Which is exactly what ANY profession does when it’s not doing something better.
In what fashion is the Ranger actually good at this? because your basically saying doing good DPS and getting the job done promptly makes a profession not a “skirmisher”…
I think they’re saying that the point of the Ranger is meant to be that if another class can deal, say, 1000 damage over five seconds, then they’ll only be able to deal another 1000 damage over the next twenty, so 2000 total over thirty seconds, while a Ranger might be able to deal 750 damage every ten seconds consistently, so less in the first ten, more in the next two tens, and 250 points more overall when a fight lasts that long or more. The longer the fight takes, the bigger the difference. I’m not sure that’s how it works in practice, but that seems to be the intent.
Unfortunately the way this game is designed, burst damage is SO much more important than sustained damage in almost all circumstances, and in the few situations where sustained damage is important, like boss fights, the boss is either actively immune to condition damage (like Dragons or objects), or just mostly immune to it due to the way stacking works (when they have minutes worth of Poison already stacked or are constantly fluctuating between 23-25 bleed stacks), so for the most part sustained damage via conditions is pointless.
They really need to fix the way conditions are applied to “yellow life bar” targets, and also fix how conditions stack before they consider “sustained damage” to be something that can be balanced against burst, but that’s a general game thing that applies to a lot of classes, not just Rangers. As DoTs go, rangers with their pets actually do a lot better than Necros, Thieves, or Mesmers.
At the bare minimum they need to change up the way that rewards are distributed in a large mass situations. So long as you need to “tag” an enemy with a certain amount of damage before it dies if you want to get full reward for the kill, Burst damage will ALWAYS be highly favorable over sustained damage. The damage you could have done ten seconds after the enemy is already dead doesn’t really mean much to anyone.
To me, operating under the misapprehension that I’m on a class that’s an “unparalleled archer”, swapping weapons is a sign of weakness. It means I’ve lost control of the situation and I’m having to scramble for my back-up plan. Forcing me to take swap-based benefits on the way to picking up fundamental Archer Traits has always bugged me.
A skirmisher isn’t meant to be a pure archer, or at least should be an archer that switches between bows. It’s basically well suited to a playstyle in which you offload all your skills with one weapon, swap to the other and offload all those skills, and then swap back, taking advantage of the swapp buffs, and likely a sigil swap buff as well, similar to a D/D Ele or Kit Engi on rotation builds. It’s not a bad build, but it might not be the build you want, and if so, it shouldn’t be the one you focus on. The Marksmanship line is more intended for an “artillery archer” who just wants to hang back and rain arrows, right?
I find this a bit disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate where you’re coming from and the fact that you guys want to stick to your Ranger philosophy.
All things considered, many of us, the players, would dearly love to be able to play a viable burst build, or have some aspect of decent physical DPS.
This is a fair point, I’m wondering if it would be possible to give Rangers one exclusively Burst build. Tie it to a GM trait in either the Power or Precision based tree, pick a handful of weapons that would work well with this, and then make the trait read something along the lines of:
Damage dealt by [chosen weapons] is increased by 25%, cooldowns on [chosen weapons] are increased by 25% (specific numbers adjusted based on balance testing, of course).
The idea being that if you spec into that tree, slot those weapons, then you could do considerably more damage on your first pass, but then you’d be stuck on cool-down much longer than a standard Ranger, making you much more bursty, without retaining the sustain capabilities of a Ranger, but only if you put the effort into it.
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”