Guild Wars 2

When compared to other “bad dps” power builds like Reaper, Revenant and Warrior… Are we really inferior to all of them?

I am interested on Condi Ranger, but I have 0 Crafting on everything save Cooking, and only a single piece of Viper armor from HoT story on my Daredevil… That means I’ll have to live with Power Ranger for a long time and I haven’t even started so: Is the class REALLY this weak?!

It depends what you’re using it for. For open world purposes it performs fairly well since you don’t recieve many buffs from other players. It’s also not bad in dungeons and low level fractals.

Most of the DPS benchmarks you see only really apply to raids, where classes scale differently thanks to there being so many buffs available. For raids, power ranger is currently the lowest DPS class in the game, slightly behind power mesmer last time I checked. I would recommend you get a healing set if you want to raid.

So basically, it’s perfectly fine everywhere except raids and maybe high level fractals (Depends on the group). Just take your time gearing up and you’ll have plenty of ascended boxes before long.

When compared to Power Reaper on Fracs and Dungeons, who would deal the most damage?

If you discount team-wide modifiers like Spotter, Frost Spirit and GotL. Power Reaper would do more damage. So that is on an individual or solo basis.

If you include those, Power Ranger does more overall damage by boosting allied damage. Which is based on group dps.

By how much specifically? It would depend on the composition of the group, eg) More difference in a Ranger/X/X/X/Ele group than Ranger/X/X/X/Engineer group.

Short answer: No

Long Answer: It is situational. Your DPS isn’t as high as it could be but the dps you lose is traded off for your own suitability and an alternate playstyle that shines in other areas. Most people won’t bat an eye because they see ranger and instantly think kitten and nothing else, which is on them because Ranger and Druid have a lot to offer in reality.

Instead of asking “is power ranger that bad?” u can reverse the question. “What is power ranger good at?”

dps: nope
healing: no( power druid healing is bad as well)
buffs: no (unless u mean druid)

It’s not that power ranger is bad (It’s not), it’s that condi for rangers is really good. We have several condi skills that load up a lot of stacks initially, instead of needing time to build up, so the condi has more burst as opposed to the slow burn that people usually associate with condi builds.

Now compared to other power builds, yes we fall behind Warrior (they have way more access to might and other things) and Reaper (Decimate Defenses and Deathly Chill make them pretty powerful). Revenant doesn’t get good until you have Herald. But ultimately it’s up to your play style.

bearshaman.3421:

It’s not that power ranger is bad (It’s not), it’s that condi for rangers is really good.

It’s not that power ranger is bad, it’s that power scaling and coefficients are low while conditions are not limited by skill coefficients.

FTFY

Wondrouswall.7169:

bearshaman.3421:

It’s not that power ranger is bad (It’s not), it’s that condi for rangers is really good.

It’s not that power ranger is bad, it’s that power scaling and coefficients are low while conditions are not limited by skill coefficients.

FTFY

I said what I meant. Coefficients aside, we wouldn’t be as effective at condi if we didn’t have multiple skills that drop a lot of stacks of a particular condition up front on cast. The tradeoff being that the duration of the conditions tends to be shorter, but that just means we end up seeing that damage get used more, not wasted because its drawn out over time.

You’re not wrong either (or at least I have no idea, I’ve not looked closely at those), but what I said is very true as well.

You should look into our base damage and coefficients then. If Anet did more PVE-side tweaks to power weapons, then maybe Rangers can have some semblance of a DPS option rather than sub-optimal viability.

But instead, they make odd – even stupid (to be blunt) – choices like increasing Mesmer’s Blurred Frenzy by 100% in PVE only (for…?) and giving Whirling Defense a damage boost.

Wondrouswall.7169:

You should look into our base damage and coefficients then. If Anet did more PVE-side tweaks to power weapons, then maybe Rangers can have some semblance of a DPS option rather than sub-optimal viability.

