Guild Wars 2

It looks like you’ve put a lot of effort into creating a playstyle that suits you, well done!

I for one, wouldn’t put as much focus on Beastmastery as the Wilderness Survival and Nature Magic traits tend to allow for a lot more survivability for the player. And while you’re alive, you can control the pet.
Increasing the player’s potential (be it surviving or dealing damage) is in most cases superior to increasing your pet’s.

As for pet choices; I usually run with a spider/wolf combination as their damage doesn’t seem too affected by the 25th patch and in my opinion have the most reliable F2 skills. Also I value good crowd control higher than more damage. It’s important to keep in mind you can always change your pets to deal with different types of situations, so don’t ever feel stuck with one pet.

One last suggestion; because the Ranger profession seriously lacks condition removal, the Lemongrass Poultry Soup is a great consumable to keep in mind.

Edit I want to leave 1 suggestion/remark about your trait build, spending points in Nature Magic is usually either all-in, or not at all. The first minor trait is not worth it at all in my opinion, and you would be much better off with 10 points in Wilderness Survival instead so you can take either III (Shared Anguish) or IV (Vigorous Renewal), I think it’ll also be a relief that you can now use shortcuts in WvW by changing that adept trait to I (Soften the Fall.)

Parktou.4263:

Frontline Melee Ranger

This is the build I will probably use when I get the ranger to 80. The pets would basically be for the boons at the start and then just to take conditions off me. Vigorous renewal+Healing Spring is awesome by the way.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMUQNAsXRnEV0FcWQKWwaZAp9QTsEM5VYWcPGlOJET5NPQtWA-j0yAoNBRiRgoGgZvioxW3CStLsFwopXw0lAK1FV7SKiWtQA9HDA-w

3000 attack
3000 armor
21000 health
1000 healing power
Perma-regen/swiftness via guard
50% regen and 65% protection durations
Gain health and 100% endurance with every kill
Game. Set. Match.

I doubt you’ll be doing much consistent damage but you seem to be keen on the build… Because of that I’d suggest one simple improvement; Instead of Runes of the Grove and Runes of the Earth, use Monk and Water for straight up boon duration. That brings all your boons’ durations up to 60%, if you want to you can also slot in Major runes of either one of the two previous suggestions to increase boon duration further.

Franklin Fhenrir.4962:

The main reason i posted this thread was to talk about the improvement of the 2 and 3e attack of skill " the attack that won’t let you move during a attack". It is not only for me but also for the other Rangers that might had some problems with the attack. Like i said it’s deadly for some PvP/WvW matches, but also during Pve combat in dungeons. During a Mesmer boss battle in SE i always dodged by a hairs breath when she casts here aoe stab, but if you are able to move you got it allot easier to get out of that field if you were not immobilized at the spot.

People can say " don’t use sword at all then" but i like the sword its MY character, MY play style, My build, i don’t wanna be forced using a other weapon just because its safer.

And if people say L2p let me tell you now not everyone is as good as the other. Some are better some are worse, i find myself a little above average with the sword. The sword must be fun for every kind of leveled player to use in a fight be it Pve or Pvp and if you take away the ability of the ranger to run around by keeping it at 1 spot then people will look bad at the sword and will barely play it.

Also skill 2 and 3 are not always about pure damage but to dodge and avoid the damage, thats what it is to be a melee Ranger

I think you misunderstood " the attack that won’t let you move during a attack"... The discussion is about the sword skill 1, as there’s serious issues with that. Must’ve been my mistake to go by the the thread’s very title, thinking it had something to do with the discussion.

Edited to explain If you leave skill 1 on auto-attack, you get rooted in place and cannot time your dodges as well as you would when disabling auto-attack. Skill 2 and 3 however, are movement/evade skills and the timing and direction is entirely in the player’s control. With these skills the player has full control of the movement of their character, because you can actually anticipate on the skill animation having a fixed pattern. Skill 2 first dodges backwards from your target, if you have a target (if not, it’s just backwards…) So if you want to move forward just change your camera angle by 180 degrees and be done with it. Skill 3 also has a fixed pattern on how much distance is passed and in what direction you will be moving. Having no control of movement during the animation is fine because you’re actually dodging. I don’t see you changing direction in the middle of a dodge roll either.

