Guild Wars 2

Not a rage post, just a wish list. List what changes you guys would like to see, try to keep it realistic, something that would make us parallel to other classes without being op, I dont wanna see any I WANTS A GOD MODE BUTTONZ.

Im a longbow man myself so couple things Id like to see for ranger and longbow itself are this.

1. Make arrows for longbow move twice as fast, people shouldnt accidentally dodge them every time they move, maybe a trait like read the wind.

2. More damage on longbow, its kind of a 1 trick pony, more damage would make that 1 trick count even if people dodge most of it.

3. Make signets affect both master and pet without being traited, and lower the cd to 60-90 seconds, this would fix alot of problems on rangers, gives them the untraited oh kitten button every other class has and allows people to pick up other traits instead of NEEDING signet of the beastmaster. It wouldnt be op either since it isnt a need but a want.

4. Fix pet pathing, let them jump down walls to attack targets, and buff their survivability, this is mainly for the skill " Protect Me " which is currently useless in pvp.

5. Lower the penalty on long ranged shot so we dont lose massive amounts of damage at close range.

6. Make it so pets can attack moving targets.

Post any ideas you have that you would like to see implimented, again no flaming needed, give opinions and ideas.

I totally disagree that Ranges are unparalleled to other professions. Rangers are amazing damage dealers. I still would like to see these small fixes though:

• Fix all the pet descriptions/skills. It’s a bit of a guessing game at the moment.
• Give spirit skill effects a 100% chance to grant their bonus. They already have so low survivability, which just makes them seem inferior next to a Warrior’s banner.
• Make the swords 1 skill stop sticking to foes. I would like to be able to move and dodge while attacking.
• Faster attack speed on longbows 1 skill would be nice.
• Greatsword damage seems a bit weak compared to other weapons. Maybe make it attack a little faster?
• Give moas a role. I never use them because they’re just too average in both defense and offense, compared to other pets.
• Give me a parrot pet, please!

Lol a parrot, would be interesting, its f2 ability is taunt :P Yea Greatsword is pretty weak, seems they over nerfed it by a small amount, its still not bad tho. I dont think rangers are amazing damage dealers, I just think condition damage is in an amazing place. Im assuming you were thinking about condition shortbow rangers being the amazing damage dealers, they are strong, but are no stronger than any other condition build which is good, its balanced. But aside from conditions rangers raw damage is weaker than all the other classes, and we gotta trait for signets just to be able to dish out competetive damage. I compared a rifle warrior to my longbow ranger and it was depressing.

Rifle warriors volley did probably a bit less than rapid fire but then I kill shot and it all changes, helps that rifle projectiles move extremely fast compared too the lolongbow, and faster fire rate, and pierces targets, sigh I still dont know why I havent lvled my rifle warrior up, probably because the medium armor is sokittenamazing and 1500 range is dead sexy.

Dante Dragonhand.2538:

Lol a parrot, would be interesting, its f2 ability is taunt :P Yea Greatsword is pretty weak, seems they over nerfed it by a small amount, its still not bad tho. I dont think rangers are amazing damage dealers, I just think condition damage is in an amazing place. Im assuming you were thinking about condition shortbow rangers being the amazing damage dealers, they are strong, but are no stronger than any other condition build which is good, its balanced. But aside from conditions rangers raw damage is weaker than all the other classes, and we gotta trait for signets just to be able to dish out competetive damage. I compared a rifle warrior to my longbow ranger and it was depressing.

Rifle warriors volley did probably a bit less than rapid fire but then I kill shot and it all changes, helps that rifle projectiles move extremely fast compared too the lolongbow, and faster fire rate, and pierces targets, sigh I still dont know why I havent lvled my rifle warrior up, probably because the medium armor is sokittenamazing and 1500 range is dead sexy.

Volley on war rifle does more DPS, yet it does less damage overall because it has half the channel duration compared to rapid fire. Overall I agree with most of what you said though.

