Guild Wars 2

The ranger came out fairly well (at least by normal ranger standards). I wasn’t really expecting much profession-wise this patch, but being ignored was sometime the best possible outcome.

Any speculation on what the next one will bring? Has anyone found any stealth nerfs?

Slightly off topic the mesmers seem to be in a uproar. Will their tear sway the developers?

This update wasn’t supposed to do anything with any class besides bug fixes.

Only mesmers got a bug fix that involved a part of their gameplay with sword, but still it was a bug and many mesmers are complaining, but I doubt anything will change about it.

About a future update, I think the devs will say something before a class update, since we didn’t hear anything, don’t expect anything.

New food will help hybrid ranger builds out i think- +40% condition duration and 33% chance to steal life on crit all in one food.

blitzkrieg.2451:

New food will help hybrid ranger builds out i think- +40% condition duration and 33% chance to steal life on crit all in one food.

will be very good with rabid trapper. Anyone knows if there is an ICD? if not – EPIC. If it is – very good still.

Prysin.8542:

blitzkrieg.2451:

New food will help hybrid ranger builds out i think- +40% condition duration and 33% chance to steal life on crit all in one food.

will be very good with rabid trapper. Anyone knows if there is an ICD? if not – EPIC. If it is – very good still.

1 second ICD.

Im thinking of testing it out for my Wvw build as well.

With a power based trapper build the +lifesteal is far better than the +condition damage they had stuck on the former +duration food..! Definately no-brainer to switch to this for me..!

The Mesmers are angry at the “bugfix” because we created an official list of 35 bugs, none of which have ever been addressed. Instead they fixed this “bug” which no one has reported, and has functioned since the first beta weekend event as such. It was most likely a tooltip error on their behalf, but they “fixed” it.

Benjamin.8237:

The Mesmers are angry at the “bugfix” because we created an official list of 35 bugs, none of which have ever been addressed. Instead they fixed this “bug” which no one has reported, and has functioned since the first beta weekend event as such. It was most likely a tooltip error on their behalf, but they “fixed” it.

I doubt that, it says swap positions with your clone. If the clone is dead , how do you continue to swap positions with it? They probably fixed it because it looks like the bug lied in it saving the position of the clone even after death for you to teleport to it and use also as a stun break after the clone was long dead but who knows. But I do agree, although it’s really not specific to mesmers in that bug fixes are randomly and oddly fixed for each profession. At the time empathic bond (when it never transferred to your pet and just removed the condition entirely even though the trait said it transferred them to your pet) was fixed, there was roughly 25+ bugs listed in the ranger forums, yet they chose to fix that – that bug also existed for a very long time as well , of course not 2 years long but 6months+. It’s really common for anet to do this unfortunately. In short, anet balancing and method of bug fixing is probably the worst I’ve seen with an MMO in the history that I’ve played them and I’ve played alot of MMOs.

Benjamin.8237:

The Mesmers are angry at the “bugfix” because we created an official list of 35 bugs, none of which have ever been addressed. Instead they fixed this “bug” which no one has reported, and has functioned since the first beta weekend event as such.

How many of those 35 bugs hurt the mesmer? How many of them help the mesmer?

The vast majority of player-reported bugs are biased in favor of bugs which hurt the player (so fixing them will help the player). It’s completely naturally that many of the bugs Anet fixes which were helping the player weren’t being reported by players.

I would like to say that I’ve actually submitted a bug report for the Mesmer leap because I thought it was bull kitten (even on my Mesmer).

That being said I’d like for some bug fixes for ranger…. LIKE BROWN BEAR F2!! Good god, all the other pets roar/use their F2 when you tell them, but good ole Beary thinks cleansing condis is more useful while he’s standing on the enemy than to use it right next to his master when he tells him to…

The mesmer “how dare they fix a bug that helps me” whining is hilarious but besides the point.

