Guild Wars 2

I think this is the main issue people have. Especially on low level it feels incredible easy to play against equally (un)skilled players and even versus good people where it actually becomes hard to stay alive and thus viability drops the offensive part feels rather brainless.

Suggested changes:

• focus on melee weapons for future buffs, they should give you a slight DPS advanatge for the greatly increased risk but right now you only swap away from lb for the utility
• maybe give ranger the interruptor role, moment of clarity could be a fun trait if there weren’t so few interrupts (GS only #5 triggers it which is extremely hard to land and on bow it doesn’t do a lot because you follow point blank shot with rapid fire)
• traps require tactical placement but you just cannot use them individually, instead you have to run an all out full traps build and even that is not good enough in current meta
• spirits could lose strength on the passive part and instead have their active effects increased in power or cooldown lowered
• pets that require interaction f.e. by spawning a waterfield randomly for the ranger to leap into, the only field right now is super short poison field on spiders, drakes could spawn a fire wall so that the ranger can position behind and rapid fire through it etc
• make weapons like offhand axe really worth taking by giving them important utility (maybe new resistance boon on axe 5?)

Any other ideas?

Dojo.1867:

• focus on melee weapons for future buffs, they should give you a slight DPS advanatge for the greatly increased risk but right now you only swap away from lb for the utility
• maybe give ranger the interruptor role, moment of clarity could be a fun trait if there weren’t so few interrupts (GS only #5 triggers it which is extremely hard to land and on bow it doesn’t do a lot because you follow point blank shot with rapid fire)
• traps require tactical placement but you just cannot use them individually, instead you have to run an all out full traps build and even that is not good enough in current meta

[…]

Any other ideas?

You pretty much have all the tools you need in game. The only brake is your imagination (and some training).

Mainly talking about ranked PvP here. The more competitive you want to be the less creative you can be with your builds in my experience. :/

Your build looks fun but it wont work against people from TCG etc or just good players with meta builds in general.

Fox is a guildie and i don’t play pvp. But you should give it a try before (maybe with your own build) to say that it’s not viable. Melee ranger is viable.

The thing is in wvw you can tune your stats a bit more with food etc and also this were all duels and he propably swapped out a few traits/skills everytime.

In spvp you build has to survive the meta which means on average it has to win matchups and be somewhat good in different situations, 1on1 or group fights. You cannot chose that much and another factor is that yu are less mobile and bound to control points.

Versus equally good people this build will unfortunately not get you far in spvp if they play meta builds. You cannot play without lb if you want to stay competitive in a power build and this is what this thread was focussing on.

Viability is relative. If you define it as staying competitive against equally good people playing meta builds in spvp then this one isnt viable. For wvw roaming it definitely is.

But your post still helped. This is the exact kind of stuff that would be great if it would be more playable in spvp since it obviously takes way more skill than a lb setup.

Most people complain on Power Ranger which is easy to pick up at first but actually much harder to do good with it which is whole point . If you want easy class to pick up and actually do good Warrior is your friend.
If you are have serious problems with ranger ( ok if you are necro maybe) then either there is something wrong with your build or sorry your skills. What you will do when you will meet half decent Ele, Engineer, Warrior, Guardian etc. It is much easier to get better results with those classes because they have simply stronger builds.
Whole skill argument is only valid maybe versus Engineer which is not that easy to pickup bute Ele, Warrior, Guardian etc pleasseee do not builds myths

Spirit Ranger which is good support but seriously much easier to do similar things with ele and engineer in current meta. I love my ranger but I am not blind about it.

I totally agree with trap changes they are way too uninteresting like most of our talents where changes I would welcome to give us much more diversity.

I would concentrate on changing our talents to be more interesting and buffing skills like off hand axe or other which are not used so often.

Most people do not know that but our Power build is most customized from meta builds only one line is mandatory other are really depending on your play style just when people see longbow think that this is all the same.

Dojo.1867:

Suggested changes:

• focus on melee weapons for future buffs, they should give you a slight DPS advanatge for the greatly increased risk but right now you only swap away from lb for the utility

are you daft

ranger melee far outclasses its ranged dps(like, really, it’s not even comparable how much better it is). rangers bows(both of them) are the weakest bows in the game, and their melee is the weakest melee in the game. there-in lies the problem: rangers aren’t really good at anything. yeah, they have range, but to achieve that range they sacrifice all survivability and generally melt in the blink of an eye(or several if they manage to get off signet of stone fast enough).

some survival based builds can 1v1, power builds can easily take down really bad players, and trapper builds are excellent for roaming in wvw assuming they don’t run into anyone running a meta build, but we don’t fill a role that isn’t already there, and are far surpassed by other classes in what we do offer.

if you want rangers to reach a competitive level, they first need to fix the over-eighty-percent-useless-traits-and-utilities, pets, and generally poorly designed weapon skills

Trap based build running around without a stun break. Good luck there.

