Guild Wars 2

I just recently a couple of months ago came back to the game after a very long break after hearing about Heart of Thorns and some friends who were already back into the game. I guess I missed out on the dark ages where there was no new content and all people did was learn how to break dungeons and the birth of the “zerk meta”. From what I understand for a while people deemed rangers and necromancers as useless classes for a while until the more recent multitude of changes that have shifted them to becoming “more viable”.

I don’t quite understand why people hate ranger though, I main as ranger, as well as my real life best friend, we run near identical LB/LS builds and do quite well for ourselves, we burned through all 50 levels of fractals in about 3 weeks doing anywhere from 2-7 fractals per night with, yes, 2 lb/ls rangers. I’m no noob to the MMO genre, I started out on original gw and moved on to other things back and forth; World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Aion, and now back to Guild Wars 2. I’m no stranger to complex raid mechanics and all those types of things. So I did not find anything within those 50 levels particularly mind mindbogglingly difficult. I understould full well what the intention was to counter the challenges the devs put before us. However every so often I find groups that outright refuse to accept rangers.

I’ll tell you a story from my most recent trip into a daily 50. They were already in stage 2(Ascalon) and I came in and everything was find starting out. This is a pug so I didn’t really expect these guys to be the greatest so when I see someone die to a meteor shower from a boss thats clearing telegraphing he’s aiming at him I’m not too surprised or kitten over it. So after 2 wipes we finally get him and move over to grawl. Everything goes well until we get to that last boss fight with the destroygrawlharpyshamanthing. Now mind you my friend and I have gone through this fight before without even a single down running our lb/ls builds and even managed to pull it off after our 3 pugs stood in the fire/meteorshower/whatevernastiness suiciding themselves. This group does just that and more, every attempt I’m left as the last individual and everyone is acting as if its my fault they are killing themselves. This fight, although a pain, is not one that is demanding on composition, rather personal initiative to identify you are in a bad spot and need to maneuver to where you are not going to die. I literally watched an engineer run him self, at full health, out into the lava and stand there and die to meteor showers, boss pokes, and the lava itself. He then proclaims that we need to replace the ranger to succeed. Another, a mesmer, would simply run up to the boss and get herself cleaved immediately at the start of the fight and die before we even got it to 95%. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture.

I feel like people have gotten themselves so deep into this zerker stack mentality that they can’t escape it. I’m sure for many players this is their first MMO experience and they have spent there entire time being brainwashed by this mentality to the point where they are litteraly incapable of thinking outside the box and realizing that certain encounters actually require real mechanics. That maybe the reason things arn’t going well isn’t because of some scrub broken class getting you killed, but because you just don’t know how to, or refuse to play the game the right way.

Maybe I’m the one who’s ignorant, there’s obviously no way I could have gotten all the way to scale 50 with not 1 but 2 rangers… oh wait… I did.

I welcome constructive input from intelligent individuals.

The imbued shaman is difficult if your group doesn’t have enough reflects/isn’t able to kill the lava elementals quickly enough. Ranger’s are pretty light on reflects (lolwhirling defense) and don’t have enough AoE to quickly deal with the elementals.

Guardians and eles make this fight easymode. If you had brought a guardian instead of your ranger, you probably could have carried your whole group through that imbued shaman fight.

To be fair though, My ranger is my only character with enough AR to run scale 50 fractals, and I suck at playing my guardian in high level fractals. But there are two fights I absolutely dread when I’m pugging fractals with my ranger. One is the imbued shaman, and I’m sure you could easily guess the second one. Because I know that if my group is bad, my ranger won’t be able to carry them through either of those fights.

My personal most hated is the norn fractal because of that first boss… No amount of stability will save you… followed by grawl. I’m guessing you are talking about Mai Trin as most people hate her. I think shes easy, time consuming, but easy, she telegraphs her moves, and they generally follow a pretty consistent timing in relation to her friends’. Just takes a group who are on the same page.

When you say, “LB/LS” what is “LS”? Not trying to troll or be rude, I honestly don’t know and am asking.

gs my bad, guess i was think longsword from another game

Well, I lately see that people are kind of blinded by meta.
I mean yes, it does help or what not…
But I had various Multi-Necro and Multi-Ranger runs that were absolutely fine in everything.

