Honor the Waves armor should fit pretty well for most races with the right dye job.
I feel like I should have learned all the secrets to SAB from reading a Nintendo Power magazine. Instead, they’re all listed online, lol.
Ahh, I miss the days when there was a reason to buy an actual physical magazine on gaming…
If you have an android phone, you can just download the rom for free. =P
Of course, you need a controller for a decent experience since touch screen controlling games sucks, lol.
Yeah, there’s not really anything in here that would suggest grouping up is mandatory, or even necessarily beneficial. It’s misleading when it says “Recommended Players: Five” upon approaching the Super Adventure Box.
Still, I keep seeing people in map chat: “LFG SAB” or “LF2M SAB”. It’s really weird. Just go, guys. This isn’t a regular dungeon. What do you think a PUG is going to get you?
Maybe, but it’s a lot of fun to do it with a full group. I mean, for the people that are just looking to speed run through in order to farm baubles or something, yea, just go solo and blow through it, but if you’re going in to have a good time (the best way to do it, imo), take some friends!
I made a pet dps guide a while back that compared numbers from tests I did on the mists. I haven’t touched it since the last patch, but I don’t think there has been anything that really changed for the data within:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Ranger-Pet-DPS-Comparison/first#post1539162
Also, for what it’s worth, I agree that this should be stickied.
I do. This is why I still throw out skills like Feedback, even when there are no projectiles to reflect.
Submit a ticket to ANet. There’s no general work around for this.
Warden’s awesome, but if you’re putting time into CCing your enemy to prevent them from moving, then you’re losing up time on your own personal dps.
That being said, popping up a warden on the turrets in Arah and watching them solo them always makes me smile.
Those dps values aren’t quite right. The numbers in the wiki are the values for the skill recharge. Recharge is calculated from the end of 1 skill to the beginning of the next. For something like the swordsman, this isn’t a huge difference. For the warden and duelist which have significant casting/channeling times, this does make a difference. The duelist dps will be significantly lower than what you have there.
That makes my decision to go with sword offhand (for most situations at least) much easier!
I gotta admit, I’m glad the numbers work out this way since dual swords look so good, particularly with something like the Super Sword Skins.
Well, not to rain on your parade, but you have to consider a few more things too =P.
If you are taking at least 15 into dueling, duelists now can proc a bunch of bleeding stacks. This will add significantly to your overall dps even without any considerable condition damage, and so the bleeding from sharper images is where the duelist starts to pick up against the swordsman.
Hmm, true. However, I run dungeons with my wife, who plays an Engineer using a condition build, so stacking up my lower damage bleeds may not be a good idea when it’s so easy to get bleed stack capped.
Good point though, I hadn’t thought of that.
Those dps values aren’t quite right. The numbers in the wiki are the values for the skill recharge. Recharge is calculated from the end of 1 skill to the beginning of the next. For something like the swordsman, this isn’t a huge difference. For the warden and duelist which have significant casting/channeling times, this does make a difference. The duelist dps will be significantly lower than what you have there.
That makes my decision to go with sword offhand (for most situations at least) much easier!
I gotta admit, I’m glad the numbers work out this way since dual swords look so good, particularly with something like the Super Sword Skins.
Maybe I haven’t used it enough to appreciate it, but I’m still not sold on Restorative Mantras in builds. That being said, I definitely like the diversity in this build, which is where the Inspiration tree really shines.
You can get through just fine with 1 person, but it can be helpful to have at least 1 friend with a whip since you can keep the bee bosses perma-stunned by using the whip on it over and over. This lets the other person dps it down without having to worry about getting hit.
I love it when Devs acknowledge feedback.
It looks like these dps tests aren’t considering the cooldown of casting phantasms (correct me if I’m wrong), which would make Swordsman an even better choice since it would allow you to pump out more of them faster.
However, even if Swordsman is higher dps than wardens, I’m wondering if the Duelist may be better if you trait into Phantasmal Haste. According to the wiki, this talent doesn’t increase the attack speed of Swordsmen for some reason. If my math is correct, this should be the case:
Swordsman attacks every 3.2 seconds for 672 damage
672 damage / 3.2 seconds = 210 dps
Duelist, untraited for PH, attacks every 5.4 seconds for 1088 (8 × 136) damage
1088 damage / 5.4 seconds = 201.5 dps
Duelist, traited for PH, attacks every 4.4 seconds for 1088 (8 × 136) damage
1088 damage / 4.4 seconds = 247.3 dps
There’s a catch though: Swordsman and Duelist have equal cooldowns, but the talent to lower the Swordsman cooldown (Blade Training) is a tier 1 talent that is a staple of most mesmer builds. The corresponding Duelist talent (Duelist’s Discipline) is a tier 2 talent, but realistically will be taken in Tier 3 since Blade Training and Deceptive Evasion are so important.
