Guild Wars 2

Dasenthal.6520:

Thaddeus.4891:

To OP : Go zerker, especially if you are casual with exotic only. In your build you didn’t choose any stats for your weapons so it should be 63% crits chance. Rune of the Ranger is a bit less dps, but if you play casual Ranger could be more dps since the buff is always there. Either are good it depend on what you prefer.

Rune of the Ranger is a bit less dps than what? I am currently using Ranger Runes but been trying to up dps so it might help me.

Scholar is slightly more DPS if you can keep your health above 90% … I think its its 60% of the time? Something like that. Rune of the Ranger’s 6th bonus is also activated by minis, so its always up.

Basically, if you’re Pr0 and/or run with very organized groups and therefore never get hit, Scholar gives slightly better DPS.

Gear-wise, if you’re full exotic and meta 6/5/0/3/0, head/chest/legs assassin and everything else zerk is slightly better dps, but its marginal and depends on many things so full zerk is fine.

I want a Colocal and a Plated Behemoth

Yelloweyedemon.2860:

PS: Armor fish = Underwater bear.

The armor fish is even more of a wet noodle meat shield than a bear. Less damage, a bit less health but waaay more armor, and a stronger heal.

Race: Any
Sex: Any
Class: Any
Weapons: Priory Historical (Long|Short)bow

The UV maps on the bow staves are mangled to kittenland and back. The gold highlights that wrap around the staves on the melee/firearm weapons are instead placed randomly and asymmetrically.

I reported it via the in-game tool back when you redid the priory weapons from the original design, apparently that gets ignored?

Don’t look too closely at what is allowed underwater and what isn’t.

Guardians set things on fire while in water, just to begin with, so just abandon all reason

Broken again/still on Gunnar’s Hold.

Amins.3710:

Aza.2105:

I’ve tried it. With 1300hp I think it was giving me around 56hp per hit in return. Its a positive change but as I said, I feel the trait is misplaced. It doesn’t make much sense, in order for a zeal trait to scale, you need healing power.

They should have made it scale w/ POWER, not Healing Power.

This way it wouldn’t become OP when you stack it up w/ a Dodge Roll Healing…

It would have opened up a 20/15/30/x/x build, or soemthing to that extent….

Simply made it a % of the damage dealt? That’s essentially the same effect as scaling with power, except now crits count too.

Same, Gunnar’s Hold.

Apparently the latest patch has made added another bow bug – the shortbow does popgun damage.

Thread in general, someone said his SB was doing 12-16 against enemies in a lvl 3 zone where the pet was doing 2-300.

When we run it we tend to stack and run together on the outside. It limits me to the lb but it also makes it real hard for anyone to fall down except during the mass disappearance phase. outside of that part nobody even needs to dodge.

Doggie.3184:

What’s up with your graphics? o.O

The Dwayna back piece is pretty cool, but after seeing Balthazar I’m wondering if they’ll add Melandru or Lyssa too~ I’d much rather have one of those. :o

I’ll just use the one with a utility slot for that sweet 20% mf.

Oh man they’re on a roll!

Kilger.5490:

… but melee dps is something other classes do better (much much better). Rangers strength is range dps. If youre not using a bow you’re better off with another class.

Although I dont do dungeons.

Range dps is terrible everywhere. Only places you range, essentially, are some very high level fractal bosses that simply cannot be melee’d no matter how godly you and your team are.

And for ranged damage supremacy, I’m afraid other classes do it better. Lbow is awful, sbow is ok, axe has a small (tiny) niche in places, but none are best of class damage by any stretch of the imagination.

MH Sword is fine. The auto chain rooting you is frankly worth it for the fact that once you start out you never end up out of melee range of some mob that likes to move. The perma-cripple will also make your teammates love you in grawl fractal.

It’s just a question of getting used to evading with #2/#3/dagger, at the start you’ll try to dodge normally, nothing happens and you raaage.

You can’t use it for everything, in some fights the tells are too short and by the time your skills get to the evade frames you’re already dead, but anywhere you can you should, and if you’re not you’re doing it wrong.

Seras.5702:

Soooo glad this is unintended. I sent a bug report and hadn’t heard back yet so this is good news. I have the helm hidden until the fix. Shame cuz I just bought the thing a week ago and can’t show it off.

Anyone with programming knowledge explain to me how the helm can unintentionally get changed?

They were testing the model change and forgot to revert it before packaging for release.

You’re not gonna get an objective reply to this kind of question, everyone has their favourite class.

As someone who mains a ranger I’ll say try it and if you don’t like the awful pet ai drop it, but you’ll find the myriad turret bugs that have existed since launch just as infuriating.

GS is only useful/needed in a few dungeons.

Fractals is a different story, there’s a lot of fights there where the delay before the evades on the sword will get you killed, so you have to gs.

20/25/0/25 full zerk with scholar runes is the best fractal build, but if you’re still learning I suggest 20/0/25/25 and runes of the ranger.

Your dps drops some, but the 20% cd helps you spike/vuln/block more with the gs, and you can evade more often with the sword, which makes it easier to learn. You also get access to more vigor

You can switch to the big boy build when you’re comfortable with the sword which will take a few weeks.

P.S. If you’re doing fractals bring /all/ the weapons. Both bows, both swords, two axes, horn, torch, dagger. Also you better like fighting underwater.

