Guild Wars 2

Note: In this thread I focus on a single aspect of Rangers, in hopes to bring it to the forefront of why Rangers have a bad name in dungeon groups. There are other issues with Rangers, sure- but I’d ask that you discuss those in other threads.

I made a thread titled “Why do YOU dislike Rangers in Dungeons” in an effort to find out why exactly Rangers have a bad name in dungeons. Reading through all of the posts, I have come to a conclusion.

The issue is that Rangers have only two ways to support the team in the “zerker meta” regardless of skill.

These two methods, Spotter and Frost Spirit, require 2 major traits (30 trait point investment total), which narrows build choices significantly, to the point where taking these traits is often the difference between a “good” ranger, and a “bad” ranger.

They are also limiting to use because of their radius of effect, which means that whenever a Ranger chooses to attack at range, their team often does not receive these benefits.
Our other group utility, Healing Spring, also suffers from this range complication.

This is especially concerning considering the recent developments regarding Berserker stats. Spotter and Frost Spirit both benefit this type of gameplay, and are also the two most noticeable utilities that a Ranger can bring to a dungeon party.

As a result, if there is one thing I could ask from the balance team regarding rangers, over all else, it would be that a ranger’s utility in groups (from range and melee) be given some consideration when planning future changes around stat balancing.

Thanks.

Just an FYI. A ranged Ranger will always be hated, unless he has a trait, that gives more precision to teammates based on how far he is away. In which case, I’d leave him in the starting zone and get my buff lol.

Well, an idea like that could be having Spotter be centered around the ranger’s pet, rather than the ranger.

That way the ranger can stay at range, but the team can still enjoy the buff.

That’s just one idea, though. Obviously there are cases when ranged attacking is inappropriate, but that is up to the player to learn, not an issue with the class.

Ltomato.8649:

Well, an idea like that could be having Spotter be centered around the ranger’s pet, rather than the ranger.

That way the ranger can stay at range, but the team can still enjoy the buff.

That’s just one idea, though. Obviously there are cases when ranged attacking is inappropriate, but that is up to the player to learn, not an issue with the class.

smart move. And at worse the guy just close range in and get a shortbow, his axe or his sword out, end of the problem.

Buff range isn’t really a ranger specific issue, the 600 range limit affects all classes which is why melee stacking is so dominant. It does suck however, to have only one viable build and to have to trait for fortifying bond. A few other classes do have the trait utility problem where they have to spend 30 points in a traitline for all meta builds.

Some adjustments to F2 skills (or spirits… i guess) would be nice changes for ranger utility. Ie. making the pet cast times more responsive and not bug out, be affected by boon duration without a trait etc.

Ltomato.8649:

Well, an idea like that could be having Spotter be centered around the ranger’s pet, rather than the ranger.

That way the ranger can stay at range, but the team can still enjoy the buff.

That’s just one idea, though. Obviously there are cases when ranged attacking is inappropriate, but that is up to the player to learn, not an issue with the class.

I was just thinking about having some more synergy between ranger and pet and buffs/auras also emerging from pets, when I read your post.

In the case of spotter, maybe both ranger and pet could apply the buff around them, that way rangers that like to use bows from max distance could do so and still be able to provide this particular buff to their teammates in melee range.

Fortifying bond could be made to work both ways somehow, maybe if distance between ranger and pet is more than x distance from each other or something.

It must be possible and viable to play from range, even in dungeons. I’m willing to bet that the majority of rangers picked the class for that very reason, that they are supposed to be “unparalleled archers, rangers are capable of bringing down foes from a distance with their bows”.
I know I myself started out fighting from a distance with dual bows on my ranger. Nowadays, I fight in melee range maybe 85% of the time.

Bow damage is half that of Sword, so not only are you handicapped because you have a pet, but you’re handicapping yourself further by using a bow.

Add to this that everyone else is meleeing, so you aren’t gaining any might/fury because ANet never thought it necessary to make it so any boons your pet gets, you get as well.

