Guild Wars 2

“Hey we see you’re spamming the only spammable ability in your weapon line, So we’re going to nerf the damage of that ability in hopes that you spam something else”

Sorry Jon, but that really isn’t what we wanted to hear. Not being “fun” to play isn’t exactly a valid excuse for this nerf, and I didn’t get the memo on the animation problem :/ But it is what it is.
I’m just sorry I’ll have to forfeit all the hours I’ve lovingly played my ranger, and the months I’ve spent dreaming, while waiting on GW2.
Until it’s fixed, I think I’ll reroll as well. I just can’t get the hang of this SB nerf and it’s more disappointing each time I take her out to play, not too mention I’ve steered clear of WvW for fear of being laughed at :P
This really needs to be reconsidered.

JonPeters.5630:

Took a couple of days to get debugging in on this. It is in fact a 40ms difference which equates to about 7% less damage when spamming 1. We made this change because it was creating some animation bugs to leave it where it was. It was also encouraging just spamming 1 which isn’t the most fun gameplay. If our data shows shortly that shortbow is now not effective we can certainly address that, but would do so by improving other skills on that weapon rather than by reintroducing the spam on 1 and the bugs that it was creating.

Um Jon, the other short bow skills do less damage than #1 and are for situational purposes.

Im not going to do a quick shot unless I need to evade
Im not going to do a concussive shot unless I need to interupt someone
Im not going to cripple someone unless they are chasing me or a priority team member.
I will spam 2 when I need to.

If your data shows that we do 7 percent less damage now then please make up for the damage loss by giving the shortbow 7 percent more damage.

As far as damage go, we dont have any burst damage, the damage from #1 was the main source of sustainable damage.

Xsorus.2507:

“Hey we see you’re spamming the only spammable ability in your weapon line, So we’re going to nerf the damage of that ability in hopes that you spam something else”

….only you can’t spam something else….unless you swap to a weapon set that does even less DPS. Actually, I’m killing things faster with sword/dagger than with SB now.

No one even runs Ranger in tPVP because so many other classes fill the role much better…yet, they need to make the Ranger worse off by wrecking SB. :/

Time to dust off the Warrior.

I’m confused about something. According to the patch notes, this nerf was done to correct an animation problem, and nothing was mentioned about the shortbow doing too much damage. So, if the goal was to correct animations by slowing them down, why wasn’t the damaged increased to compensate?

edit: I’m just worried because it sounds like the devs can’t be bothered in this instance. And anyone that played rangers in gw1 knows anet had a history of can’t be bothered with rangers. I’d hate to see rangers fall by the wayside again in this game like they did in the original.

vitigis.4160:

Xsorus.2507:

“Hey we see you’re spamming the only spammable ability in your weapon line, So we’re going to nerf the damage of that ability in hopes that you spam something else”

….only you can’t spam something else….unless you swap to a weapon set that does even less DPS. Actually, I’m killing things faster with sword/dagger than with SB now.

No one even runs Ranger in tPVP because so many other classes fill the role much better…yet, they need to make the Ranger worse off by wrecking SB. :/

Time to dust off the Warrior.

Just got invited to 2 ‘top’ tier (their claim not mine) premades because of my b-d-ss shortbow ranger’ing and my current core group doesn’t want me on anything else… so I have no idea what you are talking about.

aeroh.8930:

I’m confused about something. According to the patch notes, this nerf was done to correct an animation problem, and nothing was mentioned about the shortbow doing too much damage. So, if the goal was to correct animations by slowing them down, why wasn’t the damaged increased to compensate?

It’s their game to balance not yours, what you have said has been stated at least a dozen times in the thread so far and a responce by Jon was made. Its only a 7% loss in dmg and they are looking into if QZ is too badly hurt. The dmg is nothing you will really mourn short of major min/maxing (something the vast majority of people will never have to worry about), learning to dodge roll well, time attacks and know about your enemies class is still a bajillion times more important than that lil lost dmg.

Relax and enjoy the game
(well at least after they fix this fragging ‘you can never load into any game after dying’ bug… I’m honestly surprised that it has been around for so long >< )

garethh.3518:

aeroh.8930:

I’m confused about something. According to the patch notes, this nerf was done to correct an animation problem, and nothing was mentioned about the shortbow doing too much damage. So, if the goal was to correct animations by slowing them down, why wasn’t the damaged increased to compensate?

