Roland Daemon

I have been pondering about PvP in Guild Wars 2 lately. Seeing as how I'm going to be attempting to reach higher level competitions, I'm already starting to think about team compositions and each classes contribution to a team setup. I haven't delved 100% into the whole theory crafting yet, but there is one class that I'm starting to take a second look at.



Of all the classes I've seen so far, this class seems to be getting little excitement or credit it potentially deserves. With what seems to be an emphasis on positioning, traps and a pet, any good ranger should be able to take out anyone solo with relative ease, and be even more useful when in a group vs. others. The only problem is that with all the pvp video's that we have seen thus far, no one truly seems to have been able to take advantage of this.


Start the video and go to 10:50. I can't seem to start it from there (silly youtube)



Totalbiscuit took this video I believe at Gamescom (someone verify this?) and played a ranger during the latter half of the video. Watching him play made me face-palm at first and just shrug off the ranger as just another 'ranged class with a pet'. Looking back on it now, I really shouldn't have thought this way, the more I had been watching video's the more I was noticing that positioning in this game is going to be the key to success. I'll go down the list why this 'Alpha' really isn't the underdog that many people are going to assume it will be.


The Pet.

I'll be honest, I hate ranged pet classes. In WoW, Hunters can destroy nearly anyone in 1v1 regardless of what talents they took. Why? Because of the pet. The Pet was either a minor or major annoyance and it was usually major. Even if the hunter didn't take Beast Mastery talents to make his pet much, much more annoying, the pet skills alone were enough to make many classes useless for a few seconds. Add to the fact that the Hunter is pulling out as much damage as a Mage can (and a lot faster as well), the decision to kill the pet and then go for the hunter or vice-versa and you've got a class that is very tricky and difficult to kill. The problem I had with WoW Hunters was that the pet was never a viable target for one very good, very solid reason.

Pets disappeared when the Hunter died. This generally meant that the 'decision' you had when fighting a hunter was to ignore the pet and either run or fight the hunter. As a melee class, fighting hunters was one of the hardest classes to fight because of all the crowd control the hunter possessed. Wing-clip reduced movement speed by roughly 70%, Freezing trap was an AoE slow of roughly 40%, Frost trap froze you in place, add concussion shot which dazes you and another ability that let the hunter jump backwards 5 feet all the way up to 100 yards. It was pretty hard to stay in melee range as a hunter and keep him there. If you were a ranged class, you have an even harder time because he just stands back and lays into you while you try to do the same.


Now with GW2, Everyone will have a limited number of skills at their disposal at a given time, and the amount of crowd control a ranger will have is still pretty high. Melee and ranged classes can put up an honest fight with a ranger from what I have been able to see thus far. There is something about Guild Wars 2 PvP though with rangers that everyone needs to fully aware of and be able to deal with it accordingly.

PETS DON'T DIE WHEN THE RANGER IS DOWNED.

Note that I didn't say killed, I said downed. With the downed system in GW2, you haven't died quite yet. During this time, a ranger can fight back and try to kill someone to get back up. There is a trick that pets have that will be the key to ranger survival in PvP. Like the video had shown above, a rangers pet has the ability to "lick wounds" and revive a downed ranger. This one fact alone has so many implications with PvP that it's unfathomable in some ways.

We have decisions to make when fighting a ranger. Do we kill the pet, wasting time before the ranger kills us, or do we go straight for the ranger and the finishing blow? Obviously, this is a case by case basis but the fact that targeting pets is actually a viable strategy in comparison to most other games with pet classes, it throws what we've known for the past few years out of whack. I'm almost positive that many people will not go for pets and wonder what the hell is shooting them in the back ten seconds later after they have downed a ranger. This obviously won't last for TOO long (we'll see, I had seen people who had played games for years and never pick up on habits) as most people will figure out what has happened and learn to never leave a ranger alone unless his pet is dead as well.

Even with the pet skills, it won't matter in terms of the decision to kill the pet when fighting rangers. Even with pet CC, Conditions, or damage, the real threat is that we have to assume that all pet's can 'lick wounds' and that alone is enough to make killing a rangers pet the priority.

The Ranger

With the pet mechanic of it not disappearing when you are downed, it begs the question of how strong will the ranger be. Many people have this worry that because of how relatively underpowered the ranger was in GW1 that Anet won't be able to make it stronger or as strong as the other classes.

I think people are worried a little too much on this aspect. Anet is working hard as I've seen a game developer to make sure things are balanced for an E-sport. This little fact alone means that until they get the ranger right, this game isn't coming out. The Ranger, by the look of his Known Skills , looks likes he'll be a colossal pain in the ass to fight at any range. The amount of CC the Ranger has in addition to some more well known defensive skills from GW1, killing a GOOD ranger will be quite difficult.

From all the video's we've seen on Ranger game play have been sub-par only due to the fact that people haven't quite grasped how to play them correctly yet. (at least in my mind)



As far as game play goes, this is probably one of the better video's I have seen. He actually dodges away and uses some CC to his advantage. The video is good, but I think it's just scratching the surface of how any class (especially rangers) can be played to their full potential. The difference separating any good players from the bad ones is going to be positioning and movement, but even then there will be a step above. Control of positioning and skill management is going to be even bigger and I think the rangers, with the help of their pets, will be the kings of this type of game play.

I've been looking around and noticing that a lot of people have little interest in playing rangers. I'm not saying that people won't, I'm pointing out that as of right now, people don't want to play a ranger. With the engineer out as well, most of the people will head that way instead of ranger. I predict that the ranger population will most likely be the smallest of all the classes, but the best rangers will be looked upon like Gods.

So I ask. What about rangers are you worried or scared about? Anything you look forward to when playing this unappreciated class when it deserves so much more respect than it has right now? Am I completely wrong with everything I've written?

Was I wrong to compare it to hunters from WoW? :P

Let me know, leave a comment and if you desire a response, I will do so.

~Roland Daemon of the Free Frag Network.
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