I have a few problems with the way stealth works on the ranger class currently. As stealth was a secondary defense mechanism not originally included on the vanilla ranger, in some aspects it is still rather clunky.
Issues with ranger stealth:
1. Traps pulse damage:
With trapper runes, this reveals you. We can no longer toss traps to the side and as such our traps will get activated. We should not be punished for this. I propose that the damage portion of traps should be moved onto activation. Increase the frontloaded damage a bit, but then have the rest of the traps only pulse their conditions, and not damage. That way we can lay down 1 trap to get stealth and not get revealed, and then we can juke somewhere to safely lay another without getting revealed.
2. Pet is unstowed in combat:
3. Pet follows you when defeated:
Both of these are unintuitive. And both of these say, “I AM RIGHT HERE, MY STEALTH IS WORTHLESS.”
To fix 2 and 3, I propose that we should be able to stow and unstow our pets whenever, with no cooldown. This is different from pet swapping. Pet swap should still have a cooldown, but right now, the pet mechanic is conflicting with our class mechanics.
-If we are put into combat, our pet should not automatically become unstowed. If we choose to leave it stowed, we are strategically deciding to do less damage, but at the same time this allows us to safely stealth without revealing our location.
-In one versus one, fighting a stealth class, our stealth is useless. If I stealth, and then the Mesmer stealths, our pet runs straight back to us. Allowing us to stow pets in combat furthers our skill cap, and allows for more skillful play.
-Additionally, our pet when defeated limps after us. Being able to stow a pet, when this happens (in combat) is something I would argue rangers need. Unstowing would return the pet back to either the health it had, or stowing a pet could add a rest feature which over time regenerates its health !
Either way, we are losing some damage in order to gain survivability. The ability to make such choices is needed by our underdog class.
Thank you
~Borne
(edited by Malchior.1928)