Guild Wars 2

i went from playing ranger only to branch out playing warrior, ele, guard and a lil bit of engi.

Ranger does indeed surpass them in most aspects. Warrior can be more all round strong, with good CC, good armor, good damage and good sustain, but it really suffers once it tries to be great at any one of those. because it seems it can only be great in one or two, then have to suck at other things.

you can, with ease, run a banner regen or shout healing build. It should buff you quite a bit, and your allies too. it is very neat in groups.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fJAQRBHdxG2ITHVe25hjH0hIoKowu4BwFV/Q6TIDSBA-TlCHABA8AAq+EAM9BBwOlgMq+ztaGgUPA27P4kyPBOCABAQAc0je0je0jGpAYSZE-w

personally, id tried this. i just noticed a new sigil (givin AOE poison on crit) which could be immensely strong on warrior (since it lacks poison). I am not 100% sure cripple on sigil proc will trigger immob, but if it does, you get a rare chance to spam immob like there is no tomorrow.

turret engies are like LB rangers, spirit rangers, minion mancers, hambow etc. all decent builds, but looking beyond their strengths you find their weaknesses.
LB ranger > squishy, lack of condi removal, lack of healing
Spirit Ranger > AI is weak, AOE wrecks them.
Minion Mancer > Mobility and AOE
Hambow > Stability stop most of their CC, thus you can just dance around them and avoid majority of damage.

Turrets >Mobility and AOE. Moving 8 turrets into range is tough. These turrets do have quite a good range to them, but they do not spam attacks frequently. Meaning you can get into 1200-1500 range and unleash 2-3 AOE attacks in the time that turrets can hit you maybe two times.
Once on cooldown, the engineer has little defenses left. Turret engies relies on body blocking, so they hide behind their turrets so the turrets block attacks. Solution> AOE or piercing attacks.
Alternatively you can use one nuiseance to deal with another. LB rangers are one of the worst enemies that turret engi can face against, mainly because they can do massive damage from outside turret range and also happen to have access to AOE attacks that does quick work of their turrets. Couple this with the insane stability duration and engineers defensive CC has no real purpose VS a ranger. In terms of defense, a well set up ranger will not be as tanky, but much more damaging then the engineer, and with equal or greater access to CC.

as a temporary feature, i would love this.

actually. why not expand on the idea?

every week, one of the following “gambits” are imposed:
siege damage -50%
no white swords
downed state disabled/no rally
NPC armor and damage +75% (hard mode for roamers and night cappers)
Player kill drop rates (magic find on player kill) +33%
WEXP +25%
“The Mists of war” > 20 man culling limit reimposed on players. Players can no longer see hostile server affiliation (you only see red hostiles or blue allies). Players can no longer see AOE rings.

you can also run celestial weapons – trinkets with sinister or carrion armor. Setting it up that way will increase your defense, while maintaining a healthy offense.

Tom Gore.4035:

aspirine.6852:

sandvich.8259:

Pewp-Pewp not Pew-Pew

Rangers need toning down in WvW they are ridiculous.
Ridiculous regen with troll urgent
1200 lazer of death. Get close? get knocked back start again.
Passive evasion by spamming attack skills on sword dagger.
Fear, kD on pets.
Unrivaled revive potential from pets in down state.

Each class has risk reward kind of balance where Ranger is just reward with no risk at the moment.

They are just over the top. Either buff all other professions or nerf ranger.

Pet revive is strong indeed, but you forget one thing. If you go down as a ranger, chances are about 99% of the time your pet is already down too.
And the rest was described fine by the person above me.

Yeah but the ranger can swap pets while downed. And use their F2 skill, too.

Anyhow, Ranger downstate is only a problem underwater. Good luck trying to finish a ranger underwater when he’s got a bear pet.

they fixed the underwater super invuln revive. Pets can now be CC’d, killed and thus stopped from healing underwater.

sandvich.8259:

Pewp-Pewp not Pew-Pew

Rangers need toning down in WvW they are ridiculous.
Ridiculous regen with troll urgent
1200 lazer of death. Get close? get knocked back start again.
Passive evasion by spamming attack skills on sword dagger.
Fear, kD on pets.
Unrivaled revive potential from pets in down state.

Each class has risk reward kind of balance where Ranger is just reward with no risk at the moment.

They are just over the top. Either buff all other professions or nerf ranger.

good day good sir.

after reading through your post, i’d like to take a few minutes to explain to you where your fallacies lies.

Passive evasion: Does only exist on GREATSWORD. It is the only skill, on any class, that offers evasion as part of an “auto attack chain”. Sword, Dagger, Shortbow, Greatsword 3, Harpoon 5, Lightning Reflexes and attacks similar to these on other professions are ACTIVE skills. They cannot be spammed endlessly and continuously. They require you to think before using, if not, you will have a defensive function on cooldown.

Ridiculous Regen with Troll Unguent:
This is a healing skill, if we look at its total healing over 10 seconds (both zero and max healing power stat) then the healing per second with troll unguent is:
Zero healing power: 850 × 10 / 25 second cooldown = 340 HP per second
Max healing power (2147): 1108 × 10 / 25 second cooldown = 443.2 HP per second.

