Or along with grenades getting a nerf (Or at least, I think it’s inevitable) the other kits could be buffed up including the wrench, giving you your ‘viable’ melee, despite the fact it’s workable at the moment?
I’ve done dungeons with it for goddness’s sake, the toolkit is okay at the moment. Instead of getting new stuff, how about the stuff that’s already there working first?
….
I wasn’t serious about the range thing, and Legolas was the ranger proto-type, actually.
kits are soemthing diffirent.You sacrifice a utility skill slot and therefore it is not a fair option compared to rangers or thieves. And the tool kits melee skills are 1 and 3, not a complete set of 5 skills, another reason why this is not a real melee option.
Aragon was in an organisation that was referred to as rangers. Legolas was, afaik, ‘just’ a soldier.
The toolkit comes with a block and pull, can cause confusion (which is always handy) and has the toolbelt skill, which throws a wrench out, protentially triggering a field twice, and hitting the target twice. It’s not perfect but it’s not bad.
The thing that always puzzles me is “traps need a good range!”
Isn’t the entire point of a trap being something to lure them on? So if/when the longbow gets improved, and you’re there shooting their socks off, anyone who tries to melee you gets made to regret it.
If it’s got range it’s just a grenade.
You’re not listening to me. Armour and it’s stats are one of the variables that affect your aggro. I’ve got full Rampagers armour on my engineer and use a flamethrower with juggernaut; in some groups in a dungeon I’m utterly ignored no matter what. In other groups with a different party makeup everything is trying to kill me. You yourself have just said you had a significant armour upgrade. I expect that’s affecting the aggro, which will understand that it’s just a pet, so there’s a player nearby.
I love the female greatsword stance, it reminds me if Siegfried and Nightmare from Soulcalibur.
It should; that character and the female humans in GW2 are using a specific two-handed sword style: http://www.thearma.org/essays/StancesIntro.htm
Note the bottom two pictures; look familiar?
a fifth position is the Nebenhut (“near ward”), assumed by rotating the weapon down and to the side from above… Note on the right side here the point slants downward and behind, not off to the side, with the long edge aiming forward at the opponent, not at the ground. This permits a strong rising cut with the long edge
Italics mine.
Note the lack of any (idle) stance like the male’s in that article. Holding a big heavy sword up like that takes effort and work, effort and work you could be saving for when you actually need to swing the blade. The male’s way of holding it would be laughed at. The closest it could be is the ‘roof guard’ in that article.
I’ll be surprised if there aren’t more stances for longswords, but my point is unaffected; the way female humans and sylvari hold the greatswords in GW2 is perfectly acceptable, especially since iirc the second attack animation after the first swings it over their head, keeping the momentum of the first swing. The third with it’s spin is a bit dodgy in terms of “you’re exposing your back” but swinging the body with the sword adds momentum to the blade, and for puppy’s sake it’s a fantasy game with BLEEPING MAGIC so I think that can be overlooked.
…and before efore anyone starts complaining, the term ‘greatsword’ is actually quite modern, and there was no absolute definition of a ‘longsword’. They could be a onehander, or they could be a good 5-6 ft in length.
What was your armour upgraded from? The AI aggro system isn’t fully understood afaik, but things like your toughness, health, potential damage are all factored in. I suspect that you’re beating the bear in terms of priority.
Engineers do though; the toolkit. It’s a wrench too, so it actually fits the tinkering tools thing. Hammers do not fit the aesthetics imo. Can you see one of those massive warhammers being used to repair a turret, or fine tune some gears?
even the class which has the word ‘range’ in it has melee options.
This is a Very Stupid thing to say that is sadly far too common. Rangers do not get their name because they use ranged weapons to attack someone from range, in much the same way warriors aren’t called ‘melee-ers’ because they attack from melee. Most rangers, especially the original ones, made extensive use of melee weapons. Aragon from Lord of the Rings, the prototype fantasy ranger, spent more time running around with a sword than a bow.
