Guild Wars 2

Justine.6351:

Ranged dps. Fire staff ele mops floor with longbow ranger.

Ele staff is a completely different combat paradigm. We do lack AoE though, beyond Barrage on the Longbow and Entangle.

One interesting thing I realized is that if they wanted to do a “support brawler” as Thaddeus so aptly put it, one easy way would be to but the brawler part on the pet and the support part on the druid. Give the pet a big buff (hopefully including AI and target tracking) while the druid itself gets control effects to hold the target still for the pet and support abilities to keep both themselves and the pet standing.

Tragic Positive.9356:

• Reliable AoE hard CC (we only have pets and Path of Scars)
• Active support (spirits are passive and can get interrupted, also have delay)
• Spike Damage. We either have a long CD RF, or not-powerful-enough Maul. Apart from that, we have a constant Auto-Attack stream that can be ignored unless we go full Zerk (and sometimes even in full Zerk).

The first two I find more likely. A druid growing plants out of the ground and creating areas of healing for party members sounds like a perfect excuse for a supporty type of character that has a good deal of hard CC.

Sigmoid.7082:

KashimKudal.2961:

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

I chose answer C: Racial elite.

Ragnar knows what he’s talking about. Human Racial Elite will be amazing with Reaper for sure. Reaper of Grenth

WIll be the go to in WvW for sure. Synergy with chilling force, blighters boon, putrid defense, cold shoulder, bitter chill, chilling nova, deathly chill, and potentially blighters boon.

So much synergy with Blighter’s Boon, it’s mentioned TWICE.

Seriously though, assuming everybody’s standing still you can go from half HP to full using chilling nova, chilling force, and blighter’s boon alone.

Darwec.3784:

Seriously, the only good elites are lich and plague. The golem is sometimes useful for being a meat shield. The shout seems awful in PVE and will never see its full potential in sPVP.

On the contrary – lich form can be a big hindrance in a few situations, particularly when enemies have reflects, and plague form is terrible if you aren’t a condi spec. the Golem may not always be the best choice, but it’s far from useless, and it has consistent, decent damage.

EremiteAngel.9765:

unfortunately i am an asura necro.
but i can see grenth being a huge elite for pvp.
less so for wvw roaming become you just get kited to death against non-melee classes.

Can’t use racials in pvp, sadly. Still, for open world, dungeons, and WvW, it’ll be grand.

striker.3704:

Axe+focus has more synergy with that build than staff due to the chill+vulnerability. The Staff’s condition transfer mark isn’t useful when you’re constantly losing and transfering conditions anyway, and you don’t have the condition damage to make the blood mark useful.

Use runes of the lich. The toughness and condition duration benefit you more (longer vulnerability, cripple, and chill), and the jagged horror works well with necromantic corruption.

for sigils I’d use Ice and chilling on great sword, peril+frailty on axe+focus

For utility I’d consider “Rise!” over bone minions because in 1 v 1 you shouldn’t need bone minions or flesh wurm, so you can save your shout for bigger fights. This depends on how “Rise!” looks in the final build though. If it keeps it’s 40 second cooldown, then you’d get more minions (that also violently explode) in a shorter time with the 16 second cooldown bone minion spawns.

for traits I’d take transfusion over vampiric precision, the healing would benefit your minions and allies more.

I’d also take chilling force over decimate defenses, as you can maintain chill pretty easily between focus and the great sword.

blighter’s boon isn’t useful to a minion master as none of your traits really give you many boons. Deathly chill or Onslaught are better overall.

I’m just very used to using a staff, which is why I jumped on it first, I think. After taking a good look, the focus can even convert boons into conditions, so you’re correct in that it’s a good trade, and the vuln from axe hits is good.

I disagree that Chilling Force is better than Decimate Defenses. This build has next to no ability to critically hit without it, and a massive chance to actually crit with it, and given Gravedigger can be spammed, it’s a good idea to keep that up, as you can get a permanent 12 vuln stacks just with Greatsword #3. the Sigil of Frailty also adds on. while the might stacking might give you something like an additional +15% or so damage, in dungeon runs with competent players you should be getting a load of boons constantly anyways, and your allies will apply Vulnerability a lot for you on top of your own stuff, meaning 25 stacks will be easy to maintain for +50% crit chance, which is most certainly nothing to sneeze at. If one of them can keep fury up on the team, you’ll be looking at something like a 90% critical chance against bosses, despite being in tank gear.

