Guild Wars 2

Lots of builds are viable in dungeons. You don’t have to do dungeons the meta way. My friends and I tackled the dungeons blind (no peeking at online guides or videos unless we got stuck), learning as we went and clearing all the trash in between the major encounters.

It was a lot of fun because we consider that sort of thing to be fun. If you’re the type who considers fun to be finishing a dungeon in as little time as possible, then you’ll disagree and the dungeon meta builds will be the way you’ll roll. But that in no way means the meta builds are the only viable way to do it.

The only issue is finding a group of like-minded people to run the dungeon. There seem to be a lot more of the “do it as fast as you can” people. Or more precisely, those type of people seem to do a lot more dungeon runs so most of the LFGs for dungeons are their type. If you don’t like that way of playing, don’t succumb to it. Seek out other people who like to play as you do, and run the dungeons with them your way. Heck, in previous RPGs I’ve talked my friends into trying to clear a dungeon naked (without armor).

SKATE.1394:

3 total exotics (1 medium shoulder, 1 light shoulder, 1 trident)

4 special exotics Twin Talons sword, Cobalt greatsword, Knowledge Is Power focus, Phoenix Reborn axe

I opened up 500 exotic champ bags (2 stacks) during the Scarlet event, and only got 3 exotics. Two generic, one special. A third stack I forgot I tucked away and opened a month later yielded 2 exotics. So I got one exotic per 150 bags vs. your one exotic per 118.

I haven’t seen any change in champ bags. I get an exotic from them about every 2-4 weeks. Which based on how frequently I do the world bosses works out to about once every 100-200 exotic champ bags. Which is exactly the same as what I saw during the Scarlet event.

I suspect nothing has been changed with champ bags. And everyone just thinks champ bags used to drop better loot because they used to open so many more champ bags before. The rate at which you can farm them has been severely nerfed, so even though the drop rate per bag is unchanged, the drop rate per time played has been reduced considerably.

Countess Aire.9410:

Nothing happens. He disappears and the timer resets. It is a beginning zone boss. Nothing changes, it just resets. At least that what use to happens.

I’ve seen it fail twice in recently, and that’s exactly what happens – nothing. Last fail was about a month or month and a half ago. With the way megaservers work, sometimes you end up in a new instance with very few people.

I’ve always been curious what happens if you kill Jormag during the first phase.

laokoko.7403:

with 3000 hours, if you spend all that time farming, at 10 gold per hour, you can make 30000 gold and bought your self 30 precursor.

That being said, if you spend 3000 hours farming, you’ll be very very bored with the game.

Actually, at 3000 hours, if you’d gotten a second job at minimum wage, you’ve have made $21,750. Figure $19,000 after taxes. With it you could buy 1.52 million gems, which would currently translate into 136,800 gold. You could’ve bought every precursor in the game.

Even the folks getting rich off the TP are wasting their time. If you’re that good at making money off the TP, you should really be playing the RL stock market. For the same amount of time invested, you could probably make enough RL money that you only need to convert 5% of it into gems to make the same amount of gold as you’re making from the TP. Use the remaining 95% to treat yourself to a nice vacation to some exotic location (and no, don’t waste your time on vacation playing GW2).

Games are for fun; they’re not supposed to be a second job. Grind and farm in the game because you enjoy doing those things. If there’s a specific item you want in the game and it hasn’t dropped for you by luck, and you don’t have enough gold/laurels/etc to buy it outright, it’s almost always cheaper, faster, and less work to get it by paying RL money for it.

Mcrocha.3891:

kyubi.3620:

then learn to freeze slow and cripple? I dont have problem having my pet hit reliably and unless your cripple my pet (god how naughty are you doing that to my lovely fern hound! You puppy killer!) your likely gunna get chewed a lot of your health

Teach me how to chill on lb glass please without using sigils. Just use owl or alpine wolf right? Circular reasoning. And in no way is the cripple from barrage reliable or long for that matter. The only other thing you can do is slot frost or spike trap, but is the utility slot really worth that? Oh and ofc the cripple from sword set if you want to stay in melee, but good luck with that.

This strikes me as the same reasoning behind the people wanting to nerf RF because it messes up their “I can handle cc, melee and condition damage” builds. They want to be able to handle everything without compromise, and ranged burst forces them to compromise something.

If you want effective damage from your pets, you’ll need to compromise something else. Whether it be a sub-par utility skill (don’t forget muddy terrain), unreliable barrage, or swapping to a different weapon set to apply chill/cripple. You can’t put all the best things on a single weapon. That would be unbalanced. The game intentionally forces you to compromise something – you’re choosing to compromise pet damage.

Rym.1469:

Porcines are amazing at charging.

That one’s not a joke. Domesticated pigs lead people to think that porcines are pushovers. Truth is, wild boar are some of the most dangerous animals you can hunt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WwK_1SFE_8
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b13_1376576119

Ancient literature is filled with stories of heroes having to prove their courage and bravery by hunting boar, and sometimes being killed by said boar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar_hunting#Ancient_Greece_and_Rome

ArchonWing.9480:

How about it causing blind? The birds will peck at their eyes and stuff.

