Guild Wars 2

Lightsbane.9012:

i wasn’t aware it went anywhere. just how much crit damage do you need to hit that hard with a short bow? lmao
all i see in this video is 1oneoneone11111oneone. if that’s how you want to play ranger you’re not helping your case at all. ranger is a class that bads flock to like seagulls flock to french fries. part of the major problems rangers face are the fault of the player. although it is given that they need some serious attention.

LOL!

You must be new here. This is how ANet designed the entire class to play for nearly every single weapon set. As to the damage, even after the Longbow damage increase, Shortbow does more damage at everything but maximum range on Longbow. It’s also the 2nd strongest weapon ANet gave the class, which isn’t saying much since it’s still half as strong as sword.

Rangers are going to start taking their treatment personally ANet!

You’ve given Shortbow #3 — Quick Draw a touch of the Sword #1 treatment. When you use the skill you now take a few steps backward at the end of the animation. During these steps you lose control of your character and if you use the skill as an evade with the target behind you, you actually run toward the opponent.

LOL! This has to be a bug. If not they’ve just given Shortbow the joys of Sword #1.

Confusion is overpowered in its current implementation. The entire condition would probably need to be changed in order for it to be improved damage wise.

For example… instead of making it deal damage for each hit you did while under the affects of confusion, confusion was simply changed to deal all the damage on the next hit and the condition was dropped once damage was done forcing you to restack.

This way the person with the condition on them isn’t forced to stop playing and the person who applied the condition is rewarded for putting effort into their play by stacking the condition up higher.

Of course this would have to come with a change to the more passive ways of applying confusion like perplexity.

I wouldn’t come back as the Ranger hasn’t changed much since you left. As Chrispy said, we haven’t seen any changes based on the CDI thread (nor did we get any real dialog on the discussions we had in that thread either…). If you haven’t found something better play, I say come back after E3. Maybe ANet will be more forthcoming with information then.

You guys are blowing this entirely out of proportion. The class has very real problems, but to think people are going to change classes over this? How in the world did you make it this far…

Also having issues and also using Verizon. I’ve never had issues before though. Just with this patch. Only downloading at ~50k/sec and eventually it drops to 0.0 and never recovers. Starts download over each time.

Baltimore Maryland here.

What if the outnumbered buff made it so your siege cost 50% less and the enemies siege cost 50% more and their siege cap was reduced by 25%.

Would that help with the population issues some? Would allow fewer players to spend less resources to defend their assets and the opposing side could set up less siege with the possibility they couldn’t set up any because they’ve already hit the reduced siege cap.

She did? Or is this more sarcasm…

Black Teagan.9215:

Atherakhia.4086:

Black Teagan.9215:

1.Warrior
2.Engi
3.Thief
4.Ele
5.Ranger
6.Mesmer
7.Guardian
8.Necro

Why the thief is under warrior and engi?
Thieves are very fast on short distance, but their skills have higher CD’s or are too expensive for far distance.
For long distance have engis and warriors better skills/traits, many movementskills, which make them faster as thieves, incl. their CC-skills.

I was under the impression he was asking which classes could escape the best. Not necessarily have the fastest ground speed? Thus why Thieves are #1.

That’s exactly what I wrote.

I see you have never fighted against Warriors or Engineers, which builds are build around mobility.

How can a thief escape, if these two classes move much faster with their skills and traits as the thief regain initiative for his movementskills like IA?

I know that thieves can port 4000 units in few secs, but these range need many ressources and skills with high CD’s, warriors and engis skills aren’t so strong but reload faster and in the end they are faster and over long disctance they run every other class away.

But also the deffense is important. Speed is usless, if you cant go away from the battlefield and get one CCskill after another or heavy conditionspikes, thieves have big disadvantages against these two cases.

You must have the absolute worst Thieves in existence on your server.

Why stop at light armor? They look awful in everything. Even their cultural armor with the exception of heavy tier 3. IMO of course.

Black Teagan.9215:

1.Warrior
2.Engi
3.Thief
4.Ele
5.Ranger
6.Mesmer
7.Guardian
8.Necro

Why the thief is under warrior and engi?
Thieves are very fast on short distance, but their skills have higher CD’s or are too expensive for far distance.
For long distance have engis and warriors better skills/traits, many movementskills, which make them faster as thieves, incl. their CC-skills.

I was under the impression he was asking which classes could escape the best. Not necessarily have the fastest ground speed? Thus why Thieves are #1.

