Guild Wars 2

This is supposed to be a detailed list of things that currently are broken (from what I’ve tested) or in my personal opinion odd about the ranger. If there are any other gameplay changing bugs, please let me know. I’ll test and expand gladly.

Also, all of this was tested again post patch, so all of these are still in there. Of course those are not all bugs, but the ones I tested and are quite important in terms of gameplay mechanics. Visual and sound bugs were not specifically tested and are not listed here.

Qualification wise, I am getting close to 6000 hours of ranger gameplay and I primarily focus on PvE and some PvP.
The Bug and Odd Design lists are both ordered by importance (as I deem it). Just to make it easier to get a read on important things.

I also want to say that I think ranger has improved incredibly over the past years. Especially with the HoT update, ranger got really interesting additions, which made playing a ranger even more of a blast (looking at you Quick Draw xD)

Bug List:

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1. Pet unresponsiveness:

When using pet active and then changing pets, (and some other times?) the swapped-in pet becomes unresponsive. This bug was introduced with the last patch.

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2. Ancestral Grace: Pet Stow -> Boon Destruction (Not sure if a bug or odd design)

When using this Staff Skill 3, the pet disappears and reappears when the destination is reached. This causes the pet to loose all boons.
Because of this, this skill will loose a lot of its attractiveness in high end PvE, but also PvP. Boons on a pet are incredibly important for its dps and changing pet or loosing the boons on the pet in general is something a ranger tries to avoid by all costs. This bug was introduced with the last patch.

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3. Glyph post animation “added” to cooldown: (most glyphs)

When using glyphs, they only go on cooldown after the animation finished except for Glyph of Tides (and Equality, but has no cast time so..) oddly enough. To replicate: Try useing Glyph of Rejuvenation, Glyph of Empowerment and Glyph of Tides after each other. All of them have the same cast time, but Rejuvenation takes longer to start its cooldown than Empowerment than Tides (Tides being instat after cast time).
This is really odd. Essentially this means Rejuvenation has 1-2s more cooldown and Empowerment 0.5-1s more cd… The same applies to Unity and Alignment.

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4. Many Pets don’t use all their actives
(This was test in the Training Forces Area and in Orr (to get pets damaged). Pet was always on passive and used F1 to attack. (Just for full context ^^))

Since the Soulbeast was upcoming I wanted to check on some old bugs/ weird things with pets, since I want to use different ones in the expansion

Shotgun round of pets not useing their skills/useing skills weird:
- Drakes (Tail swipe (I absolutely could not get them to do that skill) (tested on reef drake)
- Moa (Harmonic Cry (only when pet damaged, not when player damaged) (tested on blue moa)
- Spider (Entangling Web. Never used it. Maybe it triggers on enemies running away, but that doesn’t happen in PvE really.) (tested on jungle spider)
- Bear (Defy Pain. Only casts at 20%…. stupid bear xD) (tested on black bear)
- Devourer (Tail Lash. Only when the enemy is within the 130 range (which makes sense.) but not when the enemy is on the 130 range (at least when I tested it). So when I artificially pulled my pet on top of the enemy, he used it. When enemy rang into melee range on his own, he didn’t.) (tested on whiptail devourer)
- Bristleback (Rain of Spikes. Not even with 5 enemies nearby.)

…. was a pain to test ^^

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5. Shortbow: Inconsistent shots or “from behind” mechanic

Note: This was tested with 67.19% Condi Duration

I am not quite sure what exactly this is, but when in the Special Forces Training Area, summon a golem, stand behind him and shoot with your shortbow. Sure it wouldn’t always be “perfect”. but the Bleeding stacks vary from 10-18. (From the front it’s 6-12) Seemingly more or less gaussian distrubuted and slow changing. (so most of the time at 14) Considering the attack should always trigger the same effects and attack at a constant speed, this is quite a huge margin of error. Either the “hit from behind” effect doesn’t correctly trigger every time or the shots are off a few milliseconds sometimes causeing the fluctuation. I don’t know. I think it is the “hit from behind” though.

