Guild Wars 2

Seriously? I think you’re all going about this too safely. How could each profession become specialised? How could each profession learn from their experience in the jungle? Let’s take the Elementalist as an example.

Elementalist → Pyromancer

THE most popular element among Elementalists, their new profession mechanic replaces their ability to change attunements for some other method of survival and they become locked into fire attunement, losing 3 of their trait lines for new ones. This, to me, is the most obvious answer for how the Elementalist could be specialised… But unlike Chronomancer (which could be assets from GW Utopia being worked into HoT) and Druid, pyromancy isn’t the most available specialisation to Elementalists.

Elementalist → Zephyr

The Elementalist learns from the crashed Zephyrites or in surviving the verticality of the jungle becomes an air element specialist. Losing their current attunements for Sun, Wind and Lightning. Sun can reuse fire skills, lightning air and wind can be a whole new skill bar.

Everyone is being far too conservative with their guesses.

Descendant of a great hero who fought to protect Cantha from threats across Tyria. The great great granddaughter of Hothit Yayoi. Yayoi, the surname of my favourite character from Blazblue, means extensive life or March. Her given name means apricot.

She’s the long living apricot, Anzu Yayoi!

When Guildwars 2 was still in betas I hated the Charr, they’re cats, they destroyed Ascalon’s landscape and I can only imagine the pollution output of the Black Citadel. I wasn’t sure what profession to start with, but didn’t want to fall in love with any character who I was going to lose anyway, so in the betas I played a premade mid-level thief and Monocle Cowgear a Charr engineer. Charr and Norn… They just feel so sluggish and make travelling a pain, I’ve never been able to make a character I’ve liked playing for either.

That would be the end of the story, had there not been a leveling update a while back. I’ve been running out of professions to get to 80 and excuses not to have a Charr, so I came back to Engineer, deleted Beepbopboopzibbityba and Dr McEvilBriton my previous engineer attempts and brought back my first ever idea for a Guildwars 2 character.

Monocle Cowgear managed to make a resurgance. There’s just something about a Charr Engineer that feels right to play (still travels around the map like kitten , but the character is in the right place). Might be the hair.

I was messing around with Paenula’s rifles underwater and saw that there’s an up arrow on all utility slots. I messed with bundles affecting the level gating further and found that I can use any bundle anywhere to equip my other utilities. Engi kits bust that wide open. I could theoretically get a full skill bar as soon as I can get the med kit and 3 more skill points.

This character was made after the feature pack on the 9th, so this is all post feature pack content. I didn’t want a repeat of last feature pack where I had all my traits already unlocked at level 2.

I attempted to unlock an Elite skill without sufficient skill points while I had a kit equipped and rather than the elite skill being blank it started showing me an up arrow for my Mistfire Wolf.

Edit: Further testing revealed I could only alter my new skill slots while carrying a bundle.

Ehecatl.9172:

Not bad, but personally I’d take 2 out of Wilderness Survival and put it in Skirmishing. Protection on dodge roll is great, but this way when you revive an ally you also get to leave a spike trap to help deter people from the stomp. Plus this way when your ally gets up you’ll both have swiftness and your enemies will be crippled so you can both get some distance. The switch to Skirmishing also gives you Swiftness on weapon swap so you can get to your allies that much faster.

I’d also go for Invigorating Bond over Zephyr’s Speed. Less quickness, but your pet’s F2 skills have a pretty nice heal attached to them so as you Crowd Control the enemies with fear and stuns you’re also healing yourself and allies.

Yep. This build will make standing support obsolete. Everyone knows the real game happens on your back!

I’ve been playing Beastmaster/Healer’s Celerity + Mercy for a while now. The build flexibility is pretty incredible. 6 spare trait points, whatever stats I feel like, an open utility slot and whatever weapons I feel like is more than most builds have. It’s been fun, I’d swear the Mercy runes revive with more than just 20% extra health.

Dungeons and structured PvP are very similar to how they were done in GW1, so if you’re looking for that kind of content I suggest you look into Dungeons and Fractals as well as the living and personal stories (although I doubt people miss out on those anyway).

Unfortunately, the main draw of PvE is that you can run into and work with up to 250 (I think) players. WvW is like the PvP version of that.

Donutdude.9582:

I wouldn’t worry.

Guild Wars, a 9 years old MMORPG, is still going and that game is still B2P only with NSA. Expect Guild Wars 2 to have the exact same story.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I have no doubts that Arenanet knows what they’re doing and will continue to keep this game with no subscription fee. It’s the people trying to argue for one that I cannot for the life of me understand.

If they add a subscription fee, I demand a refund. I bought this game under the pretence I could leave and come back whenever I wanted, no strings attached except that the Anet servers had to still be going.

I do understand however, that while a game for an offline handheld costs the company nothing to allow me to continue playing, GW2 has to at least pay to keep an online server going. A buy once and forget about it system isn’t going to cut it. Buy once and have some cool things to get if you throw more money their way? That’s perfectly reasonable and allows me to throw MORE money than the subscription fee at them.

