Guild Wars 2

- Superior Sigil of Battle on both weapon sets.
- Ten in Beastmastery for Mighty Swap.
- Some runes that do Mighty things.
- 15 in Nature Magic for Fortifying Bond.
- Jungle Stalker

You’ll have a mighty good time.

Condition wins this, hands down. Everybody here is going to tell you that. Especially since our class mechanic allows us to spec 30 into BM and get fairly meaningful direct damage (and more regen, to boot, if you trait for it.)

I run a Power ranger with a little bit of regen and a lot of evades with S/D and massive vigor uptime. It’s good. It gets results, but if I am playing against condition based Ranger brethren, I REALLY have to outplay them to score a win.

LB could use a cripple that isn’t on Barrage. That’s really what it needs most. Maybe tack it on to the auto-attack when at max range or even put it on Hunter’s Shot.

I agree with shortening the RF channel time — 4 1/2 seconds is a really long time. That’s more than half the cooldown of a traited Rapid Fire. Crazy.

I have used Longbow & Sword/Dagger for a long time now, and I love it. Longbow stealth gives you a big, cozy window to cast heals, utilities, or Rampage as One, then chuck a Crippling Talon at those mofos and go to town with Sword chain.

Generally, the survivability you get with both sets is excellent and you’ve got all ranges covered with them. You can be really pesky with LB by slotting Quick Draw and Malicious Training and grabbing Jungle Spider/Wolf pets. A ton of immob and a nice, long fear guarantees you score a Point Blank Shot and Hunter’s Shot, pushing your foe back and allowing you to shift positions on the battlefield. I have had many, many people party invite me in WvW to tell me how annoying the LB + Spider/Wolf combo is — it’s really the best thing you can do for yourself if you choose to use longbow.

EDIT: Don’t forget the brown bear mini.

Word on the street is that they’re adding a Longbow that looks like a giant arm and bicep and it fires frozen burritos.

I’d love to see bats, alpine stalkers, and griffons.

I am thinking bats could be like our little Mesmer pet. An auto attack that works like Winds of Chaos and an F2 that works like Magic Bullet. Sounds fun.

Bombsaway.7198:

LB should have an innate 1500 range.

This is something I can really get behind. I think it’d do so much for the Longbow, and that’s coming from someone who thinks LB is already pretty solid anyway.

Innate 1500 range, remove range bonus from Eagle Eye, give it gasp Fury on hit. (With on ICD, of course.)

It’s stupid to have permanent Fury uptime with the only investment being a single Master tier trait. That’d be poor design, no matter how you slice it.

I do think Eagle Eye could use a little fury or might love, though.

Gorwald.6170:

- change the KB of LB with a cripple or a root (like LB for warrior)

What in the name of Melandru are you talking about? No. I’ll keep my knockback on a 12 second cooldown, thank you very much. PBS is insanely powerful.

I would also hate to see Rapid Fire changed from a channel to a single shot burst skill, because the stealth tracking is pretty awesome and it has killed many, many Thieves. Maybe reduce the channel time by a second or up the damage a bit.

Longbow really isn’t as bad as people make it out to be, they just insist on using it with pets and builds that don’t give it the TLC it deserves. I say this:

Long Range Shot – Remove lowest damage range, change it to only two different damage ranges. Add Cripple to 1000+ range.

Rapid Fire – Reduce channel time by one second.

Hunter’s Shot – Increase damage to equal max range auto-attack.

Point Blank Shot – Increase range to match the rest of the weapon set, adjust knockbacks accordingly.

Barrage – Shave 6 seconds off of the cooldown, reduce the channel by a little bit.

I couldn’t really ask for more. Speaking from a WvW perspective here.

I use a mix of (mostly) knights and berserker gear. Respectable toughness combined with a ton of evasion and potentially permanent poison uptime means that I outlast most other builds that I come across. I absolutely do not recommend power/precision/condition gear with S/D, you’re going to get shredded, especially if you don’t have the hang of the sword’s auto-chain.

It’s okay to use Sword 3 and Dagger 4 to simply evade things, but nailing that poison is huge. Especially against Warriors, Eles, Guards, and some Thieves. Hornet Sting/Monarch Leap is used primarily as a disengage in dueling and gives you some breathing room to heal and let your mind process what’s going down. Just make sure you drop target before you do your leap.

You can’t always go toe-to-toe with classes, so just mashing sword 1 is going to get you killed more often than not, because those classes have big, bursty skills that we rangers hardly get access to. You have to dance around with it and the weapon set is complimented very well by either bow because you can maintain pressure after a Sting/Leap disengage.

Feel free to whisper me in game and I’ll guest over and try to explain things in greater detail.

Twenty deep in NM for this trait probably means you’re running a power sustain build, which means your crit chance absolutely does not sit at 60% normally. You also are going to have boon duration to boost this to (at least) four seconds, but likely more.

It also means you have Fortifying Bond, so all this fury goes to your pet. On top of already having Hilt Bash to increase pet damage, this is gonna be really nice for guys running x/x/30/20/x builds.

