Guild Wars 2

I have no idea how Areanet can find a solution to this. The only way how this will not absolutely destroy WvW matchups and the new seasons is if they dare deleting all these duped golems (= deleting probably 100.000s of golems) without punishing those who invested money into them without knowing these were duped golems
They could of course change the range to 900 so that omegas can be killed by players on the wall which would at least help a bit and for example reduce the HP of these golems so that golems don’t have that much of an impact. Change the missiles of the Omegas so that they can’t hit siege on walls and there might be a way to handle these hordes of golems. Also make arrowcarts hit the golems for 100% like they did before the damage nerf to siege.
Anyways they have to find a really fast way to fix this. They should even hotpatch it and not wait for the 15.10 patch. I’m pretty sure many ppl have stacked 1000s of these golems. That will destroy the WvW balance for many months

/edit: ah nice I just read that it seems they stopped the dupe. Now all that needs to be done is find a way to get rid of all these golems

I don’t sPvP and tPvP but do lots of WvW and it would be really nice to have a tradepost in HotM for the pvp’ers but for sure I and many others would go there all the time because there is no cost + very short loadscreen to get to the mists and you can get back to where you were in just one more click.
I am not sure if in the end with this fix the pvp’ers would be happy with this change if the mists gets overflow all the time.

For WvW (I know its the pvp forum) I guess it’s a good change. Warriors and Guardians are absolutely top tier classes there and conditions are rather weak in zerg fights because in good zergs you have like 30+% warriors/guards AoE cleaning conditions with shouts. With this fix maybe conditions classes have a chance to at least have conditions tick for a few seconds.
Also I think they should rather give classes which lack support options AoE support skills instead of buffing the support options of guardians which are already highest support in the game and warriors which are the new #1 class also in WvW/PvP in addition to being #1 class in PvE.

The 15.10 Patch is probably doing this by adding support to those classes which were lacking these options. At least that is my hope

I really like my pets on my ranger but they need to do two things to finally make them really viable:
1) Increase their speed by a massive amount or give them gap closers. Our pets need a way to actually hit targets like phantasms do. Someone tested pets that were moa’d. Suddenly the pet was able to hit moving targets. There is one solution
Increase projectile speed on ranged pets and give us a pet with 1200 range shots.
2) F2 responsiveness:
For example the wolf will always miss his knockback if the target moves away from him. This simply shouldnt happen.
They made it alot too easy to avoid pets. You cannot avoid other skills in the game that easily, only ranger pets. To avoid other players skills or even other players pets you have to dodge/block/invuln. You can’t just walk around and avoid most of their attacks. So please be kind to our pets and make them finally land their hits and abilities

My main issue with pets is the problem with hitting moving targets. Both melee pets and ranged pets miss their moving targets pretty often. If you move right/left really fast all the time the slow missiles from the ranged pets will miss all the time. Or you simply run in a large circle and the pet will always run and then stand still to shoot, run and stand still to shoot and so on. And it takes long to finally be close enough to attack again.
This is especially an issue in WvW. In PvE mobs dont move much, in sPvP you fight in a circle but in WvW especially while roaming pets have a really hard time reaching ranged targets.
There is a reason why every melee class has gap closers. If they did not they could be kited forever. Thats what happens to our pets.
In my opinion give them +30% movement speed which means 63% with swiftness or make them attack while moving.
If anyone uses a gap closer it will take 5-10 seconds for the pet to catch up or sometimes even forever. So it will deliver like 5-10% of its damage in some cases when someone is kiting the pet.
Now take a look at phantasms: They deal more damage, their ranged attack speed is insane and absolutely impossible to simply kite. If you want to avoid phantasms damage you have to block/evade or use another defensive utility.
Our pets should also be reliable.

The other thing is what people mentioned here: F2 takes too long and is unreliable. For example dog’s leap. Once they leap the target is already too far away and they leap into thin air. That is just sad.

It would be great if you could fix this issue in the upcoming patch

Ok so I am posting this bug again because it is starting to become very annoying and heavly influencing the outcome of some of my fights. Sometimes when I switch my pet it is dead upon switching. That means the new pet is simply dead for no reason.
This happens randomly and I had it happen at least 60 times overall. Today it happened 3-4 times.
To give evidence I attach a screenshot. As you can see it is dead even though I just switched it out. There was no fire on the pet at all at this time – it was simply dead.

