Guild Wars 2

elithrar.7143:

Removing the RNG on thrown Elixir S would be nice as well

Which one do you want to be the consistent effect? I wish we had more reliable access to stability as a class but sometimes the stealth from Toss Elixir S is pretty amazing as a defensive or escape tool.

Maybe Toss Elixir S should always grant stability and the tool belt skill for Utility Goggles could be changed to “Bend Light” and grant stealth. After all, nobody gives a kitten about the current tool belt skill for the goggles. The only thing it ever gets used for is to trigger Static Discharge.

Angewaire.6319:

If engineer is that good, if it lacks nothing and it’s playable class that can compete with others on equal terms , explain me this – WHY SO FEW OF US PLAYS IT!
( if anyone wants to do % math , exclude 1 engineer from each match [me])

I can answer that easily.

Most players don’t select their main character class based on its perceived rank within the class balance hierarchy, especially early in a game’s lifetime. Aesthetics, class mechanics and perceived role generally play a huge part, even for hardcore players.

Therefore, even if all 8 GW2 professions were perfectly balanced with each other you would not expect to see exactly 12.5% of the playerbase on each one. Hell, according to Anet’s 1-year anniversary infographic, the two most popular classes are the warrior and ranger, two classes that spent much of the game’s history being badly underpowered in certain areas of gameplay (PvP and dungeons, respectively.) On the other hand, the guardian, which has been consistently powerful in every area since the game launched, is only the 5th most popular class.

The engineer is a fairly niche class design for a fantasy RPG and will naturally attract a smaller playerbase than most others, even if it were overpowered.

It’s also not exactly rare to get a lot of enemy players bunched up for Coated Bullets spam if you’re part of an organized tower defense in WvW.

The flamethrower autoattack hits a very large area compared to almost any other weapon and deals quite respectable damage if you are using a build that includes both Juggernaut and Deadly Mixture.

Also, where are you getting the idea that the flamethrower has worse power scaling than the rifle or pistol?

The data from here ( https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Engineer-skill-coeffs ) shows the power scaling of the flamethrower autoattack as being right between the pistol and rifle. Divide the coefficient by the attack speed and you get .43 for the pistol, .81 for the rifle and .60 for the flamethrower. Seems like it’s scaling roughly in line with other weapons to me, and that’s what I generally observe in-game too.

Soon.5240:

3) Since day one, if I have Confusion stacked on me, I either cleanse it, or wait it out. This makes the Rune OP? Lol. LTP and quit spamming.

From day one until quite recently the longest base duration confusion in the game was 5 seconds and no build could put up more than 12 stacks of it in a short window.

Runes of Perplexity, when combined with multiple interrupt skills, like the engineer’s shield 5 skill, allow players to get 20+ stacks of 10-second base duration confusion in a matter of seconds. If they’re using a koi cake and 10 points in explosives plus the 30% confusion duration on the runes themselves that’s 17 seconds during which the target cannot fight back. Nobody can survive “waiting out” that kind of duration in the middle of a fight unless they get a lot of help from someone else or are using Melandru runes and Lemongrass Poultry Soup.

As far as cleansing options go, that varies a lot with classes and builds, but there’s a reason condition pressure builds were already so common in sPvP and solo WvW roaming before Runes of Perplexity were even added to the game. Condition stacking is generally stronger than condition cleansing right now, and Perplexity has just made it easier to stack another condition along with all the others.

The biggest would certainly be better responsiveness on the F2 skill and faster AI activation when switching pets.

When I give the pet the command, I want it to immediately interrupt its current action and activate its F2 skill.

I also hate it when I switch my pets and the newly activated pet takes 2+ seconds to acquire a target and do anything. I have no idea where that lag comes from but it clearly shouldn’t be there. Mesmer illusions don’t wait that long to acquire targets and start fighting so my pets shouldn’t either. They should already be running at their target by the time my computer finishes rendering their model.

VIVorcha.7853:

In fact, every class has a massive advantage over the engineer.

This is a pretty bold claim to be making when the only evidence you have is a few cherry-picked examples of bad traits and underpowered utility skills. Do you actually have any statistical evidence, like representative breakdowns from sPvP tournaments or high-level fractals or something?

