Guild Wars 2

Every day. Several times a day. 30 minute stretches if I’m by myself, longer if a party forms. Easy gold one way or another (around 1 gold every half hour or so) that requires no other people. Now get off my island unless you’re here to help me farm karkas!

He’s talking about dragons in D&D, but I think the sentiment that dragons shouldn’t be kittens kind of applies here.

Equip a sword and go, “Come at me, bro!” :P

Really, though, I don’t know. It’s always been kind of random for me. Sometimes mobs will go for my pet, sometimes they’ll come for me, and sometimes they’ll change their minds several times during the course of a fight.

Kaos.9162:

The ranger community generally likes him, but having him around doesn’t really help us much. He’s on dungeon design, not balance, so the most he can do it bring up our problems to the balance team. It seems to me (and a fair number of other people, I think) that the devs responsible for balance don’t really play rangers.

Ranger player here, and I for one almost cried man tears when he started posting in our forums (“A dev! A dev! Someone at ANet cares! He plays a Ranger, too?! I can’t breathe!”). However, like Kaos mentioned, he’s not on balance, so whether or not we’ll actually see any changes/fixes/overhauls to our profession because of him is as of yet unknown, and is something he himself has constantly reminded us of (lest we jump him if nothing happens, I suppose). Still, having even a modicum of dev input/commentary is night and day compared to having none, especially for our profession and after the months of silence following the now-infamous “Ranger Update” thread.

Sollith.3502:

Great idea! It sounds like it would have been fun, but I had work at that time Oh, well… Maybe next time.

Same. If Chopps just so happens to be running one of these again on a rare Saturday that I have off from work, I’m so there.

If I wanted my pets to be set to passive the entire time, I’d probably bring the Jungle Stalker and the Red Moa for their buffs at least.

The only time the LB (and #4 in particular) is an absolute necessity for me is when I need to stun the Legendary Rampaging Ice Elemental in the Underground Facility fractal out of his healing state. SB #5 and GS #5 can also stun, but there are too many prerequisites to fulfill in that short window to get them to work. That one instance aside, the LB is all but never used.

Cufufalating.8479:

Not really my style but I admitt, very creative and I am sure effective :P Not least because, as someone above mentioned, I doubt anyone would really be expecting it.

I’m trying to figure out what I can do to counter/survive this if/when I suddenly find myself holding the strips that was my face in WvW. :P

The Catmaster him/herself is essentially a BM Bunker variant, so the same sort of tactics one might use to bust one of those could apply here… save for the fact that the jaguar in this case is downright lethal compared to the same jaguar of a cookie-cutter 0/0/30/10/30. The jaguar is also central to this build, so the Catmaster is going to be paying a heck of a lot more attention to it (and it in particular) compared to a BM Bunker, making sure it gets buffed, healed, protected, stealthed, swapped, etc. when needed, rather than maybe just a couple or so of those.

In broad strokes, it’s almost like you’re dealing with a BM Bunker and a Backstab Thief at the same time; one’s a chore to kill and the other can kill you in a matter of seconds if you’re not alert. Such being the case, I would imagine the priority would, like going against a BM Bunker, still be the pet, just doubly so here because of how the Catmaster can so easily set you up to become a condition-stacked Fancy Feast if you focus on him/her instead.

With the shortbow build I’m running with right now, if I found myself going up against a Catmaster (and I didn’t get Catsassinated yet), I’d probably try to burst the jaguar down as much as I can and when I can, kiting the Catmaster (assuming I can find him/her) only when the jaguar stealths/swaps/becomes the Mossman, evading and using LR as necessary. I don’t like my chances, though. :P

I imagine a good 1v1 Ranger counter would probably be a Trapper, if only because he/she’d have a fairly reliable counter against stealthed opponents. A Catmaster vs Catmaster battle would be legendary.

Koru.8574:

i can see it now, ranger zerg running with piercing arrow trait….just face rolling over everyone in wvw.

Piercing Arrows + Sigil of Fire + Ranger zerg = Michael Bay movie.

