Did you know that on top of this blog, there's also a Berserkerkitten Youtube channel, Berserkerkitten podcasts, gameplay videos and articles spread over what must be half a dozen websites and magazines now? It's funny when you think about it. That name was a joke about my cat and the idea for a webcomic, which, unfortunately, never happened. Now it's a trademark of sorts, it's our "business", a huge collection of articles, posts and videos about games, reptiles and random crap. It's nothing massive or groundbreaking, nothing like the Yogscast or Totalbiscuit, but... who knows what the future might bring? One fun new side project is our contribution to Letsplaysomegames.de and I'm also a ghostwriter of sorts at demonews.de
None of that stuff is making us rich, but ya gotta start somewhere. WE ARE BERSERKERKITTEN! RAWR! :P
We also dare to be ugly and stupid.
Playing Metroid Prime Trilogy on the PC with rodent+keyboard works surprisingly well. It doesn't handle like a proper PC shooter, the controls are a bit awkward, but it beats wiggling that gay little stick at the screen all the time. Most of all, it looks pretty damn awesome, what with the improved visuals and all. I really gotta share some video footage ASAP.
Still enjoying Black Ops 2, too. Starting to get the hang of it. Which, unfortunately, comes with the added bonus of being accused of "hacking". I hate how cheaters on CoD are generally referred to as hackers. What a load of shit! People using wallhacks and aimbots are cheating scumbags, who depend on 3rd party tools to score their kills, but the only hackers are the Russian guys who create and sell (!) these tools in the first place.
I had much better matches than this one.
The one thing that ruins the fun right now is everyone's paranoia about the so-called "lag compensation", which is supposed to even out the ping ratios between players with varying connection quality. People describe a weird phenomenon where they run around a corner, spot an enemy, shoot and die the same second. And on the kill cam it supposedly looks like they ran straight towards the enemy player for at least a whole second and the other guy shoots first. I have seen youtube videos of people trying to prove the whole thing, but the difference between live action and killcam is minute to non-existent.
But many players insist that this is not just a techno-placebo and actively ruins their fun. I don't know about this, I think it's being massively overblown and I could only care less, if people would stop whining about it. That's the problem with competitive games and the people who play it. If you beat them, it's because you cheat, because you're a [insert weapon here] noob, because they were typing or some other shit, but it's never because you're the better player. Right now it's because of lag compensation. The game is a lot more fun when you ignore the chat. Well... which game isn't?
Oh yeah, I also turned 31. My significant other cooked me some dinner, which - to my great surprise - was fantastic. There was also a case, which contained 8 cans of Guinness and... well, I'm not feeling so good right now. Hehe!
The guild has sent me a whole ton of Cake on GW2, along with a Skritt pet, who is supposed to help me acquire more loot. He had already found a copper coin by the time he got stuffed in my mailbox. His name is Fernando, apparently. I bet he sports a fake French accent and dreams about his own hair salon.
There's also the "family" back in Germany. My old man contacting me for the first time since August. By email. "Sorry, I was really busy and stuff kept coming up." Yeah, I hate when so much stuff comes up, I just can't take five minutes to write a fucking email for the quarter of a fucking year! And my brother sent a little bday greeting on Facebook. "By the way, your grandmother has been in hospital for two weeks now." Oh really? Why? What's going on? If it wasn't for my birthday, you wouldn't have told me at all and now I know two weeks after? Gee, thanks! People always tell me they couldn't leave their country, their friends and families, move to a foreign place and all that. Trust me, if you had a family like mine, you'd die to be as far away as somehow possible!
Still no midlife crisis, I think. No grey hair so far, either. Still got all my teeth. The fact that I'm doing something I love for money and doing someone I love for the fun of it, as well as being able to spend 20something hours a day playing online games and kicking the ass of the younger generation, it's all stuff I always wanted to do. No time to sit back and wonder, "What have I done with my life? Where am I going?"
I'm still worried about every single bill, of course. Rent is due again in another month and right now I don't know when I'll get my next paid work order. The downside to self-employment. But everybody struggles these days.
I'll admit I'm spending more time accepting the less pleasant facts of life. Ageing. There's probably gonna be a point in life, where my reaction time will be slower than that of many younger gamers, where I'll end up losing a shootout I would have won when I was younger. Then again, I'll be more experienced, more patient, won't make as many mistakes. What a stupid thing to think about at my age! We should all be lucky like Patrick Stewart. He was born a disturbingly charismatic 50 year old. Really, he came out just like that and told bedtime stories to all the other babies in his soothing voice. And he just says like that. Forever. Amazing shit!
Hey, when I die, can we please put "I'll be back!" on the headstone? Yeah... that'd be great, thanks!
In other news, I may have ruined a friend's life. By accident. I mentioned Second Life and somehow I must have made it sound cool. It really isn't. Quick reminder:
It's the one game in this universe, which lets you spend real money to equip your avatar with a dragon vagina. With 38 states and functions. Or a canine dick. So Mr. Wolf here can follow his feral instincts when he comes across a hydrant. Because everybody loves peeing on things! And thanks to Second Life, we no longer need to leave the house to do so! Yaaaay! :P
Oh, speaking of stupid shit on the internet: You're probably familiar with stupid websites, which require you to post a birth date to "prove" you're 18. My fellow Germans have pushed this nonsense to a whole new level: If you want to watch videos rated 16+, such as gameplay footage, movie trailers and the like, most German websites now tell you to wait until 11pm. The video refuses to play any earlier than that.
But the Oscar of internet security definitely goes to Dell! If you order a PC on their official website, you have to tick a checkbox, which makes you promise that you are not going to use your new computer to plan a terrorist attack! Genius! I bet that's how they caught Bin Laden.
First of all, I'm still alive. This blog has been inactive for much longer than usual, due to shitloads of work (yay!) and way too many great games and friends who want to play them (boo!... kinda). So yeah... check this out:
This might make me a bad person, but I grew up on Sega and never cared much for Nintendo. But then I noticed how well old Gamecube and even Wii games can be emulated today. The Youtube video doesn't really do this game any justice - I can run F Zero GX on 1080p with antialiasing, multisampling and all that fancy graphical shit, which makes jaggies disappear and textures a little less blurry. Not only does the whole thing look a LOT better than on the original hardware, but I have to actually limit the maximum FPS or the game ends up running at 200% its original speed. That's not how you want to play F Zero, trust me.
I'm not a huge fan of the Wii, let alone the retarded Wiimote controls, but since that emulator is able to mimic said awful control scheme with a mouse, I could play the Metroid Prime trilogy with mouse+keyboard, the way god intended FPS games to be played. In full HD, which the actual Wii cannot pull off. On the nice, big LED screen. Oooo the temptation!
But wait, there is more:
Black Ops 2. I wasn't going to buy it. Ever. And I didn't. But a friend gave it to me for free. The nice things people do for you when you're a witty writer. In fact, I've cranked out a nice review for him in return. I guess that makes me a ghost writer. I compared the AI baddies to Imperial stormtroopers and in a direct comparison to boobs, the stunning scripted events on Black Ops 2 fall short by quite a bit. It's a shame I'll never see my name and face under such a kickass article, but I love my free game and I'm having waaaay too much fun with it!
Most importantly, though, there's still Guild Wars 2. The game I thought I'd get bored of after 2-4 weeks tops. Holy fuck, the amounts of content and actual game play I keep getting on there for zero monthly fees!
The game looks *that* good!
