Guild Wars 2

One more thing for the invasions. In the example which I described it would be important that these invasions are not happening on the same maps for the entire two weeks. That would make our efforts seem a waste. The story should react to us faster which absolutely possible to implement. For example it could start with hordes of 50s of monsters that appear. If the players fight them back the evil force will try to force us back by sending more and more like an army. If we still manage to succeed they will resign and try it elsewhere. Now there could be an ingame message that dark forces were seen in some region of Tyria. So the players will travel there to find out what happened and see that the invasion takes place there. That might be day two of the event. And so it continues until the evil gets too powerful in a region and the players have to retreat into a town. Now the NPC’s realize that there is a real threat. Hordes are preparing to attack for example Lions Arch. They will prepare defenses and at a certain time the full force will strike there. It should be difficult and maybe the players will succeed in fighting them back. (Such an event would be perfect for the weekend) If not Lions Arch has fallen. The NPC’s have retreated back into the mountains in desperation. The next day there are rumors that the dragon or the main force has left Lions Arch and that is the moment when they try to take back the town.
I guess you see my point. Such a story would really be a living story and it would be so decent
I would love such epic events. It would be pretty much unique in the world of the MMO’s.

I can agree a little darker/more serious story would be nice. I can’t take scarlet serious really. She comes here and there and plays around, joking, while throwing tons of monsters at us. Also the conversations in the queen’s jubilee seem to be for a very young audience.
It would be really great if the events felt a bit more believable. An evil force is not funny/joking or even kind. What I hope is that there will be some epic content where we feel like we can make a difference. They said thats what they are planning that decisions we players are taking are changing the outcome of the future story but the story doesn’t seem to be meaningful enough yet. I mean there is a scarlet freaky girl running around joking, playing games with the queen and other NPC’s.
I think if the dialogues were more serious and maybe also had more tension it would attract us players alot more.
Also some powerful force like Zhaitan threathening Tyria would be something epic. I liked the main story. If the living story had the same feel of threat we players might feel more involved in the world.
Here is one example: With the scarlet events noone really cares about winning against her. We all just farm the champions and lose the fight because it just makes no difference and we don’t feel like there is any meaning there to win.
Now an example of a really cool invasion theme:
A really powerful force like a dragon or a risen master is trying to invade Tyria but it will become obvious only over time. First there are some appearances in some areas where monsters arise and attack the settlers/groups living there. Over the days these invasions become more and more powerful and new areas are attacked. Even if we players fight them back they will still try again like we have the invasion from scarlet now. But we players should see an effect. If we fight them back constantly on one map they become weaker there and will appear in other areas of the map. But that way we feel like we saved these regions. It made a difference that we fought them. If we would ignore the danger and only farm that would mean that the map would be overrun because we didn’t care about the story and the threat.
After the first invasions and maybe some missions into the heart of the evil to find out what is the cause of these invasions maybe the risen master/dragon will call out the fall of tyria to his legions. This should sound like a real challenge and people should be excited and ready to do whatever is neccessary to stop him. We would know that it is up to us to stop this threat and to save tyria from a real force.
After that the invasions could come closer and closer to the cities which we players call our homes. And if we fail we should see the impact on the maps, maybe even in the towns. This would also become a living story. If a town falls we players would do all we are capable of to free the town from the creatures and to bring back the beloved NPC’s to that city. Such a story would leave an epic taste. People would really want to know what will happen and they would see that their actions actually make a difference.
The main story was epic. If the living story was as epic it would be really great. And while humor is great the main event and the main “evil” character shouild not be humorous and funny in my opinion because it makes it less meaningful.

Same here stuck at 14/16. Now we have the 2nd day where we couldn’t complete the daily and since you have to do the daylies to get the 16 there is not much we can do about it but fail
Please fix them and it would be nice if you maybe lowered it to 14 to get the achievement since we had two bugged days where we couldn’t finish them.

