Guild Wars 2

At this current juncture I dont see any reason to play a ranger over a warrior.

I wanted to play a good ranged DPS class. I figured ranger would be the best ranged dps in the game. Thats with elementalist aside.

So I leveled a ranger to 80. While waiting for my friend to catch up to 80, so we could farm together, I leveled a warrior 80.

It seems sad to me that a warrior just has far better ranged skills and utilities.

Ranger has a nice assortment of abilities, but they just cant compare to a warrior. It seems to me that warriors get their cake and eat it too.

Im addicted to the 1500 range on the longbow, but Im also addicted to being petless and having kill shot.. which is AMAZING.

Any thoughts on this?

I kind of agree.
One thing I noticed while playing both was that I enjoyed the warrior’s ranged abilities much more than the ranger’s. I really like the burst skills for the bow and rifle. By comparison, the pet abilities were kind of meh.

However, one thing that surprised me about the warrior compared to the ranger was the lack of survivability in my opinion. I remember having a much easier time surviving veterans and groups with my ranger than my warrior. Having the pet tank and being able to swap them out and the good assortment of pet/player survivability skills made me feel safer against challenging opponents. But maybe it was just me.

I’ve been told that the warrior is the same as a ranger but without the pet and has a little better utility, have not tried one yet but soon I probably will stop playing ranger and try a warrior.

I now after getting my ranger to 80 have the exact opposite opinion over my warrior. My warrior even with specced into survivability just can not survive. Having only mostly single target cripples and immobilizes it REALLY sucks in dungeons. I die a lot on warrior and it feels like after my two measly dodges a strong wind will blow me over.

However my ranger is sooooooo much more survivable. I can dodge for days and avoid a huge portion of dmg. I can up the survivability of my team just by keeping mobs off of them. I used to think on my warrior that healing shouts was a pretty good spec for dungeoning. Now i know its terrible.

As soon as i complete the last two areas for world completion on warrior he will be retired for good.

Rangers are better overall than Warriors in ranged. That said its not like they are twice as good, warriors are a good ranged class same as rangers can do good melee damage if they choose to do so. In general our ranged arsenal is better as our the traits that compliment it and our general play style. The one huge advantage I give to Warriors is head shot. I wish we had something similar. Technically our pets are a far greater source of DPS than head shot, but the burst of it is rather nice.

Well rangers, aren’t meant for burst DPS that is true. We trade off some of that for survivability I believe. We deal steady good damage over time. We have to understand the concept behind a ranger to use it to its full potential. We can’t bring in the play style a burst warrior would do to a ranger, well you can try and deal some good damage but still not the same of course.

In PvP, it’s tricky to handle the burst DPS classes, but there are ways around it. However, rangers especially from experience are always the last one standing in dungeons, I’m always holding it out until the rest of the team respawns and comes back so things don’t reset. We solo champions. It’s a tactical strategic steady type of approach.

But that said, I took my ranger into pure melee combat rushing. My build is pure power/precision with some vit, without speccing my pet at all. Warriors were dying around me left and right and I still stood strong and took down swarms with crazy AoE around me… so despite warriors being good at burst dps, rangers are very versatile and strong. I think its in PvP where rangers really have a tougher time compared to a warrior. So strategies will need to be adapted.

Once you master Kiting you will enjoy your ranger more.

A warrior running at 90%+ crit (Buffed which you can maintain near constantly) using sword/horn – ranged Rifle seeming better than bow has very good survivability if using heal proc’s on the weapons. But it’s majority melee to ranged. Quite fun.

Warrior CD’s on thing’s I’ve played with I liked more. It is sort of frustrating having great finisher options and only 1 field that I found as a warrior.

I’ve sort of realized I was asking ranger to do things it isn’t necessarily set up for with current utility CD’s and am discovering more usable builds. Ohh how I wish one could save builds in HOTM.

What was that build I really enjoyed again……

Usually the only way a ranger ever beats my rifle build is if I get within 600 range and fall victim to traps and bleed stacking. I kinda learned my lesson on that so I always fight at 900-1200 range. With immobilize/cripple every 8 seconds combined with 100%swiftness and leap/bullrush/remove cripple/immobilize if I have to, it is very easy to keep that distance. Longbow rangers aren’t much of a threat because my passive healing every 3 seconds is something like 1020. I can dodge rapid fire but I rather just let my retaliation tac on another 2,400 damage. They probably already hit me with hunters call and took 3,800 damage. Once my bleeds start ticking, they panic and try to get away but don’t.

There was a ranger I fought that made me think twice about what I was doing. I am thinking he was using the runes of speed because he was moving super fast. He also had a necro with him all the time and they could stack conditions super fast and get super close. They pretty much melted people so I never fought them alone, I ran like a wuss I think he hunter called with sharpen stone, switched to shortbow, hasted auto attack as he got close, then 5 poisoned, used traps. His necro friend was right behind him stacking more stuff.

I played EQ I can druid kite and necro push for days on end. In PVE I believe the ranger is amazing. But for RVR… we lack. 9-14k kill shots put a sick smile on my face. I do love the rangers survivability and I do love the 1500+ range 3.1k auto attack shots. I guess take the good with the bad and go with it.

It helps if you see the kill shot coming and dodge it as a ranger, but equally skilled ranged warriors will always beat rangers one vs one, they just do a crapload more damage than anything a ranger can dish out, and all the warrior has to do to avoid bleed builds, is face the ranger so he can’t flank.

I do think warrior damage might get tweaked once the balance patches come though, it can’t go on like this where warriors do over five times more dps than most other professions, both ranged and melee.

Once they see the numbers they gathered and compare the insane damage output to the other professions, things will probably change, it’s not like warriors have low survivability that needs to be balanced with high damage.. since they have the highest health and the strongest armor, as well as superior health regeneration, superior shield skills and superior utilities such as endure pain, wich offers a non-restrictive 5 second total invulnerability.. even the guardian elite renewed focus can’t come close to that.