Guild Wars 2

I’ve been attempting to make longbow fit into my builds and thought it would be a good idea to start a discussion about its viability in the game.

Viability in PvE:

From what I’ve noticed the longbow really struggles as a primary weapon in PvE. This is mainly due to the very situational long range shot skill which requires you to be at 1,000+ range otherwise you will hit close to nothing, and even at the 1k range the damage isn’t spectacular. The slow firing rate and projectile speed adds to the frustration, making it harder to “tag” enemies to get drops and hit targets at the 1,000+ range needed for viable damage, not to mention it only has a 20% combo field chance.

Rapid fire is a channeled attack taking away some of the pain of long range shot being your auto-attack, but its damage isn’t very high. Hunters shot, point blank shot, and barrage are all good skills, but you’ll be relying on long range shot and rapid fire for most of the fighting if you use this as a primary weapon.

As a secondary weapon however, the longbow can be a very useful weapon. What I found to be effective is using a different weapon such as the shortbow as your primary weapon, then switching to the longbow every so often, laying down a barrage, hunter shot, then rapid fire, and as soon as rapid fire ends you are able to switch back to your primary weapon.

But using it as a secondary weapon has an issue; what your stats are specialized to be. Both the axe and shortbow seem very much condition damage focused while the longbow is solely physical damage focused. If you use condition damage you will notice that your longbow is lacking in its damage and you would be better off using either a shortbow or axe/torch combo as your secondary.

Viability in PvP:

In WvW the same applies for secondary weapon usage, but the longbow becomes a much more viable primary weapon due to its range.

Because WvW fights are done in wide open fields over long ranges and castle warfare, the longbow can be an effective primary weapon. When enhanced to 1,500 range with one of the traits you can outrange most players, allowing you to sit in the back and sniper and barrage people. In castle warfare the longbow can be extremely effective and is possibly one of the strongest weapons in the game for that purpose. But if you get pulled into a 1v1 fight or lose your range advantage, don’t expect to be very effective.

I haven’t tried out SPvP with the longbow as the current game modes don’t appeal to me, but I suspect the situation to be similar to that of PvE.

So in short, the longbow is a horrid primary weapon in PvE and possibly SPvP , but is a decent secondary weapon if you go with a critical damage or bunker build. In WvW the longbow is a decent weapon in zerg fights and castle warfare.

My personal analysis brings me to the conclusion that the longbow needs its long range shot and rapid fire skills to be modified to make it into a more viable primary weapon, while the other functions of the weapon seem okay. The effectiveness of long range shot needs to be less situational (possibly giving it the same damage at any range and giving conditions like vulnerability and confusion based on the range), a higher combo field chance, and maybe a projectile speed increase. Rapid fire just needs a damage boost.

Thoughts?

Simple suggestion for 1 and 2 to start with:

Long Range Shot: Single damage value at all range, with bonus damage at 1000+ (10~30% – I’m no PvP player so this is debatable).

Rapid Fire: Long Range Shot damage X 10.

I think attack speed is fine. I would prefer the longbow as a slow-firing cannon.

You cannot snipe people unless they are completely at a standstil, which doesn’t happen. Barrage is the only useful skill on the LB in WvW.

Barrage is ok in wvw, but doesn’t do much damage. Elementalists’ aoe is much more powerful. I guess its good for restricting movement on the field.

Fully geared, barrage is very useful in wvw. Mine crits for ~1200 on everyone in range every tick. That, and the snare, creates a “no fly zone” that enemies don’t want to stand in. Best part is that it continues to tick while you do other things as well.

@Samfisher, while its true that the longbow misses when enemies make jerky motions, it is an over-exaggeration to say that they have to be standing still to hit them. The longbow hits at a decent rate for any target moving unless they are zig zagging with swiftness or doing lots of evade rolls/styles. Thats when it gets frustrating and you miss 75% of your shots.

Personally I’ll keep my Ranger (bersek built with longbow) for WvW only and I love it there but for the rest, it’s obvious that it’s super-underpowered.
Yesterday, I played a bit of PvE with two of my guildies that had thieves and I just laughed… When I managed to kill a mob they killed three or four.
Now I’ve decided to reroll a (longbow or riffle) warrior for sPvP and PvE, there’s no other option unfortunately.

Daze.6914:

Now I’ve decided to reroll a (longbow or riffle) warrior for sPvP and PvE, there’s no other option unfortunately.

