Guild Wars 2

Now that I’ve played several professions and come back to Ranger, I find that a lot of the skills available are awkward to use. So basically there’s 5 lines of slot skills that can be used. Pet skills, Signets, Survival skills, Spirits and Traps.

Pet skills
For me these aren’t worth using at all, because my pet spends majority of any time during fight dead. Pets are good for one use of their special F2 ability at the start of the fight before they are knocked down.

Signets
Signets are the best Ranger slot skills in my opinion, but even then their effects are odd for the Ranger role. Signet of the Wild has permanent spot on my bar for the 25% movement speed bonus it provides. Condition removal, health regen and toughness are quite passive bonuses. I like to use longbow from 1500 distance, so survival is not an issue.

Survival skills
Quickening Zephyr is another permanent skill on my bar for the fantastic Quickness it provides. Rest of the abilities are too passive (save for maybe Muddy Terrain) for a profession that outranges everyone else in a fight. Sharpening stone is worth considering if you’re specced to condition damage (I’m not).

Spirits
Spirits are interesting idea for stationary combat, like DPS’ing down a boss that doesn’t move. Spirit of Frost improves expected damage output by 3.5%. I haven’t done the math to figure out how many Might stacks that equals. Sun spirit gives a chance for 3 second burning every 10 seconds. Nice if you’re specced to condition damage.

Traps
I don’t get traps. You can only have a single one and it is disabled when you move away from it. Trap effects are mostly light damage with conditions. If the effects were actually worthwhile (like 3-4 second knockdown) then using them would have strategic implications. Another passive skill type that is basically just hoping your enemies make a mistake.

When I think of Ranger archetype, I’m mostly looking forward to DPS from range. Ranger in GW2 has a lot of skills that are defensive. For the first time I’m actually starting to consider racial skills to fill the gap here. Seed Turret from Sylvari complement the idea of ranged damage dealing. Charr’s Battle Roar has no place in Warrior’s skillbar, but Rangers would be happy to have extra damage boost with no opportunity cost.

Shouts, signets, and spirits are bad. Traps are good when traited. All other skills (mostly LR, QZ and Muddy Terrain) are okay-ish. That’s the opinion of someone who has clocked 500 hours on his ranger.

Agadar has it right…
nothing to add

Agadar.4931:

Shouts, signets, and spirits are bad. Traps are good when traited. All other skills (mostly LR, QZ and Muddy Terrain) are okay-ish. That’s the opinion of someone who has clocked 500 hours on his ranger.

And there you prove that playing a class X hours doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve learned how to use your skills.

Traps are kinda good, but they are lacking of something additional to it. Once i suggested condi removal each trap and tad higher basic damage to make it more bursty. 100-200 ain’t that much.
There’s one good survivality skill which evades you back, but it has 45s cooldown…
They need to work alot on rangers. Need to add something to make them stronger or tougher to kill.
Look at engi, he can confusion you every few sec and with good condi damage you’re basicly unable to attack for few seconds. Else it’s 2k damage to you or more.

paleeshi.1924:

Agadar.4931:

Shouts, signets, and spirits are bad. Traps are good when traited. All other skills (mostly LR, QZ and Muddy Terrain) are okay-ish. That’s the opinion of someone who has clocked 500 hours on his ranger.

And there you prove that playing a class X hours doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve learned how to use your skills.

ignore the troll

Zenith.6403:

Now that I’ve played several professions and come back to Ranger, I find that a lot of the skills available are awkward to use. So basically there’s 5 lines of slot skills that can be used. Pet skills, Signets, Survival skills, Spirits and Traps.

All skills, as for any other class, are situational. Some are better than others and highly depend on your setup. But most can be fit in some sort of build and situation (pve, wvw, dungeons, pvp). Some are indeed not worth using. Still I won’t deny that many of our utilities would do good with some improvement.

Pet skills
For me these aren’t worth using at all, because my pet spends majority of any time during fight dead. Pets are good for one use of their special F2 ability at the start of the fight before they are knocked down.

I assume you mean shouts.
Search and rescue is great in dungeons, I always use this one. However it’s extremly buggy. The res rate is slow and range is small, but it works on dead players. I think if you let the pet die first and then send it out, it would be better so that pet doesn’t die and get interrupted while rezing. It seems to work sometimes at least.

“Sick Em” I’m currently using in my sPvP BM build, where the pets doesn’t usually die so much.

Signets
Signets are the best Ranger slot skills in my opinion, but even then their effects are odd for the Ranger role. Signet of the Wild has permanent spot on my bar for the 25% movement speed bonus it provides. Condition removal, health regen and toughness are quite passive bonuses. I like to use longbow from 1500 distance, so survival is not an issue.

