Guild Wars 2

Leuca.5732:

What the OP is saying (that I apparently understood better than a lot of people) goes something like this:

1. Ranger enters a skirmish with an opponent and uses f1 to make the pet attack before taking any other actions.

2. Ranger gives no orders that would make the pet change its target throughout the fight.

3. The ranger successfully drives off their attacker, who stealths at low health and goes to hide behind a wall. The opponent is NOT visible, but happens to be just inside the pet’s leash range.

4. The opponent is downed while in stealth due to some ticking effect (conditions, etc)

5. Opponent unstealths behind aforementioned wall. Since no conditions are still ticking after being downed, there is no visual indicator to the ranger that he/she is even there, yet the pet still tracks and follows when the Ranger has absolutely no other clues as to their opponent’s whereabouts.

This has nothing to do with pets’ otherwise bad AI; the OP is pointing out a specific function that would single-handedly make the Ranger OP if in theory all the professions were otherwise perfectly balanced.

This has everything to do with a pet’s bad ai. I’ve mentioned it several times myself. Stealth doesn’t drop agro in PvE (it used to). Since you don’t drop agro, the pet doesn’t drop target. /end

Buffing raw damage of the ranger isn’t going to solve as much as you think. Sustained damage doesn’t win fights. It doesn’t apply pressure.

This class has 2 main failings: No burst, No AE. These are the areas that need work more than just increasing raw damage at the expense of reducing pet damage.

If I were to adjust things, I’d approach it as such:

Fortifying Bonds changed so any boon your pet gains, you gain as well. This simple reversal will allow the Ranger to stack might like many of the other classes in the game. This will synergize with Companion’s Might as well as Sword and several pet abilities.

I would remove Frost Trap from the game. While it is a powerful snare, we don’t need it, spike, and mud trap all doing effectively the same thing. One of them needs to go.

Make Barrage a skill. Now that it’s a skill it can be made more powerful. Change it to chilling arrows if you’re really missing frost trap. Up its damage slightly. Reduce the channel time. You get the idea… anything can be done to it at this point with an independent cooldown.

Replace the longbow barrage skill with an Aimed Shot type skill that does very high damage on a longish charge time like 1.5 – 1.75 seconds maybe.

Adjust the channel time of rapid shot down to 3-3.5 seconds but keep damage the same.

Give the longbow the same damage from 0-900. 900+ will do +30% crit damage instead of the added damage.

Now the longbow has some value and synergy within itself. It can knock players back to the crit damage range, It can stealth to gain 100% crit chance with remorseless, it can aimed shot to deal damage.

The pet now makes more sense because boons it gains affect the ranger. It of course invalidates the need for Signet of the Beastmaster because signet boons will now hit the pet and bounce to the ranger via 15 in nature.

You could then give the marks line a 20% damage on foes below 50% type trait. You could make it so your critical hits grant your pet might with some internal cooldown so the ranger doesn’t just insta stack 25might and 25 bleeding instantly.

Now this is all longbow focused simply because that’s my favorite weapon. But the main point I’m trying to make is the raw damage really isn’t the issue. It’s the lack of burst, ae, and boons imo.

ANet said in the past that they’re increasing crafting to 500 and that the way you’ll get mats is by breaking down level 80 gear. I have 4 guild banks on 2 accounts filled with yellows and I had over 50 mails of blues and greens before the last patch deleted them all. I probably have about 100 mails of blues and greens between accounts now.

I hope they don’t delete the mails again…

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Again, you can’t read apparently. No one in here as said that the pet is chasing you from the other side of the map.

What this is saying is that when you are out of sight of the ranger, and that player doesn’t even dream that you are there hidden, he gets rewarded for not knowing squat, because his pet finds the hidden player, passively. That isn’t encouraging active play. That is rewarding passive playing and clueless people that don’t have situational awareness. Meanwhile the people using the intricacies of the maps to their advantage are punished by a bad designed AI.

And again, that’s not how the pet works. If set to aggressive, the pet will sit by your side and only attack things that attack it or you. While you may think you’re hidden, tab target has found you, your name was clipped through a wall etc etc. You were selected, the pet was told to attack.

There’s so much that needs to change with this game it isn’t even funny. Just from a quality of life stand point.

