Ok, sorry about that, I thought the drakehound’s immobilize was single target. Good to know!
No need to apologize. xD
All dog howls affect up to 5 targets, regardless of whether the ability affects foes or allies. (i.e. fernhound)
(Although any Ranger fight’s technically a 2v1, due to the Pet’s % of class DPS)
Any person with a modest amount of field awareness can avoid the majority of a pet’s damage, and can most certainly avoid its key skills, as most high damage/CC pet abilities are extremely obviously telegraphed; calling a fight against a ranger 2v1 is just disingenuous.
The difference in rotation/strategy between d/d and d/f is actually pretty significant. I’ve been playing d/f for a few months now and I’ve had a lot of success with it. It does about 75% of the damage d/d can do but it has so much more active defense. Your only weakness is trying to damage people at range since the only real gap closer is Earth 3, but the ranged defense more than makes up for it imo.
I think they could start by increasing the cooldown of renewing stamina to10s.
And you realize this nerfed DD and SD burst right? They also nerfed fury. this is a tricky situation but we all know cleanses need to be toned down as well as base healing. Until they do that they will nerf all of the above killing anything that isn’t full bunker and it really is a shame because the nerf needs to happen but what they nerf always seems to be the little tools that let no bunker builds survive.
Nerf /D btw and watch the rise of D/F unkillable builds. they are already out there but no one uses them.
I’ve been using D/F for quite some time now and it’s a very efficient set when you learn how to damage with it.
The 50% condition duration thing on pets doesn’t seem to affect the chill. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
You appear to be correct, and the regular wolf’s fear howl seems to have the same issue.
Definitely looks like a trap build.
Regarding alpine wolf, I don’t want to give you incorrect info so someone please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I believe Alpine Wolf’s chill is AoE, whereas drakehound’s F2 is single target. Worth taking into account.
Knockdowns from Hyenas can be super useful, the damage is awful though so it’s a tradeoff. That second hyena is hard to keep alive for very long though.
They are both AoE.
Drakehound Vs. Hyena. which one’s the better option?
Im running drakehound and regular (fear F2) wolf atm.
Edit-
Also, conditions duration increase by 50%, I assume is malicious training? my only issue with that is that it’s down the marksmanship tree.
The only thing Hyena is good for is a double knockdown, at which point its usefulness ends because it has horrid base attack power. Just my opinion. All the other dogs are relatively good sources of constant damage as they attack quickly and have high power with modest precision.
You only need 10 Marksmanship for the trait. What is your current setup?
Yeh tried out the hyenas last night, wasn’t really impressed. Still prefer Drakehound.
0/30/25/10/5
I’m not sure what kind of build you’re running. Traps?
I honestly wouldn’t want to see the healing scale to be toned down, or at least not much, or else this would make the healing power stat a bit useless.
Also, I always felt that Cleansing Wave should be a focus skill. My immediate reaction to that skill, when I started playing this game, was “wait, this is a OH dagger skill? Why is this not on focus?” :P Especially when the scepter also had the other direct heal skill while MH dagger was left with a slower, more sustained heal skill. It kinda made sense to me that the more traditionally “magical” items would share more similarities with each other. But I suppose that with so much damage mitigation/ prevention in focus, healing like that could be a bit too strong.
Meanwhile, comet is like the ranged, weaker earthquake, and I can’t quite understand why both comet and magnetic surge are blast finishers, you won’t want to exactly combo them with the flamewall all the time, because those skills are more conditional and should be saved for specific times. And now that fire shield gives might, what is the point of all this in the focus, offer a different way to stack might like scepter/ oh dagger do? But it just doesn’t work, because it requires fast switching between three attunements instead of only two (meaning you would have to “waste” one of those attunements), depend on your opponents, and “waste” two utility skills. Might-stacking, in the focus, feels accidental – sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, without any particular strategy nor any direct result from the player’s intention.
I do like the idea of fire aura basically being the elementalist’s “weaker” version of retaliation, that also happens to make them get stronger whenever they get hit, but that kinda goes against the profession’s playstyle, that relies on dodging and rupting, and can’t soak up damage like a warrior or a necromancer. Besides, when a player sees a character covered in a (burning or not) magical shell, what is the first thing a player thinks of? “It’s a defensive/ block animation!” For all those reasons, fire shield (it’s even called “shield”!) deserved as much the 10% damage reduction frost aura got, if not more.