Warrior healing signet – NO healing power = 362 HP per second
Warrior healing signet – MAX healing power (2345) = 479 HP per second.

As you can see, the warrior clearly does better. The warrior healing is 100% passive. It has ZERO cooldown, because you do not NEED to use it. It is always there. Thus it is 100% reliable.
Troll Unguent however has a 1 second activation time, plenty of time to interrupt and or apply poison. Thus negating a whole skill and or stopping a skill. Interrupting or poisoning the warrior has less of an effect, as the heal will always be there, in addition to secondary sources such as Adrenal Health, Regeneration Boon and incoming healing from other classes (Healing Mist from ele, elite spirit from ranger, guardian symbols and shouts and other things etc).

If the ranger is destroying you at 1200 range, then EVERY CLASS can counter attack it. NO EXCEPTION. Even necromancer can actually destroy a ranger if there is only 1200 range gap to close.

So good sir, please leave this thread and take with you your blatant, misinformed lies somewhere else.

Thank you.

Tseikk.9032:

TyPin.9860:

Maybe even all NPCs can get a sort of downed state. Would make camp flipping with smaller groups or solo certainly more interesting.

Sometimes i’m glad ANet doesn’t listen to suggestions.

interestingly enough, you seem to be the only one truly agains this based upon the most ludicrous excuse any WvW player can make.

Sorry mate, but ive played in EU T5-T1 and NA T3 and T1. Neither of these places would have issues with this. Smaller servers would benefit, larger servers wouldnt benefit much from it as they would be steamrolling either way. Sniping a few dollies VS a much bigger server has little impact in the first place mainly because it only ever does one thing, potentially give the karma train something to recapture.

Tseikk.9032:

Prysin.8542:

Tseikk.9032:

Before making up new ideas for WvW, remember that they should NOT favor the server with more population! This is another idea that would just make the higher population servers stronger and smaller population servers weaker!

So, until ANet fixes population unbalances i say
HELL NO!

I think even low pop server got a thief or warrior to spare to run caravans from time to time.

This would actually favor the smaller servers as they usually struggle to secure supplies vs bigger servers. Bigger servers are also, from my experience, more prone to zerg then roam or escort, they consist modtly of pugs with no interest in server performance. If these pugs get a harder time shutting down supplies, their sheer size will be less of a problem.

This change greatly help servers which are outmanned, as even ONE players initiative can have a much greater effect on the game.

A single player will have less impact if they can’t kill dolyaks anymore.

A single player would be able to kill the dolyak, if the dolyak was unprotected (by players).

Just like it should be. The only time i could see that it would be unfair is that you cannot assassinate the doly in the middle of a huge group as you currently can. Then again, adding a hint of realism, eg. “there is actually someone protecting this from being harmed” is not a bad thing.

Just like a single player would struggle to kill a defended doly, so would a group if a single player escorted it too. because they would have to stop a dolyak, and a player. Neglecting either would most likely lead to failure

Shiyo.3578:

Prysin.8542:

Those who claim AI builds should never be meta or even a thing must realize that such a thing would require Ranger and Mesmer to be permanently disabled in PvP. Why? Both are designed around AI usage, dealing damage with AI and empowering the AI.

Changing the profession’s themselves so they no longer do damage using AI would be so hopelessly impossible to do without breaking them in every mode that disabling them would be the only cost efficient and user friendly solution.

AI is not the problem. People’s perception of skill, most notably their own skill, is the coreproblem.
That AI got less then 1/10,000,000 of your intelligence, yet you struggle to outsmart it.
Think, plan, execute plan. If you cannot think or make up a plan, ask someone else to do it for you

I don’t think you’ve ever played mesmer or understand how it works if you’re comparing it to 10k hp uncrittable turrets. Mesmer clones/illusions die instantly and are easily avoidable, mesmers also die extremely fast.

As someone who spent 1.5 years dealing with thieves and PU mesmers in WvW, i know far too well how easy it is to destroy and recreate those darn clones. It still does NOT change the fact that the mesmer class mechanic is based upon destroying their pets to deal damage.

Only thumper turret needs a reasonable adjustment, the rest of them, even with auto repair and engi spamming that wrench kit thingy, can be destroyed with little effort.

People need to realize the difference between “cannot be dealt with, too stronk” and “there is a way to stop this”.

Learn how engies work. That being said i got NO clue how to play one properly, but killing them, now that isn`t all that hard. Just spam conditions, and do so relentlessly. Even HGH elixir spammers cannot managed condies well. That being said, the speed at which you need to apply heavy conditions (burning or 10+ stacks of bleeds) limits the number of professions you can counter engi with.
Bleedstack SB ranger with piercing arrows is a great way to destroy engies. PD SB thief is also quite good, especially if you keep that poison on them to deny them any burst healing.

You can do the direct damage approach, but if the turrets got armor plating + auto repair you gonna have a bad day. Because that is going to take time to deal with.

