Guild Wars 2

The reason of the “hate in the community towards the ranger class” is becoz ranger is underdog since day1. Ranger has been considered as a free kill for so long time, then once any viable competitive build appears, it makes ranger not a easy kill. “Lose to a ranger” is the biggest shame to other classes — that’s where the hate comes from.

I managed to get 40 chests and keys together buying swapping gold etc and unlocked them put them in my bank not know they were SOULBOUND and deleted the character as I didn’t enjoy it not knowing that they were SOULBOUND and now I have unlocked chests laughing at me and tuanting me every time I open my bank who’s stupid kitten idea was it to have them SOULBOUND!!!!!! In the first place I want to cry

6) Pet class that harms pets, contradicting by design – This one should be a bit more straightforward too. As the “pet class,” why do rangers have to go abusing their pets in order to gain survival? Signet of Renewal, “Protect Me,” and Empathic Bond all kill/harm the pet. The same pet which devs have stressed to the players the need to work with in order to maximize combat potential. It just seems very counter intuitive the rangers have more functional “pet killers” than utilities that actually allow players to effectively work with their pet. What happened to skills from Guild Wars 1 like Predatory Bond, Strike as One, Symbiotic Bond, and Companionship?

7) More functionality/gameplay options for pets – Why is the pet just a DPS option? There are quite a few problems that could be fixed with more options to build around with for pets. Why do they always just have to be a damage option? The game needs more traits like Mighty Swap and Vigorous Swap, where you can choose to use your pet for utility options like giving boons and supporting rather than damage. It sure would open up playstyle diversity to have more options to gear pets towards other than “damage or more damage.”

8) Trait reorganization stressing hybridization over heavy investment – This one seems pretty straightforward too. Basically, Signets, Spirits (more so previously than now), and Traps all require 30 trait points to make otherwise pretty mediocre utilities useful (only 20 with Spirits now). Heck, signets don’t even work on the player without a grandmaster trait. For rangers, this is probably the biggest hindrance to build diversity that needs to be addressed. The utilities already require heavy investment in the utility slots to be worthwhile (Traps and Spirits both typically work better with at least 2, to even 3 slots). Adding another 30 point trait requirement on top of that makes ranger builds have to build with heavy investment in order to be successful, for the most part. Just as Spirits Unbound was moved down to the master tier, Trap Potency and Signet of the Beastmaster really should be looked at for similar reworks/repositions to open up more build opportunities.

9) Lack of immediately recognizable role for team compositions – This is more of a concept than it is a true issue. Basically, the ranger doesn’t have a whole lot that offers competitive options for a team composition to the degree where players think that rangers are worth slotting over other classes. More prevalent in PvE/Dungeons and WvW than PvP, but really, rangers only offer Spotter and Frost Spirit in certain circumstances like dungeons (this is mostly where you see this build selection). Outside of Spotter and Spirits, everything the ranger does is accomplished by other classes. But, as mentioned earlier, Spirits suffer from the same issues that pets do; not scaling well the larger an engagement gets, due to their killable nature. On top of that, most ranger builds require a trait investment that forces them to specialize more than other classes and in the process give up other offensive or defensive options that those other classes still have access to. Overall, every class should be able to compete for slots on a team composition equally, by either bringing something unique and helpful to that team composition, or by bringing something similarly competitive in function to other classes, while being able to provide more of a unique role/addition elsewhere.

Overall, this sums up where many people in the ranger community feel that ranger is at balance and as far as quality of life changes are concerned. Any feedback, especially developer feedback, is welcome.

The original discussion started within the ranger community can be found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/The-State-of-Balance-discussion/page/1

Discuss

The reasoning:

1) Pet Responsiveness – Last year, nearing the last balance patch, a developer response was kind enough to enlighten the ranger community with the information that the pet skill lag, particularly, the response time of the pet F2 key, is dealt with through the server because pet AI is coded off of the games creature AI. Essentially, this means that using this F2 skill basically just adds the unique skill to the AI action queue for the pet to use at its earliest convenience. This is a problem. Lack of true control over the single player dictated skill on a class whose pet AI has to be continuously be band aid fixed in order to improve basic functionality is a serious problem. This needs to be more reliable, especially since it is one of the only ways a player can actively utilize their pets skills to use the F2 skill on demand when needed during a fight. Without this skill taking full precedence and being reliable, its success rate has so much disparity that it ends up being more rage inducing than helpful.

