I use Sword-Axe myself.
Its a strong weapon combo in the right hands. I can consistently do 4-7k bursts with that weapon set (not counting sigils) between Path of Scars, Hornet Sting, and Monarch’s Leap.
The best part is the 2nhits from the axe will occur as soon as you hit with the leap.
I used to do the same but now I do it with crippling throw.
We’ll if people ask I will type.
Traits
There are several good combinations you can use so I will explain all the traits that can fit in the build.
- Skirmishing
( Sharpened Edges ) – The choice with control pets. Adds more unavoidable damage to the build.
( Pets Prowess ) – Used with DPS pets for more DPS.
( Primal Reflexes ) – Allows potential 40% vigour uptime for more dodges. Useful trait indeed.
( Quick Draw ) – Only master level trait and its use is dependent on your own play style with the build. If you find yourself using the bow more then pick this up. It also allows two stealth per bow swap. Useful for relieving pressure on yourself or repositioning.
- Wilderness Survival
( Vigorous Renewal ) – More vigour more dodges more protection and evades.
( Wilderness Knowledge ) – Useful as you will be using either one or two survival skills. More lightning reflex means more vigour and more evades.
( Shared Anguish ) – Extra stun break but the 90s cool down is off putting. Never the less it may be useful for you to take depending on matchups and how you play.
( Offhand Training ) – Essential as this allows beyond 100% poison uptime which is EXRREMELY powerful. Also more evades and longer range cripple.
( Martial Mastery ) – Half second evade on 6.5s cool down, more time leaping away if you ever need to buy more time for a heal, more poison uptime and evades and more access to the swords hardest hitting skill.
( Empathetic Bond ) – Pick this over martial mastery if you feel you need the extra condition removal.
( Bark Skin ) – This trait can be wonderous at times and may be useful in the right situation. Combined with high protection uptime when it’s active you will be a very hard mark to finish off allowing you to heal back up.
- Nature Magic
( Nature’s Protection ) – Good for negating burst damage and over the course of the fight can provide 17% protection uptime on its own.
( Strength of Spirit ) – This is an extra 70 to 100 power which is a great pick.
( Evasive Purity ) – Good pick so you can make sure your heals always heal the Max. Also makes room for other, more deadly conditions to be cleared.
Would like to thank shadowpass for a few tips on runes and bow use.
Besides that I’m happy to answer and questions on how the build plays or combos that I use. Hope other people can enjoy the play style and build I am having fun with.
The build is by no means new but is very effective
( Wrote this on my tablet in work so I apologise for spelling )
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
- Armour and Trinkets
Head, Leg, Chest – Berserker’s
Shoulder, Glove, Boot – Knight’s
Precise Knights amulet
Cavalier rings
Berserker’s earrings
Solider, Cavalier, Knight’s, Berserker’s back piece depending on preference.
- Rune
( Rune of the Ranger ) – Precision and Ferocity are nice here and the 7% damage as long as your pets up its huge as we lack several useful damage modifiers as it is.
( Rune of the Privateer ) – More might and the all wonderful tropical bird. This thing hits for around 1k per attack and its attack is a lunge so it hits very well. Combined with all the soft cc and immobilise it adda chunks of damage.
- Utility Skills
( Lightning Reflexes ) – Removes immobilise and grants vigour while evading and doing a descent amount of damage. Also a stun breaker which is nice.
( Signet of the Hunt ) – In roaming mobility is very important and the active when use well allows great burst.
These two are always used. The third is up to you. I have used stone spirit, signet of the wild, muddy terrain, quickening zephyr , signet of renewal , but usually sic’em as thieves are rampant and this usually causes their death.
- Heals and Elite Skills
Pick which ever you feel you like the best and fit your play style. I have found all 3 useful but I now use heal as one as it allows me to stay mobile and is a burst heal. I’m to forgetful to cast TU preemptively
Pets
There are a few pet setups you can run with this but there are two I found the most useful. The first is either the raven or then owl with the second pet being the snow leopard. This gives us access to either a lot of chill or chill and blind for stomps. These pets also have high DPS but need looking after more. Double bird can provide a nice 6 to 10k spike.
