Guild Wars 2

It wouldn’t be called monk, monk in the guild wars franchise is essentially a priest. We basically already have this role anyway, its called daredevil.

Sure would love to see that sword #1 reworked without that leap built in… But who am i kidding, the community be asking for years and nothing has come of it…

Are we really now arguing about which class can open world easiest… maybe I should just stop coming to forums…

I think OP is doing it wrong, i main pew pew ranger do excellent dps, i run marksman, sker.ishing and beast mastery, i got 100% crit including traits and fury and run ferocity food/oil, do 35k rapid fires 6-7k AA, pets do 3-5k AA, i think alot alot of these guys are doing these golem test build without taking into consideration their pets, raid buffs, and food/oil and as someone mentioned the toughness stat on golems does differ from raid bosses.

Tiger>linx f2 has 10 sec cooldown and although its not as high of damage it appkies 10 second aoe fury so it crit more often with all of its other abilities

/agree

You do realize that at a minimum it will be another 3 yrars before they would even consider changing anything regarding these abilities. Took 3 years just to make pets viable in highend group content, itll be anothet 3 before they start looking at augmenting our other underperforming abilities. Namely sword 1, longbow 1, shortbow 1… They arn’t gonna fix them.

Ranger is real fun once you actually learn how to play it. They’ve had a bad rep because a large amount of the ranger player base are complete idiots. You see the ranger has, built into its weapon skills and pets, powerful CCs and abilities that, since they are readily available, newbies just spam the kitten out of while leveling up. By the time they reach max level they have, engrained into their twitch reflexes, the urge to spam things like longbow 4 at every single cooldown. They often take the bear pets cuz… its a kittening BEAR “look at that health pool, so OP, and sooo fluffy”.

Experienced rangers will rarely use longbow 4 cuz thats a super useful skill in opportune situations, and detrimental in others. Bear is low dps, limited utility and just not very useful outside of soloing world champs.

What it all comes down to is the mechanics of the ranger make it easier than other professions at the beginning of the game, other professions come with a steeper beginning learning curve, forcing the player to git gud earlier where as rangers don’t necessarily need to till endgame when their group or guildies or w/e yell at them for being an idiot and not playing their class properly and effectively.

I main ranger and I love it. I regularly run fractals, dungeons(used to…) raids and pvp. Alot of these guys are just reiterating bad players kittening on the forums and basically copy/paste whatever rage they see regarding this cuz they are kittened some rev or DH owned them(which must mean either ranger sux, or rev/dh too OP). Rangers have excellent dps and overall viability.

You simply need to choose proper sigils, runes, pets, and stat spreads. Then learn to perform your build properly in action just as with any other class.

P.S. Our sword #1 does suck, don’t use sword… its just a pain in the kitten .

Take a healer in your group, BAM, situation fixed

Just because its technically possible to do cool things under unique circumstances with sword doesn’t excuse its’ clunky AA mechanics or make it fun to have to play in such a way that compensates for said clunky mechanics.

Shortbow doesnt really need to much work other than modifying how #1 applies bleed, you have pets to assist you, ex: Smokescale has a 0.25 sec AA that applies bleed, a knockdown, a high burst attack, and a smokefield. Yes you can make the argument that 3 out of 4 of the pets abilities are AI controlled but they are none the less 4 abilities available to you without weapon/kit/transformation/attuement swapping or clone building and shattering. Thus meaning that at anygiven time you technically have 3 more abilities active over all the other professions.

Well thematically the ranger is a ranged class utilizing ranged weapons, range is in the name of the (range)r.

This has been a feature the ranger community has wanted since the original release and nothing has come of it. Its a simple quality if life addition that would make many of us happy and I don’t see it taking a tremendous mount of work to simply enable saved pet names…

I main ranger, i occassionally run into this issue for unknown reason, seems to be entirely random. The onky way i seem to beable to get free is buy dodge rolling or use GS 3

Zenith.7301:

Oh, quit whining. At least your meteors still nuke people for 4k+.

Try being a ranger with laughable 1-1.4k Barrage ticks that trigger even MORE retaliation so you take off maybe 20% of the melee train’s health in exchange for 60-70% of your health.

It’s so obvious you haven’t played greatsword mesmer or ranger if you think retal unfairly targets ele, at least you actually do damage while mesmer in WvW remains a portal/veil bot and rangers are stuck with single target DPS in a zerg format all about AoE.

Retal is the least of ele’s problem. Lack of build diversity and being pigeonholed into celestial because of terrible baseline survivability are far larger problems.

I main ranger. On longbow you should have plenty of aoe if you have lead the wind equiped, learn to ger proper enfilade on your targets, basicly you just need to get good dude.

Im sure there is some point to what you are saaying, plz proof read your post before posting, I can barely understand this fragmentated mess.

