ATTN DEVS: Please boost the Ranger these ways

Yes I know that these things have been touched upon in other threads, but perhaps not with this focus. The game developers issue patches partly in response to what they read in forums, so here we go:

BOOST THE DAMAGE THE PET DOES: I have use up two slots to keep my wolf with me, "Charm Aninmal" to have him there at all, and "Comfort animal" to revive his sorry azz. I only have 8 slots fer Gawd's sake, the Beast ought to be doing more significant damage.

NEED MORE HUMPS TO STAND ON: Most of the little terrain humps are just art, inasmuchas I can not stand on them and shoot down as I am supposed to. Once the s*** hits the fan I try to get out of the core slaughter to shoot from range, only to find I can stand upon none of the Art.

NEED TO BE ABLE TO SHOOT FROM GREATER DISTANCES: It is frustrating to issue the command to attack a certain enemy, only to find my character run forward thirty paces to get in range to execute this order. Now he is in the middle of the fight, plinking arrows off an insane Charr Blade Warrior. Melees are for the many many Warrior/Monks in this game. Let me hit from further away.

As of last night I am a level 12 (woo hoo!), I have too much time invested in my R/E to let it go. These tweaks would quiet some of this chorus of "Rangers suck". I am not asking the Devs to make the Ranger super dominant, which would throw the game out of balance, and send a flood of Johnny come lately new Rangers into the mix. The class should be powered up some however.

And always remember....we Rangers have the coolest dance (spinning on head here in the Dining Room).

1. Umm...you shouldn't be in the middle of the fray in the first place? You're a ranger, not a warrior.


2. Stop using a short bow and buy a longbow.

3. I don't understand why people go 'HEY DEVS' or 'ATTN DEVS' or 'DEVS OMG!' cause I mean seriously, they don't care unless they have half the community behind them. One person whining isn't gonna change anything.

4. This should be in Sardelac Sanitarium.

Agreed. Ranger if you ask me is one of the best for taking out monks and other casters and easily one of the most misplayed classes along with mesmer in guild wars.

I have a ranger/elementalist and happen to think she's pretty damned awesome, not wanting to toot my own horn I do OK damage with a bow, go out of my way to poison every creature being attacked, use distracting shot on the spellcasters, and i stay back with the monk so i'm always first to get healed with the heal area spell.. as a result if in desperate need I can res with my signet, whilst also being able to cast meteor storm which is great for killing a load of creatures, then go back to my bow and repoison everything, and voila, the group survives.. i think rangers are well balanced anyway.

Level 13 eh? I'm afraid your skill bar is still equipped with toys my friend. The best is yet to come.

I do agree that rangers and beast mastery do have alot of disrespect aimed at them but even if BM was tinkered a little, i wouldn't move my points into it, my pet is a burden. The most it could do for me is be a two-hit meatshield.

Why use x energy making my pet do fancy moves when i can do everything my pet could just using a bow and still keep two slots of my skill bar?

So you have to have two slots for your pet eh... well, how much damage does your pet do, that is basically passive? Alot. I will go out on a limb here and say that over sustained time, rangers have the highest DPS of all characters. Yep, I said it. A pet attacking all the time, and their bows which do respectable damage.

I love playing with capable rangers, I wish more then 10% of rangers were capable players...

I am glad to see someone who is so supportive of their pet and has such great confidence in the ranger class. Good for you.
Belive me though, i am more than capable too

I feel a bit guilty if my pet doesn't join me don't want to leave him lagging behind in levels, or he'll just keep dying and dying.. he's almost at 20 tho, so, will try out different combinations once he is

Aye, rangers truly are powerful.. and if you say rangers are weak, please by all means give Reeze Asunder a yell.. even a ranger using earth magic can hurt. they dont beed buffing, maybe pets could be tweaked a little, (my thought would be to have charm and comfort as one skill), but otherwise rangers are my dream class.. adatpable. they mesh really well with any other profession, and there skills alone rock... at lvl 13, things may not seem that great- but the best is truly comming.

wait till you get your hands on Posion Arrow or Barrage, or any of the late game skills.. tasty.

as to pets, if you use them kudous to you, if you dont, well not harm done. i persoanly dont use pets, but thats because i dont have room in my build for them.. im quite sure one day im going to sit down and create a truly nasty pet based ranger..

its just simply a class which requires more than the usual clikc and point to learn... and isnt it ironic that my ranger can tank better than a warrior if i want him to?

