Guild Wars 2

Does anyone actually know a ranger that uses not a warhorn as their offhand? What about secondary weapon sets? More often than not it ends up being X/Warhorn. Everywhere except perhaps dungeons, in WvW, sPvP, general PVE, the 15s swiftness skill completely cannibalizes the other weapon choices you could make. Speed buffs are simply too useful, and in PvP downright necessity.
I don’t play necro or warrior, but I imagine the issue with their warhorn speedbuffs to be the same.
In my opinion, long-term swiftness (~6s+) shouldn’t be in the game period, or are atleast be extremely conditional, because they are so much more appealing to players than any other skill type. However, it’s even more destructive for it to be on an off-hand, because it not only cannibalizes other off-hands but also two-handers.

I run with sword dagger most of the time for PvP, sometimes torch. I can use the warhorn right before a fight starts and have the buff for a bit, while still wielding a dagger.
The hawks you call in with horn is also easily avoidable, which in my opinion makes the warhorn one of the worst off-hands, atleast for my playstyle.

I agree I would never use anything but the Warhorn in my offhand because the swiftness is to good.
Signet of the hunt should be 25% like the Thiefs.

It’s not such a problem for the warrior, because there are other ways of getting the speed buff i.e. signet of rage has half the cooldown of rampage as one and can be shortened further with a trait. Warrior warhorn is probably still best choice for WvW, particularly since charge! removes immobilizing conditions (cripple, immob, chill). Warrior also has better main hand skills on sword (gap closer) and axe (cyclone axe is a whirl finisher), I reckon.

I think ranger melee options need to be reworked – most of the skills are more cosmetic than effective ATM. Ranger is lacking in speed buffs, condition removal and melee AOE.

swiftness we can get multiple ways. 5 trait points on weapon swap in combat. Bird pet in combat.

The harder thing to replace is 15% crit plus might IMHO.

I don’t use the warhorn. Swoop on the greatsword is a faster traveling skill then the warhorns Call of the Wild, and next to that my bird also gives me swiftness whenever it attacks.

These are all the speed buffs/movement effects that the Ranger has (I think this is the fourth thread I’m writing this in now):
Swiftness:

• Warhorn
• Shortbow
• Rampage As One (With a 120 second cooldown, this is viable to use in Worlds PvP)
• Storm Spirit (With the “spirits can move and follow you” major trait)
• Tail Wind (A minor trait that gives you swiftness on weapon swap, when in combat. But getting in combat is easy enough; just send your pet to attack a nearby mob)
• Birds (Aim at a target that’s a great distance from you, and then call the pet back as soon as it gives you swiftness, if you don’t want to agro the mob. Use the major trait Concentration Training to make the swiftness last 15 seconds instead of 10. Practice makes perfect)

Other:

• Signet of the Hunt (10% increased movement speed is great)
• Shortbow (Use the ‘turn 180’ key to make the jump move you forward, instead of back)
• Sword (Same as the shortbow; use the ‘turn 180’ key, this will make the first attack roll you forward. Then, as you are rolling, turn your character around again, and then use the second attack to jump forward)
• Greatsword (Swoop makes you leap forward. This skill will actually move you forward faster then the warhorn, because of the short cooldown)

As of right now, the rangers to pvp for srs bsns, the warhorn is the way to go. AoE and ranged fire may sound great, but fire is an incredibly week condition (and it’s removable, unlike Hunter’s Call). Dagger has cripple and poison, but the shortbow has cripple too, and the ranger’s melee is so bad, that you shouldn’t be in range for using the evade+poison skill.

The warhorn is good, reliable AoE buffs and decent single target, non-removable damage.

The swiftness part of warhorn is only part of the story, the fury part is just as cool!

However, I actually play Shortbow+Longbow because this combo has more synergy when traited with ‘quickdraw’.

I use Sword + Torch, i never liked the warhorn, its too slow for my liking, in terms of damage and responsiveness. and like you really don’t need the buffs…how does a little swiftness help? never helped for me in situations. it felt like it was just wasting a slot for a useful skill imo.

you have plenty of evade skills in sword skills, u have two dodges, lightning reflexes if you need and rampage as one if you really needed swiftness, stability, etc etc. I also have the greatsword like someone mentioned. As well as Rampage. better yet i usually go into battle with entangle, simply immobilze everyone and escape.

I love the torch, it has so much damage and such great aoe when you’re meleeing. I’ve been going pure melee Sword/Torch + Greatsword recently with day to day activities unless it’s a champ or dungeon boss where i go double bow. But when you’re melee most of the time the dangerous situations are when you get swarmed, like you often do in Orr etc, so i find that AoE is super important and the torch gives a ton of that, plus fire shield aura combos for both me and my wolves that lunge into it. I’ve never felt i needed any other off hand weapon.

