Guild Wars 2

ItIsFinished.9462:

Haha, I’m sure we will mess around with an all Spirit team just for the LOL’s. But, in the actual tourny I highly doubt it. Although, depending on the other team comp you never know. If it’s an AOE heavy team we were going against, then most likely not.

I expect to see every one of you with Runes of the Ogre + hyena pet. Or Pirate Runes and all birds, that could be amusing too, but not as much as the dog spam

I have to admitt curiousity to see the game with a different meta, but in the nicest possible way having watched your stream yesterday I think I’d hate it.

The build you were using is more or less everything I hate in a build and if thats the sort of build that is effective over there I’m much better off here Dont take it personally, its a clash of playstyles thing rather than a judgement on you or your play

Wait till the semi-final is over

You might not be interested in it but hundreds of millions of people are, probably why they all vanish :P

WvW or nothing

Because even if you meet a thief that you completely roll over, there’s a very good chance they will escape. That annoys people.

If you fight a necro or guardian and you beat them, they are 200% stuffed. Most classes if you beat them have a chance to escape, but usually not. Thieves and warriors can more or less survive anything if they want to which is frustrating to the other person and causes some to see them as OP.

I have to say I loved it. I really don’t like dungeons, and while I can tolerate some big world events, they are usually just ginat karma trains and it gets old pretty fast.

I much prefer this style of story where you just go and explore the open world (even if the LS part of is was instanced, that’s fine).

jcbroe.4329:

RoyalPredator.9163:

At part of mesmers, they do serious ranged spike damage.
Sunday morning in EOTM: Chased a mesmer who had ~75% HP and wanted to hide from the zergfight they lost, but when he realised he got trapped beside rocks and falling, he turned around and tried to brake out. It was like 12k HP loss in 2 sec for me.
If I weren’t at full health, it would be a one hit kill from range.
I’m lucky he didn’t spawned that GS spinner clone that usually makes ~8k dmg meanwhile I’m dodging it!!

12k Hp Loss… And I’m not a glasscannon…
When will we make that dmg with our “Rapid” Fire?
After these moments; Mesmer is the superior ranged DMG.

Do they sacrifice anything? Or anyone else?
Even Stealth has no rules apart from braking out of it on will.

Speaking specifically for mesmers, they sacrifice virtually all of their condition removal to do those kind of numbers, and really don’t have much to begin with either.

That being said, I’m not disagreeing with you, and if rangers are supposed to be the maximum single target ranged damage relative to mesmers being the runner up competitor, than I sincerely believe ANet has a lot of work to do, and not just on the longbows skillset, but on the fundamental idea that there is a huge efficiency disparity between trying to operate a pet at melee/skirmish range versus 1200/1500 range that needs significant addressing.

Aah the truth. We have all heard that the ranger is a mash together of 2-3 different class concepts ANet had, and this is where is really shows the most. They continually tell us 2 things about rangers.. We should have the best and longest range DPS, and that 30% of our DPS is from the pet. They just don’t seem to realise that these 2 ideas do not work together in any way at the moment. With nearly all pets being melee, and certain all the DPS pets being melee there is just no chance a ranger is going to seriously complete with a mesmer, or heck even a rifle warrior at longrange combat.

Ranger and Mesmer are the 2 classes I play.. And while ranger is still my main and favourite, if I want to go pick people off at range, be it solo, small scale or in zergs, GS mesmer is my choice every day of the week. It has more damage, more survivability and more utility.

+1 Terravos

That’s actually why I dont watch GW2 streams. I enjoy roaming myself.. I find theres something quite interesting about constantly using the map and chatting with the other 5-6 home border roamers GH has to work out where exactly all the enermies are and track them down and whatnot… But as far as watching someone else doing that goes? Watching someone scout and defend a BL is boring as hell, the only fun part are the fights and whilst they might come thick and fast, usually they dont.

