Guild Wars 2

While I appreciate that they removed the need for the holy trinity in this game for the most part, they didn’t replace that gaping hole with anything. Now the game just lacks depth and challenege which they tried to offset with PvP, but that’s an empty shell as well.

Personally, I hope the days of the holy trinity are over and stay gone. That doesn’t mean they can’t have more supportive classes in this game though. I mean why couldn’t they have made the water spells all supportive in nature with a few being heals, others being attack speed debuffs, things that make it so you can’t crit etc. This way you remove the need for dedicated healers, but you still give players who liked that supportive role something to do.

Here it’s all about DPS and the PvE encounters have been tuned down to fights that don’t require much real effort to complete and instead they’re more like puzzles that once they’re figured out the only way you can make them more difficult is to throw out 1 shot kills or large AE’s that kill you in 2 seconds.

Their armor has no bearing on how overpowered they are. If you notice something else about them, they’re both melee. Know another class that everyone else considers overpowered? The thief. Not a heavy armor class, but a melee….

What do most people feel are the most useless classes in this game? Ranger, Engineer, and Necromancer. Nothing in common but them all being ranged classes.

Melee in this game is at a distinct advantage because they were given the tools to get into melee range, cleanse away movement impairing affects with ease, there is no need for a train because they each have their own heal, and the cooldowns for these abilities are significantly shorter than the cooldowns of other classes.

This is why the Elementalist class is the only true exception to this scenario because they actually have several heals, several incapacitates that aren’t easily countered, and a lot of mobility spells. It’s also ironic that the only truly viable option for elementalists right now is also their melee tree, but in order to actually beat melee in this game they have to use all of their cooldowns and still often need to use their great escapes to reset fights. Often they can’t even finish the fight but instead are forced at a draw (if you look at some of the best Ele d/d videos on the internet you’ll see some of the flashiest fight scenes this game has to offer that last upwards of 10mins. You’ll also notice when watching these same videos that they don’t actually kill anything…)

Look at the Ranger class. While its snares are plentiful, the class’ escapes aren’t. And with the bulk of their snaring options coming from melee range abilities, what good are they once the target you’re trying to kite is already in your face. Their ability to remove conditions are about as limited to that of the warrior, but they don’t have the roots/snare/charge advantage the warrior has because the ranger wants range and not melee. Then on top of this ranged attacks need traits in order to actually pierce targets, and even with the traits they’re horribly bugged and don’t work half the time because of the projectile’s trajectory.

So if you want to complain about something, your target should actually be melee combat and the tools they have to both get in range and keep people in range versus the tools available to ranged classes to keep targets at range.

I highly doubt you’re hitting for 5k with rtl… Unless we’re not talking about a Warrior with 24k hp which they can get in berserkers :/

And an Ele in damage stats is going to be killed in 1 knockdown or immobalize. If you manage to get away, the enemies knockdown and imobalize cooldowns are shorter than your mist and flash cooldowns. Chances are they’re shorter than your knockdown cooldowns too.

Considering on my level 70 Ele I can jump into a zerg, fire off 3 spells, and manage to get out alive if I use flash, mist, and rtl I’m sure the argument is valid. Granted I didn’t come close to killing anyone and even in the PvP videos I’ve seen of Ele’s with this build are all flash and no substance. The damage just isn’t there. Go read the D/D guide and watch the videos in that. First 10 minutes is non-stop fighting and I think one guy was actually killed. It’s all show…

The problem with his whole argument is that D/D isn’t overpowered. The problem is it outshines the other weapon options. Nerfing D/D will just leave the Ele in the same spot Rangers, Engineers, and Necromancers are now where the class has such poor design, poor skills, and poor trait choices that their weapons can’t compensate for them.

D/D is only viable with bunker/regen builds and we all know these builds don’t kill things. Even the videos from D/D Eles are all flash and no substance as you watch people fly all over the place for 15mins and kill 1 target.

If the mobility is the complaint, then how do you nerf D/D, which you feel is overpowered, but not nerf Sc/D which no one in their right mind would argue is overpowered? It has the same mobility…

Force the ele to blow their cooldowns like flash and mist early through high burst and the class will crumble. D/D is really the only thing keeping the Ele close to the same placement as Guardians, Warriors, Thieves, and Mesmers. The alternative is to go with the Engineers and Rangers. I’m not sure why you would want this?

