Guild Wars 2

The shortbow is a mobile medium range sustained condition damage weapon, primarily for fighting single targets (but can be traited for piercing). This is opposed to mainhand axe which is a close/medium range spike based condi weapon, which is better against multiple opponents, especially when comparing traited variants of both weapons.

There is a decent argument for both weapons being hybrid weapons, but the hybrid title definitely fits axe better.

I would adore if Shortbow’s poison volley was replaced with another poison inflicting skill effective against multiple opponents, but Thieves’ shortbow and our own Longbow’s volley doesn’t leave us many options.

I think one thing Anet has been very careful of is giving us access to certain things outside of our pet. We’re completely incapable of inflicting confusion and torment for instance, but our new Fanged Iboga will be able to inflict both. Another restriction would be blast finishers, at launch our only blast finisher was a Drake’s Tail Spin, but it’s clear that restriction has become a lot more lax over time (since a Druid always has Lunar Impact and can also carry a staff, Warhorn and Clarion Bond, though a non-Druid technically only has Call of the Wild to blast finish without their pet and Elite specs are allowed to break rules). So, as thematic as Concussion shot inflicting confusion is, it’s not a thing that Rangers typically do and adds extra unnecessary power that’s anti-synergistic with the daze/stun component.

Strider’s defence on the other hand… If I remember right the default build they gave us for Soulbeast was Dagger/Dagger + Shortbow with Strider’s Defence. I get the feeling Anet themselves don’t even realise what the trait does. So I’d say making the trait functional on all evades, while it would still synergise most with sword, would make the trait excellent an amazing build option. I’m not too sure how I feel about perma quickness for all weapons from 1 trait and enough boon duration though, especially when all other Ranger weapon traits have one effect that applies to the weapon they buff exclusively (besides CDR).

One change I would very much like to see is Glyph of Unity being brought in line with all other tether skills. Currently, its primary use case is to trigger Verdant Etching and Rune of the Druid. The skill should also inflict revealed on all enemies struck, like every other tether skill in the game. Doing so would make the skill itself a decent team support option and our elite skill choice wouldn’t be predetermined by our condi cleanse traits.

Glyph of Unity (non-Celestial)

• Now inflicts revealed (6s) on tethered enemies like every other tether in the game.

Dagger/Torch + Dagger/Torch. Noone will ever reflect my conditions back onto me ever again.

With the training traits gutted it’s unlikely, but I’m excited to see if non/minimal beastmode Soulbeast is viable. Because I like playing Ranger and all I really want is to not kill myself whenever I attack things in melee.

Lastly, I just wanna experiment with skills like Poison Gas

The training traits got nuked, most of the trait renames are awful and serve no purpose (especially Most Dangerous Game, it’s the thief equivalent of thief’s Mug being renamed Rob) , the signet reworks are all terrible, the undocumented changes to pet behaviour make tactical swapping worthless, ancestral grace rework combines with that to make staff worthless. It’s like the heart and soul of the ranger got scooped out to make way for Soulbeast.

Both our defensive traitlines got nerfed and our offensive traitlines got given huge synergy for power builds as well as our best defensive trait.

We’re just awkward warriors now. I’m just gonna have to go play Engi and wait to farm fractals until they put Ranger and Druid back in the game

When Drakes aren’t bugged, they’re our best pets at handling groups of enemies and also some of the tankiest (besides swapping double bears on cooldown). River and Marsh Drake work well for this with their bouncing breath attacks being ludicrously strong, though the other drakes’ breath weapons are better AoE damage overall.

Wyverns are a close second for groups and carry some CC with wing buffet, but they’re nowhere near the one man army monsters that Drakes are. Fire’s world tour attack is about as effective as Rathalos’, i.e. not at all (better in conquest at least where it can cover a point or paint the floor of a teamfight). Electric’s Lightning Assault is as kitten as it sounds and gives it the title of best CC pet, especially big targets.

Bristleback is one of the best DPS pets and is by far the best ranged DPS pet, perfect for harpies in fractals and other situations where you have to fight at range. Its F2 is also brutal in PvP, as it takes a lot of effort to mitigate. Combined with the Smokescale and (Quickdraw) Rapid Fire, you can chain long single target attacks together until any squishy opponent gets flattened.

Cats are typically the go to DPS pets though. Tiger is especially due to its great fury uptime, though in groups that don’t need that Jaguar, Melandru’s Stalker and Lynx are alternatives with their own niches.

Dogs are the pets of choice for PvP when you’re not going for Bristleback/Smokescale hijinks. Hyenas give you double dogs for double takedowns, which is more gimmicky than anything really. But the cream of the crop is the wolf. A pocket wolf makes it very difficult to finish a downstate ranger and even outside that, an AoE hard CC that forces opponents to go sky diving is as powerful as your imagination allows it to be. (black widow/Jungle) Spiders and Krytan Drakehounds are also fairly popular due to the power of spamming immobilize.

Pink Moas are the CC pets of choice against small targets. Lightning Assault is just unreliable against them and while Wing Buffet makes the wyvern the superior break bar breaker, Pink Moas deal more instant CC. Black Moa deals more break bar damage overall, but you take pink for the instant damage.

Lastly, if you must fight the Risen Abomination in Crucible of Eternity, bring beastmastery and two bears. I don’t care what your build is, that is the only way you can stop yourself from being a liability in that fight. Outside of that one fight, Brown Bear has some use as a support pet since it cleanses conditions.

Assuming 50% crit chance and 2 attacks per second you could get 66 ticks of poison from vulture stance every 30 seconds. Under similar circumstances, current sharpened edges would inflict 30 ticks of bleeding from the ranger alone, the old sharpened edges would inflict 60 ticks.

I’m fairly sure we can not only attack faster than 2 hits per second but 50% is a conservative estimate when it comes to crit chance, but more important is that sharpened edges affects our pet too (which is not only more power but…) and may compound on itself while in Soulbeast mode. So the real reason for the nerf may have simply been the engine struggling to handle 133% chance to inflict bleeding on critical.

They could have still just left it at 50%, but every other chance for bleed (or other damaging condition) trait is 33% so… Yay symmetry?

Kehlian.4380:

Wondrouswall.7169:

Reducing the aura size, possibly. Otherwise, keep the aura as persistent as long as Beastmode is activated. It’s a tell to other players and should be kept that way.

