Guild Wars 2

• Off-Hand Axe: Whirling Defense
  • This is a channeled ability that is canceled if you move
  • Reflects projectiles (tooltip only says “blocks”)
    • Will not reflect projectiles if your foe is inside the “bubble” created by your Whirling Defense

• Dagger: Stalker’s Strike
  • While being immobilized prevents you from performing a dodge roll, you still gain the evasion from casting Stalker’s Strike while immobilized.

• Horn: Hunter’s Call
  • If you cast this skill while your target is visible and your target then stealths, this attack will continue to hit your target.
  • While it will continue to hit stealthed targets, hits from Hunter’s Call require the ranger to maintain line-of-sight to the target similar to if the Ranger was shooting projectiles at the target

• Spear: Evasive Strike
  • Suffers from “animation locking”: you are unable to control your movement nor dodge roll while this skill is being used (i.e. during the animation)
• Spear: Dart
  • Using this skill grants your pet Swiftness for 5 seconds.

• Heal: Healing Spring
  • Pulses once every 3 seconds with each pulse applying regeneration and removing conditions
• Heal: Troll Unguent
  • Troll Unguent can not be removed from you (nor your pet) by boon removal or any other method.

• Downed Skill: Lick Wounds
  • This will revive a dead pet to full health, but will not heal an injured pet.
  • This means you have a better chance of being revived if your pet is died than you do if your pet is still alive but heavily injured.

You’re welcome Shiren.

Your post just gave me a nice idea … it’s something that got started on guildwars2guru in the Mesmer section (yeah, Mesmer is still my main). A thread for listing all the current tooltips that are incorrect, vague, and/or have undocumented side-effects (i.e. Sharpening Stone’s interaction with Barrage is different from Sun Spirit’s).

Leo G.4501:

Sebrent.3625:

+10% damage once every 10 seconds gives you an overal increase of 1% … and that’s assuming that you proc it as soon as that 10 second cooldown is up. That’s pathetic.

I thought someone mentioned Frost Spirit’s buff not having an internal cooldown. No one tried proving that yet? But yeah, I think the internal cooldowns on the spirits need to be dropped.

I believe they had said that it isn’t shared across party members. So if I got +10% it’d be on a 10 sec cooldown for me, but not for you and the rest of the party until you got your own +10% proc.

I agree that removing the ICD would be a step in the right direction. That said, though, they are so bad right now that there are so many things that could be done that would be a step in the right direction.

I’m curious how they are going to nerf the elementalist because the combination of support (attunement swapping w/ large amounts of +boon duration), tankiness, mobility, and decent damage is pretty amazing.

I’m curious though because the elementalist needs to be given at least two other viable options before their current “best” option is taken away from them.

Honestly, I wish we saw more Focus use from elementalists as that weapon has so many awesome uses, especially in groups. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit into the flying bat out of … build that we see all over the place.

In fact, this highlights sort of the “issue”. It’s the massive amount of mobility coupled with being able to easily cleanse and heal yourself. The only class with the same ability to “pick their fights” is the Thief due to high mobility and stealth (and 600 per sec healing if they trait it). However, that Thief isn’t providing crap for support to their team nor are they providing an abundance of CC.

Summary:
Devs said a nerf is coming and it is somewhat warranted.
Devs need to give elementalists viable alternatives or they are going to hurt the class (look at Ranger after their nerfs without recompense … let’s not repeat that).

I wasn’t aware of that about Phantasmal Regeneration.

I know Chaos Armor is not affected by boon duration but I believe the protection/regen/swiftness that it procs do … though someone please correct me if this is not the case.

KensaiZen.3740:

1. Rangers do crap damage. Rangers do not do crap damage- point proven. Certainly not as high as a warrior. But certainly not as bad as other classes.

Posting a video of bad players in bad gear doesn’t prove your point.

KensaiZen.3740:

2. Rangers pets die all the times in dungeons thus reducing Ranger capabilities especially in the damage department by 40%. – Pets dont die in dungeons if you can manage them. Point proven.

Running through the easiest path of HotW and one of the easiest in CoF doesn’t prove anything. Get a 30+ fractal and keep that pet alive while also making it useful. Then people will be impressed

KensaiZen.3740:

3. Rangers are crap in WvW and can’t do anything – still need to find a zerg in bottom tier WvW to make a video. video coming soon.