Even though it seems very random I have a few ideas what might perhaps be a reason:
- Fall damage
- Snow Leopard transformation
- Some bug with going to water (but cannot be only that reason since sometimes I was not in water and the pet is still dead)
- Maybe some ticking conditions running in the background (which shouldnt be)

I would be glad if you could add some code that will simply check if the pet has 100% upon switching. If not —> set to 100% upon switching so that this cannot happen any more no matter what reason there is for this to happen.

/edit: Oh and sometimes when I switch my pet it has some random % hp. It can have half HP, 60% or whatever. It is really strange
I will try to make more screenshots when it happens again

NargofWoV.4267:

Pets attacking while moving is to OP, won’t happen, you could then just kite with a pet and its over.

This game is maturing into 3 games in 1, which is often the case in my experience. It is just to difficult to balance PvP with PvE. AI with PvE necessitates pretty basic movements or no movements by the monster revolving around agro. PvP is all about target movement, dodging, rolling etc. The things that make 1500 range in PvE doable are a problem in PvP.

Obviously, Anet is struggling with this problem. Can’t make certain bosses to difficult or Rangers pets die fast thereby making rangers un desirable on that one boss fight, but if we make the ranger pet have too much HP, they’re un killable in PvP and that will suck for anyone being hounded by a pet.

I’m offering no solutions, just commenting on what I’m seeing.

You know that pets hitting moving targets would simple be the same as phantasm? These hit all the time and they hit for more damage than our pets.
They need to give our pets some way to actually hit targets. It cannot be that our pets can be outkited like 80+% of the time by a good player. The only problem that I can see is if you buff your pet like crazy with the signets. They might be really powerful then.

They want to change the trait where the ranger and his pet get protection on dodge in a way that the protection is applied after the dodge which is a good thing for the ranger. But with our pet proably getting the protection after the dodging they will have to implement something like what you proposed. If the pets gets the protection only after the ranger dodge is completed it will die even faster than now. As it is now you can dodge to give your pet at least protection to survive some burst skills.
I think invulnerability for the same amout of time as the ranger dodges would be perfectly fine. That would reward good play and in my opinion it wouldn’t make pets overpowered, especially since the ranger sacrifices a dodge for his pet.

I can confirm this issue. I hope they have a fix for that as soon as possible. The funny thing is that I cannot replicate this bug but some people seem to know how to do it. We had three points contested – one disappeared and immediately the timer was gone.
Then someone from Elona contested three of them and they ran out except of one. The timer continued to tick for 1:20 even thouth only one point was capped. I personally decapped the 2nd one at 1:20 but still it continued. In the end they got the buff.

I just found out that 2) already exists here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Blacktide-took-bloodlust-only-with-1-point/first#post2879754

I have found two bugs with bloodlust.
1) Ranger pets get the bloodlust buff only once when the buff is applied to everyone and all NPC’s. If you switch out pets the pets don’t get that buff anymore.
Please apply the buff to the ranger pets when you switch pets
2) In order to get the bloodlust buff you have to keep three of the ruins for two minutes. That is how it should be. But often it happens that a server loses two of these points and only have one of the ruins. Still the timer until they get the buff doesn’t disappear but continues. Now how shall we stop them if they can get the buff with only one for example green ruin? In a specific case the timer ran from 1:20 to zero with only one contested point! I even uncapped one of them but nothing happened. It continued to count. In the end they got the buff with probably only one person doin the ruins.
I have no idea how that can happen but it happened at least 2-3 times to me. It also seems some people know how to do it and kinda exploit this trick.

Still hoping this was read by someone from AreaNet

It seems to work only if someone else throws the ram and you use it. On your own ram it won’t work.

In WvW if you have one point in flame ram mastery and used the flame ram the buff will last forever. That means forever 50% damage reduction until you probably leave the map.
Please hotfix this as soon as possible. I don’t want to meet a zerg with 50% damage reduction.
This has to be fixed immediately

Rune of Water #6 doesn’t work any more. I know it didn’t work long ago. Then they fixed it but now it has again not been working for quite some time.

