Guild Wars 2

We are now voted as the class to look at (so far number 1 choice) Not sure if we should celebrate or be offended actually. Hahaha.

Anyway, lets all do a collaborative effort into making this as productive as we could be Rangers. I know we have a lot of issues to address, I am speculating on the next part which are issues that ANet should address in the top 3 classes.

Please lets dumb it down to your top 3 issues in Rangers. If you could only fix 3 things what would these be? and why? give examples on all 3 game play of the game (pve, pvp, wvw)

example format

1. Traits

Marksmanship: Minor etc etc

Organize traits to different trees

2. Pet AI

Suggestion for improvement

More commands

3. Weapon of your choice

Axe should focus more on…. condition or power?

Lets help the Devs or make it as painless as possible for the both of us.

Keep it productive

Pretty much every good suggestion can be found here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Ranger-Balance-PvP-WvW-PvE-PvX/first

I…am not sure about this. A lot have been discussed already, and we’ll only have to “redo” it later if we get “chosen”. But what the H…

1. Pet
Needs a complete re-haul, AI, tied in player mechanics, traits….everything. The pet concept is seriously flawed and wants to go everywhere and nowhere. Anything less than an overhaul is a band aid fix.

2. Utilities
A lot of our utilities are just so “meh”. And the ones that do kind of work needs the traits for them to work.

3. Weapons
Need defined roles. And no weapons auto attack should have silly limitations.

Traits

As everyone knows, Ranger traits are a mess and along with our poor active condition removal, I think this is what plagues the class more than anything.

There are too many important traits in Marksmanship for power and bow Rangers. Piercing Arrows, Spotter, Eagle Eye, and Signet of the Beastmaster. One or more of these needs to be combined with other traits to free up some space here. Since we’re unparalleled archers (according to the class description,) I’d like to see the range boost from Eagle Eye baked directly into the class with no option to increase range further and the damage boost from it combined with Skirmishing trait Quick Draw, since most other professions have an auxiliary effect on their cooldown reducing traits.

Empathic Bond is not only necessary, but it is also a grandmaster trait. I’d like to see this trait dropped down to Wilderness Survival master tier and I’d like to see another trait improved and moved to grandmaster tier. Maybe add a neat effect to Martial Mastery and make it a WS grandmaster trait. Having easier access Empathic Bond would really help open build diversity.

Many Beastmastery traits need to either be entirely reworked or combined, they’re a mess.

Pet AI

ANet has stated that fixing pet AI is opening a can of worms that they aren’t really willing to do yet. I do not expect pet AI improvement and because of that, I think they can placate much of the Ranger playerbase by slightly increasing the damage coefficient of all Ranger weapon skills to make up for the poor AI. This will do a lot to help power builds, which is where the class really needs a helping hand.

Weapons

Aside from having a slight coefficient damage increase, there are a few skills that need improving. Rangers could use a little (read: a lot of) party support and this is a good opportunity to do that. We all have a ton of ideas for this, so I’m not gonna type a gigantic list, all that needs to be said is that we have to be better at support. (Also, replace Cripple with Weakness on Monarch’s Leap for me ANet, pretty please.)

Utilities

- Sharpening Stone needs a serious buff. Maybe make it every attack for X duration causes a stack of bleeding, increase CD if need be.
- Lightning Reflexes NEEDS to remove all movement impairing conditions.
- Make Viper’s Nest and Frost Trap scale well with power so we can have nifty power trapper builds that make sense.
- Put a blast finisher on an activated Spike Trap.
- Move the damage bonus from Frost Spirit to Storm Spirit, give Frost Spirit a chance to Chill on hit; Change the active to freeze (like Ice Bow 5) enemies in the area for 1 second.
- Signet of the Hunt active grants your pet 3s of stealth. (Got this from another thread.)

ANIMAL CRUELTY
Please change all the skills that revolve around ‘kitten our pet’. At present time the GW2 Ranger is some kind of sadistic being who revels in animal cruelty for the sake of his own selfish needs. If anything we need changes to the skills that sacrifice/torment our pet.

