Guild Wars 2

Greetings. I’ve been going through topics here recently and all i saw was “rangers suck after the SB nerf” and “they are not competitive in pvp” and so on. Is it true? I started off as a ranger, can’t say i got far, but since i read those topics im starting to have second thoughts, if there is a point in leveling a ranger at all. Any help would be appreciated.

Before you fell in love with a ranger, try a warrior with a rifle/bow. Or try both and engineer and a thief with pistols before you take the final descision. My main is a ranger of 40 lvl and i gave all myself to him. I’ve gone not so far but even now it’s painful to change my main. Just try all other rangers and only then choose. GL bro

im very conservative, and thus the only ranged class i like is the ranger itself i just wanna know if it is still a viable class to play, or is it as bad as they say

They were ok and fun before the nerf, but SB was the best weapon. It just got hit for a 7% flat damage reduction and perhaps around 20% damage cut on its burst (auto-attack plus quickness).

I think you willl still have fun if you like the playstyle, but consider thief and warrior before you fall in love with ranger. Look at some other facts too-ranger damage in general is lower to compenstate for damage from our pets, which have some issues in pvp.

for pve, anything is viable. for spvp, you can get away with a few builds. for tpvp, there is currently one viable build (condition). so as long as youre ok going with the “accepted” builds for pvp, you’ll be ok.

I see. Thanks for the replies!

The problem is not in that the class is bad the problem is in players
because they use the only thing that they think is the strongest and instead to adapt the only thing they do is to cry when there is change

with LB/GS combo i have troubles mainly with mesmers but who doesn’t
also i can counter thieves often if they dont suprise me using stealth because their burst is great

Rangers are half baked. Plain and simple. An entire trait and skill line is near-utterly useless (Nature Magic + Spirits). And there are noticeable design flaws, and bugs that have not yet been addressed.

To top it off, it seems that every patch with ranger updates seems to make things worse and worse.

Warriors do nearly exactly what rangers do, but 10x better.

• They have better ranged abilities with 2 ranged options, long bow and rifle — and they roll face with it. Seriously, our ranged options are really that pitiful compared to theirs.
• Understandably, they melee better and melee/mid range is the ranger’s really only thing left that we have that is worthwhile.
• Warrior banners totally outclass our spirits in every way.
• Warriors do not however, have pets which is what is supposed to make up for our shortcomings. However, pets are slow, unresponsive and unreliable most of the time.

If A-Net paid some attention to our spirits and pets a bit more, they can solve most of these issues. But many patches later, we only feel let down and in some cases insulted with the nerfs to our already deflated class.

Yea I wish they would roll out the bug/pet/spirit fixes in a more timely manner. Then we can actually see where we stand.

many patches as in 2 months worth? that is not alot of patches.

apparently everyone is a special snowflake and nothing is more important than them.

with ele necros rangers and engineers, i am pretty sure that they have a full plate when it comes to bugs and such not including all the other bugs out side of class fixes. im not syaing you guys are wrong but seriously the game is brand new and this will be fixed and adjusted in time. i will continue to use my ranger effectively in Spvp. and when they do fix the bugs and hopefully adjust the damage of pets or AI or functionality i will probably feel a huge advantage over others.

my complaint which covers multiple classes is that teleports like mesmer blink and thief sb 5 allow for travel along the z axis while charges such as Swoop and others do not. that would be the biggest game changer for me if they fixed or changed that.

Engineers in a worse state then Ranger? Give Ranger Grenade and Bomb kit and we won’t be complaining, we will be enjoying the faceroll.

Levetty.1279:

Engineers in a worse state then Ranger? Give Ranger Grenade and Bomb kit and we won’t be complaining, we will be enjoying the faceroll.

not only that, but an odd but imo close comparison is Rifle vs not only the shortbow but the longbow.

Longbow sucks cause its 1 is kitteny as crap, its other abilities imo are really solid, its just that since 1 is so bad, it cant match up.

SB 1 got nerfed, and its 2-5 dont pack the punch of longbows and have less control aspects imo.

Rifle has a powerful auto that peirces by default, has mobility and pushes AND a buckshot ability for big damage, as well as a ranged immoble, I recently switched to eng as an alt to my ranger and my weapon feels like an a core to the class, I feel like my weapon really lets me be active and powerful. something comes up, I buckshot it, push it away, and then net it and auto away. its fASTER then LB, and stronger then SB, so its just ugh, such a good weapon.