Hardly, the meta game has just shifted to make D/D more viable than the alternatives. If this game moved away from the bunker/regen builds for every class the build would fall pretty flat. You also fail to acknoweldge that D/D is really the only option in tPVP because the environment doesn’t really support staff builds and scepter is just too difficult to reliably land the spells to put out any real damage.

On my ranger in regen gear/spec I’m pretty sure no d/d ele is ever going to do the damage to down me so long as my pets up and you aren’t going to do the damage required to down the pet in 20 seconds where I’ll just swap it anyway. As for the ability to get away with RTL, that’s hardly a d/d specific thing as sc/d is quite common in tPvP as well.

the only legitimate complaint about d/d for ele’s is how it makes staff, sc/d, and sc/f all seem worthless in comparison. Perhaps the better solution is to make staff more useful and reduce the delays in damage for staff and scepter burst.

If the damage was more reliable, scepter would probably give you the playstyle you’re looking for. While not 1200 range like the staff, it does provide high burst at range. Only problem is at range, that burst never hits.

Another problem staff has is all of the attacks suffer from obstruction due to being so easy to strafe out of. Earth 1 for example I’d say I hit maybe 1 in 10 shots with it.

Perhaps if they just exanded the combo/blast options for staff to give you some real burst potential it would help give staff a better position against the dagger and scepter.

Overall I do agree though. Too much effort was spent making the staff an AE weapon, that none of the AE options available to it really stand up to the AE options of the scepter or dagger.

I say just make the projectile speed increase to that of the ranger’s bow attacks and put some upfront damage on fire2 and earth2 so they can actually do something without waiting 5 seconds and things may improve dramatically. If not, explore the idea of giving staff some blast finishers to use with combo fields to add damage.

I don’t understand why people want more stuff added to a game that could go wrong when we still have 3 classes fighting each other over last place in this game. Where most classes have some of the most unorganized and poorly layed out trait trees with 50% or more of their skills being nearly 100% useless.

When engineers, rangers, and necros feel more like classes and less like mistakes I say we worry about adding things to this game.

When people do more than grind fractals all day for loot I say we worry about adding new things to this game.

When the crafting system has an actual reason to exist I say we worry about adding new things to this game.

For now, why don’t we try fixing the game…

Something as simple as magnetic aura, geyser, and ice breath on a sceptor/dagger build and I think I’d be in heaven

Wield 2 elements at the same time increasing all damage by 50% and unlocking a 5th element based off your highest trait line. Fire or Air having 30 points give X, Water or Earth Give Y, Arcane gives Z. If you have 30 points in more than one tree outside of the combos above, it would default to the one higher on the list (fire over water for example) 2min cooldown, 10 second duration.

This way you can use your current lines if you want for the increased damage bonus and could freely switch to the 5th line if you wanted for new abilities.

Now as for the 15 skills, /shrug. Some spells I’d like to see are:

A longer range, higher damage dragon breath.
A magma flow that pushes back all targets in front of you if they’re within 600 yards and snares everyone 600-900 yards including the people it pushed back.
An ice clone that mirrored your abilities but did 25% of the damage.
A single, bright, shocking attack that does high damage, knocks down, and makes you vuln.

I can’t watch the video so I’ll just presume it relates to the side-stepping obstructed type attacks?

While harder to achieve, it’s still quite common on rangers.
It’s also quite common on elementalists.

Since it’s a quality of life issue, it should probably be fixed for elementalists and guardians. Assuming of course this is what we’re all talking about. Youtube is work blocked

Sorry, when I said account bound, I meant not taking up bank space. Like karma, tokens, etc would be on a small line next to your gold in the bank etc.

Dyes should be account wide.

Karma should be account wide.

Tokens should be account wide.

There should be questable gear that isn’t necessarily as good as high end raiding gear, but still not awful at 80. It should have several gem slots so it can be fine tuned to specific characters. the stats on this gear should be variable based on character level.

Anyone remember Asheron’s Call 1 with their greater shadow armor and their composite weapons and the various quests to get gems for these things? This is what I’d like to see added to this game. The armor and weapons weren’t the greatest out there at their time, but they didn’t drop on death so you would always have them with you.

The same armor, but the stats giving something like +XX for Y level and you could share the one suit of armor for all your alts would really be fun.

It would also give you good transition gear into 80, something you’d have expected the story quests to do but they failed horribly.

As said above, there is no agro in this game so having a meter for that is useless.