That being said, most engineers do not know when to “quit” and flee the node. So a zealous hammer warrior with zerker stance, dogged march and stability will wreck havoc on a node, and there is not much a engi can do about that.
Turret engi is good at contesting, but unfortunately for them, they are NOT a duelist setup.
As a result, any setup build for dueling can wreck them. In theory, power BM bunker should wreck them as pet can demolish turrets while ranger deals with engi. But i havent rolled such a build in a long time, so i cannot tell you how that would go.

Warrior sucks because it cannot sustain itself over time. Most notably because it only have one healing skill that does not force you to practically build around it, that is healing signet. It works with everything. Try using mending, defiant stance, healing surge. All these builds require you to somehow tweak your setup to optimize defence during cooldown. However warrior in its current state are unable to maintain damage or pressure once put into a defensive spot.
Every other profession can apply some sort of counter pressure or escape. The warrior cannot. It either sink, or it float. It never soars.

Those who claim AI builds should never be meta or even a thing must realize that such a thing would require Ranger and Mesmer to be permanently disabled in PvP. Why? Both are designed around AI usage, dealing damage with AI and empowering the AI.

Changing the profession’s themselves so they no longer do damage using AI would be so hopelessly impossible to do without breaking them in every mode that disabling them would be the only cost efficient and user friendly solution.

AI is not the problem. People’s perception of skill, most notably their own skill, is the coreproblem.
That AI got less then 1/10,000,000 of your intelligence, yet you struggle to outsmart it.
Think, plan, execute plan. If you cannot think or make up a plan, ask someone else to do it for you

Asking if ONE skill outta 5 is “viable”?
Just reroll already if you cannot handle the few quirks any weapon has.

Move to EU, get more people to move to EU, alternatively, move out of T1, then get more people to move outta T1.

Tseikk.9032:

Before making up new ideas for WvW, remember that they should NOT favor the server with more population! This is another idea that would just make the higher population servers stronger and smaller population servers weaker!

So, until ANet fixes population unbalances i say
HELL NO!

I think even low pop server got a thief or warrior to spare to run caravans from time to time.

This would actually favor the smaller servers as they usually struggle to secure supplies vs bigger servers. Bigger servers are also, from my experience, more prone to zerg then roam or escort, they consist modtly of pugs with no interest in server performance. If these pugs get a harder time shutting down supplies, their sheer size will be less of a problem.

This change greatly help servers which are outmanned, as even ONE players initiative can have a much greater effect on the game.

Andred.1087:

Weather patterns would be neat to see, but one of the major problems I see with that idea is that weather cycles are much more complex than day/night. Personally, I wouldn’t put dynamic weather in a game unless I could at least semi-accurately model real-world weather patterns based on time, location, and other factors. Granted I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to creative things, and others could probably care less how accurate the weather is, but either way it’s completely infeasible for ANet to put that amount of effort into it, which would be enough for me to say screw it.

check out youtube videos about “Climates of Tamriel – Skyrim”.

That stuff will give you a clue about what a few people with time on their hands can do “in their mancaves”. Now, a company should be able to match that or even improve on it.

GhOst.4019:

Bhawb.7408:

There are 5 separate turret engi threads on the first page alone.

9 at the moment of me writing this. Today is a big day for the turrets!

somebody must have used traited supply crate more then once.

i tried razer mices once, didnt like em much.

but incase you want a third uption:
Madcatz Cyborg MMO 7

expensive, but it has something like 90+ buttons to program using the mode shifting.

i love random weather (sort of like Climates of Tamriel for Skyrim. its a mod that does global and local weather effects incase people wonder). It would however put more strain on Anets servers seeing as such effects would need global effect for all players online, even if the change is local. Not to mention they would need dynamic skies aswell, so you could see the storm far away, possibly moving towards you or away from you.

ooh. this thread needs more salt

Gabriell.4856:

Prysin.8542:

Solstice.1097:

if RTW increases range it should show that on the tooltip at the very least. otherwise it appears as an unintended oversight.

for crying out loud. READ THE WIND DOES NOT CHANCE THE BOW’S RANGE. IT SIMPLY DOES ONE THING IN TERMS OF AFFECTING THE PROJECTILE. IT INCREASES THE SPEED OF THE ARROW SO YOU CAN NO LONGER SPAM ADADADADADADADADADADADA TO AVOID ALL THE LB’S DAMAGE

Only trait that INCREASES range for longbow is EAGLE EYE

Eagle Eye has given rangers THE SAME RANGE SINCE DAY ONE. THEY HAVE ALWAYS HAD THAT RANGE, IT WAS NOT SOMETHING GIVEN TO THEM BY MISTAKE.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RANGER PRIOR TO RTW AND NOW, IS THAT PRIOR TO RTW, ANY SHOT BEYOND 1000 RANGE WAS VERY LIKELY TO MISS UNLESS THE ENEMY STOOD COMPLETELY STILL. THAT WAS BECAUSE THE ARROW IS SO SLOW UNTRAITED THAT SIMPLY WALKING CAN MAKE THE SHOT MISS

Now shove this into your thick skulls and get real.

