That’s a lot of damage increases for the short bow, something most people feel is pretty good. Longbow is where the damage increase needs to be but I’m not sure 10% more damage and 33% reduction in fire speed will be enough.
Honestly, I wish the Ranger got a ‘finisher/execute’ type move where instead of being a closer like you’d expect for the shortbow, it would be a channeled stationary shot that did immense damage to open the fight.
I didn’t reduce LRS cast speed by 33%, I increased its projectile speed by 33% in attempt to reasonably mitigate how absurdly easy it is for it to miss on a moving target at long range which is where longbow is supposed to excel at. It’s just a placeholder number, but the concept of the change is there.
Also, I felt normalizing the longbow’s damage but reducing its LRS cast time by a whopping .5s was significant enough that LRS wouldn’t need a DPS boost beyond normalizing its damage within 0-1000 range. I left the 1000+ dps increase as kind of a novelty thing where rangers can at least see some pertinence in staying at range.
I also thought of trying to consolidate the 10 stacks of vulnerability of Hunter’s Shot into Rapid Fire to free up Hunter’s Shot to either be modified, or reworked entirely into another ability.
Apparently there’s alot of concern about buffing shortbow that much.
The idea behind buffing shortbow was to put it within a comparable range of other classes. I thought 75% sounded a bit outrageous myself, but when I thought about it, we don’t have any abilities on the shortbow bar that increase our dps. Shortbow lives and dies on crossfire.
Even with the idea that ranger is about moderate sustained dps, even in this respect I feel shortbow is too low. We don’t even begin to compare with other dps oriented classes like warrior or thief just in terms of autoattacks, and if they actually use their abilities? (Hundred blades, backstab, heartseeker, Eviscerate) just forget it, we fall too far behind. With shortbow, we don’t have any damage abilities to weave in between our autoattacks so unless some major rework is done to shortbow abilities, I think a significant crossfire buff is necessary to put it in the ballpark of other classes.
Atm, I think it’s a fair assertion that shortbow ranger is an autoattack bot.
I’d like to hear why you think other changes are OP though. I’m not delusional, I know this will never make it into the game, but just theorizing and hearing other rangers opinions on the subject is interesting. After investing a significant amount of time in almost every other class, I honestly feel like the majority of the changes I put in my OP are justified and even a step in the right direction.
(edited by Negativity.5801)
I’m bored. Here’s a post of some stuff I think ranger bows should have.
Shortbow
•Crossfire has had its cast time reduced to .33s
•Crossfire damage increased by 75%
•Poison volley has been removed and has been replaced with:
Noxious Arrow – Fires a poison arrow at the target that explodes on impact poisoning nearby enemies. Damage: 453 Poison: 8s Cast time: .25s Radius: 300 Cooldown: 10s
•Quickshot damage has been increased by 33%
•Crippling Shot has been reworked:
Crippling Shot – Fires an arrow that cripples your target and applies multiple stacks of bleeding over time. Damage: 153 Bleed(x2): 5s Cripple: 5s (Bleed application similar to Warrior OH sword ability Impale)
•Concussion Shot damage has been increased by 33%
Longbow
•Long Range Shot damage has been normalized between 0-1000 range to 229 damage, 1000+ range remains 317
•Long Range Shot cast time has been reduced to .75s, down from 1.25s
•Long Range Shot projectile speed has been increased by 33%
•Long Range Shot Projectile Finisher 100%, up from 20%.
•Rapid Fire has been reworked:
Rapid Fire – Fires multiple arrows at your foe making them vulnerable with each shot. Damage(10x): 1,755 Vulnerability(10x): 13s Cast Time: 5s Cooldown: 15s
•Hunter’s Shot has been reworked:
Hunter’s Shot – Fires an arrow that cripples your target. Your pet gains swiftness and its next 3 attacks do 50% increased damage. Damage: 141 Cripple: 3s Swiftness: 8s
P.S. I know a patch is (allegedly) coming 12/14, I’m bored, and these are just some ideas I think rangers could be changed.
