Guild Wars 2

The ranger is a very strong PvE class.

As you are responsible for your own survival in GW2, even when playing in group scenarios, pure DPS is not nearly as valuable a metric as it is in other MMORPG’s. You should probably consider more than just how quickly you can burn down a golem when picking your main for PvE content (especially since it will also presumeably be your main for WvW.)

PvE environments are generally more controlled than PvP, which plays to the strength of our pets. You can more easily position them to be useful and take advantage of their abilities. This gives us very good survivability, even when stacking offensive stats on our gear.

Our group support skills are a bit lacking, mainly because spirits were nerfed late in beta and really aren’t very good now. I’m personally of the opinion they will eventually be boosted back up. At least we still have our warhorn buff and the rare and valuable ability to create a water field.

The shortbow is excellent single-target DPS for burning down high-health targets in dungeons or events. The axe is great for AE where you want to tag multiple targets. The sword and torch can also produce very impressive AE damage when it’s safe to be in melee range.

When farming, I can solo kill 5 mobs at the same time without burning any cooldown longer than 30 seconds. It’s so easy on my ranger I thought anyone could do it, then I tried it on a couple other characters…nope. I have no fear whatsoever of veteran mobs and can solo some champions too, though it takes forever due to their HP.

It’s also a solid WvW class. The Barrage skill on the longbow alone sees to that.

Basically, I’d say go for the ranger as your PvE/WvW main. It’s a good choice. You can always enjoy everything else in sPvP at the push of a button.

Edit: One caveat, though, is that we do wear medium armor. Arenanet’s artists clearly expended all their best armor art ideas on the light and heavy gear. Since end-game PvE in GW2 is basically grinding fancy weapon and armor skins for yourself, that’s a bit disappointing. There just isn’t much really great looking medium armor.

Tzash.5748:

Why people are running around predicting the end of the world after only one 7 day round is beyond me.

Because first impressions matter more than anything else. More than half the North American playerbases’ first impression of longer WvW matches has been watching all their efforts go to waste on a badly mismatched fight.

This could lead to a lot of people being permanently turned off of the feature or transferring to the winning servers and perpetuating the problem.

After I was done taking my number sample, I transferred back to my server that’s currently losing by 150,000 points. I didn’t have to. Many people won’t.

There are 24 North American servers arranged into 8 WvW matchups. Since free server transfers are still in effect, I just hopped around to note the current score in each matchup. There’s a lot of arguing right now about just how many players are being victimized by “night capping” or other balance related issues in their WvW matchups, so I thought I’d go get some data.

Fort Aspenwood: 241k
Sanctum of Rall: 85k
Sorrow’s Furnace: 84k

Henge of Denravi: 171k
Stormbluff Isle: 127k
Jade Quarry: 109k

Northern Shiverpeaks: 340k
Devona’s Rest: 49k
Kaineng: 27k

Dragonbrand: 229k
Maguuma: 92k
Tarnished Coast: 87k

Ehmry Bay: 341k
Ferguson’s Crossing: 41k
Borlis Pass: 40k

Yak’s Bend: 285k
Darkhaven: 66k
Anvil Rock: 60k

Eradon Terrace: 298k
Isle of Janthir: 62k
Sea of Sorrows: 52k

Crystal Desert: 217k
Blackgate: 111k
Gate of Madness: 82k

There is only 1 matchup in North America right now where the leading server is winning by less than 100,000 points.

However, only 11 of 24 servers have even managed to score more than 100,000 points total so far this week.

This basically means that 7 of the 8 matchups are heavily skewed and obviously have not been competitive for days, if they ever were from the beginning. Just over half of the servers are being soundly thrashed in their matchups.

This would seem to indicate that Arenanet’s use of 24-hour matches during the launch period to establish data points really didn’t work. The strongest servers (or at least those able to field large numbers of players in WvW around the clock) are clearly not facing off against each other in most cases, but are instead just pounding on weaker opponents. This is, unfortunately, giving many players on many servers a poor impression of WvW.

Hopefully this first weeklong match is enough to give Arenanet a clearer picture of what the rankings should be and next week actually sees more competition. I think if we see another week where more than half the servers are getting utterly crushed it could have a serious negative effect on long-term WvW participation.

I don’t particularly care if I’m on a weak server or a strong one, but a matchup that ends with one side soundly beating the combined scores of the other two really isn’t very satisfying at all.

Keldrath.4735:

Yes. Get a nightcrew.

Good idea. We’ll just go down to the supermarket and pick one up.

It’s probably fairly easy to get people to transfer to your dominant server.

The problem is getting a large group of players (large enough to matter) to transfer into your server that’s down by 150,000 points and be your late-night crew. How exactly would you recommend we try selling that one, Keldrath?