For more insult to injury, the pet has the 5 target cap for their utility. So say you run Moa (no idea why you’re not using a cat, but whatever…) and it yells. Someone isn’t getting that Fury because the pet counts against the cap as well. Heck, if you’re doing Tequatl and you’re in the group you’re highly likely to not give you or yourself fury unless you’re grouped.

Then you stack on the other issue with pets being they can’t avoid all these 1 hit kill mechanics and instead the Ranger must swap pet to avoid them or do it after the pet dies. It would be nice to tell your pet to recall, but guess what… YOU’RE IN MELEE RANGE (you better be in melee range!) and you can’t tell your pet to run away.

And then there’s the major issue that keeps the vast majority of Rangers away from maximizing their DPS… the sword itself is very off-putting to players because you can’t control it easily. In order to actually dodge while attacking with the weapon effectively you need to turn auto-cast off which, no matter how fast you think you push that button, will result in a dps loss. Especially when you stop to dodge that 1 hit kill some boss throws at you. The weapon is just a pita to use. Even for experienced players.

Now that all said, there’s nothing specifically wrong with needing to min/max your character for PvE. It’s possible to provide spotter and spirit in a single build and you should for the group’s sake. But when the overwhelming majority of players probably chose the Ranger specifically because they wanted to play a Ranged class and you make ranged combat the least effective way to play the class by half (at best), you can’t even enjoy yourself while trying to contribute to a group.

And thus the bearbow was born…

OGDeadHead.8326:

Ltomato.8649:

Well, an idea like that could be having Spotter be centered around the ranger’s pet, rather than the ranger.

That way the ranger can stay at range, but the team can still enjoy the buff.

That’s just one idea, though. Obviously there are cases when ranged attacking is inappropriate, but that is up to the player to learn, not an issue with the class.

I was just thinking about having some more synergy between ranger and pet and buffs/auras also emerging from pets, when I read your post.

In the case of spotter, maybe both ranger and pet could apply the buff around them, that way rangers that like to use bows from max distance could do so and still be able to provide this particular buff to their teammates in melee range.

Fortifying bond could be made to work both ways somehow, maybe if distance between ranger and pet is more than x distance from each other or something.

It must be possible and viable to play from range, even in dungeons. I’m willing to bet that the majority of rangers picked the class for that very reason, that they are supposed to be “unparalleled archers, rangers are capable of bringing down foes from a distance with their bows”.
I know I myself started out fighting from a distance with dual bows on my ranger. Nowadays, I fight in melee range maybe 85% of the time.

Anything is viable, but not everything is efficient. Engineers and Eles have viable (good) ranged builds (staff/grenades) but they are still played in melee range to not scatter mobs, and for buffs.

Also, I wouldn’t want spotter only on the pet. Certain fights are problematic for pet survival and losing Spotter when you make a mistake and let your pet die would suck as well.

Atherakhia.4086:

YOU’RE IN MELEE RANGE (you better be in melee range!) and you can’t tell your pet to run away.

Well you can, if you decide to waste a slot skill on the most horrid skill in the game – Guard.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Atherakhia.4086:

YOU’RE IN MELEE RANGE (you better be in melee range!) and you can’t tell your pet to run away.

Well you can, if you decide to waste a slot skill on the most horrid skill in the game – Guard.

I really find it funny that it has a 1 second channel time. It’s more like “Guuaaaaaaaaaaaaard!” -waves arms in direction pet should go-

To be fair also, a ranger using Rampage as One and River Drake/Marsh Drake can easily stack might and fury on themselves, even at max range.

TurtleDragon.3108:

Also, I wouldn’t want spotter only on the pet. Certain fights are problematic for pet survival and losing Spotter when you make a mistake and let your pet die would suck as well.

I like that though, since it adds a skill element to managing your pet- knowing when to swap pets to keep them alive can be important. There are certainly fights where no amount of pet-swapping can keep them alive, but in those fights, most players would be attacking by range, anyway.

