Guild Wars 2

The sword is currently doing what it was designed to do as a weapon and thats a) stick to your target with all the leaps and cripple and b) provide a ton of evades.

Could it be smoother? Sure.
But removing anything thats currently on it or swapping the leaps on #2 ( worst idea ) would result in the sword not being the sword anymore.

vincecontix.1264:

Rangers can be scary good in the hand of a good player. Yes not so great in zerg but none of the Medium armor prof really execl at zerg warfare but they are all good and skirmish and roaming.

Adventurer class professions good at roaming? Well I never ;-)

Its funny when people think I am a free bag and then they die. I love having people make a b-line for me in team fights since ranger has the second highest sustained melee evasion in the game.
I evade and my team kills everyone else because people are busy killing the “easy” target. Its even better when people expect you to lose easy and you drop them.

Good rangers are few and far but when you find someone who knows what they are doing you are in for one hell of a skirmish.

Edit: I play power ranger, no not the glassy stuff…they give us a bad name, and I have only lost badly vs pu mesmer.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Sigmoid.7082:

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Sigmoid.7082:

The best thing about the current sword is you can pick and choose how you want it to function . you can either glue yourself to your target and slow people down or be so evasive that people get really mad.

Honestly, it’s very easy to turn that around. If you want to glue yourself to a warrior using 100b, go ahead, but the leaps on the autoattack will screw you more times than they will help you.

You can cancel the auto chain with one of 3 evades to get out of frontal cone aoe skills. Its not that hard.
Also…I play with auto off. Makes the sword a whole lot more skilful. Both the 1.2 and 1.3 ate leaps that’s go 300 and 430 range respectively. You can slash, slight disenguage, leap back in, disengage a bit again and leap in again. Can even use pounce to create distance.
Used well sword is a beautiful weapon. I have yet yo be screwed over by sword auto to date.

I want to use my evades to evade when I have to, not to cancel skills that are broken.

Your stated problem was you being stuck auto attacking something and eating damage. That is something you would want to evade no?

Sword really isn’t that hard to learn and when you do its the one of if not the best weapon we have. Again it does what its designed to do and it does it well.

On my guard I always make sure to drop symbol and use we if they pin down → HB combo if my clenses are off cooldown. You will do enough return pressure between the symbol ticks, ww , and retaliation to force them to cancel the skill or eat a similar or larger amount of damage that they are doing.
Or save shelter for when it starts.

Be smart with your blinds and blocks and you can mitigate their damage like no tomorrow.
Besides that just practice the match up till you get a feel what you need to do or what you feel comfortable doing . you will prevail in the end :-)

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Sigmoid.7082:

The best thing about the current sword is you can pick and choose how you want it to function . you can either glue yourself to your target and slow people down or be so evasive that people get really mad.

Honestly, it’s very easy to turn that around. If you want to glue yourself to a warrior using 100b, go ahead, but the leaps on the autoattack will screw you more times than they will help you.

You can cancel the auto chain with one of 3 evades to get out of frontal cone aoe skills. Its not that hard.
Also…I play with auto off. Makes the sword a whole lot more skilful. Both the 1.2 and 1.3 ate leaps that’s go 300 and 430 range respectively. You can slash, slight disenguage, leap back in, disengage a bit again and leap in again. Can even use pounce to create distance.
Used well sword is a beautiful weapon. I have yet yo be screwed over by sword auto to date.

People think that because glass rangers are soft. I can kill them with my longbow before they can kill me with theirs.

For a condi ranger or a power ranger with decent stats thieves are not a problem. Hardest I have fought was an evasion theif. Still won but got lower than usual. Glass rangers can kill glass thieves if they play will. 3x long range shot or 2x followed by rapid fire and holding still ( it tracks better when you don’t move so they can’t break it by moving behind you ) and they die.

The best thing about the current sword is you can pick and choose how you want it to function . you can either glue yourself to your target and slow people down or be so evasive that people get really mad.
The in combat mobility it provides allows us to kite so well and when combined with GS allows us a high land speed and escapabiity of with LB allows even more kiting while still picking away. People don’t seem to like that rangers are extremely hard to catch using this weapon.