EDIT: Spelling

Odd Design:

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1. Pets loose boons on swap:

This always struck me as an odd design choice. Now more than ever. With raids being a thing and more boons being added to the ranger trait lines, it confuses me. This in addition will become WAAAY more important with the Soulbeast. If the boons get destroyed when absorbing your pet, it either will end with “never leave” or “never enter” the absorbed state.
So for both ranger and Soulbeast it is important that something happens with these boons. On absorb maybe transfer part of the boons onto you? And for pet swap, just leave the boons on there please… It would make build crafting way more fun, since it would add all “on pet swap” traits into the discussion for build crafting.

Proposal:
Let pets keep their boons even when swapped…. please. Or at least make a trait for it. It would open up SOOOOOO much more interesting stuff.

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2. Glyph of Unity:

Glyph of Unity’s purpose is currently extremely weird. It is being used as a free stack of GotL. The effect of this Glyph noone really cares about. And for heal druid the only other option is the Spirit (which is amazing). So the glyph only gets use when min-maxing team damage for raids/fractals.

Proposal:
Add a Condi/Boon sharing element to it. So outside the Celestial Form it pulses conditions you currently have also onto enemies for a short duration. When using it in Celestial Avatar, make it pulse your boons onto your allies. Kind of a weaker Signet of Inspiration as added bonus.
This way the skill would be useful for interesting boon sharing mechanics in raids and fractals, and for open pvp not only direct damage gets shared onto enemies, but also condition damage.

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3. Beastmastery Traitline:

I hoped for more changes on this line. I find this trait line so odd (for PvE. It’s fine for PvP), as it seems to not synergize with your pet well and is mainly used for the axe recharge trait.

So what is exaxtly weird? Shotgun round:
- Minor Grandmaster gives Ferocity. Many pets really don’t care about ferocity.
- Two weapon based traits… makes it really weird to navigate this traitline
- Resounding Timbre is underwhelming. Swiftness and Regen?
- Pet swap recharge reduced, but as discussed, this destroys boons, so why would I want to change pet?
- Go For The Eyes (Blind on F2) and Beastly Warden (Taunt on F2) are kind of contradictory. You want to blind before a big hit, but taunt makes the next attack an auto attack. Essentially combined, the first trait mitigates 1 auto attack on F2. Really weird.
- Minor Master trait only increases damage and not condition damage

So yeah, lots and lots of weird stuff.

Proposal:
- Resounding Timbre: Scrap Swiftness, add Fury. -> Interesting Pet+Remorseless builds
- Natural Healing: Make it minor Grandmaster and add the Movement speed from the older, scrap the rest of the old minor gm.
- For Pet swap stuff, see issue 1 on “Odd Design”
- add new trait where Natural Healing was: “Increase all secondary attributes (Expertise, Concentration, Ferocity, Condition Damage) of your pet”
- Change either “Go for the Eyes” of “Beastly Warden”

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4. Light on your feet.

The trait has always been fairly interesting, but definitely looses to Quick Draw. I also understand that if it beats Quick Draw it is definitely overpowered. None the less, I would like to be able to use this trait.
So what is wrong?
10% increase (which was added later): Really odd since Shortbow is clearly condition, but ok I guess?
Condition Duration Increase on dodge: Interesting, but 4s every dodge? Assuming 1 dodge takes 1s and you have infinite endurance, you have to dedicate 1/5 of your time to activating this thing. 20% of your time is lost in order to get 10% Condition Duration for 80% of your time. That is a terrible trade off. Assuming the 10% duration is a straight damage increase of 10% (which it isn’t), then you would get 8% more damage for the loss of 20%. Why would I do that?

Proposal:
Change the dodge to any evasion skill. That way shorbow 3, sword 2+3 and dagger 4 are also getting a way more interesting application. Also add 10% Condition damage or something. Then it would be at least somewhat competitive with Quick Draw.

post reserved for updates to the list

+1 solid points * nice format too super easy on the eyes

On pets with LOS special F2 attacks with long cast time, like the Marsh Drake special, the pet should able to track your target and fire directly at them when thier cast complets, rather than aiming the attack at where the target was (and no longer is) when you pressed F2.

Don’t forget Quickness!

Quickness will only increase the attack speed of regular attacks from devourer, spider, smokescale, bristleback or wyvern pets. On any other pet, quickness does not increase regular attack speed.