Guild Wars 2

Heres my build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNAT8YnIVEZZgFaBxahgYpQP9ppITSiz4Q8/LogVNA;TQAinWGMMYDC
This build works with lvl 80 exotic gear on. Anything less and you won’t hit hard enough.
Weapons: Bow is for the damage. You have great burst at max range to start with 15% vulnerability. Once they close blast them with rapid fire + pet swap.
Sword is when you get melee on you and you are taking too much damage (AKA you can’t evade around them and keep using the bow.) You have 3 evade abilities and a snare. Also any quickness with the sword #1 (I don’t use autoattack because its imperitive to dodge when you need to) will dominate a caster.
Pets: Wolf is godly for cc. Melee on you? press f2 and evade near the pet, wooo aoe fear. Hound is just as good, but roots instead. They have decent toughness so they won’t die to a gust of wind as long as you are not fighting zerg vs zerg. Use the pet CC and you will be so much better as a player. Don’t be afraid to swap these guys either. The quickness is awesome and so is when the pet comes out and pounces right on somebody. Stuns are rare, you have 2. Awesome. Don’t complain about their speed, with Signet of the hunt and hunters shot, they’ll get to the players unless its a thief full speed running away. In which case your 3k bow shots will finish him off.
Skills: QZ is amazing. Don’t be afraid to blow it for a finisher. Dead opponent is always better than an alive one. Short cooldown = USE IT.
Signet of the hunt: What can i say, its amazing now. So easy to catch up to people, easier to get away, and easier to get around map.
Protect Me: Who cares if your pets alive if you are dead? Sometimes you get rooted and you have people beating on you. Sometimes you need to finish a guy off but he’s kittenstorm of damage. Sometimes a thief is about to pop on you and you don’t want to take any damage. Swap the pet once he’s low. Really though, it kills the pet but you don’t die. Alive you > alive pet, EVERY TIME.
RaO: Stability, swiftness, fury. For a long time. Yes please, a lot of roaming fights are decided before RaO wears off. Fury gives me 55% crit chance. Crits are an extra 2k on my long range shots.
Traits: Marks for the plus to power. Range on longbow is nice, fury and might when the pet gets to 50% is also nice. Opening strike is awesome in roaming fights and keep defense for blasting one guy down super quick with a partner.
Skirmish is for the crit. Flanking is great for when they run away and your hitting them for stupid amounts of damage. Pets critting harder helps make the pet worth more than just CC. I see my dogs critting for 1.5-2k regularly. Vigor always helps rangers. Evading is good, remember that. Learning how and when to evade is the single greatest thing you can learn in GW2. I’m not kidding.
Wilderness: This boosts your survival. End regen, protection when you roll are self explanatory, see above comments on evading. The traits are for defense. Stealth is marginally useful. When coupled with shared anguish it becomes great. Also great for finishing since that first CC is ignored so you can finish stomping.
Sigils/Runes are too your taste. I run Knights gear, Valk jewelry, and a couple zerkers added in. I was a little bit short on health and wanted a higher crit damage, so I went Wurm. Chilling on weapons is always good especially as a bow ranger. Plus people run away all the time in WvWvW, chilling them ends that quickly.

I hate all of you negative nancies. TRY TO PLAY wvwvw before knocking your ranger. Get geared, and actually TRY.

You can be great. We get a lot of great tools for roaming, but you have to get good with all of them before you yourself can become good.

Heres my build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNAT8YnIVEZZgFaBxahgYpQP9ppITSiz4Q8/LogVNA;TQAinWGMMYDC

This build works with lvl 80 exotic gear on. Anything less and you won’t hit hard enough.
Weapons: Bow is for the damage. You have great burst at max range to start with 15% vulnerability. Once they close blast them with rapid fire + pet swap.
Sword is when you get melee on you and you are taking too much damage (AKA you can’t evade around them and keep using the bow.) You have 3 evade abilities and a snare. Also any quickness with the sword #1 (I don’t use autoattack because its imperitive to dodge when you need to) will dominate a caster.