As I’ve pointed out recently in the Dungeon forum (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Kicking-Rangers-in-Dungeons/first) ranger has been getting worse relative to other classes, either because universal changes have hit them harder than others, or because other classes have been getting better by comparison. Even though I’ve always been a proponent of using rangers in dungeons (as far back as when 4war/1mes was “meta”) at this point I’m pretty much ranking them next to necros in terms of PvE usefulness.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

The mesmer “how dare they fix a bug that helps me” whining is hilarious but besides the point.

As I’ve pointed out recently in the Dungeon forum (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Kicking-Rangers-in-Dungeons/first) ranger has been getting worse relative to other classes, either because universal changes have hit them harder than others, or because other classes have been getting better by comparison. Even though I’ve always been a proponent of using rangers in dungeons (as far back as when 4war/1mes was “meta”) at this point I’m pretty much ranking them next to necros in terms of PvE usefulness.

The last universal change that hit us harder than other professions was the quickness nerf, only because we have the highest uptime of quickness in the game, and one of our sources wasn’t compensated at the time (it has been now).

Ferocity hit us the LEAST and people still don’t realize this… About 30% of our damage is from pet, the pet doesn’t use ferocity, therefore our damage was nerfed only by 7%, not 10%.

Durzlla.6295:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

The mesmer “how dare they fix a bug that helps me” whining is hilarious but besides the point.

As I’ve pointed out recently in the Dungeon forum (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Kicking-Rangers-in-Dungeons/first) ranger has been getting worse relative to other classes, either because universal changes have hit them harder than others, or because other classes have been getting better by comparison. Even though I’ve always been a proponent of using rangers in dungeons (as far back as when 4war/1mes was “meta”) at this point I’m pretty much ranking them next to necros in terms of PvE usefulness.

The last universal change that hit us harder than other professions was the quickness nerf, only because we have the highest uptime of quickness in the game, and one of our sources wasn’t compensated at the time (it has been now).

Ferocity hit us the LEAST and people still don’t realize this… About 30% of our damage is from pet, the pet doesn’t use ferocity, therefore our damage was nerfed only by 7%, not 10%.

it is a bit more complicated then that durrz, its not 7% for sure. Also the 10% only applies to traits, the total DPS loss is over 25% overall because of all the reduction to gear and trinket stats (yes they reduced it by a good margin. Example being; old Exotic celestial LB = 10%, Exotic LB = 9%. Current Ascended LB = 5.2%).

Since pets only has base values, it is unaffected, however rangers are capped at the same ferocity limit as anyone else so in that sense we lost 10% from traits, a whole load from gear, but overall damage is affected less because pet never had anything to lose, nor gain from that nerf. Pets are pets, their damage is dependnt on their power, not their ferocity.

Meaning, if pets hit the same, and we got nerfed then class damage (since we have the biggest potential for increase in damage) is THE SAME AS EVERYONE ELSE.

Durzlla.6295:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

The mesmer “how dare they fix a bug that helps me” whining is hilarious but besides the point.

As I’ve pointed out recently in the Dungeon forum (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Kicking-Rangers-in-Dungeons/first) ranger has been getting worse relative to other classes, either because universal changes have hit them harder than others, or because other classes have been getting better by comparison. Even though I’ve always been a proponent of using rangers in dungeons (as far back as when 4war/1mes was “meta”) at this point I’m pretty much ranking them next to necros in terms of PvE usefulness.

The last universal change that hit us harder than other professions was the quickness nerf, only because we have the highest uptime of quickness in the game, and one of our sources wasn’t compensated at the time (it has been now).

Ferocity hit us the LEAST and people still don’t realize this… About 30% of our damage is from pet, the pet doesn’t use ferocity, therefore our damage was nerfed only by 7%, not 10%.

There are a couple of issues with recent patches that disadvantage rangers relative to others:

1) Ranger is one of the few classes that has Precision + Ferocity (previously Crit Damage) in the same line and actually specs deep into it. The hit to Ferocity is thus a direct hit to the DPS gain from traits, unlike for classes like the Guardian which do not invest in the Ferocity line at all.