But instead, they make odd – even stupid (to be blunt) – choices like increasing Mesmer’s Blurred Frenzy by 100% in PVE only (for…?) and giving Whirling Defense a damage boost.

I’ll make another effort to understand those at some point.

zoomborg.9462:

buffs: no (unless u mean druid)

Spotter and Frost Spirit is the next best thing after warrior for a pure power group, if we’re gonna exclude druid anyway. That’s fairly good. Not sure why we wouldn’t include the druid though, slapping on a different third specialization to take some extra buffs hardly changes it from being a power ranger.

Wondrouswall.7169:

You should look into our base damage and coefficients then. If Anet did more PVE-side tweaks to power weapons, then maybe Rangers can have some semblance of a DPS option rather than sub-optimal viability.

It’s sad that this leftover tax from having pets still exist. The fact they haven’t bother to take a second look at sword after the animation change either doesn’t give me high hopes for future coefficients on our weapons.

I recommend crafting, it’s fun and rewarding! Anywho, I love my ranger/Druid. I have 3 ascended sets, power, magi, and vipers, and I use all three sets in different situations, depending on what I feel like playing at the time. So I’m not sayin you need to get all three sets, I mean it’s fun, but what I’m sayin is I play my power Druid in all different content, and I do just fine. Raiding would prolly be the hardest place to get a spot unless you have a group of friends, pugs would be hard. Power ranger is viable but not really desired over condi and magis Druid. But yeah the lack of personal dps isn’t why you’d run a power Druid, spotter, spirits, Gotl, those are always useful for groups. There’s currently shinier options but it’s still viable, you can def play power. And for solo/running around builds just take some diff utilities instead of spirits.

Wondrouswall.7169:

You should look into our base damage and coefficients then. If Anet did more PVE-side tweaks to power weapons, then maybe Rangers can have some semblance of a DPS option rather than sub-optimal viability.

But instead, they make odd – even stupid (to be blunt) – choices like increasing Mesmer’s Blurred Frenzy by 100% in PVE only (for…?) and giving Whirling Defense a damage boost.

The big problem is that they stubbornly hold to the idea that the Pet is a reliable source of damage, and it comprises 25% of the class’s damage potential at any given time. Ironically the reason Condi tends to be so good on Ranger is the fact that A. Condi damage has a universal coefficient (meaning it can’t be arbitrarily adjusted per class), and thus B. the damage output is determined entirely by how condi stacks works….. which, incidentally, Rangers can do a lot of, given how nearly all their skills have some kind of condi component. Awhile back when they were doing the stack changes, Ranger got an indirect buff due to the way they compensated for Condi potency… but it was still pretty mediocre until Raids introduced targets with enough HP for Condi to properly ramp on .

Power builds center on their cooldowns, which makes them very easy to track and execute on most classes. But with Condi, nothing short of champs lasts long enough for the rotation to matter; which makes it feel very awkward and with poor cadence in the average mob fight. A lot of Mesmer builds follow this same principle, as illusions are ammunition, and it takes time to generate them.

As for Ranger power builds specifically, their perpetually hampered by the Pet’s “theoretical” DPS being part of their calculations for total DPS and skill coefficients. This is why most of their skills are lacking in direct damage, making their DPS bursts (which most power builds are based on) weak in comparison to pretty much every other class in a direct damage build. But since pet damage isn’t reliable, and can’t be commanded to unload over the span of 2 seconds…. not to mention AI being completely reactive, and most of their attacks being stationary; thus leading to a constant need for them to keep relocating between attacks, exacerbated further by the shoddy path finding behavior. This reliance on a damage source that only does its job 50% of time, unless the target itself doesn’t like moving (ie not constantly switch targets due to the fickle aggro behaviors), is whats really holding the power builds back. The long term DPS is there…. but the long term DPS doesn’t matter, when the overall goal is to make the target dead before it can launch its second attack.

