Guild Wars 2

JonPeters.5630:

Sytherek.7689:

JonPeters.5630:

Summoned creature AI is a different can of worms that we aren’t opening for the same reason. Pets that delay F2 use isn’t some wait script we put into their skills it has to do with core AI behavior shared by all pets and creatures and how they decide tasks. Rewriting that has the risks of breaking millions of unknown things so we have up until now band aided the solution. It is something that needs addressing but won’t be addressed until we can kitten how and when we will test it.

As a former AAA PC game developer, I am mystified by the above.

My frost drake’s underwater F2 is instant, but the dry land F2 has a several-second delay — that makes no sense whatsoever. Underwater, I press F2, and the button works immediately; on dry land, clicking F2 does nothing initially, for 2-3 seconds.

Why the difference?

Since you asked so nicely. The underwater skill is an instant skill which doesn’t not require the AI to change it’s think state, as it can fire off during other actions. The land skill plumbs into our animation system which requires the drake to change it think state and execute a new order to the animation system. Both AI think state and animation can’t be running 100% of the time on every creature on the server for obvious reasons (it would create massive CPU usage and generate tons of skill lag) Animations are masked by client side blending, but the AI stuff has no way to be masked. We can make special cases for Ranger Pet F2, but doing so requires time and testing.

Thank you for the reply.

So I suppose this answers why some pets’ F2 is more responsive than others on land.

These days, Fluffy the Ice Drake at least seems to hit his target about 80% of the time in PvE, which is vastly better than when the game was released. I look forward to future improvements.

maxinox.6283:

Could you improve the IU’s pet ? I need to see boons and conditions.

Yes, please. I could do this in GW1.

JonPeters.5630:

Even though we wouldn’t do it now another shot at Greatsword to discuss
A) 1 chain NDA by giving Vigor.
B) Add evade to swoop…
Discuss?

Thank u for all the informations and this discussions. Great work you and your team is doing.

A), not bad (but if u get vigor from an allie it won´t be a benefit), possibel a third idea. Add some endurance gain per hit instead of vigor. Interesting could be. For endurance per target hit. Just for example, 1 target hit>5, 2 targets hit>10 and 3 targets hit>15 endurance gain.

B) evade on demand is still nice. It would make it easier to escape or engage a fight. Or another skill to use if u are in meelecombat to evade an attack. And possibel 1 or 2 sec lower cooldown (if it won´t be too strong).

C) Just an idea for skill 4, counterkick, possibel that the player could decide:
1. i use the full 2(or3) blocking duration and kick at the end.
2. i want to kick immediatly
?

But! Might or Fury are not good (Fury only if u haven´t 15 points in skirmishing), but if u play in organized gruops (both PvP and PvE) it is easy to reach 25 stacks of might (and fury all the fight long).
And the sword will still be the better choice (cause it has defensive itself, especially with a dagger).
And the whirl can be nice utility. Possibel whirls could get the one or another small rework/tweak?

Some guy had the idea to make Axe 5 an ground targeting spell (ranger will use a roll or a jump like “linghtning reflexes” to get there.
This could be used as a another gapcloser (if u used swoop to dogde) or make the offhand axe a better support (and more mobile) weapon.

For Pets,

PET UTILITY

Can you allow the F2 skill to have a different cool down by type of play? Right now because of the amount of movement in wvw and spvp the skills are a bit lackluster but they work pretty well in pve.

What if the “quick relief” was to lower the cooldown of the F2 skills so we could fire them more frequently to offset some of their not working quite the way we always want them too?

PET DAMAGE

On pet damage, could you similarly increase the damage in wvw and spvp to account for the “rooting” of the pet which works fine in PvE but leads to too few hits actually occurring otherwise? If we are getting less hits (for whatever reason), seems the simple solution is to do more damage per hit.

PET SURVIVORABILITY
Pet’s don’t survive long around mass AE whether dungeons or WvW. A suggestion was put out that we increase the number of pets that can be swapped to 4. Thoughts?

JonPeters.5630:

cafard.8953:

Not convinced by evade on Swoop. First, at what cost would it come? Increased cooldown? I’d rather keep swoop as is.

Then, the times when Swoop fails me in a defensive context, it’s not because it didn’t evade, it’s because it didn’t get me far enough because of a cripple or immobilize. In those cases, evade wouldn’t help. Sure, 1s of no damage, but after that, i’m still in the same spot of fiery death.

If you want to improve the defensive side of swoop, make it break cripple/immobilize (or convert them into swiftness, haha), or apply 1-3s of stability.

It would come at no cost to Swoop, it would come at the cost of updating the chain. Also the added benefit that you aren’t taking into account as this skill could now be part of your rotation and used when you see a big attack incoming to avoid it.

Losing the evade from the chain isn’t a good tradeoff imho. GS is maybe our only option to join a melee train in wvw, and that evade is a big part of that.

On-demand evade is handy, but we’ve got dodges for that as well as the skill 4 block. In regards to the rotation, i can’t imagine it isn’t already there for most people thanks to the Leap Finisher (unless it’s saved for a hurried escape).

How about that 1-3s of stability on Swoop? There’s precious few stability on the ranger, this may be a lovely place to sprinkle some. That would fit nicely with the defensive nature of the ranger GS as well as address Swoop’s biggest issue imho. Also, wouldn’t the evade simply make it a forward-going Lightning Reflexes? :p

Since we are talking about greatsword improvements, id drop my 5c

- Evade for duration of Swoop animation is great idea and I think it would be worh trading it for evade on Power stab, even more since we are going to loose 25% endurance regeneration from Natural vigor.
- tiny speed and damage increase to Slash/Slice/Power stab chain
- Would you consider bringing 3 stacks of bleeding back on greatsword (dont have to be maul) – why was this even changed ?
- Is there any particular reason that greatsword is without any damaging conditions ?

