Guild Wars 2

No bug fixes today and no mention of re-balancing ranger here on the forums. Do the devs have a Ranger on their sPvP team? If so, how good is he? I am getting the feeling that rangers are thought to be fine. Shortbow is our only weapon choice because our damage with other weapons is horrible. we are only even slightly competitive because we have lots of quickness. Quickness isn’t helping our balance problems.

I am sure they are doing something for the Ranger. Either those other bugs were considered higher priority, or the ones they prioritised for the Ranger are taking longer than originally expected. You may be surprised how many hours it takes to take a bug-fix from the client’s initial report to the final patch. It involves a lot of people and a lot of work for every single bug.

Elric of Grans.7684:

I am sure they are doing something for the Ranger. Either those other bugs were considered higher priority, or the ones they prioritised for the Ranger are taking longer than originally expected. You may be surprised how many hours it takes to take a bug-fix from the client’s initial report to the final patch. It involves a lot of people and a lot of work for every single bug.

You obviously have never played GW1, where most rangers waited years to even be glanced at.

It is one of the reasons I tried my best to stay away from this profession in GW2…

If the devs fixed pets I think rangers will be fine. Right now the pets can’t track moving targets, and are easily avoided. Also F2 skills (especially the buffs and debuffs) need to be instant cast, w/o animation, would fix a lot of issues.

Playing my Ranger less and less each day due to all the bugs, boring skills, and lackluster trait lines. Made a Thief in the meantime, which I’m finding better in every way.

I’m seeing less and less rangers around as the weeks go by…sad. but understandable.

I’m just tired of the lack of communication from the Dev’s to any class right now.

Indeed i see not much rangers there and there.
Indeed i saw the huge bug list.
Indeed we dont have OMG skill.
Indeed GW1 ranger has more options.

BUT…….im a ranger. 80 full exotic full world.

I tried every other class on sPvP and other classes on Stress Test.

Im just complaining about the “Opening Strike” bug.

I may be crazy, but i sometimes think someday the ranger will be nerfed.

OK, now u can call me crazy.

Love my ranger, my enemies dont love me ^^

All I want for now is an information from Dev, I just wanna know if I must wait for more beautiful days or f I must leave my ranger right now because they think “Ranger is fine”….
Nothing for us inthe patchnote today, I wish it’s because they are working on major changes for the ranger…

I think rangers were made underpowered purposely, because we are the most powerful range class, and we have basically another person tanking and fighting for us.( Pets) But i think the ranger and their pets could use a def upgrade, because a trash dungeon mob can take a ranger out in 5 seconds if we stay and fight. so we have to fleet and stop helping our team to wait for the heal skill cooldown and heal.

It bothers me that they nerfed lb so quickly without testing the results. It took players to point out to the community that LB dmg >sb….

I have been studying this information like a hawk hoping to see some light at the end of the tunnel to get a patch and maybe even rework the skills/traits. Everything seems so dull, but even with the bugs I still can’t stop playing the ranger…. it is a constant struggle trying to not roll a thief since it is the next closest thing.

I’m honestly scared to death of a shortbow nerf.

Skolvikings.5132:

I’m honestly scared to death of a shortbow nerf.

If this happens it will pretty much shelve my ranger. Rangers are tough in 1v1 situations and I never feel under powered going into a fight with any other class and that is probably our only saving grace. The problem is the class is becoming pretty boring. We only have 3-4 viable specs and really most of our weapons are broke. LB and GS got nerfed into the ground at the end of beta’s which pretty much leaves shortbow and axe/horn or sword/horn (my preferred since it provides much more evasion in WvW.. take the #1 off auto attack and it is a glorious weapon combo). Only time I use longbow is when I’m assaulting or defending in WvW or farming in Orr… otherwise it sits in my bag.

I’ve already demoted my ranger to farm duty, kharza. As you mentioned, LB and GS aren’t great in comparison to our other weapon choices, and our viable trait lines are minimal. Having just made a Thief and Ele, it cemented my decision to not do PVP or much PVE with my Ranger til some serious fixes are put in place.

The problem is most of the nerfs or changes at the end of the beta turned most of the classes with the currently biggest problems into one-trick ponies. Balance changes should NOT have been made after two days of playing each month, rather they should have focused on the glaring bugs that plagued classes even during beta, especially Engineer, Necro, and pets in general.

