Guild Wars 2

I have to agree, having played the Reaper for a bit, my first impressions are not so great.

Maybe it was because I was playing an Asura, but Death’s Charge felt like it was going further than I was expecting each time. One of my two mains is a human D/F Ele, so I was basing my expectations on Burning Speed. I think it may simply be that Death’s charge is “floatier” than burning speed. Reaper Shroud itself feels incredibly strong, albeit, I didn’t consider using Soul Spiral, because skill 1 provides lifeforce, and Executioner’s Scythe had slightly too long a wind-up, even for PvE.

The Greatsword seems like an okay Necromancer weapon, if it was supporting normal Death Shroud. But for Reaper shroud I don’t really like the weapon. Both sets are trying to do the same thing, get in melee for huge pay-off skills, but Reaper Shroud provides the better pay-off skills. So for the most part, GS is left as a utility weapon for skills 3, 4 and 5. Death Spiral is easily my favourite animation on the reaper, while Gravedigger is just the worst. I keep interrupting my own Nightfall accidentally (which doesn’t happen with the Guardian animation it copies) and I don’t know how to describe it but Grasping darkness just feels weird to aim. Over the whole time I spent using the weapon, I tried Gravedigger to see if it had a decent pay-off, but the skill just wasn’t worth using over normal autos, especially when traited for lifesteal. Balance-wise, I would increase the Greatsword’s utility more. Possibly vulnerability on the the first hits of the skill chain, but most importantly an increase in the chill duration of the third hit in the chain. Gravedigger then definitely isn’t worth using over normal autos, perhaps just an increase in damage is what’s needed, I don’t know, I hate that skill.

Lastly, shouts. “Chilled to the Bone” is probably my favourite elite skill in the game, but Necros already have steep competition for it between the moving blind field and the repeatedly pointing finger of doom. I didn’t really want to slot the others and Valkyrie gear doesn’t give a good impression of any healing skill.

I’m pretty sure the animations on Death Spiral and Gravedigger are backwards.

It’s not that the quit button does nothing. Right now if you quit a living story episode it will start the earliest living story episode you haven’t completed on this character yet. While previously you only had to complete episode 8 in season 2 to be free of it. How it behaves after initially completing the personal story now I don’t know.

From a money perspective, replaying the living story isn’t that bad, I’m just going to have to get some good bags for my dedicated bank character so she can carry all these Mawdrey crafting components.
From a story perspective, the living story has almost no replay value, you can see minor variations based on your character’s race and gender and that’s it. I had left this story satisfied after completion of the, a little too easy, achievements.
From a sanity perspective, oh dear God why. We need to be able to quit it.

Upon completion with the personal story, you are currently greated with the living story season 2 finale or maybe you’re greated with season 1 recap, I wouldn’t know for certain. Point is, I didn’t go through the entire personal story on 8 characters just so I could be told I had to do the living story on all 8 characters to get the main benefit.

Clutter in the top right gets ridiculous, but without having completed all living story episodes it seems that clutter will never go away. It isn’t possible to quit the living story without its completion or at least the completion of some story steps, the quit button simply resets your living story to whatever episode the algorithm deems as the default based on the available story steps. I’ve yet to fully test and see exactly how many story steps you are required to complete.

An option to remove the living/personal story from the top right or at least the “Quit This Episode” button functioning correctly would save players like myself hours of hassle and bank space storing Mawdrey items.

DoogySnowStalker.2069:

HotHit.6783:

Precision on our pets was working prepatch, however their precision calculation is different. I’ve yet to do any proper trials post patch though.

The precision bug actually existed before the patch hit, and bit annoyed that it has yet to be fixed or addressed. Info here.

That thread is wrong. Well, maybe not wrong, but definitely misinformed or inconclusive. For example, what’s the crit chance of a pig without the benefits of spotter and beastmastery?

A similar test was performed prepatch, you can find the results in this thread.

I’ve yet to doublecheck precision on pets post-patch, however, my findings prepatch stated in that thread, concluded that cats scaled with precision, but their crit chance was always lower than what you’d expect from a player with the same precision.

Sube Dai.8496:

Its made a pretty big difference.

I’ve just been trolling Hot Join with a double melee regen cleric and I have hawks critting for 2×1500, while I soak up almost everything.

It might even be a legitimate point holder!

I’m a big fan of Settler’s trapper. Beastly Warden functioning in downed state and the extra stats mean I can safely drop wolf and start throwing hawks at people. While the lack of knockback/fear is annoying, the torch radius increase is huge for point defence. I rigged a Mesmer portal with C4 and now I’m addicted to traps.

