Guild Wars 2

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

Ethics.4519:

Chopps.5047:

I didn’t think of that but I was planning on using it against Mossman. Hopefully someone will get a chance to test it tomorrow. I’ll be busy most of the day.

100% of me really hopes we can use it on mossman.

95% of me thinks he will be immune to it.

100% of me thinks that making mossman revealed for 3 seconds isn’t a game changer

My guess is Mossman has no cooldown on his abilities so he could just stealth again right afterwards. But normally I don’t really use utilities in this fight besides might/fury stacking and some escape so I’ll throw Sic Em on my bar. Realistically, Sic Em is a good burst ability anyways…at least it’s supposed to be bursty.

Pendleton.6385:

Also, if you prefer sb or axe …. use it. Don’t let others define your play style. This game is not as hard as people like to pretend it is. You seem like a smart person …. you’ll do fine in a dungeon.

Ahem, I use mainhand axe (my dungeon loadout is sword/axe and axe/warhorn). I just don’t think it’s a wise choice to fight mobs in PvE with mainhand axe and a condition build. It just takes too long. And if it’s a single target, well, forget about it. You’ll be throwing axes all day.

Mainhand axe is only good against mobs. Besides, OP wants to use bows. I know it by reading his posts.

Spotter gives +150 precision aoe to nearby allies (up to 5 allies; also, note that keyword: nearby which is easiest to attain at melee range). It’s a master marksmanship trait. GS and LB is okay, but I’m not a huge fan of LB due to the slow attack speed. You’re better off with GS/SB.

For you, since you seem to like bows, I would recommend the following:
30 (signet mastery/spotter/signet of the beastmaster) / 20 (companion’s might and quickdraw) / 5 (+50% endurance regen) / 15 (vigorous spirits) / 0

Note: Signet of the Beastmaster is a grandmaster in marksmanship, it is not a signet like the other signets you’re used to.

Ok so a few things about this build setup. Why 15 in Nature magic? That’s for fortifying bond (boon sharing with pet…otherwise, due to 5 person cap on boons, pet would really get few boons). Why signet of the beastmaster? Because new players can benefit from using signet of stone utility being traited, which then makes the ranger invulnerable for 6s as well as the pet (normally it’s just the pet). The additional toughness from the signet of stone will help you survive too. Make sure you equip a frost spirit. The other utilities are up to you although I prefer the spirit elite in dungeons to instantly resurrect downies.

Once you improve your play, you can drop signet of stone for piercing arrows and instead take the [Protect Me] shout for a 12s diversion of damage from you to the pet. I’d say after tomorrow’s buff to pet health, protect me will be very nice for PvE and WvW in place of signet of stone and signet of the beastmaster.

Yeah, decklan, they don’t care about fast boss kills. You’re right, of course. It’s not like every zerker group is killing lupicus in 15seconds, first of all. But more to the point, ANET designed a pvp game then added PvE to it. There is no trinity. This is more like an action RPG game. If you get hit, you die. That’s pretty much how it’s designed.

I think it’s a design problem overall, ya know? How do we incorporate conditions and tanky gear and still make pve fun? I haven’t seen a convincing proposal on how to do this. So, basically, it’s always going to be this way as far as I can tell.

ilr.9675:

Chopps.5047:

Why are you so mad about questions? Just be patient, everything will get revealed tomorrow.

You’re right, my Bad…. We’re still waiting on the fine print where they sometimes list the nerfs. (assuming they won’t be unlisted stealth nerfs like the barrage nerf was)

No worries, I jumped the gun on what I thought was a buff to rejuvenation (I was wrong). We’re all excited.

I don’t understand why you would force conditions in pve. I’m really confused. In dungeons, if you need more toughness, add some knight pieces into berserker gear. Please, don’t take a condition ranger with, ew, axe mainhand? Seriously? You’re asking for trouble in my opinion.

