Guild Wars 2

This was written in 2 parts because it was too long
Hi again guys, Griften here, I’ll be talking about Rangers (the ‘pew pew’ class) and the improvements we should see in: weapon skills, utility skills, pet’s active skills, and some of the traits.
I’ll be trying to make this short (failed) so don’t panic (sorry).
And as always, there’s a much shorter version at the end for your convenience.

Weapon Skills
I’d like to start with the off-hand weapons, as I think they are the most under-powered.
Improving those would automatically improve the efficiency of using a sword or axe mainhand.

• Of-Hand Axe:
  “Path of Scars” misses the pulling part 50% of the times. The first part of this skill should either knockdown or immobilize the target so it could actually pull as intended.
  “Whirling Defense” is ok-ish, it should deal about 10%-20% more damage considering how long you have to stand still and cast it (5 seconds).

• Dagger:
  “Stalker’s Strike”, Rangers have enough access to poison without it. This skill should apply torment or blindness instead. These conditions are more “Stalkery” than poison.
  “Crippling Talon” is fine as it is.

• Warhorn:
  “Hunter’s Call” should inflict 2 seconds of blindness per second, resulting in a maximum duration of 12 seconds of blindness. This change will make this skill a lot more useful and add more utility to any Ranger build. This actually makes sense considering a swarm of hawks are pecking the head of the target!, this skills simply demands to inflict blindness.
  “Call of the Wild” is nice since it became a blast finisher.

• Torch:
  “Throw Torch” is a pretty great skill, nice damage and low cd.
  “Bonfire” has to be traited with “Off-hand Training” in order to be effective. A base radius of 120 is really not impressive. It should be 180-200.

• Longbow & Greatsword
  Both suffer from the same problem, too slow and too weak. A damage boost to the longbow would be enough to make it viable (at least +30% to every skill). None of the Greatsword’s weapon skills are reliable enough, auto attack should be stronger. a rework is needed for the Greatsword though I don’t have any ideas for it.

• Axe
  This is the “meh” weapon of rangers in PvP. If the auto attack would be stronger than it would be vaible to use it on a power build with the “Honed Axes” trait (+10% crit. damage while using an Axe in mainhand)

• Sword
  “Hornet Sting” and “Serpent’s Strike” are fine, even great. But the auto attack… the auto attack is horrible.
  The chain auto attack is: Slash(1/2 sec) -> Kick(1/4 sec) -> Pounce(3/4). During Kick and Pounce you’re locked on the target and cannot dodge while casting them. So if you attack your target with the auto attack, you won’t be able to dodge 2/3 of the time. The whole buggy behavior of this skill makes it pretty confusing and annoying to use.
  ANet doesn’t want to change the auto attack behavior of the sword because “it is a unique behavior”. Thank god it’s unique, if more weapons would work this way I would quit the game. This alone forces rangers into the Greatsword even if they don’t like the concept of it.

• Shortbow
  This is the only weapon that works fine for the Ranger. ENJOY.

Utility Skills
I promise you, this one is shorter!
Ranger’s Utility skills are too much “trait’em to use’em”, and that’s a shame. You can’t really use spirits, traps, signets and shouts effectively without the right traits. My suggestion to ANet?

Signets:
1. make signets affect the player without the “Signet of the Beastmaster” trait.
1. Change “Signet of the Beastmaster” trait to the following: “A signet’s passive benefit remains while it’s on cool down.” Exactly like the Elementalist’s signet trait.

Shouts:
1. The trait “Nature’s Voice” should also apply 3 seconds of Aegis to all targets affected by shouts.
2. “Sic ’em” should have a 25 seconds cd instead of 40. And should apply “Revealed” as AoE without the need to have a target. This way it can counter “Shadow Refuge” and “Mass invisibility”
3. “Guard” should be completely deleted from the game and be replaced by another low cd shout.

Lightning Reflexes
This skill should be reworked like warrior’s “Stomp” skill. It should apply stability for the duration of the skill.

Pets Active Skills
I think we all know what’s the best pet skill in the game: “Terrifying Howl”.
But that’s because all the other pet skills are so bad they make 80% of the pets completely useless. “Terrifying Howl” is the only some-what reliable CC pet skill. all the support or condition active skills are insignificant.

