Guild Wars 2

Not the last time, but the most thrilling experience for me was the first time i soloed mai trin. It was on lvl 9 only, due to a bug, i was left alone in the instance and nobody could join me. I was definitely a bad player, but i had to solo her if i wanted the reward. I was on my mesmer, and it took a few wipes to make me understand her attacks and how to avoid everything. Before soloing her, i had actually no idea what she did. Everytime i did it, it was “everyone run around randomly and try to stay alive”. In the end, i managed to down her after something like a bit more than one hour. I was SO proud of myself! It was my first solo in gw2, and even if it was only on a lvl 9, i found it really hard!

It made me realise that, if you want to be a better player in pve, you should definitely try to solo group contents. Since this day, i don’t think i ever died against mai trin.

After this experience, i tried to solo Arah P2. I was getting chain killed by lupicus for something like 5 hours, but i found it fun. It was enjoyable to feel that i was getting better every time i got killed. Thrilling fight, really. After 5 hours, i gave up. Came back a few days later and killed him after a few more hours. That feeling, when you beat something that killed you an insane amount of time!

So, yeah, i never felt that thrilled with a drop. I got Storm once, was a bit happy about it but not THAT happy. It was cool, but nothing compared to soloing a boss, feeling that after playing for a few hours, i became a slightly better player.

I have a full berserk elem, and i almost never go down in the whole fight, but i agree that the fight is insanely annoying. Phase 1 is pure nightmare. An undodgeable fear without any CD (you can be chain feared for 10 seconds and run straight to veterans/champ, please), used in around 1/4 second, and whose only counter on some classes is a skill in charrzooka/flamethrower with a 30 seconds CD? So fun.

Btw, the fast CD on the fire shield if you don’t finish it has been fixed (more than a week ago, iirc). Now, it’s always a 30 second CD. Enjoy getting feared to death because even if you slot every stunbreaker you have, you may not have enough.

Phase 2 is a bit better (long casting time for the fear, and jormag doesn’t seem to spam it). The problem there is that 2/3 of the players don’t even understand that the goal is to protect the golems, making the phase incredibly long. Yeah, most players are stupid (“Hey, i can dps jormag with my longbow even if he’s not stunned! I’m so awesome!” No, you’re useless) and can’t seem to get the fact that they are making the fight longer than it should be.

You know, if you do the event more than once a day, you don’t have the full reward… You sure you haven’t already done it on the same day? (or to be more precise, after the reset timer, since the hour of the reset is different based on where you live, obviously).

I have done it tons of times, each time with at least bronze reward on the defense phases, and i always had every reward.

I just googled the average reaction time, found this : http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

So, it seems like the average reaction time is around 0.25 seconds when you expect something to happen. It’s probably impossible to give an accurate reaction time against unexpected danger. Some sources say 0.5 sec, other say 1 sec…

Anyway, unlike a thief or a mesmer, a ranger doesn’t come from nowhere. If you don’t look around from time to time, that’s your problem. And, if a rapid fire from a ranger kills you, what about a backstab thief, who can actually pop from nowhere?

Archon.6480:

OK, you promised to be friendly, so here goes! I personally use that skill to demolish opponents in PvP. If they make it stronger, it won’t be fair to other classes. It’s lethality comes in the form of high precision condition builds. It hits harder than rapid fire (Ok slight exaggeration—but you get the idea) and most peeps don’t know it’s going to kill them. It can stack bleed so fast that opponents will die before the last bird hits if they don’t pull off a cleanse or dodge.

Let’s imagine a ranger, 2 points in expertise, 6 in wilderness survival, rabid gear, rune of the krait, and sigil of agony (+20% bleed duration to reach a 3 seconds bleeding with sharpened edges).
You have a 40% crit chance, 60% with fury.
The skill hits 16 times.
If it crits, it makes the foe bleeds for 3 seconds, for a 339 total damage, on a 66% chance to activate.