Pets: Wolf is godly for cc. Melee on you? press f2 and evade near the pet, wooo aoe fear. Hound is just as good, but roots instead. They have decent toughness so they won’t die to a gust of wind as long as you are not fighting zerg vs zerg. Use the pet CC and you will be so much better as a player. Don’t be afraid to swap these guys either. The quickness is awesome and so is when the pet comes out and pounces right on somebody. Stuns are rare, you have 2. Awesome. Don’t complain about their speed, with Signet of the hunt and hunters shot, they’ll get to the players unless its a thief full speed running away. In which case your 3k bow shots will finish him off.

Skills: QZ is amazing. Don’t be afraid to blow it for a finisher. Dead opponent is always better than an alive one. Short cooldown = USE IT.
Signet of the hunt: What can i say, its amazing now. So easy to catch up to people, easier to get away, and easier to get around map.
Protect Me: Who cares if your pets alive if you are dead? Sometimes you get rooted and you have people beating on you. Sometimes you need to finish a guy off but he’s kittenstorm of damage. Sometimes a thief is about to pop on you and you don’t want to take any damage. Swap the pet once he’s low. Really though, it kills the pet but you don’t die. Alive you > alive pet, EVERY TIME.
RaO: Stability, swiftness, fury. For a long time. Yes please, a lot of roaming fights are decided before RaO wears off. Fury gives me 55% crit chance. Crits are an extra 2k on my long range shots.

Traits: Marks for the plus to power. Range on longbow is nice, fury and might when the pet gets to 50% is also nice. Opening strike is awesome in roaming fights and keep defense for blasting one guy down super quick with a partner.
Skirmish is for the crit. Flanking is great for when they run away and your hitting them for stupid amounts of damage. Pets critting harder helps make the pet worth more than just CC. I see my dogs critting for 1.5-2k regularly. Vigor always helps rangers. Evading is good, remember that. Learning how and when to evade is the single greatest thing you can learn in GW2. I’m not kidding.
Wilderness: This boosts your survival. End regen, protection when you roll are self explanatory, see above comments on evading. The traits are for defense. Stealth is marginally useful. When coupled with shared anguish it becomes great. Also great for finishing since that first CC is ignored so you can finish stomping.

Sigils/Runes are too your taste. I run Knights gear, Valk jewelry, and a couple zerkers added in. I was a little bit short on health and wanted a higher crit damage, so I went Wurm. Chilling on weapons is always good especially as a bow ranger. Plus people run away all the time in WvWvW, chilling them ends that quickly.

That is my build. It’s not for everyone but it plays as an archer and can be really good. I don’t claim to be the best ranger ever but I do very well in small fights. I implore all rangers: Stop whining and try to get better. Especially in WvWvW. We have the tools, great ranged damage, great finishing abilities, good damage. Just TRY before you die once and write off the class because of what people write on these forums. We are not broken and we are not even close to bad.

Been playing this morning with great success. Arrows track targets at range a lot better, especially when they are running.

Haven’t tested the pet that much yet.

Run speed is amazing. Even though other classes got it too, it helps tremendously with using the bow.

To clear it up for some people, the projectile speed will not make you hit faster overall in a set time period. AKA you will fire the same amount of arrows in 10 seconds before and after the patch.

The increase in DPS will be because the faster projectiles will hit MORE OFTEN than the slow projectiles. Slow projectiles are currently having to “guess” which way the player is going and giving the player A LOT of time to move out of the path of the arrow. Faster arrows will mean less misses, thus increasing dips.

I crafted “Sights Be True” or something of that nature (The armored scale one).

It looks kitten and the mats weren’t that difficult. Actually I bought 100 scales at 15s, then they dropped to 9s over the next week. Best way to do it is just farm whichever way you can for rares to get the 50 ectos, then just sell any more ectos you get and use the money for the t6 mats. T6 mats are way too annoying to farm themselves. I did spend roughly 20g for the mats, seems like a lot but I also got it in under 10 hours playtime.

garethh is right. Pets main problem is when he stops to attack. More pet speed gives him more opportunity to “try” his attacks, which will end up in more hits by the pet.

Also SotH will enable you to not take the skirmish trait pet speed.

Off topic, I hate birds speed because of the stupid loop they have to do first. If you ever test DPS, make sure you stand a bit of a distance away (imitating a pvp environment) and calculate the pet travel time into the equation. A birds dumb swoop takes so much time to complete in a fight.

the new Sig of the hunt is going to be very hard not to use.

