Guild Wars 2

1) Ranger (Massive build diversity issues, defunct class mechanic due to bad AI, Many underpowered traits and poorly arranged trait lines, some underpowered weapon skills, lack of viability of power builds in comparison to other classes.) The key emphasis I would place is that NO CLASS should have to do 70% of their character damage when they are keeping up with their moving targets but their pets are not equipped to. It will take A LOT more to fix this class than adding some fields on to traps. Suggestions for how to help improve ranger pets without breaking the AI system have already been suggested in the flagged ranger thread in the balance section, please read them.

2) Elementalist (Some significant build diversity issues, and for the nature of their survivability, I think it might need some tweaks and improvements.)

3) Thief/Engineer (Major build diversity issues. They don’t break or weaken the class in contrast to others, but severely limit it in character building)

I know this was made in jest, but this sounds like a brilliant idea for a new class-wide elite skill.

Well in anticipation of this thread actually being read, here are my desired changes.

[Minor/Short term]
Weapons:
Greatsword

Block should made block all melee attacks up to the full duration and not just one. The melee range “Counter-attack” should be used at any time desired within the blocking period by hitting the 4 key again, much in the same way the sword can be thrown, only triggering a different effect in melee range.

Swoop: As Jon Peters suggested he was considering, I think adding evade to the move is an actually great idea.

Auto attack: In the event of the evade being taken out of greatsword auto attack, I’d like to see it having a cripple effect added to its auto attack and some higher AA numbers to reflect its speed difference in comparison to say, the one handed sword.

Axe- Offhand

Whirling defense should allow for some movement, just like thieves’ dagger storm ability. In the future, I think all such whirling attacks on all classes should be enabled with at least some movement.

Path of Scars: I think it’d be nice if the projectile speed could be upped a little. Currently, it feels like it’s a bit too easy for returning axe to be sidestepped.

Universal ranger signet active modification
All valid signet actives(Obviously with the exception of signet of renewal) should by default buff/effect the ranger himself, and be traited to include the pet… instead of the opposite as it is currently.

Utility Skills

Signet of the Wild: As others highlighted, signet of the wild seems a bit underpowered in terms of healing. Being a utility skill obviously it shouldn’t rival Healing Signet. That said, hitting 120-ish per second on high healing power builds is a little on the low end. Maybe if the starting point was raised to 100-ish instead of the 60 some odd that it is currently, we could see easier placement of it in more builds.

Lightning Reflexes: LR should be made to cure immobilize, with that effect initiating very briefly before its movement itself if possible.

Sick Em: I’m running a shout build, and yet sick em’ still doesn’t feel viable for me, much less for most builds. Perhaps the cool down is slightly too long, or the effects slightly below where they need to be. Please examine this skill and come up with some improvements for it.

Search and Rescue: For merely functioning as supporting downed players (and not fully dead ones anymore) and with the pet no longer teleporting past obstacles.. I feel that long cool downs on this skill have become inappropriate. Please consider reducing the cooldown and adding some new effects.

Pets

New fifth skill-distance closer skill for all melee pets

Currently, its far too easy to cut melee pet damage down to almost nothing by kiting with w,s,a,d ..much less when you consider distance creator skills like blink being used. All melee pets should have a distance closer skill added as a fifth skill slot, just as all melee built characters have some manner of distance closing skills.The attack should cover a distance similar to swoop to deal with the gaps teleporting, strafing/kiting, backflipping and dashing opponents create in the middle of a fight. (Also factoring in that the ranger himself is doing such movements and his opponents are chasing him creating a distance for the pet to gap.) It should offer damage similar to a basic pet auto attack hit, and be on approximately 8-10 second cooldown tops.

Specific pet changes

Devourer: Overall devourer physical damage should be increased. Currently it offers nothing that the spider can’t essentially do much better, outside gambling on the rare poison proc.

The devourer evade should be removed. It simply has no function, and merely cuts downs.

Some of the devourer F2s need attention. In particular, the lashtail devourer. Overall it does completely inferior damage when compared to a drake f2, yet it has double the cooldown. Other seem kind of underwhelming. The devourer with the poison barb f2 for example, is a letdown. Most of the times, enemies will not be meleeing your devourer, but you the ranger.. so “shotgunning” with it is simply not possible in most cases and makes the effect rather irrelevant.

Moa: Moa heals need to be controllable for them to function as viable skills, just like the buffs.

Porcine: Some speed-up is needed of the f2 process. Currently the delay is too large to be viable in most fast-paced combat scenarios.

Also as a general complaint, some pet skills seem too telegraphed in comparison to the damage allotted. Especially some of the pouncing ones. It’s like giving out a yell before shooting off a water pistol. I think the damage on these skills are still appropriate enough, but they simply need to activate faster.. especially the ones where stun is involved.

[Major/Longterm]
Pet AI fixes, The major Pet f2 tweaks already previously discussed

teg.1340:

LunarNacht.8913:

Yeah, certainly on block! The defender used something to block the hit and realizes where the attacker is.

How do you block attacks from behind? How do you block something you dont see coming? An invisible attacker could easily bypass any raised shield.

This is a computer game. So for gods sake stop arguing with real life logic. Otherwise stealth attacks must be unblockable. lol

A weak argument. In real life, stealth in terms of infantry combat means camouflage not imaginary invisibility devices like the predator movies. Trained eyes can spot full camo even amongst the bushes and sand they are built to mimic. Trained ears can hear snapping twigs, crunching leaves that allude to your presence. A trained mind can look at the way grass is bent, the subtle remnants of footprints and track down even some of the stealthiest combat forces. In your counter-realism, “realism” argument you seem to want stealth as absolute invisibility, but you want to nullify the possibility of your enemies having attuned senses and being able to pick out your sneak attacks, even though that can happen in “real life”. Besides that, these arguments are vain to begin with. It’s also an argument of mechanics and counter-play, not just principle. Despite that those arguments hold well though. We may not have magic in real life, but if an artillery shell lands on you, the effect isn’t going to be any less damaging than some mage’s fireball or anything like that.

Ar any rate, I remember when I played WoW back in 04-06, stealth in that game made a subtle quiet yet alarm-like noise when a stealthed player was nearby, and you knew to raise your guard or use whatever stealth revealing abilities you had at the perfect moment rather than just mindlessly spamming attacks on the air. Despite that (at least at that time) rogue was still an incredible and useful class, with a very high skill ceiling. (I played both hunter and rogue and had equal success on both.) I not going to say such counter mechanics should be implemented in GW2, but the fact is that counter-stealth mechanics don’t completely nullify classes in most games to begin with. Add to the fact that ArenaNet is the kind of company that will almost certainly buff thieves and mesmers elsewhere if they add a counter to their class mechanic.

+1. I agree with revealed on block. It’s a good suggestion that will add more mechanics to a thief or mesmer fight and potentially increase the skill level of both combatants.

However, revealed on evade I would be against. Some classes just have a lot more weapon evades than others and roll frequency. As a ranger, and especially as a melee ranger, thieves would have their class mechanic all to easily nullified against me. Even if my is poorly designed and easily nullified by spamming movement keys, doesn’t mean I think it’s fair for other classes to have their mechanics watered down with excessive counters.

If you think that’s overpowered, you should see what they steal from rangers. Healing Seed Pod gives them an extra condi removal and a water field, which due to the nature of initiation the thief can often heal upwards of an additional 5k hp or spamming leap finishers. Combine that with well coordinated blind spam and the brief periods they are vulnerable they are still very tough to take down, even with ample stuns and CC usage. Unfortunately it’s near impossible to kill a good thief without very specific skill setups, which of course weaken you in combat ability against warriors and other popular classes you will encounter if you choose to run those setups.

Even still, I wouldn’t actually say steal is overpowered. A lot of the problems players experience with thieves are from the combination of how their skills function rather than the one or two. The more you familiarize yourself with those skills and the cool downs, the more possible it does become to counter. (Pro thieves will still be near impossible to take down, but average Joe and trash thieves aren’t going to ascend to skill tiers they haven’t achieved yet just on virtue of a class mechanic alone. If a good thief can’t take you down, consider that your victory.) If you can’t do anything about the problems steal poses, I recommend you look for strengthening yourself against them elsewhere. Ie. additional condition removal, traits like “Removes blind and poison on dodge roll”, etc minimize the effectiveness of their blinds (and their ability to reduce your heal effectiveness with poison). I know our classes traits are drastically different, but I’m sure you have some good condi removal traits and methods available to consider for dealing with the blinds at least.

Also consider, changes to your sigils and how you fight. Even though my character is not built to directly counter thieves, I do very well against them due to having dual hydromancy sigils. AoE chill is another very effective method of combating thieves, and there are other ways as well. With the upcoming balance patch, two handers will be able to be dual sigil’d, and on swap sigils will have their own unique icds. Consider what sigils cover your weak points best rather than going for whatever ups your damage the most or just grants you extra evades.

Honestly, I find mesmers far more difficult to deal with than thieves on average. But that’s mostly because my class mechanic(pets with malfunctioning AI and slow f2 skills) are easily exploited by moving targets, and mesmers just kite a lot more than most thieves do.

Hey folks. Currently, there seems to be quite a few heals out there, both racial and class based that simply have no place or function. I feel long before adding appeal to the active of a certain already highly appealing warrior heal skill, much more attention should first be given to ALL of the heals across the board that simply take up space. And while we’re at it, even many useful commonly used heals need some changes to offer more choice. Anyways on the topic of the unused heals in question.. perhaps these heals were designed with certain classes in mind despite being available across the board, I don’t know.. but if that’s the case these skills need to be designed to scale in a way relevant to that class.

For example, Prayer to Dwayna. Antitoxin Spray. For me as a human ranger, there is simply zero appeal in either of these skills. They will never be used as they offer nothing heal as one, troll unguent or healing spring cannot outperform. I sure most people will recall one or two heals present in their skill list. I think it’s pretty depressing to see gimmick skills just hanging around collecting dust. I feel that every single heal available to you, no matter your class.. should have its own appeal and build viability. Please change some of the heals so they no longer need to sit around collecting dust but offer some very real, viable healing amounts and addition perks to enable more build variety across the board.

While we’re at it, I want to highlight another issue.. on some classes, there are 2-3 heals competing for the same exact function. This is especially prevalent on Ranger class as Heal as One, Troll Unguent, Healing Spirit are all competing with each other as raw heals with no additional perks. And if we’re all honest, outside team functionality in spirit builds no matter which heal you pick, (at least as a ranger) you end up making the decision based solely on preference in heal delivery method and the highest calculations of Healing over X period that your build allows. There is simply next to no other factor to make the heal you pick a tough decision… no “Might on heal” “Aegis on heal” “Cure burn and poison on heal” as some other classes enjoy. I believe this needs to be changed, and not just for rangers but all classes that have this problem.

In addition if I might be so bold as to point out one more major issue, it’s imbalance and poor management in healing cool downs across the classes and races. Here’s why this is an issue: Currently, Guild Wars 2 hosts some rune sets and traits that offer additional effects to heal skills. For example, Rune of Dwayna with regeneration on each heal use as its 6 rune bonus. Or, the Wilderness 5 trait on rangers that offers ~5 seconds of vigor on each heal use. With additional heal perks, the only classes that truly get to ride the full benefit of such runes and traits are those with a 15 second(or in one case 10 second) cooldown heal. That means engineer, thief, elementalist and mesmer get more room to build around such trait and rune types, but they are less appealing for the rest of us. This needs to change. I believe EVERY class should have an at least similar amount of heals with similar cooldowns. Having one class with all 20, 25, 30 or 30, 30, 25 second heal cooldowns while another runs around with 15, 15, 20, 25 and such.. that makes no sense, even considering the healing function when you throw in additional proc on healing runes/skills/traits. I FULLY UNDERSTAND you want each classes’ heal to have a different “feel” to them. I understand for example, stealth classes with a “Stealth on heal” are going to want a more frequent heal, I’m, not saying to change that. I’m simply saying that I disagree that “Class heal feel” should be considered in determining cool downs. That should be considered in heal amount, method of delivery and additional effects.

