Guild Wars 2

ryokoalways.3450:

I believe the opposite of the majority opinion in the thread, in that the greatsword is a weak weapon. I agree that the firepower is lackluster compared to other weapons (and I don’t share the same sentiment that it’s that much worse), but it’s defensive capabilities and mobility is so great that it easily compensates for the subpar damage output.

My concern is more that they chose to put bulk of the damage output onto the pet rather than the ranger. This is the cause for the GS nerf (and to a lesser extent, some other weapons). That said, the GS is still a very universally good weapon weapon (PvE, dungeon, and WvW. Haven’t done enough PvP to comment).

Wrong.

The survivability of a one handed sword with no offhand equipped is leagues greater than the greatsword. You get 3 evades on 2 skills before you even factor in what you take as your offhand(for instance axe has a very long channel skill that deflects ranged attacks).

As for mobility, yah swoop is nice but that’s it. I wouldn’t recommend a weapon cause it has a skill that let’s you get close to an opponent as it’s only talking point. I’d rather limp across a football field with a 20 second cripple debuff on me with a one handed sword 20 levels under my toon’s level then have to use a greatsword to kill the same mob that’s 2 feet away…why? Cause it’ll still take longer with the greatsword, a lot longer. If a feather pillow would teleport me instantly to an opponent I still wouldn’t use it to fight off a pack of wolverines.

Not a solution but if you hold the F2 button down until activation instead of repeatedly hitting it, it will queue up as the next skill. I’ve bound the F2 skill to one of my mouse’s auxillary buttons and simply keep it pressed for the 1-3 seconds it takes to activate.

Don’t touch the torch, it’s my favorite weapon for the ranger. Having two fire skills, both with high durations and reasonably low recharge allows me to tear through entire wave of pve DE’s on my own with speed and ease.

I’ll go ahead and disagree with the 5 points in beast mastery, the dps your pet can provide is pretty significant with 0 points in beastmastery, meaning if you choose to swap your pet every 18 seconds for quickness, you’ll probably lose more dps from your swapped pet having to run and restart an attack on your target than you will gain from the 2 seconds of attacking faster. If you are playing a melee primary then it might be wortwhile as your new pet will be summoned near your target but most rangers are running some sort of bow as a primary meaning you’ll be losing dps. It’s a great skill but not a necessary one and it runs counter intuitive to one of the best beastmastery traits(the one that buffs your pet for each kill it gets as long as you don’t switch it out). It’s a good skill but not an absolute must take.

arji.7192:

Seems like rangers has the most issues atm.
Pets stupidity, pets delay, utilities based on pets, our 5th trait line useless, missing a weapon with mostly dps skills(like axes on warrior), pets pulling couse sitting infront of us.
And really how can u base so many utilities or so many traits on pets or have of your dps on pets when these things always die ?
Some say manage your pet by call it back when u get dmg. Really ? Is thi a cosmetic pet or a buff pet? Do i have to do less dps from anyone else couse a)my pet dies from AoE b)gets aggro from the boss c)cant dodge d)its stupid?
PS: I keep playing my ranger but some things has to be told.

Nope, engineers still have the most problems. Probably be another few months before we take that title away from ‘em. I suspect that pet ai/programming will be one of the last things to get a real fix as it’s an issue in pretty much every mmo ever at the start.

You must be using longbow/greatsword with feline pets. Try the good ranger weapons(sword/offhand and shortbow).

I ran a build like yours originally, spirits are a two edged sword. Against someone who doesn’t bother with them, you’ll dominate in 1v1 or even 1v2 but if someone takes the 3 seconds it takes to kill all 4 of your spirits…well, you just wasted 4 skill slots and a bunch of traits. Point being, you can dominate entire teams with it and then run across a single person who realizes that your spirits are worth killing, then your entire build becomes crap. Oh and it takes a good portion of time to bring those things out and they die on their own every 60 seconds sooo…..

I changed my build to condition spam and haven’t looked back.

Sucuri is right, for some reason mobs above level 70 tend to ignore pets in the regular zones.

Even by raw dps standards, the basic attack on the shortbow will result in more raw damage than the longbow at max range without factoring in the bonus bleed from the shortbow. The skills on the shortbow provide more survivability(evasion and swiftness) and, more importantly, skills for not allowing a player to escape to fight again(cripple and poison), the longbow gets a dps channel skill that’s ok and that’s about it really about it. Don’t get me started on the aoe, it is pretty bad as it’s easily avoidable and rather low dps, certainly not burst and only useful in pve and only marginally so there.

As for the greatsword, it’s lowest dps weapon in the rangers arsenal with very little function other than swoop(which is awesome mind you as you can travel for 1000 to initiate an attack). You get the same aoe range with a one handed sword but a crap ton of more damage and a lot of evasion not to mention you can choose between 2 really good offhands(torch and warhorn, dagger ain’t half bad either), each of which has more use in their two skills than the entirety of the greatsword line.

You will probably use all of the weapons by level 80 anyhoo(heck, by level 15 most likely), who wouldn’t want to try them all out.

It’s very unlikely you’ll settle on greatsword though. Longbow is at least fun if underpowered compared to it’s smaller cousin.

Axe/axe in de’s will pretty much tag everything pretty quickly. If you want to be lazy about it, you can sit there and just use the primary attack the entire time, switching manually between targets can let you tag over 20 mobs within a few seconds.

Build strategies vary but for me, running a strong condition based build(shortbow+sword/torch) I have no problems at all with thieves, I’d even go so far as to say they are the easiest class for me to kill outside of elementalists.

Zephyr+shortbow pretty much kills everything as long as you use it judiciously.

The greatsword is easily the worst weapon in the Ranger’s arsenal. The skills themselves aren’t bad in function but the dps is so low it’s embarrassing, particularly in light of the lack of significant condition damage or damage mitigation on the greatsword spec. It might possibly be the worst skill set in the game across all classes at the moment.