Guild Wars 2

To make the Marksmanship trait line more attractive I believe that the two traits and the Opening Strikes mechanic needs to be reworked.

Issues:
Right now Opening Strikes only procs on start of combat and with Remorseless it can be reset on killing target. However this makes it pointless in dungeon play and WvW/PvP for longer fights.

Piercing Arrows should not be an individual trait, it’s a waste of a Major trait and getting it means you can’t get Eagle Eye unless you put it in the GM slot.

Aim: Make Marksmanship an attractive traitline by improving said traits and implementing a few changes.

Proposed fixes:

Piercing Arrows should be merged with Eagle Eye, it makes perfect sense, that your improved eye-sight allows you to aim for spots that will cause the arrow to pierce. This way both can be achieved using one trait, Shortbow users can take it too and benefit when switching to Longbow for WvW tower play.

Opening Strike should apply to an attack/skill and not a hit. I.E the first wave of arrows from Barrage, everything hit by the piercing effect of an arrow, or Maul should be effected by Opening Strike. Not just the first mob hit or targeted mob.

Remorseless needs to be moved down to the Major traits to replace Piercing Arrows. Remorseless needs to either proc at set intervals or on kill and on healing. Another alternative would be to make it work like Guardian’s Virtue of Justice, proccing every 10 hits or so.

Ranger’s Instinct- A new GM trait I’d like to propose to take Remorseless’ place. The point of Ranger’s Instinct will be to further buff Opening Strike.
Possible effects:
-Weakness to every mob hit by the attack
-Pet dependant effect.

Effect from pet would be based on the family:
Feline Instinct(Cats): Opening Strike will make the Ranger grant AoE Fury
Aim For the Leg(Canines): Opening Strike will cause knockdown.
Go For the Eyes(Birds): Opening Strike will Blind every target hit
Loaded Attack(Drakes): Opening Strike will be a garunteed blast finisher
Serrated Edge(Devourers): Opening Strike will inflict 5 bleeds
Poisoned Edge(Spiders): Opening Strike will poison foes
Harmonic Strike(Moa): Opening Strike will cause AoE heal around target
Stand Strong(Bears): Opening Strike will give Protection to the ranger.

I completely agree that marksman trait line needs a rework…. i was thinking along the lines of every x hits opening strikes will proc… sorta like the guardian’s passive fire thingy… i think this would make it worth investing in the trait…

It’s the trait I use the least—I will generally put 15 in Nature Magic before anything in Marksmanship.

as it is now… it seems only ws traits are any good lol…

That is a good idea too, adding that to my first post as a possibillity.

I do the same with Wilderness Survival. ^^
Gotta love the Protection on Dodge.

They need to do something soon, rangers have nothing left in terms of new solid builds. We limited to the same old 2 builds for past how many months…..

True we are very limited, buffing Marksmanship and Opening Strike should allow us to stack vulnerability and gain some bursting capabilities perhaps.

jpnova.4572:

To make the Marksmanship trait line more attractive I believe that the two traits and the Opening Strikes mechanic needs to be reworked.

Piercing Arrows should not be an individual trait, it’s a waste of a Major trait and getting it means you can’t get Eagle Eye unless you put it in the GM slot.

Proposed fixes:

Piercing Arrows should be merged with Eagle Eye, it makes perfect sense, that your improved eye-sight allows you to aim for spots that will cause the arrow to pierce. This way both can be achieved using one trait, Shortbow users can take it too and benefit when switching to Longbow for WvW tower play.

^ This, to the letter. It boggles my mind how warriors can take a single trait, (Crack Shot) and get the benefits of 20% faster skill recharge AND piercing targets whereas a ranger must take two traits from two completely different trait lines, (Piercing Arrows and Quick Draw) to get the same benefit.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on how engineers can somehow THROW grenades (traited) further than someone can shoot a longbow.

The whole openning strike thingy I find useless really.. especially since half the time people seem to block your openning attack making all your traiting 100% useless. The only reason I take Marksmenship so high for is piercing arrows which frankly should just happen without traits.

A lot of ranger lines need some serious rework. There are too many trait talents and not enough slots to fill them. Just look at nature magic. 4 separate talents just for spirits… but only 3 slots. Uhm… huh? No other class has a list of talents dedicated to a build that are too many to pick up. Why do we get screwed? Eagle eye and piercing arrow are much the same way. You simply can’t afford to get both, given that their both tier 2 and your tier 3 is just too valuable to use on one. I don’t know who designed this garbage.

To be fair, this was also back when the LB hit for appropriate damage so a split in traits may have looked like a good idea at the time.

