Guild Wars 2

A while ago you could count on the drake pets that the first thing they would do is the blast finisher tail swipe.
With the pet improvements it seems that you changed it so that the drake pets won’t ever use tail swipe when there is only one enemy and even when it stands in front of one of the many Golems in the pvp-lobby where you can test AoE skills. It will only use it when it is walking to the golems. Once it stands in front of one of the many golems it won’t ever use it again.
Please change that back since Tail swipe is pretty much the most important skill on the drakes. Even against one enemy we need that skill as blast finisher and as damage skill.

I can confirm this. Happened to me twice. It got worse and worse – felt like 3-5fps instead of 40 or so. Had to close the client with task manager.
Using a GTX 760

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

All pet buff skills should affect the pet and Ranger by default before counting the 5 players. My $0.02.

Absolutely agree on that and if they think that can’t be done at the very least make it Player + pet + up to 4 other players/pets.

Pets F2 skills don’t priorize the rangers party which is very lackluster in WvW especially since even the ranger himself doesn’t get the pets buffs in a zerg. I played support ranger yesterday in a Zerg by using the red moa for good fury uptime and the blue moa for the nice protection but I very rarely got it even if the moa was definitely in the range. We had a 30-50man zerg and only if I stood exactly next to my moa (nearer than others) I got the buffs.
My team members which I wanted to buff mainly hardly every got any boon from my moa.
So it seems that the party priority for buffs was forgotten for ranger pets. I really ask you to fix this since thats pretty important for support rangers to be viable in WvW.
Pets which come to mind for party priority:
Red Moa fury, blue Moa protection, Brown Bear condition removal, Birds swiftness, Jungle Stalkers Might, Fern hound
Oh and Pig family buffs which are dropped to the ground can be taken by enemies which is pretty fail in WvW.
Would be nice if you could fix these bugs until HoT.

Pets F2 skills don’t priorize the rangers party which is very lackluster in WvW especially since even the ranger himself doesn’t get the pets buffs in a zerg. I played support ranger yesterday in a Zerg by using the red moa for good fury uptime and the blue moa for the nice protection but I very rarely got it even if the moa was definitely in the range. We had a 30-50man zerg and only if I stood exactly next to my moa (nearer than others) I got the buffs.
My team members which I wanted to buff mainly hardly every got any boon from my moa.
So it seems that the party priority for buffs was forgotten for ranger pets. I really ask you to fix this since thats pretty important for support rangers to be viable in WvW.
Pets which come to mind for party priority:
Red Moa fury, blue Moa protection, Brown Bear condition removal, Birds swiftness, Jungle Stalkers Might, Fern hound
Oh and Pig family buffs which are dropped to the ground can be taken by enemies which is pretty fail in WvW.
Would be nice if you could fix these bugs until HoT. I will also post this on the bugs forum but want it to be seen here too.

Don’t take away the evade frames from GS auto! That is one reason why I absolutely love the Ranger Greatsword. So awesome in WvW for roaming and zerging! If you just wanna add some damage thats fine but don’t take away any utiltiy/evade or whatever. I still think the GS #5 needs some improvement to be more reliable.

I have the hope that they decided that Spirits would fit the Druid so well that they reintroduce improved spirits for the druid class. If they don’t they failed really hard cause spirits as they are now are not even worth talking about.

I have found three bugs for ranger:
1) When using the Norn Elite Transformation Snow Leopard above 50% HP once you reach 50% HP with the Trait Enlargement (Use Signet of the Wild when your health drops below the threshold) your Elite will be immediately stopped. This makes the use of that combination pretty much impossible.
This bug might happen also with other transformations than Snow Leopard.
Fix: Gain the benefits from the trait as Snow Leopard and either let him stay at the same size or enlargen him but don’t stop the 30 sec duration elite.