Well, the fact that the ranger doesn’t have a pet near him is enough to tell he’s activated soulbeast

Except when it isn’t, like myself in WvW. I keep my pet stowed while out of combat and roaming for precisely for this type of reason.

You can tell a lot about a ranger at a glance, more so than any other profession as they’re most likely to choose a pet that pairs well with their playstyle. Most professions you’ll struggle to identify the weapons of before they fire them on you, but you can make an educated guess about a Ranger and how to fight them at a glance, especially if you can also identify their current weapon.

Your pocket is also the perfect position for a CC pet to peel off would be gankers. Lightning assault is my preferred one, just because it looks cool.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Levetty.1279:

Speaking of dagger, its kind of funny that it has a skill that buffs pets.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Double_Arc

Will be a massive face palm moment if upon testing we find that you don’t get the buff yourself when in beastmode.

Maybe it will work only on the pet skills you get in BM.

As a Ranger weapon, the dagger is contractually obliged to have an attack that affects the pet in some way. The only “exception” is our staff, for healing allies, like that one that’s always with us.

But reading the tooltip, I think the self buff is what they’re going for. Soulbeast’s first trait says traits that affect your pet may affect you differently while in beast mode.

i.e. That isn’t part of the skill description, it’s a footnote saying “look, we can’t give you 350 condition damage and 33% condition duration for an adept trait, so while you’ll probably still get boosted condis you’re not getting them that boosted”. In other words, it’s assumed our spear will grant us swiftness when we dash and mauling would grant us an attack of opportunity. It’s assumed anything affecting the pet affects us.

You can generally get away with any weapons as a Druid.

As a dedicated, pure healer, staff and warhorn are our only good weapons. Most dedicated healers run double staff, sword has decent DPS to go with that, but axe provides more might to your pet with Nature Magic and better DPS uptime thanks to the range.

SB+A/T is standard for condi and condi/heal hybrid druids, PvP/WvW players will often swap one for staff or axe for sword so they don’t die to reflects and have extra survivability. Sword/Offhand, Greatsword and Longbow are all good choices for power druids, the specifics vary based on game mode, staff is a solid weapon choice here as well and it deals much more respectable damage than in condi builds. Staff is an easy fix to astral force generation, but so long as you have enough ways of gaining astral force for when you need CAF, a staff isn’t necessary.

Back during the Celestial meta, Ranger’s go to weapon sets were Axe/Dagger and Sword/Torch.

Back at launch, Axe had a power based auto with no utility besides the bouncing, a heavily condi tilted splitblade and a winter’s bite that didn’t inflict bleed. Since then it is one of the few weapons in the game that has maintained its identity as a hybrid weapon. By being a hybrid weapon, it has value for builds using all our off-hand weapons.

At present, axe is our condition damage weapon of choice, simply because it is our highest damage mainhand for a condi build (as you would expect since its only competition is our pure power damage sword). The real heavy lifting is done by the torch and Quickdraw.

It is also worth remembering, despite Viper’s being the optimal stat set for condition damage, it has plenty of power built in to take advantage of any power buffs to our hybrid weapon.

I love splinter weapon from GW1 and using it with AoE abilities resulting in AoEs that produce AoEs, so what I’d love more than anything is a way to bring that back to GW2. The ranger has had the Incendiary Arrows and Ignite Arrows combo since day one. Let’s bring it back with an elite skill.

Incendiary edges: Your next five strikes explode, inflicting burning on foes in the area.
Incendiary Edges(5): Attacks explode
Number of Targets: 5
Duration: 3 seconds
Burning: 3 seconds
Combo Field: Fire
Radius: 180

(That’s three stacks of burning total over the duration of a single field. Against 5 tightly packed foes, they can expect 15 stacks of burning if they stand in the fields for the full duration.)

Simply adding cleave to Stalker’s Strike would make it follow the same design as our other off-hand options (one long-range targetted attack, one PBAoE attack).

The dagger is really strong in PvP as a condi utility weapon thanks to the evade and the ranged cripple/bleed.

It’s just these days skills aren’t just gap closers that apply blind. They’re gap closers that apply AoE blind and drop a PBAoE light field upon landing that pulses half the damage of the initial strike every second for 4 seconds and pulses fury to allies standing in its radius, that can also be traited to apply vuln, have increased crit chance, deal more damage, have a chance to burn have the field last longer, heal and recharge 20% faster.

Dagger gives us what? An evade and applies 3 stacks of poison that can be improved to maintain perma poison easily. A projectile that inflicts cripple with 40% uptime at base when the mainhand you typically pair it with has ~98% base-line cripple uptime on its auto-attack.

Dagger is alright in a vaccuum as a defensive off-hand option but it lacks damage type synergy with our sword. The biggest change I would make for PvP is giving Crippling Talon an Immobilize, similar to crippling shot and, again, cleave on stalker’s strike for PvE, possibly an increase to the dagger’s physical damage overall.

Edit: But I’m a big proponent for skills being simple and fun like our dagger skills are currently and not having screen spanning tooltips.

Castleguard.2498:

AnariiUK.7409:

So unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be very viable, especially since you need 100% flanking uptime to reach the best numbers.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Light_on_your_Feet
Light on your Feet
Damage and condition duration is increased for a while after dodging. Short bow skills always behave as though you were behind your target, recharge faster, and pierce.

Tooltip does not match in-game functionality. It should read:

Damage and condition duration is increased for a while after dodging. Short bow skills recharge faster, pierce and their flanking bonuses are stronger.

It adds extra duration to crossfire’s bleed, poison volley’s poison and crippling shot’s immobilize as well as 10 stacks of vuln for 10s on Concussion shot if those skills hit while flanking.

Additionally, if it was just you always count as flanking, we’d just be using quickdraw instead and 100% flanking uptime would still be a relevant concern.

anduriell.6280:

First of and for a thousand time the game is not only raids, that part of the pve gamemode has the smallest participation in game, it is said not being superior to a 10% of the playerbase, even with the legendary armor bait.

Condi druid is only good for raids and few portions of some fractals. The rest of the game and gamemodes can make use of the build because it is actually trash.

Now about the flanking thing. As it seems you don’t play much with the ranger outside from maybe raids i’ll spell it for you: this game is not an FPS like call of duty, it’s a tabbed target game with autotarget and autofacing that doesn’t require any skill to face the enemy at all times.
.

