Other Characters I use when I’m bored: Taket – Warrior | Takip – Thief
Desolation
Please, don’t let the forums make you not to play a Ranger.
The Ranger is really fun, and the concept of dodging and being built more towards an evasive gameplay is really fun.
I might not be 100% happy with the current state of the Ranger, but I love this profession nonetheless.
The posts that complain, or suggest stuff to be added/changed is just improvements we suggest for the little flaws of our profession.
I don’t think Beastmastery should include the AoE resistance fix, or something like that to deal with our current “Pet Health melts in 3 seconds” scenarios. Traiting Beastmastery should be an option, not a must for our pet to work decently.
I also believe the Pet mechanic won’t change, it takes a lot of work, ANet won’t admit their design of the Ranger has many flaws, and it would mean loss of money and resources coding the current pet system, and a new project to create and deliver the new pet system.
This is an awesome idea. Much better than Revealed on Sic Em, having a pulsing revealed area for 2 seconds (not stackable in duration) each pulse, forces thieves or other stealth characters to step out of the AoE.
You may even stand on it and no thief can backstab you.
Full Berserker Ranger is tricky.
I haven’t played Berserker Ranger in the last 4-5 months, but looking at how PvP works nowadays, with lots of CC spam and stability, I’d recommend Rampage as One instead of Entangle.Either that or trait for Signet of Beastmastery, pick Signet of the Hunt, Wild and Stone. Signet of the Stone will make you and your pet invulnerable for 6sec, Wild will give you passive healings and stability on demand and Signet of the Hunt lets you run faster.
signet of stone only makes my pet invulnerable not me, I rather use a tanky pet like a bear whos F2 chills the enemy so i can stay at range and use “Protect me” incase they get close rather than making my bear invulnerable
And maybe zephyr since it breaks stuns but idk
I probably should had explained it further. That suggestion was if you are interested in getting the trait “Signet of Beastmastery” from the Marksmanship trait line. It makes your signets active abilities affect both the Ranger and the Pet, instead of the Pet only, as they would do if you don’t pick that trait.
For stun breaking I prefer Signet of Renewal for condition cleansing too or Lightning Reflexes which lets you be more dodgy too.
There was a really interesting discussion recently about the highest damage possible for autoattack. If you’re looking for berserker I recommend you to look it up:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/beserker-ranger-and-where-it-needs-to-be
The next build is a Power oriented build, I’ve never tested it myself but if you want to do some reading:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/A-Ranger-Guide-Power-Build
Full Berserker Ranger is tricky.
I haven’t played Berserker Ranger in the last 4-5 months, but looking at how PvP works nowadays, with lots of CC spam and stability, I’d recommend Rampage as One instead of Entangle.
Either that or trait for Signet of Beastmastery, pick Signet of the Hunt, Wild and Stone. Signet of the Stone will make you and your pet invulnerable for 6sec, Wild will give you passive healings and stability on demand and Signet of the Hunt lets you run faster.
Ranger or the pets are okish in Dungeons, not great, not horrible.
The support ain’t the best, but sometimes I’ve saved lifes doing AC with healing spring at the Spider Queen.
The problem with pets in dungeons or any “highly scaled” PvE content is that they require a lot of micromanagement, for example, your group is dpsing that champion, then your pet’s health start falling and your swap is in cooldown. You’re forced to pull back your pet until the cooldown is done, and swap pet. Of course, you’re saving your pet from death, but the moment you are pulling your pet away, you’re losing 30-40% dps from the Ranger until the pet goes back to attacking.
In that case, our profession mechanic rather than boosting our damage, is hindering us from dealing the same damage any other profession would, which is rather irrational, our profession mechanic SHOULD boost our damage or gameplay in general, not hindering it.
The main problem with the pet, is that unlike other professions, we’re forced to use it or fall behind other professions, and the pet isn’t really reliable. If a thief decides to not use his steal, his performance will be the same, same for the warrior’s adrenaline, amongst others. Both are handicapping themselves, but they’re not falling behind other professions.
