I ran lynx jag with expertise training and bleed on crit in spvp and liked it a lot. Traited cat bleeds are roughly 60% of yours.
At level 80, the regular cat bleed is 42/sec. With expertise training it becomes 60/sec.
I can easily surpass that if I gear for it. But as others have said, it’s nice to be able to generate those bleeds while putting your stats and gear into something else besides condition damage.
Another point regarding AI/positioning. Lets say you face 2 enemys and your pet runs to the one thats far away from the other foe you are attacking. So you have to order it back (F1 if not done at the start of the fight) or follow your animal. Thats bad positioning again due to the control mechanism. It should attack what i attack. It should ignore if i ignore.
That’s not how it works, and it’s not how it should work. Having the pet attack only what you attack is terribly limiting.
How it currently works: The pet attacks your current target if you give it the attack command (or hit the #1 skill once). If you switch targets, you have to hit #1 again to start attacking. This forces the pet to change to your new target even if you don’t want it to. I’ve only been able to get around this horrible limitation by equipping an AOE weapon like a greatsword or sword, and keeping my target locked on what I want the pet attacking. I then move around and hit #1 to swing my sword manually to damage other mobs, never targeting them directly. It’s clumsy and horribly limiting, but it lets me do things like have my pet take down a flame turret while I help kill mobs my party is fighting. Note that this doesn’t work at all with a bow because bows always fire at your current target.
How it should work: You target a mob and hit F1. Your pet attacks that target and keeps attacking that target. You are free to change targets and attack other things. The pet will stay on its initial target until one of two things happens. You hit F1 with a different target selected, in which case the pet will change targets. Or the pet’s current target dies, in which case the pet will automatically switch to attacking your current target. 1 is your attack. F1 is the pet’s attack. The only people who should be happy with the way they’re currently linked together are lazy folks who can’t be bothered to hit F1 every time they want the pet attacking a different target.
3. Ranger’s pet cannot be used as an excuse for why the GS damage should not be increase.
I use point number 3 only because it would be a point brought up and it’s truly a fallacy. Our pets are alright at best, but not good. There’s still work to be done and if the pets’ damage are increase then fine, but that is not the case.
As it currently stands, roughly half the ranger’s damage comes from the pet. So having a GS which works as well as warrior GS but adding a pet would be overpowered. I’ve been racking my head thinking how this could be mitigated but I’m drawing a blank. The only thing I can think of is to make the autoattack as good as a warrior’s autoattack, but to make the 2-5 skills less powerful/useful to compensate for having pet damage. But right now the main reason to use GS is because of the 2-5 skills, and nerfing them would generate a tremendous outcry among ranger players (myself included).
(I agree the pet damage is often lacking. They really need to work on that if they want to keep ranger weapon damaged gimped. Pets need agony resistance, have to be able to dodge/survive AOEs, etc.)
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as for the bridgewatch camp hint, I’m not sure but http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Help_Megin_Volkman_search_for_her_missing_son could be it. Though I never encountered this and don’t know where the start is. The level matches the area of the waypoint.
I dunno what triggers it, but I found it started up by the harpies. You follow her search south towards town, protecting her and her entourage from all the drakes.
Her son is...the dead body amongst the stones there.
I also noticed that my pets were not keeping aggro today, tried the cats, three drakes, some bears (oh my) and the mobs would eventually come after me even tho I was doing no healing or attacking and was at a far range from them for the most part.
Unfortunately some mobs are just hard-coded that way – to ignore the pet after they reach a certain level of hp. They don’t want you standing safely in the back plinking the mob with arrows while your pet does the tanking all the time.
In the ranger tip thread, someone posted about swapping between devourers (they have a knockback skill) and using longbow’s knockback to keep mobs away from you until they’re almost dead. Might be worth a shot.
You can leap back with sword 2, press the key to rotate 180 degrees, and press sword 2 again to do a double leap away. You have to cancel your target first though, and disable auto-target.
In practice this doesn’t work as well as it seems it would. I tested it and for covering a set distance it’s pretty much the same speed as just running away with signet of the hunt (25% run speed buff).
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Explain-Sword-Root/page/2#post1352421
The cats’ maul skill does a double attack. Easy to see in videos, hard to distinguish in the combat logs. The second skill seems to do roughly 2x the damage of a regular attack. So if one cat crit on its maul and the other didn’t, you could mistake that for it having higher damage. The crit numbers also have a distinctive graphic which will show up in the video.
In practice, I haven’t noticed a difference in the autoattack damage between the jaguar and lynx. The jaguar gets the edge because when stealthed, it’s guaranteed to crit for (at least) 3 attacks. The lynx’s F2 takes too long to activate – it basically loses 2 attacks while using it, mostly canceling out the extra damage it does. And it can miss if the target moves.
The other cat that’s worth looking at is the jungle stalker. Its F2 is also slow, but gives 5 stacks of might for 10 sec to everyone nearby. In a dungeon setting, that’s probably much more useful than the jaguar’s stealth. It’s on a 30 sec cooldown so roughly 30% of the time everyone can have 5 stacks of might (adds up to +175 power and condition damage at level 80). I just need to test it to figure out the range of the buff.
