Guild Wars 2

I have collected the most important needed fixes for the ranger from the forum. Some are my own, some are from other users. I take no credit, but just wanted to highlight the issues and make it easier for Anet to make the changes :-) Hopefully!

Feel free to add bugs / fixes not mentioned in the list.

Pet

• In general improved Pet AI!

• Masters Bond:
Beastmastery line strongly encourages the ranger to make pet swaps regularly with pre-chosen traits like Zephyr’s speed , and Loud whistle.
Please remove the reset when pets are swapped or when going from land to water and vice versa.
It’s like a sigil in a way. But your sigil stack doesn’t reset when you swap weapons?!?!!
The only time Masters Bond should be reset, is when the pet or player is defeated.

• Malicious Training:
If you start the fight then I guess your pet will benefit from the trait. But if you just stand passive and command the pet to fight with F2 ( while you don’t fight) the +350 cond dmg doesn’t work.
its a really sloppy way of handling a pet system in a game where you know you’re going to have a whole profession based around the things.
I almost always initiate combat with F2, and thats apparently a really bad thing to do based on these findings.

• Intimidation training:
The trait causes Canine and Spider F2 attacks to cause cripple.
I run mostly canines (wolves), and I don’t see why the canines have this as their trait. The wolf causes fear with his F2 skill (cripple doesn’t make that any better, and arguably makes it worse), the white wolf causes chill (Cripple not any help), the hound causes immobilization (cripple not any help) and the fern hound causes regen so the cripple could be beneficial there, but that’s 1 out of the 4 canines. I believe similar set of circumstances apply to the spiders as at least 2 of their F2 attacks cause immobilize.
The family requirements must be erased! It should apply to ALL pets!

• Ranger consumable should also apply to pets. When the ranger’s damage is shared by the pet, it’s only fair that the pet also get the consumable buffs.

• Reduced AoE damage intake for pets. Pets die to easily in dungeons and www, and we can’t do anything about it. The player can dodge in four different directions. But the pet only comes back in 1 direction. You can’t call the pet back when the red circles are all the same direction as the pet coming back to the ranger.

• If pet takes fall damage it should gain benefit from “50% fall damage reduction”

• “Stow pet” must do so until counter commanded.
When the pet is stowed away, it should only get back if the ranger commands so. Again a discipline issue!

• When pet is in Avoid Combat and you press F2, the pet will first run to the target and attack. It doesn’t do the F2 where it was standing (out of combat).

• Pets must stop right next to ranger!
Give the pets some more discipline. They should not just run wherever they feel like.

• Improve response time!
This one goes for all F skills and attack animation “Register hit from pets at animation’s start, not animation’s end”

• Signet’s are “actualized” every 10 seconds on the pet. So if the counter is at 10 sec and you switch the pet your pet won’t get any signet effect for 9-10 seconds.
That is horrible. Make it so that when the pet is created (switched) it takes over all the signets from the ranger immediately. That’s important.
If it takes 9 seconds until the pet gets the speed buff or the regeneration or whatever signet that is a real issue.

• Pet not attacking immediately after swapping.
If you’re ranged and using a melee pet the 2 seconds of quickness is totally useless for your pet. If you’re melee and using a melee pet it might actually use 1 second of that quickness.
This doesn’t even get into the fact that sigils may not be applied to a swapped in pet for up to 10 seconds, the general dps loss from a swapped in pet running to the target, or the fact that a swapped in pet can/will miss it’s F2 a lot of times because it will seldom appear facing the target but will leap/breath/whatever in the direction it’s facing if you don’t wait the 1-2 seconds for it to acquire a target. There’s other issues connected with pet swapping as well like lost boons/RaO/Master’s Bond stacks but none of this is new.

• Long range pets should have same attack range as longbow!
eg. spiders are imho long range pets. Therefore they should be able to attack target as the ranger using longbow.

• Pet names should be saved even after changing the two initial pets.

• Search and Rescue:
85 second cooldown is way to loong. It shouldn’t activate if there are no revivable allies. It should revive at the same / or faster pace than players.

• “Protect me” should not kill the pet. Why have a skill that kills your pet? Instead of the pet absorbing the damage, it could either “make the enemy miss ranger” or “pet draws the attention of the enemy” or “pet redirects the damage to air/ground”.

• Pet being attacked should not give a speed penalty to the player.

