You can now replace one of those utilities with Frost Spirit, which is literally the worst skill in the entire game after the nerf. Spike trap is actually a pretty good skill, and considering that nothing on that build will ever do any damage, it may be the best possible skill for the build(!). Direct damage + CC + Bleed. It doesn’t hurt that you have a rune giving +25 condi damage.
Crits do 150% (with no ferocity) more damage than your regular attacks, so anything that boosts your regular attack also boosts crits.
With ranger runes and sigil of perception you can easily reach 100%+ crit chance. I’m pretty sure you get more damage from pure power than higher crit though.
If this changes the GS to be the best meta weapon, I’ll be very happy.
The 1h attack is absolute #1 reason I hate playing a ranger in dungeons.
?? It’s a nerf to the class as a whole, nothing to do with GS. The biggest reason we were taken in dungeons is now completely obliterated, so no one will accept you whatever weapon you use.
LB ranger will get some hefty buffs next Tuesday. Have you looked over the upcoming changes? If it worked for you a year ago, it will be much better soon.
I don’t think there is much of a standard gear set for WvW rangers. People are all over the place customizing to their build and playstyle. Ranger’s aren’t in the WvW meta so it’s basically up to you.
One thing you could do is craft berserker and if you feel you need it, mix in some exotic PVT or something (assuming you would want the berserker for PvE.)
Even without Frost Spirit, rangers still bring Spotter and their DPS will be bumped up a bit with the upcoming changes, so no, Rangers aren’t as bad as necros in dungeons.
Not as bad as necros for sure. But we lost 50% of our unique buffs. Predatory Onslaught is a (totally guessing here) 6% personal damage increase due to losing bountiful hunter and slightly more power, so we actually come out way behind the 7% party damage boost FS gave us.
I say interesting, because instead of occassional “I got kicked because I’m a bearbow”. We’ll probably see more because they just took a massive nerf
“I got kicked because I brought party support.”
Edit: Not having to go in to the NM line will probably change the meta build completely. Definitely for the worse, but now we have 3 – 5 more point to allocate.
Edit 2: Nevermind, quickly glanced over the traits and there is nothing I can see better than NM for damage boosts. Probably still 6/5/0/3/0 unless BM can somehow be worth it.
FS is now so far beyond useless it’s ridiculous. It boosts party damage by, what is it, like 1% or so? Compare that to one single application — not even a stack — just 1 vulnerability. Absolutely brutal.
Rangers are some of, if not the best, roamers and can be effective in zergs. However everything is going to change with the Sept 9th build, so maybe wait for that. Rangers will get some serious buffs.
Edit: I don’t mean don’t play ranger, just that the builds people recommend will soon be obsolete.
Well, I had fun watching the first 120 seconds or so, I’ll probly watch the rest at some point.
Not that I 100% agree with Prysin here, but it’s sort of like posting a video of yourself dominating the storymode in Half Life 1 at this point. These self promo videos get posted pretty often. Any one of us could post a video of us doing well with any random build. Often you can even beat a skilled opponent just because his build doesn’t match well against yours, and that’s not really your own gain.
One thing I do like seeing is the people that post, say, an hour of play and fast forward through the boring parts. But don’t edit anything otherwise.
Also to answer someone’s question, he’s clearly using the bear for condi removal since it’s his only source. Considering his traits, it’s probably the best choice.
The problem with the current trait is, either the effect is too low and noone want to use it or the effect is too good and you basically have to use it as melee fighter.
I don’t think that the current implementation can be balanced properly.
Ya this. I mean you could be look to the extreme at builds of GW1, where PvP rangers had like perma 75% chance to block everything all the time. “But it’s no where near that, idiot fluffball”, you say. And neither were GW1 skills, people just stacked things. We have the most amount of evasion already, so you have to be careful adding to it.
I don’t know what to do with this trait, but I’ve heard of or seen exactly one person advocate this trait since it was introduced*. There was one person on this forum that said he used it to reflect warrior hammers when stomping, which is quite possibly the worst misuse of any GM trait I’ve ever heard of. Keen Edge is of better use in a power build than that.
