Keep in mind that having HS be a trap provides the opportunity to heal twice in a very short time period if you set up before the fight starts.
That would be pretty great. It’d give trapper rangers twice the condi clear just with their heal to compensate for not having survival skills to make use of the new Survival of the Fittest trait or Signet of Renewal. It’d be harder to use correctly but have a way better pay off when mastered.
I love this trait. It’ll give similar control power of a wolf to every pet if traited.
Who knows? Maybe the brown bear will be a viable choice for builds who lack condi clear as it’ll have the group condi clear without sacrificing a powerful control skill.
I’ll be enjoying it with my river drake. Might be a solid way to land that Lightning Breath more reliably for a change.
One concerned if ranger plays too defensively with these changes there might be backlash as some of community have a poor view of ‘overly’ defensive playstyles not to mention the amount of complaint that will be directed rangers way if it is perceived ‘tougher/more durable/harder-to-kill’ than warrior.
The PVP community don’t want rangers to be competitive in general. Nothing can help that.
why is it hated?
I remember many GW players requesting this kind of game mode at launch a few years back because people wanted something like RA.
It’s hated because a portion of the PVP community of this game just hate anything that isn’t Legacy of Foefire.
Rangers rarely spec into BM now, yes. However once the change happens the BM line will give you faster pet swap, make your pet tankier and hit harder, and make your pet move 30% faster while giving it more powerful critical hits.
There is no ranger build that wouldn’t benefit from these minor traits. None at all. Every ranger build uses a pet as it isn’t optional. Every ranger build relies heavily on their pet’s crowd control to boost their own survivability. Having a pet that lasts longer and hits harder is a benefit to every ranger build.
So I don’t really see why you’d be upset for having to go into BM to get the traits you need if BM has the traits you need.
I favor the idea of making Invigorating Bond cure conditions on activation. We need more condition CLEANSING. The fact that some of our strongest condition management abilities, Empathic Bond and Signet of Renewal, are designed to transfer the conditions to our pet makes us inherently weaker against conditions than every other profession. The pet is a vital part of our profession. We shouldn’t be forced to sacrifice it to save ourselves just because we’re not running a Survival skill heavy build with the right grandmaster trait.
1. Warrior retal uptime is 50%, you can still RF
2. Once warrior retal is up, switch to non-RF skills
3. Time your remorseless. Autoattack will still do massive damageSeriously, the ranger community’s been spoiled with RF. Does nobody remember the time where LB AA DPS was higher than RF? You’ll just be switching between meta-RF and old-AA playstyle according to the situation. Its much more interesting than just pumping out RF every time its off cooldown.
1. 50% is a lot, especially from a single trait.
2. You mean non-Rapid Fire, Barrage, Splitblades, Whirling Defense, Poison Volley, Bonfire, or Hunter’s Call. A lot of ranger abilities are multi-hit skills and not all of them do nearly as much damage as Rapid Fire. Poor Hunter’s Call is already weak. If that procs Spiked Armor near the start the ranger will eviscerate their own HP while doing almost nothing to the warrior.
3. You’re assuming I will absolutely have Remorseless in my build. Not all ranger builds are power based.
Check my post history. I don’t run power longbow. I just don’t fancy suddenly taking a ton of damage because a passive minor trait was off cooldown when I tried to use a skill for some extra damage. Hopefully it will at least have an icon on the boon display so it can be tracked, but a lot of passives don’t.
I think its pretty balanced. You shouldn’t be able to kill all classes with a single RF. 50% retal uptime on warrs isn’t bad as well, you just have to change your playstyle a little bit. The new traits allows us to do just that. Instead of brute-force RFing all day, you can trait for Remorseless and time your LB autoattacks if you can’t afford damaging yourself with RF.
You can’t even kill a full glass zerker warrior with a single Rapid Fire after blowing an elite and all your damage increasing utilities.
At any rate it seems like this trait would give warriors the ability to kill other professions who rely on multi-hit skills by simply standing still and occasionally healing up. In what way is this not passive play?
EB needs to be changed to a cleanse if it’s moved to Beastmastery. The fact it kills our pet makes it wildly undesirable for anyone who’s investing so heavily into Beastmastery.
