What's the point of ranged weapons and magic?
The point is that players cannot glitch and kill mobs while being unkillable themselves. This is pretty much in every modern game there is.
You can shoot other players and kill them just fine.
One – Piken Square
a fine observation on your part, sir. I, myself, have noted that ranged weapons and magic do not work in any part of the game. I have never hit anything outside of melee, not just on some cheesy point of invulnerability getting a few lazy farm shots.
The invulnerability can be just plain annoying as it can happen even when there seems to be absolutely no reason for it. It also kills any amount of environmental strategy one could apply to the game; using the terrain to your advantage is just a completely foreign concept to GW2.
In part it’s just due to developer laziness, but it’s also in part to prevent cheap farm spots where a player is out of reach of a champion.
This happens when the foe you’re attacking is melee. You can kill a ranged foe while staying on that cliff. Highly annoying if a foe is glitched on a rock or a tree (did you know those minions of Scarlet can climb trees?).
This has been an issue in MMOs ever since they were able to incorporate jumping. Back before they could do anything about it, MMO mods and admins would just ban people for using the terrain to their advantage.
But luckly games have come up with different things to combat it. Invulnerability is a common one. But iv played games where they give all npcs a basic ranged attack so you are never out of reach.
Then another game gave the enemys a limitless leap so no matter how high you are they can still reach you with there melee attacks.