1) I play a norn female ranger and she looks awesome. There are some really nice looking armor sets. Especially the Norn Cultural armor is nice and the Krytan armor from the item shop looks awesome on female Norn.
3) I love the norn elites but I guess it depends what you play most. For example the snow leopard is the best escape skill in the game. It can stealth you three times for 5 seconds in the 30 seconds uptime and you have two charges with huge range in these 30 seconds.
This is especially useful in WvW if you are solo roaming. It saved my life dozens of times. But it has 4 minutes CD and I don’t really see anyone using it to fight.
The other norn racials are not really used. They are fun but not really powerful. The Bear form charge can hit like a truck if you buff it with sigills but its rather easy to dodge.

Our pets should hit as reliable as mesmer phantasms. If you don’t dodge/block/reflect/… a phantasm it will hit you. You can’t just walk around to pretty much avoid most of the damage. And that is while phantasms deal alot more damage than our pets and if you kill them they will just cast new ones while we might get a long CD on our pets once they die.
They should make our pets hit reliable. This topic has the solution if the problem was how to code it. With the 1500 attack range of our pets ( I can’t send my pet on targets that are 2000 range away) the old arguments of pets following someone to the other side of the map doesn’t count anymore so it should be fine to make our pets hit moving targets reliable.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/jubilee/Queen-s-Jubilee-daily-missing
Just in case it’s not seen in the other topic I post it over here too.
Today the daily is missing for the queen’s jubilee making it hard for some ppl to complete it

I can confirm this. I need only three – if possible add this today or make two of them for tomorrow

Its absolutely awful when this happens. I will take a closer look at that the next time I play but I know they fixed it a while back that pets only bring you into combat if they attack something.

Someone mentioned a bug with eles. Once they use mistform while in down state you won’t get any loot no matter if Alt+F4/logout or regular finishing. I didn’t check if this is true but that might have been the case.
But I can confirm this. It happens from time to time that you down someone and he is just gone without any loot or WXP.

If your pet is on “follow” you stay out of combat even if your pet is attacked. You don’t even have to completely set it to passive. When you run through areas where mobs might attack your pet just click F3 from time to time. I usually call it back to me every time I see/hear a mob attacking my pet, just to be sure that it won’t attack the mob.
For me that usually works fine. What I know only if the pet attacks mobs you are slowed down.

I think that is a server issue. Servers are too weak for the load when zergs clash. That it got even worse with the last update might have to do with the fact that they removed culling for PvE which means that their servers get even more load from PvE. I have no idea if they have absolutely separate servers for WvW but probably the solution to this would be to invest quite a bit more into servers which is something they will try to avoid. Might also have to do with bandwith issues on AreaNets side but I rather think the servers are too slow.

There is one difference between a spirit build and using guard for perma regen and swiftness.
For Natures Voice all you do is replace signet of the hunt (the passive 25% speed bonus) with guard which gives your pet perma regen, perma swiftness which is faster than 25%, perma protection, 10 sec of stealth + the ability to place the pet wherever you want like if you chase someone you can place it before you.
I don’t use natures voice anymore but it’s really decent especially since with all these buffs your pet is really tough and that makes Protect me decent especially with bears/drakes.
Besides guard you have two utility slots free for stuff you like like signet of renewal and Protect me for 2 stun breakers and great utility. With a spirit ranger you don’t have these. Especially in WvW spirits are dead almost immediately but with natures voice I was able to keep my bears and drakes alive even in zerg fights. Of course you have to be a bit careful but it works.

That would be even more decent But I think they want that people have to invest for permanent 1500 range on a weapon. Engi and Ranger have to trait for it.

They should just merge eagle eye and piercing arrows. Having to spend so many traits just to make the longbow decent is a problem especially since there are so many godly traits in that line like sigills work for the ranger and spotter.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-June-25th-2013
- Pet leash range increased to 2000 units.

