Guild Wars 2

Honestly at this point I think we deserve a clear timeline of when we can expect some of these changes that have been flagged for months and months as Rangers problem areas. I know that breaks your protocol at some level, but your fans are unhappy and we need to hear something.

When can we expect longbow improvements. When can we expect spirits to actually be something worth using. When can we expect pets to hit moving targets in WvW and survive long enough to be an asset.

Necros have gotten a lot of attention and have pulled ahead in power. Engineers got huge attention in the last two patches and have pulled ahead in power. Rangers continue to languish and have fallen even further behind the rest of the classes with this latest patch. By all rights, April should be OUR month, but somehow I’m guessing we’ll see a big focus on improving Warriors again because their power has slipped from the absolute strongest, to 2nd tier.

Robert has done his part. Be kind to him! He is responsible for dungeons, not balancing professions. He just happens to be a ranger.

I do appreciate his candor in discussing some topics of Rangers with us, but unfortunately his only contribution to this thread was reminding us that AR is actually applied, even if the tool tip doesn’t show it. As it currently stands, the folks at Anet that are responsible for profession balance neglect the Ranger. I’m not saying we need to be buffed into some sort of amazing, game-breaking profession, but I would appreciate the ability to compete with other players in the game without being pigeon-holed into cookie-cutter builds.

As it exists right now, Rangers are very poor utility classes. It doesn’t mean we can’t provide something for the party, but it always feels like the lesser of available options. Now this is mostly my opinion, but I’ll do my best to support it with facts.

Spirt of Frost vs Banner of Discipline

On paper, an across the board 10% increase to base damage sounds great. If it could be maintained and proc effectively, well then it would be a must-have on any Ranger build. Unfortunately, it has a health bar, is either stationary or follows the Ranger directly and requires very careful movement to make it effective, and at best, can only trigger 50% of the time.

The banner has no health, a smaller area of effect weighed against greater benefit throughout its duration (170 precision, 15% critical damage) and can be moved at will. It also belongs to a profession that needs no investment into the traits to increase the effectiveness of the skill. It is also on a profession that can produce incredible amounts of burst damage.

Now, mathematically, on paper Frost beats Banner. But because spirits have health, Banner will always outlast Frost, does not have an internal cool down of 10 seconds (I’ve heard it’s bugged and doesn’t have the ICD, but cannot confirm nor deny). And while Banner’s effect only affects players for 95 seconds of its 120 second cool down, it will proc off of every critical hit. It also increases its own effectiveness by adding in an extra 8%~ critical chance, giving it anywhere from 5%-8% overall damage increase (if you’re under fury, which all warrior are.)

Now this is just one example, there a more (mostly with the spirits because, hey, they’re lackluster at best and terrible at their worst.)

ChillyChinaman.6057:

Just wondering, what is used in dungeons, beside the all-might shortbow? I usually take one type of sword. GS for tanking/defense or S/T for damage. The defense is quite good in high level fractals especially dredge.

Rangers, you were meant to kill trash mobs only, is what this patch says, loud and clear.

Yes, a melee weapon is the way to go when you are one a squishy class, NOT.
The gimick evasion and defense bits tacked on to a few GS ranger skills only work against single trash mobs. Forget about trying to melee the groups of trash mobs you encounter in dungeons. Evasion both for ranger skills and pet skills does not work/scale against anything greater than a trash mob.

First we got a massive GW nerf, now they give back a very minor amount of damage. It just shows a conscious effort to keep the class at the end of the line. Max damage, oh thats for Ele’s and Warriors and even Guardians.

The Zepher/ShortBow attack was about the only Ranger alpha that was of any significant use against anything greater than a trash mob and that has been sent to the trash bin.

This patch should have been named the Ranger RIP-off. (rest in peace).

Are pets, the defining and mandatory part of the class EVER going to get fixed?

Fixed you say in wonderment, why there is nothing wrong with pets, they are working as intended say the spokespersons.

Simple are pets broken test: Engage a boss, summon a ranged pet, watch ranged pet start to use ranged attacks at a somewhat safe distance from the melee boss, then watch as the same pet’s broken AI decides it is a better idea to run directly up to the boss and try to face tank it (and quickly die.) Or a more positive test: post a video of any pet, providing any meaningful contribution to a boss or champion encounter that will convince other classes rangers are desirable in dungeons.

Rangers have nothing as a class to contribute to group play.

at the rate this is going it’ll be 2015 before rangers are on par with the other classes.

i don’t have time to wait anymore. i’m out.

