Guild Wars 2

Apparently that is not your “balance philosophy” so please fix this. In PvE (Dungeons), ranged Rangers are bad… really really bad.

Pretty sure every class is better at ranger than ranger.

Why can’t we just leave Anet alone?

I think they are underfunded.

Buy Gems for Balance.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Pretty sure every class is better at ranger than ranger.

The problem of the so called “Ranger.”

I’m hoping the ideas from that CDI will start kicking in soon. Maybe rangers can get a full balance patch all to themselves one day.

What is the dps of a full dps ranged ranger including pet? I’m quite curious.

Well yeah, staff ele spaming fire skills on a target that can’t move out of a lava font with a large hitbox is the highest DPS ele build.

Tim.6450:

What is the dps of a full dps ranged ranger including pet? I’m quite curious.

Not entirely sure of the exact number, however I think that the ranger is balanced around mythical 100% pet uptime so in content that the developers themselves admit are problematic (read completely designed without considering the pet’s base limitations).

Also with more and more content revolving around multitarget the elementalist will be the king of ranged combat.

If ranger has the highest range single target dps, a ranger team should have the fastest ranged lupi kill.

Problem there is that isn’t Lupi a classic example of content in which the pet under performs?

This is my one consistent annoyance with profession balance, aside from the myriad of neglected Mesmer bugs. You come into a game expecting the profession that’s advertized as an archer to actually be good at it. I keep trying to like my Ranger, but its underwhelming performance in 2/3 game modes continuously kills my motivation.

Scepter/dagger ele versus bow ranger. Who will win the dps competition? (Ele)
Who will provide more buffs, fields? (Ele)
Who have class mechanic what not makes trouble? (Ele)
Who have more viable builds? (Ele)
Ranger=30%ele+30%thief+15%warrior=75%

Staff needs to be toned down really. Even amongst ele’s own weapon sets, it doesnt make any sense.

It’s the easiest rotation to master (spamming AA and 2 more skills off CD, don’t even need to change attunement, so complex), it has the longest range, and it has the highest DPS under optimal party buffs. That’s the very definition of being overpowered.

scepter/dagger ele is not a ranged PVE build.

Its also called Lightning hammer build.
(scepter is not used to deal damage, being one of the lowest dps weapons, but only for stacking might).

Staff ele does more ranged dps than ranger but has lot of weaknesses and most of its damage has high risk.

^ what risk? Mobs don’t move out of AoEs in this game, mages aren’t rooted on cast for most spells, and you’re at 1200 range if you want to be. The only rooted spell in the staff setup is meteor shower.

Staff ele:
- target moves => 60% less dps
- target moves and changes directions => 100% less dps
- need to do anything else than damage => 100% less dps for 13 seconds

Just stating the facts.
The problem comes from encounter designs

Quite weird though to talk about the “ranged DPS” of a Ranger. You’re in PvE, no one is supposed to be at range. What are you doing there in the first place? O.o

Darox.8069:

Staff ele:
- target moves => 60% less dps
- target moves and changes directions => 100% less dps
- need to do anything else than damage => 100% less dps for 13 seconds

Just stating the facts.
The problem comes from encounter designs

That’s the problem though. For almost everything which actually matters (in terms of rewards, it’s a MMO afterall), enemies are idiots, encounters are trivial, meaning enemies don’t move. It’s gonna take a world of work on Anet’s part to change that (we missed a year of opportunities with the temporary mess that was LS S1), so at this point, I’m thinking ‘bad’ encounter designs are a part of the game.

Carighan.6758:

Quite weird though to talk about the “ranged DPS” of a Ranger. You’re in PvE, no one is supposed to be at range. What are you doing there in the first place? O.o

Darox.8069:

Staff ele:
- target moves => 60% less dps
- target moves and changes directions => 100% less dps
- need to do anything else than damage => 100% less dps for 13 seconds

Just stating the facts.
The problem comes from encounter designs

I guess my question here is:
Is it AN’s intention for all PVE (especially dungeons) to be melee focused?
In which case
Why the hell is ranged combat not catered for in core gameplay AI?

Obviously, for Ele AoE and massive superior ranged damage, the AI aren’t going to move out of it. Due to LOS/Stack/AFK dungeon meta.

Is that an intended design? then Why is it an intended design?

Well isn’t all the following better at range than Ranger?

Engineer using grenades.
Ele using staff.
Warrior using longbow/rifle.
Necro using staff/sceptre.