Or we can remove EB entirely and just spread condition cleanses to some of our skills and utilities. That being said we don’t know what sort of skills, utilities, and traits are coming with the Druid elite specialization, so who knows?
My only issue with these weapon traits in beastmaster is that I have to pick between them and pet traits for my beastmaster build. Aside from that I agree that the greatsword and axes definitely work best with a beastmaster build, so it fits thematically.
You could trait 30% faster pets before and it hadn’t any effect. It runs faster to target, starts biting, slashing, whatever and the target was three miles away before the attack was finished.
Yes you can hit players consistently with pets, if they are afk.
You could, but you’d have to take it over Companion’s Might or Pet’s Prowess which are both much stronger traits for a BM build.
That isn’t actually true. Without Agility Training my pet can and does hit moving players, just not with any great frequency unless I supply it with swiftness or slow/immobilize the target. You can go to the Mists right now and test it if you don’t believe me. Send your pet to attack the moving golem and it will eventually kill it. Now try it again with Agility Training and your pet will be connecting nearly twice as often.
That is on it’s own, of course. Any slow effect will allow your pet to hit the enemy very consistently for it’s duration. That is how you play a beastmaster build. You set the enemy player up to get hit by the pet through careful use of positioning, slows, immobilizes, and other control skills.
Beastmaster is a perfectly viable playstyle, it’s just not meta because there isn’t much it can bring outside 1v1 dueling. A lot of these trait changes look like they’ll be able to address that by giving the beastmaster more support options while improving the build’s dueling power, which could make it a decent point defense build with some roaming capabilities. The pet traits definitely are not useless.
Do you really only see the possibility of 1v1’s in pvp? Do you really miss the whole point of teamfight? When ele will be the one standing on point, possibly with shoutbow. And ele can be pressured by mesmers/thieves on ledges. Here you go, your trait is being useless.
The trait isn’t being useless. Every time a thief jumps you with a backstab the trait is doing it’s job. Every time you’re fighting on point against multiple opponents the trait is doing it’s job. Every team fight where you’re standing in a cleave storm trying to revive a downed ally the trait is doing it’s job. This is a VERY good trait.
The fact rangers and mesmers can bypass it with strong ranged damage means that the trait, for all it’s power, still has counterplay to keep it balanced. This is a good thing.
Also in the very team fight you suggest the ele also has team members. Ideally if there is someone perched and sniping you your allies should respond by pressuring the sniper in return.
I doubt they’d make the trait in such a way that standing next to an ally who’s trying to provide you boons would completely destroy the effectiveness of your build. More than likely it’s per application.
Why merging weapons into the beastmaster line? It could be a cool option, if you really use this line. But as I said, beastmaster-specialization is useless while pet can’t hit a moving target.
Pet’s Prowess was merged with Agility Training and made a minor Beastmaster trait. That means your pet will be moving 30% faster.
This means that our pets, once we specialize in beastmastery, will be able to easily outrun player characters who don’t have swiftness and still keep up with those who do. This in turn means the pet will be able to land hits fairly consistently. Combine that with the ranger’s many, many slows and immobilizes and your pet shouldn’t have any problem hitting it’s target. So long as the ranger remains an active part of the combat and doesn’t try to let his pet solo, anyway.
I can get my pet to consistently hit players in PVP NOW without Agility Training. It’ll be far easier once these changes are made.
Looks like Beastmaster will be stronger than ever. Here are some possible set ups I see.
Shout Beastmaster
Beastmastery: Resounding Timbre, Natural Healing, Beastly Warden.
Nature Magic: Bountiful Hunter, Vigorous Training, Protective Ward.
Marksmanship: Beastmaster’s Bond, Steady Focus, Remorseless.
Sooo many outgoing boons just from swapping pets on top of perma regen and quite a bit of tankiness. Not to mention a blast finisher with every pet swap. Could swap Vigorous Training for Windborne Notes for even MORE regen spam but it might be going overboard.
Offensive Beastmaster
Beastmastery: Companion’s Might, Wilting Strike, Beastly Warden.