Let me also be clear, I’m not bashing on the attention to the warrior’s Healing Signet and the potential raising of its active. But please, while you are looking at the warrior heal, look at heals for all the classes so that healing in general starts to make more sense. I don’t know why you added so many new heals when there were already broken, dusty, unused healing skills sitting around in our skill pools for months.

Prysin.8542:

Detharos.3157:

I can just see it coming one of these days.. the future of the ranger class.

“We have decided to change the perceptions of the ranger class, and focus all the ranger damage into the pet. For a long time the pet was thought to be a burden, and now it will be the key to your success. To support this changer, the ranger has had all his attacks and evasive utilities removed. The ranger himself will take up a purely support roll from here on in, with all of his 1-5 keys adding various buffs to the pet.”

“.. Unfortunately, there are no plans to change AI at this time, or introduce gear scaling for the pet. We’re going to see how this change goes for a year and then decide whether we should add a separate heal for the pet or a tied-to-ranger evade.”

And then, in the coming months after..

“We have come to understand the dangers in WvW zerging of the ranger class essentially having disposable drake bombs and suicide assault pets available every 40 seconds. Now to accommodate for the recent pet changes in terms of balance, the pet swap cool down will be increased to 120 seconds. We believe this change will encourage the skillful use of pets and encourage more rangers to use their f3 key in major battles.”

Ranger Armageddon is coming, one way or another.

That wouldnt happen ever, as that means they have to change the AI to make it happen. Not to mention rebalancing all pet stats.

Imagine birds with the stats of a full zerk ranger. They would make backstabs look like a joke.

I wasn’t suggesting it as a legitimate change. That would make us a class where effectively 100% of our damage could be sidestepped with A and D keys instead of just 30%. It was a joke. What I just described would cause a 99% reroll rate in the ranger community. I was merely using sarcasm to elude to the line of thinking that where skilled rangers know the pets stand for their contribution to the fight(Let’s be honest, against a skilled player the pet is pretty much 100% useless) and how useful the balance team seems to think they are/believe(Who seem to believe it is a wonderful mechanic in need of maybe a few tweaks).. that we are at completely different worlds, let alone being in the same room in terms of changes this class needs to see.

ArenaNet probably would consider it a legitimate option..

I can just see it coming one of these days.. the future of the ranger class.

“We have decided to change the perceptions of the ranger class, and focus all the ranger damage into the pet. For a long time the pet was thought to be a burden, and now it will be the key to your success. To support this changer, the ranger has had all his attacks and evasive utilities removed. The ranger himself will take up a purely support roll from here on in, with all of his 1-5 keys adding various buffs to the pet.”

“.. Unfortunately, there are no plans to change AI at this time, or introduce gear scaling for the pet. We’re going to see how this change goes for a year and then decide whether we should add a separate heal for the pet or a tied-to-ranger evade.”

And then, in the coming months after..

“We have come to understand the dangers in WvW zerging of the ranger class essentially having disposable drake bombs and suicide assault pets available every 40 seconds. Now to accommodate for the recent pet changes in terms of balance, the pet swap cool down will be increased to 180 seconds. We believe this change will encourage the skillful use of pets and encourage more rangers to use their f3 key in major battles.”

Ranger Armageddon is coming, one way or another.

This has been suggested before, but I don’t know if it was suggested a gem purchase and I doubt its possible to pull of easily but nonetheless.. unique customizations for ranger pets on gem store would be awesome. Ie. items that would add a visual armor plating of some type to certain ranger pets that could be dyed, or enabling tweaking the pet colors itself with dyes would be neat.

The other thing is.. keep up the fashion options. Medium armor needs more hoods like the thief subterfuge hood for the other medium armor classes that don’t come with ugly face masks. Also much more needs to be done in the way of escaping the infinite gravity of the trench coat black hole on medium armor. More medium options with shiny armor padding but less dangly coats and anything with a technological look is quite cool. I’ll happily pay to have my character look unique AND good.

I apologize for my moment of frustration earlier in the thread. Though I must say I am happy to see I am nowhere near being the only one who has been agitated on this level about it. Despite my plans to try out other classes some, I still have much love for my ranger and the ranger class/community, and will log in to solo roam quite frequently. I hope all who are fed up with the comments from those like us would also understand how frustrating it is to see a peak, and be wanting to climb up to it.. knowing that you can reach that summit with other classes, but always being held back from doing so on ranger for the same tired issues that have plagued the class since launch. You can come close, but that last mile always being impossible to bridge.. that’s a frustrating feeling.

But as I also said that others have picked up on, the biggest agitator in the ranger class at this time is probably the lack of reply from the devs. Pretty much the last thing they said on the pet topic was that fixing pet AI could break the game and it would not be approached at this time, but there’s been absolutely no word on any plans of any bandaid fixes for the pets, or general improvements that they need separate from AI fixes to meet their expectations anyways (Ie. distance closers on melee pets, moa heals becoming a controllable skill, and various other logical changes). The countless good suggestions in various threads receive no commentary while various other threads in correspondence to other classes on what I daresay are vastly insignificant and inferior issues in comparison, continue to fetch replies from devs.

From my time working in customer service/customer relations, one of the worst things and I emphasize this, THE WORST THINGS TO DO.. was to agitate angry/upset customers with lack of communication or lack of sympathy in regards to a defective or even a perceived to be defective product. People have invested money and ESPECIALLY, time into their rangers. People are frustrated, angry and that is the natural human result for anyone who invests a great deal in a product that does appear to have defects it was not supposed to. (In this case the ranger class.) Even if their job is development, when you are replying to paying customers with a COMPANY TAG on your profile in a forum in regards to these issues, you are performing CUSTOMER RELATIONS. In these positions, most people are trained to give ear to the customer, and to agreeésympathize with the customer even when they are off-target simply to diffuse the hostility/anger. There has been next to no inkling of such replies from Jon Peters or anyone replying to ranger threads. It’s always a post along the lines of “Have you seen the ranger pvp participation numbers?”, “Condi and support builds are quite effective right now.”, “This is something that cannot be fixed at this time.”, “We do not approach modifying traits in that way. We take one step at a time.” That is not how you handle customer relations. If you did that in a store, you’d see your customer stomping out furious and telling all their friends not to shop at your location/buy your product. Many modernized businesses even record such instances in their systems and consider such as a build up/factor in “LOST SALES” and the employees that handle such situations too poorly and too often are liable to lose their jobs in a competitive environment where there’s plenty of others out there who could answer in a way that much better appeases your customers simply by using a different tone.

So defend them if you will, the ranger class and all classes are customers, and this is not how professionals handle customer relations. That it is being done over an internet forum and not face to face should not change that fact. If in my current employment I replied to angry customers in a fashion like Jon Peters I would get an ear full from my supervisor and an eventual inevitable pink slip if such patterns continued. The distance that’s built up between the ranger community and the balance team doesn’t have to be this great gulf that is today. And believe it or not, its not solely the ranger players that created it. Some simple customer service skills could easily diffuse the agitation that plagues us.

If you wanna know more of how a pro uses a ranger; then hit me up, and take a look at my build in the ranger forums to get an understanding of just how crucial dodge rolls and evades are to my build. Hint: I even use Healing as One just to proc more vigor to dodge more. If you want tips on how to play ranger effectively; even with a build the class is not designed to suppor;t and how to make your skill on ranger count, hit me up with a private message and I’ll happily share some of my tricks so you can step up your game. Here’s one to start, drakes have at least far less issues in comparison to other melee pets because their attacks cleave, yet even they fail hard against many skilled kiters and players with good movements.

All these huge pet issues are in addition considered with the sheer amount of pets which are rendered near useless to bad design. Moa heal being AI controlled means it will almost always fire off at times that are not at all helpful in the very mobile realm of Player vs player combat.. it only ever works properly when stacking melee on easy dungeon mobs and bosses.. the conditions to trigger its AI to use the heal are poorly designed which makes moas only truly good for shooting bows from the safety of a tower wall. Lashtail devourer f2 is significantly weaker than drake f2s, yet has more than double the cast time. The evade on devourers is completely useless. If a player specifically targetted your pet just for the sake of killing it, that would not be enough to keep it alive; it’s evade time does not match the animation time which makes it bad by evade standards, and it simply doesn’t need it making it lose out on a potential extra damage, condition or cc lockdown skill. Porcine F2 has too much delay to be feasible in a fast paced player vs player environment.

With all due respect, Zeffthewicked, you’ve completely missed the my point. All pets should of been equipped to properly contribute to the class from release, but they continue to hold even the most skilled rangers back. Anet thinks an AI overhaul is needed but they never even try to equip the pets with skills that compliment doing their jobs right to begin with. If I have to say it in a TLDR form; THE PETS DO A GOOD JOB VS STATIONARY TARGETS. THEY ARE HORRIBLE WHEN THE TARGET MOVES. The issues all happen when the enemy moves. Before you think how to buff AI for pets, logically you would try giving the melee pets distance closer attacks and those of a less rooted nature, which would in theory enable them to do much better against moving targets while contributing in the same way against stationary targets; nothing gets overpowered, nothing gets broken if it works as I expect it would. It doesn’t take rocket science to get pets to where they need to be, it takes devs using their head.

I’d HAPPILY eat some evasion nerfs AND condition damage nerfs to this class if it meant melee pets could hit their enemies accurately even when they move, and close the distances a good player will create as quickly as I do with melee characters.

And Zeff, I’m sorry if I sounded disrespectful. I’m just frustrated with these issues, because they are simply not issues skilled play can overcome. I want my skill to count; if I’m good at closing the distance on a kiting foe, I deserve to do my full damage and not have 100% character damage periods not limited to whether or not my pet has caught up to my foe and doesn’t have its attack sidestepped to merely hitting a or d keys. That puts too much control of the fight in the enemy’s hands; they are able to mitigate huge amounts of ranger damage just by moving around wisely; even if the ranger himself lands the majority of his attacks, the pet not landing its attacks will throw off his damage numbers and severely limit on almost every fight his ability to use his full damage.. and in fights against pro players that are always moving even while they attack, the pet can be nullified by upwards of 90% of its attacks being sidestepped.

But enough of this. I call my pet back with f3, I utilize the “Guard” skill better than every single one of rangers I’ve encountered. I fully utilize my evades and on evade protection for survival, and have very high levels of passive healing (In exchange for some damage utility) building up while I evade/block. Chances are I use my defensive evasion better than you can begin to imagine. In addition to that I have protect me for those extreme situations and my pet RARELY dies, still. So what is the issue?

The issue is that melee pets are not equipped with the skills they need to get a good hit ratio against moving targets, and that ranged pets have no high damage options.

All of the above I fully utilize; Passive healing, evades, block, protect me (And cancelling protect me when I want to stun break but don’t want my pet to suffer; you can do that by hitting f keys you know.).

So again, my only real major issue with pets is their inability to effectively contribute to your character’s damage against a moving target. People use melee pets on the understanding that 85% of their auto attacks wouldn’t be able to be sidestepped. Since you seemed to take it that way, I assure you that this isn’t an l2p issue. I’ve successfully overcome in more ridiculous odds than you can begin to imagine, without needing a cheesy evasive condi stacking build. With a build that actually takes skill to properly utilize in comparison. Sure I’m tanky, but I have to actively attack and expose myself to danger just to damage my opponents. A condi build can jut stack bleed poison, burn and run away all day.. which is too easy a playstyle for me to enjoy.

The ranger’s strengths revolve around evades and controlling the positioning of a fight in regards to its position respective to its enemies by carefully utilizing skills like “Swoop” and reversing the sword 2 by hitting your esc key for double the distance creation. I do all that. But even if I can win a lot of 1 vs 3s where 1-2 of my opponents froze up for a brief enough period to bring my full might to bear; the countless 1 v 1- 1 v x you’ll lose simply because your enemies all know how to kite ONLY because of the sole fact that your pet can’t keep up; when you reach the very pinnacle of power ranger play, you will see how annoying this issue is. My build amongst most ranger builds would stand out as one of the best designed to synergize with the pet; supporting the pet with very effective buffs and disabling my opponents to increase its successful hit ratio. I’m not calling myself a ranger god, but my skill is far beyond your average condi whipping evade build. There are other changes I’d love to see to allow for more build diversity, but the only critical has ever been the pet and the lack of control of it. Every other classes’ class mechanic is by comparison, much better designed.

