Guild Wars 2

If OP is right and pact armies will run out of magic, will that make Rangers useful again?

Part (2/2)

Rangers should have a trait or skill that acts passively and auto alerts you to threatening enemies. I don’t know entirely how this would be pulled off, but maybe when an enemy is quickly unleashing a lot of damage? or healing its team mates too much? Not sure on that one.

Map roaming ability. Rangers should have a skill or trait like ‘Rope’ or something that allows them to climb small cliff edges. Ignoring the need for stairs and giving the class the ability to traverse the map faster. Something that falls in line with my idea of the ranger and everyone else’s, a roamer. also, 25% movement speed shouldn’t have to come from a signet that should be baseline passive trait or just built into the ranger itself. (as in when you role ranger, you have 25% more movement speed over other classes. This might be a bit OP, so maybe knock that down to 10%?)

More precision. I think the Ranger should be able to do a bit more damage with his weapons. I’m aware this could take us into top-tier and people would massively complain, but hey it’d be swell for us. Or maybe, just more damage as the foes health drops below a certain value? so that we can be that clinical finisher who takes out foes. Also maybe an unblockable attack trait/signet?

More stealth options. We should have a skill which straight up stealths us for 8 seconds. Get rid of a rubbish skill no one uses and replace it with that. Cool cool.

Additional skill-slots. This is a tricky one. But maybe a GM trait that allows the ranger to take another utility skill? To be a trapper ranger we already have to sacrifice them. Could be a nice addition could be something way too unfair, may have to have a play-around with the idea more.

Well thats the end of this post. TL;DR Rangers are super cool everywhere else, can we have bird UAV + stealth pl0x?

Part (1/2)

Iv’e had a couple of ideas lately for the Ranger and so I figured I’d share them with you. But first I want to talk about what this class means to me, why I play it and what it should be all about. This has been a highly talked about topic on the forums and so I figured I’d give my two-cents. What is a Ranger?

The agreed upon opinion is a roamer. Someone who patrols large areas and “protects”. Has an affinity with nature. The opinion that gets immediately shot down is someone who uses ranged-based combat. My opinion is sort of a mixture. When I was little(er) I read a series of books titled The Rangers Apprentice. Quality books, which had a lasting impact on me. In these books, the “Ranger” is sort of a secret-police service for the king. There are only 50 of them in the land and each one protects his own area, whilst reporting to the ranger-leader guy. They are known as black-magic practicers because of their ability to seemingly vanish or appear out of nowhere, and take down entire units of soldiers easily. Their prized weapon of choice is the Longbow, but they also carry 2 daggers. (There is one ranger in the book who uses a sword but he’s a special case). They are masters of camouflage, using their specially crafted shimmering cloaks and vast wilderness survival knowledge. What they do is rarely seen but without them the kingdom falls apart etc. Anyway, great series of books I highly recommend them but THIS is what a ranger is to me. None of that LOTR Elf crap.

“Ok cool, thanks for your opinion now go back to pewpew’ing with 2”.

I’d love to but I’m not finished. My ideas are mostly thought of in a PvP sense but you can apply them to PvE quite easily.

The problem Rangers have in PvP is selfishness. They don’t really add anything to a team-based event which is also why they’re disliked by some Dungeon do-ers. They’re normally on some cliff somewhere raining down arrows on one target, whilst not doing much damage (compared to some other classes) and not absorbing any damage for the team fight. This is also why they take little to no skill to play. On-top of this, they have no real perceived role.

So in my eyes, the Ranger is the clinical finisher. We are the ones who can very quickly deliver finishing blows to enemies, or put pressure on enemies so they can’t focus on DPS output. We also don’t like to die which is why we do this from a nice safe distance. As well as this, we are the scouts. The Ranger should have the knowledge to quickly identify the opponents who are causing the most threat, target them and quickly pin them down/kill them. Whilst the “noobs” among us will never be able to do that until they become experienced enough (same with every class’s role) It should still be a considered fact due to the nature of the Ranger.

Whether you agree with me or not, this is how I believe the class should be pushed forward.

Ideas: Birds as pets should be more versatile. I think, the eagle in particular, should be able to fly up way high in the sky over the map, and act as a sort of “UAV” for the mini map for a short period of time. Your mini map shows the locations of all enemies (except maybe enemy rangers, because of their Wilderness Survival knowledge thing) when this happens.

Pets should be more unique from each other. So in real life, all animals are very different. Some are stronger, some are faster, some are stealthier etc. In GW2 what separates pets from each other is base stats and skills. Whilst this isn’t a bad way to do it, they could make it more interesting. For example, have you ever seen a scorpion run as fast as a Jaguar? No. Speed of the pet should be a base stat and should vary massively. They should also have a lot more health. Animals in real life are wild and some of them are vicious, and they will fight to the point of death for food. (We’ve all seen planet earths polar bear quest). Another bonus to that is it might make them useful in WvW as they wouldn’t die quite so quickly, which would make a lot of Rangers happy. To get an even trade-off with that is once the pet does die, all your skills are sent to recharge mode like they did in GW1.

