Guild Wars 2

Eros.6801:

Ele ofc is the best ranged class no matter what

This is an opinion. And one I strongly disagree with in many cases.

What you stated is totally normal, PvP is considered end game and the people playing it will tend to have the highest possible level of understanding of how to obliterate you.

So a couple points on that:

1) PvP automatically pairs you with equal skill players, but new players start at “average” since we don’t know if you’re good or not yet, so you’re getting thrown in with players that are mediocre PvPers (that may have over a thousand matches under their belt). After losing a few matches it should get to your skill level of “beginner”.

2) You need a very good grasp on the game to kill another player who knows what they’re doing. Consider leveling to max (80) in PvE to learn about the mechanics and your profession, or even doing some PvP-lite in WvW. Alternatively you could launch yourself into PvP if you’re a really dedicated player and get good in probably less than a week.

I think I might be the only ranger alive that thinks this skill is mildly awesome. As a skill it’s terrible beyond acceptance, but with a condi WS ranger, it sort of does everything on a short CD. You can literally use it as a utility condi cleanse, and then it does a bunch of other stuff you didn’t ask it to.

I’m sure you know this already but you can run GW2 on, like, a T1-86 calculator from 1997. I can’t remember how old my desktop is, but it’s fairly old, and I run GW2 on max settings with no issues what-so-ever.

Staff druid, worst DPS in the entire game bar none, needs a nerf.

Thanks for this thread.

No the pig brutal charge is ridiculous. It’s the same one the PvE boars use that are so common in HoT. They load up for several seconds and then charge in the direction you were in several seconds ago. It’s just awful. It effectively removes them from combat. Not only do they have a wind up, they have the “cool down” of returning to the fight. In open world PvE there is a roughly 0% chance that your pig will land a single hit.

Can we talk about how they miss their charge in PvE and throw themselves completely out of combat? I’m sure you could micro your pig to land it in PvE after you CC locked that river skale, but at what point does this become just stupid? Any point. At any point is this stupid. Is the correct answer.

I dunno, I think it’s a good change for both modes. In the past the AI sent out the axe, now you can put it where you think the player will be (which is actually REALLY helpful in openworld PvE as well.) Not a guarantee of course, but if you predict correctly you’re going to land a possibly fight ending hit.

The more control we have the better.

Swagger.1459:

I’m not saying rangers are not capable of doing “things”, what I’ve been saying is that the “self sustaining roamer ranger” is the best and most notible role we have. Other professions are capable of brining better “stuff” and playable roles (roles as in dps, support, tanking…) to the table comparatively.

I know, and I semi-agree that self sustain is our biggest plus. Semi-agree, because while other professions bring a lot of stuff that is often better than druid, druids bring all of it at the same time. And druid CC lock is the best-in-show, so doing a bunch of things pretty decently while CCing a bunch of enemies is a great addition to a roaming team.

Overloading CC while simultaneously pooping out waterfields and minor boons, a common AoE stealth, etc. It’s excellent stuff.

That is absolutely hysterical (aside from the fact that those players will see ranger autoattack as the only source of damage and come here to complain about something they don’t understand.)

GoT is too powerful to be instacast, however since other professions have skills way too powerful to be instacast, might as well make GoT on par with them. A lot of other professions get their effectiveness from their ability to do multiple things at the same time and with no time to counter them.

Since you’re relatively new to GW2, the leveling process can be a lot of fun and more importantly teaches you how to play the new profession. So you could consider just using it on your ranger when he’s level 80 for the free items, depending on how much you enjoy the leveling experience and learning.

If you turn the emotes on in your chat, you’ll often see a flood of other people “agreeing”.

Swagger.1459:

Do rangers have great toolsets for commanding and leading havoc groups compared to other professions?

Profession is pretty irrelevant for commanding since most people use nomad’s, but druid can plop waterfields all over the place which is always nice. I think a typical commander build would carry 3 waterfields on short CD, but I don’t really mess with zerg stuff.

For havoc, druids have the most access to CC in the game, which pairs really well with things like berserker eles or really any bursty class. And then druids bring pretty much every kind of small group support you could want, and depending on what build you’re using can do some 1-hit kills with short CDs while still being really tanky. A lot of posters have used a druid or ranger in the past as the “tank” which draws in a horde of unorganized solo players, and then 4 stealthed mesmers obliterate them while the druid does fairly big damage but is nigh unkillable. There is a legendary rank PvPer that posts here often videos of his pets hitting for like 25k AoE, and then add in maul, all while being tanky gear with lots of evades. That’s enough to lure in a small crowd of solo zergers and kill them all very quickly.