Rangers are so bad because their weapons are TERRIBLE, pets AI isnt as bad as people make it, but when combined with bad weapons? its a double whammy really. I love my ranger, and will keep playing it when fixes come around, but my engi is alot of fun.

*Imagine a Ranger as 80% damge to 20% pet damage split.
-Pets are useless in PvP (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk5DiFJAtWQ&feature=plcp).
-In Dungeons (80 exp.) or WvW pets are doen 80~90% of the time due to the lack of a dodging mechanism
—-
*Rangers have very unreliable condition-remove.

*Rangers have bad utility spells compared to other classes
—-
*Greatsword can’t compete with Warriors

*Short-Sword attacks disable dodgeing

*Shortbow is inferior to Theif Shortbow + it’s bugged and swiftness doesn’t work anymore

*Longbow is inferior to Warrior Longbow, it looses damage and arrows have such a low flight-speed that you can avoid them by stepping left and right

*Axe is very situational, great when facing 2 hugging enemies: else it’s inferior to penetrating arrows /has a low single target DPS
—-
*Spirits die instantly – even within weak AoE(whereas Warriors flags can’t be damaged)
—-
*Nature magic trait is nearly completely bugged

*Beastmastery trait suffers from a large amount of buggs

i dont use any range weapons on my ranger unless you count the warhorn, medium armor is fine i survive really well and have "some " good burst. the weapons abilities are good but until the damage gets buffed just a bit it is still much harder than say a warrior or thief to kill someone. however my build is a power/survival build and i have yet to see anyone else use it. it also lacks range so it has a few weaknesses in regards to targets on ridges above me. GS and Sword both have excellent survival tools. once the fix the rooting issue with sword 1 ill be happy but i have adapted through it and if i really need to dodge and sword 2 and 3 are down i switch to GS dodge roll and go to town.
while i agree ranger is in need of some help with a good build a good player can make it work even straight melee.

another thing is that while there are different types of armor in this game i have almost 3k attack and almost 3k armor.

the insignificant difference between the armors when you can throw a soldiers amulet on and have 3 k attack good toughness and vitality makes the comment about medium armor laughable

Psychrome, good on ya if you can get results from your melee ranger. Sure, a good-great player can play a warm bowl of oatmeal and tear up with it. Not sure I can and I don’t like playing a range class melee to compensate for it’s problems.

As for "i am pretty sure that they have a full plate when it comes to bugs and such not including all the other bugs out side of class fixes. im not syaing you guys are wrong but seriously the game is brand new and this will be fixed and adjusted in time. "

Balancing ranged pet professions is a mixed bag in MMO’s. Some never get it right, or take years. I was hoping Anet would polish GW’s ranger and bring something better to GW2. Why include it in the profession mix, if they were going to leave it lousy?

The first red flag was a semi-broken pet, despite a year of promises to fix it by launch. Where will ranger go from here? I think players are upset that this whole SB deal is an ill omen for the future. A weak profession was moved in the wrong direction.

I can’t agree with you more Prev. I was hoping the Ranger would offer something we haven’t seen in other MMOs with a “hunter” style class but saddly it didn’t. The pet mechanic isn’t working as well as it does in other games (pet can’t attack and move at the same time). Until the pet fixes come in, or the skills are updated I’ll be playing my thief.

Ranger is my main.
WVW-
Without exotic gear, the DPS is laughable. Good luck if you don’t stack toughness which makes the DPS even worse. There are a few builds that are viable. I use a trap build and support build for siege but you get zero credit for being a support class. Thanks ANET!

SPVP-
Ranger is okay. Trap build, condition build is okay but you just run alot. I get a lot of kills with these.

PVE-
Really nice but almost every class is good in PVE.

This is probably the only MMO that has ever been made that the Ranger class is under powered and a melee DPS class can do the same thing but better.

