Guild Wars 2

WARNING: BIG LIST BECAUSE THERE IS A LOT TO FIX, THERE IS NO SHORT WAY OF DOING THIS, IF YOU ARE INTERESTED TO IMPROVE RANGER GAME PLAY, MECHANICS AND SUPPORT, READ ALL THE WAY AND LEAVE YOUR FEEDBACK.

I’ll try to argue every trait that I think it’s out of place, and give out a decent solution to make them equally viable with other traits in same column. I wish all traits would be viable to include them in builds with same potential and bring more diversity!

—————-MARKSMANSHIP———————-
Predators instinct:
Simply not worth taking because of to long cooldown, this could be solved by linearly reducing cooldown and cripple duration at the same time.
Solution: Cooldown: 30 > 15 sec cooldown,
Cripple duration 10 > 5 sec,

Call of the wild:
Idea itself is good, but doesn’t work well in practice, because pet swap is 20 sec(15 traited) and this causes problematic because you get buff every 2nd swap or even less (a good ranger will keep pet out of rotation for as long as he/she can).
Solution: On pet swap (no cooldown) give player 8 seconds might + ferocity, and 10sec swiftness.

Opening Strike + Alpha Training = merge it into opening strike
Isn’t it obvious why, current minors are holding us back, while we could have something better, if we would merge alpha training as default with opening strike.
Solution: Merge those two, and replace it with for example: gain 2 might on successful knockback.

Predators Onslought:
Not worth being Grand master, the amount of time some one is under effect of movement impaired or disabled is irrelevant at the moment, if damage would be at least 25% higher, i would consider building around that, but as we all know only melee ranger is having this kind of mechanics that would have this build in handy. Condition rangers would never use this trait line just to get this last GrandMaster, as well as Druid, druid has way to low damage on staff to have use of it.
Solution: In order to make this trait line viable: 25%+ damage or more.

Remorseless:
Same problem, mostly viable for melee rangers only, does not work well with longbow ranger.
Solution: Would make more sense to get opening strike on successful dodge and or fury.

—————-SKIRMISHING———————-

Strider’s Defence
Chance to destroy projectile on melee attack 25%.
We did try, and tested this trait for so long and this does simply not meet a viable point because, a) you will waste way to many attacks trying to break projectile while you eat way to many damage. b) you normally want to break projectile when you expect it with 100% chance, else i’ll rather dodge the damage OR you run away from it when you are already extremely low, i would simply rather keep running then stopping to try my 25% chance to break projectile c) Other traits are simply to godlike to take this. D) it’s already hard to time projectile in GW2, why make it 25%? At least 90% if not 100% to make this part of trait viable. E) i’d rather have 3 sec cooldown and 100% rate, then trying my luck with 25%.
Solution: 100% break projectile for 1 second, cooldown 3 secounds.

Light on your feet
Remove piercing and rather add 300 range.
There is absolutely no need to pierce with short bow, short bow is currently on very bad spot, in my opinion this would bring short bow back into the game, but still, I’d rather see short bow reworked.

Most dangerous game
Some what better then before, but still not worth taking it, because when you are under 50% of health you are already in bad position to respond with offensive attack. In current PvP/WvW state being on 50% with ranger(7k-13k HP) you are pretty much one hit, and staying under 50% is suicide. Solution would be to play dangerously, drop yourself low, stay there few seconds and heal up to get few stacks of might. If trait stays unchanged, i would suggest different name Salty mode ON : Suicide game.
Suggesting1: 60%-65% threshold, after all it’s grandmaster trait line!
Suggestion2: Might duration 10 seconds, intervals 2 sec.

—————-WILDERNESS SURVIVAL———————-

Soften the fall
Has no real purpose in game on every class, i would suggest to remove this trait in every class, and it should become base of every class, unique style when you fall from high ground.

Empathic Bond
My favourite issue with range. Pets take every 10 seconds 3 conditions, you don’t know when interval happens, and the main issue with this is that most of conditions tick to hard to let them on you for 10 seconds and most of them don’t even last that long.
Solution: Linear cut: every 3 sec take 1 condition

Poison master:
On pet swap give poison to ranger as well

—————-NATURAL MAGIC———————-

Instinctive reaction
Way to low power gain based on healing.
With 1200 healing power, i did get ONLY 84 power, oO?
50% treshold for 3 sec quickness and 20 sec cooldown. kind of OK, but Heal > power ratio is still negligible even though it’s minor._
Solution: 12.5% heal to power ration at minimum to make it viable(150 power)

Vigorous training:
Problem, pets spawn on random locations and very unpredictable in dynamic fights like this and 300 radius is extremely small to by any chance give ally vigor!
Solution: minimum 600 radius.

