Guild Wars 2

Hi, I have the very simple suggestion to add more armor stat variations to the game. For power/crit builds, many combinations are available, but condition damage gear is quite subpar. For dungeons, some survivability (toughness/vitality) is a requirement.

Currently, the only viable condition gear with survivability has +condition damage, +power and +vitality. For rangers and necros, condition damage builds have little use for power or healing power. That is why I suggest several additional stat combinations. In order of my personal preference:

Gear set 1
+condition damage
+toughness
+vitality

Gear set 2
+condition damage
+vitality/toughness
+crit

Gear set 3
+condition damage
+vitality/toughness
+magic find

Please let me know what you think.

Server: Blacktide
Location: Metrica Province
Part of the map: Just near the durotl grounds POI

The npc has been dead for about 5 days, his corpse is laying on the ground and there is no way to interact with him.

If these points cannot be fixed quickly, can there at least be a skill point reset every hour or so? The bugged skill points are annoying a lot of people right now and the solution seems so simple.

In my guild-only group, we couldn’t even touch this boss. He starts the fight by spawning 10-15 crystals so we could barely out dps the regeneration. Then he spawns even more. That didn’t work. We tried killing crystals, but it went too slowly. We tried kiting the boss around the big room (which is hard because he is ranged), but the crystals spawned faster than we could kite him. We tried removing his boons, but the regeneration doesn’t count as boons so that didn’t work. We tried to interrupt the ultra-short cast animation that seemingly summons new shards, but he was immume.

I am having a hard time seeing how poison and quickness would help. When I look at that Youtube video, that’s not how it went for us. I think there might be a bug that sometimes causes him to be harder/easier than intended.

I should mention that we failed the first boss event because we tried to reset it. We were unaware that it couldn’t be reset.

Next to no lag on my side either, in NL. What you describe as ‘everything standing still and then everything happening at once’ is something I haven’t seen in this game, ever. Not even in the early beta stage where every skill press had 1-2 seconds delay. To me it always seems like the world is standing still while the server lags.

What you describe sounds like graphic lag, where your GPU can’t keep up with all the graphics and/or is overheating. It then periodically stops doing anything to prevent it from crashing. When it’s cooled down, it processes all the previous frames rapidly to get back to the current time. I have this when I play on my laptop.

I can’t see how this will be better than just banning the accounts. When the botters are aware of this, they will notice that nothing is selling on the trading post because they are all bots. Then their accounts are useless, true, but they might as well have been banned.

The idea was nice but I think you are assuming that when a botter is moved to a bot-server, he will not create new bot accounts. As opposed to banning him, because then he would create new botters. But that’s not really true. The people with access to hacked accounts will have all accounts in their possession run a bot. Whether you move them to other servers or ban them, either way you are reducing the number of bots they have. So it’d be better to ban them to save resources.

Transaction in progress. I think my account got stuck in a transfer, and I have to wait for them to answer my ticket ._.

Here’s some possibilities:
- A keylogger
- Commonly used password
- Shared passwords between sites
- Internet Explorer (srsly)

You can change servers for free at the moment.

I was not aware of the maintenance and I was trying to change servers to get a bugged skill point. Then the servers went down. Now I’ve been getting error 34 for about an hour.

Can anyone else log in at the moment? Is my character going to be stuck between worlds for the next 5 days?

Nice list. I’d like to add this one, can anyone double check to confirm?

The 5th skill of axe (last offhand skill) is Whirling defense. It is a combo finisher which is supposed to shoot out bolts in a combo field. The heart appears, but it doesn’t shoot any bolts.

I have to admit I failed to do the right research on a few points, and adjusted those. I tested the speargun damage on some kind of cage with a lot of health, and did not realize there was 150 bleeding damage attached to every attack. This makes all the difference, so I was wrong.

Also, I was wrong about the axe 3rd skill. It is better than I thought it was. I still think the torch is not worth it though. It does do some condition damage, but in the seconds of casting those, I can do so much more damage by just shooting away at them with my bow. My main objection to main hand/offhand combinations is that usually, switching to the other weapon lowers my dps because I am stuck without ranged attacks for 8 seconds. I would have to go melee, and this just does not work for me in dungeons. Your argument is valid in that I did not spend the traits in defensive abilities. But that’s the point – I want to make an agressive build where I can stay at range and dodge everything. This is somewhat handicapped by melee range weapons and skills.

I realize the damage from pets is high, but I see them run into an aoe and die so often that I don’t want to expand on it because when they die, the whole effect of these traits is gone. Maybe this problem is more related to dungeons than to rangers, but I feel pets should be at least a little bit effective even if you don’t trait for them. Compare them to bows, which will still work when you put all your points in beastmastery.

Regarding skill tiers, there was a point in the beta where you could use any major trait in any slot. They changed it to reduce the number of options available at the start, to not confuse the players. Something they said was that if there is a build that used to be possible, but isn’t anymore, people should mention it so that it can be looked at. I’m not sure if that is what they meant, but this was the reason I made a comment about the available traits in the first tier.

