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The current design of pet swap incentives is in conflict with aspects of the ranger. You’re encouraged to swap them as often as possible to maximize pet skill usage and utilize on-swap effects like Poison Master, Clarion Bond, Zephyr’s Speed, and Spirited Arrival.
But then each time you do every boon and effect on your pet is removed. All the boons you stacked up with “Strength of the Pack”, Potent Ally, and Fortifying Bond are gone, and not only does your pet lose out on damage but you can’t utilize boon-sharing effects like “We Heal as One” to full effect afterwards.
Any ongoing effects on your pet are removed. This includes “Strengh of the Pack”, Cripping shot, Signet of the Hunt, and many others.
So on one hand you want to keep your pet out to utilize all the effects and buffs you give it. But on the other hand you want to swap it as often as possible for on-swap effects and to optimize pet skill cooldowns.
A good way to frame this is with weapon swap. You swap pets and weapons for many of the same reasons, but could you imagine if every time you swapped weapons your character would lose all boons and allied support effects? This is essentially the situation Ranger is in with pet swap.
And Soulbeast takes this to the next level. Every time you meld all those effects are removed and since the intended way to play is to be constantly swapping in-and-out of meld and switching pets you’ll be resetting pet buffs twice as often!
This needs a real solution. Fresh Reinforcement doesn’t go far enough and isn’t even a baseline effect.
I’m not sure of the technical limitations, but an ideal system would be a baseline boon and effect (e.g. remaining duration and charges of Crippling Shot) transfer for both pet swap and beastmeld.
Upon a pet swap all boons and effects should transfer to your next pet with their remaining duration.
Upon entering beastmeld all effects on the pet that would have been applied to the ranger while in beastmeld (e.g. crippling shot) should be transferred to the ranger, while a baseline effect like Fresh Reinforcement should be implemented for boons.
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Definitely needs a revision. Neither its standard nor celestial versions are strong enough for how difficult the tether mechanic and condition of the skills are to use. I’m actually surprised it hasn’t seen anything by now.
Soulbeast:
- Most beastmeld skills have underwhelming damage.
- The half duration and 360 radius on group stances ruins them, especially since have to give up your main damage trait to use this.
- Dagger feels slow and has weak damage, especially for a melee weapon.
- It desperately needs pet swap while melded. Having to exit meld, swap pets, wait 10 seconds, then enter meld again to use your second set of beast skills is too restrictive.
- Sustained damage (DPS) feels lacking while burst damage is excessive.
- It’s not strong enough for the complexity and effort involved in optimal rotations. You’re constantly swapping weapons/pets/meld, using skills non-stop to keep up, tracking many invisible cooldowns, and you need to use certain skills at the correct moment in your form rotation (typically while melded). Yet other classes can achieve the same effect by pressing 3 keys.
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Ranger main.
Excited to try out soulbeast.
Wow huge burst.
We damage class now!
10 mins later.
Gets tedious.
No pet swap while melded?
Too many invisible cooldowns.
Constant weapon/pet/meld swapping.
Non-stop pressing keys to keep up.
Not enough DPS for effort involved.
Can’t see how people enjoy this.
See support stances.
Half duration?
360 radius?
Losing 10% damage and condi duration?
Not worth using.
Try dagger.
Slow.
Low damage.
Weak for melee weapon.
Just wanted a nice DPS specialization for Ranger.
Ended up with Ranger: keyboard musician, third-rate DPS edition.
While I don’t think beast-mode should be something you stay in 100% of the time, I agree with the suggestion for usability reasons.
For example, let’s say I’m using a Feline and Smokescale in a power build. I’m doing DPS with the feline then need some quick crowd control options which the smokescale has access to.
In the current system you’re looking at over 10 seconds to get access to those beast skills. Or you’re looking at a multiple stage process to get your pet out to use one skill, where you need to break meld, swap pets, then wait for the pet to use it.
But what if we could swap pets while melded? 2 clicks and you’re instantly using that crowd control skill. Then you break meld and your pet follows up with another! This would be a massive improvement.
But if you want to blast your smokefield before to land your melded CC, beastmode swap doesn’t help at all, you’re still locked for 10 sec. I really fail to understand why everybody focus on beastmode swapping whereas the real issue is the beastmode CD.
Even without a cooldown you’re looking at unmerging, swapping pets, and re-merging before you can use any of the skills.
I personally think they should do both, allow pet swap while merged and reduce or eliminate the cooldown on beastmeld.
While I don’t think beast-mode should be something you stay in 100% of the time, I agree with the suggestion for usability reasons.
For example, let’s say I’m using a Feline and Smokescale in a power build. I’m doing DPS with the feline then need some quick crowd control options which the smokescale has access to.
In the current system you’re looking at over 10 seconds to get access to those beast skills. Or you’re looking at a multiple stage process to get your pet out to use one skill, where you need to break meld, swap pets, then wait for the pet to use it.