Of course, they then Smiter’s Boon’ed the entire class and didn’t pick up the pieces when they were done.

I’d prefer if Opening Strike was like a Guardian’s Virtues, in that it occurs every so often. For example, every 10 hits Opening Strike is added again. It would be much more useful then, with a trait lowering the 10 hits to 8 or 6.

I honestly think the entire concept Opening Strikes needs to go back to the drawing board. A for effort and all, but it’s hard to specialize in Vulnerability with Unshakeable around sucking down the duration by half.

Ranger traits in general (my opinion anyway) are suffering from the fact that they were designed before the Traits were placed into Tier so now we have traits that are outright inferior to similar traits within and under the same Tier as other Profession.

A lot of people are thinking opening strikes shouldn’t be an effect applied on the initial attack in combat. Well, there’s pretty good reason for that.

The most successful build I’ve seen for the Longbow is a one that uses it as a PvP focused control weapon. Causing a lot of pressure to enemies. The Shortbow on the other hand is one of the best DPS weapons in the game (assuming the ranger’s pet is assisting). The trait line is meant to be about marksmanship and yet… Opening strikes isn’t terribly useful for either of these weapons.

Congratulations, your impact on the fight is strongest during the initial burst or your DPS is a little higher during the initial trade off. With a burst focused build (which I suppose is possible with the longbow) opening strikes works great. But we’re not thieves, we’re rangers. Our primary weapon (the bow) and its trait line should be focused on what we’re all about, applying pressure and steady attrition.

So… What I feel is Skirmishing and Marksmanship are a horrible mess right now. The traits for traps for example are in the trait line that gives almost completely irrelevant stats and opening strikes, while in the trait line that gives the most logical stats for it (condition duration) doesn’t suit the playstyle of a marksman.

I personally don’t use the skirmishing or marksmanship trees as I prefer to play an axe/warhorn and Greatsword beastmaster. But more recently I’ve tried to come up with a damage focused build suitable (good enough to make me feel useful next to this warrior or engie providing infinite regen and this elementalist providing infinite protection) for dungeons and group play, but every time I do this is the thoughts that go through my head.

Some one who invests in MM is giving up massive amounts of survivability and should be compensated for it, MM needs to boost burst or DPS or both much..MUCH more via the player, pet or weapons or whatever way.

Honestly, if they changed Opening Strike to refresh on pet-swap or weapon-swap I’d be all for it. As it is now, I agree. Ranger is not a burst class so this trait is quite poor on us.

IMO, trap traits need to moved to the Wilderness Survival trait line. Martial Mastery/Offhand Training should be moved upto Skirmishing. However this means Empathic Bond would need to be revamped and moved elsewhere.

Opening Strike revamped on weapon swap actually sounds like a great idea.

Personally I prefer atleast 10 in Skirmishing for the Pet crit trait.

The 30 point opening strike trait should refresh opening strike after 5~ crits or after a certain timeframe.
Not the stupid ‘after you killed a guy so have typically won the fight’.

Making it relate to what type of pet though is an amazing idea.

Moving traps and empathetic bond won’t really fix any problems short of an aesthetic one.

The point of moving traps is so they’re in a tree that would actually benefit them stat wise as well i.e. condition damage.

I understand the reasoning behind wanting to move the trap traits, but:

• Traps work well in both power and condition builds
• There are builds that don’t put 30 points in WS that make use of traps
• Crit chance can be beneficial to both power and condition builds (more so if they’d fix our bleed/might on-crit traits)

jpnova.4572:

The point of moving traps is so they’re in a tree that would actually benefit them stat wise as well i.e. condition damage.

The problem is that it gimps the trap build more than anything due to having to choose the trap traits instead of the good Wilderness Survival traits such as Bark Skin or Empathetic Bond, both of which help out a trapper’s survival greatly. If they changed it I would probably stop playing my Ranger since my survivability would be taking a big dive.

jpnova.4572:

The point of moving traps is so they’re in a tree that would actually benefit them stat wise as well i.e. condition damage.

If that’s your only problem, then why not suggest moving condition dmg to skirmishing?
Drop the crit dmg and replace it with condition, or even just condition duration.
BAM

I mean, the thing is, that really isn’t even a problem, at least objectively.
A spec doesn’t need to get literally every buff that could benifit it from the same traitline, the whole point of build diversity is to avoid that.

In this case every ranger goes 30 in wilderness survival because the cleansing is pretty much necessary, but that’s a bit of a different problem.

