Guild Wars 2

So happy about the LB change. No mention about splitting pet dps between PvE/PvP, though?

I had to log in to the official site to verify that this was not some massive, well orchestrated, multi-forum troll.

gg Anet.

Lets never again refer to Guardians as GA’s…agreed? lol…

Why the heck does a Tier 4 Server SoS, Tier 2 TC, get matched up with SoR?

We are getting farmed, its the first freaking day and we are already getting siege spawn camped on our own borderlands

Please for the love of god nerf the god kitten perma-stealth build. It is such a pile of crap that I have to use stealth traps to kill a thief anymore. If you won’t nerf the build, then at least give some classes something that cancels out stealth. Im not talking crap AC skills and expensive traps, im talking like an actual skill or two.

Thieves are broken. I rolled one myself to learn to counter one and found out that Thieves just have such a huge benefit from just having rolled that profession its silly.

I am by no means a good Thief, i only very recently got to 80 and went into WvW. Yet, last night i defeated 3 Thieves in WvW solo. No, they were not upleveld. And it all became clear.

Simple. Most Thieves are just terrible at this game. Absolute rubish. And that explains all the “ow i kill thieves all the time in WvW” we see. If you build to be very durable, or are skilled and have a good reaction time to counter an opening, yah you beat them. Because 9 out of 10 Thieves dont know what to do when theyr insta-gib fails.

That doesnt excuse the fact that any idiot can press two buttons and essentially gib someone. But countering this play takes a great deal more skill and experience. Its no where near the same level of play.
Just because something can be countered by being a much better player doesnt mean its balanced, infact it means the opposite.

dovrak.4376:

Helcor.9527:

Pavel.8531:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Fighting-thieves-in-WvW

Helping you out. Btw I am a thief and engis(good ones) are even worse than guards to 1v1.

Thief damage is high. Too high.

Didn’t you face fresh air S/D eles? or actually shatter mesmers? They’ll take you down whitout even going stealth. And necros can burst equally high these days. To say that thieves burst is op isn’t only false, it’s outdated.

Thieves burst is OP because they can do it over and over with no danger of dying due to stealth abuse. Other classes need to commit if their combo is countered they are in the fight win or lose. Stealth mesmers can get away also but their reset time to abuse stealth is much longer then thieves they also do not have the movement skills.

It’s quite simple:

1. SoloQ should be in the game when the game was released.
2. The fact that it was NOT, is one of the main reasons pvp players were leaving the game in hordes. Hot-join is a joke of course, and getting matched up against pre-mades when you soloQ is an ever bigger joke…
3. Now there isn’t enough players left to even make a decent soloQ where you don’t get matched up against pre-mades. There’s only a handful of teams still playing tournies. I often just get tired of waiting for the tourny to begin and just exit the game…

SoloQ just can’t work if there isn’t enough players. And it’s all Anets fault that there isn’t many of them left.

That’s what happens when you release a game that has PvP features in Alpha state.

runeblade.7514:

I wrote long paragraphs before but I could never get around to submit it so I will keep this short.

Dungeons are boring and easy. There needs to be a hard mode. A mode where you have to think even after doing the dungeon 100 times similar to sPvP. Call it hard mode so that players can’t complain how dungeons are hard.

Combat needs to be more like sPvP, where the combat is most fun. Mobs need to be more active. Mobs needs to give more boons that make their attack deadly. Mobs need to chain CC and actually kill the player. Dungeons should not cater to brain dead grinders that wants the game to be easy. Mobs need to evade player’s burst. PvE Hundred Blade Zerkers needs to be as effective as sPvP Hundred blade zerkers.

Battles should never be “Stack here! and DPS the mob down.” Sure, it is a tactic. But it makes the game boring. There needs to be counters to that.

Mob AI should be reactive rather than spammy(See Subject Alpha). Mobs fighting a full group of hundred blade zerkers? Place weakness on them, dodge backwards, observe how sPvP players counter those. Mobs should never be static. Mobs should heal like players can to replace the high hp pool.