This is what it should be according to the patch notes but it is 1500 range. The moment a target gets out of my longbow range the pet returns to me and I cannot send a pet to targets further than 1500 range. Please fix this as this is really a problem for rangers if you can’t send your pet at least into the direction of someone who is at for example 1800 range. That means once you get close enough the pet will take forever to reach the target.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-June-25th-2013
- Pet leash range increased to 2000 units.

This is what it should be according to the patch notes but it is 1500 range. The moment a target gets out of my longbow range the pet returns to me and I cannot send a pet to targets further than 1500 range. Please fix this as this is really a problem for rangers if you can’t send your pet at least into the direction of someone who is at for example 1800 range. That means once you get close enough the pet will take forever to reach the target.

I play ranger almost exclusively and a while ago I was running beastmaster mainly. Since the buff to the longbow I am running a zerker setup in pve and wvw and I like it alot.
The stealth on the longbow is just awesome. It’s what made it possible to play zerker ranger even for roaming and winning most 1v1 while still being useful in zergs with 1500 range and decent damage (retaliation is awful to barrage but since the nerf to retal you at least survive one barrage).
Soloing camps in WvW is really easy. You can even solo max updated camps before they respawn if you manage to position the mobs well and keep your bears alive.
And then the pets – I love them and it is one of the main things what makes the ranger awesome in my opinion. You can switch out pets for what you need. You want to buff the group with 50% fury uptime use the red moa. You need a super tanky pet use bears which even have nice F2 abilities like 10 sec AoE Weakness or 3 sec AoE Chill and there are a lot more pets which offer useful abilites like the wolf with knockdown and AoE fear or the hound/dog with knockdown and AoE immobilize.
In my opinion it is worth investing in a longbow ranger. But I cannot answer your question If the ranger is better for you than a warrior. I think the main difference is the stealth/knockback on the ranger longbow which are really awesome and that it is hard to avoid the longbow damage. The next thing that defines the ranger is the pet, which you don’t like as you said. I think you should try the ranger and see if you really don’t like pets or rather find out that they are pretty useful even if you only use them for fury or other buffs. It takes some time to learn to manage the pet but once you do it is awesome in my opinion.

The fern hound uses his own healing power which is 0 or 350 if you trait for it in the beastmastery trait line. I think the regen from the fern hound is 130 with 0 healing power and its like 174 with 350 healing power.
So I would rather use my own regen. Also your regen will be applied to your pet even if it is not next to you thanks to the fortifying bond. Your increased boon duration helps alot with these buffs.
A support ranger is really not bad. If you use altruism runes + healing spring + war horn + red moa you can keep up permanent fury for your party and a really strong regeneration + some might stacks for the group.
You will be very tanky and your healing spring is great for blast finishers and leap finishers with the swords for selfheal and you can even trait for high vigor uptime for everyone standing in the healing spring. Also it removes a condition every 3 seconds.
I liked the water runes back then. They healed around 1400 (with ~1400 healing power) two times per healing spring but they are not working any more.
The black bear is also a nice option for group support with 11 seconds of weakness and he is very tanky.
The jungle stalker is also nice for the 5 might stacks. You could even enhance the pets boon duration (fury from moa, might from jungle stalker) by 50% with concentration training in the nature magic trait line.
Another way to play support ranger are the spirits for high protection uptime and burn for the group. But I never really used them.

I can tell you that your healing power counts for the regeneration that you apply on others.
So if you have 1500 healing power you will have a 317 regen that also affects others not only you. So that is definitely useful.
As a beastmaster you can have a really tough pet but your damage won’t be really good.

Ok now I’m interested too. With my ranger wearking full zerker stuff with melandru runes I am at around 92% critdmg and 88% critchance with precision stacks + fury.
My Attack is at 3340 and I usually hit zergs for 900-1800 with a crit, depending on armor/protection.
My non-crits are alot lower – 400-700 or something like that. How can you hit for 3-5k with crits??
Whats your attack, your crit damage and do you have special ways to add dmg like the 10% dmg spirit?
3-5k crits with barrage seem unreachable to me.