If our staff ends up a power weapon, I’m probably going to have Healing Spring on my bar just to justify a traited Spike Trap on a power build.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I hate to complain since we got a lot of what we needed but… Ever since the big patch I’ve found Stalker’s Strike to be almost unusable. It’s incredibly difficult to land on your targets due to how short the range is which is unfortunate because it gives quite a long duration Poison.

It’s no harder to land than hilt bash, a hilt bash that makes you invulnerable during its cast time. While I’d certainly appreciate the extra distance, this isn’t like Crippling Talon where you need to pin down an opponent but they just ignore your conditions with dashes and resistance ‘til they’re at 1050 range and at 100 health. Stalker’s strike is still an amazing defensive tool and way more consistent than serpent’s strike.

Everyone seems to only test our pets’ crit chance with maximum precision investment, yet you don’t investigate it at its minimum. The last time I performed precision testing trials, I found that our pets’ crit chance was significantly below the values you’d expect from a player.

Precision on our pets was working prepatch, however their precision calculation is different. I’ve yet to do any proper trials post patch though.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

You already hit 100% burn duration without them, so you may as well be adding more condi/power/precision and you don’t need vitality really.

With 2 Nightmare and 4 trapper runes you can hit 95% condi duration, which sounds okay since we’re inflicting 2 to 3 types of conditions. Anyway, I drew up a quick build in the build calculator to make damage calcs, but it seems like giver’s was screwed over by the specialisations patch. So long as the ability tooltips from the damage calculator are trustworthy anyway, you’ll do about 50 more physical damage per attack and bunch more condition damage with ascended sinister. Sinister can also use Balthazar runes for even more benefit.

You can see for yourself
Quick link to a similar Exotic Balthazar’s Sinister build for comparison

So nevermind. All those snowflakes are still almost useless, just invest in burning like crazy.

What interests me is, why are we using Sinister Ascended weapons and not Giver’s Exotic weapons?
Group support makes the physical damage increase relevant?
Simply to appease the 10 second burst, best case scenario only overlords?
‘Cause not being full ascended wouldn’t have the same swag?

Secondly, if you’re running Exotic Sinister, would Giver’s be better for damage?

Sube Dai.8496:

Having a hard time believing that mainhand axe, with nothing on swap, is our highest dps.

In a condi build axe just has to compete with sword and 5 bleeds does a lot more damage than 2 poisons. GS and longbow only make it worse and poison Volley no matter how boosted is trumped by splitblade. The melee projectile weapon with slow animations having the highest damage output isn’t so ridiculous, it’s countered by every defensive mechanic in the game (reflects, interrupts, stealth, condi cleanse, boon removal, moving away…).

Weapon swap’s been added? Welp, I’ve lost a lot of interest in this profession.

I run a bunker build, though I’m still playing around with it and at this point the things I’m playing with are more meta calls than anything.

Here.

I should probably replace the traveller runes with something a bit more combat effective, but oh well. When condis are too frequent I’ll run wilderness survival instead of poison master, replacing viper’s nest with flame trap (same-ish damage, shorter duration, lower cooldown). In a condition heavy team I like to run sun spirit instead of lightning reflexes or my non-spike trap as well. The build could definitely use another stunbreaker though.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Anet does have that pattern of at least one class in each of the armor tiers having a low, medium, and high health pool. I know I’m going to get flack for saying this, but I think Engineers deserve the high health pool over Rangers.

hides

Nope, get back out here! This is a thread for discussion and I want to know your reasoning! Don’t make me sic my drake on you!

Now don’t just go jumping straight onto the free buffs bandwagon there. Higher power in one area suggests there should be costs in another. Of course, consensus is the Ranger is weaker right now, so this would be an opportunity cost rather than a cost of nerfing some other abilities.

Why should the Ranger have a larger health pool?
The Ranger is a profession that is meant to excel in battles of attrition but is lacking in the defences department. Increasing health increases defences against all kinds of damage, but especially helps against condition damage and as such a higher health pool would put less pressure on the wilderness survival trait line and our survival utilities to fill that role. There’s certainly an argument our +90% health traits would be harder to restore without breaking combat, but bark skin at least would be more powerful naturally to compensate. This would also make Most dangerous Game style traits more powerful.

Symmetry
Warrior, Revenant, Guardian
Necromancer, Mesmer, Elementalist
____, Ranger & Engineer, Thief
Humans like patterns, it’s just in our nature. It’s natural for us to complete them. The rules of nature dictate that we should complete patterns wherever we see them. But in all seriousness, the Ranger as the high health profession for the adventurer armour class slots into place and completes a pattern. Even if it is an unintentional pattern.

