Guild Wars 2

A lot of people feel the ranger is a ranged class I couldn’t disagree more to be honest. A ranger is whatever he wants to be, am I right? I think that’s the best part about being a ranger is the Diversity of what we can pick from.

We’ve got our bm bunker build
We’ve got our zerker glass cannon
We’ve got our Tank Gs

And several hybrids in between.

the problem is with all this functionality we don’t have anything solid. We can all agree we’ve got one of the hardest classes to play, it takes skill and a LOT of practice.

At any rate we’ve addressed our more worthless skills

Longbow 5, decent for wvw seige or defense but lets be honest you’re not going to pop this skill in a 1 v1. Cast time is to long and it easily dodged. Where better off with single target long rage nuke ability. Headshot etc something.

Shortbow great utility and even with the range nerf THIS MAKES sense. It’s a shortbow peps it can’t be shooting the same range as a long bow that’s just not right. Still great utility weapon average conditions, daze/stun and a really good jump ability that can be used while running away without having to micro, very useful. Even though our shortbow has been nerfed it’s still one of our most useful weapons.

Sword 2 slow initial cast time, can be interrupted when timed right, I feel this skill would be 100 times more useful and viable if the animation was instant like shortbow 4.

Axe main, hit and a miss. Gives us conditions we need lacks the damage. Decent aeo potential. Conditions priceless in cd builds.

Axe off: Path of scars buff is kinda fun opens up new options. The problem with this is whirling defense… The axe’s only melee skill in an entire ranged kit. A5 is very kiteable and doesn’t do the damage you need it to. However if you’ve every laughed at a zerg focusing you awhile you a5 and take no damage from their ranged than you know it just feels good, but sadly even with path of scars this skill is very limited and prone to melee interupts. Says the hammer warrior “… heh channeled abilities don’t even think about it.”

Dagger off: Prob our best off hand arguable the torch running second. I feel like all builds are going to find a way to throw this weapon in.

GS: Hands down THE BEST gs kit in the game, just so happens the ranger CAN’T make the most of it. I’ve got this skill up to around 1.5k damage with decent crits on gs 2. Howver the chasing power of the gs hands down is our best one. I feel like we need to focus on GS builds. This may be the next place we need to re explore. However we’ve recently discovered our Cd builds were doing the tricks. Now with pets not putting out as much hurt we’re having a harder time with our drawn out battles staying alive. Our goal was to do high damage over a logn period of time while keeping them from healing with posions, letting our pet chunk them. Much harder to do now, but it still works with experience.

I recently tried a GS with a s/a. The kit itself was REALLY solid except….. Were are completely kite-able. Mez’s, >_> the now super necro’s, pthiefs had the kits to just stay out of range and break down teh gs tank build. Just does not have thehealing and sturdiness you get from bm.

So even though were suffering from a lack of a solid build we have our flexibility.

I think we need to focus no on the best build for a ranger, but the best build to take down other classes period. Instead of coming up with cookie cutter builds like the other classes. THEY HAVE the advantage without a doubt, but with the right build we can focus on taking down specikittenit.

So we should work on this instead

Anti-thief ranger
anti-mez ranger
anti-guardian
anti warrior etc

Granted were going to have a lot of builds but that just means they won’t know how to fight us. Each ranger is different and I think that’s what makes our class the most unique.

I know I was talking about code of the ranger thing before, but I was buthurt.

GS/SD build is an anti-melee build. running zephyr.

Gs burst starts with a well timed counter, if they don’t take the bait throw it, activate pet active, gs 3 to gs 5 to gw 2 pop zephyr. If they run we have two otions entangle (not recommended for gs build) or rao, which I think is better. gs has great chasing and if they manage to get away, switch path of scars and s1 for unlimited cripples swap pets etc. This is a great 1 v1 vs warriors. I found I almost always won. However you will almost NEVER win vs a mez. I admit that mez are just really hard for ranger, our cd build is better.

So as a ranger we need to adapt the mindset of TOTAL flexibility. The problem with this is traits…. We just can’t allocate them where they need to be to make the most of any two weapon sets OTHER than glass cannon and bm bunker. This our our only two complete solid builds. However the glass cannon trade off… we’ve already found out that’s to risky. Bm was our safest bet.

Anyway long story short our traits skills don’t need changed really, the BONUS need to change IT WS gives tough/healing not tough/cd Bm gives Pet at/power marks gives perc and crit damage etc. Our trait bosuns are messed up. They aren’t where they need to be.

Finally… If rangers are the “Ranged” dps class…. why don’t we have the darn rifle?

also the bm bunker build gave the ranger a role in combat. The beast master, it felt right. Now I feel kinda lost, we already have ranged dps with mez and ele’s we have tanks and melee burst, are we just utility now?…. She we focuse on spirit builds and just build support?

Jayw.1045:

also the bm bunker build gave the ranger a role in combat. The beast master, it felt right. Now I feel kinda lost, we already have ranged dps with mez and ele’s we have tanks and melee burst, are we just utility now?…. She we focuse on spirit builds and just build support?

Spirits internal cooldowns are bad. Other classes have better support through combo fields.

The problem wasn’t that the shortbow range was too long, it’s that the longbow range was too short. You can now throw a lump of metal stck to a stick as far as you can fire a shortbow, that’s just plain stupid. Put shortbow back to 1200 and longbow up to 1500.

Sandpit.3467:

The problem wasn’t that the shortbow range was too long, it’s that the longbow range was too short. You can now throw a lump of metal stck to a stick as far as you can fire a shortbow, that’s just plain stupid. Put shortbow back to 1200 and longbow up to 1500.

Traited you can throw a torch, axe or dagger (with the least dominate hand) further than you can fire a short bow. Well at least we understand why the majority of the short bow skins look like toys (with the winterday slingshot actually being a toy).

I do really well with GS, I can’t say how relieved I am that it didn’t get NERFED ANY FURTHER. ….but it’s still not what it used to be in Beta. It may be intuitive, but so is Warrior’s and their’s does a lot more DPS than ours even post-nerf.

And the WORST…
…THE WORST
thing about about it and melee in general is that even when I’m doing really well with it and blocking/evading everything the mobs can throw at me…. my pet is just standing there dying a sad sad sad death that can’t be avoided. When I’m ranging, I can atleast YoYo it back and forth to evade the rarely-telegraphed 1-hits. But the biggest thing missing from Ranger at close ranger, is SYNERGY WITH THE PET.

GW1 was oozing with Melee+Melee pet synergy b/c we could customize 8 skills and one of them was whatever Elite we wanted in the whole entire Game. That was amazing, that’s what real synergy looks like.

Meanwhile at Range…. I’m not joining the bandwagon here crying for more direct DPS. We get it, Anet wants range to suck regardless of class or what hoops they have to jump through… But how about some more Quickness?? Nothing feels more ‘pro’ on Ranger to me than when I’m able to actually activate things at a fast enough rate to keep up with my old Gw1 Twitch-routines. Faster arrows helped a little there but 15% (which sure as hell ain’t no “Read the wind”) isn’t going to change every other reputation working against us or how BORING mainhand Axe is. If Thieves get Torment, then we should be the masters of Quickness. We should be able to maintain a 50% quickness uptime with ANY weapon set. And even our stupid Pets should be getting it in PvE so their long animation skills don’t turn them into sitting dead ducks in end-game content.