It’s not about speed runs. It’s about doing enough damage to kill the boss before the boss kills you. Especially for a new player (I’m assuming based on your question that you’re new), the last thing you need is a lack of personal DPS. You probably don’t want to be full glass because you still need to learn how to approach dungeon content, so beserker armor with knights trinkets is probably a good way to go.

So long as you bring spotter and a traited frost spirit with vigorous spirits, you’re doing most of the work already. Now bring a sword/axe offhand and warhorn offhand on secondary. Or, if you don’t like that, go with shortbow and greatsword. But I’d say if you want enjoyment and you like doing condition damage, use rampager gear with rampager trinkets and something like 30/x/30/x/x.

The thing about melee is you have to be in melee ranger to give/take boons. There really is no other choice. That’s how gw2 is played. If you want, you can take shortbow and stand slightly behind people, in between melee and mid-range.

You’ll get killed alone at range though. The best thing about being in melee range is that if you go down, your allies can rez you very easily without walking across the room vulnerable to attacks.

I’m sorry if this isn’t the advice you wanted to hear but pick up groups won’t usually take kindly to your proposed playstyles. In fact, I would say it’s more difficult to play in the way you propose, believe it or not.

ilr.9675:

Chopps.5047:

Um, no, simmer down there pistol pete. During the livestream, someone asked this question. The dev answered it on the air, saying “that’s a good question, no it cannot be dodged”. This was new information so I posted it here.

Right …. people ask stupid questions in streams. This is news HOW??

I saw a GOOD question get asked though about 1H sword chain.
Funny how they always ignore that one smart question…

But they didn’t answer that one. There’s no new information. Had that been answered I would have posted that here too.

Besides, I still don’t see how it’s a dumb question. The application of reveal is totally new. What if you shouted while the enemy was evading? It really is a reasonable question.

Why are you so mad about questions? Just be patient, everything will get revealed tomorrow.

Dardamaniac.1295:

Still noone said something about the petting zoo issue..

Targeting will get fixed so it’s easier to target the ranger or necro. Meaning tab targeting will select the ranger not the wolf or sun spirit. Mesmers are not affected. That’s something, maybe not everything you want.

Substance E.4852:

Poliswag.8240:

You guys are missing the point. Those 4 seconds can easily be the difference between someone living and dying, or enough time for an interrupt of ours to come up to screw them further. This is a good change, and I expect a well-played ranger will be hell for any profession that relies on stealth.

The most dangerous thieves don’t use d/d or rely heavily on stealth. Anyone with decent physical damage output and enough toughness to survive the initial strike or two from the gank thief can turn the tides with ease. You won’t catch them but they won’t kitten with you once they know you know they’re there and wont fold to their instagib.

Odd that people focus so much on the 1v1 aspect when the reality is, in high level play, it will see much more use to prevent stealth stomps and resurrects. As far as the “instagib” thieves go, I was watching docMed play yesterday. Very few people “won’t fold to their instagib”. He was just going into corners, blinding power, leaping, stacking stealth duration for many seconds, flying around the field, and basically doing whatever he wanted. So I disagree with your assessment.

ilr.9675:

Piedplat.3597:

is a shout

This

I can’t believe you actually made a thread for this Chopps
…props for being such an optimist I guess, but come on man….

When was there EVER a precedent in the entirety of GW’s history where this sort of mechanic would normally be blocked or dodged? … You’re justifying on a qualifier that has never existed. And the vast majority of comments are all still 100% focused on the duration… it’s really really really short… duration (which had to be applied BEFORE the target stealths meaning that all they have to do is wait a few seconds if they were planning to use a stealth that was on a long C/D)

Um, no, simmer down there pistol pete. During the livestream, someone asked this question. The dev answered it on the air, saying “that’s a good question, no it cannot be dodged”. This was new information so I posted it here.

Dardamaniac.1295:

thats what it always did….O_o

It always did that? Maybe I’m confusing it with guardian “rejuvenation”. At least with the tooltips being fixed it’s more clear now. My bad

I didn’t think of that but I was planning on using it against Mossman. Hopefully someone will get a chance to test it tomorrow. I’ll be busy most of the day.