And there I was, hoping to find a proper discussion on the issue… Ah well!

In that case carry on, I’m not going to defend changing the second or third skill as I think they’re both amazing. I would side with anyone who simply states it’s a l2p issue.
If any changes were made to those skills it’s the reaction time on skill 2, but I’d probably put that at the very bottom of my wishlist.

Just read the reply; my apologies for the misunderstanding. I’d been awake for way too long by now, and thought the discussion went back to skill 2 and 3 of the sword, not skill 2 and 3 of the skill 1 attack chain.

Xsorus.2507:

Why do you have Auto Attack on in the first place….

Seriously, Do you guys not PvP or something? You should of disabled it a long time ago to deal with things like Retal and Confusion.

In terms of maximising DPS having auto-attack enabled is superior to manually activating skill 1 because of possible latency issues. As for the Retaliation boon and Confusion, it’s easy enough to stop auto-attacking by cancel casting or by changing your direction away from the target…

Then again; you can’t and shouldn’t want to force players to play the way you want them to, just because it’s optimising the class’ potential. Different players have different playstyles, and there’s no telling anyone they’re doing it right or wrong if they are enjoying themselves.

Mind you not everyone is only interested in PvP. It’s already caused enough frustration that a lot of game updates are so very fixated on the sPvP format, and in the process destroyed perfectly viable PvE/WvW builds and playstyles.

Adminir.8140:

Can I ask what weapon this was btw where the animation fix, nerfed the DPS?

He was talking about the Short Bow animation change that came with the October 7th 2012 update.

Crossfire: Increased casting time by 40 milliseconds. This was done to fix some glitches in the animation that caused problems with this skill.

The funny thing is; the actual increase ingame seemed more like an increase of 80 milliseconds. (This was tested by recording the auto attack and comparing attacks/minute before and after the patch.) Before that I can recollect no actual posts or signs that there was anything wrong with the animation. I think I might have read somewhere that it had something to do with the Quickness animation. Which makes things even more hilarious because in a later patch Quickness got toned down by 50%.

Either way, it’s updates like this that have made a lot of Rangers on the forums very cautious to post at all.

I personally quit using the Short Bow. At the time I was pretty fed up with the way this apparently unnoticed glitch was dealt with. And now the June 25th patch was just icing on the cake. To me the Short Bow now only feels like a shadow of its’ former self. A shame, really. Because it was pretty balanced at release.

I never said the sword wasn’t a viable weapon, in fact I stated I’d been using it almost exclusively for awhile now. That’s not because the weapon itself is weak, but it’s the only weapon ingame with which you have to manually disable skill 1 in order to not put yourself at risk.

Decent damage and survivability aside; it’s just lousy design that you have to manually spam auto-attack. If you still think there’s no problem with that in mind, I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

One more example of good design, though. The greatsword is actually a better weapon if you disable the auto-attack and time the evade on skill 1 right. However it can still be used without disabling auto-attack and there’s no real penalty for doing so. In terms of optimising your gameplay; timing your skills manually will always reign surpreme.

The whole discussion about the one handed sword, however, is that you will get rooted if you choose not to disable the auto-attack.

If the Ranger had balanced utility skills you’d see more rangers use different utility skills.

At the moment the viable skills are;

Signets, if you leave them on passive.
Lightning Reflexes, because Rangers are dying for stun breakers. (I’m not counting Quickening Zephyr because of the Quickness nerf and it being a deathwish.)

The rest is just meh. In most cases you have to use traits to even make them worthwhile.

I do wonder why the pet leash change wasn’t split between PvE-WvW and sPvP. Then again I ask myself that very same question about a lot of the changes in the latest patch.

By the way, Aeri; I lolled at your sig. So true!

Terkov.4138:

Soon someone will jump in, tell you to turn off autoattack and shout “L2P!”

I don’t use sword too much, but I agree it should be changed.

