Guild Wars 2

Hello all,

I was just looking for some opinions from people. I did 10 levels as a ranger (like im doing with many classes to experiment) and found it rather enjoyable. Though i found myself liking melee more then the ranged skills in many situations (all those evasive combat maneuvers and poisons are a lot of fun). Does anyone know if its possible to be successful in the long run focusing more on melee with a ranger?

Also… if any higher end rangers could fill me in on something. Do pets become useful? I just found myself rezzing mine all the time and jealous of other classes F1 abilities cough warrior cough

Any hints/tips would be appreciated

Thanks!

Dont let the class name fool you, rangers have complete viability as melee. GS and axe/warhorn are my favorite for melee. Pets are an interesting thing, every one of them has something useful for a fight, its just about knowing which to use for which circumstance. Are you using it to hold attention on a mob? Use a bear or moa, bears have very high toughness/vitality and a bit of self heal and blocking, moas have aoe healing/buffs and high vitality. Are you using it in wvw for damage? Use a low vitality pet with high damage like a cat or bird, since players arent likely to target pets. Are you doing dps or support in an instance? Use a spider or carrion, both have ranged attacks that tend to keep them out of aoe. The ranger’s ability is not so much their f1 as their f2, choose a pet for the situation, then choose a sub-species of that pet type for its f2 ability, because you get to choose when to use the f2 ability.

Speaking of F2 abilities, my pets never want to activate them. I’ll be in a dungeon, hammering F2 over and over again because every time I press it, a moment passes and nothing happens.

Haven’t gotten far in mine (( she’s my third ALT xD; )), but I’ve been looking over the traits that I might want, and it seems perfectly viable. As far as being 100% melee, perhaps not. You’ll always have those situations where you’ll want to roll back and pull out an ax/bow, but I still have full intention on making my Ranger as close to full melee as possible with spirit support.

My wife’s character that she plays with my Ranger is an Ele after all, so yeah… I’ve gotta draw attention away from her somehow, haha.

addisonstone.2570:

Speaking of F2 abilities, my pets never want to activate them. I’ll be in a dungeon, hammering F2 over and over again because every time I press it, a moment passes and nothing happens.

They seem to have fixed that in the patch last night, I had been having the same issue. Apparently there was a bug that caused your pet to keep auto-attacking a couple times before it would actually use the F2 ability, but in the patch notes they claim to have fixed it. Hopefully that’s true, because yeah, that was annoying, lol.

thanks for the tips all

I have my 5 slots filled up experimenting (what can i say its a problem hahaha)

i may have to give ranger another go but looking at it from a different direction

Yeah there’s still a pause with the F2 abilities, but it’s gotten better.

Random thoughts about the ranger… mine is 50 now and has about half the pets.

The ranger really has a ton of mobility if you go short bow and sword. There are also some utility skills that help mobility, like Lightning Reflexes. I think this a a major advantage of this class over say a ranged warrior.

Rangers have lots of condition damage possibilities – bleeds, poisons, burning. They also have some very solid healing/protective abilities although nowhere near what the guardian can do.

If you choose your pets carefully you can set up lots of nice combos. For example, I use the jungle spider a lot because of the poison field. I keep axe and torch on my swap, and I’m built for +condition damage. A lot of rangers like the drakes because of their blast finishers, which a ranger doesn’t get from weapon skills (just leap and projectile finishers, and the leap can be hard to pull off in some situations).

I like the ranger mostly because I always like the hybrid classes. Medium armor, toughness/vitality traits, melee skills, pet skills, mobility skills, healing skills… you can go down a lot of different paths. Of course that also means if you don’t focus you could end up being completely kitten

I would decide on a theme… Death from afar? You can run, but you’re still going to die (bleeds/poison/burning)? Can’t touch this close combat evader? I’m not really left handed weapon swapper? Then pick your traits and pets and gear to support what you want to do.

I went for condition damage and I’ve got sigils of battle in both my swap weapons, which give me might on swapping. I’ve got runes that increase my might duration, and I’ve got traits that give me a bonus on swapping pets. There’s really a lot more to a GW build than your typical MMO – I love it!

I love my ranger to death!

The key is to pick a play style within the class that you really enjoy. Personally I sticked to the two bows (short/long) for most of my gameplay as that’s what I enjoyed so I will comment on those and leave the rest up to people who know more than I about the others.

Let me just first put some general advice. Quickening Zephyr is the greatest thing I use. I run a trap build and with my hotkey setup I’m able to drop all my traps on someonekittenfast and then still have time to smash them with rapid fire going double time before it ends. Even though that 4 seconds doesn’t seem long, when you’re moving that fast it is beyond long enough.

Anyway, out of the two bows I really enjoy shortbows. I would only recommend shortbows to someone who is willing to move a LOT. Without getting that bleed off your main attack which requires you to flank your enemy there is almost 0 point to using it. Also if you are going to focus on shortbow I would urge you to go with a condition/crit build. The long bows are excellent openers in pve, barrage then rapid fire followed by switching to the shortbow as the enemy charges in and roll around behind them and just bleed them out in short order.

As far as pets go you can’t go wrong with spiders. Their ability to stun or imobolize or poison is just amazing. Also the bears are great tanks in those boss fights.

Finally I would say that you really should look through all the traits you could possibly have and decide what looks fun to you and go for it and if you don’t like it just don’t use the same build the next time you use a book and reset your trait points.

Good points Pand, i might have to give them another try haha

and once again thanks all

I use a Shortbow and Axe/Warhorn, usually stick with my Snow Leopard just because I don’t like to switch that often. Shortbow offer’s a lot of maneuverability in combat, and the axe/warhorn combo does better DPS at close range (more damage on a per hit basis and less travel time, horn has a good buff and DOT skill).

What I usually do is load up on signets with my support skills, all of which help my pet from dying most of the time — they are either making it grow in size and do more damage, making it invincible for a period of time, or granting regeneration to us both. Cant go wrong with Hounds of Balthazar as your Elite Skill, either. Hyena + the hounds can more often than not put even Minion Masters (Necromancers) to shame.

So far Rangers are my favorite profession, give yours another chance!

I don’t find the longbow to be particularly great. Shortbow’s faster, and can REALLY stack bleeding.