I never once said raids. I was considering the use of the flanking mechanic in sPvP as well as keeping the language vague to include PvE. Yes, the flanking mechanic is pretty garbage for 1v1 fights because of how easy it is to look at a single person. But for an sPvP roaming ranger you can flank the opponent and dish out some devastating damage, coordinating with your team to maintain that flank is important (if they look at you you stand at range and force them off the point, if they look at your teammate you kill them, if they try to run they die).

From the standpoint of a game design, playing up a skill based mechanic is more fun than removing the skill based mechanic.

atheria.2837:

Who uses a shortbow? MOST players don’t and looking at the skills in the nerf list three of them I use every single day were blasted down while Shortbow of all things gets ‘buffed’ but not really, it was just returned to a pre-nerf state from a previous nerf, no gains for anyone else.

Ok, seriously, what’s your citation for this? Because none of the buffs that have been given to shortbow are equivalent to nerfs in its skill history. Heck, the only nerf shortbow has ever gotten was the drop to 900 range and these buffs certainly can’t be described as returning it to its pre-nerf state.

So again, what’s the nerf you’re referring to when you say that these shortbow buffs are undoing a previous nerf?

anduriell.6280:

that’s not correct, you pointed out just the buffs, now lets see the nerfs

• Sb ranger reduced to 900
• spirits lost mobility, thus nerf to spirits
• sword dps nerfed due slower 3rd attack
• trait empathic bond moved to WS traitline destroying any build variety
• nerf after nerf for the dps of the only 2 pets that can be used for pvp.
• nerf in Axe4 making that skill completely unreliable to hit moving targets
• nerf to rangers main condition source sharpened edges in a 66%.

I ignored patch notes that are irrelevant to condition builds, but I tried to include as many changes as possible that weren’t directly related but relevant (like the base healing to bonus healing ratio on celestial avatar and bristleback/smokescale changes) as my summary of changes was in response to a statement than condi ranger is being slowly and repeatedly nerfed into the ground.

And as stated, since the specialisations patch made so many changes to game balance I wasn’t going to waste time looking back at the entire history of the game to discuss how ranger condi builds were nerfed before condi builds as a whole were even relevant.

Axe 4 is irrelevant to condi builds, shortbow has been 900 range since long before the specialisation update, while the reworking of spirits and the repositioning of empathic bond both occured during the specialisations update and therefore are not in the scope of my summary. Everything else I’ve mentioned. Funny that.

Druid

• nerf to druid healing, nerf to druids seed of life, lunar impact.
• nerf to druid access to CA, thus healing.
• nerf to trait lingering light.
• nerf to grace of the land, Now you do 5% less dps with 5 stacks.

As above, with the exception of lingering light which I couldn’t find the actual patch notes for and therefore couldn’t put a date to, these were all mentioned though I called grace of the land a rework instead of a nerf (since for a game mode like WvW affecting 10 instead of 5 is a big deal.

Also the new trait light on your feet is a complete trash. How it is written in the description is how it should work, that is fun removes the unwanted flanking mechanic in a ranged weapon in a game that uses autotarget and autofacing and is a reason to get into the trait line severely nerfed because sharpened edges, and they can remove the condition modifier when dodge which is useless, who in their sane mind would be wasting dodges just for the 10% extra damage in bleeds.

Scientifically speaking and game design-wise, no. Removing mechanics does not make something more fun. The flanking mechanic to the shortbow has been made into its identity and gives it a lot of power as a reward for good positioning and team coordination. Regardless of the extra bloat, the flanking powerup alone makes taking the trait a statement towards your perceptions of your own skill and your willingness to live the dream. “You always count as flanking while wielding a shortbow” has none of that same joy, dedicated shortbow players would simply turn up their nose and respond “I’m too good to need this handicap”.

Just a thought, if the only other reason for weapon swapping is tailwind and furious grip (which we can expect to be irrelevant and unnecessary for DPS), then wouldn’t it be a decent consideration to ditch geomancy sigils altogether and use a second weaponset for utility or burst damage? (Similar to how we used to camp sword/axe in dungeons, but use longbow for burst damage) You could have axe/torch on swap to open with splitblade, bonfire, etc. but then camp shortbow until you can no longer flank the boss. There’s definitely some value to the AoE of Torch as well, just it’s rare to come up in raids.

I could definitely see this working out to the benefit of condi druid at least, since they would be able to carry a staff for whenever they need to heal. But then you would lose Quickdraw for Celestial Avatar if you go with light on your feet… and this is going into theory craft about a hybrid build and not a dedicated damage build.
(Edit: Aaand faffing with that once again I continue to run into the problem of Seraph’s being the most appropriate stat set outside of trying a mix set, even with its mediocre healing power, overload of precision and waste of stat points in concentration and just for completeness here’s the joke of a build I’ve come up with)

Heibi.4251:

I’m quite for real. I’ve experienced firsthand in WvW the ridiculous OP classes, and ranger isn’t one of them. Warriors can run into a zerg of 30 and survive.

That is because they have a not die button and an autoclicker duplicating the effects of the button. Their ability to do this was cut in half this patch. And I’m sorry, but I can’t render any more meaningful discussion about WvW balance and I won’t until the reward systems encourage me to actually look into how to win at the game mode.

Ranger has basically been slowly nerfed and relegated to Druid healer for raids. Yes, the condi meta for raids has helped open up another role, but most raids want the healer druid first.

Since I slowly lost interest until I left entirely from when Anet made sword boring until, wildly enough, the same time that Tragic Positive came back, I’m looking over the patch notes again between now and the specialisation change of June 2015 I’ll summarise each month where something happened, but I’m only looking for ranger specific changes that affect condi builds and not including bug fixes so there’s a good chance I miss some finer details.

