Guild Wars 2

Vox Hollow.2736:

A Tier-based Meta is an exhausting mentality to buy into.
It’s all about putting greater than or lesser than signs between things, but it rarely asks itself how much of an impact it all has.

This has been my experience as a long-term MMO player too. A vocal subset of players always gets it into their heads that “not optimal” and “not viable” mean the same thing, so any class that isn’t objectively the best at its given role is, by definition, complete garbage and desperately in need of a buff, even if the actual difference in performance is so marginal it’s barely noticeable without a stopwatch or a spreadsheet.

Of course, if said class ever gets that buff, whatever class was previously the best in that role suddenly becomes complete garbage desperately in need of their own buff. This creates a never-ending cycle of stress and resentment between players of different classes. This is also why so many players invent ridiculous conspiracy theories about how the developers hate them for playing certain classes and want them to quit or reroll. Why? Because if the developers liked a class then obviously they’d buff it to the point where it was the best (“only viable”) option for a given task that players like.

Like you said, it’s just tiring. There are guilds and groups available for players who aren’t interested in chasing the bandwagon, so just try to find one of them. They’re not as rare as you might think because the people who don’t obsess over the metagame tend to be less vocal.

I’d like to see various fixes made to the ranger class because it would make my favorite character more fun (like mechanical fixes to pets and spirits to make them more reliable in group content, PvE or PvP) but not because I want my ranger to replace warriors in the dungeon speedrunning metagame or whatever.

Troll Unguent also adds 120% of your healing power over its duration while Heal as One only adds 100% of it. Since Puandro wears cleric’s gear that can be a few hundred extra heal per activation of the healing skill. Not a huge factor, but another one in TU’s favor.

In the original post you’re comparing a ranger in berserker gear with a longbow to several popular spvp and roaming WvW builds that don’t use berserker gear and your conclusion is that the longbow is too weak and rangers who use one are free kills.

I don’t disagree with you that the longbow is a bit underpowered and could use a buff, but I think your general argument is flawed because you’re simultaneously comparing different weapon sets and different gear sets. Most classes can’t get away with a full berserker setup unless they plan on sticking closely with a group that can keep attackers off them. The various bunker builds aren’t much of a bunker with full berserker’s gear, either, which is why they don’t wear it, even though it would increase their damage a lot.

Deamhan.9538:

Got any videos of 1 ranger vs 3 of anything in WvW provided they are not upleveled, undergeard, and/or bad at pvp?

There is no build for any class in this game that can win 1v3 against enemies who aren’t bad at PvP, but a well-played ranger with a roaming build can at least escape from that situation much of the time.

There are multiple videos posted here just in the last week showing ranger players being quite successful versus multiple opponents in WvW.

See this one: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Video-Exploits-WvW-Melee-BM-Ranger

This one: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Video-Tupro-1vX-solo-roam-WvW

Or this one: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Don-t-interrupt-duels-the-movie

Rangers can zerg surf with the best of them in berserker’s gear with a longbow and either axe/warhorn or greatsword on switch. Very few other builds can match them for badges per hour.

If they use cleric’s or apothecary’s gear instead and run suitable weapons they are among the most effective solo/small group skirmishers and can hold their own against any of the other popular roaming builds.

In other words, rangers are pretty solid in WvW.

In order to determine if two weapons are actually balanced with each other you have to compare a lot more than the autoattack damage. Weapons in this game are the source of nearly half your active skills at any given time.

For large scale WvW fights, especially around keeps or towers, I’d say the longbow is superior to the shortbow due entirely to the Barrage skill, which is incredibly useful in that kind of scenario. Half a dozen rangers with longbows using Barrage on cooldown makes a big difference in a keep fight – certainly a bigger difference than higher autoattack damage would make.

However, in almost any other scenario the longbow is a poor choice. It’s basically just Barrage with some subpar other buttons to press while Barrage is on cooldown. In that regard, it should probably be fixed. If Anet thinks Barrage is so kitten good that it necessitates everything else about the weapon being noticeably weak, maybe they should just nerf Barrage and make the other skills more useful. At least then the weapon would be good for more than one thing.

The tooltip for the trait has not included a percentage chance since before the game launched. It appears to be about 33% but I haven’t tested it.

I doubt it was “stealth nerfed.” What would be the point of that? It’s a pretty underwhelming trait that probably contributes no more than 2 or 3 percent to a ranger’s total damage output. Adjusting it would have basically no effect on overall class balance at all.

