Guild Wars 2

Looks pretty good and I really like your stats. I personally am not a believer in stacked crit chance and prefer crit damage. I also would strongly suggest air+flame for bow as the double proc on that is insane for any power build regardless of class.

Here’s mine:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNMQNAsYTjEq0vaDLusw1agAha9BEAbd7ZIffBW3bBraA-TFDFABAt/gSKRwSJIAHBgCVhQgDBASKveU9BDVBJN9BE8AAW4EAAA-w

yea, koda is a reasonable fill in for it imo.

These were some of the nicer ones I found on my journey. Not too hard to get.

You’re not thinking your arguments through as usual Prysin. You simply see my name and start foaming at the mouth.

Warrior vs. Ranger: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. A Ranger running SoS+Protect Me will offer next to nothing. A Warrior running nothing but a Hammer and every utility slot empty provides more to a group than a Ranger running SoS+ProtectMe.

Mobility: What exactly is a GS+Sw/Wh Ranger providing a GvG melee train? It’s providing less survivability and less utility while at the same time doing less damage than either a Guardian or Warrior. It needs to run RaO so there goes entangle (as if that will do anything in a melee train). Alternatively it could run signet for stability, but you’re trying to justify PM+SoS+SotW at that point? So that means no SotF for condi clear. God knows the pet will be long dead so EB (and for that matter PM) won’t work. How can you support yourself let alone help the group at all?

Stealth: So after you stealth with LB, swap to GS to escape, what are you providing your group for the next 9 seconds? You’re LB spec’d at this point with 0 traits to support GS. You’re likely in zerker so can’t join the train. You’re easily out kited by the other back like classes so even your singular Maul is of no help. What do you do other than hope your team can play without you for 9 seconds?

If all else fails, die: Well that’s kind of the whole point behind this thread I feel. Why bring the Ranger when the odds are stacked against it and in order to bring anything valuable to the group they need to specialize so heavily into that singular purpose they no longer have anything to offer the group or barely enough to sustain themself.

As much as you and I disagree, I really do have a Ranger. While I prefer to play ranged, I’m fully aware of the melee capabilities of the class. The entire Ranger class was designed to be a very strong duelist but as the group numbers go up, the value of the entire class starts going down. Exponentially so imo.

At any role you decide to specialize the Ranger in, they sacrifice too much just to do that role as good (at best) as another class while that class can still support their group (and themselves).

The class is simply designed like [censored].

Handin.4032:

The problem with the thief is not with initiative. I’ve seen many bad thieves that just spam some skill (sb evade, heartseeker, s/d #3, etc). The moment you interupt them once, or daze them or really anything they’re down a lot of their initiative and easily killed. The problem with thief is more with the stealth mechanic: there is little downside to poor play. If a player is in stealth and attacks a person and it is blocked, the player remains in stealth. Having an attack blocked should instantly drop stealth to force the player to use his/her stealth wisely, whether its a thief, or mesmer, or engi, etc..

Initiative is really fine as it is…

But look at it another way…

What is causing stealth to be overpowered?

Is it the leap finisher on smoke fields? Or is it the insane initiative regen that allows it to happen with limited real risk over CnD?

When all is said and done, stealth uptime needs to be nerfed. It’s simply too easily abused. I would argue that it’s initiative regen that’s allowing it to be abused because it removes much of the risk involved for using things like BP+HS(+HS+HS) over CnD.

I have a Thief…

I think the problem is you’re working from the assumption that initiative regen is fine as is right now and chill is a needless change.

I’m working from the other side… initiative is overpowered and the Thief needs reasonable changes to it. Chill affecting the horrendously overpowered initiative regen that’s already in the game seems like a reasonable change.

Now all that said, if you refer back to my original post… adjustments to initiative regen will likely need to be compensated for elsewhere. I’m absolutely fine with the Thief getting buffs once initiative regen overall is fixed.

Distaste.4801:

Atherakhia.4086:

A Thief doing nothing has full initiative and isn’t using it. Chill has no effect on their initiative regen then, right? Chill affecting refen is the most suitable solution to this ‘problem’.

