Guild Wars 2

The german translation for the “Every other month” option is wrong. It basically says “Every few months” when it should mean “Every two months”.

Just FYI the right translation would be “Matchups alle zwei Monate überprüfen.” not “Matchups alle paar Monate überprüfen.”

I mean you can get 20 bleed stacks on 1 target with 1 button press (I just tried and got to 26, more is possible). You really need to get more specific if you want us to guess your special way.

On the GW2 subreddit I made a straw poll asking which day people would prefer for reset. Currently 130 players said Friday while 12 said Saturday. It’s obviously not representative of the playerbase, but I think there is a clear favorite here.

I’d be in. I’m always down for theorycrafting, testing out how mechanics work and stuff, there is plenty of stuff that’s hard to test alone.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQJAWRnUqAFsiVsC+sActgFPBz5v1pGcPrgAQCDOlGTzpn480lC-TZBFgANXAAgHAQyRAgd/BmDBAA

With Paladin amulett (or whatever the power-prec-tough-vit amulett was)

I wanted to have some healing power in the build, and of all healing power runes I think Grove works the best in the build, though that aspect is rather debateable. I think 175 Healing Power is a very noticeable difference to 0, but there are definitely alternative runes you could take just as well.

I was first rather unsure if Search and Rescue was worth taking, but after trying it out I have to say that it’s absolutely amazing. The range is really high and you can even activate it a few seconds before your pet gets in allied range in the first place. I mostly played with it in soloqueues, but with the short cooldown you can absolutely carry teamfights with that one skill. Especially on some maps liky Khylo you can get some crazy ports that way.

In general I think the old bunker playstyle alone isn’t really that valuable anymore, as you can’t hold a 1v2 on point for any reasonable amount of time anymore if your enemies are even a bit decent. So I’m playing it more for the roaming capabilities, going for decaps or 1v1s or +1ing fights whenever possible. With some teammates in voicechat you can often even tell them to go down when they are in a bad situation because you can quickly get a res on them anyways, with no issue. Just port them behind a corner and they are up again in 2 seconds.

I reported this as a bug early december, both ingame and directly to a dev, because I knew it would be extremely exploitable. Figures that it’s not fixed and people are catching up to it now. Well I guess ESL will soon have to ban druids from using staff.

After playing lots of PvP round with my druid, I noticed that Ancient Seeds really goes off a lot less frequently than I would expect. I tried using it on PvP golems and it was just fine (triggered each time on every golem with an AoE knockback) but then when using it on the Profession NPCs it seems to work rather infrequently. The roots mostly don’t even appear in the first place.

Can some people test around with this a bit? I’d like some others to get some opinions on it before I call it bugged. In normal PvP rounds I feel it so rarely that I seriously consider taking Grace of the Land from now on.

I (and I’m sure many of you too) had the feeling, that Ranger/Druid gets an insignificant number of nerfs in all patches since HoT released. Reflecting on it, I was not sure if it was a personally biased viewpoint, or actually the truth. So I went through all patch notes and made some notes on which ones contain balance changes, and how many of them contain Nerfs to Ranger.

First of all I want to say a bit about my criterias: I don’t consider bug fixes balance changes. If a Trait/Skill didn’t do what it was supposed to do and the patch changed that, then this is not a nerf. I don’t consider changes that reduce visual effects of skills nerfs either. However there where some Ranger changes advertised as “fixes” that I did consider nerfs, such as the 50% reduction of Smoke Assault damage, because that skill worked 100% as the tooltip said it would. Here are my findings:

There have been 10 patches since the HoT release that had balance changes in some form. In that I also counted the HoT release patch and compared it to the state of BWE3.

In 8 of those 10 patches you had some nerfs to Ranger/Druid.

In 4 of those 8 patches the Ranger/Druid nerfs where the only nerfs in the whole patch.

The impact of these nerfs was on average far higher than anything that was nerfed with other classes. You have a 300% ICD increase and 50% boon reduction in lingering light, a 50% damage reduction of Smoke Assault (which was later reduced in another patch again, although in combination with a CD reduction) or a 50% health reduction of Bristlebacks. There is no other nerf for another class that comes even close to this amount of impact, with the exception of the 40% nerf to Scrappers adaptive armor.