I’ve been leveling a ranger from 1-40 now using GS as a main weapon, it’s been fine not too slow I thought, I turned of autoattack so it’s more involving. But then last night I thought I should unlock my shortbow skills. My jaw literally dropped as i autoattacked mobs to death so fast! The GS is crap, it hasn’t even got comparable damage to 1200 range weapons.. ridiculous.
The shortbow is your premiere single-target DPS weapon. If you can get beside/behind your target to inflict bleeding, no other ranger weapon will touch its DPS against a single target (well, maybe longbow barrage if the target is stupid enough to stand in the barrage the full 5 seconds).
Against multiple targets though, even the axe will out-DPS the shortbow. The sword and greatsword are more for multiple target situations, and the other skills that come with the weapon.
It’s not enough to classify weapons on a single hierarchy of better to worse. Different weapons do better in different situations. You have to learn which weapons are a better choice in which situation.
If you really want to abuse it, light off a karma booster, guild karma buff etc, and spam through all the liquid karma you get back with boxes, and keep cycling till you flatten your karma. You’ll be amazed how much you get from doing so.
People on map chat were reporting getting about 2/3rds the karma they spent on those boxes back in the form of liquid karma. So you could use it as a way to transfer karma from your main to your alts to get them outfitted in karma armor. The gold you get selling the other stuff should mostly make up for the 33% you’re losing in the conversion.
- the greatsword with a pet should be devastating to compensate low armor
Rangers can’t equip a shield, so a greatsword or a 1h sword + off-hand weapon yields the same armor.
Right now greatsword does slightly less DPS than a 1h sword. It should be the other way around to compensate for GS locking you into 5 skills, while with 1h sword you can mix and match your off-hand weapon to suit your tastes.
+1. There’s really no excuse for your pet aggroing mobs in dungeons, I don’t recall it ever happening to me either. You don’t even have to stow it, all you have to do is put it on defensive and keep the normal safe distance from mobs.
I’ve had it happen in a couple places in dungeons where you take a small step down a ridge, and your pet decides the shortest way to follow you is to run to the opposite side of the room, aggro everything around there, before returning to you with all its “presents” in tow. Usually I’m quick enough to swap pets when this happens, but it’s so arbitrary which ridges are safe to step down and which are not that sometimes a step I think must be safe isn’t and I don’t swap my pet in time.
The other place I’d really like a permanent stow is when killing those flame turrets in AC. My pet doesn’t contribute at all and invariably ends up dead, leaving me with a 47-60 sec cooldown before I can use it again. If the pet AI were much better (i.e. pets would avoid AOE and red circles on their own), I’d agree there’s no need for a perma-stow option. But right now a perma-stow is needed to make up for shortcomings in the current AI.
I wanna know why thieves get a major trait which gives them 5 stacks of might upon signet activation, when their signets have 30-45 sec cooldowns (excluding the healing one which has a 15 sec cooldown). While the similar ranger mjaor trait only gives 1 stack of might even though our cooldowns are mostly 120 sec. Seems like it should be the other way around.
If I’m reading the wiki right, it sounds like the active effect from signet of the hunt (next pet attack does extra damage) is retained for over 16 minutes. So you could activate it, then enjoy the passive effect after the cooldown is up. If your pet attacks something within 16 min, the first attack will get the extra damage.
The problem isnt the spirits themselves its the role they play its support and very few people enjoy playing support. Even now you have gs rangers running spirits (charging straight of into battle)
[…]
Yes most of you think that spirits are garbage. But at one time most of the world thought that the world was flat.
These aren’t contradictory things. Spirits can be great support, and they can also be garbage.
The buff you alone get from a spirit is garbage. You’re almost always better off with a different skill if you’re soloing. The damage buff from frost spirit is only 2%-3% extra damage depending on exactly how it works. That’s garbage.
Where spirits shine is when you’re in a group. Because all people in range will get the buffs, the cumulative effect is much better than any of your other skills. If you’re running a dungeon and everyone is in range of frost spirit, that’s a cumulative 10%-15% extra damage that “you” are doing with the spirit. That’s a huge boost.
Unfortunately, roughly half my gameplay is solo or duo. So I can’t justify traiting for a spirit build. If you’re always running dungeons or PvPing in a group, then I can see traiting for spirits. But for a general multipurpose play, I feel a spirit build cripples you when you’re not with a full party or a huge group.
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Three-Tailed Devourer
While using a Longbow, position yourself behind your devourer. Your arrows will pass through, but your target’s projectiles will hit your devourer’s tough carapace.
This is golden. I’d been using this with melee pets on the bosses which shoot out bolts. But I hadn’t even thought of using it with a ranged pet against regular mobs.
Autoattack is NOT your friend!
Turning off autoattack will turn GS3 and Sword2 into excellent escape mechanisms, as they would otherwise fling you towards the closest enemy. If you don’t know how to use Sword2 as an escape, the trick is to hop out of combat with the first attack, rotate 180 degrees, and hit sword 2 again for a double-leap away from your opponent.
Autotarget you mean. I wish there were a way to toggle autotarget on/off with a keybind, as I like it off when traveling, but like it on in combat.
Try turning off autoattack with sword and GS
With sword it avoids the dreaded root effect since you have to mash the 1 key to attack and root yourself. With greatsword, the third attack in the chain is also an evade. With autoattack off, you can pause a bit on the third attack to try to time the evade to match up with your opponent’s next attack.