Freky.1903:

I don’t think Anet even cares about the rangers.

This seemed awfully familiar, so I just went around to all the profession forums and did a search for “cares about” and “doesn’t care.”

Necromancer: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/It-s-just-not-worth-the-trouble-to-play-Necromancer/first#post218843

ckz.6291:

true , i really wish they buff us or something but i dont see them caring about the complains of necro

Elementalist: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/The-patch-notes/first#post264092

DaedalusDragon.3754:

I bet that sounds childish but our class has the most bugs, next to necro (which it looks like they actually care about).

Engineer: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/A-reason-Elixer-gun-has-no-auto-attack/first#post219187

Haette.2701:

The only reasons it could be taking so long are 1) there’s some SERIOUS kitten in the game that makes the servers burn down if bundles auto-AA on pickup, or 2) they don’t care.

Thief: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Thief-build-for-tournaments/first#post171491

Fede.9143:

Anyway i think that the assassin role isn’t so highly sought, just because ok, you can 2shot their dd, but you’re also easy to be killed..
That’s why i did this post, just to see how the other sPVP players use it.
But.. how i see, noone cares about.. So sad.

Warrior: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/A-warrior-in-need-of-a-bit-of-faith

Plague.5329:

ANet stated they were “happy” with the Warrior. Ultimately, whether or not the players feel it needs more diversity and/or more interesting skills, it’s ANet who cares about ANet’s opinion.

Guardian: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guardian-with-longbow/page/2

Animatus.6197:

Too bad the devs dont seem to care at all about fixing the range issue on guardians

Mesmer: closest I could find was https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Is-it-just-me-or/first#post209299

Teo.8325:

Mesmers need some love. I don’t care for the limited choice of weapons, I don’t care for the rest of the nerfs since BWEs, but I DO care for EXPLOITS that they’re ruining mostly my PvP gameplay.

So it seems we have a general consensus among the posters on these forums that all 8 professions are broken, and Arenanet doesn’t care about any of them, except possibly mesmers since I couldn’t find a post on their forum where someone explicitly accused Arenanet of callously ignoring their problems.

Can we stop with the persecution complex about class balance? I’ve seen this in literally every single MMORPG I’ve ever played. Players get this bizarre notion into their head that the game developers actively hate them because of the class they play and are trying to make them quit or reroll. Can we just step back and acknowledge that makes absolutely zero sense?

The reason everyone feels like they’re not getting the attention they deserve in a timely fashion is because we’re all narrowly focused on our main character but Arenanet has to be concerned with the entire game, including bugs and problems that we personally have not encountered but that thousands of other players have. There’s no conspiracy here.

This is it for rangers. I’m pretty disappointed. 7 more days to see if they make any substantial changes.

You may as well not bother with your ultimatum. Look at the last several sets of patch notes: there are about 10 bug fixes for every balance change.

They’re obviously prioritizing bug fixes for now, and bugs are fixed as the programmers find them, not based on the merit of which class deserves the most “love” at any given time. Trying to gauge whether or not Anet appreciates ranger players based on how many of our bugs they manage to fix each week compared to the other professions is silly.

The OP is correct… this class is not viable when compared to any other class.

Nonsense. The necromancer is entirely viable. Their ability to handle solo PvE content is at least average. Their ability to attain gold medals in PvE events is probably above average. They can solo all their storyline quests without major difficulty. They can do about as well as anyone else in large-scale WvW fights. They can be a useful addition to a small roaming WvW crew. They have reasonably workable builds for power, condition, defense and support playstyles. They struggle somewhat in sPvP, but some players still manage to make them work competitively there, even if they are in the minority.

How is that “not viable?” At worst necromancers are slightly underpowered and more difficult to play well than some of the other classes and suffer from more than their share of bugs. If you like the class, either aesthetically or for its specific abilities, you can certainly make it work and you are not at a massive disadvantage.

You can’t see how a 20% or so increase in DPS is a burst damage option? I agree it’s not the same thing as other characters popping a quickness ability but it’s clearly a noticeable damage increase for a short period, and it can be comboed with other things like a Life Blast binge or dropping your wells or going into Lich Form to create something at least vaguely akin to burst.

As player more concerned with WvW than anything else, I certainly don’t look at this change and hear “Reroll, please, reroll.”

And like I said above, I don’t think life force generating utility skills is the answer to the life force problem in sPvP. That should be addressed with a system change that allows necromancers to start games and respawn with at least some life force already stored.