All them do more damage than Ranger and the weapons feel better to use, also you still have lots of spare traits, skills to put into other stuff.

Thief shortbow is a nice ranged weapon too.

Rangers are pretty rubbish at range and also rubbish in melee. Rangers are just largely for noobs who like having a large collect of useless pets.

Anet will never fix them. They have promised on 2 different occasions to ‘fix’ them and the balance team failed.

The ‘toolkit’ Anet give Rangers is a bad toolkit.

Lace.9472:

I guess my question here is:
Is it AN’s intention for all PVE (especially dungeons) to be melee focused?
In which case
Why the hell is ranged combat not catered for in core gameplay AI?

Probably not intentional. It just happened to come up like that when they were working on PvE, and since all classes have viable melee-range setups they went with it.

But as to why the PvE AI gameplay doesn’t exploit it’s own game’s mechanics… no clue. We have so many interesting mechanics to GW2’s combat, downed state, finishers, interrupts, knockbacks, kiting (casting while moving!), no target control, if AI could even minimally work with these (and certain LS components show that they can on a programming level), then we’d have a much richer PvE game.

Normal dungeons are terrible, but in fractals I could see the ranging possibilities

Lace.9472:

Carighan.6758:

Quite weird though to talk about the “ranged DPS” of a Ranger. You’re in PvE, no one is supposed to be at range. What are you doing there in the first place? O.o

Darox.8069:

Staff ele:
- target moves => 60% less dps
- target moves and changes directions => 100% less dps
- need to do anything else than damage => 100% less dps for 13 seconds

Just stating the facts.
The problem comes from encounter designs

I guess my question here is:
Is it AN’s intention for all PVE (especially dungeons) to be melee focused?
In which case
Why the hell is ranged combat not catered for in core gameplay AI?

Obviously, for Ele AoE and massive superior ranged damage, the AI aren’t going to move out of it. Due to LOS/Stack/AFK dungeon meta.

Is that an intended design? then Why is it an intended design?

From what I heard, the AI was massively toned down during BWE because everyone whined.

Rangers will always be crippled as long as they’re forced to have a pet. Always.

Having an AI minion that has to do stuff by itself will always put you at a disadvantage when other classes just have their character to control.

Meglobob.8620:

Well isn’t all the following better at range than Ranger?

Engineer using grenades.
Ele using staff.
Warrior using longbow/rifle.
Necro using staff/sceptre.

All them do more damage than Ranger and the weapons feel better to use, also you still have lots of spare traits, skills to put into other stuff.

Thief shortbow is a nice ranged weapon too.

Rangers are pretty rubbish at range and also rubbish in melee. Rangers are just largely for noobs who like having a large collect of useless pets.

Anet will never fix them. They have promised on 2 different occasions to ‘fix’ them and the balance team failed.

The ‘toolkit’ Anet give Rangers is a bad toolkit.

Ranger is the only class that can hit stuff from 1500 range and not miss and also hit from 1800 to 2000 range depending or terrain. If anyone says its 1500 they havent really played with a ranger long enough. No to other class can constantly annoy you with 3~5k hits from that range consistently.

The only real fix Anet need to do is reduce the heavy trait investment the weapon needs as well as make it so the damage isnt so weighted onto the auto attack. Its essentially a weapon with 1 dps skill and 4 utility skills :/

Im personally interested to see how Anet change this in the fture.

They really need to split skills between the game modes since having them cover all 3 makes for difficult balance.

Theres nothing in PvE which benefits having more than 1200 range. Nothing at all, and I can’t imagine how they can make it beneficial, especially given the radius of boon application.

So that should not be factored into balancing PvE.

But there is no PVE specific balancing. They look at the game and all 3 games modes as a single thing which means compromises because they are so reluctant to skill split / Anet has given themselves the task of balancing everything so it works in 3 seperate and different game modes.

I’m just starting to doubt if they actually have a balancing team at all or do they just check the calendar and go ‘oh boy, it’s that time of the year again, Rob, your turn this time!’ followed by a deep sigh from Rob.

Jasher.6580:

Apparently that is not your “balance philosophy” so please fix this. In PvE (Dungeons), ranged Rangers are bad… really really bad.

The correct statement is that ranger has the (ranged)highest single target dps. Its probably true. About a year ago Anet said something like “warrior does the amount of damage ranger does minus the pet”.