Showing Posts For AIMonster.8236:
This math is great and all, but we are forgetting one important thing here and that’s the Greatsword evades every 3rd autoattack (as well as has a 3 second block for added defense) making it easily the best damage mitigation weapon in the game. Putting the damage on par with Warrior GS would be ridiculous with that considered as there would be no reason to use any other weapon and Rangers would actually go back to being completely overpowered like they were in beta.
Devs just can’t seem to get balance right on a Ranger. Our main problems right now are due to pets and just being a lame mechanic in general (they can’t stick to targets due to path finding and inability to keep attacking while moving as many of their abilities root them in place, the pet activation skills are completely unusable most of the time due to delays) and obstructed issues with ranged weapons (I get obstructed when literally nothing is blocking the target, and even pets and friendly players can cause me to become obstructed). Our melee weapons are fine and actually output decent damage, GS included for what it is (a tanky / skirmish weapon), though it’s understandable that maul is getting a buff as it’s not very good compared to the rest of the GS skills.
Still, it’s shocking when we gets buffs to things like Lick Your Wounds which is already extremely powerful and makes us impossible to 1v1 underwater and almost acts as a free revive when it works because in that situation it works 100% of the time, instead of an actual fix to the skill which doesn’t work the majority of time (slightly over 50% in my experience) when we’re downed. Or that our shortbow is continually overlooked after it received a major (yes a 10% damage decrease and 20% during QZ is significant) nerf. Other shocking things included nerfs to Warhorn 4 skill, (it’s actually useless now for it’s cast time), axe main hand and traits, and Sharpening Stones which seem to be due to the strength of our condition stacking in beta which was due to the way the bleed sigil and trait worked and was overnerfed when that was changed.
I actually do think Ranger is in good shape right now in all aspects of the game, certainly not as horrible as people say. Most people are using horrible utilities like Signet of Hunt and Sharpening Stones and a good number of our utilities are holding us back and could use a revamp. I’ve logged over 1300 hours on Ranger and am happy with the class but I can see buffing it in many areas here’s some suggestions:
- Increased damage and utility with our Ranged weapons. Our DPS underperforms (especially when you consider we rely on a pet that isn’t able to stick on a target or dies quickly in PvE, we only match Warrior’s rifle in DPS when we have optimal conditions which you have to consider won’t happen with a pet in WvW) any other ranged damage profession and we are forced into single target mostly. Every ranged weapon including MH Axe could probably use a bit of an overhaul.
- Improvements to pets in general. Mainly their responsiveness and ability to CONSISTENTLY output damage. A slight reduction to AoE damage they would take, even if it required being traited into, would be welcome too.
- Stop forcing us to spec 30 points into trait lines to make utilities useful. As far as I know, no other profession suffers from this problem like Rangers do. In order to make our Spirits useful we require 30 points in Nature Magic. Signets require 30 points into Marksmanship. Traps require 30 points into Skirmishing.
- Many of our utilities are completely lackluster and could use an revamp.
- Our ranged attacks need to be “obstructed” far less. Something is clearly wrong here. If I can see the target and nothing appears to be in the way I should not be getting obstructed. Same goes for random “out of range” when the target is clearly in range.
- Sword animation lock on the second autoattack is annoying, especially with quickness. It would be nice if we can cancel this animation into things like dodge roll and other skills more fluidly. Same goes for the actual counterattack on GS 3. These two things tend to get me killed in a frustrating fashion too often.
Currently I’m playing a Ranger full melee because we are hardly the ranged damage profession you want us to be. I use GS + Sword/Axe primarily in WvW (Sword/Dagger in SPvP), the Warhorn for the 5 skill only buffs out of combat, the Torch for fire fields before engagement, and only equip a Longbow (Shortbow is the only Ranger weapon I do not carry) for Barrage on siege or when WvW is particularly laggy that Sword is unusable.
Also I’m wondering why people say the offhand axe needs improvements. The weapon got buffed in a recent patch and actually is our highest burst damage weapon. Path of Scars and Whirling Defense are both fantastic skills in WvW against zergs and are useful in other aspects of the game as well.
This is false. Rangers in particular have many great builds in WvW, from trap bombing / CCing or tanking the zerg and doing massive damage with whirling defense. I know a few guilds in Tier 1 have been pairing them with Necros or Mesmers for massive condition bombing. Plus Drakes now do AoE damage every attack and a Ranger can actually put on the hurt in zerg vs. zerg. Engineers have some of the best AoE damage in the game and apply massive conditions to everyone they hit as well as zerg busting abilities like their bomb kit F skill. Thieves aren’t fantastic in zerg vs. zerg, but they at least have Daggerstorm, Blast Finishers, and good AoE ranged damage. Plus they make fantastic roamers / small ops players. Don’t confuse underrated / undervalued with not being useful.
As a member of Blackgate I 100% agree with this. Help make SoR’s coverage as competitive as JQ’s and BG’s! Tier 1 will be a truely epic matchup if SoR just got more coverage in these hours.
I can solo it as a Tank Ranger with FAR less DPS than a Berserker Thief. Maybe the problem is your survivability, not DPS?
I think the bigger problem with the central node is how useless it is. It sends worthless Quaggan Guards (not Shamans, those are from the West, North, and East nodes and are sent to their respective Keep direction) to the southern supply camps which really doesn’t even stall a solo player from capping the supply camp and doesn’t do much except give the player free Bloodlust stacks.