Vampiric precision is what I’d personally take. Transfusion is good, and I can see the utility, I just prefer lifesteal on crits I suppose. I’ll be testing both out when Reaper becomes available, and revise my statements on it then.

Sigil of Ice, sure, but since I’m keeping Decimate Defenses personally, I’m thinking I’d keep sigil of Frailty on the Weapon you want to be using with it. The class already has what is basically perma-chill if you use it properly, so I’m not overly concerned with duration. the Sigil of Peril is a good call though, and pairing it with Frailty is a good call. I’d use them on the greatsword. Purely from a mechanics standpoint, though, I’d agree that they’re better on the axe.

Rise is problematic because we don’t know how it’s going to work just yet. I’ve also always preferred permanent minions over ones with health degeneration, so bone minions are my pick, though I can definitely see the merit in “Rise!”

Blighter’s boon is meant as a way to help you stay standing in situations where you have teammates helping you out. the sigil of strength was meant to help you out there, but ah well. I think you may be right, but in my opinion Reaper’s Onslaught will be better because than Deathly Chill as you pointed out earlier this build has basically no condi damage, and so would benefit more from the increased speed of the power based attacks you can get from Onslaught

yeah, every minion on the field is another condi cleanse every ten seconds. If you have 6 up, you have 6 condi cleanses every 10 seconds, which is far from small. +20 toughness, and furthermore if they buff the blood fiend as well as the others we could be looking at an even better heal from it. As it stands, it’s the only heal that procs continuously, which means it’s a lot like the Warrior Signet of Healing. Frankly, I’ve always found the other heals kinda lackluster, save maybe Consume Conditions.

Vydahr.4285:

Vizardlorde.8243:

Vydahr.4285:

Nope. Gotta be able to 1vZ. Necro god of death. ultra op. Kills streams. Next we take down all the servers. Rulers of Tyria.

Its been done before in EoTM bridges… Spot zerg near a bridge + remain undetected + spectral wall = profit

I.. well… Hm. That’s something that I wish I had known. You know. Before the satirical statement getting after those who want just huge OP abilities and stuff and don’t care about balance.

In all seriousness, though, I do like the build potential as a Reaper Master, especially if they really do buff/improve the AI of minions

yeah, necromancers are one of the very few classes that can, in the right geography, win 1vZ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG_399O1epE

definitely not in a straight up fight though.

Yeah, I don’t think “how Tanky is it vs a zerg?” is something we really have to put consideration into, given at that point it’s pretty screwed regardless :P

I think it’d probably also be pretty good in sPvP – Ridiculous levels of tankiness and the minions mean that you can bunker on points extremely effectively. It’d probably also work pretty well in Stronghold.

The reason I prefer Decimate Defenses over Chilling Force is because of the damage that critical hits can churn out if you use them properly. Still, if it’s a permachill build I can totally see Deathly Chill being very powerful.

On Defense:
Being in Soldier’s Gear gives you a level of tankiness most of your opposition won’t have – not only does it increase your maximum death shroud and HP pools, but the high toughness mitigates incoming damage. If you can keep the Chilled condition on your opponents (which you can apply even with the Greatsword auto-attack) you’ll take even less damage from them, giving you a massive ability to take hits and dish them back out.

Blighter’s Boon comes in here, and is the primary reason for Sigil of Strength – every time you have a boon applied to you, such as the might you’ll be consistently stacking onto yourself, you’ll either gain some life force, or heal if you’re in death shroud, which is considerable given how hard you are to hurt in the first place.

Conditions go on a bit of a journey with this setup. Say an enemy applies a condition to one of your buddies. After a moment, you’ll pull it off them. Then your minions pull it off of you. The next time they hit something, they’ll apply the condition off of them to the target. This can be a bit dangerous for the minions in the case of powerful, hard hitting conditions, but they’re expendable anyways, while you’re not. You, on the other hand, will be an extremely difficult target to keep conditions on, which is nice as normally they’d bypass your toughness and go straight for your vitality or life force.

the staff as an off-weapon gives an extra level of survivability to the build – if you’re being overwhelmed, the sigil of energy can grant you a much needed extra dodge. Mark of blood can give you and your minions (or other allies) regeneration, it can apply chill, a fear (which also applies chill), and even condi cleanse you and nearby allies. It’s definitely a defensive weapon, so it’s what you want to use if you’re being overwhelmed in one way or another.

