Guild Wars 2

The point is that there are both soft and hard counters available in the game. And it can be countered by skill, LoSing and jousting (running through the ranger).

Guys, you need to understand that a lot of people have complained that the final dragon boss in the living story was too hard. People who shun jumping puzzles as too hard. Why do you think they would look at ranger realistically.

The full GC 6 6 2 0 0 can be used in SPvP if you are covered by your teammates. It is absolutely terrible in WvW as they can chase you freely and not defend nodes letting you pew pew freely.

There are hard counters in place. Reflects,blocks, evades, dodges, charges, teleports. You do not use these just to counter rangers. It is very useful against power necromancers as well. Hopefully more ranged builds will pop up as well as we were focused on melee and close quarters condition spam for 2 years now. IT IS GOOD FOR THE META TO SHIFT.

How reliable and usable are rangers in competitive aspects of the game??

In PvP it is still to be implemented into teams fully and spiriter got a huge boost with axe might stacking. The utility from Nature spirit is still huge.

In WvW the only thing that matters is the zerg. Roaming is trivial and a side activity. And as far as zerging goes: Warrior, Guardian, Elementalist and Necromancer.

PvE wise, we got personal dps but lost party utility. I would say Ele, guardian, warrior and thief come first. After that the ranger can maybe be the 5th member. MAYBE

So in essence, baddies who roam in a pretty irrelevant and innately imbalanced gamemode are complaining about a class build that has been SO BAD for 2 years now getting some teeth. WOW

Where is it a problem?? In WvW?? Where you do not have to defend points, where you can get a lot more stats through ascended items, where you can stack both bloodlust AND guard kill stacks and get up to 2700 power. Sure its a bit of an annoyance there, but then again there are PU mesmers, PD thieves, reflect warriors and other great roamer builds.
Zerg warfare will remain the same. Its about movement and not dying.

I would be much more scared to face rangers who go 6×6xx then the standard 66xxx newbies.

Guard shouter and clasic 0 0 6 2 6 BM bunker will obliterate the longbow user.

So uh:

-warrior should have a pretty even fight, especially if the player went with a dueling oriented build. S/S LB or the M/S S/Sh perplexity reflect build

-DD ele can face tank the burst and outheal it. Cantrips FTW

-Mesmer and thief dictate the fight with teleports and stealth. They die if they have the awareness of a chair

-Medi guardian should have a slight edge

-Condi or fear necro has the advantage if he gets into casting range. It is a battle of positioning. Power necro… ugh no idea but Ranger should win this

-Engi has an advantage with all the blocks, reflects, dodges and stuns. Lots of sustain as well with every meta build. Main counter to engineer is condi burst and power ranger has none

This is as far as 1v1 or 1vX goes. As far as zerg combat, Guardian/Warrior/Necro/Ele have been so dominant in the last 2 years that it is nice to see Rangers at least trying to zerg. But the main power of the zerg is not damage, it is sustain and movement. LB ranger does not have either. It is paper and for its ONLY AOE attack it is rooted and dies to reflection.

There is no issue here, just rock-paper-scisors build countering. LB ranger can burst light/medium classes glass builds but it will die to anything that can tank and pour conditions or can outsustain it like medi guard, smart warrior play, DD might ele or SD thief.

my 2c

You need to use Zephyr and Signet of the Wild for that burst you are talking about. Neither are defensive skills. You also dedicate at least 10 trait points into longbow.
There are plenty of reflects, blinks, blinds, teleports, heals etc.. to say that longbow is OP. It is not, you just have to pay attention now instead of facetanking it.

Not much has changed for the warrior, you just have to play a bit smarter. And as ever, at least for PvP, your most reliable CI proc is longbow F1.

Wow people are QQing about ranger? Its just a flavor of the week. As soon as people adapt to it it will go down in popularity.

I am dumbfounded by any Anet developer response on this issue, on any topic of forum that contains this question.

I wonder if we will get any sort of information from Anet as to why this change happened

As far as traps are concerned there are 2 issues:
-traps themselves are rather bad. They each apply only one condition in a very small AOE
-to have any utility u need a master and a grandmaster trait slot in a line that does nothing for traps.

Suggestion:
-Vipers nest also stacks weakness on pulse as well as poison
-Frost trap also stacks 2 vulnerability on pulse and the CD is reduced from 30s to 25s
-Spike trap physical damage part is considerably increased
-Fire trap is fine as it is as it is a solid burning duration on a very short CD.

