Guild Wars 2

You guys definitely need to take a nice look at Rangers skills and its trait lines, we have some pretty useless traits. Some of theives Traits could use another look at.

Cool stuff I like the current direction of this game, don’t get distracted by all the forum QQ about whatever you have done to the GW2 it isn’t a WoW/Korean MMO clone and it will never be.

As for the future of class and pvp balancing I would like to see two things :

- greatsword or other 2h weapon on necro so we can go melee with cleave mechanic and wreck people’s faces

- a shapenshift mechanic for ranger cause that is also a popular thing in MMOs and many people miss that

- and for the love of god do something with zerging, I joined WvW for the first time in today and it was AMAZINGLY fun till I realized how does it work, all I had to do was to follow the mass of people spamming my swiftness and auto attack at whoever came close

there was nothing I could do alone or in a small group of few friends, always a zerg came along and wiped the floor with us

the big problem in my opinion is the downstate mechanic, wnich gives the bigger groups in small skirmishes an enourmous adventage both in wvw and spvp, I feel like it was unnecessary, it is not fun to use nor to play against

That… or you can just enable world pvp. I mean, you have a massive, living and changing world. There could be a immune buff to any1 who is in an dynamic’s event range so people don’t troll each other. But other than that I see no reason to keep pvp off the world.

You could make missions from vigil/whispers/priory NPCs to find and kill members of other fractions. Simply because each one of them wants to be dominant in the pact and they don’t want others to have too much power.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day.

I think there is more room for anti-stealth capabilities on stuff like; Utility Goggles, Ambush and Spectral Grasp.

There are also many skill types that don’t have any way to deal w/ conditions.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Elementalist
We’re working on the staff in an effort to make it a stronger support weapon, and we also improved the conjure weapons so that they’re stronger for support. You’ll see improvements to all 4 of the conjure weapons to make them stronger and better for support.

We also increased the healing on Water Blast, the radius on Geyser and we reworked
Unsteady Ground to make it function more like line of warding.

Why even bother.
No one is using them, and noone will use them in the future.

Nevertheless good work getting into us for what’s coming, and for once want to hear our voice about balancing
keep up with this!

Alrighty , very good job on what you did with turrets, now hopefully I’ll be able to use them in pvp effectively. BUT there’s one reason that I won’t

Net Shot Just fine, does what it should.

Surprise Shot
NEEDS (needs needs) a damage buff. My rifle auto does more damage than it, so why use it?

Rumble
I think it should stun, and do more damage.

This modification won’t help Turrets much – as somebody who’s used Turrets from level 5 to 80 and onward, it’s my opinion that Turrets will continue to be a substandard spec for as long as they don’t scale to Power. The fire rate bug and ludicrous hitboxes don’t help, either.

That said: I’ve seen what three damage-centric turrets can do to one enemy – and a Kit engineer with the exact same build and armor, using a single Kit, will still have an easier time.

stof.9341:

Nuka Cola.8520:

I won’t comment on anything but mesmer cuz its not the classes i play but i can assure you that no one will bother with Mantra of Concentration even after patch. Who in their right mind will waste an utility slot for 2sec of stability x 2? Increase stability duration to a minimum of 5sec for this thing to be worth running and even then it’ll be very situational.

That’s two stun breakers too. It’s not bad really and the fine grained 2s of stability could be used as counterplay to block CC you see coming.

The difference is that on paper it looks fine, in realtime combat, it’s pretty average. It’s not a horrible skill by any means, but it’s not good.

If the devs are going in the direction of having the mantras work for group support, then i feel that the matra’s effects should be bolstered dependent upon the number of allies that the matra affects.

Example: MoC applies 2s of stability/protection to you, but if you have 2 allies with you, then it should provide perhaps an additional 1s per ally that is near you. Allies are affected by the additional boon time as well

Would you consider moving the warrior warhorn trait to tier 1 and leaving the shout cd reduction where it is? This essentially serves the same purpose of buffing shouts while simultaneously helping with condition removal

JonathanSharp.7094:

Aza.2105:

Mr. Sharp,

I’m confused about monk’s focus, does it no longer heal? Or does it give fury and heal? And what replaces the focus mind trait? Its the trait that makes meditations instant.

Mr. Aza,

Just fixed it to Focused Mind. Now going to another meeting.

Sorry for the confusion.

J

Thank you sir!

