Guild Wars 2

My builds for my Ranger:
Condition/Hybrid
http://www.gw2build.com/builds/kirbys-shortbow-sword-torch-spvp-tournament-hybrid-6638.html
Power/Crit:
http://www.gw2build.com/builds/ranger-spvp-tournament-power-crit-6645.html

This is my Team, I play the guardian of the team because I wasn’t able to perform any of the rolls needed by the team better then a different class. 109/131 tourny wins since launch. Including dcs, game crashes, and testing builds.

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/clerk-psi-team-bleeder-bunker-mezmer-thief-6535.html

Rangers are currently outperformed by every class in all the different roles. Although its not all the same class for every role currently it only hurts your team to bring rangers. Rangers need a role to fill on teams any role that the dev team can give us would be great. I enjoy pet classes but Rangers in GW2 do not feel like they were created with the idea of FUN like a lot of other classes. Their traits and utility skills seem to have been created with the idea of what works rather then whats fun.

Just fixing bugs and changing numbers will not make this class competitive. Only make it either too strong/weak. Redesigning some weapon skills and utilities would work great. Below I list some of the ideas and changes that would be fun and/or competitive.

1. I can’t stress enough how important it is for melee pets to be able to attack while moving. Our pet is supposed to be a large percentage of our classes damage, but currently it seems to be 10% of the death recap even in 1v1s.

2. Greatsword 4 should just be a close range conal knock back with a cripple. Get rid of the block component it doesnt help the class being immobile. If you are super attached to the block make it a duration instead of a single hit and allow mobility.

3. Heal as one should remove 2 conditions.

4. At least 1 trap should become a stunbreak or a Major trait needs to give Trapper’s Focus where laying a trap breaks stun and if a stun is broken evades backwards.

5. Protect me could also absorb all conditions since we are sacrificing our class mechanic (which is supposed to be a large percentage of our damage) to avoid damage.

6. One of our spirits on use or a trait for our spirits should give us a stunbreak when running a team support spirit build. A different alternative is to give spirits a larger range (say 2400) that they apply the buffs so that we can place spirits in creative places to buff our team.

7. The on use abilities for Spirits would be greatly boosted by becoming targetable locations.

8. Guard could have a second ability which grants us the option of swapping places with our pets.

9. There is too many pets with less stats then others. Shouldn’t all pets have say 6000 or 8000 attribute points distributed into their 4 main stats. some pets like cats have 6130 stat points, canines have 6871, and bears have 8244.

10. We need clear values on our traits rather then the wordings of “Chance to”, “last longer”, or “increased duration”.

11. The pet talents in all our trees like 30% pet critical damage, 30% movement speed for pets, Pets heal on critical, and Increased duration for conditions applied by your pets should all be in the beastmastery tree. These are beastmaster traits please give marksmanship traits that apply to being a marksman and skrimishing traits that apply to being a skirmisher not beastmaster.

12. Remorseless changed to opening strike reapplys after a timed delay not every time you kill a foe.

13. Spike trap applying a knockdown

14. Muddy terrain applying weakness

15. Evasive purity changed to immobilize and cripple.

16. Marksmanship should have a trait like Marksmen’s Perch which increases his damage while standing still.

17. Lightning reflexes applying blind, confusion, daze, or cripple to those hit by the lightning

18. Why not a blowdart gun that applies lots of conditions like bleed, poison, confusion, blind, weakness, and cripple.

19. Master’s bond resets everytime a pet is deactivated or swapped. The trait line is built on swapping pets so why include a trait that counteracts that idea.

More to come.

20. Blind on Warhorn 4 skill.

21. Whatever happened to Throw Dirt or Dust Trap?

22. The range on thrown traps increased to at least 900

Kirby.4951:

20. Blind on Warhorn 4 skill.

21. Whatever happened to Throw Dirt or Dust Trap?

Throw Dirt is a downed skill. It is skill 1 and bleeds on hit. It used to blind on hit before Beta Event 2, IIRC.

Dust Trap died off well before any of the beta events or demos were playable.

Overall, I agree with a lot of this post. A lot of great thoughts and ideas. My real gripe is our options just don’t compare to other classes. Spirits really need to be worked on to actually be useful. That alone would help us immensely, but other things like buffing some weaponsets and making utilities other than Survival viable would be great. Traits could also use some work on. Some Traits/Stats feel like they’re in the wrong tree.

Ah so that is what happened to throw dirt. Really shouldn’t they just change our downed 1 skill to throw spikes or throw bramble for the bleed then make throw dirt a Trait to apply blind or its own utility.

According to the ranger bug list https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Ranger-Bug-List your #9 is a typo. Pets do receive 300 stats at 30 points, even though it displays 30.

Thank you Angela I changed 9 to pet attribute stat allocation (how varied our different pets are).

Sorry to seem like I’m ragging on this one , but I think I know what ANet’s answer might be to the new #9. Different stats are worth different values. For instance 5 points of vitality are worth 50 HP, but 5 points of condition damage at level 80 isn’t even worth 1 extra damage per tick on most conditions (maybe burning, would need to test). So the stat balance is more a weighted value that somehow maths out to even out the “usefulness” of each pet.