IMO the weapon does what its currently designed to do and has a nice skill cap.

Glass guard, warrior, ele, ranger and mesmer all can do similar things to a glass theif yet having their own mechanics and cooldowns to stay alive.
With a glass match up whoever has the initiative and first attack usually wins regardless of class but by no means does that mean there is no way to recover and win the fight after being opened on by a theif.

I have watched all of the above classes deal with glass thieves and its not impossible nor hard. Hell I even do it on ranger and guardian.

Also that’s how thieves work by design. Anet even said so in the ready up. They are supposed to dive in, drop damage and duck out. 1-3 solid hits on a zerker their and they die.

Maybe condition removal is supposes to be a weakness. Not every class should be good at all the things.

Imagi.4561:

Ezeriel.9574:

And just the other day, the zerg I was in, couldn’t catch a thief in gari, and after 10 minutes of chasing him around, we just gave up, because the thirty of us clearly didn’t have the skill to catch him….

I’m inclined to agree that your zerg was unskilled, if thirty people couldn’t catch a single thief in ten minutes.

A single ranger woukd have solved this issue.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Solori.6025:

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

I haven’t played this game for about 2 months, just came back to WvW and this is what I found:

I get spammed with conditions by pistol/dagger thieves, unable to hit them for the slightest number of damage. Uber trolling by anyone capable of facerolling the keyboard with the right equipment. Outhealing any damage I try to inflict.

• This is the point where you will tell me to get more vitality, more condition cleansing or even food. L2P, dodge the right skills.

I try to damage a hammer / x warrior. It gets healed up within seconds. (I’ve been fighting this bugger for minutes) Not because I can’t outplay him. But just because even when I would hit him while he’s afk, would take hours to get his health down to zero.

• And here you will probably tell me its all a matter of learning the key mechanics of the Warrior, and my build sucks because I can’t outdamage him. All L2P right? Poison him to decrease his healing effectiveness.

(fyi: I’m playing a Sword/Pistol thief since beta)
(tl:dr: OP might be correct)

That is a problem actually.

If you were playing S/D nothing would be able to touch you because of perma evades.

If you were playing D/P, nothing would be able to touch you because you would perma stealth.

But you decided to play sword/pistol..

I actually wonder how well you do, because if hammer wars give you issues I cant imagine how hard rangers are for you to fight.

The exact answer I would expect.

But wasn’t GW2: “play the way you want to play”? As I for one really like sword pistol.

And if warriors are so easy to kill, especially hammer wars. Wasn’t that the reason I gave that as a perfect example? I particulary put the outplayed blabla in my statement. Because that was NOT the problem. Its the fact that my damage can’t keep up with healing signet.

Now if I were only a little mainstream I would’ve picked sword/d or p/d or even warrior. But thats not the point being made here if you read the title of this thread.

I don’t understand how you have access to pistol whip and the strong sword auto and can’t out damage healing signet. The power coefficients on your skills are high!

I play ranger mostly and I have terrible damage coefficients but even without poison I can take a warrior down. Heck on my guardian which has similar damage coefficients I can do it so I don’t see why you are having such an issue with healing signet.

Any power the if can be bursted down in a matter of seconds and take sic’em if you fancy since watching a their stand visible in shadow refuge is gold. No stealth using power the if will be able to stay alive for a full 7s after being pressure for a a few attacks. Also they tend to panic and use all their cooldowns and initiative trying to gain stealth again.
Condi thieves you need to learn but once you do it becomes as easy as power.
On the build I run with or without sic’em all thieves are a joke.

Never stand still when they stealth and always swing aeound youself/place traps or aoes. Another good tip. Learn to count to 3 ;-)

Out of all classes we have the most tools to deal with them I believe.

@menzies
You seem to know the solutions you need to fight
A) a condition heavy build.
B) a tanky build with high health regen.

So if you know their weaknesses and how to counter play them why are they op?

