Guild Wars 2

Wait…. rangers are getting something that might make them viable in 1 game mode!?

Holland.9351:

Let’s first wait and see if Druid is going to be wanted in any content at all.

Just a few more days till HoT releases. There is going to be added a whole heap of new content that needs time to settle and for people to figure out.

Maybe come back in a month from now before giving your feedback, since you really come off as a troll. We’ve had a lot of those lately.

“Pls nerf druid even though no one has ever actually used it yet.”

Brace yourselves, laddies, we’re going to be getting a LOT of ranger hate on this forum if druid is in any way viable.

We have already been told that pet ai is tied to mob any and that with HoT there will be some improvements. Not only that but we have 5 new pets two of which Directly address several problems ranger pet have.

The targeting system may address the obstructed bug. This helps everyone. You must be some kind of special snowflake if you don’t see how making things better for everyone affects you too. One class doesn’t out weight the 8 other classes.

This is the equivalent to Grandma baking cookies for everyone but your mad because she didn’t make your favorite and everyone gets to enjoy them too.

Is there a single post in which you post something constructive that’s not s complaint about the profession? Why don’t you just roll another prof?

I wont even try to clarify your concern. I could, but I wont.

Also, if you could get Roy to issue a public apology for capping the might in the first place, then I’d be REALLY impressed ;P

‘Nerfing it to a safe place’ is a pretty reasonable normal response to keep something from destabilizing the live game while you work on it. It seems like the plan was genuinely to get back to it all along, so, Roy’s fine.

Between this and the staff #3 change, there’s been alot of talk of interfacing with Programming on our behalf. I like that you guys are making that interaction public, it makes me feel less like leftovers and more like resources are being directly dedicated to improving the Ranger’s gameplay experience.

I’m impressed with the quick traction on this, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it to see how it feels.

Dawdler.8521:

Kitta.3657:

I am fine with the change of the reset day. Fridays are work/school days for me and a lot of people that I know and we’re pretty tired late EST

So “nobody wants this” is quite fallacious, please. Speak for yourselves, people!

But how many weeks during the last 3 years have you thought “this would be even more awesome if reset was tomorrow instead, I hope Anet change it!” followed by posting the suggestion on this forum? Just curious. If you have then sure, everyone doesnt have free weekends. But most does, yes?

I understand others gripes with it or reasoning behind the negative reception, though I know for a fact this will be beneficial for my guild. A lot more people are available on saturday nights than friday nights for us. That is a simple personal point of view. For the greater of the game, I think it’s worth trying instead of having a complete aversion to change which is what I’m reading rather than concern. (this whole “they hate us!!” because they’re changing something /smh) And I do not think that this is something that they would be completely against changing back if it proves to be an issue like people are voicing right now. And on top of that, for once, I agree with Lordkrall. Maybe this change will improve the first 3 days influence on a matchup – or the opposite! Maybe it will be worse. I’m really just about giving it a shot.

I was only posting to voice my personal opinion on it and to remind people to do it in the same manner instead of freaking the kitten out and trying to speak for everyone else

Dawdler.8521:

Except that those first three days (well, drunken friday night included) is the weekend. You know, when we are supposed to enjoy our free time that we can spend on gaming?

If they want to avoid weekend as a first push, just put reset in the middle in the week instead (wednesday/thursday). But not smack in the middle of the frikking weekend, sigh…

I am aware that Friday to Sunday are weekend, you are however making a mistake thinking that everyone only works on weekdays. Not that it really matters, since that wasn’t really the point.

The point was that we have seen for quite some time that many match-ups are “decided” within those first 3 days, because those are the days when traditionally most people can play for extended amounts of time. Something that people have been complaining about since release more or less. Moving the reset slightly so that people won’t get all those days at the very start of the match up, could thus lead to more long-lived balance in the match ups, which should combat the issue of people giving up on Monday.

Like I said, time will tell. Why not give it a couple of months and see before deciding that it is apparently the worst thing ever?

Irenio,

These are great changes.

