Guild Wars 2

KensaiZen.3740:

Now if its not painstakingly obvious to some people, the GS is a GTFO of danger weapon.

If you take the entire class into focus and not just the weapon you will see that Rangers have incredible ranged damage and relatively crappy melee. The GS is the weapon that allows you to run away from melee very effectively.

GS 4 blocks melee attacks and interrupts allowing for a hastey retreat with GS 3. Hell, GS 3 without auto target will get you out of any combat situation. Combined with extra speed for carrying a melee weapon, you are pretty much home free if you have condition removers to remove those pesky rooting skills. The Cooldowns are also very low for such an effective single target control weapon (block knockdown and stun plus evade every 3 swings)

You are also not looking at what you can do with this class in its entirety. Advanced kiting. Shoot from ranged inflict stupid amounts of damage. If they get close, run away. GS3 your escape mechanic right there. When enough distance is made, turn around and shoot. All this whilst your pet is chasing your enemy (hopefully you have picked the speed traits for your pet so then can run faster than your enemy as your enemy will be running in a straight line after you) Your pet will also be hitting them now and again chipping away at their HP if not actually crippling them and making them move slower.

Now here is the other aspect of the ranger melee which funnily enough I used last nit in WvW to face tank a warrior and totally destroy him. Signet of stone is a 6 second invurnerability. “Protect me” is a second health bar. so in total you have about 12 seconds of you not getting any damage what so ever. You also have an elite which gives you stability and swiftness for 20 seconds. To put it bluntly, you cant be hurt you cant be CC’d for at least 10 seconds. This is enough time to kill anyone, burst or not.

There are viable ways to play the class using what we are given. Numbers means nothing is other mechanics are not factored in.

Agreed numbers means nothing and A Smart Opponent means Everything.
What you implying here is yes Rangers got 12 Secs of 0 damage (Signet of Stone and Protect Me)
IF…
The opponent is a newbie who keep attacking for the whole 12 secs with 0 popping up on every attacks. Which gave the ranger that 12 secs to attack without suffering any direct damage.
BUT..
A Smart Opponent will get defensive and move out of range till the 12 secs are up.
Or till he see the damage. Then he came back for the kill.
Cause by then Signet of Stone & Protect Me is on a 1 min pee break.

edit: A good example is Theif. Poof! He’s miles away with Stealth + SB 5.
And when he came back, SoS & Protect me is still on pee break.

That “Evade” does not help you in many cases. Its half as effective as you think.
But still good thing I agree

Move out of range? From a longbow at 1500 range? If somehow he does manage to survive being chased down by a ranger with SotH and swiftness carrying a longbow, the fact of the matter is, if you are smart yourself, you would gtfo of the area as SoS is on cool down.

Since he somehow managed to run half way across the map, he will spend 2 minutes trying to find you if you weren’t stupid enough to stay in the same area like a sitting duck.

GS skills are ideal for escaping or moving across map very fast. The block also blocks projectiles for the entire duration. Stun them if they get too close etc useit to create space so you can use what a ranger is really good at into play.

The enemy isn’t the only one that has to play smart.

this comparison should only give us a better insight of the ranger GS compared to the warrior, period. But to expect the ranger to be delivering almost the same damage as a warrior when using GS just doesnt make sense.

Jabronee.9465:

Wars GS hits 100% max damage on the target.
Ranger GS hits 70% max damage on the same target and wait for the other 30% damage from pets 2 days later.

Yeap thats about it, nicely put.

When I whack somebody as hard as the attack animation looks, I’d like to do some sort of matching damage.

The great sword hits about as hard as a soggy noodle.

Included March 26 GS buffs. Overall Warrior still beats ranger by ~30% with the use of 100 blades. In a PvP scenario where hundred blades is way more unlikely to connect than Maul DPS advantage for warrior shrinks to propably less than 5% when untraited.

Maul Old: 1.16 ==> 0.83/s + bleed damage
Maul New: 2: 1.57 ==> 0.90/s + bleed damage * 1.5

Conclusion: Targets that utilize dodging or stunbreakes will take nearly the same damage from both weapons after the buff without considerin traits.

Yeah but not considering traits leaves out the 25 stacks of auto-attack might warriors get.

Shiren.9532:

Yeah but not considering traits leaves out the 25 stacks of auto-attack might warriors get.

Yes. This is why I give the information that this is a pure untraited weapon coefficient comparison.

Ranger GS is more consistent with more utility than the Warrior GS. Warrior GS is countered by stunbreakers and dodging more readily than Ranger GS is.

Also, the damage of the pet needs to be factored in to the equation to make any real comparison.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Ranger GS is more consistent with more utility than the Warrior GS. Warrior GS is countered by stunbreakers and dodging more readily than Ranger GS is.

Also, the damage of the pet needs to be factored in to the equation to make any real comparison.

What? It’s kitten easy to kite a greatsword ranger. Dodge the swoop and dodge the block/sword throw, and the ranger can’t stick to you. Have you actually tried staying on a competent thief or mesmer with your greatsword, or a good ele?

Maul may have received a buff, but the problem with GS is and will continue to be its autoattack.

And a coefficient comparison means very little when weapons are designed with trait builds in mind, and warrior traits are supremely better to ranger ones.

Moreover, the pet does not scale. It may make up 30-40% of the ranger’s damage, but when food and sharpening stones are factored in, alongside procs and traits, it doesn’t even get close. Pets don’t inherit crit damage or condition duration or condition damage. Just test the bleeds from your jaguar vs yours in rampager gear. Even withg the traits to increase pet condi damage it’s far inferior.