Tl;dr – It looks like the Duelist phantasm can deal the highest dps, but it would require two talent investments (Phantasmal Haste from Illusions and Duelist’s Discipline from Dueling).
Agreed. This is easily the best commercial I’ve seen for an MMO.
After reading the interview about it, I am really curious how long it took them to make what they have so far. If this was really spur of the moment I am extremely impressed with how efficient they are with their content development. The art, the level design, the sound quality. It’s an amazing feat. I haven’t even run into a single bug (excluding the annoying camera problems which is an issue at the games very core).
I can not wait for the rest of it!
I saw some pictures posted on the GW2 Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/GuildWars2) and it looks like it was done by a team of only about 8 people. I don’t know much about video game development, but that seems like a pretty small group for something as big and high quality as this.
100 times for each phantasm? That’s a little over the top, lol.
A hammer thief sounds pretty awesome actually. I just picture some theif leaping out of the shadows and thwacking an enemy square on the head with a sledge hammer, lol!
…this is the coolest addition I’ve seen to an MMO. I know ANet took a risk in allowing so much time and resource to be spent on the SAB project, but the end is a resounding success. As someone who grew up on video games in the 80s, I am thoroughly impressed by how well the SAB has tapped into the essence of an old school game while also being a high quality release with a very substantial amount of content.
I hope we see more content like this in the future.
This is probably the coolest and most creative addition I’ve ever seen in an MMO.
…so yea, I’d say it’s worth playing.
My 2 cents: Art is just culturally legitimized entertainment.
So I say yes to both.
At best I could see crossbows if they were added.
1UP
SAB was a great idea. It’s a very original idea for an MMO that was executed very well and deserves a permanent place in the game.
Hell, if we can have keg brawl permanently, why not Super Adventure Box??
The more I stick around this forum, the more I start to see that most of the really competent rangers have left this class…
It’s really starting to be a class predominantly occupied by people who are too motivated in reinforcing their own view of rangers being great just because they’re not totally useless.
(edited by Dahkeus.8243)
Hello, fellow ranger here. I haven’t played since around November/December and I was just wondering if there were significant changes to rangers for me to come back. It looks like there have been a lot of changes from what I’ve seen in the patch notes, but from what I see in this first page posts in the ranger section, it is still all QQ.
I played mostly 30/30 and WVWVW shortbow/longbow/greatsword/axe&warhorn. Please tell me something has changed and if not, what are the pros and cons from then till now. THANKS!
With the release of the Super Adventure Box, it’s probably one of the best times to come back to the game…
…but the ranger is in a relatively bad state, making it one of the worst times to come back to this class, at least in PvE.
Reroll engineer for 100% swiftness…
…and suck at everything else in WvW.
So, the rationalization behind Robert Hrouda and the devs with Rangers right now seems to be that they nerfed some stuff (quickness) and buffed some stuff (greatsword) and that they don’t want to buff anything else because they want to wait and see what builds the community comes up with.
Here’s the problem though: Even after the buff, the greatsword still does less dps than the shortbow.
I spent some time testing out several types of glass cannon builds to see if there was any way to deal more dps with the greatsword than with the short bow and here’s what I found:
- In a full Marks/Skirm (30/30/0/0/0) glass cannon build, the short bow deals more dps unless you stand in front of the enemy the whole time.
- In a 10/10/20/20 build with the traits to increase GS damage by 5% and to reduce GS cooldowns by 20%, the short bow is equal to GS dps and the GS dps in this build is less than GS dps in a Marks/Skirm build.
So, if you’re running a build with the aim of maximizing dps, the short bow is still the clear victor.
And if you doubt any of this, feel free to step into the mists for a few minutes and test for yourself.
You need to be using sword/dagger if you want to reach max dps.
Even if the 1h sword could outdps the short bow (which it doesn’t), the dagger wouldn’t really do much of anything to help. The dagger is a survival/PvP weapon.
So, the rationalization behind Robert Hrouda and the devs with Rangers right now seems to be that they nerfed some stuff (quickness) and buffed some stuff (greatsword) and that they don’t want to buff anything else because they want to wait and see what builds the community comes up with.
Here’s the problem though: Even after the buff, the greatsword still does less dps than the shortbow.