The Ranger is a class that has to rely on his pet companion for ~30% damage. One of the main things I find odd about that is that the Ranger is also the only class that actively tries to kill his own pet all the time through his own utilities and traits.

Some quick suggestions:

• Shared Anquish – Change to “Incoming disabling conditions are transferred to your Foe instead.”
  Alternate suggestion: “Incoming disabling conditions Entangle your Foe.”
• Empathic Bond – Change to “Periodically cure conditions from you and your pet.”
• “Protect Me” – Change this to also grant Protection, Retaliation, Swiftness and Regeneration to the pet for the duration
• Signet of Renewal Active – Change to “Your pet cures conditions from nearby allies”

PETS
This might be another wild idea here, but has anyone at ANet ever considered separating Ranger pets from their npc animal versions?

The way I see it, the ‘juvenile’ pets and their npc versions are all linked. So a change to the pet would currently also result to a change in their npc counterpart. However, if they would all be added to a new separate ‘juvenile’ sub-class, they could then be reworked separately. This would allow ANet to fix the unresponsive F2 as well as ability to reliably hit targets etc. etc.

I mean, it’s the same way that Nightmare Court and Toxic Alliance npc’s are each part of a separate subsection. And a change to one would not affect the other.

I mean, we have a select number of pets to choose from (all with the ‘Juvenile’ header) so why not create a new group for them and move them there. Much easier to fix issues from entities in a separate group without having to worry about causing global issues to the whole animal kingdom of Tyria.

GLOBAL SUGGESTIONS I MADE OVER A YEAR AGO

• A Camouflage utility (be it as an opener or escape) – 3s Stealth + 10s Swiftness (similar to the Wintersday Scout ability). Could replace the active effect on Signet of the Hunt because currently that active effect is pretty pointless.
• Point Blank Shot: Change name to Sniper Shot and add a secondary effect. If you tap it once it will function as it currently does, but if you choose to press and hold the ability, it will channel and fire one shot dealing massive damage (as per the Wintersday Scout ability).
• Signets should apply their active component to Pet and Ranger by default without requiring you to use Signet of the Beastmaster.
• A utility or effect that allows Rangers to see stealthed targets. At present time stealth has no counter and is not fun to play against. The Ranger would be most befitting to provide that counter (being a tracker and having pets). See the video on Counterplay: http://youtu.be/BRBcjsOt0_g
• for the above, if signets would apply their active effects to Pet+Ranger without the need for Signet of the Beastmaster, that Grandmaster trait could be changed to Sight of the Beastmaster, allowing stealth detection as a passive ability and make stealthed targets appear in a similar fashion as we now see stealthed allies (that Predator like camouflage) if players spend 30 points in Marksmanship and choose the trait. In my humble opinion the Ranger should be the direct counter to a Thief.
• Some signet active effects need a rework because some of them are pointless (even dangerous) to use (try Signet of Renewal with Signet of the Beastmaster active).
• Some shouts need a rework as they mostly revolve around sacrificing your pet (~30% of your damage potential) at present time.
• A ‘fix’ for all the OBSTRUCTED messages when firing arrows when there’s absolutely no reason for them to become obstructed.
• More reliable AI and pathfinding for our pets and being able to hit moving targets (maybe increase their effective attack radius and cleave?).
• 75% reduction of AoE damage for our pets (with the option to trait it to 95%).
• F2 abilities that fire near-instantly. The pet just has to cancel any current action and immediately go through the F2 command.
• Some traits need to switch position as it makes no sense in having Trap traits in Skirmishing when they should be in Wilderness Survival. Same with traits like Martial Mastery which should have been in Skirmishing instead of Wilderness Survival. As stated above, trait lines are just one gigantic mess at the moment and make no sense nor offer any form of synergy.

For me the biggest issue is pets not scaling with gear (Rarity wise not nomenclature). I think its why many rangers feel ok with the class at lower lvls, but begin to feel underpower after hitting 80. Our pet are not scaling with exotic or ascended stats (maybe not even Rare).

I think a lot of this is opinion.

Conditions can be remove with shout with the correct load out the choice not to use it is an individual one but you cant say you don’t have any active condition remover. Dps vs stability has always been a major choice.