1. Increase every active skill’s range by 100%, reduce the cast time by 50%.
2. ALL support / condition active skill’s duration should be increased by 100%.
3. Pets should be completely reworked to have better active skills.
4. maybe even add more active skills and remove some of the passive skills to promote active play and increase the Ranger’s awareness of his/her pet.

Traits

Marksmanship
Marksmanship’s minor traits are a joke, they should all be combined into 1 Master trait or be entirely reworked.
some of the signet traits should be combined to spare trait point for signet builds.

Skirmishing
Nice traits, good stat combination but why traps?
The traps traits should be moved into the Adpet and Master trait choices and a new Grandmaster trap trait should be introduced, would be nice to see torment added to traps.
For power-based builds Skirmishing has pretty much great stuff.

Wilderness Survival
This is one is pretty ok except the fact you MUST fully trait it or you’re out of the meta tier. If we don’t see any better active condition removal for Rangers (Signet of Renewal is not reliable) then we should at least have “Empathic Bond” moved to Adept tier.

Nature Magic
Here it gets interesting.
1. “Evasive Purity” is a current Master trait that removes poison and blindness on a dodge, with a 10 seconds cd. My suggestion is that you make it remove any two conditions, and remove the cd all together. Here we have a much more friendly and active condition removal that doesn’t murder your pet.
2. I’ve already discussed the “Nature’s Voice” improvement I’d like to see so I won’t repeat it"
Other than that this trait line has pretty good traits that gets along with a lot of different Ranger builds.

Beastmastery
Come on, no one uses this line for the traits (which are “meh”). Rangers use this line to have a much better pet.
I don’t have a specific suggestion, we simply need a lot of these traits improved.

Thanks for reading guys, this is kind of everything I have to say about rangers at the moment.

As promised, the much shorter version:

Anet wtf u do to rangers?
why dis
why dat
weapons noob
skills is noob
pets such bad
wrong traits lol
very much suggestions
big thank-you 4 reading

Haven’t played ranger in a long time, but I’m all for moving the class away from the passive play state it’s in at the moment!

So…buff everything?

I can’t really comment on the changes but since most seem to be buffs I’d like to point out what I find annoying about Rangers.

1. Spirits – Not only do they clutter the screen they also give powerful buffs without player input. I.e. too good for passive play.

2. Pew Pew Pew – Seriously, can’t Rangers have cooler, more telegraphed moves than constantly spaming auto-attack? It just feels so lame losing to a class that does barely more than spam auto-attack and the odd evade.

3. Protection + Regeneration uptime – seriously, it seems like Spirit Rangers have these buffs up 80% of the time and are constantly reapplying them. Not cool. Buff should be tactical decisions, not reapplied every few seconds.

“Nerf” these aspects of the class and I’m ok with buffing others.

just stop it! each patch anet nerfs spirit rangers. what more do you want?

DanSH.6143:

• Of-Hand Axe:
  “Path of Scars” misses the pulling part 50% of the times. The first part of this skill should either knockdown or immobilize the target so it could actually pull as intended.

I would suggest just reducing the range so it doesn’t fly past your opponent so far.

DanSH.6143:

“Whirling Defense” is ok-ish, it should deal about 10%-20% more damage considering how long you have to stand still and cast it (5 seconds).

Agree

DanSH.6143:

• Dagger:
  “Stalker’s Strike”, Rangers have enough access to poison without it. This skill should apply torment or blindness instead. These conditions are more “Stalkery” than poison.

We need to get rid of torment not add more to the game. Disregarding pets the only poisen we have is in 1 trap and short bow. Keep the poisen on this weapon for power builds.

DanSH.6143:

“Crippling Talon” is fine as it is.

Agreed

DanSH.6143:

• Warhorn:
  “Hunter’s Call” should inflict 2 seconds of blindness per second, resulting in a maximum duration of 12 seconds of blindness. This change will make this skill a lot more useful and add more utility to any Ranger build. This actually makes sense considering a swarm of hawks are pecking the head of the target!, this skills simply demands to inflict blindness.

Great idea!

DanSH.6143:

“Call of the Wild” is nice since it became a blast finisher.

Agreed

DanSH.6143:

• Torch:
  “Throw Torch” is a pretty great skill, nice damage and low cd.

Agreed

DanSH.6143:

“Bonfire” has to be traited with “Off-hand Training” in order to be effective. A base radius of 120 is really not impressive. It should be 180-200.

Would be OP, the area of affect is fine as is and very strong. Just need to use skill to keep your opponent in it.

