Prysin, I’ve tried to state my opinion on this topic and never had much luck in the past. It’s a difficult one to address on the forums. I’ll try and get my point across though so I appologize in advance if this is wordy.
I do agree with you that it’s the developers intent for each class to use both weapons and that each weapon set should compliment each other. I just feel that the Ranger’s weapons present the least functional sets in the game from a power standpoint.
LB+GS are the best power pair the Ranger has. Neither weapon is good on their own and I would argue are probably among the worst weapons in the game. Together they provide nearly everything a power oriented class would need. But because each weapon is so weak individually, the lack of a weapon swap cooldown really hits the pair hard.
It’s a similar issue with Sword and Dagger in my opinion. The set is an amazing power set and provides a lot of the raw utility you’d need as a power class. The problem is the weapons remove all pressure while doing the evade and the lack of burst on the weapons and lack of hard CC on the set.
But these are power oriented problems. As a condi, you don’t have these problems and improving the set to more closely mirror the offensive capabilities of other classes would make a condi build horrendously overpowered.
Now that all said, this is strictly looking at the weapons alone. Obviously the Ranger has the pet which provides some of the missing utility and pressure and when taken into consideration (especially for Sw+D) the set is actually pretty strong even as a power build.
The problem then being how poorly implemented the pets are overall and how they go down in value to the point of being nearly worthless when we talk about even just small groups.
Honestly speaking, the change to Rapid Fire I’m not a fan of. It gives me what I’ve wanted on the bow (burst), but Rapid Fire was one of the few tools to use on the longbow to kite with because it did a set amount of damage regardless of range so you could use it at short/mid range while kiting and still provide high damage. It was good filler between Hunter’s Shot and Point Blank Shot while kiting etc. An argument could be made that you can still do this, but the weapon set still didn’t gain much in overall power imo.
What the class needs is a way to maintain a ranged advantage without surrendering all damage and utility. It’s this area the mobility of the class needs to be improved.
Simply giving the class a ranged burst skill would have worked, but not in exchange for Rapid Fire. A Fast Hands trait would also do the trick (on Quick Draw and only if a bow is equipped imo). Making pets more reliable in group combat would also likely do the trick (50% less damage from AE in WvW only). So would a pass of all pet skills (so they all have uniform cast times and can actually track moving targets).
Again… sorry for the rambling. I’m not good at getting my point across on this topic and explaining why mobility is really an issue and why the changes, while a good start, fell a bit short.
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