A thief doing nothing can have anywhere from 0-12(15 traited) initiative. Thieves will often burst using up all their initiative, if they are then chilled right after the burst they are effectively punished by chill when activating no skills.

If this were the case for other classes it would be like chill adding adding the 66% cooldown increase to all skills already on cooldown when chill is applied. So even if you don’t use a skill you’re still getting punished.

I’d still argue this scenario isn’t even and still favors the thief. Thief still has numerous traits and utilities that provide bonus initiative outside of the passive regen.

Regardless of class, you will respond to being chilled. The affect of initiative regen being slowed would be far less noticeable than a skill cooldown.

And it’s still the most reasonable solution to this ‘problem’. Simply ignoring it isn’t tenable.

It’s because the Ranger’s defensive options are largely useful in dueling scenarios. When that train comes knocking, your evades aren’t going to hold up.

The Ranger’s solution to this is a stealth on a short cooldown, but no viable movement skills to change location so the enemy is going to know where you are visible or not. You can SoS, but a lot of the Ranger’s group value comes from their utility skills which you just sacrficied for 6 seconds of invuln. What utility isn’t located on your utility skills is in your pet, which is absolutely, 100% useless in any scenario involving more than 3 players. You then have an Entangle, which is a good anti-train skill overall, but it comes at the expense of stability which you can’t afford to lose because you simply don’t have room to take SotW on your bar.

As a back line or periphery player, you only bring a single burst skill on a 10 second cooldown and lack any real group utility or viable defensive options. The class is an amazing duelist. The changes will allow power builds to work better in dueling roles and PvP. In WvW and GvG, not much has changed unfortunately.

A Thief doing nothing has full initiative and isn’t using it. Chill has no effect on their initiative regen then, right? Chill affecting refen is the most suitable solution to this ‘problem’.

Start with Soldiers or Cavalier and adjust from there till you’re comfortable. They’re easy to get thanks to the megaserver stuff. I don’t recall which Temple Karma vendor has what so you’ll need to wiki.

This is of course assuming you’re running a power build.

I may have missed it in the notes, but why are you seeing a DPS increase on Long Range Shot or Rapid Fire?

What purpose would increasing the group size to 8 serve? Buffs/AE/Debuffs are all still limited to 5 targets. On top of that there are 8 classes which removes the need to specialize a group (as if this were a thing in GW2 anyway given their horrible class design).

I just don’t see the point.

How much did they say they were increasing the damage by on each attack?

There isn’t much of a gap between the 2 weapons as it is.

kozmo.8760:

Tree.3916:

Since you don’t seem to know much about warrior DPS or how FGS works here is some information to consider

http://dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/13086970-who-picks-up-fgs

Let’s put this into precise perspective.

1. The FGS will produce a coefficient total of 43 over 12.15 seconds. A greatsword warrior with a walled target using perfect rotations produces a coefficient total of 42 every 30 seconds. So at the most basic level, a warrior with FGS will be producing about 2.5x the DPS of a warrior using a normal weapon.

2. There are classes that do significantly more DPS with an FGS than a warrior. A GS warrior with FGS will do roughly 29k dps over that 12.15 second period. A fairly normal 66xxx ele will do nearly 39k dps over that same time frame. So YMMV when carrying an FGS.

3. Based on the ongoing DPS research by Dekeyz published here http://gw2dps.david-reess.de/ we can see that when not using FGS, a well built meta team comp will put out 55-65k dps. Consider that one ele carrying FGS can put out nearly 40k dps by himself, and 2 two eles distrubuting a total of 4x FGSes to the team can make a total team dps of around 150k. A elite skill that is capable of increasing DPS by such a significant factor is clearly imbalanced.

4. If we consider Time Warp the measuring stick for an elite, it makes total team dps go from 65k dps to 97.5k dps for 10 seconds. We can say, very roughly speaking, that Time Warp is worth about 325k total damage. A single cast of FGS (assuming someone reasonable picks up the other FGS) is worth about 550k total damage. Time Warp has a 240 second cool down, FGS 180. I understand internal balance vs external balance but nonetheless the value of FGS is so far above the “next best” elite that it’s quite literally in a league of it’s own.