-> The skill will crit in average 9.6 times.
-> Sharpened edges will activate in average 6.4 times.
-> The total bleed damage for the skill will be 2169.6. Add more or less 800 damage for the physical damage of the skill, and it goes a bit under 3k, for a 25 seconds cooldown.

Honestly, it’s weak. And it seems even weaker when compared to other off-hand weapons. Dagger has an evade, poison, and cripple, all on a relatively short CD. Torch has a 40% burn uptime with only the 4th skill. Sure, it’s a dps increase compared to the auto-attack, but it’s not strong, and if a ranger is using warhorn, it’s probably for the 5th skill.

I would also want something else added to the skill. Cripple/blind/whatever defensive condition to make warhorn a bit more usuable.

They won’t change it, and they will never change it. If channelled skills could not track stealth, it would not only means that a thief would be invulnerable to channelled skills, but also means that stealth would have a huge boost against any skill that need a target, not only long channelled skills. I will explain.

As you may know, stealth makes you untargettable, it does not means that skills needing a target will miss, it means that the oponent won’t be able to use a skill that need a target (that’s one of the reason why thiefs destroy mesmers, btw) if you’re in stealth. That’s why channelled skills sill hit against a stealthed target. You can activate the skill when the ennemy is visible, but that doesn’t mean that the skill will miss, since you were able to use it. I hope i’m clear, because that’s what explain the following point.

What you call a channelled skill can be seen as a skill with a very long activation, but with an added effect that it will do something during the activation time, insteand of only at the end. If you modify it to miss against a stealthed target, it would means that not only can’t you use a skill needing a target, but even if you use it, it won’t activate. That would also effect every other skill needing a target in the game, such as Fire ball on Elem staff, or Hip shot on engineer rifle, or any other non-aoe ranged attack in the game. Obviously, the longer the cast, the more it is affected. It would work as an invunerability against non-aoe ranged skill, and become more that a simple invisibility, which is in itself a bad thing.

In the end, stealth would gain a buff for no apparent reason. I will finish with a question. Do you really think stealth need an overall buff? I don’t, for many reasons that i won’t explain in this thread.

I always found SB to be bad in any 1v1 situation, where you will never flank the enemy. It shines in small scale groupe fights in full condition builds where you can flank, and stack a lot of bleeds on targets who are not directly attacking you. It’s our only ranged condition weapon, coming with a very reliable interrupt.
You probably won’t use it in pve, since power based builds are often more effective.

I had to share it with you.

“Bull’s Charge: functionality changed to: “You Shadow Step to target foe and knock them down.”
I found it when reading some game updates in gw1 on the wiki. Interestingly enough, it was made as a joke on April Fool’s Dy 2009 (source : http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Game_updates:April_2009)

I would find it pretty fun if a joke in gw1 could become reality in gw2.

Well, the games are different, and honestly, you can’t really compare the 2 different bull’s charge, but i found it quite fun.

Didn’t read most of the thread.

In my opinion, dueling or open pvp is only a waste of time. In the end, it would simply be a failure. The game is not balanced around dueling, and some classes/specs would be simply OP compared to everything else.

Let’s take an example. They introduce dueling, it took X months to create it. You, as a mesmer, are wandering somewhere when a thief provoke you to a duel. Who in his right mind would accept? Same thing if you are a warrior and there is a mesmer who is provoking you into a duel. The result of the duel : Thief win 90% of his match-ups (yeah, that’s how the thief is balanced around, and P/D thief is pretty much unkillable), PU mesmer win more or less the same.

If you think about a map where people can team up to smack other groups, just go in wvw.

A map where every other player is an ennemy would create the same thing as dueling, giving a crazy advantage to dueling classes (aka stealth classes)

The result : only a few classes would be played. A failure due to a lack of 1v1 balance. Took X months wasting time for developers who could have made something useful instead.

Mesmer.
Mantra of Regret. Cast : 2.75. 90 sec recharge.
Mantra. Meditate, charging a spell that will interrupt your foe.
Number of casts : 2.

