Guild Wars 2

Ranger Longbow Needs to be Changed for Power Rangers to be Viable in any Medium of Play

Summary:
Longbow power ranger in optimal gear is always numerically worse than alternatives.
This is due to a a lack of both utility and damage on longbow skills.

The comparison:

My equipment:

All Ascended Berserker armor (Power, prec, crit damage), with Ruby Orbs slotted.
All Ascended Berserker Trinkets, with 3 Offensive Mighty Infusions.
Ascended Berserker Longbow with 2 WvW Mighty Infusions and Superior Sigil of Force (5% damage).

My traits:

30 in Marksmanship taking Steady Focus (10% damage at full endurance) and Eagle Eye (300 range, 5% damage)
25 in Skirmishing taking Hunter’s Tactics (10% damage when flanking)
5 in Wilderness Survival (25% endurance regeneration)
10 in Nature Magic for Strength of Spirit (7% of vitality turned into power)

My boons in battle and conditions on enemy:
Approximately 7 stacks of might on myself, and fury, stability, and swiftness for 22 seconds following Rampage as one (120 second cooldown)
On enemy: consistent 5-10 vulnerability, with spikes when rapid fire is up.

My damage:
On a good day with long-range shot, over 1500 range, approximately 4800 damage critical. On a bad day ( had to dodge, no flanking, pet AI decided to kitten ), maybe 3000-3500 damage critical. All this on a single (1, one) target.

This is with the most damage boosting equipment and all of the damage boosting traits available to Ranger, also at maximum range.

My friend, the engineer:
Exotic Rampager Armor with Boon duration runes (4 altruism, 2 water).
Ascended Berserker Weapons with Sup. Sigil of Bloodlust and Sup. Sigil of Fire
Ascended Berserker trinkets.

Traited into grenade kit, getting 1500 range and the extra grenade.

The boons
Permanent Vigor (100% endurance regeneration), swiftness, and might.

The damage
At any range, starting cold, 1100 damage per grenade, for a total of 3300. But wait, there’s more! The grenades also apply a bleed that does a lot of damage per tick- the grenades can also apply burning for 500 damage per tick.

With a ramp up, grenades can do about 1700 per grenade, for a total of 5100 damage in an area of effect. Along with bleeds and 500 damage burns, and vulnerability.

Let’s compare!
Endurance
Ranger: Permanent 25% endurance regeneration, loses 10% damage after a dodge roll.
Engineer: Permanent 100% endurance regeneration.

Other Boons
Ranger: Stealth is nice. Rampage of One is good when pet AI decides to cooperate.
Engineer: Permanent Swiftness and Might.

Attacking
Ranger: Best case scenario, 4800 damage on a critical against a single target at maximum range.

Engineer: Best case scenario, 5100 damage on critical, plus tons of condition damage against multiple enemies at any range with sub-optimal gear.

I don’t mean to argue that Engineers are totally broken and strong.

I just want to use this example to show that a Ranger using a longbow does not provide enough utility for the amount of damage it does, or enough damage to compensate for its single-target damage/utility.

Suggestions in next post

Some suggestions:

Increase Long-Range Shot projectile speed.

When most of our damage comes from being far away, missing and getting a confusing “Out of Range” pop up is extremely frustrating. Increasing Long-Range Shot projectile speed so that it isn’t so simple to just walk back and forth indefinitely to negate all damage would make Longbow much easier to use in long range situations.

Bring back the bugged fury on longbow

Even with permanent fury, longbow wasn’t matching up to other professions in terms of damage. Permanent fury on longbow, with my current build (55% crit chance, 108% crit damage) would result in about a 16% damage over time increase due to my high critical damage.

Lower the channel time on Rapid Fire

Currently, the four and a half second channel time is hardly rapid. It does track enemies through stealth (provided they don’t just go behind you) which is nice, but it lacks any real feeling of burst. The vulnerability is fantastic, but the channel often gets interrupted- 4.5 seconds is an extremely long time to be shooting, and with 10 shots, the damage often just gets outhealed in PvP, or simply interrupted in PvE.

Adjust Barrage

With a longbow, this is our only source of area damage unless you take piercing arrows (sacrificing 5% damage while also requiring enemies to be lined up).
Perhaps making this able to be channeled while moving, or decreasing the cast time would make it much more useful to use. In PvE, this is rarely used, as it is hard to find a safe location to cast from. In PvP, this is never used, as there is never a safe place to cast from.