AC Story Mode was done by nearly everyone who first hit 30 in beta and quite a few 30s groups at release, and yes it was difficult for some, but certainly not ridiculously hard like people here are claiming. AC EXP mode in beta was much harder than it is now (even with the new patch) for example the Spider Queen had even higher damage poison and summoned silver elite spiders constantly, and Kohler had no wind up or cue on his Scorpion Wire + Daggerstorm. Still, AC EXP was doable then so it should be easily doable now (and that was without using any level 80s in your group).
The heal is too strong I think. Try QA testing it with 5 Rangers. Pretty much should be impossible then.
If you all need videos explaining how to do each boss I’ll be happy to provide. Dungeons in this game are not so difficult that you shouldn’t be able to do them in a reasonable PUG. Fractals beyond a certain level are much more difficult and have always had this no WP until your party is dead mechanic. It really does come down to having to learn how to play properly. Bosses in dungeons shouldn’t even down anyone in your group much less kill them.
In regards specifically to Alpha Subject you do not need vigor, invulnerability, or extra evades to avoid his red circles. Simply just don’t waste your dodge rolls, don’t double dodge, etc. He often does two in a row, but he’ll stop in between and you’ll have plenty of time to refill your endurance. It’s a fight that is going to test your timing on dodging, though it’s not as bad as say fighting the Dredge boss on high level where a single agony hit will kill you. As for crystals I recommend stacking up and if you are having trouble on the crystals have party members mark them. As a tank Ranger (easily the lowest DPS profession in the game) I can easily break people out of crystals before Alpha subject does another attack solo, so if you are struggling with a full party then you simply aren’t spotting the crystals fast enough.
Remember other people can do this just fine. Dungeons are easily cleared without needing to use waypoint res zerging. I’ve completed CoE with PUGs before, some struggle, some do not. Chances are if you are not completing dungeons you may need to evaluate your own play style. Don’t assume just because you’ve been doing it since beta you are doing it correctly.
On Alpha Subject: I heard dodge roll is really strong. You should try it sometime.
I almost never get hit by any of his circles, nor do people in my group.
Lets see now. Looking at the first time SoS won in T1, to now; SoS has won 9 of the 10 matches. And now because we are trying to even things up, it’s “bad” for wvw.
Is that an accurate summary Ohai? What did I miss?
And all the matches SoS won in Tier 1 have been really close. How is adding 2000+ people to your server in 2 weeks evening things out? Does it look even to you? A few guilds transferring over would have evened it out, not a massive amount. BG and SoS only have a remote chance of catching up now and chances are JQ will continue this slaughter. I’m hoping SoS does get bumped down to Tier 2 and we lose some guilds to transfers so we can have a more balanced matchup there. I don’t recall SoS ever having a 25k lead on JQ by Monday.
The notion that SoS always had “more coverage” is baseless. There is absolutely no proof we ever had more coverage. SoS had ZERO EU guilds (we have 1 now). We had a massive coverage gap during EU time. We won PPT in NA (usually) and SEA time (almost always). We never (and still don’t, it’s worse now as we are outmanned on most maps) have queues on more than 1 map except during reset night. I’m pretty sure our coverage was always equal to JQ’s, we had better Oceanic coverage and you guys had better EU.
Since the end of free server transfers have been announced matches have been completely one sided on all but the bottom tiers. It’s going to take weeks (at least a month or two) for this to balance out, and by then I wonder what the WvW population will be likely when servers get sick of either completely dominating in their matchup or getting destroyed by stacked servers as they climb up to their appropriate tier.
Sword + Dagger / Greatsword while keeping your buff up with warhorn when out of combat is devastating to most classes 1v1. Yeah, Rangers are pretty lacking in general and need buffs in certain areas, but this combo will beat anything but tanky kit Heavy Engineers, Guardians, and certain Mesmer builds (while others you’ll kill with ease). Eles can draw with you since they can’t bring down your sustain and you can’t bring down theirs.
I build pure tank/sustain with 30 Marksman for signet share, 30 Wilderness Survival for pet removing conditions from you, 5 Beastmastery for 2 seconds of quickness of pet swap (single best minor trait in the game), and 5 Nature Magic for the extra Vitality. Use Healing Spring as you can do 4 leaps with Sword + GS during it’s duration making it heal for way more than any of your other heals as well as removing conditions. Rampage As One, QZ, SoS, and SoW for signets. Keep warhorn swiftness up as much as you can then swap back to dagger. Drag your longbow out when sieging keeps for Barrage or to do damage to a zerg. Wolf pets for knockdown + cripple. Your damage is terrible, even with 2.2k+ power, but there really isn’t a good way to do lots of damage with a Ranger without relying solely on the pet (we probably have the lowest overall damage of all the professions); however quickness + sword is still some pretty good burst damage.
Also LOL at not being built for zerg fights. You can rush in with GS and Sword/Dagger and cause hell to a zerg while having 30 seconds straight stability, massive quickness, and 6 seconds of invuln, and tons of evasion, not to mention Healing Spring being possibly one of the most broken WvW abilities in the game when you run with a good group who uses blasts finishers.
I realize that, but in large scale zergs it can be very difficult to pick out invisible targets with single target attacks. AoEs fixed that problem.
Also the way you have to tilt you camera up to throw/shoot projectiles forward with no target is fairly ridiculous. You pretty much have to be looking at the sky.