2) Reliance on a small handful of traits for every working build – This area could be said to be aimed directly at Empathic Bond, since it is the only form of reliable cleansing that is strong enough, particularly for a competitive environment. That specific example aside, there is an issue that is not ranger specific with certain traits in this game becoming a “staple” for almost every build deemed viable by the community, which limits build diversity.

3) Pet survival not balanced adequately for large scale engagements – This area seems self-explanatory, but basically, the ranger, whose class mechanic is an “always-on” pet in which the players damage is balanced around, does not have functionality that scales well with how large engagements, specifically in modes like WvW. This often results in ranger players sacrificing what most would consider a fairly significant portion of their damage during these large scale engagements, either by way of having a passive or a dead pet. Being that this is the class mechanic and was designed with an always-on design, there shouldn’t be any instance in which the class mechanic is rendered as ineffective as it can be currently.

4) Utilities completely outclassing other utilities – There are a lot of utilities the ranger has access to that can just be considered to have a “null” function. The shouts really don’t do much and really don’t compete with the functions of the rest of the other utilities. Keen Edge (trait) is the only time Sharpening Stone ever sees any use. Frost Trap is very underwhelming for its cooldown. But just generally, there are utility slot options that just don’t functionally compete with other options that can be taken, which is very limiting to build diversity.

5) Weapons not having unique and competitive functions/roles versus content – In a nutshell, weapons seem like they should ideally all be unique and have a specialty role as far as functionality goes, in order to get players to actively make the best weapon selections for the content and their build/etc. However, functionally, the ranger bows are very bland and unexciting weapons, and the ranger longbow especially, which provides very underwhelming functions and damage. Sword and Greatsword compete directly with each other, as both are power based melee weapons with evasive/defensive capabilities, and Axe (and Dagger) competes directly with the shortbow so closely that the only difference aside from an interrupt is deciding what conditional bleed application you want. This leaves only offhand weapons to compare. Really, the weapons just need to be more different from each other, and less subjectively boring in some cases.

First off, due to the lack of the lack of, or assumed lack of experience when it comes to balancing Guild Wars 2, this write up will push to make sure that the aim of the write up, which is to present an organized list of areas in which the ranger class could be rebalanced with explanations as to why these areas are being considered as having enough weaknesses to justify the potential rebalancing of them.

While suggestions are more than welcome for discussion purposes in order to create examples to make examples so that discussions can progress more smoothly, ideally, this thread should remain to discuss the Quality of Life and balance change areas being suggested for improvement, while debating whether or not any additional line items are in need of being listed. However, because specific example discussions are deemed in the developer sticky to be more useful than more generalized topics, suggestions should definitely be worked into the discussion and discussed, as to comply with this forums guidelines.

This is going to be the initial list of areas that has been discussed within the ranger subforum as having a need for either some sort of rebalance of overhaul. Here, they will just be listed, and later on, explanations will be provided as reasoning. Due to the earlier statement that essentially states that the playerbase, for the most part, doesn’t have enough information in front of them as far as direction/core balance/balance philosophies/etc goes, these explanations will refrain from making suggestions as to what to overhaul or rebalance things to. More so, this list is just a statement of where a portion of the ranger community has taken a stance of the position of the rangers class balance across various game types, versus other classes, and within itself.

