Guild Wars 2

Thank you for your answers dylan! I’m staying with healing spring and carrion amulet for now then. And yeah, spirit of nature is such a good skill when used right.

I forgot: since I’m new, I now play the metabattle standard SB – s/d spirit build with the Rune of the Forgeman.
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Ranger_-_Spirit_Ranger

Hey fellow pet trainers! I just created a ranger, and I wanted to play a spirit build in tpvp. I know I’m a bit behind the meta, but I do like the support it gives compared to a classic condi survival build. I have a few questions:

- Is the water spirit any good? I thought it was safer to use healing spring for the condi removal, the water field and the fact that it can’t be killed, but water spirit works in synergy with my build. Has anybody used it in a spirit build?

- What amulet do you play with? I like carrion at the moment, but I can see rabid work if I take the trait that gives bleeding on crit, or even celestial if I sacrifice a bit of survivability.

- I read somewhere that spirit rangers where good close point holder. You’re tanky and good in 1v1s, sure, but how do you make sure you have enough mobility to roam between close and mid?

Thank you in advance for your answers. I’m psyched to be part of the ranger community!

The title is self-explanatory. It can be a weapon skill as well as a utility or elite skill, on any profession. Whether you like it because it’s game-breakingly OP, hard to master or just plain funny, what’s your personal favorite?

RIP, QQ subforum. We’ll now have to browse all the professions subforums for our weekly shot of fresh tears.

SaintSnow.6593:

I still think toker has better mechanical skill and technique than sizer.
Though original jumper will always be the forefather of the s/d upcoming.

Yeah, your precedent post seems to indicate that you’re too involved in this ridiculous competition between continents to be really objective about this. But who is, really?

SaintSnow.6593:

This wts was honestly just a classic case of egomania becoming too much. EU has been going years of firmly believing they are vastly superior to NA and tcg just didn’t practice nor care as much bc they believed that NA would be such a easy pushover.

Toker was impressive, but you have to admit that Sizer map awareness and recap mastery is one of the major factor that explains why TCG is so successful. This morning alone, on the Niflel match, he managed to constantly fool Ostricheggs about his positioning, and get the decap on far repeatedly. Considering he faced two engis, which is a difficult matchup, I think he did great. My only regret is that he doesn’t seem to form an excellent team with Helseth, not in the way Sensotix and Chosen Pain do.

SaintSnow.6593:

This wts was honestly just a classic case of egomania becoming too much. EU has been going years of firmly believing they are vastly superior to NA and tcg just didn’t practice nor care as much bc they believed that NA would be such a easy pushover. They came into the not nearly prepared as the Abjured was, who have been practicing endlessly scrimming with Absurd and other teams.
Tcg is composed of great players but they just let their egos get the best of them and it cost them. Hopefully now, we will see a different attitude towards the NA side of things.

Did we watch the same tournament? The games were great, and often very close (that come back in the first one!). Sizer did a fantastic job, as did Rom, so I bet they practiced just fine. There were just two top teams with close enough lvl of play to offer great entertainment. I think your chauvinism has altered your experience of the tournament, maybe you should watch it again.

If you read my post history, you can see that I (falsely) predicted that TCG was gonna win, because they favored rotations over cheese builds. I was wrong. I’ve seen the matches, and I must say that even if you might say that the Abjured ran what looked like a soloq pug, their skill and communication made them win. What us mere mortals can not understand, is that at that lvl of play there is no real cheese. Gg Abjured, and gg TCG. It was a lot of fun watching those games, and it never felt like the NA team abused OP builds.

I agree! My main is an engineer, and if power necros realize that their build is incredibly lame, they’ll go back to playing condi. We don’t want that. Imo, power necro popularity is one of the reason engineer was so good in the late soloq.

It sometimes does when you have a bit of lag. Post this issue on the thief sub forum for more answers.

uberkingkong.8041:

More people want deathmatch removed than added.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Remove-Courtyard-from-every-mode/first#post4598246

Well that’s a bold assumption to make on the very night the patch came out! Let’s think about it. People complain because they played on Courtyard. It means that some people liked it, if they voted for it! I would also like to see more DM maps, but on a separate queue, to use different builds and comps.

Forsaken.4215:

Keep it it’s sick. Only a total “noob” would say get rid of it. There is one post by teef teef teef saying get rid of it simply because he thinks he is some sort of thief god while i dropped him on my guard.

Wow. Are you telling me you killed a thief on a DPS guard? Teach me sensei.

Jokes apart, I like courtyard, but I feel like it’s too small for 5v5 matches. I’d like to see 3v3 matches on a separate queue though.

In addition, I think most people vote courtyard because it’s new. Wait a week, and you’ll get it less often. The only time I got it tonight is when both teams decided to vote for it.

