Expansion. Living story, to me, was a fail. Content that I never will enjoy, due to the fact that real life trumps game time, may as well never have happened, as far as I’m concerned.
Pets optional + boost to ranger damage.
I’ve been asking for this since release. Also, give the mobs level appropriate traiting and variations of the meta-builds.
Scaling for difficulty should be through number of opponents, rather than making the enemies HP sponges.
HUGE +1 for OP.
OP, I’m 100% behind you on this. It’s how it should have always been.
Each class should have 2 skills that apply revealed. 1 weapon skill, 1 utility.
On ranger, we already have Sic ’Em, add it to bonfire, with revealed triggered when within 600 of the AoE.
Guardian it could be the first half of Zealot’s Flame and Hallowed Ground/Purging Flames.
Warrior could be Fear Me and Call to Arms
Necromancer could be Well of Corruption and Enfeebling Blood
Elementalist could be Glyph of Storms and Ring of Fire/Frozen Ground/Static Field/Swirling Winds (there’s others that would fit as well.)
Mesmer – I don’t play, and have no real thoughts on
Engineer – See Mesmer
Thief – Tie them into a burlap sack, add concrete blocks and toss them into a lake.
Realistically, ANY incoming damage should trigger the revealed debuff. Along with any attack from the thief that is blocked/misses.
“duel me bruh, you scared?” Yeah, thanks, but no.
I see very little motivation to play what I have seen before, multiple times, for monthes and monthes.
Really! Its only been 3 weeks since the LS wrapped up and the feature pack is out on Tuesday. Months and months?
Just to throw it out there, there’s an enormous number of people who absolutely hate the LS. The temp content aside, there’s been nothing new to do in PvE since Southsun. Months and months is an understatement.
I made a ranger because I loved them in GW1. Pets were optional there, and I’ve been asking for pets to be made optional (or at least something I can ignore without gimping myself) since pre-release.
As it is, I’m able to make my warrior into a more vicious archer than I can my ranger – I just prefer the theme of the ranger.
All CC is far too short, gap closers have 1/10th the cooldown of gap creators, and ranged damage is significantly weaker than melee. Add to that the complete lack of risk inherent in the “stacking” approach to 99%+ of the game, and yeah, ranged damage is at a huge disadvantage over melee.
Essentially, if you’re playing at range, you’re doing it wrong in GW2.
Ranger wishlist for balance:
- A condition removal skill that doesn’t blow our heal or kill our pets. Say, “Antidote Signet; Passive – conditions expire 50% faster. Active: Remove all conditions. 1s activation time, 45 second cooldown.”
- Remove the root on sword AA.
- Remove the range restriction on Longbow AA. (ie, does static damage over all ranges.)
- Make spirits immortal unless their active is used.
- Add a trait that reduces weapon swap time.
- Increase the direct physical damage on traps.
- Reverse how Signet actives work. Default behaviour should aid the ranger, not the pet.
- Most importantly, make the bloody pet optional. Stow pet, gain 25% damage on weapon skills and traps, and gain “spirit” of the animal class. Increased crit for felines, vitality for bears, toughness for drakes, condition duration for arachnids, etc.
Suddenly, the ranger becomes desirable. Yay!
Oh, Durz, I get it. I also get the “give the ranger a x% boost” since the pet does make up roughly 30% of our damage output.
Hell, I’m on the “don’t make me play with a pet” bandwagon. I’m just amused that after so long, with zero love for rangers at all, this is still the most requested item.
I’m just loving that more than 18 months later, having the pet go away is still the most requested ranger issue.
Lol, and today was going to be the first time I logged in in a month or so. Looked around, and went “nope!”. Guess next week is soon enough.
Look, they’ve been hyping changes that should have been in the game at release and still haven’t released any new content since September of 2012. I’m a fan of these changes, but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s nothing new to do in Tyria.
If you want to know my opinion about ascended – I have left the game a month after release. I was able to get lvl 80 and full exotic armor in less than one month, then I did almost all of the dungeons and for another week I had no motication to do anything in the game. Now I came back partially with introduction of ascended weapon crafting and now I’m playing GW2 as my main MMORPG since they added asdended armor craft. Ascended brought me back to the game. I fully enjoy progression, it gives me a reason to play, to get my equipment maxed.
You have mentioned about games without vertical progression, like LOL, DOTA, TF2 – none of them is a MMORPG. It’s a completly different game, so comparing them to GW2 is not good.
