Guild Wars 2

I see what the devs were getting at with the trait that allows spirits to follow, but ideally we could plant spirits, then hit a button to have them follow us and another buttom to have them stay in one spot again.

But I don’t see how they would make a change like that without having to make a big change to UI and/or game mechanics.

I just realized what I really want and I forgot that this existed in game, but I want:

A WORG!

They’re like wolves, but they look a lot cooler.

Why can I continually pull arrows out of thin air without end?

Why can I take a facefull of buckshot and keep running and jumping like an Olympic athlete?

Why can my jaguar swim next to me and continually maul enemies without ever once showing any strain from lack of oxygen?

MAGIC!

garethh.3518:

Dahkeus.8243:

You said speccing for a pet was silly. I replied in dispute of this statement by pointing out the value of pet burst (which is benefitted from speccing in BM).

Speccing for it does tend to be silly…
But playing your pet well isn’t…
Just to reiterate my quote.

Pets are useful, but that doesn’t make the traitlines or utilities that help them are even remotely worthwhile… of course short of running birds and the 30% bonus crit dmg for pets and some fury engine.

Hmm, maybe we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one. I mean, if you take a bird for example, you’re getting a 22% increase in power and 15% increase in precision from the 300 stat point increase alone (along of course with the increase to their defensive stats). And that’s on top of having something like Commanding Voice and Mighty Swap to increase their damage even further.

Now, if I was running a bow build, I don’t think I’d put in the investment into BM since you don’t need as much defense with a ranged weapon and also because there are so many good traits for increasing bow damage in Marks/Skirm, but with a melee build, it’s hard to pass this up.

I think the devs are trying to play it “safe” by playing with their cards close to their chests after the incident with the November 15th patch where we were told that there would be a lot of changes coming that didn’t occur.

However, I think they’re being a bit too conservative and need to find a better middle ground of communicating without promising what they can’t/shouldn’t deliver.

Nope, no temples have these. Here’s a link that might help you find an alternative though:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Berserker#Triple_attribute

And here’s a good resource for everything you need to find the right orr exotic gear:
http://dulfy.net/2012/09/08/gw2-templegod-karma-armor-sets/

garethh.3518:

Dahkeus.8243:

Pets are one of our biggest sources of burst and pet damage synergizes very well with a 1h sword since the 1 attack grants might to pet. RaO -> 1 spam -> F2 on raven -> swap pet -> F2 on other bird for example will give bigger burst than what you can do with a weapon alone.

and?
I’m honestly not sure what your point is in relation to my post…

You said speccing for a pet was silly. I replied in dispute of this statement by pointing out the value of pet burst (which is benefitted from speccing in BM).

dybryd.1358:

ok – but they’re still not useless if they’re separate bleeds that stack.

good to know.

No, although sharpened edges is often not taken because a 1s bleed is such small amount, whereas something like 30% additional damage to all of your pets criticals can easily amount to more than that much damage, even if you’re not running a BM build.

I’m pretty sure they’re independant of each other since they give bleeds of different durations (3s from sigil of earth, 1s from sharpened edges).

garethh.3518:

For Faux Sake.8457:

even if you aren’t pet specced.

Speccing for pet is silly in near every situation.
Playing well with your pet is far from it…

He really shouldn’t be running felines if he is just going to leave them sitting on whatever target they feel like… he’s going to be blowing swaps left and right which could have been better used for the 2s of Quickening Zephyr…

Pets are one of our biggest sources of burst and pet damage synergizes very well with a 1h sword since the 1 attack grants might to pet. RaO → 1 spam → F2 on raven → swap pet → F2 on other bird for example will give bigger burst than what you can do with a weapon alone.

ChillyChinaman.6057:

Let me start this off by saying I know spirits and nature magic are generally thought of as poor choices. However, we can hope for changes to eventually.

In preparation for that, I was wondering which one of these traits are better.

Edit: As an side question, does anyone know which spirits have working internal cool downs?

Are you talking PvE or PvP?

Durzlla.6295:

Dahkeus.8243:

The burning sounds nice, but because there are so many people who already apply burning so easily, the benefit of bringing this spirit often doesn’t do nearly as much as you would think it does in a lot of situations (particularly against single target boss fights).

Depends on your group comp, I know the one I normally run with our condi person is a necro (who have no burning) so bringing a sun spirit that puts all the burning we apply and uses his whopping 1700 condi damage for it makes things freakin melt

Yes, as I just said, it depends on the situation.