Also @ Casey
It’s pretty rude to come here and start saying the people who consistantly contribute to this community are terrible players, escpecially when some of them don’t even claim to be among the best. If you think you’re better and could give people better advice then by all means do it and show us all how it’s done, but if not then just leave. Also this thread isnt about whos the best ranger, its about whos the most influential which really isnt the same thing at all.

All good advise for doing it solo, but if you’re still struggling just advertise in Map Chat to do it in a group because people are more than happy to do it with a ranger thanks to our spirit elite.

Nick.6972:

Contemplation of Purity to remove 6 conditions, second or two later I again have 6 condition again.

My Sigent of Stone protects me from all damage, but as soon as it wears off I get hit for 15k?!

For those interested, the Prickly Pear Pies heal for ~330 (with 250 Healing Power).

There does seem to be a 1s ICD because even cleaving with multiple traps pulsing on multipel targets I cant get it to trigger more often than that.

Generally pretty good.. The heal is slightly less than I’d hoped, but I can still proc is every 5s or so reliably which is still ~65HP/S, higher if you’re in the team fight and you can get cleaves, traps or other AoEs out to proc it more often (or if you have more than ~60% crit chance, which is what I have).

Wait, so you mean you can’t 100% negate someones entire build with just 1 clease utility?

That’s strange, because being able to do that sounds completely fair and balanced.

I didn’t jump at all. Just stayed on the starting middle platform and SBed him to death. Easy enough to walk out of his grenade attacks and other than that I don’t remember doing much but pressing 1.

I always find ANets attitude to this amusing… I mean I am 99% sure they didn’t intend this to be a thing and weren’t even aware of it during development. I say this because it’s not a dodge-specific thing. You can jump+skill anything (at least I assume anything, I know you can do it with any of the ranger Sword and Dagger skills because I do it when running around and I’m bored. Jump+Sw3 is particularlty amusing to me).

So anyway.. I think ANet were never aware of it until players found it… but now have just jumped onboard with it and now advertise it as a piece of pro-play / skilled play simply because this game has very little of that and they are happy players have found at least some cool quirk in the mechanics. And now they just quietly ignore the whole macro issue because on the one hand, it’s clearly 2 seperate actions jammed together so having 1 button for it should be against the ToS, but on the other hand it’s such a small thing and if they say macroing it is against the ToS a significant portion on the community will, inevitably, missinterprit that as JumpDodging in general is against the ToS and hate on their hardcore players using it… which they cant have.

And so goes on the quiet ignoring of the issue

The condition duration + Life Steal do look cool. I use a celestial setup too and I always use +40% duration food because its just so OP and always worth it.. this could be a nice new option.

As someone who scouts for my server, I cant say I’ver ever felt the need to be rewarded for it.

Also, this seems to be a great way for commanders to let their friends AFK and early gold + WXP :s

Bran.7425:

Cufufalating.8479:

@jcbroe

It’s then not helped by the different play modes.. For example I will admit to having no clue who these “famous” PvP rangers people are talking about are.. because PvP combat is so far removed from WvW Roaming (which is all I do) I really couldn’t care less what PvP rangers are doing, or PvE ranger for that matter.

This general view is all in all detrimental to the profession as a whole it basically states that “As long as what I do is unaffected, the rest (of the profession) can go to skritt.”

Without some unity ranger will continue to be at the mercy of the developers listening to masses of angry pvp players who ask for the whole sale destruction of the profession.

Maybe, but at the same time it’s better than people constantly weighing in on discussions they know nothing about.

Perhaps I was a little harsh before saying I dont care.. I care enough to be aware of the general metas, roles and builds rangers play in all game modes, but honestly, what is the gain in someone like me participating in a discussion about PvP or PvE balance? I have nothing of value to add and anything I did add would be pure conjecture which is worse than not participating at all because it gives rise to completely untrue notions.

@jcbroe

Oh you’re entirely right, like I said I didnt mean it in an at all bad way towards you or the other hosts. There just isnt a huge audience on the forums, or on YT, or on twitch, or anywhere for GW2 content which means theres really very hard for someone to influence the game or play in any real way.