Ranger is Shortbow/Quickness, as pets, spirits, Sword, Longbow, and Greatsword were either nerfed to oblivion or currently bugged/broken. Axe “works” in Orr and Dungeons, only because there are no yellow mobs wandering around waiting to be slapped with an axe ricochet.

Warrior is Greatsword and Dual Axe Signet/Shout builds. Other weapons get awful traits, inability to hold hate makes Mace/Shield rather pointless, banners are constantly stolen (yes, even at 80), and Physical/Sword skills are balanced around PvP and are mostly useless due to their cooldowns in PvE.

Necro is conditions, nothing more needs to be said on how broken this class is. It’s a shame that the devs consider it “working as intended,” as I’ve personally permanently shelved this class.

Engineer might as well be Grenadier. All other skills got nerfs at the end of the beta, and are currently being nerfed almost every patch, despite being accepted as one of the weakest/most busted classes at the end of beta outside of Grenades.

Elementalist has no survivability, even going full Earth/Water spec, forcing players to make glass cannon Fire builds, circle-strafing until their wrists cramp, and hoping nothing looks their way.

Mesmer, Guardian, and Thief are mostly usable and have multiple “working” builds, despite their massive amount of broken traits, which is probably why those three are considered the best in PvP and PvE.

I think we need to be realistic. Arenanet is not looking at balance tuning right now. They’re focusing on fixing bugs.

The kind of players who post on forums tend to be min-maxers who zero in on high-end class balance issues, but the majority of the playerbase is really much more concerned with things like broken skill point challenges and trading post functionality.

There’s not going to be a lot “dev love” for rangers or anyone else until they’ve considerably shortened the list of known bugs. (And honestly there shouldn’t be any balance changes while all 8 professions still have a dozen or more known bugs.)

Swiftly.2385:

You obviously have never played GW1, where most rangers waited years to even be glanced at.

It is one of the reasons I tried my best to stay away from this profession in GW2…

Lol. This is so true. Yet i still love my rangers (both in GW1 and GW2). My main in GW2 is a Ranger. It’ll stay that way. I just hope that the rangers are on the dev list to revisit.

Let’s see here…

1) Pet AI is terrible. F2 skill takes too long. Pets need to be able to attack while moving.
2) Longbow is mediocre at best. Sword is “sticky” causing dodging issues. Greatsword damage is lackluster.
3) Sneeze on a spirit and it dies. % chance is not worthwhile. Short buff radius.
4) Some traits flat out don’t work. See bugs sticky for more information.
5) Traps traits are in the wrong trait line. Traps traits should be in CONDITION DAMAGE trait line.

Just a few of the issues I see with Rangers.

I’m rather frustrated over the lack of responses to the community concerns. A dev response with something along the line of “Working as intended” or “this is something we want to adjusted” or even “yes this is a bug and will get fixed” would be nice. But what are we getting? The cold shoulder and/or being left in the dark.

They said they are focusing on fix bugs first, before attempting to balance classes (we can see they fixed part of necro bugs in the last patch). It’s frustrating but logical.
We need to be patient, it’s hard but what can we do other.

Sadly I also have pretty much shelved my fully exotic ranger for a Thief I’m lvling. They have much more control over fights, have a ton of “oh ish” ability’s huge mobility and a viable ranged spec.

Rangers got the big FU from devs and they refuse to let us know whats going on. Time to devote everything to my thief and hope one day they actually look at and fix our issues. It really feels like they threw the ranger abilitys together last min a day before launch. How could they possibly have tested and not known at all that all of these problems existed.

Who ever the dev was that made ranger ability’s is a boring individual.

CHunterX.4083:

The problem is most of the nerfs or changes at the end of the beta turned most of the classes with the currently biggest problems into one-trick ponies. Balance changes should NOT have been made after two days of playing each month, rather they should have focused on the glaring bugs that plagued classes even during beta, especially Engineer, Necro, and pets in general.

Ranger is…

That’s really depressing, but I’m glad for the overview. You sound like you’ve played most of the classes.

Hopefully they will be able to work this stuff out in the coming weeks :/

When Thief has better short bow and ranged abilities than Ranger you know that something is wrong. How this can not be seen by the devs is beyond me. I am very disapointed with Ranger not only because of the bugs but also because it has the worst set of skills and all of them are weaker than the same skills on other classes especially Thief.

Thief is better at ranged combat with guaranteed bleeds, semi AoE and no missed shots. They have better survivability with almost infinite invisibility stun/root breakers and to top it all off, spike damage that is just plain unbalanced.