If symmetry is your argument why not give the engineer high health instead?
The Ranger and the Engineer have competed for the title of jack of all trades since launch. Rangers were jacks in GW1, with builds like Barrage/Pet performing all the necessary roles for a party like all professions in GW2 do now. But when you have top level rangers saying that celestial gear doesn’t work very well on the profession and, as I said, every profession performing every party role simultaneously, you can see why the Ranger’s not the jack of all trades.

What are your thoughts on the subject? How do you feel about the Ranger’s identity becoming the high health adventurer?

Sic ’em with a drake!

They’ll be prevented from stealthing and the drake’s cleaving will take down clones they stand next to.

I found the Revenant legends to be lacking a lot of their character or it to be completely wrong. We were told the spirits would talk to us. Ventari making grunts and battlecries is not really talking to us, he didn’t say anything like what he has written on his tablet, heck, his grunts were incredibly aggravating. Mallyx just made grumpy sounds and Jalis didn’t even say a word to me. Worst part is, my character didn’t seem to acknowledge the spirits he was summoning either. I was looking forward to seeing how a Sylvari treats Mallyx compared with a Charr. But as it stands, the Revenant’s “homages” to GW1 feel incredibly empty.

FrownyClown did change a couple of things, but explanations are good. For a power build you always have the option of greatsword, swoop provides a lot of map mobility. If you get good at performing a reverse Hornet Sting quickly then you can use sword with a torch or dagger for your secondary weapon set, our sword is probably our best hybrid weapon. But from your runes and specialisation choices, I think you’re aiming for something you haven’t mentioned. Axe, Beastmastery, Nature magic and might based runes? You want to get a lot of might on you and your bird when you’re stuck with axe’s cooldowns. Switching out longbow is what I’d do and I get really mad when I can’t launch some sucker off the point I’ve set up camp on.

What I recommend is to try Traveller runes. You’ll lose a bit of stopping power and 20% might duration, but you’ll gain marginally better condis and 25% free movement speed.

Other recommendations of mine are to try instinctive reaction. Celestial sets work incredibly well with “gain X% of stat Y as stat Z” traits, quickness is a boon now that’s transferred with fortifying bond so it stacks a lot better than it used to. I also recommend replacing signet of renewal, I can’t think of any situation where what I specifically needed to get out of that situation was yet another stun break. Signet of the Hunt works well with birds and helps with mobility (don’t use with traveller runes), Signet of Stone is amazing for survival against physical damage, Spike Trap reduces your need for mobility as you can control opposing movement and Signet of the Wild has a lackluster passive but it’s probably better than a third stun break and fifth condi cleanse.

I’d just like to know where people get the idea that they should be able to outdamage melee weapons with ranged weapons. In any game aiming for balance and a fun environment to play, risk will always provide reward. Shorter range is higher risk and lower DPS uptime, so of course it has higher active DPS.

I don’t even know why people enjoy using long-range weapons in the first place. I didn’t pick Ranger to stand around plinking arrows all day.

I’m not sure influence is the right term. My two mains, Ele and Ranger haven’t had their elite specs revealed yet.

The Tempest’s weapon could be anything, but I don’t really care anymore. If it’s my Zephyrite magic theory, Sun, Wind and Lightning attunements, then I lose my two favourite attunements, water and earth. My only other theory was that the Tempest was a squishy evasive type character with a break bar, a skirmishing melee fighter that doesn’t die when they clip the edge of a Guardian Staff wall. Anet went the obvious route with the break bar, letting the warrior ignore more game mechanics, so yeah.

Druid on the other hand had me interested from the initial announcement. The Maguuma druids are awesome and Ranger, my favourite profession, definitely needs a few different things that the Druid, or even just the staff, could provide. Despite playing Ranger I hate using bows and have been using axe or almost pure melee since launch, the Ranger’s greatsword is what initially sold me on the Ranger anyway. A ranged support power weapon would be perfect to play with Greatsword. A melee condi weapon with hard control and mobility would also be perfect for my PvP condi builds. I play druids in every other (enjoyable) game that’ll allow me, so I’ll be making druid specific builds anyway.

As for things I can fully comment on. My Mesmer wouldn’t see play without Time Marches On. My Guardian will be able to show off my hard earned Kudzu that doesn’t suit her at all while she continues to be a bank character. My male Sylvari Necromancer whose name begins with “Trahe” never felt right without a greatsword.

You’re joking right? Removing our pets altogether is not a solution, it’s a short term gutting that gives us the long term gain of being like a warrior but not as powerful or mobile and like a thief but not as evasive or mobile. Don’t worry we’ll still have a lot of long duration soft CC designed to make it difficult to avoid AI assistants that we don’t have.

