Guild Wars 2

misterdevious.6482:

The one thing about aspects is that they would seem to not work with pet traits and skills (Empathic Bond for example). How hard would it be to balance aspects that temporarily remove the pet versus a passive pet kept near you that provided support skills? Aspects could be cool, temporarily merging pet and player, and could temporarily remove all the pet problems, but having pets that provide support effects in passive mode would appear to be a solution with fewer conflicts with the traits and skills we already have.

Here’s my post from a few pages back on a way that pets could be used as non-combat support: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Collaborative-Development-Ranger-Profession/3749922

I don’t see why they should conflict. Have them key off the pet swap traits and you’re halfway there. Then just tune the traits that directly affect the pet to do something to enhance aspects (for your example, empathic bond could increase ranger’s boon duration while under an aspect).

Also there’s this angle – if we did aspects it could be turned into a cool, permanent part of the class. If we just give up on pets and make them passive buff bots then that could eventually be reverted once they finally get around to fixing pet AI.

Angela Ranna.5638:

I think this is a good point – perhaps if the trait lines were less scattered it would reduce the feeling of having to trait to make things useful. You’d have more “spare” trait points to create build diversity, rather than having to trait 20-30 into two lines to focus on one thing.

On the other hand, for the sake of PvP it would be nice to split the defensive traits out of Wilderness Survivial a bit more. Perhaps split them between Nature Magic, or maybe even make some minor skirmishing defensive traits. Right now it suffers from the opposite problem of trait dislexia – every build that has some defense in it must max this line because it has the only defensive options.

Iason Evan.3806:

Thanks for all the hard work Allie! My biggest concern outside the pet situation is the traits. I will give a few examples. Traps are in the Precision/Crit line. Problem? They do condition damage. Traps should be in the trait line that affects condition damage.

There are pet skills through out all the lines. Shouts for Ranger only affect pets doing things but are in the healing/vitality line. The GM trait in the Vitality Line number XII is for a shout. I have to spend 30 points in the vitality line if I want effects for my shouts. It renders a high damage build useless because of it.

Speed for pets is in the crit line but should be in the beast mastery line. Rangers are skirmishers, but if I want to add range to my longbow I have to spec into a master trait and it is in a wholly different line than the recharge reduction trait for Longbow.

What I am getting at is that the traits don’t feel focused enough. There are myriad other examples too. Those are just the ones off the top of my head as I am not at a place where I can log in to the game to give more focused feedback atm.

As per your comment about stowing pets not being off the table, I would at the end of the day really like to see the ability to stow pets. I really think the AI is a liability.

I think this is a good point – perhaps if the trait lines were less scattered it would reduce the feeling of having to trait to make things useful. You’d have more “spare” trait points to create build diversity, rather than having to trait 20-30 into two lines to focus on one thing.

RoyHarmon.5398:

I think what he meant was that if you gave the ranger an appropriate stat boost only while the pet was stowed, then there would be no need to rebalance in the first place.

No, I think she got it. What she was saying was a straight stat boost would be hard to balance between pet vs non-pet vs other classes. On the other hand unique effects for stowing the pets (ie aspects) is more lateral power and thus easier to make competitive, each having its own niche.

Substance E.4852:

We already have serpent’s strike and stalkers strike that both function better as dodges. We need a gap closer on the sword.

The best option would be to reverse the order and then remove the time limit on the second skill. You can close the gap at the start and hit some nice damage and then you have a retreat skill in reserve if you need it since we don’t need to spam gap closers with the cripple on the auto.

It gives us the best of both without any sacrifice.

Well, you need some kind of limit on the second skill, otherwise you’d have to use it before being able to leap again. But I’d agree that increasing the timeout to 5-7 sec would work.

Atherakhia.4086:

In addition to the above utility issues related mostly to traits, we also have these problems:

Sharpening Stone: While not dependent on traits like a lot of our utility skills, this skill is incredibly weak for what it provides and the cooldown attached to it. 45 seconds is comparable to what other similar utility skills have, but a bleed stack is far inferior to things like stacking immobilize or chill. Why not increase crit chance too? Apply vulnerability? Something…

Protect Me: Also not dependent on traits as you requested, but a bad utility skill nonetheless. In WvW, there is never going to be a scenario outside of roaming where this utility will work. The pet is often dead to begin with, let alone in a position to take this kind of damage (considering a cleave would likely be hitting the pet and redirect damage from you to the pet).

Lightning Reflexes: This utility skill needs NEEDS NEEDS to break immobilize and chill. I’m also left wondering why it does such poor damage and also only hits 3 targets where most other AE utility skills hit 5?

Quickening Zephyr: Quickness has lost a lot of its punch since the nerf to things like shortbow attack speed and the drop to 50% speed. Considering this class is so weak in the condi removal area, attaching some condi cleanse on this would help bring it up to par.

