Guild Wars 2

Forzani.2584:

How many times have you been in WvW on any class that you have built for full defense. A Thief comes by and gives you a few shots. Realizes that you have high toughness/HPs so disengages by stealthing and looks for a softer target. He doesn’t have to pay for being glass like other classes do.

happens every time.

Also, Rangers are Second Best at everything, but are Number 1 at Nothing. We aren’t even number one at being a pet class. Necromancers make a better pet class than we do.

Chrispy.5641:

Forzani.2584:

How many times have you been in WvW on any class that you have built for full defense. A Thief comes by and gives you a few shots. Realizes that you have high toughness/HPs so disengages by stealthing and looks for a softer target. He doesn’t have to pay for being glass like other classes do.

happens every time.

Also, Rangers are Second Best at everything, but are Number 1 at Nothing. We aren’t even number one at being a pet class. Necromancers make a better pet class than we do.

So they are number 1 at something.

In that long hayashi rant, it hit me the Rampager being better for ranger bit. In fact i ran that set for the longest time. Lately though i joined the zerk mass. One single thing was the decisive factor, which is the way conditions work in PVE.

That would be good if at least the highest damaging condition would tick, but i’ve seen claims of ppl testing that a virtue of justice burn from a zero condition specced guardian, overrides my torch and/or Flame trap simply because it was applied lastly. Furthermore, what’s the point of having 15 seconds of burning on a 1%hp mob? Besides i don’t think i need to go over the cap on stacks.

Hence why zerk reins supreme even on a class that seemed more fit for another stat investment.

All of this from a PVE, more specificaly dungeons and world bosses, standpoint obviously. In other areas i’m quite fond of building conditions.

Hayashi.3416:

Thieves are also useless in zergs.

Actually, no. 1-2 thieves are standard now for most GvG and fight-seeking WvW guilds since they can quickly assassinate support eles and light armored DPS. If you destroy a zerg’s/guild’s backline, the frontline is toast, which makes thieves very much desired for organized zerg play.

I run my full venom aura thief in zergs..

Rather nice actually

Sasajoe.1509:

Well Ottolette, I agree with you on your points but why shouldn’t we be able to win a match 1v1 vs a thief, i mean whole meaning of the word “balance” is everyone to have fair chance, at least that’s what i thought when beginning to play gw2 (from release).

Everyone should be able to counter everyone (ofc i know that’s difficult to be accomplished).
But there are some quite obvious flaws in ranger’s class as a whole – pet being almost worthless & further reducing the player’s damage, as well as most traits & skills – which developers refuse to fix from the beginning & the worst is they keep nerfing the class.

(I cannot think of the reason to do so when you see 80% of the rangers have either rerolled to another class or quit the game straight of [as 2 of my friends already])

The more and more I read all the posts in all the classes, the more I realize that arenanet has instituted a Rock/Paper/Scissors moment. Hammer warrior beats thief. But thief beats ranger. And ranger may beat Hammer warrior if he’s kitten lucky, or gets himself a piece of newb warrior. I been reading the post for the last two weeks. All I’m reading is, how each class wants a better shot at beating another class, and they post what they beat all the time. To the point that everyone else in the forum post agrees with those assessments.

So either two things are going to happen. Either there will be a balance, where you get a shot of taking down every opponent class equally, or it’s a rock/paper/scissors. One class will beat one other type of class but not other. One beats two, two beats three, and three beats one. And if this is one of those rock/paper/scissors sorts of combat, then you will never gain a full edge on another class specific profession.

Cufufalating.8479:

Rangers are top tier in dungeons, eiths just they need to run one specific build and do it fairly well, which 95% of people dont do, thus giving rangers a bad name in top tier dungeons thus making people reject rangers out of hand because its not for the risk.

That and also there are plenty people who dont realise rangers can and are good in dungeons if played right so they continue with the previous wisdom of “no rangers”.

All that is community problems though, not really balance problems.

Build.
Video.
Or it didn’t happen.

@Serraphin Storm.2369

• What do Rangers do better than any other class? They use environmental weapons better. Icebow, fiery axe flaming great sword dps is great on a Ranger.

You got something srsly wrong here.
The power damage of a ranger is cut to 70% due to our pet.
Using summoned weapons just removes this cap. However, if our pet dies in splitseconds to a boss, where is our advantage?

• In dungeon what players want is easy not skill.

Indeed. I, as a confident speedrunner, want to clear a dungeon as fast as possible and don’t want to waste time on mistakes of my ranger due to his high skillcap.