The magic find stat is a stupid mechanic and needs to be removed regardless of how much damage you realistically lose from it (it’s not much because most are swapping a defensive stat for it anyway, and most people can manage dungeon encounters in this game).

Now as for DPS meters, I’ll pass on this one. This game isn’t even balanced properly to warrant using DPS meters. All it will do is allow Warriors to participate in dick waving tournements because no other class in this game can compete with their single target damage in any situation.

If we didn’t have engineers and rangers fighting for a distant last place, everyone else miles ahead of them except with warriors and thieves pulling ahead of the middle pack by a mile with guardians getting an invite regardless I could see having a meter in place to help players become more efficient. But right now the meter may as well not even work for anything but warriors.

I hope you guys will get around to posting in the various class forums too. Engineers and Rangers are regarded by the majority of the community to be fighting for last place right now in both PvE and PvP. Hopefully some real progress will come to these classes in 2013 instead of the empty promises and missed oppurtunity we saw in 2012 with QOL improvements beign disguised and class buffs.

Would probably make things too difficult. Because then we’ll see people asking for specific school resists, and then slashing against light armor, bludgeon against medium, piercing against heavy etc.

That said, Shadowbane probably had one of the best PvP systems of any modern day MMO I’ve ever played and they pulled it off very well.

beeh.5134:

Atherakhia.4086:

Thieves, Guardians, and Warriors are so clearly overpowered as them staying so far ahead is realy what makes this class feel so far behind.

Guardians are not op at all just l2p. They have very bad mobility, no range dps just kite them or run.

It’s not a L2P argument. Just because you play a guardian and you don’t want it nerfed doesn’t change the simple fact that it, along with the thief and warrior, are simply overpowered in this game.

I mean we can all sit here and pretend that the Warrior’s single condition remover somehow keeps it balanced in PvP and yet 9 out of 10 players will list it in the top 3 classes in this game.

I’d make the xbow a rapid fire type weapon that has a small clip of 5 shots that fire off about as fast as the short bow, but have a 1.5 second reload time between cartridges.

1 Auto attack would have a stacking crit buff on you so the last shot had a built in 50% chance to crit.

2 would be to empty the whole cartridge in 1 second and rapid reload.

3 would be to reload with crippling rounds that snared for a stacking 20% each shot for 4 seconds up to a 4 second root if you hit with all 5.

4 would be to reload the weapon with explosive rounds.

5 would be a larger clip that could hold 10 arrows and when pushed again would allow you to fire them in a volley that shoots 10 waves of arrows for half damage. You could load your #3 and #4 if you wanted to.

Kraggy.4169:

Atherakhia.4086:

Shock and bewilder when I discover all those dyes I used aren’t available on my alt?!

Well, in all honesty, the tooltips for the dye make it totally clear they “unlock the dye this character”, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise really.

to be fair, nearly every other thing in the game is account wide though. I just wish dyes and karma were and I’d be happy knowing that even if I didn’t like the character I just leveled to 80, it wasn’t a complete waste of time doing it.

and I honestly do like GW2. I just don’t like how they’ve taken so long and achieved so little for overall game balance. It’s almost like they want everyone to be a warrior, guardian, or thief (which I’m going to do for my next char).

Female Sylvari because playing a cabbage is the closest I could come to making a pointy eared elf

I’ll chime in here even though I’m not 80 on my elementalist and only been playing about a month on my own account (my friend tricked me into getting this game by letting me play his warrior… why in the world I rolled a ranger is beyond me! And to make it worse I made an elementalist next!).

The problems with this game have more to do with Warriors and Guardians being too good in PvE, and Guardians and Thieves being too good in PvP with Warriors thrown into the mix when you factor in WvW.

If stealth worked properly, guardians were focused more in single target damage and group support, and warrior damage was actually put in check when you consider their 20k+ life in berserkers things wouldn’t be nearly as bad as the elementalist.

The problem I have is while some of the tree traits aren’t necessarily bad, they aren’t nearly as good as arcane is which makes arcane almost a mandatory 30 point investment. This is something no one wants. The other probelm is when you do invest in a true glass cannon build, it doesn’t net you much increased damage over the support builds.

But the skill selection seems strong and a lot of the traits aren’t really that bad so it shouldn’t take much to actually fix this class. At least compared to the Ranger and Engineer who simply don’t work at their very core, have absolutely crap trees, and 75% of their skills are 100% useless.

