Guild Wars 2

Hello all. I am returning to guild wars 2 after taking off for a year. I got bored with other games and decided that since I had so much fun in GW2 before to give it another go. I quit in January of 2014 so I see that a lot of things have changed. I just wanted to check in and see if anyone has anything major that I need to look at or be aware of that has changed significantly. I have read a lot of the patch notes but I figured it would be better coming from actual players. The last update I remember was the launch of Ascended Armor and that was it. Thank you in advance for all of your help and input.

Hey guys. I am thinking of making an engineer my next character. Started with ranger, found out they’re awful, and moved to guardian. Now that she is finished it’s time for an engineer. So I have some noobish questions for you long term engineers out there. Thanks!

First off, this is for PvE only. I don’t like sPvP or tPvP. I occasionally WvW, but so rarely that we won’t consider it. This is for dungeons and world exploration mostly.

What kind of build would you guys/gals say is most beneficial to an engineer in a guild group dungeon setting? I have been eyeballing the grenade kit and Explosives line because I found grenades very fun to play. ( I have a Razer Naga so aiming the grenades is actually kinda fun!). I made one and played with it in the mists so I think it could be fun. But lately I have heard that grenades got a major nerf and that elixirs are the most useful by a large margin. So what do you experienced folks think? I’ve heard a lot of HGH and elixirs being awesome, but I want feedback from the folks who have been using it for a while,

The only reason I ask this instead of doing it myself is that my playtime is very limited, and I unfortunately do not have time to make a build and get the gear only to find out it is very subpar in a group setting. I need to have a clear goal at the start.

I appreciate any and all input I can get from you all. See you in game!

Chopps.5047:

No, I don’t hVe to prove anything to you. You’re a mean spirited person. I am not a troll. 1300 hours, Bolt, and tons of ranger fun.

The only difference between us is that I have fun and win with ranger while you lose with ranger and complain. That’s a fact, not an insult.

You may have fun, that is a matter of perspective. But win? No, you dont win, you simply survive. You do nothing that anyone else cant do 1000x better. A cursory glance through yor posts here proves it. You are a fanboy. You want the ranger to be amazing when it is not. I dont lose with ranger, I have done everything in PvE that can be done (not really into WvW or PvP), and I have finally admitted that ranger is so far beneath everyone else that it is broken. So claim I lose all you want, myself and everyone else will know you are wrong. Your 1300 hours on your ranger further proves that point. With 1300 hours, you probably have not had time to do much on other classes, which would show you RANGER IS BROKEN. As for the video, I was refering to another post of mine where you so smugly stated you coudl easily keep your pet alive during Subject Alpha 2 and 3, which any good ranger can tell you is nearly impossible. And if by some miracle you do keep it alive, your whole build and concentration would be just doing that, so your pet would be either running constantly, or in swap, and you yourslef would be worthless to your team on Alpha. THAT is a fact. So call me mean, call me a loser, I really dont care. I at least have grown up and quit pretending ranger is worthwhile. So continue in your own world fanboy, cuz I am done talking to you until you get with the program.

Edit: spelling issue. Still cant figure out how to only quote part of a post

Agrios.1957:

I see you have a point with pets. But not THAT point to say “OMG Rangers FTL” as if pets were vital to core class mechanics. AFAIC I’ve never seen any pet-centered build.

I dont take dungeons, even more Fractals into consideration. Since I tend to see the difficult in dungeons a lil overkill since I think 1-shot mechanics are being abused there.

And, fractals are even worse. Agony is an artificial gate that has absolutely nothing to say about how good a class is, or how good you play. Its just a matter to have “x” item to past this point.

Just like the Mursaat in GW1, when you got your armor infused, I saw they were not that difficult..

If you ignore all that, then there is really no problem with the class. But see, unlike GW1, your pet CANNOT avoid agony. If they get hit with it, they’re dead. Every time, unless you can switch them in a hurry, but it will be very taxing. And the one shot mechanics are where the pets really show their worthlessness. So go ahead and ignore those ocean sized problems and yeah, the ranger is just fine. But don’t be surprised when PUG groups complain or kick you for seemingly no reason.

Guys just ignore anything that Chopps says. He is a known troll/fanboy who tells everyone that they are not doing it right and refuses to acknowledge the horrible shortcomings of the ranger pet. Invunerable pets while dodging would make sense, and take away their ability to attack during this time. That would make it so they are not totally useless in massive AoE fights. However, I hate the idea of dodging just so my pet wont get BBQed, but that is the flip side of this coin.

BTW Chopps, I am still waiting on the video of you doing Subject Alpha P2 or 3 and keeping your pet alive the whole time. That way when you either let your pet die or do absolutley nothing but keep your pet alive the whole time, I and others can point out what a horrible failure it is.