Actually, Read the Wind also increase attack speed by 10% (doesn’t this increase DPS?)

yes, it does increase DPS, but DPS was not what was discussed. Attack range was. And it does not affect the range

it will not fix any confusion.

People who had no interest in ranger is complaining about mechanics they do not know about. Just like people spent the first 12 months of their time in this game crying about thieves one-shotting them from thin air.

#LBisfine
#Rangerneedsbuffs
#nerfCeleEngi
#nerfCeleEle
#GiveNecroagapcloser

we should add a set of sigils that has 1% chance of instant match victory upon swapping weapons. No ICD ofc, if not they would be useless.

Solstice.1097:

if RTW increases range it should show that on the tooltip at the very least. otherwise it appears as an unintended oversight.

for crying out loud. READ THE WIND DOES NOT CHANCE THE BOW’S RANGE. IT SIMPLY DOES ONE THING IN TERMS OF AFFECTING THE PROJECTILE. IT INCREASES THE SPEED OF THE ARROW SO YOU CAN NO LONGER SPAM ADADADADADADADADADADADA TO AVOID ALL THE LB’S DAMAGE

Only trait that INCREASES range for longbow is EAGLE EYE

Eagle Eye has given rangers THE SAME RANGE SINCE DAY ONE. THEY HAVE ALWAYS HAD THAT RANGE, IT WAS NOT SOMETHING GIVEN TO THEM BY MISTAKE.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RANGER PRIOR TO RTW AND NOW, IS THAT PRIOR TO RTW, ANY SHOT BEYOND 1000 RANGE WAS VERY LIKELY TO MISS UNLESS THE ENEMY STOOD COMPLETELY STILL. THAT WAS BECAUSE THE ARROW IS SO SLOW UNTRAITED THAT SIMPLY WALKING CAN MAKE THE SHOT MISS

Now shove this into your thick skulls and get real.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

. its those warriors that sit there and soak up all my condi dmg with a single freaking healing signet passive.

if they can outheal your condition spam by just sitting there with healing signet ticking for 350-398/sec, then you are doing something wrong

I honestly feel like party size (max party size) should be upped from 5 to 8-10. reason for this is that it would make it easier to encompass all professions without having to exclude any for specific content. In addition one could, over time, revamp content in such a way that every profession could fully utilize their unique sides in order to progress as efficiently as possible.

Necro is perhaps the only class with a legitimate complaint vs longbow ranger

SuzukiMethod.4732:

ronpierce.2760:

SuzukiMethod.4732:

Amir.1570:

Illiterate could mean many things. In this case I mean it in a sense that Ranger mains are too scared to see the perspective of other classes because of how spoonfed they are with this easy class. Like even Mesmer is harder than this class and that’s saying a lot.

Like I don’t understand why Rangers “brag” about how good they are when in reality they’re only good because this class is easy.

Like learn humility already, Ranger is easy and just happened to be “unviable” which isn’t even true meaning they are still kittened viable.

TL;DR People who play ranger need to stop thinking they’re good. There are so many specs that take more skill than this easy class, like even Cele Engi or Ele takes more skill it’s not even funny.

You should see your doctor, cuz this much salt can not be healthy.

Actually, there has been studies that show that the old “recommended sodium intake” was significantly lower than we’re reevaluating to believe. So maybe he’s the right amount of salty?

Maybe the arrows are coated in salt and the more that hit you, the saltier you get?

Makes sense. Why else would they sting so bad?

Best counter to turrets is aoe (no aoe can be reflected. Retal can be nasty to aoe users though) or insane piercing burst that bypasses hiding behind the turrets. In short, LB ranger with piercing, rifle warr with piercing, staff ele with frostbow.

Stance warrior can work, but if the engi is good he or she will let you have the point then drop supply crate on you once your stability is up, then proceed to destroy you rather quickly.

rapthorne.7345:

unfortunately, GS is the best dps weapon for every single class that can use it.

You’ll likely see necros also rocking greatswords when HoT comes out (when not in DS of course), because it’s bound to blow all other weapons out of the water in terms of dps.

What a load of rubbish
Best dps wep for warrior is axe
For ranger it is sword by a margin of 15% or more due to sword auto giving might to pet.
On ranger, even longbow challenges the GS for sheer dps when using predators onslaught. Rapidfire has a few sec longer CD then maul but does close to twice the damage on average.
LB auto coeff at min range isnt great, only 0.5 while gs is 0.55 0.55 0.66, gs does use approx 2.5 sec to complete its auto animation chain, while longbow fires once every 0.9 sec. So auto vs auto, they are close, rapidfire + barrage closes the gap due to predators onslaught

Hvaran.6327:

i agree “size matters” ( that’s what she said).
composition basically tied to size and avaliable classes, cause u don’t want player that never played engi, on engi in your havoc group for sure.

banner regen, quit tricky build for havoc, i would say shout heal>banner regen, because of it’s condi cleanse ablities, mobility and boons that they give.

Most ideal is to have one of each. Banner regen is there to lessen the need for non critical hp maintenance. Example, aoe chewing away 4-5k very slowly, thus heal is needed, then you get spiked by meteor shower + frostbow 3 sec later. Regen help you power through slow pulsing aoe, such as necro wells, lava font or simply reduce the impact of condition ticks.

