perplexity engi tips
Cheese (perplexity) is only addition, not really main dish (your gameplay).
By rangers, I assume you mean ranged rangers, and not the melee-focused ones.
The bomb kit is generally not well equipped to deal with ranged opponents unless you can force them to play on an objective. It also means they’re less prone to your interrupts. Mesmer clones and phantasms will also often proc your perplexity bonus, and they tend to be a bit harder to lock down.
It might be a bit hard to tell what your issue is with them without actually watching your gameplay, but one thing you could try doing is comboing big ol’ bomb with magnet. That is, drop the BoB, then try to pull them with magnet. If it works, they’ll get hit with the explosion right as they recover from being pulled, and you can then run up to them and drop bombs on them (maybe fire→glue→confusion).
Static shot is also a strong tool against these professions because it will bounce off their pets and clones, possibly causing them to be hit with the ability twice. You might want to try and bait them into dodging and using it to follow up, although it has a relatively low enough cooldown to be used fairly liberally.
The auto smoke bomb might also not be very useful against those professions (although it might work well against shatter mesmer), so you might consider using something else there. I would strongly suggest incendiary powder since it can provide fairly consistent burning uptime so long a sit doesn’t get wasted on pets and clones.
If it’s condi based opponents you’re having trouble against, you could always go 30 into alchemy to take automated response. The other option is to place another 10 into firearms to get coated bullets, which helps you shoot through pets and clones so you can hit the actual target more consistently.
Other than that, just general mesmer and ranger matchup knowledge applies.