DanSH.6143:

• Longbow & Greatsword
  Both suffer from the same problem, too slow and too weak. A damage boost to the longbow would be enough to make it viable (at least +30% to every skill).

WAYYYYYYYYYY TO OP, the problem isn’t the raw dps it’s the lack of fury or sustained poison in power builds VS the risk you take when you are power

DanSH.6143:

None of the Greatsword’s weapon skills are reliable enough, auto attack should be stronger. a rework is needed for the Greatsword though I don’t have any ideas for it.

The greatsword is one of the funnest weapons in the game and the reason the dps is low is because it is a cleave weapon. I would like to see a stack of 5 bleeds added back to maul though along side the vulnerability so we can run some diverse builds. Counterattack should be adjusted so it doesn’t knock back AI in PvP. The other change I would prefer is swoop removing cripple and chilled and immobilize.

DanSH.6143:

• Axe
  This is the “meh” weapon of rangers in PvP. If the auto attack would be stronger than it would be vaible to use it on a power build with the “Honed Axes” trait (+10% crit. damage while using an Axe in mainhand)

Auto attack needs to be stronger and splitblade needs to turn your character to your target on skill use like poison volley.

DanSH.6143:

2. “Sic ’em” should have a 25 seconds cd instead of 40. And should apply “Revealed” as AoE without the need to have a target. This way it can counter “Shadow Refuge” and “Mass invisibility”

30 seconds rather than 25 or it can be OP and revealed shouldn’t be aoe that is a horrible idea <3

DanSH.6143:

3. “Guard” should be completely deleted from the game and be replaced by another low cd shout.

I would personally like to see the cd slightly increased and make it a very short smoke field so we can blast it with warhorn etc.

DanSH.6143:

Lightning Reflexes
This skill should be reworked like warrior’s “Stomp” skill. It should apply stability for the duration of the skill.

I’d rather it break immobilize

- Great initiative and an interesting read with some good ideas

aussieheals.6843:

I would suggest just reducing the range so it doesn’t fly past your opponent so far.

That would harm the skill’s AoE capability, and would be a nerf in PvE. Though this would be ok with me.

aussieheals.6843:

We need to get rid of torment not add more to the game. Disregarding pets the only poisen we have is in 1 trap and short bow. Keep the poisen on this weapon for power builds.

You forgot the sword! Condi Rangers most commonly use sword and shortbow, and will at least have one of those, hence they will always have at least one low cd poison applying skill.

aussieheals.6843:

The greatsword is one of the funnest weapons in the game and the reason the dps is low is because it is a cleave weapon. I would like to see a stack of 5 bleeds added back to maul though along side the vulnerability so we can run some diverse builds. Counterattack should be adjusted so it doesn’t knock back AI in PvP. The other change I would prefer is swoop removing cripple and chilled and immobilize.

yeah swoop should definitely remove movement-impairing conditions. I really hate the Ranger’s Greatsword and I don’t enjoy playing it but that’s just my taste.

aussieheals.6843:

30 seconds rather than 25 or it can be OP and revealed shouldn’t be aoe that is a horrible idea <3

yeah maybe 30 seconds, but it should be AoE so you can get players out of stealth while they are in stealth, at the moment you have to time it perfectly to actually interrupt a stealth attempt or just use it before they stealth which is not reliable enough.

aussieheals.6843:

I would personally like to see the cd slightly increased and make it a very short smoke field so we can blast it with warhorn etc.

That would be nice but this shout doesn’t make any sense, I find myself telling my pet to not move and then calling it back to me every 12 seconds. Imagine a person actually behaving like this with his dog, it makes absolute no sense.

aussieheals.6843:

I’d rather it break immobilize

You’re right it should break immobilize. But not instead, because it also inflicts damage so the evasion of this skill can be interrupted by certain skills like engi’s shield #4 or ele’s shocking aura.
I think it should do both.

Thank you very much for your constructive reply

DanSH.6143:

aussieheals.6843:

I would suggest just reducing the range so it doesn’t fly past your opponent so far.

That would harm the skill’s AoE capability, and would be a nerf in PvE. Though this would be ok with me.

I don’t want to reduce the AoE, just the throw. I suppose this fix still doesn’t solve the issue completely though because of our trait that extends our offhand range nerfs this skill even further.

DanSH.6143:

aussieheals.6843:

We need to get rid of torment not add more to the game. Disregarding pets the only poisen we have is in 1 trap and short bow. Keep the poisen on this weapon for power builds.

