Guild Wars 2

New to class after playing a ranger and engineer (go figure). Wanted a WvW roaming class for when I am off hours with guild.

Having a bit more than a bit of trouble understanding how to be effective.

Classic d/p sb build at 0 30 30 10 0 0 focusing on healing skills in SA.

1) TRAITS:

Struggling with what traits to use on shadow adapt. Shadow Protector (regen using now). Infusion of shadow or cloaked in shadow (for the blind) seem excellent too.

Anyone want to lay down the meta and why a new player should look at one vs the other?

Struggling with adept in critical strikes. People are using d/p and the 10% more damage for pistol but wouldn’t the 7% flanking and rear skill be better given most damage is from the dagger?

2) STATS

What stats are acceptable or desired? My build wound up with about 16k health 2600 armor, 3k power, 50% precision and 85% crit damage with food.

Sensible? I used Valk armor, Zerk weapons, Knight’s trinkets w zerk jewels.

3) UTILITIES

Because I have Traveler runes, I have 3 open slots.
Shadow Refuge is a no brainer
Then. . .
Blinding Powder (emergency stealth)
Shadow Step (is this really being used for condi removal or to get in range?)

But isn’t the assassin’s signet insanely good if it stacks on top of all the other damage mods?

4) PLAYSTYLE: MAKING STEALTH WORK

So this is a basic “perma stealth” type build, but I swear I don’t see how.
I can shadow refuge and build to 15 seconds that makes sense.
I have black powder/heartseeker but that is just 2 seconds (I can’t figure out how anyone gets 2 leaps much less 3 in)

What is the trick to staying in stealth? It is great but short in my experience.

5) PLAYSTYLE: LEAPING IN BLACK POWDER

Explain how this works. I keep trying to get a second or third leap in and there is just no way. Maybe I am too old and my reflexes too slow. But seriously, is there an easy way to learn this?

6) PLAYSTYLE: BURSTING DAMAGE

I am struggling to get off bursts of damage. Any rotations really work well? I tend to SB then swap to a shadow step or steal. I go into stealth with powder/heart seeker but that often messes me up in getting a backstab off.

In short, I am struggling to figure out how to get into range and then how to get off the first backstab not to mention I see thieves doing multiple backstabs.

Also, when do you really use steal?

7) PLAYSTYLE WEAPONS:
Given the swap of the third skill, I wonder why so many are roaming with SB over D/D D/P.

How do you use your SB more effectively (says the ranger who loves bows)?

8) PLAYSTYLE: INITIATIVE
Do you blow your initiative for the burst or hold it back? How do you manage? Do you take traits to increase its regen or pool?

I run out a LOT. If I don’t kill you with my burst, I often have too little left to get away without blowing a utility.

9) PLAYSTYLE: MOVEMENT
I don’t feel like the fastest class in the game to cover a map, but I see other thieves doing it. I use the sb to move and heartseeker is meh ok. But I have no swiftness.

Should I get a source of swiftness and if so what? If not, is the issue with my feeling pokey that I just need better stealth management? (I take the trait that is 50% movement in stealth).

Does swiftness add to this movement in stealth trait?

Well that is a start and thanks for the help.

The new recruit

RANGER:

The first thing that should be decided is what is the concept of a ranger.

A. Is it primarily a pet class?
B. Is it primarily to be a ranged class?
C. Is it primarily tied to crowd control, conditions or physical damage?

What is the basic model for how it should be played?
What should it be best in game at?
What should be its known weaknesses?

Imagine it like this “The ranger hunts with his loyal pets to protect Tyria and his realm. Masters of the bow they soften targets from range with debilitating shots making their targets lose initiative and be more vulnerable before swooping in to finish them in close combat.” The ranger appeals to those wanting long ranged single target attacks that do high damage and have great CC followed by a very evade and “juke” style of melee combat". Rangers are the principal pet class with more damage, utility and traits tied to their loyal friend.

RANGER ISSUE: Pet damage.
The key should be less that the pet DOES the damage but that having a pet alive increases the damage and utility of the ranger. In other words, I would tone down the damage that the pet does and replace that damage to the ranger. HOWEVER, should the pet die, the rangers damage would go down. A good starting point would be to take 1/2 the damage of the ranger’s pet and return it to the ranger.