But like I just said. If the gates of hell get frozen open and Guildwars 2 becomes subscribe or die, I’ll choose die and long for something to fill the void. Which will probably be League of Legends.

Sword/Dagger ranger is pretty sweet. The over 100% possible poison uptime plays to the Ranger’s greatest strength of sustained damage. The sword is our highest damage output weapon and the attack chain is hard to escape from due to the crazy cripple uptime. Our pets love that cripple, because normally they have a little trouble hitting a moving target, not so when it’s at half speed. The sword also has more dashes than is sane for any one weapon set, with the dagger you have a long range projectile and dashes on every other button. If you learn all the tricks? The sword is easily our strongest weapon.

A good compliment to the sword is the shortbow. It’s a condition heavy weapon that also has the capability of 100% poison uptime. Unlike the sword it’s extremely simple, for max DPS use 1 on someone’s back and 4 if it’s off cooldown. The rest of the skills are utility, poison someone trying to heal with 2, make a gap with 3 and interrupt a key skill with 5.

My preferred complimentary weapon set though is Axe/Warhorn or Axe/Torch. The axe has one trait for it and it’s not even that great, so it’s the ranged weapon of choice for off-hand focused rangers and often greatsword rangers. The bows are definitely superior when traited for though and the shortbow is unbelievably strong for single target DPS if you can guarantee the bleeds. Warhorn provides a blast finisher and party support, the Torch is an excessively offensive condition weapon. The offhand axe isn’t amazing though.

Some people will also compliment sword with Longbow or strangely Greatsword, but I wouldn’t recommend either. The Longbow is better used as the focus of a build due to the power boost of its traits.

tl;dr? The sword is our most powerful weapon, both offensively and arguably defensively. The dagger works well with it for evasion and conditions. The shortbow is an easy to use weapon that can compliment it well, but the axe allows for an offhand focused ranger build.

Like all pet choices it depends on a lot of things. I’m fond of pairing up the Jaguar with the River Drake. I’ll usually swap out the Jaguar. It’s worth noting I haven’t used a non-beastmaster build in a very, very long time.

Cats have the best single target DPS. If your pets survival isn’t an issue, there’s little reason not to take a cat. Jaguars can avoid being targetted and boost their damage and Jungle Stalkers give group might.

Drakes are our only pet that cleaves on their attacks. They’re pretty kitten hard to kill too and have half our blast finishers. River’s F2 avoids the complications of conditions and is 5 bouncing projectiles for crazy damage, Marsh has 5 bouncing /homing/ projectiles.

Devourers and Spiders provide ranged damage, both will spend time using low damage control effects, I’ve never seen them dodge circles, but I’ve also never seen them standing in them. Carrion Devourer has a handy poison field, Lashtail has a powerful bleeding barrage. Cave Spiders have a handy weakness+vulnerability venom, Widow and Jungle immobilize which is suprisingly useful, Forest will inflict 21 decades of poison on her victim.

Then there’s the “passive” pets you use purely for their F2s. I’ve got no experience with them and don’t recommend it. But y’know, gives porcine pets a time to shine I guess.

You guys are pretty awesome and I love the immersion effort you guys make for the game. I’ve loved my time on Piken Square, even if I don’t roleplay much myself (or very well when I try). The flirting can get a bit annoying at times and the Vanguard gathered outside a Skritt cave powering up the stolen helms event beyond that of Zhaitan was kind of silly.

Even so, thanks to the RPing I’ve tried to use names suitable for Tyria, my Ranger wears helmets that cover his missing left eye, my Elementalist is a decendant of my gw1 Assassin and I’ll call for help at an event rather than saying it has spawned. The game is a lot more enjoyable that way.

In attempting to start the personal story step with a friend it came up with the error:

InstanceCreate failed. Error=42; Product=5; Module=18; Line=1675.

Specifically I tried to start the instance once, my friend wanting to find a PoI asked me to close it so he could see his map. I open it a moment later, he accepts and… Not working. Attempting to start the mission closes the “start mission?” window, but doesn’t do anything.

Relogging fixed the bug.

kiwituatara.6053:

According to the livestream, the poison from pet-swap is scaled to your own condition damage and not from the pet. However, I don’t know if malicious training will affect the duration, so I’ll probably switch it out if it doesn’t work. I also meant to use forest spider instead of jungle spider, the whole point of the build is to have a fair amount of direct damage and soft-cc while maintaining perma-poison.

I have the ascended celestial insignias ready Just have to craft those and I’ll only be missing the earrings.

Wait what?! Well, that somewhat kills my toxic cat build and turns the Poison Master condition build from mediocre to really good. If malicious training somehow still applies, well, this is a hell of a sweet new mastery.

I’m lovin’ a few of the new traits. I’ll definitely be playing around with them come patch day, see if I can’t find some weird build. Considering my love for mainhand sword lately I’ll have to find a way to get the off-hand axe to work. I’m looking forward to trying a few things with poison mastery.