+1 quality of ranger life would go up immensely

+1 this let it happen

Quickening Zephyr is my favorite skill in the game at this point.

Quick Draw is just amazing.

Please Anet never take these 2 things from us <3

Anyway, I’m having so much fun in PvP running around with superspeed +lb+gs, not even doing that well with it but the fun-o-meter is off the charts.

This is exciting stuff, good to see.

Also, well written.

They say its to bring in new players. This makes me laugh.

Sure, some of them will stay, but a great deal of them will quit playing within 2 months, thats the way it is with GW2 because a lot of “RPG’ers” don’t understand it. Something that’s been proven through much of the games history…
As OP said in his well nailed post, it’s just a way to justify padding out the price.

Also, as a side note, you try to bring in new players but you make 2 of the professions near-pointless? That’ll definitely keep them playing.

Fact is, good businesses know that it’s harder to get new customers than keep old ones, ones who will benefit the business more.

OP nailed it.

So iv’e noticed a lot of posts about; rangers getting kicked from PvE groups because they’re a hinderance, not having enough DPS, being a useless LB ranger in dungeons because you don’t kill as quickly as melee etc. So I decided to do some actual experimenting.

All of these results were done with an exotic weapon, no armour or buffs of any kind, no traits applied either, and against the light training golem in the heart of the mists. I killed it 3 times for each weapon and recorded the times taken, then took an average.

Longbow at max range:
Average time – 35.69s. (34.12, 37.82, 35.13)
I only used skills 1 and 2 for this as they arguably do the most damage.

Longbow close up:
Average time – 40.183(33333…)s (40.56, 40.18, 39.81)
Again, only using skills 1 and 2.

Great sword:
Average time – 40.12s (40.03, 40.00, 40.35)
Only using skills 1 and 2.

Sword/Axe
Average time – 33.55s (33.87, 33.69, 33.09)
I used skills 1 and 4 for this… Not sure if that was the best way but I figured as its a weapon combo, I would have to use at least one skill from each weapon.

Sword/Dagger:
Average time – 29.593(33333)s. (29.81, 29.00, 29.97)
I used skills 1, 4 and 5 this time… I realise this somewhat in-validates the experiment as I used more skills, but this is definitely a condition based weapon set (poison + bleeding + cripple) so I rationalised I would have to use all the conditions to get its best potential.

Short Bow:
Average time – 39.89s (39.72, 40.57, 39.38)
I used skills 1 and 2 and didn’t flank.

Short Bow w/ flank:
Average time – 26.726s (26.65, 26.62, 26.91)
This surprised me, using skills 1 and 2 and flanking (which you should be doing with a SB) turned out to kill the quickest, giving it a higher overall DPS (I think? I’m still pretty new to this so don’t hate).

By adding traits, using utilities and playing the classes more intelligently, I’m sure you could get massively varying results, but with just the weapons alone this is what you’ll turn up.

Greatsword + longbow (close up) kill at roughly the same speed.
Longbow at max range is a little faster (about 5 seconds)
Sword + Axe is faster than that by about 2 seconds
Sword + dagger is faster than that by about 4 seconds
The SB without flanking will take roughly the same time as a great sword or longbow (close up)
The SB with flanking will kill the fastest, faster than S+D by 3 seconds. Making it 15 seconds faster than a great sword.

Again, this is just with the weapons. With 25 might and traits and utilities etc you can get a longbow or a great sword hitting 10K plus which may make it faster than a short bow with the same sort of buffs, I haven’t got all day to test everything though I may do that one day.

I’m still not sure how valid this is therefore, but it seems to state that if your dungeon group wants you to melee because it’s higher dmg or kills quicker, you should tell them the short bow is what you’re gonna use instead.

I’d be very interested to hear why you think I’m completely wrong, so please go ahead. As I said I’m not the proest pro out there and there is a lot in this game that contributes to overall damage and kill time which I’m ignoring, and so I probably AM completely wrong. Still it was fun to do.

:)

Hello. So today I logged on and discovered I could move at extreme speeds. As in I could cross the side of a map in about 10 seconds, much like the super hero Flash.

I have included a video of my screen so you can see.

I talk in the chatbox, and the chat is time stamped so you can see it’s not sped up.

Everything kind of feels like it’s been fast forwarded.

It didn’t go away when I switched maps, but it did stop happening after about 15 minutes.

(apologies for the low quality, had to export it to a lower resolution to upload. I have the original recording at high quality if you need it).

<— link

I dunno how possible this is for devs to implement, but I think player should be able to help in the construction. Like going out and adventuring to get materials which they can give to build masters to fill construction bars or something.

I read on Reddit the other day one guys suggestion which was to remove all titles and rewards from all players, then have them log back in or re-visit the HoM to get given their proper rewards that they earned again. Sounds like a logical and easy fix to me but they will still need to find a perma fix for it in-case it ever happens again. I imagine it’s that which is taking all the time.