• The ranger must have the opportunity to change the inactive pet DURING a battle. Most of the time you find yourself in battle, but it’s a new and different situation. If you could change the pet to what suits the situation best, a lot of “pets are useless” issues would vanish.

• Make pets sense cloaked enemies.

As you can see a lot of the ranger issues are within the pets! Anet should seriously make some better coding for the pet AI.

But our special skills also lack usefullness:

• Spirits need all kind of buff / rework. I never see any rangers using them. This must be a definit sign that the spirits are useless.

• Make underwater traps.

• Increase trap (cast)range to 1,200.

• Traps are also in the wrong trait tree and should be placed in either the condi damage or condi duration tree. Traps have nothing to do with precision or crit damage.

• Spike Trap traited with Trapper’s Expertise only pulses once, contrary to what the skill description currently states.

Weapons

• Longbow autoattack should not have a damage reduction from being in close range. Why be punished for choosing a longbow? Most fights, especially in dungeons are in a limited space area. It’s not always even room to go to 1200.

• Make longbow barrage a combo. If Ranger staying inside field, ofc. Like rain of fire or healing rain. With our fountain we can be great range aoe healing power.

• Axe ricochet and split should not aggro peaceful npc. It should only attack already aggroed targets.

• Axe offhand, Whirling Defense should allow the Ranger to move, just like Dagger Storm allows the Thief to move.

• It should be possible to dodge while in battle with 1H sword. Don’t remove the rooting, it’s actually a good thing. But make it possible to dodge before starting a new sequence. If you press dodge it should be the first priority when the current sequence ends.

General

• Many traits in ranger trees that provide might usually gain only one stack whereas many other classes gain 5 stacks.

• Fix the tooltips, we don’t know what skills to report for not working correctly if we do not know what they are actually supposed to do in the tooltip. It will take a bunch of the burden off dev’s reading false bug reports due to incorrect information.

I appreciate the effort to be sure – but I would just be happy if they started by fixing the actual bugs, of which there are many. Things like Splitblade’s bugged damage, Entangle’s not using your condition damage value, F2 power causing the pet to run to your target instead of activating where it is when you pressed it and so on.

More than than, I would like – indeed, I would demand – that someone from ANet actually make a statement about the bugs, so we at least know they are aware of them specifically, and whether they plan to fix them. It is not right that we have so many build-breaking bugs but absolutely no idea if they will be fixed, or if ANet even knows about them. Absurd.

This is, by far, the best and most comprehensive list I have ever seen regarding the ranger. Please Anet, take a look at these before the new update!

• Masters Bond
I like the way the current system is, but would like to see it not reset when you enter water and exit water (swimming on the surface, where you have no pet).

• When pet is in Avoid Combat and you press F2, the pet will first run to the target and attack. It doesn’t do the F2 where it was standing (out of combat).
NONONONONO. When in passive mode, I want it to activate on the spot!

• Long range pets should have same attack range as longbow!
They would miss more than they already do unless thy got a huge projectile speed buff.

• The ranger must have the opportunity to change the inactive pet DURING a battle.
I like the current system. Bring pets that compliment your build.

That’s 100% spot on, awe extender.

You got that list exactly right, and I agree on every point, and I think the majority of ppl playing rangers agree as well – how could they not?

Anet have said that they like to take small steps when changing things, but with stuff that are more or less flat out broken, small steps won’t do, because then we’re looking at getting the list above fixed sometime in the year 2015/2016, if we’re lucky.

If they don’t even acknowledge these issues, I don’t know what to say…

No mention of obstructed shots, targets dropping, auto attack randomly stopping, QZ + crossfire firing like molasses? lick wounds not working, quick shot and lightning reflexes not properly evading, pets not attacking objects, missing quite a few of the big ones and I’m sure there are quite few other big ones I can’t remember because I’ve been up over 24 hours.

I forgot a Fractal issue mentioned by an another ranger:

• Pets should either be immune to agony or have the same agony resistance as the ranger

• Jade Maw should not be able to target pets. It’s not like the pet can grab a crystall and charge it and then hit the Jade Maw with it?!?! The battle takes much longer time when pets get targeted.

I just tried master’s bond for the first time and was dismayed to find that it resets on pet swap. Totally worthless when you are swapping pets as is absolutely needed in this game with pet survivability what it is—dismal. This really needs to be corrected.