I spent some time testing out several types of glass cannon builds to see if there was any way to deal more dps with the greatsword than with the short bow and here’s what I found:
- In a full Marks/Skirm (30/30/0/0/0) glass cannon build, the short bow deals more dps unless you stand in front of the enemy the whole time.
- In a 10/10/20/20 build with the traits to increase GS damage by 5% and to reduce GS cooldowns by 20%, the short bow is equal to GS dps and the GS dps in this build is less than GS dps in a Marks/Skirm build.
So, if you’re running a build with the aim of maximizing dps, the short bow is still the clear victor.
And if you doubt any of this, feel free to step into the mists for a few minutes and test for yourself.
When you shatter, you should shout “KING ME!”
Well, I don’t know what you’d call it, but I run Strife’s build for PvE (http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/79487-buildmy-dps-mesmer-guide-for-organized-dungeon-groups/).
I’ve tried other builds, but this seems to do the best dps while giving the reflection ability to curtain, which I’ve found is pretty invaluable in dungeons.
I haven’t done a ton of PvP on my mesmer yet, but I lean towards shatter builds when I do.
There’s no point complaining and hoping for a magical fix because it’s just not going to happen, let’s see what we can come up with.
And somewhere in Bellevue, an ArenaNet developer chuckles, smiles approvingly, and tells his cubical mates, “See? I told you”.
I’ve decided it’s time to just accept it. I’m not rerolling a different class, because honestly it’s just not fun to play through something that was dull and dragged on in the first place (1-80 kill risen for hours on end and farm the same events forever). This is where we are at and it’s not going to change significantly. If it was important to the devs it would have been fixed by now as they’ve been aware of the problems but not addressed any of them at all. I think we should try and figure out what works best for our class as it is, rather than continue complaining and getting our hopes up each month.
You can level a character 1-80 quickly if you have enough funds just by crafting. Look up some good guides online, buy all the mats you need BEFORE you start, then just knock it out in one afternoon. This won’t be cheap, but you can always farm up everything you need on your ranger before you roll the new character.
PVP is different to WvsW.
WvW is a subgroup of PvP, but if you were confused, then let me clarify: I was talking specifically about sPvP (structured player vs player) and tPvP (tournament player vs player).
WvsW is different to PvP specially the accessories and the weapon stat. And don’t say That the trap ranger don’t rely on quickness when swapping pet, the spider need a quick attack so that there skill don’t just lunch on the ground, the wolf and dog they need a quick leap and then at that time you can use your entangle. If you use short bow you need that quickness to put a lot of bleed to enemy. Don’t just make a test on PVP try on WvsW and you gonna see the difference… Use a ranger when you go WvsW
Let me spell this out: PvP means Player vs Player. This is what WvW is made up of. Yes, it is very different from sPvP, but it is PvP.
And no one said that trap rangers don’t use quickness. My statement about trap rangers was a relative comparison, because pet quickness on a condition build is significantly less relevant than QZ along with pet swap on a power based build.
PVP is different to WvsW.
WvW is a subgroup of PvP, but if you were confused, then let me clarify: I was talking specifically about sPvP (structured player vs player) and tPvP (tournament player vs player).
I’m still here and lurking about (as is the balance team), gathering information to bring to meetings. For the first couple days after a patch, people are still figuring things out and getting used to changes. We didn’t kill rangers (I was doing some PvP last night, and have done a couple dungeon runs). It’s just that there’s a predictable reaction to when we change something, that we have killed classes and destroyed builds, and there’s nothing I can say or do to help in those situations. Sometimes you have to sit back and let the community sort themselves out… people depend on something (quickness) and then when that gets changed, there’s an initial period of confusion, but its always followed by “look what I can do” because people are being forced to try new things, and they do a bit of experimenting they may have not have done before.
Sure things need more attention. LB, pets, spirits.. they all need some love on our part, and they will get it. I may not be the best PvP’r out there, but I was first/second place on my team in the three games I played as a ranger (deer rank!), and I was still effective against other classes. the new quickness speed will take some getting used to, but it by no means destroyed rangers.But me going into every thread about someone claiming bad things and giving expressions isn’t going to help (there are also a lot of those threads that I just wouldn’t be able to keep track of due to time constraints). So I sit back, watch, take notes for meetings, and try to find a good time to post to help guide the conversation.
1) While I understand the idea of “letting the community sort itself out”, the logic of that doesn’t stand up to the current circumstances.
The reason is that nothing really big has changed in the ranger profession to make any new build really offset the current situation, at least in PvE. The only potential changes that would positively offset the nerf in the area of PvE performance is the buff to the greatsword. However, greatsword builds aren’t new and this isn’t the first time there has been a buff to the greatsword to give the weapon attention.
