Guild Wars 2

Ryoki Hokishami.2756:

Expansive.3716:

Ryoki Hokishami.2756:

nerva.7940:

Ive been using the gimped gs for months. In full berserker gear it’s kinda decent in pve but in pvp it’s nothing more than a utility/mobility weapon. Either boost the base damage of 1 and 2 or add a bleed on every first attack of 1. This would make it an interesting condition hybrid weapon.

Gs is very viable in spvp bunker builds but is very limiting in wvw and pve.

Even I’ll agree the greatsword needs to be restored to its former glory, but I still find plenty of viable uses for it, even in dungeons. It’s great for attacking large numbers of enemies while keeping up your health. One example would be AC path 1, where you have to take out graveling mounds. The GS works wonders at keeping the graveling hatchlings from escaping your reach, while still whittling down the mounds.

Fine point but that is taken into consideration whether GS was reverted back to its good damage or not. Yes the GS general purpose for us is to attack multiple mobs while keeping health at a reasonable amount, but the damage (currently) is still not at an ideal place. I can’t see how Anet would think otherwise.

I’m not one of those who wants everything for the Ranger to be OP, but i’m just trying to make a case that when you evaluate the Ranger’s use of the GS, then you can see why there’d need to be an increase in damage.

1. Ranger has medium armor
2. Ranger’s skills for Greatsword aren’t high dps skills
3. Ranger’s pet cannot be used as an excuse for why the GS damage should not be increase.

I use point number 3 only because it would be a point brought up and it’s truly a fallacy. Our pets are alright at best, but not good. There’s still work to be done and if the pets’ damage are increase then fine, but that is not the case.

Either increase damage on our weapons or improve our traits and pets for more viable builds and versatility. It has to be one of the two and i’d prefer the former

Out of all your points, I agree with 1 the most. 2 could actually offer a solution, maybe just vastly increase the damage of certain skills (maul again?) But as it stands, the fact that a ranger is going into a fight with less armor than a warrior or guardian should be a reason to make the Greatsword do more damage.

Agreed, good point

I hope Anet is legit looking at this thread because there’s some good discussion and points that people are bringing to the topic

Solandri.9640:

The dual wield mechanism in this game isn’t like in other RPGs. When you dual wield weapons in this game, your damage doesn’t go up. Autoattacking with just 1h sword equipped will do the same damage as autoattacking with sword + dagger equipped (aside from stat bonuses). All the second weapon gets you is your choice of the #4 and #5 skills. It’s not like you’re attacking with both weapons at the same time. All you’re doing is splitting up the same number of attack opportunities between the two weapons.

So it’s not a case where the GS needs to do more damage than the 1h sword like in other games. From a balance perspective, they should do about the same damage. GS maybe a little bit more because it locks you into 5 skills (with 1h sword, you have three choices for your #4 and #5 skills). i.e. What you lose in flexibility, you gain in damage.

Except 1h weapons spend less time in animations, resulting in more hits per second and therefore more dps. So yes the GS does need to do more damage than the 1h sword because it attacks slower. Having them at equal damage results in less DPS for the GS because of it’s attack speed. That’s not even considering the fact that you have multiple offhand options with the 1h sword.

What really gets me is that the shortbow, a 1200 range weapon has more dps than a melee weapon. Obviously the melee weapon has cleave but for every other class that has melee cleave their melee is still considerably higher than their ranged option. Reason of course being that ranged is so much safer than melee, so there needs to be a trade off.

I hope it’s pretty clear to everyone that what happened with the Ranger GS was a knee-jerk reactionary nerf and it needs to be looked at. The auto-attack is the problem here, it’s where the damage needs to come from. Every other ability has utility attached to it except maul and unless they remove the bleed, it won’t get buffed. I would much prefer high sustained damage anyways.

since now ranger dps so LOW, and pet got nerfed BADLY, this maybe the good idea to boost ranger damage for dungeon so IT CAN BE ON PAR WITH WARRIOR OR THIEF !!!!!

the huge problem with beta balancing was, that everybody was running Glasscannon builds.
Therefore, a GS ranger was just shredding everything to pieces.
Now that the majority of the playerbase learned how to counter glasscannons and defensive builds are generally a lot more viable than glasscannons, the GS damage is not enough to be a viable power weapon anymore.

