Guild Wars 2

Jeknar.6184:

Junkpile.7439:

I put rares in forge and get precursors.

I put rares on the forge and get greens…

I put peas on my head, but don’t call me pea head.

Nope. Hambow has existed far too long for Warriors to be crying now. Sorry.

Yeah, turn off auto-attack and you have all the freedom of movement you could want. The only downside is trying to escape using 1H sword, it is just so awkward.

But yeah, turn off auto-attack and bind about face to something. Then you might like the sword more.

Didn’t they fire the guy who basically created SAB?

But yeah, Anet has a plan in mind. We may not like it, but it was / is never about us. They are still in the phase of using hard statistics over test servers and player feedback. Sure, its like a step back 15 years, but whatever.

oxtred.7658:

Lot of breakstuns, vigor, dodging weapon abilities, block, even stealth, soft cc, hard cc, protection…

This.

IMO, it depends if you want to play the game the easy way or hard way. Ranger is a bit harder than others as there is no faceroll or gimmick mechanic. That doesn’t mean the class is horrible.

If you PvE, I would say go for it without hesitation. PvE is braindead easy, and for every group you get kicked from you will find one that will take you.

For PvP/WvW it really depends on your frustration tolerance level. This is because you will be target #1 (even in 20 man zergs!), just because people think Ranger = loot bag. Once you get the hang of it and learn how to evade properly, you can play amazing decoy and watch the enemy get slaughtered chasing you and not paying attention to anything else. Can also solo camps and roam very well.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Gotejjeken.1267:

No really. Guild Wars has no Guild Wars. Or Guild Capes.

So basically PvP is MMO Team Fortress. Without the crazy number of hats.

LOL – have you read the LORE of the game? I think not. From GW Wiki LORE…

" Throughout the centuries, the continent of Tyria found itself in constant warfare. The multiple Guild Wars raged across human lands – constantly ending and starting again, creating a series of wars between Humans. In all these years, not much aside from the constant wars and temporary times of peace existed. However, nearly two hundred years prior to the Searing, a powerful arcanist known simply as Lord Odran sought to reach into the unknown, and in doing so, by sacrificing many souls, found access to the Hall of Heroes. Though the spirits were outraged at Odran’s intrusion on the land they had paid to access with their life and blood, they could do nothing against beings of the living. For years, Odran explored the Rift and the many worlds, placing his portals in deadly locations and concealing them with spells. Until one day, the spirits of the Rift found a way to harm that which was corporeal and when Odran returned to the Rift they tore his body apart. In doing so that which they hated most came to pass as the spells of protection and concealment over Odran’s portals were removed and mortals gained free access to the Hall of Heroes. "

You can GvG, in OS and any other WvW or make your own PvP arena for it. No one is stopping you. Just because it is not a little ARENA all your own, does not mean it is NOT in the game.

Why do you need capes when you have Guild armor and weapons. Capes are so yesterday….

Have you played GW1? I think not…or you wouldn’t be justifying the omission of actual structured guild battles and capes with wiki references.

I mean, you can also ‘duel’ in any of the PvP areas, but is this actual dueling? Not at all.

I too run poison master and do not run EB, or Signet of Renewal (gasp!). This is mostly due to running a beastmaster spec, and condi-bombing my pet is just ridiculous. I basically run runes of antitoxin and high vitality. Really have no issues with conditions, as antitoxin + food means -50%+ base duration on me.

Anyway, I think my build is 0/2/6/0/6. Sword + Torch and Axe + Dagger. Raven and Wolf.

No really. Guild Wars has no Guild Wars. Or Guild Capes.

So basically PvP is MMO Team Fortress. Without the crazy number of hats.

No really, what even is this.

Look, I don’t want to be a commander, however I can feel the pain from here. 300g to change a color?! Way to go customization. Apparently letting people dye their tags would hurt gem sales too much.

Oh yeah, about those WvW unlocks. It’d sure be nice to know who has been commanding for a long time (and what mode they have commanded the most in) and who just dropped 300g for their dorito. But yeah, commander tracks would take way, way too much work.

Also, why is making the tag account bound tripling its price? What if one suddenly doesn’t like a class anymore…shouldn’t they just be able to switch to a new one and keep the tag? Literally almost everything else is account bound without any crazy upcharge (including dyes!).

But…I like zerker rangers swinging their legendaries in WvW. Makes for nice loot bags.

Rapid fire looks cooler than it actually is useful. It’s a slightly larger burst, but I won’t be running LB anytime soon.