Pet topic:
- would you consider increasing Harmonic cry area of effect.
- Frenzied attack is only pet skill witch doesnt land EVER.
- how about slight reduction of cast times of pet skills across the board ?

Ranged topic;
- it seems you guys completly forgot shortbow while tweaking longbow, i dont mind its 900 range, but it would need some improvements too. and quick idea – change Poison Volley to be channeled ability.

coments would be aprikittened, special yours, Jon.

Hi Jon:

Please do not change the #1 auto attack evade, instead just improve maul by:

1- adding a blast finisher to it; It always seemed to me that maul SHOULD have a blast finisher.

2- Increase the damage of Maul

3- Increase it’s CD to balance it out. I wouldn’t mind having 30 seconds of CD to use maul if it was at least a blast finisher, which would do wonders in teams playing in melee range.

4- Make #4 be able to block and ONLY counter attack when I press the button again before the channel timer runs out.

Thanks for talking to us rangers, Jon

This is what i think the GS need to come back in the game

Skirmishing XII – Moment of Clarity. Stun Duration increased from 50% to 100%.

This change can be interesting, but there are some problems with this trait:
1. Only 2 skills are affected by this trait.
2. These skills have long CD (25s).
3. One of these skill (Concussion Shoot) is on a set (Short Bow) that won’t get a great bonus from the 50% more damage.

For those reason I suggest do decrease the CD of Hilt Bash and Concussion Shoot from 25s to 10s. This will bring the CD of that interrupt similar to Warrior or Engineer interruptions.

With this change I’m sure we will see roaming rangers. They will run power build based on Great Sword. And with this other change:

Nature Magic IX – Two Handed Training. Added the following functionality to this trait. Greatsword and Spear attacks have a chance to grant Fury on hit. 50% chance. 3s Fury. 10s cooldown

I think we will see something like 0/30/20/20/0.

JonPeters.5630:

Even though we wouldn’t do it now another shot at Greatsword to discuss

A) 1 chain NDA by giving Vigor.
B) Add evade to swoop…

Discuss?

About this i think this:
A) Ranger have enouth endurance for any wanted evasion. If you want to random evade just spam 1. You don’t need more endurance to make ranger invulnerable for half of the time, remember that roll means 2s Protection.
B) Swoop is a great movement skill with 10s CD. It is also a leap finisher. If you give avade to that skill you will have the same problem as ride the lightning. Remember that ranger use it to retreat from bad situation, maybe in combo with Counter Attack. Do you really want a ranger that leave the pet on you while he is flying invulnerable 1100 away?

Conclusion:
1. Maybe the 1 attack need some buff, but do not give evasion on evasion.
2. Swoop is strong enought it do not need any buff.
3. Hilt bash is an underpowered stun, and it is conditional. This is the skill that need buff on GS.

I hope to be listened because when i see discussion like this i lose the trust in you.

It’s refreshing to see all this developers – players communication recently. It finally feels like we’re getting somewhere.

Being a GS user myself, I’m really happy that you intend to improve it. However, while Vigor on GS #1 is certainly better option than the Whirl Finisher, but it doesn’t help the weapon in terms of its offensive capabilities. It has been mentioned more than a few times in this thread, but those are being hampered primarly by low base damage of GS #1. In terms of DPS, GS is not only far behind Sword, but also behind SB and LB, if the latter is used at the distance of 1000+.

Actually, I think it would be great if we could hear what Anet’s vision regarding GS, what you want it to be. So far it is a defensive weapon, with damage being somewhat secondary role. But now you plan to add “Fury on strike” to the Two-handed Training. It’s a potential change that I really like. However, its impact on the entire weapon is not going to be as big as it could because the base damage is still low.

And now for something completely diffferent. Certain traits that are aimed towards pets, such as Concentration Training, only work when the pet is in combat. It’s something, that at least in my opinion makes them more clunky than they should be. Is it completely intentional and there is some reasoning behind such decision, or are there any plans to make them work both in and out of combat? Or is it somehow limited by the game system itself at the moment?

Undertaker.7451:

Ranged topic;
- it seems you guys completly forgot shortbow while tweaking longbow, i dont mind its 900 range, but it would need some improvements too. ………

coments would be appreciated, special yours, Jon.

Please respond to this, it is sort of sad that after the nerf to short bow, it has been completely forgotten about (so it seems) there are a ton of awesome ideas around the forums to make this weapon better.

-Adding torment to one of the skills (crippling shot, concussion shot, and even poison volley are nice candidates for it)
-Adjusting the range to be a little longer
-Making Poison Volley an actual aoe skill (similar mechanic to barrage maybe 800 range to compensate)

JonPeters.5630:

OGDeadHead.8326:

JonPeters.5630:

No because in order for the creatures to attack they are going to use animations. For example I’m not going to spit fire breath out of a drake without it using its fire spitting animation.

Add quickness to F2.

Quickness is not the problem. The problem is the server delay which would also have to wait for in order to get quickness applied.

Thanks for this information. I find it very interesting.

JonPeters.5630:

As I stated, this change is a lot about low hanging fruit. The problem with ranger is things that are good we don’t want to overpower and the things that are not as good are difficult to change. For example:

• Skirmish and Wilderness line could probably swap half of their traits.
• Beastmastery has basically one generic trait per tier and just needs to be more generalized.
• both primary ranged weapons are a mix of single target and AoE.
• Both marksmanship and skirmish lines lack traits to enable power rangers.

Despite those problems rangers have some great builds in PvE, PvP, and WvW. The core problem is diversity but it just so happens that rangers are not setup in a way that makes it easy to improve that diversity problem.