15k mauls lawl

Dude furajir that was bad kitten rock on! Loved it!

I have to say this debate has got me interested and with the suggestions going round I wanted to chime in with my thoughts.

First I wanted to look at the ranger greatsword’s purpose in the game, I think some people are making the mistake that it is the melee dps weapon. In fact my thought is that the signs from Anet point to them trying to position it as the defensive melee, while the 1h sword is the melee dps. The fact that the sword does more dps seems to back this up.

That said I still think the auto combo could use a slight tune in the upward direction, and if Anet didn’t want to do this as a straight dmg boost to keep burst down, it could be given as an increase to attack speed to improve dps that way. I also think the attack speed increase would be awesome as it would make the evade better.

I also have to say I’m all for upgrades to maul as well, and while I think the dmg is right, it always annoys me that it bleeds the target, this doesn’t seem to energise with the rest of the weapon. I’d go with what others have said and remove the bleed in favour of weakness as well as making it a blast finisher, this would also make the greatsword an interesting control weapon.

Furajir.3815:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCPU2zF3108

15k mauls lawl

So you can hit 5 digit crits by speccing 30 into marksmanship and blowing two signet cooldowns. Great, no one has ever thought of that before.

Meanwhile, back in thief land….backstabs and heartseekers for everyone!

Your looking for a one button solution. Even thieves have to add two elements stealth plus an attack from behind. Also While your maul can hit for 15k your pet can do another 12k.

While Rnagers may not be view in the most positive light. People do respect a Ranger who is well played. Thieves aren’t respected. Mesner are useful but the disstain for the class is only slightly-less. I want rangers to be strong. I dont want rangers to be like the necro just handed power. When comparing ranger to other classes please consider all factors. Rangers is a Pet class you need to consider the damage aswell as the utility pets bring.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

Your looking for a one button solution. Even thieves have to add two elements stealth plus an attack from behind. Also While your maul can hit for 15k your pet can do another 12k.

While Rnagers may not be view in the most positive light. People do respect a Ranger who is well played. Thieves aren’t respected. Mesner are useful but the disstain for the class is only slightly-less. I want rangers to be strong. I dont want rangers to be like the necro just handed power. When comparing ranger to other classes please consider all factors. Rangers is a Pet class you need to consider the damage aswell as the utility pets bring.

Even including the pet, unless you are speaking of our glass-cannon kitties, our damage output is sub-par. And that posits that the pet can survive (in PvE and WvW) or hit the opponent (in PvP or WvW). That is the biggest problem with the class.

Speaking of GS? I, too, believe it should be buffed a bit. Not a lot. Just a bit. Bring it up to par, at the very least, with the sword. A zweihander should always out-damage a one-hander. Maybe don’t buff it up to it’s beta levels, but at least boost it so it can get in a bit more damage.

Here’s the problem:

If they buff the GS to do similar damage as it did in beta, then it will primarily be the go to weapon every ranger would use. We’d then probably see more threads pop up questioning any reasons us rangers should use bows at all.

If they buff the LB so that it’s enticing enough to be an alternative to the GS, then the class will probably be viewed as overpowering in both melee and range, so that’s probably not going to happen.

To me, when I think about all the weapons in the game, I would think the GS would be the hardest hitting weapon of the entire lot. So why would a Ranger even have access to not only the hardest hitting weapon, but the longest range weapon as well (that hits pretty hard in itself). What I’m trying to say is, it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense that the Ranger can even wield the GS to begin with.

I have a GS, I use it sometimes, but it’s more so of an escape tool than anything. It just pales in comparison to the LB (and rightfully so). If the GS were to exceed the LB in overall damage, the class would be vastly superior to everyone else due the amount of sheer damage they can deal both at range and melee.

