Guild Wars 2

rogerwilko.6895:

My Sweet Lily.1952:

People should understand, that Shortbow is good at non-condition builds.

oh that`s good news! once I hit 80, I will give it a try.

Right now I am struggling with the undeads (I am lv 74) and using sword / horn & longbow.

I did try a spirit setup with my sword / horn & 2h sword, but it was pretty cumbersome to keep summoning the spirits, and they seam to die pretty fast not to mention agro the damn undeads…

Shortbow does more dmg than the longbow unless you can hit the max range req on LB, this is using optimal LB rotation vs SB auto meaning that with SB you can more easily manage other stuff.
And if you’re pvping you won’t hit the range requirement.

The issue with sword/x is that it’s very clunky. You can’t dodge out of the leap animation meaning you’re exposing yourself.

Personally I run full berserker gear 30/25/0/0/15 traits iv ix xi, i x, vi. In pve I’ll change the master trait in skirm to v.

ShinraGuardian.8053:

This patch fixes quite a lot of issues most rangers (including myself) found extremely annoying.

Bows seem to hit more now, I haven’t seen much “miss” or “out of range” (although obstructed is still there a bit, oh well but one thing at a time right?)

Pet builds will now do much better than they have before with the rate pets can hit now. I never realized how much damage could be done with specifically focusing on the pet until now. I might make another set of armor/weapons to run beast master now.

Overall I’m pretty happy with what you guys have done this patch. Relax and kick back for a little while, job well done.

First off, pet builds not working had/has little to do with being able to hit. The issue lies with pets dieing incredibly fast and the “callback” mechanic being extremely clunky (pets don’t run in a straightline which is anoying when bosses have huge(area) aoe dmg making the pet die while you actually did all you could.

Secondly your armor doesn’t help the pet in any way shape or form (apart from healingpower) so getting a new set is just silly.

^ Dahkeus “gets it” to add to this trap range is very limited and the cast time just is beyond anoying.
Also consider that one ele can do pretty much exactly the same (apart from poison) whilst also adding might/swiftness/protection/regen blind/weakness/vulnerability + “designated” heals

Ty for the update Dahkeus, usually people aren’t only skeptical they simply won’t hear me out.
Sadly I have to concur with you regarding Rangers being very “unhelpful” towards to rest of the team apart from healing spring and warhorn/pets we don’t have many ways of helping the team so my team is asking me more and more often to bring my ele and I can’t blame them

DarkWasp.7291:

If you have a pet that can survive, made way more possible by statting beast mastery and focusing on healing power, that pet will deal damage for you even if your attack stat is low. With high condition damage you’ll also notice you can hit 600+ with burning (so make sure to bring a torch) somewhere around 300 with poison and bleed out 100s all at a rate that can put a power/prec shortbow to shame.
Unfortunately I have not been able to test that in PvE yet. What I am running in PvE is:

Soldier’s gear Power, Toughness, Vitality and Longbow/Sword+Horn which actually deals damage comparable to berserkers gear and I have survived as the sole melee character in many dungeons. People really underestimate how good Power really is, even without much Precision. Keeping fury on yourself (warhorn + moa [or supportive teammate]) brings your crit chance above 50% anyway.

The idea of your build is good but the issue is you’re building around making your pet survive better and deal more dmg while instead you could be building around helping your team survive and deal more dmg, imo 4man+pet(occasionally)>pet.
You are sacrificing 2stats for no reason other than make your pet “viable” which it still won’t be the moment a boss runs around.

And no you don’t do dmg comparable to berserkers. Power/prec/crit scale very very well, to the point that almost 70% of my attacks seem to crit and deal 1k+dmg. If you’re counting on fury you can make that 100%.

i think it all depends on style of play. Building high vitality and toughness vs high Damage/Precision or conditional damage to me doesnt seem to make much difference which way you go when you are doing a dungeon crawl.

To you personally it won’t make much of a difference but this game isn’t built around soloing stuff. If you get a group where everyone is built around tough/vit vs damage/prec you’ll notice an insane difference for the simple reason that all the survivability you get from tough/vit can be brought to you by utility skills (which are probably even better than passive stats)

And if you’re going to sacrifice a skill for a stun breaker just for one boss I’m at a loss for words.