Too much typing for the bus, I’ll try and discuss more when I’m in.

Jon

P.S. I tried some stuff on MH sword but it was a marginal improvement at best. I’ll ping some programmers today about one other way we might handle it, but don’t hold your breath.

Again. Compress our traits to be in line with Warrior Traits. These are easy, low hanging fruit changes.

• Reduced recharge to all our ranged weapons skills should be rolled into Piercing Arrow to be on par with the warrior trait (crack shot). This should be an easy low hanging fruit.

• The greatsword trait you’re changing should have been in wilderness survival with the reduced cooldown trait to again be on par with warrior trait, where they gain might on crit with greatsword and spear and gain 20% cooldown on top of that (Forceful Greatsword).

• Increased Range trait should be for both bows and possibly be rolled into the increased damage trait for both bows.

• Give us a weapon swap cooldown reduction trait. Perhaps change Quick Draw to do this.

All the above are nice, easy, low hanging fruit style changes which you seem to be focusing on this patch and would do wonders for the ranger.

Why don’t we get interesting Spirit traits like Summoning a spirit removes 3 conditions on allies in a 600 range.

You have not addressed the fact that for 5 pts Guardians and Mesmers (which I do have both of at 80 also) get full vigor compared to our trait you’re trying to nerf which is only 50% of vigor. Elementalists also get full vigor in a 20 pt trait. Why aren’t these being addressed? This is the biggest change to our class survival.

JonPeters.5630:

awe extender.1908:

JonPeters.5630:

Sytherek.7689:

JonPeters.5630:

Summoned creature AI is a different can of worms that we aren’t opening for the same reason. Pets that delay F2 use isn’t some wait script we put into their skills it has to do with core AI behavior shared by all pets and creatures and how they decide tasks. Rewriting that has the risks of breaking millions of unknown things so we have up until now band aided the solution. It is something that needs addressing but won’t be addressed until we can kitten how and when we will test it.

As a former AAA PC game developer, I am mystified by the above.

My frost drake’s underwater F2 is instant, but the dry land F2 has a several-second delay — that makes no sense whatsoever. Underwater, I press F2, and the button works immediately; on dry land, clicking F2 does nothing initially, for 2-3 seconds.

Why the difference?

Since you asked so nicely. The underwater skill is an instant skill which doesn’t not require the AI to change it’s think state, as it can fire off during other actions. The land skill plumbs into our animation system which requires the drake to change it think state and execute a new order to the animation system. Both AI think state and animation can’t be running 100% of the time on every creature on the server for obvious reasons (it would create massive CPU usage and generate tons of skill lag) Animations are masked by client side blending, but the AI stuff has no way to be masked. We can make special cases for Ranger Pet F2, but doing so requires time and testing.

Does this mean that we could, once for all, get rid of the delayed F2 / unresponsive F2 by NOT having a pet animation?

I don’t mind having a pet without a F2 animation as long as it can be instant! Please drop the animations and make it like underwater :-))

No because in order for the creatures to attack they are going to use animations. For example I’m not going to spit fire breath out of a drake without it using its fire spitting animation.

I have not been in the forums much so you, or another dev, might have answered this:

Where, during the animation, does the attack itself commence? Does the attack commence at the beginning of the animation, throughout the animation, etc?

From my observation, it does not look like the attack hits at the beginning of the animation. I, for one, would be a lot happier if it did.

JonPeters.5630:

I just had a wacky idea that might make some aspects of MH sword less frustrating. I’ll test it out when I get in to work and report back.

Jon

Thank you so much for having a look at this. I understand some people like it but for many more it’s something that stands as a real barrier to enjoying the class. I can atunement swap/kit swap to my hearts content and everything purrs along with no problems, but the MH sword is an enigma to me. Even a little change to make it less frustrating would be wonderful. This is my first MMO and it’s really nice to see this level of responsiveness from devs (didn’t get this in TF2….).

Hi Jon!

First I just want to say that I really appreciate the transparency with these balance changes so far. I hope you’ll keep up the good work!

I think everybody else on here has brushed up on the major concerns far more eloquently than I ever would, so I’d just like to bring up one small QoL change that would make me very happy.

Can we please finally have Skill Recharge show on the pet F2 ability? I’m referring to the numbers. It shows on Pet Swap/Stow, and pretty much every other profession mechanic, but it still hasn’t shown for the F2 ability yet.

JonPeters.5630:

meikodesign.6471:

JonPeters.5630:

Even though we wouldn’t do it now another shot at Greatsword to discuss

A) 1 chain NDA by giving Vigor.
B) Add evade to swoop…

Discuss?

Weakness, Might, Protection or Retalation instead of Vigor?
I thought you wanted to limit the Vigor spam.

We do want to but we also want this to be a weapon with some evasion capability on it, otherwise we would not have made the auto-attack on it evade in the first place.

• Keep the evade on 1
• Add the evade to swoop
• Add weakness to maul and make maul a blast finisher seeing as our only blast finisher is on the warhorn.
• Perhaps boost the auto attack damage a little, Greatsword has been lackluster since the beta nerf, even with the minor boosts it has received.

JonPeters.5630:

As I stated, this change is a lot about low hanging fruit. The problem with ranger is things that are good we don’t want to overpower and the things that are not as good are difficult to change. For example:

• Skirmish and Wilderness line could probably swap half of their traits.
• Beastmastery has basically one generic trait per tier and just needs to be more generalized.
• both primary ranged weapons are a mix of single target and AoE.
• Both marksmanship and skirmish lines lack traits to enable power rangers.

Despite those problems rangers have some great builds in PvE, PvP, and WvW. The core problem is diversity but it just so happens that rangers are not setup in a way that makes it easy to improve that diversity problem.