Hi there!
I’d like to know what is the idea you have in mind with this build. Is it for zerging? Small Scale or Roaming?
If your idea in mind is zerging, a BM bunker probably isn’t the perfect solution, but in any case, if you love BM bunker you should go with it, I’d recommend using drakes for blast finishers and being the most AoE capable pets.
In terms of weapons, I think you need a Greatsword (your build only shows a Shortbow, you may use both), the Greatsword works really well with Cleric Bunker builds because of the evade on autoattack, the swoop and the counterattack are perfect for escaping.
I’d also consider using the Longbow, the Longbow allows you to stay at range and stealth into swoop and courterattack away. The shortbow allows you to chase down fleeing targets with Cripple/Stun.
I’d also probably use some Celestial gear if using Shortbow, so you may have greater crit chance and condition damage to stack bleeds too.
For zerging, I’d not slot Sick Em. Pets die too easily to AoE spam, I’d try to slot Signet of Stone, so your pets can stay alive for a while before dying.
The build needs more condition removal apart from Healing Spring, probably Signet of Renewal instead of Signet of the Hunt and use Traveler Runes?
This is how I’d build the Cleric BM Bunker you’re aiming for.
Thanks for all your replies guys. I’m really happy my ideas are generally accepted in some way.
The reason I suggest removing the health from pets is because, pets will never be in danger of death in the situations the pet performs accordingly like overworld, roaming or small scale fighting in WvW. The situations where my pet is in risk of danger like zerging or world events, my pet’s health is gonna melt like an ice block at the sun. So now, I ask you guys, what’s the point of pet’s health then?
Has anyone tried Tequatl after patch? How long does your pet survive as you try to get close with those AoEs dealing around 3k damage per tick everywhere?
My drakes barely got enough time to spam some lighting bolts and tail swipe for 3 seconds, pet almost dies, I swap pet, repeat the same moves, pet dies, swap to the original drake, most of its skills are on cooldown so it basically just does some bites around, after 3 more seconds it dies, now I’m stuck with two dead pets and a 50ish seconds cooldown for my pet to come back to life. They were useless, brought literally nothing to my gameplay, barely around 5k damage over those 10 seconds, and now I deal less damage cause my profession’s damage is shared with my pet.
Now, let’s add 71.43% more HP as it’s been told to happen for the next balance patch. My pets will last alive around x1.7 to x2 more time. My pet is dying on Tequatl event after 3 seconds, this means with this “buff”, my pet will now be most likely dead in less than 10 seconds (the swap cooldown is 20, 15 if traited, by the way). What did we get achieved from the buff considering the pet attacks like once every 1 or 2 seconds? Barely 3 more bites from my drakes, canines, etc.
(edited by Take.6832)
Ending:
I’m open to suggestions or different considerations over my post and suggestions, but please keep it polite and express your point in a proper way. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and developing my ideas to create this post, I expect proper feedback, not “Ranger is fine” excuses. If my ideas appeal you, I’d like to know it. If my ideas happen to be confusing for you, I’ll take my time further explaining them if needed. If you disagree with my ideas, I’d like to know why and what solution would you take to fix the current issues with the Ranger profession.
I’d like to thank everyone who has readed this whole thread as it’s such a long one, but I think, we need to give out some ideas, not from a balance point, but in terms of mechanics, as I’m sure that’s what’s making the ranger such a mess right now, our pet mechanic.
If people like these ideas, I’d like to know Anet opinion on it, because I think I brought some interesting points that in fact don’t affect class balance, but how our profession internally works without affecting the balance towards other professions.
