Guild Wars 2

A few days ago, i had my ranger eat 50+ tome of knowledge and then filled in the last few levels with crafting so this ranger is level 80 now. I haven’t actually got time to play her in both pve and pvp. However, looking at the skillsets of each weapon, they look extremely basic and boring except maybe some of the sword dodge skills. The utility skills also does not seem to look interesting at all.

So my question is does this class have interesting mechanics somewhere that i am not seeing or should i have just had my mesmer eat all the tomes of knowledge instead?

You should actually try playing it… Honestly, you should have tried it in PvP before you sunk anything into it.

In my opinion, things aren’t that fun, but I’m biased. I play Ranger for the bows and the bows are pretty much ‘auto attack and strafe in circles while you wait for you or your opponent to die of boredom’ weapons. The melee weapons, especially the condi oriented sword+torch/axe+dagger set is more interactive and is certainly much more viable. It’s just not why I made a Ranger and thus my bias.

Depends entirely on your definition of fun. Personally I find great fun in evading and kiting my opponent, and whilst yes most of my damage comes from AA that doesn’t bother me. I like the somewhat reactive playstyle rangers have.

The alternative is a class like mesmer or ele where you very much have set rotations you go through to do damage, which most argue is funner or more engaging, though to me I find this tiresome quickly because most of my skills I don’t put any thought into using. They are just part of the rotation and that’s that.

So yeah… It completely depends what you’re looking for. Atherakhia is right though, go play in PvP and see if you like the class before investing too much into it.

Ranger so far is the most fun class to me. Meele weapons make you able to 1v3~4, which is fun.
Longbow makes you laugh when you 10k a thief.

As has been stated, you should have done some PvP first to be certain you wanted to use your tomes and put your time in to leveling the character.

And as with all professions, it depends greatly on the person playing it. I enjoy my Ranger very much, more so than any other profession I’ve played (all of them). Despite what people say, they have a very high learning curve on par with Engineer and Elementalist. It will take time before you can fully grasp the mechanics of a Ranger and this is why most people are terrible with them, because they don’t take the time to explore it’s potential, which it has a lot more of than what you might first think (more than meets the eye kind of deal). If you want a reliable build that has stood the test of time, give trapper a go. If you don’t like the profession after you’ve spent some time with it, just be glad you didn’t level it to 80 manually by doing heart quests only to later decide you’re just going to delete it. Which is exactly what I did with my Thief.

Most of the weapon skills are pretty lackluster both in effect and presentation, but the class is mean to make use of two weapon sets equally for good performance so that is where most of the dynamic play comes from.

Relying on only 1 weapon set for most everything gets extremely dull, extremely fast given that most of our dps comes from auto attacks, not skills.

Also, don’t be afraid to use random pets for the helluva it. Cats are the best in pve but bringing random ones helps a lot with the monotony.

Depends what you consider fun. micromanaging the pet is one of the skills i haven’t perfected but is also one of my favorite things to do.

If you aren’t enjoying a class you aren’t going to enjoy it. for example, I tried warrior and elementalist first and they just were not my style at all and were really boring to play. I then rolled a ranger and instantly enjoyed the game 10 times more

“Does the class have interesting mechanics somewhere you’re not seeing…”

Honestly, no, not at all. If you wanted interesting skill combinations, rotations, and effects, mesmer would have definitely been more up your ally.

That being said, I’m not saying ranger is inefficient or anything, but Shortbow, Longbow, and Mainhand sword are most effective at doing damage when autoattacking…

So, to salvage your experience with the class, I would recommend going Axe/Dagger and Sword/Torch with some sort of condition based build for PvP, and I would highly recommend Empathic Bond with 6 in Wilderness Survival with Offhand Training as well.

Essentially, this build allows you to “dance” in and out of weaponsets and different combat ranges and soft CC lockdown targets. Run it with a wolf for a controllable interrupt and you’ll have just about every tool you would want available to you outside of consistent AoE and multi-target abilities.

Still, this for me is personally the most active, or actions per minute requiring way to play that I have found for the ranger class. If you don’t like how it plays, then you are probably just straight out of luck outside of trying to make a pure glass LB/GS build work. And I personally only know of one person that play glass LB/GS efficiently in PvP in a high competition setting, so what I’m going to say to you is that if you can’t play the build perfectly, and I mean perfectly, then you are going to be absolutely frustrated with it and not enjoy it at all outside of catching a few people with it in hotjoins.

Anyhow, best of luck to you. Keep your ranger around at the very least. 2+ years from now when the devs finally make enough “shave” quality changes to the game for the game to play differently, ranger will hopefully have a more active and entertaining playstyle on builds that currently lack it.

Imo to like ranger you must be a player that use your brain maybe more than ele and such class. This is because most of ranger build doesnt have room for alot of error. Their regen is low compared to warrior or class that doesnt have stealth.Thus taking a huge burst/cc make it hard to recover. As ranger you are usually not putting the tempo in fight. You fight against it to create distance and time to recover because you are sustained dmg. Many player dislike this approach because it require good knowledge of the class mechanic and other classes mechanics instead of having rotation. This is particulary true for LB.

That being said, the only build i know that is not with this play style is the condition bunker ranger. You can go full kitten and have quite alot of room for error. Because of the insane regen.

Also i think there is 2 kind of people in this game. The one that like to have organized play and the one that have a chaotic play style. Organized play is where you count on your rotation to make you win. Thus class like warrior, ele, mesmer (even guard) and such are good for these kind of player. Chaotic playstyle means they almost never do the same thing and everything is modifier according to the in-game situation. Ranger and thieves falls into that categorie.

Being a rather chaotic player i like playing a ranger despite the class having no “apm”. Its clutch decision and good reaction that make it.

Worth mentioning that no matter how good a player you may be or become, ranger will still suck in 20v20+ battles because of really poor AOE and support.

scerevisiae.1972:

Worth mentioning that no matter how good a player you may be or become, ranger will still suck in 20v20+ battles because of really poor AOE and support.

Idk. I’d argue it’s not as bad as people suggest. Arguably the ranger’s biggest shortcoming is dying to group retal or simply being a melee ranger for ZvZ. I’ll give you that melee rangers are effectively useless, however longbow ones are quite useful.

Piercing arrows and/or good positioning makes for some incredible healing and condi removing potential on your allies while hitting enemies from a fairly safe distance. I’ve noticed my zerg’s survivability increase heavily when good rangers are played for countering an enemy’s thieves trying to drop the backline due to RF’s stealth-tracking, PBS for knocking them back into the zerg fight, KD on canine engage skill, and AOE fears preventing clutch SR’s. Having a massive condi-clearing AOE-instant-healing regen-granting water field on a 20s cooldown is also incredibly useful for backline support as well, not to mention tangle either dealing substantial damage or acting as a buffer to open up/control opponents or force the very attentive ones out of dodges. Additionally, if you don’t take too much damage from AOE retal, getting off a barrage and applying aoe cripple or massive damage stacked on your backliners prevents good engages by your opponents, or kills the ones that do. One could argue they’re more useful than thieves and mesmers in ZvZ aside from a few select mesmer support skills like veil and reflect.