Guild Wars 2

Instead of numerous threads scattered through the forums, perhaps it would be best suited to create a single thread with all the suggestions. I will post the most agreed upon suggestions here (up top) for the viewing pleasure of anyone. This way, there can be a general community consensus.

Please have specifics in suggestion, I.E. nothing like “Fix pet AI!”, instead something along the lines of “Make attack priority of pets to attack rear/flank as to avoid frontal AoE”
___________________________________________________________________
Weapons:
Issue: Lack of Viability of Long Bow
Solution1 : Decrease cast timer for closer shots
Solution 2: Standard damage, but higher critical chance for longer range shots

Issue: Rooted when using 1h Sword
Solution1: Make animations similar to great sword, so that character has total control during.

Pets:
Issue: Survivability of Pet
Solution 1: Aegis upon evade w/ internal cooldown (~4s)
Solution 2: Manual Control Dodge (On F3)
Solution 3: Cooldown reset if both pets have died.

Issue: Responsiveness of Pet/ Pet Utility
-> Including “Sic’ Em” overriding pet utility
Solution 1: Make F2 priority (I.E. Cancel current attack, use F2 skill)

QoL:
->Toolbars
Issue: Sword tooltip incorrect (does not appear to remove bleed)
Issue: Sharpened edges tooltip incorrect
Issue: Furious grip tooltip incorrect
Solution: Put at correct values

Utility (spirits, trap, etc):
Pet Utility
Issue: When no target is selected, ranger needs to stop moving to cast
Solution: Allow ranger to cast pet utility move when no target is selected

Traits:
Issue: Only profession where +stat is at master level
Solution: Put on adept level like thief and warrior

Issue: Vigorous Training is Broken
Solution: Apparent bug.

General Damage:
Issue: Lack of True Burst Move
Solution 1: Replace Spike Trap w/ Barrage. Barrage will now immobilize upon first wave, and cause bleeds upon following waves. Barrage will be replaced w/ aimed shot type of move.

Hedgehog in the fog.1053:

Instead of numerous threads scattered through the forums, perhaps it would be best suited to create a single thread with all the suggestions. I will post the most agreed upon suggestions here (up top) for the viewing pleasure of anyone. This way, there can be a general community consensus.

Please have specifics in suggestion, I.E. nothing like “Fix pet AI!”, instead something along the lines of “Make attack priority of pets to attack rear/flank as to avoid frontal AoE”
___________________________________________________________________
Weapons:

Pets:

QoL:

Utility (spirits, trap, etc):

Traits:

I like your initiative, but honestly why waste it here? You should be able to tell after that last couple patches that nothing is going to come from your work. Why not put that time and effort into something more productive? Like school/work? Hell even another game would be worth more.

My suggestions:

Change Opening Strikes to increase attack speed by x%.

Change the LBs #1, by making the damage standard regardless of distance, but increasing critical chance for further distance.
——-Alternatively——
Would be to decrease cast time the closer you are, but keep the damage change the same.

Make spotter an adept skill.

Change F3, so that a single tap is a dodge back for the pet, while a double tap is a return to master.
———Alternatively——-
Introduce stances for pet, defensive and offensive stance. Defensive stance would be a X% increase in toughness, with a Y% decrease in damage. Offensive stance would be a D% decrease in toughness, and a F% increase in damage. 5sec ICD between stances.

I like your initiative, but honestly why waste it here? You should be able to tell after that last couple patches that nothing is going to come from your work. Why not put that time and effort into something more productive? Like school/work? Hell even another game would be worth more.

It doesn’t take that much effort. Also, a more organized approach may be appreciated. What’s the worst that could happen? We theory craft and hope, best case scenario, we post our compilation list, and they take SOME of the suggestions. Its a low risk, high gain (possible) scenario.

Also, we can sit around, and complain or we can still push forward! A lot of people will look at this and go…“What a waste of time”, but, at the end of the day, whats more productive, complaining on a forum, or making suggestions?

Pet Survivability: While it’s great this patch is improving pet health by nearly 72%, a pet engaged in WvW lasts on average about 8 seconds. And that’s doing nothing with the pet but having it sit next to you, on passive, unengaged and waiting to use a Howl to fear someone off me. A 72% increase on this is only 14 seconds. Not even enough time to use a second F2 ability. On the plus side, and in a strictly roaming capacity, it actually has helped with things like Protect Me and using the pet overall. But the failing of this class is group engagement, not dueling and roaming.

Solution: The easiest solution to this problem is to simply provide Aegis for the pet whenever the Ranger uses a dodge or a skill that also evades. There should be an internal cooldown of 4 seconds placed on this so a Ranger with #1 set to autocast on Greatsword will only get an aegis every other rotation.

Pet Responsiveness: This has been an issue brought up pretty much nonstop since the game has come out. It has had absolutely 0 improvements in a year. We’ve occasionally heard Dev’s comment ‘they’d like to improve it’ and yet here we are, a class mechanic that can’t even be said to work 50% of the time even if the pet were alive.

Solution: F2 abilities need to fire off instantly. If this means to stop attacking and interrupt any other active ability the pet is currently using, so be it. But F2 abilities need to activate the moment F2 is pressed. Not 2 seconds later, not 5 seconds later. This doesn’t mean they should be instant however. They should still have kitten cast time to ensure some level of balance is maintained.

Burst: With the addition of Remorseless I was starting to think the class would start to get some burst options now. Unfortunately, nothing has come of it. The only reasonable use of the Remorseless trait is to stealth and then Maul someone. Just like the only reasonable option for Moment of Clarity is the typical Swoop+Hilt+Maul combo. The reason for this is because Maul is really the only heavy hitting skill this class has.