JonathanSharp.7094:

Ranger
Sick ‘Em will now apply ‘Revealed” to enemies they target. We want to introduce some counter play to Stealth (players have asked for that for a while), so we thought a pet “catching your scent” might be a cool way to insinuate some anti-stealth into the game.

This will make more difficult for thief to escape traited pets. Good!

Please consider to add this same effect to the “Guard” shout, it makes sense (and the irony of a stealted pet jumping over an stealthed thief is just too delicious)

JonathanSharp.7094:

Ranger

To help Rangers support allies, we increased the ability ranger pets have to support allies. For instance, the Bear condition removal isn’t strong enough, so we’ll be improving that. Moas and Fern Hound will also be improved.

There will also be # changes to some of the Ranger weapons.

F2 Pet buffs should be guaranteed on the ranger owner

F2 support skills should ignore range for the pet owner so that they’ll be guaranteed to get the buff. Then party members, then allies with AOE cap should be the priority in which the buffs get dished out. Go try using F2 buffs in dragons or Scarlet invasions. Half the time you won’t get your own F2 buffs.

It’s counter productive for LB/SB/Axe rangers to cast pet buffs because not only do you not get the buff in crowds, but in order to get the buff, you’re often negating your own range advantage in order to be close to your pet, or it is kept on passive which negates your pet damage entirely. This is especially being a problem with LB due to the range penalty.

Longbow1 needs a chance cripple

Optimal killzone for the LB is at 1k+ range. Problem is that there’s nothing to CC the target to keep them there even for a second shot. There’s no root with that range and the pet cannot close the distance to the target before they get to sub 1k range. (That’s assuming the pet you picked actually could CC.) Your increasing LB4’s push back range helped a bit, but it makes no sense to blow a CC to follow up with an auto attack. You’re pretty much forced to use rapid fire after LB4 because of how long RF’s channel is.

LB1 needs a chance cripple to allow the shooter to take a meaningful second shot.

Alternatives involve reworking Predator’s Instinct so that it procs on crit instead of based on sub 25% HP. Lower the ICD to like 9 seconds on a sigil.

Further alternative is to unnerf LB damage all together so that there’s no range penalty.

Super Riceman.8702:

I think there is more room for anti-stealth capabilities on stuff like; Utility Goggles, Ambush and Spectral Grasp.

You need to realize the Dev’s have to be very careful of abilities that reveal stealth. Unlike games the majority of players who compare GW2 to other games and their stealth mechanics, the big difference for GW2 is that stealth is not perm for any class. Some only have certain skills that can do it, and making those skills to the point of useless because “everyone” all of a sudden has easy access to stealth reveal would significantly hurt several classes.

This change alone could mean I’ll have to be very cautious approaching a ranger on my mesmer as Decoy is almost guaranteed to fail depending on implementation (active / passive ability).

Lucav.9547:

Would you consider moving the warrior warhorn trait to tier 1 and leaving the shout cd reduction where it is? This essentially serves the same purpose of buffing shouts while simultaneously helping with condition removal

Actually, I think pulling the shout CD trait back to adept is best as then it mirrors the banner build in what’s required. Banners require a grandmaster and an adept. Why should shouts require a grandmaster and a master? This is simply changing shouts to be as viable as banners to build, with the same options in the master trait slot.

• We’re reworking the combat log to make it more easily used. This will involve help from a ton of departments, but it will help every player in the game. By providing you better combat information, you’ll be able to better make tweaks to your build, and you’ll be able to better adjust your play to deal with difficult encounters.

An ability to copy from the combat log(or chat in general) would be nice. Then the community could write some parsers to give the player some nice statistics on how they are doing. This would be also good for drop and other type of research related to information that is displayed via the chat log.

Laeir.5197:

Thief:

Larcenous Strike — If you reduce the boon steal from 2 to 1, this skill is going to need something. Maybe you could move the Initiative cost back down from 2 to 1, or reduce the cast time to improve its DPS. Otherwise you could just go back to the original Flanking Strike design while retaining the improved pathing and have a better skill.

As this guy says if it costs the same amount initiative you’re nerfing a build that isn’t as high DPS as other builds like D/P and D/d and narrowed down the viable builds to us rather than giving us diversity.

I hope you guys intend to give back something to balance out the nerf and don’t tell me we have Bountiful Theft cause that doesn’t even strip all the might Stacks someone may have.

