What’s the problem? AI shouldn’t be as intelligent at path finding as humans. I don’t know why rangers and necros think they should have access to uber AI that does all the work for them.
The problem with your line of thinking, at least for the ranger, is that we are balanced fully around having our pet actively hitting the opponent. We do less damage across all our weapons than we would otherwise to balance out a pet that, as it is now, is very difficult to land a hit with.
Anet has specifically stated that the pet is suppose to make up 30% of our damage output. That means that said AI not hitting it’s target due to poor pathfinding and continuously stopping before attacking causes us to suffer a 30% DPS drop, which is pretty vital in a PVP scenario.
Simply put, if our pet can’t reach it’s target and hit reliably we as a ranger are only 70% of a profession, where as everyone else can function at 100% at all times.
In my opinion, Agility Training should be innate in the profession, not a trait.
A wolf should be able to outrun a person.
I agree with this. I considered bringing it up in my own post but was hesitant as it might be a bit much, but it’d do wonders to make pets more reliable damage dealers.
Besides that, it’d also let our pets keep up with us when we have +25% movement speed from runes that don’t transfer to the pet.
Rangers have exceptional access to cripple and pretty solid access to chill for a reason. It’s not difficult to build yourself to be able to maintain permanent cripple or chill, along with other snaring effects like Muddy Terrain and Entangle that can force your opponent to stand still. Not to mention that many of our pets have their own control effects attached to them.
So we do have the tools we need to make sure the pet is landing it’s (Apparently the s and h being too close together upsets Anet) hits somewhat reliably. They could still be improved though, I definitely agree with that.
We could use more cleaving pets. Bears and porcine pets get my vote. That way you get heavy armor pets that can be used in dungeons without crippling your DPS. Giving the devourers piercing could also be a big benefit.
I also feel pets should naturally move faster than they do as a baseline. Even a simple 10% speed increase would ensure they hit moving targets reliably, short of opponents using Swiftness which would just be counterplay to avoid the pet easier.
I agree with everything you’ve said. I’ve been playing a BM ranger for a while now and while it is pretty effective and has definitely gotten a big buff this patch, it still feels a wee bit underwhelming.
One thing that will go a long way to improving our effectiveness in PVE as well as variety of good pets would be to give bears and porcine pets cleave and devourers piercing. Our tankier pets are designed to wade into groups of enemies and draw aggro to itself, so cleave would both increase the pet’s ability to get that aggro in trash clearing encounters and increase the ranger’s overall damage considerably without having to use a bird or cat that can’t take a hit. Bear/Drake pet compositions would be pretty strong.
I also found it a bit strange that conditions are a ranger’s biggest weakness. Rangers are survivors who live in the wilderness and thrive in harsh conditions. Bleeds, burns, cripples, chills, poisons… These are all things rangers should be perfectly capable of dealing with on their own. Without pulling them to our pet and thus crippling our primary means of damage. Survival of the Fittest is is a BM ranger’s best bet for condition cleansing, and that requires 6 in Nature Magic, which combined with the obligatory 6 Beastmastery means we have… 2 points left to be creative with. Not a lot of build variety.
As for axe, it does feel a bit lacking. I love that Anet basically made a designated pet weapon, but you still need 3 points in Nature Magic to use it to it’s full effect, which prevents BM rangers from investing in Survival where our best condition clearing trait is or Skirmishing where some of our best pet buffing traits are inexplicably kept.
I feel like axes are meant to be a close to mid-range weapon, evident by our only knock down sort of effect being a pull and you only get the most out of Splitblade if it hits the enemy point blank so all the axes hit. As you said, removing the bleeds from Splitblade and making it a full direct damage skill would help, but I’d also like to see each axe apply, say, 2 seconds of cripple. So potentially 10 seconds of cripple on a 6 second cooldown, but only if you manage to get every axe to hit every time. That combined with Winter’s Bite applying chill and letting our pet cause weakness would make the axe a powerful control weapon to compensate for it’s low damage, and make it exceptional at keeping an enemy slow enough for our pets to hit reliably, and would compensate us for sacrificing the evades/stealth/knockback/block we’re use to having on our weapons.
One thing you didn’t touch on is the weird placement of out traits. There are traits in the Skirmishing line that are vital for enhancing out pet. Why is this NOT in the Beastmastery line? Why is our grandmaster minor trait gaining power based on our healing power and not Pet Prowess or Agility Training? Nature’s Wrath makes no sense in the Beastmastery line. Pet Prowess is a necessary trait to maximize your pet’s burst, and Agility Training would be a huge buff to our pet’s DPS as they’d be able to consistently chase down and hit fleeing foes in PVP.
I also feel like Predator’s Onslaught and Zephyr’s Speed would make loads more sense switched around, since a BM ranger relies so heavily on cripples and quickness is a lot more effective if you have a longbow equipped, but that’s just me.
All of those professions can choose when to activate their skill but they can’t go without using it and expect to remain 100% effective. That is the point I am making. And they are balanced around having that mechanic as a part of the profession.
I am fine with us being able to toggle the pet on and off. I am not fine with us getting a stat bonus to compensate when we actively choose not to use the pet, in the same way that other professions don’t get compensated when they want to not use their mechanics.
An elementalist staying in one attunement doesn’t get their cooldowns reduced to be in line with other professions. A thief doesn’t get to replace the initiative system with standard cooldowns. A necromancer doesn’t get improved mobility skills to compensate for not using Deathshroud.
