Guild Wars 2

Krispera.5087:

You can’t miss with the Staff AA, except when blinded of course.

I think what you’re trying to say is that staff can’t be reflected. You can’t miss with the LB auto since they updated it like 2 years ago or whatever; it hits instantly. I imagine you knew that if you’re on the ranger forum, but a shocking number of people think you can still make LB autoattacks miss by strafing.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Just because our rotation squeezes most of condition part of the hybrid stats – it doesn’t mean the stats are condi. A single build of a single class doesn’t make the nature of one stat combination different. The point stays.

By that logic, if I was in full berserker running axe/torch it would be a hybrid build. It’s just a technicality that a/t uses hybrid armor and ekes some power damage out.

I’m not sure why we’re debating this though, I have no idea what’s going on.

I think we’re stretching it a bit to call the a/t build a hybrid build. I just looked at the metabattle suggested skill usage and the autoattack is only used once per rotation. If there were an armor set that was 100% condition damage instead of half and half like vipers (i.e. shove all the power of vipers into condi) that would be the recommended gear.

For PvE, axe goes in there because it does better condi damage than any alternatives. For PvP and WvW, hell ya axe as hybrid is fantastic.

It’s kind of fun to think that you may be the only person in all of GW2 history this has happened to.

Using it doesn’t remove your build, talking to some NPC in the Silverwastes who asks you if you want a build does. I think it’s an attempt to give clueless newbs a usable build.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

I cant believe people are still complaining about axe in condi builds. The gm trait pretty much tells you its for power unless ferocity has a use in condi builds.

What mode are you using it for power? I could see it in PvP but I’m not sure that’s the BEST choice.

Also the 2nd skill is for for either hybrid or condi, so you can’t just list one option and say that’s what the weapon is for. Nearly no one uses axe for power, hundreds of thousands of people use it for condi or hybrid.

Did you use the level 80 boost? It gives you the option to remake your build and you may have clicked yes to that.

I don’t know exactly what it does since I didn’t click yes.

I would go 100% complete offense in your gear, your pets, and your traits, then just add like 1 or 2 “oh poop” buttons like SoS. If you are decimating everything with zerker-melee damage in seconds, and something goes wrong, SoS allows you to finish killing everything.

Also, many/most enemies have some strong anti-melee and anti-range abilities in HoT. Concentrate on what exactly is killing you and switch the appropriate weapon next time. Trying to melee those charging mordrem rider things is a waste of time if they’re about to charge. Trying to LB range-evasive hylek or pocket raptors is not the best idea. And so on.

I run very similar build to the above posters. I like berserker trinkets and weapons, and cele armor just to round out my stats. I also have defender runes on my cele armor, which is insanely powerful. My zerk armor has the PvE ranger runes.

Some moderate toughness, vitality, and HP will allow you to effortlessly shift between solo, small group, and zerg. But if you’re just using thief armor transferred to your ranger, zerker is a good choice.

Edit: OH! And where I dissent from most of the ranger community, I would never touch LB/Staff without the quick draw trait in skimishing. If you’re not familiar it doubles up your first weapon skill on weapon swap. So if you need defense you get doubled defense, and if you need offense you get doubled offense. Skirmishing also allows me to make use of my “default level” condi stats from cele.

When you use the item it asks you if you want to have the game reassign your traits into an Anet-made build.

Check your traits and reassign the druid traitline, which will allow you to use staff.

anduriell.6280:

the problem there is that you are not rescuing anyone there. the same attacks are hitting you will hit the downed.

They should have renamed it to just “Search!”

infinitenoah.8296:

@Fluffball

You do realize that hiring real scientists to conduct research on your game requires a lot of cash, right? Anet would gladly do the same thing if the firm had the resources to do it.

Er… I don’t think you read the article:

…Riot talks about its data at gaming conferences, and when it collaborates with researchers there are few restrictions on publishing. It also has an outreach programme, visiting universities to establish collaborations. And last May, Lin presented data at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in New York City to drum up more interest.

My first inclination was medium, but my ranger is my main, thief is old main, and engi is 2nd most played.

I’d take a different approach and put it on the armor class of your main. All 9 professions can use viper’s to some extent, and each weight has at least 1 “meta” viper’s build as well.

Any of the builds from before the S&R buff are still fine. Two CC gylphs and PM or whatever floats your boat. We still have massive CC and movement.

Even if you feel like the game revolves around PvP balance, you can’t just ignore PvP balance all together. Might on the axe is really strong, and if they added retal to the mesmer scepter that would be OP. Because PvE isn’t in a vacuum.

And axe has never pretended to be a PvE weapon, it just sort of fell into it by accident. Some weapons like our axe and warrior hammer and lots of other examples were clearly intended for use against other players, especially before the defiance bar addition.

It wasn’t the stealth tracking for offense, it was that it let you know where the thief was and then automatically removed you from the backstab zone with two leaps. It didn’t prevent backstabs with great regularity, but there wasn’t really a downside to doing it if you weren’t precasting something or etc.