I can’t wait to see this one. You going to just sit back and do damage and say “see, people died” and call it a day?

You have to compare it to things like the Glamor mesmer, D/D Elementalist, Necromancer, Guardian, etc..

KensaiZen.3740:

4. Rangers spirit dies all the time in dungeons and are worthless. 10% damage increase and burning for a full 60 seconds is better than 10% damage increase or burning for 100% success rate for 10 seconds. (still not sure why people dont understand this)

+10% damage once every 10 seconds gives you an overal increase of 1% … and that’s assuming that you proc it as soon as that 10 second cooldown is up. That’s pathetic.

Even if you had given that to your group (which you didn’t in your videos), that is +1% x5 people for +5%. Giving Might to everyone would have done much more.

The burning is lackluster if there is anyone else in the group reliably applying burning to the target.

Finally, as already mentioned, your spirits were so far away from the fights that they weren’t even benefitting your group. Yeah, they didn’t die but they were only giving their horrible effects to you.

KensaiZen.3740:

Rangers bring nothing to the team – Rangers bring something very important to the team. A higher % of success for completion in instances. Usually the last to die. Has ability to keep allies up and running without losing total DPS.

The last to die … great advertisement. I prefer the “because my class is here, we are much less likelyto die” that Guardians bring to a group. My Mesmer brings that too with Feedback, traited Focus, Null Field, AOE blinds, etc. along with great damage from phantasms. It can even remove boons from enemies who would otherwise be taking 33% less damage due to protection.

Leo G.4501:

Sebrent.3625:

• Glyph of Renewal – 165s (132s traited) cooldown, 4.25s cast, can full heal rez 1 or rez up to 3 allies

Just wanted to comment that water GoR doesn’t full heal an ally. It doesn’t do anything, actually. It’s suppose to (as it says) but it doesn’t, it just casts a big heal and sometimes it doesn’t even do that. It usually just brings someone up to half health when you rez. It’s only marginally better than fire GoR and air GoR has greater utility.

But just clearing that up. I think the other good thing about S&R that you’re not bringing up is:

• It takes part of your damage from you when used, but the other option on other professions is take 100% of your damage while rezzing unless you have pets.
• It can make your rez attempts faster by combining your pet and yourself.
• It works on dead allies were those other skills have zero effect.
• Works at variable range (wherever the pet is, within its range, not yours).

It’s not perfect or even outright better in certain respects but it has its uses that other similar utilities don’t.

Oh, I won’t argue that Search & Rescue doesn’t have its uses. It certainly does. I’m arguing that there are other utilities that do the same or better. There are some worse as well.

Either way, it is far from a unique Ranger capability.

The current problem with condition builds is this:

• Runes of Melandru + Lemongrass gives a player -65% condition duration for those applied to them.
• That -65% “rounds up” since 0.999 seconds of a bleed will do 0 damage.
• Light fields are in abundance and remove conditions
• Plenty of classes have ways to remove conditions
• There is an abundance of 100% boon up-time on things such as regen … conditions take time to do their damage … that time gives your foe’s regen more time to work.

The closest thing to the -65% is protection which only reduces by 33%, doesn’t “round up”, can be removed, and requires traits/skills to be consumed. The -65% is something you can’t do anything about except increase your own condition duration.

That said, in WvW, it doesn’t seem many people are taking many (if any) defensive measures, so conditions can be quite deadly in smaller fights. It’s just the abundance of light fields in large fights that causes problems since people are constantly accidentally using light field finishers which remove conditions.

Being tanky only benefits you, so I don’t recommend it unless you’re getting downed/killed without it … because then you’re a liability that could get others downed/killed.

If you can manage without being tanky, I’d say take berserker’s for dungeons. This game is designed around not getting hit, instead of tanking, and as a Mesmer you should be very good at this.

If you’re wanting to use Restorative Mantras, then I’d recommend 30 points in Inspiration as traited Focus is great in so many places and in the places it’s not you can instead use one of the many other great traits in the Inspiration line.

Aside from that, I’d say just figure out what else you want to do and go from there … or tell us what else you want beyond what you’ve already told us.

KensaiZen, take your “arguments” and try them elsewhere (or, preferably, nowhere).

