Guild Wars 2

Hey,

I’m just wondering how the ranger AoE is compared to other classes, mostly warrior (with a longbow)? Piercing doesn’t seem that useful to me unless it’s literally crawling with enemies… Any help would be appeciated

Either you go with the barrage skill on longbows. You can also try out the axe or greatsword wich both hit 3 enemies/strike. As for utility skills you could try using the trait wich lets you ground target traps and then throw them where you want them.

See, there’s plenty of options

Ranger AoE is fine imo, it just comes from more than one source.
Something i like to use for heavy AoE is 2x Axes, a GS, the flame trap and a drake pet(preferably the river drake, that lightening attack hits REALLY hard).

The second pet can either be a murrelow for it’s poison field, a carrion devourer or simply a second drake. their basic attacks hit several targets at once and provides a blast finnisher which is very nice for all the combo fields you’re using.

Does the part of a, let’s say, Flame Trap’s tooltip that shows how much damage it does (not the burning part) scale with the Power stat or can you only increase trap damage with the Condition Damage stat?

Unless I’m missing something, the only option is longbow for a true AoE if you lack Condition Damage.

The longbow only has barrage and that’s it, if you really like the long bow you’re better off dropping a barrage and then switching to a better aoe weapon such as the axes which provide consistant aoe if you want keep your distance and kite a group of enemies or either sword.
Longsword will only hit 3 enemies while the GS will hit more, it’s also better to use when fighting enemies with long attack animations since you can move out of the way rather than just standing there. All of these scale well with a build focusing on power.

And yeah the non burning part of the flame trap scales with power, but even without much condition damage it adds a fair ammount of hurt and speeds up my kills by a noticable ammount, also if your drake uses its tailswipe in the fire field both of you get 3 stacks of might

Thanks, Petrol.

axe is amazing aoe, especially when having to kite around. I use axe in any event except for the barrage from time to time when I can get one off =P plus you have two great options for off hand, axe or warhorn. Warhorn buffs you and others and axe OH gives you a really fun up close aoe ability.

Thank you everyone I’ll stick with ranger (150 hours played and only now decided what profession I’m going)

Torch with the Offhand Training perk is delicious. It nearly doubles Bonfire’s radius.

Combine with Monarch’s Leap for an easy Fire Aura combo.

At the start of big wave events I just drop that in front of the enemies and watch them all burn to death for easy looting.

While not traditional AOE, the trait “Piercing Arrows” gives you a , hm, well a “target multiplier” that can have a big effect on groups if you are attentive to your placement. Fanning multi-shots like the F2 skill from shortbow can ripple a lot of arrows through a great many targets all at once. Toggling from a Longbow AOE and Rapid Fire to Shortbow quick shooting fire can let you play havoc on tightly packed groups.

You have both amazing, and terrible AoE. It completely depends what you’re doing. For PvE, AoE is awesome, for sPvP it’s okay, for wvwvw you pretty much just got barrage, you can trait your traps but the range isnt so great, but it’s alright if their running at you.

If you’re a SB/LB ranger like me, while I don’t find mesmers hard at all, I find them extremely annoying, and having AoE for them can be lacking in sPvP. You can open with barrage but it roots you, and you can lay your traps, but you probably won’t be running with many with a sPvP set up and then you’d need them to run over them, which a smart player won’t do, and you’re even more unlikely to have them traited anyway.

But generally speaking, it’s awesome for PvE, or being zerged with everyone on you.

Just my opinion. For direct laying the smack down while on the move we have pretty bad AoE.