Dagger has an evade skill but i don’t need that since i have a greatsword with evade every third step in attack chain. I have the serpents roll for poison as well as a trap if I choose to add one

For PvP or WvW I wouldn’t go melee sets at all and just stay ranged, conditions, traps, pets, defensive tricks and so forth

The OPs point, I think, is that the long swiftness buff on the warhorn is sufficiently desirable that it tends to make builds without a warhorn less viable and that particularly applies to WvW. All classes need a way of getting swiftness out of combat and it would be better if those options didn’t unnecessarily restrict your weapon load outs. For that reason a utility skill would be good. Speed buffs were one of the things that characterized rangers in Guild Wars 1 and made them good for splitting.

I find the ranger to be pretty good, because the bows are so good. But the other options are a bit lack lustre really: There’s no real reason to get into melee range, where you are likely to take more damage. That’s a general thing in GW2 to some extent, but it particularly applies to rangers.

well sometimes its a bit annoying for traveling outside of combat XD where every other class has stuff like that i understand. esp thief friends with their super annoying flippy teleport blurr stuff always so much faster than me XD i use my sword and gs for travel, hornet sting roll back then spin around to leap forward in direction i wanna go then switch to gs to swoop but thats reaaaallly dumb and clumsy xD i love melee tho, melee in pve normally is amazing fun and i can clear swarms of mobs, all at once, much faster than with bows. champs or dungeon bosses is all bow for me tho, cant get near those XD unless its low level weak champ

I don’t use the horn for swiftness, I use it for the fury.

Imo, ranger horn is fine as it is.. there are plenty of reasons to use the other offhand weapons depending on your playstyle, right now warhorn is just the easiest to use for starting players. Once you start experimenting with different builds and you get experience, you also start using different offhands.

It’s like the warrior GS, at first every single warrior was using GS without even bothering with switching weapons, now more and more people realize how easily the weapon is avoided, and they start using other weapons.

I don’t think downgrading non-overpowered abilities is the right way to continue with a new game.. the swiftness is only 33%, not 60-70% like in other MMOs.

I use an off-hand axe. I can’t out-run a centaur with it but I can out-tank a tank.

Most newbies don’t understand how to get the most out of the horn. They want to be a melee so bad they try something else, but they will eventually learn.

I was simply under the impression that because the ranger really doesn’t have any other skills that increase movement speed, it makes the horn ideal for that purpose, and that’s about it. iv actually stopped using sword / horn because while the movement speed is great, the sword animation lock is just too painful to work around currently. Having said that I carry a sword-horn/dagger/torch at all times. (mainly because the torch also helps in dark room situations)

For WvW I just equip axe/warhorn in when I need to move around in a hurry and then equip longbow when I get to where I need to be.

The problem here is that it is basically our only source of decent movement speed, not that it exists. Our signet should probably give 25% instead of 10% movement speed to make it worth taking.

@ “The problem here is that it is basically our only source of decent movement speed”

That’s what the op is saying, I think. I reckon it’s a general problem with putting swiftness buff on a weapon & having fixed weapon skills in that it unintentionally restricts build diversity:

In guild wars 1 you could equip a speed utility (essential for Alliance Battles for instance) without completely changing your build. Sure if you took a speed buff you couldn’t take some nice extra damage skill, crip or whatever, but in GW2 the fixed weapon skills are all or nothing.

Could be easily fixed by have swiftness utility skill/s, which makes perfect sense for a ranger; there were plenty of them in GW1 and it was one of ranger’s defining features. Rangers are medium armor users, they eschew heavy armor for more sustained speed.

Well compare this to the mesmer’s focus skills I find I can run with a pistol and get more out of it. The horn buff is pretty much goto skill because of its universality. And most of time “goto” means an imbalance.

To play the ranger the way I believe it was intended to be played, being able to sustain a high movement speed is very important for the class, as it allows the ranger to roam/patrol large distances as well as to get the appropriate distance between the ranger and its foe. However, to do so somewhat consistently today, you need to equip the warhorn and/or the rampage as one elite skill for the swiftness buff. The way I see it, putting these buffs on a weapon/elite skill is a disservice for two reasons:

First, the value of the swiftness buff is often higher than the fury and might these skills grant in combat, and so these skills usually end up being “saved” for when the ranger needs to move fast (e.g. in and out of combat). Thus, these buffs are not used to benefit the ranger in combat as much as they should be.

Second, the value of the swiftness buff is often higher than whatever weapon/skill would be chosen in its stead (e.g. longbow+shortbow, and the entangle elite skill). Instead, less preferred combinations may be chosen, simply to get the swiftness buffs. Thus, the benefit of the elite skill slot as well as the second weapon slot/off-hand slot is not as high as it should be.