As you’ve said, plenty of people have offered suggestions on how to improve the pet’s ability in combat. I’ve made a fair few suggestions myself, ranging from more cleave on bears and porcines for PVE to special pet food for WvWvW that improves a pet’s defensive stats based on the number of enemy players in the area. Lots of people have suggested adding dodge frames at the start of “Return to Me” so we can keep the pet alive long enough for it to step out of AoE circles. I’ve seen suggestions of giving us control of a second pet skill so each pet has even more utility which I strongly am in favor of.
As for pets not hitting moving targets in PVP, we do have some of the best cripple and chill up times available. But even then I agree, pets have a hard time landing their damage. So how can we fix that? Giving pets a simple, constant speed boost would do wonders, as would increasing the range on pet melee attacks so they are more likely to hit a fleeing target.
Or we could just introduce more ranged pets, which I would personally love. We could tame wind riders that shoot bolts of lightning from afar. Make them high damage pets like birds that have ranged attacks with decent projectile speed and suddenly you have slightly below bird/feline damage that can hit reliably. We already have spiders and devourers. We could also make drakes have the option to toggle between melee and ranged auto attacks, giving us even more variety in PVP capable pets. Maybe even a special toggle for moas that replaces auto attack with a weak pulse heal? That might be going a bit far, but seeing as moas are built to be support pets that might be just what a back liner in WvWvW needs. A heavy support pet that will remain at your side and provide you with buffs on demand and passive, periodic heals.
Maybe I will make a thread for more ranged pets. Thinking of ideas is pretty fun.
Nice advice for fighting against awful Rangers that do the exact same ‘efficient’ skill rotation for the sake of efficiency, not skill, which gets them killed 9/10 times. A Good Ranger does not do that because most of that Signet of the Wild will be wasted, if a good ranger chooses to take that over a more useful skill. A good ranger will also not accidentally use that rapid fire just after you go into stealth, they’ll wait for you to get out of it, some switch to GS, then use counterattack (for some reason, it works every time for me. combine with signet of the hunt for even more awesome results!).
Counting the seconds between skill uses also doesn’t work, because, as you said, bad rangers use it whenever its off cool down. A good Ranger will not do that, and waste their attack.
So, let me change the question since you are describing the tactics of a very poor ranger to me right now. How does a ‘good thief’ know when a ‘good ranger’ is about to use rapid fire? Something tells me the answer still involves fortune telling of some sort.
I told you how you can anticipate the next move of most longbow rangers and when they are most likely to use Rapid Fire. Just because you’ve declared every one of those behaviors as bad play doesn’t invalidate that it is how the build is run by poor to average players.
I don’t consider myself a highly skilled player and don’t presume to be capable of discussing the exact tactics that would be used on either side by high end players. All I can tell you is what works for me.
You said a Good thief will use stealth before a Ranger uses Rapid Fire. Please answer the question I asked instead of giving me useless advice I didn’t ask for. How do you know a Ranger is about to use Rapid Fire?
Anticipation. The same way you know a thief is about to use backstab and act accordingly, or how other professions are suppose to know where the thief went when they stealthed to spam AoEs on their location.
It’s a skill one develops after playing the game for so long. You learn how the various builds function and plan accordingly to the best of your ability.
You can also expect it after the ranger has used Point Blank Shot 9 times out of 10. Or following up Entangle. The ranger wants to make sure the full Rapid Fire lands so they will try to set it up with their crowd control. If you see the Signet of the Wild or Rampage as One animations you know the ranger is setting up for a huge burst and should be perfectly capable of hitting stealth before either cast is finished, thus avoiding the inevitable Rapid Fire that is to come.
Unless they are just firing it off every time it’s off cooldown, and honestly if they are trying to spam it then it’s the kind of player you shouldn’t be having an issue with to begin with. Unpredictability is often a more substitute for efficiency, and even then you can just count the seconds between use and figure out about when the Rapid Fire can be used next.
So…how do I learn how to tell the future so I can stealth before a Ranger uses Rapid Fire?
It is literally on you that you’ve decided to enter stealth while being hit by a channeled effect. You saw the ranger start shooting arrows at a rapid speed and went “This is exactly when I want to turn invisible!” Then you hit whichever stealth skill you were planning on using to turn invisible, only for the arrows to keep coming because that’s how the skill works.
What you should have done is use one of the thief’s many gap closers to get behind the ranger. Fun fact, if you get behind the ranger they will just stop attacking completely and all their projectiles with automatically miss.
If the ranger is out of range of your gap closers you should just suck it up and blow a dodge, reducing the damage to a much more managable 3-4K at most.Then you pop stealth, now confident that the ranger has nothing else but longbow 5 to try and hit you. Run up until you are in range for your gap closers, maybe wait out the AoE skill if you have to, and then unleash Hell.
As a thief you are uniquely equipped to take down longbow rangers more easily than any other profession. This shouldn’t be a hard fight for you unless your opponent is much more skilled than you are.
All the wannabe’s try to counter this fellow…He has it 100% correct.
I don’t mind the ranger having this ability but the real issue is it follows you into stealth. As a class that gets 2 dodges…unbelievably bad design considering ele’s get more and aree ranged…..a thief needs the stealth. If a thiefs stealth can’t be counted on for direct damage mitigation then its not worth much. This is the majority of your complaints I am sure.So either the rangers needs to be yelling for a fix to this hitting stealthed players issue or be ready to have your damage destroyed on it. the choice is yours.
Rapid Fire behaves exactly like every other channeled attack in the game. If you go into stealth AFTER the channel has begun casting it will follow you. However, if you are stealthed then Rapid Fire won’t have a target and will just fire off in whatever direction the ranger is facing, sometimes straight into the ground, as there’s nothing to hit.