The astral force changes combined with the retaining of astral force have incredible synergy with traits that previously were hard to justify using during the BWE (remove conditions upon entering CF, superspeed and stealth upon leaving CF). Beyond trait synergy, these types of things enhance the ability for more damage oriented Druids to take advantage of not only these traits, but the ability to “flash” into CF, drop an important skill or two, and then “flash” out and not have as troublesome of a time regaining astral force nor as difficult of a time leaving CF and wasting remaining resource which was a double down on punishing effects in a lot of situations.

I have no criticism of these changes at all. They are pure quality changes that enhance accessibly as well as provide new playstyles that don’t jeopardize the original intent of the elite specialization.

Can’t wait to see more in the future, especially regarding those staff 2 and 4 skills.

Thanks for sharing and for quality work (you and your team).

I like what I’m hearing. Then again…
I like big heals and I can not lie.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I agree that a healing power investment should feel rewarding, not punishing, to those that wish to play more supportive and healy. However, I fear that right now other professions that also have too much base healing (Engi and Rev come to mind), will not have much changes to theirs and Druid will end up falling behind unless they make sacrifices, while these others don’t.

Ok, so I’ve stated before that I don’t really like Natural Mender (NM) because it pigeon-holes Druid into a healing role and it should be at least swapped with Natural Stride (NS) so every Druid can benefit from NS and be able to take NM if they choose to run a healing spec build. The overwhelming majority of the builds I have seen made and theory crafted myself make almost no use of it, so, I think I want to take this further.

I think it should just be moved into Primal Echoes. Think about it, whenever you are healing consistently, it will be with a staff, to get into CAF, you pretty much need a staff too, if you actually want to run a healing build and benefit from Natural Mender, you will need a staff.

It reminds me of Pure of Sight from the Dragon Hunter. It started off as a +10% damage to foes greater than 600 range, meaning it only worked with the Longbow and the Scepter. The community overwhelmingly agreed that it was pointless and should have just balanced the LB to have the additional damage and do something useful with the trait slot. So they changed it to be 360 range instead of 600, making it work with their staff too.

It is the same with Natural Mender, without a Staff, you probably will not be able to maintain it, so why bother with it as a minor trait if it really requires Staff to function?

Now, my idea is that instead of swapping Natural Stride with Natural Mender, I propose that the Daze component in Primal Echoes be removed and replaced with the Natural Mender mechanic and the Daze become the GM minor trait which would be something like below.

Focus the staff on healing builds, that is what it was made for afterall. Allowing the Daze on any weapon swap and making it a GM minor opens up a world of possibilities!

I know it is powerful with Ancient Seeds and a Hydromancy/Geomancy Sigil, but that is the point. It is not hard to get out of anyway and so many traits and skills exist now that nullify immob or have -condi%. Plus, for it to work, its a fair investment; Druid traitline, GM trait and a sigil. It so happens that the AS CD is 10s, so you can already proc this every time off CD anyway, may as well make a synergy for that to be a build.

Hopefully, if I ever see a ranger succeeding at anything I will kill my entire family!

Ranger didn’t need an elite spec to specialize in DPS since ranger already focuses on DPS.

Elite specializations aren’t suppose to be an upgrade to the core, they are suppose to open up a new playstyle that wasn’t there before.

It’s not a childish response to tell you to simply not play the druid. Druid is a completely optional addition to the profession. Core ranger is still there and still functional without the druid trait line.

So I want to start my wall of text by saying thank you to Anet. Thank you for noticing and dedicating development time to supporting the GvG community with this feature (small note, for now and the rest of my post, the GvG i am referring to is the current 15v or 20v deathmatch, not the Gw1 GvG of old). I really do mean that. This feature should allow our community to flourish and grow, increasing both the competitiveness in large scale Gw2 pvp combat, but also should help WvW by reducing the constant transferring of a chunk of the WvW population in order to pursue the fights we enjoy. I’m also excited about the bigger arena that is in development, and I appreciate that it seems like there will be continuing development in this area. I look forward to working cordially with Anet on this.

