PvP things to try out

I used to be a pretty avid PvP player and always had a great time making (sometimes some pretty obscure) ranger builds work. I often started with extremes just to see what could happen and then tweaked the builds to make them viable. Unfortunately, I am unable to play the game at the moment but figured I would throw out some ideas.

Full disclaimer: I haven't played for 15 months and therefore can't understand the full meta or how skills/traits really behave (can't ever fully trust the tool tips).

Things to try:

• Diviner's amulet + runes with boon duration (surging runes?)

  • or use moa stance

    • with traits in Nature magic you have 100% boon duration.

  • keep that in mind for might stacking on builds

    • With reduced dagger CD if you land your dagger leaps you have permanent quickness in dagger.

    • boon duration would also help with protection on dodge from WS which also goes well with the protection healing us thing (is that real?)

• Soulbeast + frost trap + leap spams = permanent frost aura (if frost aura still stacks in duration for a bit - did they change that?)

• Muddy terrain. One of my all time favorite skills before they changed its 20s duration. Fun fact: can be cast behind you. Also decent for knock back -> immob. Anyway! Muddy terrain has a pulsing slow now!!!! Wish I could play for this. 240 aoe covers most small nodes (covers all of forest nodes I believe). With wilderness knowledge this 10s pulsing aoe has a 20's CD. With Soften the Fall lesser muddy terrain (another 10s long pulsing aoe) casts on heal. They should share separate CDs. Ergo, when 1v1ing on point. You'd have permanent pulsing slow on your enemy (with a 20's cd heal, If Wilderness Knowledge affects lesser muddy terrain. Or you take an expertise amulet like viper making the 1s pulse 1.25s - allowing it to be permanent with 25s cd heal).

  • potentially a sweet perk for soulbeast because of soulbeasts access to quickness. When fighting druids that might have muddy terrain you'd be able to have more quickness to counteract the permanent slow.

  • also if lesser muddy terrain counts as a survival skill, then your health removes 2 condis. With bear stance that's an initial 4 condis dropped immediately (curious to know If that works and if you'd get the extra heals from those condis cleared).

• beast mode: Might stacking with RaO and longbow -> stealth -> swap Gs with intelligence sigil -> maul cancel for attack of opportunity -> use it with worldly impact. Should be a decent damage number.

You won't be slaying top tier with these (probably) but it might help get some gears turning? Always used to help me out to run some weird stuff like this. Let me know what you think!

Good to hear from you Eurantien! I was discussing the permanent slow on point via StF and MT previously, I also cannot play atm but am really excited about the prospect of using that in PvP to have perma-slow on point, it's a pretty massive damage reduction.

With 100% boon duration

SoR gives 4s of resistance to pet. Using runes of the revenant you get 4s on heal use.Using heal as one you get 4s of resistance from the pet.Using Fresh reinforcements you get 4s of resistance from your pet.From a support beast mode pet you get 6s from F3

That's 18s of resistance.With Essence of speedYou get extra 2s every 5s. You can get at least 2 procs of this boosting your resistance to 22s. If you time it right you get a third 2s from essence of speed.Now that's 24s of resistance.With beast mastery your heal is a 20's CD.Cast that again and your have 4s from rune proc and 4s from the heal boosting it up on yourself in beast mode.That's 32sAnother essence of speed proc. That's 34s

Then you gotta wait 6s.But then you could start to do about that same thing again.

I can't test any of this, but someone should!

Crazy regen

• protection 339hp/s
• regeneration 130 hp/s
• natural healing 125 hp/s
• SoR 62 hp/s= 656 hp/sWith 1k healing power
• Protection 586 hp/s
• regeneration 255 hp/s
• natural healing 145 hp/s
• SoR 122 hp/s= 1187 hp/s

If supportive pets heal boost affects youNo healing power = 820 hp/sHealing power at 1k = 1463 hp/s

Someone try these out or just throw some feedback at me!

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For more boon duration, you might wanna try a versatile pet since it gives 225 concentration along with the 200 vitality.

Good to see you again Eurantien. This is the kinda thing I'm loving about the Soulbeast, it lends it self to a wide variety of good builds. I love theorycrafting, lol.

Well just in general, Spellbreaker is "meta defining" right now. With how good they are at keeping a target boonless with their Dagger and traits/abilities in general, I'd be worried that you'd lose your Resistance before you can even start to play around with combinations with it.

Then again, there won't always be a Spellbreaker around to worry about. I'm very, very interested in playing with the boon ideas in WvW though.

You have the right idea about Soften the Fall and Wilderness Knowledge. WS/NM/Druid is the "meta" for Druid right now with Troll Unguent removing 4 condis, the boon stacking focus lost it's luster when they changed the BM Quickness trait to cast lesser QZ with no more might stacking.

Bear Stance is strong utility but it's a weak heal overall unfortunately. It's not good with resetting fights and right now swapping in and out of Beastmode is a bit clunky so if you are only running 1 pet with self Support/Sustain it can be hard to access those skills and rely on them.

I can't test any of the specific stuff until after I get back from my vacation next weekend or I would.

