Guild Wars 2

Tried only soulbeast in depth and since this is just a feedback thread I’ll leave just these observations

• Feels too much like core ranger
• It’s unacceptable that some core utilities don’t work when using the new class mechanic

Returning player here, so far I have the impression that everything you do with soulbeast can be done with core ranger with the exact same skills.

In gw1 they were mostly used to stay afk and not be bothered by stranger.
Also gvg.

Only a shield for the mesmer would be unfair, the other weapon will probably be a main hand pistol.

I also would like to see double pistol elementalist.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Nvm. I thought that pets took players condition damage. But they don’t. I always assumed this because there were a lot of posts that said this. It was a huge while back, but I never saw a change in the patch notes so I assumed it was still the same. Someone told me that assumption has only later been proven wrong though.

Wich makes this ‘condi burst build’ a bit dissapointing. It was about landing 450/s poison, 800/s burning, 135/s bleeding, etc, and so pressuring the enemy. The debuff on poison is nice, but I take it more for it’s damage. I wouldnt need poison master for high uptime on -33% healing debuff so for that it’s useless. Good to know, the trait trigger itself uses your condi damage though. That would make it very good with power pets. To bad this breaks my plans to make more use out of condi pets (confusion drake, murrelow, arctobus, i had some plans with them, but their power equivalents beat them hard now, because the no condition damage stat.

This bug is around at least since the poison master introduction. Pets don’t get any condi damage from traits and beastmastery points.

WOW! Didn’t expect this so quickly! I almost feel like a normal class no, I only need a longbow with the super pistol sound effects.

The changes are good, except strider’s defence: that trait is just broken.

I made a proposal about this during the CDI.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Collaborative-Development-Ranger-Profession/page/30#post3703066

Tell me what you think.

The best MMO is always the next one.

Does that mean I have to pay to apply skins that were previously free like hom and SAB?

that +50% damage does the same DPS of one stack of bleeding

Lolwut warriors get more DPS

Atherakhia.4086:

Nike.2631:

I have to admit, prior to this round of threads I was against a player council.

Now I’m considering it if it would give someone — anyone — real access to the people who actually make the decisions instead of a red named secretary passing notes and tossing out “insights” that are so simplistic and divorced from real gameplay as to be offensive. Busted Pet AI is “a broken 2×4.” Yeah, that one is going down in the Hall of Shame.

My only concern with a player council approach is the same problem I had with all those SotG podcasts that Grouch lead. They never looked at the class as a whole, they only ever focused on one little niche and so long as the Ranger offered something in that niche, they were under the impression the class was perfect.

It will be the same with the player council imo. Those who like the condi builds or prefer playing non-ranged rangers may not be able/willing to discuss these topics for the betterment of the class as a whole. They’ll simply accept that the way they play is safe and secure and ignore the issues that don’t directly affect them.

There are two things I clearly remember about that show
1) BM rangers OP!
2) Buff warriors, make ‘em even OP, I just wanna see warriors!
See where we are now. i don’t think it’s a good idea.

Nike.2631:

I’d suggest serious sub-division of the topic:

Ranger Weapon Skills
Ranger Healing/Utility/Elite Skills
Pet Skills/Behavior
Ranger Traits

A separate thread for each, one-at-a-time, in that order. With clear ground rules to build on what exists – no complete do overs no matter how much you may object to what is in the game now. Getting approval for change always hinges on minimizing the chaos.

Splitting the topics would have been better, they did the same for the PvE CDIs and I don’t know why they decided to go this way this time. The topic degenerated really quickly and there was lack of guidance, it was more like a brainstorming session than a real discussion and I don’t think the moderators are to blame.

And then they say there is no endgame. Of course there isn’t if you put the all skins in the gem store.

Sarision.6347:

Does anybody find it funny that the current Ranger design fits new balance philosophy?

It’s funny because that design philosophy was proposed by an user on this forum in an attempt to give a more accurate description of the class to the new players.

The biggers lie of that philosophy is the sustained damage part. When someone say sustained damage they are talking about autoattack(mostly), but really, anybody can autoattack(and probably still do more damage than us) while still having the option to burst. There is just no balance in that. Sustained damage dosn’t work, pressure does, and we have none.