Poison Mastery’s getting a lot of flak it seems. But since I hate hurting my own companion I’ve gotta get a bit innovative, 2/0/6/0/6.
- Poison Mastery and Rending attacks constantly apply conditions to your opponent.
- Malicious Training and Expertise Training maximise pets’ conditions’ power.
- Zephyr’s Speed and Mighty Swap synergise with the rapid swapping Poison Mastery asks for.
- Pet choice is flexible, while catsassins are powerful, the carrion devourer’s poison cloud and the Lashtail Devourer’s rending barbs add a lot of synergy. The king of PvE Drake is also sitting on the rending attacks list.

My only problem with Poison Mastery is (as far as I know) that the damage boost only applies to our poison and not our companion’s. Hopefully I’m wrong.

Hm… Well, I’ve received two. No sense in not opening it after reading about that patch note I guess.

No.

I realise you find it slightly strange that the ranger has a non-magical, non-technological one handed ranged weapon. But for several ranger builds the axe fills a beautiful niché. It’s clear that guns have no place in a ranger’s toolbox and unfortunately rangers seem to have forgotten how to use staves and wands. Even so, I love my axe.

Off-hand builds have a ranged weapon from the axe, meaning they have an off-hand weapon whether they’re at range or in melee. It’s also a physical projectile that they can combine with the torch without having to deal with constant weapon switching.

Melee ranger builds find the axe an excellent choice as a sidearm. Since they tend not to spec into marksmanship and the only axe trait doesn’t affect the weapon’s usability. In other words, the axe gives them a weapon that fights multiple enemies at once, at a safe distance. One of the most likely reasons they’re fighting at a range in a melee build is that there’s too many enemies to take on in melee.

Yeah… It’s weird. One of the main reasons I still play a ranger my side-arm.

Oak’s words echo.

“There’s a time and place for everything, but not now.”

I can only assume this also applies to Piercing arrows, Ricochet and our melee attacks when combined with sharpening stone?

I know Barrage was our most effective use of the skill, but being able to apply a total of 15 bleed stacks from ricochet was pretty cool. I really like builds or strategies that utilize these kinds of interactions.

It depends on the amount of conditions you inflict really. If you find yourself constantly landing crossfire’s bleed, condition damage is probably the right choice. This is especially true if condition damage is your only offensive stat.

If like me you’d rather have a build that doesn’t have to worry about conditions not stacking resulting in contributing very little to a fight, just stick with power. Power is also the only thing affecting your damage to structures and it’s multiplicative with precision and critical damage.

Axe & Warhorn is my go to set for taking on multiple enemies at range. For melee rangers, the axe is fantastic as it requires no traits investment to be good and leaves you open for utilities like Path of Scar’s pull or Crippling Talon’s slow. On a Shortbow focused set, you’re likely better off with one of the swords, for the extra mobility, ability to fight ranged hate and threaten an opponent in melee yourself.

So… According to the patch notes on the wiki. If you use a longbow, opening strikes doesn’t become useless in a prolonged fight when combined with the improved Remorseless trait. So, y’know, it’s kind of important to try and make some sort of build around that right?

Obviously you need 30 in marksmanship, this gives you the beautifully synergistic power and condition duration. Now, logically, this should open us up to condition damage for a conditions focused built. But you see, unless Vulnerability has been changed since I last tested it, bleeding ignores enemy armour and vulnerability is the reduction of that armour. However, there’s no reason we can’t also take condition duration based runes. There’s also the sigils of peril, yeah, let’s get them all, because this is what we’re doing. I don’t see why you won’t take Quickening Zephyr to boost you and your pet’s physical damage, while also breaking stuns.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/ranger/?6.0|3.0.he|0.0.0.0.0.0|0.716.0.716.0.7i.0.7i.0.7g.0.7g|0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0|u00c.0.0.0.0|0.0|0.4y.0.0.0|e

This is only 30 trait points down, a weapon slot and your upgrade components used. Already vulnerability is lasting 60 to 64% longer (depending on whether you can use mad king runes or not, you may use Lich runes instead of Nightmare ones), only 10% of which doesn’t apply to other conditions. With a cat and malicious training, because why not hit max stacks alone?

After this point, you can take the build in several different ways. You can always alternate between piercing arrows and eagle eye to fit your needs, your longbow gives enough range to justify using a spirits unbound build, the vulnerability getting silly with frost spirit. You could also go full blown conditions anyway since you already have high condition duration, your other allies and pets will still benefit greatly from the vulnerability. You could also pick up beastmastery, making sure you always have an ally on hand who’s making your vulnerability stacks threatening. Triple opening strikes from you, your pet and Remorseless on Hunter’s shot’s stealth, throw in Hunter’s Signet, Jaguar’s stealth, Sic ‘em and Rapid Fire’s for vulnerability, catsassination is back only more glass than before?

Personally, I feel there’s potential here, primarily for dungeons where marksmanship hasn’t been all that great. It might not be fantastic or game breaking, but it’s something.

I don’t think so. I understand spririt summoners over 250 years would have learned to have their spirits move with them, but that kind of makes spirits less interesting. Sure, spirits can’t be turrets anymore because engi has those, but having them be passive minions doesn’t make all that much sense either.

