Guild Wars 2

How often have you seen a ranger running a lb traps build? Rarely if ever because to make traps effective (castable and do significant damage) you need to use both the master and grandmaster traits in Skimishing which will not allow you to use “Quick Draw” which is 20% decrease in the cooldowns for lb and sb. Also traps are full conditions while lb attacks are straight damage. They do not work all that well together. Now entangle is our best skill for rooting an yes if I can get that off without it being evaded that will often be a death sentence for a squishy but if attacked the roots will die in a couple of attacks so you cannot count on them being reliable against someone who knows what they are doing.

If you are in WvW you will be hard pressed to keep your pet alive and even if you do the pet cannot attack while moving and will finish the attack that it is on before using its F2 skill as you direct which means that the F2 skill often wont pop until 1-2 seconds after casting giving you ample time to get out of the range of the stationary pet. It sounds like this may be fixed in the neat future (keeping fingers crossed).

The range on the lb is a marked advantage in PvP. I hope you are referring to WvW where yes it is very effective especially sieging/defending. In spvp however a high dps thief will kill a lb ranger 9 times out of 10. All the knockbacks in the world wont help me if I have no idea where my target is and if he can remove my ranged advantage with one stealth.

Sure we have a stealth now but unlike other classes our stealth is completely based on hitting an enemy. Not really the most reliable.

True rangers have all the swiftness they need but even that will not keep foes away for long. Most every class (if not every one) has a leap to target attack or a teleport to target or both. Sure while those are on cooldown I may be able to keep you a bit further away (assuming you dont cc me at all) but surely not to the max damage of the lb.

Even for PvE the lb isnt as good as it used to be. Hunter’s Shot is nearly useless and we can no longer take advantage of the 10 stacks of vulnerability (15 if traited) we could apply instantly. Now we stack them one at a time only holding the full 10 stacks for 2 seconds.

Shemsu.8721:

Again, this is not making sense. Your asking for a weapon designed to be long range, to be most effective at melee? I want my dagger to be effective at 1500 range, guess i shoulda picked a different weapon. Thats not what its for, every weapon (mostly) has a place and a purpose. If your going to fight up close, dont take longbow or make it effective at at short range, and take away the 1200-1500 range and bring it down to 120-300 like everyone elses close range weapons.

When did i ever say make it most effective at short range?

That’s besides the point anyway. As a thief Anet has given you the tools to get up to close range with your target and to stay within that range. As a ranger using a long bow we have almost no tools at our disposal to keep anything in the effective range. I do not think that the lb should do as much damage at short range as it does at long range but I do think that its attacks need to have the ability to keep people at longer range, whether that be by adding a cripple or a root or whatever.

Shemsu.8721:

RyuDragnier.9476:

Shemsu.8721:

RyuDragnier.9476:

All I want for Longbow is for the damage dealt at furthest range to be the normal damage across all ranges. But a longer distance should equal higher critical damage IMO.

All I want from backstab is for the damage dealt from behind to be the normal damage from all directions. But a stab from behind should equal higher critical damage IMO

This is completely different from backstab amigo. Backstab is burst damage, and is easy to pull off. Longbow’s #1 is outright useless outside of super long range and it’s very hard to do that in PvE, resulting in the weapon outright sucking to the point where it’s rarely used anywhere but WvW. Whereas the Dagger mainhand on a thief is powerful enough to be used in WvW, PvP, AND PvE.

so a MELEE attack thats only available with a special buff, AND requires specific position, is harder to pull off than a 1500 range spammable autoattack? You musta bought the good stuff this week, that or your doctor messed up your prescription. How about we make the under 25% of heartseeker damage apply to all the damage ranges? no, dont like that either. You cant have the full range damage at all ranges, that defeats the purpose, at best if you dont like the mechanic of damage changing on range, then take the mid range damage and make that all ranges, with no changes at full range (since you dont like things changing at full range)

If rangers actually had the ability to keep foes at long distance than this would make sense, but any class can close the distance and make the longbow almost completely useless. Sure we have the knockback but that is mitigated by stability and now stun break will also get you out of this. “Hunter’s Shot” should have a root similar to the warriors “Pin Down” making the lb a little more viable 1v1 (although it would still be next to useless unless the damage at close range is increased).

Yeah i think its quite awesome. I have talked with guildies who also have it and none of them are having the problem. I wouldn’t be concerned in the slightest if this was never fixed.

I recently noticed that my bow wasn’t shooting arrows it was shooting…well bows.

Anyone else noticed this or is it just me?