Specific Game Mode
PvX

Proposal Overview
Opening strike improvement+boon removal

Goal of Proposal
The proposal is aimed to address one problem power ranger (pun not intended) have, which is the inability to deal with enemy boons.

Proposal Functionality
We start reworking the minor traits of the Marksmanship traitline:

• Opening strike: changed to “You and your pet cause vulnerability with your first hit when entering combat”. Basically merged with the Master Tier trait.

• Precise Strike(Master): “Opening strike always critical hits”. Same funcionality of the actual grandmaster trait.

• Alpha Training(find a more suitable name if you wish): changed to “Regain opening strike when you kill a foe or gain stealth”. We take the functionality of Remorsless (Grandmaster major trait)

Then we rework Remorsless

• Remorsless: Opening strike remove(or steal or corrupt) a boon.

Alternative

• Alpha Training: “Opening Strike remove a boon”.

Remorsless is left unchanged.

Associated Risks
I don’ see condi build going deep into a power traitline just to use this trait, maybe there are some problem with pigs but there is still counterplay because enemies can pick up the foraged weapon.

Specific Game Mode
PvX

Proposal Overview
Introduction of condi damage pets

Goal of Proposal
Reinforce the hybrid nature of the class; currently we can only run condi on the ranger and direct damage on the pet.

Proposal Functionality
Spiders and devourers have a baseline 300 condition damage. Their condi damage can now go up to 950 with 30 BM points and Expertise training (Wilderness Survival V). Now they don’t get any bonus condi damage possibly because of a bug.

Associated Risks
Overbuffing condi builds.

They are probably considering if they should split the topic or not (ie: traits+class mechanic+utility+weapons)

Durzlla.6295:

Sneakier.9460:

I trade my pet for 25%/30% damage boost to physical/condition damage

In gw1 i wasn’t forced to use pet, why should i in gw2?

Because rangers evolved to fight in tandem with animals! Except we conveniently forgot how to use an Axe + Shield…. or throw spears while holding a shield… or using a staff and chanting like a cheerleader, or using a hammer to knock enemies on the floor where we can tear them apart easier….

You know… all the weapon combos we used in GW1 to fight with a pet… because kitten logic…

And we forgot the best skills to use in combination with our pet…
Horray for the beastmaster!

Ember Doomforge?

inb4 they nerfed the shortbow to compensate the stealth buff to the longbow.
>fix the longbow next patch

I have one big problem with this skill. The active portion of the spirit generally doesn’t use our stats.

Better: GW1 (Ranger). Versatility and adaptability were the defining factors of this implementation. You were not forced into pets, bows were able to pump a reasonable amount of damage and even the support was nice. The interrupt mechanic was fun to use and forced you to always stay on your toes even in pve to interrupt key skills while bringing a mindgame in pvp. The profession primary attribute “expertise” allowed the ranger to explore new playstyles by making more use of the secondary profession running: sword, axe, daggers, scythe, hammer, basically whatever you want. The class had the best bar compression in the game: just by changing the elite skill you change your role and how you play.

Worst: Aion (Ranger). Not much to say. You are not forced into pets and that’s the only good thing. The class is just a raw dps machine: a ranged assassin without stealth. Boring.

Well done OP. /clap

On paper, yes, in practice, no. No one is going to stay in the vines for the full duration; they will die before or break the vines. This is more a nerf to thieves.

Quarktastic.1027:

coglin.1867:

Substance E.4852:

For someone who claims “factual notes”, you seem to have a very lose understanding of how said skills work in actual combat.

No, not really. After leveling the last of my 8 professions to 80 at the first of the year, one thing I really learned, is that players like you, like to claim “actual combat understanding” when you don’t know jack about the other professions to make a comparison.

Particularly Your laughable comments about condition removal. Every player always tries to convince the sane people, that their current main is the worst profession at everything and subsequently needs to be buffed at everything. You prove that in particular, by with the comical effort you put into trying to down play every skill. Your kidding yourself if you believe the other professions cannot list issues with each of their skills as well.