Solution: Remove Spike Trap. Make Barrage a skill. Barrage will now immobilize all targets on the first wave and also apply bleeding for each wave of arrows. It is now effectively a ranged Spike trap that does more damage and doesn’t need 30pts to work. Replace Barrage with an Aimed Shot on the longbow.

Hedgehog in the fog.1053:

I like your initiative, but honestly why waste it here? You should be able to tell after that last couple patches that nothing is going to come from your work. Why not put that time and effort into something more productive? Like school/work? Hell even another game would be worth more.

It doesn’t take that much effort. Also, a more organized approach may be appreciated. What’s the worst that could happen? We theory craft and hope, best case scenario, we post our compilation list, and they take SOME of the suggestions. Its a low risk, high gain (possible) scenario.

Also, we can sit around, and complain or we can still push forward! A lot of people will look at this and go…“What a waste of time”, but, at the end of the day, whats more productive, complaining on a forum, or making suggestions?

I agree. Anet already took some of our suggestions and put them in the game, you can look at this patch to see it. We should atleast try to have atleast one civilized thread to put whatever the best things we can come up with in one place, so some poor guy at Anet isn’t lost in the forums reading ten posts of rage at the begining of a thread, then skip the one constructive post in the middle of it all because he was tired of the rage quitting going on earlier.

((Also, I have alot of crazy, borderline random ideas I posted before, but lets be realistic in saying that 90% of them were way too OP to ever be considered by Anet. I’m going to rework some of them and post them in this thread this weekend))
….((as well as the slightly more practical balance suggestions. I guess I could throw those out there too.))

Trait Bugs

• Vigorous Training is broken

Tooltip Bugs

• Sword tooltip incorrect (does not appear to remove bleed)
• Sharpened edges tooltip incorrect
• furious grip tooltip incorrect

Utility Bugs

• sic ’em still overrides pet utilities
• signet of the wild transform (signet of the beastmaster) does not allow interaction with porcine drops, stomping, or elementalist weapons

Pet Bugs

• Have to stop and cast to make the utilities work when no target is selected.
• Expertise training interaction is bugged or else tooltip is incorrect
• fern hound heal amount is incorrect

Atherakhia.4086:

Pet Survivability: While it’s great this patch is improving pet health by nearly 72%, a pet engaged in WvW lasts on average about 8 seconds. And that’s doing nothing with the pet but having it sit next to you, on passive, unengaged and waiting to use a Howl to fear someone off me. A 72% increase on this is only 14 seconds. Not even enough time to use a second F2 ability. On the plus side, and in a strictly roaming capacity, it actually has helped with things like Protect Me and using the pet overall. But the failing of this class is group engagement, not dueling and roaming.

Solution: The easiest solution to this problem is to simply provide Aegis for the pet whenever the Ranger uses a dodge or a skill that also evades. There should be an internal cooldown of 4 seconds placed on this so a Ranger with #1 set to autocast on Greatsword will only get an aegis every other rotation.

Pet Responsiveness: This has been an issue brought up pretty much nonstop since the game has come out. It has had absolutely 0 improvements in a year. We’ve occasionally heard Dev’s comment ‘they’d like to improve it’ and yet here we are, a class mechanic that can’t even be said to work 50% of the time even if the pet were alive.

Solution: F2 abilities need to fire off instantly. If this means to stop attacking and interrupt any other active ability the pet is currently using, so be it. But F2 abilities need to activate the moment F2 is pressed. Not 2 seconds later, not 5 seconds later. This doesn’t mean they should be instant however. They should still have kitten cast time to ensure some level of balance is maintained.

Burst: With the addition of Remorseless I was starting to think the class would start to get some burst options now. Unfortunately, nothing has come of it. The only reasonable use of the Remorseless trait is to stealth and then Maul someone. Just like the only reasonable option for Moment of Clarity is the typical Swoop+Hilt+Maul combo. The reason for this is because Maul is really the only heavy hitting skill this class has.

Solution: Remove Spike Trap. Make Barrage a skill. Barrage will now immobilize all targets on the first wave and also apply bleeding for each wave of arrows. It is now effectively a ranged Spike trap that does more damage and doesn’t need 30pts to work. Replace Barrage with an Aimed Shot on the longbow.

Even easier solution to pet survivability would be to remove the cooldown when both your pets are dead (typically 15 seconds after a zerg fight starts if you are really lucky your pet did 500 damage before it died).

Even better, design it so when both your pets are dead you can actually recover that missing damage by having your own damage increased.

Tired of being completely kitten by the broken pet mechanic for so many aspects of wvw, apart from solo/small party roaming (oh wait, tat’s a bit like spvp, no wonder that bit works fine).

Problem: Root while using standard #1 attack sequence with one handed swords

Solution: Make the animation similar to the GS, in that the player has complete control even during the animation.

This is good stuff, I have put everything up at the top. Keep it coming. Likewise, if you have reasons to refute any solution/ a better solution let me know so that I can update. The goal would be 1 solution to each problem.

Combos from Fields and “shields” especially: Those from Eles and Mesmers last longer than ours do. …. Also our Water field just got nerfed.

Wasn’t Initiators & Finishers supposed to be like a big deal mechanic in this game? They were certainly marketed that way before release. Ranger’s especially. (Don’t make me link to all the Videos that are basically now just a sad rehash of Gw1’s “HammyStorm” propaganda). Why aren’t we properly rewarded for ours? I should want to run Axe & Shortbow & Torch as often as possible to maximize DPS when playing well beyond an average skill curve. But the Lower-than any-other-class gains we get from Combos just makes the HUGE effort for positioning a total waste on this class.

COMBO EQUALITY NOW!!!

Trap potency tooltip is incorrect **