Rex.6954:

I am seeing players getting around with over 100 mastery points……HOW!

My question is how many MP’s (Mastery Points) do you (or the hard core players have) have (at launch) that you then earn XP to unlock gliding etc making the new area fun and playable?

I had 5 and it cost 1.2million XP for 1 MP’s (first one then almost doubled, tripled..etc) and this unlocked nothing worth a crap, run faster in cities, wooptedo.
I find the cost to high in my opinion, with little to keep me playing for the $140 Aus to get HoT, then to top it off I have to basically level another 80lvls (equivalent) to play the same character but different, for me the cost both in dollars and game time is not worth it, I am (at this point) not happy with the expansions and don’t have the in game (or real world) resources to get the MP’s to make it worth while…. also the hero points are to hard to get at without the masteries so I am frustrated and disillusioned to say the least….

I think they should have 30 day money back guarantee, I spent $140 Aus for something I now realise is not something I am interested in… The core GW2 sure, HoT.. not so much.

For people with over 100 Mastery rank, they probably had world completion and a lot of MP rewarding achcievements completed in core tyria so all they needed to do was grind out the EXP to get a quick 50 or so ranks through core tyria, also they probably had a massive number of exp boosts already saved up from the past 3 years with a stack of birthday and celebration boosters. As for HoT, you have this thing called the achievement panel, under the heart of thorns section you can find all the mastery points you dont yet have and how to get them. As for the exp part, again use all the boosters and food you can get and go roll through Dragon Stand from start to finish and that should net you 25% of a full EXP bar in 1 run with additional phat loots. Basically you gotta git gud.

I noticed while sttempting vale guardian, no spirit buffs…

Agemnon.4608:

Neyjour.3921:

I would love to see many more Outfits added to the Gem Store. Specifically, an “Adventurer” or “Explorer” line of clothing, tailored for the various climates/landscapes found throughout Tyria.

I realize there are already a few that would fall under this theme, like the Pirate Captain’s Outfit (which I already own), and the Arctic Explorer Outfit and Jungle Explorer Outfit (both of which I plan to get when they’re available again). But why not expand on this?

Burger King outfit just announced xD
I’m not an RPer, but I’m finding that I have an irresistible urge to “dress for the occasion” while exploring the world. And nothing makes me open my wallet faster than clothing choices. Backpacks for each theme would be most welcome as well, either bundled with the Outfit or sold separately.

Also, it would be fantastic if we could have more than one choice per climate/landscape theme. And they could be rotated in and out of the Gem Store (limited-time availability) throughout the year. Don’t like the Spelunking Outfit that’s available right now? Wait a few months until an alternate design for that theme rolls around.

Examples of climates/landscapes that I’d like to see Adventurer/Explorer clothing tailored for:

Desert/Desolate/Arid
Jungle/Rainforest (currently 1 choice: Jungle Explorer Outfit)
Plains/Prairie
Spelunking – General
Spelunking – Winter/Ice
Tropical/Coastal/Oceanic (currently 1 choice: Pirate Captain’s Outfit)
Wetlands/Swamp/Marsh
Woodlands/Forest
Mountain Range
Winter – General/Snowy
Winter – Frozen/Tundra/Glacial (currently 1 choice: Arctic Explorer Outfit)
Volcanic/Lava

I mostly just use the Jungle Explorer outfit and dye it to the appropriate color scheme.

Speaking of outfits…Princess/king outfit! Here are some pictures for inspiration. I originally was only looking for Long Live the Queen’s coronation dress but found some dresses from other pictures in the Google search that’d be great.

Big potential problem though is clipping issues. I do think the military, tutu, and scholar outfits would be great for other outfit sets.

The male equivalent is the king outfit. It’d be inspired by the uploaded picture but with some modifications.

Burger King outfit just announced xD

They are working as intented, Coztics have stealth, evades, stuns, roots, poisons, and high damage ranged and melee attacks, they are supposed to be theives and rangers with super op stats. Basically it comes down to you need to git gud.

I’m leveling it on the off chance it is necessary for raids, otherwise i would be going straight for leyline gliding

SamTheGuardian.2938:

Can’t get into a map… Joined multiple parties though LFG… No luck… You do realize this is rage inducing right, ArenaNet? Do you care!?!?! Are you listening…

It’s Anet… what do you expect… they love telling lies and misleading statements, most notably “its not/nothing is off the table”.

Alicornus.7095:

Vayne.8563:

The story isn’t Shakespeare, obviously. But I haven’t played any MMOs where it has been. In most MMOs stories are a motivation to do something. They provide the motivation for your character to act. If I want actual story I read a book.