→ Power Leak. Instant cast, recharge 10 sec.
If your foe is using a skill, damage, stun for 1 seconds, and apply 10 stacks of bleeding for 2 seconds on him and his allies.
Damage : 600 (x1.8) (roughly twice as mantra of pain)
Number of targets : 5
Radius : 240

Potentially broken, since a mesmer could stun + shatter, killing pretty much every glass cannon with ease, with AoE effect, which means not useless in teamfight… but i still want it. Obviously, it also works very well with condition builds (krait runes ftw). And it does nothing if the timing is wrong

Ranger.
Edge of Extinction.
Spirit. Summon a spirit that deals damage to every creature in range everytime a creature dies or goes into downed state. Doesn’t affect creatures with more than 90% of their health.
Damage : 1000.
Duration : 30 sec.
Radius : 1000.
→ Active : Extinction.
Downed creatures in range die instantly. The spirit of extinction dies.
Range 600.
Number of targets : 5

How to turn a zerg vs zerg in wvw into a giant graveyard. The radius is still pretty small, though, and the spirit can die easily, but use it at the right moment, and it becomes a nuclear weapon.

Would be OP, unless i misunderstood and you want to completely change the skill (a teleport without KD, but you would have to decrease the CD to make it decent)

But they should make it like the leap on ranger greatsword ( a rush followed by an attack with a small leap attached to it at the end). It would make the skill much less buggy and far easier to use. Same goes for Rush.
It’s not like it is impossible to do, since rangers have it. I don’t know why they never did it.

LuXx.9354:

GG Thread inside ^^

Hello, anet, I play zerk dd thief. Rangers QQ about my burst, I took some nerfs. A lot of nerfs. Yes, I was balanced, before this patch. I’m now tired when I engage a group, to kil 2 or 3 guys, to have an add of a noob quickness ranger at 1500 range, and one shot.

My ex-girlfirend make a ranger and killed me and /laugh on my corpse. You want the same thing ? No, nobody wants. And she began the game 1 week ago.

So now, I want to be rollface too. I want backstab with 1200 range, like I throw my dagger into the back of the ennemy. And please, if she apply a lot of Vulnerability.
I’m okay to be squishy, I know and recognize that, but I want to survive with my skill, and I want to be killed because ennemies have skills too. I don’t want to be killed by a randomly spammer.

Ranger was balanced, but a lot of players who played it are bad.
Ty Anet.
Thx for this great game, i love it, after all

Btw: I don’t want to play p/d thief.

Next week, we will talking about Killshot on warrior. If you want “balance”, He needs to be instant.

In other words, you tried to facetank the damage, tried to stealth randomly when you saw a lot of arrows coming your way, and died. Sorry, but you deserved to lose. Btw, you can backstab from 1200 range but you probably already know it, since you are so good with your thief, let’s say that you simply forgot it…

And get serious, please. You’re a thief who got himself killed by a LB Ranger, and you still wonder why she was laughing?

Relentliss.2170:

Most people are not able to react. It is just crazy how little skill this is taking. Find someone fighting. Blast dude with #4 he is kd’d then unleash #2 before he can get up. Bam most people are half dead at this point. And wow if he is a good dodger my spider will snare him for some more rf fun 8 sec later.

Just for the sake of accuracy, LB4 is not a KD. I have seen it a lot those past few days. KBS is a Knock Back (KB). You might not see the difference (probably because you don’t even know what you’re talking about), so i will explain it. KBS push the opponent and disables him for a short duration, more or less 0.75 seconds. When you take into account the aftercast, it is more or less 0.5 seconds where rapid fire will always hit (which represents 30% the damage of the full rapid fire). So, no, you can’t unleash all the rapid fire after KBS.

I will take an example. If a guardian pulls his opponent with GS5, and chain it with GS2. Will the full GS2 hit? No (barely). Keep in mind that rapid fire lasts 3x the duration of whirling wrath.

