Guild Wars 2

• Signet of the Wild did not receive the 100% base boost like other signets did. It is still regenerating the same amount as a passive that it did before. The active cooldown reduction is a nice change but the 8 seconds instead of 10 makes it still meh. My pet will get in a couple hits at most.
• Guard & Sick Em I’ve never found a use for Guard and Sick Em to take up a slot on my 3 utility bar and these changes don’t do anything to make me want to use them.
• Search & Rescue now is something I wish I could refund for the points back. It was potentially worth taking for rezzing a defeated person as it took a lot of time to refresh and the rezzing was S L O W. Now it’s worthless.

Still out on QZ. I feel this is moving in the right direction but still makes me not want to use it.

Feed back is it sucks and robert lied to us when he said it was a step in the right direction. Search and Rescue is anything but a step in the right direction. Longbow still ignored and spirits are still subpar especially compared to banners.

I would say I am disappointed but that would require expectations on my part, history has taught me a lesson and I know better now…

Since the game fired up I have seen one patch after another make large strides for other less “needy” classes while any changes to the Ranger seem to be in small and very measured increments and rarely addresses the changes the community is bringing to the Devs attention.

I would simply like to understand why they approach the Ranger the way they do.

I still like my Ranger but truth be told I feel as if Devs do not listen to us.

I guess I am sour because I wanted my Longbow fixed

/baby rant off

Kalo

The signet cooldowns are a massive change in the right direction, even if they tweaked Signet of the Wild’s active to be shorter. If you are taking signets and intend to trigger them you will want to bring the traits (one makes them affect you as well, the other reduces cool downs, ignore the might on activation one – it’s terrible, use that slot for piercing arrows). Signet durations were their biggest flaw, now their recharges are much more managable I can see people being tempted to use them. I don’t think Signet of the Wild needed a buff, it was already somewhat strong in tanky builds.

I share your concern about it’s duration on pets. Pet attacks aren’t frequent enough to make use of short duration effects but 8 seconds isn’t as bad as the one second of might trait and you can always time it with something like Lightning Breath, especially with the faster cast times of the F2 skills now. This gives ranger’s some nice burst and the signet build could be really interesting (it gets bonus points for making pets tankier in dungeons).

This is the first patch that has had me truly excited to try some new builds (spirit build and signet build). The changes they made to the ranger this time around have some real meat to them.

I love it. Anet is the kitten.

Overall, I’m glad that Arenanet made a positive big leap for the ranger class, especially for our pets. The patch wasn’t the Best we needed but a lot Better

Obviously there are more needed changes especially for the Longbow, but I’m certain that will be included in the next patch; because we desperately in need of it.

Lastly I encourage Arenanet to take a 2nd look at “Search & Rescue”; it one of the utilites that make us stand out from the other classes. Most importantly that utility is meant for Team-Player purpose only, not for selfish gain.

Still…

Good Job Arenanet for this new Journey, especially for the Ranger class…

I encourage you Arenanet to keep it up and to not promote any attentions of giving up to this Wonderful class.

Imaginos.3756:

• Guard & Sick Em I’ve never found a use for Guard and Sick Em to take up a slot on my 3 utility bar and these changes don’t do anything to make me want to use them.

Guard & Sic Em have some functionality beyond the simple tooltip that actually make them quite useful.

Guard gives stealth & protection (as the tooltip says) but it also sends your pet to a location & it will stay there for 3 mins or until recalled. This offers a form of control. The prot is a nice spike defense if your pet is in range of an impending aoe attack.

Sic Em increases pet damage by 40%. Use this before a Jaguar pounce or a Raven swoop and you’ll net some pretty hefty damage. Also, the speed increase makes it much easier for melee pets to hit moving targets, which results in more than the 40% damage increase because more hits are landing.

Just food for thought.

I started playing the game in November. I’ve mained a ranger the whole way. This is the most exciting patch I have seen for the class to date. So many positive changes. It should open up build variety for our class, as well as increase our effectiveness in every aspect of the game.

Thanks Anet!

jewishjoyride.4693:

I started playing the game in November. I’ve mained a ranger the whole way. This is the most exciting patch I have seen for the class to date. So many positive changes. It should open up build variety for our class, as well as increase our effectiveness in every aspect of the game.

Thanks Anet!

I started in Beta, and I’m forced to agree – this is the single most improvement we’ve seen since launch.

If they keep it up, well, some faith restored.

Awesome patch. Torn between my Ranger and Thief with all the awesomeness the patch brought.