Pets needing to be able to attack and move simultaneously, like players, IS an issue and will continue to be THE issue that holds back more rangers than any other issue with this class. Just because I can make a good spider-bow build or condi spamming kiter doesn’t mean the other good builds out there; which is THE MAJORITY of the ranger build diversity.. should be hurt in PvP or WvW just because the pet was desiged far too easily kiteable. Why no distance closer skill like a charge on melee pets? It needs a utility to catch its foes just like any melee player does, and does have. Why rooting auto attacks? It needs to be able to move and attack simultaneously to land hits just like players do. These are changes that don’t need to overhaul the whole AI system to be executed.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

Detharos.3157:

The only suggestions around lately to help the pet survive certain pve aoe rich encounters and the aoe rich environment that the devs are likely to entertain are those suggesting adding skills that work like a reverse protect me so that we can redirect its damage to us to make our evades have an affect on it.. which is a HORRIBLE IDEA. We should not have to sacrifice a skill slot just to make the pet do something it needs to be able to do without cost to the player.

Only horrible thing here is your core belief that your defenses sit monstly on utility slot bar, and not weapon skills.

That being said it’s my idea and here’s clear and common logic behind it:
your melee weapons (sword, greatsword, offhand dagger, offhand axe) offer lots of build in evades and other defenses. regular dodging doesn’t take up any slot skills either. Nor does the command for you to guard your pet (it’s to be a profession mechanic under F3 button, not slot skill).

If you use the bow or axe? Then you’re most likely miles away from your pet and you can call it back to you to evade aoe, or swap it if that’s impossible. Or still use my “pet ward” mechanic with regular dodge or shortbow #3 evade.

All of the above without taking up a single utility slot. If you wanna know more then do some real reading on it – link in my signature.

You’re kidding yourself severely if you think I have any l2p issues or don’t know that. I’m running with sword AND greatsword. I use Sword 2, sword 3 and greatsword 4 in addition defensively VERY WELL as well timed evades, in addition to extremely good timing in my normal dodge rolls which I have a extremely high frequency on with. Furthermore I have protection on dodge roll. I personally have never had an issue with PvE, but many rangers frequenting dungeons complain about it all the time.. I don’t run fractals but they do, and I assume their compaints do have a foundation. About AoE, here’s the thing: If you pull your pet back, you’re losing out on damage time. Which IS NOT THE ISSUE for me ironically, because in a midst of a zerg battle for example, I don’t ever send my pet into anything I wouldn’t expect to survive. I can and do in the middle of every fight from 1 vs 1 to 1v v x and group roaming, use f3 to pull my pet to me and path it away from certain AoEs. Yet there are some situations that are unavoidable, you do know that right? For example, if you, at least while playing a full melee build, waste the time to pull your pet to take yourself and path it around EVERY SINGLE BOMB against say, a bombing or grenade spamming kiting engi.. then you’re not applying enough pressure to take them out, and are liable to go down overtime to the few attacks they do land or simply keep yourself up. You can say “You have a ton of evades”. No kitten bro, but I’m running a full melee build. I’m going to take more hits than someone kiting around to ranged distance, I have to close distance just to attack. I’m going against the fighting style that this very class was built for, BUT THAT ISN’T EVEN THE ISSUE. I still do incredibly well; better than the majority of the rangers out ther. In the past months, I’ve proven myself one of the best solo roaming rangers on my server. Just about every other ranger I’ve fought in my roaming has paled in comparison. I have no issue with pet control. NO AMOUNT of pet control can instantly gap the distance from a melee pet to the new location of your foe if they use a distance creating skill and kite, no amount of skill can make your pet able to move and attack simultaneously; Something I and all players are able to do WITH OUR CHARACTERS to begin with. Other characters move and attack simultaneously with 100% of their strength but as a ranger, if you fight a moving foe with a melee pet you attack and move simultaneously with only 70% of yours. That’s the only truly major issue in this class.

So no, I have no problems with pet control and using f3 to help my pet survive. Controlling my pet perfectly not only with f3 recalls, but with positioning it with guard and even setting up drake f2 ambushes with guard; while constantly having permanent protection and regeneration applied to an already respectively tanky pet; the drakes. Most of the builds that take down my pets successfully are direct counter-builds to begin with. My pet is almost never dead + on cooldown. If it does go down, I virtually always have pet swap up.

As far as I’m concerned, the pet mechanic is appalling and completely unfitting. I don’t think the ranger is balanced around the assumption that the 1-2 attacks a melee pet successfully lands cover the difference in its sidestepped auto attacks. No, even with a mere 200ish extra damage on my auto attacks.. in so many situations for example where a mesmer could blink, and I would gap that distance with swoop or reverse sword 2.. and land 5-6 auto attacks before the pet can even catch up (and its attacks still liable to miss when it tries after its long waddle..) considering attack frequency then over the course of 25-30 seconds I’d still have done far more damage than even the drakes can cover with the occasional tail sweep and f2 they land. I don’t know about you all, but I personally don’t enjoy at all being the only class that is incapable of bringing its full power attacks to bear against moving targets. If I use my skills to cover the distance a kiting player makes, cut them off and hit them I DESERVE to do 100% of my character damage, not 70%.

To be even more of an annoying tease, the ranged pets despite having a higher hit ratio from less chase time have such lower damage that it can’t make up any difference unless you redistribute damage into the ranger with at least half glass, which makes you extremely susceptible to dying in situations glassy builds on other classes are more equipped to deal with.

And when I say unfitting, I also mean this.. as another ranger once mentioned in the ranger forums. How do we synergize with the pet? How do we work together? How are with this “champion of nature” they seem to think we are, fighting as one with our pet? Our best condi removal involves turning our pet into a disease bag, protect me disables the pet from attacking just and gives it all the damage you receive on a class that has large cooldowns on pet swaps. By nature the class mechanic promotes trying to keep the pet alive, but some utilities and traits promote the exact opposite.There is no attack that does anything like “You and your pet teleport to the enemy and attack as one” or anything with any semblance of synergy. The pet amounts to nothing more than 30% of our damage redirected into a clunky AI. No amount of babying it, no amount of cripple, chill, stun will enable it to land the amount of attacks it needs to on w,s,a,d spamming player. In all the best ranger builds the pet is an afterthought in, and the more you invest in the pet the less returns you get due to aforementioned problems. We have to sacrifice our heal at times that we desperately need to use on ourselves to keep the pet alive when it should logically have a player controlled heal of its own to keep it alive, like other games do. The only suggestions around lately to help the pet survive certain pve aoe rich encounters and the aoe rich environment that the devs are likely to entertain are those suggesting adding skills that work like a reverse protect me so that we can redirect its damage to us to make our evades have an affect on it.. which is a HORRIBLE IDEA. We should not have to sacrifice a skill slot just to make the pet do something it needs to be able to do without cost to the player.

But whatever. I’m done. I’m done with the back and forth arguments in the ranger forum, and the ignored suggestions by countless rangers. And the terrible suggestions by people who have gotten so used to being short-changed that they immediately offer up suggestions of at best half-baked skills knowing that’s the only thing that can get through. I’m done having player’s exploit the stupidity of the AI in the pet and use my own classes mechanic AGAINST me by effectively perma nerfing 30% damage when they move right, the very class mechanic that is supposed to support me. Unless a truly significant change gets announced in the next balance patch then I can tell you.. from now on I will be playing a class that is not built around defective AI. From now on, I am going to be the one taking full advantage of the pet AI in fighting rangers on a different class. And when I slaughter them, I will party them and tell them to not be ashamed, at that it is a substantial difference in class mechanics that cannot be surpassed through any amount of skill unless you roll a disgustingly boring build that revolves around spending 15% of its time puking out condition stacks and the other 85% running its kitten off while those ticks slowly whittle down their foes.

This class is a joke, and I’m done. I’m sure someone will say good riddance too, so be it. I’ve played ONLY ranger, on the competitive level for over a year. I spent months of solo roaming perfecting my craft, yet this class is simply less rewarding for skill than others.

To be honest, this isn’t a major hit if you run with an at least semi-tanky pet (Ie. Drake) and have a decent buff pool with 15 points in nature magic to help share regeneration and such with your pet.

Still it is a little disappointing that this was considered a noteworthy mention in the live stream yet no encouragement was offered for builds that continue to be held back by the pet. Even though good buffs were promised to be revealed at a later date, I fear that as time passes we will continue to see pet design that holds back the ranger class yet no offering of any ability to play petless. The pet will be further and further alienated as just additional clutter on top of a slightly less damaging character that offers no real function of synergy or theme as a class mechanic. A year later melee pets still have no method of catching up to a fleeing target, no means of attacking while moving. Ranged pets continue to have only one viable option due to a lack of proper attention to devourers.

And condition bunker and other passive “Stack and kite” easy cheesy condition builds continue to be promoted. People will continue saying the “Ranger is class is good/at a good place” on account of just 1-2 viable builds while everybody playing an active or skillful build relying on power rather than condi continues to suffer. Skilled play should be rewarded, its certainly heavily encouraged. Yet for such players, so many other classes are more attractive.. and at this point, I’m really starting to think about benching my ranger. It will come down to whatever “Positive change” is revealed in the upcoming path, ultimately. But I’m tired of waiting over a year for the areas of the ranger most in need of change to be ignored. They know pet AI and F2 is an issue, yet they will continue to not even offer a decent band aid buff on pets to up their reliability if they stay the current course.

More special notes:

Retaliation. You may not realize this, but on this build the retaliation on your axe 5 is an EXTREMELY powerful mechanic when used right. Because it is shared with your pet, you can pull it into you and do double retaliation against whatever is attacking you if the attacks are of a cleaving or radius(AoE) nature. Any cleaving/radius attack with a high number of low damage-medium damage hits you will be able to effectively retaliate between 2000-5000+ while taking minimal damage. When you see a guardian start swirling with their greatsword for example, you should try to immediately hit your axe 5 and use that against them pile on the retaliation. Countless guardians I have fought have not realized the threat and killed themselves upon retaliation. That goes just as much for the similar skills on warrior and other classes. Anything with a high hit number that is able to hit both you and your pet is has the potential to be used as a retaliation cannon, and this tactic will often catch even skilled and very skilled players off guard.

Increasing your hit ratio on Drake F2. Many people are well aware that your drakes have the potential to hit them for upwards of 5k if all of the f2 lands. Skilled players will keep an eye on the drake and try to dodge that, in addition to the tail sweep. The best way to make use of drakes against such players is to use yourself as a lure and get the player attacking you in such a way that you are in their front and the drake is hitting them from behind. When the drake is behind your enemy, THAT is when you should fire your f2 so they will be less capable of seeing it coming and consequently have a harder time dodging the whole attack.

I figure its about time I post the build I’m running. Note that I actually use mango pie and generally not compote, I just couldn’t find it in the list.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNAR8XnIV0FciFaBxaZAp9QTsEM5VYWcP8vOJEz4oPeFB-jECB4hERzUFJjAJQUBwpmFRjtyqIasqZER16kYCB0fLA-w

Build purpose: Solo roaming, and group roaming via. Swapping out two traits to support use of spirits or swapping to Healing Spring for water fields. When I built this, I wanted something that, when played skillfully, could give me the ability to fight from 2-3 opponents simultaneously(or more in some scenarios) and if possible, to take them down if I drastically outskilled them, while maintaining the ability to frequently escape combat from unfavorable situations or simply flee entirely if the chance of victory is not to be found.

My build is heavy on tankiness, but offers good enough burst potential when dual drake setups are utilized and well timed(especially pet swaps and used in unison with good interrupt timing.) to take down many foes when played well. As often as possible(which is not always possible) hit bash should be used when anticipating the drake’s tail sweep as the next attack.

The pros: Two-on demand condi removal skills on a 12s and 48s cooldown respectively. Very tanky, Extremely mobile and adept at escaping combat and bloodthirsty chasing roaming groups, Large pool of permanent/near permanent buffs that are all shared with your pet thanks to Nature Magic, medium burst potential, powerful mid-range F2s. Drakes have cleaving attacks which makes sidestepping their attacks slightly more difficult, and axe pull can frequently pull your enemies into the pet’s major attacks when used correctly. Rampage as one offers for some very effective temporary powerups while simultaneously offering a great amount of stability. Forced drop target via stealth and permanent protection and regeneration on already respectfully tough pets means that your pet is MUCH LESS prone to dying compared to many other builds.