Spotter on both pet and ranger would be nice (not double bonus when in each others auras, just two sources of the same buff).

Ltomato.8649:

There are certainly fights where no amount of pet-swapping can keep them alive, but in those fights, most players would be attacking by range, anyway.

But… what about those who don’t? Meleeing some fights with a sword is already a pain in the kitten, and it doesn’t need to be made worst.

I meant fights like the harpy in grawl fractal, or the boss of the frost fractal. Where meleeing in any class would be very difficult.

I support my party by giving them 12 stacks of might, fury, swiftness, fire shield (for those hordes), frost armor, healing.

This is with guild party though.

My point is that we do not have only 2 ways of party support.

I’ve played this game for over year, 90% of that time being on my ranger. I have fairly simple solutions to fixing ranger in dungeons, some that have already been mentioned here.

Fortifying bond working both ways is an excellent idea, even if it cost trait points. emphasizing synergy between pet and ranger should be the point of a pet class.

increasing longbow damage modifiers and removing the range penalties would make it far more useful in dungeons.

each class should have a melee and ranged option to choose from since this is supposed to be a “play how you want” type of game.

condition caps should also be removed in general…it prevents any condition type class from being useful in PVE or capping stacks at 25 per character rather than 25 as a group. a change like that could be made in dungeons only if necessary so that conditions didn’t become overwhelmingly powerful in PVE.

solrik.6028:

I support my party by giving them 12 stacks of might, fury, swiftness, fire shield (for those hordes), frost armor, healing.

This is with guild party though.

My point is that we do not have only 2 ways of party support.

Might, fury, and swiftness are by no means rare.
Rangers also have to go way out of their way to get these things.

Let me put it this way:

In order to get 12 stacks of might on party you need:
Fire trap (requires hostile npc to trigger)
Drake AI blast finisher (not on command)
Jungle Stalker Active
Warhorn Blast finisher

If you’re a guardian, you need:
A staff.

In order for a warrior to get 12 stacks of might on a party, they need:
Longbow fire field (requires full adrenaline, which can be accomplished out of combat using heal)
Longbow blast finisher
For Great Justice
and a Banner which provides so much more than just 2 blast finishers.

For reference, Banner of Discipline gives 170 Precision and 15% critical damage at level 80. Banner of Discipline can always be up, can be used to blast finish fields at least once by everyone in the party, give swiftness, and give 8 seconds of fury to the party on a 10 second cool down.
On a Utility skill that has 100% up time, is mobile, and can be traited to do even more!
It’s also a significant damage and team utility boost over Ranger Greatsword. (Seriously. you can provide 80% fury uptime to your party, blast finish on command, and your 1 attack does about 175% more damage)
Yet if you run with a warrior who doesn’t take this, he doesn’t get instantly booted from the team.

Rangers need to spend 20 trait points to just get 150 precision for the party.

The Ranger loses so much in order to be even close to on par with other classes in terms of support while other classes can just pop a utility and reflect missiles, or stealth, or portal.

The Ranger must trait to bring their unique bonuses, which narrows build options and emphasizes good “builds” over good play.

Perhaps the new “critical damage changes” will change things for the better, but given that Berserker based ranger builds are already considered underpowered, I’m not optimistic.

Changes to Rangers don’t even have to affect this particular area of utility! There are so many ways to support a party in GW2, but it just so happens that Ranger is under par in all of them. And their most significant contributions are Spotter and traited Frost Spirit.

Ltomato.8649:

Let me put it this way:

In order to get 12 stacks of might on party you need:
Fire trap (requires hostile npc to trigger)
Drake AI blast finisher (not on command)
Jungle Stalker Active
Warhorn Blast finisher

If you’re a guardian, you need:
A staff.