MH axe change is kind of exciting, but only in zergs. For roaming, axe attacks so slow you aren’t going to be utilizing the might very much. Might be helpful for taking camps and PvE related things.

Signet changes will be fun, and these are where I can see any QQ coming in. They are just these QoL things that really should have been there from the beginning. Anything that only affects the pet /mainly affects the pet is ridiculous (I’m looking at you RaO).

The other changes are pretty meh.

I just balance them. IIRC, I have 2.6k armor and 22k health. But I balance everything out anyway, ~1.7k power (with food) and 1.5k condi (with weapon stacks). So yeah, not overly great at anything, but not terrible either.

Dodge is almost always glorified invincibility. Even in something like Dark Souls, you have fast rolling or in the case of DkS2, AGI.

I bring up Dark Souls as I think it has the best action combat of any game I have played. Of course, the magic spam and cheese builds are probably among the worst.

GW2 is pretty good though. The only MMO (even though it only technically is one) that I have played with this level of combat is Vindictus. But unlike most games, there were certain classes that had no invuln on dodge, thus making it a ‘true’ dodge.

Yeah shortbow needs something to make it stand out more. It is a difficult weapon to truly use effectively due to the heavy reliance on auto attack. A ‘bleed from anywhere’ or access to another condition(s) could make it a lot more appealing. Even something interesting like an AOE poison attack, since they seem to want to make ranger = poison master.

Didn’t someone do this in the first beta weekend, like in a day? I remember being a few articles on it.

Most dictionaries define ‘over correct’ as something similar to ‘to apply a correction to in excess of that required.’ Nothing about intent there, really.

So basically they knew they were being excessive with the silk amount required in order to drain the millions of scraps out of the system. The requirement can never change for economic reasons, but perhaps they can start providing more ways to get it.

Or possibly some way to convert it. Like a guy who takes your thick leather and gives you silk for some reason. How much he’d exchange could be tied to the AH like vendor dye prices and such used to be tied to trades in GW1.

This is only going to get worse if they add more legendaries. Suddenly the chances at the precursor you want starts dropping rapidly. So if there are 4 different 1H sword precursors for example, you go from 100% chance of a 1H sword precursor being the one you want to a 25% chance.

That is why I think some sort of token/currency system (like everything else) is needed. If its just random, then every time they release a new legendary all the people who spent all the time to get an existing one are going to be miffed. I for one am holding off, as I want a 1H sword ankitten ot entirely sold on Bolt.

But really, legendaries lost all meaning when they became tradeable.

I just wish that it would clear all conditions without transferring to the pet. I feel like we should have some on-demand clear without condi-bombing 30% of our damage output.

Shortbow is fairly terrible. Which makes me sad as I used my only fused ticket on one.

Too heavily weighted to the auto-attack, and the rest of the attacks are rather pointless (as mentioned). Axe/Dagger is such an upgrade it isn’t even funny. Dagger alone takes care of the bleed and cripple, and gives a much better evade.

Really though, SB needs some kind of AOE to make it even close to MH axe. With the might buff coming for axe, SB is just going to rot. Which again, really makes me sad, as my most lucrative skin is sitting there wasting away. To make it even worse, SB was my first ascended weapon as well =(.

I run BM Condi. It works fairly well, but I always feel hipster for using it.

I have been contemplating making a legendary, and casually have been collecting clovers. It occurred to me that clovers are one of the best uses of the forge, because you almost always get something worthwhile, even if it is not a clover.

So why not with precursors? Why not have something that comes from materials related to the legendary type you want (hafts, strings, stocks, etc.) along with ecto and other mats in the forge? Like sword tokens, rifle tokens, etc. They pretty much work the same way as clovers, that if you fail you at least get something worthwhile.

Could be a vendor that lets you trade them for parts of a legendary weapon. At the end of the day you would throw an ascended weapon and the parts gathered by token method to basically craft your precursor.

I’m thinking this could also work with the issue of multiple legendaries of the same weapon type. Why not be able to salvage your legendary for a % of the materials back which could go toward another skin of the same weapon type? This would basically future-proof things without giving the skins away too easily after the first one.

Add a few effects to that thing, and that’s a legendary I’d actually want.

I am just waiting for Read the Wind to apply to shortbow. It’ll probably take until this time next year, but I’m confident we’ll see it one day.