A little while back, there was the kickass Halloween event, which included a scavenger hunt for a really cool item reward, a mini dungeon, an epic boss battle, costume brawls and some minigames and fun activities on top of all that. Compare that to hunting down a certain headless horseman and the world's most popular MMO falls rather short after all those years.
Oh and I got a nice new weapon for Halloween, as well. In fact, I'm using that one and ONLY that one now. For good. Me and my weapon. Happily ever after.
BWAHAHAHA! *foams*
There was also the incredibly laggy, frustrating, dull, not so cool event, which introduced a new area to the game. Which wasn't all that great in itself, sure, but it brought a whole new lot of fun little mini dungeons, the so-called 'fractals' with it. Rather than fighting a whole lot of ludicrously powerful enemies and respawn-zerging bosses like in the regular dungeons (which are being fixed right now), players have to beat clever dungeon mechanisms and puzzles for the win.
For instance, there is one fractal, where the group fights its way through a whole lot of ice and snow, taking more and more damage over time as they get colder and colder. Players need to light fires on the way and warm up to remove the debuff and avoid an icy death. Problem is, the fire also attracts all kinds of freezing baddies, so while a certain amount of warmth is necessary to survive, you'll inevitably get in a lot of trouble while hanging around for too long. Each fractal features gimmicks like that, which you have to figure out and defeat on the go. The more complicated ones involve stuff such as killing enemies with a massive hammer, which kills the wielder after a certain amount of time and deals rather lousy damage. Each kill charges up a special attack, which is required to break magical seals. You have to break all the seals in order to free a giant, who is being held by them. Players have to take turns using the hammer if they want to avoid getting killed by its debuff. It sounds atrocious, but our fun little guild group is doing a rather amazing job getting through all of that stuff.
As I mentioned earlier, the regular dungeons are also being rebalanced and re-tuned. I still don't like them a whole lot, but there are some truly great moments in some of them. The final boss in one dungeon crushes the party with flaming boulders. The group needs to seek shelter behind a magical barrier, then grab the boulders' searing chunks to throw them back at the boss, all whilst dodging more boulders and taking fire damage from the hot rocks. This is what it looks like:
So now I'm working on F Zero unlocks with Claire, prestige levels on Black Ops, fractal levels with the guild and as if that wasn't stressful enough, there's still Mass Effect 3. Claire is officially hooked on that game's online multiplayer and she's making some nice progress. She started off being rather slow and clueless, but now we're taking down wave after waver after wave of bad guys without much trouble. Problem is, she's getting waaaaay too addicted to the whole thing.
Duo with Claire on ME3
She has never played any shooters on a PC before, the whole thing feels new and exciting to her, but now that she's scoring all the super-fast kills and knows how to aim for the head and all that... well, I think we need to step it up a notch and get her on Black Ops 2. The game is hideously expensive and I don't think we can get her that game anytime soon, but it's definitely something to aim for. Because fighting large waves of AI-controlled aliens is nice and fun, but you haven't truly experienced multiplayer shooters until you've shot a real, whiny 12 year old, who questions your sexual orientation on voice chat.
Guardians are insanely versatile, even for a GW2 class. A staff-wielding guardian can support a group with some really nice healing magic. Add an alternate weapon set that utilizes shields and you get one hell of a support character for your dungeon group. Or spec into those fun, floaty, ethereal weapons! With the right traits they last twice as long, won't be destroyed upon firing off their special abilities and they cannot be harmed in wvw. And you don't know real fun until you get chased around the battlefield by a ghostly sword, hammer and shield, which cut you up, knock you down and inflict vulnerability on you, respectively. Because a guardian can summon three of those suckers all at the same time!
But I'm not gonna teach you how to protect a bunch of pussies or how to make invulnerable pets do all the dirty work for you. I'm gonna teach you how to fight like a man! Up close and personal.
You might remember my guide on manly rangers, so for the sake of continuity I'm gonna demonstrate a few minutes of quick Orr solo farming, Grenth area:
This is how my build works. If you disagree with the play style, the abilities or anything else on there, move along. If you like the general idea of this build, feel free to copy, customize and match your personal preference and style. All gear, runes, sigils etc. are visible at the beginning of the video, you might wanna pause in order to see each individual item if you care for that sort of thing. This guide will explain what I'm using and how and why I'm doing so.
Overview - The Manly Guardian
At level 80 and in full exotic berserker gear, this build has a pretty small ~11k health pool. That's all a good player needs, since you get an aegis, regeneration and a powerful self-heal to keep you alive. Contrary to what a bunch of self-proclaimed pros might say, this is also a viable build for dungeons. Check my youtube channel for zero death dungeon footage.
You will need to learn when to back the fuck off and switch to ranged combat, how to predict and evade the more powerful enemy attacks and to generally stay away from those red circles. Heck, you should know these things when playing any class, but screwing up with a small health pool is just that much more punishing. You've been warned.
This build utilizes greatswords, sceptres and shields.
Pros
+ High AoE damage
+ 1200 range on sceptre attacks (as opposed to 900 range axe attacks on rangers etc.)
+ Sceptre root attack and shield punt for crowd control
+ Rooting, punting and teleporting allows you to be a major dick in pvp
+ For some fucked up reason, every dungeon group wants guardians and warriors
+ Super easy melee mob-tagging
Cons
- Your health pool is shit
- Small, easy battles can all be won just by mashing '2'
- Groups expect you to call targets. Which isn't a big deal, but if you hate it... well, sucks to be you.
- Sceptres are gay. Like, really gay. Sir Elton John gay.
Dem Traits - This is how you spec
This is where your trait points go. Why? Read on!
Zeal gets maxed out all the way. This is the law! Not only are we going for maximum power, but there are three nice traits we want from this thing:
1. Fiery Wrath: Ideally, our enemies will be burning at all times, so 10% extra damage to burning baddies is a huge plus.
2. Greatsword Power: 5% more greatsword damage may not sound like much, but with fiery wrath that's already 15% extra against burning foes.
3. Zealous Blade: Our health pool is shit, zealous blade alleviates that to some extent by granting a healing effect to all our greatsword attacks. Must-have!
The Zeal traitline also buffs our symbol of wrath a bit (no. 4 on greatsword), which isn't too shabby, but nothing insanely great, either.
Next trait line to max out is Radiance. One weakness of our full berserker spec is the lower crit rate you get when compared to a rampager build. The 300 extra precision from Radiance boosts our crit chance to an acceptable 51% at level 80. Traits:
1. Searing Flames. Removing a boon whenever you inflict burning to an enemy is more useful in wvw, but all the alternatives are worse. Shimmering Defense is alright for pve.
2. Inscribed Removal: Poison and burning can be a real bitch on a low health pool. This build uses two signets, giving us two buttons to remove such nasty conditions. Take it!
3. Perfect Inscriptions: We wanna get as much power as possible out of our Bane Signet, so this is a must.
This trait line allows us to spam Virtue of Justice, as it automatically renews itself whenever we kill a baddie. It also blinds foes around us now and we'll deal extra damage to enemies suffering from conditions. SO much extra damage!
The final ten points go to Valor. Why? Extra crit damage. Meditation Mastery is an okay trait, which allows us to teleport towards foes a little faster. The aegies renewal on 50% health is a nice addition.
So, why don't we put 30 points into Valor for max crit damage? Mostly, because the rest of the trait line is shit. They all involve shields, maces, hammers and other stuff, which is completely irrelevant to our fighting style. Some extra crit damage alone won't do if we don't have the traits to support our fighting style. 30 points on Virtues is out of the question, as it centers around activating all your damn virtues over and over again, meaning you have to manage and monitor three more abilities. Bleh!