Nonetheless, some of our traits and skills are a bit broken by nature, we are forced to trait 30 points into a single trait line to make our signets affect ourselves. We are forced to trait 30 points into a single trait line to have some acceptable condition removal that is not through healing. Plus different solutions, adding a 1 second knockdown the moment you cast Entangle (not the rest of the ticks) would be an awesome idea to make the Ranger survive in the current zerg vs zerg metagame where you just pop stability, healing (after blobbing) and go through a ball of people swinging a hammer/greatsword and spamming cc skills.
But as I said at the beginning of the post, I’m not focusing on balance at the moment, I’m analyzing our pet mechanic.
Thanks once again for reading all this, I really appreciate it, and I’m awaiting your feedback. We all can improve our profession and bring it to something that appeals and pleases us all.
Take.
Last considerations over such a change to Ranger’s Pets:
I know all I’ve exposed before involves a lot of change, but when you consider it deeply, it doesn’t change the pet mechanic that much. One will still be able to use the pet as a big damage dealer if he so wants and traits for it, even improving it further with the different traits in Beastmastery.
People who doesn’t like pets, will find in them different support abilities that will tweak their gameplay while not crippling their damage output in a high way. Pet’s issues with dodge and instant killing AoEs won’t be an issue anymore. People will get more control over their pets under their own consideration, what skills they want to have access from each pet, different pets with different roles and support abilities.
You may also spec into Condition Damage, Glass Cannon or Bunker while using the pets as support or even get some more damage out of the pets by speccing fully or not into Beastmastery.
Summing up the changes to Ranger’s Pet I’m suggesting here:
For those that got lost during the thread:
<<Continues on next post>>
Different trait considerations over such a change to Ranger’s Pets:
Ok, you convinced me, I like your ideas exposed above. But what if I want to keep using my pets as my main damage dealer?
Well, I’ve been thinking about this, of course, because I don’t want any of us to not have access to our preferred way to play the game, as most of us like me, are being crippled right now for having to deal with such a bad profession’s mechanic.
The solution is what I call, dynamic trait lines. What the hell is that? Well, let’s say as one specs into different trait lines, different parts of our pets change, for example. As one invest into beastmastery to increase the pet’s damage and pet’s different utility. The ranger’s damage output gets reduced at the following rate: -1% ranger = +1.33% pet. Of course, I know there is not a magic number that determines the different skills’ base damage like, 50 pet and 50 ranger, but what I mean with those percentages is adjust the different skills of both ranger and pet using those coefficients. Up to a maximum of 65% player and 50% pet. Talking about how to implement this into the code, let’s say for every point invested into beastmastery, if Swoop’s base damage is 1800, we reduce that value by 1% and if our pet is a canine, bite’s damage gets increased by 1.33%.
Ok, not a bad idea, but what If I want to spec into healing power via traits, healing power is allocated in the beastmastery traitline, Am I screwed if I want to do a healing power, toughness, regeneration build?
No, you’re not screwed, my Idea would be to move Boon Duration from Nature Magic to Beastmastery, and Healing Power from Beastmastery to Nature Magic. Why? Well, most of our boons will be coming from our pets, due to them being now our support backbone, despite having some skills like RaO, or the swiftness in shortbow #3 or similar, but most of our boons are not really massive. Probably our best would be Healing Spring, with the pulse of regeneration every 2 seconds with this new patch. Still, we got an adept trait in Nature’s Magic that gives +33% regeneration duration, given that line now provides healing power and let’s say dwayna runes, I think we get a regeneration uptime that is kinda sexy.
This would involve a rework of the beastmastery line to have all the different traits that affect pets, and none that affect the ranger but maybe those related to shouts, and in no way a ranger that doesn’t want to cripple his damage should be forced to trait into beastmastery for non-pet related traits.
On the bright side, some traits that give extra condition duration for pets or pets pulling conditions from us, now completely removing them as they would have no health should be kept in non-beastmastery lines, to allow rangers to trait for some of the different support options of their pets, condition removal, etc.
With this trait change, and dynamic Beastmastery trait line as I exposed before, a ranger will be able to spec into bunker, condition damage, glass cannon or pet damage (this last one while crippling himself).
