Guild Wars 2

This is for tPvP only

Since there are only 2 developers working on GW2 balance at the moment, I thought I would help out. Note these are small, realistic changes which I think could be implemented next patch.

Weapons

Axe Off-hand

• Path of Scars knocks down enemy if axe hits them on the way back.

Shortbow

• Poison Volley changed to projectile finisher. This would make it a much more active move which could be used in more situations. If you want us to stop spamming 1, make our other moves a bit more useful and active!
• Quickness with Shortbow shoots 30% faster – This is a bug-fix.

Apart from that it seems shortbow is in a good area. Despite the fact ‘spamming 1 ain’t fun’, it does require flanking and positioning yourself right to use it to full effect, making it an interesting weapon.

Longbow

• Increase projectile speed – this is stop it being so easy to evade.

Sword

• No longer roots you

Apart from that it does seem our weapons are in a ‘fine’ place. Torch is good, the projectile speed buff was actually good and needed, although not a huge change. Greatswords buff last patch was good – I’m still a bit iffy on how little damage its auto-attacks do and its long cooldowns. I know its meant to be a utility weapon, not a damage-dealing one with big numbers, but I still think it could do with a bit more damage so we can at least kill an enemy on low hp.

Traits

Line 1 – Marksmanship

• Beastmaster’s might – Activating a signet now gives 3 stacks of might as opposed to a 1. With signets having such long cooldowns, receiving just 1 stack of might when you activate them is really useless.
• Remorseless – I don’t even know how to change this. At the moment ‘You regain opening strikes when you kill an enemy’. For a grandmaster trait that really is quite useless. Feels like this is a PvE move where much more enemies get killed.

Line 2 – Skirmishing

• Moment of Clarity – “Gain an attack of opportunity when you interrupt an enemy”. Again, just a terrible trait. I don’t know what to change it to because its such a fundamentally bad grandmaster trait. 50% damage increase on next attack for us rangers is very bad. We aren’t thieves who can do 5k damage at once. We have much more sustained dps. Maybe if it was “50% more damage over the next 3 seconds” or “50% more damage on next 4 attacks”, this would be more useful. Also the terms on which you get it are really bad – interrupting in this game isn’t easy, and we only have a couple of interrupts on really long CDs!

Line 3 – Wilderness Survival

• Nothing – its the rangers best trait line at the moment, and you actually have to think about what traits to take because they are all viable. Making choices when building a character is good.

Line 4 – Nature Magic

• Enlargement – Changed from “Your pet gets enlarged at 25% hp” to “You and your pet get enlarged at 25% hp”. This should at least make this trait a bit viable. Apart from that this trait line is really good, and I feel like I have to make choices when choosing the traits.

Line 5 – Beast Mastery

• Instinctual Bond – Changed from “When you are downed your pet gains 5 second of quickness” to “When you are downed your pet gains 5 seconds of quickness, and when your pet is killed you gain 2 seconds of quickness”. Having a grandmaster trait that revolves around you getting downed isn’t exactly ideal, and I think the extra 2 seconds of quickness you get from your pet dying would make this a much more viable and interesting trait.

*This is the worst line that Rangers have, by far. However, this is because Pet A.I and relying on pets in tPvP really doesn’t work (well). Once they improved ranger pets maybe this line will become more useful.

Utility Skills

Shouts
A big reason these suck so bad is again because pets aren’t reliable in tPvP. However, there are still many improvements it could use.

• Guard – Changed from “Your pet will aggressively protect the area” to “Your pet will aggressively protect the area, and absorb 15% of damage you would take in this area for 5 seconds”.
• Sick Em – Cooldown reduced to 45 seconds and does not require an enemy to be targeted. Kind of random how it requires an enemy target?
• Search and Rescue – Pets will revive at the same speed as humans with this skill. A slow revive at 85 seconds cool down really isnt that useful. Necros can instantly revive 3 downed people at 180 seconds cooldown, I think we should get to revive one person at a normal pace at 85 secs cd.

Traps

• Fixed a bug where traps teleport next to you when your too far away, meaning they only get to do 1 tick of damage to enemies

Spirits

• Health of all spirits, apart from elite, increased by 20%. Either this, OR damage taken by AoE reduced by 50% (I do not know if this feasible from a technical point of view!). Having spirits killed by enemies because they want to focus fire them is fine, it requires thought on their behalf and for us it means they are wasting their dps on something else – but what sucks is when they randomly die without the opponent even meaning to.
• Cast times of summoning spirits reduced to 1 second from 1.5. This is so we don’t have to spend a whole 4.5 seconds mid-fight to resummon them. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to have such long cast times for them – are they incredibly strong moves or am I missing something?