Appreciate the responses. Sorry about not using a skill calculator, I post so rarely I had no idea how to do that. As for the Master of Consecratons, I swap out consecrations for shouts when need be. No need to run a consecration when the fight doesnt demand one. I do typically swap weapons in fights, mostly to staff for the buffs. So most of what you guys commented on is already addressed. I appreciate it greatly. Now just to find some armor I like! That is a tough one.

Well from what I have heard, Engineer is also in need of serious love. I don’t have one, so I cannot say for sure.

As for Ranger, where to start? Look at the multiple threads around here and you can get a good idea what the problems are. I will tell you from my experience, the higher end of PvE slaps the ragner around and laughs about it. Open world events or farming is fine, but go into Crucible of Eternity and watch your pet become mincemeat. Or fractals 10+. Pets have no agony resist and cannot dodge, so fractal AoE/agaony will decimate them instantly. Any dungeon with large amounts of AoE will kill your pet before they can do anything. Swapping them only works every 20 seconds, and recalling them is not fast enough. So you have a dead pet more often than not. Also, so many skills are bugged ATM, like Lick Wounds, Sic’ Em, etc. Search and Resccue would be an amazing skill if your pet didnt die horribly while trying to rez someone. Trying to watch a pet revive someone while in the fight against Bloomhunger is hilarious. The biggest problem with rangers are pets, but you wont really notice until you do higher level dungeons with massive AoE or attacks that one shot anything. You, as a player, can see these and react to them. Pets cannot and get destroyed, taking a lot of your potential with them. My best advice to you is to play another class, once they are a high level you will begin to see the horrible differences. That is what I did. I played nothing but ranger, did all dungeons and got 100% world exploration, and got full exotic armors and weapons (lots of them for different situations). Then I made some other characters and elveled them up, and the difference was unreal. I WILL NOT play my ranger again until the class has been fixed, because it is awful right now. Many people wil say L2P, but they are trolls/fanboys. Because ATM, there is absolutley no reason to play a ranger over anything else in PvE.

Is it possible to create jewlery with differing suffxs and prefixes?

Example: I want to make an Emerald Orichalcum Amulet with an Exquisite Ruby Jewel as the upgrade. Is this possible? And if so, how would I go about doing it? Is it something I would discover? Or would I have to create the Emerald Orichalcum Amulet of the Knight, and then replace the Exquisite Emerald with and Exquisite Ruby? Because that seems like an awful waste, and I would rather wait for an answer than waste all that ecto and orichalcum for nothing. Thank you.

Wow nobody? I can only assume that:

1) My build is perfect and needs no attention. (yeah right)

2) Nobody has read this. (i can see the nearly 300 reads so thats not true)

3) Nobody cares. (always a possibility)

4) My build is so bad it cannot be fixed. (highly doubtful as it has been working wonders for me)

So even if you guys have no help for my build, what about my armor? I still cant find one that I really like. Help me look awesome!

Warning: slightly long post

Little back-story first: I mained a ranger and get to level 80, did everything and then made an alt. A guardian. Needless to say, I wont be gong back to ranger. But I want some input from the longtime guardian community for my build. Thank you in advance for the help.

What I am doing: DUNGEONS. That is really about all I am doing 90% of the time. Any and all dungeons from AC to CoE (working on getting a guild group ready for Arah). So I do not much care about WvW, PvP or world exploration. This is strictly for dungeons.

My role: hopefully support more than anything. I have enough guildies in decked out warriors/thieves/mesmers etc. that we have a pretty good DPS setup whatever our party may be. So since there is no need for me to go pure DPS, I figured I would help alleviate some headache.
What I am running now: I am currently running a 0/0/30/30/10 build with the following skills/traits:

Heal-Shelter
Utility1-Hold The Line
Utility2-Stand Your Ground
Utility3-Save Yourselves ( I swap this as need be for Wall of Reflection/Sanctuary or whatever the need may be)
Elite-Renewed Focus. I found my guilides can survive very well without me using tomes, so I figured this will let me use my virtues more liberally.

Traits:

Purity-lose a condition every 10 seconds (I swap this if there aren’t any conditions to worry about)
Retributive Armor-5% of toughness is given as a bonus to precision
Altruistic Healing-applying a boon to allies heals you

Superior Aria-shouts recharge 20% faster
Empowering Might-allies gain might for 5sec when you critically hit
Two-Handed Mastery-2 handed weapon skills recharge 20% faster

Master of Consecrations-consecration skills recharge 20% faster and last longer.