Tibetan Mastiff:
http://www.tibetanlife.com/images/Mastiff.jpg
http://nbnl.globalwhelming.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/tibetan-mastiff-2.jpg
http://www.bark101.com/images/tibetan-tan.jpg

The burning sounds nice, but because there are so many people who already apply burning so easily, the benefit of bringing this spirit often doesn’t do nearly as much as you would think it does in a lot of situations (particularly against single target boss fights).

I wish they would either give spirits more survivability, even if it came at the cost of how potent the buffs were. There are a lot of bosses with mechanics that can easily wipe spirits out, even if you drop them far away and it really makes the overall experience very inconsistent and the benefit of sacrificing damage to go support just isn’t reliable enough right now.

I really wanted spirits to work when I rolled ranger, but sadly it’s just too much of a hinderance compared to how well we can do in a pure dps role.

From a pure defense perspective, I’d say GS because of the evade on auto-attack and the block that either gives you a longer duration of protection from projectiles compared to the evade or an enemy knockdown that protects you for longer than the evade.

The 1h sword comes close with the right offhand (dodge from dagger or projectile block from axe), but the GS still edges out (pun intended) ahead a bit.

However, if you did consider damage, then you’d have a better case for the 1h sword since it has higher dps itself and increases your pet dps with the might buff.

I don’t know much about guardian, but that armor set makes me want to roll one.

Sounds like a bug. I know some of the hitboxes can be kinda wonky when it comes to using an environment item on an npc like that, but if you’ve tried a bunch of different angles and it’s still not working, I would suggest submitting a bug report in game.

Pendleton.6385:

The picture at the top … is that a quiver? Do some armor sets have quivers now?

There are some ascended back items that are quivers.

Meledelion.2513:

^ Dahkeus “gets it” to add to this trap range is very limited and the cast time just is beyond anoying.
Also consider that one ele can do pretty much exactly the same (apart from poison) whilst also adding might/swiftness/protection/regen blind/weakness/vulnerability + “designated” heals

I regularly play with my fiance who is an ele, so I’m very familiar with being showed up on combo fields, lol!

Right now I’m grinding just as much if not more as I did in WoW to get a good full set of Berserker exotic gear.

I got one of the rare mats for an ascended item from a FotM run, which is hilarious since there’s no way in hell I’ll ever have the 50 ectos and 250 powerful blood to make the item I want from it.

GlobalSwag.8034:

What did you use to level personally Dahkeus?
Also, what stats should I aim for as I build towards my exotic set? Power/Vit/Tough or should I have some type of condi dmg? That is, since I plan on sticking with shortbow and sword/warhorn

I changed my build frequently when leveling up since I’m a big believer in using the leveling experience as a chance to get a feel for everything, but I primarily went with the short bow.

When you get to 80, berserker is really the best gear for any dps build that’s not really heavily focused on condition damage. If you run a melee build, you may want to balance out your gear with some defensive stats.

Heavy condition builds are great for PvP, but can be problematic in PvE because of the way that conditions stack when you have other people also laying down a lot of conditions and also because many mobs die before you get the full effect. This isn’t to say that condition damage is bad, but you have to be aware of its shortcomings. If you’re going for max dps, I believe a direct damage build does more dps anyway.

As for balancing out offensive and defensive stats on gear, this will depend a bit on your experience and preference, but in general I think it’s best to get defense from your traits and slot skills when necessary. I started out with a lot of heavily defensive gear when I hit 80, but I’ve been switching over to more and more offensive gear since I’ve improved my build a lot and have gotten a lot better at surviving without taking hits in dungeons.

GlobalSwag.8034:

So it seems Shortbow with Sword/Warhorn would be ideal, but then your pretty much lacking aoe which is pretty key for tagging mobs in events…guess i could always just swap to an axe when i’m in one. Thanks for all the explanations.

You get a natural cleave from using a sword, but if you want more AoE, you could always invest into Skirmishing to get the second tier trait that allows you to drop traps at range, but I would only really recommend this for leveling.

Oh yea, as a tip, if you’re planning on running primarily melee as a ranger, you’ll want to invest your talent points into the more defensive talent trees, such as Wilderness Survival, Nature Magic, and Beastmastery. You of course won’t get the same damage boost as someone running a marks/skirmishing build, but melee weapons naturally do good damage and rangers, as a medium armor class, need some investment to keep from being too squishy in melee.

