Guild Wars 2

I think the real core issue, we are reliant on them. Everything is tied to them pretty much. All our damage/healing/utility presumptions are based around the idea we have a pet with us that is alive, on target and contributing.

If it was just a bonus, an add on, instead of a integrated component, I think like 90% of the complaints would fade away or be shrugged off.

A ranger can solo camps pretty darn quick and fast and is pretty darn mobile. You’ll just be frustrated if/when the fight size scales up.

I kinda want barrage to have like, half the cool down… but then I’m like… ehhhhh I dunno.

I basically find myself frustrated in keep assaults, when it feels like everyone else is tossing AE’s onto walls and junk, where I get to dump mine every 25-30 seconds then try to camera aim arrows over the obstructed lip.

PVT is a nice baseline that you can customize around as you find a play style you want.

It might not be the best for a given situation, but it’s rarely the worst either.

Yea, you’re right about that, the real top tier GvG’s are going to burn through a Rangers condition removal pretty fast.

I was thinking more along the lines of the physical damage the ball absorbs, a Ranger that builds for it can hang with the heavy boys in that regard without much issue really. There’s just like, no benefit to actually do so. Sure is fun though :P hehe

I don’t like the 2 on axe, but I don’t like any of the split shots on any weapon really. It’s like the intent on split shots and their actual practical use are no where near aligned.

If you ignore the 2 (maybe use it for tagging in a zerg), Axe is a fairly decent weapon, just sorta boring.

I think you could make a build that would survive fine in the ball, it just wouldn’t bring anything TO the ball outside of our 6 button.

Splitting hairs I know. /shrug

I generally agree that cripple is one of the weaker ones, yet when I don’t have it I start swearing that I can’t hit the kitten running 5 feet in front of me ><

On one hand I like tying it to outnumbered, but on the other hand that can lead to all kinds of negative community things.

“Get out of the BL noobs, your ruining our buff!” stuff like that. WvW needs to be inclusive or it’s just going to be the same half dozen guilds circling the waters until they get bored then there’s nothing left.

kitten ed if you do, kitten ed if you don’t kind of thing.

Maybe make the outmanned buff mean you don’t give up points via stomps? I dunno. We’ll see how the next few weeks play out.

It will empower the smaller teams short term, but it will play out just like Khayoss said long term.

It will probably even be worse in some regards, where a desperate tower defense actually costs you more points holding it then just jumping out the back and leaving it.

Clearly you Sylvari and work out a new Seed Turret meta! :o

This is super neat, even though it might as well be witchcraft to me!

“Watch as I turn this lump of clay into leaf hair!”

Drakes are my lazy universal choice pet. Really tanky, pretty good AoE and a Blast finisher. The drakes F2 is really really really slow to fire off and often misses unless you really take the time to make sure the silly thing is pointed in the right direction. I use the Marsh and River drakes, that’s poison breath and lightning breath respectively, more forgiving then the fire and frost breath I find.

For small scale stuff most people run with a wolf for the fear and/or some kind of cat for burst. I mostly zerg so all they seem to do for me is die really really fast.

I have no idea if the numbers are legit but I do like the theme and general ideas on abilities.

Doesn’t the trait for longbow range also turn the auto attack into a 100% projectile finisher?

AydenStar.4216:

Gorath.5076

so Rangers are kind of the Swiss Army Knife of GW2? Our Blade might not be as long or as sharp but instead we also bring a Saw, Scissors, a corkscrew and a toothpick?
I am convinced
And you are dead right to live by that motto of yours! But what this thread was supposed to be about was to give Rangers a few hard facts in hand to justify their position

With the new meta coming to WvW, there are going be less zerging ( I mean less 90+ blobs) and more havoc teams/35-45 man zergs oriented, and the Ranger is going to be a nice place because they can branch off the zerg and join a smaller team at times which Rangers have always been good at. Being the Jack of all Trades and one of the tankiest/mobile professions in the game, we are going to be very useful for sure.

My guild has been preparing for this meta change for a while and its going to be fun being micromanaged around the boarderlands.

I don’t think it’s going to open up that many opprotunities honestly (the new bloodlust orb thing). The zerg is just going to make a pit stop in the middle on it’s standard BL loop and obliterate everything there.

I’d miss the longer duration, but the faster condition removal probably balances that out. I’d really need to play with it in practice to get a feel.

All a thief needs to do is equip their shortbow and press that 2 button. On demand blast finisher is pretty darn nice to have around in any zerg.

Lag is annoying yes, but the only actual problem with zerging is when you can’t zerg yourself.

I don’t mean any kind of preference, but rather when one side has 30+ people on each map and your side doesn’t have 30 people TOTAL… then it’s a no fun zone. There’s just no way to overcome that big of a gap.

No one cares if it’s an even fight, only when it’s an odd one.