Well when that idiot arrives be sure to remind him that it’s not a learn to play issue; rather it’s to learn and adjust to lousy design. I’ve been using the sword almost exclusively for over the past 6 months and while I know how to use it, it’s a weapon that cripples the Ranger (ingame with the lack of dodging and irl due to carpal tunnel syndrome if you do l2p.)

Shadowulph.4586:

Anyone else using Master’s Bond & not have it actually work! No icon shows up for the stacks, it should be a max of 25 but I get nothing.

The stacks show up on your pet, not yourself.

Quarktastic.1027:

I’m pretty sure it’s intentional. After all, anet doesn’t want us to have competent AI companions.

Over correcting to make up for how good GW1 heroes were I suppose.

Remember how good GW1 heroes were if you tried to make them fight in close combat (melee…) if anything they haven’t improved since.

The Ranger’s Spirit of Frost has an internal cooldown of 10 seconds stated in the tooltip, which isn’t actually ingame.

A Jaguar’s F2 stealth doesn’t break on attacking, it’s the only stealth in the game that doesn’t, so I’m not sure if it’s a bug or working as intended.

I find it strange that while the playerbase is screaming for other pet micromanagement options, the devs seem to think giving us more control makes the profession too hard to play.
Firstly I think it’s harder to play a pet class with a dead pet (or a pet that just has to sit by the sideline because otherwise it’ll die…) because we have little options other than slotting utility skills to keep the pet alive. Also I don’t think anyone specifically requested more options, we just want better options for micromanagement.
Secondly I think a lot of actually want a higher skill ceiling. Short Bow wasn’t exactly state of the art gameplay. It was mindlessly spamming skill 1, just like the Longbow. Only using skill 2-5 as the situation arises.

Then again; the comment on how adding more pet management options raises the skill floor too much for new players; in PvE* when I was leveling my first toon (a Ranger) I hardly ever had to even send my pet in to attack. I started attacking and that’s it. Mob dies a few seconds later. On max level I can even go afk and let the pet attack any mob that tries to kill me. As long as it’s just 1 at a time the pet will manage keeping me alive without any micromanagement at all.

So why be afraid to raise the skill floor above rock bottom?

*I think Anet really needs to remember this is where new players start out. Instead of keeping their tunnel vision of sPvP becoming too hard for new players. It’s not like every build is viable in sPvP; there’s a very structured Metagame, and most deviations from that fail hard. That’s not a friendly environment for new players no matter how you look at it.

Quarktastic.1027:

JorneMormel.9850:

The increased recharge on Counterattack (GS4) was in the patch notes but not actually implemented.

Yes I’m calling out for a nerf here, if Anet is to make the class unattractive, they might just aswell break it altogether.

They increased the recharge on Counterstrike, our spear #4. Looks like someone needs to brush up on their ranger skills.

You’re right. My bad; I mistook Counterstrike for Counterattack as I never really thought the spear block was anywhere near OP. The GS however…

I’ll delete my original post to reflect this. (And yes I do need to polish up on my ranger skills; it was my main until the latest patch, that’s when I gave him up for a lvl 2 mesmer. Rangers make for great bank alts, though!)

Eurantien.4632:

Ranger fiery GS before the QZ nerf was way OP 9s straight quickness. It tore through dungeons and it tore up pvp.

That’s like saying Short Bow should be nerfed because Longbow isn’t really a weapon people would want to use. Wait… that sounds familiar.

Either way, was the problem really the Ranger having access to Quickness on demand, or was it the Elementalist’s Fiery Greatsword not being balanced (if a character decides to use Quickness with it?)

It’s not like it’s impossible to have an Elementalist and a Mesmer with Timewarp in the same party…

CETheLucid.3964:

I didn’t need the devs to hold my hand and tell me what a ranger does. I figured that out all on my own. It’s pretty self-evident.

If you think ranger must mean range only, you’re doing it wrong.

That said, as a ranger, you’re better at range then any other class. You’re stronger then any other class at range, and incredibly competent with melee. Rangers literally do everything.

A simple understanding in any game with melee is that melee weapons will always be slightly better then range, it’s a risk/reward thing.

Always on any class. If range was better then melee, there would be no honest reason to use a melee weapon for practical play ever.

