First, I would like to say that I utterly love the ranger. A ranger was my main in GW1 for almost 7 years and has continued to be in GW2. Despite the “SB nerf” and the multiple “bugs” the ranger experiences, I believe that it is an amazing class and is far from the class that needs the most attention (look to the ele).
That being said I believe that there are some simple fixes that would people less upset about the ranger, and a couple more complicated fixes that would be required to make the ranger a little more versatile/up to par with some of the other classes. Also here I will say that I am using the warrior and a bar, not because the ranger should be able to do what the warrior does(they are different professions after all), but because I believe that the warrior was the most well done class and really plays the way it was intended to.
DR note, look for bold text to get the main points at the end
1)The Ranger mechanic – the pet
First off I love the way that Anet decided to add in the pet. In GW1 I would have to sacrifice half my skill bar and almost half my attribute points to make it even worthwhile bringing my pet with me. Now I can enjoy the company of my pet without paying too much attention to it if I don’t want to. Not only that, but the way I have decided to build, my pet is now a major threat to those who decide to ignore it.
However, there are multiple things wrong with the pet.
1) They die too easily in almost all situations even with micro-managing
2) They can’t attack on the move
3) The broken responsiveness of f2 abilities
These I believe are the major issues with the pet. The last 2 should be fairly simple to fix. The broken responsiveness is a bug that has been acknowledge by Anet but seems to not have gotten much attention so far. This is a major thing that would instantly make pets better. Also, the long animations on these skills are a problem. By the time my pet gets off the animation, their target has moved out of range. Now occasionally I’ve seen my pet queue up its f2, get the animation off, then leap like 20 feet to the target to make the attack hit, which is awesome. If that’s how the f2 always works so that it would hit just like the target was standing next to the pet then i have no problem. Actually this would add some additional skill to the ranger, making it so that players have to account for the animation time when they are trying to get a f2 skill off. But either way, all f2 skills need to either have a fix where they will hit like normal up to a certain range that makes the f2 skills feasible, or Anet needs to flat out cut the animation times of alot of f2 abilities.
Next, pets do need some kind of survivability boost. Should they be invincible? No. Should they die at the simplest hint of an AoE or from more than 3 mobs pounding on them? No. There needs to be some kind of balance. Now before anyone starts to QQ and tell me I am not micro-managing my pet or not building right I am going to stop you right there. At first yes, I did not do any of that. But now in normal situations my pet rarely dies. But as soon as I get into large fights or a dungeon, the amount of AoE or massive hits certain dungeon mobs deal out will take out my pet instantly. The solution: give pets some sort of passive AoE mitigation, enough to keep them alive for more than a split second in PvP. People shouldn’t have to feel like they are playing two players when coming up against a ranger in PvP, but they should need to have to take the time to deal with the pet instead of just being able to one shot it with a simple AoE.
Finally the move-and-attack problem. The fact that pets have both bugged f2 skills and can’t move and attack severely limits the ranger DPS. Ranger DPS alone is already lower than any other class because 40%(just a random stat) of our damage output is given to our pet. Now if the pet was functioning properly, then this would be no problem at all, but that fact that our pets can’t hit moving targets, in a game where combat is supposed to be fluid, is a severe cripple to the ranger compared to the other classes.