It will, but it’s actually slower than just walking.

Fast Hands trait, 1 second off rapid fire, and a burst skill wouldn’t hurt too

Ranger has 2 skills to use that move faster than just holding W. Swoop and Lightning Reflexes. It also has a rough time with condis. So any class with more movement skills or easy access to cripple/chill/immobilize will wreck a Ranger.

Looks reasonable. I’d go Thief, Warrior, Guardian, Mesmer, Engineer, Elementalist, Ranger, Necromancer personally.

Can ANet just come out and tell us they’re nerfing strength runes already? It’s absurd to see these threads all over the place at this point. Anyone with a shred of common sense will tell you the runes are overpowered. It doesn’t mean condis are balanced, or the other runesets aren’t underpowered. But there’s no denying the Strength runes are overpowered.

Maul is the only ‘reliable’ form of burst available to this class, but without a Fast Hands style trait, it’s mostly ineffective.

Our other high damage attacks would be Path of Scars and Counterattack, but both are much more unreliable and ineffective imo.

Now that all said… a Greatsword with an intelligence sigil which you can then use to crit on Swoop+Hilt+Maul does do a reasonable amount of damage. But the problem with greatsword has always been, if you don’t kill the opponent, you’re stuck with a mediocre weapon for the remaining 6 seconds while you wait for Maul to come off cooldown or swap weapons.

Problem #1: I have no idea what balance issue this change is even trying to fix.
Problem #2: I have no idea how this would do anything btu give players free stats which would just make already OP classes worse.

You want real balance? Nerf the ever living [censored] out of guardians and warriors so the other classes aren’t carried (ala GWEN) and ignored (ala MERT).

What’s silly is if you go with the purchase all skills and utilities approach, it costs something like 600 skill points to unlock everything. If you level to 80 and do map completion you barely have half the amount of skill points you need…

Zefrost.3425:

Basically ranger is balanced in the area of AOE spam unlike other classes.

We’re balanced because we dont have any?

I always found it odd the way this class was built. Seemed impossible for a company to make a power oriented class so completely backwards unless it was done by design. No one could possibly get so very much wrong by accident! Per CDI, it was intentional…. all part of ANet’s master plan.

How could would barrage be if it shot arrows in a cone out in front of you up till the point you chose on the ground. That would be one helluva AE to compensate the class for having nothing else to offer

Personally, I’d like to see them improve the ground speed of the Ranger. Rangers should be the fastest class in the game and make exceptional scouts.

Now that alone wouldn’t be a real valuable role, but it would give the class an identity to build off of.

We could then expand it further… what would scouts do in a large battle? They’d probably find favorable terrain to have their allies attack from or unfavorable terrain for their allies to ambush others.

In game terms, they could give us some way to spread AE vulnerability stacks around. They could give us a way to counter stability. They could just give us burst and AE and call it a day…

An example to counter stability could be to change Entangle from a PBAE root on a long cooldown to a ‘wall of thorns’ on a much shorter cooldown. This way we could throw up a wall that would immobilize people briefly since stability won’t affect immobilize.

How you make it so they run through it and are immobilized briefly but can continue running later as opposed to hitting the wall and being stuck indefinitely? /shrug…. They could make it so players who run into the wall get a condition and after 2 seconds the condition ‘ticks’ and causes the player to become immobilized for 2 seconds.

But anything could work. Just think about what the current meta is running, consider why the current meta is winning, and give the Ranger something to upset the balance of the current meta. Anything to stop hammer trains at this point would be a good thing.

Caedmon.6798:

Maybe look at gw2’s front page where they explain diff classes…And they say the following about warrior…

Warriors are masters of weaponry who rely on speed, strength, toughness, and heavy armor to survive in battle. Adrenaline fuels their offensive power—the longer warriors stay in a fight, the more dangerous they become.

did you read that.. ? They rely on S P E E D.
So,all is working as intended.

I then read the Ranger’s description and tears start to form in my eye

I also laugh at the people trying to justify the Warrior’s speed as if the class needed it to maintain melee range.

Lets not forget that on top of having the most mobility in the game the Warrior class also has the best condition clear in the game, a ton of cripples and immobilizes, blanket immunity to conditions, numerous stuns and knockbacks, and still maintains very high burst damage.

