Also agreed: 2h weapons should have 2 sigil slots.
The only class that would be really potentially imba due to this is warrior.
Because they hit harder than one handed weapons. Basically a 2-hander already comes with a buffed up Sigil of Force on it (within it).
W….H…….A……T……?
lol
Well then, let’s take a look at the damage formula first:
Damage done = (Weapon Strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
So a percentual increase in weapon strength increases damage by the same percentage.
And if we look at an ascended 1h sword:
Weapon Strength: 965 – 1066 ~ 1015.5 avgAnd an ascended greatsword:
Weapon Strength: 1061 – 1173 ~ 1117 avg (+10%)This isn’t even counting in the fact that the base skill damage from 2h’s tends to be a little higher than 1-handers on average as well.
edit: could have saved myself some typing, you can find it here as well.
You’re completely forgetting attack speed as well as damage coefficients on attack skills.
There’s a reason why 1h swords do more dps than greatswords for both Rangers and Guardians.
maybe u should rate builds and not classes!
Yeah. I don’t get why guardian is rated so high on these lists here. The only guardians I get in my solo queues are full dps and they seem to die in every single 1v1 against whatever class. I’ve seen a bunker guardian twice in my last 60 matches or so.
Dps guard: -5
It amazes me how few bunker guards there are considering how good they are at winning games. I think people just get caught up in thinking that they win games by racking up high personal kills instead of capturing and holding points.
Eh, most runes of (insert profession here) suck for that profession, with the exception of runes of the ranger, which are actually pretty awesome for power build rangers.
Yea, Descent of Shadows is pretty awesome for WvW.
Also, after watching Yishis’ video…I think I might switch back to a SA spec like he has for WvW. The blind on stealth is a really strong trait for D/D.
I love my thief, but the brutal, honest truth is that if I want to get wins and rank, I’m much, much better off running with my Guard as a bunker.
Bunkers win games. That’s pretty much what a lot of it boils down to.
I liked the idea at first, but then I realized that this would just make other areas of the game (WvW, dungeon groups, general PvE) that much emptier at those times when few people are online.
To get you to burn your cooldowns…
…either that or he just couldn’t stand to lose a fight
…or he just wanted to kittenol!
Full valkyrie armor with berserker trinkets is a solid set up. 0/30/30/10/0/0 with D/P or is currently a popular build, but will be nerfed Dec 10th. Personally, I like 10/30/0/0/30, but that may be largely because I do more sPvP and am more used to a glassy build.
However, I would suggest having a S/P offset since it, along with Daggerstorm, is great for soloing supply camps.
Rule # 498 of Video Game Interweb Forums: As soon as anyone claims something to be difficult, someone else must state that this content is in actuality very easy and proclaim, either directly or indirectly through inherent assertion, that any failures are due to the player having an uncommonly inferior ability to play the game.
I have no idea why anyone would take a pug to a high level fractal run. .
I think it’s a lot easier to leave a mechanic like this in than to take it out and since it gives some degree of a stealth counter, I think ANet is fine leaving it in.
Count to 3 -> dodge
Yup. The timing is really predictable. If you are having trouble with the timing, play a thief for a bit.
Hammer is a beautiful weapon. Yes, the attack speed is slow, but it deals good damage and brings the utility of AoE protection. Having the bulk of the damage as well as a combo field linked to your auto attack makes you have to pay attention to it, which is a nice change from so many weapons where you just mindlessly let your auto attack run.
Having a short cd blast finisher is also tremendously useful, especially if you have a staff ele in your group.
Yes, Banish is really something best suited for PvP and Ring of Warding is pretty situational, but the mechanics of the auto attack and Mighty Blow alone require more thinking than the GS. The GS is a pretty straight forward weapon that mostly encourages you to spam your weapon cooldowns as soon as they come up (except maybe if you want some condi cleanse from a whirl in your light field).
Don’t get me wrong, the GS is a great weapon, but it’s a bit more 1-dimensional and is generally best as an offset swap weapon to swap to for burst. Once your GS skills are on CD, the auto attack is so weak, that there’s little reason to keep using it if you have another weapon to swap to.
Personally, unless I need a ranged attack, I generally use Hammer as my primary weapon and GS as a swap. The GS is nice for grouping mobs with the #5 ability as well as for some AoE burst, but in most situations, the steady damage of the hammer along with the AoE protection and blast finishers are more useful.
It’s the lord, he hits like a truck because he is a kitteng lord and we are only peasant. He trained his whole life in this lethal attak, 90 years of trainning in the mountain. Go train your auto attak in the mountain for 90 years, you will hit like a truck too.