Maybe when other pets besides 2 felines, 2 birds, 2 canines are playable in PvP I might come back.
That and fix cleansing.
Trait cleansing is the necessary cleansing, and I did say FIX it, that is make it so cleansing is a more readily available part of classes instead of just found threw one~ necessary tier 2-3 trait or a heal skill or a utility… the typical “if its good nerf it, if its bad up the numbers” mentality won’t come close to fixing this game. MANY THINGS NEED TO BE REWORKED NOT SLAUGHTERED WITH INTERNAL CDs AND MILD NUMERIC TWEAKS.

Seriously wanted to throw a drake and spirit into my lineup for the intense protect me and barkskin, but spirits still blow and require a painful amount of traits to be mediocre (seriously Anet, what is your obsession with requiring traits to make things viable?!?!?! they should be bonuses not necessities. So stupid) and the shody drake F2 AI, it responds worse than any other pet I’ve played, like only triggers 1/3 the time I click it and never in a timely manner, if you use it during the 2s swap frenzy it will auto miss all the attacks in the channel, it requires a 2~s channel where the enemy has to stand in its 200-600 range cone to land its dmg, killed it…
kitten

Anyways.
Maybe in a year or so they will get their kitten together or hire new people.

Looks like I will continue playing my Guardian and leveling my Warrior. Ranger was my first 80 and now it’s relegated to gathering…

Underwhelming.

Pet HP/Toughness was never really the issue, the problem is and always will be that pets are too dumb to evade attacks. Just took Ranger for a spin in the new Dungeon, Canines and Drakes are still more dead than alive for most of the fights. I was running 0 BM and didn’t bring Guard, but be honest, if I have to stack trait points in BM AND be forced to bring a skill to make pets useful, you’re admitting the Ranger Pet still needs help badly. It’s a big buff for general PvE roaming, but really, that’s not where the issue is. It’s in Dungeons, FotM and WvW, where pets die because everything hits like a truck or several small trucks.

Tried equipping a Spirit. Unequipped it a minute later. It still dies when something farts in it’s general direction.

The QZ buff is “nice”, but not ranger specific, all classes got a similar buff. To make it worse, QZ is still bugged for Shortbow (31% speed increase instead of 50%).

Longbow and GS saw no changes, neither did any of the other weapons badly in need of buffs. No changes to our trait lines either like Warrior got.

Search and Rescue no longer works on defeated players, which is a shame. We could only use this skill for a month because of the bugs, now they take away the best part of it. Back to the pile of terrible skills it goes.

To be honest, this may have been a step in the right direction, but ANet is going to have to make huge leaps for the next update. When a class is getting more and more excluded from parties (and frankly, I’m seeing less and less reason to blame them), there’s something wrong with the class. Ask yourself a simple question: what can a Ranger do that another class can’t do better? What does a Ranger contribute to a party that another class can’t do?
After the S&D nerf/fix, nothing. As long as pets continue to have such a huge portion of our damage, Rangers will never provide reliable, consistent DPS. As long as Spirits’ survivability and effects are a joke, it’s not gonna be party support. As long as our trait lines are all over the place and weapons like LB and GS remain in their current, frankly pathetic state, we can barely have decent build variety.
We’re still in the same, subpar state we were in at the start of the game. What has changed the past 6 months? We saw some buffs here and there. Hell, for the majority of changes, we received nothing but buffs, though some were more bug fixes, like (FINALLY) fixing Lick Wounds. The problem is that it’s not enough, minor tweaks here and there do not solve what is wrong with the class and sadly, it’s its very core. IMO, as long as we don’t get permastow and get the damage the pet does back on the Ranger, it’s going to be impossible to properly balance the Ranger for the High-end PvE content it’s currently being shunned from.
Like High-end GW1 PvE and PvP, the classes that get in a party are the ones with a) good party support (Imbagon, Panic Mes, Monk) or b) consistent (AoE) damage (Wars, Eles, Splinter Barrage Rangers, …) or c) Niche roles (Cripshot, Sins). In GW2, the Pet is a permanent part of the Ranger, and its biggest handicap. The Pet simply can not provide reliable, constant DPS, there’s too may issues, it’s dead, target is moving, target is shooting from behind a wall, etc… You could work around the lack of party support, you could even do changes so the Ranger fits in a niche, but you won’t be able to fix the DPS issue as long as Pets remain in the current state. And as long as DPS is the issue, well, let’s say our party support is going to have to outshine Guardian to compensate for that…

Honestly the changes are very good. In fact, much better than anticpiated.

I can sorta see how some of you are upset, but these buffs were certainly a lot better than almost every other profession.

