Guild Wars 2

I have an idea – make rangers traps visible, and while you’re at it – make thieves in stealth visible as well. Great idea huh? No?

Thought not.

“we’ll be looking into it” – you mean you haven’t already?!? Gaaaah!!!!!

Oh, and if you want to nerf this skill, you might wanna take a look at the ever evading thief as well.

I would gladly give up my water res if the devs would only fix lick wounds when on the ground. Ppl not playing a ranger can’t even fathom how many times this skill bugs out. In spvp, for me it works maybe 1 out 4 times, if even that.

It’s simply the most bugged downstate skill out of all the classes.

Very nice video, and good commentary.

Mrbig.8019:

But surely this kind of burst is one of the main reasons why the above-average PvP population is so low, since most people trying PvP rage quit after being threated with bursts of this kind for 3-4 times.

This. Just this.

Fun as hell when you’re the one dealing out the insane burst, but for the overall health of pvp in this game, this needs to go.

Omnio.3652:

OGDeadHead.8326:

Hi ppl!

No other class has been able to take me down that fast before, it’s like they unload a bunch of skills all within the exact same moment.

Just take a look at the screenshot, lol!

I’m filing a bug report on this, since if this is an intended game mechanic, they may as well bury this game. I though thieves had insane burst, but they don’t even compare to this.

Just LOL. How about thief? Warrior? Mesmer? Engineers start to use some burst build and people start to freak out. Hey, wait a minute, this class is not supposed to have cool damage. Its easy to avoid I think if you are in 1v1, a lot of people dodged my pull or barrage, tho I’m not so good with it yet. Man up! And try to dodge.

I think no burst in this game is so sick, just quickness is.

Apparently you don’t read – like I said, I’ve never been “oneshot” like what happened here, simple as that. I didn’t even have time to react because (s)he landed the attack and I was dead – no time to dodge or anything, it happened exactly at the moment I was in the air jumping down from a small ledge behind the point. Need I explain it more?

Chaith.8256:

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but.. l2p issue if you don’t use your tools! Best of luck next time you face a glass cannon engi.

Learning things everytime I play, I’m only at Avenger rank (from spvp only), so go figure. Still got lots of things to learn in contrast to many other folks here, I’m just a casual player.

Thing is though, this particular encounter didn’t leave me any time to “use my tools” – run away from the point and -bam- dead. In other words – no time to even react whatsoever.

Durzlla.6295:

Nope, an engi can do 3, Fall damage trait = Grenade Barrage, Tool Belt = Grenade Barrage, Equipping Nade kit = Grenade Barrage.

Ah, that may be it. I ran away from the point jumping down a small ledge, and he followed me down there, so the Fall damage trait might be the explanation then?

I tried to make sure it was correct, but of course there could’ve been mistakes in the screenshot.

If I remove all duplicates, I get 15738 damage on a target with 3200+ armor – instantly (at least to me).
I think my character runs with aprox 15100 hp.

Edit: I play a ranger!

S H A K U R AS.9536:

I agree in 100%, asuras should be removed from pvp!

No!

Actually, everything seems easier when playing this race compared to my charr! It feels like I’m moving faster, the camera view is better – I never thought it could be such a huge difference in how the game feels and plays, and for some odd reason, it makes gameplay a lot easier!

I kinda knew I was gonna get some of these responses, lol! Well that’s fine, it’s what can be expected when you start a topic like this on these forums!

I’m not saying anything about the skill of the player that pulled this off on me, I take your word for it that this is hard to do and worthy of respect for a skilled player, no worries about that.

This was in spvp, and I’ve played a decent amount of spvp games to be sure of my statement that never before have I experienced a burst attack of this magnitude from any other class.

Was this a onetime deal? Maybe I experienced lag that I didn’t notice? Maybe something bugged? I don’t know. All I do know that for me it was instant death that I have never seen before.

Kudos to the player that pulled it off, I salute you!

Project Shrine Maiden.9623:

you’re doing something wrong. sorry pal.