Awesomely written, and I too now have a new favorite series of words. Catmaster! Catsassin! Catsassination! Catsassinated! =^.^=

I think what gets/would get a lot of people about this build/playstyle is the unorthodoxy of it. Rangers (at least the ones I’ve seen in WvW) rarely utilize their pets beyond support dps/target practice for the enemy. The better ones will micro their pets and use them for control effects, but going full-blown beastmaster is going to another level entirely, something I think I only last saw in GW1. As a result, people will generally only pay attention to pets as a sort of footnote to the badge-containing glass case that’s probably nearby, or at most watch out for any control effects they might try to apply, but not expect one (or something, since it’s stealthed the entire time) to murder the kittens out of them all by itself.

Well, now you’ve gone and done it! The meta’s out now, and we’re all going to be a little less safe thanks to you! If I drop dead in WvW for no apparent reason now, or especially after culling’s removed after the 26th, I’m going to go out screaming “LORDHELMOS!” :P

I like this idea, but I think lag and disconnections would prevent this from being as awesome as it probably could be. There have been one too many times when I’ve gotten killed as a result of the game being unresponsive or misinterpreting my actions.

For instance, I was on a dungeon run about a month ago that had us taking turns to sneak by a mob. When it got to my turn, I did what everyone else did, only to find myself dead in a matter of seconds for no apparent reason. Upon asking “WTF?!?”, a party member remarked that from his perspective, I had run smack-dab into the middle of the mob, versus safely along the side like I did and saw from my perspective.

Getting killed as a result of gameplay is one thing, but getting killed by what can be categorized as a game malfunction is another entirely, one that would probably result in a lot of support tickets. That said, the idea itself is sound, and without any connection issues it’d be great for the experience.

Bunker or a hybrid. If you’re going GS/S+D, I’d probably go for some sort of hybrid so you can still hit worth something without getting downed at the same time/immediately after.

My usual roles in dungeons: support dps, combat healer, and waterboy (Healing Spring).

Xsorus.2507:

Having to take a massive DPS loss because of terrible PVE mechanics and pets is rather depressing.

Agreed, but until our pets are given better survivability in dungeons, what can we do?

I suppose a case can be made for the jaguar in dungeons, since stealthing it can allow it to get in some heavy hits with relative impunity, but it still has no good answer for red rings of death, and when it’s not stealthed it pretty much has to be set to passive to keep it from getting its glass bones ground into dust. A case can also be made for the Red Moa and its AoE fury buffs, but that’d be all it’s good for, and sending it to awkwardly and ineffectively bonk an enemy with its beak feels like animal abuse…

Neb.4170:

You’re still taking a large DPS loss. If our damage is based on having something like a Jaguar and we’re stuck with the pew pew peashooter of a Devourer…

No disagreement there. I’m just saying it’s a choice between some damage versus potentially no damage depending on the boss. YMMV.

Open World
Raven and Jag, because their crits make kills happen soooooo much more quickly.

WvWvW
Devourers, because sending a melee pet into a zerg is basically handing someone a free/easy rally.

PvP
I’m not really into PvP, but for the few hours I played it, I brought a Red Moa for fury buffs and a Jungle Stalker for might buffs and dps, and they did okay.

Dungeons
Devourers, because sending melee pets to get one-shotted by bosses is pointless.

Underwater
Armor Fish and Shark, but seriously… Rangers don’t need no help underwater. :P j/k

Neb.4170:

Don’t you find bringing two Devourers to a boss fight severely hampering as far as DPS goes? I mean, sure, you don’t have to look after them, but they are also not doing very much…

Ranged pet damage is pretty bad, unfortunately.

Yeah, but the saying goes, “a dead dps is no dps”. The devourers have at least a retreating chance at staying alive and outputting damage (however lackluster it may be), versus melee pets that some bosses can one-shot before they can even get a hit in, resulting in them doing nothing except limp after you for however long until you can swap. That’s just my experience of course, so if you can micro your melee pet(s) and keep them alive and fighting, more power to you.

Pets can be both utterly awesome and utterly atrocious in PvE at level 80.

Some days they can kill whatever’s bothering me while I’m rezzing someone, allow me to attack multiple, distant targets at once (e.g. claw the faces off the snipers in CM Exp 1 while I’m fighting the boss, or alternatively claw at the boss while I go upstairs to show the snipers what’s up), help rez me when no one else can, critically-hitting and killing something just in the nick of time, etc.