Protective vard
Major problem, Weakness debuff triggers even if target is not in range, and goes on cooldown which is pretty much un fair, i’d rather see that target who attacks you gets weakness. For example every class with 500+ range attacks will never get debuff because range is 240 which is negligible small and unreasonable.
Solution: Trigger if target is in range!
Solution2: Enemy player will get debuff regardless range, ( removes aoe effect)

Invigurating bond
Again extremely small radius 300 range, it’s almost impossible to stack on pet in pvp in because it conestantly moves around, and while performing it’s already to late because you have to be ready to perform such healing and being on spot will still miss-time the healing. Viable only in zergs.
Solution: minimum 600 radius.

—————-BEAST MASTERY———————-

Honed axe
Players who desire to have 20% skill reduction on off-hand-axe, are forced to take this trait, due to removal of Off-hand training, Major problem that off hand axe players don’t get anything except 20% skill reduction. Ferocity should apply on AXE USE and not ONLY ON MAIN HAND AXE USE.
Solution: Apply ferocity also on off hand use ( Ranger gains 150 ferocity on main or off hand axe use!).

Thx for reading, alo thx Alevien, Xerathichan and Flip for days of testing and helping us out in finding viable solutions for every trait that is currently in bad shape. I believe with this changes rangers wouldn’t at any point become broken but would have fair chance of building very unique builds and bring a lot of diversity to the game because almost everything would have own chain that would make new opening for amazing gaming experience! Thx again and lets hope for better changes!

WOW! You rock lol if half of this gets implemented then ranger would be on a lot better spot! But from entire list this is my favourite!

Firelysm.4967:

WARNING: BIG LIST BECAUSE THERE IS A LOT TO FIX, THERE IS NO SHORT WAY OF DOING THIS, IF YOU ARE INTERESTED TO IMPROVE RANGER GAME PLAY, MECHANICS AND SUPPORT, READ ALL THE WAY AND LEAVE YOUR FEEDBACK.

Empathic Bond
My favourite issue with range. Pets take every 10 seconds 3 conditions, you don’t know when interval happens, and the main issue with this is that most of conditions tick to hard to let them on you for 10 seconds and most of them don’t even last that long.
Solution: Linear cut: every 3 sec take 1 condition

Really worth reading!11!1!!

Gorisek.2678:

WOW! You rock lol if half of this gets implemented then ranger would be on a lot better spot! But from entire list this is my favourite!

Firelysm.4967:

WARNING: BIG LIST BECAUSE THERE IS A LOT TO FIX, THERE IS NO SHORT WAY OF DOING THIS, IF YOU ARE INTERESTED TO IMPROVE RANGER GAME PLAY, MECHANICS AND SUPPORT, READ ALL THE WAY AND LEAVE YOUR FEEDBACK.

Empathic Bond
My favourite issue with range. Pets take every 10 seconds 3 conditions, you don’t know when interval happens, and the main issue with this is that most of conditions tick to hard to let them on you for 10 seconds and most of them don’t even last that long.
Solution: Linear cut: every 3 sec take 1 condition

Really worth reading!11!1!!

I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or not. I find it amusing though.

Anyway, I am of the opinion entire traits need scrapping. EB for instance can never be made good with how it functions…no one in their right mind is going to intentionally put conditions on their pet with no compensation.

IMO, if your pet is offloading conditions onto itself, then you need something also…clearing the condition isn’t enough, because the ranger and pet are NOT separate. Maybe something like, your pet takes the condition and you get a boon. Would have to balance the number of condis and the cooldown, but at least it would be something.

Stopped at your Predator’s Instinct nerf.

Why does every one of your posts have an all caps title and the large blocks of all caps text in it?

If you want to be taken seriously and have people actually read what write, you need to stop that.

@ Lome, that is not a nerf, its a straight up buff. Reapplication is far more important than a long duration, which gets cleansed immediately anyway, leaving you with a 30s CD

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Why does every one of your posts have an all caps title and the large blocks of all caps text in it?