• Mesmer are a crap class the only thing the offer is timewarp and stealth. Thieves Blind and stealth. They are great for skipping content in a real fight spend a lot of time dead.

Are you serious? Apart from the timewarp or the stealth mesmers are very good in blocking attacks (e.g. reaction), in removing conditions (e.g. nullfield), or simply skipping (e.g. portal). Thiefes on the other hand have mediocre AoE (e.g. shortbow), can pull single targets (scorpion wire) and have a very high burstpotential (which comes in handy in CoF P1 as example).
Rangers just ad nothing (despite from spotter) to a group which other classes couldn’t do better.

• As far as Group no wanting or wanting a certain class it just shows their lack of ablility. You never need a certain class for any dungeon run if you know how to do it right. Exploiting and glitch has become the norm of dungeon which is sad. Some People who claim to be fractal experts don’t even know how to do some runs without exploiting (like the Dregde Fractal)

The only glitches I know getting abused (beside fractals) are in Arah.

• Not every build or weapon set can overcome every class. Axe main had is a good power weapon yes it has condition but has up 1.5k crit x 3 how can you complain about this weapon.

In fact, the only weapon who is near “not useless” is the sword and it’s very hard to control the autoattack.
Axe is only good if you can hit 3 targets and thats not helping you killing your main target faster.

• As Far as WvW I have never see a group of necro fear and enemy zerg off a cliff (hills would be a good place) or a group of ele supply Gs and ice bows on defense. Rangers have great LB range. The Commanders don’t organize real tactics. They don’t utitlize the strength of any class as a unit. Yes he man call for a portal or a water field buy that in using only one person or two. I don’t see a group of mesmers acting as a decoy zerg. ( Ok they cant lot of illusion are tartget based). […]

It’s simply your if you get hit by a longbow beyond 1000 range. It’s so easy to kite those slow arrows.
And if commanders would use the tactics you are thinking of the enemy would either be gone 3 minutes ago or would just stomb you immediately.

• Rangers learn to use your stow button (yes it would be better if you could key bind it). Having your pet attack from you side make it easier to keep an eye on your pet. It also makes it easier for you to learn the timing of your pet. Those of you who complain pets never work; this will improve how you and your pet work together.

The only things you can tell your pet are “attack the enemy”, “come back to me” or “use your super-secret-special-attack-thingie”. Appart from that beeing not enough options to control your pet effectively, the AI is broken and not really responsive. There are enough threads messing with the pet. Pet is broken and it will remain broken for awhile.

(Sorry for the strange editing, forum did weird things with the qoute opperator…)

(this is a pve/dungeon post)

Ele water fields are not better than healing spring. For an ele to put down a water field they need to be using a staff, which has only one decent dps build that requires you to stay in fire attunement. If you switch to water, you render the build useless. Rangers on the other hand sacrifice nothing. Healing spring also has a much longer duration and shorter recharge.

Ranger with sword/x using a jaguar and sick em will do just as much or even more damage than a warrior. And yes you can keep your pet alive if you aren’t completely terrible.

Banners do provide more boost than frost spirit, but you can’t say one is just better when they are both unique. Banners and frost spirit and empowered allies and spotter together is way better than just banners and empowered allies. Why bring only some of what you could bring?

You asked for a build, here is the on I use: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/84268-the-perfect-dps-ranger-guide-for-real/

Dog.1472:

(this is a pve/dungeon post)

Ele water fields are not better than healing spring. For an ele to put down a water field they need to be using a staff, which has only one decent dps build that requires you to stay in fire attunement. If you switch to water, you render the build useless. Rangers on the other hand sacrifice nothing. Healing spring also has a much longer duration and shorter recharge.
Ranger with sword/x using a jaguar and sick em will do just as much or even more damage than a warrior. And yes you can keep your pet alive if you aren’t completely terrible.
Banners do provide more boost than frost spirit, but you can’t say one is just better when they are both unique. Banners and frost spirit and empowered allies and spotter together is way better than just banners and empowered allies. Why bring only some of what you could bring?

You asked for a build, here is the on I use: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/84268-the-perfect-dps-ranger-guide-for-real/

Ele waterfields are indeed “weaker” as the ranger healing spring but the staff brings 2 of them. 1 also stacks regen and removes coditions, the other one gives you a flat amount of health back.
Also the ele can support the group way better with buffs/summoned weapons and has, from what I’ve heared , in theory the highest dps with staff. At least, if you play ele with summoned weapons, you’re always attuned to water.

Sick ’em holds 10 secs and has a cooldown of 40 secs. Even if you deal more damage than a fully buffed warrior, which I doubt, it will only last 10 secs.