Other days, though…

“Attack, pet! Attack! ATTACK! What are you doing?! Don’t just stand there! GO! That colossus with all the arrows stuck in it now! Attack it! GO! All right, fine! (pulls out a sword and dagger) Let me show you how it’s done! See that colossus there? Lunge at it like this! See?! Now ATTACK! ATTAAACK!”

“Owwwww… that was a nasty fall. Kittening Risen Priest of Grenth. Aughhh… PET! Come lick my wounds! Come! Over here! My wounds, lick them! LICK THEM! Oh come on, I know I’m on a slightly elevated surface, but that doesn’t mean— oh god, he’s dropping me agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiinnnnnnn—!”

“Oh, not this again Raven— EVERYONE, INCOMING! My kittening pet did it again! I DID set him on passive! I CAN’T put him away! Whatever! Just RUNNNNN!”

=_=

awge.3852:

Just to show those -stand still and shoot- rangers that they better know they’re not in pve anymore.

Unless they’re incredibly dense/stubborn (or they’re bots), figuring out that moving around/zig-zagging might keep you alive for at least a few more seconds versus standing still should be pretty much the first thing you learn upon setting foot in sPvP or WvW.

Then again, going up against Nerva/BSW on your first WvW outing would probably have about the same effect as an emasculation, and would probably send you running back to Lion’s Arch faster than Logan could to Jennah.

After trying out a few builds apart from my BM Bunker the last couple of weeks, this so far feels to be the most well-rounded/all-purpose. I’ve since taken it on a few dungeon and fractal runs, and being able to retain a lot of the BM Bunker’s survivability while having at least some decent dps when my pet’s “not available” is simply awesome.

With Melandru armor (an easy-to-acquire set featuring high toughness and condition mitigation), Mystic weapons (because I wanted to indulge somewhere), and celestial Ascended trinkets (that are not yet complete but are included anyway for numbers’ sake), my current/projected build comes out to something like this:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/ranger/?6.3|5.1o.h1c|1.1g.h1d|1c.7r.1c.7r.1a.7r.1a.7r.1b.7r.1c.7r|411.d1e.211.d1e.311.d1e.211.d1e.311.d1e.2w.d1e|0.k1a.k6a.0.u4ac|0.0|4j.4y.4q.4r.55|e

In hindsight, I actually made a pretty lackluster BM Bunker with almost the same gear. I had the toughness down, but I didn’t have enough condition damage to make up for having little to no precision/dps, and what healing power I had was not enough for a build that pretty much relies on it to make it worthwhile. The above setup would still lack the healing power of, say, a cleric’s set to make the bunker half of it shine, but I think the higher vitality combined with the higher dps is a reasonable compromise.

Nicely done.

Aridia.3042:

This should be the effect for Signet of the Hunt when you use it.

Speed for passive. Slow stealth for active.

^This. I’m for this.

Dragikitten20:

funny that happened on the way to lupi the other night in arah p2 with my raven.

Every time my party tells me to get rid of my pet, I go, “Tell ANet that!”

Wasn’t aware of a negative vibe regarding Ranger signets o_O. I usually run with SotH for the passive speed buff and SotW for the extra regen (which adds up if NH is traited), leaving the third skill slot open for either QZ or LR depending on the situation (e.g. QZ for mobs and LR for bosses). This setup has been working well for me (albeit passively), and previous attempts to drop one more signet have proven to be too detrimental to be worth it for my build and the parties I typically run with.

Tuluum.9638:

You know, I always found that heart a little annoying exclusively because of how tedious it is to hit things.

I have found you can compensate for it pretty effectively, but obviously, the AI never will. I had not made the correlation to our own pets though, and it really does make a lot of sense. I tend to just use pets for random bursts, and support f2 skills (like regen, or chilling opponents). Most of the time, I have them on passive. They have been extremely problematic otherwise.

Still doesnt explain their attitude problem when it comes to aggroing EVERYTHING around me. Dont know if its just me, but when on “aggressive,” my pet will literally aggro everything in site. Running from one mob to the next attacking. If I could get it to happen reliably, it might even be useful! But, no..

