Guild Wars 2

Which gametype?

JonathanSharp.7094:

The 3 different game types and splitting skills. Splitting skills between all 3 of our game types (PvE, PvP, WvW) is very costly – it takes more time to split the skills, and then upkeep the split skills. Instead of upkeeping 1 version of a skill, whenever you make future changes, you now have to make sure all 3 are appropriately balanced for their respective game types. This is very powerful, and something we did in GW1 when we felt we needed it. We just need to be careful not to do it too much, or it means the balance team is literally balancing 3 entire games. As Freamon (from “The Wire”, btw if you haven’t seen “The Wire”, stop whatever it is you’re doing and go watch it. Unless you’re giving birth. In that case…wait until you’re done, then watch it immediately afterwards. Oh, and get your new son/daughter to watch it when they’re old enough.) usually reminded the other members of the cast, “All the pieces matter.” The different pieces of GW2 all impact the other pieces, and it’s something we must always bear in mind.

Chap’s woefully ill-conceived attempt at a metaphor on why we don’t spilt all skills off the bat: Imagine you’re in school, and in order to make sure you learn languages at an even pace, you have to split everything you do into 3 languages. For me, let’s say it’s English, Japanese and Latin (No, Greek, I liked learning Greek more than Latin). You start off answering a question on a test in 3 different languages. You rock. But then you do it more and more often. For every note you take in a lecture, you have to write it in 3 different languages. For every paper you write, you have to write it in 3 languages. For all homework, you have to do it in 3 languages. Every test. Every quiz. It may seem small at first, but if you’re not careful, you’re doing three times the work as normal.

Whether you like it or not, you guys already have 3 different games. Each game type has a different structure, different rules, and different goals. I get where you’re going with your analogy, but it’s flawed. You aren’t answering the same question in three languages. You’re answering English questions in English, Japanese questions in Japanese, and Greek questions in Greek.

The way you’re doing it now, you have to come up with a fix for one game type that doesn’t effect the other two too badly. I would argue that it takes more work to do that than it does to split the skills and balance to solve issues unique to each game type. The upkeep shouldn’t be costly at all, you just don’t fix what isn’t broken. What could be more cost effective than that?

Vox Hollow.2736:

It true that sPvP concerns likely lit a fire under somebody to change spirits, but the solution they cooked up is actually a bit of a compromise between the two formats. So it makes sense it would appear in the both of them.

It’s pretty obvious the mandatory downtime is there to create a window of opportunity for a human opponent, but lowered cooldowns is not something the sPvP crowd would be in favor of (Especially when it comes to Spirit of Nature).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to load a bunch of Spirits on my bar.
But the problems with them are the same problems all summonable NPC allies have, not something specific to these revisions in particular.

I haven’t been able to play since the patch, but this would be an improvement if we could dismiss the spirits in PVE. Otherwise, they mucked with PVE because they were too lazy to split skills.

I think the lowered cooldown on Spirit of Nature just keeps it the same in terms of uptime. You’re still using it for 60 seconds out of 240 seconds.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

HappinessFactory.4910:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Vamp Rook.7835:

-All spirits can now be launched, knocked down, and knocked back.

This was a bug fix which now will allow more counter-play when fighting spirits.

Vamp Rook.7835:

-Storm Spirit, Frost Spirit, Sun Spirit, Stone Spirit, and Spirit of Nature will now begin their recharge when the spirit dies instead of when the spirit is summoned.

-Storm Spirit, Frost Spirit, Sun Spirit, and Stone Spirit: Recharge has been reduced from 60 seconds to 25 seconds.

-Spirit of Nature: Recharge has been reduced from 240 seconds to 180 seconds.

Previously you were able to pre-cast spirits before a fight so that when they would die you could instantly re-summon them. This made it feel like there was little to no counter play. Players could take the time to AOE them down simply to have to deal with another set of spirits. These changes were made so that there is a time window where the ranger will be without spirits once they die. Since the spirits now die after their duration, we had to reduce the recharge to compensate. In fights where they are dying often, the shorter recharge is a buff.

Vamp Rook.7835:

Solar Flare: Fixed a bug so this skill no longer applies a duplicate infinite duration blind.

This was a simple bug fix removing unintended functionality.