Dyes should be account wide.
WvW rank should be account wide.
Commander tags should be account wide.
Purchaseable equipment (cultural for example) should be skins and not items.
All armor sets should be available in PvE and PvP(s/t/WvW)

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

This isn’t about pet’s F2 abilities, this isn’t about pet’kittenting moving targets. Have you read the OP at all?

The OP is little more than nonsensical rambling which I said in my first post.

He’s expecting the pet to behave in a way that simply is impossible in this game. It’s not exploiting anything.

When players stealth, stealth isn’t an agro dump, so the pet doesn’t lose target. This is normal AI behavior.

When a player is on a hill, if another player can get to you, the pet can too. No one is using guard so I’m confident no one is exploiting the teleporting mechanic that is common in WvW.

The pet already has a 1200 yard leash range. So it isn’t chasing you down from the other side of the map as implied.

These are all normal AI behaviors and not something that’s ever going to change. Now as for the F2 abilities, I brought it up because people are all ‘the pet is all passive, the pet is OP and doesn’t need player input’. The simple point is that the pet doesn’t respond to player input half the time anyway.

By passive play I assume you mean the class is mostly auto-attack spam because almost all of the weapon skills are utility oriented so they are held in reserve until you need them as opposed to other classes that use their weapon skills to create opennings to chain other weapon skills with.

On top of this, the vast majority of their ability skills are awful without first investing 30 points in a tree. The rest are almost all traps or awful outright. None of these are used as anything but a defensive option so again, the gameplay is more passive in nature.

I know I, personally, have been complaining about this for months ceaselessly. The ranger class is easily the least enjoyable class I’ve ever played. Most of the skills and abilities are ineffective, most traits are awful, most lines make no sense, the pet doesn’t work, power builds are awful. The only way the class has ever worked is as a bunker/regen condi spec. Even when they were trap spec’d a meta or 2 ago, they were primarily there for the condition damage and the offensive CC on objectives.

The class sucks and isn’t fun to play. But I’m still not seeing anyone come up with any real way to make it not suck, make it fun to play, or ensure it at least has something to fall back on so it doesn’t disappear entirely.

Again, this is how a pet class works. I don’t think there’s anything you’re going to do about this. Short of them going back to making stealth break agro (or just allowing it to break in sPvP) the Pet will auto home back onto you if you’re still within 1200 yards of the Ranger. There’s nothing wrong with this. This is normal AI behavior.

Now as for the Ranger pet never hitting a moving target, again… normal AI behavior for this game. Go out in the real world and find some melee oriented champion. To kill said champion all you do is hold your back key, your strafe key, and attack. Doesn’t even need to be a ranged weapon. The strafe key rules all.

Now I haven’t a clue what you people want out of the pet? The F2 abilities suck for the most part because they’re so unreliable. Rangers have been begging for the F2 abilities to be redesigned. They’ve been begging to have control over the secondary attacks as well. But beyond that the pet will have to be automated in some fashion. Think of it as an interactive DOT that you can’t dispell and you’ll be much better off.

Just introduce a way to reveal stealthed targets.

Since everyone’s also complaining burn is overpowered, reduce the damage of burn and make it put revealed on targets while burning.

2 birds, 1 stone.

Durzlla.6295:

Atherakhia.4086:

Durzlla.6295:

Atherakhia.4086:

Viridi.5467:

Although I agree with the argument of spirits being able to die, not ALL classes have powerful AoE, nor do they have the time to actually kill all these spirits (or even 1) while the ranger does insane damage. You’re basically always “in a pinch” against a spirit ranger if you have to go about killing atleast his Sun Spirit first, then perhaps (if the ranger chooses to use it) the elite spirit so he can’t revive himself.

This also means the ranger always has full control of the fight, considering he can just bash away on the target while the target is desperately struggling to keep up with the spirits (that follow the ranger at 300% speed or something).

I’m not sure any class in this game has less AE than a ranger. And also keep in mind that the insane damage you speak of is still condition damag which leads us back to the issue being predominately a condition problem (as every condition class right now is overpowered beyond belief) and not a ranger specific one.

Condi builds are not OP, they’re just really good against Direct Damage builds, you know those things that -were- the meta? And you know what’s really good against every condi build that uses rabid or shamans gear? Condi builds that have a lot of vitality, or condi removal(or better yet transfer). But you know what has little issue against those sorts of condi builds? Direct Damage….