Elementalists are clearly in the middle of the pack and it’s a shame that Thieves, Guardians, and Warriors are so clearly overpowered as them staying so far ahead is realy what makes this class feel so far behind.

Considering the miserable state of the in-game economy and the complete lack of effort on ANet’s part to improve it, I don’t feel the in-game price of dyes really relevant. It’s an enormous inconvenience for new players who don’t know better and use their dyes while levelin up and still trying to figure out which class they most enjoy.

Not to mention it kind of kills the fun in making an alt just to take advantage in some nice level80 gear you’ve been stashing for a rainy day when you can’t get your character to look as good as your other character.

Now I’m one of the many players who will never spend more than the upfront cost of the game on in-game content and I’m going to have serious trouble committing to this game if these little things like dyes, terrible class design, terrible class balance, and no end-game to speak of keep getting in my way.

What is the typical glass cannon build? I’m leveling an elementalist after a disastrous first decision to play a ranger. I’m finding the staff has a lot of defensive skills where I could realistically use a GC build and succeed. Especially if I can do it with 15k hp which seems quite simple.

I’m fairly new to the game so this topic has probably been brought up before, but what is the logic for dyes not being account wide? Like many new players, I made a character I wasn’t that thrilled with so I started working on an alt. Shock and bewilder when I discover all those dyes I used aren’t available on my alt?!

Is this something that could change in the future?

I strongly suggest you pass on this class. If you like the Hunter in WoW you will hate how dumbed down the class is here. This class is also broken at its very core so will likely never be fixed to an acceptable level just like how the Hunter launched in WoW and was worthless for 8 months (and the Warlock).

What I suggest you do is create a ranger shell, hit your PvP button, and run some sPvP as it will give you a level 80 character to play with in gear you will likely take 6 months to achieve on your own. You can see how the class plays, respec at will for free, and make up your own mind.

I also wouldn’t suggest a Warrior as even though your damage and playstyle is much stronger overall, their slow attack speed just feels very ‘wrong’ and the Ranger does have a better skill set to make ranged combat succeed, they just suck and aren’t nearly powerful enough to offset all the other class shortcomings. It just doesn’t have good traits, skills, pets don’t work well, no utility or burst for PvP or PvE, you get the idea.

GW2 is a pass when it comes to archer/ranger/hunter types.

Make all pets do the same damage.
Make all pets take 80% less damage from AE attacks.
Make all pet F2 abilities fire off instantly. Can still root and play animation, but the effect should be immediate.
Make all pet commands override attack animations so when I tell them to run, they run.
Reduce pet damage so the pet only accounts for 10-20% of the Ranger’s damage.
Boost the Ranger’s damage by whatever percent you reduce the pet by.

Divide the pets into 3 categories once their basic attacks all deal the same damage:
-Offense: These pets do large burst damage with their F2 abilities.
-Defense: These pets do CC type of effects like tackling your opponent and holding them down etc.
-Utility: These pets debuff opponents and buff allies.

Longbow attack speed increased slightly.
Longbow damage normalized to do the same DPS as a shortbow for their overlapping ranges.
Longbow changed to provide crit/crit damage bonus when flanking to offset no bleeds.
Longbow given an ‘execute’ attack for high burst damage potential.
Longbow #5 channel cut in half to allow the class to move sooner.

Marksmanship tree redone to provide bonuses to all ranged attacks.
Survival tree redone to provide bonuses to all melee attacks.
Beastmastery redone to contain all pet related traits.

Spirits changed to auras that are focused around the Ranger.

I have only ever joined parties so the T targeting is all we ever use.

I don’t know if you played Shadowbane or not, but this is the same strategy we would use with Druid bombs and earthquake with a wizard portal. Was very awesome. The mayhem a group of Elementalists can perform by just riding lightning into a zerg ball is amazing too.

I’m surprised we don’t see more clone trains running around in this game where one guy controls 5 different people all following him along and they just assist train into everything.

Just strafe…

99% of the mobs out there until you reach about 70 where risen make up the bulk of stuff can’t hit you if you just strafe in a circle by holding back and strafe left/right. Dungeons are a different story of course.

Honestly, why don’t we all just admit that the Engineer, Necromancer, and Ranger are all fighting for a DISTANT last place, shake hands, and move on. This is the ranger forum, of course we have it ‘worse’.