Yes, banners and spirits are stackable but the banner still outshines the spirit. Not to mention it wont follow you and can die. With FGS most warriors should get more than 80% precision, so spotter will be pretty useless for them.

Let’s just imagine a CoE run. Both your pets will be dead within the first seconds due to the AoE of subject alpha. So will be you frostspirit. Your groupssupport falls to near zero.

And the build you posted is the “only one working” brazil build and I don’t like it. Mainy because I don’t like the sword.

Sasajoe.1509:

(…)a thief that barely knows his wtf stomps me & that’s because of the broken stealth in this game.(…)

Stealth isn’t broken, the problem with Thief is the insane damage, THAT should be addressed and leave stealth as is.
Problem is, as always, the only thing people see infornt of their eyes is DPS numbers, they’re only happy when they see 5 digits on a training dummy anything else is widely discarded as useless, so if Anet was to fix it the outcry would see no end.

What Rangers could use is faster pets and/or longer attack range in them, if the target takes just one side step it takes them ages to catch up, in a class that was design to have the pet dealing a % of damage their workings are fundamentally flawed BUT they can easily be fixed.

I agree that the ranger class isn’t as weak as some make it out to be, but whoever that was on the first page who made as if the pet wasn’t a problem and that it’s an l2p issue with players not controlling their pet.. is fooling themselves hardcore. I’m a very skilled melee ranger, and being in melee further enables me to up the hit ratio on melee pets in comparison to ranged users I have loads of cripple and chill, and the pet missing auto attacks… is still a problem. And it’s not from lack of skill. It’s from the melee pets lacking distance closers and human level reaction time and the ability to attack and move simultaneously(Like players do) and ranged pets having their damage scaled too low by ArenaNet to contribute to some builds despite having a higher hit ratio in some fights from their ranged nature.. in contrast to the melee pets which have much higher damage readings. On top of that there are still many pets that have wasted skill slots. The devourer evade for example. Or other pets that have great skills that suffer to bugs or animations system cast delays that make them although good, not ideal in a hardcore fight.. Ie. Pig F2, and the positioning skill cancel problem on drake f2s that happens from time to time.

So yes, the biggest problem by far where PvP and WvW is concerned is the problems with the pet. The pet’s inability to hit a moving target(Ie. strafing/kiting that melee and ranged players alike do almost 100% of the time PASSIVELY.. moving while attacking simultaneously.. it’s a basic fundamental to being a skilled player.. being constantly mobile) limits it in countless fights which limits the ranger class. Furthermore if a target uses a distance creator escape skill.. Ie. lightning reflexes/sword 2 on the ranger, mesmer blink, the guardian teleport or whatever.. even if you the player are equipped with the means to close that distance very quickly if you’re running a melee build (Ie. rapid speed charge skills like greatsword 3, sword number 2 if you break target and use it right, sword 1 pounce) the melee pet itself despite desperately needing equally such utilities to be relevant and carry its weight is not equipped with them and when such things are asked for to enable the pet, a bunch of less informed players of all classes start thinking it would be op and try to deny such changes in the forum; when all we’re asking is simply for the pet to be able to contribute to the fight equally to the ranger rather than holding it back. Think about it logically, you wouldn’t expect a full melee warrior or guardian to fight against a kite heavy player without some means of closing the distances they create quickly or design all their auto attacks so that they cannot move and attack simultaneously right? Why the hell would you expect a melee ranger pet to engage in battle with no such capability?

Not every pet auto attack needs to land, but when the ranger is attacking and successfully landing his attacks, the pet’s attacks need to be hitting the enemy with an equal effort for this class mechanic to work, otherwise only the 70% of the character damage supplied by the ranger makes contact 75% of the time and only at very brief periods do in battle do we get a full 100% dps output from our character, that means its like fighting with an uplevel character, at least for builds that aren’t condition heavy due to problems with power and how it scales.

So yes, ranger is a pretty good class but still heavily limited due to the pet. We suffer equally to other classes on top of that when it comes to trait lockdown not supporting some of the more fun builds, it’s just as hard for us to get that ideal balance of survivability to damage as it is for everyone else. So throw on a 30% damage nerf in a kite/movement heavy fight by investing that into an AI that functions terribly ineffectively against moving players that no other class has to suffer from.. and you have a class that’s more limited than others, but for the wrong reasons. If you’re going to make one class more based on an AI than another, YOU NEED TO EQUIP THAT AI TO DO THE JOB. That means overall AI improvements or at least changing the nature of when it launches its auto attacks based on distance from the target, and giving melee pets distance closers like the sword pounce. Speaking figuratively right now ArenaNet is asking the melee pet nail a board but not giving it a hammer by not giving it distance closers and the capability to attack whilst moving.