In order for a warrior to get 12 stacks of might on a party, they need:
Longbow fire field (requires full adrenaline, which can be accomplished out of combat using heal)
Longbow blast finisher
For Great Justice
and a Banner which provides so much more than just 2 blast finishers.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bonfire
Torch, It’s great for out of combat fire fields or if you group with a LH ele.
Drakes usually open with their Tail Swipe too, so its predictable at least. And ofc, Mighty Roar has a tendency to fail occasionally. Only problem is that you can’t Tail Swipe out of combat.

Empower is not as effective as blasting fire fields and the might stacks only last 10s. Significant dps loss in combat makes it not worth switching to in combat most of the time.

Warrior could do like 18 stacks if he really wanted to lol.

Unlike the guardian and warrior, you could do the fire field and blast in combat without being stuck on a kittenty auto attack for the next 5-10s. In terms of practicality, rangers don’t have it that bad in terms of might stacking.

Rangers have other ways of supporting too but those tricks aren’t really needed in organized groups, and are situationally helpful in PUG-land. We’re not just a walking discipline banner.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Spotter on both pet and ranger would be nice (not double bonus when in each others auras, just two sources of the same buff).

While that would be a nice improvement, a more holistic solution would be to greatly increase the buff-giving range for all classes and abilities (talking 1800 range or something like that). The current short range is part of what encourages the current stacking-meta (among other things) and quite frankly standing still and hitting things fast is quite boring after a while.

So if we want to improve Ranger utility by having Spotter and other buffs reaching farther, it might be best to do it for all classes so we can move towards a playstyle that allows for more mobility.

TurtleDragon.3108:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bonfire
Torch, It’s great for out of combat fire fields or if you group with a LH ele.
Drakes usually open with their Tail Swipe too, so its predictable at least. And ofc, Mighty Roar has a tendency to fail occasionally. Only problem is that you can’t Tail Swipe out of combat.

So if you take torch and warhorn… That’s 2 weapon slots devoted just to stacking might, both on quite long cooldowns (25 seconds on bonfire, 35 seconds on call of the wild). Isn’t that still jumping through hoops to get on par with other sources?

There are also other reasons for a guardian to use a staff, or a warrior to use a longbow outside of stacking might.

And if you want to provide more than that, you need to take healing spring, trait 10 points & use a utility for spirits, 20 for spotter, or 40 for shout regen/swiftness.

I’m frustrated because despite what I wanted to believe, it seems that playing a ranger well in an organized setting is more of just taking the right build than playing and timing well.

I’m frustrated because despite how Guild Wars 2 was presented, and how the balance team says that they want to encourage build diversity, Rangers do not have much build diversity.

Ltomato.8649:

TurtleDragon.3108:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bonfire
Torch, It’s great for out of combat fire fields or if you group with a LH ele.
Drakes usually open with their Tail Swipe too, so its predictable at least. And ofc, Mighty Roar has a tendency to fail occasionally. Only problem is that you can’t Tail Swipe out of combat.

So if you take torch and warhorn. That’s 2 weapon slots devoted just to stacking might, both on quite long cooldowns (25 seconds on bonfire, 35 seconds on call of the wild). Isn’t that still jumping through hoops to get on par with other sources?

There are also other reasons for a guardian to use a staff, or a warrior to use a longbow outside of stacking might.

And if you want to provide more than that, you need to take healing spring, trait 10 points & use a utility for spirits, 20 for spotter, or 40 for shout regen/swiftness.

I’m frustrated because despite what I wanted to believe, it seems that playing a ranger well in an organized setting is more of just taking the right build than playing and timing well.

I’m frustrated because despite how Guild Wars 2 was presented, and how the balance team says that they want to encourage build diversity, Rangers do not have much build diversity.

If you had to be the might stacker, then yeah. In organized groups, it’s usually just the ele or engi’s job to might stack. I don’t really feel its the rangers role to stack might anyways, our job is really to be a walking discipline banner (spotter/frost) with a feline pet and auto attack stuff. If you have a single ele or guardian in your party, then you don’t need to provide the fire field. Other classes have that issue too about devoting weapon slots they might not normally use to stack might.