However, I am worried about the accessibility of Arenas for many WvW guilds. I am a member of [BMO] Adventurethyme currently located on Crystal Desert, one of the guilds in the “GvG Scene.” I have been involved in GvG/WvWraiding guilds for about 2 years now. And I think that this two-month delay really will hamper much of the enthusiasm for this feature.

Currently, many of the players who have engaged in GvG in the past are on hiatus, waiting for HoT, and watching to see how guild halls effect the scene. Many of these players have been involved for almost 3 years, found the Obsidian Sanctum a godsend, and have been active in feedback and the online community to try to facilitate a better, more healthy GvG scene. Many players are waiting to buy HoT until they see that the arenas work and are effective. If the arenas are so heavily timegated, then many of these players that would return will probably skip buying the expansion, and in the two months that it takes to unlock these arenas, these players may not see what they want, and may forget about the game entirely.

In addition, while many guilds remain for longer periods of time, the typical lifetime of a GvG guild is about 5-6 months. If for the first third of their existence new guilds are unable to fully participate in this system, and can only play against guilds who have been together for at least two months, or borrow time in an arena of another guild. This heavily impacts the accessibility of GvG, as new guilds will have a very hard time starting and sticking.

Also, GvG guilds, and many of the smaller WvW guilds in general, will have big problems producing these guild halls. Most PvE guilds tend to have tiers of involvement, with some number of players on every day for many hours, bulges in population during NA (or EU) Prime-time, with guild members mostly doing their own things, aside from organized guild events (Teq, TTW, Guild missions, champ trains, etc.) This allows guilds that have players that rep and hang out for several hours a day to rake in influence, and often times those players accumulate in game wealth through many of the ways PvE offers.

Most GvG guilds, however, are smaller, and often spend much of their time in WvW, seeking out fights in openfield, or GvGing in Obsidian Sanctum. In most cases, a given guild’s population trickles in, to whatever the guild’s size is peaking at the guilds scheduled raid time. Then, the raid lasts for 2-4 hours, and then most of the players go to bed.

It may seem frivolous to talk about guild schedules and attendance for bigger guilds, but most of the guilds who would utilize the arenas regularly, and specifically for this team deathmatch functionality, have a HUGE disadvantage in producing a guild arena. WvW isn’t very rewarding in gold, and GvG is even less so, which is fine as that’s not the purpose of those game modes, but buying influence to speed the guild hall requires huge amounts of in game gold and influence, which most of the guilds for whom this arena is targeted are sorely lacking.

A combination of these factors may lead to a diminishing and eventual disappearance of the community that all of this development time and effort (which I say again is MUCH appreciated) was intended to benefit. And that is not an ideal situation for anyone involved, game designers or players.

Now, I am DEFINITELY not saying that these arenas should be free and on demand at 12:01 pm PST on launch day. There absolutely SHOULD be effort expended in getting these arenas, and that is an important thing for the implementation of Guild Halls. I get that. I’m just worried about the scale of this SPECIFIC time for this SPECIFIC area of the Guild Halls and unintended consequences occurring.

In terms of constructive ideas, maybe make WvW kills or location captures a way to speed up the process somewhat. Or perhaps have competitions in a neutral guild hall with guild arenas as the reward. I am not a game designer, so my ideas may be stupid, but I have faith in both Anet and the community to come up with a smart solution that makes having a guild arena an achievement for any guild that has one, but is not un-achievable for many guilds who DESPERATELY want them.

tl;dr : I think that a long timegate on Guild Arenas will make them ineffective at addressing some of the concerns of players who are pushing for them the hardest, and I hope that we can find a smart way to address this before the expansion drops. Hopefully we can get a feedback thread started for ideas.