KirinDave.6451:

Code.1327:

The OP and most players forget one very important point.

PETS DONT SCALE WITH GEAR.

This might seem minor right now, but as gear creep continues, pets will continue to slide backwards as a class mechanic. It needs to be addressed at some point for the long term viability of the class, either by compleatly halting gear creep that started with ascended gear, or making pets scale with player gear.

So, I’m peeking in on this forum as I goof around looking for something to replace my Engineer (I’ve realized ANet has no idea what they’re doing with that class, and it’s just a hand’s breadth from utterly broken and useless right now). And I wanted to comment on this.

This is actually a good thing. Let me say it again; pets not scaling with gear can be a good thing. What this means is that your pets do not scale with your gear choices, which means you and one of your pets can be wildly different in spec. ANet has promised, unfortunately, to change Engineer kits so that they do have gear dependence. Try not to let them do this for you; instead have them make pets keep up with gear creep.

The reason it’s good is that right now, you could go full bunker spec and still whip out a cat and have cat-level DPS added to your own (which may be low with a bunker spec, but presumably you have control effects to help your pet). You have mid-fight role variability. It’s the holy hybrid grail, and right now the only class where it’s even remotely feasible is Ranger.

I do not have a high level ranger, but I’ve done dungeon and WvW runs with them. I’ve always been impressed by the class. I’ve watched people switch pets to dodge (exploiting the fact that pets do not instantly phase in, and as such a pet swap is actually a dodge if you time it right; even in melee). I’ve always been impressed by how much DPS Rangers can sustain while also being very good with helping the party. And in sPvP I dread stomping good rangers nearly as much as I dread stomping mesmers (“Oh kitten now I am dazed… Oh kitten now I am knocked down… Oh kitten you just got a rally… and you were contesting the point the whole time.”)

I also want to note that the people here talking about the absurd difficulty of managing a pet and themselves should probably try giving Elementalist, Thief, or (if you hate the idea of being effective) Engineer a try. All three of those classes require a lot of situational awareness, very quick decisions, and close-to-flawless technical execution. Which is not to say that Rangers are not in need of bugfixes; I think most classes are. But I do think it’s easy to forget how hard other players are actually working with their classes.

Pets not scaling with gear is a horrible thing. The class is designed so the pet accounts for 50% of its damage. So right off the bat, this class is working with a 50% handicap because the rest of the stats are being flushed down the toilet.

Zaqir.8952:

I don’t think you are wrong in every statement but you go FAR too far in some of your statements.

1)Pets in dungeons are liabilities? What pets are you using, some of them are so fragile I don’t bother taking but I have had pets do me wonders and yes some might die but you swap em use the ability etc and try to get some dmg out of em. Yes I wish they were better but they aren’t a Liability.

2)Viable builds. I play a ranger tank, I have primarily power toughness vit and some healing, with protection almost always on and regen on and my other tricks i can handle almost any fight. (that doesn’t mean u stand and swing etc, it means dodges, blocks, kiting etc)

Let me just start off by saying I’m not inept. I can use birds to great success in dungeons because they only need to be active for a grand total of 20 seconds, 5 of which is often spent fluttering around doing nothing or traveling to a target to attack.

But generally speaking I’ll use a bear with the idea that it will hold trash in a location while other adds are pulled in. I’ll swap to the birds on bosses because I won’t be tanking and the AE damage can be avoided (at enormous loss to damage mind you) and they have the quickest withdraw time. Activate time is awful unfortunately.

But you have to ask yourself how this class is balanced. Is it balanced around the pet being up 100% of the time? Well considering even with a cat or crow up 100% of the time you’re still doing terrible damage I’m just going to presume yes. Are we then balanced around using DPS pets? Again, compared to other classes our damage is awful so once again, I presume yes.

Since we know that even 75% active time on a fight is pushing the limits of reality just given travel time, AE avoidance, and idle animation time the class is already at an enormous handicap when it comes to other classes. But then when you factor in the only thing this class is bringing to group PVE is healing well you’re left with no real purpose.

Specing into a bunker build just so you can soak damage is an awful idea as well because any other class can do that too while also providing better utility and damage. Ever seen a bunker elementalist? Even with scepter they’re doing better damage and have amazing heals.

I’m sorry, but this class is a failure from the ground up. Want to fix it?