Finally, life stealing is a powerful thing in this build. As long as you’re outside your shroud, your minions and your critical hits will constantly steal health for you, adding to the levels of defense you already have oodles of.

And one last thing! This is a bit of combo defense and offense, but while you have minions out, you gain increased toughness. While you’re in reaper shroud, you have increased toughness. your toughness contributes to your overall power, giving you that extra little edge you may need to turn your opponent into mush.

Weaknesses:
This is a slow build. The Traveler Runes, and Relentless Pursuit are meant to mitigate that problem, but unless you have judicious use of your Flesh Golem’s knockdown and your greatsword’s pull, your enemies will be able to consistently get away from you unless you burst them down which, conveniently, you can.

The other issue is the minions. They can be a powerful tool and add quite a bit to your character in terms of both defense and offense, but as everybody knows, they’re idiots. Hopefully they AI improvements being brought in with HoT improve that issue. Additionally, they have serious problems dealing with AoEs, as they have no ability to dodge, meaning they could get slammed pretty hard by an AoE focused character. This is, thankfully, mitigated by the fact that they’re also completely expendable, and you’re not relying solely on their DPS to take down enemies.

Conclusion:
I’m tempted to call this build rather lazy – you’re constantly healing, are extremely hard to hurt, and a large chunk of your DPS is autonomous from you. It works against multiple enemies, a few enemies, single enemies, and in the event that it starts taking real hits it can just pop into death shroud where it actually heals itself as long as it’s slapping people. However, it can be an extremely active setup rather than the purely defensive setup that exists as part of the current minionmaster design, and that’s a huge boon for people who like actual control over battlefields.

Variations:
It has a little support in that it’s consistently pulling conditions off of allies to regift back to the ones who originally put those conditions on your team. One variation I thought of is that you can take transfusion over Vampiric Precision if you want your minions to heal each other and your allies in addition to you, giving you some more support options and ensuring your minions last a little bit longer.

If you don’t like Blighter’s Boon, you can also swap that out for Deatthly Chill for additional condition damage since you realistically should have Chill up on your target all the time, or for Reaper’s Onslaught to improve just how killy you are in Death Shroud. It’s trading defense for offense, which isn’t something I’d personally do, but to each their own. In that case though, the Sigil of Strength should be swapped out for something else – perhaps Bloodlust would be good, but I’ll leave that to you.

So, on my necromancer since I got the game (about a month after launch), I’ve been running a minion mastery build. I don’t have to tell any of you how unfortunate such a situation is, given the unfortunate levels of AI we’ve witnessed over the years. However, with the reaper specialization having just been completely revealed, I was inspired to do a little theorycrafting.

Those who were watching closely may have noticed something interesting during the Reaper livestream. Specifically, the Jagged Horrors raised by the “Rise!” shout were dealing 300 damage per hit. Even traited for damage, jagged horrors on live barely break 100 damage per hit, suggesting that to go with the AI improvements minions are being buffed considerably. So, keeping that in mind, try to not say that MMs suck in this thread. It’s not constructive. What I am interested in hearing is constructive input regarding the build.

Equipment:

• Weapons: Greatsword/Staff
• Armor: Soldier
• Runes: Pack or Traveler
• Sigils: Frailty and Strength/Energy and Leeching

Skills:

• Healing: Blood Fiend
• Utility: Bone Minions/Flesh Wurm, Shadow Fiend, Bone Fiend
• Elite: Flesh Golem

Traits:

• Death Magic: Flesh of the Master, Deathly Strength, Necromantic Corruption
• Blood Magic: Bloodthirst, Vampiric Precision, Unholy Martyr
• Reaper: Relentless Pursuit, Decimate Defenses, Blighter’s Boon

On Offense:
Current Minion Master builds suffer from two unfortunate problems – lack of personal damage and lack of AoE. In the past I’ve tried to utilize the Staff’s marks, but they’re not amazing for the job. However, the Reaper Elite Spec covers both rather nicely here – The Greatsword cleaves well, and has a high level of damage. Assuming you’re fighting a large number of enemies, you can also go into Reaper Shroud and spam the auto-attack, which will give you back up to 10% of your life force every time you finish the combo, which is great for staying in the shroud. The shroud also gives you a chasing ability, so rely on it.

