Guild Wars 2

Serraphin Storm.2369:

If pet could capture point then a ranger would be able to capture a point vs a guardian. Even if the battle would result in a stalemate. Sounds OP to me.

Sounds like a poorly played guardian, if they can survive the ranger but the ranger can still cap the point. Knockbacks can be used to remove the pet from the circle the same way as they interrupt player caps, and if the guardian were smart he/she could simply move to the edge of the ring and let the (presumably melee) pet chew on them from outside the capture ring because the AI is not smart enough to know where it should move to in this situation.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

expecting any single attack to put down a target is just wishful thinking. Rangers need to drag the fight out. Using k9s for kd followed by path of scar then your lb#4 then barrage can help you control the fight ,but stability will mess all that up. At the same time stability can help you vs that hammer warrior.

Some say using rapid fire first is a waste because of the lower dps but at the same time barrage after rapid fire makes a big difference.

Please go back and read my post. Barrage, rapid fire followed by a buffed maul from a berserker ranger all during pet damage failed to down berserker hammer warriors in sPvP that ate the whole thing using no defensive cooldowns and no dodge rolls.

I can pull off an 18k maul crit in WvW with the same build and literally one-shot someone if they’re also glass, but that’s not because of ranger skills being amazing. It’s because of the way multipliers in my traits work so well with the stats available in WvW. In sPvP where the power numbers are lower, ranger scaling is horrible—as is ranger damage scaling wearing anything less than full berserker gear for WvW.

Maul can one-shot under the right circumstances in WvW. Thief can two-shot someone with cloak and backstab in WvW too, and they don’t have to wait for minute-long cooldowns to do it like ranger’s buffed maul requires. Thief can do more damage than a buffed maul crit using two skills back to back, which is less cast time than ranger’s Signet of the Wild followed by maul (and signet of the hunt’s instant) and thief can use their abilities every four seconds. In sPvP, however, thief can still kill you in a few seconds. Ranger can’t, because of the horrible relative power scaling that becomes apparent when using balanced sPvP stats instead of WvW stats.

Miyu.8137:

I don’t think that any class can stay still while you hitting them with barrage + rapid fire + having for example jaguar on them. You need to count all the advantages and disadvantages of each skills to compare them and not just look at the final dmg.

I created this thread because multiple warriors (and other classes, but I was not watching them as carefully) did exactly to me what you just said you could not believe in sPvP hot join, with the only notable exception being that I was using wolf instead of jaguar. They were at about half health after the fights, so I seriously doubt the change in pet would have killed them.

Thank you for recognizing that we’re talking about more than just barrage, but if we are not going to get a barrage that kills people then we need more than just barrage for 5-target AOE direct damage.

runeblade.7514:

I disagree that a single barrage should kill when a player takes full effect.

This will make Barrage too overpowered. There is too many small corridors, barrage is big enough to cover a capture point, this will wipe groups that tries to res players.

If Barrage is to be improved, it should not root the player while casting.

I would agree that using barrage while moving would be preferred if a bit strange to watch animation-wise. That said, why if we do have to stand still does it not have the impact of Elementalist’s similar Meteor Shower? A player that dodge rolls will take one tick of barrage with minimal damage and the cripple will wear out at the end of the dodge roll. A player that dodge rolls after one hit of Meteor Shower may have had a third of their health taken from them in that one hit.

Why can necromancer AOE be cast while moving and also kill anyone who stands in it?

If your problem is solely with buffing barrage, please note that this post is not about only barrage. It is a general post about the inferior weapon skill coefficients that rangers have even though their pet does not make up for the difference between the damage of their weapons and the damage of weapons used by other classes.

Miyu.8137:

Well I don’t think that barrage is meant to kill a single enemy. The dmg is AoE, if it causes massive dmg then you could kill the entire enemy team stacked on one place with a single skill, which would be totally broken. However I agree that barrage, as it’s now, is awful skill. Half the ticks with double the dmg from each tick would for example make this skill much more beneficial.

I think it has no sence to comment glass cannon ranger as nobody is listening anyway. Further more, the upcomming updates shows that they have perfectly no clue what to do with rangers. Balance across all the builds is just a myth, don’t even think it’s their intention tbh.

Warrior has hundred blades. Necromancer has wells. Guardian has whirling wrath (if they go glass) or smite for a ranged option. Thief has pistol whip. Elementalist has meteor shower. Mesmer has clone shatter combos.

If you stand in any of these AOE effects as a single target, you will die. Why should ranger not also get to kill targets that cannot be bothered to move or dodge roll?

Edited for yet more random kittens. Please fix forum censorship.

Lukyromero.6780:

I am currently trying out Berserker set, except I decided to stay with some Soldier Trinkets rather than going full glass, this is so that I don’t die instantly, you should try it out, it does reduce some damage, but you can always manage.