Changes I would like to see-
-Lightning Reflexes – Additionally cures cripple/chill/immobilize on use.
-Signet of Renewal, make the condition transfer from yourself work globally so your pet doesn’t need to be right next to you for the skill to work.
-Make signet actives work for ranger as well as pets untraited
-Fix greatsword damage (it’s laughably bad right now)
-Fix sword responsiveness
-Improve pet AI, balancing, pathing and beast mastery trait line. Pet’s are very important to rangers and should be the top priority to get sorted out. There are still many weird issues with pets not being able to track/face moving targets. A lot of the pet actives are just not balanced with others. A significant numbers of pet actives root the pet, while they play a lengthy animation then air ball it doing nothing. I’m pretty sure drake pets recently got busted because for the life of me I can’t get them to use tail swipe in this patch. Pathing need to be looked at for ranger pets and necro minions as vertical changes often make pets run halfway around the world to meet back up with you.
-Whirling defense, allow rangers to move while channeling.
-General theme with ranger utilities is “put 30 points in a trait line to see any practical use from this” needs to go. Utility skills should be worth using on their own like every other profession. Thing like signet of the beastmaster, trap potency and spirit related traits give way too much bonus to the related skills, the traits need to be toned down and the base skills need to be buffed so we have viable utility choices without being overly specialized into one or two areas.
-Replace “Guard” with something else.

1. Pets need some major love.
1a. The “Master’s Bond” buff on the pet needs to remain though zoning and jumping in water. It should ONLY be cleared when the pet dies or you swap pets.
1b. Need a better UI frame for the pet. I want to see the buffs/debuffs on my pet without having to target it.
1c. Pet pathing needs to be tweaked. Also how the pet follows and stays near you.
1d. Quicker response when you press F3 to call your pet back to you. Any current action/animation it’s going though should be canceled. My pet has died because it took to long to react and get out of some ground AoE or away from a boss.
1e. Reduced AoE damage. I love playing a class with a pet however in dungeons your pet dies WAY to easily even if you spec full 30 points in Beastmaster.

2. As others have said, the sword’s (1) attack gets you killed. Sword/War Horn is a powerful melee combo.

3. Shortbow “Quick Shot” #3 ability. Have the jump back go further or the Swiftness last a few seconds longer. As it is now I don’t even notice the swiftness. Could be the arrow is missing because the target is stepping side to side. Who knows.

I have a few others but they are mostly bugs not really changes. Some of what I listed might even be considered bugs as well.

Listed by personal importance…
1. Fix pet and spirit pathing and ai and animation times.
Sometimes have to manually trigger atk multiple times before pet will acknowledge and they still can’t hit moving targets.
2. Bigger pets in general or at least the option to make them look growed up.
3. Fix 1h sword sticky issues.
4. Increase 1h axe throw speed, I seem to attack a lot faster on my warrior than ranger even though supposedly same wep speed and potentially hitting more mobs without losing damage if you get them stacked.
5. Improve off hand skills for axe and dagger. As is, horn wins hands down in overall usefulness. Axe and dagger in general off and main could use better animations.
6. Overhaul the beastmaster trait line, its a complete joke aside from zypher at five points. Especially the master and gm traits. Even zypher goes against the encouraged constant pet of masters bond trait.
7. Like every class there are many useless traits that could use removing or reworking.
8. Improve pet survival rate without having to rely constantly on pet switching every 20 seconds.
9. Spirit system could use an overhaul, having to be lv60 before they are ableto move seems utterly moronic. Maybe move it to a minor for master rank or just allow them to walk in general.
10. Signets cds and usefulness need improvements across the board.
11. Allow flying pets to fly up on walls etc. for seiging etc. And allow melee pets to jump down and atk so we don’t have to lose a good chunk of our dps when seiging or defending.
Second to last, Claw type weps. Would be awesome.
Lastly, Moar pets! Pet skins! Or other customizable pet looks

krojack.4920:

1. Pets need some major love.
1a. The “Master’s Bond” buff on the pet needs to remain though zoning and jumping in water. It should ONLY be cleared when the pet dies or you swap pets.
1b. Need a better UI frame for the pet. I want to see the buffs/debuffs on my pet without having to target it.
1c. Pet pathing needs to be tweaked. Also how the pet follows and stays near you.
1d. Quicker response when you press F3 to call your pet back to you. Any current action/animation it’s going though should be canceled. My pet has died because it took to long to react and get out of some ground AoE or away from a boss.
1e. Reduced AoE damage. I love playing a class with a pet however in dungeons your pet dies WAY to easily even if you spec full 30 points in Beastmaster.

