Guild Wars 2

I wonder when ANet will do anything to teach players WHEN to knockback. I’ve seen loads of players (mainly rangers, unfortunately) who knockback enemies just because the ability is up.

I just said in Mad King’s Labyrinth for people not to knockback because of the melee players and to my surprise I had to hear after a while things like “kittenol. Yes, don’t use your abilities…”, followed by many “Yeah, just auto-attack”, “Troll, Durr”.

Is it that so hard for a brain to process the idea that by knockbacking an enemy all melee (and some mid-ranged) will have to stop attacking to go after the foe? Or what about the mob about to be frozen by an elementalist when an “expert” ranger goes there hits his mentally inane longbow 4 just to reset mob’s stacks and screw with the whole group? I’ve seen people doing that all the time on PvE/WvW and quite surprising on sPvP.

ANet made a tutorial for dodging. When will they take some care about this “pass the mob” fest and make a “Defiant for dummies”?

*By the way, I’m not creating this thread in hopes that people will read and try to learn anything as many of those mentioned players will never read it.

I understand how you feel. Though initially I thought you’re talking about the knockbacks regular Skeletons and other mobs in Labirynth have. Do not solo these mobs, or you will get frustrated. XD

Also, players – please stop with knocbkack. Unless the monster is clearly going to attack YOU…why would you?
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About those…“intelligent” people taunting you for making sense, don’t worry. I once said on map chat that sometimes I get trolls asking me dumb questions and people felt like “bullying me” similarly to the way they did it to you. It’s just human/moron nature, you can’t fight it. XD

90% of the time it is the brainless bearbows and the problem has only gotten worse with the ranger update. Don’t expect it to go away anytime soon..

Can’t believe I’m saying this but I actually want mobs to have defiant stacks now.

I believe I was with Harbinger in the Labrynth, and I do have to say, I almost, almost went off the deep end and really tore into everyone that was using the knockbacks, and believe me…I don’t usually say anything, let alone get nasty, but I just might have gone and gotten myself a temporary suspension if I had said anything.

It’s stupid is what it is, even I know not to use my knockback when there are those in melee range(whether that’s playing my ranger, or using the hammer with my warrior), unless it’s to keep a foe from getting to a destination(Skritt thieves in DryTop).

As for the Skeletons and others in the Labrynth with knockback…stability Yoroiookami, stability, that’s all I have to say on that one.

There is a difference between a brainless longbow/shortbow ranger and one that reads skills. Unfortunately, most do not read skills so therefore it’s spam city.

These are called 1 2 3 4 5 players, and people like this are the reason I actually appreciate defiance on champions. It’s a multiplayer game, you just have to roll with it.

I really like it when people knock the High Viscount of Candy Corn off of his gooey candy patch, right when mellee is about to DPS him and my Necro is about to Lich burst him for 200k.

Man, that sure looked cool though!

I have noticed that a lot of the knockbacks end up happening as a result of people leveling up. With the amount of mobs killed farming in the labyrinth and that most people will have both food and the new utility items on for more magic find you level very quickly

The best part is that there’s virtually no reason to ever use ranger longbow #4 when fighting bosses, be it world bosses, dungeons or the like.

The only valid reason to ever use Point Blank Shot in these settings is to get off a quick interrupt, or to burn a defiant stack.

It is a DPS loss and should never be used by longbow rangers over the auto attack. (Unless you’re at point blank range, in which case it does SLIGHTLY more damage, which is never worth losing the cooldown you may need)

Although Rangers are probably the main culprit there are also rifle wielding engineers and even warriors who use knockback. Seeing a warrior use it on his rifle rather than switching to a melee weapon when the mob got close made me realize the reason is probably fear of taking damage. It was very frustrating to me on my sword wielding mesmer when the warrior knocked the mob out of range and I had to go chase it down.

I do hope that players someday learn mindlessly mashing every ability as soon as it’s off cooldown isn’t the best way to play your class.

I hope. But I am not hopeful.

There’s too much zerg content where bad players simply shrug off responsibility to everyone else, those bad players are not going to learn. You just have to accept that zerg content and open world PvE will just mean that you have to put up with these brainless players. As unintuitive as it is, keep Defiant on champs (as champs without defiant stacks confuses new players), and if possible try to keep your own pulls/gap closers available while in melee.

A lot of these people cannot be reasoned with, as they seem to pride themselves on their lack of skill and basic understanding, and many will grow hostile if you “try to tell them how to play”.

Harbinger.5129:

I wonder when ANet will do anything to teach players WHEN to knockback.