Muddy Terrain is a survival skill, not a trap
1) This means the trap traits won’t enhance the skill.
2) But the trait to reduce survival cooldown will. It reduces the cooldown to 24 seconds. The mud sticks around and slows down opponents for 20 seconds. It’s probably the closest thing in the game to a permanent cripple.
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Ranger is the easiest profession to complete the daily dodge. Equip a greatsword. The third skill in the autoattack chain has an evade built into it. Put pet on passive. Go to a low-level zone and bash on mobs with autoattack for about 10-20 min. Or you can use the greatsword for regular play (not the best DPS, but it’s still decent and it’s a lot of fun).
I usually finish it just killing trash with a greatsword while waiting for Tequatl or Shatterer.
I’d only go 30 WS if you want empathic bond, which I see as more a PvP trait. The guy who does the Pain Inverter videos was running with bark skin in one (30% less damage when under 25% health – it works out to the equivalent of 10.7% more hp), so maybe that’s viable too. But that too seems to be a PvP trait since in PvE you can usually withdraw if you get that low and let your pet/party take the heat.
20 Skirmishing gives you two important things:
- Carnivorous appetite, the heal on crit skill. I agree that most of the time it doesn’t make a difference, but by the same token most of the time it doesn’t matter if you put the extra 10 points into Skirmishing or WS. It’s those extreme cases where it matters – champion bosses and group event bosses. During those, it’s very helpful for keeping your pet alive.
- Trapper’s expertise – makes traps ground targeted and 50% larger. This will cumulatively save you tons of time since you won’t have to run up to melee range, drop the trap, and run back. It’ll also eliminate all the deaths you suffer while doing that due to being in range of a boss’ point-blank AOE.
To me, the essentials for a BM build are:
30 BM
- Your choice of adept trait
- Rending attacks – bleed on crit, though it limits you to cats, drakes, devourers, and the shark. Works best with the cats since they have a naturally high crit rate.
- Natural healing – regenerates both the pet and you in combat, despite what the tooltip says. Frees you up from carrying the regen signet to top off your hp between heals.
20 Skirmishing
- Pet’s prowess – pet does 30% more damage on crits
- Carnivorous appetie – pet heals on crit (swap for trapper’s expertise when you don’t need, or you can go for 20% faster bow skills if you dislike targeted traps)
10 WS
- Expertise training – pets deal extra condition damage. Makes the bleeds 60 per sec instead of 42 per sec at level 80. (Swap for soften the fall or 20% faster wilderness skills if you like quickening zephyr, lightning reflexes, and muddy terrain.
The remaining 10 points you can put where you like. Good candidates are 10 Marksmanship for malicious training (extends the duration of all those bleeds your pet is applying by 50%, though this only really matters on veteran mobs and in dungeons). Or you can raise Skirmishing to 30 to get the double trap condition duration trait, which will add a helluva lot more damage to your flame trap (goes from about 1k to 2k damage) than +100 condition damage will add (adds 5 damage per bleed stack, 25 damage per burning sec). Or raise WS to 20 for hide in plain sight or 20% quicker cooldown on sword skills.
just a warning though. you gotta make sure youre doing enough damage on your own and helping your team in other ways because your pet will often be dead in dungeons, regardless of your skill.
That’s why I think 20 skirmishing for targeted traps is so vital. You can be a BM first, trap ranger second.
If you hate the ground targeted traps, try turning the “faster ground targeting” option on. That makes it so ground targeted skills fire immediately below your mouse pointer. So traps will be as easy to use as when they weren’t ground targeted, you just need to be sure the mouse pointer is over your targeted area before you fire the trap.
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I’m pretty sure they designed it so you can’t just login each character one after another to get credit for all of them. Their counter seems to check at random time intervals to see if a guild member(s) is on. I’ve played one character for almost two hours and not gotten credit. I’ve logged in a character for 15 seconds to check how much influence my solo guild had and literally watched the 10 points appear on the guild page as I was staring right at it.
If it’s at random intervals, the only way to reliably get credit for being online is to actually play the characters.
Looking through the log, the most characters I’ve gotten credit for in a day is 4. I don’t play my alts that frequently though.
I’ve solod those before using a devourer, it never gets hit, just plugs along wailing him with damage from a distance while I run around in circles trying not to get hit and plinking away with the bow, or a rapid shot if I open up enough space between us.
You can channel rapid fire while moving. It’s barrage which forces you to stand still. (Also I don’t think the target can avoid it by moving like you can the autoattack – it has to be dodged or evaded.)
Yeah thought about that, even started a Warrior (Ranger), blah can’t use shortbow, and the longbow is so pedestrian, and got a bit bored after a few levels, really wanted a short bow for PVE. (Warrior can use a longbow but not a shortbow, dur) Although as a Beastmaster cough I do use a longbow for WvW.
Thief, well I’m guessing a thief can’t use a longbow (Correct me if I’m wrong).
So if you want to be a Ranger (Archer) you have to be a Ranger, there are no alternatives.
At this point I fear part of the problem is that the concept of a ranger is just popular – most people who know nothing about the game and just bought it want to make a ranger. And so to prevent the class from outnumbering the others, they have to deliberately make it weaker to discourage some of those people. i.e. Achieving numerical balance requires a mechanical imbalance.