This all doesn’t include some patches immediately before HoT, that had some even more ridiculous ranger nerfs.

I think this completely justifies my opinion now. I am still convinced that there is some (subconcious?) Ranger hate in the people that do balance changes and that the class can never keep an important role at the meta in any gamemode for long because of that.

If you swap your ranger pet after it put down a combo field, you won’t be able to use any finisher in them at all even though they are still shown as combo fields in the game. Tested with the Spider Poison fields, the 2 Wyvern F2 fields and Smokescales Smoke Field using Blast and Leap finishers.

There is some weird behaviour I noticed though. If you switch out the smokescale you can’t blast the field anymore even though it’s still shown being around. Testing a bit shows that it’s the same with the wyvern fields. Pretty much destroys possible clarion bond synergies. I will submit a report in the bug forums and ingame.

It wasn’t in the patch notes but still part of the patch, you can easily see it for yourself ingame. I’m not sure if the Smoke Assault damage was reduced as Irenio mentioned might happen in the other thread. The wiki doesn’t really have the old damage numbers.

I think if you want to get ready for raids Magi would be the best choice. The guy with the highest toughness took the boss aggro in the beta raid and since you probably don’t want to heal and tank at once your team is better off if your tank only has to take a few toughness pieces to get highest toughness of the group.

Just yesterday I ran a test with the Electric Wyvern without Beastmastery against that golem and it took him more than 6 minutes to kill it. I made a video but haven’t uploaded it anywhere yet, but the state of pets is absolutely disastrous.

Neither of them.

The beta raid had an important fight component where you had to control the aggro of the boss, and he usually attacked the person with the most toughness. So going full cleric means that either you have to constantly tank him in addition to your healer stuff or the “tank” of your group needs to fully gear with Toughness as a main stat to have more toughness than you.

Magi or Zealot allow your “tank” to have just a few toughness pieces and still reliably control the boss.

I really don’t like how this forum singles out certain devs when it comes to blaming them for errors or general hate threads. It’s completely toxic and just hurtful. Not everything is perfect, but looking at the stuff happening in the last weeks I’m 100% convinced the ANet devs are trying really hard to make us happy.

Of course I’m fine with making appreciation threads for devs. Ranger is in a much better place now than a few months ago, and Druid is some Astral force generation changes away from being really great (Live Vicariously wink wink). Everyone that worked on that deserves my thank you and in this case I only really know of Irenio directly working on it, so it definitely goes to him.

There was one change between Beta and Release that I haven’t seen anyone talk about here at all. The trait Live Vicariously was changed to have an internal cooldown of 1 second while getting a massive buff to the amount it heals.

For reference the old version:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Live_Vicariously&oldid=1075684

and the new one:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Live_Vicariously

I think this change is a major contribution to the slowed down charge time of Astral Force and I think this might have been an unintended part of the change. With the old version, if you healed 5 allies with one skill you got 10 charge units for astral force, now you only get 6. In addition to that are of course the nerfs to the charging through healing, both combined result in an insane reduction of the Celestial Avatar charge speed.

I will absolutely give the people that balance the spec the benefit of the doubt here and say that this might have been unintentional. If you don’t think about the Astral Force charge part, the change sounds quite nice actually (Healing amount was more than tripled), but the Astral Force synergy makes this probably a larger nerf to Celestial Avatar availability than any other change between the Beta weekend and now. Interestingly the 1 second CD version interacts with troll unguent only every 2 seconds even though TU ticks every second, which is pretty annoying considering reducing the trait ICD by a millisecond would give a huge boost to the TU healing.

What should be done at this point is to reevaluate the trait and the way it interacts with the Druids CA charging. Either considerably buff the amount of Astral Force you gain through healing (because your nerf didn’t take the trait change into account) or revert the trait change to the old version that wasn’t overpowered in any way.