Primarily, I just like having the utility of being able to position spirits in “safe” spots and spirits unbound is an example of a well designed trait, it’s unfortunate that it can’t really be anything below grandmaster.

If you enjoy the Ranger’s pet gameplay, then you’ll be fine at endgame. I’m not sure it’s necessary to invest traits in your pet (it is recommended though, beastmastery’s stat bonus is amazing), but it’s certainly worth learning how to position, when to swap, when to use their command skills, etc.

If you want to be shooty man, the man that shoots people, I’m afraid Warriors are a different profession.

Durzlla.6295:

It’s actually a radius, and it’s melee range untraited so it’s not -that- bad to hit them with. If you have the trait it’s a little further than melee range. You can also use spirits more as a detaunt, so if any enemy gets near you they blow up.

Not to mention that they can be activated while you’re stunned and w/e and the effect will go off, which has proved to be better than a stun break a lot of times with that freaking sun spirit, that thing is a life savor (can also be used to blind nearby enemies twice to secure a stomp)

If you’re so inclined to have Spirits unbound and have Nature Renewal as your elite, hitting your elite skill to activate its burst just before you go down will cause you to get back up long before someone could finish you. It’s unfortunate you can’t actually do it while downed though. It’s about a second delay before the revive kicks in, so y’know, the timing isn’t too difficult.

More on-topic though, the bottom line is, the spirits’ bursts are pretty kitten strong. While they’re only short range, if you have a pack of spirits following you I highly doubt anyone would be wanting to try and melee you. This is actually a good thing, it means the spirits’ bursts can have more impact because they don’t immediately have an effect on everyone in a teamfight.

I think the big issue with the Ranger having AoE support is that unlike other professions is that the Ranger will benefit from it with no investment. A minion master Necro has to have minion skills to abuse AoE support on their own. Other professions also have summon skills that they can use. However, these skills are in place of other skills that could be more useful. The ranger always has a pet by their side, so their team support skills seem stronger than they really are, because the ranger effectively has double the benefit. Spirits also have reasonably unique effects, so there’s often not any sort of worry about skills overlapping (however in a constructed team redundancy should never be an issue), this is especially true with Frost and Nature.

Let’s do a rough example. Say Sun spirit applies its burning every chance it gets, without fail. That means every 10 seconds, your victim is on fire for 3, per person buffed by the spirit. In other words, fighting a Sun spirit ranger you’re on fire 60% of the time (realistically it’ll be between 30-50%). That is a constant effect until you kill the Sun spirit, it also means you’re getting set on fire and might not know why if you can’t see the spirit.

With Spirit of Nature’s healing affecting spirits and Healing spring’s large AoE applying regen to spirits, spirits can be fairly difficult to beat down by attrition (which could be used on the same ranger who’s being just as tough to kill) and if the health buffs have made them resistant to getting bursted down that means they’re kinda tough to deal with.

Rangers don’t see this easily though. They trade 33% increased regen duration for spirit health and reliability. The trait line boosting spirits? Its stats aren’t even useful for spirits that aren’t storm or stone. The other spirit traits also aren’t fantastic, spirits unbound for example is a trade off between being able to strategically position and hide spirits and being able to let them dodge.

My point is, spirits are really complicated. Allies and enemies likely don’t understand them, but there is justification as to why they’re decent. A skilled player could probably pull off some shenanigans, but I doubt they’re OP just yet.

It looks pretty good to take this trait yeah, but something to note about movement speed boosts is they don’t stack. A pet with Sic ‘em, swiftness and agility training will only have Sic ’em’s bonus, because it is the highest.

For this reason, signet of the hunt almost gives the trait as its passive and Sic ‘em can somewhat replace the trait. Birds are usually used with the former and cats with the latter, both of these pets can benefit more from the 30% bonus crit damage trait in the same slot in these circumstances. Longbow rangers also get very little benefit out of agility training due to Hunter’s Shot providing effectively permanent swiftness.

Edit: Also, I don’t take agility training because I hate skirmishing.

*sigh* As they’re saying, yes felines have huge damage output and birds are also very popular for their ability to deal damage. Anyway, back to the question at hand.

I can only assume you want a high power pet for the reliable damage. But unfortunately, the shark has the highest power of any pet. The shark is also infamous for spending a lot of time not attacking and swimming about instead (so much so that the armour fish outdamages it). This means that, at least for underwater combat if something has high power it’s probably stupid (drakes suffer the same issue). However, for land combat the highest power pets are drakes and canines.

Drakes will provide you with AoE damage and weakness, a very sturdy body and your only blast finisher (which I believe is two blast finishers chained together), since the last patch, their breath weapons are also incredibly powerful if you can pin an enemy down in any way (previously you’d need to have locked an enemy down to the point where they’d be dead no matter happens to hit with their breath). Canines on the other hand have better control, with a cripple to allow themselves to reliably hit their target, a knockdown which they’ll usually try to open with (i.e. 2 second knockdown on pet swap).