The list:

• Pet responsiveness
• Reliance on small handful of traits for every working build
• Pet survival not being balanced adequately for large scale engagements
• Utilities completely outclassing other utilities
• Weapons not having unique and competitive functions/roles versus content
• Pet class that harms pets, contradicting by design
• More functionality/gameplay options for pets
• Trait reorganization stressing hybridization over heavy investment
• Lack of immediately recognizable role for team compositions

• The core combat mechanics are bad/overly simplified.
• Auto-attacking is sufficient to easily get through 99% of the content.
• Skills are very generic. No choice in skills.
• Most traits are ineffectual and barely change anything.
• The AI is terrible.

If this game required a subscription, it would have died faster than AOC/WAR/SW:TOR.

- Combat is kittening boring : just go full Zerk and spam dodge rolls, autoattack….
- Lack of skills: most of them are either useless or boring/uninspired , so are the traits.
- Lack of rewards.
- PvP: since GW2 is the successor of GW1 ( which probably had the best PVP ever made)I would have expected something way better than this boring conquest…. absolutely one the worst (if not the worst) PvPs I’ve seen in my entire life.
- DR
- RNG, RNG everywhere.
- Super casual.
- Ascended gear.

I’m sure I did not mention something, but that’s all for now..

You’ve had your point with the armors, but unfortunately you base everything on a Mr Sparkles mini. That point in itself is giving players opportunity to get something that till now could only be obtained for hundreds of dollars on ebay. Something like this encourages people to buy gems and use them for their own good, since some of us buy gems on regular basics anyways. Plus, they didn’t have to do anything to begin with to give us any kind of reward for gem purchases.
What should’ve been your point, it should be the new helmet skins that are 500 gems each. For a helm. The first gem store armor sets were 500 gems each. Which was pricey at the time, but they looked pretty cool. Then they came up with 800 gems sets that were fully newly designed giving a fresh feel to your character. Still bit pricey at 800 gems, but justifiable.
Then they took a wrong turn with toxic release and gloves and shoulders for 400 gems each. Two pieces of armor for the price of a full set. Given they look good, but 400 is way overpriced for one piece of gear.
Now… The new helmets… 500 gems each. One piece of gear which some of us have turned off most of the time for the old price of a full set of armor. If it keeps going that way we’ll have boots or gloves worth 800 gems each. And I don’t want to get into the whole debate on how bad of a choice was the last “set” of armors introduced. In my opinion they should’ve taken all of them down and rework each of them to make them unique, not some cheap karma armor with some fire sparkles on it.

I do agree with some of the OP’s sentiment that the attention and focus in this game has shifted too much to the gemstore. We need to regain a healthy balance again.

Account bound gemstore dyes, and skill-based exclusive armor skins would be a leap in the right direction. Let Evon go on a well deserved holiday for a while, give our wallets and our naive notion of integrity some time to catch up with the flurry of gemstore activity of the last three months.

It’s simply gemstore overkill now.

ACT 1 is in: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Disrespect-in-gem-store/first#post3306486

Please read at least 1st post, but If you don’t want here is a summary:
I wrote before how gem store is just showing bad nature by making reskins and then the shameful (for me) option to buy mini Sparkles for real live money and get equivalent with 4k gems (since you can get it only by paying with real money).

ACT 2 now.

Now we get another gem store way to make people feel bad.
Many of us bought unlimited gathering tools, at least 1 set to swap it around characters. Some bought few and others like me bought (11 sets) for all of my characters.

It was fine for us all to be able to gather it all and have fun. You kinda pay a lot of money (really for every player that just play the game and spends money on it), for something that EVERYONE, just everyone pointed as a best in slot item.

I know. I know. ANet never said it will be true, but they make those items return 2 times, released another set of those unlimited gathering tools and everyone seemed to just like everyone thought: It’s best in slot with all different skins.

THAT WAS OUR MISTAKE. Don’t trust it. Don’t trust anything you see.
It’s just not true in GW2…

Now it’s thank you but since you didn’t pay fortune for the latest models you won’t get additional money from selling sprockets that drop like crazy with 20% chance per use.
Not to mention that this way they will just kill any value that sprockets could have in TP (great move, I tell you).