Quite possible, but in this case, the screenshot is accurate – that’s the amount of damage I took from this guy in an instant.

BTW, I tried to type 1 8 2 0 0 damage in my post above, but not even that will this forum allow, lol!

I’ve experienced a lot of burst in this game, but let me assure you, nothing can even compare to this – nothing. What happened here was instant death, no time to dodge, stunbreak – you name it. It was instant.

Hi ppl!

Lately, I find myself more and more getting insta-killed by engineers. I’m not really sure what they do, but I think they toss something at me and then bam dead.

No other class has been able to take me down that fast before, it’s like they unload a bunch of skills all within the exact same moment.

Just take a look at the screenshot, lol!

I got hit for a total of 182kittenage on my char within one second!
I got more than 3200 armor – no other hit, condition or anything had landed on me prior to this, I was about to run away from a point when this guys came by and smoked me in less than one second, lol!

I’m filing a bug report on this, since if this is an intended game mechanic, they may as well bury this game. I though thieves had insane burst, but they don’t even compare to this.

Get your pet involved!

Having played a big charr all the time in spvp, switching to asura… lol, what a difference.

Pendleton.6385:

Taym.8326:

Pendleton.6385:

In my opinion, the pet scaling and reflecting our primary stats would hurt BM/Bunker builds. My pet is my main source of dps. I like that he doesn’t scale with me.

I tank while it hurts people. I’m still amazed how many opposing players don’t pay attention to pets.

But this is exactly the problem, a high damage pet that requires little to no attention that counteracts the spec that the player has chosen, what you describe what you enjoy so much is the balance issue itself.

The mechanic was designed to be this way.

Also, saying the pet requires little to no attention is not accurate. My cat can be facerolled if I’m not paying very close attention. In fact, most all GW2 pets can … even 30 deep in BM.

There’s an easy way to beat a bunker BM … kill his pet and then slowly kill him.

I’m not trying to troll or anything … I just don’t understand why people want to nerf the two main builds of a ranger that really make us viable..

I find in WvW or sPVP, people get embarrassed to be killed by a ranger because of the overall view of them. I killed the same mesmer close to 5 times in a row because he was upset a ranger killed him.

Yeah, all the cry for nerfs and changes to the ranger class lately is because mostly thieves and mesmers like to be at the top of the food chain, and stay there. They want to have their easy kills, and when that enemy starts to bite back, they get frustrated.

Paken Kai.5970:

that’s giving the entire group +20-25% damage for the first few seconds of the fight

…and this is why this traitline sucks. Vs anything but trash in pve, it’s utterly useless, and that trash dies so easy anyway, this hardly makes a difference to be worth mentioning.

In fights were it would really make a difference, ie boss mobs, the traitline is utter rubbish in its current implementation.

I don’t normally see conditions to be that big of a problem in the first place, but we do have a number of options:

- Healing Spring (skill)
- Empathic Bond (trait)
- Evasive Purity (trait, removes blind, poison AND chill I think it was, someone on here tested this a while back)
- Signet of Renewal (skill)
- Bear pet can remove conditions with its F2

So we do have a decent amount of condition removal abilities, they just work different to what you might be used to.

Both!

Nah, but really, you might want to consider more than one single piece of armor/jewels tbh. I have 3 armors and a bunch of jewels that I switch between, depending on what I’m doing; magic find, dps and a one armor with decently high armor/healing power.

Signet of Stone I can somewhat understand the need to have a long cooldown. Signet of the Wild on the other hand, the active ability is not that great to gimp yourself for 2 minutes (untraited) afterwards.

Orbys.4895:

Just to do a small correction to the above guy regarding drake pets missing their F2. This is why I recommended River/Marsh Drake. The only time their ultimate misses is when the monster dies. They shoot out several beam blasts that bounce between targets. (Similar to chain frost from dota)

I meant if you swap pets and instantly activate their F2 (more or less in the exact same moment), they will miss the target.
You’ll have to wait maybe half a second up to a second before using their F2 after a swap to get them to land their specials. The jaguar is the only pet that I know that doesn’t have this problem (and maybe birds).