Isn’t this actually huge buff to Thieves who are the only professions that have high single target damage weapons and AoE damage being nerfed hurts our ability to kill them in stealth especially when they are reviving someone in stealth?
When complaining about coverage gaps we should keep a few things in mind.
- Every server in Tier 1 is full almost 24/7, so they should have relatively the same amount of people playing per server.
- Sea of Sorrows has no major EU guilds that I personally know of, and we have a huge coverage gap in EU time. We make up for this by our Aussies staying up late and our NA players logging in early to fill this gap.
- Sea of Sorrows, especially early on or when we risk losing puts out ABPs in Lion’s Arch and other major PvE areas to try to fill lack of map coverage with militia. My suggestion would be to encourage your server to get out and WvW more.
- Sea of Sorrows has multiple alliances of dedicated WvW guilds and very large WvW oriented guilds so we probably have a better ratio of WvW players to PvE players.
- Sea of Sorrows can only field all 4 maps during Friday night resets. During NA primetime there are usually no queues across any maps because we have good coverage spread. We assign specific guilds to maps and move forces around as needed. We are not fully covering all the maps all the time, it just seems that way because we are more effectively spreading our forces around.
We’re also adapting to your strategies. The first night the AoI alliance was having problems with the HB guild and heavy use of stacking which we haven’t seen for quite a while (since Tier 2 and IoJ/SoR I think). As we were encountering it more and more we quickly developed counter methods. For example HB is not effectively using their large force to defend against multi-pronged attacks similar to WM they can only be present in one area of the map at a time because they run together and almost never split their force. Splitting our forces and attacking multi points at once prevented HB from being able to effectively defend fast enough on that map. I won’t go into other strategies we used, just that obvious one, but there was more to the method of dealing with HB in particular (and other BG guilds use much of the same tactics). HB is a very strong guild, and sometimes flat out avoiding them is the best approach.
It’s very easy to talk about how much more organized and skilled JQ/BG compared to SoS, but part of our organization and skill is due to being able to effectively manage coverage and get people motivated to show up and do WvW. Remember we are all working with the same amount of players on our servers since we are always “Full”.
Rangers can actually reduce damage better than any other profession, the problem is it’s avoidance and not very reliable. Rangers actually make great Commanders specced into their tanking tree.
Speccing 30 points into Marksman will give you 10 seconds of Stability from Wild (as well as greatly increased damage) and 6 seconds of invuln from Signet of Stone.
You can trait into 2 seconds of Protection on dodge roll.
Pet can absorb first CC on you with Shared Anguish, giving you enough time to use your Wild or Rampage if you are caught by surprise.
Sword/Dagger grants you 3 different evades. The cooldowns on these skills are fairly low. Sword is a bit bulky though, but if you can learn to disable the autoattack before you roll you should be okay.
Greatsword evades every 3rd attack. Couple this with Ranger quickness (5 points Beastmastery + QZ) and you have massive damage avoidance.
You have good sustain with Healing Spring, GS and Sword Leap in Spring, and Wild’s Passive. You can use HP regen food for more sustain. Allies can further heal you with whirls and blast finishers.
Rampage As One grants you 20 seconds of Stability.
Your condition removal is the best (or second best, eles might have a tad bit more) in the game with Empathic Bond and Healing Spring. As long as your pet is alive it’s nearly impossible to keep conditions on you.
You have decent mobility with the GS Leap, Rampage As One swiftness, and Warhorn (if you equip one) swiftness.
Counterattack gives you 3 seconds of block as long as nobody attacks you in melee range. The downside is the slow knockback animation can get you killed.
Downsides of tanking with Ranger:
The above mentioned counterattack. A melee class leaping on you can ruin your day.
Low base health along with avoidance based means you can be burst down if someone happens to get good hits on you while you aren’t evading.
Medium armor requires you to stack toughness on a lot of your gear to reach the cap before DR (3000 armor or around 1900 toughness with signet of stone) so you can’t invest in crit and crit damage.
Your damage is almost non-existent.
GS requires you to be in melee range of a target to evade, which can be tricky sometimes since you lack good slows/immobilizes in a typical signet tank build.
Relies on long cooldowns.
Your pet is squishy and it dying greatly reduces your tanking effectiveness (no Empathic Bond, longer cooldown on pet swap quickness).
(edited by AIMonster.8236)
I can vouch our melee builds (and wolf pets) do amazing against thieves. Even managed some 2v1s against them. They usually wind up running away when they get low and are nearly impossible to chase.
I run GS + Axe/Warhorn. Our GS is pretty good for being a tanky bruiser, though it does fairly low damage. Our best assets is our ability to quickness revive people (with 2 second quickness on pet swap and QZ we have the most quickness in the game) with stability from Rampage As One and invuln from Signet of Stone and Healing Spring. Healing Spring is one of the most powerful WvW abilities when coupled with lots of blast finishers. A group with 2 Rangers and a few blast finisher classes like shortbow thieves and you can easily hold back zergs 3 or 4 times your size.
Ranger is in bad shape though. If you can pair with an Elementalist have them drop conjured weapons, which don’t suffer from the scaling and low damage issues of our weapons (because we’re designed around a pet that has zero scaling and is suppose to do 50% of our damage) and wreck people. The Lightning Hammer will blast your healing spring every 3rd autoattack (coupled with quickness you can pump out 15k in AoE heals in about 10 seconds) and the Fiery Greatsword is a great damage weapon that let’s you easily rush into groups with Signet of Stone and quickly get out with it’s double charging abilities. These weapons also scale very well with Rampage As One.