That’d be my vote. And not just a single blind, but each bird causes 0.25 sec of blind. That way with it being re-applied every 0.25 sec, none of the target’s attacks can hit anything during the ~4 sec the birds are attacking. That would turn the skill into a combination damage / damage mitigation tool. Kind of a pseudo-stability (if they can’t hit you with a CC skill because they’re blinded, then it’s as good as stability against that one target).

The blind should be unblockable too (though the damage should be blockable). The blindness is caused by birds physically blocking your line of sight, not necessarily by them gouging your eyes.

The current system is the best of both worlds. If you want timed world bosses, you can teleport around the world doing timed bosses. If you want dynamic “random” world bosses, you can go to Orr and (wait to) do the temple cleansing events there.

If the Orrian temples are a PITA, then it’s because players prefer the timed bosses and aren’t bothering with Orr. To be honest, I preferred the dynamic style bosses like in Orr, but the dynamic even chains were too long and players frequently don’t know what to do next to progress the event. They miss a step, the event fails, a defense event starts, people lose interest and leave.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Temple_of_Balthazar

Dwayna and Lyssa are better because the end of one even naturally leads to the start of another. But Balthazar and Arah, and to a lesser extent Melandru and Grenth start off with events that aren’t exactly obvious that they’re leading to a temple cleansing. So the type of dynamic world boss events OP wants are already in the game, they just don’t obviously advertise themselves as a world boss event.

There are other similar event chains scattered throughout the world which end in a boss and give a daily chest upon completion.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chest#Bonus_chest

But like the temples, most of them suffer from obscure and disjointed event chains. The Dredge Commissar is a good example (that and the events to spawn the Commissar are so far away from his spawn spot he’s usually killed by others before the person(s) triggering the event can join in killing him).
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/In_Pursuit_of_Knowledge

Foulbear Chieftain, Eye of Zhaitan, Fire Shaman, and Rhendak the Crazed are other events I’ve run across but never with enough frequency to figure out how the chain works. What might help is if when doing a quest in an event chain, the game would let you browse the completed previous steps so you would know to look for next time.

Pockets.3201:

Tin foil has largely been replaced by aluminum foil. Most of the public does not realize that aluminum foil actually amplifies rather than blocks harmful rays.

Most people today don’t realize beverage cans used to be made of tin, not aluminum. In the movie Jaws when Quint crushes a beer can with his hand, and Hooper crushes a styrofoam cup in response, the scene has lost its impact because beer cans are now aluminum. There were no aluminum cans when the movie came out – Quint was crushing a tin can.

Take an empty soup can and try to crush it – that’s how hard it used to be. You had to be ridiculously strong to crush a beer can with one hand. The scene is about the enormous contrast between the two characters (tough guy vs science geek). Quint making a big display of physical strength, and Hooper not letting himself be intimidated by it. But today it just looks like a couple of guys making meaningless gestures because everyone thinks it’s an aluminum can.

(I figured if you clicked on this topic, you should at least learn something useful for your trouble.)

Baldovin.1392:

Ok thank you for your answers. I just hope that Anet will leave it lying in store for a longer time next time they put it (PLEASE PUT IT), since not all of the players can be in game every day or week.

It would be nice if they let you flag gem store items so that if they go on sale or are made available, you get notified by email. I know before the long sale a few weeks back, a lot of rangers wanted Rox’s Quiver but had missed both sales when it was available for only 24 hours

solrik.6028:

Results? Noobs are easy to hit close & far, skilled players can evade the arrows by timing their left/right strafes correctly.

I’m kinda curious what other attacks there are in the game which can be completely avoided without burning a dodge, block, evade, or utility skill. The only ones which come to mind are things like ele Dragon’s Tooth which draws an obvious graphic, then pauses for seemingly 2 seconds before dropping to apply damage.

Atherakhia.4086:

Alright, here’s my math to compare against Chrispy’s. I would appreciate someone double check it since we have 2 people quoting 30%. The largest error I found with Chrispy’s math is he’s ignoring Rifle has higher average weapon strength I believe?

Ah ha. I suspected something like that, but couldn’t find rifle weapon stats online, and haven’t had time to hop into the game. I’d been holding off posting until I could confirm, but then this topic came up.

Rapid Fire
3.75 Coefficient * 3000 Power * 1050 Strength / 2600 Armor = 4,543.27 damage
Considering the stacking vulnerability (.01+.02+…+.10/10):
4543.27 * 1.045 = 4,747.72 damage

Volley
3.0 Coefficient * 3000 Power * 1150 Strength / 2600 Armor = 3,980.77 damage
Considering Brutal Shot vulnerability:
3980.77 * 1.08 = 4,299.23 damage

You left out the 5 extra vulnerability from ranger Opening Strike. Technically that’s a trait, but it’s pretty much a given with any ranger build except bunker BM.

Chrispy.5641:

This means that Volley is actually 76.5% as Strong as Rapid Fire. Rapid Fire IS NOT 10% stronger than Volley. Its actually closer to 30% stronger.

