I don’t see ranger or several other classes ever being buffed to be able to be mainstream WvW zerg. I don’t think that was the point of this live stream.
Pets aren’t useless in WvW and neither are clones. They just aren’t very good in zergs. I’ve said it many times, I don’t think zergs are how you balance the game. If you want to do a 4 vs 4 or something with a ranger or a mesmer on your side, the ranger and mesmer are going to be extremely strong.
Also you are just 100% wrong about how useless our evades and mobility are Atherakhia. I don’t even know how to begin. Maybe with Frou Frou’s post about how a warrior reported her for cheating because she was evading multiple opponents.
With our mobility, we can quite easily escape even thieves. Thieves are faster, but they can’t chase us down unless we’re on the verge of death.
It’s actually the only class from dulfy’s notes that lists the mechanic as a weakness.
Sort of. Other class mechanics that are weaknesses are mesmers reliance on clones, or ele and engineer’s “jack of all trades, masters of none”, and every other class. In some cases it’s a hindrance instead of a weakness, for example necros not starting fights with any life force, but ya, every plus has a downside.
Ask any mesmer player how they feel about being in a WvW zerg and you won’t get a positive response about their clones.
No idea what the devs meant by “Sustained melee AoE”.
You have to view this from a WvW and I guess PvP standpoint (even though power isn’t used that much there.) The melee weapons offer phenomenal staying power, and they do so through more evades and more often than any other class.
Also … highest ranged DPS? Only against stationary golems, w/o buffs using auto-attack as parameter, right?
If you’re having trouble hitting with the LB, they did add the instant hit ability in RTW. We do have the best single target long range damage. What number skill the damage comes from is irrelevant in this case.
Re: Why not SotF, I find it to be incredibly lackluster. I’ve been running with dual melee lately, and the number of evades just makes my want for condi removal totally non-existent. Especially since HS is so strong with dual melee. And extra especially since condi classes are so easy to outrun with dual melee.
LR and MT are staples of any WvW build I use, so I have plenty of survival skills. I just don’t use them specifically for condi removal.
Anyway, I strongly encourage anyone running power builds to try out “Protect Me!” That skill is so god-like. It’s always the third skill that I fuss over. Any of the signets and “PM!” are all so amazing.
Edit: One more thing, dagger vs. axe offhand. Axe 4 is also an evade of sorts. If your opponent is incapacitated he can’t attack you. The choice is if you want poison uptime or hard CC (and huge damage.) Skill 5 on both is about equally as useful, maybe slight edge to dagger.
It does damage all the way around you. I’ve never tried to intentionally reflect anything behind me, but based on it doing damage in a complete circle, I’d guess it reflects everything in front of you.
For PvE, this skill can be amazing. Certain bosses can be reflected (most famously, Lupi.) Otherwise stick with your warhorn in offhand.
In PvP/WvW, offhand axe is mainly about skill 4, but as Sigmoid pointed out in the other axe thread today, you don’t have to wait for skill 5 to finish. I.e. you can use it to reflect the killshot, then cancel it and go finish off the warrior.
I also use it in that chaos after two zergs clash, where a bunch of wounded people are trying to range survivors down, but neither zerg is really engaging. I’m sure you’ve seen thieves doing the same thing with Dagger Storm.
It’s not the weapon combo’s fault, power builds are just in a weird place for PvP. I have played a lot of power ranger in PvP going balls to the wall with health and having low or no crit damage. It works, just condi tanks are better for higher end play.
I can’t remember the PvP build I played for a few months, but it had 27k health, max power, and I think it was dolyak runes or something tanky. 40% crit chance. It was ok.
I use s/a in WvW all the time. It looks something like these: One Two
Or as a weapon swap to longbow.
For PVE I’d say cats. My kitty isn’t in any real danger of dying with management and they do some nice DPS (the highest I hear).
Ya this is not debatable, cats do the best single target damage for PvE and in most cases people are doing it wrong if their cat dies. There are a few niche pets like drakes or red moas.
But I think this thread is all about WvW, where pet choice is way more wide open. Honestly I’ve seen videos of people using pigs to excellent effect, so just about anything goes if you’re doing it for a legit, defendable reason.
IMO you have basically no choice but to take CC pets. I recommend a drakehound and wolf. You don’t need more damage, you need a backup plan.
On the other hand, I often run in full berserker armor while using more tanky traits when I want to use dual melee in mediumish-small sized group (something like 2 0 6 6 0 or other variants.) In that case I’ll use a cat as a main since my damage dropped a lot, and wolf on switch because it’s just an incredible pet.
That WP is exactly what pushed me over the edge. I’d been trying to avoid all water for quite some time now, and it was unbearably restrictive to where I went. But there is no way that I know of to get in to or out of Bay without sinking below the surface.
I Always thought this would be a good idea. Especially if it were some large herbivorous mammal (Ntouka from GW1?) that bellows and gives brief AoE stability.
I don’t think we really need it. Warriors and Guardians should be the ones with the most stability because they are melee based heavy classes and thus need it. We are a medium class and fight more at range and in a skirmishing style, and really shouldnt be depending on stability as much.
When looking at other medium and light classes our stability access is pretty envious already so… I’m going to say no.
Well put. I do play my ranger almost exclusively in melee, so stability is useful, but with the amount of “tricks” all 3 mediums have, it’s not so much how we stay alive.