30 points on Honor is a valid possibility in order to raise our rather lousy health cap and get the 20% cooldown bonus for two-handed attacks. This trait line also allows us to increase the size and duration of Signet of Wrath.
That said, I never felt that I really *needed* a 20% cooldown reduction on my greatsword attacks, where the most powerful move can be used every ten seconds anyway. A 2 seconds speedup isn't a whole lot and freebies such as "heal allies at the end of a dodge roll" isn't all that great. And extra damage on low energy rather than extra damage vs enemies with conditions? WAY too complicated. If you spec into this, you'll either lose all your other greatsword buffs or you'll royally gimp your Virtue of Justice. And not being able to remove boons is a bad thing in dungeons.
Dem Skillz - Picking the right shit for epic hurtage - Healing: Signet of Resolve. Auto-curing conditions every ten seconds is insanely helpful, and so is healing over 8k out of 11k health. The 40s cooldown might sound harsh, but if your virtues and dodging abilities can't keep you alive for that long, then this build isn't for you, anyway.
- 1st utility: Judge's Intervention. AoE burning is good. Removes boons, allows us to deal 10% extra damage, allows us to teleport an insane distance right in front of an enemy. Try it against fleeing players in wvw, it's hilarious!
- 2nd utility: Bane Signet. We want maximum damage, therefore we want power, bane signet grants power and requires no management at all. Can be used for CC if necessary (knockdown). In this spec, triggering bane signet also removes nasty conditions like bleeding, poison, burning etc. - 3rd utility: "Save Yourselves!" An excellent oshi-button. Provides absolutely every boon there is, breaks stun, lets you run away, heals you a little bit... it's the one thing to keep you alive when shit goes sideways and your signet of resolve isn't ready. If you're feeling super badass and you don't believe in skills for additional survivability, replace with a signet of choice for more passive damage bonuses.
- Elite: Mistfire Wolf. I'm not even fucking kidding. Frankly, all guardian elite skills are shit from a DPS perspective. The special attacks on that tome leave much to be desired, you don't want supportive elite spells and temporary invulnerability may be nice, but it doesn't usually last long enough to do you any good. To me, the wolf is vastly underrated and provides for some nice extra damage. Alternatively, fill with a racial elite you like or pick one of the guardian class elites if you disagree with me.
Dat Gear - Wearing the right shtoof to bring the pain
We're going for maximum damage here, so berserker in absolutely every slot is the way to go. Maximum crit damage. If you're a cheap bastard, you can go for rampager stuff and boost your crit rate to something around the high sixties, but the added condition damage won't help you much. Burning is nice and all, but you're not stacking 20+ bleeds and poison, so this stat is mostly wasted on you.
If you desire greater survivability, you'll want Valkyrie gear, but that's not in the spirit of this build. If played right, full berserker can survive dungeons just fine.
For runes, you can go with just about anything that raises your power and crit damage. In the example video, I'm going with Baelfire stuff, because the flame nova and added burning duration go well with the guardian's abilities. If you can't be bothered to farm tokens, it's perfectly fine to get superior runes off the TP, which complement this build (burning, crit damage, power, you get the idea). Divinity Runes aren't worth it unless you're shitting gold. 12% extra crit damage as opposed to the 9% from other rune sets are barely noticeable and the +60 to all stats isn't really all that useful.
As for weapon sigils, you'll want a Superior Sigil of Strength on your greatsword. Your basic greatsword attack grants you might on every third strike, which stacks nicely with the Strength Rune procs and can quickly result in 10+ might stacks when fighting multiple enemies.
Your sceptre gets Superior Sigil of Flame. A 30% chance for an extra flame AoE attack on each crit is nice to have, looks cool and procs a whole lot.
The shield gets upgraded with a Superior Sigil of Bloodlust. Try and get the 25 ranged kills out of the way ASAP to benefit from 250 extra points of power. The power bonus persists even when you switch back to your sword, resulting in over 3850 attack power, not counting possible might stacks.
Play Style - PvE
For quick and easy tagging of large mob groups and hogging of foes, use your teleport ability (Judge's Intervention) to reach baddies halfway across the map within the blink of an eye. Be sure you can fucking handle them! Spam Virtue of Justice for greater flame damage and AoE blindness - killing an enemy instantly resets its CD, anyway! Your greatsword attacks are self-explanatory. If you need help on how to spam those, go back to Barbie Horse Adventures!
In case of trouble, try to get away using "Save Yourselves!". It'll provide a light HoT and get you out of most hairy situations. Judge's Intervention can also be used as an escape mechanism when used at a weaker, far away baddie. Save your healing signet until the last possible moment. Wasting at 60% health can mean a quick death, whilst waiting for the 40s cooldown to pass.
When melee doesn't seem safe, use your sceptre. You can cc enemies and bind them, followed directly by your ground-targeted ranged AoE for large amounts of damage. The AI is incredibly lousy at countering basic circle-strafing, so keep running circles around the masses, spam your special attacks and take them down one at a time. This also works well against veteran baddies and most bosses. Most weaker bosses can barely out-DPS your regeneration, so attacking them in melee is often the lazier, easier option. Just dodge those stomps, club attacks and other predictable, nasty shit! You can easily melee large bosses like Gronk if you time your dodge moves right.
Play Style - WvW
1200 range sceptre attacks and ranged AoEs for racking up lame, easy zerg kills, no surprises there. 1on1 melee situations are usually cake. Close in with your leap, start whirling around like the fucking morons most guardians are anyway, "Save Yourselves" to break CC, trigger Bane Signet to remove conditions and to CC your opponent some more, switch to your sceptre to root the fucker when he runs off and use Judge's Intervention to teleport after him if he gets away. An average player won't be able to handle you - including most other guardians, because they tend to suck.
You have enough CC, gap closers and condition-removing abilities to handle casters and rangers. Use your brain, maintain your cool, keep those fuckers burning and rooted and teleport after them if it needs be. If all else fails, a talented guardian's sceptre is deadlier than a crappy ranger player's bow.
I've caused a minor shitstorm on my employer's website when I wrote an article about how much the dungeons in Guild Wars 2 suck. I stand by my opinion, I think they're a chaotic, unpredictable mess and I much prefer dungeons the way I know them from WoW. I know there's a whole legion of drooling morons telling me that WoW is super easy and for complete idiots and I only hate instances on GW2, because I suck at them. Most of said drooling morons haven't actually completed any pre-MoP hard modes without massively overgearing and overleveling. And most of them ignore the fact that I have a rather nice collection of dungeon exotics to show that I'm completing stuff on GW2 just fine on any difficulty.
Some of them were rather friendly in their ignorance, telling me how to spec, what weapons to use and how they believe I should play my character. I think that's a pretty 'German' thing, actually. "I think you're doing it wrong, so now I'm telling you how you should do it and you'd better be fucking grateful. I don't care if you want my help, you're getting it now!" Ah well. I get it. In the 14 years you've spent on this earth, you have learned everything there is to know about gaming and now I get to eat your wisdom, because clearly, you're much better players than I ever will be. And while you're writing novels about how much I suck and how exactly you want me to play my class, even though you've never actually seen me play and you don't actually fucking know me, I happen to play dungeons just fine.
Fenris, my fun-sized guild on Far Shiverpeaks, has tackled the first four instances this weekend, three of which I have recorded and put on youtube. We've had some epic moments there, from our engineer, clad in green and yellow crap, soloing one of the bosses in Twilight Arbor without much trouble to smooth, wipe-free runs. Some deaths here and there, sure, but with everyone pulling their own weight, it has been a rather enjoyable experience.
