Guild Wars 2

Jasher.6580:

I was just talking to Nike from DnT. I asked him to check out this thread. He said the problem he has with the build is that it doesn’t have Frost Spirit or Spotter so he said the personal DPS might be good but that wont matter in the grand scheme of things.

He also said the power build used for comparison doesn’t use the best rotation possible and probably wont even be the one used after the patch.

He said it may be a good idea for boss solos but he is unconvinced that it will be good in a group setting.

Thoughts?

Is that not you simply misquoting him? For both of our calculations in this thread, we’ve included the relevant numbers for taking both spotter and frost spirit. Did he not mean that condi builds, especially when they have numbers like in my calculations, do not benefit much from frost spirit and spotter?

He may have just ignored our calcs entirely and been basing his assumptions off of calculations made by other people. DnT supposedly has someone who just does tonnes of DPS calcs on their own forum and even I’d be trusting what they’ve calced over myself.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Then I got to thinking that maybe Druid has a trait that interacts with OS and having too many of them would be super OP.

Highly unlikely Druid would get a trait that interacted with opening strikes directly, at least not without its own traits that affect your opening strike. Druid getting opening strikes traits would hurt the identity of Marksmanship and make not taking the two lines together an incorrect choice.

Druid providing a ton of fury procs though? More flexible and gives the same interaction.

As we know, guilds are able to have their own personal arenas in their guild hall. These arenas are able to have terrain and rules built by the owning guild, to an unknown degree of customisation.

My guild plans on having its own duelling arena but I’m sure there’ll be far more popular far more dedicated guilds who aim to create the perfect arenas for duelling. The reason for this thread is quite simple, I’m not well versed enough at PvP to know how to make a truly great duelling arena. So, fans of duelling, what would you say is core to making a 1v1 fight actually interesting?

Cover? Cliffs? A point to fight over and ensure stupid crap like PU Mesmers have no place? Fight to the down? Fight to the defeat? A giant blockade instead of open space in the middle of the fight?

Well… For the power build? We have some calcs by Tragic Positive in this thread. But while useful, those calculations only apply when comparing our old physical damage builds to our new physical damage builds.

Comparing condition builds to power builds? While attribute bonuses have been boosted by ~30% supposedly, there’s some stuff below I’ll be using I’d like to test the mechanics on come June 23rd and the condi build is likely to gain an overall damage boost from Giver’s weapons. I’ll give it a go anyway, I’m making some guesses of builds though.

Relevant spreadsheet

Assumptions:
Crit% = 100%, both builds should obtain the same precision anyway.
Vulnerability application is noted, but its effects ignored.
Someone better informed than me can consider consumable items.
25 might, especially relevant for the condi build.
Pet dps is not calculated, though condi has a minor advantage in expertise training
Gear gives ascended stats +30%

To begin, the power build. Assuming Tragic Positive is correct, the simple rotation for a power ranger is to open with barrage and rapid fire, swap into a double path of scars and slash kick pounce ’til you can swap back to longbow for another double rapid fire.
Assumed traits
Based on the damage output over 18s worth of attacks against a 2000 armour target, it comes to a total DPS of:
9728 DPS for Power builds
475 in condition damage
9253 in physical damage
This build additionally applies decades of cripple and 20 vulnerability with quick draw rapid shot.

For condition damage, things are a bit harder, but the trap buff looks delicious and depending on how scaling works, spirits could be nuts. Water spirit scales off of the healing power of you or your supported ally, whoever’s is higher, if Sun spirit scales like that… Well… You can see it in my calculation spreadsheet. A decent DPS rotation would be double splitblade, torch stuff, switch to shortbow,
Assumed traits
This comes to a total DPS of, under the same conditions:
10154 DPS for condition builds
8721 of which is condis (only boostable by quickness on shortbow)
1432 of which is physical
Provides a blind that sacs sunny I guess? And a fire field power can provide out of combat.

With Sigil of the Wild and Quickening Zephyr, I wager the physical build could keep up, but kitten . That’s with Sinister gear and still a massive portion of the damage is just through conditions alone. Neither build is in no way fully refined either, so… Yeah, condis are looking like they could be in a pretty good spot. Oh and if you don’t need spotter? Look at that delicious +33% bleed damage trait I didn’t calc about at all.

Personally, the only traits I feel are just plain weak are Light on your feet, most dangerous game and invigorating bond. That’s not even comparing the skirmishing traits to quickdraw, which has defensive, offensive and utility uses. The previous LoYF was boring and probably pretty overpowered as 10% condi duration and damage if not immobilized or trying not to die to torment, but right now the big “play” part of the trait is incredibly underwhelming. Meanwhile MDG lacks the same immediate gratification as the other half health traits, though I love the idea of the trait and I’d have to play with it first to be sure. I’d certainly never take either over end of fight double swoop or double hundred blades from probably Africa.

Invigorating bond’s numbers have just always seemed bad, mostly due to the high cooldown and as a support player I find messing with spirits far more enticing. Hell, it might still see use by resounding timbre rangers thanks to guard allowing them to aim it properly, it’s certainly not out of character for them to do it anyway. It certainly doesn’t help that using it with Beastly Warden is a little awkward due to the weaker trait having the longer cooldown.

Toxsa.2701:

Poison master is not “situational”, it would never be picked.
It’d be even more useless after the poison duration nerf.
Also all our cleanse are stuck in that one spot, that poison master will never ever be picked.

Claiming poison master is a weak grandmaster trait is unbelievably shortsighted. In the current state of the game, it’s not a great PvP decision, simply because of facts external to the trait itself in a vaccuum. Poison Master is superior to the thief’s potent poison, especially in a cleanse meta. I guarantee you, even if it isn’t buffed, we’ll see druid builds utilizing poison master if druid gets condi cleanses that can be used with poison weapon skills. I’m certainly going to try and abuse it.

Quickdraw is just so bullkitten, Beastly Warden lets us use pets other than wolf, Wilderness survival is our only source of condi removal traits (besides evasive purity). So naturally I make a trapper build that almost incorporates all three.