The second set is the jungle spider and the wolf. This pair is less bursty but the control they offer is excellent. The spider not only can stack 15s of poison on its own but also can immobilise a target for up to 6s. This will more often than not force a condi clense and waste cooldowns. Second reason for using this pet is its attack is fairly strong and is ranged. It will hit for 700-1000 damage constantly and it harder to avoid. Pet two the wolf for obvious reasons.
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
Hi guys, i used to play a variety of condi builds but I found them unsatisfying so decided to try a power ranger build. After quite a bit of trial and error with gear choices I have settled on one that has brought me a lot of success in wvw and I thought I would share it.
The build, trait and pet choices
The build is 0/4/6/4/0
Condition removal heavy varient is 0/2/6/6/0 but played well the above is better. More damage and evasion.
Weapon and Gear Choice
All weapons are berserker’s.
- Staple Weapons
( Sword ) – This is one of the staple weapons of the build. A lot of evades, decent damage and VERY high mobility. Has the amazing ability to stick to a target. With this weapon alone you will achieve perma cripple which allows better kiting and your pet will hit far more. Be sure to turn off the auto attack.
( Longbow ) – The second staple weapon. Its control and stealth ailites make it a great paring with sword for buying more time or continuing pressure when your enemy backs off. You should always start combat with this weapon as using rapid fire will either do a large chunk of damage, waste dodges or cooldowns. Also using pointblank shot followed by hunters shot can set you up for several options.
- Options
( Dagger ) – My prefered choice as this allows the powerful over 100% poison uptime making clenses useless against the heal reduction. Also a 1.25s evade on an 8s cool down? Yes please. Crippling throw also hits hard and stacks three bleeds for again more unavoidable damage. With that, sharpened edges and poison you can get 600 damage a sec ticks alongside your power damage.
( Axe ) – This can be great as path of scars not only hits hard but can hit targets up to three times. Happens if the target is near the apex of the axes flight. Whirling defence is nice for reflecting things and the retaliation. Reflecting a binding blade , unload, rapid fire its great. Especially condi theives surprise shot as they will hit themselves with it and not break stealth so will hit themselves with it between 2 to 3 times.
- Sigils
Air and Fire on both weapon sets. Rangers don’t have the damage boosts or decent coefficients to make use of 250 power from bloodlust. An extra 1.3k every 3s and 1k every 5s is better damage.
(edited by 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.
May be better with the jungle stalker rather than the lynx since with mighty swap and its roar you will give it 13 stacks and yourself 8. The might on it would ramp up faster than the lynx so even though the lynx would have those 4 extra bleeds the stalker would do more overall damage. Can even pree cast it to give yourself a head start in battle.
Oh a tip for using mighty swap. Show your pet and have the stalker as the main pet. When you enter combat it spawning counts as a swap, use its roar and swap again and you will have the spider out and 11 stacks of might on yourself.
From loud whistle and mighty swap alone you will maintain an easy 6 to 9 stacks and more for every time you swap weapons, get hit and the stalker roar.
Edit: I understand the need to keep the condi duration but at only 20% I don’t think it will give you more that one extra tick on any of your bleeds or burns since their base duration isn’t huge. The extra 350 condi duration and potential extra bleeds from cats or vigour on swap may prove more useful in the long run.
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
@ fluff
I will pm you and explain what I mean :-)
@Troll
Is this spvp or wvw and what sort of play style do you have?
Again? Anyone have a list of reflect able projectiles since it would be useful to anyone who wants to use offhand axe since popping then cancelling whirling defense can be good
@ Fluffs with slightly better gear optimisation you would have better armour, same critical damage, more power and only slightly less critical chance.
Solis build though as a power ranger and may give the traits a try with my gear set up.
Edit, don’t happen to know a list of deflectable things do you?