Actually it’s closer to 31% stronger by your numbers. 1/.765 = 1.307.

And yeah, my back-of-the-envelope calcs said that the new RF was in the ballpark of 30%-35% stronger than Volley. I don’t really know the warrior skills/traits that well though, and like you I couldn’t find where the 15% and 10% figures being thrown around came from so I couldn’t dissect it. (My calcs came out >30% because rangers can trait for power + precision + ferocity. Warriors have to pick 2 of the 3.)

Johje Holan.4607:

Tman.6349:

Yelloweyedemon.2860:

Prysin.8542:

B: Make spirits destructible but last until destroyed (like pets)

Chat: “Placed my spirit at the beginning of the dungeon, brb reloging to make it go away”…

Just change the spirit skill to a signet then back. Problem solved.

*got locked for spamming then Prysin covered this already. Though, if you use a signet instead of another spirit it will skip the CD.

@Solrik:why is killing off your own spirits a problem?

I don’t understand why you’d need to even bother switching utilities at all? I’ve never played spirits on my Ranger but I assumed they worked like the old Ritualist spirits in GW1 – creating a new one destroys the old one.

At least that’s how they’d have to make it work if they were permanent.

The “problem” is the spirit can’t be moved for 1 minute after you’ve placed it. Switching the spirit skill to another utility skill kills the spirit, after which it goes on a 20 sec cooldown before you can reposition it.

i.e. You only have to wait 20 sec to move it, instead of 1 min 20 sec. Or in the context of the original suggestion (indestructible spirits), you wouldn’t have to logout to reposition it. You’d only have to temporarily swap skills.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I had had people complain about this to me as well. Apparently using an attack as it was designed to be used makes me a scrub. Crossfire bleeds when hitting from behind or the sides and I would spam #1 as often as I could if my opponents were putting their backs to me… It’s not my fault they were making it easy to stack bleeds.

I’m pretty sure it’s because of the rate of fire. People tend to panic when when they see a bunch of red numbers quickly popping up over their head, even when the overall damage (and DPS) is the same as a slower stream of numbers or even a single big hit. There’s a sense that “Oh, I could’ve dodged that big hit if I’d been paying attention” but “WTF? Where are all these hits coming from? What do I do?” without looking closely at the numbers to see if they actually hurt. The bleeds contribute to this, because they add even more red numbers popping over their head.

Most of the complaints about RF are for the same reason too IMHO. If they kept RF’s cumulative damage coefficient the same but changed it to 5 shots instead of 10 (so the fire rate was actually slower than the pre-buff RF), I think you’d see a lot fewer complaints. The damage from the skill hasn’t changed at all, only the rate of fire (meaning it’s actually easier to dodge/block than before).

Panic is the most powerful battlefield weapon. If you can get an enemy to panic and flee, his DPS is zero regardless of how great his build is.

You can also bind “lock autotarget” to a key. Hitting the key will then clear your target.

solrik.6028:

The whole zerg would have access to burning, protection, swiftness and healing. Would this be OP?

That’s basically how spirits worked in GW1. They covered a huge area, and everything inside was affected – enemies and allies alike. e.g. You could turn the tide of battle by dropping a spirit which turned physical damage into fire damage, making warrior armor the weakest and caster armor the best protection against melee.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Nature_ritual

I thought GW1 spirits were brilliant. Skills and utilities played within the rules of the game, but ranger spirits changed the rules of the game and could make a bad skill good, or a good skill bad – if you were within range of the spirit. But for whatever reason, they decided to drop this approach in GW2. So no, I don’t think Anet would go for your idea.

Actually, this is a bigger issue with ranger balance in general.

• Either the ranger and pet are considered to be one entity for balance purposes (e.g. ranger skill damage is lower than other professions’ to compensate for the pet contributing damage), and the ranger and pet should both get a copy of all buffs (i.e. Fortifying Bond should be a default ability, not something you have to trait for) and armor and weapon bonuses should also affect the ranger as well as the pet. If other professions found that they randomly only got 70% of the benefit of one of their buff skills/traits/armor and weapon bonuses, they’d be livid. But that’s precisely what happens to rangers.

• Or the ranger and pet are considered to be separate entities for buffing purposes, and ranger skill damage should be balanced without taking into consideration the pet.

Previously we had some weird hybrid where rangers got the worst of both worlds. They were balanced as if they were one entity so their skills did less damage, but received buffs as if they were separate entities.

I advocated fixing rangers by moving towards the former. But the latest changes seem to be shifting to the latter in terms of ranger damage. Either way works, it’s just the mixed approach which unnecessarily crippled rangers. If the latter is their true intent, I’m ok with the pet being treated as a separate entity for buffing purposes.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I don’t know. Sky looks almost aqua/turquoise on my monitor. I’d think there are others a little south on the chart that might ultimately be a brighter blue.

It is. I’m on a color calibrated monitor and Sky is definitely turquoise. Measuring it with the eyedropper tool in Photoshop confirms it too. Sky = 54R, 130G, 160B. So it’s definitely skewed towards green.