July 2015: Brought back ambidexterity’s old range increasing effect as baseline for off-hands.
September 2015: Buffs to spirits, the Heal as One fiasco and pets gaining condition damage
October 2015: Say hi to the Druid and our new pets! Which opens up huge new avenues for our condi builds. And y’know, viper’s gear is more relevant to us than most.
January 2016: Hidden Barbs got a huge buff and Honed Axes now grants slightly more ferocity (ooo, so game changing), but every point of damage matters.
April 2016: We no longer kick people with our sword, a sad day indeed. Massive buffs to shortbow, increased might generation from ricochet and winter’s bite now bleeds.
May 2016: Nerfs to Seeds of Life and Lunar Impact, as well as a nerf to smokescale and I think an overall nerf to bristleback.
July 2016: Ricochet had its damage normalised for raids and lost a lot of fun, sharpening stone had a huge buff to its damage output. There were also a lot of pet buffs and nerfs to beastmastery and “guard!”. Quickening Zephyr got a small buff later in the month too.
October 2016: The Druid healing rebalance to encourage healing power. Massive shortbow buffs got hidden among the 0 healing power druid’s misfortune.
February 2017: The last set of changes before this month. Throw Torch got a physical damage buff (why?), our pets became much more reliable (unless they’re drakes), sharpening stone got its dps almost doubled, Grace of the Land got changed to its current form and sharpened edges had its dps cut in half.

2 prior changes nerfed condi specifically (though other changes can certainly cause knock on effects). Not even 2 patches on the whole, just 2 notes within all those patches. This was the first time condi ranger has been given a clear cut nerf and unfortunately it was to Bonfire. There has been no slow nerfing of condi ranger over time, no more so than would be expected from a balance team trying to balance out their game.

No idea how long you have played, but I’ve been at it since beta. Ranger has been neglected by ANeT. Pets AI is broke – we lose damage output due to it. Our big elite Entangle was truly nerfed long ago. And they’ve slowly nerfed our damage output on primary weapon choices while trying to get us t o use unpopular ones. They finally fixed our One-hand sword locked in the motion problem by nerfing it. And now they’ve come after our torch. Our axe was nerfed a while ago and no longer ricochets to as many targets.

But if you look at the other classes – big damage buffs over the past 2 years.

Same.
We are included in balance patches and our class actually has very few glaring issues left, our mainhands auto-attacks being boring isn’t exactly priority number one.
The idea that pets are worthless is an outdated ideology.
Entangle was hugely buffed. It was practically impossible to catch something in it besides PvE mobs for more than 10 seconds and despite the 1/4 duration, it has 2/5 the cooldown to compensate.
The sword changes drove me to going on hiatus they were that awful, but public opinion is praise for it.
The Bonfire nerf makes me mad, but a 17% damage loss on a single skill isn’t going to make me stop enjoying it.
I can’t understand why they removed what made ricochet fun to use instead of balancing around it.

Our class has also received massive buffs over the last 2 years, we haven’t been irrelevant or neglected since the specialisations change and the days of being auto-kicked from dungeons are long dead.

Crapgame.6519:

Obtena.7952:

For instance, has it ever occurred to you that Druid has ‘awful’ damage for a reason? Perhaps that’s intended?

I have no dog in this fight but I do have to question what reason could that be or intent?

I guess it depends on the format of play but I do not see a reason for “awful” damage say in WvW. Just one example. Maybe that isn’t fair because, well, I think most of us know that format is broke…

How does the Druid’s sustain compare to other classes? Is balance there all things being equal, if possible, outside the player skill?

Put simply, game balance. Every playstyle should have a weakness in a game like GW2. If a build is too mobile, damaging, survivable and supportive all at once then there is no reason to play any other build. This doesn’t mean that every build should be able to compare itself to another, trading off a point of damage for a point in survivability and the like at a one to one rate.

The druid traitline focuses on healing and amplifying allies, as an elite spec, that should make the traitline definitive of what your build is supposed to do. As an elite spec, the goal is to dedicate yourself to support, by the nature of having more healing abilities you are more survivable so that means you have to pay in mobility or damage. Since rangers have good mobility and it’s difficult and more against theme to reduce that with Druid, damage has to the part that suffers.

It’s not that your damage is reduced for being a druid either, but that you miss out on damage options by taking Druid, are encouraged to take healing options over damage or active defence options for better astral force gain and results in basically no damage output in celestial avatar form. Damage output seems like it was always intended to be the weakness of a druid.

Really, I’d just like the pulsing fury and swiftness back. Pulsing stability lacking counterplay and needing to be changed I can understand, but killing the synergy with remorseless as well was just too much.

Awesome synergies were one of the reasons the long list of changes during the specialisations update made buildcraft on the ranger fun. Getting rid of them is just a huge step backwards.

If you have Light on Your Feet, the shortbow skills get increased duration on conditions inflicted while flanking and Concussion shot applies 10 stacks of vuln for 10 seconds while flanking.

Wondrouswall.7169:

For Pete’s sake. Why wasn’t it reworked to something with more synergy instead of converting it so that people could be lazy with positioning in a game where positioning is kind of a thing?

At present the tooltip for the trait is incorrect. It increases the duration of the flanking bonuses of shortbow attacks as suggested by the patch notes. Concussion shot is the only exception, it now applies 10 stacks of vuln for 10 seconds when flanking, when traited.

terrorshard.3854:

Man our elites stink now.

The worst part is, Rampage as One got one of its coolest interactions removed because of an overarching change while Glyph of Unity was missed off in the overarching buff to tether skills. It woulda been fun with Krait runes and Light on your Feet boosted crossfire too.

EpheSOSIayer.6370:

HotHit.6783:

As I don’t speak german at all, I can’t know for sure the might stacks on the party (as your end goal is not to stack might for yourself). But using your personal might as a reference for it I see another issue with the build, your might generation will prioritise you, who benefits the least from it. Meanwhile, a PS warrior or a similar might stacking DPS build can accurately track their own might generation while being as combat effective as possible because they are one of the damage dealers of the party.

Thanks for your answer. I agree with everything except the last part. If you take a look at the might sources of the group there is only the PS. There is no might I gain to myself only, all skills are too 5 players (or 4 other + me). There is nearly no chance I getting might from PS since subgroup 2 is complete melee @VG. So my personal might displays the group might very well. The comp we played @Gorseval was only done to spread the healing/regeneration better to all subgroups, I would not recommend to look at might stacks here. In addition I have to mention, that condi rangers gain some stacks might to themselves, so the have even a better uptime than me.

When I mention you not stacking might on yourself, I mean there was several occasions where you shot lunar impact at long range and may have hit a fire field (which I believe was part of the intention). Your stalker too would be giving might to the party excluding you were you to use its roar while while you’re away performing mechanics.

Pfft, no. It doesn’t say it does and it doesn’t look like it does, though the reveal might be inherent in the debuff the skill applies. If it turns out it does that and it can hit enemies in stealth it would be my go to elite for WvW.

