Guild Wars 2

Listening to the StoG today, Jon spoke about desire to have profiles in PvP to prevent players from constantly having to respec and could carry around different builds.

WvW is not s/tPvP, but it’s also not PvE! It would be fantastic if we could have a separate “profile” in WvW than our standard PvE one. The ability to work towards a second set of gear (earning it, not having it handed over) and separate traits would be incredibly helpful, but defaulting to your PvE set in case you only roll one way. I would even mind paying silver every time I want to switch, just for the convince of having it all on one button.

I hope they implement this in PvP and that it works WONDERFULLY, and ends up spilling over to WvW!

Can someone from EU explain to us NA people what’s going on? It sounds interesting and I want to know more!

I’m sorry EU. I do hope though that we in NA get the match up swap at our reset later tonight

Open world PvE, dungeons/fractals, WvW, or s/tPvP? The answer will very pending on which you choose…

Ranger: 80
Warrior: 65 (will be 80 before next week though)

I was also going to buy it, but the clink clink sound and the extended animation stopped me. According to an earlier poster, the clink clink sound has been replaced… but the extended animation still remains. If they change that, they’ll have my money.

I agree that it’s just silly, and not how one ‘gathers’ though. :/

I would like to buy a precursor using achievement points or laurels. Yes please.

200 is fine too. But honestly, I’d be fine with 500 or 600 or any ridiculous hard-set number as opposed to RNG!

In a zerg, in a small group, or running solo? The answer differs significantly depending on which you choose.

I would like to pay 300-400 laurels for an account bound precursor.

Please do test it! I’d love to see it on my skill bar again.

(Obligatory “S&R should be a signet” mention. It wasn’t my idea and I read it in another thread, but it made absolute sense.)

Ran with Drakes last night in MF, and it was wonderful. Their F2’s almost always hit the target, and I enjoyed laying on some confusion and frost with these tanky lizards. They hardly died, and usually when they did it it was at places where it couldn’t really be helped.

In wvw I’d still go with dogs though. Drakes’ F2s aren’t as reliable on a moving target like the dogs’ AoEs, and the dogs have knockback which is just awesome to have on hand. But for dungeons that aren’t high on red circles of doom, I might be switching over to full-on drakes.

I would love to see your militia in Borlis Pass. We’re a pug-y server that is used to winning difficult 3-way matches, but with the newest match up again Ebay where their numbers destroy ours, have suffered a loss of moral as a consequence. In our first week against them, we pulled out the stops and destroyed them. They haven’t forgiven us since and have outspokenly focused their attention on pushing us down to T6. A large and organized guild would make all the difference in this fight, to the point where we could make this other server taste their own medicine. Or at least make the fight fair.

AR is a little more roam-y. They are the top server for sPvP, and consequently you’ll run into some great duels with their roamers, but they seem to lack large scale play coordination. Fighting them for 12 out of the 14 weeks I’ve played this game, my observations have been that they play to survive, not to win. (No offense my AR rivals, but I have seen even you admit to ‘playing for second’.) I’m confident that BP could jump to second place if we wanted—but that isn’t what we (I) want. We want to keep the boot on Ebay’s throat, not battle it out for second place with AR.

BP is at that point where we desperately want to take that next step, and your guild could be what gives us that opportunity.

Dolyaks are OP and need to be nerfed!

I don’t know who this jkctmc guy is—probably AR—but I like him!

:) Good luck out there glamour mesmers. Your build was nerfed, but it isn’t broken. I’m still going to make a confusion mesmer. After playing in sPvP with it, I can say for sure that even with 50% damage reduction of condition, confusion still packs a punch.

Haha.

I think:

Invader -> Bronze Invader -> Silver Invader -> Gold Invader -> …. -> Silver Legend -> Gold Legend

Would have been better too than:

Invader -> … -> Legend -> Bronze Invader -> … -> Gold Legend

Pretty funny though.

I want it now! I’d spend real money on this sort of thing.

I’ve tried using it in the dredge fractal, where you need to operate the door. But it doesn’t work the way I expected. It says the pet guards the area aggressively… but instead my pet picks the first mob to enter the area and focuses solely on them. Not helpful :/

Slightly altered my build to add in traps and GS. My DPS has dropped probably significantly, but at least the GS is fun.