Too much typing for the bus, I’ll try and discuss more when I’m in.

Jon

P.S. I tried some stuff on MH sword but it was a marginal improvement at best. I’ll ping some programmers today about one other way we might handle it, but don’t hold your breath.

Maybe a new skirmishing trait that changes the sword auto’s functionality, causes a loss of leaps & a minor dps boost like 5%, this would fix this weapon for pve & it wouldn’t affect the pvp functionality at all, if adding a new trait for this is not possible, maybe doing a pve/pvp split (only for this skill) would be a good way to fix it.

Idea how to make space for the new trait to fix sword auto: move quick draw to marksmanship & fuse it with eagle eye. (this in itself would be a great quality of life change for bow rangers as well)

So…after reading that little blurb about pets, is it possible to give us some kind of damage boost when running without a pet?

What I took away from that is that pets aren’t functioning optimally as they should be(or they are flat-out broken in some cases), yet they won’t be fixed(or even looked at being fixed) for quite some time. According to your goal for the class as a whole, pets are in-fact a HUGE part of the class. Seeing as how they aren’t fully up to par with the rest of classes in the game, perhaps you guys should return to the drawing table and re-think things? I don’t see why a choice ala GW1 of no pet would hurt; if anything it would improve build variety.

I mean, I knew pet AI was pretty borked to begin with, but after reading that…ehh it’s kind of a slap in the face to admit it AND say it’s not going to be fixed anytime soon. So I guess the answer is just to play another class that is actually being given attention/proper effort towards the class goal.

Another idea to improve power rangers mostly;

- Merge Tail wind and Hunters tactics and let it stay on grandmaster minor
- Add new adept minor trait – gain 3 stacks of might for 5s

First I wanted to say thanks Jon for having a one-on-one discussion with the community on ranger changes/fixes. I haven’t seen that from a lead designer since Raph Koster in Ultima Online. I think it’s great that you do that, instead of staying locked in an ivory tower guiding the game as you see fit with little or no community input.

Second, rather than pepper you with a million specifics (which others are already doing), I wanted to point out a broader conceptual problem with ranger. You seem to want to the pet to be a (the) core part of the profession. The problem is, the pet only improves with level. A pet operated by a level 80 in masterwork gear is the same as a pet operated by a level 80 in ascended gear.

This creates a disparity in the effective improvement ranger receives from gear upgrades compared to other professions. e.g. If you assume 70% of the damage comes from the ranger, 30% from the pet, then the 5% damage improvement everyone else gets for upgrading their weapon from exotic to ascended translates into only a 3.5% damage improvement for ranger.

The simple fix (unpopular among the penny-pinchers here, but the most direct way to fix this) would be a new gear type – a pet collar. It can have levels, grades (rare, exotic, etc), and item nomenclature (berserker’s, knight’s, etc). It would increase the pet’s stats, thus allowing pet damage/survivability to scale with equipment proportional to the ranger’s damage/survivability.

JonPeters.5630:

Holland.9351:

JonPeters.5630:

Even though we wouldn’t do it now another shot at Greatsword to discuss

A) 1 chain NDA by giving Vigor.
B) Add evade to swoop…

Discuss?

Why do you want to change the Greatsword?
Does the evade have to go and you need to come up with an acceptable solution for it?

I don’t have to change it. I am hoping to improve it with changes without making it overpowered. I think right now one of the major problems, despite being good is that the evade on the chain is very hit or miss and feels very RNG when using it or fighting against it. I would rather put more of the skill of when to evade under player control to give this weapon more agency.

The evade on the chain is very hit or miss currently, but I think there’s an easy way to improve that. If you could increase the amount of time it takes for the chain to reset, then I could throw in another skill like maul to adjust when the evade is going to happen. This probably wouldn’t help as much in PvP, but it would work wonders in PvE.

I’m curious about whether or not we can get an increase to the damage on the chain. It’s currently very weak compared to our spear and compared to the defensive weapons of other classes, like the hammer on the guardian. Damage output suffers too much for it to be a full time weapon, so you end up using it for the mobility or the block.

The issues with pets are frustrating. The core of the ranger has been made to revolve around a pet, which is broken. There is little incentive to continue with the ranger class. All the changes I see are focused on issues that are not as critical as the pet problems. Why is that?

Adacian.9752:

The issues with pets are frustrating. The core of the ranger has been made to revolve around a pet, which is broken. There is little incentive to continue with the ranger class. All the changes I see are focused on issues that are not as critical as the pet problems. Why is that?

Since they can’t fix them. Atleast they came out clean and admitted it so we can move on to other professions/games.

I’ve posted about Greatsword before and I do not think the autoattack chain is an issue. Swoop is only an issue because the animation for it is hawkward. What would make Greatsword more useful in pretty much every situation would be to give Maul a blast finisher. This would promote smart usage of combos in Zergs, and TPvP and breathe life into this weapon.

Other changes I would love to see are just access to on demand condition removal, tweaking shouts to be more useful, and maybe tweaking Storm Spirits active effect as the swiftness is really just not that helpful.

Adacian.9752:

The issues with pets are frustrating. The core of the ranger has been made to revolve around a pet, which is broken. There is little incentive to continue with the ranger class. All the changes I see are focused on issues that are not as critical as the pet problems. Why is that?

It isn’t something fixable apparently(or at least not for a long LONG time), so they’re focusing on other things(which aren’t the CORE mechanic of the class).

tl;dr: Pick another class and move on

-_-, its annoying not game breaking….

Hedgehog in the fog.1053:

-_-, its annoying not game breaking….