Clark Skinner.4902:

I hear this often from people in and out of game. I can’t understand how they can think that crafting something was free since they gathered the mats.

Once you have the mats, you have 2 options:
1. Craft them into something.
2. Sell them.

In both cases, you are without the mats in the end, but gain:
1. The value of the item you crafted.
2. The gold gained from selling mats.

So when crafting, the cost was either #2 (gold you would have gotten selling the mats), or the cost of buying the mats, both of which are pretty similar.

And the time it takes to gather should also be taken into account. Time saved can be used to make gold somewhere else.

Thanks for the freshman level introduction to economic theory. I should let you know, you didn’t invent the concept of opportunity cost. Next time, can we have an introduction to tensor math? I’m a little rusty on that.

According to devs on today’s livestream

also, sic ’em can be used on a downed enemy to prevent a stealth rez

It’s a 4s reveal on a single target if you were wondering.

By the way, companions defense will now activate for the pet at the beginning of the dodge roll in case you were wondering about that change.

• They claim there’s more changes in the patch and seemed to tease it in a way that made viewers feel like there’s something big being announced tomorrow. Will they deliver?

We already have juvenile forum posters and trolls in the game though. Think bigger: Juvenile Champion Grub.

I’d recommend 30/20/5/15/0, guanglai. Then he can get signet of the beastmaster for some true invulnerability with signet of stone. He would wear a few berserker pieces to make up for lost precision and crit damage. Overall, good advice though.

Scoobaniec.9561:

Chopps.5047:

Arheundel.6451:

so many warriors….this profession takes so much skills that warrior players are extremely rare..oh wait

It’s very difficult to spam 4s stuns on 8s CD.

It’s very difficult to kite someone that has 0 mobility : )

Warrior is fastest profession in game according to a recent discussion on the subreddit. And by a good margin too. How again do you kite that? There are options, sure. But warrior has counters to the counter.

Sure it is. Everything is viable to the extent that skill can make up for actual mathematical gaps, at least that’s what the tester yesterday said.

Lol ya I’m not offended. If you spent gold on that sigil, it’s another causality of gw2’s awful GUI, traits, skill, rune, and sigil descriptions. When it comes to tutorials, anet is like your classic calculus professor who’s talking about solving problems when the class is still trying to work out algebra. They just are not good at teaching while also keeping in mind where players—especially new players—get stuck or mislead. It’s infuriating, honestly.

ANET FIX YOUR TOOLTIPS PLEASE

…juvenile teqautl. Pretty please? [Tsunami] isn’t that strong.

Double sigil of battle works? I don’t think it works that way…

To be honest, I don’t like sigil of battle without fortifying bond. Only half of the pet/ranger combo gets might from that sigil without it. That’s typically an elementalist sigil. At least you have fortifying bond but I’d check those double sigils because I’m pretty sure there’s a CD such that both will not activate.

Casters should be able to choose where the spectator “seeing” locations are, ANET. The placement cameras is too functional. They show all of the map but they’re not necessarily exciting placements in my mind. I could be wrong, I suppose. just a thought, hope that helps

Can confirm: there are no secret ranger specs. We explore daily and are copin with the current imbalance in the game.

If you want to relax, play warrior. This isn’t a rip or a troll. Despite what Durzlla might say, ranger is very difficult to play. You live on a razors edge in hard PvE content, must anticipate and queue weapon evades to survive, and must hit a lot of keys to accomplish maximum play.

Here’s a quote from Brazil (aka The Mexican Cookie) from Death and Taxes and now rT, one of the best pve guilds in the world (paraphrased): “Ranger is actually very difficult to play because you have to be so active. I actually stopped playing mine because I can’t relax while playing it. Every party can benefit from a good ranger but it’s so much work!”

I hope that helps.

Guang when was the last time you quantified longbow?

Arheundel.6451:

so many warriors….this profession takes so much skills that warrior players are extremely rare..oh wait

It’s very difficult to spam 4s stuns on 8s CD.

