Guild Wars 2

1. Blind added. Damage halved.
2. Cast time halved as well as healing coefficient.

In all seriousness, I thinking the my changes are about as likely to happen as yours. ANet has shown that their forums are NOT the place for communication. At best they are used for advice and build sharing which is then fed back to them so they can plan their next nerfs.

As to your suggestions #3 sounds reasonable and #4 is locked by the already existing traps. As for #5 most classes suffer from bad trait distribution and expansion.

Hi all, back after leaving the game for the summer. Been following the forums, but I haven’t been doing any actual playing. What can Rangers do now that makes them standout. Besides die in droves? (I jest)

Traps are still untouched as are survival skills(For now).
Spirits Build is probably going to see a shift toward more tactical summoning.
BM still mostly dead in the water.
GS Heal Tanking still there.

What did I miss?
PS Planning on leveling my Fourth Character Mesmer, Elementalist, or Necromancer?

Tywele.7812:

• get rid of the ground targeting (it’s a shout!)
• get rid of the cast time (again, it’s a shout!)

Without these two things it would be less annoying to use “Guard!”.

In it’s current incarnation I would agree with you, however, that would promote the continuation of mediocrity. If it would be changed for the better(in the long run) they would have to bring it back to its old functionality. And learn to code better invisible barrier/placement limitations.

The saddest part of all this is that this, like the Ranger only AoE limit of 3 is thakittens been in the game for a a year now and no one’s said anything or done anything about it.

Setun.4368:

Pendleton.6385:

Has anyone posted this in the official bug forum?

MT, poison trap, torch 5, and spirits only hitting 3 has to be a bug. This makes me wonder even more about the randomness of the spotter trait.

How can something like this pass QA?

I wonder if this is a stealth nerf to the aoe cap / cleave cap, as my ranger, guardian, and warrior cleave moves only hit 3 people instead of 5

Cleave only hits 3 people to begin with.

atheria.2837:

Since Ascended Gear is out of the reach of most players, what would be an acceptable set of Armor?

Doesn’t Apothecary armor come in Exotic? For trinkets, you can try settler, those are quite cheap.

Just thinking out loud here, but would a GS/LB Remorseless build work using Valkyrie gear with Cavalier trinkets? You wouldn’t really need Precision since Precise Strike/Hunter’s Shot would give you a crit every weapon swap. Maybe combine with Sigils of Intelligence?

Well thanks folks it’s been a wild ride.

Lévis.5489:

Anet said months ago that making the pets less dumb and better was like giving the possibility to warriors to dual wielding greatswords. So, overhaul never.

Quote please? If you’re right, then I truly have given up hope for this class.

I think this would be good because it’d make Rangers less dependent on exploitable/gimmicky tactics that attract nerfs. Beyond the raw damage, controlling pet utilities would open up a tool box of options for rangers in additional cc, buffs, and debuffs.

It has been stated before that ANet has no intention of giving rangers greater control over their pet in the forseeable future on the grounds of adding too much complexity to the class.

In argument against that however, players on both sides, rangers and non-rangers alike disagree and want to have more control.

Rangers want more control over their pets in the form of dedicated dodges, combat log, detailed status bar, and skill control.

Non-rangers almost constanly complain that rangers are a skill-less class. First their was the “fire-and-forget” BM Pet, followed by the Spirit Spamming.

Does anyone else agree with this? I think(more like hope) that if we get a large enough community consensus, and not just in the ranger community, we might be able to get some changes.

AydenStar.4216:

-A seasoned players will focus our pets first because of the HUGE advantage they will have after that.

-In tpvp we have one broken build which will be fixed first I bet but in WvW and in PvE the profession is seen as a joke because of the lack of effort towards fixing our professions main mechanic.