If you guys keep complaining that the buffs are not good then don’t go crying when Rangers barely get any buffs going forward.

At least give Anet the credit they deserve for doing several good things for the Ranger.

SirJack.4760:

Underwhelming.

Pet HP/Toughness was never really the issue, the problem is and always will be that pets are too dumb to evade attacks. Just took Ranger for a spin in the new Dungeon, Canines and Drakes are still more dead than alive for most of the fights. I was running 0 BM and didn’t bring Guard, but be honest, if I have to stack trait points in BM AND be forced to bring a skill to make pets useful, you’re admitting the Ranger Pet still needs help badly. It’s a big buff for general PvE roaming, but really, that’s not where the issue is. It’s in Dungeons, FotM and WvW, where pets die because everything hits like a truck or several small trucks.

Tried equipping a Spirit. Unequipped it a minute later. It still dies when something farts in it’s general direction.

The QZ buff is “nice”, but not ranger specific, all classes got a similar buff. To make it worse, QZ is still bugged for Shortbow (31% speed increase instead of 50%).

Longbow and GS saw no changes, neither did any of the other weapons badly in need of buffs. No changes to our trait lines either like Warrior got.

Search and Rescue no longer works on defeated players, which is a shame. We could only use this skill for a month because of the bugs, now they take away the best part of it. Back to the pile of terrible skills it goes.

To be honest, this may have been a step in the right direction, but ANet is going to have to make huge leaps for the next update. When a class is getting more and more excluded from parties (and frankly, I’m seeing less and less reason to blame them), there’s something wrong with the class. Ask yourself a simple question: what can a Ranger do that another class can’t do better? What does a Ranger contribute to a party that another class can’t do?
After the S&D nerf/fix, nothing. As long as pets continue to have such a huge portion of our damage, Rangers will never provide reliable, consistent DPS. As long as Spirits’ survivability and effects are a joke, it’s not gonna be party support. As long as our trait lines are all over the place and weapons like LB and GS remain in their current, frankly pathetic state, we can barely have decent build variety.
We’re still in the same, subpar state we were in at the start of the game. What has changed the past 6 months? We saw some buffs here and there. Hell, for the majority of changes, we received nothing but buffs, though some were more bug fixes, like (FINALLY) fixing Lick Wounds. The problem is that it’s not enough, minor tweaks here and there do not solve what is wrong with the class and sadly, it’s its very core. IMO, as long as we don’t get permastow and get the damage the pet does back on the Ranger, it’s going to be impossible to properly balance the Ranger for the High-end PvE content it’s currently being shunned from.
Like High-end GW1 PvE and PvP, the classes that get in a party are the ones with a) good party support (Imbagon, Panic Mes, Monk) or b) consistent (AoE) damage (Wars, Eles, Splinter Barrage Rangers, …) or c) Niche roles (Cripshot, Sins). In GW2, the Pet is a permanent part of the Ranger, and its biggest handicap. The Pet simply can not provide reliable, constant DPS, there’s too may issues, it’s dead, target is moving, target is shooting from behind a wall, etc… You could work around the lack of party support, you could even do changes so the Ranger fits in a niche, but you won’t be able to fix the DPS issue as long as Pets remain in the current state. And as long as DPS is the issue, well, let’s say our party support is going to have to outshine Guardian to compensate for that…

i agree with this wall of text, i reall don’t know why gw2 team is so disturbed by the fact that there was actually awesome game and blance design at Guild Wars™ , and now they are beeing kitten, not knowing anything about how original Guild Wars™ was built/balanced.
You could choose if you want an animal with you or not, it took 1 skill space kitten !
AND now, your forced that you get your dmg lowered/deduced by it…. okey some will still say “you can spec in BM and all will be good”, BUT I don’t want to spec in freeking BM, why is us rangers the only class we’re forced in something??!?
TO the changes part: wtf did they changed?? nothing much i would say….

I never understood why Anet is so afraid of making the ranger class over-powered. Think about it, they are terrified of it. Greatsword damage got nerfed in beta. Spirits for some reason got nerfed with internal cooldown, even when 2 hits killed them. The bleed stack did also. This probably needed to happen but it left rangers with almost nothing.

Yet, they have no problem with thieves being the most mobile and having the most burst. What is that? You can catch any person and you can burst them down? How is that fair? They even decided to give thieves the ability to steal boons consistently because those were the only classes that stood a chance against them.

The biggest problem with rangers is pets. If you want pets to be a significant part of the ranger’s dps, you need to improve either the AI or give them an auto speed boost like WoW hunter pets. There is no reason they should miss 80% of their attacks and which is 40% of their dps.