Keep in mind anet intentionally and regularly changes the balance of professions that cause MASSIVE shifts in what people play. Even a single skill change can make or break a profession. So:

Razor.9872:

Choose what you like best.

Ya I think axe and entangle is going to be a lethal combo in WvW. Axe vuln covers the entangle immob. Not sure it would be the best idea in PvP though. Maybe something with SotW for AF generation. Meh.

Oh ok my bad, I haven’t seen the video in a couple years so I misremembered if she doesn’t actually do the bouncing in that one. I’ve watch probably a dozen of her videos over the years, at least some of them have the fun bouncy style of creating distance in them; I know she and I have talked about how we both have a similar style in that manner. She had a real knack for staying alive in outnumbered situations.

Dojo.1867:

The main problem is that druid/staff is just too kittening strong compared to core ranger and sb does not fit druid playstyle well since there are no real hybrid damage builds possible.

Didn’t EU run hybrid druids for a long time? I very rarely catch their matches, but I thought sword torch was a big thing over there.

I think there has to be a viable build in this somewhere, even if it’s not something you run in ESL or whatever. I haven’t tried anything so it may just be wishful thinking though. Edit for clarity: Referring to SB, not S/T.

If you are new to the game I personally wouldn’t use it at all, since I value the leveling, eploring, and most importantly, learning process. If you’re an old vet, it’s pretty irrelevant.

I used it on my main to get some free dyes and other crap I mostly deleted.

I keep winding up doing 0 DPS because I’m not used to being out of range. I’m winding up spamming 1 even more than I did with the old auto turned off.

I didn’t realize how much I loved the sticking in PvE, I thought it was just a PvP thing.

Playing glass rev = hitting 1 and then going to make a sammich.

assassin.7895:

roflmao axe and sb are bad in any player vs player scenario and they are bad for a really long time already and the buffs change nothing

Both SB and axe have historically been the most used weapons for ranger in terms of meta builds, and they’re even stronger right now than when they were used widely. The reason they aren’t meta at the moment is because staff druid came along. An even then axe is still a very strong, relatively commonly used WvW roaming weapon.

I feel like you just wanted to post a rage post and didn’t think it through.

With sage, it might do more damage than a LB in team fights now, if you want to run staff/bow. That actually sounds pretty appealing on paper.

DoogySnowStalker.2069:

Not liking the change for Path of Scars, could of been a directional arrow with adjustable range rather than an AoE

It would get stuck in terrain sometimes, this is to prevent that I’m sure.

xev.9476:

The new sword animation on a human is really ridiculous…

It looks like the cartoon uppercut where you hold your arm behind you and spin it twice before punching.

Zenith.7301:

You don’t seem to understand that hybrid builds in PvE SUCK because players stack one stat or the other.

Why do you think they don’t intend these changes for PvP and WvW, which is where those weapons have traditionally been used?

Wow.

I don’t know which one it was since she has like a thousand videos up.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Froudactyl/videos

If you go back a couple years though she uses s/d + gs in all the videos, and there is a lot of fun stuff. Maybe she’ll see this post and can recommend some videos.

I wish I had any idea what the EBG video was called, I’d like to rewatch that one. If you’re the poster that made the video and read this post, let me know!

UmbraNoctis.1907:

“she was bouncing around in a 1v5 or something and no one could kill her”

This looked to me as if the bouncing around was the reason why she couldn’t be killed, which doesn’t make much sense. Guess i just misunderstood you there.

It was. It was a funny video, she was evading left and right and using the untargeted auto to make people unable to hit her in melee range or with aoe. It’s one of my all time favorite GW2 videos, I think the favorite being the poster (can’t recall his name immediately) that had about 6 people chase him from Wildcreek all the way to Quentin, again using sword to stay alive.

Substance E.4852:

Fluffball.8307:

No, it was good because you could use it to kill people. But like tragic said, the unskilled masses and Substance E couldn’t make use of it. :P

As far as me not using to “zerg surf”, ya kind of hard in T1 when an average fight has half a dozen necro fears, DH gates, and static fields all over the place. If you think RaO and SoS (which doesn’t even block condi damage) is seriously going to let you walk through the bomb of 40-50 people then all I can say is that you have never even tried it.

Best case scenario is you make it to the back with all stab stripped and half your health gone from condi Reapers. The back line focuses you and you die from 3 ele’kittenting you with fireball autos while stuck in CC.

Excuse me for running pewpew/healbot. I rather enjoy playing the class to it’s strengths rather than as some off brand sword thief.

I could make up stories about how you play as well. All I know is the style worked for me really well and now it’s gone.

The PvP one is insanely easy to make compared to other legendaries, I would definitely get it.

Weren’t you one of the people saying in another thread that it wasn’t very good in organized play though? Did your opinion change or am I mistaking who said what?

Edit: Also are any teams going to take druid without it? Including yours.