Originally posted by “Olcon.9506”

Alright, I’ve managed to vent all my furious rage for now so I’ll try and keep this relatively constructive.
Today is Thursday morning, so I can say that roughly ~36 hours ago, the Tuesday balance patch went live and the the initial WHAO changes entered the game.
36 hours.
THIRTY.
SIX.
HOURS.
Gaile, I know you’re reading this thread, and I really do appreciate it. Thank you for attempting to communicate with us, and forgive me for directing these rhetorical questions at you.
How long did it take for icebow to get nerfed?
How long did cele d/d elementalist run rampant in the PvP arenas?
How many stacks of might can a warrior give, permanently, to their entire party?
Are rangers autoattackers, or do they primarily use their 2-5 skills to do their damage?
The main cause for my ire in this situation is, more than anything else, the sheer lack of logic demonstrated. What is wrong with a ranger being able to stack might in the first place? My warrior can stack upwards of 15 stacks of might using only his weapon skills, and he doesn’t have to gut his build for it. And he can give it to the ENTIRE PARTY!
For my ranger, before WHAO was nerfed, in order to get 25 stacks of might, I would need to:
Use my Jungle Stalker’s F2 skill, Mighty Roar, which puts it on cooldown for 25 seconds.
Swap my pet (which puts it on cooldown for 20 seconds) to procc Clarion Bond which has an ICD of 30 seconds. A combined 50 second cooldown.
Use Strength of the Pack which has an activation time of 1 second and a cooldown of 60 seconds.
Attack my target to build up might stacks. We’ll say this takes ~5 seconds if I’m saving my Rapid Fire and Barrage.
Use my healing skill We Heal As One (1 second activation time, 20 second cooldown) to transfer my pet’s boons to myself and gain 25 stacks of might if I do this entire rotation properly.
Use LB #2 Rapid Fire to deal ~15k damage in full Berserker gear if all shots land on the target. This is assuming I have LoS and the target does not have anything that would utterly ruin me, such as:

• Any skills or traits utilizing reflect.
• Any skills or traits utilizing block.
• Any skills that utilize invulnerability, which doesn’t include the Warrior’s Defiant Stance ability for some reason despite Defiant Stance doing essentially the same thing with the added bonus of using their damage to heal you.
  If, at any point, Rapid Fire and, to a lesser extent, LB #5 Barrage are somehow negated, I am out of luck. That was my entire burst. The might stacks did not last that long without you removing all damage from your build (this is how you get perma-quickness by the way), and might doesn’t even stack duration anyway.
  I am going to be perfectly honest with you here, Gaile, because honesty is what you need right now, and I truly do ask you to forgive my bluntness. I love Anet and I love Guild Wars 2, but whispering sweet nothings and saying “It’s alright” and “You’ll do better next time” will not help solve the problem.
  In my own, sincerest opinion, this smells like developer incompetence.
  This smells like people who do not understand what the Ranger is capable of and what it is NOT capable of. This smells like people who are balancing a game based on hearsay and not solid numbers and information. And, most importantly, this smells like people who do not understand their playerbase.
  If any of the developers even so much as glanced at the Ranger subforums, they would understand that things here are tense. There are many people here who feel ostracized and feel the developers, in no uncertain terms, simply do not give a flying kitten about them. Are some of them overreacting? Probably. Are there also legitimate concerns based the iffy track record of the profession they love? Definitely.
  What the developers did here was multiply the “They hate the Ranger” issue by a factor of ten. They did not wait to gather data on how the WHAO change might have effected the gameplay environment. They did not wait to see how players would use it. Within hours of the change going live on Tuesday, Ranger players had already isolated the “perma-quickness build” (if it even deserves the term “build”, which is highly disputable in itself) that the balance team feared so much as extremely niche, and determined that it was not worthwhile in any scenario.
  As someone else said, the balance team took a sledgehammer to a situation that needed a scalpel.
  And regarding the “They hate Rangers” issue:
  As an analogy, what happened here is the equivalent of a small child’s perceived bully placing a fun toy before him in an act of goodwill. “Here,” the bully says. “This should be fun to play around with!” Tentatively, the child reaches forward and runs his hand over the toy, thinking of all the fun he could have with it. After allowing the child a moment of happiness, the bully reaches down and snatches the toy away, walking away and leaving the child with nothing. The other children in the background are happily playing with their own toys, either unaware or willfully ignoring the situation.
  This is how the players of this subforum think of the issue. They are the small child, the one tormented by the bully. The background children are the other classes they believe Anet “favors”, most notably Elementalist, Warrior, Mesmer. The toy the bully takes away is the buffed WHAO. And the bully is you, Anet.
  I do not know whether this mindset is based on truth, a circlejerk or some strange, spoiled entitlement issue. Perhaps a combination of all three. But I also believe that the fact it exists at all merits some… concern.