Rangers get their name from the verb “to range” which if you crack out a thesaurus gives equivalent verbs such as “to wander”. Rangers range over a large range of lands, hence they’re called rangers. It’s like how a cook cooks, or a singer sings.
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@Levetty
Exactly. There is a serious design problem with the Beastmastery line though. It encourages swapping, but Master’s Bond, which is one of the best traits in the whole line, is totally negated by swapping. It essentially forces players into one or two builds for any serious dungeon running.
Most of it is imo, because of dodgy traits (especially the mid tier ones. Cripple for animals that have chill/immobilise effects on two or three of them? Genius!) and Master’s Bond itself. Master’s Bond was (in case you didn’t play pre-release) a shoe-in added during the beta and both in part due to the other traits being crap, Master’s Bond is Very Silly with it’s strength.
I’ve been doing some heavy dungeon spelunking, and as a result stopped taking Master’s Bond because you have to rotate the pets pretty often; you can’t just ‘fire and forget’ them. I can honestly say the pets are still fine against most things, albiet this is from someone with 30 beastmastery. I can see Master’s Bond making a massive difference when you’ve got less beastmastery perhaps, but when you’ve got 30 points in beastmaster they’re still tough as nails and will happily maul most foes.
I find that (as you might expect) it depends on the terrain. If you’re on a mountainside and you have got to get down FAST, it can often mean you don’t need to stop to regen health for the next fall, or at least, shave the time down. Otherwise, yes, it can be a bit dodgy.
Yes. If you use 6 superior runes of the Ranger for example, you get all 6 bonuses listed. If you use three, you only get the first three, ect.
Pets need a lot of work. I don’t agree that they’re useless though. If you can stomach constant swapping (negating most of the benefits of a Beastmastery build)
I really have to pick up on this. The first minor trait is quickness when you swap, and the second minor trait is a reduced swapping time. If you swap before your pet is defeated, then the cooldown is reduced. The game actively encourages you to cycle your pets. The only thing it could negate is the Beastmaster’s Bond, a single minor trait.
In regards to the OP:
It depends largely on what you’re expecting going in. Many players came in expecting an archer (range, ranger, geddid?) especially the old GW1 players, where they were the de-facto ranged combat class.
If you go in expecting a long ranged class, the ‘best’ at long ranged fighting, with a pet that’s eyecandy you can send off without a second thought, a glorified ‘fire and forget’ ability, then you’re going to be sorely disappointed. This incarnation of the ‘Ranger’ is more like it’s roots, and the weapons reflect it. They’re pretty good in melee and while they can do well in ranged combat a warrior will most likely beat them comfortably in a 1v1. On their own, the ranger is a poor-man’s warrior.
However a fight against a ranger is never a 1v1. It’s always a 2v1, because the ranger has his/her companion to even the odds.
For better or worse, the pet pretty much needs some points (about 10-15) in Beastmaster to be reliably useful. You can just double up on bears, the tanky pet, to compensate, but it only goes so far, and it becomes painfully obvious who’s been skimping on the Beastmaster trait in dungeons.
This is a big problem for many players.
I personally enjoy the pets, big time, because they give you some serious utility; the drakes can hit several foes in one go, so you can belt out some alarming damage when you’re by it’s side with a greatsword. The moa’s can buff allies, handy when you’re using traps for combo fields as well. The cats and birds (ie, raven, eagle, ect) are good at hurting single targets. The spiders can mass poison and snakittengets.
Guildwars 2’s made it so the ranger cannot (like it did in GW1) exist in a bubble without the animal companion. If you neglect it, at the very least your dps will take a big hit and you’ll have your pet limping back to you, a silent recrimination.
Is the pet system perfect? Nah. They can be dumber than a bag of rocks, but the joys of AI (unlike most PuGs) is that they’re predictably stupid, so planning and compensating for it can be done without a second thought in time.
They can’t dodge AoE very well, so if you’re fighting in melee with a melee pet, by the time you’ve dodged out and told them to follow you out, they’re often badly wounded or incapacitated.