I run full Knights armor and weapons. My runes are 2x Superior Rune of the Monk, 2x Superior Rune of the Water and 2x Major runes of the Sanctuary (I am sure this is a bug that will eventually be fixed, as the major and minor are not the same as the superior). I have hammer 99% of the time, but I cant quite figure out what sigil would be the best. I am leaning towards either Blood for health steal or maybe water for just a bit of extra HP for my allies. What do you guys/gals think? I keep one of every weapon around just in case I need it. My other is either Staff for Empower/Symbol of Swiftness, or a Scepter/Focus for when I need ranged options. I haven’t found much use for the Mace or Torch yet. Have any of you? I am currently working on getting my trinkets, I am hoping to get all Knights once again, since as I said I don’t care much about massive damage, and this setup allows me to do decent damage and really help my group.

This is what I am doing currently. As of now I haven’t had any trouble in any dungeon besides a random “oops” moment or a party member who wont hold their wait. I can practically face tank any boss with my hammer and some decent guildies. But I want to know if there is anything that I am missing, or that I should try out that will make it better for all of us. I look forward to any input I can get from you all. Thank you very much for taking the time to help me out. See you in game!

P.S.: On an unrelated note, I am having trouble finding an armor look I really dig on my guardian. It is a female sylvari, so any suggestions to help me look amazing? Thanks again!

Aegis.9724:

i suppose its a fun class, very nice while leveling and in open pve content.
Good in spvp, ok-ish to dead meat in wvw depending on the size of the group

All the issues are hard to perceive until you’re trying to run high end pve like arah/fractals etc

Exactly this. Open world PvE is fine and leveling is fine. But once you get into tougher group content where you depend on your party more, the problems start to really show themselves.

Chopps.5047:

I should videotape myself pwning Subject Alpha while keeping my pets alive the whole time. I think you just need practice.

(Dungeon Master on ranger here, over 1200 CoE tokens, duel inquest axes, and the medium CoE armor which just looks snazzy on Faelwan)

Please do. I would love to see this. And then myself and any other ranger will point out how either your damage is laughable because oyu have traited so heavily to simply protect your pet, or the pet is always on passive and therefore your damage is again laughable. Or maybe you have so much in healing/protection abilities and gear that you can survive whatever Alpha throws at you. Which would make your damage again laughable. In this dungeon, ANYBODY can survive Alpha by just learning when to dodge and having party members break crystals. Pets cannot and so are obliterated.

I will say this though, I do love the look of the axes and armor from this dungeon, so I have to agree with you there.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

Ranger takes more skill than any other class to master. Rangers do well in 1 vs 1. So its not all about big numbers.

Besides my ranger I have a Mesmer and I can’t stand the class. Maybe its becuase in GW1 they were nothing but a greif class.

I have a Thief the concept of hit and running is to kitten like. I mean I like the I deal of assinating targets but the whole jump in and out of stealth is kind of lame.

Guardian is so boring heavy armor with alot of heals (take the training wheels off).

Ele= everyone running d/d the whole it and run thing in another form. Too squishy other wise. Great damage other wise but really need party members to distract the mobs for you.

Warrior is my second favor. Only Level 10,but i dont enjoy tanking so dont think I will enjoy him in dungeons.

The ranger for me is hands down the best for Pve. ranger have a steep learning curve yes there are some issue.

If you want to stomp stuff with no skill choose the other classes. To play a good ranger it takes skill and cunnning. For most of the issue you are having there is a video of a ranger showing its not the class its the player.

Ranger are a limited as you make them. And keeping you pet on passive is not you learn the class. Use the f1 key to send your pet in if you want it to tank. guard can be use to stealth your pet so the mob changes target. Use F3 to call you pet if swap is on cd and a big attack is coming. SOS is also good better if you are traited to share signet effects.

If you want easy mode dont run a ranger.

This is so wrong. Rangers require more skill than any other class to not be useless. Useful? Sorry. Rangers will never be more useful than any other class. I could give dozens of examples, but I did that in the first post, and countless others have done it across the ranger forums. If any of you still truly think like this, I suggest you go to the wiki and read other class skills/traits. You will see the light

It is astounding how many fanboys are on this thread/forum. Ranger is broken for anything but traps in PvP or general open world PvE. Dungeons=broken. WvW=broken. Fractals=broken. I am glad there are some who still enjoy their rangers, but like someone else said, they must play about 1 hour a week farming Orr. But please keep trying to defend this broken class, I am getting a good laugh out of reading your garbage. I am truly sick of people telling me “dude control your pet”. I always have the same response. “I CANT”. That is unnacceptable. I dont care how fast you are on the pet switch/recall button, you cant save your pet from some boss AoE or from zergs in WvW. It isnt possible. To heck with all of you hopeless, clueless fanboys. I will be out playing a useful class.