Literally all my PvE pet problems could be solved by my pet attaching themselves to my heel when I tell them to return to me or dodge when I dodge. No more having to remember which side my pet is on and position myself 100-600 units away from the safe spot I’d like my pet to stand at. No more AFKing in a safe spot while my environmental hazard immune river drake face tanks the TA aetherpath clockheart, because that extreme is no longer needed.

I didn’t think the range loss would be that bad, I’ve always ran my off-hands with off-hand training. 12 “out of range” Crippling Talons in a row and I’m kind of kittened about it. I always used to use Crippling Talon for the 901-1200 range cripple. I’m sure that that projectile has no arc too, so the range loss is a lot more relevant for it.

We’re missing the awesome bonus particles from the larger bonfire now too.

singinggecko.5736:

Brian.6435:

I’m not saying you’re idea isn’t interesting, but instead of adding an entirely new mechanic, how bout making storm spirit just… useful and getting rid of swiftness as the passive boon and just making it reduce all skill cooldowns by an additional 10%?

lol you just read my mind. Exactly what I was thinking.

Actually, better yet, if Storm Spirit traited pulsed out Alacrity you’d get ~22% Cooldown reduction as it would have 33% uptime. Rather than just more swiftness to go with your perma swiftness (and your allies’ perma swiftness if they have any boon duration).

What I meant was, if you don’t have a target selected, your attacks will always move based on where your character/camera is facing and not to any target in particular. One of the most hilarious things you can use this for is flying around WvW deathballs. If you use skill one and land a hit, you’ll move on to attack 2, which you get two chances to hit with, and finally attack 3 which you also get a second use of if the first doesn’t hit. Since attacks 2 and 3 perform short dashes, you can land attack 1 on a nearby opponent and short hop on attack 2 to close the gap with a little bit away, then use your two uses of attack 3 to close the gap on their backline. In this example, you would need to deselect your target if you wanted to dash in a direction that wasn’t straight towards your target. If you learn the hitbox on kick and pounce, you can aim it manually and dance around teamfights more easily than constantly reselecting your target.

That’s what I mean by dancing circles around your enemy. It’s a bit easier to show than explain, so I highly recommend seeing what happens against the test golems in PvP.

Disable auto-attack so you have complete control.

A cool thing you can do with sword is remove auto targetting, thus every dash will be performed to its full length unless you select a victim manually. If you’re quick with aiming each strike you can dance circles through your enemy and give them little chance for counterattack.

Hitting your opponent then deselecting your target grants you the ability to dash away very quickly with two kicks or pounces. Combined with Hornet Sting and Monarch’s Leap, this can allow you to create huge gaps very quickly.

For offhands, power builds usually carry axe, warhorn or dagger. Axe is for the high damage interrupt of Path of Scars, sometimes you’ll be able to Whirling defence a kill shot though. Warhorn is for the group swiftness, fury and blast finisher on Call of the Wild. Dagger is for the low cooldown evade and long range cripple, the high condi damage from Stalker’s Strike and Crippling Talon is just a bonus, not the reason for the weapon. I highly recommend the warhorn if you want to learn the sword, as it’s the easiest of the three and puts more pressure on you learning to dodge with the sword.

There’s not really any great traits I for it, though one of its best traits Predator’s Onslaught you have to choose it over the Longbow trait or the gorgeous trait Remorseless. Remorseless/Rampage as One/Sword is an incredibly fun thing to do. I’d say the sword just works with whatever you trait really, it’s an incredibly self sufficient weapon.

A symmetrical effect doesn’t give an advantage? Au contraire, that would make the skill pointless. Reducing everyone’s cooldowns increases offense overall in a perfectly symmetrical world, as endurance regen doesn’t increase to compensate thus there are less dodges. Increasing the game’s tempo throws off players like Elementalists, who often have mentally timed skill rotations due to numerous invisible cooldowns. Thieves and Revenants, who have secondary resources, will only gain a fraction of the benefit a Rapid Fire Ranger would. Unfortunately, I don’t have the PvP expertise to say for certain, but I’d predict perma alacrity would benefit the more offensive team, rather than the defensive team.

This effect is extremely minor or catastrophic to class balance. If the skill is good and meta then 2 of 9 professions aren’t allowed to play, since you’d need to make your team abuse the effect too to not lose. As an asymmetrical effect it would actually be easier to balance, as the extremes would not be so ridiculous.

Oh and reducing cooldowns of AI enemies will probably break the game somewhere.