It’s their game to balance not yours, its only a 7% loss in dmg so nothing you will really mourn short of major min/maxing (something the vast majority of people will never have to worry about), learning to dodge roll well, time attacks and know enemy specs are still a bajillion times more important than that lil lost dmg.

Relax and enjoy the game

I’m not kittening about the dps nerf, just Jon’s attitude of ‘hey guys we did a roundabout nerf on your favorite weapon, and sorry about the unintended dps loss, we’ll give it another look later. maybe. if there’s time.’

Xsorus.2507:

Took a couple of days to get debugging in on this. It is in fact a 40ms difference which equates to about 7% less damage when spamming 1. We made this change because it was creating some animation bugs to leave it where it was. It was also encouraging just spamming 1 which isn’t the most fun gameplay. If our data shows shortly that shortbow is now not effective we can certainly address that, but would do so by improving other skills on that weapon rather than by reintroducing the spam on 1 and the bugs that it was creating.
————————————

This makes zero sense, Its being spammed because its the only bloody spammable ability…..

Honestly, If you don’t know anything about the class, Why are you bloody coming to this forum and wasting everyone’s time.

Cause its clear you’ve not actually played the Ranger.

I fully agree with you.
He didnt even took time to test hoe class work. Really after what i read from him im clearly done with this same as im done with reporting bots. Its waste of time and doesnt change anything. There is huge lack of knowledge and support and its just pathetic.

Wait, so you have destroyed the only viable PvP build for the ranger and you’re not going to change it back?! Because of an error nobody except you ever has seen or heard of!? Wow.. This is very disappointing and this build was actually the only reason I was leveling up a ranger. I have wasted 65 levels on this char. Thank god my main is a warrior. Oh wait, I’m not playing him anymore since there’s nothing more to do at 80… Hmm this might be the first evening since launch I don’t play GW2.

Apparently getting 2-3k DPS at the high end was unacceptable, but yet multiple other classes can drop you from 23k to downed in 2 seconds and that’s fine.

I’ve gotten so sick of being on a wall and watching the utterly predictable pattern of:
dink
dink
dink
dink
dink
evade
evade
out of range
out of range
target heals back up

even when you manage to down someone being careless, a teammate can heal through it and you can’t scare them off with your damage.

Meanwhile grenades and a fury of AOEs keep me from even being up in firing position half the time.

I was angling for condition damage and support, looks like warrior is now flat out all around better at this. Sword/warhorn and rifle with banners or shouts as needed, more reliable damage, more reliable healing/boons, more mobility, more survivability.

Just wish I hadn’t sunk all that time into exotics for this dead-end to occur.

First of all i want to thank you Jon for the answers but I am a bit confused for the whole situation:

- Increased casting time of a spell to fix a graphic bug:
I think that could be a more viable way to fix a (never noticed, atleast for me) graphical bug without the risk to compromise the class balance.

- 40ms speed increase:
40ms are 0.04s, i do not think that people can notice the difference without any kind of supernatural power. So if people actually noticed it there is something wrong with this, especially when using Quickening Zephyr.

- 7% damage loss:
Increasing the casting time of the spell it was obvious that it may have caused a damage loss. I do not think that the devs behind the patch did not think about this, i want to refuse this idea with all my efforts!

- skill 1 “spamming” a problem:
This is the autoattack skill, how can you pretend that we do not use it that much? Except for the poison spray (skill 2) other skill are not designed for damage but for survivability. What should we do when skill 2 is on cooldown?

- weaken a skill does not encourage people to use more the others:
As said before, except for Poison Spray other skills are not designed to do damage, how could you think that weaken Crossfire without changing the other skills encourage us to use them more? This choice just discourage people to use that weapon.

With the second post it seems that you just threw the mask of the patch, its real purpose was make the Crossfire skill less effective.
I think there are major issues that deserve your attention like longbow, spirits and pets. I am still enjoying my ranger even after that patch using the shortbow but i think you should be more sincere with the community.
I know that there are many people that do not deserve your kindness because they are just able to pretend like you were their personal “fix-my-game” slave, but do not lose trust in the community for this.
I will hope you can fix this problem and make all rangers happy again.