It is and always be the people. Of course some mechanics cannot be achieved by all classes… But I mean come on. I was able to get us in Harpy Fractal up to the highest point myself (Whirling Defense/GS block with QuickDraw), Stability from SotW and SotP…

And they kept ranging it till it was safe. People just have to use their head – and if they do – they might finish their Fractal even sooner than Meta-Head arrogant pugs that will try to melee kill harpies without a Mesmer blaming the others they didn’t bring one.

Indeed sounds like they were bad, but you dying last doesn’t mean you were doing your absolute best for the team. It just means you were doing well at avoiding damage and knew which attacks to dodge (while doing some dps) and that’s not hard to believe, all considered.
Rangers are absolutely welcome in every non-idiotic zergburger “meta” group (even though less desirable in fractals; even though they’re not meta class themselves). However, you aggressively attacking the “stacking mentality” (I’ll let you know that stacking is an outdated strategy and the dungeoneers moved on about a year ago) and claiming you play the “right way”.. I hope you mean proper dodging and mechanical knowledge, I got that right? doesn’t strike me as very positive and constructive. About getting to fracs 50; while it’s currently the hardest content available in gw2, so indeed worthy of at least a minimal amount of respect (most people at 50 find their ways to the dodge button and know how fractals work), I suppose that the people in your party were fracs 50 too. I don’t deem the content to be really challenging because it can be completely by virtually any random set up and skill level – but I understand some people think this is a good thing.
And yes, for this very reason (fracs being not that hard, as long as you know what to do), I pity those fools that died so easily and then blamed someone else. Meh. But…

A few observations from a mostly ranger/guard player:
- phiw pugs are more likely to demonize and hate on rangers than “serious” dungeoneers or up-to-date meta runners, since even my dog knows ranger can have competitive dps, if built right;
- rangers possess less utility than classes such as mesmer and guardian, and such utility skills have a huge tradeoff (whirling defense) – by going lb, you consciously or unknowingly kitten your usefulness in that particular fight, despite knowing your team to be very weak (or for that very reason?). I fully sympathise, though: I hate meleeing in pugs;
- pugs hating on rangers and necros will take a very long time to go, because pugs are very slow and pick up things with at least 1year delay over the knowledgeable players – so you gotta have more patience if you insist on playing ranger.

Now, putting aside the fact that they were scrubs and you got no responsibility on them not dodging or positioning badly, I’ll point out that staying a lot in lb or, worse, sb, isn’t detrimental to your team per sé, but it’s a rather weak option. Considered the tone of the post, I suppose you’ll eat me alive and call me out on being a filthy zerk stacker, banal, stupid, a sheep that can only follow the meta and spam 1 or whatever; /shrug, I’ll say it anyway: if you haven’t already, you ought to try out other builds and weapons, especially for the shaman fight.
I’m.. not sure what “ls” is; is it shortbow? Anyway, I see it like this: I’m a ranger, I have less utility than a guardian, my team needs me, I need to do anything I can to get them through this. If you haven’t given it a try already, I fail to imagine how you couldn’t fall in love with dropping a healing spring, blast on it, then swap to axe and go whirling defense (with signet of the wild if you’re quick at activating it) to successfully protect your team from the adds.
Another build you should try out, excluded the current meta build (which hey, has a lb in the rotation), is the sini condi one. Its good cleave will contribute a lot to adds melting, and can be successfully use at alternating states of range/a few seconds of melee to drop your aoes.

If you’ve tried out all of the above and adamantly refuse to question yourself, your build and don’t want to change a thing – and if you want to engage in a flame war about lb/sb viability and dps vs other tested builds, or if you want to again shove it in my face that you got to 50 using your build, I got nothing else to say, I suppose. I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you what you did wrong mechanically, if at all, and I most certainly can’t tell you what they did wrong (and no, I won’t be agreeable and put the whole blame on them only, it’s not fair); I can only point out the flaws I see in the situation.
I can tell you this, though, and believe me when I say it comes from my little, furry heart (and it was hard to be polite, when the tone was so confrontational): we rangers need… to be better than other classes. I know, it’s not fair. I mostly played with my friends and yet I still got blamed for basically anything that went wrong when my pet was around, even if it was dead (I’ll admit I’m a bit of a whiny blamer myself, I’m not innocent). Why? cus I was on ranger.
You need patience, and you need to step it up to prove that you can do more than them, and better. You can convince some people you’re good, but mind you: most will stay stubborn and hate on you no matter what you do. But.. it’s good when you solo p2-3 lupi in front of your 4 dead teammates and they go like “woah, didn’t know a ranger could do that”. Ahem, excuse my bragging. Soloing lupi on ranger is actually rather mellow (but that time it was with lb/sw, it was rather painful).