Thanks, I’ve had this so many times the past weeks, I kind of expect it when I’m in an open world megaserver pug but when I’m already soloing a camp and the veteran is the last one standing at 5% health and I try to backstab him, a ranger runs in and knooockbacks – and that camp after camp until I waypoint as they have the habit to follow me. Same happens with necros and mesmers. I don’t complain if I come into a camp while somebody else is already soloing it but I sure won’t “follow” them.
Sorry but had to get that off my chest. And yeah it’s annoying in these big zergs as well but I would’ve thought that a wvw regular would know better. So maybe there should be a knockback tutorial for everybody.

It is especially poor form to use those skills during zerg content or when everyone is about to unleash all their aoe on the target and some knockbacker throws it completely out of the damage zone and puts everyone on cooldown for their tiny damage skill.

knockback is something you use when SOLO, not in groups (dungeons/pvp excluded), it is a strategic skill to keep you from DYING and give you some escape distance.

This is one of the problems with a game that doesn’t have a tutorial and players have to learn from other players.
I really hate those players whose entire motivation is to hit the boss or champ with their knockback as soon as it comes out of invulnerable status or loses all it’s stacks of defiance. You know those people, they’re the same ones that makes posts like “FIRST!!! hahahah lolercopter!!!” and that’s all they type cause that’s all their brain can process.

Thanks for negating hundreds of thousands of damage for your crappy little knockback. I hope you feel special.

I would give ANYTHING for Anet to remove knockback, blowback, and long duration fear from the player portion of the game and give us more meta interrupts that don’t change the position of the enemies.

How will you teach a very situational skill to all players?

Knockback is a very powerfull skill.
It has defensive as well as offensive functions.

However the thing you mention is only part of the Roflstomp content, where the enemy is usually zerged down.

While it is true that this is true for 90% of the PvE experience (even though they are trying to change that), it isn`t for WvW and PvE, where placement is actually vital and the enemy will (mostly) be greater affected by the knockback (desoriented, pushed off a cliff, etc… )

Yes, Rangers have easy access to the skill, thanks to the longbow.
However they are not the only ones with it.

It is a very interesting gamemechanic and for everyone who thinks it should vanish I can only shake my head.

Like every other skill and ability it has to be learned and as much as you rage, there will always be someone who messes up.
Even more so in a giant Zerg.
That is what happens.

Calm down, deal with it or try to explain it to them.
You won`t win this fight, but you can reduce the problem for a given time.

So they negate thousands of damage for a brief moment? So what? Yes you are farming or fighting, but if you are a good player you have the damage back up in seconds.

As long as it is no special timed tactic where for a short window all stars allign and you can kill half the health in one beautiful attack, calm down and play a few seconds longer.

The game is supposed to be more then hitting autoattack (as i said supposed, sadly it isn`t which only fuels your anger, I know)

Video Games in the 90s : children under 14y can’t get past the first level of most games.
Video Games in 201x : video game companies have to teach players to use the appropriate button at the appropriate time.

I wonder if in 203x, video game companies will have to teach players how to use a mouse.

Rangers use the skill not only to knock back an enemy, but also to interrupt an enemy attack. An enemy that might just have caused harm to the players in melee range, and the players complaining about the ranger attack. The interrupt is only seen by the ranger when the word ‘interrupt’ comes up.

Ouroboros.5076:

Video Games in the 90s : children under 14y can’t get past the first level of most games.
Video Games in 201x : video game companies have to teach players to use the appropriate button at the appropriate time.

I wonder if in 203x, video game companies will have to teach players how to use a mouse.

Playing videogames since the early 1980s and no one of my family was ever able to beat me – except for minesweeper never had the patience for it. So alter your first point, please Yes, I have been way younger than 14 back then.

penelopehannibal.8947:

Rangers use the skill not only to knock back an enemy, but also to interrupt an enemy attack. An enemy that might just have caused harm to the players in melee range, and the players complaining about the ranger attack. The interrupt is only seen by the ranger when the word ‘interrupt’ comes up.

Perhaps so, but many melee players can also interrupt without doing a knockback, that is something those Rangers don’t see, anytime you hit a creature in the middle of performing it’s attack you can interrupt it, so it works both ways.

timmyf.1490:

I do hope that players someday learn mindlessly mashing every ability as soon as it’s off cooldown isn’t the best way to play your class.

I hope. But I am not hopeful.

Yea I hope some day players learn that throwing on autoattack is the best DPS in this game, lololol can’t really blame them. They’re probably bored as hell, coming from other games and such.

From a ranger point of view it’s 1 > 2 >1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 > 2 > 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

As with most classes.

Lil Puppy.5216:

knockback is something you use when SOLO, not in groups (dungeons/pvp excluded), it is a strategic skill to keep you from DYING and give you some escape distance.

I would give ANYTHING for Anet to remove knockback, blowback, and long duration fear from the player portion of the game and give us more meta interrupts that don’t change the position of the enemies.