I think they should change the values. Guard Leech should grant max 30 power and 30 condition damage and Applied Fortitude should offer 50 vitality instead of 250. 500 more life would still be nice but be far from 2500 more life which is too much.
Imagine a pure glass cannon ele or thief with 12k life. Adding 2500 life is +20% hitpoints which is not balanced at all.
You should be very careful with buffs. They will change the balance alot in WvW and offering the already dominant server even more buffs is a really bad idea.

I can confirm this. As soon as two large zergs fight each other skill lags start. When all three servers are fighting each other its just plain awful. Sometimes you can press your heal skill for 30 seconds and it might not activate.
I really hope they will find a solution to this. Probably they will have to invest into more powerful servers or find a way to enhance the way they calculate AoE attacks which is for sure not easy.

By the way do you know that lately I saw a few elementalists reach ballistas and canons with their1200 range skill (I think it was fireball) which I wasn’t able to reach with my 1500 range longbow until I positioned myself perfectly?
I know our longbow can shoot further when you shoot down from a hill but on even ground I thought it was 1500 range. If not that fireball would have even more range which would be ridiculous.
To answer your question. The devs once stated that they won’t give more range to the longbow because it could be gamebreaking with some mechanics in the game.

The good thing is now there won’t be only guardians offering AoE stability but also engineers. This might be a great change to handle these hammer trains.

I think the changes are not bad overall. It’s just different. Like you said during these 10 seconds its more powerful, but it will only last 10 seconds for finishers.
I could imagine that they didn’t want two rangers being able to provide 100% waterfield uptime. With the new changes it will be even better in WvW if you have three rangers with good coordination. Removing a condition every two seconds is awesome.

For example with greatsword the possible amount of healing is lower than before because you can only do one leap finisher in the water field because its duration was lowered from 15 to 10 seconds.
For cleric rangers this means 2k less heal per 30 seconds.

Then there are some issues with pets. While you said the pet leash range was increased to 2000 range it seems that I can send my pet only to targets which are max. 1500 range away. This is a huge issue because often when I move over the map my pet is next to me or behind me so once I want to send it to a target it will take quite long for the pet to reach it because sometimes it first has to catch up to me.
I would enjoy if you could change the range to 2000. That way we could also send the pet “in a direction” by sending it to a target in front of us.
You could also fix this by another great addition: What if the pet moved to our mouse cursor (if within 2000 range) once we keep F1 pressed for one second? That could bring a huge benefit to rangers. We could let our pet run in front of us if we want to and place it where we want to. To cancel this placement we can simply press F1 (without holding it one second) to send it to a target or press F3 to call the pet back.

Another issue with pets is when they attack moving targets. With all the leaps/charge/teleport/stealth abilities pets have a really hard time to catch a target. If someone knows how to kite a pet he can make the pet miss most attacks. If he even has teleports/leaps/charges/stealth a melee pet won’t be able to hit him at all.
With the leash range change which fixed the problem that pets would chase someone over half the map I think it is time to make pets move faster. This would solve the problem with pets not hitting moving targets and it would be more in line with other minions in the game which actually hit moving targets. Phantasm for example will always hit as long as you are in range. If you don’t dodge/block them you will get hit.
Our pets should also be able to actually land attacks on moving targets. A 30% base movement speed increase (with swiftness thats +63%) would help with that. Since they will still stop to do an attack they would still land alot less attacks on a moving target than on a non-moving target. That is the only way how pets will be able to hit moving targets like every other ability in the game does.
Ranged pets projectile speed needs to be drastically improved. It should not be that the phantasmal duellists hit you with every single shot no matter how you move/strafe while dealing five times more damage but our pets projectiles can easily be strafed so that not a single one will hit you. All you have to do is to change directions (move left/right) all the time and every single projectile will miss you.This should simply not happen. Since ranged pets damage is very weak it would be great if you actually made them hit.

The Canine knockback fails alot too often. I think it should almost immediately charge at the target (maybe 0.5 sec activation time) . As it is now it will miss 100% of the time if the target is moving. It will leap at him but the target will have moved out of range.
Other knockback skills are alot more reliable so I think that should be fine.