I understand some frustration with crap like Oakheart Salve and Predator’s Instinct getting buffed, but a lot of these are great.

Bark Skin is great for dungeons for those of us who don’t feel it necessary to speed clear everything with 20/25/0/25/0 Zerker builds. I think Moment of Clarity is bad anyway, but this buff is great for those rangers that use it. Longbow is a lot better than people give it credit for and this buff is fantastic. You’re also forgetting things like the buffs to Mighty Swap and Two-Handed Training, which will help a lot for power based bunker builds.

Yeah, we lose some on a minor adept trait and that really sucks, but don’t pretend like we don’t have Vigorous Renewal, Primal Reflexes, and Lightning Reflexes; Three things I feel like pretty much every ranger should be running anyway. I have so much vigor that I’ll hardly notice this nerf.

We have very little to complain about regarding todays patch.

I don’t think we need to worry about where our useful traits are; but rather what is going to be done about the hoard of unused, underperforming traits that currently plagues the class.

1.) Monarch’s Leap — As it stands, it’s used almost exclusively as a way to GTFO of sticky situations. I’d like this move to be buffed to give the user more incentive in actually attacking with it. I would say up the damage a tad and change the cripple to a condition that the weapon doesn’t already spam on auto attack. Torment or weakness, maybe.

2.) Dust Trap — Set a trap that damages and blinds foes when engaged. Make it scale well with power, pretty please?

Sword/Dagger is very versatile. For dueling (at least in WvW) I’d argue that it’s the best weapon set you can get for a power Ranger. The evades, cripples, and poisons are such great tools for making sure you maintain the life lead in a fight. The bleeds from Crippling Talon aren’t too shabby either.

I have used it in bunker specs as well, but you get a lot more mileage from splitting the set up or using torch over dagger.

What’s your current build?

I think this is the fairly standard “Full Zerk or GTFO” Ranger dungeon build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNBMhV6koiqKjswKIWLDELF7Z/cGHKReGlCVZ8zJzeA-j0xAYfBRiAIVAI5VEN2ibR0Y11YKXioapAiYMA-w

But if you don’t want to run that exactly, you should at least make sure you’re bringing along a Jungle Stalker, Spotter, and a traited Frost Spirit. That’s a lot of extra damage for your whole group.

I love that main hand axe is a throwing weapon, it makes it really unique. I just wish it didn’t have such an identity crisis. Give the auto bleeds or make Splitblade and Winter’s Bite actually do some direct damage.

You could look up any of Xsorus’ BM Bunker builds, because they are the most effective and efficient BM builds around.

If you just want a really, really strong pet without worrying about your survivability against… well, anything, try a might stacking build with 15 in NM for Fortifying Bond.

Something like this is silly, but a lot of fun — http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNBMhF6koiqg7rQxCWLEEtCUip4QJ6pI9q3pw/e6ifSbC-jECBYgCikIBiIAMBqIasVOFRjVbDT7aR1qYAyAwsAA-w

Your pets are murderous with a spec like that. It is tailored for the upcoming patch, as well.

I always thought that Master’s Bond should be changed to something like: “%10 of your total stats are given to your pet.”

Might be strong for an adept trait, though.

Going thirty deep into NM to get Nature’s Voice is really cutting you off from a lot of other important traits for a BM build; Traits like Pet’s Prowess for felines and birds or Malicious Training for wolves and spiders.

I don’t know who’s running around naked letting their pet kill enemies, anyone with half a brain isn’t going to die to a Ranger pet by itself. Your pet is still penultimate to you, so simply surviving while Fluffy does all the work isn’t a great game plan. You have to keep damage and pressure up as well and the build you linked doesn’t really do that. If your pet gets burned down, you’re a sitting duck.

That’s why you see so many BM builds centered around condition damage — It’s easy to stack enough condition damage to be a bother while maintaining a level of toughness/vitality/healing power to stay alive. Since condition damage is a really passive form of gameplay, it makes it easy to be slippery while damage is being done. You also benefit entirely from going down the WS tree to get Empathic Bond since you’re loading up on condition damage and toughness anyway. If you really don’t want Empathic Bond (it’s our most important trait, which is a real bummer because it slaughters build diversity,) you can make some really interesting builds that make Fluffy sting a lot.

Okay, wasn’t sure what the intent of the build was — I didn’t know if 30 in NM was for Spirits Unbound or Nature’s Voice.

Nature’s Voice + Guard is, unfortunately, not great group support — Those boons are being slung around like crazy anyway. You can grant your group more utility by dropping 10 in NM for 10 in BM for Vigorous Training, or just to up your own damage, which is the greatest boon anyone can bring to a group.

You’ve pretty much got all that you can for Ranger might stacking, so I’ll just throw a couple things out there to think about.