See where this is going? The only problem is the vast majority of players are too lame to actual figure anything out for themselves and need to follow everyone else.

Oh did I mention there’s bunker builds that make condi builds useless? Yeah those are fun to play atm.

Go ask on the Warrior forum what they feel is the most trollish build they know. They’ll tell you the 40k HP, 1.5khp/sec build that can still dish out high sustained damage. Ask them what their worst match up is. They’ll all say Condi Ranger. Why the Ranger over the necro or engineer? Because of the regen.

It’s not too much to ask for power builds to have a place in the current meta. I’d much rather they fix the root problem (condis) than try and tackle class issues individually.

I’ve fought that warrior build a few times and I can’t find a way to break it, it just has so much HP, Armor, and regen it’s ridiculous, I’ve yet to see a good player say the ranger one is OP though, perma poison is simple enough of a counter to it, not to mention it takes them forever and a half to kill ANYTHING that’s not made of tissue paper. The warrior build does not have that flaw either…

Well there are 2 builds involved.

One is a condi build for damage the other is pure tank for survivability (ie. Troll Spec) that is there for the utility the hammer brings (hammer, mace, shield).

But yea, their condi pressure is more than a Rangers and it’s difficult maintaining poison on them when you also can’t get in melee range (I run sb/gs for escape in WvW anyway, not sword).

I’m sure SoR will be nerfed in the future. That or they’ll get around to removing the abillity for various classes to stack 25might on their own. Alternatively, I’d be just fine with them changing Fortifying Bond to work where if our pet gets a boon, it’s shared with us and we can then too stack 25might.

Durzlla.6295:

Ljiona.9142:

Clearly if a ranger beats you, it is OP. Warriors are getting those posts also. Everything was fine when you could beat any class 1 on 1 but the moment one class counters yours, you scream nerf.

Sad thing is, a spirit ranger is so not OP.

I would say warriors have ONE OP build, but that’s more because it has a ton of HP, condi damage, regen, and armor, granted idk the build myself I’m just going off of the stats I’ve been -told- it has, and haven’t managed to bring it down myself despit the build I’ve thrown at it. Granted this may be a L2P problem shrugs.

People are just under the illusion that rangers are supposed to always lose (no idea why).

What makes the build OP is they can stack 25 might with it. So they run Apothecary, have more powerful condition damage, have insane regen due to SoR + banner. If not for the 25might it probably wouldn’t be more powerful overall than a Ranger.

How many more of these threads need ot be made until people start actually trying to come up with a solution? And we’re convinced this is now a Ranger issue and not the simple fact that bunker/regen builds with condi support are overpowered?

Ranger #2 isn’t a knockback.
Ranger #3 can be interrupted by more than a knockback.

Why are we talking about this instead of why downed state even exists in the first place…

DOTA is also a much less complex game with a decade of past experience to pull from. That’s not to say this game is perfect (lol, it isn’t even close), but if you’re going to compare it to a game at least try to fit it into the same genre.

Durzlla.6295:

Atherakhia.4086:

Viridi.5467:

Although I agree with the argument of spirits being able to die, not ALL classes have powerful AoE, nor do they have the time to actually kill all these spirits (or even 1) while the ranger does insane damage. You’re basically always “in a pinch” against a spirit ranger if you have to go about killing atleast his Sun Spirit first, then perhaps (if the ranger chooses to use it) the elite spirit so he can’t revive himself.

This also means the ranger always has full control of the fight, considering he can just bash away on the target while the target is desperately struggling to keep up with the spirits (that follow the ranger at 300% speed or something).

I’m not sure any class in this game has less AE than a ranger. And also keep in mind that the insane damage you speak of is still condition damag which leads us back to the issue being predominately a condition problem (as every condition class right now is overpowered beyond belief) and not a ranger specific one.

Condi builds are not OP, they’re just really good against Direct Damage builds, you know those things that -were- the meta? And you know what’s really good against every condi build that uses rabid or shamans gear? Condi builds that have a lot of vitality, or condi removal(or better yet transfer). But you know what has little issue against those sorts of condi builds? Direct Damage….

See where this is going? The only problem is the vast majority of players are too lame to actual figure anything out for themselves and need to follow everyone else.

Oh did I mention there’s bunker builds that make condi builds useless? Yeah those are fun to play atm.