Allow me to list all of the ranger’s condition removal skills/traits, and their drawbacks.

• Empathic bond: Transfers 3 conditions to your pet every 10 seconds. Only functions if your pet is alive, and within range (maximum range unconfirmed)
• Evasive purity: Dodging removes poison and blind. Only removes the two aforementioned conditions, costs a dodge roll.
• Signet of renewal: Passive- remove a condition every 10 seconds. Active- pet draws all conditions from nearby allies to itself. Active only works if your pet is alive, and within 600 range.
• Healing spring: Removes one condition every 2 seconds while standing in the field, and one condition upon activation. Must remain in the field to receive the full effect.
• Nature’s renewal: removes 5 conditions and revives up to 3 downed allies. Elite skill, 600 range, can only be used twice every 240 seconds, spirit can be killed rather easily.

Objectively, healing spring is our most useful condition removal skill, but it also happens to be tied to one of our better healing skills. The rest of our condition removal is either passive, requires our pet to be both alive and nearby, or has a tremendously long cooldown.

In comparison, guardians have:

• Inscribed removal: Activating a signet removes a condition. Turns every signet into an active condition cleanse.
• Purity: remove a condition every 10 seconds. Passive.
• Pure of Voice: allies affected by shouts convert one condition into a boon. Turns every shout into an AoE cleanse.
• Signet of resolve: passive. remove a condition every 10 seconds, can be traited to remove two conditions with perfect inscriptions.
• Ray of judgement: Cures a condition on each ally it strikes. Only bounces 4 times, allies must be in range to be affected.
• Purifying blast: Cure a condition on allies. Underwater only.
• Purging flames: Cures 3 conditions upon activation.
• Contemplation of purity: Converts all conditions into boons.
• Smite condition: Cures one condition and inflicts damage to nearby foes.

The list seems a bit biased, but guardians are the clear winners when it comes to condition removal. Guardians have far more active cleanses, and they come with far fewer stipulations.

Add the brown bear: same problem with the F2 delay and… it’s a bear

Just wanted to add some of my recent thoughts about the greatsword.
We often talk about how the greatsword is a defensive weapon but when you look at the sword you realize it has the same defensive capabilities of the greatsword, infact most of use use this weapon for defensive purpose as offhand weapon. It has 2 built in evades, one of which is a gap creator/closer when used right, it has more flexibility because you can pair the main hand with the proper offhand: warhorn for group buffing and the blast finisher, dagger for an extra evade, torch for the fire field, axe for the cc and reflection and all of that while still maintaining more overall damage than the greatsword. Maybe we need to start to look at the gs not as a defensive weapon but as a sword with different playstyle.

I’ll try to comment each point

Natural Vigor
Starting here because I think it requires the most discussion. This, simply put, was a wildly overpowered trait. I tell people not to compare one profession to another, but Engineer has this trait as a major grandmaster. It was simply too easy to put 5 points in this line and then be able to dodge every 6.67 seconds. As it stands after the change this still allows you to splash 5 points and dodge every 8 seconds. I don’t think this will ruin survivability, and I think by buff other traits further down this line it will encourge rangers who are looking to survive to go further into this trait line.

Jon, rangers are already going further into this traitline. Mesmers and guardians can have 100% vigor uptime for a 5 point trait wich is x2 times better than this. If you really don’t like this trait maybe you should consider to swap it with bark skin.

Spirits Unbound and Nature’s Voice
I think the biggest change of moving spirits unbound is it allows you to take this trait along with Nature’s Voice. Internally we have done some testing where you bring stone spirit, guard, and then still have a open third utility slot to make some truly good support ranger builds. Spirits have always had that feel and I think this brings that to the forefront.

More option for support are always welcome. Creating a sinergy with guard was a good decision, however i think guard should have a better function on its own without heavy trait investment, plus it’s the only shout with a casting time.