To make rangers viable in PvP we need two things, access to vertical ports and boon stripping.

My suggestion would be for the active effect of signet of the hunt to port your pet to a target location and then give you the option to swap places with your pet. This would also be a big boon to pets since their pathing makes them run halfway around the map because they can’t go over the 2 inch drop in front of you.

I’d probably add boon stripping to Sic ’em. Something like, “for the duration the pet removes a boon with every hit”, and I would fix it so their F2 attacks continue to work. This would allow pets that do AoE damage like drakes or moas to boon strip multiple players.

Interesting idea. I would add that our weapons are lacking in utility.
Take example Power Build you have Greatsword which is great for this build what other options : sword/dagger or warhorn for defense etc.
We have good options in Off hand : warhorn/torch/ dagger but we lack in main hand only sword seems to be decent but its more defense weapon.

I would say that axe in mh need to be revised decide to give it more utility, be power or condition weapon whatever now it sucks, which limits your options by far.

I think we just need a main hand melee weapon that lets us move freely on point. Sword is fun for dueling but the forced movements are frustrating when trying to fight 1vX and stay on point.

What I’ve suggested before is a main hand dagger with bleeds on auto attack, a forward leap on a short cool down for dagger 2, and an evasive roll backwards while crippling and poison on dagger 3. This would keep with the evasive play style of the ranger but it would be a much smoother weapon for fighting on point.

Fix offhand axe so it doesn’t root you in place on axe 5 and main hand dagger would become a very strong weapon for power or condi builds.

I have to say that most of our weapons have some uses maybe they still lack but axe is just in awkward spot and we need him to dual wield only offensive weapon

I think we need more access to counter-cc, like stability or aegis. Speaking of WvW here, it is incredibly annoying how any hammer wielding warrior can just waltz by, mash a few buttons, and completely destroy you.

The deck is super stacked against us. ANet knows this, which is why they are giving us a staff. Putting us in the support role cements we cannot survive on our own.

I think we only NEEED shaves off of other classes and the ability to actually control pet skill “4”. Besides that we are in a good spot.

Are we underpowered at top tier? Yes.
Does ranger have a high skill cap? Yes.
Does ranger have a low skill floor? Yes.

For the time being I’m waiting for the specializations to see how the game really changes before making more judgements.

I’m a bit confused by the title, because mostly the change ain’t raising the skill cap. But, if you want a meaningfull change in the same line as yours, here I go :

- Give us the possibility to disable some of our pet’s skills.

Just that would be an enormous improvement.

Dadnir.5038:

I’m a bit confused by the title, because mostly the change ain’t raising the skill cap. But, if you want a meaningfull change in the same line as yours, here I go :

- Give us the possibility to disable some of our pet’s skills.

Just that would be an enormous improvement.

Oh that would be awesome. No more birds wasting 4 seconds to fly in a circle when I already have plenty of swiftness…

arron.7348:

Dojo.1867:

Suggested changes:

• focus on melee weapons for future buffs, they should give you a slight DPS advanatge for the greatly increased risk but right now you only swap away from lb for the utility

are you daft

ranger melee far outclasses its ranged dps(like, really, it’s not even comparable how much better it is). rangers bows(both of them) are the weakest bows in the game, and their melee is the weakest melee in the game. there-in lies the problem: rangers aren’t really good at anything. yeah, they have range, but to achieve that range they sacrifice all survivability and generally melt in the blink of an eye(or several if they manage to get off signet of stone fast enough).

some survival based builds can 1v1, power builds can easily take down really bad players, and trapper builds are excellent for roaming in wvw assuming they don’t run into anyone running a meta build, but we don’t fill a role that isn’t already there, and are far surpassed by other classes in what we do offer.

if you want rangers to reach a competitive level, they first need to fix the over-eighty-percent-useless-traits-and-utilities, pets, and generally poorly designed weapon skills

So glad someone else saw that nonsense. Last I started looking for meta ranger builds, I think they all even had the line “Open with rapid fire with LB, then switch to sword and stay there” or something like that. LB is the utility weapon, not sword.