On the other hand, GW1 was more like a singleplayer game for me. I have finished campaigns and left the game for few months, then I turned it on again, created a new character, finished campaigns and left it again, for good. There was no reason for me to do anything else in the game than story. It was a solid game, but I would compare it to games like Heretic 2, Drakan or Tomb Raider, just complete missions and game over.
The bolded part. This is how the game was marketed, and how it was supposed to be. The entire game is end-game.
Introducing gear grind – and yes, it’s grind, and obligatory if you want BiS gear, is what made me essentially stop playing.
Were I to re-download and log into GW today, my characters would all still have the BiS gear that I got on them back in 2006. For someone in GW2, if you’ve been away for a while, you’re going to find that your fully geared character is no longer fully geared – they’re not wearing BiS. Despite over five years of advertising that there would be no vertical progression for stats on gear.
So, I’m polar opposite from you – ascended is the nail that killed it for me.
So basically you want to play the game for a month, then quit for a year, then come back being still in the best equipment, do some random stuff and then quit again for a year? (that’s question, not the statement)
I want to play the game continously and I want to have somme goals in the game. Bu that I’m not saying that Ascended gear is the only goal, but it’s a really good goal for me. The new skills would be really cool too, if they were added more frequently (I really like collecting new skills in games). Right now we have seen only few healing skills and nothing really usefull for me. On the other hand, you might call new skills a horizontal progression, but they are partially vertical too. With new skills you can find something that suits your build more and that will make your build a bit stronger.
I’d love if I could quit for a year, come back, still be in the best equipment. That’s what was advertised – best in slot for everyone, even casuals. As it stands, not only has the old BiS (exotic) been made obsolete, but they admit to having planned further vertical progression through ever-more-powerful infusions.
This means that if real life takes priority for whatever reason, when I come back, I’m behind the curve. This is uncool.
Adding skills, more areas, jumping puzzles, DE’s, dungeons, etc – all of that would be horizontal progression, of which I’m 100% in support of. Adding armour tiers and VP power treadmill? That’s just not cool.
So, to answer the question – yes, I’d love if I could quit for a year, come back, complete whatever new content there was (that didn’t disappear because it was poorly executed temporary content – that’s a different gripe though) and still be in max gear if I decide to pop into WvW or run some dungeons with friends/guildies.
kitten , Windu – I want to be able to give you a gift over the net. Head on straight, and not trolling. Dear Anet- hire Windu to keep you honest.
Perma pet stow with a 30% boost to ranger weapon and trap damage. An active condition cleanse that doesn’t blow my heal or require a pet. Fix sword AA so that it no longer roots. That is all.
Because they panicked when the locust started to leave the game. Of course, the locust left anyway – ascended was nowhere close to keep that crowd interested. So, in the end Anet might have retained a tiny fraction of the community the game wasn’t intended for, by introducing content that was at the same time poisonous to a part of the original target group, and useless for the rest.
They also fractured the community, with severe consequences that can be seen even now.I’ve quite often read people post here that the reason Anet ran with Ascended gear was because of the loud outcry of people wanting it, and because of the loss of players. This is a perfectly legitimate argument, and perhaps it is in fact the case.
Personally, I’ve always felt it was for the exact opposite reason. I’ve always suspected that what actually happened was that the game exceeded even their expectations with pre-orders and initial sales; and having got that core group firmly within their hands (the money), someone in the top level hierarchy decided to go after the WoW teenagers as well. In other words, they got greedy.
So they dragged out the “always intended” ascended gear, except I suspect they added a stat progression to that “always intended” gear that was not there originally. Of course a backlash was expected, but I believe they felt it would blow over relatively quickly. But even if it did not blow over quickly, and some of the original buyers storm off, no big deal – because that money is already had, and the newly added players would generate even more revenue.
Of course this is all just pure speculation on my part, and nothing more than that. Truth is, we will never really know for sure, as Anet, and Anet alone has the metrics for the game for those mere 2 months after release.
This is feeling I’ve always gotten for the Ascended fiasco. No proof, just gut feeling. I know that none of the 600 people I brought to GW2 with me left until after the new tier. Now, as I said earlier, there’s only 2 of us left. Not knowing the greater picture, I can only judge by the people I play with, and they spoke up by leaving.