A possible fast fix could be that as soon as you use an arrow cart the screen part which shouldnt be available (through window mode zooming) is blackened out so that even with that trick you only see as much as you would see otherwise in fullscreen mode.
I think that could work. Or simply blacken out that screen part on the entire WvW maps so that you also cannot select targets which you shouldnt.

I have to agree that it is very strange with the vitality. I did a test today with the wolf. Used no regeneration and 0 in beastmastery and let a mob hit him til he was dead. He received around 14k damage. My heal as one healed around 50% of his HP with 6520 heal. So I really guess wolves have the listed 14868 life even though they have 2061 vitaility what is really weird.
I did the test three times so I guess the listed values should be correct.

Here are the real values. I copied it from the April Patch notes. No more guessing^^

Pet Attributes

Adjusted health and/or armor of ranger pets:
Ursine pets: health increased from 26,000 to 29982; armor is now 2061 (up 687). Polar bear’s power now matches that of all other bear pets.
Dogs: health increased from 13,000 to 14,868; armor is 2061 (no change).
Cats: health increased from 13,000 to 14,868; armor is 1374 (no change).
Devourers: health increased from 11,089 to 14868; armor is 2748 (no change).
Birds: health increased from 11,894 to 14,868; armor is 1374 (no change).
Drakes: health increased from 11,683 to 22,425; armor is 2061 (no change).
Spiders: health increased from 18,646 to 22,425; armor is 1374 (no change).
Pigs: health increased from 20,538 to 22,425; armor is now 2061 (up 687).
Moas: health increased from 16,781 to 22,425; armor is 1374 (no change).
Armor Fish: health increased from 16,781 to 22,452; armor is now 2748 (up 343).
Jellyfish: health increased from 11,089 to 22,425; armor is 1374 (no change).
Shark: health increased from 13,000 to 22,425; armor is now 2061 (up 687).

I can confirm this. It often happens wen you have autorun activated and use rocket boots the character will just stand still and do nothing at all. You either have to click autorun twice again or manually press keys a few times before your character will move.
It doesnt happen every time but quite often.
I hope there will be a fix soon as this is very annoying.

I’m pretty sure that the leash range is not correct. They said they increased it to 2000 but it seems alot more like somewhere between 1300-1600.
Would be great if AreaNet could check this and increase the range because its very low now.
What I mean is the range when you send your pet to the target – that should be 2000.

It seems that the rune of water (6) is not working any more. Tested it on two characters and the additional heal is simply not proccing. I know it was working a while ago and can’t say with which patch it changed.

I think you should be ported back after 1 minute. Max 2 minutes. This would have many good effects on WvW.
It would reduce “lame” spying. There is nothing the enemy can do to stop you from spying. Even killing you is useless. This is probably the most important advantage.
No more wasting time by guarding a mesmers body because there could be a thief somewhere around hiding.
The 3rd advantage is that in long zerg fights if you down someone they really have to run and won’t all be rezzed after the fight.
I don’t see any reason why this should not be implemented for WvW.

If you cannot bring down a bunker (even with 3 offensive stats Power/Precision/Crit Damage) then just don’t waste all three stats for offense but only one and beat him. Thats very strange. You can invest 1/3th of the attributes into offense and still kill people more effectively – and you can even be rather tanky at the same time.
On top of that you apply your bleeds and then you can kite/use your defensive abilities while huge condition damage is ticking while a zerker build has to play perfectly well and has a huge risk (except maybe thiefs).
In my opinion that is the problem. Condition damage is simply too strong for what you have to invest.
A solution to this could be:
Condition damage is lowered to 1/2 of what it is now but conditions can crit. That way if someone really wants to deal tons of condition damage they have to invest into offense.
They would need to invest into condition damage/precision/critdmg to deal huge amounts of damage like power-characters too have to.
This might solve the problems in my opinion. The downside: It will probably take quite some time to implement and they might have to add armors sets with these stat combinations.
But conditions are too strong as they are now because once applied the target melts away while the applier can kite around and watch his target die.
A condition build needs to invest alot less overall time attacking. He attacks and the damage comes over time. That can be a huge advantage.
If this is not possible I support the suggestion to make a way to lower condition dmg. Vitality would really be a possible way to do so.