It isn’t the Ranger community, it is you. You may notice that when someone posts something with some actual substance, there is good conversation. When you (and certain others) post this rubbish, there is no good conversation just the community telling you “that’s bull” and you saying “nuh uh” and then the community saying “Well here is proof” and you saying “well I really meant…”.

What is the point of even continuing this? Are you just trying to prove that you’re right? So many people have brought up so many points as to why you’re not that you’ve moved away from the OP and many other stances you’ve tried to take.

The point of these forums is to discuss ideas, give/get help/feedback, etc.. You and your posts are not accomplishing this.

You and the rest of “team misinformation” just need to stop … at least till you have something of substance to post about.

I know I’ve been pushing for testing more uses of Mantras by Mesmers, but…

Since you have the 20/20/0/0/30 and the 0/20/20/0/30 specs and your playstyle could be described as a form of “jousting” (get in, burst, get out, repeat), have you thought about trying a 0/20/0/20/30 build with Mantra of Recovery and Mantra of Pain?

Mantra of Pain would allow for even more burst damage as you can Shatter + Blurred Frenzy + Power Spike x2. Cycling Mantra of Pain and Mantra of Restoration would allow you to heal more while “getting out”. You’d also have the benefit of being able to take Mender’s Purity to help against conditions.

Have you tried this? If so, thoughts? Experiences?

If not, please think about trying it :-) You have a higher APM than me and I’m curious what you could do with this.

There is no ranger in that last video … why am I supposed to watch it?

Search & Rescue is useful … except that it takes your pet (30-40% of your dps) out of the fight for a good while and possibly gets it killed.

• Search & Rescue – 90s (68s traited) cooldown and the above issues
• Glyph of Renewal – 165s (132s traited) cooldown, 4.25s cast, can full heal rez 1 or rez up to 3 allies
• Battle Standard – 240s (192s traited) cooldown, 2s cast, can rez entire party and provides Fury, Might, and Stability
• Signet of Undeath – 180s (144s traited) cooldown, 2s cast, can rez 3 party members, passive gives life force
• Signet of Mercy – 240s (192s traited) cooldown, 3.75s cast, can rez 1 party member, passive gives +healing
• Toss Elixir R – 120s (92.25s w/ 30 pts in Tools), 0.75s cast, can rez up to 5 party members, rezzing them in 5 seconds (20% per sec)
• Illusion of Life – 130s (104s traited), 0.75s cast, can rez entire party, though they will die if an enemy doesn’t die within the next 15s.

Not all of these are better than Search & Rescue, but many of them definitely are.

Search & Rescue:

• Pet can die
• Pet isn’t doing damage (-40% of your damage … though better than 100%)
• Is not instant
• Can be interrupted

That second video does a better job of showing your damage. It is better than the last video but I still saw some pretty low shots from the slow-firing longbow. There were some exceptional hits from it, but other than that it is still a very slow-firing weapon and that low speed has to be taken into account when factoring the damage. That is why it isn’t very good.

Kudos for keeping your pet alive. You actually made it “difficult” on yourself by actually taking a melee pet against the last boss. The rest of the time you did what has been common knowledge and simply used a ranged pet (I prefer the Devourers, but tomato tomato). It has to be taken into account, though, that you had two guardians in the group. Guardian’s can’t so much as go afk to pee without increasing the survivability of those around them, including your pet.

As far as the support you provided to the group, the others are correct, you didn’t provide crap for support. Even when you used spirits, they were out of range of the rest of your group.

Condition Damage and constant damage.

Burst direct damage is pretty easy for most mesmers to deal with as our defenses are largely active. Hence, our defensive cooldowns are going to be popped when a foe’s “big offensive cooldowns” are used.

Against condition damage, if it can be reliably applied to keep damage on us, most mesmer builds will crumble (most are light on condition removal).

Against constant damage, we can’t mitigate multiple quick attacks that stay on us. Our blocks block only one attack each and then we have blurred frenzy and distortion. After that we’re taking all of those hits unless we can LoS you or get out of range.