Rework Steady Focus or revert the Natural Vigor change

Despite claiming to want to improve build diversity in the Dec. 10th balance patch, power based rangers received no real damage or viable utility buffs. In fact, the Natural Vigor change (from 50% (that’s half of real vigor, by the way) to 25%) meant that after dodge rolling, Ranger damage dropped 10% for twice as long as before, essentially lowering Ranger damage output.
Perhaps make Steady Focus only lose its bonus when endurance is less than half full. This would allow rangers to dodge at least once to reposition or simply to survive while maintaining damage. 10% is a lot of damage to lose out on just for using an often necessary gameplay mechanic.
Another option would be to revert the Natural Vigor change. This change seemed aimed at the PvP scene where petting zoo rangers would just constantly dodge and negate damage. The issue here is that petting zoo rangers have ways of evading built into their weapons, as well as having the option to take traits that grant 100% vigor, such as Vigorous Renewal in wilderness survival or Vigorous Training in Beastmastery.
Reverting the change would make power rangers much easier to use.

Hopefully this clarifies my current frustration with Ranger’s longbow, and provides some fair suggestions that may inspire some change in the future.
(I also hope this wasn’t toooo wall of text-y!)

I think this suits this thread perfectly.

I think they should just replace rapid fire with a old guild wars skill called dual shot .
Put it on cd of 2.50s cd when you trait it and fire 2 shots at the same time and keep the vurnerability on hit. meaning you will hit approx 8 times if you dont manage to get out dodged instead of shooting 10 arrows in a row that can be line of sighted.
Changing the rangers skillcap is impossible but changing the skills to something that requires some planning is so much better.
That way you might actually hit the ´´rapid fire´´ and still deal damage on a steady basis.
As for the Barrage. They should consider lowering the time it takes to cast at the cost of lowering the duration the barrage takes. Also reducing the cooldown on the skill just about slightly
That way you have it off cooldown earlier, cast it faster and actually deal the damage without getting scrapped into something for having to cast it for too long.
You should be able to provide the player with options between the 5 skills he has, not like most of the situations you see now where as shortbow just turns skillcapped at turning auto attack on.

Which is why I personally think changing
2 Forked Shot Fire Two shots at the same time on a (when traited 2.5 second cooldown
Meaning you initially fire 8 shots on target imposed to the rapid fire that ends up being line of sighted or someone running or dodging behind you just cancelling it.
Keep the vurnerability, would help to build up overal damage.

3 – I feel like the stealth is very viable for getting out of a dangerous situation not to mention with having a immobilize or a daze at your disposal that includes a cripple from your 4 (If changed)

4-

Either remove the knockdown and replace it with a Daze and add Cripple to it.
Or, add an immobilize with a cripple. Longbow hardly has any real way of staying at range, and it should be allowed for the ranger to do so by having a useful utility at his disposal. He can´t deal real damage from his Rapid Fire anymore since his damage changed to sustain with the Forked Shot so being rooted in place or actually dazed wouln´t punish him so much for getting caught.
But it still gives the ranger a viable option to use his longbow without popping his Sword/? to go defensive and remain in that state for the duration of the fight.

5 – Barrage lower cooldown / lower cast time / lower AoE period

I wouln´t know how bad the change on the Rapid Fire is for pveers, but I presume you have to dodge every now and then aswel or run away for that matter.

Longbow damage is actually very high. It is higher than shortbow as well on max range and if they would make it any higher it would kitten with the balance.

The problem is the pve melee meta. If you stand beside your warrior group you will also get the 25 might stacks and aoe boons while you give them spotter etc. This won’t happen on range. And honestly it is good like that. You never should be able to make a build where ranged damage > melee damage and I don’t understand why so many people don’t get this. Must be the bearbow mentality.

Dojo.1867:

And honestly it is good like that. You never should be able to make a build where ranged damage > melee damage and I don’t understand why so many people don’t get this. Must be the bearbow mentality.

If you’d actually read my suggestions instead of simply assuming, none of them directly increase longbow damage. Closest to that would be the permanent fury.