Yeah… that heart was a PITA for me until I figured out how to compensate. Still, the whole time I was like, “This is what it’s like as a pet? Okay, maybe I’ve been too hard on the furball.”

It seems like every melee pet has something akin to this, something I’ve compensated for by either crippling and/or stunning mobs long enough for my pet(s) to get at least a couple of good swipes in, or doing a role reversal by going melee myself and serving as aggro.

As for pets aggroing everything…

—Previously in Arah Exp 1—

“Raven, go claw the blobs out of those blobs! Raven, what are you doing? Raven, why are you flying past the blobs to attack the spiders? Raven, stahp!”

Party wipe

“Thanks, Raven. -_-”

The only legendary that I drool over is the Predator. But nooooo… Rangers can’t use rifles… (sobs).

Not that I’m anywhere close to getting a legendary, but if I were, and it had to be between Kudzu and the Dreamer, I’d probably go for the Dreamer because:

1. Kudzu wouldn’t look “right” on my non-Sylvari character, as beautiful as it is.

2. The Dreamer’s “wrong” enough that it goes with anything.

3. The Dreamer’s a shortbow, so in practical terms it’d see more action with my character than Kudzu would being a longbow.

4. I would probably take far more maniacal pleasure killing my enemies with unicorns and rainbows than golden arrows and flowers.

But that’s just me.

The longbow, at least as it stands now, is a utility weapon, plain and simple. You can be effective with it, you can get it to hit hard if you build glass and incorporate it into a combo that involves your pet (e.g. RF + QZ + jaguar/raven crit), and in some places/situations it’s indispensable (e.g. for stunning the legendary rampaging ice elemental in the dredge fractal), but for general, all-purpose use, the shortbow’s just the better bow.

If you have to have it, equip a shortbow on swap so that you still have a means to output consistent dps when you’ve used up all of the longbow’s skills and can’t maintain max range. Build-wise, stat primarily for power/precision/critical damage while leaving room for toughness and vitality so you don’t get killed by a strong gust of wind. Not much else to it, I think, but maybe someone else will have more to add.

A GS? Why not go for one of the two Legendaries Rangers are known to be OP with?:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Frenzy_
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kamohoali%27i_Kotaki

Kidding, of course (sort of). :P

But yeah, swiftpaw’s probably right. Even if we get a decent buff for the GS, we’ll probably get nerfed somewhere else so that it evens out. -_- Still, the GS is great as a utility/roaming weapon, so it can always be useful, if not for damage.

I’ve run it twice so far, once as a BM bunker (successfully), and the aforementioned time as more dps-oriented, 20/25/20/0/5 build (failingly). As a BM bunker, I could better aggro, tank, and survive the gravelings even by myself, making it so that as long as I could maintain aggro and keep the heat off Hodg, everyone else could focus down on the burrows. On my last run, though, it seemed like no one (including me) was tanky enough to keep both him/herself and Hodg alive, and the couple or so that could hit hard couldn’t handle taking out more than a couple of burrows before the gravelings got to them.

Me? I could hit “okay” (at least when my attacks weren’t obstructed by thin air), but without the BM bunker’s toughness, healing power and regeneration, I just felt less useful all around, especially since like you said the point isn’t to kill the gravelings. I’m not saying I was the deciding factor for that run, but I think I could’ve pushed the odds in our favor a lot more if I could do one thing well (offense or defense), versus being sort of “middle of the road” like I was. By Hodg’s 5th or 6th death, I started adding traps and Entangle into my skill set to try to slow down how quickly Hodg’s Groundhog Days were coming, but come they did. -_-

All right, I’m going back. >_< How much does Apothecary gear cost? Yeeeeeesh.

Yeah, I ended up greatswording the burrows/gravelings, too. Before that I was using a longbow intending to RF + QZ the burrows, but no… nothing except Barrage (and I guess my pet) could bypass the invisible obstructions. Ditto with the shortbow. We ultimately failed that sequence because ol’ Hodgepodge couldn’t stop being a graveling magnet and we got tired of picking up his pieces. -_-

I experienced this in the AC Exp 1 the other day. I’m standing on top of a burrow shooting down at it and it’s still “obstructed”. -_-

If ANet gave us pocketable pet mice and that spirit as an elite, all is forgiven.