Good luck with ranged warrior you’ll need it

Longbow is a decent weapon capable of doing some burst if you combine it with quickness, i run a glass cannon berseker build and for PvE/Dungeons shortbow + longbow are a must have if you want to maximize your DPS with that build.

In WvW i stick to Longbow most of the time, great weapon and barrage does good damage, 12 arrows that hit 500-1k+ each on average…simply great.

For sPvP however Longbow is not very good because it’s sort of limited, tho the knockback and barrage are still good.

Sleepy.2647:

Good luck with ranged warrior you’ll need it

Why? It’s not viable?

Daze.6914:

Sleepy.2647:

Good luck with ranged warrior you’ll need it

Why? It’s not viable?

Viable is a tricky word, but i think people got the wrong idea about what a ranged warrior actually does by watching a movie taking advantage of a bug that has been fixed and hitting upgraded level 80s.

A mesmer’s greatsword 1 attack does maximum damage from 900+ range. Why should we suffer with 1000 range for our 1 attack? Not to mention the mesmer’s greatsword 1 attack hits instantly and cannot be avoided.

Edit: I forgot, mesmer’s greatsword 5 attack is a conical knockback. Our longbow’s 4 attack hits only 1 unless you trait for piercing arrows. Even then, it’s only a straight line.

Yea, agreed with the OP. I used the longbow as a swap from a shortbow for a while and as much as I liked using Point Blank Shot with Piercing Arrows to help get mobs off squishy teammates, it still just felt lackluster compared to axe + torch.

Honestly, I’d like to see a buff to the rate of fire because even if they increased the raw damage, it still feels sluggish and weak when you’re plinking out arrows so slowly.

I don’t seem to have any issues doing damage in pve on my Ranger (Talking dungeons here) I stay alive a lot longer than most team mates. Do constant steady damage, particularly when I manage my pets well. PvE isn’t the issue.

Now pvp or WvWvW is another story, we don’t do near the damage. I run around with 22k in hp, and have been 3 shot by thieves. Not that a thief shouldn’t do this damage, but I then should do something close maybe 4-5 shots to equal? which I do not.

My spec is a bit different, I spec in healing, health and pet protection, so it usually takes a bit to take me down, but that’s just me. I know I give up dmg in doing so, but still our damage is too little in wvwvw. That’s my 2c. Oh, and pets are rarely useful in wvwvw, I do believe we should have a pet stowed trait line and our trait lines should be better sorted out, they’re awful in the continuity of the lines.

Most pets in pve are useless because of their unwanted agro. In pvp (WvWvW) the only ones i use are the ranged pets, simply because they tend to live just a little bit longer.

In WvWvW i always run full berserker build with longbow, axe/warhorn and around 20k hp. YES i’m very annoyed by the fact our dps is nowhere near on par with other classes. Even on my guardian in tanky build i dish out more dps then my ranger and am next to that hard to kill as well.

i’m simply amazed that a well build sniper warrior can deal 3-5 times the dmg we can and on top of that wears heavy armor. I think the hardest i’ve hit with a longbow is around 4,5k crit and get easily 3-4 shot by thiefs (wearing full exotic ofc).

In WvWvW i usually make sure i’m always in a group to provide damage support and slowing down the enemy with barrage, but when (descent) non-ranger classes find me somewhere alone i already know i’m pretty much done and can prepare myself for the armor fix costs.

I sure hope at some point rangers are actually going to be rangers… but slowly i’m loosing hope that we will see these changes anytime soon.

What i don’t get from a developers point of view is why it is sooo hard to get ranger dps (depending on build ofcourse) on par with other (dps build) classes.
Why can a thief backstab you for 6-7k while we don’t even have 1 single skill that can do damage like that. Aren’t things like that with different classes with equal builds easy to test ? Take a dps meter and check the average dps from different classes in lets say 1 hour and you know things are bad.

the medium dmg is not that bad but when we are at close range and it happens often in dungeons or pvp its pure crap

I agree the lowest dmg to be removed and long range shot to be either split on 2
or 1k+ range to have bonus dmg and at the other range to do same dmg no matter 100 or 999

The reason why you’re seeing such low damage output is that theoretically you should be adding pet damage to the equation. Unfortunately, as we all know, pets aren’t functioning as intended so our dps suffers immensely. Evidently the devs are having a really tough time fixing this problem.