I understand the knockdown thing (although that could be the hardest nerf out of the 2) BUT I thought the timing the spirits was one of the few things spirit rangers had to actually plan out.

I mean that’s removing the potential for good gameplay is what that nerf is. Now if people still play spirits it will be even more mindless and less beneficial :/

How does this change remove the potential for good game play? Before a spirit ranger could go into a fight with spirits already out and off recharge allowing them to instantly re-summon them once they died. There is no counter play to that.

The spirits last for a limited duration so that the ranger must make a conscious choice when to summon them or else they could go on recharge early in a fight if you use them ‘mindlessly’. This also provides a downtime window of 25 seconds once they have died that a player knows they can deal with the ranger. This works consistently with other minions now.

We are obviously watching any changes we make closely and will make adjustments if it is necessary.

I think I must be confused. Spirits had a 60 second duration and a 60 second recharge. How long was this window where you could have a spirit out and have it ready to summon again? Also, I think we have two different definitions of the word “instantly”. My spirits took 1.5 seconds to cast. That’s not instant by any definition I’ve heard. That also happens to be where the counter play was. A really long cast that could be interrupted. Yeah, you could have the spirit almost all the time, but if you did that and a fight started when it was close to time to recast, a good player would make you pay for using a skill with such a long cast time.

Also, why did this change have to take place across all game types? Split the skills already.

Look at it this way. Many months ago Anet saw that rangers were spending too much time reviving their pets. They didn’t say “Gee, pets sure are dead an awful lot, maybe we need to take a look at their survivability.”

Instead we get, “Pets can no longer be revived using the “F” prompt. This is because you can either use F4 to swap pets which will bring that pet back alive or you can wait until you are out of combat at which point you pet will revive automatically. We felt it was doing a disservice to Ranger players to incentivize them to spend a long time reviving their pet when it was a very inefficient thing to do and happened after combat anyway. This will also help clear up “F” to interact functionality.”

They don’t try to find problems at Anet. They see behavior they don’t like and remove that behavior without ever trying to figure out what caused it in the first place.

Decklan.7540:

Jackums.3496:

Whilst I don’t think they need to be touched in PvE, especially with Rangers in general being one of the worst PvE professions

Why do people still say this? Ranger was one of the professions that helped obtain the fastest speed clear of CoF at approximately 5 minutes. Their frost spirit is such a huge boon to group dps and is completely unique of things like might stacking (IE, no other class can provide frost spirit’s dps boost).

I agree the pet does need a lot of work in pve settings, but it appears frost spirit alone is more than enough to justify bringing at least one ranger along in a dungeon/fractal.

Ranger is an optimal choice for an optimal group, but a sub optimal choice for a sub optimal group.

It’s true that spotter and frost spirit increase the group dps enough to more that make up the difference in damage between the ranger and another warrior, but only after you’ve got your might, vulnerability, and fury covered by the rest of the group. If you don’t have that, then what the ranger brings to the table pales in comparison.

The ranger can help with fury, and with the right build, he can front load vulnerability to give the other classes a chance to build their stacks. He lacks the ability to help with group might though. He has the fire fields, but they don’t belong on your bar if you’re trying to do dps. The best he can do with a sword/warhorn setup is 4 stacks of might with about a 50% uptime. The stalker can do 5 stacks of might for 10 seconds every 33 seconds, but that 3 second activation time probably kills its usefulness during combat.

It’s a hard class to work with sometimes.

Nuka Cola.8520:

killimandros.5087:

I am pretty certain THAT was the guy who fixed CULLING In that case; BIG mistake ANet. I am ALSO pretty certain he gor fired because of constantly insisting on class balances to fit wvw instead of the kitten smallscale PvP. Last one, you can take as inside information. Point is, he wanted classes to work. And was fired for it.

What kind of dumb company would fire a person (that was with them for quite some time too) for wanting balanced classes?

Probably the kind that would take years to learn that skills should be separated between game types and then choose not to split them from the get-go in the sequel.

I’d like them in wilderness survival since that’s where most of the traps were in GW1. Skirmishing should be the line with melee weapon skills since both are new additions to the class from GW1. Traps would be nice in the skirmishing line if they got a significant boost to direct damage.

All of the traps are bad, but it’s hard to compare them to the engineer’s kits. The kits replace your weapon skills, but you can swap between kits and your weapons whenever you want. I’m just not sure if they should be equivalent. If we ever get back the ability to trap like we could in GW1, I think it would look like the bomb kit. Also, I miss dust trap.