If a zerg of Rangers (let’s say 50) each summoned one of these in WvW… dude.

I play a Ranger, so an underwater map would be awesome. And ditto on it being the “closest we’re going to get to flying in this game”. Every time I’m underwater, I sort of pretend I’m either a spaceship or a submarine going pew-pew-pew-pew-pew!

To transmute items, you need either basic or fine transmutation stones: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Transmutation_Stone. The basic stones will work for items up to level 79, and the fine stones will work for items of all levels. The steps for and further information regarding transmutation can be found here: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Transmutation.

P.S.: Transmutation isn’t reversible, so make sure you know what you’re doing before you do something insane like transmute a white quality item’s skin onto a legendary weapon or something like that. O_O

LoS and reflection are perfectly sound strategies. One is (at least in part) using the environment to your advantage, and the other is using skills as they’re designed. I do get what Phandaria is saying and can at least partially agree with the sentiment, but not in regards to the aforementioned strategies. I would probably consider content/mob-skipping to be more in line with “trivializing” content, tbh.

The dredge boss in that fractal doesn’t bother me, the rampaging ice elemental that you have to keep stunning to keep from healing bothers me, mostly because up to now I’ve been in maybe one party that was cohesive enough to melt him down in relatively short order. Other times… (sigh). One time we had a guy apparently go renegade on the rest of us, randomly pulling the ice elemental everywhere except under the molten buckets (unintentionally, it turned out, as he didn’t know what we were doing and wasn’t reading our cries for him to stop), and another time we had a near-shouting match with a guy that kept calling us noobs, claiming there’s no way to stun the ice elemental.

-_-

If Dredge was the 3rd fractal and someone leaves “just because”, I’d be cursing that person’s name repeatedly and creatively for the next hour or so, or however long it takes the rest of us to finish the fractal.

shimmerless.4560:

I’ll wear my newbieness on my sleeve, I’m not much of a Ranger by any means and I only really play mine if I’m in a nature-y kind of mood, but I’ve never noticed most of the problems people seem to have with pets.

I mean, you look at your first skill tray while you’re levelling, and you suss, “Huh, obviously a lot of my damage must be balanced out in my pet”. So I just tried to figure out how best to manage it, and as it turns out you can make liberal use of the call/return commands to keep them out of harm’s way, as well as using your heal if only for them and less for yourself. I don’t really know if Rangers see it as a good skill or not but I found Sick ’Em was quite powerful at opportune moments. Lick Wounds is one of the strongest (if not the strongest) downed skills I know of.

AI is always going to be problematic in games and especially those where commands have to be relatively simple to keep bandwidth costs under control, but I still don’t think it’s even nearly as dire as some seem to believe.

In open-world PvE, the Ranger’s fine, if not great. Our pets can generally survive, if not dominate most of the open-world mobs, sometimes even taking on veterans and such on their own. In dungeons and fractals, however, pets often have seconds to live in nearly any engagement unless you set them to passive, whichs deprives the Ranger of xx% of his/her total dps output.

I’m probably oversimplifying, but basically every moment a pet’s not actively attacking is a moment in which a Ranger is missing xx% of his/her total dps output, and in dungeons and fractals where pets aren’t attacking most of the time due to either death or passivity, Rangers come out to be xx% less effective compared to any other class most of the time, and we don’t have the kind of utilities that Guardians and Mesmers have (portalling, for instance) that can make up for that disadvantage.

Lert.6287:

Post mostly: ranger too weak/ stop nerfing ranger/ any devs here/ please boost ranger/ anyone to help with build etc.
Your post: Mouse as pet.
…
We’re going nowhere.

Well, we already have a thread (with a live and responding dev, even) dealing with those issues: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Robert-Hrouda-on-pets-in-dungeons/page/11

I, for one, would welcome our new pocketable overlords.

I tend to incorporate (or plan to finish incorporating) celestial trinkets and accessories as a means for me to be able to switch between builds without re-gearing, something that isn’t ideal but seems more feasible to me given how Ascended trinkets apart from rings aren’t very easy/cheap to come by, at least for the immediate future. I don’t want to spend the laurels, ectos and whatever else on, say, a whole set of Ascended trinkets with Apothecary stats, for instance, and be locked down to only builds that favor/utilize those stats for however long until I can get Ascended trinkets with other stats.

