I’m of the opinion that arrows should pierce by default and longbow should be default 1500 range. Because right now you need 3 separate traits to effectively use bows, shutting the player out of traiting for signets or traiting for pets. This is a lot of the reason that Malicious Training—a fantastic adept trait by the way—fits into few builds (why go malicious training when you have to give up steady focus, signet mastery, or keen edge? Can you really justify Expertise training in the already tight Wilderness Survival line? etc). Just a thought…because I find that there’s a lot of neat builds in theory, that would only work if you have 80 points to utilize. Ever get that feeling? That it’s always 10 points away?
10points? how about 5? every “brilliant” idea I get when playing around with builds is 5points short of reaching a crucial trait for whatever idea I had, it’s totally infuriating at times.
I think guard can be pretty useful to help keep your pet alive in dungeons, I ran it recently when there was no guardian in the group to give aegis and I felt it was really helpful in keeping my cat alive.
you dont need over 1800 toughness, diminishing returns and all
Got any good charts or something to link to regarding this? I haven’t taken the time to look up anything other than the damaging stats really and just go by “the more the merrier” when it comes to toughness in pvp.
I have a request for the OP, though I’m sure of the answer. But any chance in the future you’ll do signet of the hunt tests along side agility training?
It would be very interesting to see how important/unimportant that 5% speed difference is.
This test I did before the patch but it’s with signet of the hunt and 30 in bm first then with 30 bm plus swiftness/fury on the second, the diffrence should be about the same now, that is to say very small, perhaps speed would be worth a little bit more after the patch though seeing most pets would take slightly longer to kill the golem.
Ahh, okay, that makes alot of sense. I was guestimating a difference of about 2-4s. I’ve been debating running something other than my typical 0/0/30/10/30 or 0/0/30/20/20 but I still don’t see where else I would put the points when running with a shamans build (apothecary/settlers mix in WvW). I don’t have enough crit to take advantage of the trait for stacking might on the pet :/
Rabid armor with celestial trinkets work pretty well together and you’ll get plenty of crits for petmight, been thinking of dusting off my old rabid gear and trying this out with that.
I have a request for the OP, though I’m sure of the answer. But any chance in the future you’ll do signet of the hunt tests along side agility training?
It would be very interesting to see how important/unimportant that 5% speed difference is.
This test I did before the patch but it’s with signet of the hunt and 30 in bm first then with 30 bm plus swiftness/fury on the second, the diffrence should be about the same now, that is to say very small, perhaps speed would be worth a little bit more after the patch though seeing most pets would take slightly longer to kill the golem.
I know one thing that is bothering the hell out of me tell them to include pets in OUR combat logs so we can see what they do instead of only showing it to our enemies, threaten with violence if you have to
well, in a group roaming around you can get swiftness up to over a min..so its not that bad..and in a fight its so useful , its hard to pass up..
Yeah it’s good no doubt, I’m just very comfortable in nature I still get perma everything in combat as it is and I have better success with it for some reason despite getting slightly lower mightstacks and having less power not using hoelbrak, cause with what I described using I had to keep using guard to keep regen up with the one I have I get regen passively, hoelbrak also had the added bonus of even shorter conditions so on paper it’s clearly better it just wasn’t in practise for me.
I tried a variation of my current 0/20/5/25/20 boon/mightstacking bm powerspec, swapping 5 in bm for the grandmaster in nature and hunt signet for guard, then dropped 4dwayna 2water for full hoelbrak runes, very strong indeed however despite feeling really good spamming guard so often just drove me nuts so I had to swap back :S
Ok, now you’ve made me laugh. I probably should ignore this, but I simply can’t.
l2p issue? Really? What, now it’s “I’m a pro player and you’re not, because I mash 1 and you only press it once”?
Thing is, the root that Sword 1 involves is a bug. It has been acknowledged as such by Anet long ago. Therefore we can, and we should, expect it to be fixed.