The focus feels kinda unfocused (lol) at the moment. There’s this vague idea that it’s a defensive set with some ranged disruption, but then it has several details that aren’t consistent with the set as a whole. Some weirdly-placed blast finishers, a weird might-stacking subtheme, a random ranged chill, 2 very conditional anti-projectile skills, and a fire skillset that is purely about condition damage while its earth set has no single bleed. Are the chill and knockdown skills even meant to make dragon’s tooth hit more often? But dragon’s tooth is mostly a burst skill, and the focus offers no burst at all… :P The focus is so contradictory at parts.
(And currently isn’t as fun as playing with OH dagger, due to the lack of epic skills, interesting cross-attunement combos, and plain simply some underwhelming or highly conditional effects).
I’m not sure what you’re doing with focus; it’s an extremely powerful defensive/utility tool and the might stacking is easily comparable to /dagger. It’s more than fluid in this regard as well; when you combo right the focus actually has higher might stack potential because of recharges/dual fire shield potential with dagger mainhand. The range on swirling winds is absolutely amazing considering its very fast casting time and relatively short recharge (try grabbing aeromancer’s alacrity for a lot of anti-range fun and extra utility) and magnetic wave is like having a free cleansing flame that applies aoe cripple+blast finisher. I think d/f is stronger than s/f because of the current levels of synergy regarding blast finishers and auras, but an ele who can use focus well is not to be trifled with. Focus will shine even more when cantrips are brought down a tad more and other utilities are brought up. I think it could use a little tweaking on a few recharges/cast times, but it’s really solid overall.
I think this is yet another reason to bring the quickness trait up to a 3 second duration. Quickness has already taken a huge hit, so it’s not like this can be as overpowered as the swap-stomp combo was before the nerf.
Nice write up. As someone said previously, cantrips bring in too many stun breakers. A better repartition of stun breakers could already improve different builds. Cantrips can do too much damage mitigation when traited, remove a bit of this mitigation from cantrips and give it to other builds. Overall elementalists have too much synergy from two trees (arcana and water).
We probably have a lot of rebalancing to go under, but in any case please help other classes first.
I think a huge problem is that the majority of traits (individual ones and entire lines) do not have this kind of synergy. I think the ele needs to be toned down slightly in this area, but a bigger priority should be compression of the sheer number of traits into a lesser number of much more viable traits that have great synergy when you build them correctly.
Drakehound Vs. Hyena. which one’s the better option?
Im running drakehound and regular (fear F2) wolf atm.
Edit-
Also, conditions duration increase by 50%, I assume is malicious training? my only issue with that is that it’s down the marksmanship tree.
The only thing Hyena is good for is a double knockdown, at which point its usefulness ends because it has horrid base attack power. Just my opinion. All the other dogs are relatively good sources of constant damage as they attack quickly and have high power with modest precision.
You only need 10 Marksmanship for the trait. What is your current setup?
Remember you can trait for increased condition durations. This would turn the chill into a six second chill (if I am correct that the increase is 50% duration) and the immobilise into a three second immobilise.
You are correct; the duration increase is 50%. A single 6 second chill is a very strong weapon when you use it properly. Waiting until just after your target uses a healing skill (or swaps out of water attunement if ele) and then significantly increasing its recharge is a great way to wear down tankier characters.
If you time the skills to hit at around the same time you can pull off surprising damage with staff before your target has time to react, especially if you are assisting an ally who is fighting on a point.
well from memory its- (e)Churn to Tele on top of targeted mob, switch to (f) drop fire spike ,fire ring ,pheonix,flame pull. (this portion of the rotation kills 75% of targets, plus gives 9-13 stacks of might) if im still fighting i continue with switching to (a) dodge to blind, #2, blind again,updraft into ride the lightning. (this keeps enemies either knocked down,blinded,crippled the entire time, plus anyone around them is dead as well)
Now if my tele churn isnt ready i go into battle doing the following.