RANGER ISSUE: Pet AI and Utility
Given the troubles with Pet F2 abilities in PvP and WvW and the corresponding game breaking potential in tweaking AI which is also pet PvE behavior, I propose adding a bit of additional utility to pets. Having a LIVE pet of each different class should provide a stat bonus to the ranger. This would be a quick fix to F2 abilities that often just don’t trigger quite right. Birds add precision. Felines add condition damage. Etc.

The idea of not being able to remove conditions but having them be toned down works but it would be a game altering event that would require numerous complex balances.

I just see no simple solution that doesn’t break the game. The issue is when you get ALL the conditions on you at one point in time in very large battles. But is that really different than getting everyone to focus fire you?

Look at the names of the skills. Enough said. ANet writes better than that!

I always thought the thief should get more of a bonus to backstabbing and flank attacks when out of stealth as a baseline. Sure, IN stealth it should be higher.

I would have Side strike do 7% more crit damage from side and 15% more crit damage from rear.

That would pretty much put the thief back in place.

I must really suck then because I just got my thief to 80 and find it harder to play than my engineer which has so many utility skills with 4 kits that I need a massage after playing!

My warrior, on the other hand, I let my 7 year old Nephew try out. Just saying.

Learning a few things about game mechanics which is nice especially about the delay. Agree your change makes sense. . . if I understand correctly. I still contend that lag really seems to impact our bombs though.

I do overall like the changes and thought put into them. My key is that changes that really require thinking about the game mechanic probably shouldn’t be fixed per class as a workaround. Make sense?

Retaliation probably needs a redesign in general versus an engineer work around. If an engineer workaround, it seems like it should be a trait vs trying to mess with the skills (but I don’t code so maybe that would be easy). A trait isn’t really a workaround and would still have intrinsic value/balance with any game mechanic change to retaliation.

I play a lot of Egun in large scale. It works well for runners and tails. No one minds a good fumigate either and it has the secondary heal which has saved my bacon many times. Lots of fun to area retail the arrow cart too. But yes, how fields work or stack on top of each other is a pain in the hindside. But that really isn’t a unique engie issue.

I don’t see healing mist as the core problem of the E-gun (though admittedly it is our stun breaker which is another issue altogether and a fair balance I would say). The support side scales very well in large scale. The damage. . . not so much. I routinely swap to it to cleanse.

If I could have an E gun change it would be that acid bomb leaps you TOWARD the enemy vs away. That could lead to better combos.

I would increase the water field times of healing mist and cleansing mist but reduce their corresponding heal rates (so it is as much regen just over 1 second per skill more time). That would allow greater group coordination without drastically increasing the overall ungrouped/uncoordinated healing potential.

Agree on the lack of need for swiftness for allies. Just focusing on the cripple works BUT 8 seconds for 4 bounces of cripple may be too many. That would be my biggest concern with the change. Low cooldown and all. That is why the mix of impacting allies and enemies works because rarely is it such a large number crippled given the cooldown. Thus, I still contend that changing the buff it provides allies is better. On the other hand, the fact it isn’t bouncing is annoying!!!!!

Rangers and engineers can do pretty significant direct damage IF they spec appropriately for it. After all, bomb auto attack scales with power better than any other skill and the melee weapons of the ranger are quite strong. . . specced for power.

The trouble is that is likely exactly how you do NOT want to play the class if you enjoy range. Therein lies the problem with PvE in this game (amongst other things).

In WvW and PvP you will enjoy both. Get out of the tedium of PvE and live!

I realize this may be like asking for a recipe to boil water but how would you set that up?

Just popped 80 on my thief and can’t figure out how in the World you can land multiple leaps on a black powder. You LEAP away (out of the circle). How do you leap and stay put?

I love hard classes (engineer and ranger) but this is without question the oddest to learn to play!

Engies are powerful in all aspects of the game and can do just about anything they need to for a specific encounter. I won’t comment on PvE because that is not my focus, but even there my ability to help with water fields, so many combinations, and high condition damage was welcomed. Engie just takes a lot to get to play well (you have 19+ utilities essentially with multiple kits). As a result, many people have played with one that just spams a bomb or a grenade. But a good engineer should be welcome just about anywhere.