I do not agree at all with this (well apart from the long duration fear perhaps).
Knockback is not a skill that is only needed in solo or keeps a ranger from dying. It a skill that should not be used just random and has its strategic uses, there is a difference there.
Its all about positioning of the ranger and in the case of a group where the rest is, what direction a enemy is moving, and who is pulling aggro.
It definately has its uses, also in a group.
I do agree that its often misused and that perphaps some form of tutorial would help. That said, i also see other skills not always used correctly, but its just more obvious and annoying to other players with ‘knockback’ skills. And its not just the ranger.

Every time map chat starts whinging about ‘Rangers’ instead of ‘that particular dude who used LB4, or maybe that dude on another class with a knockback’, i childishly make a point of spamming my own point-blank shot.

Weapon knockback skills should be locked until a once-per-account tutorial is completed. Players need to learn WHEN to use them, and not just blindly spam skills. The biggest culprits sadly are longbow rangers (4), due to how easy the profession is to play in the open world and due to the popularity of archers; followed by greatsword mesmers (5). Shield guardians and hammer warriors come far behind.

As said earlier, a Defiant tutorial is also greatly needed. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to, in the end of a Dredge fractal run, explain to people how it works, and why we control the stacks in a PUG run.

Not just Rangers, Mesmer do this too, well anything with a knock back skill.

I for one am trying to use it with some sort of skill, eg. knock the thing into aoe when the kitten thing tries to walk out of it, other times it is to get stuff around me off or away from me to get to re-position, because I’m squishy back here its not like GW1 where the warrior would come back to defend his back line, so I’m out here all alone doing the best I can.

and yes, I’m sorry sometimes I mess up and knock back when I was meaning to press 5 or some other skill, I’m human.

Zaklex.6308:

penelopehannibal.8947:

Rangers use the skill not only to knock back an enemy, but also to interrupt an enemy attack. An enemy that might just have caused harm to the players in melee range, and the players complaining about the ranger attack. The interrupt is only seen by the ranger when the word ‘interrupt’ comes up.

Perhaps so, but many melee players can also interrupt without doing a knockback, that is something those Rangers don’t see, anytime you hit a creature in the middle of performing it’s attack you can interrupt it, so it works both ways.

This is why Rangers are so infuriating. First off, I don’t need you to negate the damage for me, I can dodge, sidestep, or use damage-mitigating skills. Secondly, I also have interrupts on my Hammer Warrior, but instead of using them to interrupt the auto-attacks, I use them to interrupt the heals. (If we’re talking about WvW camps, for example.)

Longbow #4 is the worst.

Longbow 4 is probably the main reason “bearbow” gets so much hate.
I’ve also had to “Dude, c’mon…” to my Engi buddy as we’ve been running around when I swap to greatsword for my ranger. He’s since learned to apologize for it, so.. progress!

Really though, kids, knockback should be a last resort in most group situations, or if your party is heavily ranged, like my ranger/engi duo team. And if you’re a longbow ranger, use #3’s stealth and wait a few seconds to get the heat off, if your dodge is charging. Pet/someone else should pull aggro somewhere in the 2-3 second mark, and you’re clear to 2/1/1/1/1/1 after that.

I also get annoyed by knockbacks. There’s nothing worse than using/picking up an ice bow and unleashing a barrage of ice on some poor, unsuspecting foe or mob, only for a mesmer/ranger to come along and knock it/them back out of the aoe, thus causing the enemies to avoid tons of potential damage. I’ve lost count of how many times something along these lines has occurred. It’s even more baffling when enemies are knocked out of feedback bubbles or time warps. They’re spamming pointless (in zerg situations), low damage skills and causing other players to miss on their high damage, long cooldown skills.

Unfortunately, there is no real fix for players who play poorly. Even if you introduced a tutorial cautioning players on when to use knockbacks or when not to use them, players will still do it. The only fix is to remove skills with knockbacks and that will just cause more issues than it would solve.

Unfortunately, this is just one of those annoyances we’ll have to put up with.

Lazuli.2098:

Although Rangers are probably the main culprit there are also rifle wielding engineers and even warriors who use knockback. Seeing a warrior use it on his rifle rather than switching to a melee weapon when the mob got close made me realize the reason is probably fear of taking damage. It was very frustrating to me on my sword wielding mesmer when the warrior knocked the mob out of range and I had to go chase it down.

Warriors using it on Rifle is because it is a DPS improvement though over using bullets

September Release brought with it this new NPC and mini-“event” in starting zones, where players are supposed to learn dodge-rolls. There are AoE-knockback-circles and a chest in the middle. And an NPC next to it explaining what to do. And a popup-text in the upper left corner of the screen explaining what to do, too.

Do yourself a favour and position yourself next to one of these spots and wait and watch. I once did. There were players (downscaled and in guilds, so they might not be all that new to the game) who ran in and were bumped back 5, 8, 10 times in a row without even considering what might be the cause. I first thought that they were on auto-run, but they really attempted this chest from different angles, completely ignoring the main reason for this event to even exist.