The truth is that to get people to play in the long run you need to give them long-term goals; and for PvE players what else if not a big huge gold sink?
The best way to get people to play the game in the long run is to make it fun. If you think farming is not fun, why in the world are you trying to get a legendary? The legendaries were put in the game as a goal for people who find that long farm fun. Yeah it’d be nice to have a legendary, but it’s just a skin. The stats on the exotic I bought for a few gold off TP are the same.
Anet has it right – you should play games to have fun. You shouldn’t feel like you’re required to do hundreds of hours of unfun grinding or your gear will be substandard and put you at a disadvantage against other players. The same philosophy is why they let you level to 80 entirely via PvP, or via crafting, or via quests, or via killing mobs, or via exploring. You’re free to progress in this game in the way you find to be fun. You don’t have to jump through one set of hoops that you may find unfun.
I despise what Everquest and WoW did to MMORPGs – turned them into grinds where only kids who neglect their schoolwork and the unemployed had the best stuff. GW2 (and GW1) is very friendly to the casual player. You can get the equivalent of the best stuff fairly easily (just do the dailies for karma and a few dungeons). The challenge in this game comes from learning how to best use your and your party’s skills for greater synergistic effect. Not amassing better gear. If you need to have better gear than everyone else to have fun, well then this isn’t the game for you.
Ranger is the only class without a player-controlled blast finisher (the only one is on the drake pet, which the pet uses whenever it feels like it). I’d be a little concerned about the frequency with which you can spam Maul (4.75 sec cooldown if you trait for GS). But yeah, rangers need a blast finisher they can control.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blast_finisher
Also, if you spam Maul on the GS, its DPS can come close to sword DPS.
The game has a bug* where adding certain upgrades to blue (fine) gear will make it account bound, but won’t add the “account bound” text. An easy way to tell if gear is account bound is to try to mail it. If it’s bound to you (either souldbound or account bound), you won’t be able to put it into the mail.
(* We don’t know what exactly the bug is, since the warning box which pops up when you upgrade the gear says that it’ll make it soulbound. So is it supposed to become soulbound but becomes account bound instead? Is it supposed to become account bound and the missing label is the bug? Or is the missing label correct and the bug is that it becomes bound?)
In generic noob-friendly English, there are basically three types of functional builds right now.
- Raw damage: Marksmanship and Skirmishing.
- Condition damage (trap/bleed): Prioritize Skirmishing (for trap traits). Split rest between Marksmanship and Wilderness Survival as you see fit.
- Pet damage: Prioritize Beastmastery. Try to nab the pet traits at 20 Skirmishing, 10 Marksmanship, 10 Wilderness Survival.
You can tweak these a bit – take 5-10 points off here, add them elsewhere. But generically these are most of the ranger guilds out there. The Nature Magic line is severely hampered right now due to the ineffectiveness of spirits.
That said, I’ve tested out various different builds in the Mists and in most cases it really doesn’t matter. The variance in weapon damage and criticals makes it a toss-up which build will come out on top in a single head-to-head contest. In statistical terms, the standard deviation of your damage is much larger than the differences in the average damage of these builds. In English, luck matters more than build.
So play whatever you find to be most fun. If you like shortbow/greatsword, then use shortbow/greatsword. Don’t worry that you’re not perfectly min/max optimized. Pick the trait lines and trait skills you find interesting or feel add most to what you like to do. If you’re fighting lots of mobs which knock you down a lot, then hide in plain sight is a nice trait to have. As long as you know the strengths of the build you’ve created, and play to those strengths, you’ll do fine. IMHO, when leveling, having up-to-date gear matters more than build.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/New-player-Class-question/first#post1351770
If you try a build and don’t like it, it only costs 3.5 silver to reset it at level 80. And you’ll get “free” resets at level 40 and 60 when you have to buy the 1 gold and 2 gold books. So try out different things to see what you find most fun. For a long time I was running a crazy 10/30/10/5/15 build because I liked the traits it gave me.
The combo makes it so you don’t take damage for 8 seconds after activating the signet. I’m curious, does that also include falling damage? I wasn’t able to find a suitable place in the Mists to test it.
The range on their effects is ~1000 (you get the buff from further than the axe’s 900 range, but shorter than Swoop’s 1100 range). So it’s pretty easy to put them in places where they won’t attract the attention of mobs.
The problem is they get wiped out by AOEs (like our pets). And there’s no way to cast a new one until 60 seconds is up. The “spirits follow you” trait just makes things worse because of the AOE thing. They need to make it (or change the trait) so the spirit dies and the skill instantly refreshes if you walk more than about 1500 or 2000 from the spirit.
Invisible bags (prevent stuff you use from showing up in the sell list on an NPC) are a great idea but have one flaw: Loot goes into them as if they were a regular bag.
Here’s the problem. People use invisible bags for stuff they don’t want to accidentally sell. This includes consumables like food and potions – things you have to double-click on to activate. But because loot goes into invisible bags as if they were regular bags, you can’t put them at the top of your inventory. Otherwise every time you sell stuff to an NPC, you have to drag a bunch of stuff out of your invisible bag into a regular bag before you can sell them.