So basically if Rapid Fire is hitting you when you stealth it’s because you were dumb enough to activate stealth after Rapid Fire went off, thinking it would protect you from a channeled effect. Good thieves already know not to waste their stealth trying to escape a channeled attack and will instead dodge or use an evade, or use stealth before the ranger activates Rapid Fire, rendering everything on longbow except skill 5 to be useless.
Really…so there are a bunch of threads saying the same thing….hmmm what could that mean.
It means there’s an extremely vocal minority of players with poor reflexes who are prone to demanding nerfs before even trying to adapt to the latest changes.
Lots of whine threads does not mean something is overpowered.
I am not sure what a spinng Kappa face is but its good to know the issue is being seriously looked at.
It’s a kappa face that spins.
A sniper ranger isn’t survivable, though. They have awful survival for a zerker burst set up.
A full burst sniper ranger has:
Zerker defensive stats.
Little to no condition removal.
No mobility on their burst weapon.
Only one spare utility slot for defense without taking a big hit to your burst damage.
Depending on the secondary weapon set that can also get:
Greatsword: One block, a stun/daze, and two evades that are extremely difficult to time correctly to actually dodge an attack.
Or
Sword/Dagger: Two evades and a cripple with good mobility, but an auto attack that roots you to the ground and some of the more quirky mobility skills available, which dramatically increases the difficulty level of the entire build.
Baseline the longbow ranger doesn’t have enough tools to disengage from anything but a necromancer or guardian and has only one defensive cooldown to blow. The longbow ranger’s survivability pales in comparison to a thief’s, which is why a thief has to get in melee to deal it’s burst. It’s designed to survive in melee and disengage before it can be counter attacked. A longbow ranger’s primary defense IS that range. A thief’s burst also happens all at once and from stealth, making it dramatically harder to avoid even if you do know the thief is in the area.
Now, a ranger can build to be more survivable, but will take a large loss to their offensive power to compensate. This set up is likely more powerful overall, but won’t be hitting for the big numbers people complain so much about.
As for the part about ease of play. I find it interesting, actually. Initially everyone was complaining about noob rangers beating experienced players because the build was so OP. But now all arguments seem to center on what happens when this build falls into the hands of an experienced player who knows what they are doing.
The fact is the burst might be easier to land, but surviving as a longbow ranger requires a great deal of skill in using your secondary set, whatever it is, as you’re automatically at a large disadvantage against your opponent as the ranger weapons weren’t designed for the burst and escape playstyle the thief was made for. If the enemy closes the distance you’re in for a tough time, whether you’re a new player or an old veteran.
You mean the 10% damage boost to Power Stab? That’s the only other straight damage boost rangers got, and… It’s not really a game changer.
Rangers got a lot of good buffs this patch, but a fair amount of them don’t even relate to the longbow build. BM builds also got a huge buff through the might on axe ricochet, but no one is talking about that.
Rapid Fire didn’t get a damage buff. The cast time is shorter so the damage can be delivered faster. If you mean the auto attack boosts, that was only Anet reducing the penalty of using longbow in closer ranges. It didn’t increase the longbow’s damage by any meaningful amount.
I’ve beaten them fairly consistently as a trapper ranger or as a BM ranger. The range isn’t a huge problem if you know how to play.
No one short of the glassiest of glass cannons can be one shot killed with a Rapid Fire, and even then the ranger would have to blow an elite skill and two utilities to maximize the burst. It’s very much a one trick pony, and after that one shot is done the ranger has only one extra utility for defense.
So to answer your question, they probably won’t end up nerfing a build that isn’t even viable for high end play right now.
(edited by Ehecatl.9172)
I admit I’ve done something like this, but only after failing to fix the team balance several times and being stuck on the losing end of a perpetual 4v5.
After you’ve spent four or five games in a row losing because people are blatantly exploiting the team swap mechanic you start to get frustrated. After doing nothing but forcing an auto balance and re-joining the losing side to try and get both sides even only for people to leave the losing side and join the winning team again you start feeling angry at how completely hopeless it is.
So the only option available ended up being to join the winning side and just not fight so it’d be a 4v4. Even that is futile though, because they’ll just all switch to the losing team the moment it’s about to catch up in score and still win via a 5v4.
Anet NEEDS to fix this. I have no idea why they’ve chosen to not address this issue that is killing hotjoin. Just because a game mode isn’t rated doesn’t mean it should be a cesspool filled with exploiters and gold farmers who can’t win without a numbers advantage.
Actually, I think I had an idea for how we could make spirits more comparable to their GW1 counterparts and make them much more active at once.
Have the effects of the spirits trigger through certain crowd controls when they are inflicted on the enemy within the spirit’s radius.
Stone Spirit could function more like Brambles in that when an enemy in the radius suffers from a knockdown or immobilize they take bonus damage from the effects and have bleeds or cripple applied, which would allow the ranger and the ranger’s team to capitalize on this effect to deal extra damage within the spirit’s zone of control.
Storm Spirit could strike enemies with a bolt of lightning for burst damage and apply vulnerability to enemies who are inflicted by daze, stun, or launch.
Frost Spirit could work a bit differently and inflict chill on enemies who get regeneration or swiftness applied to them, which would make boon spam a lot more dangerous.
Sun Spirit could be similar to Frost Spirit but inflict burning whenever the enemies grant each other might or fury, which could go a long way to making certain overly strong might spam set ups more dangerous to use.
Water Spirit and Spirit of Nature could keep doing what they’re doing, though Spirit of Water just periodically giving small group heals similar to a weaker, but AoE, healing signet might be better. The ranger would basically sacrifice a strong self heal in favor of providing a weak constant heal to his whole team.