To be honest, ranger is never that bad in PVE, I would say even after all kinds of nerf, Ranger is still the best choice for beginer and over all above average in PVE.
The main complain about ranger’s nerf is coming from PVP side coz our most reliable DPS (SB) was cut and our pet basicly do nothing in PVP.
I really don’t mind the SB nerf, as long as Anet can fix the pet bug (atking moving target) and the 1-h sword self-rooting bug. You know the 1-h sword +QZ DPS is still awesome for non-moving target, not less than warrior or theif’s burst damage, but unfortunately in most of time it will root urself, as long as the opponent move a little bit u will do no damage. Now the only reliable way to use 1-h sword is to use entagle 1st, but well, you have to find your own way to get close to 600 range before you die(maybe give ranger a steath skill?) and can only do it every 150 sec(shorten the CD like thief can do it every 45 sec?).

CRrabbit.1284:

You know the 1-h sword +QZ DPS is still awesome for non-moving target, not less than warrior or theif’s burst damage, but unfortunately in most of time it will root urself, as long as the opponent move a little bit u will do no damage. Now the only reliable way to use 1-h sword is to use entagle 1st, but well, you have to find your own way to get close to 600 range before you die(maybe give ranger a steath skill?) and can only do it every 150 sec(shorten the CD like thief can do it every 45 sec?).

This is the kind of thing to note about the ranger OP-in this case the ranger has to use an elite skill on a 3 minute cool down to fire off a melee attack+quickness that (according to CRrabbit) does similar damage to warroir/thief burst. Compare that with warrior: they have a ranged immobilize on a 20sec cooldown AND have a number of gap closers (rangers really only have one easy to use gap closer which is on their great sword). Oh yes, and thieves? They have skills that teleport them to and immobolize the target so its relatively easy to get out that damage.

There are quite a few little quirky things about rangers like this. On the upside, traps are good and the warhorn (an offhand weapon) is still good.

Vialator.4981:

Batlav.6318:

The problem is not in that the class is bad the problem is in players
because they use the only thing that they think is the strongest and instead to adapt the only thing they do is to cry when there is change

with LB/GS combo i have troubles mainly with mesmers but who doesn’t
also i can counter thieves often if they dont suprise me using stealth because their burst is great

Anyone using a GS and going in melee with a ranger says it all to me!
Medium armor and melee pvp- LMAO
Why just why?

Took all of a minute to do a quick scan of your whiny nonsense and trolling. Not to mention, you quoted him but failed to note he mentioned thieves, who do fairly well with medium armor in melee range wouldn’t you say? Also of note, there are numerous videos for both pvp and wvw showing engineers doing well in melee range (not melee weapon mind you) with medium armor.

There may be issues with rangers in melee range, but that doesn’t mean people should not be trying their melee options.

I think your posts speak clearly about your frame of mind when it comes to gaming. Much like the root of the problem, you simply are not as good as you think you are, and therefore cannot contribute meaningfully to discussions regarding the real issues behind class balance.

I d love to play melee but am i really forced to ? And am i doing same dps compared to other dps builds or lasting more compared to other tanking builds or maybe offer more utility and support.
Also is my main mechanic helping me. What about my utilities or traits do they work as intended.
Tbh i am asking, am i effective to something or just trying to find something to cover the gap.
God gave rangers one leg, we prefer it from none but why gave the others two ?
Thanx

arcaneclarity.5283:

Rangers have been getting nerfed since beta. With each nerf it narrowed us into fewer and fewer builds until our last good builds were removed with the short bow nerf.

And this is the big reason I shelved my ranger and now play my thief exclusively. I haven’t even touched a backstab build on my thief yet and everything just seems more in sync on the thief. I think the OP hit the nail on the head when he said our weapons are the issue. I played both a warrior and ranger in all the BWE and enjoyed the flow and style of the ranger combat over the warrior and that is why I rolled it at launch. The problem is that the weapons I flew in love with in BWE got nerfed into the ground (Longbow and Greatsword) and caused me to switch over to shortbow and sword/horn to perform. Sure I love the ninja of the sword, but it has it’s draw backs too. It isn’t one big thing that is broke it is the death by a thousand cuts that just makes the ranger perform so poorly compared to other classes.

My skill level with a ranger was 100 times better than with a thief. and I feel 20 times more powerful in combat playing with my thief than I did with my ranger. I know part of it is the es-capability of the thief, but I still face slap wondering why thieves got the 25% speed sigil over rangers.. The skill cap on a thief just seems so much higher too and I think that is because the ranger’s depth has been gutted by the lack of options due to trait lines just being flat broke.