I have Sunrise on my Ranger. I feel like the GS is a better more functional weapon (SPvP, PvE, and WvW) than the bows (and the GS looks better as a legendary). Longbow especially feels bad for a number of reasons I won’t get into, so I’d recommend The Dreamer if you are absolutely intent on getting a bow.
@Bastionhawk, the legendary weapons at the moment have no stat difference between exotic weapons so it’s untrue that they are slightly more powerful; however when they bring out Ascended weapons they will likely be bumped to that level. My Sunrise has the exact same stats as the Ghastly Greatsword.
Commenting on some of the above changes.
Minor Traits – These are pretty poor now (vulnerability isn’t that great, and it doesn’t last long enough to make a big difference, compare to say Engineer vulnerability stacking) and the new ones wouldn’t really improve it that much, but I guess any change to these would be welcome.
Keen Edge would be overpowered. The Ranger already has the most quickness in the game, we don’t need more. Throwing this as a multi-skill trait is just ridiculous. Sharpening Stones is pretty weak though, and thus this trait is fairly weak so a buff would be welcome, but nothing too extreme.
Signet Mastery – This trait is already really good, one of our better traits for a signet build (I run Wild and Stone and use it). There is no need to buff it, much less in multiple ways.
Predator’s Instinct – Meh, still wouldn’t use it.
Spotter – Why? Buffing precision is fine. Warriors buff power.
Piercing Arrows – No, axes piercing would be weird, as it’s already an AoE weapon.
Beastmaster’s Might – This would become ridiculously OP with a signet build in a group situation.
Signet of the Beastmaster – Huge nerf to this skill. It’s one our most overpowered traits. We NEED this for a signet build. Why would I want to recharge useless actives that only effect my pet (with the exception of Stone maybe) as a trade off for actually receiving them myself? I’m relying on Wild and Stone actives right now in my build.
If anything our Marksmanship Trait Line doesn’t need much looking at. Our Nature Magic however….
Short Answer: Yes, go for it.
Long Answer:
I have a Sunrise on my Ranger. Use Axe/Warhorn as my alternate weapon. Main tank for my group having a Thief use Healing Spring blast heals. Makes those Tier 3 Fractals a joke with constant quickness (5 points Beastmastery pet swaps and Quickening Zephyr) and evasion every 3rd attack as well as massive group healing. GS is the Ranger’s best weapon, but very few Rangers realize it and want to do damage. We currently do the least damage of any profession (except maybe Necro) so it’s pretty pointless to spec glass cannon on a Ranger.
Rangers also make one of the best pushers in WvW with Greatsword and 30 seconds of Stability (Rampage As One + Signet of Hunt) and best healers with Healing Spring (as long as you have a thief or two blasting it).
Are you guys aware that people who completed the event are getting chests? We’ve had about 4 people in guild who did the event getting a chest, and others who never did the event because they weren’t present or DC’d are not getting the chest.
Deuce hid in Stonemist for 2 and a half (yes, that long) hours when it was capped at the start of the match. We were waiting for the most opportune time to portal our alliance in (AoI is currently assigned to EB). We had SBI distracted for most of the match, but it took a while before we found an opportunity with JQ and we took it. You guys didn’t sweep for Mesmers very well. There was no hacking or exploiting involved. Can confirm he was in Stonemist the whole time since near the start of the match.
Is it even possible to exploit into Stonemist? AoI is rarely assigned to EB (this is our second time) and I doubt we would even know about that.
Thank you for pointing out more ranger strengths in WvW. I forgot to mention Entangle in my initial post but yes it is very useful (when it works). It’s great for hitting supply camp npcs.
Ranger does have a lot of quickness and quick-revive and quick-siege build does make Ranger sound very useful in the battlefield.
Now about longbows, can’t they hit things that meteor shower can’t because of the increased range trait? Anyone know?
Very rarely due to the way AoE on Keeps work, increased ranged doesn’t matter as much as AoE radius. It can hit more than the Engineer grenades due to have an increased AoE radius.
Rangers have the longest water field in the game (possibly the longest combo field period) which also happens to be the best combo field in the game for WvW coupled with Thieves, Warriors, and Elementalists (Lightning Hammer) who can blast field it, it can heal 5 allies for well over 30khp in the amount of time it’s up.
Longbow is fairly useless except for Barrage, and even then Barrage is outclassed by other AoE (Engineer grenade spam, Elementalist Meteor Shower). I personally run a tanky spec and using the Greatsword (and Shortbow) and play as a pusher/tank. Yes, a Warrior can do this better while doing more damage, but you might as well take advantage of the Rangers invuln, 30 seconds of stability, massive HP regen and healing, most quickness of any profession as well as an evade on every 3rd attack of the Greatsword.
Rangers also have the most quickness in the game, which is handy for quickly ressing an ally (coupled with stability and invulnerability from 30 marksmanship + signet of stone this essentially gives Rangers an easy way to res an ally).
Entangle is good, but if people know how to quickly get out of it, it can wind up being our worst elite. It’s absolutely destroys people who don’t realize the multiple ways of dealing with it. A cleanse and a quick dodge or simply 3k damage on the roots (which many professions can do in a single attack) renders this elite useless. It also sometimes fails on targets moving quickly and can be negated completely with a blind.