With this I think spirits can start creeping up on the viable side. The 20% to 35% proc chance increase last patch was actually really good – you don’t have to trait the +15% now, and can use Nature’s Vegeance (spirits activated skills have larger range and activate upon their death) instead which is useful, especially because they die so much. The changes here seem small and reasonable, and is definitely a good starting point.

Signets

• Signet of the Hunt – Passive movement speed increased from 10% to 20%. Active effect is now “Your pet will deal more damage on its next attack, and chill its target for 2s”
• Signet of the Wild – Cooldown reduced from 120 seconds to 100 seconds. Stability duration reduced from 12 seconds – 10 seconds. These ridiculously long cooldowns for signets is one of the reason they are hardly used. Lower the cooldowns, and lower the effects so they aren’t one-time poof abilities that we can’t actively use unless we wait 2 minutes.

Pets
And lastly, pet fixes.

First of all, their F2 skills NEED to be 100% responsive, or in fact just have an instant cast time. You can rebalance some of the effects to make up for this (i.e reduce wolf fear from 2s to 1s). If you don’t, then they need to work perfectly or pets will just be continue to be useless in the tPvP environment.

Secondly, they need to be able to hit targets more reliably. This is something that needs to be fixed from a technical/programming point of view though. Maybe increase their melee attack ranges so they can hit targets that move more reliably.

Ending Note

These changes aren’t huge ridiculous buffs. None of them are direct “damage increased by X%”. It just makes the useless unviable traits/utilities that are never used in a competitive environment a bit better. I don’t think this will make rangers viable for top top level play, but it will definitely be a step in the right direction and I think once these changes are implemented we can re kitten the situation.

Something people seem to be missing too is that although our buffs were very small this patch, a lot of OP builds have been nerfed (unkillable staff ele, guardian protection duration/block bug etc.). This means we are actually in a better situation despite recieving barely any buffs.

Note: A lot of these changes are using ballpark figures. For example, the spirit health increase could in fact need to be an increase of 40%, or maybe just 10%. This what the balance testers and QA department is for.

Don’t change Enlargement, enlargement makes your pet have a bigger hitbox, the point of the trait is so when you hit 25% health your pet can soak up more hits for you.

As for spirits i’d say either do what you proposed, or leave their health the same and just make them pulse their effect on everyone in the area every second, this would make them being squishy make MUCH more sense because they’d be significantly more powerful.

As far as I know, hitboxes don’t change and are always the same. Its just the appearance which looks bigger.

Also, enlargement grants stability + 25% damage increase.

DalzK.9086:

Longbow

• Increase projectile speed – this is stop it being so easy to evade.

Still think you will need either a damage increase or a fire rate increase to skill 1 to go with this. If you increase projectile speed it will make the rate of fire of the weapon appear slower. I like using longbow but it is underpowered right now.

One of my biggest issues is in WvW.

1. I have to jump onto the edge of the wall to hit anything with Longbow and makes it so easy to be knocked off. Even barrage cannot be targetted without being on the edge. You are shooting up into the air, line of sight shouldn’t factor in. If any class should outperform on a castle wall it should be the Ranger class / Longbow weapon.

2. When defending on a wall my pet cannot attack and I lose DPS because of this. It is irratating they can’t run out and attack. Even worse when using birds (from a logic standpoint). This is also a problem when you have mobs on jumping platforms. Pets cannot attack unless you are on the same platform as the mob.

3. We lose DPS because of our pets when attacking players on a wall. Pets cannot attack them (even birds) but I agree they should not be able to run inside. Don’t know how to fix this. Even though damage buffs in certain circumstances are always brought up I don’t think that is the way to go.

Ah sorry, I forgot to mention this a purely tPvP balance list.

Well thought out and well written. I’d still like a slight tweek on all weapon damage numbers across the board but that is just my Humble opinion. When they fix the pets this very well could become a none issue.

Good post and good ideas.

For Marksman I would just dump the opening strikes all together and bake it all together into a master trait. Right now its so buggy and does not offer any meaningful improvement or style in play that it’s useless as 3 minor traits in the Marksman tree. I’d much prefer more ranged combar improvements in those minor traits then Opening Strikes.

I admire your effort in thinking this through but I really have to caution anyone about proposing changes. They’re not going to do it. They can’t even get themselves through the bugs, let alone think about actually changing or improving classes. Taking their time to actually read these ideas is likely out of the spectrum of possibility. They just are not up to it. So it is time spent being an advocate for this game and class that won’t be acknowledged.

I do not think I have heard them consider or implement a change from their community yet.

i think you are wasting your breath. nobody suggested harpoon gun buffs so far and that’s all we got so they are not interested in the community’s opinion, besides that most traits we have are horrible and need to be removed and utility skills are useless except lightning reflex.

Would be awesome if the Jaguar stealth skill also stealthed the ranger. In its c urrent state, its useless.