Guild Wars 2

First of all, this game is awesome. It’s mostly bullseyes, a lot of hits and some misses. The features in the game have clearly been thought out to make it as enjoyable as possible, and that pays off big time.

When deciding on a profession(including the BWEs), I tried out all of them briefly. I really liked the professions I thought I would like, but I also liked the professions I thought I wouldn’t like! The ranger is my main now, which falls in the latter category. This is a big compliment to those who designed it, because normally I’d always steer clear of this type of profession due to it getting repetitive and the poor control over pets.

Now, even though most of it is great, I would like to give some constructive criticism about the class, because in a few aspects it does not feel quite as finished as other classes. First, I would like to talk about the available weapons.

Weapons
Longbow
As the signature weapon of a ranger, I expected great things from this weapon. The skills are great and I like how range gives you more damage. It just adds to the way you play the profession. Unfortunately the damage on the weapon, even at max range, is vastly inferior to a shortbow. Aside from AoE fights, I see no reason to use a longbow at the moment.

Shortbow
My favorite by far. It lets you run around like a maniac while still firing arrows at your enemies at high speeds. It offers more damage than the longbow from almost any angle, more control, more mobility and lower cooldowns.

Greatsword
I’ve heard people like this weapon. Myself, I feel a little bit too squishy to stay in melee range of any serious mob, which is why I never really use it.

Sword
Similar to greatsword, but the added benefit is that you can use a torch/warhorn, so I use this weapon quite a bit. The attack animations are fun and rewarding, but there is a problem with the auto attack where you cannot stop auto attacking because you are stuck in the animation. Even dodging doesn’t seem to work sometimes. A simple fix to this would be to introduce a keybind that lets you stop attacking, which is something I’ve been missing since the start.

Axe
Good for multiple targets.

Warhorn
This weapon is just great. That swiftness skill is one of the best skills in the game in my eyes, and the bird storm looks cool and gives decent damage. I mainly use a sword/axe just so I have access to this off hand.

Torch
Seems a bit lackluster. In order to use the aoe, you have to be in melee range which is kind of bad for most situations where you need aoe in the first place. The 4th skill does not seem to be worth it either.

Spear
Underwater weapons count too. Spears require me to be in melee range and tank damage, which I don’t like. The damage on spears is about equal to that of a Longbow as far as I can tell.

Speargun
Decent, but a bit low on damage like spear.

Pets
This area has been covered many times, and I don’t think it’s necessary to repeat everything. In short, they just don’t feel responsive and in your control. There are several sort-of-bugs that make them feel clunky. I will include a list at the end of this post.

The part that is not bugged but should be looked at is the balancing of pet abilities. The brown bear can remove conditions which is hugely useful. I’d like to see more abilities like this where the pet is more supportive than just increasing it’s own damage. For example, a stalker can turn invisible, but that alone isn’t worth that much. If the pet could turn me invisible along with it, for even just say 2 seconds, I would seriously consider picking it up. An other problem with pets is that they die very fast unless you take a bear or moa. I really like having a Raven as my pet, but when I send it in it gets one shotted. There should be a shift in pet abilities so that squishy pets like ravens are either harder to hit (evasion), get less aggro or give passive bonusses to the player (e.g. extra crit) while they are near you.

Utility skills
There are plenty of good skills in the Ranger arsenal, allowing for different playstyles. Some of them feel a bit useless, however. The traps don’t seem to do that much damage, and don’t compensate for the lack of a real survivability skill. The signet passives are a little bit weak. But most important of all, about 30% of the skills are focussed around pets. Because I have absolutely zero trust in my pet, I just do not want to take these skills. For example, I don’t see how having my pet guard an area offers me anything in terms of damage or utility. It’s just not worth taking this over e.g. increased survivability with Lightning Reflexes or extra damage with Quickening Zephyr. On a side note, the elite skill that roots everything in an area is a tad strong. The other elites could use a buff or something that makes them worth it.