Thanks for taking the time to read my suggestions.

Thanks alot Jonathan for sharing these news with us. This patch brings some great changes for the game.
As I play ranger as main I will post some suggestions to this class. It will be a wall of text but I would be thankful if you took the time to read them.

The healing spring change from 15 to 10 seconds is understandable but it will make the healing from greatsword leaps quite a bit weaker since we can only use one leap in the field instead of two. Maybe that opens up the possiblity of a blast finisher on maul or hilt bash if mauls short CD is a balancing issue. It would be a great change for us rangers. Finally rangers could stack might and bring support to zergs with another on demand blast finisher.

In my opinion the value of how power affects ranger weapons should be adjusted. While condition works great on rangers, the power values of the weapons are rather low because you also count the pets damage as a part of the overall damage.
But what we see in the sPvP meta is only condition builds.
So I think it’s time to change this with a few changes:
- Longbow: Increase the damage at low range. As it is now it makes this weapon very weak at close range. I think at least 65% damage at close range should make this weapon alot more useful.
- Greatsword: From the leaked notes it seems you want to add damage to maul and increase the vulnerability stacks to 5. The vulnerability is great but I think you should add like 15% more damage to the autoattack. The autoattack is really weak and maul is very telegraphed and easy to dodge.
- Axe mainhand: In my opinion axe 1 is just too weak. The bouncing effect is good as it is but you might want to add +50% damage to the first hit while not increasing the bouncing effect damage. So first target gets hit for 150% of the damage, target 2 and 3 for 100%. Axe 2 might get a higher power scaling, otherwise it’s fine and Axe 3 is great as it is.
- Axe offhand: path of scars ist just awesome but it is easy to dodge. Especially if you trait for increased range the duration of the skill is increased because it flies further but at the same speed which makes it even easier to dodge especially the pull. You should increase the fly speed at least for the traited version. Also sometimes if you throw axe 4 towards a wall or over an edge it will not find its way back and disappear.
Axe 5 is really nice with the added retaliation. We rangers would of course love it if you could move while using it
Shortbow:
The shortbow was a great weapon before the range nerf. While I can understand the change you might want to give us an option in certain traits to increase the range back to 1200. You could also let the autoattack apply bleeds while not flanking, but only one bleed per two attacks (50% bleeds while not flanking).

Then there is one thing that bothers me about ranger traits. The Marksmanship trait line has too many good traits which we would love to use. Please merge the 1500 range trait with piercing arrows. At the same time add a range increase for shortbows to 1200 range maybe even to the same trait.
That way we could still use spotter or remorseless or signet of the beastmaster. It’s sad that we need to use our master and grandmaster trait to make bows viable.
By merging them longbow and shortbow builds would get alot more diversity and options. I know this is asked from alot of ranger players. An even better decision would be to make arrows pierce by default. This would allow beastmasters to get some AoE damage.

Bump – sorry but this is important

As a berserker longbow/greatsword ranger the only way how I was able to kill them was with the following tricks:
Once the warrior is low he starts running. The moment he uses rush use point blank shot (1200 range knockback when traited). That will disrupt him for a bit and you can continue to damage him. At a certain point he is further away than 1500 range and there is nothing you can do to stop him except —> use the norn snow leopard elite and charge to him in stealth + knock him down. Then immediately go back to longbow and shoot the hell out of him, hope the wolf knocks him down, fear him maybe (wolf F2) and once he uses rush again use the longbow knockback. If you manage to do this he might be dead if he is not uber tanky with insane regeneration.

That is the only way how I was able to kill GS and sw/h warriors. With 1200 range you probaly just won’t kill them. 1500 helps alot.

You could try to use the leopard charge twice but probably thats a bad idea because he will regenerate in the mean time. So it’s better to immediately leave the leopard form once you chased him and knocked him down

Would be nice if a dev confirmed that they noticed this issue since it is very gamechanging/gamebreaking in certain situations.