But my argument against the current state of FGS#4 isn’t that it’s “boring” or that I suck at the game, or I’m worried about losing records to FGS or whatever other excuses have been offered by others or for me. The problem is simply put the skill is so strong that it dominates the PvE meta and makes a minimum of 2 Ele’s obligatory in anything calling itself a “speed run.” If people want more options, more class diversity and, yes, more interesting boss fights FGS as it currently stands has to go. If you don’t care about those things that’s your right, but objectively speaking it is by far the most powerful thing you can do in PvE.

Anet fixed Ursan-way in GW1, and I would argue that there is no dispute that FGS is just as omnipresent and oppressive as Ursanway ever was. If you don’t remember Ursanway, lucky you.

A theory backed by numbers but how would you comment the recent fractal tournament where teams that had 2 eles didn’t even pass the 1st round? Semifinals had 3 eles and at the same time 6 guardians and 6 warriors. Don’t you find that slightly odd? Maybe, just maybe, if the content is a bit less trivial than old dungeons, fgs will become less popular and you can go back to more interesting metas.

And how does that negate the need for change? The exploit still exists…

Those games all used the trinity approach to game balance (not saying they succeeded). this game is using the ‘everyone can do everything’ approach and it simply isn’t working. Unfortunately ANet isn’t willing to make the hard choices and nothing changes patch after patch.

When all is said and done, the basic elements behind those games are here. It’s the defunct classes and horrid balance that’s ruining the game.

Internal cooldowns kind of nullify any advantage onCrit procs offer though. This is what leads people to the conclusion that there’s diminished returns with crit chance over 50% (there isn’t, but it ‘feels’ that way)

Here’s some math for your discussion. Let me start by saying that the total values were taken from the GW2Skills calculator so if you have total power/crit/dmg values that differ that’s why.

These values were based off a full berserker set vs a full assassin set with berserker trinkets (no assassin ascended trinkets).

The values are obviously close (inconsequentially so), so it’s whatever your gut tells you is better. But in practice, you’ll never reach a point where losing power at the expense of crit chance or damage is worth it.

Power	2003	1855
Chance	49%	56%
Damage	213%	213%
Regular	693.3461538	642.1153846
Critical	1476.827308	1367.705769
Effective	1077.251919	1048.446

(critical hit * crit chance) + (normal hit * (1 – crit chance))

[edit…] I give up, this formatted text tag isn’t behaving. Hopefully you understand what’s presented.

Uhh….

Why would you take assassins? Power is always better than crit chance. Especially these days with double sigil procs.

It’s not too much to handle. It’s tedious and not player friendly. There’s a difference. He knows how to push F2. He knows he has to push it every 6 seconds. The point he’s making is it should be on the birds secondary attack and not something a player need waste their time with every 6 seconds.

I still don’t understand how you plan to change this spec any. It’s very obvious the only real problem is the stacking fire and air sigils. This is where all the builds offensive power is coming from.

Beyond that what else is the problem? Swap 20% steal cooldown to 20% boon duration in tricks would solve those complaints.

The evade spam can’t be touched without a near total rework of the entire class. Aint nobody got time for that.

Sube Dai.8496:

A/A Celestial Ranger with Strength Runes and sigils.

You heard it here first.

Won’t even be that.

It will continue to be the tried and tested sword+torch / axe+dagger condi bunker build you know and love.

This patch helped power builds slightly. the impact might on axe bounce for a condi build will be much more noticeable though.

I’m putting my money on the Ranger meta not changing at all. Anyone want to double down?

Can’t fix it. It’s how their entire AI is designed. What do you think Rangers have been complaining about since day 1?

The fact that this is even being discussed as anything but an exploit is a giant neon sign highlighting ANets incompetence.

Well ideally you’d want to use it strategically to blind your foe (less so for bleed I imagine ) at just the right moment. too bad you need to compensate for the bird remembering how to fly before it launches off to blind your foe

Well let me ask you this question then… today, what value is entangle to a zerg? For me, it’s 0. The vines end up destroyed in .5 seconds, the effects are cleansed near instantly, and everyone’s running lemon grass so they walk right out of them anyway.