Dojo.1867:

You never should be able to make a build where ranged damage > melee damage

Again, if you had read my post, I give an example where an engineer in sub-optimal gear does MORE damage than a ranger in optimal gear at ANY range in an AoE, versus a ranger’s single target. Melee damage also cleaves, which does do more damage total.

Having farmed CoF path one on my warrior back in the day, I know the damage potential of melee. Ranged potential, even with full might stacks and fury from Rampage as One + Drake, doesn’t even come close. 4800 crits per shot at max range, 3/4 fire speed versus 3000+ melee cleave attacks at 1/4 to 1/2 second per hit.

Since you refer to “F2 decided to go kitten” i assume you were using the Jungle Stalker as pet (F2 gives 5 stacks of might, 3 1/2 sec channel before cast in WvW). This pet is far from a good companion in WvW.
Instead, i would suggest you use either the Cave Spider, or a Raven. The reason being that these pets provide better DPS and utility then the Jungle Stalker does.

Unlike most other professions, rangers can get much better power stats, however the skill-coefficient on our weapons are lower then that of other professions. This is because of the damage the pet can dish out in addition to your own. The reason we get better stats is because of the stat increases we get from 2 traitlines (Marksmanship and Skirmishing).

Longbow damage is actually very good at this point. Instead of doing 1 massive strike of 5-7k, you do constant 2.5-4.2k hits, each 1.8 seconds (LB attack speed at max range counting in projectile speed).

Changes does need to occur though.
Rapid Fire should get an increase in damage, seeing as it is currently more then 20% weaker then just using auto attack for the same duration. Rapid Fire should stay as is. It’s ability to track through stealth is perhaps one of the best offensive-defensive counters we got against thieves and mesmers. Losing this ability would severely cripple us against perhaps the two strongest duelist professions.

Barrage needs to see a raw DPS increase. Cast time is fine, if it had only done the damage to reflect the risk of being rooted for 2.75 seconds. Another problem is that in many cases, Retaliation can hit the ranger for more damage then the entire barrage dishes out in total. Cooldown should come down slightly, as it is currently the only reliable AOE that ranger’s have.

Long Range Shot should apply a conditional condition. Perhaps weakness? It is a strong condition indeed, but not many professions can apply it reliably. Allowing rangers to get it as a sort of “niche” would if nothing else, be a good thing. Weakness would also greatly increase the rangers survivability when using the longbow. The development team have previously stated that they wish to give the longbow some more defensive tools. My suggestion would be to give Long Range Shot a 15% chance (0-500 range)/ 20% chance (500-900 range)/ 25% chance (900+ range) to apply 2 seconds of weakness to enemies in a small AOE (180) around the target.

Permanent Fury did increase our DPS by a respectable margin. However, if anything, we should be granting it as an AOE buff to allies. Perhaps 20% chance to apply 20 second fury to allies every 45 seconds?
Given that Eagle Eye (the trait that gave us the bug) is situated as a master trait, we could, if nothing else, apply this change and move it to grandmaster. In return, we could move Signet of the Beastmaster down a tier. This would greatly help increase build diversity.

I actually use River and Marsh Drakes. Too often I’ll swap pets, spam f1 to hopefully try to get the pet to attack, then press f2, after which there are 3 outcomes.

1. The pet fires off in the wrong direction, missing completely and wasting both Rampage as One and its f2 skill.

2. The pet faces the wrong direction and then fires the skill at an insane angle. This is problematic because when I see my pet charging up to fire while facing the wrong direction, I’ll end up trying to cancel the skill to avoid scenario 1.

3. The pet doesn’t respond at all and just sits by me.

To put the longbow projectile speed issue into perspective, there’s currently at least 4 ways to mitigate longbow’s low damage.

1. Moving with swiftness. If you just strafe in one direction with swiftness on, all Long-Range Shots will miss. This isn’t a matter of skill- the projectile just doesn’t move quick enough. Or, taking minimum amounts of skill, you can strafe side to side without swiftness.

2. Running through the Ranger. If you run through a Ranger when they try to Point Blank shot or Hunter’s Shot, or even Rapid Fire, the skill gets canceled automatically. Again, this isn’t a matter of skill. Rangers have very little repositioning power period.

3 and 4. Damage immunities and reflects.
Damage immunities block melee damage too, so that’s not a big deal. But reflects just compound the ways to mitigate longbow damage.