I had high hopes for the class, but it is going to take a lot of work to bring it back in line with the other classes right now. I wonder if Anet even realizes this right now (hope so). The good news is I’m really enjoying my thief and the ability to roll alts and level them to 80 so fast is a huge plus for me about the game. When the ranger does get fixed I got a fully decked out one waiting to rofl stomp some thieves!

Let me paint a picture. I’m running to meet my guild’s zerg in WvW, and I literally meet a warrior face to face. I’m not super geared out but the majority of my stuff is exotic. He has a rifle I have my shortbow and my Murellow. I start to flank and unload on him with Quickening Zephyr and Crossfire. He hits me with 4 shots, and finishes me off with a 9k killshot crit. He never even switched to a melee weapon, never even tried to close the gap, and had 3/4 of his health left.

Warriors should not be able to out range rangers, but this is the state of things right now.

Rangers are more on the low end damage wise compared to other classes but over all they aren’t THAT bad. Sure they do need a lot of work (and skill changes reverts) but I still enjoy my ranger.

What I want fix and fixed soon are the following and in this order:

• Pets fixed so they don’t die from AoE so easy. Most likely any class pets have this problem, not sure.
• Short bow #1 speed change reverted back to what it was pre Oct 7th patch.
• Sword skill #1 animation fixed so you’re not locked in place.
• Make pet F2 ability just instant. No need for animation. I love how the black bear takes 3 seconds to use it’s F2 ability. Almost every time the mob has moved out of range unless the bear is tanking it.

Most pets in dungeons are useless for DPS. You need to use a range pet else it will die almost right away. You’re even forced to babysit your range pet to keep it as close to you as possible so it doesn’t end up in some random AoE and die within seconds.

When I run dungeons I mainly just use a Red Moa for it’s 20% crit buff and keep it next to me and never attacking. If I know I can send it in to attack and be generally safe I will but I keep an eye on it’s health. If the help falls below 50% I call it back. Why 50% and not something like 20%? Because there is a big delay in calling your pet back to you.

Pet DPS output is perfectly fine assuming it can stay on the mob and alive. A dead pet or not using a pet is almost a 40-50% DPS loss for the Ranger class. Pretty sad if you ask me.

soren.6918:

Let me paint a picture. I’m running to meet my guild’s zerg in WvW, and I literally meet a warrior face to face. I’m not super geared out but the majority of my stuff is exotic. He has a rifle I have my shortbow and my Murellow. I start to flank and unload on him with Quickening Zephyr and Crossfire. He hits me with 4 shots, and finishes me off with a 9k killshot crit. He never even switched to a melee weapon, never even tried to close the gap, and had 3/4 of his health left.

Warriors should not be able to out range rangers, but this is the state of things right now.

Evade his Volley, Evade his Killshot. I’m not sure why you’d be getting hit by a kill shot if it was just you and the warrior, it’s pretty easy to see long before it goes off. Sorry, there might be an argument in some respects on ranged warriors vs ranged rangers, but this isn’t it. You should have longer range, kite better, and the warrior has more to evade – crossfire constant bleed, crippling shot (which if it lands will slow him allowing your pet to hit him and apply bleeds), and if you’re flanking, concussion shot.

Why would you be running alone with a murrelow? So you can poison field any potential threats?

Frankly, this whole warrior vs ranger thing is getting a bit overblown. Yes a warrior does a lot of ranged damage, a lot of it is easily avoided. Yes a warrior has more viable ranged options than ranger has melee options, but you’re comparing straight dps to versatility.

To sum up, if you’re losing to a rifle warrior as a competent ranger, you need to adjust your approach, not call foul.

Fynos.8762:

soren.6918:

Let me paint a picture. I’m running to meet my guild’s zerg in WvW, and I literally meet a warrior face to face. I’m not super geared out but the majority of my stuff is exotic. He has a rifle I have my shortbow and my Murellow. I start to flank and unload on him with Quickening Zephyr and Crossfire. He hits me with 4 shots, and finishes me off with a 9k killshot crit. He never even switched to a melee weapon, never even tried to close the gap, and had 3/4 of his health left.

Warriors should not be able to out range rangers, but this is the state of things right now.

