Guild Wars 2

Doesn’t look that bad to me

Keep in mind that’s done with PvP equipment, in PvE with ascended weapons/armor etc it’s gonna be a fair bit higher.

Obviously we’ll have to wait until we can actually try it on the raid golem, but it looks a LOT better than any power option we have right now. Maybe it’s gonna be a viable choice, maybe it won’t, but I wouldn’t throw power soulbeast into the trash can already.

SlyDevil.3952:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVzVn6DwvY

The thing that excites me the most about that video is that this works with small interface size.

You realise stacking over half a minute of protection with one overload, AoE, was incredibly broken, right?

Leeto rages about pretty much everything, nothing to see here.

Substance E.4852:

DeceiverX.8361:

Except it doesn’t. I frequently take 1-2k damage hits per missile in WvW.

Ya that happens when you apparently run base toughness. Shocking as it may be.

God forbid he get’s Rapidfire’d for even more damage on a shorter cooldown. Nerf that one too please, ranger damage is clearly OP.

MidoriMarch.8067:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Bristleback-dmg-output/first

Check this thread there are so many people already asking for nerf on bristleback.

Bristleback + smoke scale is kittenedly strong and its just unkillable which is OP.

Bristleback F2 is strong burst, especially in Beastmastery builds with lots of boons.
You do realise the damage of the current meta druid build is mostly pet damage since they do exactly that (boons + beastmastery), right? The pet is SUPPOSED to be a threat in beastmastery builds, not a meatsack you can just ignore all the time like you used to.
If you can’t dodge the Bristleback F2 that’s a l2p issue. The people complaining about it are the same ones that whine about rapidfire.

Smokescale has horrible damage outside of its Unrelenting Assault ability. Again, just dodge that and you’re fine.

Current druid build has pretty much nothing exept Lunar Impact in CA you really need to dodge, just save your dodges for the pet F2.

Burtnik.5218:

Smokescale UA – 844/926 x5 (4220/4630 total) . 16/20cd, 750 range, 300 radius, no windup animation

Rev UA – 663×5 with berserker ammy+str runes (3315 total), 12cd, 450 range&radius (easier to make it useless in teamfight), 3/4s casttime, interrupted goes on full cd

I dont have any questions

Please consider that the smokescale has horrible damage outside of the UA burst.

Bristleback damage is bit too strong at the moment, but if they fix the bug that makes it hit 20 instead of the intended 15 times that’s all it takes imo.

The bristleback does have an animation windup for its F2, if you dont see it coming that is entirely your fault.

Sword auto is and always has been by far one of the most clunkiest mechanics in the entire game, the only time it doesn’t feel as punishing is when you have quickness and the animation lock doesn’t last as long.

People have been asking for a change for 3 years, nothing ever happened so far cause apparently it’s their “design” for the weapon. The “design” is flawed and everyone knows it, yet you keep defending this pile of kitten.

Yes, sword does have a unique feeling to it and sometimes it works out well, but for the most part its mechanics are working against the player.

The suggestion of adding mainhand dagger has been around for a bit and I’m very much in favor of it. We can get an actually working power mainhand weapon and the guys that keep defending sword can use it as they please, along those who praise its “design”.

Chokolata.1870:

It is not the same thing though. You cant play Sword/torch instead of GS.

Yeah torch offhand obviously won’t work well without condi damage, dagger is a good substitute if you prefer mainhand sword over greatsword.

Honestly nothing much will change for the meta build unless the upcoming reworks open up new possibilities.

Just switch your amulet to the new Mender’s stat combo (Power/Healing Power + Vitality/Precision), switch runes to Herald runes and you pretty much have the exact same thing.

emkelly.2371:

lolz the ranger sword is not power based. its a condi weapon

It’s used in condi builds for evades/utility, it’s not a condition based weapon at all.

It’s the only power based, viable mainhand weapon ranger has and I absolutely despise its functionality.
Sure, sometimes it works in your favor, but if I could, I’d change it in a heartbeat. It’s broken, the majority of the ranger players don’t like it and complained about it since more than 2 years, but since anet likes the “concept” of the weapon, it won’t change.

Functionality > Concept

Get rid of the kitten autoattack or at least give us another power based mainhand weapon. But hey, none of the devs care, so don’t expect any change, ever.