Fluffball.8307:

LughLongArm.5460:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAV8YjEq0yaHL+rQ1agDhq9K8rBLrAw9Q0CV9FXdUF-TpBFwACuAAKOCALOIAVLDA4BAMf/BA

The bird summon had it’s health reduced 50% with the latest update.

Link? I see no difference in the HP of the birds.

You could, but as a downside, Mango Pie gives VIT.

Belzebu.3912:

Gotejjeken.1267:

Quicksand damage is always 12% HP/s no matter what—there were / are a few guides out there admonishing removing all armor that adds vitality, which is pointless, since the damage is a percentage.

The damage being a percentage is the reason why vitality is bad there.
If you have 20k HP you’ll take 2400 damage, if you have 16k HP you’ll take 1920 damage, but in both cases you’ll be healed for the same amount so out heal the damage with lower HP is much easier.

Yeah you are right; I think I partially caught (and contradicted) myself with the last paragraph of the OP…but that’s what I get for doing math tired.

As far as blast finishers go, I couldn’t get enough healing out of something like warhorn + healing spring…maybe because I am not specce’d for healing power all that much.

I am not sure how many people this will help…but here goes. No one was doing quicksand survivor when I was playing this evening, so I mathematically figured it out to do it solo:

HP: 22405
Base Damage: 2688 HP/s (12% of total HP per sec)

6 Nature Magic (Natures Bounty, Enlargement, Nature’s Voice)
300 Healing Power

Regen:
913/s = Troll Unguent (10s)
173/s = Shout (16.25s)
320/s = Spirit (60s)
134/s = Fern Hound (10s)
82/s = Signet of Wild (Passive)

2688 dam/s – (All) = 1066 dam/s * 10s = 10660 dam
2688 dam/s – (Spirit + Shout + Signet) = 2113 dam/s * 5s = 10565 dam

= 21225 dam over 15s = 22405 HP – 21225 HP = 1180 HP left

Quicksand damage is always 12% HP/s no matter what—there were / are a few guides out there admonishing removing all armor that adds vitality, which is pointless, since the damage is a percentage.

Which means the above theoretically should work for any HP as long as one has 300 or more healing power and uses the associated skills/pet, as the quicksand damage will adjust to your HP, but the healing will remain constant.

Anyway, kinda fun.

First of all…stay in QA.

Second of all, there is a reason they aim updates at different things. You cannot do everything at once. This update was aimed at adding new PvE content, not bugfixes.

That being said, we just had a rather large bugfix / trait overhaul less than 2 months ago. Seriously.

I am normally pretty critical of the game (GW1 player, high standards, etc.), however they overhauled all of the traits, runes, and sigils, balanced classes, did bugfixes, launched a client for another country (China), and finished up the first part of Season 2 content…in the span of a few months. That’s pretty good.

Atheria, you are welcome. This is my first real shot at creating a functional condition build…so hope it works well for you.

Loco, I dunno, I find pure power pretty boring.

Link: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vMAQRAsf3YjEq0yaDLGsw1aAp9gTMPAgV4QePSP2TEL4RF-TQADPWgsXYuA

This is the build I am currently running, to pretty good effect in WvW. Empty GM slot on the build editor is for the new Poison Master trait.

Zephyr’s Speed gives great burst potential now, and Poison Master makes it so you practically have 100% poison uptime. Couple this with a few condition heavy pets, such as the wolf and snow owl, and you have a lot of on demand chill, and good escapes with fear and MH sword in general.

To remedy the lack of condition removal, I wear all superior runes of the antitoxin, and run with bowl of leek soup for the negative condition duration. Can get up to over -50% condition duration with both, making conditions much, much less of a problem. If one really wanted, I guess you could take signet of renewal over signet of wild, but I like the built in speed for roaming.

My armor is mostly dire, and trinkets mostly carrion…I end up with somewhere around 1600 power and 1300 condition damage…so more balanced than anything really. This allows me to still hit hard, and conditions to tick hard.

Sigils are superior corruption on both weapon sets for the extra stacks, and sigil of hydromancy on sword, and sigil of geomancy on axe. For now it seems to be the best option to cut down on any potential randomness that some sigils give, and allows for even more condition bombing potential. I can get up to 12-15 stacks of bleed if the geomancy is used + axe 2 + dagger 5.

So..yeah. I do not have any videos of this in action as I really never have recorded myself play competitively. I will say, this is the first time I have been 100% happy with my ranger since…possibly launch. The new poison GM really rocks a lot more than it looks on paper, even though I’m sure a lot are disagreeing with dropping the meta EB.