In WvW with certain speccs it’s almost impossible to kill a warrior. A friend says he dies like never and he loves jumping into crowds of 5-10 people, troll them and run away.
The reason for this to work is:
Melandru + Lemongrass poultry soup + that trait with -33% duration on chill, cripple, immobilize = -98% time on anything that would slow him.
The only way he really notices someone tried to slow/chill/cripple him is when he gets buffed with regen. So if you try to stop him you actually buff him.
Since he has stability + berserker stance and endure pain you simply won’t stop him. There is no way a player can stop him if he is not the same build. He also has 3600+ armor.
Warrior mobility in non-spvp is simply insane with this setup. I see more and more warriors trolling zergs. They jump out of a tower into a crowd of 30 people, hit around for a few seconds and make it back into the tower.
So no cripple and chill and immobilize are useless against these WvW Warriors. And many run exactly that setup.

Yes I run in zergs too with this build and I love soloing camps with piercing arrows. You will solo supply camps really easy. I have also done 250 camps with this build with 2 bears before any mob respawned. But it takes good positioning. Piercing arrows are mandatory for camps.
Also to kill thieves guild, mesmer pets and nekro pets its awesome to have piercing arrows.

OMG I wrote a long post but that awful error just deleted everything I wrote..
To sum it up:
30/25/15 is my specc. 10% damage, piercing arrows, 1500 range, 5 seconds vigor if hit by a crit, -20% cd on bows, first CC goes to pet
As utilities I use signet of the hunt, signet of renewal and protect me. As heal either healing spring in groups or heal as one for solo because I love beging able to instant heal up if I get dropped to under 50% by a thief.
So you have two stunbreakers, protect me is like a 6 seconds direct damage immunity and with signet of renewal you can transfer all conditions to your pet which helps in some cases when you get condition bursted.
As gear I use full zerker gear with melandru runes und lemongrass poulty soup food which offers good defense against conditions.
If you want even more defense against physical damage you can use the signet work for ranger trait and signet of stone instead of signet of renewal.
As Pet I like wolf/dog or bears if you play in zergs.

You can try a full zerker GS/longbow ranger build with wolf and dog. Bring him to around 45-60%, then use the knockbackshot followed by rapidfire. Rapidfire will follow him into stealth and deal around 10k+ damage which should finish him off except if he perma dodges in stealth which they usually don’t do.
I have finished alot of thieves with this tactic. On top of that you have the wolf knockdown and fear which help to control him.
For Shadow Refuge you should barrage the area immediately and use the wolf fear if he was not blinded by the stealth.
If you think that he lies there somewhere in stealth you can use your greatsword autoattack to find out where he lies. You will see the autoattack chain continue if it hits something. That’s decent to finish off thieves who still have 10+ seconds of stealth from shadow refuge.

It is actually true. If they made a toggle in the options which allows the ranger to decide that he wants to control one more ability of the pets it won’t harm the rangers which can’t handle more pet control. The rangers who want to increase their skill ceiling can then use the extra control about these abilities and both are happy.
So this argument is not fully valid.
If the problem is that there is no more F-key for this new ability simply don’t assign any key to it. The ranger can then decide which key he wants to choose for this ability.
That option would be really awesome. On demand blast finisher from drakes, on demand heal from the moa, on demand knockback from dogs.
It would give the ranger class more depth I guess and there would be less complaining about passive ranger gameplay.
I even think this could help the ranger alot in zerg fights. More on demand blast finishers on pets is just awesome.

There is in my opinion a Bug that makes eles Meteorshower extremely OP in certain areas where there is no place for the bolts to rain down – like in corners, close to walls, in small choke points.
In such situations all bolts will rain down at the same point which means it is an instant kill because you can practically get hit by 3-5k x 5 in like one second because every single bolt will rain down on you at exactly your location. I guess the programming code should be checked.
As it is now the game tries to find a place where it can rain down and if there is only one small area every single bolt will rain down there. This also makes choke points so extremely dangerous because every bolt will rain down there making the skill alot more powerful as it should be (like in open areas).
How it should be: The bolts rains down in a random pattern like they do in open areas and if the point where they would hit is blocked by structure then they still hit there or disappear (which means they are useless there) and it won’t try to find another place where it can hit because then all bolts will hit the exact same location if there is no other place to rain down. Barrage for example won’t hit the same player 5 times if there is no other place where it could land. If it did it could deal 12k dmg per sec.
At the very least make it so that the bolts cannot overlap which means only once per 1-2 seconds one bolt can hit you like it would do in open area.
This is ATM the most insane damage spike and I am not sure but probably there are even more of these skills like the meteor shower like fiery greatsword 5. You should check every AoE Skill that makes bolts rain down.
There is one other insane damage bug. Charge skills which are channeled if activated against a wall can hit X (sometimes 10+) times for the full final damage. From what I know for example the fiery greatsword 3.
Here is an example where it shows what I mean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDWmIxIKnx4