There is no reason for a power well necro to take BIP so them buffing the conditionmancers I feel is forcing necros into the same style of play as a conditionmancers.

Like you said yourself, power builds weren’t using BiP anyway, so buffing or nerfing it has little effect on them (except some Death Shroud power builds which might have used it to kickstart life force gain.) If you were playing a power build before, like me, then this change doesn’t “force” any response from you.

The ability to push a button and gain a 10 stack of might is nice. It gives necromancers a sort of burst option, which is certainly something we were lacking. The only argument here is whether or not it’s worth giving up what had been one of our strongest life force generators.

In PvE and WvW, generating life force is pretty easy, Death Shroud is generally available when you want it and having a new burst damage cooldown is welcome. For players who primarily play in those modes (which includes myself) this is probably a buff.

For sPvP, I’m of the opinion that necromancers shouldn’t start matches with their life force empty in the first place. That’s like a ranger starting with their pet dead. We don’t need burst life force from our utility skills; we need to just start rounds with 25 to 50 percent of the life force bar already full. (Starting at 100% would probably overpower dedicated Death Shroud builds since they really get quite a lot of damage at full life force.)

Zinwrath.2049:

Gaurdian 3 buff abilitys that will always be useful that is useful in any playstyle while doing anyting.

Theif steal never not worth using, very good in pvp.

Ranger gets a pet thus always extra damage and utility at all times.

Engineer toolbelt skills. Gets 4 extra abilitys irrigardless of how he traits or what he does.

Sorc can always attune for differnet abilitys.

Mesmer alway worth while blowing up your extra clones/phants

Wars adrenaline is always good.

Eh, this kind of seems like a “grass is always greener” kind of thing.

I haven’t played every profession extensively, but I can say that, for instance, an engineer doesn’t always get a lot of use out of their paired abilities. Sometimes you’re slotting a utility skill only for its toolbelt skill or vice versa.

The ranger’s pet is only modestly useful if you don’t build around it. Hell, they have so many problems with pathing and targeting that sometimes they aren’t useful even if you do build for them. I think most necromancer players are familiar with some of the limitations of pets in this game.

Mesmer illusion shatters can have the same issue. The shatter skills are only useful if the illusions are in the right place, and often they’re not.

Elementalists can always use their attunements, sure, but they’re locked into the extra skills that they get instead of being able to mix and match different weapon skills like other professions can.

Basically, everybody’s got some limitations to work with. Death Shroud is, at worst, a large pool of extra hitpoints you can lean on to survive a bit longer while you wait on cooldowns. If you build for it, it can also be a significant source of damage. It’s pretty well in line with other profession mechanics.

I think the staff is already a good weapon for use in events. I don’t think we really need another one.

Sure, if the axe autoattack hit multiple targets it would suck less, but it would still be a pretty poor alternative to our other options.

The staff can tag multiple targets in events and deal similar single-target DPS from twice as far away. The scepter does better single-target damage from longer range and the dagger outdamages it by about 100% if you can safely run into melee. Life Blast also does much better damage from longer range. The weapon seriously has no niche.

They could at least try to emphasize the support or control functionality of the weapon a bit. Necromancers currently don’t have a single skill that stuns except the Fleash Golem’s charge and we have no access to stability in our “normal” form. How about putting a short stun on the last hit from Ghastly Claws and making Unholy Feast apply stability in addition to retaliation? That would at least make some people consider taking the damage tradeoff of using an axe.

That’s the key to making the dagger build work in dungeons and WvW. It’s not safe to use the dagger autoattack chain all the time, but dagger mainhand and staff on switch is also the best weapon setup for generating life force quickly, which means Life Blast becomes your ranged attack of choice.

Sure, the axe is easier to use, but axe damage is pretty bad. I’d rather use a mainhand dagger, which at least has a serious payoff when you’re able to get in on a target and run the chain a few times.

By the way, the necromancer axe skills really need to be looked at. Like the guy above, I never see a necromancer using an axe, and I never use one either. If I want a high-risk but high-damage weapon, that’s the dagger. If I want to deal AE, that’s the staff. If I want consistent ranged single-target damage, that’s the scepter (with condition damage gear.) The axe seems to be kind of intended as a power version of the scepter, but it’s shorter range and lower damage, so no one uses it. If you want a ranged power attack, you’re much better off going with a Death Shroud based build.