No, seriously, dude, let go of this hate. Don’t even think for a second that playing berserker and occasionally stacking like in the old fgs meta suddenly turns pugs into morons. They were morons to begin with. They were bad, they couldn’t handle the glassiest set in the game in fracs, they died a lot, they were close-minded and raged. Just… don’t be close-minded yourself. Yeah? Bitte.

Right, it was gs, not shortbow. Ok. Still, give axe/axe torch condi a try (or axe/torch period for better damage).

I agree with all that, and I am playing around with my builds, learning all the combos and whats effective for whatever situation. I just really want to see a change in the community. I left WoW to return here because it was turning so toxic back there. While there is a greater prevalence of nontoxic players in this game, the toxic areas are far worse and really I just want to play the game that Anet said this would be rather than what it actually is. As it is currently, I feel pity for new players who are impressionable and making their first steps into the MMO world and this is their first experience in this type of community and Melandru forbid they pick up the LB and a pet and then get told by some zerkermeta, “no your not viable”, reroll to a class you didn’t want to play.

its fine , im rolling a LB/S+warhorn with 70% sinister right now which stacks up to 20 consistant bleeds on rotation with Hunters call and testing traits with Compainions might with krait runes , Mailice sigils+Sigil of earth with the new Light on your feet trait increasing the bleeds from 90% durations to 100% after dodge.

not Final on the trait lines i want to use but atm its Skirmishing ,wilderness or Nature + marksmanship though again Anet have funneled our condi clears into one tree while i realy want to use Warhorn+nature magic , but so far even without any condi clear HS double warhorn blast on Hs is enough for PvE, and the fury from the timed warhorn blasts and clarion bond swaps renews Opening strikes on nearly every petswap and every weapon swap through skirmishing.

so the build pretty much has 35% damage increase after a dodge+weapon swap while maintaining 20bleeds+pet might.

though the burning from sun spirit is at 4.5seconds i think the dodge from Light on your feet increases this to 5seconds but i can’t tell as Light on your feet does not change the tool tips to show its working, so im stuck for my fine tuning atm.

while using Nature magic , i use Natures Vengence for Sun spirit Vigour that powers Steady focus increasing the 35% damage to 45% damage while at full endurance so im very tempted to slot a sigil of energy to recover endurance quicker and change the malice to a Agony sigil for 20% bleeds then in the empty slot of Sword/Warhorn put the Sigil of energy.

but i do feel steady focus and LoyF is a bit counter active though it sure is good if you only have to dodge once near the sun spirit you won’t be short of % damage they kinda alternate keeping it at a steady 35% damage and increasing to 45% for 2seconds between trait procs.

if only Light on your feet Lasted a bit longer 4seconds feels a bit short it realy should be one of those traits you can maintain through Active dodging , the trait should last one dodge to the next and focing a second dodge would interrupt its upkeep.

I’ve gone through alot of fractals were I either just used sword/dagger or used it like 99% of the time. Although in my case I’ve very stubbon and I love the move set those weapons give me.

Few things here.

If you were running lb/GS then you were not running the optimal build. You also made no mention of what your skills/traits were so its possible that they also were not the optimal choices.

The dungeon meta was full zerk until the 23/6 patch and if you were not using zerk then your pug would have been justified in using that as an excuse for failure.

However since then the ranger meta has actually moved to sinister axe/torch. So if anything your group should have been annoyed that you were not using sinister rather than zerk.

This shows that most people are not up to date on what the current meta builds are, and people will just blame their failure on whatever they can.

Long story short, your build probably wasn’t the best but your pug had no idea either.