Go ask on the Warrior forum what they feel is the most trollish build they know. They’ll tell you the 40k HP, 1.5khp/sec build that can still dish out high sustained damage. Ask them what their worst match up is. They’ll all say Condi Ranger. Why the Ranger over the necro or engineer? Because of the regen.

It’s not too much to ask for power builds to have a place in the current meta. I’d much rather they fix the root problem (condis) than try and tackle class issues individually.

I’d much rather see them change stomp to a ranged stomp/leap type move to resolve the mobility issues and such as right now the main thing I miss about greatsword is the mobility.

As for greatsword in particular, there’s nothing wrong with anything but the burst skill. Make it a parry like the Ranger’s move. Give it a 1/3/5 second duration and if you parry a melee attack you do moderate damage and knock players back in a frontal arc that knocks back 200/400/600 yards.

How are these threads the least bit useful? No one can even say WHY spirit rangers are overpowered or HOW they would try and fix them. Also where do you draw the line between it being a class issue and not just more issues with conditions being so blatantly overpowered?

We know the Ranger class has a low skill floor and low skill ceiling. No one knows why ANet designed the class to be so passive, but they did. There is no other way to play the class other than as a bunker with regen and/or condi which seems to be the theme for sPvP right now.

Why not make a generic Rangers thread or take the dicussion to the Ranger forum. As far as I’m concerned, this is a condition problem and not a Ranger problem.

The pets have a more strict leash range now so that solves the first issue. The second issue you have a giant red name on the screen so you’re not as well hidden as you may think and tab target will find you.

The pet follows normal AI pathing so if you have a path to you, the pet will find you. I doubt anyone is using Guard in sPvP so you’re not seeing the teleport action that you get in WvW (did they fix guard? I don’t even know…). If you’re stealthed the pet can’t find you. If you unstealth, since stealth isn’t an aggro drop in this game, the pet will resume chasing once you come out.

there’s no hacking involved here… the pet is following normal mob AI just like they do in every game out there. So short of removing the pet (which most rangers want to happen anyway) I don’t see what you want done about this? I highly doubt players run around with their pet on aggressive if that’s what you’re implying?

Anthrage.2519:

You’d rather mess with all classes, to say nothing of even messing with just 1 class, to address and issue with this one build? I’m sorry but thank-goodness you’re not making the decisions at ANet…

Please, let us not change all conditions in the game, nor even just burning, and upset balance across the board, because some people find spirit rangers OP. Just no.

Atherakhia.4086:

I’d much rather try and fix conditions in this game (even if the solution is reducing the stack cap to 15 in sPvP) or adjust burning to be more utility oriented and not so much damage focused rather then start messing with a class that only barely functions as it is..

You’d have a point if the complaint was spirit rangers. It’s not. The complaint right now is split between Spirit Rangers, Engineers, and Necromancers equally. What do all of these classes have in common? They’re the premier condition classes in this game. Even Warriors are starting to edge into the QQ stream because of their condition build and insane health regen.

So yes, I would sooner try and fix the REAL problem then continually nerf classes one at a time and never getting out of this nerf/buff cycle most MMO’s find themselves in.

Viridi.5467:

Although I agree with the argument of spirits being able to die, not ALL classes have powerful AoE, nor do they have the time to actually kill all these spirits (or even 1) while the ranger does insane damage. You’re basically always “in a pinch” against a spirit ranger if you have to go about killing atleast his Sun Spirit first, then perhaps (if the ranger chooses to use it) the elite spirit so he can’t revive himself.

This also means the ranger always has full control of the fight, considering he can just bash away on the target while the target is desperately struggling to keep up with the spirits (that follow the ranger at 300% speed or something).

I’m not sure any class in this game has less AE than a ranger. And also keep in mind that the insane damage you speak of is still condition damag which leads us back to the issue being predominately a condition problem (as every condition class right now is overpowered beyond belief) and not a ranger specific one.

The most common suggestion I see for ‘fixing’ spirits is to change their cooldown to 30 seconds, but make that cooldown only start after the spirit is killed. I think this in conjunction with allowing spirits to move on their own without a 30pt trait would be a reasonable solution to the problem people are having.

I’m still not convinced spirits are THE problem though. It seems the only things people complain about are bunker builds for classes that also have access to strong condition damage: chief among them being burning.

I’d much rather try and fix conditions in this game (even if the solution is reducing the stack cap to 15 in sPvP) or adjust burning to be more utility oriented and not so much damage focused rather then start messing with a class that only barely functions as it is.