Yes, one of the first things I tested with the trait. If some AF mechanics are improved a bit I think Druid could become a very viable class for fractals with all the party wide damage modifiers.

If it didn’t work, I would have submitted it as a bug report, because the skill activated by the glyph trait is clearly the same skill as the CA skill 2.

If there is indeed no way to upgrade them, I agree that it is an oversight that should be addressed. Have you checked if you can put them in the mystic forge?

Have you looked into the new gear stats including Expertise? If you choose them you get a lot of additional condition duration. I’m not sure what exactly those stats are, but I’m sure there are ones that are great for Condi DMG builds.

Prophet.1584:

That being said I did notice a loss in personal dps. staff is certainly lower than LB but during the last BWE that charged CA much faster than anything else. LB damage was lower but not incredibly so. I was running MM/NM/Druid to keep most of my damage modifiers and buff my pet. With the incoming changes I don’t think zerker will still be an option, the healing will most likely be too low to help but the dps upgrades will be incredible. I also think that rangers will be one of the sought after classes with all the flat damage modifiers they bring.

That’s why I specified that I was basically playing the current meta dungeon build with Druid instead of Beastmastery. Staff? You don’t need it, just run LB S/A. NM? Skirmishing is higher personal DPS AND spotter. Healing to low? Who needs group healing in Fractals? Just go full DPS and with all the awesome support options you have and you will help much more than if you’d put on clerics gear and try to heal your party in an environment where enemies can one-shot them. With the announced changes you will be able to go in celestial avatar to boost your team damage in 2 seconds and then leave and continue your DPS rotation (if done right you might actually boost it a bit afterwards, thanks to quickdraw when leaving celestial avatar).

This all looks and sounds really awesome.

Looking through the Druids celestial avatar skills, most of them are AoE skills that you would want to place either under yourself or your allies (the “auto attack” is basically a healing form of the grenade auto attack when it comes to clicking work). Will there be a special case for these skills that makes it easier to use them on allies while using action camera? Because I really think due to the small AoE hitting your allies could become rather hard and annoying with it, although just having to hold down the mouse button sounds already great. At this point I don’t think there will be a way to do this, but it would be absolutely amazing if this was something that is actually already implemented.

I haven’t made a video but played Druid in Dungeons and low level fractals a bit so I’ll share my impressions. (couldn’t enter high level ones, since I lacked agony resistance and didn’t put my ascended gear in the bank before that. The raid gear provided also had no infusions slots).

Anyways. I actually thought druid was pretty effective in 5 man content. Mind you I didn’t play as a dedicated healer or anything, I was basically playing the normal “meta” zerker build while swapping Beastmastery for Druid and put Glyph of Empowerment into your utility slots. You lose a bit personal DPS, but help the rest of your group through very decent damage increases through Frost Spirit, Spotter and your Glyph. With the HoT release Druid will also get a new trait allowing him to increase group DPS even further, again at the cost of personal DPS (in that case through going into CA and using healing skills instead of doing your damage rotation). Additionally I had a sizeable amount of healing just passively through traits, although the lingering light trait now got changed a lot. I think if you get into a bad pug group, this is generally a build that could carry a group and not only because of the healing.

At the moment I was testing it I think Druid was a rather solid pick, even for a group that only cares about DPS. You don’t lose much on personal DPS compared to normal ranger and more than make up for it through active offensive and passive defensive group support. With some of the changes announced I think Druid could actually become a searched after class for their general party damage increase (similar to how warrior is always searched after thanks to their banners). Now I’m not sure about that to be honest, but I think HoT will generally greatly increase the amount of viable searched after classes for dungeons and widen the spectrum of the group composition. I think druid will be pretty good.

With the announced changes to “We Heal as One!” (removal of the might stack limit), I wanted to share a simple build I made that is designed for maximising your damage output in solo content. Here it is:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNBjYDbkSFKZxKWwVF4axweQ5B/xPF7tHAj+HHl7TnxTlIbC-T1RBABXp8jm9HwT3QeXEAAeCAUq+jZKBJFQgTtA-w

The build provides you with a 100% uptime on regeneration, fury, swiftness and thanks to the 95% duration increase of might you should be able to stay at 25 might stacks on you and your pet for nearly the whole fight. At the same time we are still able to have a very good uptime on quickness and can take nearly all of the good personal DPS traits ranger has.