Certainly not by using trapper rune haha

That being said, i think all ranger weapon have a low skill ceiling. Except LB and sword. The rest involve standing there taking dmg (axe) or have extremely unreliable attack (gs).

Klonko.8341:

Certainly not by using trapper rune haha

That being said, i think all ranger weapon have a low skill ceiling. Except LB and sword. The rest involve standing there taking dmg (axe) or have extremely unreliable attack (gs).

What about SB?

the only thing i’d ask for is better Aoe on boons,regen on our pets and maybe bringing back EB to a Master trait on 2 condis every 10secs that way we can take poison master or Bark skin plus natures voice to provide a Support build with personal condi removal.
just like how a medi guard can remove condis and apply support boons.

thats the only two things we need , because i beleive that rangers should lack On demand party support if we wish to keep the Extremes of our single target focus abilities .

so better Furn wolf regen
Better Blue moa protection 3-4secs on a 30sec cooldown (it could do with being 5base base then the traited becomes 10secs) giving it somthing better than a 25% upkeep with a long cast time.

Bears need improving atleast some of the bears are tanky by nature but they don’t have a Boon option in the bear family unlike all the other pets have some kind of Party boon support , I’d think a new bear that granted Resistance on 5 targets would be a nice addition for team comps after the stability changes.

also a Must have Make the birds swiftness a shout attack , and proberly change one of the birds to grant Taunt like a vulture pet taunting its foe from above .

I’d Really not like to pets fall behind on these new up comming changes , because that just means a part of the ranger would become out dated again.

Dojo.1867:

Mainly talking about ranked PvP here. The more competitive you want to be the less creative you can be with your builds in my experience. :/

Your build looks fun but it wont work against people from TCG etc or just good players with meta builds in general.

I’ve been playing with a zerker melee ranger more and more lately and I’ve been having really good luck with it. Roaming WvW or in PvP, it’s pretty effective if played right. That build is missing a few things though that I think are pretty important, namely canine pets and offhand axe. Path of Scars works AMAZING with MoC and Maul. If you swap weapons after throwing the axe and cast Maul, by the time the player is pulled to you (hopefully being interrupted) your maul is coming down on them. Add SotW to that and you get some massive damage on Maul.

Mine looks like this.

The build has 2 stun breakers, good condition removal, evades and block, reflection/cleave best used on downed target, decent mobility with perma swiftness in combat and swoop/monarch’s leap, great CC (stun, pull, knockback, fear, 2 knockdowns and 2 immobilizes) and huge damage multipliers.

I suppose what would help it the most, like all ranger builds, would be access to boon stripping.
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As for what I’d ask for, straight from the other thread, would be that Lightning Reflexes removes cripple and chill. Maybe a cooldown reduction on Sharpening Stone or add 5 stacks of might to it, as 45 second cooldown is quite a bit for 5 stacks of bleed.

Jim Hunter.6821:

To make rangers viable in PvP we need two things, access to vertical ports and boon stripping.

My suggestion would be for the active effect of signet of the hunt to port your pet to a target location and then give you the option to swap places with your pet. This would also be a big boon to pets since their pathing makes them run halfway around the map because they can’t go over the 2 inch drop in front of you.

I’d probably add boon stripping to Sic ’em. Something like, “for the duration the pet removes a boon with every hit”, and I would fix it so their F2 attacks continue to work. This would allow pets that do AoE damage like drakes or moas to boon strip multiple players.

That would allow us to compete with thief and mezmer for the DPS spot, but I’d rather see us go back to the role of support via unique buffs, aka spirits.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be spirits since they are pretty broken in today’s AOE spam meta…but maybe something like preparations to provide unique buffs to the whole team.

Something like thief venoms but stronger and with a broader mix of buffs.

Maybe they could make different options for skills with a given weapon…or more bows. Bow rangers went from having some of the best survivability, utility and condition removal (GW1) to having some of the worst. I blame pets, at least partially. They stick kittentons of cc and damage onto those, and take it away from the ranger. So, we have plenty of combo fields and blast finishers on paper (and by ‘plenty’ I mean ‘half as many as any other profession’), but in practice we can’t control when and where they’re used, so our performance is based on worthless AI and a kitten ed RNG. If I wanted to rely on RNG, I would play staff mes or elixir engie.

The GW1 ranger is dead, and the worst part is that the ashes were given not to GW2 rangers, but to thieves, warriors and engineers.