Prior to the update I was running SB/SB with sigils of battle and red moa/jungle stalker. I could maintain almost constant fury from weapon swapping and the moa and would always have 6-14 stacks of might due to the weapon swapping and jungle stalker. Had a 20/30/5/0/15 build and got quickness every 15 seconds from pet swap.

Now I’m running a slightly more CC-oriented build, which is more fun but at the expense of my DPS. Changed to 20/30/20/0/0 SB/GS sigil of fire and sigil of [undecided]. Traited traps and reduced GS cooldown, and now I can (literally) fly across an open field, which is just kittens of fun.

Quickness is too slow for me to bother using now, and it’s sad

OP has the right idea. We’ve been fighting each other at the expense of thousands and thousands of lives. The end of all this fighting is nowhere in sight. For months we’ve lost our brothers, sisters, neighbors and friends to this endless war—clearly it is not working, for when we DO conquer or become defeated by the enemy, a new one takes their place. And frankly, with all the towers and keeps, there is still not enough bed space. We have no children because it is far too much of a liability to bring more innocents into this world, and our supply is never so high that we could feed their hungry mouths.

This endless war isn’t working. It’s about time we negotiate with our enemies and draft some treaties. If we humans can come to terms and befriend the Charr, or put up with the Asura with their relentless arrogance, coming to an agreement with our enemy shouldn’t be difficult.

Let’s ban together, Brothers, for the good of Tyria!

I LOVE the idea of “weeklies” replacing “dailies”

Ramethzero.3785:

Congrats, and thanks for satisfying my own personal curiosity. I like what you’ve done here.

However, you also brought math to the internet ( and to a gaming forum no less ). I’m thinking its going to bounce off of many people’s heads that are just too convinced that rangers are no longer viable in pretty much everything. It’s not your fault, its just the way things seem to go.

I play both engineer and ranger extensively. After finding out the observational differences in game, I gotta say that I don’t feel terribly underpowered in PvE. In fact, the overall output of both has not changed in any dramatic way, despite what people are saying. In WvW, there is some active difference, but the play style is much more fluid and one needs to react to changes quickly. Its the nature of the beast. A build only reflects part of the story. How its implemented and played is entirely another matter.

You’re welcome, and I absolutely agree When I say a maximum decrease of 8-9% DPS, this is under the assumption that a person plays like I do, always grabbing their chance for quickness when it’s available. So this hurts my specific build and play style the most, and potentially anyone else who min/maxes to the degree I do. Ultimately, your average ranger will walk away from this change nearly unaffected. Though I do take a significant hit and I can’t say that that doesn’t make me sad.

Based on the other math threads, I was inspired to do the math myself and how it effects me as a player. I’m a DPS-focused ranger who tries maximizing her damage output, and upon reading the change made to quickness, I felt dishearten. But did it really effect me? Would my damage output change insignificantly?

With 15 second pet swap and 2 second quickness per swap, I make sure to swap pets as soon as my cool down timer is up. QZ is used often. I’m a PvE player primarily, so the positive/negative effects of the change in that regard are meaningless to me, including the “disadvantage” of being able to heal while QZ is up.

Anyways, assuming I use QZ whenever I can and assuming I pet swap every opportunity I get (and minimizing the overlap between the two), the following files are what I get. The first attached file is the data I generated to form the graphs. A 1000 second fight might not be likely, but I wanted to see if the % Decrease of DPS converged (it did).

To explain:
Link 1 is the raw data that I conjured. The last three columns are just Boolean logic. 0 means False, 1 means True meaning that that skill or buff is active or not for that one second. The Before and After columns refer to the accumulated DPS at that duration. A simple IF(QZ or PS = 1, then 2/1.5 + prior, else 1+prior) formula is used. As we can expect, at 4 seconds the Before has a DPS of 8, and at 5 seconds the After has a DPS of 7.5. We also have a % Decrease in DPS column which, you guessed it, shows at that point in time how much your DPS has decreased. This means, say, if you have a fight that lasts 10 seconds, and you fight the way I do, your DPS has decreased by a maximum of 15%.

Links 2-4: Here we can see the older DPS vs the newer DPS (with quickness maximized still). Of course as the battle gets longer, the gap will get bigger, so I find the 1000 second graph (#4) less useful than the other two. In the first graph (#2) you can see that quickness has a less profound effect.

