Showing Posts For kaid.7695:
I think this weeks live event is a good demonstration of why rangers need a way to stow pets and reclaim damage lost for having the pet out. Against the big fights and prime hologram there is so much huge area ground effect damage happening that it is just about impossible to keep your pet alive during it. I have tried ranged pets I have tried tanky pets but they are just so lacking in responsiveness that they just go poof constantly and there is no amount of skill that would keep them alive while also allowing them to be useful in any way to warrant the micromanaging.
i’d play ranger if the sword didn’t root you in place. the sword is so good but god it’s just too annoying to play. but yeah spotter and frost spirit are pretty good buffs to party dps. dumb elitists are just dumb.
If they can fix the auto attack chain of the rangers sword it would go a long way to helping their viability. It does really good damage but I get killed by being locked in place so much that it just gets infuriating. Sure you can turn the auto attack option off but if I want to spam my 1 button I will play my engineer and throw bombs at people.
Longbow is a fine weapon when used correctly and in fights where the range is useful. But as with many weapons it is not a one size fits all tool.
I’ve seen only a smidgen of that. Most people have been plenty nice even on fails. So it’s luck of the draw whether you get nice or nasty companions in your marionette fight.
One helpful thing is to patiently explain things in map before the fight begins every time someone asks. For instance, even though it’s plenty obvious by now that the five minute timer will start on the hour, there are still people that don’t know and ask “how long until it starts?” One could deride them … or simply explain the timing. If someone says they’re new to it, offer to /w them the fight explanation. I just did this on Wurm with a new person and we partied up and had a blast at Cobalt.
In any case, one can hardly tell ANet “Hey, your MMO? It’s too massive, you need to prevent large groups from congregating because man, people get nasty to each other when they get crowded.” The cure lies in players doing social engineering, not ANet reducing event size.
Things were getting a bit heated a bit in one overflow but then I started pointing out that even a failure as long as you get a chain or two actually is pretty good rewards once you unlock scarlets lair. I led some people around the portal things to get them power core bits and once they figured that out and got into scarlets and saw what their efforts on the event were getting them most were a LOT happier. Really after you have one success for the day the difference between a 4 chain fail and a 5 chain succeed is not a whole lot.
If I had one change to make would be allowing people to help a bit more once they complete their part of the arena. Maybe have their walls drop once their arena is finished so they can assist with ranged attacks vs the arena to either side of them. Given the time limits there would still be plenty of fails but it would help mitigate some of the RNG screwing of getting a bunch of uplevels or non really dps speced people in the same arena causing that chain to fail even though the other 4 platforms cleared their stuff.
If they are going to make fights that require this level of coordination among this many people they need to make them actual instanced raids. The fact these events happen in middle level zone means a lot of the zone is filled with normal people doing their level up activity and even upleveled are nowhere near useful on this kind of dps race.
The overflow system and the whole having to game it to try to get the majority of your coordinated group in the same place at the same time is just incredibly stupid.
I think the marionnette fight is probably about the most complex you can really pull off in a pug raid. Basically get enough people to fill the lanes and get a couple attempts under the peoples belts and its pretty straight forward. Things like the wurm fight is something one would expect in an instanced raid zone to be attempted by raiding guilds not as an open world pug zerg on world maps not capable of handling that number of people effectively.
So it equals to ~6% crit chance for everyone – neat o.O Why should one not take this? Again the “passive dmg doesn’t exist” disease?
The main issue is it is pretty deep in marksman and marksman is one of the trees that is actually sort of packed with good stuff. In a dungeon if you have marksman spec you should be running but many run eagle eye which gives like 5% pure damage boost in increase in range instead.
Ranger suffers somewhat in dungeons simply from what peoples perception of what a ranger should be. Most who play rangers went that way for bows or at least heavy bow use. If they wanted more melee power or a light melee fighter they would have taken rogue or warrior.
People who go ranger tend to be those who are drawn to that ranged archetype only to find the bow skills are not really good to use and or crippled at short range. Given the low radius of boon granting most group combat benefits from most people being pretty close to each other which means you generally are all at short/no range to the target. So unfortunately the mechanics of the game play against the desired play style of rangers pretty badly.
Then you have the pet meh I love pets in most games but the GW2 ranger pet is just such a headach. It is very unresponsive to commands so when people talk about rangers poorly controlling their pets some is player inattention but much of it is some guy sitting at his computer swearing like crazy because his pet will NOT do anything he tells it to in a timely fashion. It should tell you something that many rangers are asking for way to stow the pet permanently even if it means taking the DPS loss of not having it around.
People mock the bear but there is a reason people use it for an unresponsive AI pet that cannot/will not dodge having a pet with enough HP to survive the scripted boss fights with all the ground AOEs so common to them is one of the few ways to get much use out of the crappy pet. Personally though I tend to use drakes/insects drakes are pretty durable up close and at least can give you some random blast finishers from time to time. The insects have enough range to at least keep out of the instant melee death range so they tend to last a big longer and don’t get in the way. Also due to their range they are less likely to blunder around agroing extra adds.