I’d like to especially point out the synergy between Frost Spirit, Nature’s Vengeance, Fortifying Bond and WHAO. Just putting down the Spirit with Natures Vengeance alone will result on 6 stacks of might near constantly on you and your pet. Combine that with Fortifying bond and your pet gets around 19s of 3s of might every 3 seconds. These effects combined are already able to stack 24 stacks of might on your pet and maintain it for a decently long time. With We Heal as One these stacks get directly transfered to you every 16s with a duration of around 19s.

You also get many more sources of might in the build that ensure a high uptime even if the frost spirit dies. Warhorn, Clarion Bond, your jungle Stalker or even just your Sword Auto Attack all work wonder on keeping up the might for a long time. You can also easily prestack 25 stack of might quickly: Use your jungle stalker F2 (5 stacks on you, 10 on your pet), put down a Fire Field with a Torch and switch to Warhorn to blast it (6 stacks on you, 12 on your pet) then use We Heal as One for the 25 stacks.

For soloing dungeons obviously replace the sharpening stone with an appropriate slaying potion, which is a bigger increase of your net damage. If you have a few people in a group

If you have any ideas for improvement or general feedback of course feel free to post it here, I’d be really happy to read all of it. Here are some things that I am not sure about:

- It might make sense to drop Beastmastery in favor of skirmishing, especially if you have one or 2 people around you (note that pets are still bugged to not receive a crit chance increase from spotter though).

- Warhorn might be completely unnecessary and should be replaced by an Offhand Axe. Only playtesting will show this.

- You might want to use some defensive pets that allow you to use your ranged potential depending on the encounter.

- Some of the new Hot pets might be even better in terms of DPS. We’ll see with the release.

Amazing. The might stack limit was pretty much the biggest problem I had with the nerf, although I now understand that it wasn’t easy to make it work internally.

Guys, this will be amazing for solo PvE content. 25 might stacks for a huge chunk of combat if done right.

Even ignoring the valid criticism from SEA or OCX players, I don’t think that putting the reset in the morning hours for a majority of their players is promoting a healthy or humane game design. Many WvW players already tend to play for extremely long times in a session, only stopping on a reset when they go to sleep. I really fear that changing it to the morning hours will get a lot of people to play all day.

I know it sounds patronizing, but video game addiction is a serious thing and I think especially MMO developers need to consider what effect these kinds of changes have on their players, because getting people to play the game all day just isn’t healthy for them.

Might generation is also completely uninteresting, because pretty much every other class already provides might like it was nothing and providing party wide 25 stacks is easy. Let things be strong for once, it won’t make druid a must pick in 5 man groups (although it will make it a decent pick) and if it’s optimal to use one druid in 10 man groups it shows that duid at least has a place in the game.

Some really good changes in my opinion. Looks like Druid is going to be a mandatory class in raids.

A suggestion: The introduction of a cooldown to Celestial Avatar is a pretty significant nerf to the Celestial Shadow trait. To give it a bit more play options, maybe add a 20% reduction for the Celestial Avatar cooldown to the trait. It would give the trait an interesting play option and be totally in line with traits of other classes that reduce the cooldowns of class mechanics.

Looking at the update history of other elite specs, the feedback after every beta was immensely important to get them on a good level. I think very very few people would argue that druid doesn’t need a few fixes at this point and a lot of the skills need a rework. This is nothing new.

However, what if the changes after one beta are still not enough to get them in an actually good and polished spot? If Druid at HoT release is still clunky and has core problems, can we expect to see fixes at the same ground level that other elite specs got in between beta weekends? I like the core gameplay of druid, but this is at the moment my greatest worry about the class. I think having only one BWE might have doomed the elite spec from the get go.