You are correct that tank stats are effective on a ranger where pure power fails. That is because tank stats are not reduced to ineffective status in order to balance our ineffective pet. If you cannot be killed but the other person can be, you will eventually win. That is why most rangers I’ve seen playing on par with other classes are condition-based tank builds because conditions are not nerfed for "balance" with our pet.

I appreciate your thoughtful suggestion, but this thread was not supposed to be a place for playstyle advice. I would not claim I have nothing left to learn, but this isn’t about individual skill or play choice. I am fairly confident that the statement that ranger’s laughable berserker damage hits like a wet noodle compared to other classes would still hold true about the lesser damage of a soldier’s build, regardless of the skill of the player pushing the weapon skill buttons. It’s math and nothing more.

The point of this thread is to draw attention to the fact that a power-based ranger is not only inferior in its weapon skill damage output to other classes, but that the pet is unable to make up the difference in damage because it does not scale with ranger stats.

Guardians have a class mechanic that causes burning every five hits. That burning does about as much damage per tick as our pet’s non-critical hits, and with burst skills that hit multiple times guardians can proc the burning more often than our pets hit even if they can stay on-target. Similarly to our pets, guardians can buff this effect with traits in their profession-mechanic trait line (Virtues). They can also "command" their "pet" by pushing their virtue buttons to gain effects that are more powerful than ranger pet abilities if they trait for them, such as a massive aoe heal for their team, area protection, or with the help of a team applying all of their burning all at once along with might stacks.

Following the logic that ArenaNet has used with ranger, Guardian weapon skill damage should be heavily nerfed in order to compensate for their class mechanic adding damage when they attack. Doesn’t that sound like a crazy idea?

Edited for inexplicable kittens.

I don’t see why pets capturing points would be overpowered, Taym.8326. It would give rangers an option other than face-tanking melee when protecting a point, and most pets die very quickly if focused in sPvP. A ranger with a dead pet loses a lot of utility and damage, and if they swap pets at range to save the dying pet the point would likely flip to neutral before the pet could run back in.

In fact, when in my first game of sPvP as a ranger long ago, I sent my pet in expecting that it would hold the point. It is an entity on my team and therefore it should count toward holding points. Were it just a summon I wouldn’t have expected it.

I’ve been playing some sPvP today with my ranger using a build that in WvW I’m fairly happy with, though in both places the damage just does not measure up to any other class in full berserker gear. Yes, this is yet another post about Ranger’s absolutely terrible damage coefficients on weapon skills because this problem deserves full attention until it is no longer a problem.

The reason playing a full glass longbow ranger in WvW works is that while your damage isn’t as amazing as other classes at range, you have more range and can abuse cliffs and high ground, and in general damage is much higher than defense in WvW. Once you can kill someone before they are a threat to you, it no longer matters so much that another class in the same gear could kill them three times faster than you can.

In sPvP, the gearing is different. You can’t get above that threshold where your rapid fire kills glass thieves anymore. Against a true glass thief, if I burn all of my cooldowns I can still kill them but then I’m a sitting duck for longer than it takes them to run back to the same spot from their spawn with all of their own cooldowns already up again. Today, however, I repeatedly faced the most effective illustration of ranger’s ineffectiveness…

Barrage is supposed to be our ultimate weapon skill, isn’kitten It’s the hardest-hitting single skill damage ability that we have, assuming someone is dumb enough to stand in all twelve ticks of it. Today, I had two different warriors both running a berserker hammer build literally stand in my barrage without dodging and not give a kitten . They did not use endure pain. They did not have protection. It was base armor vs full glass ranger barrage AND rapid fire together with pet up, Signet of the Wild with mastery trait and Rampage as One, and the hammer warriors using only weapon skills, For Great Justice and Berserker Stance.

Both of these warriors on separate occaisions did more than twice the damage to me in a 1v1 melee situation than I could deal to them when eating barrage, rapid fire and my wolf’s damage, with neither of us suffering any crowd control because we both had stability. Yes, we are talking about a longbow in melee—but notice that longbow’s only range-dependent damage is on auto attack which was not used. I swap to greatsword for maul after the longbow’s skill burst, which coupled with signet of the hunt should be a killing blow. Both warriors survived through it all and killed me, even through the protection buff that my spec gives me and my healing spring.

I understand if weapon coefficients are lower because the pet makes up for the damage lost, but that is not the case. The pet was not even having trouble hitting these warriors. Every hit was landing. Berserker heavy versus berserker medium armor, but my ranger uses signet of stone which along with the protection buff should move the defensive odds in my favor.

A ranger burning every damage cooldown should wipe the floor with a warrior burning every damage cooldown simply because the ranger has longer cooldowns in their damage-boosting utilities and elites. That’s called balance. Longer cooldowns should mean more power when activated, and warriors are more than capable of running away or behind a rock until the ranger burns out.