I forgot about my rant on protect me…yeah, this is basically a death sentence and I’d like to see it changed to maybe take 50% damage and grant it protection or something like that.

Instead of increasing the damage and targets of lightning reflexes, how about adding immob/chill removal and removing the damage entirely? I never understood why a panic button skill puts you into combat.

Condi cleanse on quickening zephyr seems strange…maybe just increase the duration or reduce the healing reduction. Although we’d have to keep an eye on this if pets ever get buffed or their AI fixed, because it makes them hit like a truck, too.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Also, I don’t want this thread to be entirely about pets. We’ve seen a ton of great feedback about them, and I would like to hear more about utilities that need help (and aren’t viable unless spec’d into) as I haven’t seen as much on that front!

Thanks all

Woot, these 2 posts are the kind of red text I was hoping for. Acknowledge good ideas, give dev reasons for or against, then call out what direction you want to see the thread go.

Shouts
All – I liked the idea about giving nature’s voice a different buff for each shout. That would make it much more appealing.
Guard – I don’t see the point of ground targeting or stealth. I’d rather see it as a pet survivability skill, giving them protection and maybe evade frames.
Search and Rescue – CD is so high
Sic ’Em – CD is so high (and buggy, so hard to get damage buff to stick)

Signets
All – if we can swap it so rangers always are affected I think that would be enough to make these desirable. A grandmaster trait to make passives persist would also be good, since none of the passives are hugely powerful. If that happened maybe also move Beastmaster’s Might and Signet of the Beastmaster down a tier.
Signet of Removal – just feels weak. Too often it will remove a cripple with 0.5 seconds remaining rather than the 25 stack of bleed. If it had priorities that would make it much better. This might also be a target to make its passive persist regardless of a trait.

Spirits
All – trigger effects could be proc’d more often, with vigorous spirits maybe moved to tier 2 and increased to 90% chance if spirits become untargetable. Other than that these are doing pretty good now.

Wilderness Survivial
Sharpening stone – the only DPS utility we have outside of traps, this definitely feels weak for its slot. A reduced CD and applying all the bleeds in one shot would go a long way for this. Or maybe we could add another effect, like cripple, to it?

Traps
All – I’d love to see them get the necro marks treatment. Increase their default range, then have their traited range even larger or change it to give them duration increase or some such. For PBAoE, the only AoE the ranger has outside of longbow or melee cleave, and having a cast time, the radius of traps leaves much to be desired when they’re not traited. Increase of base damages across the board could be helpful, but maybe unnecessary if these are in a better trait line.
Frost – adding a base damage would be lovely, even if it’s small like viper’s. Right now the chill duration is only 5s on a 24-30 second cooldown, which is handily beat by axe 3. Reducing its cooldown is dangerous since chill is so powerful, so I think the base damage route would be better.

Ision.3207:

Oh NO, oh God Allie …. while I agree with you wholly…. I wish you hadn’t of posted that, because the thread had just recovered a bit from the “pet is 100% broken useless crowd”, and was becoming more constructive. Your post will simply launch the same set of folks into their endless mantra of “pets sux, we need more dps, pets sux, we need more dps, pets sux, we need more dps ….”

;-)

Anyway thanks for your excellent post. And good luck to you … you’re going to need it!

I mean, pets are kind of an important part of the ranger, so it’s valid that it would take up so much discussion time. But yeah, we know it’s busted and it’d be nice to talk about something else.

I’d still like to push the conversation towards more new ideas of cool mechanics or themes for the ranger. Aspects and poison traits were the best two that I noticed. We have plenty of discussion hashing over what’s broken and potential solutions, let’s make some crazy ideas about cool ranger mechanics.

Like how about giving rangers a charm utility? How cool would it be to make a temporary ally out of trash mobs.

ItIsFinished.9462:

Can you imagine every new player starting GW2 for the first time picking a new class, they go through their options, “Oooh, clones! Wait, Stealth mechanic?? Attunements and summoned weapons!! Huh whats this, Ranger, wait whats its specialty/class mechanic?” Hops on ranger forums and asks community what makes it special, gets the answer of “5 people wanted there mechanic gone to do more damage”…..

I know poorly written, its lunch time…

Unfortunately I can imagine it. It’s an unfortunate effect of two years (including betas) of unfulfilled promises to fix the pet AI. I too would love to just have an improved AI, but Chris Whiteside said it was too big a project to handle in the near future. So until they can finally get around to fixing it, I’d like to see rangers do competitive amounts of damage by shifting dps balance away from the pet.

If something else was done with pets, like the aspects idea, that would work, too.