I’ve learnt to never have high expectations of anything.
Doing so will avoid any and all disappointments of what is actually released afterwards.

That being said, having played and mained a Ranger in GW1, this comes as no surprise to me.

What I find to be ironic, and depressing at the same time, is this:

Most rangers are asking for fixes. Not buffs, not increased power. Just fixes.

Fixes to things that should have been working correctly since release, but still arent.

Why other classes are getting buffs (not just fixes but actual buffs) while ranger is still stuck with very broken skills, pets and mechanics, is beyond my understanding.

Just a huge scar on the face of what would otherwise be a beautifully made game.

Hope you brought some serious booze to deal with this forum, new sir. You’ll need it.

I love how it’s always the other’s fault. Some people should really take a good look at themselves before blaming others.
Don’t ruin this fun and (still) close matchup with accusations and what not. Enjoy the game.

It were events in [Xaoc] itself rather than Gunnar’s Hold – GH always said it’s not a server for glory seekers and isn’t much bothered about points and tiers. The previous Chaos management, including Champion of Khorne, understood that and they were fine about it, valuing GH for the community factor, trying to bring Chaos closer to it. This changed with internal changes within [Xaoc], going back to the ‘victory at all cost’ mentality, with Khorne leaving them and the server, and then with the existing GH guilds refusing to form up a ‘wvw alliance’ with [Xaoc] who still refuse to join the community site and mumble which already have gathered most of the active GH guilds.

I wish you guys all the best, everyone has fun from different things, hopefully you will find yours elsewhere, but do not put any kind of blame behind your decision on how GH works.

So in summary of this match up…

The FSP blob has been contagious causing outbreaks of blobs in Gandara and AG. The Gandaran and AG blobs are vying for blob supremacy with the FSP blobs and this has caused concern for people unaffected by the blob. These anti-blobites encounter opposing blobs and then consider the event to be so traumatic they are forced to voice their anger at the situation on the forums.

Now I’m a logical kind of guy. If there’s a ‘blob’ attacking Bay in a borderland and there’s only 15-20 of you, would it not make more sense to go for the NE tower? which you’d have capped before they even notice you were there due to no orange swords and the extra gravity caused by blob v blob combat. You could put yourselves in a position to cut off re-inforcements from their main spawn point back to the blob vs blob event.

You could even become one with the blob! There’s plenty of options, I just don’t get this hostility towards the blob. Although there was one week of the month with my ex, she was evil, I hated the blob then…

Anyway, maybe be a bit more imaginative than joining the being cool blob bashing train, blobs have feelings too

“Thanks for the wall of text. It’s also completely off-topic and doesn’t change the fact that his statement (Ranger has no positive changes) is false.”

Thanks for a very un-thoughtful response post that provides no real discussion to the matter at hand though while in the same thread trying to claim my text as just a ‘wall of text’.

“(Your opinion is wrong by the way, because Rangers did have a “positive change”, like the GS buff.)”

I laughed at this, people aren’t crying about buffs, it’s the type of buffs that are getting applied to our class instead of ignoring the TRULY important issues that are wrong with the class, which has been stated numerous times with numbers, equations and sound, reasonable logic and explanations on why they need to be fixed AND have also been stated by several devs over 5 MONTHS AGO only in the end to get ignored in favor of THESE gs buffs that do absolutely nothing but taking us a step closer to when it was nerfed in beta in the first place (which people will complain and it may get adjusted yet again). The fact remains, pets are still garbage, longbow is still garbage, signets, spirits, you name it and since the whole crossfire nerf fiasco where they tried to say they fixed an animation glitch then later came out and said that they really did end up nerfing the crossfire because they didn’t want people spamming 1 (lol?) all the time I have really lost faith in the development direction atleast for the ranger and judging by the other forums now and how kitten they are, for alot of other classes as well. It is good (and sad) to see some other class forums with some threads wondering what happened to their class, although the ranger forum has been like that since beta.

I think everyone can agree here that the greatsword buffs were great, but it doesn’t do anything fundamentally for us as a class, it’s simply their justification for the shortcomings we have in 90% of the other areas. That’s all.

Most rangers don’t play on the truly pro level in pvp, not trying to brag or anything but I’m referring on the level about tpvping with rank 50+ teams who know their kitten and know true team strategy and how their class works 100%, im talking about dueling with people of the best of their class on their server (which i do regularly), im talking about high end zerg play involving complex scenarios , use of combo fields, use of positional strategy which we also deal with. I’m talking at the top level. Most rangers in here haven’t even gotten there yet, and it’s sad to see people delusionally talking about these nerfs as if it’s alright. It’s not when you’re on the top level as a ranger, the kitten hurts, ALOT.