Orbys.4895:

i have two signets on, but I never activate them. The passive effects outweigh the triggered effects.

Yes I agree, and I never activate my signets either because of this.

Now for any dev reading this (yeah right!) – kitten don’t get any ideas to nerf the passive effects now!
hey are not that great, but they sure are better than the active abilities most of the time. Letting the passive part remain even after activating would see more use of active abilities, they are on long cooldowns anyway.

Personally, I think dagger is more for pvp, I don’t really see the need for the dagger in pve at all. Sword with torch/horn/axe is a better choice for pve.

If you use the jaguar, a quickness swap to the jaguar will give the best bang for the buck when in melee range, since it’s one of the few pets (possibly the only one) that will use its F2 ability to full potential with quickness (swap + activate F2 almost at the same time to see what I mean).
his will give you 2 seconds of pretty good burst with the sword. If you use this type of swapping for other pets, they will most likely miss their F2 attack (leap attacks will miss, drakes specials abilities will miss and so on).

I find the MF gear with runes of the pirate to be most useful to me with the Tropical bird activating quite often, which brings a pretty decent extra pet for more damage when farming. The drawback is that you may get stuck in combat since the birds wants to fight everything in sight!

As for comparison to warriors, I haven’t played a warrior yet, so I’ll let someone else answer that one.

General advice would be – take care of your pets!

I’m wondering what happens if a pet gets interrupted while trying to lick wounds?

Also, remember there are quite a few seconds before a ranger can activate lick wounds in the first place. On several occasions I’ve been burned down before even being able to activate the ability.

I was just wondering what you ppl think about signets – shouldn’t the passive effect always be active, even after using the active effect, in the same manner as how spirits work?

It’s a long cooldown on signet of the wild for example, to be worth sacrificing the active ability with 2 minutes of no gain from the passive ability.

Sorry, sloppy marking I noticed, but I think you see anyway.

As for all ppl saying that a downed pet shouldn’t be able to res its master, I’d like to toss this image in here. By all accounts, a downed pet should be able to ressurect.

Confirmed this bug, and have posted in through the ingame bug report, hopefully they’ll fix it “soonish”.

Khenzy.9348:

Waste his Empathic Bond with trash conditions.

You don’t “waste” Empathic Bond, since it’s a passive ability that we have no control over in the first place.

DancinPuppeh.8421:

A lot of people ask me how I know how much HP my pets have, and a lot think I’m making it up but there’s a simple way, use Signet Of Wild which gives regen, then what how much HP the regen heals your pet for and multiply that number by 100, because the regen is 1% per second.

For example, at level 30 my Jaguar gets 73 regen from the signet, so he has 7300 HP

Hope this helped those who are curious how to find out

Where the heck did you get this idea from??? Wrong, stop spreading misinformation around ok?

Peter.9406:

There’s either on of two problems here:
1. The ranger community has a whole doesn’t know how to play and complain too much.

2. ANet poorly designed this class since every other class seems to be content with how their class is running.

Well, if one class forum is filled to the brim with mostly complaints, while other class forums boast about how they own this and that, you can’t simply play the “L2P-card” – something is clearly broken with the class, and needs urgent attention – now.

The small babysteps Anet are taking every third month or so won’t cut it anymore. So far, since release, rangers haven’t really seen anything significant enough to be worth mentioning, with the exception of pet rez underwater, which wasn’t even asked for in the first place.

You may see stuff you would consider buffs in the patchnotes, but only if you read them as someone who have never ever really played this class to its full potential. Almost all of our so called buffs are crappy stuff we never asked for in the first place, OR, they are general buffs that apply to all classes.

In a duel earlier today vs a an ele in wvw, I noticed my pet land maybe one or two attacks in a fight that lasted for a good 3 minutes, maybe more.