Since rangers really don’t have any boon hate as is this could be an interesting new playstyle. The ranger would bring great team support by making ally crowd control effects stronger and punishing enemies for boon spamming. It’d also fit into the theme of the ranger’s spirits creating a hostile, unforgiving environment for the enemies to deal with while fighting the ranger’s team. It’s also easily countered by just taking the time to kill the spirits, so it’s not like there wouldn’t be counterplay involved.
Other class mechanics don’t cost those classes 30% of their damage output because it’s shared/tieddirectly to an unreliable AI which is unable to dodge/ evade/ block Boss mechanics. For other classes, not using their class mechanic is optional, they can be used as needed or even not used if it gives an advantage in the situation. For rangers, there are places in the game where the use of the pet is impossible due to death by unavoidable mechanics (laser jumping anyone?) or even detrimental, but it’s use cannot be avoided.
Comparing the ranger pet to other class mechanics is short-sighted and false equivalence. Other classes mechanics don’t cause problems for the ranger or the party and other class mechanics don’t debuff the class for 30% damage output, when on cooldown.
Clearly you don’t play an elementalist.
Elementalists sacrifice a LOT more than rangers do for the sake of their class mechanic. They do less damage per skill, their skills have higher cooldowns, and if they are using a shorter range weapon like daggers they are stuck at that range and cannot swap to a more advantageous weapon. Such is the price for the versatility of attunements. Funny you mention cooldowns because an elementalist without 6 in arcane is running a big risk of getting stuck in an element if they aren’t extremely careful with their rotation, which can be a whole lot more fatal than a downed pet.
I’m sure there are thieves who’d love to give up the initiative system in favor of normal cooldowns. At the very least it’d mean their skills wouldn’t be under so much scrutiny because of their spammy nature. A thief can choose not to use steal but can’t play without the initiative mechanic, love it or hate it.
I’m positive there are necromancers who’d love to not rely on Deathshroud for their primary defense. Unfortunately the class is built around it, and so necromancers aren’t allowed to have the mobility that other classes enjoy because of it. A necromancer might be able to not activate Deathshroud, but they still have to suffer from the lack of mobility no matter what they choose, and failure to use Deathshroud in combat would just be a massive handicap.
I could keep going but I’m sure you get the idea. Every profession in the game is built around their class mechanic. None of them can completely ignore said mechanic and still perform optimally. And ranger isn’t the only profession who loses damage/utility/mobility in favor of balancing those mechanics.
I’m not against the ability to turn off your pet during situations where it’s disadvantageous to have the pet out, but I don’t think the ranger should get a stat boost for it. No more so than a necromancer should get super speed when not using Deathshroud or a thief should get increased damage on their skills to compensate for the spammy initiative system not being used.
We should keep focusing our attention on getting our profession mechanic improved, not trying to get it removed.
I wouldn’t want their animations or models to change. Spirits are a call back to the nature rituals from GW1 where they had the same sort model and had the same stationary effect generators they have now. I don’t want to lose that theme.
The problem is that spirits can’t behave the way they did in GW1 because of how limited GW2 is in terms of build variety. Nature Rituals in GW1 created a constant environmental effect over a large radius that effected both allies and enemies equally, and the big advantage was from building your skill set around taking advantage of whatever environment you created with the spirits.
For example if you placed Brambles down, a spirit that damaged anyone who fell down in the area, you’d then use your knock down heavy build to rack up damage. The enemy could take advantage too, but wouldn’t have the advantage of preparing their build ahead of time to maximize the spirit.
You could throw down Conflagration and Favorable Winds to make all arrows faster and cause burning if you ran a heavy marksmanship set up, but if you came across enemies who also used bows you’d be a bit screwed.
Lacerate could be useful if you had a stronger healing team as it caused health degeneration and bleeding to everyone in the area. If you build for sustain it’d let you outlast your opponents who might have forsaken defense for offense. You get the idea.
Unfortunately the spirits can’t work like this anymore because GW2 builds are rather shallow compared to GW1. If you dropped, say, Brambles, in a team fight sure, your team could exploit the knock down damage. But if your opposing team happens to have a hammer warrior, which is fairly likely given the small number of builds per class, you could literally get crowd controlled to death.
Ones that MIGHT work for GW2 are ones like Lacerate and Predatory Season, the first doing damage as I said and the other cutting healing down but letting you regain health with attacks. So Lacerate would be ideal for a heavy sustain, bunkerish team and Predatory Season would be ideal for a high burst, low sustain set up. But alas, you’d have to build the entire team comp around the spirits to be useful, and GW2 doesn’t really offer the build variety to make that a viable tactic.
no lets give it the necro treatment like they have done to all our skills it needs a cast time increase to something humanly possible to see like a 1 second cast time with a nice big animation so we can interrupt it and keep our 2 dodges, then after that it requires a cool down increase so its not always up when you need it. that will just about do it.
So you want the longbow’s only interrupt and gap maker to have a one second cast time?
You basically just want to remove the weapon entirely, don’t you?
You guys do realize the fact they are merging your whine threads into a mega thread is proof they aren’t ignoring you, right?
They could pretty easily just start deleting these threads and be completely within their rights to do it. 90% of them aren’t even close to constructive criticism and should probably be deleted regardless.
Empathic Response seems like an awesome idea. It’d give us more value out of our pet F2s without making the pet itself useless. Wider coverage on boons, and it’d make the condition applying pets more useful for a condi ranger set up.