I would still like spirits (and signets) to not require 30 points in a tree to be useful though.

If you want to make the leap to condition damage and shortbow, you can just run the typical bunker/regen build in apothecary/settler’s gear. You could also try the spirit build that everyone is currently running in sPvP, but spirits don’t work in WvW nearly as well as they do in sPvP.

I often wish barrage was a skill the Ranger got and the #5 ability was an aimed shot. Granted no one in their right mind would take Barrage in its current form as a skill, but that’s the case with a lot of what we have.

Whirling defense I think is fine. ANet has said they aren’t pleased with how 100blades works for Warriors in the past so maybe one day they’ll adjust that and we’ll see something happen with other melee oriented rooting skills.

Short answer, no.

Swoop’s primary advantage over the Warrior’s Charge skill is that Swoop isn’t affected by movement impairing skills. When they nerfed Ride the Lightning into the ground I thought for sure Swoop would follow.

We already have black lion chests. Just allow glory to be used to buy keys.

Alternatively, just allow people to buy laurels with glory.

A month or two ago ANet made a comment about them doing away with Magic Find on gear and they would replace it with something. I’m curious if a decision has been made on what will happen with the Magic Find gear?

Will you be swapping magic find for another stat (we still don’t have a boon/condition duration stat for example), or perhaps you’ll give a higher bonus to the other stats on the gear? While the second may not work for normal gear, celestial gear would certainly benefit from an extra 5 points per stat.

WHY are they OP? HOW would you fix them?

From all the complaints, it looks like the real problem is just condition spam and bunker builds… which have been the primary complaint for 6 months now?

NargofWoV.4267:

I solo champions… I don’t think the class is bad in pve, just dungeon work and wvwvw.

To be fair… all you need to solo a champion in this game is a strafe key Coincidently it’s also the #1 killer of pets in this game as well.

I think you’re blowing things out of proportion, but this game is desperately lacking a proper duel and GvG solution (go figure with a name like Guild Wars you wouldn’t expect to have to bend over backwards to actually war another guild…)

You realize the Ranger has an elite with a very long lasting immobalize (if it would actually get fixed so it was reliable…) right? They also have mud trap. If your goal is to nerf Rangers by buffing immobalizes, you’re going to be disappointed. I’m also not convinced Rangers are that overpowered to the point they need targeted nerfing.

I mean do you even consider what will happen to the class if it can’t evade? It’s fine to suggest nerfs for the sake of balance, but the goal shouldn’t be to eviscerate an entire class to do it. Rangers have a very narrow role to play currently and rely heavily no a meta that heavily favors conditions and bunker builds.

Any adjustments to the class will likely destroy it completely and shouldn’t be done without thinking them through.

Not sure either of these would be on my list of top 10 things wrong with this game.

Things just move too slowly and aggrivating mechanics are never fixed. Honestly speaking, I think too much time is spent trying to cater to the sPvP crowd and it has let the game fester and die.

Everyone here complains about lack of build diversity, but ANet does nothing but focus on the vocal few in this forum to fine tune specific classes until they’re perfect. Bad thing is by the time they’re where the playerbase seems to want them, the meta has shifted and we’re back to square one. And worse still is they ignore the majority of classes while doing this so they either ride the meta into being overpowered or are lost for all eternity never to be heard from again.

Cool cool. I’ll check it later.

This the 2x Thief one? Can’t watch youtubes at work.

It’s a shame no damage meters exist in this game as it would be nice to know how much the ranger actually contributes to the damage as opposed to just the utility of the spirit.

I’m on the fence with this. Greatsword has an enormous amount of utility and in the hands of any other class would probably be overpowered. On the flip side, GS has so much utility I don’t know why ANet felt they needed to put so much utility on every other weapon when we could just use GS as an offweapon and be set and the vast majority of the weapon options for this class wouldn’t be awful.

I really don’t think you’re going to get GS’s damage increased. I’d be fine with attaching a blast finisher to Maul and that’s about it really. You also have to remember that a lot of other classes do so well with their weapon options due to might stacks and the ranger doesn’t have a real option for this.

Just imagine how much better this class would be if Fortifying Bond read “Any boon your pet gets would be shared with you”.

