Guild Wars 2

I’m 4 and a half year ranger main. Which means 2 years in GW1 and 2 years GW2 with over 1,000+ hours of game play on 3 accounts with sPvP & WvW experience, and I must say I’m very sceptical about MUST use pet and current flow of ranger fight. How do I see rangers? Well, “jack of all trade”, they are decent at many things, but far from the best in specific ones. In this review i’ll try to describe what could be done to fix ranger, and deliver better game play, i’ll include solutions:

How could ranger be fixed by adding some of this options:
- better interrupt system
- Pet beast mastery & kiting problem & trait changes
- Diversity on pet-less ranger & replacing special abilities
- utility mobility when using LB/SB by trait
- better melee mechanics & sword fix ( more dodgy then offensive )
- spirit changes
- WvW problems

@Better interrupt system:
If we remember in guild wars history, we had ranger as play maker in GvG, where he/she had to control the flow of the game with either pet build, condition, spike or interrupt. I miss a lot of ranger abilities to be true marksman/ranger, with that said i’m referring on play style diversity and lack of interrupts. Ranger should have at least one utility skill that would interrupt with next 1-2 arrows or arrows that you can deliver in 3 seconds. I’ll later introduce 1 more viable solution to interrupt @Beast mastery section.

@LB/SB mobility:
If you run long and short bow, you are basically without mobility, lighting reflex does simply not deliver enough distance between you and target, where every class has several gap-closers. Nice solution to fix this would be by trait, where lightning reflex would get additional full endurance while running LB/SB combination or replace vigor buff with full endurance.

@Melee mechanics & sword fix:
Sword fix is needed simply because running sword is breaking the game flow by auto-attacking where user roots himself, but what does that mean?
Every time you attack, you lock yourself on target for 1 second and then you leap short distance with channelling 3/4 which is rather big for chain, in mean time you cannot reposition or break skill-chain without changing the weapon which puts you in very uncomfortable position if you have to evade/dodge incoming damage, ( yes you have leap on 3rd hit) but price that you pay for standing still without ability to reposition yourself is huge. Solution, remove leap on Pounce(Slash3), and give ability to move freely while slashing.

Second thing is LB/GS set where you are stuck on rather huge recharge/cooldowns, but is that so? The problem that I see in this set is, GS delivers very little unless target is already in your face, by that i mean thief, warrior. GS3 is good to get away and GS2 delivers nice burst of damage, GS4 is super effective and nice, but when you are facing range somewhere between medium and close range, you are screwed for two reasons:
- LB is made for long range, and there for will have huge reduced damage @ close range.
- If you stay in GS, you can do two things, leap with GS3 or run away ( waiting for enemy move will kill you)

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@Beast mastery & special ability replace:
Rangers should have full control of pets, whether they want to use them or not. There for in my opinion I would rework rangers on the way that you can be pet-less. Ranger would have to decide if he/she wants to have pet by investing points in trait. If you don’t have at least 2 points in beast mastery trait, you cannot have a pet, and you are mainly reliable on your own. Current problem that we have with pets is, they die way to fast, or they are ignored/to slow ( people just kite them in closed or open field ). Main problem of pets is that they are to similar and easy to kite, and there is no real pet use that would define one kind and actually make ranger to think about which one would he use, because at the moment all we have is cat/bear builds with very unviable spider/devourer set up :
- Birds should be faster and hard to kite but not tanky
- bears should be stronger and slower
- spiders & devourers should aim better, they miss way to much.
- only cats are currently in good shape

@Diversity:
A very awesome solution to pet-less ranger would be?
Replacing special existing abilities with 3 new abilities:
- F1 Focus shoot/throw:
Ranger would charge and shoot/throw an axe/sword/arrow from distance which would be charged for 1-3 seconds where each tick of 1/4 of second would add power & range. (Arrow release on user release).
- F2 Arrow condition buff (burning) 30 sec
- F2 Medium range interrupt

@Spirits:
Currently spirits are pointless, since only one spirit is decent, and investing to many trait points for one Spirit, will make you lack of damage. They are good only for PVE, because in sPvP or WvW they don’t last more then a second or you are forced out of range. Solutions: Nature trait invulnerability of spirits.
Solution2:Spirits should apply boon every 5 seconds if ally is in range of spirit with chance of 70%, and not by chance on hit.

@WVW:
The hate of rangers in PvE and WvW is big mainly because of only long range shooting of commanders and they hardly deliver any support to the team, so here are some solutions:
- heavy class pets(drake, bear, maybe Moa too) should deal decent damage on gates
- Trait Marksmanship 6 piercing should ignore Aegis, which would make rangers viable versus heavy melee zerg classes.
- fixing spirits to actually make spirit rangers to deliver protection speed and revival.