I have to disagree with the first point.The aftermath of Anet’s last pet update shows that pets are an afterthought. They now do negligible damage in either burst or sustain. The tPvP community complained that was too good a source of damage and so pet damage was lowered almost across the board. So despite being a pet class, ranger pets are not our primary threat, at least not anymore. I will concede there are a few pets you might want to eliminate first, eg Canines, Birds, Drakes.

jubskie.3152:

oh hey look patch notes are out and no nerfs in sight

Can you link to patch notes? I can’t seem to find them. Thanks. I did test that Precise Strikes seems to be working now.

They should just make it a persistent field type ability like Muddy Terrain. A bunch or targetable vines that PBAoE cast immobilize and bleed on 5 targets. It’d make it more reliable and stronger since enemies in the center will get hit with multiple stack of immobilize/bleed.

idevourwater.3149:

Perhaps they are thinking of implementing new weapons into the game in the next few patches…. so perhaps some traits will make sense with the newly released skillsets

im hoping they implement a crossbow weapon with stalking, and tracking skills ^^
or a javilen with a immob throw :P

Why don’t they just make spears terrestrial? They have almost all the assets already there?

Since my version of this is buried three pages back, I’ll just copy and paste mine here again.

I can see a stealth component being added to Serpent’s Strike after the attack as well as after Stalker’s Strike and Hunter’s Call. This way we have one two-handed ranged, one offhand ranged, one melee main hand, and one melee offhand.
However, i can see this being abused to get really high uptime on 15-20 stacks of vulnerability.
How does the community feel about this?

Kal Spiro.9745:

Why would you be running 30 or even 25 in Marksman if you weren’t using a bow? It’s still not going to be usiversally appealing, and there are better options in different lines if you’re not going with bow.

Easy, I was running a Signet build with greatsword.

RedBeard.9607:

After running around with a longbow and remorseless for a little bit I found out you can actually get a lot of vulnerability on a target with opening strikes and rapid fire, and maybe adding 5% or 10% damage to a vulnerable target is a little op.

I just wish you didn’t have to take a grand master trait for your 3 minor traits to work so I can make a signet build without sacrificing some invested points.

IF you take longbow…I was trying to make it more universally appealing since most Grandmaster traits, with the exception of a few, do not require you to use a certain weapon to get the most out of it. Certain skill types yes, but rarely a single weapon option.

Kal Spiro.9745:

ChillyChinaman.6057:

Personally, I would like to see Opening Strike and Alpha Training combined and Precise Strikes brought down to master. For the now empty grandmaster slot remorseless would be nice but unlikely. So perhaps +10% damage against vulnerable foes. If remorseless were demoted it could be replaced with a trait that causes opening strike to cause daze/stun/knockdown/knockback.

Sounds familiar. Opening strike remains very limited and situational, but at least it makes a remorseless build more meaningful with the bonus damage.

Concidering that every stack of Vulnerability is 1% increased damage against the target already asking for +10% is probably a bit much, which is why I went with 5%.

I think 10% is fair because if you’re not running axe or longbow, opening strikes only lasts ~5s. So you either have 5s of 55+10=20% damage, or if you stagger it with your pet 10s of 5+10% damage. We also have to keep in mind that rangers benefit less from +% because of our pets. Assuming a generous ratio of 80%:20%, that +10% is actually adding +8% to our total damage.

Thieves are gonna hate me for this, but seeing ad the updated remorseless was made to work longbow at a really niche level, where else could we see stealth being added so as to not make the trait so weapon dependent.

I can see a stealth component being added to Serpent’s Strike after the attack as well as after Stalker’s Strike and Hunter’s Call. This way we have one two-handed ranged, one offhand ranged, one melee main hand, and one melee offhand.

However, i can see this being abused to get really high uptime on 15-20 stacks of vulnerability.

How does the community feel about this?

Personally, I would like to see Opening Strike and Alpha Training combined and Precise Strikes brought down to master. For the now empty grandmaster slot remorseless would be nice but unlikely. So perhaps +10% damage against vulnerable foes. If remorseless were demoted it could be replaced with a trait that causes opening strike to cause daze/stun/knockdown/knockback.