If you run 1h sword, I would mention that it works well with a build using a good bit of beastmastery since the 1 attack grants might to your pet.

So, the GS is easier to use than the sword and brings some good utility, but the 1h sword does more damage. However, if you use the 1h sword, turn off auto-attack since it currently roots you in place. Of all the weapons, this one will take the most getting used to. I still think the root is frustrating, but the more I use it, the more I’ve grown to like the weapon.

The short bow is probably the strongest all-around weapon and definitely one of the easiest to use if you ever want a ranged option. It outdpses the longbow, even if you’re not running a condition build, so the longbow is something to only really use if you want the utility of its abilities (although it’s range with the marks talent does make it useful in WvW).

For offhand, you’ll want to choose depending on your situation.

- The torch gives you the highest dps potential, but it relies on the burning condition, which can be problematic if you have other people also applying burning to your target.

- The axe brings decent dps and a projectile reflect, which is handy for PvE, but can be problematic in PvP since it roots you in place.

- The dagger is the most defensive weapon and arguably the best for PvP if you’re using a sword mainhand since it gives you a dodge and ranged snare.

- The warhorn is something I would suggest that you keep around on one weaponset pretty much at all times while leveling since swiftness makes such a big difference on leveling speed. Most PvPers will keep a horn in their bags so they can equip it momentarily and gain swiftness when travelling since it’s a little less useful than the alternatives in combat.

Hope that helps.

Quarktastic.1027:

Meledelion.2513:

Ty for the update Dahkeus, usually people aren’t only skeptical they simply won’t hear me out.
Sadly I have to concur with you regarding Rangers being very “unhelpful” towards to rest of the team apart from healing spring and warhorn/pets we don’t have many ways of helping the team so my team is asking me more and more often to bring my ele and I can’t blame them

Traps provide more team support than people think. Spike trap provides a 1 second immobilize, and 5 second cripple (traited), frost trap provides an AoE chill as well as a frost field. Viper’s nest provides a long lasting AoE poison. Flame trap provides a 3 second fire field on a 12 second cooldown.

Stacking poison on a boss that heals brings more to the table than simply hitting it until it dies. Keeping multiple trash mobs slowed for long periods makes them easier to kite and kill. Flame trap is arguably the worst trap for support, since all it really does is damage, and the combo field it creates only lasts 3 seconds.

If you just need an AoE immobilize and CC, you can take any build and swap in Muddy Terrain. Traps require at least 20, but more realistically 30 points in skirmishing with investment into the talent that lets you drop them at range.

A frost field is nice, but it’s not big enough to warrant the big investment it requires.

AoE poison isn’t really that useful and even if it was, you could simply bring in a spider or carrion devourer without needing a big point investment.

A fire field can be brought just by having a torch that requires no talent investment, but really if you have an ele in your group, you’ll have plenty of fire combo fields.

So basically, by bringing a trap build, you’re making a big talent investment for slot skills that are only useful in a handful of situations. While this isn’t terrible or anything (you can certainly get through dungeons while doing this), it’s more optimal to bring a build that focuses on more of our core role and to simply swap in something like muddy terrain for the pulls you need it so that when you run into that single target boss encounter, you’re not stuck with a bunch of useless skills on your bar.

Dante Dragonhand.2538:

Dahkeus.8243:

This wasn’t something I was really concerned about too much since any talent that only helps your first attack when you enter combat is inherently problematic, but I’m glad to see that this is fixed, nonetheless. I mean, we traded this bug fix for a new bug with raven’s animation, but at least that one doesn’t really affect gameplay, lol.

Anyways, keep it up ArenaNet! Good work, but please don’t stop here!

I use birds but I havent noticed any animation bug, maybe its because I spend so much time LoSing while pet attacks, what is the bug?

Also opening strike makes you and your pets next hit cause vulnerability when first entering combat and 100% crit on that.

There’s a thread about it with screenshots here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Birds-have-two-pairs-of-wings/first#post921242

It’s not revolutionary, but it’s not so bad. I didn’t get into crafting too much at first, but I’ve been having fun with the discovery mechanic when doing cooking lately.