Nice video, I don’t really get the negativity. When I first got the chance to solo a keep lord I made a video too and was really proud about it even though I knew I made tons of mistakes in the fight. It’s still something that you don’t get to do that often.

Allright, just stopped with a very long druid session and I’d be happy to give some feedback to you guys. I played pretty much all gamemodes (PvE, Dungeons, WvW Zerg and Roaming, solo and small scale, PvP and 1v1s) so I guess my feedback will be about all those modes.

The first thing I noticed is the very high amount of heal effects that do not give you astral energy. Some of them are pretty clear as to why (Rune of Dolyak, Signet of the Wild…) but I was rather dissapointed with quite a few of them. I was really thinking applying regeneration ticks would load up your astral energy, since Ranger is pretty much the best class when it comes to stacking AoE regeneration. The effects of spirit of nature and water spirit both also don’t contribute to your energy, which makes it even more unlikely that these skills will find a use again.

Staff is a very interesting weapon, although I can’t say I’m in love with it. I generally like the auto attack, especially the piercing effect of it but must say that it’s really dissapointing damage wise. I was running full zerker gear with Air/Fire sigils and the staff auto attack still couldn’t hold any significant amount of pressure on my target, so I would say it needs a damage boost. I know some people are arguing a support weapon doesn’t need any damage, but in situations where we just want to kill a target I just feel really useless when I just switched on staff, the weapon really needs more to help with that.

Staff 2 is really weak, completely fire and forget. It has no real impact on fights, deals little to no pressure and has a weak heal. This needs some kinds of additional effect or a decent damage boost, preferably both. Something like a cripple nothing too powerful.

Staff 3 is on paper a good skill, but I had some annoyances with it. I don’t like how you are stuck in the transformation for a while if you use it on short distances, it should end the moment you reach your destination. The blast finisher is nice, although I think there should be an offensive effect included at your target. A good damage spike and a blind would be fitting in my opinion.

Staff 4 is allright. The animation is great and makes the effect easy to recognize. The effect generally fits well with druid and doesn’t need a buff at the moment in my opinion.

Staff 5 has a really cool concept, but I think the heal is too low for it to be considered to be used instead of reflection. Don’t forget that the skill is competing with one of the strongest offensive effects in the game, you generally can give this skill a lot of healing without it being overpowered. Don’t forget that firing in this stuff should be punishing, and decently healing your enemy is definitely something that you should not want to do.

The celestial avatar is fun to use at least some of the skills. The “auto attack” is pretty bad. The healing effect per second is pretty good of course but it’s really hard to hit your ally, which is something that I think a healing spec shouldn’t be required to fight with that much. Also the general lack of damage feel awkward, although I am not sure if the avatar needs the damage. Staff needs it more, and if Staff gets more damage I think avatar will be just fine.

The 2nd skill is better in terms of range. I don’t think I like the long delay, but this skill can in my opinion generally remain unchanged.

3rd skill is great. The blast finisher doesn’t work right now, but it doesn’t really hurt the skill if it gets fixed the skill will be in a really good place.

The 4th skill has a really long and obvious cast, and I don’t like how limited you are to self combo in it while you are channeling it. Also just spamming 1 in theory has higher HPS, so I think if celestial avatar skill one gets improved this one might become a bit redundant.

The 5th skill is really cool, but I somehow think that it should be WAY more punishing for enemies caught in it. Doesn’t have to be more damage (although that would contribute a bit) but with everything I saw the CC isn’t really more dangerous than entangle, when I think it should be more in the icebow 5 territory, considering the long and obvious channel.

Let’s talk about the glyphs! I like the concept and implementation of them. I personally found the non celestial avatar effects more useful, but I like having the option for the other one. I thought they might replace survival skills when traited due to their condition removal, but I’m afraid the delay in that is too high to be considered worthwhile for personal condition removal. It’s still a strong effect and I think in a good place.