When your pet accounts for 25-40% of your damage depending on what weapon and skill you’re looking at doesn’t work properly even half the time, it’s game breaking. The frustration is now doubled because they know about the problem and can’t fix it in the forseeable future.

Worse still is there are ways to ‘band-aid’ it until a fix can be done, but ANet isn’t willing to do it because the animation trigger is apparently the real thing holding back progress. I completley understand their reasoning for not fixing it (a lot of other stuff needs to be done that doesn’t require nearly the same amount of resources to fix) but it’s not fair for the playerbase to be the victim.

So how do you resolve it? ANet’s taking the approach that F2’s will remain broken for now. If we aren’t here in a year having this same conversation I’ll be amazed. They’re also taking the approach that even though we’ve waited a year for change, we can wait some more because the issues take effort to fix and none of our issues are eay (low hanging fruit).

I am very pleased ANet has been as open as they are in this thread. It’s just all very disheartening and lends justification for the people who quit the class and why this class is ranked 8th place in WvW.

Somsom , thank you for your advice. I have 6 level 80s of different classes completely geared out (except for ascended weapons, only have that on my ranger). I played beta as a ranger and when gw2 went live Started with ranger , gave up and then came back to it during jubilee.
When the core mechanic of a class is broken and doesn’t work properly Its game breaking for the class- its more than annoying and a far more glaring issue than anything else listed in this forum.

There is a fix that can be implemented -let us control when the pet is present. Allow us to put the pet away, keep it put away and give a damage boost while the pet is dead or put away.

I agree with many other posters. I like the evade on greatsword where it’s at. With counterattack and dodge we have plenty of “active” evasions. I don’t have any issue with passive evade being part of the autoattack. I do think it could use a small damage increase to the auto-attack, something in the 5-10% range and a blast finisher on maul would be amazing. I don’t understand why it doesn’t have one, seems a perfect skill to put it on.

Just a thought for 1H sword Serpent Strike skill. Currently it inflicts poison on the target what if this was changed to weakness? With all the complaints about the auto attack chain and the difficulty in dodging with it, using this skill to avoid damage and then inflict weakness may give us a little more sustain if used properly. Heck this could maybe be done on Dagger 4 rather than sword 3?

Elenire.7306:

I agree with many other posters. I like the evade on greatsword where it’s at. With counterattack and dodge we have plenty of “active” evasions. I don’t have any issue with passive evade being part of the autoattack. I do think it could use a small damage increase to the auto-attack, something in the 5-10% range and a blast finisher on maul would be amazing. I don’t understand why it doesn’t have one, seems a perfect skill to put it on.

Just a thought for 1H sword Serpent Strike skill. Currently it inflicts poison on the target what if this was changed to weakness? With all the complaints about the auto attack chain and the difficulty in dodging with it, using this skill to avoid damage and then inflict weakness may give us a little more sustain if used properly. Heck this could maybe be done on Dagger 4 rather than sword 3?

Much prefer it on dagger and not sword 3 to be honest. Given the extreme lack of burst available to this class, poison is pretty much necessary if you ever plan to beat anyone to counter all the regen and healing.

Atherakhia.4086:

Hedgehog in the fog.1053:

-_-, its annoying not game breaking….

When your pet accounts for 25-40% of your damage depending on what weapon and skill you’re looking at doesn’t work properly even half the time, it’s game breaking. The frustration is now doubled because they know about the problem and can’t fix it in the forseeable future.

Worse still is there are ways to ‘band-aid’ it until a fix can be done, but ANet isn’t willing to do it because the animation trigger is apparently the real thing holding back progress. I completley understand their reasoning for not fixing it (a lot of other stuff needs to be done that doesn’t require nearly the same amount of resources to fix) but it’s not fair for the playerbase to be the victim.

So how do you resolve it? ANet’s taking the approach that F2’s will remain broken for now. If we aren’t here in a year having this same conversation I’ll be amazed. They’re also taking the approach that even though we’ve waited a year for change, we can wait some more because the issues take effort to fix and none of our issues are eay (low hanging fruit).

I am very pleased ANet has been as open as they are in this thread. It’s just all very disheartening and lends justification for the people who quit the class and why this class is ranked 8th place in WvW.

You’ve made it this far without it functioning perfectly.

Yes, let them fix the low hanging fruit. Id rather bow be nice, Id rather see a life increase on pets, Id rather the GS hit hard, Id rather a signet build require less traits. There are things Id rather see than F2. We are based around pet damage yes, we are not balanced around the pets F2

JonPeters.5630:

Vox Hollow.2736:

Ah, Zen
I think he means Swoop would receive the invulnerability effect of an evasion for the duration of the existing animation, not that it would help you evade something by automatically moving you backward. Less like Lightning Reflexes, more like Mesmer Distortion.

Correct!

That’s asking for abuse. Can you honestly say that an almost 1200 range leap with an evade for most (if not all) of its duration would not negatively impact how well people can stick to melee rangers? You’d honestly be better off putting the evade on Maul in this case. It’d be conceptually out-of-place, but the skill is already highly telegraphed, meaning your opponent still has ample time to decide whether they want to dodge or block it.

Leave it on the auto attack chain and improve the functionality there. It will lend to itself if the auto attacks start doing any respectable damage, which can be approached by improving attack speed (this already decreases the evade per activation), improving base damage and/or ratios, or a combination of both.

I’m not sure how I feel about Swoop being an evade.

On one hand, it will certainly make the Evade more reliable than on the auto-attack. And be less abusable at the same time, due to cooldown. Those are good things. Also, evading through projectiles while rushing at an enemy would be kitten.

However, Swoop is GS’s only notable finisher (Counter > Throw is a projectile finisher, but a single projectile finisher is pretty meh). I’m a big fan of finishers, and I’d hate to have to decide between saving Swoop for an evade at a key moment or using it as a Finisher, especially if its the only finisher I have access to when using GS.