I see a lot of people saying the strength of a ranger should be range and kiting. While having extremely poor melee damage. Just want to say that ranger=/=archer. we may be the profession with the best archery but there is more to ranging that being proficent with bows.
Rangers strength should be survival and lock down/ environment control
Weakness should be control abilities and soft cc
Kryptonit should be lack of stability and hard cc
Somehow because of this strong, weakness, outright death thing we have been asked as players to come up with…anyone else feel abet will balance things to have more of a rock paper scissors feel so that in any bit of content as well as PvP all classes will be needed somewhere.
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
When this is done please update the class overview page since some are misleading with the current state of balance in the game. Gives new players faulse hopes and causes frustration when class picking for them.
Guards need soft cc
I don’t see why more people don’t run sw/d/lb. Its the combo I and a few others roll with and it is beautiful! Evades, stick to your target and if they run of you need a break lb for pbs/rf combo or pbs/his for stealth and space making then either barrage or rf.
I have had people chase me thinking I was an easy kill and then they stand in my barrage as I melee them and wonder why they drop so fast…
If only we were slightly better at zerging instead of ranging then it would be nice but range gonna range
- Swap #4 and #5 on longbow, change barrage to the skill eir has that actually launches a slew of arrows, give each a small aoe ring like grenades have so people can avoid it, slap on damage coeff of about 1.5 and give it a 15s cool down.
- Increase width of piercing arrows linear area.
This would make me very happy.
Not sure if complaint about long range shot is legit…
Ranger is the King of Autoattack in GW2, is our best weapon “skill”….
Its not hard to avoid it and close in for anyone which is what i was getting at. its just crap that all our damage is loaded onto our #1 skills. no idea what anet is doing with out skills but as it is we have 7 utility skills and one attack skill.
Bad thing is cant even expect a change since it takes anet forever to do anything and their vision for the class is steady damage which is #1 spam in their eyes.
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
Not sure if complaint about long range shot is legit…
Being knocked off a cliff and using lightning reflexes so put myself on a ledge. when they follow me down use point blank to push them down the rest of the way and win fight.
Either that or thieves who dont know about sic’em…seem to be so many..so so many..
Sword is great and i love it but its not perfect and i feel these changes would make it better.
- sword #1 Should be leap finisher (20%)
- sword #2 The retreat should activate faster since the wind up is to long and be a full 600 range and be a leap. Also there should be a timer similar to larcenous strike so you know how long you have to use it.
- sword#3 needs better tracking similar to how they upgraded flanking strike/traited stalkers strike
roaming and in small groups ranger is great in wvw and thats from myself as a power build.
Blood lust and;
Air for PvP
Fire for WvW
If you crit enough then in pvp both fire and air will add more damage than the 250 power from bloodlust
Have you considered changing companions might to sharpened edges as your pets will get 17s of might every time you gain might and your stalker will always be sitting at 25 stacks pretty much after a few swaps, attacks and its roar so its bleeds will do nice damage and with sharpened edges you could do a lot of extra damage opposed to more might on your pet that will be there anyways
You can go another Bm conditank roaming build. It’s incredibly boring and durable, yet effective 1v1.
Just don’t die of boredom.
This. This is what I found so I went on a mission to find a power build that is just as if not more effective and less passive. Also I find that some builds have so much condition removal I end up doing little to no damage even with all the condi covers which sucks.
@ little
I have played all manner of guard, theif and mesmer and I wouldn’t say I’m bad either I was just questioning how you deal with certain situations because when I play glass longbow they are my downfalls.
I in no way have anything against lb I was just picking your brain for my own answers to where I am falling short with using it as a main weapon. I know veryr well its advantages and how if you are smart it wrecks people.
Tl;Dr I feel there is something from your play style I can learn from hence all the questions and situational roleplay.
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
@ shadowpass
My build is like the inverse of yours then. I rapid in and then stealth so i can get first hit and then stick to target with evades and auto attacks then drop my pet burst .