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Now we move on to other adjustments of the pet mechanic that are probably not as important as those:
Pets are hated in dungeons, in fact, pets are useless when the enemy count reaches a number higher than 2-3 or fighting high AoE enemies, or enemies that simply hit too hard. Pets cannot dodge, and there’s been some suggestions to this, making the pet dodge when the ranger dodges, add a key to make the pet dodge or give it like a 1 second invulnerability, or simply, as the next patch is doing, increase the health pool of the pet. While this increase to the health is nice, let’s be honest, if a pet dies normally in 5 seconds in a zerg vs zerg fight in world vs world, now it’s going to take around 10 seconds. Basically we’re simply moving from not sending the pet to attack, to send the drake to attack, do the blast attack and the lightning bolts of the river drake, and then “gg drake, swap to the other drake and 60sec cd”. Increasing the health of the pet, will still make it vulnerable to all those 1hit AoEs in dungeons, the Alpha guy in CoE normally would kill the pet or any character in 2 hits, now it’ll might stand longer, but at the end of the day, the health buff is just going to make it last a bit longer.
While not bad, I think if Anet doesn’t want to mess with the pet ai, I think the only solution is to make the Ranger’s Pet immune, basically infinite health or no health pool, however you want to call it. Make dungeon enemies like the Jade Maw never target it. And now, I know this sounds pretty big, but let me explain myself please. Our pet, is our profession’s unique mechanic, what makes our pet different from ele’s elementals or necro’s minions? That we may send them to attack whenever we want or have a very unresponsive skill we may cast when we want?
We’re the only profession whose mechanic can die and leave us “mechanicless”, plus we are moving a lot of damage away from the pet, we make no enemies target the pet over us, unless that’s the pet mechanic. For example, the bears could have a “roar skill” that makes them drag the ranger’s current target monster’s attention (not enemy players, of course), and therefore dragging the aggro towards them. As I said at the beginning, make pets something that is not simply attack, attack, attack and do damage for me.
I know removing the health from the pet sounds quite big, but now that I’ve explained it, I don’t think it’s that crazy really, it fixes our WvW and AoE problems, now that our pet’s leash range is very limited, they are not targeted by any enemy, their damage output is way lower (let’s say around 100-300 damage per hit depending on the pet by default with crits up to 400-600), bear in mind they attack like every 2-3 seconds and often, they miss. We are also bringing utility to them, which I think it’s perfect, the Ranger lacks utility, this way, boom, we kinda kill 2 issues with a single shot, what about that?
In the case of this being considered big, and the fact we would have a different array of support skills in our pets compared to other professions like guardians who provide healing, burning and aegis. I think a good balance, would be only allowing one pet at a time, that may be swapped while out of combat in the Pet Management screen. Therefore leaving the F1 as our “attack”, F2 as “an attack to be bound or nothing”, F3 as “an attack to be bound or nothing” and F4 as our “come back”.
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What would you do to fix the Ranger’s Pets?:
Well, the issue is the fundamentals of the profession are bad, therefore it’d probably need a lot of rework from the base. But thinking about it deeply, and I tell you, I’ve been thinking on this matter and how to fix our class over months, many months, thinking how I would fix this profession, the one I truly love.
It’s generally acknowledged, that compared to other professions, the Ranger’s damage output is 60% from the player and 40% from the pet. While I understand, It’s cool if a Ranger wants his pet to do such amount of damage, and he should be allowed to play the game that way. I, on the other side, am being crippled as I have to rely on a poor AI to deal my damage. Also when you think about it, the pet offers a lot of damage abilities, but lacks in terms of support, mainly because we can’t control such support, we only have control over Attack/Retreat and a skill which by the way has such a long cast time in my opinion. There should be different kind of pets, some more supportive, some more aggressive, some even offering no damage output whatsoever.