Also for you people saying the speed out of combat is a waste, it is amazing in WvW. If you can create a little separation and break out of combat you can get away from anything. This makes it incredibly easy to outrun zergs and small groups when you are solo. It’s also permanent, so when the horn buff wears off your still moving.

It’s also great at catching people. No longer will anything get away from us since if they get far enough away, we go to super speed and catch up.

I’m extremely excited about these two changes. In my opinion, it will remedy a lot of issues with the class.

There has been so many fights where my longbows shots miss in the beginning due to being so easy to miss or get bugged on long distance shots. Starting the fight off with another 1 or 2 hits causing 3k damage will make my toon so powerful in wvwvw. Couple that with 25% speed to catch people or keep distance, I’m not sure I won’t become the most overpowered class out there.

This is a big change, as long as the increased projectile speed does what its supposed to.

This change is going to be huge. Depending on how it works, itt will up longbow dps by about 50% on some fights. I can’t wait!

Impressive. You survived that whole time cause you kept the guy concentrating on moving for 30 seconds.

People stop and do that in all forms of pvp right?
Balance in a vacuum weeee

This is a Public Announcement for all rangers.

In the Dec 3rd patch, Opening strikes was fixed so that it activates on your first HIT with any ability. It will also go off at max range.

Tested and confirmed.

Please go back to your regularly scheduled ranger chit chat.

Please remove the Opening strikes bug from the original post. It has been fixed in the DEC 3rd patch.

Heads up people. They stealth fixed at least 1 bug.

Opening Strikes now correctly fires off your first “Hit” with any ability at any range. Tested it for the last hour with longbow in WvWvW. It is confirmed.

Check for other stealth buffs before QQing up a storm

@Holland,

It is true. Just found it when i posted it first, then have been trying it on players, mobs, and guards all over to make sure it didnt go away.

It even applies it at extreme max range (where you have to keep pressing “1” to fire)

HOLD ON!!!!!

They actually stealth fixed “Opening Strikes”

It works at all ranges now AND works with all long bow abilities.

Thats actually a really really nice fix for longbow. Starting a fight with 20% vulnerability on people, I’ve been blowing them up!

Check for more stealth fixes imo

This post bothers me. A new player is so biased by what he reads that he will give up before even giving the class a fair shake.

Undergeared lvl 60s are going to be tough no matter what class you play. Get something to 80, get some exotics, then see how you perform. Rangers are good in all but the most competitive pvp. Don’t believe everything you see on forums, and dont ever base your opinion off of what you read.

Rangers downed skills are actually pretty great if you think about it:

We have an aoe interrupt, very useful.
Pet healing you doubles your res time if it works, also we are the only class that can rez themselves WHILE doing damage when downed. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a downed 1v1 fight and won because my pet was healing me while I did damage to the other downed guy.

And the best ability: Our pets still work. You can swap pets, you can use F2, they still use their abilities. I use a wolf in wvwvw and combined with thunderclap I have kept 3 people from finishing me for over 5 seconds. I once had a guy down me, my wolf knocked him down for a lucky interrupt, then I thunderclapped, then wolf howl, swap pets to drakhound who knocked them down again to interrupt. The guy must have been screaming at his comp, it was hilarious.

EDIT: @Soja, if you use #3 when the pet is alive, he is usually going to be in combat and thus rez you for less. If the pet is dead, he rezzes out of combat and will rez you in the out of combat rate. Thats probably why you are seeing the difference in rez times.

Moddo.7105:

Well couple things, I main a thief and can kill any ranger anytime 1v1. No chance. Same on my eng and my mesmer and warrior. SB too much dependent on Cond. Well cond suck because you will be dead before you can do 1/2hp to me. Is it because I am so much more skilled than all rangers I have ever fought? Don’t think so. It has too do with 45% of dmg following me around in form of a pet.

And second thing how do you get first in WvW? Makes me wonder if you ever have been in WvW.

I bet I can beat you ~40% of the time in WvWvW if you jump me on your thief main if you actually are a really good player. If I jump you then it goes up to about ~75-80% me beating you.

That’s just ballparking, but you are either playing bad rangers or always fighting in zergs (for that extra 3 second stealth lag) if you never lose to rangers.

