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Can I use LB/GS ranger in the low/mid fractals?


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I do great with it at open world PvE but now I'm going to craft new gear and its kinda big decision with LB/GS that I'm more comfortable or condi build, so I would hope to hear the advice from the more experienced players.Care that its only low and may be mid only, not high level.

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I usually state "no longbow rangers" in my LFGs regardless of content. T1 fractals, Strikes, Dungeons... pretty much everything.I wouldnt care what wacky sub-optimal build you brought to my team. Condi Ranger is certainly viable for most content.But I find excluding Longbow Rangers leaves me with people who at least know how to stack and keeps me from getting the absolute worst of the playerbase on my team. Anything else I have all the patience in the world for.

FYI- Longbow(on ranger) is a power weapon. If you must play bow on your condi-ranger, shortbow is much more effective.

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@Murshid.9854 said:I do great with it at open world PvE but now I'm going to craft new gear and its kinda big decision with LB/GS that I'm more comfortable or condi build, so I would hope to hear the advice from the more experienced players.

My first advice:No matter how comfortable you feel, open world in nearly any area is absolutely no metric for build usefulness or aptitude. Repeat after me: open world performance is absolutely irrelevant. That said, it is always beneficial to stick to things one knows.

Second advice:Know what weapons of your class are for which type of damage, longbow and greatsword on ranger are both power weapons. The most obvious give away is usually the presence or lack of presence of damage conditions on weapons. Neither of the 2 weapons has any, as such they are worthless for condi builds.

Third advice:Overall power builds are preferred for fractals. Which would benefit both greatsword and longbow.

@Murshid.9854 said:Care that its only low and may be mid only, not high level.

Low and Mid tier fractals are not to demanding, a proper power build setup should work just fine. Ideally you want to start working on understanding game mechanics like stacking and such. Standing half a mile behind the group and pew pew longbow-range-poking at enemies is not how this game is designed, but will work in T1 and T2 fractals.

The current meta fractal build for ranger, Power Soulbeast (https://discretize.eu/builds/ranger/power-soulbeast), uses greatsword and sword+axe. You could drop the sword+axe and use longbow for a significant dps loss and/or use the open world build (https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Ranger_-_Longbow_Beastmastery) for fractals.

Almost anything works in T1+2, so go with something you are comfortable with, but keep in mind that this might change as you progress into more difficult content. It might be advisable to get a general understanding of how your class gets played at the top end to be able to work towards that goal.

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Power GS/LB does work quite decently (though not optimally) if you learn to rotate between them properly. Though longbow is a ranged weapon, you'll want to try to stay close to boss for boons even during longbow-part of the rota. The burst is essentially lb5-> lb4 (for Twice as Vicious)->Sic 'Em -> lb2 -> gs2 -> gs5 -> gs2 -> F3 and then auto+gs2 spam 'til you can swap to longbow to do it again when Sic 'Em! comes off-CD.

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@Murshid.9854 said:I do great with it at open world PvE but now I'm going to craft new gear and its kinda big decision with LB/GS that I'm more comfortable or condi build, so I would hope to hear the advice from the more experienced players.Care that its only low and may be mid only, not high level.

If you are starting out towards fractals, you are entering a new world in GW2. The world of organized instanced PvE content. That part of the game is heavily governed by meta builds, benchmarks and optimization. Now Kitty has shown you how to make a LB/GS soulbeast build work in that environment, and as long as you dont join highend speedrun groups, you will do absolutely fine with that. Though, you might want to hide your lb until the fight starts ;) and never, absolutely NEVER stay on range with your lb. GW2 group content is all about stacking as tightly together as each mechanic allows, usually clustered around the boss. If you are staying range, then you dont get heals, you dont get boons, and you will get kicked even from t1 fractals, because nothing is more annoying than someone not stacking properly in gw2. It causes all amounts of different problems and no matter if you are a lb soulbeast or a rifle deadeye or a GS chrono, stay stacked if you arent doing a special boss mechanic.

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Yea, LB/GS is definitely fine for most fractals. As long as you're not using your knockbacks on enemies without breakbars, it's not bad at all.

Your DPS will be lower, but honestly it's not really much of an issue for the group overall. Now, if everyone in your group is running a similar sort of sub-optimal personal DPS build and you don't have things like alacrity/banners/etc. then you will see the effect, but for most of lower to mid tier fractals, the most important thing is just knowing how to handle the basic mechanics of the fights.

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You'd generally want to run either lb or gs + sword/axe for optimal damage. Longbow is one of the strongest power weapon on ranger, precasting lb5 alongside lb4 + 2 provides great CC/ burst dps. However you only see it in high end record video and is not widely used otherwise. Since after the use of its burst the damage ramp down pretty fast.

For getting into fractals, i'd recommend crafting sword/axe as your base weapons and then you can choose to either use GS or LB.

A clever use of your skills which pretty much comes down to CCed enemy take +50% increased damage is what will most likely make the difference of whether you're doing good damage or not. So as you can imagine you want to use your highest damage pririoty skills when the boss is CCed.

With that said, it means that sometimes adding extra auto attacks to throw in axe 4 + 5 when the unit is CCed will result in higher damage. So whether Longbow is viable or not will pretty much result in how many breakbear you have before the boss phases and on your team ability to fast CC.

To give you an example. You start skorvald (100CM boss 1) the CC bar is available straight away, you pop all your cooldowns, precast lb 5 (fight starts) now comes the CC bar, you use lb 4 into lb 2 into axe 5 to get the most out of the CC bar. Now if when you do lb 4, the boss is still not CCed by then what you would want to do is pretty much fill in auto attacks before using your high dps skills. Generally with beginner groups, breakbear are not broken instantly and GS will results in more damage overall since GS aa (auto attacks) are greater than lb aa at short range.

Lady kitty has a lot of builds using various weapons on ranger, you can check out the DPS report and more specifically the graph damage to have a better understanding of how each weapon deals damage. As well as just watch the video to see how the build is used I guess.

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