Glyph of Rejuvenation: Seems not that great to me to be honest. The cooldown is a bit high compared to other ranger heals considering the lackluster healing effect. Conceptually it’s a very strong support skill and I guess you can use it in builds to have a very high healing burst on your allies but it really didn’t do much for me. I prefered using troll unguent to easily load up my celestial avatar between fights. I think this glyph needs a bit of a buff to the healing effect. I genuinely enjoy the super heal for allies, but it’s not useful that often so in the end I’d rather stick to other stuff.

Glyph of Alignment: Not that interesting to be honest. The non celestial effect is rather weak compared to the other glyphs, the celestial effect seems alright, but redundant considering celestial for has a 1 second cooldown AoE condition removal skill.

Glyph of Empowerment: The one glyph I was looking forward to for PvE, but the effect needs a straight up buff right now. Non celestial effect could be doubled in intensity or duration and it would still be perfectly fine. I think it could be made even stronger and it would still be perfectly in line. The celestial effect is interesting but I haven’t found a use for it yet. I really like the offensive effect and think giving it a good buff is literally everything druid needs to become welcome in dungeon parties. My suggestion would be a 15% damage boost over 10s.

Glyph of Equality: Strong skill, gives ranger access to an instant interupt and a very interesting aoe stunbreak. I think it needs no further adjustments, it’s strong as it is.

Glyph of the Tides: Good CC options and both effects on a pretty short cooldown. I like it and can totally see it finding play in WvW and PvP.

Gyph of Unity: The non celestial effect is basically a worse form of retaliation. Could use a large damage buff, since it’s basically a punishment skill for attacking us that doesn’t punish. The celestial effect is good. In general very short cooldown for an elite, but it works with the skill.

Allright, now to the new pets.

Smokescale seems really strong, although I personally don’t understand what the effect of the smoke field is, even after testing it a bit. Very strong burst, sadly couldn’t test in PvP only in WvW but many players had large problems dealing with it, although it didn’t seem too useful after that burst. Still some good utilities, especially the smoke field. The crit chance is surprisingly low, although due to a bug spotter and beastmastery don’t increase pet crit chances. After the recent nerf to the GS leap finisher I have problems comboing it with combo fields though, this one being the largest I encountered till now. Stealth access is cool, but in practice I ahve problems connecting the leap finisher. Giving back the double leap finisher on GS3 could be cool, considering engi gets something similar on hammer.

The wyverns are in my opinion both lacking in their non F2 skills. Cast times are too long damage is too low. The F2 skills are great though, both in effects and animations. I don’t like that the wyvern fire field combo part appears so late though.

Bristleback is cool. Really cute design, some good effects. The F2 seems a bit lackluster, but I see the large potential for AoE bleeding when comboed with it. A good pet that has some uses definitely.

I think that was basically my opinion on all the new stuff. I like druid and the options it opens. It needs some adjustments but the general concept is well made. Looking forward to playing it some more and seeing what the balance team will do with it until HoT launch.

I agree that a 10% damage boost over 5 seconds isn’t really interesting enough, but 25% is definitely overkill. You compare it to 10-15 might stacks, but it will be non removeable and a very quick cast and can be put on top of might. Also it would be stronger than frost spirit in longer fights, since frost spirit has a downtime after a minute (even if it doesn’t die). How about 15% and increase the duration of the buff to 8 seconds (making it a 50% uptime when traited)?

The thing is that I definitely think it would be extremely powerfull for Burst builds in PvP and WvW and I don’t think that would necessarily be a good thing. Although looking at some skills other classes are getting, your idea might be fine too, I mean chronomancer will basically provide perma quickness to groups if needed and just 2 days ago we learned that high quickness uptime would require a hotfix on rangers.

The same ones that complement bow builds. The survival skills and the signets. For PvE you have spirits too.

I understand the general need for the nerf. I understand not wanting to have 6 boons stacked for minutes on one ranger with little effort. I don’t think it was overpowered, but I see the need to turn it down.

That being said, I don’t understand why it had to be nerfed so heavily. I tried using it now, and it’s really not useful anymore, the boon durations are all ridiculously short. When you guys announced the change in the Twitchcon stream, you said that you were “Really excited about this one” but to be perfectly honest, it’s really dissappointing to me how quickly you completely reverse a change that’s positive for rangers that you apparently were so excited about. It really feels like ranger is getting no real love from the developers when stuff like this happens, and I know this is not what you want to communicate.