I Ride the Ltn in, Updraft to knock down, then use #2 ability, then blind again. Switch to earth (which cripples) and knock em down, apply bleed then Blind em with earth #3…by this time they have been so demoralized that you can finish em off with a switch to fire and pheonix,ring,flame pull….toast!
also to remember, while jumping around blinding and knocking down you can switch to water to heal and remove conditions, and use the 5 and 2 to heal people around you up.
this build really is the best one ive seen for skirmishing.
feel free to guest over to dark haven and say hello!
Jaxx.
I find it’s good to follow Churning with Earthquake; the KD keeps them still long enough for your fire 4 and 3 to hit with time to start casting your next spell.
How to use churning earth effectively.
Step 1
Arcane 30: XII elemental SurgeStep 2
Take arcane bolt or wave and lightning flashStep 3
Start casting churning earth, then teleport at you foe and use your instant bolt or wave to imob them before they can dodge it.Step 4
Profit.
Dodge wave or bolt?
It’s because of the March 26th update. Some actions that do not complete during quickness take an extra bit of time to finish; using your finisher is one of these actions. However, I do not think your healing slot is affected the same way; I could be wrong.
I think it depends on the challenge of the content. For easier content (e.g. everything but fractals and PvP), your group probably won’t need help surviving and max damage dictates that you stay in fire. I’d recommend 30/10/0/10/20 with Pyromancer’s Puissiance.
Do the trait points still work in your favor if you’re staying in fire or do you have to switch to that attunement to reap the benefits of the trait points ?
For example. If you put trait points on earth traits,lets say to raise toughness, will the toughness still work for you while in fire attunement ?
Also, can you solo pve from 0 to 80 only using the fire attunement ?
Trait point investment is always active. Certain traits may not be, such as Pyromancer’s Puissance, which requires that you be in Fire to gain might per spell cast. You can take the 5 Earth trait as an example of this as well. The toughness you gain by investing in Earth is always there, but that particular trait will only add additional toughness if you are currently attuned to Earth.
Also, I cannot see anybody soloing PvE without switching attunements. The recharges in Fire attunement don’t provide you with enough utility to have active defense.
In PvE I guess if you trait correctly it has an alright amount of damage. However, you can only feasibly play this way if you are using a Staff and have a team to cover you, so don’t bother with it if you want to do anything but sit back and spam Lava Font all day. It is also arguable that the amount of utility you sacrifice by refusing to switch elements is detrimental to your overall performance, as well as the performance of anybody you decide to play with.
what do you mean?
staff has plenty of channeled abilities.
everything from Fire – #1, #2, #3, and #5. Water – #2 through #5, and most of the earth skills as well.
Lightning is the attunment with the overall fastest casted abilities.
Unless i am mistaken thinking something that requires a casting bar is a channeled ability?
is an ability only “channeled” if u are immobilzed while using it?
For the purposes of the trait, Meteor Shower is the only skill that is “channeled.” Nothing else the staff uses will trigger the trait. If this were improved to help skills with a cast time of more than 1 second (random value as an example) the trait would be much better.
For a build that wants more consistent pressure/damage, he is right to bring hawk/eagle. Assuming conditions are not cleansed, each one adds about 1500 damage to their f2 because of bleeds anyway.
However, even though your build is gearing towards conditions, it doesn’t change the fact that Sharpening Stone is an absolute rubbish utility. Your bleed application cannot really be controlled once it is active and the 5 hit limit can’t really be justified vs the recharge. I would bring something like Lightning Reflexes.
(edited by Leuca.5732)
Just rlly LOL at this all.. You guys aren’t thinking.. Same goes to that culling effect.. Everyone thought WvW was going to be so much more fun.. Well, is it now? No, cuz every second you see someone saying “Lag here” or “wow, skill-lag, kitten this”.. Same will happen if u delete the cap since the server will need to proccess a whole lot more HP bars, skills, debuffs…
You can flame all u want, but you’ll see when they should delete cap again..
It needs to be higher than 5 to punish bad mob mentality.
Lingering elements does not work with many things that it should in theory, including the traits you are mentioning if I’m not mistaken.