That said, though, the Mesmer is quite capable of punishing people who use quick hits via our plethora of ways to gain retaliation as well as inflict confusion. This is why, despite the above, you don’t see Mesmer griping much about shortbow Rangers because we can simply keep up retaliation and put confusion on them and they’ll often melt themselves. Some Mesmers even go a step farther and reflect those shots ;-)

The useful of clones to distract people depends on your mobility. Can you get behind them when creating clones. Did you already have clones out when they entered the fight? Can you teleport around? Can you break target using stealth?

The better a player is, the quicker they’ll identify the real mesmer. However, the better the Mesmer is at deceiving their foe(s), the longer that will take. The second(s) this provides is/are second(s) of skills coming off cooldown without additional pressure on the Mesmer.

@Pyro: Gotcha. Thanks.

Mako.1942:

+14.1% damage
+14.28% crit chance
+3,000 health
+14.1% damage mitigation

Now ask yourself, is it worth roughly 40+% of your trait points to make your pet 14% better?

I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification.

If you look at every trait line, they give you bonuses to 2 different stats. Beastmastery is different in this respect, if gives you a bonus to one stat (healing) and gives your pet a bonus to 4 stats. That’s +14% dmg + 14% crit chance + 14% damage mitigation = 42% overall effectiveness just there. That’s not even counting the extra health from the vitality.

If you’re full glass cannon, you will die to a thief that jumps you. It’s as simple as that.

If you want to run full glass cannon, then you have to avoid getting jumped or accept that you will quite likely die by the time you see them when it happens.

Otherwise, replace a few pieces of Berserker gear with Cavalier (toughness, power, crit dmg), Knight’s (toughness, power, precision), Valkyrie (power, vitality, crit damage), and/or Soldier’s (power, toughness, vitality).

Boons from Mesmer weapon skills, utilities, and traits and their durations given various +boon durations given in +5% increments.

Just data for people to use however they wish. Both are the same data, just sorted by Boon and by Skill

Just watched your video. You do realize that there were several times that you hit for 300 or 400 with your longbow? Given how slowly it attacks and that you are using a power weapon, that is pathetic damage. Going back to the OP, that is the point. The damage was far from “Godly”.

<edit>
Heck, your Longbow’s Rapid Fire was doing less then 4,000 damage. Given that it’s a 5sec channel, that’s less than 800dps. Given that most people hit for that much with auto-attacks that hit every 0.5 seconds, you’re doing less than 50% of their damage.

Bah, I had suspected that but had always used Mirror with my on-heal runes so it wasn’t ever an issue. Was trying to “get more” by using Mantra of Recovery only to be sorely disappointed … bah.

Currently the Phantasm build 10/30/0/25/5 has become quite popular. As Pyroatheist mentioned in Episode 2 of their Podcast, Mesmerized, with this build you cast your phantasms, dance around your foe(s), and let your phantasms kill them.

I was thinking about this a bit more and thought to myself, “why not heal yourself while dancing around them”. As the build already has 25 points in Inspiration, you can easily swap out the usual +20% phantasm hp that people take and replace it with Restorative Mantras. Now, with Mantra of Recovery and Mantra of Pain, while dancing around your opponent, you can constantly cycle the two Mantras (as able) to get 2.5k heals (that’s with zero +healing).

Interesting concept, Henrik. I’ll look into what I can do with that sort of build … though I’m hesitant to take up a utility slot primarily for +10% boon duration … Mesmer utilities are just so good that I’d hate to “waste” it.

I don’t always want to run focus either, though it is a sexy little off-hand weapon.

Whenever I’m running the shattercat build (20/20/0/0/30), I have one main issue while roaming in World vs World … conditions. It can also be an issue in large fights.

Anyone else run into this issue?
Anyone have solutions for this issue when running the shattercat build?

Has the internal cooldown for on-heal affects been increased from 10 seconds to 15 seconds?

I’ve been running 30pts in Chaos quite a bit lately and taking x6 Runes of the Centaur for +20% swiftness duration and Swiftness on-heal.

However, if I use Mantra of Recovery and wait for the swiftness to have even 1 second left and use my heal, I gain no swiftness. Has anyone else noticed this with Runes of the Centaur or similar on-heal runes effects?