Nature Magic: Nature’s Wrath, Vigorous Training, Protective Ward.
Marksmanship: Beastmaster’s Bond, Beastmaster’s Might, Remorseless/Predator’s Onslaught.
Lots of Weakness, good amounts of vigor, and the pet’s F2 causes enemies to move TOWARD them while they apply weakness and their damage. The pet is going to hit pretty hard and it’s F2 is almost guaranteed to land… It’s a beastmaster’s dream come true.
My only confusion is why the Marksmanship line has so many traits tied to the pet. Truth be told I probably won’t use a bow with either build, so it’s a bit weird to specialize in Marksmanship when I’m not even a marksman. Aside from that little flavor hangup the new setup seems ideal for the kind of builds I want to play.
I am glad spirits are being looked at. I don’t mind them being immobile so long as we have a way to terminate the spirit prematurely so we can move to a new location and summon them again. They’ll also need a much larger range for their passive effect, maybe something like 5,000 units. Which is the same as a ranger’s pet leash. Maybe spirits die automatically when the ranger leaves the effected area.
Their active abilities also need to be ground targeted and be ranged. That way the spirits can remain stationary and the ranger can actively choose where they want the spirit’s active ability to activate. Maybe have a 600-900 range from the spirit on the active abilities so you DO have to put the spirits somewhat close to the field to get their full effect. It also makes positioning massively important as a ranger might move too far from a spirit to benefit from the active effects.
For the shout… well I guess that will be the necromancer burden.
Clearly necromancer shouts will just be a list of profanities they can scream at their Flesh Golem to make it do what they want for a change.
I hear ranger shouts are getting a similar fix.
Companion’s Prowess: Critical hits give might to the pet and pets do more critical damage.
Move this one to Beastmastery where it belongs.
Agility Training becomes baseline.
Invigorating Bond: You and your pets regenerate health and your pet heals nearby allies when using it’s F2.
Then you could go into Wilderness Survival for Barkskin, Nature Magic for Fortifying Bond and Survival of the Fittest, and Beastmastery to make a very strong high sustain beastmaster build.
Sounds pretty epic. I imagine it’ll be tied into the Zephyrites in some way. Perhaps the elementalist has adapted some of their elemental magic to become more like a raging storm?
Shapeshifting is the least likely. Druids as of Guild Wars lore have nothing to do with animal transformations and everything to do with spirits. The druids of Guild Wars are people who shed their mortal bodies and became spirits of nature. If we do shapeshift it will probably be an elite transformation that turns us into a Druid Spirit for a short time.
I’m leaning toward a mix of 1 and 2. I doubt they’d give us an ENTIRE specialization dedicated purely to support. I imagine it’ll offer skills that have a bit of both and our build will determine if we go heavy into support or try to be an AoE damage fighter. For example a druid could go into Nature Magic and the Druidism trait lines to be a specialized support build but perhaps Wilderness Survival and the Druidism line to be more of a tanky AoE build.
@Tragic Positive
I think that’s a unique aspect of the Poison Mastery trait. It effects both you and your pet as if you both had the ranger’s condition damage, but only for poison. I could be wrong, though.
@Ravinsild
The devourers are really bad pets. Their conditions will hurt your damage output as they do much less damage than yours, and only one of you can have your conditions ticking at any one time. They also have really, really weak direct damage and a tendency to waste time moving AWAY from the opponent, despite their knockback needing melee range.
If I were you I’d go for the Jungle Spider for the immobilize. It’s one of the best pets rangers have and would work well into your desire to keep the enemy at a distance. If you want the poison for the healing reduction and not the damage then Marsh Drake is also an excellent choice. It’s tanky, hits pretty hard, has cleave, and it’s F2 will hit really hard. It can also apply weakness which is pretty great as it makes the enemy dodge less, and has a functional blast finisher you can capitalize on if you’re good. Drakes always use their blast finisher as an opening move after being called, so keep that in mind.
It’s good to try and make your own builds, keep at it! Just ask questions and try and figure out why the metabattle builds are so effective. Once you understand why you’ll be able to make your own builds that work just as well.
