Guild Wars 2

So, yeah, I haven’t made an idea thread in awhile. But I got very irritated yesterday trying to make the longbow more than just a weapon you stand on walls with and shoot into teamfights in PvP, and I encountered 2 extremes. Either you are pure glass with almost no defensive options if you have to skirmish with somebody, or you have a little bit of sustain, but building for any sort of sustain reduces your damage to an almost exponentially less effective level.

So, with that in mind, I do have some ideas. Keep in mind, I’m not trying to suggest anything ridiculously over the top, but I only factored in balancing the ranger against itself, and making gameplay entertaining.

So:

Traits:
Marksmanship:

• Read the Wind: Current functionality becomes baseline functionality for the weapons it currently effects. New Effect: “Deal 5% more damage to moving foes while wielding a bow. Critical Hits on a moving foe cause 5 seconds of Cripple. 15 second ICD.”
• Opening Strikes: “Upon entering combat or weapon swapping while in combat, gain Opening Strikes. Opening Strikes applies 5 stacks of Vulnerability for 5 seconds.”
• Alpha Training: “Pets have Opening Strikes, and regain them when you regain them.”
  Remorseless: “Foes with Vulnerability take 5% more damage from you attacks. 100% chance on crit to regain Opening Strikes, 10 second ICD.”
• Signet of the Beastmaster: Additional Effect: “Activating a signet for a short time (5 seconds) reduces the recharge of the next signet activated by an additional 20%.”

Skirmishing:

• Quickdraw: Additional Effect: “Critical hits with bows have a 33% to apply 1 Vulnerability stack for 5 seconds.”
• Strider’s Defense: “50% chance to apply 3 stacks of vulnerabilty for 10 seconds and 5 seconds of cripple to opponents hitting you with melee attacks. 15 second ICD.”

Skills:
Utility:

• Guard: "Additional Effect: “Gives you and allies within eashot 1 seconds of Protection upon activation.”
• Sic’ Em: Additional Effect: “Gives you and allies within earshot 3 stacks of might and fury, for 8 seconds.”
• Protect Me: Additional Effect: “Pet becomes immune to all damage outside of the damage it takes from the duration of this skill.”
• Search and Rescue: "Additional Effect: “This skill is now ground targeted. Pet gains 15 seconds of Protection and Retaliation upon the activation of this skill. Cast time is now 3.5 seconds, Cooldown increased to 90 seconds.”

Longbow:

• Long Range Shot: 0-500 range damage removed. Now only 2 tiers, 0-1000 range: Base damage is now 283. 1000+ range: Base damage is now 347.
• Rapid Fire: Base Damage increased from 1320 total to 1536 total. (I got this number by taking Volley on the warrior, which is half the cast time and hits, finding the base damage per hit, multiplying by 10, then subtracting 40% of the damage; 10% for vulnerability, and 30% for the pet. I averaged this number with the number I got if I did the same calculation but only removed 1% of the damage on each hit so that each hit counted as a standalone damage instead of the damage for the whole skill being totaled. So the average of 1462 and 1610.)
• Hunter’s Shot: Additional Effect: “Also applies a 2 second immobilize to the target.The pet is also stealthed.”
• Knockback Shot: Additional Effect: “Perform a short evasive leap while using this skill. Allows the skill to be fired when retreating (omnidirectional skill, like the shortbow 3). 1/4 second evade added to the leap.”
• Barrage: Cast time has been reduced to 2 seconds. Base damage increased to 1757.

This right here is a where I think the ranger ultimately needs to be with power builds and certain utilities. Obvious it isn’t perfect, and obviously people aren’t going to agree. But personally I would need most all of these changes before I consider power builds both fun and competitive.

Tooltip damage = (average weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (level-based Armor value)

So base damage is scaling dependant. Base power at 80 is 916, level based armour is heavy at 2600.

Striders defense should be something to do with melee evasion. Have enough vulnerability from all other sources and even note from your changes.

I like them (main power ranger myself)

though, its called “Point Blank Shot”, not “Knockback Shot”

Longbow’s strength was always IMHO in it’s Crowd Control utility.

I would be content enough for the rest of my days if it never had any Spiking potential. It doesn’t need it. What needs changes are how many stacks of CC a ranger can put out , ….and specific to PvE (which I know you didn’t make this topic about, but since I’m on that tangent….) would either errode “Unshakable” or just bypass it depending on when the skill was “timed”.