2) Spotter and Fury are the big sells for rangers in dungeons. With the Ferocity nerf, crit chance isn’t worth quite as much. That also applies to the fact that Strength and Ranger runes are becoming a lot more common, both of which reduce the marginal impact of additional crit chance relative to Scholar runes.

3) A lot of other classes use a 2H weapon as their best DPS option. Ranger uses a 1H weapon which means that the extra sigil on 2H weapons benefited those classes that used them, and not so much rangers.

4) A lot of the classes which were previously considered comparable to the ranger in terms of overall DPS have been getting DPS buffs. For example, warriors got Dual Wield Agility as a new grandmaster trait, engineers got major buffs to kit damage (scales with rarity of equipped weapon now) as well as to rifle sigils, eles and guardians got extra ticks on their pulsing AOEs (Lava Font and Symbol of Protection. respectively), and so on. Meanwhile rangers have gotten nothing that’s positively affected their meta builds since the original ranger vs. warrior debate on Guru that got ranger accepted into the meta in the first place.

Just in terms of straight numbers, taking a ranger is NEVER the best choice for minmaxing DPS or utility no matter what the composition is. Even with the damage buff from Frost Spirit and Spotter and Fury, if you don’t have it, you would get more overall damage from just taking a class with higher personal DPS, like an engineer or elementalist.

actually that is WRONG.

When the peak damage is lower, crit chance should be higher so you hit harder more often. Since you can no longer “rely” on very high peak, you must strive to have a very very high average.

Gonna take a while before the PvE scrubs understand this simple concept of how-2-DPS-properly but frostspotter will still be the best avaliable PvE setup you can bring.

Prysin.8542:

actually that is WRONG.

When the peak damage is lower, crit chance should be higher so you hit harder more often. Since you can no longer “rely” on very high peak, you must strive to have a very very high average.

Gonna take a while before the PvE scrubs understand this simple concept of how-2-DPS-properly but frostspotter will still be the best avaliable PvE setup you can bring.

Uh, they didn’t buff crit chance at all, they only nerfed crit damage. You seem to have missed the point entirely, which is that the loss of crit damage makes the ranger’s ability to boost crit chance less useful. The reduced overall benefit from Spotter + Fury makes the boost the ranger provides marginally smaller, and coupled with all the other stuff I mentioned above, makes the necessary tradeoff in personal DPS not worth it.

Quite honestly, you take the summoned weapon the Ele made for you, you do the same damage as other classes with said weapon and on top of that you have the pet. And bring frost spirit and spotter, unique buffs.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Prysin.8542:

actually that is WRONG.

When the peak damage is lower, crit chance should be higher so you hit harder more often. Since you can no longer “rely” on very high peak, you must strive to have a very very high average.

Gonna take a while before the PvE scrubs understand this simple concept of how-2-DPS-properly but frostspotter will still be the best avaliable PvE setup you can bring.

Uh, they didn’t buff crit chance at all, they only nerfed crit damage. You seem to have missed the point entirely, which is that the loss of crit damage makes the ranger’s ability to boost crit chance less useful. The reduced overall benefit from Spotter + Fury makes the boost the ranger provides marginally smaller, and coupled with all the other stuff I mentioned above, makes the necessary tradeoff in personal DPS not worth it.

He never said that crit chance was buffed. He said that you should raise your crit chance higher so you can hit harder more often.

And the problem with Ferocity is that it takes a large investment to raise your damage by small margins. Your crit damage already starts at 150% base damage. In order to raise that by 10%, you need to increase crit damage by 15%, which requires 225 Ferocity. The highest you can realistically raise your damage through Ferocity is about 50-60% It is way better to invest more in Precision and Power than Ferocity.

Prysin.8542:

it is a bit more complicated then that durrz, its not 7% for sure. Also the 10% only applies to traits, the total DPS loss is over 25% overall because of all the reduction to gear and trinket stats (yes they reduced it by a good margin. Example being; old Exotic celestial LB = 10%, Exotic LB = 9%. Current Ascended LB = 5.2%).