1v1 you’ve got PoS and SB, plus possible bounces from pets or other AI (very plentiful.) Your pet very quickly gets to 25 might with any bounces and fortifying bond.
In group fights, the autoattack is still pretty decent, and you can pull people out for a group spike (i.e. start casting the dog immob as you throw the pull.)
I don’t think I’ve ever run dual axes in my life, but I guess I can see the appeal. As long as you have a defensive weapon on swap and don’t get stuck in the axes. Or worst case scenario, you get stuck in the axes and use LR or SoS or something.
I use all those tactics as well, but the damage doesn’t seem to be the equal to Whirling Defense on an immobilized target. Especially when you can use Path of Scars right before initiating Whirling Defense to knock the opponent down. That being said a lot of my damage still comes from the pet. As I mentioned in my post about the build I was using I combine Whirling Defense and Lightning Breath from the river drake together while the enemy is stuck in Entangle. Preferably with myself between the target and my pet so when the enemy breaks loose and instinctively moves away from my attack they’ll still be getting hit by the river drake.
I rarely get stuck with just axes, and when I do I disengage and try to skirmish a bit until the greatsword is ready again. Worst case scenario is I’m stuck in axes for a while and have to hold the point, but that’s what Barkskin is for. It’s really amazing how long that 25% HP lasts when you’re taking 50% less damage.
I can’t imagine they’d give us a set of utilities we already have. I could see engineers getting them.
Oh wow, this is going to be exciting. THREE grandmaster traits?! Oh man… I could make a killer Longbow Beastmaster ranger with Read the Wind, Survival of the Fittest, and Zephyr’s Speed… Or a bunkery beastmaster with Nature’s Voice, Barkskin, and Natural Healing. Maybe something with Moment of Clarity too.
Trapper Rangers might finally have more trait variety. And I can only imagine what the druid traitline will give.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m the only A/A ranger on this forums that takes advantage of the 900 range and doesn’t charge in and try to whirling defense on people….
So… How DO you kill people with your axe? Just the auto attack?
This is the first time I’ve made a build with dual axes as the premier weapon. Usually when I use axes it’s as a support tool in a beastmaster build or condition builds.
That being said Whirling Defense has been very effective so far. It does decent damage, not a burst but decent, while stacking a ton of vulnerability on the enemy which sets them up for a very hard hitting Maul. At the very least I’ve been able to 2v1 enemies more easily with the build I provided than with the typical longbow ranger.
Granted I am fully willing to admit that my success is likely derived more from my opponent’s lack of familiarity with the offhand axe than anything else. Such is the biggest advantage of playing an unorthodox build.
You should just avoid the condition based pet traits entirely. Even with Expertise Training your pet only has 350 condition damage, which is barely noticeable. Your pet will also be stacking conditions that will override your own much stronger conditions, so instead of doing 1,000 damage a tick with a bleed stack your enemy would go through stretches of time where they take maybe a couple hundred damage a tick instead. You’re actually lowering your damage output by setting your pet up for condition damage.
You’d get a LOT more out of your build getting rid of Expertise Training and Rending Attacks and replacing them with Vigorous Renewal and either Intimidation Training for more cripple or Vigorous Training for more vigor. Vigor likely being much more important since it provides the boon to your allies as well and you already have a done of crowd control.
Also, don’t be afraid to take Healing Spring as your heal if you’re so low on condition cleansing. Yes, Troll’s Ungent is our best heal in terms of healing potential, but if you have NO condition cleansing you really, really need something to deal with that. Being weak to conditions is fine, not all builds are effective against everything, but you shouldn’t be so weak to conditions that you accept death from the very first condition bomb. Make them work for it.
I’m always drawn to the nature mage arcehtype and the beastmaster archetype. In some ways ranger is the combination of both. I’m a very outdoorsy person in real life and that carries over to the sort of themes I’m attracted to in games. I nearly always play a druid, or as close to one as I can get.
It’s why I almost always play beastmaster and spirit builds despite them not being optimal anymore. I just love the flavor of it. I’m also very fond of the wilderness survivalist character type, which is why the first ranger build I really fell in love with was the trapper ranger.