Yeah, tonight my team got rofl stomped by premade dragon teams, and won 500-50 against rabbits. It really takes away the pleasure of playing ranked.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. I usually queue with 3 or 4 guild mates. We’re all noobs, but still we were always around 95% in the leaderboards, just because most of our foes were queuing solo or in pairs. Tonight though, all of our matches were against full or almost full premades, and we got wrecked, like we deserved! Did you queue solo tonight? What is your experience with that? For me it seems to work as intended, on the full team end.

KrisHQ.4719:

Oh. So you can basically get a 50% winrate?
That must be very nice for you

Of course you can’t. There are seven maps, you get to chose between three. So you can choose Skyhammer less than half of the matches, and if you stack on Skyhammer during the vote, and win every time it pops, you’ll win less than 25% of your matches. GG.

Well, this map is kind of a joke. The professions are balanced around contest, but that’s not the worst part. It’s a 2v2 arena where 10 people play at the same time. It’s fun, sure, and maybe with more experience it will get better, but for me it was just putting a maximum of AoE in the middle and smile at the huge numbers popping

I guess you can’t please everyone. I think the fonts in the match window are ugly, the small characters in the pvp screen immersion breaking, and the glowing looted objects hurt my eyes. On the positive side, the map selection animation and the “boon yah” when the queue is over are absolutely epic.

Simon.3794:

robertul.3679:

What class are you struggling on to fight against the dreadful 66666 engi with turret rabid celestial battle doom geomancy intelligence bomb nade toolkit slickshoes elixir gun?

but almost every engi build has " spam/CC/AI "

Riiiiight. Every engineer build has CC (that’s what the profession is best at imo), but if you play kits (“spam”), you can’t play turrets (“AI”). So no, you ran into two different engineer builds and thought it was the same. I suggest you play one.

Just stay away from the speed runners, and you should be fine. Your case is different, but I always cringe when I see a post like “Help me with my dungeon flamethrower build” getting response like “Don’t use FT nub use bombs and get gud”. Hell, just let people play the game the way they want to!

On a thread somewhere, I think I read a comment from a dev saying that it wouldn’t be fair, if you could just switch build when seeing an opponent in WvW. But I’d totally support this, if it’s only in pvp! It would make sense, since we will no longer be able to swap professions to adapt in the beginning of the match.

Prince Vigador, do you read this thread? Unfortunately, there’s a limit to what can be done on such issues. A new report option dedicated to this kind of players would be nice, but you can’t have a report button followed immediately by a sanction. How do I know if the power ranger on my team always losing far in a 1v1 is a troll, or just bad (the build was chosen totally randomly, no hate here)? To be fair, it doesn’t happen that often, most people have better things to do than crying for attention in a MMO.

The devs made quite a smart move to solve this Skyhammer issue: the vote system. It will only be played now if at least one player feels like it, so it probably won’t happen often.

Blackwyn.8127:

As I see it, you either remove being able to switch characters / builds once a match is found, or you remove Skyhammer entirely from the ranked rotation.
Skyhammer is extremely inconsistent compared to all the other maps as certain builds are far more superior than a build that would work on all other maps. Being able to gain an advantage just by switching to certain specific characters / builds for this map, just proves that this map does not belong in ranked at all.

I don’t think that ranked matches mean that you can just choose one build and run it in every comp on every map. Have you ever tried to play on Battle of Khylo with a full condi team? But again, don’t like Skyhammer, don’t vote for Skyhammer.

If I understand correctly, OP is worried that he will be forced to play on a map that, according to him, no one likes? How will it get chosen then?

Seriously though, it’s true that Skyhammer requires different builds and a different team comp than the other maps, so I again claim here my desire that the players be offered some time in the beginning of the game to switch professions if they want to. And of course, build templates would be nice.

I hope that the new matchmaking system is flawless. Right now, the main reason I don’t play my mesmer a lot is that every time I hop in soloq, there is at least one other mesmer and a thief in my team, and I am forced to swap professions. On my engineer, I almost never have to do that.

In addition to that, let’s say the matchmaking system is perfect and I never get teamed up with other mesmers, what happens if before the match starts there is a thief, a pew pew berzeker ranger, a scepter zerker ele and a zerker warrior? We are doomed! Wouldn’t it be possible to swap classes exclusively during the 2min timer in the beginning, and let the profession-based MMR be that of the profession you’re playing when the match actually starts? I never quite understood why in the current system you could not swap builds during the game but still swap classes.

masskillerxploit.2165:

You sir go off on tangents. Anyway. Skyhammer was a complete waste of resources on anet’s side. Even with the amount of changes to Skyhammer there is still the same amount of B S in everygame of skyhammer before and after patch. Skyhammer is …. uh….. a literal troll map, I can not even fathom what the devs were thinking when designing this map, it seems they completely ignored a lot of important aspect of gw2 combat, which would mean they made this map out of impulse of ignorance. In the end if it all, stop trying to point out aspects of skyhammer that can promote skillful plays among high tier players, it’s a waste of a post imo. Skyhammer will never be in a tourney or team q. Get over it.