Just spitballin’ ideas
•Add chance for cores/lodestones to every dungeon chest
•More armor/weapon skins that are unique drops from certain dungeons. Purely cosmetic of course to keep in line with horizontal progression
•Endless transformation tonics (like the endless Halloween tonic) that are unique, rare drops from dungeons that function in combat. For example, AC tonic would turn you into a random ghost, CoF tonic would turn you into a flame legion charr, Arah turns you into a random undead, CoE turns you into inquest asura, etc. etc.) They already use existing animations of existing races, just have them use your weapons like the when you turn into a ghost in path 3 of AC. Only issue here would be how to turn it off (timer, button to turn it off maybe)
•Unique rare drop mini pets out of dungeons. Mini pet Subject Alpha, Mini Pet Zhaitan, Mini pet Lupicus, Mini pet Baelfire, etc. etc. You already have the models, just make them smaller.
•New models for bosses/certain mobs. There’s an acceptable level of rehashing but at the very least, bosses should be unique looking. I cant count the bosses with unique models on one hand. Also, taking skelks and slapping graveling on their nameplate is really lazy and boring.
•Some encounters/bosses need to either be tweaked, or just redone entirely.
For the above 2, they should drop from all mobs, not just bosses.
Also this
Tokens NEED to drop in Story Mode. 60 of them, like in every other path.
(edited by Negativity.5801)
During hammer autoattack chain, dodge roll immediately after the 2nd attack, your dodge will cancel and you will barely move but you will still proc selfless daring heal and shorten the cast frames on symbol of protection. It’s an exploit of the dodge roll bug which Anet is never going to fix.
Just for fun, wall of reflection on graveling breeders used to reflect their vomit and spawn graveling hatchlings for the guardian so you could have your own small army of hatchlings that caused bleeding on autoattack. Though this was fixed from the 12/3 patch.
Also, you can reflect dredge mining suit bombs back at it with wall of reflection in the dredge fractal.
Please fix the dodge roll bug.
If you dodge immediately after the 2nd attack in your autoattack chain with a melee weapon, your dodge roll cancels less than halfway through it and you don’t move at all.
Not sure why this issue has persisted for so long and is being swept under the carpet. It’s a core part of gameplay and for a game that emphasizes skill, the fact that what is probably the core mechanic of skill based gameplay is bugged is embarrassing.
Wall of reflection no longer reflects graveling breeders so now you can’t spawn your own army of graveling hatchlings.
Guardian is no longer viable in AC.
Discuss.
So, I’ve been trying to figure out a build for my thief in terms of a power/prec/crit build and this is what I ended up coming up with:
http://www.guildhead...LFbofxa0fcoaqmV
(Note, This is for PvE dungeons/fractals, I haven’t tried it yet, this is just me theorizing)
Reasoning:
15 in power at least for lotus poison which adds 3s of weakness. Figure this is excellent for autoattack chain + steal and for aoe weakness on shortbow.
30 in crit with tolerance for increased vit for survivability (Vit is better than toughness to a certain point), critical haste for dps and faster autoattacks meaning more weakness in melee, and executioner for a sizable dps increase <50% hp.
10 in shadow arts for shadows embrace. This means with hide in shadows + refuge + signet of agility you have 3 active condition removals, 2 of them aoe. Think this would be great for utility and general survivability.
15 in trickery. More initiative and initiative regen via steal, shorter steal cd, thrill of the crime for buffs.Think this is conducive to being able to be more liberal with DB/HS usage while staying over 6 initiative for 10% increase dmg.
Utilities
I think hide in shadows is the best heal available to thieves. Good utility, heals a good portion of hp + regen, and stealth for backstab.
Signet of agility. I think this is an excellent signet, passive precision increase, aoe condition removal + endurance refill on a 30s cd.
Shadow refuge for general utility/survivability and with Shadows Embrace, another aoe condition removal + minor heal.