Plus how insanely cool would it be to use a drake’s F2 ability? It’d make salamander drakes much, much stronger as we’d be able to shoot fire from our mouths and thus aim it better. Huge benefit for a condi ranger who might not want to bring torch but still needs burning. A condi BM build where the ranger could BREATH FIRE would immediately become a popular build if for no other reason than how cool it’d be.
Marsh drake would also be nice as it’s a lot of poison applications in a bouncing AoE. Rifer drake would give the ranger a ranged AoE burst when using something like the mainhand axe that doesn’t have much burst. It’d be a pretty interesting playstyle to say the least.
I’d also like for our spirits to work differently. They just feel so underwhelming in actual use, probably because it’s just a random proc on attack and you don’t see any special animations from it. I’d like them to be a bit more engaging than just sitting there and giving passive benefits.
we dont want compensations, just the option to disable pet. so its a loose-loose situation. we wont get anything good out of staying petless, we just want the dam option for it.
Except that most people in this thread want the compensation too.
I’m fine with perma stowing the pet. I’m not fine with people being given stat boosts for ignoring their class mechanic.
Just remove team select as an option and make it so new players entering the map can only join the team with a lower score unless said team has one man more than the winning team.
An example:
Red team is winning and has 3 players.
Blue team is losing and has 3 players.
A new player cannot join the game and go to Red team. They HAVE to go to blue.
If blue team has 5 players to Red’s 4 and is still losing, only then can you join Red team for the win.
This would make it harder to get on the side that is winning and make sure that in order to join the winning team the losing team has to have the larger group to begin with, so the losing team can never have one less player than the winning team unless absolutely no one will join the match.
It also wouldn’t stop the thing that I tend to do to get the game balanced, which is to force an auto balance by going into spectate mode, then joining the team I was already on just to get the teams balanced.
Then just add a bonus for anyone who joins a losing team and sticks with them for the whole match. Without needing the autobalance prompt. This would make switching to the losing team in a 5v4 more appealing even if autobalance can’t yet be triggered.
(edited by Ehecatl.9172)
You’d think masters of wilderness survival would be better equipped to deal with things like bleeding, crippling, poison, chills, burning, and other life threatening conditions you could run into in the wild.
As is rangers have pretty bad active condition defense. You either need to run with a utility dedicated to condition defense or one of two grandmaster traits, and strangely two of those three options just pulls the conditions to your pet. o.o That seems like horrible, abusive behavior to me.
“Oh no, I’ve been poisoned and I’m bleeding to death! Here, my faithful animal companion. You can bare my burden and suffer in excruciating agony so I can keep going!”
Doesn’t exactly sound like someone the animal companion would want to be around.
where did i say ANYTHING about being shut down while being half HP? i am talking in generall… no matter how you put it ranger is only class atm that has no set up for their “backstabs” and can fire those from really long range
the pressure you can put on a point be it graveyard or clocktower is insane (not to mention that by the time your enemy actually makes it up the roof they are probably dead or burned all their CDs for your 8 sec backstab) and you don’t even need to commit into team fight while thieves for example despite their disengages still have to put themself at risk to get one shot by crossfire
ranger dmg isn’t issue really, the risk or rather lack of it is
i personally can deal with most rangers running RF build (as long as steal/signet/shs don’t bug out), only because i play thief mainly and have enough moblity/dazes for them but i saw what rangers can do when i played thief with my friend ranger, we would just delete enemies from points no matter what build/class they ran… it was stupid
The person I was responding to when you quoted me was talking specifically about rangers coming in and attacking him while he’s busy fighting someone else. I assumed you were talking about the same scenario since you quoted me.
The pressure they put on a point is the entire reason the build exists. It’s the only reason, actually. Longbow ranger is a fairly poor dueling build so if you wanted a roamer you’d probably do better with a good thief. If you want someone to sit off point and apply pressure in team fights then you’d grab a ranger, though that ranger would have to hope no one on the enemy team decides to take them by surprise.
As you’ve noted thieves are really good at bringing down longbow rangers, especially if the thief catches the ranger trying to snipe someone off. I’ve seen videos of mesmers handling them too. In fact over the past week a lot of the complaints have shifted. Originally people were claiming the longbow was unbeatable because no one could close the distance, but now people seem to have shifted to admitting they can take the longbow ranger in duels but are struggling with them in team fights. In other words, people have already started learning how to deal with the longbow rangers out in the open, which is a sign of progress.
Given a few more weeks and I wouldn’t be surprised if longbow ranger complaints die out almost completely. It’s still so early to just declare them overpowered.
I dare to say, but isn’t Dawn of War 2 a close thing to an MMO-RTS?
You got a Commander and troops which you can level – this results in them being more tanky and doing more damage
Your Commander in turn can unlock wargear (granted, gated by upgrading the base), enabling many options for Commander Builds which can turn around the tide of battle…
Maybe an RPG RTS.
Though among RPG style RTS games I think Warlords Battlecry was the truest hybrid. You had a hero that you created exactly like any RPG. You chose a race, a name, and a class. You then did battles, either in the campaign or in randomly generated maps, and could level up.
Best part was you could carry over your hero to new random maps, so every game you played was like another chapter in the character’s story. As your hero progressed you could choose a sub-class and invest points in a fairly large talent tree to improve commanding skills to make troops stronger, your hero’s personal combat stats, learn spells, or get special economic advantages to make improving your towns easier on new maps.
Even the units got experience, and after each game you played certain units that had accumulated the most experience without dying was given a randomly generated name and offered to join your retinue, meaning you could carry that unit over to future games and continue to level it up alongside your hero so long as you never allowed it to get killed.
Your hero could even seek out quests as side objectives to complete during the maps to get better gear to improve their stats.