A more reasonable fix? Remove the might limit, restore the old functionality where the boon duration stays with the conversion, but limit it to a max of 10s for each boon. I know you probably don’t have the tech for stuff like that right now, but I don’t think the skill was so broken that it needed a 24h hotfix, especially considering other actual bugs that were left in the game for far longer.

I’ve seen the same bug happen without the taunt trait on a Siamoth.

I’m a bit concerned that the combionation of Staff+Celestial avatar (and the 2 are clearly designed to be used together, as was even said before in a blogpost about chronomancer) is a bit lacking in general utility outside of healing. I’ll just go through those skills.

Staff:

1. Small heal, Small damage, long range, effect in a line
2. Decent heal, Medium damage, long range, small radius
3. Large heal, long range, small radius
4. Short CC, Condition cleanse, small damage, long range, effect in a line
5. Anti Projectile. Small Heal.

Transform:

1. Large Heal, long range, small radius
2. Good Heal, condition cleanse, long range, small radius
3. Huge Heal, cc, long range, normal radius, blast finisher
4. Huge Heal, small radius, water field
5. Stong CC in a decent radius.

Many of these skills are really really similar in fuctionality. I get that druid is designed to be a healer, but I think these skills are really one dimensional and don’t really have a lot of depth added to them. Any difficulty in using them is reduced to actually being able to hit your allies with your heals and outside of the one obvious waterfield and blastfinisher setup I’m not sure they have much synergy with each other. Both skillsets basically sound like having the same problem longbow had, before the skills were completely changed and the stealth element was introduced.

The other problem is that I don’t think there will be a lot to do in a large chunk of the time you fight, because (especially if you add a dedicated healer) a lot of the time people will just have full health. After that there isn’t really much you can do to protect your allies, and I don’t think just camping your other weapon set will be the best solution.

That being said, I obviously have to try it all out myself before I can give deeper feedback. I think the specialisation has it’s use, but a lot is keeping it from becoming truly great. My first reaction is that it could some more ways to deal a bit of damage to enemies (doesn’t need to be high at all) and access to boons like protection for your team. Maybe not Aegis, because that is really a guardian boon.

That sounds even more like a bug, as the 2 are supposed to be using the same skill.

It’s funny that they called giving pets condition damage a “Quality of Life change”. A flat DPS increase is NOT a QoL change, it’s a balance change. Although it’s definitely just a small tongue slip I found it interesting. Will definitely make some pets viable that weren’t before. Using condi pets on power builds? Could be cool.

You guys do realize that you could just ask the people at TTH why they pulled the article? The worst they can tell you is “We don’t discuss this”.

My suggestion is that F2P players should get login rewards once they complete their dailies.

I know a lot of people don’t agree with it, but I really want F2P players to have access to laurels in some form, so that they actually can get Ascended Amulets or do Ascended Crafting. I had some people ask me if F2P players could still get Best in Slot gear and compete with paying players. My answer to this was “Mostly yes, but…” and I think it would be more in line with the games core design philosophies if the answer could be a simple “yes”.

I completely understand the need for a restriction of the login rewards, as it would be highly exploitable for people with tons of accounts and the current restrictions do a great job at that. I just think that tying it to dailies would really not be exploitable anymore, at least not more exploitable than running short dungeon paths on multiple accounts. You could also tie the login rewards to the completion of a higher number of dailies like 4 or 6. This would also mean that F2P accounts would first have to level up a character a bit to be able to get login bonuses, as new accounts start out with only access to 3 dailies.

Also I’m aware that you get laurels through achievement chests, but those are so few that you can’t really use them for ascended amulets.

The longbow interrupt bug was fixed. For me it’s definitely in the top patches ever.

It wasn’t part of the patch notes, but it’s true. We can now interrupt our longbow skills (or let them become interrupted) without them going on full cooldown. Really happy about that fix, even though it took a long time.