Roll for Initiative. Not too sure about this, the roll can be just as bad as it can be good, shadow step could be a nice alternative for a breakstun and another condition removal.
Gear
I think to strike a good balance of offensive power + survivability, I’m thinking knight armor (power/prec/tough) and beryl accessories (power/vit/crit) Thief suffers from the lowest base hp of all the classes excluding ele, so vit is important for survivability and I think it’s important to get a decent amount of hp and obviously some toughness for mitigation. This with 3 active condition removals I think it should mean my thief won’t die just because a mob looks at me.
Not really sure for weapons. Definitely either berserker or knight, but probably berserker.
I haven’t really considered runes and sigils yet but I think divinity might be a solid choice since thief benefits from every stat.
P.S.
My intent is to run as d/d, I don’t like s/p and have no intention of running it.
(edited by Negativity.5801)
Seems its just bandit cutpurses. If they havent been aggro’d before, they have a little cast animation similar to human ele casting glyphs, and then pull out either a hammer or a rifle and just proceed to spam knockbacks.
Another great patch that seems to break more things than it fixes.
Seriously, when is this going to be fixed? Does Anet consider this a low priority bug?
If you dodge roll immediately after the 2nd attack in your autoattack chain for melee weapons, it bugs out and your dodge roll cancels itself halfway through drastically shortening your evasion frames.
For something that is a cornerstone in what makes GW2 combat unique and emphasizes skill, it seems pretty horrible that it is still bugged. I’ve seen numerous posts about it and I’ve never even see Anet so much as glance in its general direction.
Seriously, fix this. It’s really stupid that this bug existed in beta and continues to exist months after the official release.
I create dungeon groups and do dungeon groups because I want to do dungeons. It’s stupid that I have to spend 20 minutes doing an event (Nevermind the time spent waiting for the event to occur) to open the dungeon up.
You can go right ahead and keep the dynamic events to maintain the idea of events effecting map control for PvE but leave the kitten gates open.
Ever since FotM was released, it’s rare that dungeons are actually uncontested. Having to always have to do 20 minutes of dynamic events just to be able to do the one thing that I formed the group for in the first place is incredibly tedious and frankly, mind-numbingly stupid.
/10000th post suggesting this
What is this sudden fascination with skipping the champion hellstorm on the bridge in path 1? Before the patch, I’d never been in any group that wanted to skip him. Now after the patch where he actually drops 10s + chance of exotic/rare every group I find wants to skip him.
I’ve always held the principle that for pugs, your expectations can never be too low, but this? In what universe does this make sense?
SE tokens
Arah tokens
Crafted for armored scales/Emerald gems
What is this imaginary niche you’ve found for rangers?
Every positive aspect of the ranger I’ve found, another class does significantly better.
Anyone else use t3 heavy cultural armor on a male norn? I’ve noticed the neck isn’t affected by lighting the same way the head is with this armor.
Lupicus isn’t hard
Gotta side with Hrouda here, rewards are nice but people abuse them in ways that aren’t intended. I like that champions/legendary mobs actually have cash drops, but if you abuse them it upsets the economy by spiking the income of players; Of course Anet is gonna nerf it.
I would’ve much rather have received 26s + chest loot for running path 3 Arah once a day rather than seeing it get nerfed into the ground because people abuse it.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
On a side note, I don’t understand why Anet will hotfix and quickly nerf people farming a dungeon, but won’t quickly fix a broken dungeon like CoE path 1.
I’d rather see small incremental changes to fix bugs rather than waiting a month for it. It’s one thing to bundle dungeon and class balancing into one big patch, but it makes absolutely no sense at all to do that for bug fixing.
I’d love to hear some solid reasoning on why they don’t fix bugs as quickly as they nerf farming. I think it makes Anet look bad when their priority isn’t fixing broken content.
So I’m not sure if there has already been a post on the dodge roll bug with some specifics, but here is one from me. As people who play a melee class might already be aware of, dodge roll has a bug where it will occasionally fail and cancel your dodge roll animation almost immediately, yet it drains your endurance.