I can understand your reluctance. I’m not proposing to add Skyhammer to the teamq map rotation straight away. But imagine it was the theme of a tournament: the Skyhammer Cup, or whatever. Surely top teams would give it a try, and we would get to see interesting ways of playing on this map, and what kind of builds/composition works. Even if Skyhammer is never in the teamq rotation, it would probably improve the way we play on this map in soloq, don’t you think? I don’t know who you are, but if you are not one of the top players you would not even participate in such tournament. Again, I think the main problem we know have with this map (the pulls/knockbacks are less frequent since the recent changes) is that we are afraid to adapt, to go out of your comfort zone.

On an unrelated topic, I’m by no means a high tier players, but I think you hold them for more close-minded than they really are.

Edit: spelling mistakes. There are probably still a lot of them.

ryan.6217:

I just want to point out that not all thieves use SR, i cant remember the last time i equipped that crap

Yeah sure, but we’re talking about tpvp, where it’s the only real team utility the thief has.

Gadgets engineer. #gadgetmeta

I’m curious, why do you think Rocket Boots are underpowered? It’s a blast finisher, break immob and a forward leap on a 20s cooldown, and it even removes cripple and chill! If it was a breakstun, it would be straight OP. It’s so good I even prefer it to EG in WvW, because it is so much stronger than EG #4 than the other abilities can’t even the match. Utility Goggles could still use a buff, even if it is rather good in a SD build. Slick Shoes are good in bunker builds, but could still need a bit of love.

As a new mesmer, and an old thief, I miss SR! I’m sure it’s a great skill when used right, but for now Mass Invis gets me killed during the cast time one time out of three. But when you look at it, mesmers still have Blink and Portal, possibly two of the coolest skills in the game, and Basilik Venom is not exactly OP either, even on a 40s cooldown, so it’s not that big a deal.

To OP: yes, ranger’s downed state is extremely strong. It’s intended, since rangers tend to spend most of their time in that state

uberkingkong.8041:

If good players get 1 shotted on Skyhammer, than they are not good.

You look at good players, Euratien and Stunningstyles. They are not getting 1 shotted. They are the ones doing the 1 shots.

Why? Because they know how to make builds, the people being 1 shotted are bad players who are using meta builds that aren’t meta on skyhammer which allows them to be 1 shotted by good players who know how to play the game and change there builds so they can skillfully play on a map like Skyhammer and skillfully 1 shot newbs into ragemode.

Why does Skyhammer need to be on WTS? So newbs can copy meta Skyhammer builds, which today there are none in existence, but if they see what the best use on Skyhammer, they’ll do a lot better copying there builds.

You need to get your facts straight.

This. Skyhammer would actually make a better teamq map than a soloq one. The main problem with the map is that all these soloq heroes have to make a few changes in their FotM build, and use a different strat than in the other maps. The horror! Skyhammer is the closest this game has from a different game mode, and forcing top players to play on it in a major tournament could help this type of players to understand how to play the map. Imagine all the new possibilities in team composition!

Nicely done. That champion “genius” engi though…

Charge them 20g every time they afk! No but seriously, penalties exist already, and it doesn’t seem to stop these bad sports. I too hope than Anet will find a magical solution to fix this, but in these player-generated issues, not much can be done. Harsh report can and will be abused, that is how competitive games work.

True, it’s not game breaking. But in some cases it can really be a matter of life and death. Suppose you are dueling a thief, as a thief yourself. When downed, you want to time your teleport so that the other thief doesn’t steal to complete the stomp. If you can’t see the animation, that’s a problem.

What really annoys me is that it clearly is a bug, and I can not imagine that correcting it would be that difficult. Maybe I should post a similar thead in the bugs sub forum?

Hi everyone. I would like to discuss a bug I have encountered many times since I started playing. Suppose I’m downed, and my opponent starts the stomping animation while stealthed, when the stealth ends I can see him raising the arm as if the animation just begun, and then the flag drops. It happens literally every time, and my guilmates are experiencing the same problem.

I’ve never seen anything posted on the forums about this, which is strange, since it’s a bit annoying and frankly, really uncool. It’s not exactly game breaking, but apart from the fact that it prevents counter play, I would like to see my foe jump out of the blue, in a pink explosion, to pin a flag in my convulsed body, with the cool asura spin animation. What do you think? Have you experienced this bug as well?

There’s actually a mathematical formula you can find that explains how it works. Glicko makes perfect sense for a game like GW2, since it’s casual oriented: the fact that your rank changes more if you haven’t play in a while mean that you don’t have to play 10k games or play 8h a day to be in the top 1000. There will always be cases like this (he probably had a win streak against top players, by having other top players in his team, or he’s someone’s second account), but in the end, if he doesn’t have the skill to maintain its rank, he’ll drop in the leaderboards. It’s simple statistics: if the sample is too small, it doesn’t mean anything.