It’s something that’s been building up in the back of my head for a while, but think about all the things the Ranger playerbase wants and what the Maguuma Druids’ magic did. The Reaper was an attempt to give the Necro some awesome stuff for PvE content, the Dragon Hunter was an attempt to give the Guardian justification its sore lack of a good long range weapon, the Druid will attempt solve the Ranger’s problem of being kinda weak in WvW zerg battles and having lackluster team support.

Profession Mechanic.
As much as I hate to say it, the Druid’s profession mechanic is likely going to be the biggest U-turn from the design team. The aspects idea that’s been thrown around? Probably going to happen. The Druid will be able to “stow” their companion instead of switching them to get bonuses for it as has been demanded a lot by the community. For the sake of it, my own take would be that we’d have one pet, swap ‘em out and gain access to their third and F2 skills ourselves. Any traits that affect the skills directly (like beastly warden) would apply to our versions, but we don’t get the training stat bonuses (450 ferocity on a minor trait is dumb). A few examples for you:
Brown Bear: Shake It Off and Defy Pain
Raven: Blinding Slash and Quickening Screech
Wolf: Terrifying Howl and Brutal Charge

This solves the issue of losing our profession mechanic to random things we don’t have the control to play around, like our cat walking into a death field. But we’re still punished for keeping our companion stowed all the time.

Weapon
It’s a staff, if it’s not an AoE weapon then Anet have screwed up. I’ve heard tales of it being a CC/support weapon, which would be beautiful. Whether it’s a condi or power weapon I can’t predict, but so long as it pairs nicely with a condi build or GS build I’m happy. The Ranger lacks the ability to properly fight an opponent they can’t target outside of melee, while the new spike trap is amazing for fighting backstabs (the real deal or a grenade barrage), it’s not a useful tool against PU Mesmers or massive Zergs where you can’t select the important targets in the cluster. Basically though, Ele Earth 4 and Ele water 3 and I’d probably be happy.

Utilities
Here’s the big one I haven’t seen much discussion on. We’d heard a long while back that the Druid is heavily based around using the staff and the utilities should support that. If the staff is an area affecting CC/Support weapon, then the utilities should be AoEs you want to keep your victims in. We already have traps, but an idea of mine is “terrains”, long lasting area effects. The Druids of Maguuma can change the terrain of the Jungle by growing plants and such, Rangers used to have Nature Rituals that could drastically change fights, by providing both sides a buff, like Frozen Soil or Favourable Winds. The Druid, I predict, will get utilities like these possibly labelled consecrations if we’re needing to reuse a skill type. One such idea:

Favourable Winds:
Cause winds to blow forwards in front of you that grant super speed to allies and boosts the speed of their projectiles moving with them while crippling enemies and reducing their projectiles’ speed moving against them.

The best case scenario would be attacking an opposing team head on as two balls, but this would result in wiser teams attacking as two groups from different directions to counterplay the skill. Controlling the opposition’s ability to move around and force them to fight against the winds would be critical, which brings us back to the staff being an AoE control weapon.

tl;dr fusion dance with our bear, area control like crazy and large area unique support effects. These are just one conclusion from evidence that combines to suggest we’ll be awesome teamfighters.

You uh… You okay there dude? You seem to be a bit… Not all there. Let’s see if I can summarise your proposal correctly.

Condition teams don’t work out as well as power teams do.
A solution to this would be a support ability that multiplies the power of a condi team.
In GW1 we had nature rituals that applied an effect to every creature in their range.
You want to pay homage to a spirit using a completely different effect.
Said effect is condis tick 20% faster, but run out 20% faster also and cooldowns are 20% shorter.
Also let’s have another spirit that boosts bulk by a lot.

GW1 nature rituals were designed to have cool unique effects that a party could be built around, but the effect was symmetrical so your party had to take advantage of the effect better than the opponents. While I love that kind of effect and it’s given me an idea as to what the druid will be about, the most iconic nature ritual edge of extinction speaks for itself. Can you imagine if someone dropped that ritual during, say, the fire elemental world boss?

For a spirit the Ranger can summon that supports condi teams’ damage, we have Sun spirit, simpler to code like Heimskarl suggested too. A spirit that boosts the group’s defence we have spirit of nature renewal, spirit of water and spirit of stone. These affect our team only so as to create a much simpler system that encourages a player wanting spirits to use a build based around spirits.

You want a spirit that lowers cooldowns? Get Anet to spread Alacrity to professions other than the Chronomancer first. It took long enough for them to give us toys that let us play with cooldowns at all.

That’s game balance stuff, the formula is highly likely to change and releasing such information derails discussions from the area game designers want them. Opinions like:
“Whether it’s cool or not doesn’t matter, the dps is terrible compared to the greatsword lifesteal.” and “Of course it’s fun, it’s the highest dps trait choice for the reaper.” aren’t constructive for hype or design.

