Guild Wars 2

A simple fix for the longbow would be to make Rapid Fire a single shot skill that did the similar (probably slightly less) damage as rapid fire full sequence. Make it take 2-3 seconds to cast that roots you so it is not instant and can be interrupted. Increase the cool down for the remaining gap in cast time compared to the current rapid fire. The long bow and marksmanship trait line is about single large powerful shots with things like opening strike, long range shot with the exception of barrage for AoE.

Thoughts?

What rapid fire needs to do is act like QZ, just speed up the individual shots of the longbow. Each shot needs to be separate and have a chance to crit individually, and also have the chance to miss individually while correcting itself once they stand still again to make it even. That would fix rapid fire.

I mostly use the longbow and I like it, but my main problems with the longbow are:
- high chance of missing shots on moving targets.
- slow auto attack. It feels too slow, like walking through mud.
- barrage has much less range if you are on the high ground.
- opening strike doesn’t work for it because of the 900 range restiction bug.

Missing moving targets is the biggest annoyance. Shots should only miss if they are blocked, obstructed, dodged(the skill that uses stamina) or out of range and not simply by side stepping or running. The range of potential damage a longbow deals is too big. It can go from almost no damage to a good amount of damage, depending on how many shots actually hit. The longbow also doesn’t have any skills to immobilize a target to counter sidestepping. Maybe hunter’s shot should immobilize and the auto attack should cause invulnerability. Barrage cripple doesn’t help much with this, considering you have to be immobile yourself and it has a very long casting time.

I’m hoping the longbow will get a fix that either lets it hit moving targets or it getting an immobilize skill. Maybe Rapid Fire should cause a cripple on each hit. Anything like that. Pet’s aren’t reliable enough to provide the cripple/immobilize, because often there isn’t even pathing for them to get to their target and they also can’t hit moving targets most of the time.

Also, the Opening Strike minor traits should be fixed to 1500 range instead of 900. If it’s working as intended, then why are they in the same line as our bow traits. So if working as intended, we need other minor traits that affect bows in that line.

The only fix that a Longbow needs for now is to actually hit moving targets. It’s almost an exploit just by sidestepping again’st a Longbow user to evade the arrows simply because of one obvious factor – Projectile Speed.

The anticipation of the arrows when flying towards the enemy is 2 seconds too late. Is that how an ‘Unparalleled Archer’ should be? Missing their enemies just by a couple seconds? I sure hope not.

But it’s not like our ideas will ever be heard.

Yeah, I think the best thing they could do is give longbow terrain-height advantage, but I don’t see that being in the cards.

I hated it in other games how arrows were like heat-seeking missiles and would turn at 90 degree angles to hit people. So, I don’t want to see that, but faster projectile speed would definitely be helpful with the moving target issue.

I can get behind this – in no small part because I -hate- machinegunning arrows.

Give it Ice Bow’s #5’s animation. Hell, make it guaranteed crit. Something. Just don’t machinegun. It already contributes to make Shortbow unplayable for me.

That would make rapid fire a lot worse. One of its main advantages it the ability to proc things multiple times.

What they need to do to fix LB is increase the auto attack speed. Remove the damage being reduced by closeness or increase the damage at every stage (if they insist on keeping that mechanic then it needs to reward staying at range instead of punishing being close considering almost everything about this game is designed to allow you to keep in your enemies face) and then buff rapid fire damage because at the moment it only just beats out auto attacking at max range over the same time period.

Horrible idea. Rapid fire is one of our best abilities IMO. What we need is a damage buff to Barrage, a utility buff to Hunter’s Shot, and arrows that don’t obstruct.

Longbow damage actually isn’t that bad, it’s just half the arrows miss when you need them most – at long range. The buff to Barrage would put it on par with other AoE abilities and if Hunter’s Shot had a cripple or freeze or something similar it would make longbow kiting more doable.

Oh and lastly longbow speed is not as the tooltip says, if it were to match the tooltip speed it would be way better.

1. Add chance to cripple on Longbow 1, with crit dmg affecting duration, and crit % affecting chance to occur.

2. Shorten Rapid Fire duration by half but keep the same damage to make it more bursty and allow each arrow to have chance to crit.

3. Increase arrow speed by 50%.

4. Increase overall LB power by 10%.