ItIsFinished.9462:

Thanks for the replies Allie. I’m not sure why the same people who keep harping on you about giving the ranger back their 100% damage arguments won’t concur. Keep in mind a few of them have admitted not stepping foot in PVP aspects of the game. Over on the Ranger forum, I can’t guarantee 90%+ of them want the pet to stay along with there mechanics, just on an improved AI level, which is what you stated a few pages back. The discussions should be about ideas on making this happen, rather than bringing up this stow pet 100% damage idea.

I think most people are fine with the pet staying, but especially in pvp where they’re kited just in normal play it’s awful being balanced around the pet doing so much of our damage. In pvp they can’t hit spit, so our dps is consistently lower.

There are two versions of people who want the pet to go – those who just want to play ranger without a pet, and those who just want to realize our damage by not relying on the busted pet AI (which we’ve been told won’t be fixed any time soon). The first is thematic and up for debate, but ANet has said they don’t agree with it. The second is a real problem with a real solution, at least until AI is fixed.

Flytrap.8075:

And no matter what pet I pick, it’s still going to be hindered by terrible AI, sluggish timing, and poor survivability.

Why is Ranger the only class that has to make such a sacrifice? The longer I think about the 70:30 damage split, the more I’m against it. ANet would have to make significant improvements to the pet AI for it to be justified in my eyes, and even then, pets would still suffer in WvW.

I think this is the real point. Every class is balanced around their mechanic, but our balancing is around a mechanic that is mostly not producing its estimated DPS. Thus our realized DPS is almost always lower than what we’re balanced around, especially when compared to other classes.

Until pet AI is significantly improved, or pets are changed such that it’s no longer an issue (aspects yummy) we really need to either have a larger portion of the damage on the ranger or global base damage buffs to be competitive with other classes.

Akisame.9508:

Thank you for the summary post, however, I did not see anything in there pertaining to WvWvW. We still have the problem of them dieing way to fast in zerg vs zerg. And we also have the large issue of us loosing 30% of our damage when defending or taking a keep/fort because pet’s will not scale up or down the walls. This includes the birds which will not fly up or down the wall to attack the targets. The only way I can see to combat this would be to have pets like all over class mechanics, an addition to our damage, not taking away from our damage. For instance, warriors get to do 100% of their damage and if they have full adrenaline they do an extra 15% damage. Ranger should be set up the same way with pets. Ranger’s should have 100% control of their damage and the pet, while alive, should be able to deal an extra 15% damage. If the pet is dead then it deals no extra damage like warriors with no adrenaline will deal no extra damage. We will still have the problem of the pets not being able to hit a moving target but at least the ranger will no longer have this handicap on them.

Thing is, warriors have to build adrenaline to have that bonus damage, and they have plenty of incentive to spend it. In many scenarios ranger pet DPS is always up, so ranger base DPS has to be lower or they’d outshine other classes.

That said, pet DPS is much more often down than intended (dead, inactive to prevent dying, can’t hit spit with default creature AI, etc.), so I wouldn’t mind a band-aid to either boost pet or ranger base damages across the board to account for this. At least until pets are closer to 100% uptime.

Specific Game Mode
WvW

Proposal Overview
Change Path of Scars (axe offhand 4) to fly like a normal projectile.

Goal of Proposal
Give rangers a usable pull, allowing them to yank people off walls.

Proposal Functionality
Currently path of scars does some kind of weird terrain tracking instead of flying like a normal projectile, almost like mesmer staff auto attack except more unpredictable. Thus it’s basically impossible to use it over differences in terrain, and completely impossible to use it to pull people off walls (gives out of range error). Giving this ability to rangers would give them a desirable tool in WvW.

Associated Risks
Having more wall pulls could be frustrating in WvW. However this would still be a projectile and thus still require LoS, so it would be usable less often than the normal wall pulls from mesmers and guardians.

Gotejjeken.1267:

Just thought of another proposal:

Specific Game Mode
WvW

Proposal Overview
Shortbow #3 gives stability as well as swiftness.

Goal of Proposal
To give ranger another way to access stability other than burning the elite, and to provide a way to flee a situation without getting stun-locked. Stability duration could be 1-2s, which is more than enough time to get in a better position. Also would make the shortbow a more viable weapon to take and promote the idea of skirmishing by letting one get in and out of a fight at will.

Proposal Functionality
Shortbow #3 + stability

Associated Risks
None really.

I like the idea of giving rangers more stability, but SB3 already gives about a second and a half of evade, so this wouldn’t do much unless it activated after the evade frames.

Maybe another weapon skill would be a better choice? Or how about a moa with a stability screech?

Angela Ranna.5638:

Allie Murdock.8152:

I didn’t say Rangers are in the right spot. I just meant that we have to be very careful of the power creep.

The discussion started as how to help make the ranger more desirable, because it’s perceived as the weakest class. That implies a discussion of ranger buffs. But it seems like we’re getting a bit derailed here, talking about how the preference is not to buff rangers, but bring everyone else in line.