No player except for the tankiest of bunkers should be able to stand in barrage and pet damage for the full effect and live through it without pushing buttons to live, let alone rapid fire. Ranger must stand still to cast barrage, much like elementalist must stand still to cast meteor shower and both have similar range and cooldowns. The difference is that meteor shower kills people. And no, the cripple on barrage does not offset the severe lack of relative damage. If nobody has to even move out of it, why should they care if they’re crippled?

Please upvote this post if you’re tired of ranger’s weapon skills taking back-seat to every other class simply because of the pet class mechanic that doesn’t even measure up when the AI DOES work.

I have seen a number of posts in this thread regarding server issues creating the problem with pet skill delays. I can’t help but wonder, why is the ranger pet like any other beast in the game to begin with? It is a player-controlled object and should have a completely different AI from any other beast in the game because of that.

Why is the F2 ability in any way using the pet’s AI? There is absolutely no reason for any F2 ability to have an animation generated by the pet’s object if that is the reason for the delays.

Make the ranger’s F2 ability a skill that the RANGER casts, not the pet.

Here’s an example: let’s take a look at the wolf. The wolf’s F2 ability is, like other canines, a howl. The wolf may or may not decide to actually respond at all but if it does follow your command it will stand still and begin a lengthy cast time. The cast time of the canine howls is so long that an enemy player can literally walk out of their range before it lands.

In the example of the wolf, lets look at how making the ranger cast the ability in the game mechanics can change this:

When the ranger presses F2, an effect is generated by the ranger instead of the pet that is instant cast area fear on the pet’s current location. To make the effects look as if the pet cast the skill (even though the ranger generates the effect, NOT THE PET) create a separate animation independent of the pet that looks like the particle effects for other shout-like abilities on the pet’s current location. If you can make an animation for the pet gaining regeneration, you can make an animation for the pet gaining a "howl aura" too.

Essentially, what I’m saying is to make the wolf’s F2 behave exactly like warrior’s Fear Me shout in its activation, but to center the location of the fear on the pet instead of the player.

Also, it would be silly if the pet shouted "FEAR ME!"

Edit: I should note that this is more of a band-aid than a permanent solution because pets need to actually hit their targets instead of running around randomly when they get close. In the end, the pet AI is the root of the problem BUT making the AI better later will not break this proposed solution since the F2 would be independent of the pet AI.

Rangers should have the ability to use a staff, and the staff should be the support weapon.

Greatsword is a skill-burst weapon for every class that has access to it, and should stay that way. That said, autoattack is a bit lacking. Close, but not quite up to where it needs to be in damage--and maul should hit 5 targets. Messing with swoop’s cooldown is a big no. Running from a warrior, thief or even guardian if they’re dual sword is already nearly impossible as-is.

Based on what I am seeing on SBI borderlands today, YB has forgotten every strategy other than "Build omega golems."

sephiroth.4217:

Good fights against SBI in SBI BL for the last hour, could handle the 5 v 8 a few times but once it was a constant 5 v 12-15 it became stale.

Shout out to the [AW] rangers aswell, would love to fight you guys 1v1 on my ranger but shout out to mainly credit you guys for always upgrading your towers/camps, hope your server values your work.

Hi! I’m the blue and white [AW] ranger with Cobalt that was tagged up around the time of your post. You’re welcome to check to see if I’m around when you’re looking for duels, and I’ll accommodate if time allows.

Isslair.4908:

urieldhynne.2743:

We are the new necros without damage. If someone see you is matter of time to kill you if you are tank/support and you are alone or far of the group.

If you are alone as a melee train guard, you use sword, gs, retreat and judge’s intervention to travel around quickly.
95% of guild groups won’t chase a lone target blinking away from them. 1v1 roamers will – but it’s their job to kill people 1v1 and it has nothing to do with balance.
I only used SoS to sustain swiftness, not to start it (we have retreat and save yourselves for that, if alone). So the change is a good one for guard’s quality of life.

We should not be required to have retreat on our bar in WvW at all times. The change is a good one for guard’s quality of life ONLY when running with others / utilities that provide swiftness. It is a TERRIBLE change for a guardian who wishes to have any build variety and run around without group support.

This is an overall nerf in terms of primary usage of the skill. I main staff/greatsword on my guardian and even though I use the staff’s symbol of swiftness in combat, I use it to deal damage and not for the swiftness as often in that case. Out of combat I use symbol of swiftness every time the cooldown is available just to try and maintain some semblance of mobility that compares to the constant 25% run speed buffs other classes get so easily. Now to be clear, I don’t want a 25% move speed passive. I want my swiftness. It gives me something to do other than autorun and stare at the screen mindlessly.

I already posted on the patch discussion thread, but I’ll post again here to make sure we get attention for this issue: changing symbol of swiftness to 4 sec/tick means that a guardian out of combat on the move receives only half of the previous amount of swiftness. That is a HUGE nerf to our quality of life.