The cons: Low base crit rate, damage is not as high as many would like it and lacks the damage levels necessary to defeat other tanky builds on other classes when they are well played, pet attacks can be easily avoided by attentive and skilled players, drake f2 can be difficult to control and easily misfires due to clashes with pet movement commands, Corrupt boons and boon tampering skills are a direct and effective counter to the build.

Particularly noteworthy bad class/build match ups:

Skilled Kiter bomb/nade engis
Above average skill – extremely skilled thieves. Despite the CC and cripple you lack a truly good transition from CC to burst to take them down fast enough when they are played right.
Certain 75%-tanky/fully tanky warriors of any skill level. Be prepared to encounter warriors that can both out tank you AND out damage and Out stun you.. all simultaneously. You can put up a very good fight against them, but you will not be able to to survive unless you kite them, during which periods they will regenerate all the damage difference of what you needed to have a chance to kill them. You will either cause a “This fight won’t end” but as the pressured player who has the harder time in active combat, or die to them if you pursue them with full aggression.

Special notes:

Heal setup: You’ll notice I roll with Heal as One in solo roaming. If you wonder why, it’s for two reasons. One is because I have vigor on heal, so the more often I cast a heal, the more dodges I get. Two is that it’s the only truly good heal in this build. Healing Spring effectiveness is low because already having permanent regeneration means that you get almost nothing out of its regeneration portion, which puts it in raw healing numbers vastly inferior to Heal as One over time, so much so IMO that the combos in the field won’t be able to cover the difference. Furthermore even though the field is good on healing spring, you won’t always be able to get all your combos in a hostile environment like WvW.. sometimes the field will be loaded with aoe circles, sometimes you will be knocked out of it, sometimes you are fleeing enemies and only have the time for 1 leap, etc.

Weaknesses of the ranger class: You WILL be held back against kiting foes due solely to the pet. It’s one thing if someone avoids your attacks, but all too often you will have periods where you catch up the distance easily enough, land 4-5 attacks and your pet hasn’t even caught up yet, and is still on top of that susceptible to sidesteps. Despite that it is not as though you have no chance against such enemies.. although that does happen when they are skilled enough. The periods in which you bring your full power to bear against them will be very short, but with good timed stuns you can make your damage count against any glassy/semi-glassy kiter.

Made a big complicated post, but what it comes down too.. power ranger is just weaker than condi ranger because it’s an ACTIVE play build in a meta that supports PASSIVE play builds. On condi ranger, you can launch 3-4 fire and forget attacks stacking 2000-3000/second ticks on your enemies and then focus entirely on evading and kiting while that just keeps ticking away hurting your enemies even though you’re running around with swoop and leaps. On power builds, you can either hurt your enemies or avoid attacks and kite… you cannot do both simultaneously like condition builds. Every time you attack you are exposed to danger, and because you must attack more than a condi build to pressure your foes, you are also exposed to more enemy attack and burst sequences for longer periods. When a consequential period where you are heavily damaged and most start kiting away happens, you are not pressuring your enemies simultaneously like condi.. which means your enemies if they get the better of you can pressure you a lot more while not worrying about their health bar when you are on the defensive. They have less need to watch their health bar when you are fleeing from them, whereas with a condi build they still have to worry about healing themselves and curing their conditions, and trying to time their heal to go off when they are not poisoned which they frequently are.

That coupled with the fact that condi just seems to scale better and that it ignores toughness means that even condition removal rich builds get hurt more by condition damage than physical damage reduction builds (via evade/invuln/protection/whatever) get hurt by physical damage.

In the end you get this stupid situation where many power rangers get screwed over because our pet doesn’t work, but because condition rangers are built so that the pet is not as much a key issue to them, they get in arguments with us that buffs and fixes to the pet will make them (And I say only them) OP and is consequently not fair for the class. Which is total bullkitten, pets could be fixed and then the condition output on the popular condition weapons could be reduced to accommodate for higher pet hit ratios. It’d be as simply as giving all melee pets an auto-casting distance closer skill like swoop and an attack combo on their auto attack that pounces like sword one while simultaneously reducing the numbers on the condition staples. Condi builds would still have the same damage, just delivered differently with the pet contributing more than before. Power builds would become more viable as the pet would be holding us back less with less grotesque miss ratios.

To bad there are as many brainless condi rangers as incompetent balance team members who don’t get that and have the same objections, so this class never gets anywhere on the forums.

Kibazuka.1390:

DISCLAIMER: ALL OF THE BELOW VS. NON-MOVING TARGETS. EXPECT FREQUENT 30% DAMAGE OUTPUT REDUCTION AGAINST ANYTHING HITTING MOVEMENT KEYS WHEN USING MELEE PETS.

Top Tier in Dungeons, openworld pve.. mobs don’t kite or strafe, openworld farming same as any class, wvw roaming against players with no skill, spvp against players with no skill and players confined to tiny capture points enabling pets to hit targets more frequently..
suck at wvw zergs.
top tier damage and burst if your pet is hitting its enemies as much as you are which is never if they hit WSAD skills with any frequency,, quite ok survival and 2 decent shouts when traited right, tanky enough, takes the longest to spike in some fights which makes little to no difference anyways, strongest underwater combat which is a practical joke, strongest ranged dps(again if your pet is actually hitting its opponents and not suffering to kites, dead or on passive).
but overall little weird design.
hmmmmm dunno.. guess people like to whine?

Fixed that for you.

jcbroe.4329:

Detharos.3157:

jcbroe.4329:

So basically, making the pet hit more reliably even if it would mean numerical adjustments to any damage needed would be better than how pets currently work?

More or less. With pets, its hit or miss. In some cases, namely where targets are standing still and the full might of the class can be brought to bear.. it becomes exceedingly powerful. I think we as a class should want our damage to be at 100% when we launch a successful attack; not 70% percent with a cat, drake, canine or ursine and what not helplessly chasing a moving target while the ranger does all the heavy lifting with uplevel style damage. That or obviously, the pet could be made a choice rather than forced.. which is unfortunately something that ArenaNet historically expressed its being adamantly opposed to. Right now it seems that two; ranger and pet; are expected to fight as one entity- so we need to be able to attack in unison. Enemies randomly hitting movement keys or teleporting, whatever just mitigates that expectation far too easily.

Another argument for a different method to theoretically achieve that desired result is increased pet control. I fear that what some people have in mind for that might not be a good direction for the ranger class however.

More pet control would be a godsend for easily controlled ranger builds, but see those with an already extremely high skill requirement becoming exceedingly difficult. Melee ranger for example you have to pay a lot of attention to your timings and need high levels reaction time and good instinctual reflexes built from good amounts of pratice. You’re getting hit by more attacks, timing interrupts and stuns very carefully, fighting against your sword planting in timing your dodge rolls, very easily put yourself in a downhill fight if you mistime a utility or react poorly to stun at the wrong time; throw in having to control a pet with your mouse as well like a unit in Starcraft on top of that as some might have in mind, however nice for longbow spammers.. would make skill requirement on melee ranger even higher, maybe to the point of becoming a brain workout. I could see that becoming a living nightmare.

Plus, while admittedly not being an expert in programming; with reassigning pet locations even if the pet was controllable to that degree (as some ranger suggestions seem to demand) could increase scripted requests to the server for pet movements which would still potentially see pets responding slowly and increase strain on servers, that given certain responses by certain balance team members; I’m not certain the servers could handle the added load from a few thousand rangers constantly clicking their pets location requests everywhere. Despite that I’m not completely opposed to such pet control options, only hesitant towards them.

Definitely all true. I don’t think that the state of the game can physically handle the level of control players would like to see with the pet without recoding the pets entirely. From what I understand, ANet took the route of having the pets inherit from open world monster AI, and unfortunately, what rangers are requesting, and what I doubt will happen, or happen any time soon, based on how tedious it would be, would be to remove how the pet is currently implemented, then code pets as their own entity with their own AI entirely.

Since the likelihood of that is low, what did you think of my previous suggestion? This: My 2 cents on it is that I think that removing the rooting animation and allowing pets to attack while moving, but only for autoattacks, would be the best middle ground. Damage output balanced as necessary of course.

Doing that would allow pets to have more decent sustain than they have now, but because they couldn’t land their burst/cooldowns without setup from the player through CC/positioning, it wouldn’t be such an overpowering change that it would be unfeasible.

At least not in my opinion lol. I’m not sure whether or not it would fix, or even bandaid fix, the core issue though. Maybe making Agility Training just part of the pets coding would be a start?

I agree with the suggestion. If it can be executed, it should. I had thought Jon Peters suggested that the animation system could not support that, but now I am not sure if that was directed towards that debate or the F2 cast time debate. I have to re-read those posts in the Dec 10 changes thread and double check on that.

I worry the pet rooting problem may source from something different in nature than the sword 1 rooting though.. and I’d love to and hope that we can hear more from the balance team on that one. If enabling pets to attack and move simultaneously is easy as it would be to take rooting of off sword 1, then by all means they ought to do that. The fact that it’s still around most likely means there is a lot more to it, though.

Liza.2758:

i don’t think it needs anymore condition removal tbh if you grab that dodge – poison and other cleans ranger already has.

without poison you can pretty much outheal the dots if you are regen build.

I kinda want SB to give some more condition otherwise it really sucks without spirit fire.

It’s not about capability to reach high condition removal; it’s about the way it’s done and the lack of choices available to make in such. Many other classes, have for example heals on 15-20 second cooldowns that offer very similar levels of raw healing output while simultaneously removing 3 conditions, be it the full 3 or a specific 3: “Poison, burning and bleeding” or variations like that, in addition accessing some arguably much better on demand condition removal when traited right. Our condition removal from a non-traited ranger is laughable in comparison to certain classes. Healing Spring is extremely overrated, for one thing. It’s a great utility for team play, but on the individual level? Overtime it’s getting massively out healed by Heal as One and Troll Unguent as well if you miss any of the finishers, which is going to happen now and then especially when AE heavy classes are throwing hazardous red circles all over your precious field or you have to stop for a second and reposition swoop so as to not fly into a group of roamers engaged in battle while you are leaping that field. It sounds great in theory but in practice it really has its limitations. Especially in tankier fights over the course of say a minute and 20 seconds, but even in 20-40 seconds encounters. The healing numbers on it are not tweaked high enough to match the cooldown, and you can’t always abuse that water circle like you’d expect.

More condition removal options should be available from the default, and ones with decent healing to cooldown ratios included. Removing a couple conditions and healing maybe 8k-12k every 30 seconds is laughable. And some who roll with Vigor on heal or any runes proccing on heal actually want to cast heals more frequently, not less frequently.

jcbroe.4329:

So basically, making the pet hit more reliably even if it would mean numerical adjustments to any damage needed would be better than how pets currently work?

More or less. With pets, its hit or miss. In some cases, namely where targets are standing still and the full might of the class can be brought to bear.. it becomes exceedingly powerful. I think we as a class should want our damage to be at 100% when we launch a successful attack; not 70% percent with a cat, drake, canine or ursine and what not helplessly chasing a moving target while the ranger does all the heavy lifting with uplevel style damage. That or obviously, the pet could be made a choice rather than forced.. which is unfortunately something that ArenaNet historically expressed its being adamantly opposed to. Right now it seems that two; ranger and pet; are expected to fight as one entity- so we need to be able to attack in unison. Enemies randomly hitting movement keys or teleporting, whatever just mitigates that expectation far too easily.

Another argument for a different method to theoretically achieve that desired result is increased pet control. I fear that what some people have in mind for that might not be a good direction for the ranger class however.

More pet control would be a godsend for easily controlled ranger builds, but see those with an already extremely high skill requirement becoming exceedingly difficult. Melee ranger for example you have to pay a lot of attention to your timings and need high levels reaction time and good instinctual reflexes built from good amounts of pratice. You’re getting hit by more attacks, timing interrupts and stuns very carefully, fighting against your sword planting in timing your dodge rolls, very easily put yourself in a downhill fight if you mistime a utility or react poorly to stun at the wrong time; throw in having to control a pet with your mouse as well like a unit in Starcraft on top of that as some might have in mind, however nice for longbow spammers.. would make skill requirement on melee ranger even higher, maybe to the point of becoming a brain workout. I could see that becoming a living nightmare.