Meta for Ranger didn’t move to Sinister. Both are viable, with Sinister being less flexible…

Yeah, it didn’t “move” to sinisters. They are about equal in terms of dps, but the sinister build’s cons and pros depends on the content.

A person that is up to date wouldn’t blame anyone for running zerker ranger. I think the chances are bigger that a person not up to date would question a condi ranger, but that’s just a guess.

It was not your fault, don’t matter what you did, 4 people should be able to kill fire elemental easily, 1 player isn’t a excuse for failure,

Jasper Defthand.3018:

I agree with all that, and I am playing around with my builds, learning all the combos and whats effective for whatever situation. I just really want to see a change in the community. I left WoW to return here because it was turning so toxic back there. While there is a greater prevalence of nontoxic players in this game, the toxic areas are far worse and really I just want to play the game that Anet said this would be rather than what it actually is. As it is currently, I feel pity for new players who are impressionable and making their first steps into the MMO world and this is their first experience in this type of community and Melandru forbid they pick up the LB and a pet and then get told by some zerkermeta, “no your not viable”, reroll to a class you didn’t want to play.

Yeah, some people just can’t see (or don’t care) that negatively affecting new players with the brainwash bullkitten metacarp only hurts themselves in the long run. (less newbies staying hurts the game we all enjoy, people leaving for toxicity reasons even more so because word travels fast and a reputation develops)

There are probably already a few examples in this thread (haven’t read it all) showing people jumping through hoops to keep this zerker fallacy afloat, (eg. stacking/max dps/whatever really does work, your team were just blah or you should have done blah or team comp was missing this one of many vital elements that allows it to work like reflects or group stability or whatever). It’s kind of like a shared delusion that a lot of people just don’t want to wake up from, and it means that a lot of people who listen to it don’t end up learning about things like positioning or mobility in combat or reading televised attacks or anything.

One of the main reasons I dislike it (other than how it drives people away) is that it makes the combat system seem so much more shallow than it really is. It’s like coming across a series of increasingly intricate knots that require untying and instead of trying to learn how to untie them you just cut the rope every time.

Jasper Defthand.3018:

Snip.

This makes me worry about how well-received raids will be. Right now, we’ve had 3 years to play with dungeons, and in that time a small number of expert players have experimented with them and found out what team comps/skills/strategies make each run fastest and/or most rewarding. They share their knowledge with the masses, and larger groups of players less inclined to experiment latch on to their techniques and take them as gospel. Meta sheep, if you will. These people are perfectly pleasant to run dungeons with – as long as everything goes exactly as their meta says it should. The minute someone suggests doing something a different way or the group wipes, their attitude goes south.

Now, onto raids. This is not only new content, so will not have a meta for months after release, but is also going to be much, much harder than current dungeon content due to improvements in AI, changes in combat terrain, and of course the fact we’ll be running them with twice the players as normal dungeons. Imagine a meta sheep coming into this environment – the structured order they’re so used to up until this point is replaced by complete chaos, and the chances are that the zerker meta they swore by will be all but gone for a few weeks as people switch to more defensive/support stat combos and try new things. In the face of that chaos and lack of understanding, I worry that meta sheep will struggle to adapt, and simply do as they do in current dungeon runs when things don’t go well – leave groups, insult team members, or simply start all out flaming. If that happens, the community we all love so dearly could begin to take a serious downward spiral.

Maximum Potato.5923:

…
…
…If that happens, the community we all love so dearly could begin to take a serious downward spiral.

You mean even more than after their last Mordrem Leeching event?
Everyone I know (including me) admitted that the event made them more selfish and douchy then ever.

And I don’t even want to talk about the newcomers who didn’t even hold the friendly nature from before.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Maximum Potato.5923:

…
…
…If that happens, the community we all love so dearly could begin to take a serious downward spiral.

You mean even more than after their last Mordrem Leeching event?
Everyone I know (including me) admitted that the event made them more selfish and douchy then ever.

And I don’t even want to talk about the newcomers who didn’t even hold the friendly nature from before.

I skipped the event after realizing I couldn’t get enough blooms to get all 4 of the (former) gem store skins. Does that make me selfish?

Quarktastic.1027:

I skipped the event after realizing I couldn’t get enough blooms to get all 4 of the (former) gem store skins. Does that make me selfish?

A realist at best.