Were you using vampirism rune?

Thanks Eval for the testing. I guess I won’t use the Rune in that case.

Yes Ranger is in a worse PvE spot than before. Ranger actually lost damage modifiers through the patch, although Damage is overall higher now due to new options when it comes to skill rotations it’s not that much of a buff compared to before.

What makes ranger worse now, is that pretty much every other meta class got HUGE buffs, further solidifying their spot in the meta, while ranger just got kind of better. Warrior DPS with PS (or pure damage builds for that matter) is bonkers now, Guardian just got one of the best DPS support skills in the whole game (I still really think the cooldown of it needs to be nerfed), thief is a monster now, and icebow got buffed too. There is no reason to take a ranger, even considering pure DPS only (group DPS support is basically the only gimmick the class ever had that made it interesting) Ranger isn’t really worth taking anymore.

Eval, thanks but I don’t think it answers my initial question. Wiki says that the cripple effect of the runes has a small damage part added to it, and I want to know if this damage part will instantly trigger the opening strike you get from the dodge roll. I’d also like to know if it can trigger an opening strike you had before that.

One of the reasons I’m asking is that there isn’t really a set order in which effects trigger in GW2 that would allow me to make a prediction. If my pet is stowed and I go to combat, the activation of clarion bond won’t give me an additional opening strike at all. If I switch to a weapon with Sigil of Hydromancy and have the fury on weapon swap trait, I will still have an opening strike, although Sigil of Hydromancy will use the opening strike if I have it before the weapon swap, (which is a really nice synergy).

Perfect Synergy with the ranger traits for the Rune would of course be that the effect is able to trigger Opening Strike, but won’t do it with the Fury you get from the dodge.

I’m thinking about which rune set to take for my newish WvW roaming build and came across the Superior Rune of Evasion.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_Evasion

I think it’s rather obvious what I’m thinking about with this rune, it’s basically an additional Fury Source to proc Remorseless. Now there is one thing I’m not sure about. Wiki says that the dodge roll will also proc a cripple attack, which deals a bit of damage.

Now my question: If I dodge roll into an enemy, will this minor bit of damage instantly use up my opening strike that I get from the dodge roll, which would prevent me from actually using the +25% damage part for an attack that can actually use it? Perhaps there is someone that already has the rune set that can test it for me.

Skirmishing as 3rd line because of Quick Draw. Greatsword as 2nd weapon because I took Quick Draw. GS profits much more from the Quick draw effect than a sword dagger set. The sword dagger set can basically reduce the cooldown of a already low cooldown dodge skill if I need the defense, which maybe “protects me” for about a second more. Best use is probably doubling the jump skill anyway. With GS I can use the 3s block skill twice on every weapon swap when I need the defense, or I can still choose to use the jump skill twice to quickly get away. This in my opinion puts it defensively above S/D when roaming, not to mention the higher offensive capabilities.

I use Wolf and have different options for the second pet. I basically switch between a Bird, Black Widow or the Kryta Hound however I feel like. They are all usefull.

There is no such ranger trait. There is a ranger trait that boosts bleeding damage by 20% though, which is completely different and unrelated to this. Warrior is the class with the extra damage against bleeding enemies (and 33% extra bleeding duration and some more bleeding related stuff.)

It’s worth mentioning that it was changed. I was really looking forward to the “old” version, but can 100% see why it had to be nerfed. Attack your target the first time (let’s say with some ranged weapon) for 5 stacks vuln + 5 from your pet. Switch to Greatsword, (fury gives opening strike back) use greatsword 5 to stun your enemy. 5 more stacks vuln. Use Maul with Signet of the Hunt. You get 5 stacks vuln again from maul and another 5 stacks from another opening strike. You also get the opening strike damage bonus, 100% crit chance and the bonus damage from signet of the Hunt on top of having stacked 25 vuln on your enemy in a split second with few skills and a single pet attack. Your pet also receives a few damage modifiers meanwhile, and in theory actually stacks even more vuln. All this needed 2 trait lines and the use of Signet of the hunt a 24s cooldown.