Showing Posts For Mabuse.2879:
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Before this praise of Blizzard goes any further, I’d like to point out that the WoW Hunter forums contained almost exactly the same level of complaining about the class. It’s spooky.
That’s because hunters in Vanilla and Burning Crusade were as horrible as rangers we have today. Blizzard overhauled the pet system in Wrath of the Lich King.
It did improve, but the whining in the forums continued at the same level.
Please don’t call a game where turning off growl and dismissing the pet before a jump within an instance are the only management that a pet needs, as an example to follow. Sure you have some other abilities, i even have fond memories of eyes of the beast, or having to feed the pet but please, pets in that game are shoot and forget.
I take it you were never a PvPer with your hunter. Abilities like Bad Manners (monkey stun), Ankle Crack (crocolisk cripple), and Roar of Sacrifice (that could prevent crits on you or any ally) were essential to battleground and arena play. If you weren’t casting abilities like these, you were only playing half your hunter. And you would lose to a decent opponent, since you needed every move.
For good examples, see this clip (starting at 5:00) and note the phrase “instantly monkey stun” among others.
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Before this praise of Blizzard goes any further, I’d like to point out that the WoW Hunter forums contained almost exactly the same level of complaining about the class. It’s spooky.
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tl;dr
1. Give us control of all pet abilities.
2. Make pets respond to them instantly.
3. Give pets a broader range of utility abilities.
Not sure why you’d expect to be able to 1v1 thieves when most classes can’t atm, but that’s how balance works. You can’t expect to be good at everything.
The clue was when he mentioned WoW. In WoW, the hunter was the the counter-rogue, mainly due to Flare, traps, and anti-stealth talents. With those tools you could prevent a rogue escaping. I miss those days too. Any seasoned WoW PvP hunter is going to find the ranger very disappointing if they expect it to be a continuation in another world. It isn’t.
In GW2, I find thieves easiest to counter as Engineer.
Obv “bearbow” in open world pve/levelling is a go to face roll …
Open world PvE has a trivial amount of gameplay anyway.
Just stop talking Elly you are making me want to level my poor lvl40 engi. It takes soooo looong to lvl after a few 80s, like first trip to the principles office long.
PvP levelling is possible now. Engineer is fun in PvP, and PvP doesn’t involve killing a million dumb mobs standing in a field doing nothing.
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Sticky bombs with detonate have been done in the Rift “Saboteur” soul (a rogue subclass). You could throw up to five sticky bombs (of various types) onto an enemy then detonate them as a combo finisher. All the damage was backloaded onto the last move. I think they found this hard to balance, because the massive damage spike negates counters, and it was gradually nerfed.
Team Fortress 2 Demoman style sticky bombs, that fix to terrain, could be a lot of fun though. That’d give the engineer trap-like abilities, but with a bit of a twist. The risk/reward tradeoff is easier to balance, and it could be great for WvW. I realise you can kindasorta do something like this already by placing turrets and detonating them, but imagine a sticky bomb gun kit with four types of bombs and a detonate instead.
It’s fun to think about, but I don’t expect anything to happen.
By the way Rift is free to play now, and you could make a saboteur, try out the mechanics, and get a feel for it within half an hour of play.
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Erm, you can level almost any of the classes from 1 to 80 in the open world with little more than skill 1, because mobs are extraordinarily stupid and weak. Ranger is a little easier than most, maybe, but I find it hard to believe anyone is forced to learn much during PvE levelling.
Just for contrast, I run a general purpose WvW survival build withWilderness Knowledge, using Sharpening Stone, Muddy Terrain, and Quickening Zephyr. Sharpening Stone allows stacking of bleeds as an opener, and Quickening Zephyr gives a finisher damage spike, while Muddy Terrain allows me to kite and escape. (And I do swap in Signet of the Hunt when out of combat, just to get around the map.)
Excellent. You would be a pain in the kitten to fight. Great job kiting. The only thing that I would have trouble with is no speed for roaming.
I run builds just like these. Warhorn 5, Sword 2 and “about face” get you around pretty fast.
Muddy Terrain is the closest thing to talented Frost Trap with which I have more years of practice than I should.
