Guild Wars 2

Rainbow Phoenix from GW1.

Main Profession: Ranger only
Alternate Professions: None
Account name: Ryan.9387
Practice Availablity: Days vary but online from 6-12pm est when I log in.
Current PvP rank (Not Leaderboard): 29
Level of Desire: Competitive Tourney Play
NA or EU: NA

IGN: Shadows Shooter
Day Available: Thursday
Record Capability: MSI Afterburner (medium quality)
NA or EU: NA

I have the same issues with playing with my friends. Last night I went 5-2 and lost 170 leaderboard ranks. Why are the boards so volatile? Even though my allies were not high mmr players a 70% win ratio should not be tanking my ranking. I am feeling the only way to be competitive on the boards is to exclude even good players if their mmr isn’t high enough.

Ingame Name : Shadows Shooter
Main Class : Ranger (100% games)
Region : NA
Practice Times: Open from ~7pm-12am US EST 4/7 days.
Experience: Level 28, ~Rank 320 on Leaderboards
Other : Played on a static team until my partners went AWOL from GW2

I’m down for dueling other rangers any time I’m free and online. Count me in.

Nope, not just you.

I’ll confirm the 5000 points per rank. The screenshot preview for the WvW system showed a rank 27 “scout” that required 5000 points to the next level.

sPvP is awesome in GW2. The depth of combat and the wide variety of effective strategies is just mind boggling. Anet did an excellent job managing to add such a high skill cap to gw2. I only want the fiery dragon sword to be fixed in the next patch. Apart from that gw2 is the best game I have ever played from a PvP perspective.

Trap builds and BM builds are the two best builds that rangers have for dueling and small scale skirmishes. That being said, the key to playing as a trap ranger vs a thief is the way you use your evades, the way you use your traps, and how you play with your pet.

These are the general strategies and tricks I use to engage thieves:
When engaging a thief, always put your traps right under you, and the moment they trigger, evade.
When they use shadow refuge, throw all of your traps into the refuge, because the thief has to stand inside the skill to gain the full benefit from it.
When you see the thief stealth, try to turn erratically and use random evades to mess up their burst skills.
Since a trap ranger is a very condition heavy build, you want to focus on variety when you attack thieves because they can remove a condition every 3 seconds while in stealth, use your skills to apply as many different conditions to the thief as possible while they are out of stealth.
I personally run Axe/Torch and Sword/Dagger when I use trap builds, and when duels and small scale fights are very close, the smallest things give the advantage. The sword #2 skill is a leap finisher, and you can gain a 1.5k heal (twice) during a healing spring, or you can use the finisher to gain a fire aura.
Your pets are also very important in your play style, I run two dogs for the 2s knockdown and the aoe skills, which work though stealth. If you learn your pet’s animations, you can sync skills like splitblade (axe #2) with your pet knockdown to put 5 stacks of bleed on your target.

There are a lot of things that good rangers do to gain the upper hand in duels, just take a look at the spvp forums to see all the new “ranger OP” threads and complaints. In some cases though, you won’t beat a thief. In the WvW video above, all of the rangers are running builds that are built for zerg vs zerg action. Those rangers aren’t packing mass evades and stunbreakers. Instead they are bringing drakes for aoe, and long range power/precision type builds. In those cases you won’t win against a thief, and you will either have to run away, outnumber the thief, or die.

Roster management is a nightmare for gw2 guilds at the moment. There is no way to see what members have been inactive, or when they last logged on. Previously, every patch converted everyone’s status to “Unknown” before until they logged on again, but after the wintersday patch, members still have their previous location shown, and there is no way to tell when the last time a member has logged on. This is a devastating problem to guilds, because they have a growing list of inactive members that are impossible to distinguish from normal active members.

The only ways to weed out the inactives are error prone and complicated, such as changing member ranks when they log on and kicking those who don’t change ranks. An alternate equally complicated method is to manage a large guild database using google documents or excel.

The lack of simple roster management tools, such as a last seen date (in guild wars 1) is slowly killing the activity of large guilds, and the only way to solve the activity issue is to demand that officers devote an inordinate amount of time to manage the guild’s roster.

Apothecary trinkets are currently extremely expensive, which makes running builds requiring apothecary gear prohibitively expensive. For example:

Apothecary Ring – 52g
Orichalcum Ring – 3.5g

When compared to the next most expensive ring, the apothecary ring is nearly 15 times more expensive. The recipe for these trinkets needs to be seriously looked at because at the moment, their cost of production far exceeds the cost of every other trinket, except dungeon related ones.

I see that jewels can be dropped into the mystic forge, however I don’t know a single recipe that uses them. GW2 Wiki has nothing on them and internet searches have turned up nothing. I am curious though, is there any valid recipe using jewels?

Every profession has a reliable blast finisher except for rangers. The only blast finisher for the class is the Drake’s “tail swipe” skill that is not controlled by the player. The added party support form a blast finisher can help to make the ranger a stronger team playing class in dungeons and WvW. This could be implemented with the torch throw, or even a single spirit’s special skill (like the sun spirit), which would make them much more viable. In fact, spirit skills could also be used to produce a combo field, which would mean that their specials skills would have added use and thus be more attractive for people to specialize in their use.

Forgive me if this has been suggested before, but the search function is fairly non intuitive for finding topics (shows post’s content). My suggestion would be to have alternate keys for Black Lion Chests besides the one sold on the Trading Post. An alternate way of opening the BLC without needing the expensive keys would control the supply of Black Lion Chests, which are steadily dropping in value (aside from speculation bubbles) because of the massive difference in the supply of chests vs keys. Rewards also can be scaled to the value of the key. A cheap one that drops commonly from foes might only reward a random white to yellow weapon or a crafting material while the high end rewards would be saved for the expensive and hard to obtain keys (e.g. Black Lion Key).

Imperial Phoenix or Rainbow Phoenix from GW1. Want a prestige pet.

I often hit Exit to Desktop instead of log of to change characters. I think that an option to “confirm game close” in the options menu will be a simple improvement to the UI that would eliminate a mild annoyance for players with multiple characters.

Due to gold sellers stealing players’ accounts and using them to spam advertisement, most people will block -> report the account. If that account is recovered by the original owner, the account should no longer be blocked by the original players, because the reason for suppressing their text no longer exists. This has not happened to me; however, this thought came up upon thinking about how many accounts I had blocked due to gold selling.

The crippling shot for the short bow has always applied bleed. To be specific, it always made your pet’s attacks apply bleed.