There is a druid that plays on yak’s bend that exclusively camps the sentry just to the west of red keep and just trolls dozens and dozens of players into killing themselves against a condi druid. Ya, you’re never, ever going to kill a condi druid. It’s amazing the amount of time people waste on him. Every now and then I see him play with some other roamers and the slaughter is just staggering. It’s effectively a PUG zerg worth of players being tied up by a condi druid and some friends. Totally troll, but people are single minded. A better location is directly out the outer wall gate at blue keep, and that is a truly impactful spot for organized roamers and a place the superior CC of druid really kills people. That really shuts down zerg reinforcements because most people use that gate.

I’ve long maintained rangers and now druids are either the best roaming class, or at least top 3 depending on how the power shifts. Rangers, mesmers, thieves, and revenants all sort of shuffle around the top spots. The exact ranking isn’t important.

Zenith, ask yourself how your contributing to the forums or why people would want to converse with you at all. All your posts aside from your first are just raging at people. I don’t understand why you are spending your free time getting angry, people come here for fun and sharing ideas, not to get yelled at.

Zenith.7301:

You wouldn’t know honest, useful information if it poked you in the eye.

Feel free to leave the thread if you’re just in the mood for vague platitudes.

Why are you throwing a fit over what I said? You posted one of the most one-sided, biased, and dishonest reviews of druid that I’ve ever seen. According to you, druids can’t do anything in WvW at all. That’s not useful for a forum based on sharing information rather than just attacking other people until you win the thread and no one wants to read it anymore.

Basically: calm down, we’re all on the same team here. I don’t recognize your name so I’m guessing you don’t main ranger? If you listen to us more experienced rangers (Jim posted some good stuff) you’ll learn how to use ranger effectively in WvW.

Zenith.7301:

Not really, at least not in tier 1 match ups.

If you’re a gank squad, ranger’s kitten anyways, better replaced by a thief/scrapper/warrior who can kill far faster than autoattacking someone with staff/longbow and hoping the smokescale does the rest.

Ranger has garbage burst and garbage aoe, druid is a dueling build not a gank squad one.

I think even you must realize you dramatized things druid’s are bad at and ignored everything they’re good at. You don’t need to “win” the thread by typing this kind of stuff; post honest, useful information.

Zenith.7301:

People only play druids for roaming/duels, which do nothing of significant value for the mist war score.

If you roam to honorably duel you don’t contribute anything, but if you roam to help the zerg or team you help way more than 1 person in a zerg does. Especially if you’re in TS with the zerg commanders who are more than happy to have organized roamers pre-flipping camps for a keep rush or etc.

And if you have a few buddies, a 3 man team or so can be absolutely devastating to enemy zerg reinforcements. You often see small organized parties tying up like 20 enemy solo players running out of respawn.

The whole idea that rangers are bad in WvW is just a myth that has been repeated so often that even ranger mains actually believe that nonsense.

Khisanth.2948:

Fluffball.8307:

Ya the rock description is very confusing. You might want to check a youtube video to get the right position. It’s the tree part right before the final jumping to the sun cantle.

I don’t remember having to go that high.

Youtube is the safest bet, trying to describe something via words is annoying when the location is not at all related to the hint in the collection. I spent like…. half an hour running around looking for the specific spot until I finally youtubed it and was like “well that made no sense…”

Ya the rock description is very confusing. You might want to check a youtube video to get the right position. It’s the tree part right before the final jumping to the sun cantle.

sinject.4607:

can’t believe there are people complaining about a gimmicky thief build when the meta scrapper build plays itself and yet is able to reliably beat everything in a 1v1 and output stupid amounts of CC/sustain in teamfights while being essentially immune to any form of burst save for a lucky condition bomb.

Well 1) your’e exaggerating wildly, and 2) both builds are off balance. The thief one is worse because it require less game knowledge to perform at the 100% efficiency level.

I’m saying take it easy for a couple days. You’re ahead of the pack, most people are at like sapphire. Play unraked and in a couple days you can go back to getting your daily ranked.

People are catching up by the second, just play unranked for the weekend.