Since pets only has base values, it is unaffected, however rangers are capped at the same ferocity limit as anyone else so in that sense we lost 10% from traits, a whole load from gear, but overall damage is affected less because pet never had anything to lose, nor gain from that nerf. Pets are pets, their damage is dependnt on their power, not their ferocity.

Meaning, if pets hit the same, and we got nerfed then class damage (since we have the biggest potential for increase in damage) is THE SAME AS EVERYONE ELSE.

I have to disagree.

When the hit to crit damage happened, the maximum crit damage I had in one of my builds went from 259% to 229%. a 12% drop in overall critical damage, and That’s just for the Ranger.

Assuming a 100% critical chance, the Overall damage decrease would be 12%. The problem is that in my build, I only had 60% critical chance with spotter, not including fury. This means that if I am only hitting with critical hits 60% of the time, that 12% drop in damage, becomes 7.2. My Overall damage drop is 7% or so, and that is the same for every profession, assuming they have a 60% crit chance, and their crit damage dropped by the same margin.
After the change hit, pets can still have 180% crit damage when traited, meaning that they didn’t get affected by the change. People say that pets are 30% of our damage, though I disagree because depending on the build, the pet can be greater than 50% of your damage. Lets be safe and stick to 30%.

7 – 30% = roughly 5. This means that the overall damage drop in my build, was 5% total. (due to rounding errors, that number might be off a little)

Didn’t affect me at all. It did greatly affect people who were mixing Knight’s gear for the highest damage margins w. minimal loss in Toughness. Or, They just went Celestial and had quite high damage, while still having some extra health and toughness. That was quite unfair, and had to change.

What Chrispy said, and all the #s I threw out there were from Anet IE: ferocity nerf would be a 10% damage reduction, and pets are 30% (I’m assuming 0pts BM, otherwise it gets WAY over that.)

Chrispy.5641:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Prysin.8542:

actually that is WRONG.

When the peak damage is lower, crit chance should be higher so you hit harder more often. Since you can no longer “rely” on very high peak, you must strive to have a very very high average.

Gonna take a while before the PvE scrubs understand this simple concept of how-2-DPS-properly but frostspotter will still be the best avaliable PvE setup you can bring.

Uh, they didn’t buff crit chance at all, they only nerfed crit damage. You seem to have missed the point entirely, which is that the loss of crit damage makes the ranger’s ability to boost crit chance less useful. The reduced overall benefit from Spotter + Fury makes the boost the ranger provides marginally smaller, and coupled with all the other stuff I mentioned above, makes the necessary tradeoff in personal DPS not worth it.

He never said that crit chance was buffed. He said that you should raise your crit chance higher so you can hit harder more often.

And the problem with Ferocity is that it takes a large investment to raise your damage by small margins. Your crit damage already starts at 150% base damage. In order to raise that by 10%, you need to increase crit damage by 15%, which requires 225 Ferocity. The highest you can realistically raise your damage through Ferocity is about 50-60% It is way better to invest more in Precision and Power than Ferocity.

And my point is that that is besides the point. I’m not arguing that if you have a ranger in your group already he shouldn’t take Spotter, I’m saying that it’s not worth it to take a ranger in your group specifically for Spotter/FS. The loss in personal DPS relative to having another elementalist actually results in a net group DPS loss even after you account for the DPS gain from Spotter/FS. I outlined the reasons why above and it basically amounts to a whole bunch of different factors compounding, one of which is the loss of crit damage which hurts the class that boosts crit chance the most.

At part of mesmers, they do serious ranged spike damage.
Sunday morning in EOTM: Chased a mesmer who had ~75% HP and wanted to hide from the zergfight they lost, but when he realised he got trapped beside rocks and falling, he turned around and tried to brake out. It was like 12k HP loss in 2 sec for me.
If I weren’t at full health, it would be a one hit kill from range.
I’m lucky he didn’t spawned that GS spinner clone that usually makes ~8k dmg meanwhile I’m dodging it!!

12k Hp Loss… And I’m not a glasscannon…
When will we make that dmg with our “Rapid” Fire?
After these moments; Mesmer is the superior ranged DMG.