Don’t get into my zone
Axe/Torch and Shortbow (possibly dagger or warhorn)
Birds.
Healing Spring, Spike Trap, Flame Trap, Poison Trap, Entangle
Tons of condi damage, maybe Settler

Step one: Capture home point.
Step two: Drop Circles.
Step three: Invite unsuspecting far point roamer into your point.
Step four: Get backstabbed on circles > Poison Volley > Splitblade > Splitblade

If people aren’t going to your home point, run mid and suicide bomb it.

Terravos.4059:

Healing Spring: This skill is now categorized as a trap skill. (Also renamed to “We Heal as One”.

Uh… You mean Heal as One right?

Rampage as One: This skill is now categorized as a shout skill. (Also renamed to “Strength of the Pack”.)

Did one of the voice actors just have a crippling allergy to saying the word rampage or something? An allergy to Guildwars 1 references maybe? I notice Guardians have had their Healing Breeze renamed to the less awesome “receive the light” as well.

I call this horrifyingly bad build the Turnabout Ranger. You hit 50% health and then you hit your opponent with a pair of stupidly buffed mauls, hopefully downing them. I’d build around most dangerous game, but until that trait gets synergy with the other 50% health traits I’ll pass. The build I guess would be suited to PvP roaming as it’s suited for offensive support so I’ll try and work in stuff that helps with that role.

Traits
Amulet: Valkyrie (super secret tech for better burst with instinctive reaction)
Weapons: Axe/Axe + Greatsword
Runes: Strength
Sigils: Strength/optional + Fire/Air (possibly replace fire or air with impact)
Pets: optional + Red Moa
Heal: Healing Spring
Utilities: Signet of the Hunt / Signet of Stone / optional
Elite: Optional (probably entangle)

Tactics:
Camp axe and harrass with autos building might until you near 50%. As soon as you’re about to hit 50%: Path of Scars > Signet of the Hunt > Furious Grip to Greatsword > Maul > Slash > Slice > Hiltbash from behind > Time the Moa’s furious screech to land now > Maul. If your target goes down and you’re 1v1, unless you’re against another Ranger you’ve won the fight even if your left leg’s been replaced by condi stacks since it’s now a downstate fight. If you’re in a teamfight, you need to be sure you’re in position when you’re at half health to burst a key target. Catch ‘em with a path of scars and they’re screwed.
Use GS and signet of the hunt’s passive for mobility around the map, but avoid opening fights with GS. The burst can be increased maybe, but I’m not really sure how.

Hilarious for a super squishy PvP meta.

Mercy runes are my favourite terrible rune decision and the revival rate with Allies’ Aid will simply be amazing. Normally I run it with Healer’s Celerity in a Beastmaster build, go about picking up my allies without stopping my main damage/pressure. If the trait doesn’t suffer search and rescue’s cooldown it’ll be so much better than healer’s celerity, but if it does the situation where I need and can get my pet to res someone with me won’t be very often.

Similarly, while I appreciate the theme of most dangerous game, it seems like instinctive reaction and enlargement are better suited to the turnabout strategy. They seem like they have synergy with MDG, but MDG doesn’t really do anything until you’ve sat below 50% health for long enough to lose the quickness, by which point the enlargement is nearly over. The turnabout Ranger is cool, but it’s better suited to using Quickdraw and moment of clarity to burst someone down with a remorseless double mauling as soon as you hit 50%.

Spirits I definitely want to play with before I make a judgement, but my first thoughts are simply that a 30 seconds cooldown is way too long.

So Rangers, tell me, do you dislike the name of our Elite skill Rampage as One? Because apparently Kui Calmon-Huang doesn’t. Just after the livestream went down, if you watch the VoD on Twitch, he drops an absurd statement out of nowhere. Heal as One and Rampage as One are becoming shouts, as we know. But out of the blue:

Rampage as One is being renamed to be Strength of the Pack.

Rampage as One:
– Naming theme with fellow shout skill.
– Callback to a Ranger elite skill from Guildwars 1 with a similar effect.
– Flavour of the name links directly to the might granting.
– “Rampage” also calls back to the similar GW1 skill, Never Rampage Alone.
– Changing iconic names kittenes players off. See: League of Legends Finales Funkeln.
– A pack suggests more than two, which is more than would be rampaging. Yet no functionality change was mentioned to address this. RaO still suits the elite being a team-wide buff too.
– “Sssstrength!” does not have the same ring to it as “Rrrrampage!”
(Yes, I say that every time I use the skill)

Strength of the Pack:
– References runes of the pack, which provide all the same boons, except stability, and cast something suspiciously similar to a ranger skill.
– “as one” would possibly suggest a fusion, name change because the druid fuses?
(Not my idea of a fun skill, but it’s heavily demanded)

What are your thoughts on the change? Can someone actually explain to me why a name change was even considered?

The only other one that stops you from being CC’d is the thief’s. Were the thief’s also 60 seconds? I wouldn’t be complaining. But I’m pretty sure thieves have enough evasion/stealth to last the 30 seconds until their trait comes of cooldown easily. Meanwhile we’re, instead of refilling our endurance, CCing an ally they didn’t aim at instead of ourselves.

If they want to make me feel like a selfish, inhumane beastmaster, they could at least make the traits responsible good.

I thought Quickening Zephyr amazing already, then again, I thought icebow 4 was supposed to get nerfed, so what do I know? I guess Anet just want to keep driving it home that we should all be trying to play burst Rangers?

DoogySnowStalker.2069:

Actually, if the tests performed by the person from this post are true, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Adding-precision-to-pets-is-bugged/first#post5133966, none of the pet traits work at the moment. We have to wait for feedback from Anet to confirm whether this is an actual issue or not.

Also in the same thread was me running a similar test. Our pets just appear to have a lower crit chance than you’d expect for a player of that precision.