Traits
Many traits are not worth it. Example is ‘Create a spike trap while reviving an ally.’ The general use of this is limited already, and crippling enemies that are already in melee range won’t help you revive someone. Opening strikes do not do enough damage to be worth investing in, signets aren’t that great either. A lot of skills are based on a % of your health, which makes them unreliable. Anything related to pets, spirits or traps also don’t seem to be worth it because they are unreliable and just a bit weak. Also, maybe this is not really the place, but I would like to do a suggestion for trait lines. Currently you cannot put a trait VII or higher in the first slot. Could it be made so that once you reach the second tier (Master), the traits get unlocked and you can use them in any of the previous slots as well? This would make it possible for me to, for example, have +70 precision for allies and piercing arrows at level 40.

sPvP
Rangers are fine in sPvP. To my own demise I have to say that Quickness is a bit overpowered. I really wouldn’t like to see it nerfed because it is just so much fun, especially with the awesome weapon sounds from bows. Pewpewpewpewpew.
Aside from that, I don’t really have any specific complaints. Underwater combat remains a pain in the kitten.

WvWvW
Nothing wrong here, either.

General PvE
Fine. I can handle areas that are 8 levels above myself, and even personal story up until 6 levels above myself. Ranger seems great for tackling more difficult content, and I love doing it.

Dungeons
This has been my main focus as of late, because I really like a challenge. Dungeons don’t seem to have been balanced, meaning some fights are simple and some are painfully hard. Being one shotted happens a lot, which by itself isn’t bad. What would be great, is if some sort of warning would popup on your screen saying “Monster is preparing a big attack!”. In some situations this should be more obvious. (First boss of AC explorable)

In dungeons, I can forget about any sort of melee combat since it’s not safe. Unless I use a bear or moa, my pet gets killed immediately. I feel like I can’t keep my pet safe, because I can’t really control its position. When there’s a huge aoe on the ground between me and the boss, I have no way to tell my pet to get out of it. Maybe it could be immume to AoE in the same way that it does not trigger spike traps. Also, if I’m not very careful, my pet will run ahead of me and pull mobs. I often stow my pet to prevent this.

There are two more reoccurring problems in dungeons. The first is mob aggro, which sometimes doesn’t seem to go away. When I can only tank about two hits, I have to dodge a lot. I do this well now, and can dodge almost everything. But at some point, I run out of dodges and I just can’t get away anymore. There’s little I can do about it at times, especially with multiple monsters involved.

Finally, there’s the biggest problem I’ve encountered which is AoE. Especially for AC explorables (I’ve done all three), this seems absolutely necessary. I have two ‘meh’ aoe spells on my longbow and torch, and some traps which don’t really do much. My best bet is getting all of them in a line and shoot them with piercing arrows, which isn’t doable most of the time. Maybe ranger isn’t an AoE class, fair enough. But I’ve had at least 3 runs where we could not tackle a boss with 3+ different professions because noone had the AoE to deal with all the monsters. When someone left and we got 1-2 elementalists, we could steamroll it. The amount of AoE necessary is quite large, and the amount of AoE available is low. It does not seem balanced across the board, and forces you to go with a certain lineup. This, as far as I know, is not intended. The small monsters are either too strong or the AoE spells are too weak. (On a side note, the burrows in AC are almost impossible to hit by a ranger due to out of range/obstructed errors. I believe this is a bug.)