Pets are our downfall, and they’re the reason we fall short in this game. Don’t get me wrong now, I started to play the ranger because of the pets, but seriously, they need major work, and we need it now, not in six months, not in another year and a half, but now.
Sure, pets can burst for decent to high damage, but for kittens sake – they need to land their hits. We have to dish out all our cc to get our pets to land at least one hit, and not even then we can be sure of getting a hit in.
It’s so simple to avoid pets it’s laughable. My least feared opponent in this game is another ranger, and that’s purely because of how incredibly easy it is to avoid the pets 90% of the time.

In spvp, playing as a ranger, you’ll 90% of the time be the target of choice from the other team. Now ask yourselves – why is that? Is it because all ppl playing rangers suck, or is it something with our class that makes us subpar compared to other classes, even if the player behind the class is of equal, or many times of higher, skill compared to others?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – to be a good ranger in pvp that can hold your ground vs other classes, you’ll need to be twice the player, especially compared to thieves.

*

In the ranger forums you’ll mostly see “qq-posts” yes, but there’s a reason for that. Go to the thieves forums, and you’ll of course see some “qq-posts” there as well, but just compare the two – they all seem to have a lot more fun in the thieves, mesmers and ele-forums, wouldn’t you agree?

Xsorus.2507:

I don’t think the guard thing is an exploit, Since they changed it to do that in a patch where they said they were improving Shouts.

Yeah, agree. Without this, ranger is once again gimped compared to other classes, since a large part of our dps is standing on the ground/up on the wall, unable to contribute at all (except for the ones that brings some buffs, but that is simpy not enough).

Something that’s been suggested before, but here goes:

*Allow a separate builds in wvw/pve in the same way that’s possible when going to pvp. There’s a big difference playing vs mindless mobs in pve compared to real people in wvw. Having to respec (and pay money) each and every time going to wvw is very annoying.

jkctmc.8754:

So I’ve been leveling a Mesmer lately, and he is now 76. Last night at level 75 I was running solo, and killing other 80s with some determination, never losing a single one vs one.

Two out of three times I escaped a well known group of players who’re good when they encountered me killing a Ranger (ironically all three times). Even better, their Thief, who is extremely good, and has killed my 80 Ranger seperated from his group, and gave me a one vs one on my Mesmer.

Upleveled, in level 50ish gear on my 75 Mesmer I fought this good player on a Thief, who is fully geared in Exotics, and Ascended gear to a stand still. I couldn’t kill him, and he couldn’t kill me.

I’m sorry, but after a full night on a Mesmer, mid 70s, with level 50ish gear on solo, fighting a lot of 80s, sometimes in pairs (I won many 2v1), or trios (I lost every 3v1) and doing so well only highlighted the issues that Rangers have.

I do well on my Ranger, but when I play him it is as if I’m not allowed to make a mistake against other good players. I’ve leveled, and fully geared an 80 Ranger, Warrior, Thief, and Guardian, and now with a baby Mesmer, and done so extremely well on them all, but more than tripled what I could do as a Ranger with all the other toons.

The developers need to quit being so quiet about the Ranger.

Good post, and I fully agree with your last sentence.

But, they (Anet) likes to take babysteps when implementing class balance, and it seems that they totally misinterprets what the real issues of the class really are. This has been shown throughout all the updates they’ve made so far, they tend to buff things that won’t really make any difference whatsoever to the real issues.

When we thought we were going to get some decent buffs some patches ago, it would then show that these buffs weren’t ranger specific at all!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – being a good ranger takes far, far more effort than being good on any other class, and we have to work at least twice as hard as even mediocre players playing other classes, and still we struggle.

They key, imho, to boost this class is to work hard on improving pets, and they sure need lots of improvements.

It’s time to step it up Anet. This class is the one in most need of a serious overhaul. Mesmer, thief, ele and guardian have been at the top of the foodchain for a long time now, and it’s getting really tiresome to see that month after month passes and nothing really changes.
It’s getting tiresome to be the cannon fodder class in the game when it comes to pvp.

Northlander.4619:

I think part of the problem here is that you guys seem to consider blue and green items as rewards when in truth they are vendor trash. I never even place those items to trading post. I just outright merch them.

Bingo!

Old topic and probably forgotten, but this is still an issue. Care to try and fix this, devs?