Ethics.4519:

Lol, so true. But to OP, if the skill starts or channels before stealth is applied, then it will continue to hit. Keep in mind stealth doesn’t mean invuln. Also, there is a thing called client/server lag. Just because you instantly pop stealth doesn’t mean it’s recognized by the server.

Exactly like how when you pop OUT of stealth, doesn’t mean it’s recognized by the player’s computer who you are now beating on. 3s stealth turns into 6s stealth in zergs, wee.

Fully geared, barrage is very useful in wvw. Mine crits for ~1200 on everyone in range every tick. That, and the snare, creates a “no fly zone” that enemies don’t want to stand in. Best part is that it continues to tick while you do other things as well.

@Samfisher, while its true that the longbow misses when enemies make jerky motions, it is an over-exaggeration to say that they have to be standing still to hit them. The longbow hits at a decent rate for any target moving unless they are zig zagging with swiftness or doing lots of evade rolls/styles. Thats when it gets frustrating and you miss 75% of your shots.

Downed system isn’t a problem. The real issue is the defeated state. Players should have to wait 30-60s after being defeated before they can be rezzed. This would:

-allow smaller groups to have time to kill a chunk of a larger force before their backline just rezzes the dead ones.
-put an increase focus on positioning and pushing back an enemy force.
-still allow rezzes if you were defeated but your team won a fight.
-increase effects of being defeated. instead of being rezzed by 4+ out of combat players putting you back in the action in 15 seconds, you would have to wait before they could start the rez, and give the enemy more time to put them in combat.

If you loot corpses and actually fight players (not just doors) you make plenty of money to spend on siege. If you do the jump puzzles (in wvwvw, so you don’t have to leave) you get free siege prints.
It’s not hard to make money in wvwvw unless you are the only person supplying siege for every keep take or defense. It is well past overkill to need precursors for buying siege.

quickness shortens stomp time, as long as you use it before you start stomping.
Rangers are good at stomping since they get a 2s quickness from swapping pets if specced. Quickness stomping can finish a target before their #2 downed ability is up. It also usually surprises enemies and can let you finish them before they finish casting their #2.

The price stinks, but i’ll have to get one for the fact that its a quiver!

While some of the ranger base mechanics should be looked at, I personally think they should focus on fixing the bugs of our class first.

Opening Strikes not working at max range.
Arrow speed/AI and “obstructed” in an open field.
Pets not being able to go up small ledges
Pets bug that stops them from attacking certain targets
etc.

With those bug fixes in place, we can actually see how good the class is and they can balance accordingly. Until then I know my damage is being held back by things outside of my control and design, and that bothers me.

I don’t want to start a flame war or anything, but maybe it’s not the ranger they don’t want. Maybe it’s you the player.

DB definitely has more players playing this week than before. Most likely because we are not getting stomped.

I have had queues to get into EB and sometimes DB borderlands for the first time in 3+ weeks.

WvWvW the longbow is great. Knockback and vulnerability is great utility. AOE is useful for snaring an area if you have people bottlenecked, and it hits people up on walls. The range is really nice when traited as well.

The one downside is the speed of the arrows makes dodging them relatively easy if the enemy concentrates on it. Thats usually not the case, but when you are hitting hard but slow, and each miss negates 1-3k damage, it hurts your dps a lot.

Here’s the laydown for your original question:

You and your gear scale up in WvW/pvp, but there is a catch. At 80, you will have 80 exotics on to get the best stats. When scaling up, it scales your gear based upon the gear level vs your level, and the rarity.

So at 45, with a full set of 45 rare gear, you will be pretty close to a full lvl 80. Probably 90%. If you stay in WvWvW and level 5 times, you will find your character LESS powerful than when you started. Because you now have a 5 level difference between char level and gear, where as the game says at 80 your gear level should be identical to your char level.

This makes low level characters be subpar in WvW, unless they really spend some dough to keep their gear up to their level. In my personal experience, it was much more effective to grind out the levels in the world and then spend money on getting a suit of 80 armor, rather than buying gear every 5 levels while pvping.

I loved the puzzle. It really was the only part of the event that I genuinely liked.

The difficulty was awesome. It’s awesome that GW2 embraces jumping as much as it does, but taking it to this level was incredible. I like to think I’m an excellent jumper, always have. This really tested me and brought my ‘A’ game out.