None of the above really changes. All they did was shorten the duration (which doesn’t matter) and the cooldown (which at least makes it valuable as a defensive cooldown). The more valuable change is really with the signet allowing you access to stability without needing your elite. But I wonder if I’d want to run both if I were stuck with a shorter ranged weapon?

This thread is a riot. Lets leave the broken mechanic in game because PVE is a joke. Lets leave it in play because it doesn’t hurt anyone.

Why don’t we remove it because it doesn’t hurt anyone? Why don’t we remove it because PvE is a joke?

I could understand the complaints about removing it (I can’t, but lets just pretend I could) if Elementalists would have their spot in a group jeopardized. But they don’t. They’d still be top DPS (or top 3 at worst). They still provide useful utility. They still have a reason to exist.

ANet should be ashamed of themselves for not fixing this problem in the nearly 2 years it has been known. The only reason it was changed at all was due to the eSport impact of the change and people being 1 shot.

What’s funny is the Ranger is the only class that had their class specific mechanic classified as a weakness. Intentionally.

Don’t think you can, but I will admit I never tried.

I wish I could agree with Chrispy, I really do. But beyond my general pessimistic attitude, nearly every single patch we’ve seen to date with any preview has left very little else to be announced come patch day.

We’ll see though. With as much as was discussed before, during, and after the CDI, ANet shouldn’t really be hurting for ideas.

You guys are greatly overstating the value of axe IMO. While the might will help boost the damage some, please keep in mind that Axe is easily the lowest DPS weapon this class has (per target) and it has a 900 range. At 900 range you’ll likely be running more with the melee train as opposed to outside of it which means you being glass is a poor option. The change to axe is far more valuable to a condi build imo.

In a zerg, LB will be far more viable overall. You’ll still be able to run glass. The 1200+ range will help you stay back line where your only threat is from Thieves where your defensive options can work better with fewer opponents to avoid. And Rapid Fire will allow you to assist your Thieves to finish off enemy glass without you needing to be in harms way.

Unfortunately I don’t see this same strat working in organized group fights, but I’m hoping the mere threat of Rangers being in GvG will now cause fewer teams to run with such a heavy hammer train and maybe we’ll see more spreading out and glassier targets to hit.

As Rangers, everyone has been the victim of their opponent simply walking through them so weapon skills miss fire. Heck, even as a Ranger we recognize the importance of being able to attack a target from the back or side.

These are things made difficult (impossible?) with the current sword mechanic. Things that are not handicapping other classes, and things I would argue aren’t needed in the first place. ANet likely came up with the Ranger’s sword animation before they considered how they’d use it and the only way to make the animations line up was with the leaps and removing control from the player. Any other class would merely side step to avoid a cleave, a Ranger must forcibly use an evade or dodge or suffer a DPS loss by having the attack off autocast (and likely still have issues).

Bran.7425:

Atherakhia.4086:

And that’s why most people despise the weapon. There’s a lot involved in playing a melee class. Part of their strength is not needing to waste an evade or dodge when they can simply side step to attack the side of the opponent. The sword removes this playstyle from the Ranger. It’s almost like ANet thought Rangers would attract noobs so they designed the weapon to be very noob friendly and in doing so removed any/all strategic play from the thing and also made it very unappealing.

Fallacy. You may or may not despise the weapon, but you are presenting an opinion without data to support it.
In fact there have been many threads about the sword and many different view from the ‘nerf it so bow(s) and/or greatsword can be better’ to the ‘it seperates noobs from skilled players’ just to name a few.

Where sword is concerned there is still the problem of the sequence chain still not interacting with the game properly which is a problem that if ever fixed will have just as many arguments as any other change.

Of course I was presenting my opinion…

Only reason I said from the front was, while it’s easier to land, it’s kind of counter to the place the Thief wants to be since they want to be off to the side or back for the other bonuses.

But I figured 4 was reasonable since that’s what Headshot is which is a ranged daze. If you really want a movement skill you could put an internal cooldown on daze and have it do something like:

Kick – Leap 450 at the target and apply X vuln stacks and daze the target if struck from the Y (ICD:5 seconds). You can leap a second time at half cost if used within 3 seconds.

