Guild Wars 2

Yeah, even though a lot of the ranger gripes about being underpowered or broken are true, we really do shine in solo PvE. As I said, using a longbow, I leveld all the way up without dying too much or really having to play around too much with my heal button. A friend of mine leveled up at the same time with condition/traps and said it was great, but he got bea tup a lot and was always healing himself. Personal preference I guess.

I found that as a Ranger that can take a beating and keep fighting, POW/tou/vit gear was holding me back. All that power I was getting was just not giving me the damage I needed to accomplish anything.

I switched to a mixture of apothecary(tou/HEA/cond) and Shaman (VIT/hea/cond gear and started focusing on using conditions to do my damage. I found that my survivablitity stayed about the same, but I am able to put out quite a bit more damage this way.

@ OP question.

1. Pets have a lot of trouble attacking on the run. So, in PvP, they will chase someone around, but not really do a whole lot to them.

2. Pets are ridiculously squishy. when in a sizable fight in PvP, or in an instance, a ranger pet is usually dead in the first 5-10 seconds, leaving us underpowered.

3. Spirits are even squishier than pets. Plus their buffs are terrible. People want to use spirits, but can’t, because they’re awful.

4. Longbows, which many people including myself want to use, are really bad in WvW unless you are with a zerg. Let’s face facts here, you could be level 30 in all blues with empty traits and you’d be fine running with the zerg. But, to roam solo or in small skirmish 2v2s and whatnot, glass cannon longbow is crap. It has gotten quite a bit better since the last patch, but it isn’t quite there yet.

That’s where a lot of the complaints come from. I, for one, adapted. Of course, once I got to level 80, got full berserker gear, and realized very quickly that my long bow crit build was crap in small WvW situations, I cried. Once the tears stopped, I adapted, changed gear and specs and I am just fine. But still, I would like to stand a chance in a solo fight against a good player with my longbow. Is that too much to ask? =)

I used to use a combination of the pigs in WvW, but I found it too clumsy to be as effective as I need it to be.

Ths first issue I have with the pigs is that the item that they go find gets placed on the ground at their feet where ever they are when you tell them to forage. This means that sometimes you have to either remember right where they are when you tell them to forage, or go looking for your shiny new toy once they find it.

The second issue I have with it is that you can not simply strafe or run over it and pick it up, your character has to stop to pick it up, which can sometimes cause more harm than it’s worth. Also, there seems to be a bug in the game where if you are currently moving and try to pick it up, you will not stop to pick it up, but ionstead be locked into an auto run that is a pain to get out of.

The third and final reason that I stopped using the pigs is that even if you get past everything else I’ve said above, ANYONE can pick it up off of the ground, not just you. That sealed it for me, and I put the pigs away.

All of that makes me sad as the things they find are VERY handy in PvP. All of them. The condition damage effects, the CCs, the heals, and the stealth/boons are all wonderful. I just wish that the pig could “fetch” and bring it to me. As it is right now, it is rather clunky.

I have thought about running a more defnsive build and getting the runes of the Forge from Sorrows Embrace. That just seems like a giant headache though.

What pet’s do you normally roll with in WvW? I would imagine the Fern Hound and something else?

IMO…

We dont use rifles for the same reason Warriors don’t use nature magic ‘n’ spirits ‘n’ stuff.

If you roll with a zerg, run full berzerkers with a longbow.

However, if you prefer to roam, 1v1, or skirmish, I would suggest a bunker build type set up either focusing on condition damage or survival.

I have never had a problem with lick wounds. Then again, you all have probably tested it out WAY mopre than I have. I run a bunker build, so I rarely, if ever, get downed in PvE and in WvW you get stomped before it becomes available for use.

What is your condition damage at?

I think right now I roll in WvW with about 23k HP and 1400 condition damage -ish.

I don’t know what I’d do with myself with such a low HP pool!

I leveled from 5 to 80 with nothing but a longbow. It is kind of nice killing everything before it gets to you. You can’t die if you can’t get hit!

1. Warg
2. Owl Griffon
3. Barracuda
4. Anything that can consistently hit a moving target in PvP while having responsive F2 skills.

How many HP you normally roll with in WvW and what food/kit do you use?

Let’s first forget about healing and all the other happy stuff you are trying to do in PvP. It doesn’t matter. Your initial question was how much of a difference you would see with new gear. The simple answer is LOTS. You need to gear for what you will be doing out there. Your gear and your traits should match what it is you are trying to accomplish out there. In PvP, survivability stats like vitality and toughness are just as important as + healing if you are not trying to be a pure damage ranger, and by “pure damage ranger” I mean bad.