Feeding into above, some boss abilities (Hello Lt. Kohler and your yank-everyone-in-and-kill-them ability) will assuredly snuff the pet, forcing you to swap if you can or suffer the longer recharge time.
What I’m basically trying to get over is the animal companions are not eye candy. If you want eye-candy, get a minipet.
I know I’ve made a big deal about the pet, but I really feel I have to. I facepalm whenever I see the “I want to stow the pet” threads. It’s like a mesmer going “I don’t want to have to use my phantasms and illusions” or an engineer refusing to use the kits and toolbelt. If you want to run around killing stuff on your own, you will not enjoy the class. If you want to have a companion that you work with and share things with, you’ll probably enjoy it.
Weapon wise; I find the longbow is pretty dodgy with it’s autoattack, but the others (yes, even the greatsword) are fun. The Long-sword’s auto-attack has an interesting quirk in a leaping attack that effectively snares you in one spot, but skills 2 and 3 are dodge/evasion based, so it’s not that much of an issue usually. Until you try and disengage to heal anyway…
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AFAIK it’s single target only.
Actually, this is the Drake’s party piece. Every pet type has something going for them. Bears are durable, able to take a pummeling, the dogs have howls that (generally) crowd control, the cats do damage, the birds do damage and boost mobility (they actually hit a target twice per attack, meaning they can do some brutal single damage) the moas are generally support orientated, and the Drakes can wallop several foes in one go.
Probably not-there’s different pet types and different species of them (eh, polar bear vs brown bear) if you want specific styles of pet.
I’d actually reccomend a hybrid, with an emphasis upon criticals. Aside from Juggernaut, a Very Snazzy trait in the criticals line, the flamethrower auto attack doesn’t actually do that much condition damage (well, it’s about 1/3rd of your attack’s total damage) but it’s ten individual hits.
Down the critical/condition damage tree, you get the options to cause bleeding and vulnerability on critical hits.
I’ll repeat that bit about now. The flamethrower’s auto attack hits ten times. This means that the flamethrower can potentially plonk a respectable amount of bleeding on a target, and keep it there.
Power is still useful, because as you yourself picked up on, there’s only so much damage that fire can do.
The shortbow’s rof is nearly double a warrior’s though.
Dungeons. You get about 2/3rds a level a run, and some cash to boot.
Because Kisses, certain armour and weapon stats (hello Rabid) don’t drop and can’t be crafted, which means if you want exotic you need to hit a dungeon. In the case of Rabid armour, your choices are Arah, CM, TA or HoTW.
In regards to the OP: I’m up for it, I’ve got 180 token right now, and as I’ve alluded, I’m gunning for a full 6 piece armour set, so that’s about 24 runs.
Excuse me while I quietly facepalm; you’re not reading what I’m saying. There’s no point spending karma on things you can get with gold or from drops because then you’ve wasted karma. Karma which you could be spending on stuff that you cannot get with gold or from drops.
Notice how I kept using the Krytan skin as an example, the tier 1 human karma weapon?
Thing is Sleepy, many karma weapons are random drops, skin-wise. So you can get a weapon with the stats you want (eg, dungeon weapon) get a rubbish weapon with the skin you want, and then spend a bit of cash to get a transmutation stone. Cash is much easier to replenish then karma, so it’s just daft to effectively waste all that hard earned karma instead.
To use an analogy; it’s like paying 20 gold for something you could get with 2000 karma. You can do it if you want, but it’s a bit dumb.
It says (in the tooltip) that it rolls along the ground. A fire-trail (that’s not as good as skill 4 perhaps?) after it and exploding on contact would probably make this a much nicer skill. Thing is, when it hits, it can really do some damage, especially if both parts crit.
In theory you could ‘just’ have the kit replace the weapon’s damage, skills and appearence. That way you’d still have the sigil/bonus stats.