I’ve never heard them say that, it’s not a bug it’s because the no1 chain involves leaps in melee this will feel like a root because you get locked into the leap animation it can cause problems sometimes but it’s not a bug.
To some extent yes, but there is a slight problem with it though even if you turn autocast off you’ll get locked into the leap animation when in melee range and I’m quite positive we all at some point needed to dodge just then and were unable to because of it, turning off autocast will make it easier and faster to break the chain but you still have the animations to deal with in melee and they do get you killed from time to time.
Would be nice if something could be done about it without removing the leap entirely, not sure how though perhaps having the other evades on the weapon always cancel other skills would be a way if they activated faster that is atleast hornet sting wich is always too slow I wish they’d remove the damage on it and turn it into a plain evade or remove the damage and turn the sting into a blind.
@Dojo
If you’re talking about me, you misunderstand, i’m speaking about the longbow having much lower damage at short than at long range and how it makes no sense to me.
Edit: and there is no need to be insulting.
I would have to agree with this, to be honest longbow should be doing more damage the closer you are and less the further away, I remember in Tera you would do more damage the closer you got as an archer, but then obviously lose the survivability of attacking from a safe distance it makes much more sense to me.
It might be me that have missed it this whole time but I just realized it now makes your pet do 150% damage on it’s next attack ontop of the chill and weakness, was this always there? I’ve never seen it before otherwise axe just got a whole lot better still.
Not in the way you describe it but one thing I’ve had I think since release more or less certainly many months atleast, is that if you get in combat and your pet goes for whatever attacked you, you retreat and recall your pet until you both drop combat then bwaam pet goes mongoloid totally spazzing out and runs straight into the fight to start trouble again, and this can happen long long after combat has been already broken probably something similar you’re seeing though.
Tbh, I kind of like the idea lol. That may just be me being selfish though since it’d benefit my current build more :P
+1 :P
One thing though @OP Natural healing doesn’t get affected by the healing power you get at all, it comes from the pet and can only be buffed by increasing pet healing power with the trait for that.
It + Sharpening Stone is a 10 stack of bleed burst..
This goes along with the normal 11 stacks you can do.
I’ve killed quite a few people this patch doing this combo…No on expects to basically instantly eat 21 stacks of bleeds.
Yeah I got that I can see it working pretty well, it’s just me not liking long cds of this kind over permanent buffs, for example one cleanse and you’re left with nothing from that trait for 45 seconds while 30% on petcrit gives you constant damage on a pet that crits nearly every attack like birds do.
im not certain how i feel about your point distribution, the 10 up top and 20 in bm i think ( atleast after the patch) is not well spent.
and something that caught my eye. you dont want stat adding sigils on both sets of weps..its a waste of a spot to add ( fill endurance on kill) or something similar. Just put the stat builder on your axe set..you can rack up your 25 stacks in a couple min with the A1 bounce.
If 20 in bm with birds was good before patch then it would be just as good now they actually got buffed remember aside from the F2 burst.
I do think 10 skirmishing would be better though and Pet’s Prowess unless you need exactly 50% condi duration seems 40% would be just as good you lose 1 tick on geomancy what else? 1tick on burn, can’t really think of anything else of significance, while the bleed burst would be nice seems bigger petcrits still trumps that to me especially birds wich can do very big double crits on slash when they aren’t flopping around that is.
I’m personally curious to know why the longbow didn’t get an auto-attack damage buff, and what kind of builds they want players to try out after these changes.
Because it got 0,25s shaved off it’s autoattack making it do alot more dps with that alone?
The warrior’s longbow actually has traits that give +10% vs bleeding foes and other 10% vs burning foes, 33% chance to cause bleed on crit, 20% cooldown reduction, a 6th skill with potentially a +10% crit chance, +10% damage and 30% cooldown reduction and every skill is either a combo field or a combo finisher and they can all have 1200 range. For conditions it can inflict bleeding, burning, blind and immobilize.