Plus, while admittedly not being an expert in programming; with reassigning pet locations even if the pet was controllable to that degree (as some ranger suggestions seem to demand) could increase scripted requests to the server for pet movements which would still potentially see pets responding slowly and increase strain on servers, that given certain responses by certain balance team members; I’m not certain the servers could handle the added load from a few thousand rangers constantly clicking their pets location requests everywhere. Despite that I’m not completely opposed to such pet control options, only hesitant towards them.

Durzlla.6295:

jcbroe.4329:

Durzlla.6295:

I gotta say, one thing I’ve noticed about ranger is in PvP it’s pretty mindless with a few weapons to be good (SB for example), so the skill ceiling is just sooooo low because of how kittening passive ranger plays. This really hurts the prof as a whole because there’s almost no difference between a good and bad ranger (some builds there is but that’s like 2, MAYBE).

I will say though that as simple (and demanded) as giving rangers full control of their pet would be to shoot up the skill ceiling it won’t help the prof as a whole , we need trait and utility reworks so we aren’t pigeonholed into 30pt investments to bring utilities up to par.

I’ve been playing with Axe/Dagger Sword/Torch, spirit build without Storm Spirit (so my spirits don’t do damage, only utility), and my pet on passive so I have to manage it’s targets, so nobody can say I’m just AA spamming and being carried, at least no more than engis running Incendiary Powder or Dhuumfire necros.

I have to say, that it’s the only time I feel like I’m using any sort of APM to be effective, but the thing that takes the fun out of it is managing your APM and multitasking and everything perfectly, but the pet still not “behaving” properly.

For instance, I get my wolf knockdown, and chain it into the fear to land, so, perfect, I switch to my river drake, hit f1, and f2, and the drake still decides it wants to look at and shoot it’s f2 at the wall because it takes like 5 seconds before a summoned pet is able to “think” and select the target you tell it to select.

Like, I couldn’t have had a more perfect input, but the mechanic itself is limiting, and it’s just frustrating, because I can pull off other combinations of skills like this on other classes, just not ranger.

I feel your pain…. I know I run a Longbow+ Sword/Dagger (or warhorn) for the same exact reason, and I recently moved into using only survival utilities because they’re the only ones that feel like actual utilities.

Our shouts are just, let’s be honest, lame, I still think they should effect your pet and 5 nearby targets (excluding you) and can be traited into boosting you. Our spirits are really lack luster, I would like to see them more like shaman totems from WoW aka really easy to kill, immune to AoE so you have to target them to kill them, but a really devestation effect if you don’t deal with them. Our signets shouldn’t need traits to be worthwhile, end of story, and then traps just don’t work well with any non trap build…

PS: I didn’t comment on the pets because I could rant for hours about how stupid our pet AI is

Shouts are good when traited with nature voice and shout cooldown reduction on beastmastery and further enhanced with soldier runes. Removing AE indicator circles can make casting shout feel a little more efficient and if you have a mouse with multiple buttons, getting the f3 skill placed to cancel out guard when needed can be decently comfortable and viable. With this setup, Guard and Protect Me becomes a setup to be respected. That allows you a controlled stunbreak and damage redirection every 48 seconds, permament regeneration and protection on your pet which greatly boosts pet survivability, near permanent swiftness, and perma regen(Regen when coupled with other traits you will end up having anyways). Stealthing your pet with Guard is especially valuable when timed and utilized right, especially setting up good ambushes with River and Marsh Drake F2 from stealth, although do to lack of pet control can be hard to truly utilize to its fullest. Shouts are actually be one of the utilities, that when traited and supported right, best promote synergy between the ranger and the pet. However, they are still lackluster in some senses from what they offer the ranger character. And some of them just don’t seem to live up to expectations in pratice.. Sick Em’, and Search and rescue namely.

So yeah. shouts. Good but admittedly not great. I agree that shouts they could use some tweaking. If additional condition removal could be accessed through other means or traits, I’d ditch this setup in a heartbeat.

I roll a power/regen melee build, and have the exact same problem. I carry my build with months of experience and good instinct, but in the tooth and nail fights its always stupid things like the pet holding me back against kiting targets, hence why I do admittedly spend a lot of time complaining. It comes a point where you realize the same amount of time, build experimentation and practice invested into certain other classes/builds could yield far, far greater results but for all the wrong things. Issues like pet AI, limited access to condition removal alternatives, lack of perks on healing skills, and some utility skills and traits that just plain suck.

Many others realize this, and the end result is a forum full of ranger complaints that never end because the balance team replies never seem to include anything that would amount to any level of empathy. Always some “Condi bunker ranger is good!” “Rangers have high participation in SPvP” reply variant is given. Even if you believe the team is aware of the issues and spending real time to address them; when they don’t indicate such on the forums, you start doubting, get frustrated/angry and make an ill-fated post in the spirit of disappointment/frustration.

As it stands, we’re in a never ending cycle. Just a few decent forum replies from the balance team could help relieve a lot of ranger stress, but I guess that would get our hopes up too much. The lack of communication is adding too much frustration to the ranger class. Judging from what I see daily on the forums, what the ranger class desperately needs now is some stress relief. The first step is too decrease your attachment to the game and class at least slightly, and take a breather. The second is for Jon Peters to stop making replies that sound indignant, misinformed or downplaying towards the serious issues. (Ie. 30% of your character being easily avoided by mindlessly spamming your left and right keys when you fight a ranger.) These are huge, extremely aggravating, issues. They are not issues you can sidestep by randomly citing some ranger spvp participation figures that mean NOTHING other than highlighting the fact that ranger is popular class, something the anniversary post figures showed long before that post was made.

jcbroe.4329:

Detharos.3157:

Didn’t notice this before I posted my suggestions list. Great post, although the potential that could come from your view on sword/greatsword competing with each other greatly worries me. As a power melee ranger, I use both simultaneously. Running a sword+x/Greatsword build became impossible for condition damage builds when bleed was removed from maul. By either converting one of the two to more condition based damage output, you’d destroy the ability to run with both together, killing a few already rare but perfectly viable power builds and further feed an already massively fattened completely oversaturated condition gameplay style. Damage gained from power doesn’t scale as well as condition damage, and when I have finally found a build that enables to achieve respectable survivability to damage ratios while moving away from conditions spam, I am adamantly opposed to any change that involves tossing on more bleeds and poisons to sword or greatsword, especially if it came at the cost of physical damage.

As for the pet AI thing, I hope people understand that the pet autoattacks being negated via misses through sidesteps is just as much as issue as slow/misfiring f2s as well. People often in practice in mobile combat mitigate entire thousands of ranger damage through sidestepped pet auto attacks. It’s too much.

The AI/animations of pets not being able to “keep up” with player controlled opponents definitely is an issue that isn’t stressed enough yet in this topic, and that could probably use some discussion. It was never really truly discussed in detail within the ranger forum, which is why I held off on discussing it here, because there is always the counter argument for it that “a pet that would always hit with pets in their current state would be too powerful and take too much of a gameplay element away from the ranger by being an overly effective damage component that plays for the player too well making the ranger class too forgiving.”

Not that I won’t add it, I just want to see the discussion for it hahaha. As some key points to discuss: is the pet reliable? What is the current hit percentage on a moving target and how often do they hit? Would making the pet “stick” to a target for a 100% hit percentage be too strong? Is there some approachable middle ground between the two ideas?

My 2 cents on it is that I think that removing the rooting animation and allowing pets to attack while moving, but only for autoattacks, would be the best middle ground. Damage output balanced as necessary of course.

As for your concerns with my ideas for the sword, I didn’t really want to touch it’s damage output, but I thought that adding a blind to the initial dodge back on Sword 2 might be a nice feature that plays well with how melee ranger works currently, which is fairly evasive.

As for the torment on sword 3 versus poison, on condition builds, the poison ends up being redundant, and almost over maintainable, while in a power build, the poison doesn’t really fit well imo with how the rest of the sword attacks are basically about soft CC’ing and out maneuvering opponents. So I figured torment would be a nice condition that punishes opponents from moving, similar to soft CC, but that can be made stronger damage in a condition based build, and since it is the only other mainhand weapon aside from axe, I thought that it would be a good way to turn the weapon into a weapon that works in both types of builds.

Just to give you some reasoning, if you still don’t like the idea, I totally understand.

Thank you for the feedback though!

Ah, that would be alright then. I love the idea of the blind as well.

As for the pet AI and pet auto-attack discussion, currently there’s a very few ranger builds hitting Survivability to damage ratios that alarm people when the thought of the pet damage raising from higher hit ratios is mentioned. Namely they are certain condition builds for the most part from the nature of how condition damage ignores toughness and can be used as “fire and forget” enabling a full focus on evasion and kiting.. also how in some cases the starting damage points might be a bit high or the stacks too easily applied. (Certain bleeds and perhaps the damage allowed by torches despite the cooldown.) There MAY* be some very specific berserker builds that could be a little damage saturated with the right pets if such a change was made. In that case, it’d be easy for ArenaNet to tone down the ranger damage of the offending builds that become an issue with properly functioning pets in exchange for massively upping the pet hit ratio; to approximately equate to the same thing, but simply enabling more builds.

nicknamenick.2437:

Detharos.3157:

While we have different class mechanics, the largest raw healing numbers over a period of about 120 seconds I can get on ranger would be with Heal as One. Comparing the two, on my current ranger with an ascended cleric greatsword, 3 ascended cleric trinkets and about another 75 healing power from my other trinket slots, and a FULL 25 stacks of healing (+250 healing) power my Heal as One only hits about 7.3-7.5k (not sure which) which is with no added perks individually on a 20 second cooldown timer, and easily interrupted and susceptible to poison reductions. (Especially for many ranger builds in how limited we are on controlled condi removal.)

So, if Healing Signet really is topping 8k every 20 seconds as many are saying it does with no healing power coupled with by default larger damage reduction from armor type further augmented by easy access to many, many damage reduction functions via traits and skills.. then yes, healing signet may just be a little bit too high at least in comparison to what my class deals with. To be fair you can entertain the “well rangers have a lot of evades argument” but warriors have easily enough damage reduction by nature in every single warrior build(And high damage to survivability ratios) too easily outdo any evade spam.

Wanna compare the rest also?
Yeah warriors have also more health and armor.. but you can also use allot of evade skills + kite around way more compared to warriors + you have protection etc..
I would be happy to get some evade skills on my sword and some protection + stealth also you have to trade for that Healing signet..

When a warrior is out of its endure pain/berserker stance and maby shield stance.. after that we eat almost ALL damage we get.. where you can go stealth or use you evade skills also.. + you also have endure pain like skill + almost perma protection where you get way less damage compared to heavy armor warrior…

Nice try. To get survivability levels equivalent to a warrior built with my stats distribution I have to sacrifice my 7, 8 utilities for two shouts, my rune setup. On top of that, because of pet AI any talentless noob who knows how to hit his W,S,A,D keys can negate 30% of any ranger’s damage by attacking and moving simultaneously. The only ranger build that can do that is condi- which means power players like myself bite it in terms of hitting that ideal survivability to damage output ratio that we could EASILY hit by rerolling warrior at the present time.

Or how about we experiment and give every class a passive healing number 6 like healing signet with healing output scaled to reflect their class nature? I guarantee you would see a lot more complaints on forums about other classes. I sure would love if I could keep my 7, 8, 9 skills as full killing utilities and maintain healing as a passive. It’d be nice if fighting full stun/interrupt/daze warriors, my healing was something they could not interrupt. I bet they’d rage in our forums every day when they fought me.

But really to make it simple for you, the BIG difference comes from the fact that Healing Signet can not be interrupted, is not as prone to having upwards of a full 33% of its output nullified by poison, and enables high passive healing while providing the room to dedicate your 7, 8, 9 utilities to full damage/damage support abilities to hit that magical ratio that only warriors seem to be able to hit. I’m not saying it’s groundbreaking overpowered, certainly it isn’t on its own. But little things go a long way in Guild Wars 2.