10 days is more than enough to see the many flaws the current league system, matchmaking and the boring meta have.

5 man randoms vs full Pro League teams. Neat.
Doesn’t help 1 of us left after 1 minute, but still, this shouldn’t be happening.

Great guide, thanks a lot obal.

Btw, something I didnt see mentioned so far: sword 2 functions pretty much the same as the guardian GS5, as in, all bolts will hit the same target if you’re inside the hitbox and there are a few adds around.
Should be a dps increase if you use it in glint to run down the energy.

If you don’t use staff and/or Troll Unguent, it can take literally several minutes of constant attacking to fill up the bar.

It should be significantly harder to fill it purely with damage, but this is way too much.
On the same note, nerf astral force generation with staff a bit. Fills up too quickly, even if you’re just healing your pet with the autoattack.

Also: The healing power scaling is pathetic. There is no incentive to ever invest in healing power, ever.

Kidel.2057:

Nope. And the effect is great (BEST looking skill in the entire game), please don’t ask for a change. Just lower your graphic settings, try animation to lowest.

The effect certainly looks amazing, I just found it worth mentioning that this skill apparently causes huge fps drops, that are certainly not normal.
I’ll try the animation settings, maybe that fixes it.

Every time a revenant uses this during teamfights, my fps gets absolutely demolished, I drop from around 60 fps to around 10.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Currently I’d say the only weapons that are in a good place are the longbow, the greatsword, torch and dagger (and probably the staff too, at least from the looks of it).

Mainhand sword: It’s nothing but a glorified mobility/evade tool. Absolutely nobody uses this for its autoattack, the animation locking prevents you from dodging in time and gets you killed.
Not having a useable power based weapon exept for the greatsword limits build diversity by a ton.

Shortbow: Autoattack is underperforming, the conditional bleed application just doesn’t work well. I do like the concept behind it, but making it inflict bleeding at all times and giving it a few bonus bleeds or torment when flanking would help a lot.
In general I think torment application would fit the weapon well, it’s supposed to be all about kiting your opponent around, forcing them to move.
I’d like to see this become a true hybrid weapon, with decent power damage and strong condition application.
The shortbow trait, Light on your feet, is really lackluster. Please look into it, currently nobody in their right mind would use it over Quickdraw.

Mainhand Axe: What is this weapon supposed to be? It only sees use in condi builds at the moment, and that is solely because of Splitblade.
The axe trait, Honed Axes, is utterly horrible for a grandmaster. Improved ferocity? Nobody even uses this in power builds, why would you want more crit damage?
Winters Bite now AoE? This is not “super strong” as you said during the trait revamp stream, in fact, it should be made baseline at best. The whole trait is a mess. Revamp it, nobody uses this.
Why not change Honed Axes to complement mainhand axe as a condition based weapon? This would give it a defined niche.

Warhorn: The recent change of giving Call of the Wild 3 might stacks was long overdue, but the real problem about this weapon is Hunter’s Call.
It just doesn’t feel like it has a real impact to it, it needs a little extra. People have suggested a blind application while you’re surrounded by the birds, I think that would fit.
Why not give it a little defensive utility? Keep the total damage, increase the duration of it, make it blind your opponent repeatetly. A targettable, ranged blind would have some uses. Teammate low on health and getting chased by that warrior? Give him a little breathing room by calling your bird friends.

Offhand Axe: Whirling Defense is probably the worst offender here. Not being able to move while channeling makes this completely useless. I don’t really know where to go with this weapon, maybe someone else has decent ideas for it.

It’s overpowered as hell in connection with quickness.
You can stack 30s of quickness with 2 skills and a pet swap at the start of a fight, that’s a whole lot too much for pvp.

D/D eles deserve all the hate in the world. Everyone is so fed up playing against this OP abomination, of course you’re gonna get hate for it.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

The druid trait line has very little to offer for anything else but healing. So as long as you choose it you run at 2/3 of your potential for damage. Other classes can trait three lines of choice and still off-heal perfectly fine.

They will do more damage, heal just as fine and are more flexible in their trait choices.

That was in response to the bolded part.
Your statement there is just blatantly wrong.