Do we instead want to direct conversation towards just interesting directions to take rangers? We can do that too, and it may be a more productive direction if we’ll meet only resistance suggesting buffs.

Also I think at this point in the thread we’ve hashed out the fixes that need the most attention plenty of times, so perhaps we should look to close the discussion or take it in a new direction.

Allie Murdock.8152:

I didn’t say Rangers are in the right spot. I just meant that we have to be very careful of the power creep.

The discussion started as how to help make the ranger more desirable, because it’s perceived as the weakest class. That implies a discussion of ranger buffs. But it seems like we’re getting a bit derailed here, talking about how the preference is not to buff rangers, but bring everyone else in line.

Do we instead want to direct conversation towards just interesting directions to take rangers? We can do that too, and it may be a more productive direction if we’ll meet only resistance suggesting buffs.

Karl McLain.5604:

mtpelion.4562:

Wilderness experts should be masters of poisons. Therefore, Rangers should have the most potent poisons available.

Great point here and I agree. I would be awesome to see a way to increase poison potency for the Ranger and it’s something we’ve been talking about internally as well. We’ll keep looking into it and see if there’s something that can happen here.

Mechanically I love this idea. Thematically I would have pegged thieves as the poisoners. Of the 15 poison skills rangers have access to, only 4 of them aren’t on our pets.

To make it really stick it would need a lot of traits and class balancing to support it.

Atherakhia.4086:

Right there should be some benefit for losing it, and I’m fine with losing it… I’m just not the biggest fan of simply giving us a passive damage increase and things of that nature. Since I almost exclusively play a (long)bow ranger, a great deal of my time is circle strafing with auto attack on while I wait to see which of us dies of boredom first. Something needs to be done to make the class exciting to play and removing one of the few interactive things we have in favor of a passive damage buff is a little underwhelming.

What about having incentives to swap aspects, just like swapping pets? Also it’s not necessary to have the same +x% damage on aspect, could be tied directly to the pet actives. Red moa could grant a short fury buff and a small, permanent crit damage buff. Brown bear could be a stun breaker and a small condition duration reduction. And it’s not limited to passives, what about polar bear gives a second aoe chill roar to the ranger?

Atherakhia.4086:

Right, but this is the problem with this whole CDI thread and something that has been brought up several times now. Do we make suggestions with the assumption that ANet can get pets into a place that they actually work? Do we make suggestions to work around the problem they currently have? Or do we make suggestions as if the pets should be phased out?

The suggestion I made is working under the assumption that pets will at some point be functional in larger group settings. The faults of the pets in PvE and sPvP are pretty over stated to be honest and given the short cooldowns on spirits, the idea of shifting them to the pet as opposed to independent objects on the battlefield would end up being a positive thing for the game and class as a whole IMO. WvW continues to be the problem.

Now as for Allie’s specific request… there are 2 ways to approach it. You can simply make the spirits ‘posses’ the Ranger as opposed to the pet and make them ‘companions’ that follow the Ranger around and remain untargettable (until you shed one in which case you need to DPS them down much like a Mesmer Phantasm per a previous posters concern). This fits your ‘Ranger in control’ issue.

Alternatively, you could simply look at the permanent pet as our ‘spirit guide’ and it is capable of taking on the various spirit aspects. Alternative F2 functionIn another thread on the Ranger forum eons ago, this tied into a 'workaround' to the F2 problem where the F2 function for the pets was replaced entirely and when a player hits F2 it simply spawns a 'spirit' at your pets location (a neon blue version of your current pet like the Spirit Wolf when using the Horns) and .5 seconds later it 'detonated', turned into a blue ball and did whatever the F2 function normally does. AE howl, turns into a beam of light (guardian down state #1 for example) and hits the opponent etc.. This way you could simply turn the pets eyes various colors indicating what spirit was currently on the pet.

Now if you want to scrap the entire idea of removing the spirits and simply try to approach the body blocking issue, the easiest solution is to simply make them ground targetted like banners and move the trait to make them mobile to a 30pt trait. Not ideal, but I think you’d find most people would be using spirits if they worked more like banners and would open up build diversity some as 30pts is out of reach and other more attractive options exist in other trees.

Are you proposing this as a solution to NPC clutter in WvW or for PvP? Your original post was for PvP and kind of confused me…spirit body blocking is a huge asset and is the only reason Spirits Unbound might be considered.

There’s always issues with making more actors available on the screen though, especially in WvW with so many already there, and ranger spirits are one offender. I’m just not sure this should be changed just because of WvW if necro minions, ele minions, and mes clones aren’t also handled some other way.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Many of you have suggested removing traps from the Skirmishing line. It seems the primary reason for this is because it is the crit line while traps are primarily focused on conditions.