I change all the time but a few I’ve commonly used ones are:

• 20/20/0/0/30 Osicat’s Shattercat build with Berserker’s armor/weapons and Cavalier accessories
• 20/20/0/0/30 Osicat’s Shattercat build with Knight’s armor/weapons and Cavalier accessories.
• 0/20/30/15/5 Sebrent’s Tanky-Condition build with Rabid armor/weapons/accessories (recent bit of tweaking)
• 0/20/0/30/20 Sebrent’s Shatter-Heal-Condition build with Rabid armor/weapons/accessories (still tweaking)
• 0/0/20/20/30 Pyroatheist’s Immortal build with Soldier’s armor/weapons/accessories

Lately though, I’m trying to play around with various builds with 30 points in Chaos because:

• 30 in Chaos + Runes of the Centaur gives you almost 100% swiftness up-time with Mirror as your heal
• 30 in Chaos + any armor set that gives toughness makes both you and your illusions quite tough (imagine that! lol)

I strongly agree with SevenMirror’s/Grimm’s saying that any Mesmer build can be powerful if played right.

As Mesmers, we are blessed with several viable builds and a community of players that is exceptionally helpful as well as skilled.

Honestly, if you are wanting to confuse people with your clones, you need to do a few things:
(1) Don’t do anything but auto-attack unless forced to or already “figured out”
(2) Equip stealth skills to break targeting … this makes the enemy have to “figure you out” again.

Deceptive Evasion, taking it or not, has nothing to do with this except that if you dodge roll before an enemy has “figured you out”, then you just made their job that much easier.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

@Pyroatheist: I had read somewhere that both power and toughness scale linearly in GW2. However, that could be old news or bad info from arenanet (anyone seen our tooltips, lol!). If what you’re saying is the case, it just means that you get even less from those points in beastmastery :-/

Ping.5739:

Sebrent.3625:

The advice given here for “Mesmer vs Thief” is pretty solid, so if they are a common problem for you, definitely commit it to memory.

I think one of the things the OP was getting at that hasn’t really been discussed much though was the fact that ArenaNet mentioned they nerfed quickness because:

In PvP, this speed gives most players almost no chance to react to incoming abilities and allows for massive spike damage in extremely short periods of time.

Despite this, the OP saw a thief do an immense amount of spike damage to them, despite having (I assume) decent toughness from knight’s + 10pts in Chaos.

In regard to this, I have to half agree. I think thief burst is something they are still looking at toning down (somewhat mentioned in a recent interview), but they for some reason think a thief should be able to “burst a bunker” (what?!) so are being slow about it. On the flip side, one of the reasons quickness was nerfed was because it allowed certain content (namely PvE) to be trivialized which doesn’t have anything to do with this. Furthermore, think of how quickly the Thief could have done that burst if they had used haste … even more ridiculous. Lastly, a Mesmer can do the same thing. It requires higher APM, but the DPS spike is there.

thief is working as intend.

Lol. “Thank you” “ArenaNet employee” for that insightful feedback. :-p

BlackhawkSOM.6401:

Well like I said I played ranger since launch (no other lvl 80s except ranger)…. not to sound arrogant but I literally know the ranger inside and out so I am well aware of pet management and what not. In my post I was more focused on sprits because they are an issue that are being left untreated.
….

Some good news, here is a quote from Jonathan sharp from the warrior forums:

“And yes, Ranger spirits are in the same boat as Warrior banners. They were VERY powerful before ship, but after changes, they are on the lower end of the power curve right now. So they’ll be slowly adjusted over time to bring them back up as well.”

Could you please supply a link? I’m lazy :-p

The idea behind the sigil of hydromancy with the above build was that it’s there to provide another source of chill. You need that “other source” if your opponent is in melee range of you. Also, both the sword and the axe operate quite well at short range. In fact, you want to be at short range for Axe #2 to bleed your opponent with all the axes.

Wanderer.5471:

On the hyena thing, it does benefit them most, as BM investment just adds to base stats rather than a percentage of base stats, however it’s not that big of a difference – a 0BM hyena has 47% of the power of a 0BM wolf, a 30BM hyena has 55% the power of a 30BM wolf. So it’s nice but not game-changing.

Thanks for the explanation, Wanderer. Your logic makes perfect sense to me.

Anyone know of a way we could get some more information on pet stats such as what the base hitpoints, damage mitigation, etc. are for each pet family?