If you want to be taken seriously and have people actually read what write, you need to stop that.

@ Lome, that is not a nerf, its a straight up buff. Reapplication is far more important than a long duration, which gets cleansed immediately anyway, leaving you with a 30s CD

Well i like to format text on my own, if text format is more important to you then actual arguments and solutions, then you didn’t come here with right intentions. I don’t need your lecture on how to post something, you can either deliver feedback or none at all ,because this is not helping anyone. P.S. and for the record this is first time where i used caps in such matter, so I don’t know where did you find EVERY post of mine with caps in upper case title, please don’t make up things.

And yes this is a buff because long durations were proven that they are bad class shaping. On various skills was proven, that this was the main problem. (looking at you old ROA)

A few issues.
Call of the Wild (I’m assuming you are talking about Clarions Bond)- The reason it was nerfed in the first place was because players were exploiting tonics to have 25 might and no cooldown blast finishers. It needs an internal cooldown but it should be 14 seconds.

Opening strike + alpha training- I agree they should be combined but replacing the trait with might on knockback isn’t a very good idea. We don’t want to encourage PBS spam. Maybe something like “Opening strikes are unblockable” or “pet teleports to target and chills/knockdown/ etc. on opening strike”.

Strider defense- still kind of passive and boring. How about gain aegis when you dodge.

Light on your feet- The 1200 range should have never been nerfed, that needs to be made baseline again. Keep the piercing and add “projectiles now inflict 2 seconds of torment”

MDG- Already has whole threads devoted to it. It should just be scrapped and replaced.
Empathic Bond- I agree with the 1 every 3 seconds but the condi’s either need to be converted to boons for the pet, pet transfers condi’s to enemies on successful attack, or at the very least pet needs to take reduced condi damage (50% or more)

Poison master- needs to just be merged into the master line with refined toxins because it isn’t strong enough to take over our condi removal. The only way it will ever be considered is if EB is fixed and moved to the BM line.

Instinctive reaction- Convert % of condi to healing or vice versa, or just change it back to % of vitality is converted to power

Protective Ward- that would be a nerf in a lot of situations. The AoE weakness is too good when fighting multiple people. I don’t support this change.

Invigorating Bond- The radius isn’t the problem. The healing is pathetic. It comes out to less hps than the regen from resounding timbre. It should be changed to something useful like “Pet f2 converts 1 condi to boon on allies in 600 radius”, or “ranger shouts convert condi to boon on allies in 600 radius”

Honed Axes- make it 150 ferocity per axe quipped and swap it with EB. It would be interesting to see if that is enough to make axe/axe viable.

I wouldn’t take predator’s instinct even the way you have it. Ranger already has cripple for days. Only thing more cripple is good for is a cover condition. It would need like a 4 second ICD with a 1 second cripple or something.

Edit: And that note I seriously miss the old trait that gave birds (pets) cripple on F2.

Puck.9612:

Honed Axes- make it 150 ferocity per axe quipped and swap it with EB. It would be interesting to see if that is enough to make axe/axe viable.

After trait changes i did have a great wish to run axe/axe but it was just crap.
I just don’t have words why is anet having so much hate on rangers. Like the more i think about ranger current state the more i think, some one just doesn’t want ranger to have variety of builds. If i would be game owner, i would love to listen to community a lot more, and make mutual balance.

Why give people a choice, when only one out of 3 options is worth even considering taking.

I don’t think it’s actually needed to merge Opening Strike and Alpha Training, even though everyone always suggests it.

Personally I feel that it would be better to improve both of them slightly.

For example:

Opening Strike could be changed to “Cause vulnerability with your first strike when entering combat, or swapping weapons”.

Alpha Training could be changed to “Regain Opening Strike when swapping Pets. Pets have Opening Strike.”

Although I guess you could do the same thing through the merger that everyone always asks for

i.e.

Opening Strike: Cause vulnerability with your first strike when entering combat. Pets have Opening Strike.

Alpha Training Replaced: Regain Opening Strike when swapping weapons or swapping pets.

I guess either would work for me ;P

I also don’t think that LoYF should lose the piercing, that’s the main reason I take the trait.

I do however, think that at the very least it needs to stack duration. At the moment if you dodge twice, the second dodge overwrites the remaining duration from the first one.