Didn’t notice this before I posted my suggestions list. Great post, although the potential that could come from your view on sword/greatsword competing with each other greatly worries me. As a power melee ranger, I use both simultaneously. Running a sword+x/Greatsword build became impossible for condition damage builds when bleed was removed from maul. By either converting one of the two to more condition based damage output, you’d destroy the ability to run with both together, killing a few already rare but perfectly viable power builds and further feed an already massively fattened completely oversaturated condition gameplay style. Damage gained from power doesn’t scale as well as condition damage, and when I have finally found a build that enables to achieve respectable survivability to damage ratios while moving away from conditions spam, I am adamantly opposed to any change that involves tossing on more bleeds and poisons to sword or greatsword, especially if it came at the cost of physical damage.

As for the pet AI thing, I hope people understand that the pet autoattacks being negated via misses through sidesteps is just as much as issue as slow/misfiring f2s as well. People often in practice in mobile combat mitigate entire thousands of ranger damage through sidestepped pet auto attacks. It’s too much.

While we have different class mechanics, the largest raw healing numbers over a period of about 120 seconds I can get on ranger would be with Heal as One. Comparing the two, on my current ranger with an ascended cleric greatsword, 3 ascended cleric trinkets and about another 75 healing power from my other trinket slots, and a FULL 25 stacks of healing (+250 healing) power my Heal as One only hits about 7.3-7.5k (not sure which) which is with no added perks individually on a 20 second cooldown timer, and easily interrupted and susceptible to poison reductions. (Especially for many ranger builds in how limited we are on controlled condi removal.)

So, if Healing Signet really is topping 8k every 20 seconds as many are saying it does with no healing power coupled with by default larger damage reduction from armor type further augmented by easy access to many, many damage reduction functions via traits and skills.. then yes, healing signet may just be a little bit too high at least in comparison to what my class deals with. To be fair you can entertain the “well rangers have a lot of evades argument” but warriors have easily enough damage reduction by nature in every single warrior build(And high damage to survivability ratios) too easily outdo any evade spam.

Utility Skills

Signet Active effects
-Please change ranger signet actives to effect THE RANGER first, and to be traited to include the pet, not the opposite as it is currently. The pet is already holding us back a lot of the times so sacrificing actives to help it out only weakens us in most cases. So that means, signet of the wild should, without traits, add a damage buff the ranger character. Signet of stone active should make the ranger invulnerable first, and include the pet only after being traited with Signet of the beastmaster. (which would be more fitting with the trait name anyways.)

escape capability. I feel like rangers should have the capability to excel a little further than they do at in-battle and non-combat mobility, in fitting with one of the definitions of the word ranger: “1. A wanderer; a rover.”

While we are very fast with the right weapons(Sword/gs), we are still greatly excelled by sword/greatsword warriors in that aspect. One of the primary reasons I rolled with s/gs was the potential to make good escapes in WvW roaming, and I don’t see the need in this case for such a discrepancy between us and the warriors in the question of mobility. Please consider including added benefits to some traits to increase the distance created/covered by swoop and sword 2. I’m sure this is shaky grounds, but I’ve always found it weird how you can have such an easier time hitting a high battle escape/combat break ratio on warriors than you can on rangers. I feel we should at least be equal in that aspect when built for mobility, as we make equal sacrifices for it in terms of weapon skills.

Traits

Jon Peters already hinted that more attention is being given to ranger trait lines to increase build diversity. I don’t have much else to say in the way of traits overall outside what I already have, but I would encourage ArenaNet as a whole to continue to listen the some of the discussions in the ranger forum on this topic. And as is the case with all classes, please continue to build a game with great character build diversity in the way of traits. Nobody likes overly defined class roles.

Pets

*New distance/gap closer skill for melee pets: *
When fighting a kiting or moving opponent, it’s no mystery that the melee pets can land as little as 10% of their attacks at times, and spend an extremely inappropriate amount of time waddling around chasing targets. I suggest adding a fifth skill; a distance closer to ALL melee pets. Something like pounce on sword number one or swoop on the GS for the ranger, or the charging skills the warrior has. Something that can rapidly gap a distance. The reason being is, any melee character in this game at this time has some method to fight mobile opponents: a means of catching up rapidly, be it high speed charges, teleport to location skills or whatever. (Some of which I outlined above.) The melee pets of the ranger despite being in equal need of such utilities have no access to them. It wouldn’t cover the difference in damage we suffer from the pet’s limitations with having to stop to attack and the nature of when it launches its attacks, but it would help increase the periods in which we can bring our full might to bear against moving targets which as admittedly much smaller than other classes.

Devourer

-Slightly increase Devourer DPS capability.

I’m not really sure what was intended with the devourer. I always had the idea that it was supposed to be the damage dealer of the ranged pet options, but as it stands it is falling behind where it needs to be. It barely outdamages spiders, yet has far less useful utilities such as immobilize and weakness. I understand the concerns in setting ranged pet damage, however as it stands devourer damage is just too low to make it a worthy alternative to the spiders. The first thing, is take a look at some of the devourer F2s and lower the cast time and consider upping the damage slightly. Lashtail F2 does quite a lot less damage than drake f2s, yet it channels twice as long.

-Get rid of the evade skill on devourer, and add some damage skill.

Honestly, having an evade on the devourer is near useless to begin with. If someone wanted it specifically dead, the evade isn’t going to help all that much and the duration of the evade animation is exceedingly long when its burrowing and unborrowing which drastically reduces its dps output whenever that skill is activated making it undesirable in most cases. To make matters worse, despite the massive amount of time spent on the animation, not all of the animation period has evade attached to it. IIRC when it’s getting out of the ground, it’s not attacking but not evading which is pretty much wasting precious time.

Spiders

I only have one complaint about the spiders, and that’s that one of their attacks creates a combo field that literally lasts barely a second. I don’t know if this was intended or not, but its very, very hard to take advantage of. If you don’t want us doing combo fields in that attack, remove it, and if you do.. give us a duration to work with.

Porky porks

You will be familiar with this complaint from the ranger forums, but the porsine pets F2 has too much delay created between casting the skill, the item appearing on the ground, picking up the item and then the final delay of consuming the item.. to be truly what it should be. I don’t have any suggestions on how to fix this due to the complications with the animations system, but please consider having a brainstorming session on how to make this more viable.

Moas

-Moa heal NEEDS to be player controlled.

Ah, at last the moas. I hate to say it, but the key appeal in using them is just not working out. I’m full melee yet I still find myself missing my moas heals a lot whenever I try them due to the awkward timings of its using it, the cast/animation time and the fact that both me and my opponents are very mobile with skills creating and gapping distances often putting me out of position to take advantage of the heal when it fires off at an preferred time.

-Please do not make the above suggestion an option in exchange for control of the f2 buffs currently held. The reason I say that is that honestly, both need to be controlled to be fully useable.. otherwise the exact same problem that happens with the heal would happen with the buffs.

Healing Skills

I feel ranger heals fall behind other classes in terms of secondary perks and cooldown to benefit ratio even after high evasion mechanics are considered. First let’s take a look at those that just raw heal:

Heal as One: Heal yourself and your pet.
Troll Unguent: You and your pet regenerate health over time
Water Spirit: Summon a water spirit that grants nearby allies a chance to heal when attacking.
(Water Spirit: Aqua Surge):
Heal yourself and cause your water spirit to heal nearby allies.

This leaves us with only one heal skill having an additional perk being Healing Spring. Unfortunately the high cooldown on it greatly waters down the healing output of healing spring, even if you were running sword warhorn/gs to take full advantage of the water field which most are not. Removing 3 conditions every 20 seconds on your heal like a certain warrior heal for example, would in many cases be superior. As such I’d even go so far as to adding the above effect to Heal as One(3 conditions removed), since rangers get extraordinary build diversity penalties when it comes to condition removal.

At any rate, take a look at how many of the other classes in comparison get much more additional effects on their heals, especially condi removes:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Healing_skill

So where as healing skills are concerned, some added perks to ranger heals would be greatly appreciated. Condition removal would be the biggest desire.. even specified conditions like “Removes poison and burn” rather than all conditions, but obviously there are other effects you can consider as well… buffs like might, aegis, retaliation, or other bonuses.

Access to condition removal.
This I’ve already outlined somewhat in the above, but the ranger class is hurting from lack of condition removal options. How many rangers honestly can get the chance to try out Bark Skin when we sacrifice 3 conditions removed per second to get it? Consider adding some minor condition removal traits into other trait lines so the sacrifices don’t have to be so heavy. (There would still be tough choices.)

Weapon Skills

Greatsword:

Greatsword Evade:
Jon Peters as I recall was entertaining the thought of moving the evade from GS 1(3rd strike) to Swoop. We’d see potentially less evade frequency but have more control of how and when we evade. I like this idea, but please add something else into the 3rd strike if you do such. I’d suggest cripple. I’m admittedly biased in that as a greatsword wielding melee ranger wanting to limit my foes ability to escape.. however the greatsword has very little capability to slow down fleeing targets and it would be a godsend.

Greatsword Number 4:
I think it would be better if melee hits didn’t automatically trigger counter-attack so we could block multiple melee hits as well and counter-attack as we please. Instead, the melee ranger counter attack should be done the same way throwing the sword is from range.. and that just which attack is used would change based on range. Logically, it should be up to the player when and how they counter-attack and not up to enemies. Currently melee opponents that spot our counter attack can easily force the counter-attack ending the block early which is annoying when you are getting focused by multiple opponents and trying to block arrows at the same time.

Axe off-hand

-Please consider enabling movement similar to thief dagger storm when utilizing the number 5 Whirling Defense skill.

To be continued:

I agree that the ranger class isn’t as weak as some make it out to be, but whoever that was on the first page who made as if the pet wasn’t a problem and that it’s an l2p issue with players not controlling their pet.. is fooling themselves hardcore. I’m a very skilled melee ranger, and being in melee further enables me to up the hit ratio on melee pets in comparison to ranged users I have loads of cripple and chill, and the pet missing auto attacks… is still a problem. And it’s not from lack of skill. It’s from the melee pets lacking distance closers and human level reaction time and the ability to attack and move simultaneously(Like players do) and ranged pets having their damage scaled too low by ArenaNet to contribute to some builds despite having a higher hit ratio in some fights from their ranged nature.. in contrast to the melee pets which have much higher damage readings. On top of that there are still many pets that have wasted skill slots. The devourer evade for example. Or other pets that have great skills that suffer to bugs or animations system cast delays that make them although good, not ideal in a hardcore fight.. Ie. Pig F2, and the positioning skill cancel problem on drake f2s that happens from time to time.

So yes, the biggest problem by far where PvP and WvW is concerned is the problems with the pet. The pet’s inability to hit a moving target(Ie. strafing/kiting that melee and ranged players alike do almost 100% of the time PASSIVELY.. moving while attacking simultaneously.. it’s a basic fundamental to being a skilled player.. being constantly mobile) limits it in countless fights which limits the ranger class. Furthermore if a target uses a distance creator escape skill.. Ie. lightning reflexes/sword 2 on the ranger, mesmer blink, the guardian teleport or whatever.. even if you the player are equipped with the means to close that distance very quickly if you’re running a melee build (Ie. rapid speed charge skills like greatsword 3, sword number 2 if you break target and use it right, sword 1 pounce) the melee pet itself despite desperately needing equally such utilities to be relevant and carry its weight is not equipped with them and when such things are asked for to enable the pet, a bunch of less informed players of all classes start thinking it would be op and try to deny such changes in the forum; when all we’re asking is simply for the pet to be able to contribute to the fight equally to the ranger rather than holding it back. Think about it logically, you wouldn’t expect a full melee warrior or guardian to fight against a kite heavy player without some means of closing the distances they create quickly or design all their auto attacks so that they cannot move and attack simultaneously right? Why the hell would you expect a melee ranger pet to engage in battle with no such capability?

Not every pet auto attack needs to land, but when the ranger is attacking and successfully landing his attacks, the pet’s attacks need to be hitting the enemy with an equal effort for this class mechanic to work, otherwise only the 70% of the character damage supplied by the ranger makes contact 75% of the time and only at very brief periods do in battle do we get a full 100% dps output from our character, that means its like fighting with an uplevel character, at least for builds that aren’t condition heavy due to problems with power and how it scales.