I ran a few tests on pet traits.
Malicious Training: It doesn’t show on the tooltip, but while in combat pet’s conditions will definitely last longer. If you enter combat with their F2 skill, such as the Alpine wolf howl or the Lynx pounce, then malicious training will not apply to that skill. Spider “venoms” always apply malicious training.
Pet’s Prowess: I have no idea whether it will apply on the pet’s first attack or not due to the variance of crits. But from the quick test I did with a Lynx, no investment in beastmastery, without crits were hitting for 1000~1050, with the trait the crits were around 1200~1250. So I’d say it’s working, if maybe a little weaker than expected. But like I said, just a quick test.
Expertise Training: So it turns out that conditions deal damage based on your condition damage upon application, which makes more sense than when I was told they dealt damage based on your condition damage upon ticking. Like malicious training, if you enter combat by your pet’s F2 skill the trait will not apply. Spider venoms, again, don’t suffer from the enter combat rule.
Concentration Training: Follows the same rules as the other training skills. Your pet must be in combat before using the skill for the bonus to apply. Vigorous Training scales with our pet’s boon duration, the boon duration of our new pet that’s been switched in and is therefore out of combat.
Compassion Training: Again, only in combat. But there’s almost no situation where you’d want to use a healing effect with your pet out of combat. Interestingly affects natural healing, however, it doesn’t affect aqua surge and Spirit of Nature our other healing power ignoring healing effects.

From all this testing I’ve learned a few things. Pet traits only apply when your pet considers itself to be “in-combat”. Using the F1 skill “attack my target”, won’t just tell your pet to attack your current target regardless of anything you do, it will also put your pet into combat mode. This is related to why spider venoms don’t care if they’re used in or out of combat (and thus, precasting our spider’s venoms doesn’t produce a weaker venom). Whether tooltips are correct or not isn’t important, pet tooltips are super buggy, the traits definitely apply.

So, you want to be optimal? Always press F1 then F2 so that your pet traits apply. Sadly this means you probably can’t inflict a malicious wolf fear on a stealthed thief by switching to your emergency down state wolf.

EDIT: Whoops, forgot a couple, I logged back on to test them, results below.
Carnivorous Appetite: Is a terrible trait and I’m not sure why you’d take it, but through testing with a jaguar it appeared to function as intended and scaled with compassion training. I’m not really sure how often an injured out of combat pet uses its F2 skill and crits someone and the play who did that has this trait, but if anyone ever finds out the answer to that question I’d love to know the answer.
Speed Training: First I tried testing by counting seconds. Then I got smart and tested it using the Drake’s auto-attack timer. Drakes have a 30 second cooldown on their tail swipe and auto-attack a little slower than once per second. Their Chomp skill they save for when they reach about half health and their AI uses Tail Swipe as soon as it goes off cooldown. By counting their auto attacks between tail swipes on a golem I can test for speed training, I’d expect speed training to result in two less attacks between tail swipes. Speed training got 19, normal got 21, so yeah the trait probably works as intended. Whether it’s only applied in combat isn’t really testable, it doesn’t affect the cooldown of command skills and pets only use their other skills while in combat.
Commanding Voice: Even if the tooltip doesn’t show it, the cooldown of the pet skill was definitely reduced correctly and its correct cooldown timer was displayed after the skill was used. Unlike other traits, this one doesn’t care whether your pet is in combat or not.

Yeah, Diovid is right. A major balance patch is about to hit that is giving the Ranger a lot of tools that seem useful in GvG situations.

What I do know about the Ranger is that in PvP they are rarely used in tournaments because a lot of what they can do other professions can do just as well. Many of the powerful builds and play patterns unique to Ranger are nowhere near as strong or in some cases possible as they used to be. Spirit Ranger lost a lot of power and no longer has permanent (non-elite) spirit uptime. Shortbow got bumped down from 1200 to 900 range and no longer has the safety it used to. Beastmastery lacks hilarious catssassination potential it used to have and is just a really meh build now. I’m not even sure what happened to trapper builds, but they’re not used anymore. So what’s left is a king of soft CC with a lack of AoE damage and a tendency to lose their profession mechanic to stray fire.

In GvG what they do best is picking off key targets with Longbow Rapid Fire, soft CC and team support via spotter and spirits. Thieves are far more reliable at picking off key targets, Warriors provide better offensive team support, Guardians provide better defensive team support and both soldiers can output better CC with better AoE damage. Rangers aren’t awful in GvG, they just don’t provide anything unique other than reliably fighting the enemy backline from your backline.

Khenzo.2465:

Ok, so you don’t understand how it will work, and if you still don’t get it, or try to argue otherwise, then I may aswell just stop responding to you.

The skill will be LABELED as, for example a Mantra, it will work the same mechanically in the game as other ones for consitancy/gameplay reasons.

But the skills theme will having nothing to do with magic, I will refer back to the drone and ammo idea, you prep the drone (mantra) then then has charges (ammo)

You see you are placing too much value on the name of the skill family it belongs to.

But lore wise the skill is absolutely nothing like a magical mantra.

Take WoW for example, the Undead Priests in that game use magic that is actually pretty harmful to them, but guess what, that is just for game play reasons, in the lore they use their own Undead version.

I don’t get why this is so hard to understand for so many people.

Or they could just rename the skill type to Drone and not mantra, so this absolutely silly arguement doesn’t happen.

Alternatively, let’s look at a different game. Hell, I’ll pick one you might have heard of. Original Starcraft had Dark Templars included in its expansion that can fuse to form a Dark Archon, said Dark Archon could mind control units, if it stole a Terran or Zerg worker unit you could make an entire second army. Turns out that’s not a thing the Protoss should be doing as it’s actually the entire schtick of the Zerg. Come Starcraft 2, Blizzard fixed their mistake and moved mind control onto a Zerg caster unit. In this example, a Protoss themed ability didn’t fit because of already established lore and unforeseen possibilities with the ability.

If you want to know about failing to show mechanics and flavour correctly, go ask Mark Rosewater all about hornets, planar chaos and, just for fun, bananas.

Arenanet probably won’t make the mistake of giving a skill type with a very distinct and flavourful name to an elite specialisation whose flavour doesn’t suit using the same name.

RayBed.8419:

I have no citation, just pure speculation, I feel like they’re giving a class something it never had access to … and considering they said there is going to be a profession with a full array of signets, I feel like engi would be the only fit.

Do you have a source for that or not? Because such a thing was not mentioned in the specialisation blog posts.

True, but whether it was because of the toolbelt, keeping the engineer active and complex or some other reason, Anet seems to have avoided giving the engineer signets as a design choice. I’ve known Engis are the only profession without signets for years and I’ve not caught wind that Engi would be the one getting a set of signets at all.

