Guild Wars 2

I (and I’m sure many of you too) had the feeling, that Ranger/Druid gets an insignificant number of nerfs in all patches since HoT released. Reflecting on it, I was not sure if it was a personally biased viewpoint, or actually the truth. So I went through all patch notes and made some notes on which ones contain balance changes, and how many of them contain Nerfs to Ranger.

First of all I want to say a bit about my criterias: I don’t consider bug fixes balance changes. If a Trait/Skill didn’t do what it was supposed to do and the patch changed that, then this is not a nerf. I don’t consider changes that reduce visual effects of skills nerfs either. However there where some Ranger changes advertised as “fixes” that I did consider nerfs, such as the 50% reduction of Smoke Assault damage, because that skill worked 100% as the tooltip said it would. Here are my findings:

There have been 10 patches since the HoT release that had balance changes in some form. In that I also counted the HoT release patch and compared it to the state of BWE3.

In 8 of those 10 patches you had some nerfs to Ranger/Druid.

In 4 of those 8 patches the Ranger/Druid nerfs where the only nerfs in the whole patch.

The impact of these nerfs was on average far higher than anything that was nerfed with other classes. You have a 300% ICD increase and 50% boon reduction in lingering light, a 50% damage reduction of Smoke Assault (which was later reduced in another patch again, although in combination with a CD reduction) or a 50% health reduction of Bristlebacks. There is no other nerf for another class that comes even close to this amount of impact, with the exception of the 40% nerf to Scrappers adaptive armor.

This all doesn’t include some patches immediately before HoT, that had some even more ridiculous ranger nerfs.

I think this completely justifies my opinion now. I am still convinced that there is some (subconcious?) Ranger hate in the people that do balance changes and that the class can never keep an important role at the meta in any gamemode for long because of that.

Your grand theory is that the entire development team in charge of keeping the game balanced is, potentially subconsciously, attacking only one class?

Man, there are some people who just aren’t satisfied with tin foil hats, so they wear their pants on their heads too so the whole world knows that it’s dealing with.

Did you ever, perhaps, consider that those were needed balancing nerfs? Druids are still massively powerful healers and support characters. They aren’t designed to be part of the meta community’s silly DPS wars. If you want a character with that kind of competitive stance, then go play a Revenant.

Seriously, everyone crying into their chereos over not having fun with their classes in this game should just switch out until they’re happy. This isn’t complicated.

Mercurias.1826:

Your grand theory is that the entire development team in charge of keeping the game balanced is, potentially subconsciously, attacking only one class?

Man, there are some people who just aren’t satisfied with tin foil hats, so they wear their pants on their heads too so the whole world knows that it’s dealing with.

Did you ever, perhaps, consider that those were needed balancing nerfs? Druids are still massively powerful healers and support characters. They aren’t designed to be part of the meta community’s silly DPS wars. If you want a character with that kind of competitive stance, then go play a Revenant.

Seriously, everyone crying into their chereos over not having fun with their classes in this game should just switch out until they’re happy. This isn’t complicated.

It also does well the role of healer or not you see?
His specialization is to be healing and tempest or revent can do the same role with Best Available results.
I is poorly designed, the generation of AF awful, cures in small areas and cast too long
The spirit are arranged?
please is not helping the community or game coming to say that the druid is good, this is far from reality when we have to do is show our discontent.
And all because of pvp ….

Mercurias.1826:

Your grand theory is that the entire development team in charge of keeping the game balanced is, potentially subconsciously, attacking only one class?

It merely reflects that very few of developers have actually thought of doing their job.
Developers do not care about Rangers and Druids in particular.

Yes, some nerfs were justified.
But that only means that people who designed druid never even created the character themselves. We have been seeing it ever since pre-HoT changes and the horrible design is just a solid proof of that.

And you don’t see a problem with that? We payed for their product. And now it’s crystal clear that we don’t intend to make a similar mistake ever again.

Well as soon as we found out we were getting a pure healer spec I was prepared for the roller coaster of druid nerfs/changes. I personally find the scope of the specialization far too narrow to balance easily because it simply doesn’t relate to core ranger much at all. The problem is that they expect us heal people through building up an arbitrary force that can (for the most part) only be obtained through healing people. Unlike necro we don’t have a million different weapons that build up this force so we are pigeon holed into staff. If they just got rid or the AF completely and just gave us a CD or increase AF gain through damage significantly I would be a happy druid.

It’s not about the nerfs, because I for one will agree that some of not most of them were needed. In PvP that is.
A-net with their ESL and pvp leagues with money involved decided to balance the PvP aspect of the game without caring for the consequences that affect their PvE game.

THIS IS THE PROBLEM!!!

you have 2 different games! PvE fighting and PvP fighting do not match.

let me give you a trivial example.
immobilize for 1-2 second in a 15-30 second fight IS HUGE (pvp)
immobilize for 1-2 seconds in a 10+ minute fight IS USELESS (pve)

Mercurias.1826:

Your grand theory is that the entire development team in charge of keeping the game balanced is, potentially subconsciously, attacking only one class?

Man, there are some people who just aren’t satisfied with tin foil hats, so they wear their pants on their heads too so the whole world knows that it’s dealing with.

Did you ever, perhaps, consider that those were needed balancing nerfs? Druids are still massively powerful healers and support characters. They aren’t designed to be part of the meta community’s silly DPS wars. If you want a character with that kind of competitive stance, then go play a Revenant.

Seriously, everyone crying into their chereos over not having fun with their classes in this game should just switch out until they’re happy. This isn’t complicated.

Except they are NEVER the thing people actually QQing about, like bristleback HP and pet blind on f2. No-one ever QQ about ranger’s staff AA either , yet it got nerfed.

Actually they buffed Rev’s OP hammer 2 lol…
And everyone is QQing about DH’s traps daze spam but no fix.

Logic? There is none.
Don’t use balance to defend Anet’s action anymore. There’s none.