I’ve noticed that we’re the only class that doesn’t have at least one signet with a passive benefit to an offensive stat as well.

Is it worthwhile to trait signets? Most signet activess seem pretty poor. Here’s my reasoning:

Signet of Renewal – Doesn’t actually do anything extra when you trait it.

Signet of the Wild – You gain 25% damage for 8 seconds, but it takes 1 second to activate. The result? 10 seconds worth of damage over 9 seconds. Using it with QZ improves the damage by a fair amount since both are multiplicative damage boosts. The stability is useful, but you lose the ability to interact with anything.

Signet of the Hunt – Greatsword gets some benefit because of maul. Most other weapons do damage with multiple hits, but this signet only effects the one hit.

Signet of Stone – This one is pretty good. 6 seconds of invulnerability never hurt anybody.

So signet of stone is good, signet of the hunt benefits greatsword more than other weapons (half a maul every 30 seconds), and signet of the wild adds damage, but less than you’d think because of the activation time. So, is this worth a grandmaster trait?

His calculation was fine. Attack isn’t actually a useful stat. Attack is power + weapon strength but the damage formula is power * weapon strength. It’s never used anywhere.

I’m consistantly killing him with 4 gambits using zerker gear and a 30/20/20 build. I take spotter, the grandmaster signet trait, offhand training and anything that adds damage. For skills I use QZ, signet of the wild, and signet of stone. Weapon is sword with warhorn and axe offhands. Pets are jaguar and stalker.

My strategy is to prebuff with warhorn, RaO, and the stalker’s mighty roar. Then I talk to the ringmaster. As soon as I get in, I target deadeye and use path of scars, which interrupts the early killshot and brings him to me. Then I hit whirling defense. If I’m lucky, I’ll reflect a volley back on him. When that’s done, I pop QZ and signet of the wild and attack for all I’m worth. Save signet of stone for when he uses a kill shot that you can’t interrupt. If he teleports on you, use path of scars to pull him in again. Serpent’s strike is usually my last resort for evading killshot because of all the bombs. Also, if you can get your pet between you and deadeye, that helps a lot.

I can get him easily with 4 gambits using this method. 5 gambits might require an external source of might and a stacking sigil to help counter squeamish. Greatsword would probably be more useful than warhorn, but I haven’t tested with it yet.

Oh come on, they obviously meant moral support there.

You could add more damage to GS. Just compare GS to spear. They’re practically the same weapon, but spear #1 hits so much harder, with a longer evade, and I still wouldn’t call it OP.

Xsorus.2507:

It seems odd they’d have different stats for our pets.

Only if you assume that they have some coherent pattern of thought. Once you throw out that notion, it all makes perfect sense.

Ok, near as I can tell, vitality is good for 5.5hp on a pet, with a base health of 3532.5. I set up a system of equations using drakes and feline health. Solving for that gave those numbers, which gave me the correct health when I plugged those values in for bears.

So a bear has 4809*5.5 + 3532.5 = 29982 health. That means 30 in beastmastery gives your pet an additional 1,650 health. Doesn’t seem like much.

Marksmanship could use some trait consolidation, especially on the minor traits. The 5 point minor should be opening strike and alpha strike combined. The 15 point minor should do what precise strike does, plus add 1 stack of vulnerability for 5 seconds on a critical. The 25 point trait could be something like +5-10% damage against vulnerable enemies. That would be a good set of minor traits, in my opinion.

The grandmaster traits in marksmanship don’t seem very good either. Remorseless should have been tied to cripple and possibly chill. That would have made it usable on every weapon we have. It fits the name of the trait better too. Signet of the beastmaster is good, but I feel like signet actives shouldn’t need a grandmaster trait to have an effect on the ranger.

Beast Mastery could use help too. Those traits that apply to specific pet families are a waste of space. I’d like a trait that would have my pet swap summon the pet at my target. Traits for 3 seconds of invulnerability for the pet on swap and a blast finisher at the pet’s location on swap would be cool too. Recharging pet swap on kill would be great too, now that I think about.

Traps in skirmishing wouldn’t be so bad if we had a few direct damage traps like dust trap in GW1.