Unless there is some big change on how boons are granted and changes/upgrades to pet responsiveness I don’t see rangers ever being anything but somewhat awkward in dungeons.
I have tried the other weapon types and the great sword is a reasonable weapon for dungeons. I have tried the one handed sword and the constant rooting it does infuriates me so bad I just cannot use it.
I think the tequatl fight is interesting and fun if you have enough people and don’t get messed up by an afker in a turret. My problem with it is the server capacity issue it requires a darn near zone capacity level of people to do it and if you are not willing to go there and sit and do almost nothing for a couple hours you wind up in overflow with to few people to do the event. The other option is everybody guests to a low pop server and games the bad zone capacity issue. If the zone could support twice its current load so you don’t bump into overflows and the boss can scale well to the actual number of people facing it I would have no complaints about it.
Bows are fun in situations appropriate to them but really when soloing in story dungeons as people have recommended things like great sword and axe/axe are really what you probably should be using. The bows are mostly single target weapons and things like the claw island fight is just way to many swarming attacks that you cannot use the range of a bow to your advantage so its best to stick with your melee weapons. GS is really an excellent weapon for rangers and while most people mock main hand axe it actually is not bad in those swarmy fights where you are pretty much guaranteed to get the maximum number of bounces every time.
On claw island I also had fun with axe/torch lots and lots of burning undead.
I can’t remember what server my guild originally was on but last year we moved to TC and it was night and day better. Lots of folks around good for WVW/pvp and lots of people roaming the world to do events and things like that as well.
One thing I would love that would help horizontal type improvement/fun would be a revamp of how minis work. They should be in their own interface where you can open that interface to summon them instead of them residing in the collection part of your bank inventory. With the current system I have a bunch of super cute minis that never see the light of day because it is to cumbersome to use them and not have them instantly poof the first time you go to clean up your gathering materials.
I think a lot more people would be interested in minis if this was done. I have friends who did not even realize they even HAD minies until I told them where to look for them. They got them and then they were deposited to the collection before they even realized they ever received them.
When is this cinematic supposed to show up. I got all the way to the top of the tower and did the toxic hybrid thing and did the injection but I never saw any cinematic.
I have like 150 skill points worth of those scroll things in my bank 25 skill points does not seem unreasonable.
I honestly have been having some fun with mortar in WvW. The place it shines is defending walls/keeps. It really could use an 1800 or 2000 range given its stationary nature and pretty much only effective in a siege type situation it should have at least slightly better range than rangers longbows do. If they want to keep the 1500 range than it likely needs to get turned into something like the charrzooka and allow you to move around with it.
If it had a bit more range and if some of the bugs were fixed where sometimes it just seems to jam and not want to fire it would have a pretty solid place in WvW. The thing does some incredible damage vs zergs if you can get into the right place to rain down fire and don’t have it bug out on you.
The normal weapons all have their uses but your primary damage is very likely going to come from your kits. Both the rifle and shield have blast finishers which are great given how many fields engineers can drop.
For max damage you are probably looking at grenades/bombs and for less but still good damage and more utility Flame thrower/elixir gun is a pretty fun combo.
Static discharge builds are pretty fun too and those are one of the more likely ones for you to be using your actual normal pistols or rifles.
The flame thrower auto attack is not the strongest auto attack seen from pure single target DPS. That said it is actually a really nice auto attack in any kind of zerg/swarming type fight. You are doing a pretty reasonable amount of damage to a large number of targets which is really the situation where it shines.
Also with my build I have a chance to apply bleeds on crit and due to the rapid fire of the flame auto attack I wind up stacking up a ton of bleeds with it without even really trying this also goes for on crit or on hit effects the flame thrower auto attack procs those things really well which amps up its power quite a bit if you build for it.
Grenade/bombs is probably the highest most efficient damage but flame thrower/EG that I run is a good mix of utility and damage when running zerg support. This build is hilariously amusing when running things like the halloween event or in the middle of a wvw zerg pack.
S
-warriors(op in pve. op in wvw, top tier meta in spvp)A
-guardian (part of the meta in wvw, stable in spvp, great in pve)
-Necro, (on the edge of op in wvw,very strong in spvp, not really that great in pve-Engi (stable in spvp..dont underestimate them, stable in wvw, stable in pve..but not that popular)
B-
-thief ( top in spvp, top roamer in wvw, but not really fit for zergs, not really wanted in pve)C
-ele (at a good spot in wvw, worst in spvp atm, average- decent in pve )
-mesmer( great in 1v1 spvp, stuck as a duelist only, veil/tw,portal bot in wvw,same tpvp, great for dungeon due to gs, but terrible at tagging during events)
-ranger( ok in spvp, terrible in wvw, no role in zergs, their pet dies way too quick, warriors just run past pet and melt the ranger, average in pve)
I would disagree about rangers in WVW. No class with that much potential range is useless in blob fighting. With piercing arrows and eagle eye you can blast people from the back of the blob with near impunity. Sure your pet dies pretty frequently but they do perfectly fine in the zerg v zerg fighting. When you are in the zerg the warrior does not just run past the pet to kill you mostly because in the seething swarm of people the very low key ability effects rangers produce make them hard to pick out of the crowd at any range. I tend to run longbow and axe/warhorn in WVW. Gives me a nice on demand blast finisher/buff for utility as well as my water field so in the thick of the blob I can blast out a fair amount of AOE heals to compliment the silly range damage.