Bosses should never be a punching bag. Instead, they should act like your 5 man party is fighting a skilled solo player or a computer AI that cheats.

In conclusion, the dungeon team should observe sPvP and tPvP to design the mob and boss AI. Of course, Computer intelligence will never be the same as human intelligence but when making comptuer AI as close as possible to human intelligence, it can be much more fun than the trash AI we have right now. GW1 was designed the same way, until heroes were added that can instantly interrupt everything. I am sure that GW2 won’t add heroes or henchmen anytime soon.

Why? Because our skills are balanced around sPvP. If we have a PvP/PvE skill split, it still won’t make dungeons any kitten ring. It will make other profession kill faster.

Your title and post content are misleading-you say dungeons should be fixed, but when you elaborate what you’re saying is ‘we need better AI’. Why are they not necessarily the same? A dungeon can be put in with randomly generated environmental threats at a particular say jumping puzzle-it could be difficult. It might not be boring or easy, and you’d still have to pay attention after doing it 100 times-the mobs could still behave like mindless drones. Or to use games to illustrate-‘I want to be the guy gaiden’ is not boring, not easy and you need obscene amounts of dexterity regardless of the amount of times you’ve beaten it but the AI is mindless-it’s not Alma from ‘Ninja Gaiden’.

I’m all for better AI though-not just gw2; it’s something I’ve been clamouring about for years. With all the advancement and focus made on making smoke, walls, water, hair and grass look prettier this past decade or so-why on earth are game still using enemy AI that appears to have been used in the 1990’s? Sadly…it won’t happen-because, as I said it’s not just gw2, rather the entire industry.

WTB adaptive AI

When players start going into melee with their Rangers they will realise that Rangers aren’t as bad as they make them out to be. Use some spider pets in WvW (they can stop escaping players too) and they won’t die as quickly.

Pets die easily in dungeons when there is lots of ground aoe / red circles, they can’t dodge so they take all the damage, the new dungeons are showing very well what is wrong with ranger pets. The “jumping the traps” and the final boss part Molten Facility, the laser room and final boss in Aetherblade Retreat are the best examples that Anet devs should be playing, and try to find ways for the pet to survive in ANY of those. When they find a way for the pet to survive in those types of encounters most of the pet issues will be solved.

If you want to play Ranger in dungeons, learn how to use the sword from an early level where mobs don’t hit as hard.

Uther Deathhand.1570:

From this it looks like there will be no point in spending time doing cof more than once a day instead of running other dungeons.

randomfightfan.4091:

Why do people keep saying guardians? They don’t have that much damage

They do actually.

Twice nothing is still nothing – Cyrano Jones, “The Trouble with Tribbles”

/irony mode on

Oh noes! If CoF farmers leave CoF… and will spread dungeon wide with all their “elitist” character I don’t even want to know how the dungeons run will look like or how the gw2lfg posts will look like! “LF3Warriors 1Mes for Arah p3 link YT video of you defeating lupicus solo under 10 min + gearcheck”

LOL

/irony mode off

For real it’s on of the best changes ever made to dungeons. Hopefully it won’t be another fail.

I used to get them semi-regularly from the Dwayna temple event, but not anymore. I’m hoping it’s a temporary bad luck spree. :P

Flissy.4093:

ilr.9675:

unless they can post multiple screenshots of chests they pop containing Charged Cores. (which they won’t b/c most of them don’t even have the right servers or skill to complete those Encounters)

Oh great master, tell me how you can comprehend a players in game ability from a forum thread!

It doesn’t take a lot of comprehension to see that you are not really contributing anything to the discussion and are only trolling those with a legitimate question.

Edit: I have had a charged lodestone and a charged core drop in the past day. This without farming them or even doing CoE. I’ve no idea from whence they dropped even, just that they were in my bags when I cleaned them out, which I do regularly.