Also, Sharp, what about Mesmer’s Torch and Scepter? People been asking to improve these two for a year now and the only significant thing we got is being able to dodge roll while under The Prestige. Phantasmal Mage is the absolute worst phantasm, its so bad it doesn’t make sense. How is that this phantasm has the longest CD on them all, has one of the if not the longest icd on attacks and deal absolutely no damage on a condi build or a power build? You guys need to add some love to The Prestige (add poison as an example), completely change current iMage, Scepter autos are~~~~~ need a rework, Confusing Images also deserve some love. Not to forget Mind Stab on GS because its extremely poor for its long CD and root.

Would QoL for the necromancer include a 900 range on axe?

anzenketh.3759:

An ability to copy from the combat log would be nice. Then the community could write some parsers to give the player some nice statistics on how they are doing. This would be also good for drop and other type of research that is displayed via the chat log.

Hopefully it doesn’t lead to more elitism as has happened in plenty of other games.
The game at this time doesnt require a gear check for anything, doesnt mean people wouldnt use such a tool to start doing such things.

Perhaps if LS is reduced to 1 boon steal, we can see it reduced back to 1 init.

Aridia.3042:

Longbow1 needs a chance cripple

My opinion, that best thing they could make is to make “Opening strike” not small 1 stack of vulnerability, but cripple target for some time. And, probably, make it refreshing every X (maybe ~15-20) secs in battle, with rename of this passive. It’ll help and sounds logical.

SynfulChaot.3169:

Dristig.9678:

I’m on Blackgate. I know all about fighting zergs. I would hope they could come up with something like WoW did and give them increased resistance to AoE not just buff their HP way up like they have been doing.

Even something like deprioritizing summons in the AoE 5 count would be better than just buffing HP so high that no player can kill a Ranger Elite summon.

I don’t have the answer I just hope they can be more creative than a 70% hp buff.

I recall a forum posting by ex-dungeon dev Robert Hrouda that discussed how they considered the AoE resistance then realized, through testing, that it would make the ranger class far too powerful, at least in dungeon PvE.

I’m guessing it’s just the first in a line of changes for the pet. I don’t think it’s the only change we’ll be seeing for them ever. Just the first.

Specifically – that very few skills in this game are not some kind of AoE.

Dristig.9678:

“Pet HP split between PvE and PvP
We wanted to make pets and summons more viable in PvE/WvW while making sure they didn’t become too strong in PvP.”

Lumping WvW in with PvE is really scary for this change. Summons that can handle PvE levels of damage in smaller scale WvW are going to be very overpowered. If for instance you buff summons to be able to stand in AoE in PvE and that strength is brought to WvW how are you supposed to kill them out in the field?

This assumes that WvW was EVER balanced around small scale engagements.
Obviously it was not. It would be terrific if it was! ….but sadly it doesn’t look as though it ever will be ….and guess what, Rangers suffered horribly in Zergs for it and STILL weren’t even in the top-3 classes for small team Roaming before this. (not even /w spirits)

Please, consider making conjure-swap instant like weapon/ kit swapping. I know that, unlike engineers, elementalists have a high skill pool naturally, and so I understand that conjures have so many restrictions. But this takes the fun out of them. I think that if they gave a sense of permanency, players would like them a lot more. Take out the duration, take out the charges, but keep the 60s cooldown.

Here’s how it could possibly work:
1. Instant-swapping, and an environmental version is automatically placed at your feet for allies to pick.
2. No charges, no durations, but the utility skill still has a 60s cooldown.
3. Here’s the big thing. The 60s cooldown could either apply after the conjure weapon is cast, or if you think conjures need a more rigid restriction, then only after the conjure weapon is swapped out.

For example, I would cast frost bow. For as much time as I would wish to, I would keep it in my hands. However, once I would need any of my other 20 skills, especially if I need the survival or if the bow’s skills are under cooldown, I would swap it out, and be unable to use it for 60s.

There you have it: similar to kits, but with a cooldown restriction to make up for the profession’s higher skill pool. This makes conjures a lot funnier and less stressful than as they are now, with one minute duration and 15-25 charges. The environmental version for allies to pick could still have a limited duration, though.

Also, because of the way conjure shield works, I can’t see it ever being viable otherwise, unless it gets a serious rework. Conjure Shield would be the perfect swap-to conjure for whenever you are in danger, but that would require instant-casting and maybe even stun-breaking (important for all-conjure builds). Using its defensive skills after getting bursted down is usually ineffective.