Though that could also eventually apply to PvP too if they’d just add some real interesting mechanics to PvP itself instead of this Conquest mode crap. ….“Mann Mode” from Tf2 comes to mind which basically mimics L4D when one of the really good players gets the kitten ed Tank body. …they could even have a 25-player arena like that where 5 teams FFA moba-style with each captain being one of the 5 guild lords who always see through stealth & resist conditions too (for obvious reasons). Then there’d finally be a real role for Power Rangers and Engineers.

Honestly,

I don’t get everyone’s obsession with making Longbow higher damage. I made an Ascended Healer-Stat one myself and then also crafted Wings of Dwayna so I’d say I’m almost as invested in Longbows as someone who made Kudzu. IMHO, if we WANT an actual long distance Sniping Bow?…. or one with big DPA numbers? I think we should be asking Anet for a whole new Weapon like the Flat-Bow (for sniping …. which would require a lot more skill and literally put us in first person Reticle-View like a real shooter does) or the old Gw1 standard that only 33% I.A.S. builds used; the Hornbow which had inherent Armor penetration. Anyone remember trying to make a working build around that thing? Even on Warrior/R, I had a heck of a time of it :p (don’t laugh, I once got 20 kills with it in F.A. by exploiting Avenge)

Sigmoid.7082:

Tooltip damage = (average weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (level-based Armor value)

So base damage is scaling dependant. Base power at 80 is 916, level based armour is heavy at 2600.

Striders defense should be something to do with melee evasion. Have enough vulnerability from all other sources and even note from your changes.

All the changes that talk about base damages and scaling are dealing with the numbers provided by the wiki, so I guess what I’m suggesting to change for most of them is the skill specific coefficient, and the power scaling with Barrage.

ilr.9675:

Your message here.

I would be fine with a CC based longbow, but when I did the Ranger Balance thread around the time of the CDI, people argued with me for 10 pages about how a ranged CC weapon is OP. In it’s current form though, I would never consider the longbow as a CC weapon. It only has a single knockback and an area denial skill, and is actually quite terrible at locking anybody down, although I would love to see that change.

I would argue that outside of the Skill specific changes I suggested though, most of my suggestions actually make traits less longbow specific and more useful to other weapons and weapon combinations, though a few of them are still geared directly towards the bow.

But yeah, I’m not disagreeing that I think the LB needs to be a better damage weapon, because I think it’s quite clear from my suggestions that I think it’s a pretty bad weapon in it’s current state lol.

Edit: Don’t even get me started about how much it bothers me that people are fine with melee weapons having the ability to maintain their melee capabilities, but it becomes OP when a ranged weapon is able to maintain its ranged capabilities.

Heheh … Make game with really short max Projectile range (1200)
… give every melee build in the game ~1000unit gap closers

Yep, it’s pretty funny. Though I still feel a little safer in WvW than I did against Scavenger Skelk 1.0 in catas

10% from OS of u and ur pet + 5% from remorseless, up to 10% from rapid fire, some stacks in that time from QD and that in a great uptime because of the fast regain of OS…idk extreme strong when u go full power

jcbroe.4329:

So, yeah, I haven’t made an idea thread in awhile. But I got very irritated yesterday trying to make the longbow more than just a weapon you stand on walls with and shoot into teamfights in PvP, and I encountered 2 extremes. Either you are pure glass with almost no defensive options if you have to skirmish with somebody, or you have a little bit of sustain, but building for any sort of sustain reduces your damage to an almost exponentially less effective level.

You should try the longbow life steal build with the fern hound pet… It gives amazing amount of sustain for a glassy build.

I play something along those lines in WvW :
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQJATFGAQoWFAtrhZIGYnvZwFUwqH-TlSDwA9UCR5KAATtig7P8U5zLVVW8AAlgw1Bo4QAAwEGpAeaCA-w

You have a really great sustain. You just need to use the complete 3 second of stealth to reposition and buy more time for your cooldown. Also, a tips for any ranger here: when you activating Longbow skills, standstill, it will follow the target. So vs stealth thieves that teleport behind you, it will just continue to follow. Same for the stealth shot and the knock back.

The wiki assumes a base power of 915 and base armor of 2600. That’s where it’s getting the damage from

Power * Average weapon strength * coefficient / armor == damage
915 * 1000 * .9 / 2600 == 316.73 or ~317 per wiki for Long Range Shot.

The only way to increase a skills damage is by upping its coefficient to my knowledge? Other than some external multiplier like traits and such.

Traits:
Read the Wind: All ranged attacks should get the projectile speed base. Your change is ok but likely moves it into the ‘nope’ category due to the bloated nature of the tree and eagle eye being better. EE + Pierce + Spotter > Any 2 + RtW with your change imo.