Now if the above list started and stopped at mobility maybe posters like Warlord and Paavotar would have a point. But the idea that Warriors have any difficulty getting into melee range and maintaining it and need the mobility they have? Come on…

Is Rifle #3 overpowered when the Warrior applies quickness to it?

I’m reasonably sure the wiki has been kittened with. The per shot coefficient on Warrior longbow is .33. You double that for .66 over both shots. Unless they’ve doubled the damage it does in some patch between now and this time last year when I did the DPS calculations for all ranged weapons in the game.

[edit…] Yea, just confirmed it. It’s still .33 a shot, or .66 over both shots. Ranger Longbow is still the best single target ranged damage in the game when considering only auto attack.

Ranger Long Range Shot Longbow 0.900 1.000 36.346%
Guardian Orb of Wrath Scepter 0.666 0.800 32.019%
Engineer Hip Shot Rifle 0.650 0.900 31.944%
Mesmer Spatial Surge Greatsword 0.945 1.400 28.558%

The thing to remember is the Ranger’s longbow doesn’t really benefit that greatly from using the 2 through 5 skills to increase this damage. This is why the Ranger’s DPS model simply doesn’t work in this game unfortunately.

Honestly it doesn’t matter which race you go. You will want to use your ranger specific utility skills over the racial ones anyway. Go with whatever one looks the best to you.

And of the classes that don’t belong, which do you feel has the least to offer to WvW currently?

I also question some of of the roles you feel these classes excel at.

You mention scouting, but Warriors make the best scouts. You mention yak slaying and camp taking, but every class can solo those. So even in these side tasks, it seems we’re better off with GWEN filling those roles too, no?

And you’re ok with that Oakwind? That a game has 8 playable classes but only GWEN have a use?

This is a very easy discussion to have.

Is the Ranger useless? Of course not.

Is the Ranger the least useful class in WvW? I think so. It’s certainly outside the meta, and in an MMO, that’s all that really matters.

Is it all a conspiracy theory? I’m honestly sick of having the whole ‘well no one has seen a good Ranger so they have no clue’ debate. It’s very easy in this game to figure out what a class is capable of. After 2 years, if the class had a viable role to fill it would have been found.

Now lets summarize the type of conversations we’ve had in this thread:

Ranger pets suck! – No they don’t, they just need work.

Bows suck! – No they don’t, they just need work.

Traits suck! – No they don’t, they just need work.

Do you guys realize how silly this is? Who cares if you can’t agree on the severity of the problem? Both sides acknowledge a problem exists. Why not move the conversation back over to the Post CDI thread instead of bickering over who deserves to be at the bottom of the barrel more?

Any of the weapons you mentioned would work just fine. Typically, when people ask about power builds, they’re talking about your typical Longbow/Greatsword build. Since patch, it seems a lot of people run 6/0/2/6/0 which is honestly a pretty fun build to run.

But you can run shortbow too. Most look at it as a condi weapon but it’s a very good power weapon too capable of doing more damage than longbow at anything but the max range. I also find its utility skills much more valuable than the longbow’s. You could run a similar point spread if you want, but I run piercing arrows and signet of the beast master. If you run signets, you tend to want more than just SoS which kind of runs into problems with survival of the fittest not being that great with only 1 survival skill slotted. I usually run 6/2/6/0/0 as shortbow.

Good luck, the Ranger is an uphill battle that most burn out on.

So it was code for medium armor afterall.

Absolutely not.

Fast Hands is an insanely powerful trait and you should consider yourself fortunate it’s so low in the tree to even allow the diversity you have in the first place.

Despite where Cleansing Ire (the only truly mandatory Warrior trait) and Fast Hands are, the Warrior class already has more build diveristy than many other classes. On top of this, the Warrior class is one of the most vital classes to this entire game.

There is absolutely nothing the Warrior class needs at this point that shouldn’t also come with rather substantial nerfs in exchange.

And yes, I play a Warrior.

Those are not strong ranged choices for PvE. I don’t know what an ‘adventurer’ profession is. Is that code for medium armor? I imagine Elementalist or Rifle Warrior are out of the question?

Of those 3, the Ranger is the strongest sustained damage for ranged combat. Keep in mind that isn’t saying much as the longbow is still about half as valuable as the sword.

I do think the stealth should be independent of needing to hit. However, every longbow shot should deal max range shot damage. If it hits, it should do some secondary affect as you described or simply activate a secondary ‘from stealth’ attack option like larcenous strike (per the discussion in the post-cdi ranger thread.

