Bow vs Melee?

[Jaif]

I've gotten a bow ranger to 8. Right now I've found him rather dull and in-effective. Basically I have my choice of medium damage attacks, and buffs that add damage. Any interesting stuff comes from my mesmer secondary.

I was comparing to a lvl 7 melee ranger I made. Both builds were expertise, weapon, and eventually wilderness survival. The only difference is using a bow vs a sword. I remember that once I got out of pre-sear ascalon I suddenly had a ton of choices to play with, my favorite being hundred blades and hamstring (? I think that was the name).

Do bow rangers get to be more fun? Can they ever put out decent damage?

-Jeff

P.S. I'm considering taking inspiration instead of wilderness survival for my ranger. I'll lose some buffs or maybe traps, but being able to strip hexes and things like that is nice.

[TakiGW]

i plan on making my ranger/elementalist a condition ranger. he will make use of poison and fire to keep the enemyon constant health degeneration. as this is my first character i dont know how it will turn out, but we will see.

i had similar complaints about my ranger when i first started doing missions in post searing, but i think my confusion sprung from the fact that i expectred the ranger in GW to be akin to the rangers in L2; that is to say, ridiculously unbalanced in the early levels and able to solo the whole game. I mean, the games are both from NCSoft but its clear they put a lot more thought into this one IMO. very balanced game.

if you want the specifics on what im doing with mine, im following the ranger/elementalist build that can be found in the thread titled "emergancy" in this very ranger forum. check it out if you please.

[Jaif]

It's not a question of raw power. I started a mesmer and that character feels a lot more involved, even though I don't think he's as powerful right now as the ranger.

-jeff