Dean Calaway.9718:

Sasajoe.1509:

(…)a thief that barely knows his wtf stomps me & that’s because of the broken stealth in this game.(…)

Stealth isn’t broken, the problem with Thief is the insane damage, THAT should be addressed and leave stealth as is.
Problem is, as always, the only thing people see infornt of their eyes is DPS numbers, they’re only happy when they see 5 digits on a training dummy anything else is widely discarded as useless, so if Anet was to fix it the outcry would see no end.

What Rangers could use is faster pets and/or longer attack range in them, if the target takes just one side step it takes them ages to catch up, in a class that was design to have the pet dealing a % of damage their workings are fundamentally flawed BUT they can easily be fixed.

Faster pets? That wont help. The animation to attack is the problem. You can have a wolf pet stick to a person, but as soon as it goes to “hit”, it has to do an animation, which “roots” it before it actually hits. This causes pets to miss due to the target moving. Its a flawed system and that system is the Rangers biggest mechanic. Sad really.

And while I am not one for calling nurf on any class, there is one thief build that is totally ridiculous right now that is a perma stealth. Not huge damage (but enough) and no real threat of the thief dying if the fight does not go their way.

Well, all I know is that if they don’t fix pets or if they do not remove the pets and give the damage back to the ranger’s character…come April, I’ll be playing ESO and removing this game from my hard drive. I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one. At least there I can play a ranger the way it’s meant to be played…without being held back by some stupid AI. Anet better get their heads out of there kitten before they have a mass exodus of ranger’s on their hands.

Akisame.9508:

Well, all I know is that if they don’t fix pets or if they do not remove the pets and give the damage back to the ranger’s character…come April, I’ll be playing ESO and removing this game from my hard drive. I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one. At least there I can play a ranger the way it’s meant to be played…without being held back by some stupid AI. Anet better get their heads out of there kitten before they have a mass exodus of ranger’s on their hands.

Come April I will still be accepting donations of gold.

Bran.7425:

Akisame.9508:

Well, all I know is that if they don’t fix pets or if they do not remove the pets and give the damage back to the ranger’s character…come April, I’ll be playing ESO and removing this game from my hard drive. I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one. At least there I can play a ranger the way it’s meant to be played…without being held back by some stupid AI. Anet better get their heads out of there kitten before they have a mass exodus of ranger’s on their hands.

Come April I will still be accepting donations of gold.

I have nothing against you so don’t take this the wrong way, but why would I give you my gold when I leave this game so you can support Anet, who stiffed me with a kittened up broken class which they refuse to fix for over a year and then some? Nope, I’ll let the gold disappear and not allow it to be used in the gem store or anything else that may support ANet or have ANet believe that they are doing a good job. Sorry my friend, but if you need gold in EQ I’ll be more then happy to help you out there

By fixed you mean fun to play?
Cause its a top tier class in spvp,pve and WvW roaming…

Just you know, so boring that i want to cut my right hand to make it more challenging….

Dardamaniac.1295:

By fixed you mean fun to play?
Cause its a top tier class in spvp,pve and WvW roaming…

Just you know, so boring that i want to cut my right hand to make it more challenging….

Are we seriously playing the same game? You mean to tell me that we have no problems with Pets? ANet said we are suppose to be the ‘long range masters’ yet at range I do far more damage on my Warrior with rifle (which rifle has very very similar skills as the ranger’s longbow only with better damage attached to them). And that’s with my warrior in rare’s why my ranger has exotics. I WvW all the time, it’s all I do, and the roamer’s are really Thief’s with their infinite number of get out of trouble for free cards (AKA stealth) and necro’s with their fear while draining your life away, by the time fear wear’s off your scurrying to heal yourself before the finishing blow. Mesmers are a close second there along with warrior which for some reason, can outrun a ranger and has immunity during half the battle while his signet keeps healing him during the fight without ever having to click on the heal. Ranger brings nothing to the table that another class can do better.

30% of our damage is tied to a pet that either dies within 5 second of a battle or misses 95% of the time due to his target moving an inch to the side. We have to blow our heal to keep the pet alive and then when we need it for ourselves it’s on timer. Our traits are a mess and nothing compliments each other like they do on other classes. There is so much wrong with ranger that it’s incredible that anyone would say it’s fine. I will be the first to say that yes, I play ranger because I love ranger’s overall. All games I play are ranger classes (if available). I love the entire archery idea and that’s why I play ranger. Hell, I even read books about ranger’s like the ranger’s apprentice. Just because I love ranger’s doesn’t mean that I will be a fanboy to Anet and defend the kitten poor job they have done on the class. Sorry, but I’m blunt and I say it how I see it. Even Anet said we have issues and that they know our pet’s are bad but refuse to fix it because it could cause more problems for them if they try to fix it. So if they admit we have problems why can’t you?