Sorry about all the negativity, but I hope that I explained well why these things could use getting looked at. Do with it what you will. Kudos for any of the above points that get fixed, it will make an already good experience even better

TL;DR:
- Longbows should be better than shortbows when standing still at long range.
- Sometimes you can’t get out of the 1h Sword animation. A stop attack button would be great.
- Torch is a bit bad
- Underwater damage should be a bit higher in general, more on par with land damage.
- Pets feel out of your control, making any skill/trait concerning them a no-go for me
- When doing jumping puzzles, pets block your vision. You can stow them, but when you take falling damage they come back up. There is no hotkey for stowing pets, so this is very annoying. Maybe it could only reactivate when you enter combat?
- Nearly all of the pet abilities are slow. Their cast times are about 2-5 seconds, during which the pet is standing still and does not attack. This seems silly in a game that is as mobile and fast paced as this. Especially with clutch skills like remove conditions (brown bear), it is important for the skills to be instant.
- Even when you cast some of the F2 skills, they don’t always work. (Do go on cooldown.)
- Casting the F2 skills usually does not work at all, and when you spam them they go on a short cooldown.
- Most of the non-bear/moa pets are too easy to kill, and it’s impossible to dodge some aoe spells with them because there is no direct control over their movements. They could get some aoe resistance or immumity.
- When out of combat, it would be better if pets didn’t get aggro. Maybe a smaller aggro range would be better.
- Pet skills would be more fun if they affected the ranger/group other than just themselves. Examples are the bear dispel and moa protection.
- The raven flight animation is bugged when you run, it keeps trying to sit down because it’s flying too fast.
- Certain utility skills and traits concerning pets, traps and spirits don’t seem to be worth it.
- Some dungeons, especially those with high amounts of monsters, can kill you without you being able to do anything. Rangers, along with several other classes, have much less aoe than is required to complete certain dungeons. This is partly due to the fairly underpowered aoe spells and traps.
- In dungeons, monsters chase you around for too long, making you run out of endurance and die even if you timed your dodges perfectly.

I am very satisfied with the part of the profession that is reliable, which means my bows and survival skills. My complaints are mostly about the other areas, which are too unreliable or unrewarding to be worth using.

My main is Ranger too. I agree with OP and I hope Anet will do some changes in the future.

Regarding Spearguns, I’ve never found the damage that bad. Start off with 2 from distance, then 3, fire off a couple of more autoattacks and then shoot 4 once they’re down to half health.

Regarding warnings before getting 1-shotted, I think the intention from ANet is they want you to be playing against the environment, not the UI. I like the way you have to watch out for the mob getting ready to launch a heavy attack rather than getting messages about it.

Jodiug.9713:

Longbows should be better than shortbows when standing still at long range.

I think Longbows are just fine aside from the somewhat lackluster #1, which is rarely in effect anyway and really only suffers from attack speed.

Jodiug.9713:

Spearguns are underpowered.

They’re…really not. The 3 skill alone makes the Speargun worth it, and like most of underwater combat feels silly unbalanced sometimes.

Jodiug.9713:

Sometimes you can’t get out of the 1h Sword animation. A stop attack button would be great.

Attack chains tied to the #1 in general can be awkward, but this is indeed one of the worst offenders.

Jodiug.9713:

Third skill on Axe is a bit boring

What? Chill? Nonsense. Chill is a great status effect. In PvP, anyway.

Jodiug.9713:

Torch is a bit bad

Not for condition builds. Given your enthusiasm for the Shortbow, you should be running a condition build.

Jodiug.9713:

• Underwater damage should be a bit higher in general, more on par with land damage.*

I feel like it’s already TOO high. The Jellyfish F2 alone, my god. I’m curious how we could each have such vastly different experiences here. Again, I guess the Speargun autoattack is a bit meh, but SO many underwater abilities on SO many classes are really punchy.

Jodiug.9713:

Pets feel out of your control, making any skill/trait concerning them a no-go for me

While they do feel out of control, pets do enormous damage (or function as extremely effective damage spongers in PvE). Some of the traits affecting them are amongst our most potent/highest return traits. Even if you think of them as little more than a DoT, you should reconsider investing in them.

Jodiug.9713:

When doing jumping puzzles, pets block your vision. You can stow them, but when you take falling damage they come back up. There is no hotkey for stowing pets, so this is very annoying. Maybe it could only reactivate when you enter combat?

I’ve never had this issue, but the camera can do some wacky things during jumping puzzles, so I don’t doubt it.