I've joined some dungeons on my ranger and one as my guardian, which didn't really help with my identity crisis. He didn't die. My guardian hasn't died a single time on our guild run. His health pool is 60% lower than the ranger's, the healing abilities on his spec are hardly worth mentioning and his armor is actually slightly lower than the ranger's, due to his more offensive spec. So why the fuck didn't I die? Luck? Got revived by the guild mates on time whenever I got knocked down? Regeneration, aegis and self-removing debuffs saving my ass in situations where my ranger would have died? Sigh... my brain hurts.
We do believe they've re-tuned some of the dungeons, though. One of the guild mates brought his level 39 guardian (aka no epic gear, no mega skills and traits) and took on King Adelbern in melee and he survived the entire fight. I remember the first time I went there with my guardian and that boss pretty much killed me in a single hit. Several times. No such problems this time around. Did they start nerfing stuff? Are we getting better? It's probably both.
Either way - our little group is coming along nicely. Everybody is being helpful and supportive, we're a great team and for as much as I dislike GW2's dungeons, the right bunch of people can make them enjoyable enough.
In other news, I'm addicted to Herokon Online - a fucking browser game of all things! It's based on a German pen & paper role-playing system, which is a bit of a German take on Dungeons & Dragons. I don't wanna compare them, as they're both unique in their own way, tell different tales and use different settings, but 'Das Schwarze Auge' (aka The Dark Eye to all you non-German folks) has always been somewhat special to me. There was a whole trilogy of computer games based upon the P&P system, back when I had my first ever PC and playing the 'Northland Trilogy' lead to playing the P&P version, which ultimately lead to me writing my own stories and adventures. My addiction to writing lead to my blog, which lead to my job, blah de blah, you can see where I'm going with this. And now there's a browser game using the same rules, set in the same universe. I'm hooked!
I don't usually like browser games, because they're too heavy on the cash shop and usually limit the amount of play time you get without paying. Shakes & Fidget, Jagged Alliance Online, no matter what you play - you get to do X amount of quests or missions per day and then you gotta wait 24 hours or pay cold, hard cash in order to continue. Herokon lets me play all the way I want. They still charge you for a bigger inventory, experience potions and all the usual suspects, but I don't feel like I'm getting punished for not paying anything if I don't want to. And I just love the writing. When a lovely old lady kindly asks you to kill a bear, because "that bastard snores like ten pissed lumberjacks every night", it simply makes things a lot more enjoyable. To me, anyway.
Hm. GW2 and Herokon. Too bad I still have lots of games to review and bills to pay to help us get through this month. Eh, who am I kidding? Life is fucking awesome right now!
I think I've ended my last entry talking about how Claire's PC is now running with my old, failing PSU. Which is a bit of a stupid thing to say, considering I'm the idiot writing this blog and I could just look it up. Either way, the PSU died pretty much ten minutes after I've told the world that both our computers are running fine, so we had to order a replacement one, but now we're finally working with both PCs again, both of them running fine, I can do my job, we can play our games, life is good.
As it turns out, functionality had been restored just in time. A friend contacted me last week, saying they needed me for a Mass Effect 3 multiplayer session to show off some of the new DLC. I love Mass Effect, but my friends rarely ever play it, then there was Space Marine, Guild Wars 2, my computer problems... I'm sorry, ME3. I'm making excuses here, but the sad truth is that I haven't called as much as I should have. I haven't stayed in touch and we've not seen each other since March. And I feel shabby for having neglected you so long.
To be fair, you've been a bit of a bitch back when I quit and some of your DLC has simply scared me off. A krogan vanguard? What the hell were you thinking? It's one thing having a squishy human or an asari with the ability to fully restore their modest shields by bumping into an enemy. But the kroguard is twice as tough when it comes to both barriers and hit points, hits like a fucking truck and headbutts boss monsters into submission - which caused two forseeable reactions: Kroguards soloing gold difficulty and people kicking other players out of their sessions for wanting to play one of those overpowered toads.
Back in my day, turian sentintels were considered cool!
But a whole lot has changed in the meanwhile and I barely recognized the game when I got back the other day. New maps on earth. Well, "new" to me, anyway. Vancouver looks insanely dull and Rio has a blocky, pixellated bitmap "horizon" going all around the map. London is littered with lamp posts, which block biotic powers, rockets and just about any kind of force known in the galaxy. I want a suit of armor made of British lamppostium! But all my nitpicking aside, they're some of the coolest maps around in terms of playability. Quick and easy to figure out, the enemy can spawn practically everywhere around you and you can't just park your ass in a safe corner for the duration of the entire match to farm easy credits like on Firebase White. Which, by the way, has been fixed and can no longer be exploited. Yay!
Being a creature of habit and hating change with a passion, I dusted off ol' Hawkeye, my turian sentinel, and his M-96 Mattock. That stuff was great back then. You know, back when the game was still new, silver difficulty was considered a tough challenge and my stuff was still nice to have. It looked like this:
If you can't be bothered to sit through the whole thing, just look at this for some manly screaming and me saving everyone's day.
Basically, we're a bunch of old men playing a game on a low difficulty setting using fairly average guns and characters. The guy who recorded this session is mostly aiming for the crotch (apparently it's easier to hit than the head) with a basic M-8 Avenger assault rifle, because that's just the kind of stuff you get to work with at an N7 level of 20something. Skill levels in our little group ranged from inexperienced to 'been gone for months and got no fucking clue what's going on.' The latter would be me, in case you haven't noticed.
But I like having a clue, so I went and got one. Holy fuck, so much new stuff! Good stuff, too! First of all, the kroguard is no longer the one character to rule them all. Balance has been restored with the help of some incredibly cool new classes. There's the N7 slayer, who teleports through solid objects to appear behind an enemy and guts them with a massive katana. There's also a less cheesy version with dual laser-whips for massive AoE goodness. The fat little volus engineer boosts his team's shield rates to near-invincible levels. Sure, all the new guys still cover the same basic classes (soldier, engineer, sentinel etc.), but they all add some unique twists on old mechanics. For instance, the new turian havoc and ghost characters make up for their lack of mobility with a little propulsion pack, which helps them get away from grenades and other nasty shit. The ghots's stealth ability directly boosts damage on assault rifles rather than sniper rifles. The result is ridiculously powerful:
Not my most glorious solo ever, but it gets the point across.
Today, there are so many different weapons in ME3, it actually feels a little too much. Which game seriouslyneeds twelve (!) different shotguns? There are 54 weapons in this game right now, not counting melee, biotic or tech attacks. To be fair, some of them are pretty unique and work a bit like stuff you'd expect to find in Unreal or Quake, not realistic shooters like CoD or BF. For instance, the Striker assault rifle fires a barrage of explosives, allowing even a completely blind retard with the inability to aim for the head to rack up dozens of kills. The Scorpion pistol shoots little mines, which can either be fired in front of a bad guy's feet or right at an unfortunate enemy, where they will detonate a few moments after. Launchers, upgraded, fully-automatic versions of basic weapons and self-recharging guns, which don't require ammo. It's all there.
With all the new stuff, finishing all waves on gold with a reasonaby well-geared squad isn't that difficult anymore. It's still challenging, but entirely doable. Soloing the toughest bits still requires exploiting the relatively stupid AI and the most powerful abilities and guns, so it's not the total cakewalk some folks on the official forums might claim it to be. And since gold mode can now be handled by a dedicated team of average Janes and Joes with better than average gear, there's an all new platinum mode, which more or less throws all the nastiest shit from the lower difficulty settings at you right from wave 1. Enjoy!