Semil.8279:
Hitting with the Owl’s F2 isn’t not too difficult. The Snow Leopard isn’t bad either. Both of those animal families have some of the more reliable F2s (bird slashes and cat leaps). Much more reliable than the other pet families anyways ;-)

I’m thinking taking Rabid gear would help with the survivability of the build quite a bit given it provides good toughness. Aside from that, the Ranger’s natural ability to evade should help it survive as well.

Anyone have feedback on how putting both chill and cripple on a target affects it?

Not just more dodges, but being able to “get the **** out of dodge”.

Lightning Reflexes isn’t going to do that unless you chain it with other things.

Example:
Ranger uses Swoop traited for 9.75 sec cd.
Warrior catches up using Rush traited for 16 sec cd.
Warrior throws Greatsword to cripple Ranger … Ranger dodges or is now “tackled” unless they can remove cripple before caught.

It could go on much more than that with the Ranger using as many escapes, etc. as they can, but I think you get the idea.

It is seeming like the only way for a Ranger to be able to truly escape from a mobile Warrior/Elementalist is to use [Greatsword / Sword + X] … but I’d like to retain some range. Greatsword / Shortbow seems like the next best.

NOTE: you can escape from mobile players by speeding yourself up (signet or swiftness), weapon skill movements, and slowing your opponent down (traps, muddy terrain, pet, etc.). I’m trying to think in all three departments. It also helps to have condition removal and stun breakers.

It’s been this way since beta. ArenaNet is aware of it but hasn’t gotten around to fixing it. It’s sort of like how in beta they promised to allow us to put 2 sigils on 2hand weapons so they are equal to wielding two 1hand weapons (which allows you 2 take 2 sigils for that set) … but haven’t done that either.

Btw, I’m looking for more suggestions on how to make this build more evasive. As I said before, I think anyone with constant swiftness and weapon skills w/ movement would be able to “tackle” me for their group to catch me. I’m curious if it is possible to make a Ranger that even an Elementalist/Warrior could not catch (or would at least have a heck of a time trying)

Muddy Terrain traited with 20% cooldown reduction on survival skills is wonderful. It creates an AOE that is up for 20 seconds every 24 seconds … so its downtime is only 4 seconds.

Traps provide some additional combo fields, AOE dmg and/or control depending on which one(s) you use.

Healing spring is the best regen-giving, condition-cleansing, water combo field in the game (in my opinion) with a 50% up-time.

These are my best contributions to a group on my ranger aside from “not being stupid”, lol :-p

Sometimes I will not take muddy terrain and instead take 3 traps.

I tried spirits last night with extra hp trait and lots of toughness on me (maybe it gives it to them) and they still died in what seemed like 1 stray auto-attack from another player.

The only “great” use I can think for it in PvE is keeping melee bosses under control.

In WvW, I imagine it’d be better for smaller fights, but you could “screw over” one target at a time in larger fights. Chill is the meanest non-damaging condition you can have on you.

@nagymbear.5280: You use chilled to:

• decrease foe’s movement speed by 66%
• increase foe’s skill cooldown times by 66%

Denying movement can be crippling to enemies as it better enables you to dictate the flow of a fight. Take a look at elementalists and thieves. Their speed gives them a huge advantage when it comes to dictating fights.

Increasing cooldown times means less uses of your foe’s skills. This means less uses. This can result in your foe having reduced damage/utility/healing/etc.

I don’t see any real issue with replacing sword with shortbow. Shortbow has it’s only cripple and has one built-in evasion so it’s not a bad choice. I believe shortbow can work in most any Ranger build. You will have 10% less condition duration with it though.

If you did this, I’d be somewhat torn between Axe+Torch or Axe+Dagger. Torch gives you access to burning damage from it’s #4 and #5 and allows for a fire combo field with your axes (awesome with axe auto and especially #2!). Dagger provides it with more defense (#4 evasion) poison (axe lacks this), and more bleed w/ a cripple (#5).

@Semil.8279:
I’m very glad you’re enjoying the thread. I’m enjoying the discussion quite a bit a well. It’s a refreshing breath of air :-)

According to the tooltip on gw2skills.net (I’m at work right now), there is a 10 second internal cooldown on the Superior Sigil of Ice.