So while learning how to play a guardian, I learned about a bug exploit sometimes referred to as “Ninja Skipping” for hammer. To accomplish this, the player immediately dodges after the second attack in his hammer autoattack chain. What this does is 2 things
1. Lowers the amount of frames required to cast Symbol of Protection therefore increasing dps. Some have reported its lowered the cast time of the 3rd attack in the chain by something close to 300 frames. This leads to better uptime on protection and increased overall damage output.
2. Skipping dodge roll to get the benefit of Selfless Daring (Heal at end of dodge roll) while also not losing any ground against the mob you are fighting. With Vigorous Precision, this means guardians can always remain at 1 bar of endurance while using the other bar to exploit the dodge roll bug to minimize cast times on Symbol of Protection and gain healing from Selfless Daring.
While these are exploits with positive connotations for the player, there are obvious negative connotations to it because this bug so far as I’ve tested it applies to every melee weapon. (Ranger, Guardian, Warrior, Thief) It is much easier to spot on slower weapons, but it can be done on any melee weapon of these classes that I’ve tested. I would imagine the same would be said of Mesmer sword mainhand and necro dagger (Can someone confirm this?). The obvious being that your dodge roll can fail if you do this bug unintentionally and get hit by whatever you were trying to dodge.
I’d really love to get some feedback from a dev on this. This is a long standing bug with the game and it’s baffling that this hasn’t been fixed. It’s a cornerstone of your unique combat system and it has persisted in the game since beta.
As a bug and an exploit, please fix this.
(edited by Negativity.5801)
there is no unlucky timing of bombs, just be careful with managing your endurance and it’s fine. They always explode at the same time, you only need to dodge them once, if you want to get crafty at it, you can do it the same way as Subject Alpha where you dodge as they explode like Alpha’s aoe. Doing this you completely eliminate having to be conscientious of party positioning.
And grawl does have an animation, I’ve never had an issue finding it.
The arrows on shaman do have a cast time, it’s the same animation as Harpy hunters bow attacks (Same harpy model, same animations) so it is dodgeable, it just might get hectic to dodge them when lava elementals are around.
I would honestly rate Asura fractal harder than the Dredge mining suit.
Things to note about dredge mining suit:
-Bombs come out in 2 waves, but they explode at the same time, be conscientious of other party members positioning and which direction you dodge and you should only ever need to dodge this once
-Dredge agony attack can be dodged entirely by 2 consecutive dodges, warrior shield block can block it entirely, invulnerabilities work towards this goal as well.
The fight is easier than the final boss of Asura imo since its mechanics are predictable and more easily avoidable if with judicious use of your dodges.
Asura final boss can target the same person indefinitely and is completely random in who he attacks. The longer the fight goes on, the more likely it becomes that someone will be consecutively targetted and inevitably hit by agony. The unpredictability of this fight can make it more difficult since it can push players to the point where they run out of ways to dodge/mitigate the damage.
And finally, loot doesn’t seem to get significantly better at higher difficulties. Lodestones don’t start appearing more often, rares or exotics don’t seem to drop any more frequently then they did at 0-10 or 10-20, monetary rewards still come in the form of bag of gold (a measly 3s) and if your answer to this is magic find, then kitten that. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, magic find has no place in dungeons, it’s an antiquated stat that should have died long ago. Players should not be rewarded for dropping useful stats and becoming detrimental to the group (either via less dps, or less survivability) This is such complete kitteny garbage design I can’t even begin to understand in what universe this even begins to make sense.
To conclude this spiteful review, too much of the dungeon becomes mindless kiting and poor mechanics the higher the difficulty goes. It implements a stupid gear treadmill on top of a stupid resistance mechanic which has failed in other games and isn’t any different here. I liked FotM when I started, there were some new and somewhat interesting mechanics, but the further I go, the less and less I enjoy certain fractals. They don’t become more difficult by merit of added interesting mechanics, but rather they put you on the gear treadmill for agony resistance while forcing you to
inevitably ranged kite melee mobs and strafe/dodge projectiles.