Is it, because dodge rolls are a complicated mechanic? No, it isn’t, it’s one keypress. If you can run, you can dodge roll. It is because it doesn’t even come across their mind that a deviation from the already learned patterns may exist.

The same holds true for knockback skills. If all you have learned in other games so far is keeping all of your skills on CD is the best viable method of play, you are not even expecting that situational awareness might be an option with a positive effect.

They will not learn. Accept the fact that as a melee you will run after a knocked-back target 20% of the time. I did, I have no hope for this to change.

Halvorn.9831:

September Release brought with it this new NPC and mini-“event” in starting zones, where players are supposed to learn dodge-rolls. There are AoE-knockback-circles and a chest in the middle. And an NPC next to it explaining what to do. And a popup-text in the upper left corner of the screen explaining what to do, too.

Do yourself a favour and position yourself next to one of these spots and wait and watch. I once did. There were players (downscaled and in guilds, so they might not be all that new to the game) who ran in and were bumped back 5, 8, 10 times in a row without even considering what might be the cause. I first thought that they were on auto-run, but they really attempted this chest from different angles, completely ignoring the main reason for this event to even exist.

I do it because it’s fun to get batted around like a ragdoll.
Also, dodgerolling tangential to the chest is an easy daily when it comes up.

kitten .9460:

90% of the time it is the brainless bearbows and the problem has only gotten worse with the ranger update. Don’t expect it to go away anytime soon..

Can’t believe I’m saying this but I actually want mobs to have defiant stacks now.

I support this idea. Defiance on all mobs by default! Learn to strip stacks properly or get mauled by melee monsters, ya noob rangers.

Either that, or an automatic 1g fine that is deducted from your inventory every time you use knockback and the mob is not at the closest range possible. Yeah, that would mean they’d get fined for doing proper interrupts, but it would teach people not to spam it.

I’ve learned to dislike rangers particularly in Dry Top, especially during the Haze event. On my guardian, I’m already used to casting and reserving the GS pull until some ranger knockbacks a mob, so that I can rapidly pull it back to where melee classes were stacking. And then I’ve learned to hate rangers when leveling my warrior.

Maybe it’s time to nerf the knockback range of that skill. Interrupt is fine, the distance is not.

aerial.7021:

Not just Rangers, Mesmer do this too, well anything with a knock back skill.

Mesmers usually do it when mobs get close to them, not pew-pewing from range just for the sake of pushing a button. Sometimes it happens on reflex when your zerker is getting overwhelmed by mobs :<

Halvorn.9831:

Do yourself a favour and position yourself next to one of these spots and wait and watch. I once did. There were players (downscaled and in guilds, so they might not be all that new to the game) who ran in and were bumped back 5, 8, 10 times in a row without even considering what might be the cause. I first thought that they were on auto-run, but they really attempted this chest from different angles, completely ignoring the main reason for this event to even exist.

Hope it wasn’t me When waiting for guild events to begin, I sometimes find it fun to keep being knockbacked at these tutorials and to scream something like “Too confusing! Please nerf!”

Lishtenbird.2814:

Hope it wasn’t me When waiting for guild events to begin, I sometimes find it fun to keep being knockbacked at these tutorials and to scream something like “Too confusing! Please nerf!”

I’m on EU MegaServer, so maybe not.

I just wanted to bring this example as an illustration that a lot of ppl IMO really have problems with the process of being educated. “I’m not letting this game force me to widen my perspective”.

I started GW2 playing a ranger as my main, since I liked the idea of long bow + pet. I quickly found out that long bow 4 was even annoying for myself most of the time, so I stopped using it. Which means that my long bow now only had 4 usable skills left. And the most important one of the remaining skills made no sense at all most of the time in events, since you are close to your enemies anyways and you give up damage when being in close range. Which was the reason why I found out that other classes brought more fun. Now my ranger sits near the chest of the most simple JP and I log her in only once a day for the chest reward. So personally, I am no longer a knockback source

Upcoming Class Balances

Ranger – Too many rangers using Longbow – We are adding a tell of the animation for the Point Blank skill and the projectile has a purple color to distinguish it from autoattacks.

Time will tell if this helps.

But I once saw a GS Mesmer say it knockbacked mobs in zerg settings out of spite because it got zero loot otherwise. So every class has them.

Gambit.8425:

But I once saw a GS Mesmer say it knockbacked mobs in zerg settings out of spite because it got zero loot otherwise. So every class has them.

grumble use Sword and Staff grumble

This has always ignored me when rangers combo is essentially 12345 (and repeat) with no thought put into it.

My favorite is when in a dungeon and a boss is being pulled via LoS and the way someone pulls them is with a knockback/fear.

Good good. Get those defiant stacks on it before we’ve even started attacking. Perfect.