Guild Wars 2

Ranger is my least played profession. I have one at level 80 and I put full berserker’s exotics on him. It seems like no matter what I do with traits, Longbow and Shortbow both do extremely low damage. My necro in full knight’s actually does more damage.

What is the trick to getting damage out of a ranger?

I’ll enlighten you, since you seem to believe Necromancer deals more damage, thus believing burst and not statistics.

Numbers =/= damage.
Rangers are a class with high sustained damage dealt in low hits of rapid frequency with pet combined.

That being said, Rangers belong to the higher DPS category. If you want to learn how to deal as much DPS as you can, search for “Frost Spotter Ranger”.
You’ll learn everything you might need either here at forums or anywhere on the internet, youtube included.

first of all. Rangers do have lower than normal base damage unless you go condi.

Second. Our ranged weapons will always do less damage than our melee weapons. Because “its safer” (lol bullkitten)

Third. Ranger is NEVER taken in groups for its damage. If its just damage theyd laugh at us and replace us for kitten near anything else (probably a beserker or sinister engi if condi and herald if power)

The only reason ranger is ever brought to a group is for damage multipliers. Namely. Frost Spirit. Spotter. and Grace of the land. If you don’t bring atleast 2 of those 3. Most groups attempting to min max are going to consider you worthless. Unless of course your raid healing.

Our traits are more important than we are >.> yaaaay.

If you want to maximize your personnel damage. There are builds on metabattle.com for that. Hope you like condi builds. But all of them also require you to take frost spirt/spotter/grace of the land.

If you wan’t to persist on upping your personnel damage. Try MM BM Druid.

Take the relevant trates in those lines for upping your damage and combine the effects each line brings you.

On vale guardian I have reached 20k Rapid fires by combining the grace of hte land bonus with glyph of empowerement and the 10% increase from marksmanship after a pet swap for quickness. Combine that with bristleback f2 bursts and your damage isn’t bad. Though its still outdone by most builds out there.

Sorry if this isn’t what you want to hear. But it should give you an idea of what the current direction of the class is and how were meant to work in the current meta.

Edit: As the above post said. Hope you like being a buff bot.

Edited for accuracy

Tragic Positive.9356:

I’ll enlighten you, since you seem to believe Necromancer deals more damage, thus believing burst and not statistics.

Numbers =/= damage.
Rangers are a class with high sustained damage dealt in low hits of rapid frequency with pet combined.

That being said, Rangers belong to the higher DPS category. If you want to learn how to deal as much DPS as you can, search for “Frost Spotter Ranger”.
You’ll learn everything you might need either here at forums or anywhere on the internet, youtube included.

I mean just dagger autos with my necro. Even if I don’t use anything besides autoattacks on my necro, my ranger puts out lower numbers less frequently.

So tell me how to do damage as a ranger.

edit: @Shadelang ranger melee weapons have really low damage ratios on the auto chains so I really doubt they beat shortbow or longbow.

So… give up on power damage? Condi ranger is good?

In general, Rangers have weapons with lower coefficients used in calculating damage. This makes power scaling not as good as other classes. Reasoning is that pets are supposed to provide damage in compensation.

Specifically to your post, longbow actually is pretty good, but short bow is not really a power weapon and not that great with berserker stats.

Shadelang.3012:

If you wan’t to persist on upping your personnel damage. Try MM BM Druid.

I hope you won’t mind if I correct this a tiny bit.
The highest Self DPS setup currently is MM/SK/NM.
Druid does not really contribute to self-DPS much and NM beats BM. The Glyph for self-DPS is inferior to 1% per boon (up to 13% for both you and pet) and constant 25 might and fury on pet from NM .

Also, you didn’t have to correct the numbers of Rapid Fire.
Mine in Full Zerk DPS role with Grace of the Land buff active dealt roughly 27K. No need to be shy.

Mcrocha.3891:

In general, Rangers have weapons with lower coefficients used in calculating damage. This makes power scaling not as good as other classes. Reasoning is that pets are supposed to provide damage in compensation.

Specifically to your post, longbow actually is pretty good, but short bow is not really a power weapon and not that great with berserker stats.