Questions, comments, criticisms?
I find that the higher the difficulty goes, the less I enjoy the dungeon.
•Mobs and bosses start to get to the point where it just isn’t feasible to facetank them. The best form of damage mitigation seems to become just ranging them and kiting. I think this is stupid and really just poor design. Some fractals become almost exclusive kitefests. I’m not fond of the idea of the further I go in fractals, the more likely it is that I’m going to spend more and more time circlestrafing with a ranged weapon for an hour.
•Certain added mechanics feel poorly implemented. The added agony mechanic in the harpy fractal is awful. He has no limit on how many times he can target someone, so he can spam you until you have nothing left to dodge/block/invuln through and you eventually go down through his attrition-esque attacks, and even then he can still focus you when you’re down meaning agony against your downed state = dead. Agony attacks should have a tell, be reasonably spaced out, and should punish the player for not avoiding them. But this isn’t reasonably spaced out, every single attack the boss does applies agony and he spends the entire fight spamming it and has no filter on how many times in a row he can attack the same person.
The harpy knockback is also bad in my opinion. The size of the circle in comparison with size of the platform means it can manifest in a way that you won’t even see the circle. This part of the tell is thus, potentially entirely eliminated meaning you have to watch for a bright blue ball in a bright blue sky which is just bad design in terms of color scheme and contrasting dangerous mechanics with the environment. Also, to add insult to injury, there’s also a bug where you can fall and not be teleported back onto the platform and fall to your death, meaning now your entire party has to suicide if they don’t want to 4man the rest of the dungeon.
Jade Maw’s agony effect is also really poor. Every single phase transition he inflicts agony on everyone, it isn’t avoidable and lasts a long time (Something like 5-8 seconds?) Even with resistances, at higher difficulties it still just plays the same role of unavoidable party wide % based damage that kills. It gets to the point where it heads into this gear treadmill of acquiring more agony resistance to deal with it. Required resistances in PvE weren’t a good idea in other MMOs, they aren’t a good idea now.
The underwater fractal is one of the worst designed fractals. The dolphin path is horrible for the fact that dodging does not work against the sink because it hits multiple times in a chain. If you dodge the sink, it shouldn’t just sink you anyway. Trying to rely solely on the 2 ability to distract the krait just makes it slowpaced and boring. The boss also suffers from the same problems HotW bosses have which is just having an obscene amount of HP for essentially 1 mechanic the boss has. At higher difficulties, the boss applies agony when he devours someone, which by the way can’t be dodged and has a massive range on which he can devour someone and during his devour, takes no damage AND regens making a boring fight even longer. The agony isn’t even much of a factor because since the boss does like no damage outside of agony and the agony doesn’t even last long enough to kill you (especially if you have resistances), the mechanic just becomes a stupid nuisance that forces people to stay at range which coincedentally even further lowers many classes dps output underwater. The entire fight becomes about keeping your distance at 1000+ range which is just a 10 minute underwater kitefest against a boss that does like no damage on his own outside of agony. Absolutely terrible design.
So I have 2 major gripes with existing bugs that have been around forever and have never been fixed.
First off is the dodge roll being unreliable while attacking. Dodge roll can fail where you don’t move anywhere and your dodge roll cancels halfway through meaning you get hit by whatever it was you were trying to dodge, AND it still drains your endurance because the game acknowledges that you did in fact use dodge. This is mostly relevant with melee weapons, but still a major nuisance, and with the upscaling difficulty of FotM, dodging is becoming more and more important the further you go to avoid agony.
Why has dodge roll not been fixed yet?