So engineers suck because nobody wants to use turrets or most of the gadgets? Guardians don’t use spirit weapons. Rangers don’t use their shouts. Necromancers don’t use their blood magic trait line. Mesmers rarely use signets or mantras. Every profession has a bunch of underpowererd traits nobody in their right mind ever slots.

If you want to ask for general buffs to turrets and gadgets and the useless traits, go ahead, but you’re not going to convince many people that the entire profession is at a “massive disadvantage.” The engineer has about as many competitive builds as every other class and is decently well represented in every area of the game by players using those builds.

I’m not sure if this would actually work better than the apothecary’s and rabid items we already have access to.

VIVorcha.7853:

You know that trait “Adrenal Implant”? It’s a Grandmaster trait in the Tools line.

Well, rangers get that as a minor adept trait.

That’s just insulting.

We were given a minor trait as our grandmaster trait.

Making these kinds of comparisons in a vacuum is really not very informative, and borders on deceptive. Are you really trying to claim that rangers have a massive and obvious advantage over engineers?

As a good counterpoint, the engineer adept trait Incendiary Powder is an exact copy of a necromancer grandmaster trait. Who’s being insulted now?

Basically, there are hundreds of differences between any two professions in the game. Cherrypicking one specific comparison that puts your favorite character at a disadvantage and acting as if everything else was equal is reductive and silly.

Even though Runes of Perplexity aren’t some automatic god-mode switch that makes you win every fight, it’s pretty obvious they’re not in balance with other rune effects. There’s just no way they’re going to be left in their current form for long.

Theftwind.8976:

Stice.5204:

The current implementation of Runes of Perplexity seems out of balance with both other superior rune sets and other skills and traits that apply the confusion condition.

Sure, they have potential counters just like other conditions, but something is clearly off here, balance-wise.

Are they off balance or do people need time to learn how to deal with them?

As I said in the post, they’re off balance.

Go to the wiki and look at other 6th rune bonuses. Things like “+5% damage against targets below 50% health” and “Gain one stack of might for 20 seconds when using your heal skill.” Those sort of things are clearly not on the same level of power as Runes of Perplexity, which can literally do most of the work in killing a target just by themselves.

Runes of Perplexity are out of balance with other runes, whether players could learn to deal with them or not.

The current implementation of Runes of Perplexity seems out of balance with both other superior rune sets and other skills and traits that apply the confusion condition.

Sure, they have potential counters just like other conditions and players could probably just learn to live with them, but it’s really odd that the best application of confusion in the game, by far, comes from a rune bonus instead of a skill or trait.

killimandros.5087:

In a good organized grouip, no sane leader would pick a bunker ranger instead of ANY class. Thats the truth.

That’s not really the truth. You’re making it sound like everything except a ranger makes a welcome addition to an optimized guild squad and I can assure you that’s not the case.

My guild does a lot of organized 15 v 15 GvG and the template we use consists mainly of hammer guardians and staff elementalists with a couple each of hammer warriors and well necros thrown in and a single mesmer who’s mainly there just to cast Veil on incoming. There are always at least twice as many guardians as any other class and half the classes in the game have 0 or 1 representative on the team. There is very little build variation within classes.

Every single enemy guild we’ve fought has run a very similar composition, sometimes with a minor variation like a single thief or one of the elementalists running daggers instead of a staff.

Larger group play has balance issues that don’t show up in sPvP. Some things get a lot stronger like boon sharing, water field blasting and area denial skills (ie: things guardians are good at) while other things get weaker like personal defense, condition damage and pets (ie: things rangers are good at.)

This is a balance problem, but it’s one that has been slow to gain recognition because most guilds don’t min-max their WvW teams and most WvW fights are affected by many different factors besides class balance. The increasing popularity of organized GvG is shining more light on WvW class balance, but that’s an unofficial game mode created by players, so Anet isn’t very likely to make balance changes based off it. If they ever do, though, rangers aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit by a longshot.