Pet ai is very predictable. On my system this isn’t really a delay in skill activation for the f2 skills. This is a issue with activating righ after summoning but its only about two seconds.

Weapon damage – pet damage is over looked a lot. They just focus on the damage the Ranger Pet damage needs to be considered and pet scaling may remove some of the feeling of being underpowered.

A suggestion about signets another user made in an old thread, it really could open new possibilities of party support:

UNTRAITED: by default active also apply to ranger
TRAITED: active will apply to allies as well

Keeping it focused and simple.

1. Fortifying Bond

• Stability instead of Vigor – that’s all I want.

2. Sword auto-chain Kick

• I want it to cleave. Devs aren’t going to change the animation, so at least have it cleave.

3. Spirits

• Storm Spirit Swiftness replaced with 3-seconds of Blind instead and keep the 10 second ICD – there are other means of getting swiftness and Storm Spirit can be a more viable group utility in all modes.
• Water Spirit ICD lessened to 2-seconds and active cleanses 2 conditions – make it useful for kittens sake.

Done.

1. BOWS: Remove the damage variation based on distance for the longbow. Rangers are mostly hated because of the fact that shooting from 1000+ range does not allow us to participate in the boons shared by the team.

2. PETS: their ai is incredibly unreliable, Im not exactly sure Anet understands that since we need to rely on our pets as a class specialty, we need them to be 100% reliable. Also, their damage is horrible, specially bears. Why would any ranger, aside SOME situational moments, would want to use a bear? Thus the reason the term “bearbow” was introduced. Pets are also no exactly too varied in their attacks and skills, I would really want bears to be more useful, but to differ more in their attacks and skills.

3. TRAITS: what a mess we got here. If rangers are unparalleled archers… why do we need to trait for piercing or to improve longbow range? At the very least, merge them both together.

Pretty much, the entire class is unfocused and broken. I even forgot to mention the terrible spirit design. Why would anyone prefer a spirit that can die easily over warrior banners? unlike our spirits, they dont need traits to move the banners and cannot be damaged.

Think about this:In most dungeons, party leaders accept 2 OR MORE of the same classes: warriors are always welcomed, same for guardians, elementalists, and mesmers. Heck, even the underdogs engineers and necros can participate in a dungeon, even 2 pairs of the same class… BUT as soon as 2 rangers are in a party, ONE of them has to GO. Why? ask yourselves why?

What can i suggest to someone that thinks that fury on crit on the Eagle Eye is too much?
What can i suggest to someone that put such a bad design in his game (pets) and he kept defending it, nerfing it and providing such a little help on it (wow now Bears F2 cleanses 2 conditions instead of 1, wow awesome)?

You should consider that too…

At the end of that CDI thread, even if we “win”.
Nothing spectacular will happen. The highest voted will get more Dev Time. Dev Time =/= Dev fixing anything or improving anything at all. It means they will be forced to look at the profession, find more exiting ways to circumvent the current issues, and execute one of these amazingly evasive updates. While the problems that has been haunting us will remain.

Detharos.3157:

Pretty much every good suggestion can be found here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Ranger-Balance-PvP-WvW-PvE-PvX/first

This.

Please do NOT start yet another thread about the issues with this class – use the one mentioned above.

1) Utilities, our utilities are absolutely abysmal compared to our other profs, spirits are nothing more than some fire and forget nonsense that requires absolutely no thought to use properly and are nothing more than AoE, kill able signets. Traps are meh without traits, signets are kitten without traits, and our shouts are just kitten overall, we need a total rework.

2) Traits our traits go hand in hand with our utility problem, half our traits are designed to bring our utilities up to par, the other half rely on us sacrificing our pet mechanic so we can even be competitive, except instead of taking a logical approach of “sacrificing our mechanic” so people COULD be petless should they choose, instead it just hinders them overall. Prime example, empathetic bond.

3) the pet itself needs serious work, you can work with it, and get it to work fine, but if we are going to be THE PET CLASS this ai needs a total overhaul and needs to not be something we constantly have to fight. Having to micro and position the pet? That’s fine, not being able to rely on our pet even getting their F2 off in a timely manor? That’s kittening stupid.