TL;DR stop thinking in terms of you personally and starting thinking as a team.

Quarktastic.1027:

In other words, the only survivability you have is your traited signet of stone. Your real survivability likely comes from the 2 guardians you constantly run with. Also, you don’t have a stun breaker. I would look into picking up lightning reflexes instead of signet of the wild. Signet of renewal is also a stun breaker, though with a longer cooldown.

Ofcourse my survivability comes from my team, there’s no point in trying to do everything yourself when you can get a lot more survivability from your team.
Ele gives weakness/blind/protection aswell its not just the guardians that add surv and the mesmer copies his boons to others to give us all boons for long periods of time.

I can’t recall for what part I’d need a stunbreaker though, going over all bosses quickly I can’t remember what boss stuns.
The only reason I run sig of stone is to survive corruption If I screw up.

On my ranger I run full berserker gear+divinity runes traited 30/25/0/0/15
iv ix xi (I switch ix for vii most of the time) outmarksmanship i v skirmishing vi beastmaster sb+a/wh and stalker+jaguar pet. Utilities are healing spring, signet of stone, signet of the wild and QZ my elite is RaO.
On my mes I run full berserker gear + scholar runes traited 30/30/0/0/10 although I feel it needs more tweaking. iii x xi, iv ii xi, iii
On my ele I run a rampager set based around giving might and dropping blind/weakness on the foes 20/0/20/0/30 iv v, iv vii, i v xii

Our team usually consists of one mes, 2guardians one thief and me.

Quarktastic.1027:

1. Protection is nice, but can’t be kept up constantly.
2.Toughness on the other hand, is permanent, passive damage reduction.

3. Some builds, like a ranger running a trap spec, can’t build for survivability using utilities and traits, because those utilities and traits are used offensively.
4. Having that extra safety net of toughness/vitality goes a long way in keeping you alive during a longer fight.

1. Run with a guildgroup/friendsgroup (you’ll have to eventually), you don’t need protection 100% of the time, just for those high dmg abilities.
2. Yes it is but as I’ve said toughness only works vs 50% of the dmg, your toughness won’t help you vs conditions.
3. Maybe your build is simply sub-par?(I don’t mean this as an attack, I mean to say that you might get more dps and surv for a lower trade-off if you switch builds)
4. That’s a loop, you have more hp so you can survive longer fights but since you deal less dmg you now need more hp as buffer and so on, I gave an example with the CoF run to show that making fights shorter, increases survivability.

A big issue is that he doesn’t seem to think that shaving 2min of a boss fight is significant, the shorter a fight lasts the lower the risks meaning that dmg actually becomes a survivability stat.
An analogy: pacman only has 20lvls (I think) the difficulty to play for max score isn’t doing those levels since you can master them, the difficulty is mastering this and then playing for long periods of time without making mistakes.

Also his post doesn’t have any quantifiable data. The first time I did AC/TA/Arah/… I died (a lot) this doesn’t automaticly mean it’s my gear to begin with.

He literally claims: “The farther I get in these fractals the more skilled players I am finally seeing, players that are build for surviving and supporting other players and not just DPSing.” The issue I have with this is that he (and many others) will automatically assume that anyone who survives is built for survival which isn’t the case.

To me skill is surviving by using your skills. Popping sb+3 to evade so you keep your energy full etc is far more skillful than taking a hit and healing up afterwards, therefor since he’s meeting more and more skilled players those players should be better at dodging aswell.

Throwing around the sentence “a dead dps does 0dps” isn’t a good viewpoint either. I know that stance due to WoW so I’ll go with my experience from that. What is ment by this sentence isn’t you need to stack stamina(or tough/vit here) it means “play smart” if you’re going to take a risk make sure you’ve got ways of surviving(skillwise). In wow you have the trinity and in serious guilds DPS are supposed to be built around dealing as much dmg as possible, you can raid succesfully with 15dps whos stack stamina (if enrage doesn’t exist) but there’s a big chance someone will screw up dodging and you’ll eventually die.

