The REAL Solution to Touch Rangers...

This one's my favourite
although I prefer conjure phantasm + images of remorse, and accumlated pain to phantom pain.

Kiting may be all you NEED to get rid of a touchie, but other counters couldn't hurt at all. If a warrior comes up to you and starts wacking, you're a monk, do you just kite and do nothing about the warrior? No, you counter him with Blind, Weakness, etc. etc. What makes a touch worthy, is that it can't be completely shut down by one condition i.e. warriors.

Edited

Couldn't have said it better myself

Crippling Anguish > Conjure Phantasm > Archane Echo > Archane Larceny > Echoed Archane Larceny > Archane Thievery

3 skills disabled, and still not reached you to do any damage yet (thanks, Cripling Anguish!) then...

Energy Burn > Blackout

Wand to death... (or run further away and start all over again!)

Here's one of my Assassin builds that owns Touch Rangers with ease.

I fought one for the first time on RA a few weeks back. I was wondering what everyone was complaining about afterwards.

I request a mod to close every touch ranger topic, and ban anyone who makes a new one :/

The same things are said OVER and OVER again, people, get over it.

woo, that's part of the hammer build I use

UG SMASH!!

Problem with Touchers are that,

1. You need specific counters for them, someone mentioned wild blow.

2. It's cheap and it works, same as iway.

I'd say touchers are only overpowered in Randumb Arenas because the environment is so small and the team isn't organised/co-ordinated. The Cripshot ranger is a good counter but they just c-space to the nearest foe and plague touch it so one of your allies is now crippled, poisoned and can't kite.

I still believe its an exploit and it wasn't the developers' intention to let these skills be affected by expertise but we all know how much crying people do when there's a nerf.

I've never seen a touch ranger in gvg. There's a reason for this.

They're good in randoms, because of the refusing to kite mentality and the life steal damage > armor and protection. they aren't really overpowered. they are extremely effective against newish players who just don't understand the concept of damage mitigation. Their DPS is quite low though really

Let's see. What makes touch rangers possible - Expertise. Hmm, I seem to recall another popular, easy maintenance build using Expertise, oh yeah, Thumpers. Hm, Expertise? Wasn't there a very powerful build during the PvP preview weekend that made Ra/Par extremely powerful?

Looks like the real solution is for you brown nosers to pull your heads out of whoever's rear it is up and realise games have problems and problems have to be corrected, no matter what you think about them. Being an elitist git and whining about whiners makes you look like an ignorant ass worse than the whiners. The real, REAL solution is to fix Expertise. Fix Expertise like Divine Favor is fixed.

My A/E has no probs versus a toucher, aslong as I use way of the fox, and escape fast using AoD.

Hehe

That's a part of the problem. Thumper's damage can be mitigated with any of the common warrior hate.
What made Touch rangers so powerful was the complete utterly shitty crap skills - I mean, Faction skills.
Before factions, Touch rangers had only Vamp Touch. They were forced to bring sacrifice shadow damage skill that was hurting them without healing them. Now, they have one copy of their main skill.
Factions skills that were "new" are crap and for most of them unusable in the current metagame (there are exceptions). The copies of available core or Prophecies skill (without any change, even a minor tuning, what a lack of imagination!), though, did a lot of damage on the game balance. Like Touch rangers and double blood spike.
What are the purpose of echo or arcane echo since there are copies of the same skill?
I hope in Nightfall there will be more of this crap, like five copies of Meteor Shower.

PS: Those here saying "touch ranger" are counterable should not confuse counterability and game balance. Let's see this skill:

Counter this
30 Energy 6 seconds cast 10 sec recharge
Spell. Resurrect all your party members to full health and full energy, makes you and your allies untargetable for 5...28 secs, and kill every foe in radar range.

Is skill counterable? Yes. Its 6 sec cast make it open to interrupt, it's a spell so it is affected by any of spell shutdown, its energy cost makes it sensitive to energy denial, and its casting time make its caster very likely to be killed.
But, is this balanced? No.

Hi,

I agree to a point about exploiting. That point being that now there are 2-skills that are exactly the same except for the name (Vampiric Touch and Vampiric Bite). In my opinion ANet needs to stop this nonsense practice of skill replication and have only one skill i.e. the original Vampiric Touch. Otherwise you will soon have 3-skills that are exactly the same after Nightfall has been released.

It is also for this reason I don't like touchies. I feel that there is an exploit here and it seems to be more of a cheap way to win.

BTW. My own defense for Touch Rangers is to play as Necro and bring along Wither and Malaise (as another poster said). Rangers have only 3-pips in energy regen and shutting down their energy regen I think is key to killing them. Another way with a Necro is massive health degen plus the Necros own health stealing skills. As a Necro you should be able to out 'health steal' a Touch Ranger with no problem.

Another problem when playing against Touch Rangers in PVP is that you really have to check before the match begins what professions your opponents are. This requires targeting the R/N before other opponents i.e. the Monk which everyone targets and expects you to target as well. I have had a few touchies sneak up on me this way after getting off my first spells because I was targetting someone else via the 'T' key. They were then able to take me down because of key skill regen times and lack of energy on my part.

I also agree with others that for some professions to do well in PVP, they have to bring extra skills just in case they meet a toucher...and I don't think ANET intended this.

BTW opponets with both a Touch Ranger and a good healing monk can be hell if you haven't brought the right counter skills. The Monk will concentrate all his healing on the touchie and it is damn hard to kill them sometimes in RA because of the randomness of the teams you get there.

Thanks for the anti-whining thread. I played touch ranger in Aspenwood this weekend and got plenty of whining about it. What I thought was the funniest was most of the ones crying were War/Mo. The Touch Ranger is not a tough build to beat, there was a crippling degen ranger that scared the poop out of me and a mesmer with 2 degen spells that i could not get away from. But I was surprised about the number of whiners against me. No whiners against the bonders, or warmo's.

oh yeah expertise doesn't need fixed. if Anet thinks it's an exploit then all they have to do is change it from a skill to a spell.

... I just mentioned no spacific counter is needed, the skills mentioned in the first post have far more uses than just anti touchers.

They're perfect for Random Arenas because they need no monk, a monk just improves the condition. The thing that makes touchies good for random arenas, and even green farming, is that they require no monk and are completely self sufficient.