1. Fix sword one so you can actually control your character and play gw2 like an action mmo.

2. Pet survivabilitya nd AI, when you dodge your pet dodges or reduced damage on high hitting AoE attacks.

3. Buff the power builds in terms of survivability.

Here is something I thought of today, didn’t see it suggested before. Since its mostly power rangers that need help, and they mostly need help in survivability, how about Aegis for rangers. It would need to sit high up in skirmishing or marksmanship though, so bunker rangers don’t have access to it.

On the other hand I’m not sure how to feel about a lot of the things being suggested. I see a lot of posts in the poll thread by people asking for certain things for rangers. A lot of names I don’t remember seing on the ranger forums over the last year or so. Here are some things that I think people should seriously avoid as suggestions:

1. Removing the pet. It will never happen since half the class traits/utilities/skills are designed around pets. Anet will not do a 180 more than a year in and remove pets completely. They also won’t introduce perma stow for the same reason.
2. More hp for pets. No! Pets don’t need to be indestructible meat missiles. Only people who never faced a good beastmaster ranger would ever suggest this.
3. Pets should hit moving targets. Not all the time. It would be like conditions with direct damage. Send pet, deal 500 damage per second on average or higher.
4. Moar damage on longbow. Just how much damage do you want? 3-4k damage on squishy targets I would consider good damage. What longbow lacks is survivability.

you already got 5-6k on squishy targets with LB AA. Stop moaning about it. Just buff Rapid Fire and Barrage coefficiency (pr shot)

And you have 266,000 dmg on chickens, yeah…
You can’t produce 5-6k with LB’s LRS without being seriously buffed.
In fact, I do 2-3k with every shot, but in WvW, it hits ~1k…

pets:

• give melee pets 250 range, faster projectiles to ranged pets
• some sort of block evade every few seconds to help in dungeons
• AoE damage reduction
• scaling with ranger stats

weapons:

• Longbow should be an longrange AOE weapon
• shortbow no flanking requirement on #1
• A rifle should then become the range single target alternative (sniper), when new weapons were included
• Axe: shorter range (600) and more soft cc (?)
• sword #1 should allow dodging more propperly
• small overall damage buff especially ranged weapons

traits:

• are a huge mess, merging, reorganizing and changing is needed.

This has been on my mind for some time already, so here goes.
To improve trappers!
Utility:
Sharpening Stone removed. It’s a trash skill, we all know it.
It will be replaced by a Survival Skill, Bag of Traps, which contains our 4 current traps (no changes to them) and a new fifth trap, Smoke Trap, that dazes foes on the initial hit of the trap and then blinds foes, creating a smoke field (which we can blast for stealth yay!).

Now instead of Trap utilites, we get Preparations back from gw1. You can only have 1 Preparation active at a time. I’m sure some people can come up with some good Preparation idea, I can’t think of any now.

Now trapper rangers can get some utilities that help them survive, instead of loading their utility bar full of traps. Stuff like Lightning Reflexes or Signets.

But then comes a problem (I think). There will be 2 traits just for 1 utility skill (the traps). I don’t think any other profession has a trait just for a specific utility.

What do you think? Too OP?

Question, does anyone know how to combine threads? cause a lot of these progression mechanics topic are all over our forums. Thanks

REMOVE THE POSITIONAL REQUIREMENT IN SB 1.

we need to discuss the following things, in descending order of priority:

1. pet aoe resists, AI, and F2 cast time

2. horrible utilities that give almost no utility; signets need to be usable by pet and master without traiting, traps and spirits need to be completely reworked, shouts still need to be completely reworked because they rely on broken prof mechanic. UTILITIES MUST HAVE UTILITY, ideally for the entire group. we need a reliable on-demand condi wipe. LR MUST act like warrior horn #4. IT MUST. in that it removes all soft CC. it’s absolutely unacceptable for this utility to act without this effect. if it was buffed in this way, it would greatly increase ranger survivability. with this, SoR, Empathic Bond, HS, and if pets are buffed appropriately, i would be happy with ranger condi removal capacity.