Increasing longbow projectile speed deals with 1 out of these 4.

That said, I do like the idea of a condition on long-range shot. There are many ways to approach the problem at hand.

Rangers simply do not do enough damage for how much utility they don’t take, and do not provide enough utility for sacrificing a lot more damage.

Without burst no power build will work. With rapid fire doing about the same damage as your auto attack, there’s just nothing you can do but plink away and attempt to outlast your opponent. Honestly, this is all you can do with every weapon for the Ranger and why it has such a terrible reputation of being a passive and boring class to play.

The class needs an ondemand burst skill. I would personally just give it killshot instead of barrage and make barrage replace spike trap as I suggested in another thread. But it needs something.

Agreed. I can do 3k~4k (not the max DPS possible, but very high) hit on my Fire Staff Ele Auto Attack and it hits up to 3 foes and it is almost 2 times faster than Ranger LB Auto Attack. If compared to Meteor Shower (that can also cripple with Glyph of Elemental Power), then LB Rangers are nothing.

The extra 300 range from a trait doesn’t explain why LB on Rangers must be so bad. And isn’t just the AA, but all other skills from LB are lackluster.

Ltomato.8649:

My friend, the engineer:
Exotic Rampager Armor with Boon duration runes (4 altruism, 2 water).
Ascended Berserker Weapons with Sup. Sigil of Bloodlust and Sup. Sigil of Fire
Ascended Berserker trinkets.

Traited into grenade kit, getting 1500 range and the extra grenade.

The boons
Permanent Vigor (100% endurance regeneration), swiftness, and might.

The damage
At any range, starting cold, 1100 damage per grenade, for a total of 3300. But wait, there’s more! The grenades also apply a bleed that does up to 1000 damage per tick- the grenades can also apply burning for 500 damage per tick.

With a ramp up, grenades can do about 1700 per grenade, for a total of 5100 damage in an area of effect. Along with the 1000 damage bleeds and 500 damage burns, and vulnerability.

Let’s do some math.

x = condition damage
500 burning tick = (4.1)(80) + (0.25)x

in other words, your friend has 688 condition damage. This means that, in order to get 1000 damage bleeds, he would need to get 13 stacks of bleeding. The grenade kit 2 skill does 1 stack of bleeding per grenade, which comes to a total of 3. Even with the firearms trait of bleeding this isn’t even possible.

Spicyhash.7605:

Let’s do some math.

x = condition damage
500 burning tick = (4.1)(80) + (0.25)x

in other words, your friend has 688 condition damage. This means that, in order to get 1000 damage bleeds, he would need to get 13 stacks of bleeding. The grenade kit 2 skill does 1 stack of bleeding per grenade, which comes to a total of 3. Even with the firearms trait of bleeding this isn’t even possible.

Thanks for the correction!
I was relaying what my friend told me. I believe the 1000 bleeding could include might stacks and and quickness.

Regardless, the base damage is still higher, in an aoe, and at any range.
EDIT: Perhaps she meant 1000 damage bleed over all. That makes a bit more sense, looking at the numbers, yea?

In current state, they should have:
1. Delete almost 60-70% of current Ranger.
2. Get to work, get the kitten(pets) done
3. Make pet to work more like a extra, very small damage, but instead very survivable and utility-providing tool
4. Sit for a month and re-do all ranger weapons besides GS, Dagger and Warhorn, remake all Ranger traits, make new utilities from a scratch
5. Give the Ranger something considerable as Bow
6. Erase #1 spam-to-win gameplay from Ranger
7. Give more functionality
and full control over pets. 3/4 of pets revmaped to actually be worth picking and having great utility/variety which do work.

Here, God according to Bible made the World in 7 steps, 7 days.
I’m sure that ArenaNet could make a new Ranger also

tool

3. Make pet to work more like a extra, very small damage, but instead very survivable and utility-providing tool

Please dont do that. While i agree pet damage and ranger damage depends on each other the option to actualy run a decent damage beastmaster shouldnt be removed from the game at the expense of personnal damage either. Pet damage should be related to gear and so should be its survivability. You run zerker gear you get to have a zerker stat pet you run a carrion gear you get to have a carrion stated pet (currently you only gain from condition damage) and if you want a tanky pet then for the love of melandru go ahead and wear sentinel or knight.