In the meantime, if you want to be part of an optimized guild squad in WvW, make a guardian.

sostronk.8167:

Blackgate lost a T3 garrison mid week a couple of weeks back because we only had around 30 to defend against an 80 man assault. We had the numbers to defend, but we couldn’t get them onto the map because of the GvG (guild and spectators). Yeah it obviously effects WvW. Takes a long time to recover from a garrison reset. With organization and being considerate though, these things should not happen. There are plenty of times where GvG won’t effect WvW.

Ok, so you lost an upgraded keep because a bunch of players were off doing something else instead of defending it. What if, instead of GvG, those guilds had been doing a guild mission during that time instead? Or running fractals? Or playing sPvP? Or doing Living Story content? Would you still be mad at them for not defending the keep?

WvW runs 24 hours a day and it’s not reasonable to expect players to devote 100% of their playtime toward maximizing PPT when the game offers so many other things to do. GvG happens to be player-created content rather than officially sanctioned by Arenanet, but it’s still a potential vector of play that many people enjoy.

Perhaps the engineer is designed to have substandard autoattacks, but the speargun takes it too far. The projectile is very slow, the rate of fire is very slow and the damage is terrible. Given that the only other damage dealing skills have fairly long cooldowns, it’s basically not a viable weapon at all.

Maybe I just haven’t found the right build, but my engineer in general feels weaker underwater than my other characters, and the speargun is a major part of that.

It is correct that the 8 professions are very unevenly represented in WvW. It is also correct that the various weapon types available within each profession are unevenly represented.

I’m sure Arenanet is aware of this. I’m not sure they consider it a problem, though. Just because something is not heavily utilized does not necessarily mean it is underpowered or poorly designed. It might just have more of a niche appeal.

So if you’re hoping to get Arenanet to buff you by pointing out that not many people play your favorite build, it’s probably not going to work.

At about 2:35 in the video the stars align and you, your pet, an enemy target and a fire field are all in the same place in the middle of a fight and your drake actually uses its blast finisher to give you might.

Are you the chosen one?

Eurantien.4632:

Storm spirit should scale with power. That might be nerf enough. It is the same reason BM was nerfed, 3k+ damage on a bunker is not ok.

I know it’s already been commented on but…egads, buddy. An attack with a long cooldown, long activation time, short range and unwieldy targeting cast by a fragile pet whose positioning you cannot directly control isn’t allowed to hit for all of 3k? Are you serious? Really?

AydenStar.4216:

Trust me, I am upset that ANet gave all the utility and team synergy too Guardians and Elementalists. It makes WvW so one side. I feel adding the Blast Finisher on Maul could help the profession have more of a purpose in group play and have player debate either to bring a Guardian or a Ranger.

I understand what you’re saying, but the other posters are right. Putting a blast finisher on Maul would not create any kind of debate in organized guilds about whether to use a guardian or a ranger in competitive WvW play. The correct answer would still be guardian, every single time.

The reason for this is because guardians already have an incredibly good blast finisher (with a 5-second cooldown) and most high-end WvW guilds recruit and run as many guardians as they possibly can. If the guild leader thinks they don’t have enough blasts, they’ll recruit another guardian and get a blast as good as any in the game plus all the myriad other useful stuff a guardian can do that no other class can. Look at engineers: they already have tons of blast finishers but don’t get a very enthusiastic welcome from most high-end guilds either.

Nerfing Healing Spring and giving us another blast finisher would actually make the situation worse because right now water fields are one of the very few useful support functions a guardian can’t do. If rangers are ever going to find a place in high-end organized guild play it’s not going to be by upgrading from “4th-rate guardian substitute” to “3rd-rate guardian substitute.”

If anything, we need more water fields and other useful things that guardians don’t have, like maybe boon stripping or smoke fields or chill. Also, make spirits work better in large-scale WvW. Give us enough of that kind of thing and maybe some guilds would consider dropping their 8th guardian for one lucky ranger.

I think it’s a good thing that siege weapons are not repairable. If they were, I think it would really make large-scale WvW combat a lot more boring, especially on the higher ranked servers where large organized guilds enjoy clashing over objectives.

