Guild Wars 2

Hello all! To those of you who follow my posts, I’m pretty active on here and consider myself to be a very active contributor regarding game suggestions. I have a foundation of business analysis experience and have worked with some very complex problems in system development.

In my work with system development, our teams often used a development methodology known as “The Agile Development Process” or simply Agile. To keep this short and sweet, Agile is a very simple software/system/programming method that works by collectively putting all of the ideas of the development team and user groups into one big Backlog.

Agile programming cycles work in short time periods called Sprints. A sprint might only last 1 month and the developers will take say 5-10 items that they know they can finish within the month and work to complete those. The goal of a sprint is to complete all of the items added to it before the month’s end. If an item becomes too complex to finish in the sprint, they simply drop it off the current sprint and add it back on the next sprint. Huge items that take a long period in time are worked by another team in the backlog. When the huge items are complete to the point at which they can be finished in less than a month, they can be added to the sprint.

Agile is wonderful because all of the little items that can be implemented fast are added to the game quickly, while larger projects remain un-ignored.

I want to challenge the ranger community to participate in a little exercise that I think will really help the development team with our class.

Imagine you are the Ranger Class lead and you have to pick THREE items for your sprint. These three items are things you know or are fairly confident that you can add to the game in less than a month. Then I’d like you to pick THREE MORE items for your backlog. These should be large projects that take alot of time and effort, but things that you consider important to be added/fixed for the class.

I’ll get started. My example of a sprint and backlog would be something like this:

HELMOS’ SPRINT (Short things I think can be added in less than a month):

1.) Quality of Life Changes to Pet UI: I would really love to see my boons and conditions on my pet. I’d also like some kind of visual warning to me when my pet reaches 25% health so I know when to pull it out of danger.

2.) Ranger Weapon # Adjustments: Some of the damage numbers on the ranger weapons are really weak, like main-hand axe. I’d like to see the numbers be rebalanced a bit to make some weapon choices (like MH axe, or GS autoattack) more competitive in PvE.

3.) Pet Name Bug Fix: It’s pretty annoying for the system not to remember your pet’s name and turn fluffy Mcfluffins back into Juvenile Brown Bear every time you swap pets.

HELMOS’ BACKLOG (Long-term and complex fixes):

1.) Ranger Animations\Sword Rework: The rooting animation of the sword and the ranger animations for certain skills like the counterattack kick and swoop really make the ranger play very clunky. I’d like to see some of these animations get an overhaul and the sword as a whole get a complete rework.

2.) Pet Overhaul: Improvements to the pet system to allow the pets to be more responsive, hit moving targets, use F2 abilities more reliably, be more resistant to AoE damage, and generally path and synergize with the player better.

3.) Pet Customization: I’d like to see the pets have more customization stats (like what if I wanted to build my pet to be condition damage to support my build). Some ideas for this might be changing the way that Pet Attributes from Beastmastery work, allowing cooks to make pet food that modify pet stats or grant bonuses, giving pets swappable skills or their own skill/trait trees, etc. The idea is that the pet is so synergized with the ranger that it should always be useful in every build the ranger chooses. The idea that so many abilities are tied to the pet but only one trait tree really improves the pet’s stats makes the pet very hard to build with. It seems very inflexible for being a main class mechanic. The player should have more control regarding how the pet is built and what kind of abilities it brings to the table.

GOALS

The goal of this exercise is to present feedback to the development team in ways that they can easily understand. Agile is a great methodology to use for this because the devs can look at the player created sprints and backlogs and go “hey those are easy fixes that we overlooked that we should add to the next patch” or “hey we have that in our backlog but are getting so much feedback on it we should bump it up in priority so we can implement it faster.”

Anyway, please contribute your Sprints and Backlogs. I think this would be a good communication lane to have with the devs because it forces us players to think realistically about what we can add quickly or reasonably vs. large overarching goals that we know we won’t be seeing right away but want the devs to have visibility on.

Agile is about principles not process, you have described some screwed up half-baked scrum process.

If you knew anything about agile you would know that the developers set the size, the customer sets the priority based on value.

And no agile process relies on another team doing the big stuff in the background!

1. Update weapons damage coefficients to scale better with power.

2. Provide ranger with boon removal of some sort to remove protection/stability and make power builds more viable.

3. Spread condition removal to add an addition traiting option other than Empathic Bond, in order to increase build diversity.