Now I know this isn’t the place but since he is a mesmer and references another mesmer build as expert regarding builds I’ll comment on them.
1. The build he runs can be played with any gear set, the mesmer “support” build is focused around feedback and signet of inspiration. You do not get any additional survivability from gear using those skills.
2. The person from who he got the build doesn’t really state how far in they are and how effective it’s being. For instance tanking mossman isn’t a feat, it’s a waste of time since u can completely ignore him.
3. As I’ve tried to explain before, the additional dmg npc’s do shouldn’t matter if you know what to dodge, sure most bosses will one shot you if you “fail” but there’s a limit at which even 3k toughness and 30k hp won’t save you so you will eventually have to learn to dodge everything.

If you check the vid of the CoF run in the dungeon section you can see how dmg increases survivability, the first boss drops in 18 seconds and they actually revived someone. (also note they are all glasscanons yet they have all boons up).

What I mean to say is that most dungeon fights in fotm revolve more around corruption than actual dmg taken, since once you have corruption you can not “tank” it in any way other than using an invulnerability skill.

EDIT:
In this post people reference glass canons to be at lvl 41+ http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tezt/looking_for_some_good_builds_for_fractals/c770n3v
As you see they say the same thing, go all out dmg and for survivability rely on (utility)skills

Hi, I’m by no means an expert on fotm (I’m at about the same level as you) but I’ll speak of my experience and set out my reasoning.

First off it’s true that prec and crit (dmg) do wonders however there is a drop off point where power actually becomes more efficient than prec/crit (especially towards crit) meaning that if you’re going to drop one of your stats, crit is probably the best choice.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/gallery/image/515-403-power-precision/

Next, I do NOT believe rangers (and most other classes) should build around toughness or vitality for survivability. Imo it’s better to go with traits (giving protection/vigor/..) or utility skills, if you’re looking to increase survivability.
These views are shared by someone who linked guide videos in the dungeon section:

Everyone in the party is in full Berserker (I keep an extra set for WvW as well, since I prefer a different rune set for that anyways). I honestly see no need for survival stats in current exploration modes as long as you have good protection/weakness up time.

There are two ways of dealing damage damage over time (dot) and direct damage(dd) remedied respectively by vitality and toughness.

Let’s say you go with toughness, now you’ll survive 50% of the fights (dd) but you still won’t survive dot’s, meaning that if you want to get 25% more survivability you’ll need to sacrifice one stat for both vit and toughness (up to 50% for both since they are only valuable 50% of the time) so you won’t survive as much, and your damage would drop significantly.
The numbers if you go from 776 power/ 656 prec/48 crit (this has jewels) to 776 power/539 vit/464 tough/15 crit(this doesn’t have jewels with the same allocation so I took beryl jewels power/vit/crit(125/75/15) note that the crit dmg isn’t going to shine that much but is probably still the best choice since u can get 30% from traits).
So you just lost 656 prec and 33crit and you gained 539vit and 464 tough. Now the fun part.

Agony (the main issue in fotm since mechanics don’t change that much and there’s plenty of time to learn to play “perfectly” vs the bosses) does not get reduced by toughness so that’s a waste of 464 points there, vitality also doesn’t help since you agony is based on % of health so those stats are quite useless aswell. What you did increase is agony up time since the boss will be alive longer and thus will have more opportunities to put agony on you.
What does help vs agony are infusion and immunity skills, so you’re better off with those if you want to do well.

gotdamned.5318:

I really don’t get why everyone is complaining.

I’m playing a Ranger as my main char since the beta and pre start of GW2.

Sure, there are bugs that must be fixed, but imo Ranger is not even close to weak.

I never had any problems in PvE nor did i have in PvP (i’m not the best pvp player, but i win about 40% of 1on1’s which is pretty good for me)

And Damage?
As an example, when i’m in a dungeon (mostly with guild mates), mobs -especially bosses- are almost running after me.
I don’t know how bosses decide that, but damage will definitively be a very relevant factor in there i’d say.

I’ll restate what i said earlier: Being viable also doesn’t mean you’re competing on the same lvl as others again an example: “It’s perfectly viable to use an old wooden longbow in the olympics” you probably won’t win, but it’s viable.

Ranger is very weak, I have 3 lvl 80s all full exo all specced for dmg. Mesmer, Ele and ofcourse Ranger (my main) It’s pretty obvious my Ranger does a lot less dmg and gives a lot less utility in comparison to the other two.