Opening Strikes: Would be a bit too powerful imo. Swapping to GS to 100% chance crit with 25pts on maul for example.

Remorseless: I like what you did as it would allow controllable burst via 2x crits in a row. Class just doesn’t have enough skills to make something like that work because no single weapon has 2 burst skills to string together.

Signet of the Beastmaster: Awful on principle. Needing this trait for activated signets has always been an insult and always will be. That out of the way, it’s still a waste. People will get it for SoS or ignore it completely regardless of whatever the thing does.

Quick Draw: /shrug. Not enough to make me go out of my way for the trait. I’d still only ever get it for the cooldown reduction. It needs to make your weapon swap cooldown reduced by 50-75% if you have a bow in either hand.

Strider’s Defense: Trait is so far in the nope column I can’t imagine ever using it. Marks is a traps or nothing tree. The trait needs to give 1 bonus for melee weapons, another for ranged. I’m not a fan of RNG defense so still wouldn’t consider this trait with your changes.

Skills:
Guard: Really?
Sic ‘Em: Should be an PBAE that reveals everything around you but doesn’t put a revealed debuff on the target. Pet would then gain a ‘on next hit’ that put revealed on the target.
Protect Me: I’d use the skill like that. Probably would never give SotBM a second glance either.
S&R: I haven’t used the skill in eons. Still wouldn’t with this change.

Longbow:
#1: It has been said by numerous people numerous times. The weapon should do X from 0 – 900 and Y from 900+. Some want raw damage, others want multipliers. I couldn’t care less. Your change is fine (except 900+). Any reason behind you choosing the damage increases you did?
Wiki LRS: 915 * 1000 * 0.9 coefficient / 2600 = 317
Your LRS: 915 * 1000 * 0.929 coefficient / 2600 = 327

#2: So effectively a 15% damage increase?

#3: Should always stealth you. Should immobilize the target if you hit.

#4: Sounds good to me.

#5: I hate barrage. I’ve said this countless times so no need to rehash it. Your change obviously isn’t going to change my opinion.
Increasing the coefficient to 5.0 would give it a damage of 1759.6
increasing the damage to 1706 would give it a coefficient of 4.848

Longbow in general: You started off your post saying you didn’t want to just stand on wall all day with the weapon. You didn’t change the weapon. It’s still the same old longbow lacking any real role or purpose except now it does slightly more damage on rapid fire and barrage. You’re still on that wall.

The weapon needs a purpose. It either needs to be a power weapon (… a competitive one …) or it needs to be a support weapon (where it is currently trying to be but falls into the whole ‘rangers are duelists’ trapping). Want it to be a power weapon? It needs burst because in GW2, that’s what power weapons provide. Want it to be a support weapon? Then it needs to either compliment another weapon the class has (other than another support weapon….) or it needs to provide some AE support.

It can’t be both. Because both is what we have now. And now sucks.

snow.8097:

10% from OS of u and ur pet + 5% from remorseless, up to 10% from rapid fire, some stacks in that time from QD and that in a great uptime because of the fast regain of OS…idk extreme strong when u go full power

It has about as many modifiers as any other class though, and still relies on the pet for max damage to kick in. Also, you lose opening strike if it is blocked/dodged/etc. Not to mention that you still have to rely 99% on positioning for survival.

There’s lots of play and counter play involved to it overall, and the vuln from OS won’t even last 6 seconds without additional multiplier. It basically gives a full glass build worthy enough damage to make it threatening, and opens up a Grandmaster trait to other options that currently only is used for a single gimmick on a single weapon that really isn’t all that strong.

Oh, and a breeze will still kill you, so if anything even looks your way, you’ll die. It just shifts you to be about as priority of a target as a glass thief or glass ele, and you still wouldn’t outdamage either of those classes/builds, and have less than satisfactory burst outside of the Greatsword still.

Edit: @Thread;

Ah, I see with numbers. Annoying damage formula, will make some small edits.

Atherakhia.4086:

Your Message Here.

I edited out the mathematical errors a little. I was having a case of severe insomnia when I came up with the list, so pardon any mistakes I make/made.

RtW change: In case you missed it, also works with the shortbow too, which was the goal behind the change I had in mind for the skill, as the Marksmanship tree is heavily bloated by skills that also only effect the LB, so where as you can run EE, Spotter, and Pierce, you could now run power shortbow and turn it into a monster of a hybrid weapon that has decent soft CC.