I’m getting more and more convinced that I just haven’t been trying the skills. For example, only now I noticed that the fire trap is actually a combo field fire which combined with the axe whirl creates pretty good aoe damage. There’s also the spirits which, if traited, become a lot more useful. I do feel that by traiting these things I kitten myself, but there’s definitely more viable builds than I thought.

TL;DR:
- Longbows should be better than shortbows when standing still at long range.
- Sometimes you can’t get out of the 1h Sword animation. A stop attack button would be great.
- Torch is a bit bad
- Underwater damage should be a bit higher in general, more on par with land damage.
- Pets feel out of your control, making any skill/trait concerning them a no-go for me
- When doing jumping puzzles, pets block your vision. You can stow them, but when you take falling damage they come back up. There is no hotkey for stowing pets, so this is very annoying. Maybe it could only reactivate when you enter combat?
- Nearly all of the pet abilities are slow. Their cast times are about 2-5 seconds, during which the pet is standing still and does not attack. This seems silly in a game that is as mobile and fast paced as this. Especially with clutch skills like remove conditions (brown bear), it is important for the skills to be instant.
- Even when you cast some of the F2 skills, they don’t always work. (Do go on cooldown.)
- Casting the F2 skills usually does not work at all, and when you spam them they go on a short cooldown.
- Most of the non-bear/moa pets are too easy to kill, and it’s impossible to dodge some aoe spells with them because there is no direct control over their movements. They could get some aoe resistance or immumity.
- When out of combat, it would be better if pets didn’t get aggro. Maybe a smaller aggro range would be better.
- Pet skills would be more fun if they affected the ranger/group other than just themselves. Examples are the bear dispel and moa protection.
- The raven flight animation is bugged when you run, it keeps trying to sit down because it’s flying too fast.
- Certain utility skills and traits concerning pets, traps and spirits don’t seem to be worth it.
- Some dungeons, especially those with high amounts of monsters, can kill you without you being able to do anything. Rangers, along with several other classes, have much less aoe than is required to complete certain dungeons. This is partly due to the fairly underpowered aoe spells and traps.
- In dungeons, monsters chase you around for too long, making you run out of endurance and die even if you timed your dodges perfectly.

I am very satisfied with the part of the profession that is reliable, which means my bows and survival skills. My complaints are mostly about the other areas, which are too unreliable or unrewarding to be worth using.

Dungeons
This has been my main focus as of late, because I really like a challenge. Dungeons don’t seem to have been balanced, meaning some fights are simple and some are painfully hard. Being one shotted happens a lot, which by itself isn’t bad. What would be great, is if some sort of warning would popup on your screen saying “Monster is preparing a big attack!”. In some situations this should be more obvious. (First boss of AC explorable)

In dungeons, I can forget about any sort of melee combat since it’s not safe. Unless I use a bear or moa, my pet gets killed immediately. I feel like I can’t keep my pet safe, because I can’t really control its position. When there’s a huge aoe on the ground between me and the boss, I have no way to tell my pet to get out of it. Maybe it could be immume to AoE in the same way that it does not trigger spike traps. Also, if I’m not very careful, my pet will run ahead of me and pull mobs. I often stow my pet to prevent this.

There are two more reoccurring problems in dungeons. The first is mob aggro, which sometimes doesn’t seem to go away. When I can only tank about two hits, I have to dodge a lot. I do this well now, and can dodge almost everything. But at some point, I run out of dodges and I just can’t get away anymore. There’s little I can do about it at times, especially with multiple monsters involved.

Finally, there’s the biggest problem I’ve encountered which is AoE. Especially for AC explorables (I’ve done all three), this seems absolutely necessary. I have two ‘meh’ aoe spells on my longbow and torch, and some traps which don’t really do much. My best bet is getting all of them in a line and shoot them with piercing arrows, which isn’t doable most of the time. Maybe ranger isn’t an AoE class, fair enough. But I’ve had at least 3 runs where we could not tackle a boss with 3+ different professions because noone had the AoE to deal with all the monsters. When someone left and we got 1-2 elementalists, we could steamroll it. The amount of AoE necessary is quite large, and the amount of AoE available is low. It does not seem balanced across the board, and forces you to go with a certain lineup. This, as far as I know, is not intended. The small monsters are either too strong or the AoE spells are too weak. (On a side note, the burrows in AC are almost impossible to hit by a ranger due to out of range/obstructed errors. I believe this is a bug.)

Sorry about all the negativity, but I hope that I explained well why these things could use getting looked at. Do with it what you will. Kudos for any of the above points that get fixed, it will make an already good experience even better

Pets
This area has been covered many times, and I don’t think it’s necessary to repeat everything. In short, they just don’t feel responsive and in your control. There are several sort-of-bugs that make them feel clunky. I will include a list at the end of this post.

