Showing Posts For Kiran.2705:
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You can theory craft all you want, but you can’t say that one way or another. Fact is that spirits being invuln would be a very big change that would need to be carefully looked at. That makes them autofollowing buffs as good as or better than banners that also have fairly good active skills when you don’t have to worry about them dying.
I support a change like this, but it would have to be looked at carefully and well tested.
There’s no theory crafting about it. You’ll just continue the long standing trend of mediocrity if you do anything but make spirits unkillable. Anything else will simply result in them being murdered at the start of every battle. This game is packed with AoE. I can’t even expect my tank pet to survive more than five seconds in a fight. What makes you think spirits will? There’s no way around it if you want spirits to be viable.
There’s a world of difference between hitting like a thief and being a thief. Thieves can stealth, steal, burst, re-stealth, and escape and still hit like thieves. Rangers… can’t. They have no escapes to speak of. I’d much rather build for survival over glass canon. If you don’t have a get out of jail free card then glass canon is a free trip to the portal keep.
No, the reason the ranger isn’t wanted is because the ranger is a memememe kind of character. They offer nothing to the rest of the group outside of raw DPS, and anyone and their dog can do that. The ranger doesn’t excel at DPS. Other classes hit much harder and put on the hurt much faster. Sure, the ranger is hard to master, but even mastering it doesn’t make you a king. It makes you barely on par with mediocre players at every other class, save maybe thieves. Oh boy, all that extra work just to pull my own weight, where the same amount of mastery could make me more effective playing something else. And pets are way bugged, and that which is not bugged is very poorly implemented. F2 skills that miss more than half the time, other skills you can’t control, which also miss, extremely low hit point tables, inability to evade, terrible pathing, non-existent AI, I’m sorry, why do these make us good? The ranger pet is regarded more as a handicap than it is a tool. A reason to not allow us to put out the raw weapon DPS of classes like warriors while simultaneously dragging us further down with its unreliability. Still not master class. Not an ounce of potential there until Anet gets off their lazy keisters and makes some adjustments.
Rangers have way too few build options, especially when it comes to skills. Spirits are completely useless. 60 second CD, long cast time actives, practically non-existent HP wastes of space. Until spirits are viable(and the only way to make them viable is to make them unable to receive damage), Rangers will NEVER bring any utility to a group, thus making them undesirable in virtually every non-solo setting. Signets are OK, but just OK. Several of them have active abilities that don’t even work with beastmaster signet talent, which makes them a waste if you go deep into marksmanship. That leaves us with survival and traps, and traps seems to be the weapon of choice. Sadly, traps aren’t exactly a group friendly build. Neither is survival, for that matter. Why bring a Ranger when an Ele can provide healing, a Guardian can provide boons, or a Warrior can provide Banners? Mesmer’s bring tons of group utility as well. That leaves us competing with thieves, and even they bring venom. What does a ranger bring? Entangle? A few AoEs make that worthless, and in zerg settings AoEs are a dime a dozen. Muddy terrain? You’ve already stated we don’t’ want to be in people’s faces, so that’s out. Nothing else is particularly group oriented.
While the pet does make us somewhat flexible, it’s shortcomings more than diminish that. You can’t possibly argue that pets aren’t straight up bugged. I don’t want to be a kittenailing-at-all-trades-equally. I’d rather fill a niche that makes my class wanted for grouping. Rangers aren’t even the best soloers given that other classes have much better escapes. The ranger doesn’t have any. So where does that leave us? DEFINITELY not master class. Not even close.
Unkillable spirits wouldn’t be broken. Not even close. They’d just be usable in large group settings, which is where they SHOULD shine. Spirits affect everyone in range. Sadly, everyone in range is getting pelted by AoE. Spirits get hit by one arrow cart volley and bye bye. That’s unacceptable. Making it two arrow cart volleys is equally unacceptable. Adding more HP would only help if it was a massive increase, given that their current base HP is pathetically low. Unkillable spirits actually gives them a chance to do their job.