This made my day.
LOL there is still the bi-weekly update (aka living stories). It should keep you busy for 2 to 3 days every 2 weeks.
Other than that, WvW maybe your next best bets.
If you are not interested in the above then the next 2 big mmos is coming out in spring 2014. Or wait until GW2 decided to make an expansion but that might be a very long wait. My guess is at least spring 2015.
Well, the living story holds pretty much no interest to me. I’m going to go for the S1 WvW achieves in hopes that it will keep some interest in WvW as it hasn’t really appealed to me much so far.
As for the MMOs coming out:
Wildstar holds a lot of promise in its game mechanics, housing system, and overall polish. However, the story/style of the game is…problematic. The only female characters…lack variety (I won’t get into that here) and a lot of the videos so far are presented pretty much the way a hyper middle school kid who watches too many rated R movies would advertise a game.
Everquest Next is very promising from the little they’ve shown…but they’ve shown very, very little so far.
So, I’m running into a period of burnout. I have a fully geared max character of every profession I want to play, have attained a PvP rank I’m happy with, cleared all the dungeons, etc.
Because of this, I’ve started looking at other MMOs, but really I’d rather stay with GW2. The problem is that there really isn’t much engaging, challenging content here to keep my feet on the ground.
So, I need to ask: What is there to look forward to? Why should I stick around?
I frequently get depressed (overstatement, it’s just a game) about the direction of the game. I feel like you have to work quite hard to get quite little. ANet rewards things you don’t like doing in order to get you to do them, and doesn’t reward things that are fun.
The game is so very different from what I thought it would be. So much more grindy. So much more tedious. Each update is just more of the same zergy combat. Who cares what we are fighting if it kills us before we can do anything if not in a zerg and we kill it before it can do anything if we are in a zerg?
Yea, I agree with this. One of the hardest things for me to deal with in the game now is how different it is compared to what it was supposed to be. So much of PvE is all about grinding bosses and gear, which is almost comical considering that there’s almost nothing that makes use of better gear. There’s one dungeon in the entire game that requires special gearing (Fractals) and it’s been around and has been the same for close to a year now.
I feel little to no reason to group with friends for anything in the current state of the game. Dungeons are all outdated and sPvP only really works well if you have exactly 5 people with you.
I still don’t have any draw to WvW. Between the player size and the game length, your effort does almost nothing to make a difference and the outcome of the game doesn’t really matter anyways. Back in GW1, a solid group of players could win HoH and doing so would be announced to the entire playerbase while unlocking the premier PvE content.
GW2 is still probably the best MMO for anyone who’s looking to start playing an MMO. However, the replay value is a bit sparse.
If you love the mini temporary living story content or if you like farming world bosses in zerg circles, there’s plenty to do. However, most everything else hasn’t had much of a big update in a while.
Fractals was the only substantial dungeon addition since launch, but even as great as it was, it’s just about a year old now.
WvW has received some small tweaks, but at least there’s a new map coming out soon.
sPvP has received some new maps, but they are still pretty much the same conquest stuff we’ve had since launch.
What we haven’t seen:
– New profession skills
– New race
– New class
– Instanced content for groups larger than 5
Single blinds are meh.
Blind fields are awesome.
I gotta admit that since reading this thread, I started messing around on my ranger again with a power build like the one Eurantien posted and it’s been pretty fun. It’s still not as reliable as just bringing in something like a Guardian bunker in terms of winning games, but it does work well.
I ran a ranger a lot when I first started off and they are often underestimated…but I’m not sure I would rate them that high as a difficult class to play in PvP. I mean, running a squishy power build is definitely harder than a lolspirit build, but compared to engineer and ele, it’s still pretty straight forward. I mean, I’d probably even rate a thief as harder to play well.
Apm is not the only factor in build difficulty. It’s one of them, but not the only one.
Glass ranger is pretty high on the unforgiving scale, which is another factor.
Variety of decisions/approaches to different situations is the third main factor in build skill floor/cap imo. Since I haven’t played glass ranger much, I can’t speak to that, but I imagine that there is no “standard” rotation, as some higher apm builds have.
Well, it’s not really an issue of APM. There’s a bit less choice involved in what actions you perform with a ranger, partly because there are less abilities to choose from, but also because a lot of the abilities are so one dimensional. I mean, consider the ranger’s heals to an engineer’s healing skills, for instance.