Dojo.1867:

Check out runes of evasion.

Eh, unless the rolling attack doesn’t use up your opening strike from the rune, I’d say avoid ‘em. It doesn’t help their case that they don’t exist in PvP. A better alternative would be Runes of Rage/Scholar for burst damage or Runes of the Pack for the utility. Runes of the Mad King are really fun with the new Rampage as One too, jumping your cat up to 25 might while shredding your victim with remorseless sword autos for perma cripple and 25 vuln.

Remorseless is a godly trait that we’re probably not gonna be dropping from any of our power builds any time soon. It’s just way too flexible with how accessible fury is.

I’d guess if you aim to have 100% crit chance, the aim would be between 55-65%, depending on how impactful the diminishing returns are and whether banner of discipline is a available. That may seem low, but with spotter and banner of discipline providing 320 extra precision, that’s up to 15% bonus crit chance. Assuming constant fury (which we can assume regardless of game mode) we’d have a flat constant 20% and to ensure our skirmishing grandmaster minor remains impactful, we should assume another constant 10% extra crit chance. That totals to 45% bonus chance to crit.

However, as I mentioned precision seems to have diminishing returns and more importantly we have the auto-crits from remorseless. I don’t know exactly what kind of power build you’re running or what game mode you’re playing, but when your base crit chance is nearly 50% and you have a plethora of guaranteed crits, I’d say it’s more important to maximise your crit damage with full Zerker gear.

Cyrill Faust.9340:

I think they should have picked a different name, it’s not meant to function in anyway similar to “taunt” in trinity games and it just confuses people who have a poor grasp on game mechanic/design. It’s meant to be the opposite of Fear instead of of pushing away it pulls in, it was never meant as PVE aggro control.
That said I can see how it could be interesting in PVP/WVW however it’s not accessible enough to really matter at the moment.

It functions exactly like taunt in League of Legends.
It functions similarly to taunt in pokémon. (which is google’s first gaming definition of it)
Hell, it functions almost exactly like the taunt in Megaten, the last MMO I played.

I think your definition of a taunt status effect is just wrong.

Time Marches On is my favourite elite specialisation so far. Reaper seems like it’ll be fun to mess with and make builds for and Dragon Hunter is easily the one I have least interest in.

I have a lot of hopes for druid at this point and every day I don’t hear more info about it the more impossible my demands get. At this point I’m expecting staff to be a condi/support/control/melee weapon

HawkMeister.4758:

Not really.
I kept mine specifically to upgrade my low level alts after this patch and now they´re pretty much lost as I don´t need anything really that´s bought with these.

Better they be turned into spirit shards than let you obtain hero points you can’t use. From what I can tell they listened to complaints and you get enough hero points for everything simply by being level 80.

Is this for PvE or PvP? Anyway, we’ve got Signet of the Hunt, Call of the Wild, Resounding Timber and Tailwind.

The first is a terrible choice, as our condi weapons do lots of little hits making the Signet of the Hunt active worthless. Taking Warhorn over our other condition related offhands is an odd choice, but I’ve seen a weird build that uses it, splitblade, mad king runes, a bird pet and Entangle to nuke someone with 50+ bleeds and a dozen birds clawing at their eyes. Resounding Timber is probably your best bet in the profession, you sacrifice a few utility slots, but end up doing a mix of condi damage personally and physical damage through your pet. Tailwind is probably in your condi build and you didn’t even realise it, if you swap on cooldown you’ll have perma swiftness while in combat.

Storm Spirit and Rampage as One are also in our swiftness repertoir, but neither are particularly suited for travelling so they’re meaningless if you’ve taken tailwind.

Outside of just our profession mechanics you can always take Runes of the Traveller, they’re decent with a condi build. They don’t come cheap though.

For a do what you want pick up group, condition damage definitely has the advantage. I’m just sad there’s no Condi damage/precision/healing set I can go for those situations.

In a “speedclear” team, run condi damage and make surviving the boss easier and less punishing.

In a real speedclear team, we’ve just gotten the groundwork that allows condition builds to exist in them. For Rangers at least, condition damage sacrifices the absurd vulnerability application from remorseless (or a huge portion of personal damage), so it’s just not worth it.

Justine.6351:

HotHit.6783:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Don’t use Rabid for any PvE content, its just horrible. Seriously. Power is a must with your condi damage, so Carrion or Sinister imo, with Sinister being far better.