So, what’s your citation on a class getting all signets?

ZeftheWicked.3076:

It better have torment. And i mean serious torment, not some lol 2-3 stacks. I still can’t get over how the game’s #1 movement hampering profession, the cripple station, and immbilize maniac lacks any torment…

Oh and some boonstripping. And some area denial, we lack there too, and druid seems to fit that bill.

Eww, I think you’re the only person asking for torment. The condi plays badly with immobilization and feels like a bleed stack trying to spook you. I’d appreciate it if they played up poison more, since it now stacks intensity, and the druid excelled at fighting wars of attrition and teamfighting. If druid is all spiritual maybe, but if it’s using balms, salves and venoms from the maguuma torment is not a fit, depending on how you interpret the druids it could go either way.

Boon stripping we just need more of in general, or at least more things to punish/add more play to them. It makes boons incredibly safe when (once specialisations hit) only half the professions in the game can even do something about it.

As for “you thought you could go that way, but now there’s a tree!” practically guaranteed.

My solution would be to make this change to confusion PvE only or better yet don’t just half kitten it, make it the torment for attacking, that way skill use speed is irrelevant. I don’t like torment as a condition, yet I think the play with confusion is great (even if triggering on dodge and heal feels weird), torment just feels like a bleed stack with false choices, confusion’ll just be a bleed stack that kills on cleanse or kills if left, no extra effort on the user required. The confusion change just feels bad

As for retaliation, returning a percentage of damage dealt would serve the same purpose of punishing burst damage, whether it be in the form of big hits or lots of small ones. The trick is, calculate it based on damage dealt, before damage reduction, this would make it perfect for all the nomad’s Guardians out there and my beloved Mad King entangle wouldn’t instakill me because a guardian screwed up an Ele’s might blasts.

Yep, Anet just has a tendency to give out the real news in all the wrong places. I suppose this time it’s at least on their website, even if it’s titled wrong.

I prefer the PvP method. It just doesn’t make sense to me why we have 5 gear slots dedicated purely to stats. You run zerker armour with knight trinkets? If your trinket stats were all in your amulet, it wouldn’t really matter.

The only people who even have reason to care are the ones trying to mix Zerker and Assassin to reach exactly 100% crit chance with base+gear+fury+spotter+banner+etc. For Zerker/Assassin builders, that’s meaningless when it comes to trinkets since they’re stuck with a below perfect stat set like everyone else (Assassin’s ascended amulets don’t exist).

At the end of the day, it’s just one of those weird GW2 design decisions that go against the reasons I love Guildwars.

Legendary weapons are about the adventure, some adventures have disappointing endings. It’s bound to happen, but every legend has its own story to tell. The legendary weapons were supposed to be a final reward for those players who dedicated their time to experiencing everything the game has to offer. If I got lucky enough to find the precursor and put in the effort for Quip, the Minstrel or even an ugly Legendary like Twilight, I’d be happy with the adventure that sent me and my guildies on gathering slowly the parts required to make such a horrendous goal a reality.

There are plenty of awesome looking weapon skins you could be using, if you just want to buy into internet awesome you don’t deserve a legendary.

Umm… You’re valuing oakheart salve over bark skin, poison master or empathic bond?

Predator’s instinct seems overkill to me. The sword auto-chain inflicts more than perma cripple and even when in your other weaponset, you have winter’s bite, crippling talon, muddy terrain and entangle preventing movement. With a canine or arachnid companion backing it up, it would make more sense to use something else, like spotter for teamfights or an extra 2 in nature magic and survival of the fittest.

Without oakheart salve, your only ways to apply regen are the minors in nature magic one affecting you, the other your pet, so it would be better to replace Nature’s Bounty. Since you’re in a carrion amulet, an extra 124 power from strength of spirit seems pretty good as an alternative. Vigorous spirits is another option if you take Sun Spirit in place of your signet of renewal, it’ll keep up with the burning theme and play decently if you take empathic bond or survival of the fittest.

As a condi build there’s no benefit to vulnerability, so you should replace that sigil of frailty with another sigil of doom, sigil of geomancy or a sigil of bursting.

A request for science!?

Your test was performed with two drastically different pets, it may be worth testing each individual pet, but most important is to ensure your results are repeatable. For this, I used a jungle stalker attacking the indestructible golem with all precision boosting traits and a second time without any precision boosting traits. For these two trials I found that:

Cat, base:
Crit: 67
Nor: 111
rate: 37.6%
expected: 58.0% 2061 precision

Cat, 30 empathy + spotter:
Crit: 131
Nor: 70
rate: 65.1%
expected: 79.5% 2511 precision

For the cat boosted by 30 empathy, you’ll just have to trust my judgement, but the attacks definitely seemed to have more power behind them, so our pets or at least our cats do seem to scale with power.

As you can see, in both of these trials, neither result seems to match what we would expect. However, the results of our two experiments do appear to agree with one another, if we assume there is a +-5% range of uncertainty. So I stipulate that perhaps the conclusion to draw is not that our pets do not scale with traits, but that their actual crit rate is below what we would expect for a player with the same precision. In all three trials, the measured crit rate was 15~20% less than what would be expected, the range of which is similar to the difference between our two experimental results.

Or the indestructible golem is bad for testing crit rates, I’ll definitely be looking into this topic more later.

I’m not an experienced engineer player so I can’t say much more on the matter, I only recently obtained the Razer Naga mandatory for playing the profession after all.

Elementalist on the other hand lacks weapon swapping so as to enforce a meaningful weakness other than “hi I have low base HP and light armour”. The elementalist swaps between four roles instead of swapping between 2 weapons. If you pick staff, you’re forced into a long range AoE combat style that suffers against mobile targets. If you pick Daggers, you are locked into close quarters fighting. This weakness is overcame by correct attunement management, but it is the Elementalist’s primary weakness.

Revenant lacking the ability to swap weapons allows focus to be placed on their legend skills, it also means they can make those abilities more powerful to compensate, especially when the lack of weapon swapping gives Revenants the lowest number of skills of every profession. It’s both good for advertisement of the profession (as splashier skills appeal more than lots of meh skills) and the learning curve of the profession. The lack of skills to learn means players have to spend their time learning the correct application of their powerful skills, rather than their location on the skill bar. In a way, it’s like Dive Kick, it seems simple but has its depth focused in the areas the players most invested in the game care about.

