Originally posted by “Olcon.9506”
Alright, I’ve managed to vent all my furious rage for now so I’ll try and keep this relatively constructive.
Today is Thursday morning, so I can say that roughly ~36 hours ago, the Tuesday balance patch went live and the the initial WHAO changes entered the game.
36 hours.
THIRTY.
SIX.
HOURS.
Gaile, I know you’re reading this thread, and I really do appreciate it. Thank you for attempting to communicate with us, and forgive me for directing these rhetorical questions at you.
How long did it take for icebow to get nerfed?
How long did cele d/d elementalist run rampant in the PvP arenas?
How many stacks of might can a warrior give, permanently, to their entire party?
Are rangers autoattackers, or do they primarily use their 2-5 skills to do their damage?
The main cause for my ire in this situation is, more than anything else, the sheer lack of logic demonstrated. What is wrong with a ranger being able to stack might in the first place? My warrior can stack upwards of 15 stacks of might using only his weapon skills, and he doesn’t have to gut his build for it. And he can give it to the ENTIRE PARTY!
For my ranger, before WHAO was nerfed, in order to get 25 stacks of might, I would need to:
Use my Jungle Stalker’s F2 skill, Mighty Roar, which puts it on cooldown for 25 seconds.
Swap my pet (which puts it on cooldown for 20 seconds) to procc Clarion Bond which has an ICD of 30 seconds. A combined 50 second cooldown.
Use Strength of the Pack which has an activation time of 1 second and a cooldown of 60 seconds.
Attack my target to build up might stacks. We’ll say this takes ~5 seconds if I’m saving my Rapid Fire and Barrage.
Use my healing skill We Heal As One (1 second activation time, 20 second cooldown) to transfer my pet’s boons to myself and gain 25 stacks of might if I do this entire rotation properly.
Use LB #2 Rapid Fire to deal ~15k damage in full Berserker gear if all shots land on the target. This is assuming I have LoS and the target does not have anything that would utterly ruin me, such as:
- Any skills or traits utilizing reflect.
- Any skills or traits utilizing block.
- Any skills that utilize invulnerability, which doesn’t include the Warrior’s Defiant Stance ability for some reason despite Defiant Stance doing essentially the same thing with the added bonus of using their damage to heal you.
If, at any point, Rapid Fire and, to a lesser extent, LB #5 Barrage are somehow negated, I am out of luck. That was my entire burst. The might stacks did not last that long without you removing all damage from your build (this is how you get perma-quickness by the way), and might doesn’t even stack duration anyway.
I am going to be perfectly honest with you here, Gaile, because honesty is what you need right now, and I truly do ask you to forgive my bluntness. I love Anet and I love Guild Wars 2, but whispering sweet nothings and saying “It’s alright” and “You’ll do better next time” will not help solve the problem.
In my own, sincerest opinion, this smells like developer incompetence.
This smells like people who do not understand what the Ranger is capable of and what it is NOT capable of. This smells like people who are balancing a game based on hearsay and not solid numbers and information. And, most importantly, this smells like people who do not understand their playerbase.
If any of the developers even so much as glanced at the Ranger subforums, they would understand that things here are tense. There are many people here who feel ostracized and feel the developers, in no uncertain terms, simply do not give a flying kitten about them. Are some of them overreacting? Probably. Are there also legitimate concerns based the iffy track record of the profession they love? Definitely.
What the developers did here was multiply the “They hate the Ranger” issue by a factor of ten. They did not wait to gather data on how the WHAO change might have effected the gameplay environment. They did not wait to see how players would use it. Within hours of the change going live on Tuesday, Ranger players had already isolated the “perma-quickness build” (if it even deserves the term “build”, which is highly disputable in itself) that the balance team feared so much as extremely niche, and determined that it was not worthwhile in any scenario.
As someone else said, the balance team took a sledgehammer to a situation that needed a scalpel.
And regarding the “They hate Rangers” issue:
As an analogy, what happened here is the equivalent of a small child’s perceived bully placing a fun toy before him in an act of goodwill. “Here,” the bully says. “This should be fun to play around with!” Tentatively, the child reaches forward and runs his hand over the toy, thinking of all the fun he could have with it. After allowing the child a moment of happiness, the bully reaches down and snatches the toy away, walking away and leaving the child with nothing. The other children in the background are happily playing with their own toys, either unaware or willfully ignoring the situation.
This is how the players of this subforum think of the issue. They are the small child, the one tormented by the bully. The background children are the other classes they believe Anet “favors”, most notably Elementalist, Warrior, Mesmer. The toy the bully takes away is the buffed WHAO. And the bully is you, Anet.
I do not know whether this mindset is based on truth, a circlejerk or some strange, spoiled entitlement issue. Perhaps a combination of all three. But I also believe that the fact it exists at all merits some… concern.