Critical hits, on base, do 50% more damage then regular attacks for a total of 150% damage.

Yes, 7% average damage boost down to 0,7%. Simply funny.

Actually highest damage selfish build is currently kitten 0 0. So in that regard nothing changes. The issue at hand is that party members are usually brought in for something unique and ranger had spotter and spirit.

Considering a warrior can bring 2 banners and high cleave damage, a thief can trivialize a lot of the content by skipping, an elementalist is the highest damage in the game on top of a great might and fury well I seriously fail to see what the problem with 7% damage buffing spirit was.

Sick em, Zephyr with SotW for bursts.

Frost spirit and spotter are 100% of the reason to bring a ranger into a dungeon.

Have you given the Frost spirit an internal cool down? Because If you have you have made the skill practically pointless in any game mode. The average party damage buff went from 7% to 0,7%.

Please answer

The skill bar now is leaps and bounds above anything you have put up in the past. Keep up the good work.

I would personally love a daze on throw torch and a cures chilled and cripple on bonfire

Swoop when attacking. Close second is counter attack. Both are ranger GS but the animations when using a Human female are superb.

Rangers are getting a significant boost for PvE come next patch. Removal of the SotBM and introduction of predators onslaught

Please buff heal as one. Something simple as just reducing the cast time from 1,5s to 0,75s would make it far more usable. Perhaps making it into a survival skill even so it benefits from the traits.

This skill is never used except for the first few levels when making a new character.

On a side note, make the rejuvenation trait have a different activation requirement. Make it activate on heal instead of a 75% HP barrier with a huge ICD of 30s.

Ty

Consider using the fern hound as an alternate pet with the spider being your primary. Its F2 is fairly useful in bringing up your sustain if you are not using HS. Also its a dog and they are useful regardless of traits.

But I agree with you, the Skirmishing line is rather horrible. Have you considered going 2 into MM and 6 into NM instead. With the next patch signets will become far better and you can get a good uptime of stability and more condition removal and fury uptime with SotF.

This style cannot touch PU mesmer and PD condition thief, the two prevalent setups you will encounter as a roamer. At least this has been my experience

This is what i run, albeit with a different rune set. I use traveler runes and instead of the SotH i use SoR. Sometimes i switch 30 points into NM instead of skirmishing to mix things up. Much better condition removal.

Remember, with Fortifying bond the might given to pet is 10s even though you get a base of 3s. So it is valuable for you, but far more valuable for the pet.

The pew pew spirit ranger got nerfed considerably:

-Sun Spirit burning proc from 3s to 2s
-Storm Spirit strike damage reduced by 33%
-Spirits can be knocked back
-Natural vigor reduced from 50% bonus to 25%
-Emhpatic bond no longer works when the pet is dead.

I think this about covers it lol. Necro got a lot of shaves to innate condition spam and Dhuumfire got nuked.

Liadri was challenging because of the time limit and not being able to see the circles before the orange change.

I am crafting it because it is fun. I did not buy any single item (plant food or foxfire) and I am crafting it slowly. It is fairly easy to do so and it covers a lot of the game, like a mini legendary. And as far as an ascended back piece goes, it is on the cheap side albeit time consuming if you do not use the TP

Longbow f1 is indeed a bit to good. It does damage and is a guaranteed CI proc.

I find that the balance updates are fairly reasonable as far as changes go, but the tempo of releases is too slow. 1 balance patch every 6 months is just….uh

Necromancers fell out of team compositions because Elementalists got buffed. When Elementalists were bad Necromancers were in. There is far too much sustain and condi removal that Condition mancers are not ideal at the moment.

Super easy fight, especially for a ranger. Range 1800 pew pew

@Raven: This is about non-spirit support. Mainly shouts and some traits.

@Espleen: Sick em would teleport the spider/devourer to 900 attack range not into melee. Melee pets would be teleported into melee.

Perhaps give the damage tick an ICD of 1 second. Or 1.5?

I thank everyone in advance for reading my upcoming wall of text. (it will not be that long I swear)
I have clocked over 2000 hours in all game modes, and I have enjoyed the class. It has never been top tier in most game modes, except the early spiriter in PvP, but it can be played to a moderate success now in all content except WvW zerg warfare.

I feel as if the reason for this is that there are some unused opportunities within some of the traits and some of the utility skills. The prime culprit, as far as utilities go, are shouts.