Ever had one of your enemy servers spend an hour running supply and build 12 golems? It’s really hard to stop that once they go on the offensive. They’ll knock down the doors at fully-upgraded keeps in just a couple of minutes. If they had a bunch of engineers able to repair all the golems back to full health in between objectives there would be almost no way to stop a push like that short of overwhelming numbers.

Also, I don’t really want my teammates assuming I’m there to watch after the siege engines. I made an engineer to shoot, burn and explode people, not fix stuff.

I seriously don’t understand all of these PvE players complaining that now the longbow isn’t as good for optimized dungeon groups…

If your dungeon-running group was already willing to invite a ranger at all, they probably won’t kick you out now if bosses take an extra 5 seconds to kill because you have to channel Rapid Fire a couple times.

Hunter’s Shot was a dull skill. It was a very weak attack that applied a single-target damage buff just barely strong enough to be noticeable. Combining its condition application functionality with Rapid Fire and putting an extremely useful PvP utility that rangers previously had zero access to in its place is an excellent change for the class in general and a negligible loss in performance for the handful of groups out there that were paradoxically trying to maximize their dungeon speedrunning efficiency with a ranger in the group.

Ok, so moving the 10 stacks of vulnerability from Hunter’s Shot to Rapid Fire means a full Rapid Fire channel early in a fight does a couple hundred less damage.

The burst potential of the longbow in many situations has just been boosted, though, because of the range increase for Point Blank Shot, which hits much harder than Hunter’s Shot and can now be used more offensively because it’s no longer the only defensive tool on the longbow. Your dungeon group might not appreciate you knocking targets away as part of your burst combo, but they probably don’t really like you using a longbow instead of a sword anyway most of the time.

Your dungeon group was probably also stacking vulnerability from other sources too, so they don’t care that you no longer apply it with Hunter’s Shot. If your group actually was relying on you to help stack vulnerability and keep it up, you actually do that better now because it’s been shifted to a skill with a shorter cooldown and higher DPS.

And that’s not even getting into the million different ways stealth is useful.

Basically, the benefit of these changes makes the loss of the 10 vulnerability on Hunter’s Shot look absolutely trivial. If you are complaining about this, you aren’t just looking for a reason to be unhappy, you’re looking hard.

I split my playtime pretty evenly between my ranger and engineer. Given that it takes a whole month to make a set of celestial armor I’m kind of torn on where to focus first. I think the engineer may make better use of the offensive stat division but I’m not certain.

Rangers really aren’t deficient in general WvW play.

Taking camps, killing yaks and relaying scouting information are all extremely valuable things to do in WvW, and rangers are good at them.

We’re also fine at zerg-surfing. Sure, we don’t contribute much other than carrying supply, operating siege and tagging targets for loot when a fight happens, but half the other classes are in that boat. Maybe if you’re in a super-militant guild that insists on running nothing but well necros, staff elementalists and hammer tanks you’ve got a problem, but even most hardcore WvW guilds aren’t that extreme.

Up until about a week ago when they put that aetherblade armor skin set on the gem shop there wasn’t a single set of medium armor skins in the entire game that actually looked engineer-themed. (Hell, there aren’t even many that look ranger-themed. Whoever designed the medium armor skins seems to have assumed they’d all be worn by thieves.)

I like the backpacks because they are the only thing my character wears that actually makes me look like an engineer.

Warriors cannot sustain 15k DPS. If the fight lasts more than a few seconds they level off in the 7000’s, which is about the same as a ranger hits if their pet is alive and receiving boons.

Obviously warriors outperform rangers in dungeons because their burst ends some fights extremely fast (especially if their are multiple warriors in the group) and even after their burst is over, their sustained DPS is reliable because it isn’t tied to a clumsy pet. But their sustained DPS is not double a ranger’s under ideal conditions; it’s about the same.

With the pet in the fight, getting boons and not dying, a ranger’s damage potential is among the highest in the game, even competing with warriors under optimal conditions.

If the pet dies or has to be pulled out frequently, though, which is usually the case, our damage drops quite a lot. It’s probably more in line with a support guardian at that point.

Basically, under realistic conditions, a ranger’s DPS in a dungeon is fairly low. Under optimal conditions, it’s very high. Get ready to swing wildly in performance based on the whims of the pet AI.