I dont understand how Logan is a Chicken:
-He promises the Queen that he will hold her protection above all else
-He informs others in destiny’s edge about his duty
-When the time comes to perform his duty, he makes the choice he had decided beforehand and informed everyone else about.Would you:
a. Help 2 aliens, an animal, a plant and a giant
or
b. Try to save all the humans.He made the decision which duty bound him to make. Helping DE was just extra.
This. Logan is the only one of Destiny’s Edge I don’t want to repeatedly hit over the head with a shovel.
I could be mixing release with the beta – I was around for both. I know that when I started, there was no FoW or UW, but it was an early addition. (Difference between beta play and live release, maybe?)
Nonetheless, we got more for free in GW1 than we have so far with GW2. Once you add the paid expansions, there’s no comparison at all. We’re getting far less, and far less quality, than we would otherwise.
I went back to WoW. Much less grind there and their cash shop is entirely optional. Unlike here.
Yeah one of those non-players who hang around the forums constantly reinforcing their decision to not play… Cash shop is optional btw not that I think it particularly matters to you, afterall you’re just here to troll.
I paid full price for this game and got ripped off. I will continue to post as I wish because I paid for the privilege.
As someone who’s normally against this sort of thing, I still find myself 100% agreeing with you. You bought a product, the same as I did, and it wasn’t even close to what you paid for. Complain away. If that’s the only satisfaction you can get from that $60, take it and run with it.
Mad, you left out FoW and UW, which were both added to prophecies within the first year of release. Two complete elite dungeons, plus Sorrow’s Furnace. Three permanent dungeons is already triple the content GW2 has managed in 18 months.
in reverse order.
3. Roll a warrior. They’re stupidly OP, to the point of being easy-mode for everything.
2. There’s less dungeon grinding, because we now have ascended armor, which is the current best-in-slot gear. It can only be gotten through grinding the crafting discipline up to 500, then collecting hundreds of ascended crafting materials to make your gear. Expect this to be extremely expensive and slow.
1. You can do all the maps to 100% fairly easy, though Orr still has a few points that require the various temples to be unlocked to get. You can either do them after the world boss train clears the temples, or check the online temple status sites to see what server to guest to to get the relevant skill points.
What profession do you associate with each weapon:
1. Sword – warrior
2. Greatsword – guardian
3. Mace – guardian
4. Hammer – warrior
5. Staff – ele
6. Focus – necro
7. Shield – warrior
8. Torch – ranger
9. Dagger – ele
10. Scepter – ele
11. Trident – poseidon?
12. Spear – guardian
13. Harpoon gun – ranger
14. Shortbow – ranger
15. Longbow – ranger
16. Axe – warrior
17. Pistol – thief
18. Rifle – warrior
19. Warhorn – rangerIt’s a pretty long list so you can choose to only do a few if you wish
Windu, I like you dude. That’s a breakdown that makes it black and white.
Not as black and white as these are different games.
Yep – same developer, same fanbase, same lore (kind of) just one has a vastly inferior delivery method for content – and that content is temporary. Put out the way Windu did, it’s plain that we’re getting far less from GW2 and the LS than we would from boxed expansions.
Windu, I like you dude. That’s a breakdown that makes it black and white.
When I play I stop to explain. Unfortunatly, you’re encountering a symptom of the game’s development. Since everything has been locked behind time gating or in the gem shop, the only thing of value is getting more gold for your time. Taking time to explain anything is seen as a “waste” of time by some, and they’re rude as kitten about it.
I will say, not everyone is like that, and finding a worthwhile guild helps. Add the friendly folks to your friend list, and ask them. Ignore the wastes of skin who won’t explain what’s going on and “gogogogogo!” about everything.
Welcome to Tyria, and happy gaming!
I can give you a sample size that’s nearly a statistical universe. 600 people. We came to GW2 together. Once ascended hit, nearly 400 left. Broken promises are broken promises.
Of the remaining, exactly 2 of us still play, and counting myself as an active player is a bit of a stretch.
I’d imagine I’m not the only one experiencing this.
Zypher, if there was anything to the biweekly update – you know, actual content, I’d be thrilled. There’s not.
We have no new builds, because there’s been almost no new skills (two new skills per profession, to be precise – one being the universal heal) There have been no new zones since Southsun. The story is horrible, just bad, and doesn’t really connect with the lore of the GW universe.
So, our biweekly content has brought, for me, nothing at all of value. Just a way to farm AP.
If they’d been adding dungeons with each LS update, and a few new skills per profession, it’d be a different story. As it is, for me, it’s a whole world of fail.
