Guild Wars 2

Hey guys
Other day I played one of the most hated spec of the game in PvP, Zerker Ranger, yet I had a blast, it was a lot of fun and if you know how to positions on team fights you can turn tides even when outnumbered. It was amaizing

This made me think about doing a Ranger for more serious play. My Ranger till now was just for storage but if I get to use it for more serious play I will want to use it in both PvP and PvE, so I have a couple of questions about the class.

1st is kinda silly but is it fun to roam the world around look for Pokemons to catch?
Now a bit more serious I know meta in PvE is LBow/SwAxe, but is it fine to use GS? How behing is the GS compared to SwAxe?
In PvP I had a blast with Zerker, yet the most deadly and hard to kill Rangers I encounter run condi. I never played much with condis, is it fun or boring compared to burst damage? Also how hard is it to learn/master condi Ranger compared to Zerker? (I had a blast with Zerker but lets face it, if someone like me that never played much Ranger can get so much sucess with the spec so fast isn’t the spec a bit braindead? This sound weird to say but I got a bit that feeling after some games, still fun and I enjoy it)

Also how hard is to learn the main mechanic of the Ranger, Pets? With the Zerker spec I kinda forgot them and Idk if that is realy that good for the class …

Can you help with your feedback guys?

Condi bunkers are so boring to play unless you fight 1vX. Zerker can be too if all you will do is pewpewpew from safety. You can make your build as boring as you want or as fun as you want.

You can ignore your pet but that just makes the game boring or you can learn to be more active with it and improve your gameplay ALOT.

But like you said, you don’t have to be pinnacle of roamer to run zerker lb and get kills. Just avoid fair balanced group fights cause after you channel first rapid fire they will jump. The word glass cannon defines why this happens.

Gs is viable swap, just be prepared for elitists to drop on you like a bag of hammers.

To be honest getting kills with a glass bow setup doesn’t take much skill to do especially if you target the squishy classes such as the thief and mes. Successfully winning/surviving fights where you have been focus fired, however, are less brain-dead and much more fun.

Ranger in general has a pretty low skill floor. It is easy to pick up the class and be effective. That is why there are so many rangers around running zerker ranger and why so many people have grown to despise the build. People don’t like that some “noob” can roll up on them and press “2” and kill them because they didn’t manage their cool downs well or weren’t aware enough to not get caught out by said “noob”.

However, when you begin facing better players, rangers become pretty weak pretty fast. Zerker ranger isn’t necessarily as good as other zerker classes and it can be focused down relatively easily. As for condi ranger, although it is great for 1 v 1s, it does not yet have a build that can beat everything 1 v 1. In my experience it can either be built to beat everything 1 v 1 except warriors or except eles and given the prevalence of the two it makes it a hard choice. That being said, most players aren’t good enough to beat a condi ranger despite having a superior build against it.

Personally, I find power ranger more fun because it provides more control in the fight and you are RARELY on your back foot in a fight. Meanwhile, on condi, you are often backpeddling waiting for cds to come up.

Imo, the pet mechanic is kind of hard to learn, but is no harder than any other mechanics for any other class. Although ranger has a low skill floor, I think it has a skill ceiling just as high as any other class and a big reason for that is because of the amount of depth that can be achieved through proper pet management.

The difference between a good ranger and a bad ranger is pet control (and positioning, but that’s for all players).

The more I play the more I think the whole differences in profession skill is stupid. People always claim ele and engi require the most skill, but really is pressing 2 buttons instead of 1 for a healing effect (e.g. regenerating mist and big ol’ bomb together) "skillful’? Is it more skillful to proc yourself a second heal with swoop and healing spring than it is for a warrior to knock you down and then hundred blades on you?

There are most certainly good and bad players, but all the professions have their own combos that are confused with skill. You may not know the combos, but once you know they exist, executing them isn’t hard. Engis have more combos than other professions, so you have to remember more. I don’t think that’s skill.

And for all classes, condi is easier than power because condi doesn’t need much of an investment to reach max possible damage, so you can stick it in defense. Not only that, the defensive traitlines often give access to condi damage so you have no choice but to be tankier/easier.

/esoteric rambling

@fluffball the difference is in required knowledge of the profession, how the abilities interact, etc instead of the actual execution. Anyone can press buttons for a blast finisher in a water field, less can do it intelligently, keep track of everything else happening at the same time, or just knowing the most optimal way to do it. That’s how any form of skill is, even in a game like chess. There is no physical difficulty in actually performing the task like for an athlete, it’s all mental.

People are just computers. When you break everything down into its fundamental components, all you ever do is run a simple algorithm in your head when deciding how to react to an event. In X situation do Y. Most people have difficulty comprehending that their situation is X, even if knowing how to handle that situation is entirely extrinsic (such as knowledge, or you could say the difference between stupidity and ignorance).