Guild Wars 2

Okay—look. I’m a fellow concerned ranger. My level 80 ranger on tarnished coast is my only character. I’ve put everything in to him; he’s guild wars 2 to me. And he uses a shortbow. So I’m feeling the change. And I do think it was inappropriate. And I do think it needs to be reverted.

Towards the end of the 40ms thread someone named Wolfius was brave enough to fairly respectfully call us babies for the way we’ve been handling this, describing babies as people throwing a fit when they don’t get something they want immediately and, honestly, yes, I have to agree. A -lot- of us are being babies.

Not because we’re asking for shortbow to be given its old power back, or power anew. That needs to happen.

And not because we’re questioning arenanet for how they’ve handled communicating with us about the recent nerf. Those are good questions to ask.

And not because we’re going on and on passionately about it. We should. As long as this is an issue, it needs to be talked about.

A lot of us are being babies because we’re resorting to tactics like saying “our class sucks now”, “guess we’re all forced to go warrior”, “looks like that’s it for me and guild wars 2”, “guess arenanet doesn’t care about its playerbase”, “if only they did”, “can’t wait for a game with devs that actually care”, etc etc etc.; these are not productive sentiments. These are childish attention-grabbing tactics being used on developers who -know better- than to listen to that sort of thing. For god’s sake, we don’t need to start smashing plates and flipping tables to be noticed; in fact, all it does is make us less credible and less able to be taken seriously. I’ve been proudest of the people who have been able to voice their concerns clearly and relentlessly but also maturely and respectfully.

How many of us have seen—maybe pretty obscure, but—the peanuts sketch in which Lucy asks Charlie Brown if he thinks she’s pretty, and after staring nervously at her for all of half a second she promptly bursts in to a fit of rage saying, “You didn’t answer me! That means you don’t!”

Same thing, guys. Development processes are -not- as instantaneous and reactive as a lot of us are treating them. I wholeheartedly approve of fighting to make these changes happen but I am exhausted and honestly annoyed by all of you people so eagerly jumping on a reason to feel abandoned, neglected, and scorned that just isn’t there. And if I may be for a moment be vulgar what the hell is this kitten about implying Arenanet hates rangers? That is truly unfathomable. No developer alive has a marketing incentive to deliberately disdain a certain class; it’s all a balancing effort. And what’s more, once you actually get skilled at PvP and start playing it like an action game I’ve found that arenanet has made a pretty unusually well-balanced game ESPECIALLY for an MMO and I don’t -slightly- begrudge them tripping here and there along the way as they figure things out.

Should they communicate more with us? I’d love that.

Should they explain what gives about claiming the change was to fix an animation bug and then implying they weren’t being honest about their intentions re: nerfing it? Of course. I’d like to have a dialogue with them. I want to know what happened.

Should we continue arguing for a stronger shortbow? Absolutely. A stronger ranger on the whole? I sure wouldn’t complain.

But should we keep having every other post on the topic be some fearful, sensationalized remark of accusing arenanet, degrading the game and all around pursuing a sense of martyrdom in a desperate grab for attention out of what seems to me to be the lack of bravery and patience to actually organize your thoughts in a way that sounds respectful and reasonable?

I think not. I think it’s a useless expenditure. I observe it hurting the community and doing nothing to help the game. And maybe some of you would argue that there’s no point since the game is “doomed now”. Then -leave-. I actually have the patience to talk about this, as do many of my colleagues. I want our voices to be actually heard.

Finally I’d like to give a big shoutout to all the people who -did- express their views maturely, rationally, and argue their case, which was a very pleasingly high percentage (on the whole I’d offer a sense of about half, though this isn’t based on data). You guys make us strong, and thank you.

Vizual.3504:

PS : im not english native so pardon me for being a grammer nazi.

Just wanted to say your english is very good (I wouldn’t have guessed), and I agree wholeheartedly with your perspective on the crossfire thing!0

To the developers: I just wanted to chime in here (now that I can finally log into the forums)…
The “spam 1” approach to doing damage with the Shortbow (while continually attempting to maintain flanking position on your enemy) is exactly why I fell in love with the class, and to me was the exact definition of “fun”.
With all the other weapons in the game, you essentially play “whack a mole” with your big hitting abilities. With the Shortbow, the fun is in the need to position yourself properly to maintain optimal damage (while dropping traps and attempting to control your pet). The beauty of it is, as long as you are doing so, you continually feel like you’re putting out solid DPS – and the remaining abilities on the weapon help you control the fight or kite your foe.
I thought it was very elegantly designed, and I loved it. Since the whole usability of the weapon is designed around “spamming 1” – there really IS no other way to use the Shortbow – and almost the entire population of the Ranger class is up in arms about the “spamming 1 isn’t fun” comment… maybe you might want to rethink redesigning the weapon 2 months into playing the game. A whole lot of people really think it IS fun.

