———————————–
- General Ranger Tactics (gwrg7a) -
———————————–

In general, a Ranger is best at disruption and skirmish tactics, using
interrupt bow attacks and traps/conditions to reduce the effectiveness of the
opposite team.  Throw Dirt and Dust Trap are the bane of warriors, and Pin Down
allows your teammates to catch up to a running Monk.

Pin Down
========
In PvP, Mobility is key, and when you are selected for a pick-up group, they
typically will expect you as the Ranger to have some sort of Crippling skill.
Most of the time, this means Pin Down.  Pin Down can prevent Monks from
running away from their focused attacks and it can prevent other people from
closing the distance to attack.  You can also use Pin Down to slow down a
Warrior so you can run away.

Nature Rituals in PvP
=====================
Nature Rituals, due to their global effects and their large area of effect,
change the nature of PvP arena combat.  In effect, you are rewriting the rules
of the arena using your Nature Rituals.  Most of the general guidelines for
using Spirits in PvE apply in PvP.  However, your opponents are obviously going
to be more intelligent than monsters, and they’ll figure out that killing the
Spirit will remove the effect.  This means you’ll have to plan ahead to recast
these spirits once they are taken down, or plant them in areas which aren’t
easily accessible.

Some Nature Ritual highlights for PvP:

Frozen Soil
———–
Frozen Soil is a Nature Ritual that prevents resurrection.  While there are
folks who argue “if you have to rez in PvP, the game’s already over”, there are
many situations where a short breather will allow an opponent to resurrect a
teammate and indeed, the tide of battles can turn with such efforts.  Frozen
Soil prevents this from happening, allowing you to maintain your numbers
advantage on a team who has already lost members.  However, it can also work to
your disadvantage as well, if you’re the team that is outnumbered, and worse
yet, you can’t simply attack the spirit to destroy it.

Note that Frozen Soil only stops Resurrect spells from being cast within its
radius. If a player is outside the Frozen Soil radius, that player can still
cast Resurrect or Resurrection Signet on a corpse in the radius.

Nature’s Renewal
—————-
Nature’s Renewal is a Nature Ritual that used to strip enchantments and hexes
from everyone within its area effect, which was the bane of any caster that
depended on such things.  As of the 8/25/05 update, Nature’s Renewal no longer
does this.

The main utility of Nature’s Renewal is the fact that it increases the casting
times for those spells.  While in PvE, this has limited use (as it often hurts
your party more often than it hurts your enemies), in PvP, it is a great way to
interrupt Enchantments and Hexes being cast.  The increased Energy requirement
for Maintained Enchantments hurts Protection Monks almost exclusively. A
combination of this Ritual and Quickening Zephyr can make most spellcasters
leak Energy like cheesecloth.

Nature’s Renewal has a long casting time, which limits its usefulness, similar
to other Nature Rituals.

———————————–
- Dealing with opponents (gwrg7b) -
———————————–

Monk
====
The monk is often the first target in PvP, and rightly so.  Monks are the main
“support” characters behind the tanks, and a Monk keeps the team alive.  They
also lack strong armor, and thus can fall quickly under a direct onslaught,
making them an ideal initial target. “Kill the Monk First” is a mantra that is
chanted by most PvP players before heading into battle.

Rangers are concerned about Monks because the main method of damage that the
Ranger can do is through Conditions, such as Blind and Poison.  A good Monk
heals these conditions, nullifying the effectiveness of the Ranger.  Most of
the time, Monks will attempt evasive maneuvers when under attack.  To protect
themselves against Ranged attacks, they tend to run around walls or other
obstructions.  It is important for the Ranger to use Pin Down as soon as
possible to Cripple the Monk.  “Cripple the Monk” should be the Ranger’s Mantra
as it is the best way he can support his team initially.  If the Monk is too
evasive, it may be wise to activate a sprinting skill like Storm Chaser.
Finally, once the Monk is Crippled and weakened, lay down Distracting Shots or
other interrupts to prevent the Monk from casting healing spells.