There have been no buffs to utility, so the ranger isn’t suddenly going to have viable support builds discovered.
The greatsword is also so far behind anything like a warrior in PvE that there’s no way a few small tweaks to a few of the skills on the greatsword that it would overcome not only how much lower the greatsword was in dps compared to the short bow/longbow, but also to overcome the dps loss of the quickness nerf.
2) I don’t think the complaints about the ranger have much to do with PvP since trap builds don’t rely on quickness like beserker PvE dps builds do.
They are seriously a waste of time… you get one rare which you’re lucky to get 20 silver for and a bunch of other useless things that if sold will maybe total up to 25 silver…and you guys seriously spend hours waiting for these bosses to spawn…
Why do you do that?It’s so inefficient…
Doing ONE CoF run takes 6 minutes (8 if you’re on a bad pug team) and even conservatively gives you 80 silver per run…in six minutes you can make 3+ times more gold (and get tokens too) than you do waiting for hours for mega bosses…
You might say though… “but I don’t wait for hours, I just go when my guild tells me that the bosses are up”… ok, but even at that rate the best estimate to kill a mega boss would be 2 minutes per boss… add in the time to run there from waypoint, pick up your loot in the end, it probably takes 3 minutes minimum per boss, which at 25 silver per boss still only makes you 50 silver in those 6 minutes that it takes to run CoF… it probably takes a minimum of 3 silver to travel to each mega boss, so your total is a whopping 44 silver vs 80 in CoF… and on top of it all you can now only do the event once a day…while you can farm CoF till your hands fall off…
In fact… in 20 minutes of running CoF (3 runs conservatively) you can make more gold than if you did all of those mega bosses combined for the whole day…
Stop getting upset over these events, they are useless in the first place… no point getting your blood pressure up worrying about these nerfs to mega bosses… do what’s efficient… if you’ve never run CoF, it’s seriously the easiest thing ever to do… compete joke of a dungeon… you have no excuse to not try it… do 3 runs a day, get all your gold, then go enjoy the parts of the game that are actually fun instead of waiting in the swamp for hours…
Why?
Well, time is money, I agree and if we were strictly talking about the value of money being in the net quantitative sum, then yes, CoF is more cost effective…
…but flexibility in time is valuable too. If you are farming mega bosses, you can park a character, make a sandwich, watch something on Netflix, whatever and then spend a minute or two killing a boss when it pops.
If you are in CoF, then you’re pretty much locked into concentrating on the game without AFK for the full duration of a run if not several runs since frequent afks, even between runs are frowned upon in groups.
Well, the dev feedback tends to be fine on most areas of the game, except when it comes to class balance.
It’s pretty clear that there’s more unrest in the area of class balance than there has been since the game’s release and having little to no feedback on the reasoning behind the balance changes is pretty disturbing.
Uninstalled the game for now…..gonna try Tera FTP for a while and see if the powers that be at ANet change their perspective…as its the Devs perspective that is ruining what is fundamentally a pretty good game….the constant disappointments in how they handle us only amplifies the frustration…
Tera’s combat is absolutely amazing and is hands down the best in the industry, the graphics are pretty…but everything else kinda sucks. There’s a ton of grind involved and despite what you might expect from an action-oriented MMO that uses free targetting, PvP is really a gear-to-win endeavor.
Neverwinter and WildStar look to have some promise though.
I almost overlooked this post until I saw who was posting it.
Gonna miss ya Xsorus. You’ve been so good for the community, but I can’t say I blame ya. Good luck wherever else you end up.
@Dahkeus: Seems to me that you’re looking for something akin to the warrior signet elite; a powerful self buffing skill on a not absurdly long cooldown, and I would be 110% behind something like that.
Edit: One major thing mesmers are missing is an elite that is affected by traits. Every single class other than Mesmer and guardian have one or more elites that are affected sometimes by multiple traits.
Eh, I would consider mesmers getting a second PvE viable elite rather low on the list of things that ANet needs to balance, but it would be nice. As for what type, it doesn’t necessarily need to be something like that. I mean, they could make some form of elite clone, additional projectile reflect, or something like that, just as long as it was strong enough to be a good choice in PvE without being better for PvP than our current elites.
This thread is wearing at my faith in humanity.
Mesmer is the 2nd or 3rd most powerful profession in the game for PvE dungeons. You could throw one in a dungeon without an elite and it would still make most other classes look bad.
In PvP, warrior is the worst whereas mesmer is one of, if not THE best class.
