The way I currently rate mobility is this:
1. Thief: Extreme mobility in combat and outside
2. Elementalist: Ride the Lightning, FGS, Lightning Flash, On demand Swiftness from Air attunement. It’s more a ‘burst mobility’, but very effective for the conquest game type.
3. Warrior: Sword leap/GS, Swiftness or 25% movement speed very easy to get
4. Engineer: Extremely easy access to perma swiftness, and now can move at full swiftness speed in combat with slick shoes stunbreak.
5. Mesmer: Entirely dependent on Portal usage, otherwise quite slow. Blink and Phase retreat give decent vertical mobility. Sometimes sacrifices rune slots for Travelers.
6. Ranger: Sword Leap and Greatsword 3, but no vertical mobility or easy access to swiftness outside of combat.
7. Necromancer: Decent Swiftness with Spectral Walk, and decent vertical/kiting with Wurm, but this uses up its utility slots (it invests a lot).
8. Guardian: Overall just really slow, a couple of ports and Swiftness on Staff, but not that great.
There are a couple of things that stand out to me as weird with this. First of all, why are Warriors so fast? Warrior is a tanky, heavy armor class with a huge on-node presence. Sure, it seems more ‘athletic’ than Guardian, but its also a heavy armor wearer. Elementalist is also very fast considering how tanky of a presence it is on node, and being a caster, but its a bit more understandable than warrior.
One of the main things I don’t get is why Engineers are obviously more mobile than Rangers. Simply by taking 1 minor trait they get access to 100% swiftness uptime in and out of combat, which is absolutely huge, especially in the conquest game type. Warrior is also somewhat similar by taking Warrior’s Sprint (Minor trait for 25% speed with melee weapons). And it can get long duration Swiftness with Signet elite whenever it wants.
Ranger is probably one of the least represented classes right now in high level tournament play, I personally don’t really care about this, but I feel like Ranger would be helped by raising it’s ‘baseline mobility’, essentially giving it easier access to 25% or 33% movement speed.
One of the reasons I feel especially strongly about Ranger mobility is that it’s one of the only classes that doesn’t have ports or vertical movement, so it should have ground speed mobility to make up for this.
Here’s my suggestions:
1. Make the minor trait “Tail Wind” from the Skirmishing trait line usable outside of combat with the 9 second ICD. This would = about an 18% average movement speed without investing into boon duration. It seems reasonable for a minor trait.
2. Make “Martial Mastery” give 25% movement speed when wielding a Sword or Greatsword. Similar to Warrior’s Sprint, this trait is very rarely taken, and I feel like adding this movement speed would make it worthy of being a Master trait.
3. Lower the cooldown on Warhorn #5 to 25 seconds, also lower the Fury it gives slightly, but maintain the Swiftness so that it becomes about as usual as Warrior Warhorn Swiftness.
I realize that there are a lot of people who don’t like Rangers and think its cheap or skillless or whatever, but I don’t consider these changes an overly strong buff. It just makes Ranger more able to compete with the mobility seen in the current meta. I also don’t want to get into a balance discussion about Rapid Fire or whatever. Until Ranger is being seen a lot in high tier pvp, we can safely assume its not utterly broken or terrorizing everyone.