But what if we could swap pets while melded? 2 clicks and you’re instantly using that crowd control skill. Then you break meld and your pet follows up with another! This would be a massive improvement.
Looking at the Soulbeast from a PvE perspective its skills lack the impact they need to perform its role. Going by its skills and traits it is a DPS with capability for support, but is undertuned to the point where it cannot perform this or any role competitively.
Beast abilities are weak. They should feel impactful to use, not around the strength of an auto-attack.
Do they want us to use stances as support or not? First they make us choose between 10% damage and 10% condition duration or support stances, then they cut their duration in half, and only a 360 radius? Maybe if stances were effective support and DPS was improved this would be a competitive specialization.
Live Fast could apply its effect to all 3 beastmeld skills, not just F3, with maybe a reduced 2s of quickness and 4s fury.
Twice as Vicious needs some work. It’s useless against enemies who have breakbars and is fairly weak, only giving a 5% damage increase for 4 seconds. It could use a buff, and weakening a break bar should trigger its effect.
Fresh Reinforcement should be a baseline effect of beastmeld.
Dagger damage needs a buff. It feels rather underwhelming, especially as a melee weapon.
One Wolf Pack could apply a short duration of bleeding to make it work better with the hybrid nature of the class, even if that means a reduction in the physical damage.
Pet swap effects should trigger upon entering and exiting beastmeld, or they should allow pet swapping while in beastmeld.
The cooldown of beastmeld needs to be lowered or eliminated.
Content.
The story and new open world maps don’t last long, and raids aren’t my thing. I like the fractal updates, but one map every 6+ months doesn’t cut it.
Most of the content in the game is now so old, and I’ve exhausted it long ago, so I’m looking for things to spice up the game. Unfortunately they haven’t been delivering, and I can’t find the motivation to log in any longer.
By skill flow do you mean not able to use it without thinking on recharge? Because that’s pretty much what it was.
How the cool-down of a skill lines up with other skills and mechanics that would be used along side it, is how I’m defining skill flow.
It’s not a good aesthetics for a skill to come off cool-down too long before the skill you would combo it with recharges. QZ will come back 25 seconds early and SotW 15 seconds, before you can use the rotation.
The skills themselves synchronize very well, but now their cooldowns are all over the place. A few months back everything used to be 60 seconds, but now its 50, 60, 75. And if you want to restore any sort of skill flow you need to give up Companion’s Might, which is a fairly important trait, for Resounding Timbre solely for the CD reduction since the extra swiftness/regeneration are useless for a physical ranger. You’d be giving up something important just to bandaid the cooldowns.
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Skill flow and synchronicity is an important aspect of class design. You want skills to interact well together and generally make sense irrespective of class balance. If a class needs to be brought in-line with other classes, it should not be done at the expense of the play flow of that class, unlike what occurred with today’s changes.
With a 60 second cooldown Strength of the Pack fit in with both Signet of the Wild (60 sec cd) and Quickening Zypher (50 sec cd) for buff rotations. However now with SotP at an increased cooldown, everything is out of sync.
Now you’ve got QZ with a 50 sec cooldown, SotW with 60, and SopT with 75, when everything flows best at 60 seconds (48 when reduced with traits).
Increasing the SotP cooldown does little to balance the class at the cost of making the skill flow awkward. Please revert the SotP change and seek better ways to address whatever you were seeking in this balance update.
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Druid seems to be the only thing ranger has to make it competitive in PvE. Neither its physical damage, condition damage, or (outside of healing druid) support can match what other professions have access to.
And then there’s the matter of how few areas the Druid is competitive in. You’ve got raids, a few specific fractal levels, and that’s it.
TL;DR ranger is competitive in less than 1% of PvE.
Zealots armor for sure. The tank plays a very important role and you can’t be messing him up with a high toughness value. The more toughness the tank needs to out-aggro you the less DPS your team will have.
Once you get to Gorseval every bit of damage matters, so you’re actually going to want to bring berzerker trinkets with your zealots armor. For value guardian clerics trinkets seem to work well for the extra healing and personal survivability.
Public groups are more than capable of completing raids so I don’t understand the prejudice against them. I’ve actually done better in them than in some of my organized groups, and even beat Gorseval today in one!
For a decent group all you need to do is make sure you get the right people from LFG, which would be made a lot easier if it had its own tab.
With raids It seems like ANet took the feedback about wanting more difficult content and took it to the extreme. They created something which requires not only a very efficient group setup, but very skillful play of both your class and the mechanics of the raid. Just a few small mistakes by anyone in your group, especially the healer or tank, will often mean defeat.
And while there is no problem with content being this challenging, I can’t help but notice the lack of a middle ground. The contrast between this and the next most difficult piece of similar content, Fractals, is massive.