Also what would be the bigger dps loss? All the eles swapping to water for burst heals or replacing one of them with a druid and have them all stay in fire continuing to dps?

Kaiyanwan.8521:

The druid trait line has very little to offer for anything else but healing. So as long as you choose it you run at 2/3 of your potential for damage. Other classes can trait three lines of choice and still off-heal perfectly fine.

They will do more damage, heal just as fine and are more flexible in their trait choices.

Rangers will have to kitten themselves for off-healing. Their damage will be even worse than now. If you do not specc into druid though, you offer as much as you do right now, and we all know how that went.

If I look at all the variables, it seems pretty grim on the long run with just healing as selling point for druids.

So, which of the current meta builds for all classes has healing on par with the druid?
Oh right, none.
It’s a trade off, lose some damage (nowhere near the 33% you’re suggesting), gain a ton of support.
You can easily ditch Beastmastery for Druid in the A/T sinister build and the standard berserker builds. The damage loss will be a little more for power builds than it is for the condi build since you lose the quickness on pet swap, but that’s about it. A bit less ferocity on your pet, that’s not that big of a deal.

On the point of “other classes can heal just as well without sacrificing dps”.
That is utterly wrong.
What does ele have? Geyser, which heals for around 2.5k on a 20s cooldown and around 350 on water autoattack. Healing Rain has regeneration.
Guardian only has Virtue of Resolve, which heals for around 1.6k on a whopping 50s cooldown. You could also use the elite signet, which is a full heal, but either you or the ones you want to heal will probably be dead by the time you finished the 4s cast. If guard would switch to staff, his dps would be laughable.
So what else do we have? Revenants maybe. Exept Revenant dps will also go down by a lot simply because you have to slot ventari as one of your legends instead of Shiro/Mallyx.
Engineers healing abilities aren’t worth mentioning at the moment exept for Healing Turret.

So lets compare that to druid’s F5 skills (the numbers are baseline, without healing power at all):
Tidal Surge heals for 4850hp and is a water field.
Lunar Impact heals for 3k.
Autoattack heals for 800hp with a really fast cast time, you’ll probably get off around 1.5-2 of these per second.
Seed of life heals for 500 and removes conditions.

In a 10 second time window, you could get off 2 Tidal surges, 2 Lunar Impacts and a whole bunch of autoattacks. Even if nobody blasts your water fields, that’s a TON more than any of the above can dish out.

Tie the Preserved Queen Bee buzzing sound to player instrument volume instead of effects volume.

I loved the effects on this, but the constant humming drove me crazy, so I sold it.
It would be great to get to enjoy the game sounds, without the constant background buzzing.

The burst healing you get from your F5 is great, even without healing power at all.

Rangers might very well be wanted, even when the community figures out how to do these raids with a lot more offensive approach, since you could run a full dps build and dish out some burst heals with your F5 when needed.

Why wouldn’t you want something like that? Decent dps, offensive support with frost spirit & spotter, defensive support with your F5. Sounds like a good package to me.

Yep, about time they stop making angry threads about it.

The healing in F5 form is pretty strong even without healing power. If you run a more offensive build, you will still get a lot of team support out of that.

It really depends on what kind of pressure you’re looking at and how much healing is needed in a certain time frame.

Levetty.1279:

mistsim.2748:

Aomine.5012:

Screw the heal bot.

you don’t need to heal anyone but yourself. use celestial form for its utility and to heal yourself up. druid trait line enhances just about every offensive build.

Hows it enhance the standard LB/GS

Wilderness survival +signet of stone offers better utilities/heals.
Beastmaster has the better cc + damage combo.
Then for the third trait line you have:
Nature Magic is better defense.
Marksmenship/Skirmish offer much better options for damage (what with druid having none).

The F5 gives you a ton of support for your allies in teamfights, something ranger lacked the most. Even without healing power, you get a ton of heals and AoE daze, slow & immobilizes. The elite glyph has a lot of damage & healing potential in teamfights too.

The Druid traits are useful for power rangers, the immob when you hit a cc’d target is strong, the stealth & superspeed when leaving F5 form opens up a lot of utility.
The grandmaster traits are all pretty good, really depends on the enemy team comp which one you choose here.
Ditch Nature Magic or Beastmastery for druid, less self sustain or damage/cc, but in return you get to be a LOT more useful in teamfights.