Due to excellent endurance regen options and a ton of weapon evades (especially on S/D), rangers are really not squishy in dungeons at all. Our main problem is that nearly half our damage comes from our pet and all that evasion and dodging doesn’t apply to them, they just stand there and get killed, depriving us of their contributions.

Basically, rangers’ problems in dungeons are offense-related, not defense.

Theglados.7243:

This pretty much sums it up. It’s nice that some people keep on defending the ranger class by saying how they are good in 1v1 and roaming, but that’s pretty much the only thing rangers are somewhat good at. In the bigger WvW fights rangers are pretty much useless.

This really isn’t true. There is a big difference, which is so often lost on theory crafters, between “not optimal” and “useless.” The ranger is underpowered, not unplayable.

The ranger is not optimal for most situations. However, the balancing of the game is not that bad and the difference in performance is much smaller than many players make it out to be. A well-played ranger will outperform a poorly-played anything else.

If you are determined to min/max your performance, as many MMO players are, then the ranger is probably not the best class for you, but there is no need to get all hyperbolic and declare that the class is “useless” just because it doesn’t set the min/maxing bar in most game modes.

Note: I feel that the ranger is underpowered and would like to see it buffed. I just don’t want to compound the problem of being underpowered by having the playerbase believe things are worse than they really are and end up shunning rangers even more because of it.

The engineer is more trait-dependent than most classes, so they feel especially weak at low levels. I really noticed this on mine.

For the Grenade Kit specifically, note that the Grenadier grandmaster trait in the explosives line gives a 25% range increase and a 50% damage increase (ie: throwing 3 at a time instead of 2) to grenades. The difference between having that and not is just night and day. Until you can get that trait at level 60, the Grenade Kit will be rather lackluster.

For stuff that’s more effective at low levels, you might want to check out the Tools or Firearms trait lines instead, as they have more stuff that packs a punch at the Adept and Master level and will probably help you more now. The Tool Kit is a really good weapon for general play and can compliment pistol or rifle skills nicely.

I’d be willing to bet turret health is balanced around small scale PvP. In a 1v1 fight with another player they have enough health to survive incidental AoE damage but the opponent still has the option of killing them quickly by focusing on them, which seems like a good way for them to work. Coincidentally, you actually see turrets used sometimes in sPvP.

The problem is obviously that, in the other two game modes, you’re generally fighting things that do a lot more damage than one enemy player, so the turret just gets reduced to scrap metal in seconds, even if you take those unappealing traits nobody uses to give them more toughness and health regen.

Just tested it. No Signet of the Wild, no regeneration, no Troll Unguent and a pet that does not heal itself. Slotted Natural Healing and told it to attack a mob, then stood back and watched.

The pet’s health is ticking up, so something is healing it. Green numbers are not displaying. I’d conclude that Natural Healing still works on the pet, but the numbers disappeared just like the numbers from pet condition damage ticks.

Took Natural Healing off and slotted Carnivorous Appetite and repeated the test. Can see the pet’s health bar increase slightly on critical hits but once again no green numbers visible.

I’d say Natural Healing and Carnivorous Appetite are both working fine but the number display in combat is not working for healing and condition damage with pets.

Bredin.5368:

Instead I use the minor trait that increases condition duration for pets

I was looking into the potential of a bleed-stacking pet build the other day and found some odd stuff about it.

At first I thought Malicious Training wasn’t giving the +50% condition duration the wiki says it does, but that wasn’t what was happening.

Basically:

With no trait points spent, pet management window says lynx Maul inflicts 10-second bleed. Tested in combat and it does.

With 20 points spent in Marksmanship but no traits slotted, pet management window now says lynx Maul inflicts a 12 second bleed. Tested in combat and it’s still only 10 seconds because the lynx doesn’t get the +20% condition duration I get by spending trait points in Marksmanship.

20 points spent in Marksmanship and Malicious Training slotted, pet management window still says lynx Maul is a 12-second bleed. Tested in combat and it’s actually 15 seconds, because the pet is now getting +50% condition duration, not the +20% I have.