The skill should be changed in such a way as to allow the 8 seconds of swiftness to apply if someone does not already have swiftness. There is no need to worry about guardian having too much mobility caused by stacking swiftness buffs because a guardian on the move will not be standing in that symbol for more than one tick. To get more swiftness than one tick, the guardian must STAND STILL instead of moving, which defeats the purpose of swiftness entirely and makes the ’improved’ symbol even clunkier than the way it is now.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Damaskinos.1263:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

AgentChaos.4932:

good change to symbol of swiftness but can we have pure of voice removes 2 condi back?

I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that one.

• How is the change to symbol of Swiftness any good? So many classes move much faster then Guardians. If you want to nerf this, give us an Adept trait, that gives us flat 25% movement spead, like Warriors have it.

In many cases the symbol of swiftness change is actually a buff and not a nerf. Currently it will only apply the initial large portion of swiftness if the target does not currently have any swiftness on them. If they have swiftness on them or after that first pulse it will then add 1 second of swiftness per pulse. This is very awkward and clunky.

The change makes the spell apply a consistent 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse without the strange hidden mechanic. Basically. if you already have swiftness on the people which you using the symbol on or if you take the time to stand in the spell for the full duration then it will just be a buff. =)

The symbol of swiftness is primarily used by guardians to give themselves a speed boost while moving out of combat, more than any other use. The change may be a buff when other swiftness is available, but it is most certainly a nerf for the primary use of the skill and a very negative quality of life change for guardians trying to get from point A to point B out of combat.

JonPeters.5630:

Guardian:

• Symbol of Swiftness: This skill now applies 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse, rather than 8 seconds if you have no swiftness and 1 second if you have swiftness.

As a guardian, maintaining swiftness while running out of combat is an absolute must to maintain quality of life. Presently, the best way to do that is with Symbol of Swiftness, because the staff can be easily swapped out regardless of cooldowns for an alternate weapon just before joining combat. Retreat, on the other hand, cannot be swapped out if it’s still on cooldown from running. While I appreciate the 4 second stacking effect making it worth dropping symbol of swiftness in zergs, this change destroys the utility that staff has for a guardian moving around by themselves or a guardian that is serving as the primary source of swiftness for a small group.

PLEASE consider this alternate change:

• Symbol of Swiftness: This skill now applies 8 seconds of swiftness to targets without swiftness, and 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse to targets that already have swiftness.

I don’t think 8sec/4sec feels overpowered, as swiftness is sorely needed by guardians because they lack the control effects to keep targets in range that every other class has easy access to. But most importantly… in order to gain the full benefit of all the swiftness provided by the symbol, the guardian must STAND STILL instead of moving. That goes directly against the entire purpose of the swiftness buff. Let a fresh tick be 8 seconds. It’s hard enough to do anything without a group as a guardian as-is.

Hunter’s shot’s stealth mechanic has added some new strategy to ranger. It was a positive change, but I’d argue that it has at least one glaring flaw that could serve being looked at. It’s comparable to thief’s cloak and dagger in its stealth utility: you must score a hit to stealth. The problem is that the two skills are not equal when it comes to scoring a hit. Cloak and dagger must be countered by a dodge roll, block, or blind. Hunter’s shot, because it is a ranged projectile, tends to hit blades of grass, random terrain, or just completely miss altogether for no obvious reason. It will also fail to fire at all and trigger interrupt cooldown if the target runs through the ranger as it is cast.

Because that stealth is so valuable when needed, and to alleviate the issue of the delay between firing the shot and going into stealth (again, cloak and dagger does not have this issue) I would like to see longbow #3 changed to apply stealth to the ranger without firing a shot, swiftness to the pet, and to make up for the damage lost from not firing the shot either add 10 stacks of vulnerability to the current target (and remove that from rapid fire in favor of some other effect, it was better on a single hit) or add damage to the next attack used afterward.

Not only would a change like this make #3 less clunky, it would make for a unique utility skill rather than just another arrow shot and make the longbow stealth usable just as other classes have stealth that does not require a target. It also still wouldn’t be as powerful as cloak and dagger, as cloak and dagger does a fairly obscene amount of damage and can be used more than once even if it misses.

Bombsaway.7198:

Long Draw Using the “range meter” of siege weapons, a ranger can increase the damage of each auto bow (short and long) attack by up to 200% but at a cost of cast time tbd how much time.
Condition:
1) Once you begin a Long Draw you are rooted until the shot hits the target and are subject to double damage.

This would be a “I saw you first” way of dropping enemy health quickly.

I love the idea of a charge-up power attack for ranger, with a damage bonus depending on how long you can hold it… however, being rooted alone is enough to mean death in pvp let alone any kind of damage vulnerability. Ranger longbow is hard enough to kite with as-is.

The problem is that long range shot kind of serves the purpose of single-shot burst at long range, but because it’s an auto attack it just doesn’t hit hard enough in that single shot. It wouldn’t be balanced if it was too powerful because it has no cooldown.

