Guild Wars 2

Updates to shortbow [Poison Volley] and longbow [Rapid Fire].

Would be nice to have a kill shot instead of rapid fire

ya ok spam your skills vs a good thief and tell me how those thief “slow” cast times work out for you. I never said my ideas were revolutionary, just pointing out that there’s a time and place for each skill and that skills aren’t spammy. Instead of refuting this, you bashed my ideas. Oh and deslecting your target before fearing doesn’t “amplify” the effect, it just makes your wolf start the animation instantly, but thanks for proving my point.

law.9410:

ya ok spam your skills vs a good thief and tell me how those thief “slow” cast times work out for you.

Spamming skills indiscriminately against a “good” anything is a poor idea. The point I make regarding Ranger skills is that short cast-times and recharges on the vast majority of their attacks invite the player to spam all of their skills and don’t really punish the player for doing so.

law.9410:

I never said my ideas were revolutionary, just pointing out that there’s a time and place for each skill and that skills aren’t spammy. Instead of refuting this, you bashed my ideas.

Your ideas never held any water. You want to argue my suggestions, but instead of talking about anything relevant to my suggestions (which are meant to address the issue of spamming skills), you go on a rant about how CC-chaining is powerful or how it’s important to CC an opponent before attempting to land a powerful attack. Your “points” had nothing to do with the main argument to begin with.

It’s not that rangers are spammy, but the game is spammy. It’s spammy because there’s limited usable skills with excessive cool downs and broken mechanics like weapon swap cool down which completely limits counter play and actually discourages people from using skills properly.

Why should I save my skills for use at the “proper” time when I’ll lose access to them for 8 seconds when I swap weapons? You’re always better to blow through your skills asap and what you have left is spam 1. And if you were saving your skills for proper counter play, what will you be doing in the mean time? Oh right, spam 1. Because I’m saving it for when the enemy does something.

Get rid of weapon swap cool down, double the amount of usable skills on the weapons and let people slot more utilities instead. That’ll do this game a world of good more than any redesign.

Aridia.3042:

It’s not that rangers are spammy, but the game is spammy. It’s spammy because there’s limited usable skills with excessive cool downs and broken mechanics like weapon swap cool down which completely limits counter play and actually discourages people from using skills properly.

Why should I save my skills for use at the “proper” time when I’ll lose access to them for 8 seconds when I swap weapons? You’re always better to blow through your skills asap and what you have left is spam 1. And if you were saving your skills for proper counter play, what will you be doing in the mean time? Oh right, spam 1. Because I’m saving it for when the enemy does something.

Get rid of weapon swap cool down, double the amount of usable skills on the weapons and let people slot more utilities instead. That’ll do this game a world of good more than any redesign.

Bingo!

See swag, this is someone who understands macro issues with the profession designs in this game. All you are doing is the same junk number balancing act the devs have done on top of an extremely limited system with huge meta issues.

I’d like to remind you that your threads are breaking the posting etiquette laid out by the developers and the forum rules by continuously bumping your own threads with “updates”. Also, with the way you are spamming this forum, I’m seriously inclined to think you are intentionally trying to annoy a community that is already frustrated enough.

Aridia.3042:

It’s not that rangers are spammy, but the game is spammy. It’s spammy because there’s limited usable skills with excessive cool downs and broken mechanics like weapon swap cool down which completely limits counter play and actually discourages people from using skills properly.

Why should I save my skills for use at the “proper” time when I’ll lose access to them for 8 seconds when I swap weapons?

While this “spam everything” combat tendency is an issue aggravated by the weapon-swap system, it also comes from the fact that, within any given weapon-set, there aren’t a lot of skills that are balanced by either cast-times long enough or enough prerequisite conditions to the point where it would be a bad idea to instantly activate a given skill at any point in an encounter.

For instance:
[Backbreaker]

• Cast-time: 1¼ seconds
• Recharge: 30 seconds
• Knock your foe down. You inflict a longer knock-down if you struck a weakened foe.
• Damage: 554 (1.5)
• Knock-down: 1 second
• Knock-down vs weakened foes: 2 seconds
• Range: 130
  • This skill only hits up to 1 target.

Given its long cast-time combined with its prerequisite for its most powerful effect, is this a skill that one would use right off the bat upon swapping into Warrior hammer? Probably not. The Warrior hammer already has a source of weakness, so it’d probably be best to attempt some sort of snare that lead into [Fierce Blow] and then follow up with [Backbreaker].

If a skill is costly enough to use with regards to its cast-time or prerequisite conditions in order to achieve a maximum effect, a player may think twice about using it off-handedly in an encounter; choosing to instead wait for better positioning or when better conditions are met.

I’m thinking of more ways to incorporate this sort of system into my suggestions as a means to not only add further legibility to combat but also give players a sense of ownership with some individual skills—a good feeling for actually getting off a skill with a powerful effect instead of simply pressing a bunch of buttons really quickly as most weapon-sets would invite one to do at the moment.

Aridia.3042:

You’re always better to blow through your skills asap and what you have left is spam 1. And if you were saving your skills for proper counter play, what will you be doing in the mean time? Oh right, spam 1. Because I’m saving it for when the enemy does something.