From another thread on the topic of mining picks:

This isn’t P2W people. You aren’t winning the game by getting a few more mats from a node.
This, however, is a slap to the face to people who bought previous mining picks.

So in the end we get a great imbalance in TP and slap in the face for everyone who ever bought the tools for themselves.

I don’t know what to do now?
Hold my purchases until something is labeled as legendary (games BiS)?
Or will it be also replaced by something else?

I thought they made nice gesture be making my tools bound to account even though I never needed it. But now I will know that every time I look on them or just use them I will know that I use inferior stuff. Some will say it’s OK with them, but for me for paying as much as I did for my tools – this is just disappointing and DISRESPECTFUL.

(Please NO DRAMA here)
I will also ask people who bother to read this post to the end:
How many slaps in the face do you need to stop caring for updates and leave GW2?

I personally am very invested a lot in GW2 since playing in GW1, but since my ACT 1, I started searching for alternative game, so I’m not yet out but I’m thinking about it a lot.
I guess I will see how many slaps is my limit. How many is yours?

This thread again? It’s been explained a million times. Anything a ranger can do another class can do better.

4600 hours played, 12000 achievements including all Slayer and about 3/4 of the weapons ones.
500 exotic greatswords thrown into the forge before I was broke and gave up (about 800 gold plus a lot of dungeon tokens).
Countless (500 last month alone Rare weapons put into the forge…I put every set of 4 rare weapons I find into it)
Been playing since launch…I have had all of my gifts for twighlight for a little over 6 months (since the last Bazaar of the 4 winds).

Never seen a precursor.

Friend joined the game 1 month ago. I mentioned how I use dungeon tokens to “throw greatswords away” in the mystic forge. He decided he wanted Kudzu (he plays ranger), started doing TA for the gift…threw 4 longbows into the forge bought with TA tokens after he bought his gift…got leaf of kudzu on first try.

I almost quit the game entirely….not a fan of RNG or the current precursor / legendary system. I think precursors / Legendaries should be earned and not RNG or bought off TP.

TL;DR summary at the bottom if you don’t wanna read this wall.

‘Unparalleled Archers’

The physical damage is simply terrible compared to the archetypal weapons of other professions. My level 50 Warrior deals far, far more DPS than my zerker longbow ranger.

Now, I’m not going to say it’s completely useless – at the moment I’m having fun in zergs stacking as much might as I can and seeing how much I can crit with the auto attack at max range. But that’s about all it’s good for right now, and even then that kind of gameplay gets boring REAL quick. Why should my zerker ranger be limited to that kind of gameplay?

Why has this issue still not been addressed? Should the longbow not be considered the ranger’s archetypal weapon of choice, as the staff is for the ele and the greatsword is for the warrior?

It’s easy to say “oh well the pet makes up for the lost damage” but it just doesn’t because of the terrible AI and the ease with which other players can avoid their attacks.

EDIT: up till now we’ve only seen trivial updates to the longbow. Anet have not addressed the core issues (apart from auto attack speed, but even then the difference is just not enough to bring the bow to par with other mechanics). We’ve been given gimmicks. e.g. the stealth on skill 3. Everyone was excited at first but it didn’t take long for us to realise it was ‘meh’, because it just doesn’t flow that well with the other skills.

As it stands, the longbow has no solid direction in its purpose. The most “viable” use for it currently stands as a long-range auto-attack physical damage weapon, but that gameplay is seriously limited and flawed. The way in which the skills are set up suggest that it should be a physical DPS weapon, suited to a zerker build with decent burst damage. Just as the GS is to the warrior and the dual daggers are to the thief. But it is just too weak for that purpose. Skill 2, rapid fire, is far too easy avoid and compared with the damage potential in PvE does almost completely insignificant damage to PvP/WvW targets. To be at all viable, this skill needs to have either a significant damage boost or to be given double its current execution speed. Alternatively, replace it with a single, stronger-than-auto-attack shot that has a lower cooldown.

Allow us to cast barrage (skill 5) while moving. It takes too long to cast as it is (and is avoided by most anyway), and in zerg fights it’s all too easy to get downed while trying to make the most of your primary AoE skill.