I use my pet and it usually never dies if it does i simply exchange it for the other. Pick good skills extend beast mastery and you will have a god pet. It is always sad to see someone who cannot master their pet, but if you take the time to learn it anything is possible with them.[/quote]

I am sorry, this is absolutely not true. First off, a dead pet=60 second swap. 48 if traited, which I dont waste points in BM for dungeons. And I assure you, myself and others can control our pet just fine with the limited controls we have available to us. As for “anything being possible”: lol. Go do Crucible of Eternity or Fractals 10+ and see if that changes oyur mind. Because it IS NOT POSSIBLE for pets to survive there. Alpha specifically targets pets with rings, and he uses his attack chain every 5 seconds or so. Your pet swap wont begin to keep up. And they cant run back to you fast enough to get out of the ring. And fractals, pets have no agony resist. So they get melted in seconds. Most fractals have enough AoE they simply cannot survive, add to that the FACT pets cannot mitigate the agony, and you have a dead pet 10 times out of 10. Even keeping oyur pets on passive 100% of the time (which is what I do to get the quickness on swap) is not foolproof. And your opinion is also far outvoiced by the droves of ranger players who say the same thing I do: pets cannot surive in dungeons, therefore ranger is a very undesireable class. Hence the whole reason for my post. I appreciate all of the feedback I am getting though. Good to know I am not alone in the revelation of a class switch.

First off: this will probably be a long post and I am strictly talking PvE. I started ranger on day one of head start access. It was my only character for a very long time. I did all dungeons (minus Arah), personal story, and 100% map completion before I ever made another character. I check the forums daily and always thought it was so cute to watch the complainers whine about how broken the ranger class is. “They just don’t know what they are doing and want a free ride”, I would think to myself. I acknowledged that there are problems, pets being the majority of them (aggro issues, Sic’ Em bug, Lick Wounds bug, insta-death in AoE). I truly thought these complainers needed to learn to play. After all, I got through everything the PvE world had to offer in just under 400 hours of game play in about 5 months. I had been kicked from dungeon groups for being a ranger. Same with fractals. But I held to my thought that it was all because they didn’t know what they were doing. I ran a full Condition Damage trapper at first, but got bored and switched to full glass cannon. Since I knew the dungeons very well, I rarely died and so thought that I was doing great. Then I made a guardian, and power leveled it up to 80 quickly with crafting. Did the same with a Mesmer. I started to do my typical dungeons with them:

WHAT THE HECK ANET?!?!?!?!

Seriously. It took me switching (albeit to the classes some claim are super powered) to realize rangers are truly borked right now. I can bring so much more to ANY party makeup using other classes (engineer is still a bit lackluster and necros are kinda stuck with a condition build I know). It is not even a comparison. It was amazing to find out other classes had a core class mechanic that DID NOT GIMP THEM. I had just accepted my pet would fall to Subject Alpha in 3 micro-seconds, taking a lot of my damage with it. Now I realize other classes have amazing mechanics that actually help either themselves or the party or both. There is absolutely NOTHING a ranger can bring to a party that is not stomped into the dirt by multiple other classes. Healing Spring is about the only truly exceptional skill that parties love, but it is by no means on the same level as others. Why take a huge water field when your guardian or elementalist can protect you from the damage that the spring would heal anyway? So after this revelation I began to actually read other professions skills and traits. WOW, what is going on? Traps in Precision and Crit. Damage tree? And also full of traits that buff your pet (who is most likely dead). 30 in Marksmanship so our signets affect us as well as your pet (who is most likely dead)? It was like a had the air knocked out of me.

Like I stated before, this is all about PvE. Dungeons are what I do 95% of the time. PvP or WvW are completely separate animals and I am not discussing that. So I apologize to any rangers whom I had condescending thoughts about while reading these forums. This class needs to be buffed drastically IMMEDIATELY. There are many who will tell me to learn to play. I tell you to try out another class, because you obviously have not. Nobody who has played other classes will be able to say rangers are not borked without lying through their teeth. The abundance of GW2LFG groups with “no rangers” in the title is a very good indicator of things. So as of now, my entire account has 520 hours played. 480 is on my ranger. And I have been able to accomplish more on my 2 other characters in the 40 hours split between them than the 480 on my ranger (except world exploration, that is nothing but a huge time sink). And so my first character that I have spent a lot of gold on to get fully geared with several armor sets and exotics of every weapon will be shelved until they fix this abomination of a class. I have never posted on a forum for any game I have played, but this is absolutely unacceptable. I apologize for the length of my post, thank you for reading and I will see you in game (but not on my ranger).

TL;DR: Ranger is thoroughly broken, I realized this after playing other classes. I urge you to do the same.

Sounds like the guild I have been looking for. Me and a buddy are 5 year GW1 vets, hopefully we will fit right in. I’ve been looking for a guild that will do lots of dungeon runs. I will try to get on tonight and contact someone (I have to work late so I may not be able to get on) about an invite and more informaiton. Hopefully see you guys in game soon. My toon name will either be Wooty Cakes or Alexandria Apricot. Hope to see you soon!