I can tell you use it as a primary via the QuickDraw and less vigour uptime than myself.
The build I use is very underrated and people have complimented me on it. I ran Sw/D/A but when I changed axe to longbow everything fell into place and my play became much smoother. I use the tricks you use to kite to stay in range haha. If a warrior runs I try and use my escape combo to catch them since it out ranges theirs just about.
I would like to dual and see you dual others as by my calculations you would die in under 5seconds of less as long as someone manages to get within range.
Also how do you yourself deal with cripple or chill since it reduces the range on swoop to 363 range
@Littlefeathet
In solo roam how do you deal with people who gap close, evade, stealth? Because with that armour I can only see you being killed by anything that gets close and breathes on you.
Do you rely on the range to pew pew people down before they get to you? Since I can see from my math you will hit 3 to 5k auto attacks depending on your targets armour.
In pve full zerk or mix in knights/soldiers when you are learning new stuff for training wheels.
In wvw I run a weird set up of knights, zerk, cavalier, and precision knights that results in
58% crit, 78% with fury
2700+ armour
2.1k power
18k HP
205% crit damage.
Also its better to have air sigil instead of bloodlust since our skills have such low coefficients that one air proc is more damage than the 250 power will provide and fire breaks about even but is better if you hit more than one target.
I personally find pets fantastic. The only down point is that some pets are vastly better than others and their are to many carbon copies of pets and skills.
I want to see bear like diversity but across all pets. As in even though they are all urcine class pets their f2 skills arent just copies of each other. One is a field, one clears condi, 2 condi roars and one with an attack.
Bettwrt than howl how howl, venom venom venom, leap leap roar with a stupid long cast time, slash slash slash, breath breath breath breath 2 of which usually always miss, or RNG hero RNG hero RNG hero, or the angry birds.
Also, Sig, I see you are using the Longbow without the “signature” LB traits from Marksmanship (increased range/damage, increased projectile speed). Do you find it still works just as well? Do you focus less on LB and more on S/D instead?
I don’t know how people can play Longbow without Eagle Eye and Read the Wind. It’s such a huge difference. If you want to primarily use the longbow, make sure your build includes these traits.
Longbow isn’t the primary weapon. I have martial mastery and offhand training. The longbow is for:
- Initiation – either they eat the up to 9k+ rapid fire or they use both their dodges giving me free reign to use my burst combo.
- Chasing – when people either try to disengage or run it allows me to continue the pressure with 2 to 4k hits depending on aire and fire procs. If they strafe to avoid the arrows they lose distance and I can close in with my sticky sword.
- Stealth tracking – mesmers and thieves don’t enjoy this and if you are smart and watch where the arrows go you can regain target, switch weapons and again sticky sword people. Also stops d/p theives and their black powers heart seeker with point blank. It forces them to either waste another 9 initiative trying the combo or to engage you again.
- Escape – pointblank followed by hunters, swap, hornet sting, lightning reflexes and leap will create enough of a gap between you and your target you will drop combat unless they chase you. At which point you will be able to evade and do damage for the next around 20s without taking to many hits.
- Barrage – area denial for one, people instinctively dodge red circles so wasteing dodges for two, stealth and using this away from you people may assume you are in it and charge in eating for you to pop up ( seen it happen ) , and lastly if you can force someone yo fight you inside of it as you switch to melee right after its just extra 500 to 1k ticks in my favour.
- Interrupts – stop a res, stop a stomp, stop gap closers like ride the lightning and rush so you have the initiative entering melee combat…oh and cliffs.
- Team fight bullyseye – using a longbow paints a huge target above your head. Draw agro for team mates , weapon swap, then evade as people try to kill you and fail only to die to the others they framed harder to kill. High protection uptime, all weapon evades on low cool down, high vigour uptime and constantly using movement skills makes you a hard mark.
I don’t know what others say but used correctly longbow is a great asset to a skirmish build. Compliments Sw/d or Sw/axe very well. More so than great sword I find.