Balance all pets to do the same damage.
Make it so the pets account for no more than 20% of the ranger’s total DPS (10% would be my preference).
Make it so DPS, including bleeds, is comparable to other classes (it’s burst that wins games and makes Warriors and Thieves overpowered, not their DPS).
Make it so pets take 95% less damage from PvE AE’s and 80% less damage from PvP AE’s.
Make it so pets properly scale with gear so the ranger isn’t automatically getting a 50% handicap on their gear.
Make it so pet abilities are instantly cast with no cast time/global cooldown so when I hit F2, it goes off.
Make it so when a pet is told to retreat they do it immediately regardless if pet is in the middle of an animation or attack.

Once that’s all done we have at least a proper foundation for this class and real work can begin like:
Fixing it so 25% of our skills aren’t 100% worthless.
Fixing another 25% of our skills so they aren’t 75% worthless.
Fixing our traits to provide true variety in build options.
Splitting pets into categories so they can get added functionality to the class
-DPS: Pet F2 abilites on Cats, Birds, Etc is changed to provide high, on demand burst.
-Utility: Pet F2 abilities on Dogs, etc provide strong debuffs to enemies and buffs to party members.
-Defense: Pet F2 abilities that root targets in place, make them run in fear, etc.

That’s a lot to expect of a class 6 months after release considering we get next to no honest feedback from the development team and are toyed with patch after patch.

Been a Hunter/Archer type in every MMO since Ultima Online. This archetype is for me because if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be playing this game any longer. I’m holding out hope it will be changed. Now if this means I’ll continue to play a friend’s warrior instead of playing my ranger on this account so be it.

I think if the shortbow is meant to be this class’ condition/DOT build, the longbow should be changed over to this class’ crit/dmg build and the weapon skills, skills, and traits should all tie into this.

In another thread that was on this same subject last week I proposed the #4 skill would be changed to either do an execute/aimed shot/critical shot type of move if the target is at range or knock back if they are close. Alternatively, it could be a power move where if you tap it, it shoots the knockback and the longer you hold it the more damage it does and the less it knockbacks to the point it can do some really nice burst damage.

Now that said, I feel the bow should fire more quickly just to make it feel more fluid as right now it’s a real strain using the weapon because it’s just so boring. Its damage is also so poor at the attack speed that it probably could go with a .75 cast without a damage decrease. At the very least, the longbow and shortbow should probably do the same DPS at the overlapping range and an extra damage increase for the longer range on the longbow.

Then they need to improve the traits. Make marksman do all ranged damage, survival for traps and melee, wilderness for utility of the top 2, nature for support of ranged and pet, and BM for pet.

Right now the traits and skills themselves just won’t allow longbow (or shortbow…) to work.

I’ve never seen the pet disabled in any fashion while in WvW and it stops immediately when attacked. Same in PvE. Only ever works when the pet isn’t being targeted, which means it’s only useful against Risen.

Now if it’s not supposed to work this way, that’s one thing. But it certainly looks to be behaving this way.

The class is still a waste of time in my opinion. The problems with the class are at it’s very core and will likely never be resolved or acknowledged.

The Pets are still an enormous liability in PvP and Dungeon based PvE. AE’s still do too much damage to them, they account for far too much of the ranger’s damage, and they still don’t scale properly based off gear which means you will only slightly improve because of the handicap whereas your pet will see next to no changes once 80,

The class still has no utility for PvE or PvP to get prime group placement. If you ask around, most will tell you they only want you for helping with crowd control, which even an elementalist can do, or for your healing well. That’s it.

The class still has no real burst damage which means its role in structured PvP is also quite limited because you aren’t a good roamer or a good train class. You have no good AE’s, you have very few real escapes, and the tools you have to keep people snared/rooted, while plentiful, are easily countered and invalidated by other classes.

The class still has FAR too many useless skills and traits. About 1/4th the skills for this class have no functional use whatsoever. A further 25% more have such limited use they are almost never used because you won’t find yourself in the scenario to use them with enough forethought to actually have them activated. Then you have others that are just so good (and by ‘so good’ for a ranger is really stretching the term) that you can’t go without using them in any situation. Things like QZ or SotH.

Then to top it all off, the trait trees make next to no real sense and are completley unorganized. There’s no way to spec the class in different playstyles. There are some traits that you almost need regardless of build because of how poorly designed the class is (EB for example) whic greatly limit how you can build the class in PvP.

