Guild Wars 2

It’s been said many times before, but please help lb builds by putting some of the essential traits in different lines. Read the Wind, Sig of Beast, Piercing Arrows, and Eagle eye imo are all absolutely essential for the LB to be even viable especially with zerker based builds… Skirmish for example just has quick draw for LB and nothing else that really matters with it. /cry

Signet of the Beastmaster is far from a requirement, and piercing arrows is only really useful in large group situations.

I do agree that spreading out the useful traits may be a good idea, though. I just put meh traits into most of my ws tree (aside from barkskin) because there isn’t much in there I want

Without Piercing Arrows, my damage would be single target and would get kinda zero loot out of a zergfight…

Without Eagle Eye, I wouldn’t be able to outurange my opponents that little bit.

Without Read of the Wind, my arrows do miss a lot.

Without Steady Focus, I would be just even less.

Without Quick Draw, my LB skills would just reload so dam’ slow I wouldn’t be able to use it’s skills again before I die (and would die more often ofc)

etc…
This is why LB has to be buffed and it’s traits recreated.

The biggest problem with the MM line is that minor traits, i.e. opening strike, is complete garbage.

i don’t think that you need all of them all at once

you do not need piercing arrows and RtW as one is firing arrows of in to a group the is making sure that you hit that 1 moving target

eagle eye vs spotter (i know you didn’t mention it) one is just buffing the lb the other is “I’m going to be spending some time using my close range swap weapons”

you can have quick draw if you want it and i don’t see how sotbm is mandatory for playing longbow

+1 to Choko, guess it’s useful for 1 trick pony rangers

I’m running SPVP only and a LB/GS build without MM.

Since it’s made of totally defensive trait lines, I run zerk amulet.

I don’t look at LB as a primary source of damage but an opening tool to soften up someone with some pressure and vulnerability stacks, regain position with invis/kb, or get/protect stomps for myself or my team. It is very effective in these regards.

The actual kill is usually done through pets and a GS charge in with Swoop/daze/Maul. I get much more mileage out of GS skill recharge trait than Quick Draw I’ve found.

I realize this isn’t ideal for plinking from the back of WVW zerg, but if it’s just tags anyway is sigil of fire and barrages along with some cleave dips in from GS that bad?

I wish barrage wasn’t so slow…but the MM line is something I can live without even as a frequent LB user..in SPVP at least.

I am of course for LB being buffed especially read the wind should be default behavior. If mesmers can so much more damage at 1200 range through walls and around corners I don’t think a buffed LB is going to hurt the game much. It might put power rangers on more even footing with thieves in effectiveness is all and thieves tend to make most other power roamers obsolete in this game which is kind of boring.

The LB certainly does suffer from trait bloat though, and I don’t know of any other weapon that has so many traits just to buff it to something useful. They should all at least be consolidated into one trait and free up room for other ranger buffs, but even better LB itself should be buffed.

Regarding Sig of Beastmaster, I find it needed in more glassy X/X/0/0/0 focused builds but it’s one of those things that should be kept as a tradeoff of some kind. LB is just a weak weapon as far as damage goes.

In short the problem is more with LB than the trait line, although it wouldn’t hurt to remove trait bloat.

-Rapid fire is not burst, just look at your combat log sometimes. The game adds all those little hits into one big pretty number but their rate is not much better than AA if even that.

-Barrage is too weak, slow, and the self root is very dangerous.

If Barrage were made more of a normal aoe such as found in thief shortbow that you could fire off and move with some more damage or lowered CD, Rapid Fire made actually DPS or burst worthy and Read the Wind default behavior it would go a long way.

At least one of the longbow traits needs to be dropped down to a minor trait because the whole tree is way too backloaded.

I nominate Eagle Eye, since its warrior equivalent (Stronger Bowstrings) is also a minor trait.

I completely agree.

There should be a way to at least get the following traits in 1 build:
Read the Wind
Eagle Eye
Piercing Arrows

Other good traits which compete for a spot:
Signet of the Beastmaster
Spotter
Remorseless

And yet, Skirmishing only has 1 good trait:
Quick Draw

Chokolata.1870:

The biggest problem with the MM line is that minor traits, i.e. opening strike, is complete garbage.

Couldn’t agree with this more. Opening strike is a colossal waste of three traits. I say wrap them all into Remorseless and give us some useful minor traits.