But now let’s get to the most interesting ones. Links 5-6 show the decreased DPS based on battle duration. In (#5) we can see a very significant hit to DPS initially, but we should expect that our DPS was reduced from 200% to 150% which is a 25% decrease. As the battle duration increases, our DPS reduction decreases which is both good and expected. Yet in a 35 second fight our DPS is reduced by 10%. Ouch!

Graph (#6) is the most important. 60 second fights are common, but do we really lose out on those big, long boss battles? The answer is yes. In the long term, our DPS is reduced by 7-8%. This isn’t insignificant, and actually a rather big deal! The amount of gold one pays to increase their DPS by a percent or two, or what you pay for food buffs to increase your DPS by only 3% makes this loss extra hurtful. Of course, this is the maximum DPS loss you will suffer from the change to Quickness if you extend your battle duration longer than 500 seconds. If you sit between the 60-120 second mark for battle duration, expect a maximum DPS loss of 8-9% instead.

Links:

1. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhMRbtXpW9UNdDRseVN1VUhHajQ5UDM5aEQ1bnJIV3c#gid=0
2. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNSThCdE1xVlZRTnc/edit
3. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNanFTMkRHWm01M0U/edit
4. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNdUttc3lUdTlyaFk/edit
5. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNQ3NyNUsxaElVd0U/edit
6. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNVzNqdDh5cndORUU/edit

I had it last night.

Curiously though, the odds of not getting the Charr level in 1 run is 6/7 * 5/6 * 4/5 = 4/7 = 57%

The odds of not getting the Charr level in 10 runs is (57%)^10 = 0.3% meaning you’re 99.7% sure of getting the Charr level at least once after 10 runs…. And after 15 runs, it’s 99.98% probability that you’ll have gotten the Charr level at least once.

So, either you are intensely unlucky, or there is an intentional varied distribution (as in the odds aren’t strictly 1/7 across the board) based possibly on your fractal level, or something’s up.

More people transfer to your server and you get long queue lines

I suppose you might also get more loot. Not that the value of loot is any better, but if you’re winning on such an active server, you’re probably taking out a lot of bodies which leads to a lot of drops which means more bags to open and more loot to harvest. Though that’s more of a biproduct reward than an intentional one.

Brutakus.2784:

It’s kittening ridiculous that my sword brings down mobs faster than than either bow. Seriously? If I want to do decent dps as a “RANGEr” i have to use melee weapons. GG anet.

Not to be “that person” but…

Ranger (n):
late 14c., “gamekeeper,” agent noun from range (v.)). Attested from 1660s in sense of “man (often mounted) who polices an area.”

Range (v):
c.1200, rengen, “move over a large area, roam with the purpose of searching or hunting,” from Old French rengier (see range (n.)).

The “range” part in “ranger” refers to range (v.) not range (n.), so the argument that a ranger is a ranged fighter just isn’t valid.

Gunsei.4870:

Having played a bit of CoE with my ranger lately, I wouldn’t want to have to time both my dodge and my pets dodge every time Subject Alpha decides to AoE half the room.

Having the pet dodge when you do, or having it so that you can toggle the pet dodge button to activate when you dodge could be very useful in some dungeons.

I would also love to have more then 2 states of basic AI mode. Maybe have the current actions be split between 4 states instead of only 2, or being able to limit the “active” state. What I mean is that right now you have the choice for your pet to be either fully passive or fully agressive, where he will fight your target, then defend you from attackers and then enter the follow mode when there’s no more targets availlable. Having the option to put the pet in an attack only mode, where he attacks your target but doesn’t defend you from attackers, or having a defense only mode, where he doesn’t attack your target, but attacks anything that attacks you, could be very useful.

It’d be nice if sometime down the line we could have an advanced settings menu for the pet AI to help customized their behavior. Different players have different play styles and need their pet’s AI to react in different ways. As pets are such an integrated part of the ranger class, it would be nice if I could tweek and customize its behavior to compliment my play style. For example, I wouldn’t like the dodge on my dodge feature, but other players or certain situations it would be nice to turn that behavior on.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read the concerns and ideas in this thread Robert

Since you’re taking notes and this is my opportunity to say something, these features would help me immensely in dungeons and are much easier to fix/change than rewriting pet AI:

- Fix Search and Rescue and Lick Wounds (failure has caused a party wipe too many times)
- Passive pet staying passive after using its F2 skill (would help me keep my pet alive with minimum micro managing!)
- Different color (yellow, red?) for the bar that represents my pet is dead but is healing or something. Being a slightly darker shade of green has made me misjudge whether my pet is alive or not a number of times (and has made me failcast Search and Rescue, putting me in the 85 sec cool down)
- Perma stow pets. Helpful for Jade Maw and jump puzzles! Alternatively, let my pet go pick up a crystal for Jade Maw if I tell it to.
- Let me see my pets buffs and conditions without having to click it, just as I could my fellow party members.