Drakes I believe will offer higher damage output and better survivability, especially against multiple targets. But canines are more reliable due to their cripple and have a lot of control.

Deamhan.9538:

The class being said to be good in spvp, no doubt, is no more than people simply parroting what someone else said. The source of which is probably a number of people, who you could count on just one hand, who have done well with the class in spvp. Just because 5 out of dozens have made a good go, doesn’t make the class good.

There is spvp, WvW and PvE and yet they balance around spvp which is wrong. They should be balancing around WvW. Why? In pvp, they place certain limitations that can mean the difference in a win or lose in WvW. Also, spv kitten trictly pvp with no pve element. WvW is pvp but with nothing different to the profession from PvE and there is also PvE in WvW. Thus WvW is a PvE/PvP hybrid situation allowing the players to make use of everything.

If they balance the professions around concept of 1v1 within WvW, then the rest would, more or less, fall into place.

Short answer? No.

Arenanet balances around at least PvP and PvE, I believe they’re also separating WvW balance. This is because if they did just PvP, the thief would be impossible to play in PvE, my evidence for this? Check the Guild Wars 1 wiki and tell me how many assassin skills are split for PvP. But, well, it’s not just the thief, but the thief is an excellent example of the issues with balancing for PvE or PvP alone.

You seem to misinterpret what WvW is for as well. PvE has dungeons, a structured instance, to dictate balance while Pv kitten tructured and is the competitive side of the game so it also needs balance. WvW does not have this level of structure that allows balancing to be possible. If there are major issues, like defending yourself from a wave of invaders killing you without getting hit, then the balance team will take note. However, PvE and PvP require vastly different things.

Lastly you seem to think the game is determined by one on one combat. Well unfortunately, even one on one is situational (such as fighting a turret engi or trap ranger) and making all professions equal when it comes to one on one combat makes some professions look far worse. The thief for example can instantly win one on one fights, especially against inexperienced opponents, which is a major problem if this is our balance focus. The Ranger is also technically two people, which just makes them mechanically better in one on one situations. Both however are weaker in team fights, the thief explodes if caught by one stray stun and the ranger’s extra dude gets caught in AoE and dies because it can’t dodge easily, but that’s more the thief than the ranger, because the ranger is a jack of all trades and provides bonuses to teamfights in other ways.

Sure, I’ve probably got things about actual balance and design horribly wrong and provided extremely vague examples, but this doesn’t change my point. PvP and PvE require vastly different things, making something good in one can often make it ridiculous in the other, so balance is split as necessary.

Pets in Guild Wars 1 were also unique to the ranger and, due to how professions in GW1 worked, any profession could secondary in ranger for an almost free body in combat. What a pet “cost” you was 1 (2 if you wanted it to not stay dead in PvP) of your 8 skills and not being a ranger. You could also further improve your pet’s effectiveness by using beastmastery skills or the sunspear skill never rampage alone and spending attribute points on beastmastery. Without any beastmastery points, your pets damage is pretty pathetic.

Rangers, like Elementalists, learned they should embrace their abilities. Elementalists used to use only one or two elements, now they switch between them on the fly. Rangers however used to choose whether to fight with their pet, now they may choose to focus on fighting with their pet.

To me, it makes perfect sense that rangers are the “pet profession”, as in GW1 if you wanted a pet you’d take a ranger secondary or primary. I’m glad the ranger has such a unique combat style and I’d hate to fight any other way.

Here’s an added bonus for you, condition damage isn’t affected by % damage increases either.

Sebrent.3625:

Vulnerability is not useless for a condition build.

• Condition damage benefits from the +x% damage a target suffers from x stacks of vulnerability

Huh… Gonna go test that, right now, on the heavy golem. I’d always thought it was % armour reduction.

EDIT: 30 in wilderness survival, PvP carrion amulet and jewel (1279 condition damage), my bleeds were doing 106 damage per tick. Using hunter’s shot I was able to apply 10 stacks of vulnerability instantly.

Maul -> hunter’s shot, 106 damage per tick.

Okay, so my first theory is correct, vulnerability does not affect bleeds applied beforehand (bleeding damage is based on the situation when it was applied). But that proves nothing so…

Hunter’s shot -> Maul, 106 damage per tick.

Yep. There was an anomaly where I could get the bleeding damage to reach 107 per tick, but that was caused by applying a lot of bleed stacks, not vulnerability.

Just to be sure it isn’t completely broken, I tested slash, slice and power stab, with and without hunter’s shot’s vulnerability (ignoring crits).

Damage per hit without vulnerability ~380 and ~450.
Damage per hit with vulnerability ~430 and ~490.
So… Vulnerability isn’t broken.

Whirling defence is now a toggle skill (1 second cooldown).

Rangers everywhere spaz out in glorious projectile immune celebration!

PsionicDingo.2065:

Also, what stats best serve axes? Conditions? Or crit, as it’s own trait suggests.