Rapid fire feels too much like shortbow, as much as I love killing glass thieves in wvw with it. Longbow needs something more like warrior’s Kill Shot.

Definitely do not dilute the damage of the single hit over a certain number of seconds. That absolutely destroys the utility it currently has with maul. The problem isn’t moment of clarity, the problem is ranger’s lack of single-hit burst abilities. Maul is the only skill ranger has that puts out big numbers. Longbow in particular could really, really benefit from having a high damage, single-hit burst ability to promote synergy with moment of clarity. As-is, longbow is more or less a longer range shortbow but with a different and highly situational cripple skill.

Increase the separation between longbow and shortbow to fix this problem instead of modifying moment of clarity. Longbow should be a “sniping” weapon rather than having both weapons be based on many small fast hits.

My game client crashed during the battery phase that started after Teq ended up in the ground and we pushed him down another 25%. The battery phase started, I turned from the invisible dragon to go to the battery and then crashed immediately. Maybe the error report will help.

Bombsaway.7198:

What makes it have to be amazing? Degree of impact is a question of balance, but is the idea valid?

Yes, I think this mechanic is a great idea. I agree that the degree of effect is a balance question.

Kasama.8941:

The Thief is lacking in AoE damage options, even compared to the Ranger. It’s not even very close.

Thief:
Trick Shot, Cluster Bomb, Choking Gas, Slice (sword auto-attack), Flanking Strike, Pistol Whip, Death Blossom, Dancing Dagger, Caltrops, Dagger Storm – Steal: Exploding Venom Sack, Throw Gunk, Whirling Axe

Ranger:
Slash (greatsword auto-attack), Maul, Swoop, Counterattack, Barrage, all arrow attacks with pierce, Slash (sword auto-attack), Ricochet, Splitblade, Path of Scars, Whirling Defense, Bonfire, Call Lightning, Flame Trap, Spike Trap, Viper’s Nest, Entangle – Pets: Poison Cloud, Poisonous Cloud, Frost Breath, Insect Swarm, Sonic Shriek, Lightning Breath, Fire Breath, Poison Gas

Counterattack is not AOE, but I wish it was. You’re entirely missing the point though—it’s not about how many millions okittends of ineffective or unreliable AOE options a class has, but whether or not there are a small few effective, reliable, and low-cooldown AOE options. Ranger has no skills that have a short cooldown that hit more than three targets except for piercing arrows. Thief has shortbow.

Compare either class to elementalist, which can kill five people at once in one or two seconds with a certain dagger/dagger build, and has sustainable short-cooldown AOE on every weapon.

Wait, you mean I could bring along a terrible-damage pet that gives me amazing damage stats, and then just have it sit beside me and do nothing while I shoot things with arrows that deal the damage other classes do on their own?

Where do I sign?

Kasama.8941:

It’s not that bad at all. Playing a Thief is much worse, since all you have is the shortbow. The Ranger has the choice of traps, axes, bows with pierce, and even the greatsword. Drakes are also a great source of AoE damage.

Thief sword is just as painful to a mob as the ranger greatsword. In fact, it’s even more painful because it does full damage instead of a percentage of total damage while the other portion is reserved for the pet. Against PvE targets, a properly traited thief can keep a group of enemies blinded indefinitely while the sword auto-attack kills three at once. In WvW, I’ve been having good luck with dagger/dagger+sword/pistol in soloing camps or running right in the middle of the zerg with glass gear. Daggers may be mostly single-target, but the dual skill Death Blossom hits many targets and evades. If that isn’t good enough for you, use Dagger Storm with Signet of Malice and take your hands off the keyboard while you auto-run straight into a zerg. This leaves your hands free to roll around the floor laughing at your damage and healing output.

Shortbow cluster bomb isn’t nearly as good since the range nerf in WvW, but it still wrecks mid-range groups with damage that is more consistent than ranger’s barrage which has a much, much longer cooldown for not that much more damage.

All this said, I’m not sure either of the two classes is particularly lacking in AOE ability. Used properly, the potential for piercing arrows is amazing—that said, many projectiles for other classes inherently pierce. Having an entire trait dedicated just to piercing seems a bit steep even if the trait is a must-have for a bow ranger, and piercing arrows as AOE also requires specific positioning forcing the class into a specific play-style to AOE effectively.

Ranger’s one-handed sword has more mobility than greatsword. The leap is on an 8-second cooldown instead of 12 seconds, and the roll and the leap together are about the same distance covered.

Using one-handed sword for travel, a ranger can bind About Face to X and then use that key along with hornet sting and no currently selected target or mouse buttons down to quickly turn back, roll back (forward) and then turn again to leap in the same direction.

Hornet Sting / Monarch’s leap has a shorter cooldown, an evade and a cripple on hit. Swoop just looks cooler. I’ve used one-handed sword to chase down just about anything in WvW short of a sword/horn+greatsword warrior or one of those rocket boot engineers.