Really? Because from what I’ve been able to find on Sinister condi builds they don’t deal high power damage. Only 1/10 to 2/10 of their personal damage output is physical. So long as you’re not dealing with structures or immune to crits world bosses, rabid works out well. It’s not like going condi stops our drakes from wrecking Graveling burrows either, especially now that Beastmastery is such a strong trait line.

rabid has toughness as a stat. Pretty much they are saying take glass gear stats. Hard to argue with that thinking tbh.

If you are going precision as a stat you really cant do it wrong stacking it with power. Shortbow aa is decent with zerker but likely better with sinister for obvious reasons.

Heimskarl was also citing Carrion as better than Rabid. It’s not a case of going glass cannon, it’s a case of your equipment’s power being relevant. It’s probably because there is no condi damage/condi duration/precision gear set, the closest is Giver’s/Sinister. You aren’t able to go all in on conditions and 30-40% crit chance is still pretty solid for on-crit triggers, yet the extra power will better enable killing low toughness targets and abusing party buffs.

As much as I love our animal companion, there are some situations where having an extra body that lacks finesse can screw over a plan. Enemies like leeching Thrashers for instance. Having to watch my best friend, who I’ve told should stay out of combat stand “next” to me on the other side of the arena in a death field isn’t fun.

I don’t even care if it’s literally just enabling the stow button in combat, it’d just save Rangers the Leeching Thrasher, Risen Abomination, Lupi making grubs off pets type of problems.

The cooldown increase wasn’t in the patch notes, like Rampage as One’s absurd uptime.

jcbroe.4329:

See, what I was hoping for is that arming time referred to a period of time traps could be stood on before then activating. That would have been the most ideal change to the way traps arm imo. That way, people would have less opportunity to activate traps at the outer edge, and pets/clones wouldn’t instantly set off traps when they touch them.

It would make dodge rolling through them not necessarily a counterplay anymore, and people would have to be much smarter about their positioning and more aware of your actions as a trap ranger.

As it is, I’m just seeing traps right now as having all the same problems as before the patch, with the additional problem of not being able to throw them on a team fight and nuke areas with traps, which actually made them more situation applicable than they are now.

Its such a mixed bag for me personally, because I want to like them, but against a good player, especially who’s playing a class that doesn’t have to enter your trap range, it feels like a very limited, uphill battle.

The arming time is just so that they behave and are used like traps, not grenades. It’s intended to make them worse, not better. You do give me an idea though. My biggest issue with spike trap is that it’s an AoE knockdown that’ll probably only ever hit one person. This could be solved if what traps trigger on changed, my idea being as soon as a target in the trigger radius stops moving closer to the center, the trap triggers. Whether they run right through the middle or clip the edge they’ll still get caught, but now a well placed spike trap would catch entire teams.

Everyone’s trying to add more things to spirits and all I want is the same thing I’ve wanted since launch. Can my stats impact the effects of my spirits please? Water’s Aqua Surge and Nature’s regen don’t scale with healing power. Stone and Storm’s boons completely ignore my boon duration and instead use whoever’s is triggering it. Sunny’s burning suffers the same issues as their boons. Storm’s Call Lightning ignores my damage stats entirely. Probably some more things I don’t know about that came from the rework too.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Don’t use Rabid for any PvE content, its just horrible. Seriously. Power is a must with your condi damage, so Carrion or Sinister imo, with Sinister being far better.

Really? Because from what I’ve been able to find on Sinister condi builds they don’t deal high power damage. Only 1/10 to 2/10 of their personal damage output is physical. So long as you’re not dealing with structures or immune to crits world bosses, rabid works out well. It’s not like going condi stops our drakes from wrecking Graveling burrows either, especially now that Beastmastery is such a strong trait line.

The real issue is that Remorseless Ranger is just so much more powerful in groups and you will never fight alone. I personally recommend going berserker or if you’re uncomfortable with full offense, Valkyrie works.

nathanjameson.3542:

…are you referring to shiro?

The only thing Shiro has to do with this is as a power source to a catbull. Shiro’s armour isn’t related to this either, it’s the male Sneakthief armour set, you can even get a set of it named Shiro’s armour.

The guy he’s talking about is the NPC that made what amounts to Legendary armour. He was a denizen of the Fissure of Woe, Balthazar’s domain. With the Gods MIA the Fissure of Woe became inaccessible. Honestly, his obsidian armour isn’t anything like the Revenant armour, especially on the professions I played.

kitten that looks a lot better. Organised by species, species organised alphabetically as you’ve done I agree works best. Showing what their skill does by a little icon? Great for players not incredibly well versed with our pets. I’d suggest removing the stat icons though, the information is misleading clutter to expert players and unnecessary for new players who just want the fear dog or the bleed bear. It’s still misleading for players in between who don’t know what every pet is capable of and they are at the point where they would be looking at all the information available to make more informed decisions.