Bosses decide it on multiple factors, range is one of’m damage is another. If you’re running with a strict team remember that you need to compare your setup (berserker/ramp/cleric/…) to that of someone else with the same setup.

Another note is that some classes might not out dmg u directly, they can be giving might, fury, precision or quickness to your entire team (quickness from TW=*2dmg for every class apart from shortbow ranger, which is a big dmg upgrade).
And ofcourse skill comes into play aswell, you might be out damaging other players who simply are terrible.

Comparing yourself to other people can work, however it’s a lot more reliable to compare yourself to yourself on another toon in similar gear.

I explained in my 2nd WoT above why ppl are reacting the way they are, we (the ranger community) have been treated like garbage and we expected anet to make up for it with the patch, which was another let down.

On another note there are several reasons why people are (over)reacting so heavily, I’ll expand on this:
They said:

Poof! Someone called and I am here. We made some ranger changes this patch, but had to go back on them because of risk factor. There are some bugs being fixed and quality of life improvements coming in the next patch, as well as some other significant ranger improvements. I would Literally tell you but I think it would be considered a bit of a spoiler so you will have to be patient.

While we work hard to keep updates going on all professions, not very build us going to contain fixes for everyone due to the nature of software development. One problem with rangers is the lack of build diversity created by a number of sub par utility skills. Many signets, a shout or two, and spirits are all a bit lackluster. That is the first place to expect improvements. Second is trying to improve the feel/ pacing on some weapons.
Jon

I underlined some vague statements.
“next patch” can mean the next time I need to download something, maintenance or content release. The thing to take away is that next patch creates the image of “soon”.(1day to 2weeks in my book)
“significant improvements” does this mean straight out buffs, cd reductions, general graphics updates or maybe reworks?
“a number of…” things we consider bad/broken might be so for design reasons, not saying what skills will mean people think of the “worst” and expect updates there.
“weapon changes” what weapons?
“a shout or two” is it one or two or even more? There are four shouts, so that would mean half? And ofcourse the same issue as before.

Now our expectations derived from this post:
¹A relatively soon update (14days max)
²A rework/buff/fix for signets (since many are lackluster)
³A rework/buff/fix for spirits (since they die from random aoe dmg)
⁴A rework/buff/fix for shouts (since they simply lack use)

If there was time leftover we would have liked (but didn’t really expect)
⁵A sword rework/buff/fix since the rooting of autoattack is very cripling
⁶A greatsword rework/buff/fix since the damage isn’t in line with the lack of utility, we would’ve liked higher aoe dmg (buff to swoop)
⁷A longbow buff/fix since the overall damage is very low in comparison to all other ranged non casters (especially on projectile speed)
⁸A shortbow rework/buff/fix due to the “nerf” introduced a bit earlier due to an “animation fix” (nobody ever noticed the visual glitch they fixed)

What we got:
¹Improved the effect chance on ranger spirits to 35% base and 50% when traited.
²Beastmastery minor traits now use the correct icon.
³ Splinter Shot: This skill’s damage is increased by 150%, and its bleeding duration is increased from 3 seconds to 4 seconds.
⁴Counterattack: The blocking portion of this skill can now be used while moving. Ranged attacks will not trigger the second half of the skill.
⁵ Protecting Screech: This skill now states the correct duration of 4 seconds.
⁶ Call of the Wild: The Wilderness Survival trait Off-Hand Training now applies to this skill.
⁷ Throw Torch: The speed of the projectile has been increased.
⁸ Maul: This skill’s damage has been increased by 40%.
⁹ Sun Spirit: The tooltip for this skill now displays the proper burning time of 3 seconds.
¹⁰ Whirling Defense: This skill was updated so that it interacts better with combo fields.
¹¹ Splinter Shot: This skill is now a small projectile combo finisher.
¹² Coral Shot: This skill is now a projectile combo finisher.
¹³ Feeding Frenzy: This skill is now a projectile combo finisher.
¹⁴ Mercy Shot: This skill is now a projectile combo finisher.