It’s not exactly the axe specifically, but have a preference for physical damage over condition based. I’ve found splitblade still has enough oomph to justify using it, even if you’re not using conditions, but if you are, you’re kinda stuck with having to rely on hitting it every 6 or so seconds. That’s not to say axe and torch isn’t a thing, but burning’s a bit of a nuisance since only one person can deal their damage with burning at a time and a burning focused ranger (torch + sun spirit), guardian (I’m pretty sure they can anyway) or elementalist (thinking about fire attunement) can quite easily make someone burn permanently.

Warhorn works nicely as a secondary, especially in dungeons. The might is a bit lacking, but the fury is huge and the swiftness is extremely helpful. I think with birds you can get infinite party wide swiftness and infinite party wide fury with a red moa. With a high physical damage investment that’s a huge bonus and you’ll also be able to do a ton of damage with the bird swarm.

Off-hand axe I feel is also a physical damage focused weapon as the boomerang is a pure damage skill and whirling defence applies vulnerability which is useless for a condition build.

The axe is the go to ranged weapon of choice for melee rangers and some beast masters. Like you said ricochet allows it to hit multiple targets without traits. When are you gonna be hiding at range? When there’s a boss or when there’s a group too big to take on in melee safely. Some bosses have multiple targets, which I’m fairly certain the axe can bounce between, but also the weakness/chill is just amazing for improving survivability, but ALSO bosses tend to be large, so you don’t need to get into melee to hit them with splitblade’s full spread.

As a greatsword focused ranger, I simply adore the mainhand axe as my secondary weapon.

Terkov.4138:

2 fixes for previous posts:
1. Drakes do NOT have the same stats as canines. In last patch they doubled drake hp
2. Drakes F2 is NOT the slowest one. In last patch it got lowered to 1,5 sec – same as dogs F2.

Oh yes… Drakes got their health almost doubled and their breath speed almost doubled… So good.

It’s like easter eggs in patch note form.

Ision.3207:

Are my eyes deceiving me, or have people responded politely and intelligently as if this were a normal friendly conversation? I mean no one has jumped in telling me to re-roll a Warrior, or that I’m a self-hating female homophobe for having skimpy armor. Heck, not even the usual “self-appointed” forum moderators have shown up to tell me we already have threads like this and I’ve committed an unforgiveable sin for posting another one.

Good lord, will wonders never cease!

;-)

Seriously folks, thanks for your input and feedback, I appreciate it.

We can’t exactly warp “Which is better, drake or canine?” into those same boring complaints can we? But I suppose I should be getting back on topic…

1) It doesn’t matter.
2) You can’t get into dungeons anyway.
3) Reroll a warrior if you want DPS.

Hurrdurr… O_o

(Honestly, I’m just loving my drakes right now, but I don’t PvP.)

Lokheit.7943:

There aren’t chrysochola/carrion either.

I would love to see a revamp on the atribute sysyem, eliminating all secondary atributes and instead use traits to exploit criticals, conditions/boons and healing in creative ways.

The current system has tooooooo many variations, many of them are crappy and some of the really useful ones like Valk or Carrion aren’t covered by the last tier of equipment. Eliminating secondary atributes (setting a mark for standard critical and condition damage and healing in abscense of their atributes and playing A LOT with what traits could do with them instead) reduces the variations to 12 (18 if we keep magic find for the farmers as it isn’t affecting combat stats) so it’s much easier to get your prefered ones and you could reach very balanced builds mixing them.

Don’t worry, you can still get Rabid, hit directly for an alright amount some of the time and bleed to death almost instantly.

hplee.2839:

Harathi Hinderland is very busy, it has one of the best meta event here.

No kidding. I found the event pushed all the way back to the start (as far as I could tell). I spent the next two hours just driving back the centaurs as I tried to explore the map, the Seraph would just keep pushing forward without a single break. After a couple of camps, more people started to show up and lend a hand until we had a squad (larger than a party, not big enough to call an army) to face of against the Modniir chieftan with.

I couldn’t have asked for a better way to reach level 80, this is what Guildwars 2 is about.

I don’t get what this argument is trying to be. All stats benefit the entire party in some way, except magic find. What’s being asked is that users of magic find be as potentially useful to the party and therefore be actively searched for when making parties.

People who hate players mooching with their magic find gear don’t get mooching anymore. People who like using magic find gear get to enjoy being accepted into groups without discrimination (highly valued even). This is a win-win solution.

Elbegast.6970:

An hour for a measly 100g? Doesn’t seem worth it….unless there’s something I’m missing.

I suppose you have a faster way to make gold? ‘Cause I’d say this is a really good way to spend your karma.

A thing I’ve seen in this thread is that people are scared to implement these tools out of fear that they will be misused. Well, I’m sorry to say, but there are plenty of tools in the game that can be used to grief other players.

Chat, gear, professions, fractal level and even titles. That’s just a handful. If a person is creative enough, they can turn even the most benevolent thing into an instrument of torture. But also, humans have a very big history of taking any kind of research and using it to kill each other. Nuclear weapons being one of the most obvious.

