Guild Wars 2

I see so many posts with pages of fixes needed for the ranger.
Is there anything that would be simple for ANET?

I look at the sheer amount of work it would take to “fix” key features of the ranger and think If I were ANET that simply would not be where I would put my time (forget about the emotional fact I play a ranger). Question is what is the fastest way to make a fix that doesn’t require CONSIDERABLE coding or balancing?

Would love a list that looks like:

Do Blah (A for easiness) (10 for effectiveness)

In short, A-F on easy of fix and 1-10 on effectiveness. A is easiest. 10 is most effective.

Frankly, I’m not seeing a way to balance effective solutions with easy fixes.

-We q attacks, so do pets. An easy fix would be to change the coding so that pets F2 has priority (Skips q)
-Pets die due to AOE splurge, easy fix would be 50% damage reduction to AOE moves in PvE

Any other fix would simply be to increase viability of builds and…well fun.

They already figured out the easiest fix for them. Ignore all ranger feedback from the last 16 months.

Really depends how extreme you want these quick fixes to be.

Should ANet throw in the towel and admit that the pet will never provide this class with the bare minimum the players would deem acceptable and just drop their damage to about 150dps and increase our damage to compensate? This may sound extreme, but the problems with this class are at its very core. They aren’t going to be easy things to fix.

Another easy fix but not well received by the community is my idea about giving Longbow an aimed shot skill. Since we have spiked trap, frost trap, and muddy terrain all providing very similar things, I say we remove spike trap. It’s a very poorly designed trap. Replace it with Barrage. Barrage will now immobalize on the first salvo for 2 seconds. It will also bleed on each hit. This way it’s effectively a fully traited spike trap that provides much more damage. Replace the longbow skill with Aimed Shot. It’s a clone of the Warrior’s Rifle’s burst skill.

That’s a relatively easy change that at least makes Longbow a ‘complete’ weapon and one that will finally synergize with some of the other traits in the game.

But in all seriousness… there are simply too many issues with this class that are far too complex to resolve quickly. This is why ANet shouldn’t have completely ignored this class for the past year. If this class got even a fraction of the attention Warrior’s got perhaps things wouldn’t be in such a miserable state.

A year and we still have:
Bloated trait lines.
Almost no AE or burst potential at all.
Poor pet scaling.
Poor pet ai.
Poor pet responsiveness.
Poorly implemented longbow.
Unengaging shortbow playstyle.

If you can find a easy solution to any of this I’ll be amazed.

After those 16 months i’d say the hardest thing is to convince you that those aren’t issues, but Subjective things you struggle with.

The entire combat system is very dynamic and if pet management wasn’t as rewarding/punishing as it is now. I wouldn’t be playing it by now.

I’m no special cookie and hardly a hardcore player, but what if i told you my pet rarely died in pve apart from some miss timings from my part and stuff like jademaw-pick-the-crystal bit.

In spvp players should be rewarded for kiting you pet as much as you be satified for snaring an enemy to death.

And on WvW… oh c’mon why would a pet have to survive an entire zerg stream of aoe, just watch out you have a virtual added responsability take care of your loyal companion.

Pet F2 could be made to cancel other pet attacks and cast immediately.

Pets could be made able to attack while moving, like players can. As it is, (almost?) every pet attack roots the pet, so they will infrequently hit a moving player. Not an issue for PvE, but a huge issue for PvP and WvW. Looks like a simple fix, but would probably require some pet damage rebalancing, and a lot of animation work to not look dorky*.

(*Pet animations are generally “full body” animations, which are based around the pet remaining in one place as the attack takes place, like a bear’s maul attack. A player’s attacks are generally limited to the upper body, so the legs can display a running animation while the upper body wields a weapon. Most pet movement animations could not be played at the same time as their attack animations. This is why pets with ranged and leap attacks hit players more often.)

I totally agree that pet attacks should not root them in place. Other wise in sPvP or WvW rangers are basically missing out on a medium to large (depending on build) chunk of damage that has nothing to do with our skill as a player. Honestly if this was fixed I’d be happy playing ranger in sPvP again.

Somebody mentioned in another thread an easy idea I kinda liked. Give us more pets to swap. Like say we can have 4 pets to swap. If one dies it gets put on 60 second cooldown. Having 4 pets we would pretty much always have pet uptime.

Swapping more pets is a good idea.