Hello everyone,
Let me start off by saying thanks for giving some update to rangers at all. I mained a ranger for all 7+ years of GW1 and felt rangers received no attention at all during that time aside from nerfs to all the bow attack skills’ damage. That’s why the final state of the game practically leaves “splinter barrage” as the only option to get a group to allow you to join them as a ranger.
However, as many threads have mentioned, there’s still more to go. I’ll propose a few fixes here (no, I did not come up with all of these on my own), and hopefully others can add on later in a constructive manner.
1) Pets: This is actually several points together and is one of the 2 main issues for rangers. They need to be able to attack while moving – as players can. Buffing their survivability is almost impossible to balance without supercomputers to drive the AI. Pets will never dodge and make rational decisions like players, so the other option is to make them into super-tanks. This in turn would make them almost impossible to kill. Instead, give rangers the option to roll without a pet (again, 7 years as a GW1 ranger, and I can only remember using 1 build that included a pet). However, since so much of the ranger class is built around having a pet, something needs to take their place on the profession bar when they’re stowed. This could be something like a selectable buff or maybe survival skills (wilderness survival, anyone?).
2) Weapons: Rangers have little damage with weapons. I would say axes are the exception since they can bounce with #1 and pile on the damage that way, but that’s situational. The only other option seems to be longbow – rapid fire while barrage continues in the background.
—Sword is practically unusable with #1 rooting you in place; get rid of the rooting aspect but leave the rest. Movement will fix the sword as it is otherwise.
—Greatsword has some interesting abilities but suffers in the straight damage department. As mentioned in a couple of other threads, the regular sword does damage equal to or greater than its larger cousin. A direct damage increase on the greatsword across its abilities seems in order.
—Shortbow was nerfed to eliminate “single skill spam,” but that single skill is its only method of damage. The damage can either be re-buffed on #1, or the cooldowns could be decreased across the board.
—Longbow sees a lot of complaints because its #1 is sooooo slow, but #2 seems to recharge quickly enough (at least when traited) that you can mostly rotate between launching a new barrage and using rapid fire with some hunter shots in the middle.
—As an idea for bows in general, why not take barrage off the longbow and put in on the shortbow in place of #4. Then for the empty slot on longbow, slot in something with spread fire, similar to the warrior’s fan-fire (feels wrong to say, but feels like warriors are just flat out better with bows right now).
3) Utility Skills: Being the second major point for rangers, utility skills are mostly worthless now.
—Signets have fairly decent effects but require very specific traiting (doable, especially while they’re in the power line) and have very long cooldowns (hint).
—Shouts are worthless. Why would I take skills just to order my pet to move to specific tasks when those skills don’t even offer buffs to either the pet or myself (hint, hint…)?
—Traps work well but could use a secondary effect allowing you to activate them manually for on-demand combo fields (surely requires some extensive balance testing).
—Spirits got a buff to effect chances this patch (thanks!), but they still die almost instantly, even with traits. Why not make their effects always active a la GW1, or keep the newly buffed activation chances while making the spirits invincible (make invincibility a trait choice that cannot be slotted at the same time as the spirits move trait).
Thanks for the updates, Anet, but please don’t leave it here with so much still on the table. Rangers ended up as one-trick ponies in GW1 (at least outside of the PvP arenas) after being neglected for ages. It’s time to show them some love.