However, I suspect that would kill the 5% damage bonus from the rune of the engineer. Which could be changed, yes, but still. Fix one thing, and break another…
Spending karma often is a bad thing. Or at least, a Very Silly thing since you can often get the same/better weapon for a reasonable amount of cash, which is far easier to make than karma.
Take the Kryta skin weapons for example; it’s about 43k for a level 40 item. You can pay that, or you could pay 1-4 gold, get an exotic level 80 max stat perfect thingy, get a transmutation orb, and then just buy a 10 copper krytan skin and merge it.
So the rangers are fun, I’m not complaining about functionality or lack of content… What I’m wondering is that if a ranger can be so versatile so as to use the great sword to get up close and personal, chuck single handed axes from a distance and still be able to go the traditional bow-route, then how come we don’t get the ability to use rifles? I mean… in all seriousness, what’s holding a ranger back from this technological advancement in the world of Tyria?
Bows are closer to nature. You could perhaps invoke the whole ‘Off in the wilderness for yonks, arrows easier to make/replace’ but really, the fundamental reason is ‘Because the devs say so.’
In terms of game-play, guns are redundant. You have the longbow for long ranged fighting, the shortbow for skirmishing, and axes for multi-hitting short ranged fighting.
Rangers are the only class to get access to both bows too.
edit: since we’re on the subject of ranger and it’s origins, the ‘fantasy ranger’ is based of Aragon from LoTR… and he spent more time running around with his sword out that a bow, so following that line of thought means you should be charging into melee.
(edited by Loki.4871)
If you stow the pet the ranger’s a poor-man’s fighter, as they should be. You want to run around smacking things with axes/longswords/greatswords without a second thought to your pet? Play a warrior. Seriously, if you hate the pet so much, why are you bothering with a class who’s built around and defining class mechanic is around the pet?
I’m rolling a 20/20/0/0/30 build (to clarify, 20 power, 20 crits and max beastmastery) and it’s good fun (in pve anyway). I’m using cleric’s armour and jewellery, so the upshot is I can heal a very large chunk of my health (over half) in one go with Heal as One, and the pet has ferocious health regeneration with signet of the wild and the traits natural healing/compassion training.
Couple the pet’s durability with it’s ability to hit like a truck (a drake or bear does ~ 50% more damage than me a swing) and you’ve got two things that both hit pretty hard and can take quite a pummelling.
I noticed with the Halloween update that the Fiery Dragon Sword’s damage type is now listed as ‘Fire’ in brackets. I believe that all this does is trigger the burning death animation, so I suggest that other weapons and/or spells (read: Engineer’s flamethrower) get this damage type too.
It’s not an exploit to skip Kholer. He’s a bonus boss that unlocks a central waypoint, drops loot, and also gives a chest.
People skip him because:
A) He’s hard if you don’t know what you are doing, and don’t communicate enough.
2) Our changes to our token rewards moved the tokens out of his unlocked chest, so people don’t feel they have to fight him to maximize gains
III) Our dropped loot is abysmal, so you’re not finding anything of value.Solutions:
A) He’s supposed to be hard, it’s explorable mode. We should aspire all our bosses across all difficulties to be of similar difficulty.
2 and III) We are currently re-working and changing our loot for dungeons. I had previously hoped that it would be in for the next patch, but it requires a lot of tuning and testing, so it might take another patch.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply it’s an exploit (though in hindsight, I suppose that’s exactly what I did. )
I like the guy because he’s a genuinely interesting boss to fight. Many bosses have a gimmick that just gives them flavour. Using another example in the AC, the spider-queen; while in the beta, 2.5k damage or so a tick in the poison attack was brutal, now the attack is borderline irrelevant. With the Lt, you actually have to pay attention, instead of sitting there on auto-attack watching the health bar slowly go down. He’s also mobile, so you’re forced to keep track of the muppet. Again, I find many bosses let you just stand there doing auto-attack and/or aoe spells without really giving things a second though. Having him leaping around all the time means you can’t just switch off and only bother to watch for his ‘special attack’ like (once again) other bosses.