We also have way too many utility skills that are just bad if you don’t invest traits into them (traps, spirits, signets).

Two things need to happen with pets. The first thing that needs to happen is a robust system for programming the pet’s behavior. Make it stored and processed locally if you have to, but give us a way to program the pet to retreat at X% health, use Y skill in the presence of this type of combo field, move away from anything that has the pet on its aggro table, do this when the boss starts a long charge up animation, etc. I want lots of triggers, like status effects, boons, conditions, health, etc. Make it exportable to a code or .txt file that we can post on the forums to help each other out. I’ve seen things like this in games on the SNES, so I’m pretty sure it can be done.

The second thing that we need is the ability to chose the stat distribution on the pets. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated, but I’d like the stat combinations from all the different armors. We sort of had this in GW1 with the hearty, dire, and elder versions of pets, and with the greater importance of gear in this game, I’m not sure why we don’t have anything like this. If anything, it should be more refined in this game.

Do those two things and I think the ranger community itself can take care of a lot of the pet behavior issues.

A third suggestion would be to change some traits so that they benefit the ranger and the pet. Companions might could and should have the opposite effect as well. Traits that effect one or the other should be stronger to compensate for the fact that it doesn’t apply to both. I know this one’s not really related to pets, but they really should have that into account when traits were designed.

I think rangers just need more trait compression in general. We have lowered skill coefficients and a number of traits and skills that affect only the ranger or only the pet. It makes sense that we would have more trait compression to counteract how the split waters down our traits.

Frost trap is the only one that doesn’t have a direct damage component.

Durzlla.6295:

Btw guys, the vuln applied from Hunters Shot was 10 for 8s, the new Vuln on rapid fire is 10s per stack, so the vuln will be up longer than it would have been on hunters shot, granted it won’t be up at peak strength as long, but it’ll still be up for a while, and assuming it takes a full 2s to apply all the vuln then it’s literally a buff and means the vuln is up LONGER than before, that is all.

Uptime is the thing to look at. Also, not sure why you would assume it only takes 2 seconds to apply the vulnerability on a 4.5 second channel. Even QZ won’t let you hit the 2 second mark.

This patch barely changed the vulnerability you can apply with the longbow. Hunter’s shot without marksmanship and cooldown reduction was 66.7% uptime. Traited (cooldown and 30 MM) it had 108% uptime. Now it’s 68.9% uptime untraited and 104% uptime traited. Before and after patch, we had 0.5 seconds of overlap when traited. As long as there’s an overlap you should be able to keep 10 stacks on the target at all times.

The big difference is that you can’t apply 20 stacks of vulnerability as quickly at the start of combat. If you use opening strike, alpha strike, and rapid fire with 30 MM, you have a 2 second window where your target has 20 stacks of vulnerability. Before, you had 6.5 seconds of it, which allowed you to place the stacks early and then follow with a weapon swap -> swoop -> maul.

I was afraid of that. It might be an improvement in a group setting, but it’s worse than the bleeds when you’re alone. I’ll give Anet this though; they’ve gotten very good at making changes look good on paper.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Zenith.7301:

Can we please get the longbow autoattack fixed now? Remove the lower tier value, move the medium value to 0-600, and the high value to 600+ please.

The greatsword autoattack also needs buffing, please. It is quite behind the mainhand sword’s autoattack by quite a bit and it’s part of the reason why it’s not being used in PvE as it’s quite a substantial damage decrease.

Why would I trade hit, hit, evade, for hit, root yourself, root yourself? Greatsword auto is fine the way it is. And Longsword auto needs a lot of work to make it even useable, let alone useful. For a sword designed around mobility and evasion it’s a terrible power chain to have.

The funny part is that Greatsword is inferior to the spear. You get more damage AND a 1.5 second evade on the auto attack. Usually underwater weapons are the same strength or weaker.

The reasonable thing to do would be to wait until we actually know the amount/duration of vulnerability applied by rapid shot. If it applies more vulnerability than hunter’s shot, it may still be a net improvement.

Durzlla.6295:

Killsmith.8169:

Durzlla.6295:

Killsmith.8169:

TooBz.3065:

Durzlla.6295:

TooBz.3065:

Prysin.8542:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQJATRjAVR29VKWs2Bg1j967vmCNtkpwQGB-j0xA4uARUCUWsIasF3ioxqtxUxER12+ioVLEw3xA-w

enjoy; potential new build that can utilize the burst given by stealth.