The leeching Thrasher’s ranged attack? I’m under the impression you can dodge it by moving into melee with them. Get close when they try to hit with tendrils and keep your distance when they try to leech. I can’t say it’s my favourite attack animation though, I usually see my health mysteriously dropping and panic roll before I realise what’s causing it.

UnitedChaos.8364:

When a target is stealthed and a ranger is using a bow, they’re basically rendered useless until the stealth wears off;

True, all we have is “Sic ’em!” to prevent opponents from stealthing and Entangle to catch them during their escape attempt. Blindly throwing projectiles is unlikely to work, our pet will start playing with yarn and they’ll escape the sword chain by standing still. Stealth is a broken mechanic to begin with, I don’t think the problem lies entirely on the Ranger lacking the correct tools.

or when a ranger is running forward and being chased, you cannot attack the chasing target without either: stopping to engage the target head on or standing still and spamming skills as they run around you. Because you can only attack 180 degrees in front of you while moving which means you can’t attack the 180 degrees behind you.

Yes, but we also have other tools to help with chasers. Turning to attack is the cost we pay to land a point blank shot; ruin their dreams of becoming an adventurer and quickshot away or any of our other single target projectile cripples. If your objective is to fight and kite, we have plenty of methods of slowing the opponent which are far more useful to us than more mobility simply because a slowed opponent we can easily be forced to date Fluffy, Fuzz Meltface, Juvenile Raven or whatever you like to call your pet. If you want to escape without breaking pace, there’s nothing stopping you from dropping a Muddy Terrain or Entangle on would be chasers.

Now, if the ranger was using a greatsword (their only fully target-less weapon), they’d whip that out and start slashing air; but greatsword isn’t their ‘main’ weapon, it’s their bow.

Don’t lie, we start with an axe, obviously that must be our “main” weapon. Or based on skill requirement, the sword is our “main” weapon. This is Guildwars 2, a bow might be your main weapon, but the profession itself shouldn’t have a main weapon.

Engineers, using nade kit, don’t need a nade kit and randomly blast the area spamming 1-5 without thought and inflict tons more conditions than any ranger build could.

Yet we can hit double the bleed cap using only 3 low cooldown, quick animation skills. Claiming a well thought out and played build cannot compete with a player using only one utility skill is ridiculous.

Do rangers lack target-less skills? Is the shear inability to attack foes behind you is awful? Should bows attack parallel to the ground without a target so they don’t require a target (although arrows would look weird moving with the contour of the ground)? Do your pet suffer the wrath of target-less free-casters while running around chasing them?
I think so.

Better manual aim for projectiles is certainly something I’d like to have. But a Ranger Longbow shouldn’t just be an Ele or Guardian staff. I feel the ranger would certainly benefit from having skillshots, rather than leaving so much to AIs.

What do you think?
Do you share my frustration?

If every profession had no weaknesses and solved their problems in the same way, the choice of profession would be meaningless or just an aesthetic choice. If every build didn’t have weaknesses or strengths, then making a build would be meaningless. With Drakes, traps, muddy terrain, entangle, axe/dagger & sword/warhorn, dogs and spiders and probably several other tools I’m not mentioning, I don’t really get your problem.

NikeEU.7690:

Sagat.3285:

Wut?? No to that and no the rest, this is strictly PvE issue don’t affect PvP and WvW when you simply need tough non HP sponges mobs, the issue with faster condition application is that condition can be created easier than burst either through fields,sigils or runes(more of them), etc.

In PvE if your condi build can’t sustain 20+ bleed stacks solo it’s a failure. The problem with that is it takes time to get to 20+. By then the boss is dead, or close to it. So even with high toughness bosses condition ramp up time is a big problem.

It’s fine to have a motor that is slow to accelerate so long as their is a high top end. the problem is the top end of condi builds are low too. So its slow and weak. Tough enemies wont change that.

Nike, I think you’re missing your own logic there. If two enemies have the same physical effective health (Armour*Health) and a condition build has the same DPS as a physical build against a “standard” target, if their armour stats are different the higher armour enemy will die faster to the condition damage build. As such, not only would high toughness enemies have higher effective health and make fights last longer, their high toughness would make the top end of condition damage builds deal more effective damage.

If every enemy had infinite toughness, our only possible source of damage would be conditions. Likewise, if every enemy had effectively 0 toughness everything would die from a single blow. If the perfect balance is met and every enemy has exactly the right amount of toughness to put condis on par with Zerker gear, we have meaningless diversity where your choice doesn’t matter.

To truly break from the “Zerker” meta, we need a wider variety of goals. Even if it just starts with one other goal, building tanky to hold off a group of enemies, being conditiony to take down husks or dedicating yourself to healing an NPC. If one player putting all of their stats into breaking break bars turns out to be the fastest way to do things in HoT, that’s the meta we’ll have.

Valdyrsbane, screenshots of all the Wilderness Survival traits as seen on the live stream can be found here

Courtesy of Reddit.

It’s not quite that simple. For starters, you have to consider how many builds are possible with all of the professions in the game. How many choices do you have to make with any other profession compared with a Ranger? They all have the same number of utilities, same number of elites, same number of heal skills, same number of traits and trait choices, but we have more possible weaponsets than everyone except Warrior. But on top of all that, we have our animal companion choice, which means we have more pitfalls and false choices than other professions. It shows especially so through all of our bad skills.

Here’s an example build that falls for as many false choices as I can think up

They’re not even blatantly wrong ones either. But this build features such incredible tactics as:
Double Longbow for free weapon swapping with Skirmishing bonuses
Punishing opponents who get close with weapons swap sigils
Condi Longbow
Taking a healing power amulet, without realising these healing sources don’t scale.
Double Bear that is not brown
Panda Bow
Protect me, because it has a lower cooldown than the signet and “the same effect”.
Stone Spirit, for extra survivability.
Rune of the Grove for sick protection uptime.
Moment of Clarity + Rapid Fire for a hundred blades that opens with the big hit.
Sharpened edges with as much precision from trait stats as possible

As you can see, these individual choices are not necessarily bad for a build, but they compound into this awful monstrosity you see before you. We’re not the worst profession, just the profession with the most wrong choices.