There is a thing in PvE farming where you switch maps instead of servers though. I’m almost certain that would work, but I don’t really know how people organize those kinds of events. And you’d need to organize it with scouts for various maps. I’ve seen people doing it, I just know all the behind the scenes effort.

Actually dulfy.net has a farm for giants via an event, if it hasn’t been nerfed. Been about 4 years since I went for those titles.

Eval.2371:

or use that lovely option that allows you to switch targets mid channel.

This is actually something I don’t see brought up much on the ranger forum. Never play LB with that turned on! Excellent point.

Eval.2371:

Starbreaker.6507:

Has anyone found success running something off-meta so far this season?

From time to time when I see a really tanky group on my side, I will run glass druid and +1 with it. I have had lots of success with it. However, I wouldn’t recommend it with how prevalent projectile denial currently is.

I actually would recommend that build. Druid is tanky enough I often run something similar to your build based on our and the enemies comps. The easiest change is just to swap something like menders > marauders.

I think people make way too much of the projectile reflection. Just don’t shoot into it. Several pro league druids use LB. It’s very similar to saying don’t run melee weapons on any profession because DHs exist.

alchemyst.2165:

@Fluffball: Yes, it was so broken before. Must be why so many people ran it in pro league.

That’s not a good point and you know it. Look how many tourney players ran turret engi. Only 1 team and that was just to prove to people like you that it actually was a problem.

Forestnator.6298:

Broken does not mean it’s overwpowered. But pressing 3 the whole game and beeing 95% of the time invulnerable is broken.

I use skirmishing instead of NM, but that’s not really “off meta” just because no one uses it. QD is one of — if not our best trait since it can double up on either offense or defense, depending on what you need.

I’m surprised you found condi damage lacking, since it’s easier to crank out than power (p/p/f). I would think you’d be doing more damage, especially since sage also has power? I was tempted to try condi perhaps with SB, but I’m too lazy since it’s hot.

alchemyst.2165:

I love how people are just now calling broken now that thief is meta. Thief has literally the same amount of evades as it did when HoT came out, but nobody is crying until it’s meta.

Why are you confused about that? If broken build exists but no one plays it, no one is affected and there will be no forum threads. Now that this build is common, it’s getting really annoying.

You’ll probably want to replace both sigils, along the lines of what the 2 previous posters suggested.

If you want to use it in WvW you might want something like generosity and leeching. Those aren’t ideal for PvE, but then LB isn’t something you camp when doing dungeons and open world doesn’t matter.

It’s probably worth listing evasive purity as well.

And it’s pretty random, but if someone were theory crafting, the elite spirit does cure conditions, for whatever that’s worth.

Generosity sigils, my favorite.

msalakka.4653:

I am aware of the tournament. I don’t watch the tournament. Seeing more ads about it isn’t going to change that.

The tourney IS the ad. It already got its message across to you whether you like it or not.

4 is the big heal. 5 is the big offense skill but it roots you. 3 is the daze. That’s about all you need to know. I typically go either 3-5-3 or 3-4-3 them exit depending on whether I need offense or healing.

2 is a time delayed single condi clear, if it’s an emergency, but generally ignore 1 and 2.

Nabbo.2845:

I think most of you are missing the entire point that this 300k ish that was spent in marketing and sponsoring this ESL effort failed in two big ways

Fluffball.8307:

you’re going on too few facts. When I start with a new advertising campaign we get a brief that explains what the goal is, and is why I brought up Coke. People outside the industry have way too narrow a goal of what advertising is supposed to accomplish, and therefore say things like “I don’t even know what this commercial is about” or know why Coke advertises at all.

Maybe it did maybe it didn’t. From my literally expert opinion, it was money well spent and anet more than made the money back. I don’t have the data, but that’s what I think happened. And that’s as much as you can say only you don’t have 20 years of advertising experience to back up your opinion.

I do think pro league results are tapering out, so it won’t last forever without an additional twist.

virus.4370:

Fluffball.8307:

No one lacks the vision to see the potential of nomads which is why it will never be in PvP.

thats says to me you lack the vision to think outside the box ..on builds

Oh you’re not understanding my post. We all know how to use nomads in PvP, and that’s why it will never be used.

How long have you been playing PvP?

No one lacks the vision to see the potential of nomads which is why it will never be in PvP.