Jodiug.9713:

Nearly all of the pet abilities are slow. Their cast times are about 2-5 seconds, during which the pet is standing still and does not attack. This seems silly in a game that is as mobile and fast paced as this. Especially with clutch skills like remove conditions (brown bear), it is important for the skills to be instant.

AGREED.

Jodiug.9713:

Even when you cast some of the F2 skills, they don’t always work. (Do go on cooldown.)

Generally agreed. They usually eventually fire off. I’ve never had one fail to fire off and just go on cooldown instead.

Jodiug.9713:

Most of the non-bear/moa pets are too easy to kill, and it’s impossible to dodge some aoe spells with them because there is no direct control over their movements. They could get some aoe resistance or immumity.

Master’s Bond, Beastmastery, talents that affect pets. Like every class, there are tools in your trait lines that improve your class mechanic. If you never improve your class mechanic, it will still work, but it will be a bit naff. Your flimsier pets, for instance, will die incredibly quickly under any sort of direct attack. All pets of all varieties can occasionally run into issues in dungeons, but that’s true of players as well. I do think it would be nice if we got the ability to choose alternate or extra talents/abilities for our pets, perhaps as a top tier BM ability (to replace the lackluster rubbish we have there now).

I am running a beastmaster tanky ranger with 0/5/20/15/30 traints and find this post to be mostly ridiculous.

My Wolf rarely dies if at all even in boss fights and I’ve seen it crit for 3000 fully buffed. If you invest only in other Trait lines and go pure DPS much like other classes your class feature aka the Pet will be very weak and you’ll be stuck with bears.

The damage from spearguns is so high if you use 2, 3 and 4 on cd that it makes spears look like a joke.

I run Sword/Axe and Axe/Warhorn and it is sokittengood.
The chilling axe skill 3 is aimed at beast masters as a clutch damage reduction tool, it’s awesome and I can’t go without it. Coupled with a Cave spider I get 20 seconds of Weakness on my target with only 10 seconds downtime.

I agree that Sword’s 1 is very annoying at the moment and isn’t responsive at all.

I agree that pet F2 skills are even less responsive that the Sword 1.

I agree with a lot of your points, although I will note that I main a Raven, and he’s not that squishy when I have ten points in Beast and the Regen signet up, He can tank Champions sometimes. Also I think that the Speargun is one of the better underwater weapons I’ve used, certainly better than the Thief and Warrior versions, way better than the Engineer ones. There does seem to be an overall game balance issue though between ground and water combat, an enemy in the water just seems harder to kill sometimes than an equivalent enemy on land.

Currently you cannot put a trait VII or higher in the first slot. Could it be made so that once you reach the second tier (Master), the traits get unlocked and you can use them in any of the previous slots as well? This would make it possible for me to, for example, have +70 precision for allies and piercing arrows at level 40.

This would be unbalancing. The whole point of the existing system is so that at level 80 you can have one T3 skill, one T2 skill, and one T1 skill, or you could have one T3 and two T1, or two T2 and one T1, or three T1, or whatever, but you’re not meant to have two T2 skills at level 40, or three T3 skills at level 40. They are balanced to force you to choose.

I have to admit I failed to do the right research on a few points, and adjusted those. I tested the speargun damage on some kind of cage with a lot of health, and did not realize there was 150 bleeding damage attached to every attack. This makes all the difference, so I was wrong.

Also, I was wrong about the axe 3rd skill. It is better than I thought it was. I still think the torch is not worth it though. It does do some condition damage, but in the seconds of casting those, I can do so much more damage by just shooting away at them with my bow. My main objection to main hand/offhand combinations is that usually, switching to the other weapon lowers my dps because I am stuck without ranged attacks for 8 seconds. I would have to go melee, and this just does not work for me in dungeons. Your argument is valid in that I did not spend the traits in defensive abilities. But that’s the point – I want to make an agressive build where I can stay at range and dodge everything. This is somewhat handicapped by melee range weapons and skills.