While traps are good for spotting thieves for sure I feel they are a bit of a waste of a utility slot as they serve very little purpose in combat as the Ranger has MUCH better utilities (also stop wasting slots on Signet of the Hunt, it’s freaking terrible).
So the two main things Rangers are better at in WvW than other professions is combo healing (Healing Spring + Blasts from other professions) and quick and safe ressing. Yes, we could use some serious buffs (our damage is the lowest of any profession right now) and you are better off rolling a Warrior or another profession for WvW, but completely useless? Not true.
Sea of Sorrows is going to get owned
Sea of Sorrows has so many bad commanders they dont even know when to switch maps
so many bad guilds like FoE and pW who will sit and defend something with 10-15 players even if there is no risk of it being lost
Daish is going to avoid playing WvW this week
Good riddance.
Daish stops playing WvW we start winning. Only he fails to see the correlation.
The Fractal dungeons are amazing, but this one is was just frustrating for us. It’s not really challenging in a sense that the MOBs themselves can kill you, just the event itself is frustrating due to as mentioned already – walls popping out of nowhere and trap collision problems. For example sometimes I can jump over the spikes on the ground sometimes I can’t with seemingly no reason for them to trigger.
Aside from the other issue that members who disconnect are gone for good till you reset the dungeon, the Fractals are perfect. Absolutely love the new dungeons much better than any of the old ones.
We got less changes than many professions did, wasn’t this patch suppose to have significant changes to the Ranger?
Our overall damage – Still lower than any other profession.
Spirits – Still useless.
Longbow – Still has a horrible autoattack, still does less damage than most of our weapons.
Shortbow – No buff, after a severe nerf.
Greatsword – A bit better now, but still low damage.
Sword – No changes, still not very usable do to the leap on autoattack.
Call of the Wild – Still does less DPS than axe/warhorn autoattack when you take into account it’s cast time.
Torch/Dagger – Still never going to be used over Axe Offhand/Warhorn.
Overall I’m just going to stick to my Engineer who does 5X the damage of my Ranger, at 1500 range, and AoEs with more utility.
I’m not sure anyone claimed SoS belongs in Tier 1. If anything SoS is in a really bad spot right now, where we will always win Tier 2 matchups (IoJ, SoR, and maybe TC) and always get destroyed in Tier 1 (we have zero Euro guilds as far as I know) and we’ll never fight the server we’ll likely have the most even matchup with (Blackgate) because we’ll be exchanging spots with them in every week or two.
If anything we only want to be in Tier 1 for a fresh matchup as we’ve been fighting SoR and IoJ for quite a few matches right now and it would be interested to see how we fare in Tier 1, even with the knowledge that we’ll probably lose by a significant amount due to lack of coverage in specific time zones.
Okay, who’s the bunker elementalist from SoS? Norn, looks like the Citadel of Flame set. He participated in the large attack on Stonemist Castle last night while we (SoR) held on for dear life.
This guy is unkillable. All he does is run around in the front lines absorbing huge amounts of damage, and everyone (including me) falls for it and focuses him. Also he gains boons constantly. At one point he gained like 6 including stability, I corrupted them all into conditions, then 3 seconds later he has 4 more. We managed to kill him once in like an hour, crazy stuff.
Whoever you are, my hat is off to you, sir. Keep on keepin’ on.
Does SoR still have the castle? I went to bed before the siege ended.
That would be Papaj.
It’s one of the reasons I couldn’t enjoy Warhammer Online’s PvE either. You needed to have a tier set equal or higher level to the dungeon you were doing or you’d take % based damage increases from the enemies in the dungeon. You could go months (due to lockouts) without getting your tank to have specific armor set piece drops to progress to the next tier.
I didn’t enjoy Infusion in GW1 either. It felt completely unnecessary and a huge waste of time. I wound up having to run halfway across several zones in the Prophecies map, because I wanted to do War in Kryta on a character that didn’t have Prophecies completed just to infuse my armor and it was just a big waste of my time instead of being able to just jump in and enjoy the content without the needless infusion prerequisite.
This is actually probably the most fun dungeon in the game. I really hope they don’t lower the difficulty. We’ve done all 3 paths without a single death. Stack up so you break people out of the crystals near instantly and dodge the AoEs while one person stays out of the stack to dodge the ice rings. I know my Engineer can also solo down a crystal in less than a single AoE rotation (my Ranger cannot, but Rangers are pretty awful at the moment) so it shouldn’t be taking 30 seconds to break out of a crystal. It’s actually a fairly simple fight and the difficulty is well tuned.
I do think Anet should look into fixing the Destroyer fight in Path 3. You don’t have enough time to DPS him before having to go back on lasers, so you wind up having 2 people with 1.2k range or more standing on the stairs DPSing him from there while the other 3 man the lasers and it’s a rather long and boring fight as a result.
We did her a different way. Not having 3+ warriors available and having low DPS in general (a Ranger, a support Elementalist, and a Necromancer) we found that no matter how awesome and quick we were on orbs we were simply unable to DPS her down fast enough as we could barely put a decent dent into her before she’d go invis again.