Some time ago the developers introduced natures voice as a trait to try and push shouts into play. I personally consider this a temporary solution. The main issue with shouts is that they are fairly bad by themselves. Guard can be used with this new trait somewhat. Sick em and Protect me are very situational at best. Search and rescue is abysmal.

My suggestion would be as such, starting with the shouts themselves with the intention of pushing them to be useful by themselves:

Guard – allies within the guard radius receive 10% reduced damage from physical attacks. The pet is teleported to its targeted location.

Protect me – the pet is teleported to yourself. The duration is reduced to 4 seconds, the CD is reduced to 40 seconds. It will also clear 2 conditions.

Sick em – The pet is teleported to its attack range relative to the target of the cast. The first 3 attacks are guaranteed critical hits for the pet.

Search and rescue – The targeting interface is similar to the Guard. The effect is similar to the Engineer resurrecting elixir toss. For X seconds it heals everything for X% of health. Can be interrupted. The pet is teleported onto the area.

The teleport animation is the one we have when summoning spirits, a flurry of leaves. The reason for teleporting is to provide more responsiveness and increase overall differentiation from regular commands.

I would like to mention a few traits that I feel are in need of being reworked/tweaked for better use.

Natures voice – changed the boons given to depend on shout activated. Regeneration and Swiftness default removed. The effects are all AoE with a range of 600 centered on the Ranger
Guard – gives 10 seconds of regeneration
Sick em – gives 10 seconds of 3 stacks of might
Protect me – gives a 10 second aegis (to differentiate it from stone spirit)
Search and Rescue – gives a 2 second stability

Shout mastery – alongside of 20% CD reduction it also gives 10 second swiftness. This is to keep Guard builds viable and working.

Two more notable mentions here are:

Natures bounty – The effect changed from a 33% duration increase on regeneration, to a 33% effectiveness increase on regeneration. Meaning, regeneration applied by the Ranger will heal for 1/3rd more compared to other classes.

Instinctual bond – This is the new trait the rangers got with the April feature patch. The concept is very nice, but the implementation is not. Because of the ICD it can be very difficult to time it to work with every F2 activation leading to a lot of down time. The option of not having an ICD would be OP as there are some pets with very short F2 CDs. The solution would be to make it work on pet swap, because it is the most reliable way and a very nice middle ground of up time. You can heal every 16 seconds max.

Thank you for reading and I hope it was not very taxing on you.

I like this a lot. However, I do not see the need to changed too much of the line. Perhaps this could be more apropriate.

Instinctual bond – Convert 1 condition into a boon on pet swap. Currently it gives the pet quickness when you go into downed state

Shout mastery – Shouts give 3 might in an AoE on use as you have stated. But I find this too simplistic and uninteresting but wat the hell

F2 mastery and speed training merged into a single trait – new random trait added

Masters bond – instead of stacking, the pet inherits 10-15% of the ranger gear stats.

Invigorating bond – now works on pet swap and not on activation

Natures wrath – simply buffed, 10% off of healing power is too little. Perhaps 10% HP into both power and condition damage. Perhaps removed all together and replaced by a different trait.

As far as your trait of pet gaining dodge with a trait, i find it silly. It should be base with the pet gaining blur frames with every dodge and every weapon evade. But thats a story for another time

Ranger torches need a buff, i concur

This is how I got my PvE ranger to look, and after a long time I am quite happy.

Well, if you are running dungeons with an elementalist, then having a sword + axe off hand and torch as another off hand is the way to go. Berserker stats of course.

rapid fire damage will be the same, rapid fire damage per second will be doubled.

Longbow is just super bad at the moment. Both in PvP and WvW. There are some instances in PvE where it is useful though.

I was under the impression that the Human-Char treaty split Ascalon in essence. The char gave back some of the territories around Ebonhawke.

The only problematic thing is that piercing arrows is a trait on its own. It should be merged with quick draw and put at adept level in skirmishing. Everything else is non bow specific. Remorseless is a silly trait and should be removed

It is a PvE trait, first and foremost

Protect me should not kill the pet. The not attacking part should be more then enough of a penalty.

Remove all waypoint costs. Its pointless anyway

Or practice and improve. It is not that hard.

The precision signet also fills adrenaline. Maybe it will be used more. Although i still feel that between Cleansing Ire, Burst mastery, Signet of rage and Berserker stance(even if nerfed) Warriors will not have issues. There is just a drawback, which was needed, for using burst skills and missing.