For those who don’t know all the acronyms in the game, it would be nice for everyone to spell out what S/W or A/D means…
Sword/Warhorn, Axe/Dagger. I looked them up in the secret book of Ranger acronyms.
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hit enemy twice. drop target. Hit 1 twice in quick succession. You are now already 600 range from your opponent.
turn and use hornet sting, turn and use monarch leap. There you go.
And in fact you don’t even have to have the enemy targetted to hit them in the first place. Your attack is 180 ahead. So you can drop target first if your position is right.
For the person asking for a video, this covers it in some detail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbNuv4T8J1I
2) Every john doe is currently playing warrior( guess why ). It also makes it that there are a lot of bad warriors that still get downed by better players. ( tho with equal skilled players , the warrior will always win )
This is why balancing MMO classes using overall player stats on spreadsheets will fail. Less skilled players (such as newbies) flock to a class just so they can do OK, and so statistically, the class only does OK.
Blizzard’s chief designer openly admitted (in front of the Game Developer Conference) that they deliberately overpowered classes in order to keep people playing, and counted forum rage as a measure of their success. I was in the room and heard him say this with my own ears. You just had to grit your teeth and redefine what winning meant to you.
I don’t know anything about Anet’s balancing strategy. I just hope, if they’re using overall stats to guide it, that it’s somehow weighted by a metric of player experience and skill. And that they’re not deliberately creating FOTM to sell character slots.
Meanwhile, I recommend this excellent game design video called Perfect Imbalance
As a newbie, hotjoin continues to improve my skills, but it should be renamed “practice” or possibly “pointgrind”. I’m still not quite sure where the real game is.
spirit build is not passive. spirits have active skills too. stop calling it passive build. a ranger equipped with signets that’s passive.
No, the only even slightly viable way to play a signet ranger in sPvP is with Signet of the Beastmaster and use them actively.
Again, by bad design, it requires a 30 point investment in the power line to get signets to apply to the whole character (ranger + pet) rather than the currently useless part (the pet). Then they become more like warrior stances. Of course the warrior doesn’t have to spend any points to make stances useful. (I play warrior too.)
Anet should relabel hotjoin “Play Now” to “Join a lost game of Skyhammer”.
When did perma stealth become an issue to people? Look at all the other really successful MMO’s, they had perma stealth classes and a vanish that would put them back into a perma stealth. …
If you’re talking about a certain other MMO, then stealth was only partial invisibility with several counters and a class with a pretty hard counter.
Give Rangers flare and they might be more useful (in WvW).
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What are your goals in a game? Your original post is all about getting stuff. sPvP is about winning battles against other players, not getting stuff.
There are certainly problems with the design of sPvP, but Panda, you’ll have to rethink what you want to achieve.
Roll and engineer in sPvP and try these tactics yourself. You’ll soon learn the weaknesses that you can exploit. It will up your game.
I’ll try to get some of these points added to the stickied Guide at the top of the sPvP forum.
Especially “your personal score doesn’t matter”. Why does it even exist? (I know why, but I wish it didn’t.)
Communication wins games.
Trash talking doesn’t, but if it’s lighthearted then it just adds fun.
(For what it’s worth, in other games I’ve specialised in playing a support class and providing intel, recon, or leadership, with good results for win ratios. I’m new to GW2 and haven’t figured out if this is workable here.)
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I’ll just repeat my previous summary from memory then.
My experience of this event was:
1. Mail spam telling me to go to places where nothing was happening.
2. A big island full of evenly-spaced out mobs where nothing was happening.
3. Finally, mindless attrition punctuated by sudden mindless deaths.
If that’s gameplay, I’m a banana.
Since the feedback thread was deleted, I’ll repeat my summary: If this is gameplay, I’m a banana.
I know this probably isn’t a popular comparison, but the WoW hunter classically does attrition damage (with weapons and pet) while using a ton of CC and escape abilities to keep up the pressure and win. The GW2 ranger, when at range, seems to have a similar attrition, but no CC or escape to speak of. Meanwhile, every other class does decent ranged and AoE damage. So where’s the ranger’s unique pattern of play? What’s the point of them? If it’s the pet then we need a lot more control or pet abilities.
(I’m a relative newbie and happy to be corrected!)
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