Xsorus.2507:

I’m personally thinking about getting Reyna’s Armor (I think that’s it) which is Vit/Healing Power/Condition damage to replace my Apothecary armor (would sitll use weapons/jewelry)

That would give me a fairly large HP increase i think.

If you are curently running a full apothecary condition build, then 2 things…

1. Kudos to you for being able to afford all the apothecary lol.
2. Yes I would recommend grabbing a few peices of Shaman or Reyna’s (same stats) to boost up the ole HP a bit.

I am currently 4/6 armor peices of Apoth and everything else I have is Shaman or Reyna. I am considering once more peice or two of apoth, but that’s as far as I’ll go I think. I don’t want my HP below 22k while keeping toughness, healing, and condition damage all respectable.

I spend my time either farming monies or in WvW.

I currently roll greatsword swapping to sword/torch.

I use Troll Unjent (as much as I love healing spring, PvP is too mobile for it to be reliable), flame trap, speed signet, regen siget, and Entangling Roots. I am just now testing this out as my normal spec is 0/0/30/30/10 running with movable Spirit of Nature. I think I may end up liking this better.

I am specced 0/0/30/10/30

My gear is currently 4 peices of Apothecary and everything else -of the Shaman with 6 peice Runes of Undead.

I carry a shortbow in my bag for the many situations that I need it.

I find this build to be quite a bit of fun so far, so it is definately doable! Give it a try.

I am a level 80 Mesmer and I don’t own a focus, sword, greatsword, or pistol.

People can complain about a dead horse being beaten all they want. I don’t care if everyone and their brother is aware of this issue. The ONLY communication we have gotten from the devs is that “longbow” is a good weapon. As I have screamed a thousand times, if they only fix the BROKEN issues shown in these videos, Rangers would have much less to complain about.

-Turkish Krul
sad semi-ex-ranger.

Until something along these lines happens (which it wont), instead of wishing your clones acted more like you, try focusing more on acting like your clones. I use a staff and pretend I’m a clone in WvW to screw with people.

I don’t care if I win or lose a 1v1 as I roam around WvW. I play a staff using clone Mesmer and I only care if I thoroughly frustrated the crap out of the person I was fighting before the fight ends.

Sometimes, I will even purposefully prolong a fight because I enjoy toying with my prey.

Some form of progression.

Something like a ranking systems a la DAoC, and perhaps even maybe WvW-only rank abilities or something. Regardless.

Progression.

Please!

Ahhhh. I will have to gather some numbers when I get home. At work right now. If I were still at home, I would be in game and not on the forums =).

Can you please redo it? Shaman is vitality/healing/cond damage. You listed toughness/cond/healing, which would be the new apothecary gear (which I considered but didnt want to kitten my HP) On the Shaman gear, vitality is the main stat component.

And yes I use 6 undead runes with the staff +50 tough…

I want to maximize vitality while keeping my condition damage over 1200 and toughness respectable. So, I use Shaman gear (Vit/cond/heal) with undead runes and I am specced 0/20/30/0/20. Wasting potential on the gear?

I’d guess it would depend on your play style. For me, it would be game breaking as my whole play style revolves around acting like a clone and making people lose track of the real me.

Alright, I tested it out this morning with a buddy in sPvP. We joined an empty room, he targetted and marked me, and gave me the results as I tested out a bunch of different stuff.

RinKyu is mostly correct. All of the stealthing abilities caused him to lose my target AND for the targetting reticle (CTRL+T) to fall off. Almost all of the rest of the abilities I tried did not work except Blink. Blink caused him to lose my target, however the targetting reticle stayed on. So, as long as I was marked, he could pick me out of a crowd thanks to the giant crosshairs over my head, but it does indeed drop target.

I plan to spend most of my time roaming in WvWvW as a Staff clone/confuse Mesmer and I will most likely focus on a mixture of Shaman gear and the new Apothecary gear.

I have used Mirror Images before and it has seemed like when I do, most of the time it is a clone that gets attacked and not me. It doesn’t seem like it should drop target, but the results I have seen have made it seem like it does.

As well as which skills drop a player’s target, I would also like to know which remove the targeting reticule he may have marked me with by using CTRL+T.

For now, I know that target drops if I use:
Decoy
Mass Invisibility
The Prestige (Torch #4 skill)
Desperate Decoy (Trait 10 pts in Dueling)

The abilities I am curious about are:
Phase Retreat (Staff #2 skill)
Mirror Images
Swap (Sword #3 chain skill)
Blink

Again, making my enemy drop my target is step one, but just as importantly is making the targeting reticle fall off.

Anyone test these out?

If we don’t get any responses, I will go into an empty sPvP match with a friend and test these out.