IMO its one of the ways how they were designed and why they have the lowest health pool. But don’t say there aren’t any counters for stealth because there are several way to still kill a thief or mesmer when they are abusing it. Mesmer even have a harder time since their cooldowns are longer so there is still a period in the fight where they will be visible for large durations of time .

The one and only issue I have is that mesmers decoy can be used over revealed.

LordByron.8369:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Yeah, thieves are only OP at solo roaming in 1v1 situation. One small role (generally a useless one that contributes little to nothing to the server) in one aspect of the game.

The small role is just Half of WWW stuff.
A stealth thief/immortal war can:

Capture camps
Harass spawn points
Contest WPs
Kill or slow down the tail of a zerg
Kill casters or any player out of the zerg
Scout
Enter a keep with sieges without risk
Fight in the ruins

And much more.
That means a single player influences the game more than its supposed to.
Not that i expect anet to deal with something people complain of since release…

You just described what several classes can do roaming not just warrior and theif.

Not to sure if you had it in there but merging malicious and expertise training and also concentration and compassion training.
Would make more room for new traits.

Sevans.4619:

Sigmoid.7082:

Sevans.4619:

I’d like to see Strider’s Defense reworked to incorporate something like this. That trait is just silly right now.

I have been saying this the entire thread…
That trait is 110% useless in its current state. Something like what we are suggesting fits well with the traitbas well as the trait line.

Yeah, I can read. I’m only agreeing.

That was my lack of comprehension thought you were in about changing companions defence. Do apologise.

I’m just thinking how anet would because they don’t seem to have an open mind. If they changed the trait they would automatically assume that I’d its taken the person taking it would spec for as much evasion as possible to take full advantage of it.

We have acceptional melee evade uptime according to them so the boon duration and internal cooldown would reflect their vision in that.

Heck knowing how they think it would be changed to when you evade using a melee skill gain x,y or z since the thought process would be " they already have protection on dodge roll " and that well the pet may also gain the boon so let’s not have it triggering for too long. Or too often.

The idea is supurb but in execution of they implement it I can see it being lacking in some regard. Though..anything is better than it is now.

Sevans.4619:

I’d like to see Strider’s Defense reworked to incorporate something like this. That trait is just silly right now.

I have been saying this the entire thread…
That trait is 110% useless in its current state. Something like what we are suggesting fits well with the traitbas well as the trait line.

A 1s internal cooldown would be too strong unless it was for gaining might. There are builds that we can run that are almost constantly evading with perma vigour, skills on sword and lightning reflexes. Also GS auto attack.

Whatever the boon would be would have to be short in duration because of exactly how much melee evasion we can attain. Also protection won’t be a thing with evades as we have in on dodge as is and also GS auto attack would be huge. 33% less damage for the first two strikes and 1s evade on the last. To much.

Vigour would be reasonable at a 1s cooldown for 1s. Or 2s with kitten cooldown.
Retaliation for 3s would be alight but with a 8s cooldown would be reasonable.
3stacks of might for 5s with a 15s cooldown again would be reasonable. Or 1stack for 10s with a low cooldown to minimc rune capability and Might of the Protector.

If all pets attacked with a semi lunge like you do when you have been moa morphed by a mesmer this wouldn’t be an issue.

@Sevans
Slap on an internal cooldowns and there you have it.
Stick it on striders defence, give people to take this trait? Even better.

Having a trait have evades do something in the skirmishing line? Would be amazing. Doubt it will happen cause that would make sense and as a ranger…our trait placement is questionable….

Leave that trait. It functions well as it is.
Change Striders defence as that trait does nothing ATM.

Striders Defence – when you evade retaliate with a swift strike.
Attacks takes damage of coeffeicent 0.3 to 0.6. Cooldowns of 3 to 5s.
Or
Striders Defence – when you successfully evade an attack gain retaliation for Xs.
Internal cooldowns of Ys.

It is our support weapon, true, but with high cooldowns and mediocre buffs its still currently lacking. Now of the 4 skill had cooldowns like all the other offhands and even provided maybe a blind or if the 5 skill, with its current cooldown, granted 3 stacks of might instead of one it would fit in to way more places. I was on about roaming and in that regard its the bottom pick.