2. As others have said, the sword’s (1) attack gets you killed. Sword/War Horn is a powerful melee combo.

I have a few others but they are mostly bugs not really changes. Some of what I listed might even be considered bugs as well.

Why don’t people turn off the auto attack on Sword 1?

-Buff ranger greatsword attack speed/damage
-Add bleed to be applied by crossfire standing anywhere around enemy
-Buff longbow attack speed
-Make pets be able to attack and move at same time
-Buff axe damage, weak as hell

Lothair.8942:

Why don’t people turn off the auto attack on Sword 1?

That’s a temporary fix sure, however disabling a game feature shouldn’t be needed to solve a problem. Also the mashing of my #1 key when I’m not having to dodge/evade would be horrible over time.

Would you also recommend people turn their game sounds off if they keep getting strange sound errors or loops?

I just think in general I never play with the auto-attack on – I prefer to control the flow of the attacks. However, I agree with you – it’s a temporary fix at least.

-Master’s Bond needs to work through pet swaps, zoning, water etc. you put 5 points in beastmastery to get the quickness from swapping pets and another 5 points so that you hope you never have to swap again? that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The only time you should lose the stacks is on pet death.

-Pet survivability needs a massive overhaul. Pets don’t dodge anything, they don’t get out of AoE’s and just eat whatever damage is thrown at them. Why does it take less hits to kill them than me when I can actually move, dodge etc. Lower pet damage increase survivability.

-Trappers expertise and potency should be moved into the wilderness survival tree.
I have 2 builds once crit one condition damage. My crit build doesn’t care about the traps because using them would decrease my overall dps, and my condition build doesn’t give a crap about crits because my damage comes from poison, bleeds, and burns which don’t benefit from crits.

-Why can’t we have one trait that allows our arrows to pierce targets and lower’s the cooldowns? Warriors have this for Rifle why not us for either LB or SB?

-More reliable bleed on SB 1 skill. For condition builds the bleed on it is only worth it if the enemy isn’t attacking you. Since our pets can’t hold aggro for the life of em and other classes have reliable bleeds on their ranged 1 skill why can’t we get this? All they’d have to do is lower the base damage on the bleed and increase the bonus it gets from condition damage that way condition builds benefit while crit builds don’t become stupid op.

-Fixing all the ranger related bugs and improving pet AI.

-Master’s bond should carry over to the other pet when you swap pets and when you enter water (maybe nerf the bonus you get from it in return)

-Make pet return cancel anything the pet is currently doing. If I tell it to return it should return.

-On unnamed pets, replace the “Juvenile” with something like “tame” or “domesticated”.

-Tier 2 and 3 pet traits are boring and suck. Improve them.

-Right now making a build that focuses on the pet doesn’t seem viable. To strenghten your pet you will want to buff it up and we have a lot of options for doing that. The problem is that you want to swap your pet as often as possible to make sure it not dies, to utilise it’s active ability as much as possible (and the other ones too) and to get 2 sec quickness as well as the stacks of might your pet can get from being swapped in (Mighty Swap). But by swapping out your pet all the buffs you’ve put on it disappear.
I don’t know what to do about this but currently it’s hard to make a pet focused build because of these conflicting interests.

-Companion’s Might is useless. 1 second of might on crit isn’t going to help much. Even when using a shortbow which has the highest attack speed you barely get anything out of this.
Either buff the duration to at least 2 seconds or change it so it proccs on all hits and not just crits.

-Make Lightning Reflexes and Signet of Renewal activation break any movement hindering effects. A lot of the time when I get immobilized and try to Lightning reflex out of it I just roll on the spot, not going anywhere and once the roll finishes I’m still stuck. Same for Signet of Renewal in the same situation, I activate it and I’m still stuck.
If I can’t break cc with these abilities then why should I use the at all?
So yeah, make these two abilities break all these conditions (except for the root on elite entangle, since it’s an elite ability and you can attack the root to get free anyway)

-Buff spirits

-Make the casting animations on most pet active skills not be so long. A lot of the offensive active abilities have so long animations that by the time they actually get it off the target without even trying to dodge it has moved so much that the ability misses completely.