While on my Ranger it is really easy to solo camps beacuse you have a tanky pet and you can go full zerker without any problem I’m wondering how you solo a supply camp with a zerker static discharge engineer. Has anyone done that and can give me tips? Or do you need a condition engineer + lots of kiting to solo the camp?

I think if they didn’t shutdown WvW 4-5 hours too early there would be no reason for such topics. But who knows, maybe they had problems with WvW Implementations, even though I cannot imagine that because it was the same thing with WvW being down for hours on the last patch.
Just shutdown WvW 10 min before patch and everything is fine.

The snow leopard is a pretty cool elite but you give up quite some power during the fight just to be able to escape. Thieves for example dont even need an elite for that. They can escape at will. So in my opinion it is fair that other classes can get the snow leo to escape once every 4 minutes.

Ranger melee pets simply won’t attack quaggan power nodes in wvw on the borderlands. They sit there and do nothing. Ranged pets work but this needs a fix.

Also the harpy nests on the eternal battlegrounds make pets bug quite often. Sometimes they attack it, other times they walk into the nest and start to turn around all the time in the middle of the nest without attacking as if they were trying to reach a good attacking position forever.
These are two annoying bugs that could probably easily be fixed. If someone else has such objectives where pets simply won’t attack please post them here. I know there were certain doors and other stuff but since I pretty much don’t play PvE any more I can’t tell about these.

I can also confirm this issue. I tried it on my ranger with heal as one and there was no additional healing. I know that a few months ago this was working.

I support the idea to remove rally from WvW. People would still have their down abilities but would have to be rezzed by other people.
Another option would be that after rally or being rezzed you have 10% life and not half life. That would mean that rezzing in AoE is almost impossible which would be a good thing to bring an end to zerg vs zerg fights I guess.

The only thing that you can do now is use defensive stuff to survive immob.
Runes of melandru + lemongrass poultry soup = -65% immobilize duration.

During immobilizy you can use the defensive skills from your weapons like Shortbow 3, Greatsword 4 and maybe 1 (Evade in autoattack if the enemy is in front of you), Sword 3 and maybe 2(not sure), Dagger 4.
The -condition duration + the use of these evasive abilities makes surviving immobilize alot easier. If you get caught in another rangers entangle if you use the -condition duration setup and autoattack with greatsword 1 and press “move forward” at the same time you usually get out of it in about 2-5 seconds.
You could also destroy the roots.

@Fairtex
Could you post your build? Actually I’m trying to find a build thats fits to my playstyle for wvw. I didn’t try a turret build yet and it might be pretty interesting.

There is one thing that makes me really sad:
Ranger is the pet class but still the mesmer has the better pets (except survivability). Mesmer phantasms always hit except if you dodge. The pistol ones have a projectile speed that is so fast that the only way to avoid it is dodging or blocking/invuln. On top of that one pistol phantasm does three times the damage of our ranged pets.
Why is that? Give our pets the same projectile speed as pistol phantasms. Their damage is mediocre anyways and with such an attack speed at least they would not miss. And make them attack while moving. We need our pets damage. If it doesn’t hit the ranger has a huge disadvantage.

Then the melee phantasms. They all hit. Make our pets also do such incredibly fast attack leaps that cannot be strafed. If you want to ignore pets damage use a dodge. That is how it should be. Another solution is make pets attack while moving or give pets a flat +30% movement speed which is not capped at 33% from swiftness.
This is fair now since pets cannot move further than 2000 range.