I would be fine with my miss rate if the rest of the ranged weapons in the game had the same miss rate, but the Warrior’s rifle and bow hit fine, the thief short bow hits fine, the ranger short bow hits fine, the engineer rifle hits fine, yadda yadda yadda…

However, the Ranger longbow’s current damage added to its miss rate is the problem. It does not hit hard enough to only land half the shots at best.

I will have to give this another honest shot then. Maybe I was impatient or something through my first test.

Perhaps I should give it a deeper look. I tend to use Bark Skin because the last time I went out and tested Empathetic Bond, I never saw it work.

I made sure it was the only condition removal I had.
I stood there with my pet on passive and let mobs attack me and put conditions on me while I kept myself alive.
I never saw a condition come off of me before it ran its course.

Are we sure it actually works? I was very disheartened by my testing, because in PvP it would be VEY powerful if it works the way it says it does.

I wish this thread wouldn’t have been called “melee Ranger WvW” but instead “Asura WvW”. While the OP playsa a similar set-up to me, I am a Norn. All of the quick kills and pure ownage in this video is from Pain inverter. There are a few times when a swift clean kill is not a result of Pain inverter, but of a clearly low level player.

No disrespect to the OP, I love it. It makes me want to go home, log in, and head out to WvW on my melee ranger. However, this video makes me sad that the strongest (and clearly OP) ability in your arsenal is an Asura racial….

Remember….I just did this yesterday. I was out there for almost two hours and didn’t really experience any of the old moments of “Holy kitten, I just shot at that guy 10 times and only hit him twice”. Any tests over this last week don’t help me. I need people testing it out today.

So…

I am one of us many Rangers who started with and loved his longbow, until he reached high level PvP and realized that it had issues. Namely, only about half of my shots actually landed while the rest gave me random obstructed, missed, or other random excuses for not hitting.

Since that time, I have been a bunker Ranger (as bunkerish as we get anyway) and actually having a good time. Like many of you, I was super excited for this last big patch after the promises we got from J.P., only to be crushed when the patch hit and we saw little of anything we were hoping for.

That said, I have been toying around with other classes, but I keep coming back to the Ranger because I simply love the feel of it. Yesterday, for S&G, I grabbed my Zerker gear out of the bank, dusted it off, and respecced to glass cannon longbow just to remind myself of just how bad it is. Fastened all my armor on, grabbed my longbow, and headed to WvWvW.

Expecting the worst (as bad as I remember it) I stated shooting at people. o my amazement, my arrows hit them. Like almost all of my arrows. So I tried shooting at people who were running sideways… hit, hit, hit. So I tried shooting at people who were running on uneven terrain and hills… hit, hit, hit. Granted, I was a squishy kitten, but I was hitting like a truck. Perhaps not hitting like a freight train like the soon-to-be-weepy thieves do, but still… my damage was decent enough to not make me cry. Damage aside, I only saw an occasional “obstructed” or the like.

So. TL;DR:
ANet has a tendancy to stealth change things without telling us. Please dust off your longbows and see if I had the luckiest streak of my Ranger career, or if longbows have been, at least partially, fixed.

Thanks!

-Turkish Krul
Dragon Brand

While I usually do stop attacking when daggerstorm comes out to play, I am finding it more and more difficult to remember to stop attacking. Lately I find myself staring in awe , mouth wide open, heart full of jealous rage, as the thief proceeds to hit everyone around him (veteran guards or players, it makes no difference) for at least half of their life.

Oh if only I could do that kind of damage to 1 thing that fast, I’d be a happy guy.

I run a ranger bunker build. I find that there are some champs that it is just unreasonable to solo. However, there are those that are quite possible. For a bunker set up, go test your build against the champion Captain Rot-something-or-other in Souther Cursed Shore in Orr. You should be able to solo him and the friends that join him in the fight. It will take awhile, but it is quite doable. If you are not able to do it, rethink the build/gear/skills and try again.

Yum.

I CAN tell you how it’s productive for a Ranger:

It’s not.

However, we dont need a new ability. Stealth is bugged. There are rendering issues and the like that allow thieves to remain hidden from your view for a lot longer than they appear. It will be fixed. Be patient. Do like I am and just dream of the day when it happens. The tears of thieves will rain from the heavens. These tears will be oh so sweet. I shall savor them to the last drop.

My friend and I can clearyly see the issues with the class. We still find a lot of success, but there are concerns that need addressed.

All I know is, if/when they fix these things…..watch out world. It is on.

I have no problem with someone alt F4 ing if they get rundown by a giant zerg of people. I myself don’t do it,l but I understand the mentality.