*Hearing of one person advocate this trait, and yet think of every other complete garbage idea you can possibly think of and dozens of people have made threads advocating that garbage idea. We occasionally — literally — have people advocating their bearbow builds for WvW and not Stider’s Defense.
Lawnmower people with Signets+QZ+RF of course! Next will be enjoying the sword damage buff in some dungeons. I have little to no interest in the axe; I don’t think that level of might will do much. Maybe in some team fights in PvP.
I think it looks quite interesting and solid, but enlargement feels like a waste since it requires you to be knocking on death’s door to trigger. Might be nice for duels, but I feel like in tPvP you’ll just get downed before you can do anything.
I’d call out “The Talking Dead” as a cool example for PoI. They have tons of interesting tidbits of trivia about an episode (which PoI often has), some super deep insight in to the characters by the actors who know spoilers (Angel McCoy provides some great insight, I love listening to her talk about the characters from an emotional perspective or what not) and then they also have tons of speculation and teasers and good stuff like that from the fans, which is for me where PoI sort of fails me since the devs simple aren’t allowed to say anything. I’d love to hear super-excited Kate talk to a community guest (Matt Visual maybe??) about speculation, even if it’s only 4 minutes of the show. And maybe Angel could answer some non-softball questions about the story progression by hand picking some questions she can non-spoiler go in to depth about?
Whatever, I’m sure you guys will figure it out. Even if it’s just the Peter and Kate comedy half hour I’ll probably still watch when I can.
Edit: I just noticed this thread where Angel does a great job of exactly what I’d love to see on PoI. She can talk about speculation in great and interesting depth without spoiling anything!
Lol, I picked up the same habit, even when playing other classes I end up pressing the auto attack button.
That’s not a bad habit. Competitive players do this for more control over their characters (i.e. for attack chains or confusion, blah blah blah.)
Anywho, the biggest advantage of the sword other than autoattack damage is versatility. GS has it’s skillbar locked with 5 skills. Sword essentially has 11 skills, and 10 of them are awesome (WH4 is awful.)
traps mean you have to play the game rather than just run around on auto pilot
No, it means you have to turn the game off. This is not an acceptable addition. What happens when they add more of these and you have to quit the game every few minutes?
Well Kate says she tries not to spoil the story for herself. So as funny as Peter is, it might actually be a better show if she had other people on there who don’t know the end of the story. There is basically nothing any of the devs can say other than try to keep as much of a poker face as possible. They should all wear those oversized sunglasses from the world tournament of poker to avoid giving anything away. Doesn’t make for the most enlightening show when 3/4 of the people on it aren’t allowed to talk about the subject of the show…
Your weapon also sticks through the ground when it’s sheathed. And greatswords go straight through your backpack. GW2 is no stranger to clipping problems.
And yet we will been stunlocked under 100b’s 30-45k overkills
A typical WvW build includes 20+ seconds of stability AND 2 stun breakers AND 1 invulnerabilty. And then traits.! That is a normal build. And you can’t deal with one skill that does DoT.
Every post you make is a complaint and something that isn’t even one of the many thing rangers have to complain about. Ranger do have cause to complain. About hundred blades? NO!
You says it’s the class you like the most; what is it that you like about the ranger?
If it’s the easiness of range + pet in the open world, ya, you’ll be let down because that only applies to leveling (also stop being a lazy player.) If it’s almost anything else, why would it change at level 80 content?
It seems you know too little about how geodata and pathing works.
I don’t understand what your point is. Are you saying you think Anet tested their map so badly they didn’t see the in-plain-sight, 1 foot from an aspect crystal important location player trap? It’s literally just a ring of rocks intentionally placed. There is no weird terrain junctions that accidentally form a hole. It’s just a fence.
New, well balanced, simple, open, maps that are absolutely nothing like EotM.
Honestly even just a change of scenery would be nice to tide us over. Keep the old maps 100% the same and give them the marsh and desert textures or something. Instead of snow everywhere all the time. So much snow…
The hole takes it to an entirely new level. It’s not buggy, its just a player sized hole directly next to the crystal. Anet was 100% aware of it; it’s impossible they put a player sized hole in plain view and weren’t aware you had to exit the game in order to get out.