I know you want to complain, but please, if you complain, do it right, and not with facts that you created yourself. Even if i’m saying it, i also think KBS needs a telegraph and maybe a 20 seconds recast, but it’s not that bad to the point where you can unleash the full RF after KBS.

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

Gnat.9405:

Ranger for everything if you equip a mini pet

not effected by mini pets xd

It is.

Ranger will always be better in pvp, since you will almost never be at 90% or more HP. If you think you can win fights without being touched, go with scholar, but that will nearly never be the case, even if you stay behind the zerg.

You probably won’t get an answer. There is a ton of thread with this debate. Every time someone makes a counter-argument, the people for the ban wil say something like “yes but it’s range, so it should be weaker”. And what are you going to say against it? Yes, it’s ranged, even if there is absolutely no reason it should be much weaker than melee.

Honestly, all of this turned into a non-argument rage against the LB ranger. It’s not even that powerful, what annoys most people is the very concept of high ranged damage. I am sure that, even if they reverted rapid fire to a simple utility, some people would still whine because “Long range shot deals too much damage!”. And we all know how good was the LB ranger pre-patch.

In the end, it’s a sterile debate, one side wants ranged dps to be non existent, the other wants it to be viable. Different perspectives for different tastes.

With +100% condition duration, yes (burn procs once per second, meaning that 1.75 second burning will do the same damage as 1 second burning. But, with +100%, it becomes a 2 second burning, wich double the damage). But this is only if the ennemy stays in the bonfire for the full duration. When you know that the radius is pitifully small (seriously, way too small), and that very few people stay in red circles, you can assume that it won’t do more than 4 seconds burning, at best.

Probably intended, it also affect ennemies in the new living story (my guess is that it works with every high level mobs). If you go into stealth, you will reset the aggro, and the mob will start attacking the clones/phantasms until all of them died. But they will probably get killed in two hits at best, and the moment there is no illusion, the mob will target you again until you go into stealth again.
Kinda like a bad player, actually…

Brujeria.7536:

Any mesmer without PU / stealth centric has the same problem.

I will stop you on this one. I main a ranger in pve, so obviously i know every trait and skill a ranger can have, and the animations of those skills. But i never play it in any form of pvp (actually, i don’t go in wvw or pvp very often). This week end, i decided to go roaming a bit with a shatter mesmer in wvw, the usual build (4/4/0/0/6, full zerker, with S/F+GS, portal decoy blink and mass invisibility as my utilities). The only skill which could be better against a ranger than other professions would be iwarden. I haven’t lost to a single LB ranger. Sure, i haven’t killed all of them, some fled with GS, but in the end, i never lost.

You could say that i was simply better than them, but that’s not the case. I am a pretty bad player, and i know it. But i know how to counter decently a ranger. Going into stealth between rapid fire, and burst them down quickly was often a good choice, at least enought to force them to play defensively, going into the warden and sniping with GS was also useful. But also dodging through him/Blink behind him when he uses rapid fire, or paying a little bit attention to the pet that most people decide to ignore (if a wolf is going ro roar, you can prepare it with a stun breaker, for exemple). You can also LoS it, kitten , even grass sometimes block arrows, how could an arrow be stopped by grass?

Also, signet ranger are a joke, if you survive 15 seconds (which is pretty easy if you’re prepared for it, by the way), you know you will win the fight. Others specs like 6/0/2/6 won’t do as much damage, but can be more annoying in the long run, but that’s only my opinion.

Now, i won’t say there is no problem. Someone made a thread in which he said PBS needed a more obvious animation. I totally agree. Being stun for 1 second can be deadly if you are unprepared, if you have no stunbreakers, and no stab, and that ability to be able to maintain distance, even small distance, is really good on LB. But rapid fire is fine. Projectiles hould also always fail when they fly more than the intended distance, but that is more on the bug side (still a bug for me). Maybe Signet of the Wild needs a bit nerf, because it’s not on par with other signets on other professions, or other signets need a buff.