Based on Spear of Justice and Tainted Shackles being specifically mentioned to inflict revealed I think they just completely overlooked Glyph of Unity. That or they couldn’t figure out how to make Glyph of Unity (Celestial) not inflict reveal when Glyph of Unity (mortal) does and so just didn’t bother.

They mentioned it as an overarching change when really it’s just two skills.

Heibi.4251:

ANeT, the ranger needs a massive damage output boost not a nerf on anything.
You keep buffing the other classes to higher damage output(Revenant is even nastier) and nerf the ranger again(with small buff to SB). They keep slow boating ranger damage output.

I’d love to see a true warrior, thief, mesmer or necro nerf. Warrior is still OP with all the invulnerable, blocks and such.

But I bet this section of the forums is ignored since ANeT hates the ranger. They only want ranger to play druid in their raid meta.

Are you for real? Our core profession has been competitive condition DPS for a long, long while now and being pidgeon-holed into our elite spec would only bring us down to the same level as other professions. Since Ele’s meteor shower nerf, condi Ranger has been tied with condi engi for top DPS in raids with far more ease of use and since the group’s Druid can provide spotter to open up hidden barbs and condi engis lack a good replacement for pinpoint distribution, the rangers don’t lose effectiveness for running multiple. I’ve seen raid teams just running rangers in every DPS slot, just like they used to with eles. This nerf was justified.

I’ve not seen Power Ranger doing much in raids and the ranger really doesn’t have much going for it in that department, but I can only guess they were decent enough in PvP because they deleted remorseless rampage as one.

The shortbow trait amplifies the effectiveness of flanking benefits, like it says in the patch notes. The trait description might just be an old version that they were testing, the current effect causes all flanking components your shortbow skill facts to turn blue and have increased duration.

I’ve just tested it in-game, my 4 seconds of bleed on crossfire when flanking has increased to 6(1/2) seconds. Hunter’s Tactics doesn’t seem to be affected, but I haven’t tested it. It would make for a hell of a fun build, sharpened edges, hidden barbs and light on your feet for disgusting crossfire damage when flanking.

It would be interesting to see another off-hand and if this elite spec is the pandering to the non-rangers ditching pet kitten I hope it isn’t the melee condi mainhand of my dreams. But it would be a bit bizarre for us to get another magical oriented specialisation, even if we are arguably the most magic inclined adventurer.

Considering how ranger off-hands go, we can expect the skills to be a 1200 range targetted attack and short range PBAoE. Though the dagger does somewhat break from that second one since stalker’s strike is a single target melee hit.

Elodium.7263:

I like your idea. Mind, I’m not an experienced raider in GW2, but I did a lot of raiding in other MMO’s so I do understand the core concepts very good.

What is the purpose of this build. To take place of a PS warrior or? If you got PS warriors for might stacks and a druid for healing in a raid group, this build would incorporate both? So you can get one more pure damage build?

Exactly right.

It’s called role compression, where we take a player doing one thing (such as the healer) and give them something else to do (such as buffing party damage) while minimizing the cost to their primary or as something else they can do when they can’t perform their primary role. Druids often try to find the right balance of enough healing to suit their raid group at the minimum cost to their personal DPS and will frequently act as psuedo DPS/party buffers when they can’t access CA. Chronomancers will similarly take up tanking, because their personal DPS is terrible, but we need them for their godly party damage buffs (alacrity/quickness).

I don’t think this build will work out, but I’m not a frontrunner when it comes to raids so I can’t say for sure. It needs high healing power to make up for lost flexibility in its healing and is incredibly rigid for what it needs to do in moment to moment gameplay. Picking up an ally from downed state would be detrimental to the might stacking from this build, when a Druid would normally want to do so to quickly build up CA. Needing to swap to CA early to dish out some strong healing or needing to wait on using CA will also cause problems to your might stacking, the reliance on an allied fire field being available also further restricts the effectiveness and demands coordination. Since loss of might is a major drop in DPS, this build would primarily be for highly competitive and perfectionist raid speedrun groups. But then the loss of personal DPS from the druid is a lot from magi or berserker gear especially compared to the damage loss for a warrior using phalanx strength and you’re going to take a warrior for banners anyway. Definitely a strong and viable build, but I just don’t see its scenario where it’s great.

Edit: I just looked through the Vale Guardian video and part of my worries was obvious there. You had 25 might and the group stayed healthy until the groups split. When that occurred you struggled to get back to and maintain the 25 might, though that could also be a symptom of Vale Guardian’s green circle mechanic. The healer is needed at the green circle and with what appeared to be a one healer composition that meant it had to be you who went. The chronotank (at least, I assume it’s a chronotank) spent a long period of time at low health while you spent time stacking up might and this similarly happens at other times in the fight.

As I don’t speak german at all, I can’t know for sure the might stacks on the party (as your end goal is not to stack might for yourself). But using your personal might as a reference for it I see another issue with the build, your might generation will prioritise you, who benefits the least from it. Meanwhile, a PS warrior or a similar might stacking DPS build can accurately track their own might generation while being as combat effective as possible because they are one of the damage dealers of the party.

Well, if this thread is just to mention design things that irk us about the core Ranger then there are a few things I’d like to bring up.

Sword:
I’ve thought it was awful since the rework, the basic attack chain looks terrible and the skill names are worse. That’s simply subjective. Objectively speaking however, what’s clear to me is that without the dashes and commitment on the auto-attack chain the weapon is just… Boring. All ranger weapons can use other skills to boost their damage output. Damage type wise, the poison looks awkward, but since poison has utility in reducing healing it’s very clear cut that this is intended to be a power weapon. Dagger plays into this poison game with a second superior evade+poison and then includes another condition skill. Axe has the most synergy and leads to the most interesting gameplay I would say. Warhorn has close to as much synergy, but since warhorn skills are just “set and forget” type skills it’s not as interesting. Torch is arguably the worse off-hand to pair with sword, but that’s the way you swing you do you, because it can still use the fire combo field for a fire aura and sword wants to glue you to a victim in the field. What I’m trying to say is, the sword’s design is archaic of the time when the auto-attack chain was satisfying. The weapon would benefit greatly from altering the auto-attack to have more play to it (such as cleave on Kick’s replacement to make cleaving satisfying and higher damage on Pounce’s replacement to give the weapon back that meaty moment when you get the third hit) or create more play with Monarch’s Leap in some way (I have no clue here).