While you may be in Soldier gear, the increase to base statistics and Decimate Defenses work hand in hand – Greatsword skill #3 will inflict 12 stacks of vulnerability every time it hits, increasing your critical hit chance by 24% for the duration. the Sigil of Frailty also adds to this, and this is on top of the vulnerability adding to your base damage in the first place, meaning despite your low precision you should consistently get critical hits assuming your target isn’t consistently condi cleansing. you also have several source of chill and cripple, and a few sources of control effects, meaning your enemy is unlikely to escape without a lot of hindrance. Finally, the Sigil of Strength giving you might consistently is excellent for what should be obvious reasons.

A thing worth noting is that most necromancers going into their Death/Reaper Shroud lose access to their utilities until they get out. this is much less true for this build, as the minions stick around and continue dishing out damage despite you not directly having access to your utility bar anymore. This is a considerable boon to the DPS you bring to the fore, as even just the flesh golem on live can dish out over 800 damage per hit.

I’m personally planning on going with the Crossing for my own Ranger. It’s basically Charon’s reed staff, so while it’s a bit deathly it still fits the essence of a ranger, and the little lantern is very cool all around. the color scheme also works decently.

I personally use drakes, since I feel they’re solid in terms of damage and survivability. The breath weapons for Marsh and river drakes are extremely solid, too, and can do a lot of damage assuming your opponent doesn’t dodge.

Taunt would make the breath weapons extremely potent, which i’m excited for.

We have pet traits in other trait lines. We really should have them in Beastmastery instead, in my opinion.

I’ve set up a modified ranger power Lbow build. Drake pet to tank NPCs with traits as 6/2/0/0/6. In effect, I basically play it like PvE, but with a focus on being able to keep my drakes working on the NPCs while I deal with the oncoming players that try to heckle me. It worked pretty well during the beta.

I think the easiest way to evade the problem of retraiting when you swap pets is to have two “active” traitlines, one for each of your pet slots (primary and secondary). that way you can always have a minimum of two active builds, even if you swap out the “base stats”, which would be the pet in question that you’re swapping out.

Zenith, the opening post mentions fight a condi class, ergo 1v1. If you’re complaining about zergs now, you’re just moving goalposts.

So, you’re saying you don’t run wellspring or drakes or bears, got it.

So, the Plated Behemoth is a creature that’s been in the game since the start. It runs on the bear animation skeleton (the same way murellows and arctodi do), and thus we really wouldn’t need to adjust anything to add it to the roster of pets available to Rangers.

Bears are tank pets. Everybody who plays a ranger knows this, and it’s the reason why “bearbow” is a setup that garnered a lot of popularity early on and is still sometimes used. The big issue with this setup is that bears have a lot of trouble holding aggro, particularly against groups of mobs, and it’s especially egregious against other players, where you need to use “Protect Me!” to benefit from their large health and toughness pools at all. Even drakes get largely ignored by enemy players in any sort of pvp, and they have decent AoE capability.

The addition of a taunt would definitely help to alleviate this problem. It wouldn’t cost much in the way of additional resources to add in, would create another viable alternative in pvp (where, for ranger pets, Control is currently king), and people frankly get excited about new pet types if they play a ranger. Even better, in some of the demo videos we’ve seen for HoT, We’ve seen Plated Behemoths in the Verdant Brink, suggesting that there’s a bunch out there as well, making this an excellent opportunity for them to become tamable.

Thoughts? If this was a pet that was available, I’d most certainly run it.

Oh, huh. I just moved the game from a high resolution to a lower one and got back about 10 FPS from the 20 I’d lost. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s playable now.

Opening any windows still adversely affects my FPS though.

Just finished a reinstallation of the game – No change at all. The UI is still eating my FPS.

nicknamenick.2437:

without vsync i normally have around 200+ now its 119…

GTX980

Not exactly unplayable like it is for some of us, but that it one hell of a drop.

sirsquishy.8531:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hey all,

Believe me, the devs are aware of this issue and it has been and is being taken care of.

