Hey guys,
I am writing this to you because for the last few days I have read a lot of posts and knee jerk reactions about Rapid Fire/Longbow rangers and Warrior adrenaline. There have been many cries how LB rangers are a scourge and absolutely brainless to play and OP without a counter. On the other hand how Warrior is now ruined because adrenaline drains rapidly out of combat as soon as you leave it.
Well, I am here to tell you that neither of these changes were wrong, and here is why:
1)What ANet has tried to do with the Ranger in the last feature pack, which was obvious from the beginning, was to introduce 2 new play styles. One is completely obvious and has garnered much attention, the other one has yet to do so.
There has been no real ranged combat in this game since release. Even though there are a lot of mechanics implemented to counter it, none of it is used in competitive play be it PvP or WvW and its mostly used for PvE dungeons. Now IF we see an emergence of range combat we will see competitive use of traited vails, feedback, reflects, pulls and most importantly a completely new positioning game. THIS IS A GOOD THING
Now, I am not here to discuss weather Rapid fire rangers are OP or not. In PvP we have yet to see top teams use them. We can speculate but we do not have hard data yet.
As far as PvE dungeons go, the Ranger got a solid boost in selfish damage and that is a good thing because it was on the lower end of the spectrum, with thief, warrior and elemenalist being top tier and warrior slightly behind them. This is a competitive non issue as its simply PvE.
When it comes to WvW the organised melee train with necromancers and elementalist backline will still be the go to tactic. Why? Durability and innate defensive skills with offensive AoE. It is very simple. All the classes that go into organised zerg play have innate AoE damage, sustain and defense. This will not change.
The only thing where I can see a problem is the extreme stat stacking in WvW small scale roaming. There are many examples of this, but then again, if small scale shock squads become a thing in WvW, ITS A GOOD THING. But WvW can not be a gauge for balance simply because it allows for far too much stat stacking with lord kills, sigils and runes that are not available in PvP.
2)Warrior has been a very very boring profession with a mechanic that was borderline non skill. Adrenaline at first was just another CD to be used when possible. Then Cleansing Ire added a new dimension to it, but adrenaline was too available and for the most part you could F1 as the CD was over. This patch adds to warrior mechanic management depth and THIS IS A GOOD THING.
What I am trying to say here is that it is not really important if these changes are OP or UP by this or that much. The concept of opening up new ways to play the game are key. There is finally viable ranged gameplay in GW2. There is also no more reason to call Warriors brainless. I am certain we will see more tweaks once we see more pro streams, tournaments and hard data.
My 2c