What I don’t understand is if longbow had(comparatively) garbage DPS before, how does losing some more and gaining some interesting utility change that?

As for the vulnerability loss from moving it to Rapid Fire, on the upside, it prevent wasting the whole skill to an Aegis if it’s spread out on multiple hits.

For greatsword. Who actually ran it and used Maul for the bleeds? Maul was supposed to be used as a spike move with its decent power coefficient. The bleeds were just icing on the cake.

Forzani.2584:

I honestly thought these were fake when I first read them.

Ditto. And I’d rather not rain on anyone’s parade, but we’re not out of the whole yet, though we are climbing out with everything we’ve got.

Chase.8415:

uberkingkong.8041:

Oh Ill have to see for myself then, if that’s the case, its pretty much garbage because I don’t really buy anything because I have everything I want and all the rest of it is garbage.

I don’t even look forward to getting dyes, if anything all I look forward to when opening chests is finishers and gear that I don’t have already.

if I want money I do cof p1, gold does nothing for you in pvp so if all you do is pvp you don’t need gold. Theres nothing special about custom arena unless your in a team and participating in these tournaments.

If you ask me you should be able to convert glory to gems. However one thing they need to fix is team stacking in hotjoins before that to prevent people from farming newbies all day long, which I don’t think they’ll ever do same with glory to gems.

There is no possible way where they could convert Glory into Gems. They would essentially be throwing their money away.

Why? They do it in PvE/WvW with Gold for Gems. I’ve played the game since day 1 and I haven’t spent a cent on the gem store and yet have gotten some items.

Unholy Pillager.3791:

ChillyChinaman.6057:

ilr.9675:

Stop trying to make this one into just another Mage that summons a critter in place of a meteor shower or hundred blade storm, and then suffers no consequences for the care and positioning of that critter.

I think I can understand you sentiment, however, I don’t think it’s as easy as summoning a creature in place of a direct attack or spell, like the Mesmer, for example. The reason being is that the pet itself is completely fallible. Pathing issues, skill animation, and general AI problems prevent it from being so simple. Melee pets, unlike phantasms, have to get up to their targets, wading through attacks, and AoEs as a result. You can’t stop a meteor shower once it has been cast. You can stop a 100blades, however, that attack can be placed, exactly when and where the controlling player wants. It also scales better, for better or for worse, with the player’s stats.

The problems are: the AI sucks, ANet insists on balancing the entire game around an CP based aspect where most of the game revolves around a more TDM style gameplay even though they already have a system to separate the two in place. Finally, they balance the rangers damage and utility around a mechanic that is not always available which, to the best of my knowledge, is not something the other classes have to suffer.

There are melee phantasms, and they seem to do just fine. Remember the berserker and swordsman (GS and OH Sword, respectively)?

I don’t play Mesmer myself, but don’t those spells summon the Phantasm on top of their target? If I remember correctly, didn’t berserker spawn on walls when assaulting keeps at one time?

ilr.9675:

Stop trying to make this one into just another Mage that summons a critter in place of a meteor shower or hundred blade storm, and then suffers no consequences for the care and positioning of that critter.

I think I can understand you sentiment, however, I don’t think it’s as easy as summoning a creature in place of a direct attack or spell, like the Mesmer, for example. The reason being is that the pet itself is completely fallible. Pathing issues, skill animation, and general AI problems prevent it from being so simple. Melee pets, unlike phantasms, have to get up to their targets, wading through attacks, and AoEs as a result. You can’t stop a meteor shower once it has been cast. You can stop a 100blades, however, that attack can be placed, exactly when and where the controlling player wants. It also scales better, for better or for worse, with the player’s stats.

The problems are: the AI sucks, ANet insists on balancing the entire game around an CP based aspect where most of the game revolves around a more TDM style gameplay even though they already have a system to separate the two in place. Finally, they balance the rangers damage and utility around a mechanic that is not always available which, to the best of my knowledge, is not something the other classes have to suffer.

