Showing Posts For Punjoke.6013:
Yeah, I had a great time spamming zone chat for an hour to fill up my group, and then having to do it AGAIN when two people bailed because we wouldn’t exploit the Magg route in CoF. I could really feel the community then.
Last night I saw a level 5 with that Flame Tower (or whatever its called) armor. Not guna lie, I was extremely jealous and felt he should have EARNED the armor on that specific character.
It’s funny you should point that set out, because almost nobody “earned” that set in particular.
(If you haven’t heard, please refer to the part of the patch notes where they said they fixed the CoF exploit)
First, the things that I loved.
I loved all of the branching storylines. Obviously the first 30 levels are the most drastic, but I really appreciated the fact that even as ‘my personal story’ converged on ’everyone’s story,’ I was still given lots of different options for how I approached things. Even though I knew where it would go in the end, I was still excited to replay it again just to make different choices and play different missions. “What if I’d chosen a different fear? What if I’d investigated those missing scouts after all?”
I loved when choices I made and characters I’d met much earlier turned up again, such as running into the Quaggans from Falooaloo in Orr, and having Baroosh come with me to invade the corpse ship.
What I didn’t like was that this seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. It would have strongly helped the story had the friends I’d met during the first part of my quest followed me all the way through. The human storyline was particularly notable for this: Lord Faren was pretty much a third wheel all the way through, never really added anything to the story, and disappeared just as suddenly and without closure. It didn’t even occur to me until I’d joined the Order of Whispers and out of the blue remembered “Wait a minute… I never saw my best friend again!” Same with my sister. She had like three lines and then she gets whisked away. What a touching family reunion.
The story does a good job of introducing you to a lot of different characters depending on the choices you make, even in Orr to a smaller extent. But it removes them all just as swiftly as they come. I realize that it would have been a monumental task to actually allow your buddies like Lord Faren or the Sylvari twins to follow you throughout the entire game. But if you are going to throw a bunch of different characters at us, you can’t just put them on a bus after you’re done with them.
Based entirely on my personal experiences, I’ve found all of the things in ounkeo’s post to be accurate except for one thing: DR being character based.
There’s a certain spot I can farm that causes my DR to kick in within ~30 minutes every time (the one thing I can be 100% sure of is that it’s based on either mobs killed or loot gained, not time spent.) However, whenever I leave the area and go somewhere else, my drops instantly return to normal.
Gaia, I would instead ask you, how many PvE instance bosses have you successfully cleared using that setup? I did run into one other Ranger with a very successful 2H ‘tank’ build, but it only worked against Story bosses.
Rangers are pretty good at Evading, yes, but other classes can manage their Endurance just like we can. Guardians, for instance, get Vigor whenever they crit, rather than when they use a healing skill, AND their dodge rolls will heal the entire group. They are also rewarded for being low Endurance, whereas Rangers are rewarded for being max Endurance. Effectively, as a Guardian evades damage, his group actually gets stronger, whereas when a Ranger evades damage, the group gets weaker. Warriors and Guardians can inflict multiple stuns/blinds that have no conditional requirements such as positioning and can actually completely prevent a boss from doing any melee damage throughout a fight if coordinated in tandem with each other. These skills are just as effective even if the boss is trying to attack somebody else, whereas the Rangers evasive skills like Serpent’s Strike can only protect themselves.
Rangers and Thieves do have A skill here and there, of course, but like you said, they are forced to duck in and out while a Guardian or Warrior does not have to. Instead they can stay in melee, completely mitigating one-shot attacks again and again through chained blinds and stuns, all the while doing consistent damage AND providing superior group utility.
We did get through all of the dungeons with my Ranger and my Thief, remember – and while I did resort to ranged, my friend really did try to melee as much as he could. Problem was, it was very punishing on him, and it actually hindered the group. There was simply nothing that he, as a melee Thief, could offer the group that a melee Warrior, Guardian, or Mesmer could not do better, while offering several more benefits on top of it.
(edited by Punjoke.6013)
First off: before people begin commenting on various issues, they need to make clear whether they’re talking about PvE, W3, or sPvP, because the performance of each class and each role is completely different in each. I will be addressing PvE in this post, because that is where the disparity between melee and ranged is the widest.
The problem isn’t so much “ranged is easier than melee” so much as it is “some classes are designed with far more flexibility compared to others.”
I’ve noticed that a lot of Warriors and Mesmers are the ones that tout melee being as easy, or even easier, than ranged, and this does not surprise me at all. I started out playing a Ranger and mostly used ranged, because I found that even when kitted out for toughness, dodging and healing, I was still not really able to do anything in close range. My friend started a Thief and tried to focus mostly on melee, albeit also going with survivability stats, traits and skills over damage. His melee survivability, like mine, is insufficient against instance bosses; this is not to say that he cannot survive, but rather that he must spend so much time focusing on evading/CCing/healing that he can’t actually do any damage with his daggers, whereas when he stands back with his pistols, pumping out damage is all he does.
So that was my experience leveling up to 80 and clearing all of the instances. Then I rolled a Guardian and a Warrior, and my friend rolled a Mesmer. The difference in the class design was stark: my Guardian, for instance, has three blinds on low cooldowns and can straight up ignore several attacks in a row on slightly longer cooldowns, and that’s before we even get to the Utility skills. Warriors and Mesmers also can shrug off or sustain through a truly massive amount of punishment while still dealing out competitive damage. Frankly, I was amazed at how much more effective these classes were at dealing with the problems the game presented to them.
But I am a problem solver, and I did not discount the fact that we were simply more experienced when we rolled our second characters. So, taking the knowledge I had gained playing as and with these new classes, I returned to my Ranger and went back to the drawing board. I looked through all of the weapon skills I had discounted, all of the traits, the utility skills. But the tools just weren’t in the toolbox.
To sum things up: every class can be effective in every part of the game, but not every class is built to be competitive. There is no imbalance inherently built into melee and ranged, at least as far as the PvE instance encounters go, but rather the classes themselves are imbalanced as to how they can deal with threats. Rangers have melee skills, yes, but they lack essential tools that allow other classes to excel in those areas. Several classes seem to be very underdeveloped when compared with other classes (for instance, simply compare the amount of weapon skills that Rangers and Thieves get compared to Warriors and Mesmers.) Maybe this is by design; maybe they intentionally built Rangers and Thieves to use ranged attacks in instances and melee only in PvP. But it does not necessarily have to be that way in the future.
Part a) varies depending on each pet, so perhaps a list of the ones that are particularly troublesome could help to get them looked at =)
With all due respect, it would be easier to make a list of pets that are not particularly troublesome.
That list is: Shark.
That’s it.
Even after the supposed fix, getting a pet to use their F2 ability is so difficult that the abilities are next to useless. The only way to consistently get my pets to use their ability is to literally hold the button down, and it still takes on average 5 to 10 seconds to go off! In order for these abilities to ever be useful, they need to go off RIGHT when you press the button, NO exceptions. Even if the pet is in the middle of another attack animation (because a lot of pet animations are unnecessarily long, such as the birds.)
They also need an auto-cast toggle; the eagle’s bleed has a 6 second cooldown, there’s no need to make someone press F2 every 6 seconds (assuming the skill even went off every time you pressed the button.)
Character name: Eltari
Level 70: Breaking the Bone Ship
After Breaking the Bone Ship, the Battle of Fort Trinity played out incorrectly, and I was put on the quest Liberating Apatia instead of my proper quest.