Evade his Volley, Evade his Killshot. I’m not sure why you’d be getting hit by a kill shot if it was just you and the warrior, it’s pretty easy to see long before it goes off. Sorry, there might be an argument in some respects on ranged warriors vs ranged rangers, but this isn’t it. You should have longer range, kite better, and the warrior has more to evade – crossfire constant bleed, crippling shot (which if it lands will slow him allowing your pet to hit him and apply bleeds), and if you’re flanking, concussion shot.

Why would you be running alone with a murrelow? So you can poison field any potential threats?

Frankly, this whole warrior vs ranger thing is getting a bit overblown. Yes a warrior does a lot of ranged damage, a lot of it is easily avoided. Yes a warrior has more viable ranged options than ranger has melee options, but you’re comparing straight dps to versatility.

To sum up, if you’re losing to a rifle warrior as a competent ranger, you need to adjust your approach, not call foul.

I find shortbow thieves worse myself. Tons of mobility, stealth, thieves guild elite, cantrops on roll which stack some some great bleed dmg. Then if they feel like it they can cloak and dagger, steal and then backstab you. If you run they can infil arrow after you.

Yasha.5963:

They were ok and fun before the nerf, but SB was the best weapon. It just got hit for a 7% flat damage reduction and perhaps around 20% damage cut on its burst (auto-attack plus quickness).

The attack rate of Crossfire+Quickness was reduces by 25%; but you’re partly right, that’s almost 20% more than it should be.

Regarding the OP’s question:
Up until level 70-75 Rangers are very good in open PvE.
At level 75-80 and dungeons you’ll notice that the Ranger’s main mechanic, pets, still needs work. Even if you pay attention to your pet and call it back with F3 because the champion is about to launch a big attack it dies because it decided to ignore your command for 1-2 seconds; the F2 skills have similar problems, sometimes it takes several seconds before the pet actually uses the skill, and sometimes the pet simply interrupts itself. If the delay would always be there you could at least adjust to it and make it somewhat work but other times your pet follows your commands flawlessly.
Another weak point of Rangers is their vulnerability to Immobilize.

Sdric.8526:

*Imagine a Ranger as 80% damge to 20% pet damage split.
-Pets are useless in PvP (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk5DiFJAtWQ&feature=plcp).
-In Dungeons (80 exp.) or WvW pets are doen 80~90% of the time due to the lack of a dodging mechanism
—-
*Rangers have very unreliable condition-remove.

*Rangers have bad utility spells compared to other classes
—-
*Greatsword can’t compete with Warriors

*Short-Sword attacks disable dodgeing

*Shortbow is inferior to Theif Shortbow + it’s bugged and swiftness doesn’t work anymore

*Longbow is inferior to Warrior Longbow, it looses damage and arrows have such a low flight-speed that you can avoid them by stepping left and right

*Axe is very situational, great when facing 2 hugging enemies: else it’s inferior to penetrating arrows /has a low single target DPS
—-
*Spirits die instantly – even within weak AoE(whereas Warriors flags can’t be damaged)
—-
*Nature magic trait is nearly completely bugged

*Beastmastery trait suffers from a large amount of buggs

Completely agreed I think this is fair and accurate. If it were just 2 or 3 of these issues we would not be up in arms but because of all of them combined it is a bit daunting.

But more so due to the fact we haven’t seen Areanet respond in almost a week with a post that had over 500 replies and almost 80k views….yeah that is a lot.

Fynos.8762:

soren.6918:

Let me paint a picture. I’m running to meet my guild’s zerg in WvW, and I literally meet a warrior face to face. I’m not super geared out but the majority of my stuff is exotic. He has a rifle I have my shortbow and my Murellow. I start to flank and unload on him with Quickening Zephyr and Crossfire. He hits me with 4 shots, and finishes me off with a 9k killshot crit. He never even switched to a melee weapon, never even tried to close the gap, and had 3/4 of his health left.

Warriors should not be able to out range rangers, but this is the state of things right now.

Evade his Volley, Evade his Killshot. I’m not sure why you’d be getting hit by a kill shot if it was just you and the warrior, it’s pretty easy to see long before it goes off. Sorry, there might be an argument in some respects on ranged warriors vs ranged rangers, but this isn’t it. You should have longer range, kite better, and the warrior has more to evade – crossfire constant bleed, crippling shot (which if it lands will slow him allowing your pet to hit him and apply bleeds), and if you’re flanking, concussion shot.