Make skill 1 faster, or increase its damage. Anet seem to have attempted to take the ‘sniping’ route with this auto-attack, but it’s still too weak and too easy to avoid. Now, I’m not saying it’s completely terrible: in-fact skill 1 is the only current appeal to actually use the LB if you’re zerg fighting in an attempt to pick off enemies from the back lines. But it’s not a killer. It’s too weak.

These are a few ideas. I expect if they were all implemented, it would become OP. I’m not expecting that. However some of these key issues NEED to be addressed.

TL;DR Summary

- LB damage terrible in comparison to the archetypal weapons of other profs (GS warrior; staff ele; dagger thief; rifle engineer).

- LB skills seem geared towards making it a zerker-based physical DPS weapon (as it should be; we have nothing else as suited to the role). But it’s too weak.

- Up till now we’ve seen trivial, almost useless updates to the LB.

- Skill 1: needs to be stronger or quicker; Skill 2: stronger or quicker or replaced with a single, powerful shot with a lower CD or added debuffs; Skill 3: is fine for now; Skill 4: only truly useful LB skill; Skill 5: allow movement when casting.

Rangers bow shots need to move much faster, they are too slow and very easy to avoid.
Pet issues, ANET said there is no fix for pets. I agree that we should have a ranger build that does not have to use pets. Put pets into the traits , make it an early 5 pt trait if you want a pet.

I still haven’t figured out why Rangers cant use guns….Must be the trigger that throws them. /sarcasm.

This only happens when you as a thief want to stay in the fight. A ranger who can win you in 1v1 can never chase/catch you if you decide to escape. The ranger who has the ability to chase/catch you will be melted in 3 seconds by your BS+HS.

~a ranger

I would pay serious gems for a Morgan Freeman voice-over pack.

Zanshin.5379:

RoyalPredator.9163:

• There are confirmed users constantly getting precursors, expensive items & Ascended chests. For this happening, it has a multiper less chance than winning RL lottery.
• My consequences: RNG is broken, and Accounts somehow go “lucky” or “unlucky” on creation. I’m investigating the connections…

That’s not how accounts work.
There is a database. For it to be a difference between accounts there would have to be a “luck” value with either a number (percentage) or just an on/off. Do you really think the devs would even add that? What would be the purpose?

RNG is RNG. People try to find a logic behind it when they’re unlucky. There is no logic, just RNG. And that’s why people are complaining. They can work their kitten off for months and never get lucky at the forge and be forced to buy their precursor. And to me and a lot of people, buying a precursor isn’t “legendary” at all.

Conclusion: it’s still Anet’s fault. They should have given us a legendary scavenger hunt instead of a pointless grind. No RNG, no grind, no buyable precursors.

Q: What do you call Ascalonian wine?
A: Charr-donay.

If Caithe formed an all-sylvari guild, she could call it “Destiny’s Hedge”.

Q: How do you get directions in an area littered with deranged ghosts?
A: Ask-a-loony-one

Q: What would you call a structure like the Black Citadel?
A: Charr-chitecture.

She should dye her hair red, we could call her Queen Henna.

Q: What would you call the shiftier parts of the asura capital?
A: The Rata Slum

Nekomi.9562:

Nobody else has any luck with anything but Trading Post . _ . ?

LOL. are you serious? I hate this part of this game exactly because of all that luck that floats around players like you.

1200G ~ spent at mystic forge: 0 precursors

over 2000 hours of gameplay doing all content of the game : 0 precursors

Maybe you should be more grateful that you got 6 freaking precursors with those tries.

Mystic forge: 6-700g = 0 precursors.

Open world farming: 3,685 hours of which most spent in dungeons and different farming event = 0 precursors

Trading Post: Howl, Tooth of Frostfang and Leaf of Kudzu, all bought with money made from the dungeons/events.