With that said, I happened across a 1v1 in WvWvW. I am a Ranger and my enemy was a Guardian. We fought for a good solid minute and a half. The fight went back and forth a few times. I thought he had me at one point. But the overall outcome was him lying on the ground gasping for air. As i jumped up in the air to drive my banner through his haert and finish it….he disappeared.

Ok, now like I said, I understand the zerg thing. But after a good, long, and most importantly FAIR fight, why would you do this? This was the kind of fight I would have bowed after and run off. Why would you get taken down in a clean fight by simply being bested, if only barely, and not enjoy the moment? It was a great fight. You fought the good fight. Win some, lose some.

+1 to this post.

I can only hope that this is fixed in the upcoming ranger fix/change.

After switching to melee about a month ago, I decided to give the bow a try again 2 days ago. As a bow lover, I wanted to take a chance that they fixed the issue, or maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remembered it. However, After equipping my longbow, now referred to as longbad, I hit the WvW trail with my fingers crossed.

After about 20 minute of constant fighting, and having only approximately 1 out of every 5 arrows actually hit my target, it went back in the bank and I am a sad puppy all over again.

Please fix my longbow!!!!!

I don’t want the ability to unstealth thieves. I want thieves to unstealth the way they are supposed to with no bugs. As it stands now, I find them impossible to kill simply because they spend 75% or more of a fight stealthed. Granted, we could go on and on like that forever and he wouldn’t kill me, but still… I can’t run away because he can keep up with me. I can’t kill him because he only comes out of stealth long enough to hit me a couple times. Any damage that I DO get in is healed each time he comes out of stealth. So as it stands now, the fight goes on until someone comes along to help either one of us, I can slowly make my way to a tower or something, or he gets bored and leaves. It needs fixed.

@Joey:

A friend of mine and I both run as rangers. We both use Axe/warhorn for run speed, but when the fight starts he switches to Greatsword and I switch to sword/dagger. Thus far, we have both had a LOT of success in WvW.

We both are stacked with power/toughness/vitality gear with a sprinkling of healing thrown in. We both use the signets that restore health and remove conditions. We both use protect me. We both use the Nature Spirit (moveable of course). We both specced 0/5/30/30/5. We both use the fernhound and the Murellow.

We have tried changing individual things out now and again, but we keep coming back to this as the optimal “outlast” set up. We have been in many 2v3 or 2v4, sometimes even more, situations where we came out alive after having killed everyone simply because we outlasted them while we whittled them down.

I feel that this approach to WvW is the only real choice for Rangers until the upcoming fix. After that we’ll see, but for now, anything besides this set up and you dont get enough damage output in return for the survivability.

It has been said time and time again, the biggest reason you see people hating on Rangers is because the way our abilities currently work, the best we can hope for in WvWvW is to work 3 times as hard as other classes to get the same results. That’s as good as it gets for us.

Our signets are mostly pretty bad.
Our shouts are mostly pretty bad.
Our spirits are terrible.
Our pets, which are half of our damage apparently, are buggy, slow to respond, and cannot attack on the run.
Our bow shots have trouble hitting our target, and are weak when they do.

It is not terrible, and it can/should/will be fixed. However, right now it is quite difficult. I find success, but it takes a lot of work.

@OP:

You, sir, are mistaken. You would have zero chance in taking me down in a 1v1 W3 fight. 0 chance. None. Now, the fight may lead to a stalemate, that is uncertain. However, what is fact is that you could not bring me down as we are both rangers.

That is all.

-Turkish Krul

I would like a Warg and/or a Griffon please.

@OP I completely agree with you. If I was to gear/spec myself for a pure condition build, there are a couple of things I would consider true.

1. My crit % will be baseline. I care about condition damage and survivability, not crit.
2. Traps are now my friend.
3. Putting trap skills in the crit line boggles my mind.

@OP. I would need more information to fully answer your question, such as your weapon of choice and playstyle, and what you spend more time doing (PvP or PvE).

In PvP, I have tried most of them. I found that as a Bow user, because of our squishiness, Become the Snow Leopard was the best because I could use it to stealth and sprint to get away from death. However, now that I am a bunker Ranger (as bunker as we can be anyway) I use the Nature Spirit with double health, but I also have it mobile.

Ohhhhhhh.

I thought you were talking about the post before yours! =)

My mistake.

He wasn’t saying it’s a bug. What he wa saying is that while you are immobilized, the lightning reflexes will still evade, but you won’t leap back you will stay in the root.

With PvP off the table, you’ll be fine.

I leveled all the way to level 80 using nothnig but a longbow with a Lynx and Arcdotus as pets and I had a wonderful time.