I like the basis of the OP idea and here’s my take on it:

In my mind, pet should function similarly to a combination between Elementalist attunements, Engineer toolbelt skills, and Guardian spirits, Elementals, or Minions. F1-F4 become the pet summon/selection skills that the ranger can slot like Engineers. Activating a pet puts the pet on cooldown, which starts after pet death/swap. Active pets have their summon icon replaced with an activated ability, the current F2 skill.

I think this will address this will address a few of the problems. Having access to 4 pets in combat gives the ranger some diversity as well as emphasizing that the ranger is a BEASTmaster not a PETmaster. In addition to diversity, it will help improve pet uptime by a factor of 2. Assuming that each pet will only survive 10s, with a 30s cooldown, with 4 pets you’ll have always have a pet out and contributing.

Well this is my take on the pet dilemma, what does the community think about it?

For raw damage go bird or go home. Drakes are also good for their cleave, dogs for their knockdown and cripple.

Toby.2357:

OP is clearly not a ranger, no ranger in their right mind would say that. I bet there are no devs who actualy play a ranger class, Id like to see them keep a pet alive in pvp or dungeons.

What if, and hear me out on this, Rangers are actually the pet? The pet of the Devs, the pets of the other classes.

Jay The Dude.5830:

Substance E.4852:

Jay The Dude.5830:

Levetty.1279:

I am really confused on when you would ever be able to hit people with the Storm Spirit, especially multiple ones.

Nature’s vengeance in a zerg?

2k damage every 60 seconds is laughable in a zerg.

Recharge is 20

Assuming it’s still alive after that.

Shiren.9532:

Are you taking into account the attack rate of the pets? Some pets have stupidly long attack animations, not only resulting in less attacks in the same period of time, but also resulting in a lot more misses. This is a huge problem for birds in particular. You have to be Jabba the Hut to be hit by that thing.

Back with data.
I did not confirm Puandro’s data yet, but I ran 3 quick tests w/ canines against heavy golems.

T1 22s/16 attacks – attack speed 1.37
T2 21s/16 attacks – attack speed 1.31
T3 20s/15 attacks – attack speed 1.33

So Feline>Canine>Drake when it comes to speed.

Edit:
Drakes
T1 15s/12a – 1.25
T2 16s/12a -1.33
T3 13s/10a -1.3

Feline
T1 11s/10a – 1.1
T2 9s/8a – 1.13
T3 10s/9a -1.11

Birds
T1 11/5 – 2.2
T2 8/4 – 2.0
T3 12/6 – 2.0

So from this very RAW data, it seems that Felines>Canine=Drake>Bird at ~1.1<1.3<2.1
Between Canines and Drakes, drakes do more damage and cleave(tested), while Canines provide some nice control.

On birds, if they’re going to get a AA buff of 15% they’d end up doing up 3% more damage then felines. Since they’re basic attacks have stayed mostly intact, this would also put them above felines based on numbers. They’re AA also double strikes, so this compensates they’re slow attack somewhat when coupled with their innate swiftness when already in melee.

Shiren.9532:

ChillyChinaman.6057:

Faux Sheaux.6179:

Just change Jag for another cat. Heck, go canines. I run them anyways for the most part, so I’m barely even getting a hit with this pet nerf.

In fact, I think jags may still be completely viable. Run 0/0/30/30/10, use the “guard” skill (10s pet invisibility on 15s cooldown), and then you also have swiftness and regeneration. That’s dangerous as hell to fight against, especially when boon durations are 20% longer even than before and you have more health. The 200 hit is healing power and slightly lower pet damage isn’t the end of the world.

Canine auto attack was reduced by 27%
based off this guy’s work:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Pet-Damage-Formula-found/first#post2063986

Despite having higher toughness, feline/bird auto-attacks are hitting harder despite canine/drake’s higher power. And this is ignoring their higher crit rates. At base stats against 2600 armor, the difference in damage is about 77dmg/attack. Also according to the wiki, site, drake AA has a slight cleave. Other than their opening KD, canines are looking kinda shot, like rangers as a whole.