Well, there are ranger builds that currently dominate for top players in PvE and PvP (S/H rangers top dps in PvE and spirit builds are in almost every serious tournament team), so you can’t really argue that rangers aren’t viable anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, the class still needs a lot of work (clunky/bad mechanics on weapons like the 1h sword, problematic pet AI, lack of viability in WvW, etc.), but at least we’re getting some open communication with devs and the class is still in a better overall spot than this time last year.
But yea…the vid is funny. >.>
I ran a ranger a lot when I first started off and they are often underestimated…but I’m not sure I would rate them that high as a difficult class to play in PvP. I mean, running a squishy power build is definitely harder than a lolspirit build, but compared to engineer and ele, it’s still pretty straight forward. I mean, I’d probably even rate a thief as harder to play well.
And there’s trait changes coming on Dec 10th. Old traits getting revamps and tier moves, this could be interpreted as being technically “new traits”.
Leaving Ascended armor, which I believe they have said since that will likely miss the end of year deadline and be in 2014, have they not?
They can leave out the ascended armor.
The gear treadmill sucks (even if it’s slower than most games).
The game isn’t really designed around encouraging guilds much, but finding a good guild is still probably one of the best ways you can ensure that you have a good time when you log on and are successful with the content you run.
Even if you don’t care about having a community to be engaged with, guild groups are simply much more reliable for group events such as dungeons and will almost always get you through faster.
Eh, there’s plenty of end-game in GW2. It comes out every 2 weeks!
I think the problem is that there isn’t hardly any instanced, repeatable content. Instead, it’s a rush to complete a set of achievements before they’re gone forever.
However, for the, the biggest issue is that so much of the content seems to revolve around mindless huge masses of players running around, auto-attacking stuff. GW2 is still my game of choice, but without any new dungeons, no raids, and a really stale PvP environment, I’m losing interest fast.
WvW had some great potential, but it just doesn’t feel like you have any impact on some huge game that you can only play a tiny role in for a small portion of time. It also largely revolves around huge zergs running around with a handful of actual strategic decisions being made by a few people.
Tl;dr – There’s plenty of content, but it’s rarely engaging outside of dungeons and PvP that’s very outdated.
Not sure why people are choosing 5 v 5. In hot joins, you’re more likely to have inequalities in team size, which makes less of an impact in matches where you have more members.
If leveling is so excruciating to you that the thought of doing anything BUT crafting to get to 80 is this outrageous to you, then you may not have chosen the right game.
Besides, once you hit 80, there’s not much you can do without having a good portion of the waypoints open (especially if you intend on doing any guild missions). You can still level the cheap crafting professions, then just open up waypoints to hit 80 without ever really engaging in any real combat.
Maybe I’m getting old, but this felt like listening to a bunch of giggling high school kids. I had to put the thing on mute before long.
Near the top of my “Things I would change about GW2” list is making ranged combat riskier in PvE and buffing ranged dps as a result.
Plenty of other MMOs have been able to pull this off. It’s a shame that so few enemies do anything really threatening to ranged and it’s a shame that you have to hold your group back just to use a ranged weapon (unless you’re a grenade engi).
“I’m going to stop playing for months and months so that maybe I can get $5.00 worth of gems that can only be spent in a game that I don’t even play.”
Good plan.
^ This made my day.
How are non gem buyers supposed to compete with players who buy gems? I feel gw2 is becoming another mmo where you have to pay with real life money to be the best or grind until you are dead.
What are you competing at? A fashion contest?
I assume with some of the issues brought up….the REAL issues….has scared the dev away.
Sit back, and wait for some dev replies next year I guess.
Mostly just people who saw the red icon and figured it would be a good time to rant and rave like lunatics and kill all sense of polite discourse.
We actually got him to consider a possible semi-fix for the 1H sword…
Are you implying the complaints aren’t justified? Did you miss where he said they know about our problems but can’t be bothered to fix them because they aren’t easy fixes? Despite the game being out a year?
I’m sorry but THE core mechanic this whole class is designed and balanced around doesn’t work and they have told us quite clearly it’s not on their radar despite these issues being around since beta.
Exactly this…
Got him to consider…? Its plain as day.
With all the issues, it’s not his place to see sorting the ranger class as a “consideration”, that is his job and his responsibility to make rangers ( and all classes) battle viable to battle any class pretty reasonably.