WinterSnow.7142:

Ryou.2398:

Honestly I feel like we may have some kind of summoning with the staff, and I think if anything their may be a mix of close range and long range like many of the weapons the ranger has.

That would actually be nice!

The one thing ranger needs the least is more braindead AI minions.

Knighthonor.4061:

Silverkey.2078:

I think the popularity of rangers is increasing. Even in ESL they are not as rare anymore (meaning there are a few now as opposed to absolutely 0 some months ago). I’m afraid that what is carrying them is mostly the weird behavior of taunt (is it supposed to be unavoidable?). If this is fixed (assuming it is not intended) then rangers may go down a bit.

Before taunt what was wrong with them though?

The same things that are wrong with them now, only a lot more emphasized:

The pet being more of an annoyance than being actually helpful (this one got a lot better with the last patch, since there are now useful beastmastery traits and taunt is carrying you in every 1v1 situation. Also the pets hit for a decent amount with Beastmastery traited).
Outclassed in the dps/focus/+1/roaming niche my mesmers.
Easily killed in teamfights by hard cc.
Nothing to help in teamfights, exept damage (the new Allies Aid is useful, but that’s not really what I’d call good support).
Outclassed as a point holder by eles and many more.

You can make ranger work in PvP, the recent trait changes helped a lot with that:
Survivability on power builds went up a lot since you can use the new Weakness/Protection/Blind traits without sacrificing much of your damage.
Taunt is a super strong cc, useful both in 1v1 and in teamfights.
Decent condi remove & personal utility with survival skills.

Rizo.9534:

SkiTz.4590:

No ones priority is to worry about such a trash tier class lol. Could care less if ppl think its OP or underwhelming. Every class cries nerf or too OP regarding every other profession except theirs lol.

No one’s priority at twitchcon is freaking druid. Especially anet lol. Thats why its first on the reveal list. They want to get this crap out of the way so they can get into the more important stuff.

Disagree with you.
Druid Concept and animation was ready half year ago.
Why do you think they hold it until the last? If there are nothing to show, they’ll never move it to the end! Especially on Twitch CON!
Why people go on twitch con? To excite more people, to promote game and to earn more potential players.

Why they not chose CrapOmancer? DragonHunter? Daredevil? Berserker? Tempest?(LoL temest xD)? Reaper?
Revenant can fit too, but without proper beta test it will be fail.

Why Druid was moved to last?
Because, there have to be something, that will excite all people on TwitchCon, not only Collin.

If there will be nothing new in it, then they’ll make 1 more POI for druid earlier and that’s all.

I believe, that will be something really exciting!

Or druid is revealed last cause they had to revamp it completely since they couldn’t come up with a decent design and we get some hastely smashed together thing that we have a single whopping beta to change.

I hope druid is good, I really do. But based on their track record with ranger it probably isn’t.

Revamp the spirit grandmaster trait to actually give useful boons (fury for remorseless procs, maybe quickness), increase spirit HP, increase range of spirit passive effects, make active skills ground targetted.

At the moment spirits are pretty much one of the most useless utilities in the game. The current Nature’s Vengeance is just a slap in the face, I’m l really curious who in their right mind thought this is appropriate for a grandmaster trait when they designed it.

Levetty.1279:

Treetoptrickster.4205:

When they say “first look” does that mean we aren’t getting a third party reveal today and/or an official reveal on Thursday? God, I hope it doesn’t.

Fits in with how they have been shafting rangers.

Yup, gotta love how they manage to still find new ways to disappoint rangers \o/

Ryou.2398:

coax.2951:

We did TA Aetherpath with 5 rangers as a guild event recently, whole run took around 20 minutes without any problems.
You can faceroll your way through any dungeon there is, as long as people know what they’re doing, with almost any team comp, in a very reasonable time.

Sure, there is a meta team comp for a reason, but using a ranger/engi/necro in your group won’t magically make the run take 10 minutes longer, as long as they are running proper builds and know their stuff.

Personally I do not get the meta thing, that makes the game far less interesting, I want to rez people, I want to support my group and actually feel like my class is useful instead of facerolling everything.