There’s nothing wrong with gear progression. The current information says they’ll be limit 1 piece per day crafred, will require new ranks in crafts, and can still be sold on the AH. Just buy the things.

Introduce some way to convert badges of honor into laurels, use laurels to buy dyes, use karma to buy orrian boxes, sell all the above, buy ascended gear.

I could see the complaint if they said you would only get ascended gear by completing some long PvE only quest chain and your ascended gear would have a 10% chance on crit to vaporize your opponent like it did in WoW. But I’m not following the problem here.

Thief initiative regen is broken. Has been forever. You’re never going to have things like pistol whip, larcenous strike, or infiltrator’s strike balanced until initiative regen is looked at. There’s nothing wrong with any of these skills though and it’s stupid to try and nerf them independently.

Rangers are only here because the meta is condition. Remove the condition meta and they’ll be gone. With that said, set the spirit cooldown to 30 seconds and make it start after the pet dies and I’m sure most rangers would be fine with it. HOWEVER! Spirits and Signets need to be changed at the same time to no longer require a 30pt investment before they’re even worth a skill slot. As for the weapon evades, they’re on moderately long cooldowns on a class that currently isn’t running any stun breaks or stability because of the current meta.

Warrior Regen and SoR is the issue, not their stun breaks. There’s nothing wrong with having a control class in this game. There’s nothing wrong with that control class dishing out high burst off of a hammer stun. There’s a problem when that class is healing so much each second.

Inverted.7439:

I really hope they do nerf it but not the spirits, I love being able to play my ranger again it’s amazing but the nerf is inevitable and i dont want rangers to be nerfed through the ground. If Anet could somehow make this build alot harder to play with a better payoff for those who are good would be amazing so less people could play it to it’s full potential and people who truly like rangers can just get good from enough practice. And yea i know this is the problem with basically every class.

How do you expect them to do this though? The whole class is nothing but an autoattack fest unfortunately. Spam auto and keep poison on the target is the name of the game.

Worse still is the class is forced into specific trait lines just to make their skills useful (30 marks:signets, 30nature:spirits).

Short of a complete redesign of the class, it’s not going to change. Numbers will be crunched, but if you don’t like the playstyle of the class as it is right now abandon ship while you can. Bows will never work for this class again.

We have conditions that are beyond belief at the moment so any class with a condition build is owning in PvP.

We have Warrior healing/regen completely out of whack right now where they are nigh unkillable. Much the same with perma 25 might condi warriors.

We have rangers that are probably the worst condi class in the game owning face because of easy access to perma burn and a pet that always does max damage regardless of how you gear because there is no pet scaling in this game.

Clearly the issue is conditions to begin with and tweaks to other classes here and there. But conditions more than anything have gotten out of control. Problem is when you nerf conditions you’ll once again remove Necromancers and Rangers from the game.

It’s all going to come down how you want to play. If you want to be a low damage condi build or primarily use melee weapons, you’ll be fine. If you want to be a high burst power ranger at range you will not. If you expect your pet to work half the time, I’ve got some bad news. If you’re looking for rewarding game play, also not going to happen.

If they want to make it so 30 points weren’t required to make signets useful and 30 points in nature weren’t required to make spirits useful, I’d be fine with them toning spirits down slightly.

The root of the problem is conditions though and not really specific to rangers. The classes that have strong bunker options and condition specs are ruling sPvP. Why wouldn’t they so long as conditions require one stat leaving players the ability to collect toughness/vitality/healing power without concern for anything else?

Tone down burn so it’s a utility as opposed to a DPS condition and you’ll probably resolve the ranger problem and make them useless again just as ANet wants. Perhaps at some point they’ll realize what a giant pile of [censored] this class is and get around to changing things.

Don’t need that level of control where we tell our pet when to dodge and such. Having primary and secondary skills be controllable would be nice though. But only if they make the F2 abilities we already have actually useful.

Make F2 abilities fire off instantly regardless of what’s going on if it’s defensive in nature. Have them fire off instantly once within range if they’re an offensive ability. If they want to still play the entirely too long animations, that’s fine… but without these skills being used instantly they’re 110% useless.

Then give us F3 abilities to control the secondary effects for pets. Allow them to be turned on auto cast that way pets behave the same way they do now if players are lazy or find it too difficult.

If they seriously have a systems limitation that restricts them from adding another button to the bar, then simply make attack call your pet back if it’s already attacking the target.

