Guild Wars 2

I’ve been in some PUGs that struggle even with this, arguably the easiest dungeon path in the entire game.

I think it’s easy for us to get jaded to these bosses because we, as a community, have broken them. People who don’t even know there is a community can really struggle with dungeons, like the guy who genuinely has no idea bearbow is ineffective.

I think the best solution is varying difficulty levels, like adding TA Aetherblade type paths.

Condition damage is no good for a power longbow build. Other than that there is no right answer.

Most people wind up with offensive trinkets, but mixed with things like slightly defensive valks or cavaliers or whatever stat they need to round out for their playstyle and traits.

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

The other day I walked around EB as a quaggon with a bawoon!

Of course there are times when enemy players with run around with you, even transform into something and walk around with you.

But then you also have the red=dead players. Even though you clearly pose no threat, even to a rabbit; not only will one enemy player jump at you with everything they have, I’ve had instances where 20+ have detached themselves from their zerg train just to kill little old quaggon.

You are a loot bag, nothing more, especially in such instances

I view people in tonics as time trials for how quickly I can annihilate them.

FrouFrou.4958:

Muddy terrain is extremely handy, I can’t live without it anymore. It’s one of they key skills that keeps me going as a melee ranger.

Samsies. I haven’t made a WvW build without it in like… over a year.

It still is a clear distinction. For damage in all 3 formats it’s: More than 1 target being hit? Use greatsword. 1 target being hit? Use sword. I think that’s a very good idea for distinguishing between two otherwise almost identical weapons.

Second part is, evade vs sticking to target is the second half, and again, good idea. You can 1v1 someone with a greatsword just fine. You’ll do less damage but you’ll have more defense (on the autoattack, both weapons have other forms of defense built in obviously.)

Right now they do have clear roles. Sword is better for single targets and has a cripple (and pet might), greatsword is better for multiple targets and has the evade.

I don’t think they clash with each other at all, but if you put an evade on the sword, the GS loses half of its identity.

You can’t put an evade on the sword autoattack or the greatsword suffers. Even if you balanced out the numbers, it would make them basically the same weapon.

On that note, if you’re fighting a group of more than about 7 people, I think the greatsword is always the better choice. Unless you’re zerg-surfing with a longbow, then sword is probably better.

It’s not that long for them to revive you. What is it, 20 seconds?

Soloing on warrior is good. It’s better if you can duo with a friend, especially so you can practice lupi.

Just did it a few hours ago with no issues at all. They were probably using masterwork clerics gear or something.

SMC is not a dueling area.

Just kill everything and block people if you can’t ignore them.

You’re definitely not doing anything wrong, but here are my thoughts.

In my opinion, you’ll get more out of Spotter than Eagle Eye. The bonus range is not useful for very long, especially since you don’t have a ton of CC. However spotter will benefit LB, GS, pet, and any random ally that shows up.

I always take Nature’s Protection over Strength of Spirit. The protection triggers before whatever makes it trigger hits. So for example if you’re fighting more than one person and don’t see a fatal eviscerate or kill shot, it will save you. But it’s just personal preference. (Edit: Obviously very helpful for backstabs as well.)

Last thing to consider, you can use your LB for longer if you trade QZ for Muddy Terrain, and it helps you flee pretty easily by casting it while holding down your look-behind button. Again, just a personal preference of mine. It has a way shorter cool down and is more useful if you run in to allies since it helps an entire group instead of just you. I usually pair MT with the drakehound if you want to go that route.

I’m kind of a big deal, not sure if that counts.

Malcastus.6240:

The auto attack is incredibly annoying if you value skilled play. I seriously doubt Anet will improve the mechanics of it, however.

Here we are discussing how the sword has a high skill cap and how many players aren’t even aware of the high skill cap because they don’t know how to get extra dodges or longer leaps out of swords.

And you come barging in declaring it’s low skill.

This…. I don’t even know.

MisterBang.3516:

How many HoD’s are needed to change the lightbulb?
Dunno… they never got that far up the ladder…

Meanwhile, half the people laughing at that are former HoDs who don’t feel any connection to the “champion” server.

I take a different approach that isn’t popular around here. Glass cannon counters glass cannon. You can’t kill someone who can leave combat at any time they want by whittling them down.

IMO, load up on as much damage and as much CC as possible. I’ve literally killed thousands of thieves doing this. I can quote some of my posts for killing thieves, or if this is working for you then awesome, and I appreciate you repping ranger as something other than a bearbow.