As a nuclear physics student, I’ve had people ask me this kind of dilemma before. My response is always the same. Nightmare isn’t created by tools, it’s created by the ones that use those tools, removing the tools doesn’t remove the nightmare, it merely forces it to find other tools.

Deepcuts.9740:

A meter would be a nice addition.
But:
1. Make meters for
a. Direct DPS
b. Damage taken – Tank
c. Healing given
e. Condition damage
f. Conditions removed
g. Interrupts applied
h. Number of times a player got downed
f. Number of times a player rezzed another player
x. Some more stats

I think the title is wrong and because of that, many players are afraid and do not want this kind of feature.

Even if we no not have a dedicated dps, tank or healer, some stats would be nice to see where everyone excels at.

I might want to be a dedicated healer, so I will gear up for best healing.
I would like to know if I am good at that.
The same goes for DPS, tanking and all other stats.

It is not ALL about DPS.

While I’m not a fan of the idea that the UI should be cluttered with meters telling us one party member is being the “carry” (in the DotA/LoL sense of the word) and a couple of other players are being useful in other ways. I feel there’s too much information you’d need to know about your party to review it than there is to display on screen at any given time.

That’s 9+ bars man. NINE! Right now we can only see 6 (7 for rangers, warriors and Necros, but that’s besides the point). While I don’t claim it to be incredibly useful as a standard part of the UI, a sort of “mission report” or debriefing would be pretty cool. Tell everyone what each party member did well, which party members weren’t performing so well and maybe give out little awards for certain accomplishments? If you’ve played Megaman Zero, you’ll know what I’m talking about, if you haven’t, well… Here’s the gist of it:

http://youtu.be/S_Y9UQ_ps9w?t=5m13s

You could expand it to make a table showing how well each player did. It doesn’t add much extra time to a dungeon run since it’s just an extra button press to skip it. But it can help players who’re doing bad at the game realise where they’re going wrong and clearly shows there’s more to the game than forcing other players to distract enemies so you can be the highest damage source. Giving out little titles based on performance would also encourage players to improve their skill and would give player groups things to laugh about. Things I can think of right now would be “untied shoes” for someone who goes down a lot or “the wall” for someone who took the most hits, counting evades and blocks.

I guess I’m just really fond of mission style games, where this sort of thing is standard issue.

whitespirit.9734:

Build wise I agree greatsword is key. If going Longbow however that does not help you as much and the key is Sun Spirit is fire damage buff. Burn is a condition and you do not get many conditions out of Longbow. If Longbow must be taken however I would put last 10 points in power and get the 10% extra damage while endurance is full Trait.
Stats I would go for would be toughness/condition which ends up being apothecary ( yeah sorry it wastes the healing power) good luck and let me know how it goes.

Actually… Greatsword is a bad thing with spirits, at least in a spirits unbound build. Spirits unbound results in your allies standing around whatever enemy you’re slashing, since it’s a very precise thing to dodge in melee and the greatsword only really defends yourself they’ll go down, very, very fast.

Toughness/Condition, you can actually go for Rabid, which provides precision as well as making the primary condition damage instead of healing power. Carrion gives better damage at the cost vitality instead of toughness.

So for a while now I’ve been becoming more and more interested in the longbow. As such, I’ve been wanting to build around it, because otherwise it just ends up feeling like I’d be better off with the axe. Since my first ranger build was a spirits focused one, I kind of want to do the spirits justice as the Longbow lets me fix the biggest weakness of that build (I focused on the greatsword).

What keeps happening however, is that I’m never sure what kind of stats I’d like to use for it. That’s why I made this thread.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/ranger/?6.5|3.0.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|0.7b.0.7b.0.7b.0.7b.0.7b.0.7b|0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0|0.0.f5.u37b.f0|0.0|4i.4v.4s.0.56|e

Like in my original spirit build I’ve focused on two spirits, unlike my original spirit build I’ve realised stone spirit is weak, so runes of the forge seem pretty weak for it. However, sun spirit procs more with more allies and runes of the ogre spams allies, so that works out nicely. But as far as stats go, should I go for Soldier’s? Sentinel’s? Carrion? I prefer to have some survivability but Berserker’s? I know I at least don’t want a focus on healing power, because spirit of Nature Renewal doesn’t benefit from healing power.

There’s also a few spare trait points hanging about… Mainly because I don’t really know what to do with them before deciding on stats.

Huh… My Brother’s gonna be hoping he could get one of those on his Elementalist. Otherwise he’ll probably switch professions just to use one.

Staff Ranger would be so good.

Time to show you mages what real magic is! I call upon the mystical energies of nature, let the ether of Tyria itself that flows around us take form and fuel my will! Behold my immense power!

*clonks them on the head with a staff*

I feel it not working for defeated allies is a bonus. Your pet takes so long to revive someone who’s defeated that you might as well have just gone over there and picked them up yourself. I would always use search and rescue to pick someone up who’s down. I’ve more recently removed it from my skill bar because in any situation where I’d find it handy, it either didn’t work (reviving allies who’re stuck under the Tequatl’s cousin) or I’d have been better off reviving them myself.