You still need a burst healer such as engi medkit/water fields blasting.

Think of a havoc group as a machine, and constant regeneration uptime as oil. Without it, the machinery will eventually stop. With it, you can keep going for a long time. Especially if you run ranger with elite spirit out. 620 hp/second heal and 60% protection uptime (not counting prot from guard/necro/ele) is not something you want to pass up on without a reason.

Hvaran.6327:

one of the reasons i love gw2 that players cannot be DIVIDED BY ROLES.

“I heal i heal i heal”
“i tank tank tank”
that stupid structure is in another games, go play wow dungeuons for it

for engi build, try going with elixir S if he gets focused so hard

ele, thief builds are good.
for guardian u can just take normal raiding build and it will work fine, especially change hallowed ground to purging flames or wall of relfection – situationally.

war should go shoutheal or dps normal war with 60206 or 20606
try to coordinate your cc and dps chains together.

Map awarness is your friend.
Try to pick a good fights where u have escapes.
Use terrain smart.
Don’t go straight forward on larger groups in open field.
0 downstate must stay long on ground, so res/stomp ASAP.

Play some pvp together, not a bad comp for that, tbh

Depending on group size, once over 8-10 players you should consider taking a banner regen warrior or regen spirit ranger. Both offer revives, both can grant unique buffs (i run cleric on either if i use those builds. warrior is 00464 and ranger is 00365). Both can deal medium damage (hammer F1/Maul with intelligence sigil hits for around 4-5k on a cele ele).
The ranger can provide burning on attack, protection on attack, flat out 10% more damage (do not be fooled, the frost spirit has been fixed and is once again 70% chance on EVERY attack to deal 10% more damage. That is a lot over time)
Warrior got flat stat boosts, which can be very nice. different banners also give different boons from their “banner skills”. In terms of CC, regen spirit ranger and warrior is almost tied. Warrior got shorter durations but shorter CD<s, while ranger got longer durations and longer CDs. Warrior can give stuns and KB/KD while ranger specializes in AOE immob, chill, cripple etc…

@amir
It is not much harder to set up a evis burst on a warrior then it is to setup a rapid fire burst. Both hit equally hard, both can have their damage completely mitigated through the same mechanics, however only rapidfire can have its full damage reflected back at the ranger.
Ranger has issues that needs buffs, and it needs lots of them. But 9/10 “buffs” is quality of life changes that keep dragging the whole class down. Pet functions, heals outside of healing skills, the healing skills themselves are slightly underwhelming in a competitive scene. The ranger lacks aoe pressure to the point of being a duelist or peeler only class. You cannot effectively take on two players for more then 20-30 seconds before you start to crumble. Regardless of your ranger build.
The pet mechanic, a core function of the class, does not help you, it hinders you. We have condi removal, cc, support and 25-30% of the total DPS of the whole class tied up in a furball that dies or we are forced to put it on cooldown from random aoe. You do not see mesmers having to lose all their function for 20-60 seconds due to random aoe. At most their mechanic is out for 8sec before they got 2-3 illusions up. Thus their mechanic is back up and working. Mesmer mechanic however is based on disposing your pets, ranger mechanic is based on sustaining the pet. However due to pet design it is impossible to maintain peak performance and keep the furball alive. Either furball dies, or you gotta swap it for a less optimal pet.
Melee pets chance to land hits on the average player is around 4-6/20. Ranged pets somewhere around 10-12/20. That means i do 25-30% less damage in 75-80% of attacks with melee pets, or 40-50% of attacks with ranged pets. to every other class, that is almost equal to fighting a target with 30% more armor and -33% more condi duration then their build normally offers.
All while still being hampered by quality of life issues, underwhelming healing skills and 85-90% reliance on active defense while other classes can enjoy passive defenses en masse or having multiple sources of heals so that they are no longer required to time or set up their heal.

Ranger has legitimate issues. They are strong, but never strong enough to be a “best choice”. Spirit ranger was only a L2P issue that took players a little time to figure out, result is that the build can no longer be used effectively, because it is hard countered by bow wielding warriors, engies and DD eles. All of which you will find in any competent or even soloQ group.
Beastmaster suffers from having to rely on delivering the brunt of its damage with worse RNG on the pet landing a hit then getting exotic drops in WvW.
Trapper get owned by condies or stuns, both which is prevalent

As for eura defending ranger – he has fair points, and does not need to stoop to personal attacks or calling people out in order to somehow concoct a point. Think about that.

Eurantien.4632:

@ Shiyo

Well no Shiyo, I would argue power ranger is completely overpowered in less than 5% of the situations it is in. If 2 BRAND NEW players both picked 2 classes and one picked ranger while the other picked class X I would argue the ranger would win every duel between the two. Flash forward like a few months and I bet the ranger would start to lose as class X learns how to dodge, LoS, use his cds. Flash forward a year and the ranger is having a lot of trouble. Flash forward 2 years and the ranger cannot win a single fight because class X has learned how to play the game. The ONLY time ranger is overpowered is when people don’t understand how to play the game.

