These I feel are all reasonable, easily do-able, and while small changes, would represent some improvement for Rangers using these skills, as well as bringing them more in line with the other professions.
Guarantee this will be overlooked and nothing will be done because they don’t give a flying kitten.
Sadly I don’t disagree with you at all.
So…I was thinking about ANet’s recent tendency as regards WvW and WXP, the idea of leveling up individual skills, spending points to focus in on area or the other, and the thought occurred to me that a similar approach might be taken with pets.
The idea being, that pets would be not come with a baked-in set of skills and stats, based on pet and trait selection, but instead come from families as they do now, that once selected, could then be ‘bred’ through point application over time to open up or develop various skills. These skills would be unique therefore as they are between families, but also be unique within families for pets owned by different players.
Pets would have experience, you would level them, they would grow with you and be more personal, so you’d have more attachment to them, and most importantly, they would be much more customized than they are now. Coupled with more control over their skills, perhaps reduced in number by 1, you could breed a pet of any family to be damage, condition, crowd control or support based.
This I think would be a fantastic way to revitalize the pet mechanic, and make it a more meaningful experience. In PvP you would do as you do now for Traits, be given the total amount of points to use when selecting and raising your pet. For PvE and WvW, it would be much like WXP….picture different pets like the arrow cart, ballista or trebuchet lines…so you could build your pet and those skills the same way other players do with their powers, as your character levels to 80.
Of course those at 80 would simply be issued the total points etc.
In this way, even using the existing pet skill packages as example, you could get better value out of your pet. If you like the Moa’s Vulnerability attack, but feel it’s Heal is useless, you would spend those points accordingly, and end up with more satisfying pet than the current system gives you.
In any case, lots to consider, but if ANet were to apply the same methods they have to WvW and Siege etc, you could get a pretty cool mechanic for Rangers and their Pets.
Just a few quick comments from me on a few points.
I absolutely can’t imagine WvW or PvP without the Wolf. It’s extremely valuable in ensuring you get revives or stomps off. It dying or being dead is not an issue if you swap to it just prior to execution. Paired with PB Shot and LB stealth, I find this combo just to strong to go without.
For zerg fights in WvW, I find traps do work well, but you need to use them in conjunction with something else – again, LB Stealth is great for this, and I find throwing the ranged traps, stealthing, then hitting Entangle, evading out into your line, then Barraging works very well. Working the contact line between your group and theirs is most effective in my experience.
I do have a boon duration build, but I do not run that with traps and not for this tactical purpose. I run a build with minimum 1500 in all stats, minimum 20k HP and tons of evades, and that seems to work well enough in a group setting without the boon duration or stability. I find while obviously it is important, with how much Ranger has to commit to get it, for zerg fights it’s too much. I’ll have to repost my exact final gear/consumable numbers but outside of 1v1s I have no issues staying alive.
Another thing about using traps and LB in WvW, they are great for wall work – you can throw them up on top of the walls, Barrage, even Entangle and kills from down below, including out of LoS. Stealth has enhanced certain tactics so much, I think it’s probably my favorite ranger change thus far.
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If you like working from the walls, you can also try going with a toughness/precision/condition damage build, focusing on good crit rates, bleeding and/or burning, either of which can be applied at range if you trait offhand, sticking with LB and either of warhorn or torch. 30/20/20/0/0, Keen Edge, Eagle eye and Signet of the Beastmaster, Sharpened Edges and Quick draw, and Shared Anguish or Vigorous Renewal or Expertise training and Off-Hand training, running Sharpened Stone, Signet of the Wild and Signet of Stone, with Rage as One. Healing Spring and a Red Moa for walls and Heal as One and a Lynx when running with the zerg on the ground.
With Rabid gear that would give you just over 3000 Armor and 15k HP, 2 sources of stability and 1 of invul and stealth. On the ground I would probably swap out Sharpening Stone for a stunbreak, probably Signet of Renewal, or Lightning Reflexes. Go Signet of Fire for Flame Blasts on the Longbow or Earth for the bleeds, and Geomancy and Earth on your Axe/Horn or Axe/Torch.
You’ll have 100% uptime on Fury very easily, and do really well from walls with little trouble. On the ground you’ll need to stay on top of your positioning and utilities, but will do decent damage and be pretty survivable, with your invul for a panic button. Those stats do not include your two consumables for WvW or PVE, so you can push you Armor, HP or Precision/Crit Chance or Condition Damage up quite a bit, defending on your taste.
