Guild Wars 2

Ariete.6509:

Sure, i’ll elaborate, regardless of your sarcasm.

OP refers to dungeons, that said mobs don’t do a whole lot of kiting, which makes life so much easier for pets. Even if there are mobile mobs, by using our highest dps weapon, which is the sword by the way, you’re adding perma-cripple so our high dps pets (mostly felines and birds) can go to town on dps. The icing on the cake is your third chain attack giving them sweet might, so that ramps up.

In the so-called pets dying “issue” that is bound to surface, all i can say is that many of us rangers didn’t have survivability problems before the 71% hp buff, nowadays… come on! Pets are not a “send-in-and-forget” deal, their management is as active as gw2‘s combat itself. Pet Swap, recall and attack are there, keybind them and use them!

Sidenote: devours can withstand better than bears in plenty of situations.

Disclaimer: Current pets do not posesse opposable thumbs to pick up crystals on jade maw, a couple of other situations may have unavoidable pet downstates.

Most bosses in dungeons are immune to CC(so there goes ur control character out of the window right there). Aside from that, the threat mechanic is poorly done and most of the time there is some boss running for the highest DPS all over the place when your pet tries to land a hit.
And yes, pet management is good for keeping your pet alive, but if you pet swap you loose buffs like Rampage as One on your pet so your dps is moot.
There are big drawbacks to the pet system everywhere, dungeons are no exeception, and we, as a class, are designed to function with a working pet system, but instead we get a broken one. This is why people don’t invite rangers in dungeons and are relunctant to play with 2 rangers in a party, everytime there are 2 rangers in my party, the reaction is: “Oooo great, 2 rangers, sigh”.
Flaws of the pet:
- they have big casting times on all skills
- they don’t know how to hit when moving
- they don’t have close-gap skills
- ranged pets have inferior range(900 range on all pets, last time i checked)
- they have stupid AI
- not a big selection of pets, because many families have bugs or are useless in any scenario
Good things of the pet system:
- we have a pet
- we have a pseudo-dodge in the swap

Ariete.6509:

No team is maxed out, in terms of dps efficiency, without a Ranger. On top of that, Frost Spirit and Spotter are not the only useful things we bring to the table. Our particular dps can be absolutely on par with the next profession in line.

Can you please elaborate this phrase: “Our particular dps can be absolutely on par with the next profession in line.” May I ask how?
Last time I checked, without our pet hitting 100% of the time, our attacks feel like wet noodles. You are hardly even close to other professions in terms of dps, and we all know the GW2 trinity is formed of just one role: dps(at least in dungeons, yeah in pvp control matters too, but who cares about it in a topic related to dungeons).
Ooo… and don’t get me started about support. The best support in this game is the one that hits hard and helps his team mates to kill stuff faster.
The fundamental issue with GW2 is that the other roles(support and control) are very lack-luster and poorly designed compared to the DPS role. That is why DPS is always the first choice and the most important. And Rangers are lacking in DPS a lot compared to other professions.

Vick.6805:

It would be really nice if this could be implemented for all classes.

GW had four weapon setups that could be rotated by pressing F1-F4 while out of combat, provided that the registered weapons were in your inventory, and it would equip the new weps and store the old ones automatically.

So many QoL things in GW that would be really nice brought forward.

You could swap them anytime you wanted, not just out of combat. Actually there were many builds that utilized two weapon sets or even 3 in the case of casters.
(assassin’s with back-breaker for example)

Khalith, what happens if there are 2 mobs on you, or three? and you kill the one that put the conditions on you and then the other two chase you.
If you would go in a downed state because of those conditions and then the other two mobs will kill you.
In your suggestion you will just regenerate life if you run away and then kill the other two mobs.
Combat in GW2 is already as trivial as it gets and without much depth, skipping the conditions as a way to put you in combat mode will make the game easy and conditions even more utterly useless in PVE.
Imagine a player using conditions on a mob, but that mob is regenerating a large amount of life because he is not in combat… yay…

Edit:
Plus, for it to work, GW2 will need to do even more calculations to see when to put you in combat, when to get you out of combat and the game doesn’t run very smoothly already. Skill lag is a known issue.

One reason I liked the spirits unbound was the synergy with the trait that gives the active effects on spirits if they die… basically now you can do just that and have double life, which is incredible.
But I don’t like having to choose between regen on 10s aoe and the spirits to move.
I think spirits unbound shouldn’t be so high up so that it opens more possibilities to builds.
Edit1: What I’m trying to say is that the Ranger class seems to be plagued by sooo many faulty design decisions that it’s hard to think it will ever become a class that can do different roles very good and be on par with other professions. And even when good things come to us, the bad things still stay there.

Ok… so now we’ve got some really cool spirit trait changes but… what baffles me… is this:
Nature’s Voice
Spirits Unbound
You basically have 1 mandatory trait(spirits unbound) mixed with a powerful trait as a grand master trait.
Yes, Spirits Unbound isn’t mandatory for long encounters but for small skirmishes and general pve… you have to literally wait for the CD on spirits + if you position them out of harms way and can’t move them, you can’t use their actives.
Any thoughts so that you give me hope for A-Net Staff in regards to Ranger?