The only trouble with using one-handed sword for travel is that... well, frankly it’s super-annoying to hit that button combo over and over.

Rym.1469:

5. Condition removal – need a little bit more

Our signet that ticks away conditions and can pull all nearby conditions to the pet is nice, or with healing spring you can have spammable condition removal if you can stay in the same area with 50% uptime. These are already pretty strong, but if I’m not mistaken the signet’s active function will not pull conditions off of you unless you are standing near your pet. That’s a problem.

A ranger is supposed to be able to shoot his or her targets from long distance, meaning the pet may be nowhere near the ranger. This leaves a ranger that traits for the namesake of the class to face a distinct problem with condition removal. Not only are they separated from the pet, but also one can’t stand in a healing spring when a warrior gives chase and moving away is a necessity.

Compare our signet to Guardian’s Contemplation of Purity skill. Both have a 60 second cooldown, and the active effects are very similar. They’re intended to clean all conditions off of you. The ranger signet also cleans them off other allies, assuming you are near your pet as well—that’s good. It does not, however, do anything beneficial with the conditions. Contemplation of Purity turns them all into boons. Our signet just kills our pet, if we don’t have a swap cooldown available to burn along with the signet.

The bottom line is that the guardian does not have to wonder if a pet is nearby. If guardian is covered in conditions, a quick button press solves the problem. The solution seems simple: make the ranger signet work for the ranger at any range, not just near the pet.

I don’t like being forced to click. Ranger needs a keybind to switch pet guard/passive and stow pet. Alternatively, an even better solution may be F1 attack changing the pet to Guard and F3 return changing the pet to passive in addition to their current functions. That would make gameplay very smooth and it doesn’t seem like it would require much dev time. Once a ranger has made a decision to send a pet in rather than avoiding combat because of risk of losing it, it’s lost damage and needless hassle once the target is dead to order it to attack again. F1 should however retain the target lock effect, where the pet will chase that target even if you switch.

Auto attack needs a slight damage buff--not much.

Maul would be far more interesting if it was a knockdown on critical only. Now consider ranger’s role compared to hammer warrior, using a canine pet with greatsword to lock down an enemy, leveraging traits that cause your next attack to automatically crit or give you fury. Sword remains the offensive weapon because of spammable cripple and poison, but gsword would truly become the control weapon that ranger needs to synergize with moment of clarity. The animation is perfect for the knockdown too.

Warrior can build for it. Thief can build for it. Ranger has less healing than either class in a berserker build, so why can’t ranger build to spam control effects too?

A fully-traited, fully-geared berserker longbow ranger with bloodlust stacks can hit 4k crits on long range shot on a soft target. The damage against most wvw warriors worth their salt, however, is laughably low. Even with pet active, I’ve seen one warrior who had so much passive regen that he could outheal any berserker’s damage if allowed to dodge roll.

Ranger does need some more build versatility in terms of shifting more damage output to the ranger instead of the pet. However, the bigger problem you are likely facing is heavy armor, protection buffs, and nonstop healing from builds designed to survive the brunt of the WvW zerg. Even a glass thief will have trouble taking a chunk out of someone like that.

The counter to these kinds of builds is stacking conditions. If you want to kill everyone in WvW but not as fast as berserker against soft targets, use a condition build. If you can get poison, bleed and burning to stay on your target with high condition damage, they’ll die right quick. Just keep in mind that you’ll have to re-apply frequently as these tank builds drop conditions too.

Rapid fire used to shoot 12 arrows if I remember right. It now shoots 10 since the somewhat recent longbow changes. However, the animation and sound still play 12 times instead of 10. This looks and sounds a bit awkward, but the real problem is that there are two bowstring pull animations during which the ranger is not actually doing anything. That is lost damage time.

Rapid fire should be changed so that the animation and sound matches the actual spell effect.

It also does not seem to make the pet gain Opening Strike.

Seconded. Making actual music out of the flute now is a terrible experience, where before it was only lacking a way to silence a note by… say… lifting up the finger on the key like the horn works, or dropping the flute.

It is not only impossible to comfortably play the same note twice in a row, it also cancels the note being played if you change octave and then hit the same number button.

And is it just me, or is the volume of the instruments much quieter than before? Perhaps that was needed with the trumpet, but I can hardly hear the flute at all now.

There is a bug with the behavior of clicking to interact. The best way to demonstrate is with a large clickable object, such as a wall in WvW. Place the mouse cursor over the wall, right click and turn the camera, then release. The camera will turn, and the right click action on the wall is also triggered. This also happens with left click as well.

If the camera moves, the mouse-up event should not click on the item under the mouse.

This bug affects anything that is clickable and causes me to drop my target in the middle of combat frequently as I adjust my camera. I first thought it was just a mechanical issue with my mouse until I noticed its perfect consistency with a wall in WvW.