Now, what can I upgrade my ranger’s shortbow to do again? Nothing nearly as epic as that.
The main gripe I have with shortbow is that there isn’t a trait to make the auto attack automatically inflict bleeding or otherwise load a target up with conditions. The poison fan has to be fired point-blank to get any decent duration on a target.
Compare this with an engineer pistol that inflicts aoe bleeds on auto attack and it can even be traited to pierce, the poison volley loads up on a single target (albeit it fires a little wildly), and after that the weapons diverge into quite different areas (engie pistols having confusion, blind, burning and immobilize on 3, 4 & 5).
Shortbow 3, 4 & 5 are pretty nice as they are; 4 & 5 are both strong, 3 not so much but an evade is an evade. 2 is weak; needs a trait to liven it up. 1 could be more condition focussed but it’s really better in power builds. There’s no way to make the bleed 100% reliable in a condition build; possible place for a trait.
Poison volley actually pierces by default, in a little blob of any kind you can put 5stacks on all of them sometimes, not that it happens all that often but it can be good when taking camps and such in wvw so not totally useless for aoe.
I can tell you wich kind of hitting from behind that bothers me the most in pvp , it’s pets attempting to hit players from behind that can totally take your pet out of the fight just by running back and forth through you wich will make the pet do the same and never hit them once, it just happend to me lol.
The theifs pistol stacks 5 bleeding at most (excluding condition duration increases), whereas the rangers SB can get 8? I cant remember exactly, but its certainly more than 5.
Normal attacking with no modifications is 5-6
with 10 points in Marks i can maintain 7-8 by myself, throw in pet bleeds and it becomes ~18 without me using #4 on SB, there’s a reason theirs doesn’t have a requirement to bleed and ours does…
Well I am not arguing for or against anything here just stating how many stacks it gives without modification, one thing though if it’s 5-6 with no modification then it’s 5-6 with 10 in marksman the 10% increased duration does nothing for a 3 second bleed so you must have other sources increasing it aswell.
The theifs pistol stacks 5 bleeding at most (excluding condition duration increases), whereas the rangers SB can get 8? I cant remember exactly, but its certainly more than 5.
I was thinking maybe it’s not such a bad idea, they could be given a few defensive skills as a last resort on F1 F2 F3 like a one use search and rescue for one of them, some could have regen on one, others maybe a cleanse things like that so they are not totally useless when they die but can privide minor defensive benefits in boons or help to rez since they cannot fight, another one I thought of would be the old pet rez exept only the ranger himself could rez his pet it could also be done via the “F” button as a spell rather than the interact one in a similar cd timer as your own downed state pet rez.
What do you think of such an idea? please also add other suggestions you can think of that would fit for this without being too strong to be conceivable.
I dont understand why LOTR and Aragorn are continually brought up on these forums.
Just because he could be seen as the basis (maybe) for the ranger class is some games doesnt mean every game from now until forever will have their ranger class based exactly on what he did and didnt do.
Anet dont care what JRR Tokkien’s idea of a ranger was and frankly neither do I.
Now, I do think rangers in GW2 should be the strongest class at range, and thats not because Ranger has the word “range” in it.. its because in ANets own description of the class we are "Unparalleled archers, rangers are capable of bringing down foes from a distance ".
So can we please oneday move past assuming all rangers should be aragon, or all ranger should use range because of the name, and just go by what Anet has told us their vision for the class is in this game which is “rangers can adapt to any situation”. All that to me implies that rangers have a stronger focus on ranged combat than most but are capable in close combat fighting as well, which frankly is exactly what we are.
With that said I think we arnt actually that bad at range, the longbow for all its failings actually has pretty big DPS at 1000+ range. If you use it for that, and then swap out to another shorter range weapon set if/when people approach you its actually quite a good weapon. Its just not a “use this at all times always” weapon like the SB can be.