I’ve been attempting to use my longbow as a primary weapon in some dungeons and its been painful to use.

The design of long range shot simply isn’t suited for the design of PvE. Many fights are done in cramped fighting areas and you often need to maneuver within close distance of your target to avoid AoE, kite mobs, ect. And what if an enemy or two starts chasing you? It’s hard enough to keep them at 500+ range let alone the 1,000+ you need for optimal damage.

I can understand a range requirement on certain skills that aren’t used as often, but adding it to the auto-attack of all things just isn’t a good idea. It affects the performance of the weapon too heavily.

Once you try out the Warrior’s rifle and the Engineer’s grenade spam, you will see that the 1500 range of the longbow isn’t anything special.

The only real use I’ve gotten out of 1,500 range is in castle warfare. Just few rangers can cause an extraordinary amount of pressure from using their barrage at 1,500 range, pushing attacking enemies back or attacking from beyond the range of the enemy defenses.

I’m not sure how it compares to the skills from a rifle warrior however. I’ve seen some videos of them being extremely effective, especially with their adrenaline skill, but I’ve yet to try one for myself.

I think long range shot should be completly retooled so as not to penalize the distance on the auto attack. Hunter’s shot should be given the range damage bonus – and make it considerable so we can have our “sniper” attack and just have the auto attack normal damage regardless of range and have it give a condition or boon.

Aside from damage and sluggish fire rate my real issue with it is that it lacks any real synergy with the other weapons. It very much is a stand alone weapon where as all the other weapons synergize well with one another.

I only carry it for the times I want to do WvW or if using melee would get me creamed against an event boss. Mostly just collects dust in my inventory.

when i read analysis i expected some math , only thing i read in this thread were pretty obvious things that everyone can see after 5 min of play

I’m one that definitely needs to work on my specs much better.
I play mostly WvWvW, and feel like I always need to have the long bow primarily equipped. I was doing sword/torch combo, but unfortunately gave up the torch for the war horn speed boost that you need just to keep up in a zerg.
The long bow has great uses in WvW but again the damage seems really low, as do pretty much all of our weapons. If you are focusing on the needs of a long bow all of your other abilities such as traps and pets are useless, especially in castle warfare, so you’re kind of kittened from that aspect.
I guess a huge portion of our usability is supposed to come from the traps and pets…? But those require you not be ranged, and even those have such little damage they are no deterant for anyone coming after you – i’m thinking the pets are more of a flag TO attack you.
If I’m solo and get attacked it’s usually over for me. Doesn’t matter if you drop all your traps on them, have the pet hitting them, even do the knock back shot to get some range on them they just keel you fast, or just try running away with every speed buff or snare trap on you… forget about it.

citadelli.2591:

I’m one that definitely needs to work on my specs much better.
I play mostly WvWvW, and feel like I always need to have the long bow primarily equipped. I was doing sword/torch combo, but unfortunately gave up the torch for the war horn speed boost that you need just to keep up in a zerg.
The long bow has great uses in WvW but again the damage seems really low, as do pretty much all of our weapons. If you are focusing on the needs of a long bow all of your other abilities such as traps and pets are useless, especially in castle warfare, so you’re kind of kittened from that aspect.
I guess a huge portion of our usability is supposed to come from the traps and pets…? But those require you not be ranged, and even those have such little damage they are no deterant for anyone coming after you – i’m thinking the pets are more of a flag TO attack you.
If I’m solo and get attacked it’s usually over for me. Doesn’t matter if you drop all your traps on them, have the pet hitting them, even do the knock back shot to get some range on them they just keel you fast, or just try running away with every speed buff or snare trap on you… forget about it.

If you are playing lvled up to 80 than chances are you will lose every 1v1 or close to it you enter. Rangers actually do better outside the zerg as it is there we can see our full potential come to fruition. There no longer is the AoE fest to blow your pet up so you are free to maximize your damage. Move for you pet, force your opponent into your pet, CC your opponent, do whatever is necessery to spoon feed your enemies into the mouth of your pet.

Again though, if you are playing lvled up, you cannot compete with a lvl 80 maxed out roamer looking to gank the lowbies straggling behind the zerg.

PvP wise Longbow /Axe+torch will own just about everything combined with intelligent use of pet.

Wv3 Longbow for siege and shortbow in open battles