Long term:

1) Pet AI and functionality improvement. Pets still need to be improved when it comes to pathing and giving the F2 skills top priority in the skill queue so they are more reliable.

2) Total trait rework. Lots of the traits are extremely poor choices and have little to no viable functionality. Part of the goal would to be make Skirmishing more valuable for power builds, as well as consolidating/moving/removing traits that just don’t make the cut in the current iteration (I’m sure there are traits that have a zero usage statistic).

3) Expanding the current philosophy on the function of the pet to the player to the player and implementing a new philosophy that allows the player to choose whether their pet is just an extra source of damage, a main source of damage, or heavy support in some majorly useful way (like 3 seconds of AoE stability on Pet Swap as a Grandmaster trait while providing AoE boons on F2 activation on top of the actual function of the F2).

Sandpit.3467:

Agile is about principles not process, you have described some screwed up half-baked scrum process.

If you knew anything about agile you would know that the developers set the size, the customer sets the priority based on value.

And no agile process relies on another team doing the big stuff in the background!

You are right this is scrum and a very small small piece of the agile process, but for all intents and purposes we are just creating an easy to understand forum for providing simple and constructive feedback.

1. Pet Fix
F1 replaces F2 in function. The pet now attacks what ever target you are targeting. All pets gain a passive function, and manual function. The passive function will be buffs( Fern Hound grants regeneration when nearby ally gets to 75% health, Jungle stalkers grants 3 stacks of mights, Jungle spider increases condition damage, etc), while the manual function will be a utility/CC ability(Fern hound knockdown leap, bear throwback, etc). F1 now has priority in q.
F2 will be a stance option. Defensive stance will give protection and stability(for the first 5 seconds of switch) and cause the pet to seek out the front of the target, while offensive stance will give Fury and swiftness and cause the pet to seek out the rear or flank of the target. No cool down between switching stances.
F3 will now have a dual function, on a single hit, the pet will dodge back, and after 3 seconds leap back and cause a burst hit (to make up for damage lost when dodging), if you hit F3 again within that 3 seconds, the pet will return to you.
-Likewise, on pet death cooldown is reduced to 20 seconds. You should be punished, but not for a minute.

2. Weapons abilities/numbers
-Great sword- GS2 causes knockdown, GS3 causes blind
-Long Bow- Damage from all distances cause same damage on LB1, increased critical -chance for longer range. Decrease cast time for LB1 by 0.2 seconds.
-Long Sword- No longer roots on LS1

3. Traits
-Spotter becomes an adept skill (in line with warriors and thieves)
-Opening Strikes now causes quickness for 3-4 seconds.
-Spirits unbound becomes a master level skill
-Masters Bond causes stats to increase every 5 seconds for 45 seconds. Resets when exiting combat
-Fortifying bond is made baseline. Replaced with condition removal activated when you heal.

Dear Santa,
I’ve been good this year and putting a lot of hours on my ranger:

1- Signet’s active effect should affect the ranger by default, like the passives. Current Beastmarter could stay and now increase the signet’s active in intensity, duration and radius respectively.

2 – storm spirit’s swift bonus makes little sense if they are stationary without a major trait. Tbh any other buff would be better, just not the one involving movement. But since we have two offensive already, maybe a vigor or stability?

3 – most important though build presets two at least! Just a Simple swtich to alternate between 2 sets of weapon/armor/trait/utilities/pet.
I don’t even mean Dual trait point allocation, just 2 sets of the adjoustments one can do while out of combat!!!

That would beat any proffessíon adjoustment.

1.-Fix pets response, path finding, F2 and survival.

2.-Signets and spirits should be upgraded by default.

3.-Improve traits sinergy with utilties and weapons. aka make skills good and traits make them better not bad to make them so so, and place them in proper place.

Can I ask responders to do the following:

Rate the effectiveness of the short and long term actions on ranger playability.
In other words, take your posts and give each idea a A-F on “fixing” the underlying playability/frustration level of the ranger. A would mean you actually solved the problem. F is didn’t help. C would be makes a modest change.

Rate each action individually then all your short term and long term actions collectively. In other words, if they did ALL your short term actions would the class get an B or a D rating?