Guild Wars 2

Everything at rangers needs a fix.

Wrong. We were not buffed because somebody still believes that pets make a difference. To admit that pets are practically useless would mean they admit they were fundamentally wrong.

No please. The aoe is very badly needed and the only good one rangers have.

Never. Crafting will cost you a lot of money and it is only needed for ascended stuff, which in turn is only needed in fractals. But fractals are as boring as any other dungeon and the rewards are not sufficient.
Better harvest and sell all mats and buy what you need. And you can enjoy fractals up to level 20 iirc without the ar from trinkets.

The best way how to get equip: first and foremost, get ascended neck piece from laurel merchant, then go fractals until you are over level 10 and you have all ascended rings you need, then make ascended back at mystic forge and farm laurels for ascended accessories and you are fine.

Well thinking about it, making ascended weapons only makes sense. If you want ascended weapons, farm stuff and start in the moment you have everything and you do no t need to buy anything.

IDK why are people banned for selling, if people are certainly not forced to buy… I never did and after all it does not make any sense. AC is the best way how to make fast and easy money so to pay for it is really odd…

Please give better reward from the temple event big box to those who were helping during the whole event chain. This might encourage players who wait for the final fight to help with pre events, where help is usualy needed a lot.

Rangers are weak and overall mess.
However, this cannot be fixed, until there is some idea what a ranger should be.
Generally I would say rangers should have more ranged damage, but it is not enough. We need some party wide support.

Ranger archetype is a woodsman and a guide, so what about some (cc) abilities aimed to movement and travel?

I can imagine confusions, some aoe stun breakable by attack, invulnerabilities, immunbities and speedbuffs. Just something which would help the party in tight spots… any ideas welcome.

I think that someone tried to fix several bugs tied to world events by making attacking mobs invulnerable before they reach certain destination.
This is very annoying.

Please if the mobs are not vulnerable, mark them somehow. Maybe introduce a new color for hostile and invulnerable mobs.

bump that, I want dolphin, too

You do not need to shame yourself in public for it. Next time you will notice.

I like to play my ranger, but I mostly play my warrior. Because in a team the warrior is simply better, and people just know it.
Anyway, as much as I like ranged weapon, the melee they do more damage and they work in the stacking tactics, which is dominant. Most pug groups are not very fond of ranged only warriors.

Might be just my paranoia, but in every pug run where we got / rolled swamp we also got dredge.
Did you experience it, too?

You were kicked, I was kicked, you and me will be very likely kicked again, for a good or bad reason. This is a plain fact.
kitten happens, and the game is full of morons, griefers, or people who were frequently kicked in WoW and who believe that behaving like that is a trademark of a good player.
Just face it.
And be happy if you meet good people and try to play with these. Let the morons live and suffer in their little pseudoelitist hell… themselves.

For some odd reason we have to “rediscover” wood/metal nodes after every game update, because their positions are randomly changed.
So please tell me, do you enjoy this game feature and if yes, why?

Add 5 sec stun and 50% fumble debuff to the #5.

Recently I pug teamed with a strange guy who asked for zerker only members, claiming (rightly) that this results in a superior dps, and then he played rifle all the time, almost never going melee. And when people offered to relog to defensive chars, he was in strong opposition.
Guessing from his other remarks like “if I’m in a group which is not zerkers only I die too often” he was instinctively looking for bodyguards or maybe scapegoats to prevent frequent dying he suffered in recent runs.

I believe that this guy is a victim of the everpresent demand for zerker only gear and max dps at survivability cost. He is unable to play zerker but forced into it, which result in his funny tactics – equipping a rifle and staying at a safe range all the time. And it works – for him at least. He has the low protection of zerker gear, and a low damage since he uses a rifle which works best as a support weapon, not the main damage source, but he can claim he is a proper full zerker.

The morale of the story:
we need a viable option for players with a ranged dps playstyle (buff rangers)
we need some useful defensive/support builds

Being defensive is a stigma for a good reason – defensive characters are safe themselves, but they do not contribute to the group enough. The solution might be to add some strong party wide damage buffs or something.

Ascended rings are nice. However, after doing fotm for some time, you get more thyan you need. Selling a reward for full fractal run at vendor for 5s feels… strange.

Please consider:

1. making ascended rings salvageable for some materials related to ascended crafting, (dragonite ore, dark matter, ectoplasm, crystalline dust)

2. adding recipes for Mystic forge which would transform 4 rings into something else, other ring of random type, or maybe accessory…

3. let us sell it to the fractal vendor bot for fractal relics, or maybe a laurel – the effort to complete fotm run at 10+ level is higher than to make a daily, and you can buy a ring for 30 laurels after all…

You do not need to nerf heavies to do something with this. What you need is to properly buff other classes. However this elitism is something what evolved during time and it will die very very hard.

To all posters who ask “and do you use this or that build and equip”: Nobody realy cares. Try to join a speed group on a ranger or a necro. You will be mostly instantly kicked without a chance to say or show anything.