OP, if you have long queues, I assume you are not talking about team queuing in a full pre made, right? Cause when you do the queue is usually less than one or two minutes. And if you are queuing for soloq, or going solo in tpvp, these messages remind you to go in as fast as possible! How many times had I hopped in soloq with my thief, discuss some kind of strat, only to see another thief come in in the last seconds, giving me no time to reroll, and then proceed to push far and get farmed.

My point is, when the queue pops, drop your hotjoin, hop in and prepare to fight. A lot of soloq matches are won or lost before the clocks starts.

Good vid! Have you tried this build in tpvp ? I sometimes play a similar build in WvW, but it never seemed that effective in structured pvp.

Just finished leveling up my mesmer, and I had to spend 40g to buy my sub-optimal runes of the traveler. I feel robbed.

Lol, the fact that there is no cooldown actually requires skill: we don’t play like warriors or bad eles: 2,3,4,5,1111,swap, repeat. The entire charm of kit builds is to place the right bomb at the right moment. Look at the toolkit: only utility skills. Adding a CD would make no sense: gameplay wise, we’d just be elementalists who could choose their attunements. I doubt you ever played engineer, but that’s what makes the class fun, and that’s why I and most engis never go to battle without at least one kit!

I didn’t know you could. Pretty cool if you ask me.

I think the pvp community is actually rather fairplay (except of course these kitten ragequitters!). I rarely get insulted, even when running D/P thief or winning outnumbered fights using supply crate, or even winning 1v1 fights using supply crate, for that matter. I mostly do tpvp, and hotjoins to test builds, but when I occasionally go roaming in WvW I invariably get insults, even though I’m playing a rabid, half-cheesy engineer build and not a PU mesmer or SA thief. They are often human female thieves with double Incinerators, underboob T3 cultural armor and a flower in their hair!

eyesrutherford.1357:

So much QQ on turret engi. I never usually have problems against turret Engis myself. And as far as phent was saying about the turrets ceasing to exist if cele ammy and might stacking was gone, that is a dumb statement because I see a lot of turret engineers who run Valkyrie amulet and clerics. It’s just an AI build just like MM necro. Yes it is a little unfair to strictly melee classes because they have to be in range but most builds have certain classes they are strong against and weak against. Me myself can smoke a turret engi fairly easily on all of my characters, engi -non turret by the way, mesmer, ele, theif, and ranger. Maybe it’s a L2P moment? Or maybe it’s just that I know how to fight turrets better than most. But I did run turrets before it turned all big and got lots of buffs. But I only ran it cause players said it was the worst engi build and I had to prove them wrong. Anyways I’m done ranting. Take care peoples ~Midna~

I’m genuinely interested on how you defeat turret engi as a non-turret engi. I play a rabid bomb/toolkit build, and I never 1v1 them for I know that I will loose if the skill gap between us is not demential. I can’t damage the turrets enough with my condis. I tried to magnet pull them, CC them with shield 4/BOB and condi burst, but they immediately flee back to the protection of their turrets before I have the chance to pressure them enough, cleanse with healing turret, and gg. Can you please tell me the basics ? Unless of course you meant on a SD berserker engi, cause that’s an entirely different matter.

On swap sigils are a good thing since some of them promote intelligent and active play (hydromancy, intelligence, doom), while on crit sigils are a little more passive imo (I play with both). The only one I actually have a problem with is sigil of battle. Even on a non might-stacking oriented build it is excellent, and better than most alternatives. Maybe reduce the might duration ?

Alternatively,

Mesmer: Master of puppets. The mesmer is rooted, but for 3s the player controls one foe (meaning, he can see like he’s in observatory mode, but actually can move/use skills!). 120s CD at least.

Cool thread !

Engineer: a kit with long CD on the 5 skills (no AA), but can be switched like every other kits. Someone suggested machine gun, I’d like that !

Mesmer: Master of puppets. Every foe within 600 range is interrupted and /dance for 2(3?) seconds. 90s CD. Considered a stun.

Tao.5096:

playing bunker engineer because I can chill out and watch movies on yt.

Sadly, it will work in soloq. Far from OP, but when your team makes no effort to play collectively whatsoever, even the dumbest builds become good.

Yes, celestial builds are really (too?) strong, and ele and engi have the best celestial builds. However, my bet is that the Abjured will be crushed by TCG in Beijing. Playing on strong, bunkerish builds might work in North America, but in Europe you actually have to have a team with different dedicated roles to win. So other professions still have their part to play. I wouldn’t mind a slight nerf to strength runes and sigil of battle though, just to see a little change in the meta.