It’s different and can be fun, it’s not my main but I run it once in a while when I get tired of my primary build and I enjoy it.
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I’m not a fan of Rabid on a Trapper, in PvP I always go Carrion with a Shaman’s Jewel, and in WvW, I run with 22k HP, 1700+ Toughness and 1500 in everything else. Works fine in both in my experience, and just because you run traps does not mean you need to run 3 of them.
Range and/or AoE counters spirits pretty effectively…yes they are tough, but so are other professions/builds, but they are definitely not OP. You just need counter them in a specific way, which is true for other so-called OP builds.
That said, in PvP, in terms of team fights, 2v2 especially, a good guardian and spirit ranger can be very hard to beat, to the point of being impossible. Fortunately, you don’t need to cap all three points to win, so this isn’t a real issue.
I suppose it depends a bit on playstyle as well. For a conquest game, traps are pretty effective, and as mentioned, spirits can be killed or avoided. The CC/debuffs with traps are far superior as well, and in PvP CC often makes the difference. When someone who knows what they are doing encounters as spirit ranger, they aren’t all that hard to counter.
No question that DPS is higher on Spirit Ranger however. I think it boils down to what trait line you want to be forced down, and which more strongly dictates how you must play as a result. Spirit build may well be more effective in some areas, but I find it less versatile than Trapper, and in my view, versatility is one of the Rangers few strengths, so I find playing into it works well.
More diversity is definitely a good thing, probably why I prefer trapper to spirit.
I personally would say yes, they are still quite good, but I have been playing the same condition-based trap build since the BWEs, with a few minor modifications. The key to a trap build’s success is how you use it, and that does and pretty much has to vary depending on what game mode you are playing – PVE, WvW and sPvP/tPvP.
If you’ve played a trap build then you know what you’re doing no doubt, but there are a few things I’d like to mention that are either new or perhaps not known but those who aren’t into traps.
Previously there was a so-called bug where a trap you’d placed in a distant choke-point for example would go off and ‘teleport’ to your location. This was actually very useful for PvP contexts in the sense that it served as an alarm system, so that even if you were far away and could not see the area your trap was covering, you would be alerted when it was tripped via the sound. You could even have multiple traps and know which trap and thus which entry point was breached, by the different sound…all without looking. In some situations that is hugely valuable and was a useful consequence of that mechanic.
This bug now has been fixed, and traps no longer teleport giving you those cues. You can still use them in this way as alarms however, by paying attention to the appearance of damage numbers in your field of view in the distance. Range is limited of course but it does still work. This use of traps is again very important when several seconds of advance notice of incoming, as well as the location or direction of said incoming, can make a significant difference in the outcome, allowing a port before a WP becomes contested, or to get to and man siege before the hostiles get on you, or even give you just a bit of advanced warning so you get to a sPvP point in time to prevent it from being capped or neutralized. In some game modes, literal seconds of difference are vital.
Another fairly recent addition to the game, Ballista Spread Shot, is supported very well by a traited trap build. Good placement and usage of Frost Trap, with it’s pulses and long duration Chill, especially combined with an offset Spike trap, can net you some pretty impressive kill clusters in fixed-position fighting breach points, lord rooms or supply camps. The front entry of Vale is an especially good example of how and where that can be done to good effect.
The last significant thing that has changed is the addition of a Blast Finisher on Horn 5, and how this can be used with ranged traps. During a group engagement, Frost Armor or Might can be pretty useful to your forces in close contact – useful in all game modes.
With the addition of the new condition, and a greater degree of condition usage in general, traps gain somewhat in their usage simply through the application of more conditions and more stacks, in terms of forcing or effecting cleansing. Unblockable application of 3-5 conditions is always a good thing in that regard. While traps have not been changed at all, other game changes, to other classes or to ranger, have in these small ways, helped the trapper out.
There are a lot of cool things you can do with traps that are not entirely obvious, I will be putting a video up on my channel shortly detailing some of the things described above as well as some other things you can do – such as taking advantage of how pulses work when placing more than 1 trap; what you place where in cluster can give you significantly different results.
A Trap Master may not put up huge numbers or be overly glamorous, but they can do things no-one else can and if done well, can be the difference in a fight. I’d say they are more than viable.
