Guild Wars 2

XP – I’m assuming you’re doing the personal story as you progress (if not it will help) so my advice would be do to include gathering and crafting into your completion. You should easily be of an appropriate level for the next zone that way. Also use consumables (food/sharpening stones/oils) and boosters and it’ll help a lot.

Ranger was my first character and is my main PvE character and I love it. Unfortunately Longbow damage is lacklustre (for want of a better description) so I would recommend Sword/X (I use Dagger but Horn is good as well as it has a blast finisher) or Greatsword with a bow as a back up if you like it. If you’re going to play WvW then yeah Longbow isn’t a bad idea just watch out for Guardians and Mesmers with reflection. It can easily wipe you out.
The main reason people have an issue with Rangers is dungeons when they sit at 1500 range without being truly beneficial to the team (no boon sharing, no rez assistance, causing certain abilities to activate on bosses). If you like a Ranger play a Ranger. They are good fun.

The Train in Queensdale is basically hopping between 4 or 5 champs to earn loot and gold. As a lower level player I’d advise to avoid it (it’s your choice of course but I find it can burn you out quite quickly). If you come across an event you think you’ll need help with then call it out in map chat. Someone will most likely come and help you. Also it may be beneficial to find a guild. They’ll be able to help a bit more as they’ll most likely have newer members or members with alts that need levelling and can join you.

Hope that helps.

AdaephonDelat.3890:

XP – I’m assuming you’re doing the personal story as you progress (if not it will help) so my advice would be do to include gathering and crafting into your completion. You should easily be of an appropriate level for the next zone that way. Also use consumables (food/sharpening stones/oils) and boosters and it’ll help a lot.

The main reason people have an issue with Rangers is dungeons when they sit at 1500 range without being truly beneficial to the team (no boon sharing, no rez assistance, causing certain abilities to activate on bosses). If you like a Ranger play a Ranger. They are good fun.

The Train in Queensdale is basically hopping between 4 or 5 champs to earn loot and gold. As a lower level player I’d advise to avoid it (it’s your choice of course but I find it can burn you out quite quickly). If you come across an event you think you’ll need help with then call it out in map chat. Someone will most likely come and help you. Also it may be beneficial to find a guild. They’ll be able to help a bit more as they’ll most likely have newer members or members with alts that need levelling and can join you.

Hope that helps.

^ sums everything up. Also the reason why rangers are hated in dungeons is because of the pet AI. It does more harm than good. The pet AI is stupid and ends up causing more aggro. Even with good pet management, it still causes problems. That’s why they are disliked in dungeons.

With regards to Ranger in dungeons, they are in a very peculiar situation. On one hand, Ranger does decent damage in melee and at range and can provide long lasting water fields and provides damage boosts from Frost Spirit and Spotter. On the other hand, Ranger is a very popular profession with new players (for the reasons you stated), so the amount of Rangers experienced with the content is quite low in comparison to other professions. That leads many people to just not want to play pug roulette and avoid letting Rangers in the party at all. If I were going to try to play Ranger to start off with, I’d probably look for a guild that will help teach you dungeons, because being an inexperienced ranger looking for pug dungeon runs is likely going to cause you and others frustration.

Ranger pets aren’t bad when properly managed, they’re quite a nice damage boost if you can keep them alive (not always easy to do) and many have useful skills like blast finishers, aoe boons, etc… You really do need to know how to manage them to not be a burden to your team though, just as an example, at max melee range, the first encounter of the Grawl Shaman in Fractals will not use his heavily damaging melee attack, so classes who want to attack in melee can do that with relative impunity. A ranger pet will trigger the attack if it goes in that range, and can get those players heavily damaged or downed. As a Ranger, you are expected to know or learn those situations where certain pets are required/should be removed.