I like the build, but the only issue I have is that you have an incredible crit damage and almost no crit chance. If you swap out the cavalier for knights your damage goes up a lot.

Remorseless is a guaranteed crit every 9.5s

Nevermind.

You’re right though. A guaranteed crit every 9.5 seconds is about 11% crit chance on a longbow. The benefit is that you can pick the hit that criticals. That’s important in a PvP setting, maybe not as much in a PvE setting.

It’s important in both, not to mention you can make sure that 1000+ range longbow shot crits, and that’s going to HURT, i’ve seen those things hit for double digits before, GG if you get hit by one of those while you have 25 vuln and that ranger was given 25 might lol

I edited my post a little. The thing to keep in mind is that remorseless competes with signet of the beastmaster. If you want to control burst, why not take the crit on weapon swap sigil and pop SotH and SotW?

Because i like to not be a one trick pony who activates all my skills for my burst and would much rather pop one 9.5s CD skill that’s both a shield and a sword and use my utilities to inhibit my enemies from killing me.

Doesn’t matter how hard you can hit for your 10s of strength when i can just slip away and keep up my remorseless and relentless assault from afar.

You can make the same argument for the signets. You can get stability, invulnerability, movement speed, and damage from them. Both builds have merit offensively and defensively. Neither is denied the use of hunter’s shot. Neither is forced into 20 WS either so both could take 20 in BM.

You can pull off the same trick with sigils but with the added benefit of further augmenting them when you feel like it. The drawback is that you’ve used up your sigil and you can’t do two crits in rapid succession, the second crit being against a target with 10 stacks of vulnerability.

Durzlla.6295:

Killsmith.8169:

TooBz.3065:

Durzlla.6295:

TooBz.3065:

Prysin.8542:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQJATRjAVR29VKWs2Bg1j967vmCNtkpwQGB-j0xA4uARUCUWsIasF3ioxqtxUxER12+ioVLEw3xA-w

enjoy; potential new build that can utilize the burst given by stealth.

I like the build, but the only issue I have is that you have an incredible crit damage and almost no crit chance. If you swap out the cavalier for knights your damage goes up a lot.

Remorseless is a guaranteed crit every 9.5s

Nevermind.

You’re right though. A guaranteed crit every 9.5 seconds is about 11% crit chance on a longbow. The benefit is that you can pick the hit that criticals. That’s important in a PvP setting, maybe not as much in a PvE setting.

It’s important in both, not to mention you can make sure that 1000+ range longbow shot crits, and that’s going to HURT, i’ve seen those things hit for double digits before, GG if you get hit by one of those while you have 25 vuln and that ranger was given 25 might lol

I edited my post a little. The thing to keep in mind is that remorseless competes with signet of the beastmaster. If you want to control burst, why not take the crit on weapon swap sigil and pop SotH and SotW?

TooBz.3065:

Durzlla.6295:

TooBz.3065:

Prysin.8542:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQJATRjAVR29VKWs2Bg1j967vmCNtkpwQGB-j0xA4uARUCUWsIasF3ioxqtxUxER12+ioVLEw3xA-w

enjoy; potential new build that can utilize the burst given by stealth.

I like the build, but the only issue I have is that you have an incredible crit damage and almost no crit chance. If you swap out the cavalier for knights your damage goes up a lot.

Remorseless is a guaranteed crit every 9.5s

Nevermind.

You’re right though. A guaranteed crit every 9.5 seconds is about 11% crit chance on a longbow. The benefit is that you can pick the hit that criticals. That’s important in a PvP setting, maybe not as much in a PvE setting. Maul would be the exception, but by taking remorseless, you’re losing signet of the hunt and signet of the wild. The better option for controlled burst would be to take signet of the beast master and use the two signets and the sigil that makes your next hit after swapping weapons a critical.

Anyone know how much vulnerability maul and rapid fire got? I don’t really want to be a pessimist, but if maul got 3 stacks for 6 seconds, you’ll need 4,250 dps on the target to get the same damage as the bleed. This is easy in a group setting, but when you’re on your own you might see a drop in dps.