Look at the weapon issues as a starting point, the 1H sword rooting is a joke like the short bow nerf, the awful damage on axes that don’t know if they are hard damage or condition (both suck anyways for ranger), the pets that don’t hit despite the Anet vision where pet DPS is 40% of your damage. Someone made those decisions as bad as they were, to the point the class really is a mess. When they actually should have been nerfing and dumbing down other classes to make the ranger viable, they did the opposite and now find there are no easy fixes, even though there are some easy ones available to them – bump the damage up for one.Secondly… tongue in cheek or otherwise, critique is critique. If the facts were not there to poke holes they would not be on this forum now. The problem why people feel so strongly is because that these class balancing issues were not so apparent as newbies when the game launched. Now we know better because we are taking part in the game fully and we now realize these choices could have been rectified with a re-roll early on. But because you really have to bump to 80 to get the full potential of your class and started battling other classes in PVP or WVW. It is here you see the unfair class balance and by that time its far too late as you invested time, gold, real money for gems etc.
And it is here that where sorting the ranger problems are far more than a consideration, it’s a customer responsibility to its player base. That is the bottom line. If Anet developers actually did something considerably good for us for once instead of senseless nerfs to an already underperforming class, then perhaps the critique would not be so big. Unfortunately only they can solve that, however credit where credit is due… I am so pleased they are considering a nerf to perm stealth thieves and are understanding it was being abused in builds. So that is something at least.
^ Articulate and self aware. Very nice.
Agreed to this…except to perma-stealth thieves.
All of this assumes perma swiftness
0. Any Norn in the game with racial
1. Elementalist with FGS
2. Warrior with GS
3. Thief withdraw+shadowstep+sb
4. Ranger with GS
5. Ele with either staff, offhand dagger or axe
6. Engineer with rocket boots
7. Mesmer with Blink + staff
8. Guardian with GS (Teleports excluded because of target req)
9. Everything else (Necro, Teleport exluded because of target req + travel time)
Thief with heartseeker, withdraw, and roll for initiative should be at the top, especially if they have decent ini regen.
The NPC fights look better than most boss fights in dungeons…
Watching the vid now and have a tip for Tyler on future videos where you solo stuff like this:
Bring a S/P thief. Keep a blind field down and this stuff is a breeze.
I didn’t get a chance to watch the stream (stuck at work), but after reading what other people said, here are two things that will make or break this for me:
1) Can I join with someone else? I’m married to a gamer, so if this is another event where we can’t queue in together, there’s little chance we’ll pay this much attention.
2) What are the stakes of winning? If this is something like Hall of Heroes and unlocks something for your server/group upon winning, then this is one of the most exciting releases for me since launch. If there’s just some glory, gold, or some other small personal reward…then I probably won’t mess with this much.
Simple question, simple answer:
Why do people play content they don’t enjoy?
They do this to get to content they do enjoy.
D/P got overshadowed by S/D, but with that being taken out, I see D/P returning. If anything, a D/P build will be better than ever with the ini buffs.
And to clarify, I’m talking about 25/30/0/0/15 or 10/30/0/0/30 builds, not the SA heavy builds that are, of course, nerfed by the Dec 10th changes.
Yea, I run PvP primarily as a bunker guard now. They’re not considered vastly OP like warriors are right now and they don’t make very interesting vids since you don’t get huge crits, but it wins games and isn’t getting nerfed.
Since glory/rank is now based upon wins instead of points, there’s been no better time to run as a bunker, especially since it makes such a big difference to a team’s chance at winning.
But I did cheese around on a war for a little bit. It’s such an awkwardly clunky class compared to thief, but kitten ed if it doesn’t CC like a vice grip and hit like a truck.
I think GW2 can be an ESport, but I think it’s inherently a tough thing to pull off with an MMO. Already, they have a good foundation laid by not requiring a gear grindfest to be competitive. However, I think that the small map style GW2 has right now makes it tough to produce a really interesting game from a viewer’s perspective. Sure, the small maps throw players into the fights, but there’s a lot less room to really watch the strategies play out.
I think this is why watching games in GW1 was so much more interesting than GW2. You had people running flags, setting up for spikes, feigning attacks, etc. all going on, whereas GW2 seems to be all about squabbling over capturing points with the occaisional extra objective.
The change to sword damage from 5% to 10%. I’ve seen a lot of talk that maybe it is not really needed. The fact was this was a lackluster trait and this is a lackluster change to it. I would love to do the right thing here and have a change that MH sword wants rather than just 5% more damage.
Thoughts?
Jon
Honestly, I always thought that this talent was fine. It’s the rest of the talents in the Radiance tree (aside from Right-Hand Strength) that seem pretty lackluster.
I don’t think an extra 5% increase to the talent would break anything though.
On second thought…this put the sword even farther ahead of the hammer for any build that wants to bring decent DPS in a PvE build. This would make it even harder to merit bringing a hammer guardian in the current DPS meta.