Also please keep in mind during these discussions that as a user, as a ranger I already have a lot of micro managing to do. I really couldn’t handle one more button or to constantly keep an eye on my pet when I, myself, and trying not to get downed when fighting the Grawl Shaman! As a user of a gaming mouse that has, literally, 20 mapped buttons on it to keys, I don’t know how someone with a basic mouse + keyboard can managing keeping themselves and their pet alive in these situations.

Ranger is a challenging class, but if any of the points I listed earlier are fixed/changed, I’d be one happy pet owner!

T6 is definitely the best! Especially on Borlis Pass Feels good when you win against such tight competition. Keep challenging us, AR. And kindly stop killing me in the EB JP!

Other Borlis Pass people can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe we have a strong night presence. One night I decided not to go to bed and stayed up on WvW, got 50 BoH (a lot for a casual WvW player like myself, and this was before they increased the drop rate) and had more fun in WvW than I ever had before. I wish it was more convenient for me to do it again and again.

Search and Rescue:
- Sometimes pet will go to its target and stand over the body, but won’t heal. It will Search but it will not Rescue.
- Defeated pet will not Rescue (may be working as intended)
- Failed use of this shout will still be met with the 85 second cool down

Passive Pet turning Aggressive: Using the F2 skill on a passive pet will tell the pet to aggro your target after triggering its ability (as though you pressed F1 following F2). This causes the player to make sure F3 is pressed following F2 to keep the pet close (vital for pet survivability in dungeons). If F3 is pressed too soon, then the pet cancels out of using its F2 skill.

….but…. but I don’t like these answers! Why such a long cool down for a skill that already has so many restrictions on top of it?

It is my understanding that Search and Rescue does not work or stops working upon the death of your pet. But I have other questions about it…

If I use Search and Rescue and nobody is in a downed or defeated state, will my pet be in a “Search and Rescue” mindset and will go rescue someone as soon as they’re downed OR did I just waste a skill for 85 seconds?

If the former, how long of an internal timer does the pet have to be in that state before it “gives up” and doesn’t care about searching and rescuing? What if I switch pets?

If there are multiple people downed/defeated, will my pet go rescue another after rescuing the first?

If I or my pet are out of range of a downed alley, did I again waste 85 seconds by calling the skill?

I fear the answers. This is a very neat skill, but the number of downsides and disadvantages makes it incredibly situational and tends to just waste a skill slot.

All in all, I agree. I was looking forward to this change and hoped that it would reward my activity within the game instead of pushed me to do things that I didn’t particularly wish to do.

My biggest concern with the daily system though is the time required to complete it. As a player with a fair amount of free time, it doesn’t effect me much. But friends with full time jobs who work from 8am-9pm and wish to get to bed by midnight don’t want to spend 60-90 minutes every day just to get their dailies finished and have no time for any other content. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes for a casual player, unfamiliar to the game, to finish the dailies.

I hope that we’ll be able to customize our dailies further so that they can be completed within our normal gameplay routine and that players with tight schedules can log in, play a little, and log out with their dailies complete.

I don’t know if I simply misunderstand something here, or if there’s a bug crawling around my game.

My equipment is fully docked with a rune set.

“Superior Rune of the Ranger (12/6)”

This seems to imply to me that I’m wearing 12 of these runes with a cap of 6. However, I’m only wearing 6. If I remove all of my equipment except, say, the boots, (including removing accessories) I still have “Superior Rune … (7/6)”

It seems to be tied in with my PvP equipment which makes me wonder. Well. What’s going on? Do I get the benefits in PvE while wearing runes on my PvP equipment or what? Will I not get the stat boost in PvE because of my PvP equipment?

I’m sure I’m not the first to stumble upon this, so if anyone knows of a related thread to this situation, please pass along the appropriate links.