Guild Wars 2

StickerHappy.8052:

HeadCrowned.6834:

No, don’t make it AoE. We need a single-target burst or dps skill.

why not AoE that hits hard? like meteor shower, you both get the benefits that you want with 1 stone.

Because we already have too much AoE skills in-game. And then I mean for all professions, not only ranger. Almost all our dps skills are actually done over time or is an AoE in which the enemy has to stand in; traps, glyphs, LB #2 and LB #5, Torch #5, Axe #5, etc. We need a more reliable ranged 1-hit burst skill. With all the blocks, invulns, projectile hate and movementimparing reduction traits we barely get to land all potential damage from skills like LB Rapid fire. With a single hit burst you can do something about this.

No, don’t make it AoE. We need a single-target burst or dps skill.

From a PvP-perspective; the warhorn synergizes quite well with sword. Skill #5 is quite fine, especially if you choose to go for nature magic (large fury uptime can be worth quite a lot). The problem is skill #4, which damage is way too low. The weapon is decent if you don’t want to choose for Beastmastery or Druid natural stride to get enough swiftness.

Good idea from OP.

Oh I was talking about pvp btw. What about glyph of Empowerment for PvE?

Alignment is decent with low cooldown cripple + weakness.

Imo the ground targeting made Axe #4 worse as the radius is too small while it is a physical projectile. The range is actually good, but I’d rather make it a damaging attack, such as for example Necro focus #4 or #5. It is weird that we don’t have any dps on off-hand weapons, except for Axe #5, which is…. yeh, rooted.

What needs immediate attention:
Axe #4, Warhorn #4 and Frost trap.

From a PvP perspective, the glyphs are pretty fine, except glyph of unity. Healing glyph could use a little buff.

My Burn Druid build brought me realtively easy to legendary, SoloQ.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNAW8fnUqAFsitrAWsCctglOB7pFEqOcO/tAQhDelOT3plox0A-TphAQBA4gA4hjAgELDAj9HGxDAYDXAAA

I only watched game 3. A few tips:

- Use Strenght of the Pack much more often. It is useless in the way you use it now. You fought against 2 scrappers, you will get interrupted all the time without Stability. Preferably use it before you go in Celestial Avatar, so that your heals won’t get interrupted.

- Try to focus the proper target. At the quarry fight with I think about 8 minutes left on the clock you focus the scrapper with full hp while the ele only had 20% hp left.

- You use Celestial Avatar mainly for invisibility, but you should not forget that it is an important stunbreak and condi cleanse as well. Versus more condi-oriented opponents you will probably get problems if you waste your astral force this often.

- At your last fight at middle, you had plenty of time to use staff 3, 4 and 5 to stay alive but for some reason you didn’t. Make more use of those skills in general, instead of just AA’ing.

- You hide ur teammates hp bars above their character. This can be quite bad for creating an oversight for yourself. You have the potential to greatly heal your allies, knowing what their specific hp is quite essential to do that. The hp bars on the top left corner won’t really do the job.

These were the first things that came to my mind, good luck with it.

I remember Blackjack played tournaments with Golden title. So no, argument invalid.

ArthurDent.9538:

It should be the map that you have the highest win percentage on, that would be a kind of interesting statistic.

Good suggestion.

Hi Starbreaker,

How many matches have you played overall? It might take quite a while before you figure out your full keybind and the best order in which you should use your skills. Some tips:

- Focus on playing one profession; I read that you play ranger. I play that too, just stick with it for a longer period of time.

- Try to find a guild that accepts beginning PvP’ers. You can practice with them, and they might give you a good opinion on what you could do better.

- Winning 1v1’s is actually quite important. When you have your own combo’s working well, then try to observe what the opponent is doing; dodging certain attacks is essential.

- Try to flee from a fight that you estimate as an upcomming loss. Often it is better to give a capture point away and stay alive than dieing on the point a little later. You could spare for example Staff #3, Sword #2 or Lightning reflexes for such situations.

In general, patience is key to learn what is best, what capture node you should go, what fights you should or should not participate in, etc. Don’t focus too much on gaining pips, they’re not so important. That’s business for later. Ruby is good enough to learn a lot.

It is also the fact that you play condi trap ranger. Since the seed nerf, rangers can be quite vulnerable to that, and you can quite easily nuke them down when they dont have SOTP up. Also, quite many of ur opponents didnt even play Druid it seems. Almost any build can be hard countered by a certain non-meta build, while that build is not so useful in many other situations → reason why we barely see any trap rangers.

I agree to the camera at mid, but the rest seems pretty fine to me. Although you could consider a normal entrance to the clocktower from both sides instead of the small jumping puzzles.