Once the druid specialization is available, whatever it may bring, I’ll almost certainly have one of my two rangers choose that as well. I’m very excited to take my character’s relationship with nature to the next level.
Might is the only thing with any decent duration and even then, its only the same as you would get from sigil/blasting fire fields. I say again, all boons need to be copied and have the same duration as the ranger. All. Vigor is not useless, it may perhaps fulfil Bountiful Hunter.
No, if the pet got the same duration boons as we do then their might stacks from axe auto attack would disappear in seconds after swapping weapons. We wouldn’t be able to maintain the 25 stacks of might at all. It would be 10-15 might with the axe and maybe 2-3 might in our second weapon set, which would hurt beastmaster builds a lot more than it’d help.
If anything Fury and Swiftness just need longer durations, and even then with the Warhorn equipped I can easily maintain perma fury and swiftness on my pet anyway. Your change would only destroy my ability to keep high might stacks on my pet with little to no additional investment.
So… I’m a roleplayer. My idea of having fun in this game is to sit in one of the cities typing in /say and throwing in the occasional emote. Minis and armor skins are VERY important in making my character look appropriate for the role I am playing.
So by your logic why can’t I earn my much needed gold and skins playing the game the way I choose to? Probably because that’s not how games work.
You want PVP exclusive rewards? You have to do PVP. The reward is given to people to reward them for doing PVP. Giving them out in PVE would remove what’s special about them.
It’s like wanting to win the Super Bowl and only wanting to play baseball to do it. You can’t. You’re playing an entirely different sport without the same “game world”.
I’ve also started playing with dual axes oddly enough.
Hybrid variant. It doesn’t have easy access to multiple types of conditions so I focused heavily on bleed damage. The bleeds get cleansed fast enough but they can also be reapplied pretty quickly as well so it doesn’t hurt as bad. The bleeds help compensate for a lack of legit burst so I can still do fair damage with the tankiness of celestial.
And this is the zerker variant. You could max it out more for raw damage but I personally prefer a bit more defense than what the zerker amulet offers.
The general strategy with this build is to pop Signet of the Wild, run into the center of the point, and use Entangle followed by Whirling Defense as the river drake unleashes Lightning Breath. It does a LOT of AoE damage during the two channels that hits everyone in the immediate vicinity while stacking vulnerability and reflected projectiles. After that, depending on how much health you have left, you can either follow up with a Splitblade on your nearest target for more bleed stacks or swap to the Greatsword and finish with a Maul.
Barkskin keeps you from being focused down unless you have 4+ people hitting you in melee. The reflect stops projectiles and the stability stops the channel from being interrupted. When you hit 25% health it activates Signet of the Wild via Enlargement on top of the 50% damage reduction, which makes it very hard to finish you off should you get in a hairy situation. Then you just disengage with Lightning Reflexes+Swoop.
I’ve actually found this to be really strong in Courtyard as a way to help your team push the enemy team back, and occasionally secure a kill. It’s likewise been effective in Conquest, but it could just be a matter of no one expected offhand axe.
I’m not sure if Enlargement and Signet of the Wild share an internal cooldown or not. Nothing in the game text says it does nor does the wiki. I’ll have to test it on some NPCs and pay closer attention. If they do I’ve still found the Enlargement trait helpful on securing a stomp on more than a few occasions.
Oddly enough this build seems to destroy power rangers in team fights. If you stand between the necromancer and his prey his auto attacks will reflect and shred his health. I actually almost won a 2v1 against a necro and a thief with just Whirling Defense as the damage took out the thief and the necro killed himself. I only lost due to the crazy damage of the necro downed state.
EDIT: Did some testing and there is no internal cooldown. I activated Signet of the Wild and went down below 25% health and got ten stacks of Stability rather than five. Whether this means I get a 50% damage boost (25% from both signets) and 100% speed boost (50% from both signets) is hard to tell.
(edited by Ehecatl.9172)
Fortifying Bond is one of our best minor traits. I’m shocked you have it rated so low.