Ranger is getting buffed. It is the current class “under review” and is quite good at roaming in WvW and in PvP. It fails right now in zerging and PvE. In PvE, it really violates every min/maxing rule of sharing ranges and buffs etc. You can do well with melee in PvE dungeons as well as having a few traits and utilities that are extremely good (spotter, frost spirit, etc) for the group. So a melee ranger (or spirit ranger) tends to be better for that aspect.

But yeah, the current PvE meta is quite skewed atm favoring melee. The combination of ranger and engineer will do you well in having a good time in WvW and PvP though!

Right now warriors cleanse conditions using adrenaline. That creates a situation with cleansing ire where the warrior’s key weakness of being subject to a lot of condition damage no longer applies.

Two changes to Cleansing Ire and Berserker Stance could make warriors more fun to play and play against.

1. Change Cleansing Ire to:

On a kill for the next 5-10 (tbd) seconds, the warrior can remove 1 condition for every bar of adrenaline spent.

Why? You eat conditions if you can’t get a kill. When you run away, you are very susceptible to conditions (warriors fight they don’t run).

2. Berserker’s Stance should be 50% condition immunity UNTIL you get a kill while activated (in which case it would then be 100%). You might increase the duration.

In other words, tie warrior condition cleansing to rushing in and slaughtering enemies.

Condition damage should be higher POTENTIAL damage given it is a. Over Time and b. Likely to be Cleansed.

For a warrior, condition damage should be far less likely to be cleansed than for other classes. It is your weakness (or should be).

I still contend that what made the warrior OP were the changes that allowed them to not be very susceptible to condition damage.

As an engineer, you can easily kill me with my own damage thru retaliation and I have very little stability and stun breakers. Just lock me down or make me eat my damage.
That is fair. If I were to argue that my grenades that can hit up to 15 targets should NOT be subject to the potential of eating a huge amount of retaliation. . . I would be changing the dynamics of the risk/reward.

For the warrior, your problem was supposed to be eating conditions. You DID have too little to start. You know have TOO Much. I would definitely tone down berserker and cleansing ire. Start with 2 conditions on cleansing ire at full adrenaline. See how it works.

You have a huge HP pool and quite excellent regen with Healing Signet. That should be the primary way you deal with conditions. Umut is right on the money. You SHOULD be weak in condition cleanses. That means you wouldn’t just move around condition mitigation.

Why not change it to a Roll For Initiative BUT remove the breaking stun aspect?

So it would be a 3/4 evade and 6 initiative when you hit 25% which would give you options on what to do with that initiative to get your hinny out of there.

There would be soooooo many unintended consequences of changing stealth at this point the way people are suggesting.

Not saying that a change wouldn’t help, but this is a longer term over the horizon fix when the thief is the primary focus class. Right now, you have rangers, elementalists and warriors getting reviewed.

This is one of those areas where a hasty fix would be a very bad one!

You can remove condition damage and take far less.
Power based damage is going to hurt you period.

Condition damage SHOULD have the highest POTENTIAL for damage but be at much greater risk of being cleansed leaving you with lower damage. It is as it should be (with minor tweaking).

1. Bomb Kit really isn’t our primary kit. I’m not sure anything really is “must have” for an engineer.
a. I would think a larger radius for the base bomb is in order. Decreasing delay increases DPS and the bomb is quite powerful as it is.
b. I definitely agree that the bomb doesn’t work well “on the run” because of that slight movement unit issue.

2. Regenerating Mist should be slightly longer. Even the slightest lag and you can’t pull off even one blast from the shield on it. 2 seconds makes sense. They could even tweak the total heal to occur over that time.

3. You can’t have Thwack hit 3 targets and keep its healing of turrets (assuming they fix turrets). I always thought it should apply a bit of vulnerability (I mean who better knows the weakspots of armor with a wrench?)

4. Evasive powder keg should get a radius increase.

5. Turrets scaling with HP would be quite OP I think. Engineers have quite a number of healing options as it is. If anything, I would add a second to the water field. It works great up until there is any lag whatsoever. A second would help a lot with multiple blasts.

6. I would say that Glue should create stability for the engineer and his team. Makes more sense that you are “glued” in place. Both the bomb and the pistol have longer timers so it would be reasonable. Beats the elixir idea IMHO.