Also… Swoop, when used at point-blank range, is a relatively quick attack. Much faster than the auto-attack 3rd hit, or at least it seems that way. If the evade were that short, it’d make it pretty tough to use. Would the Evade be able to persist slightly past the duration of the skill, giving you the same (relatively long) evade as the auto-attack does currently?

The latter issue could obviously be solved by letting the evade persist beyond the animation, if possible, as I brought up. The former issue, though… not sure what could be done about that. Blast finisher on Maul is brought up a lot and would fix the issue by giving another good Finisher on GS, but given Maul’s recharge it might be too strong, and I wouldn’t want to see Maul nerfed to accomidate a finisher, since GS really needs a decent damage-dealing attack like Maul. Could maybe put a Leap finisher on Hilt Bash (since it kind of sort of moves you forward) but that has much the same problem as Swoop would, where you’d have to choose between using it as an interrupt or using it as a Finisher. And its a stretch anyway.

I know it was originally brought up to maybe put a Whirl finisher on GS’s auto-attack 3rd hit (not sure if that would still be on the table with the Vigor-on-auto suggestion currently active), and that might be interesting. But while I do like that idea for its uniqueness (I don’t think there’s any other melee weapon with a built-in finisher on auto, is there?) and fitting the animation and such, its a bit passive and would make a poor substitute for an active combo attack like Swoop.

Maybe I’m overthinking it, though. Swoop is on a shortish cooldown and we still have Block, so perhaps its a non-issue and you could still use Swoop as a finisher just fine.

With that out of the way, I’d like to talk pet traits. I’m hoping its already in the works based on one of your posts back on Page 8 about Beastmastery being more generalized (and the recent change to the “Vigor on Swap” trait to work with all pets), but can we please ditch all of the Master- level family-specific traits and make them apply to all pets? Adding various effects to your pets like bleed on crit, stability, ect are nice in theory, but having them only apply to specific pets is just bad. It means you have to use only specific pets when using those traits if you want to get the full benefit.

Alternatively, if you want to keep giving pet families a unique “flavor” by giving them all their own special traits, combine those 4 (or 3, now) traits into a single trait that unlocks the “hidden potential” in every pet (with different effects based on family), freeing up a few spots for new traits and allowing you to run said trait without feeling the need to limit your pet choice. Said trait could simultaneously give Cripple on F2 to Spiders while providing Bleed-on-Crit to Felines. Or give Porcine pets Stability while providing Bleed-on-Crit to Devourers.

Also, with the talk of rearranging some of the traits to make certain lines more “coherent” and streamlined, can we have some rearranging of pet traits too? There are currently pet traits spread all over the place, which means in just about any pet-based build you’re missing out on certain pet traits (especially since 30 Beastmastery is pretty much a requirement for any full pet build). In my case, my build is 0-0-20-20-30 so that I can pick up Fortifying Bond and Off-Hand Training / spirit traits (which support my pets well, spirits and Warhorn). I’m missing some key pet traits like the 30% Crit Damage trait and the 50% Pet Condition Duration trait that I just can’t get due to them being off in Skirmishing / Marksmanship. I could drop to 10 in Wilderness Survival so I could pick up 10 in Skrimishing and get the Crit Damage trait, but I’d still end up missing the Condition Duration trait (and Carnivorous Appetite), and my support for my pets would suffer.

And finally… Speed Training and Commanding Voice. Why are these two skills separate? Why are pet F2 skills not considered “pet skills” and affected by the same trait, but a completely separate trait altogether, when they are all used by your pet? I really don’t see the need for 2 traits doing what should be accomplished by one. It’d be like if there were 2 traits, one that reduced Greatsword skills 1-3 cooldown, and one reduced Greatsword skills 4-5 cooldown. People would be understandably baffled at why they’re seperate and not combined. And both traits kind of suck, honestly. Speed Training is only a 10% decrease (Why? Almost all cooldown skills in the game are 20%) and Commanding Voice is so limited its silly. At any given time its reducing the cooldown of one (usable) skill. Maybe stretch it and say it applies to 2 skills if you include your swap, but with swap cooldown I’d say that’s a bit of a stretch. A whole trait for ONE skill. Combine them, and make it a 20% cooldown decrease. Open up a new trait spot for something else.

Atherakhia.4086:

The frustration is now doubled because they know about the problem and can’t fix it in the forseeable future.

Actually the frustration is finally over. Before we really didn’t know if they were able/planning to adress pet issues any time soon or not.
As the pet issues are too complex to fix for them and no improvements aren’t coming any time soon people can finally let go and play some of the other professions that arent broken to the core

Is there any chance to have all F2 pet skills (that can) trigger their effect at the start of the animation, rather than at the end?

The Moa pets currently mostly work like this. The F2 is nearly instant after triggering it.
Jungle Stalker has it the worst for an AoE buff, you should have a look at it, it takes ages.
Bears are pretty bad too, except Brown Bear, which was recently updated and now uses a quicker animation. If all bears could be like Brown Bear they would be a whole lot better. The cooldown on bear F2 skills is still abysmal (except for Brown Bear).

I’m sure there are plenty more examples. Canine howls could be twice as fast I think.