Nice move for the targeting, but it would be great to be able to do custom targeting binds where the target command could take arguments (if you ever played CoH, like that) – the ability to add arguements like :

Nopets – ignores friendly pets/clones
Notmypet – ignores my pets
NotAllyPet – ignore’s allies’ pets
Enemy – Ignores friendly NPC
Hostile – targets only the red NPCs
NotHostile – Ignores red non-ally NPCs
Alive – Only allies that are not defeated
Downed – only targets downed allies
Defeated – Only targets defeated allies
NotDefeated – Ignores defeated allies
And also allowing us to put in a name or part of a name would be awesome.

The targeting updates and other quality-of-life improvements are AMAZING.
The balance changes, especially with respect to the ele, seem very underwhelming. Here are my patch-specific thoughts. While there are, of course, many other problems facing eles (just like with every other class), I’ll focus on two that this patch specifically touches upon.

1) Increasing ele’s support potential will not increase its viability in tPvP. The problem with Ele’s in tPvP was never with their lack of support options. The problem was staying alive long enough to provide that support. Ele’s right now need to build very selfishly to survive against thieves and CC warriors in higher-end tPvP. This leaves little room for them to take support skills, and eles that take these support skills will become even bigger targets for the enemy team.

The survivability problem comes down to this: Due to the healing and mobility nerfs, Ele has no defense to being trained by thieves and CC-warriors, and is quickly focused down by any competent team. This was why Phantaram and Mogwow (two of the top eles, playing for two of the top teams) chose to play a different class in the PAX tournament. You talked about how shaving some of the other classes down might help this, but the patch notes don’t indicate any relevant shaving (except making larcenous strike steal one boon instead of two, which isn’t going to help much in terms of damage).

Suggestions:
- Increase ele mobility by reverting the RtL’s CD nerf, but keep the distance reduction. A 1.2k distance leap on a 20s cooldown will give the ele some breathing room to recover from bursts, without letting the ele constantly reset fights. Other, far tankier classes can disengage much better than the ele currently can (warriors, thieves, mesmers, rangers, certain engineer builds). The ones that can’t (guardian and necro) have other survivability mechanics. Increasing ele mobility will give ele more breathing room to recover from a heavy burst and time for his team to react to the ele being bursted.

- Increase base healing on ele’s healing skills, but reduce how well healing scales w/ healing power. This increases the survivability of DPS/hybrid ele builds without overpowering ele bunker builds. Right now, it often isn’t worth it for a DPS ele to cast his water-skill heals because the damage he takes while casting those skills outpaces the health he’d get back.

2) Conjures need to be a lot better than your default weapon skills, otherwise there is no point in taking them. Consider what you are giving up for a conjure: a utility slot, access to all your main weapon skills, and the ~1s cast time involved in summoning the conjure. Unless the benefits of having this conjure outweigh the cost, there is no reason to slot it. In certain PvE situations, there are benefits to summoning conjures (frost bow for destroying large structures, lightning hammer for blind spam vs. dumb AI, greatsword for high DPS when a mob is against a wall). But these situations rarely if ever arise in pvp.

Part of the problem goes back to survivability. Most viable pvp builds are either built around taking multiple defensive utilities to survive, or taking arcane blast+wave to try and instagib your opponent before dying. Simply put, you’re giving up a LOT to slot a conjured weapon, and the conjured weapon needs to be powerful enough to warrant the loss.

Suggestions:

- I think there are two ways to go about making conjures worthwhile (you can ofc mix and match). The first is to make conjures serve specific utility roles: the ele summons the conjure, activates one or two abilities, and then drops it. For this to work, I really think the cast time of conjures needs to become instant, or at least much much quicker. Otherwise, the utility simply isn’t worth the time cost. Furthermore, the cooldown on the conjure needs to be much lower. It seems like the current cooldowns for conjured weapons are based on the assumption that you use all of the summoned weapon’s charges, then pick up the other weapon, and then use all of that weapon’s charges. If you use the conjured for only a few utility skills before dropping it, then you wind up paying a much higher cooldown cost.

- The second way to go about this it to make it so that the conjure temporarily buffs the ele’s combat potential across the board (damage and survivability/mobility). Broadly speaking, the conjure would be similar to signet of rage or a ranger spirit — you’re stronger when you’re using it than when you’re not, but you can only use it for a short duration and it has a long CD. For this to work, the conjured weapon skills need to do a lot more damage, have lower cooldown times, and some of their skills need to be reworked to provide more survivability.

Post 1 and 3 – great work.

On sigils/runes – have you considered some more interaction between the two? For example, each rune has three specific sigils associated with it and wearing a full set of those runes would make each of those sigils grant some additional bonus (different for each of the sigils), maybe strengthen one of the rune effects.