The point isn’t that every ranger has to do it like Aragorn it’s that the word “ranger” has nothing to do with “ranged combat” in this context wich IS a common misconception, I know you don’t think this way by your post but others do so it’s just an example for those people, a ranger can use ranged combat or he could not but neither is what makes him a ranger you could pick Benjen Stark if you like as example he’s a ranger because he patrols and so is Aragorn.
The point about arenanets description of the ranger class is the one that should be made but it commonly isn’t that’s why people bring up Aragorn and now perhaps Benjen
Edit: I posted Aragorn with a bow deliberatley to make fun of this btw but that is probably pretty obvious.
Companion’s might easily, you have high crit wich means it will be a permanent dps buff on your pet versus one that only triggers when you get your target below 50% health and then only every 45 seconds ontop of this you don’t even have very strong bleeds in the first place.
I don’t know if you guys noticed but I ran a power/beastmaster hybrid tonight in SOAC amatuer tourney and it worked well. The cat’s aren’t out of the picture by any means. All that happened is every pet became more viable lest porcine perhaps. If you think about what has changed—look at everything as a whole—you see that we have so many more options than we did before and we’re just as effective. I’m now thoroughly convinced that this was a PVE buff, spvp balance, and wvw buff all in one patch.
The balance team did incredible work and should be applauded. The naysayers will see once they get used to the new ways of being powerful.
I’d have to disagree with you here, in my opinion this nerf has just forced us more into using cats exclusively because now they are the only pets that do enough damage.
I wouldn’t say no cause I’m using it anyway, one thing I desperatly want with a bow though (any bow) would be to have an ability that actually was melee I want the animation to be you whacking someone in the head with the bow itself, some utility like knackdown or something, kinda like the warrior rifle knockback thing or something more kungfu agile like a roundhousekick followed by a whack in the head, kick would daze whack would knockback that would be awesome
Care to post the math on the DPS? And a video if you can. So we can finally get some solid evidence that Feline based BM builds aren’t dead.
Definetly not dead but one thing though, it’s way harder to finish some people off in spvp petswap quickness gone and maul nerf was huge for that but it still works though it’s not like that was everything but some classes that used to be fairly easy to finish fast this way like thieves can be increadibly annoying now (even more now if that is possible when it comes to thieves)
I think its Bite or something that still hits fairly hard, but Maul and the Auto Attack are just awful.
Cat Auto hits as hard as it used to be. I dont eyeball damage i actually wrote down the coefficient. Bird Auto hits twice every 2.6 seconds. Cat Auto hits once every 1.2 seconds. They do the same dps over time.
When cats use Bite their DPS goes up.
When birds use swoop their dps goes down since it does less damage then their auto attack now.
Cats Maul got nerfed but its still better than their Auto.
When birds use their swiftness they stand still for far too long and let the enemy move away too easy. Birds overall do less dps than cats.
You can keep believing birds are better by eyeballing damage but you are mistaken.
The damage feels less on their auto… I remember fairly consistent 2k hits with auto attack on crit.
But yea, Bird Swoop still is as lame as ever.
I just know I’ve been hitting for a bout 1.9k on their auto attack on crits (that’s per hit) and the Cat isn’t getting anywhere near that. But yea…I can see Birds doing less damage over time just cause of swoop alone.
Cats auto damage hasnt changed. You play Ranger much longer than me but i use cats exclusively and i know from a “feel” point of view and from a testing point of view its exactly the same.
Just stop watched a couple pets to get an idea on it.
Cats do kill quicker then Birds entirely because of Swoop, Otherwise i’m pretty sure they’d kill at equal speeds (birds hit harder, but cats hit faster) Course this has always been the case cause Swoop is awful.
Dogs/Spiders/Drakes kill at about the same speed.
Pigs kill a bit slower, Devourer’s are just awful….Even slower then pigs, I didn’t even bother with Moa’s/Bears
I still like devourers best in water though, they do more consistent damage especially on moving targets something the shark and other pets do not plus they have good F2s there, shame they just did a flat 20% damage nerf of them because of how they behave in water (faster attack speed) the logical way would be to reduce water attack speed to match that on land to me cause this way it just makes them totally unusable on land.