You forgot the sword! Condi Rangers most commonly use sword and shortbow, and will at least have one of those, hence they will always have at least one low cd poison applying skill.

I did! But with all the condi cleanse in this game 1 poison still isn’t enough

DanSH.6143:

aussieheals.6843:

The greatsword is one of the funnest weapons in the game and the reason the dps is low is because it is a cleave weapon. I would like to see a stack of 5 bleeds added back to maul though along side the vulnerability so we can run some diverse builds. Counterattack should be adjusted so it doesn’t knock back AI in PvP. The other change I would prefer is swoop removing cripple and chilled and immobilize.

yeah swoop should definitely remove movement-impairing conditions. I really hate the Ranger’s Greatsword and I don’t enjoy playing it but that’s just my taste.

I cannot understand your hate for it, the mobility feels so nice

DanSH.6143:

aussieheals.6843:

30 seconds rather than 25 or it can be OP and revealed shouldn’t be aoe that is a horrible idea <3

yeah maybe 30 seconds, but it should be AoE so you can get players out of stealth while they are in stealth, at the moment you have to time it perfectly to actually interrupt a stealth attempt or just use it before they stealth which is not reliable enough.

Rather than guessing when my opponent is going to stealth I get them to about 25% hp then use it. That way regardless of them trying to stealth or not they are going to drop. – Also, pet swap wolf fear already pulls them out of stealth, isn’t that enough?

DanSH.6143:

aussieheals.6843:

I would personally like to see the cd slightly increased and make it a very short smoke field so we can blast it with warhorn etc.

That would be nice but this shout doesn’t make any sense, I find myself telling my pet to not move and then calling it back to me every 12 seconds. Imagine a person actually behaving like this with his dog, it makes absolute no sense.

It might not make sense at the moment but I’m sure with some minor buffs this could be good in a different game mode while sniping. Especially if we get a way to obtain pet buffs in the future.

DanSH.6143:

aussieheals.6843:

I’d rather it break immobilize

You’re right it should break immobilize. But not instead, because it also inflicts damage so the evasion of this skill can be interrupted by certain skills like engi’s shield #4 or ele’s shocking aura.
I think it should do both.

That is a fair enough statement but interrupting it provides counter play, much like if it were to break imbo it’s counter-play. Not being able to stop to it would be teetering on OP.

DanSH.6143:

Thank you very much for your constructive reply

Not many of us left, we must work together! haha

spirit ranger is allrdy nerfed enough…
it wins nearly no 1vs1 anymore
only reason to run it in our team is the rez spirit right now.

btw the “bugfix” to make each spirit active skill 1 second cooldown after you spawn them dont work anet.
the spirits active still not work if you press the button to fast after this one second.
so much time my rez spirit just dont cast his active and im sure it dont get a interrupt…
the same for my other spirits, sometimes they dont cast when i press the active skills to fast, just test it in the mists, theres nobody to interrupt it…
so thx for this nice bugfix anet or should i call it ninjanerf?

for the topic:

weapons should not buffed/nerfed anymore :
shortbow, dagger, torch, mainhand axe and sword (well sword 1 maybe need a rework)

weapons need a total rework on skills not only dmg:
longbow and longsword

weapons need a bit buffs:
offhand axe and warhorn

useless skills wich need a total rework:
shouts: guard, search and secure
survival: quickening zephyr (remove the stunbreak there and give it some offensive)
survival: muddy terrain (well most other skills are rly much more interesting Oo)

skills need a bit buff:
trapps: spike trap, flame trap, viper trap and frost trap (traitreword and more traits)
survival: sharpening stone (well nobody use it for some reason)
spirits: frostspirit
shouts: guard, description sounds good, but it dont works good in a fight…

at least traits:
there are still ~50% uselsess traits and traits in the wrong traitline.

there need more INTERESTING traits for a dps ranger in the marksmanship and skirmishing traitline.

there need to be more interesting traits for a trapper ranger (like the traits for a spirit ranger)
maybe bring our 2 trapper traits into an other traitline like marksmanship 10 and 20 because this traitline have condi duration.

wildness survival:
our best traitline, it needs always the 30 points for the condi cleanse.
would be nice if theres some alternative condi cleanse in some other traitlines which give some skills active condi cleanse, so some rangers like dps rangers dont have to go with 30 wildnes surival anymore…