We pulled her into a corner and simply just DPSed her while she was hidden, keeping poisons up and having our Elementalist run the orbs. Our DPS with constant poison up was just enough to keep her from healing up while she was hidden and our Ele quickly got the orbs in and we slowly whittled her down in a 15+ minute fight. I don’t understand why she is easier when you ignore her mechanics. To do her legit we figure you need at least 3 of a combination of glass cannon engineers, warriors, or thieves in the group.
SPOILER:
Of course after this “challenge” (of sitting in a corner and spamming our autoattacks to DPS her down) we were greeted with the amazing AFK round 2 boss (Melandru being the first) who was literally a stone in the ground that had all the ignorable mechanics of the other Seer path bosses.
Had to quit playing right now due to this issue. Everyone (including allies) completely invisible to me. Most of our guild was having the same issue to varying degrees too.
I know a lot of people on Dragonbrand were completely demoralized when when logged on during primetime and Blackgate suddenly owned everything after massive work all weekend. Today PvP was nearly dead on our server. There were a total of 20 or so people on Eternal Battlegrounds that I could tell and we were losing everything almost everywhere on the map. Fort Aspenwood seemed to be having the same issue. People don’t seem to be transferring to the low population (ie losing) servers, not that Dragonbrand is a low population server, but potentially after this match up it very well could be. We’ve already had people in our guild leave to join Blackgate to hop on the bandwagon and many of us our consider this the number 1 reason we may not continue playing Guild Wars 2 as our primary MMO. Note I’m only speaking for my guild here and what I’ve observed from Dragonbrand the last 3 days, but I think it’s safe to make the assumption that the free server transfers aren’t working as Arenanet intended them to.
Several solutions could be offered. Put WvW lockouts on people who transfer till the next match begins. To keep things fair you may want to consider resetting server rankings once server transfers become paid to, as of right now Dragonbrand probably doesn’t belong in it’s current ranking and it will likely be a few months before we settle into our real ranking as we likely lost a large number of our WvW force. Simply making the transfers paid should alleviate the issue too while keeping lower population servers free to transfer to (this way guilds actually transfer to them!) and maintaining guild buffs and maybe even other incentives for these kinds of transfers.
The match up with Fort Aspenwood and Blackgate was really enjoyable for us (speaking for my guild again) as well as the earlier match up with Crystal Desert up till Blackgate got numerous transfers. We were seeing a number of guilds we never saw in WvW in full presence on Blackgate that night in WvW and tonight we could barely field a tiny force to go harass supply camps and other minor objectives on the Eternal Battlegrounds map.
Greatsword is one of the strongest WvW and PvE weapons for a Ranger. Not only does it do far more AoE damage than the axe/warhorn combo. Contrary to what people say here the damage is not lackluster on the GS and is only rivaled in single target by the Shortbow, if anything is lackluster in the damage department (and just in general) it’s the Longbow.
More importantly Greatsword evades on the autoattack every third attack and is actually a pretty fast weapon. Paired with pet swaps for quickness and quickening zephyr you are evading near constantly while quickness is up as well as outputting massive AoE to 3 enemies in front of you.
The only buff I could suggest to the Greatsword is to make the travel time on crippling throw a lot faster. It’s very difficult to hit it with it considering it’s wind up and travel time the enemy is usually long out of range and it’s difficult to stick to a target without crippling shot or entangle.
Swoop can also be used as an escape mechanism instead of a gap closer. Turn off auto targeting.
Paired with the Shortbow I’ve won many 1v4s and even a 1v6 in WvW. But sure, let’s buff the second best weapon in the most overpowered profession (in my opinion) in the game because people don’t know how to properly utilize it.
30 Skirmishing, 30 Wilderness Survival, 10 Beastmastery for the record. Marksman tree is awful. Utilities are Healing Spring, Quickening Zephyr, Lightning Reflexes, Signet of the Wild, and Entangle. Use Wolf pets for knockdown to secure kills. Run into the middle of a zerg and entangle then swap pet and go to town, after 2 seconds Quickening Zephyr and that will easily finish off anyone who doesn’t understand how Entangle works. Zerg can’t kill you when you are evading everything. Pet will absorb first CC and keep conditions off you. Swoop/Evade/Quick Shot/Lightning Reflexes out to safety. Use SB to finish off anyone else from the safety of ranged.
I guess the whole “5 elementalists can do any dungeon in Guild Wars 2 without issues” mantra they were spouting then was a lie.
We don’t have an engineer, nor are we going to go have everyone respec into high mobility specs to complete the encounter. I’d still like to see a video or screenshot of the boss killed even with high mobility specs as the sparks themselves don’t move at swiftness speeds when you kite them into position.
Not sure if post was serious or not.
Maybe if you took the extra time to format your post and stop using lazy internet text shortcuts for three letter characters I could understand the point you were trying to make, but I don’t. I’m pretty sure you don’t understand the point I’m trying to make with the statement “Arah is fine how it is!” as I’m not asking for nerfs at all and I want the encounters to be MORE challenging and only the trash and health pools to be less time consuming (less tedious and more fun).
