Guild Wars 2

According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Y8uGM1CGV8g#t=820

Traited Frost Spirit should be applying about a 7% damage increase over time- however, in personal testing against the indestructable golem, it is very clear that this is not the case.

I used longbow with and without frost spirit, at constant range with the Vigorous Spirits trait- attachments 1 and 2 are without Frost Spirit and attachments 3 and 4 are with.

I did some math on the results: PLEASE DOUBLE CHECK ME!

Non-crits:
w/o FS: 15 hits, average 945.13 per hit.
w FS: 13 hits, average 962.92 per hit.

Now, I don’t need a caclulator to tell me that that is nowhere near the 7% increase detailed in the build.

Crits:
w/o FS: 18 hits, 1871.67 average per hit
w FS: 19 hits, 1887.68 average per hit

Again, it’s fairly obvious that there is by far no increase in damage of 7%.

This is completely inconsistent to what the developer guide details!

EDIT: I did account for Opening Strike Vulnerability- I waited until it had faded before taking the screenshots from which I based my calculations.

Be interesting to see the numbers with the Vigorous Spirit trait, i’m guessing the trait is now pointless with the way frost spirit has been nerfed/bugged.

@Cletus Van Damme: If you look at my traits in the screenshot, this is actually WITH Vigorous Spirits

In case you’re wondering or are too lazy to do the math, if Frost Spirit’s buff were working as intended-

We would expect :

w FS to have around 1011.29 average per hit on non crits (vs 962.92)
and
w FS to have around 2002.69 average per hit on crits. (vs 1887.68)

Ltomato.8649:

@Cletus Van Damme: If you look at my traits in the screenshot, *this is actually WITH Vigorous Spirits"

This is quite a problem!

The theory in the ranger forums is that the 10 internal cooldown on Frost Spirit was re-enabled as a “bug fix”. Unfortunately, that ICD was originally removed because with it, Frost Spirit basically does nothing. I did the math over in the ranger forum, but for a simplified version:

• Without ICD, the damage increase is a flat 10%*35% = 3.5% (or if traited, 7%). (I’m ignoring spirit downtime to keep this short and simple.)

• With ICD, the damage increase is one attack every 10 sec + however long it takes for the effect to proc again. If the weapon attacks once per sec, on average it takes 2.86 sec to proc. So every 12.86 attacks, a single attack does 10% more damage. That works out to a 0.1/12.86 = 0.78% damage increase. Rather underwhelming to put it mildly. And this is actually the best case, since most weapons attack faster than once per second.

While disabling the ICD on Frost Spirit broke with how the other spirits functioned, it was necessary to make Frost Spirit viable. With the ICD enabled, a single stack of vulnerability (1% extra damage) is roughly twice as effective as Frost Spirit with most weapons.

A tempting way to fix this might be to keep the ICD but increase the damage boost from FS (say, make it double damage instead of a 10% boost). Unfortunately that fix would gut the Vigorous Spirits trait. While the trait doubles the chances of the effect triggering (from 2.86 attacks to 1.43 attacks), the 10s ICD adds a flat non-scaling 10 sec worth of attacks to those figures. Meaning (for a 1 attack/sec weapon) the difference is now 12.86 attacks vs 11.43 attacks per proc. The bulk of the time is spent waiting for the ICD to expire, meaning the trait has little effect. So the best way to fix this is to disable the ICD again.

Thanks for shedding light on this. This needs to be fixed, and fast. At the very least it must be immediately acknowledged by the devs as something that will be corrected in the upcoming patch.

Wasbunny.6531:

Thanks for shedding light on this. This needs to be fixed, and fast. At the very least it must be immediately acknowledged by the devs as something that will be corrected in the upcoming patch.

Or that it is intended, dun dun dunnnnnn.

Clearly the intention is for the 7% damage increase- as detailed by the Official Developer Guide video that I linked in the first post.

So this must be a bug, and must be addressed, or else rangers will have no place in dungeon parties, since they will not be able to bring sufficient unique utility.

If this is intentional, then it makes absolutely no sense. It doesn’t follow what they said about design- balancing with “shaves”. This is more of an amputation.

Ltomato.8649:

If this is intentional, then it makes absolutely no sense. It doesn’t follow what they said about design- balancing with “shaves”. This is more of an amputation.

+1

This needs to be addressed before the patch as it is very much a big part of the playstyle of PvE ranger. the complexity of PvE is already low, and not having frost spirit not only removes the complexity, but removes the class from many runs and slowly out of favor even after a supposes buff to the class.

Ltomato.8649:

So this must be a bug, and must be addressed, or else rangers will have no place in dungeon parties, since they will not be able to bring sufficient unique utility.

Rangers still have spotter and good damage from Sword / Warhorn + GS and will get a small boost from GS cleave on maul. But the loss of FS’s almost constant 7% buff will be greatly missed.

The damage is not that good as to offset +7% damage to all party members.
And if you don’t take the new trait for whatever reason, it ends up being quite a large damage decrease from present ranger overall.

It’s like if Elementalist conjured weapons suddenly couldn’t be picked up, or Warrior banners only gave 10% of their bonuses. Or if blast finishers no longer gave buffs to allies. Except they do enough damage where even if those changes happened, they’d still be viable.

The whole idea of “Look shiny buffs!” and then having this slid underneath is almost insulting. Justifying it by saying “Rangers will still be okaaaaaay” doesn’t make sense to me.

About to lose an arm? Don’t worry, your motor functions with your other arm will improve when you use it in your day to day now!

enraging stealth nerf/bug-fix.

you destroyed any reason for a group to take a ranger.

thanks again.

