Guild Wars 2

Jim Hunter.6821:

Nobody would really use a ranger condi build for fighting at range in the first place. You just make due with what little tools you have in order to keep people off guard and draw them into your traps.

I play a crit bleed longbow/staff build in WvW on my ranger and I know several other people do as well. It’s a hybrid build but it definitely qualifies as long range condi.[/quote]

I was speaking of spvp only when playing against equally skilled players. There are many more viable options in pve or WvW. The full trap/condi build doesn’t work very well for me in WvW but does a reasonably good job in pvp and pve.

Jim Hunter.6821:

What heavy condi pressure? If they are ranging you SB won’t do kitten against them because they will be facing you. The only ranged condi pressure you have is winter’s bite and throw torch, which are both pretty slow moving and easy to avoid.

Sorry man, that build relies entirely on catching a person off guard or hoping they are running zero cleanse. You are extremely vulnerable to CC, condi’s, and direct damage (no toughness).

Nobody would really use a ranger condi build for fighting at range in the first place. You just make due with what little tools you have in order to keep people off guard and draw them into your traps.

StickerHappy.8052:

Sorry to say but this is a bad build. You NEVER EVER run full traps on ranger, our traps have 0 utility.

No stunbreaker. You can argue druidic clarity but this build right here has very poor AF regen.

The problem with running traps with anything other than a full condition trap build in pvp is that you really have no sustain and can’t do enough damage to kill quickly enough. Your traps are a mere nuisance and a waste of utility slots while your conditions are cleared almost immediately.

My build is not the best for large scale team fights in large areas but easily one of the best ranger builds for capping and holding a point against unsuspecting opponents. Of course, once a good player knows your build, they will avoid your traps and try to range you – that’s where the shortbow and heavy condition pressure comes in handy and you still can hold the point while fighting.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNAnfVjMqQ7K2tCmrAXLWcEMmAwkry18tiVFN4k6UNrey0MJF-TZRAABAcEAIrMQP7PE9jAIgTAAA

Ryan.9387:

Condi druid can 1v1 every class but only barely.

You cannot contribute to teamfights and are forced to push far or sit home. If you get good enough people will just gank you 2v1 every game which you can’t really fight.

After probably 4000 games on Condi ranger I’ve thrown in the towel. The spec does not work in the current meta.

But really fun to play in unranked!

I think in spvp it is such an unusual build that most people are taken by surprise and aren’t set up for a counter. If more people used it, i’m sure it would lose it’s effectiveness!

I’ve been playing a condi ranger for quite a while with torch/axe and shortbow with really good success in holding points. The one negative is that you don’t have much sustain or condition clear so you die easily in team fights. Holding points against anything but a warrior or a very well played power ranger is a matter of laying traps and waiting with your torch in hand. By the time anyone gets to the point, your traps are already refreshed and you can lay them again. This combination melts people almost instantly – until they figure out a way to counter it or stop going to that point.

My advice is to bunker up and enjoy the fun!

With the current meta of small point conquest, AOE spamming, perma-stealth thieves, perma-stun warriors, etc., it only makes sense to run a bunker build if you want to survive for any length of time.

Unlike wvw and no matter the AI, charging on top of someone and unloading everything with a glassy build is going to do one thing; get you killed easily!

I think we should be able to cry real tears when we QQ and cause enemies to slip and fall on them.

I have so much regen on my ranger that I don’t even have to worry about confusion. In most cases, I just keep firing in order to give my opponent a chance!

Moa

Nuff said!

Likewise, I don’t like it when people gain rank by not being a team player by just capping points back and forth and tagging people. No matter what, some people are going to farm in order to gain gear, money or rank. You can complain about it all you want but you will never stop it.

If someone can sit there and grind by jumping off a ledge 1,000,000 times, they deserve just as much rank as somone who tags people and stealths away or caps an unattended point 1,000,000 times.

Most of us could care less because we play for fun, not for rank. If I can easily kill someone 10-20 levels above me, all the better!

Personally, I could care less if we removed all AI classes from the game. Out of the 3 main offenders, I see rangers as being the least dangerous by far. The spirits only take a couple seconds to kill so just kill them as you are tabbing through – problem solved!

Unfortunately, you never quite know how a 2v1 decap would work until you try it. It could be that every team bunkers up and sends 2 people to each point with a bunker roamer to cap. You wouldn’t really ever have to kill anyone – just outnumber them and stay alive to hold a point.