Any chance of cleaning up some of the inefficient animations on Sword and Greatsword? Specifically:

• The pitifully short range on the Sword’s second autoattack. I understand it’s meant to be a ‘leap’, but it’s really just an in-place kick. All someone needs to do is dodge it to ruin the entire attack chain. Honestly, it seems like only the third attack in the chain deserves to be a ‘leap’. The first two should be usable while moving.
• The nearly 1s “stand still” on Hornet Sting before the evade/leap actually takes effect. This doesn’t really belong on an evasive skill.
• The root/sluggishness on Greatswords counterattack kick. The animation is literally slow enough for someone to get in a second attack before getting hit by the kick triggered from their first one. It’s wildly ineffective, and at the very least it shouldn’t force you to briefly stop moving upon triggering. You added mobility to the Crippling Throw, so can we get it here too, perhaps?
• The animation on Hilt Bash is too slow/short against moving targets. Can you increase the range a bit, or allow us to use it while moving?

JonPeters.5630:

It would come at no cost to Swoop, it would come at the cost of updating the chain. Also the added benefit that you aren’t taking into account as this skill could now be part of your rotation and used when you see a big attack incoming to avoid it.

Usually when I want to avoid a big attack, I also don’t want to run far away, or get right up in the face of the enemy. Using swoop as an evade seems like it would be very situational, and I don’t think it fits well with the idea of a gap closer. Extender, maybe.

Vox Hollow.2736:

Would the WvW folks feel as though greater damage on the autottack chain would offset the loss of the evades, or does something like that not really matter to you guys?
I know that’s something us PvE folks would be delighted to see.

No, more damage would not offset the loss of evades. When all you can do is move and autoattack, anything on auto that saves your bacon while doing damage is welcome. The primary goal in large group combat in WvW is not damage, but staying alive. If GS had damage comparable to MH sword, there would be very little reason to use MH in PvE. However, I would not mind a slight damage increase on the GS, though. And maybe more stacks of vulnerability, or weakness replacing vulnerability on maul.

I would love a trait in the nature magic tree or in the wilderness survival tree that allowed me to bleed with the shortbow from any direction.

Please merge quick draw with piercing arrows, that way all bow traits will be in the power line and we can have more variety. I would really like for this to happen and I can’t see why it wouldn’t. Rangers shouldn’t have to spend 40/50 traits to get the most out of their bows. And with the greatsword, I think it would be best to replace hilt bash with some type of new skill, preferably either a dps one or a support skill. Hilt bash is really weak imo and I think there are many other options that could be implemented to takes its spot.

And PLEASE get rid of signet of the beastmaster and just have signet actives always affect us, like all other classes. I made a suggestion a while ago to have a trait which allows signet passives to be aoe’d to allies, and it seems pretty fair since we don’t have that many viable support builds.

I think it’s way too late to suggest this change for the december patch, but my question is about porcine pets: why their “unique” skill is shared among them?
Can we have a different f2 for 3 of them (maybe one of the 3 could be something that reveal stealthed units, like Sick’em, to fit the concept of a beast sniffing for a scent, as pigs are famous for their sense of smell)

JonPeters.5630:

One idea we talked about for Greatsword would be to take the evade off of the 3rd attack of the auto-chain and put it on swoop. This would give you a second on-demand defensive skill and instead we put something less timing based (for example a whirl finisher) on that third attack to empower it.

This sounds nice, but similar to how you want to preserve 1h sword’s unique playstyle, I consider the evasion in the GS auto-attack chain to be a unique playstyle I really enjoy as well. It is part of what defines the GS to me.

For example, used in conjunction with quickness is a fun way to maintain pressure, while upping your defensive posture.

I prefer Swoop for the distance as opposed to an evasion.

I have only ever played my Ranger with power builds, and I am glad to see some positive ideas though.

Thanks.

RWinter.1680:

JonPeters.5630:

It would come at no cost to Swoop, it would come at the cost of updating the chain. Also the added benefit that you aren’t taking into account as this skill could now be part of your rotation and used when you see a big attack incoming to avoid it.

Usually when I want to avoid a big attack, I also don’t want to run far away, or get right up in the face of the enemy. Using swoop as an evade seems like it would be very situational, and I don’t think it fits well with the idea of a gap closer. Extender, maybe.

Vox Hollow.2736:

Would the WvW folks feel as though greater damage on the autottack chain would offset the loss of the evades, or does something like that not really matter to you guys?
I know that’s something us PvE folks would be delighted to see.

No, more damage would not offset the loss of evades. When all you can do is move and autoattack, anything on auto that saves your bacon while doing damage is welcome. The primary goal in large group combat in WvW is not damage, but staying alive. If GS had damage comparable to MH sword, there would be very little reason to use MH in PvE. However, I would not mind a slight damage increase on the GS, though. And maybe more stacks of vulnerability, or weakness replacing vulnerability on maul.

If the greatsword had damage comparable to the sword, you would still use it for the offhand skills. Currently, the sword’s auto attack does like 50% more damage than greatsword (.6/.6/.7 per 1.8s vs. .55/.55/.65 per 2.5s).

Not to mention mainhand would still be used purely for the warhorn or the reflection on axe offhand. None of the greatsword skills offer meaningful PvE utility.

Quick fix to opening strike that would help power builds.

Opening strikes with ranged weapons’ (bows and axe) do 100% more damage (autoattacks ONLY). This would make remorselessness interesting too.

With right traits up, it could be a very solid initial burst (at the cost of not having much other utility).

Coarr.3286:

my 5cent:

Opening Strike – add: cannot be blocked

This a good idea, especially when aegis eats our first attack. Power rangers need help against guards.

Coarr.3286:

Honed Axes – Add a cool down reduction or a 4th bounce to ricochet.

the cooldowns are fine IMO, 6 seconds and 10 seconds. The damage buff is far more necessary.

Zenith.7301:

Not to mention mainhand would still be used purely for the warhorn or the reflection on axe offhand. None of the greatsword skills offer meaningful PvE utility.

100% agreed, this is where I think the greatsword really needs improvement. I made a thread about it too.

JonPeters.5630:

• both primary ranged weapons are a mix of single target and AoE.