Than, how can i handle it even if i am a bad player? Because i know how ranger work. I haven’t said it, but during this roaming session, i got destroyed by other professions. Why did i lose? Because i have absolutely no idea how they are played, how long are the cooldowns, and the animation of each skill and i know that as long as i will remain ignorant about them, i will keep on losing against them. I’m sure most people complaining about LB rangers have never tried to play ranger seriously, and have no idea how it is to play it. Ignorance is not bliss in GW2.

Also, LB have nearly 0 mobility. You have stealth, and that’s it. Sure, GS or Sw have a good mobiliy, but if you switch weapon, you have to keep it for 10 seconds. So, no. You can’t pew pew, go into GS, get far from the enemy, and pew pew again. If the enemy is slower, he won’t follow you unless he’s dumb. If he’s faster, even if you go back to LB, you will be at close range.

Saying that LB AA is powerful made my day. Thanks. Close range AA is sooo powerful it’s not even fun, and we all know how long range AA was buffed like crazy with this patch. Someone mentioned pve… Sword AA deals more damage than LB AA at long range, in average. The only thing that change is that LB will provide 10 vulnerability, but you won’t share boons, won’t heal you allies, won’t cleave. At best, it is a good opener, and can be used when you can’t melee.

Stealth tracking is a good thing on channeling skills, and that’s coming from a mesmer. If i use my stealth skill as a panic button when i don’t know what to do, i should be punished for this. I don’t see a problem there. If i use it between channeling skills, i am not punished because i used my brain a little bit.

SkylightMoon.2098:

Is not so much their rapid fire, but their stupidly strong autoattack. All long, medium, and short range, they are all too strong. Im not too opposed to keeping the long range damage “similar” to what it was before, but the medium and short range needed no buff. They should have stayed the same or have been nerfed actually.

There is no reason for autoattacks on any class to hit 2-3k on average. Thats broken. Especially for a skill that is an autoattack and fires so fast.

Sword deals more damage than LB at max range, it also gives might to pet, and you can’t escape it because it inflicts cripple, and leap at the target. I guess Sword ranger is also broken… (Keep in mind that I limited the comparison to ranger only, most professions deal so much more damage than ranger with their auto-attacks there is no point to even talk about it).

That’s crazy, we got our second burst (the first being maul, and not that powerful), and all i can see is people QQq about how a reflectable/dodgeable/blockable skill is OP. Seriously, you are simply upset because against a ranger, you will have to dodge once every 8 seconds (or simply walk through the ranger if you don’t want to dodge, but probably harder since you will take a bit more damage)

Rapid Fire deals more or less the same damage as volley, use a build editor if you want to see. The two biggest difference are a longer range, and Signet of the Wild dealing 25% more damage. On the other hand, warriors have killshot, nearly perma Fury, and more bulk than a power ranger. The main reason warriors don’t play rifle is because they have much better weapon for a berserk setup (and weak AA, but who cares when you can switch weapon every 5 second?)

The +10% attack speed is trivial. 2.3 sec instead of 2.5, you take one more arrow, which is roughly 1K. If you dodge right (when you see many arrows flying, you dodge, and it has a specific sound, you should also expect it, as much a you expect an evicerate is coming), you will take 4K damages at best on a glassy light armor (like shatter mesmer). Sure, if we add Signet of the Wild and Quickening Zephir, it can become hard to dodge, but you should still be able to dodge half the damage, and it has a 60 seconds cooldown.

Now, against people who don’t know you can actually dodge in GW2, this is OP, clearly. Against a player who have played LB for more than 30 minutes, it’s not.

I’m not even talking about reflect, blocks or retaliation because they are obivously countering LB ranger, but most people expect to win against a LB ranger whithout even have a single skill to counter it.