Also on the subject of pet condition builds, Expertise Training works like Spotter and only gives its bonus when the pet is in combat. If you enter combat with the pet management window open you’ll see the 350 condition damage applied to the pet as soon as you command it to attack something. That was confusing too and I thought at first it didn’t work at all, since I can no longer see condition damage ticks inflicted by my pet since the last patch.

So the pet management window is buggy and annoying, but apparently Malicious Training and Expertise Training do actually work like the wiki says they do.

This is all highly tangential but I figure it’s relevant to the new line of thinking in Beastmaster builds. Have fun making your lynx bleed people out.

Our signets are modestly good and can compliment most builds, but unless you’re running Signet of the Beastmaster they’re not quite as good as most other class’ signets. (If you are running SotBM they are probably the best signets in the game, but that’s a grandmaster trait and really constrains what you can do build-wise.)

Traps really don’t do much for you unless you go all-in on them. You rarely see them used by anyone who isn’t a full trapper build.

The shouts other than Protect Me are very lackluster. (Guard is good with the new Nature’s Voice trait, but only because of its low cooldown for triggering the trait, not because of what the skill actually does.)

The survival skills are all ok, but none of them make any other classes jealous. They can all help fill out a build, though.

And the spirits…well those are still just plain bad in most situations.

We can get by with what we have, but there’s never been anything to get excited about in our utility skills unless you’re using very specific builds. The only thing that completely sucks is the spirits, though, so at least we have a good variety of mediocrity available.

I don’t think they really help with identification that much. On an idle friendly character standing next to you, you can easily tell the difference between the Grenade Kit backpack and Tool Kit backpack. On an enemy actively moving around in combat? You probably can’t unless you’re very familiar with the models, and even then it’s hard to see because they’re probably not giving you many looks at their back.

I, however, like the backpacks. They’re distinctive and make me feel and look like an engineer, which I appreciate because my armor almost never does. About 75% of the medium armor in the game seems to have been designed with thief aesthetics in mind and the other 25% is for rangers. The new aetherblade medium armor on the gem shop is probably the first engineer-themed armor in the entire game.

So with that mind, I wish I could wear a backpack more often, and it annoys me that it suddenly disappears in combat when I switch out of my kit. I’d like a toggle to just wear the Tool Kit backpack all the time so I can always look like an engineer.

IBountyHunterI.4601:

Wvw: knights until you hit the DR, then use zerkers

What’s this about “hitting a DR” on toughness?

I thought the damage formula was (weapon damage * power * skill coefficient) / (toughness + armor)

I just checked and that’s the formula listed on the wiki too. There is no mention of diminishing returns or different formulas used at different stat levels.

Using that formula, there is no diminishing return on toughness. Every point will provide the same relative percentage of damage reduction no matter how much or how little you had before. There might be a practical value for each individual player where you feel like you have enough and can focus on other stats, but there isn’t a breakpoint you can just aim to hit.

Terkov.4138:

The bleeds on GS are useless for power build

No they aren’t. The 3 bleed stack from Maul does 127 DPS with no might or condition damage. If you have 20 points in Wilderness Survival for Martial Mastery and a 10 stack of might those 3 bleeds will combine for 210 DPS. That’s more than 5% of your non-pet DPS even in full berserker gear, so it’s not totally negligible.

The Expertise Training trait does not update the condition damage stat on the pet management window, making it appear the trait does nothing.

You also do not see damage numbers from conditions inflicted by your pets, which I’m quite sure is a recent change and makes it all the harder to confirm whether or not Expertise Training even works.

Been using a 20/20/10/0/20 build and finding it pretty solid.

Picked up Companion’s Might and Spotter and switched my consumables to truffle steak and maintenance oil. Now I’ve got nearly 50% crit chance in full cleric’s gear and every crit channels might to my pet.

I lost a little bit of survivability but I think my damage went up from my previous 0/15/10/15/30 build. It’s hard to evaluate, though, since the effectiveness of the pet can vary so wildly from one fight to the next.

