Guild Wars 2

A little background – I main a thief, and haven’t played in about a month (waiting for the PvP update). Rolled a Ranger today because they play like I assumed and hoped a sword thief would play – durable, dodgy warrior.

ATM, I suck with ranger – having to think about what each skill does before you click tends to do that to you. But On paper, ranger seems amazing.

First of all, your pet is independent of you – they bring their own spec and CC to the table. I’m currently running 0/30/20/10/10 Shb/axe-torch with 2 wolves. That means that while I’m condition/toughness focused, my pets do decent direct damage, and bring a single target chill, an AoE fear, 2 cripples, and 2 KD’s to the table, entirely independent of my weapons and utilities.

Secondly, they have insane condition options (compared to my thief at least). With Shb/axe-torch, a trap focus (Burning and Pit), and my current pets, I have excellent access to Bleeding, very good access to poison and cripple, good access to burning,, ok access to chill, 2 KD’s and an AoE fear. That amount of CC and damaging conditions seems ridiculous. They also have an immune skill, seemingly decent condi cleansing options, and player-dictated access to quickness without the downsides (pet switch 5 point beastmastery talent)

Third, they (seemingly) have great heal options, good access to regen and protection, and are mid range with base HP.

Obviously, I haven’t assessed the class in game – I’m not a very good ranger yet (I dont even know if my spec is solid), so I have no idea how powerful they really are, hence this post. One of the biggest weaknesses I’ve noticed in the ranger is mobility – they’d make a poor roamer in comparison to my thief. If ranger is still considered a weak TPvP class, can someone please point out to me why?

Ranger is considered to be the next OP class behind the d/d ele (and maybe the offensive guardian depending on who you talk to).

Trap rangers are currently considered a very strong build and Beastmastery rangers can be very effective duelists due to the amount of pet damage in combination to the huge amounts of regen available to them if the opponent doesn’t focus the pet down. These 2 rangers builds are strong in 1v1 scenarios, a skilled ranger will win most of these duels, and traps/entangle can provide good teamfight aoe and control, but they are far from being so overpowered that they are uncounterable. Power rangers, even the red one, still are very weak though. The amount of damage they provide in comparison to running a tanky spec is not worth their glassy nature and often are free kills.

The thing you need to know about pets are though, they are hilariously unreliable until you have a lot of experience with them. The pathing for pets is still quite horrible and can be kited reasonably easily and the f2 skills have a long delay, require the pet to run all the way to an enemy if you have them targetted and frequently don’t go off. That’s not to say, pets are useless. I run drakehound/wolf and the interrupts and cc they provide as well as decent damage output can make or break a fight for me. They just take a while to get use to and could use some AI improvements and are vulnerable to aoe.

Mobility, specifically with your weapon set would be horrible, with Sword or GS rangers have access to leaps which can help and WH for speedbuff so it is possible for a ranger to have pretty good mobility but it requires the use of certain weapons.

The current meta trap ranger build is usually the link below with the occassional trait moved around. Copy and paste the url if it doesn’t work.
http://www.intothemists.com/calc/index.php?build=-FV-FkBF0FFz-v2ZEF-0;9k2D;2TT44;117A28A;4K-k6aZk6jwmAjwmA2VQ

Wispy.8679:

Trap rangers are currently considered a very strong build and Beastmastery rangers can be very effective duelists due to the amount of pet damage in combination to the huge amounts of regen available to them if the opponent doesn’t focus the pet down. These 2 rangers builds are strong in 1v1 scenarios, a skilled ranger will win most of these duels, and traps/entangle can provide good teamfight aoe and control, but they are far from being so overpowered that they are uncounterable. Power rangers, even the red one, still are very weak though. The amount of damage they provide in comparison to running a tanky spec is not worth their glassy nature and often are free kills.

The thing you need to know about pets are though, they are hilariously unreliable until you have a lot of experience with them. The pathing for pets is still quite horrible and can be kited reasonably easily and the f2 skills have a long delay, require the pet to run all the way to an enemy if you have them targetted and frequently don’t go off. That’s not to say, pets are useless. I run drakehound/wolf and the interrupts and cc they provide as well as decent damage output can make or break a fight for me. They just take a while to get use to and could use some AI improvements and are vulnerable to aoe.

Mobility, specifically with your weapon set would be horrible, with Sword or GS rangers have access to leaps which can help and WH for speedbuff so it is possible for a ranger to have pretty good mobility but it requires the use of certain weapons.

The current meta trap ranger build is usually the link below with the occassional trait moved around. Copy and paste the url if it doesn’t work.
http://www.intothemists.com/calc/index.php?build=-FV-FkBF0FFz-v2ZEF-0;9k2D;2TT44;117A28A;4K-k6aZk6jwmAjwmA2VQ

Thanks for the information, and the link. The build therein is close to what I’ve been running, and makes immediate sense when you’ve run a ranger for more than a few minutes.

I haven’t had the chance to gauge just how well my pet is doing, because I’m usually focused on thinking about what ability I should be using next (something that becomes more fluid once you have some experience with said class), but if what you say is true, Ranger is only a few needed pet functionality buffs from being an extremely versatile and powerful class.

The long cast times on pet CC seem almost necessary – if they were as quick as player abilities, the class would (Seemingly) be severely OP – being allowed to Pick your CC options separate from your spec, weapon skills and utilities would be extremely powerful if the pets had a short activation time on said skills.

I’ve also noticed that escaping melee isn’t quite as effortless as with my thief, which is a big deal when you’re running Shbow/Axe-torch, though I think a few tweaks to my utilities and more experience might mitigate that a bit.

Also, concerning power rangers, who would pick anything over the green/white ranger? He came with own full sized zord and long flowing locks of magnificent black hair.