Doomdesire.9365:

D/P is all about forcing them to drain their initiative. Really any class can do it if you play it smart. A perfect push/pull out of a smoke field before they heartseeker through it will screw them over hard.

So easy to time that given the rapid cast times thieves get in skill lag. /s

Because warrior is less gimmicky and spammy rolls eyes

I was thinking more like a pet Elder Dragon. Too strong? Ok, we can settle on a claw, say, Juvenile Tequatl. The utility skill is Tsunami and instantly wipes everyone on the three borderlands, including EB.

I was going to say a pet warrior or guardian, but dear god, let’s not make it OP.

Yelloweyedemon.2860:

Here’s the situation. I play ranger (full berserker gear with LB) and i almost always roam on map (avoiding pve stuff).

I win about 90% of the 1v1 fights, and about 40-50% of 2v1 fights.

I see other enemy rangers as “free kills”. They are probably the guys that cry on the forum all day.

That’s all. Play and see for yourself.

I mean, of course you can do that but you have zero sustain in any kind of drawn out battle. If you win a 2v1 it’s only because you get the jump on them and it was a certain matchup. Quit exaggerating.

Shape shift into leopard you mean? I want to face more warriors with mobile strikes so I can see how broken they really are. Haha

That actually sounds incredibly reasonable. Did you come up with this yourself?

jcbroe.4329:

Soilder.3607:

jcbroe.4329:

Exactly. I just miss this:

http://www.guildwars.com/gameplay/developer_updates/september_2012_skill_balances.php

And these types of update pages would get released about a week in advance, detailing the major changes and the skills being majorly toned for the change.

I guess it’s too much to ask the same guys that are doing a silly “Beginners PvP” guide to instead, go and get a list of the balance updates definitely going live, and then format them and post them, detailing why they were being made and what the goal is with these changes.

Sorry, I know I’m a little rant-ish, but I do feel like ANet is a little kid kicking me in the shins repeatedly sometimes.

Don’t you know mate? Casual players don’t have time for deep balance discussions.

Lol this is so true on so many levels it actually saddened me a little…

I have 500 some guild mates, and maybe 10 of them check the patch notes. The other day, a few of my guildies and I had to explain to some guys who had leveled their Eles/Rangers to 80 and mained them with tons of gameplay time, that the Ele scepter Air Attunement autoattack and Rangers Rapid Fire were a running total, and the numbers popping up weren’t the amount that each separate hit was doing.
I mean, 80s, full exotics, everything.

I’m starting to think I give the playerbase too much credit sometimes lol.

I can see why they’d think that as the numbers look exactly the same as any other number and no where is it clearly explained. You cannot see how much health an enemy has so you can’t check that way either.

This is a function of the lackluster GUI. Tooltips are flat out wrong, traits break every other patch, exploits appear, and none if it is transparent. This is the story of the first year of gw2 GUI. Hopefully they improve it starting with this patch. Even targeting is bad. At launch, there were no indicators for retaliation or confusion even.

ilr.9675:

They didn’t preview one single change. Not even a teaser.

But they DID admit that they don’t play Ranger basically while listing the classes they do play (and find viable). Even more noteworthy was his stungank warrior finally losing to the spirit Ranger b/c he got outplayed even harder the second time. IE: It was apparent who deserved to win the fight both times. Yet the lack of viable weapons & traits for Rangers (due to the decisions these very Developers make) made the fight a blowout the first time, and a dead heat finish the second time. so there’s your REAL preview ….Expect more nerfs in the coming weeks b/c their darling the warrior still can’t wipe the floor with every Ranger yet.

Well, that’s encouraging news.

Why warrior is the fastest and not an adventurer profession I do not understand.