This leaves me with an unsatisfied feeling when looking at content to play because I only have a choice between moderate and extreme. There’s nothing that fits between the two. Perhaps higher level fractals were meant to fit into this category, but the way instabilities and scaling were handled ruined that.
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So how exactly did you get Friend of the Rabbits? Its the last thing I need and the event still isn’t appearing.
These collections are a huge QA failure. The nevermore IV collection has 2 bugs that block progress, 1 of which requires an event that hasn’t shown up for 5 months and was apparently REMOVED with the NPE. Then we’ve got that shaman event which needs multiple steps to fail to spawn the event you need, which by the way, can also get bugged up (it happened to me yesterday so I had to put up with this crap TWICE).
I really hope they have some fixes in the next patch.
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I finally beat it with the help of some awesome guy who went around whispering everyone around the area not to attack the boss! The bug that prevented credit was from the event to destroy the dragon totem not showing up. This time the events worked correctly with “destroy the the dragon totem” event appearing at the end.
For those wondering what you need to do to obtain the item:
- You need to let the shaman reach the totem. (event fail)
- The shaman has to rebuild the totem. (event fail)
- You need to protect the owls from the Svanir (event success). MAKE SURE YOU DON’T KILL THE TOTEM OR THE SHAMAN DURING THIS EVENT, IT WILL BUG UP THE FINAL PART WHICH YOU NEED.
- You need to talk to and escort Owl Shaman Ulgadis (event success)
- And finally, you need to assist Owl Shaman Ulgadis in destroying the dragon totem, which will give you the collection achievement. (event success)
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Wow.
That so totally sucks.
This failure thing they have going on. It seriously needs to go.
Especially for a “legendary” quest.
My wife was doing map completion on her elemantalist yesterday and called me to her computer, I figured she needed help with a Vista but no…
She was getting called an idiot a moron and a fool by players who were on a “legendary” quest and needed events to fail. Now I know The GW community comprises players of all ages and backgrounds so I refrained from going nuclear (IRL I’d have planted them). I simply wrote “blame Anet I need this for my heart”.
My wife who has yet to buy HoT on her account, turned off the game, so one less sale for Anet.
Its creating a lot of hostility from what I’ve seen, which is especially bad since it takes place in a level 15-25 zone filled with new players. For a game which is praised for its nice community, it certainly isn’t shown here. People are yelled at when they attack it and insulted if they kill it, and some players are even intentionally trolling the event to block progress.
And we finally beat it, BUT IT WAS BUGGED!
I mean seriously, I and 3 others go through hours of waiting for an event to spawn, have that event fail to get to the one we needed which involved a lot of shouting at and bribing nearby players, only for none of us to get the collection item.
We were all excited that we’d finally be able to continue with Nevermore, but nope. This is disappointing beyond words.
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But I don’t think they should spend much time on it. The effort spent on the enrage mechanics could also be spent on the actual fight mechanics.
Enrage would just be adding additional effects to the current mechanics. It shouldn’t be hard to program in things like faster activation times and additional effects on hit.
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if players perfom perfectly, then why wouldnt they run at least halfway decent builds?
also if you have to kick players because another profession deals more dps then i can assure you players in your group do not perfom perfectly.
the problem you are trying to talk about here does not even exist tbh
Players can perform well within the mechanics of the encounter, keeping the orbs away from the boss and players, dodging the teleport, stopping the AoE in time, assigning correct roles to the split phase, and so on, but still fail due to the timer. In raids its not only how you play that defines success, but what you play as.
i have one question for you tho, if the timer is as strict as you say, how do you explain it that people with suboptimal group comps, suboptimal gear and suboptimal rotations beat the boss with like a min left on the timer?
From what I could tell, the groups that beat it were fairly optimal. You don’t need a perfect team to beat it, but you do need a fairly optimized one.
The scale of efficient builds is pretty large, with each step outside of the meta causing a reasonable cut in efficiency. For instance, exotic instead of ascended berserker is a personal loss of ~12% DPS IIRC, not taking frost spirit is a ~35% loss, using the wrong sigil is a ~5-10% loss, and these keep stacking up. Between having a non-optimal profession composition and players not using all the best options, a group can lose a lot of effectiveness.
So if you could imagine, the guild who got the first kill of Vale Guardian with 1:20 remaining, which is pretty high on that scale, was just 17% less efficient, they wouldn’t have made it.
Also keep in mind this is only the first boss, which they call easy compared to the next 3. If the next ones are designed similarly, expect even more reliance on efficient group compositions.
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I would support the idea of incremental enrage timers, but I would take a slightly different, more simplistic approach that could be applied universally – At enrage 1, I would make it impossible to rez anyone fully dead, after enrage 2, anyone downed would immediately die (and be unrezzable) and at enrage 3, one random team member would die every 30 seconds.