I don’t ever play my ranger but this is just terrible. And sadly this does give me one more (big) reason to not take rangers in fotm 50. I rolled warrior for a similar reason with the tons of mesmer bugs. Sorry not trying to derail, but this does need immediate attention and dev response. RIP Rangers

This really needs a fix. Without frostspirit rangers loose their basis of existence for dungeon groups. Rangers are already in a bad position, there is no need for nerfing one of the only things they were good for.

Can we get a dev’s response to this? Please?

It shouldn’t be acceptable that they can stealth nerf/fix a skill this drastically without letting the players know. A skill that, according to a dev, worked as intended.

Please announce whether this is going to be fixed or not, I was actually going to roll my first ranger on Tuesday to try out the new character system!!

Bump, bump, bump bump.

This still needs attention. badly. If you want to reduce the amount of tickets sent in about dungeon kicks after patch, Fixing frost spirit would help.

even if they acknowledge it was changed unintentionally, it won’t get patched for another 6 months.

this is a pretty hard “unintended” nerf considering frost spirit is one of the things that kept rangers in dungeon groups to give the competitive edge, also with the icd this makes the frost spirit almost equal to search and rescue in terms of usability over other utilities we can bring. it is almost like we are being boxed into taking selfish utilities that do not contribute to group play.

Bump.

Devs.

Bump.

WoodenPotatoes mentions this bug (fix?) as “…that stupid Frost Spirit change…” in his latest video:

WoodenPotatoes QandA EP36

Note that he’s currently playing the new patch so I have to assume if this was fixed in that patch he would have mentioned it.

Wasbunny.6531:

Note that he’s currently playing the new patch so I have to assume if this was fixed in that patch he would have mentioned it.

I doubt he tested it, or even played a ranger for that matter.

It would be nice to get a dev response here since this bug makes the ranger absolutely useless in dungeons.

Wow!, my actual wvw ranger build have spirits skills for support my party… I need to know if my frost spirit is useless :-S

(I’m spanish, I don’t speak english very well)

RauldelCerro.8436:

Wow!, my actual wvw ranger build have spirits skills for support my party… I need to know if my frost spirit is useless :-S

(I’m spanish, I don’t speak english very well)

Yes it is useless. Do not use it. That’s the most simple answer at the moment.

Also I doubt the patch is fixing it otherwise there would probably be a dev response about this like in the mesmer thread.that and the thread is only 3 days old. Keep posting about this. Get more replies and views. Then hopefully a dev well respond.

Bump, bump, bump.

Would it be possible to get a response on this issue?

I have seen more “NO RANGER” lfg postings than ever before.

I’ve reported the bug through all the channels and gotten no substantial response.

Even a “We read this, yo” would be nice to have.

Currently one stack of vulnerability is better than traited frost spirit.

Ltomato.8649:

Would it be possible to get a response on this issue?

I have seen more “NO RANGER” lfg postings than ever before.

I’ve reported the bug through all the channels and gotten no substantial response.

Even a “We read this, yo” would be nice to have.

This. Times 100.

Devs, pleeeeease! Thats vandalism! D: Nerfing Frostspirit is pointless. I hope they have noticed it alredy (altough someone could just answer to that thread). If it’s not fixed in the upcoming patch I want to trade my ranger for gems!

Bumpedibump bump bump

Tested, still bugged.

Yep, still bugged after the Feature Pack.

Rolling thief in the meantime.

I can’t believe such a big nerf was made (accidentally I assume) and not fixed within a few days!

Hoping they know about this so they can fix it soon….want to run FS again! (bump)

I feel like I am bringing selfish utilities like QZephyr, Wild Signet, and Sic Em. I’d love to be able to run frost spirit again!

bump

Looks like this is being overlooked in all the patch hooplah, I’d hate to see this wait till the september 2015 balance patch

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

Looks like this is being overlooked in all the patch hooplah, I’d hate to see this wait till the september 2015 balance patch

Has anyoned re-tested with the new patch/hotfix that came out yesterday?

maybe it was to do with an animation fix………

It still would be good to know if this nerf was intended or just an accident that will be fixed.

The Chosen Link.3247:

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

Looks like this is being overlooked in all the patch hooplah, I’d hate to see this wait till the september 2015 balance patch

Has anyoned re-tested with the new patch/hotfix that came out yesterday?

Still broken

Tested after the last few hotfixes, still broken.

Bumping for visibility and hopefully a reply. I know things are crazy right now, but this was an issue before the patch, and still exists. Getting any information at all regarding this would be wonderful. Thanks!

The devs say they read all threads—I really don’t see any evidence of that here at all.
A simple ‘yes we know’ and ‘we are fixing it’ is all that is required instead of ignoring the bug.

Pls at least let us know what’s going on.

Still bugged. One quick way to check is reviewing the damage of hunter’s call. The damage of each hit are constant.

I posted the link to this thread in the communicating with you thread and Chris rerplied with this good news!!!!

“Chris Whiteside.6102:

Blude.6812:

Not really asking for a time frame.
Just asking for some “communication with you” in the bug forum. As I said a simple ‘yes we know’ and it’s on our to do list would be be fine. But totally ignoring it —not so fine.

Hi Blude,

We are not ignoring it all. We are aware and will update Monday.

Thanks for raising it to my attention.

Chris"

FANtasitic and thank you very much!

“We are aware and will update Monday” English is not my first language, but I have a feeling this could mean multiple things .. At least now we know that they know, that is something. If they fixed this it would be truly fantastic.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/EGRaEir.jpg[/img]

Tested and still bugged. We’ll see if anything changes Monday.