The way I play the build is as an evasion beast master skirmish hybrid. A full sword combo will hit someone for over 6k which isn’t bad. I have swiftness thanks to my birds and perma cripple between crippling throw, leap and kick. So helps my pets connect and keep my target from running.
The trick with birds is now they have fixed how responsive f2 is you can do the following. Smash f2 after you bird does and auto and it will lunge again straight away with its skill. Allows a quick 3 to 6.5k, swap pets and hit f2 again, as you swap in melee range the bird will again instantly use its move for another 2 to 3.8k. This way I can do near 17k damage in a short space which a lot of people don’t expect from a ranger.
Anything else?
Edit: also learn how to combo hornets sting with either a cripple throw or path of scars. Will net you some nice semi burst since the throws and the leap will hit at the same time. remember you don’t need to leap right after. You have 2.5s of time to decide what you want to do. Swap to longbow and apply ranged pressure/ stealth and reposition/ interups/ buy time for heal cool down or just to breath for a sec, cast heal and back into melee.
Lastly learn sword control. Losing target and using pounce twice followed by sting and leap or even on its own nets you between 900 and 2000 range. Follow with reflexes and nobody should be able to catch you.
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
This game has been out for so long that most people are good with their main profession now. So I write this with the assumption that the human factor is negligible when comparing the power of different professions in GW2. Also, i’m referring to the game content where the majority of the GW2 community participates, WvW.
Major problems:
1) Extraordinary physical damage cannot be achieved without becoming completely glass. When a Ranger specs for highest possible damage, they are still going to lose to to others that also spec for max damage. They have no damage mitigation, and no escape tool in this build.2)Every other profession is designed to be hard counter to Ranger. Blind/cripple/chill/immobilize are the conditions that prevent kiting and they exist in abundance. They are easily applied and kept on nearly permanently. Range battles don’t happen unless of terrain limitations because gap closing skills are the length of the bow range. Meaning, the range advantage isn’t significant.
3)Melee Ranger is terrible. Where other classes can hit harder at melee, ranger hits less damage guaranteed.
4)The incentive for ranger is to play a variation of condition bunker. Unfair, since any other class can freely play with any build well.
5)The pet is a failed mechanic. It is not reliable because it’s too random and too distracting. You have to be lucky to have it perform in your favor and this happens rarely. Not only is it a failed mechanic, it is a net deficit to have to use it 100% of the time.
Not a single sentence you wrote have any root in reality. Please do play the class beyond lvl 2 before making any wild accusations
+1
Blind/cripple/chill/immobilize are the counters to any melee class to. and sure as hell condi removal is a counter that too.
if your only reason to come here is to throw Negative junk at peoples faces you got the wrong place go to reddit and cry there.
instead of throwing negative junk, be constructive and go to the suggestions thread and do somthing Constructive..geez
And the condition removal on Ranger is abysmal compared to other classes. Even worse on some builds than others.
With the right traits and set up you can kill over 50+ conditions a minute
When people chase me for miles thinking I am a free kill which is annoying but don’t expect the 15k burst when I get sick of being chased.
Also when solo roaming abuse sicken since its hilarious to see thevies stand in refuge thinking they are safe or spam all their stealth skills in a row trying to get away.
This is the build i use for solo roaming and i am capable of beating most people i have come across on this, especially theives of all varieties.
similar build that has a huge vigor uptime and evades using fire and air sigils on sword/dagger/axe. Evade for days and damage is good with leech, air, and fire.
It works great for me and i can burst some people down pretty fast. On occasion i use sickem and it just does wonders.
best part about being a target is when people cant kill you and your team mates just get free passes to lay damage down.
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
Just like player skills pet skills have damage coefficients. Even with 25 stacks of might some pets abilities will only increase 2~300 damage on white hits but others will increase by near 800.
Spiders for example, their spit normally hits around 5~600 but i have been able to push it to just around 1.3k for a non crit.