Secondly, the bug where you try to pick up an item while moving, and the bug causes you to lose control of your character for x amount of seconds meaning you can walk off cliffs, or walk into mobs, or get hit by things all because you can no longer control your character. Yes, you can just make sure you’re not moving when you try to pick something up, but this is a bug that has been around for months. It’s one thing to ridicule complaining if it was a new bug and would be fixed soon, but this bug has been around for a long time, players shouldn’t have to be constantly finding workarounds for bugs that should’ve been fixed months ago. This is especially relevant in Jade Maw encounter, and the Colossus encounter where if you don’t stop, it’s a very real possibility that you can just walk off the cliff trying to pick up the hammer, or not being able to pick up a reflecting crystal on the fly.
These are bugs that should’ve been fixed in beta. Not only have they persisted through beta into the official release, but months after the game has been released, they still have not been fixed.
/endrant
(edited by Negativity.5801)
Theres a weekly reset on difficulty? Is this true, and if so what day does it reset?
Apparently alot of people are getting this loud ringing bug, and all the other audio bugs and is completely replaced by it.
Magic find doesn’t belong in dungeons. The dungeon content is supposed to be challenging and push players to perform well, giving incentive for players to wear magic find in dungeons is three steps back in what dungeons should be.
This is like some sick joke by Anet where rather then fix dungeons to be more challenging, they give incentive to wear magic find in dungeons where selfish players will drop stats for magic find thus making the dungeon more difficult. Mobs die more slowly, players die more easily, all because of an antiquated stat like magic find. It makes dungeons harder in a terrible way.
kitten off with the magic find gear
I didn’t know about this and it just makes me even more sad. Pets already struggle with surviving because they take full AOE damage and are batkittentupid in terms of AI, on top of how aggro works meaning pets are that much more likely to even be taking direct aggro and hits from mobs.
Hate to say it, but I have serious doubts that ranger will ever be a good class.
You should try Arah path 4.
From all my sources, it’s 3 tokens from the bag. So it depends on the dungeon to what the total amount is “closer” to. Either way, it’s still garbage.
I might’ve agreed if it was like 10 per bag, but 3? Really?
I never said anything about MF.
Never said it was a random drop. Just saying what the bags have in them is negligible. Everyone in my group got the bag off Mark-whatever golem in CoE right before we had to disband the group due to the newly broken Bjarl fight (Thanks Anet)
People have been complaining for weeks about poor dungeon loot and not receiving partial tokens if they’re only able to complete the dungeon and these bags don’t even scratch the surface.
Really don’t think anyone is gonna go, “Well we spent 40 minutes in a dungeon and couldn’t complete it, but at least I got 3 tokens from the bag.”
Magic find doesn’t belong in dungeons. It should be kept out as an open world PvE farming tool, nothing more.
They should’ve fixed the loot tables on bosses and made chest drops better (Adding more cores/lodestones, higher chance of rares/exotics, etc. etc.)
All magic find does in dungeons is detract from the groups effectiveness and makes the dungeons harder than they need to be because bosses will take longer to die, or people will die more easily because they’re dropping stats for magic find.
It’s a step in the wrong direction and it’s appalling that this is being endorsed by the developers.
Lucky you. There have been plenty of threads about this and I’ve had Detha bug numerous times myself. Hodgins has only ever bugged once for me, but still annoying.
Hodgins and Detha have been bugging for weeks. Nothing new here.
Bag of Wondrous goods got me 3 tokens and like 2 silver.
Yep, this definitely fixes dungeon loot, and trying to make magic find more prominent in dungeons where it doesn’t belong is another great decision.
Seriously, what the hell are they thinking when they implement this kitten?
Same problem here.
Man this patch was nothing but kitten.
birds can hit moving targets while dealing good dmg all the while..
Just need Quaggans to be a playable race to better suit our new underwater stronghold
It means that not only will your arrows get obstructed but you will run out of them!
Also there will be a added delay with taking an arrow out of the quiver that adds longbow and shortbow casting time by 40 ms per arrow.
Hey now, that extra 40ms on the autoattacks is not a nerf. Anet said so themselves.
/sarcasm
Think some people speculated about 2 hours between characters.