Durzlla.6295:

Can we get our Golden Moa back? You know… The one that gave aoe 10s of swiftness and vigor but was removed as a pet between BWE3 and launch? I miss him…

Anything with swiftness on an F2 would be awesome. And while I don’t like the looks of moas, having a golden moa with swiftness makes an awesome FF7 reference, so I could dig it.

Durzlla.6295:

Dahkeus.8243:

Durzlla.6295:

Lol I personally think it’s kinda cool… But I’ll be submitting a ticket regardless!!

PS: does it do this to Moas too?

Moas still look just as stupid as usual.

GASP!! Take that back!! You’re hurting cluckys feelings!! You’re just jealous you don’t have aoe protection/fury/chill and a 3 second daze!

Buffs are great, but the birds looks like a chocobo that got beat with an ugly stick.

I’m not sure what pet I’d wish for, but I know what pet ability I’d wish for: A projectile block or reflect (out of water).

Not sure what type of animal this would match up with though…

Work towards getting full berserker armor. If you’re dying too much, then you can always get some Power/Vit/Tough gear from the karma vendors, which is easy. As you farm gold to get berserker gear, you’ll probably get plenty of karma at the same time, which makes this possible.

Personally, I think you ideally want to get your defense from your traits and your offense from your gear (as a general rule of thumb), but if you’re running up in melee, it may be prudent to have a decent amout of defense on gear too.

@ Nldixon: You’re putting sword over short bow? Seriously? It’s good, but short bow is still king.

This wasn’t something I was really concerned about too much since any talent that only helps your first attack when you enter combat is inherently problematic, but I’m glad to see that this is fixed, nonetheless. I mean, we traded this bug fix for a new bug with raven’s animation, but at least that one doesn’t really affect gameplay, lol.

Anyways, keep it up ArenaNet! Good work, but please don’t stop here!

Durzlla.6295:

Lol I personally think it’s kinda cool… But I’ll be submitting a ticket regardless!!

PS: does it do this to Moas too?

Moas still look just as stupid as usual.

I think you’ll find good answers in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Optimizing-dmg-survivability-in-PvE-fotm/first#post919925

Raven ranger pets currently have a second set of wings set in the spread position whenever they are standing around. I’m not sure if this is true for the other bird pets, but I wouldn’t be surprised since they share a similar model.

Yea, just make sure you submit a ticket in game. If ArenaNet uses a ticket process like most companys, then the more tickets submitted, the faster the issue will get escalated and fixed.

Meledelion: That makes a lot of sense. I see why you made the choices you did, even though I was skeptical of them at first. I’m still not sure I would take SoS over LR even if there aren’t really any stuns since you still get an extra dodge that doesn’t lower your endurance (keeps up the 10% damage from traits) and grants vigor to top off endurance if you do have to dodge roll too, but it may just be splitting hairs. I also haven’t put much time into FotM either, so it’s possible I’d have a different opinion if I did.

All in all though, I like your philosophy of relying more on talents for defense and making decisions based upon what helps the team as a whole. I only wish Rangers had more talents that did this effectively.

1) Bug fixes! (no more obstructed when shooting a bow, make drake use their auto abilities, pet actually rezzes every time you use Search and Rescue, etc.)

2) Remove root mechanic from the sword. I like the high skill cap of the sword, but the root mechanic just gives a clunky feel to what otherwise is a very fluid mobile weapon.

3) Make support builds viable. As it stands, spirits just get killed too easily, especially in dungeons.

Also, I like the idea of giving Rangers the rifle, but I’m not sure how it fits. The short bow and long bow seem to cover our long range 2h option pretty well (although long bow damage needs a boost) and it really seems like we’re more in need of a good long range 1h weapon, but it would be awesome to be able to use a rifle.

Durzlla.6295:

Dahkeus.8243:

Yea, the QQ about rangers being weak is really blown out of proportion. I think we have a lot of bugs and broken mechanics that hinder diversity in builds, but we’re not alone in this.

There’s a balance between producing polished content and producing a large quantity of content. A-net is pushing towards quantity, which is understandable since they need to prove that a game without a subscription fee can still give customers enough content to enjoy, even if it sucks for people like me that would rather have the current content polished more.

I feel like they’re doing both polished and quantity, however the content isn’t as polishe as it could be at its first reveal, but it is seeming to still get the attention it needs with other patches. They’re just slow with polishing, however they’re VERY thorough with it.