Crit builds should be fixed on objects, but I don’t think the problem is really comparable. A berserker build loses roughly 50 percent of its damage on an object. A condition build loses 90 to 95 percent, depending on the weapon’s power coefficient.

Plus, most condition builds rely on crits for procs.

Like I’ve said in the original thread, I understand there’s a technical problem with bandwidth. But then the technical limitation should be designed around, not completely ignored. It’s not even like the problem is small right now; literally two condition builds can cap a boss and effectively ruin an encounter for dozens of people.

In a vain attempt, I’ll try to keep this post away from corporate politics. Regardless, I believe that certain corporate-wide policies need to be re-examined in terms of game development & maintenance, patch/update presentation and community interaction for the future.

About transparency: not limited to recent WvW scandals and community outrage, I believe we could use some form of issue-tracker and update-scheduler, present on forums or a "sister" website to main guild wars 2 website (and definitely visible as a tab on main website, as well as a link from the forums).

Issue-tracker:

- a list of all current problems with the game, separated by tabs (graphics, sound, gameplay etc.)
- every problem defined: what, how, why, temporary workarounds, ETA (be it a week, month or unscheduled)
- every problem discussed: separate thread purposefully moved away from general technical/support forums

The purpose:

- community is informed about bugs, knows they’re being worked on: less duplicates and false-positives, feedback about singular issue concentrated in a single thread
- technical forum is still accessible to users requesting personal help, or bringing up new/unconfirmed issues (less forum clutter - identified issues are moved to a separate tab or place, to reduce the chaos)

Update-scheduler:

- less technical and more general in nature, outlines game going forward in new directions (be it fixing a core gameplay system/feature, or adding new systems/features, not limited to: maps, professions, skills, events, game modes, encounter types, conditions/boons/states)
- fosters community dialogue & feedback before features go live (including: philosophical, mechanical and social consequences for the game and it’s players)

Last Words

In varying intensity and form, we’ve already seen some of these steps taken by Anet: "creative design" blogs, feature blogs and posts, progress/update posts, feature videos. What is lacking, however, are two things: consistency of approach and organisation.

Organisation: central go-to place to study and discuss existing game problems in depth, as well as game-going-forward features which are in the works, but with more flexible schedule and final content/design.

Consistency: all current issues and future features are documented, catalogued and freely discussed with the community as a prime community relations policy, NOT "as exception" rule: when under duress of public outrage, trying to limit damage after scandal/leak or "almost everything is ready so now we talk about it" mentality.

Summarising, the irrational fear of: exploits becoming public knowledge, developers being publically lynched for missing a deadline/feature, needs to go.

Exploits: make a public list of bannable offenses, gather public feedback about them and fix them faster.

Missing a deadline/feature: players have to understand that not every feature will get implemented on time, at all or in the form outlined in early design sketch or philosophy - simultaneously, playerbase as a whole shouldn’t be punished for simple curiosity and interest in the ongoing health of game and it’s continuing success.

Purposefully brick-walling and withdrawing critical information about game issues and your policy towards fixing them until the very last moment causes permanent community damage - loss of players and declining morale. I believe we deserve better.

In short: please be more upfront about your game design, talk with us openly and accept constructive criticism where it’s due. Failing that, we will see more hostility towards developers and the company, more conspiracy theories and generally poor player feedback. Worst communication is silence.

Trivia:

- "Roadmap" http://www.planetside2.com/roadmap
- "the problem, what we’ll do to fix it and the philosophy behind it" post https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/operation-make-faster-game.150281/
- "update/issue" discussion thread https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/october-on-going-performance-improvements.152361/
- "when forum or blog post is not enough" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaHgTR4yyuU

Thank you but what about client side optimizations? We were promised some major engine/client side optimizations to improve our fps in WvW 6~ months ago, has this project been dropped because I haven’t seen anything regarding client performance since then

Thank you for your work on fixing the lag. I’m actually optimistic that this will make difference in WvW.

On the other hand, what about FPS issues? Apparently a lot of players, despite having top-of-the-line PC, are still having experiencing below 20fps on very crowded events.