Either raise axe damage so it becomes a more viable choice or redesign it to provide some kind of compelling utility or defensive options that separate it from our other weapons.

I am one ranger that really feels the pet is pretty much a double edged sword, sometimes its good to have them with you, like in Dungeons or PvP, and sometimes they are the weakest link and just a huge kitten nuisance, mostly in overland PvE.

Really? My experience is totally opposite of yours. I hate my pet in dungeons (where it dies extremely fast) and PvP (where it rarely hits anything) but absolutely love it in overland PvE.

Did you know that a monster attacking your pet does not put you in combat if the pet doesn’t fight back, which means you don’t get slowed down? And that monsters will usually prefer attacking the pet over you? I can put my pet in passive mode and just run through Cursed Shore harvesting nodes while completely ignoring most mobs. It’s great.

The shoulder armor for the Sorrow’s Embrace explorable mode exotic set is asymmetrical.

From another SF player, thank you to the players from DH and SoR.

It was so intense seeing it come down to the wire like this. At one point early this afternoon SF was leading by less than 700 points. Such a nice experience seeing it that close after getting trashed by FA’s night crew and losing by 200,000 last week. This is really what WvW should be. Very fun experience and I look forward to this week.

I find my ranger does very well underwater.

Jellyfish pets are really strong, having good AE damage and a healing skill, and the spear has decent utility skills and does pretty good damage too if you use a power/precision build.

When diving into the water in WvW I feel quite confident that I’ll be able to either kill or escape from any reasonable number of enemy players and when swimming around Orr looking for orichalcum I don’t fear having 4 or 5 enemies attack me at once. I don’t know what more I could expect from my underwater abilities. I haven’t extensively played other classes much, but if any of them are much stronger than my ranger I’d be honestly kind of surprised. (I’ve never lost a 1v1 fight in the water in WvW, but most enemy players seem really reluctant to even try fighting underwater and just try to run away instead.)

The speargun is very underwhelming, though. The only things it really seems to be good for are fighting champion mobs that do ridiculous damage or poking at downed enemy players who keep bobbing to the surface. Give me my spear any other time.

The Greatsword has less damage output than other Ranger weapon options. This is a given. The evade is handy, and adds utility for sure. But what weapon sets don’t add “any” utility??

Well, I’m pretty sure there aren’t any weapons in the game that add no utility, but there are few that have as many positive features as the ranger’s greatsword.

It’s got a really good distance closer. It’s got a counterattack that doubles as a ranged snare. It’s got an interrupt. It’s got a broad swinging attack that makes it good for AE. It’s got an evade built into its autoattack chain that leaves you immune nearly half the time when executing the chain.

This is a really significant list of perks.

Personally, I agree that the damage is a bit too low, but I see the logic in having the weapon’s damage on the low end of the spectrum to offset the amount of defense and utility it grants. I wouldn’t expect a major buff for it. Maybe they could at least bump up the damage on Maul, though?

Well, it’s kind of a gimmicky build limited by cooldowns and with low survivability, but then again most character builds designed for AE burst in a WvW setting have very similar limitations. It looks fun, even if it does get you killed a lot.

The staff autoattack is pretty decent in PvE. For events and whatnot, you can line it up to tag multiple targets and the damage is very respectable that way.

However, as the necromancer’s only ability with over 900 range and no cooldown, it’s not very effective in PvP. The projectile is very slow and easily avoided and does not deal much damage to a single target.

I would be happy if they switched the autoattacks of the staff and axe. Give the 1200 range staff the quick vulnerability stacker and give the 600 range axe the piercing projectile. I think that would probably improve both weapons.

jonG.8369:

Did they suffer from the same problems our pets now currently face? (Not being able to attack while moving and hit targets that were moving?)

If so, was this ever fixed?

Ranger pets in GW were even worse than their GW2 counterparts.

Like GW2 ranger pets, GW ranger pets did a lot of damage if you dedicated your build to powering them up.

Also like GW2 ranger pets, they tended to die quickly as soon as the AE started flying, weren’t very responsive and could be easily kited because they stopped moving to attack (wasn’t as big a problem a GW because many other skills weren’t useable while moving either.)

However, they also had the problems of not having their own skill slots (you had to give up skill slots on your own bar if you wanted them to do anything other than autoattack), not being swappable in combat, and dealing almost no damage at all if you hadn’t invested into the Beastmaster attribute line.

