Guild Wars 2

Starting with my thought on the weapons.

Axe (main hand): As neat as it is to throw an endless supply of axes at enemies..it really isn’t that great compared to the axe skills for other professions, besides the Winter’s Bite giving chill and weakness. Splitblade only works well if the target’s right in front of you, which clashes with the ranged nature of the other skills. I think it might be better to give rangers the ability to use main-hand daggers, then put the current main hand axe skills on the main hand dagger while giving new abilities to the main hand axe (Although..I’m still not sure what would be good replacement skills at this time.)

Axe (off hand): Path of Scars is fine as is. I think that Whirling Defense should also give a few seconds of stability along with the retaliation, so that enemies don’t just CC you since you’re rooted in place while performing it.

Sword: Perhaps have Hornet’s Sting inflict torment? Or make your pet’s next attack inflict torment? Eh..the sword skills are fine mostly, despite the rooting animations for the sword chain taking some getting used to at first. Oh, and maybe make the leap on the last part of the chain count as a leap finisher?

Dagger: (off hand) If giving the main hand sword torment isn’t a great idea, maybe it could be applied to Crippling Talon instead.

Greatsword: Main combo chain needs to hit harder. Also, Maul should inflict 5 stacks of bleeding with the 5 stacks of vulnerability. It’s a little disappointing that the one hand sword hits harder most of the time.

Short Bow: I think that the range of the Short Bow needs to be increased to 1000 at least. With only 900 range, you might as well use a main hand axe instead. Crossfire could get a 50% chance of inflicting bleed on hits instead of just flanking/rear hits (Only a 50% chance on hits to make up for the rapid fire. If it inflicted bleeding on each hit…that could get crazy.)

Poison Volley….needs to hit harder. Doesn’t seem to hit that hard, although I guess the poison’s supposed to make up for it.

Quick Shot could inflict torment when it hits, or grant that to your pet’s next attack as well.

That’s it for the weapons. Next post will be on suggestions to improve the utilities.

Utility Suggestions:

- In another thread, someone mentioned the idea of a “trap kit” for all of the ranger’s trap utilities. I think that’d be great so you could play a trap ranger and still have two slots open for other abilities as well.

- Lightning Reflexes should remove crippled, chilled, and immobilize when used, and give one or two seconds of stability along with the vigor.

- Signet of Renewal….really needs to clear conditions more often, as rangers really lack active condition cleanse. Maybe change it to cleansing a condition every 3 seconds as opposed to every ten seconds? The way it is now, we need that and Emphatic Bond to keep conditions off…and even that doesn’t work so well.