Perhaps it’s best if Anet just removed the GS from the Rangers arsenal and buffed up the LB and SB even further to compensate.

I do not remember the ranger’s GS scaling from beta specifically but it was massive. Something like double what it is now. If they were to double the ranger’s DPS with greatsword AND leave everything the way it is currently, it wouldn’t just make rangers viable, it’d make them the undisputed gods of all content. Greatsword would have a base DPS value of approximately 3400. As a point of comparison, the current warrior greatsword that everyone apparently worships is only 2700. That means a ranger would deal 25% more than any warrior could ever hope to see on his best day, AND still have a pet and exceptional party support abilities.

Right now ranger DPS is balanced so that a ranger’s base DPS is approximately the same as everyone else’s once you include the pet (and before you start complaining about warriors, their base DPS is also about the same as everyone else’s, they just stack a lot of might and fury). If you buff the ranger’s solo damage, the pet’s damage will have to go down. Buff the pet, ranger’s damage goes down.

The problem with the ranger’s greatsword, rather, is that unlike the warrior and the guardian, who tend to have very strong burst skills on their greatswords (with convenient cooldowns) and an alternative weapon set to take advantage of weapon swapping with (axe and sword, respectively), the ranger’s greatsword isn’t strong enough to be worth switching to if you’re concerned about DPS; no matter when and what skills you use in what order, you’ll always be better off just auto-attacking with the 1H sword for ten seconds instead.

As such, greatsword needs a respectable buff to the burst damage skills (Maul and Swoop in particular) with cooldown adjustments to balance them out, and a slight increase in the auto-attack (5-10%) DPS. This would put it on roughly the same level as the warrior and guardian greatswords; high burst DPS through long-recharging skills that benefit from weapon swapping.

Of course, 1H sword needs to get rid of the root, too, but we’re all already aware of that.

I definitely miss the beta GS. I’d like it to be one of our big damage weapons but beta may be a bit too strong. You could build in such a way to one shot quite a few classes

Stop asking for buffs for the greatsword. They will just take the Anet way of doing it and break the sword some clever way to make gs more viable.

Boomstin.3460:

Stop asking for buffs for the greatsword. They will just take the Anet way of doing it and break the sword some clever way to make gs more viable.

I honestly wouldn’t mind if they did. The sword is such a pain in the kitten to use I wouldn’t mind seeing it go the way of the shortbow.

I still take GS over LB, I refuse to bend over and be forced to use the LB.

I too roll the maul build I have a thread on my build. 16stacks of might on you and your pet aint nothing to trifle with, when you hit for 10-15k and Your pet hits 6k, and 10k by the 2nd attack or so.

That being said it requires an intense amount of timing and skill and picking the engagement. You miss the burst you can enjoy a nice little grey screen. Has happened to me before by someone who saw it coming had my number I couldn’t do anything after.

So all in all, ranger GS does need a buff make it into something fearsome. ( I think by now we deserve to be feared as we once were)

Honestly, I’m seriously considering LB in dungeon theorycrafting. Hunter’s Shot man. Vulnerability is always in short supply.

I’m actually okay with this Necro… And agree, even though I use my GS for like 75% of all my fighting, the DPS feels atleast 20% too low…

Y that GS dmg from beta was totally OP..Still i dont understand how Anet aproaches changes and nerfs..I mean why we should go up-down all the time…They brought the total dmg of GS so down that they made it a totally useless weapon only to admit a few months later that “y we must put 40% more dmg on the Maul”.
Axe off hand was meh for a long time,till they realized that a pull in Path of Scars wont be gamebreaking.
Im pretty sure that Longbow will get much better in the upcoming patches but i will ask again…WHY?WHY did it had to become so useless and then bring it up
Dont nerf so hard weapons even if they are considered OP

I run GS/LB. I feel that the #1 on GS either needs an attack speed increase or a damage increase (possibly a 25% damage increase) so that it’s more useful for regular attacks (and so it can outdamage the sword by a little).