It wouldn’t be broken because spirits are a supporting skill slot. Their actives are slow and obvious, making them easily avoidable. The only reliable portion would be the buffs, and I don’t see a ranger with a few extra boons being massively hard to kill. If things like shouts, consecration, banners, veils, time warps, and what not are all 100% reliable, spirits should be too.
One and ONLY spirit fix, spirits can not be harmed. Having spirits die is just stupid, and dying as easily as they do now is straight kittenation. They have actives with a cast time and only provide passive support. WHY SHOULD THEY BE ABLE TO DIE? Do warrior banners die? Do shouts die? Do consecration fields die? So on and so forth.
Make Ranger spirits immune to all damage. Change “Vigorous Spirits” trait to something alone the lines of “Spirit cool downs and active ability cool downs are reduced by 20%”, change all non-elite spirit cool downs to 90 seconds. Fixed.
Anything else simply won’t do. Spirits will continue to be nothing but useless as long as people can simply wave them away with AoE.
As with everyone else, I’ve come to the invetible conclusion that ranger spirits are far too fragile in nearly every situation, sPvP, WvW, PvE, and otherwise. A single AoE can wipe out an entire pack before they even finish activating their abilities. Until that gaping flaw is fixed, spirits will always be ulta-useless.
Ranger is just an abandoned and over-looked class, by both players and Anet. Gotta deal with it.
Zergs do move around the map entirely too quickly. It seems to me that smaller groups should be faster, due to their ability to be more coordinated. Thanks to AoE and ground based swiftness buffs, you can keep swiftness up on every person in your zerg without them even being in your group. Even solo players can run at top speed without having the buff built into their character. This makes small groups almost pointless. Not only can you not reliably outrun zergs, you can’t even finish a fight with another group of similar size before a zerg shows up. The swords on the map, way points, and constant run speed allow them to collapse on you before the fight is complete.
Large scale fighting has long since evolved from the, “old smash our heads against one another until someone loses”. Battles are won by tactical decisions, which quite often involve either running away or retreating to regain a favorable position. Just mindlessly running at one another requires neither skill nor tactics, only numbers. In your world, the group with the most numbers wins, and they ALWAYS win. The little guy has no chance. After a while, the little guy just quits, and no fights happen for anyone. In the real world, the group with the best execution wins, with numbers playing a still significant, but no longer absolute, role. You can keep your mindless zerging world. I like the real world better.
A) The borderlands are too small. They’re made up choke points, cliffs, archways, and keeps with too few open areas for small groups to make clean engagements or, most importantly, disengagements. There’s no room to make good fights and large groups move around the map so quickly that they can collapse upon you before your fight is even finished. Zergs can clog up an entire route and box you in quite easily, so running in a small gangs is extremely risky.
B) Objectives give you the best rewards. Player kills don’t. That promotes blitzing keeps while defenders are occupied elsewhere on the map and avoiding prolonged engagements, which small groups would be able to side door or back door.
C) WvW is set up around servers, not guilds or groups. If it doesn’t benefit the server, no incentive is provided to do it. Small man groups rarely benefit server warfare, since they avoid all the things that bring in server prestige in favor of fair fights on open ground. Server oriented groups actually hate them.
Small gang fighting doesn’t really exist in this game. The deck is too stacked against them. It would also require drastic changes to fix that, which I doubt Anet will ever even consider. 8v8 days of DAoC are gone. Let them rest in peace.
Positive side to being a ranger, we can’t go anywhere but up. It can’t possibly get any worse than it is, can it?
Pets need massive work in both the defensive and offensive departments.
Offensive: They need to be able to hit moving targets. This is a stupid easy fix. Make all their skills mini-AoEs. Now you don’t have to change animations. Give them a small radius and they’ll actually connect.
Defensive: Pets die way too easily. They should be able to evade. Pets also need some sort of AoE and siege damage reduction so you can’t spam AoE them down effortlessly. What’s the worst that could happen? People actually have to target pets to kill them? Oh noes, ranger pets are a threat. What is the world coming to?
I really don’t know how Anet could miss these gaping design flaws. Other games had this figured out years ago.
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