3. weapons: HAVE A kitten VISION. decide if GS is to be a utility, survival, or damage weapon…pick one and make the kitten thing good at something. if for survival, just add that evade on swoop and be done with it. LB needs to feel like a sniping weapon that hits hard if ranger isnt punished. if SB is the single target lock down / dueling weapon, then give it another evade, buff flank effect for power builds, and make non-AA attacks hit 200-300% harder (reduce AA damage if needed). SB #2 is garbage. OH axe #5 needs more because no one cares about rifle warriors, sb thieves and rangers. cast while moving? or give it stability. MH axe needs a complete rework. it’s completely useless outside of 1v1’s and condi builds. sword is actually good, i like it. warhorn #4 needs utility attached to it.

4. traits. theyre actually not terrible. it’s just that our utilities and weapons blow. please stop tunnel visioning on trait reworks. our problems are at the very foundation (profession mechanic, weapons and utilities). ranger has a rotten foundation that was NEVER addressed prior to release. unacceptable and unbecoming of any developer.

if anyone cares, i’ll be contributing lots to the CDI thread. i have A) ideas for complete reworks, and b) ideas for quicker fixes if they dont want to dedicate more resources to revamping this profession

AEFA.9035:

If you could only fix 3 things what would these be?

1. PvE skill-splits
2. PvE skill-splits
3. PvE skill-splits

….b/c removing their outright refusals to do PvE skill-splits, is the only way this class is ever going to be fixed. We already went through this in GW1. They never actually put PvE Ranger on par with the rest of the classes there either, but atleast they didn’t allow every single PvP nerf to continually degrade it all the way down to PARAGON STATUS

The LEAST they can do here, is repeat that pattern.

….come to think of it, Paragon would become pretty Overpowered actually in THIS game for everything but Dungeons given how many people tend to cluster together at once even in PvE. Especially for Zerg vs. Zerg. So actually, they could even improve ranger probably just by bringing it up to paragon status which just goes to show how utterly BAD they’ve been in the actual metas that GW2 creates. (I actually did this to some degree with Nature-shouts build …. it’s not quite up to par with Paragons but it was a glimmer of hope)

AEFA.9035:

We are now voted as the class to look at (so far number 1 choice) Not sure if we should celebrate or be offended actually. Hahaha.

Anyway, lets all do a collaborative effort into making this as productive as we could be Rangers. I know we have a lot of issues to address, I am speculating on the next part which are issues that ANet should address in the top 3 classes.

Please lets dumb it down to your top 3 issues in Rangers. If you could only fix 3 things what would these be? and why? give examples on all 3 game play of the game (pve, pvp, wvw)

example format

1. Traits

Marksmanship: Minor etc etc

Organize traits to different trees

2. Pet AI

Suggestion for improvement

More commands

3. Weapon of your choice

Axe should focus more on…. condition or power?

Lets help the Devs or make it as painless as possible for the both of us.

Keep it productive

Fix F2. It doesn’t go off very often and not often enough to even warrant it being a “skill”, so either remove it or fix it – it’s been like this since pre-Release – unacceptable.

Fix all the bugs before adding skills or changing our skills around again.

We are not the only profession with bugs but I’ve been stuck in more walls and siege engines in the last two months than EVER before in the first year.

It really seems with each “change” that the very things that make Ranger “special” never get the fixes (as well as other professions) but get “buffs” that still do us no good in WvW and Dungeons.

I don’t have a single complaint about PvE but WvW and Dungeons are STILL staying and meaning it:

“Uh, do you have another character, we don’t accept Rangers in our group/dungeon.”

The complaints are real.

The fixes are desperately needed for what is already broken before going on with “new” skills or content.

PLEASE! FIX the professions FIRST and then change our meta but don’t give us more without fixing what has been broken since before the release of the game.

WvW and PvP are problems – one and two shotted by warriors, thieves, mesmers and guardians… the only professions I have seen have any vulnerability to Rangers are other Rangers and Necros – easily proven – easily seen on many videos across the net.

The “downed state” is a joke since my “knock the guy to the ground so you have a chance to get up” almost never works unless it’s an NPC then it’s about half the time. This mechanic, the downed state, needs to be fixed or completely removed.