2) This was described in the forums but didn’t show up here:
When you swap pets the new pet sometimes is dead. This means 15-20 sec of no pet + next pet swap is 48-60 seconds. This is one of the most horrible bugs for a ranger when it happens.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Swapping-to-dead-pet-on-occasion-Bug/first

3) Swoop back to old target
Sometimes my swoop skill will make me charge back to the last enemy which I had even though I didn’t have a target. When this happens I always check if I had a target and I didn’t have one.
This even happened to me when I hit a door in WvW from a keep then ran away and 50m further away without target and the door being behind a corner my character leaped back in direction of that door.
This bug can happen 5+ times a day to me. I have automatic target selection deactivated in my options. But since I don’t have a target after that leap back it is clearly not related to that option anyways.
In my opinion what happens here: if a target automatically gets deselected because its behind you or for any other reason the character still keeps that target in memory and when you use swoop you will charge back to the last target that you had.
This is also a major annoyment.

I don’t know the actual times for an automatic upgrade. But I could imagine if they made it take like 3 hours from each tier to the next without dolly that would be ok. It would mean to get stronger gates without dolyaks it would take 6 hours.
That way people will still want to make sure that dollys reach the towers/keeps.

But if an automatic upgrade from one tier to the next without any dolyaks reaching the tower/keep takes only 30min – 1 hour then roamers will have far less impact which takes fun from roamers.

If this happens even without transformations thats even worse than I thought. They will have to include some checks when switching pets to make sure the pet has 100% life. That would be the easiest fix if its hard to find the cause.

I had this bug for years when using my snow leopard elite. It seems to be caused by transformations. If your pet is dead and you transform the next time you use pet swap after the transformation you might get a dead pet.
With transformations I especially mean transformations which remove your pet like norn elites or what happened to others lately – using a golem in WvW.

Here are two old topics which I made long ago even with screenshots but noone cared.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Ranger-dead-pet-bug/first
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Pet-bug-dead-on-F4-1/first

Manekk.6981:

Arpheus.6918:

I know this happened (maybe still happens) when I used snow leopard elite transformation while the pet was dead. The next time I would switch out my pet I get a dead pet.
Maybe some kind of similar bug happened to you with some form of transformation while your pet was dead.

I wasn’t using a transformation utility however I was jumping in and out of a couple of golems I wanted to save from a group of enemies when it happened to me the first time, perhaps you are on to something.

That happened to me too lately I think. I was wondering why my pet was dead when I didn’t use snow leo.
The problem probably occurs if you have a dead pet and that pet disappears by transforming to snow leopard or entering a golem (pet disappears to) the game remembers that dead pet and next time you switch your pet you get a dead pet. I even posted that in the bug forum like a year ago but that bug is probably still there.

I know this happened (maybe still happens) when I used snow leopard elite transformation while the pet was dead. The next time I would switch out my pet I get a dead pet.
Maybe some kind of similar bug happened to you with some form of transformation while your pet was dead.

I think the speed nerf on Leo and Bear form had nothing to do with fixing the dmg into a wall. It seems they wanted these forms to be slower and not able to run 3000+ range with swiftness.
It was really cool actually. Now you can’t catch runaway warriors any more with the leo or bear.
The usefullness has been nerfed quite a bit thats why I think that its time for a 2-3 min CD. I’d love 2 minutes but can live with 3 min. 4 min is just too much.

The constant disconnects in WvW are very common since 9/9 patch. Lots of people have them. But if you definitely don’t have these disconnects on linux that might be something that helps AreaNet resolve the issue.

And next Disconnect. I hope you can find the cause for this. Unplayable at the moment.
Before this patch I didn’t have any DC since season start.

So after the recent update (just minutes before) it has become alot worse. Huge lag spikes and got a disconnect after 20 min or so.
Whatever you tried it made things worse.

Now that for the bear and snow leopard charge skills the speed has been nerfed by 40% I think it’s time to lower the CD to 2 or max 3 minutes.
There is no more reason in my opinion to have 4 min CD on these skills.

Since this bug has been mentioned on the forums there were 2 bug fix patches but this seems to not have been fixed according to the latest patch notes and the new WvW Season is about to start.
Please fix this as soon as possible.
The Asura Elite is dealing like 6k x 10 dmg with his arm attacks (there was a screenshot somewhere) and the worst thing about it is that you can easily damage doors in WvW. I haven’t tested it but if you have some asuras in your zerg you can probably PvD doors faster than with rams.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Asura-summon-7-series-and-mortar-mastery-bugs/

Now that for the bear and snow leopard charge skills the speed has been nerfed by 40% I think it’s time to lower the CD to 2 or 3 minutes.
There is no more reason in my opinion to have 4 min CD on these skills.