In addition to that, they didn’t automatically scale to your character’s level when tamed, so you had to manually level them up by letting them participate in combat for a long time, and they’d be useless until they got near your level. The number of killing blows they got and amount of damage they suffered during the leveling process would also influence their stats so you had to carefully manipulate them, especially if you wanted to build an offensive pet. I remember spending a couple hours casting buffs on my pet and letting it kill low-level mobs so it would come out “dire” instead of “hardy” at high level.

So yeah, we’ve actually come a long way.

This game is designed and balanced at a fundamental level to not have specialized character roles. What you’re suggesting is a radical revision of the content design, combat system and character balancing.

And for what? To make Guild Wars 2 more like every other MMORPG on the market?

I think we need to be realistic. Arenanet is not looking at balance tuning right now. They’re focusing on fixing bugs.

The kind of players who post on forums tend to be min-maxers who zero in on high-end class balance issues, but the majority of the playerbase is really much more concerned with things like broken skill point challenges and trading post functionality.

There’s not going to be a lot “dev love” for rangers or anyone else until they’ve considerably shortened the list of known bugs. (And honestly there shouldn’t be any balance changes while all 8 professions still have a dozen or more known bugs.)

Spirits: Can be used to lure away mobs(yeah they agroo)

I know they aggro. that’s part of why they’re so weak. They seldom live long enough to make much difference. The only situations you’d use them is for group content, which tends to have a lot of adds and random AE flying around, and the fact that spirits have only a few thousand health turns into a huge liability.

Shouts: Please, test them.

Ok, I just did. Heart of the Mists, medium armor golem. Spider pet (a popular pet.) No traits invested in pet boosting.

Without Sic ’Em, the pet hits for about 780 to 860 per normal noncritical attack.

Sic ’Em boosts the damage of the normal attack to about 1080 to 1150.

So Sic ‘Em appears to be about a 30% damage boost for the pet. The wiki says about the same. With a 60 second cooldown and 15 second duration, the maximum uptime is 25%. If you use the shout on cooldown it’ll net you around a 7.5% increase in pet damage over time. Even if you invested heavily in pet-boosting traits, an extra 30% pet damage isn’t much of a burst skill (especially given the unreliability of pet attacks landing at all) and an extra 7.5% pet damage over time isn’t much of a return for 1 of your utility slots.

And you say you can’t make a build without it?

I stand by my assessment that Sic ’Em sucks.

Quickening Zephyr is overpowered (all quickness effects are.)

Signet of Stone and Signet of the Wild are good, but only if you use the Signet of the Beastmaster trait. (Why we need a trait for that at all is beyond me, especially a grandmaster trait. I think our signets should effect us as well as our pets by default.)

Sharpening Stone and the trap skills are decent if you use a condition damage build and traits that boost them.

Muddy Terrain, Lightning Reflexes and Protect Me are all useable but they don’t make any other classes jealous.

All 4 spirits are very weak.

The other 3 shouts are very weak.

The other 2 signets are very weak.

Overall we have enough decent options to fill our 3 utility slots in a variety of ways, but about half the skills could really use a tuning pass. Then again, I think that’s about the same situation everyone is in, right?

thedudebro.7341:

I actually have yet to lose to a ranger. I came close once but I prevailed.

Of course you haven’t. An extremely skilled player like you would never lose, even against something overpowered. It’s not like you’re frustrated by an embarrassing loss or anything.

You’re just doing a public service by going to the official forum for a class that never gives you any trouble in PvP and suggesting that they’re overpowered. Because you have a passion for objective analysis of game design and want to help out all the poor scrubs out there who don’t have your ability to just always outplay your opponent.

X class does Y “better.” than X^2; why play X^2?(balance)

I get really tired of that one, too. It’s commonly assumed among players that there is simply no justification for playing a certain character unless it is objectively optimal for a specific role.

The problem is that the roles themselves are often vaguely defined and there are many stylistic and mechanical differences between characters that might blur the differences in performance in a real game situation.

Furthermore, players tend to exaggerate balance differences when factors like reaction speed, tactical planning and teamwork tend to completely overwhelm something like a few percentage points of DPS or effective health.

Encountered this issue tonight in the matchup between Sorrow’s Furnace, Darkhaven, and Sanctum of Rall.

Sanctum of Rall had the orb from the Darkhaven borderlands stashed in the Etheron keep since yesterday. Sorrow’s Furnace players broke into the Darkhaven garrison and found the keep lord invulnerable even though the orb was long gone. Extremely frustrating.