This is pretty much the reason why I don’t get to play my ranger/thief as often as I’d like to. Every time I join a group it’s 4 other glass cannon people on them along with my glass cannon thief and ranger, these kinds of groups almost never go well or are much, much harder than they need to be.
I run a AH hammer guardian, and a shout healer tank warrior, and runs go so much smoother on them. Why? Because there is no sitting around waiting for someone to pull, there isn’t infinite kiting going on to kill the mobs with 2 billion hp (Thanks Anet) With these support/tank classes I can control the flow of the dungeon and keep people healed/buffed and more importantly, alive.
Idk about all this. I like to wear the Dark heavy armor set and start rolling around pretending I’m Silent Chief Yurt. I think that puts GW2 pretty close to Demon Souls and Dark Souls.
^This
AC final boss of each path drops 15s. Also, some of the Champion Howlers drop anywhere between 5-15s.
CoE is better if you’re lucky, charged cores and lodestones sell for something like 1g and 2g+ respectively. Also, it’s worth mentioning that the corrupted mobs in the beginning can drop corrupted lodestones/cores, and destroyers can drop their lodestones and cores too (although most people skip the destroyers)
So AC if you want reliable income. CoE if you’re feeling lucky.
My favorite part was how well pressing 2 worked against Zhaitan. There are quite a few bugs in the game in very important places, but at least pressing 2 over and over again worked well. The functionality of pressing 2 was well done. Good job Anet, I look forward to pressing 2 against the other Elder Dragons.
I have issues with dodging all the time. It does seem to have something to do with autoattacks. It’s most prominent on my guardian and warrior, but it’s even happened a few times on my ranger where I’ll try to dodge while firing my shortbow and my dodge will cancel itself and I’ll end up just sitting there and get hit by whatever I was trying to dodge.
It’s also happened a few times when I use the shortbow 3 (leap back dodge), my ranger will do the animation for it but he won’t actually move anywhere.
I hate that this hasn’t been fixed. It pisses me off when I get hit/killed by something just because my dodge roll bugs. No idea why this hasn’t been fixed.
For all the talk of removing tank healer dps trinity, I have to really disagree with it. Tanks still exist in GW2, and you might be surprised how much smoother a dungeon run goes with someone who isn’t flopping over dead because a mob looked at them and can somewhat control mobs.
I’d say healer was removed and replaced with support. Yeah support can heal, but healers were called healers because thats all they did was heal. In GW2, that isn’t there anymore. You can support with some heals but that’s more a secondary function.
I’d say GW2 didn’t destroy the holy trinity, they just made it Tank/Support/DPS. Although support can coincide with both dps and tank but thats beside the point.
This means that individual players need to pay attention to their own self-sustainability in the form of condition removals, break stuns, and healing. Full DPS only works if you’ve got the skill to back it up and even then, it can still be really difficult without tanks or supports.
(edited by Negativity.5801)
Yeah, it’s possible to do. Yeah, I’ve done it myself a few times with pugs. I’m on the fence on this fight though. On one hand:
I like the fight, really I do. The group needs to focus down dangerous targets, adhere to mechanics (Lava explosions, imps, blood marks, etc.), and support each other to succeed. I think these are qualities of a good fight. To be honest, a part of me think this encounter is in a good place and shouldn’t be changed.
On the other hand, 98% of pugs can’t seem to do this encounter. When I’m in a group and things are going smoothly and things are dying in a reasonable time frame, I usually urge my group to try to just kill the mobs. However, even in some groups that I thought were actually performing well, they seem to just fall apart on the encounter. It turns into suicide graveyard zerging which I loathe, and once the group falls apart and begins this method, there’s no coming back from it because people are dying at uneven intervals and once the mobs start piling up, there really isn’t a choice anymore other than to suicide run it.
I hate that it’s become the common method among pugs to just suicide run it which makes me think it’s bad, but at the same time, if the encounter is done right, I think it’s a good encounter, it’s reasonably challenging and makes groups work together to succeed and punishes mistakes.