To make things even more fun, they've also added new baddies: Geth bombers, which will happily nuke the shit out of any group of players, Cerberus dragoons, who run around in heavy armor and spank you with their laser whips and, of course, the Collectors. You know, those zombified bugs, scions and protheans, who harvest entire planets. Bit weird, though, those protheans. Hyper-advanced species, millions of years ahead of mankind, their ridiculous, mushroom-shaped heads making up 30% of their bodies, yet they refuse to fucking wear some god damn helmets. But easy headshots or not, those guys are the new badass faction in ME3 multiplayer and they're harder to beat than any of the other guys. Fun stuff!
So... long-term motivation? Definitely. I may not care for every single gun or character in the game. Or every tiny achievement and the brand new titles and banners you get to show off in the multiplayer lobby. But they add a sense of progression. Sure, none of this is real, actual content, but it's a bit of an ego boost when a little medal icon pops up and tells you that you've just scored headshot no. 500 or you've just completed a hundred enemy waves on your current character. And it's nice when you actually get to unlock some new stuff every now and then (credit gain has been boosted a LOT since I've last played) instead of getting the same crap over and over again in every box. Which is exactly what happened before all the DLC came along and I simply had nothing left to unlock.
That said, unlocking stuff is also my biggest complaint. It's 100% random, which I hate. When I play CoD, I know I need this level or that amount of points to buy the gun I want. On ME3 I have to spend ingame credits or RL money on dumb boxes, which contain random shit. Some will find that exciting and just try stuff as they unlock it. But when you want to play one character in particular, use that one gun you're drooling over, then you're at the mercy of the almighty RNG. And when you really, really want that krogan shaman and a cool new shotgun and all you unlock is asari characters and pistols all day long, the whole thing will start to feel like a bit of a kick in the nuts. And they're deliberately doing this - a player, who is desperate for new stuff, is more likely to shell out real money on item boxes, which may or may not hold the desired objects. Bastards!
But let's not be unfair. You may not get the stuff you want straight away. But the DLC is entirely free, the optional RL money item box purchase aside. New maps, new mission objectives, tons of new stuff, no cost. How's that for DLC pricing, CoD & BF?
Nothing funny today, nothing about the games I play, just a bit of a status report on that bucket of screws I depend on to pay my bills.
PC seems stable for now. It has been running without crashes since Sunday, but knowing my luck, the next blackout is waiting around the next corner, now that I'm writing about how it all works again. I hope it's all fixed now, I hope the problems won't come back and I'm seriously starting to doubt my computer troubleshooting abilities. It's almost like some stupid classical crime show - I can fix the PC problems of all friends, family members and neighbours around me, yet the only PC I cannot fix is my own. What a fucking cliché! It's like Monk solving hundreds of murder cases and never figuring out the death of his wife or the date doctor hooking up fat people, whilst being unable to establish a healthy relationship. I'm hoping this is my minute 182 or my season 8, final episode, my happy ending, because I'm tired of replacing parts and buying new shit all the time.
The problem didn't even seem all that complicated: I'd run a game, any game and after a seemingly random amount of time, ranging from 30 seconds to five whole hours, my screens would go black, my sound would get stuck in a loop and the whole machine would lock up, requiring a hard reboot. Half of the time, it wouldn't even boot up anymore. Black screen, all fans spinning out like jet engines and the only way to get around this would be by re-seating the gfx card, unplugging the PSU, doing all kinds of random voodoo shit until the damn thing booted up again. Sometimes it would boot up after I removed some of my RAM, making me think I had found the problem. So I played around with reduced memory for a day, two days, everything seemed fine and the crash came back. Tried Memtest to be absolutely sure, ran it for 20 hours, no problems.
So it wasn't my fucking memory. And I thought, hey, maybe it's an audio problem, what with the sound loop and all and after some research, it turned out there's a lot of people who get crashes with Nvidia's HD audio driver, which automatically installs itself every fucking time you boot windows, no matter how many times you remove it. And yes, one of the audio controllers shared an IRQ with the gfx card, so I disabled the bad guy, hoping it would fix my problem. No joy. Mind you, that was after I had removed my sound card and tried disabling onboard audio in the bios settings, messing around with absolutely no sound at all. Nothing worked.
What else could it be? Temperatures? MSI Afterburner showed absolutely no problems on the GPU front, but core temp complained about my quadcore CPU reaching 50-60 degrees under medium workload. Nothing alarming, but far from ideal. So I went and bought some thermal paste, removed the massive cooling fan, dropped one of the screws in my PSU, removed my PSU, removed all screws from the PSU to open the damn thing and remove the screw from the fan, wiped the old thermal paste off my cpu, applied the new stuff after watching a dozen videos and forum threads on the perfect way to apply thermal paste... seriously, google that shit. People have flame-wars of religious proportions on how to apply thermal paste! So yeah, I've done that, put the machine back together, ran a game aaaaand it blacked out again.
So I checked the manufacturer's website for my gfx card. It's a factory overclocked one, which comes with one major flaw, right out of the box: The default voltage setting is too low and the card just dies after a minute or two. It's a known and confirmed problem, I figured it out the day I got it, fixed it with MSI Afterburner and the thing had been running fine for over a year. But if a manufacturer misses such a critical problem, then maybe there was even more crap going on with the card. And lo and behold: 20+ forum threads about how the actual card uses cheap aluminium heatsinks as opposed to the copper ones you see on the website, the packshots, yada, yada, yada. Card gets too hot, there's no proper thermal paste on the gpu, you get the idea. So I went and took the damn thing apart and yes, no copper, only aluminium and the "thermal paste" was a crusty old booger. So I freshened that up a bit, put it all back together and crashed again. Some more research revealed that certain cards actually crash, because the VRam gets too hot, not the actual GPU, so I applied thermal paste to that as well and it didn't fix anything. Back to square one.
Of course, I've also upgraded my bios, chipset drivers, tried gfx drivers from a year ago to the latest beta ones, but to no avail. I won't go into how the nvidia updater sucks and downloads the wrong shit for certain mainboards, causing even more problems. Let's just say I had to spend half a day undoing the damage done by the updaters and fixing utilities provided on my board's official support website.
By this time, I was getting more and more convinced that my gfx card was the problem. I ruled out the memory, all drivers were up to date, it wasn't an IRQ conflict and the crash seemed fairly obvious: It would happen during games. On some rare occasions, playing video files would result in the same thing. And then the PC would refuse to boot up again, the fans on the card would go nuts, reconnecting the card would help boot it up again. At that point I was completely ignoring the fact that removing random shit like a stick of memory would sometimes fix it as well, god knows why.
I've also tried to rule out a faulty PSU by disconnecting absolutely everything I didn't need. No dvd drives, no fancy USB shit, just one hard drive, gfx card, onboard sound, memory, rodent, keyboard, that's it. Unplugged all the cooling fans in the case, removed absolutely everything that would consume power and wasn't absolutely necessary. It didn't fix anything. And I refused to believe there was anything wrong with the PSU, because it was a brand name 500w PSU, my gfx card only required 450w and that combination had been running fine for over a year, so why would it blow up on me now? Wear and tear can cause exactly that kind of problem with a PSU, but at that time, I was absolutely sure it was my gfx card.