My ranger seems to have most of the same strengths and weaknesses I had before the patch. We’re good at small-scale and solo fighting but have a hard time contributing much to larger groups. So the people who declared the class dead seem to have overreacted, but the people who thought the patch would fix our problems seem to have been overly optimistic.

I will say that I farmed bags like a champ tonight when I put on my berserker gear and switched to a longbow build to go zerg surfing on the first day of the WvW reset, though. Faster recovery time on Long Range Shot is pretty noticeable when you’re hanging back in a zerg tagging downed targets for loot.

vinceftw.5086:

So, what is the conclusion to this statement? For what my opinion is worth, it seems I was right. You see triple necro teams now.

I think you see triple-necro teams right now because people are experimenting with the changes now that the class is actually viable. I don’t think the metagame transition has settled yet.

Brtwrst.9312:

Condition Removal:

• Probably won’t happen in PvE very often but Shrapnel should have the advantage because the bleeding can be reapplied immediately and the burn has a 10 sec cd.

I don’t think this is necessarily a good assumption. Against enemies with condition removal, a short-duration, high-DPS burn may well get a lot more damage in than a long-duration, low-DPS bleed.

If the burn gets removed immediately then you lose a lot of DPS and have to wait 10 seconds to retrigger it, but your opponent might not have a full condition clear and may fail to remove it immediately even if they try, resulting in a lot of the damage getting through. On the other hand, a 17+ second bleed is almost certainly going to get removed at some point during its long duration by an opponent who can remove conditions, so at least some of the damage will fail to get through as well.

Also, as burning is a much higher DPS condition than bleed, it may benefit you for tagging targets in zerg fights. Something getting hit in a zerg fight often has only a few seconds to live, so if you priority is maximizing loot, Incendiary Powder may give you n edge there as it will help you secure a tag every 10 seconds.

Durzlla.6295:

Are you sure it’s bugged? I’ve been able to complete this 10 times now and have not once had an issue, I’ve done this on TC, SoR, and SoS.

It’s most certainly bugged. I just opened it on Fort Aspenwood and the lights were definitely not showing the patterns I was supposed to make with the tears. I ended up just guessing random patterns until all four torches finally lit up. Very frustrating.

DeWolfe.2174:

If they removed the “from behind or from the side” from short bow auto attack, then we’d be useful. Otherwise, a Rifle Warrior can bleed out way better than a Ranger.

Uh, are you implying that there are a lot of groups out there carefully weighing their options for a ranged bleed-stacking autoattacker and then deciding not to go with a ranger because of the flanking requirement on Crossfire?

RoterFuchs.9216:

According to guildwars2.com this is what a ranger is:

Rangers rely on a keen eye, a steady hand, and the power of nature itself. Unparalleled archers, rangers are capable of bringing down foes from a distance with their bows. With traps, nature spirits, and a stable of loyal pets at their command, rangers can adapt to any situation.

Couldn’t find the unparalleled archer part ingame.

Oh sheesh…Not this again.

The warrior introduction on the same part of the website says “Warriors are masters of weaponry” so obviously they should outperform everyone else using all kinds of weapons, including bows, right?

I don’t think most players are actually dumb enough to think those blurbs are making promises about game-balancing. I think they’re just trying to play some kind of head game with the developers. The worst case of this I ever saw was in Dark Age of Camelot. God help them, but the pre-release introduction blurb for the eldritch class in that game identified them as “wielding the most powerful spells in the world” or something like that. When the game actually launched the eldritch, of course, was about as strong as every other spellcaster. This kicked off literally years of posters whining on forums about how the developers had “promised” them that their eldritch would be stronger than everyone else.

Guild Wars 2 is designed to give a lot of different weapon options to every class, and it’s pretty clear that all of the weapons are at least intended to be good. They didn’t give warriors and thieves access to bows with the caveat that their archery skills would always be inferior to rangers. If those classes had weapons that were, by design, inferior then nobody would use them anyway and even including them would be a waste of time. So no, rangers are not really unparalleled archers in Guild Wars 2 and they’re not going to be.

If you think ranger bow skills are underpowered, then go ahead and make a case for Arenanet to buff them, but the case should be something other than “the pre-release intro blurb said nobody else would be good with a bow.”