A viable mechanic for the ranger was taken away also in the context of quick reviving, I thought personally ability in tpvp to do this was crucial and separated my class with others. I could pet swap , get quickness , fear people around and me (wolf pet) get a chance to revive someone. People say that’s op , I call it a strategy and a unique one to the ranger but whatever especially since you can dodge canine f2’s and their graphic is so obvious you’d have to be blind to not see it.

Personally, as a power / crit trap ranger running 0/0/30/30/5/5 I didn’t get affected by much of this at all, the quickness I get from pet swa kitten till good, just not as good and the f2 cooldown fix hurt as well, but I have found in dueling atleast that I wait about this long ANYWAY to switch off and use f2, there was 2 scenarios where i needed to wait 5 seconds to get my wolf f2 back , but that’s it… All in all. Personally for me, the changes haven’t hurt me much. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care of the direction that these patches are headed.

But I think that’s what people are more mad about, it’s not that the buffs weren’t bad, they weren’t great either and it’s the direction of the fixes being put in place that I think people are both confused, and annoyed about.

So you show the blobs in EB and how you kill some pugs with your leet guild ,thats nothing new.
I find it way more ridiculous to now see how those leet guildzergs move around like a herd of scared chickens without a mind of their own, they just rely on full boonstacks and hack away with autoattack. Now that is boring.
You XxX may be fancy when you run with 15, but when i see some of you in a pugzerg you go down just as fast as any other guy.

I think what he is trying to say is that Anet has finally done it. They balanced all our builds to be equally bad. It doesn’t matter what you try to do it will be bad.

Paz Shadow.9715:

As a beserker ranger, overall imo this is an average update that if anything hurt me significantly with the quickness nerf, but what i was not expectng much to begin with so oh well

- if you read the patch notes and saw all that was corrected with engineer, that made me frown since if anything i would love to see an update like that for us

So long as dear Robert still has a job in ANet, don’t count on it. He’s pretty happy with the ranger so long as it “gets by”.

Do i sound negative? Has the patience to give devs the benefit of a doubt expired? Yes to both.

Game patches are usually exciting. They are, in other games. In GW2, it has been consecutively met with more disappointments than excitement.

So effectively the Ranger has had a few broken abilities finally fixed and quickness was nerfed with no compensation for the quickness on pet-swap. Not much of an improvement in my humble opinion as a lot of Rangers will deal even less dps now.

A few common sense fixes and a big nerf. And let’s not forget that the passive effects from Warrior banners got buffed by ~90% whilst Ranger spirits are left unchanged.

Color me unimpressed; but then again the ‘balance team’ doesn’t hold that much credibility in my book. They dropped the ball too many times now and seem to live in their own imagination.

Thanks for trying to help out Robert, but next time I’d suggest bringing a wooden plank to the meetings and smack some people in the face with it.

11 weeks ago we were rank 21 bottom of tier 7, and this week i’d like to think we sit equal with 2 great servers Gandara and Aurora Glade at rank 11 tier 4. FSP has worked hard to get where we are even if we currently dont go further than this just yet, im still very proud of what we have done, and from the best of my knowledge we have done this without any large guild transfers. However, my worry is that if Xoac do move here then some of the work will get taken off our hands and player may start to slack a little and when Xoac do leave for another server which is probably inevitable its gonna hit them players that slacked off very hard. I may be totally wrong, but im only speaking whats on my mind.

ThomasKreshant.6572:

Good news FSP will get 200% better once Xaoc arrives for sure!!!

We win against GH, and Xoac which is a 150 ppl guild in GH will make us 200% better?
I don’t see any logic in that.

And i don’t want them to move over to FSP because more ppl means more skill-lag and more zerging. And i don’t like that. They should rather save their gems and stay at Gunnar’s Hold.

As a GL of one of the bigger guilds on Far Shiverpeaks (at least active in WvW) I today got approached by one of the xaoc leaders about one of the branches (no idea which, Russian at least) wanting to discuss the possibility of them coming to our server.

I plain out told them that I really do not want them here. And then further brought it up with the other GMs and Officers.

We’ll see what it brings. We know they are server hoppers, and that they will stick around for a few weeks and then leave again. And I guess that’s just something we have to deal with, if they want to pay the 32g (or whatever) for the gems to come here, let them. Either way we can’t really stop them.