In my opinion the ranger lost almost every unique ability he had. We had pets that had a huge leash range. That was awesome to let us destroy siege from far away. And it wasn’t OP. They could simply kill the pet and it would run back. It also let us do two things at the same time.
Another huge nerf came with the shortbow 900 range. How are we supposed to stop anyone from running away? Honestly. If a mesmer wants to run away we cannot stop him any more. Before I was able to. If he uses his teleport he is out of shortbow range. Before I was able to cripple him and daze him to keep up. Now I can just watch him run away. If I switch to Greatsword I might close up to him again but it then it takes 9 seconds until I can switch back to shortbow. 9 Seconds for him to regenerate. And our pet will never reach him. It is so freaking slow. Make our pets faster! I have yet to see my pet attacking anyone who was running away. It just won’t happen if the opponent uses any charge/teleport abilities.

Quickness on pet swap was another unique utility of the ranger. That was also taken away from us since noone will use a grandmaster trait for it. It was great for rezzing/stomping.

Overall I can say that the ranger lost most of its uniqueness but didn’t get anything in return. I played my ranger for more than 1800 hours and it’s the first time that I am really trying to find a role. Almost everything that made us unique and that was fun is gone. In our WvW guild if we make a raid they tell us to play any class but ranger. We had 30 people but not a single ranger because ranger was simply the worst class for zerging.
Make us useful finally in WvW. We need blast finishers on demand. I cannot tell my pet to use its blast finisher in a fire field for might stacking. It needs a target.
Give us more AoE. Lower the Barrage CD to 20 sec / 16 sec traited and make it only return one single retaliation damage per tick (12 ticks overall not 60). You could make shortbow 1 fire 3 arrows by default for more AoE. All these changes wouldn’t change much in 1v1 but help alot in WvW.
Then give us traps that remove boons. You could add that to one of the existing traps like the chill trap.
If you really want to give the ranger a unique ability: Give us a trap that reveals stealthed players or give our pets an ability to make them visible at least for the ranger.

These are useful buffs that would finally make the ranger useful for WvW fights. Please do something for us rangers and don’t look at the ranger only from the sPvP or tPvP point of view.

yes I was thinking about the same. I will make one set of armor for sure and also the weapons and give it a test. But you know that for the entire armor it takes 30 days and per weapon another five days to craft?^^
And they are account bound so you can’t buy/sell them in the tradepost.

From what I have seen it takes you 5 days to make one piece of armor/weapon and it is account bound. So you cannot trade them and for the entire armor it will take 30 days to create it. If you also want the weapons 5 days per weapon.
That is crazy. If you have many chars it will take months to make these armors. Is there something that I’m missing? Is there a way to create them faster?

I think now that the pet won’t follow anyone far its really time to make the pet quite a bit faster so that at least in the 2000 range it can catch up to other people also if they use a charge to get away.

I just tested the offhand training and it is true. Offhand training makes the pull alot less reliable and easier to dodge. I think AreaNet should increase the projectile speed with offhand training so that the pull takes as long as without offhand training. Then it would actually be fine.

Since the shortbow nerf to 900 range I switched over to axe/axe too and its just pure fun. The pull is very useful in WvW and it would be bad if they removed it. Its actually great to pull mobs together and use whirling defense afterwards. I found a way to usually not annoy your teammates: Instead of pulling them away from your teammates run up to your mates and use it there. The mobs won’t be pulled away from them that way but to you can pull other mobs to them and deal decent dmg.
Definitely don’t remove the pull. The only other option that I would see is to make a choice: if you double click the skill (like GS 4 for the cripple) it is a pull, if not its only damage.

I had such a problem yesterday trying to finish a necro. I tried to stomp him 4 times but it didn’t work. The reason it didn’t work was that he was not where he seemed to be. My pet was attacking “thin air” a few feet away from me while I was trying to finish him where I saw his character.
He obviously wasn’t there but where my pet was attacking. In the end I just finished him with damage. This might be a new bug. Never had that happen before the last patch.