Opening Strikes change: Is essentially just an updated version of Sigil of Intelligence that also gives a short vuln. All it does for the greatsword is makes it so that you don’t have to run Sigil of Intelligence for a guaranteed crit, and as of right now, you can already LB stealth into Maul anyhow, so all it does is open up OS for more builds really.

Remorseless: The change is a bit stronger than you are giving it crit for, just not on the longbow. With the GS and also taking Moment of Clarity, you can Swoop -> Maul -> GS5 -> Maul, obviously not back to back, but this combo would chunk the hell out of somebody’s health if it landed.

SotBM: I agree that its existence is problematic, but at least with this change you could be a little more liberal with the activation of signets, which would mean a bit more burst opportunities. It would just make the one trick pony builds that rely on this for youtube montages that much better.

Quickdraw: Again, also works well for the shortbow, but would help give the LB some artificial burst.

Strider’s Defense: This is just a hard skill to work around. I would change the name any everything about this skill, and ideally, I would want another crit proc to go with the Skirmishing line. Maybe something like: “Being hit by melee cripples you attacker for 5 seconds, 15 second ICD. 100% chance on your next critical hit to apply poison for 5 seconds, 10 second ICD” This would help offense by reducing healing to opponents and giving some passive damage in the process. It’s the best I can do at this very moment based on how I see the class.

For the shouts, I agree that my Guard idea is bad, but I want it to give SOME sort of boon, the problem being that even if the protection suggested increased to 2 seconds, it allows spirit builds with stone spirit and 3 in WS with a little extra protection duration from gear to combine for perma protection uptime, which wouldn’t be good. In general though, because signets only work for the pet without traits, I don’t think that shouts should be the same way, and provide benefits to the player that don’t necessarily require play off of the pet, but do boost the pets effectiveness as well.

In general, I didn’t change the longbow much. I gave it a few more tools that allows it to deal consistent and arguably high damage, with the trade off for it not being a burst weapon being that some of the combination you can pull of with GS would now heavily punish people for pushing in to Melee. The longbow would have just enough tools to skirmish other players if utilized properly though, and ultimately, the build would allow a full damage specced ranger to play hyper offensive and become a serious threat to anything less than a full tank, and even a full tank would be chunked pretty severely.

So you’re advocating taking 30pts in marks to run Spotter and Remorseless for a melee build? I just don’t see it working in a bow build with your changes imo. As to RtW, I can’t see picking it up if my goal was to use it with a shortbow simply because the weapon already has a snare and a daze.

But back to longbow, my issue with it is that even after you invest so heavily to bring it up to par, it’s still not a weapon that can stand on its own. With 50pts invested into using a longbow, it’s about where you’d expect any other weapon for any other class to be with 0 traits running around naked.

Part of it is horrible trait design. Part of it is the weapon itself doesn’t have any clear goal. But another part of the equation is it just doesn’t have another weapon to pair itself with like most other weapons for other classes do. As a skillset Greatsword fills in a lot of holes the longbow has, but the greatsword itself is another support weapon.

It’s not a case of ‘the sum being greater than its parts’. Neither the longbow or the greatsword can go 10 seconds without tripping over themselves. This is why a trait to reduce the weapon swap cooldown is so critical for this class imo. It would just need to be limited in some fashion because a condi trapper build running 2×2 would abuse the crap out of it.

jcbroe.4329:

Traits:
Marksmanship:

• Read the Wind: Current functionality becomes baseline functionality for the weapons it currently effects. New Effect: “Deal 5% more damage to moving foes while wielding a bow. Critical Hits on a moving foe cause 5 seconds of Cripple. 15 second ICD.”

I thought you were of the oppinion that read the wind is a good grandmaster trait, and rangers should make choices, and shouldn’t have all the lonbgow traits available at any one time. And now you propose +100% arrow speed as base line functionality. What happened?

Longbow:

• Hunter’s Shot: Additional Effect: “Also applies a 2 second immobilize to the target.The pet is also stealthed.”

I think this is relly overpowered. A skill with a 12 second cooldown adds stealth to both you and your pet, gives pet swiftness and 2 seconds of immobilize on target. This is too much for 1 skill. I would like it don’t get me wrong, but it will never happen.

nagymbear.5280:

jcbroe.4329:

Traits:
Marksmanship:

• Read the Wind: Current functionality becomes baseline functionality for the weapons it currently effects. New Effect: “Deal 5% more damage to moving foes while wielding a bow. Critical Hits on a moving foe cause 5 seconds of Cripple. 15 second ICD.”