I liked the map, I didnt like the underwater combat. Always a lot of action going on in this map, especially in 8v8

Well nice and funny video but kinda bad from the revenant. But yeah Rangers have a decent downed state, especially condi ranger.

I’d recommend Engineer/scrapper yeah.

Safir.8723:

REAL Ranger with Longbow and Zerk-Build, i guess, or FULL Heal/Support Druid without longbow. What i hate most atm is that all new ppl use Meta Battle Hybrid Druid build and that that one got good points. I dont care that GW2 is different. If you want to dmg, then Ranger. If you want to heal, play druid. Not half/half. Hybrid druids are not useful. 99% i have seen has not healed or was too stupid to use the druid right.

Not in PvP.

Astralporing.1957:

It’s most likely because it’s soo good. Druid is not only good, it’s rather easy to play. As an effect, there’s lot of people playing it that have no real idea how to do it. The same’s with necro. With some other classes on the other hand it’s much harder to find real newbies for them. Most Mesmers i have seen, for example, are at least competent – but it’s not a class you see that often in the lower divisions. It’s like with Warriors in the second half of s2. Almost noone ran them, due to the nerfs, but if i saw one, i could safely bet on them being really good at their class, while at the same time half of the Necros were …not that good (with a significantly high percentage being outright horrible).

But that aside, in general, a decent druid player not only has sustain to live through most 1v1s, and damage to win a number of those, but also has a mobility that lets him pick fights relatively easily. It’s not the best in any of those categories, but it makes druid a well-rounded class that’s always good to have around. They aren’t good when focused upon, but then most other classes don’t do that well in such situation either.

You base the observation that you saw a lot of bad people on Ranger and Necro on your assume that those 2 professions are easy to play. I saw a lot of bad condi mesmers last season, and I saw a lot of bad warriors this season. It isn’t really profession-related, it is meta-related.

bLind.6278:

They’re fine. Disrupt their ability to get their elite skills off and you win 100% of your fights against them. Warriors are EXTREMELY susceptible to CC due to an almost complete lack of stability. They get 3 pulses of a single stack of stability while in Berserker – burn one and then stun. Congrats you win.

If you can’t do that, use dazes while they’re in Berserk. Completely stops their ability to do damage. I’ve been killed multiple times in under 4 seconds on my warrior in the last couple of days by people that waited for me to go zerk, hit me with a daze and then hard-bursted. Granted, neither Endure Pain or Resistance ever seem to do anything in these situations, but still.

TL:DR – warrior isn’t a free kill anymore, you have to actually counterplay it like you had to pre-HoT. It’s not hard. Warriors still telegraph 100% of what they do and are incredibly predictable.

Warriors have very good access to stability.

I’d rather keep it the same, but with an extra buff, for example 8 secs of protection.

FrownyClown.8402:

Try fire wyvern if you wanted more burn damage.

I tried the wyvern at first. It creates a fire combo field, but this build does not have projectile finishers to make good use of that. The CC of the hound with lower cooldown is better I feel.

Tragic Positive

My question is …
… Why hound over Wolf? To proc taunt on CD? Is it worth the trade for the chain-CC?

Yeah the cooldown is lower. But also the fire trap + Bonfire will be your main source of damage. You want to keep the enemy in those fields (Fear will put them out of it). Therefore Immobilize on a shorter cooldown than the Fear of the wolf is more worth it in my opinion. Also the stability spam of warriors/engi’s puts the wolf in kinda bad position.

Hi all fellow Rangers,

I like to try different builds in PvP, so I made this Burn Druid build recently for PvP. Most Druids seem to use Signet of Stone and Signet of Renewal these days, in combination with the standard (meta) Druid build from last season. Signet of Renewal is an important condi cleanse, but has as disadvantage that your pet dies easily. As we know, the pet was the main source of damage in this build. Therefore I have been trying to figure out a new build with a bit more damage posibilities, and came up with this one:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNAW8fnUqAFsitrAWsCctglOB7pFEqOcO/tAQhDelOT3plox0A-TphAQBA4gA4hjAgELDAj9HGxDAYDXAAA

It felt quite good during the matches I tested it. Large teamfights can be a problem, but in the smaller fights it seems strong. You can 1v1 every class with this. I am not going to elaborate on every piece and bits of the build, but it would be nice if you guys try it out as well so you can post your findings here.

Condi cleanse can be somewhat of a problem in the build, so I keep testing further with for example Wilderness Survival;

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNAW8fjEqQHL2uCmsAXLW4EsnXwoKxB3Svp90mhVlKAUwjG-TphAQBb4CA4hjAgELDAj9HAwBBYEPAAA

I have also tested the Axe instead of Sword, mainly to get a projectile finisher, but I didn’t feel it was really worth it.