I Run something similar and people always seem to target me because i am a ranger. the amounts of evade i have on my build is amazing since i run martial and also offhand training. around 30~40% of the time im evading, the other i am under protection and vigor for more evades and damage.
holy bash
Your camp clearing strategy sounds almost identical to mine. But what the heck is holy bash? Do you mean you hilt bash the supervisor to interrupt the heal?
*hilt
15 chars
Trap ranger when I played it could kill the NPCs before entangle ended so under 20s. My power ranger current camp flip strategy is los ,entangle, flame trap (with the 15 or more might stacks i can get still ticks around 650 ) , call my birds, drake swipe with 25 might and signet,lightning breath, swap, holy bash, second drake swipe and posion breath then just auto down. At best its quick and we’ll under a minute.
On topic. You did a good job at hitting some points but others are wildly wrong or are too generic
I don’t think pet tracking has been changed much so the data should still hold. In any case I do use cats and birds depending on who I am fighting. Suppose its all pve so it doesn’t matter much.
Someone did tests on a moving golem in the mists and unless it’s changed cats did more than birds iirc but they both lost out to canines.
Felines attack faster than birds and don’t have the swiftness cry that sucks damage hence why they do more DPS. They also stack vulnerability and their bite skill hits hard with only an 8s cool down. In addition on anything that moves birds often miss the second hit.
Sword will out DPS longbow for days. Longbow you have to be at Max range to even come close but then you miss out on party buffs. Also at above 1000 range auto it better DPS than #2.
Signet s are meant to be situational trade offs so the change doesn’t make much of a difference. In my build using it at the right time can result in either. A 5k canine knockdown, 8k drake aoe tailswipe or a 6k bird slash. People don’t expect it either.
Heck in another build I have run using GS can use two drakes and signet + hilt bash to get around 16k aoe damage. Great for camps or on point pressure along with the breath attacks.
i find survivability isnt an issue when i use sword dagger and i have to choose when to use my burst skills with my axe.
-snip-
Ahh you were agreeing with my list.
But it still stands that compared to the one or two that other classes have having 4 mechanics, twice the amount of other classes, is a bit odd and personally i see no reason why using two one handed weapons wouldnt result in a dual skill regardless of what class is doing so.
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
-snip-
Some of what you have listed aren’t mechanics but utilities and skills. Many of which have skills on other classes that are very similar in function and execution. Like you listed traps under rangers yet theives have traps.
The way i see if most classes have one or two “mechanics” besides thieves who have far more.
The way i see it:
- Warriors
– adrenaline
– burst skills - Ranger
– Pets - Elementalists
-Attunements - Mesmer
-Illusions
-Shatters - Necro
– Death Shroud - Guardian
-Virtues - Engi
– Toolbelt - Theif
-Steal
-Initiative
-Stealth Skills
-Dual Skills
I personally don’t find path of scars that bad. combo I can land with it does upwards of 8k maxing at around 15K including my pet.
Its a great build. Wrecked me when i ran into you on my guard and ranger last night. Not to sure how to pressure this setup enough to force the player on the defensive. All in all hard o beat 1v1. Dual you again sometime man.
-Gandara Player-
(edited by Sigmoid.7082)
Rangers have no burst and we can’t compare to other classes in damage. A don’t see a reason why couldn’t we have one hard-hitting ability, especially so easily avoided. (single dodge denies like 25% of the damage).
Anet design philosophy. Rangers are steady constant damage, no burst.
Having run a whole manner of condi and regen builds, the railgun sniper and now my own custom chill might stacker build I can say ranger is a great roamer . can get around pretty fast and handle camps and 1v1 situations very well.
My custom build stacks frost armour and thus chill along with any of my chilling skills. Takes little physical damage and can deal with conditions as long as you play safe and how the build demands. Also has huge burst if you can land it but that’s what the chill is for.
One thing I can say as a ranger roamer and may apply to all roaming if you aren’t situationally aware you will get jumped and eaten unless you are playing a very forgiving build.