As I’ve said before – enrage timers are necessary, but should – in most cases – not be so strict as to make them the defining difficulty in the fight. That would be lazy design and would only perpetuate the zerker meta. That said, I think there is a place for a Patchwerk-style dps check fight every now and then, as long as doesn’t become the norm.
Something like that would be a good compromise which I could get behind.
Reading through my comments, I think I responded too strongly. Now that I’ve had something to eat, let me try to approach this calmer and clearer.
The point I suppose I was trying to get across, is just that I don’t like how players can preform perfectly within the mechanics of the fight, but lose because they hit the enrage timer. To me it feels unnatural to hit that type of barrier and how you deal with it isn’t great either, being encouraged to kick players because another profession can preform their role more efficiently.
I actually like the idea of a timer to encourage steady damage and add tension to a fight, just not the automatic defeat it causes. I’d much rather have it ramp of the difficulty of the mechanics, where they have to keep up in order to keep going. This way players will be encouraged to defeat it before the timer, but still feel like there is a chance if they go over it.
Granted, it would make the fight somewhat less strict to complete because players would have more time, but the combat itself wouldn’t change. Players might even enjoy the new enrage system as a challenge as well, only fighting it after enrage has been reached as a form of hard mode.
I hope you can see my points, and I understand if you disagree with them. I will enjoy raids even if the enrage mechanic is unchanged, I just wanted to give my viewpoint on the system and suggest potential improvements.
I suppose I just disagree with their method of creating difficulty (at least through the timer).
Mechanics like the boss’s attacks and phases are how the difficulty should be approached in my opinion. Conditions, heals, crowd control, movement, boon removal, and many other aspects of the combat all play an important part because of these mechanics. Players even have to bring different team compositions compared to the rest of PvE because of this, and if they wanted to get players to optimize their group to a “meta” level in order to complete the content, it should have also been done through these mechanics.
But a death timer? The need for one, such as counteracting a team too focused on defense and punishing a team that is being downed too much, could be achieved in a much more interesting way by a system like I suggested. Damage is already prioritized since the main goal is to kill the boss through it. So past all this, its just a way to force players to optimize their group even further for damage, which is largely done by excluding less efficient classes and builds.
I just can’t agree with this way of creating difficulty that strikes me as uninspired, lazy, and artificial.
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If you accommodate for those compositions you will run into serious lack of difficulty problems. Thats a problem caused by poor class balance more than anything. And so it should be addressed with class balance.
That’s the most difficult approach you could take to this. To reach an acceptable balance you’d have to evaluate roles, how the professions and aspects of those professions function in relation to the content and competition, split PvP from PvE, then rework whatever is problematic.
Its why they’ve been unable to address the huge gap in efficiency between traits, utilities, weapons, and classes in PvE. They designed and balanced them around multiple game modes at once when they need to be designed and balanced separately in context of the content they will be used in.
At best what they could do, and is what they’ve been attempting, is to give each profession a few competitive builds, but this doesn’t stop the problem of huge gaps in efficiency between builds that serve largely the same purpose.
Enrage timers in their current state are nothing but a DPS test. Players can have the mechanics down, but if their damage isn’t high enough, the timer kicks in and wipes them all.
This argument is just not true. If you’re getting downed constantly, get constantly teleported away from the Unstable Energy Spikes, or send more people than is necessary to soak the Distributed Magic, all of these are poor play and bad strategy which the enrage will punish you for.
This might come as a surprise to everybody, but damage matters. Damage is actually one of the three pillars of the soft Trinity: damage, support, control. For some reason people think damage does not matter. It does.
If the group is having that much trouble already they won’t stand a chance once enrage starts building up.
My problem is with skilled groups who are surviving well and managing the mechanics, but lack the highly optimized team required to meet the DPS requirement. If they play well enough to survive the ramped up mechanics, they should be able to continue fighting, letting their skill make up for their lack of optimization.
If they are truly skilled then they should have no problem sacrificing some of their defence for more damage to actually beat the timer. That is the entire point of it. Without it its not actually difficult. Because surviving on its own is easy. And dps on its own is also easy. Difficulty comes from trying to do good damage under constant pressure. The timer forces players to require that damage. Without it there is no true difficulty.
A large part of optimizing isn’t just balancing your roles; what classes and builds you choose to fulfill those roles is just as important. A single healer and 9 DPS (with some dedicated to conditions), and maybe a “tank” to manage boss aggro, works just fine from what I could tell, but are you lacking a class to provide something like banners? Took a class that doesn’t offer as much DPS another? Chose a healer that’s not as effective as the druid? Is someone using a trait line, weapon, utility, or pet that’s not as efficient? Each of these cut into your ability to defeat the content, no matter how skillfully you play.
To give you a realistic example, my raid group during the beta was unable to complete the fight simply because too many people ran inefficient builds. We had good roles set up, learned and got pretty good at the mechanics, but the fight was impossible for us because we didn’t have enough people running efficient enough builds.
