Guild Wars 2

It makes no sense to punish condition damage on rangers ranged weapon by adding a positional requirement to apply a bleed.

Engineers pistols and thievses shotbow aplly bleed and aoe on their 1 attack with no positional requirement. Discuss

Those weapons you just mentioned fire at about half the rate of the short-bow’s crossfire.

Heck, explosive bullets do less damage, and have a shorter bleed time to.

No.
L2P, a requirement is not a punishment.
Tagging a requirement on a low attack speed/bleed duration auto-attack with no redeeming features is a punishment.
The shortbow isn’t that.
Not being the best condition weapon in the game hands down is not a problem.

The bleeds are easy to land due the the very forgiving attack angle that is considered flanking.

Plus, having to work a LITTLE bit on positioning is what keeps the shortbow auto-attack from becoming too monotonous for me.

They should instead increase the bleed duration.

Tracker.6483:

The bleeds are easy to land due the the very forgiving attack angle that is considered flanking.

Plus, having to work a LITTLE bit on positioning is what keeps the shortbow auto-attack from becoming too monotonous for me.

The weapon is its spammable (everything else is just occasional situational stuff) so yeah the spammable being anything but blindly spammable is nice, at least imo.

gadenp.7586:

They should instead increase the bleed duration.

Its 3s on a short cast.
That is good.
lol

You’ll never reliably get to flank a good PvP’er.

no, but you’ll sure as heck get a lot of damage out on a fleeing target. Especially with those stuns from behind, and cripples preventing escape that thieves/engineers pistols won’t give you.

garethh.3518:

Tracker.6483:

The bleeds are easy to land due the the very forgiving attack angle that is considered flanking.

Plus, having to work a LITTLE bit on positioning is what keeps the shortbow auto-attack from becoming too monotonous for me.

The weapon is its spammable (everything else is just occasional situational stuff) so yeah the spammable being anything but blindly spammable is nice, at least imo.

gadenp.7586:

They should instead increase the bleed duration.

Its 3s on a short cast.
That is good.
lol

I did not mind the 3s still I saw the warrior rifle bleed time. Between their non-positional 6sec bleed bleeding shot and kill shot. It makes me feel look at my SB in a whole new dimmer light.

Not saying SB is not good, just what the heck is with the warrior rifle.

Warriors are overal bad with conditions.
To put it in perspective, I haven’t seen a single condition dmg warrior using a rifle.
The class/weapon isn’t made for it.
Having a decent condition on a spammable in a class with overall otherwise bad condition dmg isn’t actually a great thing. They still are terrible at applying and making use of conditions.

Rangers aren’t.
Rangers have good condi utilities and other abilities on shortbow and other weapons besides shortbow unlike warrior.

A spec is more than just a spammable on a weapon.
Can’t really just bluntly compare the 2, I’m on the fence but I’d still say I’d rather have shortbow than rifle on the ranger class right now (faster attack speed, head shot, poison volley, the leap back-evade)

They should just put a win button on the short bow to stop all this QQing from SB rangers.

Classes are different! Surprise!

Normally I’ld say no, since it is a skill dependent mechanic.
But:
Given the fact that a Warrior with less than 750 C.damage can apply a sure bleeding (~695) with more than twice the power of a Ranger with 1200 c. damage (~305)
-> I have to agree that a sure bleeding on Shortbows ’ld only be fair.

The shortbow’s rof is nearly double a warrior’s though.

I personally think they need to make conditions more difficult to apply; the game shouldn’t be press button receive bacon (especially since we have auto-targeting doing the work for us…).

Sollith.3502:

I personally think they need to make conditions more difficult to apply; the game shouldn’t be press button receive bacon (especially since we have auto-targeting doing the work for us…).

They need to remove the 25-stack limitation /:

I never had a problem with flanking in PvE because my pet was always able to hold aggro, at least with single targets. That was, until I got to Orr, where mobs completely ignore my pets and run at light speed towards me- now i’m lucky if I can keep 2 stacks of bleed up.

In WvW I very rarely get to apply any bleeds as flanking the zerg is suicide. The only exceptions are those rare occasions when fighting a small group, or when my enemy is running away.

Due to the above I have to agree that the positional requirement should be removed.

I have nothing against positional requirements, but if they exist ranger should have more benefits. It’s obvious: if ranger’s way to applying conditions is difficulter than other professions’ ways, ranger’s condition damage or ability to stacking conditions should be rather higher. I play as condition-based ranger and if I attacking enemy from behind or from the side my damage becames just average, like other professions can deal without choosing a position.

Switch to Axe. Theres a reason why you can use it. Mobs running after you? 5 stack bleed stack to da face. Traited spike traps with lynx pet. Dagger or torch offhand. I can stack bleeds like crazy.

The SB isnt a magic button.

Shortbow outdamages every other Ranger weapon even without the bleed. For the positional requirement to be removed, you’d have to drop the damage on every other ability on the weapon across the board. Which would be awful.

Positional requirement adds just a tiny bit of skill to a weapon that already requires very little. It’s also wrong to argue that you’ll never flank a good player in PvP; any player that tries to run from you is automatically flanked, and is taking a punishing amount of bleed stacks for it. Rangers are ridiculously hard for most classes to run from because of this.

Bottom line: the class has plenty of problems, but the positional requirement on Crossfire isn’t one of them.

I just don’t like how this works out in practice. If you’re built for condition damage, the damage difference is just too extreme. When you’re not applying the bleed you do no damage, otherwise it seems very strong. Aka, if someone is running at you (typically in duels with melee) you do no damage to them.

At higher competitive levels, such a large loss in damage is an auto loss. In competitive tourneys duels happen often, and they’ll likely know that facing you removes a big chunk of you’re damage. Your damage ends up depending more on their knowledge/skill with facing off against Rangers, than your play.