7. It is time for ascended weapon stats for kits. Previously, the weapons were very rare and essentially that would have made an engineer without investing in weapons as powerful as only a handful of players who had them. Now it is pretty standard to see ascended weapons. I could see them splitting the difference and then in another 3 months adding the balance. That too would be fair.

8. E-Gun’s Healing Mist could move to 30 seconds but that may be too much. We have all sorts of traits to help us when immob or under conditions. Getting stunned is a bit of the engineer’s key weakness.
a. I might argue that reducing the time of Super Elixir would be better.
b. For Elixir F, I agree that bouncing to allies is annoying but it ensures more bounces often. I would move it from swiftness to adding a might for a short time.

9. Retaliation is sort of the cost of having grenades that can hit up to 15 targets, but there should be a way to mitigate it. It does make the FT hard to play though.
a. Maybe a trait that would reduce retaliation for all kits? It would have to be a sacrifice.

Yams is the winner. What a brilliant idea.

When in a node, all knockbacks become knockdowns.
Now you have more than solved the problem.

The problem with stealth is the ability to apply and reapply it.

You should not be able to cast a new stealth while in stealth. (You must come out of stealth to restealth).
There should be an ICD between stealth casts (2 seconds is fine).
You must be out of combat to stealth or take no damage for the prior 2 seconds.

Reducing CC would require you to redo ranged damage. As it stands, the melee classes move like greased lightening and do far too much damage. CC is essential and defiance would have to carefully consider not making CC avoid its primary purpose. The key problem would be in zergs where a random CC throw could trigger defiance and make it a hammertrain/guardian zerg fest. BORING!

PvE should not dictate how you balance. You balance person against person and then make the critters fit that system.

I wouldn’t get rid of cleansing ire, but I would make conditions what warriors worry about. In short, if you dual a warrior, the way to win would be to load them up with conditions and stay away from their heavy hits. For the warrior, the way to win is to kill that darn condition spammer!

I always thought that automated response (no new conditions at 25% health) fit the warrior. In other words, you should become very weak by conditions but not die. They still have to fight you in that weakened state with physical damage and even at 25% a warrior’s damage is still frightening for a squishy class. That would be quite amazing.

I play most “ranged” classes. Between an engineer and a ranger for roaming here is what you will find.

1. Ranger is much better at single target kills.
2. Engineer is much better outnumbered because of all the knockbacks, fields, immobilizes and ways to manage the enemy that is not the target.
3. Engineer is SIGNFICANTLY harder to learn to play just because you have 19+ skills.
4. Ranger requires you to both be at range and melee. The engineer can be a pure ranged character (bombs being PBAE).
5. Ranger allows for much faster and more accurate targeting.
6. Ranger struggles to get away from a battle quickly. Sure Swoop is effective but not nearly as much as rocket boots after stealth.
7. Ranger kills faster if all things go well.
8. Engineer has far more conditions to put on
9. Ranger has a better heal.
10. Engineers have better healing (with blast finishers).

You won’t go wrong either way.

Cleansing Ire is a problem. Warriors are supposed to keel over from conditions. That was (at least at start) their weakness. It should be made their weakness again.

Well, all classes have skills that are somewhat pointless but I am not sure there is time to fix them all.

The key is to tone down the warrior frankly. Though, you do have some good buffs for skills that are not used.

As for healing signet, I am tempted to wait and see how the reduction plays out. 8% may not seem like much but may do the trick. It may be 16-24% that does it. I am not even sure that is the issue. If anything, making the warrior slow makes more sense. Best way to beat a warrior, stay away.

“Most Warriors understand that. . . .” This is the concern. It seems that only warriors are having a hard time understanding that their class really does need to be toned down.

Of course, warriors bleed and burn. . . . but less easily than they should. Warrior defense should be their ability to kill not survive.

With Arenanet constantly tweaking new FOTM builds and traits as they are discovered and inadvertently destroying embryonic builds on the edge of viability, it’s no wonder that each profession has their own “OP” traitline that nearly every build uses for viability:
•Elementalist – Arcana
•Engineer – Explosives
•Guardian – Virtues
•Mesmer – Illusions
•Necromancer – Curses
•Ranger – Wilderness Survival
•Thief – Critical Strikes
•Warrior – Discipline

This seems to suggest that ANET actually is doing better at least on classes I know well.
The engineer has plenty of specs that don’t require explosives. In fact, having only 10 pts or no pts in explosives is quite common if not using grenades.