Why would you be running alone with a murrelow? So you can poison field any potential threats?

Frankly, this whole warrior vs ranger thing is getting a bit overblown. Yes a warrior does a lot of ranged damage, a lot of it is easily avoided. Yes a warrior has more viable ranged options than ranger has melee options, but you’re comparing straight dps to versatility.

To sum up, if you’re losing to a rifle warrior as a competent ranger, you need to adjust your approach, not call foul.

I have 4 evades on my hotbar. Your main strategy as a ranger has to be not getting hit. I evaded him 3 times (and not just spamming evades). He hit me 4 times + a killshot over the entirety of a fight. What versatility do we offer? Our melee is a lot weaker than warriors, we have lower crits, and their ranged is better. What is this versatility of which you speak?

In PVE no , as long and you kill trash , and dont want great boss dps. In eveything else yes they are bad , a warrior and a rogue can out dps you at range , because your pet cant hit a target or is dead

Even in PvE a Warrior is better. If you face more than one mob and need to kite, the pet will run around uselessly. The warrior can go in there with one of its high DD aoe skills and wipe them all out. I find I can leap into a fairly big group of mob without dying on the Warrior. Not possible on a Ranger.

Only if there is a Vet do you have to be more careful to thin out the mob first on the Warrior.

The Ranger was almost ok at kiting before the nerf, but the 30% damage reduction really hit hard.

Iv just hit 50 with my ranger and hate rolling other toons but i feel i have to at the moment. Im going to try anther profession to see if it is my gear/play style, or that rangers are not quite up to scratch at the moment

In PvP, it mostly comes down to managing your pet. You aren’t going to deal enough damage on your own, so if your pet is not doing anything, you will lose. Luckily, there are plenty of skills and traits that helps the pet along, but it should still be more reliable. To answer your question; no, the Ranger is not as bad as people on this forum makes it sound. It’s just that it’s not as a reliable professions as the others are.

Dejavu.3507:

Before you fell in love with a ranger, try a warrior with a rifle/bow. Or try both and engineer and a thief with pistols before you take the final descision. My main is a ranger of 40 lvl and i gave all myself to him. I’ve gone not so far but even now it’s painful to change my main. Just try all other rangers and only then choose. GL bro

Stop suggesting other classes in these Ranger threads. These threads are about Rangers, not what class you think should replace them or “does a better job with a ranged weapon”.

So sick and tired of reading the word “warrior” in a Ranger thread.

i play a lot of spvp, wvwvw, and dungeon run.

in spvp (in a full game) i’m usually one the top 3 players on my team. It’s not just about killing but CP. i stay away from zergs and have about 3k in armor with 22k hp. i’ve been playing around using a shortbow:crit+toughnes+condition build. i’ve actually flatly exchanged sword 1 with a glass cannon thief (who blew his initiative) with a sword+warhorn and pretty much won at half health (basically a garbage thief though).

you can also get top kills easily as a sb ranger (when they are down just tag em and continue with the next person).

a ranger is under-powered but they aren’t unplayable. make due with what you have and try and play it as best as possible. i don’t want to roll an alt because i feel like i haven’t truly mastered being a ranger.

Luriyu.6873:

i play a lot of spvp, wvwvw, and dungeon run.

in spvp (in a full game) i’m usually one the top 3 players on my team. It’s not just about killing but CP. i stay away from zergs and have about 3k in armor with 22k hp. i’ve been playing around using a shortbow:crit+toughnes+condition build. i’ve actually flatly exchanged sword 1 with a glass cannon thief (who blew his initiative) with a sword+warhorn and pretty much won at half health (basically a garbage thief though).

you can also get top kills easily as a sb ranger (when they are down just tag em and continue with the next person).

a ranger is under-powered but they aren’t unplayable. make due with what you have and try and play it as best as possible. i don’t want to roll an alt because i feel like i haven’t truly mastered being a ranger.

The last bit of this is exactly right, the ranger is badly under powered, but not unplayable.