Comments on the patch:
A wait of 25days created extra buildup/anticipation. The longer you get to work on something the higher expectations will be.
¹ Doesn’t help, the biggest issue with spirits was the fact that they die instantly from random aoe dmg(ofc the low proc-chance didn’t help)
² Nobody cares about tooltips, we’d much rather real buggfixes
[3,11,12,13,14] Fixes to things that weren’t issues, rangers were good underwater probably even OP
[4,8]. Good fixes on their own but not the things needed to make the GS more viable.
⁵ Tooltip fix, handy but far from urgent
⁶ Great fix
⁷ Another good idea but useless fix, you use the torch for the combofield so you’d probably be in melee range when using the torch (meaning projectile speed is useless. Another reason why it’s a silly update is that due to those factors you’d use a sword which on it’s own is broken aswell.
⁹ Another toltip fix, handy but far from urgent, and ofc same idea as point 1
¹⁰ Same idea as point 7

So we didn’t get our spirit overhaul nor our shout overhaul nor our signet overhaul. It’s no surprise people are upset.

Sorry for the extreme wall of text.

IAmHam.9856:

I agree with Orange too. I’m not going to say the Ranger is perfect, but besides the buggy AI and few needed tweaks, the Ranger is perfectly viable in every aspect of the game. The only part of the game that Ranger is lackluster is the extreme top tier of sPvP as seen in many of the streams. I am by no means top tier sPvP material, but I can promise you that the 99.9% of people complaining about Rangers are not either.

Additionally, I am part of one of the most influential WvW guilds on Jade Quarry and WvW the majority of my time played. Out of the top 6-8 commanders on the server, 3 of them are Rangers and love them to death (I know because I asked).

At the end of the day, many of the Ranger QQ is caused by the extremely vocal forum minority who are looking to blame something else instead of trying to improve upon their current situation. IMO the ranger does need the most changes/tweaks out of every other class, but the tweaks do not need to be as drastic as the forum indicates.

Everyone has a right to an opinion, and I respect the average negative poster, but there are some people on this forum that need to come back down to reality and get control of themselves.

You can not ignore some of the major flaws and then say, yea apart from those flaws everything is fine, for instance: “yes this car is great, apart from not having weels or an engine ofcourse”

Being viable also doesn’t mean you’re competing on the same lvl as others again an example: “It’s perfectly viable to use an old wooden longbow in the olympics” you probably won’t win, but it’s viable.

If you’re going to ask for advice regarding balance who are you going to ask, the experts (top sPvP players) or the masses?
An easy analogy: if 0.1% of the population says the world is round (the experts) and if I share that opinion even though I’m not an expert and not as smart as those experts doesn’t mean I’m wrong all of a sudden.

The fault isn’t only in sPvP. In WvW if you’re a roamer and fight a lot of skrims or 2v2/3v3 you’re more of a drag apart from your elite and speed buff. In pve you’re not usefull at all, you can’t buff as well as a war/guard/mes/ele/engi, you can’t do close to the same dmg since 30% of our dmg comes from pets and the pets that stay alive are ranged ones which do no dmg since even if you stack condi dmg gear your pet won’t benefit from it.

Commanders won’t feel the effects of how bad/good a class is since they’re running in a zerg (that’s why they can make squads), also being a commander has nothing to do with skill, you can be the worst player in the world but this doesn’t mean you’re a bad commander. (A coach doesn’t have to be in the same shape as a player on a sports team)

On another note there are several reasons why people are (over)reacting so heavily, I’ll expand on this:

Krypto.3569:

you cant build like a glass cannon, GW2 is making you choose one outlet of damage be it raw power, critical strike chances, or conditional damage. the rest of your traits should go in sustainablity. (my opinion from observation)

However it wont be long and everyone will know each fight perfectly and we wont need to communicate as much. Ran path 1 on CoF in less that 30 minutes and with minimal communication. my PUG knew what to do so we just breezed through .

I very much disagree on your idea regarding not being able to build like a glass canon. Both my brother and I have built our toons towards being full glass canons and we don’t really get penelized for it. Most “deadly” things are one hit blows or consecutive high dmg. Both of those can be countered by dodging.

Imo the way most bosses/hard trash is tuned makes it so that the extra survivability usually won’t save you so you might aswell go with more burst.

I’ve liked all dungeons so far, whenever something was becoming a PITA we were either not doing things right or just performing badly. My absolute favourite dungeon is Arah due to it’s versatility in mobs/fights SE is the one I like least (although probably due to the way the dungeon looks)