Greatsword is a flawless masterpiece of design, but would benefit from Counterattack actually kicking people like it says it does so I can kick people again and Hilt Bash getting its bugs fixed.

All ranger off-hands have a targetted long-range skill and a PBAoE skill… Except dagger, which swaps the positions of the two on the skill bar and is only single target but it’s still a similar design. Throw Torch is probably the most boring skill of the bunch and doesn’t even provide a projectile finisher to use with Bonfire (which is gorgeous) and with its primary set-up with mainhand axe it’s a longer range and cooldown, non-chilling winter’s bite without the weakness application or potential AoE when traited. It’s just a projectile you throw and forget, unlike Path of Scars, Crippling Talon or even Hunter’s Call (since you want to capitalise on the vuln stacks). Path of Scars also suffers for being roped into Ranger off-hand design, since ground targetting would make it far better and remove terrain issues (like falling off of cliff edges and boomeranging back into the cliff, but that is an engine issue that can be avoided using ground targetting).

Ricochet only getting one bounce made room for its auto to be more consistent overall damage in raids, but the one bounce mechanic is once again, a boring design and in some cases self-sabotage (Subject 6 getting free blocks because I need to auto a returning ooze especially) or just awkward (ricocheting Caudecus for a free achievement). There are at least a couple of areas where the second hit has tangible benefit or at the feeling of it (tagging enemies in a zerg and trash mobs in general). Ricochet being weaker in RangervsRanger fights is a bit of a benefit to the nerf, but there’s no longer the decision to target someone because they’re close to someone else, just coincidental free damage on someone else because they happen to be standing close by. Make it bounce or make it not bounce, not this awkward middle ground where we get the worst of both.

As for traits that are a bit… Iffy. Honed Axes comes to mind as it provides CDR to off-hand axe, but no secondary benefits like the ferocity or Winter’s Bite explosion. This would be fine in the old trait system but Ambidexterity no longer applies to all off-hand weapons.

I understand I’ve used fun and boring as objective terms and people will have different definitions of what is fun. But I consider fun being meaningful things you can do outside of just hitting your highest damage buttons off cooldown or swinging your sword over and over. Jumping through too many hoops can be bad (like the superior, pre-rework sword), but asking players to jump through no hoops is far worse as it gives them nothing to do. Even just standing behind a boss interested in another player and plinking them with shortbow is more fun than Axe, despite the gameplay being identical, because you do so with the knowledge that you’re standing where you are to achieve maximum damage. (yes all good rangers have hunter’s tactics, but that is significantly weaker than crossfire’s bonus bleed and is not inherent to the axe and is much less visible)

The animal companion in GW2 one of the best companion mechanics in gaming. What would be great is a ground targetted skill to tell your pet to move to a specific location again. If we get that back (preferably replacing F3: return to me), the mechanic is perfect. The point of the mechanic is not to have perfect control, but to have an ally with us that acts autonomously that we can give basic commands to. There will always be problems that arise from that mechanic, but being able to tell our pet to move would solve some of the biggest problems.

Removing the pet from the ranger is out of the question entirely. For a companion to be good it has to be meaningful and in a game like GW2 the animal companion basically asks to be a core part of the playstyle. This is why companions for other professions are simply nowhere near as powerful. Since the pet is so core to the profession, removing the mechanic would mean a rework of the entire profession’s design and for those of us that like ranger that would mean sacrificing what makes the profession good.

You already took away sword kitten it. I’d like my favourite profession to not be removed from the game entirely just because you don’t want to play it.

I believe the reason the attack still has a “cast time” is because they can’t remove cast times from skills. Lightning Reflexes, Shield Stance and other skills that do nothing but dodge/block can still be interrupted by attacks they should prevent. In Hornet sting’s case, the cast time is for the sword swing.

They could apply an evade to the sword swing and that would likely be the easiest fix. But removing the cast time would require a complete rework of the skill, like they had to do to remove the “self-root” of the auto-attack. Which also means we’d get our decent attack animation replaced with, I dunno, the Ranger dropping the sword or something so the animation works with the lack of cast time and Slash/Kick/Pounce’s stand-in.

I can at least laugh at all the people who wanted to remove what made mainhand sword fun. Since the DPS got lowered and both axes got huge buffs, if they want to stay competitive in dungeons they don’t get to use sword either.

The icing on the cake is now they have to actually root themselves since Whirling Defence has great damage and path of scars no longer suffers reliability issues based on the terrain.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Substance E.4852:

-It’s not slower, or if it is it’s only detectable via timing animation frames from what I can tell.
-Quickness does help, this is just flat out wrong to say.

Two points on this these:

• It actually is slower due to more aftercasts than the previous animation, resulting in a DPS loss.
• Quickness affects it, but because the aftercasts on the new chain, a Ranger still kills slower with it compared to the older chain.

Someone mentioned it. I stopped theory crafting and lurking the forums to make an axe/axe build usable and listened in game. The attack sounds noticeably slower than I remember with quickness. I used to play with a bad quickness sword build a lot, so yeah it’s anecdotal, but I’m sure I can tell the difference.

Maybe it’s to make up for the fact that you can’t slash kick pounce, slash kick pounce in time with your auto attacks anymore? ’Cause we gotta fit those 6 extra syllables in there somehow.

Substance E.4852:

HotHit.6783:

It looks like they removed Kick. I’m not sure what they actually did to prevent the “rooting” problem, so whether they killed the weapon or made it awkward to use I can’t say for sure.

Both kick and pounce would move you forward enough to lock you into a movement path, preventing you from performing any other action. You can see the same effect during GS2 and Staff3. Both are longer duration but have the same effect. To my knowledge, only swapping weapons will allow you to cancel the animation mid channel.

Changing the skills so they no longer move the character means you now have full range of movement and action during the entire chain in the same way a thief or warrior would.

I know what Kick and Pounce do. I did not know what the patchnotes were going to be until today. I was trying to retain hope that Anet hadn’t followed Riot Games’ example and deleting the things I love only to replace them with something boring and soleless. The sword has never self rooted and this patch just deleted one of the most fun weapons in the game.