Wicked.5479:

man never seen such a big zergserver as gandara, even the striketeams going for a dolly are 15+ :s

Shouldnt be a problem righ? Every time I try to intercept your dollies you are guarding them with 25 :P.

My real life cat went to the toilet today and had a wee, I thought that was quite fantastic cause I hate having a litterbox, this has nothing to do with your thread aside that the story contained cats, I felt like sharing.

You need more swag to complete JP. You should at least be General level to have enough swag to beat it.

Legendaries require Badges of Honor because you’re expected to put some time into helping your server to earn them.

As it stands, the WvW JPs encourage lazy PvEers to slowly grind their BoH over a month or two rather than invest in a few rounds of WvW and actually contribute as was intended.

People who camp the JP for the sole purpose of griefing PvEers are trolltastic heroes. WvW is large-scale PvP. The JPs are on WvW maps; the JPs are PvP. If you can’t manage fights along course of the puzzle, you’re not skilled enough for any kind of PvP. If you get killed by campers at the end and your response is to come on the forums and moan about it rather than going out and getting Badges of Honor by aiding your server and PvPing in a PvP zone, you’ve got a chronic case of childish entitlement.

I’d really love it if Anet removed Badges of Jumping or put some kind of required WvW contribution with a daily reset before you could access the puzzle.

Honestly, I believe the EB Jumping Puzzle was made specifically to troll people.

Thousands of Branded Risen Destroyer Gandarans in full PvE Ascended gear with Legendaries in all slots were holding a human sacrifice to the Titans in Gandara Garrison during prime time.

“Hahaha, we have the strength of five hundred night caps and our server population is over the server limit, and you must worship Trahaerne as your god and take him on all your Personal Story missions!”

At this moment, no more than 5 brave, Low population, underlevelled, green-wearing, no night presence Piken Square with fifteen stacks of Outmanned forced their way into the keep using only their bare hands, and tried to disrupt the ritual.

But the Gandarans did fifteen Flame Legion salutes, then called upon Zhaitan, Kralkatorrik and Mordremoth all at once, and also their Dredge and Icebrood allies. And although each of the Piken Square completed their Slayer achievement for each of the enemy types, and completed all the Personal Story branches at once, even these brave heroes could not save Tyria from the Gandarans, and they had to tactically retreat.

The craven Gandarans hid behind their walls with their five hundred Superior Arrow Carts and two thousand Ballistae and performed their dark ritual, and all was lost.

Durzlla.6295:

Learn to Micro? I have 0 issue keeping my pets up in dungeons, WvW i don’t do much there, but when i do fight there i just keep my pet back until the zergs clash and then i throw him into the fray, normally after who ever my target is and then once they die/retreat i call my pet back, let him heal up and search out a new victim.

And the pet is clearly obvious, but you want to know some MAJOR differences between pets and phantasms? 1) Pets don’t die as easily as a Phantasm 2) Pets attack more than once ~5s, a LOT more than once ~5s. So you know what happens when an enemy is stupid and tries to dodge every pet attack and/or focus on the pet? They die, end of story, unless they burst down the pet they’re just wasting time fighting the wrong thing. And if they -do- burst down the pet and you’re running a GC build it means that you get to kill them in most scenarios because you can burst them while they attack your pet, and then when they can burst again you can too and then they die.

If i’m fighting a mesmer all i need to do to kill their phantasm (unless they’re one of those really rare toughness mesmers) is shoot it with 2 autos, and i can certainly dodge their blatantly obvious attack ever ~5s.

PS: You phantasm isn’t up 30% of the fight, your phantasm will be up for MAYBE 1% of the fight, die, and then you summon a new one, the pet can stay in the entire fight if you’re a total beast at micro even with 0 BM.

I can bring Phantasms up faster than you can kill them, and each time I bring a new one up, there goes a very large chunk of your health. Up until now I’ve let you talk nonsense, but you’re stretching things so far out of reality, I can’t help but speak up.

The Longbow is pretty good in sPvP, very good in PvE, but it is the worst weapon you can run in WvW, period.

As for pets, a good player can avoid more than 50% of their damage. Watch some of the videos out there, especially Rangers fighting other Rangers. You can tell the better Rangers, they’re the ones avoiding the other Rangers pet 90% of the time. Watch Xsorus, and how he avoids Ranger pets.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Why can’t they just answer these questions here?

Indeed.

They have a community team that could quite easily gather these kinds of questions weekly in a thread, take the top 10 and post the answers on the blog. But, narp, we’re expected to throw random Qs at a fellow community member on the hope they get more than 15 minutes at a conference.