It’s then not helped by the different play modes.. For example I will admit to having no clue who these “famous” PvP rangers people are talking about are.. because PvP combat is so far removed from WvW Roaming (which is all I do) I really couldn’t care less what PvP rangers are doing, or PvE ranger for that matter.

GW2 just isn’t like that.. It’s not like Dota (picked purely because its the other game I play regularly) where litterally millions of people watch the big tournaments and then go take the tactics, heros picks, item builds, etc they see used and try to use them in their games (with varying degrees of success). All of which brings me back to there being no influencial Rangers, IMO.

I have to say I dont feel the ranger comunity has influencial players, certainly not in the same way other games or even other classes do.

Sure there are people who post here regularly, and many of them are regarded as good players, but honestly I think looking at the Arrow to the Knee podcasts really sums it up. The most recent podcast was hosted by 3 of the people most commonly mentioned names on the thread, and no even 200 people have watched it. This isnt meant in any way as a knock at them, I have listened to most of their podcasts and agree with many of their posts on the forums, but the fact that the top forum-going rangers podcasts cant even draw 200 views shows how little impact anyone here has on the game-wide ranger community.

So yeah. .we might have good rangers around, but none I would consider influencial.

Eh, I dont think it’s a quite as kittenome people are making out.. But still, it’s annoying they manage to fix this bug when they still cant get round to fixing the bugs on iLeap which cause it to outright fail half the time.

With the exception of bunkering on a point in PvP (and it’s probably not even available in PvP, is it?) I can’t imagine any class has much use for a full set of this. Rangers probably have it best since we could go and pour every trait into buff our pet in every possible way and have it still doing halfway decent damage, but even then I doubt it would be more useful than just going apothecary.

Maybe a full zerg support guard could use it too.

Also @Eggyokeo
I believe Toughness is the primary stat

Sounds like you just need more practice.

The only tip I have is you can avoid having to turn around at all if you have something behind you targeted. You just use the first leap, while thats happening deselect your target and when the leap is finished you’ll still be running the same way and can leap again. So to that end, if you’re running past a lil critter or other random NPC, you can click on them as you go past and use them to leap of without use about turn at all.

Theres nothing gained from taking 2 different Rune types anymore, so if you want bleed duration get all 6 Krait.

Somewhat curious why you’ve got Earth Sigil on the Axe and Geomancy on the SB, it would be more natural to have it the other way round.

Personally I think you arent going to manage well without a Sword. You dont even have a dagger or LR either. Generally I think you are lacking in mobility, both in and out of combat. To that end, I’d replace one of your weapon sets with S/D.

Personally I’m not a fan of Poison Master over EB.. I know some other are but without EB on this build you are seriously lacking condition removal. At the very least take a Brown bear and SoR over poison trap. That would also give you a much needed Stunbreaker, although I’ve never liked depending on SoR for your stunbreaker and condition removal since it cant do both and has a long CD.

Overall, if this is a team fighting spec and you’re running around with friends constantly, you might get away with it as it is. But if you’re going solo then you are lacking in defencive tools (condition removal, mobility/evades).

D/D thieves are the easiest of all thief builds to counter, as people have stated above.

Still.. they hit the hardest since CnD does a surprising amount of damage if landed so.. All is fair I guess.

Einlanzer.1627:

Cufufalating.8479:

I also think Poison is fine as it is.

I think it’s a good thing that actually most conditions are just as good on a direct damage build as on a condition build, a fact which is sadly missed by most people.

There are already 3 conditions dedicated purely to damage (Bleed, Burn and Torment) which is more than enough. The rest should be there for all to take advantage of regardless of their stats / build, just like all boons do, especially a condition which is really more of a utility condition than a damaging condition.

It would still be there to take advantage of. There’s no point whatsoever in having a damage dealing condition that doesn’t really scale properly with condition damage.