Yea I agree with that. Split shots are always weird because they are most effective when used as a ‘melee’ attack. It’s just an odd fit currently.

bearded dragon.6705:

i dont even know how to warrior anymore…

Yea, that’s my reaction too.

“Well, I’ve clearly been doing this wrong the whole time.”

Just like most everyone else:

Troll Unguent for Solo/Mobility heal.

Healing Spring for Stationary/Group play.

I’d consider Heal as One if I ever used one of those rune sets with the “special buffs when you use your heal skill”, just for more up time.

Why not, there are plenty of idiots it works on :P hehe

It still prevents spikes though, that’s often enough on its own.

The answer is obvious though, new meta, mass spam ghost houses!

For every time that happens, there’s another half dozen where the ghost house saves people and they run off giggling into the night. Lets face it, lots and lots of people lose the target and it might as well no longer exist in their minds.

Like yea, it’s not going to save anyone if the AE dump is just coming anyways, but what is outside of a long rez CD?

AydenStar.4216:

Chopps.5047:

Has anyone tried playing a resurrection role in a zerg? Why or why not?

In my guild, you died, you run back. There is no rezzing because my guild focuses on wiping large zergs and doesn’t have the time to rez the fallen.

My rank on my Ranger in WvW is 125 which isn’t that high. My Guardian I leveled in late May is already rank 55 and I hardly play it. The Guardian ranks 3 times faster than a Ranger in WvW because of all the tagging and survivability the profession has.

Every zerg I’ve run with has had the general rule of spike rez downed, but double downs run back or wait for rally at waypoint.

Either way, a Thief and their ghost house is going to do that job better. Preventing the death spike is a pretty big deal in both large and small scale.

I just wish the axe could travel ‘up’. So I could pull people off of walls >:)

Nuka Cola.8520:

killimandros.5087:

I am pretty certain THAT was the guy who fixed CULLING In that case; BIG mistake ANet. I am ALSO pretty certain he gor fired because of constantly insisting on class balances to fit wvw instead of the kitten smallscale PvP. Last one, you can take as inside information. Point is, he wanted classes to work. And was fired for it.

What kind of dumb company would fire a person (that was with them for quite some time too) for wanting balanced classes?

I have ZERO idea if the above is true or not… but just because they work on a MMO, doesn’t mean they are immune to office politics and all the associated baggage.

The condition version of soldiers basically?

I’m fairly certain its just how many of X have been made and nothing more.

Those numbers don’t surprise me at all though, Rangers are always a popular pick in just about every game. The classic archetypes of classes always have good representation in a overall population sample.

Like, rename Guardian to Paladin and Elementalist to Wizard and both of those would probably gain a couple of percentage points. :p

Lokheit.7943:

- An AoE poison field (more tagging!! more loot bags!!) that before the nerf to Lotus Poison was a great source of group defense with Weakness.

Can’t you still generate the weakness by simply following the poison field with the blast attack on 2?

My complaint with Path of Scars is I can’t seem to throw it ‘up’ reliably (or at all). I would LOVE to troll people off of keep walls with it <3.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Fordel.3208:

Well that’s just simply a case of One in the Hand vs. Two in the Bush.

If they are so hard to play that almost no one can use them effectively, then they are in fact, ineffective and the ranking is not wrong.

You can’t defend keeps with ‘potential’

Skill ceiling is a debate in its own. You could say that the fault is with the players not learning how to play the engineer, rather than the engineer’s design.

It could very well be the fault of the players, still doesn’t make the reality of the classes contribution to the zerg hive mind any different.

You said it yourself, you end up playing your Necro because you can be just as effective, if not more so, and have an easier time doing it, freeing up some mental bandwidth for other decision making.

Ease of play absolutely influences a professions worth.

Well that’s just simply a case of One in the Hand vs. Two in the Bush.

If they are so hard to play that almost no one can use them effectively, then they are in fact, ineffective and the ranking is not wrong.

You can’t defend keeps with ‘potential’

Kasama.8941:

Fordel.3208:

Kasama.8941:

At this point, it doesn’t matter what ArenaNet does with the Ranger, people will just keep saying it’s a bad profession. And that will, in turn, prevent them from learning the advantages of the Ranger. It’s just ironic really.

No, I don’t agree with this. People will use whatever actually works.

Gamers have short memories when it comes to ‘meta’ and game balance.

If some combination of skills and traits lets Rangers dismantle enemy balls, then you are going to see a lot more Rangers running around pretty darn quick.

But, there are already Ranger builds like that dismantle enemy balls. It’s just only players who play sPvP who seem to have gotten the memo, while almost everyone ells keeps repeating the same message over and over. The Ranger works very well, most just plain out refuse to believe it.

There aren’t though.

If there were, we would see dozens of rangers right beside the rest of your standard zerg hive mind class collective.

