I got my ranger up to FoTM 52, and i’m doing just fine. Haven’t seen a single complaint by any of my group members. The reason why everybody hates on rangers is because most people play them WRONG. Sadly, it affects all of us… Rangers aren’t bad, if the player knows how to handle one. So all the talk about ‘’uhh every ranger suck’’ is complete bs.
Pretty much this. The lighter classes tend to draw people of a more… “inferior” mindset. People who play mages want typically want to stay at range using the archetypical mage weapon, the staff. People who play rangers want to typically stay at range using the archetypical archer weapon, the bow. As such, lighter classes tend to draw the more lazy players who want to play safe and don’t want to learn to dodge. This is especially true for the ranger, especially when said ranger wants to go super lazy mode and packs a bear, sets it to F1 and forgets about it, or better yet, keeps a pet on passive the entirety of the fight.
That may work in other games where your lighter class had range and only range with quite high damage, but not here where at least one of your melee weapons by far trumps any of your range weapon’s damage output.
Unfortunately, due to many players of these classes having the same mindset, it makes it easy, and pretty much justifiable to have that guardian’s opinion. Have YOU ever played a the sole heavy in a party, where none of the others ever go melee? It’s pretty much hell on your survivability unless you go super tanky. What happens then? You have one super tanky melee with paltry damage, and 4 “ranged dps” players (also inferior damage). Enemies take longer to kill, tanky melee player is nearly dying all the time, quietly (or not) stewing in anger at those “ranged dps” classes, develops prejudice against them.
And no, there is no way you can determine if one of these players are going to be a full time range baby. Achievement points, you would think, would indirectly translate to experience with the game, so you would think that those with higher points would realize the truth of this, or at least have alts of “melee classes” so they know the truth of their inferior range dps and have experience of playing in melee range. Nope. Had a party with 2 rangers, one had around 2500 points, the other had nearly 7000. The 2500 point ranger was the one with the non bear pet using sword/warhorn like a boss. The 7000 pointer had a longbow 24/7 WITH A BROWN BEAR ON PASSIVE.
Oh yeah, add to the fact that when going in situations where it’s just not viable to melee, guess which class has the best single target ranged dps weapon. Oh look, it’s not one of the “ranged classes”, nope it’s the class with the least viable pvp range options, the guardian. So… there’s that too. Not sure which class has the best ranged multi-target dps though. The guardian staff auto is actually pretty good autoattack-wise since it hits 5 targets and all other melee auto attacks, barring a few exceptions, hit 3. With a non-full zerker set-up my staff autos typically crit around 2k, to up to 5 targets = 10k per crit. Greatsword was like… 3k, 3k, 4k up to 3 targets = 9k, 9k, 12k per crit.
Tl;dr the “non-trinity” classes aren’t inherently bad classes. They just attract more bad players than the others do because bad (for GW2) players think staves and bows are the coolest, always.