The ranger uses wilderness survival simply because it has empathic heal which is their core condition cleanse. But it is being tied to the pet being alive so builds will quickly move away from simply having 30 in it.

But you are correct that the warrior is OP and needs a significant nerf.

They would be hard pressed to do a CDI and then take no action. I suspect rangers were already being focused on and this will just help.

Poison nade is a bit insanely good. Poison is fine but that thing has a huge radius and its ticks are long. It soo helps with downed foes. Often I can wait a long time to stomp because of it.

Plus, it isn’t like the engineer lacks other good ways to apply poison with the e-gun.
I can live with a modest change. Hope we get some modest changes that will make gadgets and turrets usable again.

Agreed. It sucks. But I wouldn’t say it is a high priority given the plethora of other weapon choices the warrior has and the need to fix truly broken classes.

I think you missed my point. I was responding to a post that said that warriors should be popular and should be the casual class because that is what people want.

My point is simple, if that is the design, then typically the class which is “casual friendly” and easy to play is also quite mediocre with an ability to do most things but only meh.

Not sure that is what you want for the warrior. . . . but typically if you have it all you have it blah.

Conditions should be able to be applied quickly as they can be cleaned quickly and do damage slowly (over time). That is the very definition of what a condition should do.

Now we can talk about whether you can clean enough conditions (or a better solution is do you clean the WORST condition first vs the first condition you got) etc. etc.

But the whole idea of damage over time is speed to apply and time needed to kill.

Toning down the decap engineer is quite easy and doesn’t have to break or really impact engineers in general.

1. You just really need to make the nodes bigger. The only reason this works is because they are stupid small.

2. You could modify one or two traits just a tad and you would have a good but not great decapper.

3. You could limit knockbacks when you are in a node with a X% chance to miss.

You really don’t need to modify the engineer as much as reduce the gameplay that makes this (and a lot of other silly I can beat you up because you have to stay on point) builds.

Golem Suits are Asurian racials.

I would say something like a scorpion vehicle that is a real zerg buster. It should have several different “weapon systems” to use (like a kit) and make you quite resistant to damage. It should only be able to use most of the weapon systems once during the duration of the effect but it should be quite a fireworks show when used.

I would think a steam powered tank:
Provides a base buff to HPs, Armor and Toughness (Very hard to kill when in the vehicle).
Moves slowly (save the special). One way to avoid its wraith is MOVE.

It has a certain amount of steam. Each ability you use takes away steam. The base attack takes the least steam “rolling over the enemy”. This means while you have 5 whopper abilities, you can’t use them all. On the other hand, you could just steam roll over people (it’s base attack is a “crunch”) and stay in it much longer “but they would scatter”.

Basic Attack would be running over the enemy. It would HURT but again the tank moves slowly. (1pt of steam)
Special (2 pts steam) piercing bullet shots (like a machine gun). Short Cone piercing AOE.
Special (5pts steam) would be a mini cannon ball shot 1500 range.
Special (2 pts steam) would be a rocket ignited movement speed boost (to flee or to catch enemy) 3 second burst of speed. Also provides stability.
Special (5 pts steam) would be a giant net 1200 range catches and immobilizes up to five.
Special (5pts steam) would be health oriented (like a super sized water field)

The key is you only have so many steam points (10 seems right).

Our ability to stack so many things that make us effective at decapping (mind you then you have no other practical use) is annoying.

It would be a simple very minor tweak to a trait or two.

Generally, the engineer is one of the most balanced and diverse classes in the game.

One reason you see such an abomination in PvP is that PvP has this abomination of small nodes or control points. This is ripe for all sorts of abuse. AE blankets the entire point. Knockbacks work artificially well as do any skills that keep you from being able to reach the point.

On the other side, the decap engineer is certainly NOT going to be helping win any points other than decapping. Overall, he is not that useful except in well coordinated play.

A tweak to accelerant based turrets would more or less bring things back in line.
You just need one less way of stacking knockbacks.