Edit: Or should I just transfer to Henge of Denravi and make your queues that much longer?

If a server is beating you because of nightcapping. then they are a stronger server, and they deserve their spot above you.

Sort of like how if I spend all night shooting free throws while Kobe Bryant is asleep it makes me a better basketball player than him.

This is jsut them understadning that its a 24/7 war that doesn’t stop and so to be the very best you need to have people playing 24/7.

It’s not actually a war. It’s a game. Games have rules designed to promote fair competition and the enjoyment of the participants.

I can guarantee you at least 2 of the 3 server populations involved in my current WvW matchup are not enjoying it. If we see this happen regularly in our matchups it will quickly kill the desire to participate and/or prompt an exodus of players transferring to the more competitive servers. Neither is good for the long-term health of the WvW model or the game in general.

There is a problem with a select few servers having active WvW populations around the clock while others can only field competitive numbers during North American primetime hours.

It is impossible to win a week-long WvW matchup when your server controls no objectives for 12 hours a day because you don’t have the international playerbase that would be needed to take and hold them.

Anet could possibly designate “off peak” hours for servers based on their region, making point tallies less frequent during those hours.

They could limit populations, disallowing one side from massively outnumbering the others.

They could introduce much stronger NPC guards to help the outnumbered off-peak defenders and delay their opponents from ransacking the entire map.

They could identify the servers with strong round-the-clock populations and try to match them against each other rather than allowing them to demolish servers whose populations wax and wane with the time of day.

They just ought to do something because right now it’s 3:00 AM local time and my server, which had a point tally score of 285 about 6 hours ago, currently has a point tally score of 30. It’s been like this every night this week and we’re now more than 150,00 points behind the leader in our matchup. We probably won’t be able to take more than 100 points worth of objectives for another 10 hours or so.

However, the damage it does right now, is just too low.. even if you can get your pet to do sustained damage despite its broken mechanics, your total dps will still be barely 20% of that of a warrior.

I haven’t actually gone into the Heart of the Mists and tested it, but I really doubt this. Even if you assume the warrior’s target will sit still and eat the full channel of Hundred Blades on cooldown I don’t see how they’d do 5 times a ranger’s damage. The disparity isn’t that bad.

However, I do agree with the general assessment that the ranger’s greatsword feels a bit underpowered, and it’s not due to a lack of utility. The weapon simply doesn’t do as much damage as it probably needs to in order to be a competitive option for PvP. I’d put it in the same category as the necromancer’s axe that way. It just makes you ask yourself “Why is it taking so many hits to kill this thing?”

If you’re pushing 40-45% Crit Rate, any more precision is a waste

Why would you say that? There’s no diminishing returns on precision unless you’re using a sigil with an on-critical activation and a cooldown (like a sigil of air.) Otherwise, going from 45 to 46 is going to increase your average damage by the same amount as going from 5 to 6.

If you have a lot of bonus critical damage (from berserker’s or valkyrie’s items or from investment into the Skirmishing trait line) then every point of precision is worth even more.

With my berserker gear set on I have 99% bonus critical damage, which means my critical hits land for 249% of base damage instead of the normal 150%. That means every 21 points of precision (1% critical chance at level 80) increases my average damage by 2.49%. By contrast, 21 power will increase my attack stat by less than 1%.

Precision is a much better offensive stat than power if you are also stacking critical damage and focusing on direct damage attacks instead of conditions.

I think we’re fine for two-handed weapons. If we were going to get another weapon I’d want another main-hand option since right now we have only 2 to go with our 4 offhand options.

Why not a mainhand dagger skill set? It could be a skirmishing weapon with a mix of melee and ranged attacks, like our offhand dagger skills.

I am playing on one of those bad matchups. One of the three servers in our contest this week easily outnumbers the other two combined except during North American primetime hours. It is simply impossible to fight them. Every night, starting at about 2:00 AM EST, they capture every single objective on all 4 WvW maps and both of their opponents are powerless to stop them. They hold most of these until about 3:00 PM EST the next day. It is not a matter of tactics or coordination. We are hopelessly outnumbered. At late-night North American hours we’ve been finding ourselves with as few as twenty or so players on our WvW maps, trying to hold objectives against an opponent who is clearly at or near their population limit. It is impossible.

As a result of this total off-hours domination, they have a lead of more than 100,000 points over their two opponents, who appear to be evenly matched (the other two servers have been within 3000 points of each other all week.)

The population of my server has become very frustrated with this and many have just abandoned WvW until we get a new matchup. There are frequent comments in team chat asking how on earth it could have happened that we were matched up against an enemy server that outnumbers us by more than 3 to 1 for most of the day.

Most computer RPG’s trace the lineage of their combat stat mechanics to Dungeons and Dragons anyway, where the ranger character class has always had access to every martial weapon, including greatswords.