Everything else about the game was pretty straight forward RTS mechanics similar to the likes of Warcraft or Age of Empires in terms of gameplay, but the level of RPG elements was unrivaled. Your hero carrying over from game to game was just a fantastic design point and really let you feel like you WERE that commander there fighting alongside the armies you raised.
thief also has to go into melee risking to get downed himself in crossfire + backstab like many other high burst skills usually have certain set up… where ranger has 0 set up and can fire his “backstab” from safe range
It’s not that huge of a risk if the enemy is already at half health and engaging someone else. Thief also has vastly superior tools to disengage if things go badly, so the ranger needs that range to survive delivering their burst at all. Maul is a pretty good burst on it’s own. There’s a reason you never saw zerker rangers running around using Maul to do the same thing they’re doing now with Rapid Fire.
I’m just saying, every burst build will kill you if you’re already fighting someone else. That’s the entire point of these builds, to quickly shut someone down when they are most vulnerable. Getting mad at one profession for ganking you when your defenses are down and not another is a wee bit hypocritical.
oh so you can then just cast rapid fire knowing we are down a dodge =\ and get it anyway
Fine. Lets leave it as is so you can get knocked back by something you can barely see coming every time you try to close the gap.
Freaking Hell. Try to be constructive and discuss a quality of life change that’d make the longbow more engaging to fight against and easier to predict and it’s just not enough for some people.
im all for having rangers stronger and their spot in the light and all that, but its really lame right now. in pvp some random can run up and gun you down with 2 skills, massing around 10k damage in a couple seconds. the real culprit is #4, it needs either a longer cooldown or a more obvious telegraph. at 1500 range against an asura its impossible to see it coming.
Just a note. If they are hitting you for 10K in SPVP then they’ve blown Signet of the Wild and Rampage as One simultaneously for a single burst. So at minimum three skills.
It doesn’t need a nerf, just a tell so you know it’s being fired so you know to dodge it.
Never die vs. a ranger 1 v 1, but if I’m busy dealing with some one else… that rapid fire will probably destroy me. Its not a L2P problem its the fact more then one thing can be going on at one time and you don’t always know they are going to start bursting you down.
A thief can do the same thing with a backstab. Except the backstab will down you immediately where as you still have a chance to dodge most of Rapid Fire before the channel is completed.
Removing the ability to pick your team from spectator mode and automatically putting the new player on the LOSING team so long as the losing team doesn’t already have one man more than the winning team would solve all the hotjoin issues.
If someone tries to team swap from the losing side they’d just get put back on the losing team, and the winning side could never have more than equal the number of players on it’s side since the team randomizer will always favor putting you on the losing side until the losing side already has a numbers edge.
Sure, rage quitters might leave and make it a 5v4 for a while. But usually another person will be brought in to replace that person eventually. It’s not as big of a problem as people purposely bogging down one side and abusing the auto balance to leave the losing side and join the winning side.
In the case of a rage quitter something they could do is make an entirely voluntary auto balance after the side with a numbers edge has a 100 point lead, and anyone on the winning side can jump to the losing side for double rewards. This would give incentive to jump to the losing team even if the losing team isn’t down by two people yet.
Well, the historical definition for ranger has already been stated. It just means someone who survives in the wilderness. A gameskeeper or someone who travels a lot.
If you go back to the grandaddy of all modern fantasy, Lord of the Rings, Aragorn was the first true fantasy ranger and he used a sword primarily. He HAD a bow, but it was a secondary weapon that he used when he needed it. Legolas was the ranged specialist and he wasn’t called a ranger at all.
Then you skip ahead to the grandaddy of all fantasy gaming, Dungeons and Dragons, and the ranger could easily be built for melee or ranged combat. Ranger wasn’t strictly limited to being an archer.
So while some games may have abandoned the roots of the ranger class in favor of having them be pure archers with a pet, I’m lookin’ at you WoW hunters, they were never associated purely with bows.
Rangers in GW2 are acutally very good at depicting what an iconic ranger is, and that is a character who can employ both melee and ranged weaponry and be effective in any circumstance. A survivor who can fight at all ranges.
No, we understand you want it to be optional. We disagree that it should be an option.
Ranger is the pet profession. You made your ranger aware of this fact.
Once more if it was optional and the player was compensated with say, a 30% damage boost, then one of the two options would inevitably become superior to the other. More than likely the stowing of the pet will be the optimal choice as it removes the difficulty of dealing with the AI completely, and so will always be the better choice.
This would result in those of us who rolled the pet profession for the pet being sub-optimal players. We’d be looked down on much as bearbow players are looked down on now, but not for being bad players. For simply wanting to use the class mechanic that we signed up for when making our rangers.
“LOL scrub why u take stupid AI cheese over the straight damage buff? LOOKIT LOSER OVER HERE. LOLOLOL!”
If you don’t want a pet there are other options available. Thief if you wanted to be a fast moving burst damage dealer or warrior if you wanted to be a sturdy fighter type.
The mainhand axe has pretty much become the best possible weapon for any beastmaster build. Permanent 25 stacks of might on any pet will turn it into a force of nature. It also sets you up to take pretty much any offhand and be effective, depending on your playstyle.
Offhand axe gives you a pull to keep the enemy close and in the pet’s range and an awesome reflecting, retaliation giving doom sphere that is a pretty strong defensive channel.
Offhand torch is perfect if you’re going a hybrid beastmaster and want to add some conditions to your opponent while your pet dishes out direct damage.
Offhand dagger gives an evade and a ranged cripple that can keep you alive and help your pet stay in range.