So yes, ranger is a pretty good class but still heavily limited due to the pet. We suffer equally to other classes on top of that when it comes to trait lockdown not supporting some of the more fun builds, it’s just as hard for us to get that ideal balance of survivability to damage as it is for everyone else. So throw on a 30% damage nerf in a kite/movement heavy fight by investing that into an AI that functions terribly ineffectively against moving players that no other class has to suffer from.. and you have a class that’s more limited than others, but for the wrong reasons. If you’re going to make one class more based on an AI than another, YOU NEED TO EQUIP THAT AI TO DO THE JOB. That means overall AI improvements or at least changing the nature of when it launches its auto attacks based on distance from the target, and giving melee pets distance closers like the sword pounce. Speaking figuratively right now ArenaNet is asking the melee pet nail a board but not giving it a hammer by not giving it distance closers and the capability to attack whilst moving.

I like the suggestions of giving us the choice to roll with a pet or not as I always have, but I don’t think ArenaNet is willing to give us that choice judging by the history of their posts in the ranger forums. One suggestion I made as well was to in this case let us control the character to pet damage ratio so we could reduce how much character output is invested into the pet AI and use it more for stun or heal utilities. It would still be there but victory would hinge far less on whether or not the pet is able to hit the opponent’s but on the player instead. (Or alternatively they could have the choice to upscale the pet damage ratio for those who love the pet reliant builds.) Unfortunately the suggestion never picked up much attention and consequently support.

However making the pet an option (and the consequential damage distribution that results to support it) WOULD be the best option IMO if ArenaNet were willing to do that. But since the opposite seems to be the case, there are at least some alternatives which I believe are very viable that could at least be.. entertained on some level. Some I’ve suggested like here in this thread, some others have suggested here in this thread and other places. I just think its high time these things got taken seriously. Build diversity is hurting pretty badly in many cases and any major change outside the minor trait adjustments we’ve continued to receive would be a breath of fresh air. I don’t believe or agree at all that the ranger classes issues are the type of thing you can solve “One trait at a time”. The current process sees us waiting month after month for small changes with this idea that over the course of maybe a year and a half the total of the trait and pet tweaks if we’re lucky we might finally near the leeway in character building that the other classes have to begin with.

Month after month more and more die hard rangers seem to quit for other games or re-roll their characters because you can simply accomplish more of what they’re aiming for on other classes. I think its high time this pet issue really got looked at with more than a standard reply variation along the lines of “It’s broken, and we can’t fix it.. it would break animations, let’s see if we’ve chanced upon something in a couple months and discuss it then.”

Perma-stealth builds.. and I mean the really, really stealthy ones that find some way to have a moment of visibility as low as like one second here and there.. usually are nothing more than a nuisance anyways. If you’re not equipped with AoEs, and aren’t one shotted by them, simply move on and ignore them. They build themselves around playing mind games; they want you to think they’re pro when they manage to take on 5 people or more when they happen to luck out and jump a group not equipped with a lot of aoe and aoe stun utility and (even when they don’t manage to down anyone) will just end up trolling you. They are expecting you to get angry and keep hunting them down with overly large groups and consequently feed them with a few squishy berserker and uplevel kills that prove and mean absolutely nothing. Don’t feed their ego by letting them make your groups waste 5-10 minutes hitting air while their buddies flip your camps and towers. Most of the really, really skilled thieves seem to be rolling different non-perma stealth builds anyways as they WANT TO BE SEEN at least on some level because they want desperately to stand out as skilled players in a class that is hard to stand out with when played so that you can acknowledge their skill.

You can in turn contribute by doing a /bow or /salute when you fight a thief that isn’t rolling something cookie cutter while simultaneously keeping in your mind that it’s hard to play that class on anything other than a cookie cutter build. (And by that I mean the 2-3 copy paste builds 99% of thieves roll).

After analyzing condi bunker builds more closely, I agree with some of the above posters that may be right on condi builds becoming overpowered with such a change. Nevertheless I am still pushing for this change. If such builds are getting too high of a damage to survivability ratio to justify this change, then that damage needs to be normalized; meaning a reduction/nerf to condi damage base output; and such a change ushered. In such a scenario, the end result would be the same, if done properly… you condi builds would lose a bit of damage from your conditions but gain it from a higher ratio of pet hits.

TBH though I think it’s pretty cruel of those of you running such builds to try to shut down any call for a reasonable change just because one or two builds are working really well. Many power builds are lagging behind because of this exact issue simply because our delivery method of damage is different; and for us, to see our damage constantly lagg behind what it should be simply because of the pet.. for the pet, our very class mechanic to hold us back, even if its anywhere from a mere 20%-30% damage.. its not acceptable. And I know that you all know as well as I do that the numbers are not kitten droppings. For many of us, rolling an equivalent physical damage builds with for example a warrior or guardian or anything else would yield better results and a better damage to survivability ratio for reasons of that exact problem; a large portion of our damage would not be negated to sidesteps due to being invested in a poor AI with no plans for a fix.

I think it’s time we all started agreeing on some reasonable changes to make the ranger function as it should; and a change that works for all builds, not just condition bunker/tank/high evade condi builds alone. We NEED our damage delivery to count just as much as any other class; It’s simply not appropriate to roll this theme of ranger and pet fighting as one; the pet always being present; and then in turn deliver a combat system that sees the pet chasing moving targets and failing to land the majority of its attacks, what’s worse on crippled and chilled enemies. I don’t know about all of you, but I created my ranger with different things in mind than tossing torches and traps at opponents while my pet runs in circles and accomplishes next to nothing. And let’s be honest, that’s the theme of the class right now; “ranger and pet fight as one”, not that unparalleled archer junk. Yet there’s no skills that truly synergize well to live out that vision ArenaNet has for us in the first place. All I’m asking therefore is for the class mechanic to work as intended. For the majority of builds it doesn’t therefore it needs to be fixed. This change wouldn’t even fix what’s broken TBH; the pet would still hold us back for many reasons including f2 problems. It would simply be a step in the right direction.

This is why people keep asking for things like the ability to disable the pet and return the damage to the ranger. Because we have better control of our attacks and the ability to make them land, so that even a little extra damage on them would make the difference. But in addition to ArenaNet being adamantly opposed to that, many rangers continue to call that a distasteful request. I’m not even asking that; I like the idea of the pet, but with the current damage ratio so funky in how it’s invested in the pet; it needs to count, and it needs to work.

Despite having a variety of issues with the pet; critical damage and other certain stats not affecting the pet makes it synergize poorly with countless builds; low hit ratios, long f2 cast times and activation times and problems with skill cancels and misfires causing it to be hard to combo with, slow responsiveness especially when swapped out limiting burst effectiveness… and a countless myriad of issues we continue argue amongst ourselves what a balanced, positive change looks like while ArenaNet continues look ONLY at traits. Fix the class mechanics before you touch the traits!

We need to be in agreement as a class that these are very real issues, or we’re only ever going to have these IMO, boring condition builds having the greatest “bang for your buck”. Our class mechanic is supposed to be the strength and appeal of the class, not its greatest weakness and an overall undesirable mechanic.

This is my latest in fashion. I really like it.

Apologies about the graphics settings but I’m playing on laptop. Planning to get a new desktop real soon so hopefully I can see what it looks on more appropriate settings in the next few days.

Merry Christmas to all players of our matchup! Peace and love to all of you! Be safe this holiday, especially if you drive out on icy roads.

Thanks for the attention and support guys. I really hope something can make it through to the dev team on this, because for so many of us.. it’s only ever the pets that is the truly critical issue.

I understand well the fears involved in tweaking the pet but the bottom line is :

1) AI can never truly match human response time margins already making rangers a risky class with such a high distribution of output to the pet. A class as reliant on AI will be by very nature watered down in those high level, competitive “MLG” style fights ArenaNet is trying to encourage.

2) Pets currently don’t cut it. Unfortunately last time there was discussion on this topic, some dev team member just threw out some meaningless spvp statistics of ranger participation which shows to me they actually lack understanding on this issue. All that proved was that ranger is a popular class due to the similitude of having pets/companions in contrast to real life, that the thought of that connects with many players.. that and that there are many dedicated rangers still trying hard to make this work. This speaks nothing of how they function, or how the pet contributes to rangers, and rangers of all builds and not just condi bunker builds and really high-damage tuned builds that can afford to roll spiders with its higher hit ratio and immobilize.

For one thing, I don’t SPvP much.. but balancing the whole class in how it functions against other players with only analyzing how it does fighting in a cap point with very limited space is a borked analysis to begin with. You cannot balance based on SPvP if you’re talking about confining players to a very limited space with a very limited number of builds. You’d be amazed the number of good ranger builds you eliminate without food buffs, for example. But I digress, when players movements aren’t limited by a cap point, that’s where the true show of skills begins, and that where you see rangers failing massively as his melee pets cannot carry their weight unless their target decides for some reason to stop moving. Players get hit by pets more when their movements are limited to a very small capture point circle, so you don’t see ranger’s opponents playing in ways that limit the ranger as much as they do when their is no capture circle objective.. So for SPvPers you probably will see this more on the SPvP side in duel dedicated games, but still nowhere near as much as in WvW due to many such having player imposed rules to balance things. (Ie. the stick in the arena rule in the middle of the map and junk like that.) In this case though I can say, it shouldn’t in theory break SPvP since the pets will in theory land more attacks there than in WvW anyways, and should only at best bring rangers or at least more ranger builds to parity with the other classes. (Although it most likely wouldn’t even accomplish that.)

But yet surprisingly even expert rangers that SPvP all the time and fight within cap points most of the day still tell me this is an issue when we get into discussions. And for any power build, it’s much, much more an issue than it is for condi bunker builds.

DeadlySynz.3471:

I don’t understand how some people consider any improvement to the Rangers OP? Allowing our pets to hit our targets makes them op?

When I look at things like the warriors insane mobility with high defence and damage, the guardian’s insane defence, utility, and uptime for retaliation, thieves endless stealth, and mesmers following suit..

Is asking our pets to connect on every single attack OP? Even the idea thrown around on making Rangers longbow range 1800 or 2000 for WvW only, how it’d break the game. How exactly is it game breaking considering what other classes bring?

What’s more game breaking?

Guardians continuous uptime on retaliation making AoE on zergs a death trap or a ranger trying to hit a target from far away with an easily avoidable arrow? Or replace that with a pet that connects on all it’s attacks?

How about perma stealth thieves vs pets connecting on most of their attacks? Or a LB range of 1800..

What’s worse is, I’m not even asking for it to land every single hit. Just more. This would give it a distance gapping skill but do nothing to accommodate for the nature of how they attack and which range they automatically trigger skills from. Their would still be a lot of sidesteps, but at least a fair amount less.

Prysin.8542:

would make pets extremely OP.

If you do a BM Bunker spec, with a pet doing constant 1-2k AA’s in addition to Ranger Direct/Condition damage, the BM Bunker spec alone would surpass and or match the DPS done by many non-bunker builds on other professions

You seem to fail to understand the class mechanic. Let me explain. Ranger damage is tuned down on the basis that a portion of our classes’ damage is invested in our pet. If our pet can only land 10% of its attacks against for example, an kiting necro pulsing AoE chill or whatever.. then that ranger, no matter how skilled is doomed to either lose that bout or at best, equal out his foe even if he outskills him since the only real damage landing is that which comes from the ranger and not the pet, which makes it like fighting with an uplevel char. It’s not like the pet’s damage is scaled in such a way to compensate for its lack of accuracy and time spent chasing foes and not actually landing hits, which in comparison to a true melee char like the melee ranger, warrior or thief is abnormally high as the melee pets can only run towards their foes. This combined with the scripting to attack from maximum distance means the majority of its attacks are easily sidestepped, allowing the enemies to conserve the majority of their endurance for the majority of the ranger’s big moves; Maul, rapid fire or what not which only leaves you with stun combos, which unless you haven’t noticed other classes have and can utilize much better than the ranger class.