And what do you do in a situation like this? Keep trying and get better at the fight and its mechanics? No, instead you kick that third necromancer, shout at the other 2 to get good, kick the other 2 guys you don’t need, then spend 20 minutes looking for the appropriate builds to replace all the people you just got rid of. Is this really the best way to approach difficulty in raids?
In my opinion, what enrage should do is allow these less efficient teams to continue the fight, but push them further than a group that can kill the boss before enrage activates. And even if the team has poor role optimization by bringing too many healers, the buffed up mechanics will offset it and they’ll still have a harder time then a team with better optimized roles.
Give these less optimized groups a chance to prove themselves by mastering the mechanics. It’s not going to be easier for them to kill the boss than a fully optimized team, but they will have a chance, unlike right now.
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Enrage timers in their current state are nothing but a DPS test. Players can have the mechanics down, but if their damage isn’t high enough, the timer kicks in and wipes them all.
This argument is just not true. If you’re getting downed constantly, get constantly teleported away from the Unstable Energy Spikes, or send more people than is necessary to soak the Distributed Magic, all of these are poor play and bad strategy which the enrage will punish you for.
This might come as a surprise to everybody, but damage matters. Damage is actually one of the three pillars of the soft Trinity: damage, support, control. For some reason people think damage does not matter. It does.
If the group is having that much trouble already they won’t stand a chance once enrage starts building up.
My problem is with skilled groups who are surviving well and managing the mechanics, but lack the highly optimized team required to meet the DPS requirement. If they play well enough to survive the ramped up mechanics, they should be able to continue fighting, letting their skill make up for their lack of optimization.
Enrage timers in their current state are nothing but a DPS test. Players can have the mechanics down, but if their damage isn’t high enough, the timer kicks in and wipes them all.
I’m not sure if this is the best way to approach difficulty in raids. It forces a DPS meta onto everyone, where they must meet strict damage requirements within a timeframe and doesn’t allow much flexibility in builds or playstyles. But at the same time, enrage is needed. Without it players could run extremely defensive builds without any downside but slower kill speeds.
What I believe we need is a less strict enrage system, one which causes the fight to become more difficult as time goes on, not as a defeat timer like in the current implementation. Enrage could have multiple phases, and when each one is reached either the mechanics could become more strict or certain effects, which could be similar to fractal instabilities, could occur.
For instance, against the Vale Guardian:
• Enrage tier 1: Lightning AoE activates faster, forcing players to gather in the circle quicker.
• Enrage tier 2: Teleports activate faster. When a player is teleported they suffer from torment.
• Enrage timer 3: The red orbs cause an effect similar to agony, dramatically decreasing healing effectiveness and pulsing slight damage over a few seconds.
With effects like these enrage would become a more interesting and skill based mechanic. It would require players to change the way they play and give less room for error when dealing with the mechanics, which is much better than a hard timer that increases damage to absurd levels, guaranteeing defeat soon after its activation.
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Sounds like you want to turn the Druid into a Guardian…
The Druid has a pet that allows for several support options. You also have different ways to go with the 2nd weapon set. Can go Axe/Warhorn for more boons and an extra blast. Can go Axe/torch for healer/condi spec. I actually was keeping enemies constantly rooted or knocked down with one of my builds.
So yes staff is pretty much all healing (#5 is great mitigation and #4 decent CC) but with pets, traits and 2nd weapon set the Druid has a lot of other ways to support a group.
The druid and guardian would have distinct differences. Guardian is largely focused on mitigation with a moderate amount of healing, offensive support, and personal DPS.
Druid on the other hand would be largely focused on healing with a moderate amount of offensive support while being on the low end of personal DPS and damage mitigation.
Also keep in mind I’m speaking about this from a group based PvE perspective, in which the ranger lacks strong support options. Fury and swiftness are already plentiful, spirits and pet support in general are pathetic, and the only strong support they have outside of druid is frost spirit, spotter, healing spring, and spirit of nature in rare cases.
So when playing a support druid, its strong aspects are healing, frost spirit, spotter, and glyph of empowerment.
The point I’m trying to get at, is it could use more than this. Outside of its healing it doesn’t offer anything spectacular, which some damage support through boons and a slight bit more damage mitigation would help address.
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Addressing Druid’s Support Role
The Druid is meant to fulfill a support role, but is lacking much of what players value in this role. Its main focus is healing when that is already sufficient in many group compositions, and doesn’t have many ways to increase its allies damage or decrease the damage they take, both of which are very important.
The druid needs to branch out its support capability. Its primary role should be a healer, but with the ability to support allies with offensive boons while doing so, as well as some form of on-demand defense, such as a group aegis, to help against damage spikes.
For instance:
- Staff #1 (Solar Beam): Gives might (5s) to allies the beam touches.
- Staff #3 (Ansestral Grace): Shares your boons (at predefined durations, similar to WHaO) with allies.
