Guild Wars 2

Well it has been a while now since the ranger buffs for Rapid Fire and everything else,
so i was just wondering would it be possible to change Rapid Fire by shooting 5 arrows instead of 10 and keep damage of the skill same?

Maybe its just me but it looks a bit stupid atm with shooting arrows like a machine gun

No I prefer it stays the way it is. I love my hand operated MG

Also why change things if they work okay???

Well yeah it works well right now and changing it to shoot 5 arrows instead of 10 shouldnt mess it up. I just think it would seem a bit more realistic by shooting little bit slower but more damaging arrows

How realistic is barrage ? And don’t let us even start to talk about magic ..

Yea i cinda knew that word was going to bite me in the behind sooner or later

But anyways im pretty sure you know what i mean ^^

Haha while i see what you mean. At the same time im leery of it.

Does it keep the same animation speed? If thats the case the arrows are actually gonna come pretty far apart from the perspective of the person shooting and hte person dodging it. It loses a large amount of the saturation style damage it uses to kill atm.

Does the animation shorten? If so that runs a VERY high risk for the ranger AND the target. Probably more so the ranger against certain classes. And VERY much so for certain builds/classes getting hit by it.

Evasion thieves will pretty much stop being afraid of rapid fire except in ambush situations if we shorten the animation to match the new arrow count. However clases like mesmers which rely on getting up clones or using an ability to get into stealth might end up getting absolutely shredded by thsi if there dodges are down. Rangers in general will have a very hard time landing attacks against people with vigor. Its already difficult to kill in todays game against people with multiple gap closers. Rapid fire is as awesome for us right now as it is because it lets us deal damage while there closing the gap. Where before it simply didn’t do anything to most people as they closed on us. And with a further shortened cast time with less arrows but same damage we run the risk of once again being helpless against anything with a dodge.

What I think your suggestion would do is on one hand turn the skill into something that simply wrecks a very small number of builds but on the other hand leaves us open to the vast majority of builds that have access to vigor,invulns,reflects,absorbs, and gap closers. Im not certain that would be a fair tradeoff for rangers in my experience.

Ah no i ment to keep the animation (cast time) the same at it is right now.

Only to change the arrow count from 10 to 5 so you would shoot 5 arrows instead of 10 in the same time but those arrows would do 100% more dmg so dodging would still evade a part of the dmg but i dont think that would change much.

So in the end cast time of the skill would be the same, dmg the skill does would be the same but it would shoot arrows slower so it would look/sound a bit more realistic

There is one thing that hits it a bit harder and that would be aegis since it would block 1 of the stronger arrows instead of 1 of the weaker ones

Aval Im afraid that would change quite a bit more than just making it look realistic. Rapid fire kills through saturation. Its why its almost as effective against guardians as it is against mesmers. Thanks to its 10 arrow attack it can take a block or two and only lose 10-20% of its damage. This is vital against things like meditation guardians or even any guard running a focus offhand. Being able to continuously hit a target is a method of chewing through active defense. Going for realism on this skill would MASSIVELY increase the potential damage that blocks,dodges,and blinds,projectile destruction,as well as LOS would negate.

I could see this change being made as a BALANCE change later on (not in the current meta however. At high level play a ranger is STILL considered nothing more than a free kill or something to be ignored) if the meta switched to a setup where longbow rangers actually NEEDED to be toned down. As it is though they probably wont be balance changed that drastically due to the massive amount of counters available to stopping ranged attacks.

For the sake of realism however. I think youd end up killing this skill entirely in the current meta against some of the only top end builds it actually works against. I dont think realism is a good reason to make this change.

Yeah ty for pointing that out, and yes now i agree it would actually hurt quite a bit rangers amt if change like that would come without anything else to support it

It wasn’t a bad idea at all. Just something that would be unfortunate to implement at this time. You definetly did the right thing by bringing it up though. If you come up with another method. its worth posting it in the future.

No i love the skill as it is
the only reason why some one is not kicking rangers from dungeons no more is this !!!

Gele.2048:

No i love the skill as it is
the only reason why some one is not kicking rangers from dungeons no more is this !!!

Actually they’ll still get kicked because camping LB is still bad. As for OP yeah they can’t really do anything with out ruining the skill for pvp.

It’s an idea that, from an aesthetic viewpoint works wonderfully, but from a gameplay viewpoint is horrible.

I agree that the ranger rapid fire looks ridiculous, but it works.

Changing number of hits for Rapid Fire would change the amount of times you can proc. with the skill. (Less hits = less chances for proc.) That would be changing more than the aesthetics of the game and cause more of an uproar than keeping it at 10.

I say, don’t let the unrealistic/inhuman speeds it takes to launch Rapid Fire ruin your gaming experience. Its a fantasy world, let fantasy take over your imagination for a bit and leave the real world behind when you log in.

Shadelang.3012:

Aval Im afraid that would change quite a bit more than just making it look realistic. Rapid fire kills through saturation. Its why its almost as effective against guardians as it is against mesmers. Thanks to its 10 arrow attack it can take a block or two and only lose 10-20% of its damage. This is vital against things like meditation guardians or even any guard running a focus offhand. Being able to continuously hit a target is a method of chewing through active defense. Going for realism on this skill would MASSIVELY increase the potential damage that blocks,dodges,and blinds,projectile destruction,as well as LOS would negate.

I could see this change being made as a BALANCE change later on (not in the current meta however. At high level play a ranger is STILL considered nothing more than a free kill or something to be ignored) if the meta switched to a setup where longbow rangers actually NEEDED to be toned down. As it is though they probably wont be balance changed that drastically due to the massive amount of counters available to stopping ranged attacks.

For the sake of realism however. I think youd end up killing this skill entirely in the current meta against some of the only top end builds it actually works against. I dont think realism is a good reason to make this change.

Avala.9675:

Yeah ty for pointing that out, and yes now i agree it would actually hurt quite a bit rangers amt if change like that would come without anything else to support it

Wow a great logical explanation of why something would cause a problem and an op that doesn’t blindly ignore it and keep arguing for the sake of arguing. This is the best thread I’ve seen in awhile. Thank you to both of you.

I would opt for 50% less damage output if they increased our skirmishing survivabilty. Bring our auto attacks with sword up to par with thief. Reduce some of the cooldowns on our evade skills. Get rid of animation for signet of the wild and make it a stunbreaker. Reduce the amount of stabilty Rampage as one gives you to around 12seconds. Small things like this.

Im sorry frowny but that would absolutely DESTROY completely the ranged part of a ranger. And the RAO as one change would kill nearly every BM build left. Theres already only a few that are even remotely viable…All youd do is improve condi,melee builds at the cost of nearly every other variance.