The joint effort was really cool. It let me simultaneously compete against the map and against my friends. The charr and norn added a new challenge to recognize which one was me. Bright yellow floppy hat dye helped with that as well.

The timed aspect was another amazing addition. It got my heart pumping and really made the success worth it. It also made the failure so frustrating especially when you fail at an early stage and have to wait. The whole dynamic was enthralling.

And the best part was that it only had a so-so reward which meant it wasn’t necessary to complete. Many of my guildies had a lot of frustrating fun attempting it, but didn’t feel washed out because they quit an hour later.

Please make another tough-as-nails jumper in the next event! The thought of getting to face the hardest stuff you can throw out and have a new one every few months will really keep me interested outside of WvWvW all the time.

-Phinz the Mountain Goat

Statements like “pet dies instantly” and “2 traitlines unusable” are no help.

In fact, they probably hurt the cause. New rangers will come to these forums, read your negativity and spread these exaggerated statements as gospel without any first hand experience.

I think the OP is correct. Rangers should look to increasing their skill at the game before giving up from 3rd party information.

But is every build viable for all the other classes? I personally don’t know, but I highly doubt they are much different then ours.

Call me casual or whatever, I am still a competitive pvper. I have not seen classes “laugh and run away” from me. In fact, I’ve had very close fights with every class I’ve run into solo. Usually my losses in such scenarios is because I did something wrong, not because I’m a ranger.
This post is a reminder that the ranger world is not a wasteland, just the ranger forums.

I would like to let Anet know that I personally have been enjoying the Ranger class so far.

I do not think we are the best class out there. I also do not think the ranger is finished, as we have many bugs that when fixed will add more to the Ranger class. The game is still very young, and I am willing to allow some time for these bugs to be fixed (especially considering that we don’t pay a monthly sub).

That being said, I enjoyed leveling up going through zones. Our power level was good and everything I have needed to do could be accomplished by the ranger class.
I have had decent success in sPvP. I do not do it very often, but when I do I have a 50% winning ratio and am in the top third of the players.
I have greatly enjoyed WvWvW. I feel like the ranger has a lot of tools to have success out there in small group pvp. I have not had too much experience in over-large zerg fights or keep takes/defences, purely because my computer can’t handle it as well as I would like.
I do know that many of my deaths from pvp are from my own mistakes and lack of knowledge of other classes, and not because of limitations of the ranger. I also think the ranger works well with other classes and can be a real asset in a wvwvw group.

This purpose of this post is to show some positivity with the ranger class. I am sure I haven’t logged as much time as many players, but I have never felt like the class has held me back or been unplayable due to bugs or balance.

Notes on my gameplay:
80 exotic weapon, 3 pieces of 80 exotic gear (in progress, sub-par pieces slowly being replaced)
Hit 80 about a month after the game came out.
8-12 hours of playtime a week.
Focus on WvWvW.
Currently specced for pet dps and survivability
Been playing pvp MMO’s since daoc.

Flame away boys and girls.

I plan on running some tests with canines, felines, and birds next week to figure out which pets will be best for me in WvWvW.
Since you’ve asked, I’ll make some vids of it to show too.

Personally I think our dps would be kind of high if pets attacked while moving. Especially when spec’ed. They do have their downfalls though; short life expectancy, buggy pathing, slow responsiveness, vulnerable to aoe.

I’m not saying they are good as is though. Against people who evade a lot, or move a lot, they are pretty bad. Right now against bad players they are awesome, against good players they are pathetic. It needs to be made more consistant across the board.

Anyway, I’ll post a link when I make it prob sunday morning.

Both are correct. It’s a great aggro dump, and the jaguar crits with every attack while stealthed.

It is one of my favorite pets as his f2 is fire and forget, instant, and doesn’t require the pet to be close to the target. So there isn’t many issues with it not firing when you want it to or the enemy walking 2 ft away and the pet missing.

I do best in small groups and especially ambushes. Keep fights are off and on since we can pew pew but without the means to reliably chase someone down/put our pet on them, we don’t do enough damage to really surprise burst.

@Ninjaknight,

That video is ridiculous. I watched a full minute and didn’t see a single person dodge roll. In fact, most of them tried slowly running away from him, or standing still and casting an aoe. Anyone can make a video of killing bad players with a sheer burst spec.