I hope you brought your lube. This forum is especially against this change

You honestly struggle with spirit rangers as a warrior? The build has no stun break/stability. Warriors have tons of stuns, knockdowns, etc.

Just like Warrior is the current counter to Necro, it’s the same for Spirit ranger really.

But yea, if you were expecting some kind of involved and engaging gameplay with this class, you’re going to be disappointed. Regardless of spec, the bulk of your time is spent auto-attacking while running in a circle.

WvW: Regen bunker build in apothecary/settler armor.
s/tPvP: Spirit Regen condi build with clerics probably.
PvE: Whatever… run full magic find in an all 0 spec for all I care.

As for me personally? I run 30/20/20 or 30/20/10/10 or 30/20/0/20 etc etc. Some combination of this with longbow and greatsword. It’s awful. I wouldn’t advise it. But it’s the only way I can have fun on this class.

I wouldn’t waste your time with this class.

sPvP they rely on a very specific spec and a condition heavy meta to even stand a chance. If anything is changed the ranger will plummet.

WvW they’re about 7th of 8 possible classes right now.

In PvE they’re about middle tier. Much better off than Necros and Engineers.

Leveling is a cake walk. Only outdone by Warriors and Guardians probably.

I’m sure the toughness is doing its job as you’re probably not being killed in 2 or 3 hits. The problem is you’re not applying pressure to the target and aren’t doing enough damage. Burst is awful for this class. AE isn’t much better. The only way to apply pressure to targets is with conditions and you’re clearly a power ranger.

Try using Axe instead of longbow (I presume you’re longbow/gs?). Axe/Axe, Sword/WH is a pretty strong set for a power build.

While I think you’re overstating the skill level in longbow/s+d a bit, you’re pretty much right in general. This class simply has a very low skill floor and a very low skill ceiling. The reason for this is the class lacks complexity and depth. This is why I find the class so boring to play. Even when roaming and playing against good players, I find all I do is run around in circles with auto-attack on 90% of the time.

Some things that can be done to resolve this?

For starters, make it so we don’t need 30 points in a tree for a skill to be useful. This is a problem with both signets and spirits.

Secondly, make pet F2 abilities fire off instantly when you push the F2 button. They shouldn’t need to wait for an attack chain to finish, to stop moving etc. If they want to play their obscenely long animation after the skill is used, I couldn’t care less. But the majority of pet F2 abilities are 100% useless because they’ll never hit anyone. This is why players use dogs (for passive RNG auto downs) and drakes (passive blast finishers).

Third, give up with needing every weapon requiring 3 or 4 utility spells leaving only auto attack to deal damage. This class has such low burst and AE (noncondi) potential it’s pitiful. I’m fine with tying the class’ burst to the pet F2 abilities… but see above on how that’s simply not working right now.

Seems like just another reason to just nerf burn.

Spirits, just like Signets, for the Ranger require a 30 point investment before they’re even worth considering, let alone bringing. Any nerf to anything for the ranger must first come with signets no longer needing 30 points in marks to be useful and spirits no longer needing 30 points in Nature.

Secondly, I don’t see how making something like a combat res being tied to RNG is remotely fair. On crit stuff is one thing, those effects tend to be quite minor and crits quite common. But a 50% failure rate on an elite skill is just stupid.

I say just nerf burn across the board. Make it deal the same damage as poison (since it has a duration increase on reapplication as opposed to a stacking increase) which is 2x bleed (iirc?) and have it provide some valuable form of utility instead (revealed while burning).

As powerful as the ranger is, it’s still no where near the level of necromancers and engineers. It’s all single target burst aside from the AE burn field. It has a lot of CC, but there’s a lot of stability going around too. The ranger is barely competing currently because it’s all niche based and only works in this one narrow little way. Any adjustments will need enormous changes in other areas.

Take your zerg and interrupt the fun.

This game sucks and you need to get used to it. Fun is an afterthought for ANet at this point. Game has been out for a year and we’ve had no substantive changes in WvW yet. Balance is still attorcious. There’s still no secondary strategy outside of zerging.

I would absolutely love for ANet to make instanced guild halls where 2 guilds can go to war and at a specific time the game makes an instance and puts both guild halls on opposite sides of a map and first one to steal the other person’s intelligence wins. Not ever going to happen.

Either join in the fun or kitten in their cheerios.