On traits – my opinion is that the sudden and big changes like moving a trait from 10 to 30 or 5 to 25 really need to stop. Smaller changes at a much higher frequency would give you more room to experiment. Which is related to an another thing I wanted to talk about – sometimes, even with the best of intentions, you swing and you miss. When a change turns out differently then you expected it to, you should not be afraid to revert it or to keep tweaking it. Also, paying attention to traits that rarely, if ever, get used and replacing them is something that would definitely be well received.

Post 2 . . . :/

I can only speak for warrior, but we have been hurt in PvE almost every patch, and if you believe its justified then I can live with that, but . . . the kind of changes you keep making are really taking decisions away rather than creating more options. Example : Berserker’s Power and Heightened Focus both ending up at 30 points, making the
30/whatever/30 the only real choice. Also, trading PvE nerfs for PvP buffs is not the way to go. Shout buff could happily have occurred without hitting PvE yet again.

SynfulChaot.3169:

PvE splitting is nice, but I think the real takeaway here is that PvE is now finally getting considered for balance instead of ignored. And that is great.

+1

Allow thieves to move while using Pistol Whip in PvE or remove delay prior to channeling(via trait).For mainhand pistols, you could add some short party buff on every crit/cond apply(also via trait?), that could help out with support aspect.

Edit: or make pistol 2 buff you with dummy ability, allowing you to buff allies with unload while that buff is active, that could create some rudimentary rotation in PvE at least.

WOOT! i’m liking knowing what’s coming up =D!!

Looks good to me.

“We’re also looking at shaving the efficiency of Flanking Strike slightly, so that it now only removes 1 boon instead of 2.”

Bad idea. Boon spamming classes will lose of their hard counters. The other thing is that Sword dagger weaponset will be useless again. Dancing dagger is so slow that it can’t be used effectively, tactical strike is not very useful due to quite short duration if you compare it with warrior’s CC and Infiltrator’s strike/shadow return is no longer stun breaker and it is bugy as hell. So it will be worse than before. Instead of making more builds viable you are just destroying one of them.

BTW: When do you plan to return Shadowstep and Engi’s Rocket boots to underwater skills? You temporarily disabled them like year ago and you still can’t fix it?

Increasing pet HP in PvE won’t help anything. It’s not needed for map exploration. What is needed is a damage taken reduction on pets in dungeons. Having more HP won’t matter unless the HP pool is twice (or more) of the player HP and that’s not gonna happen. Reduce the damage pets take from bosses/AoE attacks in dungeons.

Pets (especially necro minions) need better AI. They need to attack the players target, every time, all the time, when the player does. Not standing around 2-5 seconds doing nothing (Flesh Golem). Bone minions and jagged horrors (the little minions) still run off and attack random targets, regardless of what the player is attacking, even if the player is attacking nothing.

Necro Death traitline is the most sorely lacking one, not Blood. Since pets are unreliable and because of that unviable in almost every situation this trait line is mostly useless as well. Pet AI fixes are the first step towards fixing that. Also the CD’s on pets is far too long. If a pet dies it’s a useless utility slot for ~60 seconds AND a long cast time once it’s up again. That needs to be reduced.

Tab targeting needs a sticky target option. Clicking on the game world will not deselect your target.

Just some other suggestions to throw in the mix:

Guardians: Please make some improvements to Virtues 25, 1% dps per boon is not enough for investing that much into the line. Perhaps also look into the adept traits and add alternates to the ones there, such as another dps, boon benefit, or virtue effect increaser. Or perhaps adding some sort of advantage to having virtues on cooldown. Another adept trait idea, 5% dps increase for each virtue on recharge (figure off the top my head, needs to be balanced of course).

Necros: Minions man, minions. They still need some serious love. Please throw them a bone.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Trait tooltips
Traits will now have tooltips in the same way that skills do. This means that you’ll be able to see EXACTLY how long an effect lasts, what its cooldown is, etc. We want this system to be as transparent as possible for our players, so that they can make the best decisions when creating their profession builds.

Skill tooltips as they pertain to traits
As traits impact a skill, we’ve also made it so that as skills are impacted by a trait, the skill’s tooltips adjust accordingly. Again, we want players to be able to see these details in their builds, so that they can build their characters exactly the way they want! We’ll be using different colors to show this so that it’s easier for players to see!