My idea would be to shift those damage ratings compared to other classes to 95% damage from the ranger and 10% damage from the pet, but wait, that’s 105% damage compared to other classes! Yes it is, the idea is, since the AI is so messy missing attacks often and the fact the pet doesn’t attack that often, all that missing and clunky AI gets that small attack bonus, so at the end of the day, the damage output of the class would match the 100% of other classes.
What this will do is not only make our damage output as players better and less reliant on a bad AI mechanic, it will allow the pet mechanic to shift from what it currently does to a much more interesting role. When I think about a pet in an rpg game like this, I normally expect a pet that takes aggro from monsters while I deal damage to the monsters, or a pet that provides me with different buffs or conditions that I can receive or apply at will.
This allows ANet to make our pets more supportive and allows us to bind the different skills of a pet to use them at will. For example, the healing skill of a Moa could be our F3 and the Fury/Protection/Chill/Daze would be our F2. Anet excuses themselves saying that would involve a lot of work for the average player, nonetheless here is my solution for that, the same way players have the ability to turn on auto attack for the different skills, implement a simple checkbox system in the Pet Management screen that allows us to set skills to be casted as soon as the cooldown is over, or bind such skills to our f2 and f3 keys. Therefore this would give us complete free use over 2 of our pet attacks, or 1 or even 0 if the user so desires, while the rest of the skills are casted as soon as they are available.
Moving the damage output of the ranger up, decreasing pet’s damage output and giving us a better control over our pet’s skills is in my opinion the most important fix. But not only that, I think the way the pets work should be changed, the moment F2 or F3 are pressed, anything the pet is doing should be interrupted as soon as possible and do such skills targetting the ranger’s current target, starting the animation of those attacks. In my opinion, those are probably the three most important fixes to the Ranger’s pet mechanic.
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WARNING: Very Very Very Long Post Incoming!!!
Hello everyone,
I think we all are aware of the current situation of the ranger and so I decided to start a thread, I normally don’t start threads or post, but I do read the forums very often to know the opinion of the community, and we all kinda know the ranger profession ain’t in a good point right now, in fact, it’s never been. Therefore, I’m going to explain my vision on the Ranger profession, how it evolved and what I’d do to improve it without messing much with the AI of NPC minions.
Disclaimer:
Please, do read the entire post before responding, It’s a very long post, but I think it’s interesting for anyone who cares about the Ranger profession, showing my opinion and where I’ll be explaining all my ideas on the Ranger profession with some changes you may like or not, please keep in mind we all need to be supportive and constructive towards improving our profession, a simple “no I don’t like what you’re saying” ain’t going to bring us to a good point, instead if you have an idea or an objection, please explain it in detail in a way it’ll end up benefiting us as rangers.
Also, bear in mind I don’t play sPvP, I only play WvW and PvE in all different ways, roaming, small sniping groups, zerging, dungeons, dynamic events, farming, I do all in this game that doesn’t involve sPvP and I can tell issues with the ranger in all the different parts of the game, therefore, I acknowledge how sPvP kinda works but my main topic are flaws of the Ranger profession, what its issues are, and how I’d fix them without entirely affecting balance.
Keep in mind, this thread is not about balance, the issues with the Ranger profession are not comparing it to other professions, but internally, inside the profession. Balance is something that will come after the core design of the profession is fixed, at the moment, the Ranger can’t be balanced because the profession is not well designed due to all the flaws that, in my opinion, are brought by our mechanic.
So please, let me repeat myself, read the whole thread and keep an open mind, where we all cooperate towards an improvement of our profession.
A bit of back story of who I am (read if you want, nothing important here):
I’ve been playing Ranger since the early days of head start, and even head start. I’ve seen how our profession evolved, how we’ve been nerfed in some ways, how we’ve been buffed in some other ways. But generally, we all kinda agree that the ranger isn’t in a good position right now.