This! A thousand times this. This is exactly why I loved shortbow; it was fascinating to build mobility and control around one backbone ability that was, while simple at a glance, able to be used in deep, complex ways.

I’d also like to comment I’m really proud of the community at the moment for the quality of posts that’s emerged in this thread. Early on there was a lot of unproductive general “angry gamer” whining—“ranger sucks, arenanet sucks, quitting the game forever”, etc etc etc—and while I understood the outrage I felt like it was very poorly handled. Lately I feel as though the posts with which we’re voicing our concerns have become a -lot- more mature, grounded, well-reasoned, and respectfully, powerfully honest, which—pray with me!—the developers take notice of. You’ve all been doing great for the most part and I hope it helps communicate how legitimate our concern is.

@CalamityTwo I’m a ranger built for dueling and am extremely competent in free tournaments. I don’t feel like the nerf (without buffs to even it out) was appropriate, but I also think people’s lampooning the ranger class as a whole is ridiculous.

If you’re feeling disheartened about rangers in general, feel free to send me a PM and I’ll talk to you about why they’re actually a wonderful class, even bearing the balancing concerns of crossfire/shortbow in mind.

I -liked- spamming 1 as my primary damage dealer while using the 2-5 skills for utility and control and stuff. I thought that was the point of shortbow. It was fun, and the positioning requirements of crossfire kept it lively.

I’m a little disappointed that they straight up nerfed us with the intent to make our class more “fun”. I feel a bit like they broke shortbow by fixing it when it wasn’t broken.

I’m disappointed, guys. This isn’t really okay with me. But thank you @Ninjaknight for digging up that post.

I -am- however grateful that they’re willing to look in to it if the shortbow is underperforming, if confused by their decision to nerf the primary damage dealer without buffing everything else.

And I still want to know if it was quite their intention for quickness crossfire to be hit as hard as it did.

Been a while since I followed this thread, any new word from arenanet about if they plan to address the shortbow issues? I just can’t ignore how lame it feels since the patch and I’m a pretty easygoing, GW2-loving guy.

My network diagnostic for the mentioned error code.

Code=7:11:3:189:101

I’m trying to log in from campus. The strange thing is that guild wars 2 was working fine from my campus about a week ago, when I left to visit home for a while. Now that I’m back, I can’t get in to the game. I can log in—and I can get the character screen fine—but the loading screen is either infinite spinny bubble or if not infinite than an eventual informing that the game lost connection with the server.

Help?

Full topic title: “Have the devs commented if they plan to do anything with crossfire?”

Sure do miss the old one.

@JonasV I think you’re close! Let’s run the numbers:

Old firing interval: ~.43 sec (Or 2.33 arrows/sec; 7 bleeds)
New firing interval: ~.47 sec (Or 2.12 arrows/sec; 6.3 bleeds)
Old QZ firing interval: ~.215 sec (Or 4.66 arrows/sec; 14 bleeds)
New firing interval if QZ still properly doubled firing speed: ~.235 sec (Or 4.24 arrows/sec; 12.7 bleeds)
New QZ firing interval if the 40 ms change also applies as flat rate to QZ on top of the base firing rate: (.215 + .04 =) .255 sec (Or 3.9 arrows/sec; 11.8 bleeds)

The only problem here is that even -with- that consideration, while it gets closer to illustrating the problem, the live quickening zephyr crossfire is still a good bleed or so slower than it should be. Theoretically it should be ticking up to 11 between arrows, and only briefly ever ticking down to 10, but instead it remains stuck at 10.

That said, it does bring our data -closer- to an explanation for what’s happening live, so at this point it could be my math that’s at fault. Either way I hope arenanet will address it because it markedly impacts performance.

OP here. Few things to say.

First: Big thanks to whoever made the post about ser Peters noting that he’d look in to this. That’s encouraging.

Second: Some math. I clocked the old shortbow speed at about 2.33 arrows per second based on being able to stack to 7 3-second bleeds (7 / 3 = 2.3333…), or a firing time of ~.043 seconds per arrow (1 / 2.33). An additional 40 ms (.04 seconds) per shot should increase that to .047 seconds per arrow, or 2.12 arrows per second.