The final reason I like him is perhaps less charitable. As I mentioned in the OP, it’s a great way to quickly weed out idiots and see if a pug is vaguely competent. If you can’t be bothered to res someone else or you have dodgy durability, I’d rather find out about it before the big set-piece/boss fight. In some ways I see the Lt. in his current form like the mission Thunderhead Keep back in the day for Guildwars 1. For those of you who didn’t play Guildwars 1/didn’t do that mission: if you couldn’t work together in a team, you’d almost certainly not pass it. There was a marked difference between players before and after it for quite a while.
Doesn’t incendiary powder have a 4 second cooldown, so it’s only good for one target?
Greatsword and either shortbow/dual axes. I like to get into the scrum, and if things dicey you can back off, keep a safe distance from a melee foe and heal/wait for an opportunity to dive back in.
Depends on the dungeon. Caudicas’ manor (or however you spell the twit’s name) is a big giant “I hate you” to the camera, especially inside the building. Otherwise I find it okay. If you find you’re dying a lot, I suggest you look at getting Toughness from armour, jewellery or even traits. You can get along without it fairly well in most pve, but in the dungeons it can make the difference.
Pugs seem toh ave developed a taste for simply going around the big ol’ ghost. I’m dissapointed by this because it means you lose out on a good test for “Is this group a bunch of twits?” and oh course, to borrow from Rikkiti: SHINIES!
Plus, it’s actually a pretty fun boss for me.
So yeah. Hope this gets fixed, because it’s annoying how people keep skipping it imo.
I was a fan of how pets were handled in GW1.
I wasn’t. At 0 points in Beastmastery the pet was eyecandy that died the second anything so much as broke wind at it. At 16 (maxed, for non GW1 players) Beastmaster it was stupidly tough, and if you took pet orientated skills it was a little monster, completely broken.
I can count the number of people who actually bothered to put points into the beastmaster line on one hand. Everyone else shoved it away and decided to be ‘teh snipar’ archer build. If a perma-stow is added then idiots will just do what they did in guildwars 1: entirely ignore it.
Then the ranger’s just a poor man’s warrior, and there will be even more complaining about losing to them in a fight..
Flamethrower here. It’s not fancy and it’s arguably not that good but to Torment with it. When I’m not burning them, I’m bombing them.
It might be related to your total armour value; I specc’d for high toughness (Knight’s armour, emerald jewellery and Juggernaut) and at 2.9k armour total, I’ve noticed very few things (competitively) target me over others. A mate rolling a tactics/defensive shout warrior (read: toughness up the wazoo) is often ignored in dungeons by many mobs, so it might be at least partially connected to that.
Obviously, there have been situations where some monster seems utterly devoted to squashing me. Just saying it’s pretty noticeable due to how infrequently it’s happening for me.
I discovered that if you take the third route of Ascalon Catacombs, while transformed as a ghost, you can’t use your mortar since you’re transformed.
Can anyone confirm details about Incendiary Powder? I remember reading it’s got an internal cooldown of 4 seconds, can someone confirm it will only affect one person? Or assuming the flame jet hits 3 people, all 3 could get it?
Seems like any flame thrower build that intends to actually use the kit for more than flame field and toolbelt skill needs to have Juggernaut and the +15% damage from alchemy. 6-8 stacks of might is a lot of extra damage + 200 free toughness is just too good to pass up when you have all that vitality.
Which is indeed is what conclusion I’ve arrived at. I find myself pondering if the 5% toughness converted in power is comparable to 200 power… and if the traits I’m wondering at taking if I went power (the 5% damage and incendiary powder) would be worth it.
Pretty much what it says. I’m going for a 30 firearms, 20 alchemy build, and I’m wondering what to spend the rest of the 20 points on.
I’m wondering about Inventions, since Power Shoes looks handy, and extra healing+toughness is always good.