An ideal time to interrupt a Monk is when they are resurrecting a teammate.
Many of the Resurrect skills take a LONG time to cast, which gives a long
window for a Concussion Shot and a game-winning Daze condition.

Warriors
========
You won’t be dealing much damage to warriors, unfortunately, through the
traditional bow skills.  They tend to possess anywhere from -2 to -8 points of
damage absorption due to equipment, and have a high Armor Level to boot. There
are several ways to deal more damage to Warriors.  Armor penetration works
better on Warriors than other classes, so use Penetrating Attack, Judge’s
Insight, Weaken Armor, etc. to reduce their armor rating.  Elemental Bowstrings
negate the bonuses against physical damage that Warriors get on their armor,
thus allowing you to deal slightly more damage.  Use skills that have a lot of
bonus damage to overcome the warrior’s armor.  Finally, Conditions bypass armor
quite well, so Poison and Bleeding may be your best friend against Warriors.

Warriors depend highly on their weapon to hit you to actually hurt you.  You
can use your Ranger defensive skills such as Whirling Defense and Throw Dirt to
keep the Warriors busy and prevent them from smacking you down.  Standoffs
between Rangers and Warriors one-on-one tend to end poorly for the Ranger, so
use the opportunity to poison and cripple the warrior before making your
escape.  Use your mobility to your advantage.

Elementalists
=============
Rangers already have +30 armor against Elemental damage, giving them a slight
edge against Elementalists.  A few things can help even further.  For example,
the Winter/Frostbound Armor combo gives you an additional +15 armor against all
elements.  Dryder’s Defenses can further augment your elemental armor, at least
for a short time.  Fertile Season, while normally a horrible Nature Ritual, can
give an edge in armor and hitpoints that allows you and your team to outlast an
Elementalist-heavy group.  Rangers also have a large arsenal of interrupting
ranged attacks that can shut down an Elementalist before he/she starts casting.
Quickening Zephyr can increase the costs of Elementalist spells, while Nature’s
Renewal can strip them of their enchantments needed to sustain their
spellcasting.  The standard caveats on using Nature Rituals apply here, though.

Elementalists depend on spike damage from spells to take down opponents, and
often doing so depletes their stores of energy and leaves them with Exhaustion.
If you can outlast the Elementalist, they will be out of ammunition to spend to
hurt you, and you can more easily interrupt their spells with Concussion Shot
or Distracting Shot. Still, it is tough in the current metagame to beat a group
of Elementalists all focusing on a single character.

Mesmers
=======
Rangers often have very little trouble with Mesmers. Rangers don’t cast spells,
which is the main target of the anti-caster support that a Mesmer can provide.
Mesmers have some of the weakest armor, and easily fall to any sustained
damage.  However, be warned that Mesmers are also the most deceptive class in
the game.  With Mantras and Distortion, Mesmers can avoid damage similar to a
Ranger, and spells like Illusion of Weakness can allow them to feign weakness.
Their spells don’t care about armor, and thus your slight armor advantage is
not useful against them.

The main threat from Mesmers against Rangers is their Damage over Time spells,
like Conjure Phantasm.  Empathy, Spirit Shackles, and other Hexes can also be
used against you.  The easiest way to rid yourself of them is to lay down a
Nature’s Renewal, but this can be interrupted by a Mesmer quite easily with the
long casting time.  Troll Unguent can also counter the Damage over Time, but
again, long casting times make it vulnerable to interruption.  Since Rangers
lack effective Hex removal, you’ll have to rely on your Secondary class or
teammates to remove any Hexes on you.

A Mesmer can be your easiest target or worst nightmare, depending on whether or
not it is focusing on you.  Do not ignore the sustained assault of a Mesmer, as
they can penetrate armor and they are good at shutting down a player (depending
on their skillset).

The best thing to do is to simply stick with a sustained attack against the
Mesmer, with the occasional interrupt to prevent them from casting.