Your exaple seems to portray that players playing ranger does not get better.
If we were to compensate and look at ranger development (in a similarly ideal setting as you think player B will have)
The first six months to a year of ranger play will mostly consist of learning what skills and pets does, you learn to maximize your performance on the ranger part while leaving the pet performance in the dust. A year ot so in you realize that the pet truly is essential and that including it into your play is very important. From here on out, the difference between a good and average ranger is simply down to mechanical player skill and the innate ability to multi task.

Two years of play should leave you in a position to challenge and beat most players, given that either your own or the enemies build is hardcountering the other build.
In terms of pvp, the victory conditions from being new to having two years of experience, assuming a steady linear growth in skill, can be seen like this
Build > build + skill > skill > 75% build + 25% skill.

What do i mean by this? By the time you reach the very apex of skill, your build in relation with your enemies build will be the major deciding factor. At this point, only mistakes on the superior builds side will allow the inferior build to win.

Example of this.
Average DD ele vs average LB ranger – ranger got a fair chance to win
Good DD ele vs Good LB ranger – ranger will have almost no chance to win (> 20%)
Once the skill is jacked up a notch, rangers chance to win goes down to below 10%. Only sheer human error will give the ranger a win by then.

AOE condi removal is easy, chill immob, stun, fear, KD/KB is easy too.

To get all of that:
Ranger (MT + Entangle + Alpine Wolf + Wolf)
Guard with hammer
Shout warr with hammer an axe/sword + Warhorn

There you go, massive condi removal + CC. Add a thief for blindfield spam and perhaps venoms for lulz (more chill, stun and immob).

EA compared to Nexon is like comparing a rich guy that has a foul smelling pungent cologne to a drug abusing mafia member.

I used to play Combat Arms (FPS), had sunk close to 500 euro into it over 2 years. They did an update and changed their password system, unfortunately, my password at the time included a symbol (shift + 4), this symbol was no longer avaliable for use and my password was corrupted. Asked customer support (they answered within 14 days) – got told to use my recovery info.
Told them that i had no clue about a few of the pieces of info and asked if they could reset my PW for me and if matching my current IP to the one being logged on their servers for 2 years (had static IP at that time) to verify me being me would be good enough.
Customer supports answer – Nope, cannot help. But you can always create a new account for free.

At that point, i didnt bother with their bullkitten anymore, left the game and went playing minecraft for a long long long time before starting with GW2

Another thing about havoc groups that should be mentioned is that IF you opt for having a dedicated healer, then make the group tanky, if not that healer will not heal fast enough, not enough hp and most importantly, if you got slippery squishies, they will just nuke the healer and then kill the ones who cannot sustain themselves.

Honestly, i spent 2 years on a nexon game, and in hindsight i have to say. [B] even EA is better then nexon [/b]

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

Doomdesire.9365:

Strongest possible build if played to the highest skill level when roaming is P/D thief, hands down. You can 1v2, and 1v3 fairly regularly, with the occasional 1v4. You should never lose a 1v1. The amount of conditions being put out + stealth + SA heals is extremely powerful.

Sadly, probably correct. Although I daresay you might have some issues going up against a regen/condi ranger running LB and s/d. With rapid fire tracking through stealth and the might stacking potential, plus the insane regen, you’ll end up with 20 stacks of vuln and 20 stacks of bleed + cripples, poison, torment, all sorts of crap that like p/d thief can be applied and reapplied in seconds that would be difficult to deal with.

well played condi ranger in general is a though fight for a thief, mainly because the ranger can, and will, be able to reapply large numbers of damaging conditions faster then the thief can get rid of them, on the contrary, PD thief relies heavily on bleed stacking, and with the passive condi removal of rangers, a thief will have issues doing much to the ranger.

DP is stronger vs rangers due to backstab spikes, PD is weaker.

Again, build is all that matters, either you go with the right one, or the wrong one. There is a counter to almost every build in existence

Ranger is good for roaming and havoc groups up to 15 players. Meaning, ONE ranger can have a noticeable effect on groups up to 15 people. They can do this either through boon support (protection spirit, shouts and warhorn), ressing (elite spirit/broken shout), or sheer DPS in the form of condi or direct damage nukes.

However, ranger relies heavily on cooldowns as it does not have excessive number healing skills such as other professions.
The day that ranger gets a reliable secondary heal on a reasonable cooldown that is not its healing skill, then the ranger will be near perfect.

Incase you wonder what i am talking about, its stuff like Mug on thief, healshout on warriors, guardian F2/meditations/AH, ele waterdagger 5/evasive arcana, engi kits/elix gun 5. Stuff that in itself is not stronger then the heal, but allow you to prolong your usage of healing skills by a few seconds, or restore some HP after being spiked right after healing.