IMHO, Brook and Breeze are a purer blue than Sky, even though they’re skewed slightly towards green as well. There aren’t that many saturated dyes in the game, though I’m rather fond of royal blue if the darkness is ok.

kokiman.2364:

And this is the point, you can autoattack the boss until you are dead, this will be enough for event contribution.

I’m pretty sure this part is right (though there seems to be some threshold of damage you have to do first. I’ve died after getting a couple hits in, and didn’t get credit.)

Run forward to claw of jormag in phase 1 once the wall is down, autoattack until you die and that’s it you are now considered to be on the same level as someone who actively tries to bring down the wall, resses people, supports people via shouts/banners/fearwards, escorts golems, etc.

This part is wrong, though for the different reason. I’m pretty sure Jormag phase 1 is considered a different event than Jormag phase 2. I found this out when I once participated in the pre and phase 1. I got a phone call just as phase 2 began, so I ran back to the guns and parked myself there. Jormag died before the call ended, and I did not get credit despite having done plenty of damage in phase 1.

Edit: While we’re on the topic, Jormag is one of those events where I think your final reward should scale based on which previous steps you participated in. e.g. If you only participated in Jormag phase 2, you only get one chest. If you did both phases, you get two chests. If you did both phases and the pre, you get two chests plus some misc loot. It’s a beautifully scripted event, but one that’s dangerously close to not being worth it (unless you get into a good megaserver) because of all the people who skip the pre and phase 1.

RiverSong.5067:

How would you feel to pay 30k$ for what you think would be a luxury car only to find out you get a used honda? The effort in itself should justify an adequate reward. Hell ANY reward. This thing is a pink exotic…

I take it you’re young and can’t afford a luxury car? I can assure you, that a $75,000 BMW is nowhere close to 3x better than a $25k Accord. You get the BMW for the prestige and bragging rights (or snob appeal if you prefer), not for the slightly better driving characteristics.

I think you’ll find that GW2 (and GW1 for that matter) is designed to reward breadth of achievement more than depth of achievement. e.g. Upgrading all your gear from rare to exotic will yield a bigger improvement than upgrading a single item from masterwork to ascended, and in the time it takes to make the ascended item you can run around Orr and get the exotic gear “for free” with karma. This is one of Anet’s quirks – they want you to get out there and explore new things, not stick to doing the same thing over and over until you utterly dominate it.

If you’re one of those people who want the latter in a game, it would behoove you to try to find a different game which better suits your needs. Not try to change this one. Nearly every other MMO out there is tailored for gear grinders and min-maxers like you. Please leave GW2 alone for us explorer types.

bri.2359:

First a note on rangers.
Ranger pets, if left on ‘active’ while the player is AFK will attack any mob that attacks them or the ranger.

Pets can’t draw aggro. Anet (thankfully) changed this early 2013, after endless ranger complaints about their pets taking the “scenic route” to follow the ranger due to poor pathing, and the ranger ending up attacked by a half dozen mobs the moment he stopped moving. So mobs will not attack a pet unless the pet attacks them first.

If they’re getting exp by being AFK there, then it’s a mob pathing/power issue. The mob wanders to within attack range of a player, but isn’t strong enough to kill off said player before the pet finishes them off.

No, he’s got a point. Given the way the autoattack skill rotations work (don’t roll over to next skill until you hit something or skill times out), I can see this being a bona fide bug/unintended behavior. I’ll have to test it next time I’m playing.

Sarision.6347:

The point is, one of Anet’s core balancing philosophy is “Melee > Ranged.” Now you have something that throws tomatoes at that philosophy.

If that were the case, rangers would be using longbows at melee range instead of sword or GS. I’d say it’s more like their philosophy used to be:

Melee >> Ranged

but now it’s

Melee > Ranged

Melee is still better than ranged attacks It’s just not so overwhelmingly better that anybody who tries to fight from range and doesn’t stack is called a noob and kicked from groups. As I said before, the change makes a greater variety of playstyles viable, which is always a good thing.

HARDOFREADING.7298:

Your math is way off…15% is not 24%. As much as you keep pressing for threads to be closed or moved…If Rapid Fire is reaching out to virtually every bit of 2k range…it is an easy 300 further than it should be. 1650 is not 1970+
The skill ranges should be correctly stated in game & on the wiki…and they are not.
Or they should be adjusted to their correct intended design ranges.
Sorry that makes you so sad but Range is out of control and amounts to an unfair advantage.

It is not our job to prove to you something is not broken. If you feel a ranger skill is broken, then it is your job to collect data or evidence that it is and file a bug report. As people have pointed out, all ranged attacks (except a few with hard-coded limits) can exceed their range listed in the tooltip. If you feel ranger longbow is exceeding it by more than other ranged skills, then you need to do the tests yourself and prove it.

That said, being the nice guy I am and knowing that the measured true range of ranger longbow didn’t match what the Anet dev said (15% extra), I was curious and went and tested it myself.