Sebrent.3625:

• There are builds that don’t put 30 points in WS that make use of traps
• Crit chance can be beneficial to both power and condition builds (more so if they’d fix our bleed/might on-crit traits)

You mean, only if?
Right now crit is useless to condition rangers.
Sharpened edges is a minor trait in major’s clothing, sigil of earth has a 2s internal CD and it isn’t worthwhile to make use of the crit for the sake of more physical dmg in a ranger condition setup.
Useless :/

From what I’ve seen, all competitive trap ranger builds go 30 in wilderness survival for empathetic bond.
Throwing away 2-3 utility slots on traps forces you to go to the heal skill/elite skill/traits for condition removal and easily the best most accessible one is from traits.

Sharpened edges on a whole is a rubbish trait, it needs a buff. The bleeds need to be stronger and last longer.

I’d rather they scrap the concept of Opening Strikes completely. It’s one of those trait lines that really doesn’t make much sense for the class and the only reason I invest in Marksmanship is the passive stat boosts and primarily Piercing Arrows (I wholeheartedly agree that while this trait is basically mandatory for bows, it’s ridiculous that warriors get to have it in addition to 20% cool downs in the same trait).

The ranger isn’t really a bursty assassin class (especially now that quickness is so bad) so Opening Strikes feels more like it belongs on a thief who can make better use of the early combat vulnerability (and has more of a focus on entering and exiting combat).

Compare this to Steel-Packed Powder (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Steel-Packed_Powder) which allows engineer explosions (grenades, bombs and mines) to cause 5 second of vulnerability throughout the entire fight (and grenades can hit three times) and you will see how token three traits which increase damage from 5-10% (only for the first five seconds of combat) and give a token crit (if your build benefits from crits you can easily and reliably get them from precision) are incredibly weak. Only five seconds of value from these three traits is pretty sad considering they only trigger once for each time you enter combat (and in WvW and dungeons that will mean these traits do absolutely nothing for 95% of the time).

I don’t really have suggestions to replace Opening Strike that fit the marksmanship line (although the thief trait Exposed Weakness – 10% more damage to targets suffering a condition would be perfect considering it feeds into power and condition duration – both of which marksmanship offers) but I don’t think Opening Strike is very sound. A trait which has a weak effect and is inactive for the majority of the battle (and even when using the grandmaster trait to boost it it’s pretty weak) isn’t going to be very interesting.

Honestly, I’d prefer to avoid having more on-crit traits. Personally, I hate RNG as I think it detracts from skill-based play.

Sebrent.3625:

Honestly, I’d prefer to avoid having more on-crit traits. Personally, I hate RNG as I think it detracts from skill-based play.

I disagree with you there, controlling and keeping melee opponents at bay isn’t always all that easy. I have been using my ranger for my PvP Dailies offlate and running dual bow ranger takes a hell of a lot of management. LB 3,4,5 and SB 4,5 are hell-a fun if timed right.

marksmanship traitline is HORRIBLE. They seriously need to change everything about it.

I’m dead serious. Like making you put 30 in marksmanship to you use SIGNETS? That have a 180 cooldown sometimes…I relized how stupid it was a while back and never put 5 points into marksmanship.

jpnova.4572:

Sebrent.3625:

Honestly, I’d prefer to avoid having more on-crit traits. Personally, I hate RNG as I think it detracts from skill-based play.

I disagree with you there, controlling and keeping melee opponents at bay isn’t always all that easy. I have been using my ranger for my PvP Dailies offlate and running dual bow ranger takes a hell of a lot of management. LB 3,4,5 and SB 4,5 are hell-a fun if timed right.

I’m not quite following you here. I think you mistook “RNG” as “range”. RNG is “random number generation”. It is what is often (if not always) involved when it comes to crits, procs, etc. that have a % chance to happen.

Sebrent.3625:

jpnova.4572:

Sebrent.3625:

Honestly, I’d prefer to avoid having more on-crit traits. Personally, I hate RNG as I think it detracts from skill-based play.

I disagree with you there, controlling and keeping melee opponents at bay isn’t always all that easy. I have been using my ranger for my PvP Dailies offlate and running dual bow ranger takes a hell of a lot of management. LB 3,4,5 and SB 4,5 are hell-a fun if timed right.

I’m not quite following you here. I think you mistook “RNG” as “range”. RNG is “random number generation”. It is what is often (if not always) involved when it comes to crits, procs, etc. that have a % chance to happen.

I’m sorry, my bad. ^^
In that case yeah I hate it too.

I believe this thread deserves a bump, I want it to remain on the first page for everyone to see.