Guild Wars 2

So to me, as a veteran ranger, these “buffs” seem… kitten at best. I have been holding my tongue on the forums for months now, I usually just read the posts and form an opinion in my head. That opinion has been favorable and hopeful until today. I have been playing Guild Wars since shortly after GW1 release. While I do think rangers are a viable class and 75% of people’s issues are l2p, the fact is, it is much harder to build an effective ranger than any other class. I have rolled every class and we seem to have to least amount of options in order to be competitive. Most updates that has rolled out (save the one before this last Oct. 15 one) has done very little to add variety and play ability to our class.

Personally, I want to know why. I am having trouble understanding the reasoning behind some of these updates. There certainly has to be a degree of planning that goes into these, but why such minor updates? Adding 3 or 4 conditions to a brown bear’s F2 won’t break the game. Nor will adding more DPS to our already gimpy pets. I don’t get the rationale.

I feel like we are at a disadvantage to most classes, similar to the thief, we are locked into a couple gimmicky builds if we want to be successful in any game mode, save sPvP. If you guys are balancing around sPvP, you need to stop. Either split the skills completely like in GW1 or balance for the other 66% of the game. The minority should never eclipse the majority in terms of balancing.

Here are a couple of current issues that we’re heavily plagued with
-We draw heavy aggro in dungeons, on top of that, our pets draw aggro too, making us one of the least desirable classes for high level dungeons.
-General PvE: This is probably where we do the best, because of our pets. However, just personally I have found general PvE to be far too easy. I will say this positively, we really shine here. But we still hold the problem of drawing aggro, which really hurts us in some of the harder meta events.
WvW: Here is where we probably have the most problems. Basically, anything we can do, there is another class that does it better. I do think we’re solid on roaming though, but there are only a couple builds I can think of that are truly effective for this and they don’t work with zergs at all. So you can either build to zerg or build to roam. There is no effective hybrid build that serves as a reasonable bridge to these 2 ways of playing.
sPvP: honestly I don’t really play this game mode too much. I did roll a bunker ranger and have yet to be killed by anybody in 1v1. It seems that we are in a good place in that game mode though, from what I understand. But we suffer greatly most other aspects of the game.

I mostly agree with your post. However I don’t believe “bad rangers” use brown bears. Sometimes I am forced to use a brown bear simply because it doesn’t die. I have managed to build my character so 90% of his damage comes from the actual attacks. People are frequently surprised that my ranger actually does as well, if not better than other classes in terms of DPS.

The roll of my bear is to sponge AoE, nothing more. That being said, for anything other than a meat shield, the bear is useless. Also, the F2 utility is garbage on almost every pet. Reducing the cool down slightly on moas will not alleviate the issue with rangers. If we do not gain more compelling F2 skills for our pets, they will always remain gimpy. The wolf’s change was a step in the right direction, however that was the only pet that received any noticeable buff.

Like xsorus said, a 2 condition removal on the brown bear is still not very compelling, especially when that skill requires a target, for no good reason. I have had my bear on passive and he will still try and run to a target to use “Shake it off”. This is incredibly frustrating, especially in WvW, where I always keep my pet on passive in zerg fights.