How about the FPS issues surrounding the UI?

Leave it in its own thread, mate.

Xillllix.3485:

Same here on Mac, went from 45fps to 17.

I think we should make support tickets, since Anet isn’t acknowledging this game-breaking bug.

Trust me when I say that that’s not the case. They haven’t made a response in this thread about it, but the Anet customer service and bugfixing teams have always been really solid.

This bug is humongous. I don’t know if you’ve ever done much scripting, but I’d be willing to bet someone misplaced a couple paragraphs of the core script and it sent the whole thing out of whack. Just finding the errant code is going to be a ridiculous hassle that may well be the work of days – I don’t expect them to have a complete fix until sometime late this week.

GhOst.4019:

They seem to be aware. They will also move this post to the “Bug” section of the forums, as they did with the last couple on this. Not sure how they messed so many things up; just hope they all get sorted out soon.

I suspect they misplaced some core script at some point.

LordAdre.8174:

I know it seems weird, I’ve never seen a UI eating all our FPS in any games, so I dont know what they did wrong..

I think it’s a scripting problem. the reason I say this is because I was pretty heavy into modding Skyrim and Oblivion before GW2 came out, and oftentimes the biggest performance hits weren’t from textures or meshes, but from bad scripts. See, what would happen is they wouldn’t know how to proceed, so the script would try again… and again… and again, never succeeding because it was written poorly. The end result was that FPS royally tanked as the game tried to process a script something like 300 times per second.

It’s the only explanation I have for why a UI, usually the most stable and least resource intensive part of a game, would cause so many issues.

It’s not just PvP or WvW – PvE is nearly impossible to play without knowing your HP and cooldowns

oh, an update! I used to get in general 18-25 FPS in most locations (dipping down to as bad as 12 FPS in really bad locations), and after the patch I have about 4 FPS.

If you turn off your UI, your framerate skyrockets. I went from 4 or 5 to something nearing 30. This suggests the FPS loss isn’t based on the camera changes, but that something was added to the UI that’s causing a scripting hangup which, in turn, eats CPU.

(For the record, I’m mentioning it here because a new thread seems like a bad idea, but narrowing down the problem is important for a bug fix to be made.)

I only had about 20-25 FPS to begin with, on pretty kitten low settings. I’m now looking at a grand total of 4.

Seems to me the camera options are woefully underoptimized.

I’ve got this problem too.

Okay, so, I don’t exactly have a great computer. I adjusted the hell out of the graphics settings before this patch to achievesome semblance of looking decent while having solid FPS, and the end result was that I typically had FPS somewhere in the range of 18-25 which, while not amazing, was decent.

My FPS after the camera patch? 3. Sometimes 4.

I literally cannot play like this. I can’t turn it off either, since there’s no way to do that. Even character selection, which was previously very smooth, has had an FPS drop to the point where it looks choppy, and I’ve no idea what to do to make it any better. It’s horrific.

kiwituatara.6053:

You might be right about the might stacking… the notes made no mention of might :/

They also make no note of RaO’s cooldown. Assume that if it hasn’t been mentioned, it hasn’t been changed.

Anyways, everything looks pretty solid to me. Very nice. I might actually start using RaO again.

For the record, Juvenile animals respawn about 30 seconds after they’ve been tamed, so you should have no trouble finding them in the locations they’re actually supposed to be in.

draxynnic.3719:

It’s an interesting speculation.

I don’t think Jennah is part of the duality of Lyssa, though: replacing the Krytan monarch would be a pretty big step. It’s possible that Lyssa might have stepped into the role of Jennah because the royal line was going to go extinct anyway and Lyssa wanted to hide that.

What I would be more likely to suspect would be Lyssa exploiting her duality by having one of her halves remaining with the other gods in the heavens, while the other is on Tyria in the role of Anise. For Jennah’s own proficiency, having Lyss or Ilya as a mentor is probably sufficient to explain her powers.

I have to agree with this particular concept – besides, Angel has specifically stated that voiced lines often carry a lot more storyline weight than non-voiced lines, and are often used for foreshadowing. Canach’s comment about Anise’s age has her respond on nearly the edge of violence.