The only way you could see it as OP is because of all the immobilize ranger have (Mainly pets, but also entangle (48 seconds if traited), and muddy terrain (20 sec if traited). It has never really been a problem because ranger never had any good burst to begin with, but now that they have a burst, it’s a different matter. I Find it interesting that nobody said anything about it, because that is how good LB rangers will kill their targets.

Killing a power ranger shouldn’t be as easy as it was before, and they are no longer free kills. Deal with it, it doesn’t mean they are unkillable, it only means that you have to think a little bit to beat them.

Haha, that’s nice to see people who never played ranger moaning about how a ranger will be OP.
The mesmer who got himself killed by a longbow ranger made me laugh. It’s not like he could have blinked close to the ranger or reflect everything in the face. And guess what? Blink and decoy are stunbreakers do counter the fear. Ranger are pretty good against mesmer, actually, but certainly not with a longbow.

Also, how are power ranger OP when our pet won’t even share the power we gain with our stuff, and our skills are balanced with our pet? Longbow AA is too powerful? Seriously? A longbow AA hits far less than a sword, even at max range, and any class with a gap closer will catch him in 2 seconds. Also, to be able to use LB, we have to use a GM trait. I’m not saying “making LB better”, but usuable.

Rapid fire is a burst? Our only burst is Maul, on GS, this is our one and only burst, which is more telegraphed than an evicerate (you know, when there is a bear on the head on the ranger for about one second before the hit). With every other weapon, our best dps skill is the AA, which doesn’t even do more damage than the AA on other class (well more than mesmer, but that’s not really hard to outdps a mesmer with AA).

You’re going to say “But rapid fire will be faster!”. Good deal when we mainly used it to track a thief. Now, that’s a 2 sec track nearly completly negated by a dodge. And the anti-stealth that nobody will even take… Well, only Power Ranger (wich sucks thanks to our pet) will be enough unused utility to take it, so i guess it may be useful, somtimes.

I’m not saying we were not buffed. The buff in axe will make trap ranger better, the change with the signets was really good, entangle will be much more useful, the new trait wich boost damage against crippled targets is amazing on swords, etc… But ranger will still be far from OP. I’m not even sure if they will be considered “great”. So, when i see people moaning about how powerful the ranger will be, i can’t help but scream “Get real, man!” As long as we keep a flawed pet, we will never be great.
I will add something, every class has weaknesses, keep in mind that our main weakness is ou pet, only used as a utility, but eating a good part of our damage output, making only condition based or hybrid builds decent to good.

I created a mesmer (highly reliant on traits) shortly after the changes, and that was a pain to do on every aspect.

First is the fact that between the moment you unlock a trait, and the level 70 (more or less), you probably won’t have the traits you wanted, making levelling a horrible time because there is no difference between each level up, and unless you’re actively hunting traits, you won’t have all of them as you gain lvls.

That is if you can unlock those traits, obviously. A lot of them are tied to events that nobody ever does (I soloed nearly every boss wich unlocked a traits when i was lvl 80), or time consuming things like map completition (if your character is only a reroll, you may never complete a map). And even if you are willing to do those events, you’re still far from your goal, because those events have to happen. Unfortunately, they are random with no fixed time, meaning that you may wait a really long time in the same area to be able to play on the event. And if you miss it, too bad for you, you will only have to wait again. All of this for a trait that can either completely change the way you play, or a trait that you will never ever touch.

I ended up buying around 1/3 of the traits because it was too annoying to look for traits when you are already lvl 80. I remember when the patch came, i thought something like “Cool, at least it will make levelling more interesting”. I take back those words. Having close to no character progression when you level up and buying/unlocking traits when you’re lvl 80 is not more interesting, only a waste of time and money.

Also, the biggest difference between elite hunting in GW1 and Trait Hunting in GW2 is that in gw1, if you wanted an elite skill, you only had to go near the area, bring heroes/henchmen with you and you had your elite within 5 minutes. In gw2, even if you know where to go, there is not always the event you were looking for, making you waste a lot of time, and some event are simply impossible to solo.