Guild Wars 2

Sigh, this sugarcoating of all the issues the ranger has is starting to become more irratating than the good old complaining.

New one looks definately nice. And more variety is always welcome

Obscure One.4357:

Buffs for Rangers to be practical in PvE is a fairly straightforward notion the developers thus far have stubbornly resisted; pet-less ranger options. Ideally each pet, while stowed would grant passive buffs to the Ranger, could be swapped while stowed with the F4 as normal, and would grant the ranger an F2 skill based on creature type. Let’s say you dont want that idiot pet AI agroing half the dungeon moving to your target. This option let’s you just stow it and get say a Precision buff for the Owl, or a Power buff for the Polar Bear, and so on with some kicker boon/condition that goes off on every so often like the spirit mechanic. Each pet would grant you the use of an F2 skill associated to the animal identical to the skill a thief would obtain by using the Steal mechanic on that pet. Same cool downs for all these features, and the same triggers for usage would apply, thus preserving existing game balance and compensating for Rangers who are forced to stow their pet in areas as to prevent the pet AI from over aggro.

That would be the most easy and logical solution. Unfortunately doing that they would be admitting their failure with pets which is something that any self respecting dev wouldn’t do.
Instead they have been on ignore mode about pet issues and singing doodaa while their playbase keeps hoping for better tomorrow that might never come for 7 months now.

If anyone would dare to ask about ranger pets/necro minions and why they were so poorly implemented to the game and lack of improvements/fixes to their ai/durability/pathing i’d appreciate it.

Great read and great post by the op. Looking the list though makes me certain there is no QA team in this game. Or atleast they don’t work with the ranger profession :P

Trabia.3650:

Anet’s questionable decision to allow free transfers to the #1 EU server made guilds that have been with us for a long time (some since launch) leave, or consider leaving. What Dooh said is harsh, but I agree with him. If you don’t wish to contribute, then leave.

And people are doing just that. Not only Anet managed to break tier1 matchup with their free transfers , the escaping guilds are messing up the other tiers by hopping to winning servers. Nice job with the free transfers! :P

I don’t think they want to do that. That would be like admitting to their own failure with the class. Rather continue the ignore mode and leave the pets broken.

Mesmers are laughing and why not?. Atleast eles don’t need to laugh alone :P

Sebrent.3625:

Or … they may notice something that isn’t pairing right, working correct, etc. and fix it.
Or … they’ll notice completely wrong tooltips and fix them.
Or … they’ll notice the information we would like to have on tooltips and fix them.

Good luck with that. In 7 months the list hasn’t gotten any shorter so i’m sure the next 7 months will be different :P

Steam powered pets? Would that mean that the pet would blow up instead of the usual melting down?

More variety is always nice.

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

Sorry, didn’t notice the date. Well if they’ve been working on rangers for 6 months i’m sure there is a class overhaul due any day now?

One could think so but no. Sadly big budget doesn’t always come with good quality or competence.

Rangers are fine, … in gathering omnomberries and doing event bosses. All the old issues poor pet ai/bugs/f2 resposivenes , traitlines that make no sense , poor build variety are still there.

Few decent fixes and buffs. Pets still broken.

Ghetto Guardian.9520:

Boomstin.3460:

Maybe [Yak] can trade it for our soon to be capped garrison :P

I dont get it, Yaks cant take and hold everything all the time.

The Borderlands had a que, that means there were more than enough people on the map to defend it. I heard there was four commanders…? ?

You guys need to Get on TS, get your kitten together and Get Good.

#YoloSwaggTrain

Hmm, guess my sense of humor isn’t appreciated in here , certainly my comment wasn’t meant like you understood it.
I was on Fsp borderlands the whole evening myself , just checked Gandara borderlands map before logging off and it was anything but green and garrison was contested so assumed it was going to be capped soon.

Maybe [Yak] can trade it for our soon to be capped garrison :P

Yeah, Sunnyhill gate is bugged somehow, have seen people gone threw it by accident a few times. If it happens , hopefully people are smart enough to stand next to gate and get killed or jump over the wall. If they don’t do that, you should report them.

Well, it’s not like this will make pets any more broken than they already were in this game. They got melted before the patch also.

1. No

2. No , if they would give us a working pet ai they would have to give warriors dual greatswords to compensate, (Skip to 11:03) :
Source: http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/02/18/guild-wars-2-the-past-present-and-future-up-at-noon

3. No

Indiana Jones was smart enough to not bring a pet with him.

KensaiZen.3740:

Do you realise even with that damage reduction you are still hitting like a truck? the pet is extra damage like a condition.

No , pet damage isn’t ‘extra damage’ , pets are designed to be certain portion of the rangers damage.

KensaiZen.3740:

Just imagine if the pet wasn’t there. Don’t spec for a build that requires the use of the pet. Problem solved.