Hmm ya, as I tried to add up all these intangible elements in my mind (crit damage is a big one I think) it started to add to the warrior. It’s not a blow out. I just find it weird Anet said on friday they consider the warrior a selfish class that doesn’t help others and that is a major weakness of it.

Regardless, two warriors do NOT provide this same benefit, so if NormalPerson was running meta he would indeed be contributing quite a lot to the team.

This is getting super off track but where is that number coming from?

I see fairly similar buffs of might and fury (with average builds, obviously warriors can provide massive might and ranger perma fury). Both of these are likely null from the two eles.

Both have irreplaceable damage buffs in FS/Spotter and the 2 banners. Not seeing a huge discrepancy so far. Or are the banners just THAT much better than FS/Spotter?

Finally a slightly intangible bonus from HS and the elite banner.

Edit: I’d also question the CC bit. Neither meta build provides anything noteworthy.

Ha! Ya I you knew you weren’t complaining about anything. It’s just sort of weird, like saying you can’t eat applesauce with a knife, and refusing the spoon in the drawer.

Well mace was the meta PvE offhand for ages. So that’s not obscure.

Edit: Oh maybe you were responding to my overdramatization that only GS is a PvE weapon. Sure a lot of them have benefits, kind of like the ranger axe.

NormalPerson: Of course you’re going to feel useless if you’re running a WvW build in a PvE environment. No self-respecting warrior runs toughness and vitality with a hammer in a dungeon.

You get free trait respecs now: give ’em a whirl.

Edit: Turtle, I think ranger/ele/ele/guard/thief would be effectively equal. No point at all that I’m making, other than one could bring something the other couldn’t and vice versa. Warriors will be favored due to the “no deaths allowed” rule though.

E’ry one better practice laser jumping then.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Well, all the weapons the warrior has have great use in PvE (exept mace).

I would label rifle, longbow, hammer, sword, and shield as basically PvP only. All of those except possibly rifle are very meta in PvP.

Axe, mace and greatsword have always been the only acceptable PvE weapons and now it’s down to only greatsword.

It’s the variety of weapons warriors have that give them these choices.

Galphar.3901:

Meta is not the End-All Be-All for builds.

No, it’s not. But if you were replaced by a meta warrior, the run would probably be faster and smoother. That’s not really helping this guy.

BTW, if you want to talk non-meta in GW1, I’m all over that. I have some ridiculous hero builds that were very high skill cap, yet high reward. Unfortunately it does not work that way in GW2.*

*Edit: I should add unless you mean full berserkers melee, which is basically the equivalent of what I would vanquish with in GW1. I did a lot of of zones with no healer and just a lot of melee damage.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

That however does not change my opinion that this weapon is not appropriate for PvE, as are many weapons of the ranger.

Not agreeing or disagreeing, but it’s an interesting opinion. I think warriors can get away with the relatively pure PvE weapon of a greatsword because they have so many weapons.

I think all ranger weapons are biased towards competitive play, and double as PvE weapons. But presumably most of the game is built with that in mind (competitive, also works against idiot AI.)

/streamofconciousness

Substance E.4852:

That makes absolutely no sense at all. For something to have a high skill cap it typically needs precise execution to work perfectly. One could attribute this to the 1h sword since you need to know how to work around the rooting but that doesn’t mean flexibility.

1h sword works adequately with just autoattack turned off and a decent sense of rhythm. You can take it that extra mile and get extra “dodges” out of the autoattack. (even in PvE against 1-hit kill bosses.) Also judging by the difficulty people say they have using Hornet’s Sting, the timing of that could be added to the skill cap. Likewise with the weapon swapping to achieve longer leaps.

I think the unconventional movement is appropriately called a high skill cap. You don’t even necessarily know it’s there and can still be average with the sword.

Straegen.2938:

By returning to FAs former strength they have gotten stronger as most other non-T1 servers have gotten weaker due to attrition.

As for the current state of servers… IMO looks like:

Tier 1 : TC, BG, JQ
Tier 1.5 : SoS
Tier 2 : Mag/FA

Tier 3 is looking like YB and DB with SBI/IoJ on the bubble as a Tier 3.5.

Then the rest.