The changes are bad because they are the wrong direction. Any change that buffs the pet increases the proportion of the ranger’s effectiveness that relies on poor AI and PvE kludges (e.g., ignoring normal targeting rules, strange AoE invuln, or whatever other fix might come up) to keep the class on par with others.

The more things go this way the more “The Pet” is the class. It’s no longer a pet class it’s a pet delivery system. Buffing the pet actually reduces the number of builds, once the pet becomes strong enough you essentially go BM or go home, everything else that you do becomes sub-optimal.

The class has a lot of issues, but this patch was really huge. I expect more goodies to come our way next month.

I’m really appreciate for this patch.
Why does Search & Rescue exist if it revive defeated NPC instead of player?
So we’re playing GW1 now and still do things with NPC…it’s the key.
In the other hand,the PVE of ranger is a great improvement that the PET will do DPS beyond our imagenation if we changed the trait for pets.

With 5 mins of brainstorming

To just start off, to make the ‘killable spirits’ work…

Then vuala, well made, decent and entertaining spirits…
Spirits that work better with traits yet are perfectly viable without…

It doesn’t take flaming 8 months to come up with that.
That’s partly why I have no will to log into the game anymore…

Expansive.3716:

Honestly the changes are very good. In fact, much better than anticpiated.

I can sorta see how some of you are upset, but these buffs were certainly a lot better than almost every other profession.

If you guys keep complaining that the buffs are not good then don’t go crying when Rangers barely get any buffs going forward.

At least give Anet the credit they deserve for doing several good things for the Ranger.

No one will stick with this game, at very least for PvP, threw the year without massive changes…
So the ball is in their court.

And just because they buffed stuff, doesn’t mean that the buffs were on track to fixing things. Just because all the ‘fixes’ before this were worse doesn’t mean this is good by any means but comparison.
It’s nice to know that they realize what isn’t working (spirits, pet survivablity), but its depressing when you see that the buffs they threw out aren’t actually at all even on track to fix the blaring problems… no raw buff to pet vit/toughness will be balanced, pets need a way to avoid aoes.
Buffs to spirit life and proc chance trait are kitten
Everything is on a crippling 10s internal CD…. there are kittening MINOR trait slots that PASSIVELY give more dmg than a TRAITED storm spirit… and don’t bring up ‘but it might be mildly better than, even though it is as boring as, a personal passive trait in a group fight’… sure if it was a banner it might possibly make its way into WvW and a few dungoens… but it can die, and does… allot.

Ranger still sucks outside of a few select builds in sPvP and overworld node farming. The way these tiny, incremental (and some pointless) changes are going, it’s going to take what, another 8 months of updates?

It’s a step in the right direction, some of the changes are nice, other changes like the Spirit ‘buff’ is completely useless.

I appreciate the fact that they are actually moving in the right direction. When it comes to ANet, I’m just happy when we go through a monthly patch without getting nerfed. As a Beastmaster Build, some of the Pet Buffs and Signet Buffs will help me out and I appreciate that.

I tried to use Spirits again today and the HP increase is completely unnoticeable. My Spirit was still dead within 5 seconds of it being summoned.

My ranger is going to remain parked next to a jumping puzzle chest for the jumping puzzle dailies. It was a small boost, but the ranger doesn’t need a small boost. It needs a massive dervish-style revamp. The class does not work in PvE.

I agree with SirJack and Vargs.

Roamzero, this class will not be better in any meaningful way in 8 months, it will take years to fix at this rate.

Nothing in the patch encourages me to big my ranger into dungeons again.

The ‘buff’ to pet HP is a joke and embarrassing considering this was touted as Anet’s great leap forward for ranger pets. Took them over 8 months to come up with something so underwhelming… Great work, there chaps!

As for signets, meh ..
In the scope of all the problems this class has, signets are so trivial.

My ranger is still regulated to doing dailies, low-mid level harvesting and easy PvE content.

I’m siding with those that say this patch was useless for the ranger class. None of the areas that trouble rangers have been addressed. Pets are still useless in dungeons as they still die as flies. So any dps increase to pets is pointless without added survivability where it counts and that is dungeons. Spirits… really why would anyone use spirits. They need a complete overhaul and not a hp increase.

Took my double drakes into a dungeon today, and they performed admirably. The added HP made a huge difference, at least if you’re traited into beastmaster. Still not running spirits though, at least with the occasional exception of the elite for mass ressing.