Weasel-words. There haven’t been open world games telling compelling stories either until a developer actually tried to push the boundaries of the genre and blew the contenders out of the water in the process. Video games in general have a lot of potential to tell compelling and even complex stories, whether this is something you as an individual look for in a video game or not is an entirely different matter.

As Doam pointed out, the HoT story was a step backwards from living season two. That’s not what I’m looking for from a developer, I’m looking for a company to man up and try to push boundaries, to knock the competitors down a peg instead of surrendering to mediocrity.
HoT is mediocre, unfortunately.

I’m wondering if the outcry across the forums on how terribad the story for HoT is might motivate Anet to pull their head out of their kitten , stop wasting the money we pay them for good content, and give us something worthy of the money we pay them with the next season of living story.

Also some of the best stories I have ever experienced were in video games. The story for the original Guild Wars games was wonderful. My most favorite stories were in the Jak and Daxter trilogy and Prince of Persia sands of time trilogy. There are great stories in games out there and Anet tries to boast that its game has wonderful lore and story and then when it comes to delivering, yet again Anet just kittens it up. SOOO much potential completely wasted.

Edit: On a good note, the voice acting, visuals, and music/audio were top notch. These teams need a kittening raise and a cookie.

Tigaseye.2047:

Arius.7031:

Tigaseye.2047:

Maybe it’s more like they’re acting like it’s not making them enough money?

Which, of course, is even more unacceptable, if it actually is.

In what way have they acted like they’re not making enough money?

Just a lack of everything.

They don’t work on things that need work, because they aren’t a “priority” for them.

Even this forum, with all its problems (including the notorious forum bug) is an example of that.

They reduce the rewards from existing content (which they haven’t provided a direct replacement for), so if people want to buy something they are more likely to have to spend real money.

All this seems like penny-pinching, to me.

Penny pinching gives the impression of either a genuine lack of cash, or (perhaps falsely) pleading poverty, to most people.

I honestly think its that they just don’t make enough money, I looked up the earnings reports for NC Soft for the past 2 quarters of 2015 and Gw2 is one of there lowest earning titles. To put it into perspective, Lineage 1 is there biggest earner by far earning the company around 40% of its total revenue while gw2 earning them roughly 25% of what lineage earns which means that gw2 only brings in roughly 10% of this MMO giants paycheck. Arena net should have started out with the subscription based MMO so that they could afford to keep bringing us new content and ensure that existing content is kept clean and well tuned.

morrolan.9608:

Jasper Defthand.3018:

They’ve been talking about building upon and learning from things for the future for 3 years… And I will give credit where credit is due, they learned how to deliver good story

I thought they’d learned with LS2 being an improvement on LS1 but if anything the HOT story is worse than LS1.

I probably should have worded that better, what I meant was they have learned how to deliver story well, but have completely forgotten how to come up with a good story in the first place. MEANING their voice acting, music and visuals are at an all time high, but the story itself was worse than a botched circumcision. Its started out amazing until you get past verdant brink, then the story starts to feel rushed, and by the time you get to tangled depths and do the rata novus part its like they just said kitten it.

Leodon.1564:

Jasper Defthand.3018:

My over feeling about the expansion is how I feel about just about everything as a whole that arenanet does. They come up with a GREAT idea, they start working on it, then realize “OH kitten, this is gonna be so much work, and we are so under staffed cuz our business model doesn’t make kitten for money, and its all on me and my meager pay check that barely feeds my family and i gotta make this deadline. I guess I’ll cheese kitten this kitten, make it look pretty and cool to disguise the fact that theres no real depth and the underlying mechanics and engine are shoddily build and held together by bandaids.”

I’ve been feeling this way lately also after seeing how unfinished Druid was, Rev underwater skills still being missing, Fractals getting recycled levels and weapon skins, etc. I initially gave Anet high praise for HoT but the more I dig into the expansion, the more I’m noticing how hollow/unfinished it feels.

This is Anet’s first expansion so I’m hoping they can use this as a base to learn and build upon.

They’ve been talking about building upon and learning from things for the future for 3 years… And I will give credit where credit is due, they learned how to deliver good story and came up with some really interesting technology, great music, many of the elite specs are fantastic and just in a mechanical sense they did great things. Let’s be real here, I think we are at the future now, it being 3 years since release and it seems Anet just refuses to have the conviction to make use of what they have learned. All these tools were not made use of well as the story was honestly kitten, but well excuted with great visuals and voice acting. There were tons of great points to build lore off of but went completely unused, characters with great budding story arcs that could have been followed but were abandoned. A whole universe of relevant lore went near or completely untapped. For a company that made huge boasts right up until launch talking about lore and story, they didn’t put hardly any lore and story into the game they were advertising.