Thank you for that information. It worked without problems and it is true that you have to re-equip your legendary for the stats to take effect. If you change them while wearing them it won’t work.

@ zencow
I already placed the expensive ones into the legendary. I can’t test with the others

@Spoj
Did you test it or is it just an assumption?

Has anyone tried this yet? I don’t want to risk losing infusions worth 40+ gold.

I have a question about legendaries. I have selected stats on my legendary and then I put the two infusions into the item.
Now when I double click it to choose another stat combination there is an “accept” button. But in the preview which I should accept the two infusions don’t show up

Now my question: When I switch the stats will the infusions be deleted? (which would probably be a bug but you never know).
Has anyone tried switching stats on a legendary after having infusion on the weapon? Do they get deleted or do they stay?

Thanks in advance

7) Melee fighting
If you want to go melee the greatsword is just great. Auto-Evade in the autoattack gives you great survivability. Don’t use the block skill in the middle of a zerg because you might stand still for quite a bit while doing the knockback animation and that might be dangerous.
If you have a signet build (signets work also for the ranger) you can use signet of stone which grants you and your pet 6 seconds of direct damage immunity on a 80 (or 64 sec with -20%cd) CD and you can use Protect me for another 6 seconds direct damage immunity where your pet eats the damage. Thats another reason why I use bears, since they have enough hitpoints to make protect me really useful.
You might also want to use signet of the wild for 8 seconds of stability and/or rampage as one for another 20+ seconds of stability which is great when you dive into zergs.
If the ranger chooses to be melee he has really decent survivability. You could use melandru runes and lemongrass food to handle the conditions. With healing spring you should be fine and the 12 seconds of direct damage immunity make you really tough. But there has to be said that if you go full bunker or cleric your damage will be pretty bad. I haven’t tried it yet but I think with the 12 seconds of damage immunity you might even be able to use some damage equipment while going melee.
On the 2nd weapon set I would use horn which offers a blast finisher + fury and swiftness + 1 stack of might and axe or sword.

7) Support
With a natures voice specc you can offer 100% regen and switftness uptime and have a really tough pet by using guard all the time. While this is not godly it is pretty useful especially if you run a cleric build (or apothecary if you prefer conditions).
The Elite spirit is just awesome. The CD was reduced to 3 minutes this patch. You can use the elite spirit to rez up to 5 downed people or even dead NPC’s which is decent. You can also revive a dead keep lord if needed. On top of that it will heal for 480 per second for 60 seconds if it doesn’t die. In zerg fights it won’t live that long. But if it manages to survive as long you can revive twice in these 60 seconds since the revive skill has only 30 seconds CD.

And last but not least there is one more thing many people forget. There is an AoE cap of 5 targets for most skills. Your pet or spirit will save other people by eating damage for them. Every time the pet is one of these 5 targets one of your mates or you won’t be taking the damage. Thats a huge benefit and thats another reason why I use bears. They are really tough and will eat alot of damage for the zerg.

As you can see there are alot of ways how a ranger can be useful in a zerg. I hope you will have a good time playing ranger in WvW

What comes to my mind when asked what a ranger can contribute to a zerg there are many things. You can’t do all at the same time but pick out what you like:

1) Longbow:
1500 range, piercing arrows is just decent to destroy siege, slow the enemy and with full zerker gear it even does good damage. You can pick out downed targets and finish them. With the knockback shot you can interrupt people who try to rez their mates and knockdown eles and others standing on a wall and trying to throw down the meteor shower on your team.
With stealth you can reposition yourself if someone wants to focus you.