Any build that uses mainhand axe, which is a large chunk of our condition or hybrid builds, can benefit from the excellent synergy with this trait. It lets you keep huge stacks of long lasting might on your pet, often between 15-25 stacks, for the entire duration of the fight. Even with zero points in beastmastery that’s enough to make your pet hit hard, adding even more pressure to your opponent for very little investment. Often no investment as Nature Magic is one of our two major trait lines that has one of our best grandmaster traits, so it’s not like you have no other reason to go into that trait line. Because it’s only a minor trait means we don’t even need to choose it over something else, which lets it fit into any build comfortably.
It also increases the up time of regen on our pet to make them survive longer, fury and swiftness up time to make them crit and hit their target more often, and gives the pet a little more protection to weather the large AoE hits.
I understand that only a few of us try to run pet-centric builds anymore but that doesn’t make everything pet related trash tier. There is no build that can’t benefit from sharing the boons they get with their pet, and this trait’s synergy with mainhand axe is phenomenal.
As much as I dislike turret engineers I have to say that the condition damage might be too much. The engineer is already vulnerable to conditions which means a good condition build is already at an advantage. Additionally turrets can’t be cleansed of conditions, which means dropping a condi bomb would be a guaranteed wipe of all turrets on the field.
I do like them being able to be critically hit though, as it means we can focus on specific turrets to destroy them and remove the engineer’s toys systematically. First rocket turret, then thumper, then healing. Suddenly the engineer is very vulnerable and can be beaten, but only if the engineer fails to ACTIVELY defend his turrets from the enemy burst.
Basically condition builds should be able to melt the engineer without touching the turrets while power builds need to destroy the turrets before engaging the engineer. It’d make a nice balance in how you approach the fight without making condition builds the ultimate hard counter to turret engineers.
(edited by Ehecatl.9172)
I agree with everything Yamsandjams said. It sums up all the problems I’ve had running spirits in both PVP and PVE.
I think the biggest buff would be to have spirit active abilities be ground targeted. Then, instead of the spirit moving to the location, just have the spirit cast their active ability on the selected area from where they are stationed. This way you can control your spirit effects without putting your spirit right in the middle of all the cleaves.
I’d also make at least some of the spirit form fields with their actives. Sun Spirit making a fire field would provide way more value as the ranger can then blast it for might or shoot through it for better burning up time. Water Spirit should drop a water field, and air spirit should drop a lightning field. This is suppose to be our main support build so make it more capable of providing support to allies.
And I’d buff Frost and Storm so that they have more noticable effects in PVP. I know people want to buff the damage bonus from Frost Spirit for PVE purposes to put it in line with some warrior banners, so that could help. But I’d make it’s active ability apply 2 or 3 seconds of chill per pulse and leave a frost field for combos. Storm Spirit I’d like to use have a chance of dealing weakness on enemies either in addition to or instead of swiftness. Make it a more aggressive spirit like Sun and Frost.
Water Spirit needs it’s passive buffed to be noticeable. Not too much since it does effect the entire team, but enough that your team can tell there is a buff without looking at their bar. With it’s passive healing for the team and leaving a water field it’d be a decent heal skill for the build, though I’d also like to see it cure conditions. Maybe cure 1 condition each time it’s passive activates and three conditions on activating it’s active skill. That would make it a very strong anti-condition heal for the entire party to compensate for not taking Survival of the Fittest, Signet of Renewal, or Healing Spring in your build, and to open up doors in build variety as we wouldn’t need Empathic Bond anymore either.
I was making a turret engineer’s life miserable on my trapper ranger last night. Enough toughness to weather through the turret damage and large condi spikes that the engineer couldn’t survive. It made me feel an odd sense of joy to be shutting a turret engineer down every time they approached a point for a change.
Why should rangers get new pets? Unless there is something for other professions too, I’m against it.
Every profession is getting an entirely new specialization that includes a new weapon, new utilities, a new trait line, and a new class mechanic. You’re getting plenty. Rangers can get new pets to give more options for their class mechanic without hurting anyone.
Definitely Foefire. I never vote for it yet it’s still considered me “favorite” map by my statistics chart.