Did bear use earthquake stomp? Brown bear earthquake is pretty OP, especially since it causes knockback on the target, dazes, and roots them for good measure.

If you time hunters shot right as the bear does earthquake stomp, you clear all conditions and gain stability and invisibility for 5 seconds. Just at tip.

Dire is pretty much what I run for armor, with Carrion for trinkets. I go 0/2/6/0/6…or whatever translates to 0/10/30/0/30. Using the new poison master GM with a canine and a bird. I’ve managed to win almost all of my fights this evening, and managed to escape a stalemate against a mesmer.

Yeah. F2’s have had a massive increase in responsiveness for one. My wolf actually used fear in WvW in about a second after me hitting it. Prior to the patch it was like 3 seconds.

Although, we got undeniably better for the mere fact that lightning reflexes now breaks immobilize and removes a condition. That’s huge.

Yeah, I have no idea what OP is speaking of. My BM Ranger with Poison Master is working quite effectively in WvW at the moment.

Needless to say, power rangers have always been uninspired and underpowered. Even as a Ranger, I know that LB + Bear = free kill.

It is pretty clear from the wording:

“When you unlock a dye after the feature pack is released, all characters on your account will have unlimited access to that color.”

In plain English, dyes used after patch will be account bound.

“If you already have the same dyes unlocked on multiple characters, when you log in on additional characters, you will receive one unidentified dye for each duplicate dye already unlocked on your account.”

This is meant to be taken in context with the above, not out of context. In context, in plain English, it means whenever you buy and use a new dye after the patch, if you had it unlocked on a character prior to the patch, that character will get an unidentified dye as compensation.

So simply, taking two characters (A and:

Pre-Patch: A unlocks Abyss and B unlocks Celestial, Abyss is Soulbound to A, and Celestial is Soulbound to B.

Post-Patch: Abyss is still Soulbound to A, and Celestial to B.

If A purchases Celestial and uses it, B will get an unidentified dye for the overlap. Any character created afterward will have access to Celestial, but NOT Abyss.

It’s because the balance team consists of seemingly two people. There is no public test server, and updates have to be massive affairs rather than iterative. So the only way they do thing is adding via subtraction. Nerf one thing to promote another.

Which is why the horizontal progression through traits will either slip back towards Trinity or leave us with a lot of traits that don’t ‘step on the toes’ of other traits (see: rather useless). We have a mix of these coming in the feature pack…ex: Elementalists trait that heals others (traditional monk mechanic) and then a bunch of ‘meh’ traits (most Ranger ones).

In short, nerfing critical damage to them means promoting support builds. The content itself currently has nothing where this will actually matter, so the community gets outraged.

Since they are bringing some of the GW1 ranger skills (in name only) to GW2…what are some of the ones the community would like to see?

For me:

Frozen Soil – Creatures in range cannot activate resurrection skills. Does not affect spirits.
Favorable Winds – Arrows move twice as fast and hit for +6 damage for creatures in range. Does not affect spirits.

Preparations such as:

Apply Poison – Your physical attacks inflict Poisoned condition (3…13…15 seconds).

I personally think if they would incorporate some of these into the game (fully, not like what Read the Wind will be) Rangers could be a pretty potent force.

Mad Pig.2890:

With a rangers low health pool lack of defensive ability, even 15% isn’t worth building into. If you are up close as a ranger then, you are doing it wrong and projectiles are the least of your problems.

Rangers have quite a few evades, besides the usual condi-bunker building. Ironically close range is where rangers are best at, ANet seems to love making our bow skills utterly useless (see: GW2’s poor man Read the Wind).

That being said, the new traits in general are pretty bad. Nature magic one might be okay, but that basically promotes spirit ranger more than ever.

Seriously, 100g per trait…even suggesting that seems ludicrous to me. Maybe 10g a trait, max.

If you compare it to signet of capture from GW1 (which is what it sounds like) then most of the traits should not be too hard to get, and straight out buying them will not be all that burdensome.

Vol.7601:

One of the biggest things I like about GW2 is the fluid combat and the art style.

I would absolutely hate going over to another game and notice that in order for my skill to go off, I have to be rooted in place.

You can roll a ranger and equip 1H sword if you really want the nostalgia of being rooted.

I kinda like Prayer to Kormir, as it is straightforward and does not kill off the pet in the process. I basically run with antitoxin runes, soup, and prayer for my condition removal at the moment.