I realize the damage from pets is high, but I see them run into an aoe and die so often that I don’t want to expand on it because when they die, the whole effect of these traits is gone. Maybe this problem is more related to dungeons than to rangers, but I feel pets should be at least a little bit effective even if you don’t trait for them. Compare them to bows, which will still work when you put all your points in beastmastery.

Regarding skill tiers, there was a point in the beta where you could use any major trait in any slot. They changed it to reduce the number of options available at the start, to not confuse the players. Something they said was that if there is a build that used to be possible, but isn’t anymore, people should mention it so that it can be looked at. I’m not sure if that is what they meant, but this was the reason I made a comment about the available traits in the first tier.

I’m getting more and more convinced that I just haven’t been trying the skills. For example, only now I noticed that the fire trap is actually a combo field fire which combined with the axe whirl creates pretty good aoe damage. There’s also the spirits which, if traited, become a lot more useful. I do feel that by traiting these things I kitten myself, but there’s definitely more viable builds than I thought.

In PvE I have very little complaints about pets. In SPvP I still have very little complaints about pets. Now in WvW pets need some help.

Currently they are only good for those random 1vs1 and staying by your side on passive for buffs. They need some sort of help like an ignore certain percentage of AOE damage or traits in beastmaster to make them more durable.

EDIT:
Please increase longbow arrow speed so I can use my range effectively.

Long bows are awesome:
— #4 Knock back
— Range makes them very useful in WvW
— #5 decent AOE
— #3 Vulnerability debuff
— #2 Keeps DPS up until swap cool down is over and you can change back to your DPS weapon

My only real complaints are:

1. Too many useless traits. There are some really good ones, so I don’t think the class suffers that much, but we don’t have as many options for good builds as the more well constructed classes do.

2. Pets are pretty bad.
— No dodge or damage mitigation and poor AI makes them AOE bait both in PvP and PvE
— Broken F2 abilities compound uselessness
— Easily avoided attacks and survivability issues in PvP due to poor AI

Pets in WvW are actually useful as skirmisher units if your Rangers coordinate, though most people haven’t reached the level of understanding to use them effectively for that yet.

You can add/remove any skill to be auto-attack. Just right click on the skill I believe. I have my sword #1 NOT on auto attack.

I love the Ranger, mobility, kiting and the feel of the two bows.

The biggest problems with the profession as I see them:

1) pets do too large a portion of our damage. This is damage largely outside of our control and prone to all the pet problems people report (buggy, squishy, time on target etc).

2) most pets aren’t useable because there are better options. damage/surviabily and utility of certain pets is too good, others too poor.

3) pet damage doesn’t scale with gear. This means there are no pets useful for certain builds (e.g. condition damage pet, power pet)…. and as we gear up our pets do not.

4) our trait trees are very poor compared to some of the other professions and the fact our damage is divided between Ranger and pet, the actual dps increase of some of the dps talents is really lackluster.

Conclusion: Overall, I give the Ranger a 9/10, but our useful talents are limited, and the percentage of damage our pets provide is too high. We need more choice and more of the power in our own hands, er, bows.

The only thing I can say I don’t agree with at all is the torch being bad. The reasons that I’ve seen listed here is because it does minor condition damage and requires you to be in melee for the last skill.
To avoid these problems you can simply use it as a combo field. With axe as main hand it gives you the ability to spread burning to your foes, with sword as a main hand it is for melee, and it works wonderfully with the leap skill it has as it burns all foes adjacent to you. I see a torch as more desirable in PvE than a warhorn (mainly due to the recharge).

Ranger is only as squishy as you build it. For laughs and giggles I ran with all toughness/vit gear and accessories and my passive regen alone was outhealing the damage from +5 mobs. Granted, it took me for-freakin-ever to kill anything, but the point is you can be quite tanky if you are so inclined.