Take a second to check out the poll GuildWars2Guru put up a while back. When asking what the weakest class was in the game, Warrior was voted the worst by 54% over all other classes. Mesmer was tied with Guardian at 1%.
Source: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/news/1077-community-highlight-of-guild-wars-2-pvp-survey/
So sure, if playing a class that is still considered one of the necessities for any serious group is not good enough for you and you have absolutely no consideration for any type of PvP in your wildest dreams, then go for it…
but you don’t need to cry here like a whiney brat about it.
Time warp is the single strongest group buff in the game, even after having its effectiveness cut in half.
I don’t think we need more work arounds to justify it.
Had a 13 minute fight with a Mesmer on my Necromancer which eventually ended up with me dying because my health slowly dwindled over time until I couldn’t do anything about it. Meanwhile, the Mesmer had pretty much every boon beyond the sun up at all times.
I even tried to get out of the fight 2 different times because it was taking forever but Necros cant do that.
Any time I got him below 50% health a whole bunch of “Block block block” came up.
Throughout the entire fight there was at least 3 clones at almost all times because destroying them was useless since he would just create more 0.5 seconds later.
TL;DR
Mesmer is the worst class to fight against and the most overpowered.
If you had a 13 minute fight, that’s a sign of balance, not one class being more overpowered, lol.
Course, that being said, Mesmers are really strong in general right now, yes.
Sadly, if you like the Ranger class, GW2 is not the game for you. Maybe Neverwinter one of the other upcoming MMOs might have better luck for you.
Ok, so after getting in game, I’ll agree that the piercing effect is a bit too narrow (at least compared to what it’s like compared to a ranger using piercing).
That being said, the GS didn’t need this to be viable in the first place, so I don’t think it’s really a big deal anyways.
The elite options are awesome for PvP. I just wish we had something outside of Time Warp that was viable for PvE.
I have done like 2 spvp matches since launch. Hope it gets some nice changes.
Some things that would make me play it:
Ability to play with my GF without being switched to opposite teams.
Agreed 100% with this. My wife and I love PvP in MMOs, but being put on opposite teams has absolutely killed our desire to really get deep into GW2 PvP.
Are you kidding; I’m digging the mesmer buffs.
GS1 and Scepter3 hitting multiple targets is freaking boss, in PvE and PvP.
Dazzling now works with Chaos Storm, another awesome aoe blind for zerg busting.
The big nerf to time warp through quickness affects groups as a whole, not just mesmers.
Burst warriors (who have a personal quickness skill) are the ones who should be complaining.But yeah, let’s all roll warriors. sarcasm
No we should all roll mesmers and parties LFM mesmer for the boss GS autoattack and scepter skill 2. sarcasm
To all those saying its no big deal, then why the nerf? Clearly it was a great imbalance issue that devs (in their opinion) needed to address in PvE.
It’s no big deal to mesmer’s specifically, but it’s a big deal to PvP balance in general.
It was changed for PvE as well as PvP because devs don’t want to make a bunch of abilities perform different in PvP than in PvE.
P.s. Mesmer is still by far one of the most powerful classes in the game, short of maybe Guardian and Warrior.
(edited by Dahkeus.8243)
I’m sorry but, whine whine, if you were a real ranger you’d do one of two things.
1) Suck it up and deal with it since we’ve been having this since beta
or
2) Learn and adapt. Trapper weren’t discovered until recently even though they haven’t been touched since beta.
1) You can suck up as much as you want, but just because ANet has dropped the ball on rangers in the past doesn’t justify them in dropping it even further now.
2) “Learn and adapt” won’t magically make some build that will do anything better than any other class can do.
Also, trappers weren’t “discovered” and have been around forever. The only reason they made a ripple in PvP was because the meta of bunker builds was stale as hell and people forgot how to deal with a mediocre spec that people stopped playing long ago because it was mediocre.
Don’t compare Blizzard to Anet because Blizzard actually knows a thing about balance and game development.
They have stuff like aoe damage reduction for pets that we will never get.
BWUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Oh, sorry, (wipes away a tear), hehe, yea, Blizzard knows about class balance? You mean the Blizzard that made DKs and Paladins PvP gods in Wrath? Blizzard, who allow legendary weapons (that are actually legendary for reasons other than grind) into rated arenas?
Yea, let’s take off those rosey colored glasses here for a second.
ArenaNet is dropping the ball with this patch just like Blizzard has in the past, but not just because of how well they did or didn’t deal with balance. They have little to no communication to the community to explain what their priorities are or why they made the changes they did.
Personally, I miss Gaile Gray.