Thank you

Bring back the old ranger…..we protest..

I only play ranger as main in hope that it gets something changed in the future because at this stage class seems considerably less interesting to play than other. But i have always been ranger so i cant switch.

Just becoz players love the game doesn’t mean they are blind or intellectually challenged.

How can someone “spam” a primary, auto attack? It’s like saying “Stop using this weapon. Its primary attack isn’t fun”.
How is fixing a graphical glitch affects damage legitimate?
How is 0.04s or even 0.08s (with QZ) noticeable with human eyes?

It’s pretty straightforward: STOP LYING TO PLAYERS. Just becoz we love the game doesn’t mean we are blind or intellectually challenged. Don’t insult us and your integrity as well. You are speaking on behalf of your company you know?

If you are gonna nerf something and ignore what players think anyway, at least lay it out honestly, like a man.

the big problem with this treatment of the class is that our faces were kicked in while we were down. spirits are broken. GS is not used by almost anyone. axe and torch are very situational. then you nerf SB dps by 7% (25% with quickness) without compensating us in any way.

how does that make sense? and now we have to wait months before the weapon is re-evaluated. it’s freaking Blizzard all over again. this along with a complete and utter lack of iteration and bug fixes for most profs (including the ranger) is making me lose trust in JP and the spvp team.

all the while backstabs still hit for 17k on my 1900 toughness ranger.

JonPeters.5630:

Took a couple of days to get debugging in on this. It is in fact a 40ms difference which equates to about 7% less damage when spamming 1. We made this change because it was creating some animation bugs to leave it where it was. It was also encouraging just spamming 1 which isn’t the most fun gameplay. If our data shows shortly that shortbow is now not effective we can certainly address that, but would do so by improving other skills on that weapon rather than by reintroducing the spam on 1 and the bugs that it was creating.

Tough that does take out the fun of class. I loved circlestrafing around enemy groups and apply bleed with my piercing arrows, while throwing traps at them and putting conditions on whole groups like that. Now that nerf did not only lower the normal dps but also the condition damage and the critical chance (per minute i guess)…but what is worst and what really bugs me, is that it takes out the action…it is …boring compared to before…i liked the shortbow as my main weapon, because it’s speed was fun to play..i switch back and fourth between longbow(sometimes axe wahrhorn) and shortbow, but i don’t really like staying on the other weapons for a long time, because the fast attack speed is more fun to play…(kinda the same reason, why i enjoy playing scout the most in Team Fortress 2 for example)
it’s as much fun as having a slow car in front of you, that drives slower than the permitted speed.

and i really never ever saw that animation bug…

i really want to have my ranger be my main char…since i loved ranger the most in gw1 (there you had more bows to choose from too..each with it’s own advantage and disadvantage…would love to see that in gw2)..but i don’t know if i can keep playing this class as main, as much as i want too…this shortbow nerf really broke the fun of the ranger for me…not as if the shortbow was really overpowered to begin with

Main problem is that we didnt make fuss since start. sword/dagger , sword/torch, axe/torch, axe/horn, sword/horn… All this build were and are not viable MAIN weapon builds. 95% of ppl who wanted to play ranger were forced into SB builds.
If you check war for example almost any build is viable for pvp and pve – rifle, axe/axe, greatsword, axe/shield…. and so on.
What war “community” do is COMPLAIN ALL TIME with silly stuff like "we need higher dps, we need 10k crits every 2 sec , and so on. And u know what they get it.
Right now, when someone figure out at least 1 build that work so so good, we will go silent and prolly call each other noobs in case some person chose different setup. We already do this to ourself, just look what we say to ppl who try go beast mastery, or LB builds or anything different then SB ….
Currently, i fully geared up my ranger and right now i use it to farm my bank and broker in LA. Sword/Horn is great set for LA.

im very disappointed in the way this was handled. you dont just nerf balanced specs without compensating the players with new mechanics/numbers, and then re-evaluate weeks/months down the road. brings me back to my WoW days when theyd decimate specs and classes with unreasonable nerfing/buffing, only to fix it 1 year later.

while this nerf does not break the prof completely, it adds to the list of unaddressed problems:

- sprits broken
- GS not being used by anyone
- LB subpar
- bugged abilities/traits
- axe/torch being highly situational
- inefficient pets

Regarding this topic – why did AN make this change with the patch notes saying it was because of the animation timing?