Regardless of that, though, there is no reason the design of the Guild Wars 2 ranger should be constrained by what rangers have been able to do in completely different games, novels or movies.

Treepanda.2354:

Why does it seem a Warrior with a longbow does more damage and has no ill effects for shooting close range like a ranger does? I don’t understand. Also, they shoot 2 arrows with their basic attack, and seem to have more control abilities with a bow then a ranger ( a class supposed to be specialized in range. )

I don’t know why it seems that way to you, but it’s not a widely held opinion.

The warrior longbow autoattack does not outdamage the ranger version, particularly from long range. Hell the warrior doesn’t even have long range with a longbow – it’s only 900 range for them. They don’t have more control abilities with a bow, either. They have an immobilize vs the ranger’s knockback plus AE cripple.

Also, the ranger in GW2, unlike the original guild wars, is not a specialized ranged character, nor is the warrior a specialized melee character. You may not have noticed, but every single profession has access to both melee and ranged attacks. Arenanet didn’t give warriors access to longbows and rangers access to swords just to be goofy. They are intended to be useful and, at least in the right circumstances, powerful. I don’t think you be proceeding from the assumption that rangers are supposed to be better than warriors with a longbow.

InMemoryOf.7346:

What happens if a player decides that they do not want to rely on a pet anymore? For example, They simply want to be a ranged DPS without the worry of losing 20% of their damage output because an A.I. made a poor choice.

Where does the 20% number come from? I greatly doubt my pet actually accounts for anywhere near that percentage of my total damage output.

It is seriously quite viable to just keep your pet in passive mode at your side and only use its F2 ability, or occasionally order it to attack a nearby exposed target. That’s how I use mine in WvW and I certainly don’t suffer from a lack of killing power.

I’ll agree with you that pets are kind of a lame mechanic and I’d trade mine for a passive damage boost under most circumstances, but the very fact that they’re so weak and unreliable means that we don’t rely on them. The ranger class is quite powerful and competitive while almost ignoring the fact that the pet exists. So if you don’t like using it, don’t. Just select one with a useful F2 skill and put it in passive mode.

InMemoryOf.7346:

A ranger’s DPS is highly dependent on keeping a pet alive, if a pet is not active our DPS takes a significant hit.

Honestly, no it doesn’t. Our pets don’t actually do very much damage, even when supported by traits. They hit fairly hard, but attack far, far slower than we do and have pathing issues reaching and keeping up with moving targets, especially enemy players in PvP. If you simply keep your pet at your side in passive mode and just make strategic use of its F2 ability instead of sending it in to attack you will notice little or no decrease in effective killing power.

As it has been mentioned by many people, not all weapons are truly viable. At the moment from a pure numbers standpoint. Short-bow and Swords are the strongest choices.

“Viable” is a very loaded term in game design discussions. In my experience, many people who are into theorycrafting conflate “viable” with “optimal,” and therefore anything that isn’t optimal is useless. I also think it’s absurd to judge a weapon sets viability “from a pure numbers standpoint.” Your weapon choice is the source of 5 of your 11 active skills. It’s not a decision you should make based purely on numbers.

The shortbow is clearly very good single-target DPS with nice control options and works well for skirmishing. All ranger players seem to agree on that and it’s probably the most popular ranger weapon. However, your assertion that the sword is our only other “truly viable” weapon would probably be scoffed at by many players. While the weapon does deal very high melee-range AE DPS, the autoattack chain nearly immobilizing you is a huge drawback that leads many to disfavor the weapon.

Similarly, there are powerful niche uses for many of the weapons you seem to think aren’t viable. The longbow has a million uses in WvW with it’s ability to lay down a large-radius cripple field from up to 1500 range that can tag invisible enemies, drive enemies back from keep parapets, damage siege engines out of line of sight, prevent enemies from escaping your group and so on. The axe is our best weapon for PvE events and farming with its ability to quickly tag multiple enemies. It can also deal serious damage to the first of two targets you’re fighting because of the rebound making the autoattack hit the first target twice. The only really underpowered weapons we seem to have are the greatsword and speargun, which suffer from an overall lack of damage moreso than a dirth of good skills.

Some trait lines do not make sense. The best example of this is having a large buffs for traps buried in the Skirmishing Line at the 30-point level. Traps do not benefit from Crit…

This is true from a min-maxing perspective, but it’s not a problem unique to rangers. Every other profession has the same issue with not being able to perfectly optimize their active traits with the passive trait line bonuses to make min-maxed builds. That leads me to believe that it’s probably an intentional part of the design. At any rate, it’s not a ranger issue – it’s prevalent throughout the entire trait system.

There’s no particular trick to making a burst build for a ranger.

