Longbow (ranger)

[Vitor.4597]

I wonder if they will ever fix the direction of the longbow. Sometimes I stop my character to turn around and use the skills of the bow, but almost 50% times the skill goes on CD without executing the action. For it to work 100% I have to direct my character to the enemy manually.

[Aaron Forestman.4758]

As with almost all ranged attacks in this game, you do have to be facing the enemy to attack them. It works that way by design, so it will never be "fixed".

[KeyOrion.9506]

imagine six hex boxes. one to the front, one to the rear, one to the forward left, forward right, rear left, and rear right. Understand ONE thing with ranger bow. if your enemy is to your forward, forward left, or forward right, and they are within range, your skill will go off as planned. HOWEVER, if your enemy is to the rear, rear left or rear right, your activated skill will AUTOMATICALLY FAIL, and your skill will be placed on cooldown. This was instituted after the first year from game launch, because in PvP and WvW, many players considered the ability to fire a bow "backwards" as seriously and grossly unfair to other players, because every class had to face their enemy to target them. Because of the "complaints", the forward and rear portion firing was instituted for rangers. Basically, we could target someone behind us...but we'd be facing the wrong way, so when we fired it looked like arrows coming out of our back. However anet never fixed this on certain "races" and some Asura were still able to "auto-shift" and spin their body's as they hit the activation key of the skill they wanted to use. I do not know if Anet ever fixed that particular "cheat/bug" since I don't play an Asura, but have talked to way to many asura rangers to actually know about the issue. I usually kept my mouth shut about it, cause i got tired of all the Ranger Nerfs. Still...foward arc is good...rear arc is bad for rangers. That's why certain players when fighting against rangers will always spin to get on your rear side or your full rear side causing your skills to auto-fail, causing cooldown, and making your Longbow completely useless. Being able to auto-turn towards the enemy when firing the weapon would have been awesome, but would be considered a leg up over the other classes. That's a strict no no.