Cloud.7613:

Luriyu.6873:

i play a lot of spvp, wvwvw, and dungeon run.

in spvp (in a full game) i’m usually one the top 3 players on my team. It’s not just about killing but CP. i stay away from zergs and have about 3k in armor with 22k hp. i’ve been playing around using a shortbow:crit+toughnes+condition build. i’ve actually flatly exchanged sword 1 with a glass cannon thief (who blew his initiative) with a sword+warhorn and pretty much won at half health (basically a garbage thief though).

you can also get top kills easily as a sb ranger (when they are down just tag em and continue with the next person).

a ranger is under-powered but they aren’t unplayable. make due with what you have and try and play it as best as possible. i don’t want to roll an alt because i feel like i haven’t truly mastered being a ranger.

The last bit of this is exactly right, the ranger is badly under powered, but not unplayable.

No class in this game is unplayable.

The issue is that the OP is asking is the Ranger that bad? Well equally skilled players would find many other classes more powerful both in PvE and PvX.

I loved my Ranger and got it to 80, getting exotic gear just before the SB nerf. It was weak, the pet did run around uselessly while I kited PvE and I was getting pwnd in WvW unless I hung back and sniped but it was still playable. But after the nerf what was weak went to really un-fun.

A warrior with Rifle and GS is very similar to a Ranger in GS/LB playstyle but much much more powerful. The only thing it lacks is the machine gun fire of the SB, the one thing that made the Ranger fun for me.

May i just intervene in all of this ‘’Numbers don’t add up’’ philosophy, and point out that we have pets, the pets make up the numbers and if used correctly make the skills of similar professions less of the numbers we have.

Matthew.2873:

May i just intervene in all of this ‘’Numbers don’t add up’’ philosophy, and point out that we have pets, the pets make up the numbers and if used correctly make the skills of similar professions less of the numbers we have.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk5DiFJAtWQ&feature=plcp

I really love this video.
Since it proves everybody wrong who dares to call pets a reliable damage source.

(Yet it’s not including the fact that in WvW and Dungeons pets are lie lying on the floor from dust to dawn due to AoE damage without a doding mechnism wasn’t Anets best idea.)

Come on now Sdric, that video is just lame. Pet’s cannot really do anything, just like in real life. Without companionship and help. Not only was the player not commanding it to attack, which will strafe the pet forward more into the area of the enemy, but all he had to do was use a crippling attack and that pet could have easily killed that golem by itself if you had some healing on it.

Matthew…the point is, the ranger won’t always be able to cripple or the target may be a lot faster that a cripple won’t slow down enough (like any Risen in Orr).

In PvP, smart players are using these attack animations to avoid damage all together. That video is the perfect demonstration of the root problem. Pets cant move and attack at the same time. Regardless of commands or cripples, it’s a huge problem.

Hm, That is all actually true and constructive at the same time so i can’t argue or troll:)

Sdric.8526:

Matthew.2873:

May i just intervene in all of this ‘’Numbers don’t add up’’ philosophy, and point out that we have pets, the pets make up the numbers and if used correctly make the skills of similar professions less of the numbers we have.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk5DiFJAtWQ&feature=plcp

I really love this video.
Since it proves everybody wrong who dares to call pets a reliable damage source.

(Yet it’s not including the fact that in WvW and Dungeons pets are lie lying on the floor from dust to dawn due to AoE damage without a doding mechnism wasn’t Anets best idea.)

That doesn’t show ranged pets, which actually do quite well in W3, dungeons, and sPvP.

Vialator.4981:

Batlav.6318:

The problem is not in that the class is bad the problem is in players
because they use the only thing that they think is the strongest and instead to adapt the only thing they do is to cry when there is change

with LB/GS combo i have troubles mainly with mesmers but who doesn’t
also i can counter thieves often if they dont suprise me using stealth because their burst is great

Anyone using a GS and going in melee with a ranger says it all to me!
Medium armor and melee pvp- LMAO
Why just why?

All three cloth classes have melee weapons and a lot of people use them. This game is not other MMO’s, get used to it.

Rangers aren’t really that bad, while I don’t play the style most people do, and I don’t use sb so the recent nerf to it never affected me.

I mainly go lb/axe/wh or lb/gs and I really enjoy the ranger gameplay. To be honest, I felt a little useless in the early stages, but once I started gearing up little by little, there was a huge difference.

Please note, I’m almost always in wvw and rarely do anything else, so I wouldn’t know whether ranger sucks at outside of wvw. But in my experience, it’s a fairly decent profession in wvw and I’m happy with it.

