Indeed sounds like they were bad, but you dying last doesn’t mean you were doing your absolute best for the team. It just means you were doing well at avoiding damage and knew which attacks to dodge (while doing some dps) and that’s not hard to believe, all considered.
Rangers are absolutely welcome in every non-idiotic zergburger “meta” group (even though less desirable in fractals; even though they’re not meta class themselves). However, you aggressively attacking the “stacking mentality” (I’ll let you know that stacking is an outdated strategy and the dungeoneers moved on about a year ago) and claiming you play the “right way”.. I hope you mean proper dodging and mechanical knowledge, I got that right? doesn’t strike me as very positive and constructive. About getting to fracs 50; while it’s currently the hardest content available in gw2, so indeed worthy of at least a minimal amount of respect (most people at 50 find their ways to the dodge button and know how fractals work), I suppose that the people in your party were fracs 50 too. I don’t deem the content to be really challenging because it can be completely by virtually any random set up and skill level – but I understand some people think this is a good thing.
And yes, for this very reason (fracs being not that hard, as long as you know what to do), I pity those fools that died so easily and then blamed someone else. Meh. But…
A few observations from a mostly ranger/guard player:
- phiw pugs are more likely to demonize and hate on rangers than “serious” dungeoneers or up-to-date meta runners, since even my dog knows ranger can have competitive dps, if built right;
- rangers possess less utility than classes such as mesmer and guardian, and such utility skills have a huge tradeoff (whirling defense) – by going lb, you consciously or unknowingly kitten your usefulness in that particular fight, despite knowing your team to be very weak (or for that very reason?). I fully sympathise, though: I hate meleeing in pugs;
- pugs hating on rangers and necros will take a very long time to go, because pugs are very slow and pick up things with at least 1year delay over the knowledgeable players – so you gotta have more patience if you insist on playing ranger.
Now, putting aside the fact that they were scrubs and you got no responsibility on them not dodging or positioning badly, I’ll point out that staying a lot in lb or, worse, sb, isn’t detrimental to your team per sé, but it’s a rather weak option. Considered the tone of the post, I suppose you’ll eat me alive and call me out on being a filthy zerk stacker, banal, stupid, a sheep that can only follow the meta and spam 1 or whatever; /shrug, I’ll say it anyway: if you haven’t already, you ought to try out other builds and weapons, especially for the shaman fight.
I’m.. not sure what “ls” is; is it shortbow? Anyway, I see it like this: I’m a ranger, I have less utility than a guardian, my team needs me, I need to do anything I can to get them through this. If you haven’t given it a try already, I fail to imagine how you couldn’t fall in love with dropping a healing spring, blast on it, then swap to axe and go whirling defense (with signet of the wild if you’re quick at activating it) to successfully protect your team from the adds.
Another build you should try out, excluded the current meta build (which hey, has a lb in the rotation), is the sini condi one. Its good cleave will contribute a lot to adds melting, and can be successfully use at alternating states of range/a few seconds of melee to drop your aoes.
If you’ve tried out all of the above and adamantly refuse to question yourself, your build and don’t want to change a thing – and if you want to engage in a flame war about lb/sb viability and dps vs other tested builds, or if you want to again shove it in my face that you got to 50 using your build, I got nothing else to say, I suppose. I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you what you did wrong mechanically, if at all, and I most certainly can’t tell you what they did wrong (and no, I won’t be agreeable and put the whole blame on them only, it’s not fair); I can only point out the flaws I see in the situation.
I can tell you this, though, and believe me when I say it comes from my little, furry heart (and it was hard to be polite, when the tone was so confrontational): we rangers need… to be better than other classes. I know, it’s not fair. I mostly played with my friends and yet I still got blamed for basically anything that went wrong when my pet was around, even if it was dead (I’ll admit I’m a bit of a whiny blamer myself, I’m not innocent). Why? cus I was on ranger.
You need patience, and you need to step it up to prove that you can do more than them, and better. You can convince some people you’re good, but mind you: most will stay stubborn and hate on you no matter what you do. But.. it’s good when you solo p2-3 lupi in front of your 4 dead teammates and they go like “woah, didn’t know a ranger could do that”. Ahem, excuse my bragging. Soloing lupi on ranger is actually rather mellow (but that time it was with lb/sw, it was rather painful).
No, seriously, dude, let go of this hate. Don’t even think for a second that playing berserker and occasionally stacking like in the old fgs meta suddenly turns pugs into morons. They were morons to begin with. They were bad, they couldn’t handle the glassiest set in the game in fracs, they died a lot, they were close-minded and raged. Just… don’t be close-minded yourself. Yeah? Bitte.
Right, it was gs, not shortbow. Ok. Still, give axe/axe torch condi a try (or axe/torch period for better damage).
What a meta party, huh?