Guild Wars 2

TO my mind, it’s the compromises made in the overall game design that cause the biggest problems for Ranger players, particularly in PvE. You might not agree with the propositions as I put them below, but to me, these would be the essence of a Ranger’s combat style.

• Rangers ought to be masters of their terrain. Yet you aren’t allowed to ambush enemies from on high and enemies will still detect you when you’re making use of cover. Your best tactic is really the same as the warrior’s – to charge in, guns figuratively blazing.

• Rangers operate best at range. But the maximum range of the longest range weapon in the game (longbow) is still close enough that enemies can cover the distance between you in a matter of seconds.

• Rangers scope out an area and use positioning tactics to take down enemies in an efficient fashion. But high respawn rates mean there’s absolutely no point in rekky’ing an area, working out what order to attack mobs in and take them down efficiently. By the time you’ve painstakingly taken down your third mob in a quiet and clever ambush, you’ll find one you killed a minute ago has respawned right next to you.

• Rangers excel at control, mobility and area denial. This seems to be the idea behind most of our possible builds, including traps, application of conditions, knockbacks and a plethora of dodge tactics. But all these have too long a cool-down period to really take any measure of control over the immediate area. One knock-back per battle is the best you can hope for, traps fail to properly immobilise enemies and dodging is mostly reactive because of a lack of control over direction.

• Rangers are survivalists. Yet we have no camouflage or creep ability that would enable us to sneak up on or past enemies undetected.

Yup pretty much agree with the first 3 at least, not allowed to use the terrain now, mustn’t have an unfair advantage, and if we have mobs just go invulnerable.

And it’s no fun backing up into 5 or 6 forest trolls you just dispatched a few minutes earlier.

Agreed, I would indeed love a stealth too, even if its only for 5-10 secs with a long cd on it like 60 secs. Anything at this point would be nice. Rangers are supposed to be stealthy too, atleast in the wilderness. Why are we the only medium armored class that doesnt have a skill activate on dodge, thieves get caltrops when u dodge, engineers plant mines, where is our spike trap when dodging? Traps also need to last a bit longer.

Agreed with the first. It was disheartening when I was in an Honor of the Waves and we got the bug where an ambush spawned at the instance’s entrance. The fighting was intense, but I found a really great “sniper” position and… “invulnerable.”

:(

On the topic of terrain and obstructed, I was playing my thief and I was getting the same message while standing on an ankle high ledge 900 units away. The best part about it is that they were able to hit me normally anyway I wasn’t even unreachable to them.

I don’t think this is a ranger specific problem. It just so happens that our “best” weapon was affected by it raher frequently.

Ranger gets it most but its a projectile bug in general.

What’s really frustrating about the nixing of sniper spots is that it’s a cheap way to solve an AI issue. Mobs should be able to read when they can’t reach an enemy and look for a way round or retreat out of range, but they decided not to program in this degree of AI and left us with ‘invulnerable’ instead. Very disappointing. There are many, many points in the game where I would love to snipe from.

In PvE there isn’t a game I’ve played in 15 plus years of gaming where pve that isn’t true for ranger archetypes. To gain reward there must be risk.

PvE as a ranger in this game is simplicity.

Barrage – traited spider – frost trap, muddy terrain etc… Knockback…. of course that would be making pve alot more complex than it is.

PvP map wise anet has done a much better than average job of creating snipers nests with limited access points our 20 second duration traps can cover.