I do agree that pets need to be fixed however. Pets in the vast majority of situations are trivial elements that add little to no contribution at times. Their abilities need to be faster to be predictable, as it stands now, it’s god-knows-whether-that-kitten-went-off state and you just lose interest in using it’s abilities after sometime.

Other than pets, I just wish rapid fire starts off with a slightly higher dmg, than it currently does. Just funny when my normal attack does 800-2k, and my rapid fire starts with 300-400 and if the target manages to dodge and get out of los from it, that whole skill just did 300-400 (and my pet is prolly dead from aoe, or is still chasing the target without hitting it even once at times)

Eldan.4296:

Greetings. I’ve been going through topics here recently and all i saw was “rangers suck after the SB nerf” and “they are not competitive in pvp” and so on. Is it true? I started off as a ranger, can’t say i got far, but since i read those topics im starting to have second thoughts, if there is a point in leveling a ranger at all. Any help would be appreciated.

If you like ranger go ahead and play it, i enjoy mine and it’s perfectly playable in both PvP and PvE.
Whoever says ranger was playable before the SB nerf but now it’s not playable…just don’t listen to that crap, the real SB nerf is mainly QZ, which you can still use with another weapon and then switch back to SB.

And yes, there is a point in leveling a ranger when you like the class, changes are made and skills change with patches/time, and on top of it…you already know the ranger can’t get much worse through patches unlike other classes that are most likely to get nerfed over and over for months.

I have 460+ hours on my ranger and a total of 490+ hours across all characters…so guess what? I just like ranger

In short, don’t really listen to QQers, otherwise everyone would be a warrior/thief.

I like my ranger as well because of it’s relatively simple and straight forward (ranged) playing style. I definitely think the Ranger is relatively weak (in pvp) compared to other classes however, and lately I have mostly been playing mesmer, engineer and thief. They all feel much stronger and more “finished”.

nldixon.8514:

That doesn’t show ranged pets, which actually do quite well in W3, dungeons, and sPvP.

The fact that you have to use a ranged pet to be viable shows me pet AI is broken. I have been using Devourers in WvW (they live longer then spiders) and spiders in SPvP. The reason I use them is melee pets have far to many issues and horrible damage up time.

The pathing AI for the pets is horrible in this game. The responsiveness is horrible and the F2 is still broken requiring numerous presses to work. Not to mention your pet walks like 10-15 feet from you aggroing everything around you in PvE. Running around the 70+ zones is a pain in the kitten with your pet out lol. I also noticed once I hit level 70 for some reason mobs bypass my pet now and just come after me. Prior to that my pet did most the tanking.

So yeah I have some gripes about the pets. Hey one good thing, they look nice!

As far as build variety yeah it sucks seems like I have 2-3 effective builds (depending on the situation) atm.

Spirits overall are horrible. They should be JUST like Necro minions, i.e. more health and no de-spawning. Activated abilities need reworking or more range.

Signets seem okay if you dedicated the entire power trait tree to your signets, i.e. a signet based build.

Shouts are useless. I do not even bother with them since I do not want to rely on my pet AT ALL.

Traps are good! Hence an effective trap build. Although the traps traits should be moved to Wildness Survival. Why they are in the Crit tree makes zero sense since they are condition based damage. If anything move the survival skill buffing traits up into the Crit tree. That would make more sense since you use Quickening Zephyr more in Power/Crit builds.

Beastmastery Tree and Nature magic are useless trees atm due to pets/shouts and spirits sucking so much.

Fix Longbow #1 its slow and the damage at farther range makes no sense. Everything else is fine. I could argue that Rapid Fire could be made to complete a little faster so its not super easy to dodge.

Fix Sword #1 its broken, you are locked in place, cannot dodge nor strafe while its using the 2nd and 3rd abilities.

Buff great sword damage, its lackluster.

Buff dagger off hand damage on #4 skill.

Lastly please allow us to have one or two petless ranger builds. In GW1 the ranger was petless but had pet builds. So why can we not have 1 or 2 viable petless builds. You could use the Nature Magic Tree and/or Skirmishing tree to bring this about. Would be easy to do. You just buff ranger damage and give us 1 or 2 profession abilities to compensate.