So what's the easiest way to rule out a damaged GPU? Replace it. I removed my Nvidia card and borrowed Claire's HD6850. And my machine wouldn't boot up with it, no matter what. The Nvidia chipset on my board probably didn't help things and I couldn't fit her card in the primary PCI-E slot, so one of the two SLI-slots would have to do. And those weren't too keen on doing anything with Claire's ATI hardware. It just didn't boot up at all. Plan B: Put my gfx card in Claire's PC, see if she crashes. And of course we couldn't pull that off, either: One of her PSU's 6pin PCI-E power connectors was damaged. Damn thing just wouldn't stay connected to my gfx card, so we couldn't even power up the damn thing. And since my mainboard doesn't have any onboard gfx, we had to buy a replacement card.
So we checked our finances, tried to come up with some clever way to afford at least a mid-range current gen gpu, but there was just no way we could afford something like that at that time. A friend helped me out with his old GTX280. Awesome piece of hardware back in its day and still not the worst choice today, if you can live without tesselation and other fancy shit, which 95% of today's games don't even support, anyway. And what do you know - I put that thing in there, it booted up straight away, no problems, no crashes, no nothing. For a whole day. So I did something incredibly stupid. You might wanna take notes, because this is gonna be important later on. :P
I ran MSI Afterburner to check on the card's clock settings. Yes, the card was fucking nice, but it was still a downgrade from my old hardware and I decided it couldn't hurt to do some research on safe settings in order to overclock the card at least a little bit. You know, get some of that old power back. And the furmark tests were fine, I got a small performance boost out of it, I ran a few more games aaaaand it blacked out. Exact same crash again. Black screen, sound loop, lawnmower when I tried to reboot.
I've restored the card back to factory settings the next time I managed to boot up. The overclocking I had done was minute at best, there was no way in hell I had damaged the hardware, I did a lot of research beforehand, but I didn't wanna push my luck, so I went back to default settings. And it blacked out again. And again! What's worse, booting would now fail half of the time, thanks to a bluescreen: C000021a, initialization of a knowndll failed, 0xc0000221, blah, blah... damaged hardware. Did I melt my friend's gfx card after all? I put my old card back in there, same error message, so at least it wasn't that. Whew.
I was running out of ideas and out of options. Try a google search for black screen crashes. Hundreds of forum posts and no useful answer. 90% of the time these threads will just end without a proper solution and the rest of them ends with any random piece of broken hardware. PSU, GPU, memory, the whole damn board. If I had saved any money, I would have blown it all out on a brand new machine at this point.
Instead, I tried to reconstruct my working and gaming environment using Claire's old laptop. I'm a guy. I hate change. I want stuff to stay the way I know it. So I connected the laptop to the large LCD screen, plugged in my gaming mouse and a keyboard, replicated my desktop and customization settings the best I could and started gaming and working at (almost) 720p and the modest frame rates an old 230m budget gfx chip, which had been outdated three generations ago, could muster. Not a happy experience. And a couple weeks later, the laptop would start overheating and shutting down without warning. Of course. No laptop is designed for that kind of torture, not for prolonged amounts of time.
That's when I decided to try something we should have done ages ago: Put my old PSU into Claire's PC to see whether or not it crashes. If my PSU was really failing, Claire's machine would black out as well. In my desperation, I've also done something that didn't seem possible before: I put Claire's PSU into my machine. Remember? One of her power connectors wouldn't fit in my gfx card. I forced it. At this point I no longer gave a shit about damaging my hardware, I just slammed it in there until it fit. Oh the potential for analogies!
And Claire's PC worked. With my PSU. To be fair, her HD6850 only requires one modest 6pin PCI-E connector, so the entire system is a lot less demanding and much more energy-efficient than mine. But it worked, it was stable, her machine, my PSU. And my computer with her PSU? No fucking clue. Remember those blue screens I had? The defective hardware was my hard drive. Maybe it had been failing all along and that's what caused the crashes. Maybe I was being too careless and damaged it whilst rummaging around my machine's intestines over and over again. Whatever the cause, the HDD was dead, would no longer boot up Windows, crashed on me, finito, end of.
So I've ordered a new 7200rpm Barracuda. Used some awesome little utility called 'Parted Magic' to rescue as much of the data as I could possibly grab off the failed drive. Started a new installation of Windows 7. Took me a day to get everything back in working order. You know, all my image and video editing software I need for work, my FTP settings, text editing software, KMPlayer, the works. Started a game and my gfx card crashed. Not a big deal, I just forgot to install the latest version of MSI Afterburner to crank up the voltage a tiny bit. That known and confirmed problem, that tiny little bug one can fix with a click or two. And the machine blacked out again.
Brand new windows. New hard drive. Different PSU. Memory had already been checked three dozen times. And the PC would crash with either gfx card on the old Windows installation, so that wasn't the problem. But fuck it, I put in my friend's old GTX280 for the heck of it. Nothing else to do, right?
I didn't wanna risk overclocking again, so I just ran the card, no Afterburner, nothing else. And it all worked. For a day. Two days. Three days. No crashes whatsoever. Put in my own gfx card again. Crashed. Motherfucker!
The problem was MSI Afterburner all along. At some point, with some update or during some stupid moment where I fiddled around with the fucking settings, I must have enabled low level hardware access. A quick google search revealed that this feature could cause the exact same crash I was experiencing. So I turned it off and the crashes stopped.
Three months. I've been having this problem for three fucking months. Replaced the gfx card, checked the memory, applied fresh thermal paste in every possible spot, switched PSUs, installed a new hard drive and a new OS. Okay, the HDD was necessary, as the old one had definitely died. Maybe it died from all the crashes and hard resets, maybe I physically broke it whilst taking the whole machine apart time and again. Fuck if I know. Unticking one god damn checkbox in one stupid little program fixed my problem.
But there has been one small incident, which made me feel at least a little better about the whole mess. We put the old GTX280 in Claire's PC. The one that runs on my old PSU now. It died after five minutes. The PSU was failing after all. It still runs her modest little ATI card just fine, but we should replace the PSU as soon as we have a little extra money, just to be safe. So it wasn't Afterburner alone. I'm not a complete idiot after all. But pretty damn close to it.
So. A failing power supply unit. And one tiny setting in some little overclocking and monitoring utility. What do you know. But my machine had been screaming for a fresh, clean installation of Windows for a long time now. And the new HDD is pretty damn sweet. So it wasn't all bad. I just hope that this is really gonna be the end of it. Time to catch up on all the gaming I had to miss out on!
One of the things that bug me about GW2 is how the vast majority of rangers I come across are complete and utter pussies. They grab a bow, they spam their attack buttons, end of story. That's a perfectly valid style of play. It's also fucking boring and - while I don't rule out that some of them actually know what they're doing and dish out okay damage - many of them are worthless and a fucking waste of space. That's okay, GW2 can be enjoyed even with a shit build and when you're completely stupid. And in all fairness, some people simply want to use a bow and absolutely nothing else and they have every right to do so. What pisses me off is how all of them seem to be doing it. A bit like 90% of all warriors using greatswords or swords and axes and 90% of all Guardians using greatswords. Cookie cutter shit.
I don't do cookie cutter. This guide shows you how to kick ass with a dual wield ranger, who depends on swords, axes and a metric fuckton of melee. This is not "the best build" around or some shit. There are no DPS meters in this game, no simulators that parse the strongest possible setup and I'm grateful for that. This build works, it's fucking fun and it's different from the mind-numbingly boring longbow/shortbow playstyle. Is this "better" than bow specs, then? Is it worse? Beats me, who the hell gives a shit? It's not the point of this guide. The point is that you can do more than cookie cutter and still make it work. The result looks a little bit like this:
As you can see in the video, I still need to upgrade my back slot to the level 80 guild backpack, the rest is as good as it gets.