Eurantien.4632:

Thanks for the support guys. Unfortunately we didn’t pull off the win. Hoping tomorrow’s patch creates a meta where downing someone first in teamfights actually means something again.

Requesting S&R nerf?

Archon.6480:

Dadnir.5038:

I just hope we won’t lose any attack speed on the sword AA with this change.

The third animation looks slow enough to get a good whack of mistrust…

I thought the same at first but I believe it’s still 3/4 second. From roughly keeping beat in my head, it feels like the same pattern. I am on vacation this week and have been drunk non-stop though, so don’t take my word for it.

The norn animation is absolutely hysterical. I think they were going for a “300” look, but it just goes too fast.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

How should “zerg surfing” work with sword auto? It offers nothing which would prevent the zerg from just killing you.

Cmon man, you’re better than that. Don’t just make ridiculous posts to prove your point. No one is claiming the sword auto is what keeps you alive as you attack their backlines.

I mean if people didn’t know how to do this, we wouldn’t even be discussing it. Just popping RaO and SoS is enough to get to the eles.

It was my default way of playing in zerg v zerg, and I know tons of other rangers play this type of role as well. We’re very good as “thieves” to attack backlines.

Again, all of this is irrelevant, all this discussions is doing is kittening off both sides. The non-sword likers won and this is all moot.

ekarat.1085:

As a secondary question, is the main difference between the function of these forums and reddit that the forums are chronological and that reddit is hierarchical by reply?

Reddit comments are ranked by popularity, which makes it effectively useless for a real conversation. Usually off topic jokes are at the top of the page, and dissenting opinions backed by facts are made invisible.

http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-tame-toxic-behaviour-1.19647

Edit: The article opens with a word banned on these forums, hopefully since this is one of the premier science journals in the world the mods will let that slide.

RoseofGilead.8907:

Sird.4536:

Are you ever going to do something on this forum? I am getting frustrated with the amount of devs that keep posting on Reddit and topics here get ignored.

While I also would like to see more dev activity on the forums, Reddit makes for a much, much more readable format for a Q&A than these forums. It’s easier to do Q&As there, in general.

I pretty strongly disagree, reddit (behavior-wise as well as lay out) is an unmitigated disaster and I won’t go there. I’d like to remind everyone of Gaile’s (sweetest woman alive) reddit account having negative karma once simply because the reddit community were mad at anet.

These forums are at least in chronological order. Just scroll to the red posts if nothing else.

This site should be useful to you:

https://www.gw2spidy.com/

Zedek.8932:

You, as older player (IIRC you were married and thus adult enough) you should be more positive about your surroundings instead of just shrugging the shoulders and blame “dem internet pplz”.

I don’t really follow what you’re saying. Because the internet has hundreds of millions of users, I can’t, like… be a force of good. I’m not going to go on YT and spread love amongst thousands of racist comments. I simply don’t use the internet for anything other than this website and news/business now, and I can’t see a scenario where I’d want to subject myself to a daily dose of unbridled hatred.

Edit: Oh you expanded on your post, it’s more clear now.

Substance E.4852:

So the sword is good because it can be used in harmless troll play and this fabled “zerg surfing”?

No, it was good because you could use it to kill people. But like tragic said, the unskilled masses and Substance E couldn’t make use of it. :P

Really, it’s over, I don’t know why the rooting-problem folks are still trying to tell us that sword had no advantages. You guys won, you don’t even need to understand our point of view anymore.

Ryou.2398:

Fluffball.8307:

Ryou.2398:

Thanks all for the advice, but quick question do guardians multi task at all?: Like support and do decent dps at the same time? Do they buff allot?

Everyone has ways of doing damage and simultaneously supporting, and it’s a core, critical element of the game.

Ok so what classes do more of that then? I doubt all classes are the same.

All of them are relatively equal bar none, as is the entire point of the game.

wrathmagik.3518:

Murderin.8269:

What else would I miss out on if I never went to the HoT zones?

about 20,000 deaths.

He died like twice from careening off a cliff because I went the wrong direction.

Also including in that two hours was a chak gerent kill.

For the record I am black out drunk, and could not see the HCs he had already been to. If I was running through on my own character it would take ~20 minutes to fully unlock an elite spec.

Regon Phoenix.8215:

Fluffball.8307:

Regon Phoenix.8215:

RANGER
I have literally seen Druid fight off 3 people, not dying, while downing at least one out of three every 5-10 sec.

How are we supposed to take you seriously when you write this stuff?

Just written the stuff i have seen. How i am suppose to take you seriously, if you can’t read up the experience i shared?

I did read it. And it’s a blatant lie?

Not even ESL players are 1v3ing while also downing players faster than they can be ressed. I mean you didn’t even try to make that lie believable. Just no. Not even close.

Can I suggest a friend, maybe one that knows the zones? Hell if you’re online and want to do some hero points to unlock your spec, I’ll get you there in mere minutes.

What bugs are you talking about? I can’t immediately think of any.