-Aside from Signet of Renewal the effects on signets aren’t very usefull unless you invest 30 points in markmanship (and their cooldowns are pretty long to boot). Either buff the effects or decrease the cooldowns. (also from reading the tooltip on Signet of Renewal it doesn’t sound like it would benefit from the Signet of the Beastmaster trait at all. If anything it would make it worse if you started pulling conditions from allies to yourself)

Re rolled warrior. im happy.

lol I like how that was the death of this thread, wonder how many followed suit.

- Swap the trap and survival skill traits. Traps go in Wilderness Survival and Survival skills go in Skirmishing.

I don’t care if Survival not being in Wilderness Survival seems silly. It would make a lot of builds significantly more viable.

Change the pew pew sound of the bow… drives me nuts. I’m using a bow not a ray gun.

Complete rework of the pet system. These pets are the worst pets I have every had in an MMO.

More combo fields. Full spectrum preferably, so we can really go nuts with those axes and arrows.

Fix Pet AI.

Buff Longbows and Greatsword.

Fix Sword 1 1 1 combo + dodge.

Replace some sounds.

Rebalance Signets, but keep the Master Trait the same. Signet of Stone is already broken as doggy.

Fix Issues with Rampage as One + Stability.

Make Spirits invulnerable and make them cast their actives only on activation while keeping the trait that makes them cast on death.

Apart from the standard suggestions of traits, Signets, Spirits, pet AI and responsiveness, etc.

- Crossfire (Shortbow auto-attack): Change functionality to apply one stack of bleed on attack, no matter the positioning. Add an additional stack of bleed if you hit the target from behind (instead of the current behind or from the side). Rebalance the attack speed so that if you’re behind the target, you can stack the same number of bleeds as you can with current functionality, if you’re in front/to the side of the target, the number of bleed stacks is obviously halved.

Reasoning for this is that currently, it feels like a Shortbow condition build is punished for not playing skillfully, rather than rewarded for playing skillfully (if that makes sense).
It’s also not always possible to get behind/beside targets (World event Dragons come to mind, and well as any situation with tight spaces, close-packed enemies, or large enemies), rendering a condition build practically useless. Proposed changes would alleviate the problem somewhat, while still encouraging skilled play.

- Trapper’s Expertise (trait): Increase the range of ground-targeted traps to 900.

Considering that a) If you’re melee, you’ll most likely want to drop traps at your feet, and b) all our ranged weapons have 900+ range, it makes no sense that thrown traps only have 600 range.

-Trap-based traits: Move to Wilderness Survival.

It makes no sense that traps, which are highly condition focused and get little benefit from crits, are the in Precision/Prowess trait line.

Aside from simple balancing changes and fixes which I’m sure ArenaNet will have in the works (maybe even for the 1 Oct patch!), I’d really love to see a weapon more focused on the “Nature Magic” style. I know that’s not to most people’s taste, but that’s okay – it’s fun to dream anyway!

My personal wish would be for staff to be considered for the next Ranger weapon – but used as a melee range martial bo staff rather than as a point-and-shoot caster weapon.

Some example abilities off the top of my head:
Staff skill #1 – Jab
Strike a quick upper blow to multiple enemies in a cone before you.

• Damage: 175
• Range: 180

Staff skill #1 – Twirl (chain)
Spin your staff to damage multiple foes.

• Damage: 175
• Range: 180

Staff skill #1 – Slam (chain)
Launch a powerful downwards blow by arcing your staff overhead.

• Damage: 240
• Range: 300

Staff skill #2 – Winnowing – 10 recharge
Rapidly dodge and weave between adjacent foes as you strike each a ringing blow, causing escalating damage for each additional target beyond the first. (This skill teleports you from enemy to enemy striking once per target, and ends when there are no new enemy targets in range, returning you to your starting position).