So yeah, turns out they hadn’t made new tech to produce a leap type attack that doesn’t behave as a leap whenever you’re trying to move manually in any direction other than forwards, like I was painfully hoping. No instead of removing the self root, they deleted the ranger sword and the beautiful auto-attack animation had to go with it.

It looks like they removed Kick. I’m not sure what they actually did to prevent the “rooting” problem, so whether they killed the weapon or made it awkward to use I can’t say for sure. What I can say is, I learned to use sword just so I could kick people in the face repeatedly and, maybe it’s just the Charr, but this new animation does not meet that fantasy or even provide an equivalent anywhere close. This animation is like something taken from a bland nameless NPC who you’re not meant to fight.

If this change goes how it seems to be going, I’m not sure I can pick up my sword again.

The wiki used to say water spirit’s passive proc scaled with the ranger’s healing power (or the healing of the person who procced it, whichever is higher), I wonder what happened? We could probably test it with our pet vs Svanir and the Chieftan in Heart of the Mists, using the beastmastery trait to boost our pet’s healing power.

It may just be that Water Spirit didn’t behave how the wiki claimed and suffered the same issues as Nature, Stone and Storm. I do know that Aqua Surge’s splash doesn’t scale with healing power, much like Storm’s Thunderclap.

Small forum tip, don’t put the links through a sharing system like Tiny URL. Their purpose is to reduce the size of the link, but for this forum "Build Link":www.giantURL looks identical to "Build Link":www.tinyURL until you click the link and the forum shows you the destination.

The result is incredibly suspicious links. You might as well have put your build link through Shady URL.

Veteran Oakheart.4035:

RIP spirits 08/2012 – 09/2013
All is vain.

Most spirits are more powerful than they’ve ever been, though some are weaker. Sunny is incredible since the condition stacking change and has only been getting more awesome as spirits get more buffs. Frosty is basically the same as it’s always been, one of PvE’s best damage boosts. Stone with just Nature’s Vengeance is up to 76% teamwide protection uptime, which is far more useful than the paltry <30% that it could hope for a few years ago. Nature scales with healing power now and can be traited to pulse stability, but can’t be moved onto corpses or use multiple renewals across a teamfight so it’s better in some ways worse in others.

Storm is just trying to do too many things we don’t need or want in that form, it does more than it did originally but being immobile itself makes it very difficult to use its daze and swiftness. The vulnerability simply doesn’t justify the utility slot (I’d take it before frost in PvP though). Storm is the only spirit that you could call dead.

Roots are mechanically a summoned ally and either every single thief I’ve fought pre HoT has dodged my Entangle (post-HoT I’ve a few out of shadow refuge with Glyph of Tides) or they target the unit they were summoned on with a bleeding/immob attack every second. So it makes perfect sense that they could be buffed with Sun Spirit and apply their own burning, I can’t believe I didn’t know this sooner.

One interesting build I’m considering is Rune of the Grove Nature’s Vengeance Druid.
Rune of the Grove, Nature’s Vengeance, Stone Spirit and Lingering magic grant you a theoretical 100% protection uptime.
(3*1.5)/10 + (1*1.5)/3 + (4*1.5)/30 = 115% protection uptime maximum
Stone Spirit + NV + Grove Rune
(The real value will be lower since buffs won’t refresh the instant they’re off cooldown and the RNG may just decide to screw you over)

I’m gonna test Sun Spirit proper when I get home today, but right now I’ll theorycraft a build.

Dagger’s just one of the Ranger’s many great off-hand choices and it’s certainly no slouch. It can give potentially 100% poison uptime (never gonna happen in PvP), has a low cooldown evade and a ranged soft CC. It’s very much built for PvP. I’m certain there’s a viable build you could make for Sw/D these days, it always used to be a powerhouse for WvW roaming Rangers pre-HoT. Even if it’s bad, I love mowing people down with sword autos in Zerker/Marauder gear.

Crapgame.6519:

GW2 Raid content != WoW’s. In this case the first go around of trying to tank, support/heal and DPS is still kitten poor so most expect zerk. Heck, there was a 10 guardian raid video posted. Sort of proves the point it doesn’t matter what you bring…

It’s not that it doesn’t matter what you bring. It’s likely raids could be completed with a full 10 of most professions. However, every profession is designed to be capable of pulling off a wide variety of (if not all) roles, but each in their own way. They likely put a lot more effort into their team composition and battle tactics than 10 Guardians, full zerker, rotate and don’t die. It may just be a testament to how strong the Guardian is, but every profession is capable of performing damage (condi and physical), support and control roles.

Tragic Positive.9356:

You and your Pet use your own condition damage.

Other affected allies take the coefficient from themselves.
I confirmed this only a few months ago, myself.

So the burn damage is based upon the condition stats of the player who procs it? ’Cause that is what my (somewhat outdated) testing confirmed.

The Seeds of Life mechanically is more like a timed explosive that detonates in a shower of healing. IRL there are types of fungus that violently explode. The Brachydios in Monster Hunter has a symbiotic relationship with an explosive “slime” mold that grows upon its obsidian armour.

Now I’m not saying the Devs are just copying Monster Hunter, but exploding fungus is not a completely alien concept and it has been used in gaming on multiple occasions. It wouldn’t surprise me that they were trying to make the seeds of life look fungus-like, which means, as we naturally have an aversion to fungi, the seeds of life look “icky”.

Well, my biggest complaint about druid has been addressed. Druid before was like a wedge being jammed into a nice Ranger sphere, taking it had some synergy with the base profession, but astral force generation was impossible without specific skills. It certainly didn’t help that ranger skills that heal allies apply regen or are performed by the pet, which didn’t work with Druid’s astral force. Now that Astral Force synergises with all the heals the Ranger personally throws out the Druid is in a much better spot. Druid is more like an indent for our Ranger ball to roll neatly into now.

Spirits, invigorating bond, pet damage, not giving you AF? Well since we’re not the ones performing the healing, it makes sense we don’t get any astral force. Those spirits and pets we have helping us are entities we can heal though and that gives us astral force.

Instead of our elite spec requiring one weapon choice or one healing skill for its primary function, that list now includes a plethora of options with varying impacts on the AF bar which means a Druid has to consider the impact all these healing sources has on their AF and how reliably they can reach it. This balancing act of how often we want CAF and what build decisions we’re willing to spend on gaining AF is huge for players like myself who love theory crafting builds. Yet despite wanting all this healing, Ranger’s base healing isn’t bursty, which makes even the most selfish Druid want to access CAF when they get into trouble.

