Guild Wars 2

Rangers are hated for a good reason – they are badly spoiled. During levelling, ranger gets used to use his scapegoats, um, sorry, pets, sending them to take all the damage and eventualy die, to be replaced by the second slotted scapegoat, while ranger stands far, far away just shooting his bow, rmoved from the fight.
And rangers try to behave exactly the same in groups. The group is just their scapegoat for them.
What is also bad – the scapegoat tactics works nice for soloing and normal mobs, where the rangers really can faceroll at the worst, but crumbles to dust when meeting anything even slightly more challenging.

So pets – and mob AI – are root of most of the rangers problem.
Mobs should prefer the higher threat which is not the bear, but the organ-grinder.

Ranger – pet relationship.
I hate to see pets as a mob punchbags. I personally love animals and I would never threat the real world animal friend of mine as the rangers misuse their pets ingame. Pets are way too expendable and rangers have no reason to try to keep their pets alive. And it was obviously the intent – we have enough skills where the pet suffers for his master. It is really not a pet, but a slave. So whoever wants to fix the ranger, he needs to start fixing the twisted ranger – pet relationship first.

Who is a ranger?
The origin of fantasy rangers is easy to backtrack. First fantasy rangers are modelled after Tolkien’s Aragorn and Tolkien’s rangers are simply a copy of colonial / american rangers from 18th century (anglo-french wars and independence wars). Just like the historical Robert Roger’s rangers.
Based on this, ranger is able survivalist, hunter and wilderness travel expert, a perfect skirmisher whose tactics is to outwit the regular army and perform a deadly strike from an unexpected angle. Nothing at all about pets.
So the easiest and most effective way would be to strip rangers of the pets, and make him the fundamental archer and an elite light infantryman with an unconventional and somehow dirty tactics in mind.

Let necros have their minions and be the pet class. Also the scapegoat user state of mind fits the necros better.

Is this some type of role playing?

The Ranger class comes from The Hobbits and Lord of the Rings in the Form okittenorn who was extremmly found of his horse.(in 1953 predating D&D). Anyone who played D&D should Know Drittz Do’Urden who was a very skilled Ranger with scimtars and bow who also travelled with a jaguar.

The vision of these Rangers are what Rangers were meant to be. Anet has simply rekindle the Ideal of the original Ranger. Anyone using a bow is an archer so that would include warriors and thieves.

To me it makes sense that anyone traveling a lot or spending time in the wilds would befriend an animal.

Removing the pet from the class would just create bigger issues. The first being that arrow are easily avoided. This is not a major issue now as pet are a source of damage and in many cases provide some form of cc. While pets can be avoided as well, it a lot more difficult to avoid the Ranger and his pet and deal damage at the same time.

Playing a Ranger imho is more difficult than other classes. Both of the heavy class have a lot of armor and a lot of healing. Other classes can run away very easily. Necros have an extra life bar and a minion army. Thieves and mesmers have a lot of stealthing and blinking.

For a class that is suppose to travel a lot a lot of classes can out run us with great ease. While some Ranger are very good at escaping. It is very clunky and beyond the abilities of a lot of rangers.

I wish more people would look at other issue the Rangers have other than damage. The pet is always the scapegoat on this topic. The few rangers who hunt thieves know that damage isn’t the only thing that matters.

I also think a lot of the bearbow hate comes from the fact that a lot of bots in the game have were just groups of longbow rangers running around with brown bears farming areas.

I think there are three different posts in one.

Take pets from rangers? Sure, Marksman is a good job. But, unlike your claims, the “Ranger” archetype (ranged, pet) is old and firm.

My poor pet? Dude, I am out there murdering sentient beings for a few silver and a chance that they have something I want to use or sell. I just spent an hour running around a socialist society in a hill, slaying them for their drops of blood. Some animal getting pounded on isn’t really a concern of mine, if it dies I’ll rez it, and in the meantime I’ll kill its family for food.

But neither of those are why Bearbow is hated. Bearbow is hated because it is one of the least contributory spec/profession slots in an instance. Heck, Necros do more in terms of combos, health, condition management, and more. Bearbow is “let me hit something and let’s see if it dies.” And that’s why it’s hated.

The sad part is that some people wont do a dungeon if there isn’t at least one heavy in the group. If this is you; you really need to give up on the bear bow hate.

Fext.3614:

… ranger stands far, far away just shooting his bow, …

Well, it does more damage then.
Today I tried the Giant of Nageling with my ranger (pet on peace), but she stood so far away from him that he just regenerated

So pets – and mob AI – are root of most of the rangers problem.

So true, even when I hit them first, they’ll change attention to the pet eventually. In GW1 you could train your pets by becoming the punching bag and let your pet do the punishing.

… with an unconventional and somehow dirty tactics in mind.

I like that very much

But I like pets too.

Roots of “bearbow” hate = The 2012 Ranger Bot Apocalypse.
Roots of Ranger hate = Class balancing problems.