There’s no reason the skills should do no damage though. That’s what has gotten the weapon into the situation it is now with most attacks being a DPS loss when used.

You’re right, you can’t get a full suit from a single temple vendor. You can’t get the legs at all if I remember correctly. Don’t remember which vendor had which pieces, but you’ll want to visit them all.

As for the sigil, you’ll want a different one anyway. Ranger I think is what most are considering these days for PVE? I don’t follow the PvE discussions.

It’s only an issue with 2 mob AI’s. The pet won’t do that to a player. Same thing happened in WoW and WAR.

If you’re limiting yourself to Karma gear then it’s the soldiers pieces. Power as the primary with toughness and vitality as the secondary. If you want to spend money, and your focus is purely PvE as you say, then berserker gear is your ultimate goal. You’ll swap out one or 2 pieces for assassin’s gear due to the way stats round. Last time I did the math it was all serker and an assassin head piece. I haven’t updated my calculator for the ferocity changes.

More people on the conspiracy bandwagon… that the reason no one can find a use for a Ranger is because every Ranger they’ve ever seen was bad.

Pretty low opinion of your server’s commanders and guilds if you honestly don’t think they could come up with some role for the class to play over 2 years.

Couldn’t possibly be that the class has legitimate issues. No. Never that. Oh wait! I’ve got it! YAK SLAPPER!

+1 for Ranger. Given how unreliable they are, the whole pet should be little more than a unique DOT for the Ranger class that can die instead of be dispelled.

I don’t find initiative to be the problem, it was just implemented poorly. How fast it regenerates is the larger problem and has been since day one. This is hardly the first game to use an initiative style system and it works in other games just fine.

To build off the exhaustion table that the previous poster said, what if you simply make exhaustion stack due to the repeated use of a skill and that increases the initiative cost of that skill (or all skills) until exhaustion fades?

For example…

Heartseeker costs 3 iniative and puts exhaustian on the thief for 5 seconds. If he uses the skill again, Heartseeker would cost 4 iniative and stack exhaustion to 2 and reset the timer to 5 seconds. A 3rd time would cost 5 and push exhaustion to 3 and reset the timer to 5 seconds. etc etc. After 5 seconds, exhaustion would drop by 1… so if you had 3, it would go to 2 for 5 seconds, then 1 for 5 seconds, then 0.

Now this could be implemented on a per skill basis (if you use Heartseeker back to back, only heartseeker has its initiative cost increased and becomes exhausted) or you could penalize the class as a whole and if they use any skill back to back it stacks exhaustion and all initiative costs are increased by 1.

Something like this would only really impact those who spam heartseaker to perma stealth or things like FS or PW etc.

Spotter is often quoted as being a 7% damage increase. I have never run the numbers to verify this, but if true 7% > 5%. The range on EE I’ve never cared about.

For shiggles I took a stab at the math real quick while bored at work. With just 200% crit damage you’ll have a 1% damage increase for 1% crit chance.

In the end, eagle eye helps with burst and spotter helps with sustained, but either are about even overall.

I consider the difference between a weapon not working with itself and a weapon not working with another weapon or utility to be quite significant actually.

As for a scenario? I channel barrage into a choke to snare the zerg and a thief jumps me mid channel or after the channel completes?

I feel weapons should have some kind of natural flow within themselves. If the skills don’t ‘flow’ together the weapon doesn’t ‘feel’ right. Gameplay is clunky etc. All subjective feelings, I know…

With Barrage, it is the only AE on a single target weapon. It requires you to remain stationairy to use on a mobile class. And it simply doesn’t work with the #3 skill on the same weapon. In addition to this, barrage is just a terrible skill all together.

Now improving barrage is great. I’m all for it in fact. I just would much rather see the skill moved elsewhere because the weapon simply doesn’t have room for it and it doesn’t complimenet the weapon or playstyle at all.

Xaylin.1860:

Atherakhia.4086:

#5: It doesn’t synergize well with #3 because it pulls us out of stealth.

I do agree that Barrage needs some work but I don’t see stealth being an issue. Thieves and Mesmers face the same problem with bouncing attacks or area effects. Hunters Shot just isn’t supposed to be used after Barrage.

But there’s no stealth for shortbow unless you use a utility skill and the bouncing attacks are also quite quick. They don’t leave a pulsing field on the ground that lock you out of stealthing for 6 seconds for example.