The part that is not bugged but should be looked at is the balancing of pet abilities. The brown bear can remove conditions which is hugely useful. I’d like to see more abilities like this where the pet is more supportive than just increasing it’s own damage. For example, a stalker can turn invisible, but that alone isn’t worth that much. If the pet could turn me invisible along with it, for even just say 2 seconds, I would seriously consider picking it up. An other problem with pets is that they die very fast unless you take a bear or moa. I really like having a Raven as my pet, but when I send it in it gets one shotted. There should be a shift in pet abilities so that squishy pets like ravens are either harder to hit (evasion), get less aggro or give passive bonusses to the player (e.g. extra crit) while they are near you.

Utility skills
There are plenty of good skills in the Ranger arsenal, allowing for different playstyles. Some of them feel a bit useless, however. The traps don’t seem to do that much damage, and don’t compensate for the lack of a real survivability skill. The signet passives are a little bit weak. But most important of all, about 30% of the skills are focussed around pets. Because I have absolutely zero trust in my pet, I just do not want to take these skills. For example, I don’t see how having my pet guard an area offers me anything in terms of damage or utility. It’s just not worth taking this over e.g. increased survivability with Lightning Reflexes or extra damage with Quickening Zephyr. On a side note, the elite skill that roots everything in an area is a tad strong. The other elites could use a buff or something that makes them worth it.

Traits
Many traits are not worth it. Example is ‘Create a spike trap while reviving an ally.’ The general use of this is limited already, and crippling enemies that are already in melee range won’t help you revive someone. Opening strikes do not do enough damage to be worth investing in, signets aren’t that great either. A lot of skills are based on a % of your health, which makes them unreliable. Anything related to pets, spirits or traps also don’t seem to be worth it because they are unreliable and just a bit weak. Also, maybe this is not really the place, but I would like to do a suggestion for trait lines. Currently you cannot put a trait VII or higher in the first slot. Could it be made so that once you reach the second tier (Master), the traits get unlocked and you can use them in any of the previous slots as well? This would make it possible for me to, for example, have +70 precision for allies and piercing arrows at level 40.

sPvP
Rangers are fine in sPvP. To my own demise I have to say that Quickness is a bit overpowered. I really wouldn’t like to see it nerfed because it is just so much fun, especially with the awesome weapon sounds from bows. Pewpewpewpewpew.
Aside from that, I don’t really have any specific complaints. Underwater combat remains a pain in the kitten.

WvWvW
Nothing wrong here, either.

General PvE
Fine. I can handle areas that are 8 levels above myself, and even personal story up until 6 levels above myself. Ranger seems great for tackling more difficult content, and I love doing it.

First of all, this game is awesome. It’s mostly bullseyes, a lot of hits and some misses. The features in the game have clearly been thought out to make it as enjoyable as possible, and that pays off big time.

When deciding on a profession(including the BWEs), I tried out all of them briefly. I really liked the professions I thought I would like, but I also liked the professions I thought I wouldn’t like! The ranger is my main now, which falls in the latter category. This is a big compliment to those who designed it, because normally I’d always steer clear of this type of profession due to it getting repetitive and the poor control over pets.

Now, even though most of it is great, I would like to give some constructive criticism about the class, because in a few aspects it does not feel quite as finished as other classes. First, I would like to talk about the available weapons.

Weapons
Longbow
As the signature weapon of a ranger, I expected great things from this weapon. The skills are great and I like how range gives you more damage. It just adds to the way you play the profession. Unfortunately the damage on the weapon, even at max range, is vastly inferior to a shortbow. Aside from AoE fights, I see no reason to use a longbow at the moment.

Shortbow
My favorite by far. It lets you run around like a maniac while still firing arrows at your enemies at high speeds. It offers more damage than the longbow from almost any angle, more control, more mobility and lower cooldowns.

Greatsword
I’ve heard people like this weapon. Myself, I feel a little bit too squishy to stay in melee range of any serious mob, which is why I never really use it.

Sword
Similar to greatsword, but the added benefit is that you can use a torch/warhorn, so I use this weapon quite a bit. The attack animations are fun and rewarding, but there is a problem with the auto attack where you cannot stop auto attacking because you are stuck in the animation. Even dodging doesn’t seem to work sometimes. A simple fix to this would be to introduce a keybind that lets you stop attacking, which is something I’ve been missing since the start.

Axe
Good for multiple targets.

Warhorn
This weapon is just great. That swiftness skill is one of the best skills in the game in my eyes, and the bird storm looks cool and gives decent damage. I mainly use a sword/axe just so I have access to this off hand.

Torch
Seems a bit lackluster. In order to use the aoe, you have to be in melee range which is kind of bad for most situations where you need aoe in the first place. The 4th skill does not seem to be worth it either.

Spear
Underwater weapons count too. Spears require me to be in melee range and tank damage, which I don’t like. The damage on spears is about equal to that of a Longbow as far as I can tell.

Speargun
Decent, but a bit low on damage like spear.