I use signet of wild and resolve in my pvp build. Signets can also be great with 30 points in marksmanship to get the active effect on you for invulnerability, extra stability and more damage. Downside is the long CD. =/

Survival skills
Quickening Zephyr is another permanent skill on my bar for the fantastic Quickness it provides. Rest of the abilities are too passive (save for maybe Muddy Terrain) for a profession that outranges everyone else in a fight. Sharpening stone is worth considering if you’re specced to condition damage (I’m not).

I love lightning reflexes personally, great skill when you’re out of dodges. I like using Muddy Terrain in WvW.

Spirits
Spirits are interesting idea for stationary combat, like DPS’ing down a boss that doesn’t move. Spirit of Frost improves expected damage output by 3.5%. I haven’t done the math to figure out how many Might stacks that equals. Sun spirit gives a chance for 3 second burning every 10 seconds. Nice if you’re specced to condition damage.

Probably one of the hardest skills to use. However someone mentioned in an other post that they have 1200 range. So if you put them behind you for example on top of the wall when you’re defending a tower in WvW or at certain bosses where you know they will be out of reach for AoE. Stone spirit for example would benefit full group giving protection, same as frost for more damage. Spirits of Nature is really great, I wish it could be a utility instead with a bit lesser CD. :P (wishful thinking, heh).

Traps
I don’t get traps. You can only have a single one and it is disabled when you move away from it. Trap effects are mostly light damage with conditions. If the effects were actually worthwhile (like 3-4 second knockdown) then using them would have strategic implications. Another passive skill type that is basically just hoping your enemies make a mistake.

But they are great for condition builds. =/ Probably more or less necessary as well since our weapons make it hard to stack conditions. And trapper build is popular in spvp, great against thief especially. Though I’m generally not found of condition ranger by itself. Sun spirit btw would go handy with some trapper utilities.

Playing with 2 traps (spike and fire) up pretty much all the time on my ranger, idk what you mean about only being able to have 1 up at a time. You can drop 2 or even 3 traps on top of each other, and have all 3 go off when an enemy steps into them. Spike trap is really useful in wvw, where I play mostly, as the immobilize (no idea where this comes from, heard it was from traiting into skirmishing) can be used for npc/player kiting, stopping runners, pinning enemies in aoe storms, or stopping someone from entering your cap circle as you are about to flip it.

Also, lately i’ve been seeing my traps go off at a long distance. Kinda not sure if its a bug, but if I set down a spike trap, move out of normal range of it, and see an enemy set it off, the visuals of the spikes coming out of the ground kind of teleport to ~600 range from me, while the player still gets hit with the bleeds and immobilize.

jamesigall.5938:

Playing with 2 traps (spike and fire) up pretty much all the time on my ranger, idk what you mean about only being able to have 1 up at a time. You can drop 2 or even 3 traps on top of each other, and have all 3 go off when an enemy steps into them. Spike trap is really useful in wvw, where I play mostly, as the immobilize (no idea where this comes from, heard it was from traiting into skirmishing) can be used for npc/player kiting, stopping runners, pinning enemies in aoe storms, or stopping someone from entering your cap circle as you are about to flip it.

Also, lately i’ve been seeing my traps go off at a long distance. Kinda not sure if its a bug, but if I set down a spike trap, move out of normal range of it, and see an enemy set it off, the visuals of the spikes coming out of the ground kind of teleport to ~600 range from me, while the player still gets hit with the bleeds and immobilize.

Trapper’s expertise grants the 1 second immob to spike trap.

I personally run the health and movement signets, and lightning reflexes.

You can say how mediocre they are all you want but I routinely troll zergs because they just can’t bring me down, which is directly related to these skills.

Not many classes use a passive speed buff and don’t run swiftness builds either, meaning without using any skills I can either kite or escape rather easily. It’s extremely useful with the short bow because I can stack dmg while fools chase me.

Health signet combined with all of my healing power let’s me ignore most attacks. Last night I lured a group of 6 for about 5 minutes before I finally got them into our supply camp where with the help of the supervisor I slaughtered them all(obv some were up lvled and undergeared, that being said I don’t have a single exotic). My passive health regen also let’s me ignore most dmg conditions because my health regen ticks for more health than they do dmg.

Lightning reflexes allows me to safely engage groups of 5. After I’ve used all 5 of my dodges I can burst that to basically reset the right. Combine sword skill 2 with LR and you can cover a lot of ground.

I think our slot skills are generally OK, they just take quite a bit more build synergy to maximize the benefits.