And one more thing – sword bores me on ranger. I have other characters for melee dps. I want to be ranged and use bow. This is rangers trademark weapon so I do not really care if you can make yourself almost as good as a warrior in dps (leaving survivability and support aside because wars will be always better at that) when using 1h sword and nothing else. I do not want to play sword only build. If I want go melee I would log my war or guard or thief.

And I just put my pet names to Juvenile Brown Bear!!!!!

S/M? I think vanilla choice is A/M.

BTW, Celestina, look at this thread
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/old-30-10-0-0-30-still-best-dps-build/first#post3572634
Hayashi posts an axe/axe – rifle oriented build here. I tried it and switched back to 30/25/0/0/15, but feel free to try yourself.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Bow is a superior weapon not only for the points you mentioned but because of its synergy with Cleansing Ire. Outside of picking off people in WvW Kill Shot is just not a reliable burst. Not only is it easy to avoid it also required heavy investment to make it work. The weapon forces you to invest so much just to make it halfway worthwhile when bow is not only reliable but also has better synergy.

Even with the upcoming nerf Pin Down is great with both GS and Hammer and makes landing those heavy hitting attacks much easier. Arching Arrow also hits like a truck and if used in the fire field it gives you might as well. Most of the skills are also much simpler to use.

Rifle as it currently is just feels way too clunky and Kill Shot is only good against bad opponents. I do use it in WvW but to counter it all you need to do is save your dodges for Volley and Kill Shot and most of its damage is gone. I’ve tried pretty much every feasible build I could think of and it was always lacking compared to other builds.

Well since I use 30/25/0/0/15 I dont really have cleansing ire. I’m talking PVE. Also, I don’t use Kill Shot because I want to keep Berserkers might up.

Essence Snow.3194:

Indicator of knowledge of the game? It’s the best we have.

Absolutely not.

I wonder if it’s intent or just bad drop table. I’m not saying I’m very experienced in fotm having the 200 achi completed just today, but ppl who were doing it a lot are complaining about almost no armor / weapon drops.

It is achievement points and its just straight stupid. You know I believe that this kind of elitism is imported from WoW by people who were often kicked for being not good enough and now they somehow compensate by introducing the WoW manners here.
However in WoW you were kicked because your dps was not good enough or you were underequipped or slacking.
Here you have no way how to check dps or armor (well you can ask for pinging armor to the char but thats all) so people try to find some other criteria how to compensate.
Well, they found aps…
Shorty, I normally avoid groups where they ask for certain ap minimum, because they are likely morons.
And I have seen 7k+ chars who were obviously clueless and played by total beginners – so I’d say ebayed.

Happens. However, rejoice, there are 2 viable solutions to your problem!
1. learn how to stack properly
2. find friends who do not stack and enjoy playing with them
and dont worry for being kicked. It happens sometimes.

Rangers are hated by pug. They are very good for soloing, but do not expect to be accepted in pug teams very often. Thieves are more tolerated.

Levelling in this game is extremely easy. Why do you care?

An idea: Make dungeon rewards scalable. If the group does not kick anyone, their final reward will be better. More money, higher chances for good drops, anything.

Kicking is there for a reason. So if you think that kicking causes griefing and therefore is bad, why dont you ask for its removal?
If you do not want to be kicked, team with your friends and guildies – people you trust and who like you. Pug is kitten people sometimes.
Also, there are numerous cases when kicking is well deserved.

Theorycrafting is nice, but I just went out and tried the build Hayashi reccomends. Naturally not everything was exactly as he posted, since I do not have the runes, so I was in ascended zerker with 2 exotics pieces and red orbs. After some trying which involved medium level fractals I decided that I was killing things faster on 30/25/0/0/15. I think there might be something under the hood we do not really see, but I was feeling that I was not seeing as much critical hits as I expected.
Which indeed is nothing like a solid proof.
Not that this is based on any calculation, but the reason might be that the main axe strength is in the autoattack, and for this you do not need reduced cds, the whirlwind, which offers mobility which i love does relatively low damage. Also wich missing Attack of oportunity we lose semi-permanent 10% of raw damage which is IMHO a noticeable drawback. Maybe I missed somethign but Hayashi does not mention this 10% decrease in his analysis.

Bombsaway.7198:

Warrior is just better now in all categories save fun. Ranger really is fun.

Yeah. I like ranger more, but I play warrior more.

My main is a ranger. I think I know lb ranger well enough. IMO rangers are extremely easy in solo PVE, and not very usefull in teamwork, which makes a bad combination. Also people playing rangers do the typical bearbow tactics by instinct, which might be a problem in a teamwork.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Rifle is another weapon that is generally crap, and believe me I have tried and tried to make it viable.

Please be more specific. I’m somehow tired that ppl tend to say things like that without adding any evidence. Rifle is not a crap, far from it – it’s a nice backup weapon for gs users.
Now, if you want (and can) to go pure melee it’s fine. I agree that the axe/mace does more damage than the rifle. But I tried both rifle and bow and rifle has several advantages:
bleed on auto (Attack of Opportunity is nice when using gs2)
8 stacks of vulnerability for 12s with 15 (12 traited) s colldown
interrupt with 15(12) s cd

The bow#1 root is indeed over rifle#2 slow, but OTOH it has slower cd and bow traits are not available if you go melee.