To everyone saying they do more damage at range with a warrior than a ranger, you’re just delusional, the warrior doesn’t come close to the rangers ranged damage as long as this fancy thing called a PET, you know, our class mechanic, is in play as well… ESPECIALLY if you’re using a damage oriented pet like a cat or a bird…

Does the warrior get bigger numbers with some of their shots? Yes, that’s their thing, but we have more numbers, and ours aren’t that far behind theirs… Higher DPS > Big Slow Numbers

Big slow number’s has allowed me to do many one-shot’s on people on my warrior. Comparing the ranger longbow to the warrior rifle, the rifle will out-DPS the ranger any day because the pet which you claim is the key, is either DEAD or doing an animation for an attack on a person that is no longer standing where he was when the pet started the animation 3 second ago. IF, and that’s a big IF, Pets where fixed and actually HIT their target, then I could probably agree with you. Until then, warrior will always out-DPS a ranger 10 out of 10 times in range combat.

Durzlla.6295:

To everyone saying they do more damage at range with a warrior than a ranger, you’re just delusional, the warrior doesn’t come close to the rangers ranged damage as long as this fancy thing called a PET, you know, our class mechanic, is in play as well… ESPECIALLY if you’re using a damage oriented pet like a cat or a bird…

Does the warrior get bigger numbers with some of their shots? Yes, that’s their thing, but we have more numbers, and ours aren’t that far behind theirs… Higher DPS > Big Slow Numbers

Bizarre claims, these. The warrior’s rifle outputs slower numbers in comparison to a ranger’s longbow? What? Both weapons AA speed is 3/4 of a second, and if I’m not mistaken, bullets still travel faster than arrows in GW2. Volley, which channels a full 2 seconds faster than longbow’s Rapid Fire and does roughly the same damage, shares the same CD as Rapid Fire, giving the warrior time to pull out near one-hit downs with a 1500 range unblockable (if you trigger signet) Kill Shot. Even factoring in pet damage, I have no idea how you arrive at the conclusion that “the warrior doesn’t come close to the rangers ranged damage,” especially given that warriors have more access to on-demand, high-uptime fury and multiple stacks of might.

Edit: I see you didn’t mention rifle specifically, but although I’d probably agree that ranger LB is superior for single target damage over warrior’s LB, there’s no contest when it comes to AoE ranged damage – warrior’s LB wins.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

In dungeon what players want is easy not skill. Mesmer are a crap class the only thing the offer is timewarp and stealth. Thieves Blind and stealth. They are great for skipping content in a real fight spend a lot of time dead. As far as Group no wanting or wanting a certain class it just shows their lack of ablility. You never need a certain class for any dungeon run if you know how to do it right. Exploiting and glitch has become the norm of dungeon which is sad. Some People who claim to be fractal experts don’t even know how to do some runs without exploiting (like the Dregde Fractal)

Wait, what? Mesmers aren’t crap. Stop smoking the mj before you post on the forums. The Shatter build is still pretty kitten awesome for bursting. GS/S+F is good in dungeons as the utility is fantastic. My wife plays a Mes and she stays alive just as long and sometimes longer than everybody else and she melees. They bring more than stealth and tw, but those two get the most use. I have lvl 80 Ranger, Thief, Mes, Guard, and War. I use my Mes, Guard, and War for dungeons depending on party composition 99% of the time. I’ll bring my Ranger sometimes if I want some extra challenge, melee the whole time, and if my party doesn’t care what you bring, but if I want to be extremely useful to my party I bring one of my other classes. I’m leveling an Ele right now specifically for those AC runs and world boss champ runs… Looks like it’ll be good for tagging in farming too running fire staff, ice bow, and fire gs elite. Oh, and I guess pugs are what you are referring to when you say people want it easy. I want to run dungeons as efficiently as possible so I need my party to know how to play their class as efficiently as possible to do the most DPS as possible continously… and party composition matters depending on the dungeon to make the dungeon run go as smooth/fast as possible. That being said, I’ll take five rangers as long as I know they know how to DPS with their ranger properly and their builds are right to do what we need to do to get through a dungeon A.S.A.P…. because after the 10th time I’ve run a dungeon I’m no longer doing it for story, I just want the loots.