Not to say they got this usefulness 100% right – bears are still generally thought of as more powerful than others because they have plenty of toughness, vitality, and power – but looking at pure numbers won’t get you far.

In general to your points I’ve actually found that rangers are some of the best generalists. Sure they can’t fill any particular role as well, but they seem to have much lower diminishing returns for multispeccing. For instance with hybrid condition damage + toughness + a DPS pet rangers can stay alive pretty well while still dealing enough damage to take out most guardians, given enough time (I’ve used two builds successfully with these results in sPvP). As such good rangers tend to be nightmares 1v1 and sometimes even 1v2 in sPvP.

But there are definitely things that need balancing. WTB spirit buffs. And many of your suggestions would certainly make the class more interesting, so keep them coming. I especially like the idea of Marksman’s Perch as a t2 or t3 trait, and targetable spirit actives as a t3 trait would be freaking awesome.

I defiantly agree with Angela that certain stats like condition damage, critical damage, and healing power have different weights then the big 4 (Power, Precision, Toughness, and Vitality). I don’t believe there are any pets that by default have Critical damage, healing power, or condition damage. That itself may be something that needs to be looked into. #9 was trying to get across the point that there should be a set value for the big 4 and then the different pets be distributed accordingly within those values.

Yep. I agree. Rangers are just…not a fun class to play with in sPvP. The only way to do damage is with a shortbow and just press 1.

You know what’s fun as a ranger? Greastword is fun!

But of course…the fun weapon has terrible damage and needs a major buff. It was nerfed to the ground hard.

Shrortbow needs to have more usefulness in other skills besides 1.

Ranger needs a major revamp.

I agree Duckzor I play a Ranger mainly but I also play a guardian, necro and warrior in order of my skill playing those classes. When I want to bunker I play a guardian, burst damage warrior, and condition specs I play necro.

Very well said and I do hope the Ranger gets some major love, though we have little idea as to what Anet thinks with regards to class balance. Outside of them trying a few times now to get pets to actually work well there has not been much implication they have other changes in store. Does not help either that the ranger is sort of forgotten when it comes to the majority of balance posts. They are either complaining about thieves, mesmers and guardians, 100B and how to help warriors or how underpowered people feel Ele is. Ranger, Necro and Engi sorta get swept under the rug so to speak.

I do hope changes come, for some reason it is my favorite profession and I mostly do SPvP. I keep trying to force myself to give the ranger up and focus on my guardian but I cant seem to do it.

I have been using the power/crit build today, does really well in spvp. Thanks for posting. the Signet of stone is just sweet.

I do like my Ranger and find the class fun enough – but – it does feel comparative weak in most all situations to other classes, and I do feel it needs some sort of attention from ANet.

Everyone feels “their” class is weak or X class that kill me is to op. But I feel like GW2 gives this great opportunity that most games don’t give. Which is the ability to be playing X class at 80 in pvp within a few minutes of creating the character. As such I have been playing many different classes. Ranger is always my first love and I will always love Ranger but in competitive pvp I always finding that I could have done a better job as a different class.

For example last night I played a couple tournaments on my ranger as my Hybrid condition spec. I constantly found myself fighting retaliation guardian, confusion mesmers, and bleed thiefs. As a ranger I wasn’t able to fare very well against any of those situations. As such if I was on my condition necro I would have sought out and fared very well against those specs/classes. You might say that my ranger had other classes that it did well against the necro would not. Any class that my necro was bad against as condition necro my ranger was even worse at fighting as condition ranger.

As Ranger lovers we need to collect data or hard information not subjective opinions in order to get more love for our class.

Do not: My class sucks warriors are op they kill me in 1 hit.

Do: The following situation is a comparison of Ranger Longbow vs Warrior Greatsword. Assuming equal player skill, negating utilities/heal/elite (meaning both players use utilities/heals/elites that nullify each others utilities/heals/elites), equivalent damage dealt through class mechanic, and equivalent second weapon sets.

Ranger burst is at a large disadvantage vs warriors in a 1v1 situation. Lets take the Ranger Longbow vs the warrior greatsword. The ranger is able to start doing damage at 1200 range and if the warrior is able to use charge we get 3-4 shots off before he is on top of us. Which equates to about 3k damage free before he has even done damage to us. At this point we can use our knockback then he uses his whirlwind and we get another extra shot from close range so we are up to 3.5k damage and he has done 0. For the sake of numbers we are going to assume he gets 1 hundred blades against us and we get 1 rapid fire against him. Hundred blades will do 8-13k damage on a 6 1/2 second cooldown where our rapidfire will do 3-5k on a 8 sec cooldown. At the time of the second hundred blades off cooldown placing in 5 auto attacks for each side we have done ~10k damage to the warrior and he has done ~15k. Most our our damage has been from being able to do damage to him before he could get to us. His damage is all from 1 well executed hundred blades. If his second hundred blades, a single whirlwind, or just 5-10 more auto attacks hits us we lose this fight and he survives with half health.