To compete with condition cleansing, you could also add “Immune to Poison Damage” to poison master.

I started going through Ranger traits the other day and this list is surprisingly similar to the things I was noticing too.

I think that Opening Strike should be reworked as a might stacking mechanic rather than guaranteed crits (which really only works with GS/Offhand axe)

I also thought that the Soften the Fall trait could be made useful by adding in the old Sharpening Stone when enemies reach 75% health trait. This would at least synergize with the Wilderness Knowledge Survival skill trait.

For Poison Master, I think that the trait should be removed, and the 25% boost to poison damage added into Refined Toxins.

Honed Axes is really just an awful trait. I’d really like to see Empathic Bond moved to the Beastmastery line and have Honed Axes entirely reworked. Axes don’t even work well together, so the trait needs to have functionality which makes either Offhand or Mainhand much, much superior to how it works now if it is going to be at all viable.

The traits you talked about that work only for melee rangers are used in PvE. I understand you are looking at this from PvP perspective but do add that to the start of the thread. Some of these changes were pretty confusing to read when you hadn’t given the context.

NotOverlyCheesy.9427:

The traits you talked about that work only for melee rangers are used in PvE. I understand you are looking at this from PvP perspective but do add that to the start of the thread. Some of these changes were pretty confusing to read when you hadn’t given the context.

What works for PvP works for PvE even better, and not the other way around, so things should be balanced around PvP, this is simple fact and it’s proven throughout long conversations on balance theme.

infantrydiv.1620:

I started going through Ranger traits the other day and this list is surprisingly similar to the things I was noticing too.

I think that Opening Strike should be reworked as a might stacking mechanic rather than guaranteed crits (which really only works with GS/Offhand axe)

I also thought that the Soften the Fall trait could be made useful by adding in the old Sharpening Stone when enemies reach 75% health trait. This would at least synergize with the Wilderness Knowledge Survival skill trait.

For Poison Master, I think that the trait should be removed, and the 25% boost to poison damage added into Refined Toxins.

Honed Axes is really just an awful trait. I’d really like to see Empathic Bond moved to the Beastmastery line and have Honed Axes entirely reworked. Axes don’t even work well together, so the trait needs to have functionality which makes either Offhand or Mainhand much, much superior to how it works now if it is going to be at all viable.

Yep, exactly, but why i made this list, is was simply because we had similar problem where I work, we had so many things not working out just because they were not worth taking them into the build.
And i went on my ranger the same day, and i had some super good ideas about ranger, but in theory it all looked crazy good fun and all, but once i pulled things together I just realized things don’t work out, why you wonder? Because of the list above, every trait line has columns, and most of 3 options has only 1 viable trait, and this is limiting rangers from being creating, with very unbalanced traits we don’t have much to do.

So i think Anet should seriously sit down, and think about things, it’s all there, they don’t need to rework stuff, they have awesome mechanics on table, they just have to sit down, take trait by trait, look at it, and balance it, just like we did. It’s true, it took us nearly 3 days of no life to fix it, but it was all worth it!

There is nothing better on the world then having open hands and having no limits at being creative!

Firelysm.4967:

NotOverlyCheesy.9427:

The traits you talked about that work only for melee rangers are used in PvE. I understand you are looking at this from PvP perspective but do add that to the start of the thread. Some of these changes were pretty confusing to read when you hadn’t given the context.

What works for PvP works for PvE even better, and not the other way around, so things should be balanced around PvP, this is simple fact and it’s proven throughout long conversations on balance theme.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Many skills need to be split between the two….

TheFantasticGman.9451:

Firelysm.4967:

NotOverlyCheesy.9427:

The traits you talked about that work only for melee rangers are used in PvE. I understand you are looking at this from PvP perspective but do add that to the start of the thread. Some of these changes were pretty confusing to read when you hadn’t given the context.

What works for PvP works for PvE even better, and not the other way around, so things should be balanced around PvP, this is simple fact and it’s proven throughout long conversations on balance theme.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Many skills need to be split between the two….

Yes sure, GW1 had a big prof on that in past years, but in general, it would still work better then downgrading PvP just because something works in PvE. And sorry to say, skills in PvE are not noticable, while in pvp they are. (I count WvW in PvP scene even though people say it’s not)