Necromancer
===========
Necromancers often have armor on-par with yours (70 AL), and they possess a
variety of skills and spells that can do significant damage to a Ranger.  Their
magic spells often penetrate armor (especially DOT spells like Life Siphon) and
they regenerate health just as well as you can with your Troll Unguent, using
Health draining spells and Blood magic. In other words, beware the Necromancer.

Still, Necromancers are spellcasters, and thus are vulnerable to interruption.
They have a long casting time with many of their spells. Be careful, though, of
Death Nova and Putrid Explosion, two spells that cause a lot of Area Effect
damage around death and corpses.

Rangers
=======
Inevitably, you are going to face other Rangers on the field.  Because Rangers
are so versatile, it can be hard to predict what kind of tactics they are going
to be using, but a few pointers can be given.  First of all, with all of the
conditions that Rangers typically apply, an Antidote Signet or other Condition
removal may be helpful to counter the main source of damage. Called Shot and
Crippling Shot (Elite) will penetrate all of the Ranger stances (although it
won’t affect anything while you are Blinded).  Barrage (Elite) can be handy to
take out masses of Spirits in a Spirit spamming build.  And above all, DON’T
use an elemental bowstring, due to the Ranger’s increased armor against the
elements.

Factions: Assassin
==================
This section is a work-in-progress

Factions: Ritualist
===================
Like you, the Ritualist has a large stable of spirits to summon.  Ritualists
are as dangerous as Elementalists, and support a team as well as Monk.  You
should think about taking out his spirits by either killing them (especially
defensive ones like Displacement or Union) or interrupting the Ritualist.
Remember that binding rituals are NOT spells, so you need to use generic
interrupts against them.  With the long casting times on their spirits and
spells, they are fairly easy to interrupt, and being a squishy spellcaster,
they are pretty easy to take down with standard Ranger attacks.

————————-
- The Metagame (gwrg7c) -
————————-

The Metagame is a difficult abstract concept to explain, but it is an easy
concept to grasp, and it is of utmost importance in a competitive game with
such tactical and strategic variety and balance as Guild Wars.  Basically,
while many combinations of skills can be powerful, all combinations of skills
can be countered in some way by some class combination.  By following trends in
which combinations are popular in PvP, one can figure out which combinations of
“counters” to bring to a match.

For example, in late May of 2005, Aeromancer Elementalists were (and still are)
popular in PvP matches because of their ability to quickly “spike” damage. If
an Aeromancer or a group of Aeromancers all focus on one opponent (usually the
Monk), then they can quickly take that player out of the action at the
beginning of the match, forcing an early game resurrect (which makes the team
lose tempo) or even unraveling an entire game plan.  Folks are starting to
either “Fight fire with fire” by bringing their own or finding ways to counter
the Aeromancer horde (a Ranger solution would be to place down a Quickening
Zephyr to strain the Energy reserves of the Aeromancers while a Monk solution
would be Mark of Protection or Protective Bond to attenuate the damage done).

I don’t play enough PvP to follow the Metagame, nor is it useful to write down
the current state of the Metagame in a Ranger guide, as it relies on both
up-to-date information and discussion of techniques to counter as of now
unknown strategies.  But if you play a lot of PvP, you need to be aware of the
changes in the metagame, so you can more effectively counter your opponents
even before they enter the arena.

The Spirit Spam Ranger
———————-
One ranger-specific build that has risen in the Metagame of Guild Wars is the
so-called “Spirit Spammer”, or a dedicated ritualist who constantly lays down
spirits.  Usually, these spirits are tailored to defeat the Aeromancer Spike
Build using a combination of Quickening Zephyr, Nature’s Renewal, and Fertile
Season.  There have been teams using Spirits to block the Ghostly Hero from
taking the Altar, or simply “Spirit Roadblocking” the opposing team.  With a
thick enough layer of spirits, it makes targets hard to call with so many decoy
spirits out on the field.  Another variant is a team that takes advantage of
the Greater Conflagration/Winter combination, with Mesmer secondaries to take
advantage of Mantra of Frost and Elemental Resistance.