Running the right build is important on any class. (ie. Guardians/Mesmers “need” to trait their reflects kinda like how we “need” to trait our frost spirits). As a result, there’s only 1-3 “viable” meta builds for every class. Here’s a list that Nike maintains: http://www.reddit.com/r/GuildWars2Builds/comments/1pdukv/behold_a_list_of_the_current_meta_builds_28102013/
There isn’t much room for build diversity in general. Like, I think a banner-less warrior or reflection-less mesmer is useless, but they won’t get as much hate as the ranger in PUGs becasue they don’t have the bearbow stigma and the general player base is uninformed. Any class needs to trait and bring the right utilities.

TurtleDragon.3108:

Running the right build is important on any class. (ie. Guardians/Mesmers “need” to trait their reflects kinda like how we “need” to trait our frost spirits). As a result, there’s only 1-3 “viable” meta builds for every class. Here’s a list that Nike maintains: http://www.reddit.com/r/GuildWars2Builds/comments/1pdukv/behold_a_list_of_the_current_meta_builds_28102013/
There isn’t much room for build diversity in general. Like, I think a banner-less warrior or reflection-less mesmer is useless, but they won’t get as much hate as the ranger in PUGs becasue they don’t have the bearbow stigma and the general player base is uninformed. Any class needs to trait and bring the right utilities.

Reflects are “worth” traiting into because they can take some skill or knowledge when to use at the right time.
The traits also do more per utility skill than spiritual knowledge. Guardian consecrations don’t all have similar utility effects, Mesmer focus is used often for illusionary warden which does good damage along with reflection, as well as temporal curtain.

To that effect, a ranger who traits into into spiritual knowledge gains nothing by not running a spirit. Perhaps if the other spirits (other than frost) had their effects made more useful in pve? But they are already very strong in PvP. So a buff to spirits is unlikely. Spirits are also a quite passive utility that don’t take much planning or consideration to use. Drop, pop, swap for shorter cooldown, repeat.

All a warrior, guardian, or mesmer needs to do to not be “useless” is swap out to a utility that sees active use. This gives them much more flexibility in build choices. If you’re trying to be optimal, there’ll certainly be an optimal build to take.
But the problem with Ranger is that the line between Useful and Optimal is so narrow that there isn’t much wiggle room.

I will admit that one of the strengths of rangers is that our traitlines are so overcrowded that it is relatively easy to change “builds” by swapping out piercing arrows or eagle eye or signet of the beastmaster or remorseless for Spotter if necessary. But at the same time, you lose out on those valuable traits.

Ltomato.8649:

All a warrior, guardian, or mesmer needs to do to not be “useless” is swap out to a utility that sees active use. This gives them much more flexibility in build choices. If you’re trying to be optimal, there’ll certainly be an optimal build to take.
But the problem with Ranger is that the line between Useful and Optimal is so narrow that there isn’t much wiggle room.

Well, I agree that this is a problem. On my warrior I can screw around with Empower Ally builds and still helpful with 2 banners and FGJ. A ranger without spotter/frost is not worth bringing. Some classes have near meta non-optimal builds that still perform well enough compared to their optimal counter parts that they are not dead weight.

More DPS oriented utility would be nice, since thats all what people care about. Some PvE-only spirits would be nice. Ie. a fury version of stone spirit for example.

Overall, I just feel ranger utility is “fine”, and would benefit greatly from bug fixes and QoL adjustments (which can include trait flexibility).

TurtleDragon.3108:

Overall, I just feel ranger utility is “fine”, and would benefit greatly from bug fixes and QoL adjustments (which can include trait flexibility).

Yep. There are plenty of ways to approach fixing rangers. Lots of small ways, and a few big ways, many of which have been posted in other threads.

But with no replies regarding any of them, we can only keep speculating and throwing things at the wall until maybe something sticks.