I believe that the simplest and most effective solution would be to make the following changes:

• Remove the swiftness buff from the warhorn and rampage as one, preferably replacing it with combat related buffs instead

• Increase the movement speed of the signet of the hunt from 10% to 25% passive, and 33% (or higher) active. The active could for example have 15 second duration and 30 second cooldown, during which you do not gain the 25% of the passive

This would enable the ranger to cover large distances effectively, as well as give them a “speed burst” to get in and out of combat. It will only use up one utility slot, rather than an off-hand slot and an elite slot. Also, the buffs provided by the warhorn and the rampage as one might actually be used to benefit the ranger in combat, which is how I believe they were intended to be used.

Why remove it from Rampage as One though? I feel like it’s acceptable for an Elite skill – they’re supposed to be your “press X to awesome” button with a long CD.

I agree that I start feeling useless in groups without a warhorn though. A bit. Doesn’t stop me from not using it.

I use warhorn and the armor upgrades (10 sec of speed for group when I cast a heal) use the 20 sec heal and have perma group speed. I sacrifice a lot of dps for speed but like the utility it brings to the group. It just depends on your play style, If you want dps there are better options than the horn and by using 20 sec heal I lose the healing spring. It’s all about trade offs.

Tynee.9427:

I use warhorn and the armor upgrades (10 sec of speed for group when I cast a heal) use the 20 sec heal and have perma group speed. I sacrifice a lot of dps for speed but like the utility it brings to the group. It just depends on your play style, If you want dps there are better options than the horn and by using 20 sec heal I lose the healing spring. It’s all about trade offs.

It is all about trade offs. But in Guild Wars 1 the trade offs were between single skills, whereas in Guild Wars 2, because weapon skills are fixed, you are forced into adopting a particular weapon just to get the effects of a utility skill that is really a prerequisite for many forms of gameplay. No experienced player of any profession would go into Alliance Battles in GW1 without some form of speed utility buff (and on demand condition removal) and the situation is no different in GW2 WvW, of which alliance battles was a prototypical form, not to mention that in the PvE game, where there are large maps and no mounts, swiftness is more than just a convenience.

The particular lack of flexibility with ranger speed when compared to warrior (which has the simplest mechanics for this) is largely due to the elite “Rampage As One” being on a 120s cooldown and giving only 20s of swiftness, whereas warriors “Signet of Rage” has a 60s cooldown (reducible by 20% with signet mastery) and gives 30s of swiftness. The fact that RAO has balanced stance & affects your pet in no way makes up for this difference.

In general when balancing the ranger Arenanet have IMOP way over estimated the value of the ranger’s pet in most cases. Perhaps that will change if pet’s get improved, but pets are still not a good reason for making rangers so poor at swiftness and condition removal (and yes we all know that brown bears are meant to have condition removal on their F2 skill).

For the love of god don’t listen to these people. >_< Unless, it’s that buffing signet idea. I’d agree to nerf warhorn swiftness if they buffed the hell out of the signet at least. But we need speed boosts. Things are slow enough in this game (especially if you want to save money not using waypoints), we don’t need things to be even more slow.

Warhorn does more than grant swiftness. You should take that into consideration

for me personally the best part of warhorn is that the birds are not projectiles!

which makes the abilities that stop or block projectiles useless against me and usually for the full duration they still take damage when thye are using the ability and a decent amount of damage. the torch is a projectile and there fore is blocked and i assume the axe as well. with swiftness as opposed to a aoe centered on myself it helps me maintain a close range on people running away when my gs 3 is down.(yes i am a melee ranger).

i would be happy to remove the swiftness buff from warhorn IF a charge equal to GS 3 was put in its place. could even make it 800 instead of 1100 and make it affected by the offhand weapon trait to extend its range

this thread is ridiculous.

lets nerf useful and good things so other options are used more.

I’d have no problem with the Swiftness on the horn being replaced by something else. I’d settle for a few more stacks of Might or something, even.

But for the exact opposite reason this thread is getting at. Being strictly a PvE player, I find Swift to be next to useless except for moving from place to place. In combat it may as well not even exist. I’d be all for a more useful combat buff.

Think some of the later posters are missing the point again (surprise) – rangers have OK skills in combat for swiftness, such as the weapon swap minor trait and skill 3 on the shortbow….. But if you want to run around the map you only have warhorn & the short buff on the elite RAO. So, the reason you don’t want the 12 seconds swiftness just on the warhorn is not because rangers don’t want that buff, it’s because to get that buff you have to choose warhorn, which restricts your viable builds – you can’t go shortbow/greatsword and have an out of combat speed buff, for instance. And you really need that speed buff, It’s close to essential in WvW, for instance – if you don’t want to be plodding around the map being caught by everyone else. Other classes have more flexible ways to get swiftness that don’t push you into this kind of Hobson’s Choice.