I like the water node idea with sharks but instead of the sharks attacking the person who is attempting to cap, they attack the team that has already capped, forcing them off the node.

I think conquest is viable if they expanded the capture zones into larger areas so people couldn’t simply spam aoe and kill everyone on a point.

If we had something other than conquest matches, rangers would have a wider variety of builds without any changes to the meta. Currently, we are pigeon holed into a spirit/condition build because there is no other viable way to clear conditions and stay alive while holding a point.

This is my PvP bunker setup. I like the idea of the spirit for protection but I don’t think there would be enough damage to put pressure on anyone. I agree with Shirk – condition removal is better than bark skin in this meta.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQJATVjAVF29VKWs2Bi1DC5nB1ekp+jJXB/D-ToAgzCmIuRdj7GzNybs3M+Y9B

With the change, you have to try and cast them at the start of the fight when you are getting hit the hardest. So you spend all your time casting spirits instead of dodging or attacking. Interrupts and stuns can turn a 4.5 second cast time into 20 or 30 seconds – if at all. I would rather see spirits be made easier to kill with a shorter cast time.

Conditions should cause people to randomly go berserk and hit for 5x the normal amount. I know that if someone starts me on fire or poisons me, I’m gonna start flailing around with all my might, trying to kill them!

Why nerf conditions when it would be a lot more fun if they randomly gave people supernatural abilities? I think people would be a lot more careful when using them.

I just make it a point to follow them around and help with every fight after that!

If you want to play a ranger, the common perception is that you just auto attack with a few dodge rolls and let your pet do the work for you.

Of course, you will find that is far from the truth!

Hmmm…how do we get more players in spvp?

I can tell you how we don’t get more players: Nerfs and balance patches every couple weeks!

Balance is fine, leave it alone and concentrate on designing different maps with different goals instead of just throwing people on a single point and having a spamfest!

I think they should nerf ranger weapon damage by 50% and give them more pet control.

At first I didn’t like the change because it limited ranger builds, but after playing for a few days, I really like the change. Now, every time I see a spirit ranger, I simply kill the spirits with one aoe. That gives me at least 30 seconds to burst down the defenseless ranger. Talk about easy mode pvp!

I have been playing quite a bit the past 2 days and I have only seen 1 spirit ranger (who got destroyed). Why such a vast reduction in people playing the build after it was just “buffed” to make it even stronger?

Chaith.8256:

I don’t consider that to be true at all. In my personal opinion, which is all I can speak for, every balance patch has been positive if you have an unselfish perspective.

You make it sound like the losses to the pvp community are totally attributed to bad decisions on the part of the Developers. That couldn’t be farther from the truth, in my view.

Bad decisions on the part of the devs are what has caused most other games to fail. I simply don’t think that every single one of the thousands of past balance nerfs/buffs was needed. Every time they nerf or buff a class, they don’t gain players, they lose them. That is the reason why nerfs/buffs should be kept to minimum and used only in game breaking situations.

I can think of very few nerfs/buffs that would have caused the game mechanics to fail if they weren’t implemented. Surely, the latest spirit ranger situation was not game breaking.

Complete balance is the holy grail of any mmo. It is also something that will never happen because someone will always feel that they are at a disadvantage. The job of the devs isn’t to create unattainable balance, it is to keep their customers happy. People don’t remain happy for very long when they are forced to keep re-learning their class and their chosen play style.

Chaith.8256:

You are basically saying you freaking love Arenanet. That’s nice

I really do enjoy playing this game – but I have enjoyed a lot of other mmo games until the point where the attempting balancing just becomes too much. Every time Anet puts out a balance patch, they try to balance 100 different things, but fail the fix the fundamental gameplay problems with each class. Each and every balance patch succeeds in only one thing; making balance worse and causing more people to leave.

All I am saying is please stop balancing this game into the ground based on the qq of the vocal minority.

You will never obtain satifactory balance in any game – and that’s a fact!

Every time a class creates a build to destory another build, it will eventually be countered without nerfs. Every class has the tools to counter the existing meta – it’s just that people are lazy and don’t like change.

In all honesty, I had problems with certain classes when I was new to pvp. I thought there was no way to counter them and hoped they would be nerfed. After I gained more experience, I realized that every class has a counter and devs changing the balance only makes things worse for everyone. That has been true with EVERY other mmo I have played. Eventually it has driven me away from every other game.