After reading the article about the upcoming traits… I’m like… WTF… clearly people at A-Net have serious logical issue if they think the mesmer needs more control so that they can literally kill you where you stand. Same for thiefs… they are such an annoyance to deal with, they don’t need more control.
And what do we get? considering the leaked notes, nerfed pets after we got slight buffs on them… Where is the logic, where?
A-Net you need to fire some people that are too high on their seats and stopped thinking a long time ago.

RoyHarmon.5398:

As a guardian, I agree with this suggestion. It can be very difficult to see the attack animations on many enemies due to spell effects— mostly my own, I freely admit. Theoretically, I could zoom in so that the one enemy occupies much of my screen (though it’s more likely that my own character would block most of it), providing more detail, but that leaves me completely unaware of what’s going on around/behind me.

For me, it isn’t a brightness issue or an epilepsy concern. It’s visibility. If the spell effects were a bit more subtle, they could still be noticeable without hindering the visibility of the enemy’s movements.

I’m reminded of Neverwinter Nights 2. I don’t remember if it was a mod or a feature of one of the expansions (I’m thinking the former), but if anyone has played that game, you know what I mean. The mod really helped the playability immensely, but it mostly did things like show a glimmering outline in place of a swirling sphere.

I’m sure there are things like partial transparency that would help visually but guzzle system resources, but I expect there are also many changes that could be made without a performance hit (and possibly some improvement). Simply making some of the lines a bit thinner would go a long way, I think.

But then again, I’m no game designer. My programming experience doesn’t go far beyond VBA and Windows API, so my impressions could be way off.

I want to see the animations, don’t get me wrong, I just want to be able to distinguish them. In GW1 for example you could clearly see the animations and you could easily distinguish them in 8vs8 fights, now it’s hard even 2 vs 2.
All the older mmorpgs have clean animations, while the new games are full of particle effects and all the shiny little things and while it makes the game beautiful, when taken on a large scale it is obnoxious.
I don’t think any of the developers can come and say he can melee a champion boss and clearly see his character and what other characters are throwing at him and/or the animations of the boss(although that’s more likely to happen since most of the animations have are made in a long timer and also animate the hands).
Usually when you go at a boss he’s covered by a big blob of light and that’s it. Turns me off completely. I would definitely turn all my effects down by a lot if I could have it. Sure these effects are great in a single player game, but in a multiplayer game, with multiple people spamming attacks, it makes things a lot worse for all of us.
Not to mention the hell that is WvW and the sieges with all the effects.

I second this, without sarcasm.

Especially Lightning effects are making things impossible to distinguish. I would really love an option to disable the particle effects.

I don’t think I ever posted in this forum, but kitten, I’ll do it…
My main is a ranger, I’m not a good player, never was, never will be. I don’t invest too much time in the game(let’s say 1-3 hours every day with some more in the weekends). I regard myself as being pretty average at playing a ranger but I just can’t take it anymore.
I saw in a video(state of the game or something like that) that devs balanced the ranger with the idea with having a pet alive at any time. Great, I think it’s a good idea, but there is a problem: Why can’t our pet hit the target? It happens to me every time in WvW, my pet gets kitted by everyone just because he can’t attack while moving like we do and he has to stop every time before he attacks, loosing time in the process. To the people saying, cripple, chill, buff your pets speed… yeah… I don’t say that’s impossible to do, but really… I had like 2-3 cripple skills and all the trait that gives the pet speed and he still gets kitten a lot.
The spirits are… please… those are not skills. I was a spirit ranger during my early ages but… then changed because… you know… they are dead in 5 sec when in a fight and if you don’t trait them to move… they are even worst cause you are practically bound to play in one spot till they run out. And the casting time… really? like almost 2 sec to cast a spirit? really? what does it do? bring a bazooka to the battle?
Now I’m a full 30 points in BM, why? because it feels right, at least my cat can dish out the awesome 4-5k crits that I hear people talking about and I’m pretty sturdy and with quickening zephyr and sword I can take down a target pretty easily.
But even after 5 months I still can’t find a build that I truly like and that I feel it can be useful.
I don’t think rangers will ever be fixed though. From my point of view the class needs serious work in the area of the pet, especially the AI. And from what I see it they need to make it a lot better than it is and it will never happen now that the game is released. They are too lazy to do it right, if they weren’t, they would have done it already.
After that they can focus on the balance issues that we have with our weapons like the longbow firing at a wayyyy lower rate than the shortbow even though the damage isn’t that high to justify the low attack rate.
The greatsword has almost the same damage as the one handed sword, even though one handed sword is way faster.
Ranger seems like a mess.
It seems like people working on the class just don’t know what to do, every time they wake up, go to work then go to sleep. Then come back and and so on, then they get paid, repeat, but they don’t love the job they are doing. I don’t think anyone loves to work on the ranger class. That’s what i feel, that this class doesn’t get the love from it’s creators. It’s like they want to throw it away far away and never hear of it again.