Today especially in the last hours we had plenty lags again on the eternal battlegrounds. Weird thing is that there were no zergs on the map at this time so I guess probably around 30 players overall on the map.
In the last hour I had 2 disconnects and just before it was like 10 seconds lag every 2-3 minutes.
Before the last reset everything worked fine.

In the WvW EU Gandara/Elona/Riverside matchup we encounter massive DC’s and lags on eternal battlefields. In the last 2 hours we had serverwide disconnects of like 20+ people at the same time and before it was like 40+ people who were disconnected (could be even alot more – gandara attacked us on our keep and suddenly most of our people and also from them disconnected).
Since a commander from the borderlands was rather surprised about the lags I guess its especially or only the eternal battlegrounds.
Please have a look at these DC’s and massive lags which happen very often and sometimes result in DC.
I had 3 or 4 DC’s the last hours and I hardly every DC and I’m only one of many who have DC’s.

In WvW EU Gandara/Elona/Riverside we encounter massive DC’s and lags on eternal battlefields. In the last 2 hours we had serverwirde disconnects of like 20+ people at the same time and before it was like 40+ people who were disconnected.
Since a commander from the borderlands was rather surprised about the lags I guess its especially or only the eternal battlegrounds.
Please have a look at these DC’s and massive lags which happen very often and sometimes result in DC.
I had 3 or 4 DC’s the last hours and I hardly every DC and I’m only one of many who have DC’s.

I was wondering about that too. Mesmers have decoy and the automatic decoy at 25% if traited which ignore revealed. Especially with the buffs to condi memsers (tanky and lots of stealth) reveal will be pretty important to be able to finish them off once they reach 25%. Otherwise they just chain their stealth skills and reset the fight like they love to do in WvW.
I hope decoy gets adapted to not ignore reveal.

Since the active effect of the signet is very unreliable (600 range) I would suggest the following change:

Passive: Cures a condition every ten seconds.
Active: Your pet pulls all conditions from you and from nearby allies to itself.

That means it still has a range limitation for nearby allies but it will always pull all conditions away from you no matter how far away from the pet you are.
As it is now the active often simply does nothing at all and being aware of the pet position simply adds unnecessary difficulty in the middle of a fight.
A skill should be reliable. This one is not reliable at all.
Example: pet is 1200 range away and chilled while you have CD on pet swap and 8 conditions on you. You cannot do anything to immediately use the skill without completely wasting it.

My suggestion would be an easy small change with huge QOL improvement.

When you have a dead pet and use the Norn Snow Leopard Elite (and probably the other transformations too) once you get out of the Elite the next time you swap your pet it will be summoned dead. That means 20 seconds of no pet for the ranger and 60 sec CD on pet swap if you are in fight.
The dead pet will even happen after one hour if you never switched your pet and as you can imagine having a dead pet in the middle of the fight is a real problem to the ranger.
This bug has been there for at least a year and I have reported it back then with screenshots. It is a pretty annoying bug.

I would be very thankful if you could fix this bug.
If you need more information feel free to PM me.

If you use the Red Moa fury buff while being in 600 range you and your group members have a very high chance to not get the fury if there is a zerg close to the Moa.
To me this shows that for the ranger pets you forgot to implement the change from a few patches ago that buffs priorize group members and yourself.
This is pretty important. If I use my pets buffs I want to get it every time if I stand close enough to the pet.
I guess it’s the same with other pets skills but I didn’t test them so far.

From my calculations with 200% crit damage berserker is slightly (almost no difference) better damage wise even when considering the fire and air sigill which profit from higher crit chance.
While the damage difference is really not high I chose berserker because power also helps with damaging structures and other objects which cannot be critical hit.
So in my opinion berserker is slightly better than assassin.
If a crit damage of 230% is even possible I’m not sure if assassins would slightly outdamage power. It might be possible but the difference would probably be really small.