I don’t know if I am playing a different game than other people here, but I have never had a problem with necros or spirit rangers. Of course, I have had to adjust my build many times, but that is just part of the fun. It’s a lot easier to adjust my build to counter another build than it is to adjust my entire play style to counter blanket nerfs and buffs from the dev’s who really don’t seem to have a clue what they want or what they are doing.

Please just leave the game alone and let us play!

It’s sad the way this entire thing went down. The community seemed to be dealing with spirit rangers just fine on their own – all except a few people who really didn’t know how to play their class. I stopped using spirits a couple weeks ago because it was too difficult dealing with stuns, interrupts and long recast times. There are much easier builds to play than a spirit build – especially now.

I have seen this very thing happen in almost every other game and every other class in the past. People die to a certain build, so rather than find a way to beat them, they run to the forums and complain – hoping that the devs will make it easier for them. The devs give in just to shut them up and people start leaving the game in droves.

It may seem easier to just run to the forums and complain every time get killed, but in reality, it’s much easier just to learn to play your class!

BurrTheKing.8571:

You think Warriors enjoyed getting kited to death, or conditioned to death? Once again I’ll say that Skull crack is not 4 seconds it’s around 3.75, a minor difference but misinformation is misinformation. If they don’t enjoy it they should consider investing in stun breakers, stability, or any of the many counters to Skull Crack/ Earthshaker.

Yeah, but it’s easier to qq on the forums than it is to actually learn your class!

Kasama.8941:

How is this different then any other multiplayer game? You either adapt, or stop playing.

That’s the whole problem; when devs make stupid decisions, most people just stop playing.

The good thing about this game is that I don’t have to pay a monthly fee regardless of my level of fun. If they make a change that I don’t like, I can play other aspects of the game without supporting them!

A better “shave” would have been to nerf them but reduce the cast time (give them the same cast time as underwater) and not require 30 points traited before they will follow.

It just seems like more of a guillotine than a “shave”!

BurrTheKing.8571:

If Spirit Rangers are to be removed from the meta I want it to be because Warriors are countering them, not because they were nerfed into oblivion.

That’s why I stopped using spirits. I can’t describe how nice it was to have stunbreaks again!

jmatb.6307:

That depends on how they position and the matchup.

If the number of builds that are overpowered are decreased does that not increase the range of builds? Is it really that bad to have to consider other options based on your team’s needs and the matchup?

I suppose if a ranger positions himself at range and uses his LB, the spirits would have a better chance to survive – assuming nobody thinks to kill them. At that point, what are they really adding to the team fight?

What we do know is that rangers having more evades and stun breaks again will surely make some builds obsolete. In any event, we know it eliminated one build for sure.

In the end, I think it’s a little naive to think that there won’t be consequences for completely eliminating a popular build. The way this nerf went down can only be bad for the game.

So, one well placed aoe will completely nullify 30 trait points and 3 signet slots. To me, that doesn’t sound like “shaving”.

jmatb.6307:

Spirits are still good support for a Condi team.

Spirits are terrible for team support now because everyone knows once they are killed they are down for at least 30 seconds and there is zero team support. Spirits will be killed at the onset of every encounter, so why bother wasting the points/signet slots?

They could have nerfed spirits and still made them usable. The fact that they didn’t and there is already a shortage of viable builds in the game really concerns me.

jmatb.6307:

The class isn’t dead at all lol

Of course the ranger class isn’t dead. Any good player will still excel at playing a ranger and beginning players will get destroyed even faster.

The spirit build, however, is dead.

jmatb.6307:

You can run Sun, Stone, and Signet of Renewal. Done.

Spirit Ranger builds come with the passive stun break from Shared Anguish, now you have two pet condi passes and you still get to keep the good spirits.

So in your opinion, rangers are competative with 30 less trait points and 2 fewer signets than every other class?

jmatb.6307:

Your opinion is a knee-jerk reaction to a “nerf” that isn’t even really a big nerf.

It’s enough to completely remove the spirit build from the game.

Nobody would be stupid enough to run the build knowing they have no stun breaks, little condition removal and 30 points traited to something that’s dead most of the time.

Spirit ranger should be an even easier kill now. Just kill the spirits at the onset of every fight, save your interrupts for the recast and you have almost a minute to kill a defenseless ranger with conditions.

