Guild Wars 2

So this question I have is how closely are traits related to skills? I didn’t ask this in the ranger forum because I wanted to see if its profession specific or a broader situation among many professions. For those not interested in example of my question please skip down 5 paragraphs for conclusion statement.
As a ranger I look at my Marksmanship tree and see only weapon that gets a bonus is longbow. Fantastic! makes sense since longbows need extra damage so the power boost is great, but the other is increased condition length which doesn’t make any sense to me since longbow for lacks conditions. I am guessing most rangers take this trait line for teh 6 sec invulnerability and extra range in longbow for WvW.
Next trait line is Skirmishing. It is a Precision/Critical Damage trait line. In it is Traps, Shortbow/Longbow cooldown reducer, main hand axe crit bonus, and bunch of pet bonuses. This mainly confusing because Traps, Shortbow, main hand axe are all seen as condition type weapons not crit weapons. Longbow fits here well with pets as Longbow needs more damage which it gets from crits and longbow gives pets a job as body tank. So precision is full of range weapons bonuses which makes the extra 10% flank bonus hilarious because when usually using range weapons people are charging at you or facing you so not likely to get flank bonus.
Next line is Wilderness Survival It is toughness/condition damage. Yay a tanky damage build so you take damage with toughness while your conditions do damage.
we have martial mastery which is good cooldown on melee weapons Off hand training better cooldowns for offhand. So if we look at weapons Greatsword has the better defensive skills between it and sword ,but the sword has more condition attacks. In my opinion neither fits. A “defensive greatsword build that does no condition damage because Maul blows” or an "defensive sword build that blows cause doesn’t have any defensive skills(no free evade,counter strike knockdown,daze). Off hand is great if you use dagger/torch for extra condition damage, but not the warhorn which is more commonly chosen.
Next line is nature magic Vitality and Boon duration. In it is one weapon and spirits
Greatsword doesn’t have any boons so lets look at spirits. This one actually fits! Too bad for the most part tryin to get a boon from these guys is hard. Fire spirit does extra condition damage, Frozen does condition damage, Spirit of Nature does healing/rez and condition removal. Then we have last two Earth which gives protection and Storm which gives swiftness.
Last but not least we have our Healing beast trait line. First of all I find it a bit funny as most rangers don’t care if pets die and just use this line for the quickness buff, but lets say they were gonna go Beastmastery what do they get? Shouts! and pet abilities which makes sense since instead of normal weapons we use pet as weapon. Shouts as most rangers will tell you are near useless unless in pve where enemies just stand there.
Now here is a question to my fellow rangers do any of you use the pet specific traits besides the one that gives felines extra bleeds? As for healing there is no regen bonus like in vitality(or at least not for you as pets get a regen for 30 pts) no spirit of nature/Heal skill bonuses.
First of all. This might seem like a QQ for a ranger. If you think it is don’t respond. I dont want to see comments like cry more ,etc… I just want feed back from fellow players either saying “hey yeah this doesn’t make sense” or “yeah my class trait lines are like that” and then maybe a solution you have come up with in your play style to use the fact most weapons don’t match their trait lines to your advantage.

Well, there is one slight flaw in your reasoning. With its high attack speed (even post-nerf) and low per-hit damage, the shortbow is absolutely a weapon ripe for criticals (faster attacks = more critical hits). Unfortunately, the per-hit damage is so low that a critical shortbow build is still inferior to a condition build.

Same logic applies to a mainhand axe. Its autoattack also does no conditions, but what it does is hit up to 3 targets per attack. That’s three potential crits for the price of one, and unlike the current SB, its crits, even only modestly traited, can tear stuff up. For example, thanks to really poor level scaling boundaries in Fireheart Rise, I found myself downscaled to L63 while fighting 4 L69 Charr tonight. Popped QZ and RaO, and spammed the hell out of the pinball axe. It was close, but I managed to survive. (Dat feel…)

Well, TL1 (traitline) also has piercing arrow in it.
Piercing arrow and the longer condition duration do make sense together since it allows spreading your conditions much better.

I completely agree with TL2 though.
Being forced to skill precision in order to use traps simply sucks.
Sure, it makes people use sigil of earth – but if I want a tanky condition build it would have been much more useful to actually have those skills at your condition-damage-TL instead of the precision-TL.

But well, it’s just the top of the iceberg when it comes to ranger balance.
There are much bigger problems to be faced.

After 325 hours on my Ranger I abandoned him after the recent Shortbow nerf.
I rerolled a Thief and really fell in love with his TLs, he has so many awesome Skills it’s the complete opposite of the Ranger where most skills barely justify putting points into a TL you don’t directly want to push your stats with.