In WvW I use guard in a nature’s voice build. Its pretty decent since it gives your pet perma protection and a 10s stealth.
The stealth is useful to prevent free C&D to thieves and to set up the F2 skill without the enemy being able to react to it. Also you can hide your pet if it would die otherwise like if someone tries to focus your pet or if your pet already got too much dmg from AoE / Conditions from Emphatic bond. Also useful in PvE if your pet is about to die —> just stealth it and F3 and kite around so that your pet won’t get hit until pet swap is up.
The cast time is annoying and if you run around you always have to press F3 after using Guard or your pet might be far away from you when you need it.

I still think that we should be able to have 1500 range piercing arrows with +100% projectile speed (read the wind). These three traits complete the longbow and even with these we would miss out spotter or other stuff.
They should either make piercing or 1500 range an adept trait oder combine the two into one trait.

I think people are having wrong maths on how quickness affects the channel of rapid fire.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Quickness
“Quickness is an effect that increases attack and action speeds by 50%.”
A while ago it was 100% and 100% with your calculation would have meant that 10 sec = 0 sec time cause 10 sec – 100% = 0
But it was 10 sec / 2 = 5 sec
Now it is 2.5 sec / 1.5 = 1.67 seconds and with read the wind it is either 1.51 or 1,56 seconds depending on how multiple attack speed effects stack.
That burst in 1 sec would be insane and it will not be that fast. But it is still very fast^^ 10 shots in 1.5 sec

Actually the trait could be the reason why it seems to me that it works so few times. I usually activate Sic Em on them once they reach 30-40% to finish them off and they very often seem to get away into stealth.
Reveal should still work against any form of stealth in my opinion. That is its purpose.
/edit
Ah I found it. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Desperate_Decoy
It is even mentioned there that stealth is granted even while revealed
Was this done on purpose by the developers or is it a bug? Could a dev clarify that? Thanks in advance

When using rangers Sic Em on a mesmer it pretty often won’t work because for example their Decoy utility ignores reveal. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Decoy
To me it seems that there are even more stealth skills on mesmer which ignore revealed. That makes Sic Em and the new Engineer skill which comes with the next balance update only really useful against thieves where it always works. That utility would be especially useful against PU mesmers so I hope that this is considered a bug and will get changed / fixed.

The traits for the longbow really have to be compressed. I have no way to make my longbow fully functional. I need read the wind otherwise I miss all the time. I want 1500 range and I want piercing arrows. These three traits are needed to make the weapon viable at 1500 range. But it is not possible. Now there is still spotter which would make longbow even more powerful so there are 4 traits and we can only have 2 of them to get the most out of one weapon!
Solution: Piercing + eagle eye must be compressed to one trait. Or Eagle eye + read the wind. No matter how they do it somehow we need to have a way to trait for hitting 1500 range piercing arrows to make longbow fully viable.

Fluffball.8307:

The bird summon had it’s health reduced 50% with the latest update.

Where did you get that information from?

It is really not fine in my opinion that everyone can have a permanent pet which is as strong as our DPS pet on a rune
Imagine having a runeset for every professions core mechanic. Thats just not ok.
I think they should change that rune to have a pet who hits 3 or 4 times and then unsummons because thats already 4k damage from a runeset which is alot.
But having a permanent ranger DPS pet on your side is ridiculous really.

If the rune stays as it is it is a sad statement about how much they think our core mechanic is worth. They kinda tell us then that our basic core mechanic is worth the 6th bonus of a runeset

We were finally able to join but we lost some time to build our defenses on reset

Riverside cannot join the eternal battlefields but our two enemies can. Please reset the matchup. Thanks!

It heals for 1320 + 0,2 x healing power and the healing power from the one who blasts it counts.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Water_field

I’m really glad that the devs communicate changes before they come. That gives us the opportunity to give some feedback before changes which can really affect balance in a bad way get released.

My suggestion: Bring Dire to PvP so that condition damage has to be balanced finally.
When you know that Dire is too powerful why did you even bring it into WvW? In order to get it balanced for WvW it should be brought to PvP which would lead to a condition nerf which is needed.

This issue is really severe. I was thinking about it also quite a while and if a warrior uses 4 on swap sigils they can proc 2 of them every 5 seconds. That is absolutely insane and will lead to huge balancing problems.
I hope they thought about this problem and if not find a way to fix it.