Coming back on this. Only the Longbow is really AoE and that only in 1 skill.
Shortbow only has Poison Volley which is a fan, not really an AoE.
Unless you count Piercing Arrows as AoE I suppose.

I would like to see Longbow get another AoE attached to it.
Sigil of Fire synergises really well with the longbow in WvW, it would be great if it could be default behaviour of a skill.
So in a sense like the Smoldering Arrow on Warrior Longbow. A single target skill with a radius (not a targetable AoE like Barrage).

The question is on which skill:
Long Range shot would be awesome if it had a small radius attached to it.
Rapid Fire would also be awesome if it had a radius, but it already does a lot of other things (multiple hits, no penalty to distance and vulnerability)
Hunter’s Shot could work, but it does a small amount of damage and already does other things as well (Stealth/resetting Remorseless and pet swiftness)
Point Blank shot is too short range and needs to be kept off cooldown if possible.
Barrage could be replaced with a single hit skill with a radius I suppose, but is probably too big of a change. I wouldn’t mind personally however.

Would a radius added to Long Range Shot be possible?
Otherwise Hunter’s Shot I suppose, since it doesn’t do as much damage and has a much longer cooldown. The problem is the stealth stopping auto-attack if you want to use it for damage.

My conclusion: I don’t know. A Sigil of Fire-like trait would be nice I suppose.

Holland.9351:

JonPeters.5630:

• both primary ranged weapons are a mix of single target and AoE.

Coming back on this. Only the Longbow is really AoE and that only in 1 skill.
Shortbow only has Poison Volley which is a fan, not really an AoE.
Unless you count Piercing Arrows as AoE I suppose.

I would like to see Longbow get another AoE attached to it.
Sigil of Fire synergises really well with the longbow in WvW, it would be great if it could be default behaviour of a skill.
So in a sense like the Smoldering Arrow on Warrior Longbow. A single target skill with a radius (not a targetable AoE like Barrage).

The question is on which skill:
Long Range shot would be awesome if it had a small radius attached to it.
Rapid Fire would also be awesome if it had a radius, but it already does a lot of other things (multiple hits, no penalty to distance and vulnerability)
Hunter’s Shot could work, but it does a small amount of damage and already does other things as well (Stealth/resetting Remorseless and pet swiftness)
Point Blank shot is too short range and needs to be kept off cooldown if possible.
Barrage could be replaced with a single hit skill with a radius I suppose, but is probably too big of a change. I wouldn’t mind personally however.

Would a radius added to Long Range Shot be possible?
Otherwise Hunter’s Shot I suppose, since it doesn’t do as much damage and has a much longer cooldown. The problem is the stealth stopping auto-attack if you want to use it for damage.

My conclusion: I don’t know. A Sigil of Fire-like trait would be nice I suppose.

Why does it have to be a weapon skill? This class has such a poor selection of utility skills to choose from, why can’t we consolidate some of those and introduce new utilities that actually provide some offensive power?

Barrage is also awful in its current form so instead of trying to force a second AE on us, why not just make barrage a good AE to begin with?

Here some maybe overseen things that need to be kept in mind about the proposed GS change:
As it is now we get an 1 sec evade every 3rd attack. Someone said thats 39% evade uptime when only using the autoattack – 1 sec out of ~2.5 sec.
This is huge and we know that a GS ranger is not considered OP as it is now but that we want to improve the GS. Now if we lose that evade imagine the loss in survivability. Suddenly instead of for example 2.000 damage we take 3.330 damage statistically. Thats 66% more damage taken.
And vigor is worth nothing compared to that. Even if we get one more dodge every few seconds while dodging we can’t deal any damage and if we have other sources of vigor the vigor on autoattack won’t change anything.
Even 100% protection uptime would be weaker because while having protection you can be hit for conditions/cc’ed or whatever but while evading you cannot be hit and may evade really important stuff. Also the ranger might already have protection up in which case protection is even weaker compared to the evade on auto-attack.
Also this evade makes it hard for your opponent to plan his attacks since it might be evaded which means that we might evade burst damage. Really skilled players can/could even time this evade which makes it even better.
Having the evade on swoop is nice for escaping but while fighting it is alot weaker than the evade in the autoattack chain. First you have to waste your leap finisher and your escape tool to evade which might leave you without disengaging possibilites when you need them. Then it has a 12 second CD instead of a 2.5 second cd and in a zerg you can’t use swoop to dodge because it would move you somewhere where you don’t want to be (leaving your zerg = death in mass fights).
Even aegis instead of dodge would be worse in mass fights since you block one hit instead of maybe 10 during that evade.
But the most important argument against this change is that as it is now you can deal damage while evading lots of damage which gives the ranger the ability to stay in melee range even without heavy armor.

Jon since you are looking for ways to improve the GS please don’t remove the evade on the auto since this won’t improve the GS but weaken it pretty massively in my opinion. This is especially true in WvW fights where exactly this evade on autoattack is what makes the GS so viable.
For PvE an evade on swoop (12 sec cd or 9 1/2 traited) might help to evade burst but if a burst only comes every 9-12 seconds the player could simply have dodged. And during the other time he would have evaded alot of the other attacks thanks to the almost 40% evade uptime in the autoattack.
I really hope that the GS won’t lose it’s evade on the autoattack chain. If you really “have to” remove the evade on the GS #1 then put it on maul since maul also has a short CD. This might be viable because an on demand 4 1/2 or 6 second CD evade would be fine but then if there is skill lag in WvW the evade on autoattack is still stronger.

I love the GS as it is now and by changing the evade I would not be able to face-to-face fight many thieves/warriors while roaming any more.
So a big no from me to removing evade from the autoattack.