Swirling winds is plenty strong without having a combo field. Perhaps a whirling finisher close to the epicenter, but nothing more than that. If you trait for air skill recharges it’s essentially immunity to projectiles 25% of the time. Look at skills that really need improvements, such as Flame Wall (super slow to cast, low damage, awkward field) and a possible recharge reduction on Gale. Focus is actually pretty solid; it wouldn’t take much work to get it in order.
You should reevaluate your build, I’ve seen some pretty horrifying damage coming from GS rangers (if/when they land maul, pro tip, take a spider/canine) not to mention longbow and short bow can STILL pump out a constant high DPS output, our burst, for the most part, was butchered, but we still have that brutally high sustain which if you ask me is more deadly due to how you can’t easily avoid sustained damage.
PS: if you’re a GC using a bow your defense is your range, learn to get away, LR and/or Monarch Leap+ hornet sting combo = you won’t be caught.
If I hadn’t reevaluated I wouldn’t be complaining about how much my build was hurt by the update. Maul is too obviously telegraphed to be effective against people who are good at avoiding damage, and considering it’s the only major source of DPS on the GS now that all ranger quickness is garbage, it’s pretty much the skill I wait for when I’m fighting one, which is not hard; if you’re fast enough you can even run through them without wasting a dodge since most people are constantly toggling movement during a fight anyway. Perhaps I’m just used to playing enough that the majority of players just don’t use enough mind-games to get to me, but if you aren’t speccing into a moderate amount of condition damage now you’re basically useless as a ranger, and I find that conceptually wrong.
It’s fine and dandy to say that pets are a great source of CC and that they will help you land your damage, but if you are waiting for your dog to knockdown (obvious telegraph) or your spider to immobilise (even their non f2 immobilize has a distinct animation) then you’re in a sorry state when facing a player with a well-balanced build. GS is still inferior because of all the nerfs that happened, even though the damage/recharge changes were indeed useful.
I had fun running an all-melee ranger build and it’s now a completely useless spec from a pure DPS perspective. I don’t need to learn to get away, avoid damage, etc.; I just find it extremely detrimental to this game’s future success that they invalidate a complete category of builds in a single update. Will there be additional updates to help us? Possibly, but that’s not the point right now.
>If 70 players are so bad to stack in a spot they deserve to lose
exactly, right now primitive zerg ball is the way to go in wvw – I condider this an epic fail.
>If people plays extremely bad they SHOULD lose…
>and not win just due to the number.exactly, this is why there is no real strategy in wvw at the moment.
In a real siege, 70 people did not bang on a door while explosions from above hit 5 invaders at a time; they used SIEGE weapons to blow things up then send in their peeps so that their peeps wouldn’t get slaughtered during the attempt to get in. Changes need to be made to AoE cap and in WvW how siege weapons are made.
If you could trait a decent passive minion regen or share boons with them (grandmaster tier possibly?) I would be fine with them lacking natural regeneration outside of combat.
AoE cap encourages bad mob mentality; remove it and you make people think before they throw their stupid everywhere the map will allow.
I’ve been using canines a lot (specifically the hyena) and I haven’t had any issues, intact the Hyenas have this sinister AI where they’ll stagger their KD so if you dodge one the other hits or you get a very nice talk with the dirt on the floor…
As for the power ranger thing, yeah idk, I use carrion so I can’t say I’m a power build seeing as how I rely quite a bit on condis for my full damage.
However I can say its absolutely NOT necessary to use those two traits unless you plan on swapping your pets every 15s, personally I never liked swapping my pets until they needed a heal and mine was on CD/I’d need it after they’d die without it. I suggest you get out of the habit of constant swapping and watch how much better your BM build works.
PS: how did cats get nerfed? I know my drakes, canines, spiders, and devourers still kill like they used to, never was a fan of cats and birds though.
It’s not a matter of habit; it’s simply how power-based rangers push DPS. I never swapped on recharge just to do it, but there was a method to timing swaps when you saw an opening in order to land your damage more efficiently. This goes for any build, but especially power-based builds. We need some sort of reliable damage increase and it was just flushed down the toilet. I fluctuated between Berserker and Valkyrie amulets and my build is all of a sudden rubbish in one fell swoop because no non-condi setup can do reliable damage for any sustained period of time without being so squishy that a glass ele lasts longer.