You can PM me in-game anytime. Cheers.

Eleanorrrrr

Agemnon.4608:

“I think the big reason we’ve seen a rise in Condition builds since the expansion is because Protection and damage reductions have heavily increased, but condition removal frequency hasn’t increased.”

The best argument against nerfing resistance in bold.

People started building tanky to mitigate things like thief burst, but that left a tank meta where people were still susceptible to conditions. Conditions are passive damage that just follow the character around and there are lots of damaging and movement impairing conditions in the game and that needs to be accounted for when balancing them. You block, you take damage, you dodge, you take damage (unless you’re on ele and even then you need to trait for it and it’s only chill and burning), and some conditions can last up to 10 seconds.

If resistance gets nerfed then conditions need to get nerfed with it. If conditions get nerfed then we can nerf passive defenses like protection and toughness to avoid another bunker meta. The game should also balance for skill, meaning the easier a class is to play the less useful it will be in high level play. This is already the case with dragon hunter.

The bold statement is just pathetic. We want a more diverse meta, not a meta that is narrowed down to just a few classes that you can consider harder to play. The way you wrote it down suggests that Dragonhunter is useless because it is easy to play, but that is just a wrong link. Dragonhunter is useless because of other things.

Ranger is not the weakest class, probably guardian is. Although I feel the seed nerf brought them from metaish to average.

Resistance needs to be an incoming condi damage reduction, not a complete mitigation.

Nabbo.2845:

The reason why you don’t see healing power in many amulets is that too many classes scale excellently with HP (druid) and some others have basically no interaction with healing power (warrior, unless shouts)

Which is compensated by other amulet stats that don’t interact so well with other professions (power and necro for example). The only reason that Clerics amulet is still there is the fact that 900 power won’t do much, while 900 condi damage does. Anets solution is removing the settlers amulet. A good solution would be improving power damage or reducing condi damage. Although the only truly viable build with Settlers was Shoutbow if I remember it well. Professions that have good access to Regen/healing abilities as a compensation for the lack of access to other things aren’t truly compensated because of this amulet problem.

Pyriall.1683:

Major toughness and condition damage should not be on any amulet. If condition bombing does as much burst as power burst then condition based professions should be susceptible to power burst as well. They should not be able to have such durability with so much damage. Carrion is the perfect trade off for condition builds and should be the standard to build around.

We have Rabid for that. The problem is the lack of healing power amulets.

A ranger with settlers amulet wouldn’t really be overpowered, but a warrior might be. Removing amulets has been the easy way to give balancing a try. However, it does not work at all.

Poison master isn’t viable, as the damage increase of only 25% for a GM trait is not worth it. Hidden Barbs is much better in comparison.

R O C.6574:

Condi Ranger (or more accurately Condi Druid) is fine. I run Axe/Torch and Sword/Dagger. Lots of bleeds, poisons, and burns. I also run spike trap, vipers nest, and entangle. More bleeds and poisons. Why aren’t you running druid?

Cuz you’ll get slaughtered vs average to good players. No damage mitigation, bad condi cleanse, no stability, barely escape options.

The problem is that with some skills you can apply too much different condi’s at the same time. Let a warrior land 2 skills and you got 6 different condis on ur kitten . Since most cleanses only cleanse like 2 condis, things are getting kinda out of line.

Also condi thief pure aids in 1v1.

ProtoMarcus.7649:

Seed of Life
Completely unnecessary nerf;
Takes forever to cleanse
Super small radius
Light field is so short it’s almost inexistant
In kitten-condi meta, I don’t see the logic behind removing/reducing the very few condi-cleansing options from ranger/druid. They already struggle quite a bit, and they have to TRAIT HEAVILY to have SOME form of condition management.

Indeed. It’s quite painful to see again that any average reliable form of condi cleanse , outside of druidic clarity, is only available in Wilderness Knowledge. And then you have to choose between 2 GM traits lol. This is exactly the biggest problem the PvP section has right now: you are pretty much forced into a build.

You made a valid point in the OP. Some effective changes can be made by altering the trait system, and by placing traits in a different more suitable traitline.

The nerf of seed of life was an unnecessary one. There was nothing OP about a 2-condi cleanse that has quite a big delay after you cast it. If they wanted to nerf Druids condi cleanse they should have nerfed druidic clarity.

R O C.6574:

HeadCrowned.6834:

R O C.6574:

I’m fine with less condi build diversity. Every OP build is a condi build

You don’t really got the point. A certain condi build could be OP (like mesmer with mercenary), but that does not mean that every other class should not be able to run a condi build.

There currently is no hard counter for condi. Resistance blah blah blah not effective. Rev’s access to resistance sucks all your upkeep.