Honestly, the shortbow was fun for the bleeds and the sheer arrow count it put out with quickness up.

I run a pet based build and was using the short bow for the snare and stun (so my pet could catch up and hit with an attack). I still might since the shortbow isn’t completely bad, its just worse than it was with quickness. I might try longbow again, the punt is nice, but makes my pet have to chase them again. Vulnerability is huge, and I’ll use 5 to act as a nice snare for my pet.

It will be different for me, but not end of the world. You really can’t react to the people on the forums though.

Trahearne states that his minions were “never alive” and that’s why they can’t be influenced by Z-man.
Sounds to me like they are just constructs, or bone/flesh golems.

Just wanted to drop in and say thanks for the idea for this build. Been leveling from 70-78 last couple days using it and I’m having a blast. I love the idea of pet damage, and with the right snares + pet speed my little kitty and pup are dishing out some serious numbers.

I’m focusing on hitting 80 soon, then I’ll try out WvWvW and spvp with the spec and report back. So far though, I’m very excited.

I don’t like how the longbow cuts your damage by so much when you get closer to the enemy. Especially in normal pve, I don’t want to have to sit max distance to a mob and then have to run forward 1500 ft to loot it. I find myself waiting until 25%, then running forward while shooting, which makes me have to wait to fire 2 extra arrows since I’ve cut my damage down to 1/3. Pointless waste of time to loot a mob.

Sure I can switch weapons, but then to engage another mob at near max distance, I have to wait for the weapon timer…

I find it slightly harder to get a situational awareness read while underwater. That being said, the spear is my weapon of choice.

The best fix I’ve found though, is to go a pet based spec and I just do my thing while my pet rips apart all of the mobs. It works wonders.

Just renamed my black moa with a name taken from AlpineFlame.

Black moa = Emoa

This is good to hear. I’ve been looking into a beastmaster spec, as thats the way I like to play.

Can you fix the link though? doesn’t seem to be working for me.

EDIT: NM, got the link to work by copy and pasting

Does the stealth really help so much that it is better than an extra bleed?
Also do those pets hit much harder than a canine who has much better control? I personally love the fear/root and charge knockdown on the canines, it would be hard to give that up.

Hyena: Whoopi Goldberg

I personally love our #2 in sPvP, and in wuvwuv in small fights. Between #2 and pet abilities, you can buy yourself more time. Which is really useful if your team is around, as they “should” be able to help you out if you give them 5 seconds.

I’ve had many situations where someone downs me, and then tries for the desperate finish and overextends. If you time the #2 well enough, he’s invested too much in the finish and when you break it he will end up dying before he can pull it off again from your buds.

I understand the OP, but I don’t agree with your analysis.
For pvp, it is important for the pet to give you two things, dps and utility. On the flip side, a dead pet gives you neither of those. The pets with the great abilities have to be balanced by low defensive stats and hps, otherwise they would become easy auto-use options.

If dogs, who can f2 root, snare, and knockdown could withstand as many hits as a bear, who has much worse abilities, why would anyone use a bear? If you straight buffed defensive abilities across the board, bears would become useless, since every other pet would be able to stay alive like them, but they would have not so great abilities still.

On the same vein, if you buffed stats across the board, full beastmaster rangers would see silly increases in pets abilities.

You either deal with the pet dying and try to get as much out of it as you can. Or you choose to use the few options that you can to make the pet better. Thats part of class balance and I believe it’s working well.

I had the same problem against theives. I found that what I was missing, was dodge rolls. I learned how to evade the first burst, then use signet of stone/protect me for a little immunity, and then continue to dodge and dps.

Timing the dodge rolls was really what changed the issue for me.

I agree with @Arrowstorm and Pikafan

I’m a 35 ranger, been doing a lot of WvWvW lately. I’m trying to figure out which pets are going to work best out there.

Right now I’m rocking dual bear, since they seem to stay alive. Their HPs also helps when I use Protect Me. Everything else becomes a hassle trying to recall it fast enough when getting hit by 2-3 aoe’s. The bear doesn’t do a large amount of damage though, so I’ve been thinking of trying some other animals, but I’m not too sure where to start.

So what is everyone else using out there?