2) AoE Immobilize
As a ranger you have many sources of AoE immobilize from which you can choose (if you want). Entangle, Spike trap if skilled, Muddy terrain and the Krytan hound but the dog is too squishy for zerg fights in my opinion
Immobilize is decent because stability won’t stop it. You might want to throw in for example a muddy terrain at the start of the fight to slow them down or in the back of a zerg to split them up so that your team has an easy time killing them.

3) Traps:
While I don’t use them they can be very useful because they are unblockable, tag many enemies and offer nice support. The freeze trap slows the enemy down considerably, spike trap immobilizes, fire trap does good direct damage with berserker stats + fire, poison trap weakens their healing

4) Healing spring: The best heal field in the game. Since rangers need that heal to self heal too I usually use it in the middle of a fight where it is not useless at all. It will remove conditions, grant regeneration and if you specc for it even vigor to up to 5 targets. People can use blast finshers or leaps/whirls in the field or you shoot projectile finishers through the field. A great skill

5) Pets
Well many will say pets are useless in a zerg. It depends really. If I am bunker specced with a tough pet I usually use the drakes. But there is another great option: Bears
There is one gerat benefit a ranger pet can offer. You know all these nasty AoE fields laying on the ground which hurt your zerg alot. You can send your pet through these fields for example by using guard or by sending it to a target behind the fields. The pet will activate them and if your pet eats too much damage you can simply switch it out.
The black bear offers 10+ seconds of AoE weakness, the polar bear offers AoE Chill for 3+ seconds and the brown bear takes one condition from up to 5 people.
The red moa offers about 50% fury uptime and can heal for 3400 if you manage to let it heal close to you.
With my longbow damage specc I use the black bear and the polar bear usually in zergs, sometimes the red moa. Even without any points in beastmastery they are really tough. Since bears don’t really deal damage I usually call them back once they did their job (F2, eating AoE fields)

I have to agree. It’s a great performance from AreaNet to offer new content every two weeks but it becomes a rush for achievements and trying to play the content. I have lots of free time to play the game but even then it’s hard to complete the achievements. I didn’t even do all of them just the ones I liked and which were not taking too much time effort.
Now imagine someone has only a few hours a day/week. He will never be able to keep up. And the worst thing is that you feel like you miss something and you don’t have the time to enjoy the content. Everything feels a bit like you are in a permanent hurry.

My suggestion is to make the achievements alot less time consuming to complete. This time it was like at least 30 hours to complete the achievements. Not many have the time for that. To get the 13 invasions it would take at least 13 hours but I did like 30 invasions until I finally was lucky that I got every map. Thats 30 hours. A casual player can never achieve that. The baloon thing, I simply didn’t even try to do that. That would probably have taken another 10+ hours.
I guess you want to give everyone something to do but I think if it took us only max 5 hours per two weeks to complete at least the achievements we could enjoy the new content alot more and we could also play the parts of the game that we love.

I’m a WvW player but these two weeks I played like 10 hours of WvW while being in PvE for 30+ hours. I didn’t want to do it but I felt like I had to because I would have missed insane amounts of loot and tons of achievement points.

The other thing is please don’t make any events which give so much loot. Giving so much loot means everyone has to do that content if he wants to benefit the most. I wasn’t able to do WvW because the loot was just insane and because it took forever to get the achievements.
I would really welcome it if there was more space for us to enjoy the game by making new content last for one month and making the achievements solvable also for casual players who play only 5 hours per week.

Thanks alot. I’m really glad to hear that because it would be plain fail^^

I am using Kudzu for pretty much the first time on my ranger and I found something that might be rather awful.
When I stealth myself and continue running around I see the footsteps following me even while I’m in stealth. Do others also see the footsteps while I am stealthed?
I really don’t hope so because that would make legendaries a waste.

I hope you enjoy playing a norn. It’s a decent race in my opinion and if you are not happy with the character look you can buy a look changer for gems at any time.
Btw I made my norn ranger min size. She is about as tall as the tallest humans. The good thing about it is that she doesn’t feel as slow as huge norns.
And if you plan to buy the krytan skin only put it on your final armor. It’s pretty expensive.

http://imageshack.com/a/img109/1179/txmz.jpg
I cut together some screenshots of my ranger. On daytime you can see alot more details on the armor.