Which means you have to put your invisible bags at the bottom of your inventory. But that means every time you want to double-click on a consumable or even to swap weapons or armor, you have to scroll down to the bottom of your inventory. Not the easiest nor quickest thing to do if you’ve got a half dozen mobs beating on you and you’re trying to double-click an ash legion spy kit to stealth.
Here’s my suggestion: Change invisible bags so that stuff you loot goes into them only if all your other inventory slots are full. That would allow you to place invisible bags at the top of your inventory where your stuff is easily accessible. But loot would only go into them after the rest of your bags were full, like currently happens if your invisible bags are at the bottom.
LB feels off mostly because it misses moving targets past 900 range. LB should be a sniper weapon, with a slow fire rate but hitting reliably for more. LB projectile speed needs another 30% increase, and then we might be getting somewhere. it’s the worst weapon in the game.
I think they designed away from that because one of the tactics in GW1 was a party of longbow rangers. One would call a target and all of them would shoot at it simultaneously. It was enough to instantly drop most opponents.
They don’t want high burst damage on ranged attacks. Against melee-range burst, everyone can choose to retaliate or run away. But against ranged burst, the classes with no or poor ranged don’t stand a chance. So they want players to be able to avoid ranged damage more easily.
Invisible Bags exist to prevent this very issue.
One issue even with invisible bags is that if you have a main and offhand weapon equipped, and you double-click a two-handed weapon to equip it, it and the main hand weapon will swap places. The offhand weapon will go into your inventory as if you’d just looted it.
They need to modify this so the off-hand weapon goes into the slot it was in when it was originally equipped (if still open). That way as long as you keep your invisible bag organized, it’ll go back there.
So many delusional players here. You’re not making any progression. you’re just doing the dungeon for vanity items. Spend a few gold to get exotic items crafted and you’re good to go basically forever. Vanity is only 20% of the satisfaction you get from better gear, the rest is actually improving your characters capability. It’s RPG 101
RPG 101 is the playing experience. Character improvement is secondary to the experience of running a make-believe character in a make-believe universe. Back in high school/college when my friends and I would pen and paper RPG, we would frequently retire old characters who’d achieved enormous success and wealth, and restart with freshly rerolled characters. RPGing isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey.
Unfortunately, the online gaming companies quickly figured out that while that may have been the original focus of RPGs, the addictive quality of the upgrade treadmill was highly effective in getting people to come back to play day after day. Which meant more $$$ for them if they used a subscription model. So pretty much all online MMORPGs after Ultima Online went for the level/achievement treadmill.
Achievement is hardly the only way to play the game. Go read Bartle’s seminal paper on the topic. (Had to use an indirect link because the board’s profanity filter was messing up the direct link.)
GW2 (and GW1 for that matter) is not a game which focuses on satiating achievers. It has elements which will appeal to achievers. But Anet’s primary audience has always been explorers and killers. That’s why leveling is easy, there’s diminishing returns to discourage you from camping the same location for hours, you’re strongly encouraged to PvP, there’s no monthly fee, and you get exp and rewards for discovering new places. Legendaries were a bone thrown in to mollify complaining achievers, and have the same effectiveness in combat as regular exotic gear.
If you’re an achiever and this bothers you, then you’re finally getting a taste of the frustration we explorers had to put up with for over a decade of RPGs (killers could always play FPS, and socializers went to Facebook). GW2 is a game for explorer/killers. You’re welcome to play if you’re an achiever. But please don’t try to turn pretty much the only explorer RPG in the market into yet another RPG for achievers. There are dozens of MMORPGs out there that cater solely to achievers.
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HAHAHHAHA LOL deselect. turn 180 degrees. skill 2. sorry this actually made me laugh. i dont think itll be faster than holding down W, especially if ure using signet of hunt.
Just tested this between two fixed points.
Running without buffs: 8.2 sec
w/ about face + sword 2 (no swiftness) : 7.8 sec
Swoop (greatsword, no swiftness): 6.5 sec
Running with signet of the hunt (25% swiftness): 6.6 sec
w/ about face + sword 2 (25% swiftness): 6.5 sec
Swoop (greatsword, 25% swiftness): 5.2 sec
Running with call of the wild (33% swiftness): 6.1 sec.
The weapon skill(s) took me just shy of half the total distance and I had to run the rest. So the about face / hornet sting / about face /monarch’s leap chain is faster than plain running, but it’s no faster than signet of the hunt. You might be able to shave a few tenths of a second off compared to what I managed, but screw up and you’ll be going backwards towards whatever it is you’re trying to get away from.
Swoop on the other hand is significantly faster than even a full 33% swiftness.
Huh. Warrior seems hard to solo at lvl9. especially ’cuz my heal is underwhelming. Any suggestions?
The biggest mistake I see players making when leveling is using sub-standard gear. They think: “I don’t want to waste money ugprading gear since I’m just going to out-level it and have to replace it in a couple days anyway.”
Don’t think of it as buying gear. Think of it as renting it. Open the TP (trading post). Use the search options to narrow the list to appropriate armor and weapons for your level (or close to it). Hover your mouse over the item’s picture. A description will pop up including the price you’ll get for selling it to an NPC.
Now search for armor and weapons which players are selling for a few copper more than the NPC price. Most of the time you can get something for 1 copper more than the NPC price. In many cases, green (masterpiece) gear falls into this category. When you find something you like, buy it and use it.
