Guild Wars 2

I want to create a new character, however I can’t decide between a warrior and a ranger. I know I want to be a norn, but can’t decide. With the new feature pack, it makes the decision a little tougher for me. Which profession is better in your opinion? Your help is appreciated

Personally I find rangers much more interesting, but also harder to play well.

Warriors are the typical fighter class. They have the largest range of weapons but overall they’re fairly straight forward damage dealers with some crowd control skills.

Rangers generally don’t do as much direct damage (unless you design your build for it specifically) but it’s a lot easier to add a wide range of conditions, boons and other effects. A lot of their skills are more movement/positioning based as well. For example the longbow does more damage at long range, the short bow causes extra conditions if you attack from the side or behind, the sword skills can be used to move you around the battlefield etc. You can also get your pet attacking your target, a different target, or applying boons or conditions with their F2 abilities.

Basically I feel like there’s more going on, and more to do, when I play a ranger. As I said it makes it harder to play well because you have to take all these different effects into consideration, but I enjoy that. Whenever I’ve tried playing a warrior I get bored with combat a lot faster.

Having said all that warriors are generally more popular, particularly for dungeon speed-clear groups.

And overall there is no right answer. You should try them both and play the one you like best.

If you enjoy both equally, Warrior does make a solid first/only level 80. They’re in meta in almost every aspect of the game; in PvE almost any group will want atleast 1 Warrior since Banner of Discipline and Strenght add a lot of dps to the group. In WvW they’re an amazing Frontline class because they can use a lot of AoE Crowd Control along with needing little survivability in gear, allowing for more DPS-stats and lastly in tPvP they’re a few solid builds that can make a Warrior a good asset to the team, such as team-fight potentional in Hambow (again for the Crowd Control) or a good roamer in Sword/Axe + LB Hybrid builds. Lastly they’re most likely the best class for solo, especially harder content due to being relatively self-sufficient buff-wise (high Might, (almost) perma-Fury and Vulnerability) and survivability-wise (healing signet, high hp, high toughness, access to blocks/survivability utilities)

Ranger isn’t a bad choice either though. They’re excellent in tPvP as either teamsupport/close-point holder in a Spirit set-up aswell as strong in their burst in a LB + GS zerker set-up, allowing for some variety role-wise aswell. Warriors need to be in melee for their full potentional, where-as, in PvP, a Ranger can be devastating at range. In PvE they also increase a teams dps through Spotter and Frost Spirit, though almost any highly organized group would most likely pick a Warrior over a Ranger, but a Warrior along with a Ranger would be the better option than taking two Warriors. Where Ranger falls short how-ever is the Zerg WvW Meta, they don’t bring anything as significant as what a Warrior brings, but they can still deal DPS like any other class in a zerg.

Significant play-style difference would be that a Warrior is much more survivable and often swaps between weapons to reach their maximum potentional. A Ranger spends most of the fight in one set (Sw/any for PvE and PvP depends on the build) but can be more difficult to handle due to lower base-survivability and managing of the pet. Sword can also be nasty on Ranger since the auto-attack chain can’t get interrupted as easily for a dodge, but learning how to handle that is well worth it.

I personally don’t enjoy Warrior much since I didn’t find them too challanging. But like that there’re plenty of people out there that feel the same about Ranger.