Please fix this for the sake of consistency in game controls, especially in PvP where it can decide a match.

The burning oil over the southwest Garrison gate in red borderlands is too far forward. It cannot hit anything placed directly in front of the gate, and requires a player to stand beside it on the edge of the wall to be in range to take control of it.

Sigils such as Sigil of Leeching and Sigil of Battle will not activate on weapon swap if a crit-based sigil has just been activated by a crit immediately prior to the weapon swap.

This must be bug. It doesn’t make any sense for an uncontrolled sigil to interfere with the operation of a controlled sigil.

Ethan Mccloud.3218:

Heres a suggestion… anet could simply put up a railing around the top of your spawn in location . mesmers would no longer be able to drag you off the edge with that raised section ( like some of the towers have when you want to defend from the top). Quick fix – exit portals not really needed . Just a thought.

This won’t prevent the problem. Invulnerability needs to happen on the platforms, otherwise, Mesmers will just group up and chain pulls back to back to get you over the railing just like they do on towers. Last time I was defending a tower in EB, I was yanked by multiple Mesmers from my arrow cart all the way to the other end of the tower without enough time in between pulls to get a cast off to gain stability. I actually got back inside the tower, but the little lip didn’t keep me from being pulled off after that many yanks.

Invulnerability on the spawn zone in the jump puzzle is the right thing to do, like all other WvW maps. Gaining siege from the jump puzzle gives a team an advantage, and so like other WvW maps balance must be ensured.

This is by far the most annoying thing about WvW to me. The right click options changed in the patch where they tried to fix the ability to get an enemy’s account name by using the report feature in WvW. However, in the process not only has the party frame been stripped of right click options, the friend list has received the same treatment. For an online, multiplayer game this makes the multiplayer and social aspect needlessly difficult.

Interestingly enough, the right click menu does function properly if the player’s portrait in the party frame is visible... that is, if the player is present on the same map as you and online, you can still interact with their party frame as normal. However, when someone is on the same map as you and online the kick option isn’t nearly as useful as when they are no longer active and you need space in your party.

Possibly related: sometimes I hear random and often distorted explosion sounds while playing the game after many spells were cast at once.

This isn’t just a visual glitch. This prevents projectiles that pierce from being used to hit other targets since the projectile path is not horizontal along the ground. I forget which patch changed this to the way it is now, but griffons were not always so strangely bugged.

Get someone caught in a corner when your berserker charges them, and they get hit by every strike and die instantly from full health. It’s been a while since this happened to me, but it was a huge problem on the other end of things. This also happens with warrior’s similarly animated attack with greatsword button 3, and the spin using the elementalist’s firey greatsword weapon.

The only way to fix these issues across the board is to cause the skills to hit each affected target with a fixed number of hits, rather than hitting everything in range multiple times along a path.

See the gap above the gate? With proper camera angle, you can see the arrow carts in the last two pictures easily from outside. If you can see it, you can shoot it with a well-placed arrow cart to counter. I don’t recall how to see the arrow cart in the first picture.

I’m having a recurring but inconsistent issue with Superior Sigil of Battle not giving might on weapon swap, even though the Tail Wind and Furious Grip traits on my ranger do proc confirming that I was indeed in combat on weapon swap, along with the weapon swap cooldown.

I’m not sure what causes it. It doesn’t happen every time.

Edit: After more experimentation it appears to be a problem that occurs when swapping weapons immediately after the sigil of fire on my other weapon procs.

The current system of ctrl+right click to make something auto attack while you have a target helps reduce the amount of button mashing required to play the game. However, there are many times when a no-cooldown or low-cooldown ability is repeatedly cast in a situation where the auto attack system does not function.

Speaking from the perspective of a ranger with a short bow, the main attack is very fast but auto attack will not cast if the target is out of standard range even if you can still hit it because of height advantage. The result is what for some may become a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome from mashing the button over and over multiple times per second.

I think an elegant solution to this problem would be to cause any button that is held down on the keyboard to use the associated ability repeatedly as it becomes available. This would also help to ensure maximum fire rate on low cooldown abilities such as cannons and arrow carts’ primary fire in WvW without button mashing, and make timing smoother to the player overall. Instead of causing an error because the ability is on cooldown on button down, only show the error on button up since button down state would be making the game wait for the cooldown to fire the ability.

I think a good remedy would be to stack Master’s Bond on the ranger instead of the pet.

Died to dodge roll queue bug twice this morning. Was not fixed in patch, even though it was in patch notes. The queue window might just be a little smaller.

Easy fix for dodge roll: make anything queued after dodge roll cancel dodge rolls that are waiting in the queue. Allows for latency, prevents player frustration.