- CA #1 (Cosmic Ray): Gives retaliation (1s) to allies.
- Seeds of life grant quickness (1s) to allies.
- Wisps give a random offensive boon to allies they heal.
- Upon entering Celestial Avatar you and nearby allies gain Aegis.
- Modify some trait so it activates Glyph of Empowerment. This would add some nice damage support to the druid.
With changes like these the druid would have a better spot in the game. Rather than just being viewed as a healer, players would also consider them for the buffs they apply to the group, which could make them valuable even if there wasn’t a strong need for a healer.
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Well for the sake of the druid I really hope they are not designing the spec to only be used in 1 instance in 1/3rd of the entire game. That would be tragic.
In its current state that’s exactly what’s going to happen (at least in PvE), and there’s no telling if it will even have a strong place in raids yet!
They really need to widen its design. It can’t focus solely on healing; it needs other forms of support that would make it valuable in a wide variety of content. Things like the whisps giving allies it heals a 10% damage increase for a few seconds, solar beam granting might to allies, and celestial form granting aegis when you enter it.
And why not make seeds a blast finisher while we’re at it? It would give the ranger reliable blast finishers through CS #2 and using traited glyphs.
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With raids being inaccessible and the druid being in a much rougher shape than I expected, I certainly hope there’s another beta.
Plus, since we didn’t have access to raids, the only area in PvE where Druids might have been useful, players weren’t able to give complete feedback.
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As someone who has almost exclusively played ranger since launch, runs a lot of dungeons, enjoys difficult content, and is very focused on efficient play, here are my predictions:
• Druid will not see effective use in any of the current PvE content, nor any of the new open world content.
• Edit: After finally being able to test druid in raids I can say for sure that full support druids will be strong in raids and possibly high level fractals.
They might have a place in raids and specific fractal levels if instabilities favor them. Efficient Druid builds will likely focus on offensive stats and traits, either physical or condition depending on what is needed, and switch into celestial form when burst healing is needed. The staff is unlikely to be used.
• Players unconcerned about efficiency will likely to be drawn to a healing druid and run a build significantly weaker than the notorious “bearbow”. It will likely consist of a staff/longbow, clerics gear, and a wyvern because they are cool (but incredibly weak). They will view their healing as useful, will try to let their pet tank while healing it, but in reality will just be dragging everyone down in a group setting.
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I was planning on posting some feedback after testing the Druid in raids, but since they have been disabled for the duration of the beta weekend my feedback has to be on how they function in the rest of the PvE environment.
The druid is a very niche specialization that has no place in the core game, nor any of the available beta content. Maybe this will change with raids, but as it stands the Druid and healer role in general does not fit into PvE.
Its just too one-dimensional; it focuses too much on healing and not enough on other types of support that are generally more important. Why not branch out its support to include more damage mitigation, boons, and damage increases to allies? For instance, allies caught in your solar beam could get retaliation. When wisps heal an ally it could give them a 10% damage increase for a few seconds.
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My issue with healing spring is trying to combo the water field. Previously you could place it down and instantly proceed with your blast finishers, but now you need to wait around for it to activate.
The concept of placing it beforehand doesn’t seem to have much practical use either. Putting your healing skill on a 24-30 sec cooldown just for the water field, condition clense, and regeneration (healing activates when you use the skill, not trigger the trap), seems like too large of a risk. If someone engages you soon after you place it, you’re worse off than if you had saved it.
But who knows, Druid is still unrevealed (we might get a buff through there), and Sinister Stats for the new maps would turn the tide towards rangers that are far superior in Condition competition (Sinister Already proves to have higher solo-DPS than a Zerk)
I’ve been trying out a condition build with full sinister gear, and its had great results so far. It uses WS/SK/BM, axe or sword mainhand with torch and dagger offhand, flame trap, vipers nest, and frost spirit.
It has pretty nice damage, possibly higher than that of the S/A Greatsword build everyone is using if you have someone else to apply vulnerability.
If they want to balance PvE then each profession needs important and unique mechanics and roles. We can’t have professions that are weaker versions of another (ranger vs warrior, both have the same role which is largely group damage boosts and personal DPS, which the warrior does better), or completely lacking ones like the necromancer.
Just wanted to ask – is this confirmed? We had better DPS before the patch. And I haven’t tested this myself, yet.
I’m not sure what personal DPS is like now, but I speaking more of those things combined. Rangers get frost spirit and spotter while warriors get 2 banners, Empower allies, and Phalanx Strength. The two essentially share the same role, but warrior has always been better at it.
Anet is genius when it comes to balancing ranger.
And it will ever be so because they don’t play it themselves.
I think its more because the key people who are behind the class design decisions are also the ones who are behind structured PvP. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first thing that comes to their mind is how the changes will work in sPvP.
