Ranger longbow 5, Barrage, not requiring line-of-sight to cast

ZTeamG.4603 · December 4, 2022

Not sure how long this bug has been around, but Ranger's longbow 5 skill, Barrage, can be used to shoot into areas that all other AoEs can't reach. The main area this is relevant is in WvW, where it can be used to hit siege and enemies that are well out of reach of everything else. Most of the time, this takes the form of the ranger standing with their face up against a wall and using max field of view settings to see siege on the other side.

As you would expect, this is exploited quite often by some groups in WvW, it makes it nearly impossible for defenders to use defensive siege when this is being abused, and it creates an unhealthy meta where rangers need to set their camera as far out as possible and plaster their faces against walls in order to gain an advantage. I don't recall if the heavy field of view customization has always been there or if it was added in the past few years, but it definitely exacerbates the situation.

I highly doubt this is intentional design given that:

-As far as I know, no other AoEs function this way, at least not without exploits; even other "rain from the sky" AoEs like arrow carts (can't get much closer to the idea of barrage than that) and meteor shower DO require line of sight.

-Barrage's skill description makes no mention of the ability to ignore line-of-sight.

-This sort of functionality, if intentional, pushes ranger players to set their field of view to wacky settings (ie as far vertical, zoomed out, and to the right as possible) in order to be most effective in WvW, since those wacky settings provide the best ability to aim at places that shouldn't be reachable with AoEs. With the camera set as far vertical and zoomed out as possible, there are almost no places that are out of reach.

-This functionality completely undermines defensive siege use in WvW, because if it's within 1860 range (1500 base range + 360 radius) of a wall a ranger with wacky FoV settings can hit it--aka any position in all alpine BL or EBG towers, many keep positions, etc. are all fair game for a longbow ranger.

For one particularly egregious example of shooting through a wall and ceiling in Armistice Bastion:

https://imgur.com/a/0RhAYbN

Of course, this bug can be easily replicated by playing with the field of view settings and clicking on the other side of a wall in WvW while using longbow 5.

Edited December 4, 2022 by ZTeamG.4603
Changed "hit" to "cast" in title for clarity