Yes, the ranger’s pet is really quite ineffective. I kind of roll my eyes when I see rangers claim their pet does a lot of damage. (I’ve seen claims on this forum of the pet accounting for as much as 40% of the ranger’s total damage output.)

Try using Rampage as One for a while and just observe how often your pet grants you a stack of might by successfully landing an attack. It’ll give you an idea of what the thing’s effective DPS is in a real gameplay situation. And it’s not good.

Keeping the pet by your side in passive mode and only using its F2 ability is seldom a noticeable drop in combat performance except in solo PvE (the only type of play where you can easily control target positioning and the pet is unlikely to be killed by random AE when you order it to attack.)

The skill is called Winter’s Bite. It’s an attack that inflicts chill. The icon is a set of blue jaws, because jaws are what you bite with. The type of jaws is not really important, just that they are identifiable as jaws. The color blue implies ice or cold. The icon is an icy set of jaws ready to bite something. A winter’s bite, if you will.

Good use of the elite spirit.

You should probably use your warhorn more, though. At the very least you could just have it equipped at the start of the fight instead of your bow and just use Call of the Wild and switch immediately so you can fight with fury and swiftness boons.

I find Hunter’s Call tends to be a great bit of psychological warfare, too. Even though it doesn’t really do that much damage, especially with a condition build, it’s got a very obvious graphical effect and it looks dangerous. Many players will waste all their endurance evading it, which is very advantageous to the ranger. (I’m sure it’ll eventually stop working, but for now it’s hilarious.)

ilJumperMT.4871:

Just look at how Ranger Traits and how much of them are bugged…..

There’s a large list of bugs stickied at the top of every profession’s forum. The ranger’s isn’t any longer or worse than what pretty much everyone is dealing with.

It’s unfortunate that the game launched with so many bugs, but it’s not hitting us any harder than others. Anet says that general balance will improve once most of them fixed. I’m not sure if that’s true but it’ll at least change quite a bit. There are currently a lot of abilities that should be pretty significant that aren’t working correctly.

Aridia.3042:

Tolmos.8395:

Aridia.3042:

Stice.5204:

ilJumperMT.4871:

In fact top guilds like TP and SS don’t ever use a Ranger and tell you themselfs that Ranger is horrible in tPVP.

You do realize there are 8 professions but only 5 slots on a tPvP team, right? It is impossible to actually use all of them. No matter what balance tweaks Anet makes, a specific team is always going to be neglecting several professions, so the community cannot use that as the baseline to determine viability in sPvP.

Logic dictates that if you can only pick 5 of 8, you’d expect them to pick the best 5…

I think you’ve missed the point there.

Or you missed it. There are 8 total classes- if they fix us to be in the top 5, then the bottom 3 will just QQ until they make top 5, on and on until we’re back in the bottom 3.

At the end of the day, SOMEONE has to be the odd kid out (or kids, since there will be 3 of us). We’re just the unlucky group.

No, I didn’t miss anything. What you’re saying is the Ranger class is currently taking one for the team while being one of the bottom feeders of the 8. While the other person is saying you can’t use “Pro’s” opinions to determine the viability of the class.

Read, think, then reply. The forum works better than way.

No, I don’t really think the opinion of “pros” can determine class viability, especially in a game that doesn’t even have an active ranked tournament scene yet. Many of these allegedly top players have nothing but their own confidence to back up their claims, or performance resumes from completely different games where they may have had nothing to do with discovering and developing competitive playstyles.

In short, I don’t believe that they’ve already discovered all the nuances of PvP balance in Guild Wars 2.

And no, I don’t think you can make the argument that a certain class is broken and needs to be buffed just because a well known tournament team isn’t using it. As I noted before, it’s not possible for a single team to use all 8 professions at once, no matter how well they are balanced. If you use that as a criteria for class balancing, you’re just asking for a neverending cycle of balance tweaks and complaints as passionate advocates of all 8 professions argue that it’s unfair their character isn’t one of the 5 on a tPvP team’s roster. It’s an unproductive way of framing the discussion because the entire thing is chasing a goal that is literally impossible.

Note that I have not commented on whether or not rangers need to be buffed in sPvP. I don’t know. Maybe they do. (I just play PvE and WvW myself, where rangers seem fine if not slightly overpowered so I have no horse in this race.) I am simply saying that basing balance analysis on the choices of “pro” players is really dubious.

nldixon.8514:

Turn your camera 180 degrees. Run or dodge away. Problem solved.