Given the idea behind skirmishing (for Ranger, we expect them to be able to survive longer while whittling their opponent down), would it maybe make more sense to leave the traps there and perhaps swap the stats with a different line?

However you would then lose the on-crit drive that the skirmishing tree has. And where would the crit stats go then? Marksmanship might make sense but then our trees would look almost identical to thieves in stats, which may or may not be a good thing. Wilderness Survival would be a natural choice for the PvP meta, but wouldn’t make much sense for other content.

Not that it’s a bad idea, just playing devil’s advocate for a second.

Allie Murdock.8152:

mtpelion.4562:

snip

When Stowed, the ranger should gain the “Aspect of the [pet name]” effect, which provides unique buffs based on the pet family and specific pet.

mtpelion.4562, you have some really great ideas in your posts. I noticed your sentiments about Ranger pets right now are shared by a lot of the community here. The quote is an idea in particular struck me as interesting.

If we weren’t able to have an option to keep the pet permanently stowed, would having an option like you suggested make it feel better to toggle the pet? It seems like the kind of thing that you could develop a strategy around (pet could be out for one reason, then you switch it up to catch opponent off-guard).

I’m glad you posted this, otherwise I would have missed it. This could work really well…think Udyr with a powerful short-term buff based on the pet and a permanent, weaker buff as long as it’s stored.

This could open up a lot of interesting synergy with Master’s Bond and the pet swap traits. Compact the training buffs into one and add traits based around swapping into aspects. Keep the cooldowns global, so you have to choose between gaining the short and powerful aspect buff or swapping to the other pet and proccing things like Mighty Swap.

I very much like where this is headed, though I can see problems with hotkeys. We already lost the binding for aggressive/passive; where would we bind this new aspect swap?

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

A few of you mentioned disappointment at the lack of response so far in this thread. Yesterday was an extremely busy day for me to be actively participating in the thread, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to get the thread going.

I’ll be spending most of my day today just going over this thread and summarizing some of the ideas. I’ll try and get some of the guys in here as well to comment on specific feedback!

Please be patient, the thread hasn’t even been up for a full day!

Thanks

Perhaps I can help with the summarization part. These are the issues I’ve seen crop up the most, with hopefully a general view of their proposed solutions.

1) Pets. They have problems hitting moving targets, the pet commands still feel unresponsive, and only high levels of micro management can keep them from being quickly killed in WvW and large scale content. Additionally pets are a large part of a ranger’s power budget, and because of the above points rangers often feel weaker than other classes.
-Solutions generally revolve around reworking pet AI , buffing pets to the point where their weaknesses are compensated for, or making them a non-issue with permanent storage or more utility focus instead of dps focus.

2) Traits. Traits are often in strange places in relation to their tree (traps in the crit line, pet traits scattered all over) and there’s lots of competition for major slots with almost no competition in minor and grandmaster traits (marksmanship being a big offender).
-Solutions generally involve moving traits and stat points such that they synergize better with eachother.

3) Utilities. Ranger utilities feel generally underwhelming without specializing for a certain family. This limits both your tree choice and your utility choice, since once you’ve specialized other utilities perform far worse than the ones you’ve traited for.
-This issue is often mentioned in the same line as #2, so the solutions are worked together. This might also be addressed with moving the power budget of utilities away from the master and grandmaster traits, either making more available at the first tier or baking them into the utilities.

4) Weapons. Ranger weapons often overlap in their purpose – greatsword is supposed to be the defensive option but sword has so many evades it can be better (especially if sword 1 chain is fixed), longbow is supposed to be power oriented but benefits a lot from condition duration, axe is supposed to be for mid range aoe but piercing arrows and melee cleave eclipse it.
-Many different possible solutions here, but the general consensus is that ranger weapons want for more definition on when each should be used. Offhands might be the least suspect in this category as they’re rarely mentioned.

5) Team support. Outside of spirits rangers have little that is usually considered team support, and all spirits except frost overlap with other classes that provide buffs better (guardian virtues almost completely negate sun spirit and stone spirit passives). Mostly this revolves around having limited access to traditional team buffs (only one blast finisher, weak pet actives for buffs vs their cooldown, only one weapon skill that grants buffs). A similar/related issue is their lack of aoe burst, something that’s valuable in both large-scale WvW and dungeons/fractals.
-Not a lot of proposed solutions here, and of them not much consensus. The most common is giving greatsword 2 a blast finisher.

Specific Game Mode
PvE

Proposal Overview
Increase the time available to activate Monarch’s Leap.

Goal of Proposal
Allow use of one or two skills between the activation of Hornet’s Sting and Monarch’s leap. Currently ML deactivates after 2.5 seconds, which is about the same time to use just one skill between animation times, casting times, and latency, thus there’s little to no opportunity to use this skill as anything other than an immediate reactivation.