Both the untraited ranger longbow (1200 range) and elementalist staff autoattacks (1200 range) have the exact same range. I stood at the exact same spot in the Mists with both characters, both skills showed a red bar indicating the target was out of tooltip range, and I nudged both characters forward until the Out of Range message disappeared. Both characters ended up in the exact same spot indicating both skills have the exact same true range. (Actually, Fireball has a slightly greater range since it’ll travel the same distance as longbow, then explodes in an AOE giving it a bit more range. You get both an Out of Range message and damage number when this happens.)

Using the elementalist’s Lightning Flash (900 range) teleport skill as a measuring stick, the true range of these skills is almost exactly one targeting circle radius shorter than two teleports, or1800. So perhaps 1600 or so.

1600/1200 = 33% further
1970/1500 = 31% further

It seems to me all three of these ranged skills (elementalist Fireball, ranger autoattack, traited ranger autoattack) are acting exactly the same in terms of “extra” range beyond what’s indicated in the tooltip. And this is not a behavior specific to ranger longbow as you’re claiming. Everyone is benefiting the same amount from this effect, not just rangers.

Bark Skin is seriously underrated IMHO. The problem is most people look at the damage reduction, when they should be looking at the damage transmitted. 1/damage_transmitted = how much longer you can live. So

• 33% reduction means 67% transmitted. 1/.67 = 1.5, so you can survive 1.5x as long.
• 50% reduction means 50% transmitted. 1/.5 = 2, so you can survive 2x as long.

So 33% (original Bark Skin) to 50% may not seem like a big change, but it basically doubled the effectiveness of the trait.

But the best part is when you add protection (which you get with dodge rolls if you have Bark skin. Protect gives another 33% damage reduction.

• 83% reduction means 17% transmitted. 1/.167 = 6, so you can survive 6x as long.

This is just huge. This means it takes twice as much damage to drop you from 25% to 0 hp, as it takes to drop you from 100% to 25%. There are mechanics of the trait which don’t make it quite so effective, and you’ll rarely have protect up the entire time you’re below 25%. But IMHO this is one of the best traits in the game.

Gem to gold rate is the correct conversion rate here, since I was postulating buying gems with RL money, then converting them to gold.

For the BLSK value, I used the gold to gem rate (approx 13 gold/100 gems), since I was comparing to buying the BLSKs using gold (both key runs and gold acquisition are in-game activities).

Zephyron.7081:

OP is spot on! Honestly, I love seeing more stuff I can buy in the gem store…but gold income sucks in this game for a reason…if you want a precursor, then go buy 200 gems and convert to gold. THIS IS BY DESIGN.

The price of precursors is independent of gems. It’s simply a function of how frequently precursors drop, how much people want them, and how much gold they have in their accounts. So their price has gone up because (A) more people want them, or (B) people have more gold in their accounts, or some combination of the two.

It has nothing to do with design (other than precursor drop rate), and nothing to do with the gem store. If you want to use gems to buy gold to buy a precursor, that simply means you want to “skip ahead in line” by bypassing the in-game methods other people are using to make gold to buy a precursor.

This design is flawed, because it leaves the player base with a feeling that the game is not very rewarding.

I would argue that if you’re defining whether or not the game is rewarding solely based on getting a precursor, you’re missing out on 99.9% of what the game has to offer. Legendary weapons were a bone thrown to the achiever-type players in the game. The vast majority of GW2 (and GW1) is designed to appeal to explorer-types. I’m not going to judge what you achiever-types find appealing in the game, but there are a lot of other rewarding things to do in the game than get a legendary.

duckideva.6358:

But, in all the chests I’ve opened, I’ve never gotten enough scraps to get a weapon skin; I mostly got crappy boosters, stupid 50 luck bubbles, and other junk like repair canisters. The “biggest” thing I ever got from a chest was a makeover kit.

http://gw2blacklion.com/
(though the drop rates seem to change with each patch)

I mostly key farmed to get black lion salvage kits. Probably still will, just haven’t lately because I have 7 more BLSKs to burn through. 300 gems = nearly 40 gold, or 1.5 gold per use. It’s just not worth buying them with gems.

The other stuff I got was just gravy. 1 claim ticket, 47 scraps out of about 200 keys (though half those scraps came recently from 40 keys I’d left in my bank and forgotten about – see above about drop rates changing).

Snowmoon.1758:

While key farming is not an exploit, do you REALLY wanna play the game like that?
I know some people say playing games are already a waste of time, but dude, don’t waste it like that.

Don’t “Chinese Farmerize” yourself.

Different people enjoy different things about the game. I like to take an encounter, and figure out how to optimize it. In the case of key runs, it was a matter of figuring out the most effective build and shortest routes. So I had a lot of fun doing it. I did a test run under the new system last night, and I like the change. If you don’t take the crafting shortcut, the hearts give about 40% a level. So now I’m faced with a different optimization problem – figuring out the quickest way to hit enough heart quests in the starter zones to hit level 10.