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(edited by Anthrage.2519)
Well, Stealth, the Knockback, the Stun Break and with a switch to Lyssa runes, you get a random 9 second boon on Heal (9 seconds of Retal is sick) and all conditions cleared and all boons granted for 3 seconds on the 120-sec cooldown elite. It doesn’t play that glassy honestly, I ran it for about 10 matches yesterday and had no trouble staying up. I usually run an evade-heavy trapper with the same weapon set at 21kHP, and didn’t notice a huge difference in survivability.
not bad damage but its a glass cannon with condi. 0 def skills, just the stealth.
It is in the same ballpark, but seems a good deal different – I never liked drakes or shortbow honestly. I did use Rampagers initially on this build, but made some changes to hit certain stat benchmarks. On thing it is definitely great for is taking down the NPCs rather quickly.
I posted about this type of build before
My Twitch.Tv channel has a few videos of me running it.
Rabid Will work, but I still think Rampager works better for it.
I am going to have to play a set with Warhorn instead of Torch. I generally Torch on a condition build but given the higher crit rate and the bleed potential, it may be a better option. Torch 4 and 5 on a downed is hard to pass on though.
I think it’s generally interesting to manipulate how the vulnerability stacks ebb and flow with Remorseless. But all I’ve really got at the moment are a small collection of stupid pet tricks I don’t quite have a practical handle on.
I find Remorseless to be a bit too much of an investment for the return, which is why I went this route on the build here, using a pet that can apply Vulnerability itself and going with Bleeds to make up the rest of the damage. It seems to work pretty well, in that you have a bit more control over when that ‘burst’ occurs,
Speaking of ‘stupid pet tricks’ (Dave!), I’m finding that using Canines with their Leap and Knockdown actually helps ensuring you get the full channeling of Rapid Fire off, especially if you use Quickness. While pet abilities are famously unreliable in their usage, and it would be much better to control them all manually, I’ve learned that you can kind of control what the pet does when for some of them based on you/the pets range to target when you activate them and order to attack.
The Wolf for example has 2 leaps, one that does the cripple and the other that does the knockdown. They have different ranges though, so if you swap out to it and hit F1 outside the range of one but within the range of the other, it will usually execute that – in this case, that’s your knockdown. Works well, when you get the timing right…again with the muscle memory!
Conversely, I’m finding the Lynx Leap with it’s greater range and being on F2 to be really…odd. Maybe 50% of the time the thing will leap off in some random direction, even if I have an enemy targeted…often it seems to do this when I swap to it with the enemy right near me, as if it has a minimum range requirement…putting the ‘stupid’ in ‘trick’ for sure.
Anyway, the interesting thing about Ranger is that while out class mechanic can be a pain in the kitten at times, there are quite a large number of permutations of traits, pet ability, ranger utility and weapon power and effect, where you can do all kinds of unexpected things. This bleed/vulnerability thing I was messing with is just one example, there are tons more. A large portion of which I have no idea of.
Speaking of which, I came across a friend today who didn’t know you could do a particular thing I do on one of my loadouts. It is possible to set just about all your slot skills, right bar and left bar, to auto-attack. This can be used to do things like making sure you don’t lose cast uptime by having to manually trigger something as soon as it’s off cooldown, good for stuff like Warhorn on a perma-swiftness or fury build, or even Sharpening Stone.
A cool thing you can do with this, is take advantage of the weapon-switching. Through a quirk in the mechanics, even though when you weapon-switch only the left bar, the weapon skills actually changes, the auto-attack settings for both bars change. Because of this, you can set one of your utilities to auto-cast only for one of the two weapon sets…so you effectively get a free non-manual cast ‘on switch’ effect much like you can get from Sigils, say Hydromancy and the AoE chill.
Taking this a step further, you can even get 2 such casts – using a Spirit. Set the auto-cast on the spirit slot for one weapon set, your secondary. Engage in combat with your primary, and then switch. The spirit will cast and come out, enabling it’s passive effect – burning or whatever – AND, immediately execute it’s active effect – say, cast an AoE blind. Obviously the usefulness of this depends on managing it so you get the right usage out of it…but it’s an example of one of the neat things we can do as Rangers. Stupid Ranger Tricks. :P
Sorry for rambling! It’s 3am and I am over-tired! But yeah, more tricks people, I’m sure there are a ton of them out there that we haven’t collectively found yet, the tips thread surely does not hold them all!
(edited by Anthrage.2519)