Guild Wars 2

The dragonhunter longbow is a long-range weapon and can be traited to with pushback to keep your enemies at bay. However, no range is mentioned for traps and they seem to be centered around the player. I know the player is supposed to move around, but the combination of ranged weapon and melee utility skills means that
1) there is a fair chance that the traps will not be triggered, and
2) even if the traps are triggered, that will happen with a sizeable delay, at unpredictable moments (granting aegis in the heat of the battle is a lot more useful than at random moments), and probably affecting many fewer enemies than you would like.

I previously tried necromancer wells with staff, and quickly concluded that the offensive ones were unusable without ground targeting. The recent update made wells ground-targeted by default. How come we see this same idea resurface in a new elite specialization? I know rangers have ranged weapons and traps too, but at least
1) it’s not a combination that is supposed to work together particularly well in an elite specialization;
2) ranger longbow has stealth, and its pushback is on demand (as opposed to triggered somewhat randomly by trait in dragonhunter);
3) ranger shortbow has an evasive retreat; and
4) I personally treat ranger main-hand axe as a mid-range to melee weapon. (E.g. ranger axe 1 bounces in any direction, not just behind the first enemy as dictated by guardian longbow 1. I also try to get up close before firing ranger axe 2 so that I can get as many of the spread of 5 axes as possible on my primary target.)

They’re traps, not point blank AoE bombs.

Set them down, lure your enemies into them.

They have an arming delay, not an activation delay.

I don’t believe that ANet’s goal was to ensure that the there were strong relationships between all three of LB, traps and the DH traits. I glad these relationships don’t exist because if they did, it would mean that optimal builds with any one would require the other two; I don’t think that’s Anet’s approach to the game design.

What is disappointing is that there is little outside of the DH traits to encourage the use of traps; on their own, they seems limited usefulness. I’m still holding my breath to see if DH changes to increase the appeal of traps as well. The bleed thing is weak. Even if they did the standard but boring ICD reduction, this might be enough.

Non ground targeted traps will be used by no-one, its a ludicrous set of utilities.

Ground-targeted traps are not traps. At least in this game, they are called wells.

Ranged combatants usually don’t want their foes to come too close, and that’s why even dragonhunters have a pushback trait and lots of cripple. That just makes luring your enemies to you quite inefficient. In solo, you can play it any way you want, even if it takes a long time to kill your foes, assuming you manage to do so. In a dungeon party, the action is always focused around the melee players, and the melee players are just not going to help lure the enemies to a ranged player’s traps. In WvW, there’s little control over where the zerk goes one way or another.

I agree that the synergy shouldn’t be so great that it excludes other builds. I’m just commenting that there’s actually negative synergy among the new elite dragonhunter features. I don’t believe that during the design process, they specifically decided that they didn’t want these features to work well together – it’s just an oversight. Each elite specialization actually has a theme. Shield, wells and chronomancer traits work well together (though not to the extent of making the combination mandatory). Similarly, greatsword, shouts and reaper traits are centered around melee and chill. Longbow, traps, and dragonhunter are conceptually focused around big-game hunting. It is alluring at the conceptual level, but they don’t seem to have worked out the problems at the game mechanics level, which is a pity. I’m not asking them to make traps ground-targeted. Also, given the names “dragonhunter” and “traps”, there is no chance they would change this. I’m just saying they have unfortunately missed an opportunity by (soon) releasing a feature that is not as thoroughly thought out.