Not really stale, gw1 doesn’t have nearly as much to do. And it was less interesting to do it.
Speak for yourself. I had far more fun in GW1 than I’ve had so far in GW2. I’m still waiting because the potential is there. Soon enough alternatives will be on the market, and lots of folks won’t have to wait – they’ll just move on.
To clarify from my last post. In GW1, at 18 months, we had:
Prophecies
-they added Sorrows Furnace
-they added FoW and UW
Factions was out
- Hundred of new skills, complete new continents, two new professions
Nightfall was only 2-3 months away.
- hundreds of more skills, another whole continent, two new professions.
Compared to GW2, where after 18 months we have.
- Fractals
- two new skills
- one new dungeon path, but they removed the old one.
- nothing else that’s been permanent.
This is the complaint.
I’m confused where we aren’t getting new content. Eotm was a rather substantial update.
THIS is a substantial update:
-new story
-41 new armor sets, including rare, stand-alone pieces
-100 new profession-specific skills (10 per profession, none of which are elite)
-50 new PvE only skills including 3 elite skills
-10 new heroes
-18 Dungeons
-124 new quests
-The Hall of Monuments
-4 new regions (which were comprised of 24 zones, yes that’s right, 24!)This is what we got for one of the gw1 expansions (eye of the north)
Ahh yes this again, after how many years did you get this content?
We got it after 1 year for the first, then 6 months for the second, and 6 months for the third.
Any one of the expansions puts the entirety of the LS in gw2 to shame.
especially when it’s absolutely unnecessary.
Great, so since Ascended is so unnecessary, we can get rid of it.
Problem solved.
I would support this.
There has been virtually no content added – one dungeon path got changed, one dragon event got broken, and they added fractals and southsun – but there’s nothing to do in southsun.
What an absurd comment to make.
How it is absurd? It’s the objective truth. There has been no permanent content. Take someone who played in September of release, but hasn’t come back till today, and what are we going to show him?
“There’s been a lot of living story updates, but there’s nothing to show for it, and you can’t replay them.” Otherwise, there’s fractals and Southsun. That’s it.
I udnerstand that some people want to have a change of scenery and thats good, but ESO is not near to compete with GW2
So you’re saying that the 2000 player PvP campaigns on a map that’s 20x the size of GW2 borders, complete with rankings and PvE/roaming content doesnt compete with GW2 WvW?
What do people want this hypothetical expansion to include, really? Just PvE? I dont know about you but I want better World vs World. It doesnt matter if Anet would release a massive PvE expansion – what draws me and many others into GW2 is WvW. I guild raid for hours every night – I barely venture into PvE zones for days at a time. What they have done so far is just bandaid solutions. EoTM is nice, but it doesnt solve issues like coverage/PPT.
These are the kind of people that I fear GW2 is about to loose. What’s left? Roleplayers in PvE? HA! I dont even dare to enter Divinitys Reach anymore, everywhere you go there is a wierd person lurking in a corner.
Once the guilds leave (and all anyone really care about is WvW guilds), GW2 will be a hollow shell.
You’re overlooking that PvE style games and game play will always be the biggest draw to any RPG. Quite simply, keeping PvE players around it what pays the bills.
The fact that there’s been nothing permanent added for 18 months, and now a few different options are coming along, should terrify the people at Anet. The very people who statistically spend the most money on games are about to have options that they may leave for.
The game right now is almost exactly the same as at launch, except for they neutered the elementalist.
There has been virtually no content added – one dungeon path got changed, one dragon event got broken, and they added fractals and southsun – but there’s nothing to do in southsun.
They also added incredible grind to get best in slot.
So, between launch and now, what you really have as changes is that some classes are incredibly stronger (warrior) and others are incredibly weak (ele) and yet others are still fighting the bugs that were present on release day (ranger).
For others posting in this thread – I used to be the happy optimistic poster. Possibly the biggest GW fanboy on the planet. I spent depressingly large amounts of money supporting Anet (coming close to $4000, all thing considered.) Now I’m one of the more negative posters. The change? Anet let me down.
Between the addition of gear grind when they advertised there would be none, the lack of new anything to do, and the incredibly stupid choice to not separate skill balance between PvP and PvE, I’ve lost faith.
I still want to love the game. They’ve just made it incredibly hard to do so.
The fact that this was supposed to be everything we loved about GW1 with an updated engine, combat, and story system and it’s nowhere near half as fun as the original Guild Wars.