The 5% vitality converted to power could be snazzy (going to use Knight’s armour, there’s the 200 from Juggernaut) but I’m not convinced that 200 power wouldn’t just outstrip it, with the bonus of being useful for other weapons (and possible traiting for explosion based stuff, as I also have the bomb kit equipped)
However, I’ve read Incendiary Powder only affects one person and apparently has a cooldown. On the other hand, there is a flat 5% bonus to damage while endurance isn’t full (ie, all the time in a fight), which I expect is more than the 5% from vitality.
As for the wildcard, I’m also wondering about toolbets; the toolbelt cooldowns would be handy (I use the medkit for healing, so bandages could be used more regularly) and would boost critical damage, which I do more of.
So, after reading all that rubbish, suggestions?
You know what would work for a ranged weapon? Buffed up pistols.
It’s already got damage orientated skills, you could bring two (the offhand is designed to punish those who get too close with blowtorch and keep them away with the glueshot) or a shield.
I tend to use fire drake myself. When it hits (which in the current AI state is a bit dodgy) it’s clocked over 10k damage.
As an aside, the Drakes multi-hit. That means that they can whack several things per attack, like your greatsword. I find it quite handy for Orr when you’ve got 9001 undead every two steps.
The camera while you’re downed/defeated resets; I’d quite like it if it didn’t, because sometimes you want to watch someone fighting towards you (so you can see if they’re going to make it) or take a screenshot.
Weapon switching that’s non-active in combat for the Elementalist and Engineer would be very nice too; that would you don’t have to go into the inventory to switch weapons, you can just swap like other professions. However, once combat kicks off, you’d still be ‘locked in’ to a single weapon as you are now.
part of the lore states that Tyria lost contact with both Cantha and Elona. However, that’s not to say that right before we lost contact, natives to those lands just packed their bags and left. I’m sure that many assassins probably would have set up permanent residence in both Tyria and Elona, which would mean that they could have plausibly taught younger generations the ways of the assassin. Thieves could be a splinter faction that was less about the kill and more about the “ooo, shiney” factor.
During the events of Winds of Change, non humans were exiled with Cantha, along with everyone who disagreed with any of the new decesions the empire was making. It’s never outright said, but I personally inferred that my canthan character was Not Welcome after the events of WoC. Many people would have moved to Elona or Kryta. After Orr rose, anyone in Kryta from Cantha was effectively stuck there whether they liked it or not, same as the Elonians.
Thief is effectively the Assassin with the extra ability to yank something off someone, gameplay wise. Lore wise? The assassin was designed to infiltrate and kill off a target. Those skills are extremely compatible; instead of using them to quickly and quietly off a target, you use them to quickly and quietly nick something instead.
I’ve noticed that skill 1 does do some damage; whether I missed it first time or it’s been slipped in, regardless it actually hurts targets (albeit not much, it seems to rely on condition damage for most of it)
“Hi I’m back from Orr”
The ‘full of Giant Dragon And His Undead Minions That Kill Everything’ Orr? The one that requires three orders and a full scale invasion to arrive in? I must have missed this bit in the storyline, because it seems a bit strange that he could go there, study things and take notes and whatnot, then come back without any mention/suggestion that he died.
Yes. And it would be nice if you could set your underwear colour, as I find the shade of yellow rather alarming
My snowy owl is Oreilly.
The throw is great for making sure something won’t get away from you.
Skill #1, Throw Junk, really needs to do a bit of damage. As mentioned above, if you’re unlucky and keep getting Chill and Blind and so forth, then you die just through sheer bad luck. Which is very frustrating.
Skills 2 and 3 are unlike the other classes; their #2 and #3 skills are largely independent (Warrior can KD or try and pull a “You’re coming with me!” while a ranger’s interrupts and gets the pet over to help them recover).
Skills 2 and 3 for the Engineer in contrast have great synergy; you pull a target onto you and them blow them to kingdom come with a powerful explosion. I’ve noticed in pve that if I can survive long enough to do it, then (assuming the mobs aren’t beyond at most 25% health of course) I’m usually assured a rally. Of course, you’ve got to survive long enough to do it…