That doesn’t solve anything. The pet still amounts to certain percent of rangers damage which we can’t properly use at the moment.
Imagine is some other profession had a bug after 7 months since release that made them lose 30 percent of their damage by pretty much default agains’t player targets. Sounds awesome.

danbuter.2314:

I’d love a non-pet ranger. If that is impossible, I’d like the AI for pets to be dramatically improved very soon.

They should have scrapped the pets in beta. I wonder how on earth such a poor implementation of pets slipped through to release?
They can’t scrap pets now, it would be like admitting their own failure. Designers are not usually very eager to admit that :P

Holland.9351:

Robert Hrouda, would you please give us a summary of the notes you made? I believe most has been said, but maybe not.

Page 3 in this thread.

xiv.7136:

Piken roleplayers = small / mid scale heroes fighting outnumbered (and winning)

Think the movie 300 with even more ERP

Your time machine seems to work! Can the rest of us loan it so we could fight the old piken?

Warrior is the profession you are looking for. No crippling pet, good combat capabilities and a effective longbow.

Slamz.5376:

I don’t like it but I’m very “anti-ninja”.

We should be promoting big fights, not promoting ways to avoid big fights, which is all this change was about.

Not everyone enjoys lagfests in zergballs. Mid sized battles happening across the map between 10-15 people groups where’s the fun at.
Not 3 giant zergballs 1 from each side.
I don’t personally mind playing the spotter but i think the 25 player limit is waaay too large. something like 10-15 people would be much better.

Risen completely ignoring the pet?

Sounds like risen might be devs in disguise… :P

SilverWF.4789:

Gandara and Augury – nothing special – just free stacks ^^

There’s not much challenge we could provide with outmanned buff on piken borderlands and Nug camping inside keeps for 30mins waiting if someone knocks on the door to zerg out. Anyways, enjoy your ‘free stacks’.

Oh and thanks to Dt,Xt for some fun fights, always a pleasure to meet you on the battlefield

gaborkaldy.3210:

Totally True. Putting a pet on passive is just a bad solution of this problem. Basically its not even a solution it is simple what we are forced to do. A warrior can enter in full power in a large scale fight. We – with the pet on passive – enter shorthanded into the fight. I play mostly in WvW. Pets are usually dead ikittenergfight before they can trigger their (usually) broken f2 skill.

The idea with the rangers was something like the ranger working together with the pet as a team but unfortunately without constant handhelding and micromanaging the braindead pet is useless currently on multiple areas of the game.
They say they are trying to fix the pets and they are not giving into just letting us permastow the pet for a flat +damage increase or they would be admitting their own failure.
Meanwhile for 6 months rangers are stuck in a limbo and need to drag around their ball in a chain bringing them down.
Usually unfixable things get scrapped in beta.

Ision.3207:

Shiren said:

“Honestly, I don’t think the devs can (or are prepared to) do what needs to be done to make the pet mechanic viable while maintaining health diversity (read: cats and birds are also viable in dungeons) without turning the class into a ridiculously complex mess of micromanagement and inefficient outcomes. Consider how difficult many players find dodging attacks when they only have to worry about themselves, do you really think a dodge skill for the pet is going to be a working fix for this issue for most rangers? They then have to pay attention to the boss/mobs, their character’s position and their pet’s position – and then they have to command both themselves and their pet to dodge (often at the same time) not to mention the likelihood of having to manage two dodge bars (a ranger one and a pet one, they likely wouldn’t give you unlimited dodges for the pet). So micromanaging and resource management are the gameplay being pushed by that kind of design. A lot of us play the class for the AI companion, not a micromanaged companion. Micromanaging, while increasing the skill cap (in a certain way), isn’t going to solve the problem for a lot of rangers, and for many players it takes the class in a direction they don’t want to go in.

I am genuinely interested in why he thinks two rangers, through smart use of pet swap, two-manning bosses (many bosses can be soloed by multiple classes already, it just takes longer – in some cases not by much) is a bad thing, given the current meta we already have. I don’t want brain dead easy face tanks pets to trivialise boss fights, but I don’t see micromanagement as an appropriate solution and I do think there is a problem."

I cannot agree more – BRAVO !!!

Quoted for truth.

Maybe it’s the fear of bots becoming stronger with improved pets. What other reason would there could be that in 6 months pets have gotten basicly nothing towards fixing them outside of minor melee pet fix and a new hawk icon.

Ralph Wiggum also tried running sword ranger.

What about playing a ranger agains’t thieves? The pet essentially plays in the favor of the thief by setting him up for free cloak and dagger. I thought pet was supposed to be part of rangers damage?

And against any half competent player target melee pets provide 0 damage since most if not all pet damage can be avoided by pressing the magic keys A or D on the keyboard.

All devs in the future, If you can’t make the core mechanic of a class work in beta, scrap the whole class. It will save everyones time and money.
Or atleast add ‘only competive in gathering nodes in open world’ to the class description.