The following are things that were done better in Guild Wars compared to Guild Wars 2:
-Lore
-Dungeons
-Crafting
-Player builds
-PvP
-Holiday events
-Loot
-Costumes / other cosmetic items
-Cash shop
-Still no guild halls or guild management tools
..to name a few.As this person says,
Seems like the most common update notes are that they added somethong to the gemstore.
And he couldn’t be closer to the truth. Nearly all (read: 99%) of our weapon or armor additions to the game are done through the cash shop RNG. It’s disgusting that there is nothing in this game you can actually work towards, or complete a goal to obtain like in GW1.
In GW1 I was more than happy to spend funds on the cash shop because they were things that expanded gameplay and cosmetic only rewards. I bought every mission pack, every costume, and tons of character (all the bank slots) from the GW1 shop because I wanted to.
When I bought the costumes in Gw2 for the first time only to find that they were a one time use I nearly got sick to my stomach because I knew what was in store for the game at that point.
For years I was excited about GW2, having put over 7,000 hours into my GW1 account. I was told it’d be everything I loved about Guild Wars 1 but in a persistent world with much better game systems and design philosophies.. How disappointing. It had so much potential.
The game takes so many great steps forward with many things, but takes even more steps back with everything else.
You guys lost a fan of almost 10 years. And it saddens me.
Should have read this before my reply. In addition to my beefs, this is the biggest +1 post on the whole forums.
- No guild halls
- one form of PvP
- Ranger pet doesn’t work, has been said not to work by the lead game designer, and they flat out refuse to do anything to improve it.
- Stealth. Whomever decided making a class able to be invisible permanently in a competitive game should be dragged out, shot, hung, quartered, burnt, then buried on unconsecrated ground.
- they introduced gear grind after 5 years of promising “no stat grind”.
- the complete lack of new content after 18 months, in favour of biweekly AP grind that leaves no mark on the world. This is the biggest one. It’s been 18 months, and the only changes have been:
- one dungeon path got altered
- one dragon event got ruined (when nobody does it, you can bet the change was bad)
- we have one new zone (southsun) and there’s nothing at all going on there.
- fractals were introduced for people to grind to get gear to be able to grind (see above about no vertical progression)
and that’s it. There’s nothing else in the world to show someone who’s been away since just after launch.
Yep, those are the biggest ones that bring me down about GW2.
If it could be done like if you drop from a certain height you roll (still take some dmg), but more than a certain height and you face plant, that would be awesome.
best suggestion in the thread.
If you want to know my opinion about ascended – I have left the game a month after release. I was able to get lvl 80 and full exotic armor in less than one month, then I did almost all of the dungeons and for another week I had no motication to do anything in the game. Now I came back partially with introduction of ascended weapon crafting and now I’m playing GW2 as my main MMORPG since they added asdended armor craft. Ascended brought me back to the game. I fully enjoy progression, it gives me a reason to play, to get my equipment maxed.
You have mentioned about games without vertical progression, like LOL, DOTA, TF2 – none of them is a MMORPG. It’s a completly different game, so comparing them to GW2 is not good.
On the other hand, GW1 was more like a singleplayer game for me. I have finished campaigns and left the game for few months, then I turned it on again, created a new character, finished campaigns and left it again, for good. There was no reason for me to do anything else in the game than story. It was a solid game, but I would compare it to games like Heretic 2, Drakan or Tomb Raider, just complete missions and game over.
The bolded part. This is how the game was marketed, and how it was supposed to be. The entire game is end-game.
Introducing gear grind – and yes, it’s grind, and obligatory if you want BiS gear, is what made me essentially stop playing.
Were I to re-download and log into GW today, my characters would all still have the BiS gear that I got on them back in 2006. For someone in GW2, if you’ve been away for a while, you’re going to find that your fully geared character is no longer fully geared – they’re not wearing BiS. Despite over five years of advertising that there would be no vertical progression for stats on gear.
So, I’m polar opposite from you – ascended is the nail that killed it for me.
expansions take a long time, its pretty unlikely they could have one this year when they haven’t even conceptualized one yet
Is that why other MMO companies release expansions every year?
Push the envelope. Anet did it in 6 months – twice – for gw1. They were both epic, full games’ worth of content. Now we get… 18 months with nothing new from launch, and the promise of something epic coming from the LS (which would be a first, and I’m not holding my breath), but nothing else on the horizon.