Similarly, rapid fire can’t be used as often as hunter’s shot when you take activation time into account, so if they kept the same duration on the vulnerability, we won’t keep as many stacks on the target in PvE. There’s also the initial buildup and the fact that rapid shot is not a a good attack to use if you can hit your target from max range.

These are good PvP changes, I’m just not sure if we’re coming out ahead on the PvE side of things.

I want a longbow rework that adds a skill similar to GW1 style barrage – a low cooldown cone AoE, in place of the #4 skill or maybe #3 with the effects of the current #3 skill rolled into it. Also, preparation skills good for any weapon.

The problem was that she would catch my bluff every now and then and drank water whenever it was up. Meanwhile, I couldn’t build up for belch without losing a lot of health that couldn’t be recovered.

I think it’s always been wrong. My maul hits with signet of the hunt have only ever given a 50% increase, not the 150% increase stated in the tooltip.

I thought the one in divinity’s reach was harder. For whatever reason she never let her signature move lapse.

I actually tried this against the norn yesterday and it didn’t give me any health. Healing spring didn’t do anything for me either.

I bet they could make an animation where the ranger stabs the sword into the ground mid leap to change direction and do a dodge roll. Once there’s an animation for it they should be able to change the mechanics side of it to allow dodges.

You should use the best gear available for each class. Otherwise you won’t see the full effect of the different skill coefficients. Builds may change based on weapon as well. I got the best results for greatsword by going 30/20/20/0/0. Once you get 20% cooldown for greatsword skills you get a nice rotation of two autoattack chains followed by a maul. The same build won’t work for the sword because the auto attack chain does the best damage, making the cooldown useless.

When I tested, I was able to kill the heavy target dummy in 11 seconds with warrior greatsword and 13 seconds with ranger greatsword and no pet. However, power, precision and crit damage can all go higher in PVE. I’m not sure if the pet can fill that gap or not.

The other thing to consider is that a 2 second difference against a player sized health pool gets scaled up with a boss’s health pool. Suddenly 2 seconds turns into 200 seconds because the boss has 2,000,000 health instead of 20,000.

I think I’d be able to match my warrior’s dps in PVE with a full zerker build if the pet was able to attack the entire time. It might take some good might stacking on the ranger too though. My warrior doesn’t have much trouble getting above 20 stacks of might. The equivalent trait on the ranger only puts the might on the pet.

I’d really like an effect that makes pets really durable in PVE as long as they don’t top the aggro table. Basing it off of aggro would prevent them from being invincible tanks and ressers.

Companion’s might may be better than pet’s prowess. It’s definitely a good alternative if you aren’t using felines.

If you work things around to a 30/20/20/0/0 setup you can take offhand training, which gets you better fury uptime. Plus, you have the option to equip a greatsword if you want to.

You’re talking about using a lot of resources that aren’t typically available to a ranger traited for dps.

Ok, after thinking about how to make a ranger keep up with the offensive specs of other classes in PVE, I had an idea that might make pets a reliable boost to our damage without requiring quite as much babysitting.

My proposed solution is to give all pets a passive buff that caps the damage they take from a single hit to a percentage of their maximum health. I’m leaning towards 25% to 50% myself. This buff would also give them constant health regeneration equivalent to the out of combat health regeneration. Furthermore, this buff is removed any time the pet has aggro from an enemy or takes damage from an enemy player.

With this buff, pets should be able to survive AOE attacks in dungeons without being downed in one shot. Also, it doesn’t make them capable of tanking every boss in the game like a uniform boost to toughness would since they lose the buff while they have aggro. There would still be some spots where you have to pay attention to the pet, but it would require far less management than it does currently.

At any rate, let me know what you think.

I’m doing some testing now with my ranger and warrior with traits assigned. My warrior is killing the heavy dummy in 11 seconds with greatsword and 9.5 seconds with axe. Ranger is killing the dummy in 13 seconds with a greatsword and in 11 seconds with the sword. I compared these weapons because axe vs. axe is melee vs. ranged.

My warrior’s attack was 3223 and my ranger’s attack was 3219. Crit damage was 62% for every weapon except warrior axe, which was 72% (trait).

I left utility skills out because it adds too much complexity to the testing. Warrior could get a fairly consistent damage boost with shouts or signets while ranger could get 50% extra damage on one attack every 24 seconds and 25% extra damage for 8 seconds every 48 seconds with SotW.