Sure I’ll bite.

Fairy Tail – Invoke Magic
A song that just randomly showed up in my recommended on youtube for no apparent reason.

Ape Escape 2 – Battle with Specter
I used to play Guildwars 2 with a custom soundtrack on a 10 or so year old machine. That machine broke, but back then this was my choice for boss music.

Magic 2014 – Kamigawa
I simply love games evolving soundtracks. It’s a very difficult experience to replicate when playing another game though.

Aylpse.6280:

There is only one song to listen too when playing Ranger…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b82WavFKbOY

Nice. My brother and I recently did a vanquishing spree of Cantha in GW1, we listened to the Metal Gear Rising boss music (complete with singing along) so much I ended up buying the game. My personal favourites though:

I’m My Own Master Now – Ironic for a Beastmaster Ranger
The Kazoos of Time – : D

Ben Delat.8415:

What do I need to look out for with regards to pet, anything I should know about managing them?

I’m really rubbish at managing my pet, but there is one trick I know. Put whichever pet you want to open up combat with in the top slot. Since you can stow your pet while out of combat, you can prevent it from getting clipped by random attacks and putting you in combat. If you allow your pet to be unstowed automatically by entering combat, you can get a “free” activation of any pet swap trigger traits, Mighty Swap, Vigorous Training, Zephyr’s Speed and Poison Master. Your pet will stand there kitten ily for a second unless you give them a command, even just F1 “attack my target” will cut out that standing around time.

Tim.6450:

Aemnas.8903:

There does seem to be a need of some comedic relief…

It’s time to bring him back.

Oh don’t worry, I believe one of the waypoints in Verdent Brink was found to be called “Faren’s Flyer Waypoint” or something to that effect.

Heimskarl’s definitely hit the nail on the head. For leveling you should use the weapons you most enjoy using or are most comfortable with. I often find myself trying to force myself into using a specific weapon so I can work towards an incomplete weaponmaster achievement, but that usually leads to a very uncomfortable leveling experience that makes me not enjoy the profession I’m playing. I don’t recommend trying to forcibly multitask the weaponmaster achievements with leveling, as it can easily ruin your perception of the profession.

I most certainly recommend experimenting with all the weapons, find the ones you like and build around them. As a ranger our weapons don’t have a high learning curve, they’re not as simple as hit buttons and win, but our learning curve primarily comes from micromanaging our pet. Our sword however is another story, every skill on that thing has its own tricks and pitfalls with no other weapon like it across all professions.

Again, enjoy experimenting with the profession and find out what about playing makes you happy, then expand from there.

A human male holds the greatsword in a really boring fashion that’s impractical for fighting. Behind their back, pointed upward.

Human females hold their greatswords in a much more awesome way, dragging it behind them. Just as impractical as the male stance, but looks so much cooler.

Asurans look awesome, they hold their greatsword over their shoulder. It seems they never intended to make the Greatsword a practical looking weapon. Asurans are also smaller than their pet, so unlike a Norn or Charr, an Asura is constantly reminded of their pet.

For an actual mechanical reason, there’s one ranger build that uses racial skills. Well, two but I think pain inverter got nerfed. That’s the technobabble Moment of Clarity build, which requires you play an Asura. All three Ranger Elites are really good, or at least Entangle and Rampage as One are really good, while Spirit of Nature has been nerfed to the point where it’s just decent. No need to pick a Racial elite over a ranger one.

Well, if you want to level your Revenant and the problem is you don’t have something you can spend those resources on. It is possible to convert them into gold though, have a spare character slot and use the writs and tomes to instant level 10 a character, that way you can farm keys without spending actual resources or time grinding those same 9 levels.

It’s not like Tyria is run by a single governing body, it is 6 distinct cultures (each race and Lion’s Arch) which each have their own problems, needs and politics. A portion of the people in Tyria are members of the 3 orders and the orders working together is the backbone of the Pact. The orders and the cultures of Tyria are seperate entities.

Likewise, the Consortium is a business group who have repeatedly shown they are not concerned about absurd concepts like “ethics” and “customer safety”. They are appear to be the ones rebuilding Lion’s Arch, their resources never had any chance of going to the Pact. If they put the Mystic Forge, Guild Bank, Black Lion Trading Post and crafting tables all in one area, then they’ll have actually done something right for a change.

You don’t have to use a staff. If you want maximum DPS, you’re not gonna find it on a low counterplay obscenely long range weapon with decent burst. Animal Companions are only bad at surviving if you don’t give them commands at all, the only issue is that they have a large area around you that they consider as returned to you. Ranger has more to offer than just being a dude with a cat/bird/bear and a bow y’know.

I personally look forward to having a real support weapon for the profession that never fights alone. Hopefully I’ll finally be able to actively support the Siege Carriers in Silverwastes like my Staff Zerker Ele can or at least my healing in full Cleric’s gear will trump a Zerker Ele with 4 points in water.

MarkoNS.3261:

yes but the way you put it in order for us to do it optimally we are forced to change gear.

Oh no! Build diversity! Sadly, I doubt it’ll happen like you say.

One thing pushing us away from Zerker is guaranteed crits, a Reaper with Decimate Defences and Death Perception for instance in a dungeon has (currently) 100% bonus crit chance when attacking foes with 25 vuln while in death shroud, more than enough to crit even Lupicus 100% of the time without anything else. Similarly, Rangers have spotter, absurd amounts of fury and Remorseless letting them get tons of crits without any precision investment.

Unfortunately, there’s no Power/Ferocity/[healing, condi damage, condi duration or boon duration] stat set that allows you to take advantage of this. Only Valkyrie and Cavalier increasing your personal defence (and taking cavalier comes at the cost of stopping power). If we need more personal defence then I suppose that’s the way things’ll go. But at the end of the day, we only have so many stat sets to work with and builds that don’t want maximum physical DPS often have to make do with imperfect choices. (While max physical damage builds can roll with Assassin/Zerker/Valkyrie mixes)

If you ever plan to activate Signet of the Wild with a Box of Chocolates and Party Box, you will regret not choosing to be HUGE!