Pedra.4381:

Why should two rangers (with two pets) not be able to accomplish what one exceptional solo warrior or one exceptional solo thief can do? Without explanation that seems to be a significant discrepancy in ArenaNet’s view of the game.

This. I have even seen devs appraising some players for them soloing dungeon bosses but 2 rangers doing the same thing would result in unbalance?

And why there still isn’t agony resistance for pets in any form? I personally wont touch fractals but it really isn’t fair to handicap ranger in such way. Altough it’s on par with all other aspects of the rangers game, gimped in wvw,gimped in dungeons.

edit. thanks for taking the time to visit the ranger forums though, that takes some spine as this isn’t exactly the most positive part of these boards :P

This thread and the ‘dps’ calculations confuses me

Whats the point updating the thread if nothing gets fixed anyways?

I don’t know, maybe a rollback on the shortbow animation fix would work
Would be very easy and fast to implement, maybe 42ms.

Kodash invaders seem to give much better loot that i’m used to. Much appreciated and good luck at tier 2 <3

Solandri.9640:

I figured it out.

First I dug through my notes to see if I recorded any damage numbers, and yes I did record some for the lynx for the specific skills. I reran tests and they are all about the same as before except critical damage on Maul.

With the pet’s prowess trait (30% crit dam), criticals should hit for 180% of a regular attack. Here are the averages for a bunch of crit vs. non-crit damage figures I got.

Bite: 1320.9 (n=7)
Bite, crit: 2361.4 (n=15)
ratio: 1.79, as expected

Maul has two attacks in rapid succession, the second being roughly twice the damage of the first.

Maul 1: 923.7 (n=7)
Maul 1, crit: 1156.1 (n=9)
ratio: 1.25

Maul 2: 2002.2 (n=12)
Maul 2, crit: 2171.5 (n=21)
ratio: 1.08

So the criticals on Maul are not hitting for the correct amount. Maul only fires once every 20 seconds, so it wasn’t showing up in the kill time tests because it only represented the loss of about 1000-2000 damage (or none if Maul didn’t crit). Basically 0-2 attacks. But you folks with an eye for big damage numbers spotted it because Maul used to post the biggest damage crits.

I didn’t test birds, but their big damage skill is also a double attack like Maul (actually all of the birds’ attacks are double attacks). So I wonder if it’s double attacks in general which are bugged.

I went ahead and submitted a bug report in-game.

This is actually great, atleast we know now that someone is atleast working on the ranger. Now only if he knew what he was doing…

Reaver.9256:

Before the patch I was lucky to get 1 or 2 members to do dragons with me. After the patch I don’t think there’s been one where we haven’t had 2 full groups. Guesting has little affect on what’s happening. It’s just that the loot is so good that everyone and there dog is doing these events now.

This. Guesting has very little to do with the lag. It’s the upgraded rewards that has pushed masses to do the events.

Wait a minute?!! When you open the pet management, in pet attributes theres new slots for
critical damage 0
Healing Power 0
Condition Damage 0
Agony resistance 0

Or have those always been there and i’m losing my mind one stealth fix/nerf at a time :P

Nah, it’s good to let off some steam now and then. We appreciate that you take the time to visit us here and comment on stuff

vespers.1759:

so we get nothing again and thieves and d/d eles get buffed. WHAT

Well, eles got actually quite a few nerfs, but it just seems they are missing from the patch notes. Just visit the ele forums for some ele tears.

General

- Using stealth no longer resets NPC aggression tables.

Hmm, could this mean that pet resumes attacking of the target that drops out of stealth that it was attacking previously? Maybe a slight ranger buff by accident?

Dardamaniac.1295:

Seriously..85% increase and you still complain?

That’s just a damage buff for a single weapon skill, doesn’t do anything overall for rangers.

All the core issues are still mostly untouched, pet pathing,ai,hitting moving targets,no aoe protection, messed up traitlines, pet stow…

You don’t fix a car with a broken engine and transmission by replacing the old wunderbaum with a new one which has been happening for months with rangers.

Worst balance team ever. And i tought Bioware was bad

Ranger patch notes in visual form can be found here, Ralph Wiggum plays ranger also.

It’s a horror show. No way to stow the pet when facing a thief and the f2 cast takes longer to get off than the thief is visible before he picks a free cloak and dagger from the pet and the pet resets once again wondering what happened.

Rangers should maybe just stick to gathering nodes in orr.

Plenty of good fights across all maps. Best part was TDA’s redvale refuge defence. Siege up!

felivear.1536:

Then, imagine I televised the first game and it didn’t have a shot clock, the refs had to stop play for 5 minutes to decide what to do on fouls and the stands didn’t have any seats. Then lets say most of our money was spent on advertisement and not actually paying players to….you know…play the game.

Thats nothing. What about the players that can teleport around the court and shoot the ball while invisible

edit. Nevermind