Guild Wars 2

My epic return post still has a 17 month CD. Maybe civil unrest will cast alacrity on me.

Eurantien!!

…wait

This used to be the most optimal when seeds healed 2 condis but it’s still effective. Something else to note you can start casting CF 5 and then cancel it with something like stow weapon. This cancels the skill but you end up with the stability from it. This allows you to get your CF 3 or 4 off at times. From a PvP perspective where blind and condi clear from seeds are helpful the best defensive sustain rotation was: 2 – 3 – 2 – 5/cancel – 2 – 4 – 2 – leave or adding this on the end 1 – 2 – 3 – 2 – leave. If you cast the seeds in good spots you can keep moving and keep getting every heal. For a quick o kitten heals i would do 3 – 2 – 4 or so 3 – 2 – 5/cancel – 4 depending on the situation. For offense I would do 3 – 5 for the roots and then throw a seed on their body as I run up to them for the blind usually. When in an offensive CF throwing seeds to blind the target is often a good play. So you can also do offensively, 2 – 3 – 2 – 5 – 2 – leave – damage. Or you can cancel the 5 and leave celestial form for you want to hit them with good weapon skills like greatsword 5 and a mail or something to really make sure they stay in the roots.

Just to clarify. These runes do not condi clear from allies ONLY with Ranger shouts, period. It is not that ranger shouts don’t affect allies. Other classes have shouts that do not affect allies and those shouts still condi clear from their allies.

Lol RIP

There are many occasions where it is wiser to just pew pew from far away. Sometimes, even if you’re zerker and using double ranged weapons like (lb/staff) that you gotta get on that node. Knowing the difference is what separates the good from bad, well… that and pet control.

Win a game.

Win a game.

Win a game.

Win a game.

Win a game.

Win a game.

Win a game.

Win a game.

Win a game.

25 minute queue time.

Log out.

wolfyrik.2017:

Archon.6480:

wolfyrik.2017:

Wait, what? I thought it was my imagination or that quickdraw was bugging out, I’d seem not to get it sometimes on weps. CA has been consuming it for ~zero CD heals?

That’s actually incredibly annoying. Devs could we get CA to not trigger Quickdraw please?

Hm, I don’t really use skirmishing in PvP, as it is a little weak, but wouldn’t you want quick draw to activate in CA so you could double cast skill 5?

Why would you ever want to cast CA5, even once? It’s completely useless.

CA5 does some of our highest damage, and it’s AoE, AND it slows. Not only that but you can cancel-cast the skill to get the stab so you can get your other skills like 3 and 4 off.

Yeah. They removed spirit mobility and spirit activation on death. End of discussion.

This is why seeds with 2 condi clear was balanced and 1 clear is terrible. Since laying down a Seed of Life procs a ring that then takes time to trigger you have to weigh the cost of staying inside this ring to get the clear vs taking the damage from staying confined within your own ring. Meanwhile you enemy had to weigh the damage they could put on you while you are in the ring despite you getting the clear or try to forcibly remove you from the ring with some sort of CC before the clear triggers. With Seeds of Life only cleansing 1 condition just throwing out damage at the druid is now the best option, and for the druid you are faced with a really awful choice, keep dying to conditions that you probably won’t even cleanse anymore or try to cleanse them anyway and get condi’d WAY faster than you can cleanse, not even netting a benefit.

We get forced into NM/BM/Druid purely because of the strength of boon sharing and the added stats for our pets. We then might stack our pets to 25 might. Instead of BALANCING to provide rangers with more build diversity options we just get our crazy buffed pets, which we’ve invested heavily into, nerfed instead. Effectively making every ranger build worse.

Got to love these Bristleback changes. The F2 was bugged since launch of Heart of Thorns to fire 20 projectiles instead of 15. So they then just straight nerf the skill to 10 projectiles. Claim that 33% of the projectiles were doing 33% less damage, fix that. Then increase the damage by 10% on all the hits to compensate. A 10% buff and a 11% buff do not balance out in anyway a 50% damage nerf.

If trooper runes condi cleared teammates with ranger shouts I would be more keen on running it. And maybe now with the slick shoes nerf I could get away with 5 shouts vs a coordinated team but I still don’t think it would be as efficient as having some better "get out jail free " cards on my bar besides just screaming at people. + the reduced uptime on CF would be brutal.

Besides, me and sic em. Isn’t likely to happen.

Yeah, playing in 5 v 5 I can’t run my full offense lb/gs skirm/marks/druid necessarily. Others can play rev or other dps classes which makes me someone who can and often needs to be the one on the point or outnumbered. Besides, tanky druid → pets that can blow people up → good combo. But yeah I get it haha. Description gave me a good laugh

You are aware that you get a kitten ton of clovers from PvP reward tracks?