Making it a Signet would mean the active would need to be significantly nerfed and there’s no chance any passive choice could even come close to the coolness of Healing Spring. Compared with other healing signets, ours should be attached to Heal as One.
1: An okay effect, very rangery, what we should have from our signet heal should we ever get it. Especially if the heal works both ways (our hits heal pet, their hits heal us ala RaO), that would definitely feel like a Ranger skill. Perhaps called the Signet of Symbiosis or something?
2: Very dull on its own and from my experience ineffective, you animal companion is either nigh unkillable or dying incredibly quickly. It could probably get added to healing spring with very few downsides.
3: The Ranger doesn’t do condi convertion, we can make our pet take conditions, but that’s all.
4: Boon duration doesn’t make much sense when the active is one of our best sources of regeneration. Condition reduction is okay as the healing skill you take to fight conditions.
5: We’re not Mesmers or engis, our unreliability comes from our pet and how close they consider to be returned to you today.

If the skill was made a trap, it would work with a full blown condi build taking poison master as the utilities are eaten by traps and the condi removal traits are eaten by Poison Master. The skill was also a trap back in GW1 and was a really cool skill even if it wasn’t terribly useful. I still believe it should go back to its roots.

I suppose the biggest culprit of being awful is water spirit. As a spirit you want to cast it out of the way pre-combat. During this time, if you’ve placed the spirit well, you and your allies get a rather meh heal every 10-11s, or a bit less than 80(+ 0.09) health per second (regen is 130(+ 0.125), though importantly the two effects stack). If things go a bit sour you at least have access to 2-3 Aqua Surges, a worse Heal as One that makes your spirit splash the area around them for a heal that you can’t improve with healing power. Once your 60s are up, your healing skill is now a weaker, longer cooldown heal as one with over double the cast time that gives a little extra healing to your allies, because no one is going to watch you cast your healing skill for 2 seconds and not have at least went to target the spirit. If an opponent got the drop on you, then you skip right to the point where your 60s are up and feel really bad about your life choices.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Yeah, options are good! Before there was no real reason to use HaO, HS/TU were just superior. Now, each has a place! Except that dammed Water Spirit… Let’s see what they do with that…

Yeah, when I ran a silly PvE Spirits unbound build, Water was my favourite to have around just because it made gentle water sounds constantly. Any moment of calm and I hear the droplets falling gently down on the terrain. The only not outright stupid build (spirits is a legit build, I’d still take healing spring) I’d even considered running it in will have better options now, Nature’s Voice/Resounding Timbre, it was a case of the perma regen making healing spring a bit undesirable since we only get one blast, but HaO has the case of being a shout, assuming guard isn’t enough for perma regen alone.

I’ll be sad if it doesn’t become a legitimate heal skill.

Noha.3749:

Rangers can bulk up with dire build, got plenty of condi and power damage depending on build. Whats left? -> Support <-

People already mentioned support. Just to clarify i dont think Spirits will be able to cover the support role even if they are buffed by quite a bit, not in any gamemode..

Thats just my 2cents.

Even if it’s just a small numbers buff, I think Sunny at least will be in a better spot, AoE blind is powerful and burning stacking intensity will make its passive useful, Storm will be having a bad time since providing teammates with mobility and wanting to PBAoE people’s faces doesn’t mix well with lacking the ability to move. Stone is pretty worthless mechanically though mistimed active defence is worthless and even if Quicksand is useful it’s completely overshadowed by Muddy Terrain.

I’d like to be able go into a lane in the Silverwastes and actively protect a Seige Carrier like Necromancers (fear away enemies and renewing blast the carrier), Elementalists (Staff F4, 4, 2, F1, 2, 5, F2, 2, 4, 5, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1….), Thieves (I put Shadow refuge on my bar) and Engineers (blasting heals that blast healing) can.

Harnel.6810:

Ragnar.1546:

Try a necro and get back.

Ranger: Spirits/Boons/Spotter

Don’t get me wrong it’s nothing compared to my Phalanx/Banner Regen War but it’s ahead my Necro for sure.

The problem here being that “At least you’re not [class]” isn’t really an argument. if your support is terrible, being slightly less terrible than someone else doesn’t stop you from sucking at it.

It’s more like they’re saying, “sure, your supposed strength is bad, but at least it’s better than the profession designed with it as their intended weakness!”. Arenanet have said before that the Ranger is supposed to be among the top when it comes to party support, yet all we really provide is a DPS boost for our existence in the local viscinity. Unless the numbers are broken you can’t make “everyone does X% more damage” feel good in a visceral game. Providing allies with our opening strike so we can coordinate a spike would be a perfectly good Ranger style support option.

I certainly agree that we’re lacking when it comes to support, or at least we aren’t rewarded much if at all for investing in a supportive build. For Healing power we only benefit allies through Regen, Water Spirit’s passive (which means no Healing Spring) and invigorating bond, since we’re applying regen we’re stopping our allies from getting their normal regen (which admittedly isn’t a lot, regen’s base healing is pitiful). As for boon duration… We can make Call of the Wild last a lot longer and uh… Apply a half decent uptime of protection with stone spirit? Perma swiftness and regen are already a thing with Guard+Shout master+Nature’s Voice and that’s without any extra boon duration than what nature magic naturally provides.

Things I didn’t mention? They don’t scale with boon duration or healing power. This is certainly true for vigorous training, Spirit of Nature, Healer’s Celerity, even our water spirit’s aqua surge!

When I stop playing Cleric’s Ranger and enjoy my Zerker Ele for a bit, it feels bad that my 4 points in water magic and Staff feel better supporting my team than my entire build on my Ranger. The Ranger is great at invisibly supporting their team through spotter, frost spirit, opening strikes and even Nature’s Voice, but while the Ranger has made great strides in supporting allies since release, said support skills don’t feel anywhere near as good as being a Guardian that dumped Wall of Reflection or Save Yourselves on their skill bar.

I’m not expecting it to be a copy and paste of the Ele water staff with Earth Staff 4 worked in… But that’s the kind of skills the ranger needs.