• Damage: 150, increasing by 40 for each additional blow (up to 5 times)
• Range: 300
• Duration: 4 s

Staff skill #3 – Falling Leaves – 15 recharge
Whirl your staff in sweeping circles, stirring up leaf litter that blinds adjacent enemies.

• Damage: 200
• Blindness: 3 s
• Range: 180

Staff skill #4 – Brambles – 25 recharge
Cause a ring of thorny brambles to grow around you, entangling and bleeding enemies who attempt to pass. The brambles also grant your pet protection upon entering.

• Damage: 50
• Bleeding: 3 s
• Crippled: 3 s
• Protection: 8 s (pet only)
• Radius: 240

Staff skill #5 – Fertile Season – 45 recharge
Plant your staff to grow a spirit tree that blocks enemy line of sight and activates any nearby ground magic (ie, pulses a blast finisher).

• Block Radius: 60
• Effect Radius: 240
• Duration: 15 s
• Combo Finisher: Blast (every 5s)

Roven Leafsong.8917:

Aside from simple balancing changes and fixes which I’m sure ArenaNet will have in the works (maybe even for the 1 Oct patch!), I’d really love to see a weapon more focused on the “Nature Magic” style. I know that’s not to most people’s taste, but that’s okay – it’s fun to dream anyway!

My personal wish would be for staff to be considered for the next Ranger weapon – but used as a melee range martial bo staff rather than as a point-and-shoot caster weapon.

Some example abilities off the top of my head:
Staff skill #1 – Jab
Strike a quick upper blow to multiple enemies in a cone before you.

• Damage: 175
• Range: 180

Staff skill #1 – Twirl (chain)
Spin your staff to damage multiple foes.

• Damage: 175
• Range: 180

Staff skill #1 – Slam (chain)
Launch a powerful downwards blow by arcing your staff overhead.

• Damage: 240
• Range: 300

Staff skill #2 – Winnowing – 10 recharge
Rapidly dodge and weave between adjacent foes as you strike each a ringing blow, causing escalating damage for each additional target beyond the first. (This skill teleports you from enemy to enemy striking once per target, and ends when there are no new enemy targets in range, returning you to your starting position).

• Damage: 150, increasing by 40 for each additional blow (up to 5 times)
• Range: 300
• Duration: 4 s

Staff skill #3 – Falling Leaves – 15 recharge
Whirl your staff in sweeping circles, stirring up leaf litter that blinds adjacent enemies.

• Damage: 200
• Blindness: 3 s
• Range: 180

Staff skill #4 – Brambles – 25 recharge
Cause a ring of thorny brambles to grow around you, entangling and bleeding enemies who attempt to pass. The brambles also grant your pet protection upon entering.

• Damage: 50
• Bleeding: 3 s
• Crippled: 3 s
• Protection: 8 s (pet only)
• Radius: 240

Staff skill #5 – Fertile Season – 45 recharge
Plant your staff to grow a spirit tree that blocks enemy line of sight and activates any nearby ground magic (ie, pulses a blast finisher).

• Block Radius: 60
• Effect Radius: 240
• Duration: 15 s
• Combo Finisher: Blast (every 5s)

Not critiquing this or anything, since I just feel nuetral about it in general. But, your CDs listed are far too long for the weapon to be useful. Take a look at other weapon CDs to see there is a pretty strong trend in CD lengths.

- n° 4 axe skill improve
- leap from n° 1 sword skill give him a little knock down
- improve long bow damage
- improve signet and shout

Lothair.8942:

Why don’t people turn off the auto attack on Sword 1?

Because repetitive strain injury is a horrible thing.

More Active Skills.

More Camouflage skills

SIGNIFICANT deployable trap range

Active pet skills based on race

They need to go back and sort out ALL the pet related problems,

All the pet related problems that should of been sorted out during Beta, just like all the other problems that should of been sorted out during Beta, (dare I mention Necro), but for whatever reason were not sorted out.

Untill Anet understand that both Ranger and Necro are both very popular classes/proffs that people really want to play, but are both riddled with problems then I really can’t see how they are going to move forward.

Sort the pets out, everything else is a waste of time, and words untill they do that.

when it comes to classes with problems.