Alternatively, shorten the queue such that there can be no more than one non-instant spell in the queue at a time and make sure that the enqueue operation requires that the currently casting spell has completed at least 50% of its cast time. This would also fix some class-specific queuing problems related to button-mashing. The nature of latency means the players are going to want to hit a button multiple times to make sure the message gets through, as we’ve all learned from countless other online games with latency. The player shouldn’t be punished for that.

Apraxas.3685:

• Orb of Light
  The orb may rarely get stuck in the terrain prompting you to detonate it and never expiring due natural timer. (Will remain stuck until the player detonates it).

I’d like to note that this problem with Orb of Light happens if the orb hits specific terrain, but also when it hits a WvW gate, an invulnerable target, a blocking target, or a reflect effect.

What should be used as a 3-second cooldown damage skill quickly becomes a 12 second cooldown through no fault of the player. Anti-projectile effects are too strong against orb of light because of this bug, robbing the guardian of their primary source of reliable long-range damage. This seems like it should be a quick fix to adjust the spell so that it will always revert to the first chain cast after a short timer, because with the updated projectile travel speed the orb of light reaches its maximum range before the cooldown completes.

Been killed a few times today because I use Shelter on my guardian. Being rooted just before attempting dodge roll means death, consistently. It’s not something the player can predict, and punishes the player for properly reacting with dodge roll to expected incoming damage.

Just have to say that the fights inside SM once SBI got enough people to have a chance against DR early this morning were amazing. That is the sort of thing I love about WvW. It’s just too bad DR went to bed after we finally stopped their push, I was looking forward to more.

Gab Superstar.4059:

Krash.9486:

I understand , it is the internet, and thinking you could have a mature intelligent and honest exchange about the state of the game and it’s current scoring flaws without some 12 year old troll showing up spouting nonsensical trash talk is just hoping for too much.

Why didn’t your 9 man super group just wipe that zerg like you had been doing all night then? 40+ LOL not even close.. XD

You should have seen yesterday at Bluebriar. 10 of us trapped inside the tower after SBI closed the gate behind us vs ~20 SBI.

We were badly outnumbered and forced to fight at the bottom of the tower while the SBI zerg sat near Lord’s room with 2-3 arrow carts, constantly AoEing the only way for us to get up there.

It only took us about 5min to wipe you guys and cap the tower. It was an insanely epic battle though and probably the most fun I have had in WvW for a looong time. I was about to make a post thanking whoever from SBI participated, but now that I saw your arrogant post I decided against it.

I’m not sure if this was the Bluebriar fight I was the SBI commander for or not, but in any case it sounds like a similar situation. I don’t think my group closed the door, but I could have missed it. My commander character is a female white tiger charr in banded mail.

It was a fight against BSty and I faced them and two other DR groups in SBI BL for most of the time I had my tag up that night, and they were consistently a thorn in our side while the other larger DR groups gave us trouble all over the map. The Bluebriar fight was BSty plus a handful of a second guild whose tag currently escapes me.

To BSty, congrats on the victories you had—while your estimates of our numbers are often grossly exaggerated, you are correct in that in many cases there was an imbalance in numbers and I have on multiple occasions found myself repeating in team chat not to charge into the BSty group recklessly. There were also many occasions when I would show up at a camp wondering where half of my zerg had gone only to find that you’d been picking off my completely silent followers that had lagged behind.

As it turns out, it is very difficult to coordinate a pug zerg in text chat to the same degree as an organized guild in voice chat. The fight I was in at Bluebriar was only a slight numbers advantage in our favor that dwindled quickly as SBI pugs continued to ignore directions to stay together—and alive. I can tell by BSty’s tactics that you understand the real key to the numbers game—it’s not how many people you have on a map but how many people you have in each fight. Drawing the pugs out to pick them off at the edges in small groups before you actually commit will hopefully teach them a lesson which I cannot.

So, props to you [BSty]. I hope to see you again, fighting you is a challenge and really keeps me on my toes when I tag up. I only hope that SBI’s pug WvWers continue to learn from your finishers so they’ll start following more closely. It will make all of the fights when it is we who are outnumbered (which happen frequently on my watch, including when your guild is active) much easier.

To SBI, but also to other groups: who’s under the tag you follow may matter some, but the much more important factor is how closely you follow. Stay together, stay alive, and see you on the field again tomorrow!

Retrospek.4583:

Zhokora.7048:

3 RED Players were using hacks to fly/speed around the south island of SBI BL, this distracted from a northern assault by the same guild at Bay with golems. We don’t know if any hacks were involved with the northern assault.

Not saying they weren’t flying or hacking, but this is why I think screenshot’s are useless, and that videos would tell a much better picture. To me, that picture looks like he’s standing on the rubble, which would then imply he’s not flying, rather he jumped up there. So hard to tell from just that screenshot alone, IMO.

Hopefully, if they are hacking, Anet will sort it out, and ban them.

Here’s another screenshot to satisfy the skeptics. We also had a RED ranger get into Redlake tower long before the gate was down.