And finally warhorn can keep your pet rich with swiftness so it can hit more reliably, fury so it can crit more reliably, and provide better team support so the build is less selfish.
There’s really no wrong answer with mainhand axe, which I find very appealing.
(edited by Ehecatl.9172)
Ill put bluntly that while raven can be good a snow leopard running on swiftness from horn blowing can easily outdps the birds due to access of very damaging ability such as bite (not to mention the ice leap altrought owl can do the same). Also the jaguard can litteraly hit target from stealth dealing damage but staying invisible wich makes it a Deadly tool for surprise damage in pvp.
Im running axe horn right now… i like watching people scream in horror especialy thieves who gets revealed and mesmer who just get themselves destroyed the moment they start using illusion and phantasm or just other ranger using the bow wich actualy are prety much highly disavantaged against my axe/axe weapon set
Been called a hacker 10 time today for killing them with pet damage i love those tears
Yah, I know leopard has higher potential damage. However I tend to save my horn blast for when I throw down Healing Spring so I can blast my water field for a double heal. Between the bird’s natural swiftness at the start of the fight and my horn the raven will have swiftness the entire fight too, so it can hit more reliably. Then with Intimidation Training the F2 applies cripple in addition to it’s normal burst, and my sylvan hound can apply cripple in an AoE while giving me and my team regen. Together they can keep the enemy almost permanently crippled.
But the biggest reason I use a raven is because when I use Hunter’s Call and the enemy is being swarmed by birds it just makes me chuckle.
BM definitely eats thieves alive. I’ll still struggle a bit with condi mesmers but generally yah, their clones just become fuel to make my pets hit harder. The only time I’ve lost to a longbow ranger with my BM build is when I was at the clock tower and tried to pursue my opponent onto the catwalk outside the tower. I engaged but my pet decided to take the long way around, which forced me to switch to my hound when I needed DPS.
The AI is still a pretty significant handicap, sadly. But then without that handicap beastmastery might be rather overpowered.
Amusing bit of anecdotal evidence from my time playing around in hotjoin on my rifle/hammer warrior build.
I was able to stalemate a longbow ranger in a 1v1. We both ended up going down after a fairly long duel for a pair of burst builds and I was able to use Vengence to get back up for the stomp, then died on top of him.
Bare in mind I have had my warrior for over a year and still haven’t gotten him to 80. I’m a terrible warrior, but I was still able to be a serious threat to what was actually a somewhat decent ranger (He actually switched to GS when I got close rather than panicing like most of them do).
Anecdotal evidence doesn’t count for much, but saying longbow ranger has a much lower skill floor doesn’t quite hold water if I can take a lower skill ranger with my warrior that I have comparatively little experience with. Unless I’m actually really good with my warrior despite like of experience, which I can assure you I am not.
Like, I am so bad at warrior, guys. So bad.
It’s working as intended. Anet doesn’t want to have to keep track of every pet of every ranger.
Sliv addressed a lot of it pretty well, but I’d like to point out a few things that also need to be considered.
First being that Kill Shot does actually hit harder than Rapid Fire when both are built for full burst. Rapid Fire will hit the heavy golem for around 5-6K damage in total, while Kill Shot will hit comfortably around 7-8K. Both without blowing utilities. Kill Shot can also be traited to always crit, making the damage more reliable.
Kill Shot can also be used to open a fight if you take Signet of Fury and blow it before engaging. Granted you might want to avoid that if you’re not comfortable investing too many utilities in offensive boosts, which is fine because there’s two bursts available on the rifle.
Volley only does 10% less damage than Rapid Fire for the same cooldown as a fully traited Rapid Fire. It doesn’t apply vulnerability though, but at the same time there’s another skill that does, which means you can lead with Brutal Shot for eight vulnerability stacks that will increase the damage of every shot in Volley rather than a steady stacking over the course of the burst like with Rapid Fire.
The rifle can also be traited with Crack Shot which gives the bullets piercing. Crack Shot is an adept tier trait and has the same effect as a master tier trait for Longbow. A master tier trait that is in competition with Eagle Eye, and so is almost never taken unless you want to give up the 1,500 range.
I know it’s really hard to pull off, but I’ve managed to use Kill Shot and hit three opponents in one go a couple times. It’s kind of a “If the stars align perfectly” sort of situation, but not impossible, and hilarious when it does happen. Piercing potentially dramatically improves the rifle’s damage output if the user can get a good position before unloading, and sometimes by happy accident.
Finally, the five second cooldown on weapon swap warriors get from their investment into Discipline definitely makes the warrior more effective if someone closes the gap. I’ve taken a hammer the few times I run a rifle sniper build, which is rather effective at stun locking my opponent and dealing decent damage all the while. Being able to switch to a melee weapon and back to the rifle quickly offers a great deal more survival options than a ranger has with the usual swap time.
So all in all the rifle is capable of putting out twice the number of bursts at a shorter range and has access to their secondary weapon set for defense more readily than a ranger. Longbow has a better auto attack if the target is at max range, and has a stronger knockback than the rifle. Even a glass warrior has at least 2,000 armor and 20,000 HP which is a nice plus, but the ranger can probably squeeze in more defensive utilities if they aren’t as focused on maximum burst.
Neither build can deal with conditions very well though, unless they want to sacrifice some burst for condition cleansing. This combined with the general squishiness of both builds is what is keeping rifle from being meta, and what will probably stop longbow from being meta in the end.
I like how everyone seems to be testing every single ranger skill to find the bug/flaw that we’re exploiting to be so powerful now.