So while any improvement to this class is met with much satisfaction and joy, the fact that all of the changes this class just got were quality of life changes that all classes got and nothing really specific to this class says that while the class as a whole did improve, it’s placement among the other classes hasn’t shifted and we are still fighting for last place with Engineers and Necromancers.

Any damage stops the channel. Only time I’ve ever found lick wounds to be useful was when underwater and when fighting risen as in both situations the mobs tend to stick on my and not my pet.

And as said above, when you compare this ability to other class abilities it’s still pretty awful.

First thing they need to do is normalize pets. This means make all pets do the same basic damage without exception. Once this is done they can fine tune the class to determine just how much of a percentage the ranger’s damage should come from the pet. I’d hope for 10%, but I’d settle for as high as 20% base. But the 50-60% right now? Absolutely not.

Another thing that needs to be fixed is the pet controls, AE effects on pets, and how they interact with the world. For starters, they should take significantly less damage from AE attacks in both PvE and PvP. If a player or mob wants to take down a pet, it should have to devote considerable effort to do it (and by considerable effort I simply mean target it). Pet controls also need to be tweaked. For starters, there shouldn’t need to be a return button. If I tell my pet to attack something and it’s either not attacking something or is attacking a different target it will attack what I have selected. If I tell it to attack a target that I have selected, it will return to me. And when pets return, they should move quickly to retreat to you. Lastly, the F2 abilities need to be instant cast and fire off immediately. I don’t care if the pets need to stay rooted while the animation finishes, but the effects that are triggered should be instant.

Once they’ve determined the amount of damage they want pets to account for and the class’ damage is increased to better compete with other pure dps, no support, limited escape classes, they can then flesh out the pet concept.

If I had my way, I’d make it so the pet is nothing more than a low damage DOT that accounts for about 10% of the class’ damage. I would then divide the pets into categores: dps, utility, defense.

DPS Pets: These pets are your cats, birds, etc. They still do the basic damage every other pet does, but they have stronger F2 abilities that revolve around doing very high burst damage.

Defense: These pets are your bears, drakes, and so forth. These pets do the same damage as every other pet out there, but their F2 abilities are designed to provide defensive bonuses to the ranger. Things like tackle, where the pet will effectively sit on a target and hold them in place for XX seconds or until the pet is brought down to 25% hp.

Utility: These are the remaining pets like dogs. Their F2 abilities provide large area affect moves. Things putting a marker on the ground and any enemies in it are vulnerable and any allies in it attack 10% faster and so forth.

The longbow needs to be rethought from the ground up. If the shortbow is supposed to be the low damage, DOT/Condition weapon then it should stand to reason the longbow is the high damage, direct damage weapon. The range is simply a perk and in all reality a useless addition to the weapon as a whole given the range on the special abilities.

I say make the bows do the same damage overall, slightly increase the longbow’s rate of fire, and then make it so the shortbow applies bleeds when flanking and the longbow deals +XX% crit +XX% crit damage on flanking. Or something along those lines.

Asura have a better racial ability, but chances are you’d still use the ones provided to the class as a whole. I don’t like how their toes clip through boots. Not sure there is a pair out there that they don’t. They also have a really cool greatsword animation.

Not a fan of cabbages, but they look alright.

Humans look fine and no real complaints.

I personally prefer the female models because they have a more detailed body shape whereas the males always feel so flat in their armor.

I suggest looking at the thread stickied above to see which you like in the various armors and choose from there. The racial abilities aren’t the biggest of deal.

I say go ranger. Leveling PvE stuff will be easy with 2 pets and you can set up each other’s condi damage. With flame trap you can keep the field up longer if you rotate between them. In PvP (especially WvW) you will spend a lot of time on the walls and will enjoy the added range the ranger has over the warrior. You can also support each other if one goes SB and the other LB with the various skills.

For dungeons, while it will be difficult to find a premade with room for 2 rangers (hard enough for 1!), you both assisting each other with the stacking vuln that you can get or the stacking bleeds etc is handy. Pets also could tank somewhat for you if you spec properly.

Only real problem will be dungeons and fractals IMO, but this is a problem for the ranger class as a whole and hopefully SOMETHING will be done to improve the issues by the time you’re 80.

