I know you’re sifting through a ton of opinions on this, so I’ll keep mine brief and mention a problem that I don’t think is brought up very often: The difficulty for rangers to get big results consistently.
The best example I can think of is how difficult it is to play ranger effectively in large-scale WvW. Most of the ranger’s attacks that hit multiple targets are very hard to use compared to other classes – With a ranger I have to constantly be lining up perfect shots with a longbow to hit multiple targets or get in close enough to chuck a trap at my enemies in order to hit multiple targets, where with something like an ele or engi I can just chuck an explosive into the enemy zerg and get the same thing without the risk / effort.
I think this is why so many new rangers default to the ‘bearbow’ strategy – it’s so much easier to get consistent results compared to other ranger builds, even if the results are mediocre.
