Rangers have their highs and lows like every other class. They have really good DPS, but they have to work at it a bit more than other classes like warrior or mesmer. It’s possible just not as easy.
As for ranger balance, we have frequent meetings about balance where we discuss that sort of stuff – I go to those meetings on behalf of dungeon content and to lend my experience with ranger knowledge.I personally accept the tradeoff of damage for survivability (Can’t do damage if you’re dead). I tend to run a condition build using shortbow and sword\dagger, and focus on being supportive and holding aggro while keeping a steady output of DPS through conditions. Rangers have an incredible amount of evasion and damage mitigation if you are very focused and know when to use your skills and heals (prot on dodge roll, vigor on heals) means you can keep prot for when you mess up, and always have evasions ready. There are some very successful dungeon builds, but most of them aren’t DPS focused.
We’re working on ideas for making pets better in dungeons. There’s a list of reasons we can’t just tweak a number and call it good (it wouldn’t actually solve the problem), but it is something we are aware of and working on.
One of the things you have to think about, is how the game is played. If we buff rangers just for dungeons, than they are too strong for the open world. Considering I can solo most content in the open world by letting my pet tank, I feel ranger is very powerful outside of dungeons. We can’t have rangers that change based on PvP, open world, and dungeons because that gets too confusing for players and puts us on a slippery slope. Whatever we do to the ranger, it has to happen in both the open world and dungeons, so it requires more than just number tweaks. You see a lot of bots as rangers for that very reason – they are really strong open world classes, and buffing them for the sake of dungeons doesn’t work out to being a good fix.Wow this is getting long. I should go to the class balance forums some time, lol. Sorry for the text wall!
Well, while everyone else is saying ranger isn’t that well off in dungeons, that’s actually where I find the least of my problems at, as a Ranger since release. I love doing dungeons on my ranger. Yes, my pet does kind of fail very hardly in Dungeons, and PvP both which it dies pretty fast. But lately I keep them on passive, and only send them in on certain mobs. I do wish they survived twice as long, or we had the ability to choose to turn pets off and have better stats. But in dungeons I usually switch to the one pet (forget the name, sorry lol.) that gives might with f2 and I keep it beside me. But I am usually leading in dungeons I am in doing nice DPS with amazing survivability rate. I run a SB/GS everywhere I go with Carrion gears (power/CD/vit) and for my traits 30/20/30 and use crits to add more bleeding. It works out very nice. But in PvP I can’t seem to stand a chance against most classes no matter what their build is. As a ranger, I want to use a ranged weapon mainly, not anything else. I do know I can only bleed when I shoot from the sides, or back which sucks. And I don’t hit awfully high, but I hit fast. I can’t decide if the CD or bow damage was buffed how it would turn things out, but I wish they’d try to at least buff our conditions with the shortbow, it’s too easy for classes to get rid of it. Espicially thieves, their heal takes out all my bleeds, poisions, and burns. Also, it heals them for a nice amount, AND makes them stealthed again. I wish we had heals like that, lol. But over-all ranger is a nice class. I just wish you would consider buffing our PvP aspect at least for WvW.
Thank you for taking the time to type all of your response out, though. It’s not just a wall of text, it’s a wall of text showing that you actually care.