The low point for me was when condi survival was the only build we had for PvP, and even that was basically unacceptable. That was when I gave up playing for a few months, and I think we’ve made a ton of progress since then. I feel like I’m genuinely contributing to matches and team fights at this point. If they do nerf druid… well I don’t want to be dramatic… If it stays like it is, I’m reasonably happy.
The pet stuff is infuriating, but I really don’t think they will ever even attempt to fix the core problems, so no point in worrying about that. At least we got a bandaid fix with the smokescale and bristleback.
Edit: I ran into a wolf in a match today and only noticed it because I visually saw it. I’m not sure it ever did anything at all to me. Still <3 wolves though.
Just wait till I start going for those ranked win achieves on all professions that I have no goddang idea how to play. Fear me being on your team as a mesmer!
If you enjoy Wintersday activities, do the kitten out of them the next few days. A full set of armor is I would completely guess with no back up info, about 600 gold off the TP. So farm some presents and you can just straight up buy your mats.
It wouldn’t increase pet diversity I think, people would just lean towards pets they already would use. So Example Ranger: instead of lynx and tiger maybe it’s lynx and jungle stalker, and instead of smokescale and stuffed animal bristleback it’s smokescale and wolf.
It would be a nice start for overhauling some of the useless pets though. Make the polar bear roar a blast finisher and cut both the cast time and recharge in half. Then make it be able to attack while moving.
Getting completely lopsided scored could still be an indication it’s you. If you are constantly blowing it, that would essentially make it a 4v5. I’m not saying that’s the case, but it could be.
My ranked win percentage is 68.18%, however my win percentage in general on mesmer (which I don’t know how to play) is like 13% or something. So you can see how dramatically a single player can affect a match.
You don’t need perfect trinkets to do fractals, just get some karma ones from Orr or even a heart and get ascended ones when you can.
Fractals are a decent way to learn more about your class but the rewards aren’t that great. I’d recommend just doing whatever is fun rather than forcing any particular content. Right now, Wintersday is far and away the best place to get gold for crafting (sell presents or their contents). PvP is good as well. Laurels will pile up very quickly in the meantime.
You don’t need to do fractals to get ascended gear. You just craft it like anything else, but it’s a lot more expensive.
Fractals are a good source of ascended rings, but those are extremely easy to come by anyway. You can get a couple ascended backpieces via fractals, but that 1 piece is not that important and most people just use a lower quality item.
All races get access to the same pets if that’s what you mean. For PvP, WvW, or raids you’re crazy if you pick a pet based on aesthetics.
For open world, birds are the smallest that comes to mind and are pretty good DPS. Bristlebacks are also pretty adorable which match the asuran “theme”.
I’ve made about 1200 gold since HoT released by just playing the game normally.
Salvage your drops and sell the mats (or use them, that still counts as money earned since you don’t need to buy the mats for ascended crafting.)
Wintersday presents are selling for about 8 silver each, I just did the JP 5 times, so that’s 4 gold right there in about 10 minutes. If you can’t do the JP, do toypocalypse and bell choir.
PvP gives you liquid gold rewards and is quite profitable.
You should be earning roughly 1 gold per hour if you’re not trying in the slightest. If you’re trying to earn gold like with wintersday presents, that goes up substantially.
No one is forcing you to complete masteries and you don’t need more than a small handful to play the game.
You are simply not allowed to whine about not having something you don’t need and only want. I want millions of dollars but I would be a tool if I whined about not having it.
A crappy player in emerald won’t face abjured in the current system (and they wouldn’t be gaming the system to force that.) Gem color should be taken into consideration, but also MMR.
Condi war is off the charts DPS and is probably getting nerfed next update. It hasn’t been listed in common knowledge because it’s relatively new and the average player is apparently too stupid to see what anet gave us.
It’s taken over the raid meta though after nike called attention to the blatantly obvious build.
I’m not sure any of this is that relevant if we’re talking about fighting humans. DPS is one of a thousand parts of GW2 PvP combat.
Even in PvE, contrary to popular belief, pure personal DPS has never been the end goal. The much lamented dungeon running builds were never the highest possible personal DPS but rather the highest possible group DPS + support.
You’re over thinking this. As was mentioned, any profession can do pretty much anything. I have a main character I prefer playing, and different types of armor. So in my case, I can play a healing druid, a power ranger, or a condi ranger.
Condi vs power rev and guardian… it doesn’t really matter, either can do either. For now, condi burn guard probably does more damage than the condi rev, but that could and probably will change with any random balance patch. Especially since burning will likely be looked at soon due to it’s dominance in both PvE and PvP.
Those 2 new pets are used because they are the only ones that work. Some of the old pets (and the wyverns) are effectively unable to kill a moving test golem…
I don’t mean to be snobby, but this is an insanely ignorant thread.
Someone who doesn’t understand why rangers have been a broken-code class for years complains when the devs gives players something that pretend-fixes the pet problems. Smokescale and bristleback don’t actually fix any pet problems, they just mask them via teleports and ranged attacks.
It’s also worth reiterating that ranger is a pet class, and pets are our profession mechanic. Just because we’ve been forcibly hamstrung for years and players got used to fighting only the ranger while ignoring the pet, that doesn’t mean rangers aren’t a pet profession.
You can make any profession 100% ranged. That’s both the right and wrong answer. Right in that you can do anything that is fun in PvE and wrong in that completely ranged professions are usually worse builds than ones that use both melee and ranged.
I refuse to visit reddit because of the absolutely nonstop immaturity and hostility. The devs create a (heavily) moderated bastion of civility here and then abandon it for a trashy alternative site… what??
I’ve never seen that in the threads that devs posted in on reddit.