He’s laughing at you because no one anywhere ever in all of the history of the world has used nomad in PvE except for a few obsolete raid builds. Nomads was created for WvW commanders. Are you suuuuuure you don’t already know that?

KestrelGirl.9267:

That’s no armor. That’s a Revenant skill (though the charr seems to be wearing full Mistward armor).

Oh jeez, so obvious now. I don’t play much rev.

I don’t recognize that, but it looks like a margonite-based gem-store item. Where is the image from?

alchemyst.2165:

It simply means that’s this class’s version of defense. It’s not flat armor or HP, blocks, heals, or blinds. It’s evasion and mobility. That’s it.

Skillful use of it. Not just spamming 2 buttons to defeat most players. That’s the comparison to turret engi. My mother-in-law could beat most players on an evade thief and she has never heard of GW2, same with the old turret engi.

Another high sustain class, let’s say the bunker tempest? I’m sure you can see skillwise it’s not comparable at all.

You realize you’re like Warren Buffett whining about a McDonald’s coffee price, right?

The people defending this playstyle are the same people who said turret engi wasn’t a problem. We all know how to counter a perma evade thief, the problem is that it takes literally zero effort to play and take some GW2 knowledge to counter. Your average player is not going to be able to hit this thief who picked up the game yesterday.

psizone.8437:

IThe dodges combined with DB make it so that the window of opportunity to hit them with a CC ability is so minute that it almost relies on luck rather than timing.

The fact that this even needs to be brought up is enough to call for a nerf. No build should have that high of invulnerability to damage. Imagine if obsidian flesh had even 75% uptime and also held cap points.

Cynz.9437:

Do thieves have protection? No
Do thieves have invuls? No
Do thieves have high access to blocks? No (besides utility skill from DD)
Do thieves have massive heals? No
Do thieves have high HP to take beating in the face? No
Do thieves have high toughness? No
Do thieves have good condi removal? Not really
Do thieves have high access to aegis or resistance? No
Thieves do have access to stealth which was rendered useless when devs gave engis and revs 6 sec reveal on 20 sec CD.
So what is left? Rrrright, dodges.

SO, how do you expect thieves to survive this madness of condi/aoe/CC spam that was introduced with HoT?

By using dodge, teles, stealths, evades, blinds, and interrupts appropriately and skillfully. The thief build OP is talking about is the death blossom one, which is the skill equivalent of the old turret engi.

witcher.3197:

Fluffball.8307:

If Anet is wasting money, I assure you they will change tactics. They have tons of data.

Let’s be real here, does the marketng department of Anet make the impression of a competent group? After seeing the gw2 taxi, player pledge, the live “action” trailer, and other cringy attempts?

It’s more like “we have no ideas, we don’t want to work either, let’s just throw money at it and hope for the best”.

I don’t think they have a marketing department do they? I don’t know the answer. Those travesties seemed like the work of outside agencies and some serious miscommunications. If anything, the pro league compared to those is the most ridiculous success they’ve ever had.

Leman you’re going on too few facts. When I start with a new advertising campaign we get a brief that explains what the goal is, and is why I brought up Coke. People outside the industry have way too narrow a goal of what advertising is supposed to accomplish, and therefore say things like “I don’t even know what this commercial is about” or know why Coke advertises at all.

What I get in my project briefing is “we want to associate our project with luxury. target demographic: yacht owners over the age of 75. Budget: 750k.” And then we do something that looks like an outrageous waste of money to people who don’t grasp the true intent of the project. Results get tracked, the… let’s say rum company… starts inexplicably being recognized as a quality product by elderly yacht owners and the company makes back their advertising budget when someone hires the rum company to cater a senior VP meeting for an investment bank on a cruise.

If Anet is wasting money, I assure you they will change tactics. They have tons of data.

NEVER use hyperbole on the internet.

MiGFiD.1760:

Fluffball.8307:

Well we’re both just making numbers up at this point. Stomping isn’t always the best choice.

Agreed. Let’s agree to disagree.

You’re saying stomping is always the best choice? That’s objectively wrong. Stomping is usually a bad choice, sometimes it’s a good choice.

If there are 2 or more rezzers on a downed body, cleave, stomping is useless unless you have some serious CC.

If you’re out of CDs, don’t get yourself killed attempted to stomp, that turns a bad team fight into a team wipe.

And so on.