Farming the spawn-zones around Grenth solo, taking on whole packs of enemies without going down. The damage numbers on crits may not be as high as on a warrior or guardian, but the insanely high bleed stacks and poison DPS more than make up for it.
This guide explains my build, how it works and why I've picked particular traits and skills. This isn't the law, you're free to change, customize and experiment and maybe get even better results or more fun out of it that way. What I can say is that I can solo-farm around Grenth without trouble, I rack up massive amounts of wvw kills without AoE bow spam and I'm enjoying this particular play style a lot more than my fully exotic greatsword guardian and his hurrdurr AoE mashing crap. If you dislike any of the stuff I just said, this guide is not for you. Move along.
Overview - The Manly Ranger
The manly build utilizes axes and swords, traps and 'Troll Unguent'. With a high condition damage rampager build and a crit-rate close to 70%, the manly ranger depends on crit procs, bleeds and poison. Thanks to his large health pool and a powerful HoT with a very fast cooldown, this particular ranger can take on multiple foes in melee, wreak havoc and come out without the slightest dent in his rugged beard. He is more difficult to play than flurry/100 Blades warriors or greatsword guardians. Due to the lack of mobility on his offhand axe whirl, he gets a small disadvantage in the AoE department and monster tagging gets a bit more difficult. Traps and a pet make up for that to some extent.
Pros
+ High ranged and melee DPS
+ High survivability
+ Great bleed and poison damage
+ Can handle large groups of enemies solo
+ More to do than just spam the same AoE over and over again
Cons
- Dodge, trap, circle-strafe... you can't just sit back and let your pet take the hits
- Good sigils for 3 main weapons are very expensive
- Mass monster-tagging can be difficult with axes
Like a Baws - Manly Traits
Your trait lines will look like this. (Source: Ninjalooter.de)
We're going for a 10/30/30 setup. Yes, we're only spending 10 points in the Power line on a full DPS spec! Weird, huh? Well, let's have a look at the 'Marksmanship' trait line:
Power is a nice stat. We want power and speccing into this trait line increases it. So why not go for the full 30 points? First of all, the secondary boost, "Condition Duration" is useless. A maxed out 'Marksmanship' trait-line increases your condition duration by 30%, which sounds awesome. But let's do the math: Let's say one of your attacks causes bleeding or poison for 6 seconds, i.e. 'Serpent's Strike' or 'Splitblade'. 30% extra would change duration to 7.8 seconds. That's not a lot of damage for 20 trait points.
Another thing is the actual traits. Put 10 points into 'Marksmanship', unlock 'Steady Focus' and to 10% more damage on full endurance. That's great. We want extra damage. But look at the stuff further up the trait line. The 15 points trait 'Alpha Training' grants 'Opening Strike' to our pet, which is fun, but not necessary. We run this show, the pet is just backup. Our 25 point trait, 'Precise Strike' turns 'Opening Strike' into a guaranteed critical. Big deal - we're going for 70% crit rate, we don't need guaranteed crits! Same goes for most of the selectable 'Marksmanship' traits. They mostly buff pet and bow damage. We don't use bows, we don't spec into beast mastery, so nothing to do here.
Our first full 30 points go into 'Skirmishing'. This is an abolute no-brainer. Higher crit chance, higher crit damage, we want as much of that as somehow possible. The 5, 15 and 25 point bonuses will grant us swiftness and fury on weapon swapping, as well as 10% more damage from flanking attacks. We want the former, because we swap weapons a lot and the latter, because we want more fucking damage. Our 10 point trait of choice is 'Sharpened Edges', because it supports our build perfectly: We're speccing into high crit chance and high condition damage and this trait can cause bleeds on crits. I don't need to elaborate, unless you're a complete moron.
There's nothing great in the 20 point trait section, so we're going for 'Pet's Prowess' to raise our animal companion's crit damage by 30%. Our own damage always takes top priority, but in this case, there are no damage boosting abilities for us, so to the pet it goes.
For our 30 points trait, we're going with 'Honed Axes'. Since we're choosing 'Rampager' stats on our gear instead of 'Berserker' stats, we're gonna need as much extra crit damage as possible and 'Honed Axes' provides exactly that.
Our final 30 points go to.... *drumroll* Poof! 'Wilderness Survival'. Sure, the 300 points of added toughness won't help us do any more damage, but the 300 points of extra condition damage will! After spending 5 points we gain 'Natural Vigor', which regenerates our Endurance 50% faster. Which is good - we're doing 10% more damage at full Endurance, remember? For ten points we get various fun traits to choose from. Personally, I like 'Shared Anguish', because it causes your pet to eat enemy CC effects in your stead. Also very handy in WvW! 15 points, 'Companions Defense'. Meh. 20 points: 'Offhand Training'. Reducing the cooldown on 'Whirling Defense' from 25 seconds to 20 seconds? Fuck, yeah! This is our hardest-hitting ability, so we're boosting that sucker! For 25 points we get 'Pack Strength'. 5% extra damage, while we're above 90% health! Woo! At 30 points I pick 'Sword Mastery' to reduce the cooldown on 'Serpent's Strike'. Faster poison attacks ftw! If you're a wuss, you can also go with 'Empathic Bond', 'Bark Skin' or 'Hide in Plain Sight', which are very cool defensive abilities. But why would you, if you're a manly damage dealer?
1337 skillz - Picking the right Skills
'Troll Unguent' is one of the coolest healing abilities in the entire game. Sure, at level 80 it may only regenerate about half your maximum health over ten seconds, but the HoT effect is powerful enough to keep you fighting. What's more important is the ridiculously low cooldown of 25 seconds. Once 'Troll Unguent' wears off, you only gotta survive another 15 seconds until you can use it again. Master the ancient art of circle-strafing, keep your opponents crippled with traps and nothing shall kill you.
Ahh yes, traps! 'Spike Trap' should be in your utility slots, because it causes bleed damage and serves as an AoE when timed right. Another fun trap is viper's nest - similar effect, but poison damage. Double the conditions, double the fun! And since we love those bleeds, 'Sharpening Stone' is our best friend, causing our next five attacks to add even more bleed stacks!
Our elite slot goes to 'Entangle'. Not only does it cause enemies to bleed even more, but it works as an excellent oshit-button, should we have to make a run for it. What's rooted can't come after us!
So why are we picking all this stuff? Read on!
Teach me, oh wise one! How to play a Manly Ranger
So how do we play this shit? First, let's look at our weapons: Stereo axes are our weapon choice numero uno, a sword goes into the secondary weapon slot's main hand section, that's it. Now pick an enemy. Stare at it. Roar. Beat your chest. Be manly! Now throw your axe. Now get close enough to actually hit and throw again. The enemy will come at you. If there are multiple baddies standing close to each other, your axe will ricochet off the first one and hit the guy next to him and so on. 'Winter's Bite' and 'Path of Scars' are nice attacks against far away targets. If you're facing two or more guys at the same time, use 'Splitblade'. If there's only one enemy, wait until he gets really close, then use 'Splitblade' to get as many bleed stacks on him as possible. Use 'Sharpening Stone' whenever available for even more bleed damage.
Once the enemy closes in for melee attacks, switch from dual axes to sword+axe. Use 'Whirling Defense' to beat the shit out of the sucker - do not move or you will cancel your attack! Wait for the progress bar to finish! This attack is most efficient with 'Sharpening Stone' activated. If there are any live enemies left at melee distance, use both traps. Don't forget 'Serpent's Strike' to renew the poison damage once your snake trap wears off. If you need to get away, try using 'Hornet Sting' rather than a dodge move, to avoid losing Endurance and your 10% damage buff along with it.