I from now on will take every little thing anet says with a grain of salt. I will also not recommend the Guild Wars franchise to anyone I meet because i refuse to put anyone else through the frustration of falling in love with a franchise only to be let down continuously by a developer who seems dead set on butchering a universe of great lore.

The only reason I even play this game anymore is because I have so much of my time and memories invested into it since way back when guild wars prophecies was first launched all those years ago.

Ranlares.2513:

Substance E.4852:

The absolute biggest ball they dropped is not incorporating the specializations into the story.

The worst part is that they were setting up so many plot points that could have made it work.

Brahm picks up Eir’s bow. Marjory specifically talks about training to use a great sword. Taimi needs to build a new golem. Canach grows as a person overall and learning to focus his anger could lead into Berserker.

None of it is addressed at all. The only plot that references any of the new HoT class mechanics is Rytlock and his take on the Revenant is his typical crummy “lol, I’m so anti-social. I’m not going to talk about it” he has on everything that makes me think Anet will leave it at that and nothing more.

I’m really hoping that Rox get’s the entirety of LS3 to herself because she is the most wooden, 1 dimensional character in the story and desperately needs something more to her and much better voice direction as well.

Only problem us canach is not a warrior, he is an unknown class. I agree they should have put the specs into the story, but doing each member of destiny’s edge 2 gets their elite spec would have been just as lame and childish as not putting them in. If they had more time i would have loved to see some of the main npcs comment on ME being a druid in random dialogue.

I understand not everyone had their full spec for the story the first time, but if you playthrough it again you would hear it.

As far as my 2 cents (if anyone cares) I think anet did okay. The story overall was good, but they left out too much that should have been answered, and personally the BIGGEST thing I hated was my characters attitude and inflection when speaking. I play a female ranger and I hate that no matter the situation my character always had the same loud and rude tone

That last part about character tone, I think they did really well with this. Throughout the core game my male sylvari ranger always sounded like the biggest kitten, like a teenage boy whos nuts hadn’t dropped yet. With hot his nuts have definitely dropped, his voice carries a certain saltyness now, years of war with zaitan and scarlets forces and then the rise of mordremoth have hardened him and forced a new resolve and commanding presence to reforge and lead the pact in its darkest hour.

I agree pretty much everything woodenpotatoes has said as well of the rest of you. I’ll contribute my own bit to this i suppose.

My over feeling about the expansion is how I feel about just about everything as a whole that arenanet does. They come up with a GREAT idea, they start working on it, then realize “OH kitten, this is gonna be so much work, and we are so under staffed cuz our business model doesn’t make kitten for money, and its all on me and my meager pay check that barely feeds my family and i gotta make this deadline. I guess I’ll cheese kitten this kitten, make it look pretty and cool to disguise the fact that theres no real depth and the underlying mechanics and engine are shoddily build and held together by bandaids.”

I really try to keep my faith in anet and the vision they shared with us for guildwars 2 but I’m honestly getting near the end of my hope reserve. I have been taking my time with the expansion avoiding the trap i set for myself with vanilla in which i burned out nolifeing to 80 and doing all the content and then realizing there was nothing left to do. I’ve been keeping a steady pace of only putting in a couple hours a day after work taking my time. However i have already played through all the major meta events and nearly every sub event, completed the disappointingly short and rushed story. Beat dragon stand meta and there little left to do other than grind out to max on all my masteries which im more than half done with, and its just… they basically left us with a massive grind with limited content to burn through it on, I try to subside the grind by doing different event chains to break up manotany, however its getting old doing the same events since to complete all 4 maguuma masteries is like how many millions and millions of exp?

Another thing I’m REALLY disappointed with is the revamp of fractals to scale to 100 but they added no new fractals… I was already at level 50, so now just for me and not even the new guys, I have to grind through another 50 levels of fractals with nothing new to look forward to AND reportedly far less rewards from it… wtf…

Wooden potatoes and many of you other guys covered a lot of my personal gripes with the story and lore. The lack of character development, the serious feeling of how it was like they rushed it out to make a deadline… you could REALLY feel it. 2 things I’m gonna touch on is the Nightmare Court, they seemed to, in there interviews with the story/lore people, push an agenda that they nightmare court was not mordrem and that there would be a defining presence of that or something in the expansion. There was only 1 instance in that this was brought up and that was the short part of the story with Faolin getting killed and they brought back as a vinetooth… thats it. Another thing was the Exalted, theres no really connection build with these people. We deliver the egg and thats it, you save Tarir from the mordem if you do the Octovine meta but even so you don’t really do much more than that. These people are supposed to be build by the forgotten to be some sort of savior race that works to stop the elder dragons but they dont really should any sort legendary status. I would have figured that our characters would be working closely with them to discover the weakness proposed in Ratanovus.