Of course there might be good builds out there, like the spirit build or in the past the good old BM Bunker. I’ve played most of those builds, and I admit while some were good in 1v1 or duelling situations, they also were very messy builds. What I mean is that those builds generally ain’t the reason we all picked Ranger when the game got released. I don’t think any of us picked up Ranger with the idea in mind of dodging and trying to survive for years while a not really great AI tries to do damage for us. Probably some people came to the game with those builds in mind, but I do believe 90% or more of us didn’t, in fact, I don’t want such kind of builds gone if people really enjoy them.
What’s currently wrong with the Ranger?:
That is a tricky question, because there are a lot of small bits that are currently wrong with the Ranger, our damage output gets scaled down because we have a pet (some people might do well with power builds, but our skills’ attack coefficients are lower compared to all other classes, that’s undeniable). Our sword’s #1 skill can be a bit messy to use regardless of activating auto attack or not (But this is not important, I don’t like the sword out of 1v1 situations, but each person is free to decide). Our pets die in seconds in WvW, our pets miss attacks a lot when an enemy is in motion (No argue on this). The responsiveness of our pet’s f2 skill is really bad (No argue on this). Our support is generally bad (Some people will might agree, some people will might not. I think Healing Spring is not an excuse to say “Ranger is fine in support”, though it’s not as terrible either, it can be improved nonetheless).
But if we focus, the main issue is the pet. Our pet mechanic is the reason our damage output is generally poor, our pet mechanic is, in my opinion, gimmicky. It offers different skills, that looks like a good idea, but then again, f2 skills don’t always activate, sometimes they activate a short cooldown because they fail at being executed and other different issues. I probably missed some issues, but as we all know, the ranger class got too many issues that it’s too easy to forget some in the way. I probably will read my own thread again later on and think “oh true, how could I miss that?”.
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Hi everyone!
I’ve been thinking recently of a Warrior build that can be effective in PvE/WvW area, the objective of the build is to grant enough power and damage capability while keeping enough defence.
I’d like to know other people’s opinion and points of view, ways to improve it, etc.
Using the recent Dogged March trait with Runes of Melandru and Lemongrass for the 98% Movement Conditions Duration that’s been discussed with the announcement of the Dogged March trait I wanted to design a build I could use those.
The condition removal comes from the march+melandru+lemongrass combo with shake it off for stun breaking or removing those big stacks of bleed/confusion/vulnerability, also I’ve gone with Mobile Strikes, even I think probably Adrenaline on Axe crit could do better.
I’ve also been thinking about the defence grandmaster trait of choice, Retaliation just got nerfed if I’m right. So I decided to go for the double Endure Pain, given the 2900 armor for 37% damage reduction, I think It can give enough durability to the Warrior.
In terms of Utility skills, I’m not quite sure what to go with. Bull’s Charge is only used in WvW and I replace it with FGJ in PvE, Endure Pain seems to always be good being the ‘oh sh** button’, Shake It Off and Signet of Stamina are a tough decision, 50% extra endurance regen is quite interesting, but the long cooldown and lack of stun breaker makes me realize I’d need Balanced Stance instead of Endure Pain to have enough Stability. So at the moment I keep thinking of Balanced Stance, Endure Pain, Shake it Off, Signet of Stamina and For Great Justice and switch between those as needed.
The idea of the build is to be strong for PvE usage even Warrior already does great in there by himself, while keeping a good build for WvW usage, one that can do well at both Zerg vs Zerg and group roaming.
So before I invest more money into my (already) 4th armor set / build, I’d like to know other people thoughts.
Thanks for reading all this massive text, and I look forward to your opinions since I’m not quite sure about traits and utilities and I might have left something important behind.
*Note: Buildcraft still shows Defence II as Turtle’s Defence which gives +200 toughness in the stats making the toughness shown by the calculator false, the Adept Defence trait for the build is Dogged March, but since Buildcraft is not updated I use Adrenaline when hit which is my 2nd option.
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