Proposal Functionality
Increase the deactivation time of Monarch’s Leap to 5 seconds to allow the casting of one to two skills between casting Hornet’s Sting and ML.

Associated Risks
Low risk – quality of life improvement. Small risk in being able to hold a gap closer for longer than before, especially in pvp.

Specific Game Mode
PvE

Proposal Overview
Add condition removal to shouts through a new trait.

Goal of Proposal
Increase the desirability of shouts to rangers and add access to condition cleansing.

Proposal Functionality
Add a new master-tier trait to remove one condition from the pet and ranger when shouting, or a grandmaster-tier trait to remove one condition from allies in range (maybe to replace current nature’s voice). This trait would likely fit best in wilderness survival or beastmastery.

Associated Risks
Synergy with nature’s voice making shouts too powerful, especially in pvp.

Specific Game Mode
PvE

Proposal Overview
Make special buffs persist through pet swaps.

Goal of Proposal
Increase the effectiveness of these special buffs in certain edge cases, such as when the pet must be swapped for survival and in some clever swap uses (like chaining CC to get MoC procs, which are lost for the pet each swap).

Proposal Functionality
Rampage as One, Signet actives, and MoC procs will persist to the new pet when they’re swapped. Normal buffs (might, swiftness, etc) will continue to be erased for balance purposes and potential abuse prevention.

Associated Risks
Low risk of impact, this is mostly a quality of life thing for having to swap to keep the pet alive and to eke out a little more dps with clever swapping strategies.

Specific Game Mode
PvE

Proposal Overview
Change Guard! to not be ground-targeted, remove its stealth component, and reduce protection duration. Change Protect Me! to grant pet protection, only redirect a portion of damage to the pet, and reduce its cooldown.

Goal of Proposal
Make these two shouts more desirable as utility skills, when compared with other ranger utilities. Guard! can be used to help the pet’s survivability, while Protect Me! will be changed to no longer be a death sentence for the pet.

Proposal Functionality
Guard! fulfills its roll of being the low cooldown survivability shout for the pet, but the ground targeting forces the pet to stop attacking and reset its AI. The stealth provides little utility, so removing it should help in balancing.

Protect Me! is currently used as a poor man’s block, but is basically a death sentence for everything it’s useful for, sacrificing the ranger’s DPS and utility. These changes will hopefully make the skill more desirable.

Associated Risks
Synergy with Nature’s Voice making these skills extremely powerful, Protect Me! is a stun breaker which can’t be on too low of a cooldown.

Specific Game Mode
PvE (primary mode of play, changes should apply to all modes)

Proposal Overview
Swap quickdraw and spotter.

Goal of Proposal
Move a bow-focused trait to the marksmanship line, and a crit-focused trait to the skirmishing line.

Proposal Functionality
Provides more cohesion between these two traits and the trees they’re in.

Associated Risks
Additional critical chance in a line that already offers crit as its focus, additional overloading of the marksmanship major trait slot.

Specific Game Mode
PvE (primary mode of play, changes should apply to all modes)

Proposal Overview
Move traps to the Wilderness Survival tree and swap condition damage & duration in the trait lines.

Goal of Proposal
Resolve poor synergy in trap builds between stats and trap purpose.

Proposal Functionality
Puts traps in a line that augments conditions, which are the primary purpose of traps. Gives trap builds condition duration instead of damage since not all traps are built for damage (frost, viper’s nest).

Associated Risks
Balance of traps with different stat allocations, overloading of the wilderness survival tree, underloading of skirmishing.

Yes please, bring Cantha back!

A very interesting question. I think the answer lies in the details on this one.

If the two just happen to meet in the middle of LA, with no prior knowledge of engaging eachother, then the mesmer is more likely to have a build that will be capable of handling the ranger. The generic builds I play in both PvE and PvP would fail miserably at handling a chance encounter with something like a shatter build or phantasm spam.

If they know ahead of time, and they know how to counter eachother well, I think the ranger will win. I find mesmers very gimmicky, and if you figure out what build they’re running and dodge, heal, kill clones, and CC effectively then they’re a piece of cake to shut down. Plus a build made around countering mesmers is much more effective than a build made around countering rangers, since rangers are the masters of hybrid and can shift their fighting style mid-fight much easier.

In a purely hypothetical, slightly RP situation where both classes have access to EVERYTHING, it’s really a toss-up of who gets the jump first. A mesmer with a heads-up can just reflect, shatter, and wtfdefense everything a ranger can throw at them, winning by attrition. Usually mesmer defenses are only kept in check by the fact that they can’t do all these things at once. Same with if they had a referee’d encounter where they both engaged at the same time. But a ranger getting a few free shots at the mesmer will pretty much guarantee they’re dead before they can react (QZ + shortbow/longbow + sic ’em + signet DPS actives + RaO + traps +…).