Stack as much power, precision and critical damage as you can then activate a quickness ability (Quickening Zephyr or a pet swap with the 5 point Beastmaster trait) and hope for lots of crits during the window of extremely fast attack speed.

Longbow with Eagle Eye is pretty good for WvW. At keep battles and large push-and-pull zerg fights you can frequently just drill people who are either snared or immobilized by your teammates or simply not paying attention to you.

Barrage has a million uses including preventing fleeing enemies from escaping your teammates, pushing enemies back from parapet walls, scattering people trying to revive a downed comrade, killing downed thieves and mesmers who use their invisibility skills, damaging siege engines that out of your line-of-sight on walls and so on.

Long Range Shot doesn’t have very high DPS but its individual hits can be devastatingly hard, so it’s great for assist burst if someone is already at low health or being attacked by your teammates. I run a full berserker setup in WvW (2210 power, 59% critical rate, 99 critical damage) and often see hits over 4500 on light-armor targets. A quickened Rapid Fire can do over 12,000 damage in about 2 seconds. The burst capability is certainly there.

For smaller scale fights, though, such as sniping supply camps with a small group of guildmates, I prefer the shortbow. It’s simply superior for skirmishing, as it should be. The control, defense and sustained DPS on the shortbow are all superior to the longbow.

I believe the axe is a precision weapon.

The main reason you’d use an axe on a ranger is for Ricochet, not Splitblade. Ricochet gives us the ability to tag multiple targets very quickly in PvE or WvW and to deal very high damage to the first of two targets by scoring multiple hits per throw. We also have the Honed Axes trait which directly supports a precision build.

The shortbow also actually works quite well with a precision build because it has very high single-target DPS even if you ignore the positional bleed on the autoattack. It can be quite effective with either berserker or condition damage stats.

The only ranger weapon that really seems to require condition damage for maximum effect is the torch.

I haven’t really noticed much unavoidable damage in PvE. There are a few things, like the Hunter’s Call used by the last boss in Honor of the Waves storymode, but that seemed to completely chew up anyone in my party whether they were wearing survivability gear or not. At least if you’re using a longbow with the Eagle Eye trait you can often position yourself very far from the boss and have maximum opportunity to respond to their actions.

You can get away with wearing full berserker gear in WvW if you feel like it. The environment isn’t like sPvP and some clever positioning and a lot of friendly bodies between you and the enemy can often keep you from getting hit much. However, it is always a risk and if you get caught out of position you’ll obviously die very quickly. (On the other hand, even someone in full defensive gear will die very quickly if caught in a bad place in WvW.) It’s probably worth it in general, but sometimes it’ll frustrate you.

I don’t think we really should be comparing single abilities between two separate professions. Warriors can access that effect more easily than rangers can because it is, or is at least intended to be, balanced by the hundreds of other differences between the two.

On the other side of that coin, rangers get +50% endurance regeneration as an Adept minor trait in one of our lines but that same effect is a Grandmaster major trait for engineers. I don’t think that necessarily represents a balance problem either because, once again, there are an enormous number of other differences between the two professions that mitigate any one thing.

Nonetheless, when the time comes for a tuning pass on the ranger profession, I hope Arenanet takes a close look at our Grandmaster traits (and utility skills, but that’s a separate can of worms.)

I agree that it’s kind of annoying for a condition build to have Trap Potency be a grandmaster trait in the precision/critical damage trait line. On the other hand, having precision and critical damage in the same line is really convenient for direct damage builds.

Simply swapping Trapper’s Expertise and Trap Potency out of the Skirmishing line and into the Wilderness Survival line would be a boost to condition rangers and probably not hurt anyone else. That way, trap builds could just go 30 in Wilderness Survival, probably 20+ in Marksmanship for condition duration and just ignore Skirmishing.

I’m not sure which two WS traits would be most logical to move to Skirm, though. I’m not really sure if it matters anyway. It’s not like rangers have a ton of really compelling or interesting traits.

I think Signet of the Beastmaster, particularly when combined with Signet of Stone for 6 seconds of damage immunity, is pretty great and makes a good grandmaster-tier trait. However, I’m not sure why it’s in the Marksmanship trait line since none of our signets have anything to do with marksmanship.

Trap Potency is good if you’re using a trap build. Trap builds are rarely used (at least from what I’ve observed) but they are fairly viable and this is a good trait to support them.

I wouldn’t bother to take any of our other grandmaster traits.

Ranger traits in general are underwhelming to me. I find myself using a lot of boring traits that just reduce cooldowns on my skills because there’s not much compelling to get. I think the most exciting trait I have, the one that most dramatically impacts my playstyle, is the adept minor trait from Wilderness Survival (+50% endurance regeneration) that’s been available to me since level 15.