Also keep in mind that the health on this dummy was buffed to 20k I think.

In PVE the much larger health pools amplify the difference in killing times. Against something with the same armor and 200k health, the difference in times goes up an order of magnitude as well. It is proportionally the same, but the absolute time is what matters.

Also note that in real circumstances, the ranger will have more trouble getting his damage bonuses in melee range. He needs to be flanking, have full endurance, and be above 90% health. The warrior just has to avoid using adrenaline.

One thing to note about the warrior’s crit damage tree is that they have a grandmaster trait that gives a 15% bonus crit chance with full adrenaline. That’s equivalent to 315 precision. It does require them to keep their adrenaline full, but that’s usually not much of a problem.

First of all, to the OP, good job on putting this together.

Jubskie, the main split between PVE and PVP is going to be the stats on your gear. Having more stat points makes differences in damage output grow. If there’s a resource out there that gives the maximum stats for both game modes, you could figure out how things will look in PVE without too much trouble.

The fundamental flaws with this test are that you aren’t selecting traits and you’re limiting yourself to the 1st skill on each weapon. Some classes have better placement of damage traits than others. Likewise, some classes have significant damage contribution from skills 2-5 while others don’t. Finding the optimal damage output for each weapon for each of these classes would be difficult and might take more time than it’s worth. I would recommend spot checking this on some weapons if you have time to do more. Greatsword would be a good choice because of maul and 100 blades. Warrior axe and ranger sword get the best damage from the auto attack. The warrior has his burst skill, but we aren’t counting the ranger’s pet either, so that might be a wash.

Also, I’m not sure when you did your testing, but I believe this last patch changed the health on the training dummies. If your testing took place before and after the patch, you might want to reevaluate.

What if they make points held by the underpopulated server tick for more? That way the out manned server gets more points for what they do hold. If you do something like that though, you’d want to log the amount of player time spent in WvW so that you can get an accurate picture of who has the most participation.

It would be strong in pvp, but I don’t think it would create a situation where you have great offense and defense at the same time.

There are still plenty of ways around it. I’ve found that people like using CC to force you off of your healing spring (and the point) and then kill you.

I don’t see why maul couldn’t have a blast finisher. Guardian’s hammer puts down a light field with the auto attack and has a blast finisher on the #2 skill. You can use that blast finisher with a light field every 4 3/4 seconds.

The water field blast finisher isn’t as strong as you would think. My group once toyed with spamming the banner’s blast finisher inside of healing spring for extra healing. The results weren’t impressive.

My ele puts down 5 in 4 seconds. 6 in 4 seconds if I’m fast enough. I’m not sure why my ranger can’t have any.

Chopps.5047:

D&D shortbow is 600 inches

D&D longbow is 1200 inches

GW2 is heavily influenced by that game. Just a thought. Maybe you should be glad it’s not 600 range?

Still…

Shortbow is almost as powerful as sword, pierces, and stacks insane might on pet with companion’s might and berserker now with the huge buff to companions might. Arguably, in dungeons and wvw, shortbow just got a lot better. In pvp it is a nerf because people were pressuring points from 1200 inches with a psuedo-melee weapon. Come on, that’s not too strong? Everyone and their mom used shortbow until yesterday because of it’s ridiculous range. It should have been nerfed a long time ago.

Actually, it’s 60 feet, and that’s just a range increment. The weapon shoots much farther, but you take a -2 penalty to attack rolls for each range increment past the first.

Nobody used shortbow solely because of the range. Most people probably saw it as the least sucky ranged option. It has decent defensive/utility skills built in, benefits from the piercing arrows trait, and isn’t the longbow. Those are the three things it has going for it.

Also, if we’re going to apply logic to this stuff, we should probably first recognize that a shortbow’s real world equivalent would probably be a composite bow, which had all of the range of a longbow, but was much smaller due to the improved materials, design, and construction.

GS could use a little bit of tweaking I think. Maul should be a blast finisher and the 2-5 skills shouldn’t reset our auto attack chain. That would let us support the other melee fighters and give is a little more control over when the evade in the auto attack chain happens.

As far as damage goes, the spear does more damage. You could raise the damage on GS by 40% across the board and it still wouldn’t be OP in PVE.

So in other words, the CC to CD comparison doesn’t mean much because CD competes with precision for stat allocation, not CC.