Master of Timespace.2548:

… Not a big deal. Condition bunkers need reliable counters anyway. Unlike direct damage builds, they need to maximise only one stat to have ridiculous, armor ignoring damage output.

This.
People seem to forget one thing: For massive condition damage you need only one single stat – condition damage. You can use your other two stats for example for defensive stats.
With direct damage (berserk) you need to invest all three stats into damage (power, precision, crit damage).
So direct damage should be alot more powerful, but it is not. In my opinion it is only fine that there is a counter to massive condition damage (and duration).

If you need more damage you can still use power/precision/condition damage gear. That way you still have some direct damage against heavy condition cleaning and on top of that the very powerful condition damage. But you will be squishy like someone who uses berserk gear.
So there is a solution but it comes with a price like for everyone. If you want max damage its at the cost of defense.
If someone uses all his runes + food to have defense against conditions that seems fair to me.

One main reason why I was always using the shortbow over the longbow is simply that you cannot stop anyone running away with the longbow.
The shortbow has a stun and a slow and even with these two abilities it was hard to stop people to run away. But still it was good. With 900 they can get out of range pretty often.
I also didn’t use the axe because 900 range was often not enough. After RTL or if a warrior used his gap closers to get away the only weapon which would reach them to slow them was the shortbow. Well that is gone now and our pet leash range was not “increased to 2000” like it is said in the patch notes but “decreased to 2000” from 4000 or something like that.

Shortbow also has some decent defensive utilities built in. It simply was the best pvp weapon.
I guess they saw that and wanted to change it so that the other weapons were not so much worse. They could have buffed the others but they chose that way and we will probably have to live with it.

Now what I am asking is at least give the longbow some sort of a cripple or daze that we can use while chasing someone. Barrage wont work because we have to stand still which means you cannot chase anyone with it. The knockback … well you want to close gaps not kick them away. If the longbow had a cripple it would be fine to me by either giving it to LB #3 or giving us the ability to use barrage while running.

Indoles.1467:

Dodge roll causes all retal to miss. Otherwise, don’t barrage the zerg.

Can anyone confirm this?
I tried everything to avoid damage while barrage was ticking tons of retaliation. I tried to dodge, block, huge distance, none worked.
I don’t think dodge will help since I did 2 dodges in a row and still was getting insane amounts of damage from barrage. I might be wrong but it would make me wonder.

Killing someone in 15 seconds depends on the other player. With my roamer (GS/SB) build I down some people in 5 seconds, while some bunkers take minutes
Your counter class is a well played phantasm mesmer. There are lots of weak ones that you will defeat but the good ones are extremely tough to beat.
While roaming there is not much that can stop me as a ranger and if I want to I can just outrun most enemies that might kill me like really good engis or good phantasm mesmers. Most thieves are just annoying but with 23+k HP and 3k armor they are not really a threath if you play well.

About the long bow. I gave it a try pretty often and every time I use it on a zerg I just almost die of retaliation so I simply banned that weapon. Our enemies stack retal all the time so its no option for me. What I do is run through the enemy zerg with RoA and tag them with the greatsword. That seems to work fine. You will never get the amount of badges as some other classes get but what I usually get is like 10 badges of 40 ppl.

Overall if you like to solo play ranger is a really nice class with great mobility (Greatsword). I have been pretty annoying to my enemies.
If you love running around solo you might want to make a norn for the snow leopard elite. The perfect “run-away” skill

Malicious training should work for the pet (the trait for increased pet condition duration). But I didn’t test it. Your own condition duration doesn’t increase your pets condition duration.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tail_Swipe
This attack adds 5 seconds of weakness. I found out recently too^^
Was always wondering where that weakness was coming from

Yes there is:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bowl_of_Lemongrass_Poultry_Soup

If you use melandru runes too thats decent against conditions.