Necromancer is #1

and Engineer is #2

and pet issues aren’t nearly as hindering as the problems these professions face

I love the idea of Rangers, but they are so infuriating to play as that I’m considering re-rolling as a Warrior (even though I’m level 76). In addition to what other people have said:

1. Don’t give pets aggro until they attack a target (this would help a ton in PvE. Pets make Orr a nightmare).

2. Make traps last twice as long, but don’t allow ground-targeting without the trait (they are supposed to be area-denial, but they fail in that function).

3. Reduce the damage pets take by 50% but decrease their damage by 33% (makes them more survivable but not OP, since right now my bear can out-DPS me -_-). Alternately, Arenanet could allow pets to dodge (I’m not hopeful on that though).

4. Eliminate the out-of-combat cooldown for pet swapping (this was implemented to fix an easily fixable exploit), and reduce the cooldown for a dead pet swap to 45 seconds (90 seconds is way to punishing, since you lose around half your potential DPS).

5. Rework the Shouts completely. Guard, especially, is the most useless thing imaginable.

6. Increase the damage of Shortbows slightly but don’t make bleeds automatic (this would make bleeds a reward for good positioning rather than a necessity, and make the weapon more viable in dungeons).

7. Dramatically increase the damage of Longbows. Multiple people have done the math and concluded that skill #1 needs something like a 60-70% DPS increase to break even with the (slightly underpowered) Shortbow. That is an absurd situation, and should be rectified immediately. Also consider making skill #5 an immobilize or stun (and moving Barrage to Shortbow) since this weapon is more for 1v1 kiting whereas Shortbow is for skirmishing with groups (who are ideally focused on someone else).

8. Increase the Signet of the Hunt’s movement speed bonus to 25% (equivalent to Rogue’s) and improve the active affect.

9. Either make Spirits unkillable or improve their active effects and health immensely. These things are a joke at the moment.

1. Buff the Longbow’s base attack speed and/or damage.
This is needed. Longbow’s base damage is so pitiful right now it’s not even worth taking outside of WvW sieges. For a weapon that is trading all utility for raw damage, it should at least be able to out DPS or match a shortbow at max range.

2. Buff the Greatsword’s auto attack slightly.
I think we can all agree the Greatsword was a little ridiculous before (for those of you who don’t remember, think 19k crit backstab Thieves). However, the nerf has put the base damage under the 1h sword, which has much more utility (evades, poison, cripple OH choice, pet might, etc). Buffing it slightly to put it on-par with the 1h sword would be lovely.

3. Do something with the OH axe. Touch up most of OHs for that matter.
Path of Scars is horribly outclassed by Throw Torch and Stalker’s Strike, and can just barely beat Hunter’s Call. Whirling Defense is nifty, but locks you in place for the duration. On the same thread, the OHs just don’t offer enough utility to warrant taking them over the Warhorn aside from a few scenarios. The Dagger has nice synergy with the sword, and the torch is good for condition damage, but they just need something comparable to Call of the Wild. Just pick any other proffession’s OHs and compare it to the Ranger ones, and it’s easy to see who got the short end of the stick.

4. Swap the traits for Survival skills and Traps.
Someone already brought this up. Traps fit Survival much better, as they are one of our best condition sources. This also makes it easier for non-trapper Rangers to incorporate a trap into their build: they only need to put the points in survival for the trait and damage bonus, as opposed to points in Skirmishing for trap traits and then more points in survival to make them actually do damage.

5. Fix the Marksmanship and Beastmastery Trait lines
Marksmanship isn’t bad, but opening strikes is. The mechanic is laughable at best, and takes up the entire set of minor traits while requiring a Grandmaster major trait to even work. Beastmastery has its own set of issues. The majority of the traits after 15 points are utter trash, while Master’s Bond has a glaring set of issues. The healing power also seems to be on there as an afterthought, whereas it feels like it should be swapped with Nature Magic.

6. Make Signets a viable alternative to Survival skills
Right now, Signets require a full 30 points in Marksmanship to even be considered for use, and even then are dragged down by heavy CDs. Rebalancing signets and their respective traits would open up a variety of builds beyond the Sharpening Stone/QZ combo everyone and their mother is running.