I could go on but I think you all know what I’m kittening about. Story and lore wise the expansion was a let down, content wise its… 50/50 if you like grind then you probably love it, if not they you’re hurting.

A few things they did good was the explorable nature of the new zones and methods to navigate, the new specializations and superior AI. I just wish there was more… Story and content, fractals, dungeons, i know we have raids coming but theres no new 5 man instanced content added…

I’m tired, I’m done complaining for now, I’ll come back later to see what yall got to say.

It’s been widely accepted since release that ranger sword #1 needs retooling, having a leap build into the #1 auto chain results in a very clunky form of gameplay. Yes it is possible to do some interesting things with it with precise timing in ideal situations, however just because its possible to do so doesn’t mean that a skill should reauire use that works around its clunkiness. same with with #2 and #3, the ideas of the skills are great but the overall feel of the animations has always felt clunky and it hasn’t been touched up in 3 years. I have some sick sword skins unlocked on my account, but I never get to put them to use on my ranger main because I refuse to put up with the clunky sword.

My one problem with the mentor tag is that its everywhere. I was trying to organize groups on a teq map and get 1 tag on each sub event. Before i knew it we have 12 tags on the map, my own cammander tag and 3 others and then the 8 apples clustering my minimap. I asked them to tag down so as not to confuse people and i get responses like “make me, bite me, haha kitten no”. Needless to say that map actually failed tequatl… East went down cuz it was understaffed and those who were there left before 20 secs…. The bottom line here is rather than having people actually using these tags as intended we have little kids with their special snowflake tag they got for free and abusing it. I honsestly believe anet made a mistake with this. I get the intention behind it it and its good initiative in theory for the community if guild wars had a good community. However lets be honest, we don’t have a very good community at large, just look at our forums… This mentor tag is just another tool the inexperienced or toxic can use to work in detrimate to the efforts of those trying to organize have a good time.

I dont know who att is but if its the same DnT from back in WoW vanilla- wrath then they are aiming to create content challenging to a guild with their level of skill and coordination. This is good for the game.

I only plan to use this function if it will work with my microsoft xbox 360 controller. Can someone from anet confirm if there will be compatibility? Seems kinda pointless to implement this feature if not.

arkealia.2713:

Jasper Defthand.3018:

This… Is what i have been waiting for!!!!! The only thing left on the table is a retooling of the sword #1 chain and I will have nothing left to come in here and kitten about.

Shortbow rework maybe? =3

The only thing on sb i would change is how #1 applies bleed, everything else on it is just fine.

We already have a weapon with a leap gap closer, greatsword. I would prefer to see something different done with the #1 auto attack chain, remove the leap and put in something such as a condi or boon, or boon strip. As for the other 2 skills, i would just like to see the maneuvers cleaned up so it all feels smooth and not clunky.

Personally I almost never use sword because of the #1 chain keeps you locked in place. I end up always sticking with greatsword when im solo, or a/w if im grouped. I would like to be able to roll sword but that #1 chain is just insufferable.

This… Is what i have been waiting for!!!!! The only thing left on the table is a retooling of the sword #1 chain and I will have nothing left to come in here and kitten about.

Well im a ranger, im in a guild and im one of the most active and social members so i wont have a problem getting into any group or raids or anything. As for druid, I played around with it, used it for dps, and healing. Quite frankly, i just didn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t all that fun, its damage compacities with staff and glyphs are next to none existent even running full zerkers. Playing it as healing just was meh, this game is just not designed in its current state for incorporate healing in this manor. Unless they make so you can target a player from the UI party window and cast direct heals I see it as a very clunky manor of support where you gotta look at your party window, see who is taking heavy hits, then figure out where that person is and then either port yourself there with that staff teleport and throw out an aoe heal there or throw out a ground targeted heal and hope they dont dodge out of it avoiding something else. This was my experience. If anet wants to make a healing role I feel it needs to be done in a much less clunky more efficient way. If that means clicking on UI health bars like the old school ways and hitting with fast direct heals then so be it, would it be that awful?

f3, f4, f5 doesnt always work, many a time have i had my pet on perma passive for a fight littered with red rings and yet still my pet finds its perfectly ok to run 30ft away from me and park its kitten right in the middle of a red ring armageddon. I go to switch pets, keeping the other on passive as well, yet still the other goes and does the same kittening kitten, killing its self and im left with out my profession mechanic for a whole minute purely at the fault of the garbage AI.

I know a few people who are still refusing to buy the expansion because in there eyes anet has still not put anything out there that is worth paying an amount equal to a whole new game. Which i can understand. At this point of what we know of HoT many of the inequalities in professions like we are talking about now are still not being addressed or being addressed in a very lackluster, lazy, or ineffective ways. Limited amount of content from what we have been told and have seen (like 4 or so zone maps) at this point for the same amount that the core game cost which provide how many zones? 20 or so? Even if you make the argument of there being the mulitple levels(biomes) that would make them equal to maybe 12 at best if each of the 3 levels was packed with a normal maps worth of content. That means like half the content of the core game but for the same price. With this I can see why some people want to sit this out.