Oh yeah that too, heh. Golem mk2 stair squad reporting

That’ll be utilities next … I’m betting we get:

a signet that makes the pet stop moving
a spirit that has a 35% chance for one attack every 10 seconds to apply one stack of vulnerability.
a trap that applies a 1/4 second daze

Unfortunately they gave a bad implementation of preparations to thief and called it venom

BlackBeard.2873:

Also, the range seems to be well over 1500 when traited. Using barrage (which also has 1500 range) you can hit an additional 20-25% further away with longbow – meaning about 2K range on a golem. Has it always been this way?

being above your target makes projectile attacks travel beyond max range, always has.

hilariously, this also works underwater.

mooty.4560:

Where PvE is concerned I still think nothing beats Healing Spring.

Honestly the water field on HS isn’t that crucial, it’s the fact of range being mostly useless outside a few fractals, so you have to melee, if you melee the spirit must be too for the active to heal you, and if the spirit is in melee, it dies instantly, meaning now you want the grandmaster trait just to make the heal worthwhile … so you bring another heal and trait something useful instead.

The intersection of spirit mechanics are ok/don’t need condition cleansing/don’t need melee is very small in the current meta.

I don’t think anybody ever said the heal amount was bad – the concerns for PvP/wvw I have, and the reason I’ll never run it, is the loss of our only reliable condition cleanse.

If you’re talking roaming pve, do whatever.

If you’re talking wvw … well if you were you wouldn’t be running full zerk.

… keep in mind, mainlining a bow, or any ranged weapon, is a bad idea on high end pve.

terrible dps, you don’t share your spotter/spirit with the team, you don’t get the boons they’re sharing, the mobs follow you sometimes making life harder for the guys and gals in melee … In other words, you’re dead weight that contributes nothing of use to the team. I main a range and gleefully kick bearbow rangers of the team if I’m pugging – they’re a waste of a player slot.

If you don’t plan to do dungeons or fractals, bearbow is fine – so long as you don’t mind being poor.

Bottom line: if you want to make gold in pve, bring a sword and horn. sbow is fine as the backup weapon for when you need to disengage – it’s better to be healing outside melee range with shortbow than it is to be downed – but the longbow is a waste; bar a few fractal fights you should never be more than few hundred units from your target. oh and the knockback will make everyone hate you.

These days my lbow has 2 uses, the thaumanova fractal final boss and tequatl.

The crit trait would mainly be of use to MHS+X/GS setups, sure, but that’s still better than no use

That sounds pretty nice! The amount and duration might need looking at when it’s triggering that often, but something like:

MMS 5: You and your pet have opening strike.
MMS 15: OS reset after a kill.
MMS 25: OS reset on weapon swap. Pet OS reset on pet swap
MMS Grandmaster: OS always crits.

Is a good framework for turning 4 trash traits into useful traits.

Bambula.3649:

Taverius.8645:

Haven’t found a use for double axes, so one axe is fine.

nice on the grawl lvl when the elements pop up and you destroyed the shild

Oh? Need to try that next time I get that

Its not just MHS that needs a stealth for Remorseless to be useful, but it would be a start.

The more pressing issue is that the 25 and 30 point opening strike traits should be switched, because the 5, 15 and 25 point traits are a waste of space without the 30 right now.

Honestly, the 5-pointer should give OS to you and pet, the 15 the reset on kill (like the 15-pointer guardian burn virtue reset on kill 15-pointer) the 25 the crit. New Grandmaster trait.

I thought about reset on interrupt, but that becomes ludicrously powerful when paired with Moment of Clarity – 5-10 vuln + 100% crit + 50% damage boost + 50% longer daze/stun = lolspike.

I’ll add that there’s a couple of fights where the mid-range utility of the shortbow – namely, a daze that doesn’t knock back, and occasionally the retreat with swiftness – can be useful, so I bring that too.

Haven’t found a use for double axes, so one axe is fine.

You also might want to bring fire trap for might stacking with warhorn/drakes, depending on the party composition.

0/0/30/30/10 and 0/0/30/10/30 seems to be the most popular – ‘Bunker Master’ builds focused on defence and permanent boon uptime – but there’s a few others too.

Look around the forum, there’s several recent threads with builds and vids.

I can’t speak for ignorant Pugs but at least in my guild we’re happy if there’s 1-2 rangers in the group, so long as a) only one brings spotter b) you know how to handle your pets.

jubskie.3152:

I can’t believe this. We finally get stability without having to bust out Rampage as One and people are focusing on underwater “nerfs.” We’ve been asking for this SotW change for a year!

MMO forums are always like this – look at the vitriol on the dec 10th class changes for every class; ranger especially – bar the endurance nerf everyone got its all good stuff, going through them in I was giddy like a schoolgirl, I saw at least 3 different builds open up.

Anyway, that’s beside the point. The issue here is not bringing the HP of spirits in line above/underwater, it is the kludge fix for the spirit abilities.

Obviously they didn’t have the manpower for a proper fix, so instead they gave us this .. thing. This delay is not a fix, its a work-around for a bug that they have not fixed, and it impacts functionality, and that’s hard to swallow to be honest.

This specific situation will , arguably, get slightly better on the 10th when 20-point in spirit builds will have moving spirits, but again, that doesn’t change the fact that it screwed some of us over so they could work around an issue without having to spend the time to actually fix it.

SotW fix and the Engineer’s ‘Rifled Barrels’ fix also hit this patch, which are good things, but they took ~1.5 years, and there’s still lots more major bugs extant there, so maybe by 2017 we’ll have a proper fix for this issue? We can but hope

What Solandri said. I run lynx/river drake (bounce lighting is better than a cone) unless extreme tankage is needed, in which case I bring brown bear/sylvan hound.

Since I run 20/0/20/0/30 that’s almost never.

UW default is shark/ice drake (for the insta-cast frost nova)