Over the screams of my enemies as my Jaguar rips them to shreds. So they nerfed maul on cats and jags F2. Who cares my pet still perma crits in stealth and maul is once every 20 secs. I didnt have any problem killing 2 thiefs at once last night and 1v1s were still a pushover (the patch didnt magically make people good).
All the patch did is exactly what the first patch did to elementalist when they tried to nerf bunkers. Slap on the hand on their suposed target build while doing more damage to the other less viable builds. Before the patch we had more options on our pets. Now our only option for dps is cats since birds got neutered hard and drakes got hit with an A-Bomb.
Ill be suprised if this is the end of the nerfing to BM builds.
Edit: In case you are wondering im still running my BM Hybrid 0/15/20/15/20 Cleric Power Build. Pretty much the same thing as in my last video.
I’m finding that Birds are outdamaging Cats by quite a bit.
Bird double hit for almost 2k, Cats are hitting for less then 800 on his auto attack (i’m 99% sure that they nerfed the Cat Auto attack, it use to hit much harder from what I remember)
I actually haven’t even tried bird now, they must be better than before though that’s for sure, I still doubt I could take all the downtime they have flippin and floppin.
Cat’s auto is exactly the same for me, bout 1200crit on the heavy golem without any extra buffs unless my memory fails me now.
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.
The drakes weren’t a viable option before the nerf. They were only good fo their blast finisher and if the enemy was stupid enough to soak up the F2 damage…
The F2 abilities on the drakes is high dps but it doesn’t ever hit. All in all the drakes aren’t particularly a good choice unless you’re a bunker ranger with the requirements of blast finishers for healing bursts. But I wouldn’t reccomend that personally because their regular dps is too low, they’re too tanky and you’re far better off going with 1 bird and a jag.
Drakes were nerfed and now they are even less worth the slot.
Not entirely true, they where good for their aoe and in that department they still are kings because no other pets really have that, not everything is about pvp but even considering that they did just as much damage as a bird probably more plus they had a big burst in their tailswipe even if it was nearly impossible to land it, the reason they were better than birds in my opinion is because the birds lose a truckload of their potential by flipping and flooping all over the place all the freaking time instead of attacking your target the F2 burst was nice but i want my pets to do damage the rest of the time aswell.
Having it at 900 by default but a master trait that could bring it to 1200 makes some sense actually.
No. It doesn’t. It’s the kittening Necro’s staff and Greater Marks all over again. It should be baseline. It was baseline and there was nothing wrong with it. The reason nobody was using longbow was because that sucked.
@ topic: Applying real world logic to a game with magic is pretty special in its own right…
I meant if longbow was 1200 then it makes sense to me if shortbow is 900 then the trait bring them to 1200 and 1500 repectively how does that not make sense?
I’m not arguing that I want it to be 900 I’ve used shortbow since the game came out and I still do, but I do think longbow should have a longer range by default.
Puandro, I know you like your clerics but you should seriously consider getting a few knight’s pieces, maintenance oil and adding 5points in skirmishing to pick up companion’s might, this trait totally kicks kitten now, try it I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised just how good it now is.
My only option is to go lower than 20 points in wilderness and im not willing to drop my sword cooldowns for 4-5 stacks of might on average. Maybe less.
It’s just a tip that the trait is pretty darn good seeing that you are boonstacking your pet already this would only increase your damage by alot at the cost of a tiny fraction in regen and of course your sword cd I suppose.
The trait has no internal cd you stack it alot higher than 4-5 in most cases, warhorn for example makes it work just like a little version of RaO etc, I find it’s well worth it and my cat is doing more damage than ever but then I am not running double swords like you so I can see why you want that.
Old one had ICD so i assumed they kept buy. TBH i didnt get much time to test everything yesterday. Tested cats drakes birds. Had to make a new warrior PvE build. Had to update my excel sheet with all the traits and changes from the patch also and i was low on time so i went out to WvW for an hour or so.