Do they sacrifice anything? Or anyone else?
Even Stealth has no rules apart from braking out of it on will.

RoyalPredator.9163:

At part of mesmers, they do serious ranged spike damage.
Sunday morning in EOTM: Chased a mesmer who had ~75% HP and wanted to hide from the zergfight they lost, but when he realised he got trapped beside rocks and falling, he turned around and tried to brake out. It was like 12k HP loss in 2 sec for me.
If I weren’t at full health, it would be a one hit kill from range.
I’m lucky he didn’t spawned that GS spinner clone that usually makes ~8k dmg meanwhile I’m dodging it!!

12k Hp Loss… And I’m not a glasscannon…
When will we make that dmg with our “Rapid” Fire?
After these moments; Mesmer is the superior ranged DMG.

Do they sacrifice anything? Or anyone else?
Even Stealth has no rules apart from braking out of it on will.

Speaking specifically for mesmers, they sacrifice virtually all of their condition removal to do those kind of numbers, and really don’t have much to begin with either.

That being said, I’m not disagreeing with you, and if rangers are supposed to be the maximum single target ranged damage relative to mesmers being the runner up competitor, than I sincerely believe ANet has a lot of work to do, and not just on the longbows skillset, but on the fundamental idea that there is a huge efficiency disparity between trying to operate a pet at melee/skirmish range versus 1200/1500 range that needs significant addressing.

jcbroe.4329:

RoyalPredator.9163:

At part of mesmers, they do serious ranged spike damage.
Sunday morning in EOTM: Chased a mesmer who had ~75% HP and wanted to hide from the zergfight they lost, but when he realised he got trapped beside rocks and falling, he turned around and tried to brake out. It was like 12k HP loss in 2 sec for me.
If I weren’t at full health, it would be a one hit kill from range.
I’m lucky he didn’t spawned that GS spinner clone that usually makes ~8k dmg meanwhile I’m dodging it!!

12k Hp Loss… And I’m not a glasscannon…
When will we make that dmg with our “Rapid” Fire?
After these moments; Mesmer is the superior ranged DMG.

Do they sacrifice anything? Or anyone else?
Even Stealth has no rules apart from braking out of it on will.

Speaking specifically for mesmers, they sacrifice virtually all of their condition removal to do those kind of numbers, and really don’t have much to begin with either.

That being said, I’m not disagreeing with you, and if rangers are supposed to be the maximum single target ranged damage relative to mesmers being the runner up competitor, than I sincerely believe ANet has a lot of work to do, and not just on the longbows skillset, but on the fundamental idea that there is a huge efficiency disparity between trying to operate a pet at melee/skirmish range versus 1200/1500 range that needs significant addressing.

Yes I too am tired of seeing 8k-12K spikes at 1200 range from a few pets. They also fire around corners, through any wall or obstruction and continue to damage and lengthy cripple at this range.

Condi removal isn’t a huge sacrifice on a stealth based class. If they can’t land attacks to apply conditions in the first place…yeah.

Mesmer is the real ranged winner in GW2, not ranger.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Chrispy.5641:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Prysin.8542:

actually that is WRONG.

When the peak damage is lower, crit chance should be higher so you hit harder more often. Since you can no longer “rely” on very high peak, you must strive to have a very very high average.

Gonna take a while before the PvE scrubs understand this simple concept of how-2-DPS-properly but frostspotter will still be the best avaliable PvE setup you can bring.

Uh, they didn’t buff crit chance at all, they only nerfed crit damage. You seem to have missed the point entirely, which is that the loss of crit damage makes the ranger’s ability to boost crit chance less useful. The reduced overall benefit from Spotter + Fury makes the boost the ranger provides marginally smaller, and coupled with all the other stuff I mentioned above, makes the necessary tradeoff in personal DPS not worth it.

He never said that crit chance was buffed. He said that you should raise your crit chance higher so you can hit harder more often.