Finally, this one is off topic, but does attacking drop the stealth granted from Guard?

Are you taking into account the attack rate of the pets? Some pets have stupidly long attack animations, not only resulting in less attacks in the same period of time, but also resulting in a lot more misses. This is a huge problem for birds in particular. You have to be Jabba the Hut to be hit by that thing.

Fair point, I’ll test attack speed later today.

Faux Sheaux.6179:

Just change Jag for another cat. Heck, go canines. I run them anyways for the most part, so I’m barely even getting a hit with this pet nerf.

In fact, I think jags may still be completely viable. Run 0/0/30/30/10, use the “guard” skill (10s pet invisibility on 15s cooldown), and then you also have swiftness and regeneration. That’s dangerous as hell to fight against, especially when boon durations are 20% longer even than before and you have more health. The 200 hit is healing power and slightly lower pet damage isn’t the end of the world.

Canine auto attack was reduced by 27%
based off this guy’s work:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Pet-Damage-Formula-found/first#post2063986

Despite having higher toughness, feline/bird auto-attacks are hitting harder despite canine/drake’s higher power. And this is ignoring their higher crit rates. At base stats against 2600 armor, the difference in damage is about 77dmg/attack. Also according to the wiki, site, drake AA has a slight cleave. Other than their opening KD, canines are looking kinda shot, like rangers as a whole.

Finally, this one is off topic, but does attacking drop the stealth granted from Guard?

First a few questions:
PvE/WvW or PvP?
Second with regards to rangers, with or without a pet?

Personally I think a Rangers best bet would be a full Berserker Maul hit followed by River Drake Lightning Blast. I’ll try to get some numbers up if I can.

Edit: According to wiki info, an buffed full berserker Maul can hit for at max 10377 dmg not counting bleeds.

This is 2400 power, 92% Crit Dmg, Signet of the Wild and Signet of the hunt, Hunter’s Tactics, and Steady Focus.

Malice and Power are nice, but I feel that the Vitality is a wasted stat. Personally, I’d run Rabid or Rampager. Rabid because in your typical condi-build toughness is more valuable and the precision is good for sigil procs. As for Rampager, it’s good for hybrid power/condi builds especially when you have high Prowess.

I personally have 6-0 bound as so:
6-a
7-w
8-ctrl+3
9-r
0-q

Note* I have also rebinded movement to esdf.

Deamhan.9538:

LRS should simply do flat damage but have a 1500 default range. 300 more than the 4 other skills. With the default now at 1500, change the eagle eye trait to one that allows the LB to cause cripple but on a 15 or 20 sec CD. With the LB crippling every 15 to 20 sec, remove cripple from barrage and make it a fire field.

Good idea. But instead of the cripple on CD, since we pretty much have that already, how about, LB applies vulnerability. Also, you wouldn’t really have much control over when this cripple was applied, short of changing weapons, so I’d rather keep Barrage the way it is.

DeadlySynz.3471:

Hmm I’ll have to give that a try. Do they actually stay out of battle though? My biggest issue I have with pets, well ranged ones anyways, is they see fit to run up right next to the enemy to attack, which in effect is pointless lol.

I mean experience my pets stay at range and fire away. It seem like they charge ahead because they only have 900 range. It’d be nice if Anet Increased their range 1000, or at least give a trait for it.

DeadlySynz.3471:

Pets can’t really ever be considered part of the rangers overall damage as they are either dead half the time or being pulled out of combat to avoid death (both of which take away 40-50% of your dps)

Be that as it may, I did some more testing and found out devourers, my ranged pet of choice, do 2×200 damage every ~1.8s for ~200dps. Combined with LB#1 at max range gives us a dps of ~1k.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

Pet account for 40% of our damage you cant compare weapons straight up. one should consider pet damage in the calculations. Pets have thier own issue but you will find the damage is on par with that of the warrior.