If interrupts were more telegraphed you wouldn’t be able to use them
Point Blank Shot isn’t just an interrupt, it’s a powerful knockback sitting on the same weapon that has a powerful long ranged burst. Not evading an interrupt might cause you to not use the skill you wanted to use, not dodging Point Blank Shot might cause you to eat 4-7K damage depending on if you can get up fast enough or not. It’s also vital to keep the enemy from closing the distance and so is a huge part of longbow survival.
It’s a very important skill for the person fighting the longbow ranger to avoid and should have a better telegraph so the player can tell when it’s coming. As is avoiding a Point Blank Shot is almost up to luck.
It’s like if the warrior hammer skill Backbreaker didn’t have a telegraph. It’d be ridiculous.
I’ve been defending the ranger longbow since the patch launched but even I can recognize that a tell on that skill would go a long way to improving the counterplay against the weapon and make it more interactive to fight against.
The only “nerf” the ranger longbow should really have is a better tell on Point Blank Shot. Rapid Fire telegraphs itself with the first few arrows and a fairly distinct sound and cast animation and it only hits for about 6K on average. 7K on squishy targets. It’s a lot of damage for a ranged attack, but not that much in the world of burst skills.
Sounds like a fun idea to me. It’d be interesting to use low visibility storms to set up ambushes and knock people into quicksand pits.
Unfortauntely you’d have most of the SPVP forum community complaining about “Player vs Environment!” factors and how OP it’s making mesmers, and that it’s a “kitten” that is killing PVP.
My bird can hit pretty reliably, actually. Between Intimidation Training, my sylvan hound’s cripple, and my axe’s chill my opponent isn’t moving fast enough to kite my raven, who almost always has swiftness, without blowing cleanses and dodges left and right.
I also find people don’t actively try to avoid my raven most of the time anyway. They are too use to it not being a threat. In team fights people might not even notice it approaching.
But that is how it works!
I believe that I mentioned that Pets suck in any kind of competitive mode of play (in this game). The fact that players can just focus the Ranger down and ignore the pet is just as flawed as the fact that pets can’t hit a moving target.
You are right that the pet doesn’t affect the Ranger’s survival in any way (unless you conveniently forget/ignore “Protect Me” which is way more effective if you have a pet with more health)
However in PvE, where the pet does work (mostly because most enemies can’t hit moving targets either and have to stand still to attack), it adds tremendously to the Ranger’s survival because the Pet can pull aggro, and you can easily get pets with more toughness than you.
The difference between you and me is that I don’t ignore PvE when I look at the larger picture of balance.
So yes, Rangers have more health and armor than a Warrior does. I can just add the pet’s stats to the Ranger and go “See? Rangers have the highest stats of any profession!” It does work that way, especially since biased people do that to those poor, neglected Necromancers all the time. Just gotta be fair!
That still is not how it works though. Even in PVE if the mob isn’t attacking the pet it will kill the ranger just as fast as if there were no pet at all. Not all pets can be used to face tank, and even the ones who can don’t do it very effectively in dungeons or fractals, which is the “high end” aspects of PVE.
So you’re basically saying rangers have twice the health and armor of any profession solely based on open world leveling and saying it counts toward this discussion concerning PVP balance. I’m sorry, but that is incredibly flawed logic.
Protect Me is the only valid point you’ve made, but even then it’s only one utility skill that is entirely optional to take. By the same logic I can say warriors have the best stats in the game because they can ignore direct damage completely for a short duration with Endure Pain. Or that necromancers have waaaay more health and armor than anyone else because they can go Minion Master and trot around with a small army.
Pets do contribute to survivability, but in the form of crowd control. They are a powerful tool when used intelligently. But no, they do not at all contribute to the ranger’s health and armor totals when discussing survival.
I knows its easy to forget issues with the pet (like everyone did less than 5 seconds after the patch hit, no one complains about them anymore), but I believe the Ranger’s Class mechanic counts when factoring in survival, just as people factor in the Necromancer’s class mechanic. This means that, even though pets suck in any competitive mode of play, and are miles worse than whatever concept Anet thought they originally were, Rangers have more health and armor than Warriors.
Not that I disagree with your original premise that the pet should be considered when discussing balance, but that isn’t how that works.
The pet’s health and armor do not in any way effect the ranger’s ability to survive. You can take the ranger out without ever touching the pet. In fact that’s the preferred method of dealing with the ranger.
So no, warriors still have more health and armor than a ranger does. You can’t just add the pet’s stats to the ranger and go “See? Rangers have the highest base stats of ANY profession!” It doesn’t work that way.
I did notice that my pet is suddenly dying really, really quickly in SPVP. Either everyone keeps focusing my bird or something has changed.
Even accounting for fire and air procs the 12K he cited was double the base damage. You hit the heavy golem for around 5-6K total damage. Air sigil isn’t gonna add another 6K to that.
At any rate, I’ve dome some range testing myself to see if the more outlandish claims are true.
I used Sick ’Em as a measuring stick to find 2,000 range. The maximum range of a traited ranger longbow was a step or two behind that. So the maximum range the projectiles will travel is 2,050-2,100.
I also tested the shortbow and mainhand axe and found the maximum projectile range to be around 1,200. using Swoop and Guard as measuring sticks.
And warrior longbow’s untraited range is about equal to the range of the rifle. So it’s actually 1,200 range, not 1,000.
The thing about range is though, it’s almost impossible to tell how far you’re shooting in this game. There’s no accurate measuring system available. Seeing as the longbow’s range wasn’t touched with this update just goes to show that before everyone started hyper analyzing Rapid Fire for every little advantage it had so they could complain about it NO ONE was aware of it’s full range, as it didn’t matter.