Less about warhorn and more ontopic about why we are bad.

As far as i am concerned the reason we are difficult, not bad, is:

• trait synergy -j ust look at other classes to see how well their traits and skill fit together. Guardian is a great example of this.
• investment – to make anything actually usable you must invest way to many points. Doesn’t leave room for more versatility. Longbow is the main culprit of this as well as traps.
• trait placement – the lines on where our traits should go are blurred. Some traits can fit in multiple lines where as others are just really out of place…
• usefulness of traits and splitting – some of out traits hold almost no practice use as well as a few traits should be condensed into one to make room for better and more synergetic traits, trait choices and over all build diversity.
• no clear role – currently the class is a mish mash of beast master, archer and survivalist. There is to much going on really to have room for other things. Anet has noe given us one as aprant high single target ranged damage, high sustained melee damage and evasion. I’m interested to see how they change things to fit with this new ethos.

Companions might is a great bonus as it allows your pet to gain more protection via dodge roll ( its gets uput 2.5s as well ) as well as other party granted boons like retaliation. I have finished off mesmers and thrives because of their cleaving multi hit skills. 16 ticks of retaliation isn’t anything to scoff at.
Also for those who might stack its ideal.

Against this build thieves are a joke. All venoms lose their effectiveness as they lose stacks on evades. All power thieves don’t have the damage mitigation that we have and lose out in attrition battles. Sic’em also makes it too easy.

I am now using sun spirit as offense or stone spirit as defense. Having 3s of protection evey 10s along with natures protection and dodge rolls means things dont hurt that much. Either that or a possible 6s of burning for 2.7kish damage is nice.

Rune wise I can see the benefit of travelers or even speed runes but I’m still not sure about the trade off of damage for an extra utility skill when we have so few good ones to choose from. Maybe if I wanted to be takier….and had note gold.

I take sic’em as it is for thieves but i have sometimes found myself using earth or sun spirit.

• Lightning Reflexes
• [ FREE SLOT]
• Signet of the Hunt

With the sunspirit, poison and bleeds i can get WITHOUT sharpened edges i can get around 1k damage a tick which isnt bad at all. More unavoidable damage.

Losing the parrot is huge though. It does around 1kdps and doesnt die like your pet since it has a built in evade attack. It also hits better due t the way i lunges.
Its all about the small hits adding up. It also lets you put o more pressure when you are stealthed. Great rune.

1.3k from auto, 1k from bird, 1.2k from pet, 1.2k from air, 1k from fire sigil and between 600~1k damage from conditions. Its pretty steady and hard to deal with damage wise.

Its less the might more the bird you want Also this build is supposed to be relatively cheap and those runes arent.

I used to run a build with them in but unless you are build for stacking might they wont offer near as much damage. The might takes a while to ramp up to the 11~20 stacks you need to see a huge different and by that time using other rune sets you should have killed the enemy.

Lotus.9746:

What do you feel about runes of Rage / Pack
or Traveler to free up 1 utility?

I tried pack runes and they were alright with the free warhorn #5 and all but they dont offer the extra damage privateers do with the bird. Travelers are ok but again you lose damage from the Tropical Bird to "Free UP " a utility slot. I actually use the active quite a lot in battle so it works for me.

But there is no PVE specific balancing. They look at the game and all 3 games modes as a single thing which means compromises because they are so reluctant to skill split / Anet has given themselves the task of balancing everything so it works in 3 seperate and different game modes.

Just an Update.
I have been testing the build dueling against different members of a guild today as well as some roaming and the builds i fought were:

• Hammer/GS warrior
• Axe/Shield// GS warrior
• Hambow Warrior
• Hammer/ GS Shout Guardian
• Hammer/GS Meditation Guardian
• Sword/Focus//GS Medi Guardian
• Dagger/Dagger//Staff Power Necro
• Scepter/ Focus Ele
• Staff Ele
• Sword/Sword//Staff Power Mesmer
• Condi Necro
• PU Power Mesmer
• Sword/Dagger Thief
• Dagger/Pistol Thief
• Condi Engi
• Power Engi

I only had real trouble with the PU Mesmer.