Valid point, that I did concede. However, that 40% of damage is not always available. Melee pets are useless during sieges and have difficulty when taking on a boss at range. Then there are the range and AI considerations.

Stice.5204:

As much as I love aiming Barrage in front of fleeing enemies in WvW and watching my teammates run over them, there is no way Anet is going to give any profession a cripple with 1500 range and no cooldown.

What if the cripple on #1 only lasted 0.5s? Ignoring flight time and misses, this would give you 40% uptime on cripple. This way, they won’t really have to touch the issue of slow flight speed and outrunning the arrows.

I’m one of the minority the minority that feels that the long bow’s attack speed is fine when compared to the short bow. Testing in the Mist puts the attack speed at about 1.25 shots per second. However, I feel that the damage department is where this weapon is lacking.

Whereas the short bow epitomizes the agile skirmisher, the long bow should fill the role of cunning marksman that makes each shot count.

I would like to see the tiered damage go away and just have power scaling regardless of range.

Currently at 2495 power against 2600 armor Long Range Shot does any where from 441-933 damage per non-critical hit. This would kill an unaugmented Necromancer using Well of Blood in about 26-53 hits taking 33-66s. To put it in perspective, a Warrior using the same stats with a rifle will accomplish the same thing in about 32-37s shots and take 33-38s.

With a 1.1 coefficient the range is 971-1140, taking 21-25 shots in 26-31s.
With a 1.0 coefficient the range is 883-1036, taking 23-27 shots in 29-34s.
With a .9 coefficient the range is 795-933, taking 26-30 shots in 33-38s.

There are other things to take into account such as the other skills, putting more points into condition damage, burst capability, pets. However, I would like the community’s critique and opinion on what I have put forth.

I’ve always thought the Ranger looked like some Star Wars Jedi deflecting Blaster shots.

I like the idea, however, IIRC Anet wants to keep the game “simplified.” We’ve been having enough trouble getting the suggested pet dodge button added, forget about a whole programmable doctrine system.

Personally, I’d like Rangers have complete control over the pet skills. It’d eliminate the issue people have of a ranger, “being two places at once,” and at the same time opens up alot of room for strategy when you can call a tail swipe or tackle EXACTLY when you want it.

My system would be something like this.
F1 – Sends pet to auto-attack
F2-F4 – Pet skills
F5 – Return
F6 – Swap Pet.

Just my take on a more useful version of this skill.

Changes:
Blocks(actually blocks instead of the current reflection)
Allows movement
Channel time: 3s
Cool down: 20s
Grants 5s of Retaliation
Damage: 800

Any feedback? I know we won’t be able to reflect a warriors kill shot back at him anymore, but I feel that this will be more useful overall and give the axe more usage.

I think the main problem is it competes with BM and WS, are two best trait lines.

You can always run with PvE Rampager gear. The high critical chance can be combined with crit damage for power builds or a sigil/trait for condi builds. In PvP though, with the weird/different amulet choices, I agree that not much can be done.

If you’re running shortbow, rampager is good for either/a hybrid spec. You get power and condi and with higher crit chance, you have your pick of on crit sigils: Earth for more condi or Air/Fire for more power.

I agree with this. Still not burst, but it is pretty hard hitting. If no one beats me to it, I’m gonna test out QZ, SotW, and SotH with berzerker gear in the HoM.

Mine don’t always. I think recalling then and sending them back helps a bit.

Sylvari Ash Ironbark, Emissary of the Grove, Iron Legion Auxilia
Eagle-Eye Goggles
Nightshade Shoulders
Svanir Chestguard
Nightmare Gauntlets
Vigil Leggings
Nightmare Greaves

Also had a set of:
Inquest Hood
Outlaw Shoulders
Falconer’s Coat
Heritage Gauntlets
Ascalonian Pants
Outlaw Boots