Ill have to look at it but i have to drop 5 points from somewhere. Cant go below 15 NM. If i drop my sword CD its going to suck. I had 25 BM for extra power but the sword CD actually makes it easier to kill ppl due to higher uptime on Poison and gap closers. I would prob drop some BM but that would lower my damage, how much i dont know since im not on my computer to plug in the numbers.
I can’t imagine the old one had an icd that would be madness seeing it was only a 1s nuff then, regardless you can always go to the mists just to see how it stacks up and so, even if you don’t change anything in your normal spec now.
Rampagers amulet. Max crit chance and using axe #5. ICD was 1 second it seemed. I have 11% crit chance and perma fury so 31%. 5 more points into skimishing thats 2.5% crit chance. Add crit pot instead of power and i should be touching 40%. Maybe that high it would be worth using omnom pies instead of mango.
Like i said earlier though i just dont want to give up sword CDs due to the gap closers and uptime on poison and i dont see myself giving up shout cds for sic em since its down to 32 secs which syncs up with stealth on jag at 30 secs. Also i still run Masters Bond as much as people think it sucks :p.
Is it 1s? perhaps you’re right, I was thinking none cause I have racked up 20+ mightstacks with hunter’s call and sword alone so I assumed there was none
I can definetly see you wanting the sword cd though, I first thought you had 25bm though cause I was looking at your video and was thinking dropping those 5 for skirmishing, thought it seemed worthy to point out seeing you already have the setup for it with only a few alterations if you decide to try a higher crit spec later it’s defiently a must have I can say that.
Masters bond is fantastic even though I don’t use it, but it’s actually gained in value now as I see it because there’s no longer any reason to petswap for quickness burst with a fresh cat so I think I will actually take it now that you reminded me of it.
Yes it was 1 second, was never able to get more than 1 might on pet. Also sword gives might to pet, 1 per target hit so keep that in mind when testing.
Edit: Yes i used to be 25 BM but after the vid i dropped to 20 to pick up 20 WS to get my sword CD reduction.
More than 1might per second you mean right? I know sword also gives btw it was still 20+ stacks and I don’t think sword can give more than 3-4 on it’s own.
Edit: I just tested it on a golem using nothing but hunter’s call companion’s might absolutely does not have an icd now.
Manekk, I respect your tenacity, but tell me in full honesty: would another class not dish out more damage, be more survivable, and bring more group utility? This is the thing I’m struggling with. You can only make up so much with skill, resourcefulness, and good will; there just simply comes a point when you have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself that question. I came to the conclusion that I have to start maining another class, despite all the investments I put into my ranger since beta (including the dreamer). You can’t be effective if the developer doesn’t want you to be effective. He’s been practically shouting you in the face “please stop it, why do you keep going, I made your class garbage, what more does it take”!
I have no idea mate don’t really care either aslong as it works for what I’m doing, I roam in wvw and run the odd dungeon with friends the damage is defiently very high among the best I think, it’s got top tier survivability aswell as for grouputility doesn’t really have any at all not my intention with it either it’s just a new version BM bunker for wvw that just happens to do better damage than before I felt it worth pointing out since everyone is under the assumption all pets across the board are kitten and shortbow is unusable now.
I went with this for a couple hours last night in wvw, went great….so long as no one wakittenting me. got a couple of back to back 12k+ on lb 2. And the barrage on a couple of big groups we took out were awesome. Then a thief saw me before i saw him…and kitten ..I wont say one shotted but it might as well have been…but again…don’t get caught…and your golden!!
To be fair a good thief sneaking up on you unnoticed can do that to any ranger spec I don’t believe for a second we haven’t all been there at some point, and also if you’re doing that much damage it sounds like you’re running it with good chunck of zerker armor (unless it was someone supersquishy) I mentioned that for dungeons not in wvw.