Not saying it isn’t fun to watch my opponent’s HP drop to 0 as i hide in stealth and wait for the bleeds and poison to kill them, but after playing power builds and condi builds, condi is broken as kitten. If you don’t like the idea of a hard counter to condi, then maybe we should get rid of all the hard counters to Power.

There is in most situations a big difference between hard condi counter and hard power counter, since you can still attack with hard condi counter, however with most hard counter to power such as blocks, invulns, etc you can not.

Especially all the CC is just ridiculous.

R O C.6574:

I’m fine with less condi build diversity. Every OP build is a condi build

You don’t really got the point. A certain condi build could be OP (like mesmer with mercenary), but that does not mean that every other class should not be able to run a condi build.

phokus.8934:

You have to consider access to Resistance. For example, if a Guardian shout had Resistance (2s), then if they wanted that boon, they’d have to give up a trap or a meditation.

The rate at which you can apply conditions far outweighs the recharge timer and upkeep of Resistance currently. There is very little down time for clearing conditions as they’re quickly reapplied with potent stacks.

Ofc im not talking about just 2 secs of resistance. I am talking about warriors or revenants with a resistance uptime that can be way too long. Basically the only thing a condi build can do versus that is to run away, which is intrinsically bad. Just like a too long stability uptime is bad too.

No I think resistance in itself is too powerful. It would be better to make it for example reduce incomming condition damage by 50%. A boon that could totally annihilate any condi build without boonstrip is just a misplaced boon. It also forces you to take a condi class that has access to boonstrip, so mesmer or necro. This reduces build diversity, while we actually want more build diversity.

God pls no. Give certain classes more cleanses maybe, but not more reflection and invulnerabilities.

The nerf of Seed of Life is just so bad. That skill was finally properly designed.

Hmm well we do have the extra bleed damage from Hidden Barbs, which is quite powerful since we can in theory apply huge bleed stacks very quickly. Also increasing the bleed duration through a trait would be a kinda crazy maybe.
I’d rather give some attention to the duration of poison and burning, especially the torch feels a bit like a left alone weapon.

I would go for bird. Useful F2 with low CD, and also less problems with hitting moving targets.

Spartacus.3192:

HeadCrowned.6834:

Spartacus.3192:

infantrydiv.1620:

Scrapper: A masterclass in poor weapon design: hammer 2-3-4-5 all perform multiple functions on top of poorly designed passives like protection on CC, making scrapper extremely durable and forgiving.

And yet arguably the best Scrapper player in the world (Chaith from Astral Authority) will not be playing Scrapper in Season 3.

And did you ask him why? My prediction is that it’s not because Scrapper isn’t the best in most situations.

Yes i did ask him why. The summary was (as far as i remember, Chaith can correct me if im wrong). The best thing Scrapper brought in Team fights was the CC from Slick Shoes and of course Hammer Dazes and the healing from turret.

Slick Shoes is now worthless, hammer daze is now 2 dazes not 3. Healing Turret can now be interrupted much more easily.

So your prediction is nowhere close. Scrapper is not the best in almost every situation. The fact Astral Authority is not running one is clearly an indication that its not Top 5 anymore.

Thief was buffed so now Toker is playing thief and Chaith will play Rev.

I actually meant best as in the best option for an engineer. Didn’t think that Chaith would swap profession.

@ Permafrost sorry to bother you with this unimportant question, but did you play Knight Online? I knew a player with the same name as you from that game.

OT: it would be good to see a kind of leaderboard back yes. And the reward track is kinda boring too, the rewards are not interesting at all.

Spartacus.3192:

infantrydiv.1620:

Scrapper: A masterclass in poor weapon design: hammer 2-3-4-5 all perform multiple functions on top of poorly designed passives like protection on CC, making scrapper extremely durable and forgiving.

And yet arguably the best Scrapper player in the world (Chaith from Astral Authority) will not be playing Scrapper in Season 3.

And did you ask him why? My prediction is that it’s not because Scrapper isn’t the best in most situations.

Dirame.8521:

Or….you could keep the current system and have it such that a character can pick any 9 traits from any of the 1 – 3 trait lines they select. For instance a person could run only Death magic in the case of necros or he could run just Soul Reaping by selecting all 9 traits from that specialization. Or a person could do what they are doing now and go with all 3 and select one from each. Sounds more interesting to me than going back to the overly complicated and not so eye-candy trait system.

Also, if you think some traits are that bad, you could suggest traits you think would be better suited for those slots.

Yeh thats also a solution. I’m not saying we really have to get back to the old system, but certain aspects of that old system are better than the current sytem. They could develop a new system as a mix between the current and the old ones, that’s fine by me too. We need changes to the current system that encourage build diversity, that’s all. How they plan to do that? I don’t care so much.