And that’s exactly why I mostly pvp these days. The sense of “I can actively contribute to my team’s success” is a lot stronger in pvp compared to pve (yes, I know very well about the problems of rangers in pvp, but this is a general statement that goes for any class).

The meta build DOES support your group, that’s the whole point of the current meta builds.
Offensive support; vulnerability and frost spirit mainly. Maybe you get to throw in an axe5 if the guard dies or forgot to bring reflects, that’s about it.
Your typical dungeon run has the strategic depth of a puddle, almost every encounter is reduced to putting down frost spirit and then doing your dps rotations over & over again.

There are some fun boss encounters, but at this point the majority of people that run dungeons have done so for the past 3 years. The content is stale, so they just want to get it over with as fast as possible, hence the hate for everything that is deemed not optimal.

There are plenty of people just like you though, that want to take a different approach to dungeons and not focus on pure efficiency, and that is perfectly fine.

In general I don’t get why there seems to be a constant war between the PHIW and the speedrun crowd, they can coexist just fine, don’t join each others groups and everybody’s happy.

We did TA Aetherpath with 5 rangers as a guild event recently, whole run took around 20 minutes without any problems.
You can faceroll your way through any dungeon there is, as long as people know what they’re doing, with almost any team comp, in a very reasonable time.

Sure, there is a meta team comp for a reason, but using a ranger/engi/necro in your group won’t magically make the run take 10 minutes longer, as long as they are running proper builds and know their stuff.

I really hope druid finally gives rangers some utility in teamfights.

I expect lots of the new Resistance boon. Group wide resistance buffs would be a very strong niche ranger could fill, finally giving it some utility.
Staff should be CC focused, throw in a few AoE things as well.

Ranger could really need another decent weapon, current choices are kinda limited by either clunky mechanics (sword anyone?) or just lackluster overall performance (e.g. shortbow).

The new “aspects” will probably apply boons/buffs to your allies in range either when you swap aspects or as a passive effect while you use a certain aspect.

Glyphs could be interesting, curious what they’ll do with them.

Also wondering what happens to the pet. No idea how they’re going to handle this.

EDIT: Agree with Sina too, if that’s anywhere close to what we’ll get, druid is trash.

Taunt being unevadeable is certainly not how it’s supposed to work, think everybody in their right mind would agree.
Also fix the Resistance bug already.

Concerning the ranger taunt: I’d love to keep the unblockable part of it, maybe increase the cooldown a bit so it’s not as spammable, that shouldn’t hurt too much.

I’d rather see rangers getting some actually viable stuff instead of having to use broken mechanics to be at least a bit competitive. The amount of bugs & useless traits/skills for rangers is amazing.

No, it’s too powerful in its current form. You can stack crazy amounts of low duration boons (e.g. quickness/resistance) for your party in seconds. It’s crazy OP currently.

uhohhotdog.3598:

Make it like gw1 where you had to have comfort animal equipped to have a pet active.

The pet class mechanic is already flawed enough, why do you want to make it even kittentier?
There is a reason nobody in their right mind brings rangers to tournaments, they are just getting outclassed in every role and you want to nerf them even more?

I really don’t see why they don’t bring it back into the map selection of custom arenas.

No need to add it back into unranked/ranked, but at least give us the option to play it in our own arena to have some fun, there is literally no argument against that.

Burn guards get countered by Generosity sigils.

Flamethrower engi is a one trick pony, they have a huge condi burst, but that one is on a whopping 50s cooldown. If you cleanse or dodge the initial burning you will survive easily.

Trap ranger is easily countered by not standing in the traps. Just dodge into them so they trigger.
Dodge entangle otherwise you’re probably toast, but not a huge problem since entangle has the most obvious animation ever.
Condi ranger is slow, just kite him around or cc him.

1v1’ing cele dd eles on point is a bad idea and everybody knows they are currently overpowered. Dodge Burning Speed & firegrab, don’t walk through ring of fire. If you have to, dodge through it so you don’t get burned.

Still think burning could use a small nerf to bring it more in line with other conditions, but many people are overreacting or refuse to run more condi remove. If the meta changes, you got to adapt to it.

Just to add:
The warning is Hilt Bash, not the actual pet skill (yes, that one is pretty much impossible to tell, bird animations in general are pretty horrible to read).
Without hilt bash it just hits for 4k at best against squishy targets, on a 16s cooldown.