The equilibrium achieved in this game is second to none in that regard, especially with ranger, and you people want to jump the shark. Stop that.

Is there room for suggestion and improvement? Absolutely.

Calling out the OP for trolling isn’t constructive at all. That said; yes there is a risk/reward type of thing concerning attacking from a distance or from point blank range. However the greatsword is the most defensive weapon the Ranger has. It has a built in evade with the auto-attack, a gap closer (which noone stops you to use for getting away…), a block(+pushback) and a stun. All these defensive options should pretty much negate the risk from attacking in melee, wouldn’t you agree? If anything it’s easier to avoid damage because of how easy it gets to flank your enemy if they do face towards you. The Longbow has no such options, it has 1 pushback and a channeled AoE cripple on a huge cooldown.

Post edited by moderator

1) Pet rework; they need a dodge mechanic to prevent being one shotted by dungeon boss mechanics at the very least. *Edit: and stow pet in combat.
2) Utility skills actually bringing utility and not more RNG (spirits), passive effects not worth using (signets), or functions we should already have as a core mechanic (I’m looking at you, Guard.)
3) Trait rework; traits being moved to trait lines that make sense. Like trap enhancing traits being moved to Wilderness Survival, Skirmishing pet traits being moved to Beastmastery just to name a few.

@ OP;

I find your suggestion of switching pets as soon as you jump off a wall in a WvW defending situation very bad. As soon as you get out of range of your pet (this works with the height difference in WvW structures) your pet will spawn next to you, just like when you move out of range of your pet.

This bugged me as I read through your post, as it speaks of little experience. I can’t really blame you for that though, as the Ranger is a lot more fun to roam around in WvW than it is useful to defend with.

I find using a jaguar, jumping off and doing your thing (be it Entangle, Muddy Terrain* by trait or skill use) and sending in a Jaguar with F2 to attack the enemy while running back to safety is usually enough to send a few people fleeing. If you find you can get out of combat in the defended structure, that’s the moment to save pet swapping for.
Another pet alternative that works great in these situations is the wolf, to send the people using the rams fleeing with the F2 skill. Using a squishy pet doesn’t really matter to me, because I tend to swap pets out of combat anyway.

One more bit of advice for defending structures as a Ranger; use a ranged pet (I prefer spiders because of the AoE poison field), position it on the wall with F3 and let it attack while you man a arrow cart. Pets stay active when using siege weapons other than golems so it allows for some much needed utility.

Edit; sorry I only just noticed this thread was brought up with the intention of removal. My advice stays but indeed the original post does not seem to be very well informed.

Ranger is a great class for completely running circles around people who have little to no experience in PvP combat. And still Rangers wonder why they get nerfed time and time again? It’s usually people who have no idea what they are doing that speak out the loudest when they think scissors are overpowered and they are beaten playing paper. I’d argue mesmers make for a better class to 1v1 (and run circles around your enemy) but they start getting a lot better at higher levels due to traits. Rangers simply don’t have that many great traits, so your disadvantage at a lower level isn’t that much bigger.

I actually made a suggestion last night on GW2Guru, which seems kind of similar to yours. I’ll just copy/paste the whole thing as I can’t be bothered to write it up again. Sorry for the excessive sarcasm, I may have written a lot of it in anger.

As it’s been said a thousand times before, pets are underpowered.
For some reason ArenaNet thought everyone was blatantly lying at all times, and the people in sPvP must be right that pets actually make Rangers able to watch TV and stomp people at the same time. What they didn’t realize is that the ability to watch TV during a sPvP match is actually because we spend most time on the floor anyway.

Now instead of trusting the ArenaNet developers to balance the game and all that, I propose a few changes to the Ranger class that could improve our hindering class mechanic as a whole. As Rangers are usually considered the jack of all trades, I’ll take this one step further by not only adapting to the recent changes, but also doing the developers’ work for them by thinking of a solution to actually for once balance the profession.