I thought you were of the oppinion that read the wind is a good grandmaster trait, and rangers should make choices, and shouldn’t have all the lonbgow traits available at any one time. And now you propose +100% arrow speed as base line functionality. What happened?

Longbow:

• Hunter’s Shot: Additional Effect: “Also applies a 2 second immobilize to the target.The pet is also stealthed.”

I think this is relly overpowered. A skill with a 12 second cooldown adds stealth to both you and your pet, gives pet swiftness and 2 seconds of immobilize on target. This is too much for 1 skill. I would like it don’t get me wrong, but it will never happen.

It is a good trait, and I run it in WvW whenever I LB. That being said, the Marksmanship line is cluttered with traits that could arguably be baseline functionality, and the easiest 2 people always target to make baseline are Eagle Eye and Read the Wind. I personally don’t think the LB should be 1500 range by default, and I don’t think it should pierce by default, so Read the Wind has to go to make way for clutter.

So while I do think it is a good trait, and I still think there needs to be trade offs (which is why people are debating with me that I should have had my traits push the longbow towards a more burst oriented or other role oriented weapon other than sustained output), my view of the entire games trait system is that the Grandmasters in the game are horrible excuses for Traitline caps and should act more like capstone skills that have a drastic and noticeable improvement on gameplay. Some traits like this already exist (Sleight of Hand, Burst Mastery, Illusionary Persona), and the rest of the grandmaster traits should follow suit to create a fundamental difference on immediate gameplay (not just throw some traps, or throw some traps that have longer lasting effects).

As for you thinking the skill suggestion is overpowered, I would argue that it isn’t any more overpowered than Pin Down, or the amount of spammable CC engineer rifle gets. Especially because I was particularly careful about making sure the longbow was still more sustain oriented than burst oriented with the suggestions. Is it strong? Absolutely. The skill might be deserving of a longer cast time with the proposed change. But I will never think the LB is an okay position until it has another skill on it’s skillset that can be used to setup Rapid Fire, that PBS is useless for that role and hardcountered completely by stability, and that the LB desperately needs an immobilize.

I disagree with the hunter’s shot change idea. Curret one is a great survival tool, that’s great for a longbow ranger that got too much attention.

By getting stealthed yourself only, the aggro obviously gets diverted to pet. That’s also why pet switness is there. A very reasonable and good skill for a longbow ranger if he got more attention then he bargained for.

There’s “guard” shout for pet stealthing. Though that should be insta-cast.

Seems like after two years people break eventually :P

Yes, we need Control, Kiting, Damage and Utility. The “Holy Quattro” of every “Ranger/Hunter Bow” design. In this particular order.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

I disagree with the hunter’s shot change idea. Curret one is a great survival tool, that’s great for a longbow ranger that got too much attention.

By getting stealthed yourself only, the aggro obviously gets diverted to pet. That’s also why pet switness is there. A very reasonable and good skill for a longbow ranger if he got more attention then he bargained for.

There’s “guard” shout for pet stealthing. Though that should be insta-cast.

Aggro is a PvE tool, and I made this specifically in regards to PvP. In PvP, if a target drops your pets focus while you attempt to go stealth, the pet comes back and stands next to you and gives away your position. Not to mention that every thief in the world that has more than 3 brain cells will use your pet if they are running D/D to counter your stealth with stealth.

If the pet AI was ever changed so that the pet doesn’t try to run back to you when it loses a target that stealths, then a change like what I suggested wouldn’t be needed. But at this point, people just abuse the limited AI and in the process can remove any defensive benefit you were trying to gain from going stealth.

Rym.1469:

Seems like after two years people break eventually :P

Yes, we need Control, Kiting, Damage and Utility. The “Holy Quattro” of every “Ranger/Hunter Bow” design. In this particular order.

I have NEVER thought that the longbow was a good weapon. Every time I touch it I hate it a little more. Our condition builds are pretty much as ideal as they can get. We are at the point now where power builds need visible changes (and not slight, “shave” level improvements), and the traits need a serious overhaul.

ANet has targeted the “low-hanging fruit” changes for our class long enough. When the entire forum thinks that rangers need buffs, even people that don’t play the class, that should be a HUGE red flag. The only people that argue that rangers don’t need buffs are the close-minded PvP players who have never played ranger before and associate the class with AI and autoattacks because of poorly designed weapons and a toxic build, and they don’t even realize that a single build that only performs semi-well does not equate to a class being in a well balanced spot.

So yeah. I’m just really tired of always wanting to use the Longbow, and it being an absolutely abysmal weapon that doesn’t even compensate with how not fun the skillset on it is with enough damage for me to personally let it slide.