Well when you consider the impact most of these other class specific things have on the class as a whole you can’t help but laugh at how terrible the ranger’s is. If a Warrior or Thief went the whole game without using theirs they wouldn’t miss out on much of anything. But a ranger is going to lose 50% of its damage? come on… the pet should account for 10% of the class’ damage and even that should be mitigated some if we invested fully in non-BM trait lines.

the only class that sees such a large impact from this is the elementalist and you can tell the whole class was designed around it. The ranger, it’s almost like they completely forgot to add it and threw something together last minute.

Just call it long shot. Like our chances of seeing it changed

But this class desperately needs some burst damage for PvP and this would certainly help.

Open world leveling is about as difficult as finding your strafe key. If you don’t want to focus on pets, then I would focus on ranged traps and damage multipliers.

Dual Bears seems to be the winning strat right now.
Ranged Traps and Marksman is how I would go just so you have some fun as auto attacks and sending a pet in to attack is quite limited.

Shortbow (trying to level with longbow is ungodly boring because of the insanely slow cast time on the bow) with axe+torch is what I would suggest.

Best of luck.

Can’t blame him when the pet is utterly defficient in this game with no real indication from ANet that they even understand what the root problems are. Because if all they acknowledge are damage problems this class will always be fighting for last place with the engineer. Hell, with the pets now somewhat hitting moving targets, the damage is probably the only thing they’ve got right on the pet (even if the class as a whole is still horrible at damage in general).

Once AE damage, pet utility, pet responsiveness, class traits, class skills, class burst, and the ranger’s damage mechanics are resolved we can come back with the snide comments about someone wanting an option to play the ranger class without a pet. Until then though, dropping the pet would probably get us closer to being a real class than trying to fix the pet.

Bad idea. Rapid Fire is the only thing the Long Bow currently has going for it, and even it should have a cooldown of about 8 or 6 seconds, not the 10 it currently has. I also don’t think snipe needs a minute cooldown when you consider things like killshot and rapid fire’s cooldown.

Personally, I’d look to adjust the #4 skill as said above and in the other thread on this same topic. This way if the target is close, you do the knock back and if the target is far away you do the long shot/snipe attack or you can do it as above where you simply charge the ability and the longer you charger the more damage it does, but they are thrown back less.

These types of traits are awful. They only trigger once usually, and often they trigger at times you don’t need them. If they want uncontrollable passive traits like these they would be better off doing something like when you or your pet crit the other gains a buff for 10 seconds. If the other crits while under the buff, do X.

At least this way they’ll beuseful in both PvE and PvP and stand a chance of making people really have to think about traits they would want to use. With the poor selection this class has, we all choose about the same 5 to choose from.

Heal over time
Axe + Torch
Bears
Run Speed
Fire Trap
Venom Trap
Rage
5 pts into BM. Swap pet every 20 seconds for speed boost.

Use this till you can get ranged traps then use shortbow. Stick with axe+torch for swap for if you ever get entangled.

Sorry about the above skill names, don’t play this class anymore and moved back to roomates Warrior mostly.

Dahkeus.8243:

Eh, not all traits can be good. I run a build focused on stacking might on my pet and I still pass on this talent.

The rule is actually not every trait can be good for everyone. that’s entirely different than a trait being useless to everyone. Why bother putting it in the game if it’s not useful for anyone?

I see no reason it can’t be boosted to 3 seconds like many other similar traits.

Dahkeus.8243:

Atherakhia.4086:

Dahkeus.8243:

Atherakhia.4086:

It does seem silly to design a bow and class around DOTs and then restrict the way you apply those DOTS where the only other class that has these kinds of limitations are thieves really, and they gain insanely more DPS and burst on top of it.

While I don’t mind the mechanic because in PvE it’s easy enough to handle, I’m not sure I understand why the mechanic is there either.

I think a lot of people overlook the fact that the short bow has such a rate of fire, so a bleed on autoattack of a bow is much stronger than a bleed on autoattack of something like a pistol.

It also changes things up and keeps the ranger from just standing in one place spamming auto attack.

While valid points, the Ranger’s damage with those auto-attacks is also much lower than the damage from Warriors and Rogues who still get the bleeds and such without directional limitations.

Comparing bow damage? Not when you take into account pets.

Even with pet damage, it’s still below that of the other classes. I really wish real DPS meters were available as unlike the Ranger class, the Warrior and Thief, when using their abilities, isn’t a DPS loss unlike the Ranger who’s only option is auto attack at the moment.

But yes, even with the pet factored in the damage isn’t close enough. Even if you presume 100% uptime which is impossible.