Then we have the developers preference with each profession. They have their favorites and some professions are designed better than others. The ranger just isn’t designed well and they rarely seem enthusiastic when discussing it.
Then they refuse to correctly balance for each game mode. Few skills are split for sPvP/WvW/PvE and not one skill functions differently between the game modes. This is a huge problem as certain mechanics are more important in one game mode than another. Some professions have many mechanics that are powerful in PvE, while other like the ranger and especially the necromancer, don’t.
If they want to balance PvE then each profession needs important and unique mechanics and roles. We can’t have professions that are weaker versions of another (ranger vs warrior, both have the same role which is largely group damage boosts and personal DPS, which the warrior does better), or completely lacking ones like the necromancer.
(edited by Bri.8354)
Percent damage multipliers are actually very powerful because the way they are calculated. They are multiplied so after a certain point, that “10% damage” trait can end up being an ~14% damage increase.
For instance, with Steady Focus, scholar runes, and a force sigil, you are currently looking at a (1,000 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 = 1,270.5) 27% damage increase, not 25%.
If we add another two 10% damage modifiers on there, which the old meta build had, we have a (1,000 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 = 1,537.3) 53.7% damage increase, not 45%.
If you add on the 25% from Signet of the Wild, 10% from potions, and 10% from night runes, to the old build, you are looking at a (1,000 * 1.25 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 = 2,325.173) 132.5% damage increase, not 90%.
So losing out on those two 10% damage modifiers is a significant hit, something an occasional 25% damage modifier from remorseless and faster weapon swapping might not make up for.
Edit: After doing the math on how much criticals increase your damage, if you have ascended berserker, ranger runes, and spotter, you should have 85% crit chance and 220% crit damage. With Hunter’s Tactics, which was converted from % damage to critical chance, you will have a 95% critical chance which will increase your DPS by ~11%. However, guaranteed crits from remorseless and precision from other sources that would put you over 100% would lower its effectiveness.
In short, Hunter’s tactics is around the same DPS as it was before the change as long as you don’t use remorseless or go over 100% crit chance, in which case its a lot worse.
(edited by Bri.8354)
With all the recent changes, I can’t help but feel the ranger is in a worse spot than before. They lost out on 10-20% damage from modifiers depending on the build, and now are heavily reliant on weapon swapping and remorseless to make up for it.
The pet got buffed a bit from traits, and we have a few on pet swap effects, so with all said and done, rangers are about as strong as there were before, only now they require far more management for equal effect.
However, there was also quite a bit of power creep caused by this patch for other professions. When you account for this, rangers may be competitively worse off now than they were before.
also you arew suggesting something whcih could easily make condition removal the complete counter vs any DOT build. Some builds already have 10+ cleanses in 32 seconds (e.g. : guardian w. 5 shouts traited with runes of the trooper?)
They would definitely have to modify condition removal. Perhaps we could have 2 types, one which is frequently used which only removes a set number of stacks of a condition, and another that removes it completely which would be for more powerful skills?
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So I’ve been playing around with builds and I quite like opening strikes being reapplied by fury. It synergies very well with weapon swaps, RaO, call of the wild on pet swap, and the greatsword trait. It probably works out better than it renewing on an evade.
As for my original suggestion, I think it would easily address the issue without causing any issues. Swapping the 100% crit with reapplication on fury wouldn’t impact builds with remorseless while improving opening strikes for builds without it.
I’d still like to see some further improvements however. They could easily merge the first 2 opening strikes traits to fit another trait in there.
EDIT: And thinking of “on evade” effects just gave me another idea. What if Most Dangerous Game granted might each time you evaded? It fits the name and would be more useful than its current effect which doesn’t synergize with anything the ranger has (would have worked with the old bark skin, but that gone) and seems weak in general.
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Conditions are meant to act as attrition damage, but do they apply their damage too quickly, making them too close to physical damage but without the drawbacks?
It was always my impression that conditions were meant to be built up over time before they became a threat, presenting a good opportunity to remove them with condition clears. But it doesn’t seem to work this way.
Instead, conditions are about quick application and removal. In the old system, burning and poison didn’t stack, so you tried to maintain it on the opponent rather than building up a long duration. Bleeding on the other hand did stack, but its application was frequent and duration low. No matter how hard you tried to remove these conditions, you had them back on you in another few seconds.
Now with the condition changes, everything functions like bleeding. Conditions get built up but only last a short duration, so removal is twitch based. It’s like you’re fighting a glass cannon, only you are using condition clears as a form of active defense to avoid their spike damage.
I think condition builds would be a lot more balanced and fun to fight against if things were slowed down significantly. For instance, what if conditions lasted 5 times longer but did 20% their current damage? Condition clears could also be changed to be more powerful for a single use, but less abundant and on longer cooldowns.
You already have such an immense access to Fury reapplication to go with Opening strikes, yet people ask for more.