To be honest I have’nt noticed anything different, pet still goes off, does it’s own thing, dies quickly, limps back.

Haven’t changed my setup at all, just plodding on as if nothing happened.

I believe they refuse to understand what the real problem is. % of hp won’t solve it. I agree that recoding pet AI may be a difficult task but spirits…all they need to do is just make them something like banners or give them LOTS of armor. Their buffs are not so OP so the spirit can’t be invulnerable. With such an attitude we could add SOMETHING in dungeons for the group. And now I have to keep and eye on my stupid pet and keep an eye on my stupid spirits trying to control the character at the same time. That’s awkward. Not that I am noob and handle all this stuff – NO ONE can properly manage those spirits in dungeons. They will die anyway no matter in 2 hits or 3. That is a problem that must be adressed. Simply tweaking numbers just won’t cut it.

It feels to me, and has for a while, that PvP is the main concern for ANet. Rangers might be balanced, or nearly so, in PvP but I don’t play it so I can’t say.

But increasingly it feels like any PvE and dungeon content is just thrown in as an afterthought, and the patch reflects that.

The patch was better than I expected, but I did’t expect much so surpassing that mark isn’t impressive.

Just overall I feel disappointed. For now, at least. As usual, I hold some slim hope that there will be substantive improvements in what the community sees as the primary issues with our profession.

Even without rewriting the pet AI, just making the 3 autoattacks instant cast would be an improvement. Just for my own curiosity, across all professions how many melee-range attacks have a root and an animation delay?

Semil.8279:

Even without rewriting the pet AI, just making the 3 autoattacks instant cast would be an improvement. Just for my own curiosity, across all professions how many melee-range attacks have a root and an animation delay?

Maybe Anet should start handing those delay’s out.

Honestly it seems like the pet was the only part of the profession designed in a PvE mindset, however it is the mindset of a game at least ten years old or older.

Ranger is pretty solid in a 1v1 or small scale fight now. Pet health buffs really helped. But if you run mainly WvW like I do, you’ll find that the Ranger still does not bring anything particularly helpful to the group that another class can’t do better.

Playing a tanky support Ranger? Guardian and elementalist both fill that role better with buffs and the ele with water fields for blast heals. Yes, healing spring is better than the ele water field, but eles don’t have to blow their main heal skill to use it.

Going traps for aoe? Necro can fill that role MUCH better with wells/marks.

Going glass cannon? No matter how high your DPS gets, it will always be less than other glass cannons as the ranger DPS is balanced with the pet in mind. And as we all know, in a large scale fight, pet DPS is barely noticeable.

A lot of people are suggesting spirits, but don’t realize how short their range is. Spirit buff range is about 400 or the size of an average aoe. So if you want them to help your group, you need to have them right in the middle of the fight, where they will still probably die within a few seconds even with the HP buff.

I’m not a Ranger hater. I really want this class to be my main and I still have fun on it at times. But it’s hard to deny that you just don’t really bring anything particularly useful to the group.

The only thing I can see Ranger being decent at in WvW at the moment is solo roaming.

The Rooster.2615:

A lot of people are suggesting spirits, but don’t realize how short their range is. Spirit buff range is about 400 or the size of an average aoe. So if you want them to help your group, you need to have them right in the middle of the fight, where they will still probably die within a few seconds even with the HP buff.

Its 900 and if you walk at all within that range it puts a 6s buff on you saying you get the chance to proc perks.
The active’s tend to have 300~ range.
(maybe 500~ on the elite)

The patch doesn’t really affect my ranger. She always does the daily things & gathering according to the dev who said Ranger is OP in open world because all the bot use them. And he’s right. She is so awesome for that job.

garethh.3518:

The Rooster.2615:

A lot of people are suggesting spirits, but don’t realize how short their range is. Spirit buff range is about 400 or the size of an average aoe. So if you want them to help your group, you need to have them right in the middle of the fight, where they will still probably die within a few seconds even with the HP buff.

Its 900 and if you walk at all within that range it puts a 6s buff on you saying you get the chance to proc perks.
The active’s tend to have 300~ range.
(maybe 500~ on the elite)

Are you sure about the range? We were testing it out last night after the patch by noting how close we had to get before the buff popped up. The area seems to be about the size of a traited necro mark which I’m pretty sure has a radius of about 400. Maybe 600 tops.

Try it out. Put a spirit down and have a guildie slowly walk towards you until the buff appears.

The Rooster.2615:

Are you sure about the range?

They might have ninja nerfed it or just had a smaller radius for allies.
I tested it with myself a month~ back.
Ended up with roughly a 900 radius.