This is the reason people keep raging on the forums. A game franchise that was loved, and they’ve been doing everything possible to make it mediocre.
Rhyse, the inability to perceive and cope with objective reality is the human condition, deal with it. People suffering from various mental issues are further along that slope than others, but we all are on it.
Continually doing the same thing while expecting a different result isn’t insane – it’s just stupid. Absolute objective proof of a subject’s inability to learn from experience.
What is worse, is that in the original GW they did a far better job of keeping the balancing between PvP and PvE separate – to the point where some skills had completely different functionality. It’s also true (for me at least) that PvP in gw1 was a far more skilled affair than what we have here.
The three I’ve noticed have been via IoJ. They have a guild tag that’s a huge Anet banner over their heads.
For all I know the players aren’t devs, but janitors or something.
The only way to fix the “problem” would be to make any and all of the TP related items available through normal gameplay. Which, to be honest, is what it SHOULD have been in the first place.
As it is, the drop rate for anything in game is horrendous, the reward vs. time can only be measured in gold, because the only reward worth anything is gold. Through gold you can eventually buy whatever it is that you should have been able to get in-game in the first place.
Then there’s the terrible feature of being able to buy gold for real money. The end effect of this is already clear – the people willing to spend the most real-life money on the game are going to always have better things than those who spend time playing.
In essence, the gem shop + living story have been far worse, from a reward for gameplay perspective, than if they’d gone with the tried and trued GW1 model of expansions and reward coming from gameplay.
The gemshop should have never had anything except for the storage/character slot/town clothes/backpack items. Everything else has been wrongly captured behind a purchase, where it should have existed as an in-game reward.
TL:DR – the gem shop, ability to trade real money for gold, and abyssmal drop-rate are all related, and a flaw of this particular income method for a game. Selling boxes, and having only luxury items (never currency) available through the gem shop, would have required them to make in game rewards better – otherwise people would never have kept playing.
Timmy, what you’re seeing, in the posts that are over-the-top, are people who love the game, or the potential of it, who are frustrated beyond civility through either 1) actions that have no readily understood rationale (and nobody ever bothers to explain them) or 2) concerns that are seemingly being ignored.
It doesn’t make the posters right – certainly threatening someone is never right. What it makes them is understandable and human.
Part of a job that requires dealing with the public is dealing with people who get over-emotional about things.
I work in a very specialized form of customer service. I see people at their absolute worst. Taking the bad, the threats, the physical harassment (which happens in person, not through anonymous internet postings) is indeed part of the job. Not a pleasant one, but it is certainly something I am actually paid to do.
It is no different for the few Anet employees who’s very jobs are to be in contact with those on the forums. Sometimes people will be less than rational. They are still your paying customers. People whom, indeed, Anet wouldn’t exist without.
Chris, can you address, at all, the over the top locking and deletion of entire threads over one or two posts?
There are thousands of suggestions that are worthwhile, and simply disappearing, because someone dared say anything less than wonderful about Anet.
For an example – the last one I took part in was completely removed because I pointed out that the game is rather poorly optimised for high-end systems. Nothing rude, just a statement of fact. Then something like 2000 posts just disappeared, because that qualifies as “Calling out of an Anet employee”.
It’s things like this, more than anything, that lead to the entire “the devs never listen” attitude throughout the forums/game.
While we’re at it. Make condy ticks show too! Makes sense! A burning man doesn’t hide and you can follow the blood trail! :}
(I’m kidding)
I’m not – both of those are GOOD suggestions.
Ranger needs massive buffs, ele does too. I won’t cry for nerfs for any class (though I’d love to see anyone playing backstab spam be electrocuted through their keyboard).
Waded through walls of text, and realised that 90%+ of this thread is still about the pet. With everyone’s varied suggestions (from recoding the entire game to claiming there is nothing wrong) the only workable solution is the one that’s been advocated for since launch.
Make the bleeding pets optional. Have stow result in the pet going away, and your weapon skills and traps all do 30-40% more damage.
This would result in the least number of skills to change (signets and shouts, primarily, though you could ignore shouts as being specific to pet builds) and changing traits that are “you and your pet” so that the effect you regardless of the pet’s being active or not.
Once you’ve done that, and made the ranger actually playable for most, you can (probably never, but maybe) put some effort into actually fixing the mechanic.
Also, there is something hideously wrong when the biggest desire I have for my main character’s mechanic is to simply have it go away.