Some of the dailies were hilariously easy, and I don’t mean in a chomp-down-25-hamburgers-in-one-sitting kind of way. As a Ranger, for Daily Condition Applier I just flanked something and kept bleeding it with my shortbow until it was complete (it took less than ten seconds), and for Daily Condition Remover I just found something that applied conditions and went “CONDITION ME, BRO!”, after which I just waited for my pet to remove them or I removed them myself with Healing Spring. Done, and done.

Offhand axe is great for solo karka farming. I just run up to them, hit #5 right when they start shooting, and by the time I’m done spinning they’re either dead or one kitty-crit away from it.

I for one love the new dailies. I can’t wait to log on every night to see what new combination of things I have to do to get my laurel for that day. They do require a more hands-on approach to complete compared to the originals, but as a result I find them to be more fun that way. Different strokes for different folks and all that, I suppose.

Sureshot.6725:

It’s a false choice if you want to have the best gear and the cumulative effect of ascended isn’t marginal. The gap will only get worse as they add more items.

If they really wanted to make it a choice they could have added rewards that do not effect combat stats.

Another option would be to provide 5 options for PvE, 5 options for PvP, and maybe a few introductory options for new players.

These solutions would provide real choices for players depending on what content they enjoy in the game. You can say it is a choice all day long but when you will find yourself at competitive disadvantage in a competitive game by opting out its not really a choice.

I agree with your point that between two options if one offers you competitive benefits while the other doesn’t, then at least for a competitive player there’s only one choice worth considering. However, if the benefits for doing the dailies are not competitive, as in they contribute nothing to gameplay and only contribute to, say, cosmetics in a dungeon gear kind of way, then one can argue at least some wouldn’t find them worth doing and whom would then complain about the lack of content/endgame/etc.

There’s unfortunately just no way to please both pro-vertical and pro-horizontal progression players due to their completely polar demands/expectations. :/

I’m cool with everything about the sword (even the rooting), but the seemingly random pouncing in #1 has routinely sent me kicking and screaming off ledges and has gotten me killed more than rooting ever has, and that’s with both auto-attacking and auto-targeting disabled. Once I can figure out how to get that under control, the sword would be perfect for me, if only as a purely defensive/control weapon for my build.

Oh my god a dev. That mains a Ranger. In the Ranger forums. Engaging in active discussion.

CRIES

I like the idea of F3 being turned into a pet evade of sorts, and the rationale given in favor of that (that setting our pets to passive serves the same function) versus something drastic like an AI/engine overhaul is sound to me, particularly if we expect to see such a change happen anytime soon.

Sounds good to me. Do feel free to experiment. There is no one-size-fits-all build in this game, so even if you do stick with one or two builds, you will at least be tweaking their traits and your weapons and skills to adapt to each situation/game mode/dungeon.

Have fun!

When you can roll the Ranger like Chopps can, then you can glass cannon almost anywhere you like. Me? I’m still dealing with the PTSD from my WvW tour as a glass cannon, so you’re going to have to rely on Chopps’ expertise on that if you want t— OH MY GOD WAS THAT A THIEF? Where is he?! I can’t see him! He could be anywhere due to the culling! I don’t want to get two-shotted again! Someone help me! AHHHHHHHH!

Anyway… … … going back to the BM bunker build I mentioned, this is the particular guide that I used: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Ranger-PvP-Bunker-Build/first#post1540930. Do note that that guide and the BM bunker build in general is catered towards sPvP/WvW, so if you intend on using it in PvE, you’re going to have to adapt it over with gear… which is what you’ve been asking for all along, so I’ll go over mine and how/why I use them for your reference.