But this low coefficient due to the damage source split causes a lot of problems with the Traits themselves, as well as external % buffs…… our base numbers are low enough, that the typical 10% multiplier benefits the Ranger “less”, unless that trait can be shared with the pet as well. This is pretty well evidenced in the fact that Ranger stat and damage boost traits are proportionally higher then other classes -getting 12-15% modifiers instead of the usual 5-10, +150-300 passive stats where others would cap at 160, and buff stacks being almost twice as potent in the core line, and being almost on par with especs.
Ranger weapons also have a bad habit of lacking focus; as the condi component is integral to the DPS balance of a skill rather then additive. The only 2 weapons that understand themselves is the Longbow and the Torch, where every other weapon is half condi/half physical, and generally lacking in both. I guess maybe the intent was for Ranger to always run hybrid stats… but nothing about the game play or the math rewards that behavior, since crit damage scales to 3 stats; and while condi scales to 2, it needs a third (prec) solely for the purpose of procing traits and sigils. Since direct damage scales poorly overall due to coefficients, but Condi scales consistently with gear load out, its easy to understand why one is so popular over the other, despite the abysmal gold cost to do so.

It just keeps coming back to the role of the pet, and how utterly unreliable it is given how its handled. While I don’t advocate for its removal, the pet’s movement system and attack characteristics need a massive rework so they can properly chase targets and reliably land blows. In terms of current game mechanics, they’d need the mechanical equivalent of super speed and quickness on a regular basis, to work around the AI’s tendency to get tripped on archiving target adjacency. At the very least make their basic attack non-stationary.

There was some improvements that people were very happy with a patch or two back. I think it had to do with tracking moving targets better.

The recent change was a big help. It added small lunges to most melee pets attacks. This alleviated some of the “stop” attack “miss”.

Part of the issue is that the change didn’t affect most pets ability to CHASE. At the moment the only melee pet with a reliable chase auto attack. Is ironically the wyvern. Who has a two hit auto attack with a long lunge attacked to both hits. Making it the most reliable attack source on mobile targets. Even over smokescale (especially considering smokescales now abysmal burst even when buffed).

The above is of course excluding ranged pets.

This change did help massively with keeping up with targets.

Part of the biggest problem with pets is that they are vulnerable to all of the soft conditions players are vulnerable to. With NONE of the defenses.

They can be crippled, chilled, blinded, weakened, and immobilized. Any of these effectively shuts down a pet and forces a pet swap in order to regain effectiveness.

On most pets even a single second of cripple takes them out of range of a kiting target.

And weakness drops there already low crit chance to near zero.

Pets also cant choose to use an auto attack to clear blind before winding up for a big attack.

Also, note that sometimes an old “solution” to help pets from taking damage still lingers today and ends up being an hindrance in all modes. This is where the AI will attempt to flank a target from behind rather than attacking right when they are in range.

A solution 3 years before reduced NPC damage was implemented in PVE and ends up having the pet act wonky in PVP and WVW when attempting to flank a moving player. Kind of frustrating when you see this occur where the pet is able and well within range of a target, but doesn’t attack it because it’s trying to go around them first.

In PVE, this sometimes becomes hilarious, like during the Auric Basin meta event where a pet will just stand there since it can’t flank an Octovine. I once saw my Wyvern repeatedly knocked back against one of the giant spitfire worms in Dragon Stand because it was trying to move through its hitbox to flank it.

By all means, Irenio. If you can remove this function, it would be great. Or, you can leave this function alone and let the Skirmishing Grandmaster Minor trait, “Hunter’s Tactics” apply to the pet so this AI behavior can be more beneficial. Just tossin’ that out there.

Pet flanking AI really shines against “obstructed” targets, too.
https://youtu.be/xwUIgMywXes

zoomborg.9462:

Instead of asking “is power ranger that bad?” u can reverse the question. “What is power ranger good at?”

dps: nope
healing: no( power druid healing is bad as well)
buffs: no (unless u mean druid)

Power rangers are good at knocking back mobs at the wrong time.