One of the biggest advantages of the Ranger pet is that the Ranger can go extremely defensive, even out of attack range of their foe while their pet is still doing damage to them. By keeping your foe chilled, you can better enable yourself to dictate when you are/aren’t in range. The chill reducing movespeed by 66% also helps your pet land their hits more reliably. Chilled is even better than crippled in this area as crippled only reduces movespeed by 50% while chilled reduces it by 66%.

One thing I’ve never really tested much is if the slow from chill stacks with the slow from cripple.

Dojo.1867:

Sebrent.3625:

Please acknowledge that while longbow’s rapid fire shows you a big number at the end of all of its hits, that it took you a 5 sec channel to do that damage. Yeah, the number is big, but it’s after a 5 second channel. It is extremely lackluster.

Please acknowledge that while longbow’s #5 is a nice AOE that also cripples, a foe can easy dodge roll out of it. Additionally, you have to stand still to channel it, making yourself a sitting target.

Please acknowledge that while longbow hits harder per hit, the shortbow hits more often.

• The higher hit rate of the short bow makes it better direct damage at short/medium range than Longbow … and equivalent (at worst) at long range
• The higher hit rate of the short bow makes it better for on-crit and on-hit affects (bleed, pet might, sigils)
• If someone is not facing you (trying to escape or fighting one of your allies), shortbow easily outdamages longbow via the additional bleeds … even if you have +0 condition damage

Rundown:

• Longbow #1 sucks … Shortbow #1 is great
• Longbow #2 sucks … Shortbow #2 fine (up to 10 seconds of poison)
• Longbow #3 is fine (vulnerability) … Shortbow #3 is fine (free evade & swiftness)
• Longbow #4 is fine (short range KB) … Shortbow #4 is fine (cripple & poison)
• Longbow #5 is fine (AOE dmg & cripple) … Shortbow #5 is fine (daze/stun)

So shortbow has all 5 skills that are fine while Longbow’s #3, #4, and #5 are really the only skills that are fine. I’d prefer to have 100% useful than 60%.

I did the math and LB 2 actually has a DPS nearly identical to SB autoattacking. Your posts are very biased imo claiming stuff sucks that really doesn’t.

I claim the longbow auto-attack sucks and that the longbow #2 sucks.

You reply with information about longbow #1 being worse than shortbow #1 at all ranges and Longbow #2 being the same as shortbow #1.

What did I claim “sucked” that doesn’t?

Why would someone take a weapon with an inferior auto-attack and a #2 that is a 5 second channel that is only as good as the auto-attack of the other weapon?

That “sucks” :-p

Endurance regenerates at 5% per sec. You need 50% endurance for one dodge roll. That means you need 10 seconds for 1 dodge roll (assuming no trait/vigor/etc.). The cooldown is much less than that. With traits, the cooldown is less than 5 seconds (endurance regen with vigor is 5 seconds for 1 dodge).

The idea that thieves who use backstab are squishy is only true when facing bad thieves … in which case we don’t care too much about them.

Good thieves can take all knight’s/soldier’s/etc gear and do very respectable damage do you with backstab. They can do good damage with auto-attacks (MH dagger or MH sword) as well. It’s not as bursty, but they are a pain in the butt to take down as they can easily survive the 4 seconds of revealed and many take traits to rejuv health when stealthed and gain regen when stealthed so they heal for 500+ hp a sec while stealthed. That’s 2k hp every time they stealth … and then some as the regen lasts longer than stealth.

This is how I play my thief in sPvP (been too lazy to level him, tired of leveling alts) and it’s extremely successful.

Yeah, runes of the pack was an experiment to see if several of us running rangers could make good use of it. It’s nice but you have to be too close and procs are random (duh).

I’ve definitely had my eye on Runes of Altruism, though getting the full set of 6 runes might be nice for the fury on top of the might.

Yeah, the toss-up if focusing on stopping power is:

• Traps w/ spike and frost
• Survival w/ muddy terrain

Traps gives you two different abilities on shorter cooldowns but they don’t last as long and takes 2 utility slots.
Survival gives you only one ability on the longest cooldown of the three but it lasts the longest.

I was using Signet of the Hunt because I wasn’t staying with the zerg all the time. I happened to roam to where a zerg fight was taking place and took part in it. When I did swap out Signet of the Hunt, it was to replace it with frost trap.