I only “follow” the servers FA fights, so it’s hard to comment what’s going on in other tiers. If what you wrote is true we will have pretty good matchups. 3 T1, 3 T2 (even if SoS is really strong should be fun at least) and then a bunch of T3 servers to fiddle around with each other.

frifox.5283:

Fluffball.8307:

Someone explained to me a surefire way of making it through that laser field. I’ve actually never tried it since I can almost always make it normally. It’s not a cheat or anything, just a way of measuring the distance to jump, apparently infallibly.

It’s not really a secret, just jump sideways:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7H9nIMaK5s

Yup, that was the method. Didn’t know how widespread it was. Like the guy above you said, I just do the short jumps and do fine.

ITheNormalPerson.9275:

small group content that just feels like a warrior could replace me without any consequence

I think it’s a mistake for you to feel useless. Warriors do more damage as individuals than rangers, but rangers bring unique party support that literally makes them irreplaceable.

Over simplifying, there are only two situations where a additional warrior would be the better choice than the first ranger. 1) You suck and/or don’t know what to do, or 2) you aren’t running a meta build and are drastically bringing the party down.

On the other hand, anyone is replaceable at any time, as was the goal of Anet. One time I did a 50 or 60 something fractal with 4 rangers and a necro. It’s just not the perfect comp.

Straegen.2938:

As for FA, they have gotten significantly stronger these last few weeks. They have good coverage, good population and several strong guilds. The will likely lay waste to DB and probably beat Mags now.

We really haven’t gotten stronger, we’re just back to our pre-tourney levels (maybe even slightly below.) Tons of people, including me, got bored out of our minds with the tourney and effectively stopped playing WvW.

There will once again be 4 T2 servers and FA and someone else will take turns annihilating IoJ and SBI.

Jerus.4350:

Saw a mention of COE golem being agro from the start now, anyone able to confirm? if it’s true is it back on the list? I so want to see someone good die to that laser field and rage

Someone explained to me a surefire way of making it through that laser field. I’ve actually never tried it since I can almost always make it normally. It’s not a cheat or anything, just a way of measuring the distance to jump, apparently infallibly. I won’t mention it in case someone doesn’t know it and that will make CoE runs more fun to watch.

Story modes are run for 1 of 3 reasons:
- unlock PvP track (does not care about dungeon at all)
- unlock explorable (does not care about story mode)
- and the guy who is completely new and just doing the dungeon for the first time, who wants to savor every moment.

So you just accidentally put the wrong people together.

I was looking over http://gw2dungeons.net/?HOTWS to try to remember that path. I definitely remember the end boss and his stupid birds. But most of the bosses listed say “does huge damage” or something to that affect.

All the bosses in all paths of HotW either do no damage or do enormous damage (or some combination of the two.)

I do HotW so rarely I totally forgot about it. I think many teams are going to choose those paths, and I look forward to some hysterical deaths.

Garambola.2461:

How do you know they were uplevels?

I take it you aren’t a WvW player. Uplevels have an up-arrow next to their name.

There are a lot of places you can’t enter the water without submerging. It’s ridiculously restrictive to have to work around this. I try not to play the borderland maps at all anymore because there is too much water to cross (i.e. you can’t use the Bay WP.)

I can’t believe anyone is naive enough to defend this. It’s clearly a bug. No one wants to abuse anything, we want to be able to cross a river for 2 seconds without losing enormous amounts of effort in getting stacks up.

Ragnar.4257:

Most WvW players would be happy with blank terrain dotted with a few keeps.

If given the choice between a rolling plains map and something as complex as even the ruins, I’d prefer the plains. Too much stuff just gets confusing and annoying, especially when dealing with classes that can easily run away by teleporting up a cliff or something.

They handled it incorrectly. If you don’t unequip your land weapons, you should not lose your stacks just from crossing a river. It’s infuriating.

Lake.9842:

Fluffball.8307:

I’ll find links to both videos if you’re interested because they are ideal examples or sword use, just let me know and I’d love to put in the 10 minutes searching for them.

That would be great, thank you.
And, do you recommend also turning of the autoattack/autotarget for PVE?

Some pretty awesome sword use particularly for about the last minute where he’s running for his life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AkX6q_kV-s

Frou Frou’s video where she got reported for cheating for being too good at ranger:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyxQN_UCYM0

And yes I 100% agree with turning both of those options off for PvE.

Lake.9842:

Can you explain this please?
I recently starting playing ranger and it seems to me that the sword is actually a really low skill cap weapon that basically involves watching your character be locked into an auto-attack animation until whatever you are hitting is dead. (Note, I do know that the animation can be cancelled but appears to take almost a second to do so.) The other skills don’t add much dps and are meant for evasion, but with the delay can’t be used to dodge much of anything (along with 3 usually just rolling me into terrain and not actually connecting).