Aww it’s night everywhere on my server. Night screenshots can’t compare to day screenshots.

I have a female norn ranger and she looks really nice in T3 and also in a Krytan armor mix. But the human T3 looks great and really hot too.
I guess it depends on your taste. I decided for norn because the norn females look alot more adult and a bit tougher.
Most human females look very young and also the animations are very “girly”. It’s really a matter of taste.
If you play WvW the norn elite snow leopard is awesome to run away^^ and to get into towers but it has a 4 min cd. I will try to provide some screenshots of T3 and my Krytan mix. Give me a few minutes

Oh and for invasion farming I use longbow with -20% cd. I use barrage, place fire traps (not skilled), send my drakes to groups which I don’t attack with my bow and press F2 and use piercing arrows to shoot many mobs in a line. All that with full zerker gear and 1500 range is just decent.

I love the ranger class and I just got two legendaries because I am absolutely sure that it will be my main class for quite a while.
Everyone hates the pets it seems to me. I love them. With the pets you get “free” utilities which you can switch out at any time.
You need a personal tank for example to solo camps in WvW or for tough dungeons? Take the bears with weakness and chill or if the encounter is not extremely hard you can use the drakes and have good aoe damage with blast finishers and burst damage.
You need CC? Use wolf and hound. They are just awesome. Two knockdowns, AoE fear and AoE Immobilize. Thats decent especially while roaming in WvW.
You want to support the group? Take the red moa for 50% fury uptime for the group. If you get lucky or play well you can even get a 3400 heal out of the moa in a small radius.
You need plain damage use birds or cats but they are squishy! You might prefer drakes as they deal good damage too and offer a blast finsiher + good survivaiblity
You can use spiders or devourers if you prefer. I love the pets.
It’s simply about you handling them well and finding out when to use which pets. Once you realize the strengths of the pets and know when to put them on follow or when to stow them (if you are out of fight like sometimes during jade fractal) pets won’t be as bad any more as people tell you.
What is true is that our utilities define the class alot. It’s a weakness and a strength at the same time because we can’t have too many of them even though they are so important. If they were on our weapon skills that would be great

Today I needed a build with good damage + insane survivability for the Arena. I had to fight the Dunwell with five debuffs. I had zero endurance so I was not able to dodge.
Now imagine what was possible: I used full zerker stuff, a 30/25/15 build with active signets working for the ranger and Lightning reflexes, Signet of Stone, Protect me and the Elite spirit while using longbow.
As pets the wolf and the jaguar.
So I had insane abilities – Longbow knockback every 12 seconds, wolf knockback, wolf fear as interrupts.
For survivability lightning reflexes against the onehit, Signet of Stone is a 6 sec damage immunity on 64 sec of CD (or 80), Protect me killed the pet but saved me and the Spirit healed me for 480 every second + can potentially rezz you two times after a oneshot.
All this in one build. Even though this was situational it shows the potential and how awesome the ranger class can be. The Elite spirit is also godly in groups to rezz your downed teammates and for awesome heal.

The ranger is not as bad as people tell you. I suggest that you play one and find out if you like the class or not.

I prefer heal as one as healing skill especially now that I can stealth myself with longbow 3 so that I won’t get interrupted. In group play I use healing spring.
The main reason why I use heal as one over troll unguent are two things:
1) Poison. When you get poisoned for long durations it will decrease your healing. With heal as one you can decide when to heal up (possibly when you are not poisoned)
2) Thieves. You don’t want to be at <50% HP against a thief and troll unguent won’t bring you back to 100% fast enough while heal as one does

If I encounter a crazy condition necro or engineer who beats my condition removal (melandru + lemongrass and signet of renewal) I just get out of fight which is easy against a necro and switch to healing spring and go back to the fight. Works fine for me.

Superior treb behind the gate is great against alpha golems but omega golems attack from far away (I think 1500 range) and therefore won’t be hit by these trebs if you shoot the door. And as shoufer mentioned there won’t be much left to fight them because they can erase pretty much everything that is dangerous to them with a few rockets and people clear cannons before the golems come close.