Don't be afraid to use 'Troll Unguent' the moment they hit you. If you feel you cannot simply beat the enemy into submission, circle-strafe around them and keep them away with 'Spike Trap' and 'Entangle'. The AI is easy to trick that way and you can beat just about any kind of baddie, unless they use powerful magic and ranged attacks or you step on an elder dragon's dick and there's nobody around to help you.
'Entangle' is also a great tool to help take down tougher enemies or large groups of foes, due to its nice radius and high damage. Don't waste it against harmless baddies!
Should an enemy ever get stuck fighting your pet or just stay outside melee distance for whatever stupid reason, don't be shy to run towards him and whip out your sword. Melee damage is *always* greater than ranged damage, especially against single targets. Unless you're a fucking spellcaster, of course.
As for dungeons, well... melee is fucking useless 90% of the time, so you'll want to stick to throwing axes, unless you're absolutely confident to take on enemies head-on. If a champion punches you in the face, that's usually the end of you. Same goes for every other class in DPS spec and since just about everyone uses DPS spec, well... you get the idea. The right pet
We want maximum DPS and since canines get the highest Power and decent amounts of Precision, man's best friend is the way to go. Just don't pick a fucking hyena - their power stat is pathetic and the summonable bonus hyena usually runs off in the wrong direction, pulls some shit and get itself killed. You're usually next.
If you just can't stand canines, cats and most birds are an okay choice, too. They get nice crit ratings and most of them have bleed attacks, which we're stacking anyway. I'm not a big fan of moas, spiders and any pet with balanced stats, since they don't excel at anything. Bears are a nono. You want damage, you wanna get toe to toe with the monsters and you don't need a fucking bear to take the hits for you. Bears are tanks, you're manly, you don't want a tank. Go with a DPS pet. Don't be a maverick.
Dress to Kill - The right gear
You can see the gear I'm using at the beginning of the video. So instead of explaining what to get, let me tell you why.
We're not using any defensive stats at all and as you can see, soloing in Orr works just fine. If you're a huge fan of dungeons, adding a bit of toughness and vitality may help, but then again, if you're that kinda player, you're not going to use my build in the first place.
We're choosing 'Rampager' gear (highest crit rate + condition damage) over 'Berserker' gear (high crit rate + crit damage) for two reasons. First of all, we can keep up 8-10 bleed stacks on any opponent, in any battle, without problems. Using all the right abilities and skills at the right time can temporarily stack 'em to over 20 in tough fights. So we wanna buff that shit. We need those bleeds and poison attacks to do as much damage as somehow possible. The other reason we're going for this particular set of stats is a high crit chance. Since crits can randomly cause bleeds with this particular spec and some of our weapon sigils proc on crit, we need the highest crit rate we can get.
As you can see in the video, I go with Superior Runes of the Scholar. They add a large amount of power to make up for the 200 points we're missing by not maxing out our 'Marksmanship' trait line. They also add another 10% of damage while we're above 90% health. Add that to the 5% above 90% health from 'Wilderness Survival' and the 10% whilst at full Endurance from 'Marksmanship' and a possible 10% whilst flanking from 'Skirmishing' and we're getting the most ridiculously exaggerated amount of bonus damage you could imagine. They also raise our crit damage by 8%, which adds up nicely to the extra 10% we get whilst wielding an axe in our main hand. 'Honed Axes', remember?
There are plenty of good alternatives, of course. Most people go for "Divinity" runes. Personally, I think they're overrated. +60 to all stats might sound nice, but what the fuck am I supposed to do with extra toughness, healing and vitality? Sure, the 12% additional crit damage is nice, but I'd rather have the added Power and flat DPS bonus from Scholar runes at a slightly lower bonus to crit damage. If you're a cheapass, you can go crazy with stuff like runes of the flock. An attack bird with a 5s blind attack on 10% of your hits isn't so bad and the additional healing power adds to your survivability. Of course this goes against the whole idea of manliness and maximum damage, but it's still a fair choice when you don't have a lot of gold.
As for sigils, I'm going with the following:
Axe, main hand: Superior Sigil of Bloodlust
Axe, offhand: Superior Sigil of Strength
Sword, main hand: Superior Sigil of Fire
Explanation: The Bloodlust sigil buffs our Power by 10 points after every kill, generating a total of 25 stacks, or 250 extra Power, which lasts until we go down in battle. And we don't go down in battle, because we're manly rangers! Switching from our axe to a sword does not remove the stacks! Nobrainer, buy it!
The Sigil of Strength has a chance to grant us a temporary stack of might on each critical hit. At level 80, each stack of might provides 35 points of Power and Condition Damage. Since this weapon remains in our offhand at all times, we always get to benefit from might procs, both in melee and ranged combat!
The Sigil of Fire has a 30 percent chance to generate an AoE flame burst upon critical hits. We crit all the fucking time, this sigil procs a whole LOT and we want every bit of AoE damage we can get. Gimme!
There are valid alternatives, depending on your taste, play style and budget. A word of warning: You can only use one stat-buffing sigil at a time. If you put a Sigil of Bloodlust on one weapon to boost your Power and a Sigil of Accuracy on the other to boost your Precision, you will only get stacks for one of the two, not both. They don't mix!
Buffs like Might *do* stack with them, however, as they only last for a few seconds and not until you are defeated.
Yay, war! The Manly Ranger in WvW
Whenever people talk about WvW, they bring up stupid shit like "One on one situations in WvW". Let me tell you how WvW works: 90% of the time you follow a fucking zerg and you'll be attacking a fucking gate. Sometimes an enemy zerg shows up, everybody spams ranged AoE attacks and one zerg lives, the other one dies and starts bitching about shit in the team channel. Sure, on some rare occasions you might end up in a 1vs1 and the other guy might actually choose to fight. You know what's a lot more likely to happen? The other guy runs until he finds 3 friends to beat the shit out of you, the 3 friends are already there but you cannot see them or the fucker uses Gamehack, gets infinite amounts of Endurance and has no cooldown on his skills. Or you're so perplexed to run into that one single enemy player, you completely forget to move when he one-shots you with 100 Blades.
It doesn't matter what god damn class you play in WvW. You sit on a tower and operate a fucking arrow cart. You kick down a fucking gate. You spam AoE attacks when the enemy zerg arrives. Every class can do that. But this is the internet, you're probably 14 fucking years old and know more about games than I ever will, so you're gonna disagree with me. Fine. So try that, should you ever end up in an actual, real, fair one on one battle:
Circle-Strafing and cripples (Spike Trap, pet abilities) are your best friend against average Joe, because average Joe is an idiot. If the guy is smart and leaps at you, possibly uses some CC to prevent you from getting away, switch to your sword, use 'Hornet Sting' to get away, pop your heal and when the sucker gets into melee range again, hack him to bits with 'Whirling Defense'. You're a ranger and he won't see it coming, because they're all stupid and use nothing but bows. This ability is also useful against casters, as it reflects most of their shit and throws it right back at them. Use 'Entangle' when they try to run away or you need to make a run for it, yourself. If they're not running, use it for some extra bleed stacks. Don't forget to switch pets if pet #1 gets downed, that's why they come in tag-teams.
In the much more likely zerg vs zerg battles, just throw your axes. The ricochet-effect, 'Splitblade' and your pet will make sure you get credit for just about every single idiot who dies around you, resulting in a high kill count and more loot bags than you can eat in a day.