No, that doesn’t solve the problem. The problem is two of the three attacks in the sword autoattack chain cause your character to jump at the target (even if you are already in melee range) and during the time when your feet are off the ground you can’t move or interrupt the attack except by switching weapons.

You can turn off autoattack so the chain won’t automatically proceed, which gives you a little bit more control about when you leave your feet, but it still doesn’t solve the fundamental problem that a ranger can’t deal effective damage with a sword without continually leaping at their target, and doing that severely limits your control over your movement and positioning.

Animosity.5231:

Quickness should be looked at across the board.

I agree and the two main characters I play are a ranger and an engineer, which are two of the professions that have on-demand quickness.

From the very first time I tried using it, it felt overpowered. In games like this it’s usually not a good idea to have a huge offensive burst cooldowns, and +100% attack speed for 4 to 5 seconds definitely fits into that category. All I have to do is activate quickness and if my opponent does not respond immediately to it they’ve probably lost the fight. If they can’t respond immediately (because they’re out of endurance and they either don’t have active defensive skills or they’re already on cooldown) then they lose. It feels dodgy.

I think quickness should be reduced to +50% attack speed (which would still be a huge boost) and the professions that have access to it rebalanced accordingly.

The longbow is highly useful in WvW because Barrage is one of the best possible skills you can have there.

True, it doesn’t make a huge difference for just you to be using Barrage, but WvW isn’t about just you. Having several rangers on hand all with longbows and using Barrage on cooldown can have an enormous impact on WvW fight by constantly showering the enemy position with large-radius AoE damage and cripple fields that ignore line of sight.

It prevents enemies from running away from your team. It hits enemies and siege engines up on the wall who are out of line of sight of your other attacks. It stops enemies getting through breaches in walls. It makes it harder for enemies to reach a downed teammate to revive them while also damaging the downed player. It hits enemies who have gone invisible. It damages enemies close to a door from behind it. It’s just got a million uses.

That skill alone justifies slotting the Eagle Eye trait and equipping a longbow for WvW.

Obviously the other 4 skills on the weapon could all use some work, though. You can get some modest ranged damage out of the 1 and 2 skills if you wear full berserker gear and your target is nice enough to stand still, but that’s about it. The weapon is basically your Barrage button for team support in WvW and little else.

nachtnebel.9168:

Don’t forget, you fight world bosses with raids of 30+ players (often far more) and it takes less than 3 to reach the Bleeding cap.

This really is a huge problem and is very constrictive of player choice.

There are condition damage based builds, with accompanying weapons and traits, available for all 8 professions. It’s not some small niche mechanic that only a few players are likely to be utilizing. Yet multiple players built for heavy condition damage will constantly overwrite and cancel out each other’s effects, especially in PvE.

If I’m playing a direct damage build, I can still hit my target at full effectiveness even if there are 20 other players there all doing the same thing. However, if I’m playing a condition damage build, I may have half or more of my damage cancelled out by just 2 other players present trying to do the same thing.

This really makes condition damage builds seem unappealing. Why would I want to invest a ton of resources into crafting a full set of condition damage equipment just to see it not work at full effectiveness much of the time?

squiggit.2357:

Classes you feel rule the battlefield?

There aren’t any. What rules the battlefield is numbers, coordination and the proper use of siege weapons.

Certain character builds with lots of support functionality or the ability to disable enemies or deal high damage from long range are generally more effective, but all professions can build for at least one of those things and there is no character build that can make up for the things I mentioned above.

Guard is really a fundamentally flawed skill.

Without investment in traits that boost the pet, it’s barely a match for a normal monster, let alone multiple foes or a PvP opponent, so ordering to stay in a location while you leave is basically just leaving it to die. And doing so obviously weakens you, since the ranger is balanced around fighting alongside their pet, not leaving it somewhere while they go off on their own.

The skill just sucks. I can’t think of any reason why I’d ever want to use it for its intended purpose.

Where did you read that? Anet hasn’t mentioned any changes to ranger shortbow in any of their update notes. Sounds like an unsubstantiated rumor from someone who didn’t perform any tests or see any official notes but just “felt like they weren’t doing as well today as they did yesterday” and assumed they must have been nerfed.

ilJumperMT.4871:

In fact top guilds like TP and SS don’t ever use a Ranger and tell you themselfs that Ranger is horrible in tPVP.