In a couple days when you’ve outgrown it and upgraded to new gear, sell the old stuff to an NPC and get nearly all of your money back. Congratulations, you’ve just rented an entire set of level-appropriate armor and weapons for about a dozen copper.
When appropriately geared, warrior is by far the easiest class to level I’ve played. Most fights are over so quickly I barely take damage. The only time I have to heal is when fighting 3-5 mobs simultaneously.
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All ways some people who have to come into a thread and argue of issues which if change would make game better. And why do they argue? Not for anything other than try to boost their E-gos. Telling others they need to learn to play etc.
In general I agree with you. In this case however, many of us like the way the the sword’s #1 skill chain works. We don’t want to see it changed.
It’s just a different type of weapon than the “hit autoattack once and sit back in your chair with your finger hovering over the dodge key” type of weapon. That doesn’t mean it’s broken and needs fixing; it just means it’s different. While some of those advocating its current functionality could be more polite, it really does boil down to just learning how to use this different weapon.
The “root” is easy to break. Just just hit esc dodge, instead dodge. Or (my preference) use the #2 skill to jump back out of harm’s way. Between #2’s evade (8 sec cooldown) and #3’s evade (15 sec cooldown, both of which can be reduced 20% with a trait), there really isn’t much need to dodge.
I hated the sword when I first tried it too. But I gave it a chance, and it grew on me. Now I prefer it for certain situations (e.g. clumps of archer-type mobs who like to try to run away when they get low on hp). Enough so that I say leave it as it is, don’t try to “fix” it.
Thanks for the tip on the “about face” keybind. I hadn’t thought of that and will have to try it tonight.
While a guild can have members on multiple servers, each server’s guild bank, guild features, and influence pool are independent. So if your guild switched servers, you left your guild bank (and its contents) and all the upgrades you bought for your guild back on your old server. You have to start amassing influence anew to purchase a new guild bank, as if you’d just started a new guild.
The jaguar is the highest DPS pet the ranger has. It’s pretty much dead last on the list of pets which need improvement.
Whether berserker’s armor is a help or hindrance depends on your character. If you can kill the initial spawn off (subsequent respawns are one at a time), then obviously it’s a help. If you’re dying before you can kill them off, then it’s a hindrance.
I found greatsword works really well there. Your third attack in the autoattack chain is also an evade, so you’ll reduce the damage you’re taking by about a third. Its attacks are AOE, as is the #2 attack and its bleed. And the #4 block basically gives you 3 seconds of invulnerability if you fire it while running in circles and keep running. The counterattack (which ends the blocking) only triggers if you’re attacked while standing still.
Also, try using a drake pet. Its regular attacks are AOE.
They are probably testing a nerf to remove the ability to reset the cooldown on swapping the pet
That would be a bug fix, not a nerf.
C’mon folks, it’s pretty obvious cooldown timers aren’t supposed to reset simply by swapping pets. You can argue it’s a nice perk for rangers to have until other problems get fixed. But calling it a nerf instead of a fix just undermines our credibility as impartial (rather than impassioned) players.
This is why, unlike in a crappy gamist MMO like WoW, Thieves can use bows and guns and why Rangers can melee well. Peoples’ inability to grasp that classes should be more than a simple designation of “melee” or “ranged” or “pet” is just astounding to me.
Agreed.
In truth, it would make way more sense for pets to be short-duration utility skills
That’s the way it was in GW1. If you wanted a pet, you had to slot it as one of your utility skills (though it was permanent instead of short duration). And people complained they didn’t want it taking up a utility skill, they wanted the pet out all the time. So that’s what we got in GW2. =) Either way you do it, there will always be complainers.
You can’t design a game around dodging big attacks and staying out of AoE, then design 2 classes to where their main source of damage/defense/utility….is kittening incapable of dodging big attacks and staying out of AoE.
Agreed. However, the solution (improving the AI so it can dodge and avoid big attacks) might not sit so well with people who don’t play pet classes. They might not like it if the mobs start dodging their big attacks and running out of AOEs before they land.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it would make for a better game. But there are all types of different players in the game, and an overall AI improvement could upset more non-pet players than it mollifies pet players. I imagine these forums would light up with posts about how their big attack skills are now “useless” because the mobs are dodging them.
Something that’s going to hurt when I delete this guy (after magically finding room to store all the tools) is losing a character with Black Dye unlocked. I checked the price of all the dyes I’d be losing, and all were less than a gold except for the Black, which was 10 gold. Replacing that whenever I get around to making a new Thief character (I’m looking at you, Tengu…make it happen) is going to hurt.
Wait, wait, wait. You’re going to pay 10 gold for a new black dye when you make a new thief? Why not just pay ~15 gold for 800 gems to buy an extra character slot and keep the current thief? Since you’re planning to eventually buy the slot anyway, why not do it now and just pay 15 gold, instead of in the future and pay 25 gold (15 for the slot, 10 for the black dye).
My point was that I interpreted the official “Players that have already achieved map completion will retain it without having to discover these new waypoints” as “You do not have to go to that map, they should already be accessable like any other waypoint that you have already discovered”
Yet I had to go to the maps and run to the waypoints to get my 100% world completion and map completion back.