As far as armor goes, I’m using the medium Aurora Armor of Melandru. It like the rest of the Temple karma sets have mixed stats, which means it’s not optimal for any specific build, but it’s flexible when you’re still trying out different builds and don’t have the resources (yet) to buy/craft new sets for every time you want to try something different. I chose the Melandru set in particular simply because it comes preinstalled with Superior Runes of Melandru, runes which are awesome for a BM bunker because a full set both toughens you up even more than you already are and makes condition and stun attacks against you “melt off” in short order. If you want to go straight for a specific stat combination for this build that emphasizes dps, I would probably recommend a Cleric’s set since it maintains synergy with this build’s toughness and healing power stats while adding power.

As far as weapons go, I primarily swap between a shortbow and a greatsword, but I carry one of every weapon Rangers can use with me just in case. I use the shortbow for ranged and single-target dps/conditions, evasion and control, and the greatsword for melee AoE, mobility (Swoop FTW), blocks and interrupts. On some occasions, such as in the Dredge fractal when I find myself having to both pull and stun the rampaging ice elemental, I swap the greatsword for a longbow so I can do ranged stuns with longbow #4 (because shortbow #5 requires that I flank or hit it from the side, something I can’t reliably do when I’m the one pulling). If I know I’m going into a situation where I’ll consistently be dealing with groups of enemies, then I swap the shortbow for an axe and either a torch or a horn depending on party composition and/or what we’re up against.

If I were to mostly swap from condition damage to another stat, I would probably run a different build instead (since there’s no escaping CD being the BM bunker’s primary form of damage), like this one: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Hybrid-BeastMaster-GS-SB-build-guide/first#post1566517. This build keeps a lot of the toughness and pet stats of the BM bunker, but trades healing power and some of the survivability against conditions and control effects for a higher chance to crit and faster weapon and skill recharges. It basically gives you higher dps at the cost of some survivability compared to the BM bunker. If the parties you tend to group with can handle the tanking and support buffing to make it so that you’re not often singled out, then the hybrid build might be a better fit since it’ll allow you to add to your party’s dps and survive if/when things go south. If your parties tend to be more like mine, however, where I’m often the only one left standing and have to rez people while under fire, then the BM bunker would be more useful. YMMV

Cheers!

(Edited for clarity)

Dragon.9564:

Dang at least 32 max? someone bought 32 slots? really?

It’s definitely plausible. There are people who have hundreds/thousands of gold kicking around, and might blow them on gems to unlock the additional character slots just because they can.

Question: Might there be a quiver with celestial stats at some point?

The problem with a full zerker Ranger versus a full zerker Warrior, even if our dps was comparable (which it isn’t), is that we aren’t as survivable when going glass cannon, which means one or two good hits is enough to bring us down, while a zerker Warrior can rely on his/her heavier armor and skills to keep on trucking. That’s not to say a zerker Ranger doesn’t have its place or that you can’t make one work, it’s just that when you’re out of evades or when you’re just at the wrong place at the wrong time… you’re done.

I like the look of this build. Right now I’m considering going either with this or with Nerva’s 30 skirmishing + 30 wilderness build, since my BM bunker just isn’t doing it for me as far as quickly dishing out damage goes. One upside this build has over Nerva’s for me because I can’t chain evasions and blocks like a boss is that it keeps Natural Healing, which is one trait I’m very hesitant on giving up because in previous fights it has kept me ticking when I otherwise probably would’ve died due to being at extremely low health.

CETheLucid.3964:

It’s a tragedy that affects both sides.

Exactly.

The joke’s on Adelbern and the ghosts if the Charr just up and leave in their Death Star.

Also, it’s not “die or die”. There is an afterlife in the GW2 universe, a Valhalla of sorts, one that has been denied to the Ascalonians because they’ve been condemned to a form of limbo by the Foefire.

Put it this way, I don’t feel for the Charr so much as I feel for the Ascalonians who have been forcibly condemned to this potential eternity of restlessness. The continuing generations of Charr getting or not getting what’s coming to them for the sins of their ancestors is, at least to me, small potatoes next to the mindless suffering the original Ascalonians (both soldiers and civilians) have been undergoing for over two centuries now, which goes back to what this thread was about: “Do you feel bad for the Ghosts of Ascalon?”

Do I feel bad for the Ghosts of Ascalon? Yes, yes I do. The fate they’ve been subjected to is horrendous to the point that I’d rather my GW1 character to have been killed by the Charr than to share in the same fate as the ghosts.