This might seem harsh or bigoted or whatever, but for 3 years anet’s paying customers have been directly telling them what they want and they don’t listen for whatever reason. In a way I see it as they deserve a good amount of the hate they receive on these forums because they don’t deliver to their already invested customers. They only pander to the possible new audiences they may be getting soon. You could see most recently on their twitch feed during twitchcon. Colin Johanson sat their and basically delivered the same verbatim speeches hes been spouting for the past 3 years, just selling this game the same way over and over. Its no even that good of an advertising mechanism. Maybe if their target audience in under 15 years old? Maybe if they started pandering to us, the vets, the community would become a healthier place. A healthy community would probably be a whole lot more inviting to new players which means anet would make more money, why dont they try that strategy. Eh whatever, I don’t know what I’m talking about.

The really ironic part of this all is that some people come through this forum and think all this is just whining from subpar players. Yet for anyone who has actually be keeping an eye on the forum for any length of time over the past years and been tracking on how the ranger has been treated, then they understand all this “whining” has a rather significant amount of truth to it. The devs really do not read through this forum much at all. OR they realize that the task of redoing ranger to make all its uniqueness up to par would require fundementally rewriting a bunch of mechanics in the game in order to make it as viable as the other classes. In the end this line of thought means that the devs are really just lazy and dont give a kitten and would rather just pull something like revenant out of their kitten than put some real work into the game and do right by their long time customers.

I’ll even admit that I was advocating for the changes coming to ranger. Until they came and it ended up being little more than a few number tweaks and bug fixes that should have happened years ago. Not the sort of significant fixes I along with many of your were looking for.
Such as:
-Significant AI overhaul for our pets or at least something significant to compensate for their stupidity.
-Sword #1 overhaul.
-Spirits.

there used to be trait back before the overhall to the new system where you could have your spirits follow you around, made them a far less clunky choice of utility

I’m not a extreme pvper so I’m not gonna offer input on that area of game.
For pve the newly buffed nature’s vengeance trait that empowers your spirits with double health and continuous boon output does make taking nature magic more desirable for team support.
I however still feel that its viability is still questionable since spirits still die to any sort of cleaves or high damage red rings. Until they make it so that spirits take less/no AoE damage they will only be viable in tank and spank encounters that do not have a lot of red rings or large numbers of cleaving adds.
I don’t see why this should be such a big deal to change. Warriors carry around banners that put out constant buffs but don’t have to worry about them going down to anything other than their own timers. I understand spirits put out different buffs and function differently, but I think they could still make it so they only take damage when being specifically targeted. This sort mechanic already exists in one of the fractals as a mistlock instability in which you only do 100% damage to enemys that are your active target and deal out 50% less to all other enemies.
I think that type of functionality should be applied to spirits to make them a more viable utility for rangers to bring to their group.

Also their used to be a trait you could take that would make your spirits follow you around, I would like to see that return.

Seems the theme is people who want to remain in a dps role are feeling left out that they haven’t gotten any new candy to play with. You have gotten some new stuff, namely new pets and some balance changes coming to make your existing specs balanced out with other classes to make it more desirable to for group play. That being said I would have liked druid to bring something to the table in passive support more than something restrictive like pure healing. I think the ranger community would have been more happy with means to push out more offensive boons, snares or stuns. Perhaps with the balance changes they will be making our existing support mechanics, i.e. our pets and spirits more viable. Superior pet AI, making our spirits less squishy? Perhaps making it so that they don’t take damage unless they are the target of an attack, this programming already exists in on of the mistlock instabilities where your enemies will only take full damage it they are your active target. Maybe this sort of mechanic could make our pets survive through all the cleaves and red rings in dungeons, fractals and upcoming raids.

Keep in mind everyone that they are still actively working on druid, if you keep active on the forums and actually provide intelligent feedback on how you feel about druid mechanics and how you think it could have been better implemented for your playstyle while still remain viable as a healer for those who are happy about it then maybe the devs will listen to you and make changes to help you out.

I have been reading a lot of the feedback on the druid reveal and it seems to be severely divided between people who are loving it and those who are crestfallen as it is not what they were dead set on. Let’s take a look at what this situation is.

