die they are rally fodder for the enemy. Many rangers stick their pets on passive because and thus lose a great deal of damage.
This in my opinion is the number 1 problem with the ranger in wvw.

Ranger offers weak group benefits compared to the better classes and subpar damage due to the pet. Barrage seems to be the best group skill, but many prefer the shortbow, (which to me seems kind of dull as abilities don’t stand out).

As far as being creative, I don’t think the class is fertile ground for the creativity you have shown with your guardian design.

Don’t really want to complain to much as ArenaNet really did a great job. $60 and no sub fee for a fun experience. I would however wait until the March WvW patch.