I think this goes without saying. The current system where players need to test every single trait and skill in Heart of the Mists needs to go, but I have to ask… will you guys be going over all your tooltip data to ensure that it is accurate? Even if you add more information, if that information is still incorrect/inconsistent, it is still useless.

Also, please go over all tooltips for runes and sigils also. You have an ungodly number of runes/sigils that are either 1) broken, 2) vague, or 3) incorrect as far as durations or cooldowns are concerned.

This spreadsheet number crunch approach won’t work for conjures because of a few core problems with the mechanics of the conjures (search for any conjure topic in the ele subforum). For starters, auto attacks should not use up any charges. Take the axe for example: the auto attack is fast but with only 15 charges, I’m forced to not attack so I can use the other skills. This applies to all conjures except the greatsword because of it’s channeled auto.

Nothing about hobosacks so far but I’ll stay hopeful. Come on Anet fix em

(engineer kit backpacks must go, basically)

Thank you for adding Stability to the Engi, it is a huge addition for some of us. Added to the Stealth change, I can now see the possibility of a ‘scout’ build that does nothing but run ahead in WvW and checks on status of the other roaming groups/zergs. (Similar to one my favorite Eve ship classes, the Covert Ops frigate.)

I agree though that turrets still need some looking at in larger engagements. If possible, they should inherit and scale Toughness and Power from the player (so we have other options with builds). This relates to an interesting question – when you discuss ‘pet’ balancing, why aren’t Turrets part of this? Is the code really that different between Pet/Minon and Turret?

Also, please consider scaling Kit Power off the weapon wielded – really, give us a better reason for considering Legendary and/or Ascended weapons. Or post on the subforum why you cannot do that, followed with an ETA for when the Kit max will become Ascended.

Finally, some real work into the game instead of the fluffy living story junk.

Although, Warriors are probably in a better place than a decent place. And 9/10 warriors are greatsword warriors. Never seen anything else really, and I NEVER see a shield warrior. Some work into this would be good.

And some work into P/P thieves would be nice. Other than spamming unload.

My thoughts…

Ranger
Look at the longbow. For PvE players, Hunter’s Shot is all but useless. Stealth, when we’ve got the ability to fight from range while our pets tank, is worthless in PvE. Rapid Fire applying 10 stacks of vulnerability over time (one per shot) means it cannot benefit from the full stack of vulnerability. The old Hunter’s Shot applying all 10 stacks meant each shot from Rapid Fire could benefit from the extra damage. I’d recommend changing it back and giving Rangers stealth via a utility skill (if/when new skills are added to the game).

Elementalist
As a PvE player I spend a lot of time running alone or in small groups. Giving staff a bit more potency in the support department if fine, but don’t do so at the expense of what little damage the staff is capable of doing. Don’t pigeonhole staff users into group support and don’t force PvE elementalists into running daggers, scepters, and foci.

Also, Air Attunement for staff needs some work. As is stands, Air Attunement is the attunement you never spend time in unless your using it for Swiftness when getting from Point A to Point B. Chain Lightning is next to worthless against single mobs, and the casting time for Lightning Surge is way too long.

Great, great. Seriously looking foward to Blood Magic changes.
Also, very happy about Ranger changes. Even if simple fix from World of Warcraft, where pet, if not targeted directly had 90% AoE damage resistance would be a lot better, glad to see something is on your mind at least.
Really looking foward to Longbow changes, redoing Barrage, removing range requirement from LB #1, adding some hard cast shots maybe as I suggested ? Can’t wait, big hopes. Anyway, will be posting my Ranger fixes on days. Power Range Rangers ftw!

Maybe there is a place for some of the necrotic minions to add to this support theme.
Looking through the minions descriptions and traits I didn’t notice anything that seemed to have a large team support element. Perhaps some healing/protection elements could be included…

ex. trait for bone minions – on putrid explosion, aoe heal/regen
trait/skill description of flesh wurm – apply protection to nearby allies around the point of initial cast and area teleported to.
trait Vampiric Master – siphoned health from minions heals all party members within earshot
trait/skill description of Rigor Mortis(bone fiend) – on cast create a well of blood at the planted location.
trait/skill description of Charge(flesh golem) – allies within earshot gain swiftness and fury

These are just some ideas I came up with off the top of my head in 5 mins, but the point is team support could possibly be an option with a minion build, not just straight dmg, condition application, and cc.

I’m a little curious, what are some of the other minion changes in the works?

You need stealth on longbow in pvp dude. It’s a lot better. Just use rapid fire to stack vuln. Everyone stacks vuln. If you’re the only one doing it, it’s a major problem.