It does scale with condition damage, but like I said, it’s a utility condition first and a damaging condition second, so I don’t see a problem with is scaling worse than pure damage conditions.

I also think Poison is fine as it is.

I think it’s a good thing that actually most conditions are just as good on a direct damage build as on a condition build, a fact which is sadly missed by most people.

There are already 3 conditions dedicated purely to damage (Bleed, Burn and Torment) which is more than enough. The rest should be there for all to take advantage of regardless of their stats / build, just like all boons do, especially a condition which is really more of a utility condition than a damaging condition.

I have to say I think it would be a great help if we had some more / better ranged pets.

I know spiders are really handy for the CC, but damage wise they are pretty lame and it’s certainly not helped by their super slow-mo projectiles.

I just always found it odd how on the one had they say they want rangers to have the best ranged DPS, but have 40% of their damage come from pets, and then make 90% of the pets melee so that they arent really of any use when fighting at 1200+ range, especially when your target is in a zerg.

If they gave us a cat/bird type pet with 900-1200 range it would really help the LB “sniper” style playstyle which is what I think Anet intends rangers to be in large scale combat. Maybe a Wind Rider pet with its awesome laz0r eye

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hunter%27s_Shot

36k damage in 62 burning ticks is ~600 damage per tick which means your opponent had ~1000 condition damage.

You didnt fight a power build, you most likely fought a rampagers build.

EDIT: Although lookign at the above post, he’s right, you actually probably fought a full on condition build if he had that much condition damage and seemingly did no direct damage.

Stealth should have never given so many buffs beyond its primary use (invisibility). PU is the big headline trait which people hate on, but thieves are just as bad with cleansing, regen, blinding, increase speed and initiative gain all being added extras they can get out of stealth.

It just shouldnt do so many things / everything for the player using it. Many other games give stealth classes debuffs while in stealth, such as reduced movement speed, increased incoming damage, or in GW2 maybe reduce initiative gain, etc, which balances it out and make it so going stealth isnt the answer to every problem the class has, which in the case of thieves it is in GW2.

To me, going down that route would have been the best option.. though its a bit late without a total rework of the SA traitline on thieves, as well as balancing / buffing them in general to make up for the lose of all the advantages stealth can currently give. But that will never happen so.. yeah.

And once more it all boils down to needing too much trait investment. We have decent stunbreakers.. Protect Me is awesome, LR is obviously awesome, QZ is questionable at times but other times is awesome…

The problem is to make traps, or signets, or sprits work we need to go 6 deep into traits, and once you committed nearly half your traits to making some utilities work then you really have to take at least 2 of those utilties to make that investment worth your while.. which is how we end up in a situation where builds dont have enough stunbreakers.. because we cant mix and match utilities like other classes can.

For example.. my mesmer runs 1 glamour, 1 manipulation and 1 clone utility. My thief have 1 deception, 1 signet and 1 trick. I’m not locked into certain utilities.. if I feel I need more stunbreakers I can make it happen.

When I am on my ranger on my sweet sweet trap builds (or spirit, or signet) and I have to have 2+ of those utilities.. well I am pretty much kittened if I want another stunbreaker. The wiggle room isnt there.

It’s always interesting when I encounter a thief who isnt and suddenly you find yourself fighting a theif who has a sword and a MH dagger or Pistol.. I always wondered why more thieves dont do it, they are the only class who limit themselves like that and stick to basicly doing one thing over and over till it works or till they die (BP > HS > BS or S2 >S3 >S3 >S2, etc).

Is it just the mobility thing or is there a real reason (maybe traits) which prevents using sword and a MH dagger together being good?

Well.. I havent used carrion much, and not at all outside of PvP, so I cant claim to be an expert.. but a few comments are these:

1) IMO SB is not a good condition weapon without precision. I would take Axe + Torch as your other set, especially since you didnt take a torch in the first place and burning is invaluable on any condition build.