You need to pop very long cd’s and go 30 into the crappy power line to be doing the numbers and burst that my pvt guardian with berk accessories does with a simple tough/vit traitlines symbol build with greatsword. It’s baaaaaad.

The sad part is most people don’t play alts extensively so they don’t have a clue about the gaps, and since there are no DPS meters it’s very easy for developers to have the players remain blind and content.

Well Zenith what exacly does dodging Swoop do what a normal dodge at any time doesn’t do? It still moves the Ranger next to you and dodging the swoop damage doesn’t do a lot either. Also no Ranger that knows GS will actively used 4 sword throw because it cannot be done while walking and already that is worse than a 6s cripple on a target.

GS is not baaaaaad. You need to play it right though and unlike the guardian that will be reliant on his GS you can always switch to superior ranged options with your secondary weapon. To judge about GS you have to look at way more factors than just the GS of another class anyway. The purpose of this thread is to compare the numbers alone though because it is unbiased and helps to have a baseline where all the other factors start.

Dodging a swoop means the ranger just put his ranged weapon on cooldown to close distance with swoop and once you dodge that he’s got no way to hit with the GS and basically relies on the offchance that his pet might have better luck and land a CC.

It’s just a really inferior weapon to mainhand sword with double pounce animation tricks and the built in cripple you can permanently keep up on a target you do hit with pounce.

I really want to use a GS, god knows Sunrise will be my second legendary for my ranger, but I wish by the time I get my ranger his Sunrise the weapon is not there just for looks and it actually has something more than “well, you can block projectiles and evade every third autoattack!”. The defense does little when the offense itself is so poor.

And, yeah, you will land a 10k Maul with full traitline into power and using two signets, one of which (Hunt) is deficient for pvp and roaming/1v1, and the power traitline to begin with makes you a free kill since obviously you’re missing out on wilderness survival or BM or Nature Magic regen bonuses.

I’ve tested maul with a full knight setup. Not berserker that you can’t play in pvp. With a knight setup at about 1950 power and 46% crit chance, my Maul lands noncrit for about 1500-1600 damage initial and a puny 3 stack bleed. It may crit for 4k at best. That’s just paltry compared to what my other alts like the ele and mesmer and guardian are bursting for. And it’s all because of a pet, whose crit chance we can’t increase outside the Jaguar’s f2 skill, and who has issue hitting and staying on moving targets to begin with. Just have the pet try to hit a thief that sprays caltrops with dodges, the kitten pet will barely be on him between being crippled and unlike clones being dumbfounded by stealth and not immediately pursuing and attacking unstealthing targets.

And quite frankly at full BM on my ranger with jaguar and 30% increased crit damage, the pet at best crits for 4k seldomly unless you pop sic em+signet of the wild, both of which are hefty cooldowns, and are reliant on an inconsistent pet actually using his stealth f2 in time on the target.

The pet compensates for the damage portion we’re behind a warrior BASELINE, and that’s in the best case scenario where against a pve mob standing still where the pet can land its animation-tied attacks. But then the warrior gets might stacking, gets a free 9% crit chance increase, vulnerability stacking — it’s really dumb how short the pet falls of closing the gap of traits+ gear scaling via crit dmg (they cap at 30% benefit with trait), and their crit chance is always capped barring Jaguar stealth. In fact, if you use any pet but the jaguar the damage even drops down drastically unless it’s replaced by a raven. Moas are a significant drop in damage, as are dogs, followed by ranged pets (devourer is infinitely better than the spider for some reason on his autoattack). The only pet that survives in a aoe damage environment for some time, the bear, does horrendous damage.

I agree that most of our traits need reworks and so do utility skills. GS as a weapon itself is at a decent spot though. Maybe very slight buffs to autoattack or reowrking the throw of 4 a bit but beside that it makes no sense to make this weapon stronger when it is other stuff that makes rnager weak. They would just ignore the true problems then or have to nerf GS again once they fixed those. This is why I made this pure untraited comparison. Given the fact that we have a pet by design (that one day might function properly) 30% less DPS is a good balance for the weapon compared to a class that is purely made for dealing damage and has neither a pet to back it up nore good utility.

been using GS with power-tank setup

I use the following gear http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/ranger/?6.4|1.1n.h3|7.1n.h1f.g.1n.h1d|1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x|4s.0.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.2u.d1a|a1.u382.u4ac.0.0|2m.7|4h.4x.4l.52.55|e

i have yet to meet a warrior that can match that 1V1 or even 2v1 in WvW…

Dojo.1867:

I agree that most of our traits need reworks and so do utility skills. GS as a weapon itself is at a decent spot though. Maybe very slight buffs to autoattack or reowrking the throw of 4 a bit but beside that it makes no sense to make this weapon stronger when it is other stuff that makes rnager weak. They would just ignore the true problems then or have to nerf GS again once they fixed those. This is why I made this pure untraited comparison. Given the fact that we have a pet by design (that one day might function properly) 30% less DPS is a good balance for the weapon compared to a class that is purely made for dealing damage and has neither a pet to back it up nore good utility.

I disagree regarding utility. Banner/shout heal warriors offer more utility than rangers in general. But, I guess you are right in that fixing the traits would be a better solution.

Keep in mind mesmers and necros have been asking for changes to useless minor traits since beta and nothing has changed regarding those. Wastrel’s Punishment is still crap, and so are most of the minor traits in the non-Curses necro tree.