Chopps.5047:

Dristig.9678:

“Pet HP split between PvE and PvP
We wanted to make pets and summons more viable in PvE/WvW while making sure they didn’t become too strong in PvP.”

Lumping WvW in with PvE is really scary for this change. Summons that can handle PvE levels of damage in smaller scale WvW are going to be very overpowered. If for instance you buff summons to be able to stand in AoE in PvE and that strength is brought to WvW how are you supposed to kill them out in the field?

Pets already basically are losers in the current state. Ascended weapons means they die faster now and no one kills the pet in roaming combat anyways…

What’s scary is the way rangers are considered not viable by all the gvg’ers and wvw’ers and then there’s people who would say that. Clearly the community is split on rangers. The old fallacy: ranger is either OP or UP. When will you guys in the community stop holding ranger down?

Yes, this has been the problem with rangers every time. Any nerfs due to spvp and the ranger becomes crippled in pve and wvw. Any buffs due to pve/wvw and the ranger becomes OP in spvp. I know ANET doesn’t really want to have any balance splits for spvp and the rest of the game, but if any class needs to be split between the gametypes, itd be rangers.

Xovian.8572:

Super Riceman.8702:

I think there is more room for anti-stealth capabilities on stuff like; Utility Goggles, Ambush and Spectral Grasp.

You need to realize the Dev’s have to be very careful of abilities that reveal stealth. Unlike games the majority of players who compare GW2 to other games and their stealth mechanics, the big difference for GW2 is that stealth is not perm for any class. Some only have certain skills that can do it, and making those skills to the point of useless because “everyone” all of a sudden has easy access to stealth reveal would significantly hurt several classes.

This change alone could mean I’ll have to be very cautious approaching a ranger on my mesmer as Decoy is almost guaranteed to fail depending on implementation (active / passive ability).

Even w/ just these three, they aren’t on every class and are not “easy” choices to make.
I don’t think everyone should get it but there are clearly skills that could be helped.

Utility Goggles alone wouldn’t make stealth useless because of how the player has to decide between a stun-break or a kill.

Spectral Grasp is slow and dodge-able. Ambush requires them to pass through a specific point and like goggles, it has a long-enough cooldown that you don’t just fire and forget unless you are sure you can win.

Fikston.5296:

Nothing about hobosacks so far but I’ll stay hopeful. Come on Anet fix em

(engineer kit backpacks must go, basically)

I gave up on that ages ago, though I posted support since the thread came up again.

My personal gripe with Engi appearance stems more from Medium Armor’s fetish with trench coats. SO glad mine is Sylvari, their cultural armor helps with that immensely.

P/P is frankly terrible and it’s nice to see it’s finally getting some actual work done. I kind of question the move of adding support to it though. P/P is kind of the only single target ranged damage option, and it’s frankly crap at doing damage. Obviously pistols are a delicate issue (can’t really touch 1/2 or 4/5 without breaking a bunch of stuff) so that leaves one skill to make p/p viable with.

Unload needs work for pve (not going to get into pvp because that’s way complicated and even suggestions often end up causing pain in the lower back region for some people). It’s just terribad at what it does. Wanna not get killed? Gotta dodge and break unload. Wanna do damage? Gotta not dodge and get killed. Add a % evasion to unload, for example attacks made against you while channeling unload have a 20% miss chance. By not having to break 80% of your unloads early you end up increasing the actual damage output. Or let unload continue channeling through dodges as long as your target stays in range and inside your firing arc.

Alternatively, get rid of the % vuln stacking trait (does anyone ever even use that?) and add that vuln stacking to unload, no cooldown but lower proc chance. The notion of messing up your target’s armor by blasting them repeatedly with a flurry of gunfire makes sense to me, anyway.

Even more alternatively-er. Unload is 5 init, 1 3/4s channel and 8 shots. Change it to 5 init, 2s channel and 10 shots, adjusting it to maintain the same DPS it does now. Then change the unload mechanic to work like the “hold down to dash longer” skills, taking 1 initiative per every 2 shots every .4 seconds. This would solve a lot of issues – you can now dodge without gimping your pve damage output by letting go of the button at the appropriate time. You can still dump initiative for damage, but now you can more precicely ensure you’ve still got enough to interrupt critical skills (not stuck channeling and thus unable to headshot, not forced to choose between doing laughable autoattack damage and being 1-2 init short when it’s time for headshot).