2) Following on from that, with SB doing so little and being only 900 range, I’m not sure piercing arrows is of much value. I’d move 2/4 trait points out of MS into pretty much any other traitline, but if you really dont want to I’d at least change Piercing Arrows for SotB.

3) You say Undead Runes on the post and have Nightmare Runes on the build, but regardless I think Krait might suit you better.

4) Those sigils of agony are really not worth it. I’d swap them for Geomancy in a heart beat.

5) Skills wise.. you have an odd set but I cant see any particular reason why it couldnt work. Like I said, I’d take SotB over Piercing Arrows to get more use out of the Signet, or I’d move 4 MS traitpoints to WS, get SotF and then swap your spike trap for MT or Sharpenning Stone. Oh and I prefer TU over HaO but.. HaO isnt that bad really so I guess thats up to you.

@Pure Heart

I’m curious what it is you’re looking at there? Are you looking at just using Sigil of Ice and the food? Because obviously you’re not going to get very far with just that :s

Theres really no better use for laurels if you arent into FotM. Just make sure you buy them at the WvW vendor for Laurels + WvW Badges

It benifit is simply that it screws with your opponents entire playstyle and rotation and can really throw them off. It can be hard to see the impact it makes because there are no shiny numbers to look at on our end, but its like poison and weakness.. it just sits there in the background completely ruining your opponent, possibly without them even realising it, by slowing their CDs and more obviously stopping them moving more or less at all.

Perma chill is obviously the dream but it will never go down like that, but even a 50% chill uptime will mean melee opponents cant get to you, they cant effectively run away, they cant kite you if they are ranged, their skills will be taking 33% longer to come off CD which will hit their DPS and defence, it just all round messes them up.

Also as far as condition builds go, its surprisingly easy to incorpation lots of chill into builds without changing much or reducing your effectiveness elsewhere. Power builds are a little more fiddly just because they rarely use traps, and the MH axe is not as good, but you can still get it in there a bit with something like this which is just a general CC build rather than only chill.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQJAVRjEqUvaHLusQ1aAHhqVHwubDgBwdNECHdBrmA-T1hBABAcIAsS5nOq/A4+DRcEA2TXQZKBJFAEDrA-w

The only real downside to it is against warriors and sword thieves (or more specifically Acrobatics thieves, which is almost always done with S/D) then chill and other soft CC really doesnt stick so your plan is somewhat out the window on that one.

Dont know warriors so probably everyone above me is correct that is makes no difference, but for rangers there is a slight bias towards Asura and Norn simply by the way their skills interact with the rangers traits and other skills.

The biggest example being the Asura skill “Technobabble” being effected by the ranger trait which increases daze duration by 100%.. making the skill a rather amusing 6s 1200 range daze.

Somewhat niche and not a big deal, but it is used in WvW by some and its worth noting if you really want to go all in min/maxing.

But like I said.. no idea if warriors have any such setups

Offair.2563:

Roll ranger, hardly anyone will run away from you.

So true is hurts xD

But I guess it really depends what people are looking for in their WvW / Roaming experience. If you’re there to help your server win then actually avoiding fights and just camp flipping and dolly killing makes most sense.. even if its annoying to play against and boring for most people to do.

Then theres also people who spec for certain fights, like many thieves, who will happily fight people they know they are geared to beat but will run within 10s of fighting someone they know wont be easy.

I’m like the OP want to fight anyone, and build my builds to give me at least an outside chance at any matchup.. so it can be annoying when you meet others who dont want to fight.. but you just have to remember not everyone is there for the same reason as you.

Generally I disagree. I do think it’s a bit too much thieves having a smoke field and leap on the same weapon set, IMO that shouldnt be the case, and mesmers Prestige skill should have some sort of counter play like CnD and Hunters Shot do (having to actually hit something), but those are just 2 things I think go too far. In general I dont have much of an issue with stealth and its implimentation.

I dont really like the suggestion, but it is amusing that people go around ranting that conditions are OP because they go through armour and theres no stat to decrease them, but if you try to apply the same logic the other way round they think you’re a crazy person.

