I am ThirtyOne, and I am no longer a Ranger.
After almost a year of trying to love this profession; putting up with the horrendous pet A.I., the ever unnecessary balances, incredibly lackluster traits and empty promises, I’ve had enough.
It’s difficult enough to find any one thing the Ranger is solely good at; yes we have versatility but Elementalists can do that better, yes we can evade but a Thief has the edge on us there, we are ‘unparalleled archers’ but the Warrior can easily do greater damage with the Rifle and the Thief’s Shortbow not only out-damages our own, but it’s auto-attack bounces, it has a spammable AoE, a blast finisher, a deployable weakness field, a similar evade skill and a 900 range teleporting shot.
It’s no better with our other weapons; Axe, main hand or offhand is pitiful, the damage output on the main-hand is completely laughable despite the bounce, #2 is only useful in condition builds when you are in the enemies face or against multiple opponents, if thats the case whats the point of having 900 range in a weak hitting cone attack. #3 the only good mainhand axe skill is has a distinctive tell, the offhand #4 is the saving grace, expect with the movement of combat is quite unlikely to get the second hit, which has the pull hard CC and half the potential damage, and #5 roots you in place for 2 seconds and is easily interrupted.
Sword roots you into animations on the auto attack, and occasionally leaps you off of cliffs, the Greatsword does less damage than the Sword yet a Guardian, Warrior or Mesmer gets easily up to 3 times at least the highest potential damage with each of their own Greatswords or even basic swords. The Dagger whilst nothing inherently wrong with it has no redeeming factors to justify the Ranger’s poor main hand options, the Torch is nothing more than a weapon bound Flame Trap and the Warhorn is pale in comparison to the Necromancer or the Warriors, who have better spammable boons, hard CC’s, and a blast finisher.
I won’t even get started in the water.
The utilities are pretty much god awful, whats the point in the shouts if the pet is dead or can’t hit the target? The signets are on much longer cool downs than the equal other profession counterparts, the traps whilst good are pretty much for condition builds only and are easily avoidable, and the Wilderness Survival options either don’t work (Lightning Reflexes doesn’t stunbreak Knock Down) or again on awkward cool downs or limited to different builds. The Spirits still get blown away by the faintest of winds.
The traits are incredibly messy, we often have to have 3 traits to replicate the effect of another professions similar single trait, such as bows range and damage, signets being beneficial to both the user and the pet, the traps needing both the major and grandmaster to be useful in a trait line that offers no bonuses for the build traps are designed for, no matter how you trait the Spirits, they will still wither in the wind, and the pets despite whatever traits near never hit the opponent you leash them on if they simply decide to focus on the ranger, all the opponent needs to do is move and the pet is negated.
Oh and did you know the pets are a walking Cloak and Dagger target for the Thief, the only time they can’t target the pet is when the pet is ‘in recovery’ mode, which is where the pet is even more useless anyhow.
Oh and did I mention all of this is because we have a ‘always present’ pet which is supposed to represent a good portion of our ability and damage?
I have a simple solution, reset the Ranger to how it was in the very early Beta’s, our Greatsword did damage, the Shortbow had the redeeming quality of hitting very fast, Spirits weren’t swept away by a portable face cooling fan, and ultimately, Rangers were happy.
/end rant.