And the problem with Ferocity is that it takes a large investment to raise your damage by small margins. Your crit damage already starts at 150% base damage. In order to raise that by 10%, you need to increase crit damage by 15%, which requires 225 Ferocity. The highest you can realistically raise your damage through Ferocity is about 50-60% It is way better to invest more in Precision and Power than Ferocity.

And my point is that that is besides the point. I’m not arguing that if you have a ranger in your group already he shouldn’t take Spotter, I’m saying that it’s not worth it to take a ranger in your group specifically for Spotter/FS. The loss in personal DPS relative to having another elementalist actually results in a net group DPS loss even after you account for the DPS gain from Spotter/FS. I outlined the reasons why above and it basically amounts to a whole bunch of different factors compounding, one of which is the loss of crit damage which hurts the class that boosts crit chance the most.

Actually no, but to gain the same damage you have to take some other traits then before.

Previously, you either took Sharpened Edges or some other trait in Skirmish, the change in DPS meta means you will have to raise crit chance and go at the very least 65030 with Rune of Strength and Sigil of Strength

Skirmish traits MUST be Pets Prowess and Companions Might. Incidentally, as sword AA is our best DPS no matter what we do, we can (if all stars align) raise 3 stacks of might on the pet every 0.75 seconds. This stacking usually levels out at around 9 stacks (unless using new boon duration food? in which case you should get 10-11). Couple that with spotter and a Spider will hit roughly 600-700 more damage/second. Effectively raising our DPS by 0.7k damage/sec. That is A LOT. Infact, now that you hit at a lower “top” end you need to compensate by hitting consistently high.

So instead of scoring (illustrational figures) 34555108585, you need to score constistent 777777777777 to outweigh the maximum potential-damage loss. This way, the ranger is actually more important then ever because this applies TO ALL PROFESSIONS. No matter how much HARDER you can hit then the ranger, you still do LESS dps then previously. Meaning you MUST now also hit as hard as possible as often as possible. Infact, going Assassins+zerker instead of pure zerker could overall benefit you more in terms of sheer speed as the average damage will be considerably higher.

jcbroe.4329:

RoyalPredator.9163:

At part of mesmers, they do serious ranged spike damage.
Sunday morning in EOTM: Chased a mesmer who had ~75% HP and wanted to hide from the zergfight they lost, but when he realised he got trapped beside rocks and falling, he turned around and tried to brake out. It was like 12k HP loss in 2 sec for me.
If I weren’t at full health, it would be a one hit kill from range.
I’m lucky he didn’t spawned that GS spinner clone that usually makes ~8k dmg meanwhile I’m dodging it!!

12k Hp Loss… And I’m not a glasscannon…
When will we make that dmg with our “Rapid” Fire?
After these moments; Mesmer is the superior ranged DMG.

Do they sacrifice anything? Or anyone else?
Even Stealth has no rules apart from braking out of it on will.

Speaking specifically for mesmers, they sacrifice virtually all of their condition removal to do those kind of numbers, and really don’t have much to begin with either.

That being said, I’m not disagreeing with you, and if rangers are supposed to be the maximum single target ranged damage relative to mesmers being the runner up competitor, than I sincerely believe ANet has a lot of work to do, and not just on the longbows skillset, but on the fundamental idea that there is a huge efficiency disparity between trying to operate a pet at melee/skirmish range versus 1200/1500 range that needs significant addressing.

Aah the truth. We have all heard that the ranger is a mash together of 2-3 different class concepts ANet had, and this is where is really shows the most. They continually tell us 2 things about rangers.. We should have the best and longest range DPS, and that 30% of our DPS is from the pet. They just don’t seem to realise that these 2 ideas do not work together in any way at the moment. With nearly all pets being melee, and certain all the DPS pets being melee there is just no chance a ranger is going to seriously complete with a mesmer, or heck even a rifle warrior at longrange combat.

Ranger and Mesmer are the 2 classes I play.. And while ranger is still my main and favourite, if I want to go pick people off at range, be it solo, small scale or in zergs, GS mesmer is my choice every day of the week. It has more damage, more survivability and more utility.