Since when is it good practice to change the function to match the animation?

If they just wanted to nerf the attack because it was ‘too fast’ then say so!?
Just comes across confusing

What’s more bizarre is if it really is 0.04s as they repeatedly claimed, it wouldn’t be noticeable.
Well I admit it isn’t too obvious (at least visually) until QZ is active. Or is QZ actually the broken skill after this update?

Im sorry but i feel this even w/o QZ. Since i play war and ranger, after killing 10-20 mobs on one class and other u feel how big diff is in effort spent and time spent.

Thanks for the reply Jon….
And thanks for disabling the single useful weapon on my main character…
You have destroyed my build which I have enjoyed for over 350hours with out getting sick of it, just because your opinion of “Fun”.

Until 1 hand sword is fixed, so I’m not a sitting duck in front of the target…unable to move. Short bow was my only other comparable weapon to other Proffessions.

I want my Shortbow back how it was.
I want my monthly $100 of gem purchases back.
I want 500hours of my life back.

I regret buying 10 copies of GW2 and giving them to my friends saying “Its a great game”

THANK YOU JON PETERS

I’m mainly a longbow user, so the shortbow nerf doesn’t hurt my performance.

However, I do wonder about the so called animation glitch. The few times I used shortbow, I never ever saw it glitch in its animation.

The last 2 nights, I have been trying it out, and when I pop Quickening Zephyr, it definitely glitches now. The animation is not smooth but is instead very stuttery.

I don’t care about the nerf, but please fix your animation glitch fix.

As primarily a dual-sword, condition-build warrior (also a 1-heavy build, with the rest of the skills being fairly situational) I am wary of what happened to you guys. I’ll be expecting a “fixed animation bug for warrior sword” with a stealth nerf any day now, and be told that they want me to “use 1 less, and other skills more”.

Really? 400+ posts of nothing but Rangers crying? Makes me ashamed to be a Ranger now.

I stopped playing my ranger 4 days ago (350 hours gameplay) and i level up random 3 chars.
The thing is that after 1 and a half month of doing no improvements or just changes on my main ranger i reduced the time that i am playing gw2 at 1/4.
1 line of changes every 2 weeks (included sound bugs ) are equal to i do not care and when you find the human / money recources to announce some improvements to the actual issues, gameplay, poor design i predict that i wont play enough or simply wont want to invest more hours ( couse already invested enough to a char that is broken).

I am not here to be your beta tester. I was your beta tester. Now i just want u to work on the things that you havent.

To conclude if your plan is to reduce the professions to 7 or 6 and eventually reduce the issues that u had with the servers, its almost working. Also with this rythm i assure u that you wont have server issues at your expansions also…

PS: Lying or finding excuses is a bad thing. Reminds me a bit a game called Swtor.

Guys guys guys. Jeesh calm down, Let me explain to you what’s happening.

They are slowly and slowly killing the ranger class so that nobody with half a brain will play it anymore. Then, when the player base is about 3-5%, they will ban them all. Obviously they will all be bots since they don’t care about damage reduction and only care about the spamming of 1, reviving allies, and the half kitten pets.

Then they’ll buff the rangers back up and the bot problem is solved.

@arji.7192
Hahaha love ur last comment, i think the same. Well, im happy, coz soon ill have more “choices” ;-)
Btw this is how i feel every day looking at this topic :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=la6tOXPghCA#t=55s

Chears

You know it’s not the nerf that bugs me. I don’t pvp but I do notice the damage reduction when I am in dungeons.

The thing that really bugs the kitten out of me is how they covered it up by not being truthful.

The patch notes say “Crossfire: Increased casting time by 40 milliseconds. This was done to fix some glitches in the animation that caused problems with this skill.”

There is not a animation bug with Crossfire. Don’t lie just because you want to nerf something.