I particularly like Eir’s Greatbow, as far as longbow skins go.

Why don’t you start getting to work on ascended armor? It’s the top tier stuff, and the devs have stated it’ll never go out of style.

Test out a couple. There’s noticable differences between, say, bears and drakes. Birds and bears seem to be the slowest attackers of the bunch, cats being the fastest.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

If the search box actually worked, I wouldn’t have to post my nub question that was already asked. At least now I have links to detailed analysis of each useful pet.

Glad to help Penguin

SpellofIniquity touched on important points, but as someone new to rangers, I feel you should listen to me as I shamelessly plug a guide I wrote a long time ago: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Pet-Explanations/first#post2547101

Basically, this guide doesn’t outright give you recommendations, but it does give you an informed opinion on the various pet types that are around. That said, I’ll agree with spell – Drakes are my pet of choice. If there’s no particular condition you’re going for, Marsh and River Drakes have the strongest F2 abilities.

LughLongArm.5460:

BTW, if taunt can Interupt(and i think it can) rune of perplexity can be even more ridiculous.

It’s going to be a control effect in the same vein as fear, so interruption is a given.

I only found out about it a couple weeks ago myself, but this seems to be what you’re looking for.
http://metabattle.com/wiki/MetaBattle_Wiki

It’s a build guide to all the “meta” builds at the moment, and is updated somewhat regularly. Definitely worth a read for your favorite class.

The three most demanded pets I’ve seen are the ones already ingame but unavailable to rangers – Rock Dogs, Raptors, and Griffons.

I could totally see Rock Dogs being a pet that gets taunt, and I really want that to happen.

I like this suggestion, but feel it’d fit best in a situation where not every player is doing it, giving an element of choice to the whole thing. A Beast Mastery specialization in which you gain pets of a higher quality than normal would be fairly applicable – if they were able to tame a giant mob, there’d be call for it. A siege devourer throwing AoE boulders, a drake broodmother, a giant boar, a colossal spider, all of which we already have ingame. The enhanced size would suggest a bunch of things; higher health, better defenses, more damage, and a greater reach. possibly even a higher speed than basic pets. I could even see it being applicable in pvp if you made the ranger weaker to compensate for the increased battlefield presence of the pet.

However, something you seem to be forgetting is that pets can already do a lot of tanking in dungeons, it’s just that if you want them to tank you either need a drake or a bear. They’re the tank pets, and a beast mastery traited ranger can get their pet to tank legendary bosses in mid level fractals and Arah Explorable for a surprising amount of time. Cats, birds, and similar can’t because they don’t have that level of tankiness, and that’s okay because they deal much more damage.

That’s not to say I don’t like your suggestion. I do. You just seem to have missed addressing a key point.

Cufufalating.8479:

OK, I perhaps should have mentioned I am talking purely about WvW and PvP. I don’t do PvE at all so I have no idea, and you could well be right on that.

But when fighting other players there’s really no justification for this trait.

I’ll agree with you there; like I said, this trait is very situation dependant, and PvP/WvW result in far too many deaths for both you and your pets to keep stacks up. I love it in PvE though, which is where I spend most of my time.

Untrue Cuf! it depends on the situation – plus, when you swap pets, the aggro your pet had gets swapped to you, which can be devastating for a zerker who relies on their pet for tanking.

Master’s Bond has its place, it’s just not with squishier pets. Keep in mind that a drake or bear on a BM ranger can tank legendary bosses in mid-high grade fractals and Arah explorable for a considerable amount of time.

This trait is actually very strong if you can amanage to keep a single pet out for a long time – that however makes it a lot more valuable for people with tank pets such as bears or drakes. Honestly though? It’s still a great trait that i’ve been using for a long time, as it actually turns pets into powerhouses as time goes on. Drakes in particular benefit a lot from it due to the fact that they are both tanky and cleave, giving them solid damage against multiple opponents.

Bran, it’s off topic because this is meant to be a discussion for how to improve pets. What you’re doing is going “THEY’LL NEVER BE BETTER BECAUSE THE DEV TEAM DOESN’T CARE.” You’re not even complaining about the topic, you’re complaining about the player feedback team.

aaaaas a matter of fact, I just set up a thread for this.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Pet-Improvement-Corner/first#post4815032