There are too many bugs that have been around since the early betas for me to be able to agree with you on this.

Yea, the QQ about rangers being weak is really blown out of proportion. I think we have a lot of bugs and broken mechanics that hinder diversity in builds, but we’re not alone in this.

There’s a balance between producing polished content and producing a large quantity of content. A-net is pushing towards quantity, which is understandable since they need to prove that a game without a subscription fee can still give customers enough content to enjoy, even if it sucks for people like me that would rather have the current content polished more.

Agreed with others that the burst was almost certainly from dual ravens and the quickness of QZ + pet swap.

Meledelion, I’m curious, but what build are you using for this?

Well, pets aren’t really tanks for dungeons, but that’s pretty much the case for most MMOs in my experience. If you take a tanky pet, they can soak up damage for a bit, which can be useful in some scenarios, but I would suggest taking either a ranged pet or something that’s semi-durable and using it as a source of dps rather than tanking.

Some bosses will smash pets and it sucks, but it’s nothing crippling. Most of the time you can alleviate your pet problems with bringing the right pet into the right boss fight, but that’s something you’ll learn over time, so don’t get discouraged just because of your first dungeon.

As for the obstruction on graveling stuff, this is mostly an issue with the dungeon itself and isn’t something to worry about. A similar thing happened for eles with the blossoms in Twilight Arbor where they couldn’t kill the things at all with most of their spells even though a ranger could plow through them with an axe easily.

In the end, don’t give up. Pay close attention to boss movements. They have a lot of subtle animations which can tell you when you how you need to manage your pet or how to react as melee, but it’s not nearly as obvious as some games (such as WoW where you get alarms, bells, whistles, and giant text all over telling you any time a boss does anything).

P.s. can we not turn this thread into “Your favorite personal attacks”?

NaturalPortman.9562:

Agadar.4931:

NaturalPortman.9562:

Agadar.4931:

Durzlla, other melee classes will butcher you in melee. This is not an opinion, this is a fact.

More proof that Agadar is a horrible ranger lol.

You’re trying just a tad bit too hard right now.

Just preaching the truth brother.

Ugh, seriously? Educate yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

I just came across this on YouTube and while it’s obvious that the ability of in-game characters to shoot bows the way they do is very unrealistic (unlimited ammo, always hits target, very fast rate of fire, etc.), it now doesn’t seem as fake as it did before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2zGnxeSbb3g

disclaimer the voiceover and production quality for this is pretty low, but the feats this guy pulls off are impressive.

Please read what I say before getting all offended just because I don’t appreciate how precious you are for running something different.

I don’t think axe, spirits, drake, blah blah is useless or “not viable”. As I JUST said, it works!

It really does! You can read these words right now as I just stated and understand that I don’t think they are somehow useless things that will doom you into utter failure.

But they are simply not as good as what you could do otherwise.

I know this is comprehend since I’m measuring on a sliding scale of relativism instead of a “THIS GOOD OR THIS BAD” dichotomy, but stick with me here.

All I’m saying is that unless you just need to stroke your ego or need to convince yourself that you’re a precious unique flower, there’s no reason to use something LESS effective, even if you can get away with using it to some extent.

So you don’t like popular builds. That’s fine, you can be a special snowflake and run around with spirits, sword mainhand and axe offhand as your primary weapon, and center your burst around a drake’s lightning breath…

And you will kill people. You will win games. You can even do this enough to make a fancy video where you show off how you do this.

But that doesn’t change the fact that you are equipping yourself with tools that are less effective than someone running a cookie cutter short bow build.

These cookie cutter builds are popular for a reason. You can tell yourself that we all just jump on the forums and copy what the cool guys run without trying anything else and if that lets you sleep better at night, then go for it, but I’ve tried the unconventional AND the conventional. And I’m not alone in this. I could care less if someone thinks I’m a special snowflake because I run something different, because I choose what works best.

Because in the end, it’s not about what works. It’s about what works BETTER.

Lightsbane.9012:

Agadar.4931:

For as long as sword auto-roots you, it’s essentially useless, and for as long as the greatsword has the damage of a wet towel, that too will remain useless.

If you don’t want to use bows, you’re far better off with axes.

it’s amazing that no one complaining about this thought to turn off auto attack. i feel like i’m the only ranger player not having this problem.

The root sucks even with auto attack off. Not as bad is still not good.