From what we have seen with the staff and glyphs of this new specialization its packing a ton of healing. This is opening up a new path for rangers to take, as it currently stands with what rangers can do now based on our “metas” you can go high burst with LB/ SA, GS High condi with SB/AT with traps, or even go tanky with GS/SA and signets. There are a few other scattered builds that are super effective as certain things but we have no real strong spot when it comes to group support. The druid is the new answer to that, a specialization that brings a strict support role to the ranger. It seems that theres a massive number of people who are very upset about the route this specialization is takin ranger. I’ll even admit I’m somewhat disappointed that the specialization and staff are nearly entirely devoted to healing. I was hoping for some traits and attacks based around manipulating plants and vines, which there is 1 of each, but its not something that seems like it will synergize well with the existing longbow and other specializations at this stage. However I think this spec will go well with nature magic and beast mastery which don’t get nearly as much attention as marksmanship, skirmishing and wilderness survival.

When it comes to PvP I can see a lot of ways ranger is gonna be a support powerhouse with healing, condi removal and some good CC which in this area of the game could actually synergize well with existing weapons and specializations.

For those of you who don’t understand how druid fits in with ranger, it follows on lore regarding who druids were in guild wars 1 lore. Ancient krytans to ventured into the jungle to become one with nature, eventually achieving this and became transcendant spirits of nature. So the whole celestial avatar thing actually does fit in with it…

Now that I’ve gone over the new speciallization let’s take a look at the stuff revealed about ranger NOT related to druid that we should be EQUALLY concerned AND excited for. New PETS and BALANCE changes for the EXISTING specializations AND pets. Yes they are addressing our current specs inequality and our pets severely damaged artificial intelligence. How far will they go concerning making our pets viable, who knows? Let us pray to Melandru -.-; Now for the new Pets.

Mother kittening wyverns… WYVERNS for those of you who saw that, don’t tell me you didn’t get eroused by that pet flying up into the sky and spraying napalm all over the battlefield. For those of you who didn’t, go to youtube and watch it NOW. This means we will be getting pets that can supply a firefield, as well at a lightning field with the lightning wyvern. The new misthound which if you played the first open beta you might remember fighting some of those annoying pieces of kitten. Some sort of needle shooting porcupine things, and a whole host of other creatures and dinosaurs not yet revealed… MOTHER kittenING DINOSAUR PETS.

Now that I’ve given my brief overview of what I saw and got out of the ranger reveal, what would you guys like to contribute, and please be intellectual about your opinions and really bring something good to the conversation.

I agree with all that, and I am playing around with my builds, learning all the combos and whats effective for whatever situation. I just really want to see a change in the community. I left WoW to return here because it was turning so toxic back there. While there is a greater prevalence of nontoxic players in this game, the toxic areas are far worse and really I just want to play the game that Anet said this would be rather than what it actually is. As it is currently, I feel pity for new players who are impressionable and making their first steps into the MMO world and this is their first experience in this type of community and Melandru forbid they pick up the LB and a pet and then get told by some zerkermeta, “no your not viable”, reroll to a class you didn’t want to play.

I could tell they were trying to buid a solid meta team and sacrificing me was a part of that. Anyway something else to to contribute to this is I only seem to encounter these types of issues in dungeon/fractals during the middle of the day, after say 6-8pm my groups end up becoming progressively more awesome. Food for thought?

gs my bad, guess i was think longsword from another game

I can understand that. However, when the community mentality has reached a point where I can’t get my group to listen to me for a plan to take something down, because of my class rather than my individual capacities with it, its just disheartening and says something about the developers in regards to their priorities when it comes to keeping their game closely balanced for the health of the community.

My personal most hated is the norn fractal because of that first boss… No amount of stability will save you… followed by grawl. I’m guessing you are talking about Mai Trin as most people hate her. I think shes easy, time consuming, but easy, she telegraphs her moves, and they generally follow a pretty consistent timing in relation to her friends’. Just takes a group who are on the same page.

I just recently a couple of months ago came back to the game after a very long break after hearing about Heart of Thorns and some friends who were already back into the game. I guess I missed out on the dark ages where there was no new content and all people did was learn how to break dungeons and the birth of the “zerk meta”. From what I understand for a while people deemed rangers and necromancers as useless classes for a while until the more recent multitude of changes that have shifted them to becoming “more viable”.

I don’t quite understand why people hate ranger though, I main as ranger, as well as my real life best friend, we run near identical LB/LS builds and do quite well for ourselves, we burned through all 50 levels of fractals in about 3 weeks doing anywhere from 2-7 fractals per night with, yes, 2 lb/ls rangers. I’m no noob to the MMO genre, I started out on original gw and moved on to other things back and forth; World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Aion, and now back to Guild Wars 2. I’m no stranger to complex raid mechanics and all those types of things. So I did not find anything within those 50 levels particularly mind mindbogglingly difficult. I understould full well what the intention was to counter the challenges the devs put before us. However every so often I find groups that outright refuse to accept rangers.