I consider solving this sort of traveling salesman problem to be fun. I realize not everyone does, so I don’t judge them for not wanting to do key runs. But likewise I would ask that you not judge me and lump me with Chinese gold farmers just because you don’t enjoy what I enjoy. If I simply wanted to optimize making money in the game, I would just get a second RL job and spend the pay on gems. Minimum wage is $7.25/hr, which is 580 gems/hr. At about 10 gold/100 gens, that’s 58 gold/hr minimum. By that metric, pretty much anything you do in the game is a waste of time.

Fluffball.8307:

Stick with your cats in PvE. Some people use drakes since they have a small amount of AoE.

Cats have the best single-target DPS.

Drakes are the best all-around pet.

• Good hp and toughness.
• Average single-target DPS (on par with the canines, beaten only by cats and birds).
• Best multi-target DPS. It’s not a small amount of AOE. All of its attacks are AOE and can hit 5 targets. If you’re fighting 2 targets, its DPS is as good as a cat’s. 3+ targets and it’s better than a cat.
• Blast finisher when you summon them. If you need an extra heal, drop healing spring and swap to a drake pet. Its first attack will be a blast finisher.
• Breath attack on River Drake bounces between 2+ targets and gives you a huge amount of might very quickly with Rampage as One.

I usually run Jungle Stalker / River Drake.

Poor bear is the one pet that has almost no role in any format, just a few niches.

The only times I use bears are:

• When facing something which kills regular pets before I can swap them. I figure having the pet alive and doing some damage is better than just having two dead pets.
• When facing a boss mob where the players may need a break from combat to wait for cooldowns or to reposition. The bears can usually tank well enough to distract the boss for 5-10 sec.

Sandrox.9524:

Now who is QQing? ranger wasnt “suck” in compare to others,he was decent any good ranger player would tell you that. so please Laugh with me quick,hahahahahaha

Ranger was voted suckiest profession in the official Anet poll. That’s why they were first getting their skills and balance tweaked.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Vote-for-the-Profession-Collaborative-Development/first

For our upcoming CDI projects, we would like to collect your ideas for professions that need balancing. Since there are 8 professions, we would like to do one at a time and would like you to vote on which one comes first.

Please pick the three professions that you feel need the most help right now and list them in order of priority like so:

Example
1. Profession1 (this needs the most help by far)
2. Profession2 (this needs help, but not more than 1)
3. Profession3 (this needs help, but not more than 1 & 2)

Then at the end:

Everyone, thank you for voting!

After tallying the vote up (and yes, removing repeats), Ranger will be our topic for the first CDI thread.

rapthorne.7345:

Is it truly a random act of kindness if there’s the motivation of having your name plastered for all to see?

Plastering it for all to see actually helps the community. You see the opposite in RL, where the news carries predominantly negative stories like murders, death, and destruction. Consequently people feel society is in the pits and the world is hopeless, and give up trying to change it for the better. Which in turn makes them act in their self interest rather than their community’s, which just adds more negative stories for the news to carry.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the forums tend to be pretty negative. That contributes to the cycle of devaluing the sense of community. A regular series reporting random acts of kindness would be great way to counterbalance that, and get people to value the community more and encourage them to contribute to its improvement.

Everyone is out there playing on their ranger, including lots of people who don’t know how to play ranger. The mobile world bosses (Modniir Ulgoth, Savanir Shaman, etc) are being knocked around with Point Blank Shot more than I’ve ever seen. They actually take significantly longer to kill now that every noob ranger out there keeps knocking them out of melee range. Some of the veteran and champ mobs at events literally take 2-3x longer to kill.

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

but it is some kind of Attempt to get Zergs to break up , and form more smaller groups where rangers,theifs,mesmers, and some necro builds could also be more useful than they are currently.

You want to break the zerg up and encourage people to form smaller groups? Remove the 5 target limit on AOE attacks.

Or if you want to go part-way, remove it on AOE attacks which require you to be standing still for a duration to use the skill (e.g. Barrage, Meteor Shower, etc). Give a little extra reward for the risk incurred by using a skill which requires you to stand still.

killahmayne.9518:

GS auto attack has the most horrid scaling for power. I understand that it is a very defensive weapon/CC but with 2000+ power on the tooltip it says it does 473 damage. I feel like given how weak that is the auto attack should do something else, maybe give it a 1 and a half second cripple?

If you want to do damage, GS autoattack is just to give you something to do while you’re waiting for Maul (highest instant damage skill for ranger), Swoop (tied #3), and Crippling Throw (tied #3). to come off cooldown.

Just adding Maul to your attack cycle allows GS to out-DPS sword against 2+ targets. I need to run some numbers for Maul + Swoop, though most people prefer to keep Swoop and Block/Crippling Throw for emergency defense. But if you want to do damage…

Telemin.7380:

Temporal Curtain only applies swiftness if you currently have no swiftness. It is the only skill in the game that works like that. The rest of the swiftness skills stack on duration. Such was Warrior Warhorn Blowing, Guard Staff 3 and Static + Blasts.

Guard staff 3 stacks, but is limited in max duration to about 40 sec. Something like that would make a lot more sense for Temporal Curtain. It should add swiftness duration, but not above a certain max cap.