Dwayna is most likely not doable the way she is now. I’m guessing you don’t understand exactly how the fight is working. She hides at health intervals at every 10% starting at 50%. Each time she hides the orbs spawn further away and you need place more orbs in the middle (starting at 2 and probably ending with all 5). She’ll hide first at 50% which is easy enough as you only have to place 2 orbs in the middle and she’ll likely heal in that amount of time to 70% or 80%. The next time you have to place 3 orbs and they spawn further away. At 30% you have to place 4 orbs. The orbs themselves are buggy as mentioned in other threads and this one, but I’m not going to get into that. The main problem with the encounter is if she heals more than 50% the encounter essentially resets. As far as we can tell the closest you can get her down is 30% (maybe 20%) before it’s simply impossible to get the orbs there fast enough before she heals more than 50% and you have to do the encounter again starting at 50% intervals. During this time she does absolutely pathetic damage (compare to say Giganticus Lupicus who comes before her and can 2 shot you if you fail to dodge any of his mechanics) so it’s not like your party ever runs the risk of wiping. The fight is just tedious as are all except Giganticus and MAYBE Lyssa on the Seer path.
Pathetic sry. Arah is fine how it is! Just becuz u are to bad to clear it doesnt mean others also cant. We spent 3 * hours 4 Dwayna to try out every posibility on the Sparks and we had her on 30% then DC and we didnt continued but still, it IS possible.
I hope they only change the amount of shards u get depending on the path u choose.
Warden less maybe 20
Seer the hardest maybe 50
Something like this.No challenge for the casuals huh?
How is Seer hard? All the bosses are a joke and can’t wipe your group out. Did you even read the post? The Jotun and Mursaat paths have much more difficult bosses. Dwayna isn’t hard, she’s just unreasonably lengthy. She can’t kill your group with damage. She probably isn’t doable right now either and until you show a screenshot or video with her dead (because we got her to 30% too, she heals too fast period) I still stand by her heal is too fast even if you master getting the sparks are (which are also super buggy and annoying to deal with as they stick to Ranger pets and have all sorts of other issues).
I don’t even mind the Giganticus Lupicus’s fight’s length as much as some of the other bosses who have absolutely no mechanic that can punish you enough to wipe you. I actually think Giganticus is one of the best encounters in the game even despite it’s length. There are bosses you can literally sit AFK on (the Melandru fight mentioned here, final boss of Cadecus’s butler path) that are nothing more than very large HP pools. There are just a stupid number of bosses that don’t deal enough damage through their mechanics to wipe a group out even if they aren’t paying attention. Dungeons need serious looking at.
Fights I like because they require a decent amount of teamwork and have a lot going on (note these are all pretty difficult encounters):
- Giganticus Lupicus
- Mesmer Boss in Arah Mursaat path that does extreme AoE damage (forgot name)
- Twilight Arbor’s Giant Nightmare Vine
- Alpha Subject in all CoE paths, especially the front door one
- The protect the NPC / area in Ascalon Catacombs explorable Paths 1 and 3 (2 is too easy)
You don’t need a specific group makeup to do this anymore (we only had a single elementalist in our group and no warrior when we did it, we used 2 rangers and a thief too). Any group makeup will do. They nerfed the hatchlings HP and damage from beta I believe. The burrows spawn in specific spots so you should pull as many on top of them and AoE them down. Guarding the spots the gravelings run to is also handy. Kill the breeder when he spawns. As long as you all aren’t running glass cannons you should be able to easily survive even against a massive amount of gravelings. This path really isn’t even close to the difficulty of some other explorable paths so if you are having trouble with this one you are going to have a hard time later on.
We had the same issue. It’s bugged in the sense the boss of CoF Path 1 is. The healing is way out of balance. The sparks don’t work well. Even getting the sparks in position within 10 seconds (which is difficult to do with bugs) by having each specific person go in a different direction immediately when she hides and pull a spark we were still unable to get her past 30%. The actual damage the boss does and sparks do is pathetic too and needs to be upped. We literally spent an hour trying to do this boss with no deaths, but just weren’t able to get her past 30%.
Next you have Grenth. Why is the Wraith projectile immune? This hurts certain classes and doesn’t hurt others. I thought Guild Wars 2 dungeons were designed to be done with any combination of classes. Sure, you can pick up the bone and do a whopping 200 damage a hit to the Wraith at a slowish attack speed, but this really isn’t a statisfying mechanic. Once we finally spawned him, we honestly couldn’t decipher how the mechanic worked, but no damage was going out other than the random automatic downed player when the debuff faded (which sometimes didn’t down the player and was never removed even after killing Risen Wraiths which we figured it probably should). Simply revive them and kill all the Wraith (which takes a stupidly long time) and the boss is done. They’ll lose downed penalty before they need to get revived again. No damage whatsoever. Mechanic can be ignored again. Fun? We got 3 Shards for it.
Finally we came to Dwayna. We understand the mechanic perfectly. We knew how to remove petrify and removed it quickly. However this encounter obviously wasn’t tested at all. At 50% she hides and heals and you have to pull sparks to the center. The sparks are ranged and stop to autoattack you frequently and are hard to place in position, especially 5 at once. This isn’t so much of an issue except the boss heals to full within 10 seconds and there isn’t enough time to get the Sparks in position. We tried for over an hour, mastering getting the Sparks there and she healed too quickly. Everytime she would hide and heal at 50% again as if the fight reset entirely. We made no progress. Did I mention the damage throughout this fight is minimal and it’s nearly impossible to wipe solely from the bosses and sparks damage? So it’s basically just trying to get past another heal mechanic (because that worked so well in CoF Path 1), but it’s like the boss is resetting endlessly and progress is impossible. Eventually after an hour of fighting the boss (no wipes, same engage) I DC’d. I was unable to get back into the party instance (why can’t this game get you back in the correct instance when it bugs?) after 30 minutes of fighting. They were still fighting the boss. We called it quits. Considering the trend this was probably the last boss (or second to) in the dungeon no less.