At one point Gaile Gray’s reddit account had negative karma because the community threw a temper tantrum. Reddit is just one giant petty disaster.
I refuse to visit reddit because of the absolutely nonstop immaturity and hostility. The devs create a (heavily) moderated bastion of civility here and then abandon it for a trashy alternative site… what??
Sinister and viper aren’t that great in WvW. You get all of the downsides of full glass, but condi rangers don’t get much of their damage from power and condi duration is often cut short by the opponents. If you used exotic dire or apothecary with your ascended trinkets, you’ll notice a massive uptick in your survivabilty and yet you’ll be able to spike just as hard as viper’s.
Your requirements are very general. Fortunately for you, absolutely anything will work in solo open world. Maybe take a look at the wiki and see if any skill types spark your interest, or make each profession and try them out at an instant level 80 in PvP on the test golems.
Off the top of my head, it sounds like you may like dragon hunter, revenant, or ranger if you can learn to use the pet properly. Your frustration with the pet almost certainly comes from not understanding the rules it follows, and ranger sounds like a near perfect match to your examples.
GW1 is not comparable, you were able to buy the original GW1 plus all 3 expacs for 30 bucks-ish even like 6 years ago.
If you’re complaining about having to buy both the core GW2 and the expac, you’re saying you got zero value out of playing the core game for 3 years, and in that case you shouldn’t have bought the expac. Me, I definitely got 50 bucks or whatever the price was out of the core game. If I turned my playing time into nights out on the town, I saved several thousand dollars by playing GW2 instead of going out for drinks or whatever.
If you’ve got them unlocked already, just play them and see which one you like! If you just want pure opinion on which is more “fun”, I’m biased because my main is a ranger.
I’ve got every profession at level 80, as I suspect most people do. There is pretty much zero downside to having lots of characters in GW2.
You’re both in luck and out of luck. Dragon hunter and ranger can both use longbow and greatsword (Twilight), and those are pretty common weapon combos. Both (and any profession for that matter) can do anything in PvE. A dragon hunter is basically a variety of ranger.
The bad news is that both druid and dragon hunter require level 80 characters that have played through a huge portion of the game to fully unlock. With that in mind, I’d recommend a ranger because you can start using your longbow from the start. Guardians can’t use longbows, only dragon hunters.
Like roamzero said, the mobility will mess you up for roaming, but you could potentially fix that with druid. Wilderness survival is not that critical to your build; SoR and druidic clarity (just run around with full AF before fights) is plenty of condi removal for being ranged. Then you also get the rather awesome natural stride and ancient seeds.
And another variant you could mess around with is the more typical staff + LB. It’s sort of against the core of your build, but it’s so simple to change between the two it could prolong your enjoyment of roaming. In that case you might throw in some gylphs or make other minor changes.
I complete this event with PUGs almost every single day. Just taxi to the map where everyone is doing it. Every time slot it happens has a regular group of people doing it.
You can’t blow all your utility on traps and expect to live once you reach a medium level of competition, that’s what you’re talking about when you ask for more survivability. You must take a stun break or invuln, or even both. Your weapons plus 1 or 2 traps are enough damage, but a single daze and you’re going to instantly die.
You could also drop MM for druid and get some more options, although as Lugh said that changes the build a lot. I would personally change the build a lot anyway though. :P
I seem to recall interrupts made that tourney pretty easy. NPCs are easy to shut down. Don’t forget about “You move like a dwarf” and the EV assassin, both of which KD.
You typically use rampagers or rabid for condi backpieces. Even though viper’s and sinister have power on them, the builds they are used on are condi builds. The power is just there because defensive stats are a waste everywhere in PvE.
I agree with everyone, make a new character, and make friends as you level up and learn about what the heck is going on.
I also strongly disagree with just going straight to guides on the web. That’s a terrible idea for any game. The people telling you to do that thought you had actually played the game to where you where at.
The skull fear is definitely affected by MoC, which I tested at the time of my above post. The tooltip is wrong, both with and without MoC. Base duration is a max 3 seconds, and it doubles to 6 on application.
The snowflakes and presents disappear whether there are other players there or not.
The snowflake section is pretty straight forward, just jump from platform to platform.
The presents section, you need to make sure you jump from the very edge of the fire platform so you make it far enough to land on the first present, and then just never stop running forward and jumping. Watch for the wind that will knock you off the platform once you’re off the presents. This section is the only one that is really trying to make you fall.
The snowball section, just have patience, wait at each safe spot until the snowball rolls by and you’ll make it through this section 100% of the time.
It does double the duration on the pig forage items that the ranger uses, it doesn’t work on the wolf fear or other pet applied interrupts.
Edit: Just double checked that it still worked and it does. There has actually been a WvW gimmick build for a long time where you use a bunch of modifiers to stack the skull fear up to stupid durations (and in addition to it being well known, the whole thing is nullfied by a single condi removal, so it should be safe to talk about it.)
If ranger existed in a vacuum, all of our weapons would be in a decent spot. They’ll all interesting. I like axe; if you were playing single player Diablo II and found a weapon like an axe, you’d hold on to it because “I can definitely use that in some situations.” All of our weapons have interesting pros and cons.
Unfortunately this is GW2 and there are 8 other professions, with lots of pros and a couple cons.
If you get the skull and have MoC, you get 4 seconds of fear at the closest range, which is equal to the wolf’s KD + fear. If you’re at SB range it’s only 2 seconds. If the enemy is immobile, the pig might land his own KD. If that happens it surpasses the wolf’s cripple, but that’s a lot of “ifs”.
It makes at least a little sense in WvW where you can take CC runes and MoC, but I don’t think you should ever take a pig in PvE.