RlyOsim.2497:

Prysin.8542:

Lack of mobility is not a huge deal aslong as the whole group sucks at mobility. However once one or more in the party is quicker then the rest, the party is doomed to fail

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune_of_the_Centaur
plus
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Endless_Black_Quaggan_Tonic

perma-aoe-swiftness

Better solution
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNBhOD7kRF6F0KWwfF4axAaCVvA47nWqu7gk9hP4XqH-TVCHAB3pEs5DCAAPAA30Bokyv10ME0+DGcFAQU9nAAIA7cnpz6M4oH9oH9oHt7bf7bf7bfSB81yI-w

This ranger build has so much stability that it can almost walk half a borderland before it runs out (47, 5 sec total). It has perma aoe swiftness, regeneration ticking for around 295/sec for allies. It has aoe vigor, aoe condi clear, water field, blast finisher and it can maintain perma 25 stacks of might on a BM pet (bird can burst for around 6-8k on squishes), and around 15 stacks on itself. Maul does around 4, 5k against zerk thief.

But for funz, stack drake with 25 might and fury then use F2. Seen it do over 12k to a zerk staff ele before. Drake is slow, but destroys camps due to its F2 being a bouncing attack that hits hard.

Only setups that should go beast, if at all is LB ranger, SF fresh air ele, shatter mesmer or some other build with massive spike damage on very low cooldown

Lack of mobility is not a huge deal aslong as the whole group sucks at mobility. However once one or more in the party is quicker then the rest, the party is doomed to fail

Cygnus.6903:

For one, it is way more fun.

But if you rely on high Fury uptime, SoR is probably the better choice, more consistent.

They should make Rampage a Physical skill so you can reduce the cooldown and increase the power of it with the trait in Strength.

Agreed. Rampager on warrior feels sort of like rangers rampage as one. Great skill, just needs a trait to reduce its CD (ironically, RAO on ranger is classed as a pet skill and isnt affected by any of the pet CD traits)

Smartcat.2130:

sadking.9625:

all a ranger has to do to be effective is stand at 1500 range (if spec’d), not move, and snooze on the 1 key (while occasionally rolling their face onto the 2 key).

I play a ranger and I love you for this. This is what I do. And when it gets boring I jump onto my shatter mesmer. =)
Ranger is alot of fun but there is no skill involved in playing it.
.

It takes no skill to kill with LB ranger, none at all. But try kill anything 1v1 with say BM power/condi bunker or trapper. It is perfectly possible, but without skills you will get hammered fast.

Saying a class as a whole is ezmode is wrong. Builds are ezmode, classes are defined by their complexity, in which the ranger is very complex due to how you manage the borked profession mechanic

Suggesting that we segregate and disrciminate against huge amounts of people based on their geographical location – not cool

If immob was a effect rather then a pure condition, there would be only ONE counter to stability – boon removal.
However, as we all know, boon removal is very powerful, it is the sole reason why necromancers are sought after in WvW zergs, because they got easy access to AOE boon removal that is PULSING (thus can hit multiple targets more often).

As things currently stand, only 5 classes got boon removal/corruption:
Necromancer (Well of corruption, minions etc..)
Mesmer (Null Field)
Thief (steal/larcenous strike)
Engineer (mines)
Guardian (remove 1 boon upon burning a single target)

In addition to this, one CAN get boon removal through Sigil of Nullification (60% chance on crit every 10 sec, 1 boon).

Meaning only 5 classes can really be effective (guard removing 2 boons is atleast more effective then ranger, warrior or ele removing one, even though 2 boons pr 10 sec is terrible)

So in order for stability to hardcounter all CC short of chill/cripple, we must have a valid counter counter. Because if you cannot counterplay, you are being “locked”.
To explain. If you fight a ranger as a warrior, how much fun is it to fight a ranger with a million evades AND 20-49.5 seconds of stability uptime. All that CC – completely useless, and if immobilized is included, then pin down, flurry, Leg Specialist (a trait) and bolas will no longer work. In short, a already hard to lock down class becomes almost impossibly hard to lock down.

However, immob is once again, a condition, meaning that negative condition duration affects it, this means that classes such as warrior, ele and engi, which all has traits reducing immob, cripple and chill durations with 33%, can WITH EASE get up to 98% duration reduction, while the highest + duration you can get for immob is 110% using 2x giver weapons (10% each), 10% duration sigil, traveler runes (10%), trait line (30%) and food (40%), meaning that even if someone is hellbent on locking you down, since most immob durations are 3 seconds or less, you can reduce that duration from what would be 6 seconds down to 3.35 or so seconds. meaning not even a full tick longer (game only counts full seconds)
However, while counter condi builds actually is good, full on max duration condi builds is not, because they sacrifice too many secondary or tertiary stats to pull it off, not to mention possibly using a bad traitline.