If you aren’t worried about your group, I would consider Runes of the Noble instead — They’ll boost your condition damage and your might duration by a boatload. So your other boons will lose a little duration, but you’re gonna be keeping that might for a lot longer. You have full Apothecary gear, you don’t really need that healing power from Altruism runes.

I don’t know what traits you’re running, but don’t forget that Concentration Training is important for making your Stalker’s might last. On a similar note, maybe dropping 10 from NM and slapping it into BM for reduced F2 cooldown would be a good idea. The combinations of the two traits makes the Stalker’s might permanent, basically (I think you don’t have it for a second because the cast time is absurd.)

Alternatively, take Rending Attacks. You have Fortifying Bond, your Stalker is hitting insanely hard because he’s going to have 25 might stacks all the time (AoE Might like Stalker F2 double up on might stacks for your pet.) Those bleeds that he’s stacking are going to hurt — especially if you’re willing to take the increased pet condi damage trait.

LB has definitely got some great utility with Hunter’s Shot and Point Blank Shot. Like others have pointed out, I feel like they weapon is a much more about skills 2-4 than anything else (concerning WvW.)

I don’t use GS (despite loving it) so I never use my stealth from Hunter’s Shot to land a swoop or a maul — it’s totally a positioning tool for me on my power build, which I pair with Sword/Dagger. So it doesn’t only allow me to avoid some direct damage, but it puts me in a good place to guarantee my Crippling Talon so that I may begin assaulting with Sword 1-chain and even more importantly, it provides fantastic cover to activate your heal or Rampage as One, as well as any utilities you may be running.

PBS is pretty self-explanatory. It’s an interrupt and it creates some space, if I connect with it, I often follow up with Hunter’s Shot immediately to give myself a few seconds to kitten things. Also really fun to use stealth and then PBS someone off of a cliff in WvW.

Rapid Fire is a mixed bag. Most Rangers know that it does less damage at max range than just auto attacking. The vulnerability is nice, though and it’s an incredible Thief killer in small skirmishes.

Barrage — Be safe… fire into crowds. Solid skill for the AoE cripple but use at your own risk.

Too much fun outside Mag spawn on BG BL last night. Shout outs to the DUO Thief and Ranger, you two were pesky.

Had a lot of fun on SoS BL tonight!

For the sake of build diversity, they have got to allow us to be able to deal with conditions without dumping 30 points into Wilderness Survival.

An improved Signet of Renewal would be a good start. It needs a shorter cooldown, even if it means not cleansing all conditions, or only cleansing limited conditions from allies.

To go along with Evasive Purity, I think it’d be fun to see more specialized condition removal in our traits. Something like:

Oakheart Salve — Changed to “Removes burning, bleeding, and torment when you use a heal skill.”

Wilderness Knowledge — “Decreases cooldown of Survival skills by 20%. Survival skills remove cripple and chill when used.”

This way we have multiple, synergistic traits that allow us to deal with these conditions without running all the way up the WS tree. Maybe change what traits these effects are attached to or what they cleanse exactly, but that’s what the balancing team is for.

I’d still like to see more buffs for power rangers (I promise it’s not just because I play one.) Greatsword could use a damage buff on the AA, bring it in line with sword, at least. For the love of Melandru, don’t remove the evade. Longbow has been shown some love, we’ll see how it feels after the next patch. I think a cripple on auto attack would be beautiful, even if it’s only at max range.

Make Hornet Sting/Monarch Leap more than just movement tools. The only reason I use these skills is for their mobility. I’d like to have to make a decision between using them for mobility and actually hitting with them for damage/utility. Up the damage or add a small torment/weakness. Anything.

Lots of things running through my head, but these stood out.

For leveling, double bow will work just fine.

I’d invest points into Beastmastery first and run Troll Unguent because pets tend to shred things at lower levels. If there’s a pet you like a lot in particular, pick up the Master’s Bond trait and don’t swap pets, it’ll make them pretty beefy. Just don’t jump in water, apparently Rangers forget about how much they love their companions when they take a quick dip.

I’d recommend a damage pet, by the way. Cat, Bird, Drake, maybe Canine. They’re good.

I’d like to see:

- Pet howls/roars/screeches (F2 skills) are now blast finishers.
- Damage boost on GS auto-attack chain. (The Maul boost is nice.)
- More active condition removal. Something like changing the ‘Wilderness Knowledge’ trait to remove one condition on Survival skill usage. Maybe do the same for shouts.
- Reduced channel time on Rapid Fire and Barrage. (-1 second on each?)
- Rework both Remorseless and Moment of Clarity grandmaster traits. Give’em similar functionality, but open them up for more weapon usage (especially Remorseless.)
- Condense Martial Mastery with the trait that adds GS/Spear damage boost. Add another trait to Nature Magic.
- Change Master’s Bond so that either the stacks are player-side or so that it’s just a flat % increase of the player’s stats. 5% or something — Not too strong, but hey, it’s an adept trait.
- Just fix all the shouts; They need a ton of work.

That’s what’s on my mind for now.

Someone say BUTT?

I have decided to start PvF’ing.