Are there any pets that can compensate? I mean my ranger autos are so low that I can’t see a 20-30k rapid fire every cooldown making up for it.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Shadelang.3012:

If you wan’t to persist on upping your personnel damage. Try MM BM Druid.

I hope you won’t mind if I correct this a tiny bit.
The highest Self DPS setup currently is MM/SK/NM.
Druid does not really contribute to self-DPS much and NM beats BM. The Glyph for self-DPS is inferior to 1% per boon (up to 13% for both you and pet) and constant 25 might and fury on pet from NM .

Also, you didn’t have to correct the numbers of Rapid Fire.
Mine in Full Zerk DPS role with Grace of the Land buff active dealt roughly 27K. No need to be shy.

Aye. But I wanted to post scenarios that are very easy to repeat. Not numbers that occur only when EVERYTHING is stacked if that makes sense.

Khristophoros.7194:

I mean just dagger autos with my necro. Even if I don’t use anything besides autoattacks on my necro, my ranger puts out lower numbers less frequently.

So tell me how to do damage as a ranger.

edit: @Shadelang ranger melee weapons have really low damage ratios on the auto chains so I really doubt they beat shortbow or longbow.

So… give up on power damage? Condi ranger is good?

Already told you to search internet for Frost Spotter Ranger.
Sword has the best Ratio on AA chain.
Shortbow is the Worst DPS weapon a ranger can have, atm.
Both Zerk and Condi DPS on ranger are fine. Condi drops significantly if the target is mobile.

Shadelang.3012:

Aye. But I wanted to post scenarios that are very easy to repeat. Not numbers that occur only when EVERYTHING is stacked if that makes sense.

Yep, it does. But my usual Rapid Fire numbers in raids are ~23-24K as you suggested earlier.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Shadelang.3012:

Aye. But I wanted to post scenarios that are very easy to repeat. Not numbers that occur only when EVERYTHING is stacked if that makes sense.

Yep, it does. But my usual Rapid Fire numbers in raids are ~23-24K as you suggested earlier.

On Gorseval? God kitten . I can understand that on vale guardian. But I have to nail EVERY cooldown perfectly to prep for a rapid fire burst that hard on gorse

Khristophoros.7194:

Mcrocha.3891:

In general, Rangers have weapons with lower coefficients used in calculating damage. This makes power scaling not as good as other classes. Reasoning is that pets are supposed to provide damage in compensation.

Specifically to your post, longbow actually is pretty good, but short bow is not really a power weapon and not that great with berserker stats.

Are there any pets that can compensate? I mean my ranger autos are so low that I can’t see a 20-30k rapid fire every cooldown making up for it.

Sword is the best power option we have bc it stacks might on the pet, decent coefficients on auto, great attack speed, and axe is a pretty good offhand. With sword+traits+skills you can easily start stacking 25 might on pets. This in conjunction with other damage boosts/modifiers makes pets hit like a truck.

Felines like jag or tiger are good. There are other pets that can hit really hard with their F2’s when they are buffed, but generally cats are a solid choice.

Ranger DPS is very bad on both power and condi builds. Some people will likely try to argue but it’s true. We are outclassed by everything, especially power builds.

When groups like Dnt calculate damage their method isn’t the best. They will calculate max damage meaning they will have 25 might and the like. They will often forget the pet damage and when they do calculate pet damage they do its not with maxed boons.

Classes like necro can seem to preform well since they have traits that can boost crit chance to 50% without a real investment in stats.

As for the sword it is our highest dps weapon. You can’t just look at the numbers on the screen. The auto attack chain may seem low but they also happen faster.

Necro can do 5 to 6k crit in deathshroud with their auto Rangers can do 4 to 5k on long bow aa. Add Rapid fire and pet damage into the mix and the ranger can eaislly out dps the necro. Draw back to the ranger is that food doesn’t affect our pet damage and lb dps is affected by range.

However rangers dps isn’t locked behind death shroud. In my experience it not the dps that the problem. Other classes can self buff better. Who cares about perma regen and swiftness when other class can maintain 25 stacks of might and kill thing so fast that regen and swiftness doesn’t matter.

Then their is defense: other classes can run knights like necro and not see any real offensive lose. Ele can negate condi. Warriors Defensive line is incredible. With the combination of spiked armor and defy pain it doesn’ matter that ranger have greater range because 90% of the time you cant keep the distance.