Tactical: I use Senor Wolf, even though I can control my own moves better, because if I get banged up I can retreat backwards to heal, while he still stays there in the thick of things, inflicting damage and distracting the enemy from focusing on me. Often times he takes one for the team, but after the dust has cleared I scoop up the gold and bring him back from the dead.

Plus his howling is kewl coming out of the 5.1s here.

Pets are awesome tanks when you give them call of protection and symbiotic bond. If you were really hardcore about using a pet as a tank, you could go R/Mo and use protection prayers on it instead of the ranger equivalents, but imo the ranger equivs are generally better as far as energy cost and effectiveness. Life bond + ferocious strike could be cool. Ferocious strike would (more than) make up for the maintenance cost of life bond, which has the advantage of reducing the damage received by you, but it only works on physical damage. Going with healing prayers and putting a healing seed on your pet would make your teammates love you. Or, if you want a boost in damage from your pet, go smiting and give them strength of honor and/or judge's insight, maybe even balth's aura or zealot's fire (I wonder if pet attacks trigger it?). Even if you have no skills on the bar that don't target your pet, you're potentially getting more damage/more energy soak for a lower cost than skills that work on you.

If you're using a pet, you have to pay it at least a little attention or it's a waste of skill slots. The more attention you pay, the more you'll realize how useful your pet is.

There should be a quest to infuse pets. They sometimes dont stand a chance against some monsters.

Don't ever complain about any class being weak because this game is perfectly balanced by Anet, if there is anything wrong it is because you don't know how to play the game. Rangers are awesome, you only have to stand around tomb for 1 hour or 2 to get a group.

I do hope Anet refrains from further balancing of classes. They've done a great job already. I never understood why Blizzard kept trying to mess around with D2 classes. They should have ignored that issue completely and let the players sort it out.

I completely agree... that is the only part in the game that pet can't do jack... the spectro agony really bring pet into the grave yard... which is completely unbalance and unfair to the beast master...

and pet dmg dont sux... in fact, they do around the same dmg as ur max bow... and pet skills do more dmg and effect than your bow while costing less or same. You are trading 1 slot for cheaper energy cost attacks, if you go full BM.

I played a R/N first, and I love her. She hardly ever dies, poisons everything, and my pet kicks arse Yet it is hard to get into a group as a Ranger. Meh, thier loss, I pick up henchies and solo

Oh but rangers are great! Firstly, they've already got the longest range out of all the other classes, using a longbow you can easily shoot from far distances without getting "into the fray". And the pets already do enough damage.

Do any of you have a lvl 20 moa bird? A friend of mine has one that's become utterly famous, mainly because it's 9ft tall and can tank a fair bit even in the ring of fire. It's pretty sweet. And it makes a great meatshield, if nothing else it's funny to bet on whether our crappy monk or the pet will die first. The bird usually survives a little longer.

First of all i think this should be in the suggestion forum. Secondly i agree with your points, rangers do need to run (even with the longbow) just outside the monster 'sensing circle'. More humps, well yeah rangers do need to be able to gain high ground but there is terrian 'humps' you just gotta pick your spot. It is a bit annoying that the pet takes up two skill places and doesnt do that much damage, mines level 20 and dies very quickly and doesnt do that much damage (bless him).

Yes you can increase the pets damage even more and keep him alive more with skills but i dont want to have to take up 4 skill places with pet.

Ranger is probably the most popular and worst-used class out there. Just because most of the people using them suck doesn't mean that they are bad.

I am a Ranger. I do not suck. Therefore, Rangers do not suck. The end. ^-^

(Oh, and I specialize in Beasmastery, and pets don't suck either, for reasons I've covered entirely too often in other threads.)

Rangers are patently awful around level 15 and don't start to become good until they're level 20 with top gear and a Super Expertise rune.

Pets are useful up until that point but become useless in the mountains due to aformentioned issues with Spectral Agony.

The problem with Rangers is that they are both backloaded and extremely equipment dependent. At level 12, your Ranger is awful, no two ways about it. The only thing you can do about this is continue to level until your power starts to catch up.

Rangers need to be listed as an advanced class on character creation. Their play is more akin to that of a Mesmer than a Warrior. Combine that with being backloaded, and of course people are dissatisfied with a Ranger. Throughout the early game when people are learning what's good the Ranger is a weak class that's badly played.

Peace,
-CxE

Evidently Ensign played a ranger and didn't know what he was doing so the class sucks.

You are correct.