They sometimes will do this with hidden falls, and it’s like ‘haha now you have to WP to get back because we threw you down a hole,’ but in this case you have to actually quit the game to continue.
Messiah many people are already running that build. It’s borderline ‘meta’. It will definitely be stronger after the patch.
IMO, go as glassy as you can without being easy to kill. It’s different for everyone. You may have to wait to see how ridiculous the longbow changes are. If we can obliterate everyone in a single QZed RF… full berserker of course.
What exactly is the purpose of the hole in the rocks right next to the aspect crystal near the mordrem?! It’s ridiculously easy to fall in to, and there is almost always an enemy nearby that puts you in combat. Now you can’t even WP to get out of it. You have to exit the game entirely to get out of the hole!
Seriously, Anet, I’m sure someone thought this would be a fun little trap, but think things through please!
Night is typical for dungeons but that won’t help much in WvW. Maybe strength + bloodlust would be a good combo for both roles. BL is great for WvW and GS is used for killing trash in dungeons, so you could still have 2 sigils on your sword/wh swap.
I think you could get away with that build if you ran anti-condi food and/or runes and/or sigils. I don’t have much experience with that, but the high number of evades and pretty high pressure you put out should make that viable in my estimate. You have a high crit chance so generosity could come in to play.
HS and SoR are really not very far off EB, and in fact have a couple advantages over EB.
Your vitality is awfully low though.
Edit: Oh one other thing, the HS vs TU debate, you need to use sword 2 as a leap finisher in the water field or HS is not good at all. The leap and blast finishers are what bring HS back up to par with TU in terms of healing power, and then HS takes the lead due to condi removal. Unfortunately you only have 1 leap and no blast finishers. Could be very handy if you travel with a friend though.
The first time is what I measured against the test heavy golem. The second time is how long it would’ve taken if the pet hadn’t made any crits (assuming an average crit rate in the first time).
t2 = t1 * (1 + 0.5*crit_rate)
t2 is a bit off for pets which do some condition damage (like the cats). But the cats are so far ahead I don’t think it makes a difference.
That’s really interesting. Cats get that double swipe which put some doubt in my mind about drakes power. I usually ran cats out of laziness. I’ll be keeping the cats up full time now and not feeling bad about it.
I would love to know what exactly the devs were thinking when they made each pet type. Some are so ridiculously good compared to others. Cats are at least contenders in every possible game mode (open world, dungeons, fractals, WvW, PvP) if not the best in a particular mode. Wolf is almost universally taken in competitive. Whatever…
It is a huge buff that might feel like a debuff because we remember those times we killed 5 necros in WvW and don’t remember the time the 5 warriors escaped immediately.
I urge the devs to consider many classes are reliant on AI for their damage, namely mesmers and rangers. There have been an awful lot of enemies added lately that nullify that entirely. The sparring rock, the beetles, etc, all cause certain builds to lose massive amounts of damage. It’s not game breaking right now, but it could cause some severe problems if they continue to add this stuff.
On a similar note, enemies not triggering “on death” effects in the instances could cause some problems.
I just use the normal dungeon build for open world. It’s pretty close to the highest DPS. You can go higher, but it’s not worth the effort to change traits every time you change venues.
The one thing I do is drop FS and take two handed training instead. And of course SotH is pretty much a must have. Throw FS back on for world boss train.
If you insist on running longbow, as long as you only join groups that say “play how you want” or something similar, just go as glassy as possible. Without looking at the traits, probably 6 in MM and skirmishing. None of your boons will affect your allies and you’ll be a terrible teammate, so there is no point in bringing group support like frost spirit, spotter or healing spring. Don’t even bother trying to join normal LFGs as you will quickly get kicked.
Edit: My post reads more hostile than I’d like. If you want to run longbow in dungeons, I just wanted to emphasize people will hate you. But if it’s fun, find like-minded peeps and go with it.