You do realize there are 8 professions but only 5 slots on a tPvP team, right? It is impossible to actually use all of them. No matter what balance tweaks Anet makes, a specific team is always going to be neglecting several professions, so the community cannot use that as the baseline to determine viability in sPvP.

If spirits are going to be destroyable while warrior banners are not then they should have some corresponding advantage that offsets this disadvantage.

As they are right now, their effects are so minor for the most part that an intelligent enemy wouldn’t bother to target them, but they’re so fragile that they go down in just 1 or 2 hits to random AoE effects anyway.

The utility spirits are generally a waste of the utility slot. The elite one isn’t much better. Anet has shown us they like tracking player statistics, so I’m sure they’re aware that most rangers aren’t using these skills. Hopefully some rebalancing is in order.

I don’t really like the Sigil of Air on the shortbow. It has a 5-second cooldown and the shortbow’s rate of fire is just over 2 shots per second.

With exotic precision gear in every slot and investment in the Skirmishing trait line, a character can have a critical hit chance over 60%. This means you will average more than one critical hit per second on a target, and have a lot of potentially wasted triggers of the Sigil of Air due to the 5-second cooldown. I get the feeling you’d get more damage out of the Sigil of Earth, which has no cooldown, even if you are not using much bonus condition damage.

If you have a lot of bonus critical damage, Sigils of Accuracy are great because the increased critical chance means your bonus critical damage gets applied more often, which is a great boost in total damage. The more bonus crit damage you have, the bigger the benefit of a Sigil of Accuracy.

Treble.1563:

Hell, this past weekend I tried every other class that could use a ranged physical weapon to see if I could get the burst I want… Nope.

So what is the kind of burst that you want?

If what you’re hoping for is the ability to down someone in 3 seconds from 900+ range, you’re probably not going to get it. As you said, Anet has basically systematically nerfed most of the ranged burst options in the game. They apparently want that kind of super burst to carry the additional risk of having to close to melee range. The “fix” you’re hoping for probably isn’t going to appear. The ranger shortbow is probably about as high as they want long-ranged DPS to get.

gulmari.2904:

as long there is ranged vs melee in MMO’s melee will always have the upper hand and its stupid as heck.

You and I have apparently not played the same MMO’s.

@ Stice You never played any other mmorpg pvp at a competitive level I guess? Lets take WoW as an example because its the one that is well known by almost everyone. Enter arena with full PvE gear without resilence and tell me which rank you will get.

The only reason that is the case is because Blizzard developed the resilience system specifically to counter glass cannon builds because they dominated the game. The first two years or so of WoW PvP was basically glass cannons killing people during the duration of a 4-second disable.

Dark Age of Camelot, Aion, Warhammer, Guild Wars, various MOBA games…All of them had player-driven mechanics like assist trains, coordinated target switches, counting down “3…2…1” over voice chat so people could line up their skill activation times to all hit simultaneously. All of those strategies support the use of glass cannon character builds, where you optimize for burst damage and defense is a secondary concern that you either fill in with the baseline stuff available to your class or pick up after you’ve capped out your offensive stats.

Firefly.4165:

Have you stopped to consider if the said losing servers are co operating at all? It’s extremely tough when you have two servers against you.

7 of the 8 matchups currently have the leader with more points than their two opponents combined, so it would seem that they are quite successfully beating down two servers simultaneously.

I can say that on my matchup, where the leader is currently more than 150,000 points ahead of the other two servers, they basically steamroll all 4 WvW maps every night starting at about 2:00 AM EST. They have such a population advantage that it is nearly impossible to defend anything against them for the next 6 to 10 hours. We practically have an alliance with the other losing server in our matchup because it’s not like we can fight against each other – we have nothing to take.

In most mmorpg or similar games going full glass cannon comes with alot of problems

No it doesn’t. Full glass cannon ranges from optimal to required for many, many characters in most MMORPG’s. Hell, we’ve got an entire category of character called “DPS” as if the entire character were just a glorified attack skill.

In virtually every game like this, burst damage is easier to use than it is to counter. If one player dumping all their cooldowns into a target simultaneously isn’t enough burst to kill them nearly instantly, you team up and do it with two characters. It’s always a popular and strong strategy. There are very few problems in PvE or PvP that can’t be circumvented with enough burst damage.

It’s not surprising at all to see GW2 in the same position.