So in away ranger dps is bad only because other classes can also have defense negating ranger damage while they don’t giving up any of their own damage. A glass cannon ranger is really glass.

I won’t answer your question but I will say that Ranger is absolutely capable of being dangerous.

It is a profession with high access to evades, soft CC, condition cleanse, sustain and poison. All of those things are very powerful tools to have when fighting an opponent. Ranger does not deal massive damage, it avoids it while whittling it’s targets down. There are builds available that can do heavy burst damage but you sacrifice nearly all of your defense for not even top tier offense.

If played properly, Ranger is extremely good at keeping a consistent stream of pressure on it’s targets. Not through high critical attacks but through consistent damage/debuffs and skills that allow it to avoid incoming damage. Yes, Necromancer dagger AA does high damage but as a Necromancer you’re vulnerable to being locked down, you’re slow and you need to be on top of your target to be doing that damage. As a Ranger, you can easily kite with ranged attacks and soft CC like chill, cripple and immobilize which Ranger has heaps of access to, and can avoid incoming damage with weapon/skill evades, knockbacks and blocks.

Ranger just isn’t a bursty profession, it’s meant to avoid bursts and to keep your opponents feeling pressured. Have you ever faced the Shadowleapers in Heart of Thorns? They don’t hit super hard but they’re constantly hitting you and it starts to really hurt. You try to get close and they just evade while continuing to do damage and before you know it you’re toast.

Allright. Time to make a less salty reply.

Alot of rangers dps is based on combining multiple factors.

Our highest burst is when we combine our own burst with our pets burst after buffing both.

This is best shown by shout rangers (the build I have been playing for the last 3 years) who can self might to 25 and also buff there pets to the same. Add quickness into that from BM grandmaster trait. And you and your pet can perform a HELL of a hard hit over an extremely short time.

For my build in order to make that burst happen it combines fury, might, 10% damage modifier, and 10% attack speed increase from Marksmanship. 4-7% damage modifier and a boonsharing minor trait from Nature magic as well as damage multipliers for the pet from BM as well as other boon related goodies.

Combine that with Heal as one to further boost both the ranger and the pet as well as sic em for another dmg multiplier and the list of bonuses you get for a short time is rather awesome. This all culminates into enough damage to shred most anything youl be fighting.

Due to the nature of it the burst can be a bit harder to pull off than other classes. But its extremely rewarding.

And here is the biggest part of ranger. The burst isn’t a 1 and done deal. Its not like the yolo blade of a warrior. The benefits you use to make that burst happen STICK AROUND. Meaning your dealing high sustained damage the entire time inbetween bursts.

At first when you look at just the simple base ranger. The dmg probably doesn’t seem as awe inspiring. But as you start to add in all the other factors you start to see how each trait combines and each mechanic boosts the other mechanics. And you get a pretty good picture of what the class is like. Its a big part of why I can’t enjoy other classes as much. The synergy you can find in the ranger playstyle. And the fact that that syngery is mandatory to really be effective is part of why I love it.

As we know, before HoT, ranger was a class known by fitting “words” :PEW PEW (for Berseker builds) and all thought that all you need to do was stand in the back and spam Rapid Fire, but that was not true, If you did not have sufficient experience in positioning and efficiently using all your skill you could be killed by any class

In condi builds ranger was equaly matched with other classes and i dont think that he was OP, it´s true that you were able to stack bleeding like a God, but only againts inexperienced players, all experienced players were able to counter his skill becouse of their reasonable skill motions (for example: trap throwing)

From my point of view, Ranger was well balanced with many playing variations.
BUT!!!
Now he is inferior in all of these categories:
1. Power build – cant do almost nothing against any other class after they spotted him

2. Condi build – condi dmg inferior to all classes, there is now way to stack anything since you cant throw traps, spirits cant move and you are dead even befero you can get to the enemy since expect SB all your other condi weapons are close range (i know you are thinking about axe, but its range is so low that you need to be really close to the enemy to be able to do something)

3. Support build – this is the only category that rangers can do something in, after HoT, but it really kittenes me of to be able to do only support in pvp, but even if you can provide great healing to you team, you can be easily killed if there is mesmer (daze, daze, daze), or other constant CC class in the opponent team