Solving this problem is actually so easy. You need game masters which only have to come if there are huge amounts of reports. If 10+ people from the same WvW map make a report they jump on the map to watch what happened.
If they see obvious grief they just give them a 72 hour ban with a warning that if it happens again they will get a month WvW ban.
If they do it again —> perma ban.

Problem solved. I guess that you don’t even need a full time support member for that. Once a few people got banned this will happen maybe twice per month on each server at max.

On Riverside we have the same problem at the moment. It is plain awful. Whenever we reach a door and the commander wants to throw down a ram they immediately throw down 5 ballistas which don’t cost anything. We then have to PvD the doors which is just awful. When we try to build catapults they also throw ballistas.
That is so obvious grief that a GM would instantly see that these 2-3 players purpose is only griefing. Just ban them really.
Our repair NPC gets also covered with trebuchets to make it really time consuming to find the NPC for repair and trebs are standing everywhere.
Jade Quarry I really feel with you

I’m glad that at least they made the shortened cooldowns on rams and on not completely finished siege. That helped alot but is not enough.

Armor Penetration is actually a really good idea. At the same time maybe reduce protections 33% to 20% so that it doesn’t make such a huge impact on direct damage or make protection also lower condition damage.

Although I like the idea of limiting the zerker gear a bit with my power ranger I will not be able to kill bunkers any more in WvW.
Seems like I will probably have to join the condition meta even though I don’t like it at all. I think if they change zerker gear it’s also time to nerf bunker capabilities by a bit and weaken condition damage by quite a bit.
With the rune/sigill update I really hope that 2-Hand-Weapons now get two slots for sigils.

From my tests the strongest regen ist always running first so you can’t really overwrite a good regen with a bad one.
I did that test 8-10 months ago and that was my conclusion.

Regen on Burning won’ t group support but only help you, 33% regen uptime is nice but with your shouts you already give perma aoe regen to your group even without that trait. So your regen support won’t be better with these traits meaning you can get more benefit out of other trait selections.
That was my point but it was just a suggestions.
Healing spring has decent group support that’s true. The other heals on the other hand are alot stronger in 1v1 situations given that you don’t benefit from the regen from healing spring since you already have perma regen from shouts and regen at 75% hp.

I use a shout build in wvw too but in my opinion you have WAY too much regen uptime. Guard alone will grant you perma regen. Protect me and Sick em already makes more than 100% regen uptime. You don’t need more really.
Healing spring is on a 30 sec cd and a weak heal but it has condi removal and you can use your leaps thats true.
I would use TU or heal as one to get alot higher healing. I think you won’t even need that regen on burn and could instead use the -20% sword cd trait for more dodges/blocks which helps even more.
and I use the dodge removes poison/blind instead of the 33% regen duration too and still have perma regen only from the shouts + the trait for regen at 75%.
If you change these you will have the similar trait choice and utilities that I use. A decent build.

For the Cleave AoE damage Age of Conan had a great solution. Your main target gets hit for the full damage, the secondary targets get hit for I think it was 50% of the damage.
That way also the cleave AoE could be reduced.

I think they could change the CD to 20 or 25 sec cd BUT if the high heal occurs the CD is increased to the 40 seconds.
That way Engineers can live with the really weak heal and get a strong heal when they would have died. After that strong heal the enemy anyways has alot of time to kill the engineer until the heal is back from CD.

I think one thing that needs to be fixed too which makes speed runs so easy is fix the bug of meteor shower or similar skills in corners. If there is no place for the bolts to rain make them disappear instead of making them all rain down in that corner which does insane damage. The second thing is whirl attacks against a wall/corner.
If they fix these two the overall damage of speedrun groups will drastically be lowered.

And overall the only way to make full zerker setups less possible is to make it so that attacks come faster that you don’t have enough endurance to dodge all the stuff.
Even then it will probably be possible but if you have to dodge more/replace yourself more. Then at least a more balanced group won’t be that much worse damage wise because they can stay on the boss with some healing/damage mitigation.

A very good group will still be able to run full zerker if they share protection/regen and such stuff.