ylistra

• PvE, you usually dont have to chase down enemies. Swap Agility Training for Pet Prowess.
  
• The passive signet effects are so good, that you will hardly ever use the active effect short of fat fingering the keyboard.  Swap Signet Mastery for Steady Focus.
  
• As long as you have 30 BM, Natural Healing is too good to pass up.
  
• Pet choice, except in specific situations calling for something else, I go with one ranged pet and one melee pet.  With 30 BM/20 Skirm your pet has a lot of resiliency.  You can swap the bear for a cat for single target damage, or a drake for cleave.  Also, the regen on the fern is a duration stack with healing spring, not intensity.  Healing spring already has pretty good up-time, so a different support pet might be better.
  
• Masters Bond is strictly open world.  If you dungeon crawl, swap this out.

Warrior / Guardian / Mesmer teams are the "meta", and at least in forums there is a strong desire to hold on to that.  In game, the "meta or die" mindset is strong in middle fractals, and CoF farming.  

Now recall GW1, ANet has a long and comprehensive history of taking the most popular builds and nerfing them into inexistence.  Just because the meta is one way today, doesn't mean that it will be that way forever.  The day will come when the Warrior Burst will be obsolete.  Maybe it's far off... maybe not... but it will invariably happen.

Today though - there are lots of non-meta groups out there.  As long as you are clear when you are forming the group what you intend, it isn't a problem.  I go on the LFG website and say "CoF p1, multiple runs, all classes welcome", and it is clear that I'm not intending to build an elitist speed-clear team.  I take whoever comes, make sure that everyone has done the path at least once, and go.  I don't ask for armor pings, just mildly competent players.

I've done Ice & Urban with a Ranger, at level 15, just for the challenge.  Dredge and Swamp obviously can't be done, and there isn't any real benefit to doing so for the others.  The fun part is that you have to learn the patterns of the encounters and how to deal with them, and you can't just DPS your way through it or rely on your party to accidentally fumble through.

Urban was annoying as hell, because I kept triggering anti-farming code.  I basically had to let him do damage to me or my pet to maintain his interest.  If you evade the AOE meteor showers too well, he just gives up and full heals himself.

Kumori Tensei, on 19 May 2013 - 03:43 PM, said:

Lately i've been running something like 0/25/0/15/30.  I keep waffling back and forth between that point distribution and 0/20/0/20/30, trading between the +10% damage for myself and the 70% proc rate on spirits.   As is I invest a huge amount into my pet, mostly because solo-kill champs and solo-dungeons is entertaining to me, not because it is optimal for a DPS dungeon run.

Pretty much I'm taking my solo build and armor swapping to balanced stats for dungeons, and full zerk stats for the specific dungeon encounters where it's actually a good idea to DPS optimize.

If I was honestly going for max damage all the time, and had a team I could rely on, I'd drop the pet down a bit in order to get 10/25/0/20/15.

Buhbuhku, on 17 May 2013 - 12:54 AM, said:

Sword / Shortbow have the same base damage value of 1000.  Auto attack co-eff for shortbow is .4.  Average auto attack co-eff for sword is .65.  There is bleed damage, but I'm assuming negligible unless you configured your armor heavily towards that.

.4/.65 = You could divert something like 38% of your armor points away from power, before sword direct damage dipped low enough to to be as bad as Shortbow direct damage.

Not that you would really have to...  Rangers have lots of dodge.