I’ll tell you a story from my most recent trip into a daily 50. They were already in stage 2(Ascalon) and I came in and everything was find starting out. This is a pug so I didn’t really expect these guys to be the greatest so when I see someone die to a meteor shower from a boss thats clearing telegraphing he’s aiming at him I’m not too surprised or kitten over it. So after 2 wipes we finally get him and move over to grawl. Everything goes well until we get to that last boss fight with the destroygrawlharpyshamanthing. Now mind you my friend and I have gone through this fight before without even a single down running our lb/ls builds and even managed to pull it off after our 3 pugs stood in the fire/meteorshower/whatevernastiness suiciding themselves. This group does just that and more, every attempt I’m left as the last individual and everyone is acting as if its my fault they are killing themselves. This fight, although a pain, is not one that is demanding on composition, rather personal initiative to identify you are in a bad spot and need to maneuver to where you are not going to die. I literally watched an engineer run him self, at full health, out into the lava and stand there and die to meteor showers, boss pokes, and the lava itself. He then proclaims that we need to replace the ranger to succeed. Another, a mesmer, would simply run up to the boss and get herself cleaved immediately at the start of the fight and die before we even got it to 95%. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture.

I feel like people have gotten themselves so deep into this zerker stack mentality that they can’t escape it. I’m sure for many players this is their first MMO experience and they have spent there entire time being brainwashed by this mentality to the point where they are litteraly incapable of thinking outside the box and realizing that certain encounters actually require real mechanics. That maybe the reason things arn’t going well isn’t because of some scrub broken class getting you killed, but because you just don’t know how to, or refuse to play the game the right way.

Maybe I’m the one who’s ignorant, there’s obviously no way I could have gotten all the way to scale 50 with not 1 but 2 rangers… oh wait… I did.

I welcome constructive input from intelligent individuals.

I just recently a couple of months ago came back to the game after a very long break after hearing about Heart of Thorns and some friends who were already back into the game. I guess I missed out on the dark ages where there was no new content and all people did was learn how to break dungeons and the birth of the “zerk meta”. From what I understand for a while people deemed rangers and necromancers as useless classes for a while until the more recent multitude of changes that have shifted them to becoming “more viable”.

I don’t quite understand why people hate ranger though, I main as ranger, as well as my real life best friend, we run near identical LB/LS builds and do quite well for ourselves, we burned through all 50 levels of fractals in about 3 weeks doing anywhere from 2-7 fractals per night with, yes, 2 lb/ls rangers. I’m no noob to the MMO genre, I started out on original gw and moved on to other things back and forth; World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Aion, and now back to Guild Wars 2. I’m no stranger to complex raid mechanics and all those types of things. So I did not find anything within those 50 levels particularly mind mindbogglingly difficult. I understould full well what the intention was to counter the challenges the devs put before us. However every so often I find groups that outright refuse to accept rangers.

I’ll tell you a story from my most recent trip into a daily 50. They were already in stage 2(Ascalon) and I came in and everything was find starting out. This is a pug so I didn’t really expect these guys to be the greatest so when I see someone die to a meteor shower from a boss thats clearing telegraphing he’s aiming at him I’m not too surprised or kitten over it. So after 2 wipes we finally get him and move over to grawl. Everything goes well until we get to that last boss fight with the destroygrawlharpyshamanthing. Now mind you my friend and I have gone through this fight before without even a single down running our lb/ls builds and even managed to pull it off after our 3 pugs stood in the fire/meteorshower/whatevernastiness suiciding themselves. This group does just that and more, every attempt I’m left as the last individual and everyone is acting as if its my fault they are killing themselves. This fight, although a pain, is not one that is demanding on composition, rather personal initiative to identify you are in a bad spot and need to maneuver to where you are not going to die. I literally watched an engineer run him self, at full health, out into the lava and stand there and die to meteor showers, boss pokes, and the lava itself. He then proclaims that we need to replace the ranger to succeed. Another, a mesmer, would simply run up to the boss and get herself cleaved immediately at the start of the fight and die before we even got it to 95%. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture.

I feel like people have gotten themselves so deep into this zerker stack mentality that they can’t escape it. I’m sure for many players this is their first MMO experience and they have spent there entire time being brainwashed by this mentality to the point where they are litteraly incapable of thinking outside the box and realizing that certain encounters actually require real mechanics. That maybe the reason things arn’t going well isn’t because of some scrub broken class getting you killed, but because you just don’t know how to, or refuse to play the game the right way.

Maybe I’m the one who’s ignorant, there’s obviously no way I could have gotten all the way to scale 50 with not 1 but 2 rangers… oh wait… I did.

I welcome constructive input from intelligent individuals.

Not that concerned about the outfite, grabbed the sword the second i saw it mwahahahaa