Guild Wars 2

So, I’ve seen plenty of shortbow rangers lately spamming their auto-attack Crossfire on me. For those who don’t know it, it’s an extremely fast auto-attack that deals bleeding if I’m caught at the sides or behind.

The bleeding doesn’t matters, because I can prevent it easily and remove it. But I seem to take 10k damage out of crossfire’s direct effect constantly. As a staff user at the moment (yes, staves can do decent work at spvp), Magnetic Aura is the obvious solution, but the rangers keep spamming crossfire on me, even when they lose over half their hp this way until the aura ends, heal themselves somewhere in the middle of their noob kamikaze, and spam some more crossfire for 10k damage while their pet keeps hitting me for 2k/4k+.

Dodging only takes me so far, and they dodge too out of some of my spells. I keep their movement controlled the best I can, so I can go crazy with fire and/ or eruption + fire, but I never seem to kill them faster than they kill me with their auto-attack spam, even when I connect most attacks and I am under the aura. My speccs are on air and arcane, a critical build working decently enough, with power/ precision/ lots of vitality amulet, so I don’t have big defensive problems (17-18k health while still dealing good damage, even thieves/ warriors I can work hard to have any chance against, as long as I keep them far enough from me), but I simply see no solution for Crossfire spam. Air’s Blind is pointless and slow, water’s chill does not affects auto-attacks’ recharges, and I don’t think staying on earth spamming weakness will let me go far.

Anyone help? :/

To start with, I don’t sPvP so my advice may not be relevant as I don’t know how hard things hit from players typically which is the reason for the following question/suggestion.

Question: Crossfire hits for 10k per arrow!?!?!?!?!?

Suggestion: You mention Vitality…Toughness is the best way to reduce pure damage. I run low Vit – High Toughness for general PvE and I rarely get mowed down unless I decide to face tank 4-5 enemies…
You could also try and toss Armor of Earth in? Or at least trait it? It has a pretty good duration for protection.

Staff > Magnetic Aura when a Ranger haste dumps on you. They’ll explode or come close too it. Combine with Runes of Earth which grant Magnetic Aura at low health and can proc Protection on hit.

Staff:

Use magnetic aura and start moving towards the ranger. Once you can, immobilize them with our 5 ability. Stack bleeds and then switch to water attunement. Immediately drop a snare on the ranger so they can’t run away. Drop heals on yourself and switch to air attunement. Use the knockdown and blind. If you can get the ranger to run through the air AoE stun, do it. Finally, switch to fire. Stay in fire as long as you can without taking too much damage.

By the time you’ve done all this, earth attunement should be back up and you can start things all over again. The important thing to remember is the order of attunements: earth -> water -> air -> fire.

Dagger/Dagger:

Get in air and use our 4 ability to get in melee range. Use our 5 ability to knock the ranger down. Hit 3 to put up your lightning shield and switch to earth. Immobilize the ranger and drop Churning Earth. If the ranger is good, they’ll evade out of it. Don’t panic if that happens, it’s just a huge bonus if you can get Churning Earth to land. Get in melee range of the ranger again and knock them down. Hit 2 to put up the last of your bleeds and switch to water. Immediately snare the ranger. Then use our 5 heal first and our 2 heal second, hitting the ranger while you heal yourself. Then switch to fire to try finishing the ranger off.

Again, the important thing to remember is the order of attunements: air -> earth -> water -> fire.

x/Focus:

We have so many anti-projectile abilities that Crossfire really isn’t an issue.

edit – Don’t get upset if you don’t have cooldowns up. Without them, you’re going to die to the ranger and it’s not your fault. Crossfire does hit us really hard.

I have done something like that with the staff, Zilcho. The thing is, crossfire hits really fast, so a single blind is pointless. KD delays things for, what, 2 seconds? My main tool really is the aura, but even when the ranger goes kamikaze, he somehow still beats me by spamming crossfire the entire time. I can never out-dps him, and most of my CC skills are pointless because the target is ranged and not melee. The exception is to use the CC (+ eruption) + fire, but that’s only available every 10 seconds. I know toughness deals best with many small attacks, but it’s still ridiculous that an entire build (+ mist form, arcane shield which does not work very well here, arcane wave for self-regen) is completely put aside by an auto-attack.

A single auto-attack can outdps 20 attunement skills, ignore most of the staff’s cc skills, and I spend too much time defending myself at the cost of fire attunement’s recharges, or setting up snaring + fire whenever I can at the cost of my utility’s recharges, while the ranger is hitting me, hitting me, hitting me. They don’t even need to activate half the effect of their skill, but if I get too close to them, it’s much easier for them to bleed-spam me too. Of course, they still have 4 more skills, and at the hands of better players, the occasional poison spam and the occasional rupt hurt a lot.

My best chances for survival are the aura and the aura only, and that’s only against the newbies who are not taking attention to their own self-suicide. Against newbs, the aura goes as far as taking out 1/3 or half of their hp, which is quite a lot for a single skill, but what surprises me is that they simply counter it with their heal, and then they and their pet make a massacre by auto-attacking. :/

I don’t feel like going x/ focus for a single build, but I know focus is excellent at anti-projectiles + disruption, and even its crappy fire shield with its crappy duration should apply enough burning to the foe, if I’m close enough to them.