Heavies are the in-fighter sluggers like Tyson. Mediums are the classic boxer, like Ali.
I don’t get why SE2 has such a bad rep. You just kill things and it’s a similar length to most dungeons aside from the ridiculously short ones like CoF1.
Especially if you have a competent group, SE2 is quite quick because once something dies there is nothing to wait on. Only the NPC walking is slow, everything else is as fast as you can do it.
Some of the projectile finishers have a percent lower than 100, and it says that in the skill description. The sword has a couple leaps that aren’t leap finishers, but Monarch’s leap is. Just read the skill descriptions.
fluffy and Awe , ya i tried subing out for muddy terrain , even changed pets to cats and drakes he just blinds me then heals up .
I didn’t mean the skill muddy terrain, I meant the actual ground you fight on. Check out that video; there are tons of places you can lose even humans, and minions don’t have a brain.
Minions have pretty bad AI because they can’t be ‘helped’ like with our pets. So if applicable, get them messed up on terrain. For example if you’re attacking a point, let the minions come up a cliff to you and then jump down. Minions out of play entire fight now.
Not a fan of stat increases. I use all possible stat increases for WvW, but I would prefer it if WvW used a system similar to sPvP.
The rainbow phoenix from the first game was a nice idea I thought. You got it after maxing 10 titles (probably like the equivalent of 6k AP in GW2.) The black widow from GW1 was also only able to be acquired from an elite area (sort of like Arah or high level fractals.) I wouldn’t mind something like either one of those, and they already have precedents with the HoM pets.
There is no need for defiance in dungeons. It makes sense when you have 80 people all pounding on the same boss, but 5 people is more reasonable. It might need a little rebalancing with defiance gone, but it can go away if the devs want it to. Makes a lot more sense for people to be able to shut down a boss than for us to only be able to autoattack and taking all our skill-moves away from us.
It’s not so much the profession you choose, you need to be in full berserker gear and running something at least reminiscent of meta builds. I.e., if you were to choose warrior and use a rifle, almost every group is going to kick you.
Oh I definitely don’t devalue the leaps on both swords. But we don’t have condition weapons per se. We have utilities, and then power weapons that apply conditions in specific scenarios. I guess that’s good versatility. Or semantics.
Many of the bows skins currently in game are actually recurve bows, so they can never add that bow type to the game.
I seriously doubt they would ever add a third bow type though. There were so many bows in GW1 because they made no difference to your skills. Plus we already have rifles and pistols.
I have a theory that GW1 players have a big advantage with pets. I had the mercenary pack in GW1, which meant I was manually controlling 8 characters and 64 skills at any given time. Controlling 1 pet with 1 skill is pretty easy.
I totally agree with everything you’ve said Viking, except when you’re using condis for damage, we don’t have a good melee condi weapon. Hell, we barely have any condi weapons at all.
It doesn’t make sense that only reflects, blinds, knockdowns, knockbacks, stuns, daze, fear and others are useless against bosses. We need to make sure that bleeds, sword damage, greatsword damage (all exploiters use greatswords), damage in general, any sort of not exploitable damage, and being able to be killed are also made illegal.
Kitten hackers that want to be able to use skills like reflects as intended.
Viewing your pet as a damage source is actually very meta. Obviously you’ll use a cat. It’s easy to compliment your cat with a sword, and you can buff each other. For solo PvE, you can use Mighty Roar + Flame Trap plus Call of the Wild for a quick 9 might on both you and your pet. Sword autoattack adds 1 might to your pet every auotattack cycle too! You could view yourself as a lion tamer.
If Anet sticks to their original plans, we’ll probably get all the weapons eventually.
I would most like another melee weapon, to fit with our theme of “acrobatic scout” type special forces fighter. Perhaps a land-based spear (think Prince of Dorne.)
Big or small they’re all instagibbed by AoE the same way.
I’m not sure how serious I am, but I would like to see an elite pet elephant for like 45 seconds that functions similarly to a champ abomination, berserk stampeding through the middle of a WvW zerg. I’m picturing bodies flying all over the place like the oliphant things in the last LotRs movie.
Do I switch between guard and avoid combat for the pet depending on the kind of combat (boss vs. unavoidable trash/skips)?
Yes. I’ve bound my pet controls to easily accessible keys. For quick commands, just recall your pet constantly (like for a quick skip.) Other locations like setting up traps in AC2, put it on avoid combat.
Do I cast the frost spirit whenever it’s off cooldown and the group is stacked, or save it for boss fights?
Once you learn the dungeon path, put the FS down for any fight that lasts for more than about 7 seconds. When the fight is over, immediately de-equip your FS to something like flame trap. This will kill the spirit and put it in to instant recharge mode. Re-equip it and it will be ready for the next fight by the time you get there.
How do I handle my weapon skills? Turn off auto attack and only use sword 1 manually?
Learn the rhythm of the sword and only press the button at the right time. Also for most boss fights you can turn autoattack back on because there is no danger. Just remember whether you have it on or off. For something like CoE, I leave it turned on for everything except Subject Alpha. The golem in the middle of the boon turrets is totally harmless, so go ahead and turn autoattack on.
Or just leave it off all the time you so get really good at the rhythm of the sword.
There is literally no reason at all almost every team in both NA and EU in the ToL ran rangers, they have no idea what they’re doing. No ranger can possibly compare to a warrior.