7. Buff/Re-balance Spirits.
Spirits are mediocre at best, pitiful at worst. For one of the only support skills that can actually BE KILLED, they have sub-par benefits. The proc chance just absolutely ruins most use of them, while the actual benefits are hardly worthwhile. 1s of protection or 3s of swiftness, yay? The damage spirits aren’t much better. Frost’s proc amounts to 20-60ish damage based on weapon, and Sun isn’t much better. The whole proc concept needs to go, and the buffs need to be made worthwhile.

8. Shouts. Just remove them.
For something that was withheld for so long, it’s almost sad how near-useless these are. Sic’em is completely outclassed by Sharpening Stone, Signet of the Hunt, and Quickening Zephyr, Protect me feels like a poor man’s Signet of Stone for those who don’t take Signet of the Beastmaster, and Guard doesn’t do anything to even warrant taking a utility slot. Search and Rescue is moderately useful in dungeons, but is kittened compared to other rez options. Honestly, the entire set of these feels like pet f2 skills that decided to become utilities. Putting them as f2 skills on a new set of pets (e.g. a St. Bernard with Search and Rescue) would let those who honestly like these use them, but remove them from the utility bar.

This may be a bit rant-y and come off as a lot of complaining, but I don’t think the Ranger is bad overall. Unpolished is more of an appropriate term. Some stuff is good, but overall the skills just feel underdeveloped. If you compare the Ranger from the 2010 demos to the release version, not much changed aside from the pet overhaul. A few skills were moved around and added, but the majority were almost untouched. It almost appears as if A-Net put so much effort into making pets great that they forgot about the other skills and just rolled them out. Now, that’s not to say nothing was done (the original longbow was horrendous, no cast on move, no bonus damage, and the monstrosity known as Poison Arrow existed), but there’s still a good amount of room for improvement.

I’ll just give headlines in order of importance as most of my points explained in detail already:

1-) Improve pet AI.
2-) Spirits. They need to be redesigned.
3-) Buff longbow damage.
4-) Signets. Drop the trait that makes them affect us. They should do that without traits.
5-) Rework trait lines.
6-) Fix bugged skills or wrong descriptions (whichever is true). Spike Trap not pulsing 3 times, or Entangle not being affected by “Wilderness Knowledge” etc.
7-) Remove “Search and Rescue” and “Guard”. Add them to an F button. They should not be utility skills imo. Add preparations for those spots. Burning Arrows and Read the Wind for example.

My 2c.

My Ranger whishlist:

• +30% damage for GS, 3k damage with Swoop (3374 attack, 58% crit damage, TH training, +5% damage sigil) on weakest dummy with 20 stacks of vulnerability is a sad joke.
• Remove bleed condition on GS 2, add vulnerability (5 or 10 stacks) or snare condition
• Change Counterattack to be used on movement
• Move traps traits from Skirmishing tree to Wilderness Survival tree
• Move Remorseless to second tier of the line
• Move pets traits to BM tree
• Increase bonus damage of TH training to 10% and move it to skirmishing tree
• Decrease pets damages but increase survivability (more hp/toughness, dodge with the ranger, etc)
• Improve pets AI (like going in the foe’s back when the pet is not the target)
• Give % of Ranger stats to pets stats
• Make F2 pet skill quicker to launch
• Decrease signets cooldown to 60/90sec
• Decrease RaO cooldown to 90sec
• Fix traits bugs like Opening strike
• Make birds’ speed boon on F2 skill
• Make Whirling Defense to be used on movement
• Allow Path of Scars to pull the foe on return, like Chieftain skill
• Increase LB attack rate slightly
• Allow Lightning Reflexes to break root
• Make a special bar for pet control (attack, etc) and another (F1 to F4 skills) for pets skills
• Tell us something on your concern about the Ranger….

1. Fix PETS! let them attack while moving (ya know like games 10 years ago already had) and fix the unresponsive pet F2 abilities to be instant and working

2. Fix opening strike. doesnt seem to work half of the time at all

3. (wish) make lightning reflexes break out of immobilizing effects.

changes I would like to see : out of range and obstruction bugs.

/End