The change to sword damage from 5% to 10%. I’ve seen a lot of talk that maybe it is not really needed. The fact was this was a lackluster trait and this is a lackluster change to it. I would love to do the right thing here and have a change that MH sword wants rather than just 5% more damage.
Thoughts?
Jon
Honestly, I always thought that this talent was fine. It’s the rest of the talents in the Radiance tree (aside from Right-Hand Strength) that seem pretty lackluster.
I don’t think an extra 5% increase to the talent would break anything though.
Uncatchable is a good trait, and it was considered for moving up, but ultimately passed on for reasons that escape me right now.Jon
Suggestion – move it to major instead of flanking strikes, but increase the radius by 40.
And I am thrilled about the PW change… When do you estimate can tell us how will it look like? Because it was quite decent before the 15th of October patch (1s rounded stun meant you could hit with half of the flurry before the stun ran out in wvw). And it always was a great skill for PvE.
Noted. That is likely what we would have done. I would like to hear the opposing view of players who run this trait with only 10 points in trickery…
Jon
I think the biggest argument to keep Flanking where it is (reachable for players only investing 10-15 in Trickery) is that it’s the best option for a thief in a dungeon that doesn’t need the Fury from Thrill of the Crime.
Ex: If you’re running 15 in Trickery for the extra ini pool, but end up with a S/Warhorn ranger using a red moa, then there’s not much need to bring Thrill of the Crime and Flanking is your only other real decent option.
That being said, I think that’s a pretty small issue.
Even though we wouldn’t do it now another shot at Greatsword to discuss
A) 1 chain NDA by giving Vigor.
B) Add evade to swoop…Discuss?
I like the idea of evade on swoop, but I’m not sure how I feel about vigor on auto-attack.
The synergy between the player and pet with the 1h sword (granting might to pet on autoattack is really cool, though. Maybe continue this theme with the greatsword?
How about protection of short duration to player and pet or protection to player, swiftness to pet?
Some sort of swiftness to pet somewhere on the GS, in general, may not be a bad idea. With Swoop, the player can easily close gaps, but doesn’t help the pet.
As I stated, this change is a lot about low hanging fruit. The problem with ranger is things that are good we don’t want to overpower and the things that are not as good are difficult to change. For example:
- Skirmish and Wilderness line could probably swap half of their traits.
- Beastmastery has basically one generic trait per tier and just needs to be more generalized.
- both primary ranged weapons are a mix of single target and AoE.
- Both marksmanship and skirmish lines lack traits to enable power rangers.
Despite those problems rangers have some great builds in PvE, PvP, and WvW. The core problem is diversity but it just so happens that rangers are not setup in a way that makes it easy to improve that diversity problem.
Too much typing for the bus, I’ll try and discuss more when I’m in.
Jon
P.S. I tried some stuff on MH sword but it was a marginal improvement at best. I’ll ping some programmers today about one other way we might handle it, but don’t hold your breath.
I’ve been thinking about what you said on improving power builds and I think that some talent swapping may be a good low-hanging-fruit technique of giving a bit of a boost to these types of builds. One of the best ways this may be accomplished may be to give some good melee traits to the power trait lines.
Here’s an idea I had:
Move Two-Handed Training (IX in Nature Mastery) to Skirmishing
Move Martial Mastery (X in Wilderness Survival) to Skirmishing
This empowers Skirmishing as your strait damage tree.
Move Trapper’s Expertise (VIII in Skirmishing) to Wilderness Survival
Move Trap Potency (XI in Skirmishing) to Wilderness Survival
This empowers Wilderness Survival as your condition tree by putting the trap talents in the line that increases condition damage.
To balance this out, move one of the defensive talents from Wilderness Survival to Nature Magic. Good candidates would probably be Empathetic Bond or Hide in Plain Sight.
Problems/cosiderations with a change like this: This removes the grandmaster trap trait from Skirmishing, but only adds in two master traits. You would have to either move a master trait to a grandmaster trait as is, move a master trait to a grandmaster trait and add an additional benefit to it, or remove a trait and add a new grandmaster trait.
If adding in a grandmaster trait was ever considered, I think it would be pretty cool to have a talent that did something like this:
“Gain X (insert trait here) when wielding a sword/greatsword if you have a bow as a secondary weapon. Gain X (insert trait here) when wielding a bow if you have a sword/greatsword secondary weapon”
No contest.
I never really noticed these, but I second this!
Well made thread op. I completely agree on everything you stated. You should definitely send a thank you email to them. It is indeed an admirable approach they are taking toward this future patch.
Hmm…I don’t know what email address that would go to. .