Dodge Hilt Bash and you’ll probably end up evading the pet F2 too. And if not, it deals a lot less damage.

The Owl & Raven F2 hits hard, around 4k on squishy target.
Hilt Bash (GS5) gives the next pet attack 50% more damage, so Hilt Bash -> Pet F2 is a popular combo, would also match the 6k damage you mentioned.
Trade off is the higher cooldown compared to Hawk/Eagle F2, which can be spammed to proc the pet traits (blind/weakness).

It’s always been this way if you used beastmastery, the trait line just wasn’t worth it before the patch, so now it’s more noticable.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I think that spirits just need a 2000 range, removal of the active ability and instead make it a spirit teleport to your location with 30s CD. Then improve the boons on NV and we have a build.

This right here.
I feel like the Stone Spirit & Elite have alright boons from Nature’s Vengeance, but all the other spirit boons are lackluster. 1/3 stack of might from Frost Spirit and redundant Swiftness on Storm Spirit being the worst offenders. Make one of the spirits apply Fury and boom, you even get synergy with Remorseless.

Greatsword is a utility weapon with decent burst damage. Stop treating it like a dps weapon, that’s just not gonna happen.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

You can play a power build without being totally glassy (knight amulet work fine). S/A is better single target damage than the gs.

Rangers are great for single target. Take your target down quick and move to the next. With quick draw I don’t see how you say u don’t have enough damage. As both path of scar and rapid fire can do 8k damage each and you get two of them at least within 10 seconds. Couple this with quickness and its clearly not dps that’s the problem.

I can assure you that anyone worth their salt will kill a sword/axe ranger in no time.
Sword 1 (yes, even when you disable autoattack) prevents you from dodging in time for many skills, meaning you’ll just sit there and eat it. GS is taken for the combination of burst damage + utility, and it’s good at that.

Pure straight up dps doesn’t work as well as burst damage in pvp, even more so at higher skill levels.

That being said, ranger got nice improvements, and if the bloody bugs get fixed it’s certainly in a better place than before.
Class balance is off at the moment, mesmers currently being the worst offender, might take a while for them to get it right with a few nerfs/buffs.

gavyne.6847:

I don’t get why you are still blaming players for feeling down that their only gamemode that they enjoy in this game is ruined by a week long event plagued with bugs and exploits.

Because it’s only for a week and people are overreacting a whole lot. I don’t get why people get this angry over a minor event that only lasts a couple of days.
If the queue numbers are any indication, there are plenty of people who enjoy it, apparently.
It’ll be gone soon enough, so chill. The bugs & exploits could need fixing though.

Teevell.1684:

Davey.7029:

Mike O’brien is right, most people play more than one game mode, and there’s no shame in that. And if you’re playing just WvW you’re missing out on a lot, specially since most of the resources go into PvE (maybe PvP?), and WvW is just a very small amount of playable content compared to the rest of the game.

Why is it so hard for people to understand that there are players that just don’t like doing PvE, even if there is so much we’re missing out on? There are players who only want to do some form of PvP. There are lots of them, in fact, if the rise and popularity of MOBAs is anything to go by. Why do you think Arenanet is trying so hard to make their sPvP into an eSport? Right now, that’s where the money in gaming is, not in PvE.

Nobody would deny that there are people who only play WvW.
But the WvW-only guys needs to accept they’re a very minor part of the player base and if the reaction of the current WvW crowd is any indication, they are getting offended far too much by this minor event that should be viewed as more of a lighthearted joke.

phokus.8934:

Mike O’Brien is the executive produce of GW2 and president of ArenaNet.

What he said in the videos about “you’re the exception” and that people do other things outside of WvW just shows he doesn’t under his player base nor his game.

I’m pretty sure the vast majority of the gw2 playerbase does not only play WvW. And they probably have the statistics to back that up.

Compared to the whole gw2 population you ARE the exception.
This does not mean that WvW shouldn’t be improved, not at all.
But many people here seem to overestimate the WvW only crowd by a lot, it really is a rather tiny amount of people that play WvW exclusively.

Welp, gotta wait till tomorrow then :/

Did he show that new spirit grandmaster trait? Really wanna know which boons each spirit applies.