I’m sure there’s been tons of threads about this already but I wanted to put in my 2 cents here since I haven’t seen anything about this encounter in a while.
Thoughts?
Yes, this is a whiny post, let’s just get that out of the way. I know these fights won’t be removed no matter how much moaning and groaning goes on. However, I still want to share with the forum and hopefully some Anet employees will read this and maybe take it into consideration. (LOL)These fights should’ve never seen the light of day, they have no redeeming qualities and are just terrible in every aspect. I’m not saying any of these fights are difficult or easy, just saying the design is terrible and the developers should never implement any fights like these ever again.
Evolved Destroyer in CoE path 3. This has got to be the worst designed fight in the entire game. I don’t even understand how in concept this would’ve seemed like a good idea. You get a small window of dps, for all the “do what you want” vibe GW2 has tried to give off, this fight has the potential to only have 2 dps while 3 people just afk mashing f to fire a laser at the boss, which means if you don’t have people with 1200+ range attacks, this fight takes an excruciatingly long time to complete.
Husk in CoE path 2. Yet another boss with a tiny window of dps since you can’t attack him while his thorns are up, while the method of sustained dps being mashing 1 on your gun to subvert golems to walk to the boss to blow up, except that 90% of the time they seem to just wander around completely ignoring that they’re being subverted, so not even they are following the mechanics of the fight, and then can just randomly blow up with no warning whatsoever. Just another tedious, long, boring fight.
Stargazer Jotun in Arah path 1. Again, another fight where I can’t even begin to comprehend how this seemed good even in theory. Afk holding a reflecting crystal. Really?
Arah path 4 final boss (and every boss in path 4 except Giganticus for that matter) It has all just about all the mechanics of all the previous fights, and all of them are equally as ignorable.
There might be some other bosses that I just didn’t remember to put in this list. There are also other bosses which, while I think the fight is bad, could be tweaked to be acceptable. However, I offer no constructive criticism for these fights because I think they’re awful and should’ve been scrapped.
General Complaints:
•Anet needs to strike a balance between HP and mechanics. High Hp pools need to be justified by dynamic and interesting fights.
•Stay away from gimmick fights. Fights like destroyer, stargazer jotun, and husk should never see the light of day. These ideas should’ve been thrown away when they were still on paper.
•Mobs need to stop moving out of melee range if they’re melee too. Like why do the final bosses in AC (other bosses do this too, but these in particular come to mind) hit me, take 2 steps back, make me walk towards them again because now they’re out of my melee range, they hit me again and take 2 steps back (rinse repeat until the boss is dead) It makes sense if they’re going after someone else, or if they’re supposed to move around, but if they don’t and are melee and I have aggro, why am I still chasing them around? The bosses are supposed to be scary, not: I’m scary and they run away from me.
•Too much rehashing. Gravelings are just skelks, final boss in CoE story is just an undead giant which you’ve seen 1,000 times running around Orr, Legendary Effigy is the same as any other flaming effigy, final bosses in HotW are just svanir you can find anywhere else. The list goes on. Is it so much to ask that the final bosses of “end-game content” have a unique look? Not only are many of the fights poorly designed and incredibly boring, they even look boring too. Stop rehashing everything, it’s one thing to do it in general open world PvE, but in dungeons? You’ve got to be kidding. At the very least you could make the bosses unique.
•Many bosses are too small. Even if it was necessary to dodge, I couldn’t do it on some bosses even if I tried. For instance, Leurent in TA, some of his abilities hit hard, and yes, some of his abilities are telegraphed, only I can’t see what he’s doing when my character is much larger than he is, and he’s covered in tons of spell effects. It’s a good thing I’ve only done TA on my tank warrior, because if I had to actually pay attention to what he did and couldn’t because he’s too small and can’t see what he’s doing because he’s covered in birds, fire, and all the other spell effects in the game and I got downed because of it, I’d be pretty pissed off.
(edited by Negativity.5801)