For open world PvE, take the time to smell the roses and be sure to complete your personal story and living world season 2. Open World content has 3 different level 80 areas now, Maguuma Wastes, Orr and Southsun and the most optimal method of making money from those isn’t all that large a jump from just mucking about with some old friends in guilds. Even with all the stuff I’m saying below, don’t forget to enjoy the game and the people you’re with.

For other game modes, it’s certainly possible to inform more than just saying sappy stuff. Dungeons and Fractals are in a bit of a weird spot, host your own party “all welcome” or “non-meta” party and get the dungeon master title if you haven’t yet or simply redo the popular dungeons in a non-meta group. If you’re confident you’ve got a firm grasp on the game mechanics, then you should try your hand at the meta groups. Look up some info on it first, youtube has plenty of good videos, it’s not quite as simple as maximise your damage and stand together on corners.

The general Ranger build for speedrun dungeons is full Berserker gear, with Sword/Warhorn and Longbow on weapons swap. If you aren’t comfortable with sword, you can get away with greatsword and offhand axe is useful for the reflect. 6/5/0/3/0 traits give you great damage, but be absolutely certain to take spotter, it’s one of the main reasons we’re able to get into speedrun dungeons. Make sure to take Frost Spirit as well and take Vigorous Spirits in nature magic, as that’s our other unique partywide damage buff. Scholar runes and %damage boost sigils are prefered, but for a budget build a ranger can use Ranger Runes.

I don’t like WvW and I’m no good at PvP, so I can’t say too much on that that’d be useful to you.

My Ranger’s thing is that he’s missing his left eye, so I have to design my outfits around a very, very small number of headgear (and feel really bad about underwater combat). That little detail is mostly because I just love the look of the Stalker Mask.

I’ve no idea what other armour pieces I should use though. Currently, I use Nightshade gloves and boots (Sylvari tier 2) and Firstborn shoulders (Sylvari tier 3, Caithe’s scarf). Emblazoned Leggings because they don’t cost me transmutation charges or clash and… The coat is just my favourite one that doesn’t hide gauntlets Shiro’s coat or I guess, Sneakthief armour. I might just ditch the Nightshade gloves, which look really bad when they’re hidden under sleeves and build my look around the Stalker Mask and Coat.

Colours I’ll be using will be White Gold, Midnight Yew and Oxblood or similar, Oxblood and White Gold are just my favourite complimentary dyes to any look and I adore dark greens.

My staff choice? I can think of few better than the Gnarled Walking Staff. If I get the spare money (or tickets) the Mordrem Staff will probably be my choice, the three heads at the top open up when drawn and even if I go for another staff it fits my Sylvari Mesmer perfectly.

The Ranger Shouts are intended as commands to the pet. If shouts are too good then every ranger has to run them to make the profession mechanic work, if the baseline commands are too good then the entire skillset is worthless. The skillset is certainly getting buffed though, Heal as One and Rampage as One are being included in the mix (both of which are good skills, the problem is so are the other Ranger elites and heals).

Search and Rescue used to be a good skill, but was nerfed horrendously over several patches. The pet’s leash becoming smaller, it no longer reviving defeated allies (meaning it also will never revive an NPC) and the cooldown being absurd. I feel like mechanically the skill is perfect, a lick wounds we can use on our allies is perfect. It’s simply been Smiter’s Boon’d. I definitely don’t want to see this skill’s mechanics changed (especially after all the bugs that had to be fixed), just given numbers to make it viable again.

Sic ‘em is a staple skill for beastmaster rangers. Jaguar+Signet of the Wild+Sic ’em+Rampage as One, throw down in the fight with your own sword and some sucker’s gonna die. Beastmaster rangers got thrashed I think half a year back now. The damage of our pets got stomped on and the Catsassin just hasn’t been the same since. With Agility training moving to beastmastery, exchanging the speed boost for a knockdown attack seems pretty amazing.

Guard is used by Nature’s Voice rangers for perma regen and perma swiftness. No other shouts involved at all. That build’s issue is that the Ranger has very little way to actively heal allies and our regeneration effects are all through the boon, unlike Elementalist, Necromancer, Guardian and Thief. Warriors drop Banner of Discipline with the trait making banners regenerate, obtaining perma regen for far less work. At baseline it helps with pet positioning and the protection and stealth would be even better, if pets weren’t already frustratingly difficult to take down and were a bit more threatening. In conquest it’s supposed to have your pet stand guard over a location while you help elsewhere, but the leash range nerf saw to that interaction. Point is it’s the shortest cooldown shout in the game and suffers because shouts don’t have anything as powerful as survival of the fittest. Your change is a bad idea.

That leaves Protect Me, which was a staple PvP ranger skill. But since our signets now effect us as well as our pet, there’s no reason to take it over Signet of Stone except for the lower cooldown and the fact that it’s a shout and I doubt anyone needs 12 seconds of invulnerability. Just making the pet teleport to me would be better than giving it a death sentence.

Making our shouts our CC skills, comes with a lot of inherent problems. It’s like trying to get a quick interrupt with your Flesh Golem, y’know?

Walhalla.5473:

IndigoSundown.5419:

UKADAM.3910:

You know every reaper in the game are gonna have twilight lol

I know of at least one that won’t…

Make this two.

Twilight isn’t a Sword fitting for a Reaper. There are other Skins tht fit the Spec much better like the Sunless Greatsword, Naegling, Greatsword of the Dragonsdeep, the Ascalonian Greatsword or Dhuumseal

I’d say a single bladed Greatsword isn’t the most fitting for Dark Spiral (drills look cooler if they’re symmetrical). But they’re easily my preferred choice for Greatsword skins.
For anyone with 23 HoM points can get a personal favourite of mine, the Fellblade.
Someone playing a Chill reaper and crafting a look for it may want the Corrupted Avenger. (whoops, Shiki beat me to it)
The Nightmare Court look wouldn’t be complete without the Nightmare Greatsword.

There’s plenty of really cool looking greatswords and amazing character designs you could have. If I’m gonna equip a legendary, it’ll at least be a more serious and fitting one like kudzu, Frostfang or Quip, one I can build a reasonable character around.