@Quickninja: As a charr player who fell into those wholes many times… I really wish they fixed those bridges asap… At least when they did the second set of fixes with Festival of the Four Winds (when they removed scavengers and added in the crafting stations again).
This. I’ve fallen into those tiny freaking holes too many times! It’s undignified.
Might be a bit off topic, but if they were to ever introduce mounts in this game, the Charr would totally get motorcycles.
I want one of those race cars the charr have near Black Citadel’s front entrance.
OR they can buff tornado so it’s not a detriment to turn into one.
It’s pretty bad when your profession elite is so bad other professions don’t even want it.
Well, given how reluctant they have been to touch pets at all since launch (unless it affected PVP) is why I’m saying they are highly unlikely to add any pets at all.
We got a new pet when they added Southsun, and that wasn’t even an expansion.
Long enough to kill the mesmer in moa form if they use it at the wrong time. As long as I’m not getting chain stunned by a group moa morph is seldom the deciding factor. It’s just annoying.
Any chance of any new pets coming in the expansion? It’d be nice to get some fresh new choices!
Nothing is confirmed but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t. They gave us a new pet in the Southsun release and that wasn’t even a full expansion.
Plus the area we’re going is going to have new fauna that we’ve never encountered before. New hylek sub-species, dinosaurs, and other creatures that inhabit the massive jungle they haven’t spoken about yet. At the very least I am expecting some new drake breed.
I like frog people. Hylek are among my favorite Guild Wars races.
I’ve been keeping up with this thread and while I don’t consider myself to be an excellent ranger I do spend most of my time playing theorycrafting builds, so I wanted some feedback and if the builds I run have any chance of being effective in higher tier play.
I’ve seen mention of cleric’s amulet BM builds before and this is what I’ve found works best for me. I tried to squeeze out as much group support as I could while maintaining good mobility and decent 1v1 ability.
In terms of team fights I provide high amounts of swiftness and fury to my team as well as vigor and a strong regen with my heal. I can also combo my own water field up to four times in quick succession if I time everything right by using Call of the Wild, drake’s tail swipe, switching to my greatsword for Swoop and swapping to my snow leopard for an icy pounce, doubling up on leap finishers. Usually I can only manage two or three blasts in quick succession, but it’s still a lot of outgoing healing to those near me. Meanwhile Lightning Breath is really strong in group fights, especially when I can catch my enemies in Entangling Roots to keep them from dodging. The build also provides a fair amount of immobilize with Muddy Terrain which I like to throw on enemies so my pets/allies can secure their burst.
I sometimes swap greatsword out for longbow for more personal damage, the amazing knockback, stealth, and the AoE cripple, but find myself missing the block, stun, and the mobility/leap finisher of Swoop. Plus this tends to get me a lot more angry folk who think I’m running a power ranger.
Look, spirits aren’t banners or turrets. Saying otherwise is obviously going to efface all kinds of important differences. My point, which I thought was pretty clear, is that spirits are problematic like turrets in similar ways, although I clearly acknowledged that spirits are not on the same level as turrets with my concluding line. How in the world is that controversial?
You addressed someone who was telling someone else that spirits aren’t an AI build, which they aren’t. Spirits are effectively objects that produce a constant buff and just so happen to be destructible. At best you can trait them to follow the ranger.
The reason it’s controversial is because you came to the ranger forum, clicked on a thread discussing ways to improve the spirit utilities, and said that they should be phased out completely. You want to remove the only viable support build rangers have, removing another option from a profession that’s already struggling to find a niche they can fill in PVP.
Furthermore your entire reason behind spirits being removed from the game relies on the idea that the people complaining about the build on the forum should be listened to and be the deciding factor behind balance. If we made major balance decisions based on the feedback from PVPers rangers wouldn’t HAVE a build to play.
Spirit Ranger: “AI Trash build! Promotes passive play!”
Power Ranger: “222222222222 spamming trash build! Promotes unskilled play!”
Condi Ranger: 1111111111 auto attack spamming trash build! Promotes passive play!"
What are we suppose to play? Beastmaster? Sorry, that relies on an AI too. So that’s out.