The “point” of a ranger is to be a character that fights alongside a pet using a combination of martial prowess, woodsman skills and nature-themed magic. Not to fill some min/maxed metagame niche.

If you pick characters because you enjoy them thematically instead of based on whether or not they are the objective “best” at functions X, Y or Z you’ll probably have more fun with most games.

Kolisch.4691:

Actually it makes me think that we can ditch other things that trigger regen and get something else.

Yeah, if you’re going to use this build you’ll have near 100% regeneration uptime from Guard spamming, so there’s no reason to have any other sources of regeneration. If you’re still using Dwayna runes, consider replacing them with something else useful, like Forge, Altruism, Soldier or Water.

What’s frustrating about thieves in WvW is not that they are powerful fighters in a solo encounter. They are powerful soloers, but so are several other classes.

What’s frustrating about thieves is that, when played defensively, they are extraordinarily difficult to kill. If they feel they are in danger of dying they can very frequently escape, even from large numbers of enemy players. No other class can do this with anywhere near the same reliability.

This leads to a dynamic where a fight with a skillful and defensive-minded thief in WvW has only two likely outcomes: they kill you or they escape. It’s a lose-lose situation for whoever their opponent is, and that is frustrating.

Of course, many thieves are neither skillful nor defensive-minded, and those ones can actually die sometimes when they wait too long to disengage against an opponent who plays well. And stomping on those thieves is usually the highlight of every other class’ roaming WvW sessions.

Tom.6478:

I guess what I’m trying to say, you can spend countless time and gold making your primary character, only have it made meaningless at the whim of anet person that had a bad time in pvp with a ranger.

When the game is updated or changed, and new content, new items, new characters or new playstyles alter what you had before, that does not mean your previous experiences were have somehow been invalidated.

Online games change. That can be frustrating, but it’s also one of their biggest sources of appeal. Focus on the appealing aspects and realize that the fun you had in the past has not been “unhad” because something is changing tomorrow.

Tinkering with it a bit, I’d propose this as a might-stacking power variant: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQRAnf3YnAV0FcfFKWwaZgo9QTm/8vCzy9YUoqTp8jv82D-jwCBoMRExJwkHBiEJ05dFRjtyqIas6ZER1qbYWdAWxa1GyJCA-e (Replace Evasive Purity with the new grandmaster Nature Magic trait.)

100% uptime on swiftness and regeneration from Guard, high uptime on protection (more than 3 seconds per dodge) and Fury (8 seconds per weapon swap and heal) and every crit has a 30% chance to give you 16.5 seconds of might. With the Sigil of Perception fully charged and fury up, the max crit chance you can reach is 79%, so the maximum chance to gain might per attack reaches just short of 24%.

All of these boons are shared with your pet via the 15-point Nature Magic trait, which also has near permanent protection and stealth from Guard.

You’ll have a lot less healing power than you would in apothecary’s or cleric’s gear, but you’ll have just as much toughness and almost 20k HP.

Edit: Could also replace all the knight’s gear with rabid for a condition variant.

I’m thinking maybe something like 0/15/15/30/10 with full knight’s gear, Runes of Altruism and Sigils of Strength might be really good.

Something like this: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQRAnf3YnAV0FcfFKWwaZgo9QTm/8vCzy9YUoqTp8jv82D-jwCBoMRExJwkHBiEJ05dFRjtyqIas6ZER1qbYWdAWxa1GyJCA-e (Replace Evasive Purity with the new grandmaster Nature Magic trait.)

Permanent swiftness and regeneration (albeit with low healing power) and pretty high uptime on fury, protection and vigor thanks to 65% boon duration and multiple ways to get most of those.

Also, every crit (which will happen up to 83% of the time depending on sigil stacks and fury) has a 30% chance to give you 16.5 seconds of might. And all those boons go straight to your pet too, thanks to the 15-point Nature Magic trait.

Could use it with rabid gear instead if you prefer condition damage weapons for more or less the same results.

Would take some getting used to compared to the healing-heavy beastmaster regen tank builds with apothecary’s or cleric’s gear I’ve been running, but it seems interesting.