I use gs as the main damage source, and rifle nicely supports that. You put on slow, bleeding vulnerability, then charge, and gs2, gs3 eventualy to evade if needed and repeat.

Bow might be better damage wise with aoe, and is a good choice if you want to go pure ranged, but I use the rifle as a supporting weapon.

Nimrud.5642:

But I’m an elitist, I want to be dominant

Elitist dominants go for high risk and high reward paths. Go ele.

Stacking is not about fun. Neither are dungeons. Dungeons are about fast and easy runs and so is stacking.

People often say its bow over rifle, but I like the rifle more. You have the skill 2 to slow a mob and with good positioning its sometimes enough to make him eat the whole gs2, i LOVE r4 since it gives high vulnerability, and the r5 helps if you need interrupt, the only problem is the knocback… if they removed the knockback it would be better.

As for aoe, traited it gets piercing so shooting into a group affects more mobs (r4 shines here) and you can always use signet of flame which will proc pretty often if you are zerker.
I usualy go r2 – 4, gs4 -5 – 2 – 3.

And rifle trait is also sharing line with greatsword.

Xyonon.3987:

How can one just play with weapon A and B and nothing else? You don’t have to pick 2 weapons.

You certainly don’t have to pick only 2 weapons and nothing else. Play with anything that fits your playing style best.
My meaning was that after trying several weapon combinations, I finally settled on lb and gs, and I made only 3 ascended weapons for my ranger since I don’t use him neither in fractals nor dungeons, and these are the lb, gs and sw, and I also keep an exotic horn and dagger in my inventory. And for my needs it’s enough.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

For some reason everyone gets kittened off if I use my longbow and full zerker.

The reason as I see it is that lb is not very good for stacking. You need to be at max range for the max damage.

Im doing lb/gs zerk ranger, but I gave up the team play since pug hates rangers. I just solo with him and use warrior for teams.

Legolas at the Council of Elrond: “You have my bow… and my bear!”

Frostgorge champ train is passing the Veteran Largos Assassin, who says: “Are you looking for a challenge?”

Essence of luck might work in crafting or mystic forge recipes as an additional component. Using it might improve chances to get something better than usual.

Please enable moving camera into toon eyes. Might help at stacking or jumping puzzles.

The game starts at lvl 80, thats true… but I like the character stories.

If I need dragonite I constantly watch the map, once a see a contested temple (Dwayna, Melandru, Grenth, Lyssa, in this order) I go there and join the event chain or start it if not started already. Also the Golem Mark 2 drops enough dragonite and spawns often. If you have more lvl 80 chars and you make it your priority, you can get really a lot of dragonite per evening.

laharl.8435:

Sounds like you’ve already decided.

You are wrong, actually I went back to 30/25/0/0/15 earlier today to test how will the revert feel. I will also try to go more axe heavy as obal suggests in his post.

I feel and I am more vulnerable without the panic buttons I had to keep the party members alive, but there is a noticeable damage increase. An improvement in a good group, but a drawback in a bad group, where you waste a lot of valuable time trying to ress the other players.

I had one good 20 – 39 run, one slow, painfull and frustrating 10 – 19 run, and one smooth ac p3 speedrun. And it is the easy dungeon run with the fixed strategy with a lots of stacking, where the dps build really shines. But there I had no doubts, and while I was doing numerous dungeon runs on almost daily basis I never thought about a build change.
It is the fractals where I’m not yet decided.

I think it has nothing to do with number of bolts of silk in economy – rather I see it as an attempt to make ascended armor harder and slower to make. As a long term goal to keep people playing.
However, I’m affraid it has a different effect on me. I rather feel frustrated and thinking about other MMOs already. I feel somehow obsessed by the armor, I want to finish the whole set, but the gaming experience turned into a tiresome grind for mats and gold for me.
I feel also cheated by the change of rules – if they kept the ratio and the silk thread cost only 50 bolts it would be more acceptable.
Even if they say "well we made a mistake, silk is back at 2 scraps for a bolt, and swt cost only 50 bolts, I would be happy despite the fact that I already spent huge resources on the armor pieces I already have.

guanlongwucaii.3162:

swap out the ranged weapon for axe/mace whenever you can, as the knockdown is very helpful.

I liked the axe/mace and note that you can still use the axe/mace even with the b2, and while i liked the mace5, you have rifle5 instead which lasts shorter, but spawns more often.
I love the vulnerability and raw dps the axe/mace offers, but again the rifle4 works nice, too, and when stacked I always prefer to spam gs2 anyway. And here comes the bigger disadvantage of the b2, the 1.5 sec longer cd.

So while I agree with most arguments you post, I do not think the b2 is as crappy as you say – in fact it works better for situation where you can’t rely on some fixed tactics with stacking, and, raw damage aside, the rifle offers similar utility. The raw damage is also somehow compensated with the conditions, and the ability to kite.

Well, this happened, happens and will happen again, so what.