I don’t play spvp so cannot speak for that and as for PVE they are fine if not super class. Their main benefit is high sustained single target damage which makes them really good at bosses for DPS so they do really well in invasions and things of that nature where their long range and solid concentrated damage come into play.
I will try this fight for the next couple days. After that I don’t see my self ever bothering again. Even if he can drop rarely ascended gear if you some how magically get into the primary zone for your server not the dregs of the overflow the time vs reward is simply not there. Even mindlessly running champion circuits and temples is a more effective usage of your time than this dragon fight. Sure it can be beaten in its current state if you can get enough people into voice chat and coordinate the fight and get lucky not having afk trolls in the turrets. But even if you do win the amount of time you have to sit in the zone and the amount of failed attempts you will endure it simply is not worth the effort.
The only saving grace of tornado for me is it works underwater. Given pretty much none of our other elites is usable underwater it is at least something.
Turn off those nameplates folks!
One weird thing for me with all name plates disabled I am still seeing a LOT of name plates when doing these scarlet things. It is a lot better than if you don’t disable them but it is still really hard to see what is going on with all the names.
I would think it may effect things like burning retreat but I am not sure if it only includes things with the manual targeting reticle or the automatic line powers.
I thought it was a cone skill. What is a rectangular skill?
Think its spells like the earth staff line snare thing where the targeting thing is just a long thing rectangle.
Ele can’t swap weapons.
Attunement swapping counts as a weapon swap when accounting for Sigils that proc on weapon swap.
On Topic:
I don’t get the idea of nerfing AoE because “It’s almost comparable to single target damage”
If you want people to stop using AoE’s on single targets then you’d have to give people the option of using single target abilities… This would mean in most cases lowering or removing the cooldown on them since people often use AoE’s on single targets because their 1 single target ability is on cooldown and the AoE’s do more damage than just spamming #1
The ironic thing is for elemental unless you are using scepter spamming 1 is not even an option if you want to avoid AOE. Many of our auto attacks are aoe. In staff mode only earth effects a single target, in dagger I think only earth is single target auto attack.
If you design a class where 80+ percent of their damage powers are AOE don’t be shocked that they use AOE on single targets if they don’t they are just sitting there and not even swapping elements as the class appears to be designed to do.
The quote “we don’t want you to use AoE skills on single target mobs” is utterly ridiculous. Eles don’t have a choice! If you didn’t want that you shouldn’t have designed a class with 95% aoe!
This is my biggest problem with a blanket aoe nerf. There is a bit of a concern that they do not seem to realize elementalists don’t really have a single target option. The only thing they can do that avoids aoe damage is scepter/focus in air affinity. It is the only weapon combo/affinity that is strictly single target dps. Staff has I think 2 non aoe damage abilities and dagger dagger has maybe a couple non aoe damage abilities. Even most of our auto attacks are aoe damage.
Baring an almost complete redo of elementalists to add more single target DPS options I dont see how what they are talking about would be anything other than a blanket nerf on an already not very high DPS class. Yes I use aoes on single targets because I DON’T HAVE ANY CHOICE. When you make a class based around AOEs don’t be shocked when that class uses AOEs.
The ironic thing is people went bunker ele because of the elementalists weak damage makes a glass cannon build not very viable so they plan to fix bunker eles by lowering the already mediocre damage hehe interesting.
I will be curious how much the nerf will be. All the weapons elementalists use have the majority of damage they do AOE. We wind up using aoe vs single targets even when in pve due to there being almost no single target spells/specs.
I think scepter has the most pure single target abilities. I have not really seen any problems with elementalists DPS its mostly been complaints about our durability in a bunker build and mobility. Most have built out of glass cannon magey builds to go higher vitality water/arcane bunker builds. Better to do some damage and live than do moderate high damage with no HP and die.
It will be interesting to see what changes they will be making. The vast majority of elementalist spells are AOE. In either dagger/dagger or staff all but a couple damage powers are AOE.
I have not really heard anybody complaining about how hard hitting elementalists are just complaining of their mobility/survivability. If they gimp aoe to much instead of making more specs an option it will probably wind up condensing it even more than it already is. Oh well its an MMO so wild swings in power is pretty expected I guess.