That way you could get your gap closer and a interrupt.

[edit…] As to keeping Death Blossom in tact, hard call imo. If you just made it leap forward it would be too similar to heart seaker imo. It’s going to be a hard thing to work around if you’re looking for a dynamic change in the Thief’s playstyle.

BrunoBRS.5178:

Atherakhia.4086:

Ini generates so quickly and the spec in question gains ini when entering stealth usually. Any real disadvantage from using BP+Leap is negated.

As to the original question, the skill obviously can’t be used for offense because D/D already has high burst. And is an additional 150 range on your suggested skill even going to have any real impact on anything as a gap closer? May as well use the homing HS at that point, no?

IMO, what D/D is missing is an interrupt (assuming you don’t go 6 tricks for it). I’d much rather see the move turn into a kick. Low damage but applies X vulnerability. If used from the front, it can daze.

Probably OP though

you mean like twitchy jake from the human personal story? his version of death blossom is a melee knockdown (but has no evade and he doesn’t move). any key farmer should be familiar with the fellow.

yeah, it would be OP unless it cost insane amounts of ini.

as for BP+HS, the execution time and the ini expense can be a hurdle in combat. plus the trait you’re talking about got nerfed recently (and i’m not talking about SA builds anyway).

No, I’m talking about just a normal single target daze like hilt bash for Ranger except it’s just a vuln but also dazes if used from the front (kick to the gut).

They’ll make good gankers with the change to Rapid Fire next patch. The problem is they’re still trained down pretty easily because the evades don’t hold up well to massed AE CC and RaO has a cast time and Entangle is so easy to counter (though with a 48 second cooldown maybe). The pet also doesn’t hold up to any attention from more than 1 or 2 opponents. Group utility is also non existent.

Really the only thing the class gained with this is RF now doing real burst and an effective 10% increase in damage from the RtW change imo. But that is also a curse because people tend to let the Ranger be one of the secondary targets or backline eventually intercept them. Now they could be hit by a train early on or be a primary target.

Ini generates so quickly and the spec in question gains ini when entering stealth usually. Any real disadvantage from using BP+Leap is negated.

As to the original question, the skill obviously can’t be used for offense because D/D already has high burst. And is an additional 150 range on your suggested skill even going to have any real impact on anything as a gap closer? May as well use the homing HS at that point, no?

IMO, what D/D is missing is an interrupt (assuming you don’t go 6 tricks for it). I’d much rather see the move turn into a kick. Low damage but applies X vulnerability. If used from the front, it can daze.

Probably OP though

sendaf.8375:

Deepcuts.9740:

“The gap between sword and shortbow is much higher than you claim. 30% or so”
You forget the part where you have to be near your target to actually hit it with the sword.
Target moves away, no dmg. Simple.

By that logic all ranged weapons are always superior to Close combat weapons. Ranger sword is actually the king of staying on moving targets, just spaming auto attack should keep you on top of most targets.

And that’s why most people despise the weapon. There’s a lot involved in playing a melee class. Part of their strength is not needing to waste an evade or dodge when they can simply side step to attack the side of the opponent. The sword removes this playstyle from the Ranger. It’s almost like ANet thought Rangers would attract noobs so they designed the weapon to be very noob friendly and in doing so removed any/all strategic play from the thing and also made it very unappealing.

This thread gave me a headache…

Rangers don’t need more damage, they need burst!
Anet changed Rapid Fire to give burst at the expense of no additional damage.
No! Rangers didn’t need that!

These changes are pretty reasonable overall and I’d bet money that the LB glass Ranger phenomenom that you all think is going to take over all of PvP will last a week tops before people realize this patch offered far more to condi BM builds than power Marks builds.

Initiative is very much a problem for the Thief class. It has been since day one. Everyone and their mother bemoans about how often a Thief can evade or how easy it is for them to gain stealth. The root problem is initiative and how quickly it regenerates.

That said, you can’t just make wild changes to the system without also acknowledging that the Thief is barely hanging on as it is. People aren’t using the builds they are now because they’re overpowered… they’re using them because they’re the only things that work.

