Guild Wars 2

Not literally — but if you are firing from a safe distance, consider the following:

1. Fan of Fire hits a target 3 times when fired at point blank range
2. When standing in your fire, you’ll get incidental might stacks from anyone who drops a blast finisher (including your own Arcing Arrow)
3. Smoldering Arrow is Aegis in reverse with a short duration. Seriously powerful while swarmed.
4. Combustive Shot has a huge radius, making it a great stage for hacking your enemies apart in fire.
5. The range is a luxury. You can circle strafe and dodge around all you’d like in your fire without missing.
6. Untraited, the range isn’t that great anyway.

What was the point of this thread?

Are longbows a melee weapon? No.
Should they be used by warriors? Yes. Why? Because we are warriors not knights or whatever other BS description you get from other games.

In fact we should also be able to use daggers and pistols imo

In fact we should also be able to use daggers and pistols imo

Warriors, by their nature, should be masters of all weapons. (Not necessarily every warrior master of every weapon — just some warrior somewhere specializes in using some weapon to the utmost.) Even things like staves. It’s actually kinda funny that no class in GW uses a staff for precisely what staves have historically been used for in combat: melee weapons.

That said, obviously that would require a ridiculous number of skills be developed. But perhaps each expansion they can add another weapon and a few skills to the warrior’s arsenal.

Just a observation/PSA. People often complain about longbows being weak, requiring a trait for range, and only viable for WvW for area denial. Longbows, by name, are traditionally long range weapons. Instead, they are this game’s shotgun, weak and inaccurate at a distance but incredibly powerful up close.

It’s actually a really interesting design decision by ArenaNet that isn’t obvious when you first use the weapon.

I use the LongBow a lot and agree, I stick and move with it and when I use my Burst (Combustive Shot) I follow up with the blind (Smoldering Arrow) as I run into my fire and then blast them and might myself with (Arching Arrow). Works great!

Ever since I hit 65th and was able to pick up the Power / Vitality / Condition gear pieces, I’ve been a major fan of the Longbow for my Hammer character. I do agree that the Longbow is really more of a point blank range weapon. While I’ll use its range and will kite with it as needed, a decent amount of +Condition really makes this weapon a force to be reckoned with. It’s my weapon of choice when I’m against mobs that are immune to control effects or if I need to just do massive amounts of AoE dps (instead of AoE control). By switching back and forth between the Hammer and Longbow, I feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds as a melee character.

Main issue is the Longbow 1 damage is poor, a good chunk of the damage comes from the flame spread, which is effective only as aoe or in a target’s face. If they were to modestly improve the damage of the 1 skill I would like longbows a lot more. As it stands, I prefer rifle for ranged and melee for aoe.

Yup. I used to use it to spam Combustive before I realized that combo fields don’t actually do a whole lot, and the burning condition wasn’t tagging enemies in Orr. Arcing is now my best friend, and unfortunately the only real tagging tool Warriors have, other than trying to chase undead that have the tendency to scatter in all directions and zip around like bees (or just evaporate as soon as their spawn invulnerability stops working). Sigh.

Longbow is great for laying out some OK damage at range, then putting the smack down on people who charge at you.