As for rangers in HoH, I see soo many people use them incorrectly. That's along with mesmers who don't know what they're doing. However, used correctly I seen a mesmer drop a monk in less than 15 seconds solo.

As for me, my PvE R/Mo does UW/Fissure extremely well.. (Barrage for damage, Vital for his own HP - along with Symbiosis for even more HP - and then Protective/Vigilant/Shielding Hands for temporary HP boosts.. can throw in Fertile in there to hit over 1,000 hitpoints.)

Hmmm? I said the class sucks at low levels. It does. It sucks hard. I'd rather be spamming Flare than taking whatever the Ranger has to offer early on. 10 energy Power Attacks for +14 damage or whatever are neither powerful or efficient. Penetrating Attack is grabbed early but doesn't even become playable until you start seeing enemies with armor to penetrate.

The only good option in seared ascalon is cranking up Survival for Ignite / Kindle Arrows and riding your preps to victory, because your bow attacks are just sad. the Northern Shiverpeaks work the same way. Throughout pre-sear and most of Seared Ascalon my Ranger/Necro was spending almost all of his energy on Life Siphons, as they did a whole lot more than any of those crappy Ranger skills could. Toss out a couple Siphons, Kindle, blast away for 24 seconds. It certainly wasn't good but it got the job done. I had a lot of dead skills on that bar.

Your fundamental problem is Expertise. The Ranger, as a class, has been balanced around high Expertise, and as a result at lower levels all of your skills are hideously overpriced. You're getting hit with a double dose of suck - first, the skill's attribute is low so the effect of the skill is about what you'd expect for the level you're at, but you're also hit by the Expertise 'cost', meaning that the effect is around twice as expensive as you'd expect. Balanced skills that are hideously overpriced on a low level character with stunted energy and no energy management is not a recipe for success.

Hence the overreliance upon preparations and other long-term effects. You don't have a choice because your energy is going to run out after 3-4 skills anyway.


I was chugging along, kinda scraping by with a mediocre character until I hit level 16 just outside of Ventari's Dell. Up until that point I had been firmly in the Kindle Arrows / Dual Shot / no attack skills mode. Once I hit 16, I grabbed a new armor set, respecced to 14 Expertise / 9 Marksmanship / 5 Survival thanks to the new rune trader and absurdly cheap Superior Expertise runes, and got all of those lovely attack skills back into the fold. Against a given pack I could Prep Kindle and just mash on attack skills until the battle was over. Not exactly an abusive build, but one that felt like it had some oomph to it.


I hit level 18 as I got to the desert last night, and got to 19 this morning as I completed the quest to get Tiger's Fury. Let me just say now that I have absolutely no clue how anyone could even think of playing a Ranger without that skill. After five minutes of being Fury enabled I am completely incapable of playing a non-Fury Ranger. I'm sitting on a cool 14 Expertise / 12 Marksmanship / 8 Beastmastery right now, and with an eight second Fury I only have one shot with my shortbow per ten seconds that isn't boosted. Zealous is paying for Fury, and then some. I can't fit enough attack skills on my bar because I'm using them too fast. Overall the character is humming like a well oiled machine now, and I don't even have an elite or the 10 second Fury yet.


The Ranger most certainly does not suck, it simply is a complex machine with parts that will not come together until you near ascension. Once they do, the Ranger is an absolutely vicious class that's a blast to play. Of course by that time bad habits have been learned (Expertise is worthless, you don't deal any damage, your skills are unwieldly) and people never get to see a Ranger firing on all cylinders as a result.

It's a pity, really, because a tricked out Ranger is the most fun character to play in the entire game.

Peace,
-CxE

Whats funny is that I had the exact same character, a ran/nec, and the only necro spell I really made use of was vamp glare. Some of the missions were hard, but I made it through without any major problems. Yes, I did use ignite, but I didn't have my wilderness survival up, I've always had a high marksmanship (currently a 12). Maybe your strategy was just off a bit.

Yeah rangers are truly the ultimate class unless you take into account that elementalists do more damage and mesmers have better interupts. Dont get me wrong I play R/me and its IMO the funnest, I do pretty well Im certainly not uber and cant 2 or 3 hit like the uber rangers that post on here. But Id consider myself a good interupter (using Mesmer skills) and can make life somewhat miserable for casters and monks. But they do have issues that need adressed as do the other "support" classes. And B4 the usber rangers state all you have to do is use 3 diferent skills for good dmg, IMO that takes a long time to set up while your team is chasing being chased or nuked out of existence.

Rangers in Fissure own everyone.... barrage = awesome