Last thing though.Core Ranger:You would LOVE it right now. With the Survival changes and Soften the Fall + Lesser QZ in BM, you don't need to rely on Druid for the condi cleansing or survivability anymore. Tons of kiting potential and good mobility too. It's AMAZING how well ANet did with the core Ranger tweaks.

@Eurantien.4632 said:Crazy regen

• protection 339hp/s
• regeneration 130 hp/s
• natural healing 125 hp/s
• SoR 62 hp/s= 656 hp/sWith 1k healing power
• Protection 586 hp/s
• regeneration 255 hp/s
• natural healing 145 hp/s
• SoR 122 hp/s= 1187 hp/s

If supportive pets heal boost affects youNo healing power = 820 hp/sHealing power at 1k = 1463 hp/s

Someone try these out or just throw some feedback at me!

First of all good to have you back Eurantien. I always took a similiar approach when trying out new builds.

A trait that might fly under your radar is Predators Cunning. The healing power scaling isn't that great but it can give you massive heals with a poison condi build since there is no ICD. Just shortbow 2 will proc it 5 times healing you for 850 (and dealing the same as unblockable dmg). Same when using sword 3 and dagger 4 to heal while evading. If you hit Viper's Nest on a group of people it is easily heals in the range of 3k+. Along with the stuff you mentioned this is really high sustain.

Nice stuff!

@jcbroe.4329 there is a lot of potential with core ranger right now. I keep wanting to dip into 3 core trait lines when theory crafting haha.

It's exciting with all the new stuff. I didn't realize till a couple of days ago there was even a pre - PoF balance update which makes this all extra exciting for me. Doesn't beat playing and trying things out though!

Predators Cunning is a very tempting trait but I think it's a hard one to theory craft with. Same as the elite stance being able to crit and proc things.

@ the jacaranda. Was overlooking this one. Looks powerful. Those call lightning numbers are frighteningly high!

I run some of the strongest builds on ranger atm. I don't have PoF, so I can't really test out the Soulbeast stuff personally, but I was actually theorycrafting a perma resistance Soulbeast build for fun last week.

100% boon duration build is definitely one of the strongest melee builds on ranger. The regen spec you talked about I use on core/druid. I can fight up to 4 people at once on point depending on if I have stab or not.

The perma slow is good. My build uses Soften the Fall. I tried taking double Muddy Terrain but the slow wasn't as noticeable as I was hoping. Condi duration helps out with this a lot. In general though, it doesn't have THAT big of an effect as I was initially hoping for. Though, your experiences may be different.

Glad to have you back mate :)

I'm only gonna be lurking for the time being. I won't be "back" back for quite some time.

I think I'd have to start with this and go from here if I was playing.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQJARTnUqA9rg1CCesActglJB7JIcB+YNBgGwEIf3+bTup0i3nTL-jZBHABAcBAM4BAU++DifMA8vMAA

Permanent protection.Permanent quickness.Decent condi clear.656 hp/s when in beast mode.Maybe shift that downight to 531 hp/s and take 2 handed training for fury.

From here id evaluate jacaranda vs smoke scale and so on.

Would love to hear of anyone taking 100% boon duration and getting permanent quickness with just sword and dodges with striders defense.

Also the improved skirmishing fury GM to compensate for this amulets lack of precision.

i tried out the nature magic and even the menders thing. i honestly think it's not worth investing into creating any sort of ''bunker''. u could definately make one closer resembling a bruiser with protection duration stacking now, given spellbreakers have opted for a more dueling role rather then massive boonrip. but even then 1 v 2''ing is incredibly hard to pull off u could stay alive in any 1 v 1 for an extended period of time sure but the stances are not worth taking in pvp. u could do some jacarande healing and resistance spam but druid does a better job at support.

u'd bassically be a semi tank with no support abilities and no damage.

i'd go for balouga's sniper soulbeast build or go the condi soulbeast route. iboga is so powerfull u can take nature magic and take nature magic and have wilderniss surival with refined toxins be enough. iboga+forest spider or iboga+carrion devourer or iboga+bristback.

Sorry to revive an old thread but novel ideas like these get me excited and I just stumbled upon it. This combo is almost impossible to get to work in a real game with all the delay, telegraphs, and non moving spirits, but is fun to know it exists. Storm spirit+Mesmer runes+trait (moment of clarity I think, it's whatever increases daze durations)= something like an 8 second daze.

@"Eurantien.4632" said:Crazy regen

• protection 339hp/s
• regeneration 130 hp/s
• natural healing 125 hp/s
• SoR 62 hp/s= 656 hp/sWith 1k healing power
• Protection 586 hp/s
• regeneration 255 hp/s
• natural healing 145 hp/s
• SoR 122 hp/s= 1187 hp/s

If supportive pets heal boost affects youNo healing power = 820 hp/sHealing power at 1k = 1463 hp/s

Someone try these out or just throw some feedback at me!

No they got "fixed" means they only give a boost to allies. I wanna try the regen though with marshal gear for open world, i wanna know how undying i really am with it^^