Do this vs the old simin back before nerfed her and patched sparks to make them aggro pets less. but anyways, course, well done as usual

Ricky.4706:

Honestly, i’m starting to think this is some psychological experiment lol – from another thread – I saw that the t1 servers were getting ques at 90 players per map – Last night my server …a bronze league server – I was in que and there was only like 50 people on our map. Now the developers don’t want to release that cap number – which makes no sense at all. You would think if they wanted to balance the game they would let us know how many people to rally from our server. Some servers are obviously marked to stay low level. – sure call it a conspiracy theory, but as long as these caps are “secret information” – it’s a valid theory. The leagues are fixed and the only possible explanation is someone is curious to see how we’d react.

or maybe an even simpler explanation is that they do this to conserve resources or keep fights relatively balanced ?

I don’t know but I was in que and no way did we have 90 players on our map, which is where the t1 servers say they start to que. makes me feel like even if we could rally those numbers – these restrictions would keep us out of competing.

The way sor, jq, and bg consume guilds, there’s no conspiracy needed to explain long queues.

NoTrigger.8396:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

1) Achievement points

bad. achievement points dont matter. i know players with 2k AP who can solo lupi and play better than 10k AP staff guardians.

And I know 7 year olds who can beat grandmasters in chess. There’s always an outlier.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

1) Toughness doesn’t affect aggro either. Proximity seems to be the strongest factor. The rest seems mostly up in the air.

2) GS is better DPS than shortbow.

If toughness doesn’t effect agro, then why is my longbow ranger in cleric armor an agro magnet. I’m at 1000-1200 distance. I do crap damage. I use bird which absolutely does more damage than me. But my Toughness is over 2000, my armor is over 3000. So what is attracting these mobs every time if not that?

Some bosses and mobs have a routine to attack ranged. They’re all a little different. Gw2 aggro is a “black box” per se.

These runes are balanced on some professions but imbalanced on others, in my opinion.

I hate these runes on spammy professions like warrior but on ranger they seem decently balanced. I interrupted a guardian’s leap with a concussion shot wearing the runes and I still feel like I deserved the confusion proc for such a nicely timed interrupt. It’s a shame ANET won’t reward players for making skill shots. You won’t get anything special for interrupting a heal or leap post nerf of these runes. That’s a shame. I bet these runes are worthless after the nerf because that’s how anet does business.

This reminds me of burnfall without all the negativity.

That bear still seems like he has poor AI. Reason being there are much more efficient ways to light a cigar besides tommy gun. To each his own, I suppose.

For real op? Pets are invuln to the fire in the ooze room. Axe ricochets off the gears the boss throws. And places where the pet gets blown up are not place where you need high dps (final boss for example). This dungeon was designed with rangers in mind more so than others so the complaints are unfounded as far as profession balance goes.

To beat this dungeon you must learn to manage aggro. That’s the hard part. Manage ooze aggro, manage elemental aggro, manage hologram aggro, manage tree aggro. Learn 2 Kite

A good question. This fact shows a true weakness designed into the ranger. Team play is a viable solution right now.

That’s pretty cool. +1

Lord Kuru.3685:

All the leagues are pointless. When winning is determined by coverage, it means nothing.

But it’s the Gold™ League of 2013 so clearly, judging by the name, they’re olympic medalists and professional players.

Bear is great for body blocking Old Tom’s projectiles. You need the troll and signet of the wild to make it work for a long time. That’s the only type of fight I use a bear in right now.

That is some Beowulf stuff I love it.

“They died, not of the wounds, but from a heart stopped with fear and suspended belief.”

I love that part.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

I never understood why bear was so popular. Bow I get, but bear? Honestly if I was going for a pet that wouldn’t die I’d go for the ranged one with heavy armor, i.e. the devourer. Or if I was expecting my pet to tank for me I’d go for the one that could heal, i.e. the moa.

Bear has one use right now: body block Old Tom bolts using the troll unguent and signet of the wild. That’s about it. There’s a similar attack sparkie does in the new dungeon that a bear is useful against.

By the way, I’m a fan of red moa and lashtail devourer for sure.

• you might use a bear and protect me or a bear and search and rescue if things go badly and you need some help. Usually don’t have to though.

Why will it help virtually zero against that build again? I fell asleep during that part of the explanation.