Best class for range attacks
They’re all pretty much balanced in terms of ranged, it just depends on what you like. Every class has ranged attacks. Guardian is by far the most boring and worst with ranged.
If you want damage at 1200 range, you probably want to look at the Warrior. Good single target damage and the longbow has some nice stuff too.
Aurora Glade [EU]
yeah many of the classes are broken down into wether they do melee dmg or ranged dmg and they are surprisingly close across the board. what changes them is how they deliver the dmg and how good that is depends on what you are doing. The guardian may not be popular for range but its auto attacks aoe cone is HUGE. I would choose that for farming tons of trash mobs in like DE but certainly that would get boring.
Rangers 1500 longbow range is hard to pass up. If you can maintain range its single target dps is medium to high for ranged attacks if traited like a glass cannon.
mesmers can hit hard at 600ish range with the GS. While the auto attack may be 1200 range if you are at ~ 600ish range you can mirror blade a foe for a reliable 3 hits on them. you have to trait for an extra bounce to do it and whats nice is its an illusion summon skill. Its normally 8 sec recharge but it benefits from both the GS trait and the illusion CD reducer trait taking it down to 4.8sec CD despite what tooltip says. Doing this almost takes you into the realm of what melee dmg would be. Using mantra of pain you can spike pretty hard in under 4.8 but no one likes charging mantras unless you are just using them for the +4% dmg/ mantra trait.
If you an handle medium range, then I strongly suggest engineer. All the tricks I have up my sleeve make kiting amazing. I have to make a pretty big mistake for NPCs to ever reach me in melee range, and even most melee players can be kept at kiting range for the entire duration of a fight.
Otherwise I definitely suggest rifle warrior.
You could trait the engi to the long range of other classes (1200).
Aurora Glade [EU]