I’m a big fan of the Superior Sigil of Accuracy, the blood are from when I was trying to be a bit tankier in an old build. I’m slow to change out WvW gear on my Ranger since he is not my main.

Sword because you need 2 giver weapons in each weapon set to keep your +condition duration at 100%.

Sword also because, as you stated, you can’t keep people out of melee range with you. The evasions on the sword are quite nice.

If you can’t keep someone off you while using Axe (chill) + Dagger (cripple), then I think you need to be prepared for melee.

Lastly, sword so that you can have both the dagger and torch offhands as both provide even more on-demand condition damage. Aside from flame trap and a drake pet, torch is the only other way for a Ranger to reliably inflict burning. Inflicting Bleeding, Burning, and Poison is very mean … especially with +100% condition duration.

I’ve found shattered concentration to be quite nice in some Dungeons. In some fractals, there are NPCs that have protection and other boons you want to strip from them. This is quite helpful in those instances.

@naphack: I used “fine” for all of them that didn’t “suck” … it was a “fine”/“sucks” binary description :-p

I think the affect of 10% vulnerability is being somewhat exaggerated. It is a 10% increase in damage in a game where people live by not taking damage.

@Durzlla:
There’s no doubt that it can hit hard at long range in berserker gear. The issues are this:

• It is near impossible to keep an enemy at that max range if they are coming after you.
• Berserker makes you glassy and longbow only has a knockback
  • This is made worse, as the devs mentioned in an interview, by the lackluster utilities given to the ranger that don’t help compensate for this.
  • You could use protect me (now pet is dead) and/or singet of stone with 30 in marks but that’s a long cooldown and you’re dead if they hit you before/after those 6 seconds.

Shortbow provides more control and procs can provide a significant amount of damage.

Yeah, no class is going to do it all … but Ranger isn’t doing much.

Come up with a role Ranger fulfills in a group and I’m sure we can come up with another class that does it just as well and then some.

I doubt you could say the same for Guardian, Warrior, etc.

I don’t care so much that others do different things better in dungeons. I care that people look at the Ranger and the only thing they think “oh yay!” about is healing spring.

When I bring my Mesmer, people are “oh yay!” about feedback, focus reflection, null field, chaos storm (and chaos armor blast finishers!), etc.

When someone brings a Guardian, people are “oh yay!” about the plethora of boons they are going to get.

When someone brings a Warrior, people are “oh yay!” about the ridiculous damage, offensive boons, and banner buff.

I was running around in WvW last night on my Ranger with the following build:
Greatsword, Shortbow, Knight’s: 20/30/20/0/0.

With this build I was able to contribute to zerg v zerg fights a bit more due to traps and piercing arrows (swapped pet to spider for ranged, immob, and AOE poison).

I was also able to win a couple 1v1, including against a good confusion mesmer.

Lastly, I was able to lead a large zerg around on a merry chase thanks to Greatsword #3 being on a 9.75 second cooldown, Greatsword #4 on a 12 second cooldown, spike trap, and my dogs. Eventually someone would overextend as most of the zerg got tired of chasing me and I’d turn around and get a kill. The shortbow was great at providing incentive for them to not ignore me as it hurts to get continuously plinked in the rear by a shortbow.

Thoughts:
The classes chasing me were guardians, thieves, and rangers. Had anyone with perma swiftness and movespeed skills (Warrior, Ele, etc.) chased me, I would have been run down since my mobility was only a 25% movespeed signet and greatsword’s swoop.

It may be possible to do this using Muddy Terrain instead of spike traps. The AOE lasts 20 seconds and the cooldown is 30 seconds (24 w/ trait) which gives you a high up-time on it.

If replacing Traps w Muddy Terrain, how, if at all, could we move traits around.

Greatsword’s Maul is very nice now. I could cast it every 4.75 seconds and it was hitting for 2.5k on top of adding a few bleeds. That’s good for a full knight’s set.

Being able to hang on the outside of the enemy’s range is wonderful because the pet can land a few hits. I still prefer dogs for this as they provide CC and cope well with moving targets (compared to other pet families).

The greatsword’s reduced cooldowns, especially when you trait them to be even lower, is very nice. No other class can get a 1,100+ range leap on a less than 10 second cooldown (Warrior’ Rush and Elementalist’s Ride the Lightning can only get to 16s if traited [20 untraited])