At any rate, this thread wasn’t made to discuss wether or not spirits are a better or worse immobile buff supplying object than other things PVPers don’t have an issue with for whatever reason. It’s for coming up with constructive ideas on how to improve spirits to make them more effective and more fun to use. So to that effect we shouldn’t derail the thread further.
When spirits were meta they irritated PvP players to no end because they body-blocked, provided effects on death, promoted passive play, and were otherwise a brain-dead build that wasn’t fun to fight against. Those are some of the same complaints leveled at turret builds. So, no, spirits don’t actively attack at x interval, but turrets and spirits share certain problematic commonalities that a lot of us would like to see disappear from gameplay altogether. In that vein, I think its more reasonable to consider spirits less potent turrets than banners.
Spirits are not in any way related to turrets. They deal zero damage and have no passive crowd control. Spirits provide buffs to those near them, which is exactly what banners do. The only reason people complained about them is because they couldn’t comprehend the difference between an ACTUAL AI and what amounts to a less effective, killable, yet mobile banner.
Spirits also die to a light breeze, unlike turrets that are immune to critical hits, conditions, and have way better armor and health. They are far easier to put down to the point that it’s actually a struggle to stop them from dying on accident, and impossible to protect when the enemy actually wants to kill them.
And the biggest difference between the two is that a spirit ranger is a team fight focused party buffer build. Their job is to provide their team with the spirit’s buffs while keeping up sustained pressure on a single target. Meanwhile turret engineers are pure area denial bunkers designed to hold a point forever and use their elite and crowd controls to de-cap other bunkers off their points. They perform entirely different roles using tools that aren’t at all similar to one another. They are not comparable.
(edited by Ehecatl.9172)
It shouldn’t remain possible. Enemy team lost a game just because a thief lost a duel to me twice, they had someone defending but he just lost to me and the timeframe between me getting there and killing the lord was too short so they didn’t have a chance of coming back. So you can just throw a game as one player and your teammates won’t do anything about it, or you can carry 4 other players. I don’t think this promotes teamplay at all.
Seems to me they should’ve had more than one person on defense, then. The Lord room being soloable means that you can’t easily risk a full on five man rush of the enemy keep for a sure win, as the other team can still take out your lord while holding your main attack force off.
If it takes a group to take down the lord then there isn’t much counterplay to a five man rush strategy, as you can’t easily hold off a five man team with only one or two defenders.
As I said, you shouldn’t be able to ignore a player in your lord room and expect to win. Now it shouldn’t be easy to solo the lord, but it should be possible.
As has been said pets really just need to move a bit faster and to have substantially better attack response time. F2 needs to go off as soon as possible to be effective. I’d like the pets, especially DPS pets, to attack faster so they can unload their damage in the brief time the enemy is slowed or immobilized long enough to score some damage.
I’d also like more weapon skills involving the pet. As the ranger we should be doing more to ensure the pet can hit the enemy just as the pet does the same for us.
Remove damaging conditions from pets. Pets have no condition damage stat and can’t be used to stack bleeds. Instead replace bleeds with cripples so the pets that currently do bleed damage will be able to inhibit the enemy’s movements instead of hindering actual condition users around them. Poison is still fine as that has value beyond the damage and can be useful in messing up enemy healing. Add more weakness to pet skills as rangers can further count on their pets to hinder the enemy and make the fight more in the ranger’s favor.
Have a few pets, like devourers and spiders, retain their damaging conditions but give them a condition damage stat of around 650. This is enough to make the conditions noticable, but will need traits like Malicious Training to give them the condition damage to be serious threats. It’d open the door to some very unique builds where the ranger does power damage while the pet administers conditions to keep up sustained pressure. It’d help rangers fit into a unique hybrid playstyle.
Give the Moas and the Sylvan Hound a healing power stat of around 650, allowing for people to build their pet to be a decent healbot with Compassion Training. It’d open up doors for unique support builds using the moa on passive to provide boons and healing to allies.
Make spirits immune to conditions like they were in GW1. They die too fast as is, and we can’t remove conditions on them. Spirits and shouts in general need a lot of work, though. We need more useful utilities.