A blog post I made on the Ranger profession
You made some excellent points throughout the post, but you pretty much ended up giving the major reasons for why Rangers have huge issues right now.
“What our ours? Our spirits suck, some of our signets suck, some of our shouts suck, a minority of our major traits suck, and our sword has a gamebreaking bug that causes you to be rooted in place while attacking with it.”
That right there is one of the major issues. All Spirits and some shouts, signets, and traits not working destroys a number of builds. 80% of Rangers I see are either using traps or Survival Skills + SoS/SoR/Protect Me. Those are just are only “real” options. Rangers are always criticized for running “cookie-cutter” builds, but there’s a reason why. Rangers have managed to find what little actually works for the class and make builds focused around it.
The other, and largest, issue is pets.
“Your Pet Is Everything”
That sums up the grand issue with Rangers. We are a pet class, and like you said, it’s very well designed (what with the skills, swapping, and weapon synergy). However, pets themselves are the issue. When 50% (it’s actually closer to 20-35 I believe) of our damage comes from pets, along with a good amount of utility, pets are absolutely critical to the Ranger. Unfortunately, when pets don’t work, we’re kittened. Fights with stupid amounts of AoE, any WvW, or even PvP against anyone competent makes pets more of a hindrance than a help.
They just aren’t designed for GW2’s combat. They can’t dodge, they can’t heal, and they can’t attack while moving. Players can do that, but pets can’t. Considering the pet is a part of the Ranger, it’s restricting us in situations where pets don’t work. The “Controls” can only alleviate part of the problem. We have a whopping 4 commands, attack, heel, use ability, swap. Keeping pets alive requires heel and swap, but they don’t work in all situations. Playing melee prevents you from calling your pet out of PBAoE you can dodge, leaving your pet dead if swap isn’t up. Even range users suffer, heel only works assuming the pet won’t run through AoE on the way back and will actually move out of it in time.
That leaves a whole other issue: some people just don’t like being pet-focused. Playing a BeastMaster is all fine and dandy, but there’s 4 other trait lines to choose from. Some people want to play snipers, druids, or skirmishers, all of which are viable through traits. However, without speccing into BM, the pet is just dead weight. They need the points in order to survive in combat, without it, they’re best just left on passive until you need the f2 skill. Just look through the recent forum posts, most people complaining about pets have few to no points in BM, while those advocating them have a sizable amount in BM. Pets need to be out-of-the-box usable for all specs, not just a few.
That said, I think the working bits of the Ranger are well-designed. The new patch, coincidentally, is supposedly targeted at the aforementioned list of problems. I can guarantee once the majority of the bugs and whatnot on the Ranger are fixed, you’ll suddenly see plenty of people citing the Ranger as the greatest profession. It has the mechanics and design, it just needs proper execution.
@Doombunny
Lack of build variety is a very common problem to almost all of the game’s professions at this moment. Almost every profession has certain utilities that clearly outshine the others – and most have utilities that are outright useless in any practical situation. And we’re certainly not the only ones who MUST take a certain trait line to be efficient. Look at the Elementalist class – they are required to spec heavily into Arcana just because Earth and Water are their only other decent trait lines (with most of their traits being so bad that they outright contradict their role).
As for the pet dependency issue – that’s intentional design. Arenanet had stated before the game’s release that a Ranger who does not wish to use his pet is better off rolling a ranged Warrior.
People can talk all they want about including a trait or skill that removes your pet and buffs you, but it’s not that simple. Our weapon sights are innately DESIGNED for use with pets. They would need to restructure our weapons or code an entirely different skill set into this trait or skill – otherwise we would simply be kittened horribly.
@Duke BlackRose
While everyone suffers from pigeon-holing to some degree, it’s worse on some classes than others. Playing my Engineer or Guardian, I feel like I have plenty of viable options, whereas playing a Ranger, entire sets of options are lackluster. Thankfully, the next patch supposedly addresses the awful spirits and certain mediocre shouts/signets, so it’s safe to say the utility famine is coming to pass.
As for pet dependency, it’s not about just removing pets when they don’t work. The Ranger is a pet class, so it’s reasonable to expect they would just work everywhere. Unlike the other classes with pets, we can’t unequip ours when the situation doesn’t favor it, so A-Net needs to have them work in every situation.
Take WvW for example. Right now, my pet is useless in any sort of siege. They can’t attack the gate or the defenders on the wall, they can’t jump down walls when defending, and they can’t dodge out of the endless parade of siege attacks.
Now, what A-Net needs to do is look at the situation and figure out how they can make it workable. For starters, pets need to be able to attack objects, that’s just easy. After that, we can get a bit more indepth. Letting us control ALL of the pet skills lets us use the Spider/Devourer AoE attacks to hit defenders. Letting melee pets leap off the wall fixes another issue.
Simple fixes like that can make pets work in more situations, without actually buffing or nerfing pets.