Fluffball.8307:

I find that at some level any reasonable build with a stun breaker and condi clear is just as effective as any other and it’s effectively impossible to to tell the difference between builds and skill.

For example, Eurantien, a pro league player, plays a bunch of builds that I consider relative complete garbage. Like he consistently puts up pure crap builds, but he performs on them at a level far beyond mine because he’s high skill and it fits his particular need.

I see the same in my builds, which I realize probably no one (expect perhaps ironically Eura? I haven’t watched the past couple weeks of pro league but last I saw he was interested in quick draw again which I’ve been the solitary advocate of for like half a year) find optimal, and Tragic Positive’s builds, and so on. Etc. Etc.

TLDR: Take a stun breaker, be decent.

HAHA I love this. I was once told by a friend who often asked me for build advice, “I think your builds are good for you, but they never work out for me”.

Was there any build in particular that was “relative complete garbage”? I am curious

To contribute to the thread. It is really hard to give up WHaO and SotP because of their ridiculous synergy. If I were, I would either take WS to get more self sustain for a loss of damage, but i’d gain a little more condi clear, a better “heal” technically, and protection on dodge. OR I would drop something for skirmishing for the utility of quickdraw.

The warrior is using greatsword.

This was a nerf well done. There isn’t much wrong with CS and a nerf to CS hurts weaker Mesmer builds, which would pidgeon hole Mesmer even more

On paper I would agree with you. In practice nerfing this trait would be wrong. No skilled players has trouble with this trait. Despite how OP it seems, it is a minor annoyance at best.

I wish I had mained a thief and not a ranger.

The plan is to make more elite specs, not make the elite spec on par with core.

Justine.6351:

I assume no one is casually walking out of that with -% immobilize duration.

Not if you stun, launch, or knock them down first. Although not perfect, the immobs do stack since there are multiple roots on the person. If the person was an NPC, they would be immob’d long enough that I believe you can immob them again with the same trick which would be 10s later due to the ICD of Ancient Seeds.

UnitedChaos.8364:

Can confirm.
NEITHER
Signet of the Wild or Rune of the Dolyak triggers the minor Druid trait Live Vigorously.

This is correct ^^.

My bad y’all.

I didn’t expect someone to figure it out that fast but I was gonna add things like you don’t need precision, or that I meant by ancient seeds and 2 buttons I meant that as the ONLY trait, no runes, etc.

Live vicariously.

Ancient Seeds can proc more than once if all the hits are simultaneous. Example: Lunar Blast followed by Natural Convergence = Ancient Seeds AoE.

Applying this same phenomenon to only 3 targets, how can you stack 20 bleeds shared across all 3 (ex: 1+3+16 bleeds) using only 2 button presses and the ancient seeds trait? No auto attacks needed from either you or your pet.

There are many ways to do this, but I’m looking for 1 answer in particular. As a result I will add hints till someone figures it out

If you CC a target and hit them with split blade or poison volley it procs all the ancient seeds on that same target. Doing this you can CC and use axe or sb 2 and proc 5 ancient seeds on your 1 target.

So Signet of the Wild heals you and your pet as long as each is not at full health. However, dolyak signet can proc the heal minor trait in Druid every second as well. If signet of the wild does this too then SotW is slightly better, but dolyak, regen, and natural regen from BM are enough to always have astral force ready in order to go into celestial form off of cool down. Which is why every ranger in pro league at the moment runs them.

Wanted to chime in and say I appreciate someone thinking outside the box. It’s been a long time since I have strayed from NM/BM/Druid due to the sheer strength of We Heal As One, Strength of the Pack, and Fortifying Bond. It’s refreshing to see a different perspective.

When ranked is available, you should never queue for anything else. Are you on NA or EU?

Whose Storm?

oh

Mila

nevermind

Unless you’re attempting to compete in Pro Leagues then you don’t need Heart of Thorns to win. There are a lot of core builds that can be successful all the way up into legendary. When they aren’t successful is when fighting teams using VOIP that know whatever your weakness is.

The sky hammer changes and new mechanic are amazing, might be my newest favorite mechanic. And mechanic that puts an emphasis on fighting and killing because they create neutral nodes has my approval. The spirit watch changes are in the right direction but the orb feels a little bit off at the moment for me.

I think it should have been nerfed more. It should be ground targeted too or something. It’s even a trait? Silliness!

It can be countered in organized play. I said that. I think Abjured does a great job countering it. If I’m thinking back about today’s games right PZ did a good job countering it by just hard swapping to a new target together. We did something similar but PZ did have 2 SnR (one trained) and also function gyro. There are ways to counter it, but it was definitely strong today. If SnR never existed I think no team would have run Druid except for us. I was not using it at the beginning of the season and was able to reliably 1v1 necros and mesmers without it on my bar. So that is an example of how we could have made it work.