Power Rangers
No pun intended. As many have said these guys are in an interesting position. In some ways they can be very strong, but everytime I play my ranger this way it feel like it comes up a little bit short. I think this is because they are lacking a few things as either additional tools for greatsword or as utilities. Signets are the somewhat obvious utility choice but their effect is too varied to run a strong full signet build here. Conversely all traits associated with signets tend to increase in power the more you bring. What signets need is a good trait that synergizes with bringing a single signet, like Nature’s Voice does for shouts. This would let you bring maybe one or two signets and suppliment them with something else. One idea we talked about for Greatsword would be to take the evade off of the 3rd attack of the auto-chain and put it on swoop. This would give you a second on-demand defensive skill and instead we put something less timing based (for example a whirl finisher) on that third attack to empower it.

One of the things that make power rangers bad are the ranged weapons. They don’t cleave by default like the melee weapons; generally ranged weapons do less damage to justify the range advantage but here it has basically no value in pvp where you have to fight on points and is very easy to close the gap. melee weapons do more single target damage AND the cleave.
I think the change to the greatswod will make the weapon even worse. By moving the evade from the AA to swoop you are reducing the evading uptime of the weapon and the whirl finisher is not that strong to justify the loss. The evade on the auto opens up for some skillful plays but if you want to make more a on-demand dodge you could punt the evade on the second or first part of the chain.

Main-hand sword
I just want to clarify for good that main hand sword is currently working as intended. All movement skills cannot be interrupted by dodging and this is currently intentional. It has a very specific play style, and I would like it to remain. I understand that rangers want a one handed melee option that is more mobile, but that will have to wait, as I know there are a mix of players who also like how this weapon plays and I do not want to take away one of the more unique playstyles that we have and replace it with something that is fairly common.

Actually I like that playstyle even though is not very practical in pvp.

Great post, basically the opportunity cost is too high.

We have the most clunky imlementation of enviromental weapons among all the classes with the pigs. Why don’t they work like the ellys or the thieves is out of my mind. The weapons could replace the pet f2 or they could spawn one copy on the ground and one copy in your hands, or maybe combine both: one copy on the ground and the other one replaces the f2.

on the other hand when we first read the leaked notes we said that the change to companion’s defense was bad because we couldn’t use it to give protection to the pet and it was changed in the final version, so they do listen…. sometimes…

It’s not true in the literal sense. The pets don’t scale with your gear they do a fixed amount of damage, for example if you are in tank gear and you are using a jaguar he probably will do more than that, but if you are in zerker gear and you are using a bear he won’t never come close to 40%. However, it’s true in the sense that part of our damage potential is in the pet and in the most cases he can’t deliver that. The real question is: what pet is anet using as reference to balance the class?

I don’t think it will make much of a difference in pvp. In pve it’s a nerf at least for me because I don’t use spirit unbound and my frost spirit almost never dies.

Don’t worry. Infinite coin item coming in the gem store.

From what I read here it doesn’t look it will be fun. While I did beat cat mario from 1 to 5 I didn’t find it was fun because the game constantly changes the rules to a point where the only way to keep going is to die over and over until you discover all the traps. At that point the traps were unavoidable because you don’t have any tells and if you don’t have any tells you can’t make a choice, if you can’t make a choice there is no skill.

Interesting. So TM is not really difficult but just time consuming?

tested in spvp and with only 30% boon duration I can’t stack endless swiftness and the regeneration stack works only with natures bounty.

you can slot and unslot your grandmaster trait out of combat for that… or at least that’s how it worked some months ago

OP, the same happened to me except that I didn’t have to level a new toon. I always used traps, but I got bored and decided to change to the other only logical build we have. I spent lots of gold to regear my character(lukily I didn’t use any laurels), it was a big investment since I’m not rich and all of that just to see that build destroyed 2 weeks later. I don’t want to become another anet’s gold sink, so I think I’ll probably just change to another of my 80’s toon, they haven’t been touched since months.

My friend with a staff ellys can stack swiftness an regeneration just about the same plus might and protection to the team and remove conditions and he doesn’t need to use a particular rune set, so he has more flexibility and he can use another one.

to be honest after the quickness nerf I was barely noticing any difference.