This isn’t some weird “the man is trying to keep us down!” issue. It’s a math issue, we don’t have the proper numbers to dish out in the large scale settings.

I wish we did, as I mostly just zerg hump myself, but we don’t currently.

Kasama.8941:

At this point, it doesn’t matter what ArenaNet does with the Ranger, people will just keep saying it’s a bad profession. And that will, in turn, prevent them from learning the advantages of the Ranger. It’s just ironic really.

No, I don’t agree with this. People will use whatever actually works.

Gamers have short memories when it comes to ‘meta’ and game balance.

If some combination of skills and traits lets Rangers dismantle enemy balls, then you are going to see a lot more Rangers running around pretty darn quick.

I can’t comment on the specifics of the current Meta, but generally, games become ‘not fun’ once they are figured out.

Once it’s “Do <Blah> or be inferior, the end”, well, screw it I’ll go do something else.

That’s basically what I would like. The Eagle Eye trait just being LongBow’s baseline behavior. Do that and bump our SB back up to what it was too.

I do enjoy the offhand axe. The offhand axe number 4 is a nice troll counterpoint to the longbows number 4. Ping Pong!

I can’t seem to hit people on keep walls with it though, which makes me kinda sad

Contiguous.1345:

I only play WvW.
I don’t give a kitten about Legendaries, the Magic Toilet or Transmutation.

I’ve got over 250 gold in my wallet right now and there’s nothing I need/want to buy with it.
In the end, it’s just the same as karma. It’s worth nothing.

Can I have some? My bags are pretty small

I just use two drakes and pray I can swap them fast enough to avoid the 60 second CD. Once the zergs get big enough, there’s just no hope for them really.

Maybe that will be one of our new utilities whenever those get released, some kind of stun break trap.

While I wouldn’t cry if barrage had a lower cooldown or something… really if piercing arrows was just less finicky.

If you don’t have just the exact perfect angle and line, you aren’t piercing jack. Maybe just make that piercing ‘line’ just a bit wider and make the angles just a bit more forgiving.

Why would it be OP?

Nearly twice the range too though.

jcbroe.4329:

How about this, instead of the merge, Hide in Plain Sight becomes: Stealth when you are immobilized(30 second cooldown). Remove 2 conditions whenever you enter stealth (10 second cooldown).

I would not cry if they did this.

I’ve heard this a lot, but what precisely makes Rangers so good underwater? I usually avoid underwater combat, so I have little experience myself.

The warrior and guardian can just go from zero to 8-9k in a second at baseline and it isn’t like they don’t have their own survival shenanigans on top of that.

I don’t pretend to understand how engineers work, I’ll take your word on that.

Like, how often right now, do people count on the double swoop for their healing from healing spring? Where they can save swoop just for the spring and not need it for gap closing or fast travel or positioning.

My bet would be that 95% of the time, it would be Maul, Swoop then the fight moves on from the field till the next one, 30 seconds later. That’s my experience at least, trying to linger near the field too long just gets you out positioned and/or counter fielded.

It’s not a 13k heal.

It’s 13k potential healing in that 15 second window, if you dedicate all your GS finishers to swooping into walls and junk.

If it was Spring+Maul bam full health, yea I’d agree with you, that’s nerf bait no doubt. It’s clearly not that though.

Linguistically Inept.6583:

i love my GS in wvw, swoop and counterattack are amazing, the auto attack is much better at zerg clashing than swords and hilt bash interrupts are still amazingly useful without traiting for moment of clarity

… though it could use some love (counterattack root on hit in melee range… ARGH) i do think its an extremely useful weapon

Fordel.3208:

I would not cry if they made it a blast finisher though.

i would be strongly strongly against this
swoop/leap every 10s
maul/blast every 4/5s(?)
15s duration healing spring
2 leaps,2/3 blasts = 1,320*4/5 = 5280/6600 healing
… thats on top of healing springs base 4920 heal, 2.3k regen and condition cleanses

I don’t see the problem.

It’s not like we are getting a 6k heal in one big chunk.

It’s 6k potential healing over 15 secs while putting every GS cooldown into that healing instead of using them for movement/damage and restricting yourself to that water field area.

You also still have the same healing ‘downtime’, when your field is on CD.

Like, how many times do you get 2 swoops per spring in actual fights vs. how many times you need it for positioning or gap closing?

Yea, it would be really nice to have the blast finisher, but it’s still not “We got a Blaster finisher, HealingSpring does DOUBLE HEALING WOO!”

It’s just maul that I find sorta iffy really. The bleed was never amazing, and neither is the current amount/duration of vulnerability.

Like, even just buffing up the number of vulnerability stacks and their duration, would probably be ok with me. Bring it in line with the vulnerability stacks from Longbow.

I would not cry if they made it a blast finisher though. Would open up quite a few nice synergies for us and our groups. Lets something like a Signet Ranger really hang and bang with the warriors and guardians in the ball.