Regarding ranger, this horse has been beaten to death and people keep desecrating it. Rangers are perfectly FINE, they do not need nerfs, they need buffs (just not in direct damage department).
Their mechanic is so unreliable that it is comparable to try kill a thief with killshot while sitting in a black powder field, in short, the chance that the pet will do what it is told to do, when it is told to do it, is so minute it is not even funny anymore.
Anet did upgrade pet response back in april last year, but by september, the improvement in pet response had slowly relapsed back to where it was pre “buff”. Somehow, their server performance got progressively worse and pets are as bad as ever at this point. They rarely trigger when they should unless you are in an area that is almost completely void of other players and even then they don`t always do what they are supposed to.
I get it that rangers are hard to balance. They are really strong in dueling, and the pet causes massive balance issues because if you buff pet too much (aka, give it good pathing so it can maybe even jump up a small ledge and not freeze for 0.5 seconds before trying to attack something that has long since moved out of range, then pets would be so strong that botting rangers would surely return in force. If you buff the ranger too much, then an already strong class just get exponentially stronger due to pets having their own stats (thus scaling individually from the ranger. this is why ranger are strong during leveling, the pets scale higher then the player and is exponentially stronger until around level 40-50).
So i get it that rangers are hard to fix, but having so many completely useless traits, that has no real synergy with the mid or upper tier traits of the same traitline, or any other traitline for that matter, completely destroys the ability to make solid builds. Their innate
Lack of any reasonable party buffs call for minimizing personal performance at cost of support or vice versa. And what little support they got, short of regeneration buffing and rezzing, is just abyssmal.
Rangers still need buffs, but mainly QOL stuff and support. DPS is fine, and will probably be fine for a long while (cept SB; that needs a direct damage buff or two)

TymX.8017:

Thanks for everyone, you are great and I love you all

I tried the thief but it was more about timing than using the right skill at the right situation, so I left him in his 30s, but with a lot of you suggesting him, I will give it another try later.
Now I’m leveling an engineer and an elementalist at the same time. I like the elementalist better at the moment, but will try both of them at lvl80 in real roaming situations to decide.
Also when I am to help my wife or my friends I occasionally come in to play with ranger, so he will be lvl80 anyway, but after the elementalist/engi gameplay he feels a bit slow.
Necro is out, I don’t like it, it seems too easy and not having as great potential as the others.
I also tried the mesmer, but the greatsword seems to be mandatory and I hate every skill on that weapon . Also not as exciting as the eng/elem.
The problem with my elementalist is that I loose any chance to get mass invi which I could get from my eng/thi/mes. I hope the bigger survivability and 1vsX potential will make up for it.
The invisibility trap ranger for the wife sounds great, this way we can minimize the pressure on her. The 2 thief combo with her a stealth ranger is a great idea, the more I think about it the more I love it.

Thank you all for the quality input! I learnt a lot just from reading them.

frost trap is the only trap, that thus far, does not give you revealed when it triggers.

Fuzzion.2504:

We should ask PETA.

to kill it for us?

Vert.5041:

Rangelost.4857:

Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 are two completely different genres of games. You couldn’t shove a trinity system in the latter because the game is designed around allowing anyone to play both alone and with anyone else.

In the original Guild Wars, you can’t play alone. The game is built around always having a party at your side. If it’s not players, it’s henchmen. Running around without a healer is asking for punishment, and without a tank to get in the way, mobs will take out the healers first.

In Guild Wars 2, you’re rewarded for dealing damage only. You can specialize your character to become a pure healer, or a pure tank, and you can be very efficient at it, but in a group, you will get no loot whatsoever. Furthermore, trying to do some exploring on your own without being able to deal a descent amount of damage is going to get tedious, and fast.

And no, going “full out DPS” is not very helpful. Most people don’t understand that you need to be able to survive, and the “zerker meta” is far from ideal in most cases. After all, you don’t deal any damage when you’re dead.

Your sentiments might be valid if this was the first few weeks of release. I’m sure when people were discovering dungeons s for the first time they went with all sorts of set ups. After 2 years, full zerk dps is the best option because the game relies almost exclusively on active defense to stay alive and when you know the boss or the party knows and explain to you when to dodge/block/blind what use have you of stats like healing/vitality/toughness.

If you cannot survive in the zerk meta, it’s a simple situation of Learn 2 Play. Also even when you are zerk you can add a kitten ton of survivability by simply switching a few traits while you L2P.

Also, if you want to play a healer might I suggest engie or ele. Even in full zerk you can provide excellent healing Burts to teammates if you see they are about to down.

For tank, you can go with guardian or mesmer as they both provide excellent defense e utility in the forms of reflects and condition removal.

For dps, you can go warrior/ranger to provide things like banners, frost spirit, spotter…etc.

There’s your trinity, you have classes that use defensive/healing/offensive utilities while still putting out damage. The trinity hasn’t died but simply evolved.

That being said, ranger might be the only class, at this moment, that can fill all trinity roles at once.

Slap full nomads on the ranger with monk runes, boon duration food, 02066, regen shout + heal on F2, axe axe + sword wh.
Pet has its own stas, so aslong as you stack might eith axe and move pet out of harms way (can use guard shout for that) you can still bring frost spirit + regen + sotw and you will tank, you will heal and you will do dps, albeit terrible dps, it will still be higher then any other class tryin to do the same.

Actually that is a interesting concept. Allowing yaks to enter downed mode would make yak escorting more balanced in terms of likelihood of survival vs likelihood of defeat. Currently it is indeed far far to easy to kill a yak, ontrary to duccessfully escorting one