Daleon.8912:

The Jaguar’s F2 skill (stealth) was pretty unreliable today. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I didn’t notice any problems with the Jaguar before, so this might be an issue with the new patch.

Noticed this as well. Perhaps the only F2 skill that has [almost] always been very reliable to activate, now it seems to be just as unresponsive as all the other pets F2 skills, from time to time.
In general, I find myself struggling a lot more with F2 skills now than what was the case some days ago.

But what the h… devs don’t even come to this part of the forum anymore

Well, they just don’t get it do they?

:(

Dodge on return (F3) would be a decent start, which have been suggested several times already. It should not be a trait, that’s for sure.

I guess I’m just old and grumpy, it sometimes takes time to adapt to new things. That said, I liked the old interface better, but may very well change opinion on that later on!

;)

Here are the first few bugs I’ve noticed

- Attackspeed sometimes slows down a lot. When fighting some mobs in Orr, suddenly my shortbow started to fire almost at the rate of my longbow. Switching to greatsword showed the same strange behavior. This lasted for a good minute, and was not the cause of any conditions or other ill effects that I could see. Swapping pets for quickness didn’t resolve the issue either.

- Greatsword swoop attack more often than not misses when used from range

- The fixed (?) “Tail swipe” from drakes tends to miss a lot

- Swapping pets no longer resets the cooldown of their F2 ability

If you really want to go with a full support build, that purely focuses on supporting your teammates, I’d go with spirits, even though they have their issues.
As for pets, take the ones that brings some support as well, like for example the Fern Hound you mentioned.

I think I’d run with a 0/10/0/30/30 for a support build – decent support through the spirits for both protection and damage (Sun, Frost, Storm + the elite Natue), while your pets will deal the damage (with the +30% critical damage trait).
Possibly change sword for axe to keep range all the time.

Nature Magic traits:
- Nature’s Bounty
- Spiritual knowledge
- Spirits unbound

BM traits:
- Compassion training
- Vigorous training (if you decide to go with birds/moas)
- Natural healing

Healing spring of course, and grab all the +healing gear you can find.

Amok.4961:

Considering the amount of ppl posting in this thread a Dev. reply would be appreciated..

Well, I even had the network engineers from my ISP try to contact them directly, and they are ppl that know what they are talking about. When they pointed out the fact that the PL happens at Anets server, they still refuse to acknowledge it, and replies with a generic answer.

Some crap’s going on on their side, but they keep blaming each and everyone of us for lousy connections. Go figure.

As of today, ~6 months since release, this skill is still bugged as hell, with pets standing around doing no attempt at all to res you. I sure hope this is fixed with the patch tomorrow.

…and it’s awesome, deals good damage! Biggest drawback is that you’ll be stuck in combat more than you wish for, from time to time.

False positives from antivirus programs is a bigger issue today than actual viruses.

For pets that crits a lot, it makes them able to take more punishment for sure, but if they’re the focus of a hard hitting baddie, I wouldn’t say it makes that big of a difference. The trait can be boosted somewhat with Compassion Training in the BM tree.

For maximum tanking ability for your pets, I would guess ways of giving them protection might be of a greater benefit. Perhaps a crazy build like this one:

http://goo.gl/SDj7z

With that your pet can gain protection through

- Stone spirit
- Guard
- When you dodge

Because of the Fortifying Bond trait, a dodge from you would give your pet 2+2 seconds of protection (+ any boon duration bonuses you might have, in this case at least +20% duration thanks to the points invested in NM for 2,4 + 2,4 seconds = 4,8 seconds of protection/dodge)

Stone spirit might grant it’s protection ability to you or your pet. If you get the buff, so will your pet, so that’s another source of protection.

Guard will grant your pet 10 seconds of protection as well when you use it, and with a 24 second cd (traited), that’s a rather decent uptime for protection for sure. Combined with the other sources, you should be able to keep the pet under protection almost indefinitely.

I’m not sure if runes of the earth and/or runes of the forge would further increase protection uptime…