Spiders have high vitality does not tell you that spiders are a ranged attacker with the highest base damage on their auto-attacks. Nor does it tell you that drakes are super tanky and cleave or that dogs are CC machines.

Bran.7425:

Devourers can be used underwater, as for the HoM versions of pets they are the same pet as one of the existing ones just a reskin they share cooldowns.

Also they need to either remove the ability for opponents to pickup the forage items or all opponents to pick up conjured weapons.

Heh. Not unless it was changed in the patch two days ago. Have you got 25 HoM points? You can use the Rainbow Jellyfish’ chilling whirl, switch to a Blue Jellyfish and use its chilling whirl immediately too. The shared cooldown you see is merely a visual bug. If this counts as an exploit, this is an exploit I reported around two years ago and have been exploiting underwater since.

The issues with healing spring are telling that QA didn’t really look at the skill and I’d even wager the programmers were lazy and just copied and pasted the incomplete code of their favourite profession’s elite specialisation. Hopefully we’ll have our issues fixed by the time HoT comes out.

As for why Healing Spring is a trap, I can think of a few reasons. First and most important is that the GW1 skill it references was a trap, I don’t think it ever saw use sadly. Second, our other combo fields are from our pets’ skills, bonfire or our traps. Third, its play patterns were already similar to our traps, just with the opposite targets and we weren’t able to prep it like them.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Wait, Spike Trap has a 4t5s base CD now?

Apparently so. It’s not the first undocumented change either, Rampage as One’s cooldown got cut in half. I guess it’s to prevent spike trap chaining in PvP. Doesn’t make the trap any less powerful.

Expertise training I can’t really justify, as I’m still mad about our loss of malicious training and don’t really like any Wilderness Survival adepts. But the others are somewhat simple.

Two-Handed Training is the trait for the Greatsword and the Greatsword is a suprisingly good beastmaster’s weapon. Cripple, stun, attack of opportunity for your pet, vulnerability and the defensive prowess to survive while your partner does the heavy hitting. Sure, there’s an argument for sword being the better beastmaster weapon, but eh. I guess Beastmastery just got dumped it because they couldn’t fit the weapon trait somewhere else.

Mainhand axe is the ranged weapon of choice for Beastmaster builds that take Nature Magic. With three targets you can quickly rack up might stacks on your cat/bird/drake/dog and start dishing out tons of pain. The chill and off-hand cripple with dagger help immensely. It makes perfect sense for the axe trait to be in Beastmastery. It’d just help if the axe trait helped the axe do what it wants to do.

Shared Anguish and Empathic Bond are the easiest of these traits to explain their placement though. Just because the mechanics involve our pets, does not mean it synergises with investing our hopes and dreams on our pets. A Beastmaster who cripples, chills and launches their own beast probably won’t get very far. They can’t go in nature magic, because as the support line it runs into the same problems as Beastmaster. That leaves Marksmanship and Skirmishing, neither of which are particularly great choices when compared to our defensive specialisation.

As someone who’s played since beta, I wouldn’t expect a refund for my base game. If I remember right, that’d mean Anet would be paying me money to play Heart of Thorns. The refunds are only a feature being provided for the players that bought GW2 so they could play Heart of Thorns, amends being made for unintentional false advertisement. I would have liked to have an extra GW2 account, sure the extra daily rewards would be nice, but by providing a character slot it’s basically the same as the GW1 Factions and Nightfall purchasing scheme.

Reparations have been made and now I’m just trying to figure out what to do with my 10th and 11th character slots I didn’t need.

Here’s a simple game balance lesson, an ability cannot be flexible, powerful and reliable. This is why ranged abilties are weaker than melee for instance.

Ranged AoE attacks are incredibly flexible, even if they’re only 600 range, their ability to be precast only helps that. But that’s not the play pattern people that love traps want. Trappers want to prepare, plan and relish in the moment when their opponent steps just a little bit too far left. Before they had to suffer reliability, since anyone could just roll away if you hit it. So instead, they increased the power and reliability of the desired play pattern, but at the price of flexibility and reliability of the undesired play pattern.

Hell, if spike trap could still be traited to be thrown I’m pretty sure it’d justify the throw trait on its own. That knock down is what’s currently making traps awesome.

I’ll try and resist, but I’ll end up running it in builds with weapon skills so as to obtain maximum synergy.

But in all seriousness, I’ve been theory crafting “combo” Rangers since I first saw this trait. Path of Scars switch to GS for a Remorseless Maul, followed by a Red Moa taunt to guarantee a second. The CC and spike damage will be exquisite.