Excidium.6712:

I actually think that’s one of the many bad examples of trait distribution. Having both trap traits on the Skirmishing line is just poor design, Trap Potency should be in the Wilderness Survival line where it belongs.

Trait distribution is wonky, yes, and that’s part of why it’s focus #2 on JP’s hit list. But trait compaction is awesome. Necromancer minion builds need four traits in two lines. Death Shroud/Spectral builds require four traits in one line (i.e. it’s impossible to get all the talents for a complete Spectral build). Rangers are a great example of trait compaction, where we can get all the things that benefit certain builds best in very few talents. You’re absolutely right that those great compacted talents are usually located in weird places that don’t lend themselves to synergy with the rest of the build, however.

Gah, can’t edit post. Sorry for doubling up.

Also, many of our critical talents don’t work as intended or simply don’t work. For example the 30% pet speed in Skirmishing buffs pet speed by about 13%, and the increase boon/condition duration from pets simply doesn’t do anything. This is no different than other classes though.

We do have one good thing going for our talents – the trees are incredibly well compacted. Just look at the trap talents – they required 4 major slots in 2 trees during BWE, but now they’re just 2 slots in a single tree. Some builds in other classes, and some entire classes (like necro), don’t have this luxury.

As far as PvE and WvW goes (except in small, sPvP-like skirmishes in WvW with extremely talented players, which is rare), rangers are fine. We need some balance and bug fixes, but so does every class.

In PvP…pet AI has an incredibly difficult time landing hits because they can’t attack on the move. Since our DPS is balanced around the pet hitting, our DPS is significantly lower than pretty much everyone else (this can also be a nuisance in PvE, since if you’re kiting a mob in certain patterns the mob is effectively kiting your pet). Our talents end up being a weird jigsaw for many meta-oriented builds that don’t mesh as well as other classes. Spirits die to a stray sneeze even when talented, and with a 5-player cap on teams they don’t scale as well as in 8v8’s or WvW, so a lot of our support builds are very weak. Ranger signet effects are underwhelming compared to other classes’ signets. Projectile obstruction is an unbelievable headache because shortbow and longbow arrows don’t track like axes, thief shortbow, warrior rifle, or staff/scepter. Ranger weapon skills in general have a skill cap and return on scale with elementalist, so while it’s possible to be frighteningly powerful there are few players who achieve this mastery. And since elementalists don’t rely on spirits or pets for various aspects of builds they’re the favored skill-bound class at the moment.

So yeah, rangers could use some love in pvp. Thankfully JP has stated that their first foci for rangers are fixing pet stationary attacks and making our talents mesh better. If these two things are ironed out I firmly believe that rangers will be a force to be reckoned with in PvP as well. If they ironed out the rest of the issues without also fixing the other classes’ various problems we’d be everyone’s worst nightmare.

As above – unless you spec entirely for healing power and regen time the return on point investment is pretty awful. So unless you have a very specific reason for doing it (healing spring spam for a camp trolling group in WvW comes to mind) you’ll often get way more out of some toughness, Companion’s Defense, or Bark Skin.

So I got to thinking…why only do a single buff to spirits and not even buff their limiting factors?

Here’s my thought – Greatsword. In the BWEs greatsword/spirit rangers were absolute terrors. Half of that was because of GS damage, but the other half was that spirit spammers were ridiculously hard to kill and were ludicrously valuable resources in teamfights. Since GS got such a huge defensive buff, perhaps JP&co didn’t want to buff spirits at the same time and return to invincible spirit spammer builds. As with Psychrome’s post, we’re already seeing much tankier builds involving rangers and GS, so it’s no long shot to believe that large buffs to spirits would recreate the super tanks.

So perhaps the next balance patch will see ANet continuing to delicately tweak spirits, and perhaps then they’ll be viable without making other classes bow to their spirit spammer overlords again. And perhaps signets afterwards? Time will tell.

Have you tried taking out the skirmishing points and grabbing Bark Skin? If you’re using dogs it’s mostly for the CC which rarely misses, and if you’re using birds their attack uptime is high even without Agility Training. Bark Skin might give you even more tankiness in exchange for dog attack uptime.

Seems to be related to uneven terrain. Already in the bug report thread at the top of the page.

I think I got this one worked out. You must have quickness up before starting the stomp. Then, for the animation to match, you must have little to no lag and have quickness up for the entire duration of the stomp.

If quickness runs out partway through the time is cut appropriately, but the animation still runs at 2x speed. For instance, if quickness runs out halfway through your stomp animation the buff only doubles the speed of 50% of the cast, for a total of 75% base cast time instead of 50% cast time. Thus the animation is done in one second but the stomp finishes half a second later.

garethh.3518:

One gap closer on a 12s CD isn’t good mobility.

Nine seconds traited.