How’s BM not viable? Swap pets less… I use canines (never used cats for my BM builds if I wanted damage I went for birds) and I just keep one stowed away here I -know- if I need his KD (or burst if its a bird) when I need it.
Oh yeah, Speed Training and Commanding Voice are just absolutely amazing now that those CDs matter…
No, they’re not amazing; they’ve just become necessary as we’ve gotten weaker.
No, they’re hardly necessary, don’t swap your pets so often if you think they’re necessary, and tbh idk why it didn’t work as it does now, to begin with. I mean what other “weapon” or prof mechanic recharges when you swap it? The answer is none…
They’re totally necessary if you want a pet-focused build to be even close to viable right now. Bad pet AI+highly telegraphed attacks+slow recharge+quickness nerf=lol@nonconditionrangers. I haven’t faced a non-condition ranger since the patch that I’ve had trouble with; they just don’t put out enough DPS to be a real threat. Pet auto attacks need a buff if this is to be taken seriously. They’re never going to buff our weapons to a point that’s really all that comparable to other professions, so at least make our pets something to be scared of. The only DPS pets that didn’t really suffer from this patch were Ravens/Eagle/Hawk, and the fact that they drop so quickly means that power-based rangers are being forced to take pieces of razor-sharp paper into battle.
What would be interesting is if they buffed the 25 Death Magic trait to 10% instead of 5% and made the toughness you get from Dark Armor actually mean something by allowing it to affect the 25 DM trait. Healthy trait synergy says hi.
Here’s lookin’ at you, Anet.
How’s BM not viable? Swap pets less… I use canines (never used cats for my BM builds if I wanted damage I went for birds) and I just keep one stowed away here I -know- if I need his KD (or burst if its a bird) when I need it.
Oh yeah, Speed Training and Commanding Voice are just absolutely amazing now that those CDs matter…
No, they’re not amazing; they’ve just become necessary as we’ve gotten weaker.
People figured out how to play like tanks.
Glass S/D is really fun, but he’s right; you have to choose your battles VERY wisely. A lightning flash in with Churning Earth followed by Earthquake, Ring of Fire and Phoenix+Arcane Wave kills a lot of stuff.
The lack of universal viability in Fire/Earth/most of Air magic traitlines means that you will eventually switch your traits to mostly Arcana/Water anyway, so you’re really already going in the right direction assuming eles don’t get their bad traits buffed. The optimal PvE build is usually 10 Air magic, 30 Water Magic, and 30 Arcana, from what I understand.
I think scepter/dagger is probably your most useful set in PvE. It has the ability to apply the Might boon in very large amounts to yourself and your nearby allies with its myriad combo finishers and quickly recharging fire field. It also has the two fastest healing skills eles have on their weapon set skills, being Water Trident and Cleansing Wave.
all (ALL!) of those can be done with D/D:
AoE might? np, Ring of Fire, earthquake+churning earth+arcane wave
AoE frost armor? np, aurashare!
AoE swiftness? just use a random aura (too bad leap thru ring of fire is still bugged, I think)
AoE healing? cone of cold, cleansing wave (+ evasive arcana and healing ripple which are shared between weapons)on top of all this, you get better mobility
sorry, but staff is just plain inferior to d/d.
You must finish the animation to get the fire shield; you can’t get interrupted mid-leap or you lose the finisher. Also, Powerful Auras only shares auras gained via your regular weapon skills and traits, not from combo fields, etc.
Stop spamming your 2 key so hard and you might solve this problem.
But how else will I kill anything!?
/endsarcasm
you sure you wasnt hit with Ranger’s AoE Root elite it shows no icons other than the bleeds it starts stacking on you.
Actually Entangle repeatedly applies a short-duration immobile, which you can cleanse as soon as it’s applied in order to move, but this is not an immobile. I spent about 5 seconds the other day locked in place with no conditions but bleeding/poison. I was not stunned or dazed, or otherwise snared. I don’t know if this bug lasts only 5 seconds; I was dead before I could test it; I’m pretty much always dead when it happens.
Weak, I’m not sure it’s worth traiting even for a full condition build.
Well from a conceptual standpoint it could add 25% more damage to sigil of earth-based bleeding build, but you are right, it is quite a weak trait as is.