While we may be able to hit higher dps on a non moving target, we’re an extremely weak class against anything with a smidgeon of intelligence and mobility. If 25%-30% of your character is spending 70% of its time chasing kiting enemies and only lands 30-40% of its auto attacks or less when it uses them, and this not at a cost of any endurance on part of your enemies.. than that is a broken class mechanic and a critical weakness that needs to be addressed.

Your fears are unfounded from lack of understanding of this class.

For example, I’m running a rather powerful power bunker build. But I can tell you right now I could push a similar build far better on a warrior simply because I wouldn’t have any damage invested in an incompetent and incapable AI. This difference is not acceptable, it means every class the ability to outdo us with minimal effort by simply exploiting pet AI functionality when they consider how they move their character when attacking the ranger. If ArenaNet is determined to keep us tied to the pet, “The two fighting as one”.. then that mechanic needs to work better. For that the first step is to properly equip all the ranger pets with the tools they need to function as a part of our class.

This is just a basic thing what’s worse, don’t even get me started on how pets can’t evade toward their opponents means that any engi can nuke them easily even if the ranger can dodge a lot of his attacks by playing very skillfully and carefully.

Also for one thing, 1-1.2k AAs.. the only pet capable of that on any frequency is the jaguar for the most part, which is obviously what you’re citing. Using the jaguar and felines comes at the great risk that they are very, very, very easily targeted and killed leaving the ranger on generally dangerous cooldown. That just means more classes would have to learn2play as some would put it vs. rangers and not fight mindlessly. You’re not supposed to have the luxury of doing that on a skilled player to begin with.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Add-a-pounce-to-melee-pet-auto-attacks/first#post3412450

Please feel free to pitch in and bump this my fellow rangers! I think its too long that we’ve been treated as a pet-dependent class yet seen no non-trait utilities added to pets to truly equip the pets to do their job properly. It’s time ArenaNet throw the pets a bone, and I believe there is a way to augment ranger melee pets (currently the ones functioning the most poorly) WITHOUT breaking the animations system.

To once again outline the band-aid nature of such a change, this wouldn’t be a miracle change. The pet’s AI and lack of quick responses would still hold us back at times, but the overall output should theoretically be higher when they would be spending less time slowly waddling towards mobile foes. (Which is atm completely insufficient even with permanent swiftness.) But it would be a step in the right direction while ArenaNet figures out how to deal with the tecnical challenges posed by the animations system.

Furthermore, I don’t want people to feel this is all I think the pets need, I still feel the pet system needs massive overhaul. Moa heals need to be player controlled, Porcines need a drastically reduced time on their f2 functionality. Devourers need harder hitting f2s and a better skill in place of their basically useless evade, and/or some overall dps increase to truly make them a viable alternative to spiders. Spider’s poison field needs to last for more than 1 second (Seriously? Why is it so short? It’s near impossible to utilize.) or just removed if they don’t want us doing poison field combos with it.

Just about all rangers rolling melee pets suffer a drastic dps reduction in combat vs. moving targets that no other class really sees due to the nature of how melee pets launch their attacks (from the moment the maximum range is reached) and an inability to close distances. While PVE players won’t see much issue with this, skilled opponents in WvW and SPvP as well are always mobile targets. Unlike many mobs, players actually move and attack simultaneously. If you think about it, all characters that have a melee build have multiple methods of closing distances to fleeing and kiting targets very quickly to deal with such movements. Ie. Ranger’s have the pounce on number 1 sword and swoop on greatsword 3. Thieves have heartseeker, warrior’s have various charge and hit skills. But the ranger’s melee pets despite needing the same basic utilities to hit their opponents do not have them and lagg behind in that. (Which is in addition already to the limitations of AI.) It’s not uncommon to see even the fastest auto attack melee pets getting a hit ratio as low as one in twenty attacks against very mobile players.

I think it’s crucial for melee pets on rangers to be treated no differently than players. They must have a method to gap the distance to their opponents and it must be frequent enough to make their attacks less prone to miss to mere sidesteps. You cannot do a job without the right tools and AIs are no different from players in that matter. I’m all for the pet suffering just as a player to an AoE chill pulse and what not, but currently no single melee pet has the amount of distance closing skills they need to contribute to ranger damage and equal out the difference to which the ranger’s natural output is lowered to accommodate for the pet to begin with. Gapping the distance for the pet is not something the ranger himself can do, and frankly no amount of cripple, chill and stun even on a melee ranger can totally eliminate this problem.

So, IMO the most basic solution to this problem is to make all melee range pets’ default/auto attack have a pounce/lunge effect much like the ranger’s sword number 1 pounce. Alternatively if you feel that closes distances too quickly you could add a fifth skill to all the melee pets to equate to this with maybe a five second cooldown tops. (Believe me since pets can’t accommodate for a target’s trajectory well due to having to stop for a brief moment to attack they really need this). Due to potential problems with this in dungeons however, I suggest enabling this as an add-on skill the ranger can control, like an f-5. Let us shift click such a thing to have it enabled for the pet so that we can enable it or disable it accordingly. When enabled, the pet’s auto attack gains the pounce/lunge added in to it, when disabled it’s just a plain auto-attack. I understand their could be some risk for unprepared players in PvE shooting their pet like a rocket into a powerful AoE. But whatever the case, I believe melee pets really, really do need this utility to truly synergize with the ranger.

In advance in case I do somehow perk Anet’s interest on this suggestion, I want to add: such things must be added as a PET SKILL if it is added at all. Do not make such a basic mechanic something we would have to in someway trait for because there is simply no wiggle room in most decent ranger builds to put an extra 5-10 in beast mastery just to make melee pets work on the fundamental level that they should by default.

Darek.1836:

Detharos.3157:

Come on SF I know I’m good at what I do, but that’s a bit much don’t ya think?

it’s like you’ve never even fought IoJ or Kaineng before

Hey, I just thought since we have that “Lil bro” “Mid bro” “Big bro” thing going they wouldn’t mind.. you know, letting me farm some wxp in there. Applied fort don’t come cheap!

Neocyte.8357:

To the ferg bunker ranger in aoe that I had the absolute pleasure of meeting, thanks for the long kitten fight at sf north camp xD.

Haha, so that’s who that was! You’re one tanky ele, I was throwing some serious heat trying to take you down there!

I would’ve flipped the camp too, but totally forgot about the quartermaster and was standing in the red circle asking myself “Why isn’t it flipping?” Pretty embarrassing I must say.

Come on SF I know I’m good at what I do, but that’s a bit much don’t ya think?

Why hello thar HoD! As usual my laptop was not ready.

Giving a shout-out to [RUN] as well for their brutal, vicious defense of dolyaks and camps in IoJ BL just now. You folks deserve a pat on the back for the service to your server during the upgrade process. Not everyone takes the boring job willingly, but defending dolyaks is a crucial process and anyone who does so is worthy of my respect.

As best as I can, in a nutshell from the perspective of a hardcore WvW player:

Ranger class: Work harder for less.

Some very skilled players who have put months of dedication, practice and trial and error will achieve results that are almost comparable to the extreme players of other classes (but in a much more limited sense), but will always 100% of the time lag behind due to broken pet mechanics and traits that while now slightly better, still need some drastic adjusting and improvements on certain trait lines.

So in summary of the above; you can currently make this a “good class” or a “good character” if you work hard enough, but you can never make it a “great” one. Again, this is because of 1) broken pet and 2) lack of trait-provided additional perks on skills/on many of the traits themselves. We need more traits like Nature’s Voice that boost the effectiveness of our combat skills on the 7,8,9 tabs significantly. Other traits need to have “that little extra something” thrown in; for example, the cool down reducing trait for swords and great swords should probably have one added perk like 5% damage or something. In addition to that on the topic of traits, many of the non-chosen traits in appealing trait lines at 5, 15, 25 are just terrible and need to be replaced with useful mechanics. (Ie. pet swiftness on downed state, gg. Completely worthless.)

The class is still despite all that quite powerful in the right hands but even for those elite few players they see that it pales in comparison to what they could pull off with such dedication on a warrior, thief, or mesmer and unfortunately it’s due to same old very simple problems we’ve struggled with for over a year. On the bright side some are being adjusted monthly. Namely traits. We’ve seen some incredible trait improvements and I am hopeful our class will continue to receive useful trait adjustments in the future. Some problems sadly are apparently not easily fixed. (ArenaNet is struggling to find a way to make the pet work properly and has already acknowledged its failings while stating that there is currently no way to fix it without breaking several mechanics. Probably they will look for alternative solutions and provide band-aid solutions in the mean time which never help much.)

As another small tidbit on the bright side, if you are serious your efforts as a ranger and roll with a non-cookie cutter copy and paste build, your efforts WILL be acknowledged. Many people you fight will compliment you for your skilled use of the ranger. While partially this is because it is such a hard class to utilize with its broken mechanic, I hate to say often time this will actually turn out into a bitter sweet experience. Unfortunately many players of other classes don’t know how terrible the pet AI currently is, so the reason they compliment you is simply that from their observation, most rangers are terrible players who are content to sit behind a zerg and fire heavy hitting bow builds and just melt like margarine in a fire the moment something can bypass the zerg or group protecting them. They assume that if your pet is not landing its hits, you’re not using your class right. At best, they are just happy to see a ranger who isn’t terrible at the game. While this is sadly 100% justified in a sense; having fought so many other rangers myself as one I can tell you the majority of rangers really don’t utilize the class to its fullest and are just plain bad with it… however, this speaks to an unfortunate reality where many players just assume ranger complaints on the forums and in-game about the class stem from a player base that as a whole is without skill. While I can say 90% of ranger players are terrible, that doesn’t mean the class isn’t broken. There’s no need to try to shut down ranger complaints in the forums or in-game as some do. The ranger class suffers from some very real issues, and ArenaNet themselves have acknowledged that these are indeed issues. They are serious issues, they exist. The solutions are just very untimely. We have no ETA or further comment for any pet changes, be it AI improvements, controlling the damage ratio of ranger to pet so that we could make it more of a utility and less of a terrible AI with 30% of our damage invested into it, or anything to make it work as intended.

So again, don’t roll this class if you aren’t prepared to work harder for less and wait very patiently for fixes to the key issues it faces.

torridstoic.7492:

I actually did see a couple unicorns today. I have disliked every single one of my matchups against IOJ thus far, because the quality of the “roamers” I’ve seen has been upscale-level (not saying they all are; just the ones I’ve come across) and their 20-man blobs will gladly chase solos all the way back to spawn.
BUT:
We saw the Buns today! Both of them! Normally we would have just let a 2-man squad go, especially since they ran to their buffed camp, but it was a special occasion, so I felt compelled to call for the bag-and-tag treatment.

Also, and more importantly, we had a quality ~5v~5 against some [Trbo] up between N camp and the centaurs. It was frustrating to see downed players waypointing and rejoining the fight, but it was still a lot of fun. Thank you for the good times, unicorns.

That’s no unicorn, that’s a pegasus! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uG9PGqaWeo

spiel.5149:

“FC’s NA “Prime time” isn’t a 8 hour period dude, it’s the brief period when the majority of the NA timezones overlap allowing the greatest NA number output. To my understanding in EST that’s clasically between 7-11PM tops. It’s pretty much only ever during that period you see these world-famous “50-man FC zergballs” of people trying to get inside Micbooboo’s pants. (No offense Bobo, love ya.) Convert that to whatever timezone however you please, for FC that is typically our strong period, even on the weekends.
Dathaul, 80 Melee Ranger
Ferguson’s Crossing server.”

Just so you know . . . . .[Mend] was on FC Bl from 845 pm to 1100 pm last night that falls into your FC NA primetime.

So now everyone is happy and you don’t have to go back and forth about it.

That’s fine, because it doesn’t take away from my point at all, or make any of the IoJ posts I quoted any more meaningful or significant.

Even the bottom feeders of silver being massively > Bronze fourth place in terms of numbers and coverage thereby creating an over-bloated score in respective parings was something HoD proved beyond a reasonable doubt in advance for you, and already boasted about quite enough in advance for you. It’s like you’re harping the same nothings when HoD beat you to the punch weeks ago. As for Darkhaven, their numbers fluctuate with extreme volatility and this week they’re fielding probably less than us, so in advance boasting against them would be meaningless as well.

This boast bandwagon is dead already and TBH, I felt like HoD’s had more substance behind them from what I viewed on the field.