Mainly i think the best bet would be to switch beastmastery +300 to all pet stat to:

1. Pet gain a 3.33% of master power toughness and condition damage per trait point (up to 100%)

2. add a trait to the beast mastery allowing the pet to gain a good percentage of the master stat point so that only people who realy invest into their pet get to actualy benefit from it that much.

Rym.1469:

In current state, they should have:
1. Delete almost 60-70% of current Ranger.
2. Get to work, get the kitten(pets) done
3. Make pet to work more like a extra, very small damage, but instead very survivable and utility-providing tool
4. Sit for a month and re-do all ranger weapons besides GS, Dagger and Warhorn, remake all Ranger traits, make new utilities from a scratch
5. Give the Ranger something considerable as Bow
6. Erase #1 spam-to-win gameplay from Ranger
7. Give more functionality
and full control over pets. 3/4 of pets revmaped to actually be worth picking and having great utility/variety which do work.

Here, God according to Bible made the World in 7 steps, 7 days.
I’m sure that ArenaNet could make a new Ranger also

tool

and what is with the people that like the ranger the way he is? Oo
maybe we need some small changes but not the way you want

Hey guys, there are plenty of other threads to discuss other aspects of ranger balance, but I’d like this one to stay focused on Longbow. Thanks.

rym is likely a pet hater its ok theres a thousand like him. i think the best way to fix that would be to simply bind the pet stat to the beast mastery traitline and the master gear once and for all

traited = huge damage
non traited = absolutely no damage

that way you can trait yourself however you want and deal great damage without a pet, however you have to run the pet tree if you want the pet to be effective as anything else then a buffer.

I agree longbow needs a buff to damage but i think the best way to do that would be to make longbow proc might on critical strike the same way greatsword does for warrior.

kyubi.3620:

3. Make pet to work more like a extra, very small damage, but instead very survivable and utility-providing tool

Please dont do that. While i agree pet damage and ranger damage depends on each other the option to actualy run a decent damage beastmaster shouldnt be removed from the game at the expense of personnal damage either. Pet damage should be related to gear and so should be its survivability. You run zerker gear you get to have a zerker stat pet you run a carrion gear you get to have a carrion stated pet (currently you only gain from condition damage) and if you want a tanky pet then for the love of melandru go ahead and wear sentinel or knight.

Mainly i think the best bet would be to switch beastmastery +300 to all pet stat to:

1. Pet gain a 3.33% of master power toughness and condition damage per trait point (up to 100%)

2. add a trait to the beast mastery allowing the pet to gain a good percentage of the master stat point so that only people who realy invest into their pet get to actualy benefit from it that much.

That doesn’t work. Having the pet responsible for, as it currently is, 30% of our damage is having 30% of our damage wasted because in WvW, the pet is either dead, or won’t attack. If I’m on a keep wall my pet won’t run out the keep or fly out the keep to attack my target below, thus 30% less damage. My target is up on the keep, my bird is afraid of heights because he won’t fly up to attack, thus 30% less damage. The only way to fix this problem is by removing damage from pet and giving it to the ranger so the ranger has full 100% of it’s damage at all times. You could maybe, through traits like a grandmaster trait, allow pets to have some damage for people that want the beast master fighting system. I agree with the other guy, unless they can fix pet AI, which I doubt, pet’s should be a utility tool for us while ranger’s do the full damage.

To be on subject with the OP, the bow has many flaws and unfortunately, it’s the only weapon choice that I love to play with in any game because I enjoy archery in real life. The longbow does not have the tools required to keep your target at range. Most classes have ways to block our knock back. Our barrage is a joke damage wise when compared to other AOE’s from other professions. Rapid shot does less damage during it’s 4.5 second channel then our auto-attack does. Especially when you compare it to like warrior’s version of rapid shot on rifle which does it in something like 2.5 seconds, making it much more bursty. Warrior’s rifle 1 auto does bleed while ours has nothing, and that’s with ANet claiming that we are suppose to be the best class for range combat during an interview…and that’s pretty much all they said about ranger’s in that interview while they had tons to say about every other class. Being the ranged class we also do not have a high damage finishing shot like warriors do on rifle, and warriors are suppose to be the melee profession here!