Of all the things that is broken/wrong with rangers the two things that is far more important to fix is 1. the auto attack hangs and keep on going, this might be an issue with ranged/bow in general. Even without a target it just keeps fireing and fireing. I have to press escape twice to get up the menu and close it to get rid of the auto attack. Do not get me wrong, the “normal” auto attack is great, but not if I deselect a target. Then I want to be able to hit the attack button again before it starts auto attacking, not just find random targets on its own.

The second is the pet stow button has no keybind. Surely this is a gross oversight by the devs? I really can not find any logic behind that it has no keybind. Less important are the guard/avoid pet mode, this also should be keybindable in my opinion.

As far as damage goes, I really only find short bow as the best single target damage, while the axes are great with small packs, and for bigger packs there is only traps and longbow skill 5 which is usable. When that is said, using traps and shortbow seem to work alright, but you need to use axes to get as much damage as possible. Going in melee for torch is suicide on almost all but normal easy mobs in the wild.

At first I think ranger is really funny to play, I was hoping I would get the same fun trickery feeling I get when I play ranger in GW. However I feel that some of the trait trees and utility skills does not make much sense, among other things the devs must have mixed up beastmastery and wilderness survival on grandmaster tier, since the wilderness survival is mostly only viable when using beastmastery because of the pet buffs, otherwise there are other combinations that fits better, with skirmish and nature magic etc.

I was looking forward to the spirits, since I have many fond memories of clever builds because of the interesting spirits in GW, however in GW2 the spirits have too little hp, not durable even with hp boost, and too long cooldowns for how easy it is to dispatch them. The fact that pretty much all professions deal some sort of aoe, the spirits will go down too fast to make use of the unbound trait which could have been the source of interesting builds had the spirits not been so weak, relative to the cooldowns hp and effects.

The traps on the other hand is much better balanced in respect to damage, cooldowns and area effect. They are very fun to play with almost more so than it
was in GW, since they have shorter cooldown which enables your playstyle to be more dynamic resulting in the ability to play offensive with traps.

The sword main attack has a big caveat, i do not remember if it is the last skill or second in the chain, but one of them halts the player before jumping towards the target. That halting needs to get removed, considering it sometimes hang and instead of jumping to target it just halts you and it takes a split second before you can move again. I assume this is because of the jump mechanic, so the character stops before the jump, but if the jump is not actually performed the halt is like a stun, at least in spvp and you will die if your enemy is awake.

I really hate how Ranger u-skills are designed. If you’re interested in a signet build, you -have- to dump 30 points just to have them affect -you-. That’s a little ridiculous in my eyes.

Traps are incredibly lackluster. I pretty much only use them for some immobilize/cripple.

The shouts are meh. The fact that pets die so easily, especially in an AoE-fest, completely shatters their viability. Protect me! might be good if I thought for a second my pet would be alive AND in range for it to actually work more than 10% of the time.

The guard this area command is useless as well. Despite our crappy u-skills all around, almost anything is better than this. This should have been a base pet command, IMO.

Love the sword, but that autoattack gets me killed a lot more than I’d like. Not exactly sure why this hasn’t been fixed considering how long it’s been a problem.

Greatsword, I think, was a little over-nerfed. Maybe I’m remembering incorrectly or something, but it does slightly more damage than the sword, but with much slower attack speed. No real reason to use it especially since Sword/Horn is amazing.

BIG +1 to the OP
Regarding the pets; the dogs/wolfes do roughly the same dmg as cats/birds, but are quite more resistant do dmg.
Plus the most annoying thing besides the pet unresponsivness, is the sword skill number 1, because it stucks you in place/on your target, even when you HAVE to use dodge.

Jodiug.9713:

Torch
Seems a bit lackluster. In order to use the aoe, you have to be in melee range which is kind of bad for most situations where you need aoe in the first place.

You don’t have to drop the circle on top of something for it to be effective, as anything you shoot through the field gets the burning effect. Combine this with the Axe’s #2 and bouncing #1, and you can apply a fair amount of burning to foes at range.