4 words:

Better late than never.

rest in peace my loyal gold farming slaves

The original Guild Wars was released with 6 professions, each with more or less 75 skills, in a total of more or less 450. The game was akittens peak, PvP wise and balance-wise, a bit before the release of Factions, the second chapter; that was when the best Korean guilds like War Machine and The Evil Empire gave shows of skill in the World Championship tournament in Taipei, for example. A couple years later, the game had 10 professions and more than one thousand skills, way more than ArenaNet could even hope to balance. The PvP community basically died, and PvE was filled with professions that were designed in groups only when using a single specific gimmick.

Now, in Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has announced they are going to add more skills and traits. I can’t help but wonder if the game is really ready for that. Looking at guardians, mesmers, elementalists and necromancers, they appear to be somewhat balanced (despite how there are still many relatively useless skills and traits among those professions). Everything else… Just no. If ArenaNet has not even balanced what we have currently, what hope do they have of being able to deal with even more skills and traits?

I realize a lot of players want more skills. I also realize that, often, what players want is not what is best for a game.

First off, I appreciate all of the lovely things that Anet is adding into the game. I think its great, and a hell of an improvement compared to mass expansion mode in gw1.

I also understand that Rangers are still very much viable, and still a fun class to play. I’ve been a Ranger in GW for 8+ years. My Ranger is my Commander. Through both games Ranger has been my main. I made it a point to get 100% map completion, full gear, and the best of anything I could as a Ranger because it’s the class I loved most from gw1. And then I played other classes and realized why people kick Rangers from dungeon groups, clown them in wvw, and most of the time outright refuse to run higher end Fractals with a Ranger in the party.

There are some great ways to play a Ranger, but there is nothing that a Ranger can roll through 100% of the game that is anywhere remotely close to being as desired as any other class. Patch after patch, fix after fix, nerf after nerf…things have improved and things have worsened. And unless something is done to fix the Ranger…more and more players are going to be discouraged. Not everyone has more than 1 lvl 80. And those whose main is a Ranger…getting dropped from groups, getting rolled in 1v1’s, and being a downright outcast of a class…it’s depressing. And I highly doubt that 100% of them are motivated to reroll to something more desired by the public.

I’ve clutched many guild groups dungeons, I’ve trapped many points in pvp for holds, and I’ve rolled through borderlands with heavenly arrows raining from my bow. But I was surrounded by good people confident in my abilities. But seeing the way Rangers are treated in every aspect of the game by the general public is sad.

It’s been ten months. Close to a year. The point where Colin is talking about all of the wonderful things to come, yet no word on fixing the 1/6th of the professions that no one really ever asks for in a group much less has confidence in unless they know said ranger & are confident in them.

Like I said, Rangers are great in the right hands. Rangers are great when the people you’re playing with know you and know that you as a Ranger can hold your own. Rangers are my favorite class. And it sucks to know that every other class is better at anything and everything a Ranger can do.

Instead of hyping up the incoming content, why not un-eff one of Guild Wars most beloved professions? If it wasn’t for my 7 years in gw1 having a blast doing anything and everything as a Ranger I wouldn’t have even bought this game. But until something changes…I’d rather roll any/everything else. At least I know I’m safe in a pick up group.

/$0.02

ilr.9675:

Kasama.8941:

And in PvP, a Ranger will mostly feel like damage output is too low, because the pet is not consistently hitting (or is dead) like in PvE. So it’s basically like playing two playstyles. One playstyle relies on the pet, the other tries to make up for the lack of damage.

I find snippets like this… a lot more informative for some reason than all the advice and lecturing from the number crunchers for some reason. So upon reading it , I decided to run around WvW looking for some test cases, IoW: ppl who could run forever without being boxed in by the Conquest format. …Yeah I think I see what you mean.