The dungeon was nothing but a frustrating experience the entire time. I like challenge, but the dungeon did not provide it with the exception of trash pulls and Giganticus Lupicus (who is found in all paths anyway). There is absolutely no reason to do this path over the Forgotten one as that path can be done in half the time (less trash, less bosses) without bugs and much more amusing boss fights for the same amount of shards anyway. This entire paths needs a complete rework.
Aside from the two bugged paths in Citadel of Flame this was the last dungeon path I needed for my Master Dungeon Explorer title, and considering I’ve done Citadel of Flame paths too up to the end boss in Path 1 (who regenerates far too fast due to crystals spawning way too fast to bring down with anything but a combination of 4 Rangers/Warriors and a Mesmer) or Path 3 where you actually kill the boss but aren’t awarded dungeon completion I’ve basically done every single explorable.
I could go on and on about the health of literally everything in any dungeon and ridiculous amount of trash spawns (most of which can be skipped by simply running past it) and how dungeons aren’t balanced at all and every dungeon has an easier “farm” path. It’s painfully obvious these dungeons weren’t well play tested. Overall the Arah paths are all too long, but Forgotten is the most acceptable all of them. Let’s talk about Seer, the worst of them.
The trash in Arah is hard. It’s challenging. This is a good thing. In the Seer path you have some of the hardest trash packs, with 2 hunters + mage + illusionist. It’s ridiculously easy to split these packs though, and the majority of the time we wound up doing that. There is also a lot of trash that is a pushover such as the Gorillas and Spiders (no Champion versions show up in this Arah path that can party wipe, the sliver elite and hatchlings can’t possibly wipe a party) that really serve no purpose other than to delay you. This could definitely be removed. The trash leading up to Giganticus (which is the same on all paths except Seer has non-Champion versions of the Abominations) is ridiculous and serves no purpose other than to delay you for 30 minutes (which you cannot avoid) and can’t really wipe you as they are all single pulls. Keep in mind between each boss there is multiple rooms of trash that takes ~30 minutes to clear or 2 minutes to run past.
The first boss is a Priest of Balthazar. The hounds of Balthazar can’t really wipe a party out and again seem to serve no purpose other than to force you spend 10 minutes pounding on trash with too much health. The Priest himself serves no challenge whatsoever, with a whooping one ability used throughout the fight (2 if you count the fire raining down throughout the fight) which is the Warrior skill we coined “Spin to Win”. Just dodge roll it and proceed to fight against his health bar for 15 minutes. Extremely boring and poorly designed. Your reward for the effort? 1 Shard of Zhaitan.
The second boss Melandru is even more of a joke. There are multiple places in the room where you can avoid all the damage throughout the entire fight. Sit in one place and AFK for 20 minutes as your attack slowly picks away at the ridiculously large health pool. Collect your other single Shard of Zhaitan.
Next you have Lyssa, but first you have to deal with the bug where the script where the NPC is suppose to blow up the wall bugs out. Graphically, the wall explodes, but you can’t walk through the walk and are forced to glitch your way through another area of the instance to get past. Yes, we had to exploit to get to the next boss because the script bugged out. We spent an hour figuring that out.
So after clearing through another hour of trash you are finally at Giganticus who is in fact a well designed encounter. It’s probably the most fun fight in the game, though it does suffer from the same problem this game has everywhere and he has way too much health. It’s a 15-20 minute fight when done properly and can easily wipe your group and take a while getting used to. I have no qualms here, and you are actually awarded 4 Shards for your effort.
We were clearing through more trash and took out the anti-air cannons event, which surprisingly awarded 4 Shards even though it was easier than most other areas in the instance? Well, at least we got something for clearing trash for a change.
Legendary Weapon "Rodgort" won't craft despite accepting all 4 materials as valid.
Posted by: AIMonster.8236
Yes, I understand how the Mystic Forge works; however there is no indication of numbers being incorrect on any of the mats. They aren’t showing amounts at all like other recipes.
Legendary Weapon "Rodgort" won't craft despite accepting all 4 materials as valid.
Posted by: AIMonster.8236
I understand it might be more involved; however the mystic forge acted like it was a valid recipe in that none of the 4 ingredients were greyed out when I put them in. I put in the torch, bloodstone, gift, and the other ingredient all without them ever greying out so it should be a valid recipe even if it isn’t the first step or it’s a bug with the mystic forge if it isn’t.
Legendary Weapon "Rodgort" won't craft despite accepting all 4 materials as valid.
Posted by: AIMonster.8236
I don’t want to reveal the recipe here, but when I put in 4 valid combinations (which includes a gift + bloodstone shard + Rodgort’s Flame of Rage weapon and one other material I won’t reveal) it shows as a valid recipe, but forge is greyed out. When I put in the 3 materials (gift, +one I won’t reveal + bloodstone shard) the Rodgort’s Flame of Rage shows as valid for the 4th material while everything else in my inventory is greyed out, but yet when I try to forge it nothing happens. If a dev can contact me via PM I’ll be happy to reveal the full combination I’m trying to forge, but it shows the 4th material Rodgort’s Flame of Rage is valid. Is it because I equipped Rodgort’s Flame of Rage that I’m unable to forge the item, if so I can just buy another one.