Fluffball.8307:

Not a suspension of disbelief but the fact they just look dumb. Imagine our brown bear model doing the fire wyvern F2

I want this. Anet pls.

We’re like beaten children that are chained up in the basement. Someone brings us food and we yell at them we don’t deserve to eat.

Compare rangers to shout warriors or d/d eles or any other team staple build from over the years. After trying it in a realistic scenario, WHaO is not at all OP in my opinion, and even if it was stronger than it is now it would still be ok; rangers needed and need some buffs.

Cool thing about tinfoil hats is that you can use them to cook with too.

Now that Druid has been revealed and Astral form introduced, wisps have also been introduced with a few skills. Why not change Spirits to Wisps. Make them immune to all damage like Warriors Banners. Also, revert them back to movable of course. A Ranger in Astral form, could make use of Sun Spirit for example. Burn enemy’s while you heal.

You can even go as far as treating Spirits like Glyphs. When in Astral form, your Spirit is swapped to a Wisp with new abilities etc.

What worries me is that all Druid skills that affect allies have a radius of 240 or 300. This includes Glyphs, Traits , Staff and Celestial Form.

I know the druid was “healing through positioning” but that radius sounds extremely small for regular gameplay.

If Druid only works in highly organised groups, then Druid could easily be a failure in all other aspects of the game and maybe even in most organised groups.

Invigorating Bond (GM trait) also has 300 radius, and it’s never used because of it. Harmonic Cry (Moa) is great, but it’s as good as worthless because of its 240 radius. Druid only expands the number of these skills that noone ever uses because of the extremely short radius.

This game is 90% about dynamic movement and staying mobile. 10% is about stacking on top of eachother, but only in highly organised groups in WvW and PvE.

I fear all these skills will end up on the garbage heap simply because of the radius. I’m sure in-house testing by ANet makes it seem great and awesome, but the general public is not interested to try and make these skills work.

I have a feeling the first raid will be forced to use these Ranger mechanics of short range support, just so they can say: “See, we told you Invigorating Bond is great”.

Just Wanna add these here again:

• Healing power Stat on Pets
• Please Add A Stun Break on The glyphs So rangers are not forced to get the base stun breakers again
• Please add Conditions on the Staff and Astral Form, so that it is not pigeonholed into super HEALING perspective.
• Change Invigorating Bond Radius to Atleast 450 to make it worthwhile traiting.

Druid is like the Oprah of healing in gw2 at the moment.

“And you get a heal! And you get a heal! And you get a heal! EVERYONE HERE GETS HEALS!”

Guys, don’t forget that elite specs are supposed to be new takes on the existing professions; new paths that open up that they previously couldn’t take, not straight up upgrades (ie "more of the same, just a little better). What did Ranger lack? Group support. What does Druid give us? Group support.

Sorry, OP, but I find the idea of elite RPers pretty hilarious.

I can just imagine them getting all shrill and livid and gradually turning purple, behind their screens, as people type too slowly, or get the lore wrong.

Someone should do a show about these people, quite frankly…

Comedy gold.

Guys that’s clearly a Quaggan as a pet.

Probably the disappointed kind of druid.

Honestly believe it to be a distraction from whatever got scrapped.

At this point, why are we letting ourselves even debate what it could be?

Wednesday/Thursday blogs should drop, and Friday is the reveal. Time to buy a ton of alcohol to drink in either celebration or to forget an awful reveal, or make a drinking game and take a drink (not a shot, you might die) every time the devs look displeased to be talking about ranger, sigh, or have no idea what they are talking about in regards to Ranger (“most dangerous game looks really strong, it will definitely need toning down, hue hue hue”).