Essentially, quickness is a good buff for base damage, and an amazing buff for spike damage (hence why warriors are going nuts over this). Most rangers aren’t about spike, so they don’t feel that much pain beyond the useful 2 second pet swap buff for stomping, ressing, etc.
I used this on a berserker-based beastmaster for lots of mini spikes. However, they hit quickness and pet skill recharge at the same time, so I no longer have this option.
My guess is that it would be either 33 or 66 percent, like most traits that bleed on crit. You could probably test this by hitting critting 100 times 5 times over, and counting your bleeds. Since those are the most commonly used percent chance values among the traits that have this effect, it’s probably one or the other.
I didn’t have it happen all that often before this patch. Now it happens more games than not. :/
Haste nerf was a GOOD thing. The issue people have is with the disparate impact that said haste nerf has had. Namely to the warrior- a class that was struggling already.
It’s completely killed ranger burst as well. (Not necessarily ranger sustain) Thieves have suffered a tad but I’ve seen them managing with signet instead.
Global compression of many traits would actually increase the number of builds, since you would have more viable traits intead of a huge number of useless ones.
it was/is a bad game mechanic, be glad it’s not gone completely bro!
Of course it was a bad mechanic, but entire skillsets are balanced around it even existing, which means the entire system is completely out of wack right now.
I’ve been dying quite a bit since the patch because I will randomly become rooted in place without any conditions on me, at which time I am blown up because bursty characters have no survivability when locked in place. If my character lacks a movement causing skill on the current weapon set or a teleport in utilities, I am guaranteed to die.
An AoE skill applied by horrible AI during combat cannot afford to have this in effect. They need to reduce some recharges to compensate, or improve traits that affect pet skills.
Agreed. This should be at least buffed to 2.5 – 3 seconds.
I agree on the basis that quickness is much less consequential than before.
Haste needed to be nerfed. It is outrageous that it took them so long.
But to not nerf the Ele in any way just shows how utterly useless the Devs are. Nerfing burst left and right while leaving Bunkers as they are, not to mention that Eles are the most OP class that ever made it into a MMO is just insane and stupid in every way.
So now its either PvE or getting a new game. Anet should shake hands with Mythic, incompetent when it comes to balance sa well.
What they’re trying to do is be careful and slow with game changes, but this was a little too slow for my liking.
I don’t get it….. I’ve seen so many Threads about how Quickness is supposed to be OP, but I never got it.
I get that It’s maybe too good that a Ranger has such an easy time to get Quickness, but in competetive play, I’ve used my Quickness almost solely to speed-rez or speed-stomp.
On the Warrior, I don’t get the Nerf one bit: The War has by far the biggest Drawback and he has no way of Reducing the CD on Frenzy. Also, the War has no Invis and his Gap-Closers are easy to dodge. Ergo: If you got spiked down by a Warrior on Frenzy, you are either bad, had bad luck with your Stunbreakers not being ready or the opposing team played well together – in all these circumstances, getting killed by the War is totally acceptable and not imbalanced in any way.
On the Engi, no1 used the Quickness anyways and besides some weird bugs on the Thief, Quickness was fine on them as well, because the Thief needed to sacrifice yet another “getaway-skill” for it.
To me, this looks like a balance-change completely geared towards lowlevel-players. I don’t hate it, but I don’t understand it.
Also, the War got some nice Buffs on the Banners, maybe this will make him more useful. I never was a fan of Frenzy on War anyways and I either used completely different builds than 100b, or I used Immobilizes (Sword F1 or Bola) rather than Frenzy.
I don’t think it’ll strenghten Bunker-builds more either, because against Guard, you use Conditions and against Bunker-Ele, nothing comes even close to Thief+Mesmer.
The problem is a lack of foresight. Anet knew that quickness was hampering their ability to balance weapons/skills, so they decided to tone it down. However, they failed to take into account the immediate negative repercussions (which would have been quite obvious to many people in the pvp community), leaving us in a rather awkward state where bunkers are now stronger than they’ve been in quite a while. And it certainly did indirectly buff bunkers; they now have much less worry about being picked off by instagib damage when they would have otherwise been much more vulnerable to it.