The other big hurdle I mentioned is making pets usable in all specs. Like I said, without points in BM, pets drop like flies. Pets already have the skillsets to be usable in a variety of builds, they just need to have the “mandatory” boosts built in so they can perform without the need to sink 5-25 points in a traitline. BM should enhance pets, not make them usable.
For an example of what I’m ranting about, look at WoW (yes, I know we all hate this game here). No matter what you specialized in, pets were durable and still accounted for 30ish% of your DPS while adding a bit of utility. Specializing into BeastMastery gave you access to very powerful pets and skills that made the focus of your gameplay the pet.
That’s what Rangers need. 0 point BM pets should be basic, but usable. Simple things like bonus movespeed and AoE resistance should be built in, while more specialized perks like added utility or damage should be traited.
Now everything i say will be mainly coming from sPvP/tPvP standpoint of a view.
Yes. Rangers have amazing traits. Rangers have actually couple of the best easy access traits like passive 50% energy regen or 2 sec quickness you were talking about.
But if you look overall viable builds right now, there is nothing that ranger does “the best”.
Elementalists bring their AoE support damage with loads of buffs.
Warriors are kind a lacking as well. They still have best stunlocks though.
Necros are your medicine against guardians. They shine with their condi damage/boon removal.
Guardians don’t even need to be mentioned.
Thieves are the best roamers.
Engis are very nice for neutralizing points (offensive tank)
And time warp/portal/moa shenanigans come from mesmers.
So when does ranger come in?
Can you tank? You can build some mean tank rangers with lot of self healing + permanent vigor. Their mean to take down and you can make them mobile. But at the end of the day engineers/guardians/eles can do same job, if not even better and at the same time offer a lot more support (buffs/knockbacks) for their team.
Can you damage?
Now that you can do. If you run condi trap you actually go well together with necro. Could you be more useful to your team on some other profession? Probably… If your a good player, yes you can still find a team. Are you as useful as you can to your team? Probably not.
Now coming to weapons.
Designing everything around your pet does not really work out that well.
There is a reason why every viable ranger spec right now (trap ranger/power shortbow) uses shortbow.
When you said that greatsword is meant for bursting, i just started laughing. Man, for the longest period of time i tried to pull off GS, as i love the mobility. But the damage numbers you get from this weapon are just sad.
The problem with longbow is that i can do more damage per second with shortbow standing in front of npc (no bleeds) with only using 1 than i can do with same dps longbow with same stats standing as far back as possible and using 1. If i blow all my longbow cooldowns (3 to 5 to 2), i still barely could keep up with shortbow autoattack. And i’m talking about our nerfed shortbow.
When you come down to numbers, shortbow is only “i can kind a live without my pet’s damage” weapon. And that’s why people use it.
Pets are just not reliable enough. I made a nice wall off text about it (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Changes-i-would-like-to-see/first#post547512) and i really hope they do change something and make them reliable.
Yes, you can keep your pet alive with well timed recalls / callbacks. But its action rpg. Your pet can’t stunbreak, your pet cant dodge. He does not have a separate heal for himself and you do not want to use your heal cooldown just to keep your pet alive. So what will your pet do in current meta game full of burst and aoe? He just dies, even with your 16 sec swap, while you provide him regen and perma protection. He will die.
To sum it up, you said it yourself. Weapons are designed around your pets. You also said that you need to put points in beastmastery, to keep your pets alive. Throwing your points into beastmastery will however really lower your own damage output on those already low dps weapons and in current meta game you end up with mediocre damage build heavily relying not having any AoE damage around.
I’ll keep playing my ranger, as long as i do not hurt my team. Right now, usually we do run necro+ranger as well as we play without ele tank, so we need a bait for enemy mesmers. In this kind a composition, i’m a perfect match and i can actually help a lot. My kind a situation is rare though. And even i slowly practice elementalist/engineer just in case, if they decide to nerf the only competitive builds ranger can currently run :>.
Noexc / Ranger
Talve / Mesmer
Seafarer’s Rest
Talve / Mesmer
Seafarer’s Rest
(edited by Talve.9027)
I won’t beat things to death, since most of my points were made above. But although it’s been alluded to above, I wanted to make explicit that pets not being able to move and attack is a huge problem. Since our DPS is balanced around our pet, our pet needs to be able to hit things. In sPvP, tPvP, WvW, and even with a few troublesome enemies in PvE most melee pets (i.e. most of our total pets) will land around one in five attacks (this increses slightly if we spec into skirmishing pet speed or give pets lots of swiftness, but still never approaches 100% connection).
In addition to the bug fixes we’ll need to see this addressed somehow. At the moment we’re restricted to using birds (tissue paper toughness) and ranged pets (spiders, devourers) for DPS. Any other pets we’re limited to using it purely for their utility(s).
I do agree though, rangers are in a place to be potentially very, very powerful and very desirable even in PvP. We just need bug fixes and this whole pet DPS thing addressed somehow.