Adjusting the class in a way that will have any impact on their evade spam or stealth uptime will need to be compensated for. But until they start making these changes, the real problems the class has will never be addressed.

In my opinion, all of the traits that improve initiative regen should be removed and Chill in particular should reduce initiative regen by 66%. What you replace them with I have no idea. I’d start with something that removes chill on dodge though or reduces the effectiveness of chill by 50%.

I don’t see how anyone can complain about s/d’s actual damage or burst. It almost all comes from stacking air+fire procs which are hardly unique to thieves.

Steal I could see being an issue, but how do you resolve it? Would simply moving sleight of hand to another tree or removing the 20% steal reduction in favor of a boon duration increase be reasonable here?

As to spammable evades? That’s kind of the name of the game for the Thief class. If you want to nerf it, the best solution is addressing initiative regen… but when you go down this path, you’re going to have to give the Thief some rather large improvements elsewhere.

The gap between sword and shortbow is much higher than you claim. 30% or so. That said, I used to run Shortbow and Greatsword as a power build and it worked great. Sword and Dagger would also be fine as a power set for your off weapon.

Izaya.2906:

Well that’s just how you feel. Sure using 1h sword in PvE has a skill cap, but the upcoming damage boost is significant enough to justify that cap (but I still remember them saying before april’s feature patch that they intended to “fix” sword auto attacks so there’s still hope for that).

I fail to see how any damage increase on the sword ‘justifies’ its clumsy mechanic? Thief sword has more damage multipliers and hits for more without the need of this silly mechanic.

Wouldn’t just changing Combustive Shot to not trigger Cleansing Ire unless it deals damage via the hit (and not the field) resolve a lot of the issues without having to nerf everything under the sun?

As to Rangers, their power builds are kinda trash so that’s why you don’t see Longbow.

Fluffball.8307:

26:51 you can see the new counterattack.

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/4743783

At work so it’s blocked. I’ll have to take a look when I get home. Does it look like it will work on the move now?

@Soilder & SubstanceE:

I completely agree with you both. Increasing damage beyond just giving the class more reliable burst isn’t really what the class needs and the changes to Rapid Fire and Maul will certainly help.

The problems with WvW are the pets, the lack of real group utility, and the very poor trait layout limiting build diversity imo. Though I still feel a weapon swap cooldown trait would compliment the LB+GS weapon combo perfectly and give power builds everything they need.

As to the greatsword changes, I want to see how responsive counter attack will be.

While I certainly welcome the changes, and think they’re excellent for PvP, it still needs a lot of help for WvW.

Signet of the Beastmaster, while an absolutely stupid trait, was a reasonable example of ‘choice’ in the tree. The signets were largely defensive in nature (since most everyone who took SotBM took it solely for SoS with SotW as a nice perk). That was a fair trade off imo: more defense for offense.

But as it stands now, RtW will now absolutely be mandatory for any longbow build simply because it’s effectively a 10% damage increase. Spotter, Eagle Eye, and Piercing Arrows is a bit excessive to choose between imo. One really should be moved somewhere else or merged. Piercing moved to adept like most every other class does for their similar trait is very reasonable to ask imo.

In a perfect world, they’d move it to adept and merge quick draw’s effect with it. That way quick draw could simply be changed to reduce weapon swap cooldown if you have a bow in either hand.

Not to mention staff ele has a reflect…

The problem with the whole ‘traits are there to make choices’ argument is most of the other classes have to make choices between offense or defense. Rangers don’t. They have to make a choice between offense, offense, and offense. On top of this, the Ranger has traits that are highly inefficient when you compare them to similar traits for other classes. Why is piercing a master trait? Why is eagle eye a master trait? Why is quick draw a master trait?

There is a serious problem with the Marks tree if you plan to use a bow. It’s pefect if you plan to use a melee weapon.

RtW on shortbow would be a dream come true.

Chokolata.1870:

Entangle change is actually huge for some builds. Entangle + runes of the krait for trappers/condition builds. Or with lyssa or any other interesting on elite effects. Remember that it will be that more powerful with the CD and the SoTF skill.
A proper control ranger might be possible.

Yea, entangle will be amazing.