Fluffball.8307:

Eurantien.4632:

Thanks for the support guys. Unfortunately we didn’t pull off the win. Hoping tomorrow’s patch creates a meta where downing someone first in teamfights actually means something again.

Requesting S&R nerf?

Ha I hope and expect it to be nerfed. Skills like that should never have existed in the first place.

Thanks for the support guys. Unfortunately we didn’t pull off the win. Hoping tomorrow’s patch creates a meta where downing someone first in teamfights actually means something again.

Healing spring is amazing as a trap. The reason it isn’t used is because of how ridiculously good they made we heal as one.

It should be a net gain for PvP. Sure, we can’t ez mode auto attack during the right circumstances but now we can poke and prod in situations that formerly would have forced us into bad situations because of the previous animations. Overall this change should improved our sustain dps while doing little to affect what “burst” the previous animation sequence had.

It’s about time.

I prefer druid, beastmastery, skirmishing. If you are gonna drop skirmishing then you HAVE to go with nature magic because of the synergy between we heal as one and fortifying bond.

You’re gonna need condi clear somewhere, so take Signet of Renewal and that should be enough if you want more take trooper runes as well. Lose the bear and take the fear wolf as well as the drake hound. With proper pet control you can kill anything 1 v 1. Or, since you have beastly warden drop the bear for raven and consider switching drakehound to the fear wolf. You will gain a lot of damage from the raven while maintaining some CC with beastly warden.

I would LLLLOOOOVVVVVEEEEE if they tweaked Spirit Watch and put it into competitive rotation. They say that one point is SLIGHTLY further away from one teams spawn than the other, fix that. Put the orb on a timer similar to Temple of The Silent Storm mechanics try it out in ranked queues for a little. If it seems like it works then add it to the ESL/Pro-League map rotation. I think it could be an awesome map with a unique mechanic and could play out much differently than the other maps do.

Also air and blood are universally the dps sigils.

You should use bountiful hunter > instinctful reaction. You and your pet get a straight damage bonus. With regen and swiftness it is 2% more for each of you, then when you use your elite it is 5% for both of you so that is essentially 10% damage increase across the board. You then get might from the elite so it is actually 6% damage increase for both of you. Second of all you should usually be above 50% health and when you hit 50% health you probably want to be in your defensive sets and I don’t think you want to be shortening the time of your s/d dodges with that quickness. This is my preference because I prefer the guaranteed damage bonus over a trait that has some randomness in it. A similar thing goes for evasive purity, you have enough condi clear with celestial form alone to deal with condition classes, you also have soldier runes so you are getting a little bit more condi clear. You don’t really need the evasive purity cleanse (especially with it on a 10s cd). Sure, blinds are annoying as a lb ranger, but thieves aren’t in this meta. You really shouldn’t be blinded a whole lot, + you have protect me to deal with thieves anyway. Therefore you could be taking vigorous training, AoE vigor to yourself and your teammates, basically you get permanent vigor between that and your heal which means more dodges, which means less time you have those conditions on you anyway + you can dodge power damage, evasive purity doesn’t help with that. On top of that, you get another boon so bountiful hunter, with your elite increases your dps by 7% and your pets damage by 7%.

Also slow doesn’t slow movement just skill action by 50%.

Nevermind… it stopped?

I’m stuck. No matter what character I load the game starts to load whatever map they were originally in, then tries to load Forest, and then crashes. I don’t even know why It is loading Forest. I logged on earlier, ran around in LA for 30 seconds, then the mists for a minute and then logged off. Now when I try to log in I get this…

Seems OP has trouble killing mesmers? This is a learn to play issue and is a cry for anet to not only come up with a better tutorial but an actual whole transformation of societies current education system so that the OP instead of saying, “I’m not good enough, please make these other players worse” will have a mental shift and think, “Hmm, I probably could have dodged those shatters better, NEXT TIME I WILL.” Then eventually OP wouldn’t think mesmers are supreme and this thread wouldn’t have existed. Kudos to you OP for idealism and progressivism!

Just to chime in on the s/d vs gs discussion. After queuing on my core ranger and just LOVING greatsword, it is the one ranger weapon where I really feel I can outplay other players the most, I thought that if might be a superior option for me personally than s/d. I did some duels vs my teammates zeromis/supcutie, and although GS could often quickly win me the fight with good CC chains, when I swapped back to s/d It was clear how much more of an advantage I had.

@ Durzlla, I would argue that with all the torment you have seen I would say s/d is clearly the better option. If you avoid getting hit by the shatters altogether, you have no torment to worry about in the first place.

Cause, y’know sPvP isn’t GvG. There aren’t 16 guilds competing for their share of $400k or anything.

Chaith.8256:

Sigh, now I have pre-HoT build nostalgia.