Its a total disrespect to your players. Next time in the patch notes under the Ranger section just write “whatever we felt like, and because we wan’t to” , because that’s what you pretty much did here.

Wow, just wow. I come back a day or so later and find out that JonPeters has decided o keep the unintentional Nerf in the game because he decided it wasn’t fun to “spam” 1 skill.

Well I for one did find it fun, I’m not a hardore player and there is enough going on with strafing, leapng back, dodging etc.

I am so disgusted with the handling of this I have little motivation to level up another char or continue playing my Ranger.

But I guess this suits them just fine because they already have my $80.

Increase the bow range to compensate?

Airatt.4083:

Increase the bow range to compensate?

Are you serious? What are you referring to? The SB is meant to be a constant dmg weapon since the useless LB only does any decent dmg at long range.

I can’t think of any way they can truly compensate. #1 skill is typically an autoattack. What is JonPeters thinking when he says it is boring to spam it?

Let the players decide.

Ill again point out there are bigger issues here then just SB. SB is just example of ONLY viable weapon for ranger. Even if they fix it , it will still give us ONE weapon choice (most would be happy with even that ) but fact is there are ppl who actually wonna play with other weapons.
Ill repeat that most of us are FORCED into SB builds even do we hoped to try some other solutions. Ranger problem must be worked on overall since this is not just SB weapon problem.

kiranslee.4829:

Ill again point out there are bigger issues here then just SB. SB is just example of ONLY viable weapon for ranger. Even if they fix it , it will still give us ONE weapon choice (most would be happy with even that ) but fact is there are ppl who actually wonna play with other weapons.
Ill repeat that most of us are FORCED into SB builds even do we hoped to try some other solutions. Ranger problem must be worked on overall since this is not just SB weapon problem.

Fine then fix the “unintentional” massive nerf for the SB. Some players do like to use it.

Then boost the power of the other weapons so maybe some players will start building for them.

The Ranger is already one of the weakest classes out there. To nerf the SB to force players into other builds is not right since it wasn’t even OP to begin with. (besides the fact they didn’t intend it originally, an animation fix only supposedly).

JonPeters.5630:

Took a couple of days to get debugging in on this. It is in fact a 40ms difference which equates to about 7% less damage when spamming 1. We made this change because it was creating some animation bugs to leave it where it was. It was also encouraging just spamming 1 which isn’t the most fun gameplay. If our data shows shortly that shortbow is now not effective we can certainly address that, but would do so by improving other skills on that weapon rather than by reintroducing the spam on 1 and the bugs that it was creating.

You’re suprised that when you leave us with one option to do decent damage we take it? Spammig SB one. The obvious solution here would be to rebalance the other weapons, not nerfing the one option we had. We didn’t spam SB one because we wanted to, we did it because you herded us there.

I agree on SB dont get me wrong , i just wonna see this worked on as ranger complete rework since its needed. Im SB fan, but i wish i can work on close combat with sword/dagger. Some ppl wish to have bestmastery builds (like in a way wow had). Others just wish trap and greatsword slap.
Fact is SB was only weapon usable. That was NOT right in first place but we said nothing , we did what they made us do , get SB.
Dont expect others to report and fight for ur class, devs dont play this game (at least not as rangers clearly ). Its up to us to pint out ALL flaws and its up to us to think even on builds that we dont play. We dont wonna have “best build” since that does not make us unique and i bet thats what everyone wish to be, unique.

The thing is I was mostly happy with the way it was pre-nerf. At least for PvE.

I also have an issue with the fact that JonPeters refers to using the default autoattack skill as “Spamming”.

So is using any autoattack skill on every class considered spamming?

the magic has definitely been lost. a comparably slow weapon and a non functioning meat shield thats meant to subsidise damage.

gone

I’ve been looking at the patch notes every week, hoping for some tweaks to give rangers more builds that are on par with what other classes have available.

The shortbow was the best thing we had. It wasn’t spectacular, but I was happy with it. And then they go and nerf it, reducing the speed of its primary attack that made up the vast majority of its damage output.

This is VERY disheartening. The single decent primary weapon we had is now an estimated 7% weaker, and the sad part is, it’s still superior to the other junk we have!