I’d have rather seen a GW2 with generic auto-attacks across all weapon-sets because then we could have addition skills per weapon-set and it would relegate auto-attacks to their proper place: time-fillers in between skills. Auto-attacks shouldn’t be the skills associated with maximum DPS.

Aridia.3042:

Get rid of weapon swap cool down, double the amount of usable skills on the weapons and let people slot more utilities instead. That’ll do this game a world of good more than any redesign.

I actually like that idea a lot. I would still argue that removing weapon-swap cool-downs would make a lot of this game too forgiving, but more skills is almost never a bad thing. If anything, additional skills is more room to add in powerful skills with longer cast-times or prerequisite effects filled by other weapon skills that are already in place.

As for more utilities, I’ve actually been meaning to update my one thread about the global profession changes because we really should be able to equip a utility skill in the elite slot. A change like that would light this game up like nothing else.

Added a torch skills update.

After reading most of your posts I have to say that I don’t like them that much.
I’m convinced that the devs hat a very clear concept for all the classes. While some turned out over- or underpowered, I think their vision of class balance is good as it is.
However you try to flip the whole gameplay around, creating a completely new balance.
This might happen in another game but I hope not in GW2.

Chrispy.5641:

I gotta ask you Swagg. How many hours have you actually played the Ranger in Guild Wars 2?

I’m willing to put money on way less than 500…

Because with my over 1200 it is extremely clear to see that this is a completely different game profession he is trying to design.

I read your response to my last message.

Die, please. Leave us Rangers alone. You smell like a Warrior and you look like one too.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I read your response to my last message.

Die, please. Leave us Rangers alone. You smell like a Warrior and you look like one too.

….Until you read his Warrior suggestions : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Warrior-The-Casual-7-8/3651330

I’m not exactly a big fan of Swagg’s suggestions either, but insults are not the way to go, since everyone is entitled to their opinion.

thefantasticg.3984:

Chrispy.5641:

I gotta ask you Swagg. How many hours have you actually played the Ranger in Guild Wars 2?

I’m willing to put money on way less than 500…

Because with my over 1200 it is extremely clear to see that this is a completely different game profession he is trying to design.

Anyone who hits a thousand hours playing the ranger (or any profession), going through every possbile gear combination, tinkering with every possible trait combination, you start to see reasons why Anet designed things the way they did. You also see why completely redesigning a certain class or another, doesn’t work.

As someone said above increasing pet range would help increase its value in pvp content but what of pve? In pve altrought the pet does hit on every strike the damage even when traited is so minimal its just not worth playing one otherwise then as a tank, the issue is not one of hiting or not mobs wont move around its one of keeping the pet alive and having it deal GOOD damage when speced for it. Make it so pet gain increased damage based on the master ferocity, power condition damage and precision on gear so to promote an actual dpsing BM as an alternate to a pet tank. Reduce base pet stat by 30% and replace the 300 to all stat from beast mastery traitline to

-gain 2% of master total stat per trait point (Up to 60% of the master stat)

this result into:

-Pet tank: good survivability poor damage even with a power boost, the build will work but wont be as good as puting a damage dent as a true damage build and as such is working as intended in the way someone running a tank should be.

-Pet damage: poor survivability but very good damage by using gear like rampager, berserker or assasin, Pet gains heavy damage bonus but has cheap life span if targeted.

The reason is that if the pet damage or survivability was based on the master gear we could actualy use them fully as damaging Tools and it would prevent their use as a mean to deal heavy damage despite running a pure tank build.

Despite this damage increase pet in pve would have to stay unable to do cleaving attack even on melee range. Pet ranger will likely be a pro single target dps unit but a very poor aoe damage user (well i dont mind each class has its weakness after all)

Those that dont trait BM… well pet will likely be dealing 30% less damage then before but as a compensation Anet might actualy beef up ranger somewhere else for non pet user. Altrought my guess is if running a few point in beast mastery becomes viable most ranger wont bother running without some trait in the pet.

OP, are you saying you were owned by a ranger in PVP?

Fext.3614:

OP, are you saying you were owned by a ranger in PVP?

You’re getting off-topic.

In any case, a Ranger is pretty worthless when I kill all of its spirits and CC its pet. I’m trying to give the Ranger more combat options by introducing skill synergy and CC across weapon sets and by changing passive, RNG procs into abilities that the Ranger can actively trigger.

That said, update to Shortbow skills and Longbow is getting an update soon too.

kyubi.3620:

As someone said above increasing pet range would help increase its value in pvp content but what of pve?

Pet does plenty of damage in PvP since the only thing that Ranger’s use are the dogs and occasionally the cats which have plenty of ways of getting in damage (which is often high).

PvE is a mess that requires something outside of the realm of basic buffs in order to fix. PvE is fundamentally different than PvP yet it is balanced on a PvP level with respect to players. It honestly makes no sense. The way to make Ranger effective in PvE would be to fix the issues with big game enemies in PvE (things like defiant, hp pools, damage, etc).

Updates to longbow and axe main-hand. People complained about the idea of an axe main-hand that didn’t have a ranged auto-attack so I wracked my brain to come up with an auto-attack chain that could still provide some in-weapon synergy.