Not saying I think work on the GS is done, I still think the dps all around could use a teensy boost to damage, like 5%ish.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the evade on the autoattack third chain. So totally a defense/utility weapon. But now it feels less like a utility toy with a huge arc and more like a real defensive tool, competitive with sword/dagger.

Longbow #5+Zephyr’s speed is the single strongest aoe spike in the game, short of landing a bunch of meteor shower hits, and comes with a decent cripple.

Its #4 is the furthest-distance knockback in the game at point-blank range and competes with all other knockbacks at all ranges. Oh, and 12 second CD traited.

The #3 is the strongest (single-attack) source of vulnerability in the game. We can keep the 10-stack up indefinitely and even hit a 20-stack for a few seconds if it’s traited.

Finally #2 does decent DPS while you’re closing in/backing away to use 3-5.

Seems to me that longbow’s doing pretty well. It is weird that shortbow out-DPS’s longbow in every build, but that’s probably a nerf to shortbow direct damage+buff to bleed rather than a fault of the longbow.

Might try turning off any background streaming you have. I noticed a similar bug preventing me from getting into the Eternal Battlegrounds puzzle, and the solution was to turn off my streaming music. Once I loaded into the zone I could turn it back on.

One guildy also had problems when Mumble was turned on. Worth a shot, at least.

Lies. Just traited it and flame trap went from 15s to 12s, barbed from 25s to 20s, and frost from 30s to 24s.

Tested, cooldown reduction trait seems to work. 12 second CD on flame trap.

Iz fixxored nao.

GS is hardly a damage weapon, ever since bwe2. But it now has an aoe bleed with decent damage on 2, a good gap closer on 3, a fantastic block on 4, and a stun on 5. GS is utility much.

Edit Forgot to mention the evade while autoattacking. Awesome.

Consider taking 10-15 pts from BM and putting them into skirmishing or wilderness. Tier 2 and 3 BM traits are generally weak – you can get more damage out of skirmishing stuff or more defensive tools from wilderness. And all the trap-specific stuff is in skirmishing, so there’s that. The 10 pts in nature might be better in wilderness, or get 15 pts in nature for the pet buffs. Especially with RaO the 15pt nature trait is pretty sweet. Also note that the trait in nature that increases pet buff duration doesn’t currently work, if that’s the one you wanted.

Other than that the build should be pretty decent. Nothing wrong with those sigils, weapons, or skills.

Looks like spear #4 can be used on the move now, too, and it blocks all ranged attacks until something’s in range to kick. Unless it could always be used on the move and I just don’t remember.

That greatsword #4 change is a way bigger buff than anyone thought. It’s either a 3 second block against ALL ranged attacks (16 second cooldown traited), or if anyone gets into melee range and hits you it’s a knockback. Plus you’re mobile for the entire 3 seconds.

Kthxbai.

The post says they have 2 DESIGNERS working on their stuff. More than that I can easily see leading to a “too many cooks” situation. No doubt they have a fleet of QA and bug fixers working on stuff, and we don’t know how many programmers are actually implementing the designers’ ideas or how many they need. If it’s well-built code, maybe the designers can even implement the design changes themselves so the programmers can work on expansions and stuff.

Chill dudes, 2 designers is fine.

Let me see if I can shed some small positive reflection on this patch day. If the devs do end up overhauling the systems JP mentions, then we could be in a really strong place:

JonPeters.5630:

pets ability to hit moving targets

If this one thing was fixed it would be an incredible buff to rangers. A glass cannon ranger easily does the most pressure DPS in the game when you count the pet, and in every other build the pet can be used for a leg up in some aspect that other classes usually can’t achieve (example: beast mastery tank/damage builds). And this is on top of all the utility we bring with our weapons and pet skills. The only thing currently holding us back is that the pets can’t hit their targets.

JonPeters.5630:

trait lines with not enough viable choices

We’ve been saying this for a long time. Additionally, if the trait lines were changed enough then it could invalidate a ton of balance changes they spend time on now. So if this is the plan then I’m not surprised we haven’t seen anything yet. And when we do this will create many more “viable” builds.

JonPeters.5630:

skills that are often too specialized to really compliment the weapon builds

Yup. But again, from point #2 this would have to be completely reworked if they changed it now. Additionally this was supposedly the focus of this patch for rangers, which is where I think most of the sting comes from since there were no game-changing things done. This is another thing that could quickly create many more “viable” builds.

I’m still really disappointed, since every other class saw a really strong balance pass that should positively affect the game while rangers basically were left in the ditch. But if we see the things JP spoke to changed then we’ll (eventually) be a great class with fun mechanics – our DPS is fine with the pet factored in and every weapon has tons of utility baked in. But until these things are fixed I’ll keep twiddling my thumbs and struggling to master sPvP on hard mode.