So the build is a little more proficient that i first thought. I would say pick it up and give it a go. Once you get used to the play style in general its very effective.

Meglobob.8620:

Well isn’t all the following better at range than Ranger?

Engineer using grenades.
Ele using staff.
Warrior using longbow/rifle.
Necro using staff/sceptre.

All them do more damage than Ranger and the weapons feel better to use, also you still have lots of spare traits, skills to put into other stuff.

Thief shortbow is a nice ranged weapon too.

Rangers are pretty rubbish at range and also rubbish in melee. Rangers are just largely for noobs who like having a large collect of useless pets.

Anet will never fix them. They have promised on 2 different occasions to ‘fix’ them and the balance team failed.

The ‘toolkit’ Anet give Rangers is a bad toolkit.

Ranger is the only class that can hit stuff from 1500 range and not miss and also hit from 1800 to 2000 range depending or terrain. If anyone says its 1500 they havent really played with a ranger long enough. No to other class can constantly annoy you with 3~5k hits from that range consistently.

The only real fix Anet need to do is reduce the heavy trait investment the weapon needs as well as make it so the damage isnt so weighted onto the auto attack. Its essentially a weapon with 1 dps skill and 4 utility skills :/

Im personally interested to see how Anet change this in the fture.

They really need to split skills between the game modes since having them cover all 3 makes for difficult balance.

Substance E.4852:

Sigmoid.7082:

Our warhorn is designed to be used with two traits. Outside that it serves no purpose and is overshadowed by every other offhand.

Warhorn is incredibly good for team utility in both pve and wvw. Hell it’s a vast majority of the team utility we even have.

I do agree that WH5 needs about a 5 second shorter cooldown though. Maybe drop the 1 might as it doesn’t make that big of a difference.

See this is where ranger falls short since 1 stack of might, swiftness and fury arent the best when other classes can provide the same thing without losing out on dps. Even if your team lacks fury, because one might stack is useless, you would be better off with a red moa as a swap and using offhand axe for better damage and the reflect.

Worst thing about it in WvW is when you have used its skills it leaves you with an essentially dead weapon for far to long where as in that time could have had 30s poison, 3.75s of evasion frames, 6bleeds,12s cripple, 5~15k worth of damage and interrupts, a set of reflects with varying effect or up to 20s of burning for a minimum of 9k damage depending on build.

tl;dr
The opportunity cost of using the warhorn in its current state is to great to thing about taking it over anything else.

Our warhorn is designed to be used with two traits. Outside that it serves no purpose and is overshadowed by every other offhand.

Its better against burst.
I currently use it with 0 Healing power over TU as its a nice burst heal and allows me to go back in without worry sooner. TU sometimes has you backing off as it ramps up your hp or you are in combat with it and you are essentially just negating the damage you are taking leaving you at the same hp you were at.
May be preference but they both are nice when you use them. Just dont think it should be written off as much as it is.

I don’t mean to be rude but candid..all the information you want can be found in either a sticky or the first 2 – 3 pages of the ranger subforum.

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

so yes alone Roaming troll ugent (just make sure you got enough condi removals first)
healing spring if in small groups (if you see tons of healing fields around already you can opt for troll ugent for some heavy evading/tankiness)

I would also include HaO in that list since it is a viable heal for solo roaming. It has its merits over TU so I wouldn’t count it out.
Either or both should gain status as a survival skill.

Prysin.8542:

shadowpass.4236:

I hate warhorn.

Worst ranger weapon since 1989 =D.

It doesn’t even do that much damage and its only use is for stacking something (or burst, but even axe is better for that).

The blast is on such a long cooldown that its not even worth taking over something else.

brilliant deduction there, shows that you have a lot of valuable insight and information to share with us. Any word on the torch too?

To expand on what shadow said the war horn is indeed a bad weapon. It has a few merits in the #4 skill combined with sharpened edges or companions might but not much else.