These are just some suggestions off the top of my head, but for the love of Abaddon, fix thief single target ranged damage in pve somehow.

The thing about support that bothers me is that there are 0 abilities that target allies in the game, even when it would make sense with the ability (like the guardian’s Merciful Intervention, or single target rally abilities). It would make playing support more interactive and interesting, I understand the desire to stray away from making a pure healing class, but what’s wrong with having some abilities that cure conditions on an ally and heals in an area around him, maybe going so far as allowing abilities like the elementalist’s staff auto-attack in water attunement to target allies?

As a mesmer I would like to able to throw my Greatsword 2 ability at allies for the might. There could also be an ability for mesmers which places a clone on an ally and heals for a small amount over time, and when you shatter it will have a beneficial effect based on what shatter it was [Larger heal (maybe AoE), retaliation, cure 1 condition, 1 second invulnerability (in order for f1-f4 shatters)]

This would also allow for more support focused weapon sets, as they could be viable solo as well with the lack of a pure AoE emphasis (like the guardian staff). Just make it so that you will automatically cast a single target support ability on yourself if you have an enemy targeted.

Anyway I feel like I ranted enough, the point is that I think having no single target support spells (that allow you to select who you cast it on) is silly especially with tab targeting. It’s one of the reasons I believe you don’t notice players being around you that much a lot of the time (as you don’t have those moments where you call out for an important ability that could save you). Right now there is a lot of “Accidental” or “Passive” support.

Super Riceman.8702:

Even w/ just these three, they aren’t on every class and are not “easy” choices to make.

In a standard group of 5 or so that means at least 2 would be common. While i’m not a fan of “group is how balance is done”, in this case and group dynamics (spvp &wvw) makes it potentially “too” easy to kill certain classes &, group setups and that would be a very bad thing.

Most of the “stealth complaints” are regulated to thief. I’ve never heard people really complain about other classes ability to use it. I’d almost surmise that the counters should work for specific classes and not necessarily guaranteed for others. By doing that they’d have to have 2 versions of stealth, which isn’t really feasible, but i suppose it’s something they have at least considered.

I forgot to mention, Ele Staff Air Attunement needs some serious love in the dmg department, both #1 and #2 are very weak.

And personally I would like #1 to become single target and do the dmg Fireball does, and #2 to become a chain lightning effect with a little bit more kick to the dmg, like 10-15%. Or instead of the dmg buff reduce the cooldown to 8 seconds to bring it in line with the other #2 Staff skills that have much shorter spammable cooldowns.

I really hope you consider, at the very least just boost their dmg if there’s no time for the slight rework, even 10% would go a long way.

Its nice that ranger pets are getting looked at. However there are a number of other issues with the class that need resolving.

1. No real access to boons
2. Signets with bad “active” effects
3. Overly expensive “traiting”
4. Lack of pet skill diveristy
5. Pet F2 skill fails
6. No real meaningfull pet control ability

There needs to be a lot more work on the ranger class overall than just a couple of tweaks to a few skills. And to be frank very few players Ive seen even bother with “sick em”, or any pet utility skill for that matter such is the lackluster nature of them and the pets.

Personally I would like to see Rangers get access to boons properly, without idiotically long cooldown times on skills.

For example in PVE only ;
“Rampage as One”
Reduce the cooldown time before recasting
Allow might to trigger on the PLAYERS attacks as well as pet attacks.

Along with this a complete reworking of ranger sigs so that the active effects are actually usefull. 99% of the time they are unused “active” since they are either pointless or completely ineffective.

I also believe that the LB needs a buff in base damage and additonal effects on skills to be fully effective as a weapon choice. Point Blank Shot should synergise with skill 1, so that the KB range is increased to 1200 (putting the target at “long” range for #1 skill damage. Also skill #1 should have an additional effect in addition to increased damage at range, possibly more “vulnerable” stacking or “cripple” to synergise with point blank shot.

And lastly for the love of god reduce the damage split on ranger/pet. If I want a pet to do more of my damage I would spent points in the BM trait tree. A simple system is to start at a base 10% split, with each 10 points in the BM tree increasing the power split to the pet (ie : 10 trait points in BM = 20% / 20 trait points in BM 30% / 30 trait points in BM 40%).

This above method allows those who WANT to utilise pets more a feesible option to boost them and those that DONT want to to do an option to ignore pets if they so choose.

Pet HP buff in PvE confirmed! Woot woot!

We should be able to more safely add full pet damage to our DPS calculations for dungeons.