Guild Wars 2

So I rolled up this Charr ranger alt with a Drake companion, and I have no idea how to play a Ranger, my main is an engineer. Could I get some discussion going?

Buy all weapon types your Ranger can use, and unlock every skill on them. Read the skill tooltips and see which 2 sets you like best.
Go charm some pets, and choose whichever you find cutest (lol). Well, at higher level you’ll want to look at what your pet is actually able to do and what stats they have, but at low levels it shouldn’t matter really.
At level 5+ have a look at your utilities and start unlocking the ones that look good to you.

tldr: Just play your Ranger. Read tooltips, and do whatever looks most fun to you.

I would get two bears right off and use them till you feel more comfortable with swapping and managing them. You can get 2 easily in the Norn area. Hoelbrak by the lake and the noob area heart, the bear shrine. The Charr area has black bears somewhere in the middle.Then I would use shortbow and maybe axe/warhorn as alternate. Longbow does poor damage when close up but some like it anyway. Get traps as soon as you can.

After you have leveled awhile, you can branch out to other pets and weapons. But I would use those to start out with.

I wouldn’t advice getting bears, because they’re about as exciting as watching paint dry
Drakes are actually very durable and still give good AoE DPS. Bring two of them, and low-level PVE will be a breeze!

Remember, the number 1 key ability of the Ranger is dodging. Learn the attack ‘tells’, and learn to dodge quickly. Never stand in one place, always keep moving. 50% of the ranged attacks will miss you if you keep moving and changing directions often.

ButtercupSaiyan.9457:

So I rolled up this Charr ranger alt with a Drake companion, and I have no idea how to play a Ranger, my main is an engineer. Could I get some discussion going?

Don’t ignore the pet, don’t use it as a guided fire-and-forget missile. You will need to take care of it to get the most out of it, and this means if you don’t want to have ranged pets (or Moa birds at your heel) all the time, you’re probably going to have to put points into beastmastery.
That’s the biggest mistake other rangers seem to make.

Fifteen points in Beastmastery will make things a whole lot easier as far as pets are concerned. From there you should be able to decide whether you want to specialize more in your pet or not. I suggest you do, for general purposes, as wielding it like an extra weapon makes Rangers one of the most unique and potentially effective professions on the field.

Other than that, I have no real big advice than “learn your profession.” Spend a lot of time in it, try different weapon/pet combos, get used to the timing of pet skill executions (there is a half to few seconds delay between hitting F2 and having them use the skill).

I don’t know what game you guys have been playing, just take a longbow, any pet you want, and stay in the back. Let your pet do the work, mobs will aggro it most of the times. If they get near spam all your traps and watch the npc’s melt away.

Get all the weapons, pets, bla, bla, bla, you know the rest.

Rough beginner pet stuff:
- if you use drakes, drop fields early in the fight: drakes have a Blast Finisher skill that they like to use early. If the fight’s going to last a bit, make sure you brought the Healing Spring for AoE heals when the drake blasts again, or pet swap to the second drake to get the usual early blast. Initial heal on Healing Spring also heals your pet even if he’s not in range.
- canines have a knockdown in their attacks, which is very handy 1v1. The Hyena can also F2-summon another hyena, which also has knockdowns. Fun fun fun.
- Jaguar can stealth on F2 and will crit on his attack from stealth. That’s your remote controlled thief there.
- if you wvw, know that the pet is a full blown level 80 pet no matter your level (of course, at lower levels, you still can’t max up the BM trait line). Abuse your jaguar.
- pet commands (F1-4 keys) work while downed. The wolf has AoE fear on F2. Make sure you’re on your other pet when you go down, and when downed, hit pet swap then F2 to fear out whoever was about to stomp you and buy a few precious seconds to that downed 3 skill.