They also told me I’d have to basically apply a cover condition every 2 seconds just to keep cripple on them… (not only so I could keep up with them myself, but so that my pets could even make contact). They divided and conquered by forcing unexpected 1v1’s and simply couldn’t be downed…also told me the only good ranger there was something called RRR build. I’m guessing that’s some gimmick that lets the pet actually deal damage still? Regardless… it felt like their personal positions on skill curves was a game changer in general

Well, like most other professions, the Ranger is kinda forced into specific builds in PvP. The pet can’t hit consistently, the Ranger is bad at burst damage, and you don’t have any good way to support your allies. But the Ranger has good evades and good regeneration capabilities, and is good at stacking control conditions. So this means that the Ranger is forced into playing bunker builds, because of all the evades and regeneration, or builds that relies on stacking conditions, mostly because of traps. This is also because what these two builds do, is make sure that your pet will hit more often. When you play a bunker build, you can keep close to a foe and lock him down (mostly with sword), meaning he won’t be able to run around too much. And when you play a trap build, you get your snares from them.

It is possible to play a burst build though (which is what I play myself), but the problem is the high recharge time of the skills you use. What I do on an attack is; longbow auto-attack (to remove aegis and make sure I’m in range) > Hunter’s Shot > Rapid Fire > Muddy Terrain > Barrage > Lightning Breath > Entangle > Swoop > Hilt Bash > Maul > Crippling Throw. Once I go through that, I can usually go back to longbow and get some shots in, if my opponent isn’t dead already. The problem is then that after I do this, Muddy Terrain will be on a 25 second recharge time, Barrage on 30 second recharge time, Lightning Breath on a 30 second recharge time, and Entangle will be on a 150 second recharge time. So it’s basically one big attack, and then run away and wait 30 seconds for reset. If you go all the way into damage, it is possible to down foes using just your weapon skills, and not worry about what your pet does. But needless to say, you will be very squishy. And unlike a Thief, you won’t be able to just escape should your attack fail.

Just a few comments about how people talk about the “skill curve” that I find both annoying and confusing.

To “where is the ranger on the skill curve” and “what is the skill curve for the ranger” imply two very different relationships. And with all due respect, most people don’t know what they are really talking about when use the term “skill curve”.

A skill curve can represent the relationship between performance and skill (or amount of practice). In this case, you WANT a steep curve, because a steep curve implies much more improvement in performance for a given increase in skill. A flat curve implies that performance doesn’t change much with level of skill.

There are two other aspects of the “curve” that matter. The “initial level” (or intercept), which refers to the level of performance obtained with 0 (or minimal) skill. Then there is the asymptote, which is the maximum level of performance obtained by someone with infinite (or really high) skill.

One final consideration is “what is skill”? In an MMO it implies not mainly twitch reflexes, but applying good tactics, using situational awareness and knowing how to maximize your specific build.

With this in mind, I believe that for WvW the ranger has a very shallow skill curve, with a mid level asymptote and low intercept. There seem to be many rangers who perform simply terribly (low intercept) and a fair amount of work seem required to perform even reasonably (shallow curve or slope). The very best rangers excel, but they need highly optimized builds and will still be beaten by equally skilled players of other classes (e.g., HGH engineer).

So, one way of thinking of skill curve is that each class has their own. Another way of thinking about skill curve is that there is only one curve and each class falls some place along that curve. This 2nd type of skill curve means something different and is more complex to think about.

Ranger is a pretty easy class to play, until you start doing dungeons, fractals, WvW, sPvP or you get to 65+ zones. Then the sky falls on you.

At that point you need to adapt, learn you class, find your play style, know your pets. It becomes one of the most complex/difficult classes to play effectively.

And then you have the shortcomings and continuous unjustified PvE/WvW impacting nerfs (They nerfed the Moa, for god sake).

As I said in other threads, Ranger is the class when you need skill to overcome the shortcomings, instead of gaining an edge.

But fear a well-played Ranger in a non-zerg situation in WvW, count on your well-played Ranger to prevent a wipe in a dungeon/fractal boss, to help keep the aggro away from the party in several trash encounters, to stand in a circle of fire to revive a fellow player and survive.

Rangers can be awesome, but we do feel underpowered, nerfed and neglected.