Yeah, I’m fairly sure no one internally wants to go near Ranger because it is not ‘fun’ and thus does not deserve to be played or balanced properly.

I dare say this ‘CDI’ has gone on too long. What little interaction we had seems to be all but lost, and judging from the last Ready Up things are probably not going to get better anytime soon (scrim with 0 rangers and a ‘showcase’ at the end with a thief winning a 2 v 1).

Allie Murdock.8152:

Perma stow wouldn’t make pets OP. In rebalancing for permastow, it would make those that still want to play with the pet op. THAT IS, unless we design something that gives the player a boost to balance it out.

The aspects I think were a little different. They talked about having specific bonuses based on the pet that the player was using. That is different from just giving a damage boost, which could end up being difficult to balance.

I think the reverse of this was used as the reasoning behind nerfing pets to begin with, wasn’kitten That is, the ranger and the pet did ‘too much damage’ so the pet was nerfed to compensate.

My fear with permastow is it will break things further in the balancing process. No matter what, playing without a pet would win out. Even if on paper a ranger + pet would theoretically do more damage, the pet AI is so bad at hitting things that it would not matter.

Basically, beastmasters will be seen as a huge liability. Instead of just hating rangers in general, people will start to hate based on what kind of ranger you are, which is IMO worse. Why would anyone want a person with a lackluster AI that cannot stay alive and draws huge amounts of aggro around when they could just ‘upgrade’ to the non-pet option?

I still think we are missing quite a bit of dev feedback here. Specifically in regards to the pet damage and leash nerfs. There had to be a reason for that, and obviously all of the posts here suggesting more pet usefulness will be tainted by whatever reason caused the nerfs in the first place.

In fact, prior to said nerfs I do not recall reading many complaints about pets. There has always been the survivability issue, and to an extent getting in the way during certain times, however nothing to the level we have now.

The fact that warrior LB is better than both ranger bows combined still makes me sick. Although I find this video a slightly less cheesy than hambow…

Power builds are a bit lacking at the moment for ranger, although I don’t see why you couldn’t try one.

Beastmaster has been working out alright for me, although I run a 0/10/30/0/30 build focusing on conditions. Might be able to shuffle it around to something more power oriented.

Distaste.4801:

Cosmetic skins as T1 loot went out the window when Ascended was stupidly added. Now it goes Precursor > Ascended > Cool skin > Exotic = Rare mat > Bad skin >everything else.

What if you have a cool skin + Ascended? Such as an Ascended Fused Short Bow of Fire?

Flytrap.8075:

Thoughts on this idea?

No, for the mere fact that some pets are HoM rewards and hold some prestige. We should be rewarding with more customization, not less. I want my dire pets back and ability to buy silly hats. Everyone who doesn’t like it can play another class.

That’s the whole ridiculous thing here. We have pets like rock dogs and dolphins among others that really could be used, but are not because we are too busy discussing how to get rid of them.

Meanwhile I honestly think Anet is holding back on everything because in the back of their mind pets are still OP. After all of the nerfs, some dev somewhere believes that truly fixing pets is going to cause a huge issue. Look at the uproar when our ‘dumb’ pets hit harder and were able to run farther. Now you want to make them smarter?

I know the CDI is very illusive man in nature, but could we at least get a top 10 ideas post? Or at least something that indicates what the devs foresee working and not working? We can sit here and argue about always out, perma stow, magic animal summons, aspects, etc. and none of it actually matters if it is considered OP by a dev.

Loyo.8526:

I know this isn’t the correct format, but I can’t agree with the change on Sword skill #2 being inverted. The whole purpose of it is to break off the chain and disengage from combat via a dodge or sorts. If you make it so that you have to jump forward first, it will most likely get alot of people killed in WvW moreso than going backwards.

This is my only complaint for this CDI.

I do agree using the dodge backward in a small scale fight is handy, for delayed jump forward or breathing room for a heal.

The problem comes (and this is mainly a WvW issue) when you have to run. See a zerg coming? Hit the button and dodge back…great. Facing the wrong way? Uh oh, guess who is jumping right into the zerg? Also along the same lines is fighting near a cliff…evading forward is a lot easier to judge if you are going to fly off…evading backward and you could kill yourself pretty easily.

So that’s why I am with forward forward dodges. If you go forward, you can see where you are going and still have the room to breathe. You can either go forward again to get more room, or turn and charge back (or any other direction really). This way you can always see where you are going and what is around you.