Hilariously, the only attraction I have to the bows is for the skill that’s an homage to the only skill I would use with my bow in my A/R build (yay splintered weapon spam).

At least it was. More recently I’ve felt like experimenting with the longbow and being able to start a fight with 20 vulnerability stacks on my victim to follow up with a quick crippling barrage, swoop, hilt-bash and maul is pretty devastating, even without me building for burst damage. Hunter’s shot has made me feel much more useful when I’m in a group now.

Rengaru.4730:

Don’t summon a Warrior banner anywhere near my Ranger.

I will steal it from you, use it to fight, and enjoy every single one of the 95 seconds it lasts.

Whoops, I accidentally stole your banner when trying to take loot.

… No I don’t have any plans to give it back.

The Greatsword is your friiieeeend…!

Unfortunately, there is no true “ranged damage dealer” profession. Since professions are defined more by how they go about doing things. You’re wanting to shoot people from a distance? That’s a simple task, if that’s all you want to do, go Warrior.

Rangers however fight alongside a pet. We might “prefer” ranged combat (it allows us to be useful AND get our pets to dodge red rings of death), but we by no means specialise in it.

The Engineer might be more your style, I mean… Do you want to feel like you have so much random, extremely useful junk and shoot people? If you feel confident in your ability to dodge, there’s the scholar professions. Elementalists are your similar to your standard squishy wizard, but depending on your build they can be very different. Necros… Well the less I say about them the better. I guarantee the Mesmer is like nothing you’ve played before as well, so them and their Greatsword Sniper rifles are worth trying out.

But back to the ranger. If you’re going glass cannon you need to know what you’re doing, but you can change builds and experiment a lot long before you finally have to settle on your PvE gear set. But Rangers in general… They’re not the most effective at bursting down targets, but in a prolonged fight they’re the ones I’d place my bets on. Your ability to regenerate, deal consistent damage and pressure enemies is very strong, you’re also a very effective one on one combatant thanks to you basically being two people.

If you do end up playing a ranger, just remember that proper pet management will drastically improve the impact you make.

achensherd.2735:

Pleeeeeeeease bring back secondary professions so we can do this on our own!

Unfortunately… Secondary professions just don’t have their place in Guildwars 2. I used to play Guildwars 1, I know how much depth secondary professions gave your character. But the problem is… How far would you go with secondary professions?

In Guildwars 1 your primary profession would give you a set of skills that were unique to that profession and you would always have them. Your primary would also give you your unique attribute and determine your armour (each profession had their own unique armour, Dervishes and Assassins not only look different, but Dervishes’ armour gave them more health). Your secondary profession merely gave you that professions skills and their non-unique attributes. Your unique attribute was the only attribute (aside from weapon masteries, which increased power and precision with that weapon and double strike chance for daggers) that gave you a passive effect, similar to trait lines and their minor traits, and that passive effect would encourage a certain play style.

Elementalists and Mesmers encourage spell casting, Eles by using energy storage (which is now Arcane) to give them a ridiculous energy pool to cast spells from. Mesmers on the other hand had fast casting, which let them having lightning fast interrupts and hard to interrupt big spells. Warriors and Rangers on the other hand had strength and expertise, warriors would use strength to get crazy armour penetration while Rangers used expertise to reduce the cost of a wide array of skills (most notably weapons skills and touch spells).

In Guildwars 1 each profession would play a certain role in fights and to avoid making your profession choice lock you into one thing the secondary profession system was introduced. If you want to know how bad it can be, look up the smiter’s boon story sometime.

In Guildwars 2 the dev team realised that that plan was stupidly ridiculous and they did not want to go through it again. So they gave each profession their own unique ways of doing the same thing instead. Warriors provide healing through their banners morale boosts while Elementalists throw water on everyone. With your armour, traits, healing skills, utility skills, weapon skills, profession mechanic and Elite skill all being determined by your profession, what portion of those would you have be available for secondary professions?

You can’t have it change your unique profession mechanic because otherwise you’re just being silly, especially if ranger secondary gives a free pet and since the elementalist’s profession mechanic is how they use their weapons I suppose you can’t use the secondary profession’s weapons either. Logically, if you were to access their traits you wouldn’t get their bottom trait line since that’s the profession mechanic. So… Utility skills? The ranger utilities and Engineer profession mechanic would have to get an overhaul. Ranger shouts and signets are all closely linked with the profession mechanic, their pet. Then the Engineer’s toolbelt is determined by your utilities, that is a hell of a lot of skills… I know having a whole load of skills is the Engineer’s thing, but really? Healing skills basically result in the same thing, with a large portion of healing skills doing things like giving Necromancers Adrenaline or healing the thief for each illusion they have out.

Professions are designed to have their skills work together. You take out only the things that are linked to profession mechanics and what you’ve got left is swish cheese. Having to work with my brother to do a combo like this? It’ll make me welcome his crazy lightning hammer build with open arms.

Edit: … It’s still a wall of text, by the Pale Tree…

tl;dr Secondary professions just can’t happen. Enjoy being forced to work with other players for cross profession combos.