Bombsaway.7198:

Ryan:

Casual players should have a very mediocre but adequate class. If that is the role of the warrior (not sure it is or should be), the warrior should be mediocre at everything it does BUT has the ability to use every weapon, wear heavy armor etc. They should be the non-quirky version of an engineer with lots of builds but very little which is best of all classes. And unlike the engineer, they should be easy to play.

They are the generalist of fighters versus specialists.

Ryan:

Casual players should have a very mediocre but adequate class. The warrior should be that. Mediocre at everything it does BUT has the ability to use every weapon, wear heavy armor etc. They should be the non-quirky version of an engineer with lots of builds but very little which is best of all classes.

They are the generalist of fighters versus specialists.

Too often it is those that want to retain their easy win (and, therefore, it could be argued don’t want to relearn the game playing with skill) that argue against nerfing what should obviously be nerfed.

One can say “learn to play” or one can say “learn how to play without” just as easily I think. On the other hand, one can sit back and apply some common sense and metrics and realize that there really has to be a reason that some specs, weapons and classes are overweighted.

ANet certainly has more data (and should) but it is always a good idea to provide the impressions and concerns we have as players. They can easily see if the data tells a congruous story or not.

Warriors should see their soon to be nerf as an opportunity really.

Ahh, but what do you think is the reason that there are 20 hammers versus say 20 varied means of crowd control in the train?

It very much is the warrior as it is CC heavy weaponry. Nerf both.

If you mean “needs improvement” list changes to:

1. Ranger
2. Elementalist
3. Engineer

When you say “help” do you only mean positive attention (buffing) or might you also mean negative attention (balancing downward/nerfing)?

Assuming the later.

1. Ranger (Buff)
2. Warrior (Nerf)
3. Engineer (Broken turrets and gadgets)

Stop killing build diversity BY killing builds that are so OP that they effectively cause gravitation away from diversity. HAMBOW would be a classic example.

Phenn.5167:

“Lazy” is balancing the entire game with only PvP in view, which ultimately results in a big “screw you” to the PvE metas struggling to make something horribly broken work.

I remind you that the unique feature of this game was indeed PvP and it was always billed as such (the core or heart of the game). It is a GW game after all.
Just like an ESO games will default to having a clean UI with an immersive feel.
A DAOC game will likely focus on WvW.

Yes, the PvE is quite good here, but that was not the “shtick” of the game.

Get rid of a warrior’s ability to do all but the most desperate removing of conditions.
Let’s face it that was always supposed to be their weakness. Give it back to them (but not quite as bad as they had it pre-buff).

Loco:

Anytime that one argues that other classes should be made better to “meet the warrior”, they are in effect saying that “indeed the warrior is unbalanced” but the fix should be to make other classes like it.

So Warrior is indeed OP unquestionably. The next issue is what should be done.

Buffing other classes requires far more design and impacts far more areas of the game (from dungeons to power creep to AI to designing all new skills etc) than nerfing.

Warriors are like the child who accidentally opened their sibling’s Christmas presents and now want to keep all of them.

Assuming you would ever bother to go to dungeons to get noble runes. . . the investment is unfriendly for those who enjoy more competitive aspects of the game.

Altruism work quite nicely.

One thing I have always wondered is why do they not create a PG Chat channel where if you do start trash talking, they take more aggressive action. Then, when people simply migrate from the silliness of the trash chat, they need to behave. Or, you will have a lot of PGers who have no one to chat with. Either way, both sides win.

Depends on context but since it isn’t necessary in any context, they should default to keeping the game PG and youth friendly.

Generally, is the insult to the game play or to the person?
If it ever involves race, gender, religion, creed, orientation, etc. etc. etc. then it goes immediately from trash to trashy (i.e. just ban them a few days to cool them off).
Same for being overtly sexual etc.

This is not a game for testosterone induced comments from people who simply need a real life friend.

If it is borderline, don’t type it! Simple.

Making maps bigger would really help.

As it stands, one zerg is all you need per map.

It would be silly to expect people who do not main a warrior to know exactly how a warrior should be nerfed back to size. They won’t know the solution but they certainly understand the problem.

And warriors do too. . . but it is hard to give up what was given.
Warriors know there are more warriors being played than other classes.
Warriors know that the common meta in zergs revolves around a hammer train.
Warriors know. . . but they are still human and are holding on to what they can’t keep.

I suspect the nerf will be far greater than if they proposed the changes themselves.