Has anybody noticed the zephir’s speed swap?

you don’t balance a game around bad players

jcbroe.4329:

Xsorus.2507:

He wasn’t a bad player, he was actually really hard to kill.

He switched to pig cause in previous fights I was killing his dogs over and over again soon as he swapped to them

I do agree that there is a lot of bad rangers out there….I mean a lot..Who will AJ every fight they see…I actually let whoever i’m fighting kill the person who aj’s on them if they can..I’ll pull off and let them beat em..then I tell the ranger he shouldn’t AJ

My personal favorite part yesterday was me fighting a thief, that just killed a ranger…I’m bout to kill the Thief when the ranger shoots him and kills him, i’m like wtf you doing… and he’s like “I wanted revenge for him killing me” and i told him “get revenge by winning the fight”

I don’t think its just rangers though…People in this game just ugg… I don’t know..Maybe i’m just an old foggy having played DAOC…. but I view a lot of people in this game very poorly

I miss guild wars 1 for that reason, the pvp made the game. I’m not sure what the original intention of guild wars 1 was, but pvp is where it saw its success, and its what captivated the majority of its audience.

Right now all my instincts are telling me the next truly competitive MMO is going to be Wildstar, but it’s in closed beta and I won’t know for certain until I get to experience the feel of it.

It’s sad, because guild wars 2 has so much potential. They just aren’t capitalizing on it fast enough to hold the attention of a large audience. Also, PvP shouldn’t feel like an added area. It should feel like the endgame content. There should be items obtainable in PvP (this also holds true to WvW, but WvW kind of has some of this, albeit, it’s limited) that are only obtainable there, but can be used across the game, to make people play pvp more.

It could be something extremely simple, like spending the amassed amounts of glory players have to turning armors unlocked in pvp item skin that can be applied to content accessible to the whole game.

If you jump into the game right away, I doubt somebody who just learns as they go ever even discovers PvP and WvW, because they are icons on the UI that aren’t mentioned anywhere else throughout the game.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The point is that for the most part, the game only ever challenges player to get good at PvE, and they can receive every reward they want from doing that (and spending gems at the gem store). WvW and PvP need to be more rewarding so that players have a desire to accept the challenge to get better against other players, and there by, get better at the game.

Dungeons would be the third part of that, but dungeon mechanics are always going to be undermined by people who optimize the dungeons to be run as fast as possible, to be farmed as fast as possible. It’s just another PvE mentality that only encourages players to learn more or listen better, instead of genuinely playing better.

Rewards are not necessary for making pvp bigger. In gw1 gvg was big and all you get for winning a game was more rating, your kitten gets bigger and that’s all. HA had some little rewards, but people never played for the rewards, they did it just for the rank and the animation (or enjoyment)… again, kitten. You don’t need shinies when the actual gameplay is enjoyable.

Also, I won’t get too hyped about wildstar. To me that game looks too much luke wow 2.0: arena, gear dependency/gear gind, and 40 gazillion people raids.

Ellys can summon enviromental weapons too, but I don’t think they can be picked by the enemies.

The “Brand New” was meant to refresh the cd. Around that period the out of combat cd for F4 was only 4 seconds, so basically out of combat you could stack fury, protection and all the boons given by the pig family (all the boons basically, thanks to the sianoth) just by stacking the enviromental weapons, then they brought up the cd to 15 seconds and when people asked why not just keep the cd on the F2 skill their response was “well, we just wanna give you a brand new pet on swap”. Then 3 months ago the cd for the swap was brought down again to 4 seconds and there were no partch notes for that. They basically introduced a new bug just to “fix” something that was working as intended.

Pet’s F2 skill was not a fix. Back in october Anet said that they wanted to give a brand new pet after the swap so that’s actually a nerf.

Even if they give us more damage to compensate we still won’t get the same out of each point in power because the damage is still split, we still can’t compete with warriors and thieves.

I don’t think we will se more power added to the ranger. They said that since pets are now more reliable their damage will be nerfed.

Here is mine with also a little extra

The ironic part is that the blue jellyfish is not just blue but has more colour, while the rainbow jellyfish is just green and blue.