Unfortunately, this corresponds to a 10% nerf, which would account for the difference in bleed stacking. This might mean that the patch is “working as intended” for the base fire, though I hope arenanet considers fixing it with sheer respect to balance.

As for quickening zephyr, the old crossfire, firmly clocking a critical mass of 14 bleeds, correctly corresponded to 4.66 (14 / 3s per bleed = 4.6666….). The new critical mass is firmly 10, though it does not tick down to 9 between shots so I am going to treat this as 10.5. This corresponds to a firing rate of 3.5 arrows per second during quickness, or a 25% nerf to the old firing speed of 4.66 arrows/sec. This most certainly seems excessive. The correct firing speed, if quickness is to still double actions, and arenanet maintains their .04 second increase on the casting time, should be ~4.24 arrows/sec, 21% in excess of the 3.5 it is at the moment.

Third: I’m a bit disappointed in how some of the voices in this thread and the forum in general are handling their disappointment. Arenanet has been doing their best since day one to care for the balance of all classes. If you listen to the way they talk about things, they put considerable time, effort and thought in to everything. I understand your frustrations with balance issues that are currently affecting you, but so many of the requests I hear, in the way they’re worded, sound more like cries for attention than maturely stated requests.

I also don’t appreciate the sensationalism with which ranger is degraded. I have in sPvP developed a duelist build for, as the name might imply, 1v1 superiority. My damage is dependable if not sensational, but my mobility, utility, evasiveness, and adaptability -is- sensational, and I use it to win close to every duel I get in. Defeat isn’t unknown to me, of course, especially in tournament games, but this is frequently more a matter of learning strategies to fight a given class or individual than any fundamental flaw I’ve found with my build—I always feel like I have a very dependable fighting chance.
It’s very high-execution build, and its statistical advantages don’t sell itself, but played like an action game and used with skill, it’s so effective, efficient and versatile it makes me worry about the extent to which people degrade the class.

Did testing, yes, it’s much slower than 40ms would imply. Formerly could stack on 7 bleeds without quickness, 14 bleeds with quickness; now can only stack on 6 without, 10 with. Very big hit.

I ran tests; it’s definitely firing more than 40ms slower. I can see from other posts that other people agree. I did some quantitative testing with the amount of bleeds I could stack on a training dummy; it used to be 6 or 7 before (13 or 14 with quickness). Now it’s only 5 or 6, and 9 or 10 with quickness. Both tests are using the utility skill for the 4 second quickness.

This is, I think, a bigger downgrade than the developers intended. I’d love to hear their thoughts on this.

Spirits are so close to, I think, being useful in a reasonably balanced fashion, but they are simply too squishy. I am frustrated and upset with how, even having the double health and mobile spirits trait, they die -immediately- upon entering any kind of combat because the slightest AoE shreds their nearly nonexistent health and resummoning them is burdened by minute long cooldowns and three-second cast times for individual spirits.

I want this spirit build to work. It’s so close. But they can’t actually survive right now, no matter what they’re up against; they drop like flies from what seems like the most accidental stray fire.

Help me out here, guys? I want to enjoy this. I really do.

Edit: I’ll add that no need to buff the elite skill health. The elite skill health seems to be fine where it is (reasonably tough untraited, very tough traited). It’s the utility spirits that are frustratingly near-useless due to their squish.

Trying this build:
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#MVoc0VMzMlLboolLbo0GGx0oamsmaq

Seems alright in theory, thing is that the utility spirits have the survivability of a paper towel and about the same reaction to contact with a swung sword. Has anyone had any better luck, or comments?

I’m completely inseparable from the spirit of nature elite skill, but it’s painful using it without the ability to follow me around. I was hoping I could do something viable that used the spirit utility skills. Though I have gotten some good results out of just being careful about not plunging too much in to the middle of fights where the spirits take the most AoE, kind of nipping at the fringes with my bow and taking the people who come for me with the sword (with plenty of weapon swapping in between).

It’s many fruitless minutes of waiting followed by this bad boy:
http://imgur.com/dZlm3

I’m on a campus network, and have norton antivirus installed. One of those might be related to the problem but I don’t know. Any ideas?

Problem persistent, please help.

…Including my initial login. Lately sitting down to play guild wars 2 has been wondering if I’ll be staring at the map loading screen for wherever I left my character last for five minutes, before maybe finally being let in only to disconnect as soon as I try to swap to another instance because god knows -two- maps to load is just too much.

I’m not sure where to begin with this. Has anyone else had this problem? How can I ask for help?