I don’t really see a reason to buff it or change it. You now have an amazing time using Signet of the Hunt with opening strike. Change the weapon – get the fury – Use maul.
That’s only if you have remorseless. The point I’m trying to make is that without remorseless, opening strikes is weak for the amount of investment, and is especially weak in PvE because you are often combat locked for long durations. At world bosses or silverwastes for example, you are stuck with these 3 traits that do nothing for 90%+ of the fight.
Since opening strikes is forced upon anyone who takes marksmanship, then it needs to function well enough with just the 3 baseline traits. Nobody is asking for a major buff, only that it work better without remorseless. If that means changing remorseless to balance out the change, then so be it.
(edited by Bri.8354)
Yeah Minor traits should be
Minor Adept >> Player and Pet get Opening Strike
Minor Master >> Opening Strike is 100% Crit
Minor Grand Master >> An affect that refreshes it (On stun? On kill? Every 20s?)and then you also have other Major Traits to refresh it or add other effects
MGM Trait – You gain Opening Strike whenever you evade an attack. ?
That sounds perfect to me. It would encourage smart dodges and the ranger has evades on 4 weapons and a utility. Heck, even the logic of the effect would make sense, since your character could find an opening after they evade an attack, allowing them to use an “opening strike”.
Opening strike by itself is perfect, 10 vuln + 100% crit; you don’t need to invest in PRECISION and still get solid damage output.
The core issue is that there’s no way to reapply it without a grandmaster trait. Without remorseless you only get that effect once a fight, and in situations where you are in combat for a few minutes, the effect is worthless. Its baseline effect needs a broad way to reapply it so that any player who brings marksmanship can make good use of it.
I think that OS could actually make a really good additional profession mechanic for Rangers, simply by including OS effects in other trait-lines, and renaming the mechanic to `Prepared Strike`. I suggest the rename simply because it’s only an ‘Opening’ strike if you have the Marksmanship trait.
Something like that sounds great if they are ever willing to do a revamp that large!
The default opening strike traits, using up all 3 of the fixed marksmanship traits, has always been weak for the level of investment. For 3 entire traits all you get is 10 vulnerability for 5 seconds and a guaranteed critical once a fight.
In the old system you could renew opening strikes in combat with the remorseless trait, but this didn’t address the issue. It still required heavy investment (4 traits including a grandmaster), and stealth which the ranger had limited access to, for an effect which wasn’t that great.
With specializations the remorseless trait was reworked and finally made the mechanic acceptable, where your opening strikes deal 25% more damage and every time you gain fury you regain opening strikes. Unfortunately the core opening strike traits haven’t been touched, and without remorseless it suffers from the same issues it’s had all along.
Opening strikes need to be made better without the remorseless trait. I believe a simple change can address this by reworking the following traits to:
• Precise strike: Regain opening strikes whenever you gain fury
• Remorseless: Your opening strikes deal 25% more damage and are always critical hits.
This will make regaining opening strikes in combat a baseline effect, while remorseless will function as a damage boosting trait.
Or:
Minor Adept >> Player and Pet get Opening Strike
Minor Master >> Opening Strike is 100% Crit
Minor Grand Master >> You gain Opening Strike whenever you evade an attack
(suggested by ProtoMarcus.7649 and Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582)
Remorseless may need to be tweaked to balance this suggestion out.
(edited by Bri.8354)
For PvE, beastmastery for sure.
Nature magic only has 2 traits that will be of strong benefit to you, the 1% damage for each boon on you, and boons you receive are also shared with your pet. Nothing else in this line is worth mentioning.
Beastmastery is, frankly, not that great either, but its the best choice of what we have. I think a lot of people are swayed by all the stat bonuses it gives to your pet, but pets are only a portion of your damage, so it won’t be a huge DPS increase. I haven’t done the numbers, but I’d be surprised if it was much larger than a 15% increase. To put this in perspective, that wouldn’t be much stronger than what the Predator’s Onslaught trait alone would give you.
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Do you not feel these trait effects would be better suited for another area?
• What if Poison Master activated the next time the player applied poison, or the pet would have a 20% chance of causing 2 seconds of poison on hit?
• What if Vigorous Training activated upon using a healing skill?
• What if Zephyr’s speed granted the player quickness on an opening strike (9 sec ICD) and/or granted the pet quickness, stability, and swiftness on a swap?
• What if Clarion Bond activated each time your pet received a condition, granting a boon based on the condition it received? Or what if it worked like opening strike, where it would only reapply out of combat, and your pets first attack would cause the buff to those around it?
If we moved the mechanics around like this they would have wider appeal and find their way into more builds as a result, in addition to no longer conflicting with smart pet management.
And to give an idea of what I view good on swap effects to be:
• Upon pet swap all conditions on your old pet are converted into boons for the new one.
• After pet swap, if you press F1 your pet will shadowstep to the target and cripple them.
(edited by Bri.8354)