I suggest a change to the F1 and F3 abilities. Currently F1 (which should send in our Pet to attack our target) works great, but only when our pet actually feels like attacking. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to spam my F1 key to make my pet move as much as an inch. The situation gets worse against enemies who stealth or cause you to lose track of your current target. In that case the pet will run back to you, instead of staying in the vicinity of its’ original target.
What I’d like to see is a merge with the currently useless Guard utility skill. Controlling our pets shouldn’t have to be bound to our utility skill slots, as it’s our class mechanic. If anything our utility slots should bring just that: utility. As for my proposal; it’s rather simple, really. Press F1 once to have a ground-targeted Guard ability, press it twice to let our pet actually run in and attack our selected target. (Which most of us already do?)

One of the main problems our pet becomes a nuisance in dungeons is because there are a lot of mechanics that simply have to be dodged in order to survive the encounter. As a dead pet does no DPS, but still subtracts from our weapon damage scaling, because it’s balanced around the fact that we have an active pet, this brings forth some of our most core problems with the Ranger. We bring less damage than other professions because of our pet dying in these encounters, and less utility because our core mechanic just got hard countered by some mindless one hit K.O. gimmick. There are only two viable solutions that I could think of, and one would make pets seriously overpowered.

1. Create a dodge mechanic for the Ranger’s pet.
2. Make pets invulnerable or at least highly resistant to area of effect damage.

Now you could guess that making pets have insane tanking abilities because they’re a pet isn’t really an option. How to include a dodge mechanic for our pets?
That’s where F3 comes in. If we can return our pets by using the ground targeted F1 ability, there’s no need for a recall option. So changing F3 to make our pets perform a dodge roll seems like the perfect solution. This would have to go side by side with creating an endurance bar for our pets, or making the F3 ability drain a small part of the Ranger’s endurance. We can already trait for more endurance regeneration, so that wouldn’t actually be much of an issue if it were to drain the Ranger’s endurance as long as it’s not as much as 50%.

Obviously only fixing our pet’s AI by giving us more control would not fix all the issues with the Ranger, but I think it could go a long way. And I think most of us agree something has to change to bring Rangers on par with other professions. Please feel free give feedback or to add your own suggestions.

I did not want to go into the stow pet option, as this has been suggested for as long as I can remember to keep the pet stowed when entering combat. And with good reason too. But since this easy fix is still not implemented, I kind of gave up on that one.

For some reason this has been bugging me all night long…
The picture that comes to my mind when I think of the Ranger in its’ current state basically comes down to a character holding a bow by the string, with the pointy side of the arrow directed to his buddies behind him. I tried looking for that one paticular image for a bit and I found something beautiful… to me; this is the ultimate embodiment of the Ranger profession in its’ current state. It’s my previous description, with an horse’s backside (because of god knows why… I lost track of what direction they were going anyway.) and the pet being remotely useful somewhere in the water. Out of sight. Because I wouldn’t want to see fluffy get hurt, even though I know he’s on his backside most of the time in any serious encounter.

So for all fun and giggles I present to you:
https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/3947699968/h4FBD09D4/

On a more serious note, I think we should put our heads together and come up with a general direction in which we want the profession to find its’ niche, and how to resolve the current problematic class mechanics. Great suggestions are being given all around, and have been for months (some might argue a year, even.) However; if we do wish to put our minds towards that, this simply can not be a one sided discussion. We’ve already seen in this thread and various others that all this frustration gets vented at one point anyway. We can’t argue with the developers for the sake of argueing, but our suggestions fall to deaf ears (or are misinterpreted) if there’s no feedback from the only side that can actually fix things.

Only telling us our voice is being heard doesn’t suffice, I’m afraid. We would like to give you our best suggestions on how to improve the game. But we need you (devs) to tell us what you want to do with our suggestions.

Trolling and showing verbal aggression leads to no improvement whatsoever.
(This goes for almost everyone in this thread. And read the previous posts to see how the dev’s answer has already be interpreted as trolling.)

I want to reply to the video posted earlier about the mesmer exploiting through the gates at Bay, and apologise in his stead. I know him in person and we agreed using such an exploit is not fair play and we don’t improve or learn anything from taking a keep that way.

If this happens again please do contact me as I will point this player to his mistake and faulty play.

Other then that, thanks for the good fight. We’re really enjoying the matchup so far, and hope to give you guys a hard (and fun) time!