Also,

Aleglast.6027:

Zacchary.6183:

Nope. Not until combat is balanced as a whole.

Blancing conditions is part of balancing combat……

Truer words have never been spoken.

As a strange related note we had this problem last night except with GvGs…

We had a fair number of AM guild groups on our BL and 2-3 of our own guilds raiding, and for about 2 hours the whole BL became one big GvG arena where interfering with their fights got you petty heavily flamed at times.

In some cases I could understand why there was frustration.. 2 guilds were having a good fight and its no fun if suddenly another guild of 30 people piles in.. thats just a blob and theres no fun to be had for anyone there. But then it eventually died down to just one of our guilds vs one of their over and over, and they were so mad that one single pug was semi interfering, even though they were fighting in the middle of the map with a commander tag on. I mean.. seriously? If you want a private GvG go to OS, go to the windmill, turn your tag off and do it there.. dont be the acting commander in the BL and fight in the middle and then get annoyed when pugs arrive.

Probably just want to go all in on traps and take flame trap over sun spirit. I dont see any real gain in taking one trap and one spirit and ending up with insufficient traits for both of them.

Rune of Grenth is probably better than Rune of Ice for condition builds.

Theres no need or gain from taking apothecary trinkets. You have no regen or any other healing besides TU, which scales pretty poorly with Healing Power. You’d be better off taking dire or rabid trinkets, or at least swapping your healing skill for HS.

If I see two people fighting I tend to let them be, although if my ally loses I will prevent them being stomped.

When I am the one dueling I, of course, prefer allies not to get involved but to be honest, unless we’re fighting somewhere which is clearly a dueling spot (JP, Windmill, etc), I would never get annoyed with someone else jumping in because it is WvW and if we’re there fighting in the middle of the road you cant expect everyone to just walk on by.

Nah.. There’s nothing wrong with team play. If a thief wants to use a long CD utility to have a chance of ressing their teammate (as well a a good chance he will get AoEed down while doing it) then I see no issue with that.

I see this quite a lot too.. and every time I do I wonder what sort of person you have to be to actually do that.

I mean.. I guess it could be to save points.. but most people dont take points the seriously anyway. Are they actualyl that mad to lose a 1v1? I mean come on.. why are you solo roaming / dueling if you’re going to get THAT mad when you lose (because we all lose sometimes). Maybe they think it denies me the pleasure of stomping them? Well thats pretty sad too, and doesnt even work since I just enjoy winning so whether I stomp them or they ragequit makes no real difference to me.

The whole thing is just puzzling really.

It is annoying.. Works OKish when facing the target and evading backwards but when running away and using it to shot backwards I end up jumping back and forth for several seconds.

Whats even more fun though is I started using my theif again the other day.. try using that skill on their SB more than once in a row.. now that is glitchy as kittens.

Wyrden.4713:

well when conditions r affected by dmg mitigations , like protection , or using an invulnerability skill after a condi been applied (so it doesnt hurt while u have invulnerable while haing a condition) then sure.

That will happen when damage done by Direct Damage can be removed after the attack has already landed.

Hoelbrak Runes are worth a mention too. Got all the power and might duration and -20% condi duration.

Might be a troll post but much truth was spoken none the less.

Of all the complaints people have for rangers, the one I disagree with the most is the one about most pets being unused. ANet have actually done extremely well at making so many pets and still having so many of them being useful… Hell they’ve done a better job on that than they have on all utilities being used equally.

I mean..
All Canines are used, often
All Cats are used
Birds are used often, some more than others but still
Drakes are often used, some more than others
Spiders are often used
Moas are used less often, but some are used
Bears are overused But do actually have their place, especially the brown bear

The only pet catagorys which really isnt made the most of are the pigs, and thats really because of the RNG on their F2, and Devourer’s, simply because they are like spiders without the CC (though do have a niche use with RoA).