As for Mesmers, do the clone attacks take them out of stealth? Pretty sure they don’t.

I certainly hear where you’re coming from AEFA with boon stripping being a very powerful tool but I want you to consider 3 things…

1.) The hammer train meta has been the only viable WvW meta for quite some time now even with the stun nerf because of all the boons and how easy they are to get.

2.) We’re talking about the Ranger class here. There’s an enormous void that needs to be filled before we ever need worry of the Ranger class getting close to the GWEN meta.

3.) Is a pulsing 6 second ‘field’ on the ground really that much more powerful than a Mesmer’s null field?

Isn’t it about time we had a real solution to the Hammer train? Is there a reason it can’t be Rangers to do it?

I’ve never been a fan of removing Rapid Fire and simply replacing it with a burst skill. For starters I feel we need/deserve more than one burst skill. Secondly, it would probably need a considerable cooldown increase if the damage was improved to the point to really be reliable. It would also not change much of the flow of the class imo because we can’t really follow it up with anything or combo it with much.

I’ve also never been a fan of barrage. It does short bow damage to 5 targets and ends up doing much more harm to us than to them. Now making it a boon strip is certainly going to make it more valuable and would probably finally give us some functional use in a zerg. But even with this added utility, I still feel like the skill is out of place and is still very clunky to use.

#2: Either increase the damage by about 10% or reduce the channel time down to 3.5 seconds and adjust damage so it only sees ~10% increase damage. This will make the skill a burst skill.

#3: I like your 2 phase solution to this skill and I’ve been saying since day one that it should stealth us regardless of hitting or not. If the arrow hits, have it immobilize for 1 second. You could then still have your secondary skill while in stealth do something.

#4: This skill is fine and doesn’t need any real work imo.

#5: It doesn’t synergize well with #3 because it pulls us out of stealth. The root limits its use while roaming. The damage is too low. The ROF being so similar to shortbow means we reflect too much damage. Your boon stripping idea will resolve some of these issues, but it still is a skill that I don’t think fits on the weapon. This would make room for a second burst skill (kill shot being the laziest option).

Now as for barrage I see 2 viable alternatives. Remove spike trap and replace it with barrage as I’ve suggested in the past. All you’d have to do is make barrage bleed on each wave and immobilize briefly on the first wave and it’s already better than a 6pt spike trap in use, just would hit the cooldown pretty hard.

Alternatively, why can’t barrage be molded to fit your secondary #3 skill? Instead of doing 12 waves of shots, it could do 6. It may be too powerful with a 12 second cooldown to remove boons, but what if it removed boons only on crit? Still too powerful? Cut back the waves to 4 or spread the waves out to 1 second each instead of .5. Find some reasonable middle ground.

Hyper offensive? No utility? I’m like on the completely other end of the spectrum :/

LB #2: Utility skill so you do competetive damage at min range.

LB #3: Utility skill so you can defend yourself/escape.

LB #4: Utility skill to get people off you.

LB #5: Utility skill to snare 5 targets (and kill yourself).

GS #2: Burst, but without a fast hands trait it can’t live up to its potential.

GS #3: Utility to escape/engage.

GS #4: Utility to defend with very limited offensive ability against an aware opponent.

GS #5: Utility to interrupt a cast but is primarily used to line up a maul.

I realize I’m oversimplifying this a bit and some sigil combinations have really openned up the potential with some of these options, but overall I’m not seeing the same offensive value you are. Especially when I consider half the attacks do less damage than #1.

Can we just give Ranger pets a blanket 75% reduced damage from AE in WvW unless the pet was the actual target of the skill and call it a day? If the pet wasn’t killed in seconds we wouldn’t have a dozen of these threads every weak asking for ANet to remove the pet from the class.

The amount of utility the pets provide is quite considerable. If only they were alive long enough to actually provide it.

Was just going to respond in the other thread, but may as well respond to this one instead since it’s more centralized discussion on Ranger issues.

Eurantien makes some great points, but I’d argue the problem is both weapons and not one or the other. Neither weapon can really stand on their own and both fill more of a back-up/utility role than being the main one you want to use.

For most other classes they have a dominant weapon and a back-up weapon to support it. Ranger really doesn’t have a dominant power weapon (for PvP/WvW) and that’s primarily because GW2 has nothing for a power build to provide in this game but AE and burst, 2 things the Ranger simply doesn’t have (by design no less).