Its downsides are long cooldowns, sub par damage and subject to a lot of retaliation in a small space of time. The #5 skill would be better if it granted more than a single stack of might or even lowered its cool down a and buff duration. But alas.

On torch. Problem I have with it is you have two skill that essentially do the same thing. If one of those was changed to something else it would over all be a much more rounded weapon.

Edit: Also it doesn’t do anything unique or better than anything else. There are superior options for offhand and our uptime on the boons it grants is great as is.

Signet of the hunt is for you more so than the pet since you dont have 25% from runes or high uptime of swiftness. Makes roaming easier. In WvW speed is key.
Also if you know when to use the active its great.

The best thing about the build is it is very flexible trait choice wise to fit what suits you a little better.

@shadowpass
You understand the build as well as i do so you understand what i mean

Anyways I took Primal since im usually solo and when i am not everyone sees the bow and tries to focus me :/ dont know why…I may try using pets prowess and sharpened edges.

KevlarZero.6849:

Sigmoid.7082:

Just remember unless you get a full second or , for duration stacking skills, you can rapidly keep applying it so the fractions add up…condition duration is wasted.

I’m not sure this is true. The amount of bleed damage done with crossfire (3s bleed) is definitely increased with just 20% condi increase, at least when I tested it in HoM.

It would allow higher stacks and thus look like more damage but from my understanding each individual bleed stack will still only get three ticks.

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

~snip~

That does all add up but my points were the following :

• Nobody should let you auto attack them that much in a short space of time to gain that much might. You are always moving.
• Rangers and pets have low damage coefficients and even 10 stacks of might will only add a small amount of damage.
  *Sigil of air is every 3s. With the amount of movement you have to do as a ranger to stay alive and how defensively you must play sometimes you will always get the proc and the extra hit when you engage. Rangers will never stand toe-to-toe with someone for long. Hence the might will end up dropping off your pet from companions might, you wont stack as much with the sword auto or from the strength sigil.
• To take both companions might and pets prowess you miss out on defensive traits like primal reflexes.

I literally have a set with the runes and sigil you suggested and it is less effective at doing what needs to be done.

atheria.2837:

Sigmoid.7082:

We’ll if people ask I will type.

Of course we need to know how you play!

Anyone who goes from Condi damage to Power needs to know what to focus on and what to save and what to pop first.

I’d like a video – but I will take anything.

I will explain the play style since my computer isnt good enough to make videos

You will always initiate with the bow as using rapid fire to start will do one of two things:

• net you a nice amount of opening damage
• waste dodges and cooldowns trying to avoid it

Both of these things work in your favor as an opponent who cant dodge will take all of you following damage for the next 6 to 10s or force them to play defensively.

After that the next two skills you want to land are pointblank shot and hunter shot. point blank is to move your opponent and guarantee that hunters shot will hit granting you the stealth.
From here you have a few choices on what to do depending on your trait choice and how bow heavy you are. If you have taken quick draw or are playing defensively you will wait in stealth and command your pet to attack. If you are on the offense you will weapon switch. Doing so will grant you fury and swiftness and since your enemy has, hopefully, no dodges and you now have 70% crit chance they will eat a surprise auto attack chain, air and fire sigil as well as a few pet attacks. This will net you anywhere from 3 to 6k damage from yourself and more damage from your bird and your pet.

From then its open combat making sure to keep poison up so any heals done are reduced and use your evades and auto attacks to stay on your target and take little damage. You will have a lot of vigour and evades so you should be alright.

Now if you ever need space to breathe you will do hornets sting and leap away or hornets sting and at the apex of the retreat bow switch and pointblank, start rapid fire to get some damage in and then cut it short with hunters shot if they start coming back at you. Its best to, wait in stealth the full 3s for weapon switch and other skill cooldowns, then back to the sword evasion auto bit again.