This is still a bug in my opinion and should not have been moved to this part of the forums.
It’s not a bug. They’re saying if you’ve already gotten the map completion reward for the zone, you’re not going to get the reward again for finding the new waypoint. It has nothing to do with the waypoint already being activated. Just because you choose to interpret their statement in a way they didn’t intend doesn’t make it a bug.
Just go find the waypoints. Orr is actually… enjoyable now. I even think they nerfed the mobs too much. At the ever popular shelt-pent sites, the mobs were dying so quickly I hardly got any kills. And the quest where you’re supposed to defend the NPC and keep her from dying, we were at it for over 30 minutes – the mobs couldn’t get past us to damage her. Eventually a bunch of just sat out the fights and let the mobs kill her.
You can “rent” most blue and some green (masterpiece) gear for 1-10 copper while leveling.
Just search on TP for the gear you want and sort it by price. Find some nice armor or weapons which cost only a few copper more than the sell price to an NPC. Buy it and use it. When you outgrow it and replace it, sell it to an NPC. Net cost to you is a few copper. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the green weapon which costs 1.79 silver is more expensive than the blue weapon which costs 40 copper. But if the price you’ll get for selling the two are 1.78 silver and 20 copper respectively, the blue weapon is actually more expensive.
As for karma, it’s plentiful enough that I wouldn’t worry about hoarding it. You do want to save it up for the level 80 exotic karma armor (unless you know you want different armor), so don’t go nuts spending all your karma. But even if you do use it all up, it’ll only take you a few days to a week to get back up to 10-20k.
(edited by Solandri.9640)
Even if they coded in the most efficient, optimal manner, you still don’t know what exactly is programmatically required for this change.
Games are a complex thing to code. I somehow highly doubt that the issue is simple as “if (ranger == combat) DISABLE STOW PET”
It’s almost that simple. All they have to do is take the lines in the code that say:
if ranger.takes_damage() {pet.unstow()}
if ranger.attacks() {pet.unstow()}
And comment them out. The mechanic to stow the pet is already there and works just fine. It’s the automatic unstow when the ranger takes damage or attacks which causes all the problems. Change it so the only time the pet is unstowed is when the ranger does it manually, and everything works beautifully.
In the case of stat allocation, abilities, health, etc., the ranger and pet are two different character units.
No, their stats are extensions of the same unit. They (ranger+pet) just have more stats than the other classes (like thieves have an initiative bar and warriors have an adrenaline bar). You can even modify the “pet’s” stats by adding or removing points to the ranger’s Beastmastery skill. They are one unit.
No build can compensate the difference in targettracking Arrows from the Thief SB.
If a ranger shot arrows on a left and right sidemoving target on a distance of 700+ then all his arrows will miss, the Arrows from a Thief SB follow the target and will never miss.
To be fair, ranger axe #1 works exactly the same as thief SB #1. Never misses (though it might not fire if you’re not facing the target), and will bounce to hit up to 3 targets total. The range is even the same (900, though I haven’t tested it to verify).
If you really want to insist the ranger and pet are two separate units, then the pet should not disappear when the ranger is defeated. It should stick around and continue to fight until it too is dead. And if it happens to win, it should be able to revive the ranger.
After all, they are two separate units. Right?
Well that would be OP, it already does that on downed state.
You cannot simultaneously argue that the ranger and pet are separate units in one case, while arguing that they should be treated as one unit in another. That’s self-contradictory.
The people here are arguing the game treats the pet and ranger as one unit in both these cases, and the game mechanics need to be adjusted to better reflect this.
Or the fall isn’t enough to kill them, but now you can’t reach them, and they can’t reach you, so now you can’t kill them? This would potentially block a story step, or event.
Isn’t the converse also true? If knocking an NPC off a cliff makes them unreachable, then the NPC knocking you off the same cliff also makes them unreachable, also blocking the story step or event.
I can understand preventing NPCs from being knocked over cliffs from an AI standpoint (the path back up the hill may be so far you’re not willing to give the AI enough CPU time to figure out the route). But the story-blocking reason is logically self-defeating.
If you really want to insist the ranger and pet are two separate units, then the pet should not disappear when the ranger is defeated. It should stick around and continue to fight until it too is dead. And if it happens to win, it should be able to revive the ranger.
After all, they are two separate units. Right?
Hey man, I ran tests on DPS too and Birds always beat cats. You’re doing it wrong, you don’t judge DPS based off auto attacks. Use the F2 on a Raven then swap to an Eagle and use F2 again, then in 6 seconds again. Try the same thing with two cats. Bird’s also can take more shots and swiftness in PvP is a great utility.
Ok, just tested again. 30 BM, rending attacks, 10 skirmishing, 30% extra damage on crits (shouldn’t favor either birds or cats since both have the same crit rate).
Jaguar pet, hit F2 to stealth and attack, nothing else. Killed the heavy golem 11, 10, and 11 sec. Without stealth (i.e. just autoattack) it took the golem down in 12-14 sec.
Did the birds as you said (I tried both raven and eagle, and hawk and eagle – no real difference so go for the blind on the raven). Hit F2 to initiate the attack, as soon as the blind/bleed showed up I swapped birds and hit F2 again. When F2 came off cooldown I hit it again. Most of the time they took 14-19 sec because they kept casting swiftness. On one occasion, the F2 skill seemed to be superseded by casting swiftness (i.e. F2 went on cooldown without the skill actually firing – the bird cast swiftness instead).
