Longbow Untamed

October 2024

Introduction

Untamed is a bruiser-style build that takes advantage of ranged damage combined with a melee oneshot and good area pressure. Untamed excels in ranked games due to its versatility and flexibility as a profession.

An important note about Untamed: It’s is one of the two classes in the game that has an F6 and F7. Binding these to something that you can easily reach so you won’t have to skill-click in a fight.

Build Fundamentals

Untamed is Arenanet’s attempt to take the AI component out of Ranger builds by giving you manual control over all of your pet’s actions. This is great if you’re familiar with Ranger since your pet won’t try to cast random auto attacks when you need a CC, but it also means Untamed can’t get carried by random pet abilities. It is extremely important to know how each pet works before you start playing Untamed.

You can play Untamed a few different ways but the most effective is as a rotational DPS. Unnatural Traversal lets you get to fights quickly, meaning you can move between 2v2s and 3v3s around the map and get kills. Untamed is a decent teamfighter, but its potential falls off in all-out engagements into coordinated teams due to the amount of and projectile block in the current meta.

Damage

Almost everything on Untamed does good damage if you can land it. The difficulty comes from managing the pet attacks. While it sounds simple, the pet AI often gets confused by terrain and can walk back and forth trying to execute simple attacks if your target is moving. Venomous Outburst is your best tool to get around this as it lets you move your pet directly to the target. If you’re having trouble, crippling leap on Wolf and Smoke Assault are easy to land since they track the target.

Make sure you’re using Barrage as much as possible, as it’s an excellent zoning tool due to its high damage over time. This can be used to force opponents off a node to decap or to add extra pressure on a downed opponent in a teamfight.

When in doubt, auto attack. Especially with longbow, you should never just be standing there waiting to do something. If you don’t have any cooldowns, use Long Range Shot while your pet chases an enemy, or you can look for better positioning. Longbow has the longest range in the game and you always want to take advantage of that, especially on maps with lots of verticality like Khylo.

Sustain

Untamed has good passive sustain, but it is often reliant on kiting, , and using Longbow to deal ranged damage. "We Heal As One!" is an excellent heal on a short cooldown, but unlike other ranger builds, it doesn’t give you any cleanses. Your best source of cleanse is Mutate Conditions, which will remove all conditions and replace them with . You also have additional low-cooldown cleansing from Cleansing Unleash and Sigil of Cleansing.

This build has three ways to access : one of the easiest ways is by connecting Hunter's Shot onto an enemy. Another option is to blast or leap through your Smokescale Smoke Cloud with abilities such as Swoop, Rending Vines, and Lesser Call of the Wild. Finally, it’s your Jaguar‘s Stalk applies to yourself and your pet.

Venomous Outburst will enemies due to Blinding Outburst helping you mitigate the incoming damage. Last but certainly not least, Forest's Fortification is a flat 50% damage reduction along with , , , and .

Crowd Control

Untamed has good CC on both weapons and pet abilities. Hilt Bash on Greatsword is probably your best CC and sets up combos. A good tip is to hold your Counterattack Kick for a few seconds after your block instead of pressing it immediately so people won’t expect it. Point-Blank Shot is a good knockback typically used to set up Rapid Fire, but it can also be used to bait stunbreaks or other important cooldowns before you go for an all-in burst.

Use Smokescale‘s Takedown to continue a CC chain after Hilt Bash or to interrupt important skills. This can be unreliable since pets sometimes get confused by random terrain and may take a while to cast the ability.