I tried to use the spirit build for quite a while and it was ok for standing on point but the spirits always died immediately, were always a pain to try and recast during a fight and they always lagged way behind when running over terrain. I’m glad it’s gone because there is a better build out there.

I predict the next nerf to rangers will be traps/conditions and when that doesn’t keep people from qqing then we will see nerfs to evade on sword. One of most rewarding things about playing a ranger is doing well inspite of overall class weakness and continued nerfs.

infantrydiv.1620:

Because a ranger has a pet that keeps attacking while it evades?

Are you serious? After the recent nerf to pets they might as well give rangers a mosquito! At least it would put out some damage!

Eurantien.4632:

Evade spam on ranger needs to be nerfed. Not their specs.

How is ranger evade any better than thief steath?

cymerdown.4103

Let’s get real here and face the hard facts, Spirit Ranger is overpowered. It can 1v1 well, it can teamfight well, and provides the team with one of the strongest res utils in the game.

Unless the spirits are killed, then it is undeniably the most underpowered class in the game and completely useless in tpvp.

Any ranger, spirit or not, who just macros and spams everything at random is not going to win against a ranger who times their skills.

Spirits have a 60 second cooldown starting at initial cast. That means rangers must cast the spirits when they spawn and run around avoiding anything but a 1v1 for 50 seconds because the minute they get into a team fight, spirits are dead in under 10 seconds (most of the time a second or 2). If they do get into a 1v1, they have to pray that their opponent is a complete noob and doesn’t know enough to kill the spirits.

Rangers have 30 points in the spirit trait line which is no longer valid in any way after the spirits are dead. They also have no signets and must rely on pure skill for survival. Few first-time rangers will have the necessary skills to stay alive once their spirits are dead, and even fewer will be able to recast them. Spirits take 1.5 seconds to cast x 3. During that time they cannot dodge or use any skills – they basically just stand there and die while waiting to be interrupted and have their skill delayed. If they do get their spirits back up, they are usually dead in a few second. Now they have to respawn and avoid combat until their spirits are back up (30-40 seconds).

I guess the spirit ranger is the strongest build in the ranger line so I can see how people who are used to killing rangers in 10 seconds or less would say that it is OP. Like the mesmer and necro, it’s an annoying build and that’s why people like to play it. In reality it’s is no more OP than steath, necro minions, mesmer phantasms, 100 blades, eng or ele skill spamming.

Before we continue this thread, lets correct some common misconceptions:

Nobody is going to roll a spirit ranger and mop the floor with anyone more experienced than them unless they get really lucky. A skilled spirit ranger will do really well against anyone less skilled – as will a skilled player with any class.

Spirit rangers are completely worthless once their spirits are killed. Compared to every other class, they have no defense, no damage, no stun break, and little condition removal. The key is killing the spirits and not just rushing in on top of the ranger and spamming everything at once. I know people like to play that way, but it simply won’t work against anyone with any skill.

Who really cares if a class is easy to play anyway. That just makes it easier to attract more new players and gives less skilled players a little better chance to survive past 5 seconds. I’m starting to get the impression that most people in this game don’t have fun unless they can spec glass cannon, spam all their abilities and drop people in 5 seconds. Now that would really would be a messed up meta!

Allow people to trait piercing arrows/bullet with 30 pts. in a line they would never otherwise use. Since rangers have to waste 30 points in order to make spirits even viable, people who want to shoot through them should have to do the same.

Mashing buttons and keeping up AI is way to much work. I’ll give you an abbreviated guide to always winning at pvp:

1. Roll a thief and gain perma-steath.

Daishi.6027:

No class should just flat out, out heal spike or burst.

The game would be better balanced if rangers and other classes without the ability for burst/spike damage would just lay down and die when they are attacked by any burst class.

Let’s add a little more stealth into the mix and make it a big party!

I played my spirit ranger again tonight, but this time I just stood on a point and waited with all my spirits up. Sure enough, every single opponent came charging up and unloaded on me at point blank range, while ignoring the spirits. I even had a couple spirit rangers do the same thing so I just killed their spirits before they got to me and watched my pet tear them apart! It’s getting to the point where people are just killing themselves in a ridiculous manner.

Please people, take a lesson and use a little skill for once! Kill the spirits, THEN move in on the ranger!