LB build?

just curious is there anyway for ranger to use LB and output a lot damage? my main is ranger, but recently I play P/P thief, and was surprise how much dmg it output, upward into 70k+ in boss fight, regular mob just die in a sec, solo champion with addon np, cause things just die too quick. wonder why LB is so weak now.

For pve no. For pvp either.

@weaponwh.9810 said:just curious is there anyway for ranger to use LB and output a lot damage? my main is ranger, but recently I play P/P thief, and was surprise how much dmg it output, upward into 70k+ in boss fight, regular mob just die in a sec, solo champion with addon np, cause things just die too quick. wonder why LB is so weak now.

Because other classes complained that soulbeasts with longbow do too much damage from range so ANET nerfed longbow when it really didn’t need to be nerfed. Axe is better for pve imo.

Ranger LB will be strong in PVE when Dragonhunter LB is strong in PVE - aka you'll be waiting until GW3. Like someone else stated, because of PVP it's been nerfed over and over. People just hate anything ranged that is strong,. PVE is all about stacking and getting buffs, hence why so many components of range weapons are weaker.

that's a shame, I mean I can solo champion mob with thief p/p but LB ranger no way. I was doing hero point runs, find it how easy to finish those challenge compare to LB ranger. last night running thief p/p I hit champion boss upward of 120k dmg, that just shocking to me. my LB at its peak hit about 20k ish.

@Abyssisis.3971 said:

@weaponwh.9810 said:just curious is there anyway for ranger to use LB and output a lot damage? my main is ranger, but recently I play P/P thief, and was surprise how much dmg it output, upward into 70k+ in boss fight, regular mob just die in a sec, solo champion with addon np, cause things just die too quick. wonder why LB is so weak now.

Ranger LB was nerfed only in World vs World. I mean that AA.

LB 2 is the highest dps power burst attack rangers have access to. HOWEVER, the sustained damage of long bow is very very low and it's other attacks are also pretty meager. This means LB is useful primairly in two situations:

-In optimised fractal groups, where over the duration of LB 2 a boss will lose most of it's health anyway. Fractal bosses tend to die fast, so fractal builds are focused on high BURST damage; this is also why power slb in fractals use sword mainhand on the other set. LB 4 is also a pretty strong CC, so it can help to switch to LB -> break bar with 4 -> burst with 2 -> boss dead.*mind that this takes a lot of knoweldge of the boss health vs dps to actually pull off in a way that could ever be better than other weapons sometimes. Realistically, very few people will gain an increased dps on LB 2 and on fewer bosses because spending any time auto attacking (or using not-LB 2) and you're better off using other weapons- this would require bosses to go down fast enough that you would not be able to do a weapon switch more than twice in a fight. Which is.... yeah it's possible on bosses that don't have phases, but you're still gonna have worse off dps before you switch to LB and if the thing is still alive after LB 2 is done then it's not worth it. GS instead of LB will be better for the majority of groups and bosses.

-In WvW (i have no idea about pvp) where you hope you will be not be countered when you use LB 2, it's largely a "if it hits it kills you" attack due to it's high burst, but if it is countered in some way then the ranger usually must switch weapon sets very fast because, especially with the aa nerf, you don't do much damage with it once LB 2 is gone.

Also keep in mind that the floating damage numbers DO NOT equal your dps, on my not even optimised dragonhunter i can reach 60k just facerolling-- but my actual dps is somewhere around 12k. The floating damage number will count all hits from the same attack, so multiple hit attacks can seem deceptively high damage- the warrior's greatsword 2 is a great example of this, technically it's a dps increase over auto attacking yes.... but not massively, it hits many times but also takes A LONG time to complete, so realistically it doesn't do huge dps. P/P theif will see a large damage number from spamming 3 due to it hitting a lot of times.

For PVE or PVP I have no opinion as my ranger is specifically built for WvW. After the latest GS nerf I needed to make up damage somewhere so I traited the marksmen line for LB use. I have notice a significant increase in DPS, specifically LB5 Barrage. When used correctly, it can be devastating, especially if you have 2 rangers doing it. Throw a Sic em' in there and if you attacked right, no opponent will be able to get away. Have 2 or 3 rangers drop it on a zerg and you would be surprised just how much it can break the group up, or at very least down the tail following behind it. Personally, I think we are even better than arrowcarts now!

Off topic; since I had to trait marksmen, I sacrificed Beastmastery, but after the GS nerf it became the obvious choice. That said, in my experience it seems the GS does better without the trait line. Anyone else notice this?