Presumably I am using the sword wrong, but how is it meant to be used?

This is for PvP or WvW: Turn off autoattack and turn off autotarget. The movement from sword is just ridiculous. The autoattack untargeted alone can get you to safety. If you hit things without a called target (or even with one once you get used to it) you use it as a leap.

It’s a weapon that can either make fleeing from you almost impossible or make chasing you almost impossible. It’s just downright amazing. I need to find the video someone posted of like 7 people chasing a sword ranger all the way from green on EB over to blue on EB, and the sword ranger just evading everything.

It’s hard to talk about and better just tried out. If you want, hit me up in game, or since sword has been a hot topic lately I’ve been constantly bringing up Frou Frou’s video where she got reported for cheating because she used the sword so well.

I’ll find links to both videos if you’re interested because they are ideal examples or sword use, just let me know and I’d love to put in the 10 minutes searching for them.

If the damage from the LB was consistent and safe for you, it was the Survival of the Fittest build. Probably with a bunch of defensive gear.

Longbow has one big strength, and that is big ranged damage. Making it tanky makes it useless. A well played glassy ranger is 1 in a 100, but you kill thieves.

You could be in GS to begin with, but the topic was about using a 1h sword to track thieves. GS only came up because I said once you know where the thief is, maul is a good follow up. 1h sword doesn’t do very well by itself against thieves, you’ll only get 2 hits in and have no damage boosted skills to use.

shadowpass.4236:

Nope, wrong. Maul is on Greatsword smart one.

Stop trying to prove your point, it makes no sense.

You can tell the instant you hit with the Greatsword too… soooo…

Its not very powerful either… and Maul only does a lot of damage on zerk builds if u crit and have one or two big damage modifiers like Signet of the Hunt, Moment of Clarity, Signet of the Wild, a lot of might stacks, and/or some of the X% modifiers from traits.

Hit him with the sword, see that you hit him, swap to maul.

I don’t give a good flying kitten if you use it or not, but that’s how you track a stealthed thief. This isn’t something that needs you to argue with people over.

Substance E.4852:

Fluffball.8307:

HHR LostProphet.4801:

How do you want to stick to a stealthed opponent? o.O

If I may answer since I’m here: you literally go flying when you hit a stealthed thief. You can’t stick to him, but you can find out exactly where he is. It’s very powerful, especially combined with maul.

The leap is on the third hit meaning you have to hit a stealthed target twice to fly. That either requires extreme luck or an extremely bad theif.

Nope, wrong. You can tell the instant you hit with the sword. Once you hit once, just maul him with the next attack.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

How do you want to stick to a stealthed opponent? o.O

If I may answer since I’m here: you literally go flying when you hit a stealthed thief. You can’t stick to him, but you can find out exactly where he is. It’s very powerful, especially combined with maul.

Ya it’s clearly designed as a competitive weapon. The fact that it’s the best PvE weapon I almost feel is an accident. That’s probably where the hate originates.

I was going to do a point by point but I couldn’t. I mean I just disagree. I don’t think you’re wrong with your points, I just — if I had my way — would design the sword exactly the way it is right now. It’s very important to how I play that it stay the way it is. Everything many people view as a negative is a positive to someone who likes the sword.

What I view as the best solution, which I would LOVE, is to add a third mainhand melee weapon.

Fluffball.8307:

In WvW I think you just don’t play ranger in zergs.

If you want to go 5 v 5, I assure you there will be rangers involved.

Edit: And mesmers and thieves. They never receive any zerg love either.

Edit2: Maybe beating a dead horse, but the reason your ranger died was because people target rangers in GvG. If 10 people target a warrior, I guarantee you he’s going to die. Rangers’ evades, blocks, invulnerabilities, stealths, etc., are plenty to keep you alive if you insist on zerging. Assuming it’s two PUG zergs clashing, I’m usually the very first player to hit the enemy.

Lévis.5489:

Pets will be useless in high end pve and WvW

They specifically addressed pets being dead against certain PvE bosses. It’s rare a pet will die, but they addressed the fact that some bosses will kill them.

In WvW I think you just don’t play ranger in zergs. That’s not necessarily the devs opinion, it’s mine. Some classes excel in that kind of clustercat, others don’t. Play rangers in small groups and play guardians in zergs.