Snowmoon.1758:

Interestingly, the latest TP patch showed classification of armour by class
instead of just Heavy, Medium, Light.

Could this mean that there WILL be class specific armours down the line? Maybe?

Technically the starter headgear was class-specific. Though I believe when they changed it so you unlock skins, it got turned into generic heavy, medium, light. You still need to make a character of the class to unlock the skin though.

Needless Pontification
Enticement

The more time they get complainers to waste in the forums, the less time they’re playing the game. That’s it.

Vermillion Hawk.9037:

The Oxford English Dictionary has no entries for rig that even come close to justifying the colloquial utilization of it in relation to a computer. The best it in particular comes to that is in describing an amateur radio operator’s equipment, which is what I can only imagine our modern slang term evolved from.

It actually comes from the old sailing days, when you had to rig your ship by setting up all the masts, sails, ropes, and pulleys and put them into their proper place so you could set sail. Likewise, to assemble a radio or computer, you have to rig all the different components and cables together into their proper places and connectors so you can use the radio/computer.

That’s probably why the term is used more among people who assemble their own computers, rather than buy them pre-built.

Still doesn’t change that it sounds stupid and if you use it in a conversation with me I’ll likely think you’re an idiot.

Well I think it made you sound stupid when you said it made you think of a tractor trailer (“big rig” – I hadn’t even thought of that alternate meaning of the word). But I won’t hold that against ya.

(Incidentally, “big rig” also derives from the same sailing term. To make a tractor trailer, you have to rig the tractor to the trailer.)

Snowmoon.1758:

i’ve got a ranger too and yea it seems all rangers need to wear ultra conservative.
No skimpy looks, not even a tiny bit of skin.
They might as well change the class name to “Nun” instead.

Oh, I wouldn’t say that.

Crapgame.6519:

Man – hope you never played DaOC back in the day… You want to talk about range, play a runemaster. Mofo’s had range for miles

Oh man, fun times. I once locked down an entire raid (about 40-50 people) for ~20 sec with my bard’s AOE mez, giving my team time to get to and set up a proper defense at the crossroads gate. Now that’s an AOE.

ilr.9675:

Fun fact for MMO newbs: DaoC was were the term “nerf” originated from because after Archers got downtuned, they described their bows as shooting Foam Darts like the popular toy at the time, instead of Longbow Arrows.

Actually the first time I saw the tern was in Ultima Online. Archery started off in a terrible state. I used something like 40 arrows to kill a bird, which only gave me a dozen feathers with which to fletch more arrows.

One of the forum posts complaining about it said “We’re not firing arrows, we’re firing nerf arrows.” From there it went on to refer to any weapon which was underpowered. Then any weapon which got its power reduced. Then anything that got its power reduced.

Lazze.9870:

The current best dps rotation in shorter fights against single targets is to use barrage and rapid fire, then swap to sword auto and use path of scars on cooldown.

Actually you’ll do slightly better leading off with a regular autoattack. Precise Strike means the first hit is guaranteed be a crit, so you want that on the 0.9 coefficient autoattack, instead of a 0.4 Barrage or 0.375 RF.

Properly placing the Barrage circle becomes more complicated though, since the target mob will be moving towards you after the first hit, before the Barrage starts to fall and cripple. It’s not so bad once you get a feel for it, but will likely result in lower damage when you’re first learning it (Barrage circle isn’t properly placed so mob walks out of it before Barrage ends).

McFribble.2349:

The difference here is that Condition cleanse helps against almost every class in the game. Reflect works well against LB Rangers. If you can’t see the differences here, I don’t know what to tell you. The ENTIRE kittenING GAME shouldn’t have to adapt itself around one class. That is a sign that one class is doing something it probably shouldn’t be doing.

Sigh. This is why we can’t have good things.

The problem isn’t everyone having to adapt themselves around one class. The problem is everyone has been able to ignore that one class for so long. Suddenly that class is buffed so that the abilities it brings to the game now make a difference, and people are in shock because they can’t ignore it anymore.

Basically, anything added to a game which forces you to adapt is a good thing. That’s telling you Anet has successfully added a new and different challenge or mechanic for you learn to overcome. It’s increased the breadth of the game.

You complain that Reflect only works well against LB rangers. That’s probably a valid complaint, but then you incorrectly conclude that it’s a reason to nerf rangers. The correct conclusion is that Anet needs to add more skills to other classes which require reflect to defend against, thus making it equally as important to carry reflect as it is to carry a condition cleanse. That is balance. What’s the point of even having reflect in the game if you never need to carry it because all builds vulnerable to it are non-threatening and thus can be ignored?

As I said in another thread, balance isn’t “I can run around with my preferred build and not have to worry about anything because my build can defend against anything.” That is horribly unbalanced. Balance is “My build has strong defense against certain things but not others, so I have to be careful to play to my strengths and avoid situations which exploit my weaknesses.” Rock, paper, scissors would be a stupid game if scissors were so weak paper could always ignore them.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pet_attributes#List_of_pet_attributes

Since 25 might stacks is a flat +875 power, it’s a much bigger percentage increase for lower power pets and builds than for higher power. Since most pets have base 1374 power they benefit a lot more from the +875 than players (typically 1800-2300 power).