I like to play on one character, my ranger being the one I chose, and have put over 200 hours in him so far. This “bug fix” has killed my desire to play and I don’t even feel like logging on again until we get some improvements.

The changes are very noticeable, i just don’t feel SB the same. Like someone said is Blizzard all over again, same situation, no one wanted Hunters in arenas or PvP groups they were the worse, years passed until Blizzard kinda fixed some stuff and by the time i already stopped playing WoW do i dont know. Yesterday was the first time i was denied entering a group for dungeons because i was a Ranger, no joke lol. Now every weapon in the ranger Arsenal is garbage, even our pets. I wish i can exchange my ranger for a warrior with the same gear and everything i have accomplish

I mostly use axe/torch so I havn’t noticed an SB nerf. I only use the SB when I’m fighting a single target, or a target surrounded by yellow mobs that my axe would hit accidentally.

I’m glad I havn’t played other classes otherwise I might be bitter about a nerf to my favorite class, the Ranger.

Side note, have a 45 Guardian that, to me, isn’t as much fun.

JonPeters apparently dont play a Ranger much lol Seriously spam skill 1? The others skills are for survival or to inflict a status like daze, stun not to do damage. Then my friend what do you suggest me using? Other than skill 2 there probably arent much use for the other skills in a dungeon (tho i do use them) for example i use skill 3 to evade but is not to do damage so therefore if i am not taking damage or have aggro i wont use it.

If we’re going to slow the auto-attack speed, I think it’s high time we remove the flanking requirement for the bleeds. Warrior rifle, engineer pistol, thief pistol – all have bleeds on the AUTO-ATTACK that require no flanking, and all but the Engi’s have longer durations than the Shortbow!

remove that requirement from the shortbow and fix the QZ speed issue and I personally would be ok with where the SB is at now.

JonPeters.5630:

Took a couple of days to get debugging in on this. It is in fact a 40ms difference which equates to about 7% less damage when spamming 1. We made this change because it was creating some animation bugs to leave it where it was. It was also encouraging just spamming 1 which isn’t the most fun gameplay. If our data shows shortly that shortbow is now not effective we can certainly address that, but would do so by improving other skills on that weapon rather than by reintroducing the spam on 1 and the bugs that it was creating.

Well I for one don’t consider using the default #1 autoattack skill “Spamming”.

On anything tough I’m using all the skills in the SB, but the cooldowns are slow, so the autoattack is what does the damage during the cooldowns.

7% damage reduction is only based on speed reduction alone. People like me who have built on crit and crit procs have a much bigger Nerf, which wasn’t even intended in the first place.

I would suggest you don’t try and force people who actually like the SB pre-nerf to change playstyle by keeping the nerf in place but encourage the change through improving other weapons.

The GS for example was overnerfed, I was really excited to try using it when watching beta videos. But when i actually tried it it felt (and is) very weak.

Hey Jon. I would have thought you know other short bow skills are mainly cc and survival skills and not damage skills. What do you expect for people to use for maximum damage? Can we expect 7-15 percent damage decrease across all classes now to compensate?
Also, curious that fixing an graphic glitch somehow transmuted into a damage decrease after some ‘debugging’ , to make make all ranger weapons equally worthless.
There’s a tons of issues and bugs listed on the ranger bug topic and basicly nothing has been adressed since lauch but you desided to fix a graphic issue that no one hasn’t even noticed to begin with.
Just feels so Biowaresque approach , which i’m not very keen of.

NinjaKnight.1340:

…….since the useless LB only does any decent dmg at long range.

How can it be useless, if it does decent damage at long range ;>

I will admit when i noticed the SB nerf I was mad it’s downright unfair and unnecessary, I cried a river, but I built a bridge and got over it.

what’s done is done

It is not game breaking it is still simple to outplay and kill people. But it feels 100 percent lackluster now. I have been thinking about taking QZ off my skill set.

I mean seriously the only use i see for my ranger now is to go around and farm ori nodes, not much to do. What weapon do we use now? what choice do we have? The game is already dying for me, sad thing is they wont solve anything and everything will stay as it is or worse more nerfs coming to rangers and no fixes, like every other company out there, same story.