Some tips

• When you use hornets sting you DONT have to leap back in right away it can be used as a nice 1 or 2s breather as the enemy has to come at you again.
  If you do want to leap back in be sure to use crippling throw before you do.
• In a team fight use the bow to lay down barrage on the combat area and pointblank to stop res’ or stomps
• Dont be afraid to use all your skills to back off and buy yourself time. Your pets and the tropical bird will continue to do nice damage while you wait.
• Ambient creatures are your friends with the bow as you can use them for hunters shot stealth.
• If you are using dual birds wait till the auto attack goes off then hit f2 right after. What this will do is cancel the recoil of the auto animation and launch the pets f2 right away. This will result in 4 very quick hits from the pet resulting in anywhere from 3 to 6k total damage. This can be followed by another switch and another bird f2 for another 2 to 3k.

If you have a particular situation you want me to explain how the build will handle feel free to ask.

@ Zenos
I am having trouble comprehending. Can you simplify?

Using the right pets the move scaling is amazing but if you don’t then its lack luster and there are much better options. Mighth stacking works best with a hybrid build my honest opinion :-)

See I did some math and pets don’t gain that much from power. Only way they do is companions might, might stacking on you, masters bond and points in bm. With all that any pet will have a bonus of near 1400 power at maximum. But their coefficients are as low as ours, 0.6 to 0.9, a so unless you go all in with it its odd.

Unless you double dip with condi pets then kitten gets real. I tested this out. Was sweet.

May just be me but I don’t see might stacking as extremely useful as we have terrible damage mods and skill coefficients which is why I went for as many extra hits as possible. Fire air bird and life leech food as up tonhuge amounts.
Better for you Cut as you are double dipping with a condi weapon so it balances :-)

The pets that apply the most pressure are birds. If you cancel their recoil after their auto attack with their f2 they will get all 4 hits in and apply blind or chill. Its up to a potential 6k damage and 10k if you swap to another and f2 again.

Like I said out damage isn’t burst. Its death by a million cuts. Since you have auto attacks for 1.2k+, air for 1.2k, fire for 1k, tropical bird for 1k and whatever you pet may be for another 1 to 2k. It’s all constant.
Keeping someone in melee range with the sword is easy since with the auto you natural stick to them and apply cripple.
Rapid fire on average of every hit crits will stack around 3 stacks of might and barrage, assuming someone standing in all 12 hits will only net you around another 5. Used together you will gain let’s say 8 stacks. That translates as less 160 damage extra on a crit on a heavy target. Long range kitten has a 1s repeat time so 80dps over the 3-400 air grants you. Also that is more pressure since not only more damage but more leading at one time. Makes people panic.

I say leave might stacking to other classes since we don’t have the damage coefficients, burst skill or stacking ability others have,

@ zenos
I tried something similar but with only the sigil you won’t get huge stacks of might on you or you pet. Maybe if you ran companions might then the pet would be OK but I did some math and their skill coefficients are as bad as ours so the might wpmt add a huge amount.

Best pets for might stacks are pets that have low power but still do OK damage or those with high spike skills, so that the spider and the cat/birds. Oh and river drake. But unless you lose 2 point from somewhere to get both companions might and pets prowess it won’t do a thing. Your cat will do the same damage with around 15 to 20 stacks of might as it would if you took pets prowess alone.
Not to mention using the sigil you lose air with can be upwards of 400dps if you always proc it.

Lastly the only way to might stack well, as rangers don’t have utilities that grant might like othets, is with mighty swap and both strength and battle.
But you sacrifice so much damage from air and fire to do so as well as 2 points to mighty swap your survivability drops.

I never said anything about posipn master. You don’t need it for 100+% poison uptime.

Tl;Dr
Might stacking on a ranger isn’t really worth it since you have to sac traits, sigils, runes and a pet to get any reasonable amount of stacks.

For me sword dagger is my main set and bow is for initiation and mid fight utility like stopping stomps or getting a res off and 3s stealth to wait for cooldowns and gain the initiative in battle.

The stealth also let’s you close in on ranges users.

Best thing is if I feel the need I can kite people with the long bow and slowly pick them down till I can run in with my blade and attack.

Not sure how this would work out in spvp though since you need the gear mix to get the right stats.