So yeah, good job dev team. Druid is now one of the best designed elite specs (if not the best). It isn’t simply Ranger+ like Tempest or Berserker, it’s a specialisation, like reaper or beastmastery, with a clear purpose that has actual synergy with other things.

Hell, here’s the basis of a build I’ll be trying to refine thanks the new changes.
Bunker Trapper Druid

I do not feel astral force generation has been a problem for a while if you’ve been taking troll unguent or especially a staff. Now that Druid synergises with the base ranger AF is much better off and, while the bandaid solution to OOC AF generation is problematic, your suggestion is far more complicated than making the auto animation play with no effect when it lacks a target.

Consider this scenario: You give damage an AF coefficient of 10% and healing an AF coefficient of 20%, staff autoing with my druid, dealing 200 damage and 66 healing, would generate 20 AF from damage and 13.2 AF from healing (these numbers are an estimated low damage number and healing with 0 healing power), so, per auto that’s just short of 100 AF per auto, throw in live vicariously and it jumps to a bit over 141 per auto, not considering natural mender. You want me to get CAF from 15 autos so you set the max AF bar to 2115, cool. Then I heal as one and generate 2608 Astral Force and CAF becomes an on-demand super heal I don’t even need staff for. 21150 damage? Math in a void says sword autos hit that in two seconds easily.

Then you have to balance AF generation based upon player level, because Anet couldn’t be satisfied with 480 base health and 20 levels. So you have to balance the astral force correctly for all stages of the game. Oh and you need to consider druids will generate different levels of astral force from hitting, say, old fractal 50 Bloomhunger (low armour boss) and Champion Mordrem Troll Copper (extremely high armour boss). Oh and staff needs a complete rework because it’s now no longer the AF generation king it was designed to be and means the Druid now needs to do high damage/healing outside of CAF to get into CAF.

Not even the Necromancer’s profession mechanic has the level of balancing Astral force would take to get right in your system and such a system wouldn’t lead to healthy build diversity.

My most common behaviour when dropping into CAF is to make Signet of Courage look like a joke with a Quickdraw Rejuvenating tides > Natural Convergence > Rejuvenating tides. Lunar impact is another reason I’ll use CAF.

Seed of Life I’ll use infrequently to cleanse condis. As a Ranger/Ele main I’m not too familiar with light fields, but I know they cleanse more condis so that’s good. Cosmic ray is a decent auto attack for burst healing/CC mode, if I feel I need to stay in CAF for longer than a short burst then I’ll weave Cosmic rays and seeds of life together as an “auto-attack”. That means I’m providing a small amount of healing to keep the team together the skills I’m banking on come of cooldown.

Put simply, #1 and #2 are perfect when it comes to purpose, I would argue that Cosmic ray is too difficult to hit with, but that’s the only problem I have with CAF itself. Seed of life is great as is.

Yashuoa.9527:

kleym.2340:

I think it would be more useful than the pet did not stop the run when cast F2.. What do you think ?

Almost every ability can be used while moving.
I dont see a reason why the pet F2 cant be used while moving.

Yeah I agree, it would be a good change and more useful.

The problem is that it isn’t a PvE enemy, yet behaves exactly like launch AI enemies. If you were to give a melee pet for a player tracking, where do you draw the line? The smokescale is the result of giving the ranger a pet with perfect tracking, now imagine canines’ abilities all behaved like Smoke assault. That is what happens when you enable a unit that moves 30% faster than other units by default to move and attack.

Pets don’t move when attacking because they behave like other core tyria enemies, they have counterplay outside of using your dodges to mitigate autos. This allows active skills on pets to be stronger and, if there’s no reason to, why enable those abilities to have perfect tracking?

So I just finished my personal story, the culmination of all the events that lead up to this point, having avoided spoilers like the plague so I could experience what happens for myself… Only to find myself auditing my own story during its finale.

See, me and two friends were taking turns leading each mission and as luck would have it I lead the finale. The story was doing great, we were having fun, I couldn’t figure out how to ride an updraft without gliding. Yeah, I was stuck in a box for the remainder of the finale, great mechanic for raids, not so great for enjoying a story with friends, especially one you can’t quit because you’d be forcing everyone else to restart too.

Was I put in a box because I screwed up? No. I was put in a box and forced to destroy something I’d been looking forward to and preparing for since January because when told to go airborne in GW2, I try to find a way to trigger gliding. There is swirly rising energy when you’re told to ascend, if you assume they’re updrafts attempt to jump into them to glide, your glider won’t deploy because you’re on flat ground, then you’ll look around for bouncy mushrooms or a ledge to get the height you need. Then you’ll look off the edge of the arena for updrafts. Then you’ll die when your party tells you you should’ve tried to updraft on the leyline looking things when you don’t have leyline gliding.

Even when you know what to do, latency can making gliding impossible and the leyline looking updrafts might just decide to not launch you. So yeah, I got jipped out of a story because gliding still needs some serious QA, it’s less reliable than jumping in Dark Souls.

I can concur, I’ve mostly been using CA for the Lunar Impact, Natural convergence, Lunar Impact combo to bust down a break bar. I’ve been running Beastmastery and Wilderness Survival/Nature Magic just ‘cause I have Celestial gear and I’ve never gone without beastmastery since June 23rd.

I thought MoC druid would be a cute little synergy, I should’ve tried it out sooner. Once I finish up my Zealot ascended gear I’ll try out your build (that stuff’s far too expensive to settle for exotic).

Zealot’s is easily one of my favourite stat sets in the game. It’s the most offensively oriented healing power stat set in the game and allows for some interesting builds. The problem is there’s a couple of hurdles.
Recipe prices, exotic insignia especially. It may be worth waiting until players have researched the merchants you get from the pact commander mastery, from what I’ve learned there’s no reason they shouldn’t sell all the zealot recipes, but I’ve not been able to confirm the insignia is in their inventory.
Watchwork Sprockets. The other reason this gear is so expensive. The watchwork mining pick from the gemstore is one of the two ways to get them these days.

It makes me mad that there’s no alternative stat sets for healing power and damage without any defensive stat baggage, then for trinkets Zealot’s isn’t even an option at ascended. I’m still trying to work out what I want to do for my own ascended trinkets or if it’s better to run just exotic at that point.