The thing is that staff’s cc is excellent against melee, and the chill stacking of frozen ground is excellent against non-thieves, but this is the first time I’ve seen a non-thief spamming an attack without recharge, and being ranged makes the difference.

Logged on yesterday, hit the very same problem, logged off.
A single faceroll auto attack trumps a whole class, to add insult to the injury the pet deals more damage than my fireball.
Staff is so terribly designed, can’t help but stop playing, let’s see what happens on monday’s patch.

LOL i see im not the only one.
nothing makes me rage more than me swapping 3-4 stances, and pressing 10-12 spells only to die, my opponent still be at 50-60% life and my log reads 40hits from 1 ability and no others.

Hi, Ranger here.

Just thought I’d chime in on 2 points.

1) Your first mistake seems to be your approach to this type of fight. If the ranger is dumping 10k damage from 1 set of hasted crossfire, you’re both using glass cannon builds, and you should be trying to either drop him during hard cc, or running away. Ranger have zero escapes from roots, and there is a little known bug (at least i hope it is a bug) where ranged attacks do not function while under a root effect.

2) People seem to be getting upset that most of a rangers damage comes from their primary attack ability. What you don’t seem to know (perhaps you have not played one) is that the 2-5 abilities for shortbow are entirely for control and setup to keep the only damage source going. Other classes have damage tied to all 5 (mixed with utility) or something in between. Just because you don’t take much damage from 2-5 abilities doesnt mean the ranger isn’t using them (FYI, if you miss 3 on shortbow against good ele as a ranger, you are dead 100%)

I’ll just finish with this: Ranged glass cannon ranger builds are only good at one thing – annihilating other ranged glass cannon builds. They do it better than any other class except thief, however they have next to no chance against anything else. If they had no advantage with a single target only ranged weapon nuke build against a squikittenarget, they wouldn’t be viable.

I remember the good ol’ times when shortbow didn’t fire that fast. Granted, without that fast firing shortbows were pretty lackluster. Nice control options but damage was sucky I think.
As for staff vs shortbow…yeh, 1 of our casts= what 3-4 arrows from ranger or even more on some casts (lol slow eruption) so if you can’t LOS him it’s kinda bad.

I understand how it goes from a ranger’s point of view, but against a staff ele, who cares if they can’t escape, they don’t need to escape, because crossfiring is an automatic longterm win button and no ammount of cc will decrease its effectiveness in a meaningful way.

But it seems like this problem comes from crossfire being op to compensate the lack of damage from the other 4 skills, and it’s up to the devs to nerf it and buff the damage of the other 4.

Gotta spec Splish Splash (10 Earth/30 Water/30 Arcana with Major traits being Earth – 3/Water – 3, 5, 11/Arcana – 5, 8, 11 and just never turn your back, or if you do, better make sure to hit Magnetic Aura or have a water attunement ready for condition removal and regen. If the Ranger is good you won’t kill him, but he won’t kill you either if you play your cards right. Remember, Evasive Arcana is a blast finisher on dodge roll (at the end of the roll) and will generate roughly a 2.1k heal in any attunement – addition healing in water attunement – with about 750 healing power in either your Geyser or Healing Rain).

Here my easy-steps guide to own every ranger and his personal zoo :

1) Drop staff
2) Pick up scepter/focus
3) Drop magnetic wave when ranger use crossfire+quickness
4) Die laughing as the ranger eat 3/4 of his HP with his own skills
5) Hit him by DT-phoenix combo ^^

Maybe I’ve just always been up against bad rangers, but I’ve never actually had one threaten me 1v1. They die really fast and don’t seem to put out a lot of damage and their downed state isn’t a whole lot better than our own.

You’ve never dropped some AOE in WvW and had 4 pets maul you to death after chasing you across half the map Shinobi?

They cant hit you if you gain control of the fight. KD them, blind them, stun them, whatever. Keep them rolling, use mist form when they pop quickness, and they’re ezmode.

As a reminder, this is the staff.

A blind reducing the number of hits from 22 to 21 is completely pointless. A KD only lasts two seconds, and gust is already clunky to use right and hit by itself. Snares only serve half the purpose, because they don’t help preventing ranged damage at all. They’re nice to keep the ranger on the place so I can cast my fire fields, but that only happens every 10 seconds due to attunement recharges. With magnetic aura, with mist form + heal, I still get hit about 22+ times, for a total of 10-15k damage, while their pet is consistently hitting me for 2k-4k damage.

If only I could kill faster than them when I have Magnetic Aura on, but even when they suck and lose over half of their hp from reflection alone, they still heal and quickly out-dps me. I have to get out of fire to snare them, but out of fire I barely deal any damage, and without the snares I barely hit them.

Sure, I can change my entire build, but I don’t want to change my entire build because of a single auto-attack! The staff has been working decently so far against everything else.

rangers always say “ITS MY ONLY ABILITY” and I always say back, if it wasnt a 1 button OP , then you and the other 90000 rangers wouldnt all be the same weapons and same spec.