Anyone know if the hyena’s summoned duplicate is buffless or copies the hyena’s buffs? It’s got a base 824 power, so 25 might stacks more than doubles its damage.

25 stacks of Master’s Bond is another +200.

I assume it’s still +300 from full Beastmastery.

Don’t email or text your friend the activation code. Find a more secure way to send it. e.g. put it in an encrypted zip file and email that to him. Or put it your Dropbox account, wait for your friend to download it, then delete it. Better yet, call him and tell him over the phone. (Don’t use Facebook – they keep a copy of everything you upload even if you delete the account.)

When I requested the email address connected to my account be changed, Anet asked me to give them my activation code as verification that the account was really mine. Since they’re using it for that kind of account security, you want to protect it so there’s no way, for example, someone browsing your email when you accidentally leave yourself logged in can see it.

“My character” is actually the concept of your character. Toon refers to the graphical representation. The correct term is actually avatar (like the movie by the same name – literally it means a visual representation of an abstract concept or a god). But that sounds a bit too fancy, so gamers started referring to it as toon.

Gamers are lazy folks. We’ll pick whatever is easiest to say. Character = 3 syllables. Avatar = 3 syllables. Cartoon = 2 syllables. Toon = 1 syllable.

If you take Fortifying Bond (minor master NM trait), the pet gets a copy of your boons. The duration on these boons is fixed, instead of a copy of your own. And might happens to be fixed at 10 sec.

So the 3 sec might from axe is increased to 10 sec might on your pet. The 15 sec might from Beastmaster’s might is reduced to 10 sec on your pet.

ItIsFinished.9462:

I just want to throw this out there, and please keep in mind, I am no math expert. But I believe the DPS increase is a 16% increase for damage per second. Speaking of RF only.

No, RF got a 80% DPS increase.

3.75 coeff / 4.5 sec = 0.833 coeff/sec
3.75 coeff / 2.5 sec = 1.5 coeff/sec

1.5/0.833 = 1.8 = 80% increase in DPS

The reason it’s not wildly OP was that the original 0.833 coeff/sec was really weak to begin with (worse than the autoattack). So a good chunk of that % DPS improvement is spent bring the skill up from bad to average. Probably only 40%-60% of its improvement brings it from average to good.

Chrispy.5641:

Signet of the Hunt.
+50% damage on next attack. 30 second cooldown.
0.5×1 = 0.5
0.5/30 = 0.0167
0.5/24 = .0208

Assassin’s Signet
+15% damage for next 5 attacks.
0.15×5 = 0.75
0.75/ 45 = 0.0167
0.75/36 = 0.0208

Those 2 signets are balanced against each other and are equal (unless you add our pet, in which case, our effectiveness weighted against the recharge time is 0.0333/0.0416, making it a much better skill).

Ranger is (supposedly) balanced with ranger + pet damage considered together, so adding the pet doesn’t improve the effectiveness any. You just need to multiply 0.0167 and 0.0208 by 0.7 for the ranger and 0.3 for the pet. In other words, the figures you’ve calculated are already for the ranger + pet.

The problem with Signet of the Wild is that not only is it a 25% increase in all attacks for 8 seconds, but it also gives stability and a 50% increase in movement speed.
[…]
Enjoy the fun for now, and Solandri, use as much math as you want to prove we aren’t overpowered. Things will change (eventually given anet’s speed at balancing the game, but it will change)

Actually, I agree with you that Signet of the Wild is OP now that they made all signets affect the ranger w/o a trait. I think it’s indicative of a slightly different problem though. Pets were so weak they needed a pet super-signet to make it worth using the signet’s active. Likewise, ranger signets were so weak the actives needed to be really good to make a GM trait worthwhile.

These were problems caused by a bad design decisions (pets are weak, and signet actives only affect pets). When you try to “fix” them by shoring up skills being crippled by bad design decisions , then you suddenly change course and fix one of the bad design decisions, the shored-up skill(s) tend to be too powerful.

The buffs on SotW need to be broken up and placed into other skills, instead of lumped into a single signet (which also has regen as a passive). As things are right now, probably 99% of ranger builds are going to include Signet of the WIld. A pretty clear sign that it’s OP.

Zefrost.3425:

Glass warrior (sword/axe, axe/sword) vs glass longbow ranger – who wins? Ranger, unless you’re running a build specifically designed to destroy longbow rangers.
[…]
Basically, balance would be good.

Balance isn’t “I should be able to counter anything and everything with the one build I like to run.” That is horribly unbalanced.

Balance is having to make choices, strengthening yourself against certain builds at the cost of weakening yourself against others. Then recognizing the situations where you’re weak and allowing teammates to handle those, while you take the lead in situations where you’re strong. Basically rock, paper, scissors, except in more dimensions and with teammates.

“So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.”
? Sun Tzu, The Art of War