After about 15 tries, I finally got a trial where neither bird cast swiftness and F2 worked properly. Took them 11 sec to kill the golem. Then I thought what about the trait which reduces the F2 cooldown. So I added that trait (takes the bird F2 skill down to 4-75 sec). I tried about 50 more times to get another run without them casting swiftness. The first one I goofed on the stopwatch so didn’t get a time. The second one came out 11 sec again.
It’s like I said, the bleed on crit trait is just so much better than the other pet traits. The jaguar was putting on a 6-7 stack of bleed by the time golem died (4 from the maul skill, 2-3 from its regular attacks). I added 10 points to WS and Marksmanship for the increased pet condition damage and duration traits. The jaguar’s times with stealth went down to about 10 sec, best kill was 8 sec. With just autoattack (no stealth) it averaged 12 sec, best time was 10.5 sec.
There was one trial where the first bird managed to take the golem down to 25% in 5 sec (I was a bit slow and it managed F2 + 2 regular attacks before the swap – all must’ve criticaled and rolled high for damage), so the birds can definitely put out more spike damage than the cat’s Maul. Unfortunately the second bird insisted on casting swiftness and didn’t manage many criticals, taking the total time to kill up to 14 sec. So hypothetically, if you got fury on both birds (might be tricky to do that right after the swap), and they don’t cast swiftness, they should be able to beat out the cats. But on average, the cats win easily. Mostly because the birds cast swiftness (which might not be a bad thing in PvP).
Incidentally, if you tap F2 with the jaguar, it will attack but won’t stealth (and F2 does not go on cooldown). You have to hold down F2 for a bit to make it stealth before attacking. /rolleyes bug
Also consider thief. Their range is smaller (900 w/ shortbow vs 1200+ for ranger and warrior), but their bow skills are really good.
The problem with ranger is that they tried to balance the class assuming ranger + pet damage. So the ranger’s melee and ranged damage are less than other classes’. They assumed your pet will always be there adding damage. A pet which often has horrible AI and doesn’t do what you want it to do and so frequently contributes no damage (like when the target is chasing you). Unfortunately there’s no way to permanently stow your pet, and there’s no way to create a ranger build which assumes zero pet damage.
If you want to play a stereotypical agile dual-wielding ranger but don’t want a pet, play a thief and use a bow. OTOH if you’re ok with a pet and ok with not seeing huge damage numbers then a ranger is fine. The pet mostly works in PvE (outside of dungeons). Alas the most effective ranger builds seem to be where the pet does the damage and the ranger supports the pet.
I can’t find my original data so I’ll need to run these tests again, but running a 30 BM build and timing how long it takes a pet to take down a heavy golem:
Cats are by far the best DPS pet. They kill the golem is almost half the time of the next best pet. With 30 BM they will crit about 70% of the time. Add a fury buff (e.g. warhorn 5 or rampage as one) and it’s 90%. The jaguar can stealth for 100% crit chance for 3 attacks. Their innate skills w/ cooldown do good damage with short cooldowns (8 and 20 sec – other pets’ skills are usually 20-40 sec).
Bird are the next best. Yes they attack twice, which is good for spike damage, but the interval between those two attacks is twice as long as for cats. So their overall attacks/sec is about the same. Their 8 sec skill is ok, but their 20 sec skill (which gives you swiftness) costs the bird two attacks (a skill only costs other pets one attack) and really hurts DPS. Their BM trait grants you vigor while is kinda useless, while the cats’ BM trait gives bleed on crit (which is most hits). OTOH the birds are tankier with 50% more hp.
The other pets are pretty close behind birds, with one exception. The bears have the worst DPS, taking roughly 4x longer to kill the golem than the cats. I guess that’s the trade-off for having 3x the hp. Use bears when you need a damage sponge, not for DPS.
So for PvP, I’d recommend the cats (the jaguar in particular) first, birds second. For PvE I’d go with cats first, drakes second (good toughness and hp, AOE attacks, and also benefit from bleed on crit trait). Use the other pets depending on the situation (ranged, knockdowns, damage sponge, etc).
They really need to change the pet type-specific BM traits so that they affect all pets. The bleed on crit trait is by far the best one and gives cats (who have higher precision than devourers and drakes so crit more) a massive advantage.
(edited by Solandri.9640)
But why does the numbers on damage button (F2) change when wearing armor compared to not having armor?
A lot of the tooltip info is wrong (not saying it is in this case, just making a general statement). I don’t trust it, and do my own testing on the golems in the Mists before drawing conclusions.
Get a stopwatch, sic your pet on a golem, and time how long it takes to kill. Do this 3-4 times. Then take off your armor and do it again to see if there’s a difference.
Yes, I know you can outrun a centaur, shut up.
It’s actually a brilliant game mechanic. If you’re in combat and busy trying to follow what’s going on visually, it’s hard to notice that you’ve received a buff or been hit by a condition.
But by making the buff/debuff notifications aural, you’re informed of it even if you’re completely engrossed in following the combat. e.g. When my character says “Time to do some real damage,” I know she’s picked up the might buff and can factor that into what skills to use next.