Guild Wars 2

I consider the main issue I raise here to be a bug, although development may consider part of my text is an intended “design limitation”?

I play WvW a lot using either a L80 Ranger or L80 Thief and I have become increasingly annoyed about the inability to use a Ranger Longbow properly when trying to defend a fort, as compared with a Thief Shortbow.

Let me state first of all that I have thought for a long time that the ranges of the two bows in the game are non-sensible, i.e.

1. Longbow (surely this should offer the longest range?)
- Ranger Use – Range 1,200 for all skills except Point Blank Shot (Range 600)
- Warrior Use – Range 900 for all skills except Combustive Shot (Range 1,200)

2. Shortbow (surely this should generally be shorter range than longbow?)
- Ranger Use – Range 1,200 (why same as longbow?)
- Thief Use – Range 900 for all skills except Cluster Bomb (Range 1,200)

It would have seemed more sensible to me that:
A) A Warrior bow be Shortbow, not a Longbow (in line with Thief), with only one exceptional skill providing the longer 1,200 range.
B) The Ranger Shortbow should be inline with A) with range of 900, except for one exceptional skill giving 1,200.
C) The Ranger Longbow should provide one exceptional skill with a longer range of 1,500 … the skill exist with the right name “Long Range Shot” so why not give it that range to compensate for shortening shortbow ranges?

Anyway, back to the “bug” itself, as I see it. The main problem (and my intense frustration with in WvW) is that the “targetting” for the Barrage Ranger Longbow skill appears to be broken, compared with the Cluster Bomb Thief Longbow skill.

I took a series of snapshots to try to visually show what I mean, but unfortunately, the green or red concentric circles used for targeting the skills do not display on the snapshots. I will include one snapshot to show the main position used for my tests which was inside Sunnyhill Tower in the Crystal Desert Borderlands.

Basically, as a Thief, you are able to target most areas outside of the fort using Cluster Bomb, but as a Ranger, using Barrage (which is meant to have the same range) the identical areas cannot be targeted, as the concentric targeting rings are always red.

As a Ranger, the only time you can actually get the green concentric rings to action the Barrage skill is when targeting points outside of the range that can be targeted by the Thief skill (and not useful areas where attackers congregate), or target the tower wall with an overlap so that as a Ranger you can only hit attackers immediately adjacent to the wall.

Please look at the firing position in the snapshot, confirm what I have said and fix this ASAP. At the moment, it seems ironic that a basically melee profession can do a much better job defending a fort with a bow in WvW than a Ranger!

When you also take into account that professions such as Elementalist have no problem targeting you on the wall with their red circles to hit you with massive ele damage, as a Ranger you feel totally useless trying to defend unless you can use a canon, arrow cart or ballista, etc.

The issue is line of sight, if you jump up on the edge of the wall you will find barrage will work better for you.

The issue is line of sight, if you jump up on the edge of the wall you will find barrage will work better for you.

Well some things here:

• My line of sight is fine and my Norn ranger is much taller than my Human thief, not that that matters.. lol
• Jumping on the wall edge just makes you bigger target and is not necessary on my thief.
• Key thing is that a longbow should be able to target anything within a shortbow range, but this is bugged so you can’t do that!

It would be nice if development did some stuff to improve ranger bow use, I get nostalgic for gw1 where a ranger could out range any other profession with a longbow. I firmly believe that this should be the case in gw2 as well.

The benefit of a longbow is that it shoots a heavier (and often longer) arrow with the same speed as a shortbow fires a much lighter arrow. While individual bows behave differently (especially when considering things like horn and composite bows), a longbow naturally stores more potential energy than a shortbow, which gives arrows fired a stronger punch to them. Alternatively, a short bow is faster simply because you can’t put in the same amount of energy without breaking it or causing serious wear to the wood/string. If you overdraw a shortbow in order to give it equivalent energy, it risks failing, however because it is smaller you can fire lighter arrows at a much better rate with less fatigue.

I would think a longbow fits a warrior very well, as historically longbows were the tools of only the strongest archers. They required considerable physical strength to repeatedly draw, and often archers would switch to sword or spear when the arrow supply was expended and the distance closed, so I would definately keep it as an option for warriors over the shortbow. And while I’m not against a ranger having a 1500 range shot, I would probably make it deeply traited not unlike the engineer’s range increase to grenades (3rd tier in explosives).

As for barrage’s issue, line of sight is the most likely culprit. Note that even grenadier engineers will need to hop up next to a wall’s edge otherwise the arc of their grenades won’t clear the rampart and explode in their faces. Also note that elementalists (who are using AoE and not a single-target ability that ignores line of sight) and other AoE attackers are not targetting you, but the tip-top of the wall which causes about 40% of their AoE circle to overlap over the rampart (the rest targets the vertical wall). Yeah, I know that goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway just in case.

As a ranger, I hate using longbows since they are not as effective as shortbows(bleed damage). Funny that legendary longbow looks much better than legendary shortbow. I am in a dilemma: either farm a legendary shortbow that could kill effectively and ignore what it looks like, or craft a legendary longbow which has outstanding appearance and suck on damage output…

I could work this case out myself if I could effective control the aggro, but as far as I know, bears, trolls, and especially orrs which I will mainly farm on will always aim at me no matter what